{"text":"'That is my home of love: if I have ranged,\n\nLike him that travels I return again,\n\nJust to the time, not with the time exchanged.'\n\n- attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire (fl. M2)\n\n∞\n\n'Father...'\n\nHe is waiting. He has always been waiting. In this place there is no time, not truly, not unless the forces within its tides dream it into being. Here, eternity is truth.\n\n'Father...'\n\nSlowly, with weariness and reluctance, He forms the idea of eyes, of a mouth, of limbs, of the chair beneath Him. Far off, there is another chair, and a thread of thought and will that tether Him back to a place of metal, and stone, and time.\n\n'Father...'\n\nHe opens His eyes.\n\nDarkness lies before Him, extending through every dimension. Darkness, and Him alone. In that moment He feels the echo of every man or woman who has ever woken beside a guttering fire to see the night creeping closer as the flame-light fades.\n\nThe darkness becomes a black mirror. He looks into His reflection: a man on a stone chair, old, dark skin clinging to the hollows of His cheeks. Iron and snow streak His beard. The shoulders and limbs beneath His plain, black robes are thin. Dust marks the bare soles of His feet. His eyes are clear, and there is neither kindness nor pity in them.\n\nThe chair and the man sit on a narrow stone platform. Behind Him burns a wall of fire that curves up and away, blazing and flaring like the surface of a star.\n\nThe reflection changes. For an instant, a figure of iron and blades with coal-furnace eyes is looking back at Him from a throne of chrome. Then it is gone, and the reflection is a blur of images falling one atop another: a golden warrior standing with drawn sword before the gates of a towering fortress, a figure before the mouth of a mountain cave, a boy with a stick and fear in his eyes, a queen with a spear atop a cliff, an eagle with ten wings beating against a thunder-threaded sky - on and on, images tumbling over each other like the faces of cards tossed through the air.\n\n'Is there any truth in you?' asks the voice that comes from the dark.\n\nThe images vanish and the darkness hangs before Him. It falls into the abyss beneath like a cascade of obsidian sand.\n\n'At the root of your lies, is there any truth, father?'\n\nThe darkness becomes a forest, dark trunks reaching to an untouchable sky, roots crawling out and down into the abyss beneath. The man on the chair is sitting on the snow-covered ground, a fire burning before Him. A shadow moves out of the dark between the trees. It is huge, sable-furred and silver-eyed. It drags its shadow with it as it comes forwards. It pauses on the edge of the light.\n\n'You claim to be a man,' says the wolf, 'but that is a lie revealed to any that can see you here. You deny you wish godhood, but you raise up an empire to praise you. You call yourself the Master of Mankind, and perhaps that is the only truth you ever spoke - that you wish to make your children slaves.'\n\nThe wolf tilts its head, and for a second it is not a wolf, but a bloated shadow, veined with lightning, its eyes holes punched into a red furnace.\n\n'But this son...' growls the wolf, muscles coiling under black fur, lips peeling back over teeth, '...this son has returned to your cradle of lies.'\n\nThe wolf leaps. The forest blinks to a sheet of curdled black and migraine colour. The shadow of a man reaches across the dark with hands that are claws. The fire flares, roaring up to become a burning wall and the claws rake the blaze. Shadow burns to ash and cinders. The wolf recoils, howling. Lightning laces the dark of the forest. The wolf pads along the boundary of the firelight. Behind it, other eyes shine in the deeper shadows between the trees, bright and cold as the light of cruel stars.\n\nThe man turns His head. He is not looking at the wolf, but to the blackness beyond.\n\n'I deny you,' He says, and in this place that is more real than life, yet as unreal as a dream, His words shake the dark like thunder.\n\n'Will you not even talk to me, father? Now, as your empire of lies ends, will you not tell me the truth?'\n\n'You are shadows,' says the man, 'nothing more. You offer nothing. You are nothing. You come with a puppet child, but you did not tell him why you need him. You need him because you have nothing that is true, no sword that is not a falsehood, no strength that is not a lie. You need him because you are weak. You need him. You fear him. And he will fail.'\n\nLaughter fills the night, beating like wings, rattling with the sound of the dying trying to breathe, coiling over and over in chuckling loops. The darkness billows forwards stretching, coiling, squeezing. The man on the stone chair flinches. The fire bends and shrinks. The image of the man flickers too, and for a second He looks like a corpse sitting on a throne, the bones of His hands gripping its arms in pain.\n\nHe closes His eyes.\n\nThe image begins to blur, as though seen through a dusty wind. The laughter rises higher and higher.\n\nIt has always been this way: again and again, in countless forms and metaphors, death and darkness wearing countless faces. On and on the cycle, repeating and growing in strength as the Night crowds hungrily in. And just as then, so now; there is only one answer to it.\n\nMurder.\n\nBlood and endings.\n\nSacrifice and death.\n\n'I am returned,' comes the voice of the wolf in the dark.\n\n'I deny you,' says the man, as the image fades to the echo of a dream and laughter that does not end.\n\nZero hour\n\nRemembrance of wolves\n\nOnslaught\n\nTerra\n\nOn the first of Primus the sirens rang across Terra.\n\nOn the myriad worlds conquered and ruled by the Imperium of Man, they talked of year divisions, of time sliced into a thousand equal slivers. First division, second division, third, and so on, without variation or character, until the weight of counting reached a thousand, and one year tipped over into the next. On worlds of endless night or blinding days, a year was the same. In an empire spanning a galaxy, anything else would have been meaningless.\n\n0000014.M31 was how surviving records would mark the first moment of that day, stamped and corrected for temporal accuracy, standardised and stripped of any meaning. But, here, on the world whose night and day and seasons had given mankind its concept of time, the old counting still meant something and so did the moment that one year died and another was born: the Feast of Two Faces, the Day of New Light, the Renewal - on and on went its names. But for longer than memory it had been the first of Primus, firstborn of the three hundred and sixty-five days that would follow, a day of hope and new beginnings.\n\nThe turning of that year began with snow on the northern battlements of the Imperial Palace, where three brother demigods watched the night skies above. It began with the dawn light and icy chill reaching into a tower-top chamber and stirring the painted cards dealt by a man who was older than any knew. It began with the sirens calling out, one at first, high on the Palace spires, before the cry was picked up by others, on and on across the turning globe. The sound echoed through the mountain-sized space ports and rasped from vox-horns in the deep strata of the Atlantean Hives.\n\nOn and on it went, stilling the hands of people as they ate and worked. They looked up. In caves beneath the earth, and hive vaults, and under the smog drifts, they looked up. Of those that could see the sky, a few thought they could make out new stars amongst the firmament and froze at the promise of each pinprick of light: a promise of fire and ash and an age of loss. And with the sound of sirens, fear spread, unnamed but still spoken.\n\n'He is here,' they said.\n\nPrison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit\n\n'I understand you have a story...' she said. The wolf stood before her, the fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. 'A particularly entertaining one. I'd like to remember it, for posterity.'\n\nThe wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.\n\n'Which story?'\n\n'Horus killing the Emperor.'\n\nMersadie Oliton woke from the memory-dream with sweat on her face. She breathed, and pulled the blanket over her from where it had slipped onto the floor. The air was cool and dank in the cell, scented with the tang of air that had been exhaled too much. She blinked for a second. Something was different. She reached out a hand and touched the metal wall. Moisture clung to the rivets and rust scabs. The thrum of the ship's engines had gone. Wherever they were, they were stationary in the void.\n\nShe let her hand drop and let out a breath. The tatters of the memory-dream still clung to her eyelids. She focused, trying to pull back the threads of the dream even as they slid into darkness.\n\n'I must remember...' she said to herself.\n\n'The prisoner will stand and face the wall.' The voice boomed out of the speaker set above the cell door.\n\nShe stood instinctively. She wore a grey jumpsuit, worn and faded. She put her hands on the wall, fingers splayed. The door unlocked with a clang, and footsteps sounded on the grated floor. The guard would be one just like the rest: crimson-clad and silver-masked, the humanity in its voice concealed by vox distortion. All the gaolers were the same, as constant as the ticking of a clock that never struck the hour.\n\nSmall spaces, locked doors, questions and suspicions - such had been her world for the seven years since she had come back to the Solar System. That was the price for what she had seen, for what she remembered. She had been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.\n\nShe heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.\n\n'Where are we?' she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth bef"}
{"text":"d been a remembrancer, one of the thousands of artists, writers and scholars sent out to witness the Great Crusade as it brought the light of reason to a reunited humanity. That had been her purpose: to see, to remember. Like many clear purposes and shining futures, it had not worked out that way.\n\nShe heard the footsteps stop behind her, and knew the guard would be placing a bowl of water and a fresh jumpsuit on the floor.\n\n'Where are we?' she asked, hearing the question come from her mouth before she could stop it.\n\nSilence.\n\nShe waited. There would not be a punishment for her asking, no beatings, no withdrawal of food or humiliation - that was not how this imprisonment worked. The punishment was silence. She had no doubt that other, more visceral methods were used on other prisoners - she had heard the screams. But for her there had only been silence. Seven years of silence. They did not need to ask her questions, after all. They had taken the memory spools out of her skull, and those recordings would have told them everything they wanted and more.\n\n'We are still in the void, aren't we,' she said, still facing the wall. 'The engine vibrations have stopped, you see. No way of missing it if you have spent any time on ships... I spent time on a warship once. You never lose the sense of it.' She paused, waiting for a response, even if it was just the sound of retreating footsteps and the door shutting.\n\nSilence again.\n\nThat was strange. She had tried talking to guards in the early years, and their response had been to leave her without reply. After a while, that had felt worse than if they had struck a whip across her back. They had never beaten her, though, or even touched her. Even when they opened her skull to remove the memory spools, they had sedated her, as though that made the violation that followed more acceptable.\n\nShe supposed that such small mercies had to do with Qruze or Loken. The former Luna Wolves had watched over her as much as they could. But that had still left her a prisoner of the greatest and darkest prison in the Imperium. Loken had said that he would free her, but she had refused. Even while it pained her, she understood why she had to remain locked up. How could she not? After all, had she not seen the true face of the enemy? Four years of life on the Vengeful Spirit amongst the Sons of Horus, in the shadow of their father, who now had set the galaxy alight with civil war. What other reward could there be for remembering those days? A galaxy shrunk to silence and plasteel walls, with only dreams and memories to speak to her.\n\nShe had begun to dream memories after a few months, dreams of her home on Terra, of the sunlight shattering across the edge of the Arcus orbital plate, her mother laughing and calling after her as she ran through the hydro-gardens. And she had dreamed of her time amongst the Luna Wolves, and the Sons of Horus, of people now long dead. She had asked for parchment and pen, but none had been given to her. She had gone back to the old games her mind-nurse had taught her, ways of tucking memories away when she woke from sleep, ways of remembering the past even as it fled into the distance. In the silence, she had found that memories and dreams were all she had, all she was.\n\n'Are we still somewhere in the Solar System?' she asked, and twitched her neck to look behind her. Why was she still talking? But then why had the guard not left? 'The ship doesn't feel like it's preparing for translation. Where are we?'\n\nThey had come for her in her cell on the Nameless Fortress three nights ago. They had loaded her into a box barely big enough to stand upright in. She had felt the box judder and sway as machines had lifted it and her. They had let her out into this cell, and she had recognised the vibration of a void-ship under power. It had been comforting at first, but her dreams had not been, and now the silence of this moment was feeling stranger with each elongating second.\n\n'Why was I taken away from the fortress?' she asked. 'Where am I going?'\n\n'Where we all wish we could go, Mistress Oliton,' said Garviel Loken. She whirled, and the end of her cell was gone and a wolf was rising from a pool of dark water beneath the moon. Its eyes were black spheres, and its bared-teeth grin was wide as it spoke. 'You are going home.'\n\nIn the dark of her cell, Mersadie Oliton woke to silence and lay still, waiting for the dream to fade or for herself to wake again.\n\nStrike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf\n\nThe first ship of the onslaught died as it breached the veil of reality. Streams of plasma reached out from gun platforms. White fire smashed into the ship's prow. Lightning and glowing ectoplasm streamed behind its hull. Macro shells detonated amongst the molten wounds already cut into its skin. Turrets and spires sheared from its bulk. Towers broke from its spine. It kept coming even as its bows were torn apart. The burning wreck struck the first of the mines scattered across the dark. Explosions burst around it. The front portion of the ship sheared from the back. Prow and gun decks hinged down. Atmosphere vented from the exposed interior. Debris scattered, burning for an eye-blink before the flames ate the air trapped in the wreckage.\n\n'Ship kill,' called a sensor adept from across the bridge of the Lachrymae.\n\nSigismund watched the intruder's death as it spread across the pict screens above the command dais. He was armoured, his sword chained to his wrist and resting point down on the deck at his feet. He did not blink or move as the dying ship tumbled across his sight. In the still depths of his mind he heard the words that had brought him to this place and time.\n\n'You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father's side at the end.'\n\nAround him the command crew was silent. Eyes fixed on instruments and screens. This was the beginning of the moment they had all known would end the years of waiting. Some, perhaps, had thought or hoped that it would never come. But here it was, marked with fire.\n\nI chose, Keeler, he thought, and in his mind, he heard again the words that Dorn had spoken in judgement of that choice.\n\n'You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.'\n\n'As you will, father.'\n\n'I am not your father!' roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. 'You are not my son,' he said quietly. 'And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.'\n\n'I chose,' he whispered to himself, 'and here I stand at the end.'\n\nThe fire from the dead warship spread across the displays.\n\n'If they come at us like this, the slaughter will barely be worth the sweat,' growled Fafnir Rann.\n\n'They will not give us that luxury,' replied Boreas from further back on the platform. Sigismund did not look around at where the holo-projections of the Assault captain or his lieutenant hovered at his shoulders. Each of them stood on the command deck of one of the Lachrymae's sister ships.\n\nRann wore void-hardened Mark III armour, with reinforcing studs bonded to his shins and left shoulder. The scars of battles fought here, at the edge of the system, ran beneath the fresh yellow lacquer. His tall boarding shield hung in his right hand, the twin axes mag-locked to its back echoed in the heraldry painted on the shield's face. Sigismund imagined he could see the warped smile on Rann's face as he turned to Boreas and shrugged.\n\nThe holo-image of the First Lieutenant of the Templars did not move. Unhelmed, his face was a single twisted scar, and if there was any emotion beyond cold fury behind his eyes, Sigismund could not see it. Boreas' sword of office stood almost as tall as he did, its guard the cross of the Templars, its blade etched with the names of the dead.\n\n'All ships, stand by,' said Sigismund softly, and heard the orders ripple out.\n\nThe vibration in the deck rose in pitch. The dull ache that had been building in his skull for the last hours was sharpening. He noticed one of the human deck crew shiver and wipe a hand across a bead of blood forming in her nose.\n\n'Hold to our oaths and the strength of our purpose,' he called.\n\nWhispers buzzed at the edge of his thoughts, razor tips scratching over metal. They had needed to sedate every astropath in the fleet two hours before, as a wave of psychic pressure had sent them babbling and screaming. It had become more intense with every passing moment, and it presaged one thing: it was the bow wave of a truly vast armada coming through the warp, bearing down on the Solar System like a storm front. Horus and the traitors were coming.\n\n'Etheric surge detected!' shouted a sensor officer.\n\n'Here it comes,' said Rann, and brought his fist to his chest. 'Honour and death.'\n\n'For the primarch and Terra,' said Boreas.\n\n'For our oaths,' said Sigismund. The images of his two brothers blinked out.\n\nHe reached down and pulled his own helm from his belt and locked it in place over his head. 'May my strength be equal to this moment,' he said to himself as the helm display lit in his eyes. The data of the battle sphere overlaid his sight.\n\nThe Plutonian Gulf glittered with weapon platforms, torpedo shoals and mine drifts. Together they formed a great web, tens of thousands of kilometres deep, stretching from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun's light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress "}
{"text":"ng from the very edge of night to the orbits of Pluto itself. Ships glinted amongst the defences: fast gun-sloops and monitor ships that were little more than engines and weaponry. They had been built in the orbital forges of Luna, Jupiter and Uranus and dragged to the edge of the sun's light. Alongside them lay the fleet of the First Sphere: hundreds of warships, all in motion. And beyond the warships, the moons of Pluto waited. Studded with weapons and hollow with tunnels, each was a fortress that could have stood against a fleet.\n\nThe sheet of stars erupted with lightning. Rents opened in the vacuum. Nauseating colours and dazzling light poured out as ship after ship surged from nothing into being. Tens, and then hundreds. The sensor servitors in the Lachrymae twitched and gabbled as targets multiplied faster than they could vocalise updates.\n\nMines detonated, explosions leaping from one to another in chains that stretched across the dark. Gun platforms opened up. Macro shells, rockets and plasma struck metal and stone, bored in and exploded. Ships died even as they tasted reality, armour stripped by fire, guts spilled into the dark. In the first ten seconds, over a hundred vessels burned to wreckage. Most had been former warships of the Imperial Army, crewed by humans who had given their oath to Horus and been rewarded with the honour of being the first to draw their blades in this battle. They died for that honour, burning too in the ruin of their ships, hulls shredded around them.\n\nBut they kept coming.\n\nShip after ship, tearing reality like flags waving in front of a gun-line. The first Legiones Astartes warship surfaced from the warp. It was named the Erinyes, and it was a bombardment galleon of the IV Legion: a five-kilometre-long hull wrapped around a trio of nova cannon barrels. She loosed all three shots as the void kissed her skin. Each nova cannon shell was the size of a Battle Titan, its core filled with unstable plasma. They had no target, but they needed none. They ran straight into the heart of the defences and exploded with the force and light of a star's birth. Gun platforms vanished. Mines lit off in spheres of red flame. Fire poured from the defences as more ships rammed past the debris of their dead kin.\n\nThe light of the blaze flooded through the Lachrymae's screens and viewports. Sigismund's helm display dimmed.\n\n'Engage,' he said, and the Lachrymae leapt forwards. Twenty strike cruisers and fast destroyers followed in tight formation. Lance fire speared out from them, slicing into ships as they cut across the front of the enemy fleet. Plumes of ghost-light and ectoplasm stretched like arms through the dark as more ships punched through from the warp.\n\nA backwash of etheric lightning struck the Imperial Fists cruiser Solar Son. It spun, its hull cracking and crumpling as the laws of reality went into flux. The Lachrymae and its sisters did not pause but plunged on. They had one purpose in this moment: to kill as many of the enemy as possible while they clawed from the warp onto the shore of reality. For the moment, the Imperial Fists' prey was vulnerable, and the First Sphere fleet were predators.\n\nThe Lachrymae's guns found the skin of the gun-barge Fire Oath before it could light its void shields. Macro shells punched through gun decks and exploded. Munitions cooked off in loading hoists. The Fire Oath's hull bulged, then burst. Building-sized pieces of hull scythed out, caught the flank of a battle cruiser as it emerged from the warp and tore its command castle from its back. The warp breach it had emerged from pulsed and swallowed the wreckage.\n\n'Hold,' called Sigismund, his voice passing through the ships of his command via crackling vox-link. 'For our oaths, we hold true.'\n\nThe Lachrymae sliced on while its mortal crew screamed as ghosts and nightmares flooded their sight. Reality in the battle sphere was now little more than tattered scraps blowing in the night. The Lachrymae rolled, her guns finding enemy after enemy. But for each one that died, another three came from the warp.\n\nDeadfall torpedoes set in the void triggered and speared forwards. Carcasses of ships split and burned. Pluto's fortress-moons found their range to the first of the invaders and spoke. Newly lit void shields flashed as they collapsed. Volleys answered. The reserve fleets holding close to the moons powered forwards and began to kill and die. The light of battle swelled, blurring with the glow of thousands of warp transitions, until which side was firing and which was burning was lost in a rippling blaze tens of thousands of kilometres across. Hours later, the light of that fire would glimmer in the night above the battlements of the Imperial Palace as the sirens called and alarums rang to tell that Horus had, at last, brought his war to the birth system of humanity.\n\nSilence's shadow\n\nAsh and iron\n\nDaggers drawn\n\nBhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra\n\nSilence flowed across Terra under the sound of sirens. It fell in the water markets of Albia as the shouting of buyer and seller faded and became looks held between strangers. It crept into the room where the cries of an hours-old child echoed as words of comfort died in a father's mouth. It followed the smoke carrying the smell of the burning refuse from the spoil ranges. On the towers watching the highways that ran to the feet of the Damocles Space Port, the soldiers ceased their pacing and looked up at the night sky. In cave shelters, billions of conscripts glanced at the roofs of rock before looking back down to the guns in their hands. They sat in loose groups - families, hab-block neighbours, manufactory shifts - saying nothing.\n\nWaiting.\n\nIn the administrative strata of the record-hives, scribes moved between parchment spools and auto-quills, following routine as though it would make a lie of the warning alarms. On the walls of the Imperial Palace, warriors watched the sun rise over the teeth of the eastern wall and heard only the sound of the wind and the shrill of warning. Terra was a world waiting for the first blow to fall. And in the last inch of waiting, panic had found stillness.\n\nIn the heart of the Grand Borealis Strategium in the Bhab Bastion within the Imperial Palace, Admiral Su-Kassen felt the silence crawl into the moments as she watched holo-projections of scrolling data. This was the primary command for the entire system, its view like that of a god looking down on a realm held in the light of the glowing displays. Primary fleet concentrations stood out as green runes, each a war command of tens of thousands of warships, monitor craft and others that had been pressed into service.\n\n'Update display - primary fleet force readiness,' she said. She had repeated the command every fifteen minutes for the last six hours.\n\n'Compliance,' droned a servitor, and the display stripped itself down to a few markers haloed with green data. The largest fleets held station beside Pluto, Uranus, Jupiter, Mars and Terra. These were the five Sphere commands. Signals took hours to pass from the Throneworld to the system edge, too long for the second-by-second control of battle. A lord castellan of the Imperial Fists commanded each layer of defence: Sigismund, Halbract, Effried, Camba Diaz. Rogal Dorn commanded the fifth, final sphere around Terra. Other commands deferred to the lord of the closest Sphere. Troop concentrations were marked with coloured dots. The size of a force and its strength flickered around them in abbreviated code. The few Legion units beyond the bounds of Terra glowed like hot coals, the other forces cold motes of fire. Amber specks marked fixed defences around planets or hanging in the gulfs between them. These were everything from void-fortresses to shoals of gun platforms and space stations. Clouds of tiny blue spots folded through the spaces between the larger defences, indicating the vast clouds of mines, deadfall torpedoes and proximity drones that had been cast amongst the dark like dust from a hand. Once the battle was done, the approaches to the inner system would be laced with death until the star itself died.\n\nOnce the battle was done... If there was anything left besides ashes.\n\nSu-Kassen shook herself. The first wall of any fortress was the mind, and doubt could burn it from within before the enemy had even raised a blade.\n\nShe scanned the data again. It had not changed, of course. Out there in the heavens above, the fires of battle were already burning, but here the reality of that truth had yet to arrive.\n\n'Report update,' called a signal officer, from behind a bank of machines.\n\n'Show me,' she said.\n\n'By your will,' said the officer, and she could hear the forced control in the man's voice.\n\nMachines clattered and whirred, stitching the silence as it stretched. The holo-display fuzzed, flickered and then came into focus. She looked at the image and blinked. Crimson flecked the edge of the turning display. Her mind began to parse the marker runes and data abstractions. Strategic logic-conditioning shunted aside thoughts as she absorbed the updated defence data. It was an odd sensation, one that she had never got used to in all the decades of her life and service. Every now and again her thoughts and understanding would jump, like a needle on a data cylinder, and she would find herself understanding something she had not an instant before.\n\nBit by bit the mass of runes and symbols resolved into meaning.\n\nThe Khthonic Gate... she thought. So, it begins, just as we predicted and feared.\n\nStarships had to translate from the warp at the edge of a system, beyond the Mandeville point, that arcane and invisible line that marked the boundary between safety and suicide. Arrive inside that point, and the competing forces of reality and paradox would rip a vessel apart. 'Rebirth death' the Navigators called it, when they talked of such things. Most established systems had navigation buoys and well-trodden points where it was s"}
{"text":"she thought. So, it begins, just as we predicted and feared.\n\nStarships had to translate from the warp at the edge of a system, beyond the Mandeville point, that arcane and invisible line that marked the boundary between safety and suicide. Arrive inside that point, and the competing forces of reality and paradox would rip a vessel apart. 'Rebirth death' the Navigators called it, when they talked of such things. Most established systems had navigation buoys and well-trodden points where it was safest to drop from the warp back into reality. Once back in the cold embrace of the void, ships then had to move in-system under the power of their real space engines. The journey from system edge to the planets of the core took even the fastest ships days.\n\nThe Solar System, though, was older than any colonised by humanity. Star travel and warp navigation had been birthed here, and over tens of thousands of years more secrets, wonders and terrors had been raised and lost within its bounds than existed in all the galaxy beyond. Two such relics of the past were the Twin Gates: stable points in space and the warp where ships could translate safely. Both tracked the orbits of planets as they orbited Sol. The Khthonic Gate lay off Pluto, and the Elysian Gate lay close to Uranus. The latter offered a further layer of paradox, as it gave ships a way to re-enter deeper in the system far beyond the point where they would be wrecked if they chanced it normally.\n\nAnyone who planned to attack Terra in force would want to secure the Twin Gates to move their forces into the Solar System quickly. That Horus would pour everything he could into taking them was a certainty.\n\n'That cannot be correct...' croaked Kazzim-Aleph-1 from where he hovered at her shoulder. The magos-emissary had only been attached to the command cadre for a week, and Su-Kassen was still trying to understand him. He seemed logical and emphatic but also hesitant, a combination she had never thought to see in someone who was so much more machine than flesh. His cranium whirred, cogs flipping around in slots that ran the length of his skull as the projection and screens updated. 'There is an error. This data indicates a warp-reality translation via the Khthonic Path of over a thousand ships...'\n\n'More,' she said quietly. 'A lot more.'\n\n'That cannot be. It is an error. There is a Falcon fleet that can reach Pluto in five hours. They can-'\n\n'No,' she said, dropping her voice under the buzz of the machines. 'All other forces are to hold position, magos-emissary.'\n\nEven as she spoke she felt the words pull against her instincts.\n\n'Admiral,' said the magos, 'my calculations show that the Plutonic defences can hold if reinforced. If the enemy has committed its main force strength to take Pluto as a bridgehead and then can be held there-'\n\n'They cannot be held,' said a voice from across the chamber. 'Not at a cost we can afford to pay.'\n\nBlast doors withdrew into the walls. Warriors in yellow armour and black cloaks poured in. Light caught the edges of ready weapons and sheened from armour plates. Threat radiated from them, sharper than their blades, roaring from their silence.\n\nAnd with them came the one who had spoken. Cold illumination struck the burnished gold of Rogal Dorn's armour and lit fire in jewels clasped in the claws of eagles. Control radiated from him, vibrating through air and through light, the lightning promise at the edge of a storm. To the billions that lived on Terra, he was the wall against which the coming enemy would break, defiance and strength embodied. But in person he was not the idea that the desperate clung to as they thought of what was to come; he was a force of nature that moved and spoke, a lightning bolt pulled from the sky and chained to flesh to fight until the universe broke him.\n\nThe Imperial Fists standing vigil at the chamber edges brought their clenched fists to their chests, but only Su-Kassen bowed to the Praetorian as he advanced. The officers and adepts who served in the Bhab Bastion were human for the most part. They were the finest war staff Su-Kassen had ever seen, drawn from the old Solar military elite. War-savants of the Saturnine Ordos, warriors of the Jovian Void Clans like her, tacticians from the Terran war-courts: every man and woman in the chamber knew their craft well enough to rival even the command skill of the Legions, and all of them knew that when Rogal Dorn, primarch of the VII Legion and Praetorian of Terra, entered they had a duty to continue in their tasks, rather than to bow. It had been Dorn's first order when he had created this command cadre. Su-Kassen saluted for all of them.\n\nBut as the blast doors sealed again, she knew the presence of the three who walked with Dorn would test their obedience.\n\nJaghatai, Great Khan of the White Scars, walked on Dorn's left, his eyes dancing with the turning light of the holo-displays. On Dorn's other side came an angel armoured in gold, white wings furled at his back. Sanguinius, primarch of the IX Legion, looked across the humans at their stations and then at Su-Kassen. He smiled. Last of all came an old man in the grey robes of the Administratum, leaning on an eagle-topped staff. Wrinkled skin hung from his face, but his eyes were cold and bright. Malcador the Sigillite seemed older and weaker than Su-Kassen had ever seen him, but it was he as much as the three primarchs that made her hold her head bowed. The silence in the chamber deepened, seeming to press closer as the three loyal sons of the Emperor and His Regent halted beneath the turning holo-display.\n\n'The First Sphere forces cannot hold,' said Dorn, his dark eyes fixed on Kazzim-Aleph-1. 'And it will not be reinforced.'\n\nThe magos-emissary was still, the cogs protruding from his skull rotating slowly. For a second Su-Kassen thought he was going to argue. For a second, she hoped that he would.\n\n'Lord Dorn, there are options-' began Su-Kassen, before she could stop herself.\n\n'No,' said Dorn, and the word and his glance fell on her like a blow.\n\n'As is your will, Lord Praetorian,' said Kazzim-Aleph-1 at last.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, Su-Kassen saw the Khan flick a look at Sanguinius. The Angel's face remained impassive.\n\nRogal Dorn came forwards, eyes moving from the magos to Su-Kassen.\n\n'The initial battle data indicates that your projections were incorrect, admiral.'\n\nShe nodded and opened her mouth to reply.\n\n'They were inaccurate by a factor of at least thirty per cent,' cut in Kazzim-Aleph-1, 'maybe more. We cannot yet be precise, of course, but if the core data is correct, the enemy has brought a force numbering many thousands of vessels from the immaterium.'\n\n'Thank you for your clarification, magos-emissary,' said Dorn. Su-Kassen almost flinched at the ice in the words. Kazzim-Aleph-1 seemed oblivious to it.\n\n'I am charged by the Fabricator General to aid your command in addition to representing the positions of Mars. I am...' he paused, as cogs turned and buzzed, '...pleased that my function is of utility to you, Lord Praetorian.'\n\nSu-Kassen thought she heard Malcador stifle a cough that might have been a laugh. For a giddy moment she found herself almost wanting to smile herself, and then clamped down on the feeling. It was tension and the truth of what was happening finding a way of bleeding out, of breaking the silence. She wondered for a second if somewhere out there, under the blanket drone of alert sirens, there were people laughing as they felt the seconds tick by and future come closer.\n\nIt was Sanguinius who broke the silence, walking forwards and raising a hand to dip his fingers into a turning sphere of light.\n\n'It will be Uranus next,' he said. 'And if the attack is not already under way, it will be soon.'\n\nSu-Kassen let out a breath she had not realised she was holding. Around her she felt the command staff relax and refocus. That had been deliberate, she thought. With but a few words the Angel had bent them all in a direction of his choosing.\n\n'Signal relay to the outer spheres is still clear, lord,' said Su-Kassen, 'but there has been no word from Lord Halbract at Uranus yet.'\n\n'You are still sure this is the path?' asked the Khan. He had held back, close to the doors and, apart from his glance at Sanguinius, he had remained utterly still. There was something in that stillness that was like the flash of lightning frozen in the eye. 'There are other ways - Horus could be scattering his might out in the depths beyond, and then circle them in, closing from all sides, strangling us as he cuts us.'\n\nDorn looked at the Khan.\n\n'This is Horus. Do you still think he will be anything but himself?'\n\n'He is not himself,' said Sanguinius without turning from where the holo-light played over his hand. Su-Kassen felt the tension snap back into place in the room. She felt as though she and the rest of her staff had intruded on a conversation that these demigods had brought with them. 'You have not seen him, Rogal,' continued Sanguinius. 'You have not seen the face of what has taken our brother.'\n\n'He may have changed,' growled Dorn, now as still as the Khan, the low light of the displays setting his face in cold lines and hollows of night. 'But the constraints he faces have not. Time. He does not have time. Guilliman breathes at his back. Horus has to come for us with everything he has as quickly as he can, or he will have nothing.' Dorn shook his head, a smile that was a ghost passing across his face. 'Besides, it is not his way.'\n\nThe silence flowed back in.\n\n'So, we let him take the gates?' said the Khan, his voice soft but edged. 'We wall ourselves up and wait, and hope that those walls will prove strong enough?'\n\nDorn did not answer, his gaze locked with his brothers.\n\n'We hold every wall and we make them pay in time and blood for every step forwards.'\n\n'Just so,' said Sanguinius, lowering his hand and gaze from the holo-display, and turning to look at his siblings. 'And a price in blood i"}
{"text":"Besides, it is not his way.'\n\nThe silence flowed back in.\n\n'So, we let him take the gates?' said the Khan, his voice soft but edged. 'We wall ourselves up and wait, and hope that those walls will prove strong enough?'\n\nDorn did not answer, his gaze locked with his brothers.\n\n'We hold every wall and we make them pay in time and blood for every step forwards.'\n\n'Just so,' said Sanguinius, lowering his hand and gaze from the holo-display, and turning to look at his siblings. 'And a price in blood it shall be.'\n\nMalcador's staff struck the floor. The blow was not powerful, but Su-Kassen felt the air leave her lungs.\n\n'There,' he said, looking around, his eyes bright and hard. Everyone in the chamber, primarch and human alike, was looking at him. Su-Kassen watched a sad smile form on his face. 'You see? Peace is possible, if only for a moment and amongst ourselves.'\n\nThe Khan laughed, and the frozen tension in the chamber vanished.\n\n'Quite so, quite so. We forget our place and company.' The primarch of the V Legion unfolded from his stillness and came forwards, his movements fluid and relaxed. He circled the display, glancing up at it and around. 'This is fine work.' He looked at Su-Kassen and nodded. 'Your cadre is to be commended, admiral.' She bowed her head. For a second, she had felt as though the Khan had looked right through her.\n\nBeside her, apparently oblivious to what had been occurring, Kazzim-Aleph-1 glanced up from where he had been fidgeting through the raw data-screed.\n\n'The customary astropathic communications from across the system are absent,' he said. His eye-lenses rotated in a way that created the distinct impression of a frown. 'At this time, and given the delay in other signals, delays inherent in the distances involved, it would be most advisable to make use of telepathic methods of communication. Also, the astropaths' ability to sense warp displacement would be a significant advantage.' He paused, looking up at the primarchs and command staff as though just seeing them. 'Do you not concur?'\n\n'There will be no astrotelepathic messages from inside or outside the system, magos-emissary,' said Malcador, his voice low and edged by a weariness. 'Nor any warning of more ships or fleets exiting the immaterium.'\n\n'Why is that?' asked the magos.\n\nMalcador closed his eyes, and Su-Kassen saw him shift his weight to his staff. 'Because all around us, the warp is howling.'\n\nBattle-barge Monarch of Fire, Trans-Uranic Gulf\n\nClouds of dust filled the Elysian Gate. An open volume of space three thousand kilometres across, it glittered with folds of fine particles. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years of void-ships translating to the warp at this point had seeded it with drifts of the soft, grey matter that formed in the wake of a closing breach. The Jovian clans and the Navigator houses had a name for it. Siren Ash, they called it. There were tales, they said, of prospectors who had tried to harvest the dust and could desire nothing else once they'd touched it. True or not, the dust remained, slowly coiling through the volume of the Elysian Gate, like smoke caught in a glass orb.\n\nThe gate had always been guarded. Things had come out of it during Old Night, things that the Uranus Habitats remembered in tales of star-vampires and iron men. They had built the first fortresses around the gate, watching it with guns and warriors. These stations were called the Eyes of the Old God, and they had kept their vigil as the rest of the Solar System slid into the depths of the Age of Strife.\n\nThen the Great Crusade had risen from Old Earth and brought the Uranus Habitats and moons into the nascent Imperium. The watchful stations had grown, their hereditary warrior clans augmented by Martian weaponry. Ships had begun to pass through the gate into the immaterium, and others had returned. The Navigator houses re-established their fiefs amongst Uranus' twenty-seven moons, and the volume of space between the gas giant and the Elysian Gate had become an ever-glittering stream of light as ships looped from the warp to the profusion of orbiting habitats and void-stations.\n\nHorus' war had changed that. The flow of ships had become a sullen trickle, and the stations keeping the long watch had bloated with fresh armour and weaponry. Every foothold of humanity that could mount a macro cannon or host a fighter squadron had found itself made a fortress. Amongst this, facing the dark of the Elysian Gate, the ships of the Second Sphere hung motionless, crenellated and beweaponed, in the glittering abyss.\n\nIn the gate, the dust moved. A slow swirl gathered and coiled in on itself. Clouds hundreds of kilometres across flowed and folded. The dust began to spark. Tiny worms of lightning flicked between grey motes. The clouds began to glow, now green, now bruised violet, now bloodied ivory.\n\nThe waiting fleets of warships lit their drives. In their sanctums, astropaths began to weep. In the habitats and stations, the low howl of warning sirens woke millions from dreams of shadows swallowing the sun. On the bridge of the Monarch of Fire, Lord Castellan Halbract, commander of the Second Sphere of Sol's defences, watched the reports blur across his sight as the helm of his Terminator armour locked in place.\n\n'Fleet-and defence-wide transmission,' he said, the rich accent of the Nordafrik Conclaves weighting his words. He saw the thousands of units under his command come to readiness in his helm-display. The echoes of a hundred warships' acknowledgements and salutes whispered across the vox. He breathed out and spoke.\n\n'For the light of Sol and the earth of Terra, we stand. For the oaths we made, we stand. For the blood in our veins, we stand.'\n\nHe heard it then, growing in the air outside his armour as the hundreds of crew on the Monarch of Fire's bridge took up the words.\n\n'For the stones laid by our ancestors, we stand.'\n\nAnd now the words were echoing across the vox, overlapping from thousands of mouths.\n\n'For the days that have passed and the days that shall come, we stand.'\n\nThe swirl of dust in the sphere of the gate was moving faster, the light growing brighter.\n\n'For the living and the honour of the dead, we stand.'\n\nShapes formed in the glare, blinking into sight like shadows cast by the flash of lightning. The inner ring of gun platforms around the gate began to fire. Hundreds of shells blazed into the flashing dust. Some exploded, some vanished. The multicoloured swirl contracted. The gun platforms kept firing. Then the dust and light burst outwards.\n\nA split opened at the gate's centre, black beyond night. Across the gulf of the vacuum, the humans on the nearest gun platforms flinched as a ululating scream filled their ears. The dark hole flexed, its edges growing like a tear pulled wide in ragged fabric.\n\nThe fire from the gun platforms was a deluge now. Shells tumbled into the spreading breach. Those that exploded burst like water as they touched the warp. A trio of shapes appeared in the dark. Bloated and monstrous, they pushed into reality.\n\nThey had been macro-transporters once, made to shift the output of worlds across the galaxy. Each was bigger than even the largest warships. Slabs of raw iron had been welded to their flanks, and clusters of void shield generators blistered their skin like boils. They had borne other names in their former, ponderous lives, but the will of Perturabo had remade them, and had given them new titles to bear. Alekto, Megaera and Tilphousia were their names, and they had been reborn to die in the first moments of this assault.\n\nThe second cordon of defences opened fire. Long-range turbo lasers burned hundred-metre-wide channels through the blazing dust in the gate. The Alekto, Megaera and Tilphousia pushed onwards, molten metal weeping from their prows. Their void shields lit. Fresh storms of lightning blazed through the dust clouds, as ether-charged Siren Dust kissed the forming skins of energy. The deluge of fire began to find its mark as the three huge ships shot forwards.\n\nThe plasma reactors from hundreds of half-dead machines filled the trio's decks and holds. They lit one after another. Power poured into engines and shields. Volleys of macro shells slammed into them as they shot out in different directions. Plasma conduits inside their guts began to rupture. Reactor containment began to fail, and thousands of the servitor crew died as their flesh cooked. Shells and las-fire crumpled shields and bit into iron skin. Fire chewed at them like rain into blocks of salt.\n\nIt did not matter, though. They had not been made to live. In another age, back when Terra had oceans, such vessels were called fire ships: crude mechanisms of horror and destruction in a time of primitive explosives and wooden vessels.\n\nOn the defence platforms, the gunnery officers saw what was about to happen as the three ships hurtled closer towards the first line of defences. They did everything that they could to prevent it.\n\nMacro cannon fire tore savagely into the prow plating of the Tilphousia as her shields collapsed. A chunk of smelted iron the size of a hab-block peeled back, tumbling away as lance fire reached inside the first wound and burned into the huge ship's bones.\n\nThe Tilphousia erupted in flame and light. The blast wave reached back to the warp gate, staining the dust cloud orange. Twenty gun platforms vanished, their deaths marked by blinks of light within the blaze as their magazines cooked off.\n\nIt was only as the defenders' auspex and targeting systems went dark that the true spite of the ironclad vessels' makers became clear. Laced into the heart of the Tilphousia and her sisters were machines looted from dead forge worlds. Half-wreckage, their spirits violated and rebound by the priests of the New Mechanicum, these engines had once been wonders of lost arts of communication. Now they were instruments of cacophony. Waves of wild electromagnetic distortion, scrap code and haywire radiation ripped out wi"}
{"text":" defenders' auspex and targeting systems went dark that the true spite of the ironclad vessels' makers became clear. Laced into the heart of the Tilphousia and her sisters were machines looted from dead forge worlds. Half-wreckage, their spirits violated and rebound by the priests of the New Mechanicum, these engines had once been wonders of lost arts of communication. Now they were instruments of cacophony. Waves of wild electromagnetic distortion, scrap code and haywire radiation ripped out with the Tilphousia's death fire. The distortion wave scratched its way into systems, darkened signal receivers and sent gunnery servitors into feedback convulsions.\n\nThe void-fortresses and weapon platforms fired with everything they had. Half-blinded they clawed burning holes in the hulls of the remaining sisters.\n\nIt was not enough.\n\nThe Alekto detonated as she breached the inner lines of defences around the gate. The Megaera exploded minutes later. Weapon platforms the size of manufactoria became shrapnel sprayed out into the dark. A blinding fog of fire and exotic radiation swallowed the gate, cloaking it in brightness.\n\nHalbract had held his ships back, but loosed his first battle groups now. These were monitor ships, blunt craft of raw firepower and armour. Crewed by humans pressed from the Solar privateer clans, they knew the business of killing. They cut down channels between the fortresses and platforms. Gun batteries had fallen silent as their auspexes fogged. Torpedoes were shot blind into the fire-cloaked heart of the gate. For a moment, thousands of strands of light streaked the dark.\n\nWithin the cloak of fire and radiation surrounding the gate, eight main force class battleships translated into reality, guns primed. Each had been selected for their mass, armour and the discipline of their crews. They were all ships bound to the Iron Warriors and crewed by officers who had failed the IV Legion before. That failure had earned them the honour of crossing this breach first. Forgiveness awaited those that survived, and the release of death those that proved weak.\n\nThe guns of the eight were discharging even as they arrived. Nova cannons ran down the spines of four, and they began to fire blind. The squadrons of monitor craft responded with every weapon that could find a target.\n\nThe nova shells hit first. Each one was over fifty metres in diameter and longer than some of the smaller warships in the battle sphere. Accelerated to within a breath of the speed of light, each carried a ship-killing payload. Spheres of exotic energy and primal destruction burst into being.\n\nSome caught gun platforms and void-stations and tore their shields and armour from them. Graviton and haywire torpedoes struck the defences next, seeking out mass and reactor signatures. Sensor arrays shorted. Crushing gravity fields yanked void bastions out of alignment and cracked the shells of the monitor ships.\n\nThe torpedoes fired by the defenders cut into the battle sphere. A cluster of twenty slammed into one of the eight vanguard ships and swallowed its flank and spine in a stuttering blaze. The ship listed, plunging downwards as it died. Burning atmosphere vented from its wounds in vast streams.\n\nOn the bridge of the Monarch of Fire, Halbract watched the first minutes unfold. This would not be a swift battle, but these moments would be crucial. The enemy had to race to establish a foothold in reality, a tipping point where the number of their ships outstripped the rate at which the defenders could kill them. So far, the odds of them succeeding were finely balanced.\n\n'Lord Halbract, something larger is coming through,' called one of the sensor officers. 'It casts a shadow even through the distortion.'\n\nA shape pushed through the firelit dust and haze. At first it looked like a pitted asteroid or a wreck. Then the bulk behind its prow burst through the swirl. The dead of millennia of war amongst the stars were its mass - mangled carcasses of starships, asteroids, towers and broken star fortresses, all crushed together by the immaterium. It was a macro-agglomeration of debris and dead things secreted by storm tides, a pearl of sorrow, a space hulk. The New Mechanicum had dragged it from the tides of the warp and remade it. Launch bays had been cut into its mass, reactors lit in its heart and shield generators bound to its surface. Pushing and hauling it through the warp had cost a dozen ships, and once pushed back into reality, it would never move again. That, though, was not its purpose. The size of one of Uranus' moons, it was made to be a besieger's redoubt at the gate of a greater fortress. Daughter of Woe, it had been named.\n\nThe ships that had already exited the immaterium slewed aside as the hulk grew and grew. Its bulk was breaking through the cloud on all sides of the gate, now. Hundred-kilometre arcs of warp lightning writhed from the tearing edge of the vast hole it was boring in space.\n\nThe dust of the Elysian Gate streamed down its face like water falling from a leviathan breaking from the depths of a dark sea. The wreckage of already-dead ships impacted on its surface. Torpedoes and battery fire slammed into it. Chunks of rock and metal tore from it. And it kept coming. Assault craft began to launch from it in clouds. Small frigates that had made the journey bound to its skin broke their tethers and slid into the void.\n\nLord Castellan Halbract watched as the Daughter of Woe lit with fire from the rings of defences. This had not been anticipated, but it changed little. His orders and oaths still stood. The only question was how much they could make the enemy pay, and the price his forces paid in turn.\n\n'Light our guns,' he said, and the Monarch of Fire shook to his order.\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nThe herald ship surfaced from the night. Bit by bit her shape grew, spear-blade prow and gun-serrated flanks emerging from a lightless ocean. Shadows fumed from her substance like black ink dropped into water. The sun shone beyond her armoured bows. She had been birthed in the light of that sun but had not seen its light in over a century. The Emperor Himself had named her War Oath, and she still bore that name, but like the Legion that commanded her now, time had remade her. Ghost-light clung to her turrets and pooled in the scars that marked her flanks. The marks of the Imperial Fists had long been removed, and the wounds done to her at the Battle of Phall were now repaired, but signs of her one-time masters still lived in her bones.\n\nEzekyle Abaddon looked out at the void light through the armourglass dome of the War Oath's observatory. Perched atop a slender tower on the ship's command castle, its purpose had been to watch and chart the stars. A great stack of brass machinery hung from the dome's apex, its lenses, dials and mirrors filmed with dust. Abaddon doubted that anyone had ever used the instruments; what need was there for such poetic flourishes on a warship equipped with sensors and long-range auspex? A neverborn hissed in his ears as it dissolved from the bones of the ship. A spectre with orb-eyes and a smile of needle teeth ran the tip of its claw down the observatory's dome. It grinned. Abaddon met its gaze as it faded to nothing. The bright, distant jewel of Sol glowed through the fading shadow of its mouth. He caught a glimmer at the edge of his eyes, glanced around and saw the image of the sun shining from an octagonal silver mirror set at the centre of the chamber's floor. He froze, eyes fixed on the circle of light floating beneath the surface of the dusty silver.\n\n'The gods bless us, and bring us to the light of truth,' said Zardu Layak from where he knelt on the stone floor. Candles of human tallow burned with rainbow-streaked flames around him. Eight heaps of ash and blackened bone lay around the Word Bearer. They had been chosen from amongst Layak's mortal flock and had burned where they knelt as the War Oath translated from the warp into reality. None of them had made a sound as they were engulfed. That silence had clenched the muscles along Abaddon's jaw. Part of him had thought of ordering the Justaerin Terminators standing at the edge of the room to open fire and reduce the Word Bearers and their foul sacrifice to pulped meat and shredded armour.\n\nWitch-frost cracked from Layak's armour as he rose. The two red-armoured warriors that had stood guard over his vigil bowed their heads. Layak extended his hand and his staff coalesced into being in his grasp.\n\nAbaddon looked into the rows of glowing eyes running down the cheeks of Layak's horned mask.\n\n'It is done?' he asked. Layak nodded.\n\n'By the will of the Four and the Eightfold star.'\n\nAbaddon felt his lips pull back from his teeth.\n\n'You do not have faith in the gods?'\n\n'I have faith in our Warmaster,' growled Abaddon, and opened a vox-link to the ship's command echelon. 'Report readiness condition.' Static chopped through the replies. He listened, his mind folding each report into a precise map of the ship's current strength and capability. Satisfactory. If needed, they could fight and kill now. The need was unlikely, if all had gone as it should, but you always drew a blade before stepping into the dark. The fingers of his right hand twitched, curling for an instant before he stilled them. For a second, he had felt the ghost of his false-father's knife bite into his forearm as he squeezed.\n\n'You are a fool, boy!' He could see the eyes above the bloodstained teeth, could feel his fingers digging into the neck beneath them. 'It will... slip through... your fingers...'\n\n'You were not born under that light, were you?' asked Layak. Abaddon blinked. The Word Bearer had come to stand next to him in front of the view of the sun. 'But in a sense, I suppose we all were. This is our cradle, is it not, brother?'\n\nThe Luna gene-wright rose, chromed and cold, its six bladed limbs opening above his naked flesh in a spider embrace.\n\n'You will be born anew"}
{"text":"dstained teeth, could feel his fingers digging into the neck beneath them. 'It will... slip through... your fingers...'\n\n'You were not born under that light, were you?' asked Layak. Abaddon blinked. The Word Bearer had come to stand next to him in front of the view of the sun. 'But in a sense, I suppose we all were. This is our cradle, is it not, brother?'\n\nThe Luna gene-wright rose, chromed and cold, its six bladed limbs opening above his naked flesh in a spider embrace.\n\n'You will be born anew...' it had whispered as it began to cut. 'Moon-wrought and blooded.'\n\n'You are not my brother, priest,' said Abaddon, and the threat in the words was enough to bring Layak's bodyguards forwards, their blades drawing, cracks of fire spreading over their armour.\n\nAbaddon looked at them, his eyes glittering above a cold smile.\n\nLayak stilled them with a twitch of his head. The pair paused and nodded once before stepping back.\n\nA blurt of data filled the vox for a second. Abaddon listened, and then cut the link.\n\n'The Thousand Sons ship translated successfully.'\n\nIt did, and we are here, said a voice that rolled in Abaddon's skull. His teeth clamped shut as he shrugged the telepathic communication away.\n\nAn image unfolded in the air, translucent and shimmering: crimson armour, edged in ivory. The eyes set in the smooth face shone with a cold, blue light. Ahzek Ahriman nodded once to Abaddon and walked closer, his ghost image trailing light and frost in the air. Layak's bodyguards had begun to draw their blades once more. Ahriman's image turned to look at them. They met his gaze. The light of their eye-lenses had begun to burn red, and yellow embers were trickling from the splits that had opened in their armour. Ahriman tilted his head. Ice ran across the floor.\n\nTell the warlock to muzzle his dogs, he sent, without moving his lips.\n\nThe eyes in Layak's mask were glowing, and blood was seeping from between its metal fangs. A smell of sulphur and burnt sugar mingled with ozone. Abaddon glanced at where the four Justaerin stood at the edge of the chamber. The glance held them in place.\n\n'Cease,' growled Abaddon. Layak looked at the image of Ahriman for a second, and then turned away. His two bodyguards slid their blades back into their sheaths. The splits closed in their armour. The light in their eyes dimmed.\n\nAhriman turned and glided towards the viewport. An instinct to flinch away from the ghost-figure tugged at Abaddon's muscles. He held still, eyes following the Thousand Sons Librarian as he looked out at the view of Terra beyond the dagger point of the ship's prow.\n\nHome. Ahriman's mouth did not move, but the shadows of his brow furrowed. What creatures are we that come from the night, to hearth and home, and find only strangers on the threshold?\n\nLayak made a sound that might have been a hiss of laughter.\n\n'Kaelic of Noropolis,' said Abaddon. 'From the Songs of Passing. \"And what stranger beasts do the eyes of fathers see who after long years stand by open doors and wait...\"' Ahriman turned to look at him. The light of the stars glimmered through the gauzy image of his frown. He raised an eyebrow. 'We are warriors, not barbarians,' said Abaddon. Then he nodded at the distant sun. 'Where is the rest of the armada?'\n\nWatch, sent Ahriman.\n\nSheets of aurora light formed in the night beyond, flowing and curling across the dark. The light of the sun and the stars blurred as it fell through the curtains of colour, sliding out of place until it seemed that the heavens had been twisted into a new position. Shadows formed in the folds of light, jagged silhouettes like the shards of broken spears.\n\nMillions had died to make this possible. Tens of thousands had been bled into offering vats or been jettisoned from hangar bays into the warp. Most had died with pleas for mercy on their lips. Some had spoken prayers of thanks to the gods. Slaves taken from conquered worlds, helots from the deep decks of the ships, even some chosen from amongst the soldiery that had sworn loyalty to Horus, all had died, their blood and souls poured into nothing to make this possible. The powers that Horus had bound to his cause had seen his ships through the warp, and now they had slid them back into being well past the Mandeville point of the Solar System - that invisible barrier created by a star's gravity past which it was unsafe to translate ships to and from the warp. There had been a price, of course, a price and a limit. The price had been paid in blood, and the limit was that for all the neverborn could bend the rules to place these ships deep within in the Solar sphere, they could not violate them utterly. They had not been able to return the Warmaster's ships directly into Terran orbit. Not yet. But what the blood and death had bought was what some would have called a miracle, even so.\n\nThe jagged shadows in the coiling light faded momentarily. A fork of green lightning whipped across the void, branching across thousands of kilometres. The light froze for an instant. A shiver ran across Abaddon's skin under his armour. His gaze was locked on the scene beyond the glass. He felt his twin hearts each beat once.\n\nThe frozen flash of lightning exploded. He blinked. Ships filled the void around the War Oath, tens of thousands of vast, dark metal shapes fuming pale smoke. The stars swirled, and the aurora light folded over and over, caressing their hulls as thousands of vessels shivered into full reality. Sons of Horus, Word Bearers and the New Mechanicum, enough to conquer star clusters, all hanging above the sun like daggers.\n\nAbaddon watched the ships settle and the ghost-light fade from their hulls. Behind him, the image of Ahriman faded too. A moment later he heard the door release, and Layak and his bodyguards withdraw. Abaddon turned when he heard the doors reseal. He inhaled, bringing emotion to a point of focus. He loathed how they had come here. He loathed more the weakness of his own Legion, implied by the aid given by the Thousand Sons and Word Bearers to make this impossibility a reality. But here and now, his loathing did not matter. All that mattered was the weapon that his father, his Warmaster, had placed in his hand. He heard his oath then - not the oath he had knelt and given at the foot of Horus' throne, but one given long ago beneath the light of the sun that waited for him at the end of this path.\n\n'Will you serve me, Abaddon?' Horus had asked, the coin held out in his open palm.\n\n'I will,' he had replied, and taken the coin.\n\n'All ships,' he said, hearing his voice echo as it reached across the void through the vox. 'By my word, and the word of the Warmaster. The blade falls.'\n\nOne by one, the ships lit their engines and slid down towards the waiting sun.\n\nAdmiral Niora Su-Kassen.\n\nWake and remember\n\nSon of Horus\n\nBlood and luck\n\nPrison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit\n\nSleep came for Mersadie like a thief stealing the light, closing her eyelids and pulling her down into the dark. She had tried to stay awake. Even though she knew that she would never be able to outrun it, she had stared at the caged lamp in the ceiling of her cell, stood up and paced a tiny circle between the walls when she felt her eyes fluttering shut.\n\nShe wanted very much not to sleep. The dream of the night before had left a shiver of fear in her. Loken, the Vengeful Spirit... It had seemed so... vital, and she knew that you could not dismiss what happened in dreams as insignificant simply because they were not real. She had spent years living her memories again and again, trying to recall and hold on to every detail she could. Now it was all she could do not to smell the blood and hear the screams. So, she had fought back sleep, and tried to think through what was happening as she walked the scant metres of her cell and stared at the light.\n\nShe tried to keep her mind filled with questions about the present: why had she been moved from the prison around Titan to a ship? Was that Loken's doing? Or was there another reason?\n\nShe shook her head as she felt herself contemplate stopping for a moment and sitting down. There was no night in this box of metal, but it must have been almost a day's worth of hours since she had slept. She had to stay awake.\n\nShe was on a ship and guarded. Was she alone or were there others with her? An instinct told her that there would be more prisoners on the ship, but she could not be certain. If there were others, where were they going? It would not make sense to move prisoners that were a threat to the Imperium. Unless...\n\nShe blinked up at the caged lamp, swaying. She had to stay awake. She had to...\n\nUnless...\n\nShe raised her head from the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. Painted birds soared through a painted sky of clouds and sunlight. She sat up. The window was open, and the wind was blowing warm from outside. She could smell citrus blossom. The trees under the hydro-dome enclosure were in late flower, heavy with scent and pollen and the promise of fruit. She stared around her for a moment, taking in the nightstand, the bookshelves of catula wood and the half-drunk glass of water left on the windowsill.\n\n'No,' she said out loud, testing to see if she had a voice. 'This is a dream.'\n\nThe breeze coming through the window slackened, and in the quiet she heard a distant, soft clacking, as though someone were placing pebbles on a sheet of plasteel.\n\nShe rose and went to the door. The corridors of the manse opened in front of her as she followed the noise. She did not look around her as she went. She was sure that in this dream every detail would be as perfect as her memory.\n\nAt last she stepped from a wide spiral of stairs into the Sunrise Gallery. It was set at the highest point of the manse; from here you could look all the way across the Aska mountain range and see the distant towers of Terra's equatorial hives. High, peaked windows were open to the air outside, and translucent curtains stirred in a wind that carried th"}
{"text":"she followed the noise. She did not look around her as she went. She was sure that in this dream every detail would be as perfect as her memory.\n\nAt last she stepped from a wide spiral of stairs into the Sunrise Gallery. It was set at the highest point of the manse; from here you could look all the way across the Aska mountain range and see the distant towers of Terra's equatorial hives. High, peaked windows were open to the air outside, and translucent curtains stirred in a wind that carried the smell of rain drying in the first heat of a new day. She could see the sunlight glinting off the great chrome-and-glass dome that enclosed the gardens beyond. Held back beyond it, the upper strata of Terra's blanket of pollution tinted the air a vivid mauve. A woman sat on the floor at the centre of the room, her back to Mersadie.\n\n'Hello,' said the woman, half turning her head. A rush of fleeting recognition passed through Mersadie, but she could not grasp it. 'Where is this place, if you don't mind me asking?'\n\n'Home...' said Mersadie, pausing to touch a leather-bound volume sitting on a shelf. 'My home on Terra, before I left.' She opened the book. The Edge of Illumination, from the hand of Solomon Voss ran across the title page in hand-brushed script.\n\n'You have not dreamed of it in a long time, have you?' said the woman sitting at the centre of the room.\n\n'It was not a place that made happy memories,' said Mersadie, and closed the book.\n\n'You never went back.'\n\n'No,' said Mersadie. 'Home was not somewhere I ever wanted to return to.'\n\n'So, you followed your talent, and it led you out to the stars and into the company of wolves.'\n\n'Yes, it did,' said Mersadie. She turned towards the centre of the room. The other woman still had her back to her, but Mersadie could see that she was busy with something that sat on the low table in front of her. 'Who are you?' Mersadie asked. 'I don't remember you. So why am I dreaming you?'\n\nThe woman laughed, the sound brief and clear.\n\n'Don't you recognise me?'\n\nMersadie blinked, then started forwards.\n\n'Euphrati?'\n\nThe woman on the floor turned to look at her and smiled.\n\n'It is good to see you.'\n\nMersadie stopped. Even in this dream, Euphrati Keeler looked different to how she remembered. The smile on her face was sad, her features lean and drawn, her hair cut short and streaked with grey and white. The beautiful remembrancer who had shared Mersadie's time amongst the Luna Wolves, and their fall to darkness, was gone, replaced by something harder, something defined by purpose.\n\nMersadie looked around again, then back to Keeler.\n\n'This is not a dream, is it? This is like before, when you spoke to me about Loken.' That dream had come years before, but Mersadie had been able to remember it without effort. It had been more real than real, a moment of connection made possible by means that Mersadie could not explain without reaching for words like 'miracle'. 'You are really here, aren't you, in my dream?'\n\nKeeler was still for a second, then nodded. 'I need to tell you something, and then I am afraid I need to ask something of you.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'First you must understand,' said Keeler, looking back to what was on the floor in front of her. Mersadie moved around until she could see. She stopped and frowned. A disc of brass sat on the top of the polished wood. It was as wide as a dinner plate and divided into rings. Circles of polished stone and metal had been slotted into depressions in the wood, and Mersadie could see more discs cupped in Keeler's left hand.\n\n'Those are the signs of the planets and moons from-'\n\n'From the time before Old Night, yes,' said Keeler, slotting more of the discs into place in each of the rings. 'The Planet of War, the Maiden of Dreams, the Bringer of Joy. And these beside them are the phases of the heavens, the symbols used by the scryers of the Suund - the Burning Tiger, the Bloody Sagittar, the Weigher of Souls, the Crown of Oceans, and so on.'\n\n'I know them,' said Mersadie. 'I read the Chaldeantis scripts while I was in the Conservatory towers of Europa.'\n\n'Strange to think that part of humanity held on to such things even after we had gone to the heavens they were meant to represent, don't you think?' asked Keeler with a humourless smile. 'Relics of misguided philosophy, but like all of the things that humanity clung to as it aged, there is more truth in them than most would care to admit. It is crude, a lie of sorts, but to describe what is happening it will serve.'\n\nMersadie frowned. There was something in Keeler's words that sent a prickle of ice over her skin. Behind her, the curtains stirred as a gust of wind blew in through the open windows.\n\n'Euphrati, what's wrong? You never talked like-'\n\n'You need to understand, Mersadie.' Keeler looked up and her eyes were hard, her voice like the falling of an iron blade. 'You must understand, or all is lost.' And her hand spun the disc. The symbols of stone and metal blurred as each ring of the disc began to spin at different speeds - blurred, yet somehow Mersadie could still see each symbol as it flicked around.\n\n'As above, so below. As in the heavens, so on Earth. As in the immaterium, so in the material.'\n\nMersadie found that she could not look away from the blur of symbols.\n\n'Horus is coming to take the throne of humanity and slay the Emperor. The forces of the warp ride with him. Never has such power been turned to a single goal. In the material, in the world of flesh, the battle is one of blood and fire, but as that battle rages so another battle is being fought beyond. Just as Terra sits at the centre of the cosmos in the beliefs of dead stargazers and fortune tellers, so the Emperor and Terra sit at the centre of the forces aligning in the immaterium.'\n\nThe spinning rings of symbols were slowing now. At her back, Mersadie felt a cold blast of air. She almost turned, but Keeler was speaking again, her voice louder than the rising wind.\n\n'The Emperor is holding them back by force of will and by art. He is holding them back and they cannot break Him in the realm beyond. So, they have sent their champion, Horus, to do with bloody hand what they cannot do in spirit. If the defences in the physical world can stand, He can keep the forces of the warp at bay. But if they fail...' The last ring of the disc was slowing. The wind was billowing through the chamber now. A book tumbled off a table, pages flicking over. 'The defences are strong and Rogal Dorn is ready, but he does not see the whole scope of the battle. This is not a battle of three dimensions or even four. It is a war split between realms, in which the actions taken in one world affect the other, in which acts done with mortal hands can echo beyond.'\n\nMersadie was looking at the arrangement of symbols on the brass disc. She read the alignments, and memory unfolded the meanings in her mind from old parchments that she had thought mere curiosities when she'd read them. She read the position of the planets and the meanings of each of the symbols brought into concordance with them. She looked up at Keeler.\n\n'This is not just a metaphor, is it? These symbols are not based on the planets, they are the planets. This is a design. A ritual alignment.' She stopped. The glass was shaking in the window frames. The warm dawn light had darkened.\n\n'Marked by blood and slaughter. As above, so below,' said Keeler. 'This is the dimension that Rogal Dorn does not see. If Horus can bring this into being, then the Praetorian's defences will mean nothing. You must reach him. You must tell him before it is too late.\n\n'Remember!' Suddenly she was shouting. 'Remember what you have seen!'\n\nAnd the circles of symbols rose before Mersadie, no longer stone and metal but burning in the air. She felt them press against her mind, unfolding into inference and meaning that she could not comprehend even as they poured into her.\n\n'Why me?' called Mersadie over the howl that no longer sounded like wind. Light was draining from the dream. 'Why have you asked me to do this?'\n\n'Because I cannot,' said Keeler. 'And because Rogal Dorn believed you before and will again. You showed him the truth of Horus turning on the Emperor. He will believe you.'\n\n'I am in a cell - how can I reach him?'\n\n'A way will open,' said Keeler, her voice lifting over the howl of the rising wind. 'But you will have to walk it.' The floor of the room was shaking. The sky outside was bruised purple and iron. 'They will try to stop you,' said Keeler's face in the dream. 'Old friends and enemies alike. They will come for you.'\n\nA vase toppled off a side table. White flowers and water scattered onto the floor.\n\n'How long until Horus comes?' she shouted.\n\n'He is already here.'\n\nThe glass in the window shattered. The storm wind billowed in. Mersadie could smell ash and fire.\n\nAnd her eyes opened to a world filled with the scream of sirens.\n\nVoid Fortress 693, Trans-Plutonian Gulf\n\n'Three minutes to impact.'\n\nThe voice blared in the dark. Saduran kept his eyes closed, his thoughts still, his heartbeats rising. The double rhythm was still an alien surge through his blood.\n\n'Blood on the stars,' came the call from Ikrek, and the echo roared back from the mouths of the twenty warriors in the assault ram. Saduran shouted the words, but behind his eyes his soul was silent. He heard the clink of mirror-coins and kill talismans against armour and weapon cases.\n\n'Down to the dark, we hold the coins of their lives,' growled Targo, the Cthonian rough-edged as it came from his mouth. Others barked malformed replies. The words, like the clan runes scored into their armour and the gang talismans rattling against their battleplate, were mass-wrought. None of these warriors had even seen Cthonia, much less earned scars in its warrens. They were a mongrel brood pulled from the dark corners of a dozen worlds: Norane, Vortis, Manhansu, Cylor, Neo-geddon and other places forgotten before they were ever known. Gang killers, clan warriors, mu"}
{"text":"ian rough-edged as it came from his mouth. Others barked malformed replies. The words, like the clan runes scored into their armour and the gang talismans rattling against their battleplate, were mass-wrought. None of these warriors had even seen Cthonia, much less earned scars in its warrens. They were a mongrel brood pulled from the dark corners of a dozen worlds: Norane, Vortis, Manhansu, Cylor, Neo-geddon and other places forgotten before they were ever known. Gang killers, clan warriors, murder-cult dross. They were alike in only one way - they all had the capacity to survive what had been done to them.\n\nThe Apothecaries and bio-adepts had begun their production in batches of tens of thousands. Drugs and gene-activators had been dumped into the prospects. Thousands had died in those first minutes, their bodies pulled from the racks and dragged to the render vats. The process had continued without pause. Cutting, implanting, injecting, information deluged into their brains by hypno-rigs. And as they left each step, another batch of meat took their place. More died. The remainder survived, grew, were hacked into the shape of Space Marines.\n\nWhen it was over, when they were bonded with armour and oathed to the Legion, they found themselves Sons of Horus, warriors in a war that they had not seen the beginning of and which would likely end long after their death.\n\nMany of the new Sons of Horus took the traditions of the warriors who had been made before the Emperor's betrayal, and wrapped those trappings around themselves, children aping adults in the hope of finding a way to belong. Cthonian was the language of that belonging, the emblems of its gangs the signs of status. Warrior cults proliferated in the ranks of the newborn: the Sons of the Eye, the Corpse Makers, the Brothers of the Seventh Crow, and more, all threaded with ritual and the mangled cultures of the worlds that had given the Legion its fresh blood.\n\nSaduran spoke the words and wore the marks like the rest, but he had no need of the comfort of belonging. He could see this universe and this time for what it was - an age of cruelty and killers, and he needed no mark to know his place in it.\n\n'Thirty seconds, stand ready,' came the pilot's voice.\n\nSaduran opened his eyes. The red and blue of his helm display flooded his vision. Ikrek sat opposite, bolter clamped to his harness, a red plume topping his studded helm. The sergeant slammed his closed fist into his chest as the assault ram's booster fired.\n\n'For the Warmaster!'\n\nA scream vibrated through the fuselage as the magna-melta engaged.\n\nThe ram's impact snapped through Saduran with bone-breaking force. For a second, he was blind as G-force drained the blood from his eyes. Then the mag-harness snapped free and he was running forwards, the deck ringing under his feet.\n\nHis vision cleared in time for him to see Ikrek's head vanish. Ceramite and bone shards rang on Saduran's armour.\n\nThe chug-boom of heavy cannons. The double thud of his heartbeats rising.\n\nA round hit Ikrek's corpse as it fell.\n\nSaduran ducked left. His bolter was in his hand.\n\nA round hit the legionary behind him. The warrior gasped as he crumpled.\n\nTarget runes flashed red across Saduran's sight. He fired.\n\nThey were in a vaulted junction between three wide corridors. Air was rushing out of the edges of the breach punched by the assault ram through the exterior wall. Blast doors were already dropping across the mouths of the corridors. The automated cannon had dropped from a hatch in the roof. Machine-slaved and shielded with ceramite plates, it was pouring shells down onto Saduran and his squad without pause.\n\n'Breach the doors!' shouted Saduran as he fired up at the cannon again. Explosions flashed off its armour plates. Shrapnel scattered from it. Micro-shards pinged from Saduran's helmet like hail. The cannon barrel twitched around to track him.\n\nFour of his squad mates ran towards the closing doors. The cannon barrel swung away from Saduran and put wide holes through two of them. Saduran saw the gleam of a targeting lens nestled next to the cannon's barrel. He put a burst of three rounds into it. The cannon spun, firing blind, shells punching into the deck and walls.\n\nThere were no troops yet, but they would come. This was one of the star forts that guarded the approaches to Pluto and the volumes around the Khthonic Gate. Like all the rest it was the size of a battle cruiser, a behemoth of stone and metal three kilometres across, studded with batteries and void shield generators. It took a battle group to kill each one, and ships would be lost doing it. There were ships to spare, though, hundreds of them, and if taken, this star fort could protect a corridor towards Pluto's fortress-moons. Ships could pour through that opening. So, a battalion of newborn Sons of Horus had been unleashed to take the star fort by blade and blood. It was like driving a wedge into a stone sphere - drive deep enough and the sphere would crack, then shatter.\n\nTwo of Saduran's squad-brothers reached one of the closing blast doors. They pulled melta charges from their backs, swung them into the ever-narrowing opening at the bottom of the doorway and leapt aside. The charges armed an instant before the descending door met them. Spheres of blinding light screamed into being. The lower section of the door collapsed in a wash of molten metal. Saduran was already running at the breach.\n\nA pressure wave almost knocked him off his feet as a second assault ram punched through the fortress' skin. He kept moving forwards.\n\nLas-fire whipped down the corridor towards him. He could see a barricade slung across the passage, gun barrels jutting from above a slab of plasteel. A cluster of shots hit his left pauldron and forearm. Chunks of ceramite cracked and blew off. He heard shouts as his squad came through the breach behind him. Bolts flew past him and struck the barricade. Mangled Cthonian war cries rose above the sound of gunfire.\n\nThere was no point in pausing to fire back; that would get him killed. He needed to be close enough that they would not be able to bring their guns to bear, close enough that the barricade did not protect them. The spear-strike doctrine, many of the other newborn would have called it, perhaps with a touch of reverence and pride in their words. Saduran could see the similarity, but for him it was nothing to do with the old Legion or aping its traditions. It was simply the best way to win.\n\nA las-bolt burned through exposed cable on his left thigh. A warning rune pinged in his sight. He felt the servos in his left leg stutter. He was ten paces from the barricade. There were more of his squad behind him. He exploded into the last few strides and leapt. He saw a trooper in a void-sealed dome helm jerk back, gun rising. The eyes behind the view slit were wide.\n\nSaduran felt time fill the instant, become liquid, become a promise of what was to come. His mind reached back across the short years to running across the chem-crags on the world of his birth, the howls of hunters behind him, the hunger in his stomach and the fear in his chest. That was what the rest of his siblings did not understand. The gang crests and kill marks, the Cthonian war words and titles - all of it was just a false skin over the true gift they had been given.\n\nHe hit the top of the barrier and vaulted down into the space beyond. The nearest trooper turned to fire at him. Saduran fired first. The bolter kicked in his hand. The trooper exploded in a spray of blood and disintegrating armour. Saduran charged down the line of the barricade, bolt-rounds spearing ahead of him. A trooper, braver than the rest, stabbed at him with a chain bayonet. Saduran caught the rifle's barrel behind the spinning blade and yanked it downwards. The trooper's arms snapped, and his shriek rose and cut off as Saduran slammed the human into the barricade wall. Blood slicked the floor, gunfire pulsed in the smoke. Saduran felt his beating hearts and the roar of his blood in his ears, a roll of thunder rising from within.\n\nThis was where they were truly reborn, where the skin of their pasts fell away. Not beneath the chirurgeon's blades or in the gene-changes wrought on their flesh, but here in the heat and stink of battle. Here they were remade.\n\nAn officer came at him out of the smoke, a glowing power sword in her hand. Saduran felt himself smile as lightning sheathed the human's blade. This was joy, and glory, and life balanced on a razor edge. The officer lunged. He pivoted to the side, switching grip on his gun to fire point-blank into her gut. The bolter clacked empty. The blade stabbed into the air where he had been. She was fast - very fast - and dazzlingly fluid.\n\nSaduran punched forwards, but the officer's sword flicked aside. The blade whipped across his forearm. Ceramite parted. Blood poured out, flashing to smoke as it met the blue haze around the cutting edge. Saduran felt the stimms thump into his blood as his physiology cut the pain away. He rammed his weight forwards. The officer moved aside, and her sword slashed across the plate under his arm...\n\nFresh pain and the reek of burnt meat inside his armour.\n\nThis was the gap between the old and the new. He had been a killer for most of his life, but a warrior of the Legion for only months. He was transhumanly strong and had all the skills that six months of battle hypnosis could give. But he, like his newborn kin, lacked finesse, the honed skill to match their ferocity and strength. This human was just a human, and legionaries should not bleed to the cuts of mortals. He was faster and stronger, but at some level he was still just a youth with the desire to kill, hot-housed into something more than human, but far less than a god.\n\nHe dropped his bolter and pulled the combat blade from his belt. The human officer was coiling back, spinning her blade to cut at the vulnerable join at the back of his leg. He reached for her, the fi"}
{"text":"ned skill to match their ferocity and strength. This human was just a human, and legionaries should not bleed to the cuts of mortals. He was faster and stronger, but at some level he was still just a youth with the desire to kill, hot-housed into something more than human, but far less than a god.\n\nHe dropped his bolter and pulled the combat blade from his belt. The human officer was coiling back, spinning her blade to cut at the vulnerable join at the back of his leg. He reached for her, the fingers of his left hand open to grasp a limb, his knife coming up in his right hand to slam into her gut. Not fast, and not as elegant, but it would still spill her entrails onto the deck.\n\nHe did not see the warrior in yellow come for him until it was almost too late.\n\nHe caught a blurred reflection in the burnished dome of the officer's helm and leapt back. That one moment saved his life. A chainsword churned sparks from his pauldron. He turned, catching a glimpse of a warrior in yellow battleplate with a plough-fronted helm. He did not have a chance to react other than to bring the combat knife up to jam the cutting teeth of the chainsword as it ripped up towards his gut. With a scream of shearing metal, the blade ripped from his hand. Adamantine teeth sprayed out as the chain track unwound. The warrior in yellow did not even pause but punched the guard into Saduran's faceplate. Saduran staggered, hit the barricade wall behind him and cannoned forwards, dipping his shoulder to hit the yellow warrior - but his foe was no new breed. This was a veteran son of Dorn, seasoned both in war and in killing former brothers. The warrior stepped back, lightning-flash fast, brought a pistol up, and fired.\n\nSaduran fell backwards, pain exploding through him. A second shell exploded in the crater ripped by the first. Blood, black bone and shattered armour sprayed out. He fell, gasping, pain flooding his nerves and blood drowning his breath. The warrior in yellow had shifted his aim to pump shells into Saduran's brothers as they came at the barricade. The human officer was moving towards Saduran, blade still ready. A ragged clutch of soldiers were at her back, firing. None of them were looking at Saduran. He was dead, a bag of meat in the shape of a legionary thrown aside by the tide of war. His world was a red-smeared blur.\n\nThe officer stepped close to him, put a foot on his ruined chest and brought the point of her sword to his neck. He drew a bloody breath as she tensed to ram the blade tip up under his chin. His hand flashed out. She tried to stab, but his hand was already around her wrist, gripping and crushing. Bones shattered, and he yanked her off her feet. He turned the blade in her hand, breaking fingers like twigs and sawed it into her neck.\n\nHe rose, roaring as the pain tried to pull him down. Blood and fragments of his blasted armour fell from him. The Imperial Fist turned, but too slow and too late. Saduran rammed the human officer's powerblade up into the legionary's gut.\n\nHe heard shouts and the shrieking boom of a melta charge blowing a hole in the barricade, but his world was red, and smelled of iron, and the sound of his hearts beating in his chest drowned out the rest.\n\nPrison ship Aeacus, Uranus high orbit\n\nMersadie awoke and came to her feet as the cell flooded with red light. Sirens howled. The floor was shaking. Everything was shaking. Gunfire and ricochets echoed through the cell door. She took a step back.\n\nThe door slammed inwards. She had a second to see a guard in red armour and a silver mask, a gun rising in his hands. The holes in its black barrel loomed wide in her eyes. The deck pitched. Mersadie slammed into a wall as the room turned over. The guard's gun fired. Shot and sound filled the air. She struck a wall, and felt the air rush from her lungs. The guard tumbled from the door, arms and gun flailing. The room spun over again. Mersadie rose from the wall, floating, scrabbling at air. The guard hit a wall and rebounded. Red pearls of blood sprayed out from the bottom edge of his mask. She crashed into him. The gun went off again, and the guard's gun arm yanked him up with a crack of shattering bone. Shot ricocheted off the floor and walls. Mersadie screamed as she felt something punch into her back. The guard was spinning back, limbs slack, blood seeping from him in spheres. Mersadie was turning over and over, the open door, ceiling and walls flicking past.\n\nGravity snapped back into force, and hauled her to the ground. The guard landed on top of her in a tangle of limbs. She gasped. The sirens screamed on, the world red. She tried to shove the guard off her. Muscles wasted by seven years of confinement in small spaces screamed. The guard spasmed. A wet gurgle came from his cracked chrome mask. Mersadie shoved up with all her strength and pitched him onto the floor. She scrabbled to the side. The guard was twitching, retching. She looked at the door, red light flashing beyond. She could hear shouts and screams over the alarms.\n\n'You must reach him,' Keeler's voice hissed in her thoughts. She pushed herself up and took a step towards the door.\n\n'Pl...' the guard wheezed. Mersadie hesitated, then turned. 'Please...' he said. She could hear the pain in his voice. She could see a sliver of his face through his broken mask: young, blood running from lips and grey eyes looking back at her. She took a step back towards him. His eye was steady on hers. The gun came up. It was a pistol, the barrel a black circle looking up at her. She had a frozen second to realise that he must have been working it free as she pushed him off. She saw the effort twist his face as he began to pull the trigger. She dived back at the door. A bullet struck the frame. She twisted and scrambled back as another bullet slammed into the wall just above her. She gripped the cell door by its locking handle and yanked it shut. Then she was up and running, bare feet thumping into the grated floor as bullets struck the plasteel behind her.\n\nShe ran past more cells. Some were open. Bodies, red and wet, lay on the floor inside. She heard hands hammering and muffled shouting from others. The floor lurched again. She could see a sealed door across the corridor ahead, yellow and black chevrons painted across it. She was thirty paces from it. Her run faltered.\n\nThe yellow-and-black door slammed open. Mersadie froze. Guards in red-and-black armour with silver masks came through, alarm lights flashing from their visors. Shouts filled the air. She could see a wider space beyond the door, metal, blinking light filling a wide, vaulted junction.\n\n'Help!' The shout came from beside her. The first guard through the door had a quad-barrelled cannon braced in his arms. Mersadie had a second to see her reflection in the guard's mask. There was nowhere to go, nowhere to run.\n\nThe space beyond the yellow-and-black door vanished. The shriek of shearing metal tore through the air. The guard with the quad-cannon flew back through the doorway as though yanked by a rope. Mersadie lunged for an open cell to her left. A howling wind poured down the corridor. Her hand caught the edge of a door as the deck pitched down. She cried out as her full body weight wrenched her arm. Debris streamed past her. Where the end of the corridor had been, there was now starlight and flame. For a second she stared down at it, unable to look away.\n\nShe could see the pale blue orb of a planet hanging against a field of stars. Shapes glimmered in the dark, light catching on the hulls and prows of ships, and the towers of void-stations. It was beautiful, a serene and terrifying image. Fire streaked across the view. Explosions burst into being. Lines of flame and energy latticed the void. A piece of debris spun across the view, blocking out the sight of the planet and stars. Dust scattered into the vacuum from the chewed metal.\n\nNo, the thought flashed through Mersadie's mind. Not dust. Those are people.\n\nAn emergency blast door slammed shut over the breach. The howl of evacuating air stopped. The red alarm lights still flashed, their rhythm stuttering. The sirens had silenced. Ash drifted past Mersadie as she hung, panting, blood draining from the open cell doors in the corridor above to patter on the wall below like rain. Mersadie could suddenly hear her own heaving breaths. Gravity lurched again, and the corridor pitched back to near-true. She half fell to the floor and then pulled herself upright.\n\nThe sudden quiet was somehow worse than the noise it had replaced - as if she had been plunged into water and was waiting for the air in her lungs to run out.\n\n'Help!' The shout came again, louder now, echoing off the metal surfaces. She looked around. 'Here! Over here!'\n\nShe saw it then - an eye pressed against an open view hole in a sealed cell door.\n\n'Get me out!' called the voice.\n\nShe looked away, up at the other end of the locked corridor. Her mind was racing.\n\n'Listen, you have to get me out,' said the voice, high with panic. 'This ship is coming apart. Whatever air we have is not going to last.'\n\nMersadie looked at the cell door. It was a rust-edged slab of metal. The lock control beside it was a cog-ringed set of slots.\n\n'Find one of the guards,' called the voice, as though reading her hesitation. 'There will be the corpse of one of those bastards somewhere. They had key medallions around their necks.'\n\nMersadie did not move.\n\n'Who are you?' she asked, meeting the gaze of the eye looking through the view hole.\n\n'Who am I?' said the voice. 'I am like you - someone who has spent a long time locked up and doesn't want to die.'\n\nMersadie held the gaze. No matter where she was now, the Nameless Fortress that had been her prison had held people who for one reason or another were too dangerous to set free.\n\nA shiver ran through the deck. Metal creaked. Mersadie looked up as the sound ran up and down the passage.\n\n'This ship won't last long,' called the voice. 'That explosive decompressi"}
{"text":"hrough the view hole.\n\n'Who am I?' said the voice. 'I am like you - someone who has spent a long time locked up and doesn't want to die.'\n\nMersadie held the gaze. No matter where she was now, the Nameless Fortress that had been her prison had held people who for one reason or another were too dangerous to set free.\n\nA shiver ran through the deck. Metal creaked. Mersadie looked up as the sound ran up and down the passage.\n\n'This ship won't last long,' called the voice. 'That explosive decompression meant that it's already taken a heavy hit or been ripped in two. What's left of it is going to shear apart.' Mersadie took a step away from the cell door. 'I can help get us both out.'\n\n'How?'\n\n'I know ships. This is a Promitor-class transport. We are in a sub-level two decks down from a hangar bay. I can get us there.' Another creaking shiver echoed down the passage. 'Do you want to live or not?' Mersadie held still for a second, and then she was moving along the tilted corridor, looking in the open cells.\n\n'Quickly, quickly!' called the voice from behind her.\n\nThere were corpses and bits of corpses in every cell: limbs and bodies piled at the lower edges of the sloping floor. She found the body of a guard wedged in a cell doorway. The heavy hatch had clanged shut like a mouth when the gravity had pitched, mashing the guard against the door frame. She pushed the door wide, and began to feel for the lock medallion around the corpse's neck. A raw-meat reek was rising in the remaining air. Mersadie tasted bile as her mouth ran with saliva, and fought to keep herself from vomiting. The scars of point-blank shotcannon blasts marked the cell walls, and the body of another prisoner lay sprawled close by.\n\nShe stopped, the facts piling up to conclusions in her mind. The guards had been going down the cells, executing the prisoners when the ship was hit. They had been making sure that no one got out, that no one fell into... enemy hands.\n\n'How long until Horus comes?'\n\n'He is already here.'\n\n'Faster, faster!' came the voice down the corridor. The walls were creaking. A pipe burst beneath the floor grating. Steam billowed into the corridor. Her hand found the medallion on a plasteel chain, wrenched it free and ran back to the closed cell door. The medallion was slick with blood, the edges toothed like a cog. 'Come on, come on!' She slotted the medallion into the lock. It turned. The door released with a thump of bolts and pistons. 'Yes-yes-yes!'\n\nA figure came through the door as it hinged wide. He was tall, very tall, and rake-thin, grey-white skin pulled taut across his bones, jumpsuit hanging like a sack from his frame. Mersadie looked up at his face, and froze. A band of metal circled his skull, riveted in place, holding a thick disc of iron across his forehead.\n\n'You are a Navigator...' she breathed.\n\n'Well observed,' he said, glancing around as a fresh tremor shook the deck. The Navigator hissed an expletive and began to run with long, loping strides. Mersadie followed.\n\nThe corridor pitched and twisted, throwing them into a wall as they reached a sealed hatchway barring their path.\n\n'Gravity systems are failing,' said the Navigator. Mersadie pushed herself up and tugged him back onto his feet. His arm felt almost fragile in her grasp. 'Structural collapse won't be far behind.'\n\n'How far to the hangar?' asked Mersadie. Her head was spinning.\n\n'Ten minutes, maybe,' said the Navigator, starting off again. 'If it is there at all.'\n\n'You said-'\n\n'I said that I knew ships. If this death-hulk has a standard layout, and if the decks beneath this one have not been flooded with fire or reduced to slag, then there should be a hoist shaft a few turns beyond this door.'\n\nMersadie slotted the key medallion into the hatch lock, and hoped that whatever luck had smiled on her so far would do so again.\n\nLights flashed a dim green on the lock console, and the hatch opened a crack, then the green lights faded. Mersadie shoved and felt the power-drained servo hinges give. A narrow gap opened. She squeezed through, the Navigator following.\n\nFading yellow emergency lights filled the wide passage beyond. Mersadie could smell smoke and burnt plastek. She moved forwards, matching the Navigator's loping strides. 'Of course, I'm presuming that there is nothing that's going to try to kill us between here and there,' he said.\n\nGunfire laced from the dark. Mersadie ducked against a wall, bracing as a shape scuttled into view, hugging the ground on chromed spider legs, a gun mount on its back. Blasts of las-fire burned from the thing as it came forwards. The Navigator was curled against the passage wall, hands pressed against his ears.\n\n'Is that the hoist?' shouted Mersadie. She could see a chevron-marked recess set in a wide opening fifteen paces down the passage between them and the spider-machine.\n\n'It is in the right place, but-'\n\nShe ran, ducking low and aiming for the door to the hoist platform. Las-blasts scattered across the deck behind her. She reached the opening and darted inside. The hoist platform swayed under her.\n\n'Come on!' she shouted back at the Navigator. The spider machine had paused, its gun tracking to get a clean shot at her. The Navigator glanced up and sprinted towards her, hands still held to his ears. The spider-machine pivoted its gun and fired. Las-blasts left glowing splashes on the walls. Mersadie jammed the key medallion into the hoist door controls, hoping that they still had enough power to function. The floor under her feet lurched and began to slide downwards. The Navigator gave a cry, rose and sprinted towards the hoist opening. Las fizzed in his wake as the spider-machine scuttled after him, firing wildly. He dropped onto the descending platform beside her, yelping with pain as he landed.\n\nThe spider-machine reached the lip of the opening as the roof of the hoist came down. Its gun rotated down to fire an instant before the edge of the roof crushed it into the floor. Something in its body exploded. Bits of metal and rubber showered down onto Mersadie.\n\n'Whatever luck you bring seems to be holding,' laughed the Navigator.\n\n'If the shuttle is there, can you pilot it?' asked Mersadie as she gasped for air.\n\n'Yes,' said the Navigator, 'I can.'\n\nMersadie coughed, and gulped breaths as the hoist juddered down through the dark. Every now and then she felt the shaft shake and the groan as the metal of the ship strained.\n\nThe shuttle was there when they reached the bottom. Three shuttles, in fact, red and black, their wings swept forward, held silent in the cradles above the hangar deck. Everything else was carnage. Mangled servitors lay on the deck, crushed by machinery that had tumbled through the space and now lay in smashed heaps. The reek of fuel hid the smell of blood, and her feet splashed in puddles of promethium as they ran to the remaining craft.\n\n'No...' hissed the Navigator, glancing at the first shuttle, and then moving on. 'No...'\n\nHe reached the last, gave a snort, keyed a rune on the cradle and pulled himself up onto the ramp of the machine. Mersadie followed. He was already strapping himself into the pilot cradle, muttering and keying controls.\n\n'I am going to need your help,' he said, eyes moving over the console, as Mersadie strapped herself into the second cradle.\n\n'What do you need me to do?'\n\n'Hand on the controls and hold her steady,' he said, his fingers moving over buttons and dials like a clavier player's.\n\nThe shuttle lurched, and then began to hum. Engine noise rose.\n\n'I don't know how far this will get us,' he said, 'but so far our luck is holding... Now, hold steady.'\n\nShe did not answer. Exhaustion had begun to fall on her like the blow of a hammer. Her head was throbbing with pain.\n\n'Nilus,' he said.\n\nShe raised her head.\n\n'My name is Nilus,' he repeated and gave a smile. 'Nilus of House Yeshar.'\n\nHe keyed a control. The blast doors to the external void shook, trembling as power-starved systems fought to obey. A crack opened, grew wider and stopped. The air in the hangar drained out, rocking the shuttle in its cradle.\n\n'Mersadie,' she said, eyes fixed on the doors. 'I am Mersadie Oliton.'\n\nNilus grinned. 'Well, Mersadie Oliton, I am not sure this thing will fit through that gap, so I may have begun introductions prematurely.' As the shuttle's engines roared to life, the spilled fuel soaking the hangar deck ignited in the last of the air. Flames streamed past the shuttle through the open doors. Mersadie found her hands were gripping the controls hard.\n\nThe docking cradle released, and the shuttle shot forwards, through the gap, fins almost catching the doors. Behind them, the chewed stern of the ship that had been their prison tumbled on through a cloud of its own debris.\n\nG-force punched through her, draining blood from her sight, forcing the breath from her lungs in a gasp. She had a brief image of smeared stars and flashes of white fire. Nilus had gone still, his long-fingered hands locked on the controls.\n\n'Sweet blood of the ancestors...' he breathed. Then the world went black and she could feel the burning void reaching out to greet them.\n\nBurning heaven\n\nPrisoners\n\nThe Falcon and the cage\n\nCordelia Void Habitat, Uranus high orbit\n\nThe stream of plasma flicked across the domed viewport, touched the next dock spar along from the Antius, and cut it from the habitat in a silent burst of fire. A kilometre-long arm of stone and metal hinged free of the station, then began to tumble away, scattering molten debris. The ships locked into the docks on the severed spar fell with it. One ship fired its engines to try to get free and ripped the skin from its hull. It flew into the void, spinning, scattering its guts to glitter against the light of the planet. A blast wave of micro debris hit the Antius a second later. The hauler's hull rang as though it were a tin roof in a hail storm.\n\nCadmus Vek saw cracks spread across the dome as pieces of shrapnel struck it. The ship was shaking in its dock "}
{"text":"molten debris. The ships locked into the docks on the severed spar fell with it. One ship fired its engines to try to get free and ripped the skin from its hull. It flew into the void, spinning, scattering its guts to glitter against the light of the planet. A blast wave of micro debris hit the Antius a second later. The hauler's hull rang as though it were a tin roof in a hail storm.\n\nCadmus Vek saw cracks spread across the dome as pieces of shrapnel struck it. The ship was shaking in its dock clamps.\n\n'Get us loose!' he shouted.\n\n'We have to wait for the captain,' called Sub-mistress Koln. 'She was on the main dock limb.'\n\n'You are the captain now - get us free!' he shouted.\n\n'But-'\n\n'Now!'\n\nKoln hesitated. Her lined face was pale, eyes wide with growing panic. Some of the crew around her had stopped; some even looked like they were about to make for the bridge doors.\n\n'No, I can't,' began Koln. 'The captain-'\n\nVek pulled the pistol from his gown. It was small, but it felt heavy and strange in his hand. Koln looked at the pistol as he levelled it at her. Shock pulled her mouth wide.\n\n'Cast off,' he said. He saw anger flush red into her face.\n\nSomething huge exploded in a starburst of blue and white beyond the dome above. Koln flinched, and nodded.\n\n'All stations, make ready to cast off. Begin the count.'\n\n'There are still people crossing in the dock limbs,' called one of the junior officers.\n\n'Sound the disconnection alarms,' said Koln, 'they will run if they want to live.'\n\nVek could see anger hardening in Koln as she gave the orders. She would never forgive him for what she was having to do. If she found the courage, she might one day try to kill him for it. If they survived the next five minutes, he could live with that.\n\n'Reactor output rising to sixty per cent,' called Chi-32-Beta. Out of all the crew, the enginseer seemed the least concerned about the events unfolding around them. Hunched and swathed in her robes of patchwork red and dirty-white, she moved between the bridge systems as though there was no hurry in the world. The rest of the crew were scrambling to get wired into their posts, shouting orders or questions.\n\n'All systems confirm ready to cast off,' called Koln. The replies came, rattling off loud, tension finding an outlet in noise.\n\n'Engines, aye!'\n\n'Helm, aye!'\n\n'Auspex, aye!'\n\nOn and on. The hull was vibrating now as cold machines woke in its guts. The Antius was a small ship, barely a third of a kilometre from stern to prow. Most of its bones and skin had been hauled from a wreck-drift and remade by skilled hands now long dead and forgotten. It was neither fast or slow, but it had reliably moved indentured labour and ore between Uranus' moons and asteroid belts for centuries. It had stood up to pirates and survived a conquest that had been renamed 'compliance'. Now Vek hoped she would prove to be the survivor again.\n\nKoln turned.\n\n'There are still people running along the dock limbs towards the ship. We can't cast off.'\n\n'Give the order,' snapped Vek. And if you truly listen, Lord and Master of Mankind, he said in his thoughts, have mercy on me for this.\n\nSweat beaded on Koln's sagging cheeks and hung from her chin.\n\n'Seal all doors and hatches,' she said. Lights flashed on consoles. Quiet had fallen across the bridge as suddenly as the falling of an axe. A junior officer looked up at Koln and nodded. 'Release anchor cradle, release docking limbs.'\n\nKoln looked back at Vek, fire in her eyes again, lips pulling back from teeth to spit whatever she was about to say.\n\nA glint caught Vek's eye. He began to look up at the dome in the roof of the bridge. Something huge was moving across the pale circle of Uranus' light.\n\nA flash.\n\nHe opened his mouth to shout...\n\nWhite light...\n\nSo bright it swallowed sense and sound...\n\nBlindness...\n\nGasping...\n\nThe metal deck beneath his hands and knees.\n\nThen a roaring, shouts filling his ears as he rose, neon scars swimming in front of his eyes.\n\n'Full power to engines!' shouted Koln. She was clinging on to her command console, her face drained of colour. Something struck the ship and the deck pitched. Beyond the viewport, the void was on fire.\n\nCordelia Habitat was gone. Chunks of debris rode a silent wave of destruction, spinning like pieces of shattered rock. He could see the shapes of habitation clusters, and the long tines of a dock spur with ships still locked in place, their hulls holed, fuel and air trailing after them. The Antius lurched and the view slid, and he saw streaks of light slicing across the stars, flashing the colours of jewels - burning topaz, ruby fire, cold sapphire. Ships moved across his vision then, either so vast or so close that he could see their jagged outlines with his naked eyes...\n\nHundreds of them...\n\nThousands of them.\n\nIt was almost beautiful...\n\nThe ship bucked forwards. Pitted metal plates began to slam shut over the view. Koln was shouting orders.\n\n'Drop us down fast, then cut power.'\n\n'If we do that we'll lose manoeuvrability,' called one of the other officers. 'We won't be able to get-'\n\n'You want to look like a threat to whatever just cooked the whole habitat?' Koln yelled. 'Follow your orders or you can go and join those we just left behind.'\n\nThose we left behind...\n\nVek found that he still had the dead weight of the pistol in his hand. He looked down at it. He was shaking.\n\n'Sir.' The voice was low, pitched to draw attention from him but no one else. He looked up. Aksinya stood just by his shoulder. He felt a wave of relief at the sight of the lifeward.\n\nShe had served his mother before him and his grandmother before that. Tall, with the willowy thinness of the void-born, she looked as though she would break at a touch, an impression enhanced by the signs of her age. Ash-white skin clung to skeletal limbs, dotted with dark liver spots. A crest of false, carbon-thread hair sat atop her head, and she held herself straight and stiff. The grey-and-black mesh-woven fabric of her long coat, and the white lace at her cuffs and throat completed the impression of a noble's tutor, or widow-matriarch, an impression that was utterly false. She was old, that much was true, but he had seen her move so fast you could blink and miss it, and break plasteel with a blow from her open hand.\n\nHe caught a reflection of himself in her implanted optic lenses: a man running to fat, swathed in a heavy silk and brocade gown, dark skin sheened with sweat, a gun that he was not sure how to use hanging in his hand. The contrast with the woman who guarded his family was so stark in that moment that it might have made him laugh.\n\n'Are they safe?' he asked.\n\n'In the captain's quarters with Nikal and Coba standing guard. It might be too much to hope that they sleep, but they are quiet at least.' Aksinya gave a small smile and the wrinkled skin of her face creased beneath the black lenses of her eyes. 'Oh, if we all had the strength of the young.'\n\n'Thank you, Aksinya,' he said, and heard the crack reach into his voice. 'For everything.'\n\nAksinya gave a small shake of her head, still smiling.\n\n'It is my life and my service, sir.'\n\nHe nodded, not sure what else to say. She was the reason he, his daughter and his son were alive. It had been her who had picked up the threat alert on the habitat's command comms channels before the alert sirens were triggered. That had given them enough time to alert the Antius and reach the dock. Barely...\n\n'How many...' he began, his eyes pulled back to the gun in his hand.\n\n'About a thousand made it onto the ship,' said Aksinya, replying to the question as it caught on his tongue. 'Most of them are in the cargo holds. I took the liberty of ensuring that the bulkheads to the rest of the ship were sealed. They are in shock for now, but that won't last, and shock and grief can change to anger as reality sinks in.'\n\nHe nodded. People had swarmed towards the docks as the sirens had wailed, driven by raw terror. He could remember, years ago, when the news of the Warmaster's rebellion against the Emperor had arrived. There had been riots. Peace enforcers had been brought in. There had been deaths, arrests. After that, the hand of the Praetorian had fallen firmly on everything and had not let go. Harsh order and unforgiving rule had settled on them - uncomfortable at first, but then familiar. Vek had seen some of his assets seized, stores of metal ore requisitioned under edict and two of his family's hauler-ships pressed into service as troop transports. Others had suffered worse, too, but discomfort was not loss.\n\nTime had passed, and the fear that war would come to the Solar System had become a promise that would never be fulfilled. There had been incidents - the Ariel mining operation shutting down, the alert and lockdown, a wave of detentions - but the lies put out to explain them had been enough to return people to the comforting sense that the conflict was a long way away. That state, like the warships passing through orbit, the checks on movement and the ever-watching eye of authority, had just become the way things were. Life had gone on.\n\nWhen Aksinya had woken him a few hours ago and said that he and his family needed to get to a ship now, he had wanted it to be a lie.\n\n'And how many... how many were in the dock when we cast off?' he said.\n\nAksinya shook her head. 'I don't... Sir...' She paused. 'That is not a wise question to ask.'\n\nHe looked at her and was about to reply.\n\nThe ship pitched.\n\nLights flashed across consoles on the bridge. Warning chimes sounded.\n\nVek looked around.\n\n'Blast wave,' said Koln, without looking around. 'Calis Station just detonated.' Her voice was cold, shuttered with control. 'There are a lot of big energy and mass signatures out there. A lot...'\n\n'Warships?' Vek asked.\n\nKoln shrugged but still did not turn to him. 'We only have basic navigation sensors - how am I supposed to know?'\n\n'Signal incoming!' shouted one of the deck officers.\n\n'Source?' called Koln.\n\n'Small craft. It's"}
{"text":"nsoles on the bridge. Warning chimes sounded.\n\nVek looked around.\n\n'Blast wave,' said Koln, without looking around. 'Calis Station just detonated.' Her voice was cold, shuttered with control. 'There are a lot of big energy and mass signatures out there. A lot...'\n\n'Warships?' Vek asked.\n\nKoln shrugged but still did not turn to him. 'We only have basic navigation sensors - how am I supposed to know?'\n\n'Signal incoming!' shouted one of the deck officers.\n\n'Source?' called Koln.\n\n'Small craft. It's close. Maybe a shuttle. The message is in clear,' said the signal officer. 'It's a distress call using Solar void-cant.'\n\n'Cut it,' said Koln. 'We can't-'\n\n'No,' said Vek. The sound of his own voice surprising him. Koln looked at him, and he could see the anger rising up her neck, flushing colour into her face.\n\n'They could be anyone,' said Koln. 'It's a military craft. Picking it up makes us a target.'\n\n'Everything out here is a target,' snapped Vek.\n\n'You order us to leave thousands of people behind and now you want us to-'\n\n'We would have died with them,' shouted Vek, his own anger rising. 'This is someone we can save.' He shook his head, exhaustion quenching the rage as quickly as it had ignited. Koln was looking at him, confusion plain on her face. 'This is someone we can save...' he repeated, turning and dropping into an empty seat beside a console.\n\nKoln looked at him for a long moment and nodded.\n\n'Answer the distress call,' she said.\n\nThe shuttle's rear hatch released with a hiss. Mersadie unfastened her harness, and then paused. Nilus was already up out of his seat and moving towards the opening hatch. He looked back at her.\n\n'Come on,' he said. She did not move. 'What in the name of the stars could be keeping you there?'\n\nMersadie shook her head. A sudden feeling had flooded her, drowning the relief she had felt when the ship had answered their distress call. She had come to as the shuttle spun through a void filled with the flash of explosions, racing towards the promise of a sanctuary. Now the sudden quiet of the hangar after the outer doors had closed on the fire-touched void somehow felt more threatening than the light of battle and the flare of dying ships.\n\nNilus frowned, the expression creasing around the metal plate riveted to his forehead.\n\n'What?' he asked.\n\nThe hatch touched the deck outside.\n\n'Out!' came the hard command. 'If you have weapons in your hands, we will shoot. If you do not comply, we will shoot.'\n\nMersadie took a deep breath, raised her hands and walked out into the light.\n\nThe hangar outside was small, a box of weathered metal just large enough to take the shuttle and leave space for the group of figures that waited for them. There were five: two nervous-looking troopers in blue-and-silver uniforms, which were too clean for them to have seen much use; a very tall woman in black and grey; another woman in a blue and gold-braid uniform Mersadie could not place; and lastly a heavy-framed man with polished-walnut skin. Bonded opals dotted his forehead, and his eyes were cautious. One of the troopers shifted his grip on his shotgun.\n\n'Who are you?' snapped the woman in the blue and gold-braid uniform.\n\n'You're the captain of this ship?' asked Mersadie.\n\n'This is smelling more wrong by the second,' snarled the uniformed woman at the heavyset man.\n\n'Please,' said Mersadie. 'I need to speak to your captain.'\n\nThe very tall woman raised a hand. She had barely moved since Mersadie had exited the shuttle. The woman's face was old, but there was a strength to it and a sharpness to her gaze that reminded Mersadie of a sword's edge.\n\n'That shuttle is a Corona-class lander,' said the tall woman, carefully, without looking away from them. 'Well-maintained and armed, but with no markings. Military or paramilitary, but look at her clothing.' The woman pointed a long finger at Mersadie. 'Worn, utilitarian, nothing metallic even on the fastenings, alphanumerics stitched into collar and cuffs - prison garb.' The tall woman turned and looked at the man with the opal studded brow. 'Sir, you own this ship, what do you wish done?'\n\nThe man stepped forwards. He looked exhausted, thought Mersadie, as though the universe had already piled more onto his shoulders than he ever thought he would be able to bear.\n\n'Who are you?' he asked, looking just at Mersadie.\n\n'My name is Mersadie Oliton,' she said.\n\n'Why were you a prisoner, Mersadie Oliton?'\n\nShe looked at him, thinking of what the truth would do in this moment, and then gave the only answer that came to mind.\n\n'I can't say.'\n\n'Then you must remain a prisoner on this ship,' he said, and nodded to the tall woman. The troopers moved forwards.\n\n'Please,' said Mersadie, sudden panic rising as they gripped her arms. 'I need to reach Terra, I need to reach the Praetorian.'\n\nThe officer in blue and gold-braid laughed, and then turned away as the troopers shoved Mersadie down to her knees and bound her hands behind her back.\n\nBhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra\n\nSu-Kassen heard the door lock behind her, and closed her eyes. The smell of her chambers grew as she drew her breath. Relief crept into her for a moment as the quiet inside replaced the pulse of the sirens outside the Palace. She remained still, letting the moment stretch as she held the familiar scents in her nose: the tinge of hulkar smoke, cold stone and old fabric.\n\nAs senior officer of the Solar Defence command, she rated a mansion complex amongst the Imperial Palace's tangle of towers and halls. She had avoided having to refuse such an offer by requesting a billet in the Bhab Bastion itself. Rogal Dorn himself had asked her why.\n\n'I learnt my craft on warships,' she had replied. 'I rest where I fight.'\n\nHe had nodded but not smiled, but an hour later she had been granted her request.\n\nThe Bhab Bastion stuck up from the mass of the Imperial Palace like the stump of a felled tree. Half a kilometre wide at its base, it was a cliff-sided block of undressed stone. It had been built when the land around it was a wasteland. For decades it had sat inviolate as the Palace had grown around it, replacing the desolation it had guarded with colonnades, domes and statue-capped spires. There had been rumours that it had defied multiple attempts to level it with increasingly apocalyptic quantities of explosives, until the Sigillite himself had ordered the mason-armies to leave it standing. Now, with gun nests crowding the Palace roofs, and void shields sparking above the armour-coated towers, the Bhab Bastion's defiance seemed less of an ugly reminder of the past and more a warning of the future. When Rogal Dorn had begun to fortify the Palace in the wake of Horus' treachery, he had made the Bhab Bastion the seat of his command. And for half a decade, a cluster of three small rooms set one-third of the way up its northern face had been Su-Kassen's home.\n\nSleep. By all of Jupiter's storms, she needed sleep.\n\nA static crackle ran over her skin, and a smell of burnt dust and storm-charge replaced the taste of smoke. They were test-firing the bastion's tertiary void shields again.\n\nShe opened her eyes, and was met by the gloom of the main chamber. She blinked and hung her uniform jacket from the iron hook on the wall without needing to look. A pair of round eyes lit at the other end of the room as Kelik woke. A clicking caw disturbed the quiet. She smiled and went forwards, picking up the falconer's gauntlet from a low table.\n\n'Hush,' she said. 'It's still day, not time for you to hunt yet.' The gyre-hawk gave another unimpressed call as Su-Kassen released the catch on the cage. Kelik eyed her for a moment and then hopped onto her arm, ignored the gauntlet and climbed up to her shoulder. His claws dug into the ballistic weave and she winced. He blinked once, slowly, giving the distinct air of contempt. Su-Kassen laughed and moved to light the water pipe. It began to bubble as she moved around the room.\n\nA low table of ancient cedar sat at the centre of the room between two worn floor cushions. A Saturnian power sabre hung on the wall above a brass-framed box that held one of the twin shot-pistols she had taken from a drift pirate captain in her first ship action - long ago now.\n\nShe should sleep. She only had two hours before she was back on station, but she knew she would not be able to, and besides, she found more rest in these few moments of mundane reality than in the dreams that would come to her if she slept.\n\nShe was drawing a cup of spice tea when Kelik flinched on her shoulder, head suddenly raised, eyes open and fixed on the door. The knock came a second later. She froze for a second.\n\nWho would come to find her here? If it was an alert or crisis there were procedures, signals, but the vox set into the chamber wall remained silent. She lifted the shot-pistol out of its box, loading and cocking it with practised smoothness. There were guards throughout the bastion, security screens, and warriors of Dorn's Huscarl retinue. But something had sent ice prickling her skin, and she had nearly died enough times not to ignore that warning.\n\n'Identify yourself,' she ordered, levelling the pistol at the closed door.\n\n'One who would have your counsel,' came the reply. Su-Kassen felt the breath hiss from her lungs with surprise. Then she shook herself and released the door lock.\n\n'My apologies for disturbing your rest, admiral,' said Jaghatai Khan.\n\n'My lord...' she began, bowing her head.\n\n'Please,' he said, smiling and bowing his own head. 'The impoliteness of an unexpected visitor negates all need for formality.'\n\n'What has happened?' she asked, mind still whirling.\n\n'Nothing,' said the Khan. 'At least nothing that requires you for the moment.' His eyes were like shards of ice catching sunlight. His presence was like the touch of the wind blowing across a mountain. On her shoulder, Kelik gave a soft call, and shifted his perch. She shook herself and stepped aside.\n\n'Please,' she said, pulling the Chogorian words of "}
{"text":"his own head. 'The impoliteness of an unexpected visitor negates all need for formality.'\n\n'What has happened?' she asked, mind still whirling.\n\n'Nothing,' said the Khan. 'At least nothing that requires you for the moment.' His eyes were like shards of ice catching sunlight. His presence was like the touch of the wind blowing across a mountain. On her shoulder, Kelik gave a soft call, and shifted his perch. She shook herself and stepped aside.\n\n'Please,' she said, pulling the Chogorian words of hospitality from memory, suddenly aware of the shot-pistol still in her hand. 'Enter as a friend.'\n\nThe Khan's smile broadened.\n\n'I am humbled. May fortune flow from your generosity.'\n\nHe bowed his head before stepping forwards to pass through the door. The movement was slow, she noticed, unhurried, like the padding of a snow leopard across a glacier. All of that inhuman, dazzling speed was absent, replaced by poise. He did not wear his armour, but a coat of soft, black leather, lined and edged with white fur over layers of silk. The jewelled pommels of knives gleamed at his waist, and silver rings circled his fingers with falcons and snakes. His hair gleamed with oil and clinked with beads of copper, lapis and moonstone. He looked, she thought, just what he was: a warlord untamed by time or place.\n\nShe motioned to the cushions on the floor, tapping more glow-globes to life. The Khan's gaze moved across the room with a fleeting glance that she was sure had taken in every detail. His eyes paused as she unloaded the shot-pistol and replaced it in its box beside the empty space left by the other half of the paired weapons.\n\n'A spoil of battle without its twin,' he said, sitting on one of the cushions. Arrayed in half-plate and silks, he somehow looked utterly at ease in the small space despite his size.\n\n'I gave the other away,' she said, offering him a glass of spice tea.\n\n'To another warrior?' he said, accepting the glass and taking a sip.\n\n'To my daughter.'\n\n'Of course... Where does she serve?'\n\n'I think you know that, my lord.'\n\nShe held his gaze for a second. His smile dimmed, and he nodded.\n\n'Captain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II, last recorded deployment as officer commanding the Thunder Break, attached to the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet under the command of the Sixteenth Legion... the Sons of Horus.'\n\nShe nodded and held his gaze. Her thoughts had gone very still.\n\n'Yes, my lord.'\n\n'Prior to the betrayal, of course,' he added.\n\n'How may I serve, lord?' she said, taking a seat opposite him.\n\nHe looked at her and then around the small room.\n\n'You have doubts about my brother's method of fighting this war.'\n\n'I helped devise the battle plans, lord. I have no doubts.' She paused.\n\nThe Khan smiled, but his eyes had moved to where Kelik still perched on her shoulder. The gyre-hawk gave a soft caw, unfolded his wings and glided to the Khan's wrist. He grinned, eyes flashing as they met the bird's gaze.\n\n'A Jovian void officer who speaks Chogorian, keeps a gyre-hawk and serves Terran spice tea on a table of cedar wood. You are a strange example of your kind, admiral.'\n\n'Perhaps, but are those things truly strange, my lord? I grew up in ships, in orbital shoal habitats, in corridors and spaces of metal where there was no sky, and trees lived only in tales.'\n\n'A cage,' said the Khan, raising a finger and stroking Kelik's crest. 'You lived in a cage of ideas. You broke its bars and now find more comfort in reminders that life is more than iron and stone, and death in darkness.'\n\n'I like things that are different from what I knew.' She shrugged.\n\n'But after this time is past, after your rest is done, you return them to their cage. You put back the ideas and oaths and become the warrior that you were made into. You go back to the small spaces you ran from.'\n\nSu-Kassen felt herself frown. The thread of this conversation had flowed and turned in just a few moments in ways that made it difficult to follow. It was as though there were something that the Khan's words were circling but not touching, some end which she could not see.\n\n'The first reports from Uranus arrived just after you left the command chamber,' he said, and glanced at her, then looked back at the gyre-hawk. Kelik flicked his wings and opened his beak wide. Su-Kassen had the sudden impression that the bird was smiling.\n\n'A beautiful creature. Too beautiful to be in a cage. Keep one like this from the sky and it will go mad. You let him hunt, though, I can tell.'\n\n'When I can, I take him up to the parapets, and let him fly.'\n\n'And he always returns?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nThe Khan smiled, then his face darkened, the expression like cloud passing over the sun.\n\n'The sirens sound outside, on and on. At Actinus Hive, an hour ago, ten thousand people took their own lives by sealing a zone of the hive and cutting off the air that kept them alive. The last message from inside the zone said that they could hear the howling of wolves when they dreamed and when they woke. There are others, too, smaller in scale but multiplying by the hour. Mars has fallen silent. Fire and fear spreads and spreads. Just before I knocked at your door, I was told that there have been pleas from Triton and the moon colonies of Neptune. They can see the battle-light from Pluto. They are asking for the ships taken from their orbits to be returned. They want help. They want the Praetorian of Terra to save them.'\n\nSilence filled the moment.\n\n'Uranus holds?' she asked at last. She thought of the ships, the hundreds of ships that had been redeployed from other planets to bolster the defence of the Elysian Gate. She thought of the resources pulled from Neptune to bolster Uranus' defences. She thought of the cost paid by every enclave left undefended so that the traitors would have to fight and bleed to control Uranus and the gate it guarded.\n\n'I am called the Warhawk,' said the Khan, 'but maybe only because I was given a sky to fly in. My brother, Dorn, has only ever known cages - duty, honour, strength. And for every bar of every cage that has been placed around him by someone else he has made those bars stronger. He has made his cages smaller and stronger until to spread his wings would rip him apart.'\n\nThe Khan raised his arm and Kelik spread its wings and glided back to Su-Kassen's shoulder.\n\n'You are right to question the way that this battle is being fought, admiral,' he said. 'You are right to allow your heart to doubt, and you are right to speak those doubts to my brother. He listens to you. He trusts you. And the way that he is choosing to fight this battle is maybe the last cage that he has made for himself.'\n\n'You think he is wrong?'\n\n'No, I think he is right, but that what he is having to do is breaking him. But he needs to hear the voice that tells him the price and lets him choose to do as he must. He needs to be allowed the moment of flight before he returns to the cage of necessity.'\n\nThe Khan stood and bowed. Su-Kassen rose to her feet, but he raised a hand to still her.\n\n'My thanks, admiral, for your hospitality, and for letting me speak as I will.'\n\nShe bowed her head, unsure what to say.\n\nThe Khan walked to the door, opened it, and then turned, looking back at her.\n\n'The enemy have come through the Elysian Path off Uranus in great force. The orbits of its moons are aflame. But Uranus holds.' He gave a sad smile. 'It holds.'\n\nLord of Summer Lightning\n\nInferno at the edge of light\n\nBrotherhood\n\nBattleship Lance of Heaven, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nThe Falcon fleets turned in the abyss at the edge of the light. Quartets and trios of grey-white ships, they sailed alone in the dark, the orbital plain of the Solar System beneath them, the light of the sun a burning dot. They were ships of the V Legion, sleek and swift killers all. Having come to Terra, the Khan had broken his fleets into shards and cast them above and below the Solar System's plane of orbit. There they circled the light of the sun like hawks around a falconer.\n\nSome amongst the command hierarchy had wondered if the ships of the V should not have been added to the fleet strength around Luna and Terra, or sent to reinforce the Martian blockade, as had been done with the warships brought by Sanguinius. The Khan had said no. His warriors would stand on the soil of Terra, but his ships were not dogs to be chained to watch a hearth. Their strength was in movement, in swiftness and flight. Rogal Dorn agreed and that put an end to the dispute. The ships of the White Scars were scattered high and low above the circle of the planets, soaring free to watch the dark.\n\nThe inner limit at which ships could translate from the warp was, fundamentally, a sphere centred on the sun. Ships not using the navigational gates at Uranus or Pluto could translate at any point on the invisible skin of that sphere. And just because the Elysian and Khthonic Gates were primary beachheads that did not mean the traitors would not come from the plane above or below the system's orbital disc. In fact, in some form, that seemed a certainty. So, the falcons of the V soared far from the sun's light and watched and waited.\n\nOn the bridge of the Lance of Heaven, Jubal Khan knelt in armour, and let his thoughts circle. His guandao sat on the deck before him. Incense smoke rose from twin bowls set to either side of him. The Lance of Heaven had no command throne, just a raised platform of ebony and yellowed bone. Around it the crew moved, near silent except for when an order was barked.\n\nThrough his slowed breathing, Jubal listened to the rise and fall of movements and the hum of machines. Always this moment before battle was the true storm, the building of silence and pressure before the flash and thunder. It was coming. Reports of death in the void had come from Pluto and Uranus, and the ship's sensors had seen the light of battles burning. Here, looking down on the disc of the system, those lights might seem distant, remote, but Jubal knew that was a false perception. This would be a"}
{"text":"his slowed breathing, Jubal listened to the rise and fall of movements and the hum of machines. Always this moment before battle was the true storm, the building of silence and pressure before the flash and thunder. It was coming. Reports of death in the void had come from Pluto and Uranus, and the ship's sensors had seen the light of battles burning. Here, looking down on the disc of the system, those lights might seem distant, remote, but Jubal knew that was a false perception. This would be a battle to end all battles, a cyclone that would envelop all and leave nothing untouched by its passing. He could hear the storm's approach in the quiet.\n\nMemories of the past fell into his thoughts like raindrops. He remembered duels fought for pride, and wars fought for ideals that now seemed like lies told to children. He remembered the faces of all those he had been close to: Sigismund, his soul chained to his oath and his sword; Boethius, frowning as he worked to master the guandao as the White Scars watched and laughed with derision and joy; Abaddon, bending to close the eyes of a dead brother in the red dust. He found himself unable to smile at the fragments of the past.\n\nWhat would become of them?\n\nWhat would become of them all in this storm that sought to wipe the truths of the past clean?\n\nHe heard the rhythm of the command deck change and opened his eyes.\n\n'What is seen?' he asked.\n\nThe Lance of Heaven's sensors saw one ship, then a second and then more, ship after ship descending like a sheaf of arrows. Auspex readers hit paradox as they tried to identify individual vessels. Data drowned the minds of sensor servitors. Enemy strength values became approximations within seconds: ten, twenty-five, one hundred and six, hundreds, thousands...\n\nOut in the dark, at a distance so vast that the fires of their engines were lost against the arc of stars, an armada bore down on the Lance of Heaven and its three companion warships. The ships of the armada had begun their acceleration soon after they had materialised in the void and flew now in a dense mass.\n\n'They have seen us,' called an officer.\n\nJubal Khan read the shock in the humans before he saw the data. The orders that came from his lips did so without hesitation.\n\n'To the wind,' he said.\n\nThe Lance of Heaven's engines flared to blue heat and the great ship shot upwards towards the descending armada. The three ships riding with it kicked forwards at its side. Thrusters fired down each of the four ships' lengths, punching them into spiral paths.\n\nSignals reached back towards their kindred fleets circling the sun and rippled towards Terra.\n\n'Enemy sensors have multiple firing solutions,' came the call across the Lance of Heaven's bridge. 'Approaching estimated maximum weapon range.'\n\n'Choose the mark, and send the call,' said Jubal, his voice level and calm. A second later the image of a single ship at the front of the armada flickered to being in a cone of holo-light. It was a cruiser, large but not one of the monstrous vessels that rode at its side.\n\nThis was how they lived as warriors, how their primarch and their forebears had fought on Chogoris - the marking of an enemy warrior in the first rank as battle was joined. Not a general, for a strong enemy would never let the arrows hit home, but not a soul without consequence either. The first kill had to be noted by the great, and awe those that followed.\n\nJubal watched the marked and chosen ship grow as auspex and cogitators parsed its identity. It was the Fourfold Wolf, a Legion vessel taken as a prize by the XVI when they were but the Luna Wolves. A good mark. A worthy kill.\n\nJubal rose, his guandao in his hand. He felt the judder of his ship beneath him as the spirit of its engines called out in fire. On the command screens he saw the enemy horde draw closer, reaching out and out to the edge of sight. A cloud. A storm come from beyond a dark horizon. He realised he was smiling.\n\n'Loose,' he said.\n\nTorpedoes burned free of each of the White Scars ships, running straight and true towards the Fourfold Wolf.\n\n'They have range to us!' called an officer.\n\n'Wheel,' said Jubal. The Lance of Heaven and its escorts cut their engines for an instant, fired thrusters and flipped over. Their engines ignited again, blazing as they drained power from every other system.\n\nThe lights on the bridge of the Lance of Heaven dimmed. Jubal listened to the rhythm of voice and machine as the Fourfold Wolf realised what was about to happen and tried to turn aside from the torpedoes converging on it. It fired its thrusters, but it was going too fast. The torpedoes slid through its shields like iron arrows through cloth. Red fire blossomed, then grew. It pushed forwards for a moment, its momentum carrying it on even as the explosions sent it tumbling. The ships riding close to it tried to pull clear. Then its guts opened to the void, a red-and-orange flower of light.\n\n'The first cut,' said Jubal to himself, still smiling.\n\nStrike Frigate Lachrymae, Trans-Plutonian Gulf\n\nFire wrapped Pluto. When the enemy had come to the gates of Terra before, they had come hidden under a cloak of lies. The Alpha Legion had bloodied the orbits of Pluto through deception before they were turned black. This time the defences stood ready, and those that wanted to pull them down had come openly, and with overwhelming might.\n\nThousands of warships spun through the void around Pluto. Engagements of hundreds of vessels formed, coagulating in fire and then dissolving back into the dark. The Khthonic Gate itself had been lost to the invaders days before. In the end it had simply been a question of numbers. The attackers lost ships, but for every hull left as molten debris, many more came to replace it.\n\nThe waves of enemy vessels increasingly bore the mark of the warp and the wounds of old battles. Great troop carriers and gun-galleys, their hulls bleeding from the touch of daemons, their vox-transmitters droning unwords. Bit by bit they had enveloped the planet's orbits. Sigismund's First Sphere defences were now surrounded, the void on every side swimming with enemies. But the defences held. The Imperial Fists ships that remained moved and fought without cease as the space they cut through grew smaller and smaller.\n\nThe enemy had taken Nix and Charon, and since then the fortress-moons had been firing at each other as they turned around their parent. Battles both small and large had burned hot, lighting the defences with fire. Even as Horus' forces overran the moons, they found their warrens of passages laced with traps. Key systems failed. On Nix, the plasma conduits running to a quarter of the surface batteries fused and ruptured. On Charon, a cohort of murder-servitors poured into the corridors from oubliettes in the walls and floors.\n\nBut the traitors too had sown seeds of treachery before them. And on the moons and stations still held by the defenders, those seeds blossomed. On gun-studded Kerberos, a senior officer of the Solar Auxilia walked into a communications control room and fired a digital plasma weapon into the primary targeting cogitation cluster before turning the weapon on himself. On Hydra, viral and nerve agent reservoirs, planted in atmosphere scrubbers during the Alpha Legion attack months before, laced the air in the lower vaults with death.\n\nAnd on the dance of fire went in the dark without, ever changing, never ceasing. Lance beams tens of thousands of kilometres long flicked between the ships and the fortified moons of Pluto. Millions of tons of munitions poured out of the guns of Kerberos. Explosions blossomed in the dark, growing, fading and lighting again.\n\nThe ships of the First Sphere moved amongst the fortress-moons and Pluto. They powered from engagement to engagement, doing enough to hold the enemy back for a few more hours and then moving on. They had another purpose, too. Bit by bit they were stripping the defences of munitions and troops. It had been long-planned, and the details kept secret, but there were eyes amongst the defenders of Pluto who watched for the Warmaster, and soon the enemy would know that every Space Marine and primary line unit was gone from the fortresses.\n\nThe only hope was that they would not know what it meant.\n\nOn the bridge of the Lachrymae, Sigismund's hands were tight on the hilt of his drawn sword. Soot, blood and the scars of battle marked his armour. Dozens of oath papers hung from his pauldrons. Some had been half burned away, others were new, the words on the parchment freshly inked.\n\nIn the duty I do, I will be unflinching.\n\nIn the deeds I must do, I will be resolved.\n\nThough I walk in darkness, I will not falter nor turn aside...\n\nOn the words marched. He had written them himself in the years before this moment, had mixed the ink with the grave-ash of the dead that had fallen. They were the oaths already made, carried with him to this moment and all the moments that would come after.\n\nBefore his eyes, a cluster of nova shells struck Kerberos, stuttered and howled as they burst void shields and tore the skin from half a kilometre of the fortress-moon's face.\n\n'Fleet strength at sixty-five per cent, and holding,' said Boreas. The hololith of the First Lieutenant had remained silent at Sigismund's side for the last few hours as the Lachrymae had manoeuvred into place. Every part of the fleet needed to be at a precise location and on a precise vector, and the purpose behind all of it needed to remain hidden from the enemy. It was an act of will as much as skill at arms. Under the hand of any other Legion besides the VII it would have been all but impossible.\n\n'The moment is coming,' said Boreas.\n\nSigismund shook his head after a long pause.\n\n'It is here,' he said. 'This is the tipping point. Any more, and there will be nothing left.'\n\nSigismund closed his eyes for a moment, his gauntlet tightening on his sword.\n\n'There is time to signal Terra to confirm the order, my lord.'\n\n'This is the will of t"}
{"text":" from the enemy. It was an act of will as much as skill at arms. Under the hand of any other Legion besides the VII it would have been all but impossible.\n\n'The moment is coming,' said Boreas.\n\nSigismund shook his head after a long pause.\n\n'It is here,' he said. 'This is the tipping point. Any more, and there will be nothing left.'\n\nSigismund closed his eyes for a moment, his gauntlet tightening on his sword.\n\n'There is time to signal Terra to confirm the order, my lord.'\n\n'This is the will of the Praetorian, of our...' He paused, hearing again the wind blow across the Investiary as Rogal Dorn looked down at him.\n\n'I am not your father!' the primarch had roared. 'You are not my son,' he said quietly. 'And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.'\n\n'... of our father,' Sigismund continued. 'It will be done.'\n\nBoreas bowed his head.\n\n'Of course. But there are other ways. We could-'\n\n'We are not made to question, brother,' said Sigismund, and heard the edge in his voice, the echo of words that had cut him from everything he had ever valued and ever known. He breathed out, and his voice when he spoke again was lower. 'Our duty now is to obey, to be loyal to the last. No matter the cost, no matter the deeds to which we must turn our hands.'\n\n'I understand,' said Boreas.\n\nSigismund nodded. He looked back to where a spearhead of enemy ships thrust towards Kerberos. The moon's surface was still writhing with the light of the nova strikes. Beyond the curve of Pluto, Nix was coming into alignment. Flashes pinpricked the fallen moon's face as it began to fire on its sibling.\n\nSigismund turned from the view. 'As soon as Kerberos falls, send the signal. Full withdrawal, all ships to burn towards the system core.' He felt the words form bitterly on his tongue. 'Signal Terra. Pluto has fallen.'\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\n'Take it, boy.'\n\nThe man's face crawled with flame-light and shadows. Scar tissue had swallowed his left eye, and his breath reeked of meat and still-liquor as he leant in.\n\n'Take it,' he hissed again, holding out the bone-handled knife. The light of the fires burning in the beaten bowls around the cave stained the polished blade orange and red. The old man moved even closer. His hair was crimson and bound high into a topknot that fell between his shoulders. Muscle covered his shoulders, less than it had in his youth, but still enough to fill his frame. Fire-charred armour covered his chest, iron kill-rings darkened his fingers and mirror-coins clinked on long strings as he moved. Further back, against the cave wall, the throng of warriors that called this man lord stood, silent and watching.\n\nThe boy looked past the old man at the four figures kneeling on the floor. A warrior stood behind each of them holding the chains wound around their necks. There was Gul, her shoulders heaving as she fought to keep herself controlled. Her hands were shaking, and the blackened mirror-coins braided into her hair clinked. Anyone who did not know her might have said it was fear. It was not. It was her trying to contain her rage. Kars was unmoving beside her, long limbs drawn up close, his ragged blond hair hanging over his face. He glanced up, bright blue eyes flashing for an instant before the guard shoved his head back down. Dask looked asleep, his boulder head sunk low on his chest. Graidon was twitching, his fingers flexing as they felt for his knives.\n\n'Take it, Abaddon,' said the old man who was his sire, then leaned in again to whisper. 'Do not fail me, boy. You are to be a king. This is the price of crowns and thrones.' He gripped Abaddon's hand, placed the blade. 'Learn to pay it now.'\n\nHis father stepped back. Abaddon looked down at the four who had run with him in the years of his childhood. They had saved his life, he theirs. He knew their laughter and their voices as well as he knew his own. Gul had taught him to trust, and Graidon to lie. Bonded companions, kin by blood oaths, they had grown with him, made him; they were a part of him as much as the hand that now held the knife.\n\n'Now hear, now see,' called Sekridalla the crone from where she stood behind his father. Soot covered her bald head and arms. Rust powder rimmed her eyes. White ash marked the palms she held up to the shadowed ceiling. 'At this time, at this place, under the eyes of all, by blood and by right does this son of the Iron Cord come of age. He returns from the time before birth, from the lightless pools and by bloody hand takes his place amongst us. See him as he approaches. Watch his red hand rise.'\n\nAbaddon looked at the four kneeling on the cave floor. His hand flexed on the bone hilt of the knife. He took a step forwards, level with his father. The old man's eyes were dark, their edges arcs of reflected firelight. Abaddon could feel the instant grow taut. He turned his head slowly and looked at his father.\n\n'I do not want to be a king,' he said, and rammed the knife up into the old man's gut.\n\nHe opened his eyes.\n\n'Fire,' he said.\n\nThe War Oath roared as the ash-white ships came to meet it. Prow batteries fired. A pulsing spear of plasma caught a frigate and exploded its hull an instant after its shields collapsed. Blasts of energy chased the other White Scars ships even as they turned and burned back into the night.\n\n'Why do they do it?' said Zardu Layak. 'They are insects trying to eat a leviathan. What foolish hope burns in their hearts that they come again and again?'\n\nAbaddon did not answer, but turned to the tech-adept who governed the ship's communications. The creature was wired into a column of oil-slicked metal. Cables swathed what remained of its features, and a vox plugged the area of its mouth. It reeked of static and spoiled meat.\n\n'Signal to the rest of the fleet to maintain course and speed.'\n\nThe cable-wrapped creature began a clicking acknowledgement, but Abaddon was already moving towards the doors off the bridge. Behind him, the ship's guns still chased the White Scars craft across the holo-displays and targeting screens.\n\nHe heard the steps of Layak and his bodyguards follow him, and felt anger rise. He stepped from the buzz of the bridge into the gloom and silence of the adjoining atrium. A dome of armourglass and iron capped the open space above - a typical mark of its Imperial Fists makers. The flare of the War Oath's guns glinted across the starscape beyond.\n\n'You do not watch the engagement,' stated Layak, still following. Abaddon did not reply, but strode on. There would be a council before the armada divided, and he would need to be ready for that. Every detail of each ship that was going into each fleet lived in his head. It would be simple to trust that all would happen as it must, but that was not how one made war. For as much as victory lived in the sword swing and the death of enemies, it lived too in the preparation of forces, the harnessing of leaders and the measuring of plans. Chosen from amongst his brothers for this task, Abaddon was neither a butcher nor driven by melancholic fatalism. He was a supreme warlord amongst warlords, and that reputation rested as much on his skill as a general as it did the edge of his sword.\n\nHe heard Layak and his two bodyguards halt behind him. He did not pause in his stride towards the door at the far end of the atrium.\n\n'You are never guarded,' called Layak.\n\nThe words made Abaddon frown, and he slowed and then stopped, turning to look slowly from Layak to the two Word Bearers that followed him everywhere. They never removed their helms, nor spoke. Both wore sheathed swords at their waists. Blade slaves, that was what some called them. Like everything about the Word Bearers, the reek of the warp hung over them like foetor over rotten meat. Layak tilted his head. The red eyes running down the cheeks of his mask were glowing coals under the starlight.\n\n'You have no personal guard,' said Layak, as though resuming a conversation that had merely been interrupted rather than never having started. 'Even the Warmaster has his Justaerin, but you, who are his sword hand, walk alone.'\n\nAbaddon returned Layak's stare for a long moment, then looked slowly between each of the blade slaves. One of them tilted its head slowly in echo of his master.\n\n'I am not alone,' said Abaddon, and turned to walk away again. 'I am never alone.'\n\n'You dislike my presence and my questions,' said Layak.\n\n'You have found a truth, priest,' growled Abaddon.\n\n'You dislike me very much, do you not?' he said at last.\n\nAbaddon smiled coldly.\n\n'On that we agree.'\n\n'I am a servant of the same ends and masters that we all serve. In that we are brothers.'\n\nAbaddon held his gaze steady, his body utterly still.\n\n'No,' he said. 'You are a dog that smells the meat of a kill made by its betters. The carrion eater does not call the wolf brother.'\n\n'Who is the wolf and who is the carrion eater?' asked Layak. Abaddon thought he saw the iron fangs of Layak's mask flex, as though the metal itself were breathing. He felt the anger rise then, felt it wash against the ice of his will. One of the blade slaves shifted forwards.\n\nNo, he thought. This shall not pass.\n\nHe made as if to turn away, but then snapped back, closing the distance to the three Word Bearers in an eye-blink of surging muscle and armour. He was wearing standard battleplate rather than the jet-black Terminator armour of the Justaerin elite. His only weapon was a short-bladed gladius hung at his waist. He drew the blade as he charged. The power field lit with a snap of lightning. Layak was moving back, staff spinning to a guard in his hands.\n\nThe blade slaves were faster. Much faster. Both drew their swords. Cracks ran up their arms. Fire and ashes poured from the splits in their armour, as their forms bloated. The swords stretched in their grasps, fusing with the hands that drew them, dragging light and shadow to them as they sliced out.\n\nAbaddon saw the first blow come, ducked under it and lashed his blade into the base of "}
{"text":"The power field lit with a snap of lightning. Layak was moving back, staff spinning to a guard in his hands.\n\nThe blade slaves were faster. Much faster. Both drew their swords. Cracks ran up their arms. Fire and ashes poured from the splits in their armour, as their forms bloated. The swords stretched in their grasps, fusing with the hands that drew them, dragging light and shadow to them as they sliced out.\n\nAbaddon saw the first blow come, ducked under it and lashed his blade into the base of the sword where it melded with the arm. Blood scattered, blackening to ash as it fell. The sword screamed, and twisted to strike like a snake, but Abaddon was already pivoting to meet the cut of its twin as it lashed towards his head.\n\nOthers that had fought him would have said that he was fast, beyond even the speed common to one of his transhuman breed. That missed the real truth, though. There were others amongst the great warriors who were faster: Jubal Khan, Sigismund, Lucius, Sevatar - even the fool Loken. It was not that Abaddon was fast; it was that he did not think of speed, of parry and riposte, of attack and defence. Living or dying did not matter. Bloodshed did not matter. His life did not matter. All that mattered was victory. That made him more than fast, more than skilled. It made him death.\n\nHe slammed forwards into the second blade slave before its sword could find its mark. A reek of burning flesh and hot iron filled his mouth. He gripped the neck beneath the jaw of the blade slave's helm. He felt his fingers burn as they dug into the warp-filled flesh. He lifted and twisted, momentum and strength flowing through him and sending the blade slave tumbling through the air towards its twin. Ash and orange fire scattered from it. The other blade slave dodged aside and lunged forwards, but Abaddon was already on Layak. He read the warding blow of the Word Bearer's staff and took its force on his shoulder guard. Layak staggered. Ghost-light crawled over the staff. The priest's mask was snarling, iron fangs chewing air. Abaddon looped his arms around Layak, reversed his grip on the gladius, and brought the point of his blade to the priest's side.\n\nLayak went very still. Both blade slaves froze where they were.\n\nFrom a distance it would have looked almost like an embrace, but it was nothing so kind. Any movement and Abaddon would pull the blade into Layak's chest, puncturing each and every rib, heart and lung with a single trust. On Cthonia they called it the murderer's greeting. The two were so close now that Abaddon could smell the incense reek of the Word Bearers priest.\n\n'Brotherhood is not about what misguided craft went into both our making,' hissed Abaddon. 'It is about the choices we make.' He turned his head slowly to look at the two statue-still blade slaves. 'I look at you and see a thing that has made those who were his brothers his creatures. And in that I see all I need to know of you.'\n\nAbaddon tensed for a second and let the power-sheathed tip of the gladius burn the side of Layak's chest-plate. Then he let go, and stepped back. The blade slaves snapped forwards, but Layak raised a hand as he straightened.\n\n'And I see in you all that the gods have spoken of,' said Layak. 'My thanks.'\n\n'For what?' growled Abaddon.\n\n'For illumination, and for giving me my life, Ezekyle Abaddon. Such an act creates a bond between souls, and a bond is a gift.' He bowed his head briefly, turned and began to walk away, staff tapping. The two blade slaves shrank to their normal size and sheathed their weapons. Abaddon watched them as they walked to one of the doors out of the atrium.\n\n'The gods see you, Abaddon. They see you walk alone even amongst those you choose to call brothers.'\n\nIncremented destruction\n\nCascade\n\nSend this word\n\nBattleship Iron Blood, Trans-Uranic Gulf\n\nThe flames of battle stretched from the Elysian Gate towards the orbits of Uranus like the arm of a jewelled god. The Daughter of Woe hung over the gate itself, a new and ugly false moon amongst the planet's true children. Uranus' defences fired on it without cease. Explosions burst on the space hulk's surface. Shreds of its substance puffed into the void like dust exploding from raindrops. It had no guns to fire back on its tormentors, but the ships that orbited it spoke in its stead. Rolling barrages of missiles and macro shells streamed from them. And behind it, shielded by its bulk, more and more ships dropped through the hole in reality.\n\nIn the three days since the first ship had breached the Elysian Gate, the battle for Uranus had spread across its orbit. The outer circles of the planet's defences had fallen within eighteen hours of the first shots being fired, but since then the assault had slowed. Now the fight was for the hundreds of stations, moons and habitats - from the Mechanicum outpost Tau-16-1, which hung like a black needle in low orbit, to the ancient Cadum Station, its geodesic sphere pitted by millennia of dust impacts. Each of the planet's seven moons held small clouds of their own void-stations, and untold billions of humans lived in these scattered islands of life and air.\n\nAssault groups waded through fire to hack and burn their way into stations and habitats. Torpedoes and munitions shot into orbit to plough hours-long paths into their targets. So far, the defenders had retained their dominance, but day by day the attacking forces grew. Stations died or fell, and the sphere of Uranus bled flames without cease. Defence forces counter-attacked, taking back stations while they were still burning with the fires of their first defeat. The vast bronze-and-plasteel star of the Sinderfell dynastic enclave had changed hands three times in as many days.\n\nThe moon of Umbriel swung across the sunward edge of Uranus as the fourth day of battle began. Armoured hab-domes dotted its craters, and tethered gun bastions hung in its airless skies. A quartet of assault carriers detached from the Daughter of Woe and boosted towards the emerging moon. Layered in armour and void shields, their hulls groaned with troops suckled from the guts of the hulk. A pair of battle cruisers fell in beside the quartet of carriers and the IV Legion strike cruiser Aesculus dropped into the lead of the formation.\n\nA group of six warships lay across their path. Smaller than the traitor cruisers and assault carriers, they were Legion ships, four of the Imperial Fists and two of the Blood Angels. Their troop complements had been stripped to garrison Terra, but their commanders were still some of the finest void warriors in the Imperium, their crews trained and drilled to Legion standards.\n\nThey began to fire, moving and rolling in the void as they closed with the oncoming enemy. Torpedoes surged from the prows of the attackers. Squadrons launched from the defenders' ships to tear the warheads from the void. Lance beams danced over the assault group's shields.\n\nThe six loyalist craft accelerated, their guns singling out an assault barque. The ship listed, its belly crawling with flame, skeins of oily energy stuttering around its hull as its shields failed to light. In its holds, a hundred thousand soldiers taken from the Grey Worlds of the Kayuas Belt became ash as plasma vented from cracked conduits.\n\nFire criss-crossed the void as Umbriel's defence turrets targeted the oncoming torpedoes. Explosions ringed the small moon. Then the nova shell struck it. Fired from a bombardment cruiser far out of the battle sphere, it had been timed to strike just at this moment. Primed with a haywire generator and thousands of scrap-signal initiators, it burst on Umbriel's surface. Clouds of distorting energy and ghost auspex signals fogged the defence sensors just as they locked on to incoming torpedoes. Graviton and haywire warheads struck Umbriel moments later. Crushing gravity fields yanked the moon's tethered bastions out of alignment and cracked the shells of surface habitats.\n\nThe strike was not decisive, but it made Umbriel's defences blink - and that was enough. A stutter in the deluge of fire from the guns, a split-second's pause, and the assault carriers began to shed breaching pods like seeds from ripe corn-heads. Their warship escorts came about to meet the six defenders head-on.\n\nGunships cut through the void around growing thunderheads of burning gas. Their targets were the gun platforms tethered to the moon. Those craft that struck true poured troops into the guts of the moon's bastions. Corridors lit with gunfire. One bastion detonated its magazines, and the fire-scattered night was dotted with a brief new star.\n\nForrix watched the data strand from the Umbriel assault for a single second more, then let it dissolve back into the tide of symbols and numerals that cascaded before his sight. Across the entire sphere of the battle, Umbriel was but one amongst dozens of assaults, amongst hundreds of engagements, where counting losses on either side in anything less than thousands was meaningless. As First Captain and chief logistician of the Iron Warriors, he had lived every second of this operation as simulations spooled through the Iron Blood's cogitators. The reality, even seen in the cold flow of symbols and numerals, was breathtaking.\n\nNearly four thousand primary-grade warships had already exited the warp from the Elysian Gate, pouring into the Trans-Uranic Gulf. They had paid for every kilometre advanced, but they had the coin in ships and firepower. They had pushed and pushed forwards, spreading out and advancing on the defenders not at a burning charge, but slowly, inexorably, like the erosion of mountains by ice. And just as mountains inevitably became dust, so this victory was assured. That was one of the things that made it beautiful.\n\nForrix's current role was to control and marshal the forces still exiting the warp. That alone was a monumental task. For all the power they had brought to this battle already, there were still twice as many ships waiting in "}
{"text":"ushed forwards, spreading out and advancing on the defenders not at a burning charge, but slowly, inexorably, like the erosion of mountains by ice. And just as mountains inevitably became dust, so this victory was assured. That was one of the things that made it beautiful.\n\nForrix's current role was to control and marshal the forces still exiting the warp. That alone was a monumental task. For all the power they had brought to this battle already, there were still twice as many ships waiting in the immaterium. Normally, many of them would have been carried away in an etheric riptide or assaulted by neverborn creatures by now. But while storms were churning the warp, they had not touched the ships that came to make war under the light of the sun. The gods and their daemons - for even Forrix had begun to call them that - held back their hunger and spite from the warriors of the Warmaster.\n\nForrix heard the low click of pneumatics and looked to where Perturabo, primarch of the Iron Warriors, stood at the centre of the strategium. Pistons and layers of armour whirred as his gaze moved to a different cascade of hololithic symbols.\n\n'The condition update from the assault on Pluto is overdue,' said the primarch.\n\n'Analysis of the battle-light from its orbits indicates an engagement on a larger scale than we predicted,' said Forrix.\n\n'Than Aximand predicted,' said Perturabo.\n\n'He still has enough main force to deploy that he should achieve domination within the required time.' When Perturabo did not respond, Forrix said, 'Something troubles you, my lord?'\n\nThe primarch turned his gaze on Forrix.\n\n'So far each of the strategic projections has held true. The intelligence from the Twentieth Legion has proven accurate, and where tactical reality is different, it is predictably so - the moving of main fleet forces from Neptune to Uranus, the lacing of the Plutonic Gulf with additional munitions. All of it is within a narrow band of cautiousness. We progress as we intended, and they respond as predicted. Everything is as predicted.'\n\n'You mean that there is something wrong with a plan that is executed as intended?'\n\nPerturabo was silent for a long moment. The plan for the assault of the Solar System was many things, but chiefly it was the creation of Horus and Perturabo, bound with Magnus the Red's semi-corporeal ghost of insight. It was a work of inhuman genius, a battle plan that existed not only in the four dimensions of time and space, but also in the realm of the warp. And Perturabo had been the architect of the opening moves. Even in abstract, to wield forces on the scale involved had taxed Forrix's abilities, but the Lord of Iron had alloyed force and time and space into a strategy that would take the Khthonic and Elysian Gates in days. It was direct, incremental and irresistible: war as bloody art. But now, looking at the smooth fit between reality and theory, Forrix saw the flaw.\n\n'It should not be so clean,' he said. 'The defenders fight hard, and make us pay, but they do nothing that we have not anticipated.'\n\n'My brother,' said Perturabo softly, his eyes still on the flow of data, 'is many things, and his flaws were always hidden by the praise heaped on him. Call him steadfast, and that is merely a lacquer given to blunt unreason. Loyalty in him is merely a need to belong. Nobility is the gilding to base pride...'\n\nForrix held himself still. He had not heard Perturabo talk of Rogal Dorn directly in years.\n\n'But the one thing my brother is not, is a fool.'\n\nPerturabo lapsed into silence. Forrix did not know what to say.\n\nThe Lord of Iron remained silent as the data of the battle danced on the black orbs of his eyes.\n\n'Continue as planned,' he said at last. 'Bring the lost sons through the gate.'\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Uranus high orbit\n\n'Transmit again,' said Vek. 'Make it clear it is for the primary overseer.'\n\n'There is no response, sir,' replied the signal officer. The woman glanced up at Vek and then down at her instruments.\n\n'Try again!' snapped Vek, then caught himself and raised a placating hand. 'Try again,' he said, and turned away, running a hand over his face. He closed his eyes for a second, saw the bubbles of colour blossom briefly behind his eyelids. His hand was shaking. He should sleep, but for the love of all that was precious how would he be able to...?\n\nHis hand strayed to where the small pendant had hung around his neck for these last few years, hidden from other eyes. It stopped and dropped to his side. The pendant was not there. Somehow, in the panic to get off Cordelia, it must have broken and fallen to the floor. This was what? The tenth time in as many days that he had reached for the small golden aquila. He found himself trying to remember the words of the prayers that his wife had taught him. She had been the reason he had kept the pendant, just as she was the reason he had joined the quiet faith of the Lectitio Divinitatus. She had been the reason he had done a lot of things.\n\n'Transmitting on all available frequencies,' said the signal officer. Vek nodded but did not look around. He should go and sleep... How long had it been? A day? Two? More? It had taken that long to drop over the arc of Uranus to its sunward side. Koln had danced them on a jinking path while the battle spread in silent flashes behind them. The destruction had yet to reach this hemisphere of the planet's orbits. But chaos had run ahead of the fighting. Ships crowded towards every moon and habitat, clamouring for shelter, for help - for anything that they thought would shield them from harm.\n\nThe Antius had made for Oberon and its girdle of refinery and ore-processing plants. Fewer ships had fled here; it was further out, and its pipes and industrial platforms offered less obvious sanctuary, compared with Titania's city-warrens and belts of defence stations. But its approaches still swarmed with craft trying to get close, trying to dock, trying to get the attention of the moon's rulers. The Antius had to correct its course minute by minute just to keep from colliding with other craft. Vek had connections on Oberon, good connections that had proved true even when things went wrong. It seemed now that those past alliances counted for little when the heavens were ablaze.\n\n'Still no response, sir,' said the signal officer. 'I can't even tell if they are-'\n\nThe signal officer broke off. Lights had sparked across her consoles, and parchment had begun to spool from a data transcriber.\n\n'What is it?' asked Vek.\n\n'Officer of the watch!' she called. The alternate sub-master that Koln had left in charge started forwards, but Vek snapped out his question again.\n\n'What is it?'\n\nThe officer looked around at him, blinking. There was a fog in her half-focused eyes. Terra's pact, but she is exhausted, realised Vek.\n\n'We are being hailed, Master Vek,' said the officer. Her hands were shaking as she peered down into the flickering green screens in front of her.\n\n'By Oberon governance?' asked Vek.\n\n'No, it's a military transmission, from a warship...' Her voice trailed off.\n\nVek went still.\n\n'What does-' he began.\n\n'They are requesting confirmation of our report that we picked up a prisoner adrift in the void... They want us to confirm that she is alive.'\n\n'Where is the ship?' asked Vek, before the duty officer could ask.\n\n'I don't know. Close, I'd guess, to have picked us out.'\n\nVek rubbed his hands over his forehead. This could be a chance... They needed to dock at Oberon, unload the hundreds of souls in their holds. Maybe he could even use this to barter transport for him and the children to Saturn or the inner system.\n\n'Confirm and respond that we will hand the prisoner over in dock at Oberon. Ask them to follow us in.'\n\nThe signal officer blinked at him, then at the watch officer, who looked relieved that someone other than him had decided. The signaller began to key controls.\n\n'Stop!' The call came from the doors to the bridge. Vek turned as Aksinya vaulted up the stairs onto the helm platform. His lifeward's face was flushed, her eyes wide. 'Do not transmit!'\n\n'What-' began Vek.\n\n'Don't transmit that signal,' called Aksinya, striding forwards, but the signal officer was keying her controls with fatigue-narrowed focus. Aksinya leapt towards the officer, but the distance was a fraction too far and the officer's hand pulled the transmission lever a fraction of a second before Aksinya yanked the woman's hand back. The officer let out a yelp of pain. Aksinya looked down at her for a moment, breathing hard, then she turned to Vek and grabbed his arm. 'Sir, you have to come with me now,' she hissed, just below the hearing of everyone but him. The bridge crew were looking around, puzzlement blending with the exhaustion on their faces.\n\n'Why?' he said, trying to pull his arm free as Aksinya shoved him towards the bridge's main exit.\n\n'Why would they want to confirm whether the prisoner is alive? Why in all that is happening would they seek us out to make sure?'\n\nVek felt the blood in his limbs become ice.\n\nHe could see the great bulk of another freighter through the pitted armourglass of the viewport, so close it appeared you could have jumped from one to the other.\n\nHe opened his mouth.\n\nMacro shells struck the freighter beyond the viewport and tore it into shreds of metal and tatters of flame.\n\n'Listen to me!' Mersadie shouted at the door. 'I need to speak to your master. He needs to speak to me!' The door remained shut.\n\n'They won't listen,' said Nilus. 'Think about it. They have no reason to, and every reason to think that talking to an escaped prisoner might be a very bad idea.'\n\nShe did not reply but looked at the door. Nilus shifted from where he sat in the corner of the chamber and poked at the single bowl of broth the guard had brought.\n\n'There has to be a way to make them listen.'\n\n'To what?' asked Nilus, looking up from the bowl. 'What are you going to tell them? You haven't even told me why you need to get Rogal Dorn, and w"}
{"text":"said Nilus. 'Think about it. They have no reason to, and every reason to think that talking to an escaped prisoner might be a very bad idea.'\n\nShe did not reply but looked at the door. Nilus shifted from where he sat in the corner of the chamber and poked at the single bowl of broth the guard had brought.\n\n'There has to be a way to make them listen.'\n\n'To what?' asked Nilus, looking up from the bowl. 'What are you going to tell them? You haven't even told me why you need to get Rogal Dorn, and we have the bond of mutual suffering, and now this rather inadequate cell, to share.'\n\nShe glanced at the Navigator, but he had gone back to stirring the broth suspiciously. She had woken to find Nilus curled up in the corner of the cell. It wasn't a proper brig, just a small storage space by the look of it. The crew of the freighter had ripped out the inner locking mechanism, and sealed them in with a bowl of broth, and a plastek jug of water that tasted like metal and dust. She had slept in spite of herself, exhaustion overriding fear and uncertainty. Mercifully, she had not dreamed. This had been the first time she and Nilus had spoken to each other since they had reached the Antius. Given the breathless scramble to escape the prison ship, it was also, she realised, the first time they had ever really talked at all.\n\n'It's all right,' he said. 'You can keep your secrets. I am sure you have more than a few.' He paused, then glanced up at her, eyes sharp and wary. 'You were the remembrancer, weren't you?'\n\nMersadie stiffened, cautious.\n\n'I was a remembrancer,' she replied after a moment, then folded her legs to sit on the floor. 'There were a lot of us.'\n\n'But I recognised your name. You were well known, a bit famous even, yes? You and... What was her name? The imagist.'\n\n'Keeler,' she said, the name heavy in her mouth. 'Euphrati Keeler.'\n\n'That was it. You were both quite the thing, weren't you?'\n\n'That was our job,' she said, and shrugged. 'To see the Great Crusade for people who would never be able to see it.'\n\nHe smiled, the expression a crooked twist to his mouth.\n\n'But, I remember the talk - you got close to the heart of things. Very close. Practically a step away from the Warmaster.'\n\nShe blinked, and...\n\n...a door slamming open, followed by heavy metal-on-metal footsteps. Mersadie knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her. She turned to see a shadowy form behind her, robed in a cream tunic edged with sea-green trim. The Warmaster's equerry, Maloghurst, was known as 'the Twisted', as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.\n\n'Loken,' he said, 'these are civilians.'\n\n'I can vouch for them,' said Loken.\n\nMaloghurst turned his eyes to her...\n\nShe shivered. Nilus was watching her, the oily black of his whiteless eyes glittering above his crooked smile.\n\n'Why were you in the Nameless Fortress?' she asked him.\n\n'Was that what they called it?' He snorted. 'How very predictable the methods of oppression become.' He shook his head and took another spoon of broth. 'Where was it?'\n\n'Titan, I think,' she replied.\n\n'But here we are somewhere off Uranus, hoping somehow that this bucket of rust doesn't catch a shell in one of the biggest void engagements in history.'\n\n'They were taking us somewhere,' said Mersadie. 'For whatever reason, they decided to move us. When the invasion started they must have decided-'\n\n'To kill us all rather than let such a dangerous set of prisoners fall back into the hands of the enemy.' He laughed. 'They thought very highly of us all.'\n\nHe shook his head and stabbed his spoon at the surface of the grey broth.\n\n'Why were you a prisoner, Nilus?' asked Mersadie again, after a moment.\n\n'Why were any of us? Why are we alive, here and now? Wrong place, wrong time.' He laughed again, the sound hollow and high. 'You actually want to know?'\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'I was a Navigator on board a warship,' he said, and shrugged. 'Not even the prime Navigator, but that ship was called the Akontia, and it was-'\n\n'Part of the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet,' she finished.\n\nHe nodded.\n\n'Indeed. One of the Imperial Army vessels honoured by the Warmaster to accompany him to war... An honour that does not bring kindness to its crew or Navigators when they fall into the hands of the Emperor's loyal servants.' He spoke the last words through bared teeth.\n\n'You... The ship fled to the Solar System?'\n\n'Hardly,' he said. 'The officers mutinied after Isstvan. Half of the military commanders and units on board were diehard Horus loyalists. But the captain and the other half wanted nothing to do with it. They came to us, to the Navigators, saying that they needed our help to get out... and we agreed. My house does not like this war, not any part of it or any side of it. So, when we can remove ourselves from it, we do.'\n\nHe paused and shivered. Mersadie found herself wondering what could make a creature that looked out on the immaterium afraid.\n\n'The next time we translated into the warp we took the ship off course,' said Nilus eventually. The diehards were supposed to be dealt with then, but... they lived up to that title. It became a battleground inside the ship. Storms came, and... something else, too. By that point we were lost on the tides, rolled by the storm. So, we... I... dumped us back out into reality. And here we were, within touching distance of the light that shines on Terra. They, the ones that found us, killed the rest of the crew I think. Clean sweep, fire and screams...'\n\n'But they kept you alive,' said Mersadie.\n\n'Yes,' he said, looking at her with his midnight eyes. 'Don't ask me why.' The side of his mouth twitched up in a smile. The expression somehow made her feel colder.\n\n'And you, Mersadie Oliton, remembrancer and friend to the Sons of Horus, what happened to you, and why do you think you need to speak to the Praetorian of Terra?'\n\nShe shivered. Behind her eyes she saw a wolf rising from black water under a sickle moon.\n\n'I-' she began.\n\n'You said to the masters of this ship that you needed to reach Terra. Forgive me if I am curious as to why you want to speak to Rogal-'\n\nNilus broke off and his head twitched around, his gaze flicking between the corners of the room. The broth tumbled to the floor as he came to his feet.\n\n'Something is happening,' he said, breathing hard. 'Something is-'\n\nAnd the lights blinked out as the world began to shake.\n\nVek opened his eyes. Light and sound filled the bridge. Explosions lit in the view beyond the viewports. Pieces of metal blasted outwards from the first ship struck and caught another ship's engine cowlings as it passed close by. They tore like parchment in a shotcannon blast. The ship began to skid across the void. The Antius rocked. Cracks pinged across the viewports as a wave of micro-debris broke over them.\n\n'Damage!' someone was shouting.\n\n'Where?' Vek shouted back.\n\n'I... I don't know. Port...'\n\n'Find out.'\n\nVek began to push himself up. The deck pitched and he slammed back down onto the metal. He could taste blood in his mouth. A thin hand with a grip like a machine closed on his arm and hoisted him up. He looked up at Aksinya.\n\n'Sir, you need to come with me.'\n\n'What is happening?' Koln shouted as she pulled herself up the stairs onto the helm platform. The brevet captain was pale, eyes wide, bordering on panic.\n\n'I...' stammered the watch officer. Beyond the viewports, the ship with the shredded engines hit a smaller ship prow-on. A new blaze of light blanked the night.\n\n'Full astern!' shouted Koln. 'Thirty degrees down angle! Do it now.'\n\nThe Antius began to judder as its engines and thrusters pushed it back and down, away from the expanding cloud of destruction.\n\nVek shook his head. His thoughts were racing, putting together the pieces that he hadn't seen at first. 'They fired on us, didn't they? Those shells were meant for us.'\n\n'They missed,' said Aksinya, trying to pull him away. 'But the warship that fired is still out there, and the odds are low that it will make the same mistake twice.'\n\n'The prisoner...' he said. 'They checked that the prisoner was still alive before they fired...'\n\nHe shook himself free of Aksinya's grasp.\n\n'Get the children to a shuttle,' he said. 'Be ready to launch if we get hit.'\n\n'Sir, you need to-'\n\n'I am going to speak to her, now. If we are going to be killed by our own side I want to know why.'\n\nMersadie was banging on the cell door again. There was blood on her knuckles.\n\n'Listen to me!' she shouted. 'You need to listen to me!'\n\nShe roared; a pit of anger was opening in her now. She had accepted her fate long ago. She saw the consequences of her years spent with the XVI Legion and could not fault the judgement of the Imperium. It was the price for the truth of what had happened to Horus, what had happened to everything. Except now there was something more important, just as there had been all those years ago when she and the other survivors of the Eisenstein had brought Dorn the news of the Warmaster's treachery. It felt so much the same. But this time, she was the only messenger.\n\n'That's a blast wave vibration,' said Nilus. He was crouched in the corner of the room, legs drawn up. His head was raised, eyes darting around the walls as sounds clanged from spot to spot. He was breathing hard, sweating. 'Ships like this have no shields. If someone tries to shoot a hole in it, we are not going to last long.'\n\nMersadie raised her hand to strike the door again.\n\nThe locks disengaged with a clang, and the door swung outwards. The rotund man with the polished skin and opal-dotted forehead stood in the space beyond. A guard stood with him, hands twitching on a lasgun.\n\n'What have you brought down on us?' said the man. There was fear in his eyes but anger in his voice. A booming shudder ran through the metal walls and floor. The guard flinched.\n\n'What is happening?' asked Mersadie.\n\n'Someone is trying to kill us to get t"}
{"text":" her hand to strike the door again.\n\nThe locks disengaged with a clang, and the door swung outwards. The rotund man with the polished skin and opal-dotted forehead stood in the space beyond. A guard stood with him, hands twitching on a lasgun.\n\n'What have you brought down on us?' said the man. There was fear in his eyes but anger in his voice. A booming shudder ran through the metal walls and floor. The guard flinched.\n\n'What is happening?' asked Mersadie.\n\n'Someone is trying to kill us to get to you.'\n\nMersadie stared at a him.\n\n'I was a prisoner,' she began.\n\n'People don't kill ships to execute one prisoner,' he growled, biting off the next words. 'What have you done?'\n\n'I...' she said, and then stopped, calm replacing confusion. She looked at him levelly. 'It's not what I did, it's who I was, who I knew.'\n\n'Your name...' he murmered, stepping back, looking at her with the light of realisation in his eyes. 'Oliton. In the Great Crusade, before the war... I heard your name. Reports from the front. You... were a remembrancer.'\n\n'A remembrancer to the Sons of Horus,' she said, simply. 'To the armies of Horus.'\n\n'By the Throne's grace...' hissed the man, stepping back, eyes wide. Another rumble shook the hull. 'They aren't just trying to kill you. They are trying to kill us. They are trying to kill us because we have talked to you.'\n\nThe guard, who had been listening, raised his gun, finger fumbling at the trigger. The big man slammed the barrel down just before the guard fired. The guard struggled, but the big man pulled the gun out of his hand and shoved the guard back.\n\n'She is death,' gasped the guard. 'She has killed us all.'\n\n'I can help,' said Mersadie, as the man turned back to her. 'I think I can save you, save us. But I need to get away from here. I need to-'\n\n'Reach the Praetorian,' said the man. 'How do you even begin to have a reason for that?'\n\n'Because I need to tell him something that may save everything that he is fighting for.'\n\nThe man looked at her; the guard had hauled himself to his feet.\n\nHe does not have any reason to believe me, she thought, and then a phrase he had used rose in her mind, clear and bright. 'Throne's grace...'\n\n'How could-'\n\n'Because I am carrying a message from a saint,' she said. 'From a friend. From someone called Euphrati Keeler.'\n\nThe man looked at her, mouth half-open, not blinking.\n\n'And you can help?' he said, and she could see the hope rising behind the fear. 'You can protect us?'\n\n'Maybe,' she said. 'But not if we die now.'\n\nIn the dry poetry of the void-born, this manner of disaster was called a fire cascade. One ship exploded, and the debris was catapulted out as shrapnel. The debris struck another ship in close proximity, which exploded in turn, and then its debris destroyed another, and another, the disaster leaping from one victim, to many, to countless multitudes in a few bounds. It was a rare event, the vast distances involved in void manoeuvres saw to that. But the ships navigating the approach channels around Uranus' moon Oberon were very close to each other. So close that several catastrophes had already been avoided by the narrowest margins. When the first ship exploded, the fire cascade followed within moments.\n\nWreckage flew out on silent waves of flaming gas. Pieces of torn metal the size of tanks struck unshielded hulls and punched through. Fuel lines ruptured. Promethium met plasma and roared out, ripping and burning.\n\nHundreds died - gasping for breath as billows of fire stole the air from where they slept, or stood, or crouched in the arms of those they loved, seared to dust and ash in superheated infernos, tumbled into the vacuum. On and on the cascade ran, seeded from one explosion into another.\n\nThousands died - cut apart by shearing metal, shot through by grains of debris flung through hulls in hundred-metre-wide shot blasts.\n\nHundreds of thousands died - spinning over and over in the torn chunks of their ships.\n\nShock waves spun the Antius as it turned and tried to run to the edge of the spreading cloud of death. Its engines fired, cut out and then slammed it forwards as a piece of hull the size of a Titan blasted through the space it had just vacated.\n\nSound roared through the Antius' bridge. Crew shouted, some asking for orders, others just screaming. The hull groaned. Alert gongs boomed in spaces beneath the deck plates. Lights blinked constellations of crimson and amber across every machine.\n\nVek caught the edge of the stairs to the helm platform as he hauled himself up. Mersadie was in front of him. Somehow, she was calm, almost serene, as though she had seen this face of existence before and looked on it with familiarity. Vek turned as they reached the top. Sub-mistress Koln saw Mersadie and lunged for a sidearm clamped to the side of the helm console.\n\n'No!' snapped Vek, moving between Koln and Mersadie.\n\n'We should shoot her and dump her into the void,' snarled Koln. Her eyes were bloodshot, the gun barrel shaking in her hand.\n\nMersadie had stopped, her eyes wide as they took in the strobing fire beyond the viewports.\n\n'She can help us live,' said Vek. Another blossom of flame opened in the near void.\n\n'She caused this!' roared Koln.\n\n'If there is a chance that she can help us survive then I am going to take it.'\n\n'They want her dead, so we give them what they want.'\n\n'They will kill us anyway,' said Vek.\n\n'I am captain of this ship. I will not-'\n\n'My ship,' said Vek, his voice suddenly low and dangerous. He saw Koln's eyes flick to the guard's gun, which he still had in his hands. 'My ship,' he said again. The pistol in her hand shook more. He could see the anger and fear moving beneath the skin of her face. He realised that the cacophony of the bridge had dimmed, that most of the crew were watching what was happening.\n\nKoln lowered the gun.\n\n'Whatever you can do, do it now,' he said to Mersadie.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'I can't stop this,' she said, still staring out of the viewport. We must run. Get us out of this and into the sunward gulf.'\n\n'You said you could help,' snarled Vek.\n\n'You think they are going to stop?' said Mersadie, looking at him, and something in her voice held him silent. 'If we can get away from this, they will come after us, after you. They just fired into a mass of civilian ships to try to kill us. They will hunt us down even in the middle of this war.'\n\n'That is insane.'\n\n'Not in the minds of the people who held me prisoner. To them, this is the battle and they have the will to see it through. To them, innocence proves nothing.'\n\n'Then we are dead,' breathed Vek.\n\n'No,' said Mersadie. 'That is not certain.'\n\nVek looked at her and blinked, and an image rose from memory into his mind's eye: an old boat of wood tossed on a high sea beneath a sky of black clouds and forked lightning. It had been an illustration in a book that he had read when he was small - a real book of paper that smelled of strange earthy scents, a doorway into alien realms for a boy born into the void habitats of Uranus. It had come from a distant world with his mother, and the pictures on its pages had shown him things that he still thought of as truer than the picts and holos he had seen of other places: forests of trees with orange leaves, the sun rising behind snow-capped mountains, and the boat on a sea in a storm...\n\nHe had come back to that picture of the boat again and again, staring at it, until at last he asked his mother what it meant.\n\nShe had smiled.\n\n'That is us,' his mother had said. 'Our lives and all we do are the boat, and the sea is the universe. Sometimes it is calm, and seems our friend, there to give us delight or comfort. And sometimes... sometimes it is a storm that can flip the boat of our lives over, break us and swallow us down. It means that sometimes we are small, and the tides we travel cannot be bargained with or bent to our will. Sometimes we can only hold on and hope that the storm is kind.'\n\n'What do you need?' he asked Mersadie.\n\n'I need to send a signal,' she said. 'You said that you sent a signal about me before, on military channels?'\n\n'Yes,' said Vek, frowning.\n\n'Send another signal now. Send it on the same channel you sent the last transmission.'\n\nThe ship bucked beneath them as its engines pushed against the fire-soaked void. A chunk of debris struck their spine, and the deck pitched.\n\n'What should this signal say?' asked Vek as he pulled himself back to his feet.\n\n'Just my name, and one other word.'\n\n'What?' asked Vek, glancing at the prow viewports as the ship dived into a cloud of gas lit by the flare of more explosions.\n\n'Loken,' said Mersadie. 'It should just say \"Loken\".'\n\nThe wall within\n\nKerberos\n\nSpaces\n\nBattle-barge Throne of the Underworld, Trans-Plutonian Gulf\n\nThe wolves closed their jaws on Pluto as the sons of Dorn fled. The Imperial Fists had prepared for flight, that much was clear. One moment there were hundreds of ships spinning in the dance of weapon exchanges. Then, every weapon station and fortress-moon still in the defenders' hands fired. Rolling volleys of shells, and short-fused torpedoes shook the void and lit the dark with bubbling shoals of fire. The attacking ships' sensor systems chattered in distress as they filtered the sudden squall of energy spikes.\n\nAnd the volleys kept coming, rolling over the top of each other like the rising beat of drums. The loyalist ships wheeled as one and turned, thousands of vessels coming together and diving for the inner system.\n\nThe engine light of his fleeing enemies gleamed in the eyes of Horus Aximand as the Throne of the Underworld cut through Pluto's orbit. It was a battle-barge, not the equal of the great Gloriana-class ships, but still a monarch of destruction. Two companies of Sons of Horus stood ready in its holds, a thousand of the Legion's best killers, and it mounted cannons that could hammer targets to ruin. The spear-tip force it led had been aimed at Kerberos, a primary strike to take the fortress-moon's main batteries. T"}
{"text":"of his fleeing enemies gleamed in the eyes of Horus Aximand as the Throne of the Underworld cut through Pluto's orbit. It was a battle-barge, not the equal of the great Gloriana-class ships, but still a monarch of destruction. Two companies of Sons of Horus stood ready in its holds, a thousand of the Legion's best killers, and it mounted cannons that could hammer targets to ruin. The spear-tip force it led had been aimed at Kerberos, a primary strike to take the fortress-moon's main batteries. That blow would now be left to others. The newborn and the IV Legion could take their objectives and bear the cost. And there would be a cost. Even with the cover of their fleet gone, the fortress-moons were still ship-killers. Tens of thousands would die to take them. That did not matter. All that mattered was that this gate to the Solar System was in their hands.\n\nAximand could see each of the next moves he had to make, all the gradations of victory and how to reach them. It was as simple as breathing. He understood it in his mind, but also with his soul. That was what had seen him rise in the Legion - his sheer tactical genius. There had been others who were better at the point and edge of killing - though they were few - but Aximand was able to measure war, and to weigh possibility, and then make decisions that won battles. He was 'Little Horus' because his face had resembled that of the primarch, but the deeper resemblance lay here, in his ease in the crucible of war. The face that had given him his half-mocking title had been flayed away, but the commander's soul beneath remained. Seeing the battle sphere of Pluto change, he already knew why and what to do.\n\n'Battlefleets Ullanor and Shardspear, engage the fleeing enemy ships. Run them down. Fourth Legion battle groups, divert and begin assault on Kerberos, Charon and Hydra.'\n\nBeside Aximand, Vull Bronn sucked in a breath to speak. The veteran warsmith had survived the Iron Warriors' withdrawal from Krade, but a strike on the last transport had left him with a bloody cave in his side.\n\n'They are not breaking,' he rasped. Compression pistons in his rebuilt torso hissed and released. 'The key values of their force and strength have not fallen to collapse. We should hold to our current deployment.'\n\n'No,' said Aximand. 'They are withdrawing. This is a battle they knew they would lose. They held for as long as they could, slowed us and bled us as much as they could, and now they will run to Terra.'\n\n'The dog-sons of Dorn do not run,' said Vull Bronn. 'They hold past the point of sense. This is something else.'\n\n'They have other lines and defences to use,' replied Aximand, 'and billions of people who can die on their walls.' He turned his flayed grin to Vull Bronn. 'What they don't have is ships. They cannot lose more. Their strength is their fortifications and the number of mortals who will fight for them. But fortresses cannot be moved. Their ships are the only way for them to redistribute their strength. They lose those ships and all their strength is trapped.' He turned and began to walk towards the doors that led from the bridge to the hoist down to the launch decks. 'So, they are running because they must, to keep their ships alive. And we will not let them escape.'\n\n'Where are you going?' asked Vull Bronn.\n\n'To draw my sword and bury it in their back,' said Aximand. 'One-third of your ships may join the pursuit, but the rest of the fortress-moons are yours. Live up to your reputation - take them now.' He could see his words light a fire in the cold eyes of the Iron Warriors commander. Vull Bronn understood what Aximand had explained - of that there was no doubt - but the Iron Warriors' way of war moved like a glacier over stone. They had no time for such caution. The Ultramarines were coming, and with them all the enemies they had left undefeated in these years of war.\n\n'As soon as the main defences fall, we should bring the reserves through,' said Vull Bronn, and Aximand could see that it was an act of will for the other warrior to not bite back. Good. The two chains that formed the Iron Warriors' bridle were loyalty and pride. Now pride would work to overcome caution. 'We should bring all the rest of our forces through the gate on an accelerated timetable.'\n\n'Agreed,' said Aximand. 'So ordered.'\n\nThe Imperial Palace, Terra\n\n'Admiral.'\n\nSu-Kassen looked up into the face of the Huscarl. A black cloak hung from his shoulders and snow leopard fur covered his shoulders. He held his brush-crested helm in his left hand, and his right rested on the pommel of a sheathed sword. His face was clean-shaven, his eyes hard but bright.\n\n'Yes, Captain Archamus?' she said. The name still felt strange to say to this young warrior, and for a moment she saw the face of the man who had borne the name before, her friend: bearded, unreadable, as immovable and eternal as a granite cliff. Then she blinked and the new face nodded, as though seeing the memory in her eyes.\n\n'Come with me please, admiral,' he said. She frowned and glanced around at the Grand Borealis Strategium. The circles of officers and tech-priests did not look up. The shimmer of holo-projections and the buzz of machines flowed on unceasing.\n\n'General Kaze,' she said to a lean-faced officer standing one step down from her station. 'You have the watch.'\n\nShe stood and followed Archamus as he walked from the chamber. She did not ask where she was going or why; that it was Archamus meant that this was the Praetorian's will, and she would discover the reason soon enough.\n\nTwo figures in massive amber-yellow Terminator plate flanked the door they eventually reached. Archamus paused for a second in front of them, and then the door to the chamber beyond opened. He stepped aside and motioned for her to enter.\n\nThe room was circular, and wide enough that it would have taken her twenty strides to reach the opposite wall. Thick, embroidered curtains hung over tall windows. Dusty glow-globes sent shadows across the domed ceiling above and the carpeted floor below. It smelled of pipe smoke and time soaked into rich fabric. Four figures looked up from the circular table as she entered. She knelt instantly.\n\n'Stand, admiral,' said Rogal Dorn. She obeyed. Behind her, the door closed behind Archamus and she heard the brief buzz of servos as he too began to kneel, and then stopped himself. There was a clack of ceramite as he saluted, fist to chest. She smiled inwardly. As one of the Huscarls, Archamus did not kneel unless his lord did; it was a rule that he was still getting used to. But well he might have knelt.\n\nBeside Rogal Dorn stood Sanguinius, face grave beneath his golden locks, and with them the gilded presence of Constantin Valdor. The Chief Custodian looked up from the parchment-strewn table, and gave Su-Kassen a short nod.\n\n'Admiral,' he said, his voice an echo of the gravity in Sanguinius' expression.\n\nMalcador, alone of the four, was seated. The Regent of Terra had never looked older to Su-Kassen's eyes. The hood of his robe was lowered, and she could see the skin of his scalp through the white strands of his hair. The lines of his face looked to be cut deeper into his brow and cheeks, and the skin had drawn tighter over the bones of his skull. A jolt of shock ran through her as he looked up. There was pain in his eyes, and a distance that reminded her of the eyes of her father in the last days of life.\n\n'Thank you for attending us here, admiral,' said Malcador, his voice was as clear and steady as ever. A small smile twitched the edges of his mouth. 'Excuse my remaining seated.'\n\n'Of course, Lord Regent,' she said.\n\n'Oh, please can we move past the tortuous formalities?'\n\nSu-Kassen looked around at the sound of the voice. A woman in grey robes, with chromed hair, sat cross-legged on the top of a polished wooden cabinet. She was resting her chin on her hands. Her posture looked bored, but her eyes were alight and glittering. Su-Kassen knew who she was instantly, even though they had not met in person before. The woman was called Andromeda-17, and she was one of the last of the Selenar, a scion of the near-extinct Luna gene-cults that had helped the Emperor raise the Space Marines from armies to Legions. She was a specialist in empathic and non-linear reasoning, and was part of a hazy grouping of servants that existed between Dorn and Malcador. Su-Kassen knew Andromeda-17 by rising reputation, and disliked most of what she heard. Nothing that she saw of the woman in the flesh undid that impression.\n\n'It's all right, admiral,' said Andromeda. 'Despising me at first sight is what most people do.'\n\nArchamus shifted, and if Su-Kassen had not known better, she would have thought that the Huscarl was trying to suppress a smile.\n\n'Thank you for the attempt to leaven the mood, Mistress Andromeda,' said Malcador, looking directly at Su-Kassen. 'This is a council, admiral, after a fashion, but not one that can involve the wider staff, you understand?'\n\n'In all honesty, I don't, my lord. I believe I am aware of all the dimensions of the defence, and the senior staff also knows all of those details. If it is a matter of trust...'\n\n'It is not,' said Rogal Dorn. 'It is a matter of perspective, of judgement.'\n\nSanguinius looked at his brother primarch for a second, and the gravity in his expression became a brief flash of raw emotion.\n\n'It is not weakness, brother. Our limits are what make us.'\n\nSu-Kassen thought she saw something within Dorn's gaze then, like the flare of lightning hidden by a far horizon.\n\n'What they are trying to say,' said Andromeda 'is that they are struggling with some things that don't fit in the normal patterns of war.'\n\n'Specifically?' asked Su-Kassen.\n\n'Things unseen and incomplete,' said Malcador, sounding very tired suddenly. 'Shadows on the wall...'\n\n'If you would indulge us by summarising the position, admiral,' said Valdor, activating a micro holo-projector that spun a display of the Solar System into the ai"}
{"text":" then, like the flare of lightning hidden by a far horizon.\n\n'What they are trying to say,' said Andromeda 'is that they are struggling with some things that don't fit in the normal patterns of war.'\n\n'Specifically?' asked Su-Kassen.\n\n'Things unseen and incomplete,' said Malcador, sounding very tired suddenly. 'Shadows on the wall...'\n\n'If you would indulge us by summarising the position, admiral,' said Valdor, activating a micro holo-projector that spun a display of the Solar System into the air.\n\n'The enemy progresses through the gates off Pluto and Uranus as planned for,' said Su-Kassen. 'They have also, by other means-'\n\n'By sorcery,' injected Andromeda.\n\n'-inserted a large force above the plane of the Solar System. That fleet has divided into two, with both elements making speed for the inner system, for us and for Mars.'\n\n'Why?' asked Dorn.\n\nShe looked at him. 'To divide our efforts. To put direct pressure on the inner-system defences while they take the gates off Pluto and Uranus. They pin us in place around the Throneworld and pour forces in from the outer system and overwhelm us.'\n\n'Will it work?' asked Sanguinius, lightly.\n\nSu-Kassen paused.\n\n'It can work. In the end, my lord, they have numbers and mobility. It is just a question of time.' She paused, then decided to give voice to her suspicion. 'But you all know this just as well as I do. The enemy know that others are at their heels, that they do not have time. This battle for them must be swift, and our greatest defence is to slow them, to make them have to grind through every step they take forwards. This... manoeuvre is much further in-system than we would expect. It is extraordinary, but it is not enough. It will not work quickly enough.' She looked up and met Rogal Dorn's gaze. 'And they will know that. They will know that we can defeat them with time even if we lose these battles. So the question is - what are they doing that we cannot see?'\n\nDorn nodded.\n\n'They are either blind or desperate, or there is another dimension that we do not see,' said the Praetorian. 'That I do not see.'\n\n'The warp,' said Malcador simply, and Su-Kassen could not miss the weariness in the word. They all looked at the Regent. 'This has always been a war fought on two fronts. One in the physical world, the world of guns and bullets and flesh. The other a war in the realm beyond the physical, a world of things that dream they were gods, and where power has different dimensions.'\n\n'The wall without,' said Dorn, 'and the wall within.'\n\n'Indeed,' said Malcador, 'and you have always known that, Rogal. But now Horus comes here not just in the physical realm, but in the warp...' He broke off, and closed his eyes for a moment. 'I can feel it, and see it. Just as you all can, just as every soul in the circle of the sun can. Fear and despair grow stronger, and feed the storm that rides at Horus' back. This is just the prelude, the beginning. The storm builds still and has yet to break...'\n\nSanguinius moved next to the old man, and placed a hand on his thin shoulder. Malcador let out a breath and closed his eyes again as something spasmed across his cheeks.\n\n'And everything that happens here,' said the Angel, 'has an echo in the warp, in the beyond. In war, one might unleash terror to break the will of the enemy, or sow confusion. In this war that terror is the end in itself. Everything they do must be seen as having two purposes, one we can see and one we cannot.'\n\n'Can you not look?' Su-Kassen asked, looking at Malcador. 'Forgive me, but like the beloved Emperor you are-'\n\n'I cannot see. There is a... a darkness in the warp, screaming, blinding and growing deeper. It is a constant pressure and with every moment the pressure becomes greater... I cannot see.'\n\n'The Emperor-' began Su-Kassen,\n\n'The Emperor is our wall within now. He and He alone,' said Sanguinius. 'He is... He is holding it back alone.'\n\n'And He can hold,' said Valdor. The Chief Custodian seemed to shiver. 'At great cost, but He holds and protects.'\n\n'Holds?' said Su-Kassen. 'Not triumphs?'\n\n'That is triumphing. As things stand, Horus cannot win the battle within,' said Malcador, 'and so his hope must be to break us without.'\n\n'Then they will fail,' said Su-Kassen. 'The enemy do not have time. We will move primary fleet forces to intercept them, and even at great loss, they will not be able to have victory before Lord Guilliman arrives at their back.' She looked at Dorn. 'I was preparing the fleet redeployment orders. I assume you are ready to order the Phalanx into the line?'\n\nDorn's face showed no expression.\n\n'Not yet,' he said quietly.\n\n'My lord...'\n\n'He knows,' said Dorn, and Su-Kassen could see in the stillness around the table that they had arrived at the point they had been unable to resolve. 'Horus knows all that we have said and seen already. He knows what we know of this battle so far, and he knows what we cannot see. And he is Horus.' Dorn looked at Sanguinius, and the two primarchs' gazes met. A small, sad smile formed and faded on Dorn's lips. 'Was he ever less than brilliant? Can we assume he is less than that now?'\n\n'This is the question,' said Valdor. 'For my judgement, we must proceed against what we can see, not what we can't.'\n\n'Agreed,' said Su-Kassen. Dorn looked at her sharply, but she held his gaze. 'We have planned for this battle, my lord. We have laid the ground. You know better than I that the unexpected is inevitable. We must not let it lead us. We must be firm in purpose.'\n\nFrom behind her she heard Andromeda-17 give a snort of approval.\n\n'And if that is what Horus wishes us to do - for me to follow my nature, which he knows so well?'\n\n'I don't see that we have a choice,' said Su-Kassen.\n\n'And that is one of the things that worries me more than anything,' said Dorn, softly. He looked up and away, his gaze focused somewhere far beyond the tapestry-hung walls. Su-Kassen felt a shiver run down her back at the implication in the words. In all her years at his side she had never seen a crack of doubt in the stone of his being.\n\n'He needs to be allowed the moment of flight before he returns to the cage of necessity,' said the memory of the Khan's voice.\n\n'With all respect, my lords,' she said. 'There is no choice to make. We can only fight the war we can see, and so that is what we must do.'\n\n'See?' said Andromeda-17 from the side of the room. 'I told you she would set you true.'\n\n'What else worries you, brother?' asked Sanguinius, frowning.\n\nDorn looked around the table and then at the Angel.\n\n'The same question that all of us have asked, but not spoken yet,' said Dorn. He looked at the holo-projection and gestured so that it shrank to a sphere that he could rotate with his fingers. 'Where is Horus?'\n\nSilence answered. Dorn turned his gaze around the circle, slowly, meeting and holding each of their gazes.\n\n'Just so,' said Dorn at last. 'And there is no answer we can give, and no guesses that would give comfort.' He looked back at the holo-sphere hanging between them, and keyed a control on the projector. The image folded into an image of Terra turning to show its face through day and night. Locations marked in a rainbow of colour spread across its surface. 'There are other matters to be discussed,' he said.\n\nThe conference ended an hour later, the gathered masters of the Imperium leaving without formality.\n\n'Admiral,' said Malcador, as Su-Kassen made to go, 'a moment of your time.'\n\nBehind her, Andromeda-17 was just leaving. Su-Kassen caught the gene-witch's eye, and saw that there was sorrow in her look - sorrow, or perhaps pity.\n\nThen the door to the chamber closed, and it was just her and the old man who was the Regent of the Imperium, alone in a long moment of silence. A thin sheet of parchment sat on the table in front of him, she noticed. It was a spool from an auto-scribe, one of the types used for archive reports. A section of the words on its face had been underlined in red.\n\n'There is something that you should know,' he said. 'Please, sit down, admiral.'\n\nFortress Moon Kerberos, Pluto\n\n'Breaching charge,' called Saduran, and one of his brothers charged forwards. Saduran came around the corner and fired up into the cluster of rotor cannons set in the ceiling above the blast doors. Target runes went red in his helm. His brother with the breaching charge was past him. Saduran fired. Bolt shells breathed from the barrel of his gun. Explosions burst amongst the rotor cannons.\n\nThe rest of his squad was with him now, firing up at the defence weapons. The cannons fired back. A deluge of hard rounds hit the warrior to Saduran's right and punched him back off his feet. Ceramite splintered. The warrior with the breaching charge was halfway to the door. Ten paces, a second's sprint. One of the rotor cannons spun around. Targeting beams reached through the smoke. The cowled statue beside the blast doors trembled. Hidden seams in the bronze split wide with a boom of pistons.\n\nThe ground shook again as a battle-automaton stepped out from where it had stood behind the shell of the statues. Fuel cables snapped free of gun pods and limbs. Weapons rose with a melody of gears and a chuckle of building energy.\n\nSaduran felt the moment blur as his hearts kicked, and stimulants flooded his veins.\n\nIt had taken them hours to reach this point. They were deep in the core of the Kerberos fortress-moon. The unbreakable heart of Pluto's defences had proved to be quite breakable in reality. It was just a question of the cost. With the Imperial Fists in flight towards the inner system, it had only been a matter of time before Kerberos' surface defences had failed. Then Iron Warriors bombardment barques had torn a kilometre-wide chunk from its face with mass drivers, and waves of assault craft had poured into the breach even as debris was still spinning outwards from the wound. Half of the first wave had died in seconds. Those that did reach the crater ripped in the moon's flesh found the guns of battle-s"}
{"text":" of the cost. With the Imperial Fists in flight towards the inner system, it had only been a matter of time before Kerberos' surface defences had failed. Then Iron Warriors bombardment barques had torn a kilometre-wide chunk from its face with mass drivers, and waves of assault craft had poured into the breach even as debris was still spinning outwards from the wound. Half of the first wave had died in seconds. Those that did reach the crater ripped in the moon's flesh found the guns of battle-servitors waiting for them.\n\nHalf a million dead.\n\nThat was the cost of the first wave. Half a million human soldiers pressed from mongrel clans of void pirates and ship wreckers. They served their purpose, though.\n\nA cohort of Iron Warriors Terminators had teleported into the main battery still functioning close to the breach. It had cost two strike cruisers, but the Iron Warriors had paid without hesitation. The crews manning the mountain-sized guns were still loading and firing as the Terminators cut them down. The fire from the wounded side of the moon dwindled, and fell silent. Ships slipped forwards, landing craft buzzing from their flight decks.\n\nCompanies of Sons of Horus and battalions of Iron Warriors entered the battle as the first wave foundered. Masters of signal had analysed the casualty and engagement data and chose targets as the gunships and torpedoes were in flight. Where the defenders were weak, where they had retreated, where their guns were stammering, there the Legions struck like knives plunged into already-open wounds. Saduran and his brothers had been in that second wave. Almost all were newborn, Legion warriors of years or months. These last days of battle, though, had made veterans of them all. Those that had survived.\n\nIt was murder in the tunnels of the moon. Most of the defending troops that had not fled with the Imperial Fists were of Mechanicum stock, weapon servitors and modified machine helots. Individually they were no match for a legionary, but they had numbers and time to prepare. Endless gun nests and traps met the assaulting troops, and the resistance increased the deeper they went. There was no retreat amongst the defenders. Either through programmed control, or desperation, or hate, they fought to the last.\n\nThe floor and walls of the fortress-moon shook and shook without cease. Its remaining gun batteries were still firing even as the attackers bored into its heart. Across the orbits of Pluto, Kerberos' siblings were already falling, aflame, ringed by ships, their innards burning as the IV and XVI Legions cored them out, passage by passage. Pluto belonged to the Warmaster. It was just a matter of crushing the last fingers of resistance that still clung on in the face of the inevitable.\n\nLooking up at the automaton striding out to defend Kerberos' heart, Saduran realised that he would not see that victory.\n\nHe dived aside as the weapon on its shoulder fired. Blue light scored a line across the decking. He rolled. The beam struck two of his squad brothers. They vanished into dust and ash. Saduran came up firing.\n\n'Use the charge,' he shouted into the vox as he fired. He could see his squad mate with the breaching charge running for the automaton's right leg.\n\nBolt-rounds splashed across the automaton's chest. Its gun mount rotated towards Saduran. Energies lit within the barrel. An explosion enveloped the automaton's side. Saduran staggered as the blast wave rolled through the air and floor. The automaton listed like a punch-drunk brawler. Smoke and flame snaked up its side. Pipes vented burning oil from beneath torn armour. Sparks crawled across its body. But it did not fall.\n\nIt straightened, gun mount swivelling to aim. Saduran felt a snarl of laughter and rage come to his lips. He raised his bolter to fire a last shot of defiance.\n\nThe automaton froze.\n\nSaduran's last bolts smacked into its torso. For a heartbeat it did not move. Then it folded to the ground with a sound of releasing pistons and unwinding gears. Saduran stared at the machine as it settled onto the ground, still burning.\n\nOn the ceiling, the rotor cannons stopped firing, their barrels spinning on momentum in the sudden silence.\n\n'What...' began one of the other survivors from the squad, but the question vanished behind a rolling chorus of clanks and thuds. Every door leading off the chamber thumped open. The air began to stir and billow as wind blew through the space. The vox began to chatter with voices. Every system across the fortress-moon had just shut down, every door had unlocked, and all the batteries had fallen silent at once.\n\nA clanking boom trembled the deck as the blast doors to Kerberos' core started to open. Metre-thick layers of metal peeled back one after another. Saduran found himself rising, stepping forwards.\n\n'Brother?' called one of his squad mates, but he ignored the word. Silent dark filled the space beyond. He stopped on the threshold, paused and removed his helm. The air smelled of burnt plastek and hot wiring. He could see small lights winking on banks of machines now, blue, red and green, stuttering in time with the pulse of the machines. The chamber was vast. He could feel it in the air even though his eyes could not reach to the edge of the shadows. He took another step, gun low but ready. Nothing moved.\n\nA stutter of lightning split the dark, rolling up the side of a vast metal sphere at the heart of the chamber.\n\nSaduran paused again. There was another note in the air, a high vibration that ached in his teeth. The vox chopped between the voices of Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus legionaries. The moon had gone dead, as though something vital had been cut...\n\nAnother arc of lightning flashed up the side of the metal sphere ahead. The ache in his teeth was a shrill call in his ears now.\n\nHe took another step.\n\nAnother flash, and he saw the servitors hanging from their cable links. He nudged one with the barrel of his bolter. It swung slackly. Its weapons clinked. As though something vital had been cut...\n\nThree flashes of lightning, and in the white glare he could see the tech-priests lying on control gantries high up on the sides of a forest of smaller metal spheres. Red lights were winking on control consoles.\n\nSomething cut... or something drawn back, like the backdraught of a fire, or the inhalation of a beast...\n\nCold lanced into his core. He turned and began to run for the doors that were open to the rest of the moon, the moon they had spent blood and time taking, the moon that now was ringed with warships and filled with troops. His squad mates shouted at him, but he was calling into the vox, shouting through the chop and hiss that was rising in time with the buzzing in his ears.\n\nBehind him, lightning bolts flashed and flashed, bleaching the reactor chamber blinding white. And he knew it was too late, that these were the last stretched moments of his life, and that this war that had remade him had now come to claim him.\n\nA flash...\n\nBrighter than lightning, and a sound beyond hearing that filled him for the endless instant before there was nothing.\n\nStrike Frigate Lachrymae, Pluto\n\nSigismund opened his eyes. The blade of his sword was cool against his forehead. He had waited in silence, his thoughts turned inwards. But now he needed to return to his purpose. The murmur of oath-words filled the bridge of the Lachrymae. He lowered the sword, but did not sheathe it. Boreas and Rann's holo-projections met his gaze.\n\n'The moment is here, brother,' said Rann.\n\nSigismund nodded, feeling the words he was about to speak gain weight on his tongue.\n\n'Turn the fleet,' said Sigismund. 'Cut them down.'\n\nKerberos detonated.\n\nIt was no small thing to destroy a moon. The agents of the Fabricator General had resisted. To them, such an act was a violation, the killing of machines - a tragic loss of function and knowledge. Rogal Dorn had not relented, and so it was done. Munitions had arrived on Pluto's moons in vast numbers. Their magazines swelled with macro plasma cores, blocks of explosive and cylinders of accelerant. All of it had been done so that it would seem part of preparations for the coming war. The eyes of Horus amongst the defenders saw only stores arriving for a siege, and did not ask or think any more of it.\n\nThe tech-priests had done their work, layering in time-delayed overload routines into primary, secondary and tertiary reactor controls. Charges were set in the bloated munition stores, all synchronised to a single command that would make them all parts of a single, great act of destruction. The data-jinn that the tech-priests created to enact the design had needed to gestate for months in the data-looms of deep-void facilities, and when it was complete all those involved had the memories of what they had done removed. It was a thing of artistry and genius, a hymn to the limits of knowledge and machine-craft, but none of those who wrought it would ever wish to claim their due for their work. They gave it a name, though, a designation that wove its purpose with a whisper of forgotten dread.\n\nThey had named it Vanth-Primus-Nul.\n\nAs the Imperial Fists retreated, the data-jinn had begun its work. Incubated in the core data-reservoirs of each fortress-moon, it uncoiled into full being. Tentacles of code in a dozen machine languages reached through data-cables and photon lines and noospheric connections. From system to system it spread. It overwrote command codes and retasked servitors. Data altered, and cycles of unmaking began in the spirit of each machine it passed through. Even on the moons already in the attackers' hands, Vanth-Primus-Nul carried on doing its work, increment by increment, silent and unseen. By the time the Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus had begun their assault on Kerberos in earnest, the process was already past the point where it could be undone.\n\nThe blast wave of Kerberos' death killed two hundred and five ships. Void shields vanished. Armour melted. Chunk"}
{"text":" altered, and cycles of unmaking began in the spirit of each machine it passed through. Even on the moons already in the attackers' hands, Vanth-Primus-Nul carried on doing its work, increment by increment, silent and unseen. By the time the Iron Warriors and Sons of Horus had begun their assault on Kerberos in earnest, the process was already past the point where it could be undone.\n\nThe blast wave of Kerberos' death killed two hundred and five ships. Void shields vanished. Armour melted. Chunks of wreckage the size of mountains tore through hulls. Static rolled through the vox-channels. Seconds later, Hydra and Charon followed their brother. The magazines and fuel of hundreds of warships added their fire to the inferno. Detonations leapt between the vessels manoeuvring too close to the moons. Explosions chained all the way back to the Khthonic Gate. Ships at the edge of the blast scrambled to get clear. Order vanished. Mayhem and death ringed the last planet of the Solar System, and Pluto shook in its orbit.\n\nOut in the reach, towards the sun, the ships of the Imperial Fists turned. Thrusters flipped them back over in mid-flight. The Sons of Horus vessels pursuing them ploughed onwards even as the realisation of what had happened rippled through them. On the bridge of his ship, Horus Aximand saw the fleet that had been fleeing but a moment before turn and roar back directly towards him. At his back, the shouts of officers and servitors filled his ears. Behind his mask of flayed skin, understanding slid into him, cold and sharp.\n\nThe guns of his ships roared as the fleet of the First Sphere met them head-on.\n\nBhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra\n\n'Admiral...'\n\n'Yes?' Su-Kassen blinked, not looking at where Archamus stood just inside the closed door out of her quarters. She could almost feel the Space Marine's discomfort.\n\n'There is a signal,' he said.\n\n'Of course there is.' She was still staring into the open pistol case on the stone mantle. The weapon's pepper-pot barrel gleamed blue-black in the low light of the single glow-globe she had lit.\n\nWhy had she come back here? She was needed in the command bastion. There were things that needed to be done. Time would not stop or slow for this instant. Why would it? Death was history, its tread and pulse. No one death would shake it from that course.\n\nBut here she was.\n\nArchamus had gone with her when she left Malcador's chamber. She had begun to walk, and the Imperial Fist had silently followed. She had not questioned why, but a part of her mind that felt like it belonged to someone else wondered if Dorn had asked him to go with her, to watch over her in this moment. She did not consider it for long - there was no space in her for thoughts, just the words of the recent past ringing in her ears. So she had let the Huscarl walk with her and did not think about why.\n\nIt was quiet. The last weeks had stripped the continent-city of its crowds and bustle. Nothing moved in its halls except the twitching guns of the weapon servitors that watched everything with crystal eyes. Stab-lights washed across the high windows of the Silesian Cloister as they crossed into the Northern Circuits.\n\nIt was night outside, she realised. The time had been drained of meaning over the last days. What did it matter if the sun was rising when your mind was focused on planets halfway across the system?\n\nOn she walked, not minding her path or steps. The places she passed through were empty. When she did see other humans they moved in clusters, flanked by soldiers. She recognised the green-and-silver cloaks of the Qui-Helic Guard, the crimson armour of the Inferalti Hussars, and the grey-and-ochre fatigues of the Cordesh Cavalry - the regiments of the Old Hundred deployed within the walls in what might be the last days of the Imperium they helped found. Nothing and no one moved unescorted within the Palace, except the Tenebrae. Malcador's eyes and ears watched and listened from the shadows and passed like breaths of chilly wind as they hunted whispers.\n\nHundreds of millions lived in the Palace tending its functions, from those holding high bureaucratic office to the serfs performing the lowest menial tasks. Most remained, attending to the crucial duties that kept the Emperor's seat of power working, but whatever solace their positions had given them before offered little comfort now. Every district and enclave had been locked down. Food, water and information had become rationed as the intra-system convoys halted, and the reality of war, often distant, had made its presence known. A black market had sprung up within days. Su-Kassen had read the reports: a senior supervisor of records caught crossing security lines with the water he had bought with the jewelled rings from his fingers; the high matriarch of a noble scribe-clan who had refused to turn back from a containment line, striding past with a laugh, only to be gunned down; the northern records district that was still burning after a chemical stove had exploded. It would only get worse with time, and then...\n\n'Are you all right, admiral?'\n\nShe had blinked and looked up at Archamus.\n\nThe Huscarl had glanced down at her. 'It is just that I am not certain as to your purpose in walking the Palace.'\n\nThey were crossing a stone bridge that spanned a ravine between two internal Palace walls. A chilly wind blew across her face. She blinked at the strangeness of the question and the double strangeness of who was asking it. She frowned, not certain how, or whether, to answer.\n\n'I apologise,' said Archamus after a moment. 'I should not have intruded.'\n\nThey lapsed back into silence.\n\nThey walked on, through passages narrow enough to brush Archamus' shoulder guards, and others wide enough that a platoon of soldiers could have marched down them line abreast. Most were dark, lit by a scattering of lamps or not at all; fuel and power, like everything else, was a resource that now had to be hoarded and spent with care. All corridors and spaces were empty, echoing.\n\nAfter half an hour, Su-Kassen realised that they had recrossed their path several times. A while after that she finally had to admit to herself that she had no idea where they were. As if in answer to that fact, they joined a spiral stair of brass and began to climb. Archamus had not tried to guide her, but just followed. At last she realised that her steps had taken them back to the Bhab Bastion - and so she had found herself staring down at the shot-pistol.\n\n'We always return to our cages...' she said to herself. Across the room, Kelik stirred his feathers in reply.\n\n'Do you wish something?' asked Archamus.\n\n'Nothing,' she said, still not turning. 'I will just be a moment.'\n\nThere were scratch marks on the pistol's trigger guard, she noticed, silver metal showing through blue-black. Hundreds of gauntleted hands holding the bone grip had made those scratches as their fingers curled around the trigger. The trigger guard itself was big too, enlarged to fit a digit wrapped in void-armour. She wondered how many people had called the gun their own? How many had died with it in their grasp?\n\nShe looked at the empty space in the velvet beside the gun, the empty outline of its twin. She reached out, as though her fingers would find something in the space that her eyes could not see.\n\n'I am sorry,' Malcador had said. 'We must have had this information for a while. For years, but the connection was never made.'\n\nShe had not looked up from the scroll of parchment in her hands. It was thin enough to be translucent, she realised, the black machine-scribed letters seeming almost to float. So insubstantial, so... unreal.\n\n'Why now?' she had heard herself ask. Then looked up at Malcador. The Regent's eyes were steady on hers.\n\n'The Khan made a specific request, a demand actually, that we find anything and everything we could. He seemed to think it important that if there were answers to be had, you had them. I agree. Now of all times we must be certain of ourselves.'\n\nShe had looked back at the parchment, at the words that had been highlighted with a neat line of red ink.\n\n'...wreckage assay confirm warship Thunder Break destroyed with all hands while trying to flee from the Isstvan System. Indications of command mutiny by traitor elements in crew leading to ship's loss of power and destruction by main gun force of traitor vessels. Peripheral indications that captain had ordered ship to break from Horus' force.'\n\n'I...' she had begun to say and felt a numbness soak in from her skin. 'I need to get back to my command.'\n\n'Of course,' said the Regent, and was standing before she could protest. The effort sent a twinge of pain across his face. He walked with her to the door, leaning on his staff for each step.\n\n'It is wrong,' she said as they reached the door and it hinged open. He stopped and looked at her. 'This is one of thousands, of tens of thousands of front-line loss reports. There will be others, Lord Regent. Who knows how many millions waiting for news that has already become lost in history. That is wrong.'\n\nHe nodded.\n\n'War makes the simplest failings cruelty, admiral.'\n\n'Yes,' she said. 'It does.'\n\nShe lifted the pistol out. Its weight, once so familiar, now felt different. She looked at it, sitting on her palms.\n\nCaptain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II; killed in action, Isstvan. That is what the updated record would read. An end of sorts, she supposed.\n\n'Admiral, the rating of the signals has increased to Vermillion-Aleph-four,' said Archamus. 'Your presence and response are required.'\n\nShe took the ammunition cylinder from the case, opened the breech and snapped it into the pistol. A single smooth movement readied it and pulled the safety off. One squeeze of the trigger and a blizzard of metal shards would rip anything closer than twenty strides into tatters. Not a clean way to die. She hefted it. In her mind she saw Khalia accept its twin from her hand, and felt the awkward silence deepen as she trie"}
{"text":"lion-Aleph-four,' said Archamus. 'Your presence and response are required.'\n\nShe took the ammunition cylinder from the case, opened the breech and snapped it into the pistol. A single smooth movement readied it and pulled the safety off. One squeeze of the trigger and a blizzard of metal shards would rip anything closer than twenty strides into tatters. Not a clean way to die. She hefted it. In her mind she saw Khalia accept its twin from her hand, and felt the awkward silence deepen as she tried to find something to say and her daughter tried to find a way of responding.\n\n'Admiral...'\n\nShe looked around the shadow-filled room, released the safety catch and unreadied the weapon.\n\n'That belt and holster, there on the door. Hand it to me.'\n\nArchamus blinked once and then did as she asked. The weight of the pistol settled on her thigh as she walked from the room and mounted the stairs back up to the Bhab Bastion's command chamber.\n\n'I am proud of you,' she had said, at last. Khalia had looked at the weapon, a thing that had spent more time in her mother's company than she ever had. Su-Kassen had thought her daughter was about to say something. Then Captain Khalia Su-Kassen Hon II had come to attention and bowed her head.\n\n'I am honoured, admiral,' she had said, her voice perfect in its formality.\n\nShe reactivated her direct vox-and data-link. Messages and command-grade transmissions began to ping in her ears. She cut them off and looked around at Archamus. The Space Marine would have been monitoring the communication flow and parsing the situation while he waited.\n\n'Situation precise,' she said.\n\n'The First Sphere fleet has begun the counter-attack at the Khthonic Gate,' he said. 'The crown of Pluto's moons is burning.'\n\nRule of slaughter\n\nAn end to duty\n\nOathed to this moment\n\nStrike Frigate Lachrymae, Pluto\n\nThe Imperial Fists fleet plunged back into the orbits of Pluto while they were still aflame. Drifts of cooling debris spread from the death points of the planet's five moons. Ships still coming from the warp at the Khthonic Gate ploughed into a wall of wreckage travelling fast enough to shred their hulls. Brief stars flashed as ship reactors overloaded. Of the thousands that had come to take the outermost planet and its gate, hundreds remained, clawing for space in the burning dark.\n\nInto this crucible the ships of Sigismund's fleet cut and began to kill. They came in a long diamond. The fastest ships led at the fore, their heavier sisters following. It was a formation that would have led to their destruction in most battles, but now they came to a battle sphere of scattered and wounded prey. The Three Sisters of Spite were the first to engage. They each carried a commander of the First Sphere: the Persephone was Fafnir Rann's, and carried his Assault Cadre, while the Ophelia was the ship of Boreas, First Templar and Sigismund's lieutenant. The Lachrymae remained Sigismund's steed of war, as it had been since he had taken command of the outer system defences. Faster than all their kin, the three ships took the wounded battle cruiser Fire Gorgon first. Its engines damaged, its failing shields broken under the guns of the Ophelia and Persephone, it tried to bring its batteries to bear on its killers. The Lachrymae loosed its payload of torpedoes at point-blank range. The Fire Gorgon became a blink of light. The Three Sisters burned past the debris of their kill, already firing at their next victim.\n\nBehind them the Imperial Fists fleet followed, every gun firing without cease. There were targets enough and they were there not for battle, but for reaping.\n\nOn the Lachrymae, Sigismund felt the rolling beat of the guns and his hearts rising in concert. He was not a creature of emotion. There were many who looked upon him with fear and awe, and some who thought him bellicose, driven by zeal: a warrior-fanatic of the Great Crusade. He was all those things in other eyes. But he was just a function, a necessity of time and need. He had been made one way by chance and time - the boy in the drift camps who was quick and fast, and took the beatings given by the other children but never let them break him, who survived for years after his father was lost to the dust-lung fever. He had been remade again, given strength and purpose, and an ideal to follow to the end of his life. And what he had been remade into was a weapon, a tool that shaped the world with its edge. That was his purpose, and he would follow it to the end of all things, until his edge was blunted and the strength in his arm unequal to his will. And that purpose did not require him to feel, only to go forwards. It was will, not fire, that moved his world: cold fire bound by chains. Even in shame, he had held to that. But this moment sung a chord in his soul that had been waiting within through every bitter defence and sacrifice.\n\nVengeance, righteous and pure, filled Sigismund as he watched ships become fire and atoms. It felt cold, burning like the touch of ice. He opened a vox-channel with a glance at an officer.\n\n'Burn them from the stars,' he said.\n\nAnd the blade of ships followed his command. Torpedoes were loosed almost blind into the traitor ships drifting amongst the debris. Bombers sped into the dark from battle-barges, spinning amongst the clouds of shredded metal and rock. They found the fleet carrier Synobarb tumbling through the wreckage of its escorts. Its prow ripped from its body, it was still trying to relight its engines. The bombers bored into it, flying into the exposed ribs of its superstructure to loose their payloads deep in its core. Melta bombs ripped the shielding from its reactors. Wild plasma poured out, burning through the carcass and sending tongues of flame breathing through the holes in its skin.\n\nSome of the traitor craft still had the wit or the power to resist. Five swift-strike vessels in the black and yellow of the Templar elite penetrated the debris sphere left by Kerberos as they hunted a pair of Iron Warriors frigates. The grand cruiser Barb of Nostramo was waiting for them. It had fought its own war in the years since the first treachery, and its crew and masters had loyalty only to their own spite.\n\nIts reactor signature masked by the death-echo of the moon, the Barb of Nostramo had slid into the shroud of asteroids and waited. It met the five Imperial Fists strike vessels with a cloud of assault craft. Warriors in midnight armour poured into the Imperial Fists ships. Two escaped. The remainder died by inches, their decks flooded with the screams of those who had already fallen, their chambers and passages darkening one by one as power was cut. The few Imperial Fists on each fought to the last as the screams became silence, and the night surrounding them lit with red eyes and laughing voices.\n\nThe two dozen frigates of the Saturnine Void Cohort curved deep into the space between Pluto and the Khthonic gate. They began to unleash barrages of torpedoes, some blind, others aimed.\n\nAnd amongst the slaughter, the Three Sisters moved and killed, splitting to thread the battle sphere in search of prey. They could not linger, but for this moment this was their kingdom, and its rule was slaughter.\n\nHorus Aximand heard the hull of the Throne of the Underworld groan as it made its turn. Steam and fluid vented from the pipes above as forces sheared and tugged at rivets and welds. The void shields were collapsing and sparking back to life as the outwash of debris from the moons' detonations struck them.\n\n'Select and coordinate targets,' he growled into the vox as he crossed the threshold into the teleportation chamber. 'We will tear them from the dark.'\n\nThe Throne of the Underworld and its fleet had been burning hard in pursuit of the fleeing Imperial Fists ships when the moons had detonated. The loyalist ships had turned about and arced back to the sphere of the outermost planet. Some had turned to meet Aximand's vessels, but their only purpose was to delay, to allow Sigismund's force to strike into the chaos around Pluto. It had worked. It had cost the Imperial Fists those ships they had sent as a distraction, but it had worked. Pluto was a death ground, the ruin of Aximand's assault ash and wreckage in its orbits.\n\nBut it would end now. He would take a blood price from the sons of Dorn, and he would do it with his own hand.\n\n'Find their command ship,' he ordered over the vox. Around him, a cohort of his company veterans stood ready as the machines set into the teleportation chamber's ceiling and floor began to sweat arcs of light. 'Find Sigismund.'\n\nA rolling storm of fire struck the Lachrymae as she curved past a near-crippled warship. Her auspex did not have time to detect the source of the volley before her shields collapsed. Gravitic shells hammered into her flanks, crumpling and twisting armour with waves of shearing force. A pulse of plasma a hundred metres in diameter hit her engines and reduced half of them to gas and slag. She began to spin, the flame-and iron-filled void a blur around her. On her bridge, Sigismund felt explosions shake the deck. Red light pulsed through the air. The crew were shouting now, orders screamed as the hull shrieked.\n\n'Batteries nine through fifteen lost...'\n\n'Motive power at thirty-five per cent...'\n\n'Course stabilisation lost...'\n\n'Void generator power shunts offline!'\n\n'We are unshielded!'\n\n'Lord,' called a signal officer. The man was gripping the edge of a console, the alarm lights staining his face red. 'Lord, there is an enemy ship closing, fast. Class unknown but it's big. They are launching assault craft.'\n\n'Sound a primary alert throughout the ship,' said Sigismund. 'Prepare to repel boarders.'\n\n'Etheric spike!'\n\nThe cry rose a second before a thread of light coiled in the air above the command platform. The squad of Templars scattered through the bridge began to run towards the platform. Sigismund had time to raise his sword as light and shadow reversed and time stuttered. A "}
{"text":"his face red. 'Lord, there is an enemy ship closing, fast. Class unknown but it's big. They are launching assault craft.'\n\n'Sound a primary alert throughout the ship,' said Sigismund. 'Prepare to repel boarders.'\n\n'Etheric spike!'\n\nThe cry rose a second before a thread of light coiled in the air above the command platform. The squad of Templars scattered through the bridge began to run towards the platform. Sigismund had time to raise his sword as light and shadow reversed and time stuttered. A pillar of lightning flashed into being, slamming into the deck and ceiling. It pulsed. Shapes stood within the light, vast shapes of metal and death. Then the light vanished, and gunfire roared through the sudden dark as the Sons of Horus opened up.\n\nSigismund was already moving forwards, sword lit, the words of an old oath on his lips. The edge of his blade took the first of the Sons of Horus in the throat even before the flare of teleportation had faded. He was amongst them, cutting and cutting, killing with single blows as gunfire and blades reached for him.\n\nAnd on the Lachrymae fell, bleeding into the void as swarms of assault rams and claws punched into its flanks.\n\nFire and the clamour of killing filled the bridge of the Lachrymae. Warriors in sea-green armour spread out, shooting as they moved. Pulped flesh and blood puffed into the air as bolt-rounds exploded amongst the crew and servitors. Sigismund saw the handful of Templars that had been on the bridge with him go down, singled out for overwhelming bursts of fire and then dragged down by blades. That fate would have been his too if he had submitted to it.\n\nThe seconds faded. The world was running to the beat of his twin hearts, reduced to the edge and point and turn of his sword. They were all around him now, sea-green armour, descending blades, gun barrels turning to look at him with the empty eyes of a lost stranger. Too many. Too close. Too swift.\n\nHe saw Aximand then, standing back from the killing whirl of his warriors, a snarling bronze-fronted helm beneath a red crest, a great sword sheathed at his back. A half-moon of jet and silver sat on his shoulder beneath the red eye of Horus.\n\nThe weight of the sword in Sigismund's hand seemed to vanish. The chains were gone. It would end here. All the years of war would end here.\n\nDeath... alone and unremembered.\n\nHe could see it all. The arc of a chainaxe sweeping down to cut his sword arm, the blow of a sword, the path of the rounds that would chew his legs from beneath him, on and on - the spinning truth of blades writing the words of death. He could read it all and see that there was no unravelling it.\n\nDeath...\n\nAlone in the stars, not at his father's side.\n\nKeeler had been wrong.\n\nDeath and failure...\n\nHe would die here.\n\nThe realisation sank through him, and for the first time in perhaps all his life, he felt peace.\n\nBut I will not die alone...\n\nHis sword met the chainaxe blade edge to blade edge. Sparks and lightning shrieked through the air. He cut through the axe head, sword juddering in his grip as chain teeth sprayed into the air. He pushed the cut on and down into the chest of the warrior that had swung the axe. The traitor did not have time to fall. Sigismund rammed his weight forwards, pushing the blade down and out of the bottom of the warrior's torso.\n\nA power sword thrust into the space Sigismund had just left. Its power field split the armour over his ribs. He slammed an elbow into the new attacker's face. Bolts exploded on the deck and in the air around him, but he was already moving forwards, pulling his sword around to take the legs from under the warrior with the power sword, even as his comrade collapsed to the deck in a wash of gut-fluid and blood.\n\nThis was not the swordplay of the duelling cages. It was what Kharn of the XII would have called 'the truth of battle'. Stabbing, hacking, breaking. Killing without pause or cease as blood painted the world. It had a rhythm, though - a terrible and pure beat drummed out in the clash of blades and the roar of guns and the surge of muscle and blood. It was all around him, and within him, the last refuge of his soul, the home he had carved himself cut by cut.\n\nThe Sons of Horus were good, battle-hardened and chosen for skill and ferocity. They were killers all. But they went backwards, formations and fire lines distorting as they tried to bring their guns and blades to bear on the Lord of Templars. Sigismund drove into them, every movement of his sword a strike. He barely registered the mass of them, his eyes fixed on Horus Aximand amongst the throng of his warriors. The jolt of blade parting armour, the steps that pushed him forwards past the cuts of his enemies - all fell away leaving only the path to this one enemy. He was going to die here. Sigismund knew that. The only choice left to be made was how.\n\n'Alone and unremembered...' came the ghost-voice of Euphrati Keeler.\n\nHe shrugged aside a blow from a hooked axe, felt its force crack his right pauldron and cut down. A gasp of fresh blood into the air, another body falling, another step forwards. Aximand was moving towards him now, his own blade unsheathed and lit. A shell exploded on his damaged shoulder. The ceramite shattered. Pain exploded through him and his next cut twitched aside from its mark. He caught the failed cut and raised his sword in time to meet a maul swung from just out of sight. Then another blow swinging in, hacking at his midriff, the attacker one amongst a crowd. A chainsword spun sparks as it raked down his arm, shredding armour from wrist to forearm.\n\nBlood. He could taste blood now.\n\nAximand was coming close, unhurried. The sword in his hand was as broad as a mortal's shoulders, a slaughterman's blade.\n\nSigismund turned another strike and sliced his own sword across a throat under a bronze faceplate. A concussive boom, and an explosion in his side. Pain. A world shattering into white slivers. He was not going forwards now, and the crowd of green armour was all around, striking, roaring.\n\nAximand was almost there, a red cloak spilling from his shoulders, eye-lenses red in the tusked grotesque of his faceplate, a devil-king come to deliver the last gift to a crippled foe.\n\n'Come to me!' breathed Sigismund.\n\nPillars of light unfolded in mid-air across the deck. Blast waves tore out. The Sons of Horus caught in the glare blurred to shadows before they came apart. Figures in yellow armour stood in their place. Sigismund saw the shapes of boarding shields locked in defensive circles. Bolters fired, and the sound of explosions chased the fading thunder of teleportation. Traitor legionaries fell, punched off their feet by impacts. The circles of Imperial Fists broke apart and flowed back together, shields locking into a single wall. Sigismund saw the twin axe emblem burned into the pitted yellow, and Rann's black shield at the centre of the line as it charged. They fired as they came, shooting from the loopholes in their high shields. It was brutal perfection, like a perfect axe blow to shatter a skull. And as Sigismund rose, his own blade cutting into the enemies surrounding him, he heard the shield-wall crash into the Sons of Horus.\n\nThe mass of sea-green warriors reeled back, but they were neither humans nor newborn Space Marines. They were the XVI Legion as they had once been, warriors who had earned in blood and death the high place from which they had fallen. They reformed to meet the Imperial Fists shield-wall. Gunfire punched out. Streams of plasma and melta-beams struck a single shield and vaporised both shield and warrior. The scattered Sons of Horus came together in a narrow wedge to force open the break in the shield-wall before the gap closed. A command roared out above the heads of the Imperial Fists, echoing across the vox.\n\n'Open!' shouted Rann.\n\nThe wall pulled apart, wide spaces appearing between the shields. Warriors in yellow and black charged through the openings. Enamelled laurels crowned their helms, and the swords in their hands lit with blue fire. At their head ran Boreas, his white tabard of office flecked with blood and burned by flame. The Templars struck the Sons of Horus as the shield-wall closed behind them.\n\nIt was as though a thunderbolt had reached ahead of the closing storm front. The bridge was suddenly a press of bodies and weapons grinding together like bloody teeth. Power weapons split flesh and armour, and now the deck was a swirl of hacking, slicing and battering. Sigismund saw Boreas put his sword through a warrior in sea-green, and fire half a clip of bolt-rounds into the face of another before kicking the corpse off his blade in time to meet the downward cut of a chainglaive. Another slice of time, and the jaws of battle closed over Boreas.\n\nSigismund was cutting forwards against the tide; he could feel his wounds clotting inside his armour. There were warriors in green and bronze all around him. Another line of pain across his ribs as a blow from behind lashed into his side. He reversed his sword and stabbed it up under his arm. He felt it punch home and ripped it back, spinning the blade in his hands and bringing it down and up to cut the warrior in front of him from groin to shoulder. He stepped forwards and paused.\n\nThe fingers of his left hand would not close on the grip of his sword.\n\nThere was something in his side, something embedded in his ribs, something scattering pain into his nerves.\n\n'Lord!' He heard the shout, close by but dim against the din of clashing blades and gunfire.\n\nHe could taste iron in his mouth.\n\nThe battle parted in front of him.\n\nHis left arm was numb, his strength draining red onto the deck.\n\nHorus Aximand came for him. Little Horus did not offer words or posture for the kill. Those were the mistakes of lesser warriors, of those who believed that contempt led to victory. Aximand simply charged and swept his great, broad-bladed sword up in a killing blow.\n\nSigismund stepped back, but Aximand's firs"}
{"text":" dim against the din of clashing blades and gunfire.\n\nHe could taste iron in his mouth.\n\nThe battle parted in front of him.\n\nHis left arm was numb, his strength draining red onto the deck.\n\nHorus Aximand came for him. Little Horus did not offer words or posture for the kill. Those were the mistakes of lesser warriors, of those who believed that contempt led to victory. Aximand simply charged and swept his great, broad-bladed sword up in a killing blow.\n\nSigismund stepped back, but Aximand's first cut became the second and the third. Sigismund parried the last one-handed and felt the force of the impact tear the muscles in his right shoulder. Little Horus kept coming, swinging faster and faster. Sigismund cut back but found only air; Aximand was fresh and Sigismund could feel his world contracting away from the battle around him. This was a moment that the Sons of Horus had left for their lord, weakened prey for the teeth of the alpha wolf.\n\nSigismund read Aximand's next cut and hammered a backhanded counter at his head. Aximand met the blow and the two swords ground against each other. Sparks arced out from the competing power fields. Little Horus forced his blade forwards. Sigismund jerked back, releasing his locked blade, but Aximand had felt the pressure give and was lunging forwards. Sigismund raised his sword. But the parry never met.\n\nA long blade slammed Little Horus' sword down.\n\nBoreas rammed his weight forwards into Aximand as the lord of the Sons of Horus dragged his blade back up and turned to meet this new opponent. Boreas punched the pommel of his sword into Aximand's right eye-lens. Red crystal shattered. Boreas struck again and again, giving Aximand no space to cut. Armour crumpled. Blood spattered from torn ceramite.\n\nBoreas stepped back, raising his sword to cut down and in. It was perfectly timed, the product of experience and training and the lessons of ten thousand battlefields. It was also a mistake. The blow would not land. Not because Boreas had made an error in technique, but because the opponent he was facing was a lord of traitors, a son of Horus schooled by the Warmaster both before and after his fall. Aximand twisted and rammed his faceplate into Boreas before the Templar could strike. Sigismund saw Boreas stagger, then the press of battle closed over his view.\n\nSigismund shoved forwards but a warrior with a crested helm barred his path and swung a two-handed mace. A shield caught the blow. Light and lightning exploded off the black-faced shield. The warrior with the mace staggered. Rann rammed his shield forwards and buried his axe in the warrior's neck.\n\n'They have teeth after all,' growled Rann, pulling his shield close as a squall of bolt-rounds exploded off it. Sigismund was at Rann's side, the old patterns of war slotting back into place without question. There were Imperial Fists all around them now, forming a triangle of overlapping shields.\n\n'Low!' shouted Rann as a beaked hammer's head hooked over the top of his shield to pull it down. Sigismund braced, holding his sword low in his one good hand. Rann gave for an instant and then surged forwards, muscle and armour and decades of sharpened skill flowing into the movement. The shield went high, yanking up the hammer hooked over its edge. Sigismund stabbed his sword up and under the bottom of the shield. He felt it ram home through armour and into meat, and pulled it back before the dead weight could pull it down.\n\nIn the brief opening he glimpsed Boreas and Aximand. There were Sons of Horus all around Boreas now, and blood lacquered the First Lieutenant's armour.\n\n'The teleport sequence is initiated,' called Rann. 'The Persephone will be in range in four minutes. Think we can live until then?'\n\nSigismund shook his head.\n\n'We advance to Boreas' side,' he shouted to Rann. The Assault captain's laugh boomed out.\n\n'You really do want to die, don't you? Boreas was right. We came for you and you want to die to these dogs? The ship is crawling with the bastards.'\n\n'Our oath was to this moment,' shouted Sigismund.\n\n'And our duty is to the war,' roared Rann.\n\n'We will not abandon him.'\n\nRann glanced around at him, green eye-lenses unreadable in his helmed face.\n\n'All right. As you will it.' He braced into the shield. 'Forwards on my lead!' The shield-wall surged ahead, battering into a gale of gunfire and blades.\n\nOne pace, two paces, muscle and servos screaming as they absorbed blows, bolters firing into their path.\n\n'Opening!' shouted Rann and a second gap opened in front of the shield-wall. Sigismund saw Boreas again. He was on the deck, his armour and body a bloody ruin. Aximand stood above him in triumph, sword reversed and descending for the final blow.\n\nSigismund's sword met the down-thrust. Light sheared from its edges. Aximand jerked back from the contact. Sigismund stood above Boreas, beyond the wall of shields.\n\n'Brace for teleport extraction!' shouted Rann into the vox, but Sigismund was not listening. He was taking another step, his eyes reading the arc of Aximand's rising sword, his own muscles and blade aligning. Nothing else was real. Nothing else mattered. His truth was and always had been an echo of this moment, the descent of the sword like breathing out, like life.\n\nHis first blow struck Aximand's sword arm and took hand and blade off at the wrist. A second cut followed the first. No pause. No breath drawn. Blood falling as the tip and edge of Sigismund's sword passed through chest-plate. Blood flared bright on green armour, the colour of a sea in storm.\n\nAximand staggering, bleeding.\n\nThe air around them screaming.\n\nLight expanding to drown sight.\n\nSigismund raised his sword for the killing blow.\n\nAnd the world vanished in blinding light.\n\nThe Imperial Fists left the Lachrymae to the blades of their enemies. The surviving ships dived for the void and the distant mote that was the sun. Most were wounded, many were burning, and some would die before they reached the battles that waited for them.\n\nOn the teleportation deck of the Persephone, Sigismund lowered the sword that he had raised on another ship. The dissipating thunder of teleport discharge faded from the air. Around him, streaked in blood and soot, stood the brothers that had come for him. Behind him, unmoving on the deck, lay Boreas. Blood was seeping from him, pooling on the floor.\n\n'Apothecaries!' shouted Rann from nearby.\n\nSigismund did not speak. The numbness in his left arm had become fire in his flesh. He looked down at his sword, still chained to his other wrist, and then raised it and touched the flat of its blade to his forehead.\n\nSigismund honours the fallen.\n\nSlayers of kings\n\nSpear of many blades\n\nThe truth of knives\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nThe holo-images of Kibre and Sota-Nul collapsed into static and then darkness. The psychic projection of Ahriman lingered. The Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons looked at Abaddon for a moment, then spoke in thought.\n\nFarewell, he said, and then his image was gone, leaving a ghost of psychic frost on the air. May all be done as it is willed.\n\nAbaddon looked unblinking into the space vacated by the two sub-fleet commanders. Above and behind him the council chamber rose and spread out, the empty air silent to its shadow-draped walls.\n\n'May all be done,' said Abaddon into the empty dark.\n\nSuch was the intent of what they did that the ultimate ends of each part of the attack were known only to the most senior commanders. Of that cadre, only some were aware of the interlocking purposes of their actions. And even then, only a few, a very few, knew the inner knots of the Warmaster's design. No one else could know, even amongst the highest ranks of the Legion or its closest allies. So, the last gathering of those commanders, before they took to their own paths, had taken place in the empty dark, without aides or companions.\n\nAbaddon stood still at the centre of the room for a moment, his eyes reaching into the dark but not seeing it.\n\nTorchlight danced in the distance.\n\nBlood hazed his sight.\n\n'This is him?' came a voice, low but clear and strong. Abaddon looked up and felt the chains tighten around his neck. Two shadows loomed above him. Both held torches of bright flame. 'He looks barely alive.'\n\n'We would not have got him if he hadn't been that way. He went through thirty of the deep-warren gangs before we found him. That was after the rest of his followers had fallen. He was making for a tunnel when we reached him.'\n\n'He will survive those wounds?'\n\n'If he doesn't, then do we want him?'\n\nA low grunt of acknowledgement and then one of the looming shadows came forwards and squatted down. The light of the torch it carried pulled streaks of orange and red across grey-white armour. Dark eyes looked at Abaddon from a face of scar tissue and jagged tattoos.\n\n'You see us, don't you, boy?' said the face.\n\nAbaddon did not reply.\n\nHe had been in the deeps leading a raid against the warren holdings of the Headtakers. There had been an ambush. They had been waiting, three clans' worth at least, come to take the head of the exiled prince. Hundreds of gang killers pouring from tunnels, the boom of frag mines detonating, hard rounds buzzing through the air... They had killed half of his oath siblings with the first blasts. It was butchery and cowardice, but he had come out of the smoke and dust and hit the first ambusher he had seen with a backhanded blow that had split the man's head along the hinge of his jaw to the back of his skull.\n\n'You know who we are?' asked the face, its gaze unflinching. Abaddon met it and nodded.\n\n'You are the takers of the dead,' he said.\n\nThe face laughed.\n\n'That we are, boy, that we are.' The figure held up a coin in armoured fingers. The silver disc's face was mirror-polished. 'I have a coin for your life.'\n\nAbaddon did not move but held his face and gaze still. There was pain in his side. He could taste blood. He was going to die, but he was not going to give these creatur"}
{"text":"the back of his skull.\n\n'You know who we are?' asked the face, its gaze unflinching. Abaddon met it and nodded.\n\n'You are the takers of the dead,' he said.\n\nThe face laughed.\n\n'That we are, boy, that we are.' The figure held up a coin in armoured fingers. The silver disc's face was mirror-polished. 'I have a coin for your life.'\n\nAbaddon did not move but held his face and gaze still. There was pain in his side. He could taste blood. He was going to die, but he was not going to give these creatures that looked like men the trophy of victory. If they had come for his life and soul, then they would have to rip it out of him. The takers of the dead had always been there. They lived in the night and stars that circled through Cthonia's skies. They watched, judged and took the worthy up to the dark to become like them. Some thought them just a story, but whole clans had vanished during the gang wars of recent years and were never seen again. The takers were real.\n\n'We have been looking for you,' said the face, 'for the exiled prince who killed his father rather than murder his oath-companions and become a man.'\n\nAbaddon remained silent. The other figure, still half out of sight, shifted and gave a bark of laughter.\n\n'You won't get anything from him, Syrakul. Look at him. He is not a talker. There's too much anger looking for a way out. That's why he is here. That's why he nearly died in those tunnels and got everyone who believed in him killed. He may be a killer, but he is filled with so much fire that he will burn everything he touches.'\n\nThe second figure stepped into Abaddon's blurred sight. This one wore the same grey-white armour as the first and held a comb-topped helm under his left arm. Abaddon's eye caught the sign of a crescent moon marked on the helm above the right eye. The man's skin was the black of polished cinder-wood. A close-cropped mohawk of hair ran across his scalp. Wide, silver-grey eyes glittered above a smile. 'That's right, isn't it? You will look upon us and not say a word, even if we reach into you with knives and cut out your soul.'\n\nThe first figure, the one called Syrakul, stood.\n\n'Is my brother right, boy?' asked Syrakul. 'Or do you have more than anger flowing in your veins, Abaddon?'\n\nHe felt his face twitch at the sound of his name, and his eyes flicked between the pair looking down at him.\n\n'Yes. We know your name,' said the figure with grey eyes. 'We know who you are, and what you have done. We know that you killed almost all the clan of your birth, and that those that remain have hunted you ever since. We know that you killed everyone sent against you, and then found who sent them and did to them what they failed to have done to you. We know all this. We know you are a killer, and a survivor, Abaddon, son of Tarkerradon. What we don't know is if you have the strength to be more.'\n\n'I don't...' Abaddon forced the words out through broken teeth and pain. At some point in the fight after the ambush, something had shattered half the bones of his face. 'I don't want to be a king.'\n\nLaughter boomed out again.\n\n'That is something you will never be, Abaddon,' said the warrior with grey eyes. 'Either you will die here, or you will become one of us. We are the slayers of kings and the killers of tyrants. We are brothers in war, and blood. We live for each other and die for the future we make, and that is all we will ever be. Can you be that, Abaddon?'\n\nHe looked up at them. The pain was trying to pull him down into its grasp. He sucked a breath, heard the chains clink. In his mind he saw the cave of becoming again, his father falling from his bloody hand, him turning fast but too slow as one of the guards yanked back Kars' head and sawed a knife across his blood-sibling's throat.\n\n'Is what you say true?' Abaddon asked, pulling the words from the pit of his pain. 'Do you swear that it is true?'\n\nSyrakul glanced at his companion, and then nodded.\n\n'It is true, boy. By the oath I took on this moment, it is true.'\n\nAbaddon tried to rise but the chains held him.\n\n'I am...' he said, hearing his voice rasp. 'Then I am yours.'\n\nThey did not move. He could feel them watching him, weighing him in their eyes.\n\n'Break the chains,' said the grey-eyed warrior.\n\nSyrakul stepped forwards and took hold of the links of Abaddon's bonds and broke them as though they were rotten rope.\n\nSyrakul and the grey-eyed warrior watched him. Abaddon drew a breath and then pushed himself upright, inch by agonised inch until he stood, bloody, his face a broken mass. His left arm hung by his side, broken, the hand hanging by a strand of skin and sinew. Pain shook through him.\n\nThe grey-eyed warrior exchanged a look with Syrakul, and then nodded.\n\n'I am Hastur Sejanus. There is a long road ahead of you, Abaddon, and much of it will be marked with greater pain and loss than you have known. There is no reward at the end except to be one of us, to be a brother of warriors and wolves. If that is not enough, then it is better to never begin.'\n\nAbaddon swayed, refusing to let himself prove weaker than his wounds in front of these warriors.\n\n'It will not be enough,' he said. 'It will be everything.'\n\nSyrakul laughed.\n\n'I like him. He is going to be trouble.'\n\nAbaddon watched the dark replace the past, then turned and walked away.\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Trans-Saturnian Gulf\n\nMersadie awoke with a start.\n\n'No...' she gasped with a breath that had been drawn in a dream of a wolf turning to smile at her with bloody teeth.\n\nThe staterooms were quiet around her, the thrum of the ship a low murmur swallowed by tapestries and cushions. She breathed hard for a moment, looking around at the shadows folded over the furniture by the single glow-globe mounted on a turned bronze stand. The cushions of the couch beneath her were damp, and her clothes clung to her skin.\n\n'Bad dreams?' asked Nilus. The Navigator sat in an upholstered chair across the room, his long legs drawn up under him onto the seat, so that he looked like an old statue of a mystic that she had once seen in a Conservatory collection. He had found some clothes to replace his prison overalls: loose black-and-red fabric now hung from his spider-thin frame. He had a blanket half wrapped around him but he did not look like he had been sleeping.\n\n'The merchant's sour-faced bodyguard left you some clothes,' he said, nodding to a neat pile of fabric on a small table. 'I don't think she likes you much.'\n\nMersadie pushed herself up, scratching sleep from her eyes. There was a metallic taste in her mouth, like copper or iron.\n\n'Where are we?' she asked.\n\n'Somewhere in the gulf between Uranus and the orbit of Saturn,' he said, and shrugged. 'At least that is what I would guess. You have been asleep for a while, but this is going to take days, even if this bucket of bolts and rust can make it. It's really just an orbital hauler. I doubt it's ever even done a full run from core to system edge.' He smiled, and shook his head. 'We may all die yet.'\n\nMersadie did not answer, but stood up and went to the pile of clothes.\n\nThe Antius had broken free of the cascade around Oberon and powered outwards towards Uranus' outer orbits, and the gulf beyond. No one had challenged or tried to intercept them, but they were just another panicked small ship amongst many more. No reply had come from the signal they had sent, either, but she had expected none. For all her confidence in front of Vek, it was an act of desperation not certainty, a stone thrown into a pool in the hope that someone would see the ripples.\n\nShe lifted the folded clothes - loose, grey and red.\n\n'She said she would be back for you,' said Nilus. 'The bodyguard that is. I think she wants to talk.'\n\nHe stood, unwinding his limbs from the blanket, rolling his head on his neck and then moving towards one of the hatches that led to a different part of the staterooms.\n\n'I will leave you to your privacy,' he said, and went out of sight.\n\nShe put the clothes on, the soft, clean fabric strange on her skin.\n\nThe main doors to the staterooms opened. The tall silhouette of Aksinya, the bodyguard, stood framed by the amber glow of lumen-strips. Pale eyes met Mersadie's gaze for a second. Something in the cold intensity of that stare reminded her of something, a fragment of an image lost in the cracks of the past. Aksinya jerked her head, and turned back to the corridor.\n\n'Follow,' she said. Mersadie complied.\n\nThey walked in silence for long minutes, descending ladders and stairs into spaces that smelled of raw oil and hot metal.\n\n'Where are we going?' asked Mersadie. Aksinya did not answer, but keyed a control on a heavy door crossed with chevrons. The door released with a hiss and thump of pneumatics. The smell of human sweat and breath washed out. Aksinya moved aside and gestured for Mersadie to go through.\n\nThe light beyond was a different hue, dim but cold, like a stab-light running on low power. They were standing in the corner of a cargo hold. Its roof arched up to a flattened apex some ten metres above her head. It was small compared to the vast holds on a macro-transporter or warship, but somehow it felt even smaller to Mersadie as she looked at those who waited there. A loose wall of people faced her, staring eyes set in exhausted faces. She saw every age amongst the faces, children peeking out at her from between parents' legs, the old, the young, all staring with a little curiosity and a lot of fear. They wore fabric of every kind and quality: the vulcanised rubber and oil-smeared suits of void dock-luggers, jackets of velvet dotted with brass buttons, smocks of service-stencilled drab, all grubby and stained with days of wear. None of the faces moved, most eyes barely seemed to blink. She heard sounds coming from the other side of the crowd, and realised that there must be people that she could not see, filling the hold space. Ribbons of cooking smoke coiled into the air. She coughed as the smell of excrement and urine touched the back"}
{"text":"e vulcanised rubber and oil-smeared suits of void dock-luggers, jackets of velvet dotted with brass buttons, smocks of service-stencilled drab, all grubby and stained with days of wear. None of the faces moved, most eyes barely seemed to blink. She heard sounds coming from the other side of the crowd, and realised that there must be people that she could not see, filling the hold space. Ribbons of cooking smoke coiled into the air. She coughed as the smell of excrement and urine touched the back of her throat.\n\n'Who are you?' asked a clear voice from down near the floor. Mersadie looked down, and saw two brown eyes looking up at her from beneath a matted mass of ash-white curls. Mersadie glanced up at the adults standing next to the child, but they did not move or speak. They and all those others that she could see were looking at Aksinya, who had come to stand just behind her. She looked back at the child and bent down, so that she was level with that big, brown gaze.\n\n'I...' began Mersadie and stopped, not sure what to say. 'I am called Mersadie. I used to tell stories.'\n\n'What kind of stories?' asked the child.\n\n'True ones.'\n\n'I like the stories that my grandfather tells. They aren't true, though. They have ghosts and ships of treasure in them, and the kings and queens of the sun, and the knight of the moon. The ones about the knight are the best. She rides across the stars, you know, and she can never speak, not ever, and she has a sword that you can't see, and she doesn't dream because she had to give her dreams to the sun to keep while she went to find the creatures that live in the night.'\n\nMersadie found herself smiling.\n\n'I like stories like that, too.'\n\nThe child nodded, face serious.\n\n'My grandfather will tell me a story when we get back to Cordelia. That's our home. We had to leave, but we will go back, but I have to tell the stories to myself until then.'\n\nA hand reached down and took the child by the shoulder and tugged her back. Mersadie looked up into the face of a hard-eyed man with a Uranus indentured service tattoo circling his cheek.\n\n'Come on, Sibi,' he said, then looked at Mersadie. 'You bring any food down here with your nice words and clean clothes?'\n\nMersadie straightened, suddenly aware that the line of people had moved almost imperceptibly forwards. There was anger in their eyes now.\n\n'No...' she began. 'No, I am sorry. I didn't know I was-'\n\n'What's happening?' came a call from further back.\n\n'I...' Mersadie began.\n\n'Where are we going?'\n\nThe line was a crowd now, sliding closer, so that she could smell the sweat and breath and feel the static charge of fear.\n\n'Why are you here?' came a growl, and a hand reached for her. Aksinya stepped forwards and batted the hand down. The crowd shrank back from the bodyguard.\n\n'Go,' said Aksinya, pushing Mersadie towards the door they had entered through. The crowd did not follow them, but Mersadie thought she could feel their stares even after the chevron-crossed metal closed. She stood for a second in the passage. Aksinya moved to walk past her.\n\n'I understand,' she said to the bodyguard.\n\n'Do you?' said Aksinya, stopping and looking at Mersadie. 'There are six holds on board. All of them just like that. How much food do you think a ship like this has in its stores? How long do you think it will last when split between hundreds of mouths? How long, do you think, until they are not happy to stay where they are? How long until they try to get out? What does your understanding say about what happens then?'\n\n'I am sorry, but I didn't cause this.'\n\n'No, you didn't, but you stopped it getting any better. If we could have docked, we could have got some of those people off, and we could have got supplies. There are people hunting us now, people looking for you - people who will shell fleeing ships on their own side to get to you. So now we all have to run. That little one you were talking to, what do you think happens to her if the people hunting you find us? Have you ever seen what that kind of violence is like?'\n\n'Yes,' said Mersadie, holding the bodyguard's cold gaze.\n\nAfter a long moment, Aksinya nodded.\n\n'Perhaps you really have, but it makes no difference. I am bound to protect my master and his family. That's it. This ship and the people on it are not mine to shield. That can be no other way.' She took a step closer, and now she was so close that Mersadie could feel the thread of the other woman's breath. It smelled like metal. 'But you... you have pulled the fates of everyone on this ship, and made them yours. I do not know, and I don't care, why the master believes you, but I want you to know that whatever happens to him and these people won't be his fault. It will be yours, teller of stories. It will be yours.'\n\nAksinya turned and walked away down the dim passage.\n\n'Go back to your quarters,' she called back at Mersadie without looking around. 'He will want to talk to you soon.'\n\nMersadie Oliton stood still for a second and then followed.\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nThe armada split as it plunged towards the sun. Battle groups began to pull onto separate paths, first the smallest, which rode at the edge, then the larger ships, one layer of formation at a time peeling apart like a knot of rope unwinding into threads.\n\nFar out, circling the dividing fleet, the White Scars saw the formation of enemy ships begin to change. They made kills then, driving in to pick off smaller frigates and gunboats as they broke from the safety of the herd. But the reformation of the armada went on, recasting the single fleet as many without it slowing down.\n\nThe White Scars plunged back in, but as they struck, a flock of hundreds of smaller ships broke from the divided armada. They were the fastest of the invaders' ships, crewed by rogue traders and renegade privateers. They had flocked to Horus' call and been given this task in exchange for promises of wealth and power. They were the crows of war that had followed the Great Crusade out to the edge of the dark, and now came back to feast on the corpses of their masters. They scattered outwards from the armada, spiralling out to meet the Falcon fleets. Hundreds of small battles spread across the dark, tumbling in the wake of the main mass of the armada.\n\nAnd the shape of the armada continued to change. With the skin of smaller craft gone, the main force was revealed. Many vessels bore the livery of the Sons of Horus, blooded war crones like the Last Light, the Oath of Moment and the Spear Wolf. The legionaries on board were veterans, born in the time before the betrayal, breakers of their oaths to the Emperor and keepers of their bonds to their primarch. Beside them rode vessels of such different lines that they seemed less a fleet and more a collection of creations formed of mankind's ingenuity in ship-craft fused with insanity. Galleons of black metal, their skins dotted with chrome pyramids; sleek needles of serrated bronze five kilometres long; slabs of red stone the size of mountain ranges hoisted into space and made into city-ships, their insides filled with ever-turning machines - these were the craft of the disciples of Kelbor-Hal and his New Mechanicum. No two were alike, their size and shape reflections of the magi who commanded them.\n\nOne by one the Legion and Mechanicum ships began to separate, pulling into twin spear blades. For a few hours the two formations continued to descend towards the disc of the Solar System together, leaving the Falcon fleets and the privateer carrion feeders behind to spin in battle. Hour by hour, the two fleets moved further and further apart, until each of them could see the light of the other's engines only as a single dot of starlight.\n\nAbaddon watched it all on a display enhanced by scan data, not moving from his place as the hours passed. Around him the business of the War Oath's bridge went on in near silence. It was an act of will for him to remain still, his mind following all the details while the sound of his heartbeats filled his ears, restless and unsettled. But there he remained, watching time and distance pass. There would be battle and bloodshed before victory, but that all rested on these moments. From here, each part of the armada would follow its own path to its own target and its own battles. The White Scars would have seen this first division, and they would track both blades of the divided spear. But not yet. That could not happen yet. There was one more moment of vulnerability and secrecy still to come, one more sliver to be broken off this spear blade.\n\nAbaddon felt the prickle across the skin of his back. His muscles twitched, his armour amplifying the tiny movement with a buzz of servos. He kept his eyes on the display, but bared his teeth.\n\n'I did not call you to my presence, priest,' he said, 'and I have no use for your counsel.'\n\nZardu Layak halted at his side. The incense reek of the daemon priest filled the air.\n\n'I go where I am needed, not where I am called.'\n\n'You are part of the comet strike force. That is where you need to be. The ships of the Fifteenth and your Legion are ready to depart.'\n\n'But I am not to depart,' said Layak. Abaddon looked back at him, but the priest was already stepping close, his eyes on the display, his staff tapping the stone floor. 'I remain here, with you.'\n\n'You will go to join the spear thrust to the comet,' said Abaddon. 'That is my will.'\n\n'But it is not the will of the gods.'\n\n'I do not care.'\n\nLayak was silent for a moment.\n\n'These hands were once those of an iconoclast,' he said at last, holding up a fist. 'Did you know that? The warrior who became me burned gods and lived to send the devout and the deluded to the flames.'\n\n'Your conversion is of no interest to me,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I was not a convert,' said Layak. 'The man whose face lies beneath this mask was taken, broken and remade. My faith is sacred because it is a lie, and all lies are music to the ears of the Pantheon. Piety like that"}
{"text":" silent for a moment.\n\n'These hands were once those of an iconoclast,' he said at last, holding up a fist. 'Did you know that? The warrior who became me burned gods and lived to send the devout and the deluded to the flames.'\n\n'Your conversion is of no interest to me,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I was not a convert,' said Layak. 'The man whose face lies beneath this mask was taken, broken and remade. My faith is sacred because it is a lie, and all lies are music to the ears of the Pantheon. Piety like that is false, a creation, but it is pure. You live for Horus, for your Legion, for your brothers. That is your truth. Mine is that I am nothing. I am a son who left his father. I am a brother who made those brothers his slaves.' Layak nodded to the still and silent figures of the blade slaves standing eight paces away. 'I am like you, Ezekyle Abaddon.'\n\nThe choler beating in Abaddon's blood lit to rage.\n\n'I am-'\n\n'On Isstvan, were the warriors that you slew not of your blood? Had they not bled with you? Had they not shared bread and oaths and deeds at your side, and you at theirs?'\n\nAbaddon saw the ruins again, the smoke coiling into the sky, the ash blowing on the dead wind.\n\n'Betrayer,' Loken had said. Abaddon tasted the words of his reply, still bitter even in memory.\n\n'There was nothing to betray.'\n\nLayak inclined his head towards the blade slaves. 'I put swords into my brothers' hands. You sheathed your sword in the hearts of those who had trusted you and thought the bonds between you unbreakable.'\n\nAbaddon could not move. In his mind the images of the past rolled over and over. The things done, the wars fought. Murder, slaughter and deception.\n\n'There was nothing to betray,' he said. 'They were not my brothers.'\n\n'Because they made a different choice?'\n\n'Because loyalty is everything,' and as he spoke the words, he heard the old truth that he had carried in him since he had been a boy standing in a cave looking at a knife that would kill his companions and make him a king. 'We were brothers and sons.'\n\n'And that mattered more than oaths to an Imperium, more than duty, or truth?'\n\n'You can't be loyal to an idea, priest, as your kind learned in the ashes of your first belief.'\n\nA strange, dry rattle came from behind the teeth of Layak's mask. After a second, Abaddon realised that the priest was laughing.\n\n'Belief is all that I have left, and loyalty to an idea is why I am here.'\n\n'Chaos,' said Abaddon, his lips peeling back from his teeth.\n\n'No...' said Layak with a shake of his head, 'the truth.'\n\nAbaddon felt another question form in his mind, but cut it away and turned back to the bridge displays.\n\nThe ships of the Word Bearers and Thousand Sons within the fleet were already aligning, forming their own formation within the greater mass of Abaddon's armada, a subtle blade hidden amongst many. The vessels of this third force were few in number, a dozen only, but that was as it needed to be; their part in the greater plan required them to go unseen, while the eyes of the defenders of Sol were elsewhere. Within an hour, the bulk of Abaddon's armada would turn and begin the next stage of their descent towards the inner system. The Thousand Sons and the Word Bearers would carry on, though, cutting their engines so that they fell away silent and dark, down and down into the gulf between the turning planets. Only once they were closer to their goal would they relight their engines. Sorcery would wrap them, pulling eyes and minds away from them until their task was done.\n\n'The sorcerers of Prospero and the warriors of my Legion will do what is ordained,' said Layak, as though following Abaddon's thoughts. 'But my path lies with you, Ezekyle Abaddon, and I will follow it. That is my choice and my place. Kill me if you must, but I will remain.'\n\nAbaddon watched the dance of the void without replying, and when he looked around the priest was gone.\n\nWarship Lance of Heaven, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nJubal Khan listened to the last ghosts of voices fade into the crackle of the vox-link. He looked at the tech-adept linked to the signal unit.\n\n'Send confirmation,' he said. The adept bowed its head with a whir of gears, and the constellations of lights on the unit began to blink. It would take over two hours for the reply to reach Terra, if it reached it at all. Distortion had been growing on the signal channels for days, squalling like a snagged storm wind. Sometimes it seemed as though there were voices, high and pained, drowning in the screech of interference, shouting from beyond the buzz of static.\n\nNo, thought Jubal. There were voices behind there, and he knew enough to know that the nightmares that wracked the astropaths were real, too. Both were echoes of the dead returning to the plane of the living, but whether they spoke warnings or lies he could not tell.\n\nHe turned slowly away from the vox-console. His body ached at the movement. It was as though every year of the life that he had lived was dragging on his bones. He would need to settle his spirit before they rode into the fire again. The storm... the storm was coming... He could hear it. He could feel it...\n\nChangshi waited dutifully behind him, watching his khan with grey eyes that could not hide their worry. Changshi was a child of the storm. Like the rest of the token force on the Lance of Heaven, he was not of Chogoris, despite the name he bore. It, like the organs grafted into him, were a gift of his elevation from the forgotten ocean world he had been born on. There were many like him now: creations of necessity, made from and for these bitter times, warriors who had never known the joy that came from waging war for a reason other than survival. Both his nature and name had barely had time to settle into his being, and whether fate would give Changshi the time to become the warrior he could one day be, Jubal did not know.\n\n'So we withdraw?' Changshi asked, frowning.\n\nJubal looked at him, holding the young warrior's gaze for a long moment, and then smiling.\n\n'Yes. And no,' he said, pulling a strip of parchment from his belt and handing it to Changshi.\n\n'Prepare signals to these of our ships, and see that these preparations are made throughout the Lance.'\n\nThe young warrior read the Chogorian script and his frown deepened.\n\n'Master, I do not-'\n\n'We have a duty to perform before we follow our orders. This spear-tip fleet is almost in the core of the system. We have tracked it, and we have bled it, but it will still strike like a bolt of thunder.' Jubal paused for a second, weighing his decision for a final time. 'We must take the heart of its strength before then.'\n\n'Master, five thousand ships... We cannot destroy that many even if we harried them for ten thousand years...'\n\n'I said we needed to take the heart of its strength, and that is not a ship. It is a man, a warrior like you and me. Great and terrible, and weak and vulnerable, as we all are...' And then he told the young warrior what would happen.\n\nAt the end, Changshi bowed his head, but his face was grim.\n\n'What weighs on you?' asked Jubal.\n\n'You said we had a duty, but how can we have a duty that drives against our orders?'\n\nJubal laughed and let the sound drain away slowly.\n\n'Which matters more, to obey the word, or to obey the spirit?'\n\nChangshi held his gaze still.\n\n'When the words are the Great Khan's and Primarch Dorn's, is there a difference?'\n\n'Always,' replied Jubal. 'Words are the weak children of the will and the soul. To see them truly, we must look through them, and ask what spirit moved to make those words.'\n\nHe reached down to his belt, drew his knife, tossed it up in the air, caught it by the blade and threw it to Changshi. The young warrior caught it. The blade was the length of a mortal human's forearm, curved like the moon, polished to a mirror sheen. Opals gleamed on its pommel.\n\n'Put it in my heart,' Jubal said.\n\nChangshi looked at him sharply.\n\nJubal grinned.\n\n'Or at least try to,' he said.\n\nChangshi was still for a second and then turned, his weight dropping, the curved blade vanishing behind his body. His eyes had gone distant, fixed on nothing, but seeing everything. Jubal waited, relaxed, his hands at his sides, smile still in place. Changshi nodded to himself as if deciding, then paused and opened his mouth to ask a question.\n\nHe snapped forwards.\n\nWind of truth, but the boy was fast, thought Jubal. The cover for the strike had been good too, combining timing and subtle misdirection. But he was Jubal Khan, and he had faced and bested many of the greatest weapon masters of the age. He half turned his torso, let the blade go past, brought his hand up, clamped Changshi's knife hand and wrist, and threw him with a sharp twist. The young warrior came to his feet in a blur. Jubal tapped the flat of the knife on Changshi's head as he rose.\n\n'Not quite,' he said.\n\nChangshi closed his eyes, and Jubal could almost hear the silent self-chastisement held behind the warrior's teeth.\n\n'You know the truth of death?' Jubal asked.\n\nChangshi let out a breath, and smiled.\n\n'To embrace it like a brother, and laugh in its face.'\n\n'Yes,' grinned Jubal, 'and the truth of the knife?'\n\n'To be sharp.'\n\nJubal chuckled.\n\n'Yes... but no.' He stepped away, turned, rolled his shoulders. 'To put a knife through someone's heart is the end. It is not the means.' He could almost see the question forming on Changshi's lips, could hear the inhalation of breath before the words.\n\nJubal spun and slashed with the knife. Changshi blocked the first blow. Fast, very fast, but Jubal had already reversed the knife, hooked the warrior's arm with it, and yanked his guard aside. Changshi recovered, but Jubal flicked the knife between his hands, slammed a palm into the young warrior's breastplate to rock him back, cut, switched hands again before the first cut had been blocked, then pivoted back out of range of Changshi. The young warrior made to follow, but Jubal raised a hand.\n\n'Look,' he said, pointing at Changshi's armour with the"}
{"text":"d the first blow. Fast, very fast, but Jubal had already reversed the knife, hooked the warrior's arm with it, and yanked his guard aside. Changshi recovered, but Jubal flicked the knife between his hands, slammed a palm into the young warrior's breastplate to rock him back, cut, switched hands again before the first cut had been blocked, then pivoted back out of range of Changshi. The young warrior made to follow, but Jubal raised a hand.\n\n'Look,' he said, pointing at Changshi's armour with the point of his knife. The young warrior looked. Long, straight cut marks scored the plate just above both of Changshi's wrists and elbows. 'And with the next clash, another cut...' said Jubal, stepping close to Changshi and tapping the tip of the blade against the young warrior's upper arm, against his fingers. 'And with each cut, a little more strength bleeds away, a little more rage is planted in the heart, a little more blindness in the eye, until...' He tapped the knife against Changshi's breastplate above the heart.\n\n'Until the blow to the heart is not seen, and cannot be stopped,' said Changshi. Jubal nodded, and flicked the knife over and held it out to the young warrior pommel first.\n\n'That is the truth of the knife, of life, of war... You kill with the last blow, but those cuts that come before allow that final blow to fall. Even Horus, master of the spear-thrust, knew that truth once. And now we will use it to kill whichever of his sons he has sent at the head of this armada.'\n\nChangshi took the knife, looking at it, the reflection of the crescent blade caught in his grey eyes. It was a beautiful weapon, made on Chogoris and fitted with a power field generator by the Legion smiths. It had been Jubal's father's, given to him when he left his family and his humanity behind. Now the young warrior, who bore a Chogorian name but had never seen its skies, looked at it and realisation formed in his eyes.\n\n'Master, I cannot accept this...'\n\n'You can and you will. Just as you will go from my side and join the Blade of the Endless Horizon before the strike.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'You shall bear that knife and its truth, as this battle spirals down into the throat of the sun, and beyond.' He paused. 'Someone must ride beyond the horizon.'\n\nThe young warrior nodded, and Jubal began to turn away.\n\n'You said that Horus knows the truth of knives in war...' began Changshi. Jubal turned back to look at the young warrior, feeling a frown form on his face. 'Then might we not be fighting the cuts, and not seeing the thrust to our heart?'\n\nJubal blinked, and then smiled.\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'But we fight anyway.'\n\nAtonement\n\nSmall lives\n\nLords of war\n\nStrike Frigate Persephone, Outer Solar System\n\nThe last defenders of Pluto fled towards the light of the sun. Ragged, scarred and with the blood of battle still marking their decks, they kept on. Where there had been hundreds, now there were barely enough to make a lone hundred. The Ophelia and Persephone circled their sisters and cousins, watching the fleet and the void around them. They could not see their pursuers, but they knew they were there. Aximand had suffered catastrophic losses, but new ships were still coming from the warp. There would be hunters at their backs, swift ships with cruel intent.\n\nSome of the survivors fell even as they fled. Engines failed, wounded hulls broke apart under the stress of acceleration. The Sword Sister, which had endured battles since the first decades of the Great Crusade, became a silent hulk, ploughing on for hours on momentum. The Sign of Truth peeled away from the pack as its damaged reactors began to overload. The light of its death chased its surviving kin.\n\nOn they ran, through the gulf of night, their hulls creaking with damage, their human crews feeling their world shake, the Legion-born warriors pulling broken armour from wounded muscles; past the wrecked ships of all the invaders and usurpers who had fallen in the long millennia since humanity had first left its cradle.\n\nIn the hold of the Persephone, Sigismund paused on the threshold of the sanctuary. His armour hung from him in torn shards, grinding as he moved. Blood caked his tabard and had clotted inside the plates. He felt cold, the hot beat of the pulse in his veins quieted after the roar of battle.\n\n'It is what awaits us all in the end,' said Fafnir Rann from beside him. 'By sword or bullet, it is coming for us all.' Sigismund looked up at the captain of the Assault Cadre. Blood and damage painted Rann's armour too, and dried blood masked half of his face. 'He chose how to meet it. There is nothing more any of us could ask.' Rann paused, holding Sigismund's gaze with his own. 'And nothing more you can give him.'\n\nSigismund gave a small nod and keyed the door release.\n\nThe space beyond was small and the light low. Stone-clad walls climbed to an arched roof. The names of every warrior who had ever called the ship home and died in battle marched over every surface, incised in gilded letters. The door sealed behind Sigismund. The low rasp-thump of machinery beating a dual pulse filled the quiet.\n\nThe remains of a figure lay under a shaft of dim light. They had tried to cut him from his armour, but armour and flesh could not be separated without ending what the Sons of Horus had begun. Tubes and pipes led from blocks of machinery and jars of dark fluid. The rattling bubble of breath drawn by a machine through fluid-filled lungs rose and fell in time with the pulse and thud of the tubes.\n\nSigismund stepped forwards. His armour growled. Something in the mass of sticky flesh and torn ceramite flickered and opened.\n\n'L... o...' the sounds bubbled out. After a second, Sigismund realised it was a word, pulled out of the figure letter by letter as the machines gave it breath. 'L... o... r... d...'\n\nHe knelt then, servos grinding, his gaze fixed on Boreas' eye.\n\n'No,' he said. 'I am no lord here, my brother.'\n\n'Y...o...u...' began Boreas. 'You... li...ve...'\n\nSigismund nodded.\n\n'The tech-priests-'\n\n'I... know... I will... not... go to... the... iron sleep,' said Boreas. Sigismund shook his head. There would be no rebirth as a Dreadnought for Boreas, no half-life of metal and war until he died a second time.\n\nSigismund bowed his head.\n\n'Why...' The word brought his head up. Boreas' eye was fixed on him, bright and unblinking. 'Why... did... you want... to die?'\n\nHe saw the flash in his mind of the blades and faces of the Sons of Horus.\n\nSo many... Too many.\n\n'I...' began Sigismund and now it was his words that faltered. He closed his mouth. The hiss-thump and gurgle filled the moment. 'Atonement,' he said at last.\n\n'For... what?'\n\n'For an oath broken,' said Sigismund. The gaze of Boreas did not shift as he spoke, and the machines beat out the seconds. And Sigismund found himself speaking. He spoke of Euphrati Keeler, of the days after the first word of Horus' treachery had found Dorn. He spoke of a vision she had given him of the future, and the choice that went with that vision: to be here now, as the darkness came to swallow the sun, and raise his sword against it, or to follow his primarch's order and lead a fleet to strike at Horus in the earliest days of the war. He spoke of how he had chosen, and how he had returned with Dorn to Terra, and when the fleet that was his to command was lost, how he had told Dorn about his reason for returning and what he feared Keeler's vision meant. And last he spoke of Dorn's wrath at the reason.\n\nYou are not my son. The words echoed again in his mind, and he fell silent before they could come from his mouth.\n\n'I failed,' he said, 'and I swore I would never fail him again.'\n\n'You... were... right...'\n\n'That is not for us to judge.'\n\n'Death... is... not... atonement,' said Boreas. 'Not even... now... at the end...'\n\nSigismund felt something cold tighten within him. Boreas' gaze had gone distant; the rhythmic beat of the pumps rose, labouring. The tubes and flasks gurgled and sputtered. The fluid in the jars was dark.\n\n'You... atone... by... living... until... until the last... blow... of the sword.' Something in the ruin of meat and twisted armour shifted. It might have been a hand reaching to grasp, or just the shudder of life fleeing the will holding it. 'Until... the last blow... of the sword... Swear it to me.'\n\n'You have my oath,' said Sigismund.\n\nThe machines stopped. A high wail replaced the bubbling hiss and thump.\n\n'And you... mine... my brother...' said Boreas. His eye flashed clear for a moment, his gaze steady as it held Sigismund's. 'Always.'\n\nBeyond the stone walls of the room, beyond the hull of the ship lancing through the void, beyond the ships of the fleet that followed it, the Solar System turned on, silent and unceasing.\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Trans-Saturnian Gulf\n\nVek paused outside the stateroom door, his hand on the release. Around him, the hum of the ship passing through the void vibrated gently through the air. The lights in all the compartments and companionways had dimmed to the night-cycle. Quiet shadows filled the edges of everything. Even on the bridge, the crew still on watch had talked little. Most had been stood down and gone to get some sleep. Vek hadn't, though. The thoughts that had followed him from the clamour and chaos of the flight from Uranus did not quiet in this time of silence.\n\nHe had gone to check on his children, and found them sleeping. Noon had been in his bunk, mouth wide, snoring, hands tucked under his head, and he had frowned and turned over as Vek had kissed him on the forehead. Mori was not in her bunk. She had taken her blankets and curled in the corner of the room. An auto-scribe book had slipped out of her hands onto the deck. Vek had picked it up. She had sucked a breath as if to call out, raised her head and looked as though she were about to open her eyes. Vek had frozen, and Mori's head had dropped back. After a moment her breathing had fallen back to the slow rhythm of sleep. She was frowning, he noticed"}
{"text":"ed and turned over as Vek had kissed him on the forehead. Mori was not in her bunk. She had taken her blankets and curled in the corner of the room. An auto-scribe book had slipped out of her hands onto the deck. Vek had picked it up. She had sucked a breath as if to call out, raised her head and looked as though she were about to open her eyes. Vek had frozen, and Mori's head had dropped back. After a moment her breathing had fallen back to the slow rhythm of sleep. She was frowning, he noticed, and for a blink of his mind's eye he saw the same expression cross his memory of her mother's face.\n\nHe had glanced at the words Mori had auto-scribed across the page of the book.\n\nI don't know where we are going, it read. No one is telling me. Maybe they don't want to say. Maybe they don't know.\n\nHe had looked at the words for a long while and then put the auto-scribe book back beside his daughter. He bent and kissed her lightly and went to the door. In the night-dimmed corridor he rubbed the heels of his hands across his eyes. When he took them away, there were worms of neon light still clinging to his sight.\n\nI don't know where we are going...\n\nHe should think, try to think about what they would do when they reached Jupiter. Had the war reached there yet? Did they have enough food to make it?\n\nHe swayed.\n\nHe was tired...\n\nHis feet started to move...\n\nHe should sleep...\n\nBut he would not, could not sleep. Not now...\n\nHe walked, and the ship shivered with a familiar rhythm that once would have given him comfort. He walked and the world and past and questions turned in his head, until he found that he had stopped.\n\nHe blinked at the doors of the staterooms in front of him. He began to wonder why he was here. But, of course, he knew why...\n\nHe raised his hand, and knocked.\n\n'Mistress Oliton,' he said.\n\nThe door opened from the inside before he could knock again.\n\nThe lights were on in the stateroom. Mersadie Oliton looked at him. There was an expression on her face that he could not quite read. Sadness? Resignation?\n\n'You have questions,' she said, and moved back to a chair set beneath a glow lamp. The bed had not been used, he noticed. She picked up a cup from a low table and put it to her lips. Steam and the smell of caffeine rose from it. He glanced at where the decorative samostill sat on a plinth at the other end of the room. An open tin of grounds sat beside it, some gritting the polished wood. There was a pop and a gurgle, and a curl of steam rose from a brass vent-tube.\n\n'I think that samostill is meant to be decorative...' he said. 'I have certainly never used it.'\n\n'Ah,' said Mersadie, 'that would explain why it took so long to get working.'\n\nHe looked at her and thought he saw the ghost of a smile on her face.\n\n'There seemed to be no shortage of caffeine, though.'\n\n'Part of the family business,' he said. 'We held the transit monopoly on Kaderine Caffeine through Uranus orbits for twelve decades...' He trailed off, realising that he was still standing by the open door.\n\n'Do you want some?' asked Mersadie. 'I think I made too much.'\n\n'No,' he said, turning and closing the door. 'No, I think I might want to try to sleep later, but thank you. Too much of that, and you won't sleep for days.'\n\n'That's what I am hoping...' she said.\n\nThey lapsed into silence as he sat on one of the other chairs. She took another drink from her cup, and waited.\n\nHe opened his mouth, not sure what he was going to say, but she spoke instead.\n\n'You want to know about her, don't you? About Keeler.'\n\nHe closed his mouth, then nodded.\n\n'Yes,' he said.\n\n'You believe, don't you? You are a follower of the Lectitio Divinitatus.'\n\n'My wife...' he began, then paused, closing and opening his mouth. 'No, not really, but...'\n\n'A dangerous thing to be part of a proscribed cult - even worse if your soul isn't in it.'\n\n'I... Do you... Are you...'\n\n'Do I believe?' she said. She smiled, took another sip from her cup, then gave a short laugh. 'I have seen things... When you know the truth, does that leave room for faith or does it become fact?'\n\n'But Keeler,' he asked, and heard the hunger in the words as they came from his mouth. 'She is real then, you knew her?'\n\nMersadie looked at him for a long moment, and then put the cup down.\n\n'I owe you thanks, Master Vek, thanks and apologies that you do not have to accept. But I can't offer you certainty. I can't even offer hope.'\n\n'You said, though, that you needed to reach the Praetorian, that the saint... that Keeler-'\n\n'Do you know what the Crusade and the Betrayal have taught me?' She was looking directly at him, now, and there was a hardness in her eyes. 'We are small things, we humans. We mean very little. Our lives are narrow and short, and our dreams, even if noble, will not shift the stars in the sky. We are not the movers of this age. Horus is, and the Emperor. The choices and the hope and the ruin belong to them.'\n\nVek breathed in sharply. His hands twitched. Mersadie did not move.\n\n'I am sorry, Master Vek,' she said. 'You asked about Keeler, about what I am doing and why I am doing it. I thought you deserved an answer.'\n\n'But you talk of...' He paused, the fear taking the sounds of the name from his tongue. 'You talk of the Warmaster, not the saint.'\n\n'Because if there are arch-traitors and saints, then hope is their realm, the realm of cosmic change and slaughter and sorrow. They are the ones who will decide tomorrow, and if there are any tomorrows after that. We are human, Master Vek. Our lives only matter in quantity. We can dream and despair and cling on to what we have, but those things live only in us. Our hope is our own, and if the universe cares, it does so by accident. That is why people pray to the Emperor and call my old friend a saint. Because deep down, they know that they cannot change the great course of events.'\n\n'You have a very bleak view for someone claiming to be trying to help save the last fortress of humanity.'\n\n'I have seen Horus,' she said. 'I have heard his voice. One day everyone who can say that will be gone, and no one will remember. But I remember, and for years I have tried to hold on to that memory.'\n\n'What? Why?'\n\n'Because it matters. What I saw mattered. Horus was greater and more noble and more terrible than any human could ever be. It was not just the armies, you see. It was not just his sons. It was that he was something beyond us, something that spoke like us and wore a face that was like ours, but was from another order of existence. He existed in a greater way. The smallest things he did, and choices he made could send cracks across the shell of life. He was a creature who turned, and half the galaxy turned with him...'\n\n'And burned,' said Vek, and began to rise. He could feel a headache building at the edges of his eyes. This was not what he had come for, but it was his fault that he had come here at all.\n\n'I can't lie to you,' she said. 'You have done too much for me not to tell you what I believe before you can choose what you believe. I can tell you that I am carrying information from my old friend, who is now the saint of a rogue cult that worships the Emperor as a god, a friend who spoke to me in dreams. You can hear that and believe that I am carrying a message from the divine to a primarch, that I am chosen, that this is something only I can do, that I do the will of the Emperor and that He protects us. You can believe that you are doing good, that it will mean that everything is going to be all right...' She trailed off, shrugged. She looked very tired, he realised, drained in a way that he thought was deeper than a lack of sleep. She gave a half-smile. 'Or you can believe that I am insane and dangerous. That it was the worst mistake of your life to help us, that it is all going to end badly. You can believe that, instead.' She stood up and went to the samostill, and filled her cup again. 'And all of those things might be true at the same time.'\n\n'But you believe...' he said.\n\n'I know I need to do what I can. And yes, I believe... I believe that we are small, and that our dreams cannot change the stars. But sometimes our deeds can change the universe, even if it is only by accident. If you want to, you can find your hope in that.'\n\nVek found that he was smiling.\n\n'And that is enough?'\n\n'It is all we have,' she said.\n\nVek stood, poured a cup of caffeine and winced. 'I always hated this stuff.' He stood, and went to the door.\n\nHe had his hand on the release and the door open when she spoke again.\n\n'Thank you, Master Vek.'\n\n'For what?' he asked, half turning.\n\n'For believing.'\n\nHe was still for a moment, not certain if he did believe, but knowing that he had made his choice.\n\n'You should sleep,' he said, and pulled the door shut behind him.\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\n'They come,' whispered Abaddon to himself as he watched the enemy close.\n\nThe grey-white ships did not come as a single fleet, but in a wild, pattern-less rush. First came the Blade of the Endless Horizon and its caste of torpedo frigates, burning on a spiralling path, loosing torpedoes seemingly at random, closing so fast that it seemed they would fly straight into the guns of Abaddon's fleet. They did not. As the first salvoes from long-range batteries reached for them, they turned and scattered like droplets of water from forge-hot iron.\n\nThe twin strike cruisers Truth of the Wind and Storm Soul cut in. Running side by side, they dived towards the armada and then slammed out of their dives at the edge of the Sons of Horus' range. They cut laterally, spiralling and dancing as explosions chased them.\n\nWatching them in his helm display Abaddon remembered a story told by Yoden Croweaver of the VI. When ships would meet on the seas of Fenris, warriors would run the oars of the boats in full armour with weapons drawn, bounding from oar-haft to oar-haft as the sea rose and fell and their enemies watched. Even if one boat met twenty in a storm, still a lone warrior would run th"}
{"text":"heir dives at the edge of the Sons of Horus' range. They cut laterally, spiralling and dancing as explosions chased them.\n\nWatching them in his helm display Abaddon remembered a story told by Yoden Croweaver of the VI. When ships would meet on the seas of Fenris, warriors would run the oars of the boats in full armour with weapons drawn, bounding from oar-haft to oar-haft as the sea rose and fell and their enemies watched. Even if one boat met twenty in a storm, still a lone warrior would run the oars. Abaddon had understood why.\n\n'To show their contempt of death,' he had said. 'To show that even if cut down by greater numbers they were still worthy of the life they led.'\n\nYoden had shrugged, and nodded.\n\n'Is there any other way to face death than by laughing?'\n\nThe torpedoes loosed from the first attack wave struck their targets. Explosions blossomed across the armada's lead ships. Fire and plasma ripped wounds in armoured skin. In a dozen warships, thousands died in the pinprick flashes that sparkled in Abaddon's eyes.\n\n'No sign of the Lance of Heaven?' he said into the vox.\n\n'None yet, brother,' came the reply from Krushan. Abaddon had left helm command to the veteran line-captain.\n\n'She will come,' replied Abaddon. 'Commit as soon as she does.'\n\n'As you will it, brother.'\n\nAbaddon cut the vox, but kept the sensor feed running in the corner of his right eye as he stalked into the teleportation chamber. A throng of black-armoured warriors greeted him with raised fists and weapons. These were his finest, the elite of the First Company: Justaerin, Reavers and Death Marked. All of them had fought at each other's side for years before the war, and had thrived in the battles that came after. There was Sycar, his lieutenant and commander of the components that would strike at their target's engines and power conduits, grinning at Ralkor with sharp, steel teeth; Tybar and his squad were fixing oath parchments to their bolters. Some wore talismans that showed they had founded alliances with one of the many faces of the powers of the warp.\n\nAbaddon moved amongst them, returning their greetings with a nod, pausing to grip the hand and wrist of Gultaron, the young warrior still recovering from the wounds dealt to him in pursuit of the Wolves during Beta Garmon.\n\n'My captain,' said Gultaron, bowing his head briefly. Abaddon moved on, feeling the pre-battle tension rising and spreading through the force like a thunderhead before the storm. He smiled inside his helm. This was his home. In these moments amongst these brothers and warriors he felt the universe align, become clear, become as it should be.\n\nUrskar and Gedephron were standing together, serfs clustered around them as the last plates of their Cataphractii armour were slotted into place. The breeches of Urskar's reaper cannon cycled as boxes of heavy rounds locked into its loader. His crimson helm glinted with silver-filled scars, an echo of the face beneath. Gedephron was snapping the power field of his power mace on and off, flexing his grip and shoulders.\n\nThey did not bow their heads as Abaddon approached, or show any sign of acknowledgement. They did not need to. They had fought at his side for longer than any other. They had saved his life and he theirs. He was their captain but they needed no sign to mark the bonds of respect and blood that bound them.\n\nAbaddon was about to speak when he felt stillness ripple through the chamber. Gedephron's head jerked up, the rest of his body motionless.\n\n'The dogs of ashes...' he growled aloud. Abaddon turned, following his brother's gaze. Layak and his blade slaves walked across the deck. The chatter and bark of voices quieted. Eyes followed the three Word Bearers. Abaddon waited, feeling the fire rise to his tongue and pulling his lips back from his teeth.\n\n'Why are you here?'\n\nLayak paused, looked around slowly.\n\n'To face the enemy at your side,' he said.\n\nThe room remained still. All it would take was the smallest gesture, not even a word, and the three Word Bearers would be dead on the deck. Again the question of why he had let Layak remain with him surfaced in Abaddon's mind, and found no clear answer.\n\nHe turned his back on them without reply, and blinked the ship's sensor feed so that it filled his right eye. The flash of explosions hundreds of kilometres in size replaced the sight of his brothers.\n\nThe White Scars were coming again, wheeling in, formations changing, ships moving between squadrons like birds spiralling on the wind. It was dazzling. Sixty-one ships in the outer shell of the armada had taken serious damage. This was the White Scars' purpose, not to kill unless they had a chance, but to slice a thousand times so that the ships that struck the inner Solar System would be already bleeding, already weak. The privateers and vagabond ships that had split from the armada had drawn off much of the White Scars' void-strength, but not enough. The grey-and-white ships had not taken the bait, but spun away, gathered and come back at the main bulk of Abaddon's ships with fresh focus. That took vision and control that even the best Legion void commanders would struggle to wield. Abaddon could ill afford to let their strength bleed away before they reached their true objective. So they would bring this dance to an end.\n\nAbaddon's armada did not halt. If it deviated from its path, it would lose the advantages bought by the blood and sorcery that had let it emerge so far inside the sphere of the Solar System. So, it fought as it ploughed on, a single vast beast tormented by the bites of the falcons that now spun across its path.\n\n'That's the problem with that Cthonian directness you so value - it works too well.' Abaddon had let a spark of annoyance show on his face. Jubal Khan had just laughed and put a hand on his shoulder, as though they had known each other for decades. 'You get so used to using it, you forget that it is not the only way to kill.'\n\nAmongst the Sons of Horus ships in the outer layers of the armada, one vessel started to list. It was named the Aeolus, a heavy cruiser, Mars-forged and spear blade-hulled. Multiple torpedoes had slid through its shields and burst through its armoured flanks. Fire had spread through its starboard decks and compartments. Plumes of air flashed as they streamed through its void shields. Now it began to veer off course, engines stuttering and flaring. Its fleet sisters plunged on, not slowing as it struggled for direction and speed. The White Scars ships circled as the wounded Aeolus fell away from its siblings. Its engines fired again, burning with star-bright desperation, like a wounded animal falling behind the safety of the herd, fighting against the inevitable as its killers watched and circled.\n\nBut it wasn't dying. It was bleeding, but its weakness was feigned.\n\nThe White Scars began to whirl inwards towards their kill. They drew together and now amongst them, like a ghost gathered from the dark, was a great vessel, its engines tracing a bright sickle in the stars.\n\n'The Lance of Heaven...' breathed Abaddon, as he saw the battle-barge slide into sight. He thought of the Legion brothers that he had killed to see this sight, brothers slain on the Aeolus as fire roared through its decks and explosions tore its skin. He had killed those warriors, he knew. The enemy had held the knife but they had died because of him, for him, so that he could stand in this moment and see his opponent come from the ocean of night to meet him. There were wounds that could not be affected, prices that had to be paid in the only coin that mattered.\n\nThe Lance of Heaven held fire as it closed. The Aeolus rolled, its engines misfiring and sending it spinning like an arrow loosed from a broken bow.\n\nThe Lance of Heaven fired. Beams of plasma lashed across the night. The last of the Aeolus' void shields vanished. The wheeling ships hurled ordnance at it. Blisters of molten metal formed and burst on its hull. The Lance of Heaven kept closing. Shorter-ranged batteries opened up. The Aeolus spun on. Chunks of debris arced from its sides.\n\nWatching the exchange, Abaddon could almost see the White Scars' need for the kill driving them on.\n\nThe Lance of Heaven curved close, burning hard to slice the fire of its broadside batteries across the Aeolus' engines: a final slice to leave it stricken in the void. It was a cut too far.\n\n'Strike,' Abaddon ordered.\n\nThe War Oath speared forwards. The ships of the armada that had shielded it parted. Power had built in its reactors, and the adepts of the New Mechanicum had held the fury of its plasma exchanges in balance until they screamed. Released, that power roared from its engines and plunged it towards the Lance of Heaven like a thunderbolt from a night sky. Heat and radiation killed hundreds on the engine decks. Three escort ships came with the War Oath, soaring wide to bracket their prey.\n\nToo late, the White Scars ship broke off its attack run, and turned to dive back into the night. But the War Oath was already close enough. In the teleportarium, the air pulsed with static and ball lighting.\n\n'For the Warmaster,' said Abaddon into the vox, and the ranks of warriors gathered around him vanished in a flash of strobing light.\n\nWarship Lance of Heaven, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nThe warriors in black appeared out of a whirl of green lightning in the passages of the Lance of Heaven's command castle. Abaddon felt sensation briefly drain from his limbs as reality slammed back into place around him. Gunfire met them as the teleport light vanished with a howl. Etheric blast waves ripped out, shrieking with the voices of human fear. The Sons of Horus fired back, blasting through defence turrets and bulkheads as they charged. There was no hesitation in their movements, no doubt. They read their surroundings and were moving and killing before the humans facing them had loosed more than a shot.\n\n'Forwards,' called Abaddon, firing and moving with his brothers.\n\nSquads cla"}
{"text":"k into place around him. Gunfire met them as the teleport light vanished with a howl. Etheric blast waves ripped out, shrieking with the voices of human fear. The Sons of Horus fired back, blasting through defence turrets and bulkheads as they charged. There was no hesitation in their movements, no doubt. They read their surroundings and were moving and killing before the humans facing them had loosed more than a shot.\n\n'Forwards,' called Abaddon, firing and moving with his brothers.\n\nSquads clamped charges on to sealed bulkheads and spun aside as metal flashed to shrapnel and smoke. The men and women who opposed them were drilled and disciplined, recruited and bound to serve the White Scars with honour and skill at arms. But they were still mortal. Bodies exploded inside pressure suits as they were slammed into walls by explosions. Chain teeth carved through meat and bone. Blood slicked the decks. Bolt-rounds filled corridors with shrapnel and pulped bodies.\n\nWithin three minutes, strike forces had speared through the defences around critical locations across the Lance of Heaven's command castle and engine decks. Abaddon reached the main doors to the bridge as Ralkor, his signal master, was attempting a violation of the machine-spirit governing its locks. Abaddon gave a single shake of his head and gestured with a digit of his power fist. Two Reaver squads ran forwards pulling charges from backpacks and belts. The charges locked in place as Abaddon took his next step. His mind was cold, the progress of the assault a breath of thoughts at the back of his awareness. Resistance had been low, far too low for a capital ship of this size.\n\nThe charges on the bridge doors detonated. Melta waves bored white-hot holes through the armour slabs a second before breaching charges cleaved through the warping metal. A squad of Terminators went through first, ramming through the cooling debris, firing as they advanced. Servitors and serf crew became shreds of meat under the hail of rounds. Abaddon followed in their wake, his helm display showing a scattering of threat runes that vanished as bolt-rounds and volkite beams found their marks. He reached the centre of the bridge as silence fell.\n\n'Where is he?' asked Layak, following Abaddon, ghost and shade-light spiralling over him. His blade slaves flanked him, their swords drawn, their bodies bloated, shedding cinders and ashes with every step. 'Where are any of them?'\n\nAbaddon turned, his mind shifting between possibilities. The bridge was silent, the few serf and servitor crew just those needed to keep the Lance of Heaven on course... No: to keep it on a trajectory that the War Oath could intercept. Hung out before them like a lure on a snare...\n\n'Brother!' shouted Ralkor. Abaddon had time to turn and to see a spinning mote of light beyond the viewports streaking towards them. The armourglass imploded in a wave of fire as the assault rams hit the Lance of Heaven's bridge. There were two of them, chisel-shaped blocks of armour and engines that carried five warriors in each tine of their forked hulls. Each mounted melta weapons powerful enough to punch a hole in the skin of a warship. Striking the unshielded bridge, those weapons reduced half the chamber to glowing slag.\n\nThe blast wave struck Abaddon and staggered him. Shards of wreckage and blobs of molten metal ricocheted from his battleplate. Tybar and his squad took the force of the hit and became fire and ash. The assault rams ripped through the bridge, embedding their prows deep in the deck. Sheets of metal scattered into the air. The assault rams' front hatches blew open. Warriors in white leaped to the glowing deck. Bolter and plasma fire lashed out. Sons of Horus fell. Gunfire blazed back. Layak and his blade slaves stood amongst the ruin, the pale fire and shadow that wreathed them shredding bullets and debris to burning dust. Another assault ram ploughed through the hole left by the first two.\n\nAbaddon rose. Gouges and pits marked his Terminator plate. The black lacquer of the Justaerin had burned away, replaced by the red of cooling ceramite and black of soot. Urskar and Gedephron stood with him. Air rushed past them into the void. Inside Abaddon's helm the noise of battle reached him as a vibration through his feet. He saw his enemy then, a warrior running amongst the white-armoured figures charging across the deck: plumed helm, Chogorian hunt marks running across the plates of his armour, guandao spinning in his hands like the flash of lightning, like a bark of laughter as the rain fell.\n\nJubal Khan, a warrior who had fought across the stars and left a reputation that few could hope to touch. Jubal, whom he had met on the spires of Nissek, just before the counter-attack by the Arch-Drake's horde. The Lord of Summer Lightning, the Death that Laughs. And here he was, a lord of war left to fight almost alone in this abyss. Left to fight and to die here.\n\nAbaddon began to run to greet him.\n\n'Sycar,' he growled as he took the first stride. 'Kill the power generators.'\n\nHe heard gunfire chop through the vox as his lieutenant answered.\n\n'It won't be clean, brother.'\n\n'Do it.'\n\n'With pleasure and obedience,' said Sycar, and Abaddon heard his Legion brother smiling.\n\nHe was five strides across the deck. Jubal had seen him. The White Scar whirled his blade out, and another of the Sons of Horus was falling, helm split and blood burning on the guandao's power field.\n\n'Brace for gravity loss!' shouted Urskar over the vox, firing a stream of heavy rounds into the White Scars still leaping from the assault rams.\n\nA vibration rose through the deck. The few remaining lights cut out. Abaddon felt the lurch in his stomach as gravity vanished. His boots mag-locked to the deck an instant later. One of the battered assault rams, still moving under the momentum of its impact, spun from the deck. Debris showered upwards. Half of the White Scars rose into the air. Bolt-rounds punched into them as they tumbled through the vanishing atmosphere. The rest mag-locked their feet to the deck in time. Jubal kept moving, his strides slowed but his speed still dazzling. Abaddon surged to meet him. Rounds blurred past him. The war shouts of the living and the dead filled his ears. His sword was in his hand, wreathed in lightning, his armour and blood and muscle flowing as one.\n\nJubal's guandao flashed out, reaching across the space between them. It was so fast that it might have been the glint of light from a mirror. Abaddon brought his sword up to meet it.\n\nBut the weapons never met. Jubal flicked the guandao back as though the steel were a rope, and then slashed it out again. The blade edge kissed Abaddon's right gauntlet. The power field bit deep. A spike of pain flared up his arm. He spun his sword, and sheared the guandao away, and struck back, turning the parry into an overhead cut. Jubal stepped away. The deck vibrated as the mag-locks in their boots released and engaged once more.\n\nAbaddon struck again and again, pouring the force of each blow into the next so that their strength grew like a storm-sea clashing against the land. Jubal went back, pivoting and parrying. They were fighting on the deck before the wreck of the assault ram. Light flashed from the meeting of blades. Abaddon did not slow or step back. The battle was becoming silent as the last air drained from the bridge. The sound of his hearts filled his world, became the surge and murmur of war.\n\nJubal went back again, fast. Abaddon saw an opening and thrust. But Jubal clamped his feet to the deck halfway through his step and slashed his blade back. It was not a cut that a savant of any blade school would recognise, but it struck Abaddon's sword arm, just above the elbow. Razor edge and power field sliced through the thinner armour of the joint. Pain flared, and a bright string of red pearls bubbled into the vacuum. It punched into his mind and stole the instant before he realised that Jubal was open. Mind and body shunted the pain aside, and he cut. Jubal somehow met the kill-stroke. The force of impact jolted through Abaddon. Jubal released the mag-locks holding him to the deck, and the impact of his strike sent him arcing over Abaddon's head.\n\nJubal's feet found the deck and his boots gripped him to the floor. He snapped the guandao out as he landed. The long haft slid through his right hand, the tip reaching out to Abaddon like a thunderbolt.\n\nIt was dazzling. From the first reversal of Abaddon's plan to kill the leader of the Falcon fleets to this dance of blood and edges, this was war and killing on a level that rose to something beyond even the post-human. Abaddon would strike, and Jubal would slice, and bit by bit those cuts would bleed Abaddon, slow him, pull him down into more mistakes. They would follow this pattern on and on, cut after cut, and it would never cease, only flow into its next phase, like wind and storm-rain split by the flash of lightning.\n\nExcept it wouldn't. It could not. He knew Jubal, had known him before and knew him better for these last moments.\n\nAbaddon raised his sword to meet the guandao spearing towards him. To a human it would have been too fast to follow, but Jubal would have seen it, would have been waiting for it. The guandao flicked aside. Power fields grazed each other in a plume of sparks. Jubal's feet locked to the floor as he turned his cut inside Abaddon's parry.\n\nAbaddon slammed his sword forwards. All his strength and all his skill focused in the blow. It struck the guandao. Sheets of sparks flashed out. Jubal flinched back, the flow of his strikes shattered as force jolted through his weapon and up his arms. Abaddon activated the field of his power fist and slammed it forwards, palm open. The lightning-wreathed fingers closed on the guandao with a flash of light. Jubal whirled back but Abaddon had already read the movement. His sword-thrust struck Jubal in the gut and cut upwards, sawing through armour, flesh and bone.\n\nBlood p"}
{"text":"d in the blow. It struck the guandao. Sheets of sparks flashed out. Jubal flinched back, the flow of his strikes shattered as force jolted through his weapon and up his arms. Abaddon activated the field of his power fist and slammed it forwards, palm open. The lightning-wreathed fingers closed on the guandao with a flash of light. Jubal whirled back but Abaddon had already read the movement. His sword-thrust struck Jubal in the gut and cut upwards, sawing through armour, flesh and bone.\n\nBlood poured into the air, glistening, burning in the sword's power field. Jubal's arms swung, still bearing his broken weapon. Abaddon stepped back, pulling the sword free and kicking the corpse off his blade. And the Lord of Summer Lightning tumbled away, limbs suddenly slack, blood venting in spheres into the all-but-vanished air.\n\nAbaddon stood for a second, hearing his own breath inside his helm, watching the warrior he had killed.\n\nThen the sound rose up through the deck, vibrating through his armour.\n\nAbaddon's awareness snapped back, sharp and bright. Light was building in the front of one of the assault rams embedded in the deck. Abaddon had a stretching, momentary perception of the chamber before him, of the bolts and beams of energy reaching between the surviving White Scars and the Sons of Horus. The corpses already spinning through the air. The flicker of detonations out in the void beyond. And the light of the beam of heat building, ripping through the deck beneath his feet as the assault ram fired its magna-melta. For the narrowest sliver of an instant the deck plating seemed to contain it, glowing through red to white. Then the moment passed.\n\nHeat and molten metal exploded outwards. The melta-beam sliced through the deck towards Abaddon. He felt the deck pitch as it began to crumple like parchment in a furnace. He was still moving, but these moments were slow, the last grains falling in an hourglass.\n\nThe molten beam struck an invisible wall. Frost exploded to steam as it spread across the torn deck. The sound of screaming voices filled Abaddon's ears, shrieking and pleading. Shadows spiralled around him. He could smell burning parchment and incense.\n\nZardu Layak stepped to Abaddon's side. His hand was raised. A device burned on his palm.\n\nMove... said Layak's voice in Abaddon's mind. Layak stood for another second, the hemisphere of shadow holding back the blast. Then Layak closed his hand. The shield of shadows and the melta-beam vanished. Stillness filled the second. Then Layak opened his hand and the fire leapt out, like light trapped in a shuttered lamp. The assault ram exploded. Half of the deck vanished in a flash of white heat.\n\nA moment later the gunfire ceased.\n\nAbaddon walked to Layak. Blood bubbled from under the priest's mask, dark and thick. Voices rose from the vox in Abaddon's ears, but he did not listen. He was looking at the grey-armoured priest of the Word Bearers. He blinked his vox-channel to a direct link to Layak.\n\n'Saving a life forms a bond, First Son of Horus,' said Layak looking up at him, the eyes of his horned and fanged mask glowing. 'Remember that, always.'\n\nThe bitter angels of our hearts\n\nLimit of kindness\n\nHere for you\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf\n\n'Signal contact. Distance adjusting.'\n\nThe tech-priest's drone buzzed across the bridge.\n\nThe watch officer, who had been nodding off, jerked upright, blinking. Vek had been sitting in a vacant helm cradle, trying to stave off the alternating fatigue and nerves.\n\n'What is it?' asked Vek.\n\n'Uncertain,' said the tech-priest. She had come up from the engine decks and wired herself into the helm and sensor instruments after they had broken from Uranus' orbit. That had reassured Vek a little. The tech-priest, who he thought was called Chi-32-Beta, was cold and unfeeling, but she did not seem to sleep, nor to be as open to panic as the all-too-human bridge crew. 'It is a small void-craft, fast, and its signal signature is tenuous,' continued Chi-32-Beta. 'If I was extending analysis to informed speculation, I might venture that it was equipped with counter-auspex systems.'\n\n'It's hiding,' said Vek.\n\n'That analysis is not accurate. It is less that it is hiding, and rather that we do not have the eyes to see it.'\n\n'Military?'\n\n'Almost a certainty,' said the tech-priest.\n\n'Has it seen us? Is it coming closer?' he asked.\n\n'To the first question - I would theorise that if its sacred machine systems are enough to fog the fidelity of our own auspex, then it will be more than blessed with the ability to have been aware of us for some time.' The tech-priest paused. Vek saw cogs turn inside the sculpted lips of her brushed-steel mask. 'As to whether it is closing, passing or attenuating, I have no data.'\n\nVek bit his lip. He thought of calling for Koln, but the brevet captain of the Antius had withdrawn further and further over the days since they ran from Uranus. When she spoke it was often as though she were not fully aware or present, and when she was focused she seethed with barely suppressed rage. She was seen on the bridge less and less, and Vek was happy not to know where it was she was going. But he was no void officer...\n\n'Go and find Sub-mistress Koln,' he called to one of the junior deck officers, who looked barely old enough to hold rank. 'Get her back to the bridge now.'\n\nThe officer nodded and left.\n\nVek closed his eyes and rubbed them with the heels of his hands. A headache had been growing in the space behind his eyes for hours now. The pain was becoming sharper as the adrenaline of the first days of their flight drained, and they had pushed further towards Jupiter and the system core beyond. Everyone was the same, though. He had heard the crew muttering to each other about their dreams after they returned from the few hours most of them had managed to sleep.\n\nEverything was fraying. There had been incidents: shouted arguments between superiors and subordinates. This was a civilian ship, a short-range freighter. Its crew were not military and the habits of authority and command were barely surviving this new reality. And the refugees in the hold... He had gone down to see them every day until today. The last time he had stepped into the holds they had swarmed not to him but towards the door, and there had been a blank-eyed desperation to them.\n\nRefugees... Isn't that what they all were now?\n\n'Signal intensity altering!' said Chi-32-Beta. 'Secondary signal return detaching from the primary. Plotting location and vector.'\n\n'What is happening?' he asked.\n\n'A second return has separated from the first. It is smaller, and not sensor baffled. In more easily parsed terms, the ship that we detected has launched a shuttle-or lighter-sized void-craft. It is visible to our auspex. I am using it to extrapolate data on the primary return.' The tech-priest was silent for a second. Vek heard a metallic whir from inside her mask that made him think of a sharp inhalation. 'Recommend brace condition and immediate internal lockdown!'\n\nThe officers of the bridge woke from lethargy into panicked motion. Crimson lights began to blink and strobe.\n\nVek started towards the tech-priest, but she was already calling out.\n\n'They are very close - they must have been gaining on us for hours, and the smaller craft that they have launched is approaching directly and swiftly.'\n\n'What is it?'\n\n'I would speculate that it is a class of assault craft.' The tech-priest rotated her head on her shoulders to look fully at Vek. Her eyes were two circles of crystal-brushed steel. 'They mean to board us.'\n\n'How long?' Vek asked, and as though in reply a machine-voice boomed from vox-speakers across the bridge.\n\n'Brace! Ten seconds to impact! Brace!'\n\nVek turned to look at the viewport in time to see a sleek shape fall on them like a fiery arrow shot from the night.\n\nAll those people gone, just gone, and Vek did not even pause...\n\nPulled a gun, yes, he pulled a gun, and what choice did you have then?\n\nYou had to. He left the captain. He killed her. What choice did you have?\n\nNone.\n\nAnd all for his brats. All to keep two rich little brats alive.\n\nHow many died?\n\nHe killed them. Yes, Vek killed them, not you. You gave the order to break from the dock, but he would have shot you.\n\nYou had no choice.\n\nDown in the quiet, Zadia Koln, once sub-mistress and now brevet captain of the system freighter Antius listened to the thoughts roll and roar through her head. The passage was dark. The pistol in her hands hung in her fingers, still smoking, the slide open on an empty breech. Fat brass shell cases littered the floor around where she crouched. Further off, half folded in shadow, lay the bodies. Five of them, or maybe more. She was not sure. For a second, she caught them out of the edge of her eye.\n\nShe'd had no choice.\n\nShe had been walking the decks. They had come out of nowhere as she was sealing the bulkhead, and she had pulled the gun and...\n\nKoln glanced up at the sealed door across the passage. She had come down to the decks to check that all of them were secure...\n\nNo that was a lie... She had just wanted to get away from the bridge, with its stink of fear, and Vek and his bodyguard watching everything like they didn't trust Koln.\n\nThe thought of them brought the rage again, spearing up through her, sucking in terror as fuel like a firestorm drawing in air.\n\nShe hadn't asked for this! How dare they doubt her. She was the one who had to give the orders, to keep the ship moving through the void...\n\nShe had spent most of her four decades on this ship or one of its sisters. Ore and supplies, back and forwards through the circles of Uranus' moons, again and again, predictable and certain. A mundane life filled with boredom, but there had been the temple, the quiet gatherings in the silence of the docks off Miranda. She had been flattered to be asked to join, then intrigued. The frisson of secrecy had spiced the thought that she was, for once in her life, doing something not p"}
{"text":"ugh the void...\n\nShe had spent most of her four decades on this ship or one of its sisters. Ore and supplies, back and forwards through the circles of Uranus' moons, again and again, predictable and certain. A mundane life filled with boredom, but there had been the temple, the quiet gatherings in the silence of the docks off Miranda. She had been flattered to be asked to join, then intrigued. The frisson of secrecy had spiced the thought that she was, for once in her life, doing something not permitted. Something special. It had been just as mundane after a while, though, men and woman in tattered hoods, and nonsense words spoken to recognise each other. Tokens and coins, and meetings which were half-ritual and half the kind of talk you could have in any dock drinking hole.\n\nHer eye settled on one of the corpses; its hand was open... Clear stars but it looked still alive. What was it they had shouted before she shot? Food, something about food.\n\nWhat had she done?\n\nNo, no, no... It was not her fault.\n\nWhat was Vek thinking? Almost a thousand refugees on a ship with provisions for its crew alone. Vek should have known... They had nothing. Hunger had begun to bite after only days. Soon it would make the refugees in the holds go further than this passage. They had just come running out of the dark and she had...\n\nShe had...\n\nThey should not have been there...\n\n'It's not your fault.'\n\nThe voice froze her. Her eyes fastened on the dead refugees. She heard the thump of her heart. Then she laughed, the sound echoing and then collapsing into tears. It was her voice, of course it was. Hers. The words had come from her thoughts into her mouth without her realising.\n\n'It's not your fault, Zadia Koln.' She heard herself speak, and felt the words puff into the air, cold and glittering with frost.\n\n'It's not your fault...'\n\nShe heard the footsteps then, slow and deliberate, walking towards her across the deck.\n\nShe tried to look up.\n\nShe could not look up.\n\nShe could not move.\n\nThe beat of her heart had stopped. The frost of her breath hung in the air, glittering dust hanging before her eyes.\n\n'You had no choice then, and you have none now...'\n\nThere was a shape at the edge of her sight, a shape like the shadow of something that walked like a man. She wanted to close her eyes, she wanted to look away. Her eyes stayed open as the figure stopped just next to her.\n\n'But you did have one choice...'\n\nShe could smell burnt meat, and something that brought to mind the incense they had burned in the temple on Miranda. A temple... a temple that was just a room with some candles, and marks scratched on the floor, and bowls set under a flow of water from a broken pipe.\n\n'You all have a choice of which angels to listen to...'\n\nFrost was creeping over her limbs and up her neck.\n\n'You can listen to those voices that you know are true, and which will keep you safe, even if it means that you must be just a small flame, rather than the light of eternity...'\n\nBlood... She could smell blood, and... and water...\n\n'Or you can listen to all the hate, and rage, and resentment that you carry like a parent does a child...'\n\nThe thing shifted, and she could see it now.\n\n'And all of you humans always make the same choice...'\n\nSomething sharp hooked under her chin and pulled it up. Two yellow eyes looked down at her.\n\n'You always choose to listen to the bitter angels of your hearts...'\n\nShe could not draw breath to scream.\n\n'And we listen.'\n\n'You are from Terra?' asked the boy.\n\n'Yes,' replied Mersadie. 'I was born there.' She moved the glass tile across a slot in the metal game board. The boy frowned at it. His sister sat curled on a chair, eyes sunk in a sullen face, listening. She was older than the boy by at least half a decade, maybe a little more. She was called Mori, and he was Noon. They were Vek's children. They had found their way into the room she was sleeping in two days ago, and seemed to have adopted her as a curiosity - a distraction from the situation they all found themselves in. She had told them a story, and the boy, at least, had come back for more. Vek had let them, and the bodyguard, Aksinya, had come with them, a cold-eyed shadow at the edge of the room.\n\nMersadie talked and told stories as the Antius plunged on through the dark of the gulf between Uranus and Jupiter. Apparently, the gas giants were at a stage in their orbital cycle that put Jupiter on a direct course between Uranus and the inner system. There were no explosions now, no rush and boom of sudden events, just the slow, grinding passing of moments as the pressure rose inside the thoughts of all those on board.\n\n'What's it like, the Throneworld? What's it like?' asked Noon.\n\nMersadie shrugged, and smiled.\n\n'I don't know what it is like now. I haven't been there for a long time. But do you want to know the truth?' She leaned across the board of coloured tiles, and lowered her voice to a stage whisper. 'I always thought it was ugly. There is this haze in the sky. There used to be seas once, longer ago than anyone can remember. Now there is just dust and stink. Lots of buildings grown too high. And there are people, more people than you can imagine.'\n\n'Where did you go?' asked Mori from across the room. Mersadie looked around at the girl, who had barely moved but was looking at her with a sharp gaze. 'If you were away from Terra for a long time - where did you go?'\n\nMersadie held the girl's gaze, thinking about how to answer.\n\n'I went to see the Imperium being made.'\n\n'What does that mean?' asked the girl.\n\n'Enough questions,' said Aksinya, from the corner.\n\nMersadie looked at the bodyguard, then back at the coloured tiles on the board, then up at Noon. 'I think you might have won,' said Mersadie to Noon.\n\nAlarms screamed out all around them.\n\nThe assault pod struck the Antius on its spine. Claws snapped down from the pod's flanks, dug in and pulled its bulk close against the hull. Rings of drill teeth began to rotate. Melta-beams fired at point-blank range. The skin of the hull bubbled and oozed orange. Shaped charges in the pod's base fired. The blast punched into the blistering metal and turned it into a jet of white-hot liquid. The pod rocked, but its blade-legs dug deeper, pulling the spinning teeth of its maw down into the glowing wound.\n\nThe second set of charges fired and tore through the last inches of the ship's hull. A shock wave ripped down the passageways near the breach. Half-sealed hatches ripped off their hinges. A lone crewman close to the impact point was slammed into the wall and became a broken doll of crushed meat and shattered bone.\n\nAn iris hatch set between the pod's drill teeth snapped open. Figures dropped through. Crimson void armour bulked their forms. Pressure hoses snaked from the canisters on their backs to their domed helms.\n\nIn the staterooms towards the ship's stern, Mersadie came up off the floor to standing as the breaching blast sent a shiver down the hull.\n\nAksinya was already in motion, scooping up the two children and making for the door in a blur. The bodyguard had a long-barrelled pistol in one hand.\n\n'Aksinya,' called Mersadie. There was something wrong, something blurring at the edges of awareness that Mersadie could not focus on. The skin on the back of her neck and arms was prickling. In her mind's eye she could see the dream image of the wolf, smiling at her with its sharp, bloody teeth. 'Don't go. There is something-'\n\nThe bodyguard turned, keying the door.\n\n'I need to reach Master Vek.' The door opened, and she glanced back at Mersadie, the mask of control slipping for a second to show only contempt. 'You brought this down on us. They can have you.' She turned. Noon's eyes were wide as he looked back at her from beside Aksinya's grasp.\n\n'No,' called Mersadie. She was shaking, the tremor running out from her core like a charge searching for a way out. In her mind the image of the symbols she had seen in the dream with Keeler rose, planets and signs, symbols and meanings. The marks had changed, had shifted; they were glowing with heat, weeping smoke. And as clearly as if it had been shouted in her ear, she knew that it was a warning. 'There is something else... something coming... Don't go!'\n\nAksinya looked like she would not even pause. Then she stopped, pulled a compact laspistol from inside her robes and threw it onto the floor at Mersadie's feet.\n\n'Consider that the limit of my kindness.'\n\nThen she was gone, pulling the children with her into the flashing lights of the corridor outside. Mersadie looked at the gun for a second, swaying as the sense of danger and threat poured through her. Then she hissed a curse, bent down, picked up the gun and ran after the bodyguard.\n\nVek was already running as the assault pod detonated its second charge. The jolt ran through the deck. Shouts swallowed the alarms. Some of the bridge crew were reaching for sidearms they had drawn from the Antius' weapon locker. Vek had a lasgun. His hands fumbled on the arming stud as he went for the door off the bridge. Sweat poured from him. Breath sawed from his lungs. His bulk shook beneath his clothes. Someone might have called after him, but he did not hear or stop. All he could think of was the children. The children he had left two decks down. Close to the breach.\n\n'The Emperor protects.' That was what Sadia, his wife, had said when she had first introduced him to the Temple of the Saviour Emperor. 'He always has and He always will.'\n\nHe went down the spiral of stairs from the helm platform. He saw a guard, but the man turned and fled as Vek shouted at him.\n\n'But how can that be true when billions die?' he had asked. 'How can there be a war if He protects?'\n\nHis wife had shrugged.\n\n'If there were not the dark, and the chance of loss, what need would there be for Him to protect us?'\n\nAnother jolt shook the deck. The walls rang like a struck gong. He was panting, the sweat pouring into his eyes.\n\n'He protects, He protects...' he panted, and ech"}
{"text":"spiral of stairs from the helm platform. He saw a guard, but the man turned and fled as Vek shouted at him.\n\n'But how can that be true when billions die?' he had asked. 'How can there be a war if He protects?'\n\nHis wife had shrugged.\n\n'If there were not the dark, and the chance of loss, what need would there be for Him to protect us?'\n\nAnother jolt shook the deck. The walls rang like a struck gong. He was panting, the sweat pouring into his eyes.\n\n'He protects, He protects...' he panted, and echoed in his head. Please let Him protect them.\n\nHe reached the door of the bridge. There was shouting behind him, the machine burble of the tech-priest.\n\nThe doors blew apart in a spray of shrapnel. Vek was blasted backwards.\n\nSomething struck him in the gut. He tumbled. Air rushed from his lungs, and he was falling, dimly aware of his hands still clutching the lasgun. Another blow followed, to his ribs, as he collided with a support pillar and tumbled to the floor.\n\nThere were figures around him and above him. Armoured figures pouring through the opening. Red armour, domed helms with black slots for eyes, squat guns fuming static. Beams of light flashed out. Vek tried to rise, tried to move forwards, tried to bring the gun up...\n\n'You should trust more,' Sadia had said.\n\nNone of his limbs would move. Nothing felt like anything.\n\n'That is the root of faith - not just belief but trust...'\n\nThe armoured figures moved up, firing with every step, swift but steady. Vek thought that the screaming was fading, but the world was soft and fuzzed and leaking red at the edge of his sight.\n\n'There is a plan, and He watches all of us...'\n\n'Cleared,' came a machine-distorted voice from somewhere out of sight.\n\n'All you need to do is trust...'\n\nVek could see Noon and Mori's faces in his mind, more clear than the red shadows that moved close.\n\n'This one is alive,' said a voice from close by. Vek suddenly realised how quiet everything had become. The lights still blinked, but there were no alarms, no shouts...\n\n'Just trust?' he had asked. 'That does not seem like much.'\n\n'It is everything,' she had said. 'It is everything, my love.'\n\nHe was looking up into a black eye-slot set into a crimson-lacquered helm.\n\n'The Emperor...' he managed, hearing the gurgle and rasp in his own words. The barrel of the gun eclipsed the sight of the room. He could see the scorching inside its muzzle. 'The Emperor p-'\n\nMersadie saw the gunfire from around the corner. She slowed, crouching low against the wall. She gripped the gun tight. Rounds were whipping past, shot pellets sparking off pipes and grates. She was breathing hard. A bitter taste filled her mouth and nose. She looked back at the way she had come. Blast doors had sealed behind her. Could she open them? If she could, where would she go? What about Nilus? Where was the Navigator?\n\nA child's cry jerked her head up. Another blast of shot. Another cry. The thought of going back vanished. Mersadie snatched a look around the corner.\n\nThe next door was only twenty paces away. It was a small, ovoid opening. The two children crouched behind a projecting pipe halfway between Mersadie and the door. Mori hugged her brother close as a shot sparked off the wall above their heads. Aksinya was beside the open door, pistols in hand, shooting through the hatch as guns barked from the dark beyond. She crouched back as a fresh squall of shot ripped up the corridor. Mersadie caught her eye, and thought she saw a curse form on the bodyguard's lips. There was a deeper boom from beyond the open hatch and a bolt-round ripped down the corridor and exploded on the wall opposite the corner. Mersadie saw the gleam of red armour in the muzzle flash just before she ducked back. There were figures advancing on the other side of the hatch from Aksinya. The bodyguard and the children were trapped.\n\n'Mersadie!' shouted Aksinya.\n\n'I hear you,' she shouted back. Another bolt burned down the corridor. Mersadie heard the chattering bark of Aksinya's pistols.\n\n'Your shuttle,' shouted the bodyguard. 'It's two decks down. Key command override for the launch doors is \"Juno\".'\n\n'I understand,' Mersadie shouted back. And she did.\n\n'Get the children and then get to the shuttle.'\n\nMersadie nodded. All thoughts of Nilus, of greater purposes and of final ends had become very distant. A high ringing was rising in her head and ears. Her limbs were suddenly shaking. Aksinya held her gaze for a heartbeat more.\n\n'Get ready!' she called. Mersadie nodded again, her mouth and throat dry. 'Now!' shouted Aksinya and half rose, pistols blazing through the hatch. Mersadie started up. She made it two strides. A trooper in heavy red armour was already at the hatch. Whether Aksinya had not realised how close they were, or if they had simply waded through her fire to reach the door, Mersadie would never know. She ducked to the side of the passage as the gun in the crimson trooper's hands boomed. A round tore a hole in the floor where she had been.\n\nAksinya did not pause. Her first shot hit the crimson-clad trooper in the chest. The second hit the same mark a second later and punched through the red armour. The trooper tumbled back. Blood flared bright. Aksinya twitched aside as a beam of light stabbed through the doorway. Mersadie heard the air hiss as the beam pulsed. Aksinya was turning, spinning low with the momentum of her dodge to kick her heel into the crotch of the next figure through the door. Aksinya came up, a blade in hand. The crimson trooper brought its hand up to block the thrust, but the point of the blade slid up under the chin of its helm. Aksinya activated the blade's power field, and the trooper's skull exploded in its helm. The corpse began to fall. Aksinya let go of the dagger, yanked the pins from the grenades hanging from the trooper's bandolier, and kicked the corpse back through the doorway before it could hit the floor. She ducked to the side, scooping up the knife as she moved. Beams of light snapped through the door at her.\n\nMersadie met the bodyguard's gaze. There were scorch marks on Aksinya's clothes and a spreading dark red stain on her stomach. Rage burned in her eyes as they met Mersadie's.\n\n'Get the children to the shuttle!' she shouted.\n\nAn orange blast wave punched through the open door. Pieces of burning fabric and broken armour scattered across the decking. Smoke clotted the air. Mersadie yelled in pain as the pressure broke over her. Beams lit the smoke pall, strobing out of time with the red pulse of alert lumens. Aksinya snapped a shot off through the hatch. For a second, in the red flash of light, Mersadie saw pain contort the bodyguard's face.\n\n'Go!' Aksinya shouted, and fired around the door again.\n\nMersadie pushed up from the wall and ran to the two children huddled beside the pipe. Noon was weeping, wet tears pouring down his cheeks. Mori was wide-eyed and breathing hard as she looked up at Mersadie. The girl said something, but the ringing was still filling Mersadie's ears, blurring into her skull. She felt like she was going to vomit.\n\n'Come with me,' said Mersadie, reaching for Mori. The girl flinched back. 'We need to go, Mori.' The girl hesitated, then nodded and was up, grabbing hold of Mersadie's hand and pulling her brother up with the other. Aksinya fired through the door as Mersadie and the children ran for the turn in the passage, back the way Mersadie had come. They came round the corner. Behind them, energy beams snapped through the air. Mersadie could see the blast door at the end of the passage. Thirty paces. Thirty paces and then...\n\nThe lights on the distant door's lock blinked to green. Mersadie's stride faltered. The blast door began to open, pulling back into the passage walls. She heard a snarl of pain from back where Aksinya was crouched beside the other door out of the corridor. Energy beams were smacking the passage walls. Mori was still running forwards, her hand now pulling on Mersadie's. There were figures on the other side of the door ahead, their gloss armour red.\n\nMersadie yanked back on Mori's hand as the first crimson-armoured trooper stepped into sight, gun rising. Mori saw, her mouth opening wide to scream. The trooper fired as Mersadie pulled them down behind a wall bracing. Hard shot rang off the walls and floor. More troopers poured into the passage from the other end. From their only way out.\n\nMersadie could see back to where Aksinya now sat on the floor beside the hatch. The dark stains had spread across the bodyguard's torso and a wet chunk was missing from her right upper thigh. She was reloading her pistol, face set and hard. Mersadie felt the weight of the pistol in her own hand, and fired two shots off. The snap of recoil jerked the shots high. The world was roaring with gunfire, closing in, pressing closed like a vice. Mori was shaking, her brother howling.\n\nAnd in her mind, all she could think of was the moon on water, of sharp teeth and a pair of yellow eyes. Words hissed in a dream blew into her thoughts.\n\nWe are coming for you... We know... We are here for you...\n\nPanic punched through her, flooding her with adrenaline. She needed to run. She needed to get away.\n\nShe half rose. Mori yanked her back.\n\n'What are you doing?' shouted the girl.\n\nMersadie tried to shake her off. She needed to run, the instinct so pure and raw that it left her other thoughts shouting in its wake.\n\n'They will try to stop you,' said Keeler's face in the dream. 'Old friends and enemies alike. They will come for you.'\n\nShe tried to rise from the cover of the support pillar again.\n\nA pair of crimson troopers were four paces away, guns levelled, fingers on triggers. Time became an instant caught between drawn breaths. Mersadie could see it all.\n\nThe armoured soldiers advancing... The beams and shot-rounds threading the gloom... The blur of Aksinya as she tried to rise and face the figures coming through the other hatch...\n\nAnd then she saw the shadow. It was standing in the open blast doors that"}
{"text":" come for you.'\n\nShe tried to rise from the cover of the support pillar again.\n\nA pair of crimson troopers were four paces away, guns levelled, fingers on triggers. Time became an instant caught between drawn breaths. Mersadie could see it all.\n\nThe armoured soldiers advancing... The beams and shot-rounds threading the gloom... The blur of Aksinya as she tried to rise and face the figures coming through the other hatch...\n\nAnd then she saw the shadow. It was standing in the open blast doors that the second squad of troopers had just poured through. It was still. Upright. A freeze-frame on a pict-stream.\n\nThe ringing in her head was building, and all she could think of was the message she carried in her memory, and the smell of wet fur and blood and frost.\n\nThe troopers were still advancing, their fingers squeezing back on triggers as the passing instants blinked in time with the alert lights.\n\nRed, black...\n\nRed, black...\n\nRed, black...\n\nRed.\n\nThe shadow was behind them.\n\nBlack.\n\nAnd now the shadow was next to them, and Mersadie could hear the siren-scream in her head beating with the blink of seconds.\n\nRed.\n\nBlood sprayed out. The troopers were turning, and the shadow was amongst them, moving in jerks like a broken pict-feed.\n\nBlack.\n\nAksinya was still on the floor by the hatch, her pistol frozen in her hand. There was red frost climbing the walls. Bodies flying back, broken, pulped.\n\nRed.\n\nThe shadow was standing still now, washed in gore, its head turning to Mersadie, and she could see the face within shadow, eyes stained red in the black-veined skull of Sub-mistress Koln.\n\n'We are here for you,' said the thing and it reached out fingers that stretched into shadows through the air, and all Mersadie could think of was running in dreams through dark woods and the howls rising behind her. 'We are the-'\n\nThe las-blast ripped the side of Koln's skull off. The shadow-wrapped body jerked back. Mersadie fired again, and again, stepping forwards as the thing staggered and the blasts ripped through it. It juddered, flesh and blood shuddering as it fell.\n\nShe stood over it, still, panting, the charge pack depletion light blinking red on the pistol in her hand. The only sound was the patter of blood falling to the deck from the ceiling above.\n\n∞\n\nSnow boils from the black sky as the old man begins to climb the mountain. Ice-caked fur and black rags wrap his body. The wind strikes him, and he staggers, half falling. His hands plunge into the snow.\n\nCold.\n\nBurning cold.\n\nBeyond fire, beyond water.\n\nHe gasps, and for a moment the snow is not snow, but every moment of pain ever suffered: the wail of a mother beside a small bundle, the last thought of a man dying before his time, the touch of a knife. Cold, sharp, burning...\n\nHe pushes himself up.\n\nAt his back he hears the cry of wolves. He stops, turns. The light of the burning torch in his hand ripples out in the gusting wind. His eyes catch the light of the fire as he looks back down the slope at the forest. The trees have grown upwards, bare branches reaching to catch the wind. Eyes look back at him, red, green and fever-yellow. In the distance, still visible above and beyond the tops of the trees, he can see the lights of the tower he has left to make this journey. The wind gusts and the wolves come with it, forming from darkness and frost as they leap. He swings the torch. The wolves' jaws are wide, broken fangs in rotten gums. Molten brass scatters from iron teeth, blue fire from black glass claws. The torch strikes the first wolf-\n\nFlash of lightning.\n\nShattered night.\n\nBurning snow.\n\nThe wolves fall back, cries shaking gales of snow from the sky.\n\nThe old man runs up the side of the mountain, legs sinking into the drifts, hands grasping at ice-skinned rock. The howls rise again. The opening to the cave is so close, just there, between the stones. Another step, another push of will and he will reach its sanctuary. Claws reach for him. He can feel their breath at his back. He turns, and throws the burning torch high. A jagged pillar of lightning catches it and strikes down. White light drowns the mountainside. The shadows of wolves melt into the ground but more are already coming. He leaps for the stone doorway into the mountain, and...\n\nQuiet. The smell of stone and earth. Stillness.\n\nThe cave stretches down in front of him. Rough steps have been hacked into the floor. Seams of crystal glitter in raw stone walls. The sound of water dripping onto rock touches his ears. A glow of fire seeps up the steps as he descends. A square door waits at the bottom. He pauses on the threshold, then steps through.\n\nThe cave is small but has been enlarged, first with stone axes, and then with tools of bronze and iron. The light comes from burning wicks set in a bowl of clear oil. Stone benches line the walls either side of the door. The seats are smooth, worn by time and those who have come here. Channels run down the floor from where a lump of raw crystal rises. Symbols crawl over the crystal: a half-man half-equine, water falling from a cup, a figure with the head of a bull.\n\nThe man in black rags and fur stops.\n\nAnother man, swathed in golden robes, sits on one of the benches. He holds a staff in his hand, and a folded plait of laurel leaves and silver thread sits on his head. He looks young.\n\nThe two look at each other for a long moment. Then the old man in the frost-covered fur shakes himself, and pulls the cloak from his back. The black tunic beneath is tattered and stained by sweat. The muscles on his arms are withered cords, his shoulders hunched by age, his scalp bare of hair and liver-spotted. Golden rings gleam on his fingers: a ram's head, a rayed sun, a grey opal.\n\n'Hello, old friend,' says the young man in gold.\n\nThe old man in black rags nods, and comes forwards. For a second his step falters. His eyes shut with pain. The rock of the cave creaks. A spill of dust falls from the ceiling. The man in gold looks up, and then back at the man in black as he lowers himself onto the bench opposite.\n\n'Here,' says the young man, holding out a wooden bowl. 'Bread and salt and meat.'\n\nThe old man takes the bowl with a nod and begins to eat. The man in gold lifts his own bowl, and takes small mouthfuls, never taking his eyes from his companion.\n\n'I am sorry to call you here,' says the man in gold when there are only crumbs in the old man's bowl, 'but we need to speak.' The man in black wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. His eyes are black depths in the weathered skin of his face. 'Things are pressing in and in,' continues the young man. 'So far the attack has been as we would expect. But there is something else, something that is outside of that...'\n\nThe man in gold begins to lay cards down on the stone bench between the bowls. The cards are old and the images on them faded: a figure in a dark cloak, its face turned away, climbing towards a high tower; a wolf-headed man with a bundle of swords hidden beneath a cloak; a wheel of stars turning around a darkening moon... Card after card, the pattern growing with each one placed.\n\n'You see,' says the man in gold. 'It changes, but the core of a pattern is always there, a growing resonance in the warp, like notes rising and harmonising, or pieces being placed on a board, or a weapon being assembled bit by bit... I can't see what it is, only its shadow, but it is there. Behind the night and the bloodshed, it is there.' The man in black is still looking down at the cards. 'There are other things, too. Factors that are out of place. The timing of the assault, for instance. It began at midwinter, in the pit of the cosmic nadir. And the order of things... The position of the planets is particular at this moment. It is a rare conjunction that has not occurred since... well, since before the last darkness. We have always presumed that the timing of the assault is driven by haste, but what if it is something else? What if it is something m-'\n\n'Yes,' says the man in black. He stands. For a second the light of the oil flames cast his shadow on the wall, and for an eye-blink it is not the shadow of an old man, but of a figure on a throne, his hands gripping its arms, his head held straight. 'It is there, under the surface, beyond the edge of night. I can... feel it growing.'\n\n'What is it?' asks the young man. 'What are they doing?'\n\nThe man in black is still for a second, his eyes distant. It has cost him much to send part of himself here, to this meeting of minds in one of the last sanctuaries that remain. Far off, and only a thought away, is the crushing dark, held back moment to moment, a flood tide halted on the shore's edge by will alone.\n\n'I cannot see,' says the Emperor, furs shifting over His aged frame. 'Not within, nor beyond the edge of Night. The present is darkness and the future a horizon. There is only the struggle.'\n\nMalcador, young and clad in gold, is still for a moment and then nods once, his face a mask that cannot hide his worry.\n\n'The others know,' says Malcador at last. 'The Khan, the Angel, the commanders... Rogal, in particular. The actions of the enemy don't add up, and they see that there is a gap, a shadow in their understanding.'\n\n'That is what they are there to do,' says the Emperor, picking up the furs from which the ice and frost has barely thawed. 'To be tooth and claw, to fight and not to yield. The rest is yours to mind - to shield them so that they can be what they need to be.'\n\nThe Emperors turns for the door.\n\n'Can we still win this?' asks Malcador.\n\n'That is not the question you are really asking,' says the Emperor, turning His head but still facing away.\n\nMalcador gives a sad smile, and nods to concede the point.\n\n'Farewell,' says the Emperor, pulling on His cloak of fur, and turning for the small door out into the night and winter.\n\nMalcador stays where he is, looking at the black space beyond the crude arch of stone. After a moment that in reality lasts no more than the span of a thought, he look"}
{"text":"\n'Can we still win this?' asks Malcador.\n\n'That is not the question you are really asking,' says the Emperor, turning His head but still facing away.\n\nMalcador gives a sad smile, and nods to concede the point.\n\n'Farewell,' says the Emperor, pulling on His cloak of fur, and turning for the small door out into the night and winter.\n\nMalcador stays where he is, looking at the black space beyond the crude arch of stone. After a moment that in reality lasts no more than the span of a thought, he looks back at the pattern of cards laid out on the stone bench beside him. Then he reaches down and picks up the image of the high tower shattering beneath a thunderbolt.\n\n'Can we survive this? Can anything?' he asks, and closes his eyes.\n\nThe idea and the image of the cave folds out of being, and the howling dark rushes in to claim the place it left.\n\nSolatarium\n\nI am here\n\nBattlefield of time\n\nBattle-barge Ankhtowe, Supra-Solar Gulf\n\nAhzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons Legion, watched as blood formed in the crystal sphere. Crimson puffed into being within its polished depths, swirled and then ran to the edge of the orb. Cold light gathered around it, and Ahriman heard the melody in his mind change as notes and harmonies shifted. He watched the orb for another second as it spun on through the space above him.\n\nDoes that fall within the necessary conjunction? Ahriman spoke in thought.\n\nIt does, croaked Menkaura's thought-reply. Ahriman could feel fatigue bleeding out of the sending. He understood why. To be in this chamber was to feel and hear the flow of the immaterium without break or moderation. It was a solatarium like those once used by long-dead scholars to predict the movements of the heavenly bodies across Terra's skies. In those devices, stone and glass spheres had turned around a crystal simulacrum of the sun. In this chamber the same basic principle applied, but there the similarity ended. Just as the telescopes of ancient astronomers concentrated the light of the heavens, so did this chamber draw the infinite resonance of the warp down to the point where its patterns were visible.\n\nA constellation of spheres and discs turned in the space above him, its outer elements spinning wide enough to almost touch the curved walls. The whole chamber was a sphere itself, eighty-one cubits in diameter, cut by telekinesis from a single block of jade. No living hand had ever touched its surface, or polluted it with memory. The spheres and coins of the solatarium at its centre moved on psychic currents. Most represented the physical Solar System, but others, principles no less real but ultimately intangible, spun beside them: Strength Ascendant, the Justice of Winter, the Crow's Flight. The smaller spheres and discs were made of rock, metal and bone taken from the planets, moons and void bodies that lay within the light of Sol. Each planet was a sphere of crystal formed in the warp by will alone and brought into reality by sacrifice. When the final component had been set in place, the resonance had created a delicate shriek that had killed the last of the eighty-one psychic craftsmen who had made it. Since then, the sound of its turning had ached through Ahriman's mind even when he was not in the chamber. It had been a vile price to pay, but there would be worse yet. Of that he was certain.\n\nAhriman and Ignis floated through the arrangement on silver discs. Both of them would leave as soon as this reading was complete. Out beyond its curved walls, the Ankhtowe plunged on towards its goal, moved by the half-lost science of machines. But in here, as the Sea of Souls fled past, they were standing still, looking out upon a growing hurricane. Only Menkaura would remain in the solatarium throughout the ritual. The War-Augur sat on his own disc, which hung upside down, relative to Ahriman, next to the golden sphere of the sun. Tarnish had spread across the silver of the disc, and Menkaura looked ragged and half-dead. The lacquer had peeled from his armour, and rust scabbed its plates. His head was bare, and the empty sockets of his eyes glowed with ghost-light and wept pus.\n\nThe sound of a diamond quill tip scratching on glass broke the quiet. Ahriman looked over to where Ignis was marking a line of calculations on a sheet of obsidian. The Master of the Order of Ruin looked up, the geometric tattoos on his face sliding into a new pattern. Ahriman sent a whisper of query by thought. In the solatarium chamber every thought was a shout, every sending a scream.\n\nThe progress overall is within the calculations supplied by the primarch of the Fourth and his warsmiths, replied Ignis. There are errors in the specifics that will need to be compensated for in the numeration of the final formulation.\n\nThat is what happens when plans touch reality, sent Ahriman. Things fall apart.\n\nIgnis blinked, the patterns reforming again on his face as he considered the statement.\n\nIn some cases, he replied, and then went back to his calculations and the diamond quill's scratching whine. Ahriman watched Ignis for a second and then let his sight move back to the spheres. His eyes moved between them, noting the path and details of each. Emotions and visions from across the gulf of space yanked at his thoughts as he did so.\n\nThe face of a human pressed into a crawlspace, trying to make themselves small as giants in midnight-blue armour stalked past, their vox-speakers screaming the cries of those who had already been found; a powerless ship drifting through the dark, those within clinging to their last, shallow breaths as the air ran out; a warship tumbling over and over, blazing like a torch as its death fires fed on the fuel within its drives-\n\nAhriman cut the visions away with a pulse of will and steadied his mind in the thought patterns of the ninth enumeration. He felt a breath briefly frost the inside of his helm. To observe the solatarium was not just to see it with your eyes, but to be part of it - to feel it turning as it tried to pull you into its whirlpool embrace.\n\nYou are discomforted, stated Ignis.\n\nAhriman did not answer, but looked at Menkaura and opened his thoughts to send them.\n\nIt can still be undone, said Menkaura, sending the answer to the question Ahriman was about to ask. The balance of resonances in the arrangement is such that... it is not certain. Everything is blindness and dust on the wind...\n\nAhriman felt another question rise in his mind and then let it fall. Ever since Menkaura had taken on the penance of watching the Configuration, his thoughts and words had strayed into prophecy, as though his mind and will were kites dragged by storm winds into distant lands of perception. For all his skill of foresight and mastery of the occult, Ahriman found that he was disturbed by what was happening to his brother.\n\nCome, he sent to Ignis, and turned his silver disc with a flick of will. It floated down to the lone opening cut in the chamber wall. His eyes flashed across a blue-and-white-spun sphere as he turned, and he-\n\nBlue and white stones in his hand, rounded by water, their faces dancing with patterns of herons and serpents...\n\nThe fire and blood light of the sun setting through Terra's haze of pollution, the smell of the dust and the static tang of a building storm...\n\nThe clack as Ormuzd placed three stones into the recesses of the old, wooden board and smiled up at him...\n\n'What is it, brother? Can't think what move to make?' asked his twin.\n\nAhriman pulled his senses back and the vision drained from his sight. Menkaura was looking down at him from the other side of the turning orbs and discs. The eyeless seer had his head cocked to the side, and Ahriman could feel the mind behind the empty sockets regarding him.\n\nIt is a cruel thing to return home and find it changed, but not as changed as we are. Menkaura's words lingered as an echo in Ahriman's skull as he let his disc sink through the opening in the chamber wall.\n\nAhriman pulled the helm from his head as soon as he was outside the solatarium. Around him, the Ankhtowe hummed with the familiar sounds of a ship under power: the buzz of power conduits, and the rumble of distant engines. It felt reassuringly real. He took a breath and reached out with his mind, skimming over the thoughts of his brothers and crew. All was well. Their small fleet was still on course and unseen. They had left the great flock of Abaddon's armada and the Mechanicum fleet far behind. Now they were few again, all but alone in the night, heading for a distant speck of light. He sent a brief thought to touch the psychic bonds between him and the Word Bearers that rode at their sides. He did not linger over the contact, and he came away with the taste of ashes on his tongue.\n\nHe shivered, and lowered his thoughts into the lesser enumerations.\n\n'You do not... like this,' said Ignis from behind him. Somehow his thoughts had been disturbed enough that he had not noticed his Legion brother at his shoulder.\n\n'No,' replied Ahriman, still tasting ashes in his mouth as he spoke. 'No, I do not like it.'\n\n'I know,' said Ignis, looking at him with an utterly unchanged expression. 'I have already made and stated that observation.'\n\nAhriman turned away.\n\n'The question that attends the observation is why you perceive our circumstances as you do?' asked Ignis.\n\nAhriman let out a breath and looked back at the Master of the Order of Ruin.\n\n'I do not like what we are doing for every reason,' he said. 'For every reason, brother.'\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf\n\nDoor slamming open.\n\nThere was a metallic taste in Mersadie's mouth.\n\nHeavy metal-on-metal footsteps.\n\nVengeful Spirit...\n\nShe was on the Vengeful Spirit. There were... there were bodies heaped on the deck. Limbs tangled. Flesh ripped. Blood pooling. Something rose from the gore. Slicked fur. Red muzzle. Dripping-fang grin.\n\n'Mersadie...'\n\nShe knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her.\n\n'Mersadie, wake up...'\n\nA"}
{"text":"brother.'\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf\n\nDoor slamming open.\n\nThere was a metallic taste in Mersadie's mouth.\n\nHeavy metal-on-metal footsteps.\n\nVengeful Spirit...\n\nShe was on the Vengeful Spirit. There were... there were bodies heaped on the deck. Limbs tangled. Flesh ripped. Blood pooling. Something rose from the gore. Slicked fur. Red muzzle. Dripping-fang grin.\n\n'Mersadie...'\n\nShe knew it was a Space Marine even before the impossibly huge shadow fell over her.\n\n'Mersadie, wake up...'\n\nA moon high in the winter sky. Its face a curve of silver, now a dividing line of light and dark.\n\n'Mersadie, wake up! Wake up now!'\n\nShe turned to see a shadow form behind her.\n\nThe Warmaster's equerry...\n\nMaloghurst was known as 'the Twisted', as much for his labyrinthine mind as the horrible injuries that had broken his body and left him grotesquely malformed.\n\n'Loken,' he said, 'these are civilians.'\n\n'I can vouch for them,' said Loken.\n\nMaloghurst turned his eyes to her. A hand fell on her shoulder.\n\n'Wake up now!'\n\nThe hand on her shoulder shook her.\n\nShe opened her eyes.\n\nThe smell of blood and split organs filled her mouth and nose. Her head arched up and she vomited. Red light was flicking through the passage.\n\nOn. Off.\n\nOn. Off.\n\nFor a moment the walls and decking swam and warped.\n\nVengeful Spirit... She was on the...\n\nShe was on the Antius.\n\n'Mersadie.' She looked up. Nilus was crouching beside her, his long fingers just withdrawing from where they had shaken her shoulder. The Navigator's skin was white, the shadows soaking up the red blinking light. His eyes were wide. He looked as though he was about to be sick himself. Or about to run.\n\n'Where...' she began, but then she remembered Koln, saw the flicker-skip of movement, the bodies of the crimson troopers torn to shreds, and then the flare and kick of the pistol and Koln's head coming apart. No, that was the dream... the dream...\n\nShe twisted, eyes going to the gore on the walls and floor, the heaps of meat and cloth, the gun lying next to her on the deck. Fresh bile surged up her throat, and splattered the deck. Nilus flinched back.\n\n'Where are the children?' she gasped, pushing herself up.\n\nNilus jerked his head to where two small shapes lay slumped against the wall. Further down the corridor Aksinya lay beside the open door hatch. Her weapons were still in her hands beside her. Blood had soaked her clothes black. A last additional gunshot wound had ripped a hole in her neck. Her eyes were open, but they would see nothing any more.\n\nMersadie lunged for the children, found warmth in their hands.\n\n'Catatonic,' said Nilus. 'Whatever happened here...'\n\nBut Mersadie was shaking the girl and boy, not listening to the Navigator.\n\n'Mori, Noon! Listen to me! You have to wake up!'\n\n'We have to get to the shuttle,' said Nilus, his voice rising from cold to shrill. 'I didn't see anyone alive coming here and the engines are still on. I think all the crew are dead. We are rudderless...'\n\n'We're not going to the shuttle.'\n\n'If they killed the crew then this is a tomb.'\n\n'No!' Mersadie snarled. Her head snapped up to look at the Navigator. He took a step back. 'There are hundreds of people on this ship, and I am not leaving them to die while I run.'\n\n'That did not stop you before.'\n\n'It does now.' She looked down at the children. 'And in all those people there might be some who might be able to get us to safety.'\n\n'You are serious, aren't you?'\n\nShe nodded. 'Go if you want.'\n\nNilus swore, looked around, and then swore again.\n\n'I'll go to the bridge,' he said. 'I know something about ships.'\n\nMersadie heard him move away down the corridor. She bent over the still girl.\n\n'Mori...' she said, and shook her. The girl's head twitched. 'Mori!' The girl's eyes flickered and opened and her shriek split the air. 'Mori, look at me! Look at me!' Mersadie held tight to the girl's hands. Mori's eyes steadied. She was breathing hard, face flecked with drying red. 'Mori, I need you to listen to me. We are going to be fine, but your brother needs you. He needs you to help him stay safe. You can help him, can't you.'\n\nThe girl nodded once and then again, faster, her eyes twitching but not moving from Mersadie's.\n\n'Noon,' she whispered. 'Noon... Is he?'\n\n'He is asleep, just like you were. He will wake up, but we need to get out of here.'\n\n'Father...?'\n\nMersadie blinked. She thought of what Nilus had said about the crew being dead, about the crimson troopers, about the shadow creature that had been Sub-mistress Koln.\n\nDaemon... an old word but one that was true nonetheless.\n\n'Your father would want you safe,' said Mersadie, 'so I am going to make sure you are.'\n\nMori nodded.\n\n'All right,' said Mersadie. 'I need you to stand up and keep hold of your brother's hand.'\n\nMersadie lifted the boy, his sister gripping his dangling hand. He was heavy, and her muscles ached as she took the first step towards the open door hatch. Mori's eyes found the still shape of Aksinya, and she heard the girl draw breath to cry. Thick fluid was still dripping from the ceiling.\n\n'Look at your brother,' said Mersadie. 'That's it, look at your brother. Keep walking.'\n\nThey reached the hatch.\n\nDown, thought Mersadie. They needed to go down to the cargo decks. She thought she could remember the route from when Aksinya had taken her to see the refugees. The image of angry eyes in cold faces rose from out of memory. She paused halfway through the door hatch.\n\n'Hold your brother,' she said to Mori. The girl took the boy, hugging him. Mersadie stepped back through the door, bent down and took the pistol from out of Aksinya's hand, and the fresh clips from the bandolier beneath the bodyguard's cloak. She tried not to look at the woman's face.\n\n'What are you doing?' asked Mori.\n\n'Making sure I don't fail her,' said Mersadie. She tucked the pistol and ammo under her clothes, stepped back through the door and took the still unwaking boy from Mori. 'Remember, keep hold of his hand.'\n\nThe Phalanx, Terran high orbit\n\nBrother Massak, former Librarian of the Imperial Fists Legion, knew he was dreaming. He had spent the last seven years in the same chamber he knelt in now. He and his three brothers had seen almost no one else in that time. Their armour, their weapons and the silence of their minds were their only concern. Time had become divisions of equipment maintenance, combat practice and meditation, repeated over and over again.\n\nThe clash of axe and sword, the circle of lapping powder over yellow-and-blue ceramite, the slow exchange of breath...\n\nOn and on.\n\nThis was their duty now: to wait for a day that might never come, and to keep their minds locked from the powers that had been their craft of war.\n\nIn other Legions, the Emperor's ban on the use of psykers had seen Librarians returned to other duties, trusted to abstain from using their powers. But that was in other Legions. The VII did not adhere to rules in spirit alone. So Massak and his brothers had remained in this chamber on the Phalanx, wrapped in silence within and without.\n\nBut still he dreamed.\n\nThey always came back, sliding into his moments of rest. And recently, the dream images had shaken his meditation even when he was awake.\n\nHe walked through caves of stone and through the darkness of forests he had never seen. Stars wheeled and turned. He saw the faces of creatures that were neither human nor beast but both. He saw a woman walking through the passages of a ship he did not recognise. He saw a door open...\n\nHis eyes opened. He was sweating, moisture beading his skin beneath his robe. His brothers' eyes opened a second later, looking at him from across the meditation circle. Cadus, the youngest and lowest in rank, was swaying where he knelt. His left pupil was grossly dilated, the right a pinprick.\n\n'The tides of the warp... are... growing stronger...' said Cadus.\n\n'Turn your minds inwards, my brothers,' said Massak. 'What passes beyond is not our concern. Our oaths are to endure and that is what we shall do.'\n\n'Do you feel that?' said Sollon. The venerable Codicier moved his hand to the deck beside him. 'The Phalanx is moving.'\n\nMassak closed his eyes.\n\n'Return to the centre, brothers. Our eyes gaze inwards. Our thoughts are the foundations of our beings. Our duty the life we lead...'\n\nSilence fell again, and Massak felt the patterns of meditative quieting spiral his awareness away, down and down to stillness. He would wait. But part of him - a part that had waited and listened while the storm rose in the spirit realm - knew that the dreams would come again.\n\nBattle-barge Monarch of Fire, Uranus high orbit\n\nThe Monarch of Fire fired even as it burned. A fifty-metre-wide wound gleamed with the light of internal explosions from where a kinetic shot had punched through its skin. The shot had missed vital systems by a few metres, but left flames drawing through its decks.\n\nLines of plasma poured from its spine and port batteries. A scythe of light cut across the face of the closing Iron Warriors battleships. There were twelve of them, main force class all, skinned by metal and wrapped by dozens of void shields. Each of them could weather a point-blank broadside from a ship that was its equal. But the Monarch of Fire was not their equal. She was an empress of destruction and they mere lords.\n\nThe void shields on five of the Iron Warriors ships vanished, collapsing one after another, flashing as they overloaded. Plasma flooded across their hulls. Plasteel and stone flashed to gas, melted, scattered into the dark. White vapour fumed from the Monarch of Fire as coolant breathed through its guns and hull. Its remaining opponents did not hesitate. Beams of turbo laser fire raked its shields as they flickered.\n\nOn the Monarch of Fire's bridge, Lord Castellan Halbract felt the ship judder as it drew breath to bellow again. Lights dimmed. The surge of vox-traffic chopped and quieted. Tactical displays faded to hololithic snow. A moment of quiet and stillness fell as t"}
{"text":"ed to gas, melted, scattered into the dark. White vapour fumed from the Monarch of Fire as coolant breathed through its guns and hull. Its remaining opponents did not hesitate. Beams of turbo laser fire raked its shields as they flickered.\n\nOn the Monarch of Fire's bridge, Lord Castellan Halbract felt the ship judder as it drew breath to bellow again. Lights dimmed. The surge of vox-traffic chopped and quieted. Tactical displays faded to hololithic snow. A moment of quiet and stillness fell as the great vessel inhaled power from its systems to fire upon its foes.\n\nThey had pulled back to the volume around Oberon. Ships and supplies still streamed from the last moon in loyalist hands. It would not remain that way for long. A cascade of explosions had stripped it of most of its defences, but even if they had still been in place, its fate was sealed. The Iron Warriors had moved through the orbits of Uranus bit by bit, taking what they could and destroying what they could not. Where they met resistance they applied more force, brought more ships from the Elysian Gate, and replaced the ships and soldiers that fell with more.\n\nAt the star fort Phuran, unable to break its void shields, and with troops prevented from advancing beyond their beachheads, they had deployed two vast ships to overwhelm the defences. The pair had lost their names and become codes in the data-looms of the IV Legion: I-D-I and I-V-II. Both ships had been grain haulers taken from the Imperial supply lines. Their cargo gone to feed the forges supplying the Warmaster's armies, their guts became city-sized barracks for tens of thousands of gang fighters harvested from the worlds around Ullanor. Kalma soporifics had been pumped through their holds to subdue the human cargo for transit. As they closed with the Phuran, the gas mix changed and frenzon and slaught fogged their holds. The tens of thousands of gangers began to wake, and kill each other.\n\nHalbract's ships had tried to cripple the two behemoths before they reached the star fort, but Iron Warriors warships cut them off. By the time the pair had reached the Phuran, they had lost ten thousand of their human cargo. More than enough remained. I-D-I and I-V-II docked at the Iron Warriors' beachhead points, and opened their internal doors. Passages designed to drain billions of tonnes of grain now became exits for over a hundred thousand drug-fuelled killers. The troops defending the star fort held for six hours. After it was done, the Iron Warriors opened the station to the void and let the vacuum deal with the gangers.\n\nOn and on, the brutal pragmatism of Perturabo had pushed the defenders back and back again. Now the remainder of the Second Sphere fleet was battered and wounded, circling the moon of Oberon. A hundred warships from three times that number, facing twenty times that strength - those were odds that made for stories to echo through the ages. But this would be no last stand, no final rest in death found in fire. The burning of Pluto's moons was a ploy that could only be used once. Halbract had seen the enemy forces alter their tactics. There were no hidden charges or annihilating data-jinns laid before the Elysian Gate, but Perturabo did not know that.\n\nMachine adepts scoured the moons and stations the traitors had already taken. Already careful, the enemy became even more cautious. Large ship strengths were held back from recently taken ground. Anything that held no worth was destroyed by distant bombardment. It slowed them, and in that it proved as effective a weapon as a fresh battlefleet. In the buzzing half-silence as the Monarch of Fire passed through its power cycle, Halbract reflected that, measured on the axis of time, this battle had gone in their favour. It was just on every other count that it tasted bitter on his tongue.\n\n'Begin to divert power to engines and shields,' he said softly. 'Give us one more cycle of the guns. Send the withdrawal signal to all other ships.'\n\nThe command crew answered with silent action. They all knew this moment was coming. They could not remain where they were. Ships closed on them from every plane of orbit, and soon the path out to the sunward gulf would close. But they would not fall back to the long night without claiming a final price from the traitors.\n\nPower blinked back through the bridge. Holo-displays snapped into clarity. The red gleams of enemy craft lit across targeting consoles.\n\n'Fire,' said Halbract, and the Monarch of Fire roared his word into the dark. Three warships died in a stuttering blink of destruction. Plasma bored through unshielded hulls. Reactors and munitions detonated in their bellies. They burst, showering brilliant light and gas out and out.\n\nThe lights on the Monarch of Fire dimmed, but deep in her hull, power had already been syphoned to her engines. She pushed loose of Oberon's orbit. The rest of her fleet was already falling into formation, ships breaking off and turning their prows towards the distant light of the sun. Signals reached after them from Oberon, pleading and railing and cursing, carrying the rage of people who knew that their fate was sealed. Halbract listened to them all, hearing the bitter words as the Monarch of Fire made for the cold depths. As predicted, the enemy did not chase them. They were cautious, and besides, they had won.\n\nThe signals from Oberon stopped as they reached the edge of deep sensor range. Halbract cut the link as the last whisper became static.\n\n'Signal Terra,' he said, taking the helmet off his head. 'Uranus belongs to the enemy.'\n\nThe officers around him bowed their heads at the words.\n\n'We are beyond the enemy's likely interception range,' said the senior tech-priest overseeing the ship's signal and auspex systems. 'Do you wish to send the rendezvous codes, lord castellan?'\n\nHalbract nodded, his eyes on the damage and casualty reports from the rest of his fleet. It had taken Dorn's personal word to convince him of this part of the strategy. It went against almost every instinct. Faced with an enemy, no matter how strong or numerous, one advanced, or stood and trusted to the strength of shield and sword and bolter. You did not yield ground that the enemy desired.\n\nBut that was what they were doing now, and what they had planned to do since before the ships of the traitors had breached the gates.\n\n'Now, in this moment, walls and strongholds are not our battlefield,' Rogal Dorn had said, his voice strong even through the distortion-laced signal from Terra. 'Our battlefield is time, and the battles we fight are to deny that to the enemy. They thirst for time, need it and cannot waste a second of it. And so we must deny it to them. Everything must be measured against that. We cannot stop them, my son, but we can make them bleed in time and strength before they reach the walls of the Palace. That is worth more than any fortress or line that is not on the soil of Terra.'\n\n'I will do what is needed,' Halbract had replied and sent three hundred ships from the defence of Uranus into the night to wait.\n\nHe had bowed his head then, and he did so again now...\n\nOver three hundred ships hanging in the lightless gulf between Uranus and the core of the system... Over three hundred guns that had not spoken to hold back the enemy from the Phuran, or Cordelia, or Oberon, or...\n\nWould it have made a difference? Would it make a difference now? To an enemy not expecting a fresh and undamaged force waiting for it as it leaped deeper into the system... It might. It had to.\n\n'Send the codes,' he said, raising his head. 'Bring us on course to meet the rest of the fleet.'\n\nCalculations and errors\n\nCome with me\n\nDreams\n\nBhab Bastion, The Imperial Palace, Terra\n\n'They have failed,' said Jaghatai Khan. 'Horus has failed.'\n\nThe annex of the Grand Borealis Strategium was quiet. Four humans, three primarchs and one near-human stood in silence, looking at the Praetorian of Terra through the veil of holo-light. A single tactical projection turned at the centre of the room, its surface flashing as the data cycled across its sphere. Malcador the Regent stood between Sanguinius and the Khan; beside them were Magos-Emissary Kazzim-Aleph-1 and High Primary Solar General Niborran. Su-Kassen stood to Dorn's right, and the ghost-like presence of Senior Astropath Armina Fel filled the space to his left.\n\nNone of them spoke after the Khan's pronouncement. It was undoubtedly correct, but...\n\nSu-Kassen watched as Kazzim-Aleph-1 extended a chromed digit and stopped the projection, as though halting the spin of a child's top.\n\n'The outer reaches are the enemy's,' said the magos-emissary. 'They advance into the inner system. Mars, sacred cradle of the machine, will be next. If disciples of the false Mechanicum rise from their pit, the Fourth Sphere fleet will be unable to drive them back. I estimate its primary strength will erode in main force effectiveness at a rate of three-point-six-one-two per cent per hour. That cannot be sustained. The Lost Forges will fall to the invaders.'\n\n'But they will be left with almost no forces that can be brought to bear here on the Throneworld or in orbit,' said Niborran. The old general's silver augmetic eyes did not seem to flinch from the display. The death rubies bonded to his right socket gleamed against the darkness of his skin as he gave a single nod. 'Even if they do, it will not be in time. My lord Jaghatai is correct, the position is clear - they have failed. Their forces are too few, arriving too late and in parts. We can meet them, hold them and break them one after another. They will still be clawing at the walls when Lord Guilliman arrives.'\n\n'But what of sacred Mars?' hissed Kazzim-Aleph-1. Su-Kassen thought he had never sounded so human. 'Liberation was promised. Promised and encoded with oaths. This...'\n\n'Liberation requires victory,' snarled Niborran. 'And that requires a price to be paid now, by Mars too, just as it was by Pluto, by Uranus.'\n\nKazzim-Aleph-1 clic"}
{"text":"few, arriving too late and in parts. We can meet them, hold them and break them one after another. They will still be clawing at the walls when Lord Guilliman arrives.'\n\n'But what of sacred Mars?' hissed Kazzim-Aleph-1. Su-Kassen thought he had never sounded so human. 'Liberation was promised. Promised and encoded with oaths. This...'\n\n'Liberation requires victory,' snarled Niborran. 'And that requires a price to be paid now, by Mars too, just as it was by Pluto, by Uranus.'\n\nKazzim-Aleph-1 clicked and whirred, lenses rotating beneath his hood. Su-Kassen looked at Rogal Dorn. The primarch was still, his eyes steady on the magos-emissary and the general. Niborran was Dorn's man, she knew. Born in the rings of Saturn and raised in the disciplines of the Saturnine Ordos, he was a veteran sharpened by a century and a half of war, and time had not taken his edge. Of all the Imperial Army and Militia units on Terra, several hundreds of millions were now his to command, but here in this chamber and at this moment he was here to speak the words that Dorn could not.\n\n'The Fabricator General shall learn of this and make objection,' said Kazzim-Aleph-1. 'There are forces available. They should be moved to Mars.'\n\n'An enemy fleet the equal of that making for Mars is descending towards Luna,' said Malcador mildly. The Regent reached out and keyed a control that set the holo-display slowly rotating again. He still looked exhausted and drained, but there was a spark of strength in his eyes and words. 'Unless you would suggest leaving the orbits of Terra unguarded, honoured magos-emissary? If you are not suggesting stripping those defences, then you can only be referring to the Phalanx and its attendant ships.'\n\n'The principal Seventh Legion craft is of a size and capability that would make a significant statistical difference to the outcome of these engagements.'\n\n'The Phalanx is mine to command,' said Rogal Dorn, his words falling like an axe at the end of the magos' words. 'It goes where I will it.'\n\nKazzim-Aleph-1 recoiled with a click of turning cogs, and then dipped his head slightly in what might have been a nod.\n\n'But you wait, brother,' said Sanguinius. 'Move it to either Mars or Luna and the enemy in those spheres will be banished and Horus' failure will be sealed.'\n\nDorn's eyes moved from the holo-display to his brother primarch. The two held each other's gaze, and in the moment of quiet Su-Kassen spoke the question that had been asked again and again in the past weeks.\n\n'Where is Horus?' Eyes and faces turned towards her. 'If we believe our intelligence was flawed...' She saw Malcador give the smallest movement of his head. 'For all the enemies that we can see there must be more, and so where are they, and where is he?'\n\n'Waiting for the primary attacks to strike home,' said Niborran. 'Any forces he still has to deploy will be moving through the Elysian and Khthonic Gates. Even at best speed those fresh forces will not arrive in time to reinforce the two inner system assaults.'\n\n'But what do these two strikes at the inner system achieve?'\n\n'They pin us in place,' said Niborran. 'They keep us from moving forces to counter-assault into the outer system. They are the claw-holds for a rapid assault. That was your assessment before, admiral. Are you disavowing it now?'\n\nSu-Kassen shook her head.\n\n'No, it still stands, but Horus has failed, according to our assessment - failed, and never even taken the field in person.'\n\nSanguinius gave a small shiver. The feathers of his furled wings shook.\n\n'No,' he said. 'He is coming. I know. This ends with him here, on this ground.'\n\nMalcador's eyes lingered on the Angel for a long moment.\n\nDorn stepped forwards and collapsed the projection with a hand.\n\n'This has yet to end. Move now and we may just as likely seal defeat as seize victory.' He looked at the magos-emissary, his features unreadable. 'The Phalanx remains. And we wait.'\n\n'For what?' asked the Khan.\n\n'To see if our traitor brother has truly failed,' said Dorn. 'Or if we have.'\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf\n\nMersadie heard the shouting before she reached the cargo bays. Even through plasteel, the noise echoed down the corridor. She paused as she saw the hazard-striped door. Beside her Mori looked up. The girl was still clutching her brother's hand. He had not stirred. The deck had lurched beneath her feet as they reached this level.\n\nRudderless, Nilus had said, but what else had the assault done?\n\nMersadie took a step towards the door. Something crashed into the other side.\n\n'I don't think that we should be here,' said Mori, taking a step back. 'I don't want to be here.'\n\nMersadie turned and lowered Noon into the girl's arms.\n\n'It's all right. It will be all right. Just keep hold of your brother and make sure he is safe.'\n\n'My father,' said the girl, 'we should find my father.'\n\n'Nilus has gone to the bridge to look for him,' said Mersadie.\n\n'Who...' began the girl, but another wave of impacts rang against the door into the cargo space. Mersadie took out Aksinya's pistol. It was surprisingly light, but she was not sure how its mechanisms worked.\n\nHer mother had tried to teach her pistol shooting in the pinnacle-born fashion of her ancestors. Mersadie had not liked it. Like most other things her family valued, it had been a source of anger and disappointment.\n\nMersadie worked the cocking mechanism and checked the safety. There was still blood on the rapier-style grip, she noticed.\n\nAksinya's dead eyes... The shadow... The red-black blink as the shadow tore towards her...\n\n'We are here for you...'\n\nShe could not move. Blood had seeped into the carved bone-and-silver design behind the trigger: a half-horse half-man, rearing and drawing a bow to shoot, a centaur... a sagittar. She wrenched her head up, and the past flooded into her eyes.\n\nThe practice hall on the Vengeful Spirit looked back at her, unfolding out of memory in a waking fever-dream.\n\nA dozen soldiers marched in. She recognised uniforms of the Imperial Army, but saw that their badges of unit and rank had been removed. And amongst them the icy, golden-eyed features of Petronella Vivar's bodyguard. She recalled that his name was Maggard.\n\n'Take the iterator and the remembrancer back to their quarters,' said Maloghurst. 'Post guards and ensure that there are no more breaches.' Maggard nodded and stepped forwards. Mersadie tried to avoid him, but he was quick and strong. His hand grabbed her neck and he yanked her towards the door. Sindermann had not resisted.\n\nMaloghurst stood between Loken and the door. If Loken wanted to stop Maggard and his men, he would have to go through Maloghurst.\n\nMersadie tried to look back. She could see Loken beyond Maloghurst's robed form, looking like a caged animal ready to attack. The door slammed shut.\n\n'No,' she shouted, and heard the word come out as a whisper as she made to try to run towards a closed door.\n\nShe stopped. She still had the gun in her hand, she realised, and the entryway in front of her was not a hatch on the Vengeful Spirit, but a yellow-and-black chevroned blast door closing off a hold on the Antius.\n\nMori was looking at her, eyes wide with fresh fear. For a second, Mersadie saw a reflection of her own terror in the girl's stare. With a breath she forced her hands to still, and then tucked the gun out of sight. She turned back to the door. There was a vox-horn next to the locking mechanism. She pushed the green intoning rune beside it. A snap of static spat from the speaker-grille. A wail of distortion rose over the shouting. The banging on the other side of the door stopped. Mersadie swallowed in a dry throat.\n\n'If you can...' she began, then stopped as the sound of her own voice hummed through the speaker. 'If you can hear me,' she said, and felt the words gain strength as she spoke, 'then you are alive. A military force tried to board the ship. They are dead. As far as I know the crew are dead too. The ship is drifting.' She paused, hearing her words echo. She sounded calm, she realised. In control. 'We can all get out of this, but only if we all stay steady. I am going to open the door in a moment. If there are any of you who have crewed a ship before, or know about anything that will keep one going, then come forwards.' She stopped again and turned away from the vox-horn. Then she turned back and keyed it on again. 'My name is Mersadie Oliton,' she said.\n\nShe reached for the door lock release, paused, closed her eyes. She thought of the shuttle sitting in the hangar just a few hundred metres away. Nilus had thought they should run, leave this ship of the desperate and the dead. The world inside her skull was spinning, but her thoughts had found a clear centre. There was only one way she would let herself survive this.\n\nHer hand found the release and punched in the code Aksinya had used. The piston locks released with a thump. Carefully she pushed the door inwards. The light inside was dim, stained orange by the red and yellow of slowly pulsing emergency lights. She stepped inside, hands open at her sides. Eyes looked back at her from a ring of faces. The gun, tucked out of sight, pressed sharp against her back. The lights pulsed in the lengthening seconds. In the distance something creaked and echoed through the hull.\n\nA man stepped out of the crowd. Mersadie suppressed the instinct to flinch. The man was big, tall in the way that only the void-born were but bulked out with grafted muscle. He looked at her for a moment, and then nodded.\n\n'I was a second on a belt trader,' he said. 'I know ships.'\n\nShe looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.\n\n'Thank you,' she said. The man nodded back.\n\n'I was a dock pilot,' said a woman with a lined face and a liver-spotted scalp. And the silence broke as they came forwards in a babble of hope.\n\nHab Block 287, Worker Hab Plateau 67, Terra\n\nMekcrol woke, the scream from his dream still on his lips. The dim light of the night-cycle light set in the ceiling still sh"}
{"text":"a moment, and then nodded.\n\n'I was a second on a belt trader,' he said. 'I know ships.'\n\nShe looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.\n\n'Thank you,' she said. The man nodded back.\n\n'I was a dock pilot,' said a woman with a lined face and a liver-spotted scalp. And the silence broke as they came forwards in a babble of hope.\n\nHab Block 287, Worker Hab Plateau 67, Terra\n\nMekcrol woke, the scream from his dream still on his lips. The dim light of the night-cycle light set in the ceiling still shone. Familiar shadows fell from where his robe and rebreather mask hung by the door. The ventilation fan turned behind its grating, thumping and scraping as it pushed the smells of smoke and oil into the room. Mekcrol turned his head slowly. He was shivering. Sweat slicked his skin.\n\nIt was not real... Just a dream... Just a dream...\n\nStill he did not move.\n\nIn the dream he had been standing in front of the door out of his hab-unit. He had been waiting for someone... Someone he knew... The white paint on the metal frame had the same pattern of grime and scratches beside the lock release as he saw every day as he left. Except there was something else there in the dream, something smudged and red... like the marks of fingers. Like the marks of bleeding fingers...\n\nThe door had opened. Air had gusted in. The smell. Could you smell in dreams? The air smelled of frost. It smelled clean, sharp. The space beyond the door was dark. He had stepped through. Lights had flickered on.\n\nThe corridor stretched away to either side. Closed doors led off every two metres. There was no one else there. That was not strange. Hab allocation was linked to shift rotations, so that people would not jam the corridors as they all left or returned at the same time. Mekcrol was lucky. His mother had secured an enhancement to their hereditary indenturing that had made her son a Twentieth Degree Supervisory Menial. That gave him a unit to himself, and an extra hour of rest.\n\nThe door had closed behind him. The sound echoed up the corridor. Air brushed past his cheek. Mekcrol had turned his head towards the breeze. It was cold. A flake of snow touched his face.\n\n'Son.'\n\nHe turned. His mother was there, standing in an open door. Behind her, he could see white snow, and a black sky. Shapes like the stretched shadows of pylons grasped at the silver circle of a moon. Were those trees? Was that what a forest looked like?\n\n'Son, please...'\n\nHe looked at his mother. She was thin, almost nothing between the folds of her skin and her bones. Vomit crusted her lips and the front of her smock. Her eyes were unfocused, half-closed. She had been like that the last time he had seen her. She had died while he was on shift. When he had come back, another resident had already been allocated to her hab-unit. It had been a decade ago.\n\nBut here she was...\n\n'Son...' she said, voice rattling, 'why did you leave me alone?'\n\nHe took a step back, reached for the door back into his unit. His hand found the lock release. It opened... Night sky and a blast of ice wind. She was standing there. Frost rimed her, freezing air fogging like smoke around her, ice clogging her eyes.\n\n'Son...'\n\nHe ran. Doors flew open as he passed. Night and snow poured in. His mother stood behind every door, calling to him, reaching for him, her cries following him.\n\n'Son...\n\n'...Son...\n\n'...Son.\n\n'Why...\n\n'...did you...\n\n'...leave me...\n\n'...alone.'\n\nHe had shouted then.\n\n'You are gone. You are gone... Who are you?'\n\nAnd the wind and rattling branches had answered.\n\n'We are the man beside you...'\n\nAnd the doors were opening in front of him as he ran, and hands were reaching for him, grabbing at him, tearing his skin, and he was screaming, and the wind was laughing.\n\nSitting up on his sweat-soaked bed, the slow beat of the fan pushing warm air through the room, it still seemed very real. He reached for the flask beside the bed, fingers shaking. He took a sip of water. It tasted of dust and metal. Water rations had been halved in the last few weeks. Like the constant drone of ready-sirens, it was another needle in the flesh of life. He looked up at the shift clock above the door. He had two hours left before his first rotation of the day.\n\nHe would not go back to sleep.\n\nHe did not want to go back to sleep.\n\nHe took another sip of his water, and stood up, rubbed his eyes. He would go out into the hab. There was a viewing cupola on Level 3490. He could get there and back in time to suit up for his shift. He wondered if the shift numbers would be lower. Lots of people were getting pulled into militia. He was not certain why, and the rumours... well, the rumours were laughable. It was an excuse to squeeze more out of the indents like him, he was sure, ship labour to some other complex and tell those left that they had to work twice as hard with half-rations because of some kind of crisis. It was all just a play.\n\nBut the sirens were sounding a general alert, and Nula from work gang 67 had said that there were press gangs patrolling the west zones. They had shot people for resisting. That was what she had said, anyway. Mekcrol did not know what to believe. Just like bad dreams, there was nothing you could do about rumours except to try to get your head together and get on. He would go to the view cupola and look out down the street canyon towards the Iron Spire. It might be lit, but then again, the power had been rationed too, so more likely not.\n\nHe unlocked the door and opened it.\n\nA blast of wind rocked him back. A figure was standing in the door, vomit and frost on her smock, bloody hands gripping the door frame, empty eyes looking at him. Skin folded, flesh stretched. Teeth grew.\n\n'We... are... coming...' gasped the voice of his mother as she stepped across the threshold.\n\nMekcrol did not wake again. He died screaming, falling through his dreams. No one in his block noticed and by the time his absence from his work shift was logged, no one was wondering about where a low-level indent supervisor was.\n\nThe next night, half of the people across the northern hemisphere woke from dreams of things without eyes, or of creatures squatting on their chests in the dark, wearing the skinned faces of loved ones and crooning in the voices of past pain. People fell and fell forever through abysses of night lit with lambent eyes and bared teeth, the screams of their descent following them down and down. The sound of hooves and the howl of wolves rolled through the dark as night passed across the face of Terra.\n\nAfter three nights of dreams the riots began. Fires lit the Arctic fringe hives and hab-warrens. Crowds poured through breached curfew zones. Arson flames blazed across hundreds of kilometres. Pacification cohorts were deployed. The death count rose, and the nightmares galloped on with the turning of the heavens.\n\nEdge of survival\n\nWolf of the new moon\n\nMonsters\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Gulf\n\nMersadie found Vek on the bridge. She had sent the children back to their cabin, and the mass of refugee volunteers seemed to follow her commands with the intensity of the desperate. They had held back when she told them she wanted to go to the bridge alone. They had not questioned why.\n\nPart of her had known. There had been no sign of Vek in the rest of the ship and she could not believe he would not have tried to find Mori and Noon.\n\nShe had known. But knowing was different to seeing what was left of him lying on the deck of the bridge. There were others, scattered on each level and gantry. No one had been left alive. The boarding force had been efficient. She noticed that a lone figure in crimson armour lay amongst the dead. It looked as though he had been hacked in half. For a tiny, sickening instant she wondered what had done that. She looked back at Vek. Once, maybe, she would have felt the need to weep. Now she just felt cold, as though ice had poured into the space where grief could once have lived inside her.\n\n'They didn't damage the systems,' Nilus called down from the helm platform. She looked up. The Navigator looked down over the brass rail. 'I presume they were just going to scuttle the ship once they were done.'\n\n'It's still working, though?' she called.\n\n'As far as I can tell.'\n\nA tremor shook the deck. Lights blinked across the console.\n\n'If the engines are still working then what is that?'\n\n'I don't know,' said Nilus. 'Maybe from whatever they punched into the hull to get inside.'\n\nMersadie looked back down at Vek's remains. It felt as though she should stop, as though time should stand still and mark this moment. The deck shuddered again. Nilus said something she only half heard. She shook herself, lifted a fallen officer's cloak and draped it over Vek. Nilus shouted something that was lost under another rumble of metal.\n\n'What is it?' she asked, turning away and mounting the stairs up to the helm platform.\n\nBehind her, she could hear the sounds of people coming down the corridor to the open bridge doors. Nilus was bent over on the deck, looking at a slick of blood and oil on the brass-and-iron floor.\n\n'I said that I hadn't seen any sign of the ship's enginseer amongst the dead.'\n\n'Chi-32-Beta,' said Mersadie. The deck pitched for a moment.\n\n'What?' said Nilus.\n\n'That was her name, the ship's tech-priest. Her name was Chi-32-Beta.'\n\nNilus shrugged the irrelevance away.\n\n'We need her. Even with a crew, we can't control the ship's systems without a tech-priest...' He moved forwards, eyes on the smeared liquid. Mersadie heard cries from the lower level of the bridge as the refugees saw the slaughter. Nilus reached a section of wall lined with thick seams and rivets. A crack ran from floor to ceiling between two plates, like a door left just ajar. The smear of oil and blood vanished into the wall.\n\nNilus was looking at it, his skin somehow even paler than normal. He had stopped and was staring at the crack running down the wall. The sound of voices and footsteps was coming up the stairs to the platform"}
{"text":" Mersadie heard cries from the lower level of the bridge as the refugees saw the slaughter. Nilus reached a section of wall lined with thick seams and rivets. A crack ran from floor to ceiling between two plates, like a door left just ajar. The smear of oil and blood vanished into the wall.\n\nNilus was looking at it, his skin somehow even paler than normal. He had stopped and was staring at the crack running down the wall. The sound of voices and footsteps was coming up the stairs to the platform. Nilus was backing away now. The ship shook, and Mersadie noticed that a fresh dribble of black fluid seeped out from the crack onto the floor.\n\n'Nilus,' said Mersadie. 'What is wrong?' But the Navigator was backing away still, glancing at the other set of stairs leading down to the prow section of the bridge. He began to move towards them.\n\n'The shuttle is still there,' he hissed, as though to himself. 'I will make sure it's still there. Yes, just in case...'\n\nHe made for the forward stairs, loping down them just as the first of the refugees came up the aft stairs. Mersadie was about to call after him, but he was already out of sight.\n\n'Everyone's dead,' said one of them. It was the big man who had come forwards first; Gade, he had said his name was. His eyes were wide, sweat sheening his skin. 'Everyone...'\n\nMersadie looked back at the crack running down the wall. She stepped forwards, put her hand into the opening and pulled a section of the wall wide.\n\nA figure lay coiled in the tangle of wires in the niche behind the hidden door. Motes of light and worms of static were running up and down some of the cables. Blood and oil matted the red robes of the figure, and trickled down through the knots of wires. Its hooded head twitched up, and the ship trembled again. Static breathed out through a hiss of noise that might have been speech.\n\nMersadie moved forwards, but the figure raised a brass hand, and now she could see that the cables ran into the mass of its body beneath the robes.\n\n'We...' wheezed Chi-32-Beta. 'We need to run. They are... Their ship... They are still out there.'\n\nThe Imperial Palace, Terra\n\nThe grey warrior came to the Regent on the fifth day of the dream riots. No guards or doors barred his passing. The lone sigil on his shoulder and the clearance codes transmitted by his armour let him move like a ghost through the Palace, unquestioned and unseen. Only when he reached the last door of the Regent's sanctuary did a lowered guardian spear halt his progress.\n\nSu-Kassen watched the grey-armoured warrior turn his head to look at the Custodian. The image from the Custodian's helm-feed showed the set of his features in perfect clarity. It could have been a handsome face, but gene-craft had broadened and morphed it so that its humanity was lost beneath a hardness that made the hairs rise on Su-Kassen's neck. There were the eyes, too, still and unblinking, and as cold as distant stars. She knew his name. As a member of the War Council of Terra she was aware of the existence of the Regent's Knights Errant, although not the details of what they did or why. She also knew that the warrior looking directly up into the pict-capture had been a captain of the Luna Wolves Legion and a close confidant of Horus Lupercal himself. His name was Garviel Loken, and now he was a warrior whose grey armour marked him as a ghost trapped between loyalty and circumstance, fighting a war beyond the light of morality.\n\n'Do you wish me to leave, Lord Regent?' she asked.\n\nMalcador shook his head but did not look up from the screen set on his desk. The latest gathering of the council had broken up minutes before. It had been brief and grim.\n\nFive days before, the horrors had begun to haunt the sleep of all those on the nightside of Terra. The dreams had no pattern or consistent element except one: terror. They were containing the unrest, but the dreams were fraying the already-thin threads of control. Only inside the Palace did the night pass without terrors. Renewed Lectitio Divinitatus cult activity had also been reported. It would have been difficult to deal with even under normal circumstances. With the outer spheres of the Solar System ablaze and the enemy closing with every hour, it was bordering on catastrophic.\n\n'Fate,' Malcador said softly, looking at the face of the grey-armoured warrior and letting out a breath, 'always manifests in the small things.' Su-Kassen remained still, uncertain whether he had been talking to her. 'Let him pass,' he said. A second later the door to the tower chamber opened.\n\n'Captain Loken,' said Malcador. Loken looked at the Regent and, despite the anger fuming from him, bowed his head for a second. 'Something vexes you.'\n\n'You issued a kill order for the prisoners held on Titan,' said Loken.\n\nMalcador held the Space Marine's gaze.\n\n'The high-risk prisoners held in the facility above Titan were moved. Some of them were being moved through Uranus orbital transfer when the assault began. The ships holding them were hit. There were losses, and it appears that some of the prisoners were able to escape. The standing orders are for a hunt-and-kill protocol to be pursued without limit, and yes, those orders were mine.'\n\n'That is-' began Loken.\n\n'That is what is needed in this war, captain,' said Malcador, his voice suddenly hard. 'Even now, at this hour, and with all that we face. Innocence proves nothing and can even be a weapon.'\n\n'You have no right,' growled Loken, leaning forwards, gauntlets resting on the polished wood of the desk. Aggression was boiling off him. Su-Kassen felt her hand twitch towards the holster of the shot-pistol that she had surrendered at the chamber door.\n\nMalcador stood, eyes bright, face hard, and the frailty that had clung to him fell away. He seemed taller, his shadow lengthening as the lights around the chamber dimmed.\n\n'I have a duty,' he said. 'A duty to see all that our enemy would destroy survive, and in holding to that duty I will do what others will not. We are all expendable. You, me, every adult and every child, every hope we held, every dream that we clung to. All of it. All of it, captain. That is my duty, and I will see it done, even if others do not like the price that they would not pay themselves.'\n\nLoken had not moved, but the anger in his eyes seemed to have become something else, something colder.\n\n'I would pay that price, but not with the coin you offer.'\n\n'That is why I stand where I do. Because if we fail then there will be nothing left, not even the memory of what was lost. Would you rather that? Would you rather the future that your gene-sire Horus dreams for humanity? If you would, then honour your convictions and try to kill me now, because I will not stop, and I will not explain myself to you again.'\n\nLoken rocked back. The shadow of Malcador drew upwards, spreading across the ceiling. Su-Kassen felt her nerves screaming to run, to get away from the cold rage that was flooding out as the light dimmed.\n\nThen it was gone, and the old man standing with the help of his staff looked old and exhausted. Loken's face was fixed, but pale. Malcador closed his eyes for a second, and then took an unsteady step forwards, and put a hand on Loken's shoulder guard. Beneath the fingers, the emblem of an eye etched into the grey ceramite gleamed coldly for an instant.\n\n'I am sorry,' said Malcador. 'I understand, but these are necessities, captain. If it helps, it was not a specific order relating to Mistress Oliton. The hunt-and-termination protocols are general, a contingency put in place a long time ago.'\n\nLoken shrugged free of the Regent's touch, face still stone-like.\n\n'There was a signal picked up on the military channels around Uranus,' he said.\n\nMalcador nodded.\n\n'You knew?' asked Loken.\n\n'Of course,' said Malcador. 'Although communications being what they are, I only learned of it very recently.' He paused. 'As did you.'\n\nLoken nodded once, and then turned towards the door.\n\n'I am taking a ship. If you know of the signal, then you know that the last report from one of your hunter cadres had the ship she was suspected to be aboard heading for Jupiter. That is where I am going. Send a signal - call off the hunters.'\n\n'You know as well as I that may not be possible.'\n\n'Then you will have forfeited their lives, too,' said Loken, and turned for the door.\n\n'If they have not found her, Loken, there is little hope that you will.'\n\n'Isn't that why you chose us, Lord Regent? To do what others could not?'\n\nMalcador did not reply. Loken moved to the door. It opened and Su-Kassen could see the Custodians standing beyond it. Loken paused, his foot across the threshold and turned his stare back on Malcador.\n\n'If you did know that she was being hunted, would you have countermanded the orders?'\n\nMalcador held Loken's gaze for a long moment.\n\n'No,' he said at last.\n\nLoken gave a single nod, and then was gone. The door shut after him.\n\nMalcador let out a breath and limped around his desk and lowered himself back into his chair.\n\n'Thank you, admiral,' he said after a second.\n\n'For what?' she asked.\n\n'If you had not been here, I have a suspicion he would have done what time and the blades of our enemies have so far failed to accomplish.'\n\n'I do not think so, lord, and if he had tried, I don't think he would have succeeded.'\n\nMalcador gave a tired smile.\n\n'Perhaps not...'\n\nHe picked up a data-slate from his desk and began to scan it.\n\n'We could stop him,' said Su-Kassen after a moment. 'He needs your authority to move through the Palace. Even if he reaches a ship, it could be halted before it breaks orbit.'\n\nMalcador shook his head.\n\n'Let him go. Maybe he is right. In such times, perhaps the small acts of nobility matter more, not less.'\n\n'He did not say that, lord...'\n\n'Did he not?' said Malcador, and looked up at her, eyes sharp. 'Then maybe I am just succumbing to weakness and sentimentality. Does that sound more believable to you, admiral?'\n\n'No, lord. It does not.'\n\n'No...' "}
{"text":" needs your authority to move through the Palace. Even if he reaches a ship, it could be halted before it breaks orbit.'\n\nMalcador shook his head.\n\n'Let him go. Maybe he is right. In such times, perhaps the small acts of nobility matter more, not less.'\n\n'He did not say that, lord...'\n\n'Did he not?' said Malcador, and looked up at her, eyes sharp. 'Then maybe I am just succumbing to weakness and sentimentality. Does that sound more believable to you, admiral?'\n\n'No, lord. It does not.'\n\n'No...' he said, nodding as though considering the point, before looking back to his work. 'Perhaps not.'\n\nBattleship Iron Blood, Uranus high orbit\n\nForrix closed his eyes for three seconds and then opened them again to the light of stars and war. Fatigue, long banished by ascension to the Legion, had begun to creep into his being over the years of conflict and the demands of this phase of the operation. He had begun to find that moments like these, when his eyes touched the vastness of reality rather than the coldness of data, were like a rudder holding him true. Here, on a squat tower set high on the spine of the Iron Blood, was one of the few places you could look out at space with the naked eye, and so it had become his haunt.\n\nA ragged fleet poured from the Elysian Gate before his eyes. Craft after craft slid into being, lit their engines and powered away into the dark. Some of them had once been proud ships of war, their old colours lost under battle scars and heraldry that marked them as without lord or mistress. These were the wild swarms of mercenaries, pirates and reavers that had flourished in the age of Horus' war, and now came hungry for the fruits of Sol. Most were humanled, their captains deserters from one cause or another. Others were fanatics, ships full of converts to the worship of old gods with new faces, come to make bloody pilgrimage on ancient ground. They came in converted haulers festooned with billions of scraps of parchment, others in sleek warships scorched black to remove the marks of their old allegiances.\n\nThere were Space Marines amongst the horde, too. Ships commanded by warriors that had taken new colours and new names: The Burnt Word, the Brotherhood of Set, the Twelfth Truth - oath breakers all. Forrix had felt a twinge of instinct tug at him as a battleship in the red and black colours of one of these mongrel bands turned across the Iron Blood's sensor screens. With a word the craft could have been reduced to broken metal and molten stone, a fate worthy of such creatures.\n\nBeside them were ships that still wore the colours of their Legion, even if those colours were only a mask. Midnight-hulled vessels of the Night Lords, and ships of the III Legion painted like carnival masks, their vox-channels babbling noise. In Forrix's eyes, these were almost worse than the others, carrion-reavers, and self-appointed warlords, the mockery of their lineage painted with contempt.\n\nThey served a purpose though; they knew the art of mayhem as war. They had been held in the warp until Uranus was secured, wrapped in screams and nightmares, and now were loosed on the outer Solar System. They had no mission, only a direction. The rest was left to their nature. In days, they would fall on Neptune, and Jupiter. The slaughter and bloodshed would begin. Without a specific mission, the reaver forces would kill and die, and inflict pain. Blood and screams would follow fire. Confusion and fear would spread. Those mortals that could flee would do so, and their flight would carry the terror with them.\n\nBehind him he heard the doors release, and felt the aching buzz of Perturabo's armour as the primarch entered the viewing cupola. He turned to kneel, but a twitch of Perturabo's hands held Forrix standing. The weapon pods and pistons of the primarch's armour hissed and breathed cold gas as they cycled. Forrix watched his lord out of the corner of his eye. Perturabo had suddenly become utterly still. That stillness had seized the primarch more and more in the time since they had gone to fetch Angron back to the war from the borders of Ultramar. It was unsettling in a way that Forrix did not want to think about. Perturabo watched the tide of monsters breach into being.\n\nThe Daughter of Woe hung above the murk of the Elysian Gate. Iron Warriors ships clustered around the space hulk, suckling from her scarred skin. A blackened cleft a kilometre long and two hundred metres deep had been carved into her face by the plasma fusillade of the Monarch of Fire. Forrix had thought, for a moment during the engagement, that the Imperial Fists ship was going to ram the Daughter of Woe, or try to board her in force. It would have been suicide, but the defiance of the Imperial Fists over the last days of the assault had seemed to drift to recklessness.\n\nThe pride finally surfacing from beneath the stone, Forrix had thought at the time. The sons of Dorn had pulled back from the assault, though.\n\n'How long?' asked Perturabo, only his lips moving in the mask of his face. The ammo feeds linked to his arms cycled again. It reminded Forrix of a muscle twitching.\n\n'Our ships are ready,' said Forrix.\n\nPerturabo looked at him then and gave a single nod at the data projections.\n\n'How much did we lose?'\n\nForrix licked his lips. The Lord of Iron knew the answer to the question already. No scrap or thread of data escaped him in the battle sphere.\n\n'Thirty-six hours, lord,' replied Forrix.\n\n'By such things are our deeds now weighed,' said Perturabo. 'By the slow slice of time, and not the blood that turns its wheel...'\n\nForrix shifted uncomfortably.\n\n'It is likely that this is Dorn's strategy. If he knows that Guilliman is coming...'\n\n'He knows,' said Perturabo, 'or suspects, and that is more than enough for him to make time a weapon against us. Bleed us. Slow us. Cut by cut, minute by minute. We come to the cradle of all war and find that its craft is what we always knew it to be. Not a flash of blades or the fire of heroism, but the slow grinding of bloody inches. It can't be escaped.'\n\nForrix thought of all they had given, of the legionaries that had died to slow the coming of the Ultramarines and those they had left to try to slow the inevitable.\n\nSilence fell again.\n\n'The losses in our core fleet strength have been compensated for,' said Forrix at last. 'The ships that are not battle ready will remain and oversee the consolidation. The rest...'\n\n'Stand at ninety-eight-point-seven-five combat effectiveness,' said Perturabo softly, and moved to the viewports on the other side of the tower.\n\nForrix began to reply then stopped himself. Time passed in the slow, buzzing pulse of Perturabo's armour. Out beyond the armourglass hung the orb of Uranus, its face dark against the stars.\n\n'The strategic timetable still holds, lord. If we launch now we will still be within your margin of error.'\n\nPerturabo did not reply. From the edge of the disc of Uranus a light began to gleam. Thin rays reached out and slid past the drifts of debris and the schools of ships. The sun...\n\nForrix blinked.\n\n'So many battlefields,' said Perturabo, staring directly at the distant dot of brilliance. 'So much blood and iron poured down into the earth to earn our place here...' The Lord of Iron's eyes seemed black in the pale glare, his armour slick with cold shadow. 'We are coming, my brother. We are coming, my father. We have returned...' He turned to Forrix. The coldness had gone from his eyes. Fire caught in their depths, and the edges of his exo-plates gleamed in the distant sunlight and made him seem skinned in blades and shadow. 'Give the order. Launch for Jupiter.'\n\nShrine\n\nSongs of fear, dreams of war\n\nMy father's side\n\nComet shrine, Inner System Gulf\n\nThe comet was not undefended. Eight gun platforms ringed it, tracking its flight through the heavens with batteries of turbo lasers and rockets. Their auspex and targeting systems had enough power to see far beyond the reach of their guns. Once they detected and locked on to a target, they could coordinate fire with enough precision to equal the kill output of a star fort. It was enough that anything less than multiple battleships would be ill-advised to approach uninvited.\n\nThe servitors wired into the weapon platform's auspex twitched in their cradles. Somewhere, out on the edge of their machine sight, something was moving, something large.\n\nAll weapon batteries cycled to ready. Vox signals flickered between each gun platform. The servitors looked deeper, focusing all their systems on the approaching ship. None of them noticed the frost forming on their skin and wiring.\n\nFingers of thought brushed their lobotomised minds, pulling them deeper into their focus, drawing their sight away from everything that was not that distant glimmer of a ship getting nearer. They did not see the gunships sliding towards them out of the dark. Unmarked by engine heat, the small craft had begun their flight beyond the limit of the platform's sight. Minds inside the gunships reached out, focusing down and down into the root meat of the servitors' minds.\n\nThe gunships' engines fired. The servitor-governed systems saw nothing. They were still seeing nothing as missiles blew holes in the skin of each platform. Now alarms did begin to sound. Weapon servitors jerked to life, but too late. Crimson-armoured warriors were already inside the corridors. Waves of telekinesis blew in bulkheads, and bolter fire shredded servitors and systems. The gun platforms were silent as the lone ship closing on the comet became twelve.\n\nAhriman did not watch any of the last stages of the assault play out. In the dark of his gunship, as it burned towards its target, he focused his mind on the growing pattern surrounding it in the ether. He had been preparing, body, mind and spirit, for days, locking patterns of thought and symbolism into his subconscious. The roots of the Colchisian symbol sets and the Word Bearers' pseudo-occult rites had required a great deal of refin"}
{"text":"ilent as the lone ship closing on the comet became twelve.\n\nAhriman did not watch any of the last stages of the assault play out. In the dark of his gunship, as it burned towards its target, he focused his mind on the growing pattern surrounding it in the ether. He had been preparing, body, mind and spirit, for days, locking patterns of thought and symbolism into his subconscious. The roots of the Colchisian symbol sets and the Word Bearers' pseudo-occult rites had required a great deal of refinement and integration into the Prosperine system. It was like trying to mix oil and water, or gold and iron slag. He had done it, though. Few others could have, he fancied.\n\nThere is a failsafe in the comet shrine itself, came Ignis' thought voice, cutting into Ahriman's reflections. A detection system slaved to a series of kill charges.\n\nDisable it, replied Ahriman.\n\nThat is in progress, but the detection system also has an etheric monitor grafted to its core. Our remote viewing of the outer halls almost triggered it. I have sent in Credence to remove the detection system's core.\n\nAhriman thought of the automaton that now followed the Master of Ruin like a looming shadow.\n\nIt is a machine, brother. To give it a name is to try to call a soul into something that has neither the spirit nor the will to make choices.\n\nSilence fell between their minds.\n\nAround Ahriman the minds of his brothers whirled on, patterning the ether with their thoughts. Each of them was looping a set of symbols and words through his subconscious. Those of greater power and ability spun more complex weaves of thought, all overlapping and meshing with one another. Together, their minds were like the cogs of a single colossal machine. At the pattern's core was Ahriman, subsections of his own thoughts meshing with those of his brothers. This feat alone was beyond the bounds of comprehension of even the most able of adepts, but it was only the beginning. One part of the key to turn a greater lock.\n\nIt had taken days for Ahriman to comprehend the details of what they were doing, and then he had shivered. Even Magnus had fallen silent when it had been laid before them. For this... thing that they were doing was not their design. It was something higher and darker and greater, the design of a creature who had never been human and now stood between mortality and godhood. It was Horus' act, and they were the tools that did his work.\n\nWhy do we do this? he had asked Magnus the Red.\n\nYou know why, my son... Magnus had replied. Because everything we want, everything we need lies beyond the fall of my father. Ahriman had nodded, but not tried to hide the doubt in his mind. The image of Magnus in the scrying mirror had given a sad smile. Besides, Ahzek, do you not wish to see the Towers of Leth again, or to walk the Scribe Vaults? Do you not wish to go home?\n\nThey burned our home.\n\nThe image had shimmered in the haze of cedar smoke.\n\nTo all of humanity, Terra is home. That is why it must fall, my son.\n\nThe detection and trigger device has been disabled on the comet, came Ignis' thought voice, cutting through the memory. You may proceed.\n\nAhriman's gunship shot on towards the comet. With it came flights of others, trailing out behind it like the wings of a great bird. The Word Bearers fell into place amongst them. The wings of their craft gleamed a deeper crimson in the sunlight. Lines of script covered them from nose to tail, each word an exultation of the powers of the warp. The minds of the warriors in each craft hissed and echoed with prayers. For them this was not just an act of occult war; it was a sacred devotion. Ahriman felt a wave of revulsion and pulled his senses away from them.\n\nThe surface of the comet loomed before them. Plugs of plasteel and raw iron covered old wounds from boarding torpedoes and weapons fire. These were the scars from when the Imperial Fists had purged the shrine in the early years of the war.\n\nThe whole comet had been hollowed out two centuries before and become a resting place for the bones of the greatest heroes from the War of Unification and the Great Crusade. The skull of Skand, first of the Thunder Lords to fall in battle, had been laid here beside that of Maxilla, Barkeria Vu and thousands more. It had been a shrine to unity and heroism, and the Word Bearers had guarded its halls since the time before they had borne that name. They were still there when their treachery had been revealed, and so Rogal Dorn had sent his sons to slay them. They had done that. But, with the limited insight typical of the VII Legion, they had not thought to ask a deeper question: why had the Word Bearers remained at all?\n\nRockets loosed from the wings of the gunships. Fire erupted across the sealed breaches in the comet's skin. Shreds of metal and stone erupted into the vacuum. The gunships slid through the reopened wounds into the comet's interior.\n\nAhriman was on his feet before the gunship settled. His brothers followed, turning in perfect time as they moved to match him. Air misted into the cold dark as the hatch released. The space beyond was silent and still. Sunlight shone in through the holes to the void. Soot and scorch marks covered the visible floor and walls. Dry, broken bones lay at the base of walls of skulls. Ahriman's eyes picked out names and deeds carved across the foreheads of each. Thousands of empty eye sockets returned his gaze. He let out a breath inside his helm. It tasted of dust.\n\nHe felt the ghosts of myriad wars whisper and rattle at the edge of his senses. Voices of ancient battles clung to the teeth of the skulls. The blood spilt by the Word Bearers before their purging filled his mouth with the taste of copper and iron. Around him the rest of the Thousand Sons spread out in rings, their eyes turned out, and their thoughts turning in harmony.\n\nBeyond them, the hatches on three Word Bearers gunships opened. Bones and parchment covered the warriors that emerged. Half of them led thin humans in white robes. Unsuited, the mortals began to choke as they staggered down the ramp and knelt. The Word Bearers cut their throats before their hearts stopped. The prayers in each of the humans' minds became a shriek as their death thrust the words deep into the ether. Blood splashed the scorched floor.\n\nA last figure walked from the gunship, arms raised in blessing, black-and-red armour gleaming with the crude runes of the greater aspects of the warp. A helm of brushed bronze enclosed his head, eyeless and mouthless. Books hung from his waist on chains, and his hand held a sceptre of black iron topped by a rough stone star. A thin human in a skin-tight black pressure suit walked one step behind its master. Its eyes were lidless and pinned open behind fluid-filled goggles. A vox-amplifier filled the space where its mouth would have been. It was the voice-slave of its master, bound by crude telepathy to the warrior that it followed like a shadow. That master had no name. He was just the Apostle of the Unspeaking. The lack of a name would have struck Ahriman as typically ridiculous if it had not been for the fact that the Apostle's mind was both shadowed and elusive, his thoughts and emotions dissolving from sight as soon as Ahriman's senses turned towards them. That and the fact that he had never heard of this warrior before made him wonder. Much had changed in the years of the Thousand Sons' exile, and even before then there were millions of legionaries divided between Legions spread across the galaxy. But there was something about the blankness of this Apostle that made Ahriman wonder what soul moved beneath the bronze mask.\n\nThe Apostle bent down, dipped his fingers in the blood of one of the sacrifices and scattered it into the void. A single jagged word echoed from the Apostle's mind. Around him, all the Word Bearers knelt.\n\nAhriman felt the psychic resonance in the shrine alter, unbalancing for a moment. He held his will steady, felt the patterns in his thoughts compensate.\n\nDo not do that again, he sent, edging the sending with flat command. The Apostle turned his blank helm towards Ahriman.\n\n'This is a sacred thing,' rasped the voice-slave's vox. 'It must be marked. The rites and offerings must be observed.'\n\nDo nothing that I do not command. I will not see your ignorance undo this work.\n\n'We do the work of the gods here, sorcerer. It was us that seeded the ground for this act long before you even saw your place in the universe. Do not think that this is a matter of knowledge and power. The gods laugh at such arrogance, but bless those who submit to them.'\n\nAhriman felt anger spark within him, and cut it away with a flick of will. He drew a breath and his humours balanced again.\n\nHe turned from the Word Bearers as Ignis approached from where his gunship had settled behind the rest. The Master of Ruin's Terminator armour was the orange of furnace flame, and threaded with lines that echoed the tattoos that marked his face. His remade automaton walked behind him, its weapon mounts tracking the Word Bearers as they moved through the chamber.\n\nFaith and ignorance are so often alloyed that they might as well be called one, sent Ignis.\n\nAn observation we can agree on, replied Ahriman.\n\nIt is not an observation. It is an objective truth.\n\nAhriman watched as the Word Bearers moved across the chamber. Occasionally one of them would stop, and Ahriman would hear the thought-echo of a canticle spill into the ether.\n\nThe artificial gravity is stable? he sent to Ignis, still watching the Apostle and the other Word Bearers.\n\nIt is. The primary systems of this facility were maintained to an adequate level. Power, gravity, atmosphere - it is all functioning.\n\nAhriman nodded. In the churn and swell of the ether he felt something shift, something that cast a shadow across his thoughts and tugged at their patterns. For a second, he felt as though he had just stepped off the edge of a hidden precipice. He steadied himself, turning his will and "}
{"text":"ble? he sent to Ignis, still watching the Apostle and the other Word Bearers.\n\nIt is. The primary systems of this facility were maintained to an adequate level. Power, gravity, atmosphere - it is all functioning.\n\nAhriman nodded. In the churn and swell of the ether he felt something shift, something that cast a shadow across his thoughts and tugged at their patterns. For a second, he felt as though he had just stepped off the edge of a hidden precipice. He steadied himself, turning his will and sight inwards until the sensation of falling passed.\n\nBreach the walls and bring them in.\n\nIgnis gave a small nod. Ahriman felt a pulse of thought pass out through the shrine walls to where the ships waited. A second later, a patch of the vaulted ceiling above began to glow with heat. Then it blew outwards. A new glowing hole over a hundred metres wide opened to reveal the sunlight and the hull of the Ankhtowe. Tugs and haulers swarmed forwards as more fresh holes appeared in the comet's skin. Black, slab-shaped containers the size of battle tanks slid through the openings. Spider-limbed servitors detached from the tugs and began to unfasten the containers. Ahriman could feel the growling ache of psychic noise from within as the first layers of sedation faded from their cargo. The tugs pulled back until the solatarium hung in the void between the ship and comet.\n\nSilver and plasteel sheathed the solatarium sphere. Rune-stamped chains had been welded to the casing and five tugs had dragged it from the guts of the Ankhtowe and into the vacuum. Worms of light played up and down the chains. It creaked and shivered as it moved, its dimensions seeming to flick between being close and far off even as you looked at it. Ahriman held his mind in a state of perfect balance as the sealed sphere was lowered through the hole like an eye being set back in its socket. The chains holding the solatarium broke before they were unfastened, their substance dissolving to light and smoke. It hung a metre above the floor of the chamber. Sparks of multicoloured light earthed into the void. Two of the Word Bearers were on their knees, tongueless mouths filling with blood as they thanked their gods.\n\nAhriman felt the storm winds rising in the realm beyond. He gave a single nod.\n\nWe begin.\n\nBattle-barge Monarch of Fire, Jovian Gulf\n\nThe Iron Blood gathered speed as it cut towards the glimmer of Jupiter. Beside it and around it, the main force of its daughters and cousins rode in formation. Together they formed a cylinder thousands of kilometres long, stretching behind the flagship like the shaft of an arrow. Its path was direct, a line cut through the Jovian Gulf to cross the space between Uranus and Jupiter in the shortest time. It would pass through the orbit of Saturn, but the ringed planet was on the other side of the Solar disc. It was predictable to the defenders, but it was also swift, and Perturabo and his Legion had greater need of speed than they did subtlety. The timetable of war would bear nothing else.\n\nWatching from above the path of the Iron Warriors fleet, Halbract found little comfort in what he saw. In the cold light of tactical displays there was one question that he found his mind returning to again and again. This force was behaving as Dorn and his senior commanders had predicted. The traitors were bloodied and had suffered great losses in taking Uranus. They had lost days and they would lose more strength and time as they made this passage. Even now the mines and deadfall munitions strung along their route would be activating. The first ultra-long-range nova cannon shots from Halbract's fleet were zeroed and ready for his command. They would accelerate down to intersect with the Iron Warriors' predicted path. Once they had accelerated to maximum velocity, they would cut loose their rocket boosters and fall down towards their detonation points. Almost undetectable, they would strike amongst the enemy like arrows shot by an unseen archer.\n\nThen Halbract's ships would follow their path and engage the Iron Warriors as they advanced, forcing them to turn and fight or press on and die. But that would not stop the IV Legion. That bitter fact lingered in Halbract's thoughts.\n\n'Loose,' he said, without looking up from the displays. The nova cannons began to fire. He waited, feeling the silence ache under the dome of the Monarch of Fire's bridge. He waited and watched. The fleet with him would have been enough to break a star kingdom. Hundreds of warships from the remains of the Imperial Fists fleet augmented by ships of the Blood Angels, and more from the fleets of Saturn and Jupiter. Most had been held back from the battle around Uranus, floating silently in the interplanetary gulf, waiting for this battle. But it still would only be enough to wound, not to kill. Not to make an end.\n\nHalbract looked up. The eyes of his command crew gazed down at him from the stacked tiers of platforms circling the command dais.\n\n'Forwards,' he said.\n\nAnd the Second Sphere fleet lit its engines and plunged down towards the traitors.\n\nThe Iron Warriors saw them when they were still distant. They began to run calculations estimating strength and risk. They did not slow or break formation. They could not. They did not have time to spare.\n\nThe first of the nova shells reached its detonation zone and exploded. The blast wave stripped void shields from five warships. Another struck, and another and another, until the Iron Warriors fleet was strobing with fire.\n\nThe Monarch of Fire was the first ship to engage as it entered range. Plasma poured from it. Three ships vanished in curtains of light. The fleet behind it split, lancing into the Iron Warriors. Macro shells flew from batteries to meet them, and the night vanished in the flash of explosions.\n\nOuter Solar System\n\nTerror grew at the edge of the light of the sun.\n\nOn Neptune's moon Laomedia, the quiet followers of a sect called the Paths of Revelation pumped kalma gas into the habitats sunk into the satellite's skin.\n\nThe Paths of Revelation had grown from old seeds planted in Old Night. Laomedia was not a kind home. Fuel reservoirs and processing plants ate its people. The wars between xenos, pirates and empire builders had seen it change hands many times. Its population had been slaves and citizens and the meat fed into the machine of its industries. The Unity of the Imperium had changed some of that, but not all. And in the uncertainty of that life, the Paths of Revelation had found generations of followers. They were patient, waiting for their time to come, knowing that one day the spirits of truth would come, and both they and all those that had preceded them would ascend as one to a realm without want, or hunger, or limit of delight.\n\nAnd now that time had come. They had heard the call crooned into their ears as they slept. So after they sent the habitats to sleep, they overrode the mag-locks of every fourth hab-unit. They went between the unlocked doors, clothed in tattered rags bleached white or stained red. They took something from those who slept inside each door they opened. A trinket, a hand, a face. And when Laomedia woke again, it woke screaming.\n\nIn the warp, the tides of delight and spite heard the screams and sang in chorus.\n\nOn Saturn, the dead came as terror's heralds.\n\nNight Lords had taken civilian ships fleeing Uranus. There were bulk haulers and shuttle transports, packed with people fleeing towards the hoped-for safety of Saturn or the interplanetary gulfs. They found no safety or mercy. Their holds bearing the dead and dying, their helms and engines locked on course, the ships drove at Saturn. The first warnings and hails from the planet's defences triggered vox-recordings in each ship. Wails, screams and pleas filled the ears of the defenders as they fired, and tore the first slaughter ship from the void. More and more ships of the dead came to burn on the edge of the great planet's rings. Blood poured into the void and froze; screams vanished into the vacuum. And just out of weapons range, the ships of the VIII Legion circled, watched and laughed.\n\nIn the light of the guns and in the sound of last pleas for mercy, thirsting things drank.\n\nOn the Grylor city-station death came from within.\n\nThe size of a hive city, the station had grown from old ships moored next to each other that had been bound by bridges and growths of welded metal. Tethered to an asteroid on a slow orbit of the sun, it was a layover for ships plying the outer system trade routes. But no ships had come for weeks. No signals from the Throneworld, no news or warnings - just the flashes of distant lights, and the dreams of red rivers flowing between forests of pale trees without leaves. On and on the quiet went.\n\nThe blight began with food. Starch paste grew green-and-yellow blooms. Tanks of nutrient base soured to black sludge. Bit by bit, Grylor's food stores went bad. Some ate it anyway. They died screaming, voiding fluids, blood clogging their eyes. The water was next. Salts formed in reservoir tanks and pipes. Those that drank it wasted to nothing, unable to weep from thirst. After four days the whole of the city-station was deserted. Its atmosphere systems circulated air through corridors and rooms peopled only by corpses covered in forests of mould and pale fungus.\n\nIn the light of fizzing lumens, rotting things pupated and swelled as they breathed in the silence.\n\nStrike Frigate Persephone, Inner System Gulf\n\nSigismund saw the dead ship fall back. Silence hung over the Persephone as the image of the vessel receded until it was marked only by the blink of a rune on the tactical display.\n\n'More names to mark on the walls of the fallen,' said Rann, a growl edging his low voice. 'The traitors will pay, my brother. We will ensure it.'\n\nSigismund did not reply, but watched the marker rune until the sensors lost hold of the dead ship's signal. It had been the Sun Child - a young ship, set to the void in the y"}
{"text":"gismund saw the dead ship fall back. Silence hung over the Persephone as the image of the vessel receded until it was marked only by the blink of a rune on the tactical display.\n\n'More names to mark on the walls of the fallen,' said Rann, a growl edging his low voice. 'The traitors will pay, my brother. We will ensure it.'\n\nSigismund did not reply, but watched the marker rune until the sensors lost hold of the dead ship's signal. It had been the Sun Child - a young ship, set to the void in the year before the war had begun. Now it would drift as a tomb. Maybe one day its hull would be reclaimed by the victor of this last battle, but if not it would drift on the solar tides, cold and dark, until the sun claimed it or its iron corpse became a cloud of debris.\n\nThey had been losing ships day by day and hour by hour. It was as though the Solar System were claiming a blood price for every step they took towards Terra. Battle damage had claimed some early on, others had succumbed to their wounds over time. They had scuttled some, taking what crew and supplies they could and sending the ships to death pyres that lit the gulf of night. Others, like the Sun Child, they had simply had to let fall back as their damaged reactors failed. There was no choice, and all of the surviving fleet knew it. They could see the battle-light glimmer around Mars, and hear the broken signals from Uranus and Saturn. The jaws of the enemy were biting deep.\n\nThere were enemies loose in the gulf between the worlds too, wild fleets and carrion feeder ships looking for easy prey. Some had tried to slow Sigismund's force. All who had tried had died.\n\n'We are entering the inner system,' came the voice of one of the command crew. Sigismund could hear the exhaustion and the control in the officer's voice. 'My lords, what is our course?'\n\nSigismund did not need to look at the display to know the position. There were fleets down around Mars and swarming from the outer system to the inner. A large force was bearing down on Terra and Luna from above the orbital disc. It was not a choice of where they could make a difference. He had brought fewer than a hundred ships to this point - all were damaged and under-strength in contingent and crew. The battles they were riding towards would be the clash of thousands of forces as great as or greater than those they had faced at Pluto. The choice was simply where they would stand in this next passage of war and where their blood would fall.\n\n'On the ground of the world that bore me. At the heart of the Imperium that made me,' said Sigismund, hearing the words come to his lips in answer to the thoughts turning in his head. He looked at Rann, and the scarred warrior, who smiled through victory and death just the same, gave a grim nod. 'I will stand there, at my father's side.'\n\n'And I will stand there with you,' said Rann.\n\n'Terra,' said Sigismund, feeling the tug of old prophecy at the edge of his thoughts. 'Hold course for Terra.'\n\nCaul's edge\n\nThe birthplace of wolves\n\nMars crowned by fire\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Caul\n\nThe Antius sped on through the night towards the growing orb of Jupiter. Behind it, in the dark gulf it had crossed from Uranus, the pinprick flares of battle glittered like mica dust cast into a ray of sunlight. Before it lay the Jovian Caul, glimmering like a reflection of the distant battle-light.\n\nSince days long past, Jupiter had been the seat of the Jovian Void Clans and home to shipyards that made spacecraft unlike any other in the light of Sol or beyond. Ancient mysteries went into the design of those ships, some unknown even to the priests of Mars. The blood-bound clans had been allowed to keep much of their power and many of their secrets in exchange for their fealty to Terra. The xenos breed that had dominated their moons had been destroyed in the early months of the Great Crusade. In spite of that liberation, some amongst the Consanguinities left unspoken the belief that they had exchanged inhuman tyrants for a single human one. That strain of doubt had not stopped Jupiter's shipyards becoming a nursery from which many of the fleets of the Great Crusade were born, first into a war of conquest and then a war for survival.\n\nThe Caul was the sphere of micro debris that surrounded Jupiter's shipyards and manufactoria. It extended deep into space in every direction. There, new ships were born, refitted or torn apart in the mazes of the equatorial breakers yards. On the edge of the great planet's gravity lived the low-caste reclaimers, who pulled scrap from the dark of the inner system gulf. In the polar Shoal city-stations, the high clans ruled populations bound to them by blood, marriage and oath. The void was in them all, it was said - a coldness in their blood that the illumination of the Imperial Truth could not banish. Now, as the enemies of that Imperium came, the void-born of Jupiter swarmed into the dark to defend their home.\n\nAmongst the gun-sloops and brigantines of the Jovian clans moved the ships of the Third Sphere fleet. These were warships of the Imperial Army, and the VII and IX Legions. All stood ready for battle. Signals had arrived from Uranus and from Terra. They knew that coming for them was the power that had broken the Elysian Gate. They knew that, this side of Luna, Jupiter and its sphere of dominance was the greatest force that the invaders would have to overcome. No commander hoping to take Terra could leave the void might of Jupiter uncontested.\n\nOn the bridge of the Antius, hurtling towards Jupiter, Mersadie Oliton could see neither what waited, nor what lay behind them.\n\nRed lights blinked on consoles. The light reflected from the blood and oil running from the tech-priest that lay at her feet. Chi-32-Beta was dying.\n\n'What ship is still out there?' she asked. 'The ship that the assault was launched from?'\n\nChi-32-Beta nodded. A fresh wash of dark liquid oozed from beneath the enginseer's robes. Behind Mersadie, a growing crowd of refugees from the ship's holds were filling the helm platform.\n\n'They... they have been attempting to establish vox contact with their assault party, but...' Chi-32-Beta's voice became a burble of static and the lights on the consoles across the bridge flickered. 'But there has been no... no reply...'\n\n'They are dead,' said Mersadie.\n\n'H-How...'\n\n'It does not matter. Can you get the ship under control?'\n\nChi-32-Beta trembled, and a second later the motion spread through the lights.\n\n'No... not control. It is wounded, but it will run true. Crew...'\n\n'We have crew,' said Mersadie, looking around at the ragged figures on the platform. A few were moving between the consoles. There were still spatters of blood on some of the equipment, though the bodies of the dead had been removed and unsuccessful attempts made to clean the stains and scorches from deck and helm. Most of the refugee crew were looking at her and the tech-priest. Terror and uncertainty blended in their eyes. She looked at Gade. The former dock pilot was glancing at the screens and levers next to the main helm control banks.\n\n'Gade,' she called, using the man's name and putting every scrap of the confidence she was not feeling into her words. He looked around at her. 'Get someone on every position. Do it now.'\n\nGade nodded and turned. She heard him begin to shout.\n\n'Mil...' began Chi-32-Beta. 'It is a military ship... I have been trying to make... interference... so that... so that our enemy won't realise...' The enginseer coughed a mouthful of half-binary.\n\n'The engines,' asked Mersadie. 'Are they working?'\n\n'Yes, but if we change course they will see, they will realise... Weapons, they will have weapons...'\n\nThe words sank cold into Mersadie. They could have blown the Antius to dust. They still could now. But they had come to make sure that she was dead. That was what was holding them back now: the need to be certain that she was no more. Somewhere out there, eyes were watching auspex and signal screens, kill orders held on tongues.\n\n'Can you see it?' she asked. 'Can the ship's sensors see this enemy?'\n\n'A ghost on the edge of sight...' Chi-32-Beta hissed. 'And there are... other things, too... further away and getting closer... I... I don't know what... who they are...'\n\n'How close are we to Jupiter?'\n\n'We are approaching the Caul. I can... feel sensors looking deep into the void. They may offer no sanctuary. They may end us.'\n\nMersadie paused. Around her she could hear the calls of the people crowding the command deck.\n\n'We have to reach Jupiter. Can we outrun them?'\n\n'This is a tertiary-grade system freighter. They... they are likely to outclass us in both speed and power output.'\n\n'Is there an alternative?' she asked.\n\nChi-32-Beta paused.\n\n'No.'\n\n'Then we try to run hard and hope,' she said. 'Hold on, and get ready.'\n\nThe enginseer coughed what might have been an assent.\n\n'I... doubt we will survive, but... there is a probability that we might,' Chi-32-Beta began. 'You are... the prisoner, are you not?'\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'Yes, I am.'\n\nThe enginseer was silent for a moment.\n\n'Thank you.'\n\nShe blinked for a second, not certain how to reply. She stood.\n\n'Thank me if we live.'\n\nLuna\n\nThe torpedo wave hit the edge of the assault fleet. Defence turrets opened fire. Las-beams and shells punched through warheads. Explosions bubbled out as the torpedoes detonated. Multicoloured spheres formed and burst in a foam of fire. Ordnance had loosed from launch platforms and the Luna picket fleets in a coordinated barrage lasting twenty-one minutes. It struck the hulls of Abaddon's vanguard ships.\n\nThe armada had no advantage of surprise. Word had come from the White Scars Falcon fleets that had harried it all the way down the path of its descent. The Lunar defences were ready and primed. The old face of grey-silver, which had looked down on autumn harvest and winter snow, hid beneath the scars and growths of tens of thousands of years of human occupation. Girding Luna was the Ring"}
{"text":"fleets in a coordinated barrage lasting twenty-one minutes. It struck the hulls of Abaddon's vanguard ships.\n\nThe armada had no advantage of surprise. Word had come from the White Scars Falcon fleets that had harried it all the way down the path of its descent. The Lunar defences were ready and primed. The old face of grey-silver, which had looked down on autumn harvest and winter snow, hid beneath the scars and growths of tens of thousands of years of human occupation. Girding Luna was the Ring, a great hoop of stone and metal spiked with docks and gun bastions. Ancient field generators and gravitic stabilisers held it steady and true. In its shadow lay the Circuit, a trench cut into the surface of the moon as though gouged by a god's chisel. Towers and domes dotted its surface. These were the fortresses of the Silent Sisters, and the Naval dynasties founded after the Pacification of Luna.\n\nThe moon had once been the birthplace of the Legions. The gene-looms of the Selenar had taken the genius born in the Emperor's laboratories and brought forth the armies of the Great Crusade. Millions of youths had entered its Halls of Making. Hundreds of thousands had emerged as the warriors of the new age. Space Marines. That time, though, had passed as the Crusade had progressed far beyond the bounds of Sol's light.\n\nThe gene-looms and their keepers had decayed and fallen from use and power. Luna had taken up a new role as base for the fleet and forces that watched over Terra. Here the Silent Sisterhood had made its fortress, the Assassin clades their training temples, and the Knights Errant and Chosen of the Sigillite their unnamed base of operations. But the true strength of Luna lay in the defences that spiralled out from the Ring in overlapping arcs. Its guns could target anything that moved into Terra's orbit. Before the war, it had the firepower to deal with any invasion that might reach the Throneworld. Five years of Rogal Dorn's care had added to that strength many times over. Here, moving amongst the defences, were ships of the Jovian fleets, the Imperial Fists, the Blood Angels, the Saturnine flotillas and the steelclads of Neptune.\n\nOn the other side of Terra lay the Phalanx, holding orbit above the world like a golden shadow to Luna's silver. A school of lesser ships clustered around the great fortress, glimmering like coins cast into a sunbeam.\n\nAbaddon had known what was waiting for him. The data supplied to Horus by the XX Legion had told him much, and distant optical analysis had supplied the rest. His was an armada of the finest ships under Horus' control, crewed and filled by the greatest of the XVI Legion, but still it would not be enough to break through Luna and take the skies of Terra. Not enough by far. That would take a force many times greater than that which now rode down into the guns of Luna.\n\nThis strike, deep within the circle of the Solar System, was a spear thrust against a cliff. If it struck home, it would shatter. It was a death mission, a task that could bring glory only to fanatics like Layak who craved martyrdom. Yet here he stood, listening to the War Oath shiver as it plunged down into the fire.\n\n'Do you trust me, my son?' Horus had said when he had given Abaddon command of the attack.\n\n'Of course, sire,' he had replied and bowed his head. It had been difficult even for him to stand in his father's presence. Light folded into shadow around the Warmaster, and voices whispered in the silence.\n\n'You are my truest son, Abaddon, more like me than perhaps any other. I have never failed, and I will not now.' Horus' hand touched Abaddon's shoulder. 'You understand how to strike this blow, I know. You know what is needed and why. This alone I trust to you. And you will not fail me, my son.'\n\nFire swallowed the tip of the armada. A ship died, and then another, and another. Torpedoes punched through armour and exploded. Metal skin became shrapnel. Black vacuum became bright flame. Abaddon watched and heard the oaths of his Legion brothers fill his ears, their last signals arriving seconds after the light of their deaths.\n\n'Martyrdom...' said Layak from his position on the bridge's command dais. Abaddon kept his eyes on the sea of fire and Luna waiting beyond. He blinked.\n\nHe was gasping, amnion-fluid pouring from his mouth as he struggled for air. The world around him was black. He vomited and tasted iron on his tongue.\n\n'Do you wish this to be the end?' came a voice. It rolled and echoed, bouncing off bare stone.\n\nAbaddon became still. The voice was not one of the gene-witches. It was strong in a way that made ice run down his spine. He had been in the black caverns for weeks, maybe months. He had tried to hold on to time but it had fled from him as he bled, and grew, and felt the scalpel arms and needle saws do their work. And between the flesh work, he floated in a sea of images and voices as the hypno-units deluged his mind with learning. When he slept, it was in a lightless pool, drowning in oxygen-infused amnion while his body healed and accepted what it was becoming. Every time he had woken, it had been to the grey and silver presences of the Selenar dragging him up from the water. This was the first time he had woken to pitch-dark.\n\n'Who are you?' he managed as a shiver rolled through him. The warm fluid was cold rather than warm, its sheen like ice on his skin.\n\n'You killed your father,' said the voice, 'or that is what I have been told.'\n\nAbaddon went still, trying to feel what direction it was coming from.\n\n'I did,' he said, and heard the words echo and re-echo in the blackness.\n\n'Are you ashamed of that?'\n\n'No,' said Abaddon. 'He was less than a man.'\n\n'He was a king.'\n\n'A crown means nothing.'\n\nLaughter, warm and rich in the dark.\n\n'And what does have meaning, son of Cthonia?' asked the voice.\n\n'Truth.'\n\n'Quite right,' said the voice.\n\nA pause in which he had just heard his breath slowing and the soft ripple of the pool around him.\n\n'Who are you?' asked Abaddon again.\n\n'I am the one who has come to bring you illumination.'\n\nA clatter of gears, a hiss of pistons and then light. Brilliant light, pouring down on him, swallowing his sight. He made to shut his eyes, but they were already diluting the glare, dragging it down to brilliance that illuminated but did not blind. He turned his head. The amniotic pool was circular and set into a floor of perfectly smooth black stone. The ceiling above was a dome of the same material. An iris had opened at its centre and a beam of light shone from above.\n\nPrimary starlight, said a whisper of new hypno-implanted knowledge at the back of his mind. This was the light of the sun shining down through a shaft through the surface of the moon. He felt radiation fizz across his skin.\n\nThere was only one other figure standing beside the pool, a huge figure in a black tunic. His head was bare, his features broad and strong. But it was his eyes that held Abaddon: dark, unblinking.\n\n'You are Lord Horus Lupercal,' said Abaddon.\n\nHorus nodded, not shifting his stare.\n\n'And you are the son of Cthonia of whom I have heard much...'\n\n'There are thousands of us, thousands and thousands. I am just one.'\n\nHorus gave a snort of laughter, then shrugged.\n\n'You will be amongst the last to be reborn here. The forging of our warriors will happen out there now, amongst the stars we conquer. For decades we have stepped from these pools into our new lives. Soon that will not be the case. We will take the name and the memory. Luna Wolves... that is our brotherhood. Wolves made by the moon, and raised from night to illumination...' The primarch reached out with an open hand to Abaddon. A mirror-coin glinted on the open palm.\n\n'My sons are not given to exaggeration, and Sejanus says that, of all this last generation, I should be here to welcome you into our brotherhood.'\n\nAbaddon looked at the hand of the being whose strength now flowed in his own veins.\n\n'My lord,' he said, and felt the truth of it in the space left by all that he had burned and left behind.\n\n'Rise, Abaddon,' said Horus.\n\n'Why does this feel like dying?'\n\n'Because it is. Because when you take my hand you will not be a son of Cthonia, or the heir of a dead king...'\n\n'I will be a Luna Wolf.'\n\n'Yes,' said Horus. 'You shall.'\n\nAnd then, from a place that he had forgotten, came another word, one that felt like an oath.\n\n'Father,' said Abaddon.\n\nHorus nodded once.\n\n'Will you serve me, Abaddon?' Horus asked.\n\n'I will,' he had replied, and taken the coin from Horus' proffered hand.\n\nAbaddon's eyelids blinked open.\n\nThe War Oath ran on into the fire. The ruin of the vanguard spun past, chewed pieces of metal tumbling, stray impacts exploding against shields. Behind it, the bulk of the armada followed it down.\n\nMartyrdom. Another word for suicide, for slaughter in the name of empty ideals.\n\n'Sub-spears, begin your assault runs,' Abaddon said.\n\nHundred-ship-strong formations cleaved from the armada's bulk in blade-shaped configurations. They curved out and began to unleash their own payloads of torpedoes and bomber wings.\n\nThe defence batteries of the Luna Ring and defence shoal fired in a coordinated volley. The first of the attackers' munitions exploded in the void.\n\nThe sub-spear fleets were moving to try to stab through the edge of the defending fleet. They fired their second volley. Boarding torpedoes flew free of tubes. Clouds of escort wings formed around them. The defenders assessed the manoeuvre and opened fire with macro-cannons. The volumes in the path of the boarding torpedo waves boiled with explosions.\n\nAlarms filled the inside of the torpedoes and bombers as they plunged into the blaze. Shrapnel ripped into armour panels. Torpedoes tore in two. Figures in sea-green armour tumbled into the fire and night.\n\nThe bulk of the armada was still holding around the War Oath, a column formation of a thousand ships. The ships of the defenders spread before it in a convex disc. Fire cut into the armada's flanks. Shi"}
{"text":"ro-cannons. The volumes in the path of the boarding torpedo waves boiled with explosions.\n\nAlarms filled the inside of the torpedoes and bombers as they plunged into the blaze. Shrapnel ripped into armour panels. Torpedoes tore in two. Figures in sea-green armour tumbled into the fire and night.\n\nThe bulk of the armada was still holding around the War Oath, a column formation of a thousand ships. The ships of the defenders spread before it in a convex disc. Fire cut into the armada's flanks. Shields flared, and the flash of cannons shone around the waning sickle of the moon in the night skies of Terra.\n\nBattle-barge Fortress of Eternity, Mars high orbit\n\nThe Guardians of Mars had watched the light of the attackers grow in the sky for days. First had come word from the Falcon fleets, winding their paths above and below the disc of the Solar System. The eyes of the Fourth Sphere fleet had turned to the abyss above them. Ocular and sensor arrays peered into the dark, sifting starlight and the dance of asteroids for the signs of the enemy. The first light of engines glimmered in the dark, fresh stars igniting beside those that had formed the patterns of heroes and monsters in ages long past.\n\nOn the surface of the planet beneath, silence had fallen, and stillness settled across the red plains. For over half a decade, rocket launches and beams of energy had criss-crossed the thin atmosphere as the disciples of Kelbor-Hal's New Mechanicum threw fire at the blockade fleet. Mars had blistered with explosions and swum with the dust of fallout as the factions on the surface tore at each other. Now, silence and stillness spread across its surface, as though the planet of war was holding an inhaled breath.\n\nIn Mars' orbit, the Fourth Sphere fleet reformed. It was the largest of the four defence fleets in the Solar System. Monitor craft from the Solar Auxilia and the Jovian Void Clans bulked its numbers, and with them were the great orbital assault and bombardment craft of the Imperial Fists. The gun-studded bulk of the Blade of Inwit lay beside the Blade Absolute, Fist of Judgement, Truth's Warden and Tyrant Bane. Sub-fleets of gunboats, destroyers and lance cruisers orbited the largest vessels. For years they had fought and held the enemy to the surface of the Red Planet; now they broke that cordon.\n\nOn the battle-barge Fortress of Eternity, Lord Castellan Camba Diaz waited. He had recalled all his forces from the surface of Mars. Raiding expeditions had been pulled back. Reconnaissance companies had shed their wargear and taken up the weapons of void war. Lexmechanics and magos-ordinators zeroed in guns. Minelayers swept the volumes of space that the enemy would have to move through. Faint and broken signals reached out to the Falcon fleets of the White Scars that were tracking the enemy as they closed on the planet.\n\nCamba Diaz listened to the scratched, crackling words alone in his arming chamber. Other than the sounds of the signals, he waited in silence. That was his way, the way of the planet that bore him, the people that had raised him and the Legion that had been his life. Inwit, by turns burning and dark, had been a remorseless teacher and cold parent to men of stone who bore the burdens and pains that others would not. He thought of all those who could have faced this moment. Pollux, thought dead at Phall, now half a galaxy away; Sigismund, sent to watch the edge of night with a sword in his hand; Halbract; Rann - all of them brothers, all of them warriors that another age would have made masters of war.\n\nRogal Dorn had told him why the Fourth Sphere command was his, though.\n\n'Temperament,' the Praetorian had said, and Camba Diaz had thought that he had understood his lord's meaning. In the years of conflict around and on the Red Planet - sapping endless war, thousands of cuts drawing blood bit by bit - he had felt his stillness and patience become the foundation of his command. His temperament allowed him to bear those trials and rise to conflict each day afresh. He had thought that was what Dorn had meant. He thought he had understood his lord. He had not.\n\nTemperament... the stone-soul of Inwit, and the will to look up at the stars falling from the sky and not blink. This was a moment that tested temperament, the moment when the heavens were falling.\n\nThe lights of the descending fleet grew. Auspex readings and reports from the Falcon fleets began to build a picture of what each growing mote of light was, of what was coming for them - seven thousand ships counted at an estimate...\n\nThey were not Legion ships either. These were ships of the Mechanicum, each one a relic and expression of their master's power and knowledge. All of them were disciples of the new path of the Machine Cult. Somehow, this new creed had spread far beyond Mars, beyond the Solar System. It had infected forge worlds and tech-fanes and remade those that embraced it into something new and terrible. The things that they made were not mysteries or wonders; they were abominations. Machines that broke reality, and creatures that were neither flesh nor machine yet lived - all these things came from their craft. Time and simple sentiment had given them a name that followed them across the stars and clung to the shadow of their passing. The Dark Mechanicum they were named, and now they had returned to claim the seat of their empire.\n\nThe first shot was theirs. Fired from beyond the range of Camba Diaz's weapons. A beam of cold light a hundred metres wide bored down through the dark. The ships in its path tried to move, but the beam twitched and coiled through the void like a snake. It struck the cruiser First Truth. The energy flowed over its void shields and hull like water around a stone. On board, its crew had seconds to watch as their system readouts spiked. Then the flow of energy sank through the void shields and into the ship's hull. Every system and machine cut out. Light vanished. Engines died.\n\nThere was a moment of silence filled with the breaths of the crew. Then every machine on the First Truth screamed. Cogitators melted. Power governors exploded. Vox-processors howled static. The ship came apart, components scattering out as gravitic generators reversed. Layers of metal and stone peeled back until its reactors spun free, arcing with power, an exposed heart still beating in an opened chest. Then the reactors overloaded and a wave of burning light tore through the broken hull.\n\nThe beam snapped across the void, seeking another victim even as ships burned thrusters to move out of its way.\n\nThe Fourth Sphere fleet began to loose torpedoes and maximum-range shots at the oncoming Dark Mechanicum. The guns of all their ships spoke and the space between the two fleets became a blaze.\n\nRockets and beams of energy rose from Mars towards the ships in close orbit. Its thin atmosphere flashed and shivered. Craft built in the forges of the fallen magi rose from caverns hidden under the Red Planet's crust. They were things from the fever dreams of tortured machines. Wings of brass feathers spread from under cases of steel and black glass. Tails and necks uncoiled from fuselages, and multicoloured flame roared from engines.\n\nThe ships of the Fourth Sphere fleet watching the planet opened fire with torrents of shells that exploded in low orbit. Waves of haywire energy and shrapnel ripped swarms of machines apart and sent them tumbling back down to the red dust below. Some remade themselves as they fell, flame-wreathed metal knitting together, wreckage gathering into new shapes that clawed back up into the sky.\n\nLong gone was the silence that had wrapped Camba Diaz as he waited for this battle. Every ship and every channel echoed with the shaking roar of war. He heard it all, a deluge of sound: shouts echoing over breaking vox-channels, orders given with last breaths, the metallic howl of beast-machines rising through the air. Shells and munitions were exploding amongst the ships now. Scrap code bored into communications signals and spilled over into sensor units.\n\nCamba Diaz listened, then cut the links and spoke to the warriors that had followed him through half a decade of war.\n\n'Break them,' he said, his voice not loud, but weighted, a promise as much as a command.\n\nChaos spread through the defenders' battle line. A wave of torpedoes, launched from a quartet of monitor ships, detonated as they exited their tubes, ripping the ships apart. The macro-carrier Daedalus vented atmosphere from two-thirds of its decks as scrap code flooded its cogitator systems. Squadrons vanished in spheres of cold light.\n\nBut Camba Diaz's ships had faced and fought the forces of the false tech-priests many times. They heard the word of their commander and rose to meet their enemies without pause.\n\nWithin sight of safety\n\nOccult resonance\n\nOld friends\n\nFreighter ship Antius, Jovian Caul\n\nMersadie held her breath for a moment, eyes closed, letting sound recede. The reek of blood and ash was thick on her tongue.\n\nBlood on matted fur...\n\nTeeth...\n\nVengeful Spirit...\n\nMaloghurst's eyes looking at her...\n\n'Loken, these are civilians.'\n\nShe released the breath and opened her eyes. Frightened faces turned towards her. Lights blinked on consoles. Hands trembled where they rested on levers and dials. In her niche, Chi-32-Beta was shivering in her cocoon of cables. The blood had clotted but the enginseer had curled her body into a tight ball. The rest of the crew stood, waiting. There were dock officers, a shuttle pilot, a bonded maintenance adept and landing guides. She had no idea if they knew enough to control a ship in the void for even a brief time. She had no idea whether or not they would fall apart when the next slice of the future fell. She had no idea if she would fall along with them. She thought of the hundreds of people still in the rest of the ship, of Noon and Mori huddled together in their stateroom.\n\n'Go,' she said. At the helm, the big pilot called Gade nodd"}
{"text":"were dock officers, a shuttle pilot, a bonded maintenance adept and landing guides. She had no idea if they knew enough to control a ship in the void for even a brief time. She had no idea whether or not they would fall apart when the next slice of the future fell. She had no idea if she would fall along with them. She thought of the hundreds of people still in the rest of the ship, of Noon and Mori huddled together in their stateroom.\n\n'Go,' she said. At the helm, the big pilot called Gade nodded and tensed to pull down a brass lever. His skin was ice-pale.\n\n'Reactor output reaching peak,' said Chi-32-Beta. Gade pulled the lever on the helm console. Lights flared across the bridge. The deck lurched as the reactor dumped its bloated heart into the void, and the ship burned forwards.\n\nBehind it, the hunter ship that had been watching the Antius fired without hesitation. Las-beams stitched the dark. The Antius began to corkscrew, as the hands on its helm fought to control it. Shouts and confusion filled the bridge. Machines were screaming. Some of those at consoles froze with terror while others screamed, their eyes wide as fresh banks of red warnings lit. Gade was staring at the helm console, his mouth open like a fish drowning in air. Shouts roared louder than the machines. That chaos saved the ship. As the hunter's guns fired again, the freighter's wild course pulled it away from the shots that would have torn its hull apart.\n\nBut the hunter was accelerating. It was a small ship, smaller even than the Antius. A tapered block of metal a little over two hundred metres long, half of it was engines; it was fast. The Antius tumbled on. Before it, the glittering sea of the Jovian Caul beckoned. The hunter fired again, and this time its shots struck the keel of the freighter's hull. Metal and ceramite plating burned away. Gas and bilge fluid sprayed out. The clamour of panic on the Antius' bridge warred with the shriek of sirens. In her tangle of cables, Chi-32-Beta flinched as bulkheads locked off the damaged portion of the ship. The hunter cut its fire and burned closer, eating up the distance.\n\n'We... The ship...' gasped Chi-32-Beta. Sparks were flowing over the enginseer. The smell of burning wire and cooking flesh rose. 'It can't go on. Its heart and spirit are burning...'\n\n'We must go on or die,' said Mersadie.\n\nThe tech-priest spasmed, limbs thrashing. Arcs of charge whipped out from consoles. Gade juddered in place at the helm, hands locked to the controls.\n\nOut in the void, the hunter closed. It was close enough now that its targeters could hold a lock no matter what its prey did. It charged its guns. Power built in turbo laser reservoirs.\n\nThe Antius rolled over. Micro-debris rattled off its hull. A piece of rock hit the hunter and gouged a crater in its armour. Jupiter's outer cloud of orbital detritus began to ring off both ships like rain.\n\nThe hunter held course. Targeting systems locked firing solutions. Gun turrets swung. It had been following this prey since the first hours after the destruction of the prison ship off Uranus. It had tracked it through the fires of battle and across the dark gulfs between the outer planets. For all those days it had been silent, almost every system cycled down so that it ran cold and dark, without heed to anything besides its prey. As it closed for the final kill, it reached out across the dark to the ships and stations of Jupiter. It knew that the first of the enemy was not far behind and that Jupiter's defenders could not risk waiting to see if ships coming from the void were friend or foe. Clearance codes flew out to silence the guns that would be turning to greet them. It would make its kill and then burn on past Jupiter, its duty done.\n\nIt closed the final few thousand kilometres, its course spiralling to match the Antius'. Larger pieces of drift-debris rattled from them. Chunks of rock and old shards of dead ships puffed to dust on the hunter's shields. On the Antius' bridge, the hull was singing with the plink-ring of impacts. People were weeping. Gade had slumped over the controls. His hands were charred black by electro-discharge, but somehow he was still breathing, still holding course.\n\n'Hold,' she heard a voice call, clear and strong. It took her a second to realise that it was hers. 'Have faith...'\n\nThe hunter slid into its final firing position. The lights of the Jovian Caul were brighter than the stars now. It locked its guns to firing solutions.\n\nThe Antius' engines sputtered.\n\nThe hunter loosed its execution shot.\n\nA destroyer came out of the dark and tore the hunter from the night in a volley of macro-cannon fire. Rings of plasma erupted from its hull, sending the pieces of its corpse shooting out as they melted.\n\nThe destroyer slammed through the debris of its kill. Screams and cacophonous sounds rolled out from it on every vox-and signal-channel. It had once been a ship of war and conquest, but the years of its betrayal had stripped it of that divinity. It had come to the Solar System in answer to the carrion promise of war and had soared ahead of the ships of the Iron Warriors as they broke the orbits of Uranus. Hunger, caprice and the will of the power that had created it had pulled it on and on towards Jupiter.\n\nBlossom-pink, acidic-green, turquoise, orange, purple and tox-yellow swirled and clashed across its hull. Symbols etched by the claws of things that lived in nightmares swam across its length. Oily dust shook from it like pollen from a summer flower. Its crew were gone, flesh and bone melded into the fabric of the ship. Their voices lived on, though, singing and screaming into the night as the ship hunted. It shivered as the fire of its kill touched its hull. Its howls became shrieks of delight.\n\nOn the bridge of the Antius, screams and wails burst from every vox-speaker. The hull vibrated through high notes like a struck glass. In the holds and on the bridge, people fell to the ground, blood running from their ears as the taste of roses, honey and ash filled their mouths. On and on the sounds echoed. Mersadie felt it slice through her, felt it touch the edge of things she had tried to remember but wanted to forget.\n\n'What is this?' she had asked.\n\n'Nothing,' said a deep voice from behind her, and she had turned from Maloghurst to see another set of eyes looking down at her from above and a smile that held no kindness. 'Nothing at all...'\n\nThen the voice from her dream of Keeler, strong and undoubtable.\n\n'You must reach him. You must tell him before it is too late. Remember! Remember what you have seen!'\n\nAnd the circles of symbols rose before Mersadie, no longer stone and metal but burning in the air.\n\nAnd the howl of the multicoloured destroyer as it broke from the flames and turned towards the Antius was the roar of guns in her memory and the shriek of the oncoming storm in a dream that she could not wake from.\n\nAnd then it was gone.\n\nThe many-coloured ship turned, swooped past the Antius, and dived back into the dark.\n\nThe howls died in the throats of the vox-horns and left those on the bridge of the Antius shaking and weeping, but alive.\n\n'What...' breathed Gade. The man was on his hands and knees, trembling like a whipped dog. 'What just happened?'\n\nMersadie looked back at Gade, at the console lights blinking in time to alarms that seemed soft in the shadow of the sounds that had just passed.\n\n'I don't know,' she said. 'Just get us to a dock around Jupiter.'\n\nChi-32-Beta's head rose suddenly.\n\n'We are being targeted...' gasped the enginseer.\n\n'By what?' she asked.\n\n'Defence platforms, ships, other vessels. I can't identify them...'\n\nMersadie felt cold realisation sink through the space left by the brief flutter of hope that they would make it to a place of safety. They would not; they would die on the edge of survival.\n\n'We are being hailed...' buzzed the tech-priest.\n\nThe vox-speakers gave a bark of distortion and then a voice came from them, speaking through the static.\n\n'Freighter vessel Antius, confirm you are carrying the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton. I repeat, confirm you are carrying the remembrancer Mersadie Oliton.'\n\nFaces turned towards her. The frame of the ship was still humming with the power that pushed it through the debris cloud towards the waiting guns of the Jovian defences.\n\nMersadie was still, frozen in place. Her limbs were numb.\n\n'Reply...' she said at last.\n\n'Vox-channel open,' stuttered Chi-32-Beta. The speakers buzzed again.\n\nMersadie swallowed.\n\n'This is...' she began, and then the words stopped on her tongue. After all this time...\n\n'I am here,' she said at last. 'This is Mersadie Oliton.'\n\n'Cut your engines,' said the voice that had spoken before. 'We will bring you in.'\n\nMersadie closed her eyes for a second and nodded. Inside her head, she thought she could see the image of Keeler smiling at her.\n\n'Thank you...' she said. 'Thank you, old friend.'\n\nThe vox clicked, as though the speaker on the other end had paused for a second before speaking again.\n\n'You are safe now,' said the voice of Garviel Loken.\n\nComet shrine, Inner System Gulf\n\nThe ghosts of Unification led Ahriman through the places where they had died. The transitions from one memory to another were abrupt, as sharp as the slice of a final second from a thread of life.\n\nHe walked a maze of ice beneath the Antarctic domes, watching a woman fire her last bullets into an oncoming wall of chimeric flesh and fur... He was striding in an exo-rig across the burning seas of Hattusa-B... He was looking down the side of the Truscan Hive. Fires burned at the mountain's foot and wound up its sides, shining bright in the shadow cast by its bulk. The wind was strong and held the scent of the inferno that had flooded the mountain's lower levels. It was not a mountain, of course. It was a city. Down at its root, far beneath the level of the land, were structures made so far back in the past that their makers had known Terra when it was green and blue and st"}
{"text":"burning seas of Hattusa-B... He was looking down the side of the Truscan Hive. Fires burned at the mountain's foot and wound up its sides, shining bright in the shadow cast by its bulk. The wind was strong and held the scent of the inferno that had flooded the mountain's lower levels. It was not a mountain, of course. It was a city. Down at its root, far beneath the level of the land, were structures made so far back in the past that their makers had known Terra when it was green and blue and still dreamed of serenity under the gaze of its sun. The cities that had been its seeds had names that resonated in the consciousness even though their histories were forgotten: Azinc, Opolis, Riance. Now its fate would be to be torn apart and have its bones folded into a structure that would be called a palace, but was larger than the empires of mankind's youth.\n\n'You died here,' said Ahriman, 'in the taking of the Truscan hive...'\n\nBeside him, the mute image of a bond-warrior in the Balgran tek-tribes looked at him. The man was covered with the blood of the wounds that had killed him. He nodded to Ahriman.\n\n'I am sorry,' said Ahriman. 'I cannot remain, but I will remember.' The bloodied man nodded again, then turned away.\n\nAhriman looked out for a second more, hearing the distant thump of rockets pounding the strongpoints on the hive's north face. It had taken the Thunder Legions and the armies of Unity a month to break Anak, but when the end came it had been swift and seen hundreds of thousands dead in the turning of a single day.\n\nThere is no time for this. Ignis' sending cut through the psychometric vision, smearing its clarity. The smoke-hazed sky above froze, and the image of the hive blurred.\n\nThere is time enough, replied Ahriman.\n\nThere are approximately one million, seven hundred and forty sets of individual remains within this... facility. To extract psychometric impressions from them all will take-\n\nI am aware of the factors involved, sent Ahriman.\n\nThen you know that it is not possible.\n\nI do, replied Ahriman.\n\nThen why-\n\nBecause it matters. Ahriman straightened and looked up again at the image that he had pulled from the psy-resonance of one of the skulls lining the walls of the comet shrine. In the end, everything is dust - but what we do before we become dust matters. What things were matters.\n\nIf you say so.\n\nAhriman turned and the image collapsed into dust, and then folded into the reality of a room of bone. The central chamber of the comet shrine had already been stained by blood and battle. Bolt shells had ripped skulls from walls and torn carved femurs and vertebrae from the supports of the high, domed roof. The Imperial Fists had cleared away the debris when they had finished their purge.\n\nAhriman could feel the disgust of the sons of Dorn at what the Word Bearers had done to this place. Their anger lingered in the marks left by their bolters and blades. Those thoughts and emotions sang in the churn of the shrine's past, present and future. It was created to remember the dead and the sacrifices they had made in life, but it had been remade into something else by the Word Bearers, something more terrible and profound than a place for dry bones and memories to rest.\n\nIn the decades of their stewardship, the Word Bearers had spilled blood in the comet shrine to honour their new-found gods. They had cut subtle sigils into its substance and saturated its shadows with malignancy. Threads of the warp had wormed into the bones, feeding on the memories of the dead. Whispered prayers had rooted in the gloom, locked inside the comet as it turned around the sun.\n\nEven when Sigismund and the Imperial Fists had come and killed those Word Bearers left here, their actions had only fed the pool of occult potential lying just under the skin of reality. The Word Bearers' deaths had been an act of martyrdom in service to the powers of the warp, and, whether Ahriman thought that belief naive or not, the act had power. The comet shrine resonated with ritual significance. Whispers and vortices of emotion trailed behind it as it pulled across the heavens.\n\nWhether what the Word Bearers had done was driven by chance or foresight did not matter. They had created a tool that could be used by more able hands.\n\nAhriman turned to the centre of the chamber. The stone sphere of the solatarium floated above the floor. Arcs of ghost-light whipped from its surface and earthed in the floor and ceiling. The dimensions of the room swam as he looked at it, and he had to force his mind to stay balanced. Power was building in the immaterium, taking shape and form second by second. Around the chamber, at the eight points of the compass, the pitiful cargo brought in the black containers knelt on the floor. Three thousand and twenty-four mortals. Each of them had a spark of connection to the warp. All of them had been selected from the holds of Black Ships hunted and taken by Horus' forces. There were scions of planetary rulers, beggars, men, women, the kind, the corrupt and the desperate. Iron, brass and silver chains held them to the deck while silent Word Bearers moved amongst them, painting their scalps and faces with ash ink. Some began to drool blood as the sigils marked their skin. Ahriman's fellow Thousand Sons stood between the lines of mortals, breathing calm and passivity into their minds. Light and shadow was beginning to fume off them, hazing reality overhead.\n\nHe thought of the sacrifices he had made in pursuit of the truth, of salvation for his father, things that weighed true only when balanced against the greatest of needs. Was this need enough for the atrocity they would commit? He was not sure, but he was sure that it was too late to make another choice.\n\nAhriman breathed out. A ghost-image of his thought puffed into being in the air, spread feathered wings, and then dissolved before it could take flight. He reached his mind out to Menkaura, at the centre of the solatarium. It was like calling through a rising gale.\n\nHow long until conjunction?\n\nIt is approaching. Ahriman could feel the effort in Menkaura's reply. Each house aligns. The orbs of the heavens sing, but not all... Blood still remains to be shed. The Queen of Heaven wears a crown of growing fire. The Water Bearer pours his bloody cup into the night. But the Wolf Coin still shines clear. The wheel turns. The sands run...\n\nImages flowed over the connection with Menkaura's mind. Ahriman saw Pluto, its face and moons sliding from cold reality to silver coins set in the sockets of a skull. Sigils in tongues never spoken by men ran through the dark, leading the inner eye on a spiral. He saw the symbols of the old zodiac, of apocalyptic calendars from the dawn of history: the twinned faces, the serpent that circles the fire, the keys of sleep, all dancing with the substance of smoke against the stars that were their eyes. All of the grand mechanism was moving, its parts aligning, resonating with each other, pulling tighter and tighter.\n\nThe fires of battle fed it. Fear and the blood of the dead drove it on. Even the desperate hopes and defiance of the defenders added to its momentum in the warp. It existed nowhere but linked to everything - to every moment of the past, every thought of the future and every deed unborn. It was the most breathtaking and terrible thing Ahriman had ever comprehended. He saw beyond it, to the ships swarming in the warp, holding still in currents that would normally have torn them apart. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them, great and small. Daemonic creatures circled them, colour and form shifting and changing.\n\nHe drew his mind back, felt himself sway slightly as reality washed the vision away.\n\nHe was standing on the shrine again. The Apostle was standing on the other side of the chamber, his blank helm turned so that Ahriman was certain that eyes were fixed upon him behind the smooth bronze.\n\n'The moment of alignment is close,' he said into the vox. The Apostle nodded once.\n\n'As was written.'\n\n'As long as the final elements come together, that is,' replied Ahriman, hearing the coldness in his voice.\n\n'Have faith, sorcerer. Not all is art and design. The gods ordain that all be done. Have faith...'\n\nAhriman did not answer but turned away.\n\nBring the ships in. Begin pulling our brothers out. We must not be here when the end of this begins.\n\nAnd the Word Bearers? asked Ignis.\n\nAhriman looked at the crimson-clad warriors moving amongst the chained psykers.\n\nSomething tells me that they do not intend on becoming martyrs.\n\nUnlike Menkaura, stated Ignis. Ahriman felt his thoughts twitch back to his eyeless brother, now locked in the stone sphere of the solatarium. But of course that is different. He will have the comfort that his memory matters to you.\n\nMake the ships ready, sent Ahriman again, after a long pause.\n\nAs you will it, replied Ignis and then withdrew his thoughts, leaving Ahriman to the voices of the shrine's ghosts.\n\nAhriman relives the echoes of the past.\n\nOn grey wings\n\nSpear thrust\n\nAlignment\n\nUnnamed Warship, Inner System Gulf\n\nThe grey ship flew. It left the Caul of Jupiter. None of the guns it passed turned to follow it; none of the ships holding station moved to mark its passing. Auspexes that looked at it found their augurs turning away, their questions answered by cipher codes that removed even the beginning of the question. On it flew, grey in the night, a shadow at the edge of sight, into the dark, towards the glimmer that was the sun.\n\nMersadie looked back at Jupiter as the gas giant shrank. An enhanced pane of vision had opened in front of the circular viewport. She could see the lights of void engagements. The ships of the invaders were coming from the outer system in growing force now.\n\n'The vanguard,' said Loken softly, coming to stand beside her. She had not heard him enter. No hiss of door pistons or thump of locks, and his armour followed his movements without a sound.\n\nThe chamber that they waited in wa"}
{"text":"t was the sun.\n\nMersadie looked back at Jupiter as the gas giant shrank. An enhanced pane of vision had opened in front of the circular viewport. She could see the lights of void engagements. The ships of the invaders were coming from the outer system in growing force now.\n\n'The vanguard,' said Loken softly, coming to stand beside her. She had not heard him enter. No hiss of door pistons or thump of locks, and his armour followed his movements without a sound.\n\nThe chamber that they waited in was small, but with a high ceiling and a lone viewport set into its wall. It was a small and quiet space, a refuge of solitude on a ship of whispers. The servitors that she had seen had been hooded in grey, and moved with fluidity and in silence. The ship itself did not growl or tremble with power but slid through the night seemingly without effort, gathering speed in silence.\n\nMersadie looked around at Loken, who nodded at the image of the orb of Jupiter.\n\n'The enemy have loosed jackals to harry our lines. The true force is still crossing the gulf from Uranus. It will be in battle range in hours.' He let out a breath. 'And then those lights will seem just the sparks falling before the inferno comes.' She twitched and he looked around to meet her gaze. 'The humans you brought from Uranus will be free of the planet's sphere by then. They have been put on ships, and those ships sent out amongst the asteroid colonies.'\n\n'Thank you,' she said, quietly.\n\n'It may not save them,' said Loken. 'There are no safe places any more. But you brought them as far as you could.'\n\nMersadie did not answer but looked around. Mori and Noon lay curled together beneath a blanket under the light of a glow-globe. They had refused to leave her, and so had come with her onto the grey ship. They had slept most of the time since then; perhaps they had succumbed to exhaustion and shock, or perhaps the sense that they had finally reached a place of safety had given them the gift of rest. That gift had not been given to Mersadie.\n\nThings like the shadows of wolves had been waiting for her during the few moments in which she had closed her eyes.\n\nPerhaps it was the presence of Loken, or the quiet of the ship, but she found memories coming to her, sharp and unasked for. Maloghurst the Twisted looking down at her, his eyes hard, the corridors of the Vengeful Spirit, a smell of blood and smoke.\n\nShe shivered, and blinked. Loken was still looking at her, eyes steady, face unmoving. For a second, in the reflected light of Jupiter, he looked almost human.\n\n'How long?' she asked, trying to suppress the tremor running through her nerves.\n\n'There are no ships swifter than the one we stand on,' he said. 'It will not take us long, but we may arrive to find that the enemy has made that journey, too. There are traitor forces moving into the inner system from above the orbital disc.'\n\nMersadie glanced back at the sleeping children.\n\n'It's not too late,' she said. 'We still have time. Not much, but some.'\n\n'How do you know?' he asked.\n\n'I can feel it,' she replied. 'It is like the cogs of a device turning just on the edge of hearing. It is still turning...'\n\nLoken opened his mouth to say something...\n\n'Captain Loken,' said Maloghurst. The image of the Warmaster's equerry turned its gaze on her. 'He trusts you.'\n\n'I am a remembrancer. I am recording his experiences for posterity.'\n\n'Remembrance... A strange idea to take to the stars, I have always thought.'\n\n'I don't understand.' She thought of looking around but that cold gaze held her. 'I thought I was to be returned to my quarters,' she said.\n\nShe had been taken from the training decks on the Vengeful Spirit by the bodyguard Maggard and a squad of soldiers. Sindermann and the others had been peeled away under their own guard, but Maggard had stayed with her, leading her through passages and corridors that she had not seen before. After a while he had stopped, and he had gestured at a door leading off the corridor.\n\nMersadie, the blood roaring in her ears, had not moved until Maggard shoved her forwards.\n\n'Tell me,' said Maloghurst, his power armour buzzing as he shifted. 'Does he trust you?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Does Captain Loken trust you?'\n\n'I... I don't-'\n\n'He favours you, talks to you, shares his remembrances with you. I think that he does trust you a great deal, Mersadie Oliton.'\n\nThe equerry to the Warmaster had smiled, and unwilled she began to turn to run. A hand on her shoulder stopped her dead. Heavy fingers squeezed with the smallest amount of pressure and the promise of bone-breaking force.\n\n'You see, Mistress Oliton,' said Maloghurst, 'we do not trust him, at all.'\n\n'Is there something wrong?' asked Loken.\n\nMersadie found herself leaning against the armourglass of the viewport. Distant explosions flashed like tiny stars under her fingers. She shook her head, swallowing a breath that tasted cold in her throat.\n\n'Memories,' she said, blinking. 'Just memories...'\n\nBut that memory of Maloghurst had not happened, said a voice in the back of her mind. What she had just remembered had never happened. She had been taken from the training chambers and returned to her quarters at Maloghurst's orders. It had not happened...\n\n'Memories of what?' he asked.\n\n'You, Sindermann, the Vengeful Spirit, how this all began.'\n\nHe looked like he was going to ask a question, when a light blinked in the collar of his armour. She heard a low chime, and the clatter of a vox-link connecting and decrypting. Loken turned his head to listen to words only he could hear.\n\n'So ordered,' he said after a second, and began to move towards the door. 'A major engagement is in progress around Luna. We will have to chart a course to skirt it.'\n\nMersadie nodded, still trying to grasp the strand of the memory that had risen in her mind. It was fading though, sinking back beneath the surface of the immediate, slipping through her grasp... There was something she had forgotten...\n\n'Loken,' she said as he moved away. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. 'There was a Navigator on the prison ship who escaped with me. I have not seen him since we reached the Caul - was he amongst the refugees that got off the ship?'\n\nLoken gave a small shake of his head.\n\n'I do not know. I saw no Navigator, but it is possible.'\n\nA laugh came to her lips as a thought struck her.\n\n'You might have known him, before I mean, during the crusade. He was a Navigator on the Thunder Break, part of the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet - Nilus Yeshar.'\n\n'I never met a Navigator of that name,' he said, and shrugged.\n\n'The universe is smaller than it seems sometimes, isn't it.'\n\nLoken frowned. 'Is there a reason he would try to hide from you, and then flee without telling you?'\n\nShe thought of Nilus, of how the Imperium had tried to imprison and kill him ever since he had returned to it.\n\n'Every reason,' she said.\n\nThe Phalanx, Terran orbit\n\nThe Phalanx moved by the will of Rogal Dorn. Greater than any ship of the Imperium, it was a moon of gilded armour and stone. Gun-fortresses rose in mountain ranges on its spine, and launch bays dotted its surface. A skin of atmosphere and ash from its engines surrounded it. Sunlight gleamed from the glass set in the cities borne on its back. It was not a ship; that was too small a title for it. It was war and empire given form and set amongst the stars.\n\nKilometre-long cones of fire stretched in its wake as its engines began to pull it up the incline of Terra's gravity well. Its court of ships came with it: the Regis Astra, the Eagle of Inwit and the Noon Star, warships all, and around them the attendant destroyers and strike cruisers that held the honour of being heralds to the empress of war.\n\nSu-Kassen fancied she could feel a tremble as the great ship began to move. She and half of the command staff had relocated with Rogal Dorn to the Phalanx's command bastion. It was a fortress grown from a greater fortress; a third of a kilometre long, the command bastion rose in two towers of black stone linked by bridges of plasteel and marble. The bridge, command-seat of the ship was the aftward tower; the forward and broader of the two was the strategium. From the bridge, the chosen captain of the vessel commanded the Phalanx's movement. From the strategium, the master of a Legion commanded crusades and conquests. At this moment, Rogal Dorn stood in the strategium, linked by vox and hololith with Shipmaster Sora on the bridge.\n\nThe strategium itself hung in tiers from a domed roof above a plane of crystal, over a hololithic pit thirty metres deep at its midpoint. Blue light flooded the space, rising and rippling from the tactical projections emanating from the pit. Command staff, tech-priests and Legion warriors looked down into the bowl of light, focusing on portions of the displays through lenses and screens. Dorn, Su-Kassen, Archamus and a clutch of senior command staff stood on a platform directly above the holo-pit's centre. Huscarls in Indominatus Terminator plate stood amongst the tiered galleries, immobile and watchful. Most of the staff in the strategium had been here when Dorn and his retinue arrived. A mirror of those in the Bhab Bastion's Grand Borealis Strategium, they had assumed their duties seamlessly.\n\n'Signal the fleet elements in Terran orbit,' said Dorn as data-lenses rose around the platform edge. 'All forces to integrate to our command. All are to stand by for engagement order.'\n\nHe had given the order to move his command to the Phalanx two hours before, and the transports had been in the air and reaching for the heavens minutes later. He had not given his reasons, but Su-Kassen had seen half of the catalyst and guessed the rest in his words.\n\nShe had wondered if it was now, after the weeks of feeling the darkness and the threat of fire rolling closer, that he needed to take up the sword, not in principle but in fact. The fires of war could be seen as Luna rose in the night sky above the Palace. And so now, Rogal Dorn would throw the "}
{"text":"rs before, and the transports had been in the air and reaching for the heavens minutes later. He had not given his reasons, but Su-Kassen had seen half of the catalyst and guessed the rest in his words.\n\nShe had wondered if it was now, after the weeks of feeling the darkness and the threat of fire rolling closer, that he needed to take up the sword, not in principle but in fact. The fires of war could be seen as Luna rose in the night sky above the Palace. And so now, Rogal Dorn would throw the traitors back into the dark with his own hand.\n\nThe pit of holo-light began to flare and boil. Su-Kassen began to syphon off information from the wider battle sphere, stretching her awareness out to the engagements around Mars, folding in the intelligence from Uranus, Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter.\n\nThe Solar System was ablaze. Battle data spiralled and multiplied as she watched. In places where there was need, she issued orders that would commit ships to battle; in others she pulled back what she could and watched the loss increments rise and rise. This was a war now measured in casualty estimates, lives spent by the thousand - because if they were not then what life would remain for anyone? This was her role, her duty, while Dorn turned his will to where it was needed, to the point where it could tip the scales of battle.\n\nAn alert light blinked at the edge of her sight from where the personal signal channel controls rose in a pillar of brushed bronze.\n\n'Admiral,' said the officer a second later, 'my lord Praetorian.' She turned. 'There is a ship closing at speed. It bears the clearance of the Lord Regent.' Dorn was turning to look now, too. 'It says that it brings someone you must see.'\n\n'Who?' asked Dorn.\n\nBattle-barge War Oath, Luna\n\nThe defenders knew the weapons of their attackers. The protectors of Luna, the veteran regiments, the ships of Su-Kassen's fleets and the warriors of the VII and IX Legions knew that every thrust and manoeuvre of the assault had one aim: to allow the Sons of Horus to bring their legionary forces to bear on the surface and in the sub-surface warrens of the moon. Centuries ago, when the same Legion had spearheaded the conquest of Luna for the Emperor, the same had been true. The difference now was that Luna was not defended by the weapons of a gene-cult of Old Night, but by the arms and might of the Imperium. And those defences held the assault to the vacuum above.\n\nFire circled the moon. Rolling impacts struck void shields and peeled them back in flashes of light. Chains of plasma annihilators mounted on the Luna Ring spoke in sequence, one gun cooling while another poured sun-bright energy into the enemy ships. Swarms of bombers and interceptors spun amongst the fields of fire, thousands of tiny battles squeezed between exchanges that burned the dark like the fury of ancient gods.\n\nThirty Solar Auxilia bombers dodged through the grids of fire surrounding the Sons of Horus bombardment vessel Chieftain of the Red Blade. They were about to unleash their payloads just as a broadside struck the ship's void shields. Arcs of discharge from the collapsing shields overloaded the bombers' systems. They slewed off course, ploughing into the gun ports of the ship. Their payloads detonated. Fire punched into the Chieftain of the Red Blade's gunnery decks and cooked off a macro shell being hauled towards a breech. Explosions ripped through the ship from the inside.\n\nThe Blood Angels ships Red Tear and Lamentation of War cut wide of the close formations of the main fleets and came about to unleash boarding torpedoes into the flanks of ships vying for the gulf between Luna and Terra. Each torpedo carried ten sons of Sanguinius. All had painted a portion of their armour with the black saltire of a death oath. Each knew that he would fall in this fight, and that his oath of moment would be his last. The twin ships fired as their torpedoes ran on to their targets. Plasma and macro-shells struck the attacking ships just as they were trying to find range on the closing ordnance. The torpedoes struck home and stabbed deep. Melta charges in their nose cones detonated. Walls and bulkheads became vapour. The Blood Angels squads charged out of the torpedoes. Orange light caught wings of gold and silver worked into their red armour.\n\nThey had chosen their targets well - ships carrying Sons of Horus from the 21st, 345th and 71st Companies. The Blood Angels met their traitor brothers. Blades lit with lightning. Bolters poured fire into armoured bodies. Broken ceramite, shell casings and blood fell to the deck.\n\nAnd on the fight went, spread in a shifting crescent around Luna.\n\nAbaddon felt the charge in the air around him as the War Oath's teleporters built with power. He could taste metal and ash on his teeth. Layak stood at his shoulder, the two blade slaves seeming to shiver in the warp-charged air. His brothers were around him. They were all there: Thonas, Gedephron, Tybar, Ralkor, Sycar, Justaerin, Reavers, warriors clad in black and marked with red and gold. And behind them, he could feel the presence of all the rest, dead in all but memory: Sejanus, Syrakul, Torgaddon, Gul, Kars, Dask, Graidon - silent ghosts watching him as he took his sword from the hand of a serf.\n\n'We shall become death,' said Layak. Incense smoke was fuming from his staff. 'Our knives shall become the spears of angels, our hands the thunderbolts of the gods.' Abaddon turned his gaze on the priest, who looked back at him with eye-lenses like burning coals. 'I am glad, Abaddon, that I stand with you now at this sacred moment.'\n\nAbaddon turned and gave the first order.\n\n'Full speed.'\n\nThe War Oath's engines burned brighter. The ship had been prepared for this moment in its long fall from above the solar disc. Disciples of Kelbor-Hal had worked in its engine spaces and generatoria decks. They had modified and mutilated, changed the nature of the ship from the inside. Only the shell of the one-time Imperial Fists ship existed, the bones symbol enough for its purpose. As it leapt forwards, it screamed. Bulkheads began to vibrate. Plasma poured into reactor chambers and mixed with exotic energies. Speed built. The ships surrounding the War Oath peeled aside as it bore down towards Luna. They had protected and followed it as their flagship, but it was that no longer. The attacking fleet parted before it.\n\nThe defenders saw it come, its speed building second by second. Auspex screens fogged and stuttered as sensors tried to lock on to its passage. In its hull, the crew that still lived spoke their prayers to the gods that had claimed their souls.\n\nShips moved to block the War Oath's path and its fleet moved to protect it in turn. Fire tore into their shields and armour.\n\nIn the teleportation chamber, Abaddon felt his skin tighten inside his armour. Arcs of lightning split the air.\n\nThe ships closest to the Luna Ring moved aside as the great ship plunged down. The Ring's guns fired, half-blind. Explosions tore the War Oath's shields and raked its flanks. Inside its engine spaces, tech-priests in black robes intoned their last commands to its reactors and folded themselves out of reality. The ship accelerated in a last jet of flame. Sections of plasteel ripped free. The fire pouring from the defences broke its shields. Balls of lightning burst across its hull. A hundred-metre-long section tore from its prow and ploughed back across its spine, striking the bridge castle.\n\nThe War Oath shrieked as it began to break apart. It was almost at the Ring.\n\nAbaddon closed his eyes.\n\n'Activate,' he said.\n\nThe teleportation generators convulsed and threw them into the void beyond.\n\nA second later, the wounded ship struck the Luna Ring. Shock waves rippled through the vast hoop. The War Oath ploughed on for an instant. The Ring twisted like rope. The plasma reactors and munitions in the War Oath's hull detonated. A sphere of energy exploded. Stone flashed to light. Metal became dust.\n\nThe tremors spilled into the warp as the destruction rolled out through the materium. Then the occult energies laced into the ship's reactors flooded out. Paradox overtook reality. Fire unravelled substance. Light passed through stone and flesh. A twenty-kilometre-long section of the Ring vanished into a cloud of shadow.\n\nAn aching instant of time unfurled. On Terra, the image of a black moon rose in the nightmares of those few who slept.\n\nThen the energies and the moment collapsed. Matter and light rushed back into the point where the War Oath had vanished. For a second there was just an empty volume of space. Then glowing cracks lashed out, flowing through the void, threading through the space where ships still moved and poured fire at each other.\n\nThe broken circle of the Ring trembled, then began to fall, sliding back down into the weak grasp of the moon it had protected. Vast sections of docks and defences met the grey Lunar surface. Clouds of rock and dust fountained up and up in the faint gravity.\n\nAbaddon opened his eyes. Around him the whirlwind of darkness became the smooth stone of Luna's caverns. There were figures moving beyond the settling shadows, clad in amber-yellow, guns firing, bolts and beams converging on him and the circle of warriors around him.\n\nReality asserted itself like a hammer blow.\n\n'Fire,' he said, and around him the first of Horus' warriors to set foot on the moon that made them obeyed.\n\nComet shrine, Inner System Gulf\n\nGo, willed Ahriman. The gunship kicked free of the comet shrine. Around it dozens of others flew free, engines bright as they raced for the ships already moving to make distance from the comet.\n\nAhriman felt the universe turn under the surface of reality. Images bled into his mind's eye. The spin of the Solar System above the night sky of Terra. The sages and sorcerers of ancient times, looking up and imagining the truth of the universe in the movement of stars. They were wrong, of course, but within their ignorance they were also "}
{"text":"d free of the comet shrine. Around it dozens of others flew free, engines bright as they raced for the ships already moving to make distance from the comet.\n\nAhriman felt the universe turn under the surface of reality. Images bled into his mind's eye. The spin of the Solar System above the night sky of Terra. The sages and sorcerers of ancient times, looking up and imagining the truth of the universe in the movement of stars. They were wrong, of course, but within their ignorance they were also right. They had thought that existence revolved around that Old Earth. It did not, not in the way they thought. The planets and stars and the arcing swirl of the galaxy turned without thought or care for the ball of rock that had spawned humanity. But another universe, one that lived in ideas and dreams, followed different rules. In that realm, the importance and power of objects and people did not follow the dry rules of atoms and gravity. Things made themselves important by the place they held in hopes and fears and in the stories that people told themselves. And now, at this moment, this small sun and its circle of moons and planets truly was the axis of all existence.\n\nAhriman saw Menkaura, his blind brother, floating in the centre of the solatarium. Cords of light held him aloft as bloody and burning spheres turned through the air. Ahriman felt perception and time and space flatten and bend, felt his inner eye fill with a view that held everything from the sun's core to night's edge.\n\nBlood and pain and terror spilled into the warp and flowed inwards, cascading down through the patterns of old rituals and beliefs like the waters of a broken dam. It was all Ahriman could do to hold his thoughts steady in the enumerations. He felt the War Oath strike the Ring of Luna, saw the fire billow across the moon's surface. He tasted blood. Across his connection with Menkaura he saw the symbols of the Solar System slow in their orbits. Blood was filling the crystal sphere marked with the Lunar sigil. The other spheres were glowing with flame and shadow.\n\nEverything had been for this. The assaults planned by Perturabo, the strike of the fleets deep in-system - all had taken ground, killed, weakened defences. But more than that, they had formed this alignment, this moment of ritual power written in the planets and stars.\n\nNow, he sent. And in the caverns of the comet shrine, the Word Bearers who remained put their knives to the throats of the psykers chained to the floor. And as the mortals' death screams poured into the warp, the torrent they formed met the flood-tide already surging in.\n\nAhriman withdrew his mind, and had a second to feel his breath gasp ice from his lungs as the gunship accelerated away.\n\nThe comet vanished.\n\nTime blinked.\n\nNight fell to blinding light.\n\nSound.\n\nVoices.\n\nNight.\n\nAcross the Solar System, every being felt a tremor in their soul, like something stood behind them but inhaling through their mouths.\n\nThen the sun went dark.\n\nTrust the messenger\n\nThe man beside you\n\nFane of rebirth\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\nThe grey ship docked with the Phalanx as it broke Terran orbit. Huscarls surrounded Mersadie and Loken as they crossed the docking limb. All around them the Phalanx trembled as it pushed into open space and towards its enemy.\n\nMersadie recognised some of the sights they passed, statues of heroes, images inlaid in stone, floors of black-and-white marble. She had been here before, years ago, after they had fled Isstvan on the Eisenstein. She remembered walking through the...\n\nVengeful Spirit, Maggard and the soldiers all around her. The sound of the ship, the silence that followed them as they went further. Something was wrong. She was...\n\n...walking through the Phalanx, Loken at her side, a wall of Imperial Fists around her.\n\n'Dorn...' she said, feeling the word rise from within. She felt disconnected. Something deep in her mind was screaming that it was almost too late, that she was almost out of time. There were things moving in the root of her memory and mind, vast unseen gears turning. 'I must reach Dorn...' Her feet were still moving. A buzzing had started in her head that might have been static or water falling down onto rock or wind blowing through a dry valley filled with skulls...\n\n'We are almost there,' replied Loken.\n\n'Why?' asked Su-Kassen. She was almost running to keep up with Dorn as he strode into his sanctum. Glow-globes lit as he crossed the black marble floor. 'What can a remembrancer have to tell us?'\n\nArchamus and a squad of Huscarls spread through the room, feet ringing on the floor. Dorn stopped, and turned to look at her. His gaze almost made her stumble. His eyes were dark mirrors in a face of carved stone.\n\n'Because once before messengers came to me in the ship. They told me the truth that we all now live - that the Warmaster was a betrayer. I did not believe them then, I did not want to hear...'\n\nSu-Kassen thought she saw something then, something in the deep distance of his eyes, something she could not place in a being like Rogal Dorn.\n\n'It is not often that we get to learn from the mistakes of the past,' said Dorn. 'Mersadie Oliton showed me the truth. Here, in this room...' He turned his head to look at a point in open space, as though something moved in the still air. 'She showed me what she had seen... and that changed everything.' He looked back at Su-Kassen.\n\nShe could feel herself frowning, a doubt forming on her lips.\n\nA shrill alarm rang out.\n\nSu-Kassen gasped.\n\nBlackness, a feeling of nausea, a sound of screaming.\n\nShe blinked and put a holo-monocle to her eye. Light flooded her vision as alert information poured onto the display.\n\nCold flooded her.\n\n'Lord Praetorian,' she said, staring at the tactical data as the sound of alarms rose to a clamour. 'Something is happening in the inner system...'\n\nStatic was suddenly washing through the vox-link. The holo-monocle shorted out. She stumbled back.\n\nA sound bubbled up in her earpiece, rustling, laughing, saying something that sounded like words.\n\n'...is all around you... the only name you will hear...'\n\n'Lord...' she began.\n\n'Bring the ship to full alert,' said Dorn, and began striding for the doors.\n\nMersadie stumbled. The floor of the passage met her hand as she caught herself. Lights popped and bubbled in her eyes. Voices and memories tumbled over each other in her skull.\n\n'Take the iterator and the remembrancer back to their quarters,' said Maloghurst...\n\nMaggard shoving her through a door...\n\n'Euphrati, what is wrong? You never talked like-'\n\n'You need to understand, Mersadie.'\n\n'I understand you have a story,' she said. The wolf stood before her, the white fur of its back silver beneath the moonlight. 'A particularly entertaining one. I'd like to remember it, for posterity.'\n\nThe wolf turned, its teeth a smile of sorrow.\n\n'Which story?'\n\n'Horus killing the Emperor.'\n\n'Where...' she managed, pushing herself up as Loken reached to help her. 'Where are we?'\n\n'The Phalanx,' he said. His eyes were dark, human, not the eyes of a wolf.\n\n'The Phalanx...' she repeated, blinking, feeling the world turn around her.\n\nThe eyes of five Imperial Fists held on her, red in black-and-yellow helms.\n\n'The Phalanx, yes, of course. Rogal Dorn... There is not much time.'\n\n'Mersadie, it is all right...'\n\n'No... There is something else... I need... to see him.'\n\nShe forced her legs to move. Something was happening, something that she could feel but not understand.\n\nThere were doors opening in front of them...\n\nOn, on further through the night, through the passages of the Vengeful Spirit to a door...\n\n'What was that?' she heard herself say, as the glow-globes flickered in their settings.\n\n'Something is happening,' said Loken, but his voice seemed further away now, 'system-wide anomalies. There is something wrong with the vox...'\n\nShe had been here before, in these corridors before, carrying memories... images spooled in her head... blood and betrayal and the truth... What had she forgotten?\n\nThe lights spluttered again. She could see a set of doors in front of her. She had been here before, with Keeler, with Garro.\n\n'What is that?' growled one of the Imperial Fists. There was a noise, a hissing, like static, like the whisper of wind blowing through dry valleys. Like a voice...\n\nDorn's sanctuary... the Phalanx... She had been here before...\n\nThe lights blinked red.\n\n'What is happening?' asked Loken.\n\n'Full alert,' replied one of the Huscarls. 'Something is happening in the Inner System Gulf...'\n\nThe doors were opening in front of them...\n\n'We need to get you secured,' said one of the Imperial Fists.\n\n'I need to see Lord Dorn...' she mumbled. 'I need to...'\n\n'There is someone speaking on the vox...' said another of the Huscarls.\n\nThe shove of Maggard's hand on her back, pushing her through the door.\n\n'Greetings, Mersadie Oliton,' said Maloghurst, looking up at her. His eyes were the eyes of a wolf...\n\nLoken had stopped moving suddenly. She looked at him blinking.\n\n'It sounds like a voice,' he said, 'trying to break through the interference.'\n\nThe sound was hissing in her ears... rising and falling...\n\n'S... here...'\n\n'Dorn...' she gasped, 'I need to see Rogal Dorn now!'\n\n'Sam... is...'\n\n'That sound, that voice,' he said. 'I have heard that voice before...'\n\n'Sa... mu... is...'\n\nLoken's gun was in his hand. The Huscarls were moving, turning; shadows were spreading up the wall.\n\nEverything was distant, like something happening on a pict screen hung just in front of her face. There was someone behind her. Just behind her. A shadow...\n\n'He is here.'\n\nLoken snapped around to look at her.\n\n'What did you say?'\n\nShe shrugged, feeling more words coming to her tongue. Her muscles were moving but she was not moving them.\n\n'Samus is here,' she said, and backhanded Loken into the wall. He struck it with a sound of shearing ceramite.\n\nMersadie looked at her hand. It was red.\n\nGuns roared around her. Red fire. Blinking. Red on her hand.\n\nShe "}
{"text":"reen hung just in front of her face. There was someone behind her. Just behind her. A shadow...\n\n'He is here.'\n\nLoken snapped around to look at her.\n\n'What did you say?'\n\nShe shrugged, feeling more words coming to her tongue. Her muscles were moving but she was not moving them.\n\n'Samus is here,' she said, and backhanded Loken into the wall. He struck it with a sound of shearing ceramite.\n\nMersadie looked at her hand. It was red.\n\nGuns roared around her. Red fire. Blinking. Red on her hand.\n\nShe tried to take a step, put her hand out and fell...\n\nA thin hand caught her arm, steadied her.\n\n'That's it. You are all right. I have you.'\n\nShe blinked. Nilus was standing next to her, holding her arm and shoulder, looking at her with black eyes in a pale, pale face. The face of a friend. The rest of the world had become blurred, a tableau through which something was moving faster than sight, clawed and furred and toothed. Slowly - oh so slowly - the yellow-armoured warriors were coming apart.\n\nRed... The world was bright and dark and red.\n\n'But you were not here...' she said, looking at the face of the Navigator standing just next to her. There was blood on his face she noticed, splattered right across him, bright and dripping.\n\nNilus shrugged, smiled, and now he looked nothing like a human, and nothing like a friend.\n\n'I am always here,' he said. 'I am the man beside you.'\n\nInner System Gulf\n\nThe comet shrine blazed back into being. Light poured out of the point where it had vanished. Lightning leaped across the gulfs of space, brighter than the vanished sunlight. Every soul asleep under the light of the sun woke with a cry. Every person awake, from Space Marine to child, felt the touch of knives on their skin.\n\nA vortex of energy poured into the hole punched through reality by the comet. Circling daemons were caught by the hurricane force and were unmade. The storm narrowed, became a point, became a blade. It dragged through the skin of reality, ripping back along the arc that the comet shrine had passed in the last decades. The lips of the wound peeled back. The light of paradox spilled out, bubbling, flowing, curdling the dark across tens of millions of kilometres. The warp breach gaped, drooling half-formed matter, a bloody smile opening in the dark.\n\nFor an instant, it was the only thing that moved. Stars and planets were still in the face of this violation. The black sun hung in a bleached sky, a mute and cold disc.\n\nThen the slit tore wide. Matter vomited into being. Half-formed ideas of teeth and limbs, of beasts and mouths tumbled over each other, writhing as they dissolved and coagulated.\n\nThe sun blazed back to light, screaming.\n\nAcross Terra, every person looking at the sky could see it: a burning wound across the night, or a scar of midnight in the daylight.\n\nThrough it came ships from the realm beyond, dragging cloaks of insects and shadow. Winged creatures circled them, flying like birds in the gale of etheric energy. Bolts of lightning leapt from the wound, strobing across space. And here were the vessels that had been absent from the weeks of war already waged. Here was the Conqueror, its white hull red with smoking gore. Here were the ships of the World Eaters, their murder cries echoing from the vox, and the voice of every legionary. Angron stood on the hull of his capital ship, a vast and ragged shadow axe raised to the sunlight, roaring his fury at the circle of Terra. There were the ships of the Emperor's Children, fuming musk and grey dust from jewel-crusted hulls. In the guts of the Pride of the Emperor, Fulgrim coiled and looked out through the eyes of every soul in his fleet, and laughed with delight.\n\nAnd there - following the rest, like the chariot of a king come in triumph - came the Vengeful Spirit. Warships flanked it. Daemons flew as its heralds. High on its hull, on the fortress that it bore upon its back, Horus, Warmaster, First Son of the Emperor, Chosen Champion of the Dark Gods, looked out at Terra. The seat of his father's empire glimmered beyond the prow of his ship. Shadow bled from him, and the daemons that held to the shadows of his court hissed and bowed their heads as the light of the sun touched his face.\n\nThe ships poured from the rift, spreading out in a swarm of glinting lights. A hundred, a thousand, ten times a thousand, more and more that had been waiting in the warp for the way to open to the heart of the Solar System. Even if Horus' forces had used both the Elysian and Khthonic Gates, it would have taken such a force days to translate back into reality. Now they swam from the warp into the gulfs of the inner system, not an army or a fleet, but a host sent by the will of gods and the art of mortals.\n\nThe ships clustered and divided as their engines caught on the cold vacuum and turned them towards Mars and Luna and the small orb of Terra all alone in the dark.\n\nHorus watched, and then gave a single nod.\n\n'Begin,' he said.\n\nThe Warp\n\n'I am a remembrancer. I am recording his experiences for posterity.'\n\n'Remembrance... A strange idea to take to the stars, I have always thought.'\n\n'I don't understand.' She thought of looking around but Maloghurst's gaze held her. 'I thought I was to be returned to my quarters.'\n\n'Tell me,' said Maloghurst, his power armour buzzing as he shifted. 'Does he trust you?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Does Captain Loken trust you?'\n\n'I... I don't-'\n\n'He favours you, talks to you, shares his remembrances with you. I think that he trusts you a great deal, Mersadie Oliton.'\n\nThe equerry to the Warmaster had smiled, and unwilled she began to turn to run. A hand on her shoulder stopped her dead. Heavy fingers squeezed with the promise of bone-breaking force.\n\n'You see, Mistress Oliton,' said Maloghurst. 'We do not trust him, at all... And we need to be sure. We need to know what he hides from us. We need to know which way he will choose. I have my suspicions as to that, but the Warmaster wants to be certain.' He nodded, smiled. 'Loken was a favoured son after all. You can forgive a father wishing to give his son every chance, and so you are going to help us see Captain Loken clearly.'\n\nMersadie could not move. There was something behind her.\n\nA shadow, breath on the back of her neck.\n\n'You remembrancers wanted to see the Great Crusade...' continued Maloghurst. He turned aside and she could see a low stone table, just behind him. Candles burned above it. The smell of scorched human hair filled her nose. There were objects on the table: a silver knife, a brass bowl filled with water, a pile of finger bones, a silver coin and a human eye, still leaking fluid onto the cold stone, looking up at her with a grey-flecked gaze.\n\n'You wanted to know the truth, to look into all the places where your curiosity took you...' said Maloghurst. His fingers traced a sign in the air.\n\nShe tried to move but could not. The shape Maloghurst had drawn burned red, bleeding in her sight.\n\n'Well now you will do just that, Mistress Oliton. You will see, and we will look through your eyes...'\n\nHe reached down, picked up the knife. The rune burning in the air glowed. Everything was going black, rushing past like the embers of a fire pulled apart by a gale. Hot breath prickled on the back of her head. A hand touched her shoulder. She felt the tips of claws.\n\nMaloghurst was very close now, looming above her, the buzz of his armour aching in her teeth, a rank incense smell coiling from him. And now he was stepping towards her, knife rising to her face, to her left eye...\n\nHe slowed, his movements blurring like a pict capture run at one-tenth speed.\n\n'You see...' growled a voice from behind her. 'The eyes... windows to the soul... and what were you but a set of eyes watching the world.' The tip and edge of the silver knife filled her sight. It was all she could see. 'You never know what use things will be...' Mersadie tried to draw breath. The scream in her throat burned but did not sound. 'All they wanted was to see what you saw, to know what you knew, to use your insight...' A chuckle through sharp teeth. 'So limited, but the seed was planted, the bridge and link made. And the warp remembers...'\n\n'I...' began Mersadie. 'I was used...'\n\nA laugh now, a full, high laugh that might have been Nilus, or Keeler, or Loken, or the howl of wolves in a winter-shrouded forest.\n\nAnd the image of Maloghurst, the knife and the stone table vanished.\n\nA view across the mountains of Terra blinked into being behind high windows. A breeze was sliding through a half-opened door to the enclosed garden beyond. The thin curtains stirred. The polished wood floor was warm beneath Mersadie's feet.\n\n'Nothing like being back home,' said a voice behind her. She turned, half expecting not to be able to move.\n\nThe face of Euphrati Keeler looked up at her. Coloured tiles and beads lay on the floor around her, some broken, some ground to dust. There was blood on Keeler's grey robe, a wet, bright splatter from forehead to fingers. She was picking her teeth with a piece of broken glass.\n\n'You were never Keeler,' said Mersadie.\n\n'No,' said the bloody face of Keeler. 'But you wanted to believe so much that it made it an easy choice of what face to wear.'\n\n'Where is she?'\n\nThe bloody woman on the floor laughed.\n\n'Really? At this point, you are still worried about your friend?'\n\nMersadie began to take a step forwards, anger rising. She froze, locking in place.\n\n'My, my, there is still some strength in you,' said the image of Keeler, standing, the shard of glass still in her hand, held loose, dripping blood. 'Euphrati Keeler, the real Euphrati Keeler still lives, still follows her lies about the false God-Emperor, but it was never her speaking to you.' Mersadie felt a hollowness open in her. 'Oh, you are wondering about before - about the dream and message about Loken... about \"saying goodbye\". Did you like that touch?'\n\nMersadie tried to force her jaw to open. The mouth in Keeler's face twitched and she shrugged. Mersadie gasped.\n\n'Wh"}
{"text":"he shard of glass still in her hand, held loose, dripping blood. 'Euphrati Keeler, the real Euphrati Keeler still lives, still follows her lies about the false God-Emperor, but it was never her speaking to you.' Mersadie felt a hollowness open in her. 'Oh, you are wondering about before - about the dream and message about Loken... about \"saying goodbye\". Did you like that touch?'\n\nMersadie tried to force her jaw to open. The mouth in Keeler's face twitched and she shrugged. Mersadie gasped.\n\n'When...'\n\n'On the Vengeful Spirit, of course, in one of those slivers of time that you don't even realise you don't remember. That is the strange thing about being so sure of your memory - it makes hiding things easy. You never doubted because you believed in yourself.'\n\n'Maloghurst...'\n\n'A little bit of sorcery used for a simple task. They really did just want to know where Garviel Loken stood - as though it weren't obvious.' The image of Keeler snorted. 'They wanted an eye on him, watching from where he would not expect.' The thing raised the shard of glass and pointed it at Mersadie's left eye. 'So they put that eye in you. It didn't turn out to be much use in the end. But it was there...'\n\n'But now... Maloghurst could not have known that I would be here.'\n\nThe thing was shivering slightly. Its grin was wide, too wide, and leaking red at the corners. The wind was moaning as it rose outside of the windows.\n\n'Of course not, but the connection was there, the door made. This path you have walked, this end that you serve is a later improvisation by Horus, a use of available assets.'\n\n'The message... the design in the warp... None of it was real.'\n\n'No, all of it was real,' said the thing. It was looking at its arm like a child at a toy that it did not understand. It placed the tip of the glass against the skin. Black ran from the point. 'The best lies are truth. There is a great design in the warp that is undoing the barrier between worlds and delivering the Warmaster to the heart of the Solar System. You are a part of it - a small part, but a part. Dorn could see the edges of it and he is disposed to trust messengers. Especially messengers bearing the truth, especially messengers he has trusted before.' It looked up at her. Its eyes were red, blood-red, and smoking. 'Especially you.'\n\nThe wind exploded through the windows around them. Shards of glass spun through the air, struck the thing that looked like Keeler, ripped through flesh and bone. And it was stepping forwards, skin and blood falling off it in the razor gale. The image of Nilus was underneath, tall and spindle-limbed.\n\nAnd Mersadie saw herself again on the prison ship, alone at the controls of the shuttle, arriving on the Antius alone; talking to herself in her cabin; following the blood trail to find the enginseer hiding on the ship's bridge.\n\nShe had been alone all the time, part of her mind locked from noticing that Nilus was never mentioned by anyone else, and never there when she wasn't by herself.\n\n'It was all me...' she said, feeling the shock roll through her as the creature got closer. Nilus was gone now too. It was a juddering shadow now.\n\n'We are here for you...' said a voice, a voice that sounded like it was stitched together from a chorus of howls. She saw the red light blinking through the corridor of the Antius, the troopers who had come to kill her becoming red splatter and shreds as the shadow tore them apart.\n\n'It was not trying to kill me,' she said. 'It was-'\n\n'No, we are the end and the death, but not yours... Not yet...'\n\nThe flashes of red memory vanished.\n\nSomewhere far off someone was shouting. She could hear the rattle of gunfire, and the boom of explosions.\n\nIt was dark, the night air frosted. A red, sickle moon curved just beyond the reach of bare branches. A pool of black water lay before her. Ice ran around its edge. A figure that looked like a wolf crossed with a skinned man rose from the water. Freezing water scattered from matted fur as it grew.\n\n'We are here,' it said.\n\nSeventh Fane of the Selenar, Luna\n\nThe gunfire ripped through the servitor. Abaddon rammed through the wreckage of its torso. Pieces of armour and flesh splattered across the ground. Another half-machine clanked forwards on tracks. It fired. A stream of rounds struck Abaddon. His helm lit with damage. Chunks of armour tore from his chest. He ran into the gunfire. Behind him, his Justaerin were firing down into the side corridors.\n\nThey were deep under the surface of Luna, in the warren of smooth black stone divided by circular doors and twisted into spirals like the inside of a seashell. The air was still and cold. Mica and crystal flecks gleamed in the walls as gunfire shattered the dark. Even echoing with the sounds of battle the warren seemed quiet, as if the weight of its silence dragged the sound from the air. Abaddon felt it pull memories into the moments between the muzzle flashes, old memories held deep but not forgotten: sharp silver and flesh, water and blood, darkness and blinding pain. This was the domain of the Selenar, the seat of the Luna gene-cults, the place of his rebirth.\n\nBefore him lay a circular door set in the curve of the passage wall. Low relief images moved across its surface in silver, figures with crescent headdresses and burning torches. Spiralling haloes of symbols wreathed them: tau-aleph, gamma-kaf. Beyond lay one of the last fanes of the gene-cult, a sanctuary against time and decline. They had come this far, hacking and killing without pause. Most of the resistance came from servitors following blunt battle programs. But those half-machines still had weapons that could kill a legionary.\n\nA figure of piston limbs and armour plates unfolded from a niche in the wall and launched itself at Abaddon. The human flesh that guided it was lost beneath a frame of tarnished silver and black carbon. Stretched out it would have stood taller than Abaddon, but its power had been bunched and folded into the shape of a monstrous feline, six-limbed and blade-clawed. Its head was a fanged mask, with a mane of chromed hair. It was a sacred sentinel, one of the guardian beasts of the Selenar's inner sanctums. Lightning wreathed its jaws as it leapt.\n\nAbaddon jerked backwards. The guardian beast landed in the space where he had been. He raised his power fist. The beast sprang at him, fore and mid-limbs wide, jaws open. It was quick - very, very quick. But he had killed quicker prey. He punched his fist into its mouth. The fist's power field activated as it made contact. Its head exploded. Shards of silver and brain matter struck the tunnel walls. Its movement did not stop. Nerve clusters and brain segments drove it on. Damage runes lit in Abaddon's helm as the beast's limbs fastened on his arm and shoulder. He snarled and lifted the creature from the ground. It was twisting, its hind limbs reversing to arc up over its back like scorpion stings. Abaddon pivoted, battering it into the tunnel wall. Armour splintered. He could see the lightning wreathing the thing's claw blades.\n\nHeavy rounds tore through the thing's body. Pulped meat and twisted metal showered in every direction. It lashed out. Abaddon brought up his bolter and fired a stream of rounds into it. Chrome and carbon splinters rang against his faceplate. He hurled the remains against the wall and dumped another burst of bolter fire into it before what was left of it could move.\n\n'Hard kills,' growled Urskar, closing with Abaddon, reaper cannon still smoking from the fire he had poured into the beast. 'But you didn't need all that much help.'\n\nAbaddon looked at the chosen warrior's red helm. The silver-filled scars glinted across its snout, like teeth behind a grin. Abaddon laughed, the sound blending with the sound of gunfire. For a second he felt the weight of the moment lift; he had come back to the place that had made him, that had made the Legion that was everything; unlike that moment of birth he was not alone.\n\n'Will you ever be anything but a jackal, brother?' he said over a direct vox.\n\n'I doubt it,' growled Urskar. Then his head twitched as he looked beyond Abaddon. 'I smell the dung of gods and priests.' Abaddon turned to see Layak advancing down the passage. Shapes made of shadow and cold light spiralled around him. The blade slaves walked behind their master, swords drawn, bodies bloated with power as the daemons within the blades rode their flesh.\n\n'A last temple to old lies,' said Layak, looking up at the doors.\n\nAbaddon felt his lip curl but did not answer.\n\n'Breach it,' he said. Reavers in black power armour ran forwards to clamp clusters of melta charges in place. Abaddon's chosen formed around him, guns braced, weapons lit and sweating lightning.\n\n'Detonating!' came the call, and the silver door vanished. A blast wave of superheated, molten metal broke over Abaddon and his warriors. They did not flinch - they went forwards. Guardian servitors bounded through the glowing cloud. Bolt-and autocannon rounds tore through silvered armour. Abaddon saw the head of Gedephron's power mace crash through the chest of a beast shaped like a bear of black iron. He saw another one fasten its gaze on him and begin to pounce. He fired, pounding its body to shards as it reached for him.\n\nHe was out of the other side of the debris cloud. Actinic light filled the chamber beyond. It was spherical, its walls curving up and up to a circular opening set at its apex. Staircases and platforms spiralled up the walls. Pods frosted with crystal hung from spun carbon cable in the central void. Abaddon could see clusters of vials and silver coolant tubes nested inside the pods. At the far end of the chamber was a lone figure, hovering just above the ground. Grey gauze billowed around her on the currents of false gravity. A crest of silver tubes rose from her back to halo her head. A silver mask moulded into an expression of false serenity hid her face. She twisted in the air as the Justaerin burst from th"}
{"text":"walls. Pods frosted with crystal hung from spun carbon cable in the central void. Abaddon could see clusters of vials and silver coolant tubes nested inside the pods. At the far end of the chamber was a lone figure, hovering just above the ground. Grey gauze billowed around her on the currents of false gravity. A crest of silver tubes rose from her back to halo her head. A silver mask moulded into an expression of false serenity hid her face. She twisted in the air as the Justaerin burst from the debris cloud. Abaddon could see a spiralled arrangement of crystal pipes rising from the floor in front of her. Her hands were moving between vials of liquid, combining fluids in a spinning device. For an instant the blank eyes of the woman's mask met Abaddon's gaze.\n\nBuzzing curtains of energy unfurled across the room as Abaddon and his brothers advanced. Figures in segmented black armour with sprung legs bounded forwards. Energy beams snapped out. Bolt-rounds exploded on walls of glowing force. Abaddon was charging forwards, his strides cracking the black stone floor.\n\nThe curtains of energy were changing, flicking out and then snapping back into place in different positions. He saw Ekaron from the second Reavers squad split by a sheet of glowing light as it appeared. The halves of his body fell to the floor, burning.\n\nBlack lightning reached from behind him and exploded a guardian servitor as it sprang at Abaddon. He twisted to see Layak keeping pace with him, one of his blade slaves at his side.\n\n'You won't reach her in time,' called Layak. 'This is a void maze. If they have power to keep it active it will protect her until it is too late.'\n\n'There is a way through,' snarled Abaddon. Part of his mind had already read the shifting pattern of the energy fields as they activated - read them and seen that there was a flaw.\n\n'Too slow,' was all Layak said. Abaddon felt something shift in the air. The taste of burnt sugar formed on his tongue. A high note, like the sound of breaking glass, drawn out to the point of pain. The world stuttered. Layak was moving past Abaddon, his blade slave charging with raised sword. Abaddon saw a fresh curtain of energy unfold into being across their path in the stopped-clock moment. Shadows were spilling from Layak. The blade slave struck the energy field. Light and dark flashed out. Every scrap of shadow became a pool of blinding light, every light a hole into night. The sword screamed as its edge cut. A hole - no, a wound - opened in the energy field, haloed by cold light and sparks. Layak raised his staff as the sword cut, and spoke a word.\n\nSilence screamed in Abaddon's ears. He tasted jagged iron on his tongue and in his throat. The cut in the energy curtain ripped wider, and beyond it the layers of fields parted. Layak had gone still now. His hand was smoking where it gripped his staff. Blood was running from the bottom edge of his mask.\n\nAbaddon was moving forwards through the opening, gun rising, eyes fixed on the woman at the centre of the room. The devices and vials in her hand were spinning, the fluids inside fusing into dark red. He did not understand the ways of the Selenar, but he did not need to understand their mysteries to know what she was doing. She was Heliosa-78, sole surviving matriarch of the Selenar, and in her hands she was mixing death with which to poison the last remains of all her kind held sacred.\n\nIn these halls the gene-seed of the Legions had been multiplied and implanted, and here the means to do that again remained. It was a prize great enough that Horus had sent his most favoured son to secure it - a victory beyond breaking the defences of Luna. Luna would become a birthplace for warriors again, but now their war would not be in distant stars but on the surface of the world that hung in the sky above. But not if he failed.\n\nHe saw her half turn to look at him as the curtains of energy split.\n\nLayak was beside him, holding out his staff.\n\nThe guardian beast rose from a hole in the floor. Its shape was that of a lion crossed with a scorpion skinned in graphite and oxidised bronze. It bounded into Layak. The priest spun, but the beast was faster. It struck Layak and cannoned him back off his feet. Armour tore, blood scattered across black stone.\n\nSamus\n\nLibrarius\n\nWill of stone and fire\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\nShadows flowed through the Phalanx. The darkness gathered at the edge of flame-light billowed out and up, spreading across walls, swallowing shape, dissolving brightness. The shadows roared as they spread and their voice was the sound of wind blowing through the teeth of skulls.\n\n'The end and the death...'\n\n'We are here...'\n\n'We are beside you...'\n\n'Death is beside you...'\n\n'The end is here...'\n\nIt flowed on, boiling with coalescing shapes. It passed through bulkheads and through the cracks around closed doors. Strange forms clawed across ceilings, and blizzards of shadows boiled down corridors. It was not one creature but many, a tide of murderous power poured into cold reality like ink into clear water.\n\nGunfire met the tide. There were over three thousand Imperial Fists on the ship. Ten thousand Jovian and Solar Auxilia elite, and every oath-bound crew member was a warrior.\n\nIn the decks beneath the Phalanx's strategium fortress, twenty Huscarls in Indominatus Terminator plate met the daemon tide. Assault cannons spun up. Target displays flashed red with threat markers as the shadows became vast hounds and hunched figures dragging swords.\n\nThe Huscarls opened fire. Bolt-rounds and volkite beams punched into the wall of darkness. Brass cases rang on the granite floor. Bodies formed as shadow broke into muscle and sinew. One of the Huscarls brought his cannon around as a hound made of smoke and blood leapt for him, jaws wide. The deluge of shells shredded the creature. A second later, a figure of spindle limbs and bloody skin rammed a sword clean through the Huscarl's flesh and armour.\n\nIn the primary signal-processing chamber, the darkness came as silence. Millions of cables and noospheric links all converged at this point. Men and woman sat wired into consoles, listening, filtering and diverting the flow of messages from across different regions of the Phalanx. Their mouths moved constantly, hissing echoes of the words and codes passing through them. Auto-scribes clattered. Data conduits beeped. It was never quiet and more than a day in the chamber would leave an unprotected human deaf.\n\nOne of the signal governor servitors began to twitch. The words coming from her mouth speaker stopped. She shook her head as though trying to clear it.\n\n'Samus...?' she said, unsure, as though part of her lobotomised brain had heard the word once before but could not remember where.\n\n'Samus..?' she said again. The servitors to either side of her twitched and went still. The lights on their consoles flashed amber. 'Samus... Samus... Samus...' More insistent now. One of the supervising tech-priests was moving towards her. Alarms were sounding, lights flashing.\n\n'Samus.'\n\nA ten-metre bank of vox-consoles went silent. The servitors at their stations froze and then exploded.\n\n'Samus! Samus! Samus!'\n\nThe tech-priest dropped to the floor. Smoke poured from his ears as his remaining flesh cooked. Silence spread. The babble of voices and the hum of signals vanished. In her cradle the lone servitor remained, twitching in place, shouting the only thing her slowly melting brain could hear.\n\n'Samus! Samus is here! Samus is the man beside you!'\n\nDarkness bubbled up out of the hull along the Phalanx's spine. Swarms of creatures pulled their wings from the dark and launched into the vacuum. Close-defence turrets opened up. Las-bolts blasted ghost flesh to slime. One of the Phalanx's escorts became a scream of detonating void shields and splintering armour.\n\nSu-Kassen was shouting as the darkness poured into the chamber she and Dorn had been waiting in. Coiling strands of night flowed through the open doors. Beyond, she had a glimpse of a dark shape, like the shadow of a vast wolf cast against a wall by an inferno. It was growing, stretching. The Huscarls around her and Dorn were firing. She could smell ozone and blood, spun sugar and sulphur. The shadow of the wolf beyond the door turned its head as she looked at it. Red eyes met hers. She raised her shot-pistol and pulled the trigger. A cloud of metal fragments tore into the space between her and the shadows and became flares of light.\n\nA shape detached from the spreading dark. It grew as it moved, sheathing itself in bloody meat and bone as it ran. Su-Kassen fired again, and again, punching the dog-like thing backwards.\n\nDorn moved past her, a golden blur against the shadow. She had never seen him in battle. They had conducted war together for over half a decade, but it had always been remote, his genius and nature expressed in insight, in cold logic and plans that unfolded at a distance. She had never seen him fight in front of her. Not so close that she felt the rush of his passing. He did not have Storm's Teeth. The great chainsword that he bore in battle was in his chambers. But he was still a primarch, a weapon that needed no other.\n\nHis first blow hit the daemon hound and exploded its skull and body down to his hind legs. The wall of shadow drew back, rising like a cresting wave as it touched the ceiling. Dorn had his bolter in his hands. Shots punched into the oily matter. It rushed forwards.\n\n'No!' Su-Kassen went forwards, firing her pistol. Dorn stood his ground, a lone figure, face set, lit by muzzle flash. The tide coiled above them.\n\nDorn fired another burst and turned to one of the still-open exits from the chamber.\n\n'Move!' he shouted. Su-Kassen dived after him as he went through the doorway. He turned as he crossed the threshold, grabbed the doors and pushed, his face pale and taut. The doors were three-metre-high slabs of plasteel inlaid with silver images of lightning bolts. The piston systems that "}
{"text":"ards, firing her pistol. Dorn stood his ground, a lone figure, face set, lit by muzzle flash. The tide coiled above them.\n\nDorn fired another burst and turned to one of the still-open exits from the chamber.\n\n'Move!' he shouted. Su-Kassen dived after him as he went through the doorway. He turned as he crossed the threshold, grabbed the doors and pushed, his face pale and taut. The doors were three-metre-high slabs of plasteel inlaid with silver images of lightning bolts. The piston systems that shut them normally were capable of crushing an armoured Space Marine. Dorn rammed the doors shut with his hands. They shook as something struck the other side.\n\n'Seal them!' he called, but Su-Kassen was already at the manual locking handle, yanking it down with all of her strength. Bolts shot into place with a drum roll of cogs. The doors began to glow red with heat. Dorn turned as warriors in yellow armour and black cloaks ran to circle them.\n\n'Lord,' called Archamus, as the Huscarls formed a triangle around their primarch, guns facing outwards.\n\nThe silver on the doors was beginning to melt.\n\n'Go to the silent vault. Unshackle my forgotten sons. They join the battle by my will,' said Dorn, his voice clear. 'Now.'\n\nArchamus paused and looked at Dorn.\n\n'And you, my lord?'\n\n'We need to reach the bridge.'\n\nArchamus nodded and was already moving; half of the Huscarls broke away and formed up on him.\n\nDorn was moving towards one of the other doors that led to the arterial connection to the bridge.\n\n'With me, admiral,' he called. Behind them, the doors began to flake chunks of molten metal.\n\nStrike Frigate Persephone, Inner System Gulf\n\n'Auspex failure!'\n\n'Long-range vox failure!'\n\n'Fleet target integration lost!'\n\nAlarms and voices cut across the Persephone's bridge. Sigismund felt heat prickle his skin and the deck pitch as the Persephone rolled. An arc of lightning sliced across the void where she had been. Blood mist boiled out into the vacuum. Smoke was pouring from the helm machinery. Shouts and screams were echoing through his skull. The gravity on the bridge failed and for a second he was floating. Then it reasserted itself with crushing force. A human serf officer slammed into the deck nearby, skull and spine shattered.\n\n'Reality is coming apart,' called the sensor officer. Blood was running down her face. 'We cannot see the rest of the fleet. We cannot see anything.'\n\n'We are losing navigational data,' intoned a lexmechanic from his cradle of brass-bound lenses.\n\nSigismund felt another jolt thump through the frigate.\n\n'Get us a bearing now!' shouted Rann. The Assault commander was bareheaded, a fresh wound from falling debris seeping blood across his scars.\n\n'It's gone...' said one of the officers. 'Every system is in seizure. We can't-'\n\n'Open the blast shutters,' said Sigismund. Rann looked around at him, mouth opening in question. 'Open them now,' called Sigismund.\n\nA second later the plates covering the viewports folded back with a rolling boom of metal slamming into metal. Horror poured in. Light boiled and spun through every colour; depth and distance flexed and reversed. Spheres of distant planets loomed large, swallowing the view of the stars before shrinking to pinpricks of light. And across it, vast and billowing like a shot-slashed sail, was a rift between worlds. Ships swarmed from it, glittering, cloaked in ectoplasm and warp-skinned creatures.\n\nA part of Sigismund's mind saw and understood. The enemy had found a way to bring their host to the seat of the Solar System. The fight would not be in the void now. It would be decided where it was always going to end: on the soil of Terra, beneath a sky of fire and iron.\n\nHuman crew across the bridge moaned and screamed, and some of them vomited. Sigismund felt his jaw clamp shut and muscles bunch across his body, as though he were trying to stand still in the face of a hurricane.\n\n'What-' began Rann.\n\n'The sun,' said Sigismund, raising his hand to point through the roiling chaos surrounding them. 'We can see the sun still.' And there it was, its light shredded and stained, but shining yet. 'Set our course by that. Reach every ship we can - close formation, steer by the sun. Full speed.'\n\nSeventh Fane of the Selenar, Luna\n\nAbaddon twisted aside as the guardian beast reared up, dragging Layak into the air like a broken doll. The blade slave whirled from where it was cutting through the wall of light. The opening in the fields began to shut in front of Abaddon.\n\nFire burst from Layak as he struggled in the beast's grasp. Its armour plates charred and distorted with heat, but it did not let go.\n\nAround them, the troops and guardian creatures of the temple were falling as the Justaerin advanced through the maze of energy fields. At the edge of his sight Abaddon saw Urskar brace and fire a line of heavy rounds into four troopers as a field snapped from one position to another. The resistance would not last much longer, minutes at most, but minutes was all Matriarch Heliosa would need to empty her vials into the font of tubes in front of her. From there their contents would flow into the fane and beyond, poisoning, destroying, salting this sacred ground for those who would take it.\n\nAbaddon saw Layak's blade slave swing at the guardian beast holding his master. Its sword was trailing smoke and blood. The beast's tail lashed out, extending like a whip, a metre-long blade at its tip. The blade slave took the impact on its chest. The sting punched through its armour and flesh. Black fluid and ash poured from the wound. The beast whipped its tail and the blade slave flew through the air into one of the energy fields. Flesh and armour flashed, burning and crumbling as it fell.\n\nLayak twisted in the beast's grip. It opened a mouth filled with lightning-lit teeth.\n\nAbaddon fired as he charged. Bolt-rounds struck the beast's mouth and exploded between its fangs. Its head jerked back. Abaddon felt his first blow uncoil through him. His power fist tore into the beast's flank. Bronze and black graphite shattered. The beast shuddered, back arching. Abaddon struck again and again, pounding through metal and ceramic to the human flesh within. Blood and shredded meat fountained out. The beast spasmed, toppling, the power fields around its claws flaring. Layak fell from its grasp. Abaddon punched up into the thing's inner guts, gripped and pushed upwards with all the strength of body and armour. The dying beast twisted in his grasp as he lifted it and threw it at the energy fields.\n\nBlinding light filled the chamber as false thunder shrieked. The fields vanished. The remains of the great beast struck the floor, mangled, charred and half-melted.\n\nAbaddon turned, the beast's blood lending the black plates of his armour a slick gloss. Layak was trying to rise. His armour was cracked, and half of the horned mask covering his face was torn. Abaddon had a moment to see a dark eye in a face of red, scarred flesh before the substance of the mask flowed over the features and solidified. Bolters roared behind Abaddon as the Justaerin and Reavers fired into the remaining guards and guardians. He stepped towards Layak and reached down to the sorcerer.\n\n'What are you doing?' rasped Layak, not taking the offered hand.\n\n'I remember and repay my bonds and oaths,' said Abaddon. 'You came to my side, now I come to yours.'\n\n'But the mission... The way is open. The matriarch will destroy what you have come here for.'\n\n'No,' said Abaddon. 'She will not.'\n\n'What?' began Layak.\n\n'Weakness,' said Abaddon. 'We do not need to be mighty when we are faced with weakness.'\n\nLayak hesitated and then clasped Abaddon's hand and pulled himself to his feet. Blood fell from the sorcerer as he straightened, but shadows were already pooling in the breaks in his armour and pulling flesh and ceramite back together. Abaddon turned from him and strode towards where Matriarch Heliosa-78 was frantically locking vials of red liquid into the column of tubes and machinery in front of her. The gunfire began to fade from the chamber as the last of the guards crumpled to bloody debris. Abaddon's steps were unhurried as he approached the Selenar. Casually, he reached up and released his helm. His brothers did not move; they could read the balance of the moment and follow his lead without a direct command.\n\n'Matriarch Heliosa,' he called, and his voice rang clear. He saw her half turn as she slotted another vial of the red liquid she had been concocting into the mass of tubes. 'You hold death in your hand, matriarch, but not mine.' Another vial slotted in place. Her hands were moving over fine silver levers, releasing, priming. 'I have no doubt that what you are about to do will destroy the value of this place to us. That is the gene font that links to all the gene-looms, stores and seed reservoirs in this complex. What is it you are going to unleash into it - a gene-scrambling toxin, a viral pollutant that will touch everything within your domain with imperfection?'\n\nHeliosa did not stop in her movements.\n\n'You should have destroyed this place already, matriarch,' he said, still advancing slowly. 'You must have known we would return, that we would want the cradle of our creation back. If you wanted to stop that you should have purged every mystery and person here.'\n\nHe was within five strides of her now, close enough to see that her limbs were shaking. He stopped.\n\n'But you have not done that. We knew you wouldn't. We know you. After all, in a sense, are we not your sons?'\n\nHer hands had stopped moving on the crystal tubes and vials.\n\n'I am not here to kill you, matriarch. I am here to make you an offer. You could never let go of the hope of survival. This fane should be a ruin, but part of you can't do that - you cling on, hoping that a moment like this will come to save you. That is why you bent the knee to the false Emperor, why you sold your purity and made us for Him. So now I make you another offer, matriarch, the same barg"}
{"text":"in a sense, are we not your sons?'\n\nHer hands had stopped moving on the crystal tubes and vials.\n\n'I am not here to kill you, matriarch. I am here to make you an offer. You could never let go of the hope of survival. This fane should be a ruin, but part of you can't do that - you cling on, hoping that a moment like this will come to save you. That is why you bent the knee to the false Emperor, why you sold your purity and made us for Him. So now I make you another offer, matriarch, the same bargain that you made with our creator - live and serve, or die and see all you believe and love become ashes.'\n\nHeliosa looked at him, blank eyes in a silver helm.\n\nThen, she bowed her head.\n\n'The Selenar will serve,' she said. 'What is the will of the Warmaster?'\n\nAbaddon looked at her for a long moment, then turned and began to walk back to his brothers and Layak. The smoke coiled from the torn remains covering the floor. The rest of Luna would fall within hours and there would be more killing until that was done, but they had accomplished what their father asked; they had the treasure of Luna in their grasp.\n\n'Build us warriors, matriarch,' he said without looking at her. 'Build us Legions.'\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\nBlood. There was blood all around Massak. Snow boiled out of the night sky. He was running, but the world was pulling away even as he tried to hold on to it.\n\n'Come, my son...' cackled the voices of crows and insects. 'Come, you know what you must do. Come to us... Be free...'\n\n'No!' he shouted, forcing his will against the image in his head. Somewhere, far off, he could feel his hand clenched around the haft of an axe. Heat was pouring off it, charring his palm as he gripped harder and harder.\n\n'No!' he shouted again, and pulled himself down into the well of pain. He opened his eyes, biting back the agony that had been his tether to reality. He was kneeling on the floor of the chamber. His hands were locked around the haft of his force axe. Heat glowed yellow from his gauntlets. Ice covered his armour and the floor around him. Beside him knelt his brothers. Light and heat and cold fumed off them. All were fighting within themselves now. The warp was clawing at them, ripping at their will, trying to pull them into the storm tide. Something vast and terrible was happening, something that he could feel as though it were as real as the floor beneath him and the armour covering his skin. It would kill him soon. He could feel it shredding his psyche, and he could not fight it. He had the weapons to defend himself, to bite back at the things that clawed at him, to raise the voice of his spirit and escape the sea that drowned him...\n\nBut he could not. He had given his oath. There was only his will, his mortal will standing against the hungering ocean. He would die here, in this cell that had held him and his brother Librarians for the last seven years. And facing that death would be his last duty.\n\nBeside him he heard Kordal gasp as the pain escaped his mouth. Blood-jewelled frost covered the former Lexicanium, branching into sharp spikes over Kordal's skull.\n\n'Hold, brother!' called Massak. 'We are our oaths. They are our strength. Pain is the anvil of our honour.'\n\nKordal was juddering in place, blood flowing from his eyes, mouth and ears and freezing on his face.\n\nThe boom of releasing bolts shook the walls. The blast doors at the far end of the chamber pulled wide. A Huscarl with the black cloak and white fur of the Praetorian's master bodyguard strode into sight, bolter and sword in hand.\n\n'Rise, brothers,' said the figure. 'Rise. Your lord calls you to war.'\n\n'Cerberus...' laughed a voice in the warrior's skull. 'You are amongst the dead and betrayed again, returned to the hell you fled...'\n\nHe saw it all again: the Whisperheads, Xavyer Jubal rising from the floor, red light pouring from his eyes.\n\n'Samus is the man beside you...'\n\nAbaddon's blade cutting at him.\n\n'There was nothing to betray.'\n\nMersadie Oliton looking up at him, eyes wide but not afraid.\n\n'I understand you have a story...'\n\nMersadie... Mersadie...\n\nLoken opened his eyes. There was blood across his sight, and blood dripping from the passage walls. He pulled himself up, feeling sharp edges grating against each other in his chest. Pieces of yellow armour and ragged meat lay in the congealing pool of blood covering the deck. Shadows writhed at the edge of sight.\n\n'Samus is here...' the whisper distant, half-real, calling.\n\nSomething in the shape of a skinned dog was biting into the open ribcage of one of the Imperial Fists. It turned as Loken stood. Its mouth was a cave of needle teeth. It leaped. Loken met it with the edge of his chainsword. The spinning teeth chewed through the thing's head and back into its body. It writhed, scrabbling at the air as black ichor sprayed out, but Loken was already surging forwards. He burst through its remains and began to run. In his head the call was rising, the scent in the air, shivering through his senses. He was Cerberus again now, forsaken and betrayed, loyal and inexorable, last hunter of the Luna Wolves, and he would have vengeance.\n\n'Samus is here...'\n\n'It's coming!' shouted Su-Kassen. Rogal Dorn did not turn. One of the trio of Huscarls spun to fire back down the passage behind them. Su-Kassen kept running.\n\n'The end and the death, the end and the death, the end and the death...' sounded across the vox and growled from the ship's alarm and speaker-horns.\n\nBolter fire sawed through the dark. The double-layered doors to the bridge slammed back into the walls in front of them. Su-Kassen looked behind her. Half-visible things with starved bodies and wings of rotting feathers tugged a Huscarl from the ground. Claws bit through armour. They lifted him, blood scattering as they peeled armour from flesh. A tide of black mist was pouring down the walls, strobing with red lightning. She could see the shadows of shapes inside the murk, bounding and rolling towards them on legs and tentacles.\n\nShe felt her mind flood with images of plains of dust and bone, her throat with the sting of bile.\n\nDorn was through the doors in front of her. She wrenched her eyes around and ran the last few strides.\n\nA deluge of noise washed over them as she entered the bridge. It was a circular space a hundred metres in diameter, its command systems rising in tiered islands of stone from the black-and-white marble floor. Tactical displays ten metres high covered the walls, flashing with static and blurred images. Smoke was pouring from banks of machines. Crew lay on the floor, broken by the fluctuating gravity. The rest were moving under the called commands of Imperial Fists overseers as they tried to control the vast ship as it writhed in their grasp.\n\n'The end and the death, the end and the death, the end and the death...' The hissing roar rose from every speaker and vox-system.\n\nThe doors they had come through began to swing shut. The daemon tide struck them. Gears and pistons jammed. Metal creaked and began to melt. The Huscarls in the chamber were running to Dorn's side as the primarch pivoted and fired back through the gap in between the closing doors.\n\nSu-Kassen was already moving across the floor towards the tiered mass of the command dais.\n\n'Shipmaster Sora,' she called, vaulting up the spirals of stairs. Sora turned to look at her, his blue augmetic eye shining as it zoomed. His yellow armour blinked between black and crimson in the flash of alert lights and the flare of burning machines. 'Full power to the engines - we need to push as far away from Terra as we can.'\n\n'Helm control is intermittent and deteriorating,' he replied, his voice raised. 'If we push her further out, we won't be able to bring her back into the battle sphere of Luna.'\n\n'That does not matter now,' she said, and saw the glimmer of understanding flash in his living eye. 'Begin contingency for reactor self-destruction.'\n\n'Admiral, this is the Phalanx! She-'\n\n'Would you rather she became a weapon for the enemy?'\n\n'Lord Dorn-'\n\n'This is his will, shipmaster.'\n\nShe looked around as a boom of shearing metal echoed through the chamber. Doors and sections of walls blistered with heat began to buckle. Darkness poured in, coiling like soot blown on the wind. Shapes formed in it as it billowed inwards. Wings and legs and arms unfolded. Gunfire streaked the air. The Imperial Fists scattered through the chamber were forming gun lines. Bolt shells ripped half-real creatures apart even as more came.\n\nServitors rose into the air from their cradles and chairs, cables and pipes snapping free, blood and waste drooling to the floor. The creatures forming at the edge of the wave of shadow surged forwards. Su-Kassen had her pistol out. Shipmaster Sora was shouting orders. Swarms of winged daemons rose high above them. Su-Kassen put two rounds into a creature with a body and wings of grey skin and sinew. The deck was trembling under her feet. Something dropped onto the top of a console next to her, and leaped at her with open mouth and splayed claws. Her shot-blast punched it back in a spray of black foam.\n\nDown on the deck, the wave of darkness broke over the Imperial Fists. Claws tore at helms. Armour split.\n\n'The Phalanx is moving away from Terra,' called Sora from beside her, but she only half heard. She was looking down the slope of the command dais.\n\nRogal Dorn stood amongst his sons. He had a sword in his hand. The weapon was forged for a Space Marine, long-hafted with a blade as tall as a mortal human. The warrior that he had taken it from would have borne it to battle with both hands. Dorn wielded it with one, carving it through congealed flesh and bone without cease, flowing from cut to cut. He was advancing against the tide, cutting a path into it, his Huscarls following with blades and bolters. No step took him backwards.\n\nAnd in that moment she understood something of what the Khan had said of his brother. It was not just Dorn's choices that were charged"}
{"text":"a blade as tall as a mortal human. The warrior that he had taken it from would have borne it to battle with both hands. Dorn wielded it with one, carving it through congealed flesh and bone without cease, flowing from cut to cut. He was advancing against the tide, cutting a path into it, his Huscarls following with blades and bolters. No step took him backwards.\n\nAnd in that moment she understood something of what the Khan had said of his brother. It was not just Dorn's choices that were charged by duty, but his nature - his will a chain holding back a storm that could pour out and break the world.\n\n'Samus is the only name you will hear...' the voice growled amongst the static and the sound of battle. The billowing darkness was rising, reaching up and out like a thunderhead. Su-Kassen could smell offal and blood. The substance of the walls and floor was distorting, stone burning, metal cracking with frost. A shape moved within the cloud, pulling its tendrils of vapour into an image stitched together from the oldest of fears. Fur and flayed muscles and eyes that glowed like burning homes on a moonless night. This was not just a prince of the Ruinous Pantheon now; it was an arch-herald of destruction.\n\nThe head of a mortal crewman five paces from Su-Kassen exploded. She felt her mind shrink, felt herself fighting not to collapse as her thoughts fled back into a place where the world was simple and small.\n\nThe daemon of the storm stepped forwards. Ash cascaded from its tread. The tide of daemons at its feet pulled back before it.\n\n'Samus... Samus is all... Samus will be your end... Samus is the end...'\n\nThe Huscarls began to fire up at it. Bolts burst in the congealing shadow of its torso. Casually, with speed that somehow blurred like an image drawn in a flick-book, it lashed out with a clawed hand. Bodies flew back, split open, blood showering from them. It picked one of the warriors up, cradling him as the legionary fired into its face. It closed its hand. Red sludge and shards of armour fell from its fingers.\n\nRogal Dorn looked up at the daemon. He paused for an instant and then ran to meet it, sword in hand and face set in rage.\n\nThe daemon laughed in a voice stitched together from static and gunfire.\n\nDorn leaped. Claws blurred towards him, but he was already past the blow, already slicing - once, twice, a dozen times. Black fluid and ash fell to the floor and the daemon seemed to recoil. Then it snapped forwards and its claws were tearing sparks from Dorn's sword blade.\n\nAcross the bridge, corpses lifted into the air. Red fire lit in their dead eyes. Sora had drawn his serpenta pistol and was firing down at the dead as they rose. Su-Kassen found herself reloading and firing without thought. The daemons were clawing up the command dais.\n\nRogal Dorn was a figure of gold half-submerged in a sea of darkness. There was blood on his armour, but he was still striking, lightning flaring from where his sword met the daemon's claws.\n\n'Can you see?' asked the voice just next to her. Mersadie tried to turn her head but could not. 'No, out there,' said the voice that sounded like Nilus and Loken and Keeler and Horus, and like the wind sawing through the teeth of dry skulls. 'Do you see?'\n\nShe looked. It was all she could do. She was still there, but separated from everything around her, a shadow out of sync with the reality it watched. It was like staring out through a window at a fog-filled street. And her senses stretched beyond. There was the great slice across the night, stretching wide, breathing out swarms of ships and spills of energy. There was the Phalanx, engines burning to push it wide of Luna and Terra even as it tumbled. Beside it, clouds of winged and clawed things scrabbled through the wreckage of its escorts. Across the dark, the barbed shapes of ships that had just come through the rift came closer, racing each other to be the first to cut the last threads of hope from the flagship of the VII Legion.\n\nAnd down and down through the layers of stone and metal that were the ship, she saw the black tide boiling through cracks and walls. It was a flood, a mass of daemonic energy that would swallow the Phalanx and all in it. Then it would seep into its bones and make the mighty fortress its own. And she was the gateway.\n\n'I did not do this,' she said.\n\n'No,' said the voice behind her, 'perhaps not, but you have been very helpful...'\n\nShe saw herself then. She was walking down one of the corridors of the ship. She was still there, still whole, but darkness unfolded from her shadow. The walls were blackening as she passed, tapestries and banners burning, stone cracking as ash danced in the air. Daemons were all around her, floating, spinning and gliding, a court following its queen. She looked old, her skin cracked parchment over a skull, her right eye boiled away, her left eye a pit of red fire. A ragged shadow walked at her side, its hands hanging low, its smile an arc of bloodied teeth.\n\n'You have made this last moment possible,' said the voice. 'As the storm reaches into reality, you are a lightning rod and we are the thundercloud. All you needed to do was be here and we could find a path. You are our tether, our door, our messenger. Your thoughts are our way in...'\n\n'They will turn you back.'\n\n'Do you mean Rogal Dorn?' chuckled the voice, and she felt warm, rank breath on the back of her neck. 'This is not a matter of arms and might, or did you think that a hero shouting on the seashore can truly turn the ocean back?' She felt the laugh shiver through her. 'Watch...' said the voice.\n\nMassak formed his mind into fire. The thought flooded him. He held it still for a second, tasted smoke in his mouth, felt the flames roar through his sight, consuming it, blinding him. The sound of Archamus and his Huscarls firing, of the warp creatures howling, all of it faded. The fire was everything. He held its image, and felt its power grow millisecond by millisecond.\n\n'Massak, we can't get through!' The voice was Archamus', close but distant, dimmed by the voice of the fire.\n\nHe let go.\n\nA white-hot inferno rushed from his outstretched hand. His view through his helm dimmed. Warp creatures in the fire's path boiled to slime. He strode forwards, panning the flames across the space before him. Daemon flesh unravelled to smoke and embers. Archamus and his Huscarls followed, with his two brother Librarians. Lightning arced from their swords as they cut daemons from the air.\n\nMassak felt his will fight to control the power flowing through him. He could see the inner blast door to the bridge just ten strides away. It was no more than a gaping hole of torn and fused metal.\n\nAs he ran forwards, bubbles of colour formed and burst at the edge of his sight. The ether was burrowing through his mind. Cold sweat poured from his skin inside his armour.\n\n'It is... everywhere,' called one of his brothers. Massak could feel the same truth. The warp was pouring through the ship, twisting through its substance, grasping it like a claw.\n\nThey were at the broken door. Archamus was at Massak's side, firing and reloading without cease. Massak knew what waited for them, seeing with his mind before he saw it with his eyes. A wave of heat broke over him. Images drowned in his thoughts: a wolf; a range of mountains, their canyons piled with skulls; the hiss of water falling into a shrine-pool, down, down - skulls looking up, grinning with promise...\n\n'Brother!' shouted a voice close by.\n\nHe snapped back to full awareness. In front of and above him, a figure of burnt flesh and blood-smoke clashed with a golden giant. Red lightning spat from where claw and blade met.\n\n'Father...' breathed Massak. In his mortal sight, Dorn and the daemon were a blur, a giant of shadow and ghostly flesh and a demigod of war, gleaming against the darkness. Cold control poured from Dorn, cracking the flow of the warp, splintering the folding dark as it spiralled around him.\n\n'Brothers,' he said, and the word echoed in the warp. Brothers. Cold light was kindling on the edge of his force axe. He heard and felt the other Librarians answer, and fold their thoughts and minds to his.\n\nPain enfolded him. He saw the pasts of his brothers as though they were his own; saw the scraps of human lives left behind when they became warriors in a crusade among the stars; felt the pain of remaking over and over again, the trials of mind, terrors faced and overcome, purpose found and then taken away, long years in the dark, dreaming, waiting...\n\nHe was moving forwards, his brothers falling into step around him, force blades rising to mirror his own axe. Behind them, Archamus and the Huscarls were firing back into the throat of the door they had come from.\n\nMassak felt the creature fighting Dorn become aware of them, felt its gaze turn as the Librarians advanced. Massak formed a thought and gripped it with all his will. The thought lit in the minds of his brothers. They began to glow, light and flame radiating off them in reality and the warp.\n\nIt had been a long time since they had united in this way, and even before the Edict of Nikaea they had been few amongst their Legion. But it had bound them, and now they were as they always had been, as they were always meant to be: a single weapon of many parts, unyielding alone, unbreakable as one.\n\nA crowd of lesser daemons rushed towards them. Massak shifted his will, and the fire of his soul and the ice and lightning of his brothers' minds blazed forth. Daemon flesh flashed to smoke; howls and cries spun into the air. He saw the great daemon swell, felt it suck strength into its being from the realm beyond. It lashed forwards. Massak saw the movement as a smear of smoke, and felt the promise of death that it carried. Dorn's sword dragged lightning as it rose to meet the blow.\n\nMassak's will and thought leaped out. He felt his brothers' pain as he yanked their minds with him. The air shrieked.\n\nFeathers of burning gold unfolded out of nothing. "}
{"text":" Daemon flesh flashed to smoke; howls and cries spun into the air. He saw the great daemon swell, felt it suck strength into its being from the realm beyond. It lashed forwards. Massak saw the movement as a smear of smoke, and felt the promise of death that it carried. Dorn's sword dragged lightning as it rose to meet the blow.\n\nMassak's will and thought leaped out. He felt his brothers' pain as he yanked their minds with him. The air shrieked.\n\nFeathers of burning gold unfolded out of nothing. Rubies of fire fell from etheric claws as the shape of their thoughts flew at the beast. It whipped around to meet it, and shadow claw met beak and talons. Blinding light flared. Daemons burst into showers of ash. Massak fell to his knees, his mind ringing. He could feel wounds opening across his body. The beast was still there, embers falling from its shredded limbs. Then Dorn struck.\n\nIn his dimming sight, the primarch's sword was a line drawn through the storm of the warp.\n\nLiquid fire and black blood sprayed out. The beast howled. Dorn struck again, and the daemon's cry flung Massak down amongst his brothers. His sight was draining from him. He saw Dorn's sword rise again, saw the great beast coming apart even before it fell. Muscle became bloody slime, bone crumbled, claws dissolved like salt in rain.\n\n'Samus...' hissed a voice carried on the wind that unravelled the last of its body. 'Samus is... coming...'\n\nAnd then it was not there. And the bridge was a charnel pit of dripping blood and settling ash. Dorn alone stood on the deck. Above them, other figures were pulling themselves to their feet on the command dais. Archamus and two remaining Huscarls were hurrying to Dorn's side as the primarch strode to where Massak was struggling to rise.\n\n'My son,' began Dorn, but Massak was shaking his head. His mind was a storm of pain and echoes of thoughts that were not his own.\n\n'Lord...' he began. 'There is something wrong... The creature...'\n\nA cry rose from high on the command dais as failed systems sparked back to life.\n\n'Lord Dorn, enemy ships are closing!'\n\nDorn was half turning.\n\n'No...' said Massak, forcing the words from his lips, panting, blood running over tongue and teeth. 'It is not gone... That was just...'\n\n'Samus...'\n\nThe corpse of one of the Huscarls raised its head from the deck behind Dorn. Its helm was torn. Its eyes were pits of red fire. And the dead rose into the air once more, fire bursting from within, as laughter echoed around them.\n\n'Samus will be your end...'\n\nLoken paced through the dark. The lights had failed and he had discarded his ruined helm. The world was grey now, its colours drained into shadows. He had heard the sound of gunfire in the distance several times, and had killed things that had taken the flesh of the dying.\n\n'In such visage, they turned upon their kin and gnawed then upon their bloody bones.' The old words of The Chronicles of Ursh rose from a long-forgotten crack in his memory.\n\nHe had failed, just as he had failed before. He had not seen. He had failed his new oaths just as he had failed the old. He had failed her.\n\nCerberus... The old name, the old pull of instincts, which had followed him from madness, drew him on through the dark. He was close. It was close. He could feel it. It was right; Samus was right. It had always been there, the man beside him. The shadow that never left him. But now he would end it. The end and the death for shadow and man alike...\n\nOn he went, on through the dark to an end he could not see.\n\nStrike Frigate Persephone, Inner System Gulf\n\nTraitor ships poured from the warp rift towards the Phalanx. Thrusters fired across its vast hull, shaking the vessel as it fell out into the void beyond Terra's gravity. Her sisters and escorts were gone, burned from being, or left behind. Daemons gnawed her skin, peeling away bites, threading her hide like parasites in diseased meat.\n\nTorpedoes began to strike her. First one, then a dozen. Then more, and more. Titan-sized warheads struck home, and ripped stone and metal away. Swarms of daemons spun and laughed as they tumbled into the void with the debris. The great ship trembled, its shields misfiring. The traitor ships came on, accelerating towards their prey with hunger. There were ships of all of Horus' greatest vassal Legions amongst them: the Deathchain of the World Eaters, Sovereign Blade of the Emperor's Children, and Olympian of the Iron Warriors, and dozens more.\n\nSigismund watched them close on the stricken Phalanx.\n\n'They have not seen us,' growled Rann.\n\n'Attack speed,' said Sigismund. 'All guns and all blades ready. Forwards.'\n\nRogal Dorn duels the daemon of the storm.\n\nNow you see\n\nWhen swords will not cut\n\nA story to tell\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\n'Now you see,' said the voice behind Mersadie. 'There is no way out.'\n\nAnd she did see. She saw the frozen moment as Rogal Dorn swung his blade to meet the claws of the daemon for a second time. She saw the traitors closing on the Phalanx and the few wounded ships of Sigismund's fleet plunge into them firing, lashing out with desperate ferocity. She saw daemons stalking the Phalanx's deep holds and machine spaces as Imperial Fists cut them down with bolter and blade.\n\nAnd she saw that none of it mattered. This was the end. Dorn could win a battle and Samus would still be there, all around them, a shadow that could not be shed. The warp was pouring into it, sustaining it and remaking it endlessly. The daemons would keep coming no matter how many fell, and the Imperial Fists would die one by one in a fight with an enemy that could not be defeated.\n\n'That is the truth...' said the voice behind her. 'Humanity can never be anything but slaves to us. We are made by you, and while you live we walk beside you. Mortals cannot win a war with what is eternal. What you have helped bring into being here, Mersadie Oliton, is just an example of that truth.'\n\n'What...' she began, hearing her voice echo flat in this realm of thoughts. 'What do you want of me? Why do you show me... this?'\n\nA dry chuckle.\n\n'You are our gate, but a gate is just an idea - your mind our way into being. Your memories, remembrancer, are our shape and power. Is it not fair for you to see what you bring into being?'\n\nShe saw again the cascade of vision, and the mockery of Ignace Karkasy's face in the grin of a creature as it plunged a rusted sword into a crewman's neck; saw shreds of Keeler's burning picts spin in the fire-wind as a fuel line ignited on a machine deck.\n\n'All mine...' she said.\n\n'Yes, all yours...' said the voice. 'And now... another relic of the past comes to show you his true face.'\n\nThe visions vanished, and Mersadie saw where she truly was.\n\nMassak felt the warp pour into the chamber, furnace-hot and ink-black. Cracks formed in the air as a thing that flickered between forms stepped out of the edge of sight. The corpses hanging in the air burst into a blaze. Molten fat and burning blood spun from them, falling up and congealing into arms, tentacles, eyes, chitin, fur and quills. Massak drew on his will but he could feel the currents of the warp coiling around him, squeezing, suffocating even as he tried to reshape it with his thoughts.\n\nHe saw Dorn raise his sword, bloodied but unbowed.\n\nSamus looked at the primarch with eyes that held clusters of dying stars. And it lashed forwards, the world hissing its name as it reached for the Praetorian.\n\n'No...' Massak cried. 'No, lord!' And he was stumbling forwards, his axe in his hand. 'Lord Dorn!\n\nArchamus was at his shoulder, firing without pause. Warp-formed shapes exploded.\n\n'He cannot win this,' gasped Massak at the Huscarl. Archamus flicked a glance at him. The front and side of his helm was a ruin of shredded ceramite.\n\n'We cannot-'\n\n'This is only a part of it,' Massak shouted back. 'A single hand of many. It is all around us!'\n\nA sheet of lightning flashed out. Massak blinked away blindness in time to see the primarch ramming the blade of his sword into the beast's chest. It withered and shrank as Dorn sawed the lightning-wreathed edge upwards. Massak felt a surge of power in the realm beyond. Red spots of blood blistered his sight. The daemon was straightening, growing even as Rogal Dorn cut it. It grabbed the Praetorian's shoulder, claws burning as they touched gold. It pulled closer, the blade vanishing into its flesh, its other claw rising.\n\nLoken slowed. His skin was prickling, his breath ice in his throat. Nothing stirred in the reactor chambers. Soot lay across the towers of machinery. White teeth grinned from charred heaps of flesh. There was no sign of living crew. The chamber hummed with the outpouring of reactors into conduits to feed the Phalanx's flight. There should have been a company of warriors barring his path into this chamber, and a swarm of tech-priests and servitors tending the systems. He had seen none, just drifts of ashes. He was not alone, though. It was here. He could feel it now, gliding over his senses.\n\nHe blinked. There was light. Distant flickering around a corner, the blue of plasma.\n\nHe moved forwards, so that he could look around the cliff of machinery blocking his view.\n\nA figure stood on a gantry that projected out before a pit of brilliant illumination. Beneath it shone a sphere of blue-hot plasma held in buzzing fields. Arcs of power flicked out of the sphere and burrowed down conduits lined with magnetic coils. Loken knew what it was, though not the mysteries of its working. It was a plasma junction, where the raw power of the reactor was pooled and then drawn off into hungering systems. The woman before it was looking down into it, light playing across her face. Blood dripped slowly from her fingers.\n\n'Who are you?' he asked, taking a step forwards. A sound like wind whining through rock fissures slid into the silence. He had his sword in one hand, his bolter in the other.\n\nHe could feel the cold breath of the madness in his thoughts. He was Cerberus, the hound of the under"}
{"text":"plasma junction, where the raw power of the reactor was pooled and then drawn off into hungering systems. The woman before it was looking down into it, light playing across her face. Blood dripped slowly from her fingers.\n\n'Who are you?' he asked, taking a step forwards. A sound like wind whining through rock fissures slid into the silence. He had his sword in one hand, his bolter in the other.\n\nHe could feel the cold breath of the madness in his thoughts. He was Cerberus, the hound of the underworld, vengeance and death.\n\n'Captain Loken,' said the figure. 'Do you have a story to tell?'\n\nHe did not hear but took another step forwards, finger ready by the trigger, thumb resting on his blade's power stud.\n\n'I can see it. I can see it all. There it is, you see, in the falling water...' she said, raising her hand, and as she traced an arc up in the air, the world changed.\n\nLoken froze. The reactor chamber was gone, the vast machines replaced by a slanting cavern of natural rock overlooking a deep fault. A spit of stone projected out over the blackness beneath. Water fell from above, spattering off the faces of the rocks. He knew this place. Even through the mist of madness, he would always know this place. This is where it had begun, where he had seen the first sign of what was to come: The Whisperheads. Sixty-Three Nineteen. The beginning of the end. All again, here and now.\n\n'Mersadie?' he asked. The kill instinct faded. He was not Cerberus. He was Loken, captain of the Luna Wolves.\n\nMersadie pointed at the cascade. 'Do you see your story? It's there. Just look.'\n\nHe felt himself begin to look... He stopped. His mind flashed clear.\n\nSamus. It was Samus. He snapped forwards, sword lighting, arm rising, Cerberus snarling rage and vengeance with his mouth.\n\nMersadie turned. Blood had run from her eyes and clotted on her cheeks.\n\n'Loken!' she cried, eyes wide with terror. 'Loken!'\n\nHis blow faltered.\n\n'Mersadie?'\n\nShe took a step towards him. Hands rising, fingers shaking.\n\n'Oh, you poor fool...' she said. 'No.' And she smiled as her hands closed on his wrists with a sound of shattering ceramite and snapping bone.\n\nFrigate Persephone, Inner System Gulf\n\n'Lord Sigismund, we are approaching boarding range with the Phalanx. The Ophelia and Son of Stars are locking formation with us. Coming alongside now.'\n\n'For our oaths, my brothers,' Sigismund called, raising his voice over the roar of the ship as he brought his sword up and rested his head against the flat of the blade.\n\n'Stand ready!' roared Rann, slamming his fist onto his shield.\n\nThe doors of the boarding gantry stood before him. Behind him and spread through the staging chambers was every warrior of his command who could yet wield a blade. They had taken a single oath of moment - find Rogal Dorn. The primarch was still alive, Sigismund was certain of it. Inside his helm, he watched the distance runes cycle down to nothing.\n\nToo slow... much too slow...\n\nThe whole of the Persephone was shaking as it poured the last of its ammunition into the ships converging on the Phalanx. Sigismund's force had left its slower ships scattered in a thin arc between them and the oncoming enemy vessels.\n\nThe deck around them was quaking as vast gantries extended from the flank of the Persephone. Chains rattled through tank-sized spindles. Amber lights flashed from red back to amber. A metallic roll of thunder boomed through the chamber.\n\n'Alongside now,' said the voice of the bridge officer in Sigismund's helm. 'Boarding gantries in hull contact.'\n\nSigismund closed his eyes, felt his will pull the beat of his hearts down into a low drumbeat of calm.\n\n'Lord!' The shout filled his ears. The deck and walls shook and shook again. 'Lord there is a... distortion around the Phalanx, lord. There are things in the void-'\n\nSomething struck the ship, flipping it over like a toy thrown from a child's hand. Alarms blared as the world rolled over and over.\n\nThe metal of the doors before them bloomed with rust as creatures burst through in a wave of wide mouths and reaching claws.\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\n'Look at him,' said the voice behind Mersadie. Around her, the image of the Phalanx's reactor chamber blurred and blinked into the image of a family house on Terra, then it became the cell she had lived in for the last seven years, then it was a dark cave filled with the sound of falling water. In all of them, Loken stood before her, frozen as he staggered backwards, sword falling from his hand. But his eyes were alive, and alight with pain. 'Weakness is a habit, you know,' said the voice behind her. 'You return to it like a dog to its vomit...'\n\nShe felt her body move forwards and pluck Loken's sword from the air as it fell. She kicked him. The force and impact would have broken her leg but the strength that moved in her was not her own. Loken's frozen form tumbled back. The scene around them was still the cave. A black abyss opened beneath the spit of rock they stood on. Loken lay on its edge.\n\nShe felt her neck move, so that she was looking down at him. The sword in her grip felt light, its weight and bulk a feather.\n\n'Our dreams cannot change the stars. But sometimes, our deeds can change the universe even if it is only by accident.' She heard the memory of her own words, and waited for the voice behind her to comment or laugh, but it was silent, focused on Loken lying on the floor next to the abyss.\n\n'You did the same thing with Jubal,' said a voice that came from her mouth, but was not hers. 'And then with the lodges, and then with Horus... Even after all you have seen and all you have done, Loken, you just can't quite believe the worst is happening. And so you have hope, and pity, and so you suffer for your weakness.' The sword in her hand rose, the point resting on Loken's throat just above the collar of his armour.\n\n'And that is enough?' the memory of Vek's voice said.\n\nStill there was no reaction.\n\n'We could let him choke,' said the voice behind Mersadie. 'Stop the muscles in his lungs. Crush him bit by bit...'\n\n'It is all we have...'\n\n'But I think this is better. Everything has meaning, and what does it say that this last lost son of wolves dies by his own sword.'\n\n'No,' said Mersadie. She heard the word in her mind and felt it come from her mouth. The presence behind her, the shadow in her mind, recoiled. 'I think that his story ends somewhere else.'\n\nAnd, slowly, with all the will and rage that gathered to her, and the voices of the dead shouting from memories, she turned around and looked behind her.\n\nBlackness...\n\nStars...\n\nMoon rising above bare trees...\n\nCold light caught in the water of a black pool. A shape like a man, fur and flayed skin, shadow and blood. The man in her shadow.\n\n'The end,' she said. The thing snarled, its ragged shape looming to the sky. 'And the death.'\n\nThe sword struck the daemon in its throat and punched out of its back. Yellow eyes went wide. Shadows collapsed.\n\nShe jerked back, dragging the blade free, turning. And the vision of cave and moonlit night blurred. Substance became translucent, and for a second her sphere of sight was not narrow, but broad and infinite, and she could see along all the paths to the fragments of Samus' presence. She saw Rogal Dorn, blade locked with a thing of claws and flame; she saw the ships trying to dock with the Phalanx while coils of darkness gripped them.\n\nThen the vision went and she was looking at Loken trying to rise from the floor. The chamber around them was whining as energy poured from reactors out into the ship. The ground they stood on was not a spit of rock but a gantry, the abyss the glowing light of the plasma junction.\n\nThere was a dead weight pulling her arm towards the deck. She looked down and saw that she still held Loken's sword. She let go of it. The blade struck the deck with a clang. Loken's eyes opened.\n\n'Loken,' she said. He looked at her and there was suspicion and rage in his eyes. He was already halfway to his feet. Fresh blood scattered from tears in his armour. 'It's all right,' she said. She could feel a burning presence building in the distance of her thoughts, rushing towards the present like a thunderstorm racing across a still plain.\n\n'It is you now,' he said, his voice hovering on the edge of a question. She looked just as she always had, bloodied but still the same. But that, of course, did not mean anything.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'It is me. The... the daemon is not here now, but it will be coming back. And this needs to be over before it does. If it cannot overwhelm the ship it will breach the reactors and burn it to nothing. It wants to make it a nest but if it cannot, it will make it a pyre.'\n\nLoken was rising, his armour grinding, blood seeping from breaks and joints.\n\nShe stepped back, shaking her head. The skin across her back prickled with static.\n\nBlack spheres were forming in her sight, and she could hear a voice calling to her out of the depths of her mind, coming closer like the sound of pistons onrushing through a tunnel.\n\n'It's going to be all right,' she said. 'The... the thing I brought here, it needs me, you see. It needs a door and for that door to be open. And while the door is open, it cannot be defeated. It's like a memory, or a story - it carries on for as long as it is told. But it's going to be all right.'\n\nShe saw the shadow fall across his face, then. Saw the flash in the night depths of his eyes.\n\n'I am sorry,' she said, before he could speak. 'I am sorry, but I doubt anyone will ever know your story.' She laughed. 'Maybe for the best - it's a good tale, but I have always thought that I would struggle to do it justice. Ignace would have been better. It would have looked fine in verse. The making and undoing of a dream by beings greater than men, but weaker than gods.'\n\nShe saw him twitch. Blood coughed from his mouth. He spat, shook his head.\n\n'I have always struggled with poetry,' he said. He looked at the sword lying on the deck between them.\n\nA heartbea"}
{"text":"bt anyone will ever know your story.' She laughed. 'Maybe for the best - it's a good tale, but I have always thought that I would struggle to do it justice. Ignace would have been better. It would have looked fine in verse. The making and undoing of a dream by beings greater than men, but weaker than gods.'\n\nShe saw him twitch. Blood coughed from his mouth. He spat, shook his head.\n\n'I have always struggled with poetry,' he said. He looked at the sword lying on the deck between them.\n\nA heartbeat of time passed. He did not move. The sword lay still on the metal of the gantry.\n\nMersadie smiled one last time.\n\n'Thank you, old friend,' she said.\n\nAnd let herself fall back into the glow of the plasma conduit.\n\nA howl of rage tore into her mind as a presence like night poured back into her soul.\n\nShe fell, and the voices of her past spoke one last time.\n\n'I understand you have a story... I'd like to remember it, for posterity.'\n\n'Which story?'\n\nOblivion swallowed her, and the past fell silent.\n\nSo fall the walls of heaven\n\nThirteenth of Secundus\n\nThe Phalanx, Inner System Gulf\n\nSu-Kassen felt the world expand around her. Shrill pain stitched her skin. The fire and shadow filling the Phalanx's bridge became a flat sheet stretched taut over the world. She breathed in. Sulphur and the reek of burnt metal filled her lungs. She felt bile rise to her tongue. Her head was spinning, echoing with the hiss of voices that sounded as though they were draining into the distance. She retched. Shipmaster Sora lay in a heap of many parts across the command dais. Lights pulsed red on consoles. Some of the human crew around her were sobbing; some were not moving. Some would never move again.\n\nBut the daemons were gone. Vanished away like nightmares after waking.\n\nShe focused on her breathing, and then on standing. The blare of sirens still echoed across the bridge, but there was no gunfire, no scream of blades. She still had her gun in her hand. She snapped its magazine open. It was empty and her fingers found the reloads gone from her belt. She looked at her hand. Blood caked her palm.\n\n'Admiral.' The voice brought her head around.\n\nRogal Dorn was climbing the stairs of the dais.\n\nThere was shouting coming from the other side of the torn bulkhead doors, the clang of armoured feet, the whine as guns in the hands of the surviving Huscarls built charge. There were more Imperial Fists moving onto the bridge now. Some of the warriors bore the twin axe emblem of the elite Assault Cadre, others the black-and-white heraldry of the Templars. Holo-projections were blinking to life again, painting the sulphur-spiced air with a story of blood and disaster out in the void.\n\n'Admiral,' said Dorn again. She focused on him. His face was streaked in soot and blood. The gold of his armour was scorched almost to black. But something in his presence held still the rush of her thoughts.\n\n'What happened to-'\n\n'The walls of heaven have fallen, admiral.' She looked at him. 'And so I must send you from my side.'\n\nLoken limped onto the deck of the grey ship. It seemed untouched, as though the tide of neverborn had passed over it without realising it was there.\n\nHis broken hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword. His armour growled with every step.\n\n'Cast off,' he said to the robed crew who glided forwards to meet him. 'Full speed to Terra.' The crew bowed assent but did not speak. He limped on step by step. Light shifted in the corridors he passed through. The hull rang as docking cradles unlocked and engines woke to full life. He walked on, silent, hollow.\n\nHe reached the sanctuary at last.\n\nWide eyes looked up at him as he keyed the door release.\n\nNoon shifted from where he had been curled on Mori's lap. The girl just looked at him, fear in her eyes. The boy took a step towards Loken, and looked up.\n\n'Where is Mersadie?' the boy asked.\n\nLoken found that he could not reply.\n\nSigismund looked up as the image of the Phalanx became a golden speck in the darkness of the Persephone's viewport. Before them, Terra shone. Shells burst in the night around them. The view hazed. It would be a short race to the Throneworld, a last journey to a final war.\n\nHe turned and saw Rogal Dorn standing a pace beside him. The Praetorian had sent his flagship out into the battles that still burned amongst the planets, but returned to Terra in person, the master of the citadel returning to its walls. The Persephone would carry him there, outrunning the tide as it rolled in.\n\nSigismund moved aside, bowing his head, waiting for his father to speak. The primarch did not look at him, and did not speak, but kept his eyes on the light of Terra.\n\nSu-Kassen looked about her at the ruin of the command deck. Imperial Fists, servitors and tech-priests moved around her, securing the damaged bridge and repairing it as best they could. The dead had gone, but their blood remained.\n\n'Transmit the signals as soon as we are clear of the primary battle sphere,' she said, to salutes and words of acknowledgement.\n\nShe looked around as one of the sets of holo-projectors activated and cast a sheet of blue light across the air. It was an enhanced image from visual sensors, a view of Terra alone against a field of stars.\n\n'Go,' Rogal Dorn had said to her. 'It is as we talked of, admiral. The battle will blood the earth now, not the void, but there is still a war to fight, out there to the edge of the sun's circle. And the burden of that fight I must place on you.'\n\n'Lord Dorn, this is the ship of your Legion,' she had said.\n\n'And the flagship of your command now, admiral.' And he had nodded once, his eyes unblinking. 'It was always going to be like this. No matter what else we planned, or designed.' He had placed a hand on her shoulder. The golden digits felt heavy. 'You know what is needed, and when to return.'\n\n'Yes, Lord Praetorian.'\n\n'Admiral,' said a signal officer, 'we are picking up a signal in reply to our broadcast.'\n\n'It is authentic?'\n\n'The code ciphers match those agreed by the contingency protocols,' said the officer. 'It is a ship of the Fifth Legion.'\n\nShe nodded to herself. It was a beginning.\n\nDarkness rolled through the light of the sun. Ships came from the rift cut into the skin of space without cease: ships touched by the warp and the hands of the Dark Gods, vessels of war and exploration now become cathedrals of iron weeping cries into the night.\n\nIn his throne room, Horus stood before the grand viewport set behind his throne and looked out at the void. He saw as the last survivors of Camba Diaz's fleet pulled away from Mars. He saw as the great slab-ships descended to the surface of the Red Planet, Hal's nine prime disciples, Nul to Oct, kneeling in the dust before the Fabricator General.\n\nHe saw the defences of Luna fall silent, bit by bit, and Abaddon - faithful and true Abaddon, first and best of his sons - pause beside a pool of water in a deep chamber as the echo of distant gunfire touched his ears. He saw Abaddon turn his head to look up through the shaft in the ceiling, and see not the sun but Terra looking back with reflected light. He saw Layak, the last of his soul dwindling, watching Abaddon, and listening to the distant song of a prophecy that Horus had not heard.\n\nAnd the Warmaster's gaze went on.\n\nHe saw the Phalanx roll to come about, its golden hull bleeding from its wounds. Ships detached from its flanks, and fired their engines, boosting back across the gulf towards Terra.\n\nThe Phalanx's engines flared as it arced away from Terra into the depths of the void above the system's orbital disc. Ships waited there: the scattered vessels of the V Legion, and the remains of the ships that had slowed Perturabo's passage from Uranus to Jupiter. The Phalanx would find its daughters and cousins, and spill more blood before all was done.\n\nA detail, like the survival of Rogal Dorn, now running to Terra's walls - a detail that mattered little in the turning of this moment.\n\n'All ends are mine,' he said to the light beyond. And in the void his host bore down on the Throneworld of the Imperium.\n\nTerra\n\nIt was the thirteenth of Secundus, but day was still to break over the eastern battlements of the Palace. In the night sky above, the grey ship and the Persephone and Ophelia plunged down through the cordons of atmospheric defences as enemies chased after them. The guns of Terra started firing. The thickening atmosphere shook and screamed. Surface batteries opened up. Across the face of Terra, rockets punched into the sky from buried silos.\n\nOne of the traitor vanguard struck a drift of mines on the edge of the high orbital defences. Plasma ripped through its hull. More mines detonated. Behind it, more and more ships swarmed into orbit.\n\nThe ships that had come from the Phalanx, and across the system from Pluto's fall, fired their retros as they burned through Terra's atmosphere. Drop-ships scattered from their flanks and plunged down towards the Palace, fire feathering their wings. Escort fighters fell into formation with them.\n\nThe light of the new day falling on the eastern Palace walls shredded to shadows as vast ships crowded across the sun. Across the face of the planet, from the hives still soaked in night to the southern polar fortresses, the guns fired. And far below the pillars of energy pouring up into the sky, people clung to each other in the dark, or cradled weapons that they barely knew how to use.\n\nGunships touched down amongst the towers of the Palace. Doors pistoned open. Warriors in yellow and black poured out. With them walked Rogal Dorn. He paused on the landing platform as, high above, a chain of orbital mines detonated in a rippling explosion. Debris fell as shooting stars. Fire spread across a sky growing dark with the ships. Aircraft swarmed and spun in high orbit, spreading and chasing flames through the burning air.\n\nIt was the thirteenth of Secundus, and the warning sirens, which had sounded for six weeks, rose in voice as the first shells fell fro"}
{"text":"pen. Warriors in yellow and black poured out. With them walked Rogal Dorn. He paused on the landing platform as, high above, a chain of orbital mines detonated in a rippling explosion. Debris fell as shooting stars. Fire spread across a sky growing dark with the ships. Aircraft swarmed and spun in high orbit, spreading and chasing flames through the burning air.\n\nIt was the thirteenth of Secundus, and the warning sirens, which had sounded for six weeks, rose in voice as the first shells fell from the sky.\n\n∞\n\n'Here we are... Here we are at last...'\n\nThe man does not look up from the fire. It has almost died to embers. The glow held in each splintered branch is fading from yellow to red as he watches it. The stranger who stands on the other side of the fire is tall and broad, with a face distilled from the images of kings and conquerors through the ages. He wears black, just like the man sat beside the fire, but his garments are heavy and regal where the seated man's cloak and clothes are ragged and worn. The pelt across the standing man's shoulders is thick, and the head of a beast hangs over his shoulder. Rings glint on his gloved fingers, the gems set into each catching the dim light of the burning wood: amethyst, ruby, emerald, sapphire.\n\n'Will you not talk now, father?' says Horus. 'Will you not tell me the truth?' He squats down, eyes catching the ember-glow just as the rings on his fingers do. 'I am here. I am alone.'\n\nThe man beside the fire raises His head slowly. He looks old, His skin lined and folded with time, His hair white, but His eyes are black from edge to edge, like the holes left for eyes in the bronze statues of dead ages.\n\n'You are never alone now,' He says, and turns His gaze to the shadows of the trees. 'I see you,' He says to the dark. For an instant the fire flares bright. Sparks fountain up, and the light is not dim but blinding. Brilliance pours into the spaces between the bare trunks and branches. Things of feather and fur and scale and bone shrink and snarl. But they do not retreat, and after the light fades, the shadows flow back to press close around the ember-glow.\n\n'Hypocrisy and hubris, father,' says Horus. 'I don't know why it never struck me before it was revealed to me. You are a despot, no better than those whom you cast down to make your realm... A king with a false crown who built His throne on lies and slaughter and maintains it by force. Higher purpose, greater ends to justify any deed, all are just the painted skin on a rotting skull... I know, father. I have seen.'\n\nThe man beside the fire does not move, and the void of His gaze holds unblinking.\n\n'Illumination...' says Horus. 'That is what you used to call our goal. Truth and light... Well, I have seen it, father. I am illuminated. All is revealed to my sight and there is no veil between me and the flame of truth.'\n\nHorus shifts, and for a second he does not seem a man, but a shadow of something vast and hunched and furred caught in the light of a blaze much brighter than the fading embers before them.\n\n'You still have some strength,' says Horus and raises his ringed hand. Slowly, he reaches down into the fire and grips a glowing shard of wood. He lifts it, smoke fuming from where his skin chars. Horus holds the ember up, and the red fire glow lights his face. The heat in the fire fades, becomes cold black, then powdered ash. Horus looks at the Emperor for a long second and then stands, his presence stretching up into the bare branches and night sky. 'But you are not strong enough. You never were.'\n\nThe Emperor looks back to the dead ash of the fire before Him. Then He closes His eyes, and the image of the forest and fire and the face of His false son flee away into the distance, and there is only the voice of Horus, cold and laughing as it echoes after.\n\n'Run,' it calls. 'Run, father, and know that I am coming. Run!'\n\nWhen strikes midnight\n\nBombardment\n\nWe will stand\n\nBhab Bastion, 13th of Secundus\n\nOn the thirteenth day of Secundus, the bombardment of Terra began.\n\nThe enemy aimed the first shell deliberately at the centre of the Inner Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, the Emperor's own quarters. It screamed a song of fire as it tore apart the atmosphere over Himalazia, falling through the furious storm of anti-ship cannonades and defence laser beams coming up from the Imperial defences. The assault on the Warmaster's fleet was so intense that the shell went almost unnoticed. Its flight was short, being cut apart by a net of las-beams as soon as it was detected.\n\nBut it was seen.\n\nThe Emperor's Praetorian watched its brief descent, his stern features unmoved. Two others stood with him, mighty lords of the Imperium both. The Great Angel and the Warhawk saw the momentary flash also.\n\nThree armoured giants forged in the fires of yesterday's knowledge. They were brothers, after a fashion, born of the same science and the same inhuman genius.\n\nThe Praetorian's name was Rogal Dorn. His armour was of gold. His hair was shocking white. His sculpted face was as severe as any patriarch from mankind's long history. There was no room for compromise in his expression.\n\nSanguinius, the Angel was named. He was garbed in gold as bright as Dorn's panoply. His armour covered all his body save his face and his snow-white wings. He was beautiful, a divine being incarnate pulled down from heaven and exiled in the soiled world of men. He observed the universe sadly.\n\nThe Warhawk wore gleaming white. His adopted people called him Jaghatai Khan, the first name given for his prowess, the latter because he was their king. He kept the name. Like his brothers he went without his helm. Below a tall topknot his face was proud, wild, always on the verge of a smile, but troubled, like the sky at summer's end edged with autumn's clouds. He sought out death simply for the joy of laughing at it.\n\n'Midnight, as the old reckoning has it. The symbolic spearcast,' said the Khan. 'Our brother marks his enmity for us. It is a challenge. A promise of his victory. We did this on Chogoris, when armies met. This shot is meant for the three of us.'\n\n'Such arrogance,' said Sanguinius softly.\n\n'Horus was well gifted with confidence. It has grown wayward. He is too sure of himself.' The Khan shrugged as if Horus' fall had been an inevitability. His glorious armour hissed and sighed. 'Arrogance is close kin to hubris. He will fail because of it.'\n\nDorn turned his gaze to the Warmaster's armada. Not since the Principia Imperialis had mustered at the opening of the Great Crusade had such a fleet of void-ships gathered over Terra, and never before had so many come as enemies. Terra's iron children returned to their origin with murder in their hearts, to spit hatred onto the cradle of mankind. And yet, for the moment, they held back, weathering the storm of explosives and violent energies hurled at them from the ground.\n\nThousands upon thousands of ships crowded every orbit, so many that their lights outcompeted the stars and sun and turned night and day into a single, ceaseless murk of red war-glow, strobed with vicious flashes. Void shields deflected the Palace's attack, spilling unclean colours across the upper atmosphere in such amounts that they encased the planet in vile aurorae.\n\nBells rang from every Palace tower. Sirens wailed. Tocsins clamoured. Guns rippled out asynchronous drumbeats. The sky crackled and boomed with the discharge of mighty weaponry. The Palace defences had been firing since the moment the ships came within effective range. The fleet was so densely packed the defenders could not miss. As the brothers watched, a ship came apart, shedding debris meteors.\n\nThe enemy's response was that single shell.\n\n'Why do you wait?' Dorn said quietly. The ramparts of the Bhab Bastion were empty except for the three brothers. The question he uttered for the sake of speaking, for recently he felt himself falling too often into silence. 'Come to us. Break yourself upon our walls.'\n\n'He waits no more,' said Sanguinius. His voice, once melodious, was strained. 'It begins.' He lifted his hand and pointed.\n\nThe sky sparkled a billion times as every ship in the fleet spoke together. The Emperor will fall, the pattern of light seemed to say. We have come to wreak ruin.\n\n'Every war I have ever seen has hidden beauty,' said the Khan. 'But I have seen few sights quite so entrancing as this.'\n\n'A fleeting beauty,' said Dorn. 'And deadly.'\n\nThe shells hit the upper atmosphere where they drew flaming lines through the sky.\n\n'All things are fleeting,' said the Khan. 'Life is short and full of woe. One must wring every moment dry, and drink in the experience it has to offer, good or bad.'\n\nThe space above the Palace was full of the downwards arcs of munitions, and the straight lines of las-bursts stabbing upwards. The air shook with matter hurtling from the void. Booming reverberations echoed from the peaks of the Himalazian massif, resounding around the whole world, girdling it in sound even before the first shot detonated.\n\n'How can you see the good in this?' Sanguinius asked the Khan. As he turned to look to the Warhawk the first shells burst over the Skye orbital plate, the last of Terra's artificial satellites. It hung low to the horizon, near the Inner Palace, its wide arrays of grav engines labouring to keep it aloft. The munitions exploded harmlessly, their fury vented into the warp by void shields. The dome of the plate's protective aegis shone with baleful energies.\n\n'Joy is an act of defiance,' said the Khan. 'With joy, we win, even if we lose. To have lived well is a victory all its own, for we all die. Death is unimportant to the laughing warrior. A poet makes tragedy glorious. That is why.'\n\nThe shells hit the main shields seconds after hitting Skye. The aegis was wrought with ancient knowledge jealously harboured by the priests of Mars. The voids comprising the aegis reacted, and roofed the Earth with fire. Storms of flame shot out complex tangles of discharg"}
{"text":"s an act of defiance,' said the Khan. 'With joy, we win, even if we lose. To have lived well is a victory all its own, for we all die. Death is unimportant to the laughing warrior. A poet makes tragedy glorious. That is why.'\n\nThe shells hit the main shields seconds after hitting Skye. The aegis was wrought with ancient knowledge jealously harboured by the priests of Mars. The voids comprising the aegis reacted, and roofed the Earth with fire. Storms of flame shot out complex tangles of discharge lightning. The Palace shuddered with the effort of buried machines as halls of generators fought to hold back the bombardment from the spires of the city. Beyond the aegis' protection the ground bucked. Towers of nuclear fire roared skywards from every horizon. Tremors shook the world. As the first round of shells hit, the fleet's energy cannons awoke, hurling shafts of burning light and streams of plasma down, so that the void shields danced, and the view of the ships was lost.\n\nThe Emperor's Praetorian looked into the inferno in the sky. His eyes focused somewhere past the fleet, deep into the hidden void, as if he could see beyond the bounds of the Solar System and the material universe and out into the warp, where the fleets of Roboute Guilliman made all haste to the Throneworld. His gauntlets gripped the lip of the parapet tightly.\n\n'We will not fall,' he said with utmost certainty. 'We will stand.'\n\nAltai Wastes, 13th of Secundus\n\nThousands of kilometres away, in a land where cold wind cut over bare peaks, other eyes watched the skies. From Altai, the Palace was a glow reflected from the heavens. The curve of Terra hid the Palace and the mountains it usurped, but the Emperor's home dominated the globe. One was always certain where it was, no matter how far distant, for in an empire of a million systems, Terra was but a small place.\n\nHorus' fleet swam above the city shine, like sparks over distant forest fires. To the watchers on the mountainside the first shell fell obviously down the sky in a bright tear-track streak. In the long slit lens of high-powered magnoculars, it shone even brighter.\n\nMyzmadra lowered the magnoculars from her mask lenses. The lenses and magnoculars worked together to snatch at the light and drag the image so close to her that she felt she could feel the shell's re-entry heat. Bringing the magnoculars down ended the illusion, and she shivered with the cold, though she wore a voluminous cloak over her body glove. Puffs of air exhausted of oxygen blew away from her breathing ports in misty curls.\n\n'Is that the signal?' Ashul didn't feel the cold like her. He tolerated the high altitude better too and so wore no mask. His left eye was shut gently, the other pressed to the scope of his sniper-las, watching the shell as it came apart under the anti-munitions beams.\n\n'It is as good as any,' she said. 'We have to be quick. Altai is a long way from Southern Himalazia.'\n\nThe mountain over the valley had a perfectly squared chunk removed from it. At the bottom of this square the sun could never touch was a mining town built around a monorail halt, currently crammed to capacity with people rounded up for the final conscription.\n\n'There will be no more trains after this,' said Ashul.\n\nThe glaring light cast by the town's tall lumen pylons picked out every individual in the crowd as clearly as rocks in the desert under noonday sun. He swept his sight over them, idly calculating beam diffraction and the difficulties of distance kills.\n\n'You can get us in there?' he asked.\n\n'Do you think I can't?' said Myzmadra.\n\nOver the Palace, the bombardment began in earnest. The sky flashed, and the earth shook.\n\nAshul shrugged. 'Our luck has to run out sooner or later.' Privately, he felt their luck was exhausted when they'd been sent back to Terra. Not so long ago he made the mistake of telling Myzmadra this. 'Our orders keep coming, but the assets dwindle. Now the end.' He waved to the rising false dawn of the bombardment. 'This is the last run for us. We'll get caught, or we'll die in the crossfire.'\n\n'Do you care?' Myzmadra said.\n\nAnother cynical shrug. 'I still believe in the Legion, if that's what you're asking.'\n\n'It wasn't.' Myzmadra divested herself of her kit, all of it - cloak, pouches, weapons, everything she carried. She did so methodically. Only when she stripped off her body glove did she begin to hurry. In the glare leaking from the town her naked body was cast into a relief as pronounced as the Altai Mountains: peaks of muscle, deep valleys between. Goosebumps formed all over her. Everyone has weaknesses, thought Ashul, being cold was one of hers. She was his.\n\n'Do you care about dying?' she said.\n\nHe wished she hadn't put it so baldly.\n\n'I do care. I thought I wouldn't,' admitted Ashul. 'Death in the abstract is a friendlier fellow than death in the flesh, and he's breathing down my neck right now.'\n\nShe kept her mask on, because anyone who could get a mask like that in the Altai wore one. They were relatively common despite their expense. From a backpack, she pulled out padded utility clothes worn by the workers, and a heavy, waist-length jacket. She shuddered noticeably as she clothed herself again. The body glove was a far more efficient form of insulation than the worker's uniform.\n\n'You've become afraid,' she said.\n\n'I'm no coward,' said Ashul. 'We're all going to die, one way or another. I'm still with you. You asked, I said. I don't want to die, but I will if I have to. I'd prefer it if it made a difference.'\n\n'We'll make a difference.'\n\n'What are our orders, even?'\n\n'Free rein,' she said. 'Havoc. We'll find something.'\n\n'Will we?' he asked flatly.\n\nMyzmadra gave him a look he had come to know only too well. Her face was invisible under the mask, of course, but the look was there, on her face, right now. He could tell from the tilt of her head. He could tell from the tone of her voice.\n\n'You do your job, Ashul.'\n\nHe got up and dusted his knees off. His rad counter gave out five slow clicks; the mountains were rife with residual radiation from one of Terra's forgotten wars. He'd read somewhere that the region used to be quite beautiful, a land of rivers, forests and steppes. He couldn't believe this freezing desert could be any other way than what it was today. He couldn't even imagine it. That was always his problem, he thought, no imagination. That was why he never believed the Emperor.\n\n'I will,' he said. He dumped his rifle with some regret. It was a good gun.\n\nHis other possessions - stub pistol, knife, rations and such - were common enough to pass as the authentic kit of a dirt miner.\n\nThey wrapped their belongings in plastek before placing them in a cleft in the stone and heaping rocks on top of them. They would not be coming back, and nobody would find the cache, but old habits died hard.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' he said.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' she responded.\n\nThey snuck down the mountain. The muster point was simmering with tension. The few officials present struggled to keep order. Everyone was scared. Nobody on Terra had slept well for months; hellish nightmares tormented all the world.\n\nThe crowd, heaving with irritation and fear, absorbed Ashul and Myzmadra without ever noticing they were there.\n\nEnd of the line\n\nEternity Terminus\n\nThrough the Palace\n\nEternity Terminus, 13th of Secundus\n\nBolts rattled in the pitch-dark, startling Katsuhiro from the numb, aimless terror that had replaced sleep. The door to the cargo container swung down and out on creaking hinges, slamming hard onto rockcrete. Light that wasn't so very bright but seemed as glaring as a plasma flash flooded the compartment. When his eyes adjusted, lumens grouped in berry bunches on iron vines were the first thing Katsuhiro saw of the Imperial Palace. Beyond the lights was a ceiling of coloured glassaic, softly backlit. Everything else was obscured by the throng crammed into the freight container. Since the very beginning of the sixteen-hour trip, there had been standing room only. His legs shook with the effort of remaining still so long. If it weren't for the bodies rammed in beside him, Katsuhiro would have fallen.\n\nTrying to crane his neck to see better invited a sharp spasm of cramp. His kitbag pulled at him, sending spiders of pain over his scalp and making his shoulder ache. The bag had been plucked from a pile of identical bags and slung around his neck when he boarded. There had been insufficient room for him to adjust it. He blinked and cracked his stiff spine. As if summoned by the pop of his bones, the noise outside started abruptly, and overwhelmingly.\n\nWhistles blew. Voices bellowed.\n\n'Move, move, move, move, move, move!'\n\nThe passengers were slow to obey. The groans and mutters of men and women long confined turned to shouts as burly men reached into the containers and hauled individuals out at random. After hours and hours of the rattling, stifling quiet of the train, the noise was terrifying. Despite the demands of the marshals outside, the conscripts shuffled forwards in the dazed way common to large crowds. They were hemmed in by the people around them. Progress was tortuous. The light outside remained unreachable. Biting gusts of thin air blasted into the container, churning up the damp, sweaty fug. There had been nowhere to relieve themselves. Urine stink stung Katsuhiro's eyes.\n\nThe threat of a shock maul's buzz motivated the first row onto the platform, and the occupants of the container surged. They toppled out, some falling, trampled by those behind. With no more agency than a molecule of water, Katsuhiro drained towards the open ramp. The lights and the beautiful ceiling drew nearer and nearer, then the man in front of Katsuhiro was yanked forwards hard by the bag around his neck, and Katsuhiro went after him, falling into the Imperial Palace and the open gullet of war.\n\nThousands upon thousands of people were spilling from containers clamped to flatbed trucks into a monorail terminus. Katsuhiro "}
{"text":"out, some falling, trampled by those behind. With no more agency than a molecule of water, Katsuhiro drained towards the open ramp. The lights and the beautiful ceiling drew nearer and nearer, then the man in front of Katsuhiro was yanked forwards hard by the bag around his neck, and Katsuhiro went after him, falling into the Imperial Palace and the open gullet of war.\n\nThousands upon thousands of people were spilling from containers clamped to flatbed trucks into a monorail terminus. Katsuhiro could not see far, but the pressure of many people pushed at him from all directions. Voices shouted, wailed, screamed and begged in cacophonous profusion.\n\nA marshal half caught Katsuhiro, and a flash of a face behind an armoured visor joined all the other fragments of sensory information that fought their way into his mind. Badges of the Adeptus Arbites surmounted with unfamiliar heraldry flashed past and Katsuhiro was shoved into the reeking flow of humanity pouring towards destruction. Bells and sirens sang from every quarter, and from far away there came a steady thudding, as insistent and dull as a thousand hearts. He was turned around in the crowd, sucked into eddies in the human river before being shoved back out into swift currents. Men and women of all kinds jostled him: scribes, old warriors, algae farmers, technicians, rich, poor, young, old. Every hue of skin and eye and hair present upon Terra was there. Every uniform and badge of occupation Katsuhiro had ever seen, and thousands more besides. His head spun with the overload. More details stabbed into his awareness, painful as darts. Decorations on the walls, a noble face captured in a marble relief. A sign proclaiming his location to be Eternity Terminus, Sub-Platform 99-8-Epsilon. The expressions of his fellows, two in particular - one blue-eyed and leering, the other brimful of fear - struck him. Hands grabbed at him. He was funnelled between a stack of boxes and a gun slapped into his hands. The crush increased as the crowd slowed unbearably. Elbows played his ribs as if they were bars on a semandron. The smell was dreadful. The noise was worse. Then he was out the other side, pushed along with gathering speed. All the people on the platform had only two things in common: the mass-produced lasguns clasped in their uncertain hands, and the kitbags slung around each of their necks, dragging them into hunches. Some struggled, now they were moving, to switch the straps to their shoulders, but there was as little space on the platform as there had been on the trains. Katsuhiro saw a man drop his gun. When the man bent to pick it up, the weight of the crowd pushed him down. Katsuhiro did not see him rise.\n\nKatsuhiro blundered into a pillar, raising more bruises to add to those he already had. His feet snagged on something soft. He glanced down to see a dead man, blood running from his nose and ears, crushed by the herd. He recoiled, rebounded off a giant stacked with vat-grown muscle, bald, squinting and full of violence.\n\n'Watch it,' the giant growled. Katsuhiro backed away apologetically, and the crowd caught him again, whirling him away, while from above the rapid, hurried heartbeats boomed on and on.\n\nThe platforms opened out and the ceiling sprang away from them, lofted upwards on giant piers of stone and plasteel, the crowd spreading across the vast concourse sheltered beneath. The panes of coloured glass lost their individual form, merging into a display that stopped the breath in Katsuhiro's lungs. Captured in glassaic, men and women stood victorious upon a field of battle. Supplicants bowed, defeated, holding out their hands in fealty towards the figure dominating the centre of the piece.\n\n'The Emperor!' Katsuhiro gasped. So lifelike was the display, so radiant the figure, that for a second the addled Katsuhiro thought the Master of Mankind was standing above them in judgement. A triple thump of the ceaseless hearts broke the spell, stuttering the lumens behind the image and cracking certain panes to shards. Colourful, razored rain fell that brought blood and screams from the crowd.\n\nThe conscripts slowed again, spread out and dawdled, as a swift river is arrested by a lake. Katsuhiro had a moment to catch his breath. The sheer size of the muster was sinking in, and it terrified him. Empty trains were pulling out, fresh ones rolling in. Hot engines and overtaxed rail levitators baked the scent of metal into his nostrils.\n\nGrille-gates rattled somewhere off to the right. Whistles blew again. A line of marshals, or arbitrators, or whoever they were, formed across one side of the plaza. More gently this time, the crowds were directed towards a row of arches and through the opened gates. Katsuhiro passed through into the terminus' hidden spaces, utilitarian cargo halls of new rockcrete where cranes and conveyor belts sat idle. All were bereft of the usual goods, and full instead with the chiefest currency of war, that of human bodies. Armies and armies of people shuffled within.\n\nIssuing from a line of officers at the far side, men pushed their way deep into the crowds, grabbing people and directing them to groups that grew swiftly.\n\n'You, you, you, you.' There were no pauses between their words. Gloved hands grabbed shoulders, hung coloured chits around necks and impelled the dazed populace of Terra towards the officers behind them. 'You, you, you,' they barked from helm speakers and external voxmitters, the voices roughed to inhumanity as they rounded up the nations of the world, broke them apart and pressed them towards their deaths. People cried as friends, lovers and families were separated. The officials did not notice nor did they care. 'You, you, you.'\n\nKatsuhiro's time came soon enough. A leather gauntlet grabbed him, a second dragged a green plastek chit on a chain over his head, catching his ear painfully in the process, and shoved him on his way. A small desk greeted him. Numbly, he presented his token to the army officer behind, which earned him another shove, and so, as aimless as driftwood, Katsuhiro came to a slow, grounded stop with a hundred others all clutching green plastek and blinking fearfully.\n\n'What do we do?' said a lean woman, wasted by years of short rations. Thinness was a look common to them all.\n\n'You be quiet,' shouted a uniformed man with a harried face. 'And you wait.'\n\nThe man moved on without paying them any more attention, pushing himself sideways like a blade through the recruits.\n\n'You there!' he shouted. 'You there! Stop-' and he was gone, his commands vanishing into the chorus of voices echoing in the cargo hall.\n\nKatsuhiro shook. Shock, lack of food, cold and the effort of standing upright for so many hours were each enough alone to upset his humours. Together, they brought him close to collapse.\n\nA warm hand slipped around his side and pulled him close. Ordinarily Katsuhiro would have recoiled from such unexpected intimacy, but now he welcomed it.\n\nA small, powerfully built man had him. Shorter by a few centimetres than Katsuhiro, he had to look up to address him. He was filthy, and stank of oil and stale clothes, but his smile was genuine.\n\n'It is cold, isn't it?' he said. 'Enough to knock you down if you aren't used to it. Winter at the top of the world!'\n\nKatsuhiro frowned at him, growing embarrassed by the embrace. Being so close to someone else bothered him. It was not the done thing in his subculture. Needing the support shamed him more.\n\n'Yes,' he managed. 'Thank you. Please, let me go. I am fine now.'\n\n'You sure?' The man released him anyway. The man's left hand grasped the straps of his kitbag and rifle, both slung neatly over his right shoulder. He held out his dirty right hand. 'The name's Doromek. From Baltica.'\n\nKatsuhiro swallowed his distaste and limply shook Doromek's hand.\n\n'Katsuhiro,' he said.\n\n'Dragon nations, eh?' said Doromek. 'We've got a fine mix here and no mistake. Tell you what, let's get you sorted out. You want to get that bag strap off your neck.'\n\nAs Katsuhiro struggled the bag over his head - it had somehow gained weight since it had been hung there - the man continued talking.\n\n'You'll find some tablets in there. Recaff tabs, salt and glucosium energy blends. Take one of each. Chew them up, don't just swallow them - it'll get the spit flowing in your mouth and make it easier for your body to process them. You hear me?'\n\n'Is there water?'\n\n'Not yet,' said the dirty little man. He looked behind him. Flustered officers were arguing with a man in the robes of an adepta alien to Katsuhiro. 'They're not coping very well,' said Doromek. 'Hurry up though, we'll be moving out soon.'\n\n'Where to?' he said.\n\nThe man snorted. 'Where do you think? The fighting. You hear that noise?' He pointed upwards. 'The bombardment has begun. The traitors are here. This is the big...' He frowned at Katsuhiro's fumbling. 'What are you doing to your kit? Give me that.'\n\nDoromek grabbed his bag. Katsuhiro surrendered it. Doromek set it on the ground. Once he had the drawstring open Katsuhiro saw the contents neatly arrayed, all sealed in plastek packets. Doromek moved aside.\n\n'You need to learn your way around this. This one, this one and this one.' He pointed with a strong, broad finger.\n\nKatsuhiro ripped open the packets his new companion indicated and placed the pills in his mouth. 'Thank you. I have no idea what-'\n\nA hard-faced woman barged her way into their conversation.\n\n'You two. Shut up,' said the woman. 'They don't like it if you talk. I don't want the attention.'\n\n'But someone's got to tell us what's going on!' Katsuhiro protested.\n\nAnother responded to this, a man even thinner than everyone else, who was cleaning his nails with a worn knife. 'They don't have to tell you anything, my friend. Nobody does.'\n\n'You're soldiers,' said the woman nastily. 'There are things expected of you. Shutting up is one of them.'\n\n'I'm not a soldier, I'm a third-grade enumerator for the Eighty-Sixth Nihon nutrient "}
{"text":"ey don't like it if you talk. I don't want the attention.'\n\n'But someone's got to tell us what's going on!' Katsuhiro protested.\n\nAnother responded to this, a man even thinner than everyone else, who was cleaning his nails with a worn knife. 'They don't have to tell you anything, my friend. Nobody does.'\n\n'You're soldiers,' said the woman nastily. 'There are things expected of you. Shutting up is one of them.'\n\n'I'm not a soldier, I'm a third-grade enumerator for the Eighty-Sixth Nihon nutrient complex,' said Katsuhiro.\n\nThe woman shot him a grim smile. 'You were. You're a soldier now.' She drew back, looking around at the swelling gaggle of people. 'Now just shut up.' She held a finger to her lips. Above the cut-off of the half-glove she wore, her nails were incongruously well manicured.\n\nShe scowled at him and turned her back.\n\n'Charming lady,' said Katsuhiro.\n\n'Glad to see you're recovering your sense of humour.' Doromek lowered his voice. 'But word to the wise, don't antagonise the likes of her.' He watched her carefully as he spoke. 'I recognise bad news when I see it. That one's a fighter.'\n\nA whistle blew. The officials had apparently resolved their argument.\n\n'Green chits!' The man was non-military, his voice unsuited to bellowing over a crowd's noise, and Katsuhiro struggled to hear what he was saying. 'Green chits follow me!'\n\nWithout waiting to see whether all in the group had heard him or not, the official turned about, and shoved his way through the throng towards more gates in the back of the cargo hall.\n\nThey were taken in their groups through a massive service corridor, emerging some minutes later via a side tunnel onto another fantastically decorated public platform. Hundreds of maglev trains awaited them, their insides welcomingly lit. The far end of the platform was open to the outside. The icy wind blasted in unimpeded. The bombardment's racket roared over the trains. The firelight flicker of exploding bombs had taken the place of sunlight.\n\nMen yelled themselves hoarse to no effect. Only those with voxmitters and vox-hailers had any hope of being heard, and then their commands battled one another into incomprehensibility. The moment of calm in the cargo hall seemed as if it had never happened. Katsuhiro was herded urgently onto the carriages. By the doors, menials with buckets collected chits, snatching them violently from people too dazed to understand what they were supposed to do. A single-sheet flimsy was thrust into Katsuhiro's hand, and he was shoved hard from behind into the carriage.\n\n'Move down! Move down!' A voice crackled over the train's vox-speakers.\n\nKatsuhiro stumbled his way along the aisle. The train was luxuriously appointed, each set of seats half screened from the rest by high backs and panels of frosted plastek imprinted with symbols of Unity. But there were far too many people for the seats to accommodate. Soon the aisle was full. Uniformed marshals began to physically ram people onto the train. The people behind Katsuhiro shoved at him in turn, and he was jammed into one of the nests of seats. Already, eight people sat in a space for four. If anything, it was more crowded than the monorail cargo box that had brought him from the east.\n\nHe had been separated from the few people he had spoken to, but he recognised most of the faces as being from the green chit group. They scowled as he tripped on their feet. He was forced closer to the window by the pressure of the crowd. Just when he thought the air would be forced from his lungs and he would suffocate, the doors slid shut and the train pulled out. Held aloft on a counter-gravitic field, the train accelerated quickly, blurring the innumerable people outside into a single, heaving mass.\n\nLight flashed, and the train sped outside. The great mountain of a space port dominated his view for a fragment of a second, huge, flat-topped and covered in lights. The maglev whipped past it before he got a proper look, affording him a view of a city he had never seen for himself, but every man, woman and child on Terra knew. The artful spires and bridges he expected from the holocasts had gone, replaced by buildings more fit for war. Not all had changed. He glimpsed the soaring Tower of Hegemon and the great dome of the Senatorum Imperialis, where giant machines stood guard. Fire, Titans, glory and doom - all gone in a heartbeat as the train plunged into the side of a hab-spire, and thereafter hurried past rockcrete pilings into roots of the earth that showed him nothing but the dark.\n\nSurvival of the species\n\nCouncil of war\n\nA further enemy\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, 13th of Secundus\n\nThe pit of the Grand Borealis Strategium shimmered with hololiths. False worlds hung in frozen orbits, each a copy of Terra pasted over with differing iterations of disaster. Slabs of text scrolled relentlessly down. Numbers indecipherable to the untrained circled around them in illuminated bands. Excepting the maps overlaid with their thousand blinking points of data, the displays were abstract. There were no vid-feeds or picts of the falling bombs. Perhaps the lack of informational immediacy contributed to the calm in the strategium. The hundreds of people on its many galleries worked so quietly that the noise of the bombardment was audible, muffled though it was by the bastion's thick walls and further tamed by aural dampening. Even so deep within the bastion, the air carried a charge from the ceaseless activities of void shields. Metal brought near metal generated leaping sparks. The cold plasmas of foxfire clung to hard edges.\n\nOfficers from dozens of organisations operated as a seamless whole, each responsible for a small section of the overall strategic picture, but though serenity was the order of the day, most of the personnel were well informed enough to piece together a broad view of the situation from the data cascading down the pit. The future of humanity was suspended on a thread. They all knew it.\n\nAbsolute concentration was a tonic for fear, for though all had faith in the Emperor's Praetorian there was not a mortal within the Palace walls who was not afraid. Those in the strategium could usually take comfort from Dorn's golden presence. They felt his eyes pass over them as he scanned the displays from his platform above the giant central shaft.\n\nBut at that moment, he was not there.\n\nThuria Amund was one among the many. An in-system traffic controller drafted in to aid the war effort, she considered herself a civilian, even though the demarcation between combatant and non-combatant had vanished under the needs of total war. Her specialisation was etheric monitoring, a narrow discipline in which she excelled. She watched the void to see where reality split to allow ships passage to and from the warp. Once upon a time, her station had been high above the world in a dedicated orbital, but that orbital was gone. Gutted of its original equipment to take a battery of Lord Dorn's guns, it was now almost certainly lost to the enemy. She was lucky, she supposed. Her grading was high, and she had been taken down to the nerve centre of Imperial command. Her less fortunate colleagues had found themselves manning the guns that replaced their equipment. They would have died where they had worked, deafened, choking on fyceline, attacked by warriors who were made to protect them, bewildered that the galaxy could turn on them so.\n\nThuria's new world was a tiny sliver of the strategic whole. Sol's etheric monitoring network was gone, forcing her to rely solely on sensing machines that were situated directly on Terra. With so limited a source of input, her devices, like many others in the strategium, were practically blind. She did her duty as best she could, using what resources remained at her disposal to watch the place behind the sky for further enemy intrusion.\n\nTo her left, a bank of lights in neat, crescent rows blinked off and on in patterns only someone from her caste could understand. Slightly offset from them, a cascade of hololithically projected numerical data ran on, silvery as a waterfall, offering cross-checks and correctives to the pattern of the lights. Seven screens in front of her, all either gel or active glass, displayed dancing sines and swirling motes of abstracted fact. To her right, a tall cabinet, open at the front, contained an intricate device somewhat like an orrery, whose whirling spheres ran on tracks representing orbits not found in the material realm. The visor she wore projected more data directly onto her retinas, adding to and enriching the flow of information. Each instrument had its own sound, a soft, repetitive signifier of its function, either electronically generated or as a consequence of the motion of its mechanisms, such as the gentle clicking of brass gears emanating from the etherscope, or the pulsing, white-noise hiss of the holo-cascade. It was hypnotic, soothing away her concerns and aiding her concentration. The collective orchestra induced a meditative state, where the sleep she so desperately needed ceased to be so pressing.\n\nThe size of the Warmaster's fleets terrified her. The size of the warp rift they'd entered by more so. A child of the secular Imperial Truth, she started her career thinking of the warp as nothing but a passage through time and space; indeed, she had been taught so. Despite the hegemony's best efforts to enforce that point of view, rumours escaped into the population as the war dragged on, that the warp was not a simple place of energy, but a deadly ocean swimming with creatures inimical to humanity. She knew enough to guess the rumours were true.\n\nScrambled readings crawled across her displays, all sense ripped out of them. The warp rift was of such a size that it blotted every signal that Terra's limited, fixed-point ether-augurs might detect. In looking at it, even as neutral data, she was confronted second by second with what they were facing. She doubted she would see anyt"}
{"text":"n, that the warp was not a simple place of energy, but a deadly ocean swimming with creatures inimical to humanity. She knew enough to guess the rumours were true.\n\nScrambled readings crawled across her displays, all sense ripped out of them. The warp rift was of such a size that it blotted every signal that Terra's limited, fixed-point ether-augurs might detect. In looking at it, even as neutral data, she was confronted second by second with what they were facing. She doubted she would see anything through the spikes of energy which crawled in jagged graphics across her immersion visor. She pleaded with gods she had been taught did not exist that the ragged static, full of screams and half-heard whispers, would go away, and her world would return to the placid sensibilities of understandable notification bleeps and mathematically sound ingress and egress plots.\n\nShe was not naive enough to believe that would ever happen.\n\nThuria spared what little attention she had to glance upwards from time to time, seeking Dorn's return, daring to lessen the opacity of the display in front of her eyes in case the son of the Emperor was hanging back a little in the shadows. Each time she was disappointed. She saw instead the sweep of the monitor banks curved around the strategium pit, stern supervisors, battle group liaisons, army officers and transhumans of half a dozen Legions poised to relay any information of import to their respective commanders. Members of the regiments from the Old Hundred predominated, but there were a multitude of others. They fretted near their stations, waiting for something to happen.\n\nAn air of tension so pronounced it bred a peculiar lethargy hung over everything.\n\nWhen Dorn finally strode onto his observation pier, the atmosphere changed immediately. He arrived unannounced, which was unusual. Thuria found herself looking up when he arrived nevertheless, without being aware why she chose that moment to do so. The primarchs were like that, exerting an influence on the human psyche that at once drew and repelled.\n\nThe hundred metres between her station and Dorn's pulpit did not diminish the Praetorian's presence. If anything he seemed larger above her like that, his golden battleplate carved into planes of blue and silver by the upwelling of the hololight. Lit from beneath, his noble features appeared indomitable, his hair startling white. He was as hard and cold as his native world of Inwit.\n\nAs he surveyed them, his eyes passed over Thuria, and she felt herself diminished, as if he found her wanting, not for lack of effort or of skill, but simply because she was what she was: human, fallible and frail.\n\nShe remained dismayed and exulted when his gaze swept on. He finished his survey, and leaned forwards to address them.\n\n'Servants of the Imperium. Loyal subjects of the Emperor. Believers in Unity,' he began. His voice resonated with something drawn from beyond mundane human existence, sending shivers up Thuria's spine. 'We come at last to the striking of the final hour. The Warmaster encircles the Throneworld. During the first thousandth this day, at one minute past midnight by the old reckoning, his bombardment began.'\n\nThey knew this. They'd heard the shells. Those making their way to and from the strategium for their duty shifts had seen them lighting up the void shields. They all felt the explosions shaking the world; they all suffered the crawling sensation in their brains from the active warp tech of the aegis. Another man, even another primarch, might have made a humorous aside to this effect, how obvious his statement was. Drollery was not a characteristic that factored large in Lord Dorn's make-up.\n\n'We have planned for this moment. We have striven to anticipate the traitors' plans. We stand now upon the brink of annihilation, but do not despair!' He raised his voice. 'We do not seek to overthrow Horus' armies. We must only endure. Let the defences of Terra be the cliffs Horus breaks himself upon. Let him fritter away his power seeking our end, and then, when he is exhausted, and drained, and his strength bled away, shall the revenging blow fall and wipe his perfidy from the stars!' Once more he swept his eyes across the pits. 'Not all of you will survive to see that day, but know this - we stand as a race upon the precipice of extinction. It may seem that in the equation deciding the survival of our species your lives do not amount to much. But your efforts, though they may seem small to you, are vital, one and all. I call upon you now, in the Emperor's hour of need, to put away your terror, to seal up your dread, and exert every fibre of your being towards our inevitable victory! I am a primarch, made by the Emperor's own hand and yet it is for you and you alone, the men and women of the human race, that all this undertaking was begun. Ours is not an Imperium of gods or monsters as Horus would impose, but a state of unity to shelter and protect our species from all the evils of this universe and beyond. Think not of yourselves as the bombs fall. Think not of your survival as the enemy comes. Think instead of continuance, of persistence, of the endurance of mankind.' His voice rose again to great volume. Thuria had never heard a voice so pure, or so terrifying. 'Keep in mind the coming generations of humanity. Keep in mind the peace that will follow the victory. Hold yourselves true to your purpose, do your duty to your Emperor, and we shall be triumphant!'\n\nThere followed a moment of silence in which no human sound was heard, only the workings of machines. Then first one pair of hands began to applaud, then another, and another, until every man, woman and transhuman in the strategium was clapping and shouting. Jubilation overcame fear. For a brief moment, Thuria saw what victory might feel like.\n\nDorn nodded once in satisfaction, turned his back upon the shaft and departed.\n\nBhab Bastion, 13th of Secundus\n\nThe primary defence council met in a room already steeped in history. The Bhab Bastion dated from before the Great Crusade, before the Wars of Unification. How far back, no one knew for certain, nor was its original name or builder known. It was built for war, and when the architects of the Palace had come to remove it in favour of finer buildings, it had refused to die.\n\nDorn admired its tenacity, and so he had adopted it and adapted it to be his nerve centre. Such a place suited his temperament perfectly.\n\nThe Praetorian stepped into a room muffled with old carpets and tapestries of forgotten victories. Its wood and cloth were steeped in tabac smoke and the scents of ancient wines, faded perfume and dust. Beneath mellow glow-globes the four most powerful people on Terra, save the Emperor Himself, waited for him.\n\nA pair of Imperial Fists Huscarls shut the doors behind their lord. The thick wood cut down the noise of the bombardment further, but could not silence it.\n\n'Brothers,' said Dorn. 'Captain-general, Lord Malcador.'\n\nThe greetings between them extended no further than a few return nods. Sanguinius, Jaghatai Khan and Constantin Valdor were all armoured. Malcador sported his usual plain, green robes, but he had protection none of the others could boast. He alone sat at the room's central feature: a large, round wooden table scaled for giants. He perched upon a tall stool sized to bring baseline humans level with the top, and though he exuded an aura of power even within this faintly ridiculous chair, he was more drawn and ancient seeming than ever.\n\n'The situation deteriorates,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'It does,' said Dorn grimly. As he approached, a small-scale hololith of the Solar System blinked on. He joined the company, and they spread around the table.\n\n'The last pockets of resistance on Luna fell two days ago. All our orbital forts and the sky fortresses adapted from the orbital plates are taken or destroyed. Horus has complete command of near-Terran void space. We are cut off.'\n\n'You dealt with the orbital guns of the forts before they were overrun, I assume,' said Malcador.\n\n'Rendered inoperable. In some cases we were able to convince the enemy to destroy them rather than take them. In other cases my Imperial Fists and Sanguinius' Blood Angels left nothing useable,' said Dorn.\n\n'It took too long. We both lost many sons ensuring it would be so,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'It is enough that they cannot fire upon us,' said Dorn.\n\n'Regrettable that the tactics you employed at Uranus could not be repeated,' said Malcador. 'I suppose we were fortunate Horus fell for the ruse in the first place.'\n\nDorn shook his head. 'Horus would not. Perturabo's arrogance can be relied upon, if nothing else can be,' he said. Only when he spoke of the hated Lord of Iron did his delivery take on a hint of emotion. 'But you are right, we cannot rely on the same tricks twice.'\n\n'Neither can the enemy,' said Jaghatai Khan. 'Here we are up against the truth of will. No more running, no more manoeuvring. It is time for stone and steel to speak.'\n\n'You sound eager for the fight,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Even the wind grows tired of running,' said the Khan.\n\n'Stone and steel will speak,' said Dorn. 'Horus' armies are...' He paused, as if he could not quite believe what he was about to say. A flicker of uncertainty passed behind his eyes. 'They are almost incalculable in size. There are representatives from every Traitor Legion within the Solar System. He commands thousands of regiments of traitor soldiery, hundreds of Knightly houses, dozens of Titan Legios, which though they were diminished at Beta-Garmon,' he indicated Sanguinius, 'still outnumber our own. Now the inner-system blockade has been swept aside, the unified forces of the Dark Mechanicum are heading for Terra from Mars. We are beset on all sides.' He gestured at the display, bringing a section of Terra's high orbit into focus.\n\n'We are at bay. Horus could destroy us a thousand times over,' said Sanguinius. 'A comet strike, asteroid bombardment, a con"}
{"text":"htly houses, dozens of Titan Legios, which though they were diminished at Beta-Garmon,' he indicated Sanguinius, 'still outnumber our own. Now the inner-system blockade has been swept aside, the unified forces of the Dark Mechanicum are heading for Terra from Mars. We are beset on all sides.' He gestured at the display, bringing a section of Terra's high orbit into focus.\n\n'We are at bay. Horus could destroy us a thousand times over,' said Sanguinius. 'A comet strike, asteroid bombardment, a concerted salvo from his guns only. Any one of a dozen methods would render Terra into rubble.'\n\n'That is not his intent,' said Dorn. 'If Horus wished Terra blasted down to the smallest atomic component, it could have been done weeks ago. Terra is not his target, only his battlefield.' He pointed his finger at the globe turning in its shaft of light. 'Throughout all this war, one thing has concerned me. Why this rush? Why does Horus speed to confront us? Were I to conduct this war,' he said, in a way that suggested he had spent a great deal of time contemplating the matter, 'I would have delayed. Horus has left too many of our forces intact behind him. His initial strikes at Isstvan and Calth threw us into disarray, and weakened the loyal Legions, but we retain billions of men under arms from hundreds of thousands of untouched systems. He spent little time securing his conquests. I saw early a pattern emerging in his so-called \"dark compliances\". The planets he invaded were chosen deliberately to supply his advance. This was no war of conquest - everything he did was to facilitate this rush for Terra. There are many good reasons why he would do this, but the surest path to victory if he wished to usurp our father would have been a longer war, time spent to subdue the galactic east, circumvent Terra via the Segmentum Solar to dominate the west, and isolate the seat of Imperial government. While we reeled from his treachery, he could have redoubled his efforts to finish Guilliman off - instead he left Lorgar and Angron to fumble the attempt. Now he is here with Guilliman at his back. And yet even now he could win this war at a single command.' Dorn paused. 'He does not.'\n\n'He will not,' said Malcador. 'He must confront his father. That is the purpose of this attack.'\n\nDorn nodded. 'This is the conclusion I came to myself. This lack of a decisive bombardment of the Throneworld confirms it.' Dorn looked at the Imperial Regent. 'You speak of the warp?'\n\n'I do,' said Malcador. 'Horus wages a war that goes beyond the material realm. There are factors at play here that are beyond your understanding.'\n\n'Attempt to explain them then,' said Dorn. 'Repeatedly Horus' use of sorcery confounds me. I cannot fight this war with such poor schooling.'\n\n'My boy,' said Malcador wearily, 'you cannot understand because matters of the spirit were not given you to understand by your father. I could explain them at length and you most of all would never comprehend. Do you not think if it were possible that I or your father could have explained them already, that you would have been told of the threat in the warp from the very beginning?'\n\n'I deeply regret that it was not done,' said Dorn.\n\n'The results would have been disastrous, believe me,' said Malcador.\n\n'Not telling us was arguably worse,' said Dorn.\n\n'Was it?' said Malcador softly. 'Very well. Let us take you, Dorn. You were made to command the material realm. Nothing in this world is beyond your grasp. But understanding of the warp would have eluded you. Being a man who desires mastery of all things, you would have been drawn to study it, and in doing so, you would have fallen. You are resistant to the dangers in the dark, but no one is immune.' He paused. 'Only one of you had the mettle to resist the whispers of the gods at the start. He was told.'\n\n'Who?' said Dorn in surprise. 'I thought this was kept from all of us?'\n\n'Which one could have known?' said Sanguinius. 'Jaghatai?'\n\nThe Khan shook his head. He was not so concerned as his brothers at his lack of forewarning. 'It was not I.'\n\n'So much pain could have been avoided!' said Sanguinius.\n\nMalcador fixed Sanguinius with a serious look. He seemed to grow, like a fire flaring in an unexpected breeze. 'Do not think for one moment that your trials would have been any less arduous had you known in advance. I know you have been tested, Sanguinius. There is space in the hells of the gods for more than one red angel.'\n\nSanguinius blanched, causing Dorn some dismay.\n\n'Malcador,' said Dorn evenly. 'You overstep yourself.'\n\nThe Imperial Regent sank back into himself with an audible sigh.\n\n'I am sorry. These are testing times. Even I have limits. You know all of you that you are as good as sons to me. I merely seek to make a point.' He looked to Sanguinius. 'Forgive me.'\n\n'I understand,' Sanguinius said. 'Peace, uncle.'\n\n'Who the Emperor told is not important. Even now it is better that you do not know,' said Malcador. 'To name the powers in the empyrean is to invite their attention. The knowledge alone is corrupting - that is all you need to know now, and far more than you needed to know then.'\n\n'I still say more knowledge would have benefited us. I, for one, would never have disbanded my Librarius if I had known what we faced,' said Dorn. 'I upbraided Russ for his refusal to follow the ban of Nikaea. The Khan here and I have also exchanged words on the matter for his refusal to do so.'\n\n'Father is not always right,' said the Khan evenly.\n\n'Spoken as you were meant to speak,' said Malcador.\n\n'Perhaps,' said the Khan. 'But perhaps also He should have looked beyond His intended uses for us, and should have trusted us. He is a distant father.'\n\n'Look how his affection was repaid.' Malcador struck his golden staff upon the floor; the flames wreathing the eye at the top burned brightly. 'Fate builds to this moment. The war in the warp, the webway and the materium are facets of a larger struggle. Your brother understands.'\n\nSanguinius' mind went back unwelcomely to Davin and Signus, where he had faced raw Chaos in its many forms.\n\n'I do,' Sanguinius said. 'Whether father made a miscalculation or not, the truth is we are where we are, fighting a war that is not solely of the flesh.'\n\n'That is the only kind of war I know how to fight,' said Dorn. 'These creatures from beyond, the nightmares that wrack the populace... How can I plan for that?'\n\n'You cannot, but the war of bullet and blade must be fought, as must that of soul and sorcery,' said Malcador. 'You must perform your part. I shall perform mine when the time comes.' As one of the few men in all existence who could look into a primarch's eye without flinching, Malcador met the gaze of each of the three loyal sons in turn. 'All of you have your parts to play in this struggle.' He smiled sadly at Sanguinius, and the Angel looked aside. 'They are not the parts your father wrote for you, but you are well suited all the same - the Angel, the Praetorian and the Warhawk.' He gave them a father's proud look. 'Three champions. The Emperor and I have absolute faith that you can do this.'\n\nThe primarchs fell silent a moment.\n\n'Faith will be insufficient,' said Dorn. 'Our vox communications are unreliable. The turmoil in the warp prevents astrotelepathy. We are alone. Whatever happens beyond the orbit of Luna we will be ignorant of. I anticipate that the fringe fleets will survive for several months yet. Among the last messages to reach us were communiques from Admiral Su-Kassen. The remainder of our ships have gathered in force, including many of your Falcon fleets, Jaghatai.'\n\nThe Khan inclined his head.\n\n'In force by any measure but Horus'. His void assets dwarf ours. We should have retained the Phalanx here,' said Sanguinius, referring to Dorn's immense flagship, sent away under Su-Kassen's command to form the core of the fringe fleets. 'Alone, it would have bolstered the defences greatly. We could have dealt Horus a painful blow.'\n\n'And then it would have been lost, along with every other orbital and ship,' said Dorn. 'We have insufficient strength to oppose the armada Horus has gathered around Terra. That is why I sent our remaining warships away. The Phalanx leads them until the time is right for them to strike.'\n\n'That is not why you withdrew it,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'I made my decision,' said Dorn firmly. 'It stands.'\n\n'Very well,' said Sanguinius. 'But I am unsure that this strategy of keeping the Phalanx as an escape vector for the Emperor will succeed.'\n\n'If Terra falls, the Emperor must survive,' said Dorn. 'We all agree that the Emperor, not Terra, is Horus' objective. The Phalanx represents our best chance of effecting His escape. Only my flagship has any chance of fighting in and out of the system to carry Him away. In all other cases, the perimeter ships will remain out of engagement range until Roboute approaches,' said Dorn. 'Su-Kassen's standing orders are to clear the way when the Eastern fleets break warp. Perturabo and his bastard sons have yet to come into the system's inner spheres. If he remains true to form, he and his Legion will be fortifying the outer reaches against Guilliman. We cannot allow any ring of iron they might deploy to delay our rescuers. Su-Kassen will break it.'\n\n'What of Guilliman's strength? Have we any further word on his progress?' asked the Khan.\n\n'None,' said Dorn. 'We must trust that he continues to push on Terra and that his forces have not been depleted. The Iron Warriors litter the fastest void routes like contact mines, and when all other obstacles are overcome, Roboute must break through whatever rearguard Horus has left in place at Beta-Garmon before he can gain the Solar System.'\n\n'He will do so,' said Sanguinius surely. 'Horus brought most of his armies here. Roboute's forces are formidable. When I left him, he was busy sending orders that Ultramar and all the Ultima Segmentum be emptied of men. More forces flock to him on the way, including elements of"}
{"text":"ors litter the fastest void routes like contact mines, and when all other obstacles are overcome, Roboute must break through whatever rearguard Horus has left in place at Beta-Garmon before he can gain the Solar System.'\n\n'He will do so,' said Sanguinius surely. 'Horus brought most of his armies here. Roboute's forces are formidable. When I left him, he was busy sending orders that Ultramar and all the Ultima Segmentum be emptied of men. More forces flock to him on the way, including elements of Vulkan's and Corax's Legions we thought lost. When he arrives, it will be at the head of a force the near match of Horus'.'\n\n'The Great Muster stole much from him,' said Dorn. 'He will miss the assets we lost there.'\n\n'It is unlike you to express regret,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Not regret,' said Dorn. 'A fact. If I regret anything it is that the circumstances of this war force so many unpalatable choices on us. The Great Muster was costly, but necessary.'\n\n'I did what I could at Beta-Garmon,' said Sanguinius. A little strain entered his manner.\n\n'Do not be defensive, brother. I meant no insult,' said Dorn. 'You delayed the Warmaster. You bled him. That is what I asked of you. You did all that could be done. Every task we set ourselves now is about delay.'\n\n'What of the others? Is there any word from the Wolf, or the Raven?' asked Jaghatai. 'Do Russ and Corax live?'\n\nDorn's lip curled at the mention of Leman Russ, primarch of the Space Wolves, prompting Sanguinius to speak quickly.\n\n'None. The last I heard of Leman was during the campaign at Beta-Garmon,' said Sanguinius. 'Abaddon's and Alpharius' honourless sons had him at bay at Yarant.'\n\n'But did they catch him or did he slip their net?' the Khan asked. 'And does the Raven survive?'\n\n'We cannot be sure, but I do not believe either are dead,' said Sanguinius quietly. 'I think I might know were it so. My soul has become more sensitive of late.'\n\n'Then good tidings for us if they live!' said the Khan.\n\n'Alive or dead, they can do nothing for us here, as I said to Russ before he left,' said Dorn. 'Nor can the Lion.'\n\nWith a tired sigh, Malcador rose from his stool. His staff's light danced around the room.\n\n'The Lion does what work he can.'\n\n'His harrowing of the traitor home worlds is premature vengeance,' said Dorn. 'He should be here.'\n\n'You have not seen what I have seen,' said Sanguinius. 'I know you fought a daemon on board the Phalanx not many days ago, but you have been insulated by your walls and your guns from the horrors that stalk the stars. What you witnessed is but a taste of the dark magics that upend rationality. This has become a war of sorcerers, like nothing we fought during the crusade. Every traitor world scoured of life by the Dark Angels is a blow to the plans of our enemies.'\n\n'It is purely symbolic,' growled Dorn.\n\n'Symbols have power,' said Malcador. 'Do you see how you fail to understand, Rogal?'\n\n'Then where is the Lion now?' said Dorn. 'There has been no word since his destruction of Barbarus.'\n\n'Who can tell? If we do not know, then the enemy does not either,' said the Khan. 'There is something in what Sanguinius says. I have faced the Neverborn myself. You know they do not follow the logic of our realm. They are wild. Mortarion's fleets have yet to arrive. Perhaps the Lion's activities can be thanked for that. If battle luck favours us, the Death Guard may never come.'\n\n'Could Mortarion have had a change of heart?' wondered Sanguinius aloud. 'I am certain few of our brothers expected to find themselves allied with daemons. Mortarion least of all - you know how much he hates the warp.'\n\nDorn's eyes narrowed. He thought momentarily of Alpharius. When the twentieth primarch infiltrated the Solar System, he had spoken with Dorn, and what he said could have been interpreted as contrition. Dorn had not listened, and had slain Alpharius at Pluto, a fact he still kept from his brothers.\n\n'None of them will change,' Dorn said. 'They are corrupt, traitorous. All of them. We cannot save them, and they do not deserve saving.'\n\n'I spoke with Mortarion in the ruins of Prospero,' said the Khan. 'His hatred of the Emperor goes too deep. He is fixated on our father's death. He will come.'\n\n'So they will not have a change of heart,' said Sanguinius. 'Where, then, are the rest of our fallen brethren?'\n\n'I have spent the night examining the disposition of Horus' fleet,' said Dorn. None of them had slept for a long time. Primarchs rarely did so, but all were wearied by their burdens. The hololith's light deepened the lines under Dorn's eyes.\n\n'We know that Perturabo is here,' began Dorn. The map zoomed out to encompass all of Sol's system. Dorn gestured at a point of light. 'His last confirmed position was at the Battle of Uranus. We have no indication that he has come out of the First Sphere. If he follows his usual patterns, the Iron Warriors will be fortifying the Elysian and Kthonic Gates. That is not a task his pride will allow him to delegate, but his hatred for me is such that he will come to Terra eventually, if only to watch the walls I have built fall and name himself my better.\n\n'Angron's flagship is here,' he said, his finger moving over billions of kilometres of the void, 'near the Vengeful Spirit, on the far side of Luna, where half of the traitor fleet waits. We must assume that where the Conqueror goes, so too does Angron. There were contradictory reports concerning the Pride of the Emperor, but they are numerous enough that we should also expect Fulgrim's presence in the coming battle. I suspect he is with Horus. Alpharius is unaccounted for.' Dorn ignored the look Malcador gave him as he spoke. It was patently obvious to the primarch that the old man knew Alpharius' fate. It was impossible to hide secrets from the Regent. 'Magnus is possibly dead,' he continued, 'though the opening of the in-system rift has all the hallmarks of his sorcery.'\n\n'Magnus is not dead,' said Malcador.\n\n'And you state this so surely how?' said Dorn.\n\n'His soul is too bright a thing to hide entirely. It is known to the Emperor that his essence persists, and so it is known to me,' said Malcador. 'I am sure Magnus the Red marches with the Warmaster.'\n\n'This news is poor,' said Sanguinius. 'I had hoped, if he survived, that he would stand aside from the conflict.'\n\n'He took his punishment badly,' said Malcador.\n\n'At least we can account for Curze,' said the Khan. 'Because you pushed him into the void, Sanguinius.'\n\n'I have confirmed sightings of the Nightfall and perhaps a dozen or so other capital ships,' said Dorn. 'His sons are here even if he is not.'\n\n'What of Lorgar?' asked the Khan. 'His Legion is large, but the numbers present in the Warmaster's armada suggest only a portion of his strength is here.'\n\n'Is he, too, absent?' wondered Sanguinius.\n\n'What is not known cannot be assumed,' said Dorn. 'If he is not present yet, it does not mean he will not come later, or that he is not waiting to ambush our brother Guilliman. We should prepare ourselves for both his and Mortarion's eventual arrival. For the moment, we must count ourselves fortunate that they are not here yet.'\n\n'The others announce themselves,' said the Khan. 'They make displays of open challenge. Angron, riding upon the hull of his ship. Fulgrim's coyness is a statement - and if Magnus did not want us to know he was here, then we would not.'\n\n'He hides himself only enough to show his presence,' said Malcador. 'His psychic might remains unbroken.'\n\n'Fulgrim, Perturabo, Angron, Magnus. And not forgetting, of course, the most treacherous of them all, our dear brother Horus. The Warmaster.' Dorn bit the title. 'Arch-traitor. Five primarchs, some changed by the things they serve, and in all likelihood a sixth on the way.'\n\n'Six against three,' said Sanguinius. 'Where are the rest of those loyal to the Throne?'\n\n'The Lion, incommunicado as always,' said Dorn. 'Roboute Guilliman, on his way. Corax, lost. Headstrong, foolish Leman Russ, lost. Ferrus Manus, dead. And Vulkan, dead. We are short of allies.'\n\n'So six against three,' repeated Sanguinius. 'With two more coming.'\n\n'Horus was always the most charismatic of us,' said the Khan drily.\n\n'There are more of you than you think,' said Malcador.\n\nValdor, who until that moment had kept his own counsel, looked sharply at the Regent.\n\nA sly look crept across Malcador's face.\n\n'Vulkan lives,' he said.\n\nThe shock visible on Sanguinius, Dorn and the Khan's faces gratified the Sigillite, and he smiled like a conjuror pleased with the effects of a trick.\n\n'I'm sorry?' said Dorn.\n\n'What do you mean, Malcador?' said Sanguinius. 'I saw him dead upon Macragge. I witnessed his corpse borne away by his sons myself!'\n\n'Vulkan's corpse is not like other corpses. The Salamanders took him back to Nocturne, where they were successful in restoring him to life. Vulkan has... certain abilities, as you all do,' said Malcador. 'You have your wings and your foresight, Sanguinius. The Khan has his questioning nature and his keen mind. Dorn has rectitude, his genius for voidcraft and his talent for building.'\n\n'Vulkan was a smith,' said the Khan.\n\n'His other gift is to be particularly durable,' said Malcador.\n\n'He is not dead?' said Sanguinius, displaying neither the angelic expression of his earlier years nor the persistent woe he carried with him now, but instead a look of perfect surprise.\n\nThe Khan laughed. 'Outstanding!'\n\n'Then where is he?' demanded Dorn. 'Is he coming here?'\n\nValdor and Malcador glanced at one another.\n\n'He is already here,' said Valdor, slowly at first. 'He emerged through the webway before Lord Sanguinius returned. He stands guard over it now.'\n\n'What?' said Dorn. The colour drained from his face.\n\n'That was months ago,' said Sanguinius. 'And you tell us now?'\n\n'What?' said Dorn again.\n\n'He has been there since then. He is alive,' said Valdor.\n\n'Why has he not shown himself?' asked the Khan, who alone of the three brothers seemed amused rather than angry at Malcado"}
{"text":"or glanced at one another.\n\n'He is already here,' said Valdor, slowly at first. 'He emerged through the webway before Lord Sanguinius returned. He stands guard over it now.'\n\n'What?' said Dorn. The colour drained from his face.\n\n'That was months ago,' said Sanguinius. 'And you tell us now?'\n\n'What?' said Dorn again.\n\n'He has been there since then. He is alive,' said Valdor.\n\n'Why has he not shown himself?' asked the Khan, who alone of the three brothers seemed amused rather than angry at Malcador's secrecy.\n\n'Like you, he has his role.' Malcador wrapped his hands around the black iron shaft of his staff. Its wreath of psychic flames flickered. Some of the age faded from his face. The man lived for intrigue. 'Tell me,' he asked the three, 'how much do you know of your father's project in the Imperial Dungeon?'\n\nEager to show he knew at least something, Dorn spoke first. His desire to reclaim some of his honour, if only in his own eyes, made the Khan grin more deeply.\n\n'Our father left the Great Crusade to come here.' Dorn not so much spoke as recited the information. 'His intention was to create a bridge from Terra into the webway, the network constructed by the ancient eldar. Being neither of the materium or the immaterium, the webway is therefore free of the effects of both. Having entrusted the end of the Great Crusade to Horus, our father returned here to complete His work. Success would free the Imperium from reliance on the warp for travel and communication.' He paused. 'When He first told me this, so that I might guard Him while He worked, I thought it was a matter of improved efficiency. With what I now know...' He looked at his brothers.\n\n'It would have shielded us from the powers that now attack us,' said Sanguinius. 'I knew little of this.'\n\n'And I less,' said the Khan. They both looked at Dorn.\n\nDorn stared straight ahead. 'I am the Emperor's Praetorian. I must be aware of all threats, in order to protect our father.'\n\n'Bravo, Rogal,' said Malcador. 'You were listening to Him. Though in point of fact, the webway is far older than the aeldari. They were merely the last to occupy it, before their own downfall. A fate we are coming dangerously close to repeating.'\n\n'Why can I not see Vulkan?' said Sanguinius. 'I should have felt something, or seen something.'\n\n'Your father shields his presence.'\n\nThe Great Angel pressed. 'Then why were we not told any of this?'\n\n'Genuinely? The fewer who knew the better.' Malcador raised a hand to ward off Sanguinius' protest. 'It didn't matter who you were. Trust is not the issue. The enemy have unnumbered ways to discover what they need. At first, we had to keep the project secret to protect it from our foes, and latterly, because of the threat it represented.'\n\n'What do you mean?' Sanguinius asked.\n\n'Father failed,' said Dorn.\n\nValdor took up the tale. 'Disaster struck when He was close to completion. Your brother Magnus, my lords, was loyal, but arrogant. In his hubris, he used sorcery to warn the Emperor of Horus' treachery. The sorcery he employed, that he had been forbidden from, destroyed the wards around the bridge, and all the foes of men came rushing in.'\n\n'That is where Valdor's men were for so long when you returned, my brothers,' Dorn said to Jaghatai and Sanguinius.\n\nValdor's handsome face rarely expressed anything as human as emotion, but he appeared apologetic. 'The Emperor ordered me personally to keep this to myself.'\n\n'So Russ was sent to punish Magnus without reason,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Not without reason,' said Malcador. 'But the chastisement was never meant to be so harsh. We determined to despatch the Wolf King to bring Magnus back to Terra for censure for defying the judgement of the Council of Nikaea. Horus manipulated the order.'\n\n'Another secret that spawned disaster,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'The Emperor has His reasons for keeping His plans His own,' said Malcador. 'Only in this case, I agree. Leman's temper got the better of him, worsening the catastrophe, and so two Legions that were loyal to Terra were taken from us, one forced into the arms of the enemy, the other depleted in strength, and so enraged Russ could not ignore honour's call and went to fight Horus alone.'\n\n'Many, many died holding back the daemon tide. But the war in the webway is over, for now,' said Valdor. He looked to Malcador for permission before continuing. The Regent shook his head.\n\n'Let me explain, Constantin,' Malcador said. He paused to gather his thoughts before he went on. 'What none of you know is that your father is trapped upon the device He created to keep the bridge to the webway open. It was intended to be a temporary measure, until the Mechanicum could stabilise the conduit. But all their work was destroyed. If He leaves the Throne now, the doors into the warp will open, and Terra will drown under a tide of Neverborn and all their infinite malice.'\n\n'I thought Him at work to remedy the damage... The situation is far worse than I knew,' said Dorn.\n\n'It is worse still, Rogal,' said Malcador. 'The Emperor is powerful, but His ability has limits. Vulkan waits before the gate as sentinel, in case the Emperor should fail.'\n\n'Is this likely?' said Dorn.\n\n'It is possible,' admitted Malcador.\n\n'Does Vulkan have his sons at his side?' asked Sanguinius, still bewildered. 'Are the Legio Custodes with him, captain-general?'\n\n'Vulkan stands alone,' said Valdor quietly. 'My warriors wait in the Inner Palace. The Ten Thousand lost too many in the webway.'\n\n'What good can one primarch do against all the evil of the warp?' asked Sanguinius.\n\nMalcador shrugged. 'What indeed? You have a point there, so I say that we had better win.'\n\nThe Khan leaned down to peer closely at Malcador. 'You are old, but you are cunning, for all your signs of frailty, Sigillite,' he said. 'Tell me now that you have something resembling a plan, that your agents in grey work for our victory, that your many wheels within wheels spin still to your design.'\n\n'My Knights Errant are gone,' said Malcador. 'Their purpose and mission are elsewhere. You are the plan, you three. As of this moment, you know everything there is to know. Your father fights a war on a higher plane of existence, one that should have been mankind's to call his own, but which now seethes with the enemy. The battle here falls to you. The game is set. No more subterfuge is possible. Your role is here, just as Vulkan's is to stand against the full force of Chaos should the Dungeon be breached. And Roboute's is to get here before we're all dead. You must hold these walls of stone as your father holds walls of spirit. Fight with your guns, and your sons, and all the many, many gifts your father gave you. Use them wisely, sons of the Emperor.' He looked seriously at them all. 'Use them to buy your brother and your father time.'\n\nThe magnitude of the task weighed on them all. Outside, the thunder of Horus' guns boomed endlessly on.\n\n'Thank you, Malcador, for bringing our objectives into such sharp focus,' said Dorn. He manipulated the hololith via the neural linkages of his warsuit, bringing up a detailed map of the Palace and its many defences. 'It is time to discuss the practicalities of our survival.'\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, 13th of Secundus\n\nThuria Amund swept her tired gaze across her instruments for what felt like the millionth time.\n\nThe tinkling of a brass bell, one of three dozen suspended from the top of the ether-scope, broke her trance. She glanced up at it in time to see more start pealing. A rapid chime struck up from behind the bank of lights, then a more urgent alarm from the wall of screens.\n\n'Sir!' she called to her supervising officer. In the profusion of lords, generals and aristocrats, all of whom held different ranks and required different modes of address, 'sir' was the safest option.\n\nAlerted by the chiming, the man was already on his way. He frowned as he took in the warnings singing from Thuria's desk.\n\nHe summoned someone else. 'Contact Lord Dorn,' he said. He kept his eyes on Thuria's work station. 'Tell him I have direct confirmation that a new fleet has arrived. Possible identity, Fourteenth Legion. The Death Guard.'\n\nThe loyalist generals plot the defence of the Palace.\n\nNo slave\n\nArrival on Terra\n\nThe coming of death\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Lunar orbit, 14th of Secundus\n\n'This place you have made here, Layak, I do not like it,' growled Abaddon.\n\nThe temple existed in no plan of the Vengeful Spirit, but it was but one of many changes the ship had undergone. As Horus' power grew, the Warmaster's flagship left behind the constraints of the materium, twisting itself away from its original form to please new shipwrights whose concerns were not those of human beings. Under their direction it became as mutable as potter's clay. Sections vanished. Huge parts of the structure heaved with pseudo-organic life. Areas resounded to screams that came from no human mouth. Adornments of spikes and grimacing statues grew overnight, then vanished the next day. Inconstant doorways opened into strange mirror-worlds where men were lost forever.\n\nIf logic were followed, the great black doors that led into the temple should have opened directly onto the void, but it was clear that logic had no place there, and that the temple was not on the ship. It lay in some place beyond the void and the universe that contained it, where the laws of physics did not hold true. An interstice between dimensions, perhaps, or a pocket of the warp, Abaddon guessed. The air was frigid, though the metal radiated a dangerous heat that bit at his flesh through his Terminator plate. High windows let in sickly light that gave no hint of the vast armada shoaling around the flagship, or of Luna beneath its keel, or of the stars, but showed an endless, curdled swirl of colours that hurt the eye and the mind to see.\n\nMembers of Layak's Unspeaking lurked in guard alcoves, all of them wearing armour as bizarrely decorated as their master's. Abaddon did not like "}
{"text":"ssed. The air was frigid, though the metal radiated a dangerous heat that bit at his flesh through his Terminator plate. High windows let in sickly light that gave no hint of the vast armada shoaling around the flagship, or of Luna beneath its keel, or of the stars, but showed an endless, curdled swirl of colours that hurt the eye and the mind to see.\n\nMembers of Layak's Unspeaking lurked in guard alcoves, all of them wearing armour as bizarrely decorated as their master's. Abaddon did not like the fact that Layak's men guarded it instead of his own. When Horus had ordered it be so, an ugly look had come over him, as if he tested his son, though to what end Abaddon could not discern. Like the vessel that carried him, the Warmaster was no longer what he had once been.\n\nThe chamber's air reeked of incense that was sweet at first breath, harsh with bitterness and iron scents on the second, foul on the third. A pool of viscous liquid so still it looked solid filled channels beneath the path. Shadows whispered between the warriors of the Unspeaking. They called to Abaddon, offering him power, wealth and glory as they probed his soul for weakness. Lesser men would succumb, but Ezekyle Abaddon had no weaknesses, and he scorned the voices' feeble promises as he did all the temptations of the warp. Contempt armoured him. His will was a sword against the dark.\n\n'It is a throne room fit for the lord of the Primordial Truth,' said Layak.\n\n'It is a prison,' said Abaddon. He looked upon his father. Horus' face was swollen with power, its beauty lost beneath stretched skin. When awake, Horus still possessed the legendary charisma that made all men love him. When entranced like this, he was diminished, a hero past his best. It angered Abaddon to see him so, and tainted his love with pity.\n\n'If Horus had not forbidden me from harming you, you would already be dead,' Abaddon said. 'I will hold to his word only so far, priest. Be careful what poisons you pour into my lord's ear. No order will prevent me taking your head if I deem the provocation sufficient.'\n\n'The truth poisons no one,' said Layak mildly. He appeared as ordinary as he possibly could at that moment. When he worked his sorcery, hoar frost cloaked him, strange scents rose from him, blood oozed from his vox-grille. But though he was currently bereft of the aura of dark magic, corruption left its mark. The bladed design of his helm and the six eye-lenses arranged down its faceplate cheeks could have been a bizarre aesthetic conceit. Abaddon guessed they were not. He wondered what he would see when he finally slew Layak, and tore the misshapen helmet from his head.\n\n'Your truth is subjective,' Abaddon growled. 'Horus rose to free us from one tyrant, not submit us to four. He fights with them. He will not be beholden to your masters. Your certainty is your weakness.'\n\n'The Warmaster is not a slave,' said Layak, making no effort to hide his condescension. 'He is the champion of the Four. The power of the Eightfold Path is his to command.'\n\n'I do not trust you, Apostle. I do not trust your words, or your faith, or your intentions.' Abaddon looked sideways at the Word Bearer over the neck ring of his Terminator plate. 'Know that the Warmaster does not trust you either, no matter what favour you currently have. You are a useful thing. When things no longer have their uses, they are discarded.'\n\nStill infuriatingly mild, Layak replied, 'You have no idea, First Captain, what your father thinks or feels. You never will, until you allow yourself to worship as he does, and open yourself to the Pantheon.'\n\nAbaddon grunted and continued down the walkway. His feet rang loudly from the metal and stone. Layak's footsteps dogged his own. Four others followed them: Layak's mute blade slaves, and behind them two of Abaddon's Terminator-armoured Justaerin, their weight shuddering the deck with every step. Layak's tread was the most grating, ever-present, following the First Captain everywhere he went. Layak would not let him be. Horus more than tolerated his parasitic presence; he hearkened closely to what Layak said. Once, the religion Lorgar preached was resisted by Horus. Since Lorgar's attempted coup and subsequent banishment, principles Horus had found distasteful before seemed acceptable from Layak's lying mouth.\n\nIt angered Abaddon that it was so. He did not like the faint streams of red, blue, pink and green energies that, now he drew closer, he could see racing around his unconscious genefather. He liked none of it at all. Horus was changing. He had fallen without warning, bleeding from the cut the dog Russ had given him. When Maloghurst the Twisted had brought the Warmaster back to them, it seemed to Abaddon that not all of Horus had returned.\n\nMore magic. More trickery. More weakness.\n\nThey halted before Horus. Infernal light bathed the Warmaster's face. Unconscious, he looked sickly, his face twisted by the powers of the warp, his handsomeness deformed, become lumpen and rough as the features of any narcotics addict or drunkard. His eyes twitched under swollen lids. His once full lips thinned to bloodless lines. A thread of drool snaked down from teeth that had become sharp. He was twisted, warp-touched - a bloated, swollen shadow of greatness enthroned. He seemed vast, like an extrusion of a hidden, awful truth greater than a man; but he was less than a man, when once he had been so much more.\n\nAbaddon was reminded of the time Horus lay close to death on Davin, wounded by the anathame, before he returned to his sons with new vigour, and declared that the Emperor must fall. Then, Abaddon had felt a lifetime's anguish. But now...\n\nEach time Horus fell, he came back. Each time he came back, he was diminished. Horus still believed himself master of his own destiny. To Abaddon it was clear he no longer was. By running to the lodges and heeding Erebus, Abaddon bore some responsibility for that, and the thought pricked him.\n\nLayak hissed his quiet laugh. 'Oh, Abaddon. Does your love for your father waver? Do you see him vulnerable, and feel your regard curdle into disgust? He is not weakening, I assure you.'\n\nAbaddon turned so that he fully faced the Apostle. 'Speak so of the Warmaster again and I shall kill you here.'\n\nServos whined as Abaddon's Terminators presented their guns to fire. Bolts racked into chambers. In answer, heat rose from Layak's blade slaves as they began their transformation in preparation for combat.\n\nLayak laughed again. 'You speak words of loyalty, but your reactions betray you. I voice only your thoughts. He is the vessel of Chaos, the most high, the most exalted.' Layak knelt and bent his head. 'The champion of the Pantheon, but you think he is weak.'\n\n'He is the greatest being in this galaxy,' said Abaddon, 'not the prophet of your so-called gods.' He stared proudly at the Warmaster, ignoring the worms of doubt in his mind. He wanted to act, now - to strike down the priest and remove his taint.\n\nThat moment would come.\n\n'Is that so?' Layak's sextuple lenses flared defiantly. Abaddon's fingers twitched towards the massive combi-bolter mag-locked to his hip. His warriors tensed. Like their leader, the Justaerin would have happily seen Layak dead. They wanted the Unspeaking and all the Word Bearers away from their general.\n\nThe heat from the blade slaves grew. Their armour cracked, forced apart by bodies swelling underneath. Flesh boiled out of the rents in the ceramite. Their unclean swords leapt from their scabbards into waiting hands, where they lengthened, additional mass unravelling from smoke and darkness into heavy, unnatural blades of bone. Ash sifted from the heat shimmer cloaking them. Embers drifting from their bodies hissed in the black channels below the walk. They presented their weapons, hunching into combat postures far removed from the forms trained into them as legionaries.\n\nWith one gesture, Abaddon could condemn them all. He clenched his fists, and looked sidelong at his men. One gesture.\n\n'You would slaughter me while I pay respect to your genesire?' said Layak. 'I saved your life, First Captain. There is a cost to that.'\n\n'I saved yours too, if I recall. I owe you nothing.'\n\nLayak raised his hand and twitched his fingers. The blade slaves stood to attention. The hell-light burning in their helm lenses dimmed, and their swords shrank away until they looked like any legionary gladius, and were sheathed.\n\nAbaddon grunted dismissively.\n\n'Your death would be an unwelcome distraction,' he said. He looked back to his father. The light of the energies racing around Horus' head played over the armour of the group. 'When will he wake?'\n\n'He does not sleep,' said Layak. 'Horus' affinity with the warp grows by the hour. His powers swell. The Warmaster has gone into the past.' He clasped his strange staff in front of him and bowed his head. 'Pray with me,' he said, 'for your father goes to seek out the Emperor.'\n\nTerra, the past\n\nHaving allowed himself the briefest glimpse of Terra's approaching orb, Horus kept his eyes closed during the whole of the descent. He wanted his first sight of the world to be the interior of his father's Palace, for that was where all the power of mankind was concentrated.\n\n'I look to the future. The grey dust of today's Terra is the past.' That was what he told his companions when they asked why he closed his eyes. They smiled at his words. Horus had a way with men, to speak profundity laced with humour that did not lessen what he spoke of, but raised it up. When he joked, he mocked himself. When he teased his friends he did so more gently than he teased himself. He was humble in his confidence. To be in his company was to feel oneself his comrade, regardless of what station one might hold.\n\n'The matter of Terra is greater than I,' he said, as the drop-ship started the shake and moan of re-entry. He settled into his restraints, nestling his great head in the padded brace. 'I want to see what will be, not what has been."}
{"text":"he spoke of, but raised it up. When he joked, he mocked himself. When he teased his friends he did so more gently than he teased himself. He was humble in his confidence. To be in his company was to feel oneself his comrade, regardless of what station one might hold.\n\n'The matter of Terra is greater than I,' he said, as the drop-ship started the shake and moan of re-entry. He settled into his restraints, nestling his great head in the padded brace. 'I want to see what will be, not what has been. Terra is old and used up, but it will be great again. The Palace of the Emperor is the centre of this change. From it, authority shall spread, uniting mankind as one people for the first time in thousands of years. Why would I look upon the ruin of what is now, when one day the world shall live again, and thrill to new life returned to it by the efforts of the highest power? When my father's work is done, and all Old Earth's glories are restored, then I shall look upon it fully.'\n\n'So long as it leads to a good fight,' growled the first of his companions, the largest and the strongest.\n\nThe other three of his four companions spoke their agreement. They relaxed and shut their eyes too. Always, men copied his example, out of respect, and love.\n\nThey fell through the sky in silence, rocked hard by pockets of denser air, until the thrusters ignited and burned to full, and the party felt themselves grow heavier. Landing claws spread upon the ground with loud rings.\n\nThe ship's roaring engines cut out, and were replaced by a noise greater still.\n\n'My lord, they are shouting your name!' said the fourth of his companions, his voice pure as silver bells.\n\n'Lead me to them,' said Horus, his eyes still closed.\n\nThe restraint cradle clacked open, and rose with a hiss. His companions took his giant hands in theirs, and guided him eagerly to the gangplank. Waves of adulation roared into the hold as the doors parted and the ramp fell, so loud Horus' ears sang and his warriors had to shout to be heard.\n\n'They love you, my lord! They love you!' said his second companion.\n\n'They do not know me,' said Horus.\n\n'They love you anyway,' shouted the second. He was wise, his words considered, but there was an undertone of suspicion in his voice that resonated with Horus' own most guarded fears, and the primarch's smile wavered.\n\n'Come, my lord! Come! Such life is in the crowd, such pleasure to be had,' said the third companion. 'A profusion of people! They call to you!'\n\nThe others were enthused by the jollity of the third, even the grim and growling first, and pulled Horus down the gangplank. The noise grew louder as he emerged from the shadow of the ship's belly and the people saw him.\n\n'Open your eyes,' whispered the fourth sweetly.\n\nHorus did so to the cheers of a million people.\n\nThe Emperor, his father, had prepared him as best He could for the sight of the Imperial Palace, but what Horus had taken for boastfulness he saw now was modesty. The Emperor's description of His plans had in no way encapsulated what Horus saw. Only half-finished, the Imperial Palace exceeded anything he had ever seen. Nothing on Cthonia could compare. Not even the great starships that had come for him and borne him away from his home came close in scale, or majesty, or ambition.\n\nFor only the second time in his life, Horus felt awe.\n\n'Such vision!' he said.\n\n'It is overweening,' said his second companion. 'His understanding of history's flow is simplistic, and His project will fall.'\n\n'If it does, it will fall and rise again, as all things fall and rise,' said the third.\n\n'It is beautiful!' said the fourth.\n\nThe first said nothing.\n\nHorus glanced askance at him. The four were his brothers from Cthonia, warriors who had been with him since the beginning, but he found at that precise moment that he could not recall their names. The first had a warrior's ugliness, pitted and battered, his nose flat, shaved head scarred, forever on the edge of violence. The second was a scholar, waspish in temperament. Heterochromatic eyes looked calculatingly upon everything. His face shifted into uncertain shapes beyond the human form. Horus frowned. He did not know their names! The third was heavier than the rest, fully fleshed and jolly. Yet flakes of skin at the corner of his mouth and red rims around his eyes displayed an imbalance in his humours.\n\nThe fourth distracted him, slipping his slender hand back into Horus' own, and leading him deeper into the Palace. 'My brother! My lord!' he laughed gaily. This one wore his hair in elaborate knots, and coloured his cheeks. His eyes were bright with pleasure. 'They adore you!'\n\nMusic played from every quarter. Wafers of gold leaf fluttered from the spires either side of the road. The buildings were tall and beautiful, but every window lacked for glass. Columns waiting for statues were placed at fifty-metre intervals, until they ran out, and only sockets for their placing were visible. Not far from the processional way the marble cladding gave way to rockcrete, and the rich pavement stopped. Nothing was finished. Freezing wind whipped up the crimson standards, each flap and flutter drawing the eye to another incomplete artwork, or another tower swathed in scaffolding. The thin air carried multiple chemical taints blown up from the poisoned world. The whole place was a work in progress, yet the people within the unfinished walls cheered and roared as if they were already triumphant, ignorant of how very far they had to go to achieve their master's dream.\n\nThe road Horus and his four companions trod was of a gleaming stone, amber as a lion's eyes. Upon it was a purple carpet a kilometre in length. At the end, on a dais made with enough art and beauty to persist ten thousand years, though it would be demolished as soon as Horus professed his fealty, was a throne of gold. A double-headed eagle formed its back, its wings outspread, its claws grasping stylised lightning bolts which thrust jaggedly out over the crowds lining the way. It was preposterously sized. Horus himself, bigger than any two mortal men combined, would have vanished into its seat. But even though the being upon it seemed to be but a man and no gene-forged giant, he overfilled it, his presence spilling out in a blaze of light so glaring Horus had to narrow his eyes to keep walking forwards. His four companions hung back, afraid. Though they had seen the Emperor before and borne His presence bravely, this time they trailed after Horus like frightened children. He lost respect for them, there and then, that they never fully recovered.\n\nWas that how it was? Something was wrong with all this. He had lived these events before, he was sure. The Palace had all the solidity of a memory, a spun-glass recollection perfect in every detail, as all his memories were, but nothing more than a fragile echo of time gone, never to be experienced again.\n\nThe four who accompanied him were the cause of the dissonance. The advisors who walked with him the day he came to Terra were not these four men. Those companions had been his first Mournival, beloved comrades from Cthonia who were too old to take legionary apotheosis, and who aged and died with disappointing rapidity.\n\nIt was right that these false friends should hang back. They should not have been there. Something in the light hated them.\n\nHorus walked through the roaring acclaim, and his humility fled before it. So many shouts for a being the crowd did not know or understand, and never could. He was a weapon made by an oppressor. If his so-called father had commanded him, he would have killed every single one of them without a thought, and he would have made the massacre seem just. That was the truth of it.\n\nThe Emperor was anything but just. His achievements were founded on falsehood.\n\nThe Emperor was a liar.\n\nHorus looked at the Palace again.\n\nThe towering arches were the expression of arrogance. The walls symbols of oppression. The very idea of Imperium was inimical to the freedom every man had held dear since the first examples of humanity dropped from the trees and walked out into the grasslands. The Emperor was a tyrant like every other tyrant.\n\n'Can you not see what He is?' Horus shouted boldly. 'He brings you slavery in the guise of liberation.' But the words were not heard by the crowd. He could not affect the memory.\n\nTime is a river. It flows only where it can. It is bound by laws as sure as that of gravity. Horus cheatingly followed the path of before like a man can return to a river's source and walk its length again. He remembered now. Events must play out as they did. Some beings, however, are timeless. Through the act of remembering, Horus escaped time's shackles. The Emperor's soul had never felt time's lash so heavily as other men, and so there, in memory, father and son met.\n\nHorus' spirit walked out of step with his former self. He looked through the back of his own head as his past and present moved out of synchronisation. How naive he had been. How excited by this outpouring of affection. He had been taken in completely. He allowed himself to be angry about that.\n\nHorus and his small party came to the foot of the steps. From the great chair, the Emperor stared down at him. There was imperious pride and triumph in His face as He looked upon His creation. But no love. Never that. From the vantage of the present, Horus looked back upon the Emperor's affection and saw it for a sham.\n\nBack then, he had not known. Back then, he had believed.\n\nHorus of Cthonia and Warmaster Horus knelt before the man who would become a god - the first shaking with joy at reunion with his father, the second disgusted by himself.\n\nSilence fell. From His high seat, the Emperor intoned, 'Horus of Cthonia! Do you swear fealty to me, your creator, the Emperor of Mankind? Do you swear to serve me faithfully, to bring the light of the Imperium to every world touched by the hand of our people, to protect them from the dark, to deliver them from "}
{"text":"had believed.\n\nHorus of Cthonia and Warmaster Horus knelt before the man who would become a god - the first shaking with joy at reunion with his father, the second disgusted by himself.\n\nSilence fell. From His high seat, the Emperor intoned, 'Horus of Cthonia! Do you swear fealty to me, your creator, the Emperor of Mankind? Do you swear to serve me faithfully, to bring the light of the Imperium to every world touched by the hand of our people, to protect them from the dark, to deliver them from ignorance, to give them succour when they are in need, to guide them where they falter, to save them when they are in danger...'\n\nThe Emperor went on with His list of pompous demands.\n\nWarmaster Horus looked up while his weakling former self grovelled in the light. His mouth split far wider than a human's could, evincing a reptilian smile.\n\n'Hello, father,' he said.\n\nIt is not enough that you pursue me through metaphor and dreamscapes? Now you chase me down the roads of what has been, said the Emperor.\n\n'I will chase you where I must, father,' he replied. His smile spread. 'You sound tired.'\n\nSnow whipped past Horus from the shadows of a forest hidden on the edge of sight. Lupine shapes prowled behind him, panting hot breaths, eyes of red, green, pink and blue shining from shadowy faces.\n\nBe careful, Horus, the too-perfect voice rang in his head. The past gives me strength. It has worn itself into the fabric of things, and cannot be altered. It is not mutable like the place you made your last attempt on my soul, and that did not end so well for you.\n\nLight flared. Horus was pushed back away from his former self as he ecstatically pledged to follow the cause of crusade. Behind the glare Horus saw another Emperor, a man in pain, bound to a seat He could not leave, holding back a tide of darkness while a lone sentinel waited, hammer in hand, before a sealed gate. And past that, a third version of the Emperor, fleetingly glimpsed, this one a corpse trapped within a machine grown monstrous around His throne.\n\nThe Warmaster laughed, and pushed back, drawing on the might of his allies.\n\n'I was weak. Now I am not.' The light dimmed. 'The truth makes me strong.'\n\nFalse strength derived from false truths. As you draw it, it eats you alive from the inside. Drag upon their lies as much as you wish - you are not strong enough to come against me in this way, my wayward son, and you never shall be.\n\nThe Emperor of the past continued to speak. 'Will you, Horus, first of my primarchs, stand by my side and shepherd humanity into a new era of prosperity and peace, where no xenos race might oppress us, and no fault of our nature undo us?' The Emperor stared at him with His rich, brown eyes, and it was the man of the past and the man of the moment combined when He spoke next. 'Do you swear this, Horus, do you swear it?'\n\nLight swamped Horus Lupercal's form, and cast him from nowhere into somewhere.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Lunar orbit, 14th of Secundus\n\nAn hour passed before Layak raised his head.\n\n'He returns to us.'\n\nThe lights circling Horus sped faster and faster, grew brighter, burst apart and fled shrieking for the furthest corners of the hall, where they died in flickers of witchfire. A moment later, Horus stirred. His eyelids flickered like those of a stupefied man coming round, showing only the whites, and refusing to open fully.\n\n'Horus.' Abaddon moved for his father. Layak's hand shot out and grasped his forearm.\n\n'Do not touch him!' he hissed.\n\nFrost spread over the Warmaster's black armour, turning the glaring eye on his chest milky blind. It melted as fast as it formed. The reactor buried within the Warmaster's battleplate whined with building power, and Horus lolled sideways with a groan, pawing at the arms of his seat for support.\n\n'Father,' said Abaddon, appalled by the display of weakness.\n\nHorus held up his hand to silence his son. The jointing of his Terminator armour prevented him from slumping far forwards, but his head hung within the cowl.\n\n'Father,' Abaddon repeated.\n\n'I am well, my son, do not be afraid,' said the primarch. He lifted his eyes to meet Abaddon's. In the dark they shone silverly, like those of a felid caught in a beam of light. 'You disgrace yourself with your fretting, First Captain. Nothing ails me. Far from it.'\n\nWith a sigh of armour motors, Horus Lupercal stood. Light danced along the claws of his armour as he activated them and inspected them, and skittered away to nothing when he shut them down. Abaddon relaxed. There was the man he had pledged to follow. There was his father. There was the future Emperor of Mankind.\n\n'The Emperor is afraid. Our time comes,' Horus said. His huge head turned, taking in the party before him as if seeing them for the first time. 'Why do you disturb my meditations? Why are you not on your ship, Abaddon?'\n\n'I wished to see you myself, my lord,' said Abaddon. Energy beat upon him from Horus' engorged soul. Kneel, it demanded. Kneel before me.\n\nAbaddon would not kneel.\n\n'I wanted to look at your face with my own eyes,' Abaddon continued, 'and ask you why, when Terra is within our grasp, do we delay?'\n\nHorus stared at him. The weight of his regard pushed at Abaddon's being.\n\nKneel, the demand came again, this time fully voiced within his mind.\n\nAbaddon's armour sighed as his muscles strained within his Terminator plate. He would not kneel!\n\n'You wait too long, father,' Abaddon continued. 'Your armies stand ready for your command. Everything is in place. The last geno-temples of the Selenites are in our hands. All resistance has been purged from Terra's orbits. The bombardment proceeds as you ordered. Terra burns, my lord. But we wait here. We give our enemies time. We give them strength.'\n\n'We are not yet gathered,' said Horus. Such power was contained in his words it scalded Abaddon's soul. 'You push at the bounds of your authority, my son.'\n\n'I will not apologise, nor shall I beg your forgiveness,' said Abaddon. 'The Mournival exists to speak truth to you, and I do so now. We risk everything. Mortarion, primarch of the Death Guard, and all his Legion have broken warp and sail for our position,' he continued. 'You should know this, and be ready to act. Instead, I find you slumped on your throne. You allow yourself to be influenced by this priest. You waste your time in worship.'\n\n'Careful, Ezekyle,' Horus said. 'I worship nothing.'\n\n'Your forces are complete. We should begin our invasion now. Do not tarry, Horus. Strike the final blow.'\n\nFor dangerous seconds Horus stared at his son. Strange fires leapt behind his eyes, and Abaddon feared he witnessed the bonfire of Horus' soul consumed. In so many ways it was too terrible a sight to endure, but he held his father's polluted gaze.\n\nHorus suddenly moved down from his throne dais, his vast bulk pushing past the lesser beings at his feet as he headed for the chamber door.\n\n'Mortarion is late,' growled Horus.\n\nBastion 16\n\nGuilliman is coming\n\nThe first tower\n\nDaylight District, inner wall, 15th of Secundus\n\nKatsuhiro passed a couple of nights in freezing warehouses, an interminable wait that ended without any warning with an early waking, and they were packed onto another, less luxurious train.\n\nAn official ordered them off the train at a small halt and took them through to open service ways above the level of the wall. Winter winds threatened to blast the conscripts from the walkways, and they were urged to hold tight to the guard rails. Through streaming eyes Katsuhiro looked out. 'Wall' was a misleading term for what Katsuhiro saw, for the fortifications were a linear mountain. The wall walk atop it was as broad as a major highway, double sided with crenellations on inner and outer faces of such height that a secondary walk ran along each battlement to act as a firing step. From regularly spaced embrasures giant guns pointed outwards, with smaller pieces between. There were many towers visible in both directions, for the wall there was long and shallowly curved, allowing Katsuhiro to see dozens of kilometres, as far as the Eternity Wall space port to the north, looming large over the defences to block out the view thereafter, and further south, to where the wall was shrunk by perspective to a ribbon, and bent around out of sight.\n\nBefore the dizzying mass of the space port, a greater tower jutted skywards over all the others, oval in shape, even more immense than the wall, like a ship athwart the defence. This bore the largest gun he had seen - a macro cannon mounted in a spherical turret. Every minute, the gun barrel drew in and coughed forwards violently, vomiting a gout of fire heavenwards. Katsuhiro learned later that it was the southerly tower of the great Helios Gate, the major exit through that part of the wall.\n\nA part of the plain beyond the wall was visible for a time as the conscripts descended. The ground immediately at the foot of the main defences was obscured by the fortification; further out Katsuhiro saw trenchworks and ramparts. Detail of the plain was lost to the haze of the edge of the aegis, though the violent light of shells hitting the ground flashed through, and he had a hint of a horizon foreshortened by the drop of the Katabatic Slopes to the south and east.\n\nAll over the Palace weapons fired skywards. Plasma, shell, laser and rockets roared towards the Warmaster's fleet. The counter-barrage was so loud that no voice could be heard, and their guiding official was forced to resort to hand signals, or shouted orders directly into the ear of the first man in the group, who passed them back up in a game of whispers. By the time the words reached Katsuhiro, halfway along the line of three hundred, they had lost all sense.\n\nIn some confusion the conscripts descended long staircases, exposed all the time to the wind and the roar of the guns, coming eventually to ground level shaken, frozen and half-deaf. The journey was long and nerve wracking, and Katsuhiro relished the relative quiet of the canyon st"}
{"text":"ed orders directly into the ear of the first man in the group, who passed them back up in a game of whispers. By the time the words reached Katsuhiro, halfway along the line of three hundred, they had lost all sense.\n\nIn some confusion the conscripts descended long staircases, exposed all the time to the wind and the roar of the guns, coming eventually to ground level shaken, frozen and half-deaf. The journey was long and nerve wracking, and Katsuhiro relished the relative quiet of the canyon street between the wall and the soaring Palace structures behind. It was but a brief respite. The group was rearranged, orders being more easily given there, and then led straight to a small postern guarded by legionaries in green. Few in the group had ever seen a Space Marine, and they stared at the giants as they shuffled past them. The legionaries ignored the conscripts as they passed between them through the gate.\n\nA tunnel led steeply downwards, going through seven adamantium portals before taking a sharp dog-leg covered by emplaced heavy bolters. Then through more doors which groaned violently and flashed red lights at them when they approached, before the final portal opened onto the ground beyond the wall.\n\nAgain the roar of the guns battered the senses, and their guide led them wordlessly through a maze of trenches. They crossed paths with other groups, who emerged unexpectedly from the tangle of defensive ways before being led off to their own fates.\n\nThey passed a tall wall of prefabricated sections, going out through a triple gate guarded by a switchback approach. Many groups were using this way, and Katsuhiro's unit were forced to wait their turn in a side trench, where they jumped and moaned at every explosion spreading over the aegis overhead, and endured the impatient shoves of uniformed soldiers eager to get by.\n\nA second, lower wall came soon after the first. It stood atop a recently piled slope of rubble that led down without the interruption of trenches to a final wall a few hundred metres further out. Of the three main lines, the last was the lowest, the defensive lip being only two metres above ground level, and the rampart running behind easily clambered onto from the back. They headed for this wall, then after reaching it turned north towards the Helios Gate.\n\nBy then it was snowing. Gentle at first, the weather gathered itself into a freezing storm that chilled them all and curtailed what visibility there was.\n\nCold and tired, the conscripts were gathered into a square among several dozen others collected at the outermost line, and introduced to their leader.\n\nThe commanding officer was an exhausted-looking man. There was nothing unexpected about that. Katsuhiro hadn't seen a fresh face for weeks, but their new leader excelled all others in weariness, pushing past to the unexplored realms of misery beyond. His skin looked to be ordinarily a light brown, but it had gone a haggard yellow-grey, like a blanket left too long outdoors. His black hair was plastered miserably to his forehead. His lips and nail beds were unhealthily pale. He gave the impression of being a man who had seen everything, and liked very little of it.\n\nThe pad of flimsies in his hand particularly displeased him. He scanned again the cheap bioplastek films, already disintegrating in the snow melting off his skin, then looked down with pouched eyes at the three hundred conscripts failing to hold a parade ground formation behind the revetment. He did not look impressed.\n\nKatsuhiro was right at the front of the group, close enough to hear the officer's voice over the roaring of the attack. They were now some distance from the walls and the violence of the Palace guns, while the aegis stole a good amount of the noise of the enemy's bombardment along with its destructive power.\n\n'Is this it?' said the man miserably. 'No officers? It's just me?'\n\n'Sign here and here,' said the official who had brought the group down from the Palace.\n\n'Ghosts of Old Earth, we're all going to die.' The officer made a depressed sound and scribbled at the form. Part of it came away on the nib of his autoquill.\n\n'They're all yours now.' The official rolled up the disintegrating plastek and shoved it inside his coat. 'For Unity and the Imperium.' He made a full aquila over his heart before marching off down the rampart, where he disappeared into the snow. The officer pulled a face and fetched a vox-horn from his belt. Feedback squealed when he activated it.\n\n'Right, you lot,' yelled their new officer over the thunder of the bombs and the moan of the wind. 'My name is Adinahav Jainan. I'm...' He held up the flimsies again. 'I'm an acting captain, lucky me. That makes me your commander. Do what I say, or you'll get shot.' He made an expression that could equally have been a scowl or a smile. He didn't have enough enthusiasm to form either properly. 'That is, I'm sorry to inform you, the full extent of military training that is currently available under the circumstances. You are all now members of the Kushtun Naganda, one of the Old Hundred, from Ind, not that you're worthy of the honour, and not that it matters any more anyway.' Pent-up emotions forced themselves up through his world-weary exterior, where they bubbled, briefly visible, on his face before draining away into a general lassitude. 'There was a time when that meant something. But at least you will all have the satisfaction of dying under a famous flag. Our role,' he said, raising his voice over a sudden upsurge in the bombardment's volume, 'is to reinforce the third line outworks,' he kicked the wall, 'near Bastion Sixteen.' He pointed down the line, where there was nothing visible though the whirling snow. 'You will form reserves to the very first line of defence! More of that honour when we get there. Yes, I'm afraid that does mean more walking. No, I don't have anything to shelter you from the weather. The sooner we get there, the sooner you can get warm. We go at the pace of the slowest. Feel free to beat a bit of speed into them. But we do have a little bit of time.' He looked upwards. 'The enemy won't be coming today.'\n\nKatsuhiro gave a small sigh of relief.\n\n'Don't get too excited,' said the thin man Katsuhiro had seen cleaning his nails with a knife in the city. He leaned in from behind and whispered into Katsuhiro's ear. 'Reservers aren't for keeping back. They're for doing all the scutwork, and if the enemy don't come today, they'll come tomorrow, or the day after.' His voice smiled, but his words were meant to hurt.\n\n'Shut up!' Katsuhiro snapped behind him. 'There's no need to make it worse.'\n\n'Got some teeth after all, eh?' said Doromek, who was a file over from Katsuhiro.\n\n'Leave me alone!' Katsuhiro said.\n\n'Hey! Hey, you!' Jainan's amplified voice thumped into Katsuhiro's ears. 'Yeah, that's right. You. Just so we're all reading from the same manual here, talking when I'm talking is definitely not allowed.' He patted the laspistol at his hip meaningfully. 'Got it?'\n\nKatsuhiro nodded.\n\nActing Captain Jainan sighed. 'Right then, this way.' He turned off the horn and hooked it on his belt, then executed a lazy left turn. 'Quick march.' He stopped and held out his arms when half a dozen of the new soldiers went to the rampart to get out of the mud.\n\n'Nope,' he said. 'I stay up here on this relatively dry prefabricated wall. The rest of you have to trudge through the snow.' He straightened his snow-damp uniform. 'There has to be some privilege of rank.'\n\nTheir march north allowed Katsuhiro a little time to take in his new surroundings. The walls proper soared to improbable heights to his left. Though the spires of the Palace were far higher, from his position the walls hid nearly everything behind them, so huge were they. The outworks were tiny in comparison. Being stationed in the maze of walls and trenches that fronted the main fortifications was alarming. His fears increased as the thousands of conscripted men and women continued to pour into the complex, splitting and splitting again as they were directed down differing trench ways already ankle-deep in snow. His dismay continued to rise, while never hitting the peak he expected. There seemed to be no end to how much fear he could feel. It surprised him he was able to walk, or talk, or do anything, but he did, his terrified mind operating his limbs through a buzzing fog of terror. He felt numb inside and out. The bombardment pounded endlessly down. Millions of tonnes of ordnance exploded upon the Palace's shields every minute, their released energies stolen by the voids' displacement technology. The aegis must have been thinner out past the walls, not that Katsuhiro knew the first thing about military shielding, because periodically a shell the size of a heavy hauler would pass through and impact the ground beyond the last rampart, sending up a plume of rock splinters dozens of metres high, and shaking the soldiers on their feet.\n\n'This isn't so good, is it?' said the thin man conversationally. 'I just love being cannon fodder. Isn't that right, darling?' he shouted at the woman from the station, who was a few ranks ahead. She scowled at him.\n\n'I wouldn't call her darling, if I were you,' said Doromek.\n\n'Why? She's a looker, I could do with a taste of that.'\n\n'I know her kind, my friend. She'll kill you.'\n\nThe thin man snorted.\n\n'I mean it,' said Doromek.\n\n'Will you shut up?' said Katsuhiro, addressing both the thin man and Doromek. He was by now more miserable than he had ever been. Outside the city was even colder than inside. His hands were unfeeling claws clamped upon his gun. His teeth chattered. The snow had turned black with ash, and wind chilled the exposed side of his face so that it burned. The air was thin and oxygen-poor away from the Palace's atmospheric cycling system. Some provision had been made for this; every half-mile or so giant snakes of soft tubing emerged from the ground and whooshed thicker, warmer air over th"}
{"text":"now more miserable than he had ever been. Outside the city was even colder than inside. His hands were unfeeling claws clamped upon his gun. His teeth chattered. The snow had turned black with ash, and wind chilled the exposed side of his face so that it burned. The air was thin and oxygen-poor away from the Palace's atmospheric cycling system. Some provision had been made for this; every half-mile or so giant snakes of soft tubing emerged from the ground and whooshed thicker, warmer air over the outworks. The conscripts noticed these quickly, and ran between them, desperate for the heat and nourishing airflow, though the distances between caused them to flag, and their provision was meagre overall.\n\nWhile approaching the fourth of these outflows, the thin man spoke again.\n\n'This snow, you know it's toxic, right?' He jogged alongside. Katsuhiro was too breathless to tell him to be quiet. The man took his silence as interest. 'Void shields will stop fast things, or big things, and especially big, fast things, but small stuff like this, or slow stuff like an infantryman or a tank, it can't stop that. Rain or snow'll fall right through it. This is black snow. The Palace is covered in layered void shields so deep it'll take the enemy months to pound their way through. Everywhere else on Terra? Not so well provided. So what's falling on us is the vaporised remains of the rest of the world. It's full of rad and poison. Kill us all dead eventually, not that we'll last that long.'\n\n'I think he said shut up, you. I'm asking the same,' said Doromek to the man, causing him to back off a bit.\n\n'What's he mean?' Katsuhiro asked Doromek.\n\n'It's a defensive layer thing,' said Doromek. Near the pipes the snow melted, and they splashed through freezing water running over the ground. He appeared bothered far less by the cold and the thin air than just about everyone else. 'They don't need to keep us safe. We're the first line of defence.'\n\n'First line?'\n\nAn aircraft screamed overhead, making them all flinch and more than a few throw themselves into the muddy snow. A soft explosion thumped bare metres over their heads, prompting a lot more of the conscripts to scream and fling themselves down, Katsuhiro included.\n\n'Get up! Get up!' shouted Jainan. 'It's just a bloody leaflet drop. Get up!' He jumped down from the wall, and hauled weeping conscripts to their feet. Those who were too tightly curled he kicked until they stood. 'Come on! Come on! Get up!'\n\nKatsuhiro unclamped his hands from his head. A white sheet of paper floated face down in a puddle in front of him. He reached out and picked it up.\n\n'Get up! Get up! Everyone, come on!' Jainan glowered after the aircraft. 'Bloody propaganda. Does nobody any good!'\n\nOn the other side of the paper was a poorly printed image of a warrior. A Space Marine, Katsuhiro thought at first, but closer inspection revealed it was in fact a primarch. A large 'XIII' was printed beneath him.\n\nLord Guilliman is coming, it read. Stand firm and survive.\n\n'Lot of use, that,' Doromek said. He reached down. Katsuhiro clasped his arm. 'If he gets here at all, we'll all be dead.'\n\n'That's right.' The thin man nodded sagely as Doromek pulled Katsuhiro to his feet. 'First line of defence. They'll keep the Legions back behind the main walls for the real fighting.'\n\n'Then what are we for?' asked Katsuhiro, dreading the answer.\n\nDoromek laughed ruefully. 'We're here to die, my boy. Soak up bullets. Cannon fodder, as our friend...'\n\n'Runnecan,' the thin man said.\n\n'As Runnecan says.' Doromek smiled sympathetically, attempted to scrape the mud off Katsuhiro, shrugged at the amount and gave up. 'The way this battle will play out is so - you see the batteries there, there and there?' Doromek pointed out the giant guns mounted upon the wall's towers. Flashes and rods of coherent light marked out the presence of thousands more.\n\n'I can't really miss them,' said Katsuhiro.\n\n'Now you're getting it,' said Doromek, and slapped him on the shoulder. 'There are lots more deeper within. Lord Dorn cut a thousand towers flat to take guns, guns and more guns. They stud every high structure, clustering most densely around the space ports, gates and, especially, especially, the Lion's Gate.'\n\n'Yes?' said Katsuhiro tersely. They began to trudge through the mud again.\n\n'Well, yes, obviously. My point is, no real attack can come down until those guns are taken out. If I were the Warmaster,' he said - Doromek's arrogance was astounding - 'then I would attempt to clear an area of crossfire, and begin to land my first forces. With men on the ground, the walls will be threatened. All this out here,' he swept his hand about, 'will come under intense attack. Some guns will fall, some guns will be reoriented to target the ground. The weight of fire will decrease. That will enable more ships to come down, then more, until the surface of Terra is crawling with the enemy, and the guns will cease to speak at all. But first, he has to get through that.' Doromek pointed upwards. 'The Palace aegis. It'll last, but not forever. As soon as that starts to fail, then we'll see the real bombing start, and after that, the proper invasion.'\n\n'So we're safe. For now?' Katsuhiro sneezed. Feeling in his toes and fingers was a fond memory.\n\n'If by \"now\" you mean for the next few hours, then yes we are, safe as the Emperor Himself. Not that He's particularly safe at the moment.'\n\n'We're all going to die!' tittered the thin man. Several of the conscripts within earshot were rigid with fear.\n\n'You! Talkative man.' Jainan strode out of the rain. He alone out of the unit wore a rain cape, but it was thin and he was as cold and wretched as the rest of them.\n\n'Yes, sir?' Doromek gave a coprophage's smile. The thin man grinned.\n\n'I heard you, giving all these wretches the benefit of your wisdom. Are you a military man?' snapped Jainan. 'Don't lie to me. I can check. Save us the time and tell me now.'\n\n'I was once,' admitted Doromek.\n\n'And you are again,' Jainan said. 'Sir.'\n\n'Indeed. Sir.'\n\n'How many years, and what regiment?'\n\nDoromek rubbed at his head. 'Atlantean Rangers. Fifteen years.'\n\n'Role?'\n\n'Sniper.'\n\n'Good one?'\n\nDoromek waggled his free hand. 'So they say.'\n\n'Then how come you weren't called up in the early drafts?' Jainan's eyes narrowed.\n\nDoromek shrugged. 'Lucky, I guess.'\n\n'Hiding you mean. Well your luck's run out. You're my new lieutenant. Congratulations.' He stalked off back into the storm, hollering at the group to get a move on. 'And stop diving into the ground at the sight of every aircraft - they are all ours!'\n\n'An officer? Me?' shouted Doromek.\n\n'Don't get excited. Acting officer!' Jainan called back over his shoulder.\n\nDoromek grinned at Katsuhiro. 'That makes you my first sergeant.'\n\nThey staggered on for another few hundred metres. A dark shape loomed out of the snow to meet them. Katsuhiro peered fruitlessly into the storm. The shape grew firmer with every step, until it stopped being a shape and became a great drum tower, a hundred metres tall and almost as wide across, set back some fifty metres from the outermost ramparts. Guns mounted in the walls tracked back and forth across the artificial plateau beyond the aegis. Lights shone through tiny windows in only one place, halfway up the front.\n\nDoromek whistled. 'I guess that's Bastion Sixteen.'\n\nJainan's vox-amplified voice cut over the rumble of the Imperial guns and the muffled thunder of the bombardment.\n\n'This is it. Follow me. Our section is to the south-south-west. Stay close. Don't get lost. There are uniforms, shelter, food and water waiting for you. Alternatively, you can blunder off into this blizzard and either freeze to death or be executed by the Marshals Militaris. I hear they are itching to shoot something. Your choice.'\n\nJainan strode away. There wasn't much option but to follow him.\n\nBastion 16, 16th of Secundus\n\nAfterwards, Katsuhiro was not certain if it was the increasing noise of the explosions or the wailing klaxons sounding from the wall that woke him. Mercifully spared duty, he had fallen into a deep, sudden sleep atop a pile of sacks just as soon as he'd found somewhere to hide.\n\nTocsins blared all along the ramparts, wrenching him from slumber into nerve-jangling consciousness in the space of a single breath. He leapt up, flailing around. There were no formal barracks for the new members of the Kushtun Naganda. The storage bunker he found to hide in was unlit, and for a moment he forgot completely where he was. He'd lived in the same room for his entire life. Twenty-five years of familiarity sought to impose themselves upon reality, and he stumbled about, wondering who had moved his few pieces of furniture around.\n\nThe door opened, catching on poorly finished rockcrete with a squeal. Horrendous noise blasted in from outside.\n\n'Out, out! The enemy are coming, the enemy are coming! Come on!' A wild-eyed man he didn't recognise beckoned frantically. He wore the badly made tabard that marked him out as a conscripted member of the Nagandan; this was the uniform Jainan had mentioned, and not the warm coat Katsuhiro was hoping for.\n\nWho the man was, Katsuhiro never discovered. He found his rifle and ran outside.\n\nThe snow had stopped, and cold sunk its teeth deep into the mountains. Although Katsuhiro had been warm in the bunker his clothes were still wet. Winter hit him like a blow, so hard he almost missed what occurred. The sky above him was an eye-watering pattern of unnatural colours holding back an ocean of fire. Something squeaked and ground like ice on stone, then there was a tremendous bang, and the noise of the bombardment suddenly grew loud enough to shake the teeth in his head. There were people shouting all around him, but he could not hear a word they said. Pulsed shocks of overpressure batted at him. The ground bounced like a drum skin. He staggered about in shock, half blinded by strobing explosions hammering the ground a kilometre distant.\n\nDorom"}
{"text":"nnatural colours holding back an ocean of fire. Something squeaked and ground like ice on stone, then there was a tremendous bang, and the noise of the bombardment suddenly grew loud enough to shake the teeth in his head. There were people shouting all around him, but he could not hear a word they said. Pulsed shocks of overpressure batted at him. The ground bounced like a drum skin. He staggered about in shock, half blinded by strobing explosions hammering the ground a kilometre distant.\n\nDoromek was there, turning him around, pointing and shouting. It took three attempts before Katsuhiro heard what was being said.\n\n'The voids have come down!' he yelled. 'The voids over the Palace!'\n\nHe followed Doromek's finger. He could see it then, a dark space over one of the wall's enormous towers. The edges of other void shields were visible thanks to the lack of the missing element, layered over one another in flat petals that pulsed like hearts with every impact. They held back their portion of the bombardment, but through the hole shells fell unimpeded, making it down to the ground and exploding all around the tower. Flames burst off the tower's sloped sides. Katsuhiro tried to ask if they would be targeted next, but nobody could hear him. Warning sirens sang over the explosions, audible only by dint of their shrieking pitch.\n\nThe huge defence laser that dominated the tower prepared to fire, the nested barrel pulling itself back with a series of businesslike metallic booms. With a defiant roar and cast of light the cannon uncoiled, hurling its response upwards. Whether the las-beam hit its target or not Katsuhiro could not tell, but at that moment the enemy appeared to notice the section was unprotected, and destruction speared from the night.\n\nFive beams of collimated light slammed into the tower, their impacts tightly grouped, each coming in from a different angle.\n\nMolten rockcrete and metal poured off the structure in torrents. The beams were persistent, and moved along, sawing at the tower. One punched clean through both sides of the building, bringing up a mushroom of fire from within the Palace before they all snapped off. Part of the parapet of the attached wall tumbled away, its sheared edges glowing with heat.\n\nThe gun pulled its muzzle in again, but its last roar had already been voiced.\n\nA triple hit of high-velocity mass shot slammed into the spherical turret. Explosions rolled out over the defence works, each one louder than the last. Fire swept out in a hollow disc around the top of the tower, and when it receded the gun was a tumbling wreck, slipping from its moorings and taking the outer face of the bastion with it.\n\n'Come on! Come on!' The man who had woken Katsuhiro ran past, his need to act dragging a score of his comrades along with him. 'The tower, the tower!'\n\nThey made impressive speed through the lying snow, though Katsuhiro saw they could achieve nothing and did not follow. Thin screams crept under the noise of the barrage. The heat of the molten rockcrete singed his face from so far away. In their need to do something, anything, the conscripts raced headlong into danger, while others stood rooted to the spot, weeping in terror.\n\nMore lance beams scored their way across Katsuhiro's eyes, coming this time from a lower angle. Half of them smeared away to blue light across the neighbouring void shield, but the rest hit the tower squarely, slicing it open down to the magazine. The largest, brightest fire Katsuhiro had ever seen boomed out, breaking apart the tower as it grew from nothing to everything, so big and loud it swallowed the whole of the universe.\n\nSearing air knocked him flying, sending him skidding metres through the snow. Debris rained down around him, bringing more screams into the night as men and women were crushed.\n\nGasping for the breath that had been punched from his lungs, Katsuhiro staggered upright onto his knees and remained there, filthy again, his back chilled to the bone by the wind, his front warmed by the dying fires of the tower. Through phosphor-bright after-images burned into his retinas, he saw the tower was gone, a tooth torn out from the root. A single shell corkscrewed down on a spiral trail of fire, bringing up a last explosion. The air thrummed. His skin prickled, and the void shields flexed back into existence over the ruin, glowed like the cells in an insect hive, then faded out of notice. A few hits splashed upon the surface of the aegis. The bombardment moved off, on to test the next mighty bastion ten kilometres away.\n\nDoromek found him again.\n\n'The first gun falls. This is it now,' he said. 'They'll concentrate their fire like that, to take out the biggest anti-ship cannons we have. Little by little, they'll nibble it away, until there's nothing left to threaten their landing zones.'\n\n'Landing zones,' repeated Katsuhiro dumbly.\n\n'We're lucky,' Doromek said sardonically. 'I'd say they're clearing this area here. They're going to be coming right at us.'\n\nTears of an Angel\n\nThe Emperor's work\n\nFabricator General\n\nImperial Palace airspace, 24th of Secundus\n\nSanguinius flew under a ceiling of fire. His strong wings bore his armoured form easily over the sprawl of his father's Palace. Not for the first time, he marvelled at the artifice that had gone into the creation of his wings. Most winged creatures analogous to Terran vertebrates had keel bones to anchor their flight muscles. The ones that did not were gliders, not flyers; they could not beat their wings. For his own amusement Sanguinius had once calculated how far his sternum should project to allow him to fly if he had followed the same design as a bird. Two and half metres should have covered it. Yet he had a human form, with no grotesque deformities. Indeed, they called him beautiful.\n\nExactly how he was able to fly would have been impossible to determine without having himself dissected. His father never spoke with him about his wings. Sanguinius had often wondered if they were part of the Emperor's design, or were the outwards signs of Chaos' blight upon his soul. The servants of the Ruinous Powers had intimated as much to him.\n\n'They lie,' Sanguinius said, through gritted teeth, his words torn from his mouth and left behind as he wheeled through Terra's tortured heaven.\n\nIf the Emperor had made the wings, Sanguinius assumed that a musculature of the most inspired design had been incorporated into his body. The wings were broad, and strong, and glorious to look upon. They lifted him and the great mass of his armour easily. He could control his great pinions as finely as fingers, tilting them individually this way and that to catch the air perfectly. When he moved his feathers so, air ran over the barbs like water over a hand. The sensation pleased him greatly.\n\nSanguinius passed comfortably between the blasts emanating from the Palace defences. His gift of prophecy was stronger than ever before as he neared his foreseen end. The fixed point of his death anchored his ability somehow, the coming seconds, minutes and hours unfolding more readily for him. He knew where each shaft of killing light would go before it cut the sky, and adjusted his flight accordingly. He saw shells spear upwards before they were fired.\n\nFlying was a gesture of defiance. It was sad for him that it had often been so. On mutant-hating Baal before he was found. On Macragge, where he had flown in defiance of Guilliman's wishes. On Terra now, where Dorn said the same. Always, his brothers sought to ground him.\n\nBut he would not stay out of the air. How could any of the others understand him, when none could fly?\n\nHe hoped Horus could see him beneath the squalls of energy bursting on the aegis and know he could not be touched.\n\nThe Palace stretched beneath Sanguinius, immense in scale, almost impossible to grasp as a whole. Dorn's defences came close to matching the Emperor's vision in grandeur. The Eternity Wall ringed the whole, stupendous in scale, thousands of kilometres long, hundreds of metres high, layers and layers of rockcrete, ferrocrete, plascrete and stone, the sloping fronts reinforced with adamantium. The metal alone equalled in value the combined wealth of dozens of lesser empires. In places the walls were stepped with multiple battlements marching up the outside. Hundreds and hundreds of towers punctuated its length, many topped with anti-fleet guns. Orbital batteries occupied bastions the size of hills behind them.\n\nThe Eternity Wall spawned many offspring, dividing the Palace into various wards. There was the Ultimate Wall, around the Sanctum Imperialis, and the Anterior Wall, which looped out from the Eternity and Ultimate Walls to form an outer bailey for the Lion's Gate, girdling the artificial mountain of the Lion's Gate space port as it did so. Each of the sections of the walls had their own names: Daylight, Dusk, Tropic, Polar, Montagne, Celantine, Exultant, and more besides, so many in number, though still few when divided among the overall length, so that each named section was dozens if not hundreds of kilometres long.\n\nLaid out below Sanguinius were the spires and hives of the Palatine Sprawl. The Tower of Hegemon thrust contemptuously up at the enemy fleet, its existence vouchsafed by Skye, the last of Terra's great orbital plates, whose straining engines held aloft a treasury of transplanted guns.\n\nNot far from Skye's anchor the giant dome of the Senatorum Imperialis managed to retain its dignity despite being swaddled in protection. This varied from technologically advanced foams and layers of dispersive and ablative materials to simple piles of sandbags filled with the dust of ancient civilisations. Further out he spied the Investiary, and though all except two of its monumental statues had been destroyed, they and the empty plinths around them were also covered over. These buildings and monuments were too precious, too evocative of the dream of Imperium to be taken down. Removing them would be ta"}
{"text":"g swaddled in protection. This varied from technologically advanced foams and layers of dispersive and ablative materials to simple piles of sandbags filled with the dust of ancient civilisations. Further out he spied the Investiary, and though all except two of its monumental statues had been destroyed, they and the empty plinths around them were also covered over. These buildings and monuments were too precious, too evocative of the dream of Imperium to be taken down. Removing them would be tantamount to admitting defeat, even if only to keep them safe. But elsewhere, much of the beauty of the city had been trampled on by Dorn's fortification. Guns bristled on buildings never meant to take them, and what could not be weaponised had been torn down to make way for yet more guns.\n\nSanguinius circled over the ziggurat of the Lion's Gate space port, banking to avoid the immensity of the gate itself. Guarding the way to the Inner Palace and the sanctum therein, the Lion's Gate was the greatest of the Palace's many portals, an entire mountain refashioned into a fortification. A few dozen kilometres before it was the Ascensor's Gate, the largest of the Anterior Wall's six entrances. In any other setting the Ascensor's Gate would have been a monument to Imperial might. Before the Lion's Gate it was a child's model.\n\nDiving fast under the constant thrum of the void shields, Sanguinius accelerated, and he powered by the space port. It was of such stupendous size that its flat top alone accommodated landing fields to rival the chief ports of a sector capital planet. Its sides held docking cradles large enough for major void-ships. Everything about the Palace was scaled for gods. Sanguinius had lived much of his life feeling the world around him to be small. There had been one or two occasions, mostly before the glory of cosmic phenomena, once even at the Fortress of Hera, where he had been humbled, but these things had a lesser effect than the Palace had. In the Palace, he was a mote before the majesty of his father's ambition.\n\nHe turned south-west. Hundreds of kilometres of ancient massif sped quickly beneath him, all built over by the Imperial capital. Mountains had been levelled and valleys kilometres-deep filled during the construction. Away from the Palace to the south, east and west, artificial plains, also geoformed from the most rugged terrain on the planet, reached for the horizon. They ended in the plunge of endless slopes, beyond which lay Kush and Ind. North, north-west and north-east the mountains reasserted themselves, their heads smothered in dirty snow. They were the sovereigns of this world once; now they appeared as supplicants, beggared by their usurper.\n\nCold winter winds blew from the heart of Eurasia. Sanguinius rode them through flurries of snow. Exulting in his flight, he forgot awhile the bombardment and the war. A fragile calm filled him, and the world shifted. Through his Emperor-given foresight, he saw another time as clearly as the present. The Palace had swollen to many times its size, outgrowing the walls, spreading beyond its original limits, devouring most of the Katabatic Plains and crawling up the sides of the mountains. What beauty it'd had was gone, yet it was not the ugliness of war, but that of carelessness and of neglect. He saw the familiar landmarks still, swamped by edifices of lesser quality. The Terra of his father was a greening place, a world of wastes seeded with oases and the glint of growing oceans. All that was gone in the future. Everything was grey, and oppressive.\n\nSanguinius let out a cry, and he fell uncontrolled before he mastered himself, and stretched out his wings again to catch the winds. The Palace as it was now, in his present, reasserted itself, though the vision continued to trouble him.\n\nThe Eternity Wall space port lunged heavenwards ahead. The second of the Palace's in-wall space ports, it was a giant ridge of metal fifty kilometres long, festooned with guns, crackling with void shields, its dry docks and berths enough to hold a subsector fleet with room for more besides. The grand capital craft could never come down from orbit, not without breaking their spines, but there, at the ports at the top of the world, smaller ships ordinarily confined to the void could venture to the surface, with all save the larger classes able to put in. But its honeycomb of quays was empty. Terra's naval might had been smashed asunder. What vessels survived hid far from Terra.\n\nSanguinius' eyes strayed to a sky crowded with enemy ships. He still maintained it was a mistake to send the Phalanx away.\n\nHe curved past the Celestial Citadel at the Eternity Wall space port's southernmost tip. A city unto itself, large as any hive, in better days it was the haunt of void clan emissaries, ambassadors from xenos powers, Navigator houses and naval dynasts. Before the war, the citadel's uppermost spires had extended beyond the atmospheric envelope and into space. In doing so, they had exceeded the reach of the Palace aegis, and so Dorn had cruelly cut them short, leaving truncated stumps a few hundred metres below the void shield barrier. It was predictably covered with ordnance.\n\nRogal Dorn did so love his guns.\n\nWithin minutes the second space port was behind him. Sanguinius wore his helmet to mollify his brother rather than for safety, but it gave him access to his battleplate's systems. Gauges on the faceplate display put his airspeed at well over one hundred kilometres an hour. He smiled for the pleasure of it, and reluctantly began to check his speed. He went into a broad spiral, circling down towards the southern tower of a gate straddling the Daylight Wall, that section of the Eternity Wall that faced east, into the rising sun.\n\nFast, faster, the rooftop sped at him. At the last moment, he opened his wings as wide as he could, his primary feathers spreading like fingers. Wind tugged through his plumage. Minute adjustments no aircraft could make had him smoothly descending, landing upon the tower roof at a speed no greater than a fast walk.\n\nRaldoron, First Captain of the Blood Angels Legion and Sanguinius' equerry, was there to greet him.\n\n'My lord, welcome to the Helios Gate,' Raldoron said, and saluted. An Imperial Fists captain attended him. He too saluted in the Blood Angels' way out of respect for the primarch. A thick parapet, two-thirds the height of a Space Marine and punctuated with deep embrasures, enclosed the roof. Quad lascannons, sat upon turntables on sculpted podiums, were spaced around the giant macro cannon dominating the centre.\n\n'Rise, captains,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'How was your flight?' said Raldoron\n\n'The winds of Himalazia always remind me of home,' Sanguinius said. 'Of the Wind River, on Baal Secundus, where I first tested my wings. The speeds I could attain there...' He let the sentence die.\n\nRaldoron was wrong-footed. Sanguinius had rarely spoken of Baal since Signus Prime. His sight seemed fixed on the future, and the past forgotten.\n\n'You are of the second moon, Raldoron. Did you ever fly the river?' asked Sanguinius.\n\nRaldoron hesitated. 'No, no I never did, my lord. I always wanted to, but I never wore the wings.'\n\n'Then I pity you,' said Sanguinius. 'Flight is the last pleasure left to me.'\n\nBereft of a suitable response, Raldoron changed the subject. 'This is Captain Thane of the Twenty-Second Company, Imperial Fists. He is designated watch captain for the sixteenth section of the wall.'\n\n'Your company is of the Exemplars Chapter of the Seventh Legion?'\n\n'It is, my lord.'\n\n'Do you live up to your name?'\n\n'We do, my lord,' said Thane proudly. 'There are no better builders in my Legion than our Chapter, and my company is among the best.'\n\n'Propitious. You have some work to do here.'\n\nSanguinius strode past the captains towards an embrasure looking down the southern reach of the wall. He was tall enough not to need the secondary walkway running around the inside of the crenellations, but climbed it anyway to look. Some kilometres away, past the first tower after the Helios Gate, scaffolding surrounded a scar in the wall.\n\n'We are working night and day, my lord, to plug the breach made by the collapse of the Dawn Tower,' said Thane.\n\n'The repairs are nearly complete?'\n\n'They are. The finish is rough, but the wall will hold. We cannot, regrettably, replace the tower.'\n\n'There was a flaw in the void generators under that section,' said Raldoron. 'We are unlikely to lose another bastion soon.'\n\n'This is known to me,' said Sanguinius. 'Flaw or not, the loss of that tower is only the first we shall suffer. The bombardment continues. The shields of the Palace cannot last forever.'\n\n'What the enemy tears down, we shall rebuild, my lord.' Thane clashed his fist against his chest-plate.\n\nSanguinius turned to look over the outer defences. Besides extending the city's walls, Dorn had supplemented the fortifications with miles of outworks. Trenches and ramparts extended over the artificial plains in three parallel lines. Whatever had been there before had been bulldozed. Bastions, deliberately isolated from the lines, stood behind the outermost ramparts like pieces laid out for regicide. Though much smaller than the towers of the wall itself, they were still enormous at a hundred metres tall. Sanguinius followed the lines of radial trenches emanating from the wall proper, past the third and final line where they stopped, and on towards the point where the horizon, foreshortened by the drop in elevation down to the plains of Ind, cut the earth from the sky.\n\nPast that point, the world was burning.\n\nHe saw, with a primarch's acuity, young forests aflame, and palls of dust cast skywards by the relentless pounding of the enemy's guns. There was enough firepower in orbit to tear Terra to pieces, but that was not the Warmaster's aim. It was as if instead he wished to wipe away every good thing the Emperor had done. Sanguinius recalled his glimpse of the sprawling m"}
{"text":"shortened by the drop in elevation down to the plains of Ind, cut the earth from the sky.\n\nPast that point, the world was burning.\n\nHe saw, with a primarch's acuity, young forests aflame, and palls of dust cast skywards by the relentless pounding of the enemy's guns. There was enough firepower in orbit to tear Terra to pieces, but that was not the Warmaster's aim. It was as if instead he wished to wipe away every good thing the Emperor had done. Sanguinius recalled his glimpse of the sprawling mega-hive, and the grey, dead world around it. This was the birth of that grim future. He needed to distract himself from that realisation.\n\n'The outer defences are fully manned?'\n\n'As well as they can be, my lord,' said Raldoron. 'Mostly conscripts, with a stiffening of what's left of the Old Hundred - not many though. We have stationed only the most severely under-strength formations in the outworks. Veteran companies of Imperial Army over fifty per cent manned stand beside us here on the wall. As Lord Dorn ordered, no legionaries are stationed without.'\n\nOn impulse, Sanguinius unclasped his golden helm and lifted it from his face. His shining hair unwound and flew like a banner. The cold wind should have been refreshing, but it carried the smell of burning, and deprivation. He faced into the breeze and breathed deeply, his enhanced senses capturing a thousand scents that together told only of despair.\n\n'My lord...'\n\nRaldoron gestured hesitantly to his genefather's face. Sanguinius reached up and touched his cheek. As he brought his fingers away, he saw that they glistened with tears. He had not realised he was crying.\n\n'Why do you weep, my lord?' asked Raldoron.\n\n'I cry for the price of victory, my son,' said Sanguinius, and wept no more. He stopped the tears with an act of will, and his face chilled as they were dried by the wind.\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios section, 24th of Secundus\n\nSanguinius spent the rest of the day on the Daylight Wall. There were extensive guard chambers beneath the Helios Gate's tower tops, but most of the rest was solid mass with few internal voids. Only the very centre housed further chambers, and these were small and hot, packed full of machines, men and servitors. Thane was keen to show the primarch the command centre, though it was obvious to Sanguinius he simultaneously wished his exalted visitor gone, for his presence distracted his men. Raldoron had little to report.\n\nSanguinius excused them both and walked a little way through the firing galleries of the Daylight Wall. These were occupied in the main by Space Marines, with a heavy presence of ordinatus tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus autokrator, manning the many medium and smaller guns mounted within the walls. The baseline, unmodified humans in the galleries were all veterans of the Imperial Army, principally of the Old Hundred as Raldoron had said. Those at that part of Daylight were drawn from the well-armoured Anatol Evocatii, but he saw uniforms from a dozen others.\n\nPrivately, Sanguinius had misgivings about the conscripts outside the wall. They had been handed a death sentence. As a man, he lamented their sacrifice; as a commander and a primarch, he appreciated Dorn's decision as ruthless pragmatism. When Horus' forces landed, it would be insane to throw away their better troops slowing his attack on the Palace defences, when pressed civilians would serve as well to tie up the initial landings. Everyone outside would perish. He could imagine the destruction to come only too easily. Better their elites were kept back for the real fight.\n\nYou care too much. Curze had said that to him once, before he had gone completely insane. It was a fair assessment.\n\nSanguinius passed through the Weeping Tower between the gate and the fallen Dawn Tower, amazing those working inside. Nobody expected to see a primarch within the Outer Walls. He apologised for disrupting their watch, and passed on. Most were Blood Angels, but Raldoron's Chapter was not much in evidence. As veteran Space Marines, the Protectors were held back further within the Palace. Besides a company from his own Chapter, Raldoron commanded a network of fifteen subordinate officers, and the Blood Angels Sanguinius met with were drawn from everywhere within his Legion. It saddened him that he did not know many faces. So many were young, new recruits speed-inducted by the Lunar genomancer Andromeda-17, Terrans in the main who had never seen Baal.\n\nHe reached the downed tower. The inner walkway stopped abruptly. Fresh rockcrete walled the passage off, and although Thane would doubtless bore fresh ways through, for the moment it was a stark reminder of what the walls would have to endure.\n\nSanguinius ran his fingers over the freshly cast false stone, and turned about.\n\nHis vox-beads popped into life. A priority channel, no override possible.\n\n'Rogal,' he said.\n\nDorn's voice was clear in spite of enemy interference and the energies spilling off the void shields. 'Where are you?'\n\n'I am on the walls, at the fallen Dawn Tower, south of the Helios Gate.'\n\nDorn made a noise of annoyance. 'What are you doing all the way out there?'\n\n'The Dawn Tower is not the most easterly,' Sanguinius said, ignoring his brother's irritation. 'The name should go to the tower at the easternmost point of Daylight, surely?'\n\n'What relevance does that have to anything?' Dorn said.\n\n'I teach my sons that nothing is worth doing, if not done right.'\n\n'I had not factored pedantry into father's gifts to you,' said Dorn, a little humour creeping into his voice.\n\n'There is nothing else to occupy myself with,' said Sanguinius. 'I tell these warriors that I have come to oversee them, but there is little to oversee. Your Captain Thane has done an exemplary job.'\n\n'Of the Twenty-Second? He is a good man,' said Dorn. He spoke to someone else, a terse order to redirect supplies. Dorn's life was fashioned from such details, delivered by silent messengers, absorbed, appraised, responses sent out in brief bursts of speech. He returned to their conversation. 'You should not put yourself at risk, brother. Stay off the wall.'\n\n'I am perfectly safe. We cannot hide in the Bhab Bastion until Horus drags us out.' He paused. Receiving no reply, he asked, 'What do you want, Rogal?'\n\n'The Fabricator General wishes to speak with me. He says it is urgent, and it is not something that he is willing to discuss remotely. He insists on a meeting in person.'\n\n'You wish me to speak with him in your place then?'\n\n'If you would. I am somewhat occupied at the moment, and I think Jaghatai's manner would annoy him.'\n\nSanguinius laughed at Dorn's dryness. 'Very well. I will serve as your ambassador. Our men are in place. There is nothing to do but wait. I could do with the diversion.'\n\n'That is the nature of sieges, my brother,' said Rogal Dorn dourly. 'Inside or outside the walls. There will be desperate escalade, but not yet. Waiting, waiting, and then a few hours of fury. Either they succeed, and we die, or they lose, and the process begins again. The passage of war for mortal men is measured in boredom punctuated by terror. Nowhere is this more true than in sieges.'\n\n'Your wars, perhaps.'\n\n'You are fighting my kind of war now,' said Dorn. 'I shall tell the Fabricator General you are coming. Perhaps then he will leave me alone. Zagreus Kane is loyal to the Imperium, committed to the alliance of Terra and Mars, and a valued asset of our father. I am sure he is a genius in his own field of expertise, but he is no general.'\n\nDorn sent a tight-beam datacast to Sanguinius' armour apprising him of Kane's whereabouts. 'Take a guard appropriate to your status,' Dorn advised. 'Kane is proud, but fragile. He will require a display.' With that, he bid Sanguinius good day, and cut the line.\n\n'My brother,' said Sanguinius to himself, 'is growing curt.'\n\nHe remained in the passageway a few minutes longer, staring at the fresh rockcrete, his mind wandering, then sent word to Raldoron to arrange a small squad to meet him at the base of the wall along with transportation. He would not listen to his brother. Sanguinius had had his fill of pomp on Macragge. If he must arrive escorted, then he would do so minimally.\n\nThe conclave of traitors\n\nRisks and benefits\n\nFor the glory of the gods\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Lunar orbit, 24th of Secundus\n\n'You are displeased, First Captain.'\n\nAbaddon scowled blackly at Layak. They walked dark corridors towards Lupercal's court.\n\n'I told you to keep out of my head.'\n\nLayak chuckled wetly. 'I am not in your mind, cousin. I do not need to be. You do nothing to hide your emotions. Your expression says everything your voice will not. You are unhappy. I say you would fare badly in a game of wagers.'\n\n'This isn't a game, Layak,' growled Abaddon.\n\n'Is it not? You think like a gamesman. Formulating moves, and countermoves.'\n\n'This is war,' said Abaddon irritably.\n\n'I am not talking about the war out there. I am talking about the struggle in here.' He tapped his free hand to his primary heart.\n\nAbaddon turned on his heel, fist clenched, bringing the small group of captain, blade slaves and Apostle to an abrupt halt at a junction in the corridor. Again the blade slaves objected to his attitude to their lord, and cracks in the armour flared, and their hands went to the hilts of their swords.\n\n'Go on,' said Abaddon. 'Try.'\n\nThe blade slaves remained ready to fight. Warp light shone from their helm lenses. Ash drifted around them like snow.\n\nChuckling, Layak raised his hand, fingers upright. He let the gesture hang in clear threat, then shook his ornate staff.\n\nThe blade slaves removed their hands from their swords.\n\n'I told you,' said Abaddon. 'Stay out of my head.'\n\n'Having a little trouble with your priest, Ezekyle?'\n\nHorus Aximand approached the group from the transverse way, joining them at the junction.\n\n'Lord Horus himself is my patron, Horus Aximand,' said Layak. 'It is your brother here who is having trouble with his faith.'\n\nAxim"}
{"text":"ng, Layak raised his hand, fingers upright. He let the gesture hang in clear threat, then shook his ornate staff.\n\nThe blade slaves removed their hands from their swords.\n\n'I told you,' said Abaddon. 'Stay out of my head.'\n\n'Having a little trouble with your priest, Ezekyle?'\n\nHorus Aximand approached the group from the transverse way, joining them at the junction.\n\n'Lord Horus himself is my patron, Horus Aximand,' said Layak. 'It is your brother here who is having trouble with his faith.'\n\nAximand's ruined face sat badly on his skull, stretching his once handsome features into an angry leer. They still called him Little Horus, though he barely resembled their genesire any longer. The hilt of his famed sword, Mourn-it-All, protruded above the top of his power plant.\n\n'I grant they're annoying,' said Aximand. 'But we have these Word Bearers to thank for the return of our father to health.'\n\n'Do we?' said Abaddon. He resumed walking. 'Where are the others?'\n\n'Kibre hangs around the Warmaster like a bad smell, as is his habit. He will not leave Horus' side without being dismissed. His brain has gone soft since Beta-Garmon and Horus' return.'\n\nAbaddon did not disagree. Horus' fall had shaken Kibre to a pathetic degree. 'Tormageddon?'\n\n'He does as he pleases.' Aximand's expression became more horrible as he frowned. 'But he will be at the court for this.'\n\n'Then you are blessed,' said Layak, 'The Neverborn show you favour.'\n\n'I'd rather he showed his favour somewhere I wasn't,' said Aximand.\n\n'You should embrace it,' said Layak. 'You are champions of the Pantheon. The might of the warp can be yours, if you but reach out to take it.'\n\nAximand snorted through his misshapen nose. 'I'll pass. The blessings of your gods have been decidedly mixed of late. Guilliman breathes down our neck. The Warmaster makes no move on the prize. Is a blessed warlord forced to keep his generals apart for the harm they will do each other? This edification is to be conducted by hololith. Gathering his brothers in one place has become too much of a risk for the Warmaster,' Aximand continued. 'Angron, who by your estimation is probably very blessed indeed, rages at everything when he has control of himself, which is never, and when he does not, he has the unfortunate habit of butchering everyone around him.' He continued, the voice of reason emanating from his devil-mask of a face. 'Then there's Lord Fulgrim, who especially annoys Lord Angron. True to his nature, Fulgrim revels in Angron's ire, and goads the Red Angel for his own amusement, which puts us all in danger. That's not to mention the fumes around the Phoenician that choke the mortals who breathe them.' Aximand shook his head ruefully. 'Perturabo sulks on the fringes of the system. Mortarion approaches but refuses to answer any hails. Horus' grand army is riven by divisions at every level.'\n\n'Indiscipline is our enemy now as much as time,' said Abaddon. 'This is what your gods bring us, Layak. Chaos,' he said sourly.\n\n'Things were going so well,' said Aximand. 'Until you failed to catch the Fenrisian, Ezekyle. The Wolf, the Consul and the Raven at our backs. Time grows short.'\n\n'So good then that you and Kibre kept everything working smoothly while I was about my supposed failure,' said Abaddon sharply. 'Horus cannot arbitrate every disagreement. The war will be won soon enough.'\n\n'What if it isn't?' countered Aximand. 'Horus could allow you or I to do something about these divisions. But he won't - worse, he forbids any activity on our part. Something has changed. Horus has not been the same since Maloghurst brought him back.'\n\n'Says the man who fought to prevent it, yet who wept tears of blood when our father returned from the dead a second time. Hypocrisy does not become you, brother.'\n\nAximand looked at his brother sternly. 'Mock me all you like, Ezekyle, I know you agree with me.'\n\nAbaddon grunted. He did not disagree, but he would not add to his father's burdens by feeding Aximand's fears.\n\nLupercal's court was dark and forbidding. It was hard to remember how it was before Davin. A place of glory, where honourable men met to decide the fate of a galaxy; Abaddon assumed it had been so, rather than truly recalled it. The Vengeful Spirit stank of the warp's influence, and it cheated men's minds.\n\nOn the surface, not much had altered. The banners had changed along with their allegiance, but the same decisions were made there, the same tables and chairs furnished the room, and many of the same warriors attended. The real transformation was less obvious. It lingered out of sight, an unmistakeable taint that hung over the hall, and a coy scent that refused definition forever on the edge of sensing: hints of incense, burnt sugar and powdered bone.\n\nThe source of the unease was centred on Horus. Abaddon stared at his father. Again he was disturbed by what he saw. The Warmaster sat rigid on his throne, looking off into hidden worlds, not blinking, smiling knowingly, dull eyes oblivious to all that went on around him. The cracked skull of Ferrus Manus sitting on the throne's armrest had more presence than the Warmaster at the moment, staring with empty-eyed defiance over the gathering.\n\nKibre stood at Horus' left side at stiff attention. He and Abaddon had hardly exchanged words in the last few weeks. Tormageddon, the daemon wearing its third stolen body, attended at Horus' right. It wore a smirk that echoed Horus' distant smile. Elements of Grael Noctua remained in Tormageddon's warped features, but it was a dangerous illusion. Tormageddon's being was wholly alien. It was at best a temporary ally. Tormageddon was another threat, another warp foulness that poisoned Abaddon's father, twisting him away from what he had been, remaking him in the gods' image and robbing him of his will.\n\n'Ezekyle, Little Horus,' Tormageddon greeted them. Kibre was slow to acknowledge their presence, looking between the members of the party before speaking.\n\n'Brothers,' he said eventually. 'The Mournival is gathered.'\n\nAximand looked suspiciously at Tormageddon. Both he and Abaddon had a hard time accepting the daemon as one of their own, but as Horus decreed it, so it must be.\n\n'For the final moves in this long war,' said Abaddon. He clasped arms with Kibre, then did the same with the daemon, doing his best to mask his distaste. Aximand greeted Kibre, but pointedly ignored the Neverborn.\n\nA change came over the Warmaster as he returned from that other place his spirit so often went. His smile smoothed away, he grew in stature. Unease was replaced by calm. As Horus looked over them all and blessed them with his attention, Abaddon caught a glimpse of the man he had known.\n\n'My sons,' said Horus. 'The hour approaches.'\n\nHorus rose from his throne. His presence was such that the Mournival struggled to remain standing, while Layak freely knelt. Horus had always possessed a preternatural charisma, but this was something else, a dark majesty that demanded all the universe grovel before it.\n\n'My brothers!' Horus commanded. 'Hearken to me!'\n\nOne by one, cones of hololithic projection light leapt into being around the court, turning the shadows grey and filling the space with phantoms. Besides Horus, only the Mournival and Layak's group were present in the flesh.\n\nFirst to emerge was Angron. The transformation wrought on him made Horus' change inconsequential. He was a red-skinned giant, the equal in size of the Pantheon's greatest servants. Huge wings of tattered black skin furled around his back. The cables of the Butcher's Nails, the archeotech device implanted in his brain when he was a slave, hung from his scalp around jutting horns in a tangle of metallic dreadlocks. Wild, yellow eyes stared from a face contorted forever with hate and rage, and his jaw worked around wolf's teeth. He paced with poorly contained rage, making the role of the imagists on his ship difficult. He swam in and out of focus, and often only his face remained visible. He gave voice only to growls.\n\nFulgrim was next, a purple-skinned, serpentine monster with four arms and a shock of ghost-white hair. Though he remained within the viewing field, Fulgrim was never still. Overwhelmed by his unnatural form as much as by his fidgeting, occasionally the hololith would fail completely, and present a jumble of white hair, serpent's body and mocking faces, interspersed with glimpses of other places alive with abstract horrors.\n\n'Hello, brother,' he said, always on the verge of mockery.\n\nPerturabo's image snapped into being. The Lord of Iron remained in the outer system, more distant that the rest, and consequently his image lacked the definition of the others. He flickered, but persisted like a bad memory unwelcomely recalled. Unlike his brothers, he retained his original form, too stubborn to give himself over to worship as they had.\n\n'I attend you, my Warmaster,' he said solemnly.\n\nFollowing Perturabo, Magnus the Red appeared, manifesting as a psychic projection that lent him a form of ersatz reality superior to the hololithic phantoms. When he walked, the air moved. Abaddon could smell his foreign scent. Despite the veracity of his image, it was a sorcerous falsehood that prickled at the skin and the soul. The cyclops wore the appearance of a crimson-skinned ogre clad in rich jewellery. Clothing himself in majesty he attempted to hide his true, altered form. He could not quite. The projection stuttered, showing some of the many faces Magnus favoured. Magnus had ever appeared in different guise, but masking what he had become seemed to tax him, and though he affected a studious air, all the expressions on all of his faces hinted at his pain.\n\n'Brothers,' Magnus said. 'Ezekyle, Little Horus, Falkus, and to you Tormageddon and to the priest, I give greetings.'\n\nWith the principal players in place, dozens of lesser images flickered into being. Some full bodies, others disembodied heads. The highest officers, the grandest marshals and most lordly of "}
{"text":"us had ever appeared in different guise, but masking what he had become seemed to tax him, and though he affected a studious air, all the expressions on all of his faces hinted at his pain.\n\n'Brothers,' Magnus said. 'Ezekyle, Little Horus, Falkus, and to you Tormageddon and to the priest, I give greetings.'\n\nWith the principal players in place, dozens of lesser images flickered into being. Some full bodies, others disembodied heads. The highest officers, the grandest marshals and most lordly of admirals, commanders of the mortal armies that gave Horus' forces so much of their size and might, and which outnumbered the manpower of the Legions hundreds of times over.\n\nThe Fabricator General's image appeared late among this crop, so large it swallowed several of the smaller phantoms. Kelbor-Hal was finally free of Mars and took the place of his emissary Sota-Nul, who had been at Horus' side these last years. Abaddon thought it a change for the worse. Sota-Nul had been most useful, whereas the Fabricator General was inflated with a sense of self-importance. Abaddon doubted Kelbor-Hal knew how much his overweening pride offended the Warmaster.\n\nBarely had the group gathered, when Angron launched into a familiar tirade.\n\n'When do we attack?' He thrust his head close to the imaging equipment, reducing his communications phantom to a single, glaring eye. 'Why do we sit here in the void, when our weapons cannot harm our father? We must land, take the fight to Him with blade and fist. The God of Battle demands blood!'\n\nFulgrim let out a musical laugh. 'You may not believe this, brother Horus, but I am in agreement with our angry sibling. This bombardment is boring! Let my perfect sons run free - they will give you a swift victory.'\n\n'Your peacocks will achieve nothing!' shouted Angron so loudly the audio-feed of his hololith shrieked with feedback. 'My Legion should be first. Mine! We are the chosen of war. Give me the order, brother, and end this cowardice!'\n\n'Do you call the Warmaster coward?' said Fulgrim slyly. 'I say he bides his time for the Lord of Death to join us. Has Mortarion not yet arrived?' He feigned disappointment at the XIV Legion's absence.\n\n'There is no word yet from his fleet, my lord,' Kibre reported. 'They approach, and will be here within days.'\n\n'He was to be first on Terra. He begged you for the honour,' scoffed Angron. 'And he will not even speak! Give me the task, and I shall show you how ruin is made!'\n\nHorus stared at Angron with a baleful eye. He allowed his brother to rant on.\n\n'We smashed aside Dorn's feeble defences,' Angron said. 'We broke Luna in days. Why now do we slink around the Throneworld like curs, waiting for Mortarion, when victory is in our grasp?'\n\n'We smashed Dorn's defences?' Perturabo's leaden response simmered with anger. 'I, I, I! I broke Dorn's gates, not we. Your sons did not bleed to ensure our success. You gave no plan to penetrate the system defences. I delivered the Solar System to the Warmaster. You claim a role in a victory you were not party to. Do you forget that I had to drag you back from your orgy of bloodletting to rejoin our brother? Were it not for me, you would not be here. Fulgrim would not be here. None of you would be here, now.'\n\n'You have done your part, little digger!' Angron scoffed. 'Land the Legions now! Let me be the point of the spear aimed at father's heart. Cease this game. Bombardment is a weakling's ploy.'\n\nPerturabo stiffened, taking the comment personally, which was surely Angron's intention.\n\n'Attempt to land, and see how quickly father's guns tear you to pieces,' said Perturabo.\n\n'Silence,' said Horus. His voice was hardly louder than a whisper, but it brought immediate quiet. 'You will be silent now. All of you. All proceeds to plan. Perturabo, explain,' said Horus.\n\nAngron snorted when Perturabo began. Horus cowed him with a glance.\n\n'Three things stand in our way,' Perturabo began. 'The Palace guns, the Palace aegis and father's will, which keeps the Neverborn at bay. These problems cannot be resolved at once, but must be dealt with in order - beginning with the aegis. The bombardment patterns I have devised have revealed multiple shortcomings in the Palace shields. Between the hours I spend each day fortifying the outer reaches against our brothers' coming - tasks not one of you have taken upon yourselves,' he grumbled, 'I have been examining auspex soundings of the void shield network.'\n\n'The priests of Mars designed the aegis, applying knowledge salvaged from the high days of technology,' said Kelbor-Hal proudly. 'You will find no weakness there.'\n\n'Then why do you not provide us with the information necessary to shut it down?' said Abaddon.\n\n'Impossible,' said Kelbor-Hal. 'The control systems for the shields are as impregnable as the aegis itself.' He was proud, a vain fool.\n\n'Every wall has a weakness. Build it how you will, from whatever material you can - stone, iron or dancing light, I shall bring it down,' said Perturabo. 'The centre is too strong as yet to break. Ground operations will be necessary to collapse the network to the extent that direct landing or bombardment will be successful within the Palace bounds.'\n\n'Then let us be about it!' Angron howled.\n\nPerturabo gave the chosen of Khorne a sullen stare. 'Against the success of such an action,' the Lord of Iron continued, 'stand the following factors. Firstly, the shields possess a wide-range modulation, beginning at the lower reach against any penetration of objects above one half-gram travelling faster than two metres per second. Infantry might walk through this aegis, but slowly.'\n\n'Impossible,' said Aximand. 'Voids are no defence against close attacks.'\n\n'These are not void shields as you understand them,' said Perturabo. 'The second factor against ground assault is the Palace's extensive anti-air and anti-orbital defences, and its air defence squadrons. Before a major landing can be undertaken, these must be weakened, or any force sent against them will be annihilated in the air.'\n\n'You spoke of weaknesses,' said Fulgrim. 'Then, pray tell, oh glowering, sulky brother, where they are.'\n\n'The shields cannot be brought down from outside,' said Perturabo, continuing his lecture as if Fulgrim had not spoken. 'The Palace possesses an unrivalled void network consisting of multiple layers of lenticular fields. These differ from a standard voidal energy bubble, which forms a single skin defence around its ward in spherical or hemispherical configuration. The technology required to project stable lensing is exceedingly difficult to replicate, and at this scale practically impossible. Yet following the old patterns the Mechanicum succeeded. The Palace aegis networks consist of discrete elements, like a wall of shields, each an energy lens, each one overlapping the others enough that failure on the part of one reveals only a small hole, directly blocked below. By the time the lower lenses covering the hole are also brought down, the first will have been raised again. There are legions of Mechanicum adepts labouring beneath the Palace to keep the shields in operation. Multiple redundancy networks protect against failures up to full systemic levels. Power is provided by advanced thermal conversion beneath the Palace itself. It is a low-yield but stable energy source, and cannot be upset by magnetic frequency harmonics as a plasma reactor might be. The power supply cannot be directly targeted. Only the destruction of the planet itself would be sufficient to interrupt the flow of energy from the Palace vaults to the aegis.'\n\n'Then let us set down and lead our warriors in glorious charge against the walls,' growled Angron.\n\n'That would result in your total destruction, either on descent, or on the ground.'\n\n'Cowards!'\n\n'Be patient, brother,' said Perturabo. 'You will have your glory. The shields cannot be broken. They cannot be starved of power. But they can be weakened.'\n\nAn orbital vid-capture of a section of the Palace defences sprang up. The walls cut across the landscape neat as a draughtsman's marks. The Palace-city's giant buildings were models behind. The flattened coins of explosions displaced by void shielding blinked all over the defences, not touching the ground beneath.\n\n'This sequence depicts a rare failure. Within the bombardment pattern I concealed several distinct targeting cycles to test various aspects of the aegis - modulation, raising speed, power absorption and displacement, displacement response time, displacement triggering velocity and others.'\n\n'I provided all this information!' protested Kelbor-Hal.\n\n'Consolidated datasets fall into false, idealistic patterns. Direct, practical experimentation is the only way I can be sure. The result of my test can be witnessed here,' said Perturabo.\n\nSeveral shells and a volley of lance fire sparked off the shields. Suddenly, a gap opened over a tower, exposing it to fire from orbit that quickly toppled it.\n\n'Alas, this small result was achieved only due to an isolated flaw in that part of the network. Augury readings suggest a chained failure in three series of void generatoria, quickly rectified.'\n\n'Not so perfect, eh, Kelbor-Hal?' giggled Fulgrim.\n\n'Note how quickly the shield is replaced,' Perturabo continued.\n\nOver the burning rubble, the explosions changed back to toothless rounds of fire flattened on the shields.\n\n'Then what are you proposing?' growled Angron. His head shook. His face twitched, but he held his temper. His display of control was impressive.\n\n'From this response time, and the other measurements provided to me from the main fleet, I have determined that the voids can be weakened sufficiently to allow passage of medium- to low-velocity objects, around the fringe only.'\n\n'Our brother has calculated a bombardment pattern of surpassing genius,' said Horus. For a moment, Perturabo's stolid expression showed a glint of pride. 'We will unleash all of our fleet's firepower at these points.'\n\nThe vid-feed"}
{"text":"is display of control was impressive.\n\n'From this response time, and the other measurements provided to me from the main fleet, I have determined that the voids can be weakened sufficiently to allow passage of medium- to low-velocity objects, around the fringe only.'\n\n'Our brother has calculated a bombardment pattern of surpassing genius,' said Horus. For a moment, Perturabo's stolid expression showed a glint of pride. 'We will unleash all of our fleet's firepower at these points.'\n\nThe vid-feed disappeared, replaced by a wider angle, tri-d view of the entire Palace. Equally spaced red markers blinked on all eight principal winds of the compass.\n\n'The precision of Perturabo's attack will cause a serial weakening of the shield wall.'\n\n'Then it can be bombed,' said Fulgrim.\n\n'The bombardment will not penetrate the final layer,' said Perturabo. 'Rapid, high-mass munitions or zero to low-mass light speed energy emissions will still be displaced. However, the final aegis layer will be weakened sufficiently to allow a seventy per cent chance of successful passage to attack craft travelling at one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour or lower.'\n\n'We can attack directly? What fine news!' Fulgrim clapped with glee. 'I shall prepare my squadrons at once.'\n\nPerturabo nodded. 'Attack ships should prioritise void shield projection blisters and anti-ship weaponry towers, with secondary emphasis on anti-aircraft emplacements. Voids have one true vulnerability, that their projecting elements must be exposed. A large number are mounted on the wall itself. I predict an attrition rate of forty-five per cent attack ships lost, minimum. However, though the defences are formidable, we shall darken the sky with such numbers they will despair,' said Perturabo.\n\n'While the Palace defences are occupied by our aerial attack,' said Horus, 'we will begin first landings. By splitting the enemy's fire, we safeguard both attack and landing craft. Dorn will not want his guns destroyed, nor will he want our warriors outside the walls, but they cannot afford to lose their shields.'\n\n'I will prepare my warriors!' bellowed Angron.\n\n'That brings us to the problem of the Neverborn,' Perturabo said. He paused. 'Who will tell him?'\n\n'You must find patience, my brother,' Magnus said to Angron. 'The warp is in turmoil around Terra, but no daemon may set foot there. Our father's power holds back the tides of the empyrean. If you, I or Fulgrim were to attempt a landing, our souls would be torn from our bodies, and likely obliterated.'\n\n'Perturabo's genius shows us the first cracks in Dorn's walls. We must force another,' said Horus. 'Every drop of blood spilled upon Terra's soil weakens our father's power. The second blow will quickly follow the first. Once our allies of the warp have access to the mortal sphere, and the orbital defences of Terra are crippled, then the Legions shall attack.'\n\n'There is a way to limit our father's power.' Magnus waved his hand, and a new image, far sharper than any hololith, appeared. Lines joined the eight points together into an octed superimposed over the Palace. 'Centre this upon the Palace, spill enough blood, then, and only then, Lord Angron, will father's might be contained, and you may set foot safely upon Terra. Shortly after, all the legions of Neverborn contained by eternity shall march forth.'\n\n'Sow the dragon's teeth, water the harvest with the blood of untold millions, and we shall come to you!' said Layak, quoting from obscure scriptures.\n\n'We do not need the help of these unclean things, my lord,' said Aximand.\n\nTormageddon snickered. 'This is not your war alone, Little Horus. Greater beings than you have a stake here.' He gestured to Fulgrim and Angron knowingly.\n\n'It shall be as I decree,' commanded Horus. 'There is no need for the Legions to march yet. The Emperor will conserve His best troops behind His walls. We shall land our mortal followers all over the Throneworld. Every city shall be attacked. Every settlement burned. Let the lost and the damned tire His guns. Let the False Emperor know despair behind His mighty walls while His people suffer! And when the tide of blood is high enough and our daemonic allies are ready to infest Terra, the outer defences shall be broken, the guns cast down and the defenders left bloody and bruised. Then we shall unleash the true face of death. Lord Fulgrim, Lord Angron, prepare your Legions for ground operations. When the time is right, they shall follow in the wake of Lord Mortarion, this I promise you.'\n\nMandragora\n\nA litany of complaint\n\nFabricator Locum\n\nDaylight sector, subsection 99.4, 24th of Secundus\n\nA clade of motionless skitarii Mandragora awaited Sanguinius. They stood at attention in the cold, red robes sculpted by the wind, each cyborg aligned so precisely with his fellows that they appeared to be lifeless objects rather than men. No trace of flesh was visible; every surface glimpsed beneath their uniforms was gleaming metal. Their eyes glowed a steady green. In the spaces between their exposed, metal ribs cogs spun. Tiny lumens blinked deep in their innards, but the once-men themselves did not move. They showed no reaction as Sanguinius clambered from the golden Land Raider and his bodyguard of First Company veterans fanned out to bracket him.\n\nKane was supposedly in the squat building ahead, around whose seamless exterior the Mandragora arrayed themselves in geometrical perfection.\n\n'There is no way through, my lord,' said Galenius, the sergeant of Sanguinius' escort. He was not a warrior the primarch knew particularly well, though his armour was heavy with honours.\n\n'Be patient, my son. And be mindful of what you say. You speak on Legion vox, but be sure that the Adeptus Mechanicus are listening.' The new term for the Martian priests was still foreign to Sanguinius.\n\nBeneath the muted crump of Horus' bombardment, silence of a sort held sway.\n\n'This is an outrage,' said Galenius. 'Demanding your presence then making you wait!' He strode forwards. 'Move aside! Move aside I say, for the primarch of the Ninth Legion!' The Mandragora remained motionless as he paced up and down their front rank. When Galenius put his hand upon one of the warriors, he made no reaction, but nor did he move, and when Galenius attempted to push him aside, his torso moved but his feet remained locked to the floor. Galenius ceased his efforts to shift the cyborg, and the guardian of the Fabricator General swayed back into the regiment's uniform stance.\n\n'Mindless,' said Galenius. 'Slaves.'\n\n'Enough,' said Sanguinius.\n\nGalenius stalked back.\n\n'Doesn't the Martian know the enemy are at the gates?' the sergeant complained. 'This is no time for posturing.'\n\n'Politics never cease, not even in war,' said Sanguinius. 'Maintain calm.'\n\n'As you command, lord,' said Galenius. 'My choler gets the better of me.'\n\n'Then perhaps I should have you transferred to Captain Amit's command.'\n\n'You are not the first to make that suggestion, my lord,' Galenius chuckled. 'I sometimes think Captain Raldoron keeps me around to remind himself why he doesn't like Captain Amit.'\n\n'That is a disloyal assertion,' said Sanguinius.\n\nGalenius would not be rebuked, even by his genesire. 'As you said, my lord. Politics.'\n\nWithout warning, the Mandragora formation divided itself into two halves and turned inwards, so that the left-hand side of the legion was facing the right. A ripple of scarlet passed up their ranks as they took several steps back, opening a path to the cylindrical building. The clash of iron feet on stone echoed from the surrounding spires, then ceased as suddenly as it began.\n\n'They have made their point. That is my invitation.'\n\n'Squad Galenius, form up!' the sergeant commanded.\n\n'Sometimes the best move in politics is to refuse the game in the first place,' said Sanguinius. 'You will remain here, Galenius.'\n\n'As you so command.'\n\nSanguinius strode towards the building alone, the reflections from ten thousand sets of glowing eyes glinting off his golden armour. As the primarch drew near, the smooth surface of the cylinder split. Two great sections withdrew, sinking deep into the structure, then angled back and slid aside, opening a door onto an interior ablaze with light.\n\nFive figures waited for the primarch. Four carried banners depicting the skull and cog of the Machina Opus. The fifth, ahead of the others, was obviously female. Upon the steps leading into the interior of the cylinder the delegation struck an imposing sight, until Sanguinius climbed beside them and dwarfed them with his presence.\n\n'Greetings to you, son of the Emperor,' said the female.\n\n'Well met, Ambassador Vethorel,' said Sanguinius. 'The architect of the solution to the Binary Succession. I am honoured to meet you.'\n\n'The honour is mine, son of the Emperor.'\n\nVethorel was outwardly human looking, fair of face, though the subtle signs of suppressed ageing marked her flesh. She had few visible augmetics, and what were displayed were finely wrought to enhance her humanity rather than diminish it. Her voice was modulated to bring out pleasing, if unmistakably machinic, tones. She was the Martian ambassador to the Imperium, and therefore her modifications were cynically chosen to influence baseline humans. Nothing too deviant from the standard form, everything designed with Terran aesthetics in mind. Sanguinius appreciated the art of it nonetheless.\n\n'Beautiful,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'I... Thank you, my lord,' said Vethorel. Her eyes appeared human until she dipped her head. In the shadow of her hood they glowed with concealed bionics.\n\n'The Fabricator General is here?' asked Sanguinius.\n\n'He awaits you below,' said the ambassador. She bowed lower. Robes stiff with brocade circuitry rasped on the marble step. 'Magos Kane, most exalted, gives his humble apologies that he cannot greet you himself, but there is much to be done.'\n\nSuch as making a point about how important he is, thought Sanguinius, who was by now impatient with"}
{"text":"appeared human until she dipped her head. In the shadow of her hood they glowed with concealed bionics.\n\n'The Fabricator General is here?' asked Sanguinius.\n\n'He awaits you below,' said the ambassador. She bowed lower. Robes stiff with brocade circuitry rasped on the marble step. 'Magos Kane, most exalted, gives his humble apologies that he cannot greet you himself, but there is much to be done.'\n\nSuch as making a point about how important he is, thought Sanguinius, who was by now impatient with the charade. Outwardly he displayed nothing but a warm smile.\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'Please, I shall take you to him.' Vethorel held up her arm. Sanguinius stepped within the gates. They closed behind him.\n\nOnce Sanguinius was inside, the entire floor of the cylinder slowly sank, bearing him away down a shaft of gleaming plascrete to the heart of the mountains. When the lifter platform was well below ground level, three iris doors of adamantium hissed shut overhead, each of sufficient thickness to withstand a direct hit from a void-ship weapon. Strings of faint lumens recessed into the walls emitted a dim light. The plascrete gave way to melta-bored rock. The geoforming was recent, the cuts clean, yet already the deep earth wept out its moisture where the stone's grain had not vitrified fully under the fusion beams. Down there, the weight of Terra's history pressed in. The wars of men seemed distant and unimportant.\n\nLike the Grekan bard Orphee, Sanguinius descended into the underworld.\n\nThe lifter was made for Titans, and the shaft stretched up and up. He could have flown if he had chosen, yet still a stuffy claustrophobia pressed on him. His wings twitched. He felt caged enough to remove his helmet, and expose his face to the chill, moist air.\n\nThe lifter platform came to a slow halt twenty minutes later. A huge tunnel, lined with skitarii of the most elite legions, stretched off for a kilometre or more, where the tunnel terminated in a huge cavern.\n\n'This way, please,' said Vethorel. She walked beside Sanguinius, her bannermen following at a respectful distance.\n\nThe sounds of hymns and rhythmically striking tools echoed down the way. The work of the tunnel was less smooth than the shaft, for the lifter had intersected with older workings. The ground beneath the Palace was riddled with caverns, mostly artificial, delved out in humanity's long, uneven history. There the new tunnel cut through the past. The walls were pocked with dark openings, some blocked and pale with fresh rockcrete.\n\n'Kane commands significant resources,' said Sanguinius, gesturing at the legions to show he had noticed the Fabricator General's efforts to impress him.\n\n'These are the personal guard of the Fabricator General, augmented to the highest degree, their wills subsumed utterly to the command of the Machine-God,' said Vethorel. 'As you know, appearances must be upheld, even if they can be deceptive. Much of the Adeptus Mechanicus' might is lost. We shed an empire's worth of blood holding the webway for your father, and so many of our kind pledged for the Warmaster.'\n\nHe expected the reply Vethorel gave him. Even with the issue of the Binary Succession resolved, and the Mechanicum become the Adeptus Mechanicus, the war strained relations between Terra and Mars to the limit.\n\n'When this war is done, my father will set all to rights,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'To the Machine-God we pray,' said Vethorel. 'We ask only that the Omnissiah be permitted victory so Mars might be restored to us.'\n\nDiplomatic, but she is unconvinced, thought Sanguinius. Does Rogal know the depths of their dissatisfaction? he wondered.\n\n'Yet we remain mighty. Ahead you will see more of Mars' manifest power,' Vethorel added.\n\nThey passed into the cavern. Multiple tunnels radiated from it, like spokes from a giant wheel. In the spaces between the spokes, runs of alcoves were carved, each housing a god-engine of the Collegia Titanica.\n\nThe cavern was larger than Sanguinius expected, capped with a huge dome of raw rock ribbed by plasteel and flying rockcrete buttresses that rested on columns the size of towers. Alone, these physical supports were insufficient to hold back the weight of the mountains and the Palace atop them, and between the architectural matrix shimmered the telltale blue of structural integrity fields.\n\nThousands of tech-priests laboured in this subterranean world, attended by an army of servitors and thralls, all of them hard at work upon the Titans. Giant machines, dwarfed by the war engines they attended, ground back and forth across the cavern. The floor sprouted forests of machinery. Tangles of cables ran everywhere. Despite the enormous volume of air the cavern contained, the place was thickly redolent of oil, incense, hot metal, cooling ceramite and all the myriad scents of technological worship running at a high gear.\n\n'Behold, one-tenth of all the Legio Titanicus' strength upon Terra.' Vethorel swept her arm around the dozens of machines being serviced. 'This cavern is one of several such facilities. Within them, the priesthood of Mars labours night and day to restore what god-machines we possess, for although this may appear a potent assembly, my lord, it is a fraction of our former strength.'\n\nVethorel turned her gaze upon him, and Sanguinius was shocked to see the hatred burning through her diplomat's mask.\n\n'Be careful here, my lord,' her tone took on a steely edge. 'Despite your successes at Beta-Garmon, many of our magi believe that the campaign was a mistake. So many god-machines lost. I am sure you understand.'\n\n'I do,' he said, 'and I thank you for your warning.'\n\nShe bowed, and her voice reassumed its former gentle beauty. 'The Fabricator General awaits you there,' she said, pointing to a large, many-legged vehicle whose flat back sported a bewildering array of mechanical arms, all of them in motion. 'I will take my leave of you, my lord.'\n\n'I thank you again,' Sanguinius said, but Vethorel was already walking away, and she did not look back.\n\nAmid the thickets of constantly moving mechanical arms, Zagreus Kane rode the machine upon a dais. It was edged in brass and big enough to accommodate his tracked body along with a dozen of the most exalted magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus. The machine moved no quicker than walking pace, allowing its busy upper limbs to perform their tasks. Sanguinius caught it easily. He ignored the glares of hostility emanating from the tech-priests he passed.\n\nKane made an elaborate pantomime of speaking with his chief advisers in a torrent of binharic. Sanguinius understood the machine speech, though no being without extensive mechanical alteration could hope to speak it. Kane said nothing important. His whole purpose was to force Sanguinius to wait. Despite his show, when Kane deigned to turn his attention onto the primarch, he seemed affable enough.\n\n'I am grateful that you came to see me, Lord Sanguinius,' said Kane. His advisers shuffled away, indifferent to the Angel when they were not openly hostile.\n\n'How could I not? You are the master of the Adeptus Mechanicus, ruler of the Martian Mechanicus Empire, and one of the most powerful beings in the Imperium. I am but a primarch, a tool of war. I thank you for receiving me.' Sanguinius bowed.\n\nKane's internal mechanisms chattered. 'You always were one of the most gracious of the Omnissiah's sons, but we are honest men, you and I. You are the son of the Emperor, glorious by holy design. I am merely a quester after knowledge. My appointment to this position is an accident of circumstance. It is I who am grateful. If I were as important as you say, my messages would have been acted on with more speed. The Praetorian could have come himself, but Lord Dorn does not answer me.'\n\nSanguinius stepped to Kane's side. The slender, diffident technocrat Sanguinius had first met years before had gone. Kane wore his enhancements lightly in the past, but he had evidently changed his way of thinking, for now he was more akin to a small tank than a man, his heavily modified torso sitting atop a set of tracks, and his human face buried beneath a dozen individual augmentations.\n\n'Lord Dorn sends his apologies. He asked me to come only because he is busy.'\n\n'Gracious again, Lord Sanguinius. The truth is he does not rate my abilities as a military commander. I am an irritation to him. He sees me as a block on his ability to command, because the armies of the Adeptus Mechanicus answer to me and not to him directly,' said Kane. 'Please, if you are about to, do not lie to save my pride. I know I am no general. The knowledge may be acquired, but talent cannot easily be engineered. Kelbor-Hal unfortunately is far better versed in the arts of war than I. I was always more concerned with creation than destruction.'\n\n'A finer sentiment for the best of men,' said Sanguinius, and meant it.\n\n'Alas, not in these times,' said Kane bitterly.\n\nKane had once been a gentle man. War reforges all it touches, thought Sanguinius, not always for the better.\n\n'You are loyal to the idea of concord between Terra and Mars, and to the ideal of human unity,' Sanguinius said. 'If you will not accept my first compliment, then know that this second attribute is far more valuable than any other you may possess.'\n\nKane touched no controls nor gave any audible commands, but the legged machine stopped and its multiple arms froze. Plasma torches blinked off. Cargo was deposited smoothly on the floor. The arms folded back and locked into position. The machine's legs rippled in series like a millipede, turning it around, and with a soft lurch it set off again at greater speed.\n\n'That is so,' said Kane, 'but there are many thousands of adepts in this hall, and a good portion of them believe we of Mars have sold ourselves cheaply to the Imperium of Terra.'\n\n'Someone might tell them that we live through times where every hour brings difficult choices.'\n\n'Oh I have. They are aware,' said Kane. 'I make those choices for them. I understa"}
{"text":"sition. The machine's legs rippled in series like a millipede, turning it around, and with a soft lurch it set off again at greater speed.\n\n'That is so,' said Kane, 'but there are many thousands of adepts in this hall, and a good portion of them believe we of Mars have sold ourselves cheaply to the Imperium of Terra.'\n\n'Someone might tell them that we live through times where every hour brings difficult choices.'\n\n'Oh I have. They are aware,' said Kane. 'I make those choices for them. I understand why it must be this way, even if they do not. I believe this is for the best.' Something clicked repetitively deep in Kane's chest. 'The Omnissiah's vision is the will of the Machine-God. I truly believe this. It cannot be realised if Mars and Terra remain divorced. In all alliances there must be compromises.' He turned his head to look meaningfully into Sanguinius' eyes. 'And sacrifices.'\n\nKane referred to the massed engine battles of the Garmon Cluster that saw hundreds of valuable Titans destroyed, but Sanguinius felt the words as a knife twist in his guts, as if Kane referred to him and knew the awful truth that he would not last out the war.\n\nThe Fabricator General returned his attention ahead, to the side of the cavern where sixteen god-engines in the mottled white and green of the Legio Solaria underwent the attentions of their wardens.\n\n'What I think and believe are only two strands in the data stream of our new adepta's collective opinion,' Kane went on. 'There are still those among us who doubt your father is the Omnissiah. To many of my people, I will forever be only Fabricator Locum, a lieutenant to the true ruler forced into the role of the Fabricator General, and my elevation a gross modus unbecoming.'\n\n'Your followers are loyal,' said Sanguinius. 'That is all that matters for the time being.'\n\n'To Mars, they are loyal,' agreed Kane. 'Unquestioningly. They abhor Kelbor-Hal and all his works. They lust for the forbidden knowledge of Moravec, but unlike our estranged kin in the so-called New Mechanicum they are wise to its dangers. Men are not meant to blend the essence of the warp with that of the materium. Nor should they dabble in the evils of the Silica Animus. The last loyal Titans of Mars wait for Lord Dorn's order to walk, and they anticipate the summons with righteous fury knowing it may be their last. They will fight and they will die for the cause. But if you were to ask me whether the magi are loyal to Terra's Imperium, then the answer might well be different.' Kane paused. Mechadendrites extruded themselves from his shoulders and slipped back inside in a peculiar display of discomfort. 'We have to win this war, and we need to win convincingly. At the moment our aims are the same. The destruction of Horus and his traitors must be accomplished. But I need your word that the interests of the Martian Empire will be addressed fairly when this is all done, or we may end one war only to begin another. I tell you, you must make your father listen.'\n\n'Or what will happen?' said Sanguinius hotly. 'Did you call my brother to threaten him? You will find me no less disdainful of such tactics.'\n\nAn angry noise blurted from Kane's innards. 'It is not a threat. It is the truth. Who else am I supposed to speak with? The Emperor is locked away. Politics do not go away because the enemy has come.'\n\n'I have had my fill of politics,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'I have had my fill of war,' said Kane. 'No man can expect the life he wishes for, even less demand it be the way he wants.'\n\nConversation ceased until the platform's rattling legs clattered to halt, and they stopped.\n\n'Forgive me,' Kane said. 'I spoke more angrily than I wished to. I did not contact Dorn for this discussion. In point of fact, I sincerely believe he is already well aware of how things stand. I see you, and I see someone to spend my frustration on.'\n\n'That is understandable,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'What I contacted him for was to convey some news that may be of use to us all.' Kane gestured up at a Warlord Titan ahead. It had been badly damaged, and was cocooned in gantries, scaffolds and sheeting. On floating platforms and crane lifts, dozens of repair teams were busily at work.\n\n'This is Luxor Invictoria, the command Titan of the Legio Solaria. This is all that remains from that proud order.' He pointed out the handful of machines around it.\n\n'I recognise it. It fought at Nyrcon City. I thought it fell in battle.'\n\n'It did, but where the Titan survived, the Grand Master of the Legio did not.'\n\n'Who has succeeded her?'\n\n'Her nominated heir, who fought on Beta-Garmon Three, at the Carthegia Telepathica.'\n\nLuxor Invictoria emanated more than the diffuse awareness of an electric soul. Its eye-lenses seemed to be looking at Sanguinius with human intelligence. 'He is within the Titan now?' the primarch ventured.\n\n'She. The princeps is the daughter of the last Grand Master. All members of the Order Solaria are of the XX gender designation, as is the custom of this particular Legio. Her name is Esha Ani Mohana Vi. Great Mother of the Imperial Hunters, though hers is a murdered brood. The Legio Solaria is a shadow of its former self. It is not alone in being so.' Kane bleeped sadly. 'But who she is is not pertinent. What she saw is. She is why I wished to speak with Dorn. The new Great Mother was badly injured, and has only recently awoken from therapeutic coma. I am sure you will find her tale as intriguing as I did. This information will prove uplifting to the morale of our soldiery, and may prove to be of even greater use than that.' Kane glanced up at the primarch. 'Replace your helmet, my lord. This is a conversation that should be conducted privately. I have enjoined Esha Ani from sharing her story, until you and your brothers have decided what should be done with it.'\n\nUnderstanding that information was both the coin and the vitae of the machine priesthood's domain, Sanguinius bowed his head. 'We thank you, Fabricator General, for your gift.'\n\nSanguinius sealed himself back within the private world of his battleplate. With his vision closed in and overlaid by sensorium data, the sense of claustrophobia returned, and he yearned once more for the sky.\n\nAn incoming vox request chimed in his helm, appended with the Titan's ident code.\n\nSanguinius opened communications. A voice whose softness was at odds with the giant plasteel being spoke directly into his ears. And yet, despite the voice's humanity, Sanguinius knew he was talking, in a real sense, with the Titan itself.\n\n'My Lord Sanguinius,' Esha Ani said. 'I am grateful you are here, for there is something I believe you need to know.'\n\n'I thank you,' he said.\n\n'Before I do,' she said, 'please know that I stand with you and your brothers. Many of our kind bear ill will towards you for the losses our Legios took. I do not. I understood the need. I pledge now that if you have uses for my Legio, you have but to ask.'\n\n'Again, I thank you,' he said.\n\n'Then it is done. An oath to you. Now, my story.'\n\nAnd then she told him how, on the slopes of a nameless mountain, she had witnessed Horus Lupercal fall.\n\nSanguinius emerged from the subterranean fortress to find the Mandragora gone, leaving his men alone on a windswept plaza that seemed vast now it was empty. The bombardment patterns had shifted. Whereas before every void shield sparked with displacement, now it was the edges of the city, around the walls, that bore the brunt of the attack, ringing the fortifications with fire, but leaving the sky over the Palace clear. Clouds churning with thermal vortices and dancing with lightning caused by the brutal ionisation of the air were now visible over much of the Palace. The wind switched about constantly, conflicting gusts battling one another and twisting themselves up into short-lived whirlwinds. Snow melted to rain by the bombardment spotted his face.\n\nSanguinius wasted no time crossing to his transport. His men filed in behind him without a word. The doors clanged shut, and the Land Raider lurched as its tracks bit the road.\n\n'Dorn,' Sanguinius voxed. Cogitators in the Palace comms network heard his voiceprint and opened a priority channel to his brother.\n\nRogal Dorn responded immediately. 'Sanguinius,' he said. The vox crackled in time with the lance strikes slamming into the outer shield network. 'Be quick. Events proceed.'\n\n'I see the enemy has altered his attack patterns.'\n\n'Horus has finished testing the aegis,' Dorn said. 'They fire now in earnest.'\n\n'Then I shall be brief. I have news, from Kane. There is a princeps of the Legio Solaria who, while close to death, saw our brother Horus on the mountain of the Carthegia Telepathica.'\n\n'That is only news if something of note occurred,' said Dorn.\n\n'It did,' said Sanguinius. 'She saw Horus survey the battlefield as a conqueror, then fall suddenly, though no blow was struck. A wound opened in his side with no identifiable cause. She saw it clearly. His aides panicked, and bore him away by teleportation.'\n\nDorn was silent as he digested the information.\n\n'If this is true, then Horus is not invulnerable, as some have suggested.'\n\n'Perhaps it is evidence of Russ' success. Maybe the Wolf bit,' said Sanguinius. 'It could be that Horus is wounded still. That spear of our brother's...'\n\n'This is supposition,' said Dorn. 'Though if Russ did manage to wound the Warmaster, and the injury troubles him still, it would explain why our forces at Beta-Garmon were able to withdraw as easily as they did.'\n\nSanguinius remembered the bitter fighting to get out of the doomed cluster. Denial of communication cost them dearly. Isolated battle groups were annihilated piecemeal. Millions dead, millions more scattered beyond hope of returning to Terra, and the rearguard he set to cover the retreat of the IX and V Legions lost.\n\nNevertheless, Dorn was right. It had been easier than it should have been.\n\n'This changes nothing,' said Dorn. 'Horus is here. If he was wounded, we must assum"}
{"text":"asily as they did.'\n\nSanguinius remembered the bitter fighting to get out of the doomed cluster. Denial of communication cost them dearly. Isolated battle groups were annihilated piecemeal. Millions dead, millions more scattered beyond hope of returning to Terra, and the rearguard he set to cover the retreat of the IX and V Legions lost.\n\nNevertheless, Dorn was right. It had been easier than it should have been.\n\n'This changes nothing,' said Dorn. 'Horus is here. If he was wounded, we must assume he has recovered.'\n\n'I can only agree. I suggest we do not allow this information into wide circulation. Fabrication will fill the gaps in the story. Rumour may grant Horus additional power - to recover from Russ' attack, surely he must be omnipotent.'\n\n'That is one interpretation.'\n\n'It is the one we should worry about,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'We shall discuss this later, if needs be. For the moment our plans are unaffected.'\n\n'Agreed, brother,' Sanguinius said, then ventured, 'It may have been a mistake for you not to attend on Kane yourself. The magi chafe. Every other utterance is of injustice. They blame me for the loss of their god-machines. Kane alluded openly to the possibility of war between Terra and Mars if their grievances are not addressed.'\n\n'I am aware of their displeasure,' said Dorn. 'Unrest will last only until they are committed to the fight - thereafter they may vent their anger on the foe. The presence of our mutual enemies will cement our alliance until the battle is won, and it is far from won. The time is now. We have detected large manoeuvres within the blockade fleet.\n\n'The enemy is about to attempt his first landing.'\n\nBeastherd\n\nFaithless\n\nGround assault\n\nHerdship, Traitor fleet, Terran near orbit, 25th of Secundus\n\nFor too long, you have suffered!'\n\nThe Apostle's voice rang over the vox-speakers, fighting with the rising bleats of the herd. Azmedi strained to listen. Comprehension was slipping away into animality. He considered the part that listened his human half. The other part, the beast part, jerked against the leashes of shame. Soon it would break free and consume his reasoning mind, but for now he could still understand.\n\n'You have been cast out and consigned to the fringes of ten thousand worlds, fit only for the noisome places where pure-bloods will not go,' the Apostle said. 'You are the lords of ruin, for ruins are all you have ever had to call your own. The citizens of the Imperium, those upright tyrants who shun you, have another name for you, a shameful name, a name that is soaked through with their contempt.'\n\nAzmedi didn't need to hear the word. It was uttered the moment he was born to his horrified mother, and chased him out of the bright places into the haunts of freaks and criminals. There the word had been shouted again, and he had been driven further on, despised even by other creatures who bore the stigma of mutation.\n\nThe word. The Apostle was going to say the word.\n\n'No! No! No!' Azmedi shouted, his speech losing its shape, becoming a warbling, caprine bleat.\n\n'Beastmen,' said the Apostle. The hold erupted with shouts and cries; there were those who raged, but most voices cried out in despair. 'They call you beastmen.'\n\nThere had been Imperial iterators, down in the deeps where Azmedi had found his own kind, who had come to teach their secular religion to every branch of mankind, no matter how devolved, in mean schools they carved out of compressed, hive-bottom junk. The Apostle's words evoked those lessons, fifteen years ago. So long, for one of his kind. The lives of the beastkin were short.\n\n'In the beginning, when man left the world you will soon conquer, he had but one form. Many places moulded the genome of our species, and one form became many!'\n\nAzmedi's breaking mind reeled with the sermon. His memories intruded into the present, words said to him, words that were more than sounds on the air, but chains to bind him.\n\n'Homo sapiens variatus,' the smiling man had said, as if that explained everything.\n\n'Others retain the name of human, but not you. Not you!' the Apostle railed. 'Your dignity was taken from you. You were decreed as less than human, abhuman, mutant. Undesirables on worlds you called home for hundreds of generations! The Emperor meddles with mankind's form, and they call His monsters heroes, yet you - you, the rightful children of change - are branded beasts!'\n\nThere were those who tried to follow the rules. There were those who tried to understand. There were those who tried to atone for the sin of being born. It made no difference. All Azmedi's kind were hated. Though their forms were no more aberrant than other human strains, their appearance evoked folk-memories of devils and they were treated accordingly.\n\n'If a man is treated as a beast, then he becomes a beast!'\n\nThe beastmen roared out their pain. They locked their horns and butted heads. The hold reeked of droppings and rage.\n\n'Beasts!' shouted a beastman close to Azmedi.\n\n'Beasts!' bleated another.\n\nThe cry spread through the herd, until the hold shook with stamping hooves and the chant of 'Beasts! Beasts! Beasts!' The Apostle's sermon rose in volume to compete.\n\n'But to the Pantheon, you are holy beings! You are pure! You are the children of Chaos! You are the living example of mutability! Go out! Go out into the fire, and cast down those in thrall to the False Emperor! Trample His works beneath your feet, wet your horns with the blood of unbelievers!'\n\n'Beasts! Beasts! Beasts!'\n\nThe stink of aggression filled the world. Azmedi's nostrils flared to breathe it in. He resisted joining the call for violence until the very last. His senses reeling, memories of oppression crashed upon him in waves, threatening to drown his sanity in misery and injustice.\n\nHe would not drown. He wanted to remain a man. He wished to stay human.\n\nHe could not.\n\nHis muzzle shaking, Azmedi opened his mouth and threw back his horned head.\n\n'Beasts!' he roared. His human mind sank into rage.\n\nThere were two colours to the world: red and black. All other hues existed to be drenched in the former or cast into the latter. The first came with violence, the second with the end of life. There was nothing in between blood and death.\n\nAzmedi welcomed such oblivion, for there was no pain there.\n\nWhen the clamps released the herdship from its carrier, and the nose pitched down for the desperate rush to Terra, the beastmen were already fighting each other.\n\nLoman's Promise, repurposed fleet tender,\n\nTerran near orbit, 25th of Secundus\n\nThe butt of Hanis oFar's lasgun was made of hyperdense plastek. Scratching an octed into it was incredibly hard, and had become boring well before he had finished the initial cross of the eight-pointed star. Hanis had a reputation for doggedness to uphold, and so kept at it, dragging the sharpened end of his mess spoon back and forth, cursing when the plastek crumbled and the edges roughened. It wasn't something he enjoyed, but there was precious little else to do.\n\nHe'd long since blocked out the smell and constant noise of five hundred men living in close proximity. What he couldn't cope with was his tiny little sliver of private space being invaded. When the blanket that separated his cot from the next man's was tugged back, he stabbed himself with the sharpened spoon and swore colourfully.\n\nThe nervy figure of Fendo stood in the gap. Behind him the rest of the regiment, what was left of it, went about the mind-fraying tedium of shipboard life - arguing, smoking, fighting, sleeping and swearing.\n\n'For the Warmaster's sake,' grumbled Hanis. He sucked at his cut hand and yanked at the curtain with the other.\n\nFendo wouldn't let him close it. 'We're going in,' he said.\n\nHanis oFar scowled at Fendo's moronic face. He was the kind of man who wore a look of slack-mouthed wonder ninety per cent of the time. He gaped at everything, a tendency that had only got worse since he'd embraced the Eightfold Faith. It was the less intelligent ones who had done so first, and Fendo was right at the front of the queue.\n\n'We're going in,' said Hanis flatly.\n\nFendo nodded encouragingly.\n\nHanis sighed. He shook his wounded hand and pressed a rag to it. 'We're not going in. Whispers promising battle have run through these barracks over and over again. We haven't gone in.' He took away the rag. Blood dripped into the unfinished octed on his gun, and he scowled.\n\n'But we are this time, Hanis. I heard.' Fendo scratched around the octed branded onto his cheek. The flesh around it was still inflamed weeks later. It didn't seem to bother him. 'Everyone's talking about it. Everyone.'\n\n'Is this the same everyone who said so last time?' Hanis picked up his spoon and recommenced work. The edge cut more smoothly now it was greased with blood.\n\n'Come on, Hanis!' Fendo implored.\n\n'Get lost, Fendo, I'm busy.'\n\n'I see! I see!' He pointed at Hanis' work, only now noticing it. 'The masters will be pleased. You take the mark!'\n\n'Don't get excited. I'm not fool enough to do that to myself.' He jabbed the spoon at Fendo's brand, then hunched back over his weapon. 'I'm just doing this so I'm not singled out. And because I'm bored.'\n\n'It doesn't matter why you're doing it, just that you are! The gods, Hanis. They'll watch over you, protect you. They care! The Emperor lied to us - there are gods. They want our worship. They can make you powerful!'\n\nHanis looked past his comrade into the wider hall. Loman's Promise was a fleet tender. The Thernians had lost most of their transports three years ago and since then the cargo hold had been their home. 'Look at this place, Fendo. It's cramped, smoky and always either too hot or too cold. The air is hardly breathable, we've barely enough pots to piss in and next to nothing to eat. I'd say if the gods granted wishes none of us would be in here.'\n\n'They look over me.'\n\nHanis blew out a curl of plastek. He must be getting the hang of carving, because it was getting easier.\n\n'Fat lot of good it's do"}
{"text":"had lost most of their transports three years ago and since then the cargo hold had been their home. 'Look at this place, Fendo. It's cramped, smoky and always either too hot or too cold. The air is hardly breathable, we've barely enough pots to piss in and next to nothing to eat. I'd say if the gods granted wishes none of us would be in here.'\n\n'They look over me.'\n\nHanis blew out a curl of plastek. He must be getting the hang of carving, because it was getting easier.\n\n'Fat lot of good it's done you,' said Hanis.\n\nNothing could dent Fendo's idiotic ebullience. 'If you believe that, why are you fighting the Emperor?'\n\n'I'm fighting for the Warmaster, not for these so-called gods of yours.'\n\n'Why? They're gods. The Warmaster's just a man.'\n\n'Just a man? You're such an idiot.' Hanis had a flash of the one time he had stood near the Warmaster, ten years ago, before the civil war. In the wake of 63-10, Horus had walked among the regiment, stopping to talk with men at their fires, easy with them, sharing jokes and giving praise. Hanis had been too dumbstruck to address this giant as he strode by within touching distance. He remembered the moment as clearly as if it were happening again. The sheer presence of Horus had deformed Hanis' life, like a star's mass bends space. Everything before and after was rendered meaningless. Some of his comrades had been even more affected. A couple never recovered. Not Hanis. When Horus had gone by, he had known with absolute certainty that he would follow Horus Lupercal wherever he went and whatever he did.\n\n'He's not a man,' muttered Hanis. 'He's much more than that.'\n\n'Well then, lad!' said Fendo, his overfamiliarity prompting another scowl from Hanis. 'Best get ready, because you'll have the chance to prove your worth to him soon.'\n\n'No, no I won't!' The spoon sliced through the plastek. After only a couple of minutes, he suddenly had all eight arms done. He started on the arrow tips for the ends. 'There's not enough of us left. What kind of threat could the Thernians present? Eh? We've hardly got sufficient guns for every man. What are we going to do, throw our empty ration packs at the enemy?' Hanis shook his head. 'Mark my words, he'll send in his Legions first - we'll be left to mop up.'\n\n'I know you're wrong.'\n\n'And I know you're-'\n\nA klaxon sounded twice, cutting Hanis dead.\n\nThe vox crackled on. 'Attention all Thernians. This is not a drill. Prepare for immediate combat deployment. Prepare for battle. I repeat, this is not a drill. We have the honour of securing the beachhead.' Their commanding officer's voice wavered with pride.\n\n'That... that was the colonel!' said Hanis. He frowned. 'I thought he was dead.'\n\nFendo nodded, his idiot's grin spreading wider.\n\n'We're going in?'\n\nThroughout the bay every man froze, looking up dumbfounded as if the gods themselves had spoken to them, and would do soon again.\n\n'By the Four,' said Hanis.\n\nSuddenly, all at once, the hold exploded with activity. Everybody was shouting. Everybody was moving. Tatty uniforms were thrown on. Battered flak armour shrugged over worn jackets. Guns were snatched up. Crude amulets yanked off hooks and slung about necks.\n\n'But how... how are they going to get us down there?' said Hanis. We've got no landers. This ship can't put down! Are we going to be transferred?'\n\nThe ship answered his question with a shudder. The background noises of the vessel changed, the grunting whoosh of its plasma thrusters sounding loud, even over the racket of excited men. A faint push upwards told Hanis which direction they were going.\n\n'No,' he said, afraid now. 'No, they're taking the tender down. It's not made for it! We'll crash! We're all going to die.'\n\nFendo's smile turned wicked. Before that moment, Hanis had never really noticed just how ugly the man was.\n\nTraitor fleet, Terran near orbit, 25th of Secundus\n\nAll across Horus' fleet the landing ships departed.\n\nFrom the carriers and the troop transports, the hulks and the freighters, from vessels of every kind pressed into service by Horus' armada, a hundred thousand craft set out. Among them went vessels never intended to leave the weightlessness of the void. Sinking determinedly, they pierced the upper envelope of Terra's dirty atmosphere, bellies glowing with compressive heat as smaller ships plummeted past in a race to the surface. They descended among a hail of mass fire and the discharge of ten thousand lances. The boiling fires around the Palace were visible from Luna, while overworked void shields sparked lightning that crackled from one side of the planet to the other. Outside of the Palace's protective fields, tracts of Terra burned under heavy bombardment. Dust pillared the heavens. Ash flew streamers in raging stratospheric winds. Every city, every settlement, was under attack. Most possessed their own defences, but none compared to those guarding the Palace, and several hives already burned, as giant pyres that lit Terra with a hellish glow. Debris had yet to occlude the sky completely, though it was only a matter of time before the atmosphere was choked by the ejecta of so many impacts. Steam boiled from young seas. Regenerating vegetation burned. Wherever there were settlements, buildings were reduced to craters and people to ash. Nothing was spared, no matter how insignificant. In his desire to make his father suffer, Horus punished the human race.\n\nInto this maelstrom went the ships. Terra's guns gave fire as soon as Dorn judged the drop formation set. The guns of the Palace targeted anything on a downwards course. Once the landers were past the protection of the larger ships' shields, they were immediately at risk. Smaller ships were atomised. Larger craft were crippled to plummet blazing through slate-grey skies. The warp around the Throneworld boiled with souls snatched from their mortal housings, and yet still the Warmaster's ships came, thundering through the air by the thousands. So many were obliterated, but the forces of Horus were so immense that each one lost was but a grain of sand removed from a desert.\n\nWhen the void was thick with this flotilla, and the gunners of Terra spoiled for choice of target, then the hangars of the fleet opened, and uncountable fighters and bombers rushed out. Their engines burning at full capacity, they raced down between the landers as swift as arrows, each locked upon a goal, their bomb bays filled with ordnance and cannon magazines stacked with shells.\n\nTheir mission was to break the teeth of the Imperial Palace.\n\nA soldier's duty\n\nBright Hawks\n\nFlight at last\n\nEagle's Watch rapid deployment hangar,\n\nEternity Wall space port, 25th of Secundus\n\nWe wait. That is a warrior's primary task. Our duty calls for readiness to fight, the ultimate result of which is sacrifice, but before death comes the wait. The wait lasts and lasts, and sometimes is never done. Equally it can cease at any moment, and life finish in the fire. An airman therefore must be two things above all else. They must be fearless, and prepared at all times for the end, but more than that they must be patient, or the waiting will drive them to despair.\n\nSat at her small desk, Aisha Daveinpor reread yesterday's words in her diary. Her pencil was poised over the day's new entry as it had been for three minutes, but she could think of nothing new to add. The bombardment had gone on for nearly two weeks, and her squadron hung on the very edges of their nerves waiting for action. Sleepless nights led to tense days. The repetitive duties demanded of any soldier helped fill the time: flight readiness checks, kit checks, cleaning, tidying and so on. They formed a fortification of duty around her emotions, but as the bombardment wore on with its ceaseless, gut-rumbling pounding, it eroded those walls. Trepidation crept in through the breaches, and fear snuck in behind. She wasn't frightened to die - she had become resigned to death a long time ago. A useless death terrified her, however. While her squadron was grounded she was useless, and as much at risk as any civilian.\n\nA useless death, she wrote in her diary, is the worse death of all.\n\nThe words looked stark on the white of the journal page, and she almost crossed them through. Instead, she threaded the pencil back into its loop and snapped the small book shut, and left it upon her table.\n\nHer status as an Aeronautica pilot gave her a good-sized room; being a squadron mistress gained her a little more space. Her quarters even had a window. High up on the side of the enormous Eternity Wall space port, it had unrivalled views, the sort a rich man would pay a planet's ransom to possess. On fine days she could look out across the Palace, taking in a slice of the northern aspect, over the Daylight section of the Eternity Wall, and the mountains beyond.\n\nThat's what she saw in normal circumstance. Fire was what she saw then, reds and golds and orange, shot through with the multicoloured lightning flicker of void shield discharge. The Eternity Wall space port's great bulk projected high over the fortification it was named for. The top of the port scraped the underside of space. As such, the Palace aegis rose around it in a sloped blister of energy.\n\nThe fire was a few hundred metres from her window. If she angled her head, she could see down towards the ground, past the docks and wharfs projecting from the sides of the port. The top of the wall and the towers she could also see, before the downturn of the aegis cut off the view of the world beyond and screened it with fire. The chrono said it was night, but for weeks the world had endured perpetual firelight.\n\nShe left her quarters. The 198th Squadron barracks were plain yet neat. What the pilots themselves didn't keep in order, their unit servants did. Corridors of plain grey rockcrete decorated with a single yellow stripe at waist height made up the majority of her world. Breaks in the colour told her where she was. There were scores of barracks in yellow"}
{"text":"ff the view of the world beyond and screened it with fire. The chrono said it was night, but for weeks the world had endured perpetual firelight.\n\nShe left her quarters. The 198th Squadron barracks were plain yet neat. What the pilots themselves didn't keep in order, their unit servants did. Corridors of plain grey rockcrete decorated with a single yellow stripe at waist height made up the majority of her world. Breaks in the colour told her where she was. There were scores of barracks in yellow sector, and they all looked very much the same.\n\nThe corridor terminated on a balcony overlooking hangar one. Half her squadron was housed inside: eight one-man Panthera-class fighters including her own ship, Blue Zephyr. Like the corridors, the hangar was plain but for yellow striping. Their banner hung limp on the wall over the entrance, machines underneath wrinkling up the number and the common name of 'Bright Hawks' stitched into it. Hazard striping stencilled directly onto the floor took up much of the space, especially around the fighters' individual standings, and at the ends of the two mag catapults that propelled the craft out of the hangar. With two more catapults in hangar two, all of the squadron's sixteen ships could be in the air within minutes, and at full burn in the void ten minutes after that. Right then the fighters were silent, their canopies covered with tarpaulins dogged tight, except Yancy Modin's ship. She sat in the cockpit fiddling with her guns while their tech-priest checked the tracking of their swivel mounts.\n\nAisha leaned on the gallery railing, and stared at Blue Zephyr. There weren't many ships like the Pantheras in the Imperium. They were among the best, advanced technology laid into every part; rumours had it that the Emperor Himself had a hand in their design, and why not? They were the front line of the Palace's airspace defence.\n\n'The best pilots in the segmentum, and we've been sitting on our behinds for weeks,' she muttered to herself.\n\n'Getting itchy to fly, ma'am?'\n\n'Flight Master Dandar Bey,' she said, accepting the mug of recaff he held out to her. He was her second-in-command, and led flight two of the Bright Hawks. 'I'm always itchy to fly.' She made a sorry little noise. 'I should never have accepted this posting. No action for years, always bloody waiting.'\n\n'I don't think you want to fly in that, ma'am,' Bey said, nodding out at the firestorm through the hangar entrance. He'd told her where he was from, somewhere on Terra warm enough to give him rich brown skin and matching eyes. He never looked unhappy, even when he was. Thoughtful was the most miserable emotion he displayed.\n\n'I'd fly in that quite happily,' she said. 'Better than sitting in here.'\n\n'Aren't you supposed to stamp down on that kind of talk? Keep our morale up?'\n\nShe snorted. 'What are they going to do? Relieve me of command? Not right now, my friend.' She sipped her drink and pulled a face. 'This is bloody awful.'\n\n'Thank you, ma'am,' said Bey.\n\nAisha looked out past the end of the mag catapult ramps; metal piers that looked to be supported by nothing, they ended in thin air, past which was the ceaseless roil of explosions. It was a view she was growing tired of.\n\nShe was about to open her mouth and ask the question she did every morning, 'Do you think it will be today?' when klaxons stopped her.\n\n'All squadrons report to launch bays. All squadrons report to launch bays.'\n\nThe lumens snapped off. Rotating ready lights spun up to action on the walls. Emergency lighting came on.\n\n'Is this is a drill?' Bey said.\n\n'It better bloody not be,' she said. The klaxons barked on and on. Men and women were streaming into the hangar from all sides, followed by stolid servitors moving to prepare the Pantheras for takeoff.\n\n'All squadrons prepare to launch,' said the voice.\n\nOutside a flight of golden aircraft sped by.\n\n'The Legio Custodes are up!' said Bey.\n\nShe grinned savagely, and put her recaff down by the railing's footing. 'Then it's not a drill,' she said.\n\nA clangour of sirens rose wailing over the Palace, outcompeting the sound of the bombs.\n\nThe crews tumbled into the ready rooms, wrenching open their lockers and flinging on their flight gear. In a ruckus that hid how orderly they were, they were suited and sprinting to their war machines in moments.\n\nAisha shouted the ground crew out of the way and sprang up the ladder hooked into Blue Zephyr's fuselage, then shouted at them some more to clear her path for takeoff.\n\n'Get the ladder off! Get me into the air!'\n\nThey'd been drilling this for months, they should be faster.\n\nAll around hangar one, engines coughed into life and began pre-ignition burns. The rotating tables they sat on turned them towards the hangar slot. Small trucks were guided forwards to the first two ships, and munitions locked into place. Aisha checked her chrono.\n\n'Point two slower than best!' she yelled into her helm vox. 'Hurry it up!'\n\nMore ships were streaking past the hangar, disgorged from similar facilities all over the Eternity Wall space port. She keyed in her vox to strategic-level communications.\n\n'Squadron Mistress Aisha Daveinpor ready for launch,' she said.\n\n'Scramble immediately,' came a terse reply. 'Engagement coordinates incoming.'\n\n'Understood. For the Emperor.' She switched channels to the squadron net. 'Into the air! Now! Now! Now!'\n\nHer own clusters of missiles were loaded up. By then, the first two Pantheras were angling their jets, pushing up from the ground on cushions of shimmering air. They hovered forwards and let the mag catapults take them. Running lights on the short runway spars turned from red to green, and the ships were hurtled out of the port. The second two were close behind, the third pair rising. Aisha adjusted her helmet, kissed two fingers and pressed them against the pict of her husband pinned to her ship dashboard. She'd not seen him for five years. That didn't stop her loving him.\n\nHer hands danced over a dozen switches. Displays came on in a crescent in front of her. Easing up the stick, she fell into line between the third pair of aircraft, and waited her turn for the catapult.\n\nThird pair were out, shrinking to the size of birds before punching through the voids and into the maelstrom.\n\nThen it was her turn. The ship wavered on its own backwash, the scream of engines magnified by the hangar. Red light, red light, red light. Her foot hung over the burner pedal.\n\nGreen light.\n\nThe mag catapult took her ship in its fist and hurled her like a javelin out over the Palace. She slammed back into her seat with force, and pressed hard with her suddenly heavy foot.\n\nThe burners roared at full power. Blue Zephyr and its companion Leo shot out at near-maximum speed from the sides of the space port. The sprawl of the Palace was a blur. The world was a crush of acceleration weight and a glare of fire.\n\n'Bright Hawks flight two, in the air,' voxed Bey.\n\n'Bright Hawks flight one, in the air,' she responded.\n\nBlue Zephyr shot through the voids into a world of flame.\n\nMass projectiles dumb and explosive, laser lance beams thick as hive spires, nova cannon shot, plasma streams and plasma balls, weapons of such potency as could level a world slammed into the aegis of the Palace, and Aisha flew straight into it.\n\n'Bright Hawks, fall in.' She gritted her teeth. There was no time to say anything more complicated than that. The vox was a shrieking mess of conflicting voices and interference cast out by the bombardment.\n\n'Bright Hawks, converge attack point-' Her controller's voice broke up into squealing as a particle beam sliced down from orbit, cocooned by an invisible magnetic coherence field that incidentally blotted out all nearby vox-comms. Her displays danced. She got a snatch of her squadron on the disposition screen coming into formation, only for them to break in every direction as a lance strike punched through the middle. The graphics flickered out. When they came on, one of her ships was gone.\n\n'Curse it, Bey! Bey! Get them moving!'\n\nNo reply came over the whooping of energy weapons ionising the air.\n\nSuddenly, they were through the worst of it, racing across a patch of sky over the central districts clear of weapon strikes. The dust-laden heavens writhed with lightning. Visibility was down to a few kilometres. Through the haze of dust and smoke and the witchfire glow of the aegis, the Palace was a set of unguessable shapes spitting fire into space.\n\nThousands of aircraft were in flight from every division of the Imperial war machine. True starfighters raced beside purely atmospheric craft. Legion attack ships of white, red and yellow fell in with Aeronautica wings, while the rare, bulbous pursuit ships of the Legio Custodes glinted between. Communications cleared enough for Aisha to organise her squadron, and for orders to come down from high command within the Bhab Bastion.\n\n'All air defence units prepare for engagement.'\n\nAugur screens lit up with a solid mass of contacts. As fast attack ships, the Pantheras arrowed upwards ahead of the flocks of fighters, ready to take the fight up into the void if need be.\n\nWhen her prow was pointed heavenwards, Aisha saw it would never come to that.\n\nThe traitor's air fleet filled the sky.\n\nThernia's last glory\n\nRage of beasts\n\nWe hold\n\nLoman's Promise, Katabatic Plains airspace, 25th of Secundus\n\nLoman's Promise shook all the way down. Men who had been full of excitement minutes before screamed in terror. The engines roared like dying, angry things. Metal screamed and tore. Subsystems gave out in showers of sparks that lit fires among the regiment's possessions. The temperature within shot up, the terrible howl of tortured atmosphere wrenched at the hull. Smoke billowed from open doors, rolling over the ceiling like a monster out to suffocate them. Alarms blared from every quarter, mocking the screams of the men. The racket was tremendous, but the noise of the enemy guns crashing outside was louder, and growing wo"}
{"text":" like dying, angry things. Metal screamed and tore. Subsystems gave out in showers of sparks that lit fires among the regiment's possessions. The temperature within shot up, the terrible howl of tortured atmosphere wrenched at the hull. Smoke billowed from open doors, rolling over the ceiling like a monster out to suffocate them. Alarms blared from every quarter, mocking the screams of the men. The racket was tremendous, but the noise of the enemy guns crashing outside was louder, and growing worse the further they fell.\n\nA deafening bang stole Hanis' hearing. The ship tilted hard to the fore, sending an avalanche of men and upended objects cascading on top of one another, destroying the little comforts they had made for themselves. Hanis' arm was wrenched behind him. A man sat on his head. He fought his way from a tangle of cots and blankets. Water and the contents of chamber pots sluiced over them. He felt he was drowning. He punched and fought with his comrades in his desperation to be free.\n\nHe crawled out of the tangle and saw the ship had righted itself as he struggled. Now the floor sloped only a little, but a fierce wind was shrieking through one of the doors, pulling the smoke out after it, and the noise of the enemy guns pounded all the louder.\n\n'We've been hit, we've been hit!' someone was shouting. He was one of the few not reduced to shrieks. Hanis staggered as something punched the vessel hard from beneath. A musical strike of shrapnel chimed somewhere, then another hit, and another. He leapt back as a searing blue beam of las light stabbed up from the deck, blasting apart a man not four paces from him. Three quick bangs announced more impacts, a deadly display of light leaping from the deck to the ceiling, gone before he could blink.\n\nA man holding the stump of his severed arm out before him ran past.\n\nThe ship wallowed, slipping across the sky. The lumens blinked and went out, and the hold flickered with the strobe of weapons fire outside, let in by breaches in the hull. Terra's atmosphere screamed at them. For the first time in his life, Hanis breathed the air of mankind's home world.\n\nIt smelled of burning metal.\n\nThe last few seconds were a confusion of blood and terror and light. Projectiles clattered off the hull, now coming from the side as well as from below. Hanis dropped and curled into a ball, his teeth clamped tight.\n\nThe loudest crash of all lifted up from the deck, the engine roar ceased, then all was still.\n\nHe looked up. Dancing light shone through a rent in the hull. Dead men lay about. The wounded wept and groaned.\n\nThe loading gates at the end of the hull, gates Hanis had seen opened only once before, gave out a sorry wail. Of the four warning lumens around them, only one worked, and it flashed twice before failing with a small pop. The mechanisms struggled against crumpled metal to pull the doors open, giving up halfway.\n\nBattle light flooded the room. Hanis saw through the gap onto a scene of utter carnage. Ships powered down from the sky aflame, vomiting hordes of men upon an artificial plain when they landed. Beyond them were the towering walls of the Imperial Palace, and beyond those the soaring spires, all sheltered by glowing rounds of interlinked void shields. Guns spat out a wall of deadly energy and shells into the Warmaster's hordes, while substantial outworks sheltered an opposing army ready to kill any who made it under the skirts of the aegis. Fighter craft of both sides duelled over the battlefield.\n\nA regiment vanished in the conical explosions of a minefield.\n\nFlights of loyalist aircraft swept down, strafing the landers.\n\nAn enormous plasma cannon immolated a hundred men in a single shot, leaving only molten stone behind.\n\nA ship exploded hundreds of metres in the air showering burning bodies and fuel over the armies beneath.\n\nEverywhere he looked, there was only death, death and more death.\n\nThe ship rocked again. The defenders on the walls had detected life within.\n\nShouts came from the corridors outside the hall. The regiment's last officers entered, shock goads in their hands. Mercilessly, they laid about the warriors still alive.\n\n'Up! Up! Up!' they yelled.\n\nHanis needed no encouragement. He looked around for a weapon and, amazingly, saw his own gun with the octed carved into the stock looking up at him. He smiled at it as if it were an old friend.\n\nHe stumbled on Fendo's corpse as the men were rounded up and bullied into ranks facing the door. Their colonel led them from the front again, like he had on 63-10, when the regiment won its colours from Horus himself. Looking on the Palace filled Hanis with a sense of rightness. All his life had led to this moment.\n\nThe colonel had no inspiring words. He did not need them.\n\n'For the Warmaster!' he said.\n\n'For the Warmaster!' the Thernians responded.\n\nWhistles blew, and the Thernians commenced their last charge.\n\nHerdship, Katabatic Plains airspace, 25th of Secundus\n\nAzmedi no longer knew words.\n\nGas flooded the transport hold as the herdship came down. It smelled bitter, but by then he was past caring, and with its inhalation the last of his reason fled. The Apostle's voice never stopped as they fell through the air towards the ground, though his words meant nothing to Azmedi now 'slaught filled his lungs. The ship slammed down hard, staggering the passengers, then ramps blew from their mountings, the explosives that tore them free slaying a score of the beastkin too close to the door.\n\nThey needed no encouragement to charge. Azmedi understood nothing. His thoughts were a single sheet of red. With the rest of his kin, he hurled himself from the ship, falling five metres to the ground. He stumbled, but did not fall, and rushed away into the storm of fire and destruction. From half a dozen ramps other holds emptied, and a horde of beasts ran out.\n\nThe pounding of the guns could not frighten him, only quicken the racing of his heart. His feet were arranged like a beast's, with powerful haunches and elongated feet with the ankle held high off the floor, so that he ran on the single toe of his hoof. Such physiognomy gave the beastkin great speed, and they outpaced the pure men and the mutants pouring from their own landing craft. Azmedi ran with the wind, his mane flowing behind him, his swollen tongue lolling from foam-flecked jaws. There was a glow ahead that writhed and shifted. He ran full pelt into it, felt it try to rip him in two, but he forced his way through and out of it, and emerged on the inside of the Palace aegis.\n\nAhead was the third defence line, prefabricated sections half buried in crushed rock. Sheltered by their defences, a thousand men waited, lasguns resting on the lip, ready to open fire.\n\nAt three hundred metres they let fly. Beastkin to the right and left of Azmedi fell bleating, tumbling madly such was their speed, before they came to a broken rest dead on Terra's soil. Azmedi roared, his eyes rolling. Racing through the hedge of las light towards the line he howled out his pain and his hatred. Men had denied his humanity. Men had trodden him down. Now it was his turn.\n\nA burning shaft of light branded his shoulder, filling his flared nostrils with the smell of singed hair and his own roasted flesh. He barely felt it, but ran on, gathering himself as he approached to jump. His abhuman legs bunched to hurl him over the rampart in a leap no standard human could match. A dozen more of his kind were behind him.\n\nHe came down atop a terrified man. In his hand Azmedi clutched a simple maul, a threaded bar with a nut the size of a man's fist screwed onto the end. Shouting wildly, his cries more bleats than words, he smashed the man's helmet in with a single blow, destroying the skull beneath. Wrenching out the weapon, he turned quickly, sending the dead man tumbling off the firing step. A pure-blood stared at him, eyes disgustingly large in his flat face. He swung his lasrifle around. Azmedi battered the bayonet aside, dropped his head and launched himself forwards. His horns buried themselves up to his forehead in the man's gut. Azmedi thrashed them around madly in the soldier's innards, yanking ropes of gut out when he tore back his horns. The man screamed in agony. Azmedi stamped his face in with one kick, and raced on.\n\nBy then, more beastkin were flooding onto the rampart, leaping over the piled stone and the rockcrete. They had no formation, no discipline, only years of hurt amplified by the combat stimms pumping through them. The savagery this alchemy summoned was more than enough. The conscripts panicked. The volleys they fired were poorly coordinated and badly aimed. Azmedi was shot again, but though devolution had robbed his kind of man's wits and longevity, it had made them tough. Several hits were needed to bring the beasts down. Even when mortally wounded, they fought with undiminished wrath, dragging their killers into the warp with them.\n\nAzmedi shrugged off the hit as he had shrugged off the last. Feeble bayonet thrusts were no match for his strength. His broad fingers wrenched weapons from trembling hands. His maul crushed ribcages, smashed heads, caved in faces, broke limbs. All along the rampart, the hordes of the Warmaster were coming over, widening the opening made by the beastkin. Units of turncoat Imperial Army added their firepower to the beasts' rampage. Setting up position on the forwards-facing portion of the defences, they began to attack the second line with heavy weapons and concentrated lasgun volleys. Seeing the third line broken, the officers on the second line ramparts some three hundred metres away ordered their troops to open fire on the rear of the third. As reinforcements raced along the second line, the weight of this exchange grew in intensity. The beastkin were caught. The remaining conscripts suffered more. Azmedi hauled a man from his feet, and carried him screaming as a shield against the loyalist fire. Soon he was out of the worst of it, still runnin"}
{"text":" concentrated lasgun volleys. Seeing the third line broken, the officers on the second line ramparts some three hundred metres away ordered their troops to open fire on the rear of the third. As reinforcements raced along the second line, the weight of this exchange grew in intensity. The beastkin were caught. The remaining conscripts suffered more. Azmedi hauled a man from his feet, and carried him screaming as a shield against the loyalist fire. Soon he was out of the worst of it, still running purely on instinct, charging with his dwindling herd into the next company of soldiers.\n\nHe cast aside his now dead human shield. Lifting his head to the sky he roared and roared, until the self-hate he had carried all his life was all spat out, and murder took its place.\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios Gate command centre, 25th of Secundus\n\n'Sir, we have a breakthrough in sector sixteen, three kilometres down from the commanding bastion.'\n\n'I can see it,' said Raldoron. He watched from the relative safety of the Helios Gate as the first section of the outworks was breached. 'Move reinforcements outwards from line one to two. Form firing lines between three and two.' He performed a quick mental calculation. At the rate the enemy were pushing out from their breaching point, they did not have long. 'One kilometre north of Bastion Fifteen, five hundred metres south of Bastion Sixteen.'\n\n'This is insanity,' said Maximus Thane. 'I have never seen a battle like this. They fight without care for themselves.'\n\n'I do not believe there has ever been a battle like this,' said Raldoron.\n\nAbove the aegis, fighters duelled, numerous as enraged wasps. The bombardment thundered into the energy shield, but as yet it was holding. Out on the plain, countless ships were setting down under heavy fire. More than half were brought crashing to the earth before they landed. None of them came down undamaged. They landed dangerously close to the wall. With the Katabatic Slopes to the south and east, and the mountains of Himalazia in every other direction, they did not have much choice, but it was a costly strategy. Thousands upon thousands of guns scoured the plains before the outworks. There was no time or space for the enemy to form their own camps. They landed, and they attacked, if they did not die first.\n\n'None of our traitorous brothers show themselves,' said Thane. 'Horus has a multitude of expendable mortals. This is sickening work.' He looked down onto the outworks, where flashing storms of las-fire marked out points of intense conflict. 'All the more so because we must wait here, while the men and women we were made to protect sell themselves alone.'\n\n'We must remain here. This attack is a ploy.'\n\n'That worries me,' said Thane, gesturing to the aerial battle. 'Theoretically, the aegis is invulnerable. But the Warmaster would not launch such an attack if there was not a way through. There are many heavy attack craft within his flotilla. I say they are waiting to breach the shields and attack our emplacements.'\n\n'We know the shields are not perfect,' said Raldoron. 'There are flaws. Perturabo works for the Warmaster. If anyone can find a gap in the defence, it will be him.'\n\nThane's voice turned angry at the mention of the Lord of Iron, but he did not dissent. 'All over Terra, down they come,' said Thane. 'The dispossessed, the spurned and the deluded run raging into the full force of Rogal Dorn's guns. They die by the million, but still they come. Horus has no regard for these creatures he hurls at us, but though they are expendable to him, they will not be wasted. There is reason behind this insanity.'\n\n'So then,' Raldoron said, 'we watch, and we wait, and we slaughter the enemy on the plain. When they draw nigh to the wall, that is the time for the Legions to fight. Until then, we hold.'\n\nWar in the air\n\nBlue Zephyr\n\nShield breaker\n\nImperial Palace airspace, 25th of Secundus\n\nIt was like no flying Aisha had ever done. The airspace was a conflicted mess of shock waves that turned every manoeuvre into a bone-jarring fight with turbulence. Compounding the problem were energetic wave fronts. Electromagnetic discharge disrupted her instruments, forcing her to rely on her own, dazzled senses, while gravitic disruption from exotic weaponry flipped ships over and sent them crashing down to oblivion against the aegis.\n\nAmid all this, Aisha's wing managed to kill. Blue Zephyr stabbed a swift enemy with lascannon flash, blowing out an engine. It spun out of control into the path of an incoming plasma stream before it could recover, and was vaporised.\n\nThat kill under those conditions would have been the highlight of any of her previous battles. In this fight, it was barely remarkable.\n\n'Enemy Raptor, stooping low, on the tail of Ninth Legion fighter.'\n\n'I see it.' Aisha barely heard Yancy. A blurt could have been an affirmative from Accinto. Most of the vox-net was a smear of crackles and whoops; nevertheless, two of her ships peeled off and down, Yancy's jinking to avoid a missile strike hurled at her from a higher level in the battle sphere. Missing her, the missile contacted the shield and vanished in a flash of displacement light. Yancy and her wingman blasted through the backwash, gaining on the enemy craft tailing the Blood Angels strike fighter.\n\nAisha lost them after that. She had her own problems. Proximity alerts bleeped all round her cockpit. Aisha swore, flicking switches to bring a wireframe image of her tailing foe slewing around crosshairs that blinked every time he came close to locking on. Luckily for her, that part of her ship's tech was robust enough to withstand the energies boiling around her.\n\n'You've got a friend down there,' Bey voxed.\n\n'I see him.' Aisha yanked hard on her stick. The ship fired thrusters down its port flank, sending it screaming sideways out of her pursuer's fire arc.\n\n'Do you want me to help?'\n\n'No,' Aisha said. Blue Zephyr bounced through a violent thermal rising off a low-yield atomic strike. Flames flashed over the cockpit. Rad counters clicked like maddened insects.\n\n'Only way is up,' she said, heaving back on her flight stick. G-force pushed her into her seat, smoothing back her skin until her lips peeled back. The world turned upside down. Through the upper part of her canopy, the Palace aegis flashed and writhed. Then the loop was complete, she was up and over, jinking through screaming shell-fire, coming down hard on the tail of her pursuer. Seeing she'd given him the slip and manoeuvred behind him, her foe threw his craft about, trying to shake her, but her wingman boxed him in with a stream of blue-white las light.\n\nNow it was the turn of her targeting reticule to blink. It turned green and her instruments shrilled.\n\n'There's a cliche to be said about hunters and the hunted,' she said.\n\nLas-beams pulsing at an eye-watering flicker chopped through the firestorm, puncturing the wing of her foe in a row of holes as neat as a tailor's stitch. The wing flapped loosely, then tore off. She put a double hit into the fuel tank as it spiralled away, just to be sure.\n\nThe explosion was lost in the greater inferno curling over the aegis.\n\nShe was already hunting for her next target when something caught her eye. A tight formation of ships was coming down from orbit perpendicular to the shield. The bombardment around them had a precise, neat patterning and beat. As she watched, the outer layer of the shielding gave out with a sparkling dance, but there were two more layers beneath, at least.\n\nThe formation continued its plunge.\n\n'What are they doing?' she breathed.\n\nThe first of them, a pair of escort fighters, smeared themselves to nothing on the aegis, the remains shunted into the empyrean by warp tech. She expected the same fate for the three bombers coming behind, but an instant before they hit, a dozen lance strikes battered at the shield. Collimated light shafts wide as road tunnels pummelled the voids. Her augurs shrieked. Her visor dimmed to compensate for the glare, but she found herself half-blind. When the lances snapped off she had flown near, five hundred metres and closing, and saw that more bombers were hurtling towards one, precise point. One exploded into pink fire on the voids, but the others punched through without harm. She saw them pull up steeply once through, chased by anti-aircraft fire over the Palace as they split up.\n\n'Shield breach! Shield breach!' she reported. 'Daylight Wall anterior, sector sixteen.'\n\nBey responded. 'Not just here. Five points on this section alone.' He stopped speaking, his engine noise increased, and he swore. 'Hang on. Someone's trying to kill me.'\n\n'Be advised, fighter control. Some kind of anti-harmonic fire pattern, weakening the aegis,' said Aisha. Blue Zephyr screamed through the bombers streaking down from space, dodging through them, firing as she went. 'They'll be going for the void projectors and anti-air cannons.'\n\n'Noted, Blue Zephyr. Freedom granted to pursue.'\n\nAisha grinned wolfishly. This was more like it! 'Five years sitting behind lines. A great reward for being a good pilot - now I finally get to fly. Wing one, form up, follow me in.'\n\nFour ships answered her call. Three of her squadron were dead, and she hadn't even noticed.\n\n'You can't follow them down!' voxed Bey. 'There's no space. The flight ceiling is too low. If you come back up through the void shields, you'll be caught in the bombardment.'\n\n'It's days like this that made me want to fly. Hold position here, Bey. Help the Legions hold the ships back from the holes. I'm taking flight one down with me.'\n\nThrusters firing all over her ship, she powered upwards, weathering a fusillade of solid shot from enemy fighters, flipped over, and dived down at the aegis. Her wing, expert pilots all, stayed in perfect formation with her all the while.\n\nThe surface of the aegis rushed at her. The upper shield kept rising, only to be torn down over and over again. The taxed lower layers remained up, but w"}
{"text":"tion here, Bey. Help the Legions hold the ships back from the holes. I'm taking flight one down with me.'\n\nThrusters firing all over her ship, she powered upwards, weathering a fusillade of solid shot from enemy fighters, flipped over, and dived down at the aegis. Her wing, expert pilots all, stayed in perfect formation with her all the while.\n\nThe surface of the aegis rushed at her. The upper shield kept rising, only to be torn down over and over again. The taxed lower layers remained up, but wavered forever on the edge of existence at the sort of strength that might - might - permit her craft through. There was no telling if it would work; the aegis made no distinction between friend and foe, but operated solely on esoteric calculations of mass and velocity and dimensional interface.\n\nShe flicked a look at her husband's picture.\n\n'You always told me I was reckless,' she said. 'I guess you were right.'\n\nBlue Zephyr hit the aegis. The stick jerked in her hand as three layers of void shields attempted to hurl her bodily into the warp, but they were stressed, feeble, and she powered through to the other side.\n\nThe ground was alarmingly close.\n\n'Up we go!' she shouted. Again the push of force on her body threatened to squeeze her into unconsciousness. Implants in her chest cavity squirted chemicals into her bloodstream, and she fought off the blackness.\n\nMore enemy aircraft had got through than she'd expected. They were wasting no time, emptying their payloads of missiles at the towers and wall tops, aiming especially for the flattened spheres of void projectors and the larger anti-ship cannon emplacements.\n\nExplosions bloomed in fiery chains along the Daylight Wall.\n\n'Targets of opportunity,' she voxed. 'Split up. Let's put a stop to this before it gets out of hand.'\n\nHer flight divided instantly, each Panthera chasing after a separate target. Aisha upped her thrust and shot after a pair of Reaper ground attack craft. Their missiles spent, they were turning inwards, pounding the roads and marshalling yards behind the wall with unguided bombs.\n\nShe used one of her precious stock of air-to-air missiles to knock the first from the sky. The other lumbered aside as its companion plummeted down and crashed into the side of a hive spire. Aisha drew a bead on it, and fired her lascannons, but the pilot anticipated her move. He turned hard, and her beams seared past, scorching up the ground.\n\n'Dammit, dammit, dammit!' she swore, accelerating after it. The bomber was slow, but the pilot was good. He took the Reaper down, close to ground level, using the tangle of spires and canyon streets to stay out of her firing line. She searched overhead, but there wasn't enough room to climb to come down on top of her target without flying right into the bombardment. In such close confines, her speed was of no use.\n\nShe chased the Reaper down one of the Palace's immense processional ways, jinking to avoid fire from its tail gun. Her own shots were spoiled by her evasions. In the end, the pilot's luck ran out. She dived down behind him, coming so close to the ground her jet wash shattered windows, and fired up beneath her prey. His attempt to get out of her way saw him clip a starscraper, and that sealed his fate. The craft tumbled viciously from the sky, exploding on impact.\n\nHer exultation was short-lived. She didn't dare wonder how many people had died when the bomber hit the ground.\n\nThere was no time for mourning friends, never mind people she'd never met. She pulled up Blue Zephyr, and swung around to head back towards the wall. At her speed it was a flight of seconds, but in that time there was space to see three things of dreadful note.\n\nThe first, Yancy's ship blasted apart by a trio of enemy fighters.\n\nThe second, dozens more bombers punching through the weakened shields.\n\nAnd the worst, innumerable bombs plummeting unhindered where the void blisters had been cleared, striking home on the defences with all the wrath of armageddon.\n\n'A woman's job is never done,' she whispered, and accelerated Blue Zephyr back into the fight.\n\nThree lines\n\nAbhuman\n\nSpawn of Chaos\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 25th of Secundus\n\n'They're coming, they're coming!'\n\nMen sprinted past Katsuhiro's position. They were on the outside of the rampart line in full view of the enemy, but didn't seem to know or care. The noise alone was enough to frighten a man out of his wits. The Palace's peripheral shields were giving out, allowing the enemy munitions to strike the earth. Attack craft strafed the outworks on their way to the walls. Destroyed, the enemy ships were as much danger to the defenders as they were flying, crashing down and cartwheeling over the muddy ground before exploding. The carcasses of landing craft, many on fire, hid the plain. Others poured out an endless stream of hateful creatures that ran at the parapets. Gunfire from the walls scythed them down by the thousands, but they came on, replenished by more ships, and more, landing among the wreckage of those downed earlier. Debris rained from the sky constantly, a hail of grit and metal splinters that pattered off Katsuhiro's helmet, some big enough to kill a man.\n\nA hand gripped his arm, pulling him back from the parapet edge.\n\n'Hold the line!' A veteran in full uniform grabbed him and spun him around. 'That way! That way!' The man slapped him hard. In his dirty face his eyes seemed big as saucers, and full of fear.\n\n'Three lines! Make three lines!' Jainan had found a handful of veterans like himself, and they kicked, swore and shoved the conscripts into three wavering ranks stretching between the third and second rampart lines. Katsuhiro couldn't keep his eyes forwards. His head rolled around on his neck of its own accord to look out at the plain, as if some perverse part of him was drunk on the destruction, and wanted more. Bastion 16's guns were turning from the front, pointing right at him.\n\n'Three lines! Three lines!' screamed Jainan. 'Three lines, damn you all! Get your guns up!'\n\nWhistles shrieked impotently over the boom of guns.\n\nA few more routers were racing across the firing ground between the third and second outwork rings. When they encountered Katsuhiro's company, they shoved their way through, spreading consternation. Some of them were caught, slapped, turned about. One cannoned right into a veteran, knocking them both flying. The fleeing man was up first.\n\n'Stop! Stop!' shouted the veteran.\n\nThe runner sprinted on.\n\nKatsuhiro heard the rasp of metal on leather as the veteran pulled out his laspistol, sighted down the barrel, arm straight, and dropped the man with a single shot.\n\n'Any one of you cowards runs like him, you'll die the same. Now, three lines!'\n\nAnother company was running up, this one a little better disciplined than Katsuhiro's own, with a third on their heels, enough to fill the space between the two outermost defence works completely. All of their officers were shouting, whistles blowing, voxmitters blaring.\n\nThe fleeing men petered out. A sparkle of crossfire was working its way down the killing field towards Bastion 16 as soldiers on the second line fired on the enemy who had overwhelmed the third and were advancing down the gap. A dark mass was moving towards Katsuhiro. He squinted, not quite able to make out what was approaching.\n\n'There's the enemy,' said the man to his right.\n\n'Oh no, oh no, oh no,' said the man to his left.\n\n'This is a fine mess,' whispered Doromek from behind. The hard woman was close by him. She gave them both a black look. Katsuhiro had not yet seen another kind on her face.\n\nFaces pale with fear looked out at the enemy. Black figures emerged as individuals from the group, but the flickering battle light made it hard to pick out details.\n\nJainan pushed his way in front of his company and turned to face them.\n\n'Look!' he said, pointing behind him to the running mass of enemy. 'They are coming for us because people like you lost their nerve and abandoned their positions. Our lords and masters, up there on the walls, are turning their guns upon the overrun sections. If you do not hold, if you do not stand and fire in a straight, Emperor-beloved line, then you will die, because if those monsters don't kill you, our own side will. And I for one do not wish to die today!' he bellowed. 'You will not let me down. You will hold in three lines. The first line will lie prone. The second will kneel, the third will stand, and you will not move, you will not run. You will work your fingers upon the triggers of your guns until they bleed. You will fire until your power packs are empty, but most of all you will hold your ground!' All up the line of soldiers, similar speeches were being delivered to other terrified conscripts. 'If you do not, then we're all dead, not tomorrow, but now, right now.'\n\nJainan pushed his way back through the troopers, drew his pistol and blew his whistle.\n\n'Lines, assume position!'\n\n'First line prone!' bellowed the veterans, kicking those that did not obey.\n\n'Second line kneel!'\n\nShaking, slowly and in poor order, the conscripts obeyed. Katsuhiro, who was in the second line, knelt in the mud. Cold seeped through his trousers.\n\nHe noted then that the enemy were running unnaturally quickly towards them.\n\nBastion 16's cannons opened up, flinging bright lines of tracer fire over the conscripts' heads.\n\n'Oh no, oh no, oh no,' the gibbering man continued to say.\n\n'Present arms!' yelled Jainan. His veterans relayed his orders again, and held their lasguns unwaveringly on the enemy. The conscripts did rather less well. Their unfamiliar weapons wavered in quaking hands. The firestorm was creeping down the kill-zone as the troops stationed on the second line continued to fire, each section opening up as the enemy neared. It was short-lived display. As it ran, the horde attacked the ramparts, some of them leaping over in single bounds.\n\nKatsuhiro blinked. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. No men could jump "}
{"text":" orders again, and held their lasguns unwaveringly on the enemy. The conscripts did rather less well. Their unfamiliar weapons wavered in quaking hands. The firestorm was creeping down the kill-zone as the troops stationed on the second line continued to fire, each section opening up as the enemy neared. It was short-lived display. As it ran, the horde attacked the ramparts, some of them leaping over in single bounds.\n\nKatsuhiro blinked. He couldn't believe what he was seeing. No men could jump so high.\n\nHis weapon shook in his hands.\n\nA sharp crack sounded over his head. Doromek was firing already.\n\n'Wait for the signal, acting lieutenant!' barked Jainan.\n\n'Not likely,' said Doromek. 'I was a sniper. Let me do my thing. I can drop three more before you give the order. Or you can shoot me.' He fired again without taking his eye from his targets. 'What a waste that would be.'\n\nThe enemy were close enough to see properly. A hundred metres away, no more. They were beasts in the shape of men, long-muzzled creatures with curled horns and manes of coarse hair. They could have been xenos, but Katsuhiro knew instinctively that these were a twisted offshoot of his own race, and they disgusted him.\n\n'Open fire!' bellowed Jainan.\n\nThe holding force obeyed. A volley of gunfire erupted from all three ranks, then a second. Raggedly at first, then with greater coherency, the regiment put out a torrent of las-beams in time to the shriek of whistles.\n\nFive volleys, then the enemy were upon them. Each of the beasts took three or four shots to put down. Goat-headed monsters leapt up and crashed down among the men, their hooves stamping heads flat, their primitive bludgeons smashing bones with every swing.\n\nPromptly, discipline broke down. The line wavered, then collapsed. Those who fled were laid low as they turned to run. Those who fought were barged aside, cast into the dirt, gored and smashed.\n\nKatsuhiro found himself face to face with one of the creatures. Its mouth sported sharp tusks alongside flat, grazer's teeth, all slicked with bloody foam that dribbled down its face and off its wispy beard. Its eyes were wide, wild, but human-looking, among the only features it had that were. Sharp horns jutted from its forehead, slathered in gore. It snorted at him, and swung its maul.\n\nThere was a split second in which Katsuhiro could react. One side of it was death, on the other life. Deep inside Katsuhiro something gave way like a dam; a flood of rage swept aside his passive, former self.\n\nLaunching himself from his kneeling position, he rammed his bayonet into the creature's gut, shouting into its face as he did.\n\nThe creature fell backwards, voicing a wordless, agonised scream halfway between a human cry of pain and an agonised bleat. Katsuhiro leaned his full weight on his lasrifle, twisting the weapon about, as the mutant howled and clawed at the gun barrel.\n\nIts head shook, a fat blue tongue flapped out of its mouth, and it was dead.\n\nKatsuhiro yanked out the blade. The mutants were slaughtering the conscripts. A beastman ran at him, hands held out to throttle. Katsuhiro brought up his gun to fire, but the thing's head disappeared in a mist of blood and bone that splattered across him and stung his face.\n\nThe lines of men were thoroughly disrupted, and pushed back from where Katsuhiro stood, leaving him isolated. Smoke from burning void-ships occluded the field of battle. The fur of the beast things had caught fire from the heat of the las-beams, so that some of their dead were ablaze, putting out greasy blue fumes. Combatants leapt into view and were stolen away again by the fog of war. Blue and red las light blinked through the murk, sometimes nearly hitting him. He walked backwards, alert, searching for his own kind. Strangely, he was not frightened. His body sang with adrenaline.\n\nA sheet of smoke rolled back like the curtain of a proscenium, revealing a bloody play. The conscripts were pushing back against their foes, whose number, despite their hardiness, had dwindled. More fire came in from the second line, cutting into the rear of the mutants. But more were on the way.\n\nA heart-stopping wail cut through the brume. Giant shapes lurched through the smoke, bursting through it, and suddenly there were other things pressing the line of men, huge mounds of quaking flesh that shuddered forwards on twisted legs. They were as slow as the abhumans were fast, but seemingly impervious to las-fire. Behind them pairs of savage men herded the things forwards. Half wielded arc whips crackling with electric force, sweeping them about their heads to crack against the shambling creatures' flanks. The others worked chains whose hooked heads were buried in the creatures' flesh.\n\nOne of the things lumbered into a knot of men, where it flailed at them with a multiplicity of freakish limbs. Skinless arms shot from sucking apertures, spined with hooks and claws that ripped at flesh. A man was snatched up by a barbed tentacle, whirled about and hurled away with a cry. Men screamed desperately as it coughed wetly and vomited acidic bile to blind their eyes and melt their skin.\n\nThese new foes defied description. The first wave had been mutant abominations, but their form was stable, they were of a type. The things facing them now were nightmare composites. They made no sense to look at. They were not xenos or laboratory beasts, but chimerical horrors made of disparate body parts carelessly stuck together. Their physiognomies should not have allowed them to live. But live they did, and move, and kill. They were all different, united only by their complete disparity of form and the horror it kindled in Katsuhiro, for these things too were of human stock. Human heads lolled on boneless necks. Human eyes peeped from fanged orifices. Human tongues screamed lunacy from multiple mouths.\n\nA wailing monster came past him. Katsuhiro stumbled backwards out of the way, managing to fire, but though his beams did no more than brand its skin, it felt the hits, for its single, furious eye swivelled to look upon Katsuhiro, and its course changed to approach directly.\n\nOne of the thing's handlers saw him, and flashed a grin full of metal teeth. He, too, was deformed, another mutant, albeit of a less gross sort. He yanked hard on his cruel reins, causing the beast to howl from a dozen mouths and increase its speed.\n\nA las-beam flashed past Katsuhiro, taking the handler in the face. He fell, dragging at the chains and causing the beast to turn to the side. The second handler extinguished his arc whip and ran forwards to disentangle his comrade from the chains. A second las-round smacked into his thigh, and he swore loud enough for Katsuhiro to hear. The beast heard too, turning immediately on its injured tormentor. A vertical slit opened bloodily down its front, exposing quivering teeth and a writhing knot of tentacles. These darted out, snatched up the handler and dragged him whole and screaming into its gullet.\n\nAt that moment, the hard-faced woman moved in to attack.\n\nShe moved so fast, Katsuhiro didn't recognise her. Only when she slowed to step on the mutant's swollen foot and launch herself up did he see who it was. She tossed something into the beast's mouth - a grenade, Katsuhiro realised a moment later - and kicked away from its chest, her foot narrowly missing the mucus-dripping maw.\n\nThe creature moved with surprising speed to catch at this new morsel, but the woman was away. The grenade exploded inside the mutant, rupturing its flesh and sending it into keening throes. It was mortally wounded, but still lived, flopping around in pain, thrashing its limbs with deadly ferocity. The dead handler whipped around on the end of his reins.\n\nKatsuhiro shouted, and discharged his gun into the thing's single eye. It exploded with the first hit, but he did not stop firing until the mutant was lying on the ground, body heaving its last.\n\nHe stared at it. He had never seen anything like it. He had no idea things like that even existed.\n\nA hand caught his upper arm gently.\n\n'Nice job,' said Doromek. 'It's time to get out of here.'\n\n'Did you see that?'\n\n'See what?' said Doromek.\n\n'The woman... She did this. She killed it.'\n\nEngines grumbled behind the combatants. Large shapes were heading through the smoke.\n\n'You know,' said Doromek, 'it really is time to get out of here.'\n\nWhistles blew far back towards Bastion 16. Officers and their veteran bullies were shouting for everyone to retreat. The surviving knots of infantry gladly obliged, making way for three huge tanks coming to the battle. Anti-personnel weapons in sponsons tracked down to draw a bead on the enemy, their targeting augurs shining red in the battlesmoke.\n\nWithout realising it, Katsuhiro was running, following Doromek and the stream of men falling back from the attack. Though retreat had been called, there was no order to the withdrawal, only mad, headlong flight.\n\nThe high grey sides of the tank flashed by him, and he saw another line of infantry, this one of regular troops, properly provisioned with uniforms and winter kit, waiting in neat ranks and ready to fire. Hands pulled him through to the back even as las-beams flashed out.\n\nHe fell in a heap behind the line.\n\nA moment later, the tanks opened fire, belching choking, acrid smoke over the infantry lines. Heavy bolters and stubbers rattled into action, drowning out all noise with the roar of micro-rocket motors and the detonation of miniature warheads in flesh. Katsuhiro got himself up, turned around to see the mutants being torn apart. All the large abominations fell to the fighting vehicles. The few lesser abhumans that got past the tanks were shot down by groups of infantry. Doromek was firing rapidly but calmly beside him, taking the things through the eyes or mouth, or hitting them squarely in the heart. When he fired, they went down, their toughness no protection against his accuracy.\n\nThe last of the abhumans fell dead. The tanks ground forw"}
{"text":"sh. Katsuhiro got himself up, turned around to see the mutants being torn apart. All the large abominations fell to the fighting vehicles. The few lesser abhumans that got past the tanks were shot down by groups of infantry. Doromek was firing rapidly but calmly beside him, taking the things through the eyes or mouth, or hitting them squarely in the heart. When he fired, they went down, their toughness no protection against his accuracy.\n\nThe last of the abhumans fell dead. The tanks ground forwards, their blocky rears vanishing into the maelstrom of smoke and fire, still discharging their guns.\n\n'Cease firing!'\n\nJainan's voice was a lonely coherent sound in the racket.\n\n'They've gone!' someone shouted.\n\nA ragged cheer went up from the conscripts. The regulars remained quietly vigilant.\n\n'What were those things?' said Katsuhiro.\n\nDoromek was efficiently changing out his power pack for a fresh charge.\n\n'Mutants. Abhumans. Beastmen, one of humanity's more degenerate subtypes.'\n\n'But the others, the big ones, what were they?'\n\nKatsuhiro locked eyes with Doromek. He could have sworn he saw a flash of consternation before the man's flintiness returned.\n\n'Honestly? I don't know.' For a moment he seemed like a different man, then he smiled and slapped Katsuhiro's arm hard enough to make him wince. 'You survived your first battle. Well done.'\n\nJainan strode past them. 'It's not over yet. Everybody back to the ramparts.'\n\nDoromek called something after the captain, but it was drowned out by the whistling boom of incoming ordnance and the angry buzz of overstretched void shields.\n\nThe enemy was bombarding their section again.\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios Gate, 25th of Secundus\n\n'The breach of the third line of sector sixteen has been contained, only just. We have minor breakthroughs in two other places in our section.' Thane's report was delivered in unhurried, stolid style, typical Imperial Fist. Raldoron's auto-senses dampened the cacophony of the attack, allowing him to hear his counterpart. 'They will soon be dealt with. How looks the situation from the wall?'\n\nRaldoron was on the wall walk over the gate. He cast his eye across the sweep of the battle. Only a fraction of the invasion force had made it to Terra alive, but the Warmaster had managed to land millions of men even so. They surged through the wreckage of their transports, a black tide of hatred, battering at the ramparts of the outworks.\n\nAircraft roared over the gate. Cannons clattered at them.\n\n'We still have enemy fighters and bombers making it within the aegis envelope,' said Raldoron. 'The shielding here has taken severe damage. I have contacted the Adeptus Mechanicus to request repair teams be sent, but many of the projection discs are destroyed, and I do not know if they will be able to accomplish much. Over the Palace, the aegis is holding, but out here, past the foot of the walls, it won't be long until it fails.'\n\nRaldoron turned his gaze towards that part of the battlefield where the enemy had broken through.\n\n'Traitor army units have taken up position outside sector sixteen. We cannot let them dig in. I recommend immediate purgation fire from the wall defences.'\n\n'I concur,' said Thane.\n\nRaldoron paused while three more fighters screamed overhead, firing on each other, too loud for his auto-senses to screen out.\n\n'I will send the order,' said Raldoron, when they were past. 'Let this be on my conscience, as commander of the Helios section, Daylight Wall.'\n\n'Then I shall return to my duties here,' said Thane. 'My thanks, brother.'\n\nA macro cannon volley got through the peripheral shielding, slamming into the plain just beyond the outworks and killing hundreds of traitors. It wouldn't be too long before the enemy could breach the voids more reliably, and rain death down on the fortifications directly. Raldoron doubted the aegis would fail completely for some time, but it had already been weakened. Eventually, they were going to have to trust in Lord Dorn's walls alone.\n\nRaldoron called his aides to him, and had them relay his command that the Palace open fire on the outworks. The bombardment would cost loyal lives, but from up there on the wall, he could see there was no viable alternative short of sending out the Legiones Astartes, and that had been expressly forbidden.\n\nThe guns were opening up as he opened channels to the other captains under his command. His kind were not made to sit and wait behind walls, and he found the duty onerous. Twenty companies, Imperial Fists as well as his own Blood Angels, looked to him for guidance, his purview covering a two hundred-kilometre stretch of the Daylight Wall.\n\nHe was in the process of hunting one of his subordinates out through a tangle of vox-relays, when one of his aides shouted out a warning.\n\n'Attack run!'\n\nA void fighter was coming in at a steep dive straight for the Helios Gate. As Raldoron looked up, its cannons fired. Rockcrete burst in high cones as it strafed the wall walk. The First Captain flung himself out of the way, his battleplate ringing off the parapet as he hit the ground. The enemy fighter made a single pass and sped off southwards, loyal interceptors in hot pursuit.\n\nRaldoron clambered to his feet, armour motors grinding. His two aides were dead, their armour shattered and the bodies inside pulverised by direct autocannon hits. The blood stirred his emotions, and he stared at it for too long.\n\nHe tore his eyes away, looking instead towards the third line of the 16th outwork section, now under fire from the Palace walls. Piece by piece, they would lose ground. It was happening faster than he had hoped. He could move inside, but he refused to hide in the Helios command centre, when he could see the battle far better from the walls.\n\nHe opened a vox-channel to his Chapter command cadre.\n\n'This is First Captain Raldoron,' he said. 'I require a new nuncio vox-specialist and logistician immediately at my position.'\n\nKatsuhiro of the Kushtun Naganda.\n\nIn support of betrayal\n\nI am Alpharius\n\nNot in vain\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, contested zone, 25th of Secundus\n\nMyzmadra found it easy enough to slip away from the skirmish down the third line towards the overrun zone. The attack was coming to a close, and a heavy quiet took hold where the roar of distant voices and munitions blended into an avalanche rumble, threatening but far away. Shouts were coming from the second line, so she kept to the ramparts of the third, out of sight in the drifting smoke. She was more than capable of moving unseen when occasion required.\n\nExplosion flash lit up the devastation, the harsh light more disorienting than illuminating. Dead abhumans lay strewn across the killing zone between the third and second lines, their bestial faces still twisted with the rage of battle. She almost pitied them; she knew little of their kind, but what she did told a sorry tale of a rejected human offshoot, not quite debased enough to kill out of hand, but too different to be afforded dignity. The rank chemical smells of frenzon and 'slaught rose from them, the foam around their muzzles another telltale sign of combat drug administration, but she doubted they needed much encouragement to kill. The Imperium promised peace and advancement for all mankind, except for those it didn't. Creatures like these lived lives of abject misery.\n\nLies upon lies.\n\nThe baseline human corpses she saw were of both loyalists and traitors, not that those terms meant anything to her. Allegiance hadn't spared either side the savagery of the abhumans. Both traitor and loyalist had been ripped into, and showed signs of cannibalism.\n\nShe passed through a platoon of dead traitor soldiers. On the line, the loyalists spoke of scum and dregs, but despite the symbols of dark gods sprayed onto their equipment and the fetishes hanging from their kit, these were professionals from once loyal regiments. Scum wouldn't undertake such a suicide mission; you needed discipline for that kind of sacrifice. You needed belief in the cause.\n\nActivity on the second line was increasing, risking her discovery, so she skidded down the outer face of the rampart. A shell had come down at the foot of the wall, laying out men and body parts in a pattern of gory regularity. Her eyes caught on the stock of a lasgun on the fringes of the crater. Upon it was etched a crude octed, painted red with recent blood.\n\nThe icon was a blasphemy in a world that was supposed to be beyond such things. Myzmadra didn't believe in Horus' cause. He was a puppet of awful powers. She didn't think the Alpha Legion believed in him either, though they hid their purpose behind a hedge of deceit. The Alpha Legion could be trusted to be untrustworthy, that was all. It was enough. In her experience, that was about as much assurance as any human being could get about anything.\n\nAfter the Battle of Pluto, before the Legion had cast her and Ashul back out into the void, she'd prodded at the legionaries. Myzmadra wasn't likeable, but she was good at getting people to talk. Legionaries, however, were not people. She'd exerted herself, she really had, asking why they fought and received the same answer she always did, if she got any answer at all.\n\nFor the Emperor.\n\nThey said that to her over and over again. Even when their actions could only be construed as being directly contrary to the Imperium's survival.\n\nFor the Emperor.\n\nShe'd heard that maybe a dozen times, which was a lot, coming from so secretive a group.\n\nMaybe she was being foolish, but she chose to believe it.\n\nHer thoughts went back to the first time she'd heard it.\n\n'For the Emperor.' He'd said that to her, when she was recruited. Alpharius, he said his name was, but they all said they were him. Was he Alpharius? Was he the warrior who fought at Pluto, truly? Maybe they all were Alpharius. There were stranger things in the universe now than a Legion of clones.\n\nHow long ago was it? A decade? Fifteen years? Time was one of those bedrocks "}
{"text":"up.\n\nMaybe she was being foolish, but she chose to believe it.\n\nHer thoughts went back to the first time she'd heard it.\n\n'For the Emperor.' He'd said that to her, when she was recruited. Alpharius, he said his name was, but they all said they were him. Was he Alpharius? Was he the warrior who fought at Pluto, truly? Maybe they all were Alpharius. There were stranger things in the universe now than a Legion of clones.\n\nHow long ago was it? A decade? Fifteen years? Time was one of those bedrocks of civilisation that didn't have anything sensible to say once you interrogated it. Time was like money, a convenient, mutually agreed fiction. It wasn't real, not in the way people thought. It was a human construct. A collective delusion.\n\nNobody liked to hear things like that. When she was young, she'd said that and similar once too often. Finding her opinions unwelcome, she'd tried to go as far away from humanity as possible, fetching up in the back end of nowhere on a planet that was itself at the back end of nowhere, cosmically speaking. Out there, in the dry maquis, there was nothing to do but scratch a living and drink. She did the former desultorily, and the latter with great enthusiasm.\n\nShe still didn't know why she'd been chosen.\n\nOne night, exactly when was not important enough to remember, she returned from the local taverna to find a stranger in her tatty hab-module. There were precisely one hundred and fifty-nine people in her village and the scorched hills around about it. As soon as she saw the silhouette of her visitor in the dark of her living quarters, she knew he was not one of them, primarily because none of her neighbours were warriors of the Legiones Astartes. He was big, even for one of their breed, perched precariously on one of her chairs. His knees were too far off the ground to go under the table, and he had arranged it so it was in front of him, with the only other chair she owned set aside for her to sit upon. Despite his incongruous size, he somehow contrived to be unobtrusive, a trick all the Legion seemed to have.\n\nIntelligent eyes glinted in the depths of a camouflage hood. Throughout their entire meeting, he did not take it down.\n\n'Lydia Myzmadra,' he stated. He didn't ask. She had her gun in her hand before he could blink. That seemed to entertain him.\n\n'Shoot me if you like,' he said. 'If you do, you will never know why you came home to find me in your hovel.' He looked around, finding great amusement in the piles of dirty clothes and the unwashed utensils spilling from the sink. 'A reduction in circumstances, for a woman of your background. I doubt your family would be impressed with your living arrangements.'\n\n'My family's none of your damned business,' she said. She waved the gun barrel at the door. 'Out,' she said.\n\nHe remained where he sat. His smile hardened, just a little. 'Let me rephrase what I was saying before. You can try to shoot me. I will kill you.'\n\n'Who are you?' she said.\n\n'I am Alpharius,' he said.\n\nHer gun lowered a fraction. 'The twentieth primarch? Don't be ridiculous.'\n\n'Whether you believe me or not is irrelevant, it is how you will address me,' he said. 'Otherwise \"my lord\" will do.'\n\nCould it have been him? So many of the Legion looked like their genesire.\n\n'What do you want with me?' she said.\n\n'Straight to the meat of the matter.' He appeared pleased. 'My Legion likes people like you, Lydia.'\n\n'Nobody calls me that,' she said. 'Not ever.'\n\n'We like competent people. We like people who get things done. People we might use.'\n\n'Who says I want using?' she said.\n\n'Please,' he said. He held out an enormous hand. The skin tone was unusual, coppery to the point of metallic. 'Sit.' Despite his politeness, it was not a request. She obliged, but kept her gun up.\n\n'I am looking for someone Terran-born, but who is not too attached. Someone who believes in what the Emperor is doing, but not the way it is being done. Someone who suspects that things are not what they have been told.'\n\n'What are you talking about?'\n\n'You're not frightened, are you?' said Alpharius. Once more, he was pleased. 'The psychological effect of the presence of legionaries on some mortals can be overwhelming. It's worse for we primarchs - I've seen people piss themselves when I walk in the room. But you don't care, do you? You'd shoot me, right now, if you didn't want to know why I was here, and you see my threat is good, that you'll die if you try, so you're not rash. You don't panic. That's good. That's very good.'\n\n'Get to the point, or get out of my house.'\n\nWhite teeth grinned in the shadow of his hood. 'Very well. The Imperium is doomed. Horus Lupercal, the Warmaster, will fall under the sway of forgotten gods and betray the Emperor. This will happen in a few years. The fate of the galaxy and everything within it is at stake.'\n\nShe snorted. 'Nonsense. Is this some kind of test?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'You're going to stop him then?'\n\n'Not exactly. If Horus loses,' said the man who called himself Alpharius, 'the Imperium will be crippled. It will allow these gods to prosper, to the extent that they will eventually overthrow the laws of reality, leading to a catastrophic blending of the warp with the material universe.'\n\n'Surely that would happen if he won?'\n\n'We have... sources that tell a different story. Should Horus win, humanity will burn itself out in an orgy of violence, fatally weakening these entities, these gods.' He made a face at the word. 'Please be aware I use the term loosely. Eventually, it will allow for their destruction, saving all reality. The Emperor has known of these things since the beginning.'\n\n'He lied?' she said. She wasn't surprised.\n\n'Perhaps with good reason,' said Alpharius with a shrug. 'His design is to keep mankind safe. The primarchs, Unity, the Imperium, all of that, but He will not succeed. In trying He will make the problem worse. Apocalyptically so.'\n\n'If you know this now, why don't you stop Horus? Why don't you warn the Emperor?'\n\n'The events cannot be stopped. Even if they could, the result would be the same, or similar - they would happen a few thousand years later, and that is the end of the universe. In simple terms,' he added.\n\nShe waved her gun at him. 'What's this got to do with me?'\n\n'We need people to help us. I would like you to help me.'\n\n'Marvellous. Assuming this is all true, why would you tell me? How do I know you're not lying?'\n\nAlpharius shifted. The chair, comically small under him, creaked dangerously.\n\n'Most of the people I speak to don't hear the truth. Some of them believe we are working against the Emperor because we wish to rebel, or that we hate Him, and because they hate Him and wish to rebel themselves they are only too glad to join us. We tell people what they need to hear. Everyone has a lever. For most, it comes down to money or power, or a combination of them. Most people are simple. But someone like you craves neither money nor power. You had both, and walked away from them. Only the truth will do for you. You want to mean something, Lydia Myzmadra. I am offering you the chance to spend your life in pursuit of the worthiest cause of all - the protection of...' He paused, and smiled, as if they were sharing a private joke. 'Of everything,' he concluded.\n\nShe laughed at him.\n\n'Let me put this another way, Myzmadra,' he said. 'You are alone, destitute and in danger. You are very far from home. The unification of humanity passes people like you by. You are the kind of person who looks in at society from the outside, never part of the group, always ill at ease, because you can see how foolish other people are, how quickly they are duped, how fast they take on beliefs they know to be false in order to construct a comfortable reality for themselves. You know instinctively how much they overestimate their understanding of the world. You sneer at their optimism, because you feel only despair. You laugh at their troubles, for their woes are small and pathetic when set against the unfeeling sweep of time. You condemn them for their friendships, because you see betrayal in every smile.' He leaned forwards. 'But what really hurts you, is that you long to be like them, for you know you are no better, that your intelligence might be greater, but ultimately it is as limited as theirs. You know enough to know you know nothing, so you yearn for their society, their delusions and their ignorance. You are tormented, because you understand too much, but comprehend far too little.'\n\n'Riddles and lies,' she snorted.\n\n'It is the Emperor who lied. Calculatedly, and regrettably.'\n\nHe was right. She despised her race. She supposed that he expected her to blanch and stammer, and deny it all, or become angry. Once she might have done, but she was too jaded for all that. Not very much later after their meeting, she realised had she evinced any one of those reactions, she would have died at that table.\n\n'And your point is?' she said. With her free hand, she picked a splinter from the wood. Her sharp fingernails were perfectly manicured even then, out there, in that hole. 'I'm not the first woman to look at the apish herds of humanity and hate them for what they are, or to hate myself for being one of them. I came to terms with it.'\n\nThe stranger looked around her hovel with a smile on his copper face. 'It seems you have. You've done very well,' he said sarcastically.\n\n'What does it matter to you?' she said. 'Space Marines aren't renowned for their psychological insight.'\n\n'Contrary to popular belief, we weren't all made the same,' he said. His smile widened. 'Our Legion looks for people with particular qualities. You have them in abundance.'\n\nShe raised an eyebrow at that.\n\n'Contrary to popular belief,' he repeated the words so exactly it could have been a recording, 'the Legions have different roles to play. Ours was designed for intelligence and counter-intelligence roles. Infiltration, subversion and propaganda - all the dirty, dark sides of human interaction."}
{"text":"'Contrary to popular belief, we weren't all made the same,' he said. His smile widened. 'Our Legion looks for people with particular qualities. You have them in abundance.'\n\nShe raised an eyebrow at that.\n\n'Contrary to popular belief,' he repeated the words so exactly it could have been a recording, 'the Legions have different roles to play. Ours was designed for intelligence and counter-intelligence roles. Infiltration, subversion and propaganda - all the dirty, dark sides of human interaction. Other Legions pull triggers, we pull levers. Illusion,' he said mockingly, waggling his fingers in front of his face. 'Misdirection.'\n\nHe looked down. Her gaze followed his unconsciously.\n\nA pistol had appeared on the table between them. Small for him, it would have required both her hands to hold it steady. It wasn't one of the inelegant signature weapons of the Legiones Astartes, the blocky, barking death dealers they bore. It wasn't a boltgun, but a slender, alien thing. It looked quiet.\n\nDetails. It was deadly whatever it was, and he didn't need it. She could have run, right then. Fast as she was, she wouldn't have made it out of the room before he grabbed her and broke her neck. She wondered if he'd enjoy it, or if he'd be disappointed in her, or if her death might be used in some way, to make a point to someone else in some other place.\n\n'So,' she said. 'Tell me if I understand correctly. The Emperor's most loyal son is going to rebel, having fallen under the sway of gods we've all been carefully taught don't exist, and you want to help him to win in order to deny said, non-existent ancient gods the opportunity to overrun all of existence.'\n\n'That leaves out a lot of the nuance, but that is the basics of it, yes,' he said.\n\n'And this will result in the extinction of mankind?'\n\n'Sadly, but certainly.'\n\n'So if I act on your behalf, I will die,' she said.\n\n'If you choose not to, you will die in the next few minutes. If you join us, you will die eventually, but I promise you will not die in vain. Nobody that serves us does.'\n\n'Are you rebels?' she asked, incredulously.\n\n'No,' he said plainly. 'I wish there was another way. Either humanity dies now, and the universe is saved, or it dies later, and every living, breathing, thinking thing that exists in this reality will perish in torment.'\n\n'Then why would you do this?' she asked, genuinely curious; although her death might have been seconds away, it was worth knowing, just for a moment.\n\n'There are other powers in the world besides these gods. They are not exactly benevolent, but they are not evil.'\n\n'That's not an answer,' she said. 'Why do you do it?'\n\n'For the Emperor,' he said simply.\n\nThat conversation was the most she had ever heard any one of them say.\n\nShe lifted her gaze from the octed carved into the gunstock. Above the clouds, night was falling; under them darkness was kept at bay by the bombardment. The world was orange from the shelling of the breached outwork sector. The aegis shone a lurid purple. Hugging the shadows, she made her way to her destination at the very edge of the zone being fired on by the walls.\n\nThere was a turret half a kilometre on, a small version of the outwork bastions that were themselves small versions of the Palace towers. Dorn's fortifications had a fractal nature, each part a smaller reproduction of the greater parts, all interlocking, covering and supporting each other. From this simplicity of design arose complexity of defence.\n\nThere were four dead officers in the turret command centre. Their suite of rugged equipment was functioning, but offline, the screens for the cogitators blue fuzzes. Myzmadra was skilled with such devices, and soon had them dancing to her tune. She was sifting through the dataloom when a noise outside had her facing the door, a looted laspistol in her hand.\n\n'I thought I'd find you here,' said Ashul. He stepped through the door, his gun cradled in the crook of his arm. He carried it as if he'd always had it, as if it were a child. 'Did you find anything useful?'\n\nShe nodded, keyed the cogitator off then put several shots through it. 'I've found tunnels under the bastions. They present opportunities.'\n\n'Opportunities worth dying over? You were lucky. Chances were that you'd be shelled by Dorn before you got here.'\n\n'We have to seize what resources we have. It's worth a little risk.' She shook her head. 'All this care and attention the primarch Dorn goes to, and these fools have all the data I need copied onto their unit cogitator.' She went through the bodies, checking jewellery and pockets for cypher keys and signum identifiers. 'Anyone could have found it.'\n\n'Anyone did,' said Ashul. 'I thought we were done with this,' he added after a pause. 'After Pluto. When they sent us back. I thought, what more could they possibly want from us?'\n\n'You're never done, Ashul,' she said. She pocketed an ornate ring and a data wand. 'Not with them.'\n\n'The name's Doromek currently, better use it,' Ashul said absently. He looked out the door. 'There will be men here soon. They're regarrisoning this section now the enemy have been forced back. You need to leave. It'll raise awkward questions if you're found here, and you'll be executed if they find those keys on you.'\n\n'Let me worry about that,' she said. 'It's you that should leave.'\n\nHe shook his head. 'I'm supposed to be here. I'm acting lieutenant. I volunteered to scout ahead, on account of my proven skill set.' He smiled humourlessly. 'It is my sworn mission to retake this turret. I count it accomplished.'\n\nShe scowled at his joking. 'You're making too much of a show of yourself, and you're too close to that trooper.'\n\n'Katsuhiro? He's harmless. We might need him, and others. You said it, we have to make use of the resources we have, and we don't have very many right now.'\n\nShe gave him a black look. 'When you've finished playing hail fellow well met, why don't we see about doing what we're supposed to be doing?'\n\n'I get a bit tired of hanging back all the time,' said Ashul. 'And it's working. I'm in now. We'll find life a lot easier if I've got influence. Jainan listens to me. He needs me.'\n\n'You should stop it. You're losing focus. You're drawing attention to yourself.'\n\nAshul shrugged. 'Attention sometimes works.'\n\n'Be careful.'\n\n'We're going to die,' he said.\n\nMyzmadra gave him a tight nod.\n\n'But not in vain,' she said.\n\nRage and decay\n\nFirst Captain\n\nSword arm\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Lunar orbit, 8th of Tertius\n\n'Dorn defies us! The walls should be broken, the streets red with blood. Attack, attack, we must attack!' Angron's growls rang across Lupercal's court. Drool ran from his snarl, vanishing into nothing as it fell outside the imaging field.\n\n'Walls cannot be shouted down,' Perturabo said, his voice the ringing of a leaden bell. 'You have lost your patience with your sanity.'\n\n'He's not insane,' said Fulgrim sweetly. 'Are you, dear brother?'\n\n'Do not allow this snake to address me!' roared Angron.\n\n'Cease your yapping, hound,' said Perturabo. 'This is a gathering of intellect, not animals.'\n\n'Speak with me in person and we shall see who is silenced first!' roared Angron.\n\n'I bested you before, and will do so again,' said Perturabo levelly.\n\nAngron let out a howl of outrage that shook the air.\n\nAbaddon glanced at his genefather's empty throne. Horus was late to the meeting.\n\n'For the Warmaster's sake, Ezekyle,' hissed Kibre. 'Do something.'\n\n'Someone has to,' said Aximand, as the primarchs goaded each other. He made to step forward.\n\nAbaddon grabbed his brother by the arm. He shook his head, his face a warning. Aximand shrugged and stepped back.\n\n'I'll do it.'\n\n'Suit yourself,' Aximand said.\n\nAbaddon stepped forward, but did not speak. He stood in the midst of the primarchs and disdainfully watched their bickering.\n\n'Oh, Angron, my dear brother, your howling grows tiresome,' said Fulgrim. 'Where is Horus?' He appealed to the room. 'If anyone can get Angron to quieten, it is he.'\n\nAngron sneered. 'Nothing is more important than-'\n\n'Do be quiet, Angron,' said Fulgrim. 'There's a good fellow.'\n\nFor a moment Angron stared, wide-eyed with affront, then his face swelled with apoplexy, and he screamed in anger. 'I will not be quiet! I am the chosen of Khorne! You will heed me. You will-'\n\n'I have heard enough. Cut Lord Angron's audio-feed,' Abaddon said. Adepts of the True Mechanicum working in the background complied. The Red Angel was left a silent, raging ghost.\n\n'Look at how weak you have become,' Abaddon said in disgust. 'Lord Perturabo, you sit at the edge of the system pronouncing your genius and implying no one heeds you. This behaviour is not worthy of you.'\n\n'Do not provoke me, First Captain.'\n\n'Be quiet a minute, or you will find yourself further goaded,' Abaddon snarled. 'You, Fulgrim, and you, Angron, have whored yourselves out to the gods in the warp.'\n\nAngron raged in silence. Fulgrim tittered girlishly. Abaddon glared at him. Fulgrim pulled a lewd face.\n\n'Where is your majesty, where is your purpose? We stand at the threshold of victory, and you threaten everything with your bickering,' said Abaddon. 'You posture, you rage, you question your Warmaster's orders. It is he who has brought you here. It is he who has ensured your power grows. It is he who made all of this possible. I have seen the brats of decadent nobles behave with more decorum and sensibility.'\n\nFulgrim clapped all four of his hands slowly. 'So brave, so noble,' he mocked. 'So bold. The son grows while the father fades. How proud of you he must be.' Fulgrim leaned closer to the lens capturing his image. 'But careful now, little Ezekyle,' he purred dangerously. 'You are mighty, but you play in the court of the gods. You cannot murder us as you did your birth father. You do not have the stakes to wager in this game. Back away, small man, and we might let you live.'\n\n'Do you think Horus would allow you to kill me?' Abaddon said, pacing around the circle of hololithic phantoms. 'He cou"}
{"text":"grows while the father fades. How proud of you he must be.' Fulgrim leaned closer to the lens capturing his image. 'But careful now, little Ezekyle,' he purred dangerously. 'You are mighty, but you play in the court of the gods. You cannot murder us as you did your birth father. You do not have the stakes to wager in this game. Back away, small man, and we might let you live.'\n\n'Do you think Horus would allow you to kill me?' Abaddon said, pacing around the circle of hololithic phantoms. 'He could obliterate you all, any one of you, utterly. You are slaves to your passions where you are not slaves to your gods. Horus is above you, and he is above the entities you worship.'\n\n'Our brother would not put the life of his son before that of his brothers,' said Perturabo. 'You go too far.'\n\n'Tell that to Lord Lorgar,' said Abaddon. 'Banished, lucky that Horus did not tear him limb from limb. Be careful that you do not further test my father's patience - it is not inexhaustible.'\n\n'Well said,' Aximand muttered under his breath.\n\n'Abaddon. Never speak to me in that way again,' warned Perturabo. 'I am not as indulgent as my brother.'\n\n'And nor am I,' said Fulgrim.\n\nThe door to the court opened and Horus strode in, more alive and vibrant than he had seemed the last time, Abaddon thought.\n\n'Captain Abaddon is correct,' said Horus. 'You disgrace yourselves.' The court trembled at his words. 'Listen to my chosen son as you would to me.' He walked to the centre of the room and rested one of his great talons on Abaddon's shoulder. 'He is my sword arm.'\n\n'What kept you, brother?' asked Fulgrim. 'Why do you call us here and keep us waiting?'\n\n'I commune with the powers who guide my hand, and strive to ensure our victory in their realm as in this. They say this, that Abaddon is right! You gather power to yourselves and become pathetic for its excesses. Cease your arguments, or face the punishment of your patrons.'\n\nFulgrim's never-still form flickered. For an instant his perfect, monstrous face was transformed into a mask of terror, then the image blinked, and his mocking smile returned.\n\nHorus paced up to his throne, the Mournival making way for him. His huge bulk shook the court, and he sat. 'Angron,' he said to his brother's image. 'Can you hold your peace for a few moments?'\n\nAngron snarled silently, but nodded.\n\n'Return his voice to him,' Horus commanded. 'You may speak, favoured of Khorne.'\n\n'Brother,' said Angron, remaining calm only by dint of the most immense effort. 'Why do we not attack?'\n\n'Events proceed as planned,' said Horus. 'I am in control of our strategy. Do you not trust me?'\n\nHorus' unnatural charisma reached across the void, dominating his brother. Angron looked aside in furious shame.\n\n'Yes, my Warmaster.'\n\nHorus swept his gaze around his siblings' images. 'The time has come to enact the second phase of the invasion. Ambassadress Sota-Nul, attend us.'\n\nA hololith unlike the others manifested beneath the apex of the dome. Technology blended with warp magic rendered Sota-Nul in perfect verisimilitude that exceeded even the projections of Magnus. Around her was a constellation of eight smaller images, subsidiary to hers, though each also perfect, and presenting the full gamut of Mechanicum insanity. Every one of these nine tech-adepts had begun life as human beings; now few of them remotely resembled their original form. They had eyes of glass, tentacles, grossly enhanced bodies, multiple arms with tools for hands, exposed innards of glowing glass tubes, all swathed in the black of the New Mechanicum.\n\nThin lines of silver light linked them into an emblem akin to a compass rose: the octed of Chaos.\n\n'We are the nine,' they intoned, their mixed voices of warbles, twittering databursts and synthesised humanity a jarring electronic chorus. 'Nul, Protos, Duos, Tre, Tessera, Pent, Ex, Epta and Oct.'\n\n'No Fabricator General, brother?' Perturabo asked, a sly tone entering his doleful voice.\n\n'Kelbor-Hal is a loyal and trusted ally,' said Horus. 'But Sota-Nul served me well while the Lord of the Mechanicum was penned on Mars. Her acolytes have delivered many marvels to me. Sota-Nul heralded my armies and successfully enjoined several forge worlds to side with us against the slave master of Terra. Her warp tech eases our communications, and reduced our reliance on the cursed Erebus' warp flasks. Ardim Protos found a way to bind the souls of daemons to our Titans. Axmar Tre uncovered the archeotech hoard of Periminus. Each one of them has exceeded my demands. Each one of them is a magos of rare talent. Kelbor-Hal shall oversee the ground operations of the forces of Mars, as is his right, but it is to Sota-Nul we turn now to ensure the next phase of the invasion is successful. The Nine Disciples will ensure our victory is swifter and sweeter than it could otherwise be.\n\n'The aegis is sufficiently weakened to permit a larger assault to begin,' Horus continued, addressing the whole room. 'Our attack craft destroy more of their defensive batteries with each sortie. The numbers of their own defence squadrons dwindle with the hour. The efficacy of the Palace outworks is broken. All over Terra, our loyal armies conquer and burn. Now we must take the fight to the walls, and open the way for our allies from the empyrean. Then, Angron.' Horus extended a claw at his brother. 'Then you may set foot on the soil of Terra, as may you, Fulgrim. Sota-Nul's acolytes will land their arks upon the surface as eight points of the octed. We shall begin the work of besieging the Palace in earnest. Siege camps shall be established, the arks will be fortresses to oppose the walls. Under their protection, the siege masters of the Mechanicum will establish defences and deploy their engines to break the fortifications.'\n\nPerturabo growled with outrage. 'That is my purpose! You said that I would be given the honour of breaking Dorn's fortress. You do not listen to me, brother. You dismiss my ideas. You do not let me attack the sun of Sol itself to bring this to a speedy conclusion, or to break Terra into rubble. You wave away my plans of planetary Exterminatus. You keep me at arm's length, and now this insult? Dorn's humbling is mine to accomplish!' His famed temper boiled quickly once provoked, and before he had finished he was shouting.\n\n'I did,' said the Warmaster evenly. 'I meant what I said. You will have your turn, Lord of Iron. The Mechanicum will prepare the ground for your Legion, so that your genius may be set to work with minimal distraction. Your task on the system fringe is done. Return now. Begin your plans for the contravallation of the Palace.'\n\nPerturabo calmed, reassuming his dour manner like iron plunged into a quenching barrel.\n\n'I have my plans prepared already,' said Perturabo pettishly. 'Dorn cannot stand before me.'\n\n'When will the Legions land?' said Angron.\n\n'My orders remain as they were. No Space Marine is to set foot on Terra yet,' said Horus.\n\n'A legionary attack will draw out the defenders,' wheedled Fulgrim. 'Let my children out to play, most lordly brother. We can destroy at will, and weaken the Palace defences. I am bored!'\n\n'I have a role for you. One you will enjoy. Like all the greatest pleasures, it must be deferred a while. Until then, the bombardment continues,' said Horus. 'If we feed our legionaries into the fire piecemeal, we will all burn. The attacks on the walls must be complete, total and overwhelming.'\n\n'What of my Neverborn legions?' said Angron. 'What of this witch's hex that keeps me from battle?'\n\nZardu Layak stepped forwards.\n\n'Not him! Hold your tongue, priest. Where is Lord Magnus?' Angron bellowed.\n\n'Yes, Magnus. We would take his word on this subject, not that of this... groveller,' said Perturabo dismissively.\n\n'Let Layak speak,' Horus commanded.\n\nThe primarchs fell to grudging quiet.\n\n'The Emperor shields Terra,' said Layak. 'But He cannot do so forever. Blood flows in such torrents upon the Throneworld that it calls across the barrier between the warp and the material realm. Souls flee their bodies in crowds, every one wearing at the fabric of space and time.' He rubbed his fingers together. 'Each death sees the servants of the Pantheon push harder on the veil. When the weight of slaughter is great enough, then they will be called through in their multitudes. By my god-granted vision I see vast legions of the Neverborn ready to take to the field. The door is creaking. The latch rattles. We lack but a key.'\n\nPerturabo was the first to grasp the strategy, and nodded in understanding. 'If father's dogs attack the siege camps, they will spill more blood, and aid the coming of your allies. If they do not, then the Mechanicum may raise engines by the dozen to break the walls. Dorn will see this, but he will have no choice.' A rare smile broke across Perturabo's features. 'He will have to fight it either way, and give you victory whatever his choice is. A bridgehead of blood!' To his brothers' amazement, he began to laugh.\n\n'Then I shall land first!' said Angron enthusiastically. 'I shall come at them, and cleave their bodies!'\n\n'You will not,' said another. A familiar voice, a quiet, rasping, sullen growl, but changed, thickened with phlegm. 'I claimed the task. My Legion will be first to attack the walls, as I pledged to the Warmaster months ago.'\n\nMortarion, primarch of the Death Guard, entered through the grand doors of Lupercal's court. This was not Mortarion as his brothers remembered him. He was changed, like Angron, Fulgrim and Magnus, lifted by the Pantheon and given new form. Always among the tallest of the primarchs, he had grown further, his famine-spare frame pushed to great height. Tattered moth's wings furled on his back. The scythe Silence had grown with its master, become as long as a vox-transmission pole. Mortarion appeared sickly, his face scarred by disease and his eyes milky with cataracts. Fluid wept from craters in his dirty armour, while all around him swirled a dense, s"}
{"text":"anged, like Angron, Fulgrim and Magnus, lifted by the Pantheon and given new form. Always among the tallest of the primarchs, he had grown further, his famine-spare frame pushed to great height. Tattered moth's wings furled on his back. The scythe Silence had grown with its master, become as long as a vox-transmission pole. Mortarion appeared sickly, his face scarred by disease and his eyes milky with cataracts. Fluid wept from craters in his dirty armour, while all around him swirled a dense, stinking fog.\n\nWhere he passed the door guard, Abaddon's Justaerin fell heavily. Black fluid leaked from perished seals and bloody phlegm coughed from their breathing grilles. The sounds of armour closing itself against the environment filled the room, but it did no good. The Terminators suffered in the grip of sickness. Mortarion continued forwards, felling Horus' elite by his very presence.\n\n'Back away from him!' Abaddon commanded. 'Seal the room!'\n\nAtmospheric cyclers ceased turning. Machines bleeped out tones of compliance. Still the Lord of Death marched forwards. Kibre began to cough behind his mask. Aximand took several steps back, his face greening as he fumbled on his helm. Layak dropped to his knees, singing praise in the ear-burning tongue of his worship, but he too struggled to breathe Mortarion's miasma. Of them all, only Horus, Tormageddon and Abaddon were left unaffected. A stench wreathed the Lord of Death that defied any kind of description. Human senses lacked the capacity to experience it in fullness. So foul, so pungent with rot and sickly life was it, that it triggered Abaddon's omophagea, and he tasted a bouquet of miseries sublime in their variety. It shocked him to his soul that he could breathe. He looked to the others choking on Mortarion's foetor, and yet when the primarch approached Abaddon, he inhaled easily, though the stench appalled him.\n\nMortarion stopped a few feet from his brother's throne. Pearlescent eyes stared down into brown, both afire with inner power that was not of the material realm. His breathing was laboured, rattling in his lungs so that each exhalation sounded like his last. Puffs of reeking corpse-gas jetted from Mortarion's mask.\n\nAximand and Kibre dragged themselves back, behind the throne, crawling as far as they could from the corrupted primarch. Retching grated from Kibre's voxmitter as he vomited into his helmet. Aximand pulled himself into a corner, managed to roll onto his back, and lay there stupefied.\n\nThe Lord of Death slammed the ferrule of Silence upon the floor hard.\n\n'My Warmaster, I heed your call.'\n\nWith those words he knelt. The height his transformation had bestowed meant that he was as tall as the seated Warmaster even when he bowed.\n\nAbaddon suppressed a sneer. Such weakness. The Lord of Death had traded his position as a lord of men to become a slave of the gods.\n\nAngron paced in and out of the field of view of his holo-emitter. Fulgrim giggled. Perturabo glared.\n\n'My brother, we welcome you,' said Horus. 'Rise.'\n\nBones popped as the Lord of Death stood again. 'I come to fulfil my promise and lead the assault upon the Palace.' His voice, once a pure bass, was a hoarse whisper.\n\n'You are greatly gifted by our patrons,' Horus said, taking in his brother's transformation. 'You will not be able to set foot upon Terra.'\n\n'I have patience. My sons will go before me to prepare the way. They are ready,' said Mortarion. 'We bring new weapons for an old war. My warriors have transcended the limitations of mortality. Nothing can harm them, while I have seven plagues for you to unleash upon Terra. Let the unseen soldiers of bacillus and virus reap the foe, and add their deaths to the total, and when the tally pleases Father Nurgle, then I shall descend to the Palace, and take my vengeance upon the False Emperor.'\n\n'Do you see?' said Horus. 'You all must wait, but not for long.' He raised his voice to address them all, but stared Angron in the eye. 'The second phase of the invasion begins tonight. Once the Mechanicum begin the construction of their siege engines, then Mortarion's Legion shall be given the honour of being first upon Terra.'\n\n'No!' shouted Angron. 'No! It should be me!'\n\n'It is my will,' said Horus, 'that the Death Guard attack first.'\n\nA new pattern\n\nThe bombardment continues\n\nSea of mud\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 1st-13th of Tertius\n\nA new pattern was set. For two weeks after the first landing, the enemy attacks followed the same routine. Swarms of enemy bombers and fighters descended from orbit while the fleet pounded the void shield periphery. Somehow, the exact mechanism was beyond Katsuhiro, the enemy got through, and while the ships in orbit hurled their fury at the ground, the attack craft bombed and strafed everything they could. Every attack saw the aegis lose efficacy, so that each successful raid inflicted more damage. The shields over the Palace proper were inviolable; not so those around the edges. The trench lines took a pounding. Kilometres of works were obliterated, along with the men and women guarding them. The nature of the landscape before the Daylight Wall was transformed. The perfect flatness of planed away mountains was upheaved, and new peaks and declivities carved by orbital attack. Quakes shook the ground as the planetary crust was disturbed.\n\nAll the while, the enemy landed more of his troops. They came down as regular as the tides, rising up across the twisted landscape to break against the fortifications in spumes of blood. Though it was cold at such an altitude, the stink of spoiling flesh infiltrated everything.\n\nThe sun was gone, hidden by clouds of ash black as the sackcloth of myth. Winds laden with corpse dust blew from far-off cities. When the visibility was good enough, they saw the funeral pyres of distant hives.\n\nSpring approached. The energy poured upon Terra caused a rapid warming, and snow turned to rain, even at the top of the world. Freezing mud clogged everything. Watered now by blood, the ground reeked horribly. The recruits fought in the clothes they had been drafted in. Nobody had anything to change into, nor was there water to wash. They became a dirty tribe, skulking behind their broken ramparts in the shadows of the Imperium's greatest fortress. Whatever their original skin colour they were remade in a single shade, caked in grey dust, red raw eyes startling in their filthy faces. Dust coated the whole world. Their clothes took on the hue of the ground, the fortifications, the downed ships. Everything was the same colour, everything smelled the same, living and dead.\n\nA lucky few were given coats to stave off the cold. Katsuhiro was not among them. To begin with he cut a hole in the middle of his blanket and wore it over his head as a poncho. He was never warm, even when the dead provided him with a padded jacket and trousers more suited to the climate. All were bloodied, and covered in excrement and rotting flesh. He had ceased to care. The cold was a worse killer than the guns. Battle was an infrequent peril. The cold was persistent.\n\nSometimes, it rained a toxic slime of pollutants from the burning cities. When it stopped, it left behind a metallic stink. Those who dared to drink the rain perished. Some tried for lack of water - thirst and hunger tormented them all - but after a time, some drank the water purposefully in order to escape. The rain brought other dangers. When tech-adepts and their robotic guardians paced the outworks on their inscrutable tasks, rad clickers rattled loud as hysterical ravens.\n\n'We're all dead,' Katsuhiro said, to no one in particular, one night when they tried to snatch some rest. His teeth wobbled in his gums. His hair was falling out. 'The question is when.'\n\n'That's the question asked the moment you were born, boy,' said Runnecan. He was one of the few Katsuhiro knew. He never learned many of the others' names. The conscripts hadn't made much of an effort to get to know one another. Death took most before familiarity could set in.\n\nSleep was only ever taken in snatches. Watches were four hours long. The enemy could come at any time, and did. Katsuhiro's time was filled with terrifying battles repulsing hordes of raving traitors, sheltering from the bombs, or engaged in backbreaking manual labour repairing the fortifications. Their efforts were overseen by tech magi, not the VII Legion as the conscripts hoped. At least sometimes the Martians lent their servitors or constructs to the task, though machines and cyborgs were just as likely to stand aloof while sentient men worked themselves to death.\n\nDaily, trench networks spidered out from nexuses like Bastion 16, bridging shattered sections of the original rampart system, or breaking up the kill-zone between the lines into defensible boxes. Sometimes they looped out into the plains to create deeper zones of defence for the bastions, or incorporate lumps of wreckage into the plan. Remarkably quickly, Lord Dorn's original circles of defence were remade, but as soon as they were done, the enemy did his work again. Trench lines were smoothed away, along with the lives of those within, and the digging started anew. Constant attacks broke up the stone of the geoformed plain, but although this eased the cutting of trenches, it churned flesh into the mix, making the work abominable. The walls of the networks were mortared by the remains of the dead.\n\nSuch things Katsuhiro saw in those two weeks. A lifetime's supply of fear and awe packed into a terrible winter. There were rains of debris that created an optimist's wealth of shooting stars; each wish Katsuhiro made was not to die. Sometimes, huge elements of sundered craft made it down from the heavens, or entire vessels cut burning wakes overhead. Once, a capital ship, its back broken, fell on the Palace. It appeared suddenly through the ash cloud, its burning lighting up the land. It plummeted towards the Palace centre, disappearing from view behind th"}
{"text":"ly of fear and awe packed into a terrible winter. There were rains of debris that created an optimist's wealth of shooting stars; each wish Katsuhiro made was not to die. Sometimes, huge elements of sundered craft made it down from the heavens, or entire vessels cut burning wakes overhead. Once, a capital ship, its back broken, fell on the Palace. It appeared suddenly through the ash cloud, its burning lighting up the land. It plummeted towards the Palace centre, disappearing from view behind the monumental walls moments before impact. They expected the worst. Men stood from their defences pointing. A voice called.\n\n'The Emperor has fallen!'\n\nThe detonation that followed could only confirm their fears. A brief sun rose in the west over the Palace, vaporising the Warmaster's falling ordnance and half blinding the conscripts with its brilliance. For a second a searing false day bled all colour away, then winked out, leaving after-images in the eyes of its witnesses, and the rumble of thermic shock rolling over Himalazia's distant peaks.\n\n'The Emperor!' someone whispered.\n\nFurther down the line people were weeping.\n\nYet the Palace guns fired on, punching glowing holes through the pall of ash smothering the sky, and the Warmaster's fleet returned the same, while the aegis danced with purple, pink and blue arcs of discharge as it had for days and days.\n\n'The Emperor lives, so do you. The shields took it!' shouted one of Jainan's veteran bullies. He moved down the line, shoving people back to the wall. 'No danger! All mass and energy gone into the warp. That's the aegis' job or we'd all be dead a thousand times already. Back to your stations. The war's not over yet.'\n\nIndeed it was not.\n\nSometimes, hours passed with no attempt made on sector 16. Its bastion heart fired ceaselessly, one small part of the Palace's endless array of weaponry. Three macro cannons with limited traversal studded its outwards-facing walls. The rearmost portion was free of guns, to prevent their use against the fortifications should it fall to the enemy. Between these iron-collared behemoths, the slimmer barrels of lascannons protruded, and neat stacks of heavy bolters in vertical series. The top was crowned with anti-aircraft weaponry, whose quad cannons, each as big as super-heavy tank barrels, banged endlessly away. Their distinctive chattering became the background to Katsuhiro's life, so constant and unvarying that he only really became aware of them when they stopped firing briefly to cool.\n\nBehind Bastion 16 were Bastions 15 and 14, offset from the outermost tower to provide the greatest amount of cover. Bastion 14 made the transition from active defence to blackened stump sometime around the end of Secundus, taking a direct hit from orbit that sent its magazines up in a pyrotechnic display. Bastion 15 went soon after.\n\nKatsuhiro lost track of the date. It seemed to him that time flowed differently on the line. Life became a series of horrifying incidents interspersed by periods of exhausted terror. If he had been familiar with the old Catheric myths, Katsuhiro would have thought himself in hell.\n\nDespite all the privations and loss of liberty the rebellion had incurred on Terra, and the sorrow and the death of hope for man's future, the war had been far away. Now he was living it.\n\nThus was the pattern of the siege set, until, inevitably, it changed.\n\nBlood and skulls\n\nFather's wrath\n\nFive of Eight\n\nThe Conqueror, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius\n\nThe Conqueror shook to the steady beat of its guns. Since arrival in orbit over the Throneworld, they had not ceased. Overseers worked their gunnery crews to death. Weapons fired to the point of failure. Reports that the magazines were running empty went unheeded.\n\nThe Legion did not care. The World Eaters could not hear the booming of cannons. They did not feel the decks vibrate. Their skulls sang with the sawing song of the Butcher's Nails, and that obliterated all other sensation.\n\nAt being denied the spear point, Angron had lost all vestiges of restraint. The Legion agreed with him.\n\nViolence had been endemic on the Conqueror for years now. The thralls knew to keep themselves apart and seal themselves away where they could, lessening the effects of the great massacres that had come after the Thramas Crusade. With little to spend their rage on, fights broke out between rival squads of legionaries, staining decks that were already black with mortal vitae with transhuman blood. Those particularly afflicted were brought under control only with much bloodshed, which provoked more. Others made for the embarkation decks and the lesser hangars, eager to be off the ship in defiance of their orders to remain aboard.\n\nAngron could not be restrained again as he had been before Ullanor. He strode his vessel as a pillar of living rage. The deck plates shook to his tread. The air trembled to his words. Where he went, lives ended, but when he learned his sons attempted to depart the Conqueror, his rage could finally no longer be contained, and his rampage cut a bloody swathe through his Legion.\n\n'None shall depart!' he roared. 'I go first! None shall take skulls on the Throneworld's soil before I!'\n\nKharn ran in his genefather's footsteps. Where the daemon primarch trod, the metal smoked. Heat as much as anger radiated from Angron. Mortals ran from him. Those that did not fell convulsing, bleeding from their eyes, or else attacked one another in awful outbursts of violence.\n\n'Kharn, I have reports of a demi-company attempting to breach hangar nineteen, not far from your position.'\n\n'Hnnnh,' Kharn swallowed bloody spittle. 'We are nearly there, Lotara,' he said. 'Angron knows.' Speaking with the shipmistress calmed his fury a little, but not much. He struggled to concentrate.\n\n'That is not good.'\n\n'I... I... hnnnh, I would agree,' Kharn finally managed.\n\n'You will not land before me!' Angron roared, and sprinted ahead. 'I will be first!'\n\n'I must go.' Kharn swore, and ran after him. Angron pulled ahead easily. His sword was ready and trailing black vapours.\n\nKharn caught up as the primarch was slaughtering his way through a hundred World Eaters. The fools had been throwing themselves against the hangar doors, despite all of them being sealed at Kharn's order. The heavy portals were scarred with melta burns. The disobedient company had made little headway before their father arrived to punish their presumption.\n\nAngron's lessons came at the edge of his sword, and all were fatal.\n\n'You dare? You dare!' Angron roared. He cut one of his sons in half from helm to crotch. The sword wailed as it swung, blood boiling from its edges. Always huge, Angron had grown to immense stature since his change, dwarfing his sons. He caught one up in his left hand, his fingers easily grasping the Space Marine's chest, and slammed him repeatedly into a wall. Armoured fingers prised at Angron's grip, but nothing the World Eater did could free him.\n\n'I will be first upon Terra!' roared Angron. 'You are not worthy! It is my honour! Khorne demands it! The Blood God decrees it! You shall burn in lakes of fire for your temerity!'\n\nSeveral hacked at the primarch's limbs. The blows his brass armour did not turn aside sunk only a little way into his daemonic flesh. Sprays of scalding ichor hissed over the primarch's assailants, blinding those without helmets. His skin rippled around the wounds, closing them quickly. Angron ignored those who attacked him, and continued to pound the warrior in his fist against the wall.\n\n'Traitor!' roared Angron. 'Usurper!'\n\nThe ceramite cracked, followed by the warrior's ribs. Blood gushed from rupturing flesh. The primarch cast his dead son aside, and turned his blade upon the others.\n\nAngron would not rest until everyone in the corridor was dead. Kharn tried to think of how to calm his primarch, to bring his rage to manageable levels, but the answer eluded him. His own reason was drowning in a tide of blood. The Butcher's Nails pounded into his skull. The smell of spilt vitae excited his senses. He swallowed a mouthful of saliva, suddenly conscious of a flood of it streaming down his chin. Before he lost himself entirely, he reopened communications with Lotara.\n\n'Seal decks eighty-four through ninety, portside of the spinal way. Every entrance.' He could barely speak. His vision swam. He wanted to fight. He needed to kill. With heroic effort he growled out his orders. 'Order this deck cleared. Dispatch suppression teams to all other hangars, ship-wide. Lock them all down. Prime remote weapons to kill on sight. No one leaves this ship. Angron will slaughter us all if anyone tries. Seal all portals on this deck except forwards gate nine. Open all doors leading to the lower decks beyond. If Angron wants to keep fighting, he can do it among the thralls.'\n\n'Confirmed. No one runs from the Conqueror,' Lotara said. 'What about you? Kharn?'\n\nKharn could no longer hear. Words belonging to something else forced themselves out of his mouth.\n\n'Blood for the Blood God!' he roared, and joined battle at his father's side.\n\nArk Mechanicum Pent-Ark, Terran near orbit, 14th of Tertius\n\nClain Pent's Ark Mechanicum took its first orbital breach with good graces. Spherical and of a mass similar to a large asteroid, it was not designed for such a landing, but it was not the first void-ship to break Terra's atmospheric envelope during the siege, and it would not be the last.\n\nPent's lair was situated right at the centre of the vessel, in an armoured sub-sphere that could be ejected in the event of the ark's destruction. It was a ship within a ship, equipped with its own void shields, drives and external weapons systems. Throughout the descent, Pent's metaphorical hand hovered over the activation codes in the ship's infosphere.\n\nHe had his own clade of lesser servants. Some of the disciples of Sota-Nul, such as Ardim Protos, had no followers of their own, whereas the likes of Illivia Epta kept legions of them. For Pent, "}
{"text":"ssel, in an armoured sub-sphere that could be ejected in the event of the ark's destruction. It was a ship within a ship, equipped with its own void shields, drives and external weapons systems. Throughout the descent, Pent's metaphorical hand hovered over the activation codes in the ship's infosphere.\n\nHe had his own clade of lesser servants. Some of the disciples of Sota-Nul, such as Ardim Protos, had no followers of their own, whereas the likes of Illivia Epta kept legions of them. For Pent, eight followers were sufficient. Not too many to control, enough to be useful, and with the additional bonus of flattering Nul through imitation. The eight of them served him as ship crew, engineers, advisers, agents and all other things.\n\n'Great magos,' said Acolyte Penta-7, who hunched low over the auspex scopes cramming the forwards portion of the command dome. 'The Palace Androcline Battery has acquired us as a primary target. Defence lasers cycling to fire.'\n\n'Blind their augurs,' Pent blurted. He used direct voxwave communication, always. The body he wore had a mouth, but it was not his own. Pent's preferred disciplines were those of biomancy and cybertheurgy. He kept a stable of bodies of his own design to wear. He'd chosen his current one for its combat efficacy. It was large, heavily muscled, being vat-grown from abhuman gene stock, and heavily modified with bionics. Not that he intended to do any fighting; he wore it for appearance's sake.\n\nOutwardly, he showed no sign of fear. Within his suit of flesh, it was a different story. Pent was little more than a brain in a jar hidden in the armoured chest cavity of his host. He had no face of his own to display worry or similar emotions, while that of his temporary body was immobile. Pent found joy in manipulating biological matter, but he saw no need for the humanity in them; the biological was merely another form of machine. The face had been cured upon the skull and painted brightly so that it looked like a carnival figure, and in whose permanently open mouth Pent's glowing sensor array hid. But a magos can betray himself in other ways than an unguarded scowl or frown, and Pent kept a tight rein on his external links in case an involuntarily expelled data packet revealed his dismay.\n\n'Maintain void shields at maximum intensity. Increase displacement index to highest value.' The command, delivered as electric pulses, was transmitted instantaneously via augmitter wired into his host's vestigial brainstem. The ship shook when the order was executed. Air is remarkably hard and hot when encountered from the void, and the shields treated it as they would any other threat, shunting it partially into the warp.\n\nThe violence of the reaction was alarming. The ship dropped by sudden degrees as the voids annihilated huge pockets of atmosphere, and accelerated into the lacuna, then decelerated abruptly when air rushed back in.\n\nAn outside observer would have seen Pent in his grotesque body and his eight servants, all augmented to more or less horrific degrees, working quietly but for a gentle bleeping passing between them. The peacefulness of the data exchange belied the ferocious argument it conveyed.\n\n'I respectfully demand that the void opacity matrix be reduced to allow free passage of air,' spoke Acolyte Penta-1.\n\n'The terse nature of your request denies protocols of respectful behaviour,' rejoined Acolyte Penta-2.\n\n'Penta-1, regardless of respectfulness and appropriateness of irony in delivery of honorific, has valid concerns,' said Penta-5, who was female once, but had transformed herself into a waving shock of metal tentacles arranged around a metal box. 'Current accelerative\/decelerative forces risk terminal hull compromise.'\n\nThe ship lurched to the side. External gravity was taking hold, throwing the grav-plating's effects out of true. Miniature gravitic vortices tugged at the adepts' black robes.\n\n'Hold course and current void parameters,' commanded Clain Pent. 'This I so command. Atmospheric void shock is preferable to atomisation by ground battery fire.'\n\nAttacks from the ground were coming in hard. Machines sang their hosannas of alarm as the first of the void generators burnt out. Immediately, servitors detached themselves from deep-set alcoves and clomped off the bridge to enact repairs. Pent reviewed the damage in his internal data-feeds. They were wasting their time.\n\n'Quaternary void generator burn out,' buzzed Acolyte Penta-3. 'Time to next ground volley, zero point nine seconds. Primary, secondary, quintenary void generators holding. Tertiary nearing collapse.'\n\nBy the time Penta-3 had finished, the next hit slammed home.\n\n'Blind their augurs!' demanded Pent. Fear suppressant swirled into the fluids of his cerebrarium, dulling the panic.\n\n'Negatory,' responded Acolyte Penta-7. 'Augur clouding ineffective. Palace noospheric security network impenetrable. Enemy cogitation reaction time superior to Pent-Ark data illusion capability.'\n\nPent's brain twitched. Well-protected noospheres were the bane of the Mechanicum's war. He cursed the day Koriel Zeth had conceived them. Though the one at Calth had been easily corrupted, the slaves of the Emperor had learned quickly. When any lesser system could be subverted, a noosphere on guard was nigh impossible to breach.\n\nLike Dorn's walls.\n\nHe was reminded there would be no lesser systems in the battle below, whether in the warp, the materium or the electronic ether world of machines. They were assailing the Palace of the Emperor Himself.\n\nAnother thrill of fear, more deeply felt this time, shook his amygdala. He really ought to have it removed.\n\n'Bring us down more quickly!'\n\n'Confirmation,' said Penta-4. Thrusters fired on the upper surface of the ark, pushing it faster into Terra's churning atmosphere.\n\nThere were no windows on the Pent-Ark. They were weaknesses. Pent was in full agreement with the primarch Perturabo on that. Views of the exterior were displayed via hololithic representation and pure-data displays comprised of abstract symbols. Less dramatic to view, perhaps, but so much more efficient.\n\n'A second battery has locked on to your vessel, oh great eminence,' Penta-7 reported.\n\nSo unfair, thought Pent. The ark ships of the other seven disciples were also coming down, and all of them were screened by fleet assault. Why was he being singled out? He would petition the lords of the warp for more favourable luck after they landed.\n\n'Predicted intersection of plasmic streams in four, three, two, one...'\n\nIf they landed.\n\nThe Pent-Ark shook, flinging the adepts about in their restraints. The reactors warbled at having to increase their power output, but the ship stabilised.\n\n'Damage minimal,' Penta-7 reported.\n\n'Shields holding,' Penta-3 added.\n\n'Incoming wideband datapulse,' Penta-2 code-blurted. 'Infiltration attempt by Throne-slaved Mechanicum. Releasing data-jinn. Thwarting.' A pause of several microseconds had Clain Pent fearing the worst. He'd always had an active imagination. During battle that was a curse.\n\n'Thwarted,' Penta-2 finally reported. 'Ongoing interference from external Throne-slave sources. Cogitation efficiency compromise at thirteen per cent. Holding.'\n\n'The ship nears the landing zone. Preparing for impact reduction.'\n\n'Show me Terra. I wish to see our target.' This time Clain Pent spoke aloud in the standard Gothic, his rasping voice emanating from a voxmitter stapled to his host's flesh. An indulgence, but it seemed appropriate to the occasion.\n\n'Compliance,' Penta-2 responded.\n\nThe middle of the room vanished, replaced by a view of the ground. The last streamers of ash cloud smothering Terra's skies wriggled past the external augurs, giving Pent a view of his destination. He was looking directly down, but the image was presented vertically, so that it appeared, from Pent's point of view, as if he were running towards it. Back when he had such things as a vestibular system, effects like that had made him feel mightily nauseous. Thankfully, such weaknesses were far behind him.\n\nAs a biologian, Pent was apt to draw comparisons with fauna. From above, the Palace resembled a chelonian beast. He saw the inner precincts, isolated from the main body of the city behind the edifice of the Lion's Gate, as a head extended on a neck. Being roughly circular and several times larger than the Sanctum Imperialis, the other Palace districts resembled the great shield of a turtle's shell.\n\nThe impression was fleeting. The Pent-Ark was coming down to the east, near the Helios Gate in the Daylight Wall, and on a parallel with the Eternity Wall space port. As the ship neared the ground, perspective shifted, and Pent's view of the Palace as a whole was lost.\n\nThousands of fires burned on a cratered plain fronting the eastern walls. Defensive lines wriggled their way across the terrain, like the marbling of fat in meat. Flights of attack ships from both sides swarmed thickly over the battlefield.\n\n'There, the Daylight Wall,' he said, his thoughts highlighting the fortification on the hololith. Thread-thin from that altitude, it was rapidly thickening into significance.\n\nIdle curiosity led him to superimpose old orbital views over the scene - first, the old Himalazian mountains and valleys, then over that the artificial plain the Emperor had levelled around His sprawling creation. After millions of years of stasis, the area had gone from the natural repetition of geoforms to rigidly imposed order to the void-ship graveyard in less than a few centuries. The plains were shattered. The corpses of fallen vessels were scattered everywhere, and the tides of armies moving over the land stained it black.\n\nLower they went. The augurs flashed with every hit upon the shields. His acolytes burbled their status reports, but Pent paid them little attention. Instead his view was fixed upon the actions of the Palace aegis. It shimmered under the bombardment, revealing its complex, cellular structure. Far superior to standard"}
{"text":"yard in less than a few centuries. The plains were shattered. The corpses of fallen vessels were scattered everywhere, and the tides of armies moving over the land stained it black.\n\nLower they went. The augurs flashed with every hit upon the shields. His acolytes burbled their status reports, but Pent paid them little attention. Instead his view was fixed upon the actions of the Palace aegis. It shimmered under the bombardment, revealing its complex, cellular structure. Far superior to standard void shielding, it was one of a kind. If Pent still had a digestive tract to call his own, his mouth would have been salivating at the prospect of learning its secrets.\n\nBut first the aegis had to fall. He was proud to be playing a part in that.\n\nThe wall grew larger and larger under the ship's keel, perturbing Pent with its scale. Then that moved off to the left as they came down. The Katabatic Plains filled the holo side to side. The sights of individual skirmishes became clear, rapid, chaotic exchanges of las light slashing across blackened ground, and the flash of explosions like flowers on bare earth.\n\nMore impacts were troubling the ship now as smaller weapons drew a bead on it. The void shield arrays chimed constantly. Large hits shuddered the shielding still, taking down two more of the Pent-Ark's layered protective fields.\n\n'Landing cycles initiated,' intoned Penta-4. A great shaking took the craft. Pent saw individual men on the ground briefly, before the vibration blurred focus away from the augurs, reducing the ventral view to a brown smear.\n\nBringing down a ship the size of the Pent-Ark was no small feat, and deleterious to its physical condition. It would likely never ply the void again once it set down, but the sacrifice of his personal ship was nothing compared to what Clain Pent would gain should the Warmaster be victorious.\n\nScreaming alarms forewarned of imminent arrival on Terra's soil. Thrusters roared and the bombardment intensified, taxing the vessel's shielding hard.\n\nClain Pent gritted the memory of teeth.\n\n'Touchdown complete,' Penta-4 announced, when the screaming of the thrusters seemed about to break open the world.\n\nThe ship settled. The engines cut out. The thunder of battle reasserted itself as the dominant noise.\n\nPent drew himself up. Now was his moment.\n\n'Prime all automata. Redirect shield focus. Divert reactor power to shield generators.'\n\nHis acolytes worked fast, both physically and within the sacred world of the machines. The void shields were realigned, clamping hard onto the earth, and extending outwards to cover an area around the ship emanating two hundred metres out from its hull.\n\n'Prepare external portals.'\n\n'Automata awoken,' reported Penta-2.\n\n'Tech thralls active,' added Penta-1.\n\n'Machine-spirits awakened,' said Penta-5.\n\n'External portals primed for opening,' said Penta-3.\n\nPent's grotesque body leaned forwards, huge hands gripping the railing around his command pulpit.\n\n'Execute.'\n\nThe sides of the Pent-Ark opened like petals. Ramps slid out from housings. Armoured doors opened.\n\nThe servants of the Order of Nul marched out.\n\nAt seven other equidistant points around the Palace, the same procedure was undertaken by the rest of the disciples of Sota-Nul. Their ark ships put out a stream of cyborgs and semi-autonomous mechanisms, forbidden machine intelligences and things motivated by essences of darker sorts. They began working as soon as they walked off the ships, ignoring the weapons fire that punctured the void shields of their transports and shot them down, neat and as orderly as ants. Though each device had a governing mind of its own, be it human, machine or otherwise, all were slaved to the will of the Machine-God, as enacted by the eight. Under the disciples' direction they began the next phase of the Warmaster's plan.\n\nSuch variety there was among these creations. Giant, armoured earth-moving machines came out first, beginning to heap up high banks of stone extending from the sides of the grounded arks as soon as they emerged. Teams of noo-linked servitors armed with melta-cutters followed behind, burning tunnels into the stone to house command centres, and carving trench networks behind the banks. Machines and prefabricated sections of buildings were wheeled out, their erection commencing before the fusion-smoothed ground had cooled. Among them went heavily armoured adepts and followers of the myrmidon creed, who strode the battlefield with arrogant disdain for the fury the enemy threw at them.\n\nWeapons fire from the walls zeroed in on these fledging networks, but in doing so they took pressure off the mortal servants of Horus, allowing ragged hordes of traitors deeper into the outworks. After weeks of attacks, the outworks were much disrupted, and though the arks set down close to the outermost perimeter, much was in ruin and there was little resistance to be found there.\n\nPhysical defences were the least of the New Mechanicum's assets. Within two hours, the framework of siege camps was in place, and growing outwards. When the excavators reached the limits of the arks' void shields, more machines rolled out from the innards of the craft. Some bore giant shields of adamantium, others energy mantlets of varying type. They moved in precise order along newly carved roads, stopped, turned at forty-five degrees and presented their fronts to the enemy walls.\n\n'Our passengers inform us that they are about to activate their defences,' said Penta-5.\n\n'See to it their mechanisms do not disrupt out own shielding,' Clain Pent ordered.\n\n'Compensating,' Penta-3 said.\n\nA few hits struck the hull as the void shields were recalibrated. Now was a moment of vulnerability. Through senses integrated with his ship, Pent felt the beat of activating power supplies radiating from the outside.\n\nThe pulse built to a crescendo. Clain Pent cackled as the energy mantlets of the Ordo Reductor sprang into life across the siege camp and a wall of roseate light leapt between the machines.\n\nHe glanced inwardly to his datacore, running a critical mind over the plans contained therein. The Ordo Reductor would be piecing together their grand cannons very soon, but he had his own work to do, a project of such ambitious scale he was daunted by it. Monumental engineering was required, and sorcery to bind an appropriately powerful soul.\n\nHe watched the energy screens extending further out from the Pent-Ark. Soon, behind them, his grand work would begin.\n\nWe are symbols\n\nGrounded Angel\n\nA subterranean break\n\nEternity Wall, 3rd-7th of Quartus\n\nForethoughts of death afflicted Sanguinius more often as the days passed. The vision of Horus, standing over him in leering triumph, leaked into his waking hours.\n\nDorn had little time for him, and when he sought out the Sigillite for company he was nowhere to be found. Consumed with foreboding, the Great Angel sent himself out upon a tour of the walls. He did not tell Dorn. He had no wish to hear another lecture about keeping himself safe.\n\n'I am more than a symbol,' he had said to Dorn.\n\n'Your value as such should not be underestimated,' Dorn replied.\n\n'Then I should put myself to use and be seen on the wall.' He would be gainsaid no further, and left Dorn fuming.\n\nDorn was right. All of them were symbols, and though he hated the role his father had placed upon him and which Guilliman had exploited, he took upon himself the burden of humanity's hopes again. This time he did not fly. He went on foot, surrounded by all the ceremony his position allowed so that the people would better see him.\n\nAzkaellon insisted they stay upon the walls and not venture into the city wards.\n\n'The streets are not safe,' he said. There was unrest throughout the Palace, the worst in the outlying districts close to the walls. Food and water were scarce, fear was in plentiful supply. Privation did the work of ten thousand enemy operatives, tying down troops to watch civilians when they would better serve the defence on the walls.\n\nEventually Sanguinius relented, and they stayed out of the city on the perimeter defences, where the Angel might be seen by the populace from afar, and the warriors of the Legions stood at guard with predictable discipline.\n\nHe set out with a dozen standard bearers, both imagnifers and signifers. The serried banners of the IX Legion made an awe-inspiring sight in ranks behind the primarch, and the winged figures of the Sanguinary Guard swooped overhead, weapons ready. Their wargear glinted in the fires of the bombardment, but there was more - an inner light that shone from the primarch, so those who saw him said. To these lucky witnesses, the Blood Angels appeared as a procession of demigods passing along the walls. Wherever Sanguinius went, memories of sunlit dawns were kindled, and people remembered better times, and hoped that those times might yet return. The arbitrators and enforcers of each city block he passed reported a calming of mood, and a cessation of violence that lasted several days.\n\nHis procession took him many days, past several areas facing various siege camps of the Dark Mechanicum, but in time he found himself staring down the Daylight Wall, on that section overlooked by the heaped massif of the Eternity Wall space port.\n\nSanguinius' stride was the speed of a legionary's jog, which was the speed of an unmodified human running, so they travelled many kilometres in a few hours, and by the closing of the day, by which point Sanguinius had been on the Daylight Wall for seven hours, they had covered nearly a hundred, and so made their way through lesser league-castles to the Helios Gate.\n\nThe party headed directly for the command centre at the tower's heart. A thousand men and women laboured in a modest recreation of the Grand Borealis Strategium. Emergency lumens saturated the spherical room with threatening red, and though thousands of hololiths and other displays provided illumination of other hues, they were too weak to banish the bloody g"}
{"text":"Daylight Wall for seven hours, they had covered nearly a hundred, and so made their way through lesser league-castles to the Helios Gate.\n\nThe party headed directly for the command centre at the tower's heart. A thousand men and women laboured in a modest recreation of the Grand Borealis Strategium. Emergency lumens saturated the spherical room with threatening red, and though thousands of hololiths and other displays provided illumination of other hues, they were too weak to banish the bloody glow.\n\nOnce more Raldoron greeted him.\n\n'My lord,' he said.\n\n'The section where the first tower was brought down has been repaired?' the primarch asked. His eyes went to screens showing the enemy siege camp on the horizon, aglow with active shielding and flashing with the work of construction.\n\n'Thane's men did as they pledged,' said Raldoron. 'Truly, they can work miracles with false stone. The wall there is plugged, and the walkways reconnected. They have repaired most of the damage so far inflicted on my section, my lord, while Salamanders repair ruptured power networks and bring guns back to life. It is good to see our kindreds working together. I thought not to see the like again, there has been so much suspicion bred between Legions.'\n\n'But there is still damage.' Sanguinius did not criticise. There was damage everywhere, worst on the far north of the Dusk Wall on the opposite side of the Palace, where a score of major towers had been reduced to rubble by arcane energy cannons, and the wall only held at great cost.\n\n'Eighty-seven way castles from the five hundred in my protection are damaged, four lost entirely,' said Raldoron. 'The Helios Gate comes under protracted attack with each aerial foray. The aegis here is failing. Every attack sees more void blisters scoured from their mountings, though the Emperor's squadrons make them suffer for it. I fear what Horus' Martian lackeys have in store for us behind that energy screen.'\n\n'We have been lucky thus far,' said Sanguinius. 'The walls are holding past Dorn's more optimistic estimates.' He ran his gaze over the displays, away from the live feeds covering the siege camp. 'The outworks less so,' he said, gesturing to the images of scarred, twisted lands where trenches, walls and men had been only a fortnight before. 'The enemy continue to test our defences, and taunt us with their intent.' He pointed at the shimmering energy fields of the siege camp. 'This is a ritual. The Palace is the epicentre. I imagine whatever they plan will be fuelled by blood.'\n\nAll the Blood Angels present had been at Signus, and at Davin. What had been consigned to the realm of impossibility was now a matter of course.\n\n'Sorcery must be accounted for strategically like any other factor of war. We help them by fighting, we lose if we stand back. We are damned if we do and damned if we do not.'\n\n'An ancient saying,' said Raldoron.\n\n'But apt,' said Azkaellon.\n\n'The conscripts fight bravely,' said Raldoron. 'They hang on, and repulse the enemy every time, though they dwindle in number daily and I am forced to order the wall guns activated more frequently to bombard compromised sections. I regret we cannot go down to aid them ourselves, but I understand my orders,' he added.\n\n'Lord Dorn forbade me from fighting outside the walls,' said Sanguinius. He turned his sad, noble eyes onto his equerry. 'He did not forbid us to venture outside.'\n\n'My lord?'\n\n'Let us go down outside the wall. I want to go among them. I want to see the troops. I want to tell them their heroism is valued.'\n\n'There is no attack at the moment,' said Raldoron thoughtfully, and no enemy near the gate, but the bombardments come without warning.'\n\n'There are other considerations.' Azkaellon stepped in front of his primarch. 'There have been mutinies on the line.'\n\n'You suggest that I, a son of the Emperor, have something to fear from my father's subjects?' Sanguinius said.\n\n'You are not immortal, my lord,' said Azkaellon quietly. As Sanguinius' death approached, all the Blood Angels had a foreboding that their lord might leave them soon. They felt it in their hearts and in their humours. Azkaellon's words hung over them, like the dying echoes of a funeral bell.\n\n'Nothing truly is.' Sanguinius smiled sadly. 'But I do not die today. Gather additional legionaries if it will make you feel easier, Azkaellon, but I am going outside the wall.'\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus\n\nKatsuhiro was there when an angel came down from the distant heights into the mudscape of the outworks. He arrived without warning, passed among them like something from a dream and was gone before they could acknowledge his reality.\n\nSanguinius was gold and he was glory. Familiarity can lead a man to accept the worst circumstances as normal. In the blood and the destruction, where flesh was pounded into the pulverised stone, Katsuhiro had forgotten what purity looked like. In the person of Sanguinius he was reminded.\n\nThe first Katsuhiro heard were shouts of amazement, and he looked back from no-man's-land to see a soft glow, then Sanguinius himself. He stood behind the broken rampart in full view of the enemy. There were snipers in the drop-craft wrecks, but he forgot them.\n\nThe guns on the walls were firing, aimed at the siege camp and the contravallation that grew day by day around the city. Counter bombardments answered from the enemy lines; the orbital batteries had not ceased, nor had the fleet bombardment, and shells periodically broke the flickering voids to blast up craters among the defensive lines. The roar of the siege was at its worst, save for those times the foe made direct attempts on the outworks, when all became a bedlam of flashing light and terror.\n\nA hush descended. Though the guns continued to fire, their violence was somehow lessened by the primarch's presence.\n\nMen and women fell to their knees as Sanguinius passed along the line. His entourage of aides, standard bearers and the gold-armoured and winged elite that guarded him were almost as affecting as the primarch himself. Grumbles were silenced. Fear ebbed. Filthy hands reached out to touch the Lord of Angels. His warriors moved to push the soldiers back, but Sanguinius raised his hand, just slightly, and the guards moved away. A female soldier was the first to dare to hold out her fingers to his wings. The feathers twitched, but Sanguinius stood firm, and allowed her to caress him.\n\nAnother person came forwards, then another, until a crowd was around the Great Angel, arms radiating inwards like worshippers from less enlightened times stretching for their idol.\n\nSanguinius was uncomfortable, Katsuhiro could see. The primarch kept his perfect face as neutral as he could, but it was there in the set of his lips, and the way he looked upwards, away from the supplicants around him. Like all the rest, Katsuhiro was captivated, and moved towards him, his feet dragging through the mud of their own volition. The Angel's radiance touched Katsuhiro. He felt a peace in his heart, a calmness in his mind and a stilling of fears. The aches and chills that sickened him were alleviated briefly. For a moment, he felt whole again.\n\nSurrounded by the dirty and the desperate, Sanguinius shone as pure as sunlight reflected from snow.\n\nThen it was over. The light dimmed. The Great Angel's guards moved forwards and, gently as they could, pushed back the weeping crowd so Sanguinius could address them.\n\n'Be brave, children of Terra,' he said. 'Your courage and your fortitude are most needed in this war, and I, on behalf of my brother Rogal Dorn, and the Emperor of Mankind, thank you.'\n\nWith those words he moved on, his crimson-armoured sons marching in wary perimeter. Their boots were smeared with the muck of the field, but Sanguinius was pristine, or so it seemed. He was as much a vision as a solid being, and as a vision he was untouched and untouchable by the filth of the mundane world.\n\nKatsuhiro watched him go, joy and awe overwhelming him.\n\n'You there!'\n\nA man with a sergeant's rank insignia stitched to his civilian clothes accosted Katsuhiro. The man was trying too hard, probably angry at his own awed reaction to the primarch. Not one man had continued his duties while Sanguinius was there.\n\n'Stop your gawking. Captain Jainan is looking for volunteers.' He looked Katsuhiro up and down. 'A little small, but I think you'll just about do.'\n\nJainan was sick. Katsuhiro was not the only soldier feeling ill. A host of minor ailments had swept through the defence force. Coughs, colds and digestive complaints to add to the misery of rad poisoning. Nothing immediately fatal, but every sickness wore down the resolve of the men and women in the outworks, making their condition that little more insufferable, and every misery increased the chance that they would run. But Jainan was genuinely afflicted. He was propped up in a makeshift bed occupying the shell of a bunker. Part of the roof had been blown in by a direct hit. The gap was covered over with corrugated sheeting. The walls were blackened. Katsuhiro couldn't stop looking at the marks. Much would be the soot from incinerated human bodies.\n\nIt was shelter, and Jainan needed it. His eyes were red and puffy, and his nose ran. His skin had turned an even unhealthier stage of grey. Sores spotted his mouth, and his breath was rank; though Katsuhiro was never nearer than an arm's length away, the stench of it filled the enclosed space.\n\nKatsuhiro arrived to find Doromek, Runnecan and the woman present. She and Doromek were drawn with hunger, but less afflicted than the others.\n\nJainan coughed before he spoke. A light tickle that grew into heaving, rib-punishing hacks. When it subsided, he spoke quickly, in case it began again.\n\n'Acting Lieutenant Doromek here has come up with a worrying possibility. There are tunnels... There are...' He ran a hand over his face. 'Doromek, you explain.'\n\n'I'll keep this simple,' Doromek said, shifting his gun "}
{"text":"ed to find Doromek, Runnecan and the woman present. She and Doromek were drawn with hunger, but less afflicted than the others.\n\nJainan coughed before he spoke. A light tickle that grew into heaving, rib-punishing hacks. When it subsided, he spoke quickly, in case it began again.\n\n'Acting Lieutenant Doromek here has come up with a worrying possibility. There are tunnels... There are...' He ran a hand over his face. 'Doromek, you explain.'\n\n'I'll keep this simple,' Doromek said, shifting his gun on his shoulder. 'There are supply tunnels under the battlefield running out from the second line to the bastions. Some of them have been opened by bombardment. They might give the enemy a way behind our lines. I think we should check them out.'\n\nJainan's eyes closed. 'You're a good man, Doromek, a real find. There we have it. I need someone to go into the tunnels to see what's left. To...' He swallowed. His pale lips trembled. 'To see if they're a risk.' He was struggling to speak, and coughed again. Through spluttering breath he managed, 'Dismissed. Be about it,' before he curled in over himself, a bowl was brought and he bent double to vomit up a stream of red-streaked phlegm.\n\n'What's wrong with him?' Katsuhiro asked Doromek. 'It's not rad poisoning, is it?' he added. They all suffered that to a degree. Anti-rad pills kept the worse effects at bay, but Katsuhiro lived in terror of the day they stopped working.\n\n'Nah, it's the camp sickness,' Runnecan said.\n\n'What do you know about it?' Doromek said. He strode easily through the mud. The woman, Myz, he'd heard Doromek call her, was even more assured. Thin-faced Runnecan scampered, rodent-like, his small feet pit-pattering. Only Katsuhiro was struggling, needing to wrench his boots from the sucking ground with every step.\n\n'You've never been in a war before, Runnecan,' said Doromek.\n\n'I have. I've fought on five worlds for the Emperor.'\n\nKatsuhiro looked at him in mild astonishment.\n\n'I was born hive scum, and I am hive scum, but I was a soldier in between,' Runnecan said proudly. 'I've seen people get sick, all the time!' He sniggered. 'Then they die.'\n\n'Nasty little piece of work,' Doromek said. 'You are a hive rat. In this place, awful as it is, we have medicine. That's the reason why you're not all dead from rads yet.'\n\n'They're stopping the rads but what about everything else? The medicae aren't doing any good!' said Katsuhiro.\n\n'Do you know, Katsuhiro, I like you but you take forever to catch on. Exactly, the medicae aren't doing anything. These sicknesses are coughs and sneezes and upset bellies. Nothing any anti-viral or bacteriophage shouldn't stamp out. But they're not working.'\n\nThey were walking away from the front, towards the second line. Bastion 16 loomed large to their right.\n\n'Is Horus using germ war on us?'\n\n'Now you're getting it,' said Doromek. 'Could be.'\n\n'I feel dreadful, why are you still healthy?' Katsuhiro said.\n\n'Natural resilience,' Doromek said humourlessly.\n\n'Be quiet, all of you,' Myz snapped. She pulled ahead, heading for a gap blown into the second line. Twisted lengths of plasteel reinforcement writhed up like briars around the breach.\n\n'Why do you let her speak like that to you?' said Runnecan. 'If my woman spoke to me like that, I'd give her a hiding.'\n\n'That attitude explains your lack of female company. She's not \"my woman\". I barely know her.'\n\n'I think you do,' said Runnecan slyly. 'I think you know her much better than you're saying.'\n\nDoromek grunted. 'What can I say? I lose my heart to pretty faces. That's as far as it goes. I know her about as well as you do.'\n\n'What did you think of the primarch?' asked Katsuhiro, trying to find something positive in the day.\n\nDoromek shrugged. 'How did he make you feel?'\n\nIt annoyed Katsuhiro that the question was turned around on him, but he answered anyway. 'Joy, awe.'\n\nThey headed down the slope of the crater. Filthy water puddled the bottom. As they skirted it, Doromek glanced back.\n\n'That's not all is it? Come on now, we're all comrades here. Be honest.'\n\n'I feel... sad,' said Katsuhiro uncomfortably. 'Hollow.'\n\n'Insignificant?'\n\nKatsuhiro nodded. They walked into the network of trenches between lines two and one. Large sections of it were collapsed and abandoned.\n\n'They do that. Them and their sons. I ask myself why the Emperor created them,' Doromek said. Myz was well ahead, and he spoke more freely when she wasn't listening in. 'He always said they were to protect us, and that men would take over when they were done. But why make something so powerful, so beyond humanity?'\n\n'Oooh, that's treason that,' said Runnecan.\n\n'Shut it, you,' said Doromek.\n\n'He's right, Runnecan,' said Katsuhiro. 'I don't know what to think any more. I felt insignificant when I saw Sanguinius.' He fell quiet for a few paces. 'This is their war,' he said quickly. 'We're just in the way.'\n\nDoromek nodded. 'That's about the size of it.'\n\nThe aegis thrummed painfully overhead. A shell pierced the energy membrane and dived murderously for the ground, scattering troops with a terrifying howl. It bored into the mud and stone a few metres ahead of the first line and detonated, lofting a section of the outwork ramparts upwards with a searing flash. Katsuhiro and the others hit the ground the instant before it struck. He kept his hands over his head as debris pattered everywhere.\n\nThey got up. Men were screaming. New corpses waited to be carted off by servitor orderlies to the funeral pits. Katsuhiro looked on helplessly at a screaming man clutching the ragged stumps of his legs. There was nothing he could do. Doromek was already walking on. The others followed. The screaming had stopped before they'd gone a hundred metres more.\n\nMyz was over by a small, isolated bunker at the end of its own run of trench.\n\n'Get a move on!' she shouted.\n\n'I thought this was your idea,' said Katsuhiro.\n\n'It was,' said Doromek. 'Truly.'\n\n'I thought you said she wasn't your woman,' Runnecan said unpleasantly.\n\n'I told you, she's not,' said Doromek, and jumped into the trench.\n\nA small plaque over an armoured door proclaimed the bunker Nexus Zero-One-Five. Myz did something to open the lock, and the four of them descended into the dark under the battlefield.\n\nA short spiral staircase brought them out into a tunnel just wide enough for two men to walk abreast. Cabling hung in long sweeps from loops set into the ceiling. The tunnel was made of precast ferrocrete sections, but if it had been laid straight, it no longer was. Deformation of the battlefield by the bombardment pushed the tunnel out of true, in some places forcing the segments apart and allowing water to seep in. As a result, a stream of dirty water, ankle-deep and polluted with bodily fluids, ran along the bottom, collecting into deeper pools where the tunnel sagged. The tunnel shook every now and then when a shell or energy beam made it through the aegis. The ground transmitted the vibrations well, and down there, without other distractions to the senses, hits on the earth seemed more frequent than they had above.\n\nDoromek consulted a map. Myz paid particular attention to it, then pointed off down the tunnel. The pair of them disappeared around a kink in the line. Katsuhiro made to follow them, but was stopped by a grubby hand.\n\n'Did you see that?' said Runnecan. 'She had a cypher wand.'\n\n'So what?' said Katsuhiro grumpily. His bones ached with his fever and the rads. He welcomed the quiet under the battlefield. He wanted to lie down. Standing still made the aching worse.\n\n'Where did she get it from?' said Runnecan.\n\n'I don't know - Jainan?'\n\n'Then why didn't he give it to Doromek?'\n\n'He's not thinking clearly, he's sick.'\n\nRunnecan gave a smile partway between sympathetic and patronising. 'Listen, I know you don't like me very much. You think I'm underhive scum, and I am. Because of that, I can see something odd is happening here. Those two know each other, trust me. There's something going on here. I-'\n\nFootsteps splashed back towards them.\n\n'Come on. Stop hanging back. We'll need your guns if there are infiltrators down here,' said Doromek.\n\n'I bet you will,' muttered Runnecan.\n\n'Coming,' said Katsuhiro. 'Just catching our breath, that's all.'\n\nThey followed the tunnels as best they could. A little way beyond the kink was a crossroads. The western line went half a kilometre towards the walls before terminating in another staircase leading back to the surface. The northern line had taken a direct hit, and was open to the sky. A surprised sentry posted to keep soldiers from hiding down there challenged them. Doromek told them of their business and they quizzed him as to the state of the tunnel beyond.\n\n'All gone in,' he said. He had a nigh-impenetrable accent. 'All pounded flat, far as the Helios Gate.'\n\nDoromek thanked him.\n\n'Back this way, lads,' he said.\n\nMyz said nothing.\n\nBack at the crossroads they turned east, away from the wall.\n\nKatsuhiro couldn't decide what the tunnels were for. They were too small to move many troops or munitions, or to shelter men from the bombs. They could have been escape routes, he supposed. He asked Doromek what he thought, but the veteran muttered something he didn't catch.\n\n'Lines for power, for water,' Runnecan said, pointing to the bundles of cables hanging down. 'And yes, probably so the officers can run away, and not die with the rest of us.'\n\nNeither answer satisfied Katsuhiro, but no other was forthcoming.\n\nEventually they arrived at a wall in the tunnel. The power lines disappeared through a plasteel plate stencilled with a large numeral sixteen.\n\nDoromek shook his head. 'Nothing the enemy can do with these,' he said. 'Too small, too short, too fragmented. I declare myself satisfied.'\n\nHe rolled up his map. 'Come on, back to our posts. Our little excursion is over.'\n\nIt took little time to retrace their steps. As they reached the bottom of the iron stair, Katsuhiro paused.\n\n'Something's changed.'\n\n'Shh!' Doromek had his head cocked "}
{"text":" the tunnel. The power lines disappeared through a plasteel plate stencilled with a large numeral sixteen.\n\nDoromek shook his head. 'Nothing the enemy can do with these,' he said. 'Too small, too short, too fragmented. I declare myself satisfied.'\n\nHe rolled up his map. 'Come on, back to our posts. Our little excursion is over.'\n\nIt took little time to retrace their steps. As they reached the bottom of the iron stair, Katsuhiro paused.\n\n'Something's changed.'\n\n'Shh!' Doromek had his head cocked to one side.\n\n'I tell you, something's changed!' said Katsuhiro.\n\n'It's the shells,' said Doromek.\n\nThe noise of the bombardment was so ubiquitous that it took a moment for Katsuhiro to register they had stopped. The tunnel wasn't shaking.\n\n'Shhh! Do you hear that?'\n\n'What? What do you mean? I hear nothing,' said Runnecan.\n\n'Exactly.'\n\n'The bombardment. It has really stopped? Oh thank the Emperor!' Katsuhiro forgot his aches, and forced his way up the stairs. Runnecan was right behind him, and they hurried through the door together.\n\nOutside the sky had ceased to burn. Rolling ash clouds filled the air. Although the Palace guns had not relented flinging their cannonade towards the heavens, without the shelling from orbit the battlefield felt quiet. Katsuhiro's ears rang with the lack of noise.\n\nAll down the line cheers fluttered from lips pale with tiredness.\n\n'They've stopped!' said Katsuhiro, letting his lasrifle dangle from its straps so he could grasp Runnecan's skinny arms. The hiver smiled back at him.\n\n'They have!'\n\nMyz pushed past, eyes on the heavens. Doromek shook his head pointedly.\n\n'I'd stop that if I were you,' he said.\n\n'But it's stopped!' said Katsuhiro. Excited chatter rose from the soldiers. More and more were looking upwards. Only the veterans, few in number, remained stern and watchful. That should have informed Katsuhiro something was about to happen, but hope outdoes sense in every contest.\n\n'They've stopped bombing, because they're coming at us again.' Doromek put his face between Runnecan's and Katsuhiro's.\n\n'So?' said Runnecan. 'We beat 'em back half a dozen times! Let them come.'\n\n'No, no, no,' said Doromek with a cruel smile. 'If they're not firing, it's because they don't want to hit their own troops. They've not minded about that before, have they? Stand ready, boys. They're going to have another go, and I don't think they'll be sending cannon fodder this time.'\n\nRide of the ordu\n\nInformation\n\nSiege work\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus\n\nSanguinius was still outside the wall when the bombardment ceased.\n\nThe Blood Angels recognised what this meant before their helms rang with urgent communications.\n\n'Legionary spearhead inbound across all sectors,' Azkaellon relayed. 'Father, you must retire behind the walls.' He looked upwards. As yet, no drop pods pierced the ash clouds.\n\n'What example will that set to our brave defenders?' said Sanguinius distractedly. His attention was on the wall, not on the void. He was so intent on the stretch between the Helios Gate and the Dawn Tower that several of his men followed his gaze to see what so fascinated him.\n\n'My lord...' Azkaellon began. He waved forwards the Sanguinary Guard to shield the primarch.\n\n'We remain. My brother will need me,' Sanguinius said, his voice still distant.\n\nAzkaellon looked at Raldoron.\n\n'What do you foresee, father?' Raldoron asked quietly.\n\n'A need for assistance. The White Scars come.'\n\nThe scream of jets cut through the boom and thwack of the Palace defences, high and pure, an orchestra of a thousand engines: Land Speeders, jetbikes, gunships and attack craft. Over a narrow frontage of the defences, between two lesser towers to the south, a storm of white shapes dropped precipitously off the wall, then raced over the outworks towards the siege camp facing the Helios Gate. As soon as the threat registered, guns on the contravallation began firing again. Though their first volleys smacked harmlessly into the aegis, the White Scars were heading courageously into a solid enemy barrage.\n\nSanguinius smiled as his brother roared by on an oversized jetcycle and tilted stubby wings in salute. Mortals ducked, so close to the ground were the White Scars flying. Once they were past the final line, they flew lower still, their contra-grav sending up sprays of debris and their plasma jets heating the air into a dancing shimmer. On and on the stream of attackers went, a thousand warriors in white, all mounted, all shouting melodic Chogorian war cries. At the edge of the aegis they split into multiple flights, hugging the ground, dodging between the wrecks of ships and armoured vehicles from earlier days of the fighting. Starbursts of shrapnel detonated among them, swift lasers slashed out, unseating some of the ordu, but the mass flew on, accelerating towards the enemy line until they were jinking blurs. The kilometres between besiegers and besieged were covered swiftly, and they were soon in range, firing their guns, the gunships pulling up to draw the enemy's attention, loop around and attack targets of priority. One exploded under a withering hail of hard rounds. A few moments later, the siege line shields buckled under massed fire, and soon after that the first enemy cannon died.\n\nSanguinius watched transfixed.\n\n'He fights with such elegance,' the Angel said.\n\n'He was ordered not to attack?' asked Raldoron.\n\n'He is the Khan of the ordu of the White Scars Legion, the Warhawk of Chogoris,' said Sanguinius. 'One might as well attempt to chain the wind.'\n\n'The enemy will be with us soon,' said Raldoron. 'What are your orders, father?'\n\nAzkaellon consulted with distant command nexuses.\n\n'My lord, we must return within the walls. The Death Guard are arriving in force. A third of their Legion is bound for the Palace battle sphere alone.'\n\nSanguinius looked skywards calmly.\n\n'Bring me my helm and my weapons. Retire our colours behind the walls. We fight.'\n\n'You are at risk!' Azkaellon said fiercely.\n\nSanguinius responded with the disturbing mantra his sons had heard all too often of late. 'I do not die today,' he said, 'and if I do not aid my brother on his return, he will. I have seen it. My sword, my spear! Man the ramparts alongside these brave warriors of the Imperium.'\n\nHis helm was brought and Sanguinius locked it into place.\n\n'It is time at last for the Ninth Legion to fight.'\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, 7th of Quartus\n\n'My lord, the Death Guard drop assault will be on the ground within five minutes.' The officer stood to attention, not daring to meet Lord Dorn's eyes. 'Here is a cartograph of their projected landing zone. The larger part is divided into seven groups bound for the Palace, but there are numerous smaller detachments headed for locations all over Terra.' A cartolithic map blinked on close to Dorn's observational pulpit.\n\nDorn knew all the map had to tell. He guessed the enemy's intentions well in advance, and read the actualities of their attack, seeing them in the dance of numbers streaming through the hololiths before the strategium's machines or his subordinates could collate them.\n\n'Keep monitoring. Notify me of anything out of the ordinary. Compare projections with the developing situation. Miss nothing!'\n\nThe officer swallowed.\n\n'My lord, there is more. We have large numbers of loyal light grav-attack craft departing the Palace, sector fifteen and sixteen, around the Helios Gate.'\n\n'What?' Dorn's stone-hard face turned suddenly to look at the officer.\n\n'It is the White Scars, my lord. They are making a sally.'\n\n'Where is the Khan?'\n\n'He is leading them. I am sorry, my lord, we had no warning, and have made all attempts to urge him back but-'\n\nDorn silenced him with a gesture. 'Strategic overlay, Daylight Wall, central quadrant,' he commanded. An overhead representation blinked into view in the strategium shaft.\n\n'My lord!' another officer shouted. 'More White Scars battle groups are departing the Palace, sections 1,004, 320, 87 and 2,400.'\n\nDorn summoned more cartographs.\n\n'He's going for the siege camps. Damn his impetuousness. Aerial command!' he barked. 'Get our fighters into the air now. Split six squadrons off from interception missions to cover all White Scars fall-back corridors, but concentrate efforts on sectors 15 to 16. Prepare to aid my brother's retreat - if he plays his usual game he will strike hard and make for the Palace. Ensure he returns intact.'\n\n'My lord, if he doesn't?'\n\n'Then he is on his own,' growled Dorn. Alarms bleeped from numerous stations in the Borealis Strategium. 'By the Emperor, get those fighters up!'\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus\n\nJaghatai Khan's jetbike surged under him with a leonine growl as he accelerated out past the contravallation. At the head of a hundred jetbikes, he burned out across the broken lands beyond, and swung back on another attack run. The defences were well planned, with outwards ramparts against the possibility of relief forces coming to the Palace's aid, and although the rearward guns were fewer in number than those facing the Palace, they mustered a considerable firestorm against the White Scars.\n\nThe Khan rode with three brotherhoods. They crowded the air, their jinking paths taking them so close to one another he could hear the snapping of pennants over the battle's roar. He took in a massive amount of information from the battlefield; he did not possess Sanguinius' ability to see the future, but his mental powers lent him near-preternatural reflexes. A slight movement on the parapet was enough warning for him to swing his jetbike a few degrees, avoiding the lascannon aimed at him.\n\nHis sons, though skilled, were not as gifted as he. Many were blasted from the sky. Some died in flight, their mounts consumed with fire, their armour shattered. The lucky ones tumbled from smoking saddles, rolling on the shattered ground with a born horseman's grace to come up firing. Some dozens were forming up in ad hoc"}
{"text":"ers lent him near-preternatural reflexes. A slight movement on the parapet was enough warning for him to swing his jetbike a few degrees, avoiding the lascannon aimed at him.\n\nHis sons, though skilled, were not as gifted as he. Many were blasted from the sky. Some died in flight, their mounts consumed with fire, their armour shattered. The lucky ones tumbled from smoking saddles, rolling on the shattered ground with a born horseman's grace to come up firing. Some dozens were forming up in ad hoc squads to continue the fight on foot.\n\nAn eye-blink later the Khan was back over the enemy siege line. The shields protecting the camp were not as sophisticated as those making up the Palace aegis, and the light vehicles slipped through them with little more than a flurry of sparks breaking over their prows. The Khan banked hard down the trench, and sped along directly above the foe. Hundreds of Dark Mechanicum tech thralls turned their weapons around, too late, too slow. Rotary cannons in the nose of the Khan's jetbike whined up to firing speed and sent twin impact lines down ahead of him, shredding metal and flesh to ruin. He drew his tulwar, keyed on the power field and, with a kick on the control pedals, sent his jetbike arrowing down with a scream of overtaxed engines.\n\n'For the Emperor!' he roared. 'For Unity, for the Imperium!'\n\nSuch was his speed that he could have wielded a switch of wood and it would have cleaved his enemy down. When the tulwar struck the enemy, they exploded in showers of oily blood.\n\n'Onwards, my ordu! Onwards!'\n\nDozens of jetbikes followed him, the bolters mounted on their fairings spitting death. Mass-reactives pulverised the foe's servants, leaving them to hang as bloody shreds on the guns they operated. Land Speeders dipped from the sky, targeting weapons emplacements, turning them to slag with roaring fusion beams. Living beings hit directly by the terrible weapons were vaporised. Those only clipped suffered horrific deaths as the vapour within their cells was atomised, and their organs exploded with sufficient force to rupture their plasteel casings.\n\n'Death! Death to the traitors!' Jaghatai called, his war cries broadcast over his Legion's vox-net. His khans' answers were loud with laughter and jubilation. Too long had they skulked behind the walls. The wind had them, filling them with its rushing power and lifting them up with its strength.\n\nTheir target was ahead, one of eight Mechanicum arks beached around the Palace. Enemy activity was the greatest around these vessels. Huge machines were in the process of assembly. Part covered though they were by tarpaulins and armoured sows, Khan recognised breaching cannons with shield-bane technology made to bring down the aegis, and other things - huge frameworks of stupendous size. He frowned, not quite believing what he saw, and set his augurs to record everything.\n\n'Primary target,' Khan said. Their time was running down. The window of opportunity afforded by the pause in the bombardment would close as soon as the Death Guard made planetfall. 'Execute and withdraw,' he commanded.\n\nAround the ark ship, the siege line broadened into a large space flattened by machines, and protected by turrets, energy screens and physical obstacles. The dark arts of technology were much in evidence. Arcs of crackling power whipped up to catch White Scars riders, leaping between them to bring three or four down at once. Actinic light burned from eye sockets as warriors were consumed within their armour while systems shorted out in their machines, dousing their jets and cutting off their contra-gravity fields. Clamp mines leapt up in fountains of dirt, riding short-burn jets to home in on their prey, where powerful magnetic locks slammed them home before they blew. Men fell on burning jetbikes left and right. The Khan dodged as the wreck of a Land Speeder plunged down in front of him. Beneath the black sky all was fire and energy light of startling colours, blue, purple, red and gold.\n\nThe ark ship was heavily guarded by Legio Cybernetica troops. There were siege robots there, huge things approaching the size of Imperial Knights. These remained inert, but their smaller brothers and sisters fired upwards. Radium bullets fizzled past. Volkite beams sliced the air. Still the White Scars came on.\n\nHis men ignored the robots and the cyborgs firing on them, but broadened their formation and peeled apart, the greater portion of them heading for the shield generators protecting the camp. The first were laboriously shattered by bolter fire, but as the shield weakened, missiles and weapons shot from the Khan's circling fighters streaked down, impaling more shield generators, and bursting them apart.\n\nJaghatai himself rode amok through the crowds of enemy, his tulwar held forwards at the charge in the manner of a cavalryman of Chogoris. A battle automaton swiped at him clumsily; he separated its head from its body. Another fell back with a glowing line cut through its torso. Limbs flew. His rotary cannons fired until they clicked dry. Bullets rattled musical holes into his vehicle's fuselage, and he jinked away, finding himself herded towards a wall of advancing war machines by lines of converging bullets. He slewed around, coming into a long, sweeping sideways turn, using the jetbike's bulk to knock three of the robots to the ground and, gunning the engines, immolate their screeching data master with a wash of plasma burn. He hardly decelerated before he was away, ducking as the machines fired after him.\n\nFighter craft were shrieking overhead now, dropping bombs and missiles onto the siege camp. A line of fire raced along the ground, and a mighty detonation shook the air as chained explosions detonated several energy mantlets.\n\n'Daylight Wall sections thirteen through sixteen, hear me. Jaghatai Khan, primarch and lord of the White Scars ordu, commands you. Priority target, these coordinates. Open fire on my command.' He didn't wait for confirmation.\n\n'Sons of Chogoris!' he voxed. 'Break free, return to the walls!'\n\nAs suddenly as they had attacked, the White Scars disengaged. Jetbikes swooped upwards, corkscrewing through deadly patterns of las-fire. On the far side of the siege lines, Thunderhawks touched down only long enough to rescue some of the warriors who had lost their machines, before blasting back upwards again. As they fell back, they fired, until their guns were pointing towards the Palace, and they showed their jets to the enemy.\n\n'Wall sections thirteen through sixteen, open fire now.'\n\nThe White Scars passed through a hail of ordnance heading out. Explosions boomed behind them, cutting off the fire that chased them.\n\nJaghatai Khan opened his throttle and raced ahead of the wind.\n\nThe depleted soldiery of the outworks watched the sky. Despite impending peril, their nerves were steadier than they had been in weeks. For the first time, legionaries fought with them. The Blood Angels were few in number. Sanguinius called no more of them down from the lofty walls. He seemed distracted, not like Katsuhiro had imagined a primarch.\n\nThat was a small thing. There was a primarch on the line, a primarch, and though he kept to the top of Bastion 16 with his closest aides and glorious bodyguard, conscripts felt new resolve at Sanguinius' presence. If they looked up, they could glimpse him shining behind the ramparts. He was a spot of golden hope in the blackness cloaking Terra.\n\nSanguinius put his legionaries out to strengthen the defence around Bastion 16. The mortal soldiery he also commanded closer to the tower. Even tired and ill, the conscripts found a new energy, moving with purpose they never had before. For the first time, under the gleaming green eye-lenses of the Space Marines, Katsuhiro felt like a real soldier, and the thoughts of inferiority he had earlier in the day were swept away.\n\nAll of them felt that way. All of them, except Runnecan. The little man dogged Katsuhiro's footsteps. Often cocky, his confident air had given way to unease.\n\n'I don't think he's up to any good.'\n\n'Who?' said Katsuhiro, who was focused on the White Scars' attack upon the siege camp. With the bombardment halted, he could hear the discharge of their guns clearly over the wastes. 'Sanguinius?'\n\nRunnecan spoke a name, but it was drowned out by a cheer erupting along the line as a series of explosions ripped through the distant camp, and the darting hornets of the Khan's Space Marines swarmed towards the beached warship.\n\n'What?' Katsuhiro said.\n\n'Doromek! Doromek! Listen to me!' Runnecan was wild-eyed now. 'All that trudging around in the tunnels. Why? Where did she get that cypher wand from?' He shook his head and huddled lower. 'They know each other from before, I seen it. They do.'\n\n'She can fight,' said Katsuhiro, recalling Myz killing the giant mutant.\n\n'Exactly!'\n\n'But that doesn't mean anything. Maybe she's like him, a soldier. There are people in that Palace who can kill in a million different ways.'\n\n'Yeah, there are, and they're in there, not out here. We're out here because we're not even soldiers, we're nothing! Do you really think someone like Doromek could avoid the draft, even now? And how come she's not piped up about her handiness with a blade? They shouldn't be here!'\n\n'It's a mistake,' insisted Katsuhiro. 'Someone's bound to slip through the cracks.'\n\n'Right,' said Runnecan darkly. 'But did they slip or did they creep through?'\n\nThat made Katsuhiro look round. 'What are you saying?'\n\n'There are traitors everywhere, my friend.' Runnecan sighted down his gun towards the siege camp. 'There are-'\n\nOnce more, an explosion stole his words, this one much bigger. The White Scars fighters and gunships were pounding the encampment. The shields flickered, then gave out. Immediately, the White Scars pulled back, buzzing up in a flurry of white glints to race home. All along the line the remainder of the conscripts cheered.\n\nA ripple of pops crackled across the sky, insi"}
{"text":"re you saying?'\n\n'There are traitors everywhere, my friend.' Runnecan sighted down his gun towards the siege camp. 'There are-'\n\nOnce more, an explosion stole his words, this one much bigger. The White Scars fighters and gunships were pounding the encampment. The shields flickered, then gave out. Immediately, the White Scars pulled back, buzzing up in a flurry of white glints to race home. All along the line the remainder of the conscripts cheered.\n\nA ripple of pops crackled across the sky, insignificant to the conscripts, but a warning sound the legionaries knew well.\n\n'Stand ready, warriors of the Imperium,' said one of the Blood Angels. He was metres away from Katsuhiro but his vox-amplified voice carried far, strong, pure and proud. 'The enemy are coming.'\n\nNervous faces glanced skywards. Hundreds of bright dots were hurtling down through the sky, bursting through the cloud layer with violent speed. Ahead of them came a storm of attack craft.\n\nFrom the Palace dozens of defence wings raced up to meet them.\n\nThe guns all along the section of the wall to Katsuhiro's back redoubled their barrage, and the siege camp was lost in a storm of fire. The White Scars hurtled through the flames as if the furies of the warp themselves were at their backs.\n\nIt was after that point that everything descended into anarchy.\n\nDeath among us\n\nSpearhead\n\nThe Angel and the Warhawk\n\nImperial Palace airspace, 7th of Quartus\n\n'Get it off my tail!' Aisha screamed.\n\nShe yanked the stick of Blue Zephyr hard, sending the Panthera into a bone-crushing curve to escape her pursuer. Enemy ships were all over them. A dual-pilot Stiletto fighter exploded at her left, taken out by the Legiones Astartes ship gunning for her. Bright tracer fire streaked by. The fuselage made a dull clang as a lascannon beam clipped her. She shot out a hand to silence screaming systems and reroute power away from damaged circuits, snatching it back just as quick to the stick.\n\n'Old gods of Old Earth,' she snarled. 'If any of you are still out there, give me a little grace.'\n\nThe battle sphere was a tempest of metal, hard light and fire. Fighters of dozens of different marques duelled over the Palace walls and the outworks, while through the storm of flame and ships the drop pods of the traitors punched like iron fists. Aisha's mission was supposedly to destroy as many pods as she could before they touched down, but they were denied even the most unlikely shot by the enemy air armada, which protected the pods with furious tenacity. Her own auspex returns and what little sense she could make from flight control's messages suggested larger landers were coming in, almost certainly laden with heavy equipment. Such slow-moving beasts were meat to Blue Zephyr, but they were even better protected. The enemy were everywhere, over everything, flights and flights of them, and now they had an additional Legion's worth of air support to bolster them. The Imperial defence squadrons attempted to block enemy craft from penetrating the outer rings of the air defences, but some were bound to get through, and although most of them died in clouds of fire before they got far over the city, a handful wrought havoc, unleashing clouds of incendiary bombs. Phosphex fire had a special shine all of its own. Glaring magnesium white, it filled canyon streets with a deceptively beautiful light as it ate through metal, rockcrete and flesh with equal voracity. There were poison smokes and acid fogs and other vile weapons deployed. Gas blanketed a part of the outer city. Heavier than air, it sank down through ventilation grilles and fractured pavements to smother the people hiding below the Palace.\n\nNone of that would matter to her any more if she couldn't shake her pursuer.\n\nOrders screamed in her vox-beads along with panicked calls for aid. The enemy was throwing more and more craft into the fight, and with the air defences already damaged and their own numbers whittled down by every engagement, the loyalist squadrons were suffering. Gunfire flashed over her cockpit. She heaved Blue Zephyr to the side, and burst through a streamer of flame, almost slamming into a Fury void-fighter spinning out of control across her flight path. A quick jerk of her stick sent Blue Zephyr skipping over it.\n\nStill the legionary craft came.\n\nShe got barely a glimpse of it, it was so fast, but she'd seen enough to get an identity: a Xiphon interceptor, XIV Legion, one of the few machines she'd ever been afraid of facing in combat. Streams of missiles burned past her, shot with terrifying rapidity by the interceptor's rotary launchers. She was getting boxed in by the pilot. Where she dodged the missiles, lascannon beams waited for her. He was closing in on the kill, and she was running out of options.\n\n'I'm coming! I'm coming!'\n\nAisha almost cried out with joy when she heard Dandar Bey's voice. 'I've got him. Hold your course. I'll free you up, get you back into it.' He swore. 'This is a mess.'\n\nThe fire from behind broke off as Bey joined the deadly game. Aisha caught another glimpse of the Xiphon; its green-and-white heraldry was dirty, and its engine exhaust an unhealthy black, but it flew true enough, breaking off its pursuit of her to dodge Bey's counter-attack. She immediately reacted, pulling herself up. Although she loved her ship as dearly as she did any person, she cursed Blue Zephyr's comparative lack of agility as it sped out wider than her foe.\n\n'I've lost him! Aisha, watch out, I can't see him in all this-'\n\nThere was a brief growl on the line, then nothing but static. So little to mark a man's death.\n\nAisha climbed. She found the Xiphon and opened fire with all her armaments. The Xiphon plunged down in an evasive dive impossible for a baseline human to tolerate. She couldn't follow to finish him, and knew it was going to come again behind her.\n\n'Bright Hawks, Bright Hawks! Squadron Mistress Daveinpor requesting immediate support.'\n\nNothing came back. She glanced at her unit markers. Half her ship lights were red. Another blinked from green to mortis glow as she watched. There was a garbled message from somewhere, then nothing but the howling of interference and the half-heard shouts of orders blasting over the vox-net.\n\nShe was on her own. Warning signifiers bleated that the Xiphon was lining her up again. Gritting her teeth, she pushed Blue Zephyr into a punishing dive, penetrating the weakened aegis and coming down behind the walls of the Palace. An obvious manoeuvre, but designed to goad her foe to follow. She yanked up a few hundred metres above the deck, skimming fast down burning streets. The Palace was taking damage directly now. The aegis still held back the worst of the orbital bombardment, and doubtless would for months more, but Palace airspace was dense with enemy attack craft that rained down bombs on everything. She punched through a firestorm, narrowly avoided a toppling spire. All the while the Xiphon was closing. The pilot chanced a few lascannon volleys, herding her again like livestock to the slaughter.\n\nAn opportunity presented itself. A bridge ahead, grandiose, huge, typically Imperial. Her auspex was a welter of confused signals, but she knew it was there, in the poison fog and fire. She hoped only that her foe did not.\n\nAccelerating as fast as she dared, she lessened her evasive movements, luring the Xiphon closer. Rockets stormed past her cockpit. Las light flashed by.\n\nThe bridge was there, somewhere.\n\nShe misjudged. The bridge, ablaze from end to end, burst from the gas almost too suddenly for her to react. She pulled up to nearly vertically, making Blue Zephyr scream in machine pain.\n\nThe Space Marine, for all his gifts, could not avoid the unexpected obstacle. The Xiphon slammed into the bridge and burst out the other side as a wingless stub in a shower of broken armourglass and masonry.\n\nShe took a breath, then another, and banked back round.\n\nThere was enough time to register three more fighters closing in on her from three separate directions. From that position, there was no escape.\n\nHer fingers stretched out to the pict glued to the instrument panel. They did not reach her husband's face before Blue Zephyr was torn to flaming pieces.\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus\n\nAhead of the drop pods a brief but widespread bombardment of shells detonated over the outworks with soft, floury bangs. As they did not hit the ground, they seemed no threat at all, but then the defenders saw a paint-burst spread begin its rapid sinking, and they understood the danger that these bombs posed.\n\n'Gas! Gas! Gas!'\n\nWhistles blew. Men shouted. Though millennia old, gas was still a much feared weapon. An attack by the very air induced an atavistic response deep in the limbic system, a fear of drowning, of suffocation, a fear common to all creatures that must breathe.\n\nRunnecan swore in fluent underhive gutter slang. A thousand hands went for cases at belts. The Space Marines salted among the lines remained impassive, protected from all environmental harms by their power armour. Katsuhiro was nervous of the Space Marines, for all the awe he felt. He had never wanted to be one, but at that moment he envied them their protection and their lack of fear.\n\nThough the conscripts had started out poorly equipped, the rate of attrition was so high that by that time most of the troops on the outworks had some form of protection against the poison, a gas mask at least, looted from the dead if not assigned to them personally. Katsuhiro fell into the former category. He had no training in how to use the mask he'd acquired, and nearly didn't manage to get it on. In his panic he yanked on the straps all wrong and got the mask twisted about. A brown fog sifted around him as he struggled. He smelled acrid chemicals, then, mercifully, he managed to pull the mask down to cover his face. Stinging eyes made him fear the worst, but they stopped streaming after a moment and his breathing ste"}
{"text":" if not assigned to them personally. Katsuhiro fell into the former category. He had no training in how to use the mask he'd acquired, and nearly didn't manage to get it on. In his panic he yanked on the straps all wrong and got the mask twisted about. A brown fog sifted around him as he struggled. He smelled acrid chemicals, then, mercifully, he managed to pull the mask down to cover his face. Stinging eyes made him fear the worst, but they stopped streaming after a moment and his breathing steadied.\n\nKatsuhiro's hearing was muffled by the mask. The gas mask had an unpleasant, rubbery smell. The odour of gas stuck to the back of his throat and irritated it, but he couldn't spit, and he swallowed his gathering phlegm down repeatedly, until he felt nauseous.\n\nThe cloud, now a rich mustard brown, closed in over the troops. At first all he could hear was his breathing, in and out, roar and hiss with the click of the mask's simple purifier. The gas thickened until Runnecan was a grey shape, though he was only a couple of metres away.\n\nFalse calm descended, peaceful and poisonous.\n\nA man, blood running from blinded eyes and blistered lips, burst from the fog. Katsuhiro fired reflexively at him, missing in his fright. The man was clawing at his face, his screams turning to gurgles. His shoulder clipped Katsuhiro hard as he ran by and the gas swallowed him again.\n\nScreaming came out of the fog. Not all of the troops had gas masks. Many that did couldn't work them, or had equipment that was damaged. They ran about in terror. One with greater presence of mind turned over bodies for a gas mask, finding one, slipping it on just in time. Two men brawled over a mask neither had any hope of donning. Others tried to run, but fell, screaming froth from burning throats.\n\nTime slowed. Katsuhiro moved as a man underwater. Images of horror appeared as sheets of gas shifted like weeds in currents, each waft of poison opening a curtain on another scene of suffering. It seemed to go on forever, as awful things do, though according to Katsuhiro's chronometer less than two minutes went by.\n\nThe screams died as men died. Vapour drank the sound of the wall guns, squeezing them down to subaquatic thumps. Laser flash dispersed by the gas turned the rolling clouds into alien thunderstorms of yellow and brown lit by red lightning.\n\nA roaring scream sounded right over Katsuhiro. Glaring yellow appeared overhead, and a wash of heat blasted the poison fog aside. A huge metal ovoid bore right down on him. He was frozen, sure he would be crushed. Other men, revealed by the backwash of the descending pod, were close to breaking, but a giant in red stood among them, his bolter ready, shouting.\n\n'Stand firm, servants of Terra!'\n\nTheir panic quelled, they held. A storm of tracer bullets ripped around the vehicle, puncturing it many times. Half its thrusters went out, and it tilted over, hurtling off into the wastes beyond the third defence line.\n\nIt was only the first.\n\nA drop pod assault was an intentionally terrifying spectacle. The pods fell so fast they seemed to be upon the verge of destruction, only firing their retro thrusters at the last minute to slow their descent from fatal velocity. They smashed into the ground with a force that would kill an unmodified human outright, even one lucky enough to wear power armour. The noise they made was tremendous, like containers full of scrap metal slammed into rock. Explosive bolts went off in crackling bursts, and the huge petal doors fell down with metallic booms. There were hundreds of them, suddenly, crowding the sky, jets roaring, some exploding. The fury of the wall guns was cutting over the third line, streaks of bullets and las light almost close enough to touch, and all the roaring added to the havoc.\n\nMore soft thumps overhead. More gas floated down. Different colours, copper-oxide greens and heavy yellows, powder reds and blues. Electromag munitions blew, filling the fog with crackling energy that earthed on the ceramite of the Space Marines in crawling displays of lightning.\n\n'Stand firm!' roared the Space Marines, their deep voices pushed into inhumanity by the harshening of helmet voxes. 'Stand firm!' they shouted, and no one dared run.\n\nKatsuhiro had only an impression of the warriors disembarking from their pods before the thickening gas hid them all. Again so much transpired in so short a space of time, seconds maybe, but fearful years crawled by.\n\nHe saw nothing in the murk, but the Space Marines' auto-senses penetrated it easily, and they called out once again.\n\n'They come! Ready weapons! For the Emperor!'\n\nThe Space Marines brought up their bolters to their shoulders and opened fire.\n\nThere were perhaps two dozen Blood Angels on that section of the rampart, nothing compared to the massed thousands who had fought on alien worlds the length and breadth of the galaxy, and yet the report of their bolters firing even in such thin numbers struck Katsuhiro with terror. They barked like hellhounds out of ancient myth, each round the equal of another age's cannon shot.\n\nBastion 16's guns raked past the rampart's front. Katsuhiro saw large shapes collapse. The wall guns still fired over their heads at the drop pods. So much noise.\n\nThe first of the enemy legionaries came out of the gas in a line, their own bolters firing.\n\nA human voice bellowed along the rampart. 'Troopers of the Kushtun Naganda! Present arms!'\n\nTwo men down from Katsuhiro a soldier was hit in the shoulder by a bolt-round. When the mass-reactive detonated, the man's torso from his right shoulder to his hip ceased to be. A mist of blood joined the fog. The end of his left arm was blown clear; the right arm and the head, connected by shredded bridges of tissue, collapsed inwards.\n\n'Ready!' the human officer bellowed.\n\nKatsuhiro rested his gun on the rampart's lip. Though the men were sheltered by the fortification, in most cases only their heads exposed, they were still being hit, still dying. The Blood Angels knelt, but they were so big their chests protruded over the defence line. Bolt-rounds blew on their armour, taking out chunks of metallo-ceramic from the plates. The enemy were targeting them in favour of the lesser men. Incredibly, so it seemed to Katsuhiro, one of the crimson angels fell, his chest a bloody ruin.\n\n'Aim!' the officer roared.\n\nKatsuhiro did his best to ignore the carnage among his fellow defenders. He'd played his part in repelling six assaults upon the defence line; he'd been bombed; he was ill, hungry, cold and exhausted. But he had not yet faced Traitor legionaries.\n\nHe struggled to draw a bead on the warriors coming to kill him. Just aiming at them seemed profane, somehow, a final inversion of how things were meant to be.\n\nThen they came from the fog, and terror showed a new face.\n\nThey wore green-and-white armour adorned with images of death. Where the Blood Angels were crimson and glorious, these beings were debased, though they wore the same wargear and had been created the same way. Their battleplate was filthy, and streaked with dirt and rust. From their vision and breathing slits oily fluids dribbled. Black smoke poured from the exhaust vents on their power plants. They shuffled forwards without the Blood Angels' grace, while preceding them was a stench of sickness, the collective illness of a hospice ward in time of plague distilled. They were dead men walking, and yet they would not fall.\n\nAutocannon rounds, bolts, lascannon shots and explosive shells fell among them. Armour shattered on their bodies. But if they dropped, they climbed back up. Katsuhiro saw one riddled with dozens of hits from the loyal Space Marines. Only when a bolt punched through his helm and detonated in his skull did the filthy giant collapse to his knees and pitch forwards into the mud.\n\nKatsuhiro drew a bead on a warrior advancing without his helmet. He was getting close, close enough to see wild, lidless eyes in a face as drawn as a skull and a black-lipped mouth forever set in death's humourless grin.\n\n'Fire!' the officer ordered.\n\nKatsuhiro squeezed the trigger. Hundreds of las-beams flickered through the fog. His own shot scored clean black through the slime weeping from the monster's armour plates. But the guns of the mortals were of little use against legionary battleplate. Lucky shots to eyes and softseal joints might do some harm, but such wounds were nothing to the corrupted legionaries.\n\nA battle cry went up behind the advancing traitors, and foes more suited to Katsuhiro's gun emerged.\n\nThrough the gas, the lost and the damned charged the line again.\n\nJaghatai Khan's ordu were nearing the wall when the gas shells choked the sky. Dirty smoke rushed out, so thick his jetbike engines coughed when the intakes sucked it in. Guns boomed on both sides. He raced between the tracks of death, his auspex picking out the features of the ground in pulses of lurid green. The Khan was blessed with the best eyesight that could be engineered into a human being, and marvellous wargear to enhance it, but in that murk he was half-blind. Drop pods screamed past him, blasting shafts into the gas that closed quickly.\n\nHe was close to home when a haywire shell, cast down from orbit to blind the Palace's machine eyes, exploded right by his jetbike. A pulse of electromagnetism so violent it made his armour scream shut down his engines.\n\nLike a javelin cast by the thunder gods of Chogoris, Jaghatai Khan's jetbike plunged down. Its golden prow ploughed poison mist, then earth.\n\nThe Khan leapt free at the point of impact. He rolled twice, using the momentum of the fall to launch himself back to his feet, where he skidded to a halt, tulwar poised to strike.\n\nHe stood ready, every sense alert in the muffled battle zone. His warriors sped overhead. Guns coughed gently. Interference crackled in his helm, his communications useless in the electromagnetic bombardment.\n\nThen they came for him.\n\nThe Great Angel watched the gases of the Death "}
{"text":" ploughed poison mist, then earth.\n\nThe Khan leapt free at the point of impact. He rolled twice, using the momentum of the fall to launch himself back to his feet, where he skidded to a halt, tulwar poised to strike.\n\nHe stood ready, every sense alert in the muffled battle zone. His warriors sped overhead. Guns coughed gently. Interference crackled in his helm, his communications useless in the electromagnetic bombardment.\n\nThen they came for him.\n\nThe Great Angel watched the gases of the Death Guard envelop the defence lines, retreat momentarily under the blast of drop pod rocket motors, then surge back in, engulfing the top of Bastion 16 and banking high against the Palace walls. Throughout he kept his eyes forwards, following his brother's progress. He watched the haywire shells crackle, and saw the Khan plunge into the gas banks as more drop pods screamed down from on high.\n\n'There,' he said. He pointed with the Spear of Telesto into the gas. 'The moment is at hand. Our foe blinds our communications, but you must find me. My brother, my brother! To the aid of my brother!' he shouted.\n\nWithout waiting for confirmation from his men, Sanguinius spread his wings and threw himself from the top of Bastion 16 into the deadly fog.\n\nKhan of Khans\n\nCourage's reward\n\nBrothers at war\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus\n\nThe Khan was alone and the enemy saw immediately what a prize was within their grasp. Hundreds of Mortarion's sons closed in from the fog, boltguns blazing. His armour sparked with impacts; for the moment it withstood the assault, but even his panoply was not immune to concentrated fire. The Warhawk lived by one rule of war above all others, one learned the moment his adopted family were slaughtered by the Kurayeds, and borne out in his war against the Palatine on Chogoris.\n\nAttack was the strongest form of defence.\n\nThe Khan fought with silent fury, charging into the ranks of the Death Guard with his tulwar spinning in a blurring figure of eight. He crashed into them without slowing, his sword cutting them down. Ceramite was atomised by the blade's disruption field. Viscera spilled onto the earth. Polluted blood showered him.\n\nThrough his armour filters he smelled the corruption upon Mortarion's sons. Theirs was sickness of flesh and soul. They fought slowly, without the finesse of other Legions, but the doggedness they were known for had been intensified by their fall into darkness, and no matter how many he killed they pressed at him without cease.\n\nIn the thick of them he was safe from the firestorm they unleashed; hand-to-hand combat was on his terms, not theirs. The Death Guard favoured disciplined lines and overwhelming close-range fire to bring down their enemies, taking whatever they received in return with grim stoicism. The Khan refused them their preference, leaping among them, barging down ranks before they formed. He fought unpredictably, throwing off the offensive of his foes, who rightly guessed he wished to regain the Palace. Though he rushed them and pushed them back, or cut diagonally through their formation, always the pattern of his movements took him closer to the defences; if he was forced to take fifty steps away from the walls to throw them into disarray, he would take fifty-one back.\n\nHis fury would have inspired a thousand bards had any been able to see it. The fogs made his fight a lonely struggle. Hidden from all knowledge he faced the Death Guard alone, his vox and locator beacon jammed by haywire ordnance. The enemy died by the dozen, for not one was the match of a primarch. But though he fought like a god of old, he was but one being against an army, and not even the sons of the Emperor were tireless or supplied with infinite battle fortune.\n\nThe first cut to break through his armour came after his fortieth kill. A son of Mortarion lunged at the back of his knee while he was engaging four to the front. The weapon he sought to slay a primarch with was a simple combat knife, but perseverance pushed it through the armoured ribbing of the joint seal. The Khan felt the blow as an angry, hot sting, and the attacker paid for the injury with his life. The Khan smashed backwards with his tulwar's pommel, his Emperor-given strength caving in ceramite perished by rot and the greening head beneath. He bellowed in anger, slashing across at transhuman chest height to drive back the assailants to his front. Three of them died in a storm of disruption lightning, their innards laid open to the chemical fog. A fourth lost his left arm, a fifth took a blow to the head that spun him around and knocked him down. The Khan would have finished him, but he was reaching instead for his damaged left knee, trying to pull out the knife lodged in his suit. At the first attempt his fingers slipped off a blood-slicked hilt made for hands smaller than his. His second attempt was foiled by a renewed attack.\n\nThe knife penetrated seven centimetres into his flesh, no more, interfering minimally with the bones of his joint. He had suffered far worse from deadlier weapons and fought on. Trusting to his engineered physiology to blunt the pain, he pressed forwards, but as he did so, he felt the strength running from his body along with his unstaunched blood.\n\nAnother Death Guard died, then another. Explosives were raining down on him now from the enemy side, seeking him out, as the XIV Legion shelled their own troops in their lust to slay a primarch. The Khan wondered if Mortarion saw his battle there, and grimly ordered his death whatever the cost to his sons. There was a soulless pragmatism to the act typical of the Lord of Death.\n\nThe fog swirled with the rain of fire, lifting to reveal a horde of warriors in dirty white and green. A hotness spread from the piercing knife, infecting his blood with a fever. Incredulous, the Khan fought still, but the touch of worry grazed his heart. Never in all of his days had he been ill, but he instinctively recognised disease in him. He was human, after all, on some distant level. His bones ached like ice, and his flesh blazed like the forge. Sweat dripped from his brow. He looked around at his brother's corrupted sons, and wondered what awful pact had been agreed to make them so, and give them the power to sicken a primarch.\n\n'Mortarion! What have you done?' he shouted.\n\nThere was no answer.\n\nHis body warred with the infection of the knife. Wellbeing came and went as the knife's poisons overcame each trick his engineered physiology deployed. He scrabbled for the knife again as fought, his great tulwar burning through the air to obliterate yet more of the traitors, but he could not take enough time to pull the knife free. It was so firmly embedded, and too delicate for his fingers to easily pluck out.\n\nA surge of bile rose in his throat. His limbs shook. He was slowing. The enemy were gathering closer, like the pack hunters of ancient Earth's steppes, closing in on the great beasts of those times.\n\nHis next blow was weak enough to be turned aside. Arms clad in algae-green gauntlets grappled with his forearm. With a bellow of anger he wrenched himself free, and stood for a moment unmolested, before they surged forwards, hacking and stabbing with more diseased weapons, and dragged him down.\n\nThe Khan of Khans ends his days, he thought, not upon the sea of grass in one final, glorious charge, but dragged down and butchered in the mud.\n\nThey wrestled with him, their filthy knives dragging grooves into his ceramite. They tried to get at the joints in his arms, groin, legs and neck, crawling on him like vermin. He threw them off, once, twice, but the third time was an exhausted heave. His body burned with disease, and his strength left him.\n\nA creature of unclean gods - they were no longer the Emperor's work - brought forwards a huge, rusted axe for the executioner's stroke.\n\n'I am Jaghatai Khan!' he shouted, the passion of his words driving them back. 'I am Jaghatai Khan, loyal son of the Emperor, and I have ridden well.'\n\nThe axe swung up to its apex, and hung poised on the cusp of descent. It never fell. The legionary bearing it fell backwards, his headless corpse pulled over by the weight of his weapon.\n\nJetbikes cut through the gas, and the air was filled with the sound of engines and Chogorian voices.\n\n'The Khan! The Khan! To the Khan!'\n\nA warrior of the ordu leapt from his steed, the speed of his fall turning him into living ordnance that ploughed through the grimy ranks of Mortarion's brood. The warrior was brought to an end as he attempted to rise, hacked apart by a flurry of rusted, dull blades, but he had done his work; his genefather was free.\n\nThe Khan erupted from the pile of Death Guard, his tulwar flaring again with the lightning of its energy field. This time, he firmly grasped the knife hilt sticking from his leg. This time, he wrenched it free.\n\nThe source of contagion removed, his body redoubled its efforts to purge the sickness. The disease fought with a traitor's hate to undo his cellular biology, but the light of ancient knowledge shone from every curl of the Khan's genecode. Defeat was inevitable.\n\nStill weak, still shivering, the Khan went back on the offensive.\n\n'My ordu! My ordu! To me! To me! Chogoris calls! Ride to me!'\n\nFlights of jetbikes streaked overhead, twin boltguns tearing into the foe. Putrid organs ruptured in rusting armour, and they fell. Land Speeders banked around, vaporising the Death Guard with their meltaguns, and hammering them to pieces with heavy bolter fire.\n\nNow the sons of Mortarion turned their attentions outwards. Away from the Khan, they formed their lines and opened up, weight of fire accomplishing what aim could not. Jetbikes were shot from the sky to gouge tracks of flame and blood into the horde. Warriors punched from the saddles were pinned down and slain.\n\nThe Khan abandoned his dancing feints and misdirection, pushing instead directly for the wall.\n\nThe fog parted.\n\nBetween him and the Palace"}
{"text":"mering them to pieces with heavy bolter fire.\n\nNow the sons of Mortarion turned their attentions outwards. Away from the Khan, they formed their lines and opened up, weight of fire accomplishing what aim could not. Jetbikes were shot from the sky to gouge tracks of flame and blood into the horde. Warriors punched from the saddles were pinned down and slain.\n\nThe Khan abandoned his dancing feints and misdirection, pushing instead directly for the wall.\n\nThe fog parted.\n\nBetween him and the Palace, a company of Death Guard formed three lines, all presenting bolters. Some fell to bolt or shell fire from the wall, but their ranks closed up as each warrior died. Behind them seethed Horus' damned mortal followers in uncountable number, most half-dead from the gas already, but driven on by hate.\n\nHe presented his sword, saluted them and prepared to die.\n\n'A rush into the jaws of death, snatched free, to plunge therein again at will,' he said. 'I greet death with a smile on my face.'\n\nSanguinius' voice sliced through the muffling fog as if it were not there.\n\n'My brother, my brother! To the aid of my brother!'\n\nKatsuhiro snapped off shot after shot. Leaving the Traitor Space Marines to the attentions of the Blood Angels, he downed mutants, sickly men and turncoat army soldiers. When the call went out, the Blood Angels looked out into the gas, following something he could not see. They stood from the wall as one, and leapt over the sloping rampart.\n\n'Drive them back!' roared their sergeants. 'Into them, for the Emperor! For Sanguinius!'\n\nCaught up in their bloodlust, the Nagandan conscripts rose alongside the Blood Angels and charged after them. Katsuhiro ran behind a line trooper of the IX Legion, snapping off opportunistic shots and jabbing with his bayonet. The Blood Angel smashed his way through the lesser humans of the enemy, his fists alone enough to slay the rabble with single blows. He saved his bolts for his traitor kin.\n\n'The primarch! I see the Khan!' someone called.\n\nHorus' wretches parted for a moment, and Katsuhiro saw a line of Death Guard forming up ahead. Raised above them on a pile of corpses was a giant in white, another primarch, the Warhawk himself.\n\nThe Khan was utterly different to his brother Sanguinius, yet fundamentally the same. Like the Great Angel, he was forged of high science and lost arts. Like Sanguinius, he inspired dread and awe in Katsuhiro in equal measure. But where Sanguinius recalled higher, more refined creatures than men, and so inspired humanity to excel, the Khan was a being of caged lightning. He was a storm's fury poured into the shape of man. Where calmness and a near-holy beauty radiated from the Angel, the Warhawk was a restless wind that filled Katsuhiro with the need to rush forwards, to charge through the enemy, to ride them down and never stop moving, to doubt all, to know all, to laugh and live fully through the best of times and the worst of times, and then at the last to greet death with a defiant smile.\n\n'To the Khan! To the Khan! For the Emperor!' the Blood Angels shouted.\n\nThey pressed forwards again, the poison fog and the swirl of combat obscuring the fate of Jaghatai Khan. Katsuhiro speared a man covered in weeping sores through the throat with his bayonet, and hurled back another diseased specimen with a shot to the chest. Many of the enemy had no protection against the gas and were dying as they fought. The traitorous soldiers of the earlier landings had been replaced by wild-eyed lunatics with sigils of their evil religion burned into their skin. There were people of every desperate sort, hive-dregs, mutants, abhumans and others of the lowest positions in Imperial society. Katsuhiro had wondered how anyone could turn on the Emperor, but confronted with the hatred he saw in the eyes of these savages, he gained an inkling that the dream of Imperium was a nightmare for some.\n\nThe damned came at them in large numbers, forming a buffer between the Death Guard's line and the Blood Angels. The IX Legion fought with terrifying ferocity, but their way was blocked no matter how many they slew. Katsuhiro's world closed to a few square metres delineated by the faces of the foe, time measured not in seconds but in kills. He saw but barely registered light blazing through the gas. The Blood Angels roared the name of their primarch, 'Sanguinius!' and pushed the enemy harder. Katsuhiro and his fellow mortals were sucked deeper into the horde in their wake, embattled, sure to die, until the last line parted, and the enemy dregs fled back into the fog. In reward for his courage, Katsuhiro was privileged to glimpse two of the Emperor's warrior-sons fighting side by side.\n\nLight shone through the gas, and Sanguinius was there; bright and devastating as a cometary impact, he dived from the heavens into the enemy's midst. In one hand shone his golden sword, in the other he wielded the Spear of Telesto. The sword felled traitors with every blow, but the spear's arcane technology was particularly deadly to the tainted Death Guard. With each blast from its gilded head, the Death Guard writhed and gave inhuman squeals, and melted in its rays.\n\n'For the Emperor!' Sanguinius called, and saluted his brother.\n\nBehind his filth-smeared mask, the Khan grinned and replied, 'For the Emperor!' and joined his brother's slaughtering.\n\nBattle cries went up, and through the gas a mixed group of Blood Angels, White Scars and human soldiers came, cutting through the crowds of men and mutants. Jetpacks howled, and golden, winged warriors thumped down behind the Khan, forming a perimeter. Together, back to back, the primarchs fought until the Death Guard were reduced to a tattered handful who slipped away into the gas clouds.\n\nGunship engines thundered from the direction of the Palace.\n\n'We must depart now,' Sanguinius told his brother. 'They will return.' Already the shelling was picking up pace around them.\n\n'Not quite yet, my brother,' said the Khan, pushing past his guardians.\n\n'What are you doing?' yelled Sanguinius, but followed after the limping Khan.\n\n'My jetbike. I must go to it and inload the images I gathered. The haywire wiped my armour's datacache.'\n\n'They are returning, my lords!' a Blood Angel shouted. The crackle of boltgun fire began anew.\n\n'Then fight them off. I need only seconds,' said the Khan. 'With this we shall know our enemy better, and beat him all the more soundly.'\n\n'This is unwise, brother!' Sanguinius shouted, loosing off a blast from the Spear of Telesto.\n\n'Nothing in war is wise. Violence is not wisdom. Do you believe I went over the wall merely for glory?'\n\n'It had crossed my mind you might be bored.'\n\n'Hold them back.' The Khan's laughter turned into coughing.\n\n'Something ails you, brother?'\n\n'A poisoned knife,' he said.\n\n'They poisoned you?'\n\n'Sorcery brought the sickness. Do not fear, the effect is dwindling, but I trust you to strike off my head should my loyalty appear to waver.'\n\nThe Khan reached the wreck of his machine and heaved it over. Lights still shone on the instrument panel, and he punched them rapidly. A status bar appeared on the main display.\n\n'They are returning! Hurry!' said Sanguinius. He raised his spear. A cone of noiseless light snapped out, taking the lives of three Death Guard who approached. More were behind, and Sanguinius leapt at them, sword whirling.\n\nA Thunderhawk set down close by. Others whooshed by overhead, their boltguns swivelling as they tracked priority targets in the murk.\n\n'Exload complete,' the jetbike's cogitator intoned.\n\n'It is done,' said the Khan. 'I have what we need.' He stumbled. His wounded leg was still weak.\n\n'Then we go!' Sanguinius shouted over the howl of the engines. He plunged his sword through the chest of a traitor, kicked another back and reached out to steady his brother. Together, their armour dulled by rotting blood and mud, the pair of them boarded the Thunderhawk as Blood Angels fired from the ramp, blasting back the enemy. The Khan limped inside while Sanguinius stood on the ramp and loosed a pair of final blasts from his marvellous spear.\n\nSurrounded by explosions, the gunship took off into a sky crowded with ships. They were harried all the way back over the wall, where a combination of the aegis and the defensive guns drove off their pursuers.\n\nSanguinius turned away from the open ramp only when they were over the city. 'Did you see what has happened to them?' he said. 'Mortarion's sons are diseased. Were it not for all I have witnessed, I would not have thought it possible for a legionary to become so afflicted.'\n\n'Despite that, brother, they are more resilient than ever.' The seated Khan dragged off his helmet, revealing a pale face drenched with sweat. 'They have sold themselves to the so-called gods of the warp,' he said. 'Mortarion has fallen far. Once the staunchest opponent of sorcery, he embraces it fully. Truly these gods play with us. They love irony very much.'\n\nSanguinius arched an eyebrow at the Khan. 'You do not look your best, brother.'\n\nThe Khan shivered. 'I do not feel it, but now we return within the walls, the disease appears to be withdrawing quickly. See the blade that infected me.'\n\nHe held up his left hand. Still clasped in his fist from when he had torn it from his knee was the Death Guard's combat knife. Beneath its coating of primarch's blood it was pitted with rust, and the edge was dull, yet it exuded a sense of peril. Black venom dribbled from the blade over the Khan's fist, evaporating in the air before it hit the ground.\n\n'An evil thing,' said Sanguinius.\n\nThey passed some threshold over the Palace, and the knife blade suddenly crumbled into dust, and the venom boiled away, leaving only the filthy hilt, toylike in the Khan's immense palm.\n\nThe brothers shared a look.\n\n'Curious,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Our father's doing, surely,' said the Khan, marvelling as the hilt collapsed into nothing. A smear of his drying blood gritted with grains of rust was all that remained "}
{"text":"evaporating in the air before it hit the ground.\n\n'An evil thing,' said Sanguinius.\n\nThey passed some threshold over the Palace, and the knife blade suddenly crumbled into dust, and the venom boiled away, leaving only the filthy hilt, toylike in the Khan's immense palm.\n\nThe brothers shared a look.\n\n'Curious,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Our father's doing, surely,' said the Khan, marvelling as the hilt collapsed into nothing. A smear of his drying blood gritted with grains of rust was all that remained of the weapon. 'His protection is strongest over the Palace. That is the only explanation. This is a blade of the warp, and He is proof against its witchcraft. The toxin, too, has gone from my blood. I feel His presence, as a cool wind soothes a burn.' He looked up at his brother. 'My equilibrium returns.'\n\nHe fell silent for a moment, then said, 'On Prospero, Mortarion tried to sway me to Horus' cause. He spoke of the truth and of Horus' rightness, and of our father's lies.' He clenched his fist. 'I was the most critical of father's designs, but now I see the truth, and it forgives all mistakes on His part. The warp is nothing but madness and corruption. Our brothers lose their minds one by one. When we face Mortarion again, we will fight a facet of a greater evil, a puppet, and not the proud warlord he once was. This troubles me greatly.'\n\nSanguinius' wings twitched.\n\n'I cannot recall a time I did not feel troubled, my brother,' he said.\n\nThe primarchs retreated into the gunship and it rose from the battle with furious noise, carrying the sons of the Emperor away from immediate danger. The golden guardians of Sanguinius rocketed after the ship, the jet turbines set between their metal wings screaming like fighting birds.\n\n'Fall back!' A transhuman voice boomed from the fog. 'Back to the defence line!'\n\nKatsuhiro and the few conscripts still alive fled gratefully. The Space Marines let them run by, holding off the enemy with steady bursts of fire while they escaped.\n\nChaos ruled on both sides. The conscripts had gone into the fog of gas in poor order, and came out with none at all. But the Space Marines fought with incredible discipline. The swirl of battle had thrown them together. Red-armoured and white-armoured legionaries stood shoulder to shoulder. To an outsider, it would not have been apparent that most had never fought together before, but the ad hoc units worked smoothly, covering one another as they fell back, squad by squad, to the defence line.\n\nThe baying of barely human traitors mocked the retreat, but there was no doubt who was victorious. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser mortals blanketed the muddy field, with scores of giants in dirty white strewn among them. There were islands of bright red and cleaner white too, as well as swift contra-gravity mounts burning on the ground. Nevertheless the balance was in the loyalists' favour.\n\nIt was a hollow triumph. They had come only a short way from the ramparts. Soon Katsuhiro found himself scrambling over broken chunks of rockcrete, only belatedly realising he had reached the third line. Amid the devastation he found an intact landmark, a numbered comms tower, its mast lights still blinking, and made his way back to his station.\n\nShells continued to scream down, all of the explosive variety, but he was too exhausted to duck, and left his fate in the hands of the universe. The adrenaline gone, his sickness returned with a vengeance, and his limbs shook. As he made it back to his company's section the poison fogs began to part. He heard engines in the thinning mist, and saw armoured giants falling back. Tired warriors of his company slumped onto the few intact stretches of rampart left. There were more corpses than living men, and that included Runnecan.\n\nRunnecan lay on his back staring up at the sky, not far from where he and Katsuhiro had begun the battle, not having made it off the wall. There was no sign of what had killed him. His gas mask was still in place. No claw or knife cut had opened his body. A mass-reactive would have left a spread of meat, but though he was unmistakably dead he looked unmarked.\n\nKatsuhiro knelt by Runnecan's side. He had never liked the man, and the loss he felt took him by surprise. For some reason he pulled off the other man's mask, and wished he hadn't. Runnecan's ratty little face wore a disturbing expression of horrified surprise.\n\nFootsteps crunched to a stop behind him.\n\n'Now that is a spot of terrible luck,' said Doromek.\n\nKatsuhiro twisted around. The effort required was immense. The mask he wore was poorly designed. His breath had fogged the lenses, and the front pulled to the side as he turned, cutting his vision down further.\n\nDoromek peered down. He was unmasked, and munching on a piece of bread gripped in one bloodstained hand.\n\n'You can take that off now, you know,' he said, nodding at Katsuhiro's gas mask. 'The air still stinks, but the gas is not concentrated enough to harm you any more.'\n\nHesitantly, Katsuhiro reached up, unclasped the gas mask and pulled it off over his head. It slithered on his sweat in a repulsive fashion. The cold of the mountain air was a punch in the face, and the smell of the gas nauseating, but he gulped it down gratefully, glad to be free of the hood.\n\n'Thank the Emperor,' said Katsuhiro. 'The Emperor protects.'\n\nDoromek gave him a curious look. 'You're not one of them, are you? The worshippers?'\n\n'I...' said Katsuhiro. 'What? I just heard it somewhere.'\n\n'Well,' said Doromek, 'the Emperor had nothing to do with this. Space Marines and blind chance saved the day.'\n\n'Where have the enemy gone?'\n\n'Back,' said Doromek. 'They'll reinforce the siege camps. They achieved what they set out to do, I expect. They brought up some artillery under the cover of the fighting, lobbed some shells over the walls.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Beats me,' said Doromek with a shrug. 'But they'll have a reason, you can be sure of that. I never knew legionaries do anything without a reason.' Doromek smiled at him. 'You were pretty brave, weren't you?'\n\nKatsuhiro dropped his eyes, letting his gaze settle on Runnecan. 'Leave me alone.'\n\n'Suit yourself,' said Doromek. He dropped a packet of bread by Katsuhiro's side and left. 'Don't get too comfortable,' he called. 'The third line's had it. We'll be pulling back behind the second soon.'\n\nKatsuhiro watched until Doromek had gone. When he was out of sight, he grabbed Runnecan. Rolling him over made him grunt with effort. The dead were always heavier than he expected, and in his weakened state shifting the body was almost too much for him. Runnecan's open eyes disturbed him, and he was gladder than he should have been to pitch him over face down into the mud.\n\nWhat he saw next was worse.\n\nHe remained staring at Runnecan's back for a long time.\n\nThe wound that had killed him was a las-burn, neatly placed in his back, right over his heart.\n\nBloodhunt\n\nThe price of glory\n\nAn unworthy son\n\nThe Conqueror, Terran near orbit, 7th of Quartus\n\nKharn's presence terrified the bridge crew. Lotara's armsmen stiffened when he entered, holding their weapons down but ready. The sound of his tread clanging slowly off the deck made the deck officers cower. They could smell the blood caked onto his weapons. They shivered at the clink of the chains that bound them to his armour. Let them tremble, he thought. Let them fear me.\n\nLotara Sarrin feared him too, but she was brave enough to face him. The ship and crew were ragged. Maintenance went undone. Whole areas of the command deck were dark. Machines spilled cabled entrails onto the deck. The smell of blood was ever-present. Dust lay thickly on abandoned stations. The crew's uniforms were filthy, and there were far too few of them on the bridge. Murder whittled them away. Sarrin too was dirty and unkempt. The blood print honour she bore on her uniform was lost beneath a hundred other stains but she, unlike her ship, was still proud.\n\nShe had been waiting impatiently for him and got up to speak to Kharn as soon as he approached her command throne. 'We have a big problem,' she said, as he reached her.\n\nKharn swallowed thickly. 'Hnnnh,' he grunted. He forced his panting breath into the patterns of speech. 'No greeting, Lotara, no inquiry after my health?' His voice was an intoxicated slur. Controlling his urge to violence took all of his concentration. The longer they were in orbit, the harder the Nails pounded, and the louder the whispered demands in his head were that he spill blood. Command was an unwelcome distraction. He had to fight.\n\n'I don't have time for your attempts at humour, neither do you - not if you want to see this war out and not die at the hands of your own father,' she said. She was rake-thin, worn out by the struggle to impose some order on her ship. 'Do it,' she ordered one of her officers. 'Put it on the hololith.'\n\nKharn's hands flexed impatiently around the haft of Gorechild. The axe was never away from his hands. He'd rather lay aside his limbs. 'I do not have time for, hrrrrnh... for this... for this either.'\n\n'Make time. Look, listen, damn you, Kharn. Wake up! Look at what you have done.'\n\nA cylindrical projection sprang on. Blood red from top to bottom, it appeared to be malfunctioning. It was not. An awful roaring emanated from the audio projectors, accompanied by screams so thin they were barely audible. A huge, inhuman hand swept by, taloned fingers spread, slashing downwards. A tumble of limbs and gore spread across the floor.\n\n'And?' said Kharn. The Nails thumped softly in his skull at the display, tempting him to indulge in a similar slaughter on the bridge. The crew left were below half-strength. All of them knew what he was capable of. They expected him to kill them. Why should he disappoint? His forefinger twitched towards the switch that would send the mica dragon's teeth into a blur. He estimated he could cut down twenty of the bridge crew before they raised a single gun against him. 'The mortals die. The legio"}
{"text":"\n'And?' said Kharn. The Nails thumped softly in his skull at the display, tempting him to indulge in a similar slaughter on the bridge. The crew left were below half-strength. All of them knew what he was capable of. They expected him to kill them. Why should he disappoint? His forefinger twitched towards the switch that would send the mica dragon's teeth into a blur. He estimated he could cut down twenty of the bridge crew before they raised a single gun against him. 'The mortals die. The legionaries do not.'\n\n'Angron is rampaging through the thrall decks!' Lotara said. 'We've too few men left. We can't afford losses. Not like this.'\n\nHe imagined taking her skull. She was physically weak, but her efforts had sent millions of men to their deaths. She would be a worthy offering to the brass throne.\n\nThe idea horrified him, only a little, but enough to make him force his thoughts back under control.\n\n'He'll kill them all, I'm sure, and we have a more pressing problem.'\n\n'Explain,' breathed Kharn, a dangerous, throaty whisper.\n\n'Since you shut him down there, Angron has been butchering his way through the ship. He is getting dangerously close to the enginarium. If he gets in there and slaughters the transmechanic clades the whole ship could go up. Or he'll get bored and find his way up here, then you'll have to fight him.'\n\nKharn stared at the image. Angron's daemonic face swung into view. A yellow eye squinted into the vid augur. A giant fist followed, punching it into nothing and sending the projection cylinder into a fuzz of static. He would fight Angron. He could.\n\n'Cut the feed,' Lotara said. The projection cylinder winked out. 'Can't you stop him? We have come this far. I don't want it to end before we have the chance to fight.'\n\n'My father is doing what he wants,' said Kharn, swallowing a mouthful of coppery saliva. 'Nothing can restrain him. He will not go back into the vault. He has become too strong to contain. I... I...'\n\nBlood. Angron spilled blood. A voice in his head demanded to know why Kharn did not.\n\nLotara took a step closer to him.\n\n'Kharn? Kharn! Listen to me!' she snapped.\n\n'I am listening,' he said, with difficulty.\n\n'Kharn, I know this is hard for you,' she said gently. 'But I know you can hear me and that you understand. Angron has to be stopped.'\n\nKharn looked down on her. His pulse thundered in his brain, each beat of his hearts a terrible agony. 'You were his favourite. He gave you the blood mark himself, and you want to lock him away. Our father wished to be first on Terra. He was on the verge of rage anyway. Seeing Mortarion's Legion sent in before ours is an insult. We are fortunate he did not leave the Conqueror to attack the Death Guard.'\n\n'This is not a good situation,' she said.\n\n'He is contained. You sealed him in as I ordered. Let him alone. He can do little harm where he is.'\n\n'That is little harm?' she said. Her face wrinkled in disbelief. 'Little harm does not encompass the slaughtering of our tech cadre and the resulting reactor death.'\n\n'What do you suggest?' said Kharn. He looked at her through a red haze. Sarrin was renowned for her cool head, but she too was feeling the effects of Angron's influence. The crew had suffered the attentions of the Legion for a long time. He thought it likely they would soon turn on each other as the legionaries had. 'We are changed, Lotara. This ship is a crucible of rage. The pull to violence in my mind is so strong that the slightest faltering of concentration will see a scene on this command deck similar to the one below.' He moved. The chain binding his weapon to his wrist clinked. Lotara's gaze flicked to the head of the great axe. 'I think now of how much pressure would be required for me to crush your skull, how many shots your armsmen will have time to fire before I cut them down. Let Angron vent his fury on the thralls, better them than more legionaries. I can spare no more thought for the matter.'\n\nShe shook her head. 'No, no, if this is allowed to go on, we are all dead. We have to either confine him or get him off the ship. Only you can do that. You have to pull yourself together. Snap out of your bloodlust, Kharn. Help me!'\n\n'If he attempts to land on Terra, he will die,' said Kharn. 'So say Magnus, and Layak and the other mystics. Insufficient blood has been offered to the lords in the warp. The Emperor denies the Neverborn access. Not until Terra's soil is damp with vitae will the gates open for their kind.'\n\n'Daemons,' she said harshly. 'How has it come to this?' She looked at him fiercely. 'How did this happen to you?'\n\n'They are our allies,' he said. 'Angron is blessed by the gods in the warp, and he is still my genesire.'\n\nShe nodded and massaged her forehead. 'He is still Angron, I know. He is in there.' She snapped her gaze back up to his face. 'Do you wish him to die?' Privation and time had aged her so much while he remained strong. She would be dead in not so many years, he thought, if she managed to survive the war. A poor end for such an accomplished killer. Better to die a warrior's death, in battle. He could offer her that honour.\n\n'He might survive the detonation,' she said. She was speaking quickly, aware Kharn's thoughts were drifting. 'Will he survive an attempt to reach Terra? Do you want to find out?'\n\nKharn shook his head slowly.\n\n'Then I have an idea. The Nightfall.' She was gabbling now. She had a limited period while Kharn would remain calm.\n\n'The Night Lords,' he said dismissively.\n\n'A few weeks ago, I received some intelligence,' she said. 'From the Twentieth Legion. They told me there is some kind of prison made for a primarch on the Nightfall. If we can get them to take Angron, it will keep him occupied for a while. Long enough until the time comes for him to land.'\n\nThe Kharn of old would have interrogated her as to how the Alpha Legion gave her this message, and why, but such finesse of thought was beyond him now, lost under an ocean of blood.\n\n'How?' he said. It was all he could manage to say.\n\n'You'll have to do it,' she replied. She rubbed her hand over her face again. 'You'll have to do all of it. The arrogant dogs won't answer my requests for communication. They might listen to you.'\n\n'Might,' said Kharn. His sense of self floated on a sea of red, threatening to sink at any time. He could taste the blood. Hear the screams.\n\n'Yes, curse you!' she snapped. 'Might! It's the best chance we have. Send the message,' she commanded. Her hololith master nodded and began to direct his few remaining serfs. A floating orb coasted down from the ceiling near to Kharn, ready to capture his image for transmission.\n\n'I did not agree,' said Kharn, his voice dreamily murderous. In his mind's eye he saw Terra burning, and bodies falling before his axe.\n\n'Another damn thing we don't have time for,' she said. 'Send my request again to the Nightfall. Inform them Lord Kharn, Eighth Captain of the Twelfth Legion, equerry of the primarch Angron, wishes to speak with their leader.' She turned her attention back to Kharn. 'There's some treacherous whoreson in charge now. No sign of Curze. Sevatar I have heard is dead. Kharn!' she said.\n\nHis attention drifted back to her. 'Who will I speak with?'\n\nAn acceptance chime tolled from the hololithic communications station.\n\n'My lady, I have their assent.'\n\n'Activate the projection field,' she said.\n\nThe hololithic phantom of a youthful-looking Space Marine stood upon the deck, life-size. He was unusually flamboyant in appearance for one of his kind. The long, pale hair draped over his shoulders was more characteristic of Fulgrim's warriors than Curze's, and his armour gleamed, sub-surface projection plates making it squirm with lightning effects. He lacked the skulls and fetishes of bone worn by his brethren. Most striking were the vertical black ovals tattooed over his eyes, and the large sword strapped to his left side. Kharn recognised it as a weapon of the warp. He growled instinctively. A weakling's weapon.\n\n'My Lord Skraivok, the Painted Count,' said Lotara, bowing. 'Might I present to you the Lord Kharn, equerry to the primarch Angron, master of the Eighth-'\n\n'Yes, yes,' said Skraivok, waving his hand. 'Your minions relayed all this. Besides, who would not recognise the great Kharn! Such a reputation.' He clucked his tongue. 'My, my, Eighth Captain Kharn, what an unexpected pleasure.' Everything about the Night Lord howled with insincerity: his posture, his smile, the tone of his voice. 'What can I possibly do for so vaunted a warrior as yourself?'\n\n'I want a service from you,' said Kharn bluntly.\n\nSkraivok laughed. 'How very forwards! You are not speaking with some fame-dazzled captain. I am the commander of the Night Lords in this warzone, perhaps leader of the Legion itself.'\n\n'By what right?' said Kharn.\n\nSkraivok gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword with his left hand. 'By right of conquest. I thought you might respect that.'\n\nI have never respected any Night Lord, Kharn managed not to say. He wanted to challenge the captain to a duel right there. Enough of his wits remained under the punishing thump of the Nails that he refrained.\n\n'Battle is what we are made for. If you have triumphed, then I will speak with you.'\n\nThis seemed to satisfy Skraivok.\n\n'That's better. I don't want us to get off on the wrong foot. Now, to business. This service, whatever it is it will cost you. Times are not what they were. Nobody gains the Night Lords' aid for free. I have a price in mind, depending on what you require, naturally.'\n\nThis fool offended him. The Butcher's Nails pounded harder in his skull at the affront. Kharn managed, somehow, to keep his voice level.\n\n'First tell me something, Painted Count. I have heard rumours about your vessel. Before we bargain, I must know whether they are true.'\n\nSkraivok's eyes narrowed. 'What rumours might they be?'\n\n'That in your flagship is a prison for a primarch.'\n\nThe Night Lord's face crinkled with humour. Starting around his eyes in"}
{"text":"depending on what you require, naturally.'\n\nThis fool offended him. The Butcher's Nails pounded harder in his skull at the affront. Kharn managed, somehow, to keep his voice level.\n\n'First tell me something, Painted Count. I have heard rumours about your vessel. Before we bargain, I must know whether they are true.'\n\nSkraivok's eyes narrowed. 'What rumours might they be?'\n\n'That in your flagship is a prison for a primarch.'\n\nThe Night Lord's face crinkled with humour. Starting around his eyes in the depths of his tattooed stripes, his smile was entirely dark in nature. 'Don't tell me. You're having trouble with your transcendent lord! Favoured of Khorne, or whatever this god's name is. I suppose that is what happens when one hearkens to gods. You wish me to take that monster aboard my vessel?' He smiled condescendingly. 'My my, what an interesting proposition.'\n\n'This is getting us nowhere,' said Kharn. 'Cut communications before I decide to go and cut off his head.'\n\n'No, wait!' countermanded Lotara, holding out her hand to stop her communications officer. 'Forgive me, Lord Skraivok. Kharn is much troubled by his father's predicament. At least, let us know if it is true. Is there somewhere upon the Nightfall that might hold our lord until it is time for him to join the battle? Does this prison exist?'\n\n'A prison? No,' said Skraivok. 'It is more than that. It is a labyrinth, devised by Perturabo himself to torment Vulkan. As you might imagine, it is ingenious and deadly in design. The Drake was one of the Emperor's more intelligent sons.'\n\n'How do you know this?' growled Kharn. 'How do I know you speak the truth?'\n\n'Mostly because I was put into it,' said Skraivok.\n\n'You escaped?' said Kharn. 'You. Then it is not fit to hold a primarch.'\n\nSkraivok smirked. 'It'll hold your primarch. He is a mindless monster. I did escape, but I confess I had help. The labyrinth will hold your lord. Not forever, I imagine all those little traps and dilemmas will slow him down not at all and he'll simply batter his way out, but it will occupy him for a time.'\n\n'How long?' asked Lotara.\n\n'Long enough,' said Skraivok. 'The moment approaches when he will be able to manifest on Terra, does it not? That is the Warmaster's plan.'\n\n'And how do you know that?' said Kharn neutrally. The Nails burned into his hindbrain. He did not like this Skraivok. He was pompous, melodramatic, playing the villain's role like an actor.\n\n'As I said, I have help.' Skraivok's hand twisted around his sword's leathern grip. He thought a moment. 'I will do it,' he said. 'We will take him. But I require something from you in return.'\n\n'What do you require for this service?'\n\nSkraivok's unpleasant grin spread wider. 'This will surprise you, but I want something you have in great supply, Lord Kharn. I want glory, and you have so much of that I am sure you can spare me a little.'\n\nKharn passed through heavy blast doors from the upper levels of the ship into the abattoir of the thrall decks. The doors were multiply layered, and strong. Even with his mind half-drunk on the lust for blood, Kharn saw the irony inherent to those doors. Angron had spent his youth as a slave, fighting for other slaves. His anger towards the Emperor sprang from his inability to save his fellows, yet he became a master of slaves himself, and wary enough of them to keep them under tight control as brutal as that meted out by his former owners. As time had passed and the Legion degenerated, the doors had provided a little safety to the abused multitudes of the crew. This part of the ship was one place where Kharn's brothers could not easily go.\n\nThe decks had been in a terrible state even before Kharn shut Angron in. Now, they were close to ruinous. The lumens were out. Sparks spat lethargically from severed cabling. Bodies clogged every corridor of the thrall decks, not a single one of them entire. The whole warren of workshops, service ways, barracks, food halls and conduits stank - that nauseating battle reek of spilled guts and fear. Viscera festooned the walls like celebratory flags. Scraps of flesh spattered every surface. Kharn paused and swung his head around, tasking his auto-senses with a deep sweep of his immediate surroundings. Boosted by the ship's internal auspex, his helm senses scried fifty metres in every direction, providing him with an accurate cartolithic display of the area - a long way in the convoluted bowels of a void-ship. Among the maze of corridors he found not one sign of life. It was so quiet. In the dark there he could feel the Conqueror itself. The machine soul of the battleship had grown fierce with the spilling of blood. It was watching Kharn.\n\nNone of Angron's victims could have put up much of a fight. Where the bodies hadn't been smashed into a pulp by the primarch, Kharn saw only wounds to the rear. They'd died running.\n\nThe sight could not disturb Kharn, he who had slaughtered civilisations. For years now blood and death had ruled the corridors of the Conqueror. Angron had despatched him below decks to kill three hundred thralls himself, to build a throne from their skulls. Even so, the extent of Angron's massacring stirred disgust in his flinty heart. There was no honour in this, no skill, no point, only butchery for the sake of killing. Blood must be spilled, their god demanded it, but there were better ways to make sacrifice than this.\n\nHe stopped to let his cartolith update. This part of the vessel had never been legionary territory, and he would be lost down there without the map. More pressingly, he did not know if Angron's otherworldly form would register on his battleplate's auto-senses. He had no desire to stumble across his genesire unprepared. He shifted his grip on Gorechild, his axe. Its teeth glinted. His thumb hovered over the activation stud.\n\n'My lord!' he called into the darkness. 'It is I, Kharn!'\n\nThe drip of blood and creaking of cooling machinery replied.\n\nMag-locked to his thigh next to his holstered plasma pistol was a teleport beacon. There were no armourers left in the Conqueror's ruined workshops, so Kharn himself had fastened a heavy, barbed spike to the shaft. Kharn hadn't checked the homer mounted at the other end. Its ready light blinked when activated, but he had forgotten how to run the checks needed to ensure it definitely worked, another part of his past drowned in the ocean of blood filling his soul. Either it would perform, or he would die according to the will of his god. He paid it little attention, letting it bump along the ground as he prowled through the under-decks.\n\nEach turn of the corridors, each open door, showed him the same bloody ruin. The steady blink of the teleport homer's ready light flashed on thousands of lifeless thralls. The dead were scattered everywhere. In places they were reduced by Angron's ferocity to thick slurries of gore where recognisable body parts were few and far between. In places the primarch's sword had cut into the walls, and there the wounded metal shone with dark light.\n\nKharn passed a spur corridor leading to the upper decks closed off at the far end by an armoured door. According to his cartolith, the corridor was over fifty metres long. He could not see to the end, for the corridor was packed by the standing dead. The bodies nearer the main way were smears of red. Further into the crowd, the thralls' wounds became less severe, until, about ten metres in, they exhibited no sign of physical harm. The mortals had crushed each other in their panic to escape, creating a press so tight that Angron could not get to them all. It had done them no good, for they had suffocated.\n\nKharn grunted at the sight and moved on.\n\nHe neared the enginarium section and several possible routes of escape for the primarch. Blast doors leading out to the lower embarkation decks and stores were scarred by accidental cuts. Evidently Angron had been focused on his quarry or he would have sliced his way out there. No mortal material could stop the otherworldly blade of Angron's sword for long.\n\nShortly after, Kharn emerged onto the observational gallery of a long, hexagonal hold. The walls were punctuated by four sets of doors down the sides, also hexagonal, and surrounded by hazard striping splashed with blood. Corpses lay about like storm-tossed leaves. When he descended stairs to the hold floor, his feet splashed through deep puddles of blood. The hold had been exhausted of supplies some time ago. Thralls had set up tents in the corners and more elaborate homes in empty containers, turning it into an ugly shanty town. If they sought sanctuary there, it had done them no good. Their bodies were sprawled over the wreck of their possessions.\n\n'Lotara,' he voxed. His voice was obscenely loud in the confines of his helm. 'Lotara, this is Kharn. Have you any sign of him?' The vox-beads hissed in his ear. 'Lotara?'\n\nThe vox clicked. 'Kharn. We've lost him.' Lotara's voice was faint.\n\nKharn stopped walking.\n\n'Where?'\n\n'Before he reached the enginarium. He's gone to ground. We can't find him on any of the augurs. Most of the internal systems are out. We're...'\n\nLotara's voice dropped out in a burble of static dominated by the pulsing of an electromagnetic heart. He was so close to the reactor it interfered with the vox. Its beating sounded uncannily like the throb of the Nails.\n\n'Lotara?' he said.\n\nHer voice reasserted itself over the pulsing hiss. 'The vox-relay downdecks must have been compromised. Shielding around the reactor blocks signals from outside. You could try to find a hardline.'\n\n'I see none,' Kharn said. 'Will Skraivok be able to receive my notification?'\n\n'Keep your vox-channel open to me,' said Lotara. 'I will relay the order when you have him.'\n\n'Do not trust the Night Lord,' said Kharn.\n\n'This is the best chance we have. Stop your father, or our war is over.'\n\nKharn left the channel open, and moved on again.\n\nMore holds came and went, all emptied long ago. The dried-up corpses of past rampages "}
{"text":"reactor blocks signals from outside. You could try to find a hardline.'\n\n'I see none,' Kharn said. 'Will Skraivok be able to receive my notification?'\n\n'Keep your vox-channel open to me,' said Lotara. 'I will relay the order when you have him.'\n\n'Do not trust the Night Lord,' said Kharn.\n\n'This is the best chance we have. Stop your father, or our war is over.'\n\nKharn left the channel open, and moved on again.\n\nMore holds came and went, all emptied long ago. The dried-up corpses of past rampages lay black in the corners. The pulse of the reactor on the open vox-channel grew louder. The temperature rose. Kharn reached the edge of the thrall decks and stores, beyond which the enginarium sections began.\n\nIn a hold half a kilometre long, he found his father.\n\nKharn felt the primarch's presence as a great warm patch of rage welling up from the dark spaces between stacked cargo containers. In the hold, a place of silent cranes and dusty supplies, Angron's fury was as obvious as a volcano spewing lava. But exactly where the primarch was, Kharn could not say. Every avenue dividing the supply stacks was a potential ambush site. He could not fight his father and win. When Angron was united with his Legion, many years gone by, he had killed every captain sent to speak with him apart from Kharn. None of them had fought back. Kharn vowed to defend himself this time, but even so he would die. Though he was renowned as the greatest warrior among the Legiones Astartes, even Kharn could not beat Angron before his transformation. Now, infused with the power of the warp and sharing the God of War's infinite rage, Angron was practically invincible.\n\nKharn unhooked the teleport beacon and proceeded in a crouch with his axe ready. He did not need to fight to win, only long enough to tag his genefather with the device.\n\nThe sooner it was done the better. There was no honour in skulking around in the shadows.\n\n'Father!' he called. 'Father! It is I, Kharn!'\n\nHis amplified voice echoed through the hold.\n\n'Father!'\n\nSomething huge moved way off in the dark. Kharn turned around while his auto-senses struggled with the echoes in their attempt to triangulate the movement.\n\n'Father!'\n\n'Kharn,' Angron's voice rumbled from the dark, so low and powerful the deck trembled. 'Why are you here?'\n\n'I have come to find you, father. The Conqueror is at risk. We can afford no more deaths among the crew.'\n\nAngron laughed. 'Kharn, Kharn, Lord Khorne demands blood and skulls. Do you not hear his cries? Blood and skulls.'\n\nKharn felt a stir of unease. He heard the whispers. The words remained elusive, but the furious insistence that murder be done and blood spilled was clear enough. He feared hearing what the words would say. He knew that enlightenment would come in time.\n\n'I do not hear him, my lord,' said Kharn.\n\n'You will. He values you, my son.'\n\nHeavy footsteps thumped deep in the stacks. Knocked chains jangled.\n\n'These slaves are unworthy offerings for the Blood God, but you, Kharn... Your skull will make a fine gift.'\n\nAngron came out of nowhere. Kharn barely had time to twist aside from the blow of his unholy sword. The blade, longer than Kharn was tall, embedded itself in the deck. Green fire sheathed it, eating into the metal. Kharn leapt back too late. Angron's backhand clipped him, sending him noisily into the side of a cargo container. Kharn's bulk pushed a deep dent into the metal, and he struggled to get out before Angron wrenched his sword free and whirled it around at his head. Kharn fell forwards from the dent just as the blade hissed through the air, splitting the container's side wide open. Plastek-wrapped packets bounced off the floor. He pushed up with his legs, parrying the next blow with Gorechild. The impact jarred him from head to toe, and he reeled back down an avenue between the containers, turned, and ran.\n\nAngron pounded after him. Kharn slipped into a dark space, and eluded his father.\n\nHe leaned back against metal. Both his hearts thundered. The Butcher's Nails sang their melodies of pain into the meat of his brain, urging him to fight.\n\n'You stole my axe, Kharn,' Angron growled. 'You took my weapon from me. Now you steal his favour. Khorne's eye strays from me to you.'\n\n'I serve only you, my father,' Kharn called.\n\n'You serve me by hunting me in the dark?'\n\n'Only to bring you to the battle, my lord.'\n\nAngron snarled. Kharn risked glimpsing down the avenue. Angron strode past, a monster from myth: horned, huge, red-skinned, nostrils twitching as he sniffed out his son. Blood stink and anger washed off him in hot waves. He was mighty, but his god-given gifts had robbed him of all art other than killing, and Kharn remained hidden.\n\n'What battle would that be?' Angron rumbled. 'The battle against tedium as we watch Mortarion's sons fight where we should? The battle against my brother's arrogance? Horus defies Khorne. Khorne demands we fight for him now, yet the Warmaster keeps us caged.' Metal squealed as he upended a stack of containers hundreds of tonnes in weight as if they were empty card boxes. The boom of them falling to the deck took a long moment to die. 'I am the avatar of rage. The power of the warp runs through me, my son. I will not be chained like a dog any longer, not by the Emperor, not by Horus, and not by you. You are a fool to come here. I will kill you. There will be blood, there will be skulls. Khorne cares not whence the blood flows!'\n\nAngron threw over another stack. Kharn used the cover of the noise to run out unnoticed behind his father. Angron's whole upper body heaved with each breath. Leathery wings flexed. Every movement he made revealed a towering anger barely contained. Kharn recognised the condition in himself.\n\nKharn ran, Gorechild in one hand, the unwieldy spear of the teleport homer in the other. Gathering all his strength, he leapt, the fibre muscles in his battleplate sending him high. He crashed into Angron's back, and buried the teleport homer deep in his father's searing red skin between the shoulders where, even with great determination, the primarch would struggle to knock it loose.\n\nAngron's reaction was immediate and furious. He roared loudly, spinning around, knocking Kharn back. Kharn landed heavily, and scrambled up, while Angron's hand came up, scratching at his back, but though his black nails brushed the teleport homer, it refused to be dislodged.\n\n'You have no honour! Attacking from behind.' Yellow eyes blazed. 'No true son of mine would stoop so low. We are warriors! We face our enemies. We look them in the eye before we take their heads for the skull throne! You are weak, all of you, slaves to my father then slaves to me. I should have killed you that day you first came to me. You are weak!'\n\nKharn backed away. The urge to throw himself into battle with his father was crippling his mind. 'Lotara, now!' He spoke through a mouthful of blood. Fluid ran down his nasal passages from his bleeding brain and drooled from his lips and out of the open vent of his breathing grille. 'Lotara! Lotara!' he snarled. 'Now!'\n\nStatic replied. Angron was on him. He jumped, wings spread, half gliding, half falling towards his equerry. All sign of recognition, of humanity, was absent from the primarch's face, subsumed by the need to kill. His black sword hissed through the air, bringing a thin scream from reality as it too was wounded.\n\nThe Butcher's Nails pounded in time with the thumping of Kharn's hearts. 'Lotara...' he managed, but the nails sang louder, and his words snagged in his throat. Roaring, he dodged Angron's swing, and surged forwards, gunning Gorechild's motor as he cut down towards his father's knee. The primarch kicked, sending Kharn hurtling sideways and cracking his breast-plate. He drew his plasma pistol as he rolled out of the way of Angron's stamping foot. A return swing of the sword took off part of Kharn's pauldron. Sickly sweet smoke boiled off the damaged ceramite. He rolled again, too far gone into anger to feel the stab of his broken ribs. The plasma pistol whined as it charged. Gorechild blocked another punishing blow. Black sword locked with dragon's teeth. Ligaments tore in Kharn's arm as his father forced his weapon down towards his face. Gorechild's engine screamed, the tooth track locked on to the edge of the daemon primarch's blade. Priceless mica dragon teeth smoked as daemonic fires ate into them.\n\n'You are disappointing, Kharn,' said Angron. The sword was closing on Kharn's face. Angron grunted with the effort of forcing down the blade. 'I thought if any of my sons could test me, it would be you. I was wrong. You are weak.'\n\n'And you... Hnnh,' Kharn fought to speak. 'You have lost your mind, my lord.' The plasma pistol let out a ready note. Kharn brought it up and fired it point-black into Angron's face.\n\nThe heat from the plasma stream seared Kharn's face within his helmet. Angron roared and reeled back; his eyes cooked to steam and his cheeks stripped back to smoking bone. Kharn pushed himself up, playing the pistol across his father's chest. The gun let out a warning, but Kharn fired until it overheated and vented superheated coolant all down his arm. Red lights flashed by its charging coils; the gun was useless. He disengaged the power feed and threw it aside. Angron staggered back, crashing into a pile of containers that crumpled like paper under his weight.\n\nAngron roared and thrashed in agony, but already the damage was being made good. Eyes swelled like moist fungal fruits in empty sockets. Charred flesh swelled with rehydration, skin closed over deep burns. Veins and nerves spread across exposed bone, followed by muscle and fat.\n\n'You cannot beat me! You are as unworthy as these pathetic slaves!'\n\nKharn readied himself. His muscles burned. Gorechild shook in his weakened grip.\n\n'Father,' he said in a drool-soaked growl. 'I do not wish to fight you.'\n\n'You have no choice,' Angron bellowed. 'There is only war.'\n\nThe black sword hurtled down again. Kharn"}
{"text":"ngal fruits in empty sockets. Charred flesh swelled with rehydration, skin closed over deep burns. Veins and nerves spread across exposed bone, followed by muscle and fat.\n\n'You cannot beat me! You are as unworthy as these pathetic slaves!'\n\nKharn readied himself. His muscles burned. Gorechild shook in his weakened grip.\n\n'Father,' he said in a drool-soaked growl. 'I do not wish to fight you.'\n\n'You have no choice,' Angron bellowed. 'There is only war.'\n\nThe black sword hurtled down again. Kharn could not block it, he knew, but held Gorechild ready to deflect the blade, and prepared the blow he would land before he died.\n\nAngron's roar battered at Kharn.\n\nLightning skittered all over the daemon primarch. Wisps of corposant streamed off his body in a white fog. Then, with a clap of air rushing suddenly into a vacuum, he was gone.\n\nKharn fell down. His right hand refused to work, and he wrestled his helm off with his left, vomiting blood copiously onto the floor. The Nails hammered at him relentlessly.\n\n'Kh...?' The vox-beads in his ears rattled with the reactor's angry beat. 'Kharn? Kharn? Can you hear me? Are you still alive? Kharn? The Night Lords have the primarch. Kharn?'\n\nKharn coughed. His enhancements and armour were working in tandem to repair the damage to his body, and where they could not, to numb the pain. He sat down, legs out in front of him.\n\n'Kharn?'\n\n'Hnnnh,' he said. 'You took... you took your damn time.'\n\nThe Nightfall, Terran near orbit, 7th of Quartus\n\nAngron appeared in a blaze of teleport light. His sword was still chopping down and it smashed into the deck of an unfamiliar room. He wrenched the weapon from the metal, ready to slay his son for the greater glory of the Blood God.\n\nKharn was not there.\n\nAngron growled. His rage was checked for a moment. The ship smelled strange, its sounds were different.\n\nHe sniffed the air. He was alone.\n\nA single portal led out of a featureless heptagonal space. Through this he ventured into a cylindrical corridor. A gate slammed down behind him as soon as he was through. Small laser emitters rolled from apertures in the wall and onto tracks cut helically into the tube. The emitters snapped on, their beams constant and razor-thin, and spun themselves into a whirling vortex.\n\nThe door behind Angron squealed forwards, pushing the primarch towards the lasers. One stung his skin, then a second, until he was forced into them and they scored his flesh with a netted pattern that would have cut his original body into chunks. They merely pricked his warp-formed flesh.\n\nAngron snarled, brought up the black sword and smashed them all into oblivion. He strode forwards through the smoke of destruction and into the next chamber, where another trial awaited him.\n\nThat too he overcame with the sharp edge of his sword.\n\nSenatorum\n\nInfernal allies\n\nKinder powers\n\nSenatorum Imperialis, 9th of Quartus\n\nThe Senatorum Imperialis had the capacity to accommodate thousands, having been constructed for a vision of civilian rule that would allow voices from all parts of society to be heard. It would never come to pass. Rows and rows of empty seats stared down as blind witnesses to the small gathering on the dais at the very heart of the chamber. No meeting had taken place within for months, and the space had been given over to refugees. They had been removed for a while, and now waited patiently outside in the cold under legionary guard, but their possessions remained behind, heaped on benches made into beds where lords were meant to sit. The smell of cooking and chamber pots lingered.\n\nThe last council of the Senatorum Imperialis was done before the invasion fleets arrived. Voluntarily it had ceded control to the three primarchs, yet the High Twelve in particular still had great influence, and many responsibilities.\n\nIt had been the Khan's idea to call them back together, just this once, a show of unity between men and demigods.\n\nUpon the dais of the High Twelve, the Ruling Council of the Hegemony of Terra were gathered around their table of fossilised redwood. Twelve men and women, Malcador as their chairman - the once-rulers of an empire under siege. Dorn, the Khan, Sanguinius and Constantin Valdor stood at the edge of the dais, slightly out of the light, allowing the Council their moment of remembered authority.\n\n'Thanks to the actions of Jaghatai Khan, we have a better understanding of what the enemy intends,' said Malcador. He pointed to the holo-captures the Khan had made, which floated before the gathering over the table. 'Lord Dorn and the others thought it best we were informed, and for that we are thankful.'\n\n'What are the enemy's intentions? What is that?' Jemm Marison, High Lady of the Imperial Chancellory, asked.\n\n'That is clearly a siege cannon,' Zagreus Kane said irritably. He was still new to his role as Terran potentate and had yet to master some of the gentler arts of diplomacy. The others found him abrupt, though preferable to Ambassador Vethorel, whose brash tactics in creating the new Adeptus Mechanicus had left her disliked. 'The type is quite distinctive. It is shield-bane technology of the Ordo Reductor, a most holy and terrible knowledge. Kelbor-Hal's traitors are working against the Palace.'\n\n'It will penetrate the aegis?' asked Simeon Pentasian, the dour Master of the Administratum. Though all on the Council had renounced governance of the Imperium while the crisis lasted, he worked as they all did in his own sphere of influence, attempting to keep the failing city running while the enemy gathered outside.\n\n'It has a better chance than a less specialised weapon,' said Kane. 'It is far from certain to do so. The aegis is strong.'\n\n'There are eight siege camps around the Palace. I assume all of them contain similar weaponry,' said Chancellor Ossian, of the Imperial Estates.\n\nMalcador glanced at Dorn.\n\n'That is the case,' said Dorn quietly.\n\n'I had my Legion survey five of the sites,' said the Khan. His armour appeared grey outside the area of bright light shining on the table. He moved fluidly, worryingly reminiscent of a predator outside a campfire's glow. The members of the High Twelve present peered nervously at him. 'All of them have similar machinery under construction. I chose to overfly the camp facing the Helios Gate myself, because of the tower collapse on that section early in the bombardment.'\n\n'It is reasonable to assume they will make a determined attempt to break the wall there,' added Sanguinius. He appeared distant to the Council, as if his mind strayed beyond mortal affairs. 'They have concentrated their efforts on the Helios section of Daylight, and to the north, at the Potens section of the Dusk Wall.' His wings shifted, wafting air over the Council that carried sweet scents from a better place. Again they moved in their seats uncomfortably.\n\n'Then why have they not fired their guns?' asked Marison.\n\n'The cannon must be assembled, my lady,' said Kelsi Demidov, Speaker for the Chartist Captains. She was gentle with Marison, who though expert in her own field lacked breadth of knowledge.\n\n'The weaponry of the Ordo Reductor is generally apocalyptic in scale,' said Kane. He chose a deliberately mechanical voice for the meeting, but could not hide his irritation at explaining the obvious to Marison. 'It takes time to prepare.'\n\n'I am aware,' said Marison huffily. 'We're all aware of that.'\n\n'Well,' said Kane. 'There are other strategic considerations, of course.'\n\n'We have nowhere to go,' said Bolam Haardiker, Paternoval Envoy. 'They do not need to rush.' That day he carried his own nuncio system. None of them had their usual servants in attendance.\n\n'Let them dither!' said Pentasian. 'Every moment they waste building their weapons is more time for Lord Guilliman to make his way to Terra and to our rescue. Is that not the case, Lord Dorn?'\n\n'There is another reason why they are taking their time,' said Malcador, before Dorn could answer. As Imperial Regent, Malcador was leader of the group. Though his title was more one of ceremony while martial law was in place, he was the only man the primarchs would still defer to. 'These bombardments, this wasting of life has to have a purpose. Do you think Horus Lupercal, conqueror of half the known galaxy, once most favoured of the Emperor's sons and appointed Warmaster by Him, has lost his mind?'\n\n'I had hoped so,' said General Adreen, the Lord Commander Militant of the Imperial Armies. 'It would make him easier to beat.' His comment drew a ripple of gallows laughter from his fellows.\n\nMalcador didn't laugh. 'Thus far we have not seen Horus' infernal allies upon the field. We are fortunate, the Emperor is powerful, and holds back the wickedness of the warp. But every drop of blood spilled on Terra's soil weakens His grip on the energies of the empyrean.'\n\n'Daemons,' said Nemo Zhi-Meng, Choirmaster of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica. 'He speaks of daemons.'\n\nThe lords and ladies looked at one another uneasily at his use of the word.\n\n'These beings exist,' Haardiker said, his nuncio set smoothly translating the clicks and whispers emanating from his mutant throat into Gothic. 'We Navigators know them of old. They serve the entities that name themselves as gods.'\n\n'Well don't look so surprised,' said Pentasian sharply to the others. 'We've all heard the reports. We've spoken to eye-witnesses. Do not let the name frighten you - they are extra-dimensional xenos, nothing more.'\n\nThe primarchs did not correct him. Better that the High Lords thought that way.\n\n'They could come in... here?' said Marison, glancing around the vast building.\n\n'Maybe. Eventually,' said Malcador gravely. 'The Emperor's power is not infinite, and certainly long before the enemy is able to manifest his wicked allies within these walls, His protection will be weakened sufficiently that the barriers between the materium and immaterium will be broken through elsewhere on Terra. Then we will have to face daemonic creatures fighting alongs"}
{"text":"er that the High Lords thought that way.\n\n'They could come in... here?' said Marison, glancing around the vast building.\n\n'Maybe. Eventually,' said Malcador gravely. 'The Emperor's power is not infinite, and certainly long before the enemy is able to manifest his wicked allies within these walls, His protection will be weakened sufficiently that the barriers between the materium and immaterium will be broken through elsewhere on Terra. Then we will have to face daemonic creatures fighting alongside Traitor legionaries, besides all the misguided masses who follow the Warmaster.'\n\n'I can't quite believe it. In all this, you know,' Sidat Yaseen Tharcher, Chirurgeon General said. 'Magic. Sorcery.' It was hard for him. He was a scientist to the core.\n\n'The dark side of the warp,' said Malcador. 'You all understand, I am sure, that the full extent of the truth is still not to be shared beyond the higher echelons of government. We discuss these matters here among ourselves. They are not to be disseminated further.'\n\nThey agreed, some more than others.\n\n'Why did He lie about this?' said Ossian abruptly.\n\n'A lie of omission is not the same as outright untruth,' argued General Adreen.\n\n'The Emperor's omissions are not as awful as some say. The warp has changed,' said Nemo Zhi-Meng. Few shared the reach of his vision, and he was apt at seeing past the surface of things to grasp truths others did not. 'Powers move in the deeps of the empyrean that were quiet before. Awareness of them gives them strength. His instinct to shield the human race was the correct one - for the same reason we should not spread this news. Knowledge of the false gods gives them strength. It makes them real. In a certain way of looking at it, until recently they did not exist except as whispers, nightmares and half-myths.'\n\n'We are not here to discuss the motivations of the Emperor,' said Malcador firmly.\n\n'True, true,' said Pentasian. 'But still.' He gave a weak smile, wholly out of place on his miserable face. 'Nightmares, witches, warp entities. All the old legends coming true.'\n\n'Please, Lord Dorn, present your strategic analysis,' said Malcador.\n\nDorn stepped forwards fully into the light. His golden battleplate flashed resplendently, dazzling the High Lords. Although the dais raised the table well above the debating floor, Dorn was of sufficient height that he could meet their eyes when standing on the ground, and when stood next to the table as he was then, he dwarfed them. The brief illusion of the Council's authority was shattered. Any who witnessed the scene could not doubt who was the true power on Terra; this son of the Emperor, with his brilliant white hair and his golden panoply, was the embodiment of the Imperium.\n\nDorn cast his eye over the High Lords. Most looked down, afraid. A couple met his gaze with difficulty. 'There are further problems the Khan's reconnaissance has brought to light,' Dorn said. 'You see these structures here?'\n\n'Buildings?' said Demidov. 'Fortresses?'\n\n'Siege towers,' said the Khan.\n\nMurmurs of disbelief went around the twelve.\n\n'They are immense,' said Adreen. 'Is it possible? Will they even function?' He addressed this last question to Kane.\n\nKane fell into a contemplative silence. 'Yes,' he said eventually. 'Nullification of mass by contra-gravity devices and structural binding with integrity fields would enable such large objects to be motivated without becoming unstable. They are tactically impractical, and of limited use, but they could be built.'\n\n'We have indications of other, similar siege engines under construction in the other camps, but none so far advanced as these. It is clear to us that soon the enemy will make an attempt on the walls by the Helios Gate,' said Dorn.\n\n'You are bombarding them, of course?' said Zhi-Meng.\n\n'I will come to that. First, enemy landing zones,' Dorn said, pausing after announcing the subject. A projection of Terra came into being, huge and grey, over the table. 'The enemy has made planetfall at over three hundred separate locations around the globe.' The hololith displayed enemy concentrations as blotchy purple. 'Most of this is speculation. There are no precise figures for enemy numbers. Terra's orbital network is either destroyed or in enemy hands. These figures are collated from information gathered from other hives where possible. In most cases, it is impossible. Supposition is our only tool.\n\n'Siege camps.' Again, Dorn paused. 'Eight siege camps ring the city, all established behind defence screens. Overhead voids, layered power shields, ion shielding, while their smaller constructs go about protected by atomantic sheaths. Using the camps as a base, the Dark Mechanicum has begun work on a line of contravallation to encircle the entire Eternity Wall. They are under constant bombardment from the Palace, but this will only slow rather than stop them. The shielding prevents our direct targeting of their siege equipment until it is ready, and moving against the walls.\n\n'Enemy troop strength. We have downed thousands of their landing craft. Nevertheless, several million troops of varying quality are now encamped outside the walls. However, these forces are of little concern. Other landing zones, out of range of the Palace guns, have been set up further back in the Himalazian massif. These landing sites are by necessity far from us, but we can be sure that reinforcements are marching from them already. What intelligence we can gather shows higher quality troops moving from these sites on other Terran cities.\n\n'Space ports. Horus has secured a number of landing fields across Terra. Near the Palace, Damocles space port is under constant attack. For now it holds, but it will fall. As it lies outside the aegis, most of the structures in the Damocles zone have been destroyed, including the Black Ministry. Our warriors have done what they can to compromise Damocles port's usefulness, but even damaged it will offer the Warmaster a safe landing zone for Titan Legios and other heavy formations close to our main defences.\n\n'Aerial theatres,' he continued relentlessly. 'We have no control of the void. Our fighter forces dwindle with every sortie from the Warmaster's fleet.\n\n'Aegis strength. The aegis holds at close to one hundred per cent strength over the central districts and the Sanctum Imperialis, but on the periphery we have less than forty per cent efficacy. This is falling daily. Before long, the outer walls will be open to attack from above, and when that occurs they will be breached.'\n\n'The shields will hold,' said Kane.\n\nDorn looked at the Fabricator General. 'We face five primarchs. One among them has uncovered and is exploiting weaknesses in the aegis network. My guess would be Perturabo.'\n\n'Or Kelbor-Hal,' said Kane.\n\n'Perturabo was made for tasks such as this,' said Dorn, staring at the Fabricator General with certainty. 'The bombardment patterns bear his mark as surely as if he had fashioned them in steel and struck them with his die. The aegis will fail under his attack. The walls will then begin to take bombardment damage. This will happen soon.\n\n'Palace outworks.' Dorn returned his gaze from Kane to the hololith, dismissing the Fabricator General's quibbles. 'The outworks are close to collapse. Greater than one half of the conscripts and other formations committed to their defence are dead. I will shortly give the order to abandon the third line, and fall back to the second.'\n\n'The bastions still hold,' said Adreen.\n\n'While they do, we can keep the enemy away from the Palace defences. I anticipate the next major attack will come soon in an effort to clear the outwork towers from the field,' said Dorn. 'This may be accompanied by the first serious attempt on the Eternity Wall. If it does not come then, it will come soon after.'\n\n'This is a ritual,' said Constantin Valdor. He was almost as commanding as the primarchs, but being better known to the Twelve, they were not as afraid of him. While the Emperor's sons spoke, he kept his own counsel, and that was something Dorn encouraged. In earlier days, when the primarchs waged the Emperor's war among the stars, Valdor's voice had great influence on the Senatorum. His silence spoke volumes on the primarchs' authority now that they ruled in their father's stead.\n\nValdor stepped next to Dorn to point at the hololith. 'Eight camps at varying distance from the Palace. Draw a line from each, and the lines intersect over the Sanctum Imperialis. These desperate attacks by low quality troops against the outworks are not serious attempts. They are sacrifices.'\n\n'Not long ago, we might have overlooked the possibility,' said Dorn, 'but the captain-general has it right. Though the Warmaster erodes our outer perimeters, the strategy is suboptimal.' He pointed at two siege camps, one directly north of the Sanctum, the other to the south-west. 'For example, the walls here and here are weakened, yet the enemy establishes his camps kilometres out from those points. It is unmistakably a ritual arrangement.'\n\n'My lords,' said Valdor, 'Horus is taking our choices from us. If we do not attack, we allow them to build their siege works unhindered. If we attack, we add to whatever blood magic they are planning.'\n\n'But are they truly involved in ritual? How can we know?' said Marison disbelievingly. 'Not one of us here is a sorcerer.'\n\n'I know it is hard to believe,' said Malcador gently, 'but by these means, the traitors will bring their creatures against us. The forces we see now are only a fraction of what we will eventually face.'\n\n'For the time being, there are other problems to occupy us,' said Dorn. 'Until three days ago, we were at least being spared the attentions of the Traitor Legions. The Death Guard have put down all over the globe. Their preference for biological and chemical warfare remains as it always was, and the efficacy of these weapons appears accentuated by their recent change. I have notification of plague from every cor"}
{"text":"nst us. The forces we see now are only a fraction of what we will eventually face.'\n\n'For the time being, there are other problems to occupy us,' said Dorn. 'Until three days ago, we were at least being spared the attentions of the Traitor Legions. The Death Guard have put down all over the globe. Their preference for biological and chemical warfare remains as it always was, and the efficacy of these weapons appears accentuated by their recent change. I have notification of plague from every corner of Terra.'\n\n'What has happened to them? What are these reports of mutants and other abominations in the ranks of the Traitor Legions?' Ossian inquired.\n\n'A number of the Legions have given themselves over completely to the so-called gods of the Pantheon,' said Dorn. 'The first we heard of these creatures were unstable members of the Word Bearers. We now know these warriors were Space Marines whose bodies were inhabited by warp entities.'\n\n'Them again,' said Pentasian. He took a hefty gulp of wine. In the old days, he had only ever drunk water.\n\n'This practice has spread to other Legions, notably the Sons of Horus,' said Dorn. 'Other malformities among the enemy ranks are caused by exposure to the warp, both intentional and incidental, and deliberate mutilation.'\n\n'We've heard all this, but reports about the Death Guard are particularly disturbing,' Ossian said. 'Lord Khan's images and pict-capture from the walls show...' He peered at a data-slate in front of him. 'I don't know what they show. Diseased warriors. Fouled weapons. How can they fight?'\n\n'The answer lies in the warp,' said Dorn.\n\n'I saw them first-hand, as did Sanguinius,' said the Khan. 'They are diseased, as you say, but somehow this makes them more durable.'\n\n'Have we any samples to investigate, corpses, remains?' asked Demidov. 'Perhaps Tharcher's hospitallers might be of help?'\n\nThe Khan shook his head. 'Do not ask for such things to be brought into the city. My Apothecaries wished to examine the dead. I was unwilling to take that risk. Any examples close to the walls I ordered burned. They managed to infect me with something,' he said, and his disbelief was clear to all. 'The Emperor made us proof against all disease. I have never been ill in my life, until this week. We cannot risk sickness of that potency getting into the general populace.'\n\nTharcher nodded. He was a precise and reserved man, his ageing face pocked with blister-scars. On initial impressions, he looked nervous but the scope of his intellect was apparent too from his quick movements, and his large eyes held reservoirs of compassion.\n\n'That is for the best,' Tharcher said. 'Even so, the Palace has not been spared. Disease runs rampant through the outer districts already, thanks to Mortarion. It is getting worse.'\n\n'Although on first examination the Death Guard attack on our outworks appears wasteful of men, their objective was to get close enough to the city to bypass the aegis with their artillery,' said Dorn. 'Short bombardments from near range covered by their infantry engaging with our outwork forces, followed by immediate withdrawal. Their aim was to introduce disease vectors into the civilian population.'\n\n'Of what sort?' asked Ossian.\n\n'Diseased corpses, living tissue riddled with bacteria, infected human waste matter, viral agents in suspension that aerosolised on detonation of the munitions,' said General Adreen. 'They were inventive.'\n\n'They succeeded,' said Tharcher. 'Our medicae facilities are already overrun. Thousands are sickening. People are dying, and I expect many more deaths soon. Most of these diseases, though severe, are treatable under normal circumstances, but our staff are overstretched and we have insufficient medical stockpiles. Malnutrition is exacerbating the problem.' He looked to his fellows. 'Our populace is weak. I have taken the step of quarantining the areas within the walls that have been affected, but in a place such as this, with so many crammed into so small a space, no quarantine can be watertight. I cannot guarantee the core districts will escape disease. For the moment, the enforcers and the militia raised to assist them are shooting quarantine-breakers on sight. Unrest is increasing. The sickness will get through.'\n\n'The people are frightened. Martial law has increased the incidence of rioting,' said Harr Rantal, Grand Provost Marshal of the Adeptus Arbites. 'My men are stretched thin. Only an hour ago, there was a concerted effort to break out of the fiduciary subzone of sector twelve. Five hundred and seventy civilians dead, twenty enforcers killed or seriously injured, one arbitrator dead. These events are occurring so frequently they're in danger of becoming statistics.'\n\n'Civil unrest and disease must both be brought under control,' said Dorn. 'By any means. This picture we provide for you is a grim one, but we have gathered you together again because it is going to worsen. The enemy will begin attacking in earnest. Once that begins, Horus will attempt to break through the Eternity Wall until he is successful. We will hold it as long as we are able, but we shall be forced to fall back to the inner defences.' Dorn gave them a grave look. 'Listen to me as I say again this will happen. The civilians have to be moved before then, or they will perish.'\n\n'What do you wish us to do?' said Pentasian wearily. 'If we bring them further in, they will carry their diseases to as yet clean districts. We've had this problem before. Do you remember? Our final Council meeting?' He looked at the other lords, who nodded and muttered their agreement. 'We struggled to screen them then. We cannot screen them now,' said Pentasian. 'They once numbered in the thousands. Now there are millions of refugees within the outer city. We have nowhere left to put them. They can't all live in here.' He gestured around the hall.\n\n'Millions of people, Lord Dorn,' said Ossian. 'Leaving aside the time it will take to vet them all, and the men we do not have to do it, we will then have further overcrowding. Every quarter of the city is full of refugees. There is not enough space. Tension will increase. It is bound to.'\n\n'I trust to you to see it done,' said Dorn. 'You have no choice. The other alternatives are to leave the civilians to their fate, or to actively cull them. I assume none of you wish to give either order.'\n\nThe High Lords looked uncomfortably at one another.\n\n'Yes, well.' Pentasian said. 'We shall see what transpires.' He cleared his throat and massaged the bridge of his nose, then poured himself some more wine. 'That leaves the question of the rest of Terra.'\n\n'With the bulk of the Legions at the Palace, the enemy is having an easier time of it elsewhere,' said Sanguinius. 'Over the last three days, since the Death Guard began their landing, we have received reports of four major population centres falling to the Warmaster, including Lundun, Noy Zaylant Hive, Neork and Brasyla. Millions are dying. The diseases outside the Palace are already killing. They are far more virulent than the ones we see here.'\n\n'The Emperor shields us from such witchcraft,' said the Khan. 'I experienced the effect myself. As soon as I passed within the walls, the sickness left me, and the knife used to infect me disintegrated.'\n\n'The Emperor protects,' Ossian said clearly, then hurriedly added as Lord Dorn gave him a sharp look, 'so they say.'\n\n'You will still not commit your forces to actions outside the walls?' said Pentasian.\n\n'We must stand firm,' said Dorn.\n\n'Your firmness is commendable, but will ensure no Terra is left!' said Ossian.\n\n'There will be no Terra if there is no Emperor,' said Dorn.\n\nThe Khan gave Dorn a sidelong glance. They disagreed on this matter.\n\n'Guilliman will come. If he is delayed, then we must guarantee the Palace and the Emperor until he does,' said Dorn. 'The Legions cannot leave the Palace without jeopardising the Emperor. If the Emperor dies, we have lost, and so the Legions do not leave.'\n\n'My lords,' said Adreen, 'let us not bicker. The primarchs favour us to give us this news. They do not have to. We have no authority over them, and the Praetorian is right. We cannot weaken the Palace defences, even if it costs billions of lives.'\n\n'It will cost billions of lives,' said Pentasian.\n\n'Then what are we to do?' said Ossian.\n\n'We fight! The Imperial Army fights on,' said Adreen. 'We have plentiful support from Lord Kane's armies. The enemy's strength is concentrated here, at the Palace. While that remains the case, my armies shall do what they can elsewhere. It is appalling, I agree, but the legionaries and Custodians are needed here. We must resist as best we can.'\n\n'That is all any of us can do,' said Dorn. 'Resist. We tell you these things that you might prepare, and save as many of our people as you can. That is your role in this, while we wage war on behalf of the Emperor. See to the civilians. Free us from this task, and I swear on my honour, it shall be enough. We will not allow the Imperium to fall.'\n\n'What were you thinking?' said Dorn to his brothers, though primarily he addressed the Khan.\n\nThe Khan kept his silence. The three primarchs were in an unfinished side chamber off the Senatorum Imperialis. The building had been under construction for centuries, and still the outer chambers were yet to be completed. The one they occupied had bare rockcrete walls and was lit dimly by a single lumenglobe. It was freezing and damp; nevertheless there were bedrolls and other signs of civilian occupation all around the walls. 'Why were you on the same section of the wall?' Dorn demanded.\n\nAgain, the Khan said nothing, but stared at his brother with calm eyes.\n\n'Providence,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'You could both have been killed,' said Dorn.\n\nThe Khan chose to speak then. 'We all die eventually, brother. There is nothing more true than that. Even for us.'\n\nDorn clenched his fists. 'Why will you not obey my orders? Why will you not put the safety of our father"}
{"text":"ls and other signs of civilian occupation all around the walls. 'Why were you on the same section of the wall?' Dorn demanded.\n\nAgain, the Khan said nothing, but stared at his brother with calm eyes.\n\n'Providence,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'You could both have been killed,' said Dorn.\n\nThe Khan chose to speak then. 'We all die eventually, brother. There is nothing more true than that. Even for us.'\n\nDorn clenched his fists. 'Why will you not obey my orders? Why will you not put the safety of our father above your own impulses?'\n\n'We are different, you and I,' said the Khan. 'In the eyes of the actor, the action is justifiable. We know what the Dark Mechanicum are building. We would not if I remained here. Intelligence in war is the mightiest weapon.'\n\n'I had already accurately deduced what was there,' said Dorn irritably.\n\n'Then I have removed uncertainty from your calculations.' The Khan gave his brother a wide smile. 'I thought you would appreciate that.'\n\nDorn placed his fists upon a workbench. The bench was a crude thing, plasteel sheets bolted to scaffold-pole legs. The surface was neatly arrayed with tools. He stared at them in silence. They were covered with the dust of neglect, and left perfect outlines where curious refugees had moved them.\n\n'No more risks,' he said. 'Either of you. Can you imagine the blow to morale alone if one of you died?'\n\n'I am sorry, my brother, but I am going to disappoint you again,' said the Khan.\n\nDorn turned round so quickly the tools rocked.\n\n'Do not take your Legion away,' said Dorn. 'I forbid it.'\n\nThe Khan held his eye. 'You heard the High Lords. The people of Terra are dying. You are sacrificing the population of this world,' he said. 'It is pragmatism, I know. You present a cold face to the world, brother, but your heart does not match it. You know this is not right. If we cannot protect the men and women of mankind's cradle, how can we claim the best interests of humanity are at the centre of what we do?'\n\n'You have known of my strategy since you returned to the Throneworld, brother,' said Dorn. The shocking white of his hair accentuated the paleness of his face. In the dimly lit room, it seemed age had finally got its talons into him. 'Your objections are noted, but at this late stage, meaningless.'\n\n'You shackle me to the Palace with too short a chain,' said the Khan. 'We fought the Great Crusade to free humanity, not to sacrifice it.'\n\nDorn nodded once, though not in agreement. He rested his hand on his sword hilt.\n\n'Jaghatai, I understand. I feel your anguish that mortal men and women suffer to ensure our father survives. But war is a calculation, this one more than all the others. Life cannot be measured in absolute terms any longer. Every death must be set against one consequence alone - how much time it can buy us. Time is the currency of this battle. We must hoard seconds like misers. Lives we have in abundance. They can and must be spent freely, regrettable as that is.'\n\nNeither of the others spoke.\n\n'Do not be hasty, brother,' said Dorn, more gently. 'Horus continues his bombardment of the surface. He is still testing us, still probing the defences of the world. He is saving his best troops. He knows we cannot spare our own legionaries anywhere but here. The creatures assailing the hives of Terra are scum, dregs, opportunists and fanatics. While here our outwork forces arrayed against them are more than enough to keep them back. These attacks of the Death Guard are intended to draw us out. Their presence shows our strategy is working. Leave, and you shall be playing into Horus' hands.'\n\n'The situation is fluid,' said the Khan. He spoke without rancour, but his objections were clear. 'Horus will land all his Legions soon. I prefer to act now, while I am still free to do so.'\n\n'If you do, you will provoke his attack!' said Dorn.\n\n'Making the enemy change his plans is strength. Force your enemy to react to you. A general who waits for the enemy to act is already defeated, I learned this as a child.'\n\n'Your wars were different to mine,' said Dorn.\n\n'Then perhaps you should listen to me,' said the Khan. 'The ordu are better served in swift battle. On the walls they are worth ten men - if we ride, twenty or more. I will not stand by while billions die.'\n\n'Jaghatai!' said Dorn in exasperation.\n\n'Brothers,' said Sanguinius. 'Arguing over eventualities that have not yet come to pass serves nothing.'\n\n'Every strategic sense I possess tells me that Horus will direct his forces to reave the planet to exploit our concern for humanity,' said Dorn. 'He does this expressly to divide our efforts. When we are split, and our warriors spread, that is when the Warmaster will fall on us and seize victory. We must stand united.'\n\n'Then you do not disagree with me,' said the Khan. 'The population is at risk.'\n\n'I anticipated slaughter long ago,' said Dorn, 'and I regret that this chain of events came to pass, but we cannot respond to whatever provocation Horus presents to us. We cannot let ourselves be lured out. We cannot follow his plan. We will make ourselves weak, then all is lost.'\n\n'Since when was saving mankind from the darkness a sign of weakness?' said the Khan. 'Sanguinius, my brother and comrade, what do you see? Lend me your foresight.'\n\nSanguinius shut his eyes. Like that, he appeared drawn and tired, a funerary monument to himself. Dorn suppressed a shudder.\n\n'My sight is not so clear as father's,' said Sanguinius. 'The future is ever in flux. Only some events...' He paused, finding the words hard to say. 'Only some events are certain.'\n\n'Do you see me? What will be the consequences of inaction?'\n\n'I see fire, and blood, and a world laid waste if you do not act.'\n\n'If I act?' said the Khan.\n\nSanguinius opened his eyes to look at him.\n\n'There is grave risk to you. A confrontation unlooked for, and if you survive, a flight from one danger into greater peril.'\n\n'Who will I face?'\n\n'I cannot divine.'\n\n'Will I save lives?'\n\nSanguinius nodded. 'Many.'\n\n'That is what I was made for,' said the Khan. 'I will ride out.'\n\n'We will save lives by holding the Palace,' said Dorn. 'So long as the Emperor lives, Horus cannot be victorious.'\n\n'You hold the Palace,' said the Khan, turning his hard brown eyes back on Dorn. 'I will not leave the ordinary citizenry of Terra defenceless.'\n\n'Jaghatai, I insist...'\n\n'Half my Legion remains here, at all times.' The Khan spoke across him. 'This is my word, but I ride with the rest of the ordu. I will say no more other than to swear that I will return when I am needed. I will be here when the time comes. Do not try to stop me. I will not be dictated to, not even by you. If the Emperor Himself were to tell me I should not go, I would not listen.'\n\nThe Khan left the room.\n\nDorn let him go. Sanguinius rested a hand on his brother's shoulder.\n\n'Trust to fate, brother. There are kinder powers at work who favour us.'\n\n'I do not believe in such things,' said Dorn with a troubled sigh. 'But I shall ask them to watch over the Khan anyway.'\n\nThe Lord of Iron\n\nIron circle\n\nSuperior intelligence\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Terran high anchor, 9th of Quartus\n\nPerturabo arrived aboard the Vengeful Spirit in a foul temper.\n\nHis Stormbird put in to a small hangar high on the command spines of the vessel, where Sons of Horus in gleaming armour waited for him with all the pageantry of inter-Legion diplomacy. Were it not for the polished skulls hanging from armour upon cords and the bright red banners bearing Horus' baleful eye, the greeting could have taken place during the Great Crusade.\n\nThose days were done. Perturabo saw through the display. There was nothing of the old glory nor anything of honour. He was insulted his brother did not greet him personally and saw only threat in the welcoming party, a feeling that intensified when Horus Aximand stepped forwards to greet him.\n\n'My Lord Perturabo,' said Aximand. 'Welcome to the Vengeful Spirit. It has been far too long since you graced us with your presence.'\n\nPerturabo had never warmed to Little Horus. He was a preening man, full of borrowed confidence. His resemblance to the Warmaster made him think himself better than others, when all he had been was an image of Horus reflected on dirty water. Now his face was ruined, he was not even that.\n\n'Get on with it and take me to Horus,' grumbled Perturabo. 'There is no time for this pantomime. I must speak with my brother immediately.'\n\nThe side hatches of the Stormbird slammed down. The booming tread of iron feet on metal echoed from the belly of the ship. The Iron Circle, Perturabo's bodyguard of six towering battle robots, marched out, formed a crescent around their master and slammed their hazard-striped shields together to make a wall behind him.\n\n'I see you have company,' said Aximand. His attempt to raise an eyebrow succeeded only in pulling at the scarred wreck of his face and making him even uglier.\n\n'The Iron Circle goes where I go,' he said.\n\n'You have more forces with you? Why don't you call them out?'\n\n'There are always more,' said Perturabo.\n\nTen Iron Warriors in modified Cataphractii plate stepped onto the deck and took up position beside the battle automata. They aimed their weapons pointedly at their hosts.\n\n'Is that Captain Forrix I see there?' said Aximand mildly, ignoring their show of strength.\n\n'Him?' Perturabo said with complete disinterest. 'Yes. It is Forrix.'\n\n'I shall see to it that they are refreshed,' said Aximand.\n\n'They will remain here. They are staying to guard my ship,' said Perturabo. 'Refreshments are not required.'\n\nAximand looked over the Terminator-armoured Space Marines and the automata, and gave a little sigh. 'Your caution is a credit to your genius, but you should trust your brother, my lord,' said Little Horus. 'You are held in high esteem here. You have nothing to fear.'\n\nPerturabo glowered. 'I fear nothing, but I trust no one,' he said. His cape of blades clanked behind him as he strode past Little Horus. 'Not even my brother.'\n\nTh"}
{"text":"o guard my ship,' said Perturabo. 'Refreshments are not required.'\n\nAximand looked over the Terminator-armoured Space Marines and the automata, and gave a little sigh. 'Your caution is a credit to your genius, but you should trust your brother, my lord,' said Little Horus. 'You are held in high esteem here. You have nothing to fear.'\n\nPerturabo glowered. 'I fear nothing, but I trust no one,' he said. His cape of blades clanked behind him as he strode past Little Horus. 'Not even my brother.'\n\nThe Iron Circle came noisily alive, and stamped after their master.\n\nAximand looked at Forrix. The Iron Warrior acknowledged him with a tiny dip of his helmet, no more than that. Aximand smiled a crooked smile and followed Perturabo from the hangar, leaving the sons of two primarchs staring at each other over their guns.\n\nPerturabo walked swiftly through the Vengeful Spirit, his Iron Circle clanking behind tirelessly. The ship shuddered in time to the firing of its guns. Having skulked behind Luna for several weeks, it had come out and joined the bombardment of the Throneworld. Horus was putting on a show of leadership from the front. A screen of destroyers and frigates protected the flagship from defence batteries that Perturabo would have destroyed many times over had his brother not kept him at the edge of the system. The story was the same as it ever was; Perturabo was exiled, ignored, called upon only as a weapon of last resort.\n\nHe would not let that stand. Already a master of the material sciences, he coveted the power of the warp. He saw possibilities beyond anything his genius could accomplish were it to remain shackled to the materium. But he was wary. His investigations were thorough. He would not follow his brothers into damnation and throw himself blindly upon the mercies of the gods, but circumvent them altogether and become a god himself.\n\nAs he proceeded through the vessel, his armour's auto-senses recorded everything for later examination.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit was a living textbook on how not to grasp the warp's might. In every way, it had changed for the worse. The taint of mutation lay on all things. Perturabo deeply disapproved. The warp was chaos. If approached carelessly, it was uncontrollable. He prized order. He would impose order upon chaos where his brothers had not. In securing his own apotheosis Fulgrim had tricked Perturabo but ultimately, like Angron, he had become a puppet of his passions. Magnus had chosen the esoteric path and fallen from it. Mortarion had been humbled. Lorgar was abandoned by the creatures he had unleashed.\n\nThese things would not happen to him, for he was Perturabo. He was logical when the others were impulsive. Methodical when they were rash. Passionless when they were indulgent. He was the Lord of Iron, and he was better than them all.\n\nIf the Vengeful Spirit were his ship, he would have burned the rot out. Horus didn't even bother to hide it. Corruption was in plentiful evidence. The smell of spoiled meat blasted from atmospheric cyclers. Crew and legionaries bore the marks of flesh change. When he ascended a huge staircase leading up towards the command deck he encountered an entire wall subsumed by a mat of throbbing flesh, a tapestry of skin that presented a madness of rolling eyes and dribbling orifices. As the automata passed it, each chimed out a warning and powered its weapons. It was a supreme effort to order them to stand down, and not send them to cut away the canker.\n\nPerturabo saw things other men did not. His psychic abilities were nothing compared to some, but he was nevertheless a primarch, and had an affinity for the warp. He had always been able to see the weeping sore in reality he had dubbed the Ocularis Terribus. Being on the Vengeful Spirit was like looking into the depths of the Ocularis and being unable to look away. There was a shifting of reality there. Nothing was real. Falsehood had stolen in behind every atom.\n\nHe wanted to be off the Vengeful Spirit. It reeked of slavery, and Perturabo was no one's slave.\n\nHe made good distance from the hangar without the irritation of Aximand, but the dog caught up with him to nip at his heels.\n\n'My lord,' said Aximand, jogging to keep up with Perturabo.\n\n'What do you want, Aximand?' said Perturabo.\n\n'Where are you going?'\n\n'Lupercal's court. I know the way, you need not follow me like a lost child. Begone, I am here to speak with the Warmaster, not a spoiled facsimile.'\n\n'Horus is not in Lupercal's court,' said Aximand.\n\nPerturabo stopped. The instant he did, so did the Iron Circle.\n\n'Where is he?'\n\n'In his temple. It is a new location on the ship. I must take you there.'\n\n'Must you,' said Perturabo.\n\nAximand turned them about and led the party back down the stair and off towards a large lifter platform. Perturabo stared at it suspiciously before he and his robotic guardians clambered aboard.\n\n'I prefer stairs,' he said. 'Less opportunity for assassination through mechanical interference.'\n\nAximand said nothing, but worked the controls, sending them down towards the base of the command spire.\n\nAt the bottom, he led Perturabo down a long corridor whose portside windows showed a fine view of the fleet and whose starboard side gibbered nonsense from thousands of chattering mouths. Presently they came to an ornate doorway carved of black, faintly luminous stone with a bestiary's worth of leering faces. Perturabo had seen such stone before, in the Cursus on Tallarn. Recognising the door as an artefact of the warp, he greedily set the devices of his armour to analyse it. As always, the stone showed only as a blank space to his equipment.\n\n'The Iron Circle must remain outside,' said Aximand, interrupting his evaluation.\n\n'My machines pose no threat to Horus,' he said, still playing his instruments over the black stone.\n\n'So you say,' said Little Horus. 'How can I be sure?'\n\nPerturabo's furious grey eyes stared at him, but he held up his fist and clenched it, and the Iron Circle took a simultaneous step backwards. Their hammers thudded onto the floor, their shields they brought across their bodies, and they deactivated as one, sinking into themselves with a hiss of released pressure.\n\n'Satisfied?' said the Lord of Iron.\n\nLittle Horus bowed his head; again there was an air of mockery to his show of respect.\n\n'You may enter, my lord,' he said.\n\nThe doors opened.\n\nPerturabo stared at Little Horus long enough for his disgust to be known before passing through the portal.\n\nThe doors closed behind him, sealing him in a chamber that should not have been there.\n\nPerturabo took in the silent Unspeaking standing guard in alcoves; the raised walkway; the black oil, strangely alive-looking, in the channels cut into the floor; the windows that looked upon an alien cosmos.\n\nHorus sat upon a throne at the far end of the walkway, which was fashioned of the same black, lustrous stone as the doors. He sprawled carelessly, armoured legs thrust out in front of him, his hands on the screaming daemon heads worked into the armrests. A penetrating sense of unease had Perturabo in its grip; the warp was close here, its otherworldly tides practically lapping at his feet. The lights were dim, but they shone with painful wavelengths not found in the material realm, and Perturabo squinted against them to see his brother.\n\nHorus was armoured, his hands encased in the huge machinery of his power claws, his great maul leaning against the throne. He stirred and sat upright. The machineries of his battleplate were loud in the sepulchral quiet.\n\n'Brother,' said the Warmaster. 'It is good to see you.'\n\nPerturabo hesitated. He should go to his brother. Caution held him back.\n\nSo much of the scene was wrong. The many Word Bearers vastly outnumbered the two Justaerin standing sentry at the entrance, whose presence was the only acknowledgement that this was a Sons of Horus ship.\n\n'Brother,' said Horus again. 'It is unlike you to dither. Come to me and greet me. You have performed well. I wish to thank you. We have a great deal to discuss.'\n\nThe Lord of Iron advanced steadily to mask his worries. Perturabo felt no fear, but he was paranoid to the core, and the voice that whispered treachery and death into the hidden folds of his mind was screaming at him to get out.\n\n'My brother,' he said. He believed he hid his internal conflict, but Horus watched him sharply, so that he feared he had betrayed himself.\n\nWith difficulty, for his famed battleplate, the Logos, was a massive construction, Perturabo knelt at his brother's feet.\n\n'My Warmaster,' he said.\n\n'Rise, Lord of Iron,' Horus said.\n\nPerturabo had no choice. He had to obey. Horus' gift was his ability to command men. Long ago he had done so artfully, through argument and persuasion as much as force of will. His charisma had been such he convinced others to follow him gladly. Now his presence demanded obedience. There was such power in him, yet he was also lesser than he had been, to the extent that Perturabo barely recognised his brother. Imperiousness replaced nobility. The easy smile had become a knowing leer. His thoughtful countenance had become slightly wild, suggesting wisdom too terrible to hold. Yet there was a glimpse of the old Horus when he stood from his throne and looked upon Perturabo fondly, causing the Lord of Iron to doubt himself.\n\n'We shall talk awhile, you and I,' said Horus.\n\nA febrile heat rose off the Warmaster. The sourceless light shining up from his gorget stained his skin a lurid magenta. So much power was invested in Horus. Perturabo recognised authority when he saw it, and though he shied away from others who would dominate him, to Horus he grudgingly submitted.\n\n'You have waited too long to summon me,' Perturabo said sourly. 'Why did you not allow me down with the Mechanicum landing parties? I have examined their work. It is pedestrian at best. Their contravallation is full of weaknesses. Had Dorn half the wits he ascribes himself, he would have overrun the siege camps a"}
{"text":"enta. So much power was invested in Horus. Perturabo recognised authority when he saw it, and though he shied away from others who would dominate him, to Horus he grudgingly submitted.\n\n'You have waited too long to summon me,' Perturabo said sourly. 'Why did you not allow me down with the Mechanicum landing parties? I have examined their work. It is pedestrian at best. Their contravallation is full of weaknesses. Had Dorn half the wits he ascribes himself, he would have overrun the siege camps a dozen times already. Lucky it is for us that he is arrogant, and afraid, choosing to skulk behind his fortifications. Let me at the Mechanicum to show how feeble Dorn's efforts are. Let me down to Terra, my lord, and I shall win this war for you. You promise me honour and respect, then leave me to languish in the outer system digging ditches. We delay when we should strike, we-'\n\n'Perturabo,' said Horus, silencing him.\n\nPerturabo's stolid face showed surprise as his words jammed in his throat and would not come out.\n\n'Do not complain. Not until you have heard me out.' Horus stepped down from the throne dais to come to his brother's side.\n\n'My lord,' Perturabo gasped, able to speak again.\n\n'Dear brother,' Horus said. He rested his massive claw on Perturabo's shoulder. Perturabo's teeth and bones ached at the otherworldly power emanating from the Warmaster. 'Always looking for the poison in the meat and never at the feast. I did not summon you until now for good reason, and I assure you it is the exact opposite of the suspicions churning around in that mind of yours. You see deviousness when truthfully I set you to work as I do because you are the only one of our brothers I trust. Be aware of this. You are blind to the affection I have for you. It offends me.'\n\n'My lord...' said Perturabo haltingly.\n\n'Fulgrim is flighty,' said Horus. 'Angron is consumed with rage. Mortarion has fallen on the sword of his pride. Magnus cannot be trusted, for he serves only himself. But you are here, Perturabo, you are still strong. You have not cravenly begged for the mercies of the Four. You see in me what the true power of the warp can grant.' He held up his other hand. 'I am the master of the Pantheon, not their servant. The others are diminished creatures, slaves to darkness. The lost, and the damned.' Horus smiled regretfully. 'They were not strong enough. They give themselves to one small aspect of the warp. But you, Perturabo, you are too wise for that. Too clever. You preserve your individuality when the others have lost theirs without realising it has gone.'\n\n'I broke with the Emperor to be free, not to enslave myself to worse masters,' Perturabo admitted.\n\nHorus chuckled, a leonine growl somewhere at the back of it. 'The Four hear you. Your arrogance delights them. They respect you. The others...' He shook his head. 'They are tools. They are not respected. Not like you, Lord of Iron.'\n\nHorus walked a few steps from the throne to look out at the vivid displays through the viewports.\n\n'You are too important to waste. Your sons too - they are valuable! Why would I send you down to bleed with the dregs? I have greater things in mind for you.'\n\n'Mortarion's sons are on-world,' Perturabo said peevishly. 'We are as indomitable, more indomitable, than the Death Guard. They are ill-suited to this battle. I should be there, fighting now.'\n\nHorus dismissed his concerns with a gesture. 'They have a different role to play to the one I have for you. Mortarion's sons will die in their multitudes performing their task. I am saving you and your sons, my brother, for the real work.'\n\nPerturabo's frown broke into a hundred different wrinkles around the input cables embedded in his scalp. 'When have you ever had a care for the lives of my sons, or for my talents?'\n\nHorus looked at him pityingly. 'When have I not? You are the best of them, brother! This is a siege. It is the siege, Perturabo. There will never be another battle like this. You are the finest engineer in the galaxy. I protect my best assets. I preserve them for the right moment. You do not toss your advantage away.'\n\n'Then... then you finally acknowledge my worth?' said Perturabo stiffly.\n\n'Finally? I have always acknowledged your worth!' said Horus. 'That is why I speak with you alone. The rest of our siblings must be dealt with together, like children, but not you, bold, brave Perturabo. We can talk as men. You and I, we are more alike than the rest. Equals, almost, in the scale of our intellects and the scope of our ambitions.'\n\nPerturabo bristled. He regarded his intelligence as superior to all others', even Horus'.\n\n'Of course your Legion will perform better than the Ordo Reductor and Sota-Nul's lackeys,' Horus continued, smiling indulgently at Perturabo's pride. 'Of course you would already be forcing the walls. Was it not you who uncovered the vulnerabilities of the aegis? Was it not you who proposed the nature of the aerial assault? I rely on you, brother. This is a dangerous time. My attention is... elsewhere. We must be circumspect, not rush in where angels fear to tread.' His grin became impossibly wide at his use of the ancient aphorism. 'An egg is a strong vessel for the life it hides...' He held up his clawed hand. 'Pressure, pressure, pressure, the egg remains whole, until the pressure is too great, and the egg cracks.' His claws scissored together with a noise like striking swords. 'A small breach, a lone assault, these little violations can be overcome by the defender. The Palace must be forced wide on every front at once. So hard and so widespread our attack must be that it cannot possibly be countered.'\n\nHorus' smile had no humanity to it. It was the sneer of a gargoyle on a pagan fane.\n\n'You will go to the surface. You will direct your Legion to encircle the walls of the Palace with unbreakable siege lines. Yes, improve the contravallation. Yes, have your Stor Bezahsk show the others how to conduct a barrage. But this is not all I wish you to accomplish. Very soon the Emperor's grip on the warp around Terra will be prised loose. Mortarion, Angron and Fulgrim will then descend, and the Neverborn allies our patrons promise will be able to manifest soon afterwards. You will-' Horus broke off suddenly and looked up, hearkening to a call Perturabo couldn't hear. The Warmaster's gaze slid along the lines of motionless Word Bearers. He stared into nothingness for a while, then regarded his brother again.\n\n'So there is nothing for me to do other than dig more ditches while false gods steal my victory?' said Perturabo.\n\n'No, my dear brother. All the daemons spawned since time began will not win us victory. Nor will the Legiones Astartes. We require a greater power.'\n\n'Titans,' said Perturabo decisively. 'Landing our Titans without their destruction is the key. Too far from the Palace, they are at risk of counter-attack. Too near, and their landing craft will be targeted and brought down.'\n\nHorus nodded. A pointed tongue slid along teeth that appeared momentarily sharp.\n\n'You will have your victory, and all the triumphs due you. When you accomplish the task I set you, every creature in the galaxy will know your name, all shall fear you. None shall doubt your brilliance.'\n\nPerturabo listened, rapt.\n\n'Only you can do this.' Horus gripped Perturabo's pauldrons in both hands and stared into his eyes. Heat from the Warmaster's body warmed his armour. 'You will find me a way to get Titans past the wall, Perturabo,' said Horus, 'and directly into the Imperial Palace.'\n\nSeven plagues\n\nNightmares return\n\nThe enemy speaks\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus\n\nKatsuhiro was still alive. He did not know how. Sometimes, he thought he had died and been tossed into some punishing afterlife. He was so ill and tired. When the third line was abandoned, Katsuhiro was ashamed to retreat from it, but it had lost all use as a defensive position. Where clean lines of plascrete ramparts had crossed the land, now there were only heaps of splintered rock sculpted into hillocks and dells by endless bombs, all reeking with the corpses trapped in the ruin. Bastion 16 still stood, but now it was in front of Katsuhiro's position. He felt safer when it was behind him, as if it had his back. Now it was in front he watched it deteriorate, its guns fall silent, its surface pit and crack. Like the slow death of a valued friend, it filled him with despair.\n\nBut still Bastion 16 held. Others did not. Their remains lined the battlefield, ugly, rotting teeth in gums brown with decay.\n\nA month limped by. If time could get sick, then it did, leaking putrid fluid from every day. One after another, seven plagues swept over the outworks, ravaging the defenders stationed there. First came the running boils, the trench pox and fungal rot: novel diseases that baffled the medicae sent to treat the troops. Red blindness, foaming madness, a plague of insectoid parasites that ate men from the inside, and finally, the humiliating, agonising death of the Bloody Flux. Jainan died. So many people died. The few people Katsuhiro knew were gone, save Doromek, who never sickened, and the woman Myz. He stopped talking to other people, saving his words for tearful monologues to himself that he mumbled into holes in the ground.\n\nThe enemy kept coming. Often the attackers were the undisciplined rabble they had faced before, but increasingly the merciless, nigh-on unkillable legionaries of the Death Guard came against them. The sole time the loyal Space Marines had come out faded from memory. When the Death Guard were driven back it was by dint of the wall guns, meaningless, short-lived triumphs that came at a terrible cost to the human defenders of the outworks.\n\nThe aegis continued to weaken, allowing more of the enemy's ordnance to fall through. Artillery emplacements in the fortifications encircling the Palace pounded them incessantly. Poisons and disease fell as often as fire. Toxic environment gear became the "}
{"text":"he sole time the loyal Space Marines had come out faded from memory. When the Death Guard were driven back it was by dint of the wall guns, meaningless, short-lived triumphs that came at a terrible cost to the human defenders of the outworks.\n\nThe aegis continued to weaken, allowing more of the enemy's ordnance to fall through. Artillery emplacements in the fortifications encircling the Palace pounded them incessantly. Poisons and disease fell as often as fire. Toxic environment gear became the defenders' skin, gas masks took the place of faces.\n\nKatsuhiro's company was merged three times with others, until they were a mongrel formation, stripped of the thin pretence they had of being members of the Kushtun Naganda. They were as motley and filthy as the wretches that attacked them. Only the direction they were facing told who was on which side, and that was not enough. Men from both forces broke in the middle of battles, going berserk and attacking anyone around them. Mistakes were common.\n\nThe nightmares that assaulted Terra in the months before the invasion, gone from Katsuhiro when he reached the Palace, crept back into his few hours of sleep. Horrible things, full of mutilations and blood, they were far more real and disturbing than even the traumas of war.\n\nOne rest period - it might have been the night or the day, the clouds of ash and fire long having removed differentiation from the two - Katsuhiro dreamed such a dream, of endless tunnels of black glass curved like a beast's intestines that he ran through in a panic, something clawed and silent gaining on him. He fell from the tunnel without warning into a sea of violent colours, where toothed hallucinations took on solidity for the sole purpose of tearing him apart, then tumbled through a door made of eyes onto the ruin of the Katabatic Plains. A bloody rain poured, and then, from the sky, a giant fell, huge and monstrous. Roaring in pain and rage, it came for him, a clawed hand reaching down to snuff out his life.\n\nKatsuhiro woke screaming. No one came to his aid. Everyone had their own daemons to wrestle with. When he calmed himself from shrieks to moans and then to sobs, he feared for a moment he might be deaf. He heard nothing but his own, sickly breath rattling in the hood of his gas mask.\n\nHe stood on feeble legs. Hundreds of other soldiers were doing the same, looking across the grey wasteland of the Katabatic Plains in fear.\n\nThe bombardment had stopped. The heat of the constant explosions, which rose on occasion to heights painful to bear, was carried off by the spring winds and the temperature dropped rapidly. Poison gas and clouds of viral spores blew away. Katsuhiro felt the breeze's caress through the rubber of his tox-suit. The wind called to him.\n\nFor the first time in what seemed forever, he tore off the hood of his gas mask, not caring if he died, and stood gasping like a landed fish. He closed his eyes to enjoy the simple bliss of sweat drying on his skin.\n\nThunder boomed, then roared again - no bomb this time but a shout, a voice, a presence so large it filled the heavens from horizon to horizon.\n\nThe sky flashed, and all on the defences looked upwards, and there beheld a terrifying vision.\n\nThe Crimson Apostle\n\nAn offer of surrender\n\nBlood rain\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios Gate, 15th of Quartus\n\nThere were six hundred merlons on the parapets of each tower of the Helios Gate, huge tombstone blocks four metres deep, three wide and three high. Each one had its own firing step. Each firing step hosted a figure in blood-red armour. They faced out in every direction, silent sentinels, waiting for the petty battles of air and outworks to be done and the first true hammer blow to fall. They were men of the First Chapter of the Blood Angels, its men and their captains under Raldoron's command.\n\nAnother commander might have remained inside the tower command centre, but Raldoron still preferred to walk the walls. He paced around the circumference of the tower. The space between the central gun turret and the battlement was wide, but then everything about the gate was scaled for gods and not for men. The macro cannon fired every ten seconds, hurling its destructive payloads no longer upwards at the fleet, but across the plain towards the contravallation. The barrel was at its lowest elevation, close enough for Raldoron to reach up and touch as he passed underneath it. When it fired, the gate convulsed upon its foundations. Even to him, a veteran of a hundred wars, the effect was alarming, but he put his faith in the primarchs, and trusted that Lord Dorn had allowed for these violent forces when he designed the defences.\n\nRaldoron's auto-senses failed to shut out the gun's roar. Dampened, the discharge still made his ears ring. He relished the sensation. While his orders prevented him from attacking, the gun was proof that the Imperium was fighting back.\n\nRaldoron's vox pulsed. Thane's notifier rune blinked in the upper right of his helm-plate.\n\n'On the walls again, First Captain?'\n\nRaldoron paused in his patrol. He looked out between the mighty teeth of the crenellations over the blasted plain. War remade worlds so quickly.\n\n'I could hide inside,' said Raldoron. 'It is safer. A few of my officers have intimated as much to me, but I will not listen to them. I am a Blood Angel. I am no logistician. My place is in battle, with sword in hand and bolter kicking in my fist.'\n\n'I prefer battle myself,' voxed Thane, as he approached around the turret's giant turntable. 'If you would have me, I would accompany you.'\n\n'You are welcome,' said Raldoron. He looked out over the tangle of wrecks. 'I feel that something is about to happen.' They spoke over the vox, insulated to an extent from the roaring of the wall guns, though no conversation could survive the macro cannon's report.\n\n'Your lord is well known for his second sight,' said Thane. 'Do you share it?'\n\n'In truth, I am not sure,' said Raldoron. 'I anticipate things, but I have always attributed that to my augmentations and training. I would not wish for Sanguinius' foresight. It is a curse as much as a gift.'\n\n'It appears you perhaps do have a little of his power,' said Thane pointing. 'The bombardment has ceased!'\n\nThey looked upwards. A last shower of shells screamed down. Lightning flickered through the churning clouds, purple, yellow and green. The heavens writhed with dying winds.\n\n'Fresh devilry,' said Thane.\n\n'It is beginning,' said Raldoron tersely. 'Maintain bombardment of enemy positions,' he voxed to the gunnery command centres. 'All companies stand ready for assault.'\n\nThane looked at him. 'How will they come against us?'\n\n'That, I do not know,' said Raldoron. 'But it is time. That I know in the pit of my being.'\n\nThe skies rippled like water, and in the clouds a face appeared, flat as a pict from a plastek flimsy projected onto an inadequate screen. It wavered with the movement of the clouds, unfocused at first, then became sharp as a knife to the skin.\n\nAt first, they took it for a sort of daemon. The face was horned. Its short muzzle ended in a maw surrounded by lamprey teeth. Six eyes glowed above it. But then, like the effect of a trick picture, the face changed in Raldoron's perception, and he saw he was looking at the distorted war-mask of one of the Legions.\n\n'Word Bearers,' Raldoron said.\n\n'Sorcery,' said Thane. 'They have fallen far.'\n\n'Hearken to me, oh people of Terra!' the being said, its harsh voice penetrating the racket of the guns.\n\n'Perhaps they have come to offer their surrender,' said Thane drily.\n\nThe Palace guns continued to fire.\n\n'There's my father's answer to that,' he added.\n\n'Predictable,' the Word Bearer said. 'But it is not primarch or Space Marine I address, but you, the common people, the subjects of Lord Horus who languish under the tyranny of the False Emperor.' The guns boomed on, but every word was clear, bypassing ears and auditory systems to ring in the minds of everyone on the planet.\n\nThe head turned, sweeping across the world. With that glance the legionary took in continents, and he laughed at what he saw with a low, monster's growl.\n\n'Heed my offer!' the Space Marine said. 'I am Zardu Layak, the Crimson Apostle. I am the herald of the Warmaster Horus, rightful lord of mankind. I call on you all, people of the nations of Terra, to hearken to me and hearken well. There comes a choice now, twixt life and death.'\n\nThe voice boomed away across the valleys of the truncated mountains and tore around the globe. The Apostle waited for his words to be digested before he continued. Some of the warriors on the defences shouted up at the vision in defiance. Others screamed.\n\n'I come with an offer to you all. Lay down your arms. Renounce your False Emperor. Raise your voices to the Warmaster and plead for your lives, and you will be spared.' Another pause. Where the maw of the Space Marine's mask projected onto the clouds, a vortex spun, and down it floated an island. That was how Raldoron instinctively named it. It was not a craft. It was not a platform or an orbital plate, but an island made of bone. Even from so far away, the ivory glint of it and the rough, compacted surface of the thing made it clear that it was formed of thousands of skeletons, crushed together.\n\nThe island ceased descending when it was level with the walls. It came down close by the Helios Gate, and began a circuit of the defences, passing in front of Raldoron and Thane's position. Guns tracked the island, las-beams, plasma and shells hammering at it, but they did no harm. The island rippled, the shots passing through.\n\n'A vision. An illusion,' said Thane.\n\n'Maybe, but this Layak is there,' said Raldoron. 'Look. He shows himself to us.'\n\nHe pointed. Upon the top of the island was a pulpit formed of a monster's skull. From the empty brainpan, Layak delivered his sermon. Around the pulpit eight thousand mortal priests in purple robes swayed from side to side in worshipful silence.\n\n'The Emper"}
{"text":"sland, las-beams, plasma and shells hammering at it, but they did no harm. The island rippled, the shots passing through.\n\n'A vision. An illusion,' said Thane.\n\n'Maybe, but this Layak is there,' said Raldoron. 'Look. He shows himself to us.'\n\nHe pointed. Upon the top of the island was a pulpit formed of a monster's skull. From the empty brainpan, Layak delivered his sermon. Around the pulpit eight thousand mortal priests in purple robes swayed from side to side in worshipful silence.\n\n'The Emperor is a liar,' said Layak. 'You have all been deceived. He has lived among you for thousands of years, biding His time, using your ancestors as He uses you now. The Emperor speaks of Unity. The Emperor speaks of the protection of the species. The Emperor speaks of the furtherance of mankind. The Emperor speaks of many things, and all He says is lies. Know this, people of Terra, He is false! The Warmaster, great Horus, has seen through His deceit, and commands me to relay to you the truth of the Emperor's ambition.'\n\nThe island rotated as it floated by. The wall guns continued to shoot at it, but it was a mirage called with magic, and it passed by unharmed. Seemingly serene, it nevertheless moved at pace, and was soon shrinking out of sight down the sweep of the Daylight Wall. Raldoron ordered surveillance automata to track it, giving him a doubled view. Via his auto-senses he looked down on the traitor. From the wall he looked up to the sorcerously projected image.\n\n'The Emperor is a parasite! He uses your sacrifices to raise Himself up in the warp. Your blood and your souls are His meat and drink. He wages a campaign to challenge the Pantheon of true deities. Listen to me, misguided, abused children of Terra. Let it be known to you that the Emperor desires only apotheosis. He would become a god and supplant the Gods of War, Life, Pleasure and Knowledge. He would transcend this plane of existence, and abandon you all to the monsters He pledged to rid you from. It is He who is the traitor to the species, not Horus! Horus will save you. Look to the sky and see his fleets. Witness how many others have seen reality for what it is, unclouded by lies and wishful thinking. Know that the coming of Horus is the coming of truth! He is the chosen of the gods, the powers in the warp who have watched over humanity for time immemorial until, to their dismay, the Emperor barred them from their worshippers. He has seen the gods' glory and serves them willingly. He does not wish to supplant them. He does not spoon-feed you pleasant fantasies. He is not a lying tyrant - he, Horus Lupercal, is the saviour of mankind!'\n\nLayak pointed skywards, to the churning air and the fleet that waited beyond for Terra's answer. Raldoron's wall captains reported in, sending target locks for verification. He blink-clicked and thought-approved them all. They were as good targets as they could be, straight shots, but every beam of energy and solid round passed through the island.\n\n'I am a prophet of the gods. I am Horus' servant,' said Zardu Layak, 'and I say to you, rejoice! The gods are coming here, to this world. They will bestow their power and their wisdom to any person strong and faithful enough to take it. Look upon me, and witness one of their champions. I swear to you that they will treat mercifully those who turn their backs upon the False Emperor. They will be kind to those who kneel to the righteous powers of this universe! This is my pledge! You will survive, you will prosper. You will know mastery of this realm, and glory in the next. This is their compact with me, and through me, with you.'\n\nAgain the figure paused. Again thunder rolled its drums.\n\n'As I come to you with these joyous tidings, I must also convey a warning. If you do not embrace the true faith, if you do not acknowledge the true gods, if you do not pay obeisance to Khorne, God of War...' The sky shook at the speaking of the name. Men cried out. 'To Nurgle, God of Endless Life...' The sky shook again, and again as he spoke the names of the other powers. 'To Tzeentch, God of Knowledge, and to Slaanesh, God of Pleasure... then you will be slain by them and their servants, and your souls will be cast into the warp, there to be devoured. Only then, in the life that comes after this as surely as night follows day, will you know the magnitude of your mistake. There you will see through the Emperor's tissue of lies in despair. In the warp you will beg without hope for the chance to change your actions. There is but one choice!' Zardu Layak boomed. The island of bone had passed hundreds of kilometres to the south by now.\n\nThrough the automata's eyes, Raldoron witnessed the thrall-priests of Layak cast back their hoods, rip open their robes and expose their torsos. They were eyeless, every one, bloody sockets in their faces, and their bodies cruelly cut with ritual scars and burned with brands. In their right hands they held daggers of dull metal.\n\n'This is the end!' Layak roared.\n\nThe priests lifted their daggers to the sky and howled praise with tongueless mouths.\n\n'Grovel before the gods and beg for their mercy!' Layak demanded.\n\nThe knives plunged into the breasts of the priests. They fell as one, their blood rushing from their opened hearts and pouring through the gaps in the bone to sluice the land below.\n\n'Now is the time, now is the moment! The way is clear! The doors open! Turn on the slaves of the False Emperor, repent before it is too late and liberate yourselves from His tyranny!'\n\nThe island rose up, rapidly vanishing into the crowds, chased all the way by a tempest of ineffectual gunfire.\n\nDrops of rain plinked off Raldoron's battleplate, the few turning rapidly to many. It ran over his eye-lenses, smearing the view.\n\n'What is happening?' asked Thane. He held up a cupped palm.\n\nOnly then did Raldoron see that the drops of rain ran bright and crimson on Thane's yellow armour.\n\n'A rain of blood,' Raldoron said.\n\nA great howling split the sky, then another, then a third. Three streaks of lurid energy shot down from above, each displaying brief glimpses of howling faces. One by one they slammed down. More thunder rumbled.\n\nOn the horizon, screeching horns blew.\n\nPhysical movement pushed through the line of shimmering energy fields guarding the contravallation. Constructs so large they were visible from the wall top across scores of kilometres of broken land emerged from the battlesmoke. Three huge siege towers pushed their way through the landing craft wrecks, taller even than the broken ships, and big enough to grind the smaller of them flat.\n\nSirens rose up from the city. Still the enemy fleet did not re-engage with their cannons, but across the land between siege line and wall sped the fire of more conventional weaponry as enemy artillery opened fire again. These hit the weakened shields, with many passing through to strike the wall itself.\n\n'This is it,' said Thane. 'The circling is over. The duel begins in earnest.'\n\n'There will be a landing soon,' said Raldoron, looking up into the bloody rain.\n\n'Let us strike blood together, brother,' said Thane. He held up his yellow gauntlet. Raldoron crashed his forearm against the Imperial Fist's.\n\nExplosions rippled over the aegis.\n\n'I will not let that sermon rest without reply,' Raldoron said. He clambered up onto the firing step, and faced the mighty cannon. Framed by the fires of the enemy's impotence boiling off the shields, he raised his bolter and demanded the attention of friend and foe alike.\n\n'Now! Now!' Raldoron shouted. He opened his communications to all the men under his command: his company, his Chapter, the warriors of other Legions pledged to the Helios section of the Daylight Wall, Martian cyborgs, mortal humans, grizzled soldiers and terrified conscripts.\n\n'The oath! Take the oath!' he commanded.\n\nHis men turned about, took to one knee and bowed their heads.\n\n'We are the sons of the blood of Sanguinius!' Raldoron shouted over the howl of weaponry.\n\n'We are the sons of Dorn!' Thane echoed.\n\n'In this moment we take our oath, solemnly to be upheld, that we defy these prophets. We deny their superstitions, their bloodthirsty idols, mumbled cantrip and fearful fetish. We deny these so-called gods. We deny their right to be. On this day, not one traitor shall pass this wall. Not one being who spits on the Emperor's name. Not one with treachery in his heart. Not one in thrall to these false gods. We fight to the last of our blood, for the Emperor, for the Imperium, for Unity, for Terra!'\n\n'For the Emperor, for the Imperium, for Unity, for Terra!' half a million voices, human and transhuman, roared back, loudly enough to be heard over the guns.\n\n'Let our defiance be our first blow!' Raldoron shouted. 'Let that be our oath!'\n\nThere were no parchments to be affixed by wax, or time to observe the proper rites, but in the gathering of warriors there was more solemnity than any official practice could contain. There was no distinction between man and superhuman, only brotherhood, and the shared will to prevail.\n\nRaldoron rejoined Thane.\n\n'Well said, Blood Angel.'\n\n'Now I am ready to fight,' said Raldoron.\n\nDorn himself spoke then, a message that went to every helm, vox-bead and address system in the Palace.\n\n'The time for speeches is done,' said Dorn. 'The first great test is here. My order to you all is simple, yet heed it well, and exert yourselves to see it done.\n\n'They are coming. Kill them all.'\n\nAngels of Death\n\nAngron freed\n\nFirst on the wall\n\nThe Nightfall, Terran orbit, 15th of Quartus\n\nA single note sang through Horus' fleet, calling all to action. Upon the Nightfall it was greeted gladly.\n\n'That's it. That's the signal. All engines full ahead!' bellowed Terror Master Thandamell, wild with excitement.\n\nAll mutual respect between the Legion and its servants was gone aboard the Nightfall. The bond had been failing for a long time, a process of erosion quickened since Skraivok had installed himself, and come thence to"}
{"text":"rst on the wall\n\nThe Nightfall, Terran orbit, 15th of Quartus\n\nA single note sang through Horus' fleet, calling all to action. Upon the Nightfall it was greeted gladly.\n\n'That's it. That's the signal. All engines full ahead!' bellowed Terror Master Thandamell, wild with excitement.\n\nAll mutual respect between the Legion and its servants was gone aboard the Nightfall. The bond had been failing for a long time, a process of erosion quickened since Skraivok had installed himself, and come thence to collapse. It was not so on every ship, but under the Painted Count's overlordship, the crew were reduced to chattels. The slave masters moved among the thralls, laying their scourges across the backs of those deemed to be performing their duties too slowly. No Night Lord would lower himself to the tedious administration of day-to-day discipline. Every overseer was drawn from the thrall-stock of the ship. All were desperate men, and sadists. Their eagerness to perform their duties exhilarated Skraivok. He had never been a gentle man, but his character was changing under the influence of the sword, becoming more wanton in its cruelty - quickly enough that he could see it himself, invigorating enough that he did not care.\n\n'Thandamell!' Skraivok crowed from the shipmaster's dais. 'What glories await us! What fine adventures we set ourselves upon. When the bards compose their sonnets of this war, come victory or defeat, the name of Gendor Skraivok will be remembered, and that is very fine. When the chroniclers of the future ask where Konrad Curze was at the moment the first assault crashed against the walls and find no answer, they will know that I, the Painted Count, was there in his stead! As Curze blunders his way across the cosmos whining for his father, it is I who bring the sons of the sunless world to glory, for power, for plunder and for pain! Onwards, sons of the night! Onwards to victory.'\n\nThandamell grinned savagely. 'What a lovely speech,' he said. 'Are you all done now?'\n\n'Of course, Thandamell.' Skraivok gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword and gestured to a slave to bring him his helm. 'If you would be so good as to release the primarch, I have a ship to board. Order the Raptors to depart immediately. Take the enemy by surprise, clear a safe zone. I wouldn't want my crowning achievement to be spoiled by my death.'\n\n'How do we get him out?' said Thandamell.\n\nSkraivok, on his way to the nearest lifter, stopped.\n\n'Who, terror master?'\n\n'Angron. How do we get him off the ship?'\n\nSkraivok waved a hand around dismissively.\n\n'I shall let you decide on that. I've other prey to hunt.'\n\nThe Nightfall shuddered from stem to stern with the push of its engines. Terra's tortured orb swelled. Klaxons alerted all aboard to imminent planetfall. On decks below, warriors readied themselves for the drop.\n\n'You, serf!' Thandamell barked. 'Prepare to cut power to the labyrinth.'\n\nAngron blundered from a smoking chamber. Delicate crystalline pain engines lay broken on the ground. The daemon primarch panted with effort, his red skin crossed with a thousand welts. The pain engines could keep a normal man occupied with an eternity of torments - yet another trap in Perturabo's maze. Under Angron's fury, they had lasted four minutes. Behind him stretched a trail of destruction through the intricate workings, a road of smashed priceless technologies, caved-in walls, ruptured conduits and broken machinery.\n\nThe next room came alive. A labyrinth of screaming faces trapped in mirrors, all pleading to be saved, all in peril, shouting endlessly.\n\nThere was perhaps a way through. Once, Angron had possessed a mind sharp enough to best the challenge by intellect alone. Now, he did not need to think. Brute force served him better. His wings were tattered, one eye blinded. Las-burns, rad-burns, cuts and bullet holes covered him. The labyrinth had tested him, but it could never, ever stop him.\n\nAngron heaved in a wheezing breath and spat it out as a blood-curdling roar. He was not done with the maze.\n\nHe ignored the faces pleading for mercy. He passed by the slaughter of innocents without care.\n\n'Blood!' howled Angron. 'Blood and skulls!'\n\nThe black sword sliced. A mirror burst. The face within screamed. Blood spattered the primarch, followed by a burst of tinkling clockwork. Perturabo had put all his artistry into the creation of the maze. It was lost on Angron.\n\n'Blood!' he roared. 'Skulls!' Furious at his captivity, he was reduced to a vocabulary of two words. A fist, the skinned knuckles shockingly white against his red skin, caved in another mirror artwork, crushing the weeping mortal trapped inside.\n\n'Skulls!' he howled. The black sword fell, umbral flames roaring along the killing edges. It melted as much as cut through the next mirror. Arcane energy fields exploded with a crisp bang. Powdered glass burst everywhere.\n\nAngron was in the thick of slaughter, and there alone could he find a scintilla of peace. As he smashed apart the machines and the beings within, his fury blotted out all thought, removing the troublesome weight of sentience. He did not stop to contemplate whether the people were real, and if so, how they had come to be trapped. He was as unaware as an earthquake, and as destructive. He battered his way through every mirror, silencing the screams, then smashed in the door at the end of the chamber with three blows that dented it and sent it clattering over the floor of the next room.\n\nFlashing lights lit figures juddering into life. Dragging footsteps approached Angron. Bladed fists whirred. Mindless voices moaned. Each one was a Salamander of Vulkan's Legion, their bodies violated by cruel cybernetics. Insanity blazed from their red Nocturnean eyes. Hints of sentience lurked there. More torments for their father, but Angron did not notice nor would he have cared. He saw skulls and blood for the harvest, and charged without thought.\n\nThey cut him. Black blood ran from his wounds and fizzed on the deck as it dissipated, taking his essence back to the warp. Buzz saws and power shears gouged at him. The enslaved Space Marines could harm him. They could kill him. He would not stop fighting until he was hacked apart.\n\nA cut nearly chopped his wing from his back. With his sword gripped in both hands, he spun around in a deadly circle, wrecking every slave-cyborg within reach. Yet still there were more.\n\nThey stopped moving. The lights went out, and he didn't notice, hacking at the Salamanders until most were rent into slivers of metal. He was still battering away at the floor, shouting, 'Blood! Blood! Blood!'\n\nThe last was slashed to bits, its flesh mashed to red pulp and its mechanisms broken.\n\nAngron snuffled in confusion into the dark.\n\nSomething had changed. A door opened. He turned. No more tricks or foes. An empty corridor.\n\nHis rage ebbed. His mind cleared. He had wandered the maze for hours, fighting and destroying, only to be brought back every time to the central chamber, no matter which route he took.\n\nFar off a klaxon blared, and the maze shook with the movement of heavy machinery. A breeze tugged at Angron's legs.\n\n'Freedom,' he grunted. 'Blood.'\n\nThe breeze grew into a raging torrent of air, sucking at him. Door after door opened, drawing him through inactive rooms outwards, until the air howled, and he came to the end of the labyrinth, and passed out through vast, patched adamantine doors into a cavernous hold.\n\nThe maze filled most of the space, the iron mask of Perturabo stamped regularly along the exterior. Angron barely comprehended it, but followed the gale, turned a corner and was presented with the sight of giant loading doors open to the void. He ran to them, and stood upon the lip of the hold, buffeted by the gale. Terra was before him, its tortured atmosphere flashing and roiling, its orbits shoaling with a hundred thousand ships. From them fell drops of fire. Angron's last remaining shreds of humanity dimly recognised a drop assault of a magnitude that dwarfed any unleashed during the Great Crusade.\n\nThe wind died to nothing. Angron stood unharmed in open space.\n\nA little of his mind returned. He saw the white-and-blue ships of his own Legion shoot out their landing craft.\n\nSol rose around the globe, spreading its wide beam of golden light over Horus' fleet, and silhouetting the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n'Horus! Horus!' he shouted. Against the laws of nature, his voice was heard in the vacuum. 'Give me my due!'\n\nWith that, he spread his wings, and leapt into the void.\n\nHimalazian airspace, 15th of Quartus\n\nDropping at several hundred kilometres an hour into the most dangerous warzone in history, Lucoryphus of the Night Lords was preoccupied with one thing, and that was that his feet hurt.\n\nHe lifted up his right boot for the fifth time and stared at it.\n\nThe vox clicked.\n\n'What are you doing?' asked Tashain.\n\nLucoryphus put his foot down.\n\n'My foot hurts,' he said.\n\n'See an Apothecary then,' Tashain said disdainfully.\n\nHe could have added that Lucoryphus shouldn't need to see one. That his foot shouldn't hurt. He was a legionary, and beyond the petty aches that plagued unmodified humanity. Lucoryphus could equally have responded that he had already consulted with their company medicae staff, but then he would have to tell Tashain that his foot was not as it should be.\n\nHe had been to Estus, because he could trust him. When so many Apothecaries abandoned their role or turned from healing to torture, Estus still did his job properly. Many standards had slipped in the Night Lords, but Estus could still be relied on. In his notes were annotated scans of Lucoryphus' feet, arrows picking out metatarsals in the process of fusion, the calcaneus atrophying, phalanges lengthening, and smaller bones dissolving altogether.\n\n'A malfunction of the ossmodula,' Estus had said, somewhat uncertainly, marking his comments down in a book of meticulous records. 'There is not much I can do. I am busy with the wounded. I do not have "}
{"text":"b properly. Many standards had slipped in the Night Lords, but Estus could still be relied on. In his notes were annotated scans of Lucoryphus' feet, arrows picking out metatarsals in the process of fusion, the calcaneus atrophying, phalanges lengthening, and smaller bones dissolving altogether.\n\n'A malfunction of the ossmodula,' Estus had said, somewhat uncertainly, marking his comments down in a book of meticulous records. 'There is not much I can do. I am busy with the wounded. I do not have time for your problem.'\n\nHe had given Lucoryphus a stabilising compound to add to his suit pharmocopia. It had not helped.\n\nThat was weeks ago. Lucoryphus' foot had changed further since then. He was too canny to go back. The Night Lords were degenerating, but they still had only contempt for mutants.\n\nThe Thunderhawk bounced through a storm of turbulence. There was not a still pocket of air in all of Terra's atmosphere. Crosswinds and pressure changes were violent enough to tear gunships from the sky and dash them on the ground without any help from the loyalist guns. But though the Night Lords had a reputation for cowardice it was undeserved. They were Space Marines; they knew no fear. Lucoryphus didn't want to die, not one bit, but he did not fear death. The very idea of being afraid was slightly absurd. His disregard for danger was not down to conditioning, or bravery, but because of one simple fact.\n\nLucoryphus knew he was going to live forever. He felt it to his core.\n\nSo as the ship bounced and screamed through the dried-up valleys of Himalazia, out of sight of the Palace wall guns but on a collision course with them, Lucoryphus stared at his feet. The lengthened toes of the right curled uncomfortably against his boot. He had no heel to speak of on that foot any more. A backwards-facing digit tipped with a claw was growing in its place.\n\nHe could no longer deny it. His right foot had become the image of a bird's talon.\n\nThe left foot was not far behind. Their confinement in boots made for human feet was the source of his discomfort. He had wondered if he could find an armourer willing to make him new boots more fitting to his condition, until he wondered again if he was going to need to. A mark had appeared on his right boot recently. An indentation in the ceramite that would not polish out, and no matter how many times he filled and sanded it, grew deeper. The boots were hot with some machine fever, as though they were changing to fit his new form.\n\nHe looked around the shaking crew compartment. He was not alone in his change. The Raptors seemed like Night Lords, until one looked closer. The helms of some had been refashioned with a distinctly birdlike aspect. Through personal choice, the armour was diverging already from that of the rest of the Legion, but the alterations that armour hid were telling. When on the ground some of them moved awkwardly, their steps exaggerated into avian hops. Several had strange birdlike twitches and hunched postures, as if the jump packs they wore were folded wings, not jets.\n\nLucoryphus lived for flight. All of them did. Being a Raptor was becoming more important to him than being a Night Lord.\n\nHe looked at his feet again. How would his comrades judge them? He thought how much more useful talons would be to him as a flying being than human feet, how they would allow him to grasp and hold himself fast after a jump.\n\nThe engines screamed. The Thunderhawk nosed upwards into a rapid ascent. Suddenly the sky around them was full of the bang of explosions and clatter of shrapnel as the ship came under fire. A heavy lascannon beam cut through the front hatch, skewering three of Lucoryphus' brethren on a shaft of light, leaving them dangling in their restraints when it snapped off.\n\nAnother hit moments later, smashing the left engine. The ship dipped, its wounded jet coughing, and lost height.\n\nThe ready lights switched from red to green, bringing a little more illumination to the dingy interior through the smoke rising from the dead. The damaged front ramp flapped open, the extra drag pulling the gunship faster towards destruction. The rear ramp followed with more mechanical discipline. The side doors ratcheted wide. Fire flashed on every side as the Emperor's slaves tried to bring them down.\n\nLucoryphus stood first. He drew his weapons as he walked down the aisle to the prow, trying to suppress his growing limp. His armour whined at his awkward movements. Sometimes he thought it would be more comfortable to run on all fours.\n\n'Brothers!' he voxed his command. 'We fly! First to the wall! First to the blood! Ave Dominus Noctem!'\n\nThe others were rising as Lucoryphus ignited his jets, ran from the prow and leapt into the maelstrom of fire. Thirty Raptors followed him, bright comets of exhaust joining the flare and flash of war. Its task completed, the gunship rolled in the sky and fell, fatally wounded. Smoke chased it to the ground, where it died in orange flames.\n\nLucoryphus' hearts pounded with the thrill of flight. Bloody rain splashed from his war-plate. A billion people were trying to kill him during that glorious fall. The wall rushed at him, a giant's hand to swat a fly. He fired his jets to slow himself, passing through the failing aegis with a searing crackle of energy that shorted out half his suit's systems and left the smell of burnt circuitry in his nostrils. The wall grew from a black slab to a layered stack of defences manned by tiny figures in yellow and red. Behind them rose the Palace spires, daunting in their height, and the inconceivably huge whale-ridge of the Eternity Wall space port. The figures saw him, and fired. Smaller humans among the legionaries turned their attention to him. Pintle stubbers streaked tracer fire in his direction. Lasgun beams flickered out their short-lived displays. It seemed he was the one stationary in all that fury, and the bullets, and the wall and the world rushed at him, as if he were the offended party and they attacked without provocation.\n\nHe was so intoxicated by his flight that he remembered to fire his own gun only moments before impact. Three rounds he allowed himself. Two went wild. The third blew apart a mortal man in a gaudy uniform whose body flowered with stamen ribs and chest wall petals.\n\nThe wall punched up to meet him. Lucoryphus altered his course to slam into an Imperial Fists legionary with force enough to kill. The Emperor's slave flew back so hard he cracked a chunk from a merlon before pitching over into the fire-dazzled twilight and falling from the wall. Lucoryphus was sent spinning off by the impact, slamming into the rockcrete with his jets still burning. The surface was slick with vitae pouring from the heavens, and for a moment he teetered on the brink of the inner crenellations. The chasm of the canyon road dividing city from defences yawned at him. A burst of jets and a painful push from his twisted feet sent him back onto the parapet, where men ran at him. Staggered, he brought up his inactive chainsword to deflect the desperate bayonet jabs of three Imperial Army soldiers. They fired their guns as they stabbed, scoring his livery. He punched at them clumsily, breaking their skulls with his fists. Time slowed. His head rang. Imperial Fists were running at him, bolters barking. A macro shell hit the wall fifty metres away, sending out a cloud of fire, flailing bodies and a storm of deadly rubble.\n\nTime ran true again. He launched himself up, finger gunning the chainsword trigger. He met the first attacker with a sweep at the torso. The sword's teeth did not bite, skidding off the ceramite with a spray of sparks, but it threw off the legionary's aim and his bolt burned past Lucoryphus' head, wounding his vision with rocket motor flare. The Night Lord was fast, working on instinct, and finished him with a round through the eye slit that obliterated his helmet and painted Lucoryphus with blood.\n\nA second warrior came for him, only to be hit by a howling Raptor whose falling kick was strong enough to shatter ceramite.\n\nNight Lords thumped down around him, guns firing, chain weapons growling. A flurry of violence, a popping chorus of bolt explosions, and there were no more of the Emperor's slaves there to oppose them.\n\nLucoryphus was on the walls. After all this time, he was on the Palace walls. Their attack had taken the defenders by surprise. There were no other of the Warmaster's forces on the battlement; only the blue and red of Night Lords battleplate was visible, both colours close to black in the fire and murk. He looked up at the spires of the Imperial Palace, bathed in light and glorious despite their embattled state.\n\nLucoryphus' hearts pounded with the scale of his achievement.\n\nHe raised his arms and shouted at the sky. 'Mino premiesh a minos murantiath!' he cried in Nostraman, the words as liquid as the rain. 'We are first on the wall!'\n\nHe gathered in his warriors, and ordered them to secure the landing zone.\n\nSkraivok was coming.\n\nSecond line\n\nOrdo Reductor\n\nMyzmadra plays her part\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus\n\nThere was only noise.\n\nGuns were firing from both sides in such great numbers their reports had no individual existence, but became a single block of sound as tangible as stone. The racket stole every other sound and made it into part of an unyielding, physical whole. Moving against this force required effort. It permeated the earth. It shook every cell in the human body.\n\nIn this realm of war, noise was the king, oppressing every sensation ruthlessly. Occasional louder eruptions would surface from the racket: a jet's roar, a direct macro cannon hit on the line's revetment, the warbling shrieks of dying void shields, the explosion of a nearby bomb. They would exceed the volume of the noise, then be swallowed up by the greater whole.\n\nThere was no question of Katsuhiro hearing orders. Even touch was blurred out by the noise's relentless vibrations, and the "}
{"text":" body.\n\nIn this realm of war, noise was the king, oppressing every sensation ruthlessly. Occasional louder eruptions would surface from the racket: a jet's roar, a direct macro cannon hit on the line's revetment, the warbling shrieks of dying void shields, the explosion of a nearby bomb. They would exceed the volume of the noise, then be swallowed up by the greater whole.\n\nThere was no question of Katsuhiro hearing orders. Even touch was blurred out by the noise's relentless vibrations, and the slaps sergeants gave to attract attention were hardly felt.\n\nMen died to the left and to the right of Katsuhiro, felled by buzzing swarms of shrapnel or shots from the seething mass of the foe coming at them. They fell unnoticed, their screams unheard. He would reach for a fresh power pack, and then see the fellow beside him had been blasted into scraps, or realise that a bunker which moments before had been slaughtering the enemy had become a burning ruin.\n\nIn the pouring rain of blood, the conscripts fired down from the second line rampart. Once more, the lost and the damned of Horus' grand army surged at them with no care for their own lives. Abhumans and mutants had been replaced by worse abominations. Every squint through Katsuhiro's iron sights brought a new horror to his attention. Months ago any one of them would have had him gibbering in terror, but now he shot them and moved on to the next target.\n\nThe last bastions fired their guns until the barrels glowed hot. They killed and killed, but the enemy would not stop coming, nor would they break and run. Behind the foe the three siege towers rumbled forwards, crushing everything in their path. Smoke obscured them from Katsuhiro, and he saw them only as looming shapes lit up by the aching glow of shield discharge. Another threat ready to destroy him should he survive the horde.\n\nThe Palace aegis shook to the drum beat of plasma, las and shell. The shrieks of the voids were the worst of the noises deafening Katsuhiro: otherworldly, moaning howls as each lenticular field collapsed which gave the impression that the shield was a tormented being. Collapses happened with increasing frequency. Each time the voids reignited they came back weaker. Permanent gaps were forced and targeted by the foe, and thereby widened, exposing the wall to the attentions of artillery. Behind the wall the shields held, but over the outworks the aegis flickered with dying light.\n\nGunfire battered at the Palace walls. Among the outworks the bombardment wreaked havoc, tearing up the ground, breaking the ramparts into islands of resistance amid a sea of hatred. More bombs were getting through. More streams of incinerating plasma slashing into the defenders and boiling them to steam. More las-beams obliterating bunkers and breaking the bastions.\n\nKatsuhiro fired and fired as his comrades were slain. At the beginning of the siege, the conscripts had stood in such numbers they packed the ramparts and tangled their weapons. Now there were too few of them to cover all the defence line. They relied more than ever on the Palace guns and the closer-ranged weaponry of the bastions. They had all become snipers, thought Katsuhiro, which made him think about Doromek. He was certain the veteran had killed Runnecan. Were it not for the million traitors to his front, that might have worried him.\n\nEnfilading fire cut the enemy down some way out from the ramparts, but the dead were so numerous and heaped so high they created cover for those coming behind. Phosphex grenades launched from the tops of the bastions set fires among the slain that reduced them to ash, but the enemy used the black smoke pouring from these ragged pyres to press even further forwards.\n\nOverhead the gunships of the Legiones Astartes roared in to attack the walls. Aircraft duelled around them. Such violence was inflicted on every level of the battlescape, but Katsuhiro was unaware of the larger fight. All he saw were bestial faces twisted in rage, fusillades of las-beams stabbing towards him, and clawed hands reaching impotently from the ground towards the rampart top.\n\nThe fumes and poison gases blown away earlier in the day returned. Blood fell in sheets from the racing clouds. Such fury and tumult had the world, Katsuhiro could not hope to survive; but whether he lived another minute or another hundred years, one thing was certain.\n\nThe second line was failing.\n\nSiege Camp Penta, 15th of Quartus\n\nClain Pent watched the battle raging against the wall's feet. His precious constructs rumbled across the littered plain, each engine fuelled by burning souls and directed by the essences of captive daemons. They were but the first Neverborn on Terra, the machina diabolus. They were protected from the Emperor's psychic might by their half-material forms. Untold legions of daemons waited beyond the veil, but more blood must flow. Pent's efforts were key to that.\n\nPent was nervous. His siege towers were among his finest creations, yet they moved against the greatest fortification in the galaxy.\n\n'Are the shield-banes ready?' he demanded via datapulse of Penta-4. 'When will the Ordo Reductor open fire?'\n\nAround the Pent-Ark, teams of Dark Mechanicum thralls laboured under electro-scourges to load and prime the great cannons. The barrels alone were dozens of metres long, larger than any weapon carried by a Titan, as large as the capital-ship killers mounted on void fortresses. Scores of tracked trucks supported their frames. Platforms along their sides allowed access to unfathomable workings. Grim tech-priests by the hundred oversaw the efforts of their creatures.\n\n'Now, oh knowledgable sage,' said Penta-4.\n\nClain Pent's grotesque body nodded stiffly.\n\nThe great guns started to draw power. Giant cables snaked off to trailers behind the cannons, where plasma reactors were lit and coaxed to full power output. Stray arcs of electricity leapt over the surfaces of the weapons. Giant finned energy sinks were filled with coolant in readiness for the cannons' firing.\n\nThe lords of the Ordo Reductor held their machines, waiting for the command to come down from the fleet. In the eight siege camps, Sota-Nul's disciples, reliant on the ordo's protection for their infernal devices, watched impatiently.\n\nThe order came. Horus Lupercal himself issued the command, a single, rasping sentence broadcast to each of the cyborg siege masters.\n\n'Unleash your weapons,' the Warmaster said.\n\nThe guns spoke.\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus\n\nSomething imperceptible changed the moment before the cannons fired, causing Katsuhiro to cease shooting, and look to the wall to the south of the Helios Gate.\n\nOut over the wastes before the wall, there was movement. From the siege camp came first a flash, and then a spear of black light that crawled across Katsuhiro's vision. It was energy of some sort, but it moved with a malevolent slowness a man's eyes could track.\n\nA shock wave preceded it. Although the beam itself did not touch the ground, a line of force surrounding it ripped a furrow through debris, the defence lines, the defenders and the attacking armies. Like an attacking serpent, it slithered quicker, then struck, planting itself against the shields, which wavered and sang with tortured harmonics.\n\nUpon contact with the void barrier, the beam thickened, its strange energies dammed by the aegis. A living tar spread over the voids, some arcane reaction making the lenses of the Dark Age energy field constantly visible on normal wavelengths. Like an overlapping wall of shields, the lenses stood against the strike, but as Katsuhiro watched, their vitality was bled away. Where the play of black energy caressed them, the lenses dimmed from healthy blues and greens to angry reds, then through lower frequencies to sulphurous, glowering oranges.\n\nA horrible, discordant squealing came from the contact point, building in volume and intensity, until it overcame the thundering guns completely. The detonation was immense, sending warriors on both sides reeling from their fight in pain. Something gave in Katsuhiro's right ear. Hot wetness trickled down the angle of his jaw. His left ear screamed with discordancy.\n\nThe shields bled light.\n\nHe fell to his knees, jaw clenched tight enough to break his teeth. The pain went beyond any suffering he had so far endured. His eyes shook, blurring his vision. He wished then to die, but could not stop watching.\n\nLike dying embers, the lenses under fire burned out, and their failing set up a chain reaction in the cellular construction of the aegis. With painful flares and whooping screams, a great swathe of the landward shield collapsed, robbing fifty kilometres either side of the Helios Gate of shelter, opening the way for the Warmaster's forces to assail the walls directly. Uncountable thousands of land-based artillery pieces hammered the great walls, or shot over the defences to target the giant buildings they guarded.\n\nThe moment had come. Huge chimneys on the motive units of the siege towers belched green smoke. Wheels ten times the height of men churned up the ground, and the massive constructions lurched forwards, their fronts alive with shield flare as Dorn's defences tried to bring them down.\n\nDauntlessly, the Death Guard's towers made all haste for the breach in the aegis and the walls behind.\n\nThe ruination of worlds poured down upon the outworks. Quake cannons ripped up the ground. Macro shells gouged craters from the stone. Plasma reduced rockcrete to boiling geysers of atoms. Weapons exotic and mundane hammered into the second and first lines. Now completely unprotected by the shields, they were ripped apart. The bombardment was intense and indiscriminate. Hundreds of thousands of Horus' followers were obliterated to kill a few thousand defenders. The ground bucked and heaved, swallowing the living and the dead. Bastions up and down the line were smashed like skulls under hammers.\n\nThe defenders broke and ran."}
{"text":"ne. Plasma reduced rockcrete to boiling geysers of atoms. Weapons exotic and mundane hammered into the second and first lines. Now completely unprotected by the shields, they were ripped apart. The bombardment was intense and indiscriminate. Hundreds of thousands of Horus' followers were obliterated to kill a few thousand defenders. The ground bucked and heaved, swallowing the living and the dead. Bastions up and down the line were smashed like skulls under hammers.\n\nThe defenders broke and ran. The veterans who had watched over them fled as readily as the depleted regiments of conscripts. There was no other choice.\n\nKatsuhiro ran when the others did, abandoning his post in a state of detachment. Weeks of horror had numbed his soul. The deafness in his left ear isolated him a little from the battle's fury. Tiredness cocooned him. He felt as if he floated over himself. The pathways of his body raged with adrenaline that muzzled his consciousness and pushed him only to survive, so that numinous piece of Katsuhiro which existed apart from the slosh of blood and muscle watched disinterested from on high.\n\nHe leapt from explosions, he sprinted past glowing lakes of cooling rock. Everything was on fire. Where it was not molten, the ground was a steaming mix of mud and blood. His feet splashed in scalding red puddles. His face burned. His hair crackled back on his scalp. Blood was in his eyes and in his nostrils and mouth. Tears streamed down his face. The few survivors of the lines were black figures, fragile in the roil of flame. They ran without in panic, all of them heading towards the soaring citadel of the Helios Gate. The gates were shut tight against the world, and the towers under ferocious attack that would see all the soldiers dead before they came anywhere near shelter, but there was nowhere else to go, so they ran away from one source of certain destruction towards another.\n\nBehind Katsuhiro a wall of fire reached for the heavens, its glare and heat obliterating every other sight. Silhouetted in black before the inferno, Bastion 16 fired wildly when so many others of the outwork forts were gone. The call of wheezing trumpets sounded out in the wastes that even now crept closer to the feet of the defences proper, and from the blasted lands of the plain the giant shape of a siege tower burst through the flames like an axe breaking a shield.\n\nThe tower was as tall as the walls that it set itself against. Its forwards arc flashed as incoming fire was annihilated by its void shields, sending oily swirls all around its height. The front was armoured with giant bronze faces stacked atop one another, seven in number, as grotesque as any feral-worlders' totem pole. Their screaming mouths vomited words of coherent light from cannons in place of tongues, scoring molten streaks across the walls.\n\nThe scale of the thing defied sense. It was hundreds of metres tall, its wheels immense. It should not have stayed in one piece, let alone move, but it did, flattening the land with a great dozer blade, smoke pouring from whatever engine propelled it forwards.\n\nThe incongruity of the tower struck him as wildly funny, and he laughed as he ran. To see a sight like that... In a time of reason, unreason was let loose. Impossible towers in an era of high science and rediscovery. The world had gone mad.\n\nHe cried tears of fear and tears of laughter. His throat hurt from smoke inhalation and from screaming. A shell sent up a fountain of earth in front of him, and he skidded to a stop. The tower ground forwards faster than he could run, crushing everything, its protection of energy and of metal impervious to all weaponry.\n\nKatsuhiro sank to his knees.\n\n'It's hopeless, hopeless,' he said. 'There is no escape.'\n\nWar trumpets blared from the construction once again, weakening his grip on sanity. His mind might have collapsed entirely, right then, and left him gibbering to perish in any one of a thousand ways, had the glare of a plasma strike not illuminated the area with more certain light, and shown Katsuhiro a familiar sight. The trenches had been pounded so hard they were hardly recognisable, and the small bunker was half buried in rock and shattered plascrete, but it still stood, and the door was ajar. A rivulet of blood rain poured inside from the wounded earth.\n\nNexus Zero-One-Five.\n\nWithout realising, Katsuhiro had run close to the tunnels' entrance.\n\nThere was a way out after all.\n\nThe door was jammed open by a fan of rubble. There would be no closing it, though he dearly wished he could shut out the awful battlefield. Nevertheless, as Katsuhiro descended into the network the tumult receded a little. The inferno became a glow, the noise almost bearable, and when he got to the bottom and set out into the network, it dwindled further until, when he turned a corner into cool blackness, it faded away to a quiet, faraway roar.\n\nHe became acutely conscious of his lost hearing. Everything on the left felt muffled. His right ear functioned, but rang with tinnitus.\n\nWhen he set a foot forwards and heard the soft crunch of fallen debris under his boot he was a little relieved, and he set out deeper into the network, intending to turn north and make his way nearer to the wall in safety. Darkness pressed in. The lumens were all out. The ground shook with the bombardment, sometimes violently. Debris pattered off his head. Without the immediate danger of the explosions and the enemy to keep him occupied, his fear built, and he went cautiously.\n\nHe did not find the way towards the wall. Somewhere, perhaps several somewheres, he took the wrong turn, and ended up in the corridor leading to the base of Bastion 16. Once more he smelled blood. His foot rolled on a corpse, and he nearly fell. Stumbling probably saved his life, for it prevented him from blundering into the dead man's murderers.\n\nAround the corner, dim red light shone, and he heard voices.\n\nHe crept forwards, not daring to breathe.\n\nAway down the tunnel, by the base of Bastion 16, Myz and Doromek stood by a crate of explosives. Two more dead soldiers lay close to them. They were talking in urgent whispers. Despite Katsuhiro's impaired hearing, it was quiet enough in the tunnel that he could hear what they were saying. With growing alarm he eavesdropped on their conversation.\n\n'It's time,' Myzmadra said.\n\nAshul's face set.\n\n'Maybe we should stop a moment. Take a pause to think.'\n\nThe detonator nestled in Myzmadra's palm. Her finger was close by the button, the nail still beautifully shaped under its covering of dirt.\n\n'There is nothing to think about.'\n\nDoromek looked away. He found it hard to formulate his words when Myzmadra stared at him like that.\n\n'Do you ever question why we're doing this?' he said eventually. 'If we're on the right side even?'\n\nShe stared at him hard. 'No. You do though, apparently.' Her free hand moved smoothly to her holstered laspistol. 'Should I worry?'\n\n'No,' he said. 'I won't stop you. But...' He looked at his feet. 'After Pluto,' he began again. 'It got harder. I don't know what I think any more. I forgot what I believed once. It's changed so many times.'\n\nMyzmadra could have shot him right then, and he half expected she would. But she didn't. Her face retained the same fixed, slightly fierce expression it usually wore. They'd escaped the sicknesses that killed so many, but they were underfed. She was frighteningly thin. The war was using them up.\n\n'You used to trust me.'\n\nHe shrugged. 'I still do.'\n\n'Then listen to me,' she said. 'I have always said this was for the Emperor.'\n\n'You did.'\n\n'That this is the only course of action.'\n\nHe nodded.\n\n'I never told you why.'\n\nHe shrugged. 'I did not need to know why. I believed you. I never believed Him.'\n\n'I was not lying. I do not think the Legion were, when they came to me, and told me that this was the only way. It all makes sense now, seeing the things we have.'\n\n'Myzmadra,' said Ashul. 'Come with me. We can get into the city. Ride this out, see which way it goes. We have no orders. No contact. We're making this up as we go along. Destroying this bastion is an insignificant action. You're throwing your life away for the sake of it.'\n\n'Every death is a triumph for us,' she said defiantly. 'Every act of destruction serves. This bastion is the last obstacle between the traitors and the Helios Gate. If I bring it down, they may get inside today.'\n\n'You can't believe that,' he said.\n\n'Does it matter if I do or if I don't?' She looked him in the eye. She was so proud. He admired her more than any other person he had ever met.\n\n'You can go now,' she said, distantly, as if he were a servant to be dismissed. 'There's no need for both of us to die.'\n\n'There's no need for either of us to die,' he said. 'What's the point of this? This is one bastion from hundreds. We've done our part, why keep fighting?'\n\n'There is no wasted action in this war. We are here because we are meant to be. This action will mean something.'\n\n'How do you know?' he said.\n\n'I just do,' she said, with conviction.\n\n'That doesn't sound like you.'\n\n'How do you know what I sound like?' she said. 'We don't know each other at all.'\n\nHe stared at her. He could have said she could go, that he would stay. He could have told her the truth, that he'd had enough, and was sick of the war and his role in it. But he didn't. Life finds a way to make itself persist, even if it means turning a man into a coward. He had already made his choice. He wouldn't give his life up for anyone. Not even Myzmadra.\n\n'All right,' he said. 'All right.'\n\nShe looked relieved. 'There's more for you to do before this is all over. But my story ends here.'\n\nAshul held out his hand. She clasped it.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' she said. Her smile was small but brave, and bright as polished steel in her dirty face.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' he replied.\n\nThey held hands for what seemed to be an age. Ashul had never touched her like that before. It was a simple, warm, human gesture, and he wished he had"}
{"text":" for anyone. Not even Myzmadra.\n\n'All right,' he said. 'All right.'\n\nShe looked relieved. 'There's more for you to do before this is all over. But my story ends here.'\n\nAshul held out his hand. She clasped it.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' she said. Her smile was small but brave, and bright as polished steel in her dirty face.\n\n'Alpha to Omega,' he replied.\n\nThey held hands for what seemed to be an age. Ashul had never touched her like that before. It was a simple, warm, human gesture, and he wished he had done it a long time ago. A different version of his life with her by his side flashed through his mind, the two of them against the universe. Once upon a time, he had wanted a life like that.\n\nAs if guessing what he thought, she frowned and she shook his hand free. A woman like her would never be with a man like him. She had her cause, and so did he.\n\n'Get out of here,' she said coldly. 'I'll give you one minute, no more.'\n\nKatsuhiro waited for the next earth-shaking detonation, and slipped away before Ashul caught him.\n\nDaemonfall\n\nLord of the night\n\nRed Angel\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios section, 15th of Quartus\n\nMidnight-blue gunships set down on the parapet under heavy fire. Gun positions in the city spires raked the wall tops where the enemy landed, but Skraivok chose his drop-craft carefully. All were of the increasingly rare Stormbird Sokar pattern, and void-shielded. They landed in a tight group, ramps slamming down simultaneously. Support squads poured out first into the rain, arraying themselves near the Stormbirds and targeting the nearer weapon installations with missiles and lascannon fire. The gunships angled their ball turrets up and added to the infantry's efforts. Breacher squads came next, heading off away from the Helios Gate to block Imperial reinforcements coming up from the south. Rapier weapons platforms were dragged out from the holds. Further down the wall a heavy transport deposited a pair of Predator tanks to bolster the line. Lesser vessels flew as air support, strafing the buildings with their cannons, their missiles demolishing fortified balconies and bolted-on gunnery blisters before roaring past and coming about to make further passes.\n\nRelieved of their cordon duty, the Raptor packs ignited their jets and bounded down the wall out from the landing zone.\n\nThe Night Lords worked quickly to secure the area. A final ship thundered down through the sky, breaching the weakened aegis in a flare of orange and sickly green. The torrent of blood raining from the sky ran off it in black falls, but it could not hide the ornate nature of the ship. Decorated with precious metals, lavishly painted, the Stormbird carried the personal heraldry of Gendor Skraivok, self-proclaimed leader of the Night Lords Legion.\n\nThe ramp opened as the ship was landing. Space Marines leapt from the exits before it had touched down. When landing claws kissed rockcrete and the ramp opened, a unit of Atramentar strode purposefully forth, slower than their power-armoured brethren but massively better protected. Lesser Night Lords took hits from the buildings of the Palace and died, but these giant warriors stood firm as las-fire flashed off their power fields without effect, and bolts and solid slugs were deflected away by their angled armour plates.\n\nGendor Skraivok marched out with a confident swagger, his hand gripping the hilt of his sheathed warp blade. He surveyed his troops from the top of the ramp before joining his Terminator guard. His chronometer told him it was day, but the world was deep into a war gloom as black as any Nostraman noon.\n\nNight suited him perfectly.\n\n'An exemplary deployment, Captain Ashmalesh,' Skraivok voxed. He drew his sword. The comforting power of the Neverborn flowed into his body from the naked blade, and he smiled within his helm. Why had he resisted its gifts? He saw how foolish he had been now, and it made him smile.\n\n'Get a shield line of breacher squads at the fore of our advance,' he commanded. 'We move on the Helios Gate.'\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios Gate, 15th of Quartus\n\nThe smell of the blood pouring from the sky permeated everything. It filled Raldoron's helmet long after he activated the void sealing on his armour. Though it was sickening by any human measure, he found it alluring, appetising even. The odour fogged his mind, encouraging him to throw off restraint and slaughter the enemy.\n\nThe world had lost all colour barring red, black and orange. Fire lit everything. The sky was so dark it was hard to believe Terra had ever enjoyed sunlight. The aegis' displacement glows were guttering pinks and purples.\n\n'Captain.' Thane's voice penetrated the fog in Raldoron's mind. 'Captain!'\n\nRaldoron shook himself out of the fugue. They were under attack from all quarters.\n\n'The Night Lords to the south of the gate have reinforced and are moving on our position. The siege towers are closing, two to the north of the gate, one to the south. The aegis has collapsed across the entire front of our section.'\n\n'Elsewhere?'\n\n'Hardline vox reports say the wall is under assault in the seven other places facing the siege camps,' said Thane. 'The shield-banes burn away our protection. The upper aegis holds for now, but we have lost many generators, and the system is under great strain, so the adepts say.'\n\nRaldoron surveyed the wall top. It had taken the enemy minutes to sweep the rampart free of defenders, secure their landing zone, then bring in more troops. Now the Night Lords were advancing in force, before he and Thane had rallied a counter-attack. The great black snake of the shield-bane cut a darker channel across the murk. Meanwhile, the siege engines had gathered speed, and were dark shapes in the downpour, revealed by flashes of gunfire like shock images in vid-plays made to frighten.\n\n'We do not have enough warriors to hold the wall against this attack,' said Raldoron.\n\nThe macro cannon on the gate tower roared, shaking him to his core.\n\n'Take one in every two men from sections twelve, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen and eighteen. I shall provide you with my authorisation coding.' He blink-clicked an icon to send the data key over to Thane's warsuit. 'We will have to trust that the enemy will not attempt an escalade there. Inform Bhab command that those sections will be vulnerable. Request reinforcements, whatever they have. The siege towers here must not be allowed to make contact with the wall. Concentrate all fire on them. If one gets through, then our situation here will be greatly compromised. And watch the skies. If one Legion is willing to attempt a landing on the rampart, others will.' He looked upwards through the dying aegis, half expecting to see the trails of falling drop-craft. 'They will attack us here at section sixteen, where the aegis is weak. We can trust the sections we draw our reinforcements from will be safe, for now.'\n\n'As you say, Lord Raldoron. If I had command, I would do the same.' Thane said. 'And I tell you, I am glad I do not have command.'\n\n'You hold here. The Blood Angels must deal with the threat to the south. The Night Lords must be swept from the wall before the siege towers come into contact with the ramparts. Give me covering fire.'\n\n'We shall bring up heavy weapons to cover the wall top, both sides.'\n\n'Make it so. Target their heavy armour and their Terminators. Your Legion is the holder of gates,' said Raldoron. He looked south again. The Night Lords were close enough for him to pick out their heraldry under the coursing blood. 'Night Lords are an insignificant threat to the Blood Angels. I shall give our guests below a warm welcome they will not quickly forget.'\n\nCalling up his veteran squads, Raldoron gathered his warriors within the guard chambers of the Helios Gate, then led them out from the doors onto the ramparts. They came under immediate fire from the Night Lords advancing on the gatehouse. Breacher squads went to the fore of both lines, shielding the warriors behind them. Shield walls drew closer to each other, the thick breachers dancing with bolt impacts. Heavier weapons from both sides gunned for their opponents, the exchange becoming more violent the closer they came. Impacts from the wasteland and increasingly from the void blasted chunks from the fortifications, but the Night Lords and the Blood Angels were intent on each other. Warriors fell, opening gaps in the walls of shields that were quickly filled. Though the Night Lords suffered heavier casualties from Thane's attentions and the gunfire coming in from the Palace hives, they were greater in number.\n\nSo it was that two forces came within striking distance of one another upon the walls.\n\nThis was a contest that would be decided by blades.\n\nThe space between the two groups was a storm of explosions and microshrapnel. They were one hundred, then seventy, then fifty metres apart.\n\nWhen the foe were forty metres away, Raldoron held aloft and ignited his power sword. It glittered in the bloody rain as droplets burst to atoms in the disruption field. Timing was all. They must charge first.\n\n'Drop shields!' he shouted. 'Charge!'\n\nA hundred veteran Blood Angels roared out their battle cry.\n\n'For Sanguinius! For the Emperor!'\n\nThe ramparts shook to the thunder of ceramite.\n\nA replying call of 'Kelish!' sounded from the Night Lords' line. 'Brace!' it meant. They stopped, shields angled and planted against the parapet, pauldrons butting them. Each shield bearer was supported by the hands of the legionary behind.\n\nRaldoron ran ahead of his warriors. Guns barked on both sides, but the Blood Angels, their shields abandoned to grant them speed, took the brunt of the damage. Several fell dead.\n\nThe lines met with a deafening crash.\n\nRaldoron leapt, sword buzzing down. It caught the edge of a shield. Searing light dazzled him as ceramite was annihilated by the disruption field. The sword boomed and crackled, slicing across, taking the shield bearer's arm off.\n\nThe line bowed under the impact of the Blood An"}
{"text":".\n\nRaldoron ran ahead of his warriors. Guns barked on both sides, but the Blood Angels, their shields abandoned to grant them speed, took the brunt of the damage. Several fell dead.\n\nThe lines met with a deafening crash.\n\nRaldoron leapt, sword buzzing down. It caught the edge of a shield. Searing light dazzled him as ceramite was annihilated by the disruption field. The sword boomed and crackled, slicing across, taking the shield bearer's arm off.\n\nThe line bowed under the impact of the Blood Angels, but held. Guns fired from behind the shields, dropping more of the sons of Sanguinius. The Blood Angels wrenched at the Night Lords' protection, dragging shields down and firing their bolters at the men behind, but they held. The line rearranged itself, and set firm.\n\n'Ilashovarath!' The Night Lords officers shouted through their voxmitters. 'Advance!'\n\nThe Night Lords gave a wordless shout, and set themselves hard behind the shields. Arranged as a giant, pressing scrum, they pushed forwards. Blood Angels battered at them, killed them, but the pressure was immense. Red boots rasping on bloody rockcrete, the Night Lords pushed forwards three steps, and set their shields down again, rearranging themselves for another push.\n\n'Ilashovarath!' The Night Lords commanded a second time.\n\nThey shoved hard, pushing Raldoron and his men back another few steps towards the tower. The ground gained, they slammed down their shields and braced once more.\n\nRaldoron smote at his foe, but with the shields angled as they were, it was hard to land a telling blow, and though the shield in front of him bore several smoking gouges, it held. Raldoron reversed his grip, and pushed the point at the shield. Point and energy field worked together to cut into the surface. The breacher shield was thick, and though he strained with the effort, it nibbled only slowly through the metal towards its bearer.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nNight Lords' shields squealed against the Blood Angels' armour, forcing them back. Raldoron counted the distance to the southern tower of the Helios Gate. Two hundred metres. Each push brought the Night Lords a few metres closer to their gatehouse. They were dying from Thane's shots angling in from above, but not quickly enough.\n\n'Ilashovarath!\n\n'Ilashovarath!\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nThe shield wall pushed on. The racket of weapons hitting shields was a hundred drums played to different rhythms. Raldoron had no need to push his blade. His sword sank into the shield before him as the legionary behind it was forced forwards. Bolts shot from the firing loops of the shields burst on his armour.\n\nRaldoron waited as long as he could.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nUntil their backs were almost against the wall.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nThe tower was behind them, massive, indomitable, its reinforced portals standing between the Night Lords and the taking of the gate.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nAt the other points of the wall, similar things were happening. He wondered if any gates had fallen, if the enemy were on the wall elsewhere, or had come over it and got into the Palace.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nHe had little vox contact with Bhab command. No guidance.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nThane's guns rained down their slaughter on the Night Lords. The Night Lords responded in kind, firing plasma guns up at the ramparts. Yellow-armoured figures fell back ablaze.\n\n'Ilashovarath!'\n\nThe gate was ten metres behind him.\n\nThe moment had come.\n\n'Now!' Raldoron voxed.\n\nThe portal ground open, rolling aside like the stone of an ancient tomb. Lens lights blinked at twice the height of a man. Servos purred in the darkness of the chamber.\n\n'Split!' roared Raldoron.\n\nHe yanked his sword free. His men stepped back. The shield wall, relieved of pressure, surged forwards in disarray.\n\nGiant footsteps thumped in the tower chamber towards the wall walk.\n\nBefore the Dreadnoughts emerged onto the rampart, they were already firing.\n\nThe first shots of the rotary cannons mowed down the leading ranks of Skraivok's men. Shields shattered under thousand-round-a-minute blows. The shield wall broke. Three Contemptor-pattern Dreadnoughts in pristine red thundered out from the tower, the blood rain slicking them a bright gloss, and smashed into the Night Lords' advance. Blue-armoured warriors were bowled over. A power fist smashed a Space Marine into the air, sending him shouting madly over the battlement to plummet down on the far side.\n\nThe Blood Angels followed their walking dead, hacking and shooting. They roared like beasts, their famed refinement gone.\n\nThe Dreadnoughts ploughed deep into the Night Lords' line before the mass of troops slowed them to a halt. They stood embattled by dozens of Space Marines, and the real work began.\n\nThe first Dreadnought fell a moment later, its leg blasted off by implosion charges.\n\n'My lord,' growled Skraivok's Atramentar sergeant. 'We must take you to a place of safety.'\n\n'What, now, at the moment of my triumph?' Skraivok scoffed. 'When word of my deed reaches the Warmaster, I will be rewarded with power and with riches. If I depart now, I will be known as nothing but a coward.'\n\n'The leader!' Another of his escort raised his combi-bolter, sighting it on a veteran captain whose armour was encrusted with high honours.\n\nSkraivok put his hand on the top of the Terminator's gun and pushed it down.\n\n'He's mine,' he said. 'I want him. I want it to be known that I killed the captain of this gate myself.'\n\nSkraivok pushed forwards into the fray. His Atramentar followed behind.\n\nThe first Blood Angel he encountered died so easily Skraivok barely felt the ceramite part. The sword shifted in his hands as he swung, perfecting the strike. The edge cleaved through the warrior's helm, cutting it in half, and passing deep into his torso. A lesser blade would have stuck, but not his sword. He pulled it out with a light tug, easy as plucking a blade of grass. Skraivok smiled to himself. Power flooded him. His body tingled with it.\n\n'Blood Angel!' he shouted. His Terminators pushed aside the combatants, clearing him a path. 'Blood Angel!'\n\nThe ramparts were broad, but crammed with fighters. The fighting was close and dirty work. There was little room for finesse.\n\nAnother Blood Angel died to Skraivok's blows. The Atramentar laid about themselves, the booming of their power fists and the roar of their heavier weapons drawing the attention of one of the Blood Angels Ancients. It crushed the Space Marine it was fighting and threw down the leaking body. Bullets sprayed from its rotary cannon. One of the Atramentar was hit hundreds of times. The cannon overloaded his field generator, chewed through his layered ceramite and plasteel, and tore into the adamantium frame beneath. The man died inside his giant suit, and fell over heavily.\n\n'Deal with that for me would you, sergeant?' said Skraivok. 'I do not wish to be distracted. I will have that captain's skin for my cloak.'\n\n'Our role is to protect the leader of-'\n\n'Do it!' shrieked Skraivok. 'Bring it down.'\n\nHis sergeant said no more but moved with his men to engage the Dreadnought. Skraivok pushed on. The lines of the two warring Legions were by now thoroughly blended. Bodies clogged the rampart. Footing was treacherous, but the enemy captain was near.\n\n'Blood Angel!' Skraivok yelled joyfully. 'Face me!'\n\nThe Blood Angel finished his opponent and turned to face the Night Lord. Upon his left pauldron, his name was emblazoned across a scroll plate, just legible under rivulets of blood.\n\n'Raldoron?' said Skraivok. 'The Raldoron?' He made a few passes with his sword, revelling in its lightness, in its killing edge. 'This will be a day to celebrate, the day I slew the hero of the Blood Angels!' He saluted, and declaimed pompously, 'I am Gendor Skraivok, the Painted Count, Lord Commander of the Night Lords Legion, and I am your end.'\n\nThe Blood Angel was unimpressed. 'Never heard of you,' he said, and came in to attack, his power sword buzzing.\n\nSkraivok laughed and parried. The daemon sword moved with a mind of its own to block the blow so fast Raldoron was almost taken down by Skraivok's riposte, only a wild slicing deflection turning it aside. A second strike was thus deflected by Raldoron, and a third. The First Captain of the Blood Angels was as good as his reputation suggested, but Skraivok was filled with sorcerous foreknowledge and supernatural speed. He saw an opening, and moved in for the kill.\n\nHe missed. He was too slow. Raldoron sidestepped the blow and twisted it aside with a slight flick of his blade.\n\nSkraivok stepped back. The delicious feeling of power was gone. The world lost its sheen. He was in the rain, on the wall, surrounded by the dead, and he could not beat this man.\n\nPanic gripped Skraivok's gut. The blade was heavy. It would not respond as it had. Where before it accentuated his skills, lending him greater speed and strength, now it did nothing. Raldoron pressed his attack, battering at Skraivok with a flurry of blows that he could barely deflect.\n\nThe daemon had deserted him.\n\n'No,' said Skraivok. 'It cannot be!'\n\nRaldoron's power sword banged against the edge of Skraivok's blade, sending him stumbling backwards.\n\n'That always was the problem with your Legion, Night Lord,' said Raldoron. 'You are quick with your torturer's knives, but so few of you are worthy warriors.'\n\nRaldoron swung his sword overarm, building momentum into a blow that would cut a power-armoured warrior in two. Skraivok parried it only just in time, stepping back and nearly tripping on the corpse of a Night Lord. Raldoron followed with another blow, and another. Skraivok struggled to stop him. He was so fast. Skraivok was a Space Marine captain, and more than a passable swordsman, but Raldoron was a hero of the Imperium whose name was known across the galaxy.\n\nRaldoron attacked with greater ferocity. Skraivok's arm was numb from deflecting the blows. He forayed a few attacks, but they put him in more danger, as Raldoron caught and countered every one. His l"}
{"text":" nearly tripping on the corpse of a Night Lord. Raldoron followed with another blow, and another. Skraivok struggled to stop him. He was so fast. Skraivok was a Space Marine captain, and more than a passable swordsman, but Raldoron was a hero of the Imperium whose name was known across the galaxy.\n\nRaldoron attacked with greater ferocity. Skraivok's arm was numb from deflecting the blows. He forayed a few attacks, but they put him in more danger, as Raldoron caught and countered every one. His latest riposte was turned away, and Raldoron's power blade scraped sparks up the side of his breast-plate.\n\n'Atramentar!' Skraivok called, his panic rising. 'To me!'\n\nIf they heard, they could do nothing; they fought the Blood Angels Dreadnought still, their number reduced to three.\n\n'Night Lords! Help me!' His power pack scraped on rockcrete. He had his back to the outer crenellations, and could retreat no further.\n\nRaldoron faced him. His sword energy field buzzed in the downpour.\n\n'Listen to you,' Raldoron said. 'The masters of fear. You are cowards, like all cruel men.'\n\nRaldoron's power sword slashed across Skraivok's chest, breaking open the ceramite and severing his power cabling. The Painted Count staggered, unbalanced by the sudden loss of energy to his war-plate's systems. Raldoron lunged forwards, stunning Skraivok further with a blow to the face from the punch guard of his sword. Cracks crazed over Skraivok's eye-lenses. His faceplate systems fizzed and broke down into a display of meaningless blocks. He feebly attempted to parry, but Raldoron smashed it aside and turned the blade downwards, his own sword cutting deep into Skraivok's greave, cleaving through ceramite, undersuit and flesh, and sliding into the bone.\n\nSkraivok staggered to the side, slipped and fell backwards into the chute of a crenel. A wedge-shaped gap between merlons, the crenel sloped down and narrowed towards the edge. Skraivok scrabbled at the smooth, polished plascrete of the surface, and succeeded only in making himself slide towards the killing drop.\n\nA red boot on his wounded leg pinned him in place.\n\nSkraivok cried out in pain.\n\nRaldoron leaned forwards to address him.\n\n'You are and always were an evil Legion. You took the Emperor's mission and twisted it. Selfish. Monstrous. Tormentors of the weak,' snarled Raldoron. 'If Horus had not turned, I would have gladly led the hunt for your kind myself. I thank you from my heart that you came to my sword and saved me the trouble of looking.' He shifted the weight of his foot, bringing another cry from Skraivok.\n\n'Wait!' the Painted Count said. 'I give you my surrender. You beat me. I am your prisoner!'\n\n'There can be no prisoners in this war,' said Raldoron. 'How much mercy have you shown to all those that you harmed? I have as much mercy for you as you had for them. Now get off my wall.'\n\nHe shoved hard with his foot, sending Skraivok skidding towards the drop. The Night Lord dropped the daemon sword to grip at the polished rockcrete with both of his hands, but there was no purchase on the blood-slick surface. He managed to brace himself on the merlon's rounded corners with his elbows, and for a moment he thought he might save himself. He looked up to see the Blood Angel still staring at him.\n\n'You are a pompous man,' Skraivok said.\n\nRaldoron raised his bolt pistol.\n\nScreaming in defiance, Skraivok shoved himself over the edge, whence he plummeted, reaching terminal velocity long before he hit the ground and the stone broke him.\n\nThe Night Lords were retreating. More than half their number had fallen. Three Terminators fought Ancient Axiel, but they would not last long. All those near Raldoron were dead. Thane's men continued to shoot down onto the enemy, while his own warriors were reforming their squads to better discipline their firing at the retreating foe. A report from Captain Galliard of Raldoron's Chapter crackled in his ear, informing him the Night Lords rearguard was falling back. Their gunships were powering up. True to their nature, some were taking off without their passengers, the pilots seizing the opportunity to save their own skins.\n\nBut the battle was far from over.\n\nSiege towers lumbered on towards the wall, the nearest now approaching the cratered zone where the third outwork line had been. Enemy artillery pounded at the wall directly. Overhead the failing aegis held out the bombardment, but would not for much longer, while in the sky lines of fire marked the approach of hundreds of drop pods.\n\n'Thane,' voxed Raldoron. 'Imminent drop strike. What is the status of our reinforcements?'\n\n'Incoming,' said Thane. 'Requested Ninth and Seventh Legion reinforcements estimated arrival within fifteen minutes. Bhab has commanded four Imperial Army regiments to be redeployed from the inner districts as reserves to our section of the wall.'\n\n'I would prefer more legionaries.'\n\nMore drop pods were hurtling through the clouds.\n\n'You have re-established contact with the Bhab Bastion?'\n\n'Hardline only.'\n\n'What occurs elsewhere?'\n\n'The same as here. Direct assault on the walls. No breaches reported.'\n\nRaldoron looked down the wall after his men. Close at hand, the final Atramentar went down to a piledriver blow from the Dreadnought. The fighting had drawn away from his position. The Night Lords were boxed in on both sides. The last ship was lifting off under fire it could not survive.\n\n'The threat here is contained,' Raldoron said. 'Concentrate all fire on the siege towers. If we can weather their assault, and that of the drop pods, then we may yet-'\n\nA squeal of feedback cut off the line between Thane and Raldoron.\n\n'Thane?' he said. 'Thane?'\n\nHe scrolled through other channels. The vox was silent, then half deafened him with a cacophony of screams, like a million people dying at once. He shut it off.\n\nFlame burned in the sky. Lightning spread out in a ring around the fire. Thunder rolled.\n\nA fireball fell from the churning heavens towards the land before the Helios Gate; too big to be a drop pod, too controlled to be debris from the fleet, too slow to be a shell or mass round.\n\nRaldoron followed the fireball down, the blood running over his helm blurring its outline.\n\nIt hit the ground, sending out a billow of flame that raced over traitor and loyalist alike.\n\nThe vox burst back into life.\n\n'What was that?' said Thane.\n\nRaldoron increased the magnification of his helm lenses, revealing a smoking figure crouched in the glowing, eight-pointed emblem of the enemy stamped into the ground by its arrival. Bat wings wrapped around the figure protectively. Its head was bowed, a giant, black sword placed point down into the earth, both hands resting on the hilt. Fissures raced away from the sword point, and fires glowed within. The fissures widened, becoming chasms, and from them leapt sheets of flame.\n\nThe figure at the centre of the octed rose, spread its wings, and lifted its sword to show the world it had arrived. Raldoron didn't recognise it at first. The being was vast, a daemon-beast of a size that exceeded those he had battled on Signus. But something in the way it moved made him suddenly sure of its identity.\n\n'Angron. It is Angron,' said Raldoron quietly. 'By the Emperor, what has happened to him?'\n\nEven from so far away, the primarch's fury touched Raldoron, stirring something hot and vile in the Blood Angel's being.\n\nAngron howled. Horus' mortal armies surged forwards over the carpet of dead fronting the outworks and the walls. The first drop pods hit the ground among them, hatches blowing wide, bringing more Space Marines into the attack. Dreadclaw pods angled down at the walls. The dying aegis destroyed some; others hit the fortifications and glanced off. More extended their claws at the right moment, catching the crenellations and holding fast. Two landed close together, between Raldoron and his men engaging the remnants of the Night Lords. World Eaters leapt from inside into the downpour of blood.\n\n'Father!' roared the giant; his furious, brazen voice was empowered by the violence, thundering louder than any cannonade and audible over all the racket of battle. 'I have come for you!'\n\nThe breaking of the line\n\nThe gates open\n\nThe Great Mother\n\nPalace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 15th of Quartus\n\nKatsuhiro was running from the tunnel when Bastion 16 exploded. Flaming chunks of rockcrete rained down over that section of the battlefield, as deadly as any weapon. The outer lines were deserted, and with the bastion gone there was nothing to hold back the enemy. They poured over the shattered ground. Worse things were joining them, emerging from the smoke and fire to kill. Surrounded by flames, Katsuhiro did not see Angron fall from the sky, but he heard his call, and he saw the things the fallen primarch summoned.\n\n'Father! I have come for you!'\n\nThe words shook the world. Terror and fury swamped Katsuhiro's mind, leaving him fighting with himself. When the World Eaters came loping from the fire with their chainswords and set about their grisly work, cutting down men and hacking skulls from the dead and living alike, he ran harder. One saw him, and came springing after him, the mass of the legionary's armour making the ground tremble even through the bombardment. Skulls bounced on chains from battleplate whose white-and-blue livery was all but obscured by a thick coating of gore. In his warsuit, the Space Marine was far faster than Katsuhiro could ever hope to be, and ran at him, joints grinding, his chainaxe gunning.\n\n'Blood!' the legionary shouted, so thickly he hardly spoke words. 'Skulls!'\n\nKatsuhiro tripped, sprawling on the ground. He rolled over to see the monster leap at him, weapon lifted to sever his head from his spine.\n\nHe threw up his hand. A loud bang and a blast wave of superheated air thumped the wind from him.\n\nNo axe fell. He looked up to see he was alone. Only when he scrambled to his feet did he find the Space Marine scattered in bubbling pieces across th"}
{"text":"ts grinding, his chainaxe gunning.\n\n'Blood!' the legionary shouted, so thickly he hardly spoke words. 'Skulls!'\n\nKatsuhiro tripped, sprawling on the ground. He rolled over to see the monster leap at him, weapon lifted to sever his head from his spine.\n\nHe threw up his hand. A loud bang and a blast wave of superheated air thumped the wind from him.\n\nNo axe fell. He looked up to see he was alone. Only when he scrambled to his feet did he find the Space Marine scattered in bubbling pieces across the ground.\n\nNo time to think. No time to see. More World Eaters were bounding through the fires and the explosions. Brazen horns blew. Drop pods slammed into the ground and released squads of legionaries. The siege towers ground on, and behind were the mortal hordes. All would kill him just as well, no matter their method. From the walls death was flung indiscriminately. Away to the south one of the great siege towers' shields failed. It caught fire and detonated, going up like a resin torch thrust into a fire. Seconds later, metal from its destruction rang down around him, missing him, but there were more towers, and there were more deaths for him.\n\nThe red giant ran through the flames between the towers, his sword sweeping before him, slaughtering all he encountered. Guns rained every form of technological destruction down on him, but he was unharmed in the main, and what damage was inflicted was smoothed away, as if the wounds were washed off by the bloody rain.\n\n'Blood and skulls!' the giant howled. 'Blood for the Blood God!'\n\nHe ran with lowered head towards a trio of tanks that had somehow survived the destruction. His horns connected with one, rocking it on its tracks. The giant pushed a hand beneath its treads and heaved it over. A point-blank shot from the main armament of its squadron mate made the giant reel and roar, but he seemed only enraged by the blow. The sword sang through the air. Katsuhiro gaped as it sliced cleanly through the hull, setting the metal alight with black fire.\n\nWhen the giant turned on the third tank, striding through a storm of bolts to ram his blade into its engine block, Katsuhiro ran again.\n\nSomehow, he avoided the myriad forms of extinction that sliced, blasted and bludgeoned over the ruined outworks. Finally he crested the ridge of broken ground the first line had become, the roaring of the winged giant echoing behind him. Through the tempests of fire he beheld the grand portal of the Helios Gate. Little trace remained of the outwork fortifications there.\n\nThe gate was only a few hundred metres away, but firmly closed. He stumbled towards it, all strength spent, not sure what he would do. If he approached, he would die under the enemy bombardment, and there was no way through in any case. Not far from the gate one of the great siege towers was making its final approach to the wall. Between them there was no hope.\n\nOne more minute to breathe, he thought. One more moment to hear the pounding of his heart, that was all he could ask for.\n\nThere were other soldiers converging on the Helios Gate from all quarters, scattered survivors, a small proportion of the conscripts sent out to fight, but numerous in terms of absolute numbers.\n\nThen a miracle occurred. Multi-throated horns sang orchestral warning cries. The great locking plates along the hinges of the gates clunked open, withdrew and lifted back. Grinding debris to powder, the gates swung open - slowly at first, but then, as their enormous mass was bullied into moving, with surprising speed.\n\nLight flooded out from the open gate. Enemy weapons fire that had slammed into the portal was caught by a void shield spread over the arch. Figures, small as ants, formed up behind the sparkling aegis into firing lines. All were transhumans, their yellow armour golden in the city's light. Tanks and Dreadnoughts supported them against the foe making for the gate.\n\n'Loyal men and women of the Imperium,' a greatly amplified voice boomed from the gates. 'Look now to your salvation. Make your way into the Emperor's protection.\n\n'You have three minutes.'\n\nA cry of anguish went up from the fleeing soldiers. Exhausted as they were, they redoubled their efforts, and fled through the field of death in hope of life.\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios section, 15th of Quartus\n\nChain teeth growled past Raldoron's face with a hair's breadth to spare. He leaned back, and slashed down with his power sword, cutting the axe head from the World Eater's weapon. It flew off, teeth still spinning. The Traitor legionary slammed a fist into Raldoron's face, knocking his helmet into his cheek, and then grappled with him. Raldoron jammed his bolt pistol into the neck joint of his foe's armour and pulled the trigger, emptying the ammunition clip and blasting the World Eater's head from his body.\n\nHe heaved the warrior's limp corpse away and moved on.\n\nSeveral dozen World Eaters were on the wall. More drop pods were screaming down from the sky. The last of the siege towers was approaching, now only dozens of metres off the rampart. The uppermost storey was higher than the crenellations, its drawbridge held up on rusty chains the thickness of a Titan's leg, and ready to drop. The size of it was ridiculous; it was so huge it should not be, and yet it was. From a castellated firing deck atop, Death Guard fired down onto the wall.\n\nThere was space within the tower for hundreds of legionaries. The difficulties the Blood Angels were experiencing would pale into insignificance if the siege tower made it all the way in.\n\nThree had come out of the enemy camp. Two were now ablaze out from the wall, brought down by the Palace guns, but nothing, it seemed, could stop the third.\n\nWorld Eaters reinforced the few Night Lords left on the rampart. They fought with astounding savagery, with no thought for tactics or self-preservation, but went berserk as soon as their Dreadclaws snagged themselves on the crenellations. The aegis had weakened to such an extent that drop pods were falling into the city now, slamming into hive spires and putting down in plazas. Not enough warriors made it through the air defences to take the Palace on their own, but they cut bloody slaughter through soldier and civilian alike before they were taken down, diverting the reserves coming up to hold the wall top against the main assault.\n\nMortis runes peeped for Raldoron's attention as warriors of the First and Fourth Companies died around him. Thane's weapons fire was diverted by the tower as his men engaged in a gun duel with the Death Guard riding it in.\n\nThe World Eaters expended their lives in savage explosions of violence, taking three of Raldoron's men with them for every one slain.\n\n'Finish them!' Raldoron voxed. 'Get them off the wall!'\n\nBehind him, another Dreadclaw hit the wall at a poor angle, ripping out several of the giant merlons and ricocheting off. It hit the tower on the way down, losing half its mass to the shields cocooning the construction, and cartwheeled uncontrollably end over end towards the ground.\n\nThe enemy surged around the tower base, certain it would reach its target: mutants, traitors, abominations, readying to flood up its steps and into the Palace after the Death Guard, their baying filtering up to Raldoron from all the way below. The ground was black with them, studded with fires from torches and burning effigies. Enfilading shots from the Helios Gate tore into them, slaughtering them by the dozen, but there were no big guns that could hit the tower itself, not at that range.\n\n'Get them off the wall!' Raldoron repeated.\n\nA World Eater came at him, his armour overpainted with gore. Chains bearing jawbones whipped around him. He was bareheaded, nothing but pure rage and hatred on his face, the tendrils of the Butcher's Nails buried deep into the back of his scalp.\n\nRaldoron shot him down, turning his skull into mist. The warrior dropped, blood pumping from his neck, fists beating at the rampart when his body hit the ground.\n\nTo the south, loyalist reinforcements finally arrived, bolstering the thinning ranks of the Blood Angels coming from the direction of the broken Dawn Tower. Howls and battle cries filled his vox. Making any strategic sense of the situation was impossible.\n\nA lance strike punched through the aegis several kilometres away, cutting down into a small spire behind the fortifications. The weapon burned through, slicing the building diagonally. It collapsed with the screech of tortured metal, the top part falling on the wall, crumpling as it hit and blocking the wall walk.\n\nAnother World Eater came at him. Raldoron met his blow. Disruption lightning wreathed them both as his blade chopped off the legionary's arm. The traitor barely seemed to notice the amputation, but launched himself head first at the captain. Raldoron stepped to the side, letting the warrior throw himself onto the paving of the rampart, and stabbed him through the back. The blow obliterated the World Eater's power pack and the back-plate beneath, leaving his spine exposed to the air.\n\nThe first siege tower was mere metres away, and the rain was pouring down.\n\nBetween the north and south forces of the Blood Angels, only three World Eaters remained, then none, gunned down rapidly by the two lines of loyal legionaries meeting. Another drop pod speared towards the wall, retro thrusters burning to line it up for a perfect landing on the rampart, but as it was poised to cut out its jets and drop, guns within the Palace blasted it to scrap, dropping its wreckage on the wall.\n\n'Form up!' bellowed Raldoron. He looked to the siege tower. Another few seconds and it would lower its bridge. Armoured loophole covers rattled up, and banks of melta-cutters extended, angled down.\n\n'Stand clear!' he said. 'Two lines! Two facing lines!'\n\nSergeants ordered squads over the gap between the groups of Blood Angels, bolstering Raldoron's depleted units. They jogged over an uneven ground of power-armoured corpses, Night Lords, World "}
{"text":"ted it to scrap, dropping its wreckage on the wall.\n\n'Form up!' bellowed Raldoron. He looked to the siege tower. Another few seconds and it would lower its bridge. Armoured loophole covers rattled up, and banks of melta-cutters extended, angled down.\n\n'Stand clear!' he said. 'Two lines! Two facing lines!'\n\nSergeants ordered squads over the gap between the groups of Blood Angels, bolstering Raldoron's depleted units. They jogged over an uneven ground of power-armoured corpses, Night Lords, World Eaters and Blood Angels intermingled, their rounded armour slippery with blood and treacherous underfoot.\n\n'Stand ready!' Raldoron called. 'Stand ready!'\n\nThe siege tower moved forwards slower than he expected. It shuddered under fire and adjusted its course. A blaze of bolt-rounds hammered from its roof, forcing the Blood Angels to duck down behind the crenellations, their return fire ineffectual owing to the angle.\n\nRaldoron took stock of his men. Three hundred left from two companies waited for the riders of the tower. A terrible stink came off the siege engine, of sickness and putrid wounds, that he smelled even though his armour was void-sealed.\n\nMore reinforcements were coming. Thane's men were running down from the gatehouse, more arriving from the north, and a sixth company of Blood Angels speeding along the road behind the defences. This was the risk. This siege tower. If they threw back this assault, the Helios section of the Daylight Wall would hold.\n\nWe will triumph, he told himself. We are worthy.\n\nThe trumpet chorus of the gate's war-horns snatched his attention from the siege tower. For the first time in centuries he experienced dread. Not even the daemonic horrors of Signus Prime had unnerved him; what he saw at the Helios Gate did.\n\nThe gates were opening.\n\nThey swung wide, pouring the pure lumen light of the city onto the field of battle. His hearts pounded. If the gates were open, they were lost.\n\n'Thane! Thane!' he voxed. 'The gates are opening! Angron is outside! Thane! On whose authority do the gates open? Are we betrayed?'\n\nThere was a rush of air behind him, and the thump of boots upon the stone. He turned to see Sanguinius alight on the wall, sword drawn in his left hand, the Spear of Telesto in his right, his golden armour running with the bloody downpour.\n\n'The gates open by my authority, captain.'\n\nSanguinius strode to Raldoron's side.\n\n'My lord, why?' For one terrible moment, Raldoron doubted his genefather's loyalty, and feared he had turned against the Imperium at the last. If that were so, the Death Guard were in ignorance, for they turned all their attention on the Great Angel. His armour sparked with bolt impacts, but he stood in contempt of their efforts, even his bare wings untouched, and spoke.\n\n'My brother, the Khan, reminded me that we must not forget our ultimate duty. The Emperor works for mankind, but while I live I will not forget the individual men and women who make up that whole.' He swept his spear out over the ramparts. Tiny figures pursued by all the horrors of Horus' mutant legions were running for the gate, while Angron rampaged through friend and foe alike. 'I will not abandon the human troopers to this vile death while some might be saved. In them, I see bravery, I see loyalty, but above all, I see faith in my father's vision. I shall not let them die while there is blood in my body and strength in my limbs. Fear not, my son, the Imperial Fists hold the arch, and even now allies come to their aid. Now, prepare. The enemy comes against us, and we must look to our own task.'\n\nThe fire from the roof of the siege tower cut into the ranks of the Blood Angels. The melta arrays upon the front discharged, their beams agitating atoms to the point of destruction. A swathe of the downpour evaporated into meaty steam. The crenellations glowed red, then orange, then white, and collapsed into slag. Where the beams cut across the bodies of the fallen, flesh exploded. Ceramite resisted the arrays for mere seconds before collapsing into powder.\n\nThe Blood Angels waited either side of the beams' tracks, now separated by a trench of molten rockcrete.\n\nSanguinius stood unafraid in the storm of bolt impacts, unharmed while his sons were felled.\n\n'We shall repel them!' he said.\n\n'My lord, I suppose my telling you to get off the wall will do no good,' said Raldoron. 'But I am honour bound to say you should. We cannot lose you.'\n\nSanguinius laughed, a musical, pure sound in the blood rain and the slaughter. 'You are right, my son. I would not leave you if I were sure it would be my end,' he said. Then he spoke the awful words Raldoron had heard so much of late. 'But I know I do not die today.'\n\nThe gargantuan chains rattled. The siege tower's drawbridge fell forwards, rusty teeth in the underside biting into the softened fabric of the wall. The boltgun fire from the top roared on.\n\nFrom within, a throng of Death Guard ran out, rasping their praise of Mortarion and their new-found god, and poured onto the battlement.\n\n'For the Emperor!' called Sanguinius, and led his sons into the fray.\n\nThe Imperial Fists shot with incredible discipline, killing traitor humans and monsters alike, yet avoiding the majority of the fleeing soldiery.\n\nThe conscripts ran between their saviours, staggering into the safety of the city. Those that collapsed were lifted up and carried away. Katsuhiro fled towards the yellow line, not daring to look back. He heard the shouting of the enemy behind him, and the bellowing of the red, winged giant. To his utter disbelief, he made it through the whistling bolts to the line of Imperial Fists, was grabbed and dragged through. Guns all around the arch fired down. The Imperial Fists swept the field clear. He dared not think himself safe, and looked back, immediately regretting it.\n\nThrough the legs of the legionaries, he saw that the giant was nearly upon them. He had abandoned his rampage and was making right for the open city gate. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands perhaps, of bolts impacted on him, blasting divots from his flesh, obscuring the greater part of him with the gathered flashes of small explosions. Las-beams punched smoking holes deep into his body. Plasma streams scorched muscle from bone. He would not fall, but he was slowing, encountering some obstacle invisible to Katsuhiro, leaning into it like a man battling against a hurricane. The giant roared in frustration. Flesh boiled off him from an attack that had little to do with legionary weapons. Fire ran over his body. Katsuhiro's teeth ached. He tasted metal.\n\n'Father!' roared the giant. 'I will destroy you!'\n\nBut the giant went no further. Something was holding him back.\n\nA frantic stalemate was reached. The enemy died in droves at the threshold. Their daemonic leader could make no more headway.\n\nMore giants were required to tip the scales.\n\nThe ground shook to steady beats, and Katsuhiro turned to look into the Palace. To his amazement a group of Titans were advancing down the main road to the Helios Gate, green and red and white. They blew their war-horns in outraged cries, lined up in the gate, steadied themselves on splayed feet, and powered their weapons. Katsuhiro was hustled beneath them, enduring the soul-wrenching shock of passing through their void aegis. They sang their war songs once again, and the largest spoke.\n\n'The Emperor Protects.'\n\nIt opened fire.\n\nTwinned cannons blasted volcano heat. Las weaponry of a scale that dumbfounded Katsuhiro cast double spears of hard light at the enemy horde. They both hit the raging giant, who was caught upon the cusp of entering the city, throwing him back, and vaporised the greater part of his charging Legion. The other Titans opened up, war-horns still howling, blazing fury across the sky. The enemy streaming for the open gate were annihilated, the survivors retreating in disarray.\n\nWar-horns blared again. Legs straightened, and the last of the Legio Solaria strode out of the Imperial Palace, weapons still firing.\n\nSanguinius slew the Death Guard with such speed and power. All that came against him died. With blasts from his spear and the sweep of his great sword he ended their treachery once and for all. He leapt from wall to drawbridge, knocking as many foes from the edge as he slaughtered directly; then having cleared a space he leapt from the bridge, beat his wings and flew up and round, landing upon the siege tower roof, and there lay about himself with his blade, bringing to an end the hail of fire that so troubled his sons. At the lip of the wall the Blood Angels fought in a line against their fallen cousins, no quarter asked and none given. An equilibrium held there, the Blood Angels' fury matched by the Death Guard's tenacity. The XIV Legion were far more durable than Sanguinius' sons, taking blows and bolts that would have incapacitated other legionaries, but they were slow, bloated by sickness, disabled by infirmities. The Blood Angels moved with a grace that their counterparts could not match and found hard to counter. Just as much stinking blood was spilled as pure, legionary vitae, and the line held. Pushed at by the mass of warriors at their backs, Mortarion's diseased progeny fell from the sides of their ramp, but the thin barrier of red would not give.\n\nSanguinius was captivated by the sight of his brave sons holding back the tide of the traitors. Such pride stirred in him at their sacrifice, such sorrow that he would behold their valour only a few more times before the final act of his life played out.\n\nUntil that moment, he was safe. He could not die. He would not. That was his advantage.\n\nTime was running against them. The hordes of the enemy were converging on the tower. They would keep coming, brave in their madness, and no matter how many Raldoron and his warriors slew, eventually they would overcome the defenders. The tower had to fall.\n\nAid was at hand. Five towering walkers were making their way out from the gate. Sanguinius"}
{"text":"a few more times before the final act of his life played out.\n\nUntil that moment, he was safe. He could not die. He would not. That was his advantage.\n\nTime was running against them. The hordes of the enemy were converging on the tower. They would keep coming, brave in their madness, and no matter how many Raldoron and his warriors slew, eventually they would overcome the defenders. The tower had to fall.\n\nAid was at hand. Five towering walkers were making their way out from the gate. Sanguinius looked upon them from the siege tower. Many times the height of the war engines, the tower's very existence made a mockery of the laws of physics. No mortal engineer could build such a thing and expect it to hold up against gravity, but, he reminded himself, they fought the wars of gods now.\n\nAnd yet the mortal realm still had might of its own.\n\n'Great Mother, I am pleased you heeded my call,' he voxed. 'I salute you for overlooking factional division in the name of the greater cause. We will stand together in victory.'\n\n'This war construct at the walls, you wish it gone?' Esha Ani of the Legio Solaria responded.\n\n'Indeed,' said Sanguinius. 'The hour hangs on you.'\n\n'Then stand clear,' she said.\n\nIn the command czella of Luxor Invictoria, Esha Ani Mohana Vi drew a bead upon her target. Her new augmetics troubled her, but they had certain advantages, bringing her closer to the roaring soul of the Warlord through the holy unity of steel with flesh.\n\nThrough his eyes she saw the rear of the daemon tower, where was mounted a gargantuan steam engine, meshed in fleshy sinew, and powered by a furnace of damned souls. From the engine great pistons led to the drive wheels of the tower. It idled, having done its purpose of bringing the tower to the wall, but she had another use for it.\n\n'Increase reactor to maximum output,' she commanded. 'Disengage fail-safes. Remove limiting protocols. Stand by for core venting.'\n\nIn ordinary wars, her orders would have been rigorously questioned by the Titan's enginseers. Overpowering the plasma core of her god-engine carried a high chance of its destruction, but this was not an ordinary war.\n\n'Legio Solaria,' she said, voxing the other Titans in her mongrel maniple. 'We stand on the brink of annihilation once again. Let this not be the last action we undertake. Keep the enemy from me while I serve the Lord Sanguinius, and prepare for immediate retreat.'\n\nHer mind meshed with that of her Titan. They had yet to know one another perfectly, she and Luxor Invictoria, but they held a common bond in their grief for Esha Ani's lost mother, and that made them strong together. His systems gave her insight into the abominable engine they faced, and his bold spirit picked out two sites for her, one for each of the Titan's volcano cannons, that would bring the damned thing low.\n\nToscins rang, klaxons grated at her hearing. The soft alarms of the Warlord's servitor clades whispered in her mind, their voices still human, though they had but one thing to say.\n\n'Danger, danger, danger.'\n\nSolaria were spotted. Punishing fire from the enemy contravallation zeroed in on them. Void indicators flickered with troubling portents of failure. She did not have much time. At Luxor Invictoria's knees, Warhounds and Reavers burned back enemy infantry and armour with plasma, flame and bullet. The enemy were so many.\n\nShe could not fail.\n\nThe whine of the reactor climbed. The great god-engine trembled with barely contained power. More alarms pushed into her being, prodding at her soul through the manifold.\n\nGauges slid into the red. Target locks screamed at her. The machine-spirits of the volcano cannons begged for release. Still she did not fire. She waited for maximum power, the very acme of destruction.\n\nAlarms shrilled. The moment came.\n\n'Legio Solaria, switch fire - all weapons to the siege tower, now.'\n\nImmediately the god-machines obeyed, swinging their great limbs to bear, and opened fire. The shields of the tower, weakened during its advance on the walls, finally collapsed under the pounding of the Titans' guns.\n\n'Loose,' she said.\n\nLuxor Invictoria sighed with machine pleasure as its cannons were unleashed. Alarms screamed. An overbearing wailing resounded through the entire machine, promising imminent destruction, but she did not shut the energy stream off until the last.\n\nThe giant las-beams slammed into the tower engine, itself bigger than the Warlord. They burned through warp-infused bronze, put out the hellish furnace.\n\nThe Titan's reactor howled.\n\n'Dump all coolant. All Titans retreat to the Helios Gate.'\n\nClouds of superheated gas burst from the cannons' thermal vents, shrouding the maniple in pure white steam. Alarms still shrieking, still under heavy fire, Luxor Invictoria turned about as the daemon tower's engine exploded.\n\nScalding fluid blasted out in every direction. The tower shook, spilling the tiny figures of battling Space Marines from its broad ramp. Chained explosions raced up its many floors, blasting flames from its firing slits and windows. Magazines caught. Energy sources detonated.\n\nEsha Ani did not see the tower's final demise; she wrestled with her Titan's desire to fight while her tech clade brought down its internal temperatures, until it arrived, still spraying scalding gas, back at the Helios Gate, and returned through the wall.\n\nThe cannons hit the tower, shaking it from top to bottom. Sanguinius staggered. The Death Guard coming up the main stairs to confront him fell back. Sanguinius used the distraction to jump at them, incinerating them with his spear's energy cast, and took again to the air.\n\n'Retreat from the bridge, my sons!' Sanguinius shouted. He blasted down with the Spear of Telesto directly into the melee, its strange energies leaving his own warriors unharmed, but turning the Death Guard into shattered husks of broken armour.\n\n'Fall back!' Raldoron said, passing on Sanguinius' order. 'Fall back!'\n\nThe Blood Angels gave way, and the Death Guard spilled from the drawbridge onto the ramparts. For a moment the sons of Mortarion were triumphant. They fired as they advanced, killing many of the retreating Blood Angels, before the illusion shattered along with the tower.\n\nThe first explosion was so distant it was lost in the general roar of the battle, but as those that came after sped upwards, the noise grew to deafening thunder, shaking the whole structure so that warriors fell screaming to their deaths, until the top half was obliterated in a fountain of green fire, and a tempest of shrapnel burst over the rampart, slaying warriors on both sides. A pressure built in Raldoron's head, and released again when a malevolent presence roared from the broken interior of the tower in a column of black flies. Glowing eyes stared down from the swarm's midst, then the flies dissipated across the night sky, and the eyes faded away with a howl that made men vomit.\n\nRaldoron grabbed the standard from a dead banner bearer and waved it over his head. The tattered flag snapped beneath the winged blood-drop finial.\n\n'To me, sons of Sanguinius! To me!'\n\nThe Death Guard had taken the brunt of the explosion, but they were hardier than they had ever been, and some dozens of them were on the rampart. The Blood Angels rallied themselves for a hard fight, warriors again attacking from both sides and running up against a wall of rotting ceramite and iron will.\n\n'The battle is almost won! Do not falter!' Raldoron shouted. 'Cast them from the rampart! For the Emperor! For Sanguinius!'\n\nCalled down from on high by his name, Sanguinius, most perfect of all the primarchs, hurtled into the middle of the Death Guard. His landing killed three even before he set his spear and sword whirling through them, cutting them down with contemptuous ease.\n\n'To the primarch! To the primarch!'\n\nBolters and voices roaring, the two lines of Blood Angels crashed back onto the ruined section of the wall walk, slaughtering the traitors utterly, so that not one was left alive.\n\nSanguinius swept his gaze over the battered remnants of the Blood Angels.\n\nHe held aloft his spear.\n\n'It is done!' shouted Sanguinius, and his sons cheered him.\n\n'My lord! Look out!' Raldoron pulled at his genefather's arm, but no Space Marine could move a primarch.\n\nAngron was flying straight at them, wings beating, howling madly, black sword drawn back to strike. The Blood Angels opened fire. Bolts ricocheted from Angron's armour and his flesh without effect.\n\nBut Sanguinius stood there, and lowered his weapons.\n\n'My lord!' screamed Raldoron in anguish.\n\n'Do not fear. He cannot pass. The Emperor's ward is weakening, and soon the Neverborn will walk upon Terra, but for now, even Angron is forbidden entry to the Palace.'\n\nThere was truth in Sanguinius' words. Angron spread his wings and came to a halt some way out from the wall. He swooped back and forth, his yellow eyes fixed upon his brother.\n\n'Sanguinius,' growled Angron. 'Face me. Let us fight, you and I.'\n\n'You shall not pass over these walls, nor under or through them until our father decrees it,' said Sanguinius. 'You know this to be true.'\n\nAngron snarled. 'Then come out and fight me, red angel to red angel, upon this field of battle where father can no longer interfere.'\n\nSanguinius saluted his brother as if Angron remained the troubled warrior of before.\n\n'We will fight, my brother, but not today.'\n\nAngron roared and wheeled around, but he must have seen the truth of the Great Angel's words, for he did not attempt to pass over the wall, and flew back to the burning plains below where the last unfortunate few of the outworks' defenders were being hunted down.\n\nSanguinius stood at the edge of the ruined wall section. The crenellations had been entirely stripped away by the melta arrays, and the rampart cratered deeply. The wrecked stump of the siege tower burned some distance down. He looked out over Horus' hordes, mutants and Traitor Space Marines, held up his sword and shouted.\n\n'None of you "}
{"text":" not attempt to pass over the wall, and flew back to the burning plains below where the last unfortunate few of the outworks' defenders were being hunted down.\n\nSanguinius stood at the edge of the ruined wall section. The crenellations had been entirely stripped away by the melta arrays, and the rampart cratered deeply. The wrecked stump of the siege tower burned some distance down. He looked out over Horus' hordes, mutants and Traitor Space Marines, held up his sword and shouted.\n\n'None of you shall pass within!' he told them. 'You shall all perish! This is the judgment of the Emperor. Remember these words, for they shall haunt you when the moment of your death comes and you learn to regret your treachery.'\n\nHe turned away from it all.\n\n'Remove the corpses, Raldoron. Burn the Death Guard and throw the ashes over the wall. Have the Librarius check for warp taint. Mortarion's sons have strange new gifts.'\n\n'My lord,' said Raldoron.\n\n'And rest while you can.' Sanguinius looked to the heavens. 'They will try again and again. The veil between worlds weakens. The Neverborn are coming.'\n\nRaldoron's genesire had no further words for him, but leapt skywards and passed as a flashing mote of gold and white feathers towards the Palace centre.\n\nRaldoron looked out over the zone of battle atop the wall. The Apothecaries and engineers had much work to do. Dozens of Blood Angels were dead or dying. The wall was badly damaged. The place where the outworks had sheltered the wall's feet was covered over by the servants of the enemy. As his men worked through long hours to set things right, reports finally came in from Bhab command. At every point the enemy's escalade had failed.\n\nThe walls held.\n\nThe attack was over.\n\nTitans swayed through the Helios Gate, their ponderous footfalls shaking the ground. Again the voids slipped over Katsuhiro, making him sick to his soul. The Legio Solaria hooted a mournful salute to the fallen as the last came in.\n\nStill firing into the enemy, who would not give up their suicidal attempt on the gate, the sons of Dorn fell back, covered by their tanks and the guns of the walls.\n\n'Close the gates!' the cry went up, taken up by others.\n\nThree minutes. That was what they had been offered. That was all that was given. Katsuhiro saw desperate men sprinting for the gateway. Three minutes was a lifetime quickly spent.\n\nOnce more the gate's array of war-horns blared out their tune, the Palace itself giving a valediction for the dead. The ground thrummed with powerful motors, and the gates swung inwards. A last few conscripts sprinted through as they swung closed. Katsuhiro tried to go to them, but he was pulled away from the gate by shouting people he could barely hear.\n\nHands pulled him onto a low cot at the edge of the great canyon way behind the wall. There medicae personnel performed triage on a group of filthy, shell-shocked soldiers. Many thousands had manned the outworks in their section. Katsuhiro reckoned there to be less than one thousand left.\n\nThe Imperial Fists in the gateway altered their formation to intensify their firing through the gap of the closing portal. It shrank with increasing rapidity.\n\nGuns fired nearby. A group of legionaries festooned with skulls ran at the rear of the gates from within the city and were cut down by bolter fire from loyal Space Marines, who turned around on the spot and smoothly switched targets. The Titans sang again as they moved off into the Palace. He watched them go. They moved so quickly despite their plodding pace. Then the gates swung closed with a boom, shutting out the battle and the horrors beyond the wall, drawing his attention back.\n\nKatsuhiro stared at the rear of the closed gates. Transhumans moved all around the square behind the gatehouse. Now combat was done, they went about rearmament and repair without the post-combat shock lesser humans experienced.\n\nA captain of their kind walked by, shouting orders from his voxmitter.\n\n'Please, my lord,' Katsuhiro said, reaching up his hands.\n\nHe expected to be ignored, but the captain stopped at his cot and looked down on him.\n\n'Why did you save us?' Katsuhiro asked.\n\nAs the Space Marine wore his helmet. Katsuhiro could not gauge his expression. Green eye-lenses stared at him hard, so soullessly he regretted speaking.\n\n'We were ordered to,' said the Space Marine.\n\n'Then you think it a waste of resources,' Katsuhiro said. 'I do not blame you. I am a coward. Every time I think I have overcome my fear, then some fresh horror is revealed, and I am a coward all over again. The city was put in danger for our sake. I am sorry.'\n\nThe Space Marine lord stared down at him. He was so tall, so distant, the last bits of his humanity hidden behind the angled mask of his war-plate, and when he spoke his voice was near robotic thanks to the voxmitter; and yet Katsuhiro heard his compassion, even through all of that.\n\n'Hear me, son of Terra. Not one of you who fought upon those lines is a coward. You did what was asked of you. You performed your duty. I am proud to call you my comrade in arms, whatever the cost in blood and the risk of bringing you within these walls. This I, Maximus Thane, swear to you. Now rest. You will be needed again.'\n\nThe Space Marine walked away. A medicae orderly came to Katsuhiro and pushed him gently onto the cot. But Katsuhiro saw something behind Thane's huge, yellow bulk that made him sit up.\n\n'That man! That man! Stop him!'\n\n'That's the commander of the gate.' The medicae muttered to his attendants. 'Delirious. Battle shock. Administer somna vapour.'\n\nA soft plastek mask was pulled over Katsuhiro's face. He struggled against the hands pushing him down. Gas hissed down tubes beaded with condensation.\n\nThane moved on, calling to his men, revealing Ashul at the edge of a crowd, the man Katsuhiro had known as Doromek. The traitor.\n\n'Stop him, stop him,' Katsuhiro muttered, already losing consciousness.\n\nAshul saluted ironically. Katsuhiro's eyes slid shut. He forced them open one more time, but Ashul was gone.\n\nHissing filled the world, and Katsuhiro fell into welcome, dreamless sleep.\n\nGendor Skraivok and Raldoron duel on the wall.\n\nThe daemon primarch Angron sets foot on Terra.\n\nAscension\n\nAbsent father\n\nA new champion\n\nDaylight Wall, Helios section, 15th of Quartus\n\nA broken man in broken armour stirred at the foot of the wall. A single casualty among thousands, he was not noticed in the battle's aftermath by either side.\n\nGendor Skraivok was dying. The fall had brought him down across a lump of rockcrete and his back had shattered on it. He could move his arms. Everything below his shoulders might as well have been sculpted from clay.\n\nThe hum of his warsuit's reactor had stopped. No power ran through the armour's systems, and much of its ceramite shell was broken open. Skraivok could see very little past his collar and his pauldrons. The walls soared above him, as if placed there with the sole purpose of framing the sky, where the living art of orbital bombardment danced in ever-changing patterns on the aegis. From a lump of stone his helmet looked at him accusingly, having been torn off as he slammed into the wall. It had contrived to land upright, solely, it seemed, to silently condemn him with cracked glass eyes.\n\nBlood was leaking into Skraivok's mouth. He spat weakly to the side, an action that stabbed his organs with a hundred knives of agony. The blood flowed faster than he could spit.\n\nHe groaned. If his other injuries did not kill him first, he was going to drown in his own vitae.\n\nGendor Skraivok did not wish to die.\n\n'Daemon,' he whispered. 'Daemon!'\n\nHe patted the ground to his left and his right. Amazingly, his hand touched the familiar hilt of his warp blade. Gripping it cost him greatly in pain, but he managed to bring the weapon onto his chest, where it clanked against his armour.\n\n'Daemon, can you hear me?' He spat again. Blood was running down his throat.\n\nThe sword trembled.\n\n'You are here with me!' he croaked in relief.\n\nSkraivok's smile became an expression of dismay as the metal's trembling turned to shaking so pronounced it clattered on his armour. The blade began to fizz, boiling off into black smoke that fled upwards towards the flaring sky.\n\n'No!' he said. 'No! Daemon, wait! Do not desert me!'\n\nThe rattling died away as the weapon evaporated into nothing. Skraivok stared at his empty hand.\n\n'I don't want to die!' he said, weakly. He felt intensely sorry for himself. 'I'm not ready! Daemon! Daemon...'\n\n'I have not deserted you, Gendor Skraivok. Not yet.'\n\nDragging footsteps approached. Skraivok turned his head. Relief turned to horror at what he saw.\n\nThe daemon came fully formed, solid as a man of flesh and blood. It was a scrawny thing with skin covered in tumorous lumps. Its head had something of the equine to it, being long, with eyes set far back and to the side of its face. The teeth were predatory, however: sharp along the front, large incisors lying neatly together, like the scissor-blade tusks of Terran boars. The head carried four short growths that were more nobbles than horns. Its ears, Skraivok noted, were very small and delicate.\n\nIt came closer.\n\n'Get away from me!' Skraivok gasped, suddenly afraid.\n\nA famine-swollen belly dangled from an emaciated ribcage. Its legs were knock-kneed. It limped. Its arms were overly long, held awkwardly across its body, with grasping, twitching fingers covered in warts. Dragging misshapen feet, it approached Skraivok slowly, as if bashful, unsure of how to greet a potential mate, but Skraivok could see even from his limited view how triumphant it felt.\n\n'Do not be afraid. I am your sword. I am your daemon. We spoke before, on Sotha, you and I. We are important to one another.'\n\n'I do not know you!'\n\n'I have many forms, and many names. You know me well, and always have, as you shall soon see. The walls between our spheres are breached. I can be here now, thanks to my connection with you. Others of my kind will come "}
{"text":" as if bashful, unsure of how to greet a potential mate, but Skraivok could see even from his limited view how triumphant it felt.\n\n'Do not be afraid. I am your sword. I am your daemon. We spoke before, on Sotha, you and I. We are important to one another.'\n\n'I do not know you!'\n\n'I have many forms, and many names. You know me well, and always have, as you shall soon see. The walls between our spheres are breached. I can be here now, thanks to my connection with you. Others of my kind will come soon enough, but not for you. I am the first, and you are mine.' It came to a halt at Skraivok's side and looked up at the continuing battle. 'Soon the Anathema will fall, and this sphere of being will be like ours.'\n\nIt stared down at Skraivok with huge brown eyes that might have been beautiful in another creature, but in its lumpen face were abhorrent. Thick, clear fluid wept from them, dribbling down its long snout and coating its teeth.\n\n'Now what do we do with you, I wonder?'\n\nThe Neverborn knelt over him, and rested a knotted hand upon Skraivok's broken armour. Its fingers dabbled in his blood.\n\n'Why did you leave me on the wall?' said Skraivok.\n\n'Because I could,' it said. Its voice was wet and laboured. 'Because you needed a lesson. I made you strong, Skraivok, and you assumed that strength was your own. You are a traitor and a murderer. Ruthlessness and a little cunning are your only gifts, but you mistook my talents for yours.' It snickered. 'Can you imagine, the Painted Count thought himself the equal of the First Captain of the Blood Angels? A priceless error.'\n\n'I slew Lord Shang,' croaked Skraivok.\n\n'I slew Lord Shang,' countered the daemon, 'not you. Truly you are gloriously arrogant,' it said with satisfaction. 'A fitting bondsoul for me. We shall have such times, you and I.'\n\n'I am a captain of the Night Lords.'\n\n'You are, you are,' the daemon said, patting him. 'But you cheated your way to your command. You never had the patience or the discipline to properly master the gifts the Anathema bestowed upon your mortal body. You are no warrior, Skraivok. You never were. You are a parasite. You are a gutter politician. You are devious, and false. Nothing more.'\n\n'What do you want of me?' Skraivok said. His life was ebbing away. Not long now. He almost welcomed it.\n\n'You have a choice to make,' it said with relish. 'You can die here, now, and your soul will flee into the warp where it will be torn to pieces by my kin who dwell there.'\n\n'The alternative?' His eyes were heavy. Blood dribbled into his lungs.\n\nThe Neverborn leaned closer, and whispered with rank breath into his ear.\n\n'You can offer yourself to me, wholeheartedly, with no reservation or doubt, and I will take you into myself. You will become a part of me and I will become a part of you. Together, we shall live forever, and freely tread the materium and immaterium both. We shall bring such pain upon this sphere of being that it will wound the very light of the stars.'\n\n'I will die otherwise?' he said.\n\n'You will do more than die. You will cease to be.'\n\n'Then yes,' said Skraivok. 'Yes! Anything but death.'\n\n'Anything?' crooned the daemon.\n\n'Yes!' said Skraivok. Fear sent a last jolt of energy into him. He lifted his head. 'Anything.'\n\n'Then say the words,' growled the Neverborn. Its thin lips were close enough to kiss. The fluid from its eyes dripped onto Skraivok's face.\n\n'I pledge myself to you! I shall become yours! You will be me and I will be you! Is that right? Is that right? Please, do not let me die!'\n\nThe daemon chuckled. 'I chose you so well. Yes, those words will suffice. This is your first lesson - the form of the words do not matter, only their sincerity, and I see that for the first time in your life, Gendor Skraivok, you are sincere.'\n\n'I am! I am!'\n\nA long, reeking tongue slipped between the daemon's lips, furred green and ulcerous, and pushed roughly into Skraivok's mouth. It slithered into his throat, growing longer and thicker, plunging down, down inside him, blocking off his air, choking him. The daemon's mouth parted wider, and wider. The tongue grew thicker while the rest of the being deflated, pouring itself through the serpent of its tongue into the Night Lord. Skraivok goggled and choked, his eyes wide with terror.\n\nDid I mention, said the daemon into his mind, for the mind was its now too, that for you to deliver pain correctly, you must learn what pain is. I will take you now, into the warp, where for six times six hundred and sixty-six years you will learn the depths of agony. This is a great gift. No living being could survive the torments that await you, my friend, my soul bond, my Painted Count, but you will... You will become expert in pain.\n\nSkraivok's eyes bulged. The daemon slithered inside him, pulling its empty skin after it. Skraivok's flesh glowed lurid purple, too bright to look at.\n\nWhen the light went out, his armour was empty, but the daemon was good to its word.\n\nThe Painted Count was not dead.\n\nIn the depths of the warp, Gendor Skraivok began to scream.\n\nThe warp\n\nHorus coalesced from shreds of smoke and blood fume, striding from one existence to the next as if he walked from one room to another.\n\nHe stopped to take in his surroundings.\n\nThere was a place his father had taken him soon after his arrival on Terra. A rotunda tower in the young Palace, whose colonnaded sides were protected from the freezing winds of Himalazia by shimmering atmospheric shields. The room at the top was of simple luxury. Nothing ostentatious, but everything fashioned to the highest standard, and of the finest materials. The floor was chequered with black and white marble fitted to the room's circular shape, the flagstones rhomboids with curved edges that grew more slender until they reached the middle of the room, where they became tesserae locked into a geometric prison. At the very centre was an ancient symbol, a circle divided into two tailed shapes of black and white by a curved line, a small dot of black within the white and vice versa. The Emperor had told him that this symbol represented equilibrium.\n\nWhere he was now was an echo of that chamber. He saw it as it had been, and he saw it as it would become, its energy shields out, curtains shredded, floor cracked. The rotunda offered a view of the whole Palace, and it showed now a vista of fire. Hot breezes laden with embers wafted between the pillars. Horus looked on approvingly.\n\n'Why did you bring me here, father?' he said. The Emperor did not show Himself. Horus felt His presence all around him, but no contact came. He remained hidden.\n\nThe Warmaster raised his eyebrows at this display. He felt the consternation of the Four, but he was not unduly concerned. His father had never liked to give a straight answer. His gaze wandered over the chamber, touching on a pile of cushions where he and the Emperor had talked long into that first night, then over the table where they dined together when time allowed. The Emperor was always occupied with His great work - His great lie, Horus thought - but at the beginning of it all He had had more time for Horus than He had for any of the others that followed.\n\nThat had been important to him, once. In truth it was so meaningless. Days full of lies to feed a tyrant's vanity. It saddened him. Such a waste.\n\nAt one side of the room was a regicide table of ancient origin. Upon a single curled leg a round board sat, its surface inset with wooden squares to make the playing surface. The wood was so old the whites had darkened and the blacks mellowed, until they were nearly the same shades of brown. A game halfway through was set on the board. Ivory pieces aged to a mellow cream were on the defensive, half their pieces off the playing surface already. A nearly full set of ebony was arrayed against them. Over the heads of their servants the black king and the white king looked directly at one another. Horus ducked down to get a better view. The attack was deeply flawed. The defence had many holes. Grains of dust and debris littered the board. Ash drifted onto it from the fires outside. It was when one of these grey smuts settled next to the black king that he saw that the piece rested in a puddle of blood.\n\nHe shook his head at the symbolism. Unsubtle.\n\nHe stood up, picked up a thrall piece on a whim and moved it to block a white keep.\n\nThe base clicked onto the ancient wood with a soft finality.\n\n'I have tested your walls, father. My armies stand ready to begin their attack. Why do you still resist? You can see the end, I know you can. Your resistance is pointless. You damn humanity. Release them. Let me save them.'\n\nThere came no reply.\n\nHorus stood back from the game.\n\n'Your move, father,' he said quietly.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Terran near orbit, 15th of Quartus\n\nThe air was foul in Horus' nameless sanctum where Abaddon watched over his father.\n\nAs always, Layak and his tongueless servants had followed him there, giving him no moment of peace.\n\n'He spends too much time in his meditations,' said the First Captain.\n\nHorus' eyes were wide open, staring at nothing. His mouth gaped. He looked an imbecile, or dead. Abaddon was glad few others saw the Warmaster like this. He wished he did not see it himself, but he could not stop looking.\n\n'How do you think that Angron walks on Terra?' said Layak mildly. 'He will not be the first child of the warp to do so. The Emperor's might dwindles because Horus confronts Him in the warp. Without these attacks your father makes upon the Terran despot, our allies would never break through.'\n\n'Erebus would have claimed those triumphs for himself,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I am not Erebus,' said Layak. 'The First Apostle served himself first and the gods second. That is why the Warmaster banished him. He and Lorgar were faithless in the end.'\n\n'What about you, Layak? Do you keep faith?' he said dismissively.\n\nA burst of angry heat radiated from the Apostle. 'I serve only the gods,' said Layak, 'for what use is mortal po"}
{"text":"ther makes upon the Terran despot, our allies would never break through.'\n\n'Erebus would have claimed those triumphs for himself,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I am not Erebus,' said Layak. 'The First Apostle served himself first and the gods second. That is why the Warmaster banished him. He and Lorgar were faithless in the end.'\n\n'What about you, Layak? Do you keep faith?' he said dismissively.\n\nA burst of angry heat radiated from the Apostle. 'I serve only the gods,' said Layak, 'for what use is mortal power in the face of eternity?'\n\nAbaddon stared at the Warmaster.\n\n'The price of this is too high. We can bring the Emperor down without the Neverborn. I do not like what these sorcerous journeys are doing to my father, and I hold you responsible.'\n\n'Kill me, and it will make no difference. It is too late to change the Warmaster's path,' said Layak. 'The deal has been struck. The daemonic legions wait to add their might to yours. There is no going back on that.'\n\n'We could have obliterated this world.'\n\n'Then you would have lost. The Emperor is no ordinary foe,' said Layak. 'Slay His body, and He will persist. He must be destroyed, face to face, in body and in spirit.'\n\n'Then we should have tried it on our own,' Abaddon said. 'If Horus continues with this harassment of the False Emperor, he risks himself. Do not underestimate the power of the Emperor, Layak. I do not. Do your masters?'\n\nLayak did not answer Abaddon's question. 'There are pressures upon our labours,' he said instead. 'They must be completed quickly, or the war will be lost.'\n\nAbaddon looked at the masked priest. 'Such as? Guilliman is nothing. I will break him. I will break them all, these loyal sons. These primarchs. They are weak.'\n\nLayak's six eyes flared. 'Do you believe that Guilliman's advance is the only limit on our time?'\n\n'Layak, I have no liking for you. You are useful, and Horus has decreed that you are not to be harmed, but I would require little excuse to overlook both these protections you enjoy.'\n\n'I will say what needs to be said, threats or not. I serve the gods. My life means nothing.'\n\nAbaddon's fists flexed. 'Then if you are so faithful, I dare you to speak, and we will see what affection the gods hold you in.'\n\n'You have seen it,' Layak said steadily. 'You can sense it. Horus is failing. He is too strong to defeat, but it may be that he is too weak to claim victory. The Pantheon gift him with great ability, but the favour of the gods carries a steep price.'\n\n'Speak clearly,' Abaddon said.\n\n'Horus' soul is bright with divine might, but it burns. Mighty as his being is, it is finite. He is not invincible in this world or the other. If we delay too long, he will be devoured by the power he commands.'\n\nAbaddon did not want to recognise it. He could not, but he knew, looking at his father's blank face, that what Layak said was true.\n\n'How long does he have?'\n\n'Long enough, perhaps,' said Layak. 'His will is strong.'\n\n'But if it is not strong enough? If he fails now, if his soul burns out before the task is done, what will happen?'\n\n'Then, my lord, what happens will be what has always happened before.' Layak looked at Abaddon. 'There shall come another champion of Chaos.'\n\n'There are three weapons in the armoury of the victorious. Endurance, Belief and Loyalty.'\n\n- Monito san Vastall, First General-Maximus of the Lucifer Blacks\n\n'There is no foe so powerful or so innumerable that we cannot overcome them with single-minded determination. Our weapons are simply an extension of our will, and it is our will that shall conquer the galaxy.'\n\n- Warmaster Horus, address to the Ullanor Triumph\n\n'Faith exists to be tested.'\n\n- Lorgar Urizen, Lectitio Divinitatus\n\nHimalazia, undisclosed location, date unknown\n\nThe smog of hundreds of engines blackened the sky, adding to the gloom of the filth-choked heavens. The thunder of tanks and transports, some the size of city blocks, created a deafening wave of sound that reverberated from the mountainsides, an assault on ears already numbed by the winds of the high Himalazia.\n\nThe growl of machine voices all but drowned out human shouts, even those amplified by voxmitters. Electronic clarions howled into the whirl of noise, sounding the advance or stand-to, their modulated calls overlapping.\n\nEverything was sudden movement, dust billowing from treads and boots alike.\n\n'This is it.' General-Captain Egwu did not raise her voice, but her words were carried by the tongues of those under her command. 'Everyone stand ready.'\n\nBeside her, Zenobi Adedeji fidgeted with the cover of the banner she carried, eyes flicking between her company commander and the scene of organised bedlam being enacted around the troopers from Addaba Hive.\n\n'Everything we have done, the oaths we have sworn, the hardships we have endured, has led to this moment.' Now Egwu shouted, not simply to be heard, but filled with passion. Her remaining eye stared wide amongst the burn scars that covered most of her face, fresh tissue pink against her dark skin. 'Now is the time we strike at the enemy! Our families laboured and died to deliver us to this place. Our courage and determination have carried us this far. We may not live beyond this day, but our deeds will!'\n\n'Now?' asked Zenobi, her voice quavering with emotion, a shaking hand reaching towards the cover of the standard.\n\n'Yes,' said the general-captain. 'Now.'\n\nThe Lord of Iron\n\nFarewells\n\nAn honour bestowed\n\nThe Iron Blood, Terran near orbit, seventy hours before assault\n\nPatches of static in the holo-display vexed Perturabo, causing him pain in a way that a wound to his flesh could not. Every blur marring the projected image was a failure of surveyors, each a gap in his knowledge.\n\nHis only companions were the six automatons of his Iron Circle, stationed at regular intervals around the periphery of the octagonal chamber. They stood with their shields raised, mauls dormant, the only movement that of their ocular lenses, which whirred and clicked as they followed the pacing of their creator.\n\n'I could extrapolate the defences hidden from me,' Perturabo thought aloud to his bodyguard. Their unquestioning silence was a welcome break from the ceaseless doubts and queries that spilled from his subordinates of late. 'I have perfect recollection of other works raised by Dorn, and by patterning those memories with what is shown here I can fill the gaps to a high degree of accuracy.'\n\nHe stared at a glimmering hololith that filled most of his planning chamber aboard the Iron Blood, as though force of will could make it offer up its secrets.\n\n'Extrapolation is not fact,' he growled. 'There is too much at stake for assumption, no matter how well informed.'\n\nHis mind, his military genius, was the key Horus needed to unlock the palace of his father, but it needed data like an army needed supplies.\n\nHe stepped into the display, his massive suit of armour hissing and wheezing. Its shadow obliterated whole sectors of the Sanctum Imperialis as he strode to examine one area in particular. He crouched, coming eye to eye with a fictional defender standing on the Ultimate Wall.\n\nThe yellow of Dorn's Legion was spread everywhere, though it was concentrated around the north-east and south-west. The red of the Blood Angels was strongest to the south-east, where Mortarion's Death Guard had launched a damaging but ultimately unsuccessful assault near the Helios Gate.\n\nThe Khan's White Scars were harder to place. They had sallied forth against Mortarion in support of Sanguinius, but had since been seen in several other battles to the north and west of that attack. The precise whereabouts of the primarchs themselves was a factor to be considered, but impossible to ascertain with any degree of timeliness or certainty.\n\nRaising the fingers of his left hand, he gestured and the display rotated around him, placing him behind the wall so that he was looking out across the Katabatic Plains surrounding the Palace.\n\nThe Warmaster's forces were rendered in a more abstract sense; series of runes, numbers and sigils denoting troop type, strength, current morale estimates, longevity of engagement, and half a dozen other factors.\n\nAnd there were more features, sketched with a nomenclature he was still creating. These were the forces of the warp, whose powers he had only just started to investigate. Daemons. Possessed legionaries. Word Bearers and Thousand Sons sorcerers.\n\nAnd his brothers. Swirls of arcane conjunctions between the real and the imaginary, with a foot in the world of the mortal and immortal alike. Angron, so determined to prove himself, unable to hold his wrath, was still trying the defences at Helios. Mortarion had not personally attempted to breach the Emperor's shield yet, and at the command of Horus was redirecting efforts to the south-west, attacking a twenty-kilometre stretch of wall near to the bastion of the Saturnine Gate. The Emperor's Children and Fulgrim, who Perturabo considered the least trustworthy of Horus' other lieutenants, had been engaging the defenders to the west and north, without any breakthrough.\n\nOf Magnus there was no sign, but his Legion commanders had been content to take assignment from Perturabo and invested the south-west of the continent-city, supporting the efforts of the Death Guard.\n\nAll of his brothers were baulked at the walls still, held back by the last and most powerfully enigmatic variable in the whole war.\n\nThe Emperor.\n\nSo many questions Perturabo could scarcely think of them, much less attempt to provide answers. Queries that stretched back decades, strategies and decisions he had been picking apart since first he'd come into the presence of his creator.\n\nBut it was equally simple to dismiss most of the unease. Questions of why his father had acted in certain ways, why He had treated His sons the way He had, were now irrelevant. All that was left was the how of the matter. It was connected to the powers of the warp. If Perturabo could unpick that relationship, he could br"}
{"text":"less attempt to provide answers. Queries that stretched back decades, strategies and decisions he had been picking apart since first he'd come into the presence of his creator.\n\nBut it was equally simple to dismiss most of the unease. Questions of why his father had acted in certain ways, why He had treated His sons the way He had, were now irrelevant. All that was left was the how of the matter. It was connected to the powers of the warp. If Perturabo could unpick that relationship, he could break apart the psychic wards that held back his brothers.\n\n'Titans,' he reminded himself. 'The Warmaster needs our Titans to break the siege. He is right - the war engines of our foes' Legios are a force we cannot yet counter.'\n\nThe reinforced plates of his armour rippled with projected light as he stepped back, fingers clenching and unclenching as he surveyed the Palace again.\n\n'There is only the one place,' he said, gesturing to zoom the display to the middle of the Palace, where the two great loops of the Eternity Wall and Ultimate Wall met. It was both the weakest and the strongest point of the entire complex. If it were to fall, the entire fortress-city would be vulnerable; protected from both sides by immense fortifications, it would be death to any enemy that dared entry.\n\n'But you left a key in the lock, Rogal,' said Perturabo. The display cycled closer, flickering with more static as the required data for the level of detail was unavailable. Even so, the edifice that drew his eye was plain to see, so tall that it made the surrounding walls and Palace seem like models though they were each ten kilometres tall and more. The lord of the Iron Warriors grimaced at the lack of recent reconnaissance. 'The Lion's Gate space port. All but part of the wall itself, like a growth on an artery. One cut here and Horus can move whatever he desires into the Palace.'\n\nYet failure would be costly, and victory only a little less so. The Lion's Gate space port was an immense fortress in its own right, an orbit-piercing city protected by shields, cannons and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.\n\n'Perhaps an attack against the wall, after all,' he said, panning the view to the north, drawing back to see more of the Imperial Palace.\n\nNo commander in their right mind would attempt a direct assault... Except that he was Perturabo, the Hammer of Olympia, and there was no wall he could not topple, even the defences of the Emperor's Throneworld arranged by Rogal Dorn. He was tested on all sides, but the greatest challenge was the one written in stone and guns and force fields upon the mountains of Himalazia. There were only two outcomes possible. Dorn's will prevailed, or Perturabo's genius overcame it. This would be his legacy, the triumph that no other could take from him.\n\nIf it cost him every warrior in his Legion, that was a price worth paying.\n\nAddaba Hive, Afrik, one hundred and seven days before assault\n\nThe shrill whistles of the officers set Zenobi's heart racing with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Around her the crowd of recruits surged towards the opening gates of the transit station, but she resisted the pull and held her ground, not yet called to succumb to the tide and the journey that was about to begin.\n\nThe sun was bright, as always, gleaming from the hub-keep of Addaba Hive, the only home she had known in her seventeen years of life. The transport yard jutted from the flank of the huge city-mound about four hundred metres up from the surrounding plains. Above, dozens more landing pads and shuttleways played host to a steady stream of craft, coming and going from the near-cloudless skies and forming a double line to the east.\n\nIt was not so dissimilar to any other day, for Addaba had always been a desert-bound industrial city, incessantly hungry and thirsty for orbital drops and the product of distant hydrofarms. In return, the output of its dozens of immense manufactories had been taken to the space ports and beyond.\n\nUntil four days after Zenobi's tenth birthday, when orders had come to cease production of the colony tractors and grain haulers that had poured by the thousand from Addaba's production lines.\n\nTanks. The Emperor needed tanks, and Addaba would provide.\n\nAnd along with that change of purpose had come the first rumours. The Great Crusade had stirred up an ancient enemy that was coming to Terra. An unknown xenos species had been discovered. Traitors within the Legiones Astartes had turned on the Emperor. Each tale had seemed more incredible than the last.\n\nThen the first of the Imperial Fists watch teams had arrived to oversee the new production and the rumours were quashed, replaced with a simple statement. Warmaster Horus was a traitor. Terra had to prepare for invasion.\n\nWith that, the Standard Templates for Rhino armoured carriers and their variants were provided to the manufactories and Addaba became part of the war effort.\n\nSeven years.\n\nTo some the war may have seemed a distant thing, but in Addaba it was a harsh, instant reality. For generations the factory-dynasties had served the Emperor, and their vassals had laboured for them on the production floors. Born to lowly labourers, Zenobi had nevertheless benefited from the scholasta, learning to read and write and conduct mathematics; skills that barely twenty years earlier had been restricted to the factory-dynasty members alone.\n\nShe had imagined herself as a shuttle pilot. She didn't want to leave Terra, or Addaba, but did want to spend time outside of its manufactories. 'Do well at maths, Zenobi,' they'd told her, and she'd tried really hard. So hard sometimes her head had ached from numbers and equations, her studies at least two years ahead of the rest of the tutor-group.\n\nAll of that had stopped when the order for tanks arrived. The Emperor required armoured fighting vehicles, not shuttle pilots. And to meet His demands every able pair of hands was needed.\n\nZenobi looked across to the great chimney stacks that soared from the lower levels of the hive. Dormant. Always Addaba had been a place wreathed in oily smog, the plains stained rainbow hues at its feet even as the air sparkled with gases and exhaust smoke.\n\n'Strange, yes?' She recognised the voice of Menber but didn't turn towards her cousin. 'Quiet.'\n\n'Dead.'\n\n'Not yet. Let's say asleep.' Menber laid a hand on her shoulder but still she did not turn away from her home.\n\nFourteen-hour shifts had been too much for children - even the Emperor was not that demanding. Eight hours a day had sufficed for Zenobi until she had turned fourteen, when it had increased to ten. On her eighteenth birthday, nine months away, she would have taken on full adult duties. The imminent arrival of Horus had spared her that.\n\nAddaba was no longer sending out the wares of its manufactories; now it sent out its people. Millions of them had left over the preceding days.\n\n'Why didn't they train us to drive the tanks we made?' Zenobi asked, at last turning to her cousin, picking up her kitbag and lasgun. 'We could have driven them in battle.'\n\n'That would have been too good,' said Menber, grinning. Though taller than Zenobi - almost any man was - he shared her slight build and round face. His skin was marked by lesion scars from a bout of rustpox he'd suffered as an infant, so that his cheeks in particular looked to be stippled with paler brown.\n\n'Why bother?' They both turned their heads to find Captain Egwu standing close at hand, arms crossed, her baton tapping her shoulder. While they were dressed in their light brown factory coveralls - newly decorated with regimental, company and platoon badges for Epsilon Platoon, First Company of the Addaba 64th Defence Corps - Yennu Egwu wore a trim uniform suit of deep blue, her dark curls braided tightly to allow a cap with a gold peak to sit on her abundant hair.\n\n'Overse- captain!' Menber saluted, bringing his heels together smartly as he did so. Zenobi brought her hand up a second later, eyes directed to the ferrocrete at her feet.\n\n'Look at me, Trooper Adedeji.'\n\nZenobi met the captain's dark gaze.\n\n'You asked a question. Do you want the answer?'\n\n'Yes... captain.'\n\nEgwu tapped the end of her plain baton against the side of Zenobi's lasgun.\n\n'It takes time to learn to drive a tank, trooper. Rogal Dorn, in his wisdom, concluded that our hours were better spent building them than being taught how to operate them. Other folk, menials and clerks of distant hives, contributed nothing to the direct war effort and so their time was best spent learning to be tank drivers, pilots and gunners.'\n\n'I understand, captain.'\n\n'You have been given basic infantry training, a lasgun and sufficient power packs for three hundred shots. It will take us several days to reach our placement. We do not know when we will be called upon to engage the enemy. Until that time you will drill every day and hone your marksmanship, close-quarters combat skills and tactical knowledge.'\n\n'I look forward to improving myself, captain, and fighting for the cause.'\n\n'I know you do, Zenobi.' A rare smile curved the captain's full lips. 'The Adedeji were amongst the first to dedicate themselves to our endeavour. Your tireless work on the production line is appreciated, and I expect will be duplicated on the line of battle.'\n\nShe looked at both of them and then cast her gaze towards the mass of humanity advancing slowly through the gates of the transit station. The quad rotors of large heli-transports thudded louder than the din of ten thousand conversations, muted by the kilometre that stretched between the group and the main landing site. Bladed craft lifted up, their places on the embarkation apron taken seconds later by a constant stream of descending heli-transports.\n\n'It defies belief, does it not?' said Egwu. 'Somewhere else, a hive like ours spent all its days making these transports. All over Terra, each part dedicated to the whole endeavour according to its capabilities and the designs of Rogal"}
{"text":"er than the din of ten thousand conversations, muted by the kilometre that stretched between the group and the main landing site. Bladed craft lifted up, their places on the embarkation apron taken seconds later by a constant stream of descending heli-transports.\n\n'It defies belief, does it not?' said Egwu. 'Somewhere else, a hive like ours spent all its days making these transports. All over Terra, each part dedicated to the whole endeavour according to its capabilities and the designs of Rogal Dorn.'\n\n'By the will of the Emperor,' added Menber.\n\n'By His will indeed were we set to our tasks,' said Egwu. 'Dorn's was the hand, but His was the thought that moved it, and He has had mastery over us for our whole lives.'\n\n'And those of our ancestors, captain,' said Zenobi. 'Long the forges of Addaba have burned for the glory of the Emperor and the conquest of His domains.'\n\n'And now we fight to protect what is ours,' said the captain.\n\nThey stood in silence and Zenobi contemplated the meaning of the course she was about to embark upon. The mobilisation confirmed that Horus was coming. There were quiet rumours that forces of the Warmaster had already reached the outer defences of the Solar System and been repelled. That had been followed by an increase in recruitment through the cradlespur, as the moment of truth came closer and closer.\n\n'Do you think we'll see Addaba again?' Menber asked the question that had been loitering at the back of Zenobi's thoughts.\n\n'Unlikely,' Egwu replied bluntly, crossing her arms once more. 'Even if any of us survive this, what we are moving towards will change our lives and Terra forever. This is the end of an age but also the beginning of a new, brighter era.'\n\nThe thought cheered Zenobi and she nodded, taking a step forward, her renewed eagerness propelling her towards the transports.\n\n'A moment, Trooper Adedeji,' said Egwu, holding out her baton. The captain turned and signalled to her staff, who were gathered a few metres away. Lieutenant Okoye broke away from the others, carrying a long pole swathed in a canvas tube. 'This is for you.'\n\nZenobi stared wide-eyed as the lieutenant presented her with the standard.\n\n'The company colours,' Egwu told her. Menber laughed and clapped Zenobi on the shoulder.\n\n'Congratulations, cousin, you're going to carry our colours!'\n\nZenobi looked at the standard and then back at her captain.\n\n'Take it...' said Egwu.\n\nThe trooper shouldered her lasgun and took the proffered banner, feeling the smoothness of the lightweight pole in her grip and the weight of the cloth furled beneath the plain canvas. She reached a hand towards the cover, but Okoye grabbed her wrist with a warning look.\n\n'Not yet,' he said, pulling her hand away.\n\n'I am entrusting you with these colours, Zenobi, because I know that I can,' said Egwu, laying a hand on her arm. 'It is an honour and a responsibility. If you fall, another will take them up, but it is your privilege and duty never to lose this standard. Never.'\n\nHer stare was intense and just for an instant Zenobi was afraid: afraid that she was not worthy, that she would not be equal to the task. The standard, like others that were being taken from the hive, had been made by the Sendafan tribes in their own workshops.\n\nThe rulers of the Imperium had not seen fit to provide colours for most of their newly raised regiments. What need did conscripted menials and drafted notaries have for martial pride? The meaning was obvious, despite the messages calling upon all citizens of Terra to be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice: some sacrifices were more expected than others.\n\nShe stroked the concealing fabric, as if she could feel the stitches within, and from them the hours of care that had gone into the creation of the artefact. Days of work. Days rationed between the back-breaking stints on the line. Days huddled around smuggled lumen and naked flame, tired fingers working with thread and material scavenged from across the work shifts - not even yarn had been spared the all-consuming audit required by the Emperor's war effort.\n\nPerhaps Egwu read something of her doubts in her gaze and the captain's grip on Zenobi's arm tightened.\n\n'You more than any other know why we must fight. Our futures depend upon what we do next. Your family, your tribe, the people of Addaba and all of humanity will be led by our example. I trust you, Trooper Adedeji. Trust yourself too.'\n\n'I will, captain.' Zenobi shifted her grip on the standard, holding it in the crook of her left arm with her lasgun so that she could pull up her hand in salute to the officer. 'Thank you. I swear that I will not fail you, or our people.'\n\nA simple plan\n\nFamily\n\nA new commander\n\nThe Iron Blood, Terran near orbit, sixty-nine hours before assault\n\nArriving at the doors to Perturabo's chamber, Kydomor Forrix was surprised to find that he was not alone in seeking audience with the primarch. Clad in full battle-plate and helm, the warrior that had been Barban Falk waited in the antechamber. Kroeger was there also, a hunched, hulking figure in Terminator armour who seemed on the verge of hurling himself at the closed portal. Each tread of his boots on the bare deck rang around the small room, accompanied by bull-like exhalations of frustration.\n\nThey both turned at Forrix's approach. There was a glimmer of something through the lenses of Falk's helm, while Kroeger's gaze was a mixture of confusion and annoyance.\n\n'Why are you here, Falk?' Forrix demanded, striding into the antechamber.\n\n'I am the Warsmith,' the warrior replied. It sounded like Falk, tinged with the metallic ring of the external address system. Except for the studied enunciation, of someone taking care with every word issued. 'Address me as such.'\n\n'There are a dozen warsmiths on this ship and its attendant flotilla,' said Forrix with a curled lip. 'Why do you assume the singular title? And you didn't answer my question - what are you doing hanging at the Lord of Iron's door like a hound waiting to be whipped by its master? Were you summoned?'\n\n'I heard word that you sought the primarch's attention alone,' Falk admitted.\n\n'Alone being the operative word.'\n\n'We are the Trident, we should speak as one with the primarch. Unless you are seeking singular audience in an effort to undermine our father's confidence in me.'\n\n'It would be harder to undermine a child's wall of bricks.' Forrix turned his eye to Kroeger, who returned the attention with a belligerent stare. 'And you?'\n\n'I followed him,' replied Kroeger with a flick of the head towards Falk.\n\nForrix rolled his eyes and turned back to the great double doors that barred entry to the chamber. He moved towards the ocular security device set above them and looked up.\n\n'I am here to see the primarch,' he announced.\n\nHis demand was met with a flat horn denying entry.\n\n'I have already tried entering,' said Falk. 'Do you think I would have waited here otherwise?'\n\nBefore Forrix could respond he was silenced by the grinding of bolts in the doorway. With a hydraulic hiss, the massive plasteel portals opened, a flickering stream of light bursting into the antechamber.\n\nThe hololith projector within was at full power, throwing the lord of the Legion into stark, shifting silhouette as he stepped slowly across a projected image of the Imperial Palace.\n\nForrix hurried forward, knowing no invitation would be issued. Kroeger and Falk followed on his heel. With a clank, the Iron Circle marched forward, shields and mauls raised. They turned in synchrony to form a line between their master and the Trident, each visitor targeted by the shoulder-mounted cannons of two automatons.\n\n'Lord Perturabo,' said Falk. 'It is your Trident, come to seek your orders.'\n\n'I haven't,' growled Forrix. 'I'm here with a way to break the siege.'\n\nPerturabo straightened, taller even than the mindless bodyguards he had created.\n\n'Really?' Perturabo's voice rumbled around the chamber, heavy with menace.\n\nThe automatons parted to form a path towards the primarch. It looked like a guard of honour but Forrix knew better. Hesitation would invite instant criticism so he strode forward, stopped a few paces from his lord and crashed a gauntleted fist against his chest plastron in salute.\n\n'The space port, Lord of Iron. At the Lion's Gate.'\n\n'I have studied it in some detail.' The primarch's dark stare settled upon Forrix in the manner of a predator that had found its prey. 'What have you seen that I have not?'\n\n'A mistake, Lord of Iron. Dorn's overconfidence has left a flaw we can exploit.'\n\n'A mistake?' Perturabo's voice dropped to a dangerous whisper.\n\n'Leaving the space port intact so close to the wall is an error,' Forrix said. He was committed now, and plunged on for good or ill. 'If we can seize the port swiftly enough there will not be time to reinforce the defences separating it from the main wall.'\n\n'That is your plan?' The primarch's scorn was like knives scoring wounds in Forrix's pride. 'You think that a mistake? Dorn does not make mistakes! Seven years he has pondered every detail here. Nothing is in error. Nothing is where it is except by his design!'\n\nThe primarch stomped through the hololith like a metal giant attacking the city. His fists crashed into the projector, turning it into a cloud of shrapnel and sparks.\n\n'It is only by my superior intellect that his plans will be broken, his conceit revealed to the universe!' he roared.\n\nForrix stood his ground, pushing against every instinct that told him to back down. The remains of the hololith projector stuttered, strobing red and purple light across the chamber, like a malfunctioning blind grenade.\n\n'Perhaps his mistake is in underestimating you, Lord of Iron,' he said quickly. 'And maybe your doubters' lies have blinded you to your power also. Dorn would not think you daring enough to strike so boldly and decisively at a place that seems impregnable.'\n\n'No,' said Perturabo, but his rage was dissipating as his mind engaged with the issue pr"}
{"text":"m to back down. The remains of the hololith projector stuttered, strobing red and purple light across the chamber, like a malfunctioning blind grenade.\n\n'Perhaps his mistake is in underestimating you, Lord of Iron,' he said quickly. 'And maybe your doubters' lies have blinded you to your power also. Dorn would not think you daring enough to strike so boldly and decisively at a place that seems impregnable.'\n\n'No,' said Perturabo, but his rage was dissipating as his mind engaged with the issue presented. 'No, he taunts me with this flaw. It is too perfect... A trap. Dorn would see me commit to this attack and then reveal some secondary ploy in order to ensnare me and see me executed.'\n\nPerturabo's eyes roved across the Trident, not really seeing them.\n\n'But I see you, Rogal. I will turn the trap against you.' The primarch's gaze finally settled on his subordinates and a grim smile twisted his face. 'I will not be lured into the maw of the beast, but that does not mean I cannot ram my fist down its throat and rip out its innards.'\n\nFalk stepped up quickly, fist banging in salute.\n\n'I would be honoured to lead the attack,' said the Warsmith.\n\n'I am sure you would,' Perturabo replied with a dismissive sneer. 'No, not you.'\n\n'I-' began Forrix but the primarch cut him off.\n\n'Kroeger shall have battle command,' announced Perturabo.\n\nPractice allowed Forrix to internalise the bellow of rage that stirred in his gut - to have given the slightest hint of dissent was to risk immediate and fatal censure. He remained passive, showing not the least reaction that Perturabo's inhuman senses and paranoia might detect.\n\n'I am honoured, my primarch.' Kroeger's brow was as furrowed with peaks and troughs as the Himalazia. 'Surprised.'\n\n'It is time that you had opportunity to prove your full worth.'\n\n'The Lion's Gate will fall to us, I give my bond,' Kroeger continued, somewhat unnecessarily. There was no need to iterate the price of failure, for the blame would not fall solely at the feet of Perturabo if the Iron Warriors were baulked.\n\n'This is not a time for subtlety.' The Iron Circle drew back as Perturabo stalked through the strobing hololith, his cable-pierced scalp shining with glimmering beads of sweat. With unspoken intent, Forrix and Falk both retreated a few steps to leave Kroeger standing alone against the primarch. 'You are the most bloody-minded of my Trident, Kroeger. I know that you will not relent for a moment. I see the desire in you for brutal war, and the Lion's Gate will supply you with more brutality than any conflict you have seen before.'\n\n'Forrix, remain with me.'\n\nPerturabo's command stopped the warsmith in mid-stride as he headed out of the primarch's chamber with the other two members of the Trident. The Lord of Iron seemed placid enough, his tone even, but Forrix knew well that the churning passion beneath the veneer could break forth in destructive rage. He spun on his heel and returned to stand to attention before his master.\n\nPerturabo said nothing more until the reverberation of the doors' closing clanged through the hall.\n\n'Hololith off. Lights on.' The lumen strips above flickered into a wan yellow gleam, banishing the shadows that had wreathed the primarch. For a few seconds Forrix remembered his commander as he had been at the height of his power and insight; before the Warmaster had corrupted him, turned ambition into arrogance, curiosity into obsession.\n\nThe moment passed as Perturabo's features twisted into a scornful grimace. He lifted armour-sheathed hands, fingers flexing in agitation. The warsmith wondered if his misgivings had been obvious, or perhaps some other act or inaction had slighted the lord of his Legion. Forrix kept calm and tried not to let Perturabo's paranoia infect him as it had so many that surrounded the primarch.\n\n'You think it wrong of me to appoint Kroeger to command this attack?'\n\nThe question was a gaping chasm opening in front of Forrix, but a lie could drag him into its depths as easily as the truth. Better he be damned in courage rather than cowardice.\n\n'He is inexperienced and lacking much strategic expertise,' said Forrix, keeping his criticism focused on Kroeger rather than his primarch. A little flattery would not hurt either. 'Only you have the breadth of knowledge and depth of concentration to unpick the lock set by Dorn.'\n\n'Though you were going to volunteer to command the Legion, were you not? Is that the role you see for yourself, Forrix? My heir?' Perturabo tilted his head, eyes narrowing. 'My successor?'\n\n'I am happy to rest in your long shadow, Lord of Iron.'\n\n'Indeed, you are.' Perturabo turned away and Forrix let his breath escape through gritted teeth, trying to relax every muscle that had bunched tight under the primarch's scrutiny. He almost flinched as Perturabo rounded on him again, but his lord's gaze passed over him swiftly and settled on the doorway, as though looking at the departed warsmiths.\n\n'Kroeger knows himself and his place well. He will fight this battle for victory, not as some stepping stone to further glory at my expense.'\n\nForrix clenched his jaw against the instinct to protest innocence. His pride was pierced by the implicit allegation, but better a wound to his ego than a greater injury to the body. Perturabo stroked an armoured finger across his chin, like a file rasping on metal. His silence loomed over Forrix, demanding he say something.\n\n'Kroeger is single-minded, that much I can say with certainty.'\n\n'Single-minded. Not easily distracted.' Perturabo smiled but there was little about his humour that Forrix could share. 'Trustworthy. Uncomplicated.'\n\n'All of those things,' Forrix agreed, wondering why Perturabo had bid him to remain. Evidently the primarch also realised he had not addressed his point.\n\n'Dorn has set a trap for me, and I intend to use Kroeger to spring it. The Emperor's Praetorian has laid his plans with guile and patience, doubtless trying to anticipate my every move, countering in advance every stratagem, ploy and tactic he has gleaned from my previous work. Be sure, Forrix, that every stone laid in this palace was done so in consideration of my arrival. As certain as our foes have been that Horus would one day reach Terra, my brother has been equally sure that it is my wit, my siegecraft, that would be the test of his defences.'\n\nPerturabo placed his palms together, fingers splayed against each other, his eyes wide with manic thought. His lips twisted in a terrible smile.\n\n'But he never contemplated one eventuality. It is beyond Dorn's ego to comprehend that I might step aside and allow another to fight in my place. Kroeger is unsophisticated, a dull tactician and an uncharismatic commander.'\n\nThe primarch left his evaluation hanging in the air just long enough for Forrix to play his appointed part in the dialogue.\n\n'Everything you are not, Lord of Iron,' he replied dutifully. He was rewarded by a nod and a smile that had all the benevolence of a hunting cat's stare. 'Dorn protects the Palace with the most complex lock ever devised, so you have given life to a sledgehammer to break it to pieces.'\n\n'Very good, Forrix. A sledgehammer to pick a lock.' There was a moment of genuine humour in the primarch's expression. 'Kroeger will blunder and bustle and hurl my warriors at the enemy without relent, and Dorn... My brother will try to pick out my will from the anarchy, try to dissect intent from Kroeger's pitiful strategies. He will be looking for every sign of me, and I will not be there.'\n\nForrix nodded, not trusting himself to speak any further in case his doubts betrayed him. Even so, he was sure of one thing, and finally found his voice.\n\n'I will do everything I can to ensure we are victorious, my lord.'\n\n'You will follow Kroeger's commands to the letter, even if they seem disastrous or nonsensical to you,' Perturabo insisted. 'I have schooled you myself in war, and though you can never approach me in generalship you have been an adept student. Even a fraction of my genius might show through if you interfere and I want to confound Dorn utterly. Am I understood?'\n\n'Perfectly, Lord of Iron,' said Forrix, raising his fist to his chest.\n\nPerturabo dismissed him with a gesture. As the doors creaked open to allow his exit, Forrix glanced back to see his master half-turned away, arms clenched about himself, fingers drumming on his armour while his lips moved wordlessly in thought. Forrix considered Perturabo's logic in appointing Kroeger to command.\n\nIt was a move of genius or madness, or quite likely both.\n\nDorn waits\n\nIn transit\n\nMortarion's gifts\n\nBhab Bastion, thirteen hours before assault\n\nThere was nowhere within or below the Imperial Palace that was peaceful. The din of war and the noise of its defenders permeated every stone. Yet if there was a place quieter than any other it was the Sanctuary of Satya, located on an offshoot of the Bhab Bastion that held the Grand Borealis Strategium. It was one of twelve identical chambers that ringed the buttress-tower, each a domed hall forty metres across reached by a single covered bridge. It was part of the oldest building, arranged according to the design of the Emperor before Dorn had been instructed to reshape the defences. It was also numbered among only half a dozen places that had been left intact on the specific command of the Emperor, along with such locations as the Hall of Victories and the Senatorum Imperialis.\n\nThe hall was open to the elements, the domed crystal roof that had once covered the circular chamber shattered by the shock wave of supersonic bombers flying too close. Pieces of it crunched underfoot as Dorn crossed the wooden floor. Behind him Rann followed, Sigismund at his side, while Malcador sat upon a bench ahead, staring out through the broken dome towards the south-east. The Sigillite held his staff across his lap, spine straight, his hood pulled back so that the distant flare of detonations shone from his forehead.\n\nDorn stopped a few "}
{"text":"l roof that had once covered the circular chamber shattered by the shock wave of supersonic bombers flying too close. Pieces of it crunched underfoot as Dorn crossed the wooden floor. Behind him Rann followed, Sigismund at his side, while Malcador sat upon a bench ahead, staring out through the broken dome towards the south-east. The Sigillite held his staff across his lap, spine straight, his hood pulled back so that the distant flare of detonations shone from his forehead.\n\nDorn stopped a few paces from the bench but said nothing. Rann felt that to speak would be to intrude upon something pristine, despite the scream of jets overhead and the muted thunder of explosions. There was a stillness about the Sanctuary of Satya that demanded respect and peace.\n\n'The enemy will make their next move soon,' said Malcador, still facing away. 'Their troops are at the wall and the aegis fails daily.'\n\n'It is only one defence of many,' said Dorn, folding his arms. 'It was never intended to protect us indefinitely. Horus can bombard for as long as he likes, shells and rockets never captured a city.'\n\n'That is the truth,' said Malcador. 'So Horus' warriors will come.'\n\n'Perhaps if you came to the Grand Borealis, I could better share with you the preparations.'\n\n'The clutter of all that information is not what I seek, Rogal.' Malcador half turned, one leg moving onto the bench, creasing his robe. Stern eyes regarded the primarch and his companions. 'You fill yourself with data, but this is a place of simplicity. A shrine to clarity.'\n\n'I do not take your meaning.'\n\n'No. A pity.' Malcador sighed. 'With as little of your military terminology as possible, what do you expect Horus to do next?'\n\n'Is my strategy to be questioned again?' Dorn jutted out his chin.\n\nRann thought his genefather's behaviour strange but had not been party to such conferences before. Few spoke to a primarch in such casual tones, but Malcador was the hand of the Emperor and clearly used to such encounters. Rann glanced at Sigismund but the First Captain's eyes were fixed on Rogal Dorn.\n\n'You have the confidence of the Emperor, Rogal, and I am not a strategist. I wish to keep the High Lords informed and would spare you the chore of addressing them yourself and being bombarded with petty concerns.'\n\nThe primarch relaxed a little and cast his eye towards Rann.\n\n'You have the latest reports, captain? What would be your assessment?'\n\n'Against all sense, the enemy appear to be mustering their strength for an attack against the Lion's Gate space port, my lord.'\n\n'Why would that be against all sense?' asked Malcador, standing up to face the Imperial Fists. 'It is a worthwhile objective.'\n\n'It is outside the wall itself, and is very secure, Lord Sigillite,' explained Rann. 'An attack there draws strength away from the main assault.'\n\nMalcador looked at Dorn, who had a finger lifted to his chin in thought.\n\n'Do you concur with Captain Rann's assessment?'\n\nThe primarch did not answer immediately. He strode past the bench to look out through the frame of the shattered dome. Rann followed his gaze, seeing the stretch of walls curving together at the massive edifice of the Lion's Gate, and as a towering adjunct to it, the space port beyond. Distance and the smog of war rendered it a vague stepped pyramid rising out of banks of multicoloured cloud, its summit lost in the lightning-fractured storm that roiled constantly across the upper atmosphere.\n\n'It could be a feint,' said the primarch finally. 'Having lost all orbital surveyors, there are massed movements beyond our sensors that we only learn of from scattered reports of physical sightings. While our gaze turns one way, perhaps Perturabo seeks advantage elsewhere.'\n\n'We should let him, my lords,' said Sigismund, speaking for the first time since he had answered Dorn's summons. 'Until the blow descends, any reaction benefits the foe more than us.'\n\n'What do you mean?' said Malcador. 'If we must make adjustments for an attack, better to start now.'\n\n'Our time is better spent deciding our next blow, rather than second-guessing the enemy's intent. We must press on with our chosen strategy, force the enemy to make hard choices rather than taking them ourselves.'\n\nRann saw Lord Dorn's jaw tighten at Sigismund's interjection and said nothing until the primarch's gaze turned to him. Lord Dorn nodded for Rann to continue.\n\n'It's true that we could chase ourselves in circles responding to every threat,' the lord seneschal told Malcador. 'I think we've learned enough from the void war not to trust appearances. Time is our ally, not the Warmaster's. Whatever gains Perturabo thinks he can make will take him time to achieve at the space port. For all that effort, there are other goals he might achieve more swiftly.'\n\n'It reminds me of something an ancient Terran general once said,' Malcador told them. 'Never interrupt the enemy while he is making a mistake.'\n\n'That concerns me,' said Dorn, who had continued to stare across the Imperial Palace at the vague apparition of the Lion's Gate. 'I can lay many charges at the feet of my brother, but idiocy is not one of them. If he is set upon taking the space port it is because it suits him in the grander scheme. If he was somehow to succeed, the captured port would serve him well in an assault against the Lion's Gate itself.'\n\n'Or suits Horus,' added Sigismund. 'We should not forget that it is the fallen Warmaster that commands the Lord of Iron. Perhaps it is Horus' folly, not Perturabo's mistake.'\n\n'A good point.' Malcador leaned on his staff, gripping it with both hands. 'There is the matter of intent. What gains might be made by the capture of the port?'\n\n'That's simple,' said Rann. 'The traitors could bring down larger ships close to the Palace. Bulk transports, even the Vengeful Spirit itself!'\n\n'Could there be... ritual significance?' asked Dorn. He looked ill at ease with the subject, in a way Rann had not thought possible of his primarch. The implication sent a shudder of apprehension through the lord seneschal, who had been engulfed by the daemonic assault upon the Phalanx and dared not imagine what his genefather had witnessed. 'Much of the opening assault was not to make physical gains, but to weaken the Emperor's psychic grip on Terra. Is there a further agenda that I do not understand?'\n\nMalcador looked away, uncomfortable with the question.\n\n'It is possible, yet impossible to know for sure,' he answered without looking at the primarch. 'Such matters are even less exact than military science.'\n\n'The defences at the Lion's Gate space port are considerable. I feel no need to reinforce them at this point,' Dorn said decisively. 'If Perturabo wishes to attack, we shall allow it and we shall stop it. To respond in any other way would be to risk weakening against a concerted effort elsewhere.'\n\n'I will make sure everything is in order,' said Sigismund.\n\n'No, you will remain with me for the time being,' countered Dorn. 'This matter requires a steady hand. Rann will take command of the forces in the space port.'\n\nThe implied admonishment shocked Rann, but if Sigismund thought to argue this judgement he gave no sign. Instead he acquiesced with a bowed head and bended knee. Rann followed suit, fist to his chest.\n\n'I am honoured, my lord.' Rann raised his gaze to the primarch. 'I will do my utmost to hold the port but suggest that I am no equal to the mind of the Lord of Iron. Would it not be better to personally lead the defence?'\n\n'I shall spare it due thought when needed and pass on such guidance as is required,' Dorn said in a measured tone, 'but I cannot risk being drawn into operational decisions when the whole Palace requires my attention. Should I have to extricate myself from the battle to deal with broader concerns it could prove disastrous to the fate of the Lion's Gate, and likewise if I am hesitant in response to wider developments because of local issues. As observed, it is Horus that commands and Perturabo that obeys. It could be the Warmaster's intent to draw me out, so that I am unready for attack elsewhere.'\n\n'The Legion will not fail you, my lord,' Rann said. His gaze moved past the primarch to Sigismund, who stared at the ground with jaw clenched, whatever emotions he was feeling only barely held in check. Rann stood up, still watching the First Captain. 'I will prepare my company to move to the Lion's Gate space port. I hope to see you soon enough, brother. Your sword would be a welcome addition if our lord permits it.'\n\nSigismund replied with only a flicker of a nod, eyes meeting Rann's gaze for a split second before returning to the floor.\n\n'As Lord Dorn wills it,' he said tersely. 'Glad would be my sword to join you in this coming battle.'\n\nWhatever vexed the First Captain, it was not Rann's doing and he departed feeling better for the knowledge.\n\nDjibou transition station, Afrik, one hundred and six days before assault\n\nThe heli-transports headed down into the dawn light, which seemed somehow significant to Zenobi. A new beginning, something like that. She had left Addaba behind but was not sure what came next.\n\nZenobi was fortunate enough to be within sight of one of the small windows that pierced the hundred-metre-long cabin. She'd seen nothing all flight, but daylight now brought a fresh view.\n\nThe coast of an ancient, dead sea ran in a jagged line from north to south, and upon the very lip of the shoreline sprawled a maze of roads, landing strips and railway lines. Excited muttering greeted the sight and those further inside the fuselage left their seats and crowded across the craft for a glimpse of their destination.\n\nZenobi remained silent as her eye tried to follow kilometre after kilometre of wide highway and looping tracks. Bridges and tunnels turned the criss-cross of incoming traffic into a bewildering maze, half-seen past the constant flights of heli-transports and stratocruisers.\n\n'Why don't they just fly us all the way there?' someone behind her a"}
{"text":"xcited muttering greeted the sight and those further inside the fuselage left their seats and crowded across the craft for a glimpse of their destination.\n\nZenobi remained silent as her eye tried to follow kilometre after kilometre of wide highway and looping tracks. Bridges and tunnels turned the criss-cross of incoming traffic into a bewildering maze, half-seen past the constant flights of heli-transports and stratocruisers.\n\n'Why don't they just fly us all the way there?' someone behind her asked.\n\n'Fuel.'\n\nZenobi turned to find Lieutenant Okoye standing to the end of the bench on her left. 'Need to save every drop.'\n\n'And so why not build the railway all the way to Addaba?' asked Menber.\n\nOkoye leaned on the back of the bench and shrugged dismissively.\n\n'Because Dorn chose not to. Rail lines are permanent and might be used by the enemy. There's probably a dozen of these air fleets moving people all over Terra, and when the fighting starts, they'll still be useful, but idle tracks won't. Efficiency and redundancy. If you ever wonder why something is the way it is... that's your answer, right there. Efficiency.'\n\nThe timbre of the engine noise rose in pitch and out of the corner of her eye she saw that they were only a few hundred metres up.\n\n'Better sit down, sir,' a voice from the back warned the lieutenant.\n\nAll across the compartment troopers were dragging themselves back to their seats, their squad leaders and officers rapping out commands. Okoye swept a last warning look over his charges and returned to his place a little way ahead of Zenobi.\n\nThe craft started juddering as it hit the swell of heat coming up from the massive transportation hub, the pilot dipping the nose hard to compensate for the sudden lift. Clattering and shouts filled the cabin as poorly lodged weapons skittered from their places and troopers that had not secured themselves tumbled from their benches. Zenobi rammed her feet into the foot loops and pushed herself back against the bench, fingers moving to the haft of the banner that was wedged between her and Menber.\n\nShe felt his hand on hers and glanced aside, drawing reassurance from the gesture and his expression.\n\nThe heli-transport dropped the last few metres and landed heavily, massive suspension coils squealing in protest, the packed defence troopers calling out and swearing as they were once more thrown around the crowded compartment.\n\n'Stay seated!' bawled a sergeant near the front, the call echoed by other squad leaders along the rows.\n\nThe address system crackled into life.\n\n'Companies and platoons will leave in reverse order of embarkation.' Egwu's voice was tinny, almost unrecognisable. 'Form up when ordered. No pushing and no loitering. We clear the transport in ten minutes or the whole company will be on reduced rations as punishment. Other troopers are waiting for this ride.'\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, six hours before assault\n\nIt had once been known as the Palatine Arc, a crescent of palatial dorm-blocks for high-ranking administrators that covered nearly a hundred square kilometres inside the Europa Wall. Before the erection of the defences, the kilometre-high towers had enjoyed views of newly verdant mountain valleys to the south of the Imperial Palace. Each had housed only a handful of diplomats, arch-clerks and other privileged attendees of the Terran Council, in hierarchy only second to the seated Senatorum members.\n\nAfter concerted efforts by the Death Guard, the Palatine Arc had been renamed by the refugees that inhabited it.\n\nPoxville.\n\nThe attempted levity did nothing to alleviate the suffering of those within. Supplies were dropped once a day by gyrocopter, crates of protein powder and barrels of barely drinkable water. Nothing else. A few brave medicae - some of them already marked by one of many virulent diseases - ran clinics inside the quarantined zone. If they saved any it was only so that they would endure longer in a pit of unremitting misery. Hundreds every day were transported into Poxville, but not a single man or woman was allowed out.\n\nStationed upon freshly raised walls that surrounded the ruins of the Administratum buildings, Katsuhiro felt more like a ghost than a man, even more wraithlike than when he'd been in the depths of battle shock on the outer defences. He had heard rumour of a creed that declared the Master of Mankind a divinity, but if that was so then Katsuhiro was forced to wonder why he would be punished by the God-Emperor in such malicious fashion. To be delivered from the battle without had seemed a blessing. He had thought to stand at one of the great bastions, but instead, like thousands that had faced the plague-ridden sons of Mortarion, he had been despatched to guard the quarantine zone erected around Poxville.\n\nDay after day the Death Guard kept up their attacks. He had almost laughed when he had seen the engines of war lumbering up within range of the walls. Crude-looking catapults - trebuchets and onagers his new captain had called them. Powered by twisted rope or sinew, made of rotting wood and rusting metal, they looked too weak to break even a hovel, never mind the immensity of the Ultimate Wall.\n\nBut the wall had not been their target, and their payloads had not been explosives. Instead they hurled infected carcasses, skulls filled with noxious slime and sealed with wax, pots of biting flies and other ammunition suited to a war twenty-nine thousand years in the past. But the cruel genius was that these infectious bombs were not of sufficient speed nor mass to trigger the void shields. It was not worth the might of macro cannons and volcano cannons to pick off the engines one by one, and so they crept forward beneath the gaze of the mightiest guns. Day after day small-arms gunfire raked the approaching weapons, and day after day enough made it through the fusillade to bombard Poxville for a few minutes.\n\nIt was not lost on Katsuhiro that the buildings once inhabited by the lords of the Administratum, the highest notaries of tax, account and statistic, were now home to an unknown number of infected. A few days after internment had begun, the authorities had stopped counting. Ten thousand? Twenty? Katsuhiro thought it a low estimate.\n\nThose with any cogency left stayed away from the encircling walls. Those without were met by las-fire if they approached within one hundred metres. Even this cordon was little comfort to Katsuhiro. Plague could carry far on the wrong wind. Sometimes it seemed as though strange eddies would stir up the fumes and guide them towards one part of the wall. Sirens would wail, reminding him of the gas attacks on the trenches. He had been lucky so far, never his stretch of wall. But to hear that distant alarm dragged him back to those sickening days and nights where painful death was only ever a moment away.\n\nShooting the infected did not cause him any grief. He was inured to the misery of others, concerned only with his own survival. At times he was jealous of them, driven mad so they no longer knew what would become of them. Death was a mercy - a mercy he craved on the long, cold night shifts when the moans of the dying were loud enough to be heard over the continual bombardment, and the silhouettes of staggering pox-carriers could be seen against the fires burning deep inside the quarantine zone.\n\nThere were stories that the plagues of the Death Guard were not merely mortal. Some said they had seen the dead walk again. A lifetime ago, before he had set foot on that train of conscripts, Katsuhiro might have scoffed at such claims. Now... Now, he was unconvinced, he had not seen it with his own eyes. But if he did, it would not surprise him.\n\nKatsuhiro was sustained by a single purpose, one which he pursued in his down-watch when he could. Somewhere the traitor Ashul - or Doromek, or whatever he was called - was inside the Imperial Palace. Ashul lived only because Katsuhiro had been a coward. He still was, but his guilt gnawed at him even more than his fear. He made enquiries when he could. His first adamant questions had been met with suspicion, and he had calmed himself lest he be thought one of the raving infected that he now stood guard against. And, when his health had returned a little, he'd realised that if he made too much fuss over an officer named Doromek, the traitor might hear of it.\n\nKatsuhiro knew that finding one man amongst the teeming millions was near-impossible. It did not matter, because the search was the only thing that gave him any purpose. Without that quest to restore his pride and silence his unquiet conscience, Katsuhiro had nothing to live for.\n\nFafnir Rann - Lord Seneschal, Captain of the First Assault Cadre, Imperial Fists.\n\nLion's Gate space port\n\nChosen One\n\nA long walk\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex exterior, seven hours before assault\n\nIt belied Rann's credulity to think that he was atop something that had been built by humans. The Imperial Palace had vast towers and walls, and he'd spent as much time in drop pods and gunships as any legionary, but standing on an open observatory platform thirteen kilometres above sea level was a singular experience.\n\nHe turned and looked at the soaring edifice behind him, astounded that it continued another sixty kilometres up. He was glad of his helm and armour, able to stand in the clear air and look down upon the massed cloud banks that boiled across the Palace. Without his war-plate he'd be frozen in moments and dying of oxygen starvation. The only moisture was a gentle drift from the vaporators of the Space Marines' power plants, tiny snowflakes falling from the vents and drifting away. Were their suits not environmentally sealed their bodies would have been desiccated and preserved for centuries. It made Rann think of the mummified remains of the Old Kings his people's ancestors had entombed on the mountaintops of Inwit.\n\nRann fancied that he could see glimpses of stars between the aurora of the upper shields, a"}
{"text":"ygen starvation. The only moisture was a gentle drift from the vaporators of the Space Marines' power plants, tiny snowflakes falling from the vents and drifting away. Were their suits not environmentally sealed their bodies would have been desiccated and preserved for centuries. It made Rann think of the mummified remains of the Old Kings his people's ancestors had entombed on the mountaintops of Inwit.\n\nRann fancied that he could see glimpses of stars between the aurora of the upper shields, and the flickering shadow of void-ships passing across them. A product of imagination, most likely, but symptomatic of the sense of wonder he felt standing beneath the uncaring gaze of the upper skies. He was far more certain about the plasma-plumes of drop-craft he watched to the east, rising and falling against the coming night. The flare of other suborbital aircraft criss-crossed the twilight, far above the squadrons that duelled below the cloud cover.\n\nThe space port's immensity was impossible to bring down to human scale, so he regarded it in purely strategic terms as he would a city or smaller fortification. The outer portions of each layer, up to about a kilometre deep, were called the skin; this gave way to the mantlezone around the innermost ten kilometres, which itself was known as the core-wards, or just the core.\n\nIt had three main vertical portions, each of which roughly equated to atmospheric layers. The broadest and most populous area was the base, rising to his position, known as the tropophex, though the workers that lived and laboured within its shell referred to it as Low District. It was about this lower region that the bulk of the air transport pads clustered, where both jet and rotary craft could land and take cargo.\n\nThrough the tropopause into the stratosphere were a thousand storeys of transit machinery, sealed habitation towers and intermediary orbital platforms, where craft capable of both void and atmospheric travel could join. Sky City, properly known as the stratophex, controlled progress between the uppermost level and the bulk of the space port. These jutting skyquays were linked by communication and power cables, as though some vast spider had spun its web haphazardly over the flanks of the mountain-port. The skin was uninhabited, at least by anything more sentient than a servitor. Port labourers used envirosuits and powered crane harnesses when outside their habs.\n\nThe remaining spire soared over six successively narrower towers, and then broadened to a twelve-kilometre-wide landing pad at the summit. Starspear, it was called by the locals, a far more poetic designation than its official title: the mesophex. At its height atmospheric pressure was almost non-existent, allowing void craft to touch down and load directly into the immense conveyor shafts that dropped down through the core. An orbital lift mechanism provided counterweight propulsion, so that when fully in operation a constant stream of immense carriages rose and lowered from the landing platform. They were dormant now, locked down in case of attack.\n\nIt left Rann feeling overwhelmed, a tiny figure in yellow armour, not even a speck on the flank of the tallest structure on Terra. He turned to the warrior on his left, a lieutenant-commander by the name of Sevastin Haeger, a Terra-born recruit.\n\n'Did you know I was a Chosen One?' said Rann.\n\n'Your pardon, captain?'\n\nThe lieutenant-commander was Rann's subordinate in charge of the eighteen thousand Imperial Fists currently assigned to the space port's defence. Rann had a further seven hundred and ninety thousand non-legionary personnel under his authority, as well as several wings of fighter craft and direct-attack bombers. The inhabitants of the port had worked until the last moments of defeat in orbit, bringing in materials and survivors. They had refused to leave since then, barricading their homes and arming themselves, so that the Lion's Gate militia probably numbered even more than the registered soldiery. They would fight to protect their homes but Rann considered his command of them to exist in title only.\n\n'I was a Chosen One,' Rann explained. He turned and the hundred-strong honour guard turned with him, thirty warriors of his personal Huscarls leading the company with shields raised. For the moment an attendant servitor carried his shield, though his paired axes were hung on his belt. 'My people raised me in the belief that I was marked for greatness, destined to be a powerful leader of the tribe.'\n\n'Why?' asked Haeger, confused. Rann's laugh made him realise the question was an importune one and softened his doubts. 'What caused your people to have such a belief?'\n\n'There is a great underground river on Inwit. It flows along the boundary between light and dark for thousands of kilometres, almost a kilometre below the ice plains. It has hundreds of tributaries and many of the tribes follow its course from one ice hive to the next. My people, the Rann, were quite far downstream of this mighty flow. The River of Life, we called it, the Bringer of Fates. The Dorn, our noble lord's adopted people, controlled the headlands of the mightiest tributary. Anyway, I was found by my mother abandoned on the riverbank.\n\n'There was a woman's body close at hand, starved and pierced by wounds, and the corpses of two men armoured in the style of the Dorn. It was reasoned that she had fled them, to protect the child. Some thought I should be given back, lest the Rann earned the wrath of the Dorn, but my mother said she would slit the throat of anyone that tried, and offered the explanation that the Dorn feared I would rise up against them one day and that was why they wanted me dead.'\n\n'They believed her?'\n\n'My mother was a formidable woman, and a deft hand with a knife.' Rann took one last look at the skies before the Space Marines passed into the vaulted arch of the compression chamber. 'I was raised in this belief until puberty, learning from the greatest of the Rann. Blade, hunting, sewing, cooking.'\n\n'Sewing?'\n\n'You've seen nothing beautiful until you've seen Inwit stitchcraft, lieutenant-commander.' Rann stopped, his train of thought derailed by the interruption. 'What was I saying?'\n\n'The Chosen One story,' prompted Sergeant Ortor, with the tone of a man who had heard it more than several times.\n\n'Right. There I was, all ready to become leader of the Rann on my transition to adulthood, though I was a bit wary of waging war on the Dorn, when the Lord Praetorian arrived and everything changed. The first time he came downriver everybody of the Rann knew their Chosen One was a poor imitation of the real thing.'\n\n'And how did you end up as one of the Legion?' asked Haeger. There was a chorus of groans from the Huscarls.\n\n'Perhaps another time,' said Rann.\n\nHe turned as the armoured portal began to grind shut, and saw again the distant lights of hundreds of landing craft. Rann knew enough to conclude there was no other reason for their appearance other than as a prelude to an assault on the Lion's Gate space port. The reports had alluded to it, but he had wanted to see it with his own eyes.\n\n'I need to speak with Lord Dorn. This isn't a feint, and we're going to need more guns.'\n\nDjibou transition station, Afrik, one hundred and six days before assault\n\nThere was a sense of solidity that came from a large body of people moving together with a united purpose. Though no order was given, Zenobi found herself falling into step with those around her, finding the natural rhythm that joined them. As on the factory lines, there was a harmony between the troopers, an instinctual togetherness derived from long acquaintance and practice. Just as the line had its own pace and routines, so the work groups that had become defence corps squads settled into a unified movement.\n\nThe transports had deposited them and many thousands of others on a raised apron, after a brief glimpse of the dizzying sprawl of roads and rails. Since landing, Zenobi had seen nothing but the others around her and the lightening sky above.\n\nShe had no idea where they were going next and the thought was oddly liberating. All she could do was move with the crowd, directed by the officers and the course of the wide rampways and bridges - she knew they were still high up by the cold bite in the wind, like when she used to steal a few moments on the upper hive-skin between shifts.\n\nThe drone of engines and clatter of rail carts created a backdrop to the tramping of booted feet. There was little chatter - after nearly a day in close confines with each other everyone was content with their own thoughts.\n\nOver time the footfalls became even more regular, a rhythmic thudding that reminded her of pneumatic die cutters and pounding shell-hammers.\n\nA few metres ahead of Zenobi a woman raised her voice, the words familiar to anyone that worked in the lower east cradlespur, and Zenobi had heard of similar work songs all across the manufactories.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working it all day.'\n\n'Just like my father before,' someone sang the refrain from behind.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working it all night,' the woman continued.\n\n'Just like my mother before,' sang more voices.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working all shift.'\n\n'Just like my son will after,' sang Zenobi, her wavering voice joining dozens more.\n\nOthers took up the lead line, a mix of bass and lower notes from the men, higher-pitched and strident harmonies from the women.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working all my life.'\n\n'Just like my daughter after.'\n\nThe sound swelled around Zenobi, helping her forget the endless sky above, reminding her that she was with her people. With that thought came the comfort that she was where she was meant to be. The factory workers of Addaba were a fatalistic people, but not without contentment. Within their allotted lives there was room to rise a rank or two, to get a little "}
{"text":"and strident harmonies from the women.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working all my life.'\n\n'Just like my daughter after.'\n\nThe sound swelled around Zenobi, helping her forget the endless sky above, reminding her that she was with her people. With that thought came the comfort that she was where she was meant to be. The factory workers of Addaba were a fatalistic people, but not without contentment. Within their allotted lives there was room to rise a rank or two, to get a little more living space, an extra ration of fresh water and - if one reached the heady heights of overseer like Egwu and the others that had become officers in the defence corps - real fruit once a month. Having been raised on recycled water and air and having tasted nothing but synthetic protein slabs and nutri-mush, the idea of an apple or orange bordered on the mythical.\n\nSo they sang songs as they marched, of labour and love, of family and cherished moments, of building a world for their descendants and honouring the lives of their ancestors. Songs that carried them through long shifts of dangerous manual labour swept them along the seemingly unending march to their next stop.\n\nIt was almost two hours before the monotony of walking was interrupted. Zenobi reckoned they had covered more than ten kilometres since being put down by the transports. They came to a slow stop and Zenobi took the moment to crouch and rub her calves, her hamstrings just as stiff. The singing died away and was replaced by sighs and grumbles. It was just a couple of minutes' break before they were moving again, and a few hundred metres later Zenobi could see the reason for the delay.\n\nThe huge rampway dropped and split into three, dividing the defence troopers into contingents. The left and right paths curved gently away from the central road, the descent steepening sharply. Their destination was still out of sight.\n\nShe found herself being ushered left with the rest of Company Epsilon and as the body of troopers moved, she caught sight of the low wall that bordered the ramp. From this new vantage point she could see down into the mass of the transit hub, though at first vertigo threatened to topple her as she gazed at the bewildering maze of rail lines and roadways.\n\nShe turned her attention ahead and saw five massive roofed structures. They were not buildings as such, for they had no walls, and beneath each of them stretched eight straight tracks that continued underneath the walkway she was on.\n\nThe sound of rotors and engines had faded with distance but as they descended it was replaced by a background noise of a different kind - shouts, moans and cries. A disturbed muttering rippled through the Addaba companies as they encountered its source.\n\nBeneath the bridge, on a platform many kilometres long, tens of thousands of conscripts were being herded towards the open-topped carts of a train that stretched out of view. Goad sticks crackled and the bellows of provosts with voxmitters cut through the audible misery of the massed people.\n\nThe anarchy sickened Zenobi, as much as the obvious suffering of those unfortunates being loaded for transport to their zone of deployment. It was such a stark contrast to the orderly manner of the Addaba Defence Corps.\n\n'I wonder where they're from,' she said to Seleen, the woman between her and the retaining wall to their left.\n\n'I don't know, yeye, but they don't look happy to be here.'\n\n'Khertoumi wasters,' said Menber. 'Look at their tattoos.'\n\nHe was right: amongst the press of bodies it was possible to see the distinctive white facial tattoos of the nomads that lived in the Khertoum rad deserts.\n\n'Grit-eaters?' laughed a trooper just in front of Zenobi. She recognised him from Gamma Platoon but did not know his name. 'Dorn will hurt his back bending to scrape so low for his armies!'\n\n'They'll fire a lasgun just the same as you or I, Kettai,' snapped Menber. 'And their blood will water the ground all the same too. You think the war cares what station we each come from?'\n\n'I'm just glad we're not sharing space with them, is all I'm saying, yeye. Don't be taking hurt for their feelings, they don't have none.'\n\n'That would be us, if it were not for the cause,' said Zenobi, fingers tightening around the haft of the standard over her shoulder. 'Swept together and thrown into wagons like animals. Only because we work together are we marching like this, so you keep your mean words in your heart and not let them come to your lips.'\n\n'She is right,' called out someone outside Zenobi's eyeline. 'We have bonds, we are all family, but when we fight we'll be doing it for all Terrans, yeah? All humanity! For Addaba!'\n\n'For Addaba!' came the reflex cry in response, even from the mouth of Kettai. He fell silent but shook his head as he continued to glance down at the awful scene playing out below, the stink and sobs of the indentured troopers growing stronger as the rampway took the defence corps down to ground level.\n\nA monumental task\n\nThe assault begins\n\nThe locomotive\n\nLion's Gate space port, eastern approach, six hours before assault\n\n'Remind you of anywhere?' Forrix said to his companions.\n\n'Cadmean Citadel.' Kroeger grunted the name of the place where Perturabo had elevated him to the Trident. To Forrix it seemed that journey had now been completed by Kroeger's appointment to general command of the assault on the Lion's Gate space port but Kroeger made no mention of it.\n\n'As though drawn on a far larger canvas,' said Falk.\n\n'Far, far larger,' agreed Forrix.\n\nCadmean Citadel had also been a space port, a mountain of a tower raised and defended by the sons of Dorn. Forrix recalled it as something of an arduous campaign, among many such labours of war in which he had taken part. Yet it seemed a mere anthill in comparison to the structure that rose out of the Imperial Palace, dwarfing even the mountains from which most of the Emperor's grand city had been hewn.\n\nHe was a considerable distance away and yet had to crane his neck to see its summit, lost against the haze of the upper atmosphere now fogged by bombardment debris and energy discharge. It was a ziggurat, in rough outline at least, half as broad at its base as it was high, large enough to be considered a hive city in its own right. One of the largest, in fact, though its purpose was not residential but logistical. From this angle he could just about make out the highest connecting transitways between the space port and the Imperial Palace - highways and monorails and viaducts, each half a kilometre across, big enough to carry the bulk transport of the immense cargos that passed to and from the ships docking at its summit.\n\nCadmean Citadel had been large enough for traders and carriers to land, but the very largest vessels - vessels like the Arks Mechanicum and the Legio Titanicus transports that had sworn for the Warmaster - could not enter so far into a gravity well nor withstand re-entry to any significant degree. They were giants born in the void and destined to die in the void. But the Lion's Gate space port was so tall that such considerations were no longer valid. Starships were not forced to shuttle down their loads in smaller landers but could disgorge the contents of their kilometres-long bodies directly to the massive elevators and carriages.\n\n'Do you think we've brought enough guns?' said Forrix, turning his attention to the infamous siege train of the IV Legion. The landing had begun three days ago while Mortarion and Angron had occupied the attention of the defenders. Still the dark blur of shuttling craft could be seen linking the distant drop field with a succession of starships in orbit. The column of armoured vehicles stretched all the way back to that landing site, nearly forty kilometres of undulating metal serpent intent upon the Lion's Gate.\n\nLike the Trident and the twenty-five thousand legionaries that accompanied them, the wall-breaker companies of the Iron Warriors had been landed within range of only the largest defence cannons of the space port - and they were directed upwards to fend off any direct approach from orbit. Lead formations had encountered little resistance, the bulk of Dorn's forces having been withdrawn to the final defences within a few kilometres of the space port.\n\nA mountaintop had been flattened by orbital scouring to create a level a kilometre across. Tiny compared to the vast expanse of the Katabatic Plains that had been flattened for the Imperial Palace but enough to allow heavier landers to bring down squadrons of tanks and assault guns.\n\n'Two thousand, three hundred and eight Basilisk assault guns,' said Kroeger, reeling off the list as though pleased with the feat of memory. To Forrix it was the least requirement of command to have the complete logistics of one's force ready for immediate recall. 'Fifteen hundred and twenty-two Manticore assault rocket carriers. Thirteen modified Sicaran bombards. Four hundred and seventy-six Deathstrike platforms. Four hundred and ninety-five Medusa howitzers. Thirteen hundred and six Siege Dreadnoughts. Eighty-four Typhon siege guns. Seven thousand, one hundred and eighteen Thunderburst towed guns.'\n\nForrix allowed Kroeger's voice to become a drone as he continued to list the tens of thousands of support tanks, Land Raiders and other armoured beasts committed to the attack. It was nearly eighty per cent of the Legion's armoured might in the Solar System, the rest being kept in orbit or the outer reaches, or already deployed in support of the efforts being made by the other Legions and primarchs, particularly Mortarion's attempts to break the wall to the western side of the Palace.\n\nTheir efforts would be rendered obsolete if the Iron Warriors could break through at the Lion's Gate.\n\nTo the north and south stretched the support echelons - Imperial Army forces sworn to the Warmaster and appointed to Perturabo, as well as various vassal hosts that had come under the sway of the Iro"}
{"text":"e outer reaches, or already deployed in support of the efforts being made by the other Legions and primarchs, particularly Mortarion's attempts to break the wall to the western side of the Palace.\n\nTheir efforts would be rendered obsolete if the Iron Warriors could break through at the Lion's Gate.\n\nTo the north and south stretched the support echelons - Imperial Army forces sworn to the Warmaster and appointed to Perturabo, as well as various vassal hosts that had come under the sway of the Iron Warriors. One and a half million men and women, as well as countless beasts, mutants and freaks of the warp. Forrix didn't care much for such grist in the war mill, but viewed them more as a lubricant. Their blood would make the machine of battle turn more smoothly for the warriors of Perturabo.\n\nFor perhaps the first time in decades, Forrix felt that the IV Legion would be given credit for its victories. He thought back to when he had left Terra, just a line legionary, embarking on the Great Crusade for the Emperor. He had harboured no illusions regarding the glory of war - the brutal truth of battle had been revealed to him during Unification - but they had all felt something of a greater promise to the war they would unleash. Reclaiming Terra and Luna had been a stepping stone; the Great Crusade was the endeavour for which history would laud the Space Marines.\n\n'I left from here, you know?' he said to his companions.\n\nKroeger grunted, annoyed at the interruption to his logistical liturgy. Falk turned a helmed head, cocked slightly to the right.\n\n'Really?' said the Warsmith. 'I knew you were from Terra. I did not realise you were native to the Himalazia.'\n\n'I wasn't,' Forrix corrected him. 'But before the Fourth Legion were despatched, we were granted honours by the Emperor. A parade to receive His salute. We went straight from there onto our first crusade campaign.'\n\nHe looked again at the sky-piercing stalagmite of ferrocrete and plasteel.\n\n'It was smaller then, of course.'\n\nWatching the seething mass of humanity and inhumanity spilling like a stain across the Katabatic Plains, Forrix realised that the non-Legion elements of the army were driving straight towards the space port. By the early morning they would be in range of the space port's main batteries and the heavy weapons of the trench lines around it.\n\n'You're launching the attack without any preparatory bombardment?' he said, unable to hide his incredulity from Kroeger.\n\n'Perturabo was quite clear in his orders,' the other triarch replied. 'Speed. It was your plan, wasn't it? Take the port-city before Dorn can respond? There's no point wasting shells on a city where the defenders are hiding behind the walls. The scum will bring them to their gun positions and then the heavy metal will fly.'\n\nForrix bit back any reply. He could think of half a dozen flaws in this approach but remembered the injunction of his primarch not to interfere. It was this brutish simplicity that Perturabo desired.\n\n'I recall Cadmean Citadel again,' said Falk. 'The Lord of Iron's coming went very poorly for some. It would be wise not to draw the primarch's personal intervention, especially as he has been most specific in his desire not to become embroiled in Dorn's trap.'\n\nForrix was not convinced that there was any trap, but he was not about to argue the matter with Falk, whom he had once considered a close ally but now viewed with deep suspicion. The Warsmith would not hesitate in reporting any perceived misdemeanours to the primarch.\n\nThere was the added benefit that when Kroeger's lack of expertise led to failure, he would pay the price of the primarch's wrath. His replacement might be more amenable to Forrix's desires, or at the least more wary of ignoring him.\n\nDjibou transition station, Afrik, one hundred and six days before assault\n\nUnder the shade of the station Zenobi felt the chill, her bare arms sheened in sweat from the morning sun and the long walk. It was not just the sudden drop in temperature that set her skin prickling. As they passed into the shadows, she saw the gun towers. They were built into the great pylons that held up the roof, dozens of them stretching along the narrow platforms between the tracks.\n\nHer fingers sought the arm of Menber next to her, gripping it tight just below the elbow. He glanced at her and saw where her gaze was directed.\n\n'You've seen guns before,' he said with a shrug, his lasgun almost falling off his shoulder. He hiked it back into place.\n\n'Look where they're pointed, cousin.' Quad-barrelled heavy stubbers tracked back and forth between the scores of companies filing into the station. On walkways between the pillars visored guards patrolled, heavy carbines at the ready. 'They're not here to protect the station against attack.'\n\n'It doesn't mean anything,' insisted Menber. He cocked his head back towards the loading platforms where the waster conscripts were still being corralled into their wagons. 'Maybe there was some trouble before.'\n\n'Why would they suspect us?'\n\n'They don't. It's... It's like the dynastic security teams. They don't expect any trouble, it's just for show.'\n\nTheir pace had slowed to a few metres a minute as the companies pushed together on the raised rockcrete. There was nowhere to go, no way of avoiding a lethal fusillade if the guards decided to open fire. Her heart pounded harder and faster as she imagined the muzzle flare and screams. She remembered the stories Auntie Hermayla had told her of the old food riots, how the corridors would be filled with bodies, the stairwells red cascades of blood.\n\n'I can't even lift my arms,' Zenobi muttered, 'much less fire my lasgun. What are they afraid of?'\n\n'Nothing,' growled Menber. 'It's procedure. It's not for us. Why would it be for us?'\n\nIn the press of bodies the banner pole was pushed tight against Zenobi's chest. She ran a hand along it, seeking reassurance from the touch.\n\n'Dorn put out the call, and we answered.' Menber leaned towards her, face earnest, voice quiet. 'There is nothing to worry about.'\n\nZenobi tried to look around to take her mind off the matter, but there was little to see. She was one of the shortest in the company and even on tiptoe she could barely see past the shoulders of her companions.\n\nIt was not long before the ground started to vibrate. It was almost undetectable at first but quickly grew in vigour. Through the soles of her boots, Zenobi could feel it thrumming, a slow pulsing sensation.\n\n'I think the trains are coming,' she said, as excited muttering and whispers spread through the assembled platoons. 'It's nearly time.'\n\nShe saw Kettai was right in front of her. He was rangy for a factory-hiver, almost a metre and seventy-five tall. She heard Kettai gasp and there were other expressions of surprise and shock rippling through the troopers. Zenobi tugged at Kettai's collar.\n\n'What is it? What is it?' She thrust a hand at Menber and then Kettai. 'Let me see! Help me up.'\n\nThe two glanced at each other and then sighed, turning towards one another and crouching so that their knees formed steps. It was common practice in the work crews, to help reach a fouled gear or belt, and more illicit destinations among the factory levels such as the crawlspaces used for a quick mozo smoke break or to share a flask of tei.\n\nZenobi's lack of height meant she was used to such improvised ladders and she quickly scaled the two men, coming to rest on their shoulders. From her elevated position she could see across the mass of troopers to the far end of the station, several hundred metres away. In the sunlight beyond the shadow of the vast roof something dark was approaching along the tracks, though it was hard to tell what it was amongst the dust kicked up from the old seabed.\n\nAt first she thought it was eight trains approaching in unison, for the dark patch within the dust cloud straddled all of the lines that came into the station. Another half-minute revealed the error of her assumption. It was not multiple trains but one vast engine, running along the parallel tracks, which meant that it had to be more than a hundred metres wide. She glanced up at the roof, understanding now why the station required such titanic proportions, to accommodate a vehicle that was easily thirty metres high.\n\nHer upbringing in the confines of Addaba had not given her much of a sense of distance, and the train's massive size made a mockery of normal perspective, so it was only after watching for several minutes that Zenobi realised it was still some way off, at least half a kilometre. It was approaching slowly, probably no faster than walking pace, its slate-grey armoured prow forcing its way through the bank of grit and sand kicked up by its passage.\n\nThe rails between the platforms were humming now, their vibrations coursing into the rockcrete with increasing volume. A hushed sense of awe settled on the Addaba troopers as they watched the marvel of engineering bearing down upon them like the great elfants of Old Earth myth that could lay waste to armies with their curving tusks and fearsome bellows.\n\nThe hum became a rattle, while from the distant train came a grumbling of metal wheels accompanied by a higher-pitched whine. Zenobi could make out more of its prow as it neared the far end of the station. There was an offset cab at the upper left side - probably large enough to house a crew of dozens but seemingly small against the flat angle of the train's impossibly broad nose. On the other side was a multi-gunned turret, one of several that blistered around the engine car, each holding two large-bore cannons and a variety of small anti-personnel armaments, much like those of the gun nests beneath the station roof.\n\nA fog billowed from exhaust vents along the sides, tinged by pale blue light from within the immense locomotive.\n\n'Plasma reactor...' whispered Kettai.\n\nThough it was still slowing, moving at barely a crawl as it passed into the gloom, massive air displacement sent"}
{"text":"ther side was a multi-gunned turret, one of several that blistered around the engine car, each holding two large-bore cannons and a variety of small anti-personnel armaments, much like those of the gun nests beneath the station roof.\n\nA fog billowed from exhaust vents along the sides, tinged by pale blue light from within the immense locomotive.\n\n'Plasma reactor...' whispered Kettai.\n\nThough it was still slowing, moving at barely a crawl as it passed into the gloom, massive air displacement sent a sandstorm roiling along the rails and platforms. Warning shouts greeted the cloud of swirling dust as troopers covered their faces and turned their backs in a ripple that passed back through the crowd.\n\n'Watch yourself!' Menber cried out, pulling Zenobi down from her perch, one bulky arm crooked around her shoulder to pull her into the protection of his chest.\n\nShe scrunched her eyes shut, the rattle of grit and sand and the curses of the Addaba hivers heralding the arrival of the dust cloud. It scoured across the back of her neck and prickled at her exposed shoulders, swirling between her and Menber, who had his chin buried in his chest, a calloused hand like a visor on his brow.\n\nThe light disappeared as the dust wave passed over them, but the gloom was nothing compared to the darkness beneath the train as it snarled over their heads, the clatter of wheels like the deafening pound of a hundred forge hammers. The wheeze of venting coolant vapour, long shriek of braking plates and tremor of throbbing power lines churned in Zenobi's gut. She gripped the front of Menber's coverall with her free hand, fingers making a tight fist in the material as the monstrous engine continued to rumble over them, the absence of light combining with the noise to overwhelm her senses.\n\nOnly another minute or two passed, but it felt like an age until quiet suddenly descended. It was broken by the coughs and muttering of her companions and the slow tick-tick-tick of cooling metal.\n\nBright orange lumens flared into life along the length of the train, bathing the platforms with harsh light. Zenobi blinked tears away, teeth gritted against this fresh assault. As her eyes adjusted, she saw that the underside of the train was barely two metres above her head. Slender metal ladders rattled down from hatches to either side of the platforms, the interior of the train lit by a more ambient yellow gleam.\n\n'Boarding begins now!' The command rolled along the station from the front, passed from officer to sub-officer to squad leaders. 'Ascend to the third level. Stow your kit beneath the cots. Sit on your cot and await further instruction.'\n\nAgain and again these orders rang through the companies, as the troopers recovered and started to move towards the ladders.\n\n'This way, this way,' called Lieutenant Okoye, pushing his way towards a ladder on Zenobi's left, the sealed underside of the train blazoned with a numeral beside it - '143'. 'First squad, climb the ladder and take the stairwell to the top. Move it!'\n\nThe platoon shuffled forward as one, directed by their common destination. Zenobi waited until she had space to manoeuvre the banner into the opening, pushing it up the ladder towards Sergeant Alekzanda, who waited at the top. Her lasgun swung down between her legs as she climbed, threatening to trip her, until she wrestled it back onto her shoulder.\n\nShouts from below urged her to hurry and she almost lost her footing, swinging by one hand, just a toe on a rung.\n\n'Here, here, your hand!' Someone reached down and she grabbed the proffered wrist, feeling iron-strong fingers curling around her own. She was almost bodily lifted into the opening and deposited on the decking. Zenobi looked up to see who had helped her and saw that it was Xirsi, the sergeant from third squad. He was short like most hivers, but so broad she wondered how he had fitted through the hatch.\n\n'Come on, yeye, up you go,' he said, pointing to a metal spiral stair a few metres along the narrow passageway.\n\nZenobi took a couple of steps and then returned to claim the banner from Alekzanda. Her sergeant raised an eyebrow.\n\n'Keep it safe, Zenobi.'\n\nFace flushing with humiliation, not just regarding the banner but her whole undignified entry into the train, she hurried to the stairwell and ascended, not daring to look at anyone else until she had reached the top level.\n\nThe stair brought her out into a chamber that ran half the width of the train, filled with cots. There were no windows, but every few metres a ladder pierced the ceiling.\n\n'Not that way,' called Kettai as she took a step away from the stairwell. He waved her closer and pointed to the bunks that lined the metal wall. 'First squad over there.'\n\nShe nodded her thanks and hurried over, joining the increasing throng of troopers spreading out into their strange accommodation. The cots were plain metal frames with thin mattresses, built atop a low locker box. She realised that each bunk had a serial etched into a small brass plate on the headboard and swiftly decoded it as company, platoon and squad followed by two initials. She found hers quickly enough, just as Menber and the others arrived, Alekzanda bringing up the rear.\n\n'Welcome to your new home, brave troopers of Addaba,' the sergeant announced, tossing his bag onto the bunk next to Zenobi's. 'Next stop, Himalazia.'\n\n'Oh, Throne-heart, we coming to you,' said Seleen, her grin flashing uneven teeth yellowed from too much mozo. She winked at Zenobi. 'Hope you packed clean baggies, yeye, we're off to see the Emperor.'\n\nThe first wave\n\nAllies in blood\n\nIntegrity officers\n\nLion Primus Strategium, Sky City, six hours before assault\n\n'Dross.' Fafnir Rann handed the data-tablet back to Haeger.\n\n'A lot of dross, commander.' Haeger passed the report to one of the logistaria attendants, who withdrew to his post. The strategium was designated Lion Primus, and Rann had set it up in the two hundred and ninety-eighth level of Sky City, replacing the civilian command hub that had once run the core-wards' transport network. Vox-murmur and the clicking of augur relays provided a constant backdrop to the conversation. 'Three hundred thousand strong and growing by the hour.'\n\n'It doesn't matter if there are a million of them, lieutenant-commander. Logistics and physics are on our side. A force that size can't bring all of its strength to bear against a narrow front.'\n\n'We cannot allow them to reach the defence lines,' argued Haeger.\n\n'We can and we will, but I'm not throwing valuable soldiers away to hold a line in the dirt. All forces will withdraw to the Lion's Gate space port.'\n\nAn adjutant in the uniform of the Terran Conscriptia hurried across the strategium, her brow furrowed.\n\n'Withdraw, lord commander?'\n\n'Drop the \"lord\", I'm not a primarch,' Rann told the young woman. He saw confusion in her eyes, shared by Haeger. 'Perturabo is like a vox-broadcast on repeat. This tactic of sending in the worthless masses has been tried over and over since the traitors landed.'\n\n'And Lord Dorn has seen fit to match them with our...' Haeger glanced at the adjutant, unsure of how to phrase his words.\n\n'Basic mass formation troops,' the adjutant replied quietly. 'That is the correct term in the Imperial Army.'\n\n'...indeed,' Haeger continued. 'The enemy would have us expend our strength slaying mutants and beasts. Our orders from Lord Dorn are simple - to hold for as long as possible.'\n\n'I'll not have brave women and men slaughtered just to save some bolter rounds,' Rann growled. Haeger looked as though he might object further but Rann silenced him with a raised hand. 'It's not sentimentality. We have to take the initiative now and then, otherwise Perturabo and his generals will think they can do as they please. I want them to feel uncomfortable.'\n\n'Am I to send the withdrawal now, Lor- Commander Rann?'\n\n'How long until all the outer defence regiments can be inside the port?'\n\n'Two hours,' the adjutant replied promptly. 'Three if you want us to set demolitions beforehand.'\n\n'Do that,' Rann said with a smile. 'The first enemy wave will be here in six hours. Do not begin the withdrawal for another two, I want our enemies to commit to a plan before we change things.'\n\n'The grand batteries of the Iron Warriors will be within range,' said Haeger. 'If you wait that long the withdrawal will be made under fire.'\n\n'We'll boost the base layer fields, extend them a kilometre for the final hour of withdrawal. Redirect power from the mesophex to compensate for the drain on the reactors. Leave enough for the upper defence cannons to dissuade any orbital approach, but drop the shielding. If Perturabo wants to capture the space port he's not going to start by bombarding the landing docks.'\n\nThe adjutant waited for a few seconds to see if any more commands were forthcoming, and then snapped off a sharp salute before moving to the closest communications station. Haeger remained.\n\n'You're not happy, lieutenant-commander.'\n\n'I would not dispute your orders,' replied Haeger stiffly. 'However, Lord Dorn has been exact in his preparations, both in the raising of the defences and their manning. Is it really wise to discard that on a whim?'\n\n'A whim?' Rann kept his temper in check, though his fingers tapped on the haft of the axe at his left hip. 'Is that how this seems to you?'\n\nHaeger was intelligent and chose not to answer. Rann gestured for Haeger to come closer. The lieutenant-commander took a step and, being a few centimetres taller, dipped his head slightly. Rann's voice was barely a whisper.\n\n'I have commanded the First Assault Cadre for many years. I bear the title Lord Seneschal, though I don't insist others use it often.' Rann leaned closer still, teeth gritted. 'Most importantly, Lord Dorn put me in charge.'\n\nHe stepped back, voice rising a little, but not enough to carry further than Haeger.\n\n'I know you will follow my orders, lieutenant-commander, and I am not going to make a habit of explaining myself. B"}
{"text":"res taller, dipped his head slightly. Rann's voice was barely a whisper.\n\n'I have commanded the First Assault Cadre for many years. I bear the title Lord Seneschal, though I don't insist others use it often.' Rann leaned closer still, teeth gritted. 'Most importantly, Lord Dorn put me in charge.'\n\nHe stepped back, voice rising a little, but not enough to carry further than Haeger.\n\n'I know you will follow my orders, lieutenant-commander, and I am not going to make a habit of explaining myself. But this time, just this once, because I need you to trust me, I will make something clear.' Rann strode across the strategium towards the main display, a square table five metres across that was currently showing an orbital view of the space port and the surrounding twenty square kilometres. It was a simulacrum generated from records and augur data; there were no loyalist orbital assets left in the vicinity. A servitor burbled into life at their approach: a torso, head and arms wired into the side of the table, a nest of cables springing from its spine to other cogitating engines arranged around the chamber. The logistaria hurried over from his alcove and took his place at a control panel next to the servitor.\n\n'Top view, Highway Four,' said Rann, leaning forward with fists on the plasteel edge of the screen-table.\n\n'Analysing. Compressing.' The servitor's head tilted left and right as it processed the information from the strategium's databanks. The logistaria's fingers tapped a few commands into his panel. 'Display adjustment in progress.'\n\nThe table went slate grey for several seconds and then flickered into life, showing a rendition of the broad road that led almost straight from the Iron Warriors' landing site to the space port, entering by means of a three-hundred-metre-wide barbican and gate.\n\n'Highlight emplaced defences.'\n\n'Highlighting static weapon positions.' The servitor's eyes rolled towards Rann and then back to the display. Red smudges blurred the walls and towers that flanked the road.\n\n'It's a killing ground,' Rann said to Haeger.\n\n'Yes, lord seneschal. I oversaw the construction.'\n\n'Of course,' said Rann, allowing the gentle rebuke. 'High-powered laser batteries, macro cannons and assorted plasma platforms.'\n\n'A combination of anti-vehicle and anti-legionary guns. The mass waves employed by the enemy will have no chance.'\n\n'But the whole point of their assault is to sap our resources. If we sit in the trenches and behind the walls, we'll be doing exactly what Perturabo wants us to do. There's a better way to hold off the attack and ensure we have the weaponry available to meet the full-scale legionary and armoured assault which is bound to follow.'\n\nRann moved around to the logistaria's position and took up a light wand, with which he started to make marks upon the display. As he did so, he explained his plan.\n\n'I will lead the First Assault Cadre to meet the enemy attack, supported on the wings here by two columns of heavy tanks and a mobile attack reserve - bikes and speeders.' Rann drew in the lines, forming a V-shape against the line of the enemy advance, with a few swipes to indicate the counter-attack movements from a pair of lesser gateways that flanked the main barbican.\n\n'What will that achieve that the gun emplacements cannot?' asked Haeger. 'Or the Imperial Army remaining in their bunkers and trenches?'\n\n'It's about planning for defeat,' said Rann. 'Rearranging the layers so that they work for us, not the enemy. We save ammunition on the big guns until the armoured assault, and keep the volcano cannons and other high-energy weapons dormant so that maximum power flows to the shields. It's all about time and how much of it we make Perturabo use up. We can't stop the enemy getting in, not forever. Cannons on walls are no good then, but thirty thousand massed infantry holding the interior will be.'\n\n'And the assault cadre is as good as any wall,' said Haeger, nodding to himself.\n\n'A wall we can put where we like,' added Rann. 'I can assure you that whatever else our enemies have in mind, they have not considered the possibility that our first act in defence will be an attack...'\n\n'I shall issue orders to gather the flanking forces and reserve. I assume you will lead the muster of the First Assault Cadre personally.'\n\n'You assume correctly, lieutenant-commander.' Rann caught the warrior's eye just before he turned to leave. 'I hope I have made myself clear.'\n\n'The doubts were mine to own, not yours, lord seneschal,' said Haeger, banging a fist to his plastron. 'I have prepared for this moment for seven years, but in the event have fallen victim to predictable orthodoxy.'\n\n'I can't take all the credit,' said Rann. 'Lord Sigismund put the thought in my mind. I recall what the Khan and his White Scars accomplished when set free. To be honest I think the Imperial Fists can do even better.'\n\n'We will, lord seneschal. Death to the traitors!'\n\n'Death to the traitors,' growled Rann. 'Every last one of them.'\n\nHe returned his attention to the display as Haeger strode away. The lines and shapes he had drawn looked so simple on the schematic, but he saw them with the eye of a battlefield commander, as ranks of warriors and squadrons of engines, lit by the fury of fire and resounding with the crash of war. It was a bold move, and he was certain of success. Even so, Dorn had not taught him to be rash. He started to think about the many ways the tide of conflict might turn against him and what could be done to ensure they did not come to pass.\n\nXII Legion vanguard, proximity of Daylight Wall, four hours before assault\n\nThe tracks of a solitary Rhino transport carved furrows through mud made slick with blood, scattering shards of half-buried bones. Beneath the gore-spatter it was a solid gunmetal, its hatches and cupolas painted in yellow-and-black stripes. A banner pole bent beneath a broad standard, depicting the metallic skull face of the IV Legion, blazoned against crossed lightning bolts on a field of black. Battle honours were stitched into dozens of scrolls around the main device and the top edge showed signs of wear, charred by some historic conflagration that the Iron Warriors had seen fit to commemorate by leaving this scar unrepaired.\n\nIt passed between broken tank hulls and shattered fortifications, wending a zigzag route through the devastation left in the wake of successive attacks. Even now magazines and arsenals still burned, pouring thick black smoke into air choked with fumes and toxins.\n\nA cordon of large troop carriers in the bastardised colours of the World Eaters marked the boundary of their zone of operation, but there was no challenge or hail levelled at the incoming vehicle. Its passage went wholly unremarked.\n\nWithin the crude encampment Legion slaves hauled at great tarpaulins piled with bodies, forging between sagging marquees and makeshift flakboard bunkers. A great pile of corpses was being assembled within sight of the main wall, where a hundred weary axe-wielders laboured to behead those that had fallen to Angron's sons. Their blades rose and fell with the monotony of a factory line, turning the dead into righteous sacrifices, though without the least pomp or ritual. Half-human ghouls - creatures suckled on mutant blood and Khorne's power - stripped flesh from bone and polished the skulls, in turn passing them to box-laden beasts of burden driven by more slaves to the immense mountain being erected in the Blood God's honour.\n\nThese dreary tasks were left to menials, for there was none among the World Eaters that desired ought but to face the enemy and add to the body count of the war. It was industrialised sacrifice, at odds with the highly personal battle-lust of Khorne's chosen, who favoured only the slaying in their god's name.\n\nAnd at this bloody task a greater part of the Legion still laboured. There was little semblance of Chapter and company command remaining, and even individual squads had started to break apart as champions rose from the ranks to create fiefdoms of authority within the fragmenting Legion.\n\nAngron cared nothing for this fracturing, for in his presence all were cowed to his will, and cohesion, of a sort, could be maintained. He was, for the present, absent the battleline, seeking his bloodthirsty pleasures elsewhere around the overrun defences, butchering whatever he came upon.\n\nThere were a handful of others that could command similar obedience, but they were not of any single mind, no more than the greatest of the warlords that were starting to hold sway where once all was dictated by the Principia Bellicosa. Of these the most admired was Kharn, whose lists of titles seemed to grow daily as his feats of death-dealing continued - the Axe of Khorne, the Death-gifted, the Walking Ruin and more.\n\nHe watched the approach of the Rhino from close to a pyre of blackened bones, which he had lit as a beacon for the transport to find him at the appointed hour. Of all the warriors of the XII he retained a modicum of strategic interest in the war and had agreed to the parley on behalf of his primarch. Now that his battle-brothers were intent upon the last survivors outside the wall it was safe for an outsider to enter, though he knew there was a substantial risk that his own self-control might slip, potentially bringing the World Eaters and Iron Warriors into conflict with each other.\n\nThe Rhino stopped a short distance away and a solitary figure disembarked. His armour was reinforced Terminator plate, with heavily riveted, banded strips like the oldest marks, a brutal throwback to the earliest days of the Legions. His oversized left fist gleamed with a power generator, a similarly blunt weapon, and Kharn felt himself drawn to the other warrior's simplicity.\n\n'I expected to meet with your primarch, Angron of the Red Blade,' the Iron Warrior declared as he stopped a few metres away.\n\n'I... Hnnh.' Kharn snorted hard, clearing the blood-fugue from his thoughts to focu"}
{"text":"reinforced Terminator plate, with heavily riveted, banded strips like the oldest marks, a brutal throwback to the earliest days of the Legions. His oversized left fist gleamed with a power generator, a similarly blunt weapon, and Kharn felt himself drawn to the other warrior's simplicity.\n\n'I expected to meet with your primarch, Angron of the Red Blade,' the Iron Warrior declared as he stopped a few metres away.\n\n'I... Hnnh.' Kharn snorted hard, clearing the blood-fugue from his thoughts to focus on the burly Iron Warriors commander. He wanted to bury Gorechild into the mask of the warsmith's helm, just to see the spray of blood. He plucked the man's name from the whirl of gore-choked daydreams that swelled up from the implants in his brain.\n\nKroeger. Commander of the IV's attack on the space port.\n\n'The primarch fights where he chooses. I am not... Hnnh. I am not his master. He bends to the will only of the Blood God.'\n\n'So it doesn't matter that I am here for Perturabo?'\n\n'No, Kroeger, it does not.' Kharn pointed his blood-flecked axe towards the companies of the World Eaters storming the last of the outer defences between him and the eastern stretch of the Eternity Wall. 'Angron demands that we breach the Palace.'\n\nThe warsmith stood silent for a few seconds, shoulders hunched.\n\n'Fulgrim has already agreed to bring his Legion to the attack,' Kroeger said, his attempt at guile obvious. 'Would Angron be outdone by his brother?'\n\n'You are fortunate... Hnnh. Fortunate that my lord is not here to respond to such taunts.'\n\nKharn gritted his teeth, biting back the urge to cleave the Iron Warrior's head from the torso as payment for his petty remark.\n\n'I don't need Angron,' snarled the warsmith, fists rising. 'I need your legionaries. You'll all die before you set foot on the Eternity Wall, but I have a plan that will get you into the Lion's Gate space port.'\n\n'You'll need... Hnnh. You'll need more inducement than that.'\n\n'Dorn's sons.' The man's savage grin was audible in his tone. 'Never mind mopping up the scum of the Imperial Army, don't you want to cut down the brothers that betrayed us?'\n\n'Hah! I understand where the betrayal lies.' Kharn stalked back and forth, wanting to end the conversation to join the assault. The crack of bolters and battle cries of his companions called to him, the urging of his implant like a hot barb dragging him to the wall.\n\n'The World Eaters I knew would never seek the easy battle. Perhaps I don't need you, after all.'\n\nKroeger turned away and Kharn was about to let him go. Another force, the whisper voice that ran through his blood, sounded louder than the insistent bark of his Nails.\n\n'Hnnh. Wait, Kroeger.'\n\nKharn could sense the mettle of this soldier and heard the thunder of Khorne in the Iron Warrior's hearts. This was one who could be kin to the World Eaters. The Blood God was willing to lay his hand upon Kroeger and that demanded special attention.\n\n'Angron might listen... Hnnh. A call to arms from one dedicated to the Skull Throne might catch the primarch's ear.'\n\n'What do you mean?' Kroeger stepped back, his fist rising. It took every effort of the XII Legion captain not to react to the implied threat. The hand clasping the haft of Gorechild almost moved of its own accord.\n\n'You have the qualities of a great warrior,' said Kharn. 'The sort of warrior Khorne would bless with his blood-gifts. He demands nothing but what you want to give already. Hnnh. The deaths of your foes.'\n\n'The Emperor has already made me stronger than any mortal man,' said Kroeger. 'What other gifts do I need?'\n\nA wreck of a Rhino transport protruded from the blood-slicked earth a few metres away. Kharn turned to it, the teeth of Gorechild spinning faster until the weapon howled in his grip. The champion of Khorne took two long strides and launched himself into the air, leaping higher than any normal Space Marine was able, axe in both hands. He brought the weapon sweeping down as he landed next to the wreck, its shining teeth slashing through armoured hull and track housing with a single mighty blow. Shattered ceramite and scattered track links exploded around him. Khorne's power flowed through him, energising, setting his mind aflame through his Butcher's Nails so that the growl of his axe was a soothing purr.\n\nKharn balled a fist and drove it into the flank of the armoured transport. His gauntlet split under the impact but his bone did not, punching through the armoured plate to the elbow. He tore the panel away with a wordless shout, hurling it far out across the blasted wasteland.\n\n'Nothing stands before the chosen of the Blood God and lives!' he roared, turning on Kroeger. 'No blade will pierce my skin. No bolt can scar my flesh. Swear yourself to Khorne and you will become his bloodied killer. Every life you take shall be offered up to his glory, and every moment you will know the joy of slaying.'\n\n'All I need to do is kill in his name?' Kroeger laughed, long and deep. 'No oaths? No rituals? No sacrifices?'\n\n'Hnnh.' Kharn staggered towards the Iron Warrior, letting Gorechild fall to his side, ignoring the smell of his own blood flowing from the ruin of his hand. 'As long as the blood flows, Khorne cares not for words.'\n\nKroeger lifted his combi-bolter, shining in the flash of artillery and the continued flare of orbital lance strikes.\n\n'Then let Lord Angron know that a brother-in-blood calls on him to carry his holy slaughter to the Lion's Gate space port and we shall please the Blood God together.'\n\nDjibou transition station, Afrik, one hundred and six days before assault\n\nThe scale of the train defied belief. Zenobi and others investigated their new surroundings while the rest of the regiment boarded; even the idea that a single vehicle could transport the ten thousand-strong 64th Defence Corps seemed insanity.\n\nOn trying to ascend the ladders, they were rebuffed by armed provosts and told that the upper deck was for the crew only. These menacing sentinels bore red sashes over their uniforms, marking them out as dynastic chosen, the direct servants of the factory-dynasty overlords of the hive. Zenobi didn't know when they had arrived; they certainly hadn't travelled with the worker platoons over which they now stood watch.\n\nA few scouts that dared glances past these impassive-faced guards reported weapons storage and doorways that the gathered troopers deduced were for access to the gun turrets that lined the roof. There was speculation as to what else might be found, and within half an hour the upper level had attained a semi-mythical status as a realm of plenty and comfort.\n\nConversations with wanderers from the decks below confirmed that each level was identical and windowless, save for the bottom deck, which was home to huge cabling links that connected the immense carriages together. There were basic cooking facilities at one end of each carriage but no mess area - they would be expected to eat at their cots it seemed. At the opposite end were the ablution blocks, which seemed woefully inadequate for the number of people that would be using them. The prospect of extra latrine duties rapidly became one of the worst punishments the sergeants and officers could threaten.\n\nTwo hours after boarding, the train still hadn't moved. Zenobi broke open a slender ration bar she had smuggled into her kitbag and sat down on Menber's cot to share it with her cousin.\n\n'Everything else is all about \"move, move, move\", what's taking so long?' Zenobi asked but received only a silent shrug in reply as Menber chewed his portion of the ration bar. 'They must have everybody on board by now, what's the delay?'\n\n'You're eager,' said Sweetana from where she lay with her hands behind her head, two bunks over. 'This isn't so bad. I think this bed is bigger than the one I had back at Addaba!'\n\nIt was odd to realise the truth of what she said. Zenobi had never realised how cramped life had been in the hive-factories but comparing it to the space on the train - a train! - it was clear that all things considered, there was more comfort in this mobile barracks than in the worker dorms of their home.\n\nA sudden stir amongst those quartered near the foremost stairwell drew attention from across the barracks-deck. Zenobi stood on the cot to see what was happening. Just as she gained her elevated position, she caught a glimpse of swirling crimson and purple as a knot of officers gathered with equal suddenness in the vicinity of the new arrivals.\n\n'Dynastic colours,' Zenobi told those around her, her voice hushed with respect. 'Maybe the ruby-born are coming with us.'\n\n'Don't be such a fala, Obi,' said Menber, pulling at her arm to dismount the bunk. She snatched herself away from his grip so she could carry on watching. 'They're staying at Addaba to oversee the defences and keep things running.'\n\nThe scattered discussions were silenced by barks from sergeants and platoon officers, and a few moments later the officers parted to reveal half a dozen newcomers, three men and three women, whose blue officer uniforms were additionally adorned with silken sashes of red and mauve, as Zenobi had seen. They were all shaven-headed and clean-cheeked and bore the lean, muscular build of uphiver enforcement. Red ink marked their eyelids and lips, giving them a stark, otherworldly look.\n\n'I guess that was who we were waiting for,' said Menber.\n\nCaptain Egwu stepped forward, eyes scanning back and forth across the assembled company.\n\n'These are our company integrity officers, sent on behalf of the dynastic chiefs to ensure their reputation and intent is maintained by the defence corps assembled in their names.'\n\nOne of the integrity officers joined the captain, a woman with a sharp nose and cheeks, her forehead adorned with an additional red diamond tattoo.\n\n'I am Jawaahir Adunay Hadinet, integrity high officer for your company. Some of you may know me by the name my inmates gave me as punitive overseer of the East Main Spur correctional com"}
{"text":"mpany integrity officers, sent on behalf of the dynastic chiefs to ensure their reputation and intent is maintained by the defence corps assembled in their names.'\n\nOne of the integrity officers joined the captain, a woman with a sharp nose and cheeks, her forehead adorned with an additional red diamond tattoo.\n\n'I am Jawaahir Adunay Hadinet, integrity high officer for your company. Some of you may know me by the name my inmates gave me as punitive overseer of the East Main Spur correctional complex - the Iron Warden.'\n\nThe name meant nothing to Zenobi, but judging by the scattered muttering from across the company the announcement meant something to others. It was certainly a title that bode poorly for any transgressor.\n\n'We are not here to uphold Imperial Army regulations. We will not be judging the quality of your kit, nor monitoring your training drill. We will deal with disciplinary infractions that reduce the fighting effectiveness and discipline of this company. We will ensure that you adhere to a deeper truth of loyalty and dedication to the cause.'\n\nThis was met with silence. The assembled troopers were experienced enough in the work line to keep their lips sealed when a superior made such an announcement. Right from the outset the integrity officers would be watching for any with a loose tongue or showing signs of insubordination.\n\nZenobi suddenly felt quite exposed standing on the bed of her cousin but dared not climb down in case the movement drew further attention.\n\n'There will be one integrity officer for each platoon,' said captain Egwu. 'They will make themselves known-'\n\nShe stopped as the train trembled. The growl of reactors being brought to full power could be heard through the walls. The floor trembled as motors were engaged. There was barely any feeling of movement, just the slightest tug of inertia giving way to acceleration.\n\n'They will make themselves known to each of you in time,' Egwu continued, raising her voice as the throb of the locomotive continued to grow. It was joined by the first metallic clatter of the wheels, muted by the thick hull of the carriage. She glanced at Jawaahir. 'You will defer to the commands of the integrity officers at all times. Their word is law, their judgement absolute. I advise you now not to test their patience or resolve, but to comply with their wishes without hesitation or dispute.'\n\nThe integrity high officer cleared her throat and Egwu retreated a step, ceding even her authority to Jawaahir.\n\n'The entire corps will be subjected to introductory interview in the coming days, to get to know each of you better.'\n\n'Thank you-' began Egwu but she was cut off by a glance from the high officer. The look was passive enough, no scowl or other visual admonishment in her expression, but it silenced the captain immediately.\n\n'I want you to bear no illusions, troopers of Addaba,' Jawaahir told them, folding her arms. A movement in the crowd between Zenobi and the integrity officer briefly afforded her a full view. A long maul hung at one hip and a pistol was holstered at the other. 'There are those that are looking to turn us from our purpose, seeking weakness in our hearts. The enemy will stop at nothing to strangle all liberty and resistance, and their agents are moving amongst you even now.'\n\nZenobi glanced around, expecting these spies to somehow reveal themselves immediately upon being accused. There were others darting suspicious glances at their companions and she started to ask herself just how well she knew the people in the other platoons and companies. She caught a look of annoyance on the face of Menber and she threw him an enquiring gaze. He subtly shook his head, motioning with his eyes towards the integrity officers.\n\n'This is a war we will win with courage, determination and sacrifice,' Jawaahir continued. 'Your resolve will be tested. Your stamina will be pushed beyond anything you have ever endured. Your loyalty... Your loyalty to the cause will be called into question time and again. Against all of these threats, physical and mental, you must stand strong. We will be here to remind you of your duties and oaths.'\n\nHer hand dropped to the pistol at her hip, whether unconsciously or not Zenobi could not tell, but the message was clear.\n\n'Company!' snapped Egwu, bringing them all to attention. She paused for several long seconds, her gaze passing over every trooper under her command. 'Lunch rations will be issued in thirty minutes. Your platoon officers will detail those on catering duty. The rest of you will attend to maintenance. The forces of Horus are not far away and soon the battle for Terra will begin. You will be ready when called upon.'\n\nWith a flick of her head, she dismissed them and turned to her officers, pointedly ignoring the integrity officers, who moved as a group towards the nearest ladder leading up to the roof level.\n\nA collective sigh escaped the mustered troopers when the last of them had disappeared through the hatch, and Zenobi dropped down on the bunk, a nervous laugh escaping from her as she landed.\n\nShe heard her name being called by Okoye as he made his way across the carriage, along with others being summoned to the kitchen.\n\n'We've nothing to worry about,' said Menber, gripping her hand as he dragged her off the cot. 'Whatever these interviews are about, just tell the truth. Remember that you are of the Adedeji and our ancestors were kings.'\n\nShe gave him a half-smile and a pat on the arm before she moved to join the others assembling around the lieutenant. She gave a last glance back to the banner pole that she had stowed between her cot and the wall. It was her badge of pride, her talisman of loyalty.\n\nSurely she didn't have anything to worry about from integrity officers?\n\nBig guns never tire\n\nSerration\n\nNews from the void\n\nKatabatic Plains, assault hour\n\nA lifetime of war had inured Forrix to the pound of heavy guns as much as it had the beating of his own hearts. Yet there was something majestic about the power unleashed onto the Imperial Palace by the Warmaster. The sky itself was blackened, a roiling storm of discharge and plasma, through which burning mass driver rounds crashed like meteors and beams of lance light strafed.\n\nPerturabo had unlocked the secrets of the aegis that had warded the walls, exposing them to direct bombardment and assault, but the Sanctum Imperialis and surrounds were still swathed by energy screens. So too was the Lion's Gate space port. The air about it shimmered with barely contained energies.\n\nGreat guns about the circumference of the space port prevented warships from lying-to in orbit directly above for fear of counter-bombardment. The risk of a broken starship crashing upon the landing docks they were trying to capture was too great a risk, which had been pointed out to Kroeger when he had sent request to their primarch for orbital support. Smaller weapon arrays - still dwarfing those carried by anything smaller than a Titan - ringed the port in bastion outcrops.\n\nThey roared now, spitting defiance down into the packed regiments of turncoat Imperial Army and devolved creatures. Anti-air batteries awaited their turn to bark rebuke, for Kroeger had not yet committed his aerial assets to the attack.\n\nIf Forrix had assessed the situation on what he could see, without knowledge of what was to come, he would have laughed off the assault as a piecemeal, uncoordinated affair with no chance of success.\n\nIt would have been a mistake. Kroeger was a straightforward warrior, raised in the best and worst traditions of Iron Warriors stubbornness and dogma. He lacked finesse, or even any desire for finesse, but that did not make him an idiot. He had explained his plan at length to Forrix and Falk, ensuring they understood their parts well enough as well as his overall objectives. There was nothing to do but enact Kroeger's will or risk the ire of Perturabo, and so Forrix had accepted his allotted role without question. There was every chance that his directness was just the hammer needed to break open the lock of Dorn, as Perturabo believed.\n\nAdvancing with bolter in hand, a tide of soldiery and beasts around him, Forrix's auto-senses picked up the first distinctive cracks of the siege train loosing its wrath. A dozen kilometres behind him, battery after battery of cannons coughed forth a cloud of shells. The muzzle flare of their anger lit the skies, silhouetting their deadly rounds. A rolling thunder of noise followed, a shock wave that swept over the advancing legionaries and auxiliaries, bending banner poles, fluttering top knots on Crusader helms and washing over the unarmoured masses with a hot wind that brought cries of astonishment and dismay. They howled as eardrums split and sinuses burst, those foolish enough to look upon the moment of firing left reeling as a flare brighter than the sun burned out their sight.\n\nThe noise of the weapons loosing was as nothing to the detonation of the defensive shields. The bombardment could not reach the highest sections, but was targeted at the middle layers, so that the space port seemed girdled by a ring of fire five kilometres high, arcs of power forking ten kilometres to the ground below. The release of so much energy created a counter-blast that flowed down the uneven flanks of the port like an avalanche, gathering roiling vapour and debris as it descended to smash into the first companies of auxiliaries daring the lesser guns at the base. Bodies by the hundred were picked up and dragged through the crushing cloud of shell shrapnel and fire, cutting a swathe through those that followed.\n\nIt was the single most powerful explosion Forrix had ever witnessed, and was yet the overture for the fusillade that was to follow.\n\nAs the last after-shimmer of the void shields dissipated, the cannons spoke again, this time accompanied by the hiss of fifty thousand rockets and twenty thousand missiles. This fresh wave of brutality smashed into the labouring "}
{"text":" hundred were picked up and dragged through the crushing cloud of shell shrapnel and fire, cutting a swathe through those that followed.\n\nIt was the single most powerful explosion Forrix had ever witnessed, and was yet the overture for the fusillade that was to follow.\n\nAs the last after-shimmer of the void shields dissipated, the cannons spoke again, this time accompanied by the hiss of fifty thousand rockets and twenty thousand missiles. This fresh wave of brutality smashed into the labouring shields just half a minute after the first. Purple and blue coruscated through the air a few hundred metres from the armoured skin of the space port. Explosions wracked its surface, hurling chunks of plate and showering burning rubble down its mountainous slopes - not from impacts but void shield generators that had torn themselves apart under the strain of resisting the gigatons of rage unleashed upon them.\n\nAnd again the great guns of the Iron Warriors fired.\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach, Highway Four, one hour before assault\n\nIt was almost impossible to think, much less hear, under the force of the bombardment. The ground shook constantly, while dirt rattled down from the rafters of the gun pit. Trooper Alijah Goldberg cupped a hand to his ear to listen to what Sergeant Kazhni was shouting to the squad. He was standing at the vox hard-line from the headquarters fortification and had been silently nodding for the last sixty seconds.\n\n'It's our time!' The sergeant hung up the vox-receiver and gestured towards the two support guns mounted in the firing slits. 'There's no tractor, we'll pull the lascannons ourselves.'\n\n'This is ridiculous!' Goldberg shook his head and pointed to the intermittent flashing of shell bursts outside. He cupped his hands so that he could be heard. 'They want us to give up a nice, safe bunker and go out in this?'\n\n'You can stay here and wait for half a million mutants, traitors and beastmen if you want,' the sergeant replied.\n\nGoldberg considered his options and sighed and pushed himself to his feet.\n\n'Do we have to take them?' asked Trooper Kawar. 'They'll slow us down and the space port has got plenty of big guns.'\n\n'We take them,' Kazhni said decisively. 'I don't want to be shot by my own guns tomorrow.'\n\nThe squad busied themselves making the lascannons ready for moving, locking them onto the metal trails, securing the energy cells and detaching the breaking pins so that the rubberised wheels touched the floor. They had started with three, but a third of their small battery had been taken out by a rogue piece of shrapnel through the firing slit three weeks earlier, along with Trooper Sabbagh.\n\nGoldberg and Kosta lifted the trails of the closest lascannon and hauled it towards the ramp out of the gun pit. Closer to the opening the bombardment was even more shocking. Blast waves washed hot wind over his face and he blinked against the fire and detonations.\n\n'Where are we going?' he yelled to the sergeant.\n\nKazhni waved a hand directly through the doorway.\n\n'Just head for the space port and keep going.' The sergeant looked around as the second lascannon trundled up behind him, Kawar and Adon at the lifting bar. He pulled out a laspistol, though Goldberg had no idea what it would be used for. 'Everyone ready?'\n\nThey all nodded and set their backs to the task, a slow pull becoming a steady walk as they mounted the crest of the ramp. Goldberg glanced up to see the heavens dancing with blue and orange fire, coruscating over the screen of the void shields. Despite the energy fields, stray rockets and shells fell to the ground, cratering the broad ferrocrete strip of the highway and its muddied surrounds, tearing bloody holes into the tide of soldiery pouring back to the sanctuary of the Lion's Gate space port.\n\nThe heavy weapons squad picked up pace as they hit the flatter surface of the road, joining thousands more Imperial Army troopers. Alongside, halftracks and flatbed trucks bobbed and swayed as they picked their way over the shell-rucked earth, carrying the wounded and those that deemed themselves too important to walk. Above one mud-spattered transport Goldberg saw the huge banner of Colonel Maigraut, bright scarlet and edged with gold braiding. It seemed incongruously colourful among the mud and drab uniforms.\n\nEveryone looked as tired as Goldberg felt. Some trudged with a half-vacant look he had come to know well, uniforms of grey and green splashed with blood - their own or others' - and dirty from the long siege. Faces smeared with grime, bandaged, arms in slings or showing other wounds, they became a river of humanity flowing together along Highway Four.\n\nGoldberg barely flinched when a shell detonated a few hundred metres to his right, turning an armoured carrier into a flaming wreck that pitched down a slope away from the roadway. His back burned with effort as they broke into a slow jog, feeling the crowd around them moving faster.\n\nNobody was counting exactly, but everyone knew that the enemy would be at the defence line in minutes, if not there already. At any moment las-fire and bullets might start chasing them up the highway, far deadlier than the rage of the artillery being expended on the void shields above.\n\nA deeper, longer rumble sent a tremor along the road. Some troopers cried out, living their waking nightmares; others called warnings and broke into a run, ignoring the shouts of sergeants and officers.\n\n'That's not a bomb,' said Goldberg, looking back. The others stopped with him and turned.\n\nIn the distance, a couple of kilometres back, a wall of fire spread behind the line of retreat, following the arc of the last defence line. More detonations stretched the flames further and further, every trench, gun pit, bunker and foxhole turned into an inferno.\n\nAdon laughed and patted the barrel of the lascannon.\n\n'We'll be waiting for the survivors.'\n\nGoldberg spat in the dirt.\n\n'Burn, traitor scum!' he shouted. 'You can all burn!'\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach,\n\nHighway Four, assault hour\n\nTraitor corpses were piled so high they formed a bloody rampart in front of the Imperial Fists shield wall. The enemy continued to press on regardless, scrambling over their own dead, to be picked off by heavy weapons and marksmen as they crested the ridge of cadavers about twenty metres ahead of Rann, silhouetted against the fires that continued to rage along the former Imperial Army positions.\n\nA line of yellow-armoured warriors stretched almost from one promontory of the outer defence to the next, half a kilometre wide, a solid bank of power armour and boarding shields as inflexible as a plascrete rampart.\n\nThe line was unmoving, a last obstacle to be overcome should any foe survive the storm of fire that roared over their heads from support squads and Dreadnoughts, as well as the bastions of the space port itself.\n\nHere and there a mutant creature or turncoat army trooper staggered almost impossibly through the cannonade, only to meet the solid wall of Imperial Fists. The smallest partition allowed a bolter to fire with deadly accuracy, taking off the traitor's head or ripping apart their chest with a single bolt. The line would close again, as though nothing had happened.\n\nRann watched through the visor of his shield for any threat, as alert two hours into the battle as he had been the moment he had led the counter-attack from the armoured bastion. So far the Iron Warriors continued to direct their fire against the space port, mostly ignoring the force of Space Marines that had sallied forth. The shorter-ranged artillery that supported the attack had so far been kept at bay by the extended defence screen. Rann glanced up to see an aurora of gold and green above, rippling beneath the impacts of rockets and airbursts.\n\nShould any enemy gunner feel like encroaching within the dome of the fields, a whole flank of lascannons and multi-launchers were poised to greet them with counter-battery fire. Similar precautions had been prepared for aerial attack. Even so, Rann expected to hear the telltale whistle of a descending shell, ready to abort the armoured attack and withdraw his force the instant the murderous barrage of the IV Legion started to fall upon his warriors.\n\n'Commander, this is Verdas, on the left flank,' his vox crackled, the message from one of the Dreadnoughts assigned to support the First Assault Cadre. 'Lines of fire are getting very narrow. The dead are blocking our sight beyond thirty metres. Suggest an advance to establish a new base of fire.'\n\nThe phrasing was so respectful, it made Rann smile, coming as it did from a Terran veteran of the Chapter who had served longer than he had.\n\n'Understood, Verdas. I'll give you more room.' Rann switched the vox-channel to contact Lion Primus. 'Status report on armoured attack.'\n\n'Preliminary bombardment underway. Gates opening now, commander. Estimate contact with the enemy in three minutes.'\n\n'Inform the lieutenant-commander that I am moving forward our battlezone by fifty metres.'\n\n'Affirmative, recalculating safe zone for air and artillery strikes, commander.'\n\nA mutant ogryn shouldered its way through a narrowed part of the carcass mound. It was clad in pieces of angular armour, a bladed helm strapped across its misshapen head. In its hands it carried a length of metal topped with a lump of ferrocrete: a broken lumen pole from the highway partition. Bolts exploded off its makeshift war-plate, and those that found flesh did not hinder its advance in the least.\n\nFive more seconds and it would be on the line. The risk of even a single breach was unacceptable and Rann responded instantly.\n\n'By threes, target front, converging fire,' he told his Huscarls, finger slipping into the trigger guard of his bolter. 'Single round. Fire!'\n\nEvery third warrior hinged his shield to the left, allowing the Space Marine on their right to fire through the gap. Fifty bolters, Rann's included, barked as one, engulfing the mons"}
{"text":"lesh did not hinder its advance in the least.\n\nFive more seconds and it would be on the line. The risk of even a single breach was unacceptable and Rann responded instantly.\n\n'By threes, target front, converging fire,' he told his Huscarls, finger slipping into the trigger guard of his bolter. 'Single round. Fire!'\n\nEvery third warrior hinged his shield to the left, allowing the Space Marine on their right to fire through the gap. Fifty bolters, Rann's included, barked as one, engulfing the monstrous aberration in a storm of detonations. Shards of metal and hunks of flesh flew from the welter of bolts, leaving a ragged mess to flop to the floor, the lumen pole crashing down beside it. As swiftly as the line opened, it closed again, shields crashing back into place alongside each other.\n\nRann didn't believe in the concept of 'overkill'. Whatever it took to ensure the target went down he considered proportionate. Even fifty bolt-rounds for a solitary ogryn.\n\nHe checked the chronometer. Ninety seconds until the armour columns hit. That too might be considered more force than necessary, but he was determined to send a message to the Iron Warriors that Dorn's sons were not at this battle just to take punishment.\n\nThe IV Legion would be following on the heels of their expendable horde and the last reports had detected both Fulgrim's and Angron's warriors moving in support of this offensive. It was nearly time to withdraw to counter the approaching Traitor legionaries coming at the Lion's Gate from the north and south. Rann forced himself to wait a further thirty seconds, ensuring they drew in as many of the traitor scum as possible for the armoured attack.\n\n'Cadre to attend,' he voxed his entire command, hearts beating faster in anticipation of action. 'Huscarls prepare for serration and advance. Echelon squads to give support fire.'\n\nHe took a deep breath, holding himself for just another two thunderous heartbeats.\n\n'Three, two, one. Serrate!'\n\nStarting with the warriors either side of Rann, every other Imperial Fist in the front line lifted his shield and advanced five strides. Two warriors from the rear ranks followed on the heel of each, one firing left, the other to the right, sweeping the ground before them with a welter of bolt-rounds. No sooner had the first serration planted their shields than the remaining front-line legionaries lifted theirs and advanced ten paces, each also joined by two support warriors. Rann advanced with them, measuring his stride, and then drove his shield down into the filth of mud and gore that soaked the ground.\n\nAgain and again the line advanced, pushing with fusillade and shields into the charging enemy, the Huscarls like a saw cutting into the heart of the attack while any foes that tried to circle behind them were mown down by fire from the flank squads and supporting Dreadnoughts. Twenty metres at a time, through ten times their own number, they pushed onwards.\n\n'Echelon squads advance, hourglass attack. Huscarls, link for breach.'\n\nFlank squads withdrew behind the shield walls to allow the enemy to flow to the left and right of the line. Rann judged the moment, waiting twenty seconds, then gave the command for the advance by spear point. Like a wedge through dirt the Imperial Fists forced their way onwards, using their shields as a bulldozer's blade, pivoting outwards to trap the flanking foes against the spur walls, treading over the slain as they did so. The support squads held the centre with rapid bolter volleys and heavy weapons, until the line hinged together again. Dead eyes stared at Rann from the ridge of bolt-cratered bodies and broken bones.\n\nRann felt a swell of pride at the discipline of the manoeuvre. It had been simple enough to sketch it on the tactical display, but the precision of his lieutenants and sergeants was a thing of beauty to him. He wished Lord Dorn had been present to appreciate it.\n\nWith the full line advanced as far as it could, the Huscarls clamped their bolters and took up their close-combat weapons - chainswords, for the most part, a few with axes like Rann. As they had with the serration manoeuvre, they alternated hewing at the dead and living alike, while their companions pushed forward with their shields, pressing into the mounds of tattered flesh. Rann heaved, angling his shield slightly so he could chop at limbs and bodies as though cutting through tree branches across a jungle track. Pieces of corpses were trodden into the muck as he moved forward.\n\nPush, step, hack. Push, step, hack. Push, step, hack.\n\nThe dead were heaped deeper than he had realised, nearly fifteen metres of flesh to hew through before his warriors broke clear, forming up once more on the far side of the charnel mound. Still the enemy did not give in, rushing at the Imperial Fists with hoarse yells and shrieked invocations to their dark masters. Volleys of bolter fire cut down scores of traitors at a time. The Huscarls battered with shield and slashed with blade, dismembering and decapitating any enemy that reached the line.\n\nThrough the smog and gas, past the heaving mass of foes, Rann saw yellow plunging into the horde half a kilometre ahead from the left and right. As the armoured columns came around the defence spurs like ancient ships of the line rounding headlands into a harbour, flares of las-fire and muzzle flash lit the sickly cloud, the strobing of multi-lasers flashing like red navigation lights.\n\nCaught between the tanks and the shield wall, the traitor horde finally slowed, unsure whether to press on against the infantry or turn to swamp this new threat with their numbers. The armoured columns linked up on the highway and turned inwards together, spaced so that they could shoot past each other, heading back towards the shield wall, weapons firing non-stop to both sides, turrets spewing lascannon blasts and autocannon rounds. The fusillade cut lines through the unarmoured enemy, their dead falling in waves like the spreading ripples of stones tossed into a pool.\n\n'Huscarls, gate formation!' Rann bellowed when the lead vehicles were just a hundred metres away, approaching fast. Like a double door opening, the shield line divided, Rann at the right-hand end of one 'gate', Sergeant Ortor securing the other. They marched outwards, so that the line shifted but still faced directly towards the enemy. Rann could see mutants and traitors crushed against lowered dozer blades or speared by assault spikes as the column came on without slowing, punching through the horde like an armoured fist.\n\nThey roared past the line, guns falling silent at the last moment, tank after tank grinding through the gap between the two gates of the shield wall. They split again, peeling to the left and the right to form a support line behind the infantry companies, taking up positions beside the Dreadnoughts.\n\nThere were barely a few hundred foes left to target, many of them running one way or another in terrified confusion, some huddling among their dead to hide from the Imperial Fists' wrath.\n\n'Permission to seek and destroy, commander?' came the call from Lieutenant Leucid, leading the fast reserve.\n\n'Granted. Ten minutes only, then withdraw to the port.'\n\n'Understood.'\n\n'First Assault, withdraw by squads. Armour to provide cover fire and then withdraw by squadron.'\n\nThe last of the vehicles passed through the line, a Spartan assault tank that slewed around to come to a stop a few metres behind Rann, guns tracking back and forth over his head. The lord seneschal strode up to it and rested his shield against the side. Using the sponson for handholds, much to the audible amusement of the gunner within, he hauled himself up to the roof. The tank commander was standing in one of the forward hatches, the grips of a pintle-mounted combi-bolter in his hands. He slid the weapon aside and pulled himself up to join Rann, fist clashing on his chest in salute.\n\n'Welcome aboard, commander. That's quite a view, isn't it?'\n\nThe whine of anti-grav engines and scream of propulsor jets filled the air as six squadrons of Land Speeders swept overhead, just a few metres above the defensive line. Rann grinned as he watched them pass, a fist raised to salute them to victory.\n\n'Good hunting!' he called over the vox.\n\nThe chatter of heavy bolters and hiss of missiles faded with distance as Leucid's fast reserve chased after targets of opportunity. Rann looked back to the Lion's Gate space port and then out along the highway. Multi-spectral filters flickered across his view, picking out the body heat of the cooling dead. It was as though the ground were carpeted with undulations of fading orange and dark red, as far as his enhanced senses could penetrate the smog banks.\n\nWith the Emperor's Children and World Eaters inbound, it was just the beginning. However, he thought, three hundred thousand enemy dead in two hours was not a bad morning's work.\n\nArabindian massif, ninety-seven days before assault\n\nAs far as anyone could tell, the train was moving at a conservative ten kilometres an hour, which surprised nobody given its immense size and weight, even with two plasma reactors driving its motors. Its purpose was to convey large volumes of people, but it was certainly not doing so swiftly.\n\nRoutine had been the cornerstone of life on the factory line and it quickly became the bedrock of Zenobi's existence as a member of the defence corps. Each day was carefully scheduled and regulated, assigned duties moving through the platoons of the company as the roster and occasional punishment dictated. They drilled with their weapons - power packs removed - and turned spare mattresses into dummies for bayonet practice. The food was pretty much indistinguishable from day to day but given that they had all lived in the downhive spurs for their whole lives, such culinary tedium was of no remark.\n\nThe integrity officers were a constant, low-key presence. As warned, they started conducting interviews from the very first day."}
{"text":" platoons of the company as the roster and occasional punishment dictated. They drilled with their weapons - power packs removed - and turned spare mattresses into dummies for bayonet practice. The food was pretty much indistinguishable from day to day but given that they had all lived in the downhive spurs for their whole lives, such culinary tedium was of no remark.\n\nThe integrity officers were a constant, low-key presence. As warned, they started conducting interviews from the very first day. Names were called and troopers were escorted up to the top deck. They returned either within minutes or after more than an hour - there never seemed to be any absence between these two extremes. They were loath to discuss what they had seen, but persistence pried a few details from hesitant lips - though there was little enough to tell, as they had all been taken up the central ladder and down a narrow passage to a bare interview room. They had glimpsed the gunnery rondels and other doorways, which they assumed were the quarters of the crew, but little else.\n\nA few of those that had been summoned had spied a little of the train's surroundings through open turret doors and the firing slots beyond. Even so, there was nothing in their reports to excite, for they all returned with descriptions of endless grey sky and, if they saw the ground, an undulating expanse of dried seabed.\n\nOf what occurred within the interview chamber even less was said, other than that there was nothing to worry about if everybody told the truth. Zenobi had expected to be interviewed early, being part of the command squad of the platoon and the company standard bearer, but days passed without her name being called. She had started keeping note of who had been in an effort to predict when it would be her turn, but after three days she was forced to conclude that either she had no idea what the criteria were for the order of selection, or the troopers were being taken upstairs at random.\n\nAbout a week after leaving Djibou, the captain and lieutenants disappeared shortly after the midday inspection, ascending en masse to the mystery world of the upper deck. Like many others, Zenobi wanted to follow, to try to sneak a look at what delights and secrets were housed above. However, the dynastic enforcers were around in number, visible at the top of every ladder.\n\nIt was not just Zenobi's company. Officers from the lower decks went past until it was clear that the whole carriage had been emptied of every rank above sergeant.\n\n'I hear there gonna be some big news, yeye,' said Seleen. 'Everyone gonna be told at the same time. No rumours, just one truth.'\n\n'No rumours?' laughed Menber. 'Then what are you saying? That's a rumour!'\n\n'You know what I mean, fala,' said Seleen with a shake of her head.\n\n'It's got to be Horus,' said Kettai.\n\n'Keep it down,' shushed Menber, glancing towards the closest ladder to the top deck.\n\n'What?' The trooper shrugged. 'Saying his name a crime now, is it?'\n\n'It could be,' growled Menber.\n\n'Nah, I been in with the integrity officers,' said Seleen. 'Our platoon is good. We're all true to the cause and they know it. Volunteers, yeah? We were doing the recruiting.'\n\n'I don't care if you've got a signed letter from the dynastic chiefs themselves,' said Menber. 'I don't think those integrity officers need much to take offence.'\n\n'Even if the news is about Horus, it might not be bad news,' said Zenobi.\n\n'It could be anything,' agreed Menber. 'But I don't think everyone would be so subdued if they'd just heard Horus was dead.'\n\n'True, very true,' said Seleen. 'My bet? Horus' ships are here, in the system.'\n\n'I'd not bet against that,' said Kettai. 'If the stories are right, that there was void war in the last few months, testing the defences, the main attack had to be coming...'\n\nHe trailed away as they heard footsteps above, lots of them. They watched the officers coming down again. Fewer than went up.\n\n'Where are the others?' Zenobi asked, when the last of the officers from the lowest deck had gone - those that were now coming down wore the badges of Beta Company, quartered in the deck directly below. 'Twenty went up, only fifteen came down.'\n\n'Special duties?' suggested Menber, though even he didn't look convinced by his answer.\n\nThose officers that were returning were tight-lipped, glancing at each other with pointed expressions whose meaning was lost on the watching troopers.\n\n'Do they look worried?' said Kettai.\n\n'They don't look worried,' said Zenobi. 'Not scared for themselves, worried. More like guilty. I-'\n\nShe stopped as Captain Egwu descended the rungs of the ladder at the centre of the carriage. Okoye followed, as did most of the others from the company.\n\n'Three?' whispered Seleen. 'Who's missing?'\n\n'Gbadamosi, Adeoyo, Onobanjo,' said Kettai quickly. 'All lieutenants.'\n\n'Adeoyo was a platoon commander!' said Zenobi. 'What does it mean?'\n\n'We're about to find out,' said Menber, directing their attention back to the newly returned officers.\n\nCaptain Egwu stood in the middle of the deck while most of the lieutenants made their way back to their respective platoons and squads. Okoye stopped a short distance away, eyes flicking from one subordinate to the next, agitated.\n\n'Eyes and ears on the captain,' he said quietly, turning on his heel to face their company commander.\n\nEgwu stood with her hands behind her back, pacing a slow circle to look at the whole deck. She kept glancing at the ladder to the top deck and the hatchway to which it ascended. It was impossible not to be drawn to the object of her attention, so that Zenobi found herself staring at the iron rungs with growing unease, transmitted from the captain though Egwu said nothing and kept any telltale expression from her face.\n\nA succession of sharp reports followed by loud thumps on the deck above caused Zenobi to flinch - not alone amongst the gathered troopers. Around her, troopers were looking up, murmurs of disquiet rippling around the room.\n\nThere was no mistaking the noise, even muffled by the deck: gunshots.\n\nZenobi's first reaction was to turn, wide-eyed, and look for Menber. He glanced at her, shook his head a fraction and returned his gaze to the ladder. Booted feet appeared a few seconds later, soon revealed to be those of an integrity enforcer. A score of them descended, followed by Jawaahir and her cohort of officers. Six assigned to the company remained and the rest descended with enforcer escort to the decks below.\n\nThe integrity high officer gave a nod to Egwu, who cleared her throat before addressing the company.\n\n'The forces of Warmaster Horus have reached the Solar System. Naval and Legion fleets are engaged in void warfare against these flotillas at the gates near Pluto and Neptune.' The captain paced as she continued. 'We have no further intelligence regarding the ongoing status of that battle and we do not plan to provide a running commentary. We will try to keep you informed of any major strategic developments, but the assumption from this moment forward is that Horus will, sooner or later, reach orbit over Terra and commence invasion.'\n\nWhether it was discipline or shock that held their tongues, the troopers of the defence corps greeted this news in stoic silence. Though Zenobi had agreed with Seleen's prediction and had been expecting something like this to be announced, to hear the actual words set her heart racing. For a great part of her life she had been prepared for the coming battles, and to think that they were weeks, possibly even days from combat was exciting and terrifying.\n\nMostly terrifying, the more she considered it, but it was tempered by the knot of duty she felt hard in her gut. She was no warrior-born. Not a legionary or even a proper soldier of the Imperial Army. But when the recruiters had come and spoken to her and the rest of her family they had all been in agreement. For Addaba, for future generations, they had to fight, and give their lives if needed.\n\nShe remembered not quite understanding what was happening, but feeling her mother's grip on her shoulder, reassuring and proud. And every day since then, whether on the line or with the company, she had turned her thoughts to the time when the promise would become reality.\n\nShe was brought back to the present by the raised voice of Jawaahir.\n\n'The Warmaster's forces are closing upon Terra.' Her words were calm and assured, bearing no threatening undertone as they had on her first introduction. She might as easily have been telling them the latrine rota had been changed. 'Nothing but the utmost dedication to the task ahead will be tolerated. We have completed our inspection of your officers in light of this news. Those that fell short of our expectations have been executed.'\n\nAgain, there was little reaction from the Addaba troopers. The noises they had heard had left little doubt as to the missing officers' fate. There were, however, voices of consternation rising up from the lower decks. Zenobi realised that they could not have been forewarned and were hearing this news first from the mouths of their integrity officers.\n\n'Such action may seem harsh, and in a time of peace you would be correct,' Jawaahir continued. She turned her gaze as she spoke, addressing them all, her eyes seeming to fall upon everyone present for a second each. Not long enough to register a reaction, but a feeling of constant scrutiny all the same. 'The decision was not made lightly, nor arbitrarily. Do not grieve for them. Had they been left in their positions, their lack of commitment would have eroded your own, and jeopardised the integrity and courage of this fighting force.\n\n'Just as we will not allow any of you to waver from the course that must be followed, so we hold those that lead you to the highest standards. Hesitation in the face of the enemy will cost lives. Doubts that we serve a cause greater than ourselves will undermine discipline.'\n\nHer expression softened, becoming almost matri"}
{"text":" grieve for them. Had they been left in their positions, their lack of commitment would have eroded your own, and jeopardised the integrity and courage of this fighting force.\n\n'Just as we will not allow any of you to waver from the course that must be followed, so we hold those that lead you to the highest standards. Hesitation in the face of the enemy will cost lives. Doubts that we serve a cause greater than ourselves will undermine discipline.'\n\nHer expression softened, becoming almost matriarchal as she pivoted slowly once more.\n\n'We do not wish to terrify you into obedience. It is natural that you look upon the decisions you have made and wonder if you have done the right thing. Such lapses are understandable, but they have no place in battle. You must act without thought, without question, without regret. To do otherwise is to risk the victory towards which we all strive, for which we should all be prepared to give our lives.'\n\nSilence followed, broken only by the background clatter of wheels on rails and the hum of energy cables. Zenobi felt herself swaying, thinking it the motion of the carriage at first, but increasingly so as a sense of unreality descended on her. She was reminded of the time she had been told of the Warmaster and what had occurred during the Great Crusade, of being subjected to ideas so much larger than she was that it was almost overwhelming to think about them.\n\nA hand on her elbow steadied her.\n\n'Breathe, cousin,' Menber told her with a concerned look. 'Breathe...'\n\n'I will be working with the integrity officers to select suitable replacements for those...' Egwu paused, glanced at Jawaahir and then continued. 'Gaps in the command structure will be filled from the ranks. Just like on the factory line. That is all.'\n\nZenobi sagged, realising that she had been holding herself as taut as a wire for several minutes. The babble that erupted across the deck was immediate, divided between the two topics of conversation: Horus' imminent arrival and the executions.\n\nBefore she could say anything, Zenobi felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to find Sergeant Alekzanda looking at her. He took a step back and tilted his head towards the integrity officers. Zenobi looked past him, her gaze meeting the stare of Jawaahir.\n\n'Interview time, Zenobi,' said Alekzanda. 'You're up next.'\n\nCharge of the berzerker\n\nLoyalty scrutinised\n\nThe telaethesic ward\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach, Highway Two, assault hour\n\nThe barrage of the Iron Warriors lit the peak of the Lion's Gate like a candle. Red flames crawled across its hab-units and docks, long licks of scarlet that danced with a strange life. In the south-east, on the far side of the artificial mountain, purple flames silhouetted high shipyards and kilometre-long boarding quays - the twin beacon to Fulgrim and his Emperor's Children.\n\n'That's... hnnh. That's the signal!' barked Kharn, slamming his fist onto the roof of the Land Raider to alert the driver. All around him others were responding in similar kind, raising war shouts and cries to Khorne that rolled down the highway along with the sudden growl of engines coming to life.\n\nIt had taken all of Kharn's willpower to linger with his brothers, fighting back the urge to charge headlong at the enemy. To do so would have meant throwing themselves into the teeth of the defence without any support from Perturabo's Legion.\n\nHe lifted Gorechild in his other hand as the engines of five hundred transports and tanks grew to a roar, their tracks snarling over pitted ferrocrete - Rhinos, Land Raiders and Spartan transports flanked by an echelon of Predators and Vindicators. This support element was much diminished, for many of Kharn's brothers were incapable of controlling themselves sufficiently to steer or guide a heavy gun. Slaves were chained into their positions, or servitors installed to take the place of the truly living. Freed from other concerns, the legionaries would be able to storm forth and slaughter without distraction once they reached their target.\n\nKharn was thrown back in the cupola as the driver rammed the assault transport forward, the Land Raider heeling and swaying as it picked up speed, thundering across ground cratered by thousands of shell bursts. Around him others vied to take the lead, their shouted urging crackling across the vox, mixed with boasts of the souls they would send to Khorne's realm that day.\n\nThe roar and smoke of the assault column surrounded Kharn, a battle-din that started his hearts thumping their own percussion, the implant in his skull adding an insistent, rapid pulse to the symphony.\n\nBut it was inside that the music swelled. He felt the Blood God reaching into him, lighting a fire in his gut to ignite a rage that no mortal shell could contain. He revved Gorechild, delighting in the glitter of the signal flame on the whirr of the mica-dragon teeth that served as its blade. He let out a roar that became a howl, and then from deep within he gave voice to the demands of Khorne, slamming his fist upon the armour plate in time with his chant.\n\n'Kill! Maim! Burn!'\n\nArabindian massif, ninety-seven days before assault\n\nThe thrill of finally being allowed to tread upon the hallowed upper deck momentarily quelled the sickness roiling through Zenobi's gut. She held her breath as her eyeline cleared the hatch and she was granted her first proper look at the domain of the officers.\n\nIt was disappointing. Bare metal bulkheads created a small, square space directly around the ladder. A bench was bolted to the wall, and though it was currently unoccupied the scuffing in front of it was evidence of the sentries that had been using it. Beside it a few steps led up to an armoured hatch with a small round window, though all she could see beyond was a sky smeared with dark clouds underlit by the early morning sun.\n\nTo the left and right stretched narrow corridors lined with more doors, leading to another ladder landing about ten metres away, and so on and on for the length of the carriage.\n\nShe turned about, away from the bench, to find another corridor, broader than the others, that ran across the width of the train. There were ladder rungs cut into the wall here, leading up to roof entrances, armoured like the other gun turrets. A few metres away a dynastic enforcer waited, maul held across the front of her thighs in both hands, feet shoulder-width apart in regulation pose.\n\n'This way,' she told Zenobi, stepping to one side and pointing to an open door a few metres further along the passageway.\n\nThe sound of footsteps on the rungs behind her prompted Zenobi to move, aware that Jawaahir was following. She hurried past the enforcer and into the waiting chamber. Inside was more metal, and at first she took it to be a cell. There were holes in the walls where shelf brackets had been bolted, revealing the chamber's original purpose as a storeroom. In place of whatever crates and sacks it had contained it now played host to a small metal table and two chairs set opposite each other.\n\nThere was a triangular banner hanging on the wall - real cloth from a pole of real wood. The design incorporated the six symbols of the dynastic chiefs, gold against a red background, the whole trimmed with coiled purple thread.\n\n'One of the old standards, from Unification.' Zenobi turned to find Jawaahir at the doorway. The integrity high officer glanced at the chair with its back to them and Zenobi moved next to it immediately. 'A reminder to us that Hive Addaba has a history with the Emperor that stretches back generations.'\n\nZenobi opened her mouth to reply but was silenced by a raised hand. Jawaahir stepped into the interview cell and closed the door behind her. She placed a hand on Zenobi's shoulder as she walked past, firmly pushing her into the metal chair, before taking the seat opposite. She knitted her fingers together on the table and Zenobi noticed the bright scarlet of her fingernails - implants she guessed, not painted. Like the tattoos, they were permanent modifications to declare her position and allegiance.\n\n'You are Zenobi Adedeji, line worker and now trooper. Captain Egwu vouches for you and has even entrusted the company banner to your care. That is quite remarkable, a serious responsibility for a seventeen-year old.'\n\nZenobi kept her nerve, and her silence. There had been no question asked and it seemed unwise to volunteer information.\n\n'I think she is right.' Jawaahir leaned back and her hands moved to her lap. 'I'm sure you know all about the history of the Adedeji.'\n\n'I share the name of a ruby dynasty. Their blood is in me even if my family have fallen low in status in recent decades.'\n\n'Former ruby dynasty. Shamed by the Emperor, for resisting Unification.'\n\nZenobi fought the temptation to defend the honour of her ancestors. Many a squabble, and a few outright brawls, had proven that whatever the facts, the accepted story of the Adedeji was that they had betrayed the Emperor.\n\n'The Adedeji are no longer among the Gifted Six. I'm a line worker, I don't know much about the top-hive politics or what happened to my distant relatives.'\n\n'And you are loyal to Addaba.'\n\nZenobi nodded. There seemed nothing further to add to the assertion. A ghost of a smile passed across Jawaahir's lips.\n\n'Do I frighten you?'\n\nThe truth, Zenobi remembered. Everyone that had come out of the interviews had a single message to pass on: just tell the truth.\n\n'I find you and your officers intimidating,' she said. 'I know that my loyalty to the cause is as strong as the foundations of Addaba. Even so, I worry that you might not see that.'\n\nJawaahir pursed her lips, eyes never straying from Zenobi's. The trooper met her stare for as long as she could, out of pride more than defiance, but eventually her gaze dropped to her hands. She was gripping the edge of the table tight and hadn't realised it.\n\n'You've not said a single word to convince me of your dedication,' said Jawaahir. 'You're very calm.'\n"}
{"text":"e said. 'I know that my loyalty to the cause is as strong as the foundations of Addaba. Even so, I worry that you might not see that.'\n\nJawaahir pursed her lips, eyes never straying from Zenobi's. The trooper met her stare for as long as she could, out of pride more than defiance, but eventually her gaze dropped to her hands. She was gripping the edge of the table tight and hadn't realised it.\n\n'You've not said a single word to convince me of your dedication,' said Jawaahir. 'You're very calm.'\n\nThis time Zenobi could not hold back the urge to speak.\n\n'I haven't anything to fear, if what you say is true. I am loyal. I swore the oaths. Oversee- Captain Egwu herself recruited me, and my family. If I didn't trust you, I'd still trust her. And since she came back down after... Since she is still commander of the company, I guess that you must trust her too.'\n\n'Do you find that logic reassuring?' Still Jawaahir's eyes bored into Zenobi. She wasn't sure if the integrity high officer had even blinked. 'Is that how you see the world, a place of reasons and rules?'\n\n'I lived on the factory line, bana-madam,' Zenobi said. 'Everything works a certain way or it doesn't work at all. People die if it goes wrong.'\n\nJawaahir smiled again, though now the expression was dry, devoid of any humour.\n\n'I meant no offence,' Zenobi added quickly.\n\n'People die in battle too, if people do not follow the system. You are a follower, aren't you, Trooper Adedeji?'\n\n'I will obey the orders of my officers, bana-madam,' Zenobi assured her interrogator. 'I would never bring disgrace to the name of Adedeji.'\n\n'No, I'm sure you wouldn't. That you have retained the name, when most of your distant relations threw it away like an old jerkin, tells me it means a lot to you.'\n\nZenobi had to clamp her teeth shut to stop the words that wanted to burst from her. For more than a week she had hardened herself to the idea of being shouted at, accused, insulted and threatened but she hadn't expected this nagging, baiting line of conversation. It was like her grandmother's silent stare when they'd been assembled as youngsters to uncover the perpetrators of some infantile misdemeanour. The guilty were always the first to spring to their own defence. It wasn't until she was fourteen that Zenobi had realised this. Unfortunately, too late to make use of it, her grandmother having been passed to the endforges two years earlier.\n\n'What are you thinking about?' Jawaahir sat forward again, clasped hands back on the tabletop. 'Answer me now!'\n\n'Abay Su-su,' Zenobi replied without thought. She flushed, embarrassed at the childish nickname. 'My father's mother. She was the law keeper in the family when I was little.'\n\n'I am older than your grandmother was, Zenobi. Can you believe that?'\n\n'No, bana-madam. You... Your skin, your hair... Maybe, for top-hivers. No work smog in your lungs, no forge heat on your skin.' Zenobi frowned, her eyes flicking to the tattoos and fingernails. 'Maybe the dynastic chiefs give you a pick-me-up, right? I heard that top-hivers can live seventy, eighty years or more.'\n\n'That is right, and also wrong. I am a little over ninety years old. I will live a few more years but I cannot have another treatment. This journey, this battle that we travel to, will be my last effort for the dynastic chiefs. No endfires for me, I expect. Nor you, Zenobi. How does that make you feel, to know that your body will likely end up on a pile, rotting under the sun in some place you have never heard of?'\n\n'I'll be dead, I'll not care either way. What matters is how I die.'\n\n'And how will that be?'\n\n'Fighting for freedom and the lives of my companions, bana-madam.' Zenobi stood up, feeling a wave of assertion pushing her to her feet. Her knees wobbled slightly but she held her place, and a look with the integrity high officer. 'If my words don't convince you, then I hope I live long enough that my actions do. If you doubt me, then pull your gun and shoot me like those officers.'\n\n'Really?' Jawaahir stood and flipped the top of her holster. She slid out a long-barrelled autopistol, the crest of the Ellada dynasty engraved into a plate on its side. The muzzle swung towards Zenobi, the small black hole swallowing all of her attention. 'Is this how you would die for Addaba?'\n\nZenobi tried to speak, cowed by the muzzle, regretting her rashness and the hint of pride that had led her to dare the anger of this woman. It had been a foolish, selfish act. Insolent.\n\nShe closed her eyes and bowed her head, accepting her punishment.\n\n'If I have done wrong, chastise me, bana-madam. But ask yourself a question first.' Zenobi straightened and looked the officer in the eye again. 'Would you rather not have one more bullet for your real enemies?'\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach,\n\nHighway Two, assault hour\n\nAhead of the assault, thousands of slave-beasts and the serfs of the Iron Warriors continued to throw themselves at the defensive line that had been drawn across the highway leading into the south-eastern gate of the space port. Gun towers and pill boxes spewed fire into the numberless mass, prevented from targeting the incoming transports by blocked lines of fire and the fear of being overrun by the much closer foe. Gun captains further up the Lion's Gate port's flanks had no such concerns and it was not long before shells began to fall among the blur of red transports carving furrows through the ash, dust and smoke that blanketed the Katabatic Plains.\n\nThe tanks leading the charge opened fire, their accuracy severely diminished by the rate of advance and inexperience of their crews. Even so, a welter of siege cannon shells, las-blasts and plasma punched through the swirl of smog and debris, flaring against the local power fields and smashing into ferrocrete walls.\n\nThe support echelon slewed aside, guns still firing, allowing the transports to race past, their own weapons flaring and roaring.\n\n'Into the heart of battle!' snarled Kharn. 'Drive your blades down their throats!'\n\nThe road was littered with the corpses of earlier attacks, crushed beneath the tracks of the Land Raider, sending splashes of blood up its blue-and-white flanks. Kharn's enhanced sense of smell was awash with the scents of death and battle. His eyes rolled back in his head as he took a deep draught, intoxicated by the thought of imminent bloodshed.\n\nThe Land Raider slowed and Kharn forced himself to focus. Ahead, a throng of turncoat soldiers and Legion slaves pressed along the highway, blocking the way.\n\n'Drive on,' he yelled down through the hatch. 'Go through!'\n\nThe driver laughed and accelerated again, bringing the Land Raider back up to full combat speed. Some of those unfortunates at the back of the crowd heard the approach of engines above the din of the barrage and turned in time to flee. Others did not and were slammed aside, or crushed under the tracks, or pinned upon the razor-sharp blades that had been affixed to the front of the tank.\n\nTheir screams bypassed Kharn's ears and flared through his brain like bolts of electricity, causing him to howl again. Drool fell from teeth bared inside his helm as animal hunting urges overwhelmed any higher human sense.\n\nLike a blade parting flesh, the assault column carved through the press of lesser warriors, coating the highway with a slick of pulverised organs and bone. The spray from the tracks coated the following vehicles in gore. The warriors within wrestled with each other to push themselves to the open hatches so that they might be anointed in blood for their new god, armour already much crimson-stained getting fresh slicks of life fluid.\n\nSeveral vehicles slewed aside, falling by the wayside as their running gear became clogged with viscera. Their passengers poured out of the assault ramps and through roof hatches, leaping down onto the road to continue the assault on foot.\n\nAs though a curtain peeled back, the throng of serfs and soldiers parted and Kharn heard a great rumbling over and above that of the flying column and the big guns of the Iron Warriors. Detonations blossomed amongst the lead wave, incendiary shells and airbursts scything down hundreds of mortal troopers and mutants pressed into the breach. Beyond them loomed towering armoured vehicles clad in the ochre yellow of Dorn's Legion. Mighty Leviathans and Capitol Imperialis, three of each, emerged from the vast gateway, guns laying down a carpet of fire that ripped whole companies to bloody shreds in seconds. With them came other super-heavy vehicles - Baneblades, Shadowswords and other variants in colours of the Imperial Army, and VII Legion Malcador heavy tanks with plasma cannons and rapid-firing laser blasters.\n\nThe first wave slowed, baulked by this sudden wall of armoured might and the beams of deadly energy that lanced from their batteries. Some of the rearmost horde regiments turned to flee the counter-attack, only to find themselves in the path of the onrushing chosen of Khorne. Guns roared retribution for their cowardice, cutting them down even as they fell beneath the armoured vehicles.\n\nEven through the frothing madness of his Butcher's Nails and the spirit of Khorne rushing through his body, Kharn vaguely recognised the danger. He tried to order the column to slow, so that guns might be brought to bear. The words would not come. He thought to signal the Iron Warriors to redirect their strikes or bring in attack runs from gunships that circled overhead, but all he could manage was an animal panting.\n\nSo it was that instead of fear he embraced the nature of his master and admitted in that moment what he had known in his soul for many years. He would die in battle, broken and bloodied, but his spirit not quenched. Now he gave his death to a cause far worthier than the Emperor, for his blood would spill for the God of Battle and one day his skull would be raised up and placed in honour on the throne of Khorne.\n\nBut it would not be this day.\n\nThe beacon-barrage had c"}
{"text":"nage was an animal panting.\n\nSo it was that instead of fear he embraced the nature of his master and admitted in that moment what he had known in his soul for many years. He would die in battle, broken and bloodied, but his spirit not quenched. Now he gave his death to a cause far worthier than the Emperor, for his blood would spill for the God of Battle and one day his skull would be raised up and placed in honour on the throne of Khorne.\n\nBut it would not be this day.\n\nThe beacon-barrage had called not only to the legionaries of the World Eaters. Kharn felt a shimmer of anticipation run through him and looked up as he heard an unearthly bellow cutting through the tumult of war. Against the lightning-wreathed clouds that crowded above the Palace, a silhouette of a great winged beast appeared. It dived down, trailing godfire and shadow, the gleam of its magic blade like a thunderbolt in the darkness.\n\nAngron, daemon primarch of the World Eaters, did not slow to land, but speared into the nearest of the Capitol Imperialis. Shields flared and failed, engulfing the titanic engine in brief layers of gold and purple. The tip of the sword sheared through armour like that of a castle's bastion, and a shower of molten plasteel and shards of ceramite fountained from the gaping wound. Though the vehicle was the size of a hab-block Angron's impact was enough to rock it on its huge tracks. With a sound of tortured metal it fell sideways as the primarch beat his wings and howled his anger.\n\nKharn's last sight of his lord was amid sparks and flames, as Angron leapt into the exposed innards of the fallen war machine. He grinned as he imagined the carnage being wrought within, the slaughter of a company of soldiers in tight confines, the walls and floor and ceiling decorated with their blood and body parts, their skulls offered up in praise of the Blood God.\n\nThe remains of the super-heavy command vehicle exploded, engulfed by a plasma fireball two hundred metres across, overloading the shields of its neighbour and incinerating several smaller tanks in the gap between the behemoths.\n\nKharn recovered his sight from the blinding flash to see Angron striding from the molten ruin, pieces of burning wreckage jutting from his armour and unnatural flesh, trailing black flames.\n\nA Leviathan turned its main cannon upon the primarch, belching forth a shell that could break open Battle Titans. Angron cleaved the air with his curse-edged blade, cutting the shell in flight so that its detonation rolled harmlessly around him.\n\nThe mobile command bastion blazed away with full batteries, slamming shell after shell and laser volleys into the unfeeling form of Angron. There was nothing that could stop him: a blood miasma surrounded the primarch, warding away attacks like a power field, drawing energy from the continuing slaughter.\n\nThe counter-attack faltered in the face of the unstoppable beast, and the super-heavy tanks withdrew, leaving a Capitol Imperialis as rear-guard. Platoons of soldiers alighted from its ramps, not to challenge the primarch but to flee for the safety of the space port. Angron bellowed after them, thwarted in his pursuit by a fresh cannonade from a slab-sided Leviathan.\n\nThe column had almost drawn level with their lord, their sponson weapons and pintle mounts chasing the fleeing troopers into the shadow of the Lion's Gate space port. Kharn dragged himself from the cupola and leapt to the ground as the Land Raider slid to a halt, surrounded by a surge of power-armoured berzerkers chanting for blood and calling upon Khorne for battle-favours.\n\nThe primarch hacked apart the Imperial command vehicle as Kharn and the assault column neared. Angron broke open the ammunition stores and the shells within detonated, surrounding his immortal form like celebration fireworks. Blade aloft, his sons a red tide around him, the daemon primarch led the advance. Ahead, the great gates started to close.\n\nAngron snarled and leapt to the wing, soaring past the ruin of the Capitol Imperialis, becoming a scarlet blur as he gained speed.\n\nHe was perhaps three hundred metres from the still-open gate when a flare of silver light pulsed around him, hurling him from the sky. The primarch crashed, breaking stone, furled wings trailing silvery sparks, eyes aflame with pale light. Roaring defiance, he came to his feet and launched himself again at the fortifications but was repulsed a second time, the silver energy coiling about his limbs like chains as he tumbled to the ground once more.\n\nOn foot he approached, sword and fist pounding at the insubstantial barrier, but every blow was reflected back at him, so that he recoiled from his own fury, armour rent in a dozen places as though his mystic blade had carved it open.\n\nKharn's vigour left him as he witnessed the impotency of his lord, flailing mindlessly at the psychic barrier that kept his daemon form at bay. The defence guns that had fallen silent during the counter-attack came to destructive voice again. Transports exploded under the renewed barrage and legionaries died by the hundred, forced to take shelter in the defences they had overrun, while still-laden transports drew back, seeking sanctuary.\n\nAngron lifted away, thwarted by the shield, and soared north. Lightning crackled from his wingtips as he tested the extent of the barrier. He disappeared with altitude, and then returned, before winging southwards seeking easier prey.\n\nClarity burned through Kharn's battle rage. His World Eaters would be trapped against the closed gate, super-heavy tanks ready to strike from within, guns pounding them from above. Without their Khorne-blessed primarch the Legion would break uselessly upon the space port's walls.\n\nTo die in close battle, eye to eye with the foe was one fate, but he would not let Khorne's favoured be blasted apart from afar, raging at an enemy out of reach.\n\nReluctantly, sickened by the notion as his Butcher's Nails threaded chastising agony through his brain, Kharn voxed the order to withdraw.\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach,\n\nHighway Three, assault hour\n\nHeaving up a bucket of water, Aggerson doused the breech of the gun again, steam filling the ferrocrete bunker as it hissed from the overheated cannon.\n\n'Give it two minutes,' said Olexa, the gun captain. She pulled a lho-stick from her pocket and lit it. Aggerson frowned and looked at the three shells lined up next to the ammunition elevator from the magazine below. Olexa shrugged. 'What? There's a full-scale attack. Nobody's doing gun inspections...'\n\nAggerson didn't bother arguing, but exchanged a glance with Maxxis, the third and final member of their gun crew. He came to an unspoken agreement with her and they both moved to the slit in the wall that served as their only window.\n\nBattery 65-B was situated overlooking Highway Three, which ran north from the Lion's Gate space port. The other four guns of the battery still fired, sending their shells down into the swathe of purple-armoured figures a kilometre below. Around them larger guns thundered their deadly payloads even further along the road, targeting the command vehicles and super-heavies that had moved up in support of the Emperor's Children attack. Smaller anti-personnel weapons rattled and barked from emplacements in the lower levels, though much was wreathed in smoke and choked with rubble from the enemy's attacks.\n\nDistance gave the scene an unreal quality. Target coordinates would come through on the command feed and they fired at that spot, never really seeing what they were aiming at. Even with the naked eye the procession of Traitor Space Marines and swarms of lesser warriors seemed like something from a vid-projection.\n\nAggerson saw a swathe of purples and gold, swirled about with multicoloured fog that reminded him more of his mother's incense burners than the smog of battle. Pennants and banners flew from vehicles and company standards, their aquilas and honours replaced with stylised runes that he had never seen before, but which made him feel queasy to look at all the same. Vehicles were festooned with new decoration, like baroque railing spikes with body parts impaled upon them.\n\nAnd among the din of engines and crash of weapons he thought he heard music: disharmonies of strident orchestral works alongside nerve-shredding electronic screeches and inhuman wailing.\n\n'They're pulling back!' gasped Maxxis, pointing out of the slit.\n\nAggerson realised it was true. Under cover of a renewed bombardment, squads of the Emperor's Children were moving away from the space port, while squads of power-armoured warriors pulled back from the breaches in the lowest batteries. They filed onto their transports, kaleidoscopic smoke belching from engines as the troop carriers picked up speed, heading northwards. Others followed on foot covered by fire from squads positioned along the sides of the highway.\n\n'And don't come back!' Maxxis laughed, shaking a fist.\n\nAggerson didn't share her good humour. Something was off.\n\n'Cap, pass me the magnox,' he said, stepping back from the slit to hold a hand out to Olexa.\n\n'They're mine,' she said.\n\n'Please.'\n\n'Fine.' Olexa tossed him the spotter's magnox, which he only just caught.\n\nTurning back to the slit he leaned out as far as he dared, magnox raised to his eyes. Autofocus lenses clicked until he sighted on the ground below. He swept towards the main highway and saw hundreds of purple-armoured Space Marines marching back to the road. They were not alone. Each carried or dragged two or three prisoners, some unconscious, others flailing futilely at their superhuman captors. Rhinos, Land Raiders and other tanks crawled out of range of the guns, captives piled on their roofs and strapped to their flanks like bundles of baggage. Most wore Imperial Army uniforms, seized from the lower batteries and the regiments that had been defending the highway approaches.\n\n'They're taking people,' he whispered. Scanning along the road, he saw "}
{"text":"They were not alone. Each carried or dragged two or three prisoners, some unconscious, others flailing futilely at their superhuman captors. Rhinos, Land Raiders and other tanks crawled out of range of the guns, captives piled on their roofs and strapped to their flanks like bundles of baggage. Most wore Imperial Army uniforms, seized from the lower batteries and the regiments that had been defending the highway approaches.\n\n'They're taking people,' he whispered. Scanning along the road, he saw hundreds, maybe thousands being hauled back to the waiting transports. He pulled himself back in and looked at his companions, mouth dry with fear. 'Why are they taking people?'\n\nKharn raises Gorechild to signal the World Eaters' attack.\n\nA war song\n\nFresh assault\n\nFlawed iron\n\nKarachee Flats, seventy days before assault\n\n'Two minutes!' the call went around, stilling all sound and motion as it moved from one part of the carriage to the next, hopping from squad to platoon to the whole company like an auditory epidemic.\n\nTwo minutes.\n\nTwo minutes was the call on the line to prepare for the shift change. Two minutes to set the safeties on the machinery. Two minutes to rack the tools. Two minutes to clear the pipes, secure the cables, stow the lock-bolts and perform the hundreds of other small but essential duties that led to a smooth and safe handover.\n\nZenobi looked around, chest swelling with suppressed emotion as she saw the company coming to a halt as one. Across the divide she caught the eye of Sweetana, waiting with a few others by the stairwell.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working it all day,' Zenobi began, her voice wavering a little.\n\n'Just like my father before,' Sweetana sang back in reply, joined by more voices from the company.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working it all night,' Zenobi continued, growing in confidence. She could see Lieutenant Okoye hiding a smile behind his hand, other officers showing a mixture of amusement, pride or contempt. The enforcers stopped their prowling as the chorus grew, swelling to fill the carriage with voices.\n\nAn even louder, defiant burst of song erupted from the deck below, pulsing through the stairwells like a physical thing.\n\n'All my days, working in the dark, all my days, carrying my own light!'\n\nZenobi remembered that Second Company came from the lowest part of the cradlespur, mostly hivecore miners that clawed raw materials back from the city's ancient substrate.\n\n'I been working the line, working the line, working all shift!' she cried, her voice almost cracking with effort as she competed with the song from below, the two forming a harmony. The muted words of a third from the lowest deck drifted in and out of rhythm. All three songs rose and fell in competition.\n\nZenobi almost choked, her throat tightening with emotion, stalling her words. It didn't matter, the carriage was almost rocking from the combined voices of all three decks, which segued together into the unofficial anthem of Addaba: Onwards, Lords and Ladies of Industry.\n\nShe heard the first faltering notes disturbing the song a few moments before movement drew her eyes to the ladders from the upper deck. The singing fractured as one after another the troopers caught sight of Integrity High Officer Jawaahir. Disconcerted by the disharmony creeping in from the upper deck, perhaps wondering what was amiss, the companies below stuttered and quietened in the following minute.\n\nOther integrity officers filed past their leader, heading to the lower decks, silencing the last voices raised in song.\n\n'You need not silence yourselves on my account,' said Jawaahir, her voice raised to carry across the hall-sized compartment. 'But perhaps it is time to stop singing about the past. You are not on the line any longer. Now perhaps turn hearts and tongues to the future. A new song for Addaba. A war song.'\n\nThis declaration was met with speculative muttering, soon silenced by whispered threats from the lieutenants and sergeants.\n\n'It is time,' the chief of the integrity officers declared, rubbing her hands together with relish. Quite what she was so animated about, Zenobi didn't know. As the order was passed round to prepare for disembarkation, she remembered a piece of advice from Menber and tried not to think about it too much.\n\nKatabatic Plains, four hours since assault\n\nForrix found himself viewing the continuing attack from the roof of a burnt-out way station, about seven kilometres from the Lion's Gate space port. The highway that ran alongside had been churned to ferrocrete grit by the passage of so many tanks and mobile fortresses.\n\nThe IV Legion had created circumvallation works in a twenty-kilometre arc around their objective, formed of armoured vehicles and self-creating fortifications based on ancient Standard Template Construct systems. The Khan had led his White Scars against the engines of the Pneumachina and Mortarion's warped legionaries and caused great damage and delays, and the surprise sally by the Imperial Fists against the opening assault had caused Kroeger to reflect a little on his impatience. If Dorn or any of his allies thought to launch another counter-attack against Perturabo's Legion they would find far stiffer opposition.\n\nThoughts of what had happened to the Death Guard gave Forrix pause. There had been no formal report about their delayed arrival, but it was clear their transit through the warp had met with complications. Those he had once known as Dusk Raiders were no more. Their primarch had become an embodiment of nightmare, like Angron and Fulgrim, and their bodies had been changed by exposure to something beyond Forrix's knowledge. He was not naive about the forces to which the Warmaster had pledged himself, but he was no expert either. He had seen daemon-altered Word Bearers and mutated sorcerers, as well as the results of the Pneumachina's experiments with previously forbidden warp tech. Watching the sea of once-human and pseudo-human creatures hurling itself at the outer defences left a sour taste in his mouth. The thought that the Iron Warriors might one day succumb to that kind of degradation made him feel sick.\n\nHe turned to his companion, Soltarn Vull Bronn, who was known as the Stonewrought. Overall commander of the barrage, he was observing the effectiveness of his cannons and rockets. A cluster of Cataphractii Terminators loitered behind him, their presence more a badge of the Stonewrought's rank than a military precaution.\n\n'I'm glad at least one true Iron Warrior stands alongside me still,' said Forrix.\n\n'What do you mean?' The Stonewrought did not turn his head, gaze fixed upon the conflagration engulfing the Lion's Gate space port.\n\n'I'd have you in the Trident, you know? You have a talent for destruction.'\n\n'I am content with my allotted role,' Soltarn Vull Bronn replied. 'The Trident is not missing a member.'\n\n'It would be an outrageous stretch of fortune if all three of us survived this battle, you know that. I would rather have someone steadier at my shoulder.'\n\nNow the Stonewrought turned, his burnished helm catching the light of a thousand fires, sparkling as volcano cannons spat back their fury in counter-battery fire against his siege machines.\n\n'You assume that you will survive while the others might fall. That borders on a threat.'\n\n'None was intended, to you or them.' Forrix stepped closer, dropping his voice. 'However, the loss of one or both of my fellow triarchs would cause me no grief. Personally, and as a commander of the Fourth, I have grave reservations.'\n\n'Both have the favour of Perturabo.' The Stonewrought paused as hundreds of rockets flared overhead, lighting the sky as if it were a celebration day. His head turned as he followed their progress, and gave a nod of satisfaction as they dipped and fell onto the lower levels of the port, not far from the foremost lines of attacking infantry. He returned his attention to Forrix. 'To speak against them is to speak against the primarch.'\n\n'Favour is fleeting, you know that as well as I do. Just ask Berossus. Kroeger is fast becoming unstable. I saw him with the World Eaters and even in a span of hours he has become even more irrational, as though tainted by their bloodthirst.'\n\n'It is no secret that you desired Toramino to replace Harkon, but Kroeger was raised in his place. Your disdain for Falk I find more surprising. His recommendation spilled easily from your lips when Harkon was dishonoured, but now you speak against him.'\n\n'That was the Barban Falk we knew.' Forrix stepped beside the Stonewrought and gripped the remains of the wall that edged the flat rooftop. Ferrocrete crumbled beneath his fingers, weakened by anti-fortification viruses that had been released into the air by the Pneumachina. 'The thing that insists on being called the Warsmith is not the same Barban Falk.'\n\n'And you have a common complaint against both of your companions?'\n\n'Their loyalty is questionable,' said Forrix. 'I sense that Kroeger has set foot on the road that leads him to the same mania as our allies in the World Eaters - the whisper of a bloody power now speaks in his ear. As for the allegiance of the Warsmith, I do not believe it is for mortal concerns any longer.\n\n'This malaise, this power that grips our once-proud cousins and strips away all honour and humanity... It comes from the Warmaster himself, and hungers for us all.'\n\n'We have already turned traitor on the Emperor, would you have us turn once more, on the Warmaster? Or even against our genefather?'\n\n'No!' The thought that such an accusation might reach the ears of Perturabo made Forrix shudder. The primarch's hands were bloodied already by subordinates that had wronged him, for crimes both real and imaginary, and Forrix had no desire to dare such wrath. 'That is not what I said. But Horus is not our genefather, and he is using us just as the others have used the Fourth since we left Terra.'\n\n'I wish for no part in your conspira"}
{"text":" once more, on the Warmaster? Or even against our genefather?'\n\n'No!' The thought that such an accusation might reach the ears of Perturabo made Forrix shudder. The primarch's hands were bloodied already by subordinates that had wronged him, for crimes both real and imaginary, and Forrix had no desire to dare such wrath. 'That is not what I said. But Horus is not our genefather, and he is using us just as the others have used the Fourth since we left Terra.'\n\n'I wish for no part in your conspiracies, Forrix.' The Stonewrought gestured towards the Lion's Gate space port. 'I have a task at hand and it is all the occupation I need. Since the battle with the eldar... Since we saw what became of Fulgrim and his sons... I prefer to focus on immediate, physical problems these days. I have no desire to venture into the less tangible realm, and that is what your plotting would entail.'\n\n'I cannot force you to share my doubts, but I would give further warning. These powers at play are courted by some of our brothers, knowingly or not. They desire us, and ignoring them will not rid us of their threat. When we are done with the Emperor's lackeys there will be reckonings within the Legion.'\n\n'I hear nothing,' said the Stonewrought, and turned away.\n\nThe Lord of Iron baulked\n\nA sorcerer's aid\n\nPiercing the Starspear\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Terran near orbit, ten hours since assault\n\nAbaddon despised Horus' court chamber aboard the Vengeful Spirit. Each time he returned it seemed more a mockery of what it had once been, what it had once meant to him. His master spent ever more time behind the portal of the empyrean, supposedly to do psychic battle with the Emperor Himself, though Abaddon wondered if there might be darker reasons why the Warmaster retreated so regularly to his unreal sanctuary.\n\nWord had reached the Vengeful Spirit of the failure of Angron and Fulgrim to enter the Lion's Gate space port. Like the Palace proper it was under the Emperor's protection. No being of daemonic origin could cross the threshold. Was there a similar price for Horus to pay when he was not awash in the energies of the empyrean?\n\nThe leader of the Mournival was surprised to find himself the only member of that honoured group present, and dismayed to see that the Crimson Apostle shadowed him as usual. Zardu Layak and his silent blade slaves slipped through the shadows around the periphery, perhaps choosing to observe rather than intervene for a change. The Word Bearers sorcerer's mask-eyes shone, six flashes of yellow in the gloom.\n\nHorus was present, his bald head sheened with thick sweat, his eyes sunken, ringed with darkness as one suffering heavy fatigue. Abaddon thought it impossible for a primarch to show such weariness, much less his master, but Layak had told him of how the Ruinous Powers' presence in his mortal form taxed the Warmaster's strength to its limits.\n\nHorus' expression was grim as he raised his gaze to meet the stare of Abaddon.\n\n'The war progresses too slowly, Ezekyle,' the Warmaster pronounced. There was no accusation, simply a statement of fact. Horus gritted his teeth and sucked in a breath, odd lights dancing across his eyes for a few seconds. He blinked them away and seemed restored, his face not so lined as moments before, his shoulders straighter.\n\n'I did not think Perturabo would fail you,' said Abaddon. 'If he cannot devise a means to enter the Palace, I do not think his brothers will do so. Perhaps it is time that the greatest of our leaders takes his rightful place at the forefront of the battle.'\n\n'You think I shirk my duties as general?' Horus seemed amused by the idea.\n\n'Not at all, Warmaster. I think your Legions and countless other servants would fight harder to see you at their head. Your vision has brought us to the door of the Emperor's throne room, but at the moment of your victory you stand aside and let others break it down.'\n\n'It cannot yet be done,' Horus said with a slow shake of the head, his expression turning sombre.\n\n'Because of this psychic shield that bars the daemons?'\n\n'In part. But also, the powers that work through me gather yet more strength. When I strike, I must annihilate my father entirely, body and soul, physically and psychically. Not a shred of him can survive lest it grow again in some future century.' Gauntlet-claws tapped on the arm of the throne for several seconds. 'Perturabo is the sanest of my brothers. His agenda is solely to serve me, to prove himself as strong as he believes he can be. You have already seen how the others work at cross purposes except under firm hand. The Lord of Iron must be allowed his time of glory or he will lose faith. And if I lose my reliable commander, what can I achieve with unreliable ones?'\n\n'What is to be done?'\n\n'We shall see.' Horus turned his head and nodded to one of the army of lesser creatures that attended the court. Incense billowed from burners and the hololithic comms array flickered into life, bringing with it the images of the Warmaster's primarch allies. Angron licked gore from a clawed hand, twitching with the taste of it, his bestial features broad and large in the column of light that projected from the ceiling. Fulgrim seemed to be lounging on a couch made of corpses, tail languidly flicking back and forth, while attended by creatures with eyes and mouths stitched shut, offering flagons and platters of treats to the primarch. Mortarion seemed the most attentive, though his features were obscured by billows of vapour erupting from his mask with each stentorian breath. He was clad in darkness and what Abaddon first took to be vox static soon resolved itself into the buzzing of thousands of flies.\n\nIt was several more seconds before Perturabo answered the council. He paced, appearing and disappearing from view as he passed in and out of the comm-capture unit aboard the Iron Blood. His fingers flexed murderously and Abaddon caught glimpses of wreckage in the primarch's hall.\n\nOf Magnus there was no sign.\n\nPerturabo stopped his pacing and glared through the projection at his brothers.\n\n'The space port should be invested by now! We wasted many lives and much time in pointless attack, when my cursed brothers cannot cross the boundary into the Emperor's domain.'\n\n'Cursed?' drawled Fulgrim. 'Says one that has not experienced the delights an immaterial existence has to offer.'\n\n'Cursed,' Perturabo snapped. 'You are less than I, for you cannot even set foot upon the Palace grounds.'\n\n'Then take Forgebreaker and knock upon the Emperor's doors yourself,' replied Mortarion, gaseous puffs accompanying his words.\n\n'I did not think the Lord of Iron was so cautious of spending his warriors' lives,' said Abaddon. 'The Fourth rightly earned themselves a reputation for forcing battle even in the face of costly resistance and tremendous casualties.'\n\n'I would spend them for good cause, not dash them against the walls while my brothers amuse themselves with inhuman delights.' The image of Perturabo turned towards Horus and lowered to one knee. 'I know that I promised you the walls, Warmaster, but I have not the tools to dismantle this shield. It not only spurns the presence of the Neverborn, I am sure it steels the hearts of the Emperor's servants. I could spend a century taking the space port apart piece by piece and yet my brothers would never lead their Legions upon the ground hallowed by our father.'\n\n'My faith in you is not misplaced, Perturabo,' said Horus, standing up. He gestured for the Lord of Iron to do likewise. 'One setback is not defeat, as you know well. It was wrong of me to send you forth unarmed against the foe you would face.'\n\nHorus twisted, a clawed gauntlet stretching to point towards Layak.\n\n'In the absence of Magnus, who aids the soul-battle in his own way, the greatest proponents of these arts are the Word Bearers. I send to you my Crimson Apostle, the oracle of the Neverborn.'\n\n'I am honoured,' said Layak, stooping from the shadows in a bow. 'I have some theories regarding the telaethesic ward of the Emperor. I shall summon the most powerful of our brethren, and if the Lord Mortarion permits, discuss matters with Lord Typhus. Our efforts combined will find a means to break this shield.'\n\n'You will share all that your art can tell me,' insisted Perturabo. 'If I am to deliver the Palace to our Warmaster I must have proper understanding of all the elements.'\n\n'Of course. It will be necessary for me to be on Terra, if you are willing to hold council there with me.'\n\n'I will,' agreed Perturabo.\n\n'And you will have Abaddon to accompany you,' added Horus.\n\n'There are better aims to which I might be employed,' argued the First Captain. 'The Sons of Horus can draw defenders away from the Lion's Gate by presenting threat elsewhere.'\n\n'You will go where I command,' Horus said heavily, eyes flashing with anger. 'Layak is to my soul as you are to my body. Where the one goes, so too does the other.'\n\nAbaddon restrained any argument. He looked at Layak but it was impossible to read any reaction from the Crimson Apostle's masked, inhuman face.\n\n'By your will I am commanded,' said Abaddon, bowing his head to his primarch.\n\n'I will have Typhus ready for your instruction,' said Mortarion. His image wavered and then vanished.\n\n'Then I will prepare for my descent,' said Perturabo. 'Transmit your coordinates, Layak, and the time of meeting.'\n\nThe Lord of Iron's feed blinked out of existence.\n\nFulgrim muttered a distracted farewell and faded also, leaving Angron's immense face floating in the midst of the chamber.\n\n'Be ready, Angron, when Perturabo calls upon you,' said Horus, returning to his throne. He gestured and the link was severed, plunging the chamber into gloom once more.\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex core, eighteen hours since assault\n\nManish Dhaubanjar did not like the quiet at all. For all of his forty-eight years he had lived and served the Emperor within the great tower of the Lion's Gate space port. Starspear by birth, and h"}
{"text":"ng Angron's immense face floating in the midst of the chamber.\n\n'Be ready, Angron, when Perturabo calls upon you,' said Horus, returning to his throne. He gestured and the link was severed, plunging the chamber into gloom once more.\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex core, eighteen hours since assault\n\nManish Dhaubanjar did not like the quiet at all. For all of his forty-eight years he had lived and served the Emperor within the great tower of the Lion's Gate space port. Starspear by birth, and hauler operator by labour, he rarely ventured below the thirty-kilometre level. His world had always been one of clanking machinery, shouting overseers and the rumble of starship plasma engines.\n\nNow all he could hear was the distant tremor of the Palace bombardment. The orbital attack had moved on from the space port. Through announcements and hall briefings, Colonel Maigraut had warned the people that this cessation of the artillery attack was likely a forewarning of a renewed assault. The upper gun batteries had fallen silent for the time being, denied targets for their wrath while the enemy regathered their strength.\n\n'We've still got to be ready,' he told his wife, Daxa. She nodded, fingering the autogun in her lap as she sat in a rocking chair made from spare hauler parts.\n\n'We'll be ready, flower of my heart,' she replied. 'When the alarms sound, we'll wait in the hall with the others.'\n\n'When the alarms sound,' said Manish.\n\nHe pushed himself out of his low chair, limbs stiff with arthritis protesting at the sudden movement. Leaning his gun against the cupboard of their small kitchen unit, he picked up a pan and filled it from the water urn - the mains supply had been cut off in case it was poisoned by the enemy. Plague was rampant in the main Palace, but the space port had so far been isolated from the flux and poxes that were killing hundreds of thousands beyond the wall. The electric cook ring was also disconnected but the Imperial Army had issued tens of thousands of camp stoves. One sat on the countertop, smelling faintly of refined alcohol fuel.\n\n'Tea?' He looked over his shoulder. Daxa was rubbing a smudge of gun lubricant from the cuff of her dress.\n\n'What's the special occasion?' she replied with a smile. 'We won't be getting any more for a while.'\n\n'Might as well drink it,' he told her.\n\nJust as he reached for the caddy, fifteen thousand kilometres away in low orbit the Iron Warriors cruiser Rebuke prepared to fire its main lance array. As did the seven ships of its battle group, plus scores of others. Simultaneously, a hundred gunships entered targeting range, loosing a storm of missiles and shells.\n\nThe combined weight of this gunship fire overloaded a patch of the Starspear's protective fields roughly three hundred metres across. Into this relative eye of the needle the Rebuke and its fellow warships fired beams of energised particles powerful enough to punch holes through starship armour and level ground fortifications.\n\nThe upper atmosphere caused almost no diffraction at all, so that the combined beams hit the weakened patch of shielding at almost one hundred per cent strength. In microseconds scores of laser blasts punched through the skin of the space port, sheared through ten kilometres of bulkheads and supports but avoided damaging the core shafts of the transport network.\n\nThe first Manish and Daxa knew of the attack was when their bedroom vaporised, leaving a glowing hole in the wall between it and the living space. Decompression lifted them both from their feet along with chairs, pots, burner, guns and other detritus.\n\nManish's scream ripped from his mouth as a wisp of vapour, a moment before his lungs emptied, their fabric disrupted by the sudden loss of pressure. The roar of winds disappeared as his eardrums burst. Manish spun through the air alongside his wife, moisture icing on his skin, the bodies of thousands of other workers flying alongside them until the onrushing winds dragged them into the atmosphere, forty kilometres above the ground.\n\nDespite the freezing cold, his body temperature was warm enough to boil his blood at that altitude, though thankfully he was unconscious from hypoxia before his eyes leaked blood and his tongue swelled up to choke him.\n\nHe was already dead before he started falling and the silhouettes of hundreds of gunships appeared against the rising dawn.\n\nBack in Starspear, alarms started to howl.\n\nThe archmagos\n\nObliteration\n\nA concealed blade\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex core, eighteen hours since assault\n\nOlfactory sensors translated the stench of death into a series of quantifiable molecular components while audio interceptors turned the snap of volkite blasters and thrum of rad beamers into wavelength data. To Archmagos Inar Satarael these added to the beauty of battle rather than detracted from it, just as the annotation for an orchestral symphony contained all the potential for drama that was then expended during a performance.\n\nFor the insertion into the heart of the Lion's Gate space port he had built himself a warform smaller than the cybernetic monstrosities he had favoured of late - it would be shameful to be denied entry to the control halls because the doorways were not large enough for such a body. Instead he had focused on anti-personnel weaponry and maximum shield efficiency, as well as the mobility afforded by a heximal limb layout. Even so, his bulk was twice that of a legionary, though composite materials meant he was no heavier than a normal man. Of these augmentations, the shield boosters were proving the most valuable, deflecting las-blasts and autogun rounds by the score every minute as he pressed forward along the arterial passage to the main dockwork controls.\n\nSpeed was vital. The Iron Warrior, Kroeger, had devised a simple plan, and a greater part of it relied upon the systems of the defenders being blind to the true nature of the attack being launched. Should the archmagos and the ally he was due to meet suffer undue delays the entire endeavour was at risk. With this in mind, Satarael ploughed into enemy fire with little concern, knowing that the clave of battle servitors that followed would cut down anything that evaded the attention of his maxim bolters and graviton imploder.\n\nVia noospheric pulse he could also feel the converging approach of his allies in the Iron Warriors. Arriving at an angle of seventy-two degrees to his own attack, the IV Legion assault force was equally small but specialised. Their combined firepower would swiftly overwhelm any defenders still alive to hold the central command hall.\n\nThe archmagos swept through the outer chambers without pause, slave routines directing the fire of his weapons while his conscious mind applied itself to the matter of the armoured portal sealing the inner sanctum.\n\nIt was substantial, reinforced with thick bars and heavy gauge locking wheels. Sparks emanating from the control panel at its side betrayed a desperate ploy by the defenders - the electrical locks had been blown from the inside, impossible to override. They were sealed inside, but it was an effective barrier to Satarael's entry. The continued buzz of overloaded circuits highlighted that the measure had been taken perhaps only a minute earlier, in response to the rapidity of his advance.\n\nMelta-burners seemed the best option, but there were none in his vanguard. His graviton imploder would eventually twist the door locks into scrap metal, but that would be costly in terms of time and energy output, during which his part in Warsmith Kroeger's plan would be unfulfilled, risking the success of the entire enterprise.\n\nThough he had every confidence in his own abilities, Satarael considered that it was somewhat foolhardy of Kroeger to place so much necessity into a single operation, especially one carried out by a relatively small military force. Whatever the merits of the plan, if the New Mechanicum was to thrive, the overthrow of the False Omnissiah was essential and Satarael was determined to play whatever part he could in that revolution. The future would be written by visionaries such as himself.\n\nAs he flashed active surveyor beams across the armoured door to assess its internal structural qualities, Satarael picked up an energy surge close at hand. Two pinpricks of white light resolved into bright patches around the central lock gears. The energy build-up continued until sparks erupted from the near side of the door, moments before the wash of high-intensity radiation burst through the two neat holes.\n\nSomething powerful slammed against the portal from inside the command terminal chamber, rupturing the remains of the lock's gears. Molten droplets and slivers of metal showered outwards as the door cracked in half, the shriek of tortured metal filling the antechamber as it twisted on its immense hinges.\n\nA figure the size of a Legion Dreadnought loomed through the smoke of vaporised metal and ceramite, the telltale gleam of two melta-cutters where eyes should have been.\n\n'You are late, archmagos.' The creature's voice warbled with artificial modulation, but there was also a strange after-effect that did not register with Satarael's sensors: the daemon-voice of the creature's cohabitant.\n\n'Volk-Sa'ra'am, I am grateful for your intervention,' said the archmagos. 'It is a privilege to finally be in your physical vicinity. It is an honour to find alliance with the one who will usher in a new age for the Mechanicum and Legions alike.'\n\nVolk-Sa'ra'am looked like a legionary in the same way that a battleship might look like an orbital shuttle if one mistook size for perspective. Everything about it was larger in scale, bloated with the power of the daemonic coupled with the technophagic enhancements it had been given by noted members of the New Mechanicum. It was impossible to tell where ancient battleplate ended and iron-hard skin began, but the gunmetal of its old armour gave way to patches of dark flesh in places, "}
{"text":"s alike.'\n\nVolk-Sa'ra'am looked like a legionary in the same way that a battleship might look like an orbital shuttle if one mistook size for perspective. Everything about it was larger in scale, bloated with the power of the daemonic coupled with the technophagic enhancements it had been given by noted members of the New Mechanicum. It was impossible to tell where ancient battleplate ended and iron-hard skin began, but the gunmetal of its old armour gave way to patches of dark flesh in places, while horns and spines both of bone and metal protruded from breaks in the glistening carapace that had once been the Space Marine's power plant backpack.\n\nIts form was not static but an ever-shifting mass, more than simple mutation. The melta-cutters - or the analogue the daemon-machine hybrid had created - receded into the face and something approximating human features returned, a flat face with a bulbous nose. The eyes still gleamed with circuitry, devoid of any human feeling.\n\n'Are you ready for the transference?' Volk-Sa'ra'am asked, turning away. Bone gears whirred and pistons shuddered with each step it took into the chamber, heading for a hexagonal console bank at the centre. A clawed hand as large as a service hoist lifted towards the cogitators. 'There is still a connection here we can exploit.'\n\n'You understand what will be required of you?'\n\n'I will... divide and conquer,' said the hulking creature, a sketch of a smile twisting its assumed face. 'I will obliterate all opposition.'\n\n'Obliterate? Yes, that is certainly the word. All trace of the previous incarna machina will be replaced by your anaethemix.'\n\n'Blood is required, I was told.' Volk-Sa'ra'am turned its arm as though offering a wrist. Metal plates peeled back like the petals of a mechanical flower, exposing blood vessels ribbed with cabling. Thin pipelines carrying other fluids ran alongside, pulsing with red and green and blots of purple.\n\nAt an urge from the archmagos a servitor advanced, a length of sanguinaxial cable coiled in its hands. One end was tipped by a standard Imperial five-pin interface, the other fitted to a device that looked like the unholy offspring of an intravenous cannula and an ornamental dagger. Satarael snaked out a mechandenrite from beneath his battleform, gently lifting the jagged end of the sanguinaxial cable while the servitor connected the other to the main console.\n\n'You need to appease me, first,' said the hybrid-machine, drawing the arm away from Satarael's approach. 'This is the power of Chaos, there are forms and rituals to be observed.'\n\n'I understand,' said the archmagos, though in truth his comprehension was limited.\n\nThere had been nothing like Volk-Sa'ra'am before, and Satarael's studies in the esoteric area of warp manipulation were shallow. It was only his self-recreating experience that gave him any insight at all - having rebuilt his consciousness from scattered parts he was best placed to convey a partial daemon consciousness into the systems of the Lion's Gate space port.\n\n'I offer up fealty to the Powers that Wax and Wane,' intoned Satarael, recalling the words imprinted to him via the Iron Warriors from the Word Bearers' Neverborn experts. Truly this was an effort of the great new alliance that would shape the future galaxy beneath the rule of Horus. 'Of the mortal we take, and of the immortal we give. Threshed to the soul of the warp, I steer the ship of will through the storm of need. Glory to the powers!'\n\nThe mechadendrite speared out, plunging the sanguinaxial blade into the exposed arm of Volk-Sa'ra'am. Light flared at the contact, like sparks leaping from a broken wire, and travelled along the length of the cable. Blood seeped from the wound, quickly congealing around the entry point like coral accretion on a shipwreck, bubbled and blistered.\n\n'I feel the connection.'\n\nThe voice came from a communications grille situated above a display screen cracked by bolter impacts. The monitoring station flickered into life, showing a horned face among swirls of static, teeth of lightning flashing in a grin.\n\n'I shall obliterate all.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, surface approach, eighteen hours since assault\n\nIt had been twenty years since Bious, and Forrix had not previously thought of that world since its eventual compliance. But there was something about the unreality of this battle that took him back to that campaign. His auto-senses had overloaded within three minutes of the main assault beginning, reducing his hearing to that of his own enhanced ears, though muffled by his helm. Roving banks of smoke and gas swathed his view, so that his lenses constantly flickered between different spectrum images depending on where he looked, one moment bright with infrared radiation then sliding through the visible light and back again, before switching to dampened night vision and cycling back into ultraviolet. All was cut through by streaks of tracer rounds, continuous muzzle flare and the after-glow of plasma detonations.\n\nHe couldn't remove his helm: even his enhanced physiology would start to succumb to the mixture of toxins billowing among the ash and debris - toxins his own side had unleashed in the bombardment that now choked the Warmaster's allies as much as they had devoured the lungs of the Emperor's servants in previous weeks. The warsmiths cared little, driving hundreds of thousands of mortal chattels into the deadly mists and scything cannonade.\n\nLike an autoharvester's spinning blades, battery after battery of anti-personnel and heavier weapons ripped hundred-metre-wide swathes through the snarling, wailing morass of troops. Staccato heavy stubber bursts rippled through the slower, deeper beat of macro cannons, whose every shell ripped open craters fifty metres across. Airbursts rained a razor-edged hail of shrapnel, leaving hillocks of rent flesh for following companies to toil across.\n\nForrix heaved himself up one such mound, boots sinking into the bloodied meat of a beastman's chest, bolter mag-locked to his armour so that he could use both hands to aid his ascent of the hill of the dead. Around him were mortal troopers - he had paid little attention when their commander had introduced herself and named their world of origin - nearly three thousand of them, armed with crude solid-shot pistols and axes. They seemed inordinately proud of the fact they had been chosen to deliver him to the Lion's Gate, not understanding that their purpose was as a literal meat shield. Five hundred had already been cut down by long-range artillery, the others would be lucky to come within sight of the broken armoured portals in the southern slopes of the space port - gates that had been painfully wrested open by the proceeding five hundred thousand soldiers.\n\nBious had been what the adepts of Terra would later designate a death world. A single brood organism, utterly inimical to other life but for the sole advanced human society that had made their home there. A whole world and populace bent upon destroying those it deemed interlopers. An advanced people and an eco-system coupled together in shared purpose. Now he faced similar opposition, but there was a single mind directing that enmity, a figure whose intent was written in the strewn bodies and scouring cannonades - the Emperor. And as with Bious there would be no surrender, no chance of compromise. Only total extermination would see the IV Legion to victory.\n\nCresting the mound of the dead, booted foot snapping the curling horn of a mutant slave, Forrix paused for half a second to gaze left and right, before continuing down into the ragged crater on the far side. Ahead of him, about three hundred metres away, a rapid series of explosions tore the ground apart, hurling body parts high into the air. How the minefield had not been triggered by previous waves was a mystery - or perhaps the mines had been deliberately left dormant until now - but as body parts fell in a grisly shower Forrix veered left, the troopers around him turning as well like shoaling fish, angling towards ground chewed over by thousands of earlier footfalls.\n\nThe drone of jets drew his eye to the heavens but he could see nothing through the smog of battle. His chronometer told him that the aerial attack had begun, the second front in Kroeger's simple plan. As he watched, it started to rain, but on magnification the rain turned out to be tumbling bodies. Tens of thousands of them, falling through the cloud cover, glittering with ice and trailing shards like human comets.\n\nHe watched the first hit the side of the space port about four kilometres up, a strange combination of shattering and splattering as frozen heads, limbs and torsos scattered like broken glass while their warm interiors smeared down the ferrocrete flanks. Bodies descended like hail, smashing into gun batteries and ricocheting from cannon barrels. Corpse after corpse, until the flank of the space port was carpeted in a compacted mass of flesh and congealed blood. Even Forrix was taken aback by the sight of tens of thousands of the IV Legion's victims tumbling, splitting and bouncing off the metal skin of the Lion's Gate facility.\n\nThe Iron Warriors' auxiliary horde was about half a kilometre from the armoured barbican that had protected the southern approaches, the structure now a smoking ruin of metal and blasted ferrocrete. Ahead, protected by directional power field generators, siege tanks with dozer blades carved paths through the ruin of masonry and flesh, while pioneer teams with flamers and phospex missiles cleared the remaining bunkers of the outer ring.\n\nFunnelled by natural ridges and the projecting walls of the space port, the assault wave slowed as it reached the defences, a sea of living creatures pressed closer and closer while fire raked down from above and mortar shells dropped in constant bombardment. With enemies to the front and sides, and the guns of their masters threatening equal ruin behind them, the vassal "}
{"text":"of masonry and flesh, while pioneer teams with flamers and phospex missiles cleared the remaining bunkers of the outer ring.\n\nFunnelled by natural ridges and the projecting walls of the space port, the assault wave slowed as it reached the defences, a sea of living creatures pressed closer and closer while fire raked down from above and mortar shells dropped in constant bombardment. With enemies to the front and sides, and the guns of their masters threatening equal ruin behind them, the vassal regiments poured on, each warrior trusting that some form of providence - or perhaps warp-spawned patronage - would see them survive when millions of others had fallen.\n\nIf the Iron Warriors had been able to call upon such unquestioning, endless hordes at Bious, the campaign would have lasted weeks, not months. It was the crudest use of raw power, typical of Kroeger's thinking. But in the midst of the incalculable carnage there was a kernel of brilliance. Kroeger was not a master strategist, not in the mould of Forrix or Perturabo, but he was a brawler, a street fighter that cared nothing for honour or the forms of combat. As Kroeger had put it, reflecting perhaps a youth that Forrix did not want to know more about, sometimes a shiv was more effective than a broadsword if it was pushed into the right place.\n\nHe'd continued by explaining some tradition of his people on Olympia, something about eating the grubs found near their city. Most were harmless males but the females had hidden stings, indistinguishable from the males except during one mating season. It was a time-honoured assassination method to hide a few females in the meal of an enemy. Via this drawn-out analogy, Kroeger had told them of his plan to get a thousand Iron Warriors into the space port, hidden amongst the living debris of the vassal troops.\n\nIt seemed to be working.\n\nForrix was one of only a thousand Iron Warriors hidden in the tide of the attack, his armour on minimal systems and coated in gore, vox-silent to reduce the chances of detection. Only close manual inspection would pick him out from the churning wave of mortals, and only the indiscriminate barrage that assailed the horde might take him by chance.\n\nLas-fire joined the projectiles of the larger weapons as they came within a hundred metres of the broken rampart of the barbican. The lower levels of the space port yawned beyond, full of smoke lit by an inferno raging within, as though they stormed the mouth of some ancient hellscape.\n\nThe ground shuddered with impacts and recoil, causing those around him to lose their footing. He scrambled and crouched and staggered his way forward among them, trying not to reveal himself amidst their struggles.\n\nMouth dry, hearts beating like an Olympian forge hammer, he came into the shadow of the broken gates, towering forty metres above him. Grenades flashed and the screams of the dying added to the din, but he paid them no heed. Troglodyte mutant ogryns, larger even than a legionary, smashed at side doors with gleaming mauls and hammers, while hundreds of lesser mortals streamed into the firelit innards, only to be scythed down by volleys from platoons of ochre-uniformed defenders.\n\nThe siege-breaker mutants crashed through their objective, ripping open the emergency access doors adjacent to the courtyard within the barbican. The troopers flowed on, bearing down the lines of defenders with sheer numbers, while Forrix and scores of others turned towards the new avenue of attack.\n\nA shiv indeed, he thought, pounding down a side corridor into the dark of the space port's maintenance labyrinth.\n\nUpdate from the front\n\nApostle of Chaos\n\nThe Utterblight\n\nKarachee Flats, sixty-nine days before assault\n\nStepping out from under the huge train, Zenobi had been expecting it to be night-time and so was surprised to discover a strange twilight greeted the disembarking troops. Her immediate surrounds were devoid of illumination except for the gleam of the train's reactor vents and a few hooded lumens stretched out on cables strung between high poles that led away from the tracks. Others were shuffling slowly forward, eyes cast upwards, and she looked up with them, mouth dropping open at what she saw.\n\nThe night sky was alight with colour - bursts of red and purple, searing arcs of green and blue. Shooting stars were a constant flicker of movement across the vault of the heavens, beyond which a shifting miasma of glittering dust blotted out the stars.\n\n'Debris,' said Menber, and Zenobi knew he was referring to the falling sparks.\n\n'Void war.' She uttered the two words in an awed whisper, scarce believing that she was witnessing such a thing.\n\n'Keep moving,' Lieutenant Okoye bellowed from behind. 'Others have to get off the platform!'\n\nStill looking up, Zenobi joined the shambling horde of troopers that made their way down the dimly lit track, just one of a crowd of distracted onlookers moving more by mass consensus than individual volition.\n\n'Look!' Someone ahead thrust a finger towards the smudge of orange dusk light. A flare of bright white burned across it as a crippled starship plunged into the atmosphere, trailing more sparks as its hull disintegrated. A chorus of gasps greeted the sight, like a crowd watching the celebrations on Unification Day.\n\n'Horus is in orbit...' This came from Sergeant Alekzanda, betraying his normal stoicism. 'The Warmaster is nearly here.'\n\n'If he's winning,' replied Kettai. 'There's a lot of ships and guns between him and Terra.'\n\n'Remember what Jawaahir said - we have to assume the Warmaster's armies will land,' said Zenobi.\n\n'Not here,' replied Kettai. He pointed north-east. The sky beyond the horizon was a constant fluctuation of colours, the intensity of the space battle like an artificial aurora. 'Himalazia. The Imperial Palace.'\n\n'It might be over before we get there,' said someone behind Zenobi.\n\nZenobi's head turned one way and then another as she tried to see everything, almost falling as her toe caught in a rut on the unpaved path. The near-fall brought her mind back to the present and their surroundings.\n\n'Where are we going?' Other than the faint lumens overhead and the bulk of the train behind them, there was nothing to see. She thought about the platforms, simple raised slabs of rockcrete, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. 'I thought this was Karachee?'\n\n'I don't know,' answered Menber, shaking his head. He looked around and shook his head again. 'I don't see anything.'\n\n'Did you see what happened to the others? The ones that left the company?'\n\n'Nothing, they were long gone by the time we got off the train.'\n\nZenobi lapsed into agitated silence and followed the huge herd of troopers. Tens of thousands of them were tramping across this featureless wilderness; perhaps even those at the front didn't know their destination. After a few minutes the light poles stopped and the only illumination came from the orbital pyrotechnics that continued to shine down in rainbow sprays of laser and plasma.\n\nAs the minutes became half an hour and then an hour, the sense of unease grew. The cold was starting to bite and the troopers struggled to get heavier coats out of their kitbags whilst still pressed together and moving. Lieutenant Okoye cut his way through the mass to help them, organising them into trios that would assist each other in turn, two holding bags and equipment while the third pulled on their coat. Zenobi had the additional burden of the standard, which she briefly relinquished to the care of Seleen and Sergeant Alekzanda but retrieved the moment she had buttoned up her coat.\n\n'I thought this was just a transfer, bana-lieutenant,' said Zenobi. 'We've walked kilometres by now.'\n\n'Just keep walking, trooper,' the lieutenant replied, but it was clear from his manner that he had no more idea of what was happening than any of them.\n\nThey walked on, dispersing slightly more as the group spread from the main line of advance. Zenobi heard shouts as dynastic enforcers barked at those they judged to be wandering too far from their invisible course. There was no sign of Captain Egwu nor the integrity officers, but now and then Zenobi thought she heard the grumble of motor engines and assumed that some form of transportation had been secured for the upper ranks. She certainly couldn't picture Jawaahir trudging through the seemingly endless dust bowl.\n\n'Lights!'\n\nThe call echoed along the column from the companies at the front, but Zenobi couldn't see anything at all and her enquiries with her taller companions yielded nothing. It was only after a few more minutes' advance that Menber spoke up.\n\n'Lights. They look like... Vehicles. Searchlights?'\n\nThe column slowed and then stopped, though for those any distance from the front the reason for the halt was unseen. Slowly, platoon by platoon, they started to shift again, edging forward only a few paces every minute, until finally First Company of the 64th could see another railhead a few hundred metres in front. It was far less imposing than the great station where they'd been deposited by the heli-transports. Just a maze of connecting tracks and dozens of multi-chimneyed locomotives - far smaller than the one that had brought them here, though each still pulled a snake of carriages several hundred metres long. Interspersed between transport compartments were armoured wagons with gun turrets on their roofs and smaller firing ports along their lengths. All was illuminated by the headlights and mounted lumens of a score of halftracks. When a train was filled it groaned away beneath plumes of exhaust smoke, each a machine serpent near three hundred metres long. Company by company the troopers from Addaba were funnelled into the waiting transports and shipped east, towards the brightness of the orbital battle.\n\nA cabal of company officers waited by the trackside. Zenobi was relieved to see Captain Egwu among them.\n\n'The orbital blockade has collapsed,' the company commander announced. Zenob"}
{"text":"nted lumens of a score of halftracks. When a train was filled it groaned away beneath plumes of exhaust smoke, each a machine serpent near three hundred metres long. Company by company the troopers from Addaba were funnelled into the waiting transports and shipped east, towards the brightness of the orbital battle.\n\nA cabal of company officers waited by the trackside. Zenobi was relieved to see Captain Egwu among them.\n\n'The orbital blockade has collapsed,' the company commander announced. Zenobi heard the collective intake of breath around her, her own gasp lost among the reaction of her companions. 'Forces of the Warmaster broke into the atmosphere four hours ago. Karachee has already been subjected to sporadic orbital bombardment and so we are avoiding the transfer stations. Landings are expected across Terra, but our destination and purpose remain the same.'\n\nAn integrity officer - a lean-faced man named Oyenuzi assigned to Alpha Platoon - held out a handful of paper sheets as Egwu continued.\n\n'Squad leaders will each take one of these and disseminate the information to their squad. They detail specific orders and behaviour to minimise detection by orbital scan and aircraft overflight. There are far larger and more important targets than half a dozen trains crossing the Arabadlands. Even so, we have several days' travel ahead of us and the less attention we draw, the better.'\n\nShe stopped as a junior officer appeared out of the gloom, the coils and box of a long-range vox hanging from a shoulder harness. Zenobi wasn't close enough to hear what was said, but the urgency in the young man's expression and the reaction from the captain were enough to communicate that the news was not welcome. Zenobi's throat tightened sympathetically as Egwu started a hectic, hushed consultation with the integrity officer and the handful of nearby lieutenants.\n\nThose behind were unconsciously but inexorably pushing forward to see or hear, creating a building pressure wave against those nearer the front. Someone stepped on Zenobi's heel as they shifted position, one hand steadying on her shoulder. There were snarled complaints ringing around her, and she saw elbows and even fists being flung around as the troopers started pushing into one another.\n\n'We have to get moving!' Kettai shouted, waving his hand at one of the enforcers lining the side of the train. A group of troopers from the platoon, Zenobi included, shuffled forward several steps, trying to allow more space, but this vacuum simply drew in those behind, causing a ripple to flow back through the growing crowd of waiting soldiers.\n\nThen the lights went out.\n\nThe sudden darkness sucked at Zenobi, leeching the last of her nerve from her body. A squeak of a cry escaped her lips before she clamped down on the fear. Mixed shouts of panic and anger broke the stillness of the night.\n\nZenobi took another step, twisting her ankle on a buried rock. She threw out a hand and grabbed an arm to stop herself falling, heart hammering as she imagined the company surging forward, trampling over her in the moments of her fall.\n\n'Steady.' It was Sergeant Alekzanda that grabbed her coat, keeping her upright. He turned, teeth bared as he berated the troopers directly behind them. Her eyes were getting accustomed to the dim illuminations of the orbital battle, the outline of the train and people resolving into focus in front of her.\n\nA small lantern appeared from the left, illuminating the enforcer that carried it. The knot of officers broke apart, the lieutenants hurrying into the twilight.\n\n'Everybody, onto the train now!' barked Okoye, slapping a hand on Menber's shoulder, almost shoving the trooper towards the locomotive. 'By squads and platoon. Now, now, now!'\n\nIt was the worst possible decision.\n\nLike water through a broken dam, the defence corps soldiers burst forward, spooked by the darkness and then panicked by the sudden command. Gripping the banner pole tight, her lasgun and kitbag slapping against her side, Zenobi started forward, got caught with her neighbour and fell. Hands grabbed her shoulders, wrenching her up, and she was propelled towards the nearest train door, a set of metal steps folded down for access. She regained her feet before she had to be bodily thrown aboard, wrestling her burdens sideways through the door even as Kettai pushed in beside her.\n\nBy the same miracle by which he always seemed to be ahead of his squad, Sergeant Alekzanda was in the companionway just inside the door, marshalling the new arrivals.\n\n'Across to the other side, all the way to the far end. Across to the other side, all the way to the far end.'\n\nThe troopers piled on, into the darkness of the compartment. It was about thirty metres long, six wide, and the only light glimmered through a row of small windows that ran the length of the join between the wall and roof. There were hammock nets bundled to the ceiling and the benches that ran crosswise along the carriage had cloth pockets for those seated behind to stow small possessions. The carriage was split along its length by a thin latticework, through which Zenobi could see others herding onto the train. Curses followed the troopers as they negotiated their way around wooden benches with foot lockers beneath, navigating by bruised shins and clattered knees until they found space.\n\nWith the soldiers came the froth of muttered speculation.\n\n'Enemy on their way, I heard.'\n\n'Something's spotted us.'\n\n'Gotta be a ship in orbit.'\n\n'Airstrike, she said. Definitely airstrike.'\n\n'I heard the captain say we had to get moving in five minutes.'\n\n'There's no way we'll all be aboard by then,' said Menber in reply to this last claim.\n\nZenobi climbed onto a bench to look out the window and saw figures flowing between the wagons, heading to other trains on parallel sidings. A grumble announced the motors starting, and with a jolt a few seconds later the train began to move, almost spilling Zenobi from the bench.\n\n'No! Stop!' she shouted, as though the driver would hear her, two hundred metres further up the track. 'There's people cutting past!'\n\nShe pressed her face back against the window so she could peer through the reflections into the darkness, others around her ascending the benches to look as well. The train was moving at a crawl, and still some of the troopers were daring to dart between the carriages. She couldn't see but heard screams as some of them weren't quick enough, disappearing beneath the grinding metal of the wheels.\n\nTurning around, she looked over the packed troops to see that the doors were still open. Alekzanda and some others were there, hauling latecomers through the opening as they ran up alongside the moving vehicle. A little closer amidst the mass were the uniforms of the officers, Egwu among them.\n\nPeople were coming on board from both sides now, but the rate of their boarding had slowed to a person every few seconds, not the constant rush that had greeted the original command. The train was picking up speed, moving from a walk to a jog, enough that those that had been chasing it started to fall behind, legs unaccustomed to running giving way to tiredness after a few hundred metres.\n\nThe track was curving to the left. Through the window Zenobi could see groups of abandoned troopers silhouetted against the glimmer of lights on the horizon. Brighter flares flashed across the night. A chorus of distant cracks cut across the clanking of the train.\n\n'Bolters!' someone yelled. More small flares of red criss-crossed the gloom, converging in the patches of darker shadow that were the troopers left behind. A sudden, stark flash of muzzle fire lit the distance and a rapid-fire thunder drifted after the departing trains.\n\nA few seconds later an explosion lit the middle distance, briefly highlighting ramshackle buildings that lined the track - a makeshift way station that the night had hidden. Zenobi flinched from the brightness, the sudden light searing her vision. But in the instant before momentary blindness she thought she had seen armoured figures against the billow of flames.\n\nShe stepped down from the bench and dragged her kitbag and lasgun to her lap, flopping back onto the seat in stunned silence.\n\n'Did you see them?' whispered Menber, bending over the back of the bench from behind.\n\nZenobi stared ahead, not really looking at anything, her vision fogged by shock.\n\n'I'm not sure what I saw.'\n\nShe raised a shaking hand to wipe her brow. Her coat was now hot in the throng of troopers and her short curls of hair matted with sweat from the brief but sudden exertions that had got her to the train. Her gut was spinning and her pulse was unfeasibly loud in her ears, drumming incessantly like a forge hammer. Everything else was muted, a hundred conversations taking place in a neighbouring room.\n\nIn that moment she knew that the war was real. It wasn't some distant battle beyond the stars. It wasn't even a future conflict at the end of a train line, to be fought around the walls of the Imperial Palace. Folk of Addaba were dead now, slain by the violence of the struggle between the Emperor and Horus. Thousands had probably died on the production lines, worked beyond their limit, injured by machines that should have been maintained better, their bodies aged by the greater toil of the war effort. But that was different. That was at home, where they would be remembered, their bodies taken to the endfires. What would happen to those they had left in the Arabadlands? Did she know any of them? Would they be missed?\n\nIt was suddenly so large and impersonal.\n\nWould anyone remember her?\n\nDrops of water fell on her hands and for several seconds she was confused, unable to recognise her own tears.\n\nKatabatic Plains, eighteen hours since assault\n\nDescending the gunship's ramp, Abaddon paused for a second before stepping onto the bloodied dirt of Terra. He halted a few metres on and looked around, for the first time seeing the siege from below rather than"}
{"text":"abadlands? Did she know any of them? Would they be missed?\n\nIt was suddenly so large and impersonal.\n\nWould anyone remember her?\n\nDrops of water fell on her hands and for several seconds she was confused, unable to recognise her own tears.\n\nKatabatic Plains, eighteen hours since assault\n\nDescending the gunship's ramp, Abaddon paused for a second before stepping onto the bloodied dirt of Terra. He halted a few metres on and looked around, for the first time seeing the siege from below rather than above. Behind him came a bodyguard of Sons of Horus, but a raised hand stopped them as they disembarked.\n\n'Await me here,' he told them, turning to the broken remnants of a defence keep that Layak had chosen to be the site of his ritual. The ground about it was littered with the corpses of Imperial Army troopers, skin blotched, tongues lolling, slain by some deadly disease or poison.\n\nPassing into the ruin Abaddon came upon Layak in a central hall. In the hours before departing the Vengeful Spirit he had been absent from Abaddon's presence, unusually so, and the Sons of Horus commander had found the experience partly a relief and partly filled with suspicion. On the premise that one should keep one's enemies close, he was sure that he shouldn't let Layak out of his sight, for all that the Word Bearer enjoyed almost unparalleled support from the Warmaster.\n\nNow he found himself in close proximity to the Crimson Apostle and was of the firm opinion that absence was always preferable. The sorcerer had selected one of the overrun defence positions, a bastion of the outer defences directly north of the Lion's Gate space port. Through the broken roof Abaddon could see the spear of the port reaching into the storm clouds.\n\nEvidently the bastion had changed hands several times and nobody had bothered with the expense of energy required to remove the dead. Halls and corridors were choked with casualties from both sides: mostly human but a few abhumans, mutants. There were two power-armoured bodies, in the livery of Mortarion's Legion. The bastion was located close to the central axis of the Death Guard's first assault, more than a thousand kilometres from the Lion's Gate.\n\n'Why here?' growled Abaddon. 'How will this get Perturabo into the space port?'\n\nLayak gestured to the ground. Carrion-eaters crawled across the bodies, giant millipedes, mutant rats and black-backed beetles, impervious to the toxic fumes that lay like an ankle-deep cloud across much of the Katabatic Plains. Fungal growths wavered with strange life, puffing clouds of spores into the polluted air.\n\n'The God of Decay has already passed his eye across this place and found it pleasing. The barrier to the Neverborn comes not from the Lion's Gate port but the Emperor. It is from within the heart of the Palace that we shall erode the shield.'\n\nTyphon of the Death Guard was there also, crouched next to a distended corpse, allowing a segmented arthropod to crawl around his hand like some obscene pet. Since Abaddon had last met him, Calas Typhon was as much changed as his genefather. Abaddon recalled that Mortarion had named him Typhus, as though the morphing of his body necessitated a new identity. Though he still wore his heavy Terminator plate, as did Abaddon, it was pitted with odd corrosion, the ceramite covered in lesions like diseased bone. Organic-looking funnels splayed from the carapace across the power plant upon his back, a fume of buzzing insects constantly leaking forth. A horn protruded from the brow of Typhus' helm, reminiscent of the emissaries of the God of Decay that Abaddon sometimes witnessed in the Warmaster's warp chamber. The Death Guard bore a long scythe, a smaller replica of Mortarion's signature weapon. Its pitted blade shone with unearthly light, a pale gleam in the death-fog.\n\nPerturabo arrived soon after, his sour demeanour filling the bastion as much as his bulk. His presence was more oppressive than Horus', his glare a challenge to any that dare meet it as it swept across the chamber at the heart of the bastion.\n\n'Your mechanical companions must wait outside,' said Layak, gesturing towards the Iron Circle advancing through the door behind the primarch.\n\n'Send away my guards so that I remain alone amongst some of the Legions' most powerful warriors?' Perturabo turned his head towards the blade slaves, who stood a little back from Layak. 'We all know how deceit is the handmaid of sorcery. I have not forgotten how Fulgrim earned his transformation at my expense.'\n\nLayak's blade slaves turned as one and departed by an archway. The Crimson Apostle kept his inhuman gaze upon the primarch, his voice tempered by patience.\n\n'Your presence is not necessary, Lord of Iron, if you wish to leave. You were invited so that you might observe, as you requested. Their soulless minds disturb the etheric qualities of the ritual.'\n\nWith his own command reflected back at him, Perturabo had little choice but to comply, and the Iron Circle withdrew, clanking into an antechamber. When they were gone, Layak stepped into the centre of the room. His gaze moved from one to the next, then stopped, his words intended for the primarch.\n\n'Were you to question Magnus or one of his Thousand Sons about the nature of the warp, you would come to a very different understanding to what I will demonstrate to you. The mystics of Prospero analyse the warp as analogy, thinking they might discern patterns and laws and equations from its movements. While it has moods and phases and textures, the warp is a law unto itself, and so that is how Magnus' hubris led him into folly. You must abandon any sense that there is a science to be learnt, and instead focus on the concept of ritual and faith.'\n\nPerturabo grunted, listening intently to every word. Abaddon was not sure whether it was wise to impart too much detail to the Lord of Iron. Perturabo excelled at perfecting what others started and creating marvel from nothing. Armed with deeper knowledge of the powers there might be no limit to what his imagination and craft could conjure.\n\n'Think of our place within the warp as a relationship, emotional rather than physical. Just as you and I have a context with each other that is separate from our bodies - our past, our attitudes to one another, our shared experiences. These cannot be catalogued. They defy calculation. They might even be misremembered or imagined. Yet to the warp, all of that is real, while the physical is unreal.'\n\n'I am not sure I fully grasp your meaning, but continue,' said the primarch.\n\n'The ritual we used to allow your brothers to land upon Terra had a physical component and a spiritual one. Slaughter played its part.' Layak waved a hand to the corpses that surrounded them. 'Slaughter is meaningless without emotion. If I chopped down a forest of trees I would end as much life, but nobody would call it slaughter and I could not use it to summon the smallest manifestation of the powers. Death is intangible, as is fear, hatred, anger. These are the energies of the warp, the sustenance of the gods. The physical creates the spiritual. When the two are moulded and directed appropriately, a bond is made and passage between the realms can occur.'\n\n'I see your meaning more clearly,' said Perturabo. 'And how is the bond connected?'\n\n'That is the art, not the science,' purred Layak. 'It is the belief that shapes all things, and the dedication in heart to the powers. Words, symbols and actions are still physical properties of the ritual, to help shape the faith that stems from within. I have studied these mysteries for years, to smooth the passage, but it is my faith that creates the bond between me and the gods. For their boons, you must give yourselves over to them.'\n\nAbaddon saw Perturabo's eyes narrow.\n\n'Like my brothers?'\n\n'That is but one way. They have taken to themselves a patron and have become shaped by their inner desires. The gods are collectively happy to receive your worship.'\n\n'Worship? Gods?' Perturabo clearly struggled with the concepts, though whether intellectually or dogmatically it was impossible to know.\n\n'You once followed a god, though He would not let you call Him such.' Layak glanced now at Abaddon. 'Why not serve powers that grant favour in return, rather than spurn your love and dedication?'\n\n'We are here for a more specific purpose,' grunted Abaddon, uncomfortable beneath the gaze of the Crimson Apostle. 'To break the barrier that protects the space port.'\n\nLayak crouched, dipping his fingers towards the exposed viscera of a body at his feet. Bugs scuttled away, clustering around the feet of Typhus like chicks seeking protection from their hen. The Word Bearers sorcerer stood, pulling out a rope of intestine. It was clearly diseased, marked by pale blisters and dark scabs.\n\n'The gods will feast upon the light of the Emperor and in doing so will extinguish it. We must empower them with our prayers and sacrifices, lending them strength with our faith, giving of ourselves unto them that they may provide for us. In our commitment we grant them energy. We come upon this world at an auspicious time, when the warp waxes strong and the physical power of the Emperor wanes. The same thinning of the veil between realms that allowed our ships to penetrate the star system also brings close the breath of the gods.'\n\nTalk of extinguishing the Emperor's light, and what the Chaos Gods intended for humanity, sat uneasily with Abaddon, but he said nothing. Perturabo was ill at ease for a different reason.\n\n'You speak in metaphor, clouding the truth with esoteric nonsense.' The primarch flexed his fingers in agitation. 'Do not hide your knowledge with these riddles. Speak in plain terms.'\n\n'I return to my initial point,' said Layak, looking at the organ in his hand. 'The physical and the immaterial. The telaethesic ward is generated by the Emperor Himself. He is the physical. There is none except perhaps Magnus that could break it in direct opposition, and it would slay"}
{"text":"ase for a different reason.\n\n'You speak in metaphor, clouding the truth with esoteric nonsense.' The primarch flexed his fingers in agitation. 'Do not hide your knowledge with these riddles. Speak in plain terms.'\n\n'I return to my initial point,' said Layak, looking at the organ in his hand. 'The physical and the immaterial. The telaethesic ward is generated by the Emperor Himself. He is the physical. There is none except perhaps Magnus that could break it in direct opposition, and it would slay your brother in the doing. The only way to remove the barrier is to pile upon such pressure of the immaterial that its creator cannot sustain it. And, as you would know, master of sieges, the greatest way to seize a wall is from inside as well as out.'\n\n'We need to be inside the ward?' Perturabo snarled. 'But it is to gain entry to the port that we need to bring down the barrier!'\n\n'Not so, Lord of Iron,' said Abaddon. 'Perhaps we need the presence of your brothers for the victory, but a breach can be made beforehand. Your plan surely does not rely on having Angron leading the charge all the way to the bridges?'\n\n'No.' Perturabo glared daggers at the First Captain. 'I can break open the gates by conventional means.'\n\n'That is good,' said Layak. 'We can begin the binding of the immaterial before we need to create the physical. Something to start the process, you could say. Do you remember Samus?'\n\n'The daemon that almost destroyed the Phalanx?' said Perturabo. 'That was a masterful plan, though Dorn thwarted it eventually.'\n\n'We were able to insert Samus into such a vulnerable position by implanting a connection into the form of Mersadie Oliton, who was already bound to the entity by shared experience. In order to breach barriers of the nature we face here, to create a gateway across the telaethesic ward, one can use a physical vessel to mask the Neverborn presence or anchor it. No pure daemon can set foot on Terra yet, but our daemon primarch allies can do so because of their once physical nature. Though made of the immaterium now, they yet leave an imprint on the real universe that gives their presence... solidity. Similarly, my possessed brethren and certain Neverborn-powered artefacts have been brought to the surface because of their physicality.'\n\n'And what will you use?' Typhus stepped closer, a fume of tiny flies issuing from the grille of his helm as he spoke. 'Why am I here?'\n\n'You have become the host of the Destroyer Hive, and that gives you considerable power,' said Layak. 'Your voice echoes far in the warp and there is one you must help me call.'\n\n'What will you summon?'\n\n'Samus is of an order of Neverborn the Word Bearers call the Heralds of the Ruinstorm. There is one for each of the powers, strong in the favour of their patrons. Your grandfather, the Lord of Decay, can send to us a creature that is named Cor'bax Utterblight.'\n\n'I thought you said no daemon can be summoned to the surface of Terra,' said Abaddon.\n\n'And we stand outside the ward,' added Perturabo. 'What use is a creature barred entry as much as my distorted brothers?'\n\n'No daemon can manifest,' Layak said sharply. 'Samus was a Neverborn of the soul, working through the minds of those it sought. All of the Heralds of the Ruinstorm are such, their greatest power being the corruption of thought, not body. The Utterblight does not need to take form to begin its work. The Life Within Death. The Breath on Your Lips. It is the Spirit of Hope, seeded in the hearts of all humans.'\n\nAs he spoke, the intestine started to move in his grasp, a slow pulse rippling along its length. The pulsing grew more vigorous, becoming writhing, and then curving up out of the corpse like a viscera serpent. With a wet tear, the organ pulled from the body, its ragged end growing maw-like, rows of fangs erupting from the pallid flesh.\n\n'Behold the cosmic worm, the cruach-maggot that feeds upon the universe,' declared Layak. He held out the coiling mass towards Typhus, who held out an arm for it to crawl onto, looping about the wrist and forearm.\n\n'A marvel,' said the Death Guard, turning his hand one way and the other to examine the entity. 'A tendril from the worms that burrow through Nurgle's garden itself.'\n\n'Indeed, that chew their way through all of existence - the worms of entropy.' Layak crouched and punched his fist through the chest of another corpse. He prised open the shattered breastbone and then reached in to pluck free the heart within. It seemed a shrivelled, small thing in his palm. 'The source of life. The seat of love. The vault of hope and courage and defiance.'\n\nThe Word Bearer held up the heart and began to chant in a strange tongue, witch-light playing around his hand. Abaddon felt something tugging at him, an insubstantial grip that teased at his own hearts, seeming to pluck at the arteries in his chest. He tried to catch a breath but found himself unable, as though he were drowning.\n\nHis gaze flicked to Perturabo, who watched the proceedings intensely, his eyes moving from one component of the ritual to the next, never stopping long on Layak or Typhus or their grisly accoutrements. Layak's chanting grew louder and the warp glow intensified, the heart in his grip like a weak yellow lumen.\n\nAbaddon's hearts had almost stopped, so slow was their beat, but he could not take the breath to utter an injunction and his body seemed paralysed. He stared at the heart in the sorcerer's hand and saw it beat, in time to the thud in his chest. Only his human heart functioned; his secondary organ was like a useless weight behind his chest bone. His heart pulsed again and the thing in Layak's fingers twitched in sympathy. The sorcerer turned to him then, proffering the heart like a prize.\n\nAbaddon raised his hand to take it, almost drawing his fingers back as the heart pumped once more in time to his own, gaining rhythm and speed. Layak's six eyes bored into him, yellow will-o'-the-wisps in the fog and flies, moving in and out of focus as oxygen starvation started to affect Abaddon's vision.\n\nAs the offering plopped down into his palm Abaddon felt a moment of release and took in a long, shuddering breath. Now he felt a triple-pulse, of his own hearts and the organ in his hand, thudding in unison with each other.\n\nFrom Typhus the gut-snake lifted up as though scenting prey, its toothy mouth gaping, sweeping left and right in an eyeless search. Abaddon took a step closer, holding out the beating, glowing heart. The intestinal serpent stood out straight from Typhus' arm, like a rearing cobra, a gurgle issuing from its rippling throat.\n\nIt descended with purpose, not striking swiftly, but almost delicately plucking the heart from the palm of Abaddon's gauntlet. Leaving a rope of thick drool, it pulled back, the passage of the heart into its innards visible by the bulge that travelled its length.\n\nLayak's chanting resumed, become more strident, almost a screeching. The gut-serpent started to weave back and forth, and leapt from Typhus to judder across the floor, spasming as if in pain. It coiled about itself, teeth sinking into its own flesh where the glow of the heart shone through. Razor-sharp teeth opened up its meat with ease, and it swallowed the heart again, chewing it from its own insides. It started to swell as it ate, spines and scales breaking from the surface, rows of paired wings splitting in the manner of a moth emerging from its cocoon.\n\nLifting from the ground with a buzz of dozens of wings, the scaled serpentine creature weaved around the legs of Layak, moving in time to the tempo of his voice. It moved to his icon staff, and then around his head, forming an obscene halo. Then it ascended, flitting across the chamber, coiling and uncoiling as though at play, growing larger still until its girth was as wide as Abaddon's waist.\n\nWith a shriek that was echoed from the mask of Layak, it plunged down, spearing into the corpse pile in front of the sorcerer. Like a las-drill it burrowed swiftly into the charnel heap. It was several metres long, far greater than the depth of the bodies, but continued downwards, disappearing into the ground. As its tail vanished into the exposed viscera Abaddon caught a momentary sight of a flowering bloom made of gristle and veins, a swirling hole at its centre, before the disgusting petals closed and the wound erupted into a pile of festering meat laced with hundreds of maggots.\n\nWith a gasp Layak stumbled backwards, eyes dimming. Abaddon made no move to assist him, but watched as the Word Bearer straightened, leaning a little on his staff for support.\n\n'Beautiful,' whispered Typhus.\n\n'It is done,' croaked Layak. He turned three pairs of eyes upon Perturabo. 'The Utterblight will begin its burrowing into the souls of the defenders, now it is time for you to launch your attack.'\n\nThe primarch surveyed the chamber, examining Layak and Typhus, the corpses where the worm-daemon had disappeared. He nodded, once, and then left without a word. The clank of the Iron Circle joining him reverberated through the bastion.\n\n'Now we return to Horus,' said Abaddon.\n\n'No, not yet,' replied Layak. 'The ritual must be completed within the ward, when the Utterblight has thinned the barrier sufficiently. Typhus, return to your primarch and continue your assaults. Know that every disease-ridden corpse feeds the cruach-worm and makes it stronger.'\n\n'We shall make a banquet for the Utterblight,' promised the plague sorcerer, lifting his scythe in salute.\n\nAbaddon watched him go and then approached Layak. He stopped, two paces short of weapons' reach, aware of the blade slaves that had silently re-entered the chamber behind the Word Bearer.\n\n'What did you do to me, sorcerer?' he growled, holding back the urge to seize Layak and pound the answer from him.\n\n'I gave you a taste of what will come. The slightest inkling of what your genefather has endured to gain his power. When you come before the gods and demand their support, you must give of yourself"}
{"text":"addon watched him go and then approached Layak. He stopped, two paces short of weapons' reach, aware of the blade slaves that had silently re-entered the chamber behind the Word Bearer.\n\n'What did you do to me, sorcerer?' he growled, holding back the urge to seize Layak and pound the answer from him.\n\n'I gave you a taste of what will come. The slightest inkling of what your genefather has endured to gain his power. When you come before the gods and demand their support, you must give of yourself for their favour.'\n\n'And am I... The ritual, it bound me to that creature somehow?'\n\n'No, you are free from any bargain or influence. It is to Typhus' fate that the star-maggot is drawn, not yours. This will not be the last time Typhus seeks out the worm of entropy for his designs.'\n\n'You speak of matters beyond the end of the siege.'\n\n'Horus' victory, or defeat, is not the end - it is the beginning.' Layak turned away, took a step and looked back at Abaddon. 'In time you will embrace that destiny.'\n\nAbaddon watched the Word Bearer depart, his mood sour. He thought about the Warmaster and his brothers, the changes wrought upon Typhus and his companions, and of the Neverborn and possessed that he had seen in Horus' court - Tormageddon and others. He could see clearly what price the powers demanded, beyond simple allegiance. Layak seemed convinced that Abaddon would one day voluntarily pay it. What was he willing to give to serve his father and brothers?\n\nThe traitors gather to perform a dark ritual.\n\nThe ghost\n\nDangerous beliefs\n\nShort supplies\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, Barracks-C, two days since assault\n\nSeveral different nightmares had tormented Katsuhiro since he had arrived at the defence line. Coming within the walls, he had hoped perhaps his night-time tortures would end. Like all hopes he had nurtured since arriving, that was another to be crushed by reality.\n\nHe murmured in his bunk, trapped in a vision in which his skin and flesh fell away piece by piece. He felt no pain, but was left a bare skeleton, green-and-grey moss growing from his bones as he lay in a shallow grave. The moss thickened into fresh muscle, giving him a new form, and flowers blossomed on his verdant not-corpse. All the while he heard singing, wordless but the notes like a waterfall, sometimes light and refreshing, other times booming and powerful.\n\nIt was not the dream that was the nightmare, but the waking.\n\nThis night he was ripped from the embrace of the plant-death by Chastain barging into the dorm he shared with fifty other guards. All of them were veterans from Outside. Nobody ever called it the first line or the outer defences any more. The Outside was all they had to say. 'I was on the Outside, were you?' Even through the farts and snores, every man and woman woke at the loud footfalls of the new arrival, their senses keyed to any potential danger, a paranoia that even kilometres of high walls and gun towers would never set at ease for the rest of their lives.\n\n'What's the racket?' demanded Sergeant Ongoco.\n\n'Something's in the mess hall!' Chastain told them. 'Get your guns!'\n\n'Where's the officer of the watch?' Ongoco asked as Katsuhiro and the others rolled from their bunks. Katsuhiro dodged aside as Corporal Lennox in the bunk above him dropped straight to the floor.\n\n'Quick, forget your shirts!' Chastain hovered at the doors ashen-faced and wide-eyed, and then disappeared back into the corridor.\n\nBare feet padding on the varnished ferrocrete floor of the barracks, East Wall Second Guard Company followed, snatching lasguns from the wall racks as they flowed towards the passageway.\n\nKatsuhiro was about five from the front of the line, Lennox beside him.\n\n'Why didn't he sound the alarm?' asked Katsuhiro. Lennox just shrugged in reply.\n\nIt was only fifty metres to the mess - probably the reason Chastain had headed to the dorm rather than the watch station on the floor above. Lasgun in hand, Katsuhiro followed the others through the double doors into a broad hall filled with tables and benches, enough for five hundred troopers to be seated at one time. The only light was from dull orange night-lumens set in the walls, barely enough to see the vague shapes of the furniture.\n\nThe serving hatches in the far wall were all closed with plasteel shutters but a paler light shone through the gaps from the kitchens beyond, swaying and dipping as though the source were moving back and forth.\n\n'First and third squad with me,' called Ongoco, not bothering to wait to see if any officers were going to turn up. He pointed to the doors to the right of the shutters. 'Second and fourth, that way. Fifth hold the rear.'\n\nPart of second squad, Katsuhiro hurried towards the right-hand doors. The light played out through the cracks between and below, ripples of white tinged with green. His hairs prickled across his arms and the back of his neck as he caught a strange scent. It brought to mind a forest canopy and mouldering leaves beneath, though he had never seen such a thing. While Lennox reached for the door, Katsuhiro had a flash of the dream, the earthy scent of mulch soft beneath his rebirthing form.\n\n'Weapons ready,' croaked the corporal, voice breaking as trembling fingers curled around the door handle.\n\nKatsuhiro brought up his lasgun, Spilk and Kalama to either side of him with weapons readied too.\n\nLennox dragged open the door and the trio stepped forward, Spilk turning to the left, Kalama to the right while Katsuhiro was focused ahead.\n\nThe light came from everywhere, flashing from the reflective surfaces of the massive ovens and stove tops, dancing around the dormant lumen fittings, gleaming from rows of pans hanging on wall hooks. The thud of the opening doors at the far end drew their attention, guns swinging towards Sergeant Ongoco and his squad.\n\nKatsuhiro advanced, allowing the rest of second squad into the kitchen, gun barrel swinging towards the shadows cast by the erratic light. The tiles were cold underfoot, the sensation helping to keep him grounded amid the otherworldly shimmer. The smell of nature grew stronger and Katsuhiro thought he heard the sound of wind in trees, the rustle of leaves and creak of arboreal giants.\n\n'There!' Kalama jabbed her lasgun towards a patch of wall between the chimneys of two bread ovens. Light rippled over bare brick, seeping along the lines of mortar. Dust crumbled where it touched, each speck falling slowly, glinting like a tiny particle of light.\n\nBlinking, Katsuhiro thought he saw an outline in the gathering motes. Instantly he thought of a man, beautiful and strong, an arm reached out towards the troopers.\n\nHe heard Spilk snarl in disgust and the hum of an energy cell charging.\n\n'No!' Katsuhiro knocked his companion's lasgun upwards as he pulled the trigger, the beam of red light blasting into the ceiling. Panicked shouts came from others and a flurry of shots erupted along the kitchen from both ends, hiding the wall in a cloud of exploding brick dust.\n\nFor a heartbeat longer Katsuhiro saw a face amidst the billowing specks, frown creased in disappointment, full lips pursed.\n\nThen it was gone.\n\n'By the Forefathers, that was disgusting,' muttered Kalama. Katsuhiro turned to see her lip ripple in disgust, eyes fixed on where the apparition had appeared.\n\nHe was confused. The entity he had seen in the ghost-light had been anything but disgusting. The memory of it left an ache in his chest, longing for its return.\n\n'Everyone stay where you are!' barked Sergeant Ongoco. 'Nobody's going nowhere until this is reported.'\n\nKatsuhiro caught a last flurry of leaf-whisper and the forest scent.\n\n'What are you happy about?' demanded Lennox, eyes narrowed.\n\n'Nothing, corporal,' Katsuhiro said quickly, pushing the smile from his lips.\n\nKarachee Flats, sixty-eight days before assault\n\nA strange light brought Zenobi from a fitful slumber. She awoke huddled on a bench, the company banner clutched to her like a child, her pack and lasgun sticking out of a half-open locker underneath. Her head rested on Seleen's shoulder, a folded coat for a pillow, who in turn was butted against Menber, who sat wedged against the wall.\n\nThe light came through the windows in a wavering, golden haze. It was sunlight, itself a rarity to the downhivers, but unlike anything Zenobi had seen before. She had managed the occasional trip to the hive-skin to watch a sunrise - it was virtually a rite of passage for those working on the line - and recognised that there was something sickly about the light that crept into the carriage to cast thin, long shadows.\n\nThere were far more people inside the compartment than intended, so that the benches were filled with half-asleep troopers, nearly as many curled on the floor between. She rose quietly, mumbles and groans sounding from those around her as their weight shifted, though she tried to ease herself free without disturbing them. She almost tripped over her kitbag and took a couple of seconds to shift it around and force it fully into the wooden locker.\n\n'What are you doing?' murmured Achebe, slumping sideways into the space created by her departure. His eyelids fluttered open, a yawn splitting his face to reveal a dark tongue and stained teeth. 'Is it breakfast?'\n\nOthers were stirring or had already awoken, either just sitting quietly where they had found themselves or, like Zenobi, picking their way carefully through the maze of bodies to see what was going on.\n\nShe saw nothing of the officers - integrity or regular - and assumed that they had found alternative accommodation more suited to their rank. Sergeants Alekzanda and Asari-dokubo were crouched in the vestibule by the doors, sharing a knife to pare away slices of something from a rations packet. Alekzanda looked up as her movement caught his attention. His eyes were bloodshot, dark rims around them, but his expression was as determined as ever.\n\n'I need some fresh air.' Zenobi said the words and a moment later realised how ridiculous "}
{"text":"rity or regular - and assumed that they had found alternative accommodation more suited to their rank. Sergeants Alekzanda and Asari-dokubo were crouched in the vestibule by the doors, sharing a knife to pare away slices of something from a rations packet. Alekzanda looked up as her movement caught his attention. His eyes were bloodshot, dark rims around them, but his expression was as determined as ever.\n\n'I need some fresh air.' Zenobi said the words and a moment later realised how ridiculous the request must sound, coming from a downhiver who had lived in a family hab-chamber only a little less crowded than the train car. 'I feel...'\n\nAlekzanda handed the knife to the other sergeant and stood up, hand moving to the handle of a door behind him.\n\n'There's a sort of gantry on the roof.' He opened the door and the noise of the train's passage intensified. 'There's a few folks up there already.'\n\nShe thanked him with a nod and stepped past. A gnarled hand barred her, the fingers moving to the haft of the banner that Zenobi had brought with her.\n\n'Don't want that going over the side, do we?' Alekzanda said sternly.\n\nZenobi reconsidered going outside, but her head was spinning and she really did need to get away from the smell and the heat of everybody. Reluctantly, she relinquished her grip on the banner and watched Alekzanda stow it in the corner.\n\nThrough the door was a short walkway that connected to the next carriage, made of wooden slats and canvas. Guide ropes lined the sides at waist and shoulder height, but it didn't look at all inviting as it swung with the motion of the locomotive. Thankfully the ladder to the carriage roof was a set of metal rungs bolted to the end of the car itself. Zenobi pulled herself up, taking deep breaths as she did so. The air was cool, not cold, tainted by the oil fume of the engine that passed along from the smokestacks, but it didn't taste of sweat and fear so that made it the most refreshing draught she had ever taken.\n\nAnother smell lingered on the breeze. Mozo. It reminded her of her aunts and uncles - her mother and father were both against smoking, a rarity among their family - and her thoughts strayed thousands of kilometres back across the world to Addaba.\n\nThere were three others on the gantry, which was little more than a metre-wide strip of metal with a short lip that ran the full length of the roof. There was nothing to stop anyone falling off, but the train wasn't going fast so if the fall didn't cause a serious injury it wouldn't be too much trouble to run and jump back on.\n\nShe didn't recognise the three that were there, two men and a woman. Their eyes flicked to her chest and hers to theirs, checking out their identity badges.\n\n'Epsilon. Command squad?' said the woman, raising an eyebrow and affecting an air of being impressed. Her eyes were lined with wrinkles, a touch of grey at her temples. Her hands had calluses from manual work, a few burn scars on her cheeks that spoke of labour near the forges. If she'd been an uphiver she might well have been forty or fifty, but life aged one fast on the line and Zenobi guessed the other woman was ten years older than her, perhaps fifteen at the most.\n\n'Zenobi,' she introduced herself, choosing to drop her second name for the time being. 'You're all from Beta Platoon?'\n\n'Better Beta than nothing,' one of the men joked, flashing a gap-toothed grin. He extended a hand. 'Name's Wrench. Well, not my name, obviously, but what folks call me.'\n\n'Wrench? You good at fixing things, I guess.'\n\nHe nodded and drew a slender hand-rolled paper tube from inside his coat, and offered it. Zenobi shook her head with a polite smile and pulled herself up the last couple of rungs. They all shuffled as best they could to allow her to step by, venturing further along the top of the carriage. Zenobi picked her way carefully past. She'd ridden moving crane booms when she had been no older than ten but the manufactories were definitely lacking in crosswind, unlike the roof of the train.\n\nShe looked back along the length of the vehicle, saw the track beyond it stretching into nothing. The ground was hillier here than where they'd embarked, a line of low mountains visible along the horizon to the right. There was a smudge against the sky, perhaps smoke where they'd transferred. It was dwarfed by vast columns of black fumes billowing into the sky from beyond the horizon. Every now and then she thought she saw a flash or heard the distant thunder of a detonation. It could have been a trick of sunlight and the rattling of the car.\n\nTurning around, she looked where they were heading. An indistinct haze in the furthest distance might have been more mountains but it was impossible to tell. The sky above them danced with constant colour, reds and oranges of fire mostly, sometimes struck through with flares of blue and purple or a stark beam of yellow blinking down from orbit.\n\nShe watched for several minutes, thinking the display would stop. It didn't. She swallowed hard, confronted by the impossibility of imagining the power that was being unleashed upon the Imperial Palace. It stretched reality to consider the forces raging through the atmosphere, and the titanic energy holding it at bay. How long could such defences last against such unruly might?\n\nZenobi turned quickly as she felt someone standing behind her. It was the third of the Beta Platoon members, the one that had not introduced himself. The other two were deep in quiet conversation, arguing over something Wrench was holding, a book or pamphlet of some kind.\n\n'When we find ourselves powerless, we understand what it is to look for the power beyond our knowing,' said the man. He smiled warmly and thrust his hands into the pockets of his coveralls, swaying gently with the motion of the train. He had the easy balance of one that had lived as an ore-rigger, riding the monorail cars from the foundry to the production line.\n\n'I know where this power comes from,' Zenobi replied, eyes turning heavenwards. 'The wrath of Horus visited upon the city of the Emperor.'\n\n'And He resists, doesn't He?' The man took in a deep breath, nostril's flaring. 'I'm Natto. Zenobi, right?'\n\nShe nodded confirmation.\n\n'What if I told you that this wasn't about the Warmaster, but something vaster and more majestic?'\n\n'I'd say you have a knack for stories,' Zenobi replied cautiously. 'Or perhaps fancy yourself a line philosopher.'\n\n'We all wonder about life, don't we? What's it about? Why do we do what we do? Who makes us what we are?' He stepped closer, so Zenobi moved aside. Natto sauntered past, still talking, not looking at her. 'Most of the time it doesn't amount to a bucket of bolts, am I right?'\n\nZenobi said nothing, not sure what he was talking about. This didn't deter him.\n\n'We're standing on top of a recommissioned mining train - that's what this is, I've seen them - heading towards the most destructive force ever to visit Terra. Wouldn't you like to know what that's really about? Why this war had to happen?'\n\n'It's about Terra,' replied Zenobi. 'We all know it. Control Terra, you can control the Imperium. Slavery on one side, freedom on the other. For Addaba, for Terra and for all of humanity.'\n\n'The recruiters' words, so well crafted, aren't they?'\n\n'Are they false?'\n\nNatto turned, still casual, a half-smile on his lips.\n\n'I'm not trying to trick you, Zenobi. I'm not going to tell you what to think, what to believe.' He put his hand inside his coverall and pulled a small book from within. It seemed to be the same as the one Wrench was holding. Zenobi glanced back to see that the other Beta Platoon troopers were watching her and Natto, glancing up from their discussion frequently.\n\n'I don't know why you think I'm here...'\n\n'This book doesn't claim to have the answers,' continued Natto, oblivious to her suspicion. 'It does ask some interesting questions. It's called the Lectitio Divinitatus.'\n\n'The lecto-what?' said Zenobi.\n\n'Lectitio Divinitatus. That means Book of the Powers, something like that, in the language of the Palace. There's a whole sphere of understanding that's been kept from us. The Emperor, Horus, is all part of a universe that was hidden away.'\n\nHe held out the booklet but Zenobi folded her arms, determined not to be dragged into the man's lunacy.\n\n'What sort of thing do you mean?' she found herself asking. Almost immediately she regretted opening her mouth, but Natto gave her no time to revoke her interest.\n\n'The warp. It's not just another part of our universe that lets ships travel fast.' His hand still held out the book and he thumbed open some pages, trying to show her the lines of small print within. 'And the Emperor. The Emperor isn't a man, Zenobi. He's a-'\n\n'I don't need to hear this,' she snapped. She advanced, but there wasn't room to push past. For a moment they both teetered around each other, almost falling from the roof, but he spun away with an easy movement, letting her regain her balance. Natto said something else but she was deaf to his words.\n\nThe other two stood up but didn't try to stop her passing. With an effort to still her trembling hands, Zenobi swung down onto the ladder and descended to the carriage at a slide.\n\nShe barrelled through the door and almost straight into someone on the other side. She saw the flash of crimson and looked up into the unforgiving features of an integrity officer. His name was Abioye, assigned to Gamma Platoon.\n\n'Is something amiss, Trooper Adedeji?'\n\nShe backed away, heart thumping. He stepped after, eyes intent on her face, trying to read her like a book.\n\n'You seem out of sorts.'\n\nZenobi steadied herself, feeling squeezed between the integrity officer and the end bulkhead of the carriage. It was difficult to see past him, to the press of soldiery that filled the rest of the compartment, where her platoon companions and friends were.\n\nThere was nobody to help her.\n\nShe swallowed hard, but her fear subsided, replaced by a sudden anger. She ha"}
{"text":"he backed away, heart thumping. He stepped after, eyes intent on her face, trying to read her like a book.\n\n'You seem out of sorts.'\n\nZenobi steadied herself, feeling squeezed between the integrity officer and the end bulkhead of the carriage. It was difficult to see past him, to the press of soldiery that filled the rest of the compartment, where her platoon companions and friends were.\n\nThere was nobody to help her.\n\nShe swallowed hard, but her fear subsided, replaced by a sudden anger. She hadn't done anything wrong, why was she feeling so guilty?\n\nThe lie of omission. That's what it was called, when you knew something but didn't tell someone.\n\n'On the roof,' she said, flicking her eyes towards the ceiling. 'Beta Platoon. They tried... They had a book they wanted to show me.'\n\nIt took a moment for Abioye to understand her meaning. When he did there was just a flicker of recognition in his eyes.\n\n'I see.' He stepped back, allowing her past. 'Return to your platoon. Tell nobody of this.'\n\n'Yessir,' she snapped, her hand rising in automatic salute.\n\nShe stumbled past into the main part of the carriage. There was more of a semblance of order than when she'd awoken. Sergeants were gathering their squads and proper billeting arrangements were being made with weapons and kitbags.\n\nZenobi glanced back and saw that Abioye was gone. She felt pleased at her honesty, and not just because it assuaged the guilt by association that had tarnished her conscience the moment she had seen the prohibited book. As company standard bearer she had to hold herself to the highest standards of loyalty and, yes, integrity.\n\nRejoining her squad, she was soon swept into the daily life of the defence corps trooper, coming to terms with the same routine but in different circumstances. About half an hour later they were called to attend to the captain, who had reappeared in the carriage from whatever quarters had been secured away from the bulk of the company. She stepped up onto a bench near the door so that she could be seen by the whole compartment, several hundred pairs of eyes all turned towards her as one.\n\n'The transfer station where we boarded has been destroyed,' she told them, each word enunciated carefully, her expression a study in sober impassivity. 'There were no survivors.'\n\nZenobi took this news with a sigh of resignation, and there was no particular reaction from the rest of the company.\n\n'The trains we boarded are following different lines to the battlefront. It is unlikely that we will see the others again. Certainly not this side of victory for us. Elements of the 64th, 65th and 70th Defence Corps have come together on this train. Nearly six thousand troopers and three hundred officers and other ranks. Colonel Tadessa is not among them. The corps are combining higher officer staff functions and we will come together as a single operating unit. Old squad, platoon and company designations will remain for the sake of simplicity. However, we are no longer the 64th Defence Corps. All troopers, officers and other ranks aboard this train are now proud soldiers of the Addaba Free Corps.'\n\nThere were smiles and shouts of approval to greet this news. Zenobi grinned, catching a look from Menber past the bodies of her companions.\n\n'The Free Corps!' someone shouted.\n\n'The Free Corps!' Zenobi called back, along with a deafening chorus of other voices.\n\nEgwu smiled, nodding her acknowledgement of their enthusiasm.\n\n'Yes,' she laughed. 'We thought that would be popular.'\n\nThe shout of 'Free Corps' went up again, and once more, until the captain raised her hands for quiet. The troopers settled as her expression became serious.\n\n'The truth is, the hurried transfer has left us in bad shape. We have the same manpower as before, but heavier weaponry and specialist equipment was still being loaded at the time of our quick departure. The same is true of rations, water sanitation packs, ammunition and other supplies.'\n\nThe captain paused to allow the importance of this to sink in. Her stare roamed across her command.\n\n'In addition, the crew that were trained to operate the defensive systems of this locomotive were mostly on the ground.' Disquieted mutters greeted this news, and Zenobi sagged with the thought of going almost defenceless into the attack on the Palace. 'A few that were servicing their weapons remained behind. You will each be shown how to man the guns over the next few hours and defence shifts will be drawn up by your platoon officers.'\n\nOnce more she waited for this information to seep into the minds of the troopers, hands clasping and relaxing round the baton she held at her waist. Zenobi could only imagine the strain the past twelve hours had placed on her commander and the other officers. She had no illusions that the rest of her life was likely to be brutal and short, but at least she didn't have to weigh up decisions that would alter the life chances of hundreds, perhaps thousands of others.\n\n'Alpha Platoon, you will be first to report for gunnery training.' Egwu lifted her baton in dismissal and received the salute of her company in return. A burst of chatter filled the carriage as she stepped down from the bench and disappeared back through the door.\n\n'Was never going to be a long fight anyway,' said Lieutenant Okoye.\n\nThe shiv cuts deeper\n\nEvidence of daemons\n\nPunishment\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex core, twenty hours since assault\n\nA hundred and twenty strong, the Iron Warriors insertion force pushed up into the Lion's Gate space port like a splinter worming its way towards a person's heart. One by one they had gathered, the small force coming together over the course of several hours, while similar formations did likewise in other parts of the port-city.\n\nForrix had expected more resistance but having passed through the outer skin of the space port the warriors of the IV Legion had encountered little in the way of opposition. Most of the defenders were occupied with the tumult of beastmen and rogue troopers rampaging through the lower levels, or defending against the aerial attacks and landings that had begun in the uppermost reaches. As yet it seemed that the Imperial Fists and their allies thought the middle levels of the port unthreatened.\n\n'Auspex shows nothing within seven hundred metres of our position,' reported Allax, sweeping the scanning device left and right as the company waited at the junction of a dormant travelator and an arterial corridor.\n\nThe innards of the space port betrayed its purpose as a place of labour rather than a domestic hive. While the outer regions had been packed with defended hab-blocks, communal areas and transit plazas, the core of the Lion's Gate space port was filled with immense machinery for the transportation of materials to and from the landing docks at the summit and arranged in a spiral down the flanks. They had passed loading bays vast enough for Emperor-class Titans to pass through, accessed by lifters capable of carrying a company of battle tanks. Monorail stations abutted these cavernous spaces, their locomotives missing but their sidings filled with carriages, each a hundred metres long and forty high.\n\nWith vox contact too much of a detection risk, the IV Legion infiltrators were reduced to picking up the energy signatures of power armour, coupled with transponder beacons with a range of only two hundred metres - signals too faint for the standard monitoring stations to pick up. The click-click-click of the auspex on passive scan was audible above the creaking of the port's ancient metal skeleton, the clatter of chains swinging and the rumble of the ongoing barrages.\n\n'We'll move up,' said Forrix, pointing his bolter towards the stationary travelator. They swept suit lamps into the dark tunnel, the light swallowed after forty metres. 'Nobody to find here.'\n\nCaptain Gharal led the way, a ten-strong squad with him. The others followed a hundred metres behind, close enough to give support if needed, far enough to slip away if that proved the more prudent course. Each of the thousand Space Marines had been chosen by the Trident, based on the reports of the field commanders regarding temperament and patience. No glory-hound heroes, no warriors that would put personal honour above the mission.\n\nAn army of pragmatists, Falk had called it.\n\nForrix was in command, but his objective was nebulous. Kroeger's cunning plan was good enough to get them inside the space port but ran short of details on what to do once they were inside. To follow the shiv analogy, Forrix had promised to find a vital organ to pierce.\n\nLacking any detailed intelligence regarding the interior of the space port - their allies in the Alpha Legion had been disappointing on that account - Forrix was left with finding a target of opportunity. In lieu of any defined objective, he had chosen a geographic rendezvous, appointing a grid coordinate as the final meeting point for the force. Smaller formations within the army had been given waypoints so that they approached from different routes, their full strength concealed until it had come together.\n\nFalk had laughed at the plan, accusing Forrix of confusing the IV Legion with the Raven Guard. The Warsmith's taunts were easy to ignore: he would likely soon be dead, his body, such as it remained, lost in the upper reaches of the space port.\n\nForrix checked his positional relay via a blinking dot and rangefinder in his visor display. They were two kilometres below and four hundred metres south-east of the final meeting point. It was too much to expect that all one thousand warriors assigned to the mission would evade detection, but Forrix hoped that he could gather a sizeable enough force before the defenders realised what the scattered Iron Warriors signified.\n\nAfter that it would simply be a question of holding out for reinforcement. Would the dual attacks above and below reconnect with Forrix's force in time, or would they be crushed by the sons of Dorn and t"}
{"text":"r hundred metres south-east of the final meeting point. It was too much to expect that all one thousand warriors assigned to the mission would evade detection, but Forrix hoped that he could gather a sizeable enough force before the defenders realised what the scattered Iron Warriors signified.\n\nAfter that it would simply be a question of holding out for reinforcement. Would the dual attacks above and below reconnect with Forrix's force in time, or would they be crushed by the sons of Dorn and their allies, trapped in the depths of the space port far from assistance?\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, Barracks-C, two days since assault\n\nThe quarters of the Imperial Army personnel had become the abode of giants. Three Custodians stood watch at the entrances to the main garrison block, barring all passage within. Those stationed at that section of the quarantine perimeter had been moved to a holding location deeper inside the Imperial Palace - to the relief of many of them.\n\nInside, at the mess hall where the apparition had been witnessed, the only figure that did not look out of place was Malcador, garbed in his robes of office, staff in hand. With him were Constantin Valdor, the commander of the Legio Custodes, and the primarch of the VII Legion, Rogal Dorn. They made their surroundings look like some strange undersized play-stage for children. Other elements of the Palace defences were of a ratio suitable for demigods so that Space Marines, primarchs and war engines could pass at will, but these hastily erected barracks were meant for mortal humans alone.\n\nDorn crouched inside the kitchen rather than stand with his head awkwardly cocked to one side, while Valdor had removed his high-plumed helm before ducking through the doors.\n\n'The Silent Sisterhood have been over every part of the barracks,' said Valdor. 'There is nothing psychic here.'\n\n'Yet four dozen men and women saw something in this place,' replied Dorn. He glared at the spot of bare brick where the vision had appeared, thinking back to recent events on the Phalanx. He could barely countenance the threat of daemonic attack here, within the perimeter of the Palace walls.\n\n'Saw what?' said Valdor. 'Some reported a woman clad in robes of green leaves. Another confessed to seeing fist-sized flies bursting from the wall. Some claim the bricks turned to putrefying flesh, others a one-eyed monster with broken claws and the stench of faeces.'\n\n'Some kind of hallucinogenic toxin?' suggested Dorn.\n\n'Possibly.' Valdor looked around the rest of the chamber. 'There is no central environmental system through which it could have been introduced. Something in the food perhaps.'\n\n'Why here? Why now? Mortarion's Death Guard have been bombarding this sector for a month without relent, but there is nothing worth attacking here except lunatics and plague victims.'\n\n'Perhaps this is the point,' said Valdor. 'Sooner or later something has reached the quarantine zone. That gave rise to this... apparition?'\n\nMalcador coughed, one hand raised to his mouth.\n\n'The both of you seem intent on dancing around the real subject at hand.' The Regent stared at them, eyes regarding each equally for several seconds. 'It was a daemon.'\n\n'Daemon?' Dorn growled. 'Impossible.'\n\n'Daemon. Neverborn. Nosferatus. Diabolarum. Nephilla.' Malcador sat on one of the stools beside a preparation worktop. 'Many names. All the same thing. A warp incursion.'\n\n'How?' Valdor stepped towards the bare wall, a hand raised towards it. 'The Emperor's might shields us from attack of that kind.'\n\n'We have seen that the telaethesic ward is imperfect.' Malcador looked at Rogal Dorn. 'Your tainted brothers setting foot upon Terra being the most troublesome example. We must assume that the bombardment by the Death Guard and this arrival are connected. Perhaps it was unwise to gather all of the plague victims in restricted spaces. Such confinement concentrates their misery. It provides a... Think of it as a power source.'\n\n'Power source? A warp ritual, you mean?' said Valdor. 'Like the great slaughter that allowed the twisted primarchs to make planetfall?'\n\n'That would suggest assistance from within,' Dorn said heavily. He turned his attention to Valdor. 'I have every warrior I can muster stationed on the walls. I cannot spare any for patrols inside the Palace as well.'\n\n'I have few enough Custodians remaining after our withdrawal from the webway. However, I agree with you, this is a matter for my people.'\n\n'A proportionate response, Lord Valdor,' said the Regent.\n\n'We should not let ourselves be too drawn on this issue, Malcador,' added Dorn. 'The Emperor will protect us against any dangerous assault from the netherworld.'\n\nThe Regent looked away at that moment, hand moving to his mouth as though to hide his reaction.\n\n'What do you know, Malcador? Are you holding back?'\n\nThe Sigillite scratched the side of his nose, his glance moving from Dorn to Valdor and then back again.\n\n'There was a time before when the telaethesic ward was broken.'\n\n'When?' demanded the Imperial Fists primarch. 'Why was I not told of this?'\n\n'You know of it,' said Valdor, catching Malcador's meaning. 'When Magnus came before the Emperor, he broke through the psychic wards.'\n\n'I see.' Dorn set his gaze on Malcador. 'Do you think this is the work of Magnus?'\n\n'Doubtful.' Malcador rubbed a thumb and finger together as he thought. 'His last, uh, arrival was done by sheer force of will. It would require a similarly unsubtle concentration of effort.'\n\n'Yet you look concerned,' said Valdor. 'Is Magnus orchestrating a more insidious attack?'\n\n'I do not know,' confessed Malcador.\n\n'It should be obvious enough,' said Dorn. 'I know little about the realm of the psychic but I do understand that a being as potent as the Crimson King would leave traces for one of your ability to detect.'\n\n'I...' Malcador sighed heavily. 'I do not know where Magnus is. I have felt his brothers, the ones touched by the enemy powers, but of the Lord of the Thousand Sons I sense nothing. He may not be on Terra.'\n\n'His legionaries are,' said Dorn. 'It seems unlikely he would release them to the command of Horus unaccompanied.'\n\n'I cannot give you an answer!' Malcador stood, staff thudding on the tiles. 'As I said, I do not know where Magnus is.'\n\nDorn took a moment to absorb this and decided there was nothing to be gained by pressing the Sigillite further. If news of Magnus surfaced, Malcador would be certain to share it.\n\n'In the absence of any obvious cause, what are we to do?' the primarch asked his two companions.\n\n'I will have a Custodian investigate to see if any further action is required.' Constantin Valdor regarded the Regent with a faint smile. 'Is one Custodian proportionate enough?'\n\n'A perfect amount,' Malcador replied. 'Who do you have in mind?'\n\nKarachee Flats, sixty-six days before assault\n\nThere was a bulky analogue chronometer mounted above each door of the carriage, though somewhat predictably their filigree-decorated hands told slightly different times. Zenobi found her attention drawn to them again and again, checking the passage of time. It was something she'd never been able to do before. Personal chronometers were expensive, only uphivers would have such things. Everyone else was ruled by the shift sirens, their personal observances and the routine of daily life. Zenobi had always known when it was ten minutes before the shift change warning siren because her neighbour, an older lady named Babette, was a habitual singer and broke into a tune at the same time every day when she was washing her clothes in the 'tweenshift. That she could now break down her day by the minute was incredible and she found herself timing various activities to see how long they took. Three minutes to unpack and repack her basic combat kit; five minutes for a self-heating ration can to bring itself to full temperature; less than two minutes to devour the warm contents afterwards.\n\nSeveral times Sergeant Alekzanda admonished her for being distracted, but her new fascination meant that she knew it was sometime around two thirty in the afternoon when the squeal of brakes brought the train to a long, slow halt. The lieutenants and sergeants barked chastisements as the troopers started to move towards the windows to investigate if anything could be seen outside.\n\n'Form ranks!' came the call from the doorway as Captain Egwu entered.\n\nThe squads fell hastily into place by their benches, arms by their sides, eyes fixed on their commander. Egwu entered flanked by Jawaahir and another integrity officer. Two other officers loitered behind her in the door vestibule.\n\n'As of this time, I am assuming command of the Addaba Free Corps,' Egwu announced. 'My rank will be general-captain and I will have joint authority with Integrity High Officer Jawaahir. It is an honour to have been chosen for this position by my fellow officers.'\n\n'The vote was unanimous,' Jawaahir interrupted with a smile.\n\n'Indeed, an honour,' continued Egwu.\n\nBefore she could say anything else, a cheer erupted from the survivors of her company, a roll of congratulations and compliments. Egwu waited patiently for the ovation to subside, her expression oddly grim. When the last voices of celebration died away, she looked across the company, eyes moving from one officer to the next.\n\n'The corps will assemble to witness punishment,' she said gravely. 'Alternate squads will ascend to the roof. Others will disembark to view from the ground. Punishment will be enacted in twenty minutes.'\n\nThis pierced the mood instantly. Egwu and her escort advanced along the carriage, the ranks parting as she approached, until they had moved on to the next compartment. Lieutenant Okoye rounded on his platoon.\n\n'You heard our general-captain. First squad to the roof.' The troopers bustled towards the gangway but were stopped by the lieutenant, who plucked a lasgun from beneath the bench and thrust it into the arms of the closest solder. 'Armed. We are at"}
{"text":"hment will be enacted in twenty minutes.'\n\nThis pierced the mood instantly. Egwu and her escort advanced along the carriage, the ranks parting as she approached, until they had moved on to the next compartment. Lieutenant Okoye rounded on his platoon.\n\n'You heard our general-captain. First squad to the roof.' The troopers bustled towards the gangway but were stopped by the lieutenant, who plucked a lasgun from beneath the bench and thrust it into the arms of the closest solder. 'Armed. We are at war.'\n\nThey retrieved their lasguns, checked their power packs as they had been trained to do and then followed their sergeants in orderly fashion out of the doors and onto the roof.\n\nNow that the train had stopped the ascent was less precarious. They led Epsilon Platoon up, meeting the first squad of Alpha Platoon halfway along the carriage. Zenobi found herself between Seleen and Menber. The crackle of the orbital attack to the north-east had not changed one bit in the hours since she had last been up there and her squad-companions marvelled at the display as she had done.\n\n'It's been going like that for half a day now,' said Menber. 'How long can the Palace shields last?'\n\n'I heard the lieutenant say we should be in the Himalazia within two days,' said Kettai from further along the roof. 'Do you think they'll last that long?'\n\n'Doesn't matter.' This came from the Alpha sergeant. Zenobi didn't know his name. 'Bombardment might level the Palace but you need soldiers on foot to clear the ruins. The Emperor isn't going to stand on top of the Sanctum Imperialis and let Horus drop bombs and plasma on His head, is He? There will be plenty of fighting before this is over.'\n\n'You sound eager,' said Menber.\n\n'In the years from now, when my son and daughters have grown up, I want to look them in the eye and say I fought for them,' the sergeant replied, his eyes drifting to the distant, unseen Palace. A half-smile danced on his lips. 'I will tell them I was with the Addaba Free Corps, and I fought at the Imperial Palace to ensure they would never be the slaves of tyrants.'\n\n'The Free Corps!' Zenobi shouted, swelling with pride, her fist punching the sky. A few others echoed her shout, but Menber gave her a quizzical look.\n\n'Remember what we were saying earlier? What the lieutenant told us?' He dropped his voice and leaned closer. 'Nobody's going to make it back to Addaba. Nobody's telling their kids or grandkids nothing.'\n\n'Maybe not,' conceded Zenobi, 'but our names, what we're going to do, will be remembered for a long time.'\n\n'Careful, yeye,' said Seleen. 'Glory is an empty plate to feed from.'\n\n'I don't want glory, I want to inspire,' said Zenobi. It was the first time she had been able to articulate that particular ambition, but the words seemed to capture her feelings well enough. 'Maybe someday a child in Addaba will read about Zenobi Adedeji and how she carried the banner of the company at the Imperial Palace, and maybe they'll think that was worth something and maybe want to do something brave and strong too. I'll be dead, I know that, but at least my life and death would mean something.'\n\n'Not many heroes on the line,' said Kettai.\n\n'No, everyone that works the line is a hero,' said Menber. 'You don't have to fight and kill to be a hero. Everyone still back at Addaba, manning the guns, heaving energy packs, pumping the water filters is a hero.'\n\n'Said like a true believer,' said Kettai. 'The recruiters really did their work on your family.'\n\nAny retort was cut short by activity further down the train. One of the storage wagon doors opened, wheezing down on hydraulics to make a ramp to the grey soil. A procession of integrity officers appeared, several dozen of them. They descended in pairs, each carrying a body. Zenobi sucked in her breath as she saw them, dressed in Free Corps coveralls, their collars and fronts stained dark. The bodies were unceremoniously dumped in a pile about thirty metres from the train and the integrity officers returned but emerged minutes later with a fresh cargo of the dead.\n\nSpeculation whispered back and forth along the roofs, and from those squads closer to the action came the rumour that they could see the badges on the bodies - most seemed to be from Beta Platoon in Zenobi's company, some from other platoons and two other companies. There had to be more than four hundred dead heaped together in the dust by the time the integrity officers were finished.\n\n'Throats cut,' came the murmur along the line.\n\n'Not wasting ammunition,' followed soon after.\n\nVoxmitters crackled into life along the length of the train. The distortion in the voice that followed was so bad it took several seconds for Zenobi to decipher it as belonging to Jawaahir.\n\n'These are the dishonoured dead. They have been found harbouring intent that is against the cause to which we have all pledged ourselves. The rot of false belief had taken root in their hearts and was deep, but fortunately had not yet spread far amongst us.\n\n'In better times we might forgive such transgressions with milder punishment, but we are at war. Spare no sorrow for these traitors, for they would have doomed us and the cause for which we will fight. It is not for their beliefs that they have been punished, though they are at odds with our ideals. It is the disobedience and clandestine conspiracy that surrounds their actions that has taken them from the path of integrity. By allowing these forbidden ideas to foster, to indulge in the conceit of speculation, they have shown themselves to be untrustworthy in all matters. They have allowed themselves to give ear to false promises, to consider fantasies that would erode their dedication and courage.'\n\nA score of integrity officers marched into view, two columns of ten; between them shambled half a dozen other figures. They were naked and even at this distance Zenobi could see they were bruised and bloody, eyes swollen shut, some limping, others holding broken arms awkwardly.\n\n'Their leaders. Had they been ignorant then punishment for negligence would be due. Worse, they were orchestrators of this dishonesty. Harbour no illusions, warriors of Addaba. The enemy has spies amongst us still. You were warned that elements dangerous to our cause were among you and yet these criminals not only protected lawbreakers, they encouraged them, sponsored their lies in an effort to further pollute our resolve.'\n\nFeedback whined through the speakers. Zenobi winced, teeth gritted against the hideous noise. Jawaahir's voice was replaced by a deeper tone - General-Captain Egwu's.\n\n'Free Corps, attend for punishment,' she ordered through the crackles of the voxmitters. Zenobi, like the thousands of others lining the roof, came to attention, lasgun at her side, the banner pole gripped tight in her right hand. 'For the wilful spreading of enemy propaganda and other actions at odds with the cause of the Addaba Free Corps, these officers before you are condemned to summary execution.'\n\nThe naked men and women were compliant, spirits broken, as they were forced to their knees next to the mound of those they had led into deceit and death. The integrity officers stepped back and drew their pistols. One of the captives suddenly rose to his feet, fists balled. The report of pistol fire snapped through the air and he fell, half twisting from bullet impacts. Another volley rang out, felling those on their knees, puffs of blood exploding from their foreheads before they slumped into the dirt.\n\n'In forty-nine hours, we will reach the terminus of our journey,' Jawaahir announced over the voxmitters. 'You must remain vigilant for all deviancy. Failure to disclose transgressions is itself a crime against our integrity.'\n\nThese last words made Zenobi shudder. Menber must have felt her unease, for when they were dismissed, he turned to her.\n\n'What's the matter, cousin?'\n\n'They spoke to me,' she said quietly. The words came as a stammer as the magnitude of what had occurred hit her. 'The conspirators. Tried to recruit me. I could have... What if I hadn't...?'\n\nShe tailed off, gaze dragged back to the corpses left beneath the careless sun. Already a cloud of flies was gathering. There would be maggots and other insects. No cleansing farewell in the endfires. Perhaps the integrity officers had already known about their secret. It seemed unlikely. Zenobi knew in her heart that the pile of dead was a direct consequence of her actions. She had never raised her lasgun, had not pulled her knife. With just a few words she had killed several hundred people.\n\nThe thought numbed her.\n\n'You didn't, and you wouldn't,' Menber said, grasping her arm to pull her along the roof with the rest of the squad. 'You would never betray us.'\n\nThe train jolted into movement, the snarl of immense engines throbbing along its length. It brought Zenobi's thoughts back into focus. Those that had been snared by the lies of the Lectitio Divinitatus had been targeted for a reason. It was a virus, claiming the Emperor was a god. It eroded everything they fought for. And someone had been the first to whisper its untruths in the ears of Beta Platoon. The rot had been introduced, perhaps not even maliciously, but it was not her that had killed those men and women.\n\nSomeone had corrupted their companions, knowingly risking them for their own ideals. It took just one traitor to taint everything around them. Zenobi steadied herself and looked at the other squad members, eyes resting on her cousin, and then past him, catching a glimpse of Kettai as he swung himself down to the ladder.\n\nIt wasn't her loyalty that she was worried about.\n\nA Custodian investigates\n\nStand by your guns\n\nBerossus\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, Barracks-C, two days since assault\n\nFor three hours Amon Tauromachian had walked the halls and corridors of the quarantine force barracks to acclimatise himself to its layout and atmosphere. It was cramped for the Custodian, who had disrobed of his armour after an hou"}
{"text":"usin, and then past him, catching a glimpse of Kettai as he swung himself down to the ladder.\n\nIt wasn't her loyalty that she was worried about.\n\nA Custodian investigates\n\nStand by your guns\n\nBerossus\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, Barracks-C, two days since assault\n\nFor three hours Amon Tauromachian had walked the halls and corridors of the quarantine force barracks to acclimatise himself to its layout and atmosphere. It was cramped for the Custodian, who had disrobed of his armour after an hour so that he could inspect some of the smaller spaces. Clad in an anti-ballistic tunic and nothing else, he returned once more to the kitchen where the manifestation had been encountered.\n\nHe crouched before it, eyes closed, picturing the scene as it had been when the Imperial Army troopers had clustered into the tiled chamber. He had read their accounts and spoken to each of them in person, and could locate almost all of them within a metre or two of where they had likely been standing.\n\nHe stood, head brushing the ceiling, eyes still closed, using his mind's eye rather than any physical sense. Two forces, converging from each set of doors. Afraid, some of them had opened fire.\n\nAmon moved to the wall, fingers gently moving across the rough bricks and lines of mortar. The indentations where las-strikes had hit. Some from the left, most from the right. No grouping that he could discern.\n\nHe backed away half a step, adding the strike pattern to his mental picture. Why here?\n\nHe retreated a few more paces and opened his eyes, glaring at the silent brickwork. What was important about the kitchen?\n\nThe first witness, Trooper Chastain, had confessed to sneaking into the mess facilities to procure an illicit off-shift meal. Cross-interrogation had revealed nothing amiss in his character or record. An opportunistic pilferer, but not an enemy of the Emperor.\n\nSo why had the apparition appeared in the kitchen? Had Chastain's guilty presence triggered something? Would any of them have been the wiser had not the hungry trooper entered at that time to encounter the manifestation?\n\nHe let his mental gaze widen again, encompassing the whole garrison block and the kitchen's place within it. It was a squat, unappealing building butting against the low quarantine wall around the Palatine Arc, now the plague slum nicknamed Poxville. The kitchen, one of three, was located in the south-west corner, closer to the outer wall than the others. Was that significant?\n\nAs though controlling a pict-drone he cast his mind back to the corridors, retracing the steps of the troopers as they had come to the kitchen. A short journey, nothing of importance there.\n\nThat was the moment Amon realised there was a blind spot. He'd paced out every passageway and room. There was a void of about four metres square next to the kitchens, right behind the wall.\n\nWith quick strides he circumnavigated the mess area and came upon the officers' quarters that were set behind it. A large, tattered banner hung on the far wall of the main hallway, which led to four individual officer dorms. The hallway was about four metres short.\n\nAmon carefully lifted the banner from its hook and set it aside. The wall was plasterboard, painted light grey like the rest of the barracks.\n\nHe set his hand to the right side of the centreline and pushed. There was a tiny amount of give but nothing else happened. Moving to the left-hand side he did the same. This time there was a faint click and the wall section spun about on a central spindle, revealing a chamber beyond.\n\nHis eyes pierced the darkness and took in the surrounds immediately. As soon as he saw what lay beyond the wall Amon activated his vox.\n\n'Signal Regent Malcador. Tell him that I need him to come to the quarantine barracks immediately.'\n\nIt was an exceptionally humble shrine.\n\nTwo crates had been covered with a rough canvas for an altar cloth. Upon this had been set two metal cups, battered from much use, the regimental inscriptions still clear on the sides - Mercio XXIV and Gallilus XXXI. A ewer of red liquid - cheap wine, Amon's nose told him - sat between them. In front was neatly set a small cushion upon which had been placed a book.\n\nThe book was little more than a sheaf of mismatched paper held together with thin wire. Two words were written on the front, in plain handwriting.\n\n'Lectitio Divinitatus,' said Amon.\n\n'A fane of the Emperor,' said Malcador, eyes passing over the rest of the room's contents. Amon's gaze followed his, taking in a few chairs in a circle, and some tall candlesticks likely looted from a senior officer's belongings.\n\n'And this?' Amon pointed to a stain upon the bare wall, directly behind where the apparition had been witnessed in the kitchen beyond. The rime had almost fully melted, leaving streaks down the brickwork. The floor beneath was also damp, bare ferrocrete darkened by the liquid.\n\n'That...' Malcador cleared his throat and peered at the phenomenon more closely. 'That is not good news.'\n\nAmon sniffed the air, detecting old sweat, gun oil and boot polish, as well as the musky scent of the unlit candles and the sharp, ozone-like tang he always associated with the Emperor's Regent.\n\n'It's just water ice, nothing else.'\n\n'Yes, just ice,' said Malcador, scratching his chin. 'Created by a massive localised drop in temperature.'\n\n'But it's between two large ovens on the other side,' said Amon. He could picture them precisely, without even recourse to his helm's special suite of visual systems.\n\n'Very localised.' Malcador flipped open the small book, eyes scanning the pages.\n\n'We have known the cult of the Emperor has been active in the Imperial Army for some time - this is not a revelation,' said Amon. 'The Lectitio Divinitatus is even more widespread in the civilian population. Efforts to curb its influence were suspended when the siege began.'\n\n'Yes, resources better spent elsewhere. I recall being at the senate when such decisions were made.'\n\n'You disagree?'\n\n'I am unsure. The Lectitio Divinitatus could end up being an enormous distraction from the real problem.'\n\n'But...?'\n\nMalcador gestured towards the ice-soiled wall.\n\n'This is residue of psychic activity.'\n\n'Does not the Emperor's shield suppress such energies?'\n\n'Hence my concern,' said Malcador as he met the Custodian's gaze. 'The fane and this are connected, but it is not clear how.'\n\n'What does it mean?'\n\n'That's a rather complicated question, isn't it, Amon?' Malcador chuckled for a moment and then grew serious again. 'It means a crack, a tiny crack in the telaethesic ward. Forced from the inside.'\n\n'There may be other instances that have gone undocumented. Perhaps even taken as signs of the Emperor's divinity.' Amon stepped outside the shrine room, his memories of the webway battles trying to surface at the thought of daemonic activity. 'The captain-general must be informed.'\n\n'Valdor has many concerns, as does Lord Dorn. This will be brought to his attention during the hourly briefing as usual. And he will say that you must continue to investigate, because you only have evidence of one minor incident so far. Is this an isolated phenomenon or cause for wider concern?'\n\n'This worship of the Emperor is forbidden. Monarchia was destroyed and a whole Legion of Space Marines chastised for misplaced piety. The Emperor has made His thoughts on the matter very clear.'\n\n'I was at Monarchia too, I need no reminder of what the Emperor thinks about divinity,' snapped Malcador. 'And yet we cannot fight our own people at the same time as we combat Horus. Practicality necessitates some leeway.'\n\n'Leeway is just a euphemism for a weakness that can be exploited,' said Amon.\n\n'Our war cares little for absolutes. The matter at hand requires careful examination. You cannot hope to find and prosecute every gathering of the Lectitio Divinitatus. Find out what is particular about this group. Why did the manifestation occur here?'\n\n'I think it obvious that the proximity to the assault of the Death Guard gives us some answer.'\n\n'But how widespread is the effect? Not every plague victim is found. Is there some other connection we can chase down?'\n\n'The cult is secretive. It will take a long time to make progress into its workings.'\n\nThe Regent joined him in the hallway, staff tapping on the hard floor as he stepped past. The Lord of Terra stopped a few paces ahead of Amon and turned back to him.\n\n'There I may be of further assistance to you, Amon,' said Malcador. 'Someone with an... inside knowledge of such things.'\n\nNagapor Territories, sixty days before assault\n\nA series of staccato machine bleeps over the voxmitters roused Zenobi from a half-slumber. She opened her eyes, still slumped against the back of the bench, and looked first towards the windows - still daytime, moving to evening. She sat up as her gaze passed over the others around her. All were looking at the speakers with some confusion, a loud hiss emanating from them.\n\nBrakes squealed into life, suddenly slowing the train. As a human wave, those standing tottered and swayed from the sudden loss of momentum, several troopers tripping over each other or benches, their swearing lost amid the laughter of their companions.\n\nThe lights flickered and went out as the train came to a stop. The yellow light of late afternoon did little to illuminate the interior through the grimy windows.\n\nThe voxmitters crackled again, and then came the voice of General-Captain Egwu.\n\n'There is a high risk of detection by orbital scan. All systems are being reduced to standby to dull our energy signature. Remain inside the carriages until further instruction.'\n\nA worried silence followed this pronouncement until Lieutenant Folami broke the stillness.\n\n'You can talk,' she said with a shake of her head. 'They won't be able to hear us in space...'\n\n'This is all just a precaution,' added Okoye, making his way between the benches. 'Command have received word that a starship is passing over this sector. It is unlikely we wil"}
{"text":"l scan. All systems are being reduced to standby to dull our energy signature. Remain inside the carriages until further instruction.'\n\nA worried silence followed this pronouncement until Lieutenant Folami broke the stillness.\n\n'You can talk,' she said with a shake of her head. 'They won't be able to hear us in space...'\n\n'This is all just a precaution,' added Okoye, making his way between the benches. 'Command have received word that a starship is passing over this sector. It is unlikely we will attract any attention, not when there are far more important targets to attack.'\n\nThe mention of targets and attack did nothing to ease Zenobi's concerns. She stood on the bench to look out the window, hoping to see something that might take her mind off the sudden stillness. The ancient dry seabed stretched for kilometres around them, nothing else in sight. It felt a blessing and a curse to be so isolated. It seemed unlikely that they would be discovered amongst the expanse of wilderness, but on the other hand any energy signature or vox signal detected would stand out like a guide flare at night.\n\nA flurry of movement drew her eye to the door at the far end of the cabin. The slash of scarlet announced the presence of an integrity officer. Another was prowling between the benches on the far side of the lattice that divided the length of the cabin.\n\n'Remember, be vigilant at all times,' he told them as he started a slow patrol of the compartment, his hands clasped behind his back. 'Be aware of your companions, watch for any oddity in their mood. It takes only a moment for security to lapse and betrayal would see us destroyed.\n\n'As you are watchful, know also that you are being watched. Not by your brothers and sisters in arms, but by enemies masquerading as troopers loyal to Addaba. They will see your laxity and exploit it. They will appeal to your compassion and empathy and turn those virtues into weaknesses to be exploited.\n\n'It is not just our guns that will carry us to victory over those that would make slaves of our future generations - it is our resolve that will prove the greatest of weapons. If one of us flinches now, before we have even been tested, what will be their actions under fire?'\n\nThe integrity officer stopped about two-thirds of the way along the carriage, almost level with Zenobi. His eyes were a startling blue, unusual amongst the folk of Addaba, and they were like daggers of ice as they passed momentarily over her. She held her nerve, reminding herself that she had no shame to bear, that she feared nothing from the scrutiny of that piercing gaze. The officer moved on.\n\n'Just sitting here, waiting for it to happen.'\n\nZenobi turned her head to find Babak climbing up next to her. He was almost as short, his delicate, callus-free fingers fidgeting with the belt of his coveralls. She knew him as a spindle-wright, one of those who maintained the machines that made the parts for the production line.\n\n'I know what you mean,' she said. 'I think I'm ready for battle, but this isn't that. No chance to fight back. Just waiting for a beam of light to come down and obliterate us.'\n\n'Don't be silly,' said Kettai from across the gap between benches. He looked relaxed, hands behind his head. 'A ship's not going to waste a lance strike on a train. Even if they spot us, it'll just be catalogued among all the other data.'\n\n'Starship surveyor expert, are you?' said Babak.\n\n'It's just sense, isn't it?' Kettai sat forward, hands moving to a pocket from which he produced a slender plastek flask. He pulled the stopper and offered the drink to them.\n\nZenobi caught the smell of spirits. She had never drunk before and was curious, but now was not the time to give in to that temptation. She shook her head.\n\n'Isn't that contraband?' said Babak, his gaze flicking nervously around the carriage. 'What if the integrity officers find out?'\n\n'It's like the train and the starship,' said Kettai with a shrug. 'This isn't important enough to bother them. Maybe Lieutenant Okoye will put me on latrine duties, but nobody is taking me out and putting a las-bolt in my head over some tei.'\n\n'Throat cut,' said Babak. 'Like those others. You're not worth the las-bolt.'\n\nKettai laughed and stoppered the flask before slipping it away. Zenobi noticed that he hadn't actually taken a drink himself but said nothing.\n\nA sudden blast from the voxmitters made Zenobi jump, almost sending her sprawling from the bench. The engines grumbled into life and motors whined through the floor as the train started to get underway.\n\n'See, nothing to-' started Kettai, but he was cut off by an announcement over the speakers.\n\n'Defence quarters! All active squads to their guns. All inactive squads assume protective positions.'\n\nA siren wail replaced the voice, its urgency setting Zenobi's heart hammering against her ribs.\n\n'So much for not being spotted,' said Kettai, heaving himself up from the floor.\n\nZenobi's diminutive stature made her an ideal gunner and she crawled up into the cupola while the others got ready behind her. Squads from the carriage on the opposite end of the gunnery car were coming in and moving to their positions too.\n\nShe strapped herself into the gunnery chair, a single loop over her waist, and then pulled the lever that elevated her into the armourglass dome at the top of the car.\n\nIn front of her on a pintle was a quad-barrelled autocannon. It was far too heavy to aim manually; instead her hand came to a control stick between her legs, a firing pin projecting from the top.\n\n'Engage traverse motors,' she called back. She was answered by a whine of power and the stick juddered in her grip. A few test movements set the autocannons rising and falling and adjusting slightly to the left and right. Her feet found the pedals that rotated the entire gun assembly. 'Engage rotary motors.'\n\nA test of the pedals sent her in a circle first to the left and then the right. She reached forward and flicked a switch, activating a grainy greenscreen display just in front of her - the gun imager. There was nothing to see except clouds, almost indiscernible among the flashes of static and the darkening sky.\n\n'Check ammo feeds disengaged.'\n\n'Ammo disengaged,' came the reply from below, sounding oddly distant within the confines of the cupola. Zenobi depressed the firing stud. The autocannons clicked and clacked against their empty breeches.\n\n'Firing test complete. Engage ammo feeds.'\n\nThere was a heavy crunch and scrape of metal as the four belt feeds were levered back into place within the turret mechanism. Zenobi's thumb hovered over the firing pin. If she pushed it down, a stream of high explosive shells would be sent searing into the sky.\n\nShe had live-fired her lasgun during their scarce training drills, but this was of a totally different magnitude of destruction. Added to that was the knowledge that she would likely be firing in genuine combat. The thought made her legs tremble and her head spin. It was not the idea of her death that set her nerves quivering but the knowledge that others were relying on her to protect them. If she failed, if she messed up in some way, it wouldn't just be her that died but Menber, Seleen.\n\nEven Kettai...\n\nLike a battle tank emerging pristine from the end of the line, Zenobi's experiences all came together in that heartbeat to bring another realisation. Everything the integrity officers said about vigilance was just as true and important as her stint as gunner. A single slip could bring calamity. If one enemy spy or sympathiser was allowed to infiltrate the Addaba Free Corps they could ruin the entire cause.\n\nHer legs had stopped shaking. The speaker set into the bulkhead just above her head had quietly hissed into life. She could hear someone moving about in the command chamber set into the heart of the gunnery car; the squeak of a chair, the thud of something being dropped on the floor. A few breaths wheezed mechanically across the internal vox-link.\n\n'This is Lieutenant Okoye, fourth gunnery car command officer.' Feedback whined. There was a pause punctuated by a few beeps and a hiss of static, which then faded, leaving the connection clear but for an occasional crackle. 'There are aircraft inbound to our position from orbit. It could be an overflight, they could be heading somewhere else, but we have to assume the worst. All weapons are now live. Anti-aircraft explosive rounds have been loaded.'\n\nThere was another pause and a sound that Zenobi didn't identify immediately but realised after a few seconds was the crinkling of plas-transparencies.\n\n'The crew gunners have been spread across the train to provide experienced, accurate fire. Remember what they taught you earlier. Follow the line of your tracer rounds and lead your targets. Between the time something appears on your targeting imager and the time you open fire, a fast-moving craft will have covered a hundred metres and more. Weight of fire will keep them off us, do not conserve ammunition unnecessarily.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex exterior, one day since assault\n\nSeventy kilometres above the ground assault, where the atmosphere became space, scores of drop-ship and attack craft squadrons descended towards the Starspear. They had been travelling for the better part of twenty hours, drifting tens of thousands of kilometres from ships beyond the range of the greatest defence lasers.\n\nAs they closed to near orbit, one by one their engines lit, a firmament of plasma jets springing into life against the blackness. Like shooting stars they fell, hundreds of craft each intent upon a different target, angling towards one of the Starspear's more than three hundred docking spars, platforms and quays.\n\nSix strike cruisers powered through the void, dashing into the surveyor-wake created by the massed gunship assault. Drop cascades opened, disgorging payloads of assault pods, ejected from their bays by rocket boosters in the absence of sufficient gravity. As the laser be"}
{"text":"springing into life against the blackness. Like shooting stars they fell, hundreds of craft each intent upon a different target, angling towards one of the Starspear's more than three hundred docking spars, platforms and quays.\n\nSix strike cruisers powered through the void, dashing into the surveyor-wake created by the massed gunship assault. Drop cascades opened, disgorging payloads of assault pods, ejected from their bays by rocket boosters in the absence of sufficient gravity. As the laser beams of defence cannons speared out, the emptied starships broke away. The last was not quick enough, its void shields lit by the impact of a volatile blast. Like a pack of hounds the other defence positions converged their fire on the struggling vessel, swiftly overloading its remaining shields. One final slash of red energy tore through its engines, plasma detonations spilling like blue fire along its length.\n\nAboard one of the larger pods lit by the brief flash of azure was Berossus, once favoured of the Trident, fallen into disrepute after near-death at the hand of his primarch. The systems of his artificial body flashed with sensor data, highlighting the outcrop of ferrocrete to which he fell, as well as a spike of radiation from the detonating vessel above - the ship he had been aboard only minutes earlier. He cared nothing for the loss of the ship, and was long past any fleeting thoughts of mortality its destruction might have engendered, his thoughts wholly concerned with his immediate future.\n\nIt was quite rare for an objective to conveniently have three hundred square kilometres of dockspace for gunships and drop pods to land on. It was not a fact that amused Berossus as the metal capsule depositing him towards the Fourth Eastward quay-spur slammed through the thin atmosphere above the space port. It should have been his assault to lead, a glorious campaign for one of the IV Legion's most lauded warsmiths.\n\nInstead he was encased in an artificial frame, scorned by the primarch and almost forgotten by his battle-brothers. The body of a demigod with the authority of an infant.\n\nRetro-jets fired, slowing the pod's descent almost as harshly as an impact, but cocooned in the sarcophagus of his Dreadnought armour Berossus felt nothing. He was only dimly aware of pneumatically powered legs, his arms replaced with heavy weapons. Not for him the familiar pre-battle rush of hormones, a stacked atomic fuel cell for a heart. Crude kinaesthetic feedback gave him a rudimentary awareness of self, but to all purposes he was a mind trapped in a prison of ceramite, titanium and plasteel.\n\nIt was easy to regard his salvation as a punishment instead. Those that had kept him alive, had wired the broken remnants of his body into this machine, had thought they were preserving his legacy. All they had done was extend the life he would live knowing the shame of Perturabo's censure. More than the physical agony, the imagined pain of ghost limbs, the mental torment of that failure vexed Berossus. He had been ascending towards his prime as commander, a long service in the Trident assured.\n\nAnd all because he had the misfortune to bear bad news.\n\nThe drop pod slammed into the ferrocrete apron amid a blast of jets and the scattered shrapnel of frag launchers - not that there was a living soul on the platform to oppose the landing. The access ramp whined down and explosive bolts detonated to release the crash-clamps that held his armoured form in place. Taking a heavy step, the thud of his footfall lost in the thin air, Berossus advanced onto the metaphorical ground of Terra.\n\nWith ocular contacts and inhuman sensors he observed his surroundings. Seven hundred Iron Warriors formed the landing force tasked with securing the uppermost ten kilometres of the space port. There was barely anything alive, the airless upper levels now a haunt only of those with power armour or vac suits. Pieces of debris from the destroyed starship fell around the Starspear. This far up they had little momentum, thousand-tonne chunks of metal and plascrete that drifted through the midnight blue as serene as snowflakes.\n\nBerossus barely spared the descending meteors a thought. Even this mission was punishment, assigned a guard dog's role rather than spearheading the assault.\n\nNot this time. He was a warsmith in his soul even if he was stripped of the prestige.\n\n'My warriors, hearken to me!' His bellow leapt across the vox-links to his battle-brothers. 'Are we to stand upon this barren apron while lesser warriors steal our glory? Those with souls forged in battle do not stand sentry, they seek out the enemy and destroy them!'\n\nNot caring whether any followed him or not, Berossus turned his massive frame towards the closest rampway leading into the body of the space port. He would reclaim his status as warsmith or be destroyed in the attempt.\n\nAerial attack\n\nKharn's gambit\n\nOn the trail of the faithful\n\nNagapor Territories, fifty-nine days before assault\n\nZenobi felt the vibration of the turret behind her moving. Looking up through the armourglass dome she saw the tips of twin lascannon barrels swing overhead towards the front of the train.\n\nShe depressed the left-hand pedal and swung in the same direction, attuning herself to the speed of the rotation. It seemed painfully slow and there was a second's delay between her foot pushing at the metal and the motors activating. The stick controller was more responsive, angling the guns towards the sky, but their range was limited to about ten degrees to either side of the centreline of the turret.\n\nThe voxmitter crackled into life.\n\n'We have a confirmed contact. Aircraft descending from orbit to the north-east.'\n\n'Which way is that?' Zenobi then remembered she needed to push the transmit stud in the control panel in front of her. Her left hand found the switch. 'Which way is north-east?'\n\n'Check your bearing sphere,' came an unfamiliar voice. The accent was from a more southern Afrik hive, perhaps the Cape City. After a moment she remembered it was DeVault, the gunner that had run them through the brief training earlier that day. 'It's up and to the right of the transmit switch, like a floating ball behind a plex-glass disc.'\n\nZenobi scanned the cluster of controls, trying to recall the hasty tutorial from DeVault. She found the bearing dial, a grubby white sphere marked with compass points and an elevation level, which showed where the turret was pointing and at what angle to the train. She saw that she was aiming almost due north and used the right pedal to swing back east a few degrees.\n\n'Thank you,' she said, remembering to activate the transmit.\n\nShe peered through the scratched dome, trying to find something against the blue of the sky. There were occasional flashes that might have been the sun reflected off incoming aircraft, or equally might have been the flashes of the last orbital defence stations being destroyed, or perhaps anti-surface fire from one of the ships in the void.\n\n'Aircraft heading our way, confirmed three larger bomber-class signals. No escort detected.'\n\n'You okay up there?' Menber's voice was distorted by the metal tube that linked the main gangway with the turret.\n\n'Don't distract me,' Zenobi snapped back. 'Just make sure you're ready to change feed lines when the ammo runs out.'\n\n'Don't worry, cousin. We're all here on the line with you.'\n\nShe flexed her fingers on the control stick, her knuckles pale from the intensity of her grip. Her other hand fidgeted with the seam that ran down the left thigh of her coveralls, picking at a loose grey thread.\n\nThere was no chronometer within the turret. It might have been two minutes or ten since she had first climbed in, she wasn't sure. Panning the gun down, she used the imager to look back along the long line of carriages. Fumes from the engines obscured the already murky view, but she could see there was a slight curve to the train, the track bending them left, towards the north. Circling around, she looked ahead again. The mountains were larger than when she had seen them from the roof, the skies above them a constant strobe of emerald light and darkness on the crude screen.\n\nThe siren blare from the main compartment caused her to jerk against the belt over her lap. Her head banged against the plain metal seat back, bringing her focus sharply back inside the turret.\n\n'Targets detected at thirty kilometres.' Lieutenant Okoye spoke quickly, the first time she had heard him sound anything but controlled and calm.\n\nIt was easy to forget that despite being officers, those that commanded the platoon and company were as inexperienced with actual war as the troopers they led. Authority on the line was very different to the prospect of combat. They had been assigned their roles underneath the general staff of the 64th Defence Corps, but that entire officer cadre had been left behind or wiped out.\n\nIt was inevitable really, she decided. At some point the appointed hierarchy was going to have given way to the reality of war. In some ways it was better that it had already happened, rather than later when they were embroiled in battle.\n\n'Still on an intercept approach. Targets will be in range in four minutes.'\n\nZenobi started to hum one of the work songs to keep her mind settled. She trained the gun imager back towards the north-east, panning left and right a few degrees in the hope that she would see something against the artificial storm that boiled above the distant mountains. Clouds scudded across the view, further obscuring the sky.\n\nShe thought she saw a brighter flash but it might have been from the ongoing bombardment of the Imperial Palace beyond the horizon. A second later warning horns blared again, ringing through the metal bulkhead and up through the accessway.\n\nThe spark became a distinct flare, racing towards the train from beyond the clouds.\n\n'Brace for-'\n\nOkoye's warning was cut off as a thunderous detonation rocked the train. The scream of tortur"}
{"text":"tains. Clouds scudded across the view, further obscuring the sky.\n\nShe thought she saw a brighter flash but it might have been from the ongoing bombardment of the Imperial Palace beyond the horizon. A second later warning horns blared again, ringing through the metal bulkhead and up through the accessway.\n\nThe spark became a distinct flare, racing towards the train from beyond the clouds.\n\n'Brace for-'\n\nOkoye's warning was cut off as a thunderous detonation rocked the train. The scream of tortured metal and ripple of noise from carriage to carriage swept around Zenobi. Engine protests snarled below, wheels screeching along the rails.\n\n'Missile hit, missile hit!' Okoye was breathless on the vox, voice loud in her ear, cutting through the after-noise of the explosion. 'More incoming!'\n\nA faster, higher-pitched rattle replaced the noise of struggling motors. Two pounding heartbeats passed before Zenobi recognised it as the gatling turrets firing at the incoming missiles. Small streaks blurred across the gun imager view, lit by the brighter spark of tracer rounds every few seconds.\n\nSomething larger sped past the jade circle of her world, a split second before another blast rocked the train. Perhaps it was only a glancing hit, or perhaps she had become accustomed to the violence of the first detonation. Whichever it was, the second impact seemed less traumatic.\n\n'Zenobi! Open fire!'\n\nOkoye's yell across the voxmitter dragged her back to the view on the gun imager. To the top right of the screen three birdlike shapes blurred against the clouds. She nudged the control stick towards them, pressing the firing stud as she did so.\n\nThe thunder of the quad cannons smashed into her like physical blows, her head crashing against the chair back again as she flinched from their fury. On the imager screen streaks of darkness whirred uselessly into the sky below the murky dots of her targets.\n\nTwo flashes, almost simultaneous, announced the firing of more missiles. It took barely three heart-wrenching seconds before they hit. As before, they struck somewhere towards the rear of the train, the dual detonations briefly eclipsing the cacophony of guns that raged around Zenobi.\n\nShe felt the entire train lurching, the drawn-out shriek of wheels far longer than before, accompanied by a hideous metallic scraping.\n\nZenobi gritted her teeth, ears ringing, and fired again, using a combination of control column and pedal to guide her long fusillade towards the larger blots on the viewing scope. Other streaks of shells converged from further down the train, along with airburst blossoms from the dedicated flak guns mounted on the locomotive cars.\n\nThe enemy craft parted, becoming three distinct shapes now. One seemed to come right towards Zenobi. Two others headed away to her right. She tried her best to track the strike craft coming in her direction, aiming low in the hope that the diving craft would descend into her line of fire.\n\nShe could see the distinct silhouette as it dropped below the cloud line, stark against the mountain peaks. Broad, flat-tipped wings carried a fuselage that bulged with gun positions. Bright red bursts stabbed from the battery, scoring hits somewhere just behind Zenobi's position.\n\nPerhaps they hit the carriage of Epsilon Company.\n\nHer mouth went dry and her gut curdled at the thought. She slammed her foot onto the right-hand pedal, turning the turret hard as the attack craft banked away, coming alongside with its flank guns roaring shells back at the transport train.\n\nShe thought her next burst hit but couldn't be sure. Glitters of shrapnel and torn metal fluttered away from the vortices cut by its wings and she heard a defiant shout from one of the other gun positions.\n\n'Reloading!' came the cry from below. She realised she had been holding down the trigger stud for several seconds, ripping through the last of the ammunition feed.\n\nShe took her thumb away so that she wouldn't jam the mechanism the moment the new belts were fed into the loader. Her ears were accustomed to the din of the guns and through their roar she heard the howl of plasma engines. The attacking aeroplane banked away, twin plumes of blue pushing it upwards again as it sought altitude, the ire of the train's guns following it back into the cloud.\n\n'Reloaded!' Menber's shout came a heartbeat after the loud crunch of the loader being rammed back into position.\n\nHer target was gone, either circling for another attack run or heading back to orbit. Zenobi breathed a sigh and lifted a shaking hand from the control stick.\n\nHer relief lasted a few seconds, only until the growl and thunder of the other guns reminded her that there were two other aircraft in the attack. At the same moment she came to this recollection, the gunnery car bucked like a snapping cable. Flame washed over the top of the armourglass dome, carrying with it spinning pieces of jagged metal.\n\nThe boom of the impact consumed her as the car tipped, hurling her against the strap of the chair. She threw up her hands, but not quickly enough to stop her face smashing into the control console.\n\nThe world listed crazily and she tasted blood. The screech of twisting metal, screams of her companions and flicker of flames faded, replaced with the blackness and silence of unconsciousness.\n\nUpper mesosphere, one day since assault\n\nBoarding torpedoes had never been used outside of a void assault and Kharn was starting to understand why. Even in the thin air of the upper atmosphere, friction was starting to overheat the nose cone. His vision was filled with amber displays from the network-linked system of the torpedo. A slight warping caused the whole forty-metre-long missile to shudder erratically, while heat crept deeper and deeper into the circuitry within the nose.\n\nIt could set off the impact detonators, tearing away the nose cone and ejecting an intense melta-blast designed to cut through the metres-thick hulls of starships, thirty kilometres above sea level.\n\nThe alternative was perhaps even less enticing - the circuits would overload, turning off all the impact systems so the torpedo would hit the side of the Lion's Gate space port at four hundred kilometres an hour with no retro-thrust or breaching detonation...\n\n'I am Khorne's blade,' he muttered to himself. 'There is no life without death. Hnnh. Kill or be killed, such is the law of battle.'\n\nThe readout flashed as they passed the five-kilometre mark. Less than a minute until impact.\n\nAs with the rest of the strike on the Starspear, vox-silence was absolute, to give the defenders no warning of what was about to hit them. Other World Eaters were following in gunships, three thousand of Khorne's chosen, but the point of the spear was Kharn and five hundred of his deadliest fighters.\n\n'How thick are the walls?' The question came from Balcoth, who was strapped into his harness four seats down from Kharn, one of thirty in the boarding torpedo. 'Will the melta-blast cut through?'\n\n'Hnnh. Too late to ask now,' the captain grunted back. 'Should have thought of that earlier.'\n\nLaughter greeted the reply.\n\n'My knife will feast on the entrails of Sigismund,' growled Khordal Arukka.\n\n'If the Blade of Dorn is there, he is mine,' snarled Kharn. His fingers flexed around the haft of Gorechild. 'I'll kill any that challenge my claim.'\n\nCowed by his assertion, the rest of the warriors lapsed into silence.\n\n'Ten seconds,' Kharn told them.\n\nThe restraints pressed tighter, hydraulic rams sliding into position along the sides of the torpedo to absorb some of the impact.\n\nLights blinked amber and then red. Kharn felt sudden deceleration with a surge of relief. Twenty metres from impact the meltas fired, turning the nose of the torpedo into a white-hot lance.\n\nArmour squealed protests and the rams split, showering hydraulic fluid as the prow met ferrocrete. Kharn's neck twisted hard and he heard a curse from Galdira, who lost his grip on his chainsword, the weapon clattering past them along the deck. Kharn looked at the chains he had used to bind his axe to his vambrace. Yes, he had unfinished business with Sigismund, a lesson to complete.\n\nThe booming detonation throbbed along the length of the torpedo even as the remnants of the nose cone petalled outwards into an assault ramp. The restraint exploded upwards and Kharn was out of his seat, plasma pistol in one hand, Gorechild in the other.\n\nThe torpedo had struck a gunnery position, punching through the outer revetment of an anti-orbital laser. The remains of the crew were smeared amongst the debris, their environment suits turned to black tatters, their gun little more than twists of molten metal splashed against the walls.\n\nPlunging through the vapour, sirens wailing around him, Kharn headed straight on, hearing the pounding of his hearts and the thuds of his companion's boots on broken ferrocrete.\n\nShapes loomed ahead, helmed and semi-armoured. Gorechild roared, taking the head of the first, sweeping the guts from the second. Kharn let his Nails take him to the bliss of destruction, knowing there was nothing but enemies in front.\n\nSanctum Imperialis, three days since assault\n\nThe sky over the Sanctum Imperialis was a sheet of flickering purple and black, and had been for months now. The unnatural twilight had cast its shadow over the Emperor's capital for so long that Amon barely paid it any heed. Now he looked at it with new insight, wondering if the storm above was more than just a physical symptom of the long bombardment. Was it indicative of that other, invisible war?\n\nHe enjoyed a good vantage point on a walkway that ran alongside an abandoned terrace overlooking the Via Principa - the main arterial route from the plaza of the Lion's Gate to the immensity of the Sanctum Imperialis itself. A city within a city that housed millions, large enough that in past times it would have been considered greater than most nation states. Its populace had been purged initially but as more and more of the outsk"}
{"text":"ng bombardment. Was it indicative of that other, invisible war?\n\nHe enjoyed a good vantage point on a walkway that ran alongside an abandoned terrace overlooking the Via Principa - the main arterial route from the plaza of the Lion's Gate to the immensity of the Sanctum Imperialis itself. A city within a city that housed millions, large enough that in past times it would have been considered greater than most nation states. Its populace had been purged initially but as more and more of the outskirts by the Ultimate Wall were demolished in expectation of a traitor breakthrough, increasing numbers of their displaced inhabitants sought shelter in the sprawling shanties that had grown up among the colonnades and fora of the great and powerful.\n\nIt was to one of the tent slums that Amon travelled, eyes fixed upon a lone figure in the masses half a kilometre below.\n\nColonel Nhek Veasna. A decorated officer of the Angkorian Dragoons, itself one of the lauded Old Hundred regiments that had taken part in the Unification of Terra. It was her name that the lieutenant in charge of the quarantine garrison had finally confessed as his introduction to the Lectitio Divinitatus. Finding her had been easy enough; she was attached to the Dragoons' Third Brigade as a command liaison. A position, Amon had noted, that allowed her to move freely between many different elements of the defence force without hindrance. In all likelihood she had a more senior patron in the general staff of one of the defence regiments, but for the time being Amon had focused on her as the most promising lead to follow.\n\nHe'd spent two days trailing her from one Imperial Army garrison to the next, and she had interspersed these duties with visits to several refugee encampments. Amon had decided not to attempt to infiltrate such gatherings, content to know that the only reason for her presence was the proselytising of her faith to the homeless and desperate. A Custodian was not such a rare sight that he drew unwelcome attention, but to get closer to such gatherings he would have to divest himself of his armour, which seemed unwise given that the Palace was under direct attack.\n\nEarlier that day, Colonel Nhek had been summoned to a council of senior officers - arranged at the instigation of Valdor on request from Amon. He had left the request and then initiated blood games protocols on the assumption that the Lectitio Divinitatus could extend as high as the Imperial Senate members. He could not afford for anyone to influence his mission, nor risk any report of it passing beyond the Legio Custodes. Vox-silent, he had single-mindedly tracked Nhek without any further communication with his order, and would make no contact until he was ready to make his report.\n\nBrought to the Sanctum Imperialis, Nhek Veasna had used the opportunity to make contact with several other heralds of the Lectitio Divinitatus. She had barely attempted secrecy, such was the growing confidence of the cult that they would not be prosecuted. It was not Amon's decision to make, but he was of a mind to argue for a very visible and memorable chastisement.\n\nAmon could understand their weakness of spirit, but he could not forgive it.\n\nNhek had also been granted a leave of twelve hours before being posted back to her commander. The first six she had used for rest and sampling some black-market luxuries - nothing specifically contraband, just consumables that were becoming very rare like fresh water, menthol lho-sticks and some mild alcoholic beverages.\n\nAmon had been on the verge of following up some of her contacts he had discovered when he realised that he had been party to a well-organised deception. It was not aimed at him specifically, but the more obvious meetings and exchanges had been intended as lures for anyone following the colonel. Six hours of low-grade indulgence provided the perfect opportunity for any move to arrest Colonel Nhek, and at the same time offered cover for a far more subtle communication. After all, what did a colonel have to exchange for rare goods? Currency had rapidly fallen out of favour except among the most optimistic dealers who thought it would have value after the siege was lifted. For most it was information or barter, but Nhek Veasna had not been misappropriating supplies. The same applied to sensitive data that her position afforded her. There was no evidence she was betraying the trust of her military rank.\n\nThat left only spiritual exchange.\n\nIf his suspicions were confirmed, he was following Nhek to a secret gathering of faithful inside the Sanctum Imperialis, consisting perhaps of a few high-ranking officials with dealings in the black market themselves. The illicit trade was a convenient mask for those wishing to communicate about an even more sensitive issue, and those that acted as vendors would be as likely to trade information about faith and the Emperor's divinity as they were powercells and rations packs purloined from front-line consignments.\n\nShe faded into the thousands-strong sprawl of humanity that swelled around the Processional 16 gate, where almoners from the Palace distributed medical and nutritional packages to the needy. Amon's research had shown that burgeoning religions frequently preyed upon the least fortunate for support, and he expected the Lectitio Divinitatus was no different.\n\nReaching the conveyor at the far side of the terrace, he lost sight of Nhek, but he was not concerned. Her particular scent - enhanced by illegal beer and pungent lho-sticks only an hour earlier - would make her easy to track even through the interior of the Palace.\n\nDescending to almost ground level, Amon crossed to the outer districts of the Senatorum building about three hundred metres from where the Via Principa ended at the huge Bastion Argentus. Once inside he picked up Colonel Nhek's trail near the Concordia Central, and from there followed it until he had her within sight in the concourse leading to the Hall of Widows. He saw her enter by a side door, and ascended several floors to come upon a sentry balcony overlooking the main hall. As he approached, he found the sentry post unguarded, the guards doubtless relieved from duty while the conspiratorial gathering took place.\n\nSlipping inside he picked up the babble of voices from below - far louder than he was expecting. Moving up to the curtained edge, he peered down into the amphitheatre and saw that there was at least a hundred people gathered. Others were still entering.\n\nAt the same time he observed this Amon's senses prickled, drawing his eye to one of the other sentry balconies on the opposite side of the hall, about three storeys lower down. A woman of middle years was standing there looking directly at him. She was blonde, pale-skinned, dressed in a long skirt of light blue and darker blue blouse. She picked up the closed-vox dialler on the wall and an instant later the device installed on his balcony purred into life.\n\nHe answered it.\n\n'How are you here?' he asked.\n\nHe had recognised the woman the moment he had laid eyes on her. Like many of those detained by Dorn or Malcador, her image had been circulated amongst the Custodians in case she somehow escaped her confinement. Now she was looking at Amon with a wry smile, obviously expecting him.\n\nEuphrati Keeler.\n\nTechnophage\n\nUnexpected assistance\n\nSmoke and fire\n\nLion Primus Strategium, four days since assault\n\nRann disliked red lights and sirens. The Lion Primus Strategium was alive with both in strobing, screaming harmony. Though he was immune to panic, lesser soldiers were not and he felt that sudden clamour was a poor way to bring about quick, clear thinking. Despite his misgivings, the adjutants, logistaria and legionaries moved with brisk purpose from console to console, updating the primary and secondary displays in wake of the latest alert. Schematics of the Lion's Gate space port flashed up on every screen, covered with warning symbols and scrolling runes.\n\nIt was almost an hourly occurrence as fresh enemy attacks from above and below assailed the defenders. Surveyor malfunctions and system errors had made a mockery of trying to predict their landings and movements, and this time it appeared as though the entire port was on the verge of being overrun. It was impossible, the enemy were far from such a victory, but the sight of hostile signal returns throughout his command zone was a shocking reminder of what Rann was trying to prevent.\n\n'Shut off that noise, and those lights too,' he snapped. Rann leaned over the main display table, trying to take in the sudden wealth of information. He rounded on the logistaria at the control panel. 'How is this happening?'\n\nThe tech-priest clicked and warbled for a few moments, brass eye-lenses dilating and narrowing several times within the folds of her red hood.\n\n'There has been another noospheric intrusion, Commander Rann.'\n\n'That's not an answer.' Rann waved a hand at the data still accumulating on the display. 'Is this real, or not?'\n\n'There have been confirmed enemy landings on the mesophex platforms, Commander Rann. There have been confirmed enemy contacts in the stratophex core, Commander Rann. There are ongoing engagements in the tropophex skin- and mantlezones, Commander Rann.'\n\n'But many of these signals are... false? Errors?'\n\nThe logistaria worked the panel controls and a pulse of static rippled across the display, in places turning some of the red data sigils blue, and in others green. There was still a lot of red all across the space port. Much of the base was swathed in green, which Rann took as a good sign until the logistaria spoke.\n\n'The green runes signify confirmed contacts with enemy weighted eighty or more on the threat-factoring scale employed by my data set, Commander Rann. The blue runes signify confirmed contacts with enemy weighted thirty or less on the threat-factoring scale employed by my data set, Commander Rann. The red runes signify unconfirmed contacts with e"}
{"text":"ere was still a lot of red all across the space port. Much of the base was swathed in green, which Rann took as a good sign until the logistaria spoke.\n\n'The green runes signify confirmed contacts with enemy weighted eighty or more on the threat-factoring scale employed by my data set, Commander Rann. The blue runes signify confirmed contacts with enemy weighted thirty or less on the threat-factoring scale employed by my data set, Commander Rann. The red runes signify unconfirmed contacts with enemy of unknown weighting on the threat-factoring scale employed by my data set, Commander Rann.'\n\n'So, the red ones are fakes?'\n\n'Unknown. The red runes may represent legitimate but unconfirmed enemy contacts of variable threat level, Commander Rann.'\n\n'Do what you can to confirm the reports and scrub the rest,' he told the Martian.\n\nHe gave the screen one last inspection, trying to see if strategic experience could tease any truth from the clusters of flashing icons. If he looked at the patterns in a certain way, there appeared to be a general movement from the uppermost levels down. There were certainly enemy in the surrounding areas of the bridgeways and monorail connections to the main Lion's Gate. The connecting rails and roads were well defended, but if they were to fall into the hands of the enemy, the traitors would be within striking distance of the gatehouse itself.\n\nRann knew his strengths, and the limitations of his authority, and both were being tested by the impending crisis.\n\n'Comms, I need an urgent connection to Lord Dorn. Urgent.'\n\n'Yes, commander. Prioritising a command vox for you.'\n\nHe felt like he should be reeling off orders to deal with what was happening, but the truth was Haeger was already in place to make those decisions. The majority of his field commanders were experienced enough to assess for themselves the local situation; better than he could with unreliable battle-data.\n\nHe checked the display again, but it was no clearer than thirty seconds earlier.\n\n'Commander, I have Lord Dorn's equerry in vox-contact.'\n\n'Tell him I need the primarch. I need to speak with him immediately.'\n\nThere was a quiet exchange between the legionary and the equerry at the other end of the vox-link. For the first time in several years the commander heard several Inwit curse phrases, including a pointed comment that the listener would go into an ice storm without a coat, one of the gravest insults from Rann's home world.\n\n'Shall I connect the channel to the briefing room, commander?' the vox-operator suggested, nodding his head towards the adjacent chamber.\n\n'That seems sensible,' replied Rann, realising that some discretion might be needed in the circumstances.\n\nRann strode into the chamber and sat down at the broad oval desk within, punching the vox-connecting button set into a rune pad upon its surface. The speaker built into the ceiling hissed into life.\n\n'I am conducting contra-siege operations against the Death Guard attack, and Lieutenant Takko is demanding an honour duel with your vox-officer. Explain quickly.'\n\nThe lord seneschal took a breath, figuring out where to begin. There was no point trying to be coy about the situation.\n\n'The defence of the Lion's Gate port is compromised, Lord Dorn. The traitors have made ground through the base, established a presence in Sky City and in the last hour conducted massed landings in the docking spires. Our response is being hampered by an intervention through the noosphere and electronic systems, rendering augurs and comms erratic.'\n\n'Give me an assessment of the threat. Can you recover the situation?'\n\n'It depends on what you want me to do, Lord Dorn. If I concentrate defences around the gate connections I will have a static position that can hold for some time. If you want me to retake lost ground... The attack in the base can be contained but I think that if we do not press them in the Starspear, they'll have a steady reinforcement route. Of course that will leave the bridges vulnerable.'\n\n'Do not allow the enemy to gain a foothold. It sounds as though you have a plan, what do you want from me?'\n\n'Permission to destroy the bridges, Lord Dorn.'\n\n'Denied. Retaining possession and access to the space port is preferable. Time is of the essence and it may be the case that when Roboute Guilliman arrives we will need the Lion's Gate port to bring down his troops with sufficient speed to turn the battle. Every hour could be the difference between the Emperor's victory or defeat. The bridges also provide the means for a massed counter-attack should too much of the port be overrun.'\n\nRann bit back the arguments that rose to his tongue, knowing that the primarch had made up his mind.\n\n'Understood, my lord. In that case, I request the despatch of a second ranking commander to ensure redundancy of leadership. I intend to take to the field to combat the enemy gains.'\n\n'You have someone in mind?'\n\n'First Captain Sigismund's presence would be invaluable.'\n\nRann resisted the urge to drum his fingers on the table edge as he waited for Rogal Dorn's answer. That the request had not been turned down immediately was a good sign, he thought, but he started composing his arguments in favour of the decision just in case.\n\n'I can spare three thousand more legionaries. It will take some time to assemble them from across the Palace so that we are not weakened elsewhere. You will have to make do with that.'\n\n'They will be a great help, my lord. If possible, I would suggest a counter-aerial assault to coincide with a renewed offensive from my attack from Sky City.'\n\n'You want me to send Sigismund's force in by air?'\n\n'That would be the swiftest way into the battle, my lord.'\n\n'I agree. I will have Sigismund contact you directly to work out the details once the strike force is ready to leave.'\n\n'Thank-'\n\nThe vox hissed into dead static, the connection broken. Rann flicked the dial to his command channel.\n\n'Lieutenant-Commander Haeger! Bring my strategic council to the briefing room. We have a counter-attack to plan.' He sat back in thought for a moment before activating the switch again. 'Have Magos Deveralax come as well. We need to discuss how to eliminate this new electronic threat. And have her bring her best demolitions experts.'\n\nSanctum Imperialis, central zone, three days since assault\n\nLooking across the expanse of the Hall of Widows, Euphrati Keeler watched the Custodian carefully, the steady tempo of his breathing coming to her ear through the vox-receiver. He hadn't raised his weapon, which was encouraging only to a certain point. Her next words would frame the rest of their relationship. She wanted to tell him that the Emperor had guided her to this time and place, but a lesser truth would have to serve for now.\n\n'Malcador sent me to help you.'\n\n'I see. How did you know I would be here?'\n\n'I'm sorry, but you've been led on something of a false trail.'\n\n'Explain.'\n\n'You went into shadow guise before Malcador could tell you that I would be assisting you. Your training meant you would ignore all vox contact. I tried to find you but had to give up, even though I knew you were following the colonel. You're very good at what you do.'\n\n'How did you know I would follow Colonel Nhek to this place?'\n\n'I wouldn't feel put out, Custodian Amon. It was Valdor himself that helped lay the bait once it was clear we could not contact you by conventional means. From your request he deduced you would follow the lead of the colonel and Sindermann received word that she would come to this meeting. I thought I would have to wait a while longer but you were very prompt.'\n\n'Has this been some kind of trial? A reverse blood game to test my abilities?'\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'No, Custodian Amon. This is all very real. The apparition, the confession, the gathering you are witnessing were not staged for your benefit.'\n\n'These are members of the Lectitio Divinitatus. Conspirators in the cult of the Emperor.'\n\n'High-ranking, as you can see. They are unaware of our presence. I agreed to help you navigate the labyrinth of the Lectitio Divinitatus. Conditional upon my aid was Malcador's promise that nobody within the cult will be prosecuted unless found guilty of some greater crime. You are here to uncover the source and scale of the daemonic intrusion, not to wage war upon the Lectitio Divinitatus.'\n\n'I do not take orders from political agitators, nor does Malcador's oath bind me.'\n\nKeeler sighed.\n\n'Firstly, without my help you will find out nothing. The moment the Lectitio Divinitatus knows you are seeking them, they'll disappear. Secondly, perhaps you miss the meaning of Valdor's involvement. I am here with his full, ah, blessing.'\n\nAmon stared at her silently for several seconds longer, not moving at all. His expression was impossible to read, a blank canvas of emotion. Eventually he gave a perfunctory nod.\n\n'Very well. We need to agree our objectives and approach. There is a disused common area on the fourth level of the adjacent quarters. Do you know it?'\n\n'I can find it. I'll meet you there in ten minutes, Custodian.'\n\nHe hung up the receiver without further acknowledgement, disappearing back through the curtains a heartbeat later. Keeler slid her vox-handset back into its sconce and turned to lean her back against the wall next to it, letting the tension flow from her body. The curtain twitched.\n\n'Is it done?' a voice asked from the hallway beyond.\n\nShe pulled back the curtain to reveal a silver-haired man, face lined with age. Despite his wizened features he held himself straight, gaze firm, voice strong. He was every bit as imposing and charismatic as he had been at the height of his prowess as one of the iterators of the Imperial Truth. Kyril Sindermann, now her herald to the growing masses of the Lectitio Divinitatus.\n\n'That went better than expected,' she told him. 'Malcador warned that he is a hardliner when it comes to matters of faith. He was at Monarchia.'\n\n'Perhaps that was why Valdor chose hi"}
{"text":"lined with age. Despite his wizened features he held himself straight, gaze firm, voice strong. He was every bit as imposing and charismatic as he had been at the height of his prowess as one of the iterators of the Imperial Truth. Kyril Sindermann, now her herald to the growing masses of the Lectitio Divinitatus.\n\n'That went better than expected,' she told him. 'Malcador warned that he is a hardliner when it comes to matters of faith. He was at Monarchia.'\n\n'Perhaps that was why Valdor chose him for the task.'\n\n'If Valdor wanted the Lectitio Divinitatus eradicated, he would have ordered it so, long before now. I think Custodian Amon has a talent for rooting out hidden things. Nothing more.'\n\n'Even so, you cannot trust him too much. You are a saint, a valuable hostage...'\n\nKeeler stepped through the curtain and answered with a smile.\n\n'Trust is a commodity that comes and goes, my dearest friend. Faith is eternal.'\n\nNagapor Territories, fifty-nine days before assault\n\nAn insistent banging and the stench of smoke woke Zenobi. She was still strapped to her gunnery chair, hanging over the control console. The armourglass of the dome was intact, heavily smeared and scratched, but through it she could see the bent barrels of the autocannons and the furrows they had scored through the dirt as the car had tipped off the track.\n\nThe metallic clang of a hammer dragged her senses back inside. Between each blow she heard the crackle of flames and through the ringing in her ears caught her name, very muffled from outside. She braced a foot against the side of the turret and unclasped the strap, falling sideways between the control console and the dome. From this new position she could see that a panel had torn away, blocking the access ladder into the cupola. Flames flickered from the cables that had been exposed. The fire didn't seem very big, but it was between her and the route out.\n\nThat was when she remembered the ammunition feed.\n\n'Help!' She slid boots first along the hatchway and slammed her foot against the twisted metal sheet. 'I'm alive! I'm in here! Draw the ammo feed! There's a fire!'\n\nShe battered the metal several more times, shouting for her companions to remove the ammunition belt feeds. The fire was growing in brightness, sputtering and flaring as it reached the lubricated turntable of the quad cannons. She worried that an electrical discharge might make the whole metal turret live and scrambled back, trying to wedge herself into the non-conductive armourglass dome, one rubber-soled boot pressed against the chair.\n\nA thump right behind her jolted her head back, banging it again. There were figures outside, scraping away at the grime that had accumulated on the dome. Menber peered through, eyes shielded by his hands, a cry of relief becoming a short laugh as their eyes met. He grinned and said something but the thick armourglass reduced it to meaningless mumbling.\n\n'I can't hear you,' she mouthed deliberately, shrugging her shoulders. 'There's a fire. You need to disconnect the ammunition before it blows.'\n\nHe nodded and gave a thumbs up. Zenobi focused on his mouth as best she could, turning her body so that she was more or less parallel with him. Menber nodded but she couldn't tell if he had really understood. She raised her voice, shouting each word with careful intonation while pointing back to the hatchway.\n\n'Fire! Get! Me! Out! Of! Here!'\n\nA few others gathered, their lasguns turned in their hands. They started hammering at the armourglass with the butts of their weapons, but the only discernible result was deafening noise within the turret.\n\n'Stop, stop!' Zenobi waved her hands and then shielded her ears. Menber noticed and called for the others to back away.\n\nZenobi's eyes were stinging and it was getting more difficult to breathe as smoke continued to fill the cupola. She swivelled around to look towards the ladderway. The fire was still burning within the exposed bulkhead. It wasn't large but the fumes were acrid, a mix of burning lubricant and melting plastek. Looking around the turret revealed nothing that could put out the flames.\n\nThe smoke was far more dangerous than the heat from the fire. Zenobi was almost unable to keep her eyes open, blinking hard all the time as tears streamed through the grime on her face. Every breath felt like inhaling razor blades.\n\nThat was when an idea struck. Zenobi turned her attention back to the dome and signalled for Menber and the others to move back. Almost blind, her fingers fumbling every delicate motion, she persisted. Every few seconds coughs wracked her, doubling her up. She eventually unlaced her boots and wedged them under the control pedals. A dizzy spell stopped her for several erratic heartbeats. She wanted to suck in air but knew that would only make it worse.\n\nNext came the coverall, an even more awkward struggle in the confines of the turret. First one arm then the other came free. A sudden crack and green flare from the entranceway marked the fire reaching some new source of fuel. The smoke became darker, leaving a black slick along the metal as it flowed up into the turret. She shifted to the rubberised seat, nearly lying down to pull the heavy uniform off her legs. Folding a rough rectangle, its arms and legs tucked inside, she put it to one side and drew her boots back on, still nervous about electrocution.\n\nShe moved along the ladderway at a crouch, trying not to touch anything. The curls of her hair stood up with static and the choking smoke was thick in her throat. With the folded coverall held out before her like a shield, she lunged forward, thrusting it into the exposed cable compartment.\n\nThe thick folds of material fitted almost exactly, cutting off the air. Cautiously, she drew it back to see if there were any flames left. A spark from a severed wire caused her to flinch, but as far as she could see, the fire was gone. Zenobi filled the hole with her uniform just in case, hoping it wouldn't catch alight from a stray discharge. She started to kick at the cover that had come away to block the entry hatch.\n\n'Can you hear me?'\n\nThere were voices and movement below. Lieutenant Okoye's face appeared in the small gap between dislodged sheet and floor.\n\n'We are improvising a cutter out of the laspacks. Step back.'\n\n'What about a melta?' she replied.\n\n'Too powerful, it might blast all the way up into the turret.'\n\nShe obeyed, scuttling back up to the dome. A hiss joined the symphony of other noises that creaked and rattled through the derailed car, and she saw a red glow appear on one corner of the lodged metal plate.\n\nHammering resumed, bending the metal where it had been heated. Gloved hands grasped at the torn edge, twisting and pulling. Zenobi almost blacked out again, trying to breathe as little as possible - the fire was producing no more smoke but there wasn't enough ventilation to let the trapped fumes escape.\n\nThe sheet buckled. Almost unconscious, Zenobi threw herself towards it, slamming shoulder first into the metal. Corners screeched along the entranceway but it gave under the impact, sending her, the metal and several troopers sprawling into the main gangway. A shriek left her lips, coming from somewhere she hadn't known existed, quickly followed by a lungful of acrid but smoke-free air.\n\nShe lay on the metal, eyes closed, chest heaving for several seconds, the heat from where the lascutter had melted it warming the back of her legs.\n\nIt was this that reminded her she was dressed only in her undergarments. Slowly opening her eyes, she found herself with five troopers and Lieutenant Okoye looking down at her with a mixture of humour and amazement. Kettai was among them.\n\n'I need a drink,' she croaked.\n\n'I have some water here,' said one of the other rescuers, pulling a canteen from her belt.\n\nKettai met her gaze as she swigged down tepid water, a smile on his lips.\n\n'Let's get you outside,' he said, draping an arm over her shoulder to lead her away, his other hand moving to the flask in his pocket.\n\nAbaddon joins the attack\n\nAmong the masses\n\nA question of faith\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex core, two days since assault\n\nThere was a lot to be said for the simple pleasure of combat. Abaddon had always been a fighter, first and foremost. Born to be a king, he had chosen the road of battle rather than rulership, giving up that birthright to honour his blade-kin.\n\nWreathed in armour-shattering energy, his fist made short work of the VII Legion warrior that barred his passage into the upper sensoria of the Lion's Gate space port. Another fell to the sleeve-blades of Layak's bodyguards, while the sorcerer ended a third with a fork of black lightning from his staff.\n\nThis was purity. To be victorious and live, or to know defeat and death. A clear foe, a defined objective.\n\nAbaddon's gun roared, a hail of bolts cracking open the plastron of an Imperial Fists legionary in the livery of a veteran sergeant. He followed up with long strides, smashing his gauntlet into the broken armour, pulverising bone and organs beneath, the blow hurling Dorn's fighter across the tiled floor.\n\nBolt and blade did not care for allegiance, nor the wiles of priests and sorcerers. They were loosed for many reasons, honourable and vile, but once set on their way they either hit their target or missed. Abaddon remembered a time of similar clarity, when he had been a legionary, newly recruited into the Luna Wolves.\n\nFollow orders. Kill the enemy. Protect your brothers.\n\nNow he could barely stand to be in the same room as those he had once thought close as kin. He raised his blade alongside an abomination that paid service to powers existing beyond mortal comprehension. And more than anything, he fought for a lord whose true ambitions were impossible to know.\n\nDespite his doubts, perhaps because of them, the First Captain of the Sons of Horus was not content to be an observer during the battle for Terra. Behind him came three thousand Sons of Horus, their we"}
{"text":"s.\n\nNow he could barely stand to be in the same room as those he had once thought close as kin. He raised his blade alongside an abomination that paid service to powers existing beyond mortal comprehension. And more than anything, he fought for a lord whose true ambitions were impossible to know.\n\nDespite his doubts, perhaps because of them, the First Captain of the Sons of Horus was not content to be an observer during the battle for Terra. Behind him came three thousand Sons of Horus, their weapons raking fire through the warriors of Rogal Dorn. By Stormbird and Thunderhawk they had been summoned, another blade aimed at the heart of the Lion's Gate space port.\n\nIt had not been by the order of Abaddon that they had come; rather they had been despatched by the Warmaster on the word of Layak. Though he had received no order himself, Abaddon had assumed command.\n\nEzekyle Abaddon, First Captain of the Sons of Horus, the right hand of the Warmaster and victor of countless campaigns had not come to Terra to watch others overthrow the Emperor. He would sooner die in battle than see a Word Bearers sorcerer lead the first of his battle-brothers into the Imperial Palace.\n\nThe line of yellow that held the hallways around the upper sensoria buckled under the attack, unable to hold against the ferocity of their newly arrived foes. In the close confines of the interior Abaddon swapped his bolter for powered blade, so that with sword and gleaming fist he carved his path through to the objective.\n\nWith him came the Justaerin, their Terminator war-plate proof against withering volleys of fire, their loyalty to Abaddon as certain as their armour. In a time when he trusted little but himself, he placed his life in the hands of his close guard without question and they followed him without hesitation.\n\nA last knot of VII Legion warriors held the doors to the sensoria. At a conjuration from Layak a black cloud blinded them, flickers of warp energy in its heart. Abaddon charged into the gloom, ignoring the sporadic bolt-rounds that burst from his war-plate. His sword took the head from the first foe he encountered, his fist deflecting the gladius of the second. A blade slave pounced past, burying its dagger-like limbs into the Space Marine's neck, its momentum carrying them both into the murk.\n\nAbaddon pivoted at the sound of heavy footfalls, driving the point of his sword forward to meet the onrushing Imperial Fist. He slowed too late, running onto the blade tip. Abaddon advanced, driving the sword on until it erupted from the Space Marine's back. Ripping his sword free, the gloom dissipating as Layak's spell faded, he stepped past the falling body into the broad chamber of the upper sensoria.\n\n'We will blind their commanders too,' said Layak, hurrying past, head turning quickly as he surveyed the room.\n\n'Secure the orbital augur channels,' Abaddon told the Terminator-armoured legionaries fanning out into the chamber. His sensor data carried the signals of the rest of the force dispersing to secure the area against counter-attack. Within thirty seconds the sensoria was ringed by Sons of Horus.\n\n'Over here, First Captain,' one of his Justaerin replied, indicating a nearby console.\n\nLayak strode over, staff leaving trails of sparks where it struck the bloodied floor.\n\n'Yes, this is perfect,' crowed the Word Bearers sorcerer. 'I will guide Volk's essence to the auguries to mask the arrival.'\n\n'And what of the barrier of the Emperor?' demanded Abaddon. 'I have seen little enough from you to prise open the shield that guards against the Neverborn.'\n\n'That work is ongoing. All elements must come together, Ezekyle.' Layak turned to regard the First Captain with six gleaming eyes. 'The gods are with us and the Utterblight is growing in strength. Our work here aids the greater plan. Even as Dorn must commit more strength to the defence of the space port his grip on the Inner Palace is weakened, his eye drawn elsewhere. Progress is being made, though it is not visible to you.'\n\n'We are on the brink of taking the port, regardless of your efforts.'\n\n'The gods will decide when the space port falls, and we shall claim it not a moment earlier.' Layak returned his attention to the console. He drew a curved knife and started etching symbols into the plasteel of the terminal housing. The scratching of its point punctuated his words. 'When we move to the Ultimate Wall, would you have the elevated primarchs be baulked again, or shall they lead their Legions in the final battle?'\n\n'Fulgrim has already wearied of the attack and withdrawn from the vicinity of the Lion's Gate,' Abaddon told him. 'Angron rampages without purpose outside the walls and Mortarion continues his bombardments. I see little to be gained from their participation.'\n\n'Horus and his ascended brothers are the chosen of the gods - they are the will of Chaos given form,' the Word Bearer replied. He stepped back, looking at his handiwork. The runes glimmered, soft green and dark red. 'To be in their favour is to be favoured by the gods themselves. These are forces you will learn to balance when you come to accept your destiny.'\n\n'If it is my destiny, then it will happen whether I accept it or not,' Abaddon growled. 'You seem keen to persuade me I must make a choice whilst telling me that I have none.'\n\nLayak had no response to this and busied himself at the augur terminal for some time, daubing ritual marks on the console in the blood of the slain. With his staff he ignited the fluids, so that sigils danced in flames, strange intersections of the mystical and mechanical.\n\n'None of this would have been possible without the patronage of the gods,' Layak told Abaddon when his ritual was complete. 'Victory is not certain except by their favour.'\n\n'Victory is never certain.'\n\n'Without the gods, your ambitions would have died in a flame-lit lodge on Davin.' A note of anger entered Layak's voice, the first time Abaddon had heard such a thing. 'Without the gods the Warmaster's star would have ascended and fallen, and even the shadow of his memory would have eclipsed anything you had achieved.'\n\nThis time it was Abaddon who was robbed of a retort. He was unsure where the cause and effect lay between Horus seeking the power of Chaos and the gods reaching out to him.\n\n'Is it done?' he asked, pointing towards the augur terminal. 'The sensor array will fail completely?'\n\nLayak examined the images that flickered across the screen. Abaddon saw spirals and jags, coming together like waves or overlapping flames. To his eye they were meaningless shapes.\n\n'Volk has seen the beacon and is coming. Darkness will fall when we need it.'\n\n'Then we will press on,' said Abaddon, clenching his fist. 'The Imperial Fists strengthen their grip on the skybridges - it is only a matter of time before we face a counter-attack from within the Palace. Kroeger has extended too far without consolidation, rushing the attack. If we fail to seize our objectives in the next thrust, we will never do it.'\n\n'And you think you will seize victory by your strength alone?' Layak cackled. 'Such hubris.'\n\nAbaddon held up a lightning-wreathed glove.\n\n'Not by my strength alone, but in the close-fought war, a single blow can turn the course.'\n\nSanctum Imperialis, western zone, four days since assault\n\nThe environs of the Sanctum Imperialis were a sprawling refugee camp. Several thousand square kilometres of habs and dorms and other blocks inside the Eternity Wall had been cleared in preparation for fresh assault. Some, like the Palatine Arc, had been hit by the enemy, turned to rubble, scoured by flame and toxin. Tens of thousands, later hundreds of thousands, had been displaced, fleeing through the Lion's Gate into the city around the Sanctum Imperialis before that impenetrable barbican was closed against the coming of the enemy.\n\nThe streets throbbed with a different life. Firelight replaced lumens that had been turned off to conserve energy. Against the thundering backdrop of siege guns, the murmur of a thousand conversations echoed down regal boulevards. Fountains had become wells. Plazas had become markets. Every scrap of material was pressed into use as shelter, transport or both.\n\nAnd into the mass of humanity, Amon followed Keeler.\n\n'I wonder what a Custodian sees when he looks upon this,' she said, casting out a hand to encompass the mass of people making their homes in the streets, archways and abandoned buildings.\n\nHe did not answer straight away. Very little surprised Amon, but he took a small delight in seeing how places could change so dramatically. He had seen the Imperial Palace raised upon the ancient city of its foundations - a city that the Emperor had apparently built in a past age before Old Night. A monument to mankind - not its master, the Emperor had assured His creations. It had been a place of beauty and awareness of humanity's strengths and frailties. Not just a museum, but a building block to the future. A template not a temple.\n\nFunction had started to subsume its form. It became a capital not just of Terra, but of a burgeoning empire beyond the stars. The Administratum had grown out of the need to officiate such an immense endeavour. Hab-blocks, arcologies and hives had appended the statue-flanked processionals and broad cloisters. Edifices dedicated to a different kind of deity, laying sacrifice at the idol of bureaucracy, hoping to tame a galaxy with numbers in vid-ledgers.\n\nThe Emperor had been concerned with the webway project and the Custodians had accompanied Him. They had surrendered the greater part of the Palace to humans, overseen by Malcador - though not wholly mortal in body, certainly in mindset. It amazed Amon even now to think of the sprawling otherworld a few kilometres beneath his feet, past the wards and gates and bastions of the Imperial Dungeon. It also gave him pause to recall the limitless horde of Neverborn that waited below, closed off from Terra by arcane machines and the will of the "}
{"text":"bway project and the Custodians had accompanied Him. They had surrendered the greater part of the Palace to humans, overseen by Malcador - though not wholly mortal in body, certainly in mindset. It amazed Amon even now to think of the sprawling otherworld a few kilometres beneath his feet, past the wards and gates and bastions of the Imperial Dungeon. It also gave him pause to recall the limitless horde of Neverborn that waited below, closed off from Terra by arcane machines and the will of the Emperor. The traitors did not need vile rituals to summon their unnatural allies: a legion of the warp tested the defences constantly, a whole dimension yet a paper's breadth away.\n\n'I see the flotsam of a Warmaster's pride,' he told her. 'Seven years ago, the Imperium was turned upon its axis by the selfishness of Horus. That moment has led directly to this and every suffering felt here, every hurt upon the people of the Emperor that has followed, can be laid upon him.'\n\nKeeler said nothing in reply.\n\nRogal Dorn had come to turn the Palace into a fortress. Immense walls, domineering towers and buttresses by the thousand had strengthened the Sanctum Imperialis, and about it the great curtain fortifications of the Eternity Wall and the Ultimate Wall had been raised and widened, each stretch a city-state in its own right. Administrators remained but labourers in their millions joined them. The latter were eventually given guns and became soldiers, ordered to defend the ramparts their hands had built.\n\nAmon had changed with it all yet remained constant at his core. Through the blood games he had learned of the ever-shifting societies and ecosystems that existed both in the centre and at the fringes of the Imperial Palace. Some things never changed, like the demagogues and black marketeers and gangsters. Only the means of trade, threat and payment altered with the passing decades.\n\nAnd in the last months the Palace had metamorphosed into something new again.\n\nHis presence caused some reaction, a stirring among the listless crowds, but this close to the Sanctum Imperialis the presence of a Custodian was not rare even if it was not commonplace. A few desperate souls called out petitions for aid, the more unhinged demanding audience with the Emperor Himself. Others approached with thanks for the Custodian's vigilance, mistaking his presence for one of the irregular patrols through the growing encampments.\n\n'It is no surprise the dispossessed have a ready ear for the sermons of the Lectitio Divinitatus,' he said to the self-professed Holy Lady of Terra. 'When one has no power, one will seek hope from any source.'\n\n'Indeed,' said Keeler with furrowed brow.\n\nThey passed across a square dominated by a wide bonfire. Among the flames Amon recognised the broken shapes of shelving and Administratum lecterns. The building on the far side was a counting house, the windows long since broken in, the contents looted. Makeshift lamps flickered inside.\n\n'Have you considered the alternative?' Keeler continued. 'If these impoverished folk do not turn their thoughts to worship of the Emperor, where else might they seek succour?'\n\n'You do not understand the extent of the folly.'\n\n'I have witnessed first-hand the darkness of the warp that can consume a soul,' she replied quietly. 'You forget that I saw the Warmaster fall prey to that same delusion.'\n\n'All the more reason that such knowledge should not be shared widely,' Amon told her. He stepped carefully over blanket-wrapped forms. Only the faintest of movements showed them to be alive not dead, in the grip of deep fatigue and oblivious to everything else.\n\n'To accept His own divinity does not suggest any other exists,' countered Keeler.\n\n'Where did you hear such a thing?' Amon asked sharply.\n\nKeeler pulled out a book from a bag over her shoulder. Amon did not need to look at it closely to know that it was the Lectitio Divinitatus.\n\n'It is the wisdom in these pages,' she told him.\n\n'Yet it is a sentiment that fell from the lips of Lorgar, one who has long since passed from veneration of the Emperor to a far darker life.'\n\n'Knowledge is power, ergo ignorance is weakness,' Keeler said. 'It is a battle into which the Emperor would have His servants go unprepared and unarmed. Is it any wonder that so many have fallen when it appears to them that the Emperor deceived them?'\n\n'The Emperor is above judgement. I have walked beside Him many times and would not claim to know His mind in these matters.'\n\n'Yet you are sure He would condemn my faith?'\n\n'To accept any superstitious nonsense invites speculation and unreason. It is the path that leads to the end of everything the Emperor has built. It is to combat those very powers that...' Amon fell silent, aware that he should not share too much with Keeler. She had a unique perspective on events around Horus, but the secrecy of the webway and the Emperor's true goals was inviolate. 'To know is to be tempted.'\n\n'I know and I am not tempted.' She stopped at the steps into the portico of the Administratum building and looked up at Amon's face. 'The Emperor gives me the strength to resist their wiles. Did He not create you to be immune to such desires also?'\n\n'Each Custodian is a singular labour, imbued with individual strength and purpose,' Amon told her. 'When primarchs can be led astray, there is little hope for the common human to withstand the barbs and lures of the hidden foe.'\n\n'I do not think we will agree, nor that this will be our last discussion on the matter. All I ask is that you approach what you see,' she gestured to the building's interior, 'with an open mind.'\n\n'And you think I will see something different today? This is the fifth gathering you have brought me to, and all I see are empty rituals and charlatans.'\n\n'Perhaps that is for the best, from your point of view. What if you were to witness a true miracle of the Emperor? Would you accept it?'\n\nAmon said nothing, but simply gestured for Keeler to proceed him into the counting house.\n\nA man and a woman waited in the foyer but remained silent, standing aside to allow them to pass the main stairwell and head towards a hall beyond. Ducking through the arch, Amon found himself in a circular chamber about thirty metres across, the floor muddied from many footfalls, the original mosaic design lost beneath the grime. The ceiling was black with soot from a handful of fires, a few broken skylights acting as chimneys.\n\nThe first thing that struck him was the singing. Those gathered were mostly knelt in haphazard lines on an old carpet that had been salvaged from somewhere, hands in their laps. He picked out three dozen different voices from the assembled worshippers, some of them skilled, many of them not. The effort that went into the singing was not related to the quality of the outcome. He stopped at the threshold for a short while, listening to the words, decoding the euphemism and metaphor as best he could.\n\nIt was a song of praise, and of hope, and thanks.\n\n'For what do they thank the Emperor?' he quietly asked Keeler, who waited beside him. 'Their homes are destroyed. They live in abject poverty. It is likely they will die of exposure or violence very soon.'\n\n'But they are still alive today,' said Keeler, eyes glimmering with moisture. She held her hand to her breast, the lump of the book inside her coat beneath it. 'The Emperor has guarded them through the tribulation when so many others have perished.'\n\n'Survivor bias is not blessing.'\n\nKeeler ignored him and entered. Kyril Sindermann had come ahead of the pair to prepare the way and was leading the verses from in front of the group. There were several others with him, presumably the group leaders.\n\nAs their presence was noticed, the singing faltered and stopped. The congregation turned their attention to the newcomers, some with gasps, raising hands to mouths in surprise. At first Amon thought it a reaction to his presence, for he had come clad in full panoply, as Keeler had suggested. But he heard whispers - 'The blessed one is here!' 'She walks among us!' - and saw that though eyes strayed to him, they lingered on Keeler. It was the first time he had been in the presence of a human, except Malcador, that had commanded more attention than him.\n\nKeeler responded, her face flushed in the firelight, eyes wide. He heard her heart racing.\n\n'Come, come,' Sindermann called out, ushering them to the front of the group. He made introductions but Amon did not recognise any of the names as people of significance. The congregation were of a kind, much like those he had seen on his previous excursions with Keeler. Men and women, mostly older than average because the younger, healthier ones had all been drafted into the Imperial Army. There were a few he took to be adolescents, not quite old enough to be trained with a lasgun.\n\nThey looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and awe. The first was due to the illicit nature of the gathering, he had learned, and the second down to his existence as a creation of the Emperor's labours. He found himself uncomfortable under their gaze, but showed nothing of his feelings in his expression, a study in calm interest.\n\nAnd the evening continued in predictable fashion, with a few more songs, some discussion of certain passages from their holy book and an exchange of goods in the form of food, drink, medicines and such that had been scavenged since the last gathering. These were taken by the group leaders for distribution to those most in need, or so they claimed. Whether they were true to their word was not Amon's concern.\n\nFinally, prayers were offered to the Emperor in exchange for protection, guidance and forgiveness. The last of these confused Amon particularly, as though the Emperor cared anything for the supposed moral infractions of these people. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Amon approached Sindermann and the other cult leaders.\n\n'It is such an honour to receive your visit, Custodian,' said a grey-haire"}
{"text":"hose most in need, or so they claimed. Whether they were true to their word was not Amon's concern.\n\nFinally, prayers were offered to the Emperor in exchange for protection, guidance and forgiveness. The last of these confused Amon particularly, as though the Emperor cared anything for the supposed moral infractions of these people. At the conclusion of the ceremony, Amon approached Sindermann and the other cult leaders.\n\n'It is such an honour to receive your visit, Custodian,' said a grey-haired woman called Coral. She looked at him oddly, hand half moving towards his armour and then withdrawing. 'To think that you have been in the presence of the God-Emperor.'\n\nAmon stiffened on hearing that term, plucked as it was from the forbidden book written by the traitor Lorgar. That it had entered common parlance was testament to the price of laxity. Coral acted as though something of that supposedly divine connection might be passed off by simple proximity.\n\n'Sindermann assured us that you are not here to condemn our practices,' said another, a dark-skinned man with a walking cane, dressed in the robe of a minor administrator.\n\nAmon glanced at Keeler. She raised an eyebrow.\n\n'I am seeking those that may have witnessed strange phenomena,' said the Custodian. 'A shared vision or dreams, perhaps. Voices, images, anything that cannot be explained by natural law.'\n\n'Like signs from the Emperor?' asked the youngest of the trio, a mother with a babe in a sling no more than a few months old. Amon realised the child must have been born since the siege began. His surprise must have slipped through his guarded expression.\n\n'His father fights on the walls,' the woman said proudly, stroking the babe's cheek. Her voice quavered a little. 'At least, he did when I last heard a month ago. I pray to the Emperor to see him safe through his travails. I don't suppose you could get word of him?'\n\nShe looked at Amon with a hope that was in stark contrast to her sunken features and dark-rimmed eyes. He could see that the child was malnourished also, as were most of the congregation. Their clothes were tatters, homes destroyed. Yet they gave thanks to a fiction of the Emperor and asked for news of loved ones rather than decrying the Master of Mankind who surely some might blame for their predicament.\n\nThe sheer scale of the battle for the Imperial Palace meant that any single soldier could not be accounted for. Whole companies died without remark. It did not seem productive to share this point with the desperate young woman.\n\n'I do not think it possible,' he told her softly.\n\n'Life goes on,' said the older woman. 'Horus cannot halt all of humanity.'\n\n'Indeed, the great cycle continues,' said Keeler, joining them having finished a conversation with one of the congregation. She looked at the mother. 'What do you know of the group that meets in the Basilica Ventura?'\n\n'A strange lot,' said the man, limping closer. 'Gave themselves a name. What was it, Chikwendu? The ones that follow Olivier?'\n\n'Oh...' The older woman rubbed her chin for a moment. 'The Lampbearers? Lamplighters?'\n\n'Lightbearers!' said the young mother. 'I saw one of their emissaries on the west arch road just this morning.'\n\n'Yes, the Lightbearers,' said Chikwendu. 'You want strange happenings, the Lightbearers are the ones to watch, for sure. Olivier, he's claiming he can heal the sick, and that's just the start of it.'\n\nAmon exchanged a look with Keeler. She smiled and held her hands out to the group leaders, embracing each in turn.\n\n'Stay strong,' she whispered to each of them.\n\n'My thanks for your assistance,' Amon said with a nod of acknowledgement. He was about to depart but felt he could not do so without some further comment. It was not his place to fuel false worship, but nor was it his duty to quash all sense of hope. 'This time shall pass. The Emperor will prevail.'\n\nPick a target\n\nVox-silence\n\nThe Lightbearers\n\nLion's Gate space port, stratophex core, two days since assault\n\nSlowly accreting more warriors on the advance, Forrix's hidden force had pushed far from the hordes pouring into the base of the space port, cutting through several Imperial Army cordons to reach the heart of the stratophex. It transpired that the rendezvous point Forrix had selected was located in a nest of hab-dorms clustered about one of the main drop-shafts. Civilians with autoguns and kitchen knives had proved less of an obstacle than the distance to cover, their bodies left cooling in the passageways and rooms they had called home.\n\nThe advance had not gone unnoticed - indeed was not meant to be wholly clandestine. With the defenders unsure of the threat posed by the Iron Warriors, several scouting forces had been sent after them, each greeted by a sudden and overwhelming counter-attack. To Forrix it seemed that the Imperial Army colonel or whoever was in charge of the sector had finally decided enough was enough and despatched a company-level force to deal with the interlopers.\n\nAs soon as the augur pickets had detected the incoming soldiers Forrix had responded, setting ambushes and a mobile reserve. Twenty minutes had passed since the first shot had been fired and more army personnel were being thrown into the fight. A few mortars and support guns had been brought to bear, frag bombs and armour-piercing shells forcing the Iron Warriors into a more defensive mode around the central hab-cluster. The warsmith was keenly aware that his mission to draw the enemy away from the coming offensive above and below was starting to have an effect.\n\nIt was hard to pick out what Gharal was saying over the sound of bolters and thud of shells landing not far above Forrix's position, though his second-in-command was only a few metres away.\n\n'It's safe to break vox-silence now,' Forrix transmitted to the captain. A red las-blast slashed across his left pauldron, leaving a grey mark through his insignia. 'I think they know where we are.'\n\n'Counter-offensive is still sporadic, triarch,' the captain told him. 'I can confirm eight hundred and eleven warriors have reached the rendezvous.'\n\n'We've been inside more than twenty-four hours, I don't expect anyone else to make it to us.'\n\n'No, triarch. What are your orders?'\n\n'No contact from either the aerial attack wave or the surface reinforcements?' As soon as he asked the question Forrix realised it was redundant. 'Forget that, you'd have told me if there was.'\n\n'All squads are currently on perimeter guard or mobile reserve assignments, triarch. This is a defensible position. Ingress and exit is only via four corridors. Should we dig in?'\n\n'Easy to defend, but if we get stuck here, very hard to break out. The longer we stay, the more chance we'll get bogged down by an insignificant defence force. To draw their attention we need to pose more of a threat. I'm not going to wait for any more stragglers - it's time to identify a target and push this shiv a bit deeper.'\n\nAnother enemy thrust along the passage to the east drew Forrix's eye. Scores of troopers in plated carapace armour led the fresh offensive, daring the bolter fusillade as they dashed from one doorway to the next. They'd lost half their number in the first fifteen metres. He could not decide if they were brave or stupid to try a forced attack against his Space Marines.\n\n'I have some schematics, triarch.' Gharal pushed through the squad protecting Forrix and proffered a slate-projector, its surface criss-crossed with a wireframe rendition of their surroundings. 'There are a number of potential targets within three kilometres of our position.'\n\n'The point of our attack is to open up a front inside the space port to allow the upper and lower forces to push forward in strength. These lacklustre assaults will bog us down, but they aren't a significant commitment. Every bolt we have could kill a trooper and we'll achieve nothing. It is Dorn's sons that are the spine of this defence. I need to make sure the Imperial Fists deploy in numbers against us.'\n\n'So, what does that mean? What objective do we aim for?'\n\n'Once we have cleared away this chaff, send out eight scouting forces. Ten legionaries each. I want even dispersal, vertically and horizontally, as far as they can go. Have each report levels of resistance every two hundred metres. In particular, keep an eye out for our cousins in yellow. Any contact with Imperial Fists must be signalled immediately.'\n\n'Yes, triarch...' Gharal's uncertainty was betrayed by his wavering affirmative. 'What are they seeking?'\n\n'Whichever force encounters the greatest increase in resistance is the one we shall follow.'\n\nThe armoured Imperial troopers pushed on again, using their surge to cover the arrival of a pair of tripod-mounted multi-lasers. Soon rapid-fire beams of blue burst along the eastern corridor, sparking from the armour of Forrix's warriors and leaving scorch marks along the pale yellow walls. Missiles and heavy bolters roared in reply, turning the heavy weapons and their crews to broken metal and flesh.\n\n'I... Excuse my ignorance, triarch. Why would we knowingly advance into the hardest defence?'\n\n'If you were defending the space port and you had enemy roaming at will, how would you organise your troops?'\n\n'I would assign defenders based on a scale of significance and vulnerability. The greater the value of a potential objective, the better defence...' Gharal laughed as he reached his conclusion. 'The best defences will be arrayed around the targets that are worth the most to our enemy.'\n\n'Exactly. It doesn't matter what we attack, only that the Imperial Fists prize it highly. The more they fight to defend it, the greater its value to them.'\n\n'And when we have identified the target, triarch?'\n\n'We move in full force, rapid spear point assault. We'll break the defence, seize whatever it is the sons of Dorn are trying to protect, and then prepare ourselves for the counter-attack. The greater their response, the better we're doing...'\n\nNagapor Territories, fif"}
{"text":"e most to our enemy.'\n\n'Exactly. It doesn't matter what we attack, only that the Imperial Fists prize it highly. The more they fight to defend it, the greater its value to them.'\n\n'And when we have identified the target, triarch?'\n\n'We move in full force, rapid spear point assault. We'll break the defence, seize whatever it is the sons of Dorn are trying to protect, and then prepare ourselves for the counter-attack. The greater their response, the better we're doing...'\n\nNagapor Territories, fifty-nine days before assault\n\nThe scale of the damage was hard to take in. As Zenobi looked along half a kilometre of twisted, burning metal it reminded her of the time when, as a child, she had seen a furnace implosion. Even that didn't really compare: a brief, violent episode that had slain hundreds but caused little permanent damage to the production line of the cradlespur.\n\nAt least seventeen carriages and gun cars had been derailed completely, including the one Zenobi had been in. Half a dozen more had skipped the tracks and were listing one way or the other, zigzagged together by the sudden slowing of the train. The frontmost four cars showed signs of hits but were otherwise intact, as were the last dozen or so.\n\nIt was not the sight that reminded her of the flashfire back in Addaba, it was the smell. Charring bodies and burning oil. It brought the memory back, stark and hot, her parents screaming for lost relatives.\n\nIt was calmer here. The immediate mayhem had subsided while she'd been trapped in the turret. Search teams picked through the wrecks that were not alight, pulling free the living and the dead. A steady stream of wounded, walking and stretchered, passed by to the rough medicae stations that had been set up away from the train.\n\nWith a shock that brought her aimless pacing to a halt, Zenobi remembered the aircraft. She looked up, scanning the smoke-smudged heavens. Dusk tinged the sky with purples and reds.\n\n'They left.'\n\nZenobi turned at the sound of Seleen's voice. Menber was just behind her, a spare uniform in his arms.\n\n'Put this on, it'll be getting colder,' he said, passing her the coverall.\n\nShe struggled into the bulky uniform, which was made for someone at least five centimetres taller. She folded up the cuffs and it bunched around her ankles out the top of her boots.\n\n'I feel like a child,' she said, flopping her arms up and down.\n\n'You're not, cousin,' said Menber.\n\n'You a smart woman,' Seleen told her. 'Good thinking, using your uniform to put out that fire. That's a bright brain inside your skull.'\n\n'Do we know who's dead yet?' Zenobi asked quietly, surveying the wreckage.\n\n'Sergeant Alekzanda,' said Seleen, swallowing hard.\n\nZenobi choked back a sob and Menber held her arm as she swayed.\n\n'Come on, sit down,' he said, leading her away from the burning train. She took several steps and then shook her head, pulling herself away.\n\n'I can help,' she told him, wiping soot and tears from her face with the sleeve of her new clothes. 'I'm not hurt.'\n\n'You took in a lot of smoke, Obi,' said Seleen. 'That's not good.'\n\n'I'm not hurt,' insisted Zenobi, starting back towards the carriage behind the gunnery car. 'And the company banner is in there somewhere.'\n\nShe saw the two of them exchange a glance.\n\n'It's important,' Zenobi insisted.\n\nThere were two piles of bodies, one at each end of the car a few metres from the doors. The whole carriage had tipped along with the gunnery carriage, but there was space between them to get to the entrances. Zenobi squeezed through easily enough, once again thankful for her small size.\n\nIt was strange to see everything at a right angle to its former position. She walked along the wall between the ends of the benches and the windows, trying to find where she had stowed the banner.\n\nThere were puddles and smears of blood on the painted metal, and a few hands and feet stuck out from under the mangled remains of benches that had come loose from their fastenings, too entangled to be removed. The roof was on her left, the hammocks still bundled where they had been before the attack.\n\nLuckily there had been no fire here. Or perhaps it was something more than luck, she thought. She remembered what the Beta Platoon trooper had tried to tell her, about powers greater than her. Maybe there was a force that was protecting the standard, the physical proof of her loyalty and dedication to the cause.\n\nShe found the banner pole but it was stuck behind the webbing of the hammock. Looking around she found a bayonet that had slipped from a kitbag. She used it to saw through the straps, until she, the hammock and the banner pole fell backwards, tumbling over a bench.\n\n'You okay?' Menber called from the door, his shock of curled hair silhouetted against the ruddy twilight.\n\n'Fine, cousin.' Zenobi struggled to her feet, untangling the hammock from her boot. She picked her way back to the door, slipping twice on drying blood. Coming out into the open air made her realise how dark it had been inside the carriage, though day was rapidly giving way to night-time.\n\nFlames added to the crimson illumination, and by its light she saw integrity officers moving through the gangs of labouring troopers. One of them approached the gathering members of Epsilon Platoon and other scattered company soldiers.\n\n'Any vox-sets here?' she asked. One hand was on her holstered pistol, a slender disciplinary cane in the other.\n\n'Yeah, I got the platoon set,' said Beley, pointing to a bulky transmitter box that was set on the dirt nearby. There were lasguns, power packs and a few rations boxes heaped next to it.\n\nThe integrity officer walker over to the vox-set, raised a booted foot and stamped hard on the communications equipment. The box was sturdy and hardly bent under the blow.\n\n'What are you doing?' Beley took a few steps towards her amidst cries from the others, but a glare from the integrity officer stopped him mid-stride and silenced the rest.\n\nShe kicked the set over, exposing the speaker to her descending heel. Again and again she drove her boot into the controls, until grille, dials and internal circuits were scattered about, sparks and crackles emitting from the dying voxcaster.\n\n'What was that for?' asked Zenobi. She regretted the outburst, but was still unsettled from her recent trauma and couldn't stop the words coming out. 'We might need that.'\n\n'There will be no unauthorised transmissions. Several vox-sets will be retained for corps command.' The integrity officer stepped closer, looking at each of them. 'Someone tried to contact the incoming aircraft prior to the attack.'\n\nZenobi drew in a breath, exchanging glances with the others nearby.\n\n'What happened to them?' asked Kettai.\n\n'Dead, in the attack,' replied the integrity officer, scowling. 'Unfortunate that she died before we could learn if there were any others that thought as she did.'\n\nThe integrity officer drew away from them, cane swishing in her hand.\n\n'The closer we come to the battle, the greater the risk of treachery. There can be no complacency.'\n\n'Yes, bana-madam,' said Kettai, snapping off a salute.\n\n'Get down to the intact carriages. Work parties are separating the locomotive and functional cars. You'll be detailed your labours. There's no way we can move this mess,' a sweeping cane indicated the buckled remains of the train's middle cars, 'so we'll be walking the rest of the way to the Palace.'\n\nBasilica Ventura, five days since assault\n\nTo Keeler the encampment of the Lightbearers was to the shanty shrines as the Sanctum Imperialis was to the shack of a toll keeper. In the ever-twilight of the besieged Imperial Palace, gloom had become the norm, but the Lightbearers had decided to be literal with their name. By some means they had reactivated the energy grid around the Basilica Ventura, which was a gate keep that guarded the Via Oxidentus. The forbidding walls of the barbican were hung with brightly coloured lights and the rooftop avenue that led to it was lined with lamp posts gleaming with red and blue lumens.\n\nMost of the Palace was in collapse nearby, having been struck by several orbital lance bursts during a failure of the aegis. Into the desolation a small sect of the Lectitio Divinitatus had ventured, Keeler had learned, led by a man called Olivier Muižnieks. There was little known about him from before his arrival a few weeks earlier, but already the Lightbearers numbered several hundred devotees. They were sending out messengers to other groups of the Lectitio Divinitatus, actively inviting members to come and join them.\n\nThis certainly was not a furtive prayer-meet in an abandoned tithe house. Keeler was surprised by the number of people that were gathering. It was late evening, though nothing could be seen of stars and moon through the storm above the Palace. Ranging from individuals to extended families, the faithful of the Lightbearers climbed up through the broken ruin of a scriptorum and onto the Via Oxidentus, which ran towards the western districts. The imposing towers and domes of the Capitol Imperator loomed above them, shadowed against the faint glimmer of void shields.\n\nKeeler had come alone, wanting to see for herself the nature of the Lightbearers' rituals without the distraction of Amon's presence. The Custodian's desire to investigate had been placated by a promise that she would meet with him the next morning and report everything she witnessed. In addition, she wore a brooch shaped like a rose, into which had been secured a miniature pict recorder so that Amon could review the encounter himself.\n\nThe immense double doors of the basilica were open, more light spilling from inside, bathing the brickwork road in a yellow glow. Everything seemed clean compared to the shanties that held sway everywhere else, with barely a piece of grit to mar the swept pathway.\n\nHalf a dozen children stood at the doors handing out small lanterns made from the pierced casings of large bore cannons, with twisted wire for ha"}
{"text":"been secured a miniature pict recorder so that Amon could review the encounter himself.\n\nThe immense double doors of the basilica were open, more light spilling from inside, bathing the brickwork road in a yellow glow. Everything seemed clean compared to the shanties that held sway everywhere else, with barely a piece of grit to mar the swept pathway.\n\nHalf a dozen children stood at the doors handing out small lanterns made from the pierced casings of large bore cannons, with twisted wire for handles. She wasn't sure what had been used for the oil within, but assumed it had been salvaged from one of the hundreds of downed planes that had fallen around the Palace during the height of the aerial battle. Nobody gave Keeler a second glance as she took up one of the lamps and stepped within.\n\nThe basilica itself had been almost hollowed out by a blast that had pierced the roof. Floors and walkways of metal sheets and wooden planks covered the hole that burrowed half a kilometre down into the body of the Sanctum Imperialis' foundations, and parts of the upper levels remained like mezzanines, lined with more of the faithful. The glow of so many lanterns suffused everything with visual warmth, and Keeler could feel a spirit of welcome embracing her as she ascended a ramp to the nearest level.\n\nShe found a place between several families - there were all ages here, including a few attendees in their Imperial Army uniforms. Smiles greeted her but thankfully no questions.\n\nAbout half an hour passed until the doors swung closed, leaving only the light of the lanterns that spiralled up the inside of the basilica. About halfway up, some forty metres above the doors, a curtain was pulled back from an archway and a youthful man stepped out, flanked by a pair of older women. They were dressed in identical robes of white and yellow, a glittering of metallic thread around collar, hem and cuff. All three had shaved heads, a sheen of perspiration on their hairless scalps. The two women each carried a large volume, bound in black leather or mock-leather, embossed with silver writing. Many scraps of paper jutted from between the pages, marking particular passages of what Keeler knew to be the Book of Divinity. Her hand moved to her far humbler copy beneath her dress, and saw others around her doing likewise, the book itself as much a totem as a reference work.\n\nOlivier Muižnieks, for such it had to be, advanced a few paces further than his companions, his hands clasped to his belly. There was a softness about him, a little flesh on the jowls, a bit of a paunch at the waist. Unusual in such dire times, when so many ate only rarely. On further study, Keeler saw a looseness in the skin that suggested Olivier had been carrying a lot more weight until recently. He wasn't putting himself above the food shortages suffered by his congregation.\n\n'Faithful!' he declared, raising his hands. He had a soft voice, smooth and assured, an accent that Keeler couldn't exactly place but which brought to mind the Europa hives. Despite his tempered demeanour, his words carried well in the confines of the makeshift temple. 'Raise up your lights so that we might feel the gaze of the Emperor in the darkness.'\n\nThe congregation lifted their lamps and Keeler copied them. Though each offered but a small yellow flicker, the combined effect of so many tallow-lights was a warm suffusing of the basilica's interior. As flames danced in the draughts, shapes moved in half-shadow on the walls.\n\n'Feel the breath of the Emperor entering your lungs,' Olivier said, commanding but gentle.\n\nKeeler took a breath. She tasted tallow smoke and sweat and... Impossibly, she thought she could smell blossom, the fragrance of nightrose that used to grow near her window when she was a child. Delicate gasps from others around her revealed that she was not alone in the experience. Her gaze drifted between Olivier and the near-invisible movement of the wall shadows. His voice continued, hypnotic and low.\n\n'Feel the hands of the Emperor lift you up.'\n\nThe basilica faded as the shadow images grew clearer. Olivier's voice was a breeze in the swaying bushes that surrounded Keeler. There was long grass under her bare feet. All about her the wind stirred a beautiful garden - not an ornate, ordered plot but a natural flourishing of wildflowers and heathland, which stretched onto far hills broken by copses of golden-leafed trees.\n\nHer eyes were open as she wandered, taking in the bucolic voice of the wind, the buzz of insects and creaking of bending tree trunks. She walked slowly, with purpose, gazing upon each flower as though it were a newly revealed wonder, the warmth of the sun always on her back no matter where she turned.\n\nShe tried to see the sun, to look upon its brightness, but the light was omnipresent, yet without source. Keeler told herself that it was not wise to look upon the font of this power. To gaze upon the soul of the Emperor was to see into the heart of divinity. The sons and daughters of the Navis Nobilite had been bred over generations that they might see the chink of the Emperor's spirit that was the Astronomican; to see it in full splendour would surely shred one's own soul from the body.\n\nShe was drawn across a babbling brook into a broad pasture, where she came upon the greatest tree she had ever seen. How she had not observed it before defied logic, but she knew this was a place of faith not reason and accepted it as such.\n\nThe tree stretched beyond the clouds, its sprawling limbs holding up the vault of the heavens themselves. The branches quivered with life, bending beneath their burden, and from this came a tremendous creaking. She listened awhile, trying to hear the voice of the Emperor in the sound of the tree.\n\nHer transition back to reality was abrupt but not harsh, like waking naturally from a deep slumber, refreshed and clear of thought. She heard weeping, but those around her shed tears of joy not woe, clasping each other in their shared ecstasy. She took a moment to steady herself, unsure of her own body.\n\nA man in late middle age approached her, a broad smile on his face, eyes alive with delight.\n\n'Did you see the tree?' she asked, wanting to share the feeling that bubbled inside her breast.\n\n'Tree?' He laughed. 'I followed the rose path. You saw a tree?'\n\n'The lord of trees, the strength of the Emperor holding His shield above us,' Keeler confessed. 'It was incredible.'\n\nThe man's eyes widened further and he reached for her arm.\n\n'Amazing! Come, come, you must tell Olivier of your journey.'\n\nShe allowed herself to be led around the rampway until she was brought before the head of the Lightbearers. His gaze turned to her as she approached, his eyes a startling green, reminding her of the verdant gardens.\n\n'Olivier!'\n\n'How can I help you, Vili?'\n\n'This woman, she says she saw the Tree of Hope!'\n\nOlivier's first reaction was a smile, no hint of suspicion or surprise.\n\n'Indeed?' He held out a hand and Keeler shook it. 'That is a blessing that you have come to us and shared such a thing. Who are you, daughter of the Emperor?'\n\nShe hesitated, not sure if she wanted to reveal herself in this way.\n\n'I understand,' Olivier continued. 'We all have pasts - and presents! - that perhaps are to be kept secret. We are united in our single purpose under the light of the God-Emperor, and that is all that matters.'\n\nThere was an openness about him that Keeler could not resist. She had been used to doubts and suspicion and questions, and here was a man who wore his faith like a light, accepting of her without reservation.\n\n'Keeler. My name is Euphrati Keeler.'\n\nOthers nearby heard her reply and a small pool of silence spread around them. Eyes turned towards Keeler, faces displaying a mixture of fascination and delight.\n\n'Euphrati Keeler?' It seemed impossible that Olivier's smile had widened even further. 'The Guide? The one that brought the Light of the Emperor back to Terra?'\n\n'I...' She had accepted her role as a messenger for the Lectitio Divinitatus, but being confronted by the truth of what that meant caught her off guard. 'If that is your belief. I am Euphrati Keeler, and I would like to know more about the Lightbearers.'\n\nRann fights back\n\nSolidarity\n\nA deeper loyalty\n\nLion's Gate space port, stratophex core, six days since assault\n\nHour after hour the enemy continued to push towards the skybridges. Pressed on all sides, it took the best part of a day for Rann to muster a force capable of pushing back against the Iron Warriors' advance. As the traitors moved further down the Starspear they overran defence emplacements, reducing Rann's anti-air and anti-orbital fire. Cannons from lower regions were still capable of keeping back larger vessels but a stream of drop-ships had reinforced the initial enemy landing.\n\nThe technophage that had been introduced to the port's systems continued to plague everything from gun control to energy output, bringing rolling blackouts, environmental support shutdowns and weapons misfires. Every tech-priest was spared other duties to coordinate the response, but for the most part Rann had access only to crude hard-line communications between the strategium and his defence posts, and short-range personal vox between companies in the battle.\n\n'Simple is best,' he told Haeger and the six Imperial Army colonels who'd travelled to Lion Primus to receive their briefing in person. All communications equipment in the chamber had been shut off, just in case the Dark Mechanicum had devised some means of reversing the transmitters to listen in on the council. Word of mouth was slow but hard to intercept. 'Our objective in the base is to slow the advance and contain it where possible. There's almost no leadership that I have seen, so redirect their attacks to non-vital areas. Let them rampage around the hab-blocks and loot what they can - the citizens will fight to keep them at bay as well. Haeger, what's your assessment of the infiltration attack "}
{"text":"se the Dark Mechanicum had devised some means of reversing the transmitters to listen in on the council. Word of mouth was slow but hard to intercept. 'Our objective in the base is to slow the advance and contain it where possible. There's almost no leadership that I have seen, so redirect their attacks to non-vital areas. Let them rampage around the hab-blocks and loot what they can - the citizens will fight to keep them at bay as well. Haeger, what's your assessment of the infiltration attack in Sky City?'\n\n'Problematic,' said the lieutenant-commander. He zoomed in the monochrome briefing slate to show several key port systems that were situated close to the Iron Warriors' attack. 'Plasma reactors, conveyor access and the bridges themselves are all within a few kilometres of the enemy insertion. We have no more information regarding how they arrived, so there could be further reinforcements on their way that we cannot detect.'\n\n'Prioritise vulnerable sites by value and location. There are ten thousand Imperial Army veterans in Sky City. Deploy them and reinforce with a thousand legionaries.'\n\n'And what are you going to do with the rest of your warriors, lord seneschal?' asked Colonel Maigraut. The Imperial Army chief of staff fidgeted with the brim of the officer's cap on the table in front of her. 'There is another Iron Warriors column approaching along Highway Four. It is possible that a sally from one of the minor gates could assault the enemy forces from the rear, catching them before they gain access to the outer defences.'\n\n'We have to deal with the enemy already here,' said Rann. 'I'm taking ten thousand legionaries into the Starspear to meet the aerial assault head-on. It's the worst area in terms of our data, so I need to see for myself exactly what sort of trouble we're in.'\n\n'But if we allow-'\n\n'Your troopers cannot fight in the depressurised levels. If you wish to contact Lord Dorn and request an Imperial Army armoured reserve be despatched to counter the Iron Warriors, I will endorse the move. But I cannot ignore the army landed on the orbital docks.'\n\nThe colonel acquiesced with a nod of the head. She put her cap back on and stood up, straightening her uniform. The other officers also stood, looking to Maigraut for guidance.\n\n'We will hold to the last trooper,' she assured Rann. 'I shall send request for an armoured thrust as you suggest. For the Emperor!'\n\nShe raised a hand to her cap in salute, copied by the other colonels. Rann banged a fist to his plastron.\n\n'For the Emperor,' he replied.\n\nHe waited a few seconds as they filed into the strategium, and then followed, Haeger at his side.\n\n'There is a Rhino outside ready to take you to the muster, commander. Your Huscarls are already waiting for you at the transfer ramps into the Starspear.' Haeger moved quickly to one of the scanning consoles and returned with a flexisheet showing the top third of the space port. It looked like a heat map, blurs of white over a complex wireframe model. 'Latest augur returns.'\n\n'I'll study it on the way,' said Rann, taking the flexi. 'Remember, our mission is to slow them down. Give ground to preserve resistance, no unnecessary offensive action unless the opportunity is too good to pass up.'\n\n'Defence first. I understand, commander.' Haeger thumped a fist to his plastron, the crash of ceramite momentarily louder than the grinding of cogitators and the murmuring of servitors.\n\nRann turned and left, knowing there were a hundred things he wanted to tell Haeger, and knowing equally well they were all redundant. The lieutenant-commander was a highly capable war leader. As he clambered through the Rhino's rear hatch, Rann knew that protocol really dictated that Haeger lead this attack while he, the senior officer, continued in the role of strategic command. He was grateful that Haeger hadn't even mentioned swapping places.\n\nSon Basin, forty-one days before assault\n\nThe weather rapidly worsened, so that even the days were a frigid ordeal. The further north the Addaba Free Corps trudged, the colder they felt. As altitude increased, so did the chill wind. Eighteen days since the train had been attacked and the sun was a memory. Smoke choked the upper airs, spread far and wide from the continuing bombardment of the Imperial Palace. Even at midday it was as cool as an Addaba dusk.\n\nZenobi huddled close to the other squad members, swathed in a thick coat, the bulky gloves on her hands making it difficult to grip her lasgun and the banner pole. Despite the burden she was grateful for the clothing, supplied by the seamstations back at Addaba - for months they had known they were destined to fight at the Imperial Palace in the heights of the Himalazia. It had not mattered when they were deployed, the turn of seasons did little to change the climate of the high mountains. Every kitbag had contained a coat, gloves and a body stocking to be worn beneath the uniform coveralls. Though much had been lost in the wreckage, there were enough kitbags for everyone.\n\nThey followed the line of the solitary rail, the locomotive and four carriages chugging along with them. The officers rode on board, but most of the available space, those four cars not adorned with cannons, was packed full of weapons, power packs and such other supplies as could be fitted into every nook and gap. One wagon had been turned into a rolling hospital, where the seven surviving medicae did their best to ward off starvation, dehydration, frostbite and exhaustion, with diminishing success.\n\nZenobi's company had got off relatively lightly, with only a handful of walking wounded and perhaps a score of dead. Some platoons had suffered almost fifty per cent casualties, while the companies in the middle carriages had been all but wiped out. The survivors had been spread into the existing formations, so that two new arrivals had joined Zenobi's platoon.\n\nOne was the new squad sergeant, a gruff woman named Attah, who was as different to Alekzanda as the Himalazia were to the plains around Addaba. She barked her commands with a sneer, derided her squad's efforts and was generally unpleasant. It was also clear that she was as unhappy with her assignment as her subordinates and missed no opportunity to compare them unfavourably to her former squad. At night she muttered the names of her dead troopers, restless in her sleep. For this she was given more latitude than perhaps she was due, for nobody could imagine what it would be like to survive when everyone else around you had been killed.\n\nThe integrity officers carried out hourly inspections, hovering like vultures around the marching platoons, ears and eyes alert to any mischief. The influx of relative strangers into the surviving companies stirred up suspicions and there had been a flurry of accusations and counter-accusations.\n\nJust as they were bedding down for the night, three integrity officers approached through the dark, their pistols in hand. Jawaahir arrived a few seconds later.\n\n'Which of you is Seleen Mogowe?' she asked.\n\n'That's me,' Seleen replied, standing up from her bedroll. There was frozen dirt on her coat and she brushed it off self-consciously. 'What do you want?'\n\nZenobi knew Seleen well, that no belligerence was intended, but she cringed at her friend's forthright manner in front of the integrity high officer.\n\n'You submitted a message for return to Addaba this afternoon?'\n\n'Yeah, that was to my niece. She's only six years old, I thought she'd like a letter from her auntie.'\n\n'Come with me.' Jawaahir turned away, expecting compliance. Seleen did not give it.\n\n'What's this about?' she demanded. 'What's the problem?'\n\nOthers in the platoon, Zenobi included, roused themselves from their sleeping sacks. The integrity officers twitched, but none of them raised a weapon. Jawaahir was calmer, regarding the minor insurrection with a calculating gaze, her eyes reflecting the orange gleam of the camp burner they had clustered around for warmth.\n\n'I wish to clarify a statement you made in your letter,' said the integrity high officer.\n\n'Then ask me here,' said Seleen. 'I got nothing to hide.'\n\nJawaahir looked at her for several seconds, unmoving. Her hand slowly dipped into a pocket and produced a folded piece of paper.\n\n'Is that my letter?'\n\n'You wrote, \"I know this battle is inevitable, that it couldn't have ended any other way, but I wish that it didn't have to be fought by us.\"' Jawaahir folded the letter back along its creases and returned it to her pocket. 'Why are you reluctant to fight for Addaba? Does the future freedom of your niece mean nothing to you?'\n\n'Come on, Seleen's as loyal as any of us,' said Tewedros from the ring of half-gloom beyond the immediate gathering of troopers. 'Which of us hasn't wished we didn't have to fight?'\n\nThere were a few murmurs of agreement but Zenobi remained silent, watching her companions carefully. She glanced to her right, grateful to see Menber standing a few metres away. His arms were folded and his brow creased in a scowl, but he kept his lips shut too.\n\n'Would you have others die and fight in your place? Would you trust the future of Addaba to others?' growled Jawaahir, stalking further into the light, her anger flashing as she glanced at the group of troopers. 'Nothing - nothing! - less than total dedication will see us to victory! When your friend Seleen has her lasgun pointing at an enemy, do you want her to wonder for a moment if she has the right to kill them? Is your life worth her hesitation?'\n\n'I wouldn't-'\n\n'You already have,' snapped Jawaahir. 'Selfishness breeds cowardice, Trooper Mogowe.'\n\n'What's going to happen to her?' Zenobi asked quietly, stepping towards her squadmate. 'What's the punishment?'\n\n'Close observation,' Jawaahir replied. She looked at Seleen. 'Yours is not a grand transgression, but we must be sure of your integrity to the cause. You and others are being formed into a dedicated platoon under the direct command of an integrity offi"}
{"text":"our life worth her hesitation?'\n\n'I wouldn't-'\n\n'You already have,' snapped Jawaahir. 'Selfishness breeds cowardice, Trooper Mogowe.'\n\n'What's going to happen to her?' Zenobi asked quietly, stepping towards her squadmate. 'What's the punishment?'\n\n'Close observation,' Jawaahir replied. She looked at Seleen. 'Yours is not a grand transgression, but we must be sure of your integrity to the cause. You and others are being formed into a dedicated platoon under the direct command of an integrity officer.'\n\nSeleen laughed, her relief evident.\n\n'That's it? Redeployment to the naughty girls' company? A punishment shift... I thought...' She made a slashing motion across her throat.\n\n'Lieutenant Okoye!' Jawaahir's voice cut across the whine of the wind, summoning the officer as if by magic, though Zenobi assumed he had already been warned regarding the arrest of Seleen.\n\n'Yes, integrity high officer?'\n\n'The solidarity of your platoon is admirable, but please remind them that they are not to question the authority of integrity officers.'\n\n'Yes, integrity high officer,' growled the platoon commander. He raised his voice to address the assembled soldiers. 'You will all stand watch for the next two hours! Patrol by squads on the perimeter. Sergeants, take the names of any man or woman that complains.'\n\nA chorus of yessirs echoed back, accompanied by a swell of suppressed sighs and grumbling.\n\n'See you on the battle line,' said Seleen, lifting a hand to a salute that turned into a wave. She disappeared into the darkness with the integrity officers.\n\nWhen they were gone, Kettai slipped out of the gloom, joining Zenobi and Menber.\n\n'Punishment platoon?' he whispered. 'Do you really believe that?'\n\n'Not a word of it,' said Zenobi. 'I'd be surprised if we ever see Seleen again.'\n\nZenobi slept fitfully, disturbed by the cold and a slew of disjointed dreams. She awoke as the engines of the train growled into life, fumes billowing from its stacks. Dawn tinged the horizon and she could see the silhouettes of the sentries atop the ridge to the east. Northwards the rising sun touched upon the snow-covered flanks of the mountains, but it was the continual shimmer of purple and blue from beyond them that caught the eye.\n\nMenber rolled out of his blankets and came over, following her gaze.\n\n'Do you think it'll still be going on when we get there?' she asked.\n\n'I don't know if I want it to or not,' he replied, expression pensive. 'If it stops, that might mean we're too late.'\n\n'But you don't want to be walking into that storm...' Zenobi finished for him.\n\nHe nodded and looked at her. 'I'd rather we had our chance to make a difference.'\n\nMovement behind her caused both of them to turn. It was Kettai, rubbing sleep from his eyes.\n\n'You think we will? Make a difference, I mean.' He crouched and started to roll up his blanket, breath steaming the air. 'Millions of soldiers. Titans. Legionaries. Starships. You really think the Addaba Free Corps makes a difference in all of that?'\n\n'Why not?' replied Menber, fists balling. 'In a close battle, who knows what would swing it one way or the other?'\n\nKettai conceded the point with a nod and shrug, and started packing his belongings into his kitbag. Others were rousing, but the morning calls from the officers were still a few minutes away.\n\nThe first they knew of the gunship was an explosion that ripped through the camp of Second Company, a few hundred metres west of where Zenobi gathered her stuff.\n\nThe blast wave tossed bodies high into the air, tatters of burning bedrolls and shards of camp stoves hurled with them. The thud of the detonation rolled across the slumbering companies, a snarl of plasma jets growing louder in its wake.\n\n'Get down!'\n\nKettai threw himself at Menber and Zenobi, tackling both of them hard into the frozen dirt. Zenobi felt something crack in her side as his weight landed on top of her. Past his sprawling body she saw the blunt-nosed gunship diving groundwards, cannons mounted atop the fuselage spitting shells. She could trace the impacts through the camp, those on their feet cut down while those still waking were tossed into the air like dolls by the barrage of explosions.\n\nThe bark of the train's guns joined the noise of the attack, blossoms of shrapnel detonating around the incoming aircraft. Smaller guns on its flanks opened fire, the flare of bolts raking more death through the fleeing and huddling soldiers of Addaba.\n\n'This way,' said Menber as the gunship banked away, revealing a symbol Zenobi knew well - the Legion badge of the Luna Wolves, who had taken the name Sons of Horus just before the outbreak of the war.\n\n'Where?' she asked, getting to her feet, Kettai and a handful of others joining them.\n\n'Under the train?' someone suggested.\n\n'It'll target the train next, I bet,' said Kettai.\n\n'Split up.' Lieutenant Okoye arrived with two other squads, some of them wounded. With him was an integrity officer, his uniform torn down one side, left arm a bloody mess strapped across his chest with a belt.\n\nThe pitch of the gunship's engines changed and it looped over, turning to bring its main weapons to bear again.\n\n'Spread out!' bellowed Okoye. 'Don't give the gunners an easy target.'\n\nThey broke like iron ants from a disrupted nest, running in all directions. Zenobi found herself heading in roughly the same direction as Kettai, the integrity officer and three others. They headed almost directly away from the roar of the attacking gunship. She almost covered her ears, wanting to block out the increasing snarl of its approach, wincing as she expected to feel a bolt in her back at any moment.\n\nShe thought about the banner, left among the packs and sleeping sacks. She slowed, thinking to go back for it.\n\nHesitation saved her life.\n\nA rocket exploded about twenty metres in front of her. She saw an instant of brightness, Kettai lifted bodily by the blast, two others engulfed by flames. The wounded integrity officer, alongside Zenobi to her right, turned away but she was caught looking directly at the detonation.\n\nA hot wind lifted her from her feet, carrying her several metres before she landed hard, her back catching against a jut of rock, gouging through coat and coverall into the flesh of her right side.\n\nFor several seconds she thought she was deaf and blind, her world nothing more than ringing and blackness. Through the sensory static emerged other sounds, her name being called. Her vision started to fuzz back into something recognisable - the face of Kettai.\n\nBlinking hard, she pushed herself up, feeling pain slash through the side of her face as the skin stretched. She lifted a hand and blood came away on the fingertips of her glove.\n\n'Just a gash,' said Kettai. 'You'll live.'\n\nPart of his left ear was missing, crimson dribbling down the side of his neck. There was a burn mark on his coat near the left shoulder too.\n\n'Look here.' One of the third squad troopers was standing over something a few metres away. He had his lasgun in his hands, pointing down at the integrity officer, who lay crumpled and unconscious at the man's feet.\n\nZenobi's eye caught a glint of metal in the light of the flames from the rocket. She stooped and pulled the wounded officer's pistol from the melting frost.\n\n'This is the one that took Seleen,' the trooper said, his finger moving from the lasgun guard to the trigger. 'Nobody's going to miss this bastard.'\n\n'What?' Zenobi took a step. 'What are you doing?'\n\n'I'm done with this,' the trooper said. Zenobi remembered his name was Tewedros. 'These integrity officers will kill more of us than the enemy.'\n\nZenobi was aware of the weight of the pistol in her hand. She lifted it, aiming at Tewedros' right eye.\n\n'Put down your lasgun,' she said.\n\n'Why? You're not going to choose me over him. What've they ever done for you? This type would have been grinding you about slacking on the line. Bullies, nothing more.'\n\n'There's too much at stake to fight among ourselves,' said Zenobi. 'Did you hear what happened about the voxcaster?'\n\n'So what? So what if someone tri-'\n\n'It's all or nothing! You're either for the cause or you're the enemy. Jawaahir is right. They're all right. Look at you, thinking to kill your own.'\n\n'They're not our own! This one wouldn't give your body a second look. You don't know anything, barely old enough to work the line. We don't need them to know what we're fighting for.'\n\n'I've worked the line,' said Zenobi. 'And my family worked it. I worked since Horus started this war, so don't tell me I don't know what we're fighting for. It's not so we can turn on each other. This is our chance to fight for our future.'\n\nShe saw the look in his eyes, the tightening of the skin as he grimaced, and knew he was going to pull the trigger.\n\nShe pulled hers first.\n\nThe las-bolt hit him in the cheek, searing through flesh and bone in an instant. He fell, folding in on himself like a worker exoskeleton suddenly powered down.\n\nHer hand started to shake, until she felt strong fingers closing around her own, another hand gently lifting away the pistol. She turned her head, numb, and looked at Kettai.\n\n'Your first one,' he said.\n\n'First what?'\n\n'First kill.'\n\nShe looked at Tewedros' body, a trickle of blood leaking from the neat hole in his face. The moisture in his eyes was already glistening with ice.\n\n'Didn't think it would be one of our own,' she said quietly, lowering her hand.\n\n'It wasn't,' Kettai told her.\n\nShe couldn't take her eyes off Tewedros. Who knew the enemy would look so much like her friends and family?\n\nGive no ground\n\nA tense ascent\n\nThe long walk\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex skin zone, six days since assault\n\nAs though it were the fist of Dorn himself, Rann's counter-attack punched deep into the oncoming companies of Iron Warriors. Hall by hall, conveyor by conveyor, they drove back into the Starspear, while assault companies bounded from level to level, scaling the skin of the space port to fall upon the enemy from without.\n\nWhile t"}
{"text":"enemy would look so much like her friends and family?\n\nGive no ground\n\nA tense ascent\n\nThe long walk\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex skin zone, six days since assault\n\nAs though it were the fist of Dorn himself, Rann's counter-attack punched deep into the oncoming companies of Iron Warriors. Hall by hall, conveyor by conveyor, they drove back into the Starspear, while assault companies bounded from level to level, scaling the skin of the space port to fall upon the enemy from without.\n\nWhile they waged a fresh offensive into the Starspear, the Imperial Army surged from Sky City into Low District.\n\nRann led from the front. The deployment of the First Assault Cadre on open ground had been something of an oddity, although highly effective. Their specialist equipment and tactics were intended for warship-to-warship boarding and defence, as well as combat in close urban environments. The confines of the Lion's Gate space port were perfect ground, with broad areas linked by narrow choke points he could easily defend, or tight channels and passages along which his troops could advance with near impunity behind their boarding shields. In their wake, several thousand more Space Marines consolidated their hold on the reclaimed territories, guarding against counter-attack and flanking forces.\n\nSiegecraft was no mystery to the IV Legion traitors. Their specialist wall-breakers and assault companies had been landed en masse across the Starspear. Having swept away the remnants of the standing defence force, whose efforts had been much hampered by the lack of environmental protection, the Iron Warriors had secured several wide bridgeheads around the highest landing decks of Sky City and were bringing in squads by the dozen to reinforce any contested position. In a few more hours they would be able to meet up with the enemy force at large in the Sky City core, undercutting almost half of the Imperial Fists' offensive.\n\nRann was determined to retake at least one of the docks, cutting off the reinforcements at source and giving the Iron Warriors cause to think twice before sending another wave directly into Sky City. From across the nearby commands he pulled together the breach companies of the assault cadre. A steady slew of transports moving along the inner ringway brought in many, others arriving on foot from closer postings.\n\n'It's just a matter of time before they have so many troops, we can't hold them back,' Rann explained to Sergeant Ortor.\n\n'Attack is the best form of defence, lord?' the veteran laughed. 'Nothing to do with you not wanting to be sitting in the strategium looking at screens rather than running about with an axe in your hand?'\n\n'I resent that implication,' the commander replied with a grin.\n\nThe four hundred-strong assault cadre gathered ten levels below the extent of the Iron Warriors' furthest advance. Pockets of Space Marines from the IV Legion had established themselves across the upper tier, but seemed reluctant to advance into Sky City, as though waiting for something despite the advantage gained by their rapid and unexpected advance.\n\n'They should have pushed on for the bridges,' Rann continued, marching at a steady pace with his warriors. Three hundred of them made their way to the great loading conveyors in the skin of the Starspear, while a hundred-strong force under Lieutenant Koerner had been sent ahead to make a long climb by stairwell. Koerner's force would arrive a few minutes before the main attack, sowing some discord among the Iron Warriors, who undoubtedly had strong cordons across the rapid transit shafts and docking elevators.\n\nHaeger's periodic updates painted a grim picture. The technophagic invasion continued to intermittently play havoc with the scanners, vox-network and transportation systems. Even with the assumption that many of the augur readings were false positives acting as a mask for the true location of the enemy, there were several thousand Iron Warriors in the Starspear while ten times that number were reinforcing the attack at the base. It was unimaginative, a simple pincer assault on the vertical rather than horizontal, but the traitors did not need to be sophisticated. They had orbital supremacy and the advantage of numbers. Rann was only thankful that it seemed the World Eaters and Emperor's Children were reluctant to join the attack in force without their warp-twisted primarchs. If the psychic shield failed and the Neverborn appeared, as they had during the latter stages of the void war, there was likely nothing short of the Emperor Himself that could hold the space port.\n\n'It's time,' he told his companions, signalling Sergeant Ortor towards the control panel between the two massive conveyor gates. Ortor plugged in the device supplied by Magos Deveralax, which contained a cipher devised by the magos to override any lingering technophage. It could only be introduced to systems locally and physically at the moment, but Haeger had assured Rann in the last update that a more widespread cure was being created.\n\n'Hope this works,' said Ortor, pushing the call buttons. The clamour of arriving troops echoed around the loading bay.\n\n'What is the worst that could happen?' joked one of the assault veterans.\n\n'This doesn't work and the enemy override the emergency protocols so that we get dropped ten kilometres straight to the bottom of the shaft,' the sergeant replied gruffly, his usual humour stifled by the tension that was building among the legionaries.\n\n'This will also mask our arrival,' Rann broadcast, seeking to find something more reassuring for his warriors to think about. 'Unless someone's stood looking down the shaft, they'll have about thirty seconds warning before we arrive.'\n\n'We're treating this as a bridgehead engagement, even though technically we're defending,' said Ortor, reiterating the briefing Rann had given them all half an hour earlier. 'We break through the first defence line and then set up for hit-and-run raids across the neighbouring grid zones. We're the shield for the companies that are following. Ten thousand of our brothers are ready to counter-attack, but they'll get nowhere if we don't keep the enemy off the transitways and conveyor shafts.'\n\n'Deployment is critical,' Rann told them over the vox. 'The conveyors are large enough to carry the whole force between them, but if we get stuck on the exit we can't bring numbers to bear. Lead squads will take hits but we need a fifty-metre zone of control within ten seconds of arrival. Use your shields, advance under cover fire. You've done this a thousand times.'\n\nHe almost said, It's just another battle, but chose not to at the last moment. This wasn't just another battle; his warriors knew it and would see such a speech for the platitude it was. Rann took a different approach.\n\n'We're going to be in the battle of our lives in about three minutes. Lord Dorn and the Emperor are depending on us to hold this space port for as long as possible. No pointless heroics - we fight for as long as we can and make them pay for every pace they take on our world. They advance ten metres, we'll drive them back five. You look after your squad-brothers, keep tight and trust in one another.' He took a breath, and in the pause heard the rattle of the approaching conveyors. 'This is why we are here. This is what we were created for.'\n\nWith a squeal of metal and crunch of braking gears sliding into place, the two massive platforms arrived. The command overrides keeping their approach secret had shut down the motors for the doors, meaning they had to be manually cranked apart. Four legionaries apiece started on the lock wheels that flanked the gateways, like sailors of old on a capstan. Nearly thirty metres high, a metre thick, each sliding gate weighed several hundred tonnes. Step by step, boosted by their armour, the legionaries worked the wheels, the doors creaking apart a few centimetres at a time.\n\nWhen the gap was wide enough for a Space Marine to pass through, the squads started to board, pushing on into the cavernous interiors, boots echoing as though in some grand hall.\n\n'These are just the small service shafts,' Rann remarked to Ortor. 'You can fit tanks or Knight walkers in here, but it's the mega-conveyors in the core that we really need to hold. They're the Titan-lifters.'\n\n'Couldn't we disable them, lord?'\n\n'Lord Dorn has made it clear that the facilities for a strong counter-attack must be maintained.'\n\nThe doors were about ten metres apart and Rann joined the cluster of warriors pressing through the gap, shield on one arm, axe in the other hand. His bolter and second axe were clamped to the inside of his boarding shield, which was as big as a tank hatch. Ortor joined him, the magos' electronic key-box in hand.\n\n'We're going to use the door motors at the top, aren't we?' the sergeant asked.\n\n'Yes, sergeant, we are.'\n\nWhen the last of the assault force were aboard, the door gears were disengaged and counterweights rattled past the conveyor, pulling the gates shut. The crash of the closing portals shuddered through the immense cage, echoing up the shaft.\n\n'Just another bang,' Rann assured his warriors. 'There's about ten megatonnes of ordnance hitting the port every second, nobody's going to care about one more bang.'\n\nThe floor vibrated as the conveyor motors kicked in, juddering at first as the weight was taken up by immense chains and gears, becoming smoother as the mechanism found its pace. Rann ignored the urge to look up. He knew there was no ceiling, just empty shaft above where chains swung and clanked. Instead, he turned and focused on the doors. The rest of the company followed suit, an about-turn that had them all facing the way out when they arrived. Lead squads jostled past those assigned support duties, bringing their shields to the fore, while others readied their bolters. A few had more exotic weapons - flamers, graviton guns, plasma guns.\n\nMentally counting off the levels as they passed,"}
{"text":"ge to look up. He knew there was no ceiling, just empty shaft above where chains swung and clanked. Instead, he turned and focused on the doors. The rest of the company followed suit, an about-turn that had them all facing the way out when they arrived. Lead squads jostled past those assigned support duties, bringing their shields to the fore, while others readied their bolters. A few had more exotic weapons - flamers, graviton guns, plasma guns.\n\nMentally counting off the levels as they passed, Rann calculated that they were forty seconds from arrival. In ten seconds the noise of the conveyor would be too loud to miss. Thirty seconds ago the stairwell force should have begun the attack. Everything had to be timed; the technophage interruptions to the vox meant anything but almost line-of-sight communication was likely to fail or, worse, be intercepted.\n\n'Fifteen seconds!' he called out to his troops.\n\nOrtor connected the key-box to the rune pad and the lead squads advanced several more strides, almost to the gates themselves. Shields crashed together, forming a wall inside the conveyor.\n\n'Ten seconds!'\n\nEvery warrior had a visor chronometer but there was nothing like an insistent voice in the ear to concentrate the mind. Rann took a moment to push power through the auto-senses of his armour, blanking his vision whilst boosting the aural signal. Through the mess of machinery and detonations he thought he could pick out bolter fire nearby. If he was right, it meant the vanguard had arrived just at the right time.\n\n'Five... Four... Three... Two... One...'\n\nThere was a pause, two more seconds, before the conveyor thudded to a halt, dipping ever so slightly so that the whole company tilted. Armour whined, compensating for the motion.\n\n'Doors!'\n\nOrtor activated the connection and the great portal groaned open, revealing an expansive chamber as large as the one they had left, lit by strip lumens and the flare of bolt shells. A waft of lubricant, bolt propellant and stale sweat flowed past Rann.\n\nRounds started clanging against the doors and zinging into the conveyor. Detonations sparked along the front line of legionaries' shields. Beyond them Rann could see the metal armour and yellow-and-white stripes of Iron Warriors squads, many of them turned to face a blur of yellow emerging from a distant stairway. Others had kept their weapons trained on the conveyors - Rann couldn't fault the enemy fire discipline.\n\n'Advance!' he bellowed, lifting his axe.\n\nThe conveyor filled with thunder as a hundred and fifty legionaries pounded out through the doors, soon joined by the clamour of bolters and the snap of plasma. A roar emanated in unison from four hundred external address grilles.\n\n'For Dorn and the Emperor!'\n\nVaranzi approaches, thirty-five days before assault\n\nIt was hard to remember if this was the fifth or sixth day since the blizzard had begun. At least it spared them any more strafing runs from passing aircraft. The integrity officers had given up trying to marshal everybody into a single column; there were simply too many stragglers and they were losing their own in sudden flurries of snow or down unseen crevasses.\n\nThey'd been forced to leave the locomotive behind three days earlier. The track had simply stopped, running into a blasted plasma crater that shone like glass. It was impossible to know whether the hit had been deliberate or simply collateral damage from the ongoing bombardment of the Imperial Palace.\n\nNow and then Zenobi thought she could see the towers among the half-seen mountain peaks, but Menber assured her it was impossible. Just more mountains, he said. The aurora of the defence screens still danced beyond the horizon, tinging the snowstorms with a blue-and-purple aura, flickered with the gold and silver of orbital attack. The rumble was constant, broken every few minutes by the higher-pitched whine of some other kind of projectile or the drawn-out, excoriating snarl of a plasma detonation. That they could hear anything over the strengthening winds was testament to the fury of the attack.\n\nThe cold reminded Zenobi of the first time she had been taken to the upper levels of Addaba by her aunties. The hive was nothing like the towering spires of some other cities, most of it spread a hundred and sixty kilometres outwards in the cradlespurs across the plains. Even so, its highest point was several kilometres above sea level, the air bitter.\n\nShe'd cried, only seven years old, her face stinging, gloveless hands bitten to the bone by the chill. She had wondered why her aunties had taken her there, but had been too upset to ask, thinking it was perhaps a punishment. She'd certainly appreciated the view, such as it was from freezing, scrunched eyes. And she'd been very fond of the heat of the forge line when she'd returned, reminding her that she belonged there.\n\nNow she realised they'd just been showing her something different. They'd said nothing, faces wrapped in oil-stained rags as scarves, but she remembered now their look as they gazed far across the wastes of Afrik. It was a lesson that not everywhere was the same. Zenobi looked back and thought how different, how much bigger her world was now. They'd tried to show her a glimpse of what could be, of the lands beyond the walls of her home. Back then there might have been a chance she'd leave Addaba, either by herself or on a caravan, maybe meet someone she loved and travel to their home.\n\nThat had ended with the war. Nobody was allowed off the line without good reason. Dorn, and through him the Emperor, had needed Addaba to labour hard and unceasingly, dreams of distant cities and strange shores forgotten.\n\nShe almost stumbled over something at her feet. Zenobi thought it was a rock at first, dark beneath a thin layer of snow. Kettai stopped and pushed it with a foot, revealing it to be a coat-swathed corpse. It wasn't someone from Addaba: the skin was far too pale, the hair straight and brown, not curled and black. He wore a blue uniform, a long dress coat of black with silver braiding hiding most of it.\n\n'Guess we're... not the only ones that... came this way,' said Menber, teeth chattering. His face was almost hidden between collar, improvised scarf and hood. He folded his hands under his armpits and stamped his feet.\n\nZenobi planted the banner pole in the snow and crouched beside the body. She reached out a hand covered with three layers of glove - the two larger pairs salvaged from companions that had succumbed to the elements. There was something on the man's chest, almost hidden by ice.\n\n'Cut open,' she said, pointing to a horrendous wound that ran from shoulder to gut. The injury was a wide, ragged cut that had splayed his ribs and chewed through internal organs. 'What could do that?'\n\n'Keep moving!' Okoye told them, emerging from the snow, his right side clad in white from the wind-blown ice. 'If you stop you might not start again.'\n\nNobody had strength enough to protest. Zenobi retrieved the banner and plodded on, following in the larger footprints made by Menber, her shorter legs making harder work of the snowdrifts.\n\nThey found other mounds in the snow, more corpses. All of them were dressed as Imperial Army conscripts. Advancing with lasguns at the ready, about half a kilometre later they came upon the broken wreckage of tanks and transports, thirty in all. The vehicles had tried to form a circle but were heavily damaged, some of them with their roofs blown out, others with shattered track guards, links scattered beneath the snow waiting to trip the unwary.\n\nThere were hundreds of bodies, most of them still inside. Everything was frozen solid like a pictograph.\n\nGeneral-Captain Egwu had stopped amid the carnage and was in conference with Jawaahir and several others. Zenobi caught snippets of their conversation through the wind as she and the others trudged past.\n\n'...moved on by now. So many bolt impacts, it had to be the Warmaster's legionaries,' Egwu said. 'We haven't any choice but to push on. There's a road about forty kilometres further along, we'll follow that towards the Palace proper.'\n\n'And if we get attacked, captain?' countered one of the attending lieutenants.\n\n'We fight, of course,' answered Jawaahir. 'We're not here to martyr ourselves. The Addaba Free Corps will fight for its people, in whatever way it has to.'\n\nHers was the final say and the cabal of officers moved to continue on their way.\n\n'You!' Egwu called out through the blizzard. Zenobi stopped and looked around, trying to see who she was shouting for. The general-captain pointed directly at her and turned, forging through the snow.\n\n'Trooper Adedeji!' Egwu's face was burnt down one side, the scar tissue twisting strangely as she grinned. 'Zenobi, isn't it?'\n\nShe nodded her reply, not sure what to say. Jawaahir loomed out of the snow beside the general-captain, brow furrowed.\n\n'What's this?' Egwu asked, pointing to the pole across Zenobi's shoulders. 'You're still carrying the banner?'\n\n'Of course, bana-madam. I'd never leave this behind!'\n\n'See?' said Egwu, rounding on her officers, proving some point that Zenobi was not aware of. 'Trooper Adedeji has carried the company standard for two hundred and thirty kilometres already. Nothing's going to stop her getting to the battle.'\n\nZenobi saw an opportunity to ask a question that had been nagging at her and her companions for several days. There were quite a few of them nearby, having stopped to witness the conversation.\n\n'How much further, bana-madam? How long until we reach the Imperial Palace?'\n\nJawaahir replied first, waving a hand to the north. There were frozen droplets on her eyelashes, her cheeks even more sunken than before.\n\n'Are you sure that's where you want to go, Adedeji?' she asked. 'The wrath of Horus falls with a thousand shells an hour. The Emperor's aegis weakens by the day. You know it is only a matter of time before it fails and the Palace will break under the Warmaster's anger.'\n\n'Where else "}
{"text":"How much further, bana-madam? How long until we reach the Imperial Palace?'\n\nJawaahir replied first, waving a hand to the north. There were frozen droplets on her eyelashes, her cheeks even more sunken than before.\n\n'Are you sure that's where you want to go, Adedeji?' she asked. 'The wrath of Horus falls with a thousand shells an hour. The Emperor's aegis weakens by the day. You know it is only a matter of time before it fails and the Palace will break under the Warmaster's anger.'\n\n'Where else would we fight?' said Zenobi. She turned her gaze back to the general-captain. 'How far is it?'\n\nEgwu glanced away and for a moment Zenobi thought she was not going to answer. Then she looked back at the trooper, her expression intent.\n\n'Nearly a thousand kilometres, Zenobi. Over mountains and valleys, higher and higher, the air thinner and thinner, as winter grows colder.'\n\n'Thank you.'\n\nZenobi shifted the weight of the company standard and turned to the other troopers. She met the gaze of a few, Menber included. Some looked worried, confronting the challenge ahead. Others matched her look of determination.\n\nShe said nothing else but started walking, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the next, for as long as she needed to.\n\nAttrition\n\nIron within\n\nAmon and the Neverborn\n\nLion's Gate space port, stratophex core, six days since assault\n\nThe darkness was split by the flare of bolts snarling back and forth across the lading hall. The vast space echoed with the discharge of weapons and the crack of impacts, cut through with the hiss of plasma bolts and high-pitched whine of melta weapons. Every flash threw stark light onto the rows of Iron Warriors that held the upper gantries and walkways, and across a black void a solid barrier of shields emblazoned with the device of the Imperial Fists. Half-seen chains and lifting rigs lurked in the shadows, the floor and mezzanines scattered with the broken remains of the IV Legion's last attempt to cross the open ground.\n\nThat assault had been ten hours earlier. Since then Forrix's Iron Warriors had been caught in an ever-tightening noose of Imperial Fists and Imperial Army auxiliaries. The latter were a lesser threat, the confines of the chambers and passages around the reactor relays a poor environment for massed platoons. Unable to make their numbers count against their far superior opponents, the Emperor's soldiers were being used to slow down breakout attempts, selling their lives for just long enough to allow the Imperial Fists to bring more potent opposition to bear.\n\nIt was a callous tactic, and Forrix found himself admiring the commander that employed it, whoever that was. Perhaps Sigismund, the famed First Captain, though there had been no report of Dorn's Blade in any of the encounters so far. It might have even been the hand of Dorn himself that pulled the defenders' strings.\n\nIt didn't matter. Forrix had only two concerns as he stood on the line with his warriors, firing his bolter down at the shield-bearers below. Concerns he voiced when Captain Gharal voxed a request to withdraw several squads to the rearguard.\n\n'If we weaken here, the Imperial Fists will push us into the anterior channels. They will be able to set up a secure picket across five levels of the transfer station, blocking all access to the reactor conduits.'\n\n'If we continue to engage at this intensity, triarch, we will run into logistical issues within seven hours. Better to withdraw and temper the level of battle, and fight for longer. The lead companies of the aerial assault force are only two kilometres away.'\n\n'Logistical issues? You mean ammunition supply?'\n\n'Stimulant infusions are reaching unsafe levels. Armour recycling systems need flushing before they start passing toxic elements back into our bodies. Nobody has slept. At the ninety-six-hour mark mental fatigue starts to accelerate rapidly.'\n\n'You want to rest?' Forrix poured all of his scorn into those words, then regretted the rebuke immediately. Gharal was leading the upper elements of the force, half a kilometre away. If he chose to make a breakout - not an unreasonable strategy - he would leave Forrix utterly bereft of support. He assumed a more accommodating tone. 'Your attention to the longer-term viability of our force is commendable. And yet, survival is only one of our two objectives, captain.'\n\n'What do you mean, triarch?'\n\nA lascannon pulse burned through the wall just above Forrix's head showering droplets of molten plasteel onto his armour. He shifted to his left, allowing Merrig and his reaper autocannon to take position and return fire. The pound of the twin-barrelled weapon shook the walkway for several seconds until the gunner stepped back, lifting his smoking weapon.\n\n'Enemy heavy weapon eliminated, triarch,' he said with a hint of pleasure.\n\nForrix banged a fist against the warrior's shoulder guard, a mark of praise, and then pointed for him to move further along the walkway to find another target worth expending his precious ammunition upon.\n\n'What was I saying? Survival. I don't plan to simply be the bone these dogs of Dorn chew on while Kroeger takes the bridges above. I aim to live long enough to see them all dead. To do that, odd as it seems, we have to make ourselves as much trouble as possible. We're not getting out of here alive by ourselves, Gharal. We need that relief column.'\n\n'It's no good to us if we're all dead when it arrives,' said the captain, voice strained.\n\n'The wave attacks through the lower levels ran out of momentum six hours ago. Thirty thousand of the Fourth that followed the lesser formations are engaged in brutal back-and-forth with Dorn's sons. Most of them are new recuits, barely worth the armour they wear. They are not coming. That leaves just the suborbital attack force. If they are going to reach us, we need to draw away as much opposition as possible. We have to remain a mobile and relevant threat.'\n\n'I understand, triarch. If I relocate westwards by three hundred metres there is a maintenance conveyor shaft. We'll be abandoning the upper perimeter but we can flank the defence of the plasma conduits.'\n\n'So commanded,' Forrix said without hesitation. 'I will pull back a company on my left as a feint, to draw more enemy inwards towards the central force. That will give you time to break off engagement and move.'\n\n'Affirmative. Will commence manoeuvre in ten minutes.'\n\nThe vox crackled into inactivity, replaced by the cacophony of the battle that raged around Forrix. Once he'd ordered Lieutenant Sarpara to pull back on the flank, his mind's eye shifted from the wider area to his immediate locale. The warriors of the IV Legion needed to get across the open ground between the conjunctions of stairwells and walkways, but the Imperial Fists were content to defend the opposite side of the hall, ready to cut down anything that ventured out from cover.\n\n'Lieutenant Dreik, have your Iron Havocs ready,' he voxed. 'Assemble on me for dedicated strike force. All other legionaries maintain fire discipline.'\n\nHe mustered together eight squads from his surroundings, moving them down several levels towards the floor of the lading hall while squads of Iron Havocs with lascannons, plasma cannons, multi-meltas, autocannons and other support weaponry made their way to him from across the force. At the ten-minute mark, as Sarpara and Gharal would both be making their moves, Forrix ordered the attack.\n\nTargeting a narrow front of the Imperial Fists' line, about a hundred metres wide and five storeys high, the ad hoc Iron Havocs company unleashed a torrent of shells, las-bolts and plasma, while Forrix's squads burst down the remaining steps and loading ramps.\n\n'Hold bolter fire!' he bellowed at his warriors. The fusillade above masked their energy signature and he didn't want anyone to give away their position in the darkness. 'Wait for my command.'\n\nPlasma bolts smashed into shields and armour, slashing through both while salvos of reaper rounds and heavy bolter fire tore into the gaps carved by lascannon hits. Pounding across the ferrocrete floor, splashing through puddles of blood and oil, Forrix panted hard, hearts and lungs pushed to capacity.\n\nThe first sparks of bolter fire sliced down into his force, passing over him into the squads behind. There were several shouts from injured legionaries.\n\n'Keep moving!' Forrix ordered, straining even harder, his armour carrying him forward in three-metre strides.\n\nThe heavy weapons flared hard for several more seconds, punishing those foes that had remained in the arc of fire. By light of lascannon bursts and detonating bolter rounds, Forrix saw yellow-armoured legionaries ripped apart, their plate no match for the power of the weapons levelled against them.\n\nThrough the flare of the Iron Warriors' heavy weapons poured more bolter fire from the Imperial Fists above - but not directly ahead. The brief but massed fire of the heavy weapons had done its job, carving a narrow but telling wound into the defence line. Forrix and the lead squads gained the stairwells opposite unhindered, crashing over the bodies of Dorn's sons.\n\n'Split by combat squad and provide cover to gather weapons and ammunition,' Forrix ordered. Half of his warriors set upon the corpses of the Imperial Fists, ripping free bolters and magazines, tearing boarding shields and blades from their dead hands. The others pushed outwards as more squads piled into the breach, securing the level above.\n\n'Lieutenant Uhaz, what are the enemy doing?' he voxed.\n\n'Pulling back, triarch.'\n\n'Not mustering for counter-attack?'\n\n'No, triarch, they are moving away from your position.'\n\n'Good. Cover fire and advance by company.'\n\n'Affirmative, triarch.'\n\nForrix turned back to the open hall, almost tripping over the body of an Imperial Fists legionary. He looked down. The warrior's helm had been cracked open by an autocannon hit. Moving his gaze back to the hall, he counted his dead. Thirteen more. Not a bad price to"}
{"text":" Uhaz, what are the enemy doing?' he voxed.\n\n'Pulling back, triarch.'\n\n'Not mustering for counter-attack?'\n\n'No, triarch, they are moving away from your position.'\n\n'Good. Cover fire and advance by company.'\n\n'Affirmative, triarch.'\n\nForrix turned back to the open hall, almost tripping over the body of an Imperial Fists legionary. He looked down. The warrior's helm had been cracked open by an autocannon hit. Moving his gaze back to the hall, he counted his dead. Thirteen more. Not a bad price to pay for getting across the hall, but he'd expended a good amount of heavy weapons ammunition and powercells to do it.\n\nAll to get two hundred metres closer to an objective he wasn't even trying to destroy.\n\nExultant Wall zone, eight days since assault\n\nAmon was known for his patience even among the Custodians, but he had not expected his investigations to be quite so lacking in progress. Gatherings of the Lectitio Divinitatus were scattered all across the Palace, and far beyond he suspected, yet he had seen nothing more threatening than glorified debating groups and book discussion. Whatever power the officers in the quarantine barracks had tapped into was so far absent elsewhere.\n\nKeeler's information about the Lightbearers was the only solid lead they had, but Amon shared her opinion that such progress would be wasted if he made his involvement known. Consequently, the Custodian had agreed to allow her to return at the next gathering to see if there was a repeat of her previous experience. She had claimed it might have been her own, unique connection to the Emperor that had brought about the vision, although Amon was inclined to believe it was more a case of shared massed hallucination. Even without artificial induction, such shared manias were possible, and under the constant stress of the siege all kinds of psychological phenomena were bound to surface among the stifled populace.\n\nPessimism was no excuse for lack of thoroughness, and Amon was determined to continue to observe as many of the remaining sects as possible, in case the Lightbearers proved to be a false hope. His current self-assigned target was a gathering of Imperial Army recruits taking place in one of the makeshift medicae sprawls that had been set up a few kilometres from the fighting at the Exultant Wall, where many casualties were arriving from the offensive through the Lion's Gate space port.\n\nHis presence would be considered exceptional if not threatening, and so he went clad in nondescript cloak and robes. If anyone paid him attention it was likely they would take him for a warrior of the Legiones Astartes rather than a Custodian. He expected no trouble but carried a gladius-style blade favoured by the Imperial Fists concealed within his garb.\n\nHe caught the smell of blood and rot even before he came to the outskirts of the medicae encampment. Though ostensibly a field hospital, there was little more here than in the other slums, the only exception being that the inhabitants were wholly of the Imperial Army rather than from the dwindling non-combatant populace of the Palace. The hospital stretched for three kilometres and over several storeys of former Administratum hab-blocks, the cells and dorms well suited to wards and quarantine rooms. Infants carried ration packs and water flasks, while older children acted as stretcher-bearers, a constant stream of wounded coming in from the front lines. The grisly task of disposing of those that did not survive fell to them also, in almost equal numbers, bodies carried to funeral pyres in an old power plant building a few hundred metres west of the facility. The furnaces burned as constantly as they had done before the siege but now with a far more grotesque fuel.\n\nFlies swarmed thick, drawn by gangrene. Every effort had been made to provide sanitation but the stench of urine and faeces could not be masked. As Amon picked his way through the lines of miserable wretches, he encountered no few that were dead in their cots, their fluids seeping into the bedding. The more he observed the dismal scene, the greater his misgivings. Having witnessed the horrors of the quarantine zone, and the proximity of the first apparition to that degradation, it occurred to Amon that this great hoarding of the dead and dying might be some other part of the Death Guard's plague-scheme.\n\nIt took only a few minutes to locate the shrine that had been erected - the surrounding chambers were empty of patients, which made it instantly stand out among several city blocks of virtually wall-to-wall casualties. In what had once been a ranking clerk's offices, the wooden aquila that had served as a backdrop to the administrator's duties had been brought forth onto an altar of ammunition crates, draped with service medals and identity tags. Laspacks and bullets were placed at the foot of the altar, ankle-deep, as offerings to a far more belligerent form of deity than the one worshipped by the Lightbearers.\n\nWatching the hundred or so wounded troopers, Amon observed the usual ritual forms - incantations, marching songs instead of hymns, and finally a shared moment of silence. The soldiers were instructed by their leader - a nondescript woman in the uniform of a corporal, the side of her head wrapped in bloodied bandage - to turn their thoughts to those still fighting, to ask the Emperor to lend them strength in the ongoing battle.\n\nAmon was about to depart, seeing nothing amiss, when he caught a sweet-smelling breeze. The troopers were talking in unison, the words barely audible but clearly intoned.\n\n'He is the Life Within Death. The Breath on your Lips. The Hope in your Heart.'\n\nA ghost light played about the aquila on the makeshift table, like dappled sunlight reflected from water. A breeze stirred the pile of offered munitions, so that casings clinked against each other, settling into the pile.\n\nThe chanting grew louder, the same words over and over.\n\n'He is the Life Within Death. The Breath on your Lips. The Hope in your Heart.'\n\nThe troopers, heads bowed, swayed to the tempo of their invocation, the corporal-priest standing before them with eyes closed, hands clasped to her chest. A line of glistening drool fell from the corner of her lip and dripped to her filthy shirt.\n\nThat was not all. Her eyes moved back and forth rapidly beneath their lids, like one in the throes of deep sleep. The veins in the back of her hand grew darker, as though black fluid ran through them.\n\nAmon's fingers closed around the hilt of the gladius as he moved from beneath the shadow of a broken stair, boots crunching grit underfoot.\n\nThe woman's eyes snapped open, orbs of pure black, glistening with a sheen of mucus that dribbled down her cheeks. She turned towards Amon as he broke into a run, a screech rousing the hundred-strong congregation from their reverie. Opening their eyes, they cried out in disgust and alarm, even as the corporal threw a hand towards Amon, another shriek of command issuing from cracked lips.\n\nA few responded, pulling at combat daggers and pistols, leaping forward to intercept the accelerating Custodian. They fell, gutted or headless, not even interrupting his stride. The Neverborn creature hissed and pounced like a hunting cat, fingernails that had become claws lancing towards Amon's face. He swerved and brought up the short sword, stabbing through the creature's chest as it passed, cutting from breastbone to pelvis.\n\nAlmost bisected, the remains flopped to the dusty floor, where the monstrosity continued to flap and flail through a trail of filth and blood, turning back towards Amon. The rest of the gathering erupted into mayhem, some trying to flee, running into others immobile with terror or stepping forward to aid the Custodian.\n\nHe stepped around a lunging hand and brought the sword down hard, tip piercing skull and ferrocrete. He ripped it out and struck off the head to be sure. Even then the body quivered for several more seconds, claws raking at the dirt. When it finally flopped sideways, Amon saw that the clawing had not been random, but had etched a diabolic symbol into the floor, the shallow inscription filling with bodily fluid.\n\nAmon was at a loss as to what to do next. Several of the congregation had already fled, others were starting to run. Were they tainted? Did he need to hunt each of them down? Others were clearly shocked, ignorant of their part in the manifestation.\n\nHe stepped quickly to the altar. The aquila shone with a coating of ice.\n\n'Nobody leave!' he bellowed, drawing back his hood. 'I am Custodian Amon Tauromachian, and by the authority of the Emperor you are all under arrest.'\n\nNone of the remaining congregation tried to leave, awestruck by the presence of the Custodian revealed in their midst. Amon struck the aquila with the pommel of the gladius, knocking it from the altar, before striding back to the corpse. It had all but melted into a puddle, like an oil slick in the dust and grime. Even as he activated his vox to call for assistance, his thoughts turned to his companion in the investigation.\n\nKeeler would not be able to argue away this event quite so easily.\n\nThe Keeler issue\n\nKroeger's plan\n\nPhosphex\n\nExultant Wall zone, twelve days since assault\n\n'How could you possibly not see the threat posed by this cult?' Amon rarely raised his voice outside of battle, but his words rang back to him from the vaulted roof of the hall, the last word echoing menacingly.\n\nKeeler opened her mouth to answer but was quieted by the raised hand of Malcador.\n\n'It is to that very point that this debate is turned, Custodian,' said the Regent.\n\nThey moved in brisk procession along an inner passage of the Ultimate Wall - Dorn's decree was that they speak only as he moved between other engagements that required his attention. The thunder of impacts and the counter-fire of the towers was a constant vibration in the walls and floor. The clank of magazine hoists pulling up shells to the macro cannons and the tramp of booted f"}
{"text":"by the raised hand of Malcador.\n\n'It is to that very point that this debate is turned, Custodian,' said the Regent.\n\nThey moved in brisk procession along an inner passage of the Ultimate Wall - Dorn's decree was that they speak only as he moved between other engagements that required his attention. The thunder of impacts and the counter-fire of the towers was a constant vibration in the walls and floor. The clank of magazine hoists pulling up shells to the macro cannons and the tramp of booted feet echoed from side corridors and bastion chambers.\n\nFootfalls ahead betrayed the presence of four Imperial Fists squads clearing the path to the Praetorian's destination - a moving cordon of Templars from Sigismund's command. Their presence ensured the impromptu conclave went unheard.\n\nAs well as Malcador and Dorn, the gathering included First Captain Sigismund, and Constantin Valdor. These giants were forced to pace slowly so that Malcador could keep up, his staff tapping on the bare ferrocrete floor. Keeler was accompanied by Kyril Sindermann, who now spoke for the first time.\n\n'To accept that is to concede that Lady Keeler herself poses a threat to the Emperor,' said the former iterator. He smoothed a crease in his robes with precise, delicate hands. 'And my own beliefs, though they are of substantially less importance at this juncture.'\n\n'Captain-general, I know what occurred in the hospital,' said Amon. 'Coupled with the evidence from the quarantine barracks, it is obvious that there is a link between the rites of the Lectitio Divinitatus and daemonic activity.'\n\n'And what do you propose?' said Malcador. He cleared his throat of the dust that drifted through the beams of lumen light. 'I am not certain a purge of the theists will be productive, even if possible. The siege is too finely poised to risk immense resentment among a significant swath of our soldiers.'\n\n'This is not a discussion of prosecuting a law, but of guaranteeing the sanctuary of the Imperial Palace,' said Valdor. His armour hummed as he turned to look at the Regent. 'The battle rages on many levels, you know this.'\n\n'I cannot spare any warriors,' Dorn said bluntly. He looked aggravated at being waylaid outside of the strategium, but his presence was essential. Amon had hoped the Praetorian would be a staunch ally, but he apparently needed some further persuasion. 'I cannot tell you how the spirit war fares, but the physical conflict stands upon the balance. The enemy are in control of half the base levels of the Lion's Gate space port, and nearly a similar amount of territory in the upper spire. A force of unknown size is targeting objectives in Sky City, but Commander Rann cannot spare the firepower to eradicate them without weakening the defence of the transport bridges. I have drawn together a reinforcement strike that Captain Sigismund will lead within the hour, but that leaves me with no reserves. All of the Legions are stretched thin.'\n\n'Given your recent encounter with the daemon Samus aboard the Phalanx, let us recall that timely reminder of the perils posed by the Neverborn,' said Amon, moving his gaze to Keeler. 'Let us not also overlook that incident's connection to you, through the figure of Mersadie Oliton.'\n\n'I know little of what happened,' replied Keeler, looking from Amon to Malcador. 'In any event, Mersadie and I parted company long ago.'\n\n'I hear accusations but no solid proposals,' Malcador said again, shaking his head. 'Rogal is correct, we cannot spare warriors from the walls to patrol the Inner Palace. Such a diversion may be the only intent of these manifestations.'\n\n'We must trust in the Emperor to protect us,' said Keeler. 'I witnessed His power, I swear. It is by His will that the Neverborn are kept at bay. The worship of the Lectitio Divinitatus will only strengthen that power.'\n\n'That is true, to a point,' conceded Malcador. 'It is the telaethesic ward that shields us from daemonic intrusion. The Emperor is under constant assault, perhaps it is not surprising that the odd leak is now occurring.'\n\n'Is the Emperor in danger?' demanded Valdor. 'What of the security of the Imperial Dungeon?'\n\n'The Emperor is always in danger, Constantin. It is the nature of being the adversary of the Four Powers to live with their enmity. But is He physically threatened by this? I think not.'\n\n'What of the Silent Sisterhood?' asked Keeler. 'Should they not have a representative here?'\n\n'The Sisters of Silence are as stretched by these attacks as all of our other forces,' Dorn told her. 'Having been forced from their lunar facilities, they lack some of the support they would normally have to conduct widespread anti-psyker actions. They guard the walls against sorcery even as the Emperor guards Terra against the daemonic.'\n\n'Perhaps it is simply the psychic that we should investigate,' suggested Valdor, looking meaningfully at Keeler. 'You profess powers that can only be described as coming from the warp.'\n\n'From the Emperor,' she said, folding her arms. 'Not from the enemy.'\n\n'A distinction only you seem to be able to make,' said Amon.\n\n'You ignore several pertinent facts,' argued Sindermann, stepping protectively next to Keeler. 'Firstly, I myself have witnessed rites of abjuration using the holy text.'\n\n'The supposed banishing of a daemon aboard the Vengeful Spirit?' Malcador scratched his chin. 'Was not that conjuration precipitated by your own hand?'\n\n'In error,' Sindermann said hastily, 'through a cursed book. Regardless, it was the power of the Emperor that allowed Lady Keeler to dispel the Neverborn.'\n\n'I felt real power with the Lightbearers,' said Keeler. 'Power we could harness. Why should the Emperor protect us at His expense without us giving back? Our prayers can be used as weapons against the unholy, just as surely as bolts and las-blasts are the foes of mortals.'\n\n'Let us put that aside for a moment, lest we are sidetracked,' Malcador said quickly. He looked at Sindermann. 'You said \"firstly\", indicating you have other reasons why we should not suspect Keeler in this matter?'\n\n'The first apparition took place when she was in confinement. The second when she was elsewhere. The only manifestation we have when Lady Keeler was actually present seems to be entirely benign.'\n\n'Is such a thing possible?' asked Sigismund, breaking his silence. The Templar followed a little apart from the group and Amon had almost forgotten him. 'Can it be possible to channel the essence of the Emperor in such a way?'\n\nAmon noticed Dorn's deep frown, as though vexed at the First Captain's contribution.\n\n'We will not be indulging in superstitious speculation,' the primarch growled.\n\n'Is it superstition, when one has evidence of the supernatural?' said Sindermann, receiving a glare of admonishment from the towering commander. He absorbed the brunt of Dorn's displeasure with a visible flinch, even his long experience of the primarchs no surety against the intimidating presence of the Emperor's gene-sons. He continued in more subdued fashion. 'If the power of the Neverborn can be channelled by sorcery, cannot a person of faith act as focus for the Emperor's might?'\n\n'I do not know if this is a discussion of theology or metaphysics, but neither is useful for our purpose,' Valdor said, cutting off a reply from Malcador. 'What is to be done about these cults? I accept the argument that for the time being a harmless worship of the Emperor may be good for morale, and perhaps keep minds looking for a greater power from wandering down paths left unexplored.'\n\n'Harmless?' said Amon. 'Twice we have seen what these ceremonies can do, breaching the ward that protects Terra.'\n\n'I did not say it was harmless, only that if it is so, it may have a use,' Valdor told his subordinate. He swung his gaze down to Keeler. 'There are hundreds of groups practising your faith around the Imperial Palace?'\n\n'At least,' she replied. 'For longer than the siege has been in place.'\n\n'So it seems to me there is more connection to the efforts of the Death Guard than the cults themselves.' Valdor stopped and the group halted with him at the junction of the main corridor and a side passage that led back towards the Inner Palace region. 'The quarantine zone and the hospital are the common denominator, more than the cult. Amon, concentrate your efforts on other such pits of misery, for any activity by the Lectitio Divinitatus in such places brings greater risk of corruption.'\n\n'What of the Lightbearers?' asked Amon.\n\n'Keeler will continue to attend and monitor their meetings,' said Malcador.\n\n'I will report anything untoward as soon as it occurs,' Keeler said.\n\nAmon shook his head. 'I find that little assurance, given the bar that has been set to judge what is untoward.'\n\n'We shall need to trust each other a while longer,' Malcador intervened, stepping between the Custodian and Keeler. His unwavering gaze met Amon's. 'Will you take my assurance?'\n\nAmon hesitated. There was only one being that he fully trusted, but in placing his trust in the Emperor he had to submit to his master's decision to appoint Malcador as His Regent, with the full authority that entailed. He glanced to Valdor and received a subtle nod in reply.\n\n'Very well, Lord Regent.' Amon lifted a fist to his breastplate. 'I will investigate the plague aspect of the attack and leave the Lightbearers to your appointee.'\n\n'My officers can provide you with data on field hospitals, plague zones, Death Guard assaults.' Dorn gestured along the side passage. 'I will signal Bhab Bastion to be ready to respond to your requests immediately.'\n\n'Our thanks, Lord Praetorian,' said Valdor.\n\n'I shall return to the Sanctum Imperialis with you,' said Malcador, stepping after the two Custodians. 'I am sure Lord Dorn would prefer to have no more distractions from his duties at the wall.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex mantlezone, twelve days since assault\n\nWorkshops that had once resounded to the beat of hammers and hiss of forges now rang wit"}
{"text":" side passage. 'I will signal Bhab Bastion to be ready to respond to your requests immediately.'\n\n'Our thanks, Lord Praetorian,' said Valdor.\n\n'I shall return to the Sanctum Imperialis with you,' said Malcador, stepping after the two Custodians. 'I am sure Lord Dorn would prefer to have no more distractions from his duties at the wall.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex mantlezone, twelve days since assault\n\nWorkshops that had once resounded to the beat of hammers and hiss of forges now rang with the crack of bolters and snarl of plasma. Maintenance lines became bulwarks held by the Imperial Fists, their bright armour smeared with grease and soot, the flare of bolts bright pinpricks in the gloom of the massive halls. Lascannon beams and detonating missiles cast shadows of tractor skeletons and hauler carcasses.\n\nThe Sons of Horus pushed from one cavernous workshop to the next, thrusting deep into the territory reclaimed by the counter-offensive. At their head Abaddon and his Justaerin formed the point of the spear, as they had been in so many battles before. The First Captain urged his warriors on by example, plunging into each fresh firefight without relent. Bolter, sword and fist took their toll of the enemy, while at his side the sorceries of Layak split apart their armour and bewitched their weapons. Combi-bolters blazing, the Terminators followed, clearing aside any that survived the wrath of their leader.\n\nThe bulk of an auto lathe offered a few seconds' respite, giving Abaddon opportunity to assess the broader situation. Issuing orders to send a company to the upper levels of the refitting houses, he checked the sensorium of his war-plate. More enemies were arriving from a travel duct that ran along the far side of the installation, the heat plumes of five vehicles approaching at speed.\n\n'Why do you pause now?' asked Layak, his blade slaves picking through the fallen enemy, plunging sword-limbs into each. 'You have the momentum.'\n\nAbaddon regarded him for several seconds, undecided whether he would respond or not. It was no business of the sorcerer what he intended. He signalled for Haork to bring the auspex. The legionary dashed through a sudden flurry of Imperial Fists bolts as he broke from the cover of a half-dismantled cargo loader that looked like a giant, dissected beetle.\n\n'Only days ago you lamented that the Iron Warriors risked failure by their inability to seize the bridgeways. Now you spend your warriors clearing out maintenance sheds and transit terminals.'\n\nChecking the schematics, the First Captain saw that there was only one way to advance without being exposed - directly through the Imperial Fists' line. Whoever commanded the local forces had chosen the workshops as a choke point, easily supported from the internal ringway. If the Sons of Horus could break through, they would turn the flank of a five-kilometre-long defence line protecting the upper approaches of the skybridges.\n\n'When it comes time to seize your prize, you cannot hesitate,' Layak continued, oblivious to Abaddon's apathy.\n\n'I have had a change of heart,' Abaddon told him. His auto-senses picked up the rumble of the tanks. 'A longer view.'\n\nHe rounded the end of the auto lathe, sighting along his combi-bolter. Spying the flash of yellow behind a pile of gears and other spare parts, he opened fire. The volley sparked from the heap, filling the air with a cloud of shrapnel. Taking his lead, two squads of Justaerin poured fire into the same position, incendiary rounds mixed in with the regular bolts to set the metal pile ablaze.\n\n'Perturabo wants to seize the space port to bring in Titans for Horus,' Abaddon explained as he advanced behind the curtain of fire, his own weapon adding half a dozen more rounds to the fusillade. 'It has not fallen quickly enough, so it is better to use this battle to draw in as many defenders as possible. Every Imperial Fist that dies here is one less to defend the wall.'\n\nLayak appeared at his side, black energy leaping from his staff. The sorcerous lightning engulfed an enemy squad pulling back from the Terminator attack, leaping from one Space Marine to the next. They crashed to the ground in turn, bloody vapour coiling from shattered eye-lenses and ruptured armour joints.\n\n'Time is our enemy, you know this.' The Word Bearer thrust his staff forward and his blade slaves stormed ahead, the detonations of enemy bolts across their half-armour skin no dissuasion. Vaulting the next line of work benches, they set upon the Imperial Fists beyond. Abaddon ran after them, exploiting the gap in the enemy fire created by the sudden assault.\n\n'The threat of Guilliman may be overrated,' he growled back.\n\n'The arrival of Guilliman, the Lion and Russ is not the only factor,' Layak warned. 'You have seen the toll paid by your master to channel the energy of the True Gods. Every day he must contain their power is a day closer to his ruin.'\n\nAbaddon smashed a bench out of the way with his power fist, flipping it into the armoured warriors beyond. He followed up with a burst of fire that cut down two sons of Dorn.\n\nThe roar of vehicle engines shook the workshop, flakes of rust falling on both sides from the high rafters. Abaddon's focus was on the foes to his left and right as he clamped his bolter to his armour and drew his blade, parrying the chainsword of an Imperial Fists sergeant. His fist closed about the legionary's arm, crushing armour, flesh and bone to a pulp of blood and broken ceramite.\n\nThe thunder of heavy bolters and autocannons cut across the din of the escalating melee, followed by the crack of breaking war-plate. The vox was strangely silent for a few seconds. Abaddon turned aside a boarding axe with his glove and cleaved his blade into the bearer, parting his foes for a glimpse at the armoured squadron pulling up beyond the main gateway.\n\nHe saw dark metal armour broken by stripes of red and black, their hulls festooned with scrawled dedications to Perturabo and Horus. Skulls and pieces of armour hung like bunting from exhaust stacks and weapon pintles.\n\nIron Warriors.\n\nFrom a pair of Land Raiders emerged two squads of iron-clad legionaries, just as the transports and their escort of Predators opened fire again. Lascannon blasts and explosive shells raked into the surrounded Imperial Fists, tearing apart war-plate and genhanced bodies.\n\n'Hold position!' Abaddon bellowed to his warriors, concerned that they would charge forward into the fire of their allies. 'Mark your targets.'\n\nBolters adding to the fury of the attack, the Iron Warriors advanced, more squads arriving behind them in a wave of Rhinos. In their midst strode an officer with old-style Cataphractii plate, armour coated with bloody handprints as grisly livery.\n\n'Warsmith Kroeger,' said Layak. 'Come to welcome the right and left hands of Horus.'\n\nA knot of several dozen Imperial Fists tried to break out, turning from the newly arrived legionaries to seek escape through the Sons of Horus. Abaddon despatched his Justaerin with a word and gesture, his focus turned to the Iron Warriors commander.\n\nKroeger used a crackling fist in great sweeps, breaking open helms and plastrons without any thought of defence. He advanced without pause, treading over the slain of both sides, rivet-studded boots cracking ceramite beneath his weight.\n\nAbaddon sheathed his blade and took up his bolter once more, turning to fire the rest of the loaded magazine into the withdrawing Imperial Fists. He passed the weapon to one of his companions to reload as he came face to face with Kroeger. The Iron Warrior's shoulders heaved as though he were panting, something primal in his hunched stance. His blood-specked mask looked up at Abaddon, eyes hidden behind red lenses.\n\n'Captain Abaddon,' Kroeger grunted, raising his fist in salute.\n\n'Warsmith Kroeger.' Abaddon touched a finger to his brow in return. 'I was not expecting you.'\n\n'Been looking for you. Came on a Dorn-scum flying column and wondered where they were going. Saw there was a fight going on where one of my companies were, so I took them out on the way and came here to see what the fuss was.' Kroeger took in a shuddering breath. 'Here you are. Haven't heard from your Legion command since you captured the upper sensoria.'\n\n'I am the Sons of Horus command,' Abaddon said pointedly. 'I choose our objectives and the manner in which we will achieve them.'\n\n'I'm not here to tell you otherwise,' said Kroeger. 'You're Ezekyle Abaddon, one of our greatest commanders! But if you find yourself wanting something to do, I think we can stop this counter-attack within the day.'\n\n'How do you plan to do that?' asked Abaddon.\n\n'An unstoppable force, Captain Abaddon. My Dodakathik Guard will take the brunt of the fighting. Hardened warriors, unshakeable. Dreadnoughts, automatons, mobile support weapons. Kharn and his Blooded are joining me.'\n\n'A keen blade edge to cut through the morass,' said Layak, tone betraying his relish at the idea.\n\n'You must be the Crimson Apostle, the Warmaster's daemon-caller.'\n\nAbaddon felt a stab of amusement at the petty title, but Layak bridled.\n\n'I am the spiritual aide of Horus Lupercal, prophet of the Dark Gods, Lord of Mysteries.'\n\n'Have you broken the Emperor's psychic shield yet?'\n\n'The process is ongoing. One does not pierce a-'\n\n'Thought not,' said Kroeger, turning back to Abaddon. Horus' lieutenant was drawn to the warsmith's brusqueness, so at odds with the theatrics of Layak.\n\n'I thought you were trying to link up with the force inside Sky City,' Abaddon said, noting that the blade slaves had closed in on Layak, perhaps in an attempt to intimidate Kroeger. 'What of the warsmith trapped behind the lines?'\n\n'Plans change,' Kroeger said with a shrug. 'I've not heard from Forrix in days. Probably dead.'\n\n'You would abandon one of the Trident?' said Layak. 'One despatched by your own orders?'\n\n'Don't think Forrix would spare a second thought for me, warp-talker. He had a fighting chance, wh"}
{"text":"e trying to link up with the force inside Sky City,' Abaddon said, noting that the blade slaves had closed in on Layak, perhaps in an attempt to intimidate Kroeger. 'What of the warsmith trapped behind the lines?'\n\n'Plans change,' Kroeger said with a shrug. 'I've not heard from Forrix in days. Probably dead.'\n\n'You would abandon one of the Trident?' said Layak. 'One despatched by your own orders?'\n\n'Don't think Forrix would spare a second thought for me, warp-talker. He had a fighting chance, which is more than he'd give to those he wanted rid of.' Kroeger swung his gaze to Abaddon. 'Think about it. You, me, Kharn of the World Eaters... Just let them try and stop us.'\n\nAbaddon was thinking about it, very carefully. In a war of gods and demigods, here was a chance for the Legions to prove their strength was undiminished. Even as his genefather drew ever greater strength from his immaterial patrons, it would be wise to remind him of the mortal power still at his command.\n\nThere was still much that could be done with a bolter and a blade, and a legionary behind them.\n\nLion's Gate space port, stratophex core, twelve days since assault\n\n'Phosphex!'\n\nThe call echoed down the passage and across the vox, just seconds before a junction thirty metres ahead of Forrix brightened with yellow light. He thought his engineered body was already pushed to the limits but that single word set his hearts racing, his armour pumping the last drops of stimulant into his body.\n\nThe squads nearest the attack had no chance. The air around them ignited, a cloud of fire crawling through nothing to engulf their armoured forms. Their shrieks - noises that no legionaries should ever produce - were thankfully brief. The silhouettes of diminishing figures danced in after-image as Forrix tried to blink away the glare of the phosphex, having been forced to discard his damaged helm the day before. Even at this distance, he felt the prickle of impossible heat in the first moments and was turning to run even as he bellowed the order to pull back.\n\nSpace Marines did not panic, but the retreat from the living flames was hurried and disorderly. Snaking tendrils of fire raced along the high ceiling, overtaking the slowest runners, droplets raining down on their helms and pauldrons. The phosphex made fuel of whatever it landed on, and it devoured with all the rapaciousness of a starved glutton. A fully armoured legionary was reduced to ashes in less than seven seconds, and once they started burning there was nothing that would stop it.\n\n'Dorn's bastards!' swore Uhaz. 'Burning their own city!'\n\nIt was a terrible but effective tactic, and Forrix was grudgingly impressed that the commanders of the VII Legion had the stomach for such a move. Unless, and he voiced this thought to nobody, the phosphex had come from the Iron Warriors' own bombardment. It was possible that some of the barrage unleashed on the first day was still creeping around the space port like a burning mass murderer looking for fresh victims, even fourteen days later.\n\nThree more legionaries thrashed their last as the phosphex speared after them, creeping up from their boots to swallowed them legs first, the rounds in their bolters snapping as they detonated, spraying flecks of metal that turned to mist in the heat of the flames.\n\nEleven days.\n\nForrix reached a stairwell and turned into it, throwing himself up the steps with the others. Distance was the only saviour.\n\nEleven days since they had mustered, expecting reinforcements after two days. They had certainly tested the defenders. The Imperial Fists had stopped sending their allies after eight days, perhaps baulking at the immense casualties inflicted by the warriors of the IV Legion. It was the ideal fight, in a way, for an Iron Warrior. Fighting stubbornly for its own merits. No broader strategy. No vague objectives or collateral concerns.\n\nEngage.\n\nKill.\n\nSurvive.\n\nForrix continued past the next landing, seeing through a set of open doors that the level above was already flickering with eerie phosphex light.\n\n'Regroup at seventy-five metres up,' he voxed to all in range. He transmitted to the command channel as he ran, gulping down breaths that tasted of his brothers' charred flesh and molten armour. Glancing down the stairwell he saw the phosphex creeping towards the steps. 'Gharal! What is your position relative to the eastern stairwell in designated sector six?'\n\nThere was no reply. He tried again, wondering if it was his vox malfunctioning, or a problem with Gharal's reception.\n\n'Engaged by Dreadnoughts and heavy gauge power armour. Cataphractii and other squads.'\n\n'There is phosphex creep from level eighty through eighty-three.'\n\n'Understood. Has it reached the maintenance bays we moved through last night?'\n\n'I don't think so. Seems to be moving vertically more than horizontally, burning down through the plasteel decking around here.'\n\n'I'll lead the heavy infantry towards it then. Let's see Dorn's filth run away from the stuff for a change.'\n\nGharal chuckled and the link cut off.\n\nForrix reached the summit of the spiralling stair and slumped against the wall. Every muscle burned with fatigue, even with the assistance of his war-plate. He waited while scores of Iron Warriors hurried past, most of them sporting broken and patched armour, wearing elements of yellow stolen from their foes, burned and scarred and riddled with craters from bolter impacts. Others bore heavier injuries, missing hands and arms, their skulls exposed or cheeks pierced by shot.\n\nThose without helms met his gaze, and all he saw in them was determination. This was the iron in their blood, the metal of the spirit. The retreat slowed to a steadier pace, becoming a march. A chant started, the words issuing to the beat of armoured footfalls.\n\n'From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.'\n\nNever had Forrix seen his warriors so undaunted and formidable. The longer they were hammered upon the anvil of battle, the harder they became.\n\nBut it would not be enough. Forrix had been keeping track of their losses and movements, and they were being hemmed in, corralled by the Imperial Fists. Contained. That was not the act of a foe worrying about assault from further afield. Something disastrous must have happened to the main assault, leaving Forrix's force the only functioning Iron Warriors formation. And he was running out of room to fight. Once they were cornered it was over.\n\nIt was a testament to their character that they had lasted this long, but they could not prevail indefinitely. Perhaps two more days at most. That's all they had left.\n\nHe needed a better plan.\n\nHimalazia, thirty days before assault\n\nThey heard engines long before they saw the tanks. The rumble of scores of vehicles reverberated along the valley, following the course of the road as it wound towards the highest peaks.\n\n'Off the road! Off the road!' The bellow echoed from officers and integrity officers, sergeants and troopers alike.\n\nWith the rest of the platoon, Zenobi broke left, up the slope of the mountain. There was little enough cover - boulders and outcrops. There were no trees, but thousands of knee-high stumps, every square centimetre of forest having been stripped for materials to bolster the Imperial Palace. They hunkered down as best they could, plumes of white following them as they waded through the snow.\n\nThe growling grew louder and louder, until it rivalled the dull, constant noise of the production line. Gears clanked, metal creaked, adding mechanical voices to the continual background wail of the Himalazian winds.\n\nLying down in the snow made little difference to Zenobi. She had long since lost any real feeling in her legs. Her feet were a constant aching throb inside her boots, and her hands, even inside three gloves, barely flexed. She stripped off the gloves to use her fingertips to clear ice from the trigger guard of her lasgun.\n\nShe pushed the arming stud but nothing happened - no vibration of the energy cell activating, no indicator lights turning from red to amber to green.\n\n'Powercells are frozen,' she whispered, turning her head to Sergeant Attah on her left.\n\nIn reply, the sergeant pulled out her own lasgun and repeatedly breathed on the main body of it. After a minute or so of this, a flickering light lit the sergeant's face from below.\n\nZenobi nodded and copied Attah, holding the lasgun close to her mouth to maximise the body heat that reached it. She tested the activation stud each time, and after the fourth misty exhalation the lights glimmered into jade life. Whether it would be enough to hold a charge after a shot was another matter.\n\n'Not that they'll be much good against tanks,' muttered Kettai. Squad structure had been abandoned on the march; everyone moved at their own pace as best they could. Several dozen more troopers had been lost in the time since they'd come across the frozen battle - six days? Seven days? More?\n\nShe shifted, a root digging at her thigh. The sound of engines changed, growing louder but also more diffused as the source came closer. Rather than reverberating down the valley as a single noise, she thought she could pick up individual vehicles and the rumble of tracks on the road.\n\nIt sounded familiar.\n\nBulky shapes loomed through the flurries of snow, and the wind brought the distinctive tang of fuel exhaust. The steady clank-clank-clank grew louder still as they approached. The snarl of gears and squeal of a turret rotating on its ring punctuated the noise. There were dozens, perhaps scores of tanks driving slowly up the road, the back of the column lost in the distance and snow.\n\nAccounting for the fact that they were in the open air rather than a cavernous testing chamber, the sound took her back to the times she'd crept into the arming hangar at the end of the line, where the fully assembled tanks were driven from the production facility. She wasn't t"}
{"text":"pproached. The snarl of gears and squeal of a turret rotating on its ring punctuated the noise. There were dozens, perhaps scores of tanks driving slowly up the road, the back of the column lost in the distance and snow.\n\nAccounting for the fact that they were in the open air rather than a cavernous testing chamber, the sound took her back to the times she'd crept into the arming hangar at the end of the line, where the fully assembled tanks were driven from the production facility. She wasn't the only one that thought so. There were exclamations around her.\n\n'These are our tanks!' said Menber.\n\nGreen pennants flew from whip aerials, bent forward by the prevailing wind. Every few tanks there was one that bore the flag of a squadron commander. These were large, square standards decorated with the laurels of the Imperial Army encircling two crossing curved blades.\n\n'I know that flag,' said Kettai, rising to his knees. 'That's from Bakk-Makkah, one of the cities we sent our tanks.'\n\nAll along the line troopers and officers were breaking from the banks of snow, their shouts almost lost in the cacophony of engines. They waved their hands to attract the attention of the crews.\n\nSomeone in command must have seen them. One by one the tanks ground to a halt, turrets and sponson guns bearing on the approaching infantry.\n\nMenber helped Zenobi up, as she cradled her lasgun under her arm and pulled the standard pole from a white drift. Flanked by her cousin and Kettai, she waded back towards the road, using the banner like a staff to negotiate the parts that came almost to her waist.\n\nThere was a tank almost directly opposite their position - a gap of ten metres between it and its neighbours. A heavy bolter in the closest sponson was trained on them, as was the massive battle cannon in the turret. Steam billowed from the engine vents and grey slicked the blizzard from the exhaust stacks at the rear. Melting ice left streaks on the dirty hull, revealing a grey camouflage scheme that made Zenobi laugh.\n\n'I might have painted that,' she said, her main labour having been with the spray brush just before the end of the line. Her family were - had been, she reminded herself - fitters and finishers by trade.\n\nThe hatch atop the turret creaked open and a young man - no more than twenty or twenty-one, Zenobi thought - rose cautiously from within. He had a laspistol in hand, his face hidden behind broad goggles over a tanker's cap. His mouth and nose were swathed in a scarf woven of bright red, emerald green and dark blue. What she could see of his skin was lighter than her own, though it might have also been caked in grime.\n\nHe pulled up the goggles, squinting against the wind.\n\n'Stay where you are, do not approach.' The voxmitter of the tank didn't mask his clipped accent. He raised the laspistol as if the threat of the battle cannon and heavy bolter were not enough.\n\n'We're from Addaba,' Kettai called out. 'We made your tanks!'\n\n'Keep back,' the commander warned. They did as he said, stopping about twenty metres from the low wall that ran along the roadside. 'We will open fire if you come closer.'\n\nThe message was the same all along the column, so that the Addaba Free Corps formed a near-continuous line three and four deep. Platoon commanders wearily told their subordinates to remain in place and assured them that General-Captain Egwu was communicating with the leader of the armoured regiment.\n\n'You from Bakk-Makkah?' Menber called out. 'How long have you been driving?'\n\n'Fourteen days, including resupply stops,' the commander called back over the voxmitter. 'Where did you say you come from?'\n\n'Addaba,' Menber told him.\n\nThe commander stiffened with surprised.\n\n'You've walked five thousand kilometres?'\n\nThere were laughs from the Free Corps troopers.\n\n'Feels like it, but no,' Menber explained. 'We had a train but it was attacked. Been walking the last five hundred kilometres or so. Do you know how far we've got left?'\n\nThe tank commander leaned forward, resting his arm on the turret roof, holding the laspistol more casually now.\n\n'About another three hundred kilometres until we reach the Katabatic Plains.' He pointed eastwards, towards the roiling aurora of the continuing attack. 'The road goes pretty much straight from here, but that's at least another fifteen days on foot in these conditions.'\n\n'And more,' said Menber. 'Everyone's exhausted.'\n\n'Any chance of a ride?' Kettai called out.\n\n'That's what I'm waiting to hear from General Mushezibti. I'd say yes, but it's not up to me.'\n\nThey fell silent as they awaited the verdict of the consultation between their commanders. A figure approached along the line, one arm in a sling. It was Tesfaye, the integrity officer assigned to the platoon, the one that Zenobi had stopped Tewedros murdering. Okoye and a few of the sergeants gravitated towards him, seeking news.\n\nThe integrity officer continued along the line, looking at the troopers. He pitched his voice to be heard above the wind, but not so much that it would carry over the idling engines of the tanks. He repeated himself every dozen steps, speaking to the troopers in clusters.\n\n'Remember to keep your tongues still,' said Tesfaye as he came upon Zenobi and the others nearby. 'Any one of these Bakk-Makkahi might relate anything we say to those that would see us thwarted. They are temporary allies at best, do not become overly familiar.'\n\nTesfaye carried on, his words lost in the snowstorm, and soon so was he.\n\n'I guess that means we'll be getting a ride,' said Kettai.\n\nHis guess was proven correct a few minutes later. Shouts moved along the line from the front, but before they reached the survivors of Epsilon Platoon the tank commander was on the voxmitter.\n\n'Good news, my new friends. Climb aboard!'\n\nOne of the gunner hatches opened and a crewman exited, guiding them to where they could safely sit on the track skirts, avoiding the hot engine grille and exhausts.\n\nMost of them were used to scrambling over the giant beasts of metal, and probably knew their way around better than those within, finding handholds and spaces amongst the baggage and spare track links already strapped along the flanks.\n\n'If we come under attack, you get off instantly,' the commander continued as they pulled themselves and their gear up the tank's sides. 'You don't want to be aboard when we get into battle.'\n\nZenobi found herself helped up to the turret itself. She saw the commander looking at her with dark brown eyes, and wondered what he made of the dishevelled, coat-swathed shape in front of him. His appraising gaze made her smile, appreciation in his eyes as they lingered on her rimed face.\n\n'Why are you looking at me like that?' she asked.\n\nHe pulled down the scarf to reveal thin lips smiling, beneath a generous moustache. Zenobi found the shape of them appealing, as she did the broad cheek bones and the rest of his features. Very appealing.\n\n'I like what I see,' said the commander. He held out a hand and she clumsily shook it. 'I am Nasha and this,' he thumped a hand on the armoured turret, 'is Breath of Wrath.'\n\n'Nice,' said Zenobi, stroking a hand along the welded plate. 'I hope you're taking care of her.'\n\n'Her?'\n\n'Everything we make in Addaba is a girl,' said Zenobi. She grinned, having not really thought about it before. 'We find they have a better temperament that way.'\n\n'And you are?'\n\n'Zenobi. Zenobi Adedeji.'\n\nTheir eyes met and she felt the frisson of attraction again. It seemed ridiculous, to be flirting with this man she had just met, in the middle of a blizzard, on the way to her first and last battle. She couldn't help it; the chemistry was immediate, the feeling mutual.\n\n'You're a small one, Zenobi Adedeji.' He leaned back in the turret hatch. 'I reckon I might be able to squeeze you in here. If you're willing and allowed, of course.'\n\nZenobi moved closer and he pulled himself out fully, offering her his hands to help her, strong around her waist.\n\nShe half-heard Menber saying something behind her and Kettai laughing. It didn't matter. To get away from the snow and the cold and the wind for a few minutes, Zenobi would have accepted even had Nasha been a toothless, ugly brute of a man.\n\nIt was just a bonus that he wasn't.\n\nCall for a champion\n\nComplications\n\nPlague of belief\n\nExultant Wall zone, twelve days since assault\n\nKeeler watched the Custodians and Regent move away before she turned back to Dorn and Sigismund. She could feel the antipathy of the primarch like a physical force, as though waves of heat emanated from the immense warrior. He turned a belligerent stare down to her, a lip curled.\n\n'We have nothing further to discuss.'\n\nKeeler struggled to find her voice in the face of the primarch's disdain. Swallowing hard she remembered she was doing the Emperor's work and forced herself to look up at the glowering demigod.\n\n'I would like to speak with Captain Sigismund.'\n\nDorn stepped closer, just half a pace, but in that small movement he changed from bulky to menacingly oppressive. Like a moon being eclipsed by its planet, Keeler's world shrank to the couple of metres between them, as though nothing else existed. Her hand moved to the book concealed in her breast pocket.\n\n'Your lies have done enough damage. There will be no more.'\n\nShe trembled as she met his iron gaze, knowing that those eyes had looked upon the deaths of thousands, millions even, and shown not the slightest compassion. It was as if Dorn were made of the same unfeeling stone as the fortifications he built.\n\n'I have not lied. Is it not true that had he travelled to Phall, Sigismund would now be among the thousands of dead?'\n\n'He is no better than those that gave their lives. Now he thinks himself special. Weakened by your delusion, he took the coward's choice.'\n\nKeeler stepped back, giving herself space to breathe. She felt the reassuring presence of Sindermann at her shoulder, his hand lightly touching her arm. Past Dorn she saw the First Captain a few metres a"}
{"text":"tone as the fortifications he built.\n\n'I have not lied. Is it not true that had he travelled to Phall, Sigismund would now be among the thousands of dead?'\n\n'He is no better than those that gave their lives. Now he thinks himself special. Weakened by your delusion, he took the coward's choice.'\n\nKeeler stepped back, giving herself space to breathe. She felt the reassuring presence of Sindermann at her shoulder, his hand lightly touching her arm. Past Dorn she saw the First Captain a few metres away, head turned towards them. She addressed her next words to him directly.\n\n'The Emperor has need of you, Sigismund.'\n\n'No more!' Dorn clenched his fists. Keeler drew back with a gasp, though she did not think he would swing them with lethal intent. His shoulders flexed within his bulky armour, servos whining as he sought to control his temper. 'Is it not enough that you robbed me of one of my finest sons? Do not turn him further from his duty!'\n\n'He is not your son, he is the Emperor's!' snarled Keeler. She recoiled, shocked by her own vehemence; her voice lowered and she looked at the warrior in yellow and black. 'The great enemies we face choose their champions and pour all of their spite and power into them. Horus is at the pinnacle, a vessel for all the hurt and tragedy and wrath that the warp-twisted body can hold.'\n\nHer eyes moved back to Dorn.\n\n'Your brothers, I hear they have become something else, have they not? The perverted gifts of their gods give them abilities beyond even those that the Emperor bestowed upon you. You have not the strength to face them without accepting the power of the Emperor into your soul.'\n\n'Soul? Keep your nonsense to yourself.'\n\n'Then what is it that stays their advance? A psychic shield? Or the soul of the Emperor, bright and hot to them, as the Astronomican is to the Navigators.' She made one more entreaty to Sigismund. 'Who will face those champions of the Dark Powers? The Emperor needs His own, and through me He has guided your step from disaster to stand here upon these walls to face them.'\n\n'No more.' Dorn's voice was a growl as he loomed over Keeler. He thrust a finger towards Sigismund without looking in his direction. 'Go to the gate keep now, captain.'\n\nSigismund remained a moment, silently watching Keeler, before he turned and continued down the corridor.\n\n'It is only the mantle of Malcador that keeps you from your deserved cell, Keeler,' Dorn told her, bending low so that they were almost eye to eye. 'Report to him. Work with the Custodians. If I learn that you have spoken to any of my warriors again, Malcador's protection will not keep you safe, and it will not be imprisonment that silences you.'\n\nHe straightened and composed himself for several seconds, eyes closed. When he opened them, he looked at Sindermann, silently appraising the old man. The primarch said nothing of his conclusions but pivoted on his heel and marched after Sigismund.\n\nKeeler stood shaking, Sindermann's hand on her arm. Taking a deep breath, she stood upright, drawing her hand away from the book within her dress. Sigismund's ascension to the truth was but one of the tasks she had been set by the Emperor. The matter with the Lightbearers required her full focus.\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex approach, fourteen days since assault\n\nHow many times had Sigismund sat like this, in a drop pod or gunship or boarding torpedo, hurtling towards battle, sat in quiet repose? His Templars knew him well and did not interrupt his silence, save for the periodic countdown to their landing. Three minutes.\n\nIt was therefore strange for Sigismund when the pilot, Kassar, contacted him on the command vox-channel.\n\n'First Captain, apologies for the interruption, but there has been a development.'\n\n'What sort of development?'\n\n'Augur scans show a notable hole in the Iron Warriors' deployment. A landing apron behind their advance appears unprotected.'\n\n'A trap?'\n\n'Unlikely, First Captain. Energy signature suggests that a force landed there in drop pods but rather than securing the site they have pressed onwards in totality, leaving no rearguard.'\n\n'Where?'\n\n'Fourth Eastward quay-spur, First Captain. Large enough for the whole force to land.'\n\n'Agreed. Send word to the rest of the expedition. Redirect attack to the Fourth Eastward quay-spur.'\n\n'Affirmative.'\n\nSigismund felt the craft bank as it adjusted course, so that it would come around the space port and approach from the opposite direction. The captain of the Templars tried to regain his focus, drawing into himself once more. He brought his hands together, remembering the conversation with Lord Dorn and Euphrati Keeler. He had not thought to see her again and her presence was a source of some turbulence in his mind.\n\nHe could not afford to be distracted. The Iron Warriors and World Eaters would break through Rann's defensive line within hours. It vexed Sigismund that he did not know whether Dorn had despatched him because of the urgency of the situation or because he had finally wanted to be rid of the First Captain.\n\nHad he been sent to Lion's Gate space port to die?\n\nNinety seconds.\n\nThe Stormbird slowed. Gunners opened fire as defensive batteries overrun by the traitors targeted the incoming assault force. Flak shells exploded around the descending gunships, shrapnel rattling against the armoured hull.\n\nSigismund drove the sound away. This was his chance to prove himself. If he delivered the space port from the enemy it was proof that he had been right to return to Terra rather than join the ill-fated expedition to Phall. This was the battle for which he had been directed.\n\nKeeler herself had said as much. Had Lord Dorn been convinced by her words? He had departed in anger, but perhaps cooler, wiser counsel could yet prevail.\n\nTen seconds.\n\nSigismund stood up, checking the chains that kept his sword locked to his armour. Bound by metal, bound by oath, bound by fate to his blade.\n\nThe Stormbird dropped almost vertically, plasma jets roaring. Assault ramps slammed down and Sigismund was first to the ferrocrete, eyes scanning the abandoned landing quay.\n\nNothing but empty drop pods. Not a trap.\n\nIt did not matter. There would be plenty of enemies to face.\n\nHimalazia, thirty days before assault\n\nThe warmth inside the bivouac was deceptive. Outside, a gale howled and snow piled up against the tank which formed one wall of the tent. Zenobi shifted, feeling the heat from Nasha, cocooned in their shared bedroll. The hab-unit she'd lived in with her family had been cramped; the bivouac had been intended for a crew of five and now housed an extra fifteen troopers. She and Nasha had found intimacy in the simple act of closeness, but space and an opportunity for anything more amorous had so far been denied them.\n\n'Two days,' he said, stroking fingers across the curls of her hair. His breath on her neck sent shivers through Zenobi. 'Only two more days.'\n\n'Until the battle?'\n\n'Not yet. That's when we arrive at our muster point. It's still another hundred kilometres to the Katabatic Plains.'\n\nShe said nothing but listened instead. Their companions' heavy breaths and snores. The whine of the tank battery lighting the small lantern hung on the pole that held up the centre of the bivouac. And thunder that wasn't thunder but the detonations of gigatonnes of ordnance crashing against the shields of the Imperial Palace. Every few minutes there would come a crack of a different timbre as some new projectile hit home or a void shield temporarily failed.\n\n'We might not ever...' she whispered, stroking the back of her hand along his thigh. 'You know, might not have time to...'\n\n'Be united?' he said with a smirk. 'I know. It's not that important.'\n\n'Maybe not for you,' she said sadly.\n\n'Oh.' He pulled her closer. 'We might not be moving from the muster point for a while.'\n\n'I think we'll be carrying straight on.'\n\n'Really? What were your orders?'\n\nZenobi felt a sudden pang of awareness. She couldn't let down her guard, even for a moment of pillow talk.\n\n'I don't know, but we were all expecting to get straight into the battle.' She listened for a few more seconds. 'The attack's well underway.'\n\n'The battle for Terra!' he said, eyes comically wide. 'Never thought I would be part of it. Never considered that the war would come here.'\n\n'It's been here a while,' said Zenobi. 'The touch of it, I mean. I don't know anything about Bakk-Makkah, but Addaba was first affected seven years ago.'\n\n'Changed, yes,' said Nasha. 'They flattened the old precincts to make a testing and training range. Three hundred square kilometres of city from before the Old Night. Ancient, really ancient buildings.'\n\nHe sighed and she laid her head on his arm.\n\n'Don't be so sure about what's going to happen,' he told her. 'It'll take a day or two for your formation to receive fresh orders from high command. You're not even supposed to be here.'\n\n'Glad that we are,' she said. She kissed his neck and their conversation ended.\n\nBasilica Ventura, thirteen days since assault\n\n'An impressive gathering.'\n\nSindermann was right. Through a window in the upper reaches of the Basilica Ventura, mostly frame with only a few shards of glass remaining, Keeler could see some distance down the Via Oxidentus. There was light everywhere, not just clustered at the gateway below but stretched out along the approaches to the improvised fane. People brought their own lamps as well as those that were handed out at the doors, their bobbing progress easy to follow in the evening gloom.\n\n'Here because of you, holy one,' said Olivier. 'Word spreads that the emissary of the Emperor graces the Lightbearers with divine blessing.'\n\n'Blessing is not mine to deliver,' Keeler warned him. 'Only the word of the Emperor.'\n\n'Of course, but He has sent you to us as a sign of His favour,' Olivier said quickly. He gestured and his two attendants, Maryse and Essinam, came across the small chamber, holding the massive bound copies of the Book of Divinity. Keeler"}
{"text":" to follow in the evening gloom.\n\n'Here because of you, holy one,' said Olivier. 'Word spreads that the emissary of the Emperor graces the Lightbearers with divine blessing.'\n\n'Blessing is not mine to deliver,' Keeler warned him. 'Only the word of the Emperor.'\n\n'Of course, but He has sent you to us as a sign of His favour,' Olivier said quickly. He gestured and his two attendants, Maryse and Essinam, came across the small chamber, holding the massive bound copies of the Book of Divinity. Keeler had meant to ask where they had come from but had not yet had the opportunity. 'It would honour me if you would lay your hands upon our texts.'\n\nKeeler did so, putting a palm to the cover of each, feeling the embossed lettering under her fingertips. It was as though she could feel the words inside stretching to be read, eager to leave the page and set themselves free in her thoughts.\n\nShe pulled her hand back, a tingle of sensation running up her arms.\n\n'Would you address the congregation tonight?' Olivier asked.\n\nKeeler considered it and shook her head.\n\n'Not yet. These are your people, this is your creed. I am the follower here and would not take that from you.'\n\n'I simply heard the message that you whispered in our ears, holy one,' Olivier said, clasping his hands together. He looked pointedly at the tomes carried by his companions. 'And the words of truth as laid down in this book, of course.'\n\n'Do not undersell yourself,' said Sindermann, clasping a hand to Olivier's shoulder, gently guiding him towards the door. 'The lights hang because of you, and the whisper travels because your voice has been added to it.'\n\nBefore he realised what was happening, Olivier had been coaxed to the curtained doorway, Essinam and Maryse diligently flanking him.\n\n'I will join you shortly,' Keeler assured him.\n\nHe accepted this with a smile and left. Sindermann took a deep breath and crossed back to her, gaze moving to the scene outside the window. It was not only the light of lamps that broke the twilight. It seemed as though a patch of sky at the horizon were ablaze, but in truth it was the Starspear of Lion's Gate space port, lit with the fires of battle.\n\n'The traitors are pushing hard to take the space port,' said Sindermann. 'It may be only a matter of hours or days before they are at the Lion's Gate itself.'\n\n'A victory that would have been far swifter if not for the protections against the Neverborn,' Keeler replied.\n\n'There have been more apparitions, lady.' Sindermann rubbed his hands slowly, as though wiping away something in his palms. 'I have heard rumours of visitations and received word from Custodian Amon that he has uncovered two more sites of what he claims to be daemonic activity, though the gatherings that caused them had dispersed before his arrival.'\n\n'The blind guess at what they see, but those that have seen know the truth,' Keeler told him. 'If one expects the infernal, one sees it.'\n\n'Amon would argue that if one expects the divine, one would also see it.'\n\n'He would be wrong. I have touched the light of the Emperor. It cannot be feigned.'\n\n'There have been other stories, that tell of warming lights, and of soldiers on the walls seeing gold-clad ghosts sallying forth into the murk. A group of staff officers that meets by the Pradeshi Way says that they shared a group dream of the Emperor, in which He came to them and commanded they defend the wall at a certain place. The following day the traitors launched themselves at that section and were barely repelled. Had they followed Dorn's deployment orders there is a chance the enemy would have gained a foothold.'\n\n'It is too much for a pragmatist like Rogal Dorn to place his faith in forces he cannot comprehend,' said Keeler. 'Though I feel he is starting to appreciate more their magnitude in opposition with each passing day.'\n\nShe fell silent, lost in her thoughts. Sindermann withdrew across the chamber, moving to another window. A rumble of jet engines shook the basilica as a flight of bombers flew low over the stretch of the Palace, heading towards the outer wall.\n\nKeeler took out her Lectitio Divinitatus and opened it to the first page.\n\nRejoice, for I bring glorious news. God walks among us.\n\nShe lost herself in the words, as she had done the first time the scripture had been shown to her. It described with certainty the divinity of the Emperor, rightly placing Him among the celestial spheres as a being to be venerated. She knew the opening chapters by heart but took strength from her own simple handwriting forming the words, as though her voice were given permanent form.\n\nIt was with some effort that she roused herself on hearing Sindermann speak her name.\n\n'The congregation is ready,' he told her. 'Olivier will be waiting.'\n\nShe reluctantly closed the book and headed down to the broken stairwell that took her to the platform of the chief Lightbearer. Without ceremony she passed through the archway and came up behind him, not willing to place herself before him.\n\nHe turned and acknowledged her with a simple nod, and then began his sermon.\n\nShe did not listen to his words so much as the cadence of his voice. As before, she let the flowing shadow-pictures take shape in her thoughts, growing branches and leaves from flickering light, while the voice of Olivier took on the role of the gusting breeze once more.\n\nAnd even more simply than the first time, she slipped into the garden. She was more intent on her purpose than previously and she barely spared a thought for the glorious flora that surrounded her. Greater than ever were the blooms that clustered close, petals and stems turning towards her as though drawn by her life, seeking her energy rather than that of the sun.\n\nKeeler stepped quickly through the waving grass, ignoring the tickles at her legs as seed-heavy heads brushed at knee and calf, caressing her as though trying to entice her to remain.\n\nShe was dimly aware of others now, her fellow worshippers each picking their own path through the cultured wilderness. Like the shadows of cloud wisps far above, they drifted past, almost unseen, heading to their own destinations. Keeler paused to reflect that they seemed to be going the opposite way to her.\n\nShe considered following them for a moment, but pushed on instead, eager to lay eyes on the majesty of the arboreal Emperor once again.\n\nShe found it in a deep valley this time. As before, the immense arch of the upper leaves were a roof to the sky. But where before the lower limbs had also reached up, now a few were bound by golden chains that stretched to the ground, taut and unmoving.\n\nKeeler's heart skipped a beat at the vision, both awed and concerned. She broke into a run, but no matter how far or fast she tried to approach, the tree remained as distant as ever, out of her reach.\n\nShe stopped, knowing that she could not come closer by physical effort. This was a place of faith, and through faith would she one day climb amongst those boughs and know the embrace of the heavenly leaves.\n\nLord of the Huscarls\n\nBreakout\n\nA waiting army\n\nLion's Gate space port, mesophex skin zone, fifteen days since assault\n\nThe corridor rang with crashing boots, the whine of servos an undercurrent to the pounding charge of Rann and his Huscarls. Flecks of ceramite splintered from bolt impacts but they did not slow even as the intensity of the fire greeting them increased to a storm.\n\nOnly when they were thirty metres from the Iron Warriors did they lower shields, slowing their pace. Ortor was slightly ahead on Rann's right and checked his stride so that the others came alongside.\n\nAhead, the sons of Perturabo drew chainblades while combat attachments on their bolters whirred and gleamed in anticipation of the charge.\n\n'Ram breach!' Rann called, just ten metres from the gateway held by the enemy.\n\nSeamlessly the Huscarls manoeuvred on the charge. Ortor and Rann came together, shields angled to form a point. Their companions fell in beside and behind them, shields braced against their backpacks.\n\nAs a single blade of powered ceramite, the tip of the Imperial Fists company hit the Iron Warriors' line. With full power to his legs, Rann drove forward. His axe was in his hand but he held it back, shield locked to the sergeant's, the triangle of their edges slamming into the breastplate of a IV Legion warrior, splitting armour like the prow of an ancient galley holing a foe.\n\nThe wounded Iron Warrior was spun away by the impact, going down to one knee. The Imperial Fist behind Rann, to his left, leapt over the tumbled legionary. The Space Marine behind drove his blade into the enemy's throat, ripping the sword free as the mass of ochre-and-black plunged onwards.\n\nCut down or hurled back, the Iron Warriors broke apart, allowing the flying wedge to burst through the gateway and onto the broad landing apron beyond. A battle raged across the kilometre-wide span of ferrocrete, a blur of yellow and black on one side set against iron and red on the other.\n\nIn the wake of the Huscarls' attack, seven hundred more Imperial Fists pounded out into the freezing air, the moisture carried with them crystallising on their armour as they advanced, their bolter reports sounding stifled in the thin atmosphere. The fire of missiles and laser beams criss-crossed the sky above, from circling gunships and companies ranged across the outskirts of the storeys above.\n\nRann urged his warriors onward with raised axe. There was no time to lose. The reinforcements led by Sigismund had drawn much of the ire from the Iron Warriors and their allies, but if Rann's force did not break through to them they would be driven back from the space port, their mission failed, their losses sustained in vain.\n\n'Over there, that's the one!' Ortor pointed with his sword to the right, into the shadow of a jutting boarding quay that ran over the landing pad.\n\nA knot of fighters in Iron Warriors livery hewed their way through a line of yellow. The legionary at their head was a b"}
{"text":"by Sigismund had drawn much of the ire from the Iron Warriors and their allies, but if Rann's force did not break through to them they would be driven back from the space port, their mission failed, their losses sustained in vain.\n\n'Over there, that's the one!' Ortor pointed with his sword to the right, into the shadow of a jutting boarding quay that ran over the landing pad.\n\nA knot of fighters in Iron Warriors livery hewed their way through a line of yellow. The legionary at their head was a brute of a fighter clad in old Terminator armour, using his fist like a gleaming hammer. Rann saw an Imperial Fist go down under a series of vicious headbutts, his mask mashed into the flesh and bone of his face, blood splashed across the Iron Warrior's grille.\n\n'Secure the left flank,' bellowed Rann even as he altered direction towards the Iron Warriors champion, breaking the formation.\n\nA dozen warriors came with him, Ortor included. The others peeled left, bolters and blades directed against a wave of bloodstained World Eaters pouring along the edge of the landing apron.\n\nThe Iron Warrior recognised the challenge inherent in Rann's charge and lifted a gore-spattered fist in reply, taunting the lord seneschal. The Imperial Fist could see the rank markings of a warsmith among the blood spatter and daubed graffiti of defiance.\n\n'Stay close,' Rann warned his companions, remembering this was a battle, not a duelling cage. He had no desire to face the Cataphractii alone. 'Take down their leader.'\n\nFar from waiting to receive the attack, the warsmith leapt forward to meet Rann's charge. Shoulder lowered, arm braced, the Iron Warrior met the boarding shield at speed. The impact lifted Rann off his feet and sent the warsmith spinning away.\n\nRann crashed to the floor a few metres away, watching his Huscarls slamming into the warsmith's guard. The warsmith advanced, fingers of his power fist flexing in anticipation.\n\nSo much for not being drawn into a duel.\n\nHis shield bent at almost a right angle, Rann tossed it away and drew his second axe, the heads of both weapons crackling with licks of power. Crouched, legs braced, the lord seneschal waited for his opponent to come to him.\n\nThe Iron Warrior obliged, rushing forward without any attempt to mask his attack nor to use his combi-bolter, fist swinging with sudden speed towards the seneschal's head. Rann brought up an axe, deflecting the blow to the left, and swung the other upwards, looking for the exposed armpit.\n\nThe blade caught on chestplate instead, a split second before the warsmith crashed into him, taking them both down with a thunder of breaking armour.\n\nRann rolled, using the last of the Iron Warrior's momentum to push the warsmith away before regaining his feet. The Iron Warrior was slower, but still raised his massively armoured gauntlet in time to meet Rann's next attack. Lightning flared and the glove burned red in contact, dimming the seneschal's auto-senses. Quicker than his bulk and armour should have allowed, the warsmith's fist thudded into Rann's gut.\n\nIt was an odd blow, a brawler's punch rather than a trained Space Marine's attack, but its power cracked abdominal armour and sent system warnings flaring across Rann's display. He was forced back a step and in the moment of regaining his balance realised that momentum had turned against him. The power fist swung for Rann's chest but caught him on the arm instead, the flare of energy sending splinters of ceramite slashing through the air.\n\nThere was not a hearts' beat of hesitation in the warsmith: he came on without pause, almost crushing Rann's head, clenched fist missing by millimetres to split his pauldron with an impossibly powerful blow. It was more than his Terminator plate that powered such blows, his strength unnaturally boosted.\n\nRann went down on one knee, vision swaying. On instinct he raised his axes, warding off two more blows to regain his feet.\n\nPride told him he could swing the fight back in his favour. Experience called pride a liar.\n\n'To me!' Rann called. 'Huscarls, to me!'\n\nHis guards were too embroiled to come to his aid. Rann tried one last time to take the initiative, ducking beneath the blur of the fist, axe angled towards his opponent's thigh. Blade bit into riveted armour, slashed through into flesh.\n\nRann gave a triumphant shout as he dragged the weapon clear, expecting to see a fountain of arterial spurt. Instead the warsmith backhanded him across the face with his combi-bolter, a trickle of thick, black fluid leaking from the wound.\n\nThe power fist caught Rann square in the chest, shattering his plastron, pulverising the bones within. A sudden loss of breath told him he'd lost at least one lung. Armour warning sigils filled his vision with flashes of red.\n\nThe warsmith loomed over the seneschal, lightning-wreathed fist raised for the killing blow. It was impossible to see the warrior's face but Rann could imagine the gloating eyes, the homicidal grin of a foe that seemed more beast than man.\n\nSomething black arrived at speed, a gleaming blade flashing out to meet the descending strike. The sword deflected the fist to send it crashing into the ferrocrete just beside Rann's head. Then it spun, catching the side of the Iron Warrior's helm, though it glanced off the angled plate.\n\nBlood flowed from a shattered eye-lens, bright against the tarnished silver armour.\n\nSquinting through swirling pain, Rann saw the knightly helm of his saviour - a second before a wall of yellow crashed around him, the Huscarls responding to his call even as the Iron Warriors closed about their own leader. The black-armoured legionary took a step as though to continue the attack but a blaze of bolter fire from the Iron Warriors dissuaded pursuit.\n\nOrtor appeared in front of Rann, asking if he was all right. Rann tried to answer but tasted blood bubbling in his mouth. Pain punched up through his ribcage as he tried to stand and he fell back, desperately trying to suck air into damaged lungs.\n\n'Sergeant, get him to safety,' snarled Sigismund. 'The rest of you, hold ground here.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex core, fifteen days since assault\n\nThere had been three Apothecaries in Forrix's original force, of which only one had made it to the rendezvous - Oumar. Forrix had fought alongside him since the Unification Wars, both veterans of the Terran Legion. Battle cared little for history, but had perhaps a penchant for irony, and so Oumar had been one of the first casualties following the muster. A krak missile had opened up his skull as he had tended to one of his fellow legionaries.\n\nSo it was that Forrix patrolled the corridors that had become their home, Gharal at his side, looking at the wounded but with no specialist to treat them. Some were so still that it was only the beat of their armour's transponders that betrayed any sign of life. Others moaned and writhed without sedation. Pieces of broken battleplate were piled out of the way, removed to get access to las weals, plasma burns and bolter wounds.\n\nTurning down a side passage Forrix came upon a bloody scene, arterial scrawl drying on the wall and ceiling. Two of his warriors were knelt next to a third, holding his plastron onto his chest. Blood foamed around its edges and dribbled from the legionary's mouth. His eyes roamed sightlessly, fixing on the faint lumen hanging from the ceiling. The two Iron Warriors turned to their superior, one of them delivering a simple prognosis with a shake of the head.\n\nForrix stepped over the blood spray, fingers flexing in agitation.\n\n'How many?' he asked the captain.\n\n'Left?' replied Gharal.\n\n'Yes, left,' he snapped.\n\n'Two hundred and four, including walking wounded.'\n\n'Nearly eighty per cent casualty rate...' Forrix whispered. Judged against some of the Iron Warriors' past victories, that would count as acceptable. Had Perturabo tasked him with surviving in the midst of enemy territory for so many days with only a thousand legionaries and no armoured support he would have thought it impossible.\n\n'Triarch!' one of the wounded legionaries called out, wheezing breaths breaking the flow every couple of seconds. 'Help me... up. I can still... fight.'\n\nForrix looked at the warrior, saw the plasma scarring on his left side.\n\n'You've lost a lung, legionary.'\n\n'That's why they... gave us... a third.' His bloody grin showed broken remnants of teeth.\n\nForrix offered a wrist and the legionary grabbed it, pulling himself up with a moan. Forrix heard air whistling out of the wound in the Space Marine's side. The warsmith stooped and picked up the warrior's bolter, pressing it into his grasp.\n\n'It's Zorovar, isn't it?'\n\n'Yes, triarch. Sergeant.'\n\n'It will be lieutenant when we're reunited with the Legion.'\n\nZorovar nodded his thanks, a trembling fist raised to his chestplate in salute.\n\n'See you... on... the assault line.' He winced with the effort, pain etched into every feature. 'Triarch.'\n\nForrix returned the salute and turned away. His pace quickened as resolve hardened in his gut.\n\n'He'll not live out the day,' Gharal said, glancing back at the wounded sergeant.\n\n'Of course not. If we stay here, none of us will.'\n\n'I need you to be very clear, triarch. You want us to move from this position?'\n\n'Only those that can fight,' Forrix said slowly, fists clenched.\n\n'We're leaving-'\n\n'Keep your voice down.'\n\n'We're leaving the wounded, triarch?'\n\n'Yes. We need to jettison the burden.' Forrix stopped and rounded on the captain, struggling to keep his voice low. 'We cannot save them, Gharal. Either we die with them or we give ourselves a chance to live.'\n\n'And if the enemy take them alive?'\n\n'Let them. What are they going to reveal? That we came in here without a specific objective? That we only have two hundred fighters left? None of this will be news to our enemies.' Forrix rubbed a knuckle across an itch on his forehead, smearing soot and blood over skin cracking from dehydration. 'There is a tiny chance that our foes might even "}
{"text":" keep his voice low. 'We cannot save them, Gharal. Either we die with them or we give ourselves a chance to live.'\n\n'And if the enemy take them alive?'\n\n'Let them. What are they going to reveal? That we came in here without a specific objective? That we only have two hundred fighters left? None of this will be news to our enemies.' Forrix rubbed a knuckle across an itch on his forehead, smearing soot and blood over skin cracking from dehydration. 'There is a tiny chance that our foes might even treat them. There's not much honour left in this war, and I know the Fourth had little enough to begin with.'\n\n'We could finish them ourselves,' Gharal suggested quietly, hand tapping the side of his bolter.\n\n'We haven't got the ammunition,' Forrix told him with a frown. The warsmith stepped back and waved towards a pair of legionaries slumped against the wall nearby. 'And do you really want to take your blade to their throats?'\n\nGharal's helm turned as his gaze moved between the triarch and the injured. Back and forth, deliberating. Forrix would have told Gharal it was a command, that his opinion mattered nothing, but the warsmith was living off borrowed authority. If Gharal, or one of the two surviving lieutenants, decided to lead a mutiny, there was a good chance Forrix would get a bolt in the back of the head.\n\n'I am thinking about those of us that have a chance,' said Forrix, grabbing the captain's arm. 'We need to break through to the outer levels. There's a monorail terminal one kilometre north of here. We'll move fast, head down the track to a skybridge.'\n\n'Towards the Imperial Palace, triarch?'\n\n'Better than deeper into the space port.' Forrix cocked his head and raised a finger, indicating for Gharal to listen. The distant pound of explosions had become nothing but background noise. 'The barrage continues. Lion's Gate space port is still contested. If we can get to the outer levels, we might be able to contact Legion command.'\n\n'Fast. Precise. We can do this.' Gharal pulled free his arm and offered his hand for Forrix to grip. The warsmith did so, wrist to wrist in Olympian custom. 'We will live so that we can remember the fallen.'\n\nHimalazia, undisclosed location, twenty-eight days before assault\n\nThe valley opened out, stretching a dozen kilometres from side to side. The mountainsides around it were artificially hewn, a semicircle of laser-cut cliffs that soared hundreds of metres above the mustering site.\n\nZenobi had a perfect view perched alongside the battle cannon of Breath of Wrath, able to see down the road as it dipped below two bastions built out from the slopes themselves. Gun turrets as big as the tank festooned each pillar tower, tracking the incoming column with macro cannons and immense laser batteries.\n\nOverhead the sky was black and grey, swathed with smog from the bombardment. Nothing could be seen of the fluctuating aegis of the Palace itself, a hundred kilometres beyond the far wall.\n\nEven more incredible was the sea of machines and people that thronged the artificial caldera. Squadrons of walkers, batteries of self-propelled guns and artillery were spread out along a grid of roads stretching from the main highway, as well as companies of mechanised infantry with troop carriers.\n\n'How...?' Zenobi looked up again, seeing just the faintest shimmer of an energy field distorting the dark clouds and streaming embers. A faint drizzle of rain misted the air. Debris was still falling from orbit weeks after the void battle had ended, streaking the fumes with false meteors.\n\n'It's a special type of void shield, called a reflex shield,' said Nasha. He shrugged. 'They briefed us before we left, but I'm not sure how it works. All I remember is that it's keeping the muster base hidden from scans. Even light doesn't escape. One of the traitors' aircraft could be right overhead and they'd just see a haze of rock.'\n\n'But there's so many troops here,' said Zenobi. 'Why aren't they fighting?'\n\n'Some plan of Dorn's, I'd say. A reserve force.'\n\nThe column continued on. It was joined a few minutes later by a score of provosts on motorcycles, the flashing beacon lights of their steeds guiding the tanks to their allotted encampment. The roadway was raised here, giving them a view across the crater. Nasha pointed out various companies and regiments as they passed.\n\n'Over there,' he said excitedly, pointing to a company of building-sized tanks in black-and-red livery, stark among the camouflage of the surrounding regiments. 'Anzakk Heavy Brigade. Those are the very same Baneblades that broke the Noose of Kabbala!'\n\n'How do you know this?' Zenobi laughed to see him so enthused, like a child allowed free rein with another's toys.\n\n'We have our own claim to the Old Hundred. The Golden Hegera came from Bakk-Makkah. Well, the Old Precincts that were there before it. My ancestors have been fighting for the Emperor since the earliest days of the Unification Wars.'\n\n'And now you're following that proud tradition,' she said.\n\n'Maybe not my ancestors... I'm not from any of the heralded bloodlines. My family are algae farmers mostly. A few made it onto the local council, but that's it. If not for the Warmaster, I'd be slopping wet mush from vaporators instead of commanding this magnificent metal creature.'\n\nThey came to a halt about two kilometres from the entrance, squadrons of tanks peeling to left and right. At shouts from their officers the Addaba Free Corps spilled from the backs of the parking vehicles, like a metal snake shedding its skin from nose to tail.\n\n'I need to be g-'\n\nNasha grabbed her arm and pulled her close, his lips finding hers a heartbeat later. Tears welled up as she tasted him, wondering if it would be the last time. Eventually they parted.\n\n'Red border, gold braiding, green pennant,' he told her, nodding to the banner flying from a pole at the back of the turret. She gave him a quizzical look. 'There's a lot of tanks here, but only my one has that flag.'\n\n'Red border, gold braiding, green pennant,' she repeated, fixing the sight of it in her memory. 'I don't know where we'll be...'\n\n'If you don't find me, I'll find-'\n\n'No, don't do that,' Zenobi said sharply, causing him to flinch. She softened, stroking fingers down the lapel of his tanker's jacket. 'We have... security officers that would punish us both if you were found.'\n\n'So, this is it?'\n\n'Maybe not. I'll find you if I can.'\n\nShe kissed him again, gently, lingering in the moment of connection.\n\nIt took more effort to drag herself away from his embrace than it had to forge through the blizzards. Zenobi mustered the strength to do so, turning away. She picked up her kitbag and tossed it down to where Menber was waiting beside the tank. She handed him the standard pole next and then followed, her lasgun slung over her back by its strap.\n\n'Saying farewell, cousin?' he said, expression stern. Everybody else had moved away, leaving just the two of them. 'You know nothing can come of it.'\n\n'Something already has,' she said with a smile.\n\n'Say nothing to the integrity officers. If they think... If they question your loyalty for an instant...'\n\n'I'll be careful, cousin. I promise.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex mantlezone, sixteen days since assault\n\nThere were breakthroughs all across the boundary levels between the Starspear and Sky City. Sigismund did the best he could to shore up the weakening defence, but he leaned heavily on Lieutenant-Commander Haeger to see through the implementation. Remembering the words of Keeler, the Templar put himself in the forefront of every counter-attack, and for two solid days had fought as though he could single-handedly drive back the Iron Warriors and their twisted allies.\n\n'First Captain, new report from the core patrols.' Haeger had timed his vox call to coincide with Sigismund's transit from one embattled area to the next, a window of a few minutes' relative peace. 'Captain Thudermann requests reinforcement or withdrawal orders. We are experiencing augury blackout on the orbital scans. Lord Dorn has sent instruction that we hold for another eighteen hours.'\n\nBoarding the Rhino that would take him across the level to the conveyor station around the besieged skybridges, Sigismund considered each of these in turn.\n\n'Tell Thudermann to pull back to the second cordon. There is no gain in getting trapped between the two advancing forces. The augurs are in the purview of the tech-priests, we can do nothing except stand ready for the enemy to receive more troops from orbit. As for the third... I plan to hold as long as possible. Did Lord Dorn indicate what would happen after eighteen hours?'\n\n'He said there would be further assistance but did not care to share the details.'\n\n'Transmit to Legion command that we will hold the Lion's Gate space port for as long as the Lord Praetorian wills it so.' Sigismund spared a moment to check the Rhino's progress on the telemetric display. 'We shall be at Gate Stratos-Fourteen-Delta in two minutes. Have the companies on levels seven hundred and eight through seven hundred and thirteen push to my position for counter-attack.'\n\n'Affirmative, First Captain.' There was a pause of several seconds but the link did not cut. 'I have heard that a new enemy strike force has been assembled and is cutting through our defences more swiftly than we can recover.'\n\n'Is that a report, Haeger?'\n\n'More of a rumour, but there is scattered vox-traffic that claim sightings of Sons of Horus led by Ezekyle Abaddon himself. We are losing contact with anyone that they come upon.'\n\nA shudder of apprehension and excitement coursed through Sigismund. This was the words of Keeler made clear, his purpose suddenly revealed.\n\n'Where was this last rumour, Haeger?'\n\n'If I extrapolate, I would say that the enemy strike force is heading for level nine oh two, somewhere near beta quadrant.'\n\n'Redirect all commands in the bridge sector to my direct authority. Full assault preparation.'\n\n'What of Lord Dorn's command to"}
{"text":"n himself. We are losing contact with anyone that they come upon.'\n\nA shudder of apprehension and excitement coursed through Sigismund. This was the words of Keeler made clear, his purpose suddenly revealed.\n\n'Where was this last rumour, Haeger?'\n\n'If I extrapolate, I would say that the enemy strike force is heading for level nine oh two, somewhere near beta quadrant.'\n\n'Redirect all commands in the bridge sector to my direct authority. Full assault preparation.'\n\n'What of Lord Dorn's command to hold?'\n\n'If we do not parry this strike before it lands, there will be no point holding.'\n\nHis fingers moved to the runes of the terminal, keying in commands to locate the shortest route to beta quadrant of Sky City. Visions flashed through Sigismund's thoughts, of himself with blade in hand standing against the lord of the Mournival. Surely if Abaddon fell beneath the blade of the Templar it would be a great victory for the servants of the Emperor.\n\nIntrusions\n\nThe half-born\n\nDangerous relations\n\nEuropa Wall zone, sixteen days since assault\n\nSome would have called it luck, others destiny. Amon suspected Keeler would attribute his timely arrival to the will of the Emperor. As far as he was concerned it was nothing of these, simply the inevitable result of diligence and logic coupled with a pre-emptive attitude.\n\nHe was swiftly becoming more absorbed in the nature of the Lectitio Divinitatus, day by day getting more acquainted with their customs, personnel and movements. What had seemed a disorganised clutter on the surface belied a sophisticated, organic communications network on par with the most complex espionage cell-systems he had encountered. But it was all the more remarkable because there was no nefarious puppet master at the centre, nor were the vast majority of those participating in the movement even aware of the greater part of the whole.\n\nBy ways and means originating in necessity, the faithful had discovered how to identify each other without direct contact, centring themselves around commonly regarded symbols, phrases and mannerisms without ever directly communicating them. It was like a virus, passed on by contact, embodied in the sermons that were delivered, the pamphlets handed out, the pages of the Lectitio Divinitatus itself.\n\nThe similarity to the spread of a disease was not lost on Amon, and he had coined a term for it: the plague of belief. It was, he was sure, as potentially threatening as any physical malaise, being a corruption of culture that undermined the tenets of the Emperor's vision for humanity.\n\nAs soon as he had considered the spread of faith as an epidemiological issue he had found tracing it from one place to another far more straightforward. Though he had begun with plague victims and medicae facilities, the premise had led him farther afield, beyond the Sanctum Imperialis to the Ultimate Wall itself.\n\nAnd in doing so he had noticed a pattern, or rather a void in a pattern. Despite the clandestine support of a handful of higher-ranking Imperial Army officers, the worship of the Emperor was still forbidden among the ranks of the troopers. As such, soldiers were forced to gather off-duty or to make time and space within their duties when not directly engaged - opportunities for either were exceedingly rare with the enemy at the walls themselves.\n\nA break in vox-chatter, uncovered by Amon, had piqued his interest. A patrol that had made excuses for a late return, whose sergeant had been absent or delayed on other occasions. He might have ignored it, but their proximity to the garrisoned quarantine zone where the matter had been brought to light demanded further investigation.\n\nHe came upon the bodies in a disused way station about a kilometre and a half inside the curtain wall, just within the perimeter of the Palatine Arc quarantine zone. The detritus scattered about the bare chamber had all the markings of an impromptu fane, including a bloodied copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus. It seemed likely that others from the garrison had performed a rite in this place.\n\nThe corpses had been torn open, ribcages splayed from the inside, skin and flesh hanging in tatters from broken bones. Amon had not seen the like; it was as though the killer had emptied the victims of their insides. Each had been hollowed out, the tattered edges of ribs and breastbones showing striations like gnaw marks.\n\nHow all ten of them had succumbed was another mystery, for each lay in close proximity and though their weapons were close at hand, not one of them had fingers on a gun or pistol grip.\n\nWhatever had overcome them had done so with instant and brutal swiftness.\n\nThe floor was muddy, tracked by boot marks in and out, but among the blood spatter were other footprints. They appeared barefoot with long nails, some with three toes, others four or five. It was impossible to tell how many assailants, but at least four and quite likely more.\n\nThe stench was far worse than simple dead flesh and evacuated bowels. Amon knew the smell of death and this was edged with an acidic tang. In total contradiction he thought he also detected a floral scent, and on closer inspection of the corpses could not find any soap or other perfume that would explain its lingering presence.\n\nHe voxed the closest Legio Custodes outpost, on the outer barbican of the main Sanctum Imperialis almost ninety kilometres away.\n\n'Argent Tower, this is Custodian Amon. I am pursuing a possible incursion force into the Palatine Arc, heading north-east through the quarantine zone. Urgent despatch of support required.'\n\nHis vox buzzed for several seconds. Before a reply was forthcoming a shadow on the wall warned him of movement behind. He was fully armoured, his guardian spear in hand - a lesson he had learned at the hospital. Amon was turning, the blade blurring with its energy field, even before he registered the nature of his attackers.\n\nThe tip scored a line across the chest of the first, bubbling ichor spilling forth in its wake. The creature that flopped back reminded him of the Neverborn he had seen in the webway, supposedly incarnations of the Plague power. The others, nine more, closed fast with clawed hands, their limbs famine-thin, bellies swollen like old corpses.\n\nBut there the similarity ended. These fiends looked more human in feature, with a pair of eyes rather than one, lank hair hanging from scalps and, on three of them, cheeks and chin. Their flesh was a mottle of pinkish-white and dark brown, and their eyes were startlingly human.\n\nAs he slashed his spear tip through the throat of another, his thoughts sprang back to the mutilated bodies of the patrol and the origins of these half-daemon hybrids became obvious. The thought sickened him, even though he had seen sights that would have driven lesser warriors to madness - that somehow these creatures had emerged or incubated themselves within the bodies of the troopers.\n\nHe did not pause in his assault, not allowing his enemies any advantage from their ambush. His spear's bolter roared, hard and bright in the confines of the chamber, the salvo cutting down two more of the daemonkin.\n\nOne thing was for certain, these were no ghostly manifestations, drawn of warp power and nothing more. They died as easily as mortals, perhaps shorn of true daemonic resilience by their hybrid birth and the shield of the Emperor.\n\nSome tried to flee, which was also a first for Amon. In his experience the Neverborn were near mindless in their assaults, uncaring of personal danger or tactical disadvantage. They survived only by the whim of the power that created them. But these half-born knew fear. He saw dread in their eyes as he cut them down, his armour bathed in sickly gore.\n\nFour eluded his immediate ire, disappearing into the adjoining hallway. He gave chase, guardian spear roaring more bolts after them. Another fell, legs blown away by the detonations.\n\n'This is Argent Tower control, we have received your message,' the vox buzzed. Amon realised it had been only a few seconds since he had made his transmission. His altered physiology had made it seem far longer.\n\n'Standby for update, copy broadcast to personal channel of the captain-general,' he told the operative on the other end of the vox-link.\n\nThree swift strides took him to the junction at the end of the corridor. Blood and mud trailed left and right, two tracks leading in the first direction, one in the other. The half-born were faster than humans, already out of sight as he turned the corner. They were heading into the quarantine zone, which had become a shifting maze of shanty and open plague pit.\n\nHe pursued as fast as he could, coming upon the two abominations about a hundred metres further along the domestic palace. The third survivor would be half a kilometre away by now.\n\n'Rapid pursuit teams required at my position,' he voxed. 'I need airborne support and search inbound immediately.'\n\nHissing, hearing the thud of the Custodian's boots coming upon them, the creatures turned on him. One held up its hands as though to plead for its life; the other had ripped a support bar from the rubble and swung it like a ferrocrete-headed club. The blow bounced from Amon's auramite war-plate without leaving a scratch, the creature that wielded it almost spinning from its feet as it was unbalanced by its own blow.\n\nAmon's weapon punched forward, slicing off a warding hand before entering the chest directly through the heart. The half-born gave a screech of pain - a chillingly human sound from such an otherworldly apparition - and slipped backwards from the vapour-wreathed blade.\n\nThe second tried again to strike the Custodian, heaving up its improvised club. He smashed the butt of the guardian spear into its forehead, crushing the skull and snapping its neck with one blow. Grey fluid splashed from the wound as it fell.\n\nSparing a second to ensure both were truly dead, Amon turned on his heel and set off after the other, though he knew it was likely too late t"}
{"text":"llingly human sound from such an otherworldly apparition - and slipped backwards from the vapour-wreathed blade.\n\nThe second tried again to strike the Custodian, heaving up its improvised club. He smashed the butt of the guardian spear into its forehead, crushing the skull and snapping its neck with one blow. Grey fluid splashed from the wound as it fell.\n\nSparing a second to ensure both were truly dead, Amon turned on his heel and set off after the other, though he knew it was likely too late to find it by himself. Lost among the walking dead of Poxville, there was no knowing what further damage it might do, nor what others of its kind might yet appear.\n\nHimalazia, undisclosed location, day of the assault\n\nIt should have been a month of tedium and misery, but for Zenobi the time spent at the mustering was one of the best experiences of her life. Compared to the harrowing train journey and nightmarish march that followed, spending four weeks cooped up with rations, shelter and the company of her fellow troopers was almost bliss. It was better than life in Addaba.\n\nAnd then there was Nasha.\n\nThe illicit nature of their relationship only heightened the excitement. Illicit insofar as the integrity officers warned against spending excessive time with the other regiments being held at the hidden base. A month was a long time to avoid any contact whatsoever, though, and the needs of simple decorum and logistics had required that the Addaba Free Corps acquaint themselves with their new neighbours. The local commanders had agreed to attach the Free Corps as infantry support to the reserve force, pending confirmation from high command that seemed to have been lost somewhere in the reports.\n\nZenobi almost stopped thinking about the battle that was being waged just a hundred kilometres away. The noise of bombardment, the flights of aircraft overhead were constant reminders, but just as the reflex shields kept the reserve base undetected, so its inhabitants were isolated from the ongoing bloodshed.\n\n'What if we never get called up to the fight?' she asked Nasha after one of their midnight couplings. It was still cold, their hot breath fogging the air, sweaty bodies layered in coveralls and coats that had doubled as bedding a few minutes earlier.\n\nThey lay in the dark underneath an empty supply transport, not far from the lot of Breath of Wrath. Everything was in blackout to help maintain the cover of the reflex shield - the less energy it had to absorb the greater its effectiveness, she had learned. What was good for remaining undiscovered on the larger scale applied equally well to the small scale, affording her ample cover to make her clandestine rendezvous.\n\n'Would that be so bad?' he replied, lying with his hand behind his head, his chest making a pillow for her.\n\n'You don't want to be part of the fighting?'\n\n'I don't want to die, if that's what you mean.'\n\n'No, I mean do you want to fight for what you believe in, or let others do it for you?'\n\n'That sounds like an accusation.'\n\n'It's not.' She stroked his face. 'I just... Our futures are being decided and we're just sitting here, not involved at all. I joined... I don't want to be on the losing side just because someone forgot we were here.'\n\n'There's a plan. Dorn commissioned this secret muster personally. He'll deploy us when we're needed. If we're needed.'\n\n'When will that be though?' It wasn't the first time she had asked the question and she knew she was sounding increasingly petulant each time. 'I'm not in a hurry to leave. Not leave you. But I want to do my part.'\n\n'Do you think you can make a difference?'\n\n'Why do people keep asking that?'\n\n'There's less than six thousand of you left in the Free Corps. There must be as many tanks, transports and armoured walkers in here as you have people. And we're the tiniest fraction of the Imperial Army's might in the Himalazia.'\n\n'I work on the line. Everything has a place. Everything is balanced and timed and has a rhythm. A small disruption, the least amount of change can cause catastrophe. It's not just about how many of us are still alive, it's about where we are, when we fight. We'll die trying, anyway. Better that, if you ask me.'\n\n'You think you'll die?'\n\nShe shifted as he sat up.\n\n'It's a certainty. Like you said, there's not many of us. Enough to swing a battle, but only if every last one of us is ready to lay down our life.' She sighed and swivelled to sit next to him, her hand on his thigh. 'I never expected to have this long.'\n\n'Don't you... Don't you have something you'd like to live for? Maybe someone?'\n\nShe grinned and punched him lightly on the arm.\n\n'If it was different, then of course I'd want to live. But I wouldn't trade the future of Addaba for this happiness. Not even for you, my beautiful man.'\n\nHe looked at her for some time, perhaps memorising her features, perhaps just trying to think of something to say. She let the silence stay, relishing the quiet she knew could not last much longer.\n\nA couple of hours later she parted from Nasha with a last kiss and made her way back towards the camp of the Free Corps. Though it was almost as dark as an underspur sewer she made her way unerringly through the maze of tanks, tents and roads. She crossed a berm separating the Addaba companies from several platoons of the Nor Alba Steelwatch and turned left to avoid the checkpoint at the junction a hundred metres ahead.\n\nShe froze as a voice issued from the darkness.\n\n'Nice stroll?'\n\nZenobi said nothing, weighing up her options. She could bolt and hope that she hadn't been recognised. She could see nothing of the other person and it was likely only her footsteps had betrayed her presence.\n\n'Have you been to see Nasha, Zenobi?'\n\nShe swore as she recognised the voice of Kettai. Zenobi swung towards the sound, a snarl building in her throat.\n\n'Breaking curfew is serious. Socialising with outsiders, even more serious.'\n\n'What do you care? It's not like you haven't broken a few rules in your time. Turn me in to the integrity officers and maybe I'll let them in on a few of your secrets.'\n\nHis laugh was low, almost a hint of menace in his humour.\n\n'What's so funny, Kettai?'\n\n'You really don't know?' His next laugh was more fulsome. She heard footsteps. A shuttered lantern flickered into life to her right, revealing his flat face but little else. Flecks of snow and ash fell through the yellow glow. 'You must be the only one left in the platoon that hasn't figured it out.'\n\n'Figured out what?'\n\n'I'm with the integrity officers!' He grinned. 'Hidden in plain sight, I hear is the expression. A spy. There's an old phrase for it, an agent provocateur. Testing from within, offering the temptation before it becomes vital.'\n\n'So, everything you've been saying was a trick? Trying to lure me into giving myself away?'\n\n'Not you particularly, yeye. Everyone. You're a remarkable soldier, nothing swerved you from the cause.'\n\n'Nothing until now, you mean?'\n\nHe stepped closer, just a few paces away.\n\n'Nasha is rather handsome. Obviously, he's not inclined in my direction, so I'll never know anything more than that, but I can see why you would want to have a little fun before the killing and dying starts.'\n\n'Are you going to report me? For... socialising. I've told him nothing.'\n\n'You don't know anything to tell him.'\n\n'That's a good point. But, please, it's not done any harm, has it?'\n\n'Some might say the disobedience itself was the harm.'\n\nZenobi didn't say anything. As when she'd seen Jawaahir the first time, she knew that any further conversation just opened the way for more possible recriminations. He had already decided; any resistance would just make matters worse.\n\n'You seem calm,' he said.\n\n'What else should I be? It's up to you what happens next. What am I going to do? Kill you, like Tewedros tried? Run away to...?' She waved a hand vaguely behind her. 'To where? To do what?'\n\nKettai smiled and shook his head, a sort of impressed disbelief.\n\n'Egwu chose you well. You've got a spine of titanium in that little body of yours, and a heart that burns like forgefire. You know that you could have your throat slit for this, and you just face up to it, no worries at all?'\n\n'I'm worried,' she admitted. 'I'm worried I'll die before I get a chance to make a difference for Addaba. But the death itself, that's not anything to be scared of.'\n\n'Well, you'll not have to worry any longer.' He took a step back and half turned, raising the lantern to light her way between two privy blocks. She hesitated. 'On your way, yeye. I trust you to fight for the cause more than I trust myself.'\n\n'But I'll have to stop seeing Nasha?'\n\nHe shrugged.\n\n'Why? You've got a good thing, why spoil it? Just remember that in an hour, a day or a week we could get the command, and from that moment on, it's Addaba first and nothing else. Nothing.'\n\n'I know that.'\n\n'Of course you do. Get going.'\n\nShe gave him a long look as she walked past, searching for deceit in his face, but saw none. When she was concealed by darkness again, relief crested through her feelings and erupted as a broad grin.\n\nDesperate times\n\nThe power of faith\n\nNo stragglers\n\nPalatine Arc quarantine zone, eighteen days since assault\n\nKatsuhiro wept as he fired. He had thought himself sapped of all emotion by his experiences but the sight before him plumbed a depth of self-loathing he had not known before. The orders given to him and the hundreds of other troopers that lined the quarantine walls were brutally simple: destroy all targets.\n\nThat had been his life for the past two and a half days. Sixty hours of near-continuous duty as the living and the dead tried to break out of Poxville, time spared only to catch naps and meal breaks on the wall. It wasn't as though everything had happened all at once. The malaise had spread slowly: first they had come in ones and twos, then larger groups. Two hours ago there had been a surge, hundreds of vacant-eyed corpses juddering towards the walls, a few living am"}
{"text":"mple: destroy all targets.\n\nThat had been his life for the past two and a half days. Sixty hours of near-continuous duty as the living and the dead tried to break out of Poxville, time spared only to catch naps and meal breaks on the wall. It wasn't as though everything had happened all at once. The malaise had spread slowly: first they had come in ones and twos, then larger groups. Two hours ago there had been a surge, hundreds of vacant-eyed corpses juddering towards the walls, a few living amongst them, screaming for help, trying to dash free of the nightmare gripping the quarantine ghetto.\n\nNothing was to reach the wall, whether warp-tainted or human. It was impossible to tell, the officers had said, who was carrying the seed of corruption within them. So they came on in their hundreds, the plague victims and the refugees, the medicae that had volunteered to help them and the self-appointed carers and families who had chosen isolation with their loved ones, fleeing the abominations in their midst.\n\nHe pulled the trigger and the las-blast hit a young woman in the chest, knocking her back into a pile of corpses. Katsuhiro fancied there might be a smudge of a rash on her face, seeking the smallest justification not to hate himself every time his finger twitched.\n\nHe had become quite a marksman, he realised, almost throwing up at the thought.\n\nHis next target was definitely warp-infected. A limping gait and the spattering of mucus from the lolling mouth had to be evidence of taint. He swallowed hard and fired again, shooting the old man in the forehead.\n\nThe fusillade had ebbed and flowed, sometimes near constant for half a minute at a time then dying down to sporadic shots for an hour. Now there was just a steady rhythm to it, flashes of red and blue a few times every minute.\n\nHis lasgun whined mechanically about its empty powercell and he pulled the pack free, discarding it with the other three at his feet. Each was good for a hundred shots... He slapped one of his two remaining packs into the weapon, charged it and lifted the stock to his shoulder again.\n\nHis aim trembled and he took a deep breath, steadying his hands.\n\n'Just stop,' he whispered, choking on the words. 'Please stop.'\n\nA commotion behind him caused him to turn, others of the squad doing the same. A striking woman in a flowing blue dress had mounted the rampart, a man in light-coloured robes behind her, followed by two women bearing large books. With them came a host of people in civilian clothing, and among them a few in uniforms from different defence regiments. They each carried a lamp, even though it was midday - as far as such a time existed in the siege-gloom.\n\nThe defence officers crowded close but seemed to be greeting the new arrivals rather than challenging their presence. They pointed to the ferrocrete battlement and the newcomers continued on, spreading out along the stretch of wall. The woman that led them came close to Katsuhiro. She looked at him and smiled, and the sight soothed away the anguish. She held a lantern made out of an artillery shell casing, but the light seemed to emanate from her pale skin as much as the lamp.\n\n'Let us slay the unworthy and protect the innocent,' she said, her words carrying some distance along the firing line. The thought came to Katsuhiro to step back and he did so, shouldering his lasgun. Others also made way for the woman's silent acolytes, until the firing step was populated by them.\n\n'Who are you, lady of light?' Katsuhiro asked.\n\nAn older man came forward, interposing himself between Katsuhiro and the pale figure that looked out into the devastation of Poxville.\n\n'She is the Holy Messenger, trooper. Blessed of the Emperor.'\n\nLooking at her radiance against the darkness of the broken palaces Katsuhiro could easily believe it.\n\n'Is this safe?' Olivier asked, voice trembling. His gaze kept straying from Keeler to the dead and dying heaped upon the road about seventy metres from the wall. Shambling figures moved among them, some crawling over the charnel piles, others trying to pick routes through the rubble around them.\n\n'Of course not,' she told him. 'I told you we would confront the enemies of the Emperor. They do not dwell in safe places, not in these times.'\n\nThe truth seemed to reassure him more than any platitude, and he visibly calmed.\n\n'Your strength is an inspiration,' he said.\n\n'It is the Emperor's strength, not mine. My faith connects me to Him. It will connect us all to Him.'\n\nOlivier looked along the curve of the wall and nodded. Here and there the spark of a las-bolt spat out into the ruins but far fewer than when they had arrived.\n\n'I think we are ready.'\n\n'Then raise up your voices in prayer and let us banish this evil.'\n\nOlivier raised his voice, beginning one of his invocations. Keeler listened to her heart beating in her chest, a little faster than usual. She stared at the flame inside her shell-lamp, watching the dance of light on the blackening metal. Olivier's voice became an undercurrent of her thoughts as it had at the bastion. It was joined by the rest of the Lightbearers that had come with them, nearly four hundred souls.\n\nEach of them was a light, a patch of brightness in the darkness of Horus' shadow. Keeler could feel that oppressive shade laid upon the Palace as much as the twilight of ash and smoke that obscured sun and stars alike.\n\nShe felt also the soul of the Emperor again, though rather than a tree it felt more like a dome, the skies themselves. But all was not well. The dome was assailed from without, its surface blackening like the interior of the lamp, the daemonic accretion growing thicker, in places enough to stifle the light from within.\n\nKeeler felt her breath coming in short gasps, panic threatening her. Almost unnoticed a hand slipped into hers, gripping the fingers. She felt the closeness of Sindermann and relaxed.\n\nThe light. She turned her thoughts to it again, taking the illumination of the Emperor and casting it as a flame in her thoughts. She let the heat build, becoming an inferno of ecstasy. She knew nothing else, not of the wall beneath her feet, the men at her side, the hundreds of souls along the wall and within the ruins. But she did see the blots, the stains on the fabric of the Emperor's vision.\n\nTo these she directed the flames, her lips moving as words came unbidden to her.\n\n'With the Emperor I am righteous. With His light the darkness is broken. With the fire of purity I purge the unholy.'\n\n'Look!' grunted Olivier.\n\nKeeler opened her eyes. From the ruins of the Palatine Arc dozens of figures staggered into view. Each was human-like, but obviously twisted or infected in some way. Fire burned in their skin, consuming them from inside as they flailed into the walls and fled over the rubble, bodies crumbling like ash as they fell.\n\n'Praise the Emperor!' Keeler shouted, feeling the power flowing through her.\n\nThe call was echoed, weakly at first, and then again with greater vehemence.\n\n'Praise the Emperor!'\n\nThe keening cries of the dying Neverborn were drowned out by the third triumphant shout, the words coming from the lips of the soldiers as well as the Lightbearers.\n\n'Praise the Emperor!'\n\nThe sudden uplift of faith swept through Keeler like a hurricane, so that it felt as though her soul ascended on a hot wind. She was borne away by it, losing the sense of her body, and in that moment she found herself flying over the gardens of faith.\n\nThe great Emperor-tree spread its branches against a falling twilight, more sombre than before. Darkening clouds gathered about the treetop, flecked with malevolent lightning.\n\nKeeler raced closer, no longer walking, but with wings like the aquila, feathered with pure faith.\n\nFor a few heartbeats she thought she might actually reach the branches that she desired so strongly, but even as she neared them her wings began to fade. She did not fall, but descended lightly to the ground, clawing at the air with her hands as though she might climb through the space between her and the Emperor.\n\nThrough tears she saw that the chains binding the branches to the ground had grown thicker, and more numerous. Each was like a great docking cable, broader than her shoulders, and she thought she could make out writing etched into every link.\n\nShe fell back into her body before she could read the words.\n\nIt took some time before she reacquainted herself with her physical form, though it must have been only moments since her departure. She sat down, back against the battlement, Sindermann bent over her with concern. She gave him a smile of assurance but could not speak, robbed of words by her experience.\n\nThe former iterator deterred others that tried to crowd closer, Olivier among them. One of the troopers approached from the other side, the slight-looking man that had spoken to her before.\n\n'Was that...?' He stared back over the wall. 'How did that happen?'\n\nKeeler held out her hand and the man helped her to her feet.\n\n'The Emperor protects,' she told him, handing him the shell-lamp. She raised her voice, addressing Olivier and the others nearby. 'There will be other times we are needed, when the evil of Horus and his allies takes form. Our faith will be the light that banishes them back to the abyss that spawns them.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex core, nineteen days since assault\n\nPushing forward into the brightly lit monorail terminal in the company of his warriors, Forrix saw the tunnel at the end of the light. Three lines ran across his advance, separated by broad platforms broken by rows of pillars. A flurry of bolter rounds greeted the arrival of the Iron Warriors, shattering the tiles on the wall and the entrance gate, slamming into armour already much-punished. Yellow-armoured foes lurked behind many of the columns and along the sunken trackbeds. The crack of boltguns and crunch of armoured boots on shattered tiles echoed back and forth across the open station.\n\nThe warriors of the IV Legion split, bre"}
{"text":" lines ran across his advance, separated by broad platforms broken by rows of pillars. A flurry of bolter rounds greeted the arrival of the Iron Warriors, shattering the tiles on the wall and the entrance gate, slamming into armour already much-punished. Yellow-armoured foes lurked behind many of the columns and along the sunken trackbeds. The crack of boltguns and crunch of armoured boots on shattered tiles echoed back and forth across the open station.\n\nThe warriors of the IV Legion split, breaking left towards the tunnels and directly ahead to the nearest foes. The noise of their bolters sounded wrong in Forrix's ear, like coughs instead of barks, as close to the point of failing as those that carried them. Likewise, their armour whined and creaked and moaned with every movement, hissing and snarling from battle damage and lack of maintenance.\n\nForrix's own armour had seized at the left ankle, giving him an awkward limp. For the past four hundred metres of the advance he had adopted an almost crabwise gait, bolter pulled tight to his left pauldron, sighting by naked eye along its length.\n\n'If you fall behind, you're left behind.' It wasn't the most inspirational speech Forrix had ever delivered, but it conveyed everything his weary legionaries needed to know. 'Keep pushing forward.'\n\nHe reached a square pillar and almost fell into it, turning at the last moment to lean his backpack against the blue-and-white tiles. A glance up showed a roof vaulted with broad arcs of plasteel, the rockcrete between cracked and showering trickles of dust. The bombardment was distant, targeting another part of the space port, but its effects were still obvious.\n\n'Triarch! I'm reading multiple power armour signals in the vicinity,' Allax reported from the next pillar along, about thirty metres closer to the track.\n\n'Yes. The occupants are shooting at us!' Forrix bellowed back.\n\n'No, there's even more.' Allax gestured with his free hand towards the tunnels and upwards. 'Hard to pinpoint, but scores, maybe hundreds of signals.'\n\n'From the tunnels? Are you sure?' Forrix asked, heart sinking. There was no other way out.\n\nAllax's reply was cut short by a beam of red energy that punched through the pillar and out of his chest.\n\n'Lascannon!' The warning was shouted from behind Forrix, too late for Allax. The legionary's armour collapsed to its knees and then toppled forward. The auspex was still clasped in one hand, the green glow of its screen flickering on the tiles.\n\n'Cover fire!' commanded Forrix. He rounded the pillar and let loose three rounds, aiming towards the closest blurs of yellow. A fusillade of fire erupted around him and he broke cover, limping as fast as he could to Allax's body. A bolt-round detonated on his backpack, spraying the back of his head with hot shards. As he ducked beneath the hole left by the lascannon blast, he felt blood trickling down his neck.\n\nHe ignored it and prised the auspex from Allax's fingers. First glance confirmed that there were readings in the direction of the tunnels and on the same plane as the Iron Warriors. Forrix slid down to a crouch, the auspex falling from his fingers.\n\nIt had all been a ridiculous gamble.\n\nIf he had really examined the plan, rather than just accepting it as Perturabo had instructed, he would have seen that it required a great many factors to come together to succeed. Too many, it had turned out.\n\nHe checked his ammunition. Seven bolt-rounds in his weapon, another magazine of twenty mag-locked to his thigh. He corrected himself, pulling the magazine from Allax's discarded bolter and fixing it to his spare. Another six bolts.\n\nIt was hopeless. The only reasonable objective left was to kill as many foes as possible. Trying to escape would make that harder. Forrix was about to order his remaining warriors to hold fast and die fighting when an orange blur on the screen of the auspex at his feet drew his attention.\n\n'That's weapons discharge...' he muttered to himself, leaning forward to retrieve the scanning device. He panned it back towards the tunnels. The energy signatures grew stronger.\n\nAs though in confirmation, his vox buzzed into life, chiming three times to indicate a long-range command channel broadcast. He subvocalised the acceptance.\n\n'This is Captain Rannock, subordinate command of the Third Spear. Nobody is supposed to be in this warzone. Who is this?'\n\n'Triarch Forrix. Were you expecting someone else?'\n\n'Triarch... We thought you were all dead!'\n\n'We're not. We're in the monorail terminal. Heavily engaged. What is your situation?'\n\n'We've been positioned to stall a counter-attack across this axis. There's a significant force of Imperial Fists and auxiliaries heading right past your position. Arrival time in less than five minutes.'\n\n'Can you come to us?'\n\n'Not my orders, triarch. If you command it, we'll try...'\n\n'No. No point risking your mission. We'll come to you.'\n\n'I'll send forward five squads to link up.'\n\n'Good. We'll have company when we arrive. Forrix out.'\n\nForrix stood up, avoiding the hole in the pillar, and attached the auspex to a belt clamp. He tuned his vox to general address.\n\n'All legionaries make speed for the tunnels. Cover and advance by threes. If you haven't got a three, make pairs. Suppressive fire maximal. We have two minutes to get off this station.'\n\nFire from the Iron Warriors intensified immediately. Forrix looked around, finding his closest companions were Gharal and a legionary called Dexalaro.\n\n'On me,' he called to them, moving to fire a burst through the lascannon hole. 'Dexalaro, move on.'\n\nThey covered the next hundred metres in that fashion, two covering the third from cover to cover. Around them the rest of the force did likewise, though the return fire of the Imperial Fists grew in response, converging on those closest to the tunnels.\n\n'Onto the rail and then run!' bellowed Forrix. A score of Space Marines broke cover with him, covering the twenty metres to the edge of the platform while bolts screamed both ways around them. Forrix almost fell into the gap, landing heavily against one of the other legionaries. As Iron Warriors threw themselves against the far platform edge to renew their fire, the next wave pounded across the platform.\n\nForrix heard a cry and turned to see Gharal down on one knee, thigh armour shattered, blood streaming. He tried to rise but the Imperial Fists were merciless, their fire tracking towards him like a pack of wolves scenting wounded prey. Another round caught Gharal square in the chest, a moment before a third bolt exploded against his shoulder. Three more successive eruptions slammed him backwards, his bolter flying from his grip.\n\nForrix saw him roll to his belly, clawing through his own blood. Through a shattered lens, the captain looked at the triarch.\n\n'Fall behind...' wheezed Gharal. He stopped crawling, reaching out to retrieve his weapon. 'Left behind.'\n\nSwearing, Forrix looked away and broke into a run, limping along the rail amongst his warriors. He heard the snap of Gharal's bolter as he resumed firing.\n\nIt felt like an eternity before the darkness of the tunnel swallowed him, footfalls loud in the sudden confines. A gleam ahead, suit lamps another couple of hundred metres away, dragged him onwards.\n\nHe didn't look back.\n\nUltimate sanction\n\nDorn's hidden army\n\nA banner unfurled\n\nGalleria Formidus, Senatorum Imperialis, twenty days since assault\n\nIt was not often that Amon felt the need to demonstrate obeisance to his superiors, but he did not resist his urge to kneel before the captain-general.\n\n'I have failed you.'\n\nHis confession felt small and worthless, lost in the expanse of the Galleria Formidus, which arched a hundred metres over their heads and stretched three kilometres from end to end. Once a busy thoroughfare between the chambers of the Senatorum Imperialis and the Tower Auris of the Custodians, it was now deserted but for the pair.\n\n'Failed?' Valdor gestured for Amon to stand but he ignored it, determined to make plain the depth of his contrition.\n\n'The daemonic peril continues. Escalates, in point of fact. Faith in the notion of the God-Emperor is spreading more quickly than ever. Keeler and her Lightbearers number almost a thousand devotees now and more sects are making themselves publicly known, no longer fearing admonishment.'\n\n'Stand up.' The two words were issued with such vehemence that Amon had to comply. The commander of the Legio Custodes clenched his jaw, and Amon prepared himself for his chastisement. 'This self-flagellation is unbecoming of a Custodian.'\n\nValdor turned and gestured for Amon to continue alongside him, towards the halls of the senate where he had been heading when Amon had caught up with him. His expression remained stern.\n\n'I tasked you with investigating a single incident of untoward behaviour. You may have taken it upon yourself to launch a single-handed crusade against the rise of faith and a daemonic invasion, but that was never my command.'\n\nAmon accepted this in silence.\n\n'I am on my way to speak with Malcador, I am happy for you to join me.'\n\n'I do not think that would be the wisest course of action. The Regent clearly has his own agenda in this matter, whether he shares it or not.'\n\nValdor looked at him sharply.\n\n'You think he works against the will of the Emperor?'\n\nAmon did not reply immediately, careful of his words. When they had advanced a few more strides, footfalls echoing along the great marble-and-gold transitway, he gave his answer.\n\n'I do not believe any of us know the will of the Emperor, not on any specific topic.' Amon controlled his tone, trying to avoid implication of accusation or complaint. 'We have only the past and our own counsel to guide us. Unless you have some hidden contact?'\n\n'No, you are right,' Valdor conceded with a sigh. 'I have not been in communion with the Emperor for some time. We can only forward guesses on how He would view the current situation, and in that we must rely on the wisdom of M"}
{"text":" answer.\n\n'I do not believe any of us know the will of the Emperor, not on any specific topic.' Amon controlled his tone, trying to avoid implication of accusation or complaint. 'We have only the past and our own counsel to guide us. Unless you have some hidden contact?'\n\n'No, you are right,' Valdor conceded with a sigh. 'I have not been in communion with the Emperor for some time. We can only forward guesses on how He would view the current situation, and in that we must rely on the wisdom of Malcador as much as our own.'\n\n'On other matters, I would not hesitate to agree. But this is a direct direct against the Emperor, and also a flaunting of one of His most emphatic decrees. I was at-'\n\n'Yes, Monarchia. However, I was at Nikaea and yet I see even Rogal Dorn makes use of his Librarius again. The Emperor has not issued forth to chastise us for what you must agree would be perceived an even greater crime.'\n\n'It all revolves around the same tenet of the Imperial Truth, does it not? Faith and psykers. Intricately linked.'\n\n'The Sisters of Silence had Keeler for many months. They detected no psychic talent within her.'\n\nAmon checked the arguments that came to mind. Instead he focused on practicalities.\n\n'Keeler is amassing too much power. If she continues it will become harder to remove her.'\n\n'Remove her?' Valdor frowned. 'I thought she had some success in banishing these incursions?'\n\n'The incursions continue to grow in frequency and magnitude, so I would not make any claims to their efficacy. In fact, the greater the influence of the Lightbearers, the more daemonic activity has increased.'\n\n'I understand that we have not yet seen anything more potent than these warp-flesh hybrids. Is that true?'\n\n'For the time being. As Malcador speculated, it seems some physical focus is required. The Emperor's ward continues to keep at bay any pure manifestation of the Neverborn. Even so, it can only be a matter of time before the corrupted primarchs will be able to breach the barrier. We should proceed on the assumption that Angron, Mortarion and the others will soon directly attack the walls.'\n\n'I will pass that on to Rogal Dorn. Malcador informed me that Keeler believes there may be some central figure or group responsible for the occurrences.'\n\n'She has shared that theory with me.'\n\n'You disregard it?'\n\n'No, but speculation is unproductive. The connection to the Death Guard and the power they now serve is plain. Whether they have operatives, sympathisers or unwitting allies within the Palace does not change matters.'\n\n'This fascination with the Lightbearers seems to be personal. It is a distraction from the task of combating the daemons.'\n\n'The two are linked. Faith is growing in correlation to daemonic presence. I have yet to determine if there is causality, and in which direction. I do not deny my personal distaste for the misguided belief in the Emperor as a deity, but we cannot ignore the evidence.'\n\nAmon took a breath, readying himself for what had to come next.\n\n'I believe that even if she is not directly responsible for the daemonic attack, Keeler's spreading influence is a threat. It is too late to simply incarcerate her again, and as we saw with Sindermann, she has associates that will find ways to aid her and promulgate her creed.'\n\n'You propose to kill her?' Valdor asked the question without sign of surprise or judgement. 'To be clear.'\n\n'Yes, captain-general. If she is the source of the daemonic breaches, they will end. If not, we have still curtailed the rise of a dangerous anti-Imperial demagogue.'\n\nThey continued on in silence for several minutes. Amon knew not to prompt his superior for a reply but instead reviewed his own plan for the execution should Valdor ask for it. They were almost at the gate into the halls of the Senatorum Imperialis when Valdor spoke.\n\n'No. Keeler is not to be harmed.'\n\nIt was not in Amon's nature to question the judgement of his superiors, but he could not hold back his question.\n\n'What good do we achieve by letting her live?'\n\n'The enemy of my enemy...' Valdor stopped, about fifty metres short of the steps leading down to the sealed gates. Two Custodians stood guard at the portal, their auric armour partly concealed behind surcoats of white that indicated they had been assigned as bodyguard to Malcador.\n\n'Horus sent an assassin after Keeler,' Valdor continued. 'Until she presents a provable threat to the immediate safety of the Emperor, I take guidance from that fact. If the renegades desire Keeler dead, I suggest to you that it is in our interest to keep her alive. It may well be for the very acts we see now that her assassination was ordered.'\n\n'I had not considered that,' admitted Amon.\n\n'I will take command of the wider fight against the daemons, in concert with the Silent Sisterhood.' He raised a finger to stall Amon's next words. 'This is not admonishment, simply practicality. I need you to focus on the cause. The threat has expanded far beyond the original intent of your investigation, so I am commanding you to focus on that first purpose. Examine Keeler and the Lightbearers, and determine with certainty whether there is a connection between them and the Neverborn attacks. If there is, we will deal with it appropriately. If not, we can make use of them and spare ourselves the distraction.'\n\nAmon knelt again, this time out of gratitude for a renewed sense of purpose.\n\n'As you will it, so I obey.'\n\nHimalazia, undisclosed location, twenty days since assault\n\nExcitement rippled through the mustering base, moving from one camp to the next like a virus.\n\nThe order to attack had arrived.\n\nFor the Addaba Free Corps the next twelve hours were spent waiting for their companion regiments to get ready. There was little enough for Zenobi and her companions to do other than pack their kitbags and make sure they were ready to march. Their lost heavy weapons had been replaced by donations from other regiments, along with other supplies such as the rations they'd been eating while awaiting their new mission. The muster point had been well victualled - evidently Dorn had expected his reserves here, and perhaps in other places around the Himalazia, to be waiting for some time.\n\nUnlike with the looting of their first transport train, this time the troopers from Addaba didn't load themselves down with unnecessary supplies. They took only power packs, grenades and anything else that could be used for fighting. For them the war was almost over, the day of glory upon them.\n\n'Aren't you off to see your lover?' asked Menber, when he and Zenobi were left washing the squad pans after breakfast.\n\n'No. We've said goodbye every night as though it was the last time. There's no need to make this difficult.'\n\n'You mean more difficult?'\n\n'No. This is what we've been waiting for. I'm happy it's here.'\n\nEgwu brought them together to address the entire corps. A couple of armoured command transports had been liberated from one of the other formations and it was from atop one of these that the general-captain spoke, voice amplified by the voxmitters below.\n\n'Now is the day of our first and last test. Rogal Dorn has sent word for the reserve force to advance on the Lion's Gate space port. It is sorely contested, the strength of the Imperial Fists and their allies matched against the might of the Iron Warriors and their supporters.'\n\nShe paced along the roof of the vehicle, baton in hand.\n\n'The timing of the attack will be crucial, I have been told. This force, this mechanised column, will arrive along an axis that will turn the flank of the Warmaster's forces. A counter-attack from within the Palace will be mounted as the blow from this army falls, catching the Iron Warriors unawares.'\n\nShe stopped her walking and took the baton in both hands, staring down at the ranked squads of her companies.\n\n'Lord Dorn has impressed upon the command staff the necessity of this attack. It is the engagement for which he has been waiting, one to which we have been delivered by fate to witness. The position of the Emperor's forces will be untenable if this attack fails. I do not need to tell you how happy that makes me! This is the battle that our cause has needed. This is the opportunity to prove ourselves that we have wanted for seven years. Some of you will be detailed with special operational preparations. The remainder of the Free Corps will stand ready for my commands.'\n\nShe bowed her head and her voice was barely audible even over the voxmitters.\n\n'Soon the effort and sacrifice and blood we have shed will be made worthy.'\n\nThe companies were dismissed and a tense quiet descended on their encampment, pregnant with expectation. These last hours were the worst for Zenobi, far more excruciating than the weeks and months that had come before. To be so close and yet not quite at their goal made every minute tick past with torturous slowness.\n\nBy midday, the reserve force was almost ready to move out. A few scouting companies had been despatched already to provide reconnaissance on the route to the Imperial Palace. The Free Corps made their way to the main highway, bringing their new lascannons, heavy bolters, mortars and other weapons with them. Running the length of the enclosed base, a viaduct gave them a vantage point that looked out across the regiments both historic and newly raised.\n\nZenobi and first squad received the call to attend to Egwu. She started shaking as they marched along the road for the head of their column. Memories flocked for attention, of family and friends, time spent on the line and the experiences she'd had since leaving Addaba. All of it crammed into her thoughts, bringing her to that time and place.\n\nSo much labour, so much loss, all in the name of the Emperor. It was this thought she held on to as she clambered to the top of the command vehicle, assisted by Menber and Kettai.\n\nEgwu waited there, Jawaahir alongside. The integrity high officer spared a brief smile for the standard bearer and with a"}
{"text":"s flocked for attention, of family and friends, time spent on the line and the experiences she'd had since leaving Addaba. All of it crammed into her thoughts, bringing her to that time and place.\n\nSo much labour, so much loss, all in the name of the Emperor. It was this thought she held on to as she clambered to the top of the command vehicle, assisted by Menber and Kettai.\n\nEgwu waited there, Jawaahir alongside. The integrity high officer spared a brief smile for the standard bearer and with a flick of a finger directed her to place herself next to the general-captain.\n\nThe smog of hundreds of engines blackened the sky, adding to the gloom of the filth-choked heavens. The thunder of tanks and transports, some the size of city blocks, created a deafening wave of sound that reverberated from the mountainsides, an assault on ears already numbed by the winds of the high Himalazia.\n\nThe growl of machine voices all but drowned out human shouts, even those amplified by voxmitters. Electronic clarions howled into the whirl of noise, sounding the advance or stand-to, their modulated calls overlapping.\n\nEverything was sudden movement, dust billowing from treads and boots alike.\n\n'This is it.' General-Captain Egwu did not raise her voice, but her words were carried by the tongues of those under her command. 'Everyone stand ready.'\n\nBeside her, Zenobi Adedeji fidgeted with the cover of the banner she carried, eyes flicking between her company commander and the scene of organised bedlam being enacted around the troopers from Addaba Hive.\n\n'Everything we have done, the oaths we have sworn, the hardships we have endured, has led to this moment.' Now Egwu shouted, not simply to be heard, but filled with passion. Her remaining eye stared wide amongst the burn scars that covered most of her face, fresh tissue pink against her dark skin. 'Now is the time we strike at the enemy! Our families laboured and died to deliver us to this place. Our courage and determination has carried us this far. We may not live beyond this day, but our deeds will!'\n\n'Now?' asked Zenobi, her voice quavering with emotion, a shaking hand reaching towards the cover of the standard.\n\n'Yes,' said the general-captain. 'Now.'\n\nThe cover fluttered from Zenobi's grasp and the banner unfurled as she waved the pole, greeted by a roar from the troopers arrayed along the roadway. The voxmitter picked up her cry as the cloth straightened to reveal a red flag, a black stylised eye embroidered upon it, the names of thousands of Addaba families stitched in long lines beneath.\n\n'For freedom! For Addaba!' she shouted as las-fire ripped into life around her. A series of sharp detonations echoed across the base, plumes of yellow fire erupting within the tank columns and artillery batteries from demolition charges concealed that morning. 'For the Warmaster!'\n\nDorn capitulates\n\nShattered iron\n\nA terrible revelation\n\nBhab Bastion, twenty-one days since assault\n\nStanding on the central platform of the Grand Borealis Strategium, Dorn turned his head one way and then the other, sensing a change in the atmosphere. It had been the first time in a week since he had been able to return, forced to lend his physical presence to the most pressing battles for the wall. His brothers did likewise, each of them needed in more places than they could reinforce, moving from one battlezone to the next without pause. Only the necessity of retaining his overview of the siege had brought him back.\n\nThere was muttering. Not the quiet conversation of reports being made, communications being passed along. Murmurs of disquiet. He saw Imperial Army adjutants hurrying from one display to another, exchanging concerned looks. The few remaining Imperial Fists officers - those with fresh wounds or older injuries that prevented them from fighting - gathered in conspiratorial clusters.\n\nOne of them, Captain Vorst, broke away and limped across the strategium as fast as his augmetic leg allowed. Dorn regarded him without comment as he ascended the steps to the command platform. The captain's hand rose to his plastron and fell quickly in a hurried salute.\n\n'Lord Dorn, all contact has been lost with the Lion's Gate space port.'\n\nThe agitated manner of the equerry was at odds with the normally calm demeanour that made him so suited for his position. Even with such momentous news, Dorn could not allow any laxity in discipline.\n\n'Steady yourself, captain.' Dorn's gaze took in the great sweep of the strategium. 'Others are looking to you for example.'\n\n'Apologies, Lord Dorn.' Vorst straightened as best he could with a crude hunk of metal for a leg, banging his fist to his chest in sharper salute.\n\n'When was the last communication?' Dorn asked.\n\n'Thirty minutes ago. Lieutenant-Commander Haeger reported that the enemy were within five kilometres of the skybridges, my lord. Captain Sigismund had drawn down all remaining forces from the Starspear to contain the threat.'\n\n'And what are the enemy dispositions now?'\n\n'Unknown, my lord.' Vorst glanced up at the long line of sensor terminals on the level above. 'All comms and scanners are being jammed.'\n\n'How? We have the most powerful, most sophisticated surveyor arrays in the Palace.' The scale of such an event explained his equerry's discomfort.\n\n'It seems that the space port's own scan and docking systems have been corrupted, my lord. Inverted, so that they are blocking every conceivable spectrum analysis and communications frequency. It's silenced and blacked out every link we have with the forces inside.'\n\nDorn swallowed back his immediate reaction, which was to demand how such a thing was possible. If there were an explanation it would have been offered, even if highly speculative. Another recent loss of communication came back to mind.\n\n'Any further report on the relief force at Station Ultima?'\n\n'Scattered vox-chatter. As previously reported, it seems there was a rogue element introduced into the relief camp, my lord. Nobody is sure how. They attacked the camp from within. It will be another eighteen hours before they are in any state to mount an offensive.'\n\nDorn ground his teeth, fists clenched. The timing was disastrous. Though he had other reserves, of much less strength, the Ultima force had been ideally positioned to strike behind the siege lines at just such a moment. It seemed more than coincidence that traitors should attack from within just as his need was greatest.\n\nSimilar stories had been trickling in from across the Palace. Imperial Army units not responding to orders. Others disappearing entirely. Turncoats, from a few dozen individuals to whole regiments, were turning on their companions, gunning down former comrades, bringing their tanks and artillery to bear upon loyalist positions. A few incidents had become a much deadlier phenomenon over the last twelve hours.\n\nAll was building to a long-anticipated crescendo.\n\n'This is it,' said the primarch. 'He will be coming now.'\n\n'It is what, my lord? Who is coming?'\n\n'Perturabo. The Lord of Iron. This is his masterstroke, he thinks. Blinded, cut off, our forces are ripe to be swept away by his arrival. A self-indulgent finale to his victory.'\n\n'Why now?'\n\n'Sigismund has been too focused on the bridges. He has forgotten he needed to defend the Starspear as well.' Dorn let his pent-up anger free, slamming a fist into the palm of his other hand. Vorst withdrew a step, aghast at this unusual display from his lord. 'This has always been a battle for the docks, not the bridges. With the upper guns overrun or blinded, my traitor brother can bring in as many ships as he wants. He can bring in whatever strength he needs to overrun the space port terminals.'\n\n'Titan transports,' said Vorst, hushed by the notion.\n\n'Or a battle-barge,' snarled Dorn. He turned his gaze upwards, as though looking into orbit, imagining his brother on the bridge of the Iron Blood. Would he be brooding or exultant? His first victory on Terra was close at hand. How did it feel, taking that step closer to the Inner Palace?\n\n'Orders, Lord Dorn?'\n\nThe primarch realised it was the second time of asking.\n\n'Alert all forces at the Lion's Gate. Prepare supporting fire and sally attacks to cover the withdrawal at the space port. Keep trying to signal Sigismund. He is to order full, strategic retreat to the bridges and then to the Lion's Gate.'\n\n'Retreat?'\n\n'The space port has fallen, Vorst. It is just a matter of time, and how many of our warriors we can extricate from under the enemy guns. Every soldier saved today will stand to fight tomorrow.'\n\nHe strode towards the steps, reaching for the helmet that hung on a stand at the back of the platform.\n\n'You are leaving, Lord Dorn?' Vorst hurried after him.\n\n'Yes. Prepare my gunship and my Huscarls.'\n\nHe had matched wit and will with Perturabo across star systems, siege lines and palace walls. Now it was time to face his brother in person.\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex exterior, twenty-one days since assault\n\nSigismund's sword sheared through the bolter of the Iron Warrior that faced him. The blade detonated the round in the breech so that his sword was aflame as it cut deep into the legionary's helm. The warrior of the IV Legion stumbled back, blood flying. Sigismund followed, relentless, driving the point into his target's throat.\n\nAround him bolter and blade made a cacophony of war, but he fought as though in a bubble of silence. The battle had sprawled out into the concourses and galleries around the skybridges, so that gunships and anti-air cannons roared and thundered above while gun batteries upon the skin of the space port tracked fire across the melee, seeking foes of opportunity. Loyalist and traitor were too embroiled with each other to mark friend and foe apart, like two combatants with blades in each other's guts and hands clamped to each other's throats.\n\nStriding past the falling corpse of his enemy, Sigismund looked not at the next Iron Warrior but beyond him to the great conf"}
{"text":"he skybridges, so that gunships and anti-air cannons roared and thundered above while gun batteries upon the skin of the space port tracked fire across the melee, seeking foes of opportunity. Loyalist and traitor were too embroiled with each other to mark friend and foe apart, like two combatants with blades in each other's guts and hands clamped to each other's throats.\n\nStriding past the falling corpse of his enemy, Sigismund looked not at the next Iron Warrior but beyond him to the great conflagration that had erupted around the monorail terminals and the immense archways that led to the outer platforms. Dreadnoughts and tanks duelled along the kilometres-wide station front, while in the further distance thousands of others ebbed and flowed like a tide of power armour, as the last of both forces committed to this final battle.\n\nFar below, where mortals could breathe the polluted air, hundreds of thousands of Imperial Army troopers toiled against the horde of turncoats, beasts and mutants, but their war was without victory even if the cost continued to rise - the fate of the space port would be decided in the next hours at the gates of the skybridges.\n\nDucking beneath a chainsword, Sigismund fired his bolt pistol into the faceplate of a legionary, following the bolts with the edge of his blade. He let another snarl-toothed weapon ricochet from his angled pauldron, the blow deflected away from his head, exposing the wielder's neck to a downward cut.\n\n'Where is Abaddon?' he cried, letting his frustration free through his external address. There had been no sign of the Sons of Horus at the point of the enemy attack.\n\nHis vox crackled, but not in reply to his challenge. The voice that came through the static was that of Lieutenant-Commander Haeger.\n\n'Captain, I have an incoming transmission from Lord Dorn.'\n\nSigismund paused in his assault, taken aback by the news. There had been no communication in or out of the space port for more than an hour.\n\n'I stand ready to receive.'\n\nThe static crackle increased as the link was established. Lord Dorn's voice was tinny and distant. The surrounding clatter of small-arms and crash of weapons on power armour swelled around the Templar.\n\n'Order immediate withdrawal from the Lion's Gate space port.'\n\nShocked, Sigismund almost missed an axe swinging from the melee towards his chest. He parried at the last moment, stepping back to allow Gaurand and Elgeray to pass him on the left and right, taking the brunt of the fight from him.\n\n'This is their last effort, my lord. We can hold.'\n\n'The cost is too high. This is not our last battle to fight, it is only the first wall.'\n\n'Abaddon is here, my lord. And other commanders of the foe.'\n\n'It is of no consequence.' Bitterness entered the primarch's voice. 'Do not let the lies of Keeler lead you astray a second time.'\n\nSigismund choked back his argument, knowing that he had nothing more to say to his genefather than had been said already. Dorn must have taken his silence as objection; his tone was fierce when he next spoke.\n\n'These warriors' lives are not to spend for your superstition, Sigismund. Nor are they currency for your personal glory. You want to hurl yourself at Abaddon? You have my leave. Discharge your last efforts as you wish, but do not call it honour, do not call it duty.'\n\nDarkness fell upon Sigismund, but it was not a product of his genefather's words but a literal shadow. He sensed the fighting diminish around him, a pause as though both armies took a breath together.\n\nHe looked up and saw a silhouette against the purple dusk-lit clouds. An immense starship descended from orbit, its prow aflame with friction heat, energy discharge crackling across its dark hull.\n\nNot a single cannon fired in defiance of its landing, the orbital batteries seized, blinded or destroyed.\n\n'My lord, we have been fools,' Sigismund told Dorn, voice breaking, recognising the warship as plumes of fire carried to the upper docks. 'This was never to seize the bridges - all was a ploy to clear the defences of the high dock.'\n\n'Too late the truth comes to you,' said the Emperor's Praetorian, censure dripping from every word. 'It is the Iron Blood. Perturabo's flagship.'\n\nSigismund looked up again at the shadow passing across the heavens, its plasma engines leaving wakes of azure. At full magnification he could see launch bays opening, gunships pouring forth like wasps from a nest. There would be other ships coming, bringing overwhelming force to bear directly from orbit.\n\nWould Rann have allowed it to happen?\n\nSigismund would not accept that this was failure. The space port could never hold forever; it was always his lord's intent to slow the enemy and then withdraw. He brought up his sword, touching its hilt to his brow as he closed his eyes, trying to find the peace he sought.\n\nInstead he saw the face of Keeler. He heard her voice, telling him he was the Emperor's chosen.\n\nThe port would fall but there would be other battlefields. It was up to him to make sure the greatest of the enemy did not survive to see them.\n\n'What is your command, my lord?' he asked, opening his eyes.\n\n'Unchanged. The flow of time bleeds the foe greater than any wound. Hold the bridges just long enough for the withdrawal.'\n\nA great shout burst across the battle, bellowed from thousands of voxmitters and external address systems. Accompanied by the crashing of fists and the thrum of revving engines, the Iron Warriors gave voice to welcome their arriving primarch.\n\n'Iron within! Iron without!'\n\nWith their battle cry rebounding from the walls, echoing from the broken plascrete and burning wrecks, the Iron Warriors surged again.\n\nLion's Gate space port, tropophex skin zone, twenty-one days since assault\n\nForrix had spent weeks at a time aboard ship during the Great Crusade and the subsequent war against the Emperor, and had never thought anything of his confinement. Emerging into the open air of the Lion's Gate space port's primary skybridge terminal made him realise how closed-in he had been for the previous twenty days - days spent in constant fighting, just one mistake from death.\n\nFighting continued below, about twenty storeys down and a kilometre away. It seemed that not a balcony, bridge or mezzanine was not home to an iron-clad warrior or ochre-armoured foe. Armoured vehicles slashed through the periphery while cannonades from support battalions rained fire onto the bridges themselves. Among the metal of his brothers he spied a thrust of red aimed at the heart of the Imperial Fists' line, a smudge of grey next to it.\n\nIt seemed impossible that for all the time he had fought inside the port, only now were the bridges being seized.\n\nHe cared nothing for it, wearied beyond imagining in body and spirit. He longed to suck in lungfuls of air but he was still eleven kilometres up; unsealing his armour would be a mistake, a salvaged Imperial Fists helm adjoined to his plate. He wanted to spit the dryness from his mouth and wipe the congealed sweat from his face. Instead he let himself slump to his knees, bolter in one hand, blood-caked knife in the other. His suit sighed with him, fluctuating power readings scrolling across his visor.\n\nLike everyone else, his eye was drawn to the massive starship descending to the uppermost tower of the Starspear, wreathed in flame, accompanied by a shower of shooting stars as orbital debris fell with it. The pyrotechnics of its approach were greater than any celebratory display. Sparks of blue betrayed the presence of descending attack craft, a swarm of fireflies falling from a flame-wreathed behemoth.\n\nThe Iron Blood, seat of Perturabo - the primarch now come to claim his prize on the backs of his warriors' efforts.\n\nThe urge to spit returned, this time out of disgust. Kroeger's whole plan had been a simplistic disaster waiting to happen, and only the bloody-mindedness of the Iron Warriors - fighters like Gharal - had wrested any kind of victory from the mess. Now the conquering Lord of Iron would arrive and finish the job his sons had started. After so many years of other Legions using the IV as their battering ram, it sickened Forrix to think of his own genefather doing the same.\n\nTelemetric transponders warned him of the approach of more Iron Warriors, alighting from an industrial conveyor a few dozen metres away. Six squads emerged, battle-damaged and wary. Forrix recognised their leader immediately and pushed himself to his feet to raise a hand in greeting.\n\n'Stonewrought, I didn't think I'd see you so far from your guns!'\n\nSoltarn Vull Bronn signalled to his warriors to take positions at the wall overlooking the platforms below, before breaking away to approach the triarch.\n\n'Thought you were dead,' said Bronn.\n\n'Should be, by any sane calculation,' Forrix replied with a shake of the head. 'If I suspected Kroeger of any intelligence, I would say he intended to have me trapped and slain in that murderzone. But, he's too stupid for that kind of politics.'\n\n'He seems to have your measure. Who else has come this close to seeing you dead?'\n\nForrix just grunted, not willing to concede anything in favour of Kroeger. Had it not been for Perturabo's injunction, Forrix would have not been forced into a suicidal infiltration.\n\n'Stupid, but standing on the brink of victory,' the Stonewrought continued. He pointed across the skybridges where, level with the terminal of the space port, the Lion's Gate itself stood tall and undaunted. 'This is just the first wall to cross. The gate itself is the prize.'\n\n'Prize? There is no prize left.' Forrix looked past the bastions of the Lion's Gate to the flare of the last shields of the aegis above the Sanctum Imperialis. 'Not for us mortals. You've seen the tides of this war, the things that have changed. We're lubricant in a war machine built for gods, as expendable as bolts and powercells.'\n\nThe Stonewrought said nothing, offered no argument, so Forrix continued.\n\n'My brothers... Maybe some of them would sti"}
{"text":"all to cross. The gate itself is the prize.'\n\n'Prize? There is no prize left.' Forrix looked past the bastions of the Lion's Gate to the flare of the last shields of the aegis above the Sanctum Imperialis. 'Not for us mortals. You've seen the tides of this war, the things that have changed. We're lubricant in a war machine built for gods, as expendable as bolts and powercells.'\n\nThe Stonewrought said nothing, offered no argument, so Forrix continued.\n\n'My brothers... Maybe some of them would still fight for me, but most have their eyes turned up, seeking a higher glory, wanting to elevate themselves. This Legion isn't worth my blood any more. Perturabo? He is as much a danger to us as the enemy. His temper will be the ending of us yet, and we'll follow him into the abyss despite it. Horus?' Forrix laughed bitterly, tasting the acid in his mouth. 'He and his gods see only the Emperor. We are ants under their boots as they fight, thinking to sway the course of the galaxy with a bolter and a blade. A stone in the Ultimate Wall will have more influence over the end of this war than you or I.'\n\n'You're not coming with me?' said the Stonewrought, pointing to a set of steps that ran down from the overlook to the main terminal. 'I've been ordered to flank the Imperial Fists position while Kroeger, Kharn, Abaddon and Layak lead the final assault.'\n\nForrix looked back up at the Iron Blood and then to his warriors, such as remained, standing in the darkness of the terminal archway. The battle continued to rage below, the reports of bolters as sharp then as they were the first time Forrix had been in battle. The flare of laser and shell lit the fog below, winds carving glimpses of firefights and melees ranging across the rampways and rails of the kilometres-long skybridges. The battle might be concluded before Perturabo arrived - that at least would give Forrix some satisfaction.\n\n'Form on me!' he called to his warriors. They responded wearily but without complaint, falling in to rough squads around their commander.\n\n'You've found something to fight for?' said the Stonewrought.\n\n'No,' Forrix told him as he started towards the stair, Bronn falling into step beside him. 'But I would rather win a battle fighting for nothing than lose one.'\n\nBasilica Ventura, western processional, twenty-one days since assault\n\nIt was with a mixture of disdain and foreboding that Amon watched the 'faithful' gathering on the processional just to the south of the Basilica Ventura. More than ten thousand disciples, each of them carrying some form of home-made lamp, a sea of flickering lights that stretched along the walled transitway.\n\nFrom a ledge-walk around the outside of a former assayer hub, Amon had an unblocked view of the three-kilometre-long processional, from the ruins of the Basilica Ventura all the way to the Westmost Gate. It was a commonly used route for those approaching the Senatorum Imperialis for petition, though of late much of its length had been populated with refugee families and scavengers. It was very public, which was the reason Keeler had given for the choice of venue for this unprecedented gathering. Convinced that the Lightbearers were innocent of any connection to the daemonic attacks, she saw the expansion of their numbers as the only defence against the Neverborn.\n\nIt reminded him too much of Monarchia. How long before they erected their first monument to the Emperor? Statuary abounded within the Palace, of philosophers and warlords aplenty, but none of the Emperor Himself. A city had been levelled because it had been constructed in praise of the Master of Mankind's divinity. The Imperial Palace wore the mantle of fortress of late, after so many guises, but what of those days after the defeat of Horus and the lifting of the siege? Would the Emperor be forced to walk among cathedrals raised to His false godhood, or would He have to break apart every stone of His own greatest work to be rid of the taint?\n\nAmon had secured a copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus, studying it in the hopes of learning more about the cult that took its name. It was a mixture of truth and wishful thinking, with many passages expanding upon the original doctrines that took it into the realm of pure speculation - that it was the work of multiple authors was clear to see in the various sections, each seemingly trying to outdo the last in pomposity and self-reflection.\n\nDespite his deepest misgivings he was powerless. This phenomenon had to be allowed to run its course, barring direct intervention from the Emperor, so that the folly of religion would be made plain to all once again.\n\nAlready Keeler had passed on information about a faction within the Lightbearers that was demanding she and Olivier were vocal in denouncing other cults around the Imperial Palace. Infighting would inevitably follow, and internecine debate could well become another civil war.\n\nHe corrected himself. Not entirely powerless. Twelve Custodians and a detachment from the Silent Sisterhood stood by to assist should his suspicions of the sect and its parade prove correct. Never before had so many gathered together in singular purpose, and it seemed to Amon that if anything was amiss among the rituals of the Lightbearers it would become clear today. He would have preferred more support, but ongoing regular unrest as well as more immaterial incidents kept the much-diminished force of the Legio Custodes spread thin across the Imperial Palace. The very real threat of the daemon primarchs gaining ingress to the Palace occupied the thoughts of Valdor and the Silent Sisterhood.\n\nHe could see Keeler upon a platform erected on the far side of the processional, flanked by address systems to carry her voice to the growing mass around her. She had not confided in him the nature of her sermon. The Custodian also noted several dozen uniformed troopers near the base of the platform, weapons in hand. How they were at the procession and not at the walls did not concern him, but their presence was a further complication.\n\nA click behind Amon drew his attention to the concealed doorway through which he had passed to come to his observation post - one of many secret routes the Legio Custodes maintained throughout the Imperial Palace. He turned, expecting another Custodian, and was surprised to see Malcador framed in the doorway. A flash of gold and white in the vestibule behind betrayed the presence of at least one guard, though the Custodian remained within the building when the door swung shut behind the Regent.\n\n'Bracing weather,' said Malcador, robe and thin hair tousled by the strong wind. He stayed close to the door, unwilling to approach the wall-less edge.\n\n'Is this what the Emperor desires?' Amon asked, gesturing with his spear towards the converging masses.\n\n'There is power here.' The Regent closed his eyes, head tilted back. His lips barely moved as he spoke. 'A great pressure from without pushes upon the telaethesic ward. Daemons beyond counting expend their existence to break through. Sorcery abounds in the camps of the Dark Mechanicum, the Death Guard and the Word Bearers. Magnus is finally committing his psychic might to the assault.'\n\nMalcador opened his eyes, a last glimmer of gold in the irises as he looked straight at Amon.\n\n'The Emperor has greater concerns than a few hymns and prayers.'\n\n'The Neverborn are drawn to power.'\n\n'Yes, but it can also keep them at bay. If I could be definitive, I would tell you for certain that this gathering of faith was good or bad. In such matters there is no certainty, only intent.'\n\n'And you trust the intent of these people?'\n\n'I trust Keeler, as I told you before.'\n\nAmon returned his attention to the woman at the front of the platform. She had started to address the crowd, the words audible to his enhanced senses, though he paid them little mind.\n\n'The webway was only one means for protecting mankind from the lure of Chaos,' said Malcador, taking a step forward, eyeing the drop with some concern. 'The Emperor thought that the best means to break the Dark Powers was to starve them of energy at the source.'\n\n'Mastering the secrets of the webway would have allowed humanity to traverse the stars without the warp. No warp, no Navigators, no psykers.'\n\n'Yet psykers are still born among us.' Malcador tapped the side of his head, reminding Amon that he spoke to one with such abilities. His next words materialised directly inside the Custodian's thoughts. It was not pleasant, something he had only experienced from the Emperor previously. What would we do with all of those psykers?\n\n'The Astronomican is power...' Amon realised the meaning of Malcador's question. 'With the webway there is no need for the Emperor to project the light of the heavens. The void would fall dark.'\n\nMalcador edged closer, fingers tight around his staff as he peered down to the processional far below, people still making their way to the gathering.\n\n'What if that psychic power was used by the Emperor rather than projected?' Malcador shrugged. 'If our base emotions feed the Dark Powers, what of our common humanity?'\n\n'The webway project failed, this is idle speculation.'\n\n'Not so. Not for me. Dorn wrestles with the logistics of waging war across a continent-sized fortress-city, I contend with the implications of a battle that rages over the boundless realms of the immaterial.' Leaning on his staff, he sighed, gaze turning towards the distant speaker. 'If we cannot stifle the gods' power in the warp, then what better means to defeat them than to channel it away? Or perhaps given sufficient psychic energy, could the Emperor weaponise the Astronomican? Rather than light the warp, could He purge it?'\n\n'This discussion is a distraction. I do not understand why you came here.'\n\n'To see it for myself. To see faith growing, in the flesh even as I feel it in my thoughts.' Malcador smiled but there was no humour in his eyes. 'You see, everyone is a psyker. Everyone has a tiny connection"}
{"text":" in the warp, then what better means to defeat them than to channel it away? Or perhaps given sufficient psychic energy, could the Emperor weaponise the Astronomican? Rather than light the warp, could He purge it?'\n\n'This discussion is a distraction. I do not understand why you came here.'\n\n'To see it for myself. To see faith growing, in the flesh even as I feel it in my thoughts.' Malcador smiled but there was no humour in his eyes. 'You see, everyone is a psyker. Everyone has a tiny connection to the warp, even you. Except the Silent Sisters, of course, and a relative handful of others. Instinct, empathy, sympathy... They are products of the soul, communicating in infinitesimally small ways with the souls of others. What if a force bound not just the powerful psykers together, but every soul in humanity?'\n\n'That force is faith, you think?' Amon was not sure he could deal with the nuances of Malcador's suggestion. It was as outside his expertise as algae harvesting or Martian theologika poetry. 'You want to see if faith has power? Is that why you have let this folly grow so wildly?'\n\n'Let us call it weapons research,' said the Regent.\n\n'The Emperor forbade His own worship.'\n\n'And the moment He makes known His will to end this, I will order the extermination of every last member of the Lightbearers and any other cult.' Malcador drew up straighter. 'Until that time, I am the Regent and I allow it to continue.'\n\nAmon realised the speaker had changed - Olivier had now taken centre stage and was pontificating to his followers. Something he had said had pricked Amon's suspicion.\n\n'Is something wrong, Custodian?'\n\n'Yes.' Amon reviewed the last few seconds of his unconscious memory. 'Olivier just said to give praise to the Emperor, the creator is hope in the heart of every person.'\n\n'So?'\n\n'I heard the same, the first time I encountered one of the half-born. The corporal said, \"He is the Life Within Death. The Breath on your Lips. The Hope in your Heart.\" And I heard him call the Emperor the Life within Death earlier, but it did not trigger the memory.'\n\n'Titles from the holy book, perhaps?'\n\n'No, I have read three different copies and not one of them contained those specific phrases.' Amon started towards the doorway. 'You are about to find out just how dangerous faith can be, Lord Regent.'\n\nLion's Gate space port, interstitial bridges, twenty-one days since assault\n\nIt was foolish to think that a single battle would change the course of a war already seven years progressed, but as he advanced along a boulevard filled with the wrecks of Imperial Fists, Iron Warriors and Imperial Army tanks of both sides, Abaddon felt a sense of shifting momentum. The void war, the suppression of the Lunar defences, even the slaughter of millions around the walls was simply preface to the assault on the Imperial Palace.\n\nAn assault that would commence within days if the skybridges of the Lion's Gate could be captured. The Iron Blood was no longer in view, docking with the orbital pilaster, but it was only a matter of time before the Lord of Iron joined his warriors.\n\n'Enjoy your victory,' Layak told him, the six eye-lenses of his helm gleaming with their unnatural light as twilight rapidly fell on the smoke-shrouded terminal.\n\n'It is not mine,' Abaddon replied.\n\n'When you are dedicated to the powers, all victories are shared, for the ascension of one is the ascension of all. Rejoice in the knowledge that we step closer to Lord Horus' final confrontation with the Emperor. We are delivering the Warmaster to his fate.'\n\nAbaddon was not so sure he knew what that meant, but the arrival of ochre-clad warriors ahead of the vanguard pushed aside all other considerations. Bolts speared out to meet the oncoming warriors, while fire from heavy weapons sited further down the bridges flared past. With his knot of Sons of Horus around him, Layak and the two blade slaves at his left shoulder, Abaddon strode forward with purpose.\n\nWordless cries drew his attention to the left. From among the silver-clad companies of the Iron Warriors burst forth a stream of red - legionaries of the World Eaters racing ahead of their companions. At their head pounded Kharn, the teeth of Gorechild flashing in the flare of bolt propellant, his armour encased in dried gore.\n\n'There goes a champion who is at one with himself,' said Layak. 'Kharn embraces the gifts of Khorne and is freed the indignities of doubt and self-concern. See how he charges right at his enemies, no longer afraid, no longer wondering at his purpose. He is fulfilled and through him so Khorne's power grows, a mutual glory.'\n\n'He becomes more mindless, unable to focus, losing what he was,' replied Abaddon. 'And Typhon - Typhus - what has he turned into? What of the lodge-brother I once swore oaths alongside? We have travelled a long road, and I am not sure it leads to the destination we wanted when we set out.'\n\n'The destination has always been written. Destiny, you see?' said Layak with a short laugh. 'Perhaps you were blind to it. Erebus thought that guile was needed on occasion, but I have hidden nothing from you. All power comes at a price.'\n\nThe captain of the World Eaters was almost at the line of Imperial Fists, running ahead of his brothers by twenty metres, uncaring of the bolter fire that turned towards him. Thirty Imperial Fists converged on him, shields coming together like a thunderclap. Five metres from them, Kharn leapt, turning salmon-like in mid-air as he passed over them, Gorechild taking the heads from two before he landed. The champion of the Blood God did not stop to attack the shield wall from behind, leaving his followers to crash against it in a welter of chain weapons and blazing power axes. Instead he pushed on, heading for the next line of Imperial Fists, where Abaddon saw a large banner flying, carrying the crests of the Legion and their First Captain, Sigismund.\n\n'He'll be surrounded and cut down, no matter how much the forces of the warp grant him power,' said Abaddon.\n\n'What do you care?' crowed Layak. 'It is the will of the gods!'\n\nAbaddon gave no reply, but the sorcerer's words spurred him. He owed Layak no explanation and doubted the Word Bearer would understand anything of fraternity, of the bond between battle-brothers stronger than loyalty to distant gods and nebulous powers.\n\nHe broke into a run. His warriors followed without hesitation.\n\nKharn thought himself powerful but in fact all he was offering up was his own life. Abaddon would fight to save him that sacrifice, if only for another day. To allow otherwise, to stand by while the gods turned a great warrior of the Legions into their puppet, was to start along a winding path that led back to the Warmaster, and raised questions Abaddon was not yet willing to ask of himself.\n\nThe Custodians attack\n\nFaith sustains\n\nSigismund's test\n\nUnknown\n\nIt was impossible to tell where the leaves ended and the storm began. The crown of the tree was a blend of fire and lightning, the flicker of its conflict reflected in the thick chains that wrapped about its great trunk, golden vines biting into valley-sized ridges in the bark.\n\nKeeler felt impotent, blown about on hurricane gusts that emanated from the battle in the heavens. She yearned to spear upwards into the roiling blackness of the Chaos cloud, to become a bright thunderbolt of the Emperor's wrath.\n\nThe memory of burning the half-born brought back the intoxicating sense of power that possessed her when she became a vessel of the Emperor. She trembled at the recollection, aquiver at the thought of the Emperor's spirit passing through her again.\n\nFor all she tried to channel that power, it remained as elusive as the lightning bolts that rained down on the upper limbs of the god-tree.\n\nCircling as close as she could, blinded at times by the ferocity of the sky war, Keeler tried to latch on to the faith of the Lightbearers around her mortal body. She could hear the sermon of Olivier, and beyond his words the distant, slow pulsing of souls from ten thousand witnesses.\n\nIt was as though she tried to grasp fog. The faith bubbled and flowed through her spiritual grip, refusing to be ignited by her passion. It whirled from touch like a magnet presented with its opposite pole, always just out of reach.\n\nThe mist in her thoughts manifested about the arcing roots of the tree, seeping up from cracks in the arid ground. Keeler had not noticed before how parched the landscape had become. Nothing was left of the fecund wilderness, the earth drained of its vitality.\n\nWhere the fog touched the tree it left smears of colour, patches of brightly sprouting fungus. They matured rapidly, filling the air with spores, and the spores became flies, buzzing about the cracks in the bole, eager to lay eggs into the sap of the god-tree.\n\nScreaming tore Keeler from her reverie. Her thoughts flooded back to the real world, her senses confronted with panicked shouts, the roar of plasma jets and buzz of rotary cannons.\n\nTo the west a golden gun-cutter soared over the tall arch that denoted the end of the processional, wing cannons spitting tracer rounds into the packed column of pilgrims. Keeler retched as she saw a line of Lightbearers gunned down, their bodies turned to tatters by the hail of bullets.\n\nFrom the east a black gunship of the Silent Sisterhood appeared, the sky about it churning with strange energy, flickering with black and purple. To look upon it made Keeler sick, her vision swimming dizzyingly as she tried to watch the approaching craft.\n\n'Custodians!' gasped Sindermann, who was at her shoulder, his hand tight on her arm to pull her away. She refused, standing her ground.\n\n'Wait!' she called to Olivier as he turned to run. The single word stopped him and he turned. 'This is a test of faith.'\n\nHe took another half-step, conflicted. Keeler held out a hand.\n\n'Trust me,' she said. 'Trust in the Emperor.'\n\nOlivier glanced over his shoulder at the gold-armoured figures advancing on the crowd "}
{"text":" she tried to watch the approaching craft.\n\n'Custodians!' gasped Sindermann, who was at her shoulder, his hand tight on her arm to pull her away. She refused, standing her ground.\n\n'Wait!' she called to Olivier as he turned to run. The single word stopped him and he turned. 'This is a test of faith.'\n\nHe took another half-step, conflicted. Keeler held out a hand.\n\n'Trust me,' she said. 'Trust in the Emperor.'\n\nOlivier glanced over his shoulder at the gold-armoured figures advancing on the crowd from several directions. Keeler could guess his thoughts - that the officers of the Emperor should turn their guns upon them.\n\n'Share your faith with me,' she urged him, extending her hand again. 'Show your followers the path of righteousness.'\n\nHe seized hold of her hand, grip almost painfully tight. The contact was like a shock of electricity, jolting up her arm.\n\nSindermann slipped his hand into her other, and she felt another surge of power. When others on the platform joined her, Keeler felt the pulse of their faith pushing outwards.\n\nSome in the crowd, which was surging back and forth between panic and anger, saw the unity of their leaders and copied them, joining hands. Though separated by several hundred metres, it was as if they were next to Keeler, adding their prayers to hers. She felt light-headed, as though the ground dropped away.\n\nThe further she reached out with her faith, the greater the strength that flowed back to her. Her calmness multiplied, propagated through the crowd by a ripple of awed silence as worshipper after worshipper turned away from the attacks and towards the fulcrum of their belief.\n\nIt was then that Keeler saw the light of the Emperor shining from the congregation, spreading like a dawn from person to person. As it stretched further down the processional, she saw bolt-rounds sparking from the gleam, as though a power field had been switched on. The holy ambiance pushed further, forcing the gunship high, its rocket salvos exploding prematurely in thin air.\n\n'Have faith, brothers and sisters!' she called, her voice echoing like thunder.\n\nThey were joined as one; she was the tree and her faith was the roots. As the water and sun nourished the tree, so the prayers and souls of the faithful gave her strength.\n\nKeeler felt a small pinprick of cold in her consciousness and turned to see a golden warrior ascending the stairs to the platform. He strode with purpose but without undue haste, guardian spear in one hand rather than at the ready in both. Though he wore his helm, she knew it had to be Amon.\n\nAmon advanced through the swarm of flies around the platform as though passing through a black curtain. They crawled over his armour and visor, almost obscuring the handful of figures beyond. A glance down to the processional confirmed that the cloud that had enveloped the congregation was thickening still, blotched with patches of darkness that seemed to assume humanoid shape before flowing back into formlessness. He heard the reports of the Custodians, their weapons still unable to penetrate the miasma that shrouded the Lightbearers, while the processional itself was like a mire, immobilising any warrior that tried to set foot upon it. Even the Sisters of Silence were unable to penetrate the fog bank, warning that it was not wholly psychic in nature, something they had not encountered before.\n\n'Keeler!' he called out. She had a strange half-smile as she turned fully to him, still holding hands with Olivier and Sindermann. 'You have to end this madness.'\n\n'Madness? I see only the faithful protecting themselves.'\n\nAmon knew better than to argue. The daemonic presence had cloaked itself in a garb of righteousness before. Whatever Keeler and the other Lightbearers witnessed was not the reality he observed. As much as he had vowed to execute Keeler if she had proven to be the font of the incursions, now that he confronted her he saw that he would need to find another way. Energy crackled across the platform, the flies coating everything with furred black bodies, the buzzing drone enough to drive a listener insane. He was not sure if killing her would release the full power of the Neverborn or end it, or even if he would be able to land a fatal blow within the miasma that protected the 'faithful'.\n\n'Why do you turn on your own, Custodian?' Keeler demanded, her smile turning to a frown. Black lightning crawled across her skin but she seemed oblivious to it. 'Why do you murder the faithful?'\n\n'It is a lie,' he told her. 'Your faith has been perverted. The Life within Death is not the Emperor. The Breath on your Lips is not the Emperor. The Hope in your Heart is not the Emperor.'\n\n'What would you know of it?'\n\n'Listen to me. I have stood at the Emperor's side for a lifetime. I have fought His wars and nearly died a score of times in His service. You are being corrupted, just like the soldiers in the hospital.'\n\n'We are the righteous!'\n\nAmon glanced into the miasma below. The shadow within moved like a shark through water, gliding between the immobile faithful, solidifying for a few seconds before dissipating. Each time it darkened it seemed to do so for longer. Its power was growing.\n\n'Will you kill us all?' she asked. As she spoke, black vapour issued from her mouth, falling like smoke from parting lips.\n\nIf I could, Amon thought.\n\n'You must see the truth for what it is.' He took a few paces closer, beetle shells crunching underfoot, flies batting against his armour with each step. 'If you believe the Emperor is a god, then pray to Him to let you see what is truly happening.'\n\n'You do not believe.' Keeler shook her head, but he could see uncertainty creeping into her expression. 'Your words mock my faith.'\n\n'You are right, it is not my faith. It is yours. Claim it. Confront it.' He dropped his voice low. 'Look with your faith, Euphrati.'\n\nUnknown\n\nHearing her name spoken by the golden giant sent an eddy of chillness through Keeler, like the draught from a window briefly opened. The golden giant was almost invisible among the haze of the faithful, a looming shade in the brightness. His voice seemed like the boom of distant waves on a shore, powerful and incessant, but it was only her name that she really heard.\n\nThe words that had preceded it filtered through the throbbing of her blood, a command to look with her faith.\n\nNot a command. A... plea? A prayer, almost, from the lips of a Custodian.\n\nFaith.\n\nWhat was her faith?\n\nThat the Emperor was a god?\n\nIt was more than that. The Lectitio Divinitatus had shaped that belief, but it was not the foundation of her faith. In being confronted by the immortal nature of the true enemy she had looked upon a universe as removed from humanity as the void was separated from the depths of the oceans. And she had turned to the Emperor.\n\nWith the faith that whatever He was, the Emperor was the Master of Mankind; not just humanity's ruler but also its guide.\n\nThat same Will had shaped the Custodians, and now Euphrati Keeler heard her name uttered by one of them, asking her to look with faith.\n\nHe could not know what she meant when she talked of faith - such devotion to an abstract was written out of his personality. Instead he had appealed to her sense of faith.\n\nThe tree.\n\nThe instant her mind turned to it, she closed her eyes, seeking to look upon its shining boughs as she had the first time she had walked into the garden of the Emperor.\n\nThe garden was there again, the parched plains replaced with a sprawling, verdant landscape. But this was not the garden she had wandered in with such pleasure. The sky was dark, the ground a mire underfoot, where thorny tendrils clasped at her feet and ankles. Gases bubbled from the marsh, and flies buzzed over flowers that stank of corpse-rot.\n\nIn desperation she looked for her tree, scratching arms and legs as she burst through bushes of black roses and scrambled down bramble-choked dells.\n\nShe saw the faintest glimmer of gold beyond the ridgeline ahead, the hill crowned with forbidding forests.\n\nIt was not to run that she had come here, but to fly. With a last effort she propelled herself into the skies, as pustule-like growths erupted from the mulch and belched forth clouds of hideous wasps behind her.\n\nThey pursued Keeler but the swiftness of her faith was greater, taking her high into the air where the clouds felt like cold oil on her flesh, the wind knotting her hair like briar tangles.\n\nBelow she saw the Lightbearers. Each was no longer a shining lamp but a marsh-flame, burning the decay of centuries that burbled from the underbelly of the world. Ghostly eels prowled amongst them, pale-flanked bodies moving in sinuous waves between the small hillocks of bone and flesh.\n\nSickened, she turned her gaze back to the tree, seeing weeping sores upon the bark, streams of black-threaded sap pouring from burrow holes.\n\nAs before she longed to ascend to the branches, where dark clouds hung like creepers among the dying leaves. Instinct told her to look down, right to the base of the great tree where the roots pushed hard into the earth. That was where she had felt the faith lifting her, feeding her from the roots, and that was the strength of the Emperor too.\n\nShe dived, heedless of the wet ground rushing up to meet her. Mouth closed, she plunged into the murky waters that drowned the tree's roots, feeling coldness on her skin, thick ooze pushing into ears and nostrils, eyes closed tight.\n\nKeeler thrashed into the sucking mud, trying to force herself deeper and deeper, feeling her heart hammering as her breath grew short.\n\nShe forced her eyes open, straining in the filth, hands groping in front of her, following the root trails deep into the ground, far from light and air.\n\nFaith.\n\nFaith exists to be tested.\n\nShe recalled the line from the Book of Divinity.\n\nFaith sustains when all else is lost.\n\nKeeler grasped the root tendril ahead of her and used it like a rope, pulling herself further and further from salvation, letting its roughn"}
{"text":"erself deeper and deeper, feeling her heart hammering as her breath grew short.\n\nShe forced her eyes open, straining in the filth, hands groping in front of her, following the root trails deep into the ground, far from light and air.\n\nFaith.\n\nFaith exists to be tested.\n\nShe recalled the line from the Book of Divinity.\n\nFaith sustains when all else is lost.\n\nKeeler grasped the root tendril ahead of her and used it like a rope, pulling herself further and further from salvation, letting its roughness between her fingers guide her when all other senses were blinded and numb.\n\nHer hand came upon something slick, her fingers sinking into a slug-like growth. Her questing revealed it to be one appendage of a much greater entity coiled deep in the mud, sucking the life from the tree.\n\nHere was the source of the rot.\n\nShe could not fight it here, but seized the rubbery limb in both hands, turning to ascend through the murk. Something far below, something ancient and vast, bucked and resisted, but she gritted her teeth, the rancid muck dribbling into her mouth, threatening to choke her.\n\nWith all her strength she started to pull, dragging the creature away from the tree roots, kicking her way back towards the light.\n\nLion's Gate space port, interstitial bridges, twenty-two days since assault\n\nSigismund watched the crimson-armoured figure arc above the shield wall of his brethren, incredulous that such a jump could be made. His belief was stretched further as he watched Kharn running straight at him.\n\n'Shall we gun him down, captain?' asked Eghrlich, lifting his plasma gun.\n\n'No, save your fire for them,' replied Sigismund, raising his sword towards the Sons of Horus and Iron Warriors that swept forward in the wake of the World Eaters' headlong charge. He saw the bulk of a Terminator suit among the Warmaster's gene-sons and recognised the markings of Ezekyle Abaddon. 'When I am done with Kharn I will cut off the right hand of Horus.'\n\nThe World Eater did not slow in his approach but swept up the dragon-toothed axe over his shoulder. A crude, slow move that Sigismund would easily counter as he moved forward to meet Kharn's charge.\n\nSpinning teeth smashed against the edge of the Templar's sword with a force he had not reckoned for. The strength of the blow jarred Dorn's son mid-stride, knocking him off balance. Taken aback, Sigismund spun, dodging the next blow while he assessed his options. Kharn gave him no time at all, rushing like a bull with a wordless bellow.\n\nKharn's axe rang against the sword, swept away and lashed back again. He was breathing hard, a fog jetting from the vents of his helm, swathing them both in a ruddy mist as dusk light pushed through the cloud cover below them. Sigismund took one step backwards, deflecting each blow as it came. Kharn pulled away, growled, and hammered in again.\n\nNow expecting the greater strength of his foe, Sigismund parried with a looser grip, turning aside with timing rather than meeting force with force.\n\n'I have your measure, as always,' he told the traitor. 'This time there is no cage.'\n\nHe swerved away from the next strike, letting the tip of his blade lash out towards Kharn's chest. It carved a furrow through the dried blood and ceramite, leaving steaming, ruddy swirls in its wake.\n\n'Still... Hnnh. Still chained to your duty, I see,' Kharn snorted, shoulders heaving with effort as he stepped back. Gorechild's head weaved a figure of eight, as though moving with a life of its own while Kharn stepped to the left, seeking an opening.\n\n'Better duty than the emptiness of self-service.' Sigismund stepped and thrust hard, but Gorechild flashed down to meet the attack with stunning speed and impact, sending the Templar staggering away.\n\n'You are weak. Duty isn't purpose, Sigismund.' Kharn flexed his fingers on the haft of his chainaxe, moving from side to side on the balls of his feet. 'Your lord is empty. He cares nothing for your blood.'\n\nSigismund attacked again, lancing his sword towards Kharn's groin. The haft of Gorechild met it, but Sigismund had been relying on the parry, having seen Kharn employ it many times before in the World Eaters' duelling cage.\n\n'Enough talk,' he spat as he turned, swinging the sword in a wide arc, the blade crashing against the World Eater's pauldron. He rained down another blow against his foe's chest, seeking to keep him off balance.\n\nKharn pushed into the attack rather than retreating, so that the blade edge struck his helm a glancing blow. Gorechild screamed as it slashed into Sigismund's arm and juddered down his vambrace to shatter the chain binding the Templar's sword to his wrist.\n\n'Jubal was right. Hnnh. You are better without them.'\n\nIt was a fool's move, a gesture that left Kharn open to a deadly attack. Sigismund cared nothing for ceremony, hacking double-handed towards his enemy's gut. The blade bit deep, searing into armour and flesh. Blood spilled as he ripped it free.\n\nHe swung again, blade meeting axe overhead. Sigismund braced, trying to turn aside his enemy's weapon. With a deafening bellow, Kharn flexed, thrusting Sigismund back with raw strength.\n\nStumbling, almost falling to one knee, Sigismund saw the seams of Kharn's armour parting, splitting where plate met plate. Slabs of muscle bulged beneath, unnaturally swollen even for a Space Marine, veins as thick as power cables taut beneath thick skin.\n\n'I serve a power greater than yours,' Kharn roared, lifting up Gorechild, sunlight sparkling from its mica-dragon tooth blades. Flecks of the Templar's blood showered down upon him. 'You are hollow, Sigismund. Hnnh. You'll never beat me again.'\n\nSigismund dived aside, too late to fully avoid the blow. Dragon's teeth caught his left thigh, ripping chunks from power armour and genhanced muscle.\n\nIn that moment Sigismund understood Keeler's words and knew that he was beaten. As legionaries there were none among the traitors that could match him. The Legions' greatest had always been his inferiors. Corswain of the Dark Angels. Jubal of the White Scars. Kharn of the World Eaters. Sevatar of the Night Lords. Lucius of the Emperor's Children. Abaddon of the Luna Wolves.\n\nBut as he looked at the warped figure that had once been his sword-companion, he knew that he no longer fought legionaries. He had to be more too, something pure to match their vileness. To draw strength from a power beyond himself.\n\nThe Emperor.\n\nIf only he had heeded the lesson earlier, learned its full meaning.\n\nA shadow covered them both for an instant before a flare of weapons and plasma jets lit the fog. Missiles scythed down while lascannons spat sparkling beams of death. Kharn looked up and the Templar spared a glance to recognise the shape of Aetos Dias, the personal gunship of the Praetorian.\n\nThe nose opened and from the assault ramp appeared a large armoured figure. It fell through the smoke, glinting gold, and slammed into the ferrocrete a few metres from Sigismund and Kharn. A giant clad in the same auric-adamant of the Emperor Himself, bearing a two-handed chainsword as tall as a legionary. In the flash of gunfire Sigismund looked upon the face of his genefather, nostrils flaring, teeth bared. Dorn's eyes were not on him, but fixed upon the wider battle.\n\nBellowing, Kharn hurled himself at the primarch. Dorn swung Storm's Teeth to meet the captain, the force of the blow throwing Kharn a dozen metres through the air. Dorn spared not a second glance as warriors clad in Terminator armour materialised around him, sent from the teleportaria deep within the bastion of the Lion's Gate.\n\nAt the same moment, the Imperial Fists' shield wall broke, a spearhead of Sons of Horus and Iron Warriors crashing through amid bolter volleys and gleaming powerblades. Sigismund tried to stand but his wounded leg gave way, cut to the bone.\n\nDorn's gunship landed and more Imperial Fists swept forward around their lord, the white of an Apothecary among them heading for the Templar. He lost sight of Kharn beyond the erupting melee, an instant before hands grabbed his pauldrons and dragged him towards the Thunderhawk.\n\nSigismund's thigh was agony, but it was nothing compared to the pain of his shame.\n\nKeeler confronts the taint\n\nManifestations of false hope\n\nLayak's destiny\n\nUnknown\n\nGaining speed, Keeler focused her thoughts on the branches of the great tree, imagined them in the bright sun as she clambered up through the labyrinth of roots. The parasitic worm thrashed in her grip, mewling and shrieking, occasionally falling silent when promises of everlasting life and eternal hope whispered in her thoughts.\n\nShe realised that in her haste she had lost herself amidst the tangle, suffocating and blinded by the putrescent mulch that ebbed around the roots. She had no sense of up and down, only the tug of the creature away from her offering any feeling of direction at all.\n\nShe continued on until another passage from the Lectitio Divinitatus came to mind.\n\nFaith should not be blind. Faith is not ignorance, but acceptance. Faith should always be measured, and directed, and serve the purpose of the Emperor not the faithful.\n\nHow was she to find direction in the lightless morass? If faith alone could not buoy her up, how was she to ascend to the light again? She fought back a surge of panic, during which the creature's whispering grew in vehemence, offering her a lifetime of certainty and purpose if only she followed it back into the depths.\n\nRather than succumb to despair, she forged on, but stopped shortly after, second-guessing herself. She had been fooled once by the Hope in her Heart; was it possible that it was trying to mislead her now? What if it was pulling towards the surface, trying to trick her into plunging deeper into the darkness?\n\nDoubt assailed her, bringing weakness to her grip, so that she almost let go of the slick tendril in her fist. It had been so long since she had taken a breath but she dared not open her mouth. The thought of the malignant ooze around her slipp"}
{"text":"pped shortly after, second-guessing herself. She had been fooled once by the Hope in her Heart; was it possible that it was trying to mislead her now? What if it was pulling towards the surface, trying to trick her into plunging deeper into the darkness?\n\nDoubt assailed her, bringing weakness to her grip, so that she almost let go of the slick tendril in her fist. It had been so long since she had taken a breath but she dared not open her mouth. The thought of the malignant ooze around her slipping into her throat, infecting her lungs, caused a flurry of terror. Sensing her weakness, the worm-creature thrashed hard, forcing her to reach out a hand to seize a root to brace herself.\n\nHer fingers closed not around the rough texture of wood, but something smooth, and cool.\n\nMetal.\n\nGold.\n\nShe could not see it but she sensed it. Her exploring fingers identified the link, slender here, but as she pulled herself up a short way the chain grew stronger and thicker.\n\nChains of faith.\n\nKeeler was confused. She had thought the chains were some kind of prison, an artifice of the enemy ensnaring the Emperor. Yet her faith had brought her to them, and through them she climbed, growing in courage again. One arm wrapped about the squirming entity, she heaved with the other.\n\nAfter an eternity, her head broke through a layer of rotted leaves and broken carcasses. She opened her mouth and took in a long draught of air. It was tainted by decay but tasted as sweet as nectar after her confinement in the bog.\n\nGrunting, giving vent to her frustration and effort, she pulled an arm free, clinging to one of the massive chains that stretched up into the branches. Finally, she saw the letters inscribed on the chain and she let out a short laugh.\n\nKyril Sindermann.\n\nIt was his faith that had saved her.\n\nThough it was a mighty limb, the bough from which the chain hung bent under her weight, the tree swaying ever so slightly as she used the links to pull herself out to her waist.\n\nShe realised that each time she pulled herself up, she also dragged down part of the tree.\n\nBasilica Ventura, western processional, twenty-two days since assault\n\nThe fly swarm had thinned around Amon, though hundreds of the loathsome insects clustered around Keeler, encasing her in a writhing coat of darkness. She seemed oblivious and immobile, though one hand dropped away from Olivier's, the other still clung tightly to Sindermann, who stared vacantly ahead. In the periphery of his vision Amon also saw the miasma dissipating, seeping into the thousands of worshippers gathered around the platform. Their skin greyed and their eyes rolled up as the cursed fog entered them, jaws lolling open, trails of saliva falling from slack lips.\n\nMore than a century of warfare had honed Amon's instincts to the sharpest edge. So it was that he brought his guardian spear to readiness a fraction of a second before Olivier leapt at him. The Lightbearer's eyes had also rolled back, black tears falling from the ducts to coat his cheeks in oily grime. He had no weapon, his lunge met by the tip of the guardian spear, which split his shoulder open, his left arm flopping to the metal decking of the stage even as Amon sidestepped to let his attacker flail past.\n\nThe blood that gushed from the injury bubbled with something unnatural, so that it hissed and spat as it hit the platform. Olivier stumbled and turned, not the least afflicted by the wound.\n\nAmon fired, three bolts direct to the tainted man's face, tearing apart the skull and brain. The body toppled, lifeless.\n\nThe two book-bearers came next, gurgling through mouths filled with sickly yellow mucus, the same black tears dripping from their eyes, pustules erupting around their nostrils and on the backs of their hands.\n\nHis guardian spear whipped out, beheading the first. Amon stepped close, ramming his fingers into the throat of the other, snapping the neck. The woman slapped her hands against his armour, sustained beyond the breaking of her spine. Amon tore the head completely free and kicked the twisting body away.\n\nHe ran to the edge of the platform. Many of the crowd were surging up the steps towards him. The chatter of bolter fire announced that the protective field had failed - or been withdrawn - and that his companions were assailed in a similar manner. The snarl of rotary cannons split the background din of the bombardment, joined by the noise of plasma engines as the Custodian cutter renewed its attack run down the processional. The Sisters of Silence had disembarked from their gunship at the far end of the route. Muzzle flare marked their slow progress into the horde of aimless worshippers.\n\nThe stage was flanked by two sets of steps, each three flights high. Amon could not defend both: to stand at the top of one would be to expose his back to the other.\n\nHe looked at Keeler. She was still entombed within a sarcophagus of flies, only her hand where it held Sindermann's visible among the welter of buzzing wings and furred bodies.\n\nHe could not abandon her, either.\n\nAmon levelled his guardian spear and took up a wide stance just in front of Keeler. The metal steps creaked as scores of tainted Lightbearers raced up them, pants and moans growing louder as they ascended.\n\nThe first group appeared to his left. He leapt across the distance between to meet them with his spear, three slashes taking down the first handful. Spinning, he fired across to the other steps, stitching explosions across the bodies of four more. He cut down another half a dozen before breaking away, dashing past Keeler to bring the tip of his spear down through the skull of another.\n\nHe fired, emptying the spear's remaining ammunition in a series of controlled bursts, aiming high into the crowd pouring up the left-hand steps.\n\nThere was no attendant to reload for him, but he managed to swap out the magazine with a second to spare before they came upon him from the right. The bolter attachment roared, turning the head of the closest half-born to a bloody mess.\n\nNineteen more shots, and then he would be down to his blade alone.\n\nLion's Gate space port, interstitial bridges, twenty-two days since assault\n\nAbaddon's experiences of late had somewhat inured him to the presence of primarchs, but he still felt a primal shiver of response to the sight of Rogal Dorn carving his way through the Warmaster's forces like a golden blade. Bolts and blades struck his armour without effect while great sweeps of his chainsword dismembered and decapitated legionary after legionary, leaving a trail of bloodied armour plates and broken corpses in the primarch's wake.\n\nWhat had been a victorious final charge to drive the Imperial Fists from the space port faltered in the face of the Emperor's son. Across the bridges, companies slowed in the advance, baulked by the prospect of facing Dorn's wrath, waylaid by the reinforcements that he had brought with him.\n\nAbaddon slowed, his remaining warriors taking station around him, weapons raised towards the incoming giant. He had expected he would have to face one of the Emperor's greatest sons before the war was over, but the prospect was far from thrilling.\n\n'It is not your time.' Layak continued onwards, his blade slaves flanking him, a halo of power writhing about the tip of his staff. 'I see now that this moment was ordained for me long ago. Remember that the gods always demand a price, but if you are willing to pay, their power is yours to command.'\n\nThe urge that had drawn Abaddon to push forwards in support of Kharn did not surface for Zardu Layak. The lord of the Mournival watched with detached interest as the priest conjured a gleaming hemisphere of power about himself and advanced several dozen metres to take up position between the oncoming primarch and the Warmaster's First Captain.\n\nHe felt no brotherhood with the creature Layak had become, any more than he did the Neverborn that wore Grael Noctua's skin or cloaked itself in the guise of the Word Bearers' vakrah jal. Not that Layak was no longer human, but his motives had long since departed any mortal concern. He was wholly a creature of Chaos, and as such served only the gods' ends, not those of any other around him.\n\nLayak's blade slaves dashed forward to confront Rogal Dorn, whose unstoppable advance had carried him a hundred metres ahead of his gene-sons. It was clear his intent was not to support the legionaries, but to pursue a more personal mission.\n\nWickedly serrated blades lashed at the arms and legs of the primarch as the two blade slaves attacked in unison, dodging the churning blades of Storm's Teeth. The air about the sorcerer churned with power, but Abaddon could see the faint shimmer of Neverborn struggling to manifest. The Emperor's shield was still protecting the port; no daemon could answer the Word Bearer's summons.\n\nLoosening the grip of one hand, Dorn swung a hammer-like fist, crushing the skull of a blade slave. It fought on for several more seconds, jerky and weak, until it fell backwards and thrashed upon the floor for a few heartbeats more. The second drew back, putting itself between the primarch and its master.\n\nAbaddon could feel a hot wind rushing over him, emanating from the sorcerer. It was strange, a sensation felt through his Terminator plate, not of the physical realm. His skin prickled at the sensation and his gut crawled at its touch, even as he saw the shapes of the Neverborn growing more substantial.\n\nHad Layak known this? Could he sense the thinning of the Emperor's protection?\n\nAbaddon's armour snarled as he took a step forward. He checked himself. To be cut down by Dorn was pointless. Perturabo was on his way, a primarch to counter a primarch.\n\nDorn drew a bolter, chased with gold and styled with the Imperial aquila, like a pistol in his hand. He fired at Layak even as his chainsword sought the blade slave, bolts exploding against the warp shield of the sorcerer, Storm's Teeth carving a furrow through ferrocrete where the blade slave"}
{"text":"ning of the Emperor's protection?\n\nAbaddon's armour snarled as he took a step forward. He checked himself. To be cut down by Dorn was pointless. Perturabo was on his way, a primarch to counter a primarch.\n\nDorn drew a bolter, chased with gold and styled with the Imperial aquila, like a pistol in his hand. He fired at Layak even as his chainsword sought the blade slave, bolts exploding against the warp shield of the sorcerer, Storm's Teeth carving a furrow through ferrocrete where the blade slave had been half a second before.\n\nThen Dorn was upon the priest, ignoring the blade slave to crash his weapon thrice against the dome of power that guarded Layak. The sorcerer responded, wrapping himself in scarlet lightning before unleashing it from the tip of his staff, the bolt sending Dorn back three steps.\n\nSnakes of dissipating energy crawled over the primarch, flicking between armour and the blades of the slave creature as it leapt to the attack once more, sleeve-swords aimed for Dorn's midriff.\n\nThe primarch drove the hilt of his chainblade down, slamming the pommel into the neck and shoulder of the slave. Spine snapped, the Neverborn-infused carcass flopped like a netted fish, spasming across the ferrocrete ahead of a trail of blood and dark ichor.\n\nIf Abaddon was to strike it had to be now. Dorn would be upon Layak in moments.\n\nThe vox crackled and Layak's voice hissed into his ear.\n\n'I give up my life not for you, mortal soul, but for the glory of Chaos that you will come to serve.'\n\nGathering more Chaos power, Layak let his shield collapse, the energy of the dome whirling into his staff head, becoming a burning black flame. He swung with sword and staff together, both trailing sorcerous fire to crash against the golden armour of the Emperor's Praetorian. A storm of power exploded from the contact, once more forcing the primarch back, arm raised across his face as sable flames engulfed him.\n\nAgain Layak attacked, this time to strike the ground at Dorn's feet. His voice rose in unintelligible supplication, a screeched prayer to the gods of the warp. Ferrocrete exploded upwards, becoming claws that snatched at the primarch's limbs. Dorn fended them off with swings of his chainsword, spinning teeth chewing through the animated surface in a shower of sparks and stone.\n\nStill the air about the sorcerer writhed faster, Neverborn flitting into and out of existence, half-glimpsed by Abaddon as his gaze moved between the duel with Dorn and the wider battle.\n\nDorn's arrival had bolstered the defence, but he had not brought sufficient reinforcements with him to retake the terminals. Kharn had resumed his rampage further along the main bridge while Iron Warriors companies led by Kroeger, seeing Dorn engaged, forged ahead across flanking viaducts and monorail tracks. Dreadnoughts crashed like battering rams into the last ranks of the Imperial Fists, met by cannonades from tanks arrayed along the approaches to the main bastion.\n\nHigher burned the immortal flames that wreathed Layak, so dark they swallowed light yet edged with a power that was blinding in its intensity. A third sorcerous detonation rocked the primarch, but Abaddon could see that such conjurations were not given freely. Layak's armour was peeling away like skin flaking from charred flesh, carried away on the thermals of warp energy that he channelled through his body. Revealed skin was ancient like wrinkled parchment, yellowing and thin, devoid of the muscle one expected of a warrior from the Legiones Astartes, little more than withered bone.\n\nThere was another form around the sorcerer, far larger but less distinct: a winged mind-shadow that matched Dorn in height, but far broader of shoulder, and possessed of arms like writhing tentacles.\n\nAbaddon wondered if this was the true form of Layak or some Neverborn brought to his summoning. Whichever, the daemon struggled to manifest as did any other, sometimes seemingly whole and flesh, other times nothing more than a sketch of vaporous movement.\n\nDorn advanced with purpose, hanging his bolter upon his belt to take up his chainblade in both hands once more. Layak was almost unmoving before him, flares of warp power spitting from his amorphous, shifting silhouette. The Praetorian ignored the sparks as they scythed across his armour, bringing back Storm's Teeth for a blow.\n\n'Remember this moment, Abaddon. I give my life so that you will take my place upon the path to glory.'\n\nThe chainsword fell, cleaving through apparition and physical body alike. Flames and blood were as one, showering from the churning teeth as they slashed down through horned head and armour.\n\nWhat was left of Layak detonated with a burst of multicoloured light. Abaddon had never seen a primarch tossed aside like a child's toy before, and felt the psychic shock wave wash over him like a hurricane across his nerves.\n\nAbaddon's vision blurred and for an instant he thought he saw a great tree, its leafless branches ablaze with dark flames. The fires crawled down its trunk, burning down to the roots.\n\nThe crash of heavy war-plate drew him back. Dorn had landed a score of metres away and lay unmoving, coils of oily smoke drifting from the joints of his armour. Dozens of Imperial Fists sprinted towards him, voices raised in despair.\n\nOf Layak all that remained was a rune-marked crater in the ferrocrete, its metres-deep sides glowing with power from sigils burnt into the material.\n\nFrom the ripples of flame left in the bottom of the hole, a clawed hand appeared, red-scaled and taloned. An arm followed as a Neverborn pulled itself through the breach, struggling like an obscene chick from an egg, dripping with the life fluid of the sorcerer. It was not much larger than a human, spindly of limb and possessed of a long, bulbous head with dead white eyes and curling horns. A belt of skulls hung about its waist and a triangular-bladed sword of dark grey gleamed in its fist.\n\nIt pulled itself out fully and stood upon the stone of the Imperial Palace, the first true daemon to set foot upon Terra.\n\nBeyond, Dorn rose to one knee amid a creaking of armour, hand still gripping the hilt of his chainsword.\n\nA second daemon emerged from the ruin of Layak, baring needle-teeth, forked tongue tasting the sweet air of this forbidden world.\n\nYet it was not the daemons that drew the eye of Dorn: his head was tilted back, looking up to the darkening skies. Abaddon turned slightly to follow his gaze and saw the blue plasma jets of a gunship falling through the murk, dark against the continuing muzzle flare of cannons higher up the flanks of the space port.\n\nAs it approached, Abaddon saw the colours of the Iron Warriors, with the IV Legion's symbol embossed in gold upon its prow. Legionaries scattered as it landed behind the Warmaster's captain, front ramp whining open even before the landing gear touched down.\n\nFrom the ruddy interior advanced six automatons, striding in perfect unison, weapons trained outwards as they formed a half-ring around the front of the gunship.\n\nWith thunderous tread on the metal ramp, the Lord of Iron followed, his immense hammer in hand.\n\nCor'bax Utterblight\n\nFaith prevails\n\nTwo brothers meet\n\nBasilica Ventura, western processional, twenty-two days since assault\n\nMore than forty half-born had fallen to Amon's blade yet they thronged around the platform in even greater number. The pile of corpses acted as a barrier of sorts, forcing them to come at him in ones and twos as they pushed past the mounds or crawled over the dead. Keeler stood behind him with Sindermann, neither of them moving.\n\nHis guardian spear was slicked with blood and other fluids, affecting his grip. He could fight for hours more if needed, but soon the whole platform would be choked with the dead. His footing would be uncertain, and he would have no room to swing his blade properly. Long before he tired in mind or body he would be overwhelmed by the sheer weight of his foes.\n\nHe signalled the Zenith gunship.\n\n'Raptorae Sextus, I need support run on my position.'\n\n'Unable to locate you, Amon. Too dangerous to fire in your vicinity. Set transponder to maximum broadcast.'\n\n'I am at maximum!' Amon chopped the head from a tainted woman and calmed himself. 'Attack runs on the platform steps. Cut off the flow to my position.'\n\n'Understood, Amon. Inbound in thirty seconds.'\n\nAmon sensed movement behind him, coming from Keeler. He took a narrow grip on his spear haft and swung wide, slashing its tip across a handful of foes in a single arc. In the precious seconds between their bodies tumbling and fresh foes replacing them, he glanced back.\n\nThe fly swarm that had surrounded Keeler was breaking apart, becoming individual insects that drifted up like motes on the thermals of a fire. The spread of their disintegration rapidly increased, becoming a whirling vortex streaming upwards and revealing Keeler beneath. Her head was tilted back, mouth agape, and from it issued a dark smoke that followed the swarm, adding to the unnatural maelstrom that twisted higher and higher.\n\nThe half-born foundered, tumbling into each other, tripping on bodies. Like sleepers waking from long slumber they blinked and gazed numbly at their surroundings. Some slipped in the viscera spilled on the platform, crying out in horror.\n\nThe fly-funnel merged with the smoke, forming the body of an immense wormlike creature with a yawning maw at one end, arching over the platform. It passed a few metres above Amon's head, bending down towards the processional.\n\nKeeler gasped and fell to her knees, pulling Sindermann down with her. Moans and grunts from those that had moments before been tainted by the Neverborn presence betrayed that they were free of its grasp. Amon saw intelligence in their eyes - fear and shock as they gazed at the golden warrior in their midst.\n\nThe tail of the smoke worm detached from Keeler and it flopped to the ground, becoming more solid as it did so. Flies churned in the interior, becoming pulsing "}
{"text":"n towards the processional.\n\nKeeler gasped and fell to her knees, pulling Sindermann down with her. Moans and grunts from those that had moments before been tainted by the Neverborn presence betrayed that they were free of its grasp. Amon saw intelligence in their eyes - fear and shock as they gazed at the golden warrior in their midst.\n\nThe tail of the smoke worm detached from Keeler and it flopped to the ground, becoming more solid as it did so. Flies churned in the interior, becoming pulsing muscle, while the smoke rippled like grey-green skin over the forming mass.\n\nAmon realised that the Zenith was still on its attack run.\n\n'Raptorae Sextus, abo-'\n\nThe ripple of rotary cannons cut off his transmission as the golden attack ship swept over at cruising speed, wing cannons chewing furrows through the people milling on the steps.\n\n'Abort! Abort!' Amon transmitted. 'Target the creature!'\n\nThe worm-beast reared up, a tendril-ringed mouth lunging towards the gunship. Glinting teeth sank into a wing, and the daemon-thing wrestled against the thrust of the engines. The gunship's structural integrity gave way before either beast or jet, the wing tearing away. The gunship spun crazily for several seconds, spiralling down until it crashed into the crowd on the processional.\n\nThe worm-beast continued to change, becoming smaller and obesely humanoid. Its mouth widened and limbs sprawled from its sides, while horns like shattered tree limbs extruded from its mucus-sheathed flesh. Its gut billowed in folds like a cloud, wart-ridden skin turning to patchy green and grey.\n\nAmon raced to the edge of the platform as it started to feed, massive jaws engulfing two or three people at a time. Its body rippled as it gulped them down, swelling with power as it devoured them. Many were still in numb shock, easy prey for the bloated monstrosity, mindless of the ravening daemon. Its hands became jaws, snapping up even more victims, shovelling their mangled corpses into its distended gullet.\n\nThree Custodians emerged from the downed cutter, spears cracking bolts at the abomination. They detonated harmlessly across skin thick with scabs and patches of lichen-like growths. A fang-limb swept out, picking up one of the Custodians, auramite shrieking as impossibly strong jaws crushed his armour. His companions set about the arm with their spears, hacking hunks of flesh away, ichor spilling from the wound. Where it fell, the fluid of the daemon formed into small, rotund creatures that cackled and pointed at the futile attempts of the Custodians.\n\nAmon was about to leap down when he heard footfalls behind him. Keeler approached, leaning heavily on Sindermann. She looked down at the monstrosity without saying anything, her chest heaving as though from great effort.\n\nThe daemon had grown again, the size of a gunship now. It plunged forward, trampling another of the Custodians beneath its bulk. The worshippers were still recovering from their mass possession, and screams echoed back from the high buildings. Panic spread outwards like a ripple, terrified Lightbearers stampeding over each other as they fled.\n\nAmon's auto-senses activated as a blinding flash filled the broad roadway. Through the filter of his helm, the Custodian saw a figure emerge from one of the doorways opposite. Light as bright as a star almost obscured the person completely, an indistinct silhouette at the heart of the blaze.\n\nHis auto-senses adjusted, Amon saw a man swathed in a voluminous robe, a staff in hand.\n\nMalcador.\n\nThe Regent swept out his staff and the nimbus of light became a flurry of burning bolts, siphoned through the staff's head to fly across the processional. Each impact sent the daemon reeling, slipping and squirming across the ferrocrete, a trail of slime left in its wake. Eyes bubbled up from the frothy trail, tentacles stretching out of the murk. Blue flame leapt from where the bolts struck home, igniting immaterial flesh, feeding on its corrupted nature.\n\nThe monster flexed, partially turned itself inside out, its incorporeal body extinguishing the flames within fleshy folds. A new fang-ringed mouth puckered open, widening to its previous immensity. Malcador raised his staff once more, but before he could let loose with another blaze of psychic power, the Neverborn abomination retched out a tide of body parts and filth. Heaving, it projected already rotting carcasses at the Regent, the noisome deluge spraying from a hastily conjured shield of silver energy.\n\nWhere the daemon vomit slid to rest, a gang of the smaller creatures gambolled from the bodily ruin, pelting Malcador with handfuls of dripping offal and faeces, forcing him back towards the doorway as disgusting projectiles smeared across his immaterial ward.\n\n'Wait!'\n\nKeeler's injunction came just as Amon tensed to jump down to the processional. She held out her hands towards the daemon, eyes closing. Amon saw nothing physical linking her to the monster but a moment later it reared up as though struck, gurgling madly, tongue lolling as if it were being choked. Keeler pulled her hands and the worm-beast writhed as though on reins, flopping backwards over itself. The daemon slithered back to its two stubby legs, turning a nest of milky eyes up towards its tormentor.\n\nIts guts started rippling in preparation for a fresh torrent of filth.\n\nBeyond, Malcador swept away his diminutive tormentors with a sheet of white fire. Their cackles became shrieks, the popping of their bodies like wet wood in a bonfire, a greasy smoke rising from their demise.\n\n'Wait...' Keeler gritted her teeth, eyes screwed shut, and wrenched her hands again. The huge Neverborn yelped, a startlingly high-pitched noise for its girth, and fell sideways again. Malcador unleashed a flurry of psychic bolts into its thrashing maw, setting fire to its pustule-crusted tongue and gums, teeth melting like iron in a foundry fire.\n\n'Now!'\n\nAmon leapt, guardian spear in both hands.\n\nHe fell onto the exposed gut of the creature, the tip of his spear cutting deep through immortal skin and blubber. With all his weight behind it, the spear pushed deep into the daemon's innards and he followed, plunging into a coagulating mass of blood and greenish ichor.\n\nThe monster heaved around him, but Amon reversed his grip and thrust upwards from inside the beast's belly, piercing what would have been the brain in any corporeal animal.\n\nHe waded through bile, the guardian spear torn from his grasp as the monster bucked, trying to eject him out of its burning mouth. Amon grabbed hold of slime-covered flesh, gauntleted fingertips tearing chunks from its insides.\n\nWith a last scream, the daemon exploded, becoming a fountain of gore and mucus that rained down over a hundred metres of the processional, splashing over the buildings in a final tide of filth.\n\nAmon lay among the ruin of its body, slicked from head to toe in viscera and gelatinous waste. Feet slipping on bodily debris, he retrieved his spear, wary lest the daemon reformed in some manner. A few blobs of flesh quivered here and there, but cleansing fire from Malcador's staff turned the remains into a pyre, forcing the Custodians to retreat along the processional.\n\nIn the distance the craft of the Silent Sisterhood took off, jets screaming as it accelerated away to the south while gold-and-white armoured figures intercepted the fleeing worshippers.\n\n'There is your faith,' Amon told the Regent.\n\n'We might never know where faith ends and corruption begins,' replied Malcador, leaning heavily on his staff, wisps of fire dancing about his fingertips.\n\nHis turned his gaze upwards and Amon followed it. Keeler stood at the front of the platform, and for several seconds it seemed as though she were bathed in a golden corona of power.\n\nA trick of the light, Amon told himself.\n\nLion's Gate space port, interstitial bridges, twenty-two days since assault\n\nA hundred metres of bloodied ferrocrete separated two demigods. Created as brothers by the same bio-alchemy yet raised so disparate in temperament. One lauded as the builder, the other as a destroyer, but in skill and aptitude identical. Dorn, the Praetorian of the Emperor, the bastion upon which the Imperium had been built. The Hammer of Olympia, Perturabo, doom of a thousand fortresses.\n\nThe Lord of Iron stood Forgebreaker's pommel on the broken stone of the ground, leaning forwards to rest his arms on its wide head.\n\n'Brother.'\n\nAll of Perturabo's scorn poured into that one word. His external address carried his voice easily across the distance, while vox-transmit broadcast it across an open channel for all to hear. He had nothing to keep from friend or foe today.\n\nDorn did not reply.\n\n'Do you wish to discuss terms?'\n\nAt this, the Praetorian stiffened, hands moving on the grip of the two-handed chainsword.\n\n'You think me beaten?' The reply drifted back, derision in the tone.\n\nPerturabo cast his gaze about the terminal. His forces were on the advance everywhere he looked. A small cluster of the Blood God's Neverborn had emerged from Layak's remains, ashen swords flashing as they fought with a ring of Imperial Fists Terminators. Red tendrils of power snaked around the crater, forming into more creatures. The daemons appeared unable to venture too far from the portal, but only for the moment. It was a matter of time before more powerful entities manifested and the Neverborn would walk abroad on Terra.\n\nThe Emperor's lackeys were in full retreat.\n\nExcept here, on the main skybridge, where Dorn had launched his counter-attack.\n\n'I think you are a good enough commander to know when you are outmatched.' Perturabo chuckled at a thought. 'Were you expecting some assistance, perhaps? Some hidden reserves?'\n\n'You have turned lies into a weapon and guile into your shield,' Dorn said. 'Cultists, traitors, warp abominations... These are your allies now. To win with such powers is no victory at all.'\n\nThe denial snagged at Perturabo's pride and he straightened, the Iron Circle "}
{"text":"ridge, where Dorn had launched his counter-attack.\n\n'I think you are a good enough commander to know when you are outmatched.' Perturabo chuckled at a thought. 'Were you expecting some assistance, perhaps? Some hidden reserves?'\n\n'You have turned lies into a weapon and guile into your shield,' Dorn said. 'Cultists, traitors, warp abominations... These are your allies now. To win with such powers is no victory at all.'\n\nThe denial snagged at Perturabo's pride and he straightened, the Iron Circle clattering into attack formation around him.\n\n'No victory? Am I not allowed my alliances, brother? Send away the Khan and the Angel. Will the Custodians and the Silent Sisters stand aside to let us settle this equitably? If I bring a weapon it is only to break a defence you have erected. If you are truly superior, it is time you stepped out of the protective shadow of our father.'\n\n'Is that what you wish?' Dorn brandished his chainsword. 'You and I, blade against hammer?'\n\nThe temptation was almost overwhelming. For long years Perturabo had thought of this moment. He had pictured in exquisite detail how he would humble his brother and prove himself the greatest commander in the galaxy.\n\nThe vox buzzed, distracting him from the daydream.\n\n'Lord of Iron, the defenders are withdrawing in good order while we delay the pursuit.' With some surprise he recognised the voice of Forrix, whom he had thought dead in the midst of the space port. 'Dorn is playing for time.'\n\n'You would like that, wouldn't you, brother?' Perturabo declared, not deigning to respond to his triarch. 'To take the petty road rather than settle this as generals. A brawl in the dirt may suit you, but it is not enough for me.'\n\n'You may brawl, but I am an expert swordsman.'\n\nThe barb tugged again, but Perturabo would not be drawn by his brother's insults. He pictured again the vision that had sustained him.\n\n'I will crush you, Dorn. Forgebreaker shall shatter your armour and break your bones before we are done. But that proves nothing save my physical superiority. Before I end you, I will lay low everything you have raised. I will topple your towers and shatter your walls. I will deliver the Warmaster to our father, and you will watch everything you have trusted be torn apart.\n\n'When you have nothing left but the rubble of your ambition, and I stand triumphant amid the folly of your inferiority... When all the world's weeping will not save you and all you have is regret for bricks and despair for mortar... When you look at me and know that you were bested by the Lord of Iron and accept the truth of your hubris... Only then will my victory be complete and I will end your suffering.'\n\n'Bold words from a man that sent his minions to do his fighting for him.' Dorn stretched out a hand, gesturing to the space port and its surrounds. 'A million souls it has cost you for a few kilometres of ground. You always were wasteful, Perturabo. Lacking finesse.'\n\n'When Terra burns and the Emperor's corpse is ash, we will see the value of finesse!'\n\n'Lord, Imperial Army forces are pulling out too. If we do not secure the skybridges soon, we'll be facing them all again at the Lion's Gate.'\n\nPerturabo cut the link to Forrix with a snarl.\n\n'This is just the first wall,' Dorn called out.\n\nThe golden-armoured giant turned away and strode back along the bridge to his waiting gunship. The vox crackled with various commanders informing the Lord of Iron that they had targeting solutions on the Thunderhawk. He ignored them all and watched the gunship lift away on azure plumes.\n\nIt did not matter how many escaped to the next battle, it would never be enough. Brick by brick he would pull down the Palace. The space port had taken too long, but soon the Warmaster would have his Titans and then Perturabo would show Dorn the meaning of siegecraft.\n\nPerturabo sent one final broadcast.\n\n'See you on the next wall, brother.'\n\nAmon faces down the daemon.\n\nThe next wall\n\nHarsh counsel\n\nA strange arrival\n\nLion's Gate space port, interstitial bridges, twenty-four days since assault\n\nThe Iron Warriors took little time to establish their new front, throwing up immense siegeworks around the docks and bridge terminals of the fallen space port. Some of them even erected a bunker around the site of Layak's last act and hung trophies from their fallen foes upon the walls within. The portal had closed but the crater remained, dark shapes burned into the ferrocrete. A shrine of sorts, Abaddon realised, to a martyrdom he would never accept.\n\nHe had been given a command post, erected among the gun pits and communications towers. Standing in front, just a few strides from the forward edge of a monorail terminal and a ten-kilometre drop, Abaddon could see the entirety of the Lion's Gate and the massive wall that stretched from its impossibly vast towers. His post was dwarfed by a far larger structure about a kilometre to the west, the headquarters of Perturabo, already dubbed the Citadel of Iron.\n\nAbaddon did not intend to stay long; he felt the need to return to the Vengeful Spirit so that he could see his lord again. Layak's words troubled him, especially his ambivalence regarding the outcome of this war. Were Horus' patrons as uncaring of the result, and did that explain why the Warmaster refused to join the battle in person? Abaddon needed to see for himself what could be done to stir his lord to action.\n\nNews from across the Palace was mixed, and gave him little optimism. Kharn and the bulk of his World Eaters had moved on from the Lion's Gate, travelling south along the Eternity Wall to reunite with their primarch. Though he had no confirmation, there was rumour that Magnus had been sighted among his Legion, taking to the field of battle for the first time. Mortarion had drawn back to the outer lines while his fractured Legion regrouped from their month-long assaults. Fulgrim and his Emperor's Children had headed away from the Palace to the south. They had tens of thousands of prisoners and refused to respond to any broadcast from the First Captain or Perturabo. Perhaps Horus would bring them to heel.\n\nStrong winds had dispersed cloud and toxin, so that from the promontories of Sky City it was possible to see the ground far below. From this altitude it seemed as though the surface of Terra writhed with a carpet of colour, broken by blotches of metal in places, bruises of darker hue in others. In reality it was a horde of daemons uncountable in its vastness, their great generals and princes leading the attack against the massive walls of the Palace.\n\nThe spirit war had merged with the physical war, but Horus had rebuffed Abaddon's calls for him to join his warriors on the surface. He still awaited some anointed hour it seemed, much to Abaddon's chagrin. Looking at the tide of Neverborn, the First Captain curled a lip.\n\nA deafening noise drew his attention back to his surroundings and the terminal behind him. Turning he saw the immense conveyor doors opening, a dozen lights streaming from within to cut beams across the twilight.\n\nFrom the shadow stepped a Warlord Titan, greater than fifteen times Abaddon's height, festooned with kill banners. Its armour shone like the shell of a beetle, broad flame-stripes decorating the amber carapace, greaves and abdominal plates. A horned, grotesquely feline face leered from under the superstructure where the princeps' control station would have been. Multi-launchers jutted from its back, crusted in bony growths, its left arm a cannon that gleamed with unearthly pale light, its right a bone-sheathed claw that opened and closed in slow anticipation.\n\nTaking another step that sent dust billowing along the bridgehead, the Chaos god-engine opened its mouth and bellowed its challenge to the defenders, its call echoed by the war sirens of two others emerging behind.\n\nThe Legio Fureans, first of the Warmaster's Titans, had arrived.\n\nSanctuary of Satya, Sanctum Imperialis, twenty-four days since assault\n\nAmon looked out across the besieged city from the window of the Sanctuary of Satya, to the distant siege lines battering at the walls, and to the roiling storm above. He could see the fires in the summit of the Lion's Gate space port, and the jets of gunships strafing back and forth along the Ultimate Wall to the south-east.\n\n'The damage has been done.' Dorn made this pessimistic proclamation. 'Daemons - pure Neverborn - are taking over the Starspear atop the Lion's Gate space port. Reports from the observatoria say that manifestations in impossible numbers are appearing before the walls. Angron is leading his World Eaters south, towards the Eternity Wall. The sorcery of our foes has breached the wards on Terra and we shall face Neverborn without limit.'\n\n'This was not a victory for our enemies, but a concession to necessity,' said Malcador. He turned, looking at the others in the hall: Amon, Valdor, Sanguinius and the Khan. 'The telaethesic ward was not breached, it has shrunk. The Emperor cannot protect all of Terra forever. The shield of His protection has been withdrawn to the Inner Palace.'\n\n'And then?' said Valdor. 'When it cannot protect the walls? The Sanctum Imperialis? The Dungeon?'\n\n'It does not matter,' Dorn said curtly. 'It has always been a question of how long we can hold, not of defeating Horus with the troops we have to hand. Guilliman, the Lion and Russ are on their way. We held the port at the Lion's Gate far longer than I had hoped, certainly longer than Horus desired.'\n\n'I am not content to sit back while the enemy makes ground,' said the Khan. He laid a hand on the pommel of his sword and stroked his chin with the other. 'If you have no argument, brother, I will stand at the defence of the Lion's Gate, where the next great blow will fall.'\n\n'Why so?' asked Sanguinius. 'You have not been quiet in your distaste for standing behind walls.'\n\n'I do not intend to remain behind them for too long,' the Khan assured them with a slight smile. 'But the wall is the best"}
{"text":"\n\n'I am not content to sit back while the enemy makes ground,' said the Khan. He laid a hand on the pommel of his sword and stroked his chin with the other. 'If you have no argument, brother, I will stand at the defence of the Lion's Gate, where the next great blow will fall.'\n\n'Why so?' asked Sanguinius. 'You have not been quiet in your distaste for standing behind walls.'\n\n'I do not intend to remain behind them for too long,' the Khan assured them with a slight smile. 'But the wall is the best place to prepare for the next attack, not the depths of the Palace.'\n\n'We will need to secure the space port again,' said Dorn. 'Should I need to call the Phalanx to remove the Emperor from Terra, it is the best way to reach it. On the other hand, should Guilliman arrive he will face the same issues as the traitors - how to get into orbit and down to the surface with sufficient forces to win the battle.'\n\n'So, you agree?' said the Khan.\n\n'Of course,' Dorn replied. He held up a finger to emphasise his next point. 'Yet I would appreciate that you consult with us before you launch a counter-attack.'\n\n'The least courtesy I could do,' the Khan said with a grin.\n\nThey said nothing for several seconds until Amon broke the silence.\n\n'What is to be done with Keeler?'\n\n'She has returned herself to my custody,' said Malcador. 'And offered parole that she will not try to grow or influence the Lectitio Divinitatus whilst the siege remains in place.'\n\n'Is that wise?' Amon waved a hand to the window, indicating the ongoing war. 'Daemons now join the fray because of the actions of these cultists.'\n\n'Yet daemons were also kept at bay and banished by them,' the Regent replied sharply, his eyes moving from Amon to Valdor. 'We must be vigilant but there can be no persecution of the Lectitio Divinitatus for the time being, for reasons we have discussed before. If the Emperor chooses to outlaw the cult, we will wage that war when this one is concluded.'\n\n'The threat to the Emperor cannot be underestimated,' said the captain-general. 'You recently said, Lord Dorn, that the business of protecting the Palace is for the Legions. I find myself forced to agree now. The Legio Custodes must concentrate on our primary purpose, to safeguard the Emperor. We surrender the outskirts to you, the Legiones Astartes, and will maintain a strict cordon within the Sanctum Imperialis. No citizens, no troopers, no Space Marines will pass within unless given specific licence by me.'\n\n'I would keep watch on these \"faithful\", if I may, captain-general,' said Amon. 'My task is not yet complete.'\n\n'As you deem right.'\n\n'I approve,' said Malcador.\n\n'You do?' said Amon, surprised.\n\n'It is fitting that someone watches the Lectitio Divinitatus. You have performed your duties with diligence and honour. Captain-general, might I suggest the awarding of a name to Amon?'\n\n'You may,' said Valdor.\n\n'In one of mankind's oldest traditions there was an item known as the spear of destiny. Perhaps you would take the name of its supposed bearer, as a symbol of your duty to guard against the unholy and the holy alike?'\n\nAmon nodded.\n\n'What name would that be?'\n\n'Longinus.' Malcador pulled up his hood and turned away, his staff thudding on the floor. He stopped at the doors to address them all. 'We have suffered setbacks, but we are not defeated. Come, we each have our parts yet to play.\n\n'There is still a war to be won.'\n\nKhertoumi Wastes, date unknown\n\nA hot wind blew dust clouds across the desert basin. In the distance the twilit sky was illuminated in red as flames devoured a hive city. Here the sky was still clear save for the fume of the inferno, so that the heavens shone with stars - the starships that had levelled the city had moved on to new targets.\n\nOne dust cloud in particular stopped in place for several seconds, spinning faster and faster, as though trapped in itself.\n\nThe air around it crackled with nascent power, sparks springing from the motes of dust, whirling away to form a vague outline of a man.\n\nA blue spark appeared in the air, falling to leave a jagged trail of colour. A crack opened in nothing, parting to allow waves of blue and purple light to spill forth.\n\nFrom this aperture stepped a man, ostensibly of middle age. He had short, dark hair and his chin and cheeks were covered with recent hair growth, patches of silver in the black. His eyes were sunken with fatigue, his cheeks hollow, and he licked dry lips as the aperture closed behind him, leaving him alone in the desert.\n\nA cough caused him to turn.\n\nSat on a rock was an old woman, wrapped in pale scarves and a dark red coat. Her eyes were wide with shock, white orbs against dark skin. Tattoos the colour of ashes marked her face, painting flames on cheeks and brow. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion as she watched the man, who was dressed in a worker's coverall, a tattered backpack over one shoulder, a belt hung with many pouches about his waist.\n\n'Hello,' he said before a bout of coughing wracked him.\n\nThe woman pulled a flask from her coat.\n\n'Drink?'\n\n'What is it?' the man asked.\n\n'Just water.' She frowned. 'You speak Khert?'\n\n'I speak anything,' the man replied with a smile, reaching for the flask. 'Where am I?'\n\nThe nomad raised a wrinkled finger towards the burning hive.\n\n'That was Addaba,' she told him.\n\n'Oh.' The man slumped, took a drink and then straightened his shoulders. He nodded to the north-east. 'The Imperial Palace is that way?'\n\n'Yes. A long, long way.'\n\n'You don't seem scared.' He gestured to himself. 'My arrival.'\n\n'Should I be?' She raised an eyebrow. 'I seen a lot these last weeks. My family taken by the Emperor. The sky burning. Addaba broken by light from the stars. So... A man that steps from the air? Not so dangerous.'\n\n'No,' he laughed. 'I suppose not.'\n\nThe man handed back the flask and started to walk away, heading in the direction she had pointed.\n\n'Who are you?' the woman called after. 'Are you with the Warmaster? The Emperor?'\n\n'No, I'm not one of Horus' servants.' The man carried on walking, almost swallowed by the dust and night. His voice drifted back on the wind. 'My name is John, and I'm on my own side.'\n\nA heartbeat later, he was gone.\n\n'The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is gone, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert...'\n\n- Terran poet Vyasa, circa 850.M1\n\n'I need to fight whole armies alone; I have ten hearts; I have a hundred arms; I feel too strong to war with mortals -bring me gods!'\n\n- the dramaturge Rostand, circa 900.M2\n\n'Immortality, for us, is impossible.'\n\n- Horace, Odes, fl. Ml\n\nPART ONE\n\nHELL IS A CHAINSWORD DEEP\n\nReiteration\n\nWho knows what He is thinking, or what He was ever thinking? He moves, Kyril Sindermann conceded to himself as he climbed the last of the steps, our beloved Emperor, He moves in mysterious ways.\n\n'Misterious,' he said aloud, breathing the word like a sigh. The cold echo of the stairwell answered him, the patter of the rain. Sindermann was exhausted. He had come a long way; not just up the thousand step of the tower, but along the path before that, the long road that had once seemed so promising, but had led him - led them all - into unforgiving disaster.\n\nKyril Sindermann had walked alongside history as it was being made', and had been appointed to observe and record that process. But history, wilful and cruel, never leads where it is expected. It cannot be anticipated. Sindermann should have known that most base of professional principles - history only makes sense in hindsight.\n\nDid He know? The beloved Emperor? Did He read history backwardsand understand what the end of the book would be? If He did, could He have changed the words? Could He have warned us? Did He try?\n\nDid He know, all along, in His mysterious way, that this would be where it all led to?\n\nHere?\n\nSindermann unlatched the door and pushed it open. Cold air met his face. The roof garden hissed with rain. Beyond, grey cloud sloped from the upper bastions of the Sanctum Imperialis, cloud-conjured ghosts of the mountains that had been levelled to make way for this citadel. It had once seemed a wonder, a great feat of man, the flattening of a mountain range to make the foundation stone of a city-palace. 'No greater wonder can be imagined,' some witness had written at the time.\n\nNo longer. Greater wonders had come since to eclipse it: the war to pacify the heavens; the crusade to crush bestial species; the liberation of lost humanity; the unification of the cosmos.\n\nThe revelation of unthinkable horror. The betrayal of all that was.\n\nNow this, here. Mountains had been shaved flat to build a palace, and from that palace, an empire was raised. All that would fail, and the palace would fall, and the rocks that had been planed away to hold it up forever would split, and so too the world beneath that rock.\n\nSindermann wandered along the garden walk. The Katabat Terrace, a hanging garden, once a paradise. The beds had been left to grow wild, stone tubs and planters split by untended roots. Auto-irrigation and pesticide systems had been shut down to conserve power. The botanical servitors had long since been recoded to serve in the munition vaults. The garden staff had been conscripted to siege labour brigades or sent to the front lines. Other Palace gardens, and there were many, had been turned over to food cultivation.\n\nBut not the Katabat. The highest, the loneliest, the Emperor's favourite, near the top of old Widdershin's Tower. It had simply been abandoned. Perhaps He, the beloved Emperor, hoped it could be opened again one day, the gardeners brought home, the precious specimens nurtured back into bloom.\n\nIf that was so, thought Sindermann, then hope still existed.\n\nThe Katabat had not withered. Rain drummed across its paths, beds and parapets, pooled on uneven flagstones, and overspilled from empty pots. The garden had turned feral, overcome with weeds, untamed creepers and unpruned saplings. Water dripped from the bowed and buds of c"}
{"text":"n abandoned. Perhaps He, the beloved Emperor, hoped it could be opened again one day, the gardeners brought home, the precious specimens nurtured back into bloom.\n\nIf that was so, thought Sindermann, then hope still existed.\n\nThe Katabat had not withered. Rain drummed across its paths, beds and parapets, pooled on uneven flagstones, and overspilled from empty pots. The garden had turned feral, overcome with weeds, untamed creepers and unpruned saplings. Water dripped from the bowed and buds of chemically disfigured flowers. The symbolism was breathtaking.\n\nIt wasn't even rain, not natural rain. The entire Inner Palace, the Sanctum Imperialis, of itself a city bigger than old Konstantinopol, had been shut inside its dome of void shields since before the start of Secundus. The shields had never been designed to stay up for so long. All air was recirculated, processed, breathed a trillion times, and artificial weather systems had built under the dome, breeding stained cloud, acid rain and pocket storms that churned and festered beneath the crackling fields. This rain was recycled sweat, body moisture, piss, blood.\n\nIt was worse, he had been told, outside the inner voids: toxic smogs and bacterial clouds lifting from the burning sectors and the battle fronts, or artificially engineered; searing firestorms; ash blizzards; epileptic convulsions of lightning spasming from the aftershock of orbital strikes; shrieking tornados, propagated by the concussion of incessant bombardments. The ground shook. Even here, he could feed the constant tremble.\n\nThat was just here... Just the vast Palace Zone, the Zone Imperialis Terra, a continent wide. Beyond it, global hell, a systematic ravaging of the home planet, a collateral disaster of pollutants, seismic shock and fallout that was hairowing outwards from this monumental focus of attack. He had been told the plume of poison ash and smoke trailing off the Imperial Palace obscured the entire Europa and Pan-Asiatic landmasses.\n\nHe had been told...\n\nHe didn't need to be told. He could see it. He could see enough. He stepped to the parapet, rain kissing his face, and stood over the thousand incite drop straight down to the roofs of the West Constant Barracks.\n\nHe could see the sprawl of the Sanctum Imperials Palatine, the scope of the vast city-palace beyond, the Anterior Barbican, the Greater Palace Magnifican, tumbled and laid out like a casualty awaiting death. He could see the vast gates, the spires, the immense forms of the once-majestic ports, the lines of walls that had been built never to fall. Beyond that, in every direction, the belts of flame, the girdling circumference of black smoke banked forty kilometres high. And through the distortion of concentric void shields that blurred the air to soft focus like petroleum jelly on glass, he could see the flash and blink of detonations, the blaze of vast and distant fire-deaths, the streak of energy weapons like lightning light years long. The muffled thunder of existential collapse rumbled on, lagged and softened by the void shields.\n\nNo sun, just twilight. Poison grey. Like sight failing.\n\nThis, here. Where it began. Where it ends.\n\nSindermann looked down, down the deep drop. Rain had got under his coat, and into his eyes in place of tears. He saw the toes of his boots projecting slightly over the stone lip.\n\nHe had been an iterator, but there was nothing left to say. He had been a historian, but history was dead. He had found faith - not just an intellectual faith in the Emperor's stewardship of mankind, but something more: a true, shining faith that he had never dreamed possible. He'd clung to that, felt blessed by it for a while, secure against the gathering darkness. He'd even tried to share that word.\n\nBut the darkness had thickened. The howls of the Neverborn had drawn doser. His faith had leaked away, frail in the face of pandaemonic horror, as piss-weak as his philosophy and scholarship. No purpose remained for him. Last night, some of his few remaining friends had claimed that there was still some history left to tell: a future that would in turn beget another future that would want to hear, and deserved to hear, what had taken place before its birth. From the Katabat Terrace, Sindermann knew that could not be true.\n\nOthers, young Hari, so diligent and dutiful, had insisted that whatever history was left, its dying days should be recorded.\n\n'The death should be marked,' he had said, 'even if no one survives to lead of it.'\n\nUntrue, young man. Wrong. Yes, a few days or weeks or even months of history remained, but Kyril Sindermann could see it from where he stood. He could read it in the distant mountain-walls of black smoke that surrounded them, the thickets of unquenchable flames. There was history left, but it was not a history that should be recorded. It was nothing but a litany of pain, of agony, of mutilation, of miserable destruction.\n\nNo poet ever described the last, involuntary twitches of a corpse, and all historians had more decency than to linger over such things. The history left to write was a night terror of daemons, of abomination, of obscenity, and that should not be set down for anyone to hear.\n\nEven if they tried, there were no words left. No words in any human language could begin to describe the horror of this end.\n\n'I'll speak and write no more,' he had told them.\n\nNo one had replied at first. They had all understood what he meant. Kyril Sindermann would not be the first human soul to step away to end his witness by choice so he didn't have to bear the rest. 'Who's there?' he asked, a halt in his voice.\n\n'I thought I was alone up here. Were you addressing me?' Sindermann began to climb down. Suddenly the drop terrified him. He clutched the parapet to stop himself toppling.\n\nA figure pushed aside dank vines and tangled branches, and stepped onto the path. The cloth of his mantle was jewelled with raindrops.\n\n'Sindermann? What the hell are you doing?'\n\n'M-my lord. I come here from time to time-'\n\nRogal Dorn, several times Sindermann's size, took his arm and lifted him off the parapet like a small child. He set him down.\n\n'Were you going to jump?' Dorn asked. His voice, a whisper, was the rumble of an ocean murmuring secrets in its sleep.\n\n'N-no. No. My lord. I came to view the scene. It is... perhaps the best vantage point. So high up... I came to observe, and gain a greater perspective.'\n\nDorn frowned, nodded. The Praetorian's massive form was unarmoured: a yellow wool tunic, his dead father's old, fur-edged robe, an overcloak of grey.\n\n'Is that... Is that why you are here?' Sindermann asked. He wiped rain from his blow. 'No.'\n\n'Your pardon. I'll leave you to-'\n\n'Sindermann, were you going to jump?'\n\nSindermann looked up into the giant's eyes. No lie could exist there.\n\n'No,' he said. 'No. I don't think I was, after all.'\n\nDorn sniffed. 'It's all right to be afraid,' he said.\n\n'Are you afraid?'\n\nDorn paused. Rain ran down his temples. It appeared he was actually considering the question, which Sindermann had regretted the moment it came out.\n\n'That's a luxury I'm not permitted,' he said at length.\n\n'Do you wish you were?'\n\n'I don't know. I don't...' Dorn faltered. 'I don't know what it feels like. What does it feel like?'\n\n'I feel...' Sindermann shrugged. 'How do you feel?'\n\n'I feel a biting at my throat. A pounding inflammation of my mind. I feel the limit of my ability, and yet I must give more. And I don't know where that will come from.'\n\n'Then I think, if I may be so audacious as to say so, you are feeling afraid.'\n\nDorn's eyes widened slightly. He stared into the distance.\n\n'Really? That's a very bold thing to say to me, Sindermann.'\n\n'Agreed,' said Sindermann. 'I apologise. Thirty seconds ago I was intent on flinging myself from the parapet, so speaking truth to a lord primarch is not quite so daunting as perhaps it once might have been... Actually, that's a lie. Now I think on it. Damn me, offending you is... more alarming than the prospect of my own death. I can't believe I said that.'\n\n'Don't apologise,' said Dorn. 'Fear... So that's what it tastes like. Well, well.'\n\n'What are you afraid of?' asked Sindermann.\n\nDorn looked at him and frowned, as if he didn't understand.\n\n'What are you afraid of?' Sindermann asked. 'What are you really afraid of?'\n\n'Too many things,' said Dorn simply. 'Everything. For now, I'm simply afraid of the idea that I can, after all, know fear.' He paused, then as an afterthought, 'For Throne's sake, don't tell Roboute.'\n\n'I won't, my lord.'\n\n'Good.'\n\n'You should tell him yourself.'\n\nDorn looked at Sindermann.\n\n'You think I'll get that chance?' he asked. 'That's not the optimism of a man bent on ending his life.'\n\n'Further evidence, lord, that I was just up here enjoying the view,' said Sindermann. 'Is my optimism misplaced? Is your brother close yet? Do we know?'\n\n'We do not. I do not know if Guilliman or the Lion or any other loyal bastard is going to get here in time.'\n\nThey fell silent. Rain drizzled around them.\n\n'What were you doing up here, lord?' asked Sindermann. 'Forgive me, but shouldn't you be running this defence? At your post, data arrayed...'\n\n'Yes,' said Dorn. 'Seventy-eight hours straight, last shift, at Bhab Command, watching a thousand feeds scroll, implementing action and reaction. I-' he cleared his throat, 'I find, iterator, as this onslaught wears on, it's fruitful to step away. Just now and then. An hour alone here, or in the Qokang Oasis, to clear my head. To re-see what I have seen. It's all in here...'\n\nHe tapped his brow.\n\n'The data. Eidetic recall. I meditate, and process it as well as any strategium's cogitation. Better, perhaps. New forms occur to me, new micro-strategies. I step away to rethink, and recompose. And I try to think, if I can, like my opponent. Like the bastard Lord of Iron, Perturabo. I consider the logic of his processes. In the meantime, the ongoing truth is never far away.'\n\nHe showed Sindermann the noospheric-li"}
{"text":"r my head. To re-see what I have seen. It's all in here...'\n\nHe tapped his brow.\n\n'The data. Eidetic recall. I meditate, and process it as well as any strategium's cogitation. Better, perhaps. New forms occur to me, new micro-strategies. I step away to rethink, and recompose. And I try to think, if I can, like my opponent. Like the bastard Lord of Iron, Perturabo. I consider the logic of his processes. In the meantime, the ongoing truth is never far away.'\n\nHe showed Sindermann the noospheric-linked dataslate tucked in the pocket of his lobe.\n\n'I am sorry I disturbed you, lord.'\n\n'No need. A break or interruption is a healthy tool for thought breakthrough. Clarity through interruption. One can become too locked in. As in a blade light. A rhythm develops, a pattern, hypnotic. You win by breaking the pattern.'\n\n'Then I am glad to be of use,' said Sindermann. 'And glad that I did not find you intent on the same escape that brought me up the stairs.'\n\nDorn eyed him.\n\n'I apologise for that suggestion too,' said Sindermann.\n\nDorn glanced at the parapet. 'A thousand metres onto the roof of the West Constant? I doubt that would do the job.'\n\n'What would?'\n\n'One of my brothers, I would expect.'\n\n'Ah,' said Sindermann.\n\n'It was unthinkable,' said Dorn softly. 'We thought... We believed we could not be killed, until Magnus fell. But that's just history now.'\n\nThey looked out at the burning horizon.\n\n'Have you given up on history?' Dorn asked.\n\n'You heard that part, then?' Sindermann said, embarrassed.\n\n'History eating itself? Yes.'\n\n'The Order of Remembrancers is long dissolved, by Council edict. Its purpose is curtailed. There is no formal programmeme. The late Solomon Voss' great project is abandoned. No more illumination is needed, no more iterators required to articulate the truth of-'\n\n'It was necessary to control the flow of ideas,' said the Praetorian gently. 'Fundamentally necessary, as a measure of security. The word of the enemy can be toxic. The idea of the treason is toxic. It is infectious. You know that.'\n\n'I suppose I do,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Censorship is abhorrent to me,' said Dorn. 'It runs against the principles of the society we were meant to be building. Great Terra, I'm beginning to sound as high-minded as Guilliman. My point, Kyril, my point is... we're not building any more, and we had no idea how words could contaminate everything we hold dear. Remembrancers. Theists. Ideas that, in better times, we might at least have gently humoured. I stand opposed to all that woman Keeler represents, but I would defend her right to say it. In better times. But words and ideas have become dangerous, Sindermann. I don't have to explain that to you, of all people.'\n\n'I understand, I do,' replied Sindermann with a shrug. 'And what is there left to tell anyway? What words left to use?'\n\n'Sindermann,' said Dorn. He paused.\n\n'Lord?'\n\n'Find some.'\n\n'Some... what?'\n\n'Some words, and people to help you use them. The order may be gone, but I feel we need remembrancers now. More than before, maybe, and unofficially, perhaps. I would support the idea. To see the truth, to report it, to write it down.'\n\n'Why, lord?'\n\nDorn fixed him with a steady gaze.\n\n'Historians toil at the past, but they write for the future. That's the point of them. If I know there are historians still at work, it tells me there will be a future. I think that might strengthen my resolve. The idea of a future, a far future, that will exist and want to remember. It would fortify any purpose, and offer me hope. If the historians give up, then we're admitting an end is coming. Go do the work the Emperor once gave you, and remind me that some future is still a possibility for us.'\n\n'I will, lord,' said Sindermann. He swallowed hard, and pretended that the rain was in his eyes again.\n\n'If we win this,' said Dorn, 'it will be the greatest thing we ever do.'\n\n'It will,' Sindermann agreed. 'Yes, it will. For this is surely the greatest hell we have ever known. I think of the Palace as the solid heart of everything, yet wherever I go, I feel it tremble.'\n\n'Tremble?'\n\n'To the bedrock. The halls, the walls... I walk the place, you know. Every day, from line to line, within the defences and the bastions. I feel the vibration of the constant bombardment, the deluge of energy quaking the mantle, the sub-shock, the aftershock. I feel it everywhere.'\n\n'I've been told the entire Palace and the crust beneath has shifted eight centimetres west since this began,' said Dorn.\n\n'Extraordinary,' said Sindermann. 'Well then. You see? The tremble is everywhere. I feel it here. At the Hasgard Gate, eight days ago, like an earthquake during that ion barrage. The casements shook. And yesterday, I walked the Saturnine Wall. Even there, a shudder underfoot, like there was palsy in the old stones. Shock, lord, transmitted kilometres through the dirt from the port warzones.'\n\nDorn nodded. Then he went very still, his mind turning; considering, Sindermann was certain, more memorised data in one second than Sindermann could retain in a year.\n\n'Saturnine?'\n\n'Yes, lord.'\n\nDorn turned. 'I must return to my post. And so must you. Go down, remembrancer. Do your work so that mine can matter hereafter.'\n\n'I will, lord.'\n\n'Take the stairs, please.'\n\nSindermann grinned. 'Most amusing, lord.'\n\n'Laughing at this plight, and at ourselves,' said Rogal Dorn, 'may be the last thing we are able to do. When the munitions are all spent and our blood is leaked away, I will look our enemy in the eyes and laugh at his ghastly misunderstanding of the way things are meant to be.'\n\n'I will make a note of that, lord,' said Sindermann.\n\nONE\n\n* * *\n\nAfter the gate fell\n\nBegin\n\nOath maker\n\nThere's a bond stronger than steel to be found in the calamity of combat.\n\nWillem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) had found that out in the span of about a hundred days. They had met on the sixth of Secundus, in the crowds swarming off the Excertus Imperialis troop ships at the Lion's Gate. Everyone tired and confused, lugging kit, gaping at the monumental vista of the Palace, which most had never seen before, except in picts. Officers shouting, frustrated, trying to wrangle troops into line; assembly squares outlined in chalk on the concourse deck, marked with abbreviated unit numbers; adjutants hurrying along the lines, punch-tagging paper labels to collars - code marker, serial, dispersal point - as if they were processing freight.\n\n'I swear I have never seen so many people in one place,' Joseph had remarked.\n\n'Nor me,' Willem had replied, because he'd been standing next to him.\n\nJust that simple. A hand offered, shaken. Names exchanged. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). The brackets were always there, with everybody. Your name became a sentence, an extension of identity.\n\n'Ennie Carnet (fourth Australis Mechanised).'\n\n'Seezar Filipay (Hiveguard Ischia).'\n\n'Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile). This is Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).'\n\nNo one stopped doing it. It was too confusing otherwise. No one came from here, no one knew the place, or anybody except the rest of their unit. They brought their birthplaces, regions and affiliations with them, in brackets, like baggage trains after their names. Like comforting mementos. It became second nature. On the eleventh, Kordy found himself saying, as he reported to his own brigade commander, 'Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile), sir.'\n\n'Colonel Bastian Carlo, Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mo- What the shit is wrong with you, soldier?'\n\nThey lugged their brackets into the war with them, along with their packs and munition bags and their service weapons, like a little extra load. Then they had to cling to them, because once the fighting started, everything quickly lost definition and the brackets were all they had. Faces and hands got covered in mud and blood, unit badges got caked in dirt. By the twenty-fifth, the long red coats of the 77th Europa Max (Ceremonial) were as thick with filth as the green mail of the Planalto Dracos 6-18 and the silver breastplates of the Nord-Am First Lancers. Everyone became indistinguishable, alive or dead.\n\nEspecially after the gate fell.\n\nLion's Gate space port fell to the enemy on the eleventh of Quintus. It was a long way from where they were, hundreds of kilometres west. Everything was a long way from everything else, because the Imperial Palace was so immense. But the effects were felt everywhere, like a convulsion, like the Palace had taken a headshot.\n\nThey were on the 14th Line by then, out in the north reach of the Greater Palace. The 14th Line was an arbitrary designation, a tactical formation of twenty thousand mixed Excertus and Auxilia units holding positions to guard the western approaches to the Eternity Wall space port. When the Lion's Gate fell, cohesion just went, right across the 14th Line, right across everywhere. A series of heavy voids had failed, soiling the air in the surrounding zone with a lingering sting of raw static and overpressure. The aegis protecting the Palace had ruptured in a cascade, spreading east from the Lion's Gate, and the electro-mag blink of that collapse took down vox and noospheric links with it. No one knew what to do.\n\nCommands from Bhab and the Palatine Tower were not updating. There was a mad scramble, a fall-back, evacuating dugouts and leaving the dead behind. Parts of the Lion's Gate space port were on fire, visible from leagues away. Traitor armies were shoving in from the south east, emboldened by the news that the port had fallen. they were driving up the Gangetic Way unchecked, piling in across Kigaze Earthworks and the Haldwani Traverse bastions, swarming the enclosures at the Saratine and Karnali Hubs and the agrarian districts west of the Dawn Road. The units of the 14th Line could hear the rumble"}
{"text":"vacuating dugouts and leaving the dead behind. Parts of the Lion's Gate space port were on fire, visible from leagues away. Traitor armies were shoving in from the south east, emboldened by the news that the port had fallen. they were driving up the Gangetic Way unchecked, piling in across Kigaze Earthworks and the Haldwani Traverse bastions, swarming the enclosures at the Saratine and Karnali Hubs and the agrarian districts west of the Dawn Road. The units of the 14th Line could hear the rumble of approaching armour as they ran, like a metal tide rolling up a beach. The sky was a mass of low smoke, scored through by the ground-attack aircraft making runs on the port-side habitations.\n\nNo one could believe that the gate had fallen. It was where they had all arrived, almost a hundred days before, and it had felt so huge and permanent. Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordfrik Resistance Army) had never seen a structure so magnificent. A vertical city that soared into the clouds, even on a clear day. Lion's Gate. One of the principal space ports serving the Imperial Palace.\n\nAnd the enemy had taken it.\n\nThat meant the enemy had surface access inside the Eternity Wall, inside the Anterior Barbican. It had the critical operational capacity to stall landing principal assault forces from the orbital fleet: heavy units, mass units, to reinforce the Terran traitor hosts that had begun the outer assaults.\n\n'No,' Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) told his friend. 'Not reinforce. Supplant. The first door of the Palace has opened.' An orbital artery had begun to pump. Until then, they'd faced men and machines. Through the yawning hole of the Lion's Gate, other things could now arrive, the way cleared for their advance.\n\nTraitor Astartes. Titan engines. And worse, perhaps.\n\n'How could there be worse?' asked Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).\n\nThey tried to make their way from Southern Freight Quadrant to Angevin Bastion, approaching the top end of the Gangetic Way where it crossed Tancred and the Pons Montagne, in the hope of skirting the traitor armour that was reducing Gold Fane Bastion to rubble. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had nominal command, but they didn't need a leader. It was move as one, in support of each other, or die.\n\nSome fled, discipline lost. They were cut down inside two hundred metres, or overtaken by the viral clouds. Others gave up. That was the worst thing to see. Anonymous troopers, their identities lost undei a film of grease and mud, no longer able to say their brackets, sitting in doorways, beside broken walls, in the stinking shadows of underpass revetments. A few put pistols in their mouths, or tugged the pins of their last grenades. But most just sat, ruined by despair and sleep deprivation, and refused to get up. They had to be left behind. They sat until death found them, and it never took long.\n\nThe rest, the still living, they tried to move. Vox and noospheric links remained dead. The constant flow of updating directives and deployment instructions had been choked off. They had to switch to Emergency and Contingency Orders, which had been issued on paper flimsies to all field officers. They were basic, spartan. For them, the units of the 14th Line, a curt general order written on a curl of paper, like a motto from a fortune cracker: 'In the event of breach or failure at 14th, withdraw to Angevin.'\n\nAngevin Bastion and its six-kilometre line of casemates. Get behind that. That was the hope. A new line. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) had about seven hundred infantry with him in a long, straggling column that kept breaking into clumps. His seven hundred was just a small part of the eighty-six thousand loyalist Army personnel in retreat from Line 14, Line 15 and Line 18. Packs kept stumbling into each other as they struggled through the ruins, yelling names and brackets frantically to prevent mistaken engagement.\n\nEnemy fire was at least only coming from one direction: behind them.\n\nThen it began to come from the flank too. From the north. Close by and heavy, pricking through the colonnades and the gutted buildings, stippling rockcrete, raising puffs of powder-dust from rubble slopes.\n\nAnd killing people.\n\nTheir line, their ragged column, began to crumple. Some scattered and brocke for cover, others turned, bewildered. Some fell, as though they were tired of standing up. They dropped heavily, like sacks of meat, and tilted at ungainly angles, their legs bent under them, poses only death could accomplish. Captain Mads Tantane (16th Arctic Hort) started yelling above the chatter of weapons fire, urging them on to Angevin and a lew of the troopers obeyed.\n\n'He's a fool,' said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). 'My friend Willem, don't go that way! Look, would you? Look!'\n\nThe enemy had emerged. A wide, rolling line of traitor ground troops surged through the ruined fringes of Gold Fane, spilling through broken archways, and across streets, and down spoil heaps, flowing like water through every gap they could find. They were chanting. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn't make out what There was too much noise. But it was all one thing, voices lifted as one, a sound as ugly as the icons on the banners that wobbled and flapped over their ranks.\n\nThe kill-rate increased. Friends were dropping all around them. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) couldn't tell who. A body twisted. Was that Jurgan Thoroff (77th Kanzeer Light) or Uzman Finch (Slovak 14th)? Just a figure caked in mud, identity lost, no longer able to utter its brackets, no face left to wipe clean so that features could be discerned.\n\nSmoke everywhere. Dust. Vaporised blood. Filthy rain. The chanting. The constant crack and rasp of weapons firing. The slap and scorch of impacts on stone and rubble. The hollow thump of impacts on meat. You knew when a body had been hit. A muffled punch came with an exhaled gasp as air was squeezed out of lungs. It came with the sharp stink of burned cloth and exit steam, the burned and atomised innards splitting skin to escape.\n\nYou learned the sound fast if you didn't already know it, because it repeated a dozen times a minute.\n\nWillem Kordy grabbed his friend's sleeve and they ran together. Others ran too. There was no cover. They scrambled up a bank of nibble, rounds slapping the tangled debris around them. Joseph Baako Monday made the mistake of looking back. He saw-\n\nHe saw that Captain Tantane had definitely gone the wrong way, and taken two hundred or more people with him. The traitor multitude had boxed them. He saw-\n\nHe saw taller figures pushing through the marching traitor files. Beast-giants armoured in black. He knew they were Astartes. War horns.. billowed through the smoke-fog. More now, more giants.\n\nHe saw-\n\nHe saw these Astartes wore armour of dirty white, like spoiled cream. Their pauldrons were black. Some had great horns. Some had cloth tied around their armour like smocks or aprons. He saw-\n\nHe saw the dirt was caked blood. He saw the aprons were human hides. The Astartes in black slowed their advance. They let the Astartes in white rush ahead. They surged like dogs, charged like bulls. They weren't men, or even like men. The Astartes in black were upright, like handlers. The Astartes in white galloped, almost on all fours.\n\nThey shrieked in berserk pain. They swung chainblades and war-axes that Joseph Baako Monday knew he could not have lifted. He saw-\n\nHe saw them reach Captain Tantane's group. He saw Tantane and those around him screaming and firing to hold them at bay. And failing. The Astartes in white ploughed into the mass of them, through them, running them down like trains hitting livestock. Slaughter. Butchery. A huge cloud of blood-vapour billowed up the slope, coating stones like tar. The Astartes in black stood and watched, as if entertained. He saw-\n\nA hand on his arm.\n\n'Come on!' Willem yelled into his face. 'Just come on!'\n\nUp the slope, sixty, seventy of them, scrabbling up the rubble incline, sixty or seventy that had not made the mistake of following Captain Tantane. Up the slope, dragging each other when feet slipped, up the slope and onto what had once been the roofs of habitats. The horror below them The war-horns booming. The grinding squeal of chainblades. Billowing clouds of clotting fog.\n\nThe roofs ran out. A huge structure had collapsed, leaving nothing but frame of girders and spars rising from a sea of shattered masonry. A twenty-metre drop. They started to clamber out along the girders, the sixty or seventy of them, single file, walking or crawling along girders hall a metre wide. Men slipped and fell, or were knocked off by shots from below. Some took others with them as they clawed to stay on. They had all passed through fear. Fear was redundant and forgotten. So was humanity. They were deaf from the noise and numb from the constant shock. They had entered a state of feral humiliation, of degradation, mobbing like animals, wide eyed and mindless, trying to escape a forest fire.\n\nWillem nearly fell, but Joseph clung to him and got him to the far side, the roof of an artisan hall. They were among the first to make it. They looked back at their friends, men and women clinging like swarming ants to the narrow girders. They reached out, grabbed hands, brought a few to safety. Jen Koder (22nd Kantium Hort), Bailee Grosser (Third Helvet), Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar)...\n\nWar-horns boomed. Bigger horns. Deeper, howling sounds that shook the breastbone. Two dozen streets away, true giants loomed out of the haze. Titan engines, glimpsed between the soaring towers as they strode along, demolishing walls and whole buildings, black, gold, copper, crimson, infernal banners displayed on the masts of their backs. Each was like a walking city, too big to properly comprehend. Their vast limb-weapons pulsed and fired: flashes that scorched the retina, static shock"}
{"text":"ssar)...\n\nWar-horns boomed. Bigger horns. Deeper, howling sounds that shook the breastbone. Two dozen streets away, true giants loomed out of the haze. Titan engines, glimpsed between the soaring towers as they strode along, demolishing walls and whole buildings, black, gold, copper, crimson, infernal banners displayed on the masts of their backs. Each was like a walking city, too big to properly comprehend. Their vast limb-weapons pulsed and fired: flashes that scorched the retina, static shock that lifted the hair, heat-wash that seared the skin like sunburn even from two dozen streets away.\n\nAnd the noise. The noise so loud, each shot so loud, it felt as though the noise alone could kill. At each discharge, everything shivered.\n\nWe will die now, thought Joseph, and then laughed out loud at his own arrogance. The giant engines weren't coming for him. They didn't know he even existed. They were striding west, parallel to him, driving through the harrowed streets to find something they could kill or destroy that was worth their titanic effort.\n\nThe sixty or seventy of them had become thirty or forty. They slithered down slopes of scree and broken glass. No one had a clue where they were going. No one knew if there was anywhere left that could be gone to. Buildings around them were burning or blown out, the streets buried in a blanket of debris.\n\n'We should fight,' said Joseph.\n\n'What?' asked Willem.\n\n'Fight,' Joseph repeated. 'Turn around, and fight.'\n\n'We'll die'\n\n'Isn't this already death?' asked Joseph. 'What else are we going to do? There's nowhere to go.'\n\nWillem Kordy wiped his mouth and spat out dirt and bone dust. 'But what good can we do?' asked Bailee Grosser. 'We saw what-' 'We did see,' said Joseph. 'I saw.'\n\n'We won't measure it,' said Willem.\n\n'Measure what?' asked Jen Koder. Her helmet was so badly dented, she couldn't take it off. Under the crumpled rim, blood ran down her neck.\n\n'Whatever we are able to do,' said Willem. 'We'll die. We won't know. Whatever we do, however little, we won't know. That doesn't matter.'\n\nNo one said anything. One by one they got up, picked up their weapons, and followed Joseph and Willem down the street, picking their way over rubble, heading back the way they had come.\n\nThe Space Marine was in their path, hazed by a draw of thick smoke. Scarred siege shield propped in one hand, longsword resting across a huge shoulder guard. Plate dented and scored, even the ornate laurels on the breast. Eyes, slits of amber throbbing in the mauled visor.\n\nTheir weapons came up.\n\n'Where are you going?' it asked.\n\nBack. To fight,' said Joseph.\n\n'Correct,' it said. 'That's what He needs from us.'\n\n'You... heard me?'\n\n'Of course. I can hear a heart beating at a thousand metres. Follow me.'\n\nThe legionary turned. Its armour and siege shield were yellow.\n\n'I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army),' Joseph called out.\n\n'I don't need to know,' the legionary replied, without glancing back.\n\n'And show some damn noise discipline.'\n\n'I need you to know,' said Joseph.\n\nThe legionary halted, and looked back. 'That doesn't matter\n\n'It matters to me,' said Joseph. 'It's all we have. I am Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).'\n\n'I am Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),' said Willem.\n\n'Adele Gercault, (Fifty-Fifth Midlantik).'\n\n'Jen Koder (Twenty-Second Kantium Hort).'\n\nThe Space Marine let them all speak. Then it nodded.\n\n'I am Camba Diaz (Imperial Fists). Follow me.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Wait,' said Archamus, seeing them approach, but not looking up, one finger raised for patience.\n\n'I won't. How is he occupied? Right now? One hundred and more days of this, and the deepest shit yet, drowning in our own blood, and he's occupied?\n\nArchamus' face was expressionless. 'Consider your tone please, colonel,' he suggested.\n\n'Screw my bastard tone, lord.'\n\nArchamus rose. Vorst had risen too, heaving his yellow-plated bulk out of his seat. Again, Archamus signalled him to return to work with a brief gesture.\n\n'We are all very tired,' said Niborran quickly. 'Very tired. Tempers fray and-'\n\n'You don't look tired,' Brohn said to Archamus. 'Not at all.'\n\n'Bred that way,' said Archamus. In the first hundred days he'd stood three tours on the lines. The grazes and dents on his yellow plate hadn't been finished out and were there for all to see. But no, he didn't look tired. He looked Astartes, the way he always did. Unmoving, as solid as a statue. He didn't look tired the way these three humans did, with their hollow eyes and drawn cheeks and shaking hands.\n\n'I will allow you some latitude, colonel,' he said. 'The circumstances-'\n\n'The circumstances are shit, and getting shittier by the second, and Dorn is absent. He is supposed to be running this. He's supposed to be the bastard genius-'\n\n'That is now enough,' said Archamus.\n\n'The Praetorian's absence is concerning,' said Niborran. 'Brohn is out of line, but his sentiment is-'\n\n'We're screwed,' snapped Brohn. 'His plan is splitting at the seams. Lion's Gate is done. They're in. Inside Anterior. The aegis is blown in eight places. They've got engines on the ground and they're walking, Our plan is on fire. It's gone to shit-'\n\n'Get out.'\n\nThe words were a whisper, a hiss, but they cut like acid through metal. Everyone in the Bhab strategium fell silent. No voices, just the chatter and babble of cogitators and the crackle of vox monitor stations. Eyes averted.\n\nJaghatai Khan stepped up onto the central platform. How anyone or anything so big could have entered the Grand Borealis without being heard, or could have walked silently from the chamber arch across the plasteel deck, in full, fur-draped armour plate...\n\nHe towered over them. There was blood on his cheek, beard, gorget, left pauldron, breastplate. It matted his cinched-back mane, freckled his ermyet furs, and ran down his left thigh-guard. It wasn't his. His left hip was scorched back to bare metal from a melta burn.\n\n'Get out,' he repeated, looking down at Brohn.\n\n'Colonel Brohn is tired, lord, and spoke poorly,' Niborran began.\n\n'I don't give a shit,' said the Great Khan.\n\n'My lord,' Niborran pressed. 'Colonel Brohn is a senior and decorated Army officer, and an essential part of the-'\n\n'Not a single shit,' said the Great Khan.\n\nNiborran glanced at the deck. He sighed.\n\n'His question was insolently framed,' said Niborran flatly, 'but his point was valid.'\n\nHe looked the primarch in the eyes. He did not waver.\n\n'My lord,' he added.\n\n'You too,' said the Great Khan. 'Get out.'\n\nBrohn glanced at Niborran. Niborran shook his head. He tossed his slate onto the desk, turned and walked out. Brohn followed.\n\nThe Great Khan didn't even watch them leave.\n\n'Which seniors are on the next rotation?' he called out to the chamber. 'Find them. Wake them. Get them here.'\n\nSeveral adjutants jumped up and hurried out. The Great Khan turned to Archamus.\n\n'Where is Dorn?' he asked.\n\n'In council with the Sigillite and the Council.'\n\n'Get him here,' he said. He glanced at Icaro. 'You. Icaro. Begin.'\n\nIcaro cleared her throat. 'Aegis failure in eight sectors,' she said. She swept her hand across the face of her dataslate like a sower scattering seed, and threw the data up onto the display. Ugly blobs blossomed across the northern and central areas of the vast Palace map.\n\n'Repairs?' asked the Great Khan.\n\n'Pending. Voids sixty-one and sixty-two are beyond salvation. Lion's Gate Port remains wide open. Bulk landers are setting down along the northern upper platforms at a rate of sixty an hour. Vox and noospherics are interrupted in those sectors and adjacent zones.'\n\nShe cast more blobs onto the holofield.\n\n'Multi-point auspex confirms engines walking here, here and here.\n\nLegio Tempestus. Legio Vulpa. Perhaps Legio Ursa too. Progressing to Ultimate Wall, Anterior Wall, and into Magnifican.'\n\n'They have one, they want another,' said the Great Khan. Archamus nodded.\n\n'I believe so, lord,' he said.\n\n'Army lines are fracturing across the northern reaches,' said Icaro. 'Assault is a primary factor, traitor hosts driving up from the south. They have Astartes support.'\n\n'On the ground?' asked the Great Khan.\n\n'On the ground, in force,' she confirmed. 'World Eaters, Iron Warriors, Thousand Sons, Luna Wolves-'\n\nThey're not called that any more,' said the Khan.\n\n'My apologies, lord. But I won't use his name,' she replied.\n\n'Just use numbers,' said Archamus gently.\n\n'Yes, lord. Fifteenth, Seventeenth, Fourth, Sixteenth, Third. Perhaps others. Assault pressure is the primary factor, but Army cohesion is disrupted by the loss of vox and comm-channels. We can't issue orders to the plates where orders are most needed.'\n\nShe looked at the primarch.\n\n'The merits or demerits of the Praetorian's defence plan are moot all the while said plan cannot be implemented,' she said.\n\nThe Great Khan nodded, and tried to comb dried blood out of his moustache with his fingers. 'And daemons?' he asked.\n\n'Probably very many,' she said. There was a tiny wobble in her voice. 'Probably the most significant threat to the Sanctum Imperialis Palatine. But they are not detectable by our systems.'\n\n'That assessment is confirmed,' said Archamus.\n\n'We are relying on sighting reports,' she said, 'which are... unreliable and confused. And dependant on vox. We must trust, I suppose, in our lord the Emperor's will to keep them at bay.'\n\n'That trust is never unfounded,' said the Great Khan. He looked at at the shimmering, updating chart. 'They're coming to our doors. Right to our doors. Lion's Gate, Ultimate Wall. But they want that too.'\n\nHe pointed to the icon that represented the Eternity Wall space port.\n\n'Agreed,' said Archamus.\n\n'If they take that, they have both principal space ports in the northern reaches. Double the landing capacity.'\n\n'Surely they'll concentrate on the Sanctum now?' Icaro asked. 'The added capacity is useful, but Lion's Gate is closer, its landing volume is immense, and they're at o"}
{"text":"g, updating chart. 'They're coming to our doors. Right to our doors. Lion's Gate, Ultimate Wall. But they want that too.'\n\nHe pointed to the icon that represented the Eternity Wall space port.\n\n'Agreed,' said Archamus.\n\n'If they take that, they have both principal space ports in the northern reaches. Double the landing capacity.'\n\n'Surely they'll concentrate on the Sanctum now?' Icaro asked. 'The added capacity is useful, but Lion's Gate is closer, its landing volume is immense, and they're at our throats already.'\n\n'No, they want it,' said the Great Khan. 'Get as much on the ground as they ran to knock us down. It's what I'd do.'\n\n'And it's what I'd do,' said Dorn. He stood at the foot of the plat form steps, looking up at them, 'And it's what I know our brother Perturabo would do. Maximise landing capacity. Deprive us of orbital access. I am sure this is as Horus has instructed.'\n\n'They want them both,' said Jaghatai Khan.\n\n'They want them both. They want everything,' said Dorn.\n\nThe Great Khan nodded. He looked at Dorn.\n\n'So, there you are,' he said.\n\n'Here I am,' said Dorn. 'I had business elsewhere. Ironic... it's usually you who slips away and can't be found.'\n\nJaghatai Khan did not soften. The Lord Khagan would clearly not be mollified with gentle good humour.\n\n'What now, brother?' asked the Great Khan.\n\n'I have been examining the latest variables,' Dorn said, joining them on the platform. 'Each move our opponent makes reveals more of his intention. I'm beginning to see the Lord of Iron's strategy in some depth, which means I can predict where-'\n\n'We do not need to predict,' said the Khan simply.\n\n'This is a complex, multi-aspect battle sphere, brother,' Dorn began, then cursed himself inwardly. Jaghatai Khan's martial doctrines were very different from his own, but the Great Khan was a peerless, precise and subtle warrior. He did not deserve condescension. He did not need to have complexity explained to him the way humans did.\n\nJaghatai Khan shook his head. He looked weary, and that in itself was concerning. For a primarch to look tired...\n\n'He wants our father,' said the Khan quietly. 'He wants unhindered access to the Palace. He has one foothold, he wants another. It is not complex, Rogal, not any more. Eternity Wall Port must be defended and held. Lion's Gate Port must be retaken. It is an offence they have claimed it at all.'\n\n'It was unavoidable,' said Dorn.\n\n'I'm not blaming you, Rogal,' said the Khan. He sighed. 'We must hold the ports. Deny them access. What forces they have already landed can be contained and butchered.'\n\n'Jaghatai,' said Rogal Dorn. He cleared his throat, as if considering what to say next. 'I assure you, I have weighed every option. I applaud your determination, but it's not quite as simple as you-'\n\nHe cut short. Jaghatai Khan was gazing at him. There was a hardness in his look that made Icaro take a nervous step back.\n\n'I think you misunderstand me, Rogal,' the Great Khan said. 'I am going to take Lion's Gate Port back. I'm not asking you. I came here to tell you what I'm about to do.'\n\n* * *\n\nShe asked, 'Why are you kneeling?'\n\nHe was renewing his oath of moment in a dingy cubicle a million light years from the place she'd first watched him perform the ceremony. His private arming chamber on the Spirit, that seemed like false memory, something he'd imagined but which had never been true. The metal walls lacquered pale green, the smell of lapping powder, the noise from embarkation decks outside. Those images didn't belong to him any more, the oaths of moment pinned to the wall under the stencilled eagle, those too. They belonged to something else. They were deeds another man had done, and he was dead.\n\n'To show respect,' he replied.\n\n'Who are you kneeling to?' Always so insistent, so curious.\n\nHe shrugged. He had laid out two blades. Rubio's sword looked dull in the candlelight. The force sword's blade was inactive. It was an old Ultramarines weapon, gladius-pattern, a form he was familiar with. It still had the Ultima mark on the hilt.\n\nThe Mk IV long-pattern chainsword beside it had a dent across the cowling and several teeth that needed to be re-set or replaced. A repair unit stood ready, beside the frame supporting his plate. The pale gray of the battered armour segments was the colour of old bone in the gloom, like a moon catching only back-scattered sunlight.\n\n'Kneeling is an act of respect or fealty,' she remarked. 'Or it is an act of reverence and devotion.'\n\n'It's not devotion,' he said. becoming annoyed at her interrupting and her questions. 'There are no gods. We burned that lie.'\n\n'Then fealty... but there is no one here to kneel to, so the fealty is worthless.'\n\n'The Emperor is everywhere.'\n\n'Is He?' She looked amused. 'You kneel to the idea of Him, as an act of faith? So which is it, fealty or devotion? Have you destroyed false gods just to build another?'\n\n'He is not false,' he snapped. The floor shook briefly. Dust sifted down from the trembling ceiling. The closest batteries and casemates had resumed firing, and their mass recoil was flexing the fabric of the Palace.\n\n'Is He a god, then?' she asked. She brushed away dust that had fallen onto the pauldrons of his racked armour.\n\n'There are daemons now, so...' he began.\n\n'So there must be gods too?'\n\n'I didn't say that. What do you want, Mersadie?'\n\n'To live. Too late for that now.'\n\nThe candles guttered.\n\nWhat oath are you making? Loken imagined her asking. He wondered how he would explain. Oaths of moment were just that - specific, taken before battle. All those he had sworn, almost everything he had ever sworn apart from his devotion to the Emperor, had long been voided. He had decided to make his own, a crude and simple oath, enough to keep him going through whatever part of his life remained.\n\n'I've seen slogans daubed on walls, in the lower parts of the Palace Precinct,' he said to the empty cubicle. 'A few to begin with, then more. I think the Imperial Army garrisons and conscripts scrawl them up. A mantra. I adopted it as my oath. Simple. Encompassing, and easy to remember, lust three words'\n\nHe showed the scrap of parchment to the empty air, to the ghost memory of her presence.\n\nTo the death.\n\nTWO\n\n* * *\n\nTheory versus execution\n\nAngels among us\n\nOnly human\n\nTo see the Lord of Iron at work, that was a thing. A mighty thing. There was only one other mind in the known galaxy that could orchestrate mass war like him, and that mind was behind the monolithic walls they were trying to tear down. Well, one or two minds, Ezekyle Abaddon thought. One or two, maybe three. And one of them might be standing here on the platform watching him work. But give the Lord of the IV his due. He had a true flair for it.\n\nThe others were about to push ahead and approach, but Abaddon raised his hand to stay them.\n\n'What?' asked Horus Aximand. 'Afraid we might break the bastard's train of thought? Balls up his plans?'\n\nTormageddon chuckled. There was little love lost between the Mournival and the Lord of Iron. The war had spilled too much bad blood. But these things had to be set aside, for the time being at least. There was one, unifying goal to be accomplished, and the Lord of Iron was master of the battle sphere.\n\n'Take more than the sight of you to derail his concentration,' Falkus Kibre told Little Horus. The Widowmaker paused, and sneered at Aximand. 'I don't know, though...'\n\n'Just shut up,' said Abaddon quietly. 'I wanted to watch him work. For a moment. It's a thing. A mighty thing.'\n\nHis Mournival brothers shrugged and indulged him. They stood and watched with him.\n\nA formidable lifter throne had been brought onto the platform. The Iron Circle, six towering battle-automata that never left Perturabo's side, stood watch around it, impossibly still and alert. Forgebreaker, the Iron Lord's colossal warhammer, stood head down on a grav-pad beside the throne.\n\nFrom the lifter-throne's broad arms and footrest, hololith plates were mounted on sooty servo-arms, surrounding him on three sides: left, right and ahead. Eighteen active screens, streaming with data, flashing with quick-cut pict-cap images from the fields below. The Lord of Iron was lit by their glow, immersed. He sat hunched, an ogre sheathed in massive, matt-anthracite metal plate that looked as though it could withstand a siege all on its own. The cold plate seemed to be perspiring a sheen of gun oil. Servo-cables and feeder-pipes laced his skull like roped plaits, covering his ears, sprouting from his neck, cheeks and chin. Precious little of his face remained visible. The mass of cables gave him the look of Medusa from old lore, writhing serpent-haired.\n\nHis head twitched, darting from screen to screen. His fingers scuttled across the throne's haptic surfaces, adjusting, deleting, moving, impelling.\n\nWriting history, touch by touch.\n\nPerturabo, Lord of Iron, twelfth-found son, stepchild of Olympia, primarch of the IV Legion, devisor of war, master of the art of attack, leveller of walls, demolisher of fortresses, unmaker of worlds.\n\nSiege-war was his craft, his genius. It had got them that far, through the bulwarks of the best defended planetary system in realspace, through the orbital defences of the most secure world anywhere, and in through these walls, to his genefather's doorstep. Perturabo could see the entire micro-detail of the theatre all at once, but through the screens around him and the feeds in his head. He was oblivious to the actual world, to the view just a few meters away from where he sat. It was quite a view, Abaddon reflected. My Lord Perturabo, the twelfth primarch, is so buried in his work, he's really missing something. A fine view on a day like this. But that was probably why he was so good at what he did: acute focus, utter concentration, diligence, obsessive attention; processing data, distilling, making choices step by step to accomplish his goal.\n\nPerhaps, two goals, in truth. The commands of the Warmaster, waiting high above for"}
{"text":"just a few meters away from where he sat. It was quite a view, Abaddon reflected. My Lord Perturabo, the twelfth primarch, is so buried in his work, he's really missing something. A fine view on a day like this. But that was probably why he was so good at what he did: acute focus, utter concentration, diligence, obsessive attention; processing data, distilling, making choices step by step to accomplish his goal.\n\nPerhaps, two goals, in truth. The commands of the Warmaster, waiting high above for the work to be accomplished, of course, that goal first and formost. Take the Palace. But also Perturabo's own, private, iron hard ambition. To best his estranged brother Dorn, to take the ultimate prize, to finally answer the question that had generated jealousy and rivalry from the very first days: immovable object, unstoppable force... Which ceases to be when they meet?\n\nFrom the view at hand, it seemed to Abaddon that the smart wagers were an unstoppable force. He gazed out at what the Lord of Iron was so singularly failing to appreciate. They were on a landing platform midway up the artificial mountain of the Lion's Gates space port, an objective hard-won five days earlier. The port, wounded but able to function, rumbled with activity. The mass Freight lifters and elevators assemblies were pouring manpower and machines down to the surface levels. The immense edifice was also presented: Abaddon could hear and feel the cackle and slither of the Neverborn things that were coalescing around the space port's structure, taking form and flowing like oil, like rancid fat, into the open city below.\n\nEvery few moments there was a vibration, transmitted from kilometres above, as another bulk warship grazed the docking rings and locked into place. Smoke, in thick banks, clambered up from below, gusting from the base structure and skirts where fighting still raged. But Abaddon could see enough: the vast, vast heart of the Anterior Barbican laid out below, the towers and fortresses, the streets, the fires; the distant shape of the cyclopean Lion's Gate two hundred kilometres south-west, with its implacable rings of concentric walls and sub-gates; the shielded expanse of the Sanctum Imperialis beyond that, vague in the ash haze. A distant mountain range, but closer than it had ever been before.\n\nBelow, many hundreds of metres straight down, the fields of fire, the burning, blackened, mangled zones around the port, thoroughfares that had once been the majestic entrance to the most exalted citadel in the Imperium. A million fires like spilled coals, ropes of smoke, the fire-cracker flash of heavy artillery, the lightning pulse of engine main-weapons, aircraft and strike ships darting past like birds, flocking and mobbing. The last swirls of their long migration home.\n\nAbaddon looked at the view. It was more than he had ever imagined, and he had imagined it a thousand times. He looked at the view, then at Perturabo in his cell of data, then back again. Theory and practice, side by side.\n\nPractice. Execution. That was where Abaddon's heart lay. Naturally, he admired Perturabo's genius, his virtuoso art that had made this all possible. But he was so detached. When he finally triumphed, and he would, would it be by the touch of another haptic control? Would he make one last command stroke, and know it was done, and only then, at last, look up and see the reality he had wrought?\n\nThat was not Abaddon's way. A proper ending came with the blow of a sword, not the touch of a button. Blades and mettle had won the crusade, and they should win this. Not theory.\n\nNot warp magic either. Not the shrieking, filthy warp-things manifesting in the port around him, or inhabiting the flesh of beloved brothers as though they were second-hand garments. This end-war was being too much determined by new methods. Abaddon trusted the old ones far more.\n\nFreight-lifter doors squealed open behind him, footsteps thumped across the deck.\n\n'Why do you wait?' Lord Eidolon asked.\n\nAbaddon glanced at the III Legion champion. Eidolon's retinue trailed him, wretched and gaudy in their enhanced and augmented battleplate. Their faces, and in some cases their forms, had grown wildly misshapen. Their adopted colour schemes hurt the eyes. They were the cream of the Phoenician's men, the Emperor's Children, grotesquely and excessively ornate. Haughty bastards. Why did they preserve the name? Did Fulgrim fear offending his father somehow? Names could be changed. There was honour in that. When the time demanded, wolves became sons. Sons of a better father.\n\n'Respect?' Abaddon suggested.\n\n'Also, there's a wonderful view,' said Horus Aximand.\n\n'Respect of what?' asked Eidolon. His voice was unnatural, sonically phased. He regarded the four warriors of the Mournival, and the row of black burnished Justaerin Terminators standing honour guard behind them. Abaddon could almost smell his scorn, and the look in Eidolon's eyes spoke of the very special place he kept in his heart for the XVI Legion. A place swimming with contempt.\n\n'There is work to be done,' he announced.\n\n'I'm aware,' said Abaddon.\n\n'My beloved lord,' said Eidolon, 'grows-'\n\n'Many more supple breasts every day?' asked Aximand. Kibre snorted loudly.\n\n'Don't goad him, little one,' said Abaddon, smiling despite himself 'It really might put our good lord Perturabo off his stroke if we started brawling with our brothers while he worked.'\n\nHe looked at Eidolon.\n\n'Besides,' he added, 'it might dent that lovely armour. Which would be a terrible shame.'\n\nHe stroked his fingers down the ludicrously decorated pauldron of Eidolon's plate. Eidolon caught his hand, stopped it, clenched it very tightly, and smiled back.\n\n'It's good we can still have fun,' Eidolon said. 'A tonic for the toils ahead. I've always enjoyed indulging your juvenile horseplay.'\n\nHis smile did not diminish. His teeth were perfect, like fine ivory. His face was not. It was like a painted parody of human features, fixed like a carnival mask. Frilled sacs breathed either side of his throat.\n\n'I was trying to say,' he continued, his voice oddly modulated, as if an ultrasonic shriek wandered and skirled behind the words, 'if I'd been allowed to finish, that my beloved lord grows fatigued by the delays. He is impatient. Almost listless. It's a tragedy to see. He is-'\n\n'Not the man he was?' asked Little Horus.\n\nEidolon forced out a courtesy laugh.\n\n'Oh, how you play, Little Horus. He is changed. Aren't we all? All of us, made glorious? Even those in your own clumsy ranks?'\n\nHe looked at Tormageddon. Tormageddon was still gazing blankly al the lifter-throne. Something was purring inside him, and fluid seeped horn his cracked lips. Abaddon eyed him. Tormageddon was not what he had once been. Death and resurrection came at a price. The hulking fourth member of the Mournival wasn't Tarik Torgaddon, who had once been the best of men, nor was it Grael Noctua, whose flesh had been borrowed. There was, disturbingly, something of both of them in the warrior's features, but there was something else too, something underneath that stretched and twisted the face into a bloated pastiche. Abaddon disliked Tormageddon's proximity, disliked the fact he was any part of their quartet. They bore him with them like a scar, the cost of doing business. Whatever lived in Tormageddon's armour and meat, Abaddon had no desire to know it any beller.\n\n'Yes, we are,' he said. He pulled his hand from Eidolon's grip.\n\n'My lord Fulgrim grows impatient. I thought this was to be a planning session? He has sent me to propose an acceleration of attack.\n\nNow the engines are down, a full and frontal assault of the Lion's Gate.\n\nLet's split the Sanctum open and have done with this delay.' Abaddon sighed. 'Eidolon, I am dismayed to find myself agreeing with you, and with desires of your lord and master.'\n\n'Really?' replied Eidolon.\n\n'You know how very much that must pain me,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I am gratified that good sense can be spoken between us,' said Eidolon, 'that we may put aside our trivial contentions and stand as one mind. The war is, after all, the most important thing.'\n\n'I enjoy teasing the shit out of you,' said Little Horus, 'but there is a time and place. The Warmaster wants Terra taken, and we would not disappoint him with delays. We all serve the Warmaster.'\n\n'We do,' said Eidolon, alter too long a pause.\n\n'All well and good,' said Falkus Kibre. 'But your Lord Fulgrim's suggestion won't be entertained.'\n\n'How so, Kibre?' Eidolon asked. A fluting sob of noise echoed each syllable.\n\n'Because there's a plan,' said Kibre. 'The Warmaster has issued his objectives, clearly stated, and the Lord of Iron is executing them. Seise the ports, land the host, raze the city, then take the Palace. A methodical undertaking, old school.'\n\nEidolon laughed. 'This is no undertaking,' he said.\n\n'It really is,' said Aximand.\n\n'What? Are we... bringing Terra to compliance?' Eidolon giggled.\n\n'Yes,' said Abaddon. 'It may be the Throneworld, and it may be an uncommon undertaking, but it's what we have always done. The suppression and conquest of worlds that counter the interests of the Imperium.'\n\n'You're serious,' said Eidolon.\n\n'Someone's got to be,' said Abaddon.\n\n'Lord Fulgrim's proposal of a full and focused assault is attractive,' said Kibre. 'But it will be dismissed. It is contrary to the Warmaster's instructions, and to Lord Perturabo's plans.'\n\n'Besides, the aegis of the Sanctum Imperialis remains intact,' said Abaddon. 'The voids and the telaethesic ward. This process is an attrition to wear them down. Until they fall, we can't mount a full and focused assault because our Neverborn assets cannot be brought to bear.' I can't believe I'm defending that aspect, Abaddon thought. We can't unleash our daemons. When did a war hinge on that?\n\nEidolon looked in Perturabo's direction.\n\n'I say we bring this meeting to order and put it to the mighty Lord of Iron. See what he thinks.'\n\n'After you,' said Abaddon.\n"}
{"text":" Abaddon. 'The voids and the telaethesic ward. This process is an attrition to wear them down. Until they fall, we can't mount a full and focused assault because our Neverborn assets cannot be brought to bear.' I can't believe I'm defending that aspect, Abaddon thought. We can't unleash our daemons. When did a war hinge on that?\n\nEidolon looked in Perturabo's direction.\n\n'I say we bring this meeting to order and put it to the mighty Lord of Iron. See what he thinks.'\n\n'After you,' said Abaddon.\n\nAs Abaddon had anticipated, the Lord of Iron was not receptive to Eidolon's proposal. He did not, however, rage at them, as Abaddon might have expected, no matter how much hatred brewed in him for the Sons of Horus and the Emperor's Children. Petty feuds no longer had any place in his mind. It seemed Perturabo was in his element, relishing every moment of a game he had played out in his head over and over again for years. He dismounted the lifter-throne to converse with them, looming over them, and addressing Eidolon's remarks in a blunt but cordial manner. He praised Eidolon, and so by extension Primarch Fulgrim, for his enthusiasm. He was fierce-eyed, vital, eager to show them the complex beauty and ingenuity of his grand stratagem. He tilted some of the throne's screens so that he could describe certain patterns and tactical nuances.\n\n'I've never seen him so... happy,' whispered Horus Aximand. 'That is what it is, isn't it? That's the Lord of Iron happy?'\n\nAbaddon nodded. 'Like a grox in shit. This is what he was born for.' And it was beautiful. The summary Perturabo gave, the casual yet absolute knowledge of the data, the subtle expression of field strategy - adjusting for this, predicting for that, reading the battle sphere fifty moves ahead, like a regicide grand master. Abaddon's regard for Lord Perturabo's gifts reached new levels of awed respect. He was the right man for this greatest of undertakings. No one could come close to doing it better. Abaddon found himself taking careful mental notes, fascinated by the game plan that Perturabo laid out.\n\n'Great lord,' he said, pointing. 'There, to the south. You just mentioned it in passing. It seems a valuable opportunity. Will you not implement it?'\n\nThe Lord of Iron looked at him, and almost smiled. His eyes were black pits, but points of light blazed in them like distant suns.\n\n'You have a sharp mind, Son of Horus. Few have the acuity to notice the elegance of that. Sadly, it does not comply with the approach your genefather has ordained. I am obliged to hold it in reserve, for now. I would not risk the Warmaster's ill will by deviating from his wishes. But in the unlikely event that Dorn shows some final spark of wit, and manages some last rally, then it's a gambit I can employ.'\n\n'A shame, lord,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I don't see it,' said Eidolon. 'What are you referring to?'\n\n'Never mind,' said Abaddon. 'Trust me when I say it's a shame.'\n\nA glare of rancid light bathed them all. Tall figures solidified inteleport fields, on the platform nearby: Ahriman of the Thousand Sons, regal and impassive, accompanied by initiated warriors; Typhus of the Death Guard; three archmagi of the Dark Mechanicum; Krostovok, acting Legion commander of the small Night Lords contingent active on Terra; and four lords militant of the Traitor Army host.\n\n'I see we are all gathered at last,' said Perturabo. 'I'll brief now, so you may all communicate my directives to your respective forces.'\n\n* * *\n\nAt Gorgon Bar, nine hours of uninterrupted shelling suddenly came to an end, as though a switch had been thrown.\n\nHalen threw a switch of his own, a neural signal that deactivated the noise suppression systems of his helmet. He still felt deaf, as though his ears had blown, but he realised he could hear himself moving, hear the scrape of ceramite as he clambered out of the blast box.\n\n'Look alive,' he said. The dust-caked visors of his brother Imperial Fists watched him. He hand signed: restore audio. They began to stir.\n\n'Look alive,' he repeated, now they could hear him. 'We know what's coming next.'\n\nHalen pushed through the blast curtains, and moved down the narrow defile to the front of the casemate. His mind was still adjusting. After almost nine hours of generated white noise to withstand the constant, jarring onslaught, the stillness and quiet seemed unnatural.\n\nIt had been impossible to maintain vigil on the outworks. The saturated shelling had been too intense. Traitor armour and artillery had focused their wrath on a three-kilometre stretch of the outworks: squadrons of Stormhammers, Fellblades and other super-heavies, hulls down, Basilisks, Medusas, thousands of bombards; Venator and Krios units of the Dark Mechanicum. None were visible; all were firing from rubble fields and dead plazas eight kilometres out, files after files of them, discharging in concert.\n\nThe Space Marines had been obliged to pull the Imperial Army, Solar Auxilia and conscript strengths off the outworks and the first circuit wall. No humans could withstand the ceaseless noise and concussion, not even those in heavier field armour. Their human cohorts had been sent back to the hardened bunkers and subsurface shelters to the rear of the second circuit wall, leaving their emplacements and wall batteries unmanned. Even there, shuttered in dark, shaking pits, there had been casualties, as overshots sailed across the outer lines, striking the second circuit or dropping behind it to split open bunkers.\n\nThe Imperial Fists had stayed on alone, and even they had been unable to hold guard at the wall. Suppression dampers active, they had sheltered in the blast boxes built into the back of the first circuit - compartments of rockcrete, ceramite supports and ballistic sacking that they had further reinforced by wedging their siege shields against the exterior wall and sitting with their backs to them.\n\nStill, they had died too. Four boxes had been hit and gutted by high explosives, and in others, including the blast box where Halen had been sheltering, superheated shrapnel fragments had punched through the shuddering wall, perforating rockcrete, siege shields and the brothers huddled behind them.\n\nFisk Halen, captain of 19th Tactical Company, recognised that this was merely the prelude.\n\nHe stepped up onto the silence of the first circuit wall. Brown dust hung in the air all around, making it seem as if his wall position were the only patch of the world left. He'd expected the worst, but it was worse still. The front edge and parapet of the bulwark looked as though it had been gnawed away by a ravenous giant: ashlar blocks split and bitten through, the parapet entirely blown out in many places, buttressing reduced to shingle, the thick armour facings of the wall crumpled and shredded like metal foil. Most of the wall guns, the macro cannons, rotary nests, las-platforms, were gone.\n\n'Assemble,' he told his brothers as they clambered out around him. 'Make good. Begin vigil. Tarchos? Call the Army strengths back into position. Quickly.'\n\n'Captain,' said Sergeant Tarchos.\n\n'And get me a link to the second circuit batteries. We're going to need them.'\n\n'How do we hold this?' asked Brother Uswalt.\n\n'I doubt we do,' replied Halen.\n\n'Agreed,' said Rann, moving along the shattered line to join them.\n\nHalen threw the lord seneschal a quick salute. His men began to do the same.\n\n'No ceremony, brothers,' said Fafnir Rann. There was no time to waste on decorum.\n\nHe stood beside Halen, gazing out into the eerie haze of dust. Their optic units clicked and whirred as they tried to adjust for distance and definition. Halen was aware how stiffly the lord seneschal, captain of the First Assault Cadre, had been moving. He'd taken wounds at the Lion's Gate action. He wasn't close to being healed.\n\n'Sudden cessation,' remarked Halen. 'Does he think we're broken?'\n\n'He works on percentages,' replied Rann. 'Nine hours shelling, whatever percentage saturation, however many thousand tonnes of munitions. Enough to break our teeth and whip us to our knees. Then round two.'\n\nThey called him 'he'. They meant Perturabo. He was the personification of their foe, the demigod they faced. Not the Warmaster. Horus was the toxic spirit of malice that inspired the traitor host. Perturabo, Lord of Iron, was the instrument of execution, the facilitator of Horus' will. Though Perturabo was probably hundreds of kilometres away, it was his decisions and doctrines they were fighting. He was their line opponent, the architect of the traitors' scheme, though architect seemed the wrong word for a creature who brought walls down.\n\n'He thinks he's softened us, does he?' asked Halen.\n\n'Oh, I think he has, and he knows it, Fisk,' said Rann. 'First circuit and the outworks are hammered to non-vi. Let's see what he pushes up. Maybe run interference for a few hours, give them a slap while we drop back to second or even third and dig in there.'\n\nNon-vi. Non-viable. Rann did not rate the first circuit wall as a viable defensive position. He clearly had doubts about the second circuit wall too.\n\n'If we pull to third,' said Halen, 'we're reducing our opportunities.'\n\n'I know, Fisk, I know.'\n\nGorgon Bar had formerly been known as Gorgon Gate when the Palace had still been a palace. 'Bar' denoted that it was a civilian structure converted into a fortification, as opposed to one built explicitly as a bastion. It was part of the outer ring, the initial circle defences on the approach to the Lion's Gate and the Sanctum Imperialis. The Gorgon Gate had never been a fortress, just a magnificent triumphal arch on Anterior Way. The Praetorian had armoured it, just like he had armoured everything in the Imperial Palace, during the exhausting months of siege preparation. Decoration had been removed; walls reinforced and built out; utilitarian armour added to encase the once beautiful marble, ouslite and dressed ashlar. Four hemispheres of defences had been built before it, covering what had "}
{"text":"on's Gate and the Sanctum Imperialis. The Gorgon Gate had never been a fortress, just a magnificent triumphal arch on Anterior Way. The Praetorian had armoured it, just like he had armoured everything in the Imperial Palace, during the exhausting months of siege preparation. Decoration had been removed; walls reinforced and built out; utilitarian armour added to encase the once beautiful marble, ouslite and dressed ashlar. Four hemispheres of defences had been built before it, covering what had once been Trajanus Park and the Sonotine Gardens, Four hemispheres: four new, concentric circuit walls, bristling with casemats and defence batteries, and the outworks beyond them, all of them linked by redoubts and supportive trenchwork. In six mouths, the ceremonial gate, a site noted in monographs on palatial architecture for its tranquil beauty, had been retrofitted into an ugly, five-layer fortress.\n\nHalen understood why. Every prep simulation had shown it would he attacked. Why drive at the actual bastions and fortresses protecting the Lion's Gate, like Colossi or Marmax, when you could break through a ceremonial landmark and drive all the way into the Sanctum itself?\n\nGorgon would fall. Halen knew that, Rann knew it, Dorn knew it. Perturabo knew it. The question was, how long could it stand? How long could it delay the traitor advance? How much materiel cost could its defenders wring from the traitor host in taking it? How much could it deplete enemy strengths before they reached the Lion's Gate?\n\n'We've got partial aegis still,' said Halen, checking his auspex. 'Retaining void cover over eighty-eight per cent of the circuits.'\n\n'So it'll come from the ground,' Rann nodded. 'Any armour?'\n\n'What we held was drawn back to third,' said Halen. 'Except the stuff from the first sorties.'\n\nAt the start of the onslaught, fast Vindicator and Cerebus units had run from the ramparts to hunt and execute the bombarding forces, each hoping to get into their formation like a fox in a fowl-coop. But they'd failed. The tank destroyers had been obliterated by heavy flanking fire. As the dust began to clear slightly, Halen could see blackened hulks to the south, some still burning.\n\n'Draw armour forward, lord?' Halen asked.\n\nRann shook his head. 'Just to have them roll back again? No, we'll need them at two and three. But get them to stand to and wake engines.'\n\nHalen turned aside to issue vox instructions. Someone called out.\n\nIt'll come from the ground.\n\nAssault lines were approaching through the dust and fyceline fumes. Infantry in their thousands, fanned out, moving fast. Some light armour too: Predators, assault tanks, troop carriers, winnowing the blown dust back around them like the wakes of jetboats.\n\nThe ground forces came first. Charging.\n\n'Line up,' Rann commanded calmly. Siege shields clattered into place along what was left of the parapet. Bolters locked into firing loops. Crews cycled and turned what wall guns remained. Some refused to move or traverse, fused in place. Imperial Army support was still seven minutes away.\n\nHalen upped his optic gain. The charging horde, in hard zoom: abhuman beastkin, like fairytale ogres, spittle flying from wide, braying mouths; assault units of the Dark Mechanicum, like nightmares conjured from the very darkest ages of Technology; Traitor Army formations, brandishing banner-obscenities. Among them, hulking Death Guard and Iron Warrior legionaries, moving more slowly, advancing inexorably. Halen didn't up his audio gain. He had no wish to hear the howling chant again.\n\n'Hold or withdraw, captain?' he asked. There was still time to make the second circuit their line.\n\n'I'm tired of hearing them shout that,' Rann replied. 'I think we'll stay and slit some throats.'\n\nHalen could hear the chant by then anyway.\n\nThe Emperor must die! The Emperor must die!\n\n'Target,' Rann commanded.\n\nAll along the wall, a series of whirrs and chimes sounded as boltguns tanged and auto-locked.\n\n'What do you think, Fisk?' Rann asked. 'Thirty to one?'\n\n'Thirty-five, maybe forty.'\n\n'Praetorian odds,' Rann replied. He took aim. Whirr-chime.\n\n'Another day on the wall,' Halen replied.\n\n'Hah, for that, friend, you get the shout,' said Rann. 'Thirty metres out, please.'\n\n'Yes, Captain.'\n\nHalen raised his Phobos R\/017, felt its targeting systems slave to his helm's auto-senses. He had a perfect headshot on a striding IronWarrior. He ignored his target lock, and watched the distance meter climbing down Two hundred metres, one-seventy, one-fifty...\n\n'To your glory, brothers,' he called out.\n\n'And the glory of Terra!' they all sang back, even Rann.\n\nSeventy live metres, sixty, fifty, forty... thirty-five... thirty...\n\n'Commence,' said Halen.\n\nThe bolters began to fire. Sharp flashes stippled along the top of the circuit line and from defence boxes in the face of the wall. The first impacts were scored. Every hit a kill-shot. The front of the charging tide crumpled. Bodies broke mid-stride, exploded, toppled backwards, tripped others. Warriors fell, tumbling on the fallen ahead of them, or torn down by the next rain of bolt shells. The charging line hinged in on itself at its midsection, flank elements outstripping the punished centre. Halen barked instruction, and his own flank units cast wide, broadening the fields of fire to demolish the outrunners. Wall guns began to thump and chatter to his left and right. Traitor rows buckled. Mud and rubble blasted into the air.\n\nFire was coming back at them. Loose and wild, fired on the run, but heavy, hammering at wall faces, parapet lines and shields. Then a few more-accurate shots, the bolter fire of Traitor Space Marines, their weapons motion-compensating. Brother Imperial Fists snapped back from the wall, heads blown off, chests blown out. Halen changed clips, feeling his siege shield buck as it took fire. Though its front ranks were mangled, the traitor host was still streaming out of the dust. More than they had imagined, so many more.\n\nThey reached the outworks, pouring between shattered stone piers and cratered revetments. A dazzling storm of crossfire ripped between rampart and ground. At Halen's command, his brothers moved to defensive pairs, one firing down the wall face to clean off anything or anyone attempting to scale, his partner standing to cover him with the rim of his shield while maintaining fire into the mass, Bodies began to pile up at the foot of the wall, heaped like dead leaves, half-submerged in the mud and the slime-skinned pools of waste-water that had formed between the revetment piers.\n\nThe charge broke. The traitor host flowed backwards, staggering, disarrayed.\n\n'We're persuaded them of their stupidity,' Halen said.\n\n'No brother,' said Rann. 'That was a feint.'\n\nThe traitor Warhounds strutted into view, emerging from the dust clouds, retreating infantry flooding around their ankles: three engines, Legio Vulpa, accelerating to fast advance. Behind them, more ponderous, lumbered a towering Warlord, a behemoth silhouette against the sickly, backlit dust. The wall began to tremble.\n\nYes, a feint. Throw infantry at the first circuit to keep the Imperial Fists in position, prevent them from falling back, then run the Titans in to burn them where they stood. That's how you wore down defences: bait and switch.\n\n'A bad call from me,' Rann said to Halen.\n\n'No, lord-'\n\n'Yes, it was,' Rann snapped. He looked at Halen. 'Prepare to draw us back fast,'\n\nHalen started to bark commands. The advancing engines were a daunting sight. Halen didn't know the Warlord giant. It looked Mars Alpha-pattern, but it had changed, like so many of the brothers that they had once stood shoulder to shoulder with. Its crusade insignia was gone. Feral crests and crudely daubed sigils covered its flanks and its hull was blackened, as though it had walked a thousand leagues through roasting flame to face them. Chains swayed from its limbs and groin, and tattered banners proclaimed filthy concepts in runes that made Halen's gorge rise. What he first took for heads he realised were naked human corpses swinging from the chains. The engine looked sick, skeletal, its stride uneven as if limping, though from chronic disease rather than injury. Its armoured head, hunched between the massive yoke of its gun-platform shoulders, had been refashioned into the form of a massive human skull. Cockpit lights glowed in the eye sockets, and rotary cannons protruded through the open, screaming jaws like tongues. War-horns boomed. The hound-Titans escorting it, similarly malformed, stalked like flightless birds, first rushing ahead of their giant dam, then edging back skittishly to stay at the Warlord's heels and retain formation.\n\n'Solemnis Bellus' muttered Rann.\n\n'You know it?' asked Halen.\n\n'Barely,' Rann replied. 'Just a few traces left of the engine it once was. Throne, I weep to see such a glorious weapon so debased.'\n\nThe weapons of the advancing engines began to fire. Mega-bolter. Turbo laser. Torrents of blast-shot from the rotator mounts of the three hounds. Devastation ripped across the circuit line. Ferrocrete shattered. Wall sections erupted, collapsing in avalanches of masonry, dust, flame and plate debris. Yellow-armoured bodies were tossed into the air. Casemate 16 subsided, the throat of its turret torn out, its entire gun platform sliding off its mount and dropping down the wall face, munitions cooking off in a frenzied stream of overlapping detonations.\n\n'Fall back!' Halen yelled into the vox. 'Fall back to second now!' A blast took him off his feet. Grit and flame swirled around him. A strong arm pulled him to his feet.\n\n'No, brother,' the Angel said, looking down into Halen's cracked visor. 'No need. Not yet.'\n\nSanguinius let him go, and turned to the mangled lip of the wall. He leapt off, into the wallowing curtains of fire, wings unfurled.\n\n'Did I see that?' asked Rann, hauling Halen into cover.\n\n'He's with us,' Halen replied.\n\nThe Great Angel wasn't alone. Legionaries were rushing"}
{"text":"Fall back to second now!' A blast took him off his feet. Grit and flame swirled around him. A strong arm pulled him to his feet.\n\n'No, brother,' the Angel said, looking down into Halen's cracked visor. 'No need. Not yet.'\n\nSanguinius let him go, and turned to the mangled lip of the wall. He leapt off, into the wallowing curtains of fire, wings unfurled.\n\n'Did I see that?' asked Rann, hauling Halen into cover.\n\n'He's with us,' Halen replied.\n\nThe Great Angel wasn't alone. Legionaries were rushing onto the wall line from the defiles and back access wells. Warriors in blood-red plate gripped brothers of the VII by the hands in greeting as they pushed forward, pulling them back, giving them a moment to reload and reset while they took over the positions. The bolters of the Blood\n\nAngels began to roar.\n\nFresh blood, but still just blood. Even concentrating their fire, the guns of the Space Marines couldn't bring down a war engine.\n\nThe Great Angel of Baal was another thing altogether. He soared across the slopes of rubble at the foot of the crippled wall, across the tumbled and twisted enemy corpses brought down by the Imperial Fists, into miasmal fog of dust and smoke and fire, surging on powerful wingbeats that spiral-eddied the smoke in his wake.\n\nHe swept low, like a hunting eagle, banked magnificently between the streams of turbo laser fire trying to track him, and ploughed into the snout of the nearest Warhound. He drove his spear straight through the top of its command compartment, through inhuman symbols, through ancient armour, through sub-system skins, through power trains. It dug deep. Sanguinius twisted the haft, feet braced on the full canopy, wings beating hard to maintain balance. The Warhound squealed and faltered, a misstep, cumbersome weapon limbs flailing in a vain attempt to brush its attacker off its face, like a child flailing against a hornet's persistent attention.\n\nThe Great Angel wrenched the spear free, and fell backwards. He dropped, then his wings grabbed the air, his fall turned into flight, and he raced like a missile across the churned earth that had been expecting his impact. The Warhound stumbled backwards, sparks spraying from the gaping puncture in its head. The Warlord, annoyed and protective of its fledglings, declined both principal limb guns and opened fire, swinging at the waist as it tracked Sanguinius' low and rapid line of flight. The catastrophic firepower ripped earth, mud and rockcrete slabs apart, chewing an enormous burning crescent in the ground.\n\nSanguinius swept clear of the chasing hail of fire. His wings carried him faster than the Warlord could traverse. He banked again, turning in, climbing, his wings beating at the limit of their strength, and came at the right flank of the engine that had once been proud to call itself Solemnis Bellus.\n\nHe powered up its side, a vertical climb. The Great Angel dragged his spear as he ascended, raking the blade tip through flank armour, lipping a long, ugly gash from hip to breastwork that spewed cinders and black fluid.\n\nHe crested the Warlord, forty metres off the ground, hung for a moment, and dropped onto its shoulders, straight onto the armoured nape behind the skull-head.\n\nThe Spear of Telesto slid into the back of its head.\n\nUgly, choking snorts echoed from the engine's war-horns. The huge Warlord shook and swayed. Both eyes blew out, flames and fragments of cockpit glass bursting from the skull sockets.\n\nSanguinius tightened his grip. The spear, harpooned deep into the base of the engine's skull, glowed briefly, and pulsed energy into Solemnis Bellus. Sub-detonations went off in its waist assemblies, its hips, and out through the back of its drive compartment. Sanguinius plucked the spear, raced forward, and took off, lofting clear of The machine's prow as the death blast claimed it.\n\nBright fire, an internal blast of devastating force, burst through its torso and sheared off one of its weapon limbs. It fell sideways, legs locked, and hit the ground so hard it slapped up waves of mud and soil lite earth shook. The wall shook. Halen reached out to steady himself As it came down, the giant's head connected with the out-spur of a stone revetment, and was twisted backwards so it ended neck-broken, gaping at the dead sky.\n\nSecondary blasts rippled through the immense metal carcass. A magazine blew up, showering flames and molten steel. The mud, polluted water and debris hurled up by its gargantuan impact began to rain down in a half-kilometre radius, a torrential downpour of slime, fluid and metal fragments.\n\nSanguinius landed on the butchered earth, facing his kill. Backlit by the god-machine's huge pyre, he rose, wings furled, spear sizzling by his hand, and gazed at the three Warhounds. The one he had wounded was still vomiting sparks, and smoke trailed from its holed head. It whinnied and brayed. All three had come to a halt. They cycled their weapons and washed the Blood Angels primarch with target-seeking systems.\n\n'Try, if you like,' Sanguinius yelled up at them. 'Shall we continue?' There was a long pause. Then the Warhounds moved in unison.\n\nThey took a step backwards, swung around, and ploughed back into the dust the way they had come.\n\nLater, when the incident was recounted, someone insisted that even a primarch, even the glorious Great Angel, could not stare down three Titan engines. Their auspex must have painted Titan-killing armour - Shadowswords or Slayerblades - that had been closing in, two minutes out.\n\nBut Halen knew what he'd seen.\n\nSanguinius flew back to the outworks rampart. The Blood Angels rose from their freshly taken positions along the parapet line as he swept overhead. The Imperial Fists drummed the butts of their bolters against their shields in a crude chorus of martial applause.\n\nHe landed. He leaned on his upright spear for a moment, as a man would rest after hard toil. The Warlord's black grease and oil-blood spattered his ornate gold armour, his beautiful face, the sunburst labarum behind his head. It dripped from his long, golden hair.\n\n'Fafnir,' he said, greeting Rann with a nod. He clasped the lord seneschal's hand, dwarfing it.\n\n'My lord,' said Rann. 'They will tell stories of this deed.'\n\n'No, Rann,' Sanguinius replied.\n\n'I am sure of it, lord,' Rann said. 'I'm lucky to have seen a myth being made.'\n\nThey knew the Great Angel of old. A heartfelt comment like Rann's would have once provoked a smile and a modest laugh. But no smile appeared.\n\n'No story will come of this,' he said. 'It was a tiny thing. There are too many stories, Fafnir, my dear brother, and most will be forgotten in a moment as the next takes its place. This is... This is everywhere.'\n\n'My lord,' said Rann. There was silence all around them.\n\n'I've seen it, Fafnir,' said Sanguinius. 'From here, to the gate, to the port, across Anterior, across Magnifican. This is everywhere and everything. Far too many stories, a million of them, all destined to be lost, for only the last line of the book matters.'\n\n'Then we had better make sure we're the ones who write it,' said Rann.\n\nSanguinius did not reply at first. The smallest hint of a smile lit his eyes. It felt to Halen as though the sun had come out, dispelling the infernal gloom.\n\n'Indeed,' said Sanguinius. He took a deep breath, and straightened up. 'Indeed, brother. So let's attempt to hold this line a little longer.'\n\n* * *\n\nDorn left the bastion via the Petitioners Gate, and headed across the yard towards the walkway, two Huscarls in tow. The gate yard was half empty. By the light of fat tapers enclosed in frosted glass hoods, groups of petitioners waited while liveried wardens dealt with their supplications. Most of the petitioners were high-ranking citizens, or civic leaders, and Dorn knew their requests were probably reasonable increased ration allowances, medicae provision, permits for evacuation into the Sanctum. He also knew most would be denied. It was wartime, the wartime. Privations were a necessary burden to be shouldered by any who stood with the Throne.\n\nHis appearance caused a stir, a murmuring. Most averted their gaze, respectful, but he saw a few consider the notion of approaching him. Timidity got the better of them.\n\nOne small group, a mismatched band of men and women of various ages and stations, had taken seats on the stone benches by the arch. As the Praetorian passed, one rose and came to him. It was Sindermann.\n\n'My lord-'\n\nA Huscarl blocked his approach.\n\n'I crave just a minute, my lord,' Sindermann called.\n\n'Not now,' Dorn replied, and kept walking.\n\nHe paused, then turned back.\n\n'This concerns remembrancers, Sindermann?'\n\n'Yes, my lord.'\n\n'I don't have time now,' said Dorn. I may never have time, he thought. 'But the project has my support. Diamantis will take your proposal and issue your permits, with my authority.'\n\nDiamantis, one of the Huscarls, glanced at Dorn.\n\n'My lord?'\n\n'Take their proposal, get it sealed with my bond. Get them all attachment warrants in my name. Just make sure their proposal contains nothing too unreasonable.'\n\n'On what criteria, my lord?' Diamantis asked.\n\n'Use your discretion,' said Dorn. He turned and moved on without another word.\n\nDiamantis looked at Sindermann. 'What is this about?' he asked. 'Remembrancers, lord,' Sindermann replied. 'A new order. A small one, I assure you.'\n\n'I thought we were long past that,' said Diamantis.\n\n'My Lord Dorn-' Sindermann began.\n\n'I heard him,' said Diamantis. 'You have this proposal?'\n\n'Here,' said Sindermann, pulling a folded parchment from under his coat.\n\nDorn passed under the old arch and onto the walkway. It was a broad, high bridge that spanned the deep gulf between Bhab Bastion and an annex of smaller drum towers to the west. The bridge was lit by more of the glass-hooded tapers. High above, the sky swirled with a darkness that looked like low thunderhead cloud. He could hear the creak and moan of the void shields, the uneven thump and rumble of distant, constant bomba"}
{"text":"\n'Here,' said Sindermann, pulling a folded parchment from under his coat.\n\nDorn passed under the old arch and onto the walkway. It was a broad, high bridge that spanned the deep gulf between Bhab Bastion and an annex of smaller drum towers to the west. The bridge was lit by more of the glass-hooded tapers. High above, the sky swirled with a darkness that looked like low thunderhead cloud. He could hear the creak and moan of the void shields, the uneven thump and rumble of distant, constant bombardment. The southern horizon was lit with a dull and throbbing orange light that made a silhouette out of the immense Lion's Gate and the neighbouring towers.\n\nFar below the bridge span, the access streets and thoroughfares were choked with people, rivers of displaced citizens flowing into the Sanctum Imperialis. Officials and Adeptus Arbites with light poles were routing each long, migrating convoy towards temporary shelters: halls, libraries, gymnasia, theatres; any decent spaces that could be requisitioned and spared. The displaced were welling in through the Lion's Gate and the other gatehouses of the Ultimate Wall, driven from their homes in Magnifican and Anterior, desperate for shelter in the one zone of the Imperial super-palace that was still deemed safe and unviolated. Dorn could see people with small sacks of possessions, with handcarts, with children. How many millions had been driven out of the port zone and the northern reach of Anterior? How many millions more would follow?\n\nWhere would they go if the enemy breached the Ultimate Wall?\n\nMidway across the bridge, Dorn realised he could hear an odd, incessant chime that his genhanced senses could detect above the moan of the aegis, the muffled bombardment and the low drone of unnumbered voices from far below.\n\nHe stopped.\n\nMy lord?' asked Cadwalder, his remaining Huscarl.\n\nDorn raised his hand. That sound... Where was it coming from?\n\nThe lamps. The glass hoods of the bridge lights were all trembling in their holders, very slightly, invisibly, but he could hear their shiver. He realised the bridge was also vibrating very, very slightly, so little, a standard human could not have sensed it.\n\nBut it was there, the... What had Sindermann called it? The tremble.\n\nThe whole Palace was shaking. Not from fear. From the constant exterior impacts.\n\nHe started walking again, reached the horseshoe arch of the annex, and went inside.\n\nThe drum tower was as old as Bhab, but a tiny sibling of its vast and ugly neighbour. A Custodian Prefect Warden stood in the upper access, waiting for him; a regal golden statue with a draped crimson cloak, ornate castellan axe upright.\n\n'My lord,' he said.\n\n'Prefect Tsutomu,' Dorn replied. 'He awaits?'\n\n'At your pleasure.'\n\nThe Custodian led them in. Dorn had requested a private meeting, away from bastion activity. None of the usual conference chambers of audience halls. Just a little gallery room in the thick, stone peak of the drum tower.\n\nConstantine Vador waited within. The captain-general of the Legio Custodes sat at the long table, his gleaming helm resting on the tabletop at his elbow. Scores of cylinder candles stood on the table, their flames the only light in the old room.\n\n'Irregular,' Valdor remarked as Dorn entered.\n\n'You'll excuse that, I'm sure,' Dorn replied.\n\n'What's the business, my lord?' Valdor asked.\n\nDorn glanced at Tsutomu and Cadwalder, who had taken station inside the door.\n\n'You may step out,' he said to them.\n\n'Tsutomu can he trusted,' said Valdor, raising an eyebrow.\n\n'So can my Huscarl,' Dorn replied quickly. He hesitated. 'Stay,' he told the two warriors, 'but appreciate the utter confidence of what is about to take place.'\n\nHe sat down, facing the master of the Legio Custodes. They were old friends, but there was tension.\n\n'So, what is about to take place?' Valdor asked.\n\nDorn raised his index finger. 'Not yet,' he said. 'For now, small talk.'\n\n'I don't believe I need to point out to you that we have precious little time for such luxuries these days,' said Valdor.\n\n'Indulge me.'\n\nValdor shrugged. 'How did you settle things with your brother?' he asked, as if the subject were trivial.\n\n'Jaghatai? Well enough. He wants to go for the port.'\n\n'Of course he does.'\n\n'Defensive doctrines are not his preference,' Dorn agreed.\n\n'Not fair,' Valdor replied. 'The Khagan simply defends by attack. His Legion has always been energetically mobile. They are chafing. And the port is a logical and viable objective. Essential, some might argue.'\n\n'And he did argue,' replied Dorn. 'It's safe to say I've never seen him that angry with me. Or perhaps angry with the world. Or me and the world. And I've never seen him so tired.'\n\n'It's a sorry day for us all when the likes of you and your brother are fatigued,' said the First of the Ten Thousand.\n\n'Everyone's tired, Constantin,' said Dorn. He sat back and watched the candle flames dance. 'The attrition rate in the bastion is savage. Officers falling sick, breaking down, suffering nervous exhaustion. Every few days, there are fresh faces to learn - new officers, new aides, new generals, stepping in, filling shifts.'\n\n'The shift rollover is punishing. How long do they get to sleep? Three hours? Then there's the sheer volume of data-flow. We don't all have minds like yours, Rogal.'\n\n'It doesn't help when Jaghatai storms in and dismisses two good seniors out of hand.'\n\n'For what crime?'\n\n'Being tired. Speaking too frankly. Being human.'\n\n'Who?' asked Valdor.\n\n'Niborran.'\n\n'No!'\n\n'And another. Ah...'\n\n'Brohn, my lord,' said Cadwalder from the door.\n\n'Brohn, yes. I'll find roles for them elsewhere. It's not as if we don't need good officers across the board.'\n\n'Still, Saul Niborran's been there since day one,' said Valdor. He scowled.\n\n'And he's probably burned out. It happens.'\n\n'Isn't he too old for active line?' asked Valdor. 'I mean, the fellow's only human.'\n\n'I don't think age limits factor in this any more,' said Dorn.\n\nThey both stopped talking. The candle flames trembled. Neither of them was good at casual conversation.\n\nOnly human. Valdor's words hung in the candle smoke. Neither of them was human. They had both been gifted with extended spans that were supposed to outlive war so they could aspire to things beyond it. But war was all they had known, and already they had seen through too many mortal generations. Humans had been born, lived, and died of old age several times within their lifespans, and still war persisted. Dorn and Valdor had never spoken of it, but they both privately feared they had, through necessity, become too moulded by the one role that they could never leave it. They could not talk easily or lightly, like men, or pause to consider the nuances of culture. They could not relax or reflect. Martial responsibility had pushed all other concerns out of them. Even the simplest conversation turned to logistics and strategies. Humans lived and died like gadflies, Dorn thought. Where did they find the time in their short spans to be anything other than warriors when I can't find it in mine? And I was supposed to find it. I was supposed to be so many things. Soldier was only one of them.\n\n'We were born for more,' he muttered.\n\nValdor looked at him. The Praetorian realised he had spoken out loud, unguarded. He was about to brush the remark aside, but the captain-general of the Custodians held his gaze. Valdor simply nodded. His eyes betrayed a sad hint of empathy.\n\n'We were,' he said. 'Born to fashion a future.'\n\n'And enjoy it,' said Dorn.\n\n'Enjoy it, yes. Be part of it, not just its midwives. When we were made, the future was full.'\n\n'And now there is only war.'\n\nValdor exhaled, then laughed. He rubbed the stripe of cropped hair that ran across his otherwise shaven scalp.\n\n'We will prevail, Rogal,' he said. 'One day, you'll break your sword and hang up your shield, and you will sit, and laugh, and from the window, see golden towers standing without fear or aegis or batteries, freed from all possibility of threat because of what we do now.'\n\n'You believe that without hesitation, don't you, Constantin?'\n\n'I have to. The alternative is unacceptable.'\n\n'But, from the way you speak, you don't see that as your future, then?' Dorn asked.\n\n'My duty will never end,' Valdor replied. 'The primarchs were wrought to build an Imperium. Your task, however hard, has an end. Mine docs not. The Custodians were born simply to protect Him. It is what we will always do.'\n\n'You always thought the primarchs were a mistake, didn't you?' said Dorn.\n\nValdor looked at him. 'I-'\n\n'You had misgivings.'\n\n'What I may have felt hardly matters,' Valdor replied. 'Especially now. We stand together. You and I, at His side, against this fall of night. We must be allies, without reservation or recrimination, and I trust that we are.'\n\nHe sighed. 'So...' he said, turning them away from contemplation quickly, 'you were saying. Your brother?'\n\n'I let him simmer,' said Dorn. 'Then I took him aside. I told him he could have the port. Take it, with my blessing. It's not as if I'm going to go to war with him about it. I simply requested he took his force out to it via Colossi, and did a little work there first to holster the line, so that strengths from the port could fall back if they had to.'\n\n'He agreed?'\n\n'Yes. It's mobile assault. The fight before Colossi is a running war for now. The White Scars get to slip loose. But he knew what I was doing'\n\n'Saving face for him?'\n\nDorn nodded, 'Jaghatai knows I can't spare one of my two loyal brothers in a gambit at the port, no matter the potential gain. But he'd said what he'd said. He knows Colossi is a shitstorm, and getting worse by the hour. He'll be locked there. He'll see it's where he's most needed.'\n\n'And it's where you wanted to put him?'\n\n'It's there I wanted to put him. The Khan at Colossi, the Angel at Gorgon. But it will feel, to him, that I'm acquiescing to his desire for aggressive tactics. Faces are saved and honour is retained.'\n\n'So you handled hi"}
{"text":" of my two loyal brothers in a gambit at the port, no matter the potential gain. But he'd said what he'd said. He knows Colossi is a shitstorm, and getting worse by the hour. He'll be locked there. He'll see it's where he's most needed.'\n\n'And it's where you wanted to put him?'\n\n'It's there I wanted to put him. The Khan at Colossi, the Angel at Gorgon. But it will feel, to him, that I'm acquiescing to his desire for aggressive tactics. Faces are saved and honour is retained.'\n\n'So you handled him?'\n\n'I did. And I don't like that.' Dorn sighed. 'He's the Khan, for Throne's sake. The great Warhawk. His doctrine of combat is superlative. As a warlord, I'd rank only Roboute above him.'\n\n'And Roboute's not here.'\n\n'He's not.'\n\nValdor nodded. 'I'd agree with your assessment. Roboute, the Khan... There's really only one other.'\n\n'Don't flatter me, Constantin.'\n\nValdor smiled. 'I wasn't even including you, Rogal. You're Praetorian. The list starts with you. No, I meant, back in the day...'\n\n'Ah. Yes. Him.'\n\n'Him, indeed.'\n\n'Well, He's the damned reason we're doing any of this,' said Dorn. He paused. 'No, I don't like having to handle Jaghatai. But it's necessary. He is wilfully independent. The Angel, well, I just ask, and he does. It's a different kind of loyalty. And you-'\n\n'Me?' asked Valdor\n\n'I want you at Colossi.'\n\nValdor frowned. 'My sole duty is His protection,' he said simply. 'The Custodians are withdrawn to the Sanctum. That-'\n\n'I need your power in the field of war,' said Dorn. 'We must be allies, and I trust that we are.'\n\n'I suppose,' Valdor said, with reluctance, 'I can release a Custodian force into the field, provided the main bulk remains in the Sanctum on watch. Colossi, you say?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'To keep an eye on your brother?'\n\n'No, to fight the bastards.'\n\n'And keep an eye on him?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nValdor smiled faintly.\n\n'I'm glad of the clash, to be fair,' Dorn admitted. 'Letting the Khan have his way a little.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'This entire battle sphere is me against the Lord of Iron. Strategy, counter-strategy. Doctrine against doctrine. And we both know it. We're both reading each other, predicting... And we're good at it.'\n\n'You've been rehearsing for decades.'\n\n'I never thought it would come to a practical test. I just worry that we're both too good at it. Ploy, block, ploy, block... Stalemate. But if I can introduce a more random factor, one I haven't specifically crafted...'\n\n'Like the Great Khan, cut loose?' asked the lord of the Legio Custodes.\n\nDorn nodded. 'It might introduce a small, unscripted element,' he said.\n\n'It's what Perturabo did to us at the port of the Lion. He let Kroeger have his run, and it cost us. Perhaps I can do likewise, on a grander scale, with Jaghatai. Perhaps, in time, that might be enough to break dear Perturabo's expectations and skew his decisions.'\n\n'So,' said Valdor, 'your complex and utterly comprehensive plan of war now includes the unplannable?'\n\n'It is a strange time, Constantin.'\n\nAll the candle flames suddenly flickered. A couple went out, hoisting dribbles of blue smoke. The outer door had opened and closed without the Custodian or the Huscarl reacting.\n\nThey did now, belatedly. An odd, stilling pressure had passed through the room. There was a half-shadow near the table at Dorn's side, as though a patch of air had been smeared with grease.\n\nTsutomu and Gadwalder both realised what it was, and lowered their weapons.\n\nDorn had to concentrate for a second. Even right in front of him, she shifted so easily, like a peripheral image.\n\nJenetia Krole, Mistress of the Silent Sisterhood, saluted him.\n\n'I'm glad you could join me, mistress,' said Dorn.\n\nShe signed a response, her pale face impassive.\n\n'Yes, anywhere,' Dorn replied, reading the thoughtmark of her hands.\n\nKrole took a seat at the far end of the table. She nodded to Valdor. The deadening, flavourless nothingness of her psychic nullity permeated the room like an absence seizure. They felt the wrongness of it in the air.\n\n'I asked Mistress Krole to attend for the same reason I requested this unremarked location,' said Dorn. 'To ensure the privacy of our conversation.'\n\n'So now we can dispense with small talk and begin?' asked Valdor.\n\nAn inner door opened. Malcador the Sigillite, robed and cowled, emerged from an anteroom. He took his place at the other end of the table.\n\n'Now we can,' said Dorn.\n\nTHREE\n\n* * *\n\nKrole\n\nWhisper it Muster point\n\nI am aware I am present simply as a cloak. I am an instrument, placed at the end of the table, so that others may talk unguardedly. I am nothing, and my nothingness gives me great value.\n\nThey barely see me. They try. Even with their immortal senses, they struggle. I am a smudge. A smear. A piece of stained light in which the image of a woman occasionally appears, if you strain to look. They don't, unless they are addressing me. I am hard to look at. Harder still to bear. I am an ache in their joints, a clench in their jaws, the taste of bile in their throats.\n\nI see everything.\n\nI don't participate. I'm not here to talk. I'm just here to be. So I watch, for there is nothing else to do. I watch the flames of the candles flicker. Never the same shape twice, like snowflakes. The rising smoke-streaks of the wicks that simply died when I walked in. The whorls of the wood in the tabletop, tight lines marking years gone by. The stone walls of the old gallery. Uneven. Covered in bas-relief carving once, the emblems long scoured back to faint shapes by the process of passing touch and faster-passing time. This was a chapel once. I read so, in a book. A holy place, when things were still allowed to be holy. I wonder what was prayed for here? Health? Victory? Long life? Good crops? What were the images of? That shape there. Was that a god? A bear? A stag? An altar? It's hard to know. I make sense of some shapes, but then one may make sense of clouds, and read dragons and gods and demigods in the sky. The mind does that. It fills in blanks, and provides a semblance of meaning where meaning lacks. It is impossible to say what was really on these walls. The myths have been erased.\n\nGods, demigods and heroes still exist, though. I sit, looking at them as they converse. I wonder who will write their myths, and whether they will endure, or be erased by time and the unfaithful memory of man.\n\nThey would make good myths. I hope they get the chance. Rogal, I admire him. He is talking. He is the focus of all our trust. Everything hangs upon him, like the heaviest case of armour ever made, plate forged from the hyperdense matter of a neutron star. His armour is surprisingly plain. Grand, yes, as befits a primarch-son, more ornate than the suit worn by his man at the door. But utilitarian. Functional. It is there to protect him, not impress others. His bearing does that. The high line of his cheekbone, the stark white of his hair, the tone of his voice, like the hush-surge of an ocean.\n\nHe talks. I do not pay close attention. I am not here for my opinion. I wonder if he even expects me to listen, or assumes my blankness is as internal as it is external. He talks of defence lines and intersecting strategies. I'm not sure how he keeps the surfeit of detail so readily at the front of his mind. This is the most complex battle ever fought. He knows every line of it by rote, like a favourite poem. I review his plan daily, and understand perhaps a third of it. I could not do it, and I have noted ability in that discipline. He was born to do this, and no other could.\n\nConstantin listens, makes comments. He follows as well as I do, which is very well, but not well enough. I have known him the longest.\n\nHe was the one that first took me to kneel before the Throne, and brought me into this life. He was the one who found a purpose to fill the otherwise hollow girl. My life has been unpleasant, but it would have been more unpleasant if he had not taken me out of Albia. I will be sorry when he dies.\n\nAnd he will. He is a Custodian. That is a very specific duty. A warrior of the Legiones Astartes may die in battle, as a negative consequence of battle, but a Custodian lives to give his life. Like Tsutomu Pearlfisher Adriat Malpath Pryope Uranus Prospero Calastar there, at the door. I know him well, too; I know all the Custodians, well enough to know the entirety of the title-names engraved inside their auramite armour, even Constantin's one thousand nine hundred and thirty-two. They are not warriors, they are protectors. They live to die, to place themselves in front of the Throne and suffer any mortal stroke. Space Marines pledge to fight to the death. So do I, and all my pariah sisters. But Custodians, they pledge to fight for the life. It's not semantics. It means their deaths are inevitable rather than merely possible.\n\nConstantin's armour is magnificent. A gold finer than gold, more ornate than the Praetorian's, for it is ceremonial before it is anything else. Rogal took down all the splendour of the Palace when he fortified it. I think he would have had the Custodians cast off their raiment and wear brute ceramite, too. Ornamentation does not serve a purpose in Rogal's mind. But I think the ostentation may be forgiven if a demigod offers his life to protect yours, then you should gash him in gold to honour that sacrifice.\n\nThe Sigillite listens silently. He is the second oldest person I've ever met. In this room, he looks every one of his some six and a half thousand years, a liny thing beside the two demigods. I make him uncomfortable. My presence negates his demigod mind as easily as I might pinch out the candle flames in front of me. He is shorn of his glamour, the psykana mask of health, wisdom and purpose I am told he manifests to those few he meets in person. In this room, he is a fragile thing, bird bones gathered in a tight wrapper of thin skin, hunched inside a worn robe. His eagle-staff, his rod of office, leans against the table as if it is too heavy for him to hold.\n\nFor him to show himself like t"}
{"text":"him uncomfortable. My presence negates his demigod mind as easily as I might pinch out the candle flames in front of me. He is shorn of his glamour, the psykana mask of health, wisdom and purpose I am told he manifests to those few he meets in person. In this room, he is a fragile thing, bird bones gathered in a tight wrapper of thin skin, hunched inside a worn robe. His eagle-staff, his rod of office, leans against the table as if it is too heavy for him to hold.\n\nFor him to show himself like this, to allow himself to be seen as he really is, marks how significant this meeting is. The Regent of all Terra has come naked among us, allowing his public mask to drop.\n\nBut I don't know why. Rogal is talking, but still it consists of logistical detail. He says that the siege, at this hour, is composed of four thousand and seventeen interlocking battles. His definition of battle, he says, is any engagement with more than thirty thousand troops on each side. We've taken worlds with less. The scale is mythical. But we know that.\n\nHe says the battle sphere is fuelled by two considerations. First, his strategic contest with Perturabo. He describes it like a game, but one of infinite complexity, a game with so many rules they would need to be encoded in spirals of DNA. The winner, Rogal or Perturabo, will be the one who identifies some missing allele somewhere, some trace phenotypic mutation, some tiny loophole that the other hasn't seen. That will be how this is decided. Like a game, with Terra as the board.\n\nThe second consideration is logistics. That may be the more fatal decider. We have simply what we have: three primarchs, three Legions, the Army Excertus, the Custodians, my Sisters, the engines. Barring the arrival of others, like Roboute or Leman or Lion, we are obliged to play this game out with what is already in the Palace. And that is a vast, but finite resource. We pray they will come, of course. The Lion, the Wolf, the Master of Ultramar. If the friezes on this chamber's walls were carved today, that is the prayer this chapel would display.\n\nBut they may come too late. They may not come at all. Their deaths may already be myths we have not read. And Perturabo, Perturabo and the heretic-dog who jerks his choke-chain, they have no limits, there is no cap on how they may be resupplied or reinforced. Six, seven, maybe eight primarchs and their hosts, the war-masses of Traitor-Mars, untold armies. And then, what else? What unstemmed tides of war might flow here from xenos worlds with whom the Great Lupercal has made pacts? What rivers of Neverborn filth might break the levees of the immaterium, and flood the Himalazia Zone?\n\nRogal's point, and he makes it firmly, is that attrition is the gravest menace. We contest this with whatever we have within the walls.\n\nThey do not. We grow weaker every day. They grow stronger.\n\nI wonder if this is it. The reason for our privacy. The thing too dreadful to admit in the bastion, too crucifying for the staff to hear. It cannot be. We all know it. You would have to be stupid not to. The general staff see the data-flow every day. They may not, like me, understand it fully, as Rogal does, but they grasp the gist. We are outnumbered, and the odds in our favour decrease by the hour.\n\nNo, this could not be the revelation that Rogal fears to make elsewhere. For this, he speaks in private, excluding even his seniors?\n\nFor this, Malcador suffers the indignity of letting himself be seen unmasked? For this, I am summoned to block out the world?\n\nI am oddly disappointed. I reason Rogal was simply too concerned for general morale to articulate our plight so baldly in front of others.\n\nMy gaze goes back to the candles. I watch their light dance reflections across Constantin's gold plate. I smell the tallow, the dead smoke, the oil in the table's wood, the dust lodged in the clefts of the rafters. I smell the sweet perfume of the balms anointing Tsutomu's skin; the clean, unfragranced body odour of the Imperial Fist Cadwalder, sweat-less, like a warm, dry dog. I think of my duty, and wonder how it will end. I have been six hours on the walls today, ten yesterday, eight the day before. There are spots of blood on my gauntlets still. My fingers smell of resin. My sword has never been cleaned so often. Their blood is so black. The wind on the ramparts smells of cancer and decomposing rockcrete.\n\nI have never felt so tired.\n\nI am older than I care to admit, and older than I look, if anyone could see me. I have nothing to prove. My battle honours lack for nothing, even set alongside the records of these demigods. The Wars of Succession, Red Frost, the harnessing of Albia, the Pacific, Last Unity, Compliance 9-13, Pentacanaes, Mournful Gate, Skagan, Itria, the Witch Wars, Asmodox, Calastar in the webway. My formation of protectorate detachments allowed the Censure Host to torch Prospero.\n\nNothing to prove. I think of those times. My record is my identity, for I am lacking a visible one. Am I a myth too? Surely no one will write mine if I am. 1 have no one to tell who will listen. My proloquor is dead. I buried her myself. I have not taken another. My lamed hands will speak for me.\n\nI wonder if, when my end comes, I will register any satisfaction. Any fulfilment I will have done my duty, and I have never flinched from that. But duty is cold. It is functional, like Rogal's plate. It serves its purpose. It has never filled the hollowness in me. I was born hollow. I watch the candle flames. I think, perhaps for the first time in a lifetime spun out unnaturally long by alchemy, I think I might cherish some sense of fulfilment. Just something, in whatever are my last few seconds, that is more than mere duty. The thought that I have done something no one else could.\n\nThe candle flames flutter. Rogal has gestured for emphasis. He is speaking of the Eternity Wall. No, not the wall. The port named after it. I have drifted and lost track. I realise he is now saying, at last, what he could only say here.\n\nJenetia Krole, Vigil-Commander of the Silent Sisterhood.\n\nI listen He is re-emphasising our logistical deficiencies. He is reiterating our decreasing odds. He mentions again the four thousand and seventeen interlocking battles currently raging.\n\nHe says, of those, in the coming days, there will be four crisis points: Gorgon Bar, Colossi Gate, Eternity Wall Port, and a fourth.\n\nWhat is the fourth? I ask. My hands ask. The demigods do not notice my thoughtmark. Constantin and the Sigillite are watching Rogal speak.\n\nHe says that we will only hold three. There it is. The unutterable truth that must be blanked. We cannot hold them all. We can only hold three. We are on the brink.\n\nConstantin won't have it. He interrupts Rogal and starts to speculate about contingency. A redeployment effort to cover all four. A shift of doctrine. When Rogal counters every suggestion with cold data, Constantin asks if it is time. Time to bring Phalanx in. Time to take Him away. The last-ditch option. Get Him clear. Abandon Terra and rush the Emperor to safety.\n\nRogal looks at the Sigillite. He waits for the Sigillite to speak. It's a decision only the Regent can make.\n\nI don't know if he is going to speak at all. He hasn't so far. Before he can, I rap my knuckles on the tabletop.\n\nThe candle flames shiver. A few more go out. All three of them look down the table at me, their eyes straining as they make an effort to resolve me.\n\nWhat is the fourth? my hands ask.\n\nAnd Rogal says, 'Saturnine.'\n\n* * *\n\n'There is a weakness,' said Dorn, looking back at Valdor and Malcador. 'Infinitely small but very credible. In the wall line, near the Saturnine Gate. It hadn't been detected or factored in before.'\n\n'They've struck at nothing that far south-west,' said Valdor.\n\n'But they can, and they will,' replied Dorn. 'I would.'\n\n'Why was this missed?' asked Valdor. 'How-'\n\n'It looks like nothing,' said Dorn. 'I caught it by chance, entirely by chance, a few days ago. Something off-hand someone said to me. A tremble.'\n\n'What does that mean?'\n\n'It doesn't matter,' said Dorn. 'I've been analysing it since. It's proven. Certain.'\n\n'But if you didn't notice it until now, why would he?' Valdor asked.\n\n'Because he's Perturabo, and one of us was going to slip sooner or later. The deciding mistake. I cannot risk assuming he has not.'\n\n'A strike at Saturnine, if it worked-' Tsutomu began.\n\n'Station, Custodian!' Valdor snapped.\n\n'Let him speak if he likes, Constantin,' said Dorn. 'He's here. He heard.' He looked at Tsutomu. 'Go on.'\n\n'If it worked,' said the Prefect Custodian, 'it would cut to the heart.\n\nHe would be into the Palace Sanctum. The Palatine core.'\n\n'Decapitation strike,' said Malcador, speaking for the first time. His .voice was like a dry wheeze, like a creak of weight-stretched rope.\n\n'Decapitation strike,' said Dorn, nodding. 'Very quick and very sure.' 'Then we fortify-' Valdor began.\n\n'Of course,' said Dorn. 'Of course. But this is my point. We are stretched too thin. The crisis points, Constantin. Perturabo drives at Gorgon Bar. If he breaks us there, he takes the central line of aegis generators and splits the Sanctum open. Best case, once that happens, two weeks.'\n\n'You have Sanguinius at Gorgon.'\n\n'And more besides,' said Dorn. 'So I trust we can hold it. The Lord of Iron also focuses effort at Colossi. A breakthrough there would take him right to the Lion's Gate. The very door of the Inner Palace, Best case there, a month. We anticipated they'd get there eventually of things continue as they are, but if Colossi falls, it cuts five months off our projected hold-out lime.'\n\n'But your other brother stands there,' replied Valdor firmly. 'Jaghatai, thanks to your handling, and I will be at his side.'\n\n'So, again, I trust in our forces prevailing,' said Dorn. 'Then there's the port.'\n\n'He can't take another port,' said Malcador. 'He has one. Eternity Wall Port would more than double his capacity to land ground forces. The result would be d"}
{"text":"d get there eventually of things continue as they are, but if Colossi falls, it cuts five months off our projected hold-out lime.'\n\n'But your other brother stands there,' replied Valdor firmly. 'Jaghatai, thanks to your handling, and I will be at his side.'\n\n'So, again, I trust in our forces prevailing,' said Dorn. 'Then there's the port.'\n\n'He can't take another port,' said Malcador. 'He has one. Eternity Wall Port would more than double his capacity to land ground forces. The result would be devastation.'\n\nDorn nodded. 'The loss of a second port would escalate this siege.\n\nI estimate the advantage a second port would give him... it would shave four months off our holding threshold.'\n\n'And deprive us of an exit route,' said Valdor. 'Lose that, and we would no longer be able to choose the contingency of evacuation.'\n\nThe Sigillite sat with his head bent, one bony hand cupped in the other, as though in prayer. 'He will never leave,' he said. 'The question went unanswered. I can tell you, He will not agree to it.'\n\n'He might have to,' said Valdor. 'His safety is my duty. It's the one area in which I have final say. I won't ask. I will just do it.'\n\n'He's fighting a war of His own,' the Sigillite rasped. 'You know that, Constantin. If He leaves the Throne, we lose more than Terra.'\n\n'Four crisis points,' said Dorn. 'We can't afford to lose any of them. But we must decide which is the most affordable.'\n\n'Sacrifice one?' asked Valdor.\n\n'Give up a piece to win the game,' said Dorn. 'Sacrifice a queen to secure checkmate. It's ruthless, but sometimes it's the only option. Which do we give up?'\n\nValdor stared at the Praetorian. He bared his teeth in a half-snarl. 'You've already decided,' he said.\n\n'I have. But I'm asking.'\n\n'A rhetorical question,' said Valdor.\n\n'We give up the port,' said Dorn. 'It is a massive loss, but it is the least worst of our options.'\n\nThere was a moment of silence. The annulled air was stifling.\n\n'The port,' whispered Malcador with a frail nod.\n\nValdor sat back. He cleared his throat. The rage in his eyes was a terrible thing to see.\n\n'The port,' he conceded.\n\nDorn turned and looked down the table. 'Mistress?'\n\nThe shadow of her shivered, as if she was surprised to be consulted.\n\nThe port, she replied as a thoughtmark.\n\n'So, we draw back forces,' said Valdor. 'I suppose it's one less front to fight. We can redeploy strengths to-'\n\n'No,' said Dorn. 'That's the bitter part.'\n\n'There's a bitter part?' asked Valdor sarcastically.\n\n'I'm sorry, Constantin,' said Dorn. 'We need to defend the port. Make a decent and convincing show.'\n\n'A show?' Valdor shook his head in disgust. He looked as though he wanted to get up and leave.\n\n'He can't know we know,' said Dorn. 'If we let go of the port, Perturabo will know we know about Saturnine.'\n\n'So what?' asked Valdor with raw scorn.\n\n'To undertake Saturnine successfully,' said Dorn slowly, 'he will will send an elite force. It's a decapitation strike. He will use the very best.'\n\nHe let that thought hang.\n\n'And if you're waiting for them, you take a significant scalp?' said Valdor quietly.\n\n'Several, perhaps.' Dorn watched Valdor's face for a reaction.\n\n'I take it you intend to run that line?'\n\n'I do,' said Dorn. 'If Perturabo goes at it blind, thinking we are ignorant of the weakness, we may have a chance to accomplish something significant. Not just protect the Palace. That's paramount. But we may achieve a victory of true consequence. Strike a blow that puts a... a Saturnine in his strategy.'\n\n'Allowing us to win this?' asked the captain-general.\n\n'It could take us much closer to a win,' Dorn said.\n\n'Who would he send?' asked Malcador, his voice as small as a hedgerow rustle, 'in your estimation?'\n\n'It's a spear tip strike,' replied Dorn. 'Who would you send? Who was always the master of that kind of war?'\n\nValdor breathed out heavily. 'Oh, Terra!' he said. 'Is that why? Is that why we haven't seen him yet?'\n\n'You know him,' said Dorn. 'He wants that glory. In person. He wants to be the one that spills blood across the Throne.'\n\n'We would be condemning every soul who stands at the port to death,' said Malcador. 'Without doubt. We would send them out there knowing. And we couldn't tell them. They cannot know or this ruse of yours falls down.'\n\n'You're right,' said Dorn. 'It's not how I ever thought I'd run a war. It's a burden we would have to bear. An unforgivable guilt.'\n\nHe ran out of words, and wiped his palm across his mouth, as if trying to stuff back in words he wished he'd never uttered. He stared at nothing. Valdor's face was set expressionlessly, like a death mask. He glanced at the Sigillite.\n\nMalcador leaned forward and splayed a knotted-twig hand on the table, the fingers extending towards Dorn.\n\n'Every loyal warrior is oathed to give his life,' Malcador said to the Praetorian quietly. The weight of his words stretched the old rope of his voice lighter still. 'For Terra, for the Emperor. That's why they commit and die. Rogal, that's all they need to know. It's all they know already.'\n\n'It still sits heavy,' said Dorn. 'I am going to have to order men, to their fates, knowing-'\n\nA sharp thumping interrupted him. He looked down the table. Krole had tapped her armoured knuckles on the wood again to get his attention.\n\n'Mistress, what?'\n\nHer hands moved.\n\n'Yes,' said Dorn. 'There will be daemons there.'\n\n* * *\n\nOn the nineteenth day of the fifth month, the north-east hem of the Imperial Palace began to vanish.\n\nMagnifican, the eastern and greater half of the Palace megastructure, an immense super-city in its own right, had previously been breached, by traitor forces storming east out of the Anterior bridgehead and by rabble hosts swarming up from the south-east. No one, not even the seniors on station in Bhab, openly admitted it, but Magnifican was already regarded as lost. It was non-vi. It could no longer be protected from external attack, or held. The vast territory of its sprawling district, comprising almost two-thirds of the Palace area, was now acting as a soak, it had become a massive urban battlefield where the loyalist forces, falling back, fought delay and denial actions in hold off the invaders, slow their inexorable advance to join the main engagements in the Anterior Barbican and face the proud gates of the Sanctum Imperialis.\n\nOn the nineteenth, the nature of that collapse changed. Detonations came first, and firestorms followed.\n\nThe first projectile strike consumed a street section almost a kilometre square. Large buildings at the epicentre were simply atomised, Then, a blast wave of churning flame and concussion levelled more, block after block, shredding civic stone, granite and steel, disintegrating buildings like petals in a tempest. That missile was only the first. Its immense lire cloud, boiling with a billion sparks that seemed to hang and linger in the air, was still unfolding when the rest projectile fell, and the next, each one overlapping, explosions propagating from the first tanged point. Fire cloud blossomed beside his cloud and proud streets vanished, reduced to dust or whizzing fragments of stone. Incendiary payloads of sticky napthek and aero-solised pyrosene spewed outwards, engulfing neighbouring blocks, where buildings had survived the initial impacts. Their windows punched in like gouged eyes, they lit and were enveloped, whole boroughs and districts swept up in seas of fire thirty storeys high. A canopy of black smoke covered forty square kilometres. Ash and petrochemical waste fell twenty more beyond that. Outrush wind carried soot further still.\n\nThree of the Lord of Iron's siege-breaker chiefs, warlords of the Stor-Bezashk schooled in breach-craft by Perturabo himself, had broken the walls at Boenition earlier in the day, a calamity that passed almost unnoticed because of the intense fighting in the Central and Anterior reaches. Hundreds of thousands of invaders swarmed across the mangled rubble. Labour gangs and Martian engines began to clear pathways, and slave armies hauled in the first of the massive petra-ries and mass bombards. These were the monstrous siege engines that had been employed to crack the wall and collapse the voids, but their work was not done.\n\nBy mid-afternoon - an entirely arbitrary division of time, as the skies were as black as night at every hour - the vast engines were repositioned inside the wall line, and had begun firing. Gastraphetes, gravitic ballistas and manuballistas whipped like cyclopean crossbows, launching colossal ceramite arrows or wall-felling blocks; torsion engines and graviton onagers fired low trajectory payloads; counterweight trebuchets, accelerator mangonels and manjaniqs slung high trajectory missiles. Some hurled inert, high-density loads of ouslite or tungsten that filthy abhuman teams had to wrestle onto the sling mesh. These wrought catastrophic damage by sheer kinetic force. Many of the payloads were slabs of broken masonry from the fallen wall or the ruins of Boenition District. The traitors were recycling the city, hurling shattered pieces of the Palace back against it to break it further. Other engines flung chemical or high explosive projectiles like pyrosene mines or drums of gas\/fyceline intermix that exploded, spreading greedy fires that could not be doused.\n\nBy nightfall, which passed invisibly for it was already perpetual night and had been for weeks, the petrary units ranged inside the shattered line of Boenition had reduced the north-eastern rim of Magnifican to pulverised rubble and firestorms as large as cities.\n\nThey were not conquering. They were razing.\n\nEach impact, and they were unceasing, jarred the earth, even from many kilometres away. Shards of glass and plex rained from pressure blown windows in untouched streets. Soot swam like fog. Roofs shivered, split free and fell in avalanches. Terminal cracks rent buildings from foundation to eaves.\n\n'Keep moving,' Camba Diaz instructed.\n\nThe streets they trod were largely empty, an od"}
{"text":"f Magnifican to pulverised rubble and firestorms as large as cities.\n\nThey were not conquering. They were razing.\n\nEach impact, and they were unceasing, jarred the earth, even from many kilometres away. Shards of glass and plex rained from pressure blown windows in untouched streets. Soot swam like fog. Roofs shivered, split free and fell in avalanches. Terminal cracks rent buildings from foundation to eaves.\n\n'Keep moving,' Camba Diaz instructed.\n\nThe streets they trod were largely empty, an oddly tranquil hinterland, like the eye of a monster storm. To the west of them, the immense roar of the Anterior warzones. To the east, the volcanic pandemonium of the razing.\n\nPeople had fled, combatants and citizens alike. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) presumed they had fled west, hoping to find some kind of sanctuary in the Sanctum Palatine. Buildings stood empty, vehicles abandoned. The sky was an acid yellow smog, and white ash fell like snow, coating every surface.\n\nThe hulking Space Marine led them onwards, saying little. His instructions were simply: 'Stay grouped. Fire only on my orders. Retain formations at all times, no matter what.' They were moving north, that was Willem's guess. From time to time, they crossed the path of recent battles: buildings punctured with shell holes, or entirely collapsed; bodies; litters of hard-round casings brass-bright on the ash-snow. A bridge destroyed, except for its central span, still miraculously suspended. The gorge of a deep underpass canyon choked with rubble like a collapsed mine. Messages on walls or doors, frantic efforts to inform families and neighbours where the occupants had gone. On Caesium Rise, four Imperial tanks, squashed flat as if something vast had crushed them underfoot, and a fifth, burned out and embedded in the wall of a manufactory, six floors up, its broken tracks hanging like intestines.\n\nAt Traxis Arch, they found another band of stragglers from the 14th Line, forty ash-caked troopers led by two more Imperial Fists. The Imperial Fists greeted Diaz with respect, and from that, Willem decided Camba Diaz was more than just a squad warrior. He heard them call him lord.\n\n'Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),' said Willem. 'Where are you from?'\n\n'Lex Thornal (Seventy-Seventh Europa Max),' replied one of the men. 'We were on Line Fourteen at Manes Place, but the engines came.'\n\n'Noise there!' Diaz called out. 'Keep moving.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe hydrogalvanic plants at Marinus Spire had been crippled by something. Reservoir cisterns had ruptured, and trillions of tonnes of water were flowing through the streets and plazas, fast-flowing and a metre and a half deep. The water was turgid, frothy and grey. It carried debris and bodies with it, a flotsam of bloated corpses, some trailing tatters of armour. The soldiers waded and clambered across islands of rubble and scree. There was a large rockcrete embankment running to their right, but Diaz refused to let them use it as a pathway as it, in his words, 'brought them up against the sky as targets'. They waded on, freezing, poling bodies out of their path with the butts of their weapons. Slicks of oil gleamed iridescent on the scummed surface of the flow. Ash fell like soft snow. To the east, beyond the rockcrete embankment, the sky was flooded with twisting amber light from the firestorms. They could feel the heat, but the water was freezing, and the ash snow fell unmelted. Jen Koder (22nd Kantium Hort), who had still been unable to remove her buckled helmet, sat down on the top of one of the rubble islands, and refused to go on. Willem knew her injury wasn't survivable.\n\n'We have to leave her,' Diaz said.\n\nWillem didn't know what to say.\n\n'I can prevent her suffering further,' said Diaz.\n\n'No, lord,' said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). 'I will do it.'\n\n'No noise,' said Diaz after a moment's consideration. 'A blade.'\n\nWillem watched Joseph slosh his way back to the mound of rubble. The rest of the party was already moving on. The inferno in the fast cast dancing, orange reflections across the floodwaters.\n\nJoseph reached her. She was blind. She jerked her head at the sound of him.\n\n'Who's there?'\n\n'Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army).'\n\n'Leave me,' she said.\n\n'I don't want you to suffer,' he said.\n\n'Mercy shot?' she asked.\n\n'It's not permitted. I'm sorry.'\n\n'I don't want a knife,' she said. 'There's no mercy in that. Or were you going throttle me, Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army)?'\n\n'I honestly do not know what I was going to do,' he replied.\n\nThe oddest smile crossed her blood-caked face. 'You're very kind,' she said. 'This can't get worse for me, but I won't have it be worse for you. Go your way.'\n\nShe allowed him what she was clutching in her hand.\n\n'I want it to be quick,' she said. 'It hasn't been quick up till now. Go on your way. I'll count to a hundred.'\n\nHe could not say goodbye to her. It seemed worthless. He splashed and scrambled back to join the others. A few minutes later, as they clambered up a steep incline of debris, they heard the sharp thump of the grenade behind them. The sound of it slapped off nearby walls and rebounded along the wet pit of the street.\n\nDiaz looked at Joseph.\n\n'That was stupid,' he said.\n\n'I'm only human, lord,' Joseph replied.\n\nDiaz stared at him. It was impossible to tell what expression lay behind his glaring visor, but Joseph guessed it was a look that said 'that's the same thing.'\n\nIt was stupid. Less than two streets on, drawn by the sound, the reavers found them. A Traitor Army unit in rags and furs, with skulls war-painted on their faces. They opened fire from cover along a raised colonnade. The waste-water began to splash and spray as las-bolts and hard rounds chopped into it. Two troopers were cut down, falling in clumsy splashes, then a third as he tried to run. Diaz gave the order to shoot. With no cover except the floodwater and a few atolls of rubble, the stragglers began to return fire, their lasguns blazing in sup port of the bolters wielded by the three Imperial Fists. The facade of the colonnade became ragged, chipped and scorched. Bodies twisted in the archways, slumped, slid or toppled forward into the water. The enemy fire eased. Joseph thought they had been discouraged, but they were preparing to charge. Feral figures leapt out of the archways, jumping into the water, yelling as they tried to run into the tide.\n\n'Hold ground. Selective shots. Fire,' Diaz ordered.\n\nFreezing and soaked, they picked the traitors off as they lumbered through the water to get at them. Each kill-shot cut short another war cry. Joseph couldn't bear to hear the phrase. He shot at faces and mouths to shut them up.\n\nThe Emperor must d-\n\nAt his side, Willem was murmuring, 'It's not your fault. This is not your fault.'\n\nIt was, and it wasn't. Hell had no rules. Whatever you did, or didn't do, it came back to bite you.\n\nSome of the traitor reavers were abhuman giants. It took two or three shots to bring them down. Then a true giant emerged.\n\nIt came through the colonnade at a run, as though it had been drawn to the gunfire and death. Its running leap took it through an archway and six or seven metres clear before it hit the water. It was still running, somehow unencumbered by the flood that was slowing the other reavers down. It kicked up sheets of spray. It was a Space marine: a Traitor Space Marine. One of the berserkers they had seen destroy Captain Tantane and his group in the first hours of retreat.\n\nBone-white armour badged in terrible signs, human pelts tied around it, a ragged cloak of scorched chainmail. A chainaxe, screaming.\n\nWorld Eater.\n\nTheir firing line, ragged to begin with, broke, and began to scatter, despite Camba Diaz's previous instructions. Just the sight of the thing had unmanned them, that and the hideous, wordless howls it was shrieking. It rushed them like a charging simian, faster than anything had any right to be in the world.\n\nBut Diaz was fast too. He stopped being the grim, taciturn sculpture that had been gliding along with them, measured and ponderous.\n\nHe moved like a blur.\n\nHe got between them and the charging World Eater. He met it with shield raised, and longsword swinging from its scabbard. The impact was like runaway trains hitting head-on. Water sprayed. Waves crashed far in all directions. Sparks fizzled blue and electric as the chainaxe's teeth hit the rising shield. The collision knocked Diaz backwards. Joseph thought, surely they should be evenly matched? Legionary against legionary. Transhuman strength against transhuman strength.\n\nBut the beast in white seemed far stronger. Bigger, too. Its scything axe caught Diaz's shield, and spun him off his feet. The beast bellowed, and chopped down at the floundering Imperial Fist. That impact made a ghastly, snapping sound. Sparks and chips of yellow ceramite flew up.\n\nThe side of the monster's head blew out. One of the other Imperial Fists had closed in, and brought his bolter to bear. The World Eater swayed, its head partly removed, blood and bone and teeth visible through the cracked ceramite. It reeled, and lashed out. The back-spike of its axe caught the Imperial Fist who had shot it across the faceplate, and wrenched him sideways into the water. The third Imperial Fist was aiming his boltgun, but the axe smashed it out of his hands. The third Imperial Fist tried to stagger back out of strike radius. The World Eater roared, blood squirting and drooling from its ravaged head, and swung hard.\n\nCamba Diaz came up out of the water in a wave of spray, and ran his power sword through it from behind. The searing longsword blade impaled it through the torso. Still, it refused to die. Diaz kept the blade in place, and held the beast fast, preventing it moving closer to the third Imperial Fist.\n\nThe third Imperial Fist wrenched out a compact-pattern bolt pistol mag-locked to the back "}
{"text":"f strike radius. The World Eater roared, blood squirting and drooling from its ravaged head, and swung hard.\n\nCamba Diaz came up out of the water in a wave of spray, and ran his power sword through it from behind. The searing longsword blade impaled it through the torso. Still, it refused to die. Diaz kept the blade in place, and held the beast fast, preventing it moving closer to the third Imperial Fist.\n\nThe third Imperial Fist wrenched out a compact-pattern bolt pistol mag-locked to the back of his waistplate. A hold-out piece. He emptied the sidearm point-blank into the chest and face of the monster Diaz had pinned in front of him.\n\nThe rapid shots made a huge, echoing report. The impaled World Eater bucked and shook as the explosive rounds shredded its chest, shoulders and sternum, shattering plate armour and chewing it apart Flecks of blood flew six or seven metres.\n\nIt went limp, cored out and mangled from the belly up. Diaz eased his grip, and let the hulking ruin slide down into the bubbling water. He pulled his blade out.\n\nThe third Imperial Fist reloaded his pistol, clamped it back on his plate, and recovered his primary weapon. The second Imperial Fist regained his feet, a huge, bare-metal gouge across the cheek and bridge of his visor.\n\nDiaz turned to the Army stragglers.\n\n'Stay in formation when I tell you to,' he said.\n\n* * *\n\nCrossing wide, open yards that were flecked with rubble, they got a proper view of the firestorms to the north-east. None of them had ever seen so much fire before, a wall of it thirty kilometres long and higher than a rampart. The heat, even at that distance, felt unbearable. Boenition District was gone. Through their scopes, they saw survivors fleeing the edge of the inferno into the cratered wasteland of Damascus Park. 'Survivors' was the wrong word. They were limping, blackened figures, trailing smoke, some still on fire, unable to claw the burning napthek from their flesh and clothing. They walked out of the torrent of flames as if to escape, and then fell. The edge of the park was littered with smouldering bodies.\n\nWhite ash and oily rain fell, like a blizzard and a tropical storm at once. Ahead, through the miasmal drifts of brown and yellow smoke, they saw a huge structure with outer barbicans and defensive lines. Willem wondered if it was Angevin Bastion, though he had presumed that the constant roar of casemate weapons coming from the west was Angevin.\n\nThey couldn't see the true size or shape of the structure they were approaching. Smoke filled the air, the whole sky, and obscured everything except the lower ground works and fore-batteries of the enceinte. Whatever the place was, it was of stupendous size. It promised safety and cover at last.\n\nThey approached the outworks along a trackway, an old transit route, passing scarred or abandoned habitations. Missiles began to fall behind them, two or three kilometres east, huge lumps of stone hurled by petrary engines that fell soundlessly, and struck with shivering force, each impact a numbing boom of incredible volume, a fireless explosion, a column of dirt and debris. At Diaz's order, they began to double time.\n\nThe outer defenders were waiting for them: ragged loyalist Army, Solar Auxilia, citizen militia. Their emplacements looked sound, some well-made, some makeshift. Support weapons in dug-out firing pits, ditches, ceramite revetments; bundled loops of stake-pinned razor wire and scattered spike-blocks to maim approaching armour.\n\nThey crossed the iron boards of a temporary bridge thrown out across a deep heat-sink channel that had been fortified into a defence ditch. Armed troops came out to meet them. A few of the soldiers in the straggler group began to weep in relief.\n\nWillem saw a Space Marine emerge from the paling line. His armour was white, but it glowed like pearl. His markings were red. His head was bare, scalp shaved, bearded. The White Scar came up to Diaz, saluted, and then embraced his brother. They spoke, but they were too far ahead for Willem to hear what they were saying.\n\n'From here, we can fight,' Joseph said to Willem. Willem nodded.\n\n'A stronghold,' said Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar). He wiped tears from his cheeks, embarrassed. 'Safety, thank the Throne.'\n\nJoseph smiled at one of the Solar Auxilia troopers escorting them in.\n\n'Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army),' he said.\n\nThe man eyed him, and shrugged.\n\n'Al-Nid Nazira, Auxilia,' he replied.\n\n'What is this place, my friend?' asked Joseph.\n\n'Eternity Wall Port,' the man replied.\n\nFOUR\n\n* * *\n\nConviction\n\nThe thunder of hooves\n\nHate everything, win anyway (objective tactical clarity)\n\nThe warden of the watch, a Solar Auxilia veteran called Vaskale, checked their warrants carefully. He ran them through the optical reader twice, frowning. He hadn't seen documents like them before, but the seal of the Praetorian was authentic.\n\n'Kyril Sindermann, Hari Harr,' he muttered, handing them back. 'What's this concerning?'\n\n'We are commissioned to gather reports,' Hari replied. 'To document in the fashion of-'\n\nSindermann stopped him, a hand on the boy's sleeve, a cautioning smile.\n\n'Warden,' he said to Vaskale, 'our warrants are intended to remove the necessity of repeated explanation. Our work is urgent, and time is finite.' The air shivered. Distant thunder rolled. A bombardment of macro cannon shells was falling like sleet across the aegis twenty kilometres away. Sindermann tilted his head at the sound. 'Finite,' he repeated.\n\nVaskale nodded, huffed. He took up his crutches, and led them through the inner hatch, each step a twin thump of the sticks planting together and a sliding slap of one boot. The effort made him grunt and wince.\n\nThe Blackstone was a large and hulking annex in the skirts of the Hegemon complex, built as robustly as any of Dorn's fortifications, but inside out. It was designed to keep things in. Its sulking travertine walls, thirty metres thick, were laced with buttresses of Cadian-mined noctilith, and every portal was a series of blast hatches and portcullis grates. It served the Imperial Palace as its primary penitentiary. Other prisons existed, for civil crimes, out in Magnifican, though fate alone knew what had become of them and their inmates. Only the sub-level known as the Dungeon, beneath the Palatine Central, was a more secure place of imprisonment. According to Vaskale, much of that had been cleared. He didn't know why. Traitors, political subversives and other recidivists had been transported to the Blackstone for incarceration.\n\n'Throne knows what that's about,' Vaskale mumbled as he limped along. He was short of breath from the effort. 'We should shoot them all. Have done.'\n\n'Shoot them?' Hari asked.\n\nVaskale shrugged, turning to them as he waited for one of his men to unlock the next series of hatches. 'Liquidate them. What? Time's not the only finite quantity, gentlemen. Space is, too. Resources. We're keeping these devils warm and fed, safe from harm. You've seen what it's like outside. Good people starving, begging for shelter.'\n\nSindermann nodded. They had. As they'd hurried through the streets around the Hegemon, they'd passed through throngs of the displaced and injured, past petitioners, past soup kitchens and welfare centres. The Sanctum Imperials was flooded with refugees seeking safety, and Sindermann knew it was but a fraction of the pitiful host trying to gain access from the Palace zones outside.\n\n'So you'd see these prisoners executed?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'They have more space and better provision than any bastard out there,' Vaskale replied. He glanced at the guard. 'Hurry up, Gelling! You know the codes!'\n\nVaskale looked back at Sindermann and his young companion, searching their faces for some sign of understanding.\n\n'The Blackstone's a big place,' he said. 'We could take overspill.\n\nAccommodate thousands. Temporary of course, but better than-'\n\n'Out there?' asked Sindermann.\n\nVaskale nodded. 'We have set food and water rations every day for the inmates. That's a waste, isn't it? They're not on our side, or they wouldn't be in here. Why feed and house them, when we can't feed and house our own?'\n\n'I think the answer to that lies somewhere in the field of ethics,' ventured Sindermann. 'In trying to maintain some kind of decent, human society.'\n\n'Really? Does it?' Vaskale replied. He chewed that over. 'You, you're making reports, are you? Enquiring? My name going to be mentioned?'\n\n'No, sir,' said Sindermann.\n\n'I'm nut ashamed of my opinion,' said Vaskale.\n\n'And you're entitled to it.'\n\n'No. I see that look. Snooty, superior, liberal-intellectual... I'm not suggesting some...... eugenic cull, I'm-'\n\n'I never said you were,' said Sindermann. 'You're desperate. We all are.\n\nWe're caught in the greatest siege history has ever known, and everything we have is dwindling and running out. You are obligated to keep and feed criminals and threats to our sovereignty, while good people go without. So you voice a pragmatic idea.'\n\n'Pragmatic,' Vaskale nodded.\n\n'Brutal, but pragmatic,' said Sindermann. 'I fear you're right. It may come to that. I also fear that, if it does, then we cross a line and become no better than the things trying to break these walls in.'\n\nVaskale scowled. The guard had opened the hatches. He waved them on, down a long, dank hallway that was utterly without decoration or hope.\n\n'Where were you injured?' asked Hari as they walked.\n\n'Me?' asked Vaskale, glancing back. 'Dawn Gate, about three weeks past. Got unlucky. Lost my leg, mashed my hip. Can't fight on the line, but I'm sound enough to be turnkey here.'\n\n'Where's the previous warden?' asked Hari.\n\n'On the line with a gun in his hand,' Vaskale answered, chuckling darkly. 'We all of us do what we can, don't we?'\n\n'We do,' said Sindermann.\n\nAnother guard opened another hatch, and the warden brought them into a broad stone chamber, a congressional for communal dining. Guard posts overlooked the "}
{"text":"ncing back. 'Dawn Gate, about three weeks past. Got unlucky. Lost my leg, mashed my hip. Can't fight on the line, but I'm sound enough to be turnkey here.'\n\n'Where's the previous warden?' asked Hari.\n\n'On the line with a gun in his hand,' Vaskale answered, chuckling darkly. 'We all of us do what we can, don't we?'\n\n'We do,' said Sindermann.\n\nAnother guard opened another hatch, and the warden brought them into a broad stone chamber, a congressional for communal dining. Guard posts overlooked the bench tables.\n\nVaskale had voxed ahead to have the prisoner brought up from the cells.\n\nThe warden looked at them.\n\n'I apologise if my comment offended you,' he said.\n\nSindermann shook his head. This is what we are now, sir,' he replied. 'We serve the Emperor the best we can. Fight, if that's what we can do. If we can't fight, or if we're wounded, we serve however else we can, but still the best we can. Each wound is pain. Each wound shrinks the Palace a little more. But we serve. What you suggested... Sir, I hope it doesn't become a necessity. You're not the only one seeing the worst, and understanding what that may force us to do.'\n\nVaskale half-nodded. 'Inform the guards when you're ready to leave,' he said, and limped away, his metal crutches clacking.\n\n'You've met the warden, I see,' said Euphrati Keeler. They sat down facing her across one of the scabby old dining trestles. Hari took out his scuffed dataslate and set it down in front of him.\n\n'The warden's just a little closer to despair than we are,' said Sindermann.\n\nKeeler shrugged. 'Speak for yourself.'\n\nHer hair was loose, unwashed and lank. Her skin was unhealthily pale. She'd been given army surplus breeches, a baggy linen smock and woollen mittens.\n\n'It's good to see you again, Euphrati,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Who's this?' she asked.\n\n'This is Hari,' said Sindermann. 'He's with me.'\n\nKeeler looked at the young man. 'Run, Hari,' she said. 'Being with Kyril never ends well. Not his fault, but true.'\n\n'I'm fine, mam,' said Hari.\n\n'What's this about?' Keeler asked Sindermann. 'Do you bear a pardon with my name on it? No, I doubt that. I hold views that are considered dangerous. They're beliefs I won't renounce. But you, you walk free. Did you renounce yours?'\n\n'No,' said Sindermann. 'However, the Sigillite's terms were clear. Freedom of movement and no prosecution for any theist, provided they do not practise or promulgate the cult.'\n\n'Cult?' she echoed sadly.\n\n'His term,' said Sindermann. 'In truth, I've set aside my faith for now. It was growing shaky, anyway. You were always more of a figure-head than me.'\n\n'Kyril, you were the voice of-'\n\n'I have set aside one truth for another. The original Truth. The Imperial Truth. The light is growing dim, Euphrati. Even in the short time since we last met. Hell rises up around us-'\n\n'And the Emperor protects,' she said.\n\n'He does,' said Sindermann. 'And He may purge the theist movement at any time. I value my freedom... Which is ironic, given we are all trapped here. But I've set aside sacred ministry for now, in pursuit of secular work.'\n\nSindermann showed her his warrant. She studied it carefully.\n\n'I have another for you,' he said.\n\n'Really? Kyril? Really? This? Remembrance?'\n\n'I was close to giving up,' said Sindermann calmly. 'Giving up everything. My faith gone. My faith in everything, including the rationale of our Imperium. Someone reminded me that we're not just battling for our lives. We're battling for our way of living.'\n\n'I don't want a bloody iteration, Sindermann-'\n\nSindermann held up his hand gently.\n\n'I know, Euphrati. What we were building together, whether we believe it to be sacred or secular, has begun to fall. It's our duty to fight for it. Every part of it. We're not legionaries, we're not even soldiers. There are other things to fight for, and other ways of fighting.'\n\nThere's only one thing to fight for,' she said.\n\n'And that is?'\n\nThe Emperor, Kyril.'\n\n'And what is the Emperor?'\n\nShe smiled. 'People get uncomfortable when I answer that question, Kyril.'\n\n'Why?' asked Hari. 'What do you tell them?'\n\nKeeler beamed at the young man. Throne, Kyril! Did you not brief this poor child? Doesn't he know what kind of poison I spread?'\n\n'I think he's teasing you,' said Sindermann. He glanced at Hari.\n\n'Are you teasing?'\n\n'Little bit, sir,' said Hari.\n\nKeeler laughed. 'Oh, I like you! My apologies, Kyril. I should have known you'd choose bright, clever people. He looks so innocent. How old is he?'\n\n'Old enough,' said Hari.\n\n'Oh, now you've spoiled it, Hari,' Keeler said, tutting. Trying to sound like a big, tough man.' Sindermann's companion didn't respond. Keeler stared at him, and frowned. 'What are you writing?\n\nWhat is he writing, Kyril?'\n\n'I suggested to Hari he could make notes...' Sindermann began.\n\nKeeler snatched the dataslate from the young man. Hari glanced at Sindermann, stylus in hand.\n\n'Notes,' said Keeler. She sat back, scrolling, reading. 'I'm surprised they let you bring this inside.'\n\n'The warden vetted our possessions,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Yes, Kyril,' she replied, still reading, flicking through panes with her index finger. 'But a writing instrument? When I am so full of words? Isn't a slate considered a weapon these days?'\n\nShe paused, studying the text.\n\n'Euprati Keeler. Imagist. Ex-remembrancer,' she read aloud. 'Promulgator of the so-called Lectitio Divinitatus bracket theist bracket.\n\nRemoved to Blackstone facility, Thirteenth Quintus. Pale. Hair untied, appears unwashed...'\n\nShe looked at Hari.\n\n'They won't give me a tie, Hari. Or much water.' She looked at the slate, reading again. 'Appears healthy. U\/R.' She looked back at the young man, quizzical.\n\n'Uh. abbreviation, mam. Unremarkable.'\n\nShe sniffed, considering this. 'Unremarkable. Why, what did you expect?'\n\n'It's just an abbreviation,' Hari replied. 'I make a lot of notes. report any distinctive features-'\n\n'You're right,' said Keeler. 'I'm not remarkable. Just a person with ordinary features and dirty clothes' She held the slate so she could look at it, fidgeting with her mitten as if it was in danger of sliding off her hand. The only remarkable thing about me, Hari, the reason I'm in here, is the idea in my head. Apart from a little offhand mention, there's nothing about that. The way I look doesn't matter. The way I think does. There should be page after page about it. Hasn't Kyril talked to you about it?'\n\n'No, mam,' said Hari. 'He hasn't spoken to me about theist ideology. Not to me, or any of the group.'\n\nKeeler looked at Sindermann. 'I'm disappointed, Kyril,' she said.\n\n'Really?' Sindermann replied. 'You thought I'd carry on without you? Publicly renounce, and secretly continue?'\n\n'You could have done that,' she said.\n\n'So could you,' Sindermann replied. 'Defying the edict of the Sigillite is sedition, Euphrati. And an issue of sedition inside this city is a problem we don't need when we already have enough of them. Does that make me a coward? You could be outside, preaching in secret, but something, I don't know... Pride? Something made you stand by your beliefs. And here you are, making a point where no one can hear you. So let's not go there. We both made a decision. We have both stood by them.'\n\n'They watch me,' Keeler said quietly. She put the slate down, and slid it back across the table to Hari. 'They watch me closer than anyone. There's nothing I could have done outside. All I could do was keep my faith.'\n\n'And I could not,' said Sindermann. 'Not the way you needed me to.'\n\n'But it wasn't faith, Kyril,' she said. 'You had proof. The evidence of your senses. You no longer had to rely on faith. You'd seen it, so many times, Kyril! But at the port especially, with me, you witnessed-'\n\n'Witnessing it is what broke me, Euphrati,' said Sindermann. She looked astonished. 'Faith has a very special quality,' he said. 'When presented with proof, the mind does other things. I was elated, for a day, maybe two. But evidence erodes the patience that faith supplies. I began to think, \"if He is divine, and I have seen proof of that, why does He not act? Why doesn't He end this? Because surely He can! Why does He let us suffer?\"'\n\nSindermann hunched forward, eyes down, rubbing his finger around some knot-mark on the table's top. 'My faith could not survive the proof,' he said. 'I could not bear the idea He was allowing this.'\n\nHe looked up at her.\n\n'I'm sorry,' he said. 'An existential threat is about to overwhelm us. I found something else I could do, something practical. Everyone needs to work together, contribute in whatever way they can. We need a unity of intent-'\n\n'The Emperor is unity,' said Keeler.\n\n'Don't preach to me.'\n\n'I'm not. It's just truth.'\n\n'Your truth,' said Sindermann, 'and it's a beautiful one, I still believe that, but your truth won't win this war. So I came to ask you to consider-'\n\n'It will,' said Keeler. 'It might be the only thing that can.'\n\n'Are you going to listen?' asked Sindermann. 'I think I'll let Hari lay it out for you-'\n\n'I don't need either of you to explain it,' said Keeler. 'It's the same argument as when we set out to join the fleets. War is a necessity, but our culture is more than that. It has to be.'\n\n'Rule of law. Freedom. Ethical values...' Sindermann nodded.\n\n'Responsibly documented history,' she went on. 'Progress, not stagnation. Advancement beyond simple obligations of conquest. A human society that does more than exterminate external threats. Because that, to answer your question, is what the Emperor is - the embodiment of a great scheme. His scheme, dreamed in the first ages. Mankind as a great, sentient power. Civilisation. A purpose.Why destroy threats if those threats threaten nothing but our lives? Why are our lives of any value? Because we are more than destroyers. We are not an army. We are a culture.'\n\n'That happens to have an army,' said Hari.\n\n'I'm growing to like him again,' she said.\n\n'I've been asked to re-form a small order of remembrancers,' said Sindermann. 'It "}
{"text":"t the Emperor is - the embodiment of a great scheme. His scheme, dreamed in the first ages. Mankind as a great, sentient power. Civilisation. A purpose.Why destroy threats if those threats threaten nothing but our lives? Why are our lives of any value? Because we are more than destroyers. We are not an army. We are a culture.'\n\n'That happens to have an army,' said Hari.\n\n'I'm growing to like him again,' she said.\n\n'I've been asked to re-form a small order of remembrancers,' said Sindermann. 'It seems like a luxury at this hour, perhaps, but it's not. It represents the things we are fighting for. The essence of us.'\n\n'The ethical framework that justifies us,' said Keeler. 'Like the decent treatment of prisoners. Yes, I've had long chats with the warden. He makes a good point.'\n\n'Sadly, he does,' said Sindermann, 'which makes it essential we fight to cling on to the things that separate us from animals - knowledge, ideas, a moral code-'\n\n'Is history really high on that list?' she asked.\n\n'If we survive this, do you want to repeat it?' Sindermann asked.\n\nShe sighed. 'Who charged you with this noble calling, then, Kyril?' she asked.\n\n'Dorn,' he said.\n\nKeeler nodded, grudgingly impressed.\n\n'The mighty warlord is full of surprises,' she said. 'He really wants this?'\n\n'He wants it done. It matters to him. But he has his hands full. He charged me to assemble a modest body of remembrancers. Whatever else you are, whatever else you may have become, you are a veteran of that service, so I thought of you at once.'\n\nKeeler picked up the warrant again.\n\n'Nowhere on this does it say \"remembrancer\",' she remarked.\n\n'But you guessed my purpose straight away.'\n\n'Because you never change.' She looked at the warrant. This symbol, the \"I\" icon...'\n\nFor \"Interrogation\". We have a warrant to interrogate and record. The word \"remembrancer\" has unfortunate connotations for many.\n\nWe will interrogate any who have the time to speak.'\n\n'And publish where? When?' she asked.\n\nSindermann shrugged. 'Maybe nowhere, maybe never.'\n\n'Because we're all going to die?' she asked.\n\n'That, or the things we record are too sensitive,' Sindermann replied. 'Too hazardous for civilian consumption. Dorn has the final say. For now we compile. Collect and compile. The material we gather may be published when this is done, or sequestered for official record.'\n\n'Or burn with us?'\n\n'The other possibility,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Keeler sat back, toying with the warrant. She looked at her old friend.\n\n'I would imagine the things I might wish to record are just the kind of things our Imperium would restrict.'\n\n'I imagine so, Euphrati. But that's no reason not to record them.\n\nI'd like your help.'\n\n'I'd like to do more than just sit here,' she admitted.\n\n'Unfortunately...'\n\nThe three of them looked around. The Custodian had appeared from the shadows. His gold armour seemed to glow like dying ambers in the prison gloom.\n\n'Unfortunately?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'The Praetorian's seal conveys great authority,' said Amon Tauromachian. 'But in matters of ideological conviction, the word of the Sigillite carries more. My orders are plain. Keeler is not permitted to go beyond the bounds of this vault, because she refuses to relinquish the observance of her faith. She cannot leave. So, she cannot be part of your work.'\n\nSindermann sat back sadly. 'I feared that might be the case.'\n\n'I'm sorry, sir,' said Amon. 'Unlike you, the Lady Keeler will not set aside her ministry. She has been open about that.'\n\n'I believe the Emperor is a god,' Keeler hissed across the table at Hari in mock conspiracy.\n\n'I know,' said Hari.\n\n'An actual god.'\n\n'I know, mam.'\n\n'And that's not a popular concept,' she hissed, 'especially with the Emperor.'\n\n'Please stop that,' said Amon.\n\n'It's as if He doesn't want people to know, or something,' Keeler said. She looked at the Custodian. 'So I can't leave, Amon?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'How many inmates are there, Custodian? In Blackstone?'\n\n'Nine thousand, eight hundred and ninety-six.'\n\n'They all have stories too,' she said. She picked up the warrant and looked at Sindermann. 'I'll do it, Kyril,' she said, 'but I'll have to work from my place of residence.'\n\n'What did you make of her?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'Not unremarkable,' Hari replied. The visitors' gate of the Blackstone had closed behind them. They walked across the access bridge, past dormant anti-air batteries swaddled under tarpaulins, to join the busy foot traffic of the main thoroughfare. The stone mountain of the Hegemon rose before them, cased in shield-plate and strung with weapon emplacements that clung like ivy to every platform and ledge. Above them, the sky was a pulsing violet, threaded with black. Sindermann could almost see the rippling distortion of the aegis. To the east and north-east, the sky shimmered with saffron light Abrupt white flashes, brief flourishes of bright sparks, spoke of titanic struggles dwarfed by the distance.\n\n'She was slightly terrifying,' Hari admitted.\n\n'Terrifying?'\n\n'Not the right word,' said the young man. 'A ferocity. Self-possession. As though she has seen things she can't adequately relate, or knows things she can't properly articulate.'\n\n'You didn't find her articulate?'\n\n'Yes. There's conviction there.' Hari paused. 'But the notion that the Emperor is divine... That's just a comfort, isn't it? A production of the eschatological mindset.'\n\n'Because our world is ending, she clings to whatever seems to offer hope?'\n\n'It's a common syndrome,' said Hari. 'Like a... a deathbed conversion. In a lime of powerlessness, we look for meaning and a source of strength. The Emperor is that, above and beyond us, so much more than human. It becomes easy to believe He is an actual god, especially as we face what other ages would have deemed to be daemons. The entities of the warp are explained in supernatural terms, because we have no sufficient language to describe their nature. If a supernatural darkness exists, then a supernatural light must exist also, because humans respond to symmetry. The Emperor manifests in god-like ways, ergo He must be a god. It's a comfort. The resort of the desperate. We seek to believe that some higher power will save us. The Emperor fits that bill easily, despite any evidence or proof.\n\nBecause we want to be saved.'\n\n'So it's a mental issue?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Clinically, I suspect so,' Hari replied. 'And entirely understandable.\n\nSuperstition is rife these days. Lucky boots, lucky guns, lucky caps.\n\nWe seek signifiers to reassure us.'\n\n'You don't think the Emperor will save us, Hari?'\n\n'I hope He will,' said Hari. 'I think He will. But not because He's a god.'\n\nThey walked on, across Hegemon South Plaza, through the crowds A cloister hell was ringing clear, slow, dull notes above the murmur of the throng. It had started to rain, the acidic back-fall of second hand atmosphere.\n\n'Have I offended you?' Hari asked.\n\n'What? No. I was just thinking you sound like me.'\n\n'You when?'\n\n'Seven years ago, Hari,' said Sindermann.\n\n'You don't speak of it much,' said Hari. 'At all, in fact. You shared her beliefs for a while. Promoted them. What made you believe?'\n\nThe things I saw,' said Sindermann.\n\n'And what made that belief fade?'\n\n'It didn't.'\n\nSindermann stopped, and turned to look at the young man.\n\n'But it isn't a fire, the way hers is. And I don't speak of it, because it is too easily dismissed as a mental issue. Do you want to know the truth?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'Religion was a blight that shackled us for millennia. Faith almost ruined us, many times over. Willing ignorance. The eager embrace of that which cannot be demonstrated. It held us back. Do you want to know another truth?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'That's what I'm afraid of. That's what makes me reticent. That she's right.'\n\n'Oh,' said Hari.\n\n'How much would we suffer, Hari, if we are forced to accept that gods and daemons are real after all? Do you want to know a real truth?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'Then go and find it. Interrogate the world. Find it for yourself.'\n\nMost of the others were waiting for them under the portico of the Hegemon's civic entrance. Acid rain drummed on the stone peristyle that had admitted congregations for public ballot for over two centuries. Puddles were forming on the flagstones, and a faint mist hung where stone was being gnawed by chemical action. The bell continued to toll. Ceris was there, bundled up in a quilted military jacket with a fur-trimmed hood; Dinesh in weatherproof slickers; Mandeep, and eight more of Sindermann's initial recruits.\n\nCeris looked excited.\n\n'We have been given disposition permits and travel waivers,' she said.\n\n'This is from Diamantis?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Yes,' she replied. 'He was grudging. I think we're a bother he wants to be rid of. But he has to do as he's told.' She produced a plastek folder, fat with official documents and tags.\n\nSindermann took it from her, and began to look.\n\n'Grants of authority, so we can be dispersed among line units,' she said as he looked. 'Some in the Sanctum. Some in Anterior.'\n\n'Some of these postings will be hazardous,' said Sindermann.\n\nCeris scowled at him. 'Duh,' she said. 'Where isn't hazardous? We stand here much longer, the rain will kill us.' Someone laughed.\n\nSindermann looked up at them.\n\n'You're prepared for this?' he asked. 'There are no names assigned, so we can choose. I don't want you all grabbing the high-risk places. They're high risk, nothing romantic about them. And there's a lot of good work to be done inside the Sanctum. It's not all about the glamour of the front line.'\n\n'I've already begun interrogations in the refugee camps,' said Mandeep. 'I'd very much like to continue with that project. There is a great wealth of material from eye-witnesses.'\n\n'Good, exactly that,' said Sindermann.\n\n'I thought, perhaps, the manufactories,' said Leeta Tang. The munition plants in particular.'\n\n'Yes, to chronicle that this immense war effort isn't simply about lighting,' said Sindermann. 'I think that's a valuable approa"}
{"text":"um. It's not all about the glamour of the front line.'\n\n'I've already begun interrogations in the refugee camps,' said Mandeep. 'I'd very much like to continue with that project. There is a great wealth of material from eye-witnesses.'\n\n'Good, exactly that,' said Sindermann.\n\n'I thought, perhaps, the manufactories,' said Leeta Tang. The munition plants in particular.'\n\n'Yes, to chronicle that this immense war effort isn't simply about lighting,' said Sindermann. 'I think that's a valuable approach, Leeta.'\n\n'May I look?' asked Hari.\n\nSindermann passed him the folder. Hari began to leaf through the dockets.\n\n'I'd like to take this one,' he said, showing Sindermann a tag. '1 had family in the north reach.'\n\nSindermann read it, and nodded. 'If that's what you want.'\n\n'Go and find it, you said,' said Hari.\n\n'It may not be there.'\n\n'Then I'll start there.'\n\n'You don't get to choose, though,' Ceris told Sindermann.\n\n'What?'\n\n'The mighty Huscarl Diamantis was very clear,' she said. 'I got the feeling it was an instruction from the Praetorian himself. He wants you, and a companion, if you like. He has something specific in mind for you. You're to report to Bhab tomorrow.'\n\nSindermann glanced at Hari. The young man was studying the docket he'd selected. Sindermann looked away, back at the group. 'You, then, Therajomas, you come with me.'\n\nHe looked at the rest of them.\n\n'Well? Let's begin our histories,' he said.\n\nThe enemy ramparts were advancing. A kilometre-wide stretch of them: plasteel-threaded ceramite plates, mounted like dozer blades on the frames of giant tractor units, rolling forward with their edges almost overlapping. I founding fire crackled and sparked from loops in the plates, or came over the plate-tops from heavier batteries mounted under mantlets on the backs of the tractors. Behind the advancing rampart, in the driving rain, walked the heavy infantry, diseased storm troops, chanting as they trudged, smacking pike-shafts against shields in a funereal rhythm.\n\nThe Imperial line, ranged below the Colossi Gate outworks, began deterrent fire. Field guns began to crump and sling, teams working furiously in shuddering gun-pits that quickly filled with dust and smoke, despite the rain. The first shells fell short, lifting geysers of filth from the chewed flats. Others struck the advancing wall, puncturing ceramite, washing up great waves of mud that plastered the machines. Missile batteries and box-launchers on the outer wall above joined in, spitting rockets that streaked into the shield wall.\n\nInfantry units stayed low in the outwork trenches, fixing bayonets and readying pole-arms. Chainblades test-rewed. Fire gullies were lit. Most of the troops were mixed Imperialis Auxilia brigades, selection-led by veterans of the Antioch Miles Vesperi and the Kimmerline Corps Bellum, both regiments of the Old Hundred. Among them, flashes of yellow and red, a few scattered Space Marines, spread out to bulk fighting units.\n\nBanners rose and unfurled behind the travelling wall line. Their profanities shivered in the rain. White smoke was fuming off the open ground, almost pure white, like cirrus cloud, where the outwash of military chemicals and gas mixed with the acid content of the rain had tortured soil. At the fringe, the white billow was trimmed with a fine embroidery of hard black smoke running off the fire trenches.\n\nThe traitor forces had spent nine days pushing down from the fallen port. They had razed almost everything in their path, leaving a tumbled desert of smoking debris where once had stood an entire city reach. Colossi was the holding point, the northernmost and first of the huge fortress lines that guarded the approach to the Lion's Gate. Colossi had not been converted to defence like some of its noble brethren. It was not a civic structure reworked for war like the massive build-outs at Gorgon Bar. The Colossi Gate was a principal fortress of the Anterior Barbican, a massive series of wall lines and concentric fortifications, its inner lines fitted with their own void shields. It was designed to stop and break any advance from the north.\n\nThe enemy had stopped at first. Shelling from Colossi had driven them back, pummelling a landscape already cleared, on Dorn's orders, into extinction. They'd made their line at the eight kilometre marker, and set out their investment: an arc of contravallation, twenty-eight kilometres wide, ditches, trench systems, earthwork ramparts and reinforced palings. They were dug in, defended and capable of resisting any sortie or counterstrike Colossi threw at them. Armour divisions had duelled for a day and half, an inconclusive sparring. Air assaults had been punished by the gate's comprehensive circuits of surface-to-air weapon systems.\n\nNow they pushed a section of their own ramparts forward, a few metres at a time.\n\nBehind the advance, artillery and dug-in tank sections began to fire, looping a steady bombardment over the heads of the heavy infantry and into the outworks and lower wall tali. Explosions lifted in vivid bouquets: bright fireworks of incendiary, spitting flashes of phosphor, fire-splashes of napthek. High explosive hurled earth and brick into the sky. Penetrators shattered stone, and sowed the air with showering grit. Trench 18 was hollowed out. Trench 41 was lost in a welter of sub-munitions. Four field emplacements were annihilated in as many seconds as high-arc howitzer shells dropped into them shredding the guns and atomising the teams. Men fought to keep the raging fires from spreading to the back-line shell magazines\n\nMost shells fell deliberately short, dropping into the mangled waste between the lines. They were ranged to kick off any mines spread by the loyalist garrison, though few remained undetonated, At the blast of a war-horn, rotating flails extended beneath the lower lips of the trundling plates, their chain lashes whipping the torn earth to trigger micro anti-personnel seeds.\n\nMarshal Aldana Agathe of the Antioch Miles Vesperi jumped down the steps into Trench 40, and hurried along the metal duckboards to the fire control station. She could feel the heat-flash, the prickle of grit the air. This would be assault sixteen, the first significant land push. She dodged stretcher parties, yelled at malingering Albian infanrtymen, ignored the snap salute of Vesperi hussars. At fire control she looked at the auspex status. She kept thinking about her husband and her two children, back in Hatay-Antakya Hive, a quarter of the world away, the sunlight on the patchwork arable estates beyond Orontes, the vivid green of the irrigation circles, the cool of the plunge pool below the villas on Iskenderun Spur. Why that? Why now? She couldn't eject the thoughts from her head, and there was no space for them. The images were like drag weights slowing her down. She waved her hand, and the adjutant brought her the vox-link.\n\nClear precise now. Hatay-Antakya may not exist any more. This was the business now.\n\n'Forty, forty,' she said. This is forty, forty calling.' She took off her throne helmet and ran dirty fingers through her tightly curled brown hair. Crease sweat and the helmet had flattened the natural ringlets and made her scalp itch. 'Range now two kilometres,' she said. 'Requesting air cover and wall guns'.\n\nBig ask. Air cover north of their line had been decimated after the fall of the port. Wall guns in the main upper bastions of Colossi had been told to conserve munition stocks for possible engine assaults. Handling orders direct from Bhab. But Bhab had not reckoned on mobile shield advance. And this was the Death Guard. She could smell them on the wind.\n\n* * *\n\nAt Emplacement 12, Militant General Burr of the Kimmerine heard her voice on the link, chopped by the overlap traffic from a hundred stations.\n\n'Forget it, Agathe,' he called, thumbing the send button of his vox-mic. 'Ready foot for repulse, go.'\n\n'They're ready,' she replied, her voice a twisted crackle. 'Is armour deploying, go?'\n\n'Engines hot, six minutes,' he replied, 'but the last strikes took down the dispersal ramps at Twenty. We're laying boards. Lag time, ten minutes.'\n\nHe heard her curse.\n\n'There'll be no top cover,' said Raldoron, watching him. Tell her that.'\n\nBurr glanced at the massive Blood Angel standing nearby. First Captain Raldoron's helm was off, and he was hunched to fit in the low Army dugout. Technically, Burr had seniority in the line section, but he deferred to the veteran legionary.\n\n'I told her, lord,' Burr said.\n\n'Tell her again, and make sure she knows.'\n\nBombs fell close by, shaking the bunker. Dirt sieved from cracks in the ceiling. Debris rained across the angled roof, pattering like a cloudburst.\n\nSomeone shouted out.\n\nBurr got on the scope. It had been knocked out of alignment, the lenses blinded by mud. He squeezed past the Blood Angel, and got up on the scaling ladder instead. Bright shoals of las-fire and tracer were shredding past overhead.\n\nThe advancing wall had parted in several places. Through the gaps, plated gun carriages were running out ahead of the line: small, light, fast. They'd harried the outworks before. The men called them gun wagons. They mounted heavy auto and las cannons on their pay-load pintles. Their wheels were big and spiked, and often rode over mines that blew harmlessly against the armoured axles and angled bellies of the wagons.\n\nBehind them came the first of the foot heavies, echelons of a thousand at a time, streaming through the wall gaps, striding at their tails, sheltered by the wagons. Storm troops. Trench fighters. The insane riders unafraid of death, who would rush the line and assault the outworks first.\n\nLine, up, line up!' Burr yelled. Men scrambled.\n\nRaldoron was calling him. He dropped back down.\n\n'What, my lord?' he asked.\n\nThe Blood Angel showed him the vox signal.\n\n'Hold fire, two minute count,' Burr read out. 'What is this?'\n\n'Nothing, unless it's authentic,' said Raldoron. He remained patient. The siege made t"}
{"text":"gaps, striding at their tails, sheltered by the wagons. Storm troops. Trench fighters. The insane riders unafraid of death, who would rush the line and assault the outworks first.\n\nLine, up, line up!' Burr yelled. Men scrambled.\n\nRaldoron was calling him. He dropped back down.\n\n'What, my lord?' he asked.\n\nThe Blood Angel showed him the vox signal.\n\n'Hold fire, two minute count,' Burr read out. 'What is this?'\n\n'Nothing, unless it's authentic,' said Raldoron. He remained patient. The siege made them all brothers, and survival required strict adherence to the chain of command Dorn had set. But, in Baal's name, humans could be so slow...\n\n'You can see it is, general. The tag marker...'\n\n'I can. Call the hold.'\n\nBurr grabbed the vox.\n\n'Lines, lines, all lines!' he yelled. 'Cease on my mark and hold! Seventy seconds!'\n\nA barrage of queries answered him.\n\n'Do as you are bloody told!' Burr shouted. Raldoron calmly fitted his helm into place. Burr heard the throat seals click and lock. It seemed like the loudest sound in the world. The only sound.\n\nBurr watched the clock. He could hear Aldana Agathe yelling at him over vox for confirmation. He ignored it.\n\n'We're dead bones if this is a mistake,' he said to the First Captain. Raldoron drew a sword, a tactical gladius. For a moment, Burr thought the Blood Angel was going to strike him down for cowardice, and realised he didn't care.\n\n'We're all dead bones in the end, Konas,' said Raldoron.\n\n'Throne, that's the truth, lord,' said Burr.\n\n'Let's delay that inevitability by trusting the Praetorian has a coordinated plan.'\n\n'Yeah,' said Burr. He nodded. His mouth was utterly dry. 'Yeah, let's do that.' He was gripping the vox-horn so tightly his knuckles had gone white. He looked at the clock, clicking down.\n\nMark.\n\n'Lines, lines, all lines!' he yelled. 'Cease and hold!'\n\nThe Imperial bombardment died away. Burr could hear officers yelling at men who were still blasting from the gun-steps. It wasn't silence. The thunder of the enemy barrage remained. But it was stillness, eerie. The stillness of death.\n\nBurr put down the vox, and heaved his way back up the ladder. Assaulting fire was still coming in. Smoke was washing north across the Colossi lines. He saw a flash. The glint of light catching sonic thing moving in from the south-east, something exceptionally fast.\n\n'Oh, Throne,' he said. 'Oh Throne and stars.'\n\nThe cavalry action was a technique of warfare seldom practised any more, except on some feudal or xenos worlds. It was a throw back to an antique age of conflict, when military superiority was weighed on a different scale.\n\nBut the technique had not disappeared entirely. It had evolved and disguised its true nature under a veneer of modern technology\n\nThat was what this was, the raw truth of it. A cavalry action. A charge. The simple rules had been laid down long ago, before man reached out to the stars.\n\nThe first: maintain formation. Start steady, and do not race ahead of your fellow riders.\n\nThe White Scars ran out of the ground smoke in a wide, blade-edge fan. A perfect formation. They came from the south-eastern end of the Colossi outworks, sweeping around north in an arc like the swing of an axe. Three hundred and thirty jetbikes, gunning together. The roar of them was like a scream. Slow smoke tumbled in their back-wash, accelerated, whipped, tortured into streamers and whirls and even halos, as the White Scars punched through thicker banks. Crimson pennants bent and cracked from the red-and-white vehicles: Bullock-pattern, Scimitar-pattern, Shamshir-pattern, Hornet-pattern, Taiga-pattern.\n\nBurr stared.\n\nThe second: put your spur to your steed only when the enemy is in range.\n\nThe formation, already moving, as it seemed to Burr, with dazzling speed, somehow accelerated. The agony-howl of the massed engines intensified. The enemy line, shield wall and extended storm-force had broken step and slowed. They had seen what was coming. Weapons drew up. The jolting gun-wagons began to turn, or stopped to traverse their pintle-mounts. Maintaining the arc line, the formation bore down on them, unfaltering, unyielding, low-level, a racing blur, like a pack of target-locked missiles. The stained light glinted off the blades of the ordu: lances, drawn tulwars, glaives. At the heart of the line rode the Khagan, the Khorchin Khan of Khans, astride his monstrous voidbike. His sabre rose.\n\nTime slowed down, as time always seems to do when something terrible is about to happen. The enemy columns started shooting frantically. The Great Khan's sabre swung down.\n\nThe White Scars began to fire.\n\nBike-mounted bolters, heavy bolters, some in pairs; rotary guns housed in the nostrils or chins of their snarling steeds; plasma and lascannons, volkite culverins. A raking hurricane of destruction. Contrails and streamers of grey and black weapons-exhaust dragged out behind the bikes like banners. The discharge of it was heart-stopping, the continuation of it numbing. The roar, a frenzied drumming of heavy bolters, sounded, to Burr, like the thunder of hooves, the stables of a god unslipped at full gallop.\n\nThere was no ranging fire. The White Scars already had their targets. The first gun-wagons exploded. Others lurched, hammered buckling. Fireballs lit off across the extended enemy mass from east to west. The storm troop lines began to fracture. Some broke. Some ran. Some tried to retreat towards the sally gaps in the shield line. Whole echelons were mown down where they stood, bodies twisting and lifting, and disintegrating in clouds of churned earth and stitching impacts. A few, unscathed, tried to fire back.\n\nRule three: shock is the action's best weapon.\n\nThe White Scars ripped in, never for a second breaking formation, despite the gunfire that clipped at them and tore at their armour. One jetbike cartwheeled, gushing flame, rider lost. No one looked back. The bikes crossed the line of the already-dead, the blackened bodies littering the ground, and their anti-gravitic down-force bent, tossed and flipped the slain as they rushed over, their kills jerking and dancing.\n\nImpact. The first ordu riders reached the standing lines. Then guns were still reaping the enemy formations down. They punched through the breaking ranks, crushing through upright men, running over them, smashing them into the sky. Broken forms were thrown up and back, spinning slack and disjointed. Others burst against speeding armoured prows, washing the white ground-smoke red with puffs of aerosolised gore. Lances impaled, glaives scythed. Swords hacked, hooked, slashed. Burr saw one White Scar streak across an overturned gun-wagon. A traitor on its flank aimed a volkite pistol. The White Scar's back-extended tulwar met his fist before he could fire, splitting the pistol end to end, the hand at the thumb, and the entire extended arm lengthways to the shoulder, where the blade-tip dissected the man's head too. A kill from the saddle. All in one forward rush. The jetbike was past and on, even as the man spun and fell, sliced through, the cell of his pistol detonating like a flash grenade.\n\nThey reached the shield line, slaughter in their wakes. At close range the bike guns fractured and crumpled the thick sheets of storm-plate, but they could not break them. They broke formation instead, rushing in through the wall gaps or over the shield line, entirely.\n\nThen they fell upon the vast host sheltering behind.\n\nThe fourth rule: if you break the enemy line, you are in the heart of them, and war becomes the melee of hand to hand.\n\nFrom Emplacement 12, Burr could no longer see the White Scars. The shield wall and the smoke screened off the havoc that followed. It was perhaps, a blessing he was spared the sight. It becomes hard to trust as brothers, those you have seen capable of unbridled savagery.\n\nFor the White Scars, the rapacious V Legion, the far side of the wall was another world. Speed, shock and rate of fire had swept them to the shield line with devastating effect. But crossing the wall line had robbed them of speed and line discipline, and the odds were reversed. They were inside the choking enemy mass. Each rider, in a second, had passed from the bright smoke of the open field into a fast back-line of standing infantry. The rain seemed heavier, a curtain unfogged by the blanket of smoke. The assault host was immense: thousands of storm pikes, dripping with rain, ranked for assault; hundreds of thousands of traitor infantry; ready lines of armour, engines revving; monstrous formations of the Death Guard.\n\nThe Death Guard. Of all the Traitor Legions, the Death Guard was the one most despised by the White Scars ordu, and the feeling was mutual. The war between the XIV and the V had become a blood feud would never be cooled. Hatred was too small a word. Even on this precipice of history, the White Scars were known as wild hunters, carefree killers, warriors who laughed in the heat of action, delighting in the fire of war.\n\nThere was no laughter now.\n\nNor were the Great Khan and his warriors fazed. They had done this before. Indeed, they had all known, from the moment they committed to the charge, that this was the goal. Unless enemy fire brought them down in the charging line, this was the highest purpose of a charge action: to reach the enemy, to meet his main strength, to engage, to be in his midst. They knew what to do. Physical momentum had been lost, but a momentum of mind took over.\n\nThey broke into individual actions, maintaining as much speed as they were able, preserving what collective forward movement they could. They thrust through the waiting ranks, or dropped into them. The bikes themselves were weapons: their armoured prows, their mass and motion, the crushing downward force of their repeller systems. The traitor host, far larger than even the Great Khan had been expecting to find, was war-ready, but it was not prepared. They were drawn up in deep, pre-battle cohorts. Their sight lines generally blocke"}
{"text":"aintaining as much speed as they were able, preserving what collective forward movement they could. They thrust through the waiting ranks, or dropped into them. The bikes themselves were weapons: their armoured prows, their mass and motion, the crushing downward force of their repeller systems. The traitor host, far larger than even the Great Khan had been expecting to find, was war-ready, but it was not prepared. They were drawn up in deep, pre-battle cohorts. Their sight lines generally blocked by the shield wall, they had no idea what was coming at them. Only the roar of guns and the scream of engines had suggested that anything was.\n\nThe White Scars riders slammed down into them. Many came nose up, rearing, allowing their lift-systems to hammer the first rows off their feet. Their guns cycled, chewing into the bountiful, waiting lines of targets. Some shots passed through two or three lines of bodies. This was greedy killing. They were spoiled for targets, because they were vastly unnumbered, surrounded on all sides by armed, but as-yet undeployed enemy combatants. There was a kill to be made in every direction.\n\nThe enemy mass collectively flinched from the points of attack, the host rippling like a pool of oil as it recoiled. Men fell against, and into, other men as they scrambled away from the killers entering their positions.\n\nBut the White Scars were truly outnumbered. Traitors mobbed them from all sides, blasting weapons point-blank, heedless of their own kin, striking and battering with whatever blades and mauls were in their hands. Riders and bikes became mired in scrums of attackers, fighting from the saddle in the driving rain, lopping off every hand and head and pole-blade that came at them. Thickets of pikes speared two of them from their steeds, punctured in a dozen places. Gunfire destroyed the engine of a running jetbike, and its rider leapt clear, allowing the burning, tumbling machine to power into the enemy files, killing a score with its shredding mass, and then another score with its detonation. But the rider, Kherta Kal, was on foot, alone, encircled and rushed.\n\nThe Death Guard surged forwards, fighting through their own dazed foot troops to meet the White Scars. They were driven by transhuman reaction, sheer outrage at the audacity of the assault, and, more than anything, hatred. The desire to close with and punish their arch-foes, who had been fools enough to ride in among them. The brute horror of the Death Guard was plainly visible, a spasm of sadness to the heart of every rider. They beheld their once-brothers, painfully transformed: massive armoured thugs, their grey-green plate greased with rain, streaked with rust and seeping fluid, rank and diseased, their armour swollen as though expanded by infected bloat within, jet and ebon-iron visors formed like howling beasts and wild wood predators.\n\nLegionary met legionary, dots of gleaming white engulfed by tides of mottled verdigris. Tulwars and sabres slashed down from saddle height, splitting dark plate like rotten squash and pumpkin, spraying ginger and yellow gouts of pestilential matter. Filthy spears, black as charcoal, plunged into burnished white ceramite, squirting scarlet into the rain, unseating riders, carrying them down under weight of numbers, some White Scars taking eight or ten fatal blows before they hit the mud.\n\nThe ground beneath was a deep mire, a liquid black morass, thrashed up by the shield tractors and the advancing host. It spattered and clung to the boots and legs of the churning Death Guard, and splashed the flanks of the wallowing jetbikes.\n\nWild chaos. The deepest and most intense melee. No rules, no order. A frenzy. An overwhelming din of blows and impacts, bolter blasts, shrieking engines. A tulwar splitting a houndskull helm and the skull inside. A dirt-crusted warhammer breaking chestplate, bone and muscle, pulverising heart and organs. A White Scar lifting clean from the saddle, impaled on a dark serrated lance. A Death Guard squad leader mangling against the snout of a surging bike, knocked down, shredding in the repulsor field. Flying flakes of armour. A spinning visor, torn off. Dismembered limbs, spinning aside, some still clutching weapons or parts of weapons. Gore splashing up to meet the hellish rain.\n\nIn the heart of it, the Great Khan. Almost unassailable in his might, but the greatest focus of the traitor wrath. He had dared to come among them, to enter their heart. He had wounded them savagely, broken the day's assault, but it would cost him. His was the trophy-head they most desired, the unthinkable kill they suddenly craved. A chance, an opportunity no traitor heart had dared imagine.\n\nThey swarmed.\n\nBut to take their prize, they had to kill him, and Jaghatai Khan was not in the mood to meet death. The vast and feral melee in the traitor back-lines was not a dismal misadventure to end a glorious cavalry action. It was just the far-point of the rush, the true price demanded of the enemy when the charge began.\n\nRule five: if you have driven through the enemy mass, turn and charge them again from the rear.\n\nThe Khan swung his dao, cutting through armour like fat. The war-calls of Chogoris bellowed from his lips, drowned out by the impossible deluge of the battle.\n\nYet they were heard.\n\nJetbikes gunned. Engines rose at the sound of other engines shrieking. Bikes turned, ramming through bodies, swinging sideways to fell others with deliberate and brutal sideswipes of the flanks and rear ends.\n\nThe White Scars broke back. One by one at first, following the Khan's lead, then en masse, breaking free, accelerating, retracing their rush back to the wall. They turned high to break out, but then swept low again prow-rams, chattering gun mounts and raking blades slaughtering any who had survived their outward run, or any who had been foolish enough to try and surge in at their backs.\n\nAlmost as many traitors fell to the rear-charge as had died during the in-rush.\n\nThe White Scars raced towards the rear of the shield wall. Kharash riders split sideways as they approached the shields, running the length of it, tossing saddle charges into the unprotected backs of the massive field tractors.\n\nNone had been set with more than a cursory fuse. The mines began to detonate, some only seconds after the Kharash rider had sped past. Tractor mounts blew up, shearing apart in searing clouds of flame, bodywork splaying, stanchions fracturing, frames collapsing, engines bursting, splintered axles spinning clear from each inferno.\n\nShield sections fell. They remained, true to their construction, for the most part intact. But, torn from their supporting frames, they toppled forward flat into the mud, a wall no longer.\n\nEight tractors died. The advancing rampart was broken, like a broad smile with teeth missing, black smoke swilling from the gaps. The White Scars burned through the heavy smoke, taking full advantage of the clear passage provided by the annihilated sections. Some Kharash paused as they turned out of their breaking action, halting to haul fallen or wounded brothers up onto the bikes beside them Yetto of the Kharash found Kherta Kai still alive, drenched in gore, standing alone with enemy dead heaped around him. He pulled him onto the flank of his steed, and bore him out of hell.\n\nBurr saw the first riders punch out of the seething smoke. He started to cry out, a whoop of joy and shock, but it died in his throat. There could only be a few of them. The glory of the charge had gone into the darkest pit of the enemy. Precious little could return from that.\n\nBut more appeared. Then more still. Not all, but a startling number. Dozens. Hundreds. Their return ride, harried by parting shots from a wounded enemy mass, had little of the original discipline in its formation, but formal discipline no longer mattered. Some riders were wounded. Others, running more slowly, carried wounded men with them, clinging to the sides, or even held limp across the hulls in front of the saddles.\n\n'I'm dreaming, surely,' Burr murmured. He looked at Raldoron. 'How could any of them have survived? Not just any, but so many?'\n\n'Are you awake, Konas?' Raldoron asked. He had removed his helm, and was staring out at the ruined enemy line and the returning riders. There was no expression on his face.\n\n'I am, lord,' said Burr. 'I'm sure I am.'\n\n'Then know, you have seen the White Scars do what the White Scars do,' said Raldoron. 'It is rare for any to witness it. I confess, I have relished it every time I've been lucky enough to watch it happen.'\n\n'It's not...' Burr began. 'This isn't a game! A... display!'\n\n'No,' Raldoron agreed. 'It never is. And certainly not here, in this time of darkness. What you just saw, Konas, was fortune favouring us for the day. But you should still enjoy it for what it was. Great art must be appreciated, no matter the situation.'\n\nThe first riders were approaching the outworks.\n\nThe entire cavalry action had lasted six minutes.\n\n* * *\n\n'I'll go no further,' said Horus Aximand.\n\nAbaddon glanced at him. 'Why? Are you afraid he'll refuse?' he asked.\n\n'No'.\n\n'Then have you changed your mind?'\n\n'No, no,' said Aximand. 'He does not like me, nor I, him. Better you make the approach.'\n\nAbaddon glowered. 'He is focused, these days,' he said. 'No interest in old scores, no time for it. You saw that yourself. We have unity, Aximand. Cohesion of thought and purpose. Old feuds are dead.'\n\n'Even so, I shall stay here,' said Little Horus. 'I will not risk opening old wounds. Speak to him. You, I think, he still admires.'\n\nAbaddon nodded. 'Tell me you still trust the sense in this?' he said.\n\n'I do. The Mournival will back you. I'll see to that.'\n\nAbaddon turned away. 'Stay here then, and wait for me.'\n\nThe great vaults of the Lion's Gate space port rose above them, almost devoid of light. The vast structure creaked and moaned, Stressed by the sheer weight of the materiel flowing down through it every minute of every hour"}
{"text":"e Horus. 'I will not risk opening old wounds. Speak to him. You, I think, he still admires.'\n\nAbaddon nodded. 'Tell me you still trust the sense in this?' he said.\n\n'I do. The Mournival will back you. I'll see to that.'\n\nAbaddon turned away. 'Stay here then, and wait for me.'\n\nThe great vaults of the Lion's Gate space port rose above them, almost devoid of light. The vast structure creaked and moaned, Stressed by the sheer weight of the materiel flowing down through it every minute of every hour, every freight lifter and cargo platform running at capacity. This was their artery, through which the life-blood of their war pumped from orbit to surface.\n\nDown through which the first tides of the Neverborn were ranning in an immaterial river.\n\nAximand watched his brother walk away into the gloom, footsteps ringing from the plate deck. He didn't want to stay, but he would. He was uneasy. It wasn't the skin-prickle of the malaetheric vapour flooding the place, nor was it his proximity to the Lord of Iron. These last few nights, since the port broke, the dreams had started again: dreams in his sleep and in waking moments too, dreams he hadn't had in months.\n\nBreathing, someone was close. Close but unseen. Someone was coming for him. The dreams, which had started around the time of the Dwell undertaking, had bothered him until he had engaged with them, and seen, at last, the face of the someone: Loken... Loken, Loken. He'd put the dreams to rest, exorcised.\n\nNow, they were back, the soft sound of breathing just behind his head. What was his imagined menace now?\n\nHe stood alone, Abaddon now out of sight.\n\n'Go away,' he whispered, 'or let me face you. Either way, I'll cut you down.' The breathing did not change its soft rhythm. Aximand wanted to leave, but he knew the breathing would be with him wherever he went.\n\n'Tell me where,' he whispered.\n\nNothing replied.\n\n* * *\n\nThe battle-automata blocked his path, silent and huge.\n\n'I would speak with him,' said Abaddon.\n\nThey didn't move.\n\n'You know me,' Abaddon said. 'I would speak with him.'\n\nA subsonic murmur, a command. They stepped aside.\n\nAbaddon entered the chamber, a command station for docking control, twenty kilometres up the spire of the port. Vast observation windows on three sides, clouded with soot. The pale sub-orbital twilight spilling in, illuminating a derelict control centre where a thousand port officers had once run the daily business of the port. A cold blue gloom revealed ruined console stations, the wreckage of fallen monitors and overturned desks on the deck. On the corner of one console, a ceramic caffeine cup, half-full, miraculously still stood where it had been put down weeks or months before. Put down between sips, waiting to be picked up again.\n\n'The contents of my last briefing haven't altered,' said Perturabo. 'I would have informed you. Why are you here?'\n\n'To speak to you,' said Abaddon.\n\nThe Lord of Iron had retired for the evening, and taken himself to the quiet of this dead area, alone. Abaddon thought that odd. When did Perturabo's work cease? His vigilance, his constant moderation of the battle sphere.\n\n'I thought to find you below,' said Abaddon, 'at your station.'\n\nPerturabo sat off to his left. He had stripped away his armour. The implacable panoply of the Logos plate waited nearby, arranged systematically by the battle-automata on a ready rack, like a specimen of some titanic beetle genus, pin-spread for display by an entomologist. Stripped to the waist, Perturabo was still massive. His flesh was almost white, pocked by the circular punctum of plug sockets and the shadows of old scars, slabbed with brute muscles. He sat on a cargo crate, elbows resting on an unpowered strategium table on which a large, paper chart of the Palace had been spread and weighted down with bolter shells. A few small lamps and candles burned.\n\n'I have withdrawn,' said Perturabo.\n\n'From what?'\n\n'From the data, First Captain, not the engagement. It's a trick I learned. You're disturbing me.'\n\n'I apologise,' said Abaddon. He didn't leave. He stepped from the upper range of extinct consoles onto the main floor, and approached the table. His feet crunched over shards of armourglass and chips of spalled metal.\n\n'From whom?' he asked.\n\n'What?'\n\n'This trick. What is it?'\n\nPerturabo turned his giant head to gaze at Abaddon. Pure disdain. Somehow, unarmoured, he looked more terrifying, more capable of rising up like a seismic convulsion and annihilating the First Captain.\n\n'I learned it from my brother Rogal Dorn,' he said. 'I trust that suitably amuses you, Abaddon.'\n\n'I'd like to know it,' said Abaddon.\n\n'Data,' said Perturabo, as if that were an answer in itself. 'Vast amounts, in any battle, any war. In this... you can imagine the scale. '\n\n'I can.'\n\n'It must be reviewed, monitored, moderated, modified,' said Perturabo. 'Constantly. When I was younger, I bent myself to that task. Unstinting. I would not leave the strategium or the noospheric uploads for a moment until the action was complete. I never took my eyes off the game.'\n\n'I've seen you do it,' said Abaddon. 'And few can begin to do it like you.'\n\n'One can,' said Perturabo. 'Test exercises, nine times, he beat me. This was in the early days. I couldn't fathom how. Do you know what I did?'\n\n'No, lord.'\n\n'I asked him,' said Perturabo. He made a sound, a grating sound, that Abaddon realised was a rueful, perhaps melancholy chuckle. 'I asked him, Abaddon. We were brothers then. Such interactions were possible.'\n\n'And?' asked Abaddon.\n\n'He told me... and understand this, he was willing. He was glad to share a technique with me. He told me that data can blind. The weight of it. The burden of detail. Especially if one engages with it without a break or rest.'\n\nPerturabo looked at the chart rolled out in front of him.\n\n'He told me he had learned to step away,' he said. 'Step away, even at the height of conflict, if you can believe that? To clear his mind and focus, to shed the extraneous and the superficial. To contemplate. To reduce the immeasurable complexity of the arithmetic down to simple principles. Thus renewed, he would return. Do you know what he would do then?'\n\n'No, lord.'\n\n'He would win, Abaddon. The bastard would win.'\n\n'He has a talent,' said Abaddon.\n\n'He does', replied Perturabo. 'I am the first to admit it. Only a fool ignores the advice of a brilliant man. Only an idiot denies the good practice of an enemy. I took up the habit. Intense moderation, as had been my way, but then short periods of withdrawal. Entirely unlinked. No augur-feed, no noospherics. He was right. The objective tactical clarity is astonishing.'\n\nAbaddon approached the table, and looked down at the old chart.\n\n'This is clarity?' he asked.\n\n'It is. Sixteen thousand, four hundred and eighty-six individual engagements as of the last hour mark. Or ten thousand, nine hundred ninety, if we use his scale. His definition of battle differs from mine. I measure by twenty thousand troops per element, he by thirty thousand. It's merely a difference in doctrinal tradition.'\n\nAbaddon stared at the map. The thick bolter shells, red-tipped and brass collared, did more than weigh the map down. Four stood upright on the map, marking Lion's Gate Port, Eternity Wall Port, Gorgon Bar and Colossi Gate.\n\n'Reduced to the most spare basics,' said Abaddon.\n\n'Yes,' said Perturabo 'A paper chart with objects for markers. The old way'.\n\n'No, I mean...' Abaddon gestured. 'To the essential clashes. Sixteen thousand plus reduced to four.'\n\nPerturabo bad a bolter shell in his hands. He was toying with it\n\n'Yes, those four. They are the key to this phase. I keep considering placing this on Marmax.' He pointed, with the shell, to the area of the map between Gorgon and Colossi in the Anterior Barbican. 'But we won't take Marmax yet. We can't. It's too strong, and insulated from the north by Colossi. Once my brothers are done with Colossi, we'll roll through both, one after the other. We'll level them on our way to the Sanctum wall.'\n\nHe glanced up at Abaddon. 'You see? You strip it all down to the barest essentials, and even the greatest battle ever fought is reduced to a simple series of steps. Why are you here, Abaddon? I hope you have not come to impart some private instruction from your genefather. Eh? Some whisper in my ear to do better and work faster? I don't want to hear it. Tell him I am accomplishing what he has tasked me to accomplish.'\n\n'Lupercal is not aware of this visit,' said Abaddon.\n\nPerturabo sat back. His brows knotted, intrigued. He studied Abaddon's face for some clue.\n\n'I'm curious,' he said. 'You have my attention.'\n\nAbaddon didn't reply. He reached over, picked up one of the bolter shells in use as an edge-weight, and carefully placed it on the map upright, just south of the Ultimate Wall. Then he stepped back, as though he had made a move in regicide, and was waiting for his opponent to respond.\n\n'The other day, you were the only one to notice that,' said Perturabo. 'To even understand it. You like it, don't you?'\n\n'So do you, lord.'\n\n'Yes. But I told you. We are committed - four key, focus sites. Moreover, they satisfy the edicts of the Warmaster. They'll get the job done.'\n\n'How quickly?' asked Abaddon. 'A month? Two? More? How soon before relief arrives and we begin a war on two fronts?'\n\n'Faster. Faster than two months,' replied Perturabo, irritated. 'This scheme works. The other is appealing. I will hold it in reserve.'\n\n'It's more than appealing,' said Abaddon. He looked around, spotted-another broken cargo crate, drew it over and sat down without invitation. 'It's a flaw. A vulnerability.'\n\n'He will have seen it.'\n\n'What if he hasn't? Isn't it exactly the kind of error you're waiting for? The tiny oversight? It's the error you've been praying he'll make.'\n\n'Watch your mouth, Son of Horus.'\n\nAbaddon raised a hand. 'But if it is? That flaw is the basis of a spear-tip assault. Done right, that would end this affair in a week.'\n\nPertu"}
{"text":"ling,' said Abaddon. He looked around, spotted-another broken cargo crate, drew it over and sat down without invitation. 'It's a flaw. A vulnerability.'\n\n'He will have seen it.'\n\n'What if he hasn't? Isn't it exactly the kind of error you're waiting for? The tiny oversight? It's the error you've been praying he'll make.'\n\n'Watch your mouth, Son of Horus.'\n\nAbaddon raised a hand. 'But if it is? That flaw is the basis of a spear-tip assault. Done right, that would end this affair in a week.'\n\nPerturabo stared at him, and said nothing.\n\n'You saw it, my lord,' said Abaddon. 'You. It would make this triumph yours. The Triumph of Terra. By your command, not merely executed by you at my lord's behest. That's immortal glory. That's a place above all of your brothers at the right hand of the new order-'\n\n'I know what it is. Don't try your flattery on me. Tell me this, why did you bring it to me?'\n\n'Because I saw it. Because I want it. It's a military win.'\n\nPerturabo began to smirk. He could at last detect the hidden fire behind Abaddon's eyes.\n\n'Oh ho, now I see it,' he said. 'You were always the warrior, a fine one I'll confess. You want a piece of this glory too. You want to prove what you are. A soldier. Not a child of the warp. An Astartes.'\n\n'It's what I've always been,' said Abaddon. 'I won't lie. I want the story, and I want to win it with the skill of my blade and the superiority of my troops. As I did in the old days, as I have always done, as an Astartes. That is how the compliance of Terra should come. That's what carried me here. And carried you too.'\n\n'Perhaps.'\n\n'No, perhaps about it,' said Abaddon. 'Tell me it wouldn't be sweet. 'For you, most of all. To settle the score. Brother against brother. You and him, decided warrior against warrior.'\n\n'I am going to win this, Abaddon. The rivalry will be decided in my favour at the last.'\n\n'I know you're going to win. Eventually. Entirely. You will best Dorn. But it's not the result. It's the means. Surely? To beat him on his own terms. Astartes against Astartes. Military rules. The true crafts of war, pitted according to the games you've played against him so many times, and too often lost.'\n\n'I said watch your mouth-'\n\n'I don't think I will, because you know it's a fact. Beat him this way, and no one can deny your supremacy. No one can say, \"In the end, the Lord of Iron won, not because he was better, but because he had the warp at his side.\"'\n\n'You little bastard.'\n\nPerturabo stood up so violently the cargo crate crashed over on its side. Abaddon found himself a metre off the deck, his feet swinging, the Hammer of Olympia's right hand gripping his throat.\n\n'No one by-blow manipulates me like this,' hissed Perturabo.\n\nAbaddon clenched his teeth.\n\n'I sincerely apologise,' he grunted, slowly choking, 'and take back any word I have uttered that was not true.'\n\nPerturabo squeezed his grip more tightly. He was trembling with rage. With a sharp crack, one of Abaddon's collar seals began to buckle.\n\nThe Lord of Iron spat in Abaddon's face, then threw him across the chamber like a discarded doll. Abaddon fell into an abandoned monitor station, smashed it, bounced off, and sprawled on the deck.\n\nHe raised himself slightly, small fragments of plastek and glass tinkling off him. He pulled at the broken throat seal that was drawing blood from his neck. He looked at the primarch.\n\nPertuabo had turned away. He stood, breathing hard, staring out of the observation port at the polluted darkness outside, staring as thought he could see something, something bright but far away, that only he make out. His monstrously broad back, lined with ancient cicatrix, raw neural plug-ports and the traceries of sub-dermal circuitry, heaved and flexed.\n\n'You'd have your rabble do this, would you?' asked Perturabo in a low voice.\n\nAbaddon got up. He wiped the spittle from his cheek.\n\n'It would please the Lupercal if his own loyal sons were the instruments of this act.'\n\n'I'm sure,' murmured Perturabo.'A reason, but not a good enough one.'\n\n'It's a spear-tip lip strike, my Lord of Iron. It is our proven specialty. You are the unrivalled master of military analysis, so tell me, loyalties and grudges ignored, who would you send? Think clearly now. Objective tactical clarity. Who would you send?'\n\nPerturabo turned his head slowly to look at Abaddon.\n\n'You know the answer to that,' he said.\n\n'I do. I'd hear you say it.'\n\n'The Sons of Horus. The Sixteenth. No, the Luna Wolves. That's who I'd sent, if I had them. Hell, but you goad me, captain. As if you had come here to make me kill you.'\n\n'Not that.' said Abaddon. 'I came here to make you take me seriously.'\n\nPerturabo crossed to the table. The shell markers had fallen. He picked them up, set them back in position, then held up the one Abaddon had put down.\n\n'The Luna Wolves are gone,' he said, 'and the Sons of Horus are assigned. Here, here and here. I cannot release their strengths. They are tucked into the plan.'\n\n'I don't need them all,' said Abaddon. 'First Company, maybe one other, the Justaerin. The Mournival.'\n\n'A savage execution force, but scarcely a host,' said Perturabo. 'Not enough for this.'\n\n'This offers another opportunity,' said Abaddon. 'A chance to deal with other problems that you contend with.'\n\n'Such as?'\n\n'We stand unified,' said Abaddon. 'Undivided. The greatest war-host in history. Differences and disputes set aside or ignored. But for how long? You know that's the invisible danger. Our own unravelling. You use every fighting asset at your disposal for maximum effect, but you are also obligated - against, I venture, your temperament - to act with a degree of diplomacy. To keep the multifarious factions content, and your brothers satisfied. It won't be long before they start to get their own ideas. Lord, to maintain our trajectory towards triumph, you need to keep them all in line.'\n\n'The Phoenician.'\n\n'The Phoenician, yes,' said Abaddon. 'He'll be first. Well, Angron has already snapped your leash, but at least his rampage serves your plan. Fulgrim is your immediate problem. He is wilful, he doesn't take to the bridle, and his attention span is woefully short. He in growing listless. I know this for a fact. Give him something to do that feels significant, and you can keep him in check.'\n\n'His bastard children are deployed-'\n\n'Who cares where you've placed them, or what you've charged them to do? Another few days, they won't be there anyway. They will have decided for themselves what action to take. But this bright objective would focus their attention, and allow you to channel them to genuine effect. And it would flatter him. He likes to be flattered.'\n\n'I can't approach him,' said Perturabo, 'I can barely stand the sight of him.'\n\n'I can,' said Abaddon. 'Through back-channels at company level. I can secure them for this, I'm sure of it.'\n\n'And keep them in line?'\n\n'Long enough to get this done. And once we start...' Abaddon shrugged. 'It doesn't matter then. The Third will give us the meat and muscle we need for grand scale assault. Cannon fodder for whatever greets us.'\n\nPerturabo nodded slightly, thinking. That prospect clearly made sense and, more importantly, entertained him.\n\n'They provide the necessary mass, I provide the scalpel, and you are the glorious architect,' said Abaddon. 'And this work is done inside a week.'\n\nHe walked over to the table, took the shell from Perturabo's hand, and put it back on the chart. The base squarely covered the middle of the words Saturnine Gate.\n\n'If this is some ploy, if you renege...' Perturabo began, quietly.\n\n'It's not, and I won't,' said Abaddon. This matters to both of us. It's the achievement we both long for. Forget Dorn's genius strategies, my lord, forget the prospect of loyalist relief. Time is our greatest enemy, fraying and eroding the patience of your brothers. We must had our where we can, and make those bonds count.'\n\nThen Perturabo, Lord of Iron, did the most terrible thing Abaddon would ever see him do.\n\nHe smiled.\n\nFIVE\n\n* * *\n\nLeave-takings and dialogues\n\nDorn was in the Grand Borealis when Vorst brought him the day's deployment summary. He took it, and skimmed it quickly. The date at the top, the twenty-first day of Quintus, then almost forty pages of logistic data. Each day, the document took him less than a minute to approve. Apart from any specific requests he made, it was assembled by the War Courts, usually through statistical analysis algorithms.\n\nHe was intensely busy at an augur station, reviewing North Anterior tactical schemes with Master of Huscarls Archamus, Mistress Tacticae Sandrine Icaro, Mistress Tacticae Katarin Elg, and twelve Excertus war-chiefs, but there was one section of the document he wanted to review. He saw the names: companies, regiments, divisions, officers, support cohorts and auxilia. They had been selected due to proximity, mobility, ease of transfer. They had been chosen by cool machine logic. His jaw clenched slightly. He had been waiting for this tight moment of necessary pain.\n\nHe handed the report back to Vorst, and returned to the augur display.\n\n'You were saying, Mistress Icaro, that-' He stopped. 'Wait, I'm sorry.'\n\nDorn turned away from the station again, and called Vorst back.\n\n'A problem, my lord?' the veteran Huscarl asked.\n\n'Just give me a moment,' said Dorn, scrolling back down the list.\n\nThere it was. It had not been mistake of memory.\n\nThe vast bastion chamber seemed to close in around him, the babble of voices like a mocking, hectoring chorus. He looked around. The others were waiting for him. Old Vorst was attentive, dutiful, but frowning. There was no one Dorn could tell, no one among the thousands present who knew, no one who could know. And Dorn couldn't leave his post or the review. In the great, uncaring scheme of things it was nothing, a trifle, just a name on a list: a tiny, irrelevant detail compared to the defence of the Palace.\n\nDorn saw Cadwalder at station by the chamber door, far away across the se"}
{"text":"ing, hectoring chorus. He looked around. The others were waiting for him. Old Vorst was attentive, dutiful, but frowning. There was no one Dorn could tell, no one among the thousands present who knew, no one who could know. And Dorn couldn't leave his post or the review. In the great, uncaring scheme of things it was nothing, a trifle, just a name on a list: a tiny, irrelevant detail compared to the defence of the Palace.\n\nDorn saw Cadwalder at station by the chamber door, far away across the sea of faces and urgent activity. Cadwalder knew. He'd been there, and he'd heard it. The Huscarl was the only other soul in Bhab Bastion who would understand.\n\nDorn caught his eye, and the Huscarl immediately made his way to his lord's side.\n\n'My lord?' Cadwalder asked.\n\nDorn quietly, quickly, showed him the name on the list.\n\nCadwalder nodded.\n\n'You understand the-'\n\n'Sensitivity, yes, my lord.'\n\n'This bothers me,' Dorn whispered to him. 'I would appreciate-'\n\n'I'll go and see if I can stop it, my lord,' said Cadwalder.\n\n'I'm grateful,' said Dorn. 'Be discreet.'\n\n'I will, my lord.'\n\n'Just... do something about it, if it's not too late. Safeguard him.'\n\nThe Huscarl put his fist to his chest, nodded, and strode away. Dorn turned back to the waiting chiefs.\n\n'My apologies,' he told them, 'I noticed a minor transcription error. Let us continue.'\n\n* * *\n\nLeeta Tang had been waiting at the door of Munition Manufactory 226 for nearly an hour. There seemed to be some problem with her warrant. No one cared to explain what. Supervisors came and went in the cold, utilitarian atrium, and she could hear the noise of industry from beyond the inner hatches: the clank of conveyor assemblies, the drone of lathes, the periodic echo of safety sirens. She wanted to get in, perhaps to the canteen. Interviews with munition workers seemed like an ideal starting point. Sindermann had urged them to seek out the ordinary people, the workers, the menials, and hear their stories, stories that grander histories all too often ignored. Almost a hundred thousand people worked at MM226, one of the principal armament factories in the Southern Palatine.\n\nAn Imperial Fist strode into the atrium from the manufactory's yard. For a moment, she thought it was Diamantis, come to resolve her access problem, but it wasn't. The Space Marines all looked alike to her, but this one had the laurels of an officer, a company captain, not the ornate plate of the Huscarl detail.\n\n'Sir,'she said, 'could you-'\n\n'Not now,' the legionary snapped.\n\n'But-'\n\n'Really, not now.'\n\nThe Imperial Fist spoke to a supervisor, who let him through the inner gates immediately.\n\n'Hey!' Leeta yelled after him.\n\n* * *\n\n'What was that about?' the captain asked the supervisor as they walked down blast-proofed tunnels, past the rhythmic thump of the automated casing press chamber. Smoke-wash from the annealing halls streamed past their ankles, drawn to the floor grates of the manufactory's humming extractor system.\n\n'A remembrancer, lord,' the supervisor replied.\n\n'I thought they were a dead breed?'\n\nThey stepped aside to let a steward pass, driving a train of cargo-carts laden with freshly stamped shell casings. Some of the rattling cylinders still glowed pink with residual heat.\n\n'Apparently not,' said the supervisor, as they resumed step. 'She has the right warrant. All proper and correct. The mark of the Praetorian. But...'\n\n'Go on.'\n\n'I didn't think it was right to let her in, so I was delaying her. I was worried she might see...' He shrugged.\n\nThe legionary nodded. He knew what the man was trying to say. Munition plants like 226 were running low, their stockpile bunkers almost empty of explosive, propellant, intermix, charge-powder and alloy. Just a few - a very few - weeks of capacity remained, and then they would be spent, with no possibility of resupply. That was the kind of information that couldn't be allowed to get out, the kind of information that would damage public morale. No remembrancer could be allowed to wander in to ask questions, or see empty, echoing storage vaults.\n\nThey walked on, in silence, past bustling depots sheathed in rockcrete, the entrances to vast machining halls that rang with the squeal of air-buffers and the clatter of constantly running conveyor lines, and the curtained hatches of eerily quiet filling rooms.\n\n'Anyway, he's in here, lord,' said the supervisor at last, as if they had been talking cheerfully for the past several minutes. He ushered the captain through a blast-curtained arch, into a dry room that stank of fyceline. The walls were clad with thick concussion padding and stacks of water-filled bowsers designed to absorb any accidental detonations. Sprinkler rigs and fire-suppression systems hung from the ceiling. Inside sterile and inert priming tents, tech thralls and arachnoid assemblies of servo-arms were precisely measuring charges, and delicately packing them into test canisters.\n\n'Station six, lord,' said the supervisor, pointing.\n\nMaximus Thane nodded.\n\n'You!' he called out. At a nearby desk, a tech-magos looked up, puzzled.\n\n'Yes you,' said Thane. 'Arkhan Land, correct? Magos Arkhan Land? I need you to come with me.'\n\n* * *\n\n'What's this about, captain?' asked Arkhan Land as he followed Thane out into the manufactory yard. Acid rain was drizzling across the broad, high walled gateyard, and heavy transporters were backed up to the factory's loading docks.\n\n'You're needed for the war effort,' replied Thane.\n\n'I was engaged in the war effort,' replied Land, jerking a thumb back over his shoulder. 'Very much engaged. Vital work. I was refining a new powder intermix, using tetraheldyl in granular form rather than volate-nineteen primer...'\n\nHe glanced at the Imperial Fist, who didn't appear to be paying any attention.\n\n'Because resources are depleting,' he continued. 'We may run out of volate primer entirely in the next eight days. But a viably stable form of tetraheldyl could be used as a coactive accelerant, allowing us in extend the primer supply.'\n\nThe captain still did not respond. He was intently leading the way across the yard to a waiting armoured carrier.\n\n'You don't know much about the composition of explosive charges, do you? asked Land.\n\n'I know what to do with them,' Thane replied. He gestured for Land to board the carrier via the rear hatch. Land clambered up, hauling his kitbag after him, balancing his chirruping artificimian on his shoulder. Thane swung in after him, closed the hatch, and banged his fist twice on the metal partition. The carrier spluttered into life, and began to move.\n\n'So,' said Land, sitting back in the battered, bare-metal compartment. 'You were saying?'\n\n'I was not,' replied Thane. He sat facing Land, his helm clutched on one thigh.\n\n'Well, start,' said Land. 'I was engaged in essential work. Essential war effort work. And you're taking me away from it.'\n\n'Your abilities are required elsewhere, magos,' said Thane.\n\n'I'm not actually a magos,' said Land.\n\nThane frowned. 'You are Arkhan Land?' he said.\n\n'Yes, relax. I prefer the term \"technoarchaeologist\". I'm not, in any precise or official capacity, an ordinate of the highmost Mechanicum though, of course, I am a true servant of the Divine One. \"Magos\" is a... what you would call a \"brevet\" rank, in your parlance. I adopted the title to facilitate my service, attached to the tech-priesthood, for the duration of the war. I am, I assure you, honoured to serve in whatever way I can. Successful prosecution of this hideous conflict is essential so that we can achieve the great goal.'\n\n'The liberation of Mars,' said Thane.\n\n'Ah,' said Land. He smiled, and adjusted the goggles on his brow 'You're feigning ignorance, captain. You've read my file.'\n\n'I have. You are a renegade technicist, and your paramount driver is the salvation of the Mechanicum world.'\n\n'Terra first,' said Land. 'The Throneworld must be protected, or there is no hope for Mars. I am entirely committed to the cause at hand. And \"renegade\"? A little harsh, I feel.'\n\nThere is no record of your assignment to Manufactory Two-Two-Six,' said Thane. 'You just turned up there, and took it upon yourself to work in the development department.'\n\n'One serves the Divine One where best one can, captain,' said Land. 'I had appreciated the impending crisis in munition supply, so I thought I should deploy my expertise there.'\n\n'Without asking.'\n\n'Well,' said Land, folding his arms. 'If you're going to get formal about it.'\n\n'I don't care, Land,' said Thane. 'You're required elsewhere. Formally.'\n\n'Is this Zephon? Did Zephon send you?'\n\n'Zephon?' asked Thane.\n\n'Captain Zephon, the Bringer of Sorrows,' said Land. 'Of the Ninth. A colleague of mine.'\n\nNo,' said Thane.\n\n'Oh. Where is he?'\n\n'If I knew, I wouldn't tell you,' said Thane. This is wartime. Need-to-know basis only.'\n\n'Exactly. I need to know some things,' said Land. 'Like where we're going.'\n\n'I'm not at liberty to discuss anything,' said Thane wearily. 'I'm merely your escort.'\n\n'Well,' said Land. He frowned. 'I will deduce, then. The Divine One has sent for me. He values my specialist expertise. I've met Him, you know? Oh yes. He knows my name. He's sent for me.'\n\n'You deduce this how?'\n\n'From you, captain... I don't know your name.'\n\n'Thane.'\n\n'From you, Captain Thane. You're not merely anything. My escort? No one sends a line captain of the Seventh on a personnel escort duty during time of war. Oh no. A man like you can't be spared for such a lowly function, unless the Divine One requests it personally.\n\n'I'm flattered, of course. But this wasn't necessary. He could have simply summoned me.'\n\n'You talk a lot,' said Thane.\n\nLand pursed his lips. The psyber-monkey on his shoulder chattered, and grimaced at Thane.\n\n'And I don't know what that is,' Thane added, pointing at the artificimian with distaste. 'You'll have to get rid of it.'\n\n'I very much won't,' said Land indignantly. This is my companion. My familiar, if you will. He helps me think.'\n\n'I'm not"}
{"text":"ess the Divine One requests it personally.\n\n'I'm flattered, of course. But this wasn't necessary. He could have simply summoned me.'\n\n'You talk a lot,' said Thane.\n\nLand pursed his lips. The psyber-monkey on his shoulder chattered, and grimaced at Thane.\n\n'And I don't know what that is,' Thane added, pointing at the artificimian with distaste. 'You'll have to get rid of it.'\n\n'I very much won't,' said Land indignantly. This is my companion. My familiar, if you will. He helps me think.'\n\n'I'm not remotely surprised to hear that,' said Thane. He sighed 'Land,' he said, 'I'm here at the behest of the Praetorian. You have been summoned to assist my primarch.'\n\n'Oh,' said Arkhan Land.\n\n* * *\n\n'This one?' asked Amon Tauromachian. Keeler nodded. Amon signailed to the sub-warden at the end of the block to open the cell door.\n\n'We have to start somewhere,' said Keeler. 'I propose to work in simple alphabetical order.'\n\n'This one is a murderer,' said the Custodian. 'Multiple homicides. Other, unsavoury crimes.'\n\n'Everyone in this place is profoundly guilty of something, Cuslodian,' she said. 'I am obliged to work with what I have.'\n\nThe cell door began to grind open. The sound of sobbing echoed down the Blackstone's cold, damp gallery from another cell.\n\nKeeler stepped into the opened cell. Amon hesitated, then followed her, bowing slightly to swing under the frame.\n\n'Edic Aarac?' she said. 'My name is Euphrati Keeler. I've come to interview you.'\n\n* * *\n\nBulk landers and troop ships were lined up across the wide, wind-blown space of the Field of Winged Victory, north of the Palatine. Their loading ramps were open, hatches ratcheted wide like hungry beaks. Thousands of troops and support personnel were lining up to board, huddled in greatcoats, lugging weapons and kit-packs, chitching deployment notices.\n\nCadwalder dismounted his jetbike, and pressed through the throng, his optics whirring as they hunted to make a facial recognition match, trough he was looking for features he knew well enough. The faces all around him were pinched with cold, squinting into the gale that was sweeping the field, a gale generated by the aegis weather systems,\n\nCadwalder had always felt the Field of Winged Victory to be a significant place. From this massive parade ground, in the very shadow of the Palace, great musters and departures had been made, warriors assembling to set off into history, or to make it. The Great Crusade has begun here, so very long ago.\n\nIt was a glorious place to return to, too. The field beneath the Pharos Tower had seen great heroes come home from victory, seen the mass parades that had honoured them, seen the shining laurels and citations bestowed on them.\n\nNo one had returned to the field for a hundred days. With a sick heart, Cadwalder knew that none of the faces around him were destined to return here, ever.\n\nCadwalder had carried the private burden of that knowledge with him since the meeting in the drum tower five days before. He'd set it out of his thoughts, to contain it. He'd only known because he'd been present, by chance. He had been trusted.\n\nBut seeing the men and women marshalling for departure, he felt the weight of it return. He keenly understood his lord primarch's secret grief. To spare just one...\n\nHe spotted his quarry, on the ramp of a Stormbird painted in Excertus drab. He wasn't too late. He had been concerned he might miss the departure of the first flights.\n\n'My lord,' he said, approaching. Waiting troopers parted to let him through.\n\nLord General Saul Niborran turned from the officers he had been chatting to. He wore a long storm coat and the cap of his old regiment.\n\n'My worthy Lord Cadwalder?' he asked, frowning. 'How can I help you?'\n\n'General, I...' Cadwalder hesitated. Now the moment was on him, he wasn't sure what to say. Since Dorn had given him his instructions, he'd been concerned with the simple act of getting to the field in time. He didn't know how to begin.\n\n'My lord general,' said Cadwalder. 'I must inform you there has been a small mistake...'\n\n* * *\n\nHari Harr's warrant got him a seat on one of the transports assembled at Aurum Gard. He'd been told the overland route would be gruelling. The convoy would have to go out of its way to avoid the battle zones in Anterior, and once it entered Magnifican via the Ballad Gate, there would be no guarantee of safety.\n\nThe transport was a battered old Brontosan-pattern, the bulk cargo version of the Dracosan. There were eighteen in the convoy, showing signs of rust and age, the emblem of the Solar Auxilia flaking on their side-plates. A line of Aurox units formed the munition train, and six Garnodon tanks waited, engines coughing, to act as armour support.\n\nThe air stank of exhaust fumes. The transports had been fitted with twin decks of cramped seating areas to maximise personnel conveyance. Men were loading on, jostling, laughing, shoving: Solar Auxilia, mainline Excertus squads, militia, service staff. It was rowdy, almost convivial. Troopers were passing flasks around, telling jokes, boasting of martial feats they were yet to accomplish. Hari perched on a bench seat at the back of the lower deck, squeezed against the hull. He wrote down a few observations on his slate. The mood. The camaraderie. The ebullience. Small details, like a man sewing his cap badge back on, another showing picts of his wife and children, explaining how safe they were in the Palatine shelters; the way they all, as a practised habit, stuffed their kitbags under the crude and uncomfortable bench seats, and then cradled their weapons in their arms like infants; the words of a song someone started to sing; the manner in which a pack of Solar Auxilia veterans ousted militia men, and claimed a block of benches for themselves; the smell of sweat, and of clothes that had been only superficially washed.\n\nA man sat down beside him, taking up too much space.\n\n'Piers' he announced, offering a dirty hand. 'You're not a soldier, boy.'\n\n'No I'm not.'\n\n'What you doing here, then?' the man asked. He was in his late fifties, over weight and solid, an Imperialis Auxilia trooper with a hugely bushy horseshoe moustache. Hari didn't recognise the insignia on the man's patched red greatcoat. He was clutching a bearskin shako, and had an antique plas-caliver that he rested upright between his splayed thighs. The hefty weapon was made bulkier still by the fat grenade launcher unit damped on as an under-barrel mount.\n\n'I've been sent to make reports,' said Hari.\n\n'Reports?' the man replied, brow crinkling in suspicion. 'What, like conduct reports?'\n\n'No, uhm, for posterity,' said Hari.\n\n'Oh,' the man said, frowning, thinking about it. 'Like a... what'sname... remembrancer.'\n\n'Very much like that,' Hari agreed.\n\n'You're young,' said the man. His tone had altered. It had become slightly more avuncular. 'You know what you're getting into, don't you, boy?'\n\n'The main warzone. I understand that.'\n\n'You've seen war, have you?'\n\n'Not up close.'\n\n'It's not nice, boy.'\n\n'You've served have you? Seen action?'\n\n'Served? Oh yes! Olly Piers, corporal, Hundred and Fifth Tercio Upland Grenadiers. I've served me share. Dawn Gate. Helios retreat. Pons Magna, that were a one. Then Marmax, 'course. That's where I lost the leg.'\n\nHari looked down at the man's heavy and all too real legs.\n\n'Your leg?'\n\nThe man guffawed. His breath was sour, almost as unpleasant as the onion-sweat reek of his armpits. 'Oh, ball-bags, boy! Oh my life! If you want to see a war, and record stuff for posterity, there's things you should know, like, for one, soldiers lie. All the time. Everything's bravado. Lies and jokes. Jests and boasts. It's all bluff, boy, to keep the spirits lifted. Reckon as I'll die with a lie on me lips. Reckon you could take every man-jack in this fine and luxurious carrier, and not find a strand of truth in the lot of us.'\n\n'Duly noted,' said Hari.\n\n'Aha ha ha!' the man burst out. 'Unless I'm lying.'\n\n'I have noted that too,' said Hari.\n\nHatches clanged shut. The men aboard cheered as one, uttering war-whoops and praise to the Emperor. The troops packed into the upper deck space stamped their feet, making the thin metal sub-floor shake and flex over Hari's head. Now its engines were running, the entire carrier vibrated.\n\n'We're off, boy!' Piers yelled. He joined in with a rowdy song that was being sung by most of the personnel on board. By the time the lumbering carrier had cleared the cavernous transport bunkers under Aurum Gard, and passed through the fortress' chain of gates, he was asleep, his head dropped on Hari's shoulder.\n\nThe carrier trundled on its way. The vibration and the rumble of the engines didn't ease. Re-circ systems were evidently broken, and the air quickly became close and foul. Excertus adjutants moved down the aisles between the tightly packed men, swaying for balance against the vehicle's motion, hooking open the covers of the gun loops in the hull to improve ventilation. Despite the weight of the slumbering Piers pressing him against the hull, Hari found that, if he craned his head, he could peer out of the nearest slot, and glimpse fragments of the city rolling by: the redoubts and guntowers of Aurum, like tombs in the rain; the grey streets of Anterior, buildings empty or armoured, or both; the passing shadows of bridges and skyways; the deep nocturnal chasm of Nilgiri Himal Way, where it rose through a canyon of towers and manufactories like a river through a gorge. Hari could smell rain and tar, fyceline and exhaust. Every now and then, to the north, he saw sheet flashes in the sky, like summer lightning, though he knew that they weren't. Twice in the first hour, the convoy halted, for no apparent reason, and they waited, engines idling, hearing men shout and argue outside.\n\nPiers slept through it all, compressing Hari into an involuntary body pillow. Hari had one arm free. Tentatively, without waking the corporal, he took out his slate and started to read back throug"}
{"text":"mell rain and tar, fyceline and exhaust. Every now and then, to the north, he saw sheet flashes in the sky, like summer lightning, though he knew that they weren't. Twice in the first hour, the convoy halted, for no apparent reason, and they waited, engines idling, hearing men shout and argue outside.\n\nPiers slept through it all, compressing Hari into an involuntary body pillow. Hari had one arm free. Tentatively, without waking the corporal, he took out his slate and started to read back through old note files.\n\nThree hours into the journey, Hari found a file he had not put on the slate himself.\n\n* * *\n\n'I don't understand, lord,' said Niborran.\n\n'An error,' said Cadwalder. 'In assignment. My lord the Praetorian expresses his apologies.'\n\nNiborran smiled. They had boarded the Stormbird while it was being loaded, and sat alone in the seats at the back of the cabin. The brown leather upholstery of the flight seats was worn and cracked. The 'bird was as old as Cadwalder.\n\n'With respect, the error's yours, I think,' the general said. He had an easy, fluid manner to him that Cadwalder had always liked. 'I was dismissed, lord Huscarl. Removed from my post by the Great Khan himself.'\n\n'As I understand it,' said Cadwalder, 'that was a heated incident. You are a senior officer militant, with great tactical insight, and a valued member of the bastion's command cadre.'\n\n'Well, that's kind of you, lord,' said Niborran, 'but I won't be going back.'\n\n'The dismissal was a lapse, general,' said Cadwalder. The Praetorian has instructed me to tell you that he'd like you to return to your position. He thinks highly of you.'\n\n'You can tell him I'm grateful, Cadwalder, and flattered. But I have my posting.'\n\n'A clerical error-'\n\nNiborran raised his hand, and smiled again. 'I was done, Cadwalder. Honestly. Sixty years of service, the last dozen without a weapon in my hand. The Grand Borealis is a gruelling tour, I don't need to tell you that. It burns the best of us out, and I was burned out. Harder than any front-line post. The Great Khan was right. I don't want any special treatment. I put my name back in the system. Brohn did too. We requested line posts. I think it's time I remembered I was a soldier.'\n\n'No one's forgotten that, general.'\n\n'I think I have,' said Niborran. 'My deployment was selected by the War Courts. They've given me zone command. I'm delighted by that and I won't back out of it. It's where I want to be. At the front again fighting the fight, not orchestrating it. I want a last taste of active service, Lord Cladwalder. I've got nothing useful left to give to the cadre'.\n\n'Well, then, I will organise an assignment to the Anterior Wall, or to Marmax-'\n\nNiborran stared at him. The general was frowning.\n\n'My lord... there's something you're not saying, isn't there?' he observed gently.\n\n'I can't explain, general. I'm sorry. You will come with me now, and we'll cover the necessary reassignments.'\n\n'Cadwalder, the port needs to be defended,' said Niborran. 'It's a priority.'\n\n'It is, yes.'\n\n'And when I was selected for zone command there, I was overjoyed. There, of all places, command of what's likely to be the most crucial fight of the next ten days. Maybe this whole show.'\n\n'Understood, general, but-'\n\nNiborran sat back. His smile had faded. He took off his cap and his leather gloves.\n\n'I think I see what this is,' he said sadly. 'The Great Khan saw my shortcomings at the Grand Borealis. He could see I was done there. I accepted that. I did. But the Praetorian doesn't think I'm fit for this either does he? He thinks I'm burned out full stop. That's the clerical error you're talking about.'\n\n'It's not-'\n\n'Don't dance around, Cadwalder. Please,' said Niborran. 'It's not dignified for you, and it shows me no respect. Just say it. Dorn thinks I'm old and washed out, and not fit to command a zone as vital as the port. Just out with it. I'm a grown-up.'\n\nCadwalder hesitated. Then, in a low voice that only Niborran could hear, he explained. The port would and could not be held. It was going to sacrificed if necessary. The defence operation was for show only, necessary cover and distraction for another operation that Cadwalder wouldn't name.\n\nNiborran listened impassively. The silver irises of his augmetic eyes dilated slightly.\n\n'A show?' he whispered. Cadwalder nodded.\n\n'I've come here as a personal favour to my Lord Dorn,' said the Huscarl. 'He is stricken with... with regret over this matter, as it is. There is no choice, but he is bitter that he has been forced into such a deplorable tactical calculus. Then he learned of your posting. He doesn't want to lose you.'\n\nNiborran sat quietly. He gazed down the cabin, watching the junior officers as they began to board.\n\n'Well,' he said softly. 'Not what I was imagining at all. I am flattered, truly, that he thinks so highly of me. That he'd jeopardise the confidence of what must be a critical operation to pull me out. Tell him I'm honoured and immensely grateful.'\n\n'You can tell him yourself when-'\n\nNiborran reached out and clasped Cadwalder's armoured hand.\n\n'I have to go now, Cadwalder,' he said. 'Do you think I can just disembark and watch these good men go on without me, now I know what I know? Could you do that?'\n\n'General, I-'\n\n'I won't be spared by sentiment. War doesn't work that way. I have to go. The port needs the best defence, no matter what its strategic fate.'\n\n'I shouldn't have told you,' said Cadwalder.\n\n'Maybe not, but I'm strangely glad you did. I know my worth now and I know the odds. Few commanders ever get that luxury. Thank you, Lord Cadwalder. Now, you get off before the ramp shuts. And tell Lord Dorn I am thankful for his faith and his consideration. Maybe...' Niborran chuckled slightly. 'Maybe, if I'm as valuable as he thinks I am, I can win the unwinnable anyway.'\n\nCadwalder breathed heavily. He wanted to argue. He considered picking Niborran up and physically removing him from the craft. He didn't have to respect Niborran's rank. Legion and Excertus were different branches, and Legion always took precedent. But his primarch had insisted, from day one, that loyalist victory had to be based on mutual regard and cooperation between command structures. It was an imperative. Niborran was about as senior as a human could be. No option seemed appropriate. Everything he might do seemed an unforgivable insult to Niborran's uncomplicated heroism.\n\nJust... something about it, if it's not too late. Safeguard him.\n\nThe Praetorian's instractions echoed in the Huscarl's mind.\n\n'I know that look, Cadwalder,' said Niborran. 'Don't keep trying, my lord. You've had your answer.'\n\nCadwalder nodded. He got up.\n\n'Have a good war, lord Huscarl,' said Niborran. 'To your glory, and to the glory of Him on Terra.'\n\n'And to yours, general,' Cadwalder replied. He turned to the acceleration seats, built into the rear bulkhead of the cabin to accommodate Space Marines, and began to strap himself in.\n\n'What are you doing?' asked Niborran.\n\nDo something about it. Safeguard him.\n\n'Coming with you,' said Cadwalder.\n\n* * *\n\nThe guns had begun to speak. All along the lines at Gorgon Bar, guntowers and watch bastions started to unleash into the towering, murky dust banks beyond the distant outworks. Wash-smoke pooled back from redoubts, and wreathed from casemate turrets. The noise and concussion was physically painful.\n\nCeris Gonn had made her way up to the parapet line of the Bar's central fortification. From the fighting step, she could see across kilometres of tiered defences: three further walls and the hazard-line of the outworks beyond, vanishing into the haze. The wall lines below her were packed with troops. She could make out the glint of red and yellow plate, a huge number of Legiones Astartes, along with the grey, drab and beige units of the Imperial Army. She wasn't sure how anything could ever get through a defended fortification this massive.\n\nShe was also disappointed. She'd wanted to get to the front, to see the front, but the true edge of Gorgon was kilometres away at the fighting line of the outworks and first wall. Her requests to move down from the principal fortress had been denied, despite her warrant.\n\nThen again, the scale of it numbed her: to stand at the lip of the bastion, to see the millions below her, to feel the deluge of the guns. She pulled up the hood of her quilted jacket. The noise and blast shock was unremitting. It hurt her teeth and her diaphragm. The air stank of something that smelled like burned plastic, a dry chemical odour that caught in her throat, and made her eyes run.\n\nSomeone spoke to her. She turned. A subaltern of the Imperial Militia was staring at her, annoyed. She frowned, a hand to her ear. She couldn't hear him over the constant, air-splitting thunder of the guns.\n\n'I said you can't be up here!' the man yelled.\n\nThis again. She showed him her papers.\n\n'I don't care,' he replied, shoving the warrant back into her hands. 'The Bar's no place for civilians or observers.'\n\n'I am very far away from anything,' she shouted back. 'I can't see a thing. What are they even firing at?'\n\nHe frowned at her. 'The attack,' he yelled. 'Are you an idiot? The attack.'\n\nShe couldn't see any attack. She could see smoke, banks of it, streaming off the outworks, huge clouds of roiling black. A few sparks, little dots of light.\n\nWait-\n\nShe pulled out the scope Mandeep had lent her, and zoomed it into the distant line. The view was only slightly better. It was too fuzzy and she couldn't stop her hands from jumping at every salvo. But in the confusion of the smoke, she could see the little sparks more clearly. She realised what she was looking at. Blizzards of las-fire, swarming around the outworks and the first wall, thousands of shots flickering out, and being returned.\n\nCeris laughed. She'd been on the wall for fifteen minutes and hadn't realised she was looking directly at a massive engagement. A battle, right there. Not a skirmish, a full-scale war"}
{"text":"oo fuzzy and she couldn't stop her hands from jumping at every salvo. But in the confusion of the smoke, she could see the little sparks more clearly. She realised what she was looking at. Blizzards of las-fire, swarming around the outworks and the first wall, thousands of shots flickering out, and being returned.\n\nCeris laughed. She'd been on the wall for fifteen minutes and hadn't realised she was looking directly at a massive engagement. A battle, right there. Not a skirmish, a full-scale war front.\n\n'How do I get closer?' she yelled at the man.\n\nHe yelled back.\n\n'What?' she shouted.\n\n'You don't!' he barked. 'Throne's sake, what are you? A fool? You're not even safe here! You're not supposed to be-'\n\n'I'm allowed,' she shouted back. 'Approved! And I need to get closer!'\n\nMaybe the third wail, she thought. At least the third wall. Still a long way from the leading edge, but good enough. Get in among the troops, to watch them operate. See some Space Marines closer up. Witness something worthwhile she could document. Maybe even speak to them when the action lulled. Hear their experiences first hand. Perhaps... perhaps even glimpse the Great Angel. She'd heard he was here, commanding the repulse in person. Just to see him even from a distance.\n\nBut not this distance. She couldn't see much of anything from this distance. She might as well have stayed in the Sanctum and used her imagination.\n\n'I need to get down to the third wall,' she shouted at the subaltern. 'Please show me the way.'\n\nHe look her by the arm.\n\n'Hey! You need to leave!' the subaltern yelled. 'This is not a safe.'\n\n'Get off!' she snapped.\n\nHe started to drag her along. 'You can't just stand there!' he shouted. 'Poking your head up for a look! The Bar's rated mortalis from front to back! I'm having you escorted down to the back-bunkers.'\n\nShe started to tell him what he could do with his back-bunkers. But something odd happened.\n\nThe noise stopped. The crushing thunder surrounding them simply ceased. There was a perfect moment of quiet.\n\nThen she could hear ringing in her ears. Dull at first, then louder, like sounds from another room. Her face was wet.\n\nShe was lying on her back.\n\nSounds rushed back, muffled and soft. She sat up.\n\nTwenty metres away, an entire section of the wall was missing. It had simply vanished. All that remained was the rough, bitten edges of rockcrete, and the twisted ends of sheared rebar, still glowing. The wall top was shrouded in smoke. Everywhere there was grit, dust, lumps of rubble and shards of stone. As she sat up, pebbles and debris trickled off her jacket.\n\nShe flinched, and cried out as another shell struck the wall, a hundred metres away. A vast cloud of flame, rising from a flash-burst into a slow toadstool. She felt the air bulge with pressure. More debris rained down. A guntower, six thousand tonnes of masonry, plate and cannon cradle, titled slowly, and then fill like an avalanche.\n\nCeris got up. Her legs were rubbery. Her ears were so hurt, everything sounded like it was under water. She looked for the subaltern. He had been clutching her arm.\n\nHalf of him was lying on the parapet to her left. Something, perhaps a sheet of fractured ceramite plate, thrown out by the impact at the speed of a bullet, had cut him in two. His head and most of one arm lay to her right. There was blood everywhere, the settling dust sticking to it like a film. It was all over her, the whole front of her, from head to toe, painted in it.\n\nTroops and medicae were rushing onto the wall top, yelling unintelligible muffled sounds, running to the fallen. They were all around. Men and women crumpled in the dust, blood pooling from crush and debris wounds. There had been three or four dozen people on the wall top when the shell hit. She was the only one who had got back on her feet.\n\n'Move,' a voice said.\n\nShe turned, swaying. The Blood Angel towered over her. He placed a huge, gauntleted hand around her shoulder to steer her away.\n\n'What?' she said. Her own voice sounded dull and muted.\n\n'They have ranged the main line. You cannot stay here.'\n\nShe nodded. She looked back at the subaltern.\n\n'He-'\n\n'Move.'\n\nHe led her off the wall top towards the rear defiles and blast-boxes. The injured were being brought in. Some were being carried. Some were walking unaided, but as though in trances. Some wept. Several were screaming. She saw facial wounds, burn injuries, medicae teams fighting to cinch off mangled limbs that were hissing arterial blood. Everyone was coated in dust, rescued and rescuers alike.\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' she said.\n\n'What?' asked the Blood Angel.\n\n'You said-'\n\n'The foe is close to the outwork line,' he said, his voice an expressionless crackle from his visor. 'Artillery.'\n\n'But it's so far away,' she said.\n\n'If our wall-guns are firing, so are theirs. We both possess weapons of great range. Why are you here? You are not militia.'\n\n'I have no idea any more,' Ceris replied. She looked up at him. 'What's your name, please?'\n\n'Zephon,' he replied. He cocked his head, hearing something that all of the humans around him, including her, could not. Instinctively, he took her in his arms, pulled her to his chest, and turned to put his back towards the wall.\n\nThe next shell hit a second later, and fire took everything away.\n\n* * *\n\nI am leaving now. I haven't asked permission. I am my own permission. His grace fills me, as it always has done, and I know where I must go. I tell almost no one. No one will miss me or wonder where I am. It is hard to miss those who are never noticed. No one will come to the sanctuary asking for Krole with their hands or their mouths.\n\nI tell Aphone. My hands tell her. In my stead, she will lead the Raptor Guard. If my duty is failing, or His grace does not sustain me, she will almost certainly be Vigil Commander after me. I think she is perplexed by my departure. I say, my hands say, it is the right thing. Not just to serve, but to serve where one is most needed.\n\nI do not tell her the rest. My fingers are too clumsy to express the idea. Satisfaction. A fulfilment. Something more complicated than cold duty. The hollowness in me has always yearned for that. It is not vainglory, nor is it weary eagerness to meet certain death. Nothing is certain. Can I even explain it to myself? Not easily. I can justify it. The infamous Lupercal will suspect a ruse if the port is not adequately defended, and my kind is part of that defence. There will be daemons there. I also think, some proud part of me thinks, that it is not decided, no matter what Rogal has declared. We have won greater victories against worst odds.\n\nI have won greater victories.\n\nIt is not vainglory. I am certain of that. If I fall, no one will remember me to heap plaudits on my name. No myths will form. My name won't vanish, for it has scarcely ever been.\n\nI watch Aphone's hands. Should she pick a unit and come with me?\n\nMy hands say no. We cannot spare any main force. Later, He will seed us here.\n\nA squad then?\n\nMy thoughtmark is insistent. No. I must arm now.\n\nShe helps me secure my hair, and clothes me in my artificer armour, piece by piece, the old, slow ritual. She hangs the voidsheen cloak around my shoulders, and pins it. We choose my instruments: Veracity, of course she will be with me to the end; Mortale, the aeldari sabre, as a second blade at my back; No Man's Hand, the long dagger, for my hip, my arheotech pistol, long-snouted and ornate, older than the Imperium, which has never had a name, for it speaks for itself.\n\nAphone looks at me, and nods. I realise she is actually looking at me. Seeing me That is so rare. One null to another. I have not really noticed the shape of her face before. This seeing is distressing. I fear, in that moment, she sees me so well she can see the truth. The secret Rogal struggles to keep. The coming danger. The impossibility. My selfish urge to do something that no one else can.\n\nIf she does, she does not speak of it. She shakes out the folds of my cloak, smooths the fit across the shoulder.\n\nThen she embraces me. I don't know what to do. Neither of us are used to this. Contact with another. Connection. We are all so used to being utterly alone. I hold her. Our embrace is tight, like frightened children. It lasts, perhaps, ten seconds. It is the most intimate moment of life.\n\nShe steps back.\n\nHer hands say, Come back.\n\nMine reply, I will.\n\nI walk the dark halls. My feet make no sound. In the gloom, the ancient statues pay me as much heed as any living thing has ever done. The soaring ouslite walls, monolithic, seem so permanent. I reach out and touch one, cold stone, my hand flat. This place will not fall. My fingers make the vow.\n\nThe landing docks are quiet. I have sent a transmission, in orskode, to order the servitors to prepare a Talion for me. The gunship waits on a platform, underlit in the darkness, its flanks slate grey, the leaves of its prow retracted to expose the iris valve entry. The servitors are detaching the feed cables, and locking the munition hoppers, sliding them back into the hull recesses. They do not notice me.\n\nThen I see Tsutomu. He is sitting at the edge of the platform.\n\nI walk up to him. Only when I am very close does he react, belatedly seeing the grease-shadow in the air that he has been watching for,\n\nWhy are you here, prefect? my hands enquire.\n\n'I am compelled,' he says. 'Like you, I think. We are both party to the same sad secret.' I find it amusing that, even though he is looking at me, he, even he, can barely keep me in focus.\n\nWe were both present, my hands agree.\n\nThen, you understand,' he says.\n\nYou were just a sentinel at the door, I mark.\n\n'And you were just a veil, but we were both there anyway.'\n\nI do understand. The Legio Custodes, they are not manufactured blood-warriors like those of the fine Legiones Astartes. They are intricate and individual expressions of His will, they are extensions of His grace. That is why they so often operate alone, autonomou"}
{"text":"looking at me, he, even he, can barely keep me in focus.\n\nWe were both present, my hands agree.\n\nThen, you understand,' he says.\n\nYou were just a sentinel at the door, I mark.\n\n'And you were just a veil, but we were both there anyway.'\n\nI do understand. The Legio Custodes, they are not manufactured blood-warriors like those of the fine Legiones Astartes. They are intricate and individual expressions of His will, they are extensions of His grace. That is why they so often operate alone, autonomously, going precisely where they are needed.\n\nWhere He wills them to be.\n\nJust as my lamed hands are the instruments I use to speak, they are the digits He uses to communicate. Tsutomu was not the prefect at the door that day by random assignment. Fate placed him, so he could overhear, just as I overheard.\n\n'My mind has dwelt on the matter since then,' he says. 'A certainty has formed. A-'\n\nCompulsion? my hands finish.\n\n'Yes.'\n\nHe has, of course, been monitoring the dock stations. He has seen my orskode command. We will go together, it seems.\n\nI turn to board. He is not following. He has lost track of me. I look back, and snap my fingers loudly.\n\nCome on then, my hands say.\n\nHe nods, picks up his helm and his castellan axe, and walks up the ramp behind me.\n\n* * *\n\n'Damn the bastard,' said Gaines Burtok. 'Screw Him, screw His eyes. His plan? His dream? A dream of shit.'\n\nHe sat back.\n\n'You did ask,' he said, with a sneer.\n\nThe cell was damp. The oppressive black stone glistened with moisture. The reek of the rusted slop bucket in the corner was wrenching.\n\n'I don't think this is the kind of sentiment you wish to record,' said Amon quietly.\n\nKeeler shrugged. 'I don't know,' she said. 'Should history be selective? Shouldn't it be written by everyone in order to be true? Not just the victors?'\n\n'Or the High Elite?' put in Burtok. He grinned. His teeth were tobacco brown.\n\n'Or them,' Keeler nodded. She glanced at Amon. 'I think the purpose is to record everything, without exercise of censor or mediation. As starting point, at least. Plus, this is the fifth interview, Custodian, and Mister Burtok is the first subject to provide us with anything like a vehement opinion on anything, even if it does make your hackles rise.'\n\nShe looked back at the prisoner. Burtok was sitting on the cell's soiled cot. She was sitting on the small chair that she had insisted Amon fetch from the guard post after the third interview and the third hour.\n\n'Your passionate distaste for the world,' she said, 'for society? Is that why you butchered those women?'\n\nBurtok nodded. 'Indeed so, miss. An expression of my inner rage. My contempt for the conventions of this shit-hearted civilisation. A scream of anarchy. It was my life's work, really. I conducted it for many years, until I was caught. My so-called crimes were a protest, an articulation of the rage so many people feel. I'm a political prisoner.'\n\n'Not really,' said Amon.\n\n'You carried out these killings over thirty-five years,' said Keeler.\n\n'One hundred and sixty-three, I did. They only found eight of them. Shall I talk about my methods?'\n\nKeeler raised her hand.\n\n'Not yet,' she said. 'Talk more about your protest. If it was a protest, how was it being made? You concealed the bodies of your victims. Only a few were discovered, by happenstance. Your statement, if it was a statement, was invisible.'\n\nBurtok tutted.\n\n'I thought you were smart, miss,' he said. 'They know. They shitting-well heard. The High Elite, they see everything.'\n\n'You keep using this phrase, \"the High Elite\"-'\n\nThe secret rulers of the world,' said Burtok. 'The ones of wealth and influence. High-born, inherited power, handed down through generations. A tiny minority, making decisions for the rest of us. He's one of them. The most powerful of all. And now, not so secret. All their work down the ages has been to get Him to the top. Unassailable supremacy. Absolute power. Surrounded and guarded by His witches and His mind-priests. They treat us like cattle. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of the species, treated like livestock, to feed them and sustain them and get them where they want to be. And it'll get worse. If you think we lack rights now, lack a voice, just wait.'\n\n'You seem very sure of these facts,' said Keeler.\n\n'I've lived in this world,' said Burtok. 'Where have you been? You can see it everywhere. If this cell had a window, I'd invite you to look through it. This Palace? It's obscene. The paraded wealth, the flaunting of grandeur. And yet, there are famines. Pestilence. Hives where the poor eat dirt. Nomad cities of beggars in the Asiat. Whole sectors of Europa without clean water. Infant mortality. How is that a great Imperium? A great dream? Shit on Him. Screw Him and His dream of shit. This serves only Him. Everyone else is an expendable slave.'\n\n'You don't believe He's a god, then?' she asked.\n\n'I think He wants to be,' said Burtok. 'I've heard there are some who treat Him as such. That won't last long. Another few generations, no one will remember what He used to be. Everyone will accept it. Do as you're told, because He's god. Do your duty, because He's god. Die, because He's god. Worship Him-'\n\n'What was it that He used to be?' asked Amon. It was the first question he'd asked any of the subjects.\n\n'You should know,' said Burtok. 'Weren't you there? A warlord. A king. A conqueror. Chasing power, bringing rivals into line by force. Unification? That's a euphemism. Power grab. He's strong, I grant you. Him and the High Elite. Unnatural strong.'\n\n'You acknowledge He has abilities that are beyond human,' said Keeler. 'But you do not accept Him as a divine being.'\n\n'He has wealth,' said Burtok. 'Wealth like His, you can create those abilities. Build technologies that run like magic. Make scourging demigods like him.'\n\nHe gestured to the Custodian.\n\n'These days,' Burtok said mournfully, 'there's few that can see it for what it is. See that truth. See beyond the global lie. Few who are as courageous as me to rage against it.'\n\nKeeler nodded.\n\n'Amon is a fearsome being,' she said. 'I am wary of him, his size, his splendour. You say these things without fear that, if what you say is true, he might strike you down for saying the unsayable.'\n\n'I'm not afraid of a little passing pain,' said Burtok. 'Let him strike me. I've been in here twenty years, isolation. How much worse could it be for me?'\n\n'I would invite you to look out of the window,' said Keeler, 'but as you point out, there isn't one. And if you saw what was happening outside, around the walls of the city, I fear it would only convince you further that you were right.'\n\nShe rose, and picked up her chair.\n\n'But I assure you, Mister Burtok, it can be very much worse, and it may soon be very much worse. The future you fear is not the future that is bearing down on us. Thank you for your candour.'\n\n'Won't you stay?' Burtok called. 'I haven't yet told you of my methods. The details of how I went about my protest-'\n\nAmon looked back at him.\n\n'How was skinning your victims part of your statement?' he asked.\n\n'That?' Burtok shrugged. 'Oh, that bit was just for fun.'\n\n* * *\n\nAfter five hours, the convoy came to a halt. A ten-minute rest, they were told. The troopers scrambled off the carriers to flex stiff joints, to urinate, or to empty the bottles they had urinated into along the way.\n\nIt wasn't clear where they were. A haze lay over them, a low and overcast sky that grew darker to the north. The area was rubble, as far as the eye could see. The ghost marks of streets. Burned-out wrecks of machines, military and civilian.\n\n'South of Palatine Tower,' said Piers. He had got off the carrier without a word to Hari. He stood, buttoning up his fly. He nodded his head. 'That there, boy. Palatine Tower. Ten kilometres, maybe.'\n\nHari looked, but he couldn't see anything except atmospheric murk.\n\nEvery part of him ached. Five hours of discomfort, sweltering airless heat, and being used as a bolster by a man twice his size.\n\n'How much longer?' he asked.\n\nPiers shrugged. He had put on his shako at an accidentally jaunty angle, and was carving slices off a foul-smelling cured sausage with his bayonet. Around them, troopers milled, stretched, pissed. One of the escort tanks grumbled past, kicking up dust.\n\n'Interesting that,' remarked Piers, through a mouthful of sausage. 'That thing what you were reading.'\n\nHari glared at him. The grenadier had been asleep for over four hours, the weight of his head never shifting from Hari's shoulder.\n\n'Just resting my eyes, boy,' Piers grinned. 'You should be careful with that, though. A theist tract, eh? Get yourself into trouble. That stuff is banned, as contrary to the Imperial Truth. Could get yourself shot.'\n\n'I didn't put it there,' Hari said.\n\n'Will not stand up in court,' Piers replied. A fleck of sausage had got caught in the bristles of his moustache. He hacked off another slice, offered it to Hari on the tip of his blade.\n\nHari shook his head.\n\n'Actually', Hari said, 'it's not banned. The preaching of it is banned, but the belief itself is tolerated.'\n\n'You a believer, then, boy?' asked Piers, his cheeks stuffed with sausage.\n\n'No,' said Hari. He'd read the file through twice since he'd found it. It appeared to be a copy of the so-called Lectitio Divinitatus. He had no way of telling if it was complete, or what complete even meant. He wondered how it had found its way onto his slate. His first thought had been Sindermann, but that seemed unlikely. Sindermann would have just given it to him, and asked for opinions. Hari wondered about the woman in the Blackstone. Keeler. She'd taken his slate from him. Had she secretly loaded a copy? Perhaps from a data-storage ring hidden under those mittens? Prisoners smuggled things into their isolation, especially items dear to them. If it had been her, why had she done it?\n\n'Are you?' Hari asked.\n\nPiers stopped chewing, and swallowed. He wiped his mouth 'A believer?' he asked. That's a question an"}
{"text":"ly. Sindermann would have just given it to him, and asked for opinions. Hari wondered about the woman in the Blackstone. Keeler. She'd taken his slate from him. Had she secretly loaded a copy? Perhaps from a data-storage ring hidden under those mittens? Prisoners smuggled things into their isolation, especially items dear to them. If it had been her, why had she done it?\n\n'Are you?' Hari asked.\n\nPiers stopped chewing, and swallowed. He wiped his mouth 'A believer?' he asked. That's a question and a half. Do I believe He's a god? The god? I don't know what any of that means. Is He high above us all, a Master of Mankind, divine in His grace? Well, I have to believe so. Otherwise, what's the point of any of this?'\n\n'Is He not just-' Hari began.\n\n'What? What is He?' Piers asked. He sat down on a block of rubble, eased off one boot, and tipped grit out of it. His thick, dirty toes stuck out through holes in what once had been socks.\n\n'I'm from the Uplands, I am,' he said. 'Born and raised. Upland Tercio, hooo! There's faith up there still. In a lot of places. Don't give me that eye, boy. You know it. People have to believe, it's wired into them. They need it, that's my slant on the matter.'\n\n'They need it?'\n\nThe grenadier nodded, and began to make a clumsy effort to get his boot back on.\n\n'We've always needed something,' he said. 'Deep down. You do. I do. Everyone. The faiths, the old religions of the back-then days, they're all gone. Erased. They was a crutch, so it's been said, we didn't need. They was holding us back from our potential as a species.'\n\nHari raised the slate and wrote that down.\n\n'You like that, eh?' asked Piers. 'You like that, do you? I read that in a book once. Don't look surprised, boy, you know I can read. I was doing it over your shoulder.'\n\n'So, faith persists?' asked Hari.\n\nPiers nodded. 'It's a part of us we don't let go. We need it, I think, like air. Like food. Look at us here. Would we be doing this, any of us, if we didn't have faith in something bigger than us? Something bigger, with a plan for us?'\n\n'We had orders' said Hari.\n\n'You didn't.'\n\nHari sighed.\n\n'In the Grenadiers, when I joined up,' Piers said, 'we had a confraternity. Just private, unofficial.'\n\n'Like a warrior lodge?'\n\n'No!' Piers snapped. 'Not like that Astartes bullshit. Just an association. We offered thanks, for surviving battles and such, to Mythrus. Some way she was a god. From a long, long time ago. A god who watched over warriors.'\n\n'She?'\n\n'I called her she. I call my weapon she.' Piers patted the heavy caliver leaning against the rubble beside him. 'I believe in Old Bess before anything else. Gender's not the point here-'\n\n'Gender is fluid?'\n\n'Shit,' Piers groaned, and shook his head wearily. 'Let's stick to one matter at a time. Your mind's everywhere. Mythrus looked after us. I don't know if she was a god, or used to be a god, or what. I don't know if any of us even really thought she was a god. But it made us feel better. A little faith, see? To keep us warm through a cold night in the trench, to keep us safe in a firefight.'\n\n'Two minutes!' an officer yelled out from behind them. Piers got his boot back on.\n\n'Gods come and go,' said Piers. 'Religions, creeds, they come and go. Sometimes they die out. Sometimes they fade, or get suppressed. Sometimes they lose their identity, or we forget about them. But they linger, that's what I think. They remain, under the surface. They are there, for when we need them again. So sometimes, they come back. They might have old names, like my girl Mythrus. They might take new ones. The creeds don't matter, see? That's just dressing, ritual palaver. The need in us, that's what counts. The Emperor, is He a god? I don't know. Maybe we're making Him into one. Maybe He's become one along the way. Or maybe we're mistaking Him for one. Does that matter? Or perhaps, just saying, He was a god all along, and we're only just realising it.'\n\n'You think that?' asked Hari.\n\nPiers raised his hands.\n\n'I'm not coming down on any side of it,' he said. 'I'm just suggesting that it's us. We need something. Need something to believe in. He's either truly that thing, or-'\n\n'Or?'\n\n'Or He'll do, boy. We look around, and He's the obvious choice. The only choice. He fills our need, see? He's the new name we've latched onto to keep us strong. He's god, by default. We need Him to be, or all of this is mass insanity.'\n\nThe officers were calling again. Troops were trudging back to the carriers, complaining.\n\n'Are you lying again?' asked Hari.\n\n'Yes,' Piers grinned. 'Or was that a lie too?' He got up, stretched robustly and gleefully ripped the loudest, longest fart Hari had ever heard.\n\n'Better out than in,' he declared.\n\n'Better out here than in there,' said Hari.\n\n* * *\n\nThe hatches slammed. The vibrations resumed. They began to roll. Piers filled the seat next to him, lolled, and was soon resting the dead weight of his head on Hari's shoulder. Hari held the slate, hunched up, and began to read through the file again.\n\nHe could see Piers' reflection in the glow of the small screen.\n\nHis eyes open.\n\n* * *\n\nCorbenic Card had fallen on the eighteenth of Secundus. Fallen easily, brutally. The first of the bastions that protected the approaches to the Lion's Gate, proud and haughty, it was gone, its defenders put to the sword, Now it formed a vantage from which to oversee the mass assault on the Colossi Gate, a far greater prize.\n\nCorbenic's fabric had been shattered. Its walls were split, and barely any of the roofs remained. Dust was everywhere, dust like chalk powder. It coated every surface, and drifted in the air. The light was sallow. From the broken ramparts, Ahriman watched the advances below: tides of infantry, of war machines, rolling past the ruins of Corbenic like the delta of a vast, black river, flowing from its source to the north, at the Lion's Gate space port, then down the floodplain of the broken Palace to encircle Colossi.\n\nGround attack craft flew past, heavy and fat, droning and glinting like blowflies. Eighty, then another eighty, growling south at low level.\n\n'I undestand the Great Khan has already presented his credentials,' Ahriman remarked.\n\nMortarion slowly torned his immense frame from the rampart's splintered edge, and glowered at Ahriman. The white dust caked Mortanion's armour and his face like the dry clay of a tomb. He had rested his scythe against the cracked wall nearby, but Ahriman knew the huge weapon could be in the Pale King's hands, and striking in a nanosecond.\n\n'Goading me is not advisable,' Mortarion said.\n\n'Not a goad,' Ahzek Ahriman replied, though it had been. The scythe, named Silence, was preposterously huge, even by the theatrical standards of the Legiones Astartes warrior-kind. Ahriman wondered if Mortarion would ever understand what true strength was, the strength they had come to be blessed with. Under the drape of his cloak, Ahriman's hands were empty, but just as ready as the Pale King's blade. The idea of pushing the spectral prince was tempting but this was not the moment. 'Not a goad at all,' Ahriman repealed 'An observation.'\n\n'Hmm.' The primarch-lord of the XIV Legion grunted, then sneered. 'Yes, he's there. Jaghatai. He has tested my line, the usual show. A mere sortie. This will see an end of it, though. These next few days.'\n\n'Of the war, my lord?'\n\n'What? Yes, that too.'\n\nAhriman knew where the Pale King's focus lay. Mortarion despised almost everything, but the war had bred in him a particular animus with the Khan and his Scar-brood, and that had festered into a complex obsession, a battle too long unfinished. It was useful to harness that, to keep the Pale King's eyes on a singular goal and prevent him from lashing out at those around him, most of whom he reviled.\n\nLike the Thousand Sons. Their battlefield alliance, Death Guard and Thousand Sons, so ordained by the Lord of Iron, would inevitably be a difficult thing to manage.\n\n'Ah,' said Ahriman. 'You mean, specifically-'\n\n'Of course I do,' murmured Mortarion. 'Let them laugh, let them try to laugh, as my blades cleave their faces. They have lasted this long only by running from me. There is nowhere left to run.'\n\n'I'm sure your victory will be severe, lord,' said Ahriman. 'But I urge you, the Great Khan's warriors have more talents than mere speed of mobility They don't have our numbers. Your numbers. But they have always displayed great merit in warfare...'\n\n'Urge me not, Ahriman,' said Mortarion. 'I seek no advice from witches.'\n\n'Yet here we are,' said Ahriman.\n\n'We are,' the primarch replied. 'Where is he?'\n\n'Approaching, lord. Be patient.'\n\n'That's twice you've told me what to do,' said the Pale King. 'There won't be a third time.'\n\n'Understood,' said Ahriman. Mortarion turned back to the wall. Ahriman saw him wince. He could taste the suffering in him. He could smell it. A pestilential stench leaked from the Death Lord's armour. Flies buzzed around the seams and joints of his panoply. He was decaying inside, and would decay forever. The torment was unimaginable. It was extraordinary that anyone, even a being as insanely as Mortarion, could endure it and remain standing.\n\nWe all get our gifts, Ahriman thought, each one tailored to our needs by the Great Ocean, all ruinous, in their way, but some more callous that others. I am whole, at least. Blessed with exquisite wonder. Gifted beyond measure.\n\nAhriman raised his left hand, his iridescent robe parting like mist. He let the motes of dust that thickened the air around them fall on his open palm the dust of Terra. The home world. From which we came, and to which we now return. And all will be dust in our triumph.\n\nThe Crimson King had sent Ahriman ahead of him to Corbenic Gard to gauge Mortarion's present demeanour. Though now riddled with it himself, the Pale King still deplored warp-craft and witchery a blight he considered personified by the Thousand Sons. It was utter hypocrisy, of course. Mortarion had swum deep in the same into"}
{"text":"t thickened the air around them fall on his open palm the dust of Terra. The home world. From which we came, and to which we now return. And all will be dust in our triumph.\n\nThe Crimson King had sent Ahriman ahead of him to Corbenic Gard to gauge Mortarion's present demeanour. Though now riddled with it himself, the Pale King still deplored warp-craft and witchery a blight he considered personified by the Thousand Sons. It was utter hypocrisy, of course. Mortarion had swum deep in the same intoxicating Ocean was like an addict... no, an inebriate. A rabid advocate of strict temperance who had then fallen to drink, who then raged for weeks at a time in drunken excess, only to hate himself when the bout was done, and swear never to touch another drop again, until the next relapse came.\n\nPitiful. To obtain such gifts and not appreciate them. Mortarion's tragedy was that he had become what he had spent his life opposing. He hated himself. He could not reconcile his own drastic transmutation in his mind. The pestilential stench seeping from his plate was, as much as anything, shame.\n\nFor our part, thought Ahriman, you are the enemy, Pale King. How ironic you are content to be known by that title now, the name of the very monsters you used to hunt with such glee. Mortarion, witch-burner, purger of wisdom. Louder than any other voice, yours was raised against our being from the very start. There were other accusers too: Dorn, Russ, Corax, Manus, but none as loud or as self-righteous as you. Because of you, Prospero burned and Tizca fell. Russ was the implement, and dread Horus the architect, but you were the instigator who fomented the prejudice to begin with. We have longed to see you punished for that, and this is sweet indeed. Look what has become of you: Manus is long dead; Corax and Russ are broken, and lost from the field of war; Dorn is cornered and sweating out his last hours in a prison of his own making as oblivion descends.\n\nBut you. You couldn't even cling on to your principles, unlike them. You, the loudest critic of all, have become one with us. Your strength counted for nothing. You have submitted to the warp, and you loathe yourself for doing so. And we can now watch with relish as you rot and hate yourself for ever.\n\nBehind his gold-and-azure mask, Ahzek Ahriman smiled. Placing the main strengths of the Thousand Sons and Death Guard Legions side by side in the same formation had seemed an insensitive decision, typical of the Lord of Iron's blunt and tone-deaf paradigms. This great siege was Perturabo's to orchestrate. He expected his ally lords to set aside their differences and work together without complaint.\n\nOf course, the Lord of Iron had not made that decision, though he thought he had. With a deft twitch of his fingers and a touch of his mind, Ahriman had adjusted Perturabo's precious and detailed mental scheme at their last meeting without the Lord of Iron even knowing it.\n\nDespite the presence of the Death Guard, the Thousand Sons had chosen to fight here.\n\n'Do you hear voices?' Mortarion asked, without looking around.\n\n'No.' Ahriman lied.\n\n'I keep hearing voices,' said Mortarion.\n\n'Just the wind,' said Ahriman.\n\n'In my sleep?'\n\n'Do you sleep, lord?' Ahriman asked gently.\n\n'No,' Mortarion admitted.\n\nThe voices were there. Ahriman could hear them all. The Neverborn were gathering to the north, building like a storm at his back, seeping under the telaethesic ward where it had fractured at the port, and manifesting to advance.\n\nHe could hear their voices. It was not his turn to answer them yet. He longed to shackle them and wrench their secrets from them, There would be time for that, when the war was done. For now, they were malformed, new-fleshed, learning to live and move in realspace. Some, like old Samus, chattered incessantly, repeating his dirge over and again: 'That's the only name you'll hear. Samus. It means the end and the death. Samus is all around you. Samus is the man beside you. Samus will gnaw on your bones. Look out! Samus is here.' Others, like Balphagora and Ka'Bandha, Sahrakoor Elekh and Amnaich, spoke in tongues Ahriman had yet to master. Some sang. Some mewled like abandoned infants. Some, like Ku'Gath and Rotigus and Scabeiathrax, made the whirring drone of insect plagues or the infrasonic croak of frogs. N'Kari and Orbonzal and a thousand others gibbered, issuing noises of inhuman pain, of despair, of glee, of anger, of hunger. Inarticulate sounds. They had yet to find their languages.\n\nA million immortal voices. A million million. One rose from the cacophony, quiet and clear.\n\nIs he prepared?\n\nHe is, my king, willed Ahriman. As much as he ever will be.\n\nI approach.\n\nThe air writhed open. The motes of dust swirled, flurried, and swam together, forming a great, pointed archway that looked as though it had been fused from calcified bone. Cold light burned through the arch.\n\nMortarion turned, raising his hand to shield his eyes against the glare. Ahriman bowed.\n\nThe light shafting through the skeletal arch dimmed, sucking back like a tide to be absorbed into the figure that stepped out. The arch cooled, blistered, turned to vitreous stone, then flaked and blew away into the air like ash.\n\nThe Crimson King had arrived. Ahriman could not look upon him His glory was too raw and bright.\n\n'You are late,' said Mortarion.\n\n'My brother,' said Magnus. His radiance dulled. Just as he had chosen the magnificence of his arrival to establish unequivocal power, now he selected his form carefully: a human face, one eye socket simply empty; a helm of wide, downturned ivory tusks to subliminally suggest deference; a modest scale, gigantic still, but deftly measured to be slightly shorter and slighter than the towering shape of the Death Lord; plain plate. Even the billowing silk over-robes were demure and unpatterned, to indicate submission.\n\n'I am glad to see you, and to stand with you,' said Magnus.\n\nMortarion glared. Ahriman rose again, watching, delighting in the Pale King's discomposure.\n\n'I...' Mortarion began.\n\n'Be at ease,' said Magnus. 'Please. We are both yoked under instruction from our brother Perturabo. We are to abide by his plan. I would not have chosen to discomfort either of us by standing shoulder to shoulder with you. The Zone Imperialis is big, with many, varied theatres. But still, who am I to question the Lord of Iron's intricate scheme of war?'\n\n'The Warmaster has faith in his abilities,' said Mortarion cautiously.\n\n'So do I, brother, so do I,' said Magnus. 'No finer exponent of siegecraft.'\n\n'So, we are obliged.'\n\n'It seems so,' said Mortarion.\n\nMagnus nodded. 'So, Colossi?'\n\n'Colossi.'\n\n'Your mighty strengths and my... qualities,' said Magnus.\n\n'I have no need of your qualities,' said the Pale King. 'I can crush this by myself.'\n\n'No doubt at all,' said the Crimson King with a smile. 'But I go where I am sent. You seem so wary, brother. Surely our old disagreements are behind us?'\n\n'You bring that up?'\n\n'I read it in your face.'\n\n'And I have always read yours, Crimson King,' said Mortarion. 'Of your qualities... deceit has always been the uppermost.'\n\n'There is no deceit today, brother,' said Magnus. 'That is why I came in person, to assure you. We are as one. We stand together. The Lord of Iron has charged us with a task. We must be undivided. So let us take this moment to unburden ourselves of tiresome histories, and reconcile. Things have changed. You. Me. I say this, all of this, so that may know I forgive you.'\n\n'You... forgive me?' Mortarion snarled.\n\n'We are both now what you hated. It's unbearable, I know. The pain-'\n\n'The pain is nothing.' The Pale King's voice was an empty husk. Magnus stepped closer to face him.\n\n'The idea is not,' he said. He looked Mortarion in the eyes. 'Your suffering gives you power. The sort I promised from the start. Your submission was not weakness. There is no shame. I bear you no ill will. I understand.'\n\nIt took the Pale King a moment to find a reply.\n\n'I hate this,' he whispered.\n\n'I know,' replied Magnus softly. 'It should ease your torment to know I harbour no resentment towards you. Not now.'\n\nMagnus placed his hand gently on Mortarion's shoulder. The Pale King flinched slightly, wary.\n\n'What are you doing?' he growled.\n\n'I have had my gifts for a lot longer than you have,' said Magnus calmly. 'Let me show you how they may be harnessed.'\n\nA golden light seeped from Magnus' fingers, and suffused Mortarion's ragged plate. Mortarion blinked, straightened slightly, and took a breath. He seemed taller, less bowed by pain and wrack. His eyes had become fierce and unclouded.\n\n'You are kind to me...' he murmured, puzzled.\n\n'There is only one enemy now,' said Magnus. 'The Lie-Father. We face Him side by side.'\n\nThe Pale King nodded. He clutched his fellow king's hand for a second then turned away, took up his scythe and stepped over the ragged battlement.\n\nThey watched his giant figure bounding effortlessly from block to block, descending the slope of rubble and calling for his captains\n\n'Compassion?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'A temporary respite,' Magnus replied. 'He is made to endure, more than any of us, but pain dulls his abilities. He must learn to love what he is, or he will be of no use. And he and his Legion are fine blunt instruments.'\n\n'To crack the walls?'\n\n'To crack the walls. To open the way. To let me reach the place I need to be.'\n\n'If he realises you are using him,' Ahriman began, 'if any of them do-'\n\nMagnus looked at the Corvidae captain sharply. Not out loud, he willed.\n\nVery well. If, for a moment, they appreciate that your true concern is not the united effort to topple your father's throne, but something more personal...\n\n'They won't,' said the Crimson King.\n\nSIX\n\n* * *\n\nDialogues and arrivals\n\nGarviel.\n\n'I am occupied, lord.' Evade. Sidestep. Swing, left blade. Decapitation.\n\nSo I witness, warrior. What is your tally today?\n\n'Eighteen.' Turn. Adjust. Block. Block again. Right blade, under the guard. Impale. 'Nineteen"}
{"text":"aptain sharply. Not out loud, he willed.\n\nVery well. If, for a moment, they appreciate that your true concern is not the united effort to topple your father's throne, but something more personal...\n\n'They won't,' said the Crimson King.\n\nSIX\n\n* * *\n\nDialogues and arrivals\n\nGarviel.\n\n'I am occupied, lord.' Evade. Sidestep. Swing, left blade. Decapitation.\n\nSo I witness, warrior. What is your tally today?\n\n'Eighteen.' Turn. Adjust. Block. Block again. Right blade, under the guard. Impale. 'Nineteen.' Adjust again. Back step. Re-address.\n\nFour more, coming from the right. Heavy storm troops, battle-armoured, intending to mob and overwhelm.\n\nA slow day for you, then?\n\n'It's s barely begun.' Adjust grips. Low address.\n\nDoes spinning your blades like that, one in each hand... Does it help? Or is it merely a flourish?\n\n'It's cleans off the blood, so they bite better.' Block two. Kick the third back. Snap that blade. Thrust. Kill. 'It also shows them my intent.'\n\nI wouldn't know. I need to speak to you, Garviel.\n\n'You're speaking.' Block to the face. Down-cut. Kill. Step out. Evade. Side-cut. Kill. Slash to block. Lock and hold. Cross-guard thrust. Kill.\n\nFace to face.\n\nLoken stepped back, and lowered his blades. The chainsword continued to purr. In his hands, Rubio's sword was just an inert metal blade, but a fine one. He looked around. The balustrade section, now littered with dead, was clear. Below him, on the sub-wall line, Excertus repel-squads had torn down the last of the siege ladders. The fighting now raged ten metres below him.\n\n'I won't leave my post, Lord Sigillite,' said Loken. 'They've been assaulting this section since dawn.'\n\nA mere harrying action, Garviel. Marmax West is not a priority objective for them.\n\n'Tell that to the men with me. Tell that to the dead.'\n\nLoken, your efforts on the wall have been tireless. I commend you. Especially your efforts to rally and coordinate the common army units.\n\n'I have no Legion to stand with, Sigillite. What you call the common army are my brothers now.'\n\nLoken, I have a particular service I need you to perform.\n\n'I'm not your hand any more, lord.'\n\nI know. Though a place was set aside for you.\n\n'And I refused it. You know why.'\n\nI don't.\n\n'To be one of your chosen, to walk in the grey, I would need to have my mind woken. Those were the terms, the requirements of membership. You said so. I've never had a trace of that talent in me, but you say it's there. Latent. Well, perhaps it is. It can stay that way. I have no wish to become that. I have seen too much of what it costs.'\n\nLoken walked to the parapet, Rubio's blade rested across his shoulder, the chainsword growling low at his side. He looked over. The light was thickening. Traitor squads had broken in across the lower redoubts, and the repel-squads were being slowly forced back into a choke point along the edge of the earthworks.\n\nIt is nothing to fear, Garviel.\n\n'You're speaking to me, in my head, in the middle of a battle, from hundreds of leagues away. Only a fool wouldn't fear that. I've given you my answer. I serve the Emperor. I have one cause.'\n\nVengeance.\n\n'Don't say it as if it's a weakness. It's all I have left.'\n\nAnd it's why I've turned to you. The service I require is specific, It speaks directly to your cause, and it comes directly from the Praetorian. This is, you must understand, a great confidence. He needs men like you, but you especially. One who knows and understands a very particular foe.\n\n'Explain.'\n\nI don't need to. I feel your heart rate elevate. I sense you already understand my meaning. Dorn's needs match yours entirely. Garviel, this is what you want.\n\nStep up on the parapet. Judge distance and depth. Multiple targets below, unaware.\n\nBlades out. Leap.\n\n'I'm listening.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe Mournival entered the war camp down a long avenue of cowled and kneeling adepts. Binharic chants formed versions of the warrior's names, and crooned them to whatever dark aspect of the Omnissiah Mechanicum they adored. Behind them, the sheer and gargantuan cliffs of the Katabatic Slopes dropped away to dark plains far below, and violet lightning storms boiled and fractured through the roof of the world. Before them, visible beyond the structures and siege-machines of the Mechanicum's war camp, rose the southern aspects of the Imperial Palace, Adamant, the Ultimate Wall, far away but still staggering in their magnitude.\n\nThe place was known as Epta. It was one of the circumvallation strongholds, a war-steading raised by the menial hosts and Martian levies in preparation for the siege, part of the traitor host's great, encircling investment. Abaddon liked the Mechanicum as little as he liked the Neverborn, but they were a useful tool. They had the engines and devices he needed, and the surplus manpower. This visit was a necessary compact, a sufficient display of respect to secure the efforts of the traitor host's most capricious and inscrutable allies.\n\n'My lord captain,' said a senior adept, moving forward to meet him. She was entirely blind, her organic eyes removed. Sensory acquisition nodes bulged out of her augmeticised forehead, an ugly enhancement that she kept mercifully hidden, until she swept back the cowl of her black robes and stood, long-necked and proud, before him, as if seeking his admiration. Her mouth and larynx were still human unmodified. Abaddon suspected this was why she had been chosen as interlocutor.\n\n'Epta welcomes you,' she said.\n\n'The ceremony is unnecessary,' he replied. 'This is a simple formality.'\n\n'The Lord of Iron has supplied you with a list of requirements.'\n\n'It is received,' she said. 'A long list. Specialised. Our resources are great, but not unlimited. The reserves of this steading and the others are drawn upon every hour to furnish the siege effort.'\n\n'I'm sure my Lord of Iron made it clear this was a special favour to him.'\n\n'He did so, through subtle use of hard cipher and nuanced encryption. He speaks our languages well.'\n\n'And the confidence of this matter?' asked Kibre.\n\n'Assured, Lord Kibre,' she replied. 'We do not fall to the whims of human weakness. We do not gossip or whisper. But to fulfil these needs, to deploy the assets, we require details of the undertaking specifics.'\n\n'And I'm here to give them to you,' said Abaddon. 'Do you have a name?'\n\n'In flesh? Eyet-One-Tag. It is short for-'\n\nThe adepts around her chorused a long sequence of binary code-forms.\n\nAbaddon nodded. 'Can we converse in private?'\n\nShe spread her hands. 'We are all a linked unity, Lord Abaddon. All that is Epta is private.'\n\nAximand touched Abaddon's arm, and inclined his head. Abaddon saw what he was looking at.\n\n'Eyet-One-Tag, perhaps you could review the specifications of our request with... Lord Kibre and Lord Tormageddon in your control station. Out in the open seems so vulnerable to un-linked beings like us. I have to step away for a moment.'\n\nThe adepts led Kibre and Tormageddon towards the nearby modular out-build. Little Horus followed Abaddon past the ring of crackling watchfires to the perimeter beside the steading's landing pads.\n\n'What does he want?' Aximand asked.\n\n'I suggest we ask him,' said Abaddon.\n\nArgonis, equerry to the Warmaster, was uncoupling the over-segments of his flight armour. His Xiphon-pattern Interceptor, its sleek lines dressed in the colours and insignia of the XVI, stood on the dock behind him, vapour fuming from its cooling hull.\n\n'I'm surprised he's let you out on your own,' said Abaddon.\n\n'I've duties to perform, First Captain,' replied Argonis.\n\nHe removed his helm and stared at them.\n\n'What are you doing, Ezekyle?' he asked.\n\n'What do you think I'm doing, Kinor?' Abaddon replied.\n\nAgronis sighed. 'I think,' he said, 'that you're organising an unsanctioned operation that is contrary to the Warmaster's wishes.'\n\n'Untrue, on both counts,' said Abaddon. 'It's sanctioned. A formal component of the Lord of Iron's strategy. Check, if you like. You know how Perturabo likes to help people out with trivial questions. And it is in exact accordance with the Warmaster's wishes.'\n\n'Then why is it confidential?' asked Argonis.\n\n'To ensure maximum effect,' said Abaddon.\n\n'Why, what do you know?' asked Aximand.\n\n'Nothing, except that First Company, including both the Justaerin and the Catulan, along with Goshen's Twenty-Fifth and Marr's Eighteenth, have been rotated out of the active line, without explanation.'\n\n'What does he know?' asked Aximand.\n\nArgonis glowered at Little Horus. 'He knows you can't be trusted,' he replied. 'Other than that, he knows nothing. Yet. Serving as the Great Lupercal's equerry is an honour. But it is thankless. I won't suffer his rage until I know who to blame.'\n\n'That's fair,' said Abaddon. He didn't envy the equerry's testing role, but he admired Argonis Unscarred: a true, Cthonian Son of Horus, brutally effective and maliciously loyal. He also knew that, as Chieftain of the Isidis Flight, Argonis had been oath-bound to First Company for many years. He was the finest pilot Abaddon knew of, and the fact that Argonis still wore a burnished crest of feathers across his sea-green chestplate showed he remained proud of his former post and his former loyalties. 'How long can you keep it that way, Kinor?'\n\nArgonis mouthed a soft, Cthonic curse. 'What is this, Ezekyle?\n\n'I asked how long?'\n\n'As long as I have to. But it's better I know what I'm protecting. For your sake, at least.'\n\n'An opportunity has arisen,' said Abaddon. 'Swift and complete compliance. Perturabo likes it very much, and so do I. But it will stall and fail if word gets around. If... people get involved'\n\n'People?' said Argonis. 'You mean him?'\n\n'He has a way of dominating situations,' said Abaddon. 'Of making them his own. This will please him, but if he learns about it too early he will get involved. Stamp his mark. Make... improvements. Potentially kill it before it can fly.'\n\n'Oh, quite probably,' said Argonis. 'I'm surprised he's leaving the Lord of Iron alone to run"}
{"text":"liance. Perturabo likes it very much, and so do I. But it will stall and fail if word gets around. If... people get involved'\n\n'People?' said Argonis. 'You mean him?'\n\n'He has a way of dominating situations,' said Abaddon. 'Of making them his own. This will please him, but if he learns about it too early he will get involved. Stamp his mark. Make... improvements. Potentially kill it before it can fly.'\n\n'Oh, quite probably,' said Argonis. 'I'm surprised he's leaving the Lord of Iron alone to run his schemes. Perhaps he understands that Perturabo will not perform optimally if he's interfered with. In all honesty, I'm amazed he hasn't dropped yet to join the brawl and lead the way. It's not like him.'\n\n'He's still on the Spirit?'\n\n'He is'. Aigonis nodded. 'Almost in seclusion. Withdrawn. Ah, I don't know what to make of it.'\n\n'Perhaps he wants to use his brothers, and all of us, as cannon fodder to topple the walls,' said Little Horus. Then just, you know, stroll in across our corpses and take the prize.'\n\n'These days, said Argonis, 'I wouldn't put anything past him. He's not himself. I... I don't know what he's becoming or where his mind is. He...'\n\nThe equerry trailed off.\n\n'What?' asked Abaddon. 'Kinor, if there's a problem, I need to know it more than anyone.'\n\nArgjnis sat down on a wheel-arch of a munition trolley. He took off his right gauntlet and flexed his fingers. His flesh showed the old, white flecks of knife-fight cuts. His nickname was an ironic reference to the fact that only his face had remained unscarred through his long career.\n\n'He sits alone,' he said quietly. 'He studies plans, and Perturabo's reports. He reads. Books and manuscripts. I don't know where they come from, or who gives them to him.'\n\n'The Crimson King?' Abaddon suggested.\n\n'I doubt it. That friend hasn't been near him. I'd venture that little shit Erebus, or even Lorgar, except neither of them have dared to show their faces here. The books, papers, they're just there. I don't know what language they are written in. I don't even know if they're made of paper.'\n\nHe swallowed. Abaddon crouched down in front of him, and peered into his face. He knew that Kinor Argonis, like him, took little pleasure in the manifestations of the warp. Aximand remained standing, looking on with creeping concern.\n\nArgonis glanced at Abaddon. His face was drawn, tired, tight with anxiety.\n\n'I love him, Ezekyle,' he said.\n\n'We all love him.'\n\n'He's Lupercal. The Lupercal. Our genefather, the greatest man, the finest warrior that...'\n\nHe shook his head.\n\n'I cannot bear to see him this way,' said Argonis. 'Withdrawing, alone. He... he calls for things, just little things, like a cup of wine, or a stylus, or some object from his chambers, and then, when I bring them, he doesn't remember asking me for them. Or he... holds them. The objects, usually trophies of old victories I've had to fetch from his shelves, he holds them, and stares at them for hours at a time. He talks to himself. At least, I hope it's to himself. And sometimes, he-'\n\n'He what?'\n\n'He calls me Maloghurst. At first, I laughed and gently corrected him. But he still does it. I don't think it's a mistake. I think he thinks I'm Maloghurst, or at least... that's who he sees when he looks at me.'\n\nArgonis got up sharply, cleared his throat, and began to lock his gauntlet back into place.\n\n'When I heard these rumours,' he said, These... deployment discrepancies, I came to find you. Only the Mournival could have authorised them. I didn't want anything to come out that would unsettle him. Not now.'\n\n'Kinor,' said Abaddon, slowly straightening up. 'I need you to keep this confidential. Keep it away from his eyes until we're done. What He doesn't know can't trouble him.'\n\n'But if he finds out I've been screening things from him,' said Argonis, 'or worse, if he finds out you have... I fear the consequences of that.'\n\n'What we're doing will save him,' said Little Horus.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Aximand is right,' said Abaddon. 'Once executed, this operation will win the war, outright. And early, long in advance of even the most optimistic estimates. He will rejoice. It will lift his spirits and restore him. It will bring back to us the Lupercal we adore.'\n\n'How certain are you?' asked Argonis.\n\n'Certain,' said Abaddon. 'I'm doing this for him.'\n\n'Not for your own glory?'\n\n'Oh, that loo,' said Little Horus. 'Always, that too.'\n\nArgonis laughed involuntarily. Abaddon laughed too, to demonstrate that everything was safe and secure between them.\n\n'I need you to keep this close, for now,' Abaddon said.\n\n'Then show me what this is,' replied the equerry.\n\n* * *\n\nFalkus Kibre looked around, and narrowed his eyes as the three of them entered the command station.\n\n'What's he doing here?' he hissed to Abaddon.\n\n'Go with,' whispered Abaddon. 'We need him.'\n\nArgonis had crossed to the hololith display that Eyet-One-Tag and her adepts had set up to review the assets. The adepts, twenty of them, stood to one side, as silent as the deadpan figure of Tormageddon, who had said nothing for hours.\n\nThe equerry looked at the three-dimensional display. He raised his hand and folded the light to enlarge one image.\n\n'Three Donjon-class siege engines,' said Eyet-One-Tag.\n\n'Good grief,' Argonis breathed. 'Abaddon, this is no minor operation.'\n\nHe flicked up another image.\n\n'Twenty Terrax-pattern-' Eyet-One-Tag began.\n\n'Damn it!' Argonis spat. These are major assets!'\n\n'Considerable,' said the adept. 'Especially when one factors in the support squadrons, menials and surveyor drones. A total of perhaps six thousand personnel. Though the secondary assets are rather more substantial.'\n\nShe changed the images with a twitch of her head.\n\n'Eighteen hundred batteries, mixed artillery, heavy ordnance and petraries,' she said, 'plus munitions and teams. The sustained bombardments of the Europa Wall section and Western Projection Wall section represent an extensive materiel debt.'\n\n'Europa and Western Projection are two of the strongest wall-runs in the line,' Argonis exclaimed. 'You're throwing us against them? Abaddon, you're out of your mind! Three companies, even of our best, won't be enough to break them!'\n\n'I agree,' said Abaddon. 'But I'm not going against Europa or Western Projection.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'They're distractions, Kinor. Loud and very big distractions.'\n\nAbaddon leaned past him, and rotated the chart display. He pointed to a spot on the wall.\n\n'This is my target,' he said.\n\n'But that... that's impenetrable too,' said Argonis.\n\n'Not as much as you would think,' said Abaddon. 'Or as much as anyone would think. Especially the Praetorian. Our Lord of Iron has found a chink in his armour.'\n\n'Now do you appreciate why secrecy is paramount?' asked Little Horus. The equerry nodded.\n\n'Good,' said Aximand. He turned and wandered to the exit, stepping out into the cold air. His hands were shaking. What Argonis had described, the state of Lupercal's mind... it had been hard to hear. That talk of listening to voices, speaking to things that weren't there, or people who were long dead...\n\nBeside him, in the darkness, something breathed gently. When the lightning flashed its fitful glare, Aximand could plainly see he was alone.\n\n'Go away,' he hissed. 'Go away or tell me where. Name a place.'\n\nFrom behind him, in the station, he heard Argonis ask, 'When exactly does this operation commence?'\n\nAnd Abaddon reply, 'Any moment now.'\n\nA minute later, at the adept's binharic cue, the sky lit up. To the north of Epta, cascades of fire as large as cities burst against the flanks of Europa and Western Projection. Once begun, the bombardment did not pause or cease.\n\nThe insane roar of it, the thunder, sounded like the howls of a tormented god.\n\n* * *\n\nAmber 'prepare' runes lit on the forward bulkhead and along the ridges of the cabin's armoured ceiling, but Niborran already knew, from the shift in engine note and the gentle dipping away to starboard, that they were commencing their final approach.\n\nHe opened his despatch case, and put away the slates and papers he'd been reviewing during the journey. He'd been trying to assess an overview of the port's current defensive capabilities and strengths, but his data reports were wildly contradictory and incomplete. Vox and noospheric connection in the Northern Magnifican had been patchy at best since the void collapse, and very little hard intel had come through to Bhab. Niborran didn't even know who he'd be accepting zone command from. He didn't know what he was dropping into. Except, of course, he did.\n\nHe put that out of his mind. In the seats around him, officers and staff were stirring, and prepping, if necessary, for a hostile disembark when they reached the ground.\n\nHis stomach and ears told him the 'bird had begun dropping steeply. Combat approach. He opened his seat-window's blast cover. Daylight, a creamish haze. They were still high up. As the 'bird banked in a wide turn, the surface swung into view. The palace-city of Magnifican, an endless vista of towers, blocks, fabricatory complexes, plazas and highways. It rolled slowly below him. A few plumes of smoke, and occasional patches of damage in the street plan. Not as bad as he'd heard, or feared.\n\nThe command Stormbird dropped lower, arcing west in what felt like a leisurely curve. He saw a distant blackness that looked like a mountain range, then realised it was an immense wall of smoke, a band some thirty or even forty kilometres wide. He gazed at it in shock for as long as it remained in view. North-east... That had to be, what? Boenition District? Tortestrian? In the name of Terra, a whole swathe of the city gone, on fire...\n\nNow they were passing over debris fields and the outlines of ruined streets. What was that? Could it be the remains of the Celestial City that adjoined the port, and served its needs? Surely not.\n\nThe 'bird banked north. The huge, rising curve of the Eternity Wall space port swung into view. Niborran had always loved the place. It was"}
{"text":"ong as it remained in view. North-east... That had to be, what? Boenition District? Tortestrian? In the name of Terra, a whole swathe of the city gone, on fire...\n\nNow they were passing over debris fields and the outlines of ruined streets. What was that? Could it be the remains of the Celestial City that adjoined the port, and served its needs? Surely not.\n\nThe 'bird banked north. The huge, rising curve of the Eternity Wall space port swung into view. Niborran had always loved the place. It was still impressive, even with its upper ridges and vast, ascending pylons hidden behind thick banks of atmospherics and smog. One of the great structures of the Imperial Palace, a monument of grand scale architectural engineering to rival the Lion's Gate or the Palatine tower or the soaring superstructures of the Sanctum.\n\nIt had been the site of his first footsteps on Terra, all those years ago. He'd been born in the rings of Saturn, and raised in the strict disciplines of the Saturnine Ordos. Then he'd come to Terra as a trained but green young officer, ready to take up his inaugural active command, and he'd stepped off the boat here at Eternity Wall Port, his first glimpse of Terra and the Palace. The port had seen him off, too, on his first combat lift as a young officer, Setuway 55th, heading out to join the crusader fleets. He'd come and gone many times since then, arriving and departing via the Lion's Gate space port or Damocles, and once or twice through Eternity, but Eternity remained his favourite. It was the place where he felt he'd properly begun as a warrior. The place from which he'd first marched out to active war.\n\nThe view distorted. The 'bird had activated its voids. Low approach. Was it just a precaution? He saw puffs of brown smoke, and felt a slight judder. No, airbursts. They were taking fire from ground positions. Enemy anti-air batteries, off to the west, by his estimate, harrying anything that came across them.\n\nThe overhead runes went red.\n\nIn the seat in front of him, Brohn turned and looked back, grinning.\n\n'And I thought we'd get there in one piece,' he said.\n\n'We will, Clem,' Niborran replied.\n\n'Well, that's half the battle,' Brohn replied with a chuckle.\n\nNot even the half of it.\n\nThe run had been surprisingly clean. Once they'd paced out though the Lion's Gate, the air convoy had been obliged to skirt heavy fields of flak and anti-air over Marmax, and it had grown worse as they lengthened their stride and crossed the heart of Anterior. The ride had been a boneshaker. They hadn't been able to climb, because the aegis limited their operation ceiling. They'd been obliged to run the storm. Twice. And Niborran had recognised the distinctive thump and jolt as the pilot had been forced to dispense anti-missile canisters. Niborran had heard, though it hadn't been confirmed, that the convoy had lost two troop lifters crossing Anterior.\n\nOnce they'd gone through the Ascensor Gate into Magnifican airspace, things had steadied. 'Unless you'd been told,' Clem Brohn had joked, 'you wouldn't even know there was a war on.'\n\nYou would now. Niborran sat back, and checked his harness. They were picking up speed. Combat approach indeed: low and fast, and then a short, dead drop onto the landing zone at the very last second He'd always loved this part. It scared the living shit out of him every time.\n\n* * *\n\n'I've lost them,' said Camba Diaz. Shiban nodded towards the south.\n\n'Low,' he said. 'One minute out.'\n\nCombat approach. The train of air transports, just black specks in the southern sky, had dropped, tracking in so low they were out of sight below the edge of Monsalvant's landing platform. Diaz could see the anti-air well enough: stippling clusters of russet smoke pops that were turning the entire skyline into a leopard's pelt.\n\nShiban Khan looked to his second, Al-Nid Nazira of the Auxilla, and nodded. Nazira hurried away. They'd cleared the platform for landing safety, but the honour guard was waiting on the dock ramps ready to hurry into position.\n\n'How many is Niborran bringing?' asked Diaz.\n\n'My guess, not enough,' Shiban replied, 'and probably fewer than he set out with.'\n\nThey could suddenly hear the scream of burners. They took a step backwards into one of the blast alcoves used by ground crew.\n\nThe huge, bat-delta of the Stormbird burst up into view over the lip of the platform, blotting out the sky. Its gear was already down, like the grasping talons of a stooping falcon. Its engines howled as the pilot slammed main power from forward thrust and lift to reverse and brake. Too much gun, and the huge craft would simply overshoot the platform and have nowhere to go, and no space to climb.\n\nIt set down hard, spread wings bowing slightly on impact, the weight of it shivering the entire platform. Its engines shrieked to a new fury as they reached maximum reverse to suck in forward momentum. All the brake vanes on its wingline were vertical. The airframe shuddered, and it rolled to a halt and stood there as though it were panting. Vapour spewed from its aft vents. The piercing shriek of the overstressed engines began to die back.\n\nShiban Khan clapped his hands. Captain Nazira ran the honour guard out of cover. They began to assemble on the foredeck. Sixty troopers, mixed units. Four of them struggled to raise the huge banner. It showed, in a sunburst, the Emperor Ascendant, rays of light streaming from His golden face to form a halo. The banner had become tangled by the jetwash.\n\n'Get it straight, damn it,' Diaz muttered as he and Shiban strode forward, side by side. The boarding ramp of the Stormbird began to lower. The 'bird was painted in an Excertus drab, a tawny brown that made Shiban think it was in its winter plumage. Lord General Niborran emerged, a tall, noble figure in a long storm coat. He put on his cap, and walked down the ramp to meet them, followed by one of his senior officers, and, Diaz noted with surprise, a Huscarl of the Imperial Fists Praetorian cadre.\n\nDiaz and Shiban halted, their fists to their chestplates. Shiban set his guan dao pole-arm upright at his side. He was an imposing figure, heavily augmented for a warrior of the V. On the flesh of his face and neck were the hard, pink lines of old scars, from both injuries and surgeries, that spoke of his exploits and the immense efforts that had been made to place him back in the field. Shiban had grown a beard, which Diaz presumed was an effort to disguise some of the repair-work scars, as though he was ashamed of augmetics, but the beard had odd seams in it, like tribal markings, where it had been unable to grow back across the worst scarring.\n\n'High Primary General, we are honoured,' said Diaz. 'Welcome to Eternity.'\n\n'Well, isn't that a phrase to be reckoned with?' Niborran replied, with a wry smile. He took the salute, then offered Diaz his hand. 'Lord Diaz,' he said, 'I have to say, I am astonished to see you here.'\n\n'Fate takes us where it will, general,' Diaz replied. He gestured to the White Scar at his side. 'This is Shiban, khan of the ordu Fifth known as Tachseer.'\n\nNiborran nodded to the White Scar, and then started to say something to Diaz. His voice was instantly drowned out.\n\nThe rest of the transport convoy was coming in, passing low overhead: heavy lift transports, bulk cargos, Thunderhawks, support gunships. Their shadows washed across the platform, each passing craft shaking the air with noise as it went over. They were heading low towards the combat hangars in the south face of the port, just half a kilometre beyond the platform. Two of the transports were trailing smoke. Over the thunder of thrust, Diaz could hear sirens starting to wail in the hangars as emergency crews scrambled to receive some less than perfect touchdowns.\n\n'You arrive in force,' remarked Diaz.\n\n'Some force,' replied Niborran. 'All that could be gathered. Additional reinforcement will be arriving overground in the next day, Emperor willing. You had better bring me up to speed rapidly, lord. And begin with... how does the lord castellan of the Fourth Sphere come to be in command here at Eternity?'\n\n'You have misunderstood, general,' said Diaz, 'I am not in command. Shiban Khan is zone commander.'\n\nNiborran looked at the White Scar. 'Really?' he said. 'My apologies.' 'I have effective seniority through rank,' said Diaz, 'but Shiban has precedence. He was running the port zone defence when I got here, and I saw no reason to disrupt the effective command structure he had established.'\n\n'We built what we could with what we had to hand,' said Shiban. 'Some troop elements that were stationed here at the beginning, but mostly companies, squads and even individuals that fled here after the lines collapsed in Magnifican. You will not find much uniformity.'\n\n'How many do you have, khan?' Niborran asked.\n\n'Last count, eight thousand,' said Shiban. 'Mostly field infantry, Auxilia and militia. About four hundred main division Excertus, a little armour. And the port defence systems, of course.'\n\n'Wait,' said Colonel Brohn, standing at Niborran's side. 'The lines collapsed in Magnifican?'\n\n'Yes,' said Shiban, 'on and after the eleventh. Everything in the Northern Reaches broke when Lion's Gate Port fell. Mass enemy incursion followed systemic shield collapse. Most comm coverage was disrupted at that point too.'\n\n'No, go back,' said Brohn.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Niborran, 'this is my chief of staff, Clement Brohn.' 'Which lines?' Brohn asked Shiban. His look was intense. 'Which lines collapsed? Fourteenth? Fifteenth?'\n\n'All of them,' replied Shiban.\n\nBrohn blinked.\n\n'As far as we can tell,' said Diaz, 'and I was out there, there is no longer any coordinated Imperial defence in the northern reaches of Magnifican. Perhaps nothing north of the Processional. Gold Fane's gone. Angevin too, we think. There are some Army brigades active in the field, but they are principally fighting for survival.'\n\n'Shit,' murmured Brohn.\n\n'We had no idea,' said Niborran. 'Bhab Bas"}
{"text":"e. 'Which lines collapsed? Fourteenth? Fifteenth?'\n\n'All of them,' replied Shiban.\n\nBrohn blinked.\n\n'As far as we can tell,' said Diaz, 'and I was out there, there is no longer any coordinated Imperial defence in the northern reaches of Magnifican. Perhaps nothing north of the Processional. Gold Fane's gone. Angevin too, we think. There are some Army brigades active in the field, but they are principally fighting for survival.'\n\n'Shit,' murmured Brohn.\n\n'We had no idea,' said Niborran. 'Bhab Bastion has no idea. Nothing's coming through. They're into Anterior, you see. Burning up to Gorgon, Colossi, Vitrix, Callabar. I think Corbenic's gone already. We didn't realise it was this bad east of the Anterior Wall.'\n\nThere was a long silence, stirred only by the port-side wind.\n\n'Do you stand ready to receive zone command, general?' asked Diaz.\n\nNiborran cleared his throat.\n\n'There'll be time for that, Diaz,' he said. He looked at the ragged honour guard, who were trying to look as presentable as possible in their motley array of dirty uniforms. They had finally got the grand banner unfurled. 'Those men have been waiting patiently for a long time,' he said. 'Let me greet them and we can turn to business.'\n\n'As you wish,' said Shiban.\n\n* * *\n\nNiborran walked the proud line. He shook hands and exchanged a few words with each trooper in turn.\n\n'Your duty and vigil here will be remembered,' he told them.\n\n'Getty Orheg (Sixteenth Arctic Hort),' the next man said. Niborran glanced quizzically at Diaz.\n\n'It's become a habit, general,' Diaz said. 'Since their units were fractured. I can't seem to make them break it.'\n\n'I don't think you should, lord,' Niborran said.\n\nHe turned to the next man.\n\n'Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile).'\n\n'That's quite a banner, Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),' said Niborran.\n\n'We support Him, and He watches over us, sir,' said Kordy, staring rigidly straight ahead.\n\n'As it should be, soldier,' said Niborran. 'Can you free one hand long enough to shake mine?'\n\n'It's a little heavy, sir,' said Kordy.\n\nNiborran reached out and gripped the banner pole with his lefthand, supplying enough support for Kordy to let go with his right and accept the handshake.\n\n'We'll support Him together, what do you say, Kordy?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Is he in charge now?' asked Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar). The command party had left the platform, and the honour guard was standing down and rolling in the banner.\n\n'That's how I understand it,' said Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). 'I liked him. He asked me if I came from Setuway I live, and I said no, Endayu, but I know Setuway, and he told me he had done early service there, at Setuway, and he knows Endayu well. I wanted to ask where he had lost his eyes, but I didn't dare.'\n\n'He's the High Primary General,' said Oxana Pell (Hort Borograd K). 'The High Primary. They have sent us the supreme commander, no less.' 'He's an old man,' said Cavaner. 'An old human man. We've had the bright Astartes here to lead us, Lord Diaz, and Khan Shiban. I thought more Astartes were coming. That's what we need. Space Marines. Not some old man. What does he know?'\n\n'He wouldn't have been sent if he wasn't good enough,' said Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile). 'Now, grab the other end of this, will you?'\n\n* * *\n\nThe general's retinue followed the dank transit tunnels from the platform down into Monsalvant Gard, principal bastion of the port's southern line, a fortress built out of the skirts of the space port's infrastructure.\n\nDiaz fell in step with Cadwalder.\n\n'Glad to have you here,' Diaz said. 'Were you sent to ward the general?'\n\n'Safeguard him, yes,' Cadwalder replied.\n\n'On the Praetorian's orders?'\n\n'In a manner of speaking,' Cadwalder replied.\n\n'I don't know what that means,' said Diaz, tersely.\n\n'Likewise,' said Cadwalder, 'it's beyond me why a White Scar was running this zone and not a lord castellan.'\n\n'Shiban had already pulled it together,' said Diaz. 'We're on a knife-edge, and he had it balanced. He's a fine warrior, Cad. A real leader.'\n\n'I'm sure.'\n\n'I'm telling you,' said Diaz, 'he's one of the Khagan's senior men. Ordu commander. Would have made Master of the Hunt-'\n\n'Would have made?'\n\n'Injury, I think. He has a good doctrine. \"No backward step\".'\n\n'Very ordu. And simplistic.'\n\n'It's Terran, in fact, as I understand,' said Diaz. 'And not a million leagues from our own philosophy.'\n\nCadwalder glanced at him.\n\n'If this khan is a friend of yours,' he said, 'keep an eye on the command staff mood, particularly if Niborran's got to work with him. You see that man? Brohn? Colonel Brohn?'\n\n'I know him.'\n\n'See that look on his face, like someone's put a turd under his nose? Every time he looks at Shiban. He can't hide it. Niborran's doing a better job.'\n\n'What are you saying?' asked Diaz.\n\n'Niborran and Brohn were command staff, Grand Borealis.'\n\n'Yes, of course. Niborran is High Primary, and Brohn is one of the best. That's why the Praetorian sent-'\n\n'They were dismissed,' said Cadwalder. 'Summary expulsion.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Said the wrong thing to the Khan of Khans, and the Khan of Khans was not in the right mood. Vorst said he nearly took their heads off.' 'For what?' asked Diaz.\n\n'It doesn't matter. Something or nothing. They were tired, he was tired. My point is, I don't think White Scars are their best friends.'\n\nWait, if they were dismissed-' Diaz began.\n\nCadwalder stopped, and brought Diaz to a halt. The rest of the party moved on down the tunnel.\n\n'They were done, strung out,' said Cadwalder. 'Bhab is chewing through senior commanders like... The burn-out rate is atrocious.\n\nThe Khagan lost his temper, and they were out. They chose not to go back, though Dorn wanted them. They volunteered to return to the line, and this is what they got. They want to be soldiers again, and see active service. They want to hold a gun, not look at an augur screen.'\n\n'Because that's so demanding,' said Diaz.\n\n'It's different,' said Cadwalder. 'You haven't been in the bastion for a good while. It's punishing. Overwhelming. Things... things are not going well for us, lord. I think... Killing the enemy face to face might actually be easier. More meaningful, certainly.'\n\n'Are you telling me they're non-vi? Incompetent?'\n\n'No, they're very competent,' said Cadwalder. 'Niborran especially. Not just by dint of his supreme rank. There's a fire in him, like he's gained twenty years. He's exactly the zone lead we want. But we're going to need to support him, our full support. Clear any extraneous problems out of his path, like-'\n\n'Like Shiban Khan?'\n\nCadwalder nodded. 'Yes. It's not the White Scar's fault. But I doubt they'll take to him. We need Niborran at the top of his game, because this is going to be hell.'\n\n'I thought it might be,' said Diaz.\n\n'I'm telling you,' said Cadwalder, 'it definitely will be. To the glory of Him on Earth, trust me on this.'\n\n'You know what they say about hell, Cad,' replied Diaz. He turned and set off after the others.\n\n'What, lord?' asked Cadwalder.\n\n'It's just a chainsword deep.'\n\n* * *\n\nEuphrati Keeler leaned back against the wall, exhaled a long sigh, and rubbed the bridge of her nose. Her brow furrowed.\n\nAmon Tauromachian handed her a cup of water. 'We should finish for the day,' he said.\n\n'No,' she sighed. 'One more.'\n\n'You are tired,' he said.\n\n'I won't sleep. One more.' She took a few sips from the cup, and handed it back. She straightened up, and turned to face the next cell door.\n\nAmon hesitated. The air was cold. Nearby, rainwater pattered from the ceiling onto the friendless stone floor.\n\n'Not this one,' he said.\n\n'Alphabetical order,' she said. 'Systematic. He's next.'\n\n'Not this one,' said Amon. 'Skip this one.'\n\nKeeler looked at him.\n\n'Well, now I'm just intrigued,' she said. Today I have spoken, in turn, to some of the most unpleasant individuals ever sired by the human race-'\n\n'I told you Sindermann's entire effort was misjudged,' he said,\n\n'And I told you,' she snapped, 'if you let me out, I could do it better. But this is the hand you've dealt me. So, how much worse could the next one be? Amon? Custodian?'\n\nShe frowned, and took the dataslate from his hand. She read the next entry.'Open it,' she said.\n\nAmon gestured. The cell door rumbled open.\n\nShe stepped inside.\n\nThe prisoner was nothing to look at. A very small old man, his undernourished child-frame swamped by the dirty inmate overalls he'd been given. His forehead was broad, his eyes sharp. He reminded her of a small owl, or certainly some form of bird: perched on his cot, head tilted, eyes unblinking, everything about him small, fragile and entirely breakable.\n\n'Hello,' he said.\n\n'Basilio Fo,' she said, checking the slate. 'Secured captive fifteen years ago by the Sixty-Third Expeditionary Fleet, following the compliance of Velich Tarn. Interesting. And it says he was held in the Imperial Dungeon.'\n\n'One of the transferees,' said Amon.\n\n'The Dungeon was getting too full,' said Fo, 'or too empty. They didn't tell me which. I would imagine the former.'\n\n'It says you were a biomechanical engineer,' said Keeler, checking the slate. 'A self-professed \"worker of obscenity\".'\n\n'I wanted to put \"artist\",' said Fo, 'but apparently that wasn't an option on the form. Your culture has never really appreciated my work. Hardly surprising. Yours is a very conservative civilisation.'\n\n'My culture?' asked Keeler.\n\n'The Imperium of Man. That's what you call it, isn't it?'\n\nKeeler looked back at the slate. \"There isn't much detail here. It looks redacted. It says he's a genius. By some abnormal measure, neurotypically. And it... Wait, that can't be right.'\n\n'Can't it?' asked Fo sweetly.\n\n'According to this, you're in excess of five thousand years old,' said Keeler. 'That must be a mistake, surely? Active on Terra before the fell of Old Night?'\n\nFo shrugged.\n\n'What can I say?' he asked. 'I look after myself and exercise regularly.' 'That's nonse"}
{"text":"call it, isn't it?'\n\nKeeler looked back at the slate. \"There isn't much detail here. It looks redacted. It says he's a genius. By some abnormal measure, neurotypically. And it... Wait, that can't be right.'\n\n'Can't it?' asked Fo sweetly.\n\n'According to this, you're in excess of five thousand years old,' said Keeler. 'That must be a mistake, surely? Active on Terra before the fell of Old Night?'\n\nFo shrugged.\n\n'What can I say?' he asked. 'I look after myself and exercise regularly.' 'That's nonsense,' said Keeler.\n\n'Biomechanism and organic engineering were my areas of speciality,' said Fo. 'I learned very early on how to prolong my mortal fabric. Of course, for the past fifteen years, without access to my studio, 1 have been ageing naturally. It's miserable. I avoided it for so long.'\n\nKeeler stared at him.\n\n'Were you really born before Old Night?'\n\n'Oh, that's not the question you've come to ask me, is it?' said Fo. He moistened his lips with the tip of his tiny bird-tongue and smiled. 'Is he here? Has he come now? These last few weeks, I've been hearing terrible sounds outside.'\n\n'Who?' asked Keeler.\n\n'When I met him,' said Fo, 'he called himself Lupercal.'\n\n'You mean Horus?'\n\n'That's the one.'\n\n'You've met him?' she asked.\n\n'He was the one who captured me,' said Fo. 'Have you met him? You have. Isn't he quite the most awful thing?'\n\nHe looked at Amon. His smile was gone.\n\n'But then, they all are, aren't they?' he remarked.\n\n'What question did you think I was going to ask you, Fo?' Keeler asked.\n\n'Well, I presumed you had all finally come to your senses and decided to ask me for my expert advice.'\n\n'About?'\n\nFo frowned. 'About how you might kill him,' he said.\n\n'Kill Horus?'\n\n'Well, you clearly want him dead, don't you?' asked Fo. 'It's plainly becoming quite an imperative. Survival, as I found out a long time ago, triggers the most basic, fundamental responses in an organic form. An individual, a species... It will do almost anything, evolve in almost any way it can, in order to stay alive. I called it the Existential Maturation Trigger.'\n\nFo sat back on his cot, and rested his head against the wet stone wall. He gazed up at the ceiling.\n\n'I have a few suggestions,' he said. 'No guarantees, but they have a reasonable chance of working. I've had time to consider the problem, and formulate some recommendations.'\n\n'Based on?' asked Keeler.\n\n'Based on the fact,' Fo replied, 'that fifteen years ago I came very close to killing him myself'\n\n* * *\n\nThe six missiles had been travelling for two kilometres at one and a half times the speed of sound when they hit the convoy. All came from the west, and the impacts were virtually simultaneous.\n\nThey struck the hulls of the target vehicles broadside and to port. The tip of each projectile was a high-explosive shaped charge of volate-19 and compressed imotex, designed to create a narrow and ultra high-velocity particle stream. The superplasticity created by these precursor charges bored through any hull armour and anti-rocket plating. The molybdenum liners around the precursors vaporised during contact detonation, allowing the much larger main charge of each weapon to penetrate each target vehicle nanoseconds later, via the puncture the precursor had created.\n\nTwo carriers and one of the escort Carnodons were wiped out instantly. A second Carnodon survived the initial strike, but caught fire.\n\nUnable to move or return fire, the vehicle was destroyed fourteen seconds later when the flames reached the main magazine.\n\nA third Brontosan was hit at the wheel line. The blast lifted the entire bulk of the transporter, and flipped it on its side.\n\nThe sixth missile struck the upper deck of the carrier Hari Harr was riding in.\n\nThe impact was so sudden, so complete, it felt like something he was remembering from weeks before: a noise that was too loud to be heard; a pulse of monstrous concussion trapped and channelled by the vehicle's hull; a flash like the sun.\n\nA vast ring of dirt slapped up around the carrier. The vehicle swayed, the side of it deforming inwards at first, then bursting out like a hatching egg. Seventy-nine per cent of the personnel on the upper deck were killed outright immediately.\n\nPower failed. The carrier filled with dense smoke. The upper flooring bulged and collapsed, crushing men below. Many of them were already dead or dying in their seats, ruined by compression, burning gas or blast debris that had torn down through the decking into the lower compartment. Fire instantly engulfed the upper compartment. Those troopers still alive and conscious shrieked as they were consumed. The fire, a rolling wave, rushed down into the lower deck through the collapsed floor, and washed backwards More men died before they could even rise. Others scrambled up choking the aisles, and were engulfed or crushed by their own comrades.\n\nOnly those at the rear stood any kind of chance. Hull deformation had actually burst the access hatches open. Troopers in the last six or seven rows scrambled and fell out into the open. Several had clothes ablaze.\n\nOlly Piers came out with his plas-caliver in one hand and Hari in the other. He dropped Hari within metres of the hatch, and fell to his knees. His moustache was singed. Hari found himself on the ground, his ears ringing. He was still clutching his dataslate as though he was reading it. There was a diagonal crack across the screen.\n\nIt was bright outside. The sky was a stained haze. The landscape was a wasteland of tan dirt, the dry ruins of some industrial zone.\n\nDust as fine as sand rolled in across the wide road.\n\n'Up, up, up!' Piers yelled.\n\nHari rose. Behind them, several vehicles were alight, spewing fat cones of smoke into the pale sky. He could hear the chatter of small-arms, the crump of the surviving Camodons as they fired their main guns into the wasteland to the west. He could hear the moans of the injured, the screams of men trapped and incinerating.\n\nThe entire convoy had halted. They could see figures milling aimlessly around stopped or ruined vehicles, people too stunned to know what to do.\n\n'Get rolling, get rolling!' Piers was yelling down the road. 'We're sitting bloody ducks, you shitting simpletons!'\n\nNothing seemed to happen. A tank fired again. Hari heard the thump, and saw the dust-kick. Then the Aurox munition train started to move, trying to draw up past the line of stricken transporters. They hadn't heard Piers, of course not, they were too far away. But someone had the same basic instinct for self-preservation.\n\nThe second volley of missiles found the munition train as it was trying to pass. The flashes made Hari stumble back and flinch. He saw fireballs lift from the road, an Aurox turning over in midair.\n\nThen even bigger blasts came, as the munition wagons cooked off, blasts that engulfed some of the stationary carriers, and devoured the men out on the highway.\n\nPiers turned, and ran up the highway, heading towards the scrub waste to the right of the road in front of the convoy position. He hugged his huge riffle. His gait was heavy and ungainly.\n\n'Where are you... Where are you going?' Hari yelled after him.\n\nPiers kept moving. Hari followed him. So did two dozen or more of the troops who had made it out of their carrier.\n\nHari suddenly realised he could see what the grenadier had seen. It was so big, it was almost invisible: a vast, white cliff some five kilometres north, veiled by the thick atmospheric dust.\n\nIt was the port. It was the vast, beautiful superstructure of the Eternity Wall space port, silent and massive like an alpine range. They had come so close. They had come so close without loss or incident and now, in sight of it, this.\n\nThey were running, piecemeal and with no order, out into the scrub. Some soldiers had their weapons, some didn't. One ran off in the wrong direction for no apparent reason. Piers lumbered along at the head of the pack. He was fumbling to load something into his trusty firearm as he ran, cursing and spitting. Hari could hear the caliver whine as it charged to power.\n\nThe port was further away than it looked. It didn't seem to be getting any closer. They started to slow, out of breath, some troopers stopping, heads down, hands braced on their knees, panting. Hari looked behind him. The convoy was a quarter of a kilometre back. A long, black curtain of smoke was lifting from it, as though it were trying to mirror the white sweep of the port in negative.\n\nIt was so quiet. Scrub. Dust. The stir of wind. A few men gasping.\n\n'Shit,' said Piers. He steadied his shako, and started to stride back the way they had come. 'Shit-cakes,' he added.\n\n'What?' asked Hari.\n\nPiers reached inside his heavy red coat and, with some effort, wrenched out an old service autopistol. He held it out to Hari without looking.\n\n'What?' Hari repeated.\n\n'Do you know how to shoot one, boy?' Piers asked.\n\n'You know I don't!'\n\n'Bloody lake it anyway,' the grenadier snapped. 'You're about to learn.'\n\nHari found the gun in his hands. It was heavy, and it stank of oil. He sluffed the slate in his coat pocket, and tried to hold the weapon in some way that it wouldn't be pointing at him.\n\nPiers turned to the others. He was settling the long mass of Old Bess against his shoulder.\n\n'Get yourselves in a line!' he yelled out. 'A flaming line, right now!' His voice was a foghorn, though it had a ragged edge of fear. Some troopers stopped, bewildered. Most stepped forward, prepping whatever weapons they had.\n\n'Who's got rank?' Piers hollered. 'Who's got a stripe?'\n\nNo one answered.\n\n'Bloody me, then,' he growled. 'Come on, show some order then!' 'What's going on?' Hari asked.\n\nPiers gave Hari the dirtiest look of contempt.\n\n'We thought we'd stop for a picnic,' he said.\n\n'No, I mean-'\n\nThe grenadier pointed. Hari saw.\n\nBack on the highway, figures were moving around the burning vehicled. He could hear pings and cracks on the wind, like sticks being broken. Infantry. Ground troops, swarming the convoy from the"}
{"text":"ot rank?' Piers hollered. 'Who's got a stripe?'\n\nNo one answered.\n\n'Bloody me, then,' he growled. 'Come on, show some order then!' 'What's going on?' Hari asked.\n\nPiers gave Hari the dirtiest look of contempt.\n\n'We thought we'd stop for a picnic,' he said.\n\n'No, I mean-'\n\nThe grenadier pointed. Hari saw.\n\nBack on the highway, figures were moving around the burning vehicled. He could hear pings and cracks on the wind, like sticks being broken. Infantry. Ground troops, swarming the convoy from the west. There were hundreds of them. Black dots. Some were turning their way.\n\nWe've got a moment, Hari thought. It took us forever to run this far. They-\n\nSome of the dots weren't dots any more. They were shapes, bounding across the scrub towards them, moving so fast Hari couldn't quite make sense of it.\n\nThey weren't human.\n\nAt first, at first he thought dogs. Big dogs. Attack dogs. Then he thought apes. Then grox, galloping. The creatures rushing them weren't any of those things.\n\nThey were might, once, have been men. Some appalling process had swollen them, enlarged their torsos, put humps of muscle bulk across the tops of their spines, and dropped them back down the evolutionary ladder onto all fours. Olly Piers was the biggest man present, and each of these things was twice his size. Their faces... their open mouths... the smell of them...\n\n'What are they?' Hari asked, very quietly. 'What are they? What are they? What-'\n\n'I dunno,' muttered Piers. 'I don't care. But I'm thinking daemons.'\n\nHari made a sound that almost had a question mark on the end.\n\n'Daemons, boy,' Piers repeated. 'Shit-arse, for-real daemons.' He spat, and put the caliver up to his cheek, sighting. He started to mutter, 'Mythrus, war-lady, you useless bitch, wherever you are, send your old soldier some grace now, for shit's sake, I'm begging you...'\n\nThe things were closing.\n\n'There's no...' said Hari, trying to sound as clear and certain as he could, as if that would clear everything up. 'There's no such thing as daemons.'\n\n'Oh, we're all right then,' said the grenadier.\n\nHe snuggled into his aim.\n\n'Ten metres!' he yelled.\n\n'We're bloody dead, Olly!' someone shouted.\n\n'You bloody will be if I hear you say that again!' the grenadier roared. 'Ten metres! Final offer! Going once, going twice...'\n\nThe things came up to them, bounding, leaping, eager, their jaws open to bite and snap. The ragged line of troopers began to shoot The rippling barrage made Hari jump.\n\nThe grenadier's first shot was a raking beam of blue-hot light.\n\nIt burst the frontrunner, splitting it apart from front to back and dropping it in the dust, steaming, bloody bones open to the sunlight. To the big grenadier's left, an Excertus squadder with an old autocannon slew a second, ripping it into chunks of meat with a burst of fire. Lasrifles and hard-round guns cracked and popped.\n\nOld Bess whined back to power, and Piers fired again, knocking another beast off its feet. The beam left a smoking hole the size of a dinner plate clean through its body. The squadder's autocannon kept blurting, cones of flash dancing around her muzzle, spent casings flying out in a jingling spray. A militia man with a lasrifle scored a kill. It had taken him four hits to do enough damage to stop his target in its tracks.\n\nThe grenadier's caliver whined back up to power. Slower this time, straining.\n\n'Come on, Bessie me girl, come on,' Piers crooned, taking sight. 'Upland Tercio, hooo!' he yelled above the volleying gunfire.\n\nHe fired a third time. The caliver let off a less emphatic beam. It clipped a beast, and knocked it flat, but it writhed in the dust and got up again, blood bubbling from a gouge in its shoulder.\n\n'P-piers...' Hari mumbled.\n\nThe caliver whined, struggling to cycle.\n\n'Piers!'\n\nThe wounded beast lunged. Piers fired again. Just a bolt, a clumsy spit of light, but the thing was almost on them, and it was enough. It collapsed within metres of his feet.\n\nThere were two more right behind it.\n\nThe grenadier changed grip. He tucked the caliver's butt under his right armpit, and reached forward for the under-barrel grip. The weapon was whining again, but it sounded feeble and exhausted, living the best it could to reheat.\n\n'Come on, then!' Piers roared at the things bearing down on them.\n\nHe squeezed the forward grip. The under-barrel tube coughed out a grenade with a hollow thump. The small, heavy projectile flew like a piece of well-aimed fruit, struck one of the incoming beasts head on, and disintegrated it in a cloud of flame.\n\nPiers pumped the under-barrel slide, and thumped off another grenade shell. It blew the second dog off its feet, and sent it cartwheeling.\n\nHe pumped again.\n\nBut the dogs, the beasts, were now in among them. The squadder with the autocannon was carried over. She shrieked, trying to fight her killer off, but it savaged her relentlessly, until she stopped making any sounds. Two beasts caught the militia man, and fought over his corpse, pulling it apart. Four more troopers were slammed off their feet: crunching impacts, soldiers brought down in tangles of limbs and snapping bones. Other men broke the line, and tried to run. Most didn't get far.\n\nOne beast came for Hari. He saw its eyes, wild and inhuman, its mouth swinging open, its belly as it launched into its leap.\n\nA beam of blue light snatched sideways, and sent it tumbling. Old Bess had finally recharged.\n\n'Piers!' Hari yelled.\n\nThe grenadier turned. The dog that had killed the squadder was coming at him from the left, its face plastered with gore. He had no charge developed. Piers thumped a grenade into its chest point-blank. The blast killed it, but the air-smack knocked the grenadier off his feet too. He got back up on his knees, dazed, ungainly, coat twisted, shako off. Another dog was running at him. A frantic pump of the mechanism. A hollow pop. The grenade demolished it. Yet another came in, from the left again. Piers swivelled, still on his knees.\n\n'Suck it, you ugly ball-bag!' he said, and destroyed it with his last grenade.\n\nPiers looked up at Hari.\n\n'Sorry, boy,' he said.\n\nA shadow slid across them both.\n\nSomething thunderous mowed the ground around them. It felt as though multiple lightning strikes were earthing all at once. Hari and Piers sprawled together, arms tight around each other. It wasn't entirely clear who had grabbed whom, or who had pulled whom flat.\n\nThe thunder continued. Huge sprays of topsoil and dust flew up, like giant stalks of corn, stippling the ground around them. The earth under them quivered, vibrating like the skin of a drum. Beasts jerked and shredded, caught in the ferocious kinetic downpour. The air choked with yellow dust and sheets of drifting red mist.\n\nHugging Piers tight, Hari looked up, almost rigid with shock. He wiped a slick of blood and dust off his face with one splayed hand.\n\nThere was an aircraft hanging almost directly over them, hovering no more than thirty metres up. It was just a dark shape against the sky. He could feel the pummel of its downwash. Weapon pods on its underside were howling out a hail of suppression fire. The dogs, the beasts, were being slaughtered and driven back from the small knot of cowering soldiers who still remained. The ground was being systematically cleared around them.\n\nBut a second and larger wave of beasts was already bounding in, a surging tide of what the grenadier had called 'daemons'. A hundred or more, drawn by the scent of blood, flooding in from the ravaged convoy to feed.\n\nThe aircraft swung away, and dropped lower to face them. Its pods chewed at the approaching tide, the rotary canons buzzing like rapid metal hammers, one long blurt of sound rather than individual shots.\n\nThe gun-pods' snouts were spinning crowns of flame.\n\nThe entire front-end of the slate-grey machine opened. It sort of hinged and unfurled at the same time, plates of metal spreading, overlapping and sliding over each other.\n\nHari saw something golden catch the light.\n\n* * *\n\nPrefect Tsutomu exits the Talion. He is more use on the ground. I didn't know if there's anyone left to save. We have arrived too late. This relief convoy is miserably annihilated. But these things must die. They are the first Neverborn I have seen inside the Palace zone.\n\nThey are not full-blown creatures of the warp. They are human shells, soldiers of the traitor host, I believe, now a different kind of host. Mindless vessels for Neverborn spirits that have infested their flesh and remade their form. I have seen such things before in the depths of the webway, but not here, in the realspace of the Throneworld's heart. The Custodians named them 'witch-dogs', but I always felt that was insulting to witches.\n\nI maintain suppressive fire from the helm. The prefect clears ten metres from the front hatch, and hits the ground running. He accel erates into a blur. He fires bolts from his poleaxe as he sprints, crippling and killing, cracking their line to make an opening. Then he is among them, and his castellan axe starts swinging.\n\nThe form is superb. He has been at this duty for a long age, and has mastered the very specific skills a castellan axe requires. Elegant but brutal, a fine balance of transhuman strength, constant momentum and subtle balance. It is like a dance, a whirling ballet that, once begun, cannot be halted. Unlike a sword, with which one might strike, break, re-address and strike again, axe-work must flow, stroke into stroke, or momentum will be lost and the axe become unwieldy, even for Tsutomu. In combat, a castellan axe must be kept in motion. It is a narrative of violence, not a dialogue.\n\nTsutomu knows this. Blade-stroke becomes blade-stroke becomes blade-stroke. The butt of the haft is a weapon too, breaking skulls on the through-swings and returns.\n\nBut there are many of them. From my seat, I see him: a lone figure of gold, reaping amid a broad field of dark forms. I will intercede. This work is why I came here. I set the lift systems to autonomous hold,"}
{"text":"nwieldy, even for Tsutomu. In combat, a castellan axe must be kept in motion. It is a narrative of violence, not a dialogue.\n\nTsutomu knows this. Blade-stroke becomes blade-stroke becomes blade-stroke. The butt of the haft is a weapon too, breaking skulls on the through-swings and returns.\n\nBut there are many of them. From my seat, I see him: a lone figure of gold, reaping amid a broad field of dark forms. I will intercede. This work is why I came here. I set the lift systems to autonomous hold, the gun-cogitators to auto-selective. I leave the gunship to hover and kill on its own.\n\nI move to the open hatch. I draw Veracity, though I won't need her. It is not far to jump.\n\n* * *\n\n'What is that?' Hari whispered.\n\n'A Custodian, boy,' Piers said. He started to laugh. 'A Talon of the Emperor Himself! Balls of glory, look at him kill!'\n\nThe grenadier let Hari go, and got to his knees. He began to clap find cheer, as though it was a performance just for him.\n\nThe Custodian was a smudge of moving gold, fogged in a billowing cloud of blood. The bodies of beasts, none of them intact, littered the dust around him. He was leaving a trail of them.\n\nBut Hari hadn't meant the Custodian. He had meant the chill, the sudden cold. A shadow that had just passed over them, darker than the shade the aircraft had cast when it hovered over their heads.\n\nSomething else was here, something else-\n\n'Oh shit,' murmured the grenadier. He got to his feet, pulling on his dusty shako. He was staring, but at what, Hari couldn't see.\n\nThe dogs, the beasts... stopped. They froze. A few yelped and yapped. They pawed backwards, heads low, whimpering, then turned and fled, every one of them that was still alive, or what might be termed alive. They raced away in, as it seemed to Hari, sudden and abject terror. They ran back the way they had come, in their hundreds, leaving their abominable dead behind.\n\nThe Custodian stopped swinging. He came to rest, a golden blur becoming a gilded giant. He lowered the immense axe, and stood, watching the enemy retreat.\n\n'She saved us,' Piers murmured.\n\n'Old Bess?' asked Hari.\n\n'What, boy?'\n\nPiers walked forward. Hari stumbled after him. Everything tasted of dust and blood. The Custodian turned.\n\n'Are you alive?' asked the Custodian. His voice was like a lead weight wrapped in silk. 'How many of you are alive? Trooper, make an account.'\n\n'In His name, I thank you!' Piers stammered. He had taken off his shako, and was clutching it to his chest. 'All these years, I have left little offerings, all I could spare, so forgive me, but just what I had, little offerings to ask for your intercession...'\n\nHari came up behind the grenadier. Piers wasn't speaking to the giant in gold. He wasn't even looking at him. He was grinning inanely at the empty air to the Custodian's left, rambling, tears in his eyes.\n\nThe Custodian turned his gleaming visor towards Hari.\n\n'Was this man injured?' he asked, clipped. 'Has he taken a blow to the head?'\n\n'I have no idea of his life story, lord,' said Hari, 'but there's every chance.'\n\n'Your intercession, all I asked,' Piers went on. 'I'll admit, I have cursed you, from time to time, when it never came, so I hope you'll excuse that, but you were saving it for now, saving it for this moment, weren't you? Saving it all up for the day I needed to be delivered from daemons!'\n\n'Piers,' said Hari. He put a hand on the grenadier's arm. 'Piers. The lord Custodian is trying to talk to you.'\n\n'Well, he can see I'm busy,' Piers snapped. 'I must abase myself before anything else.' He looked at the space beside the Custodian 'Should I? Is that required? Should I abase myself?'\n\n'To whom?' asked Hari.\n\n'I wasn't talking to you, boy!' Piers snapped. 'I was talking to her!'\n\n'To-?'\n\n'To Mythrus, you flaming idiot! Show some manners, boy!'\n\n'The Custodian looked to his left. 'Agreed, it is unusual,' he said, as if in answer to something.\n\nThe air around them was so cold. Hari felt sick. He squinted, and realised there was something there after all, like a broken sliver of dirty glass standing upright in the settling dust, almost invisible.\n\nA greasy smear of light. The impression, for a brief second, of hands moving, forming quick shapes.\n\nPiers had dropped to his knees.\n\n'Yes,' said the Custodian. 'It would appear he can see you.'\n\n* * *\n\nAt that moment, a very long way away, half a world, a man arrived at his destination. It was his last stop along the way before journey's end.\n\nIt was the right time, and the right place, within a reasonable margin of error: the deep and stubborn heart of the PanAfrik north-west, baking in the heat, a great erg, a sand-sea. Just a few miles out; he still measured things in miles. Perhaps a few days shy. A few miles, a few days. That was an impressive degree of accuracy, given the scale with which he was obliged to work. All of times, and all of spaces, the entire cosmic map, and he had nailed it to within a few days and a few miles.\n\nAt least, he hoped he had this time.\n\nHe had an appointment to keep. A meeting. He wasn't looking forward to it at all. It was going to be awkward. Too many big favours to ask from people who didn't like him. Too many big debts to call in, and apologies to make. A lot of apologies, probably. He had pissed people off over the years. A lot of people. A lot of years.\n\nHe was going to have to work hard, appeal to natures much better than his own.\n\nHe stood for a moment. Soft, red sand lay all around him, quartz dusted with ferric oxide. The rolling dunes of the erg lay in the uruq manner, the long ridges flowing with the sculpting wind, like frozen breakers. Between these great banks of sand lay avenues, the shuquq, hollows between the dunes bedded with soft gypsum and seeq. There was a rocky rim of flat, black hills to the west. The sun beat down from a sky so cloudless, its blue had gone dark and hard with heal He was sweating already. He wasn't dressed for this.\n\nHe sighed.\n\n'Right, okay,' said John Grammaticus to himself, and started to walk along the nearest shuquq into the west.\n\nPART TWO\n\nI AM THE FORTRESS NOW\n\nONE\n\n* * *\n\nThe twenty-second of Quintus\n\nLateral cunning\n\nPons Solar\n\nYzar Chroniates of the Third Grand Battalion of the Iron Warriors, lord captain of the Second Armoured Century, came over the splintered rampart, assured his name and deeds had just become immortal, and that he would be remembered upon the honour lists as the first of Great Lupercal's host to breach the fourth circuit wall of Gorgon Bar. Massing over a tonne of augmented, artificed Cataphractii plate, he was the first legionary to crack the inner ring of the gate defences that had held them at bay, a bellow of rage and triumph on his lips, servo-steered flamer systems mounted on the colossal shelf of his shoulders, framed by spikes - huge scaling hooks that had brought him up the sheer stone cliff of the wall - curving like an eagle's talons from his forearms and shins, power claw spreading to strike, bolter already firing, first among conquerors.\n\nAnd the blade came the other way to meet him.\n\nEncarmine bit through etched plasteel. Through ceramite. Through refolded harness padding. Overlaid power systems severed and shortedin clouds of flying sparks. Coolant ducts ruptured. The blade's course continued, its edge slicing reinforced undersuit, segmented liner, yielding flesh, and then the solid skeletal shell of the carapace, the nested transhuman organs, the spinal cord.\n\nChroniates teetered on the lip of the wall, his bolter firing blindly, wildly. His thorax seemed to slump slightly into his abdomen, as though his immense panoply of plate was a rock face succumbing to a landslip.\n\nThe Brightest One wrenched Encarmine free.\n\nChroniates toppled backwards. As he fell, his torso hinged open, like yawning jaws, like some toymaker's novelty, power systems exploding as cabling tore. He plunged down the sheer drop, his dismantled bulk smashing others of his kind off the stone facing, their scaling hooks tom free: Tyranthikos and Stor-Bezashk specialists cast down from the height into the smoke below. His moment of immortality had been less than a second long.\n\nSanguinius did not watch his kill's long plunge. He was turning to meet the next enemy, Encarmine a whistling band of silver, the flicker of a sunlight ray from which armoured heads tumbled and limbs parted.\n\nEverything was noise and motion. Blurred noise, fogged motion. The drench of blood, the shearing of metal, smoke in every seam and every pore. Feral war engulfed the Bar, accelerated to transhuman proportions, a battle of the ancient days magnified in scale, amplified in force and performed at inhuman speed. Industrial death, with no pause, no scant second of remission, no time for reflection on glory, no room for myth or even the merest kindling of myth An eight kilometre line of angled high wall, sheer as a mountain, covered in a carpet of bodies like a plague of gleaming beetles, like a mat of moss and trailing vine folded across a great stream-thwart rock, ranks of defenders above, writhing against the press of the scaling creeper-tides of traitor host ascending against them, like termites massing to overtop a rival mound.\n\nSmogged air, bruised black, underlit and jarred by explosive flashes of nippling brilliance, the fire-spears of detonations lancing out in sunbursts, eating the wall, shredding all in their radii with hyper-sonic shrapnel, and the jagged fragments of those already obliterated and instantaneously perished. Chains of fire from defending flamers, Jetting infernos hosing from attacking units. Stitching interference patterns of tracer and bolt-rounds. Enemy forces, some advancing under shield or covered by plated sows. Falling bodies, alive and dead. Outflung body parts, still armour-clad. The howl of focused and accelerated plasma. The shriek of chainblades. The eerie local distortion and fume of melta fields, auras of sub-atomic agitation. Red mist. Dirt. Ouslite chips flying from the "}
{"text":"sly perished. Chains of fire from defending flamers, Jetting infernos hosing from attacking units. Stitching interference patterns of tracer and bolt-rounds. Enemy forces, some advancing under shield or covered by plated sows. Falling bodies, alive and dead. Outflung body parts, still armour-clad. The howl of focused and accelerated plasma. The shriek of chainblades. The eerie local distortion and fume of melta fields, auras of sub-atomic agitation. Red mist. Dirt. Ouslite chips flying from the teeth of scaling hooks as they dug for purchase.\n\nArmoured belfries disgorging men onto walls. Escalade ladders slamming into parapet lines, or being poled back past the apogee, every figure clinging on and falling as the ladder toppled. Tower guns and wall batteries firing at the lowest declination, barrels glowing with waste-heat, shells jamming in swollen breeches. The drizzling chime of autoloaders emptying hoppers, raining casings in jingling blizzards that fell in metal drifts, and covered parapet steps like spills of mining slag, obscuring all definition of structure.\n\nLives leaking out. Slow bleeds. Massive and sudden blood losses. Grim mutilations of extraordinary scope that would surprise the most inventive anatomists. Guns too hot to hold or use. Blades broken and still swinging, jagged edges acting surrogate for the lost fine teeth of hallmark weapons. Screams of death, of pain, of hatred, of loss, of hope, of disappointment, of duty. Last breaths expended in long, slow, shuddering exhalations or brief and violent bursts. Final moments spluttering in bubbles of blood between gasped lips, finalwords whispered to no one, final hopes dashed into darkness. Noise too loud to hear, noise that could only be felt, with no meaning in it.\n\nBloodstained Blood Angels, vanguard of the line, their beauty revealed as it had always truly been: as cruel and merciless horror, their noble legend put aside so they could kill unashamed, the way their genefather had made them to kill. No false myth of noble angels, that guise gone so that they, though unchanged in aspect, had become the truest, oldest meaning of terrible. A coin reversed. A truth that had been obvious all along, but was now unmasked, unslipped. Their true selves, beings of awe, when awe is a weapon of itself.\n\nBloodied Imperial Fists, backbone of the defence, yellow panoplies so badged and washed with gore they could be mistaken for their Blood Angels brethren, taking not one step backwards, nor one forward, for there was nothing before them but the brink of hell. Shields tattered, lances shattered, swords cracked to jagged stubs clenched in Imperial fists. Fafnir Rann, plate dappled with blood, red spots on yellow, like some illuminator's garish notion of a heraldic beast, rampant upon a wall of bodies atop a wall of stone, paired axes hacking like pistons into faces, chests and pauldrons, hooking torn visors into the haze on the backswing. Rann's breaker-shield had been destroyed in the first fury of the assault, and he had cast it aside, unclasping his war-axe's twin to wield a cleaver in each hand.\n\nBlow answering blow. The hammer of war, a million individual impacts falling so fast they became one noise that shivered and buckled the air. Unbreakable materials breaking. Unstoppable strengths being stopped. A devolution of war: blades when ammunition was spent, empty guns when blades were broken, mailed fists when blade stubs were lost, bare fists when gauntlets were shredded.\n\nAnd tip from the darkness, the Iron Warriors, the grey-black flood of a dam that had burst in hell, a deluge of siege-breaker armour and liny that would not stop or ebb until the wall and the bastion was washed away and reduced to fused and smoking pegs of rock, and the path to the Sanctum was opened.\n\nOpen all the way to the Lion's Gate, and the Palatine underbelly, and the last, unassaulted wall of Eternity.\n\nIt was the morning of the twenty-second of Quintus. In the last three hours, the Bar's outermost lines had fallen. After a day of long-range shelling, which had wounded even the central bastion, the mass had come, and the outworks and first two circuit walls had been lost, and then the third wall too, in catastrophically quick succession. The traitor tide had rushed in, higher than any forecast, sundering stone, drowning that which had been safe and dose-held. Imperial Fists had died, overwhelmed as they grimly kept their place. Blood Angels had died, overtaken as they rushed to regroup and stem the flow. The hosts of the Army, unbearably mortal, had died in between the two, crushed to paste and bonemeal and blood-ooze by the iron avalanche.\n\nThe fourth circuit wall had to be the flood break. The fourth circuit wall, so impossibly quickly, had become the last line that Sanguinius was prepared to draw. 'No further'. It had not been an order, it had been a law: an Angelic commandment that allowed for no failure.\n\nAn hour of inarticulate horror followed that collision of might.\n\nThe fourth circuit wall, Gorgon Bar, the twenty-second of Quintus. In other histories of other wars, it would have been a defining moment, a legendary clash. But in this War of Wars, it was just a sortie, a footnote fast forgotten in a catalogue of equal furies.\n\nThere was no grace to it, no order, despite the stoic discipline of the Imperial Fists, the drilled resolution of the Iron Warriors, the elegant execution of the Blood Angels. All that dissolved in moments into blind murder. It was the most intense, most concentrated, most disordered battle of the Terran Siege thus far, and would remain so until the ghastly, inchoate slaughter of the final days.\n\nFisk Halen turned it in the forty-eighth minute of the assault. With Terminator squads at his side, and a deluge of support fire from Aux-ilia units along the bastion ledge, he drove into Katillon guntower and its adjacent wall top, and compressed the southern hem of the enemy influx with such severity that Iron Warriors tumbled from the wall like spilled beads, both down the scarred face they had scaled and off the inner range into the yards below, where Army halberdiers and skitarii hoplites mobbed and butchered any that the fall had not killed.\n\nSanguinius, Lord of Baal, his golden hair stained red and dripping, saw the break. He could not reach it, locked as he was in cataphract onslaught, but Rann could, and Furio could, and Bel Sepatus of the Keruvim, and those he directed with a voice that pierced the storm. Rann's tattered wallguard was the first to reach the crux, and they bore into the tide as if they had no other desire than to meet Halen face to face and clasp his hand.\n\nAnd there it teetered, on the brink of loss and collapse, for seconds as dense and heavy as centuries. Then Sepatus and his Paladins, their tri-faced emblems obscured by gore, joined Rann's desperate extension, and bolstered it with their Cataphractii might. In the shadow of Katillon guntower, a burning stump of stone into which shells kept smashing, Imperial Fists and Blood Angels pincered and broke the enemy's back.\n\nThe traitor tide snapped. So many bodies, most of them still living, cascaded from the wall where there was no longer any space for them to exist. They became involuntary weapons, their plummeting armoured forms striking those behind and below, taking them with them, disintegrating ladder frames and scaling chutes, tearing down the rising breach-scaffolds and the belfries of the warsmith engineers. Legionaries rained, a black hail of bodies. Rann, his faceplate torn in half, threw three of them personally, grabbing them as they tried to counter and turn, and casting them bodily off the parapet. The rest broke, their formation damaged beyond recovery. Like a sea going out, they rolled backwards in retreat, and the mangled third circuit wall of Gorgon Bar became the Iron Warriors' new fortification and investment of attack.\n\nQuiet fell, smoke-muffled, somehow more oppressive than the noise that had preceded it. Gorgon Bar, its lines of resistance cut back to one last circuit, was disfigured, weeping smoke, sheeting flames, walls deformed by onslaught pressure, towers bent and gnawed away, as though the entire bastion line had contorted in a rictus of pain and death. A cinder pall, eight kilometres long, hung across the Bar, a smoke ridge visible from the turrets of Marmax, a funeral banner of annihilation barely averted.\n\n* * *\n\nSanguinius bowed his head. His vision, unbidden, fled from the stilled carnage. It became elsewhere, else-one. It touched an anger still to come.\n\n'Not now,' he whispered, but his prescience took no orders, not even from him. It was wilful and disturbing, and came when it chose. For a moment, his mind conjoined with that of one of his brothers, and showed him...\n\nA future. An unbridled wrath. A battle-slaughter that would make the last hour he had endured seem tame. He did not want to look at it. He did not want to see with a traitor's eyes, feel a lost brother's infernal torment, taste a killing hatred so intoxicating.\n\nBut he wept in pity, for slayers and slain to come, and could not look away.\n\nThe visions had stalked him his whole life, sporadic and infrequent, but they had started to come more often in these last days. He never really spoke of them to others, not out of shame or fear of suspicion, but more because there was never an exactitude to them. It wasn't a talent, nor could he harness it to make it an art. He had never tried. He didn't divulge it, because it wasn't something that could be turned into a reliable tool of prognostication.\n\nIt was just a thing that happened to him.\n\nHe walked from the broken lip of the wall, too tired to fly, though he knew the sight of him soaring would lift the concussed spirits of the defenders. Too tired, too unsteady: the fleeting vision was already going, but the aftertaste of anger made him tremble, enflaming the autonomic responses kindled by the battle.\n\nHe knew what it was. At least, he h"}
{"text":"ivulge it, because it wasn't something that could be turned into a reliable tool of prognostication.\n\nIt was just a thing that happened to him.\n\nHe walked from the broken lip of the wall, too tired to fly, though he knew the sight of him soaring would lift the concussed spirits of the defenders. Too tired, too unsteady: the fleeting vision was already going, but the aftertaste of anger made him tremble, enflaming the autonomic responses kindled by the battle.\n\nHe knew what it was. At least, he had always believed he knew. They had always said he was like his father, more like his father than any other. He shared the numinous qualities of his genesire. He was no high psyker, no magician, no warlock of the warp, but the vestige was there, an inherited trait like eye colour or handedness. It was his talent, or perhaps a slow curse. From time to time, the future would glance his way, and he would lock eyes with it briefly. Since the start of the siege, since the grim vision he had seen during the turmoil of the Ruinstorm, in fact, Sanguinius' escalating visions had become very particular, very specific. Each vision showed him the future through the eyes of one of his brothers.\n\nThe specific intimacy his visions brought to him chilled him. He would glimpse something the way one of his brothers was going to see it: a prescience linked to kinship, to blood.\n\nAnd there was blood at Gorgon Bar. Too much of it. It pooled on the parapet walks and anointed the broken crenellations. Blood of the Legiones Astartes gene-line, which traced its direct heredity through him and his brothers to the Father of All. Perhaps that, Sanguinius thought, was the raw truth of it. Perhaps that explained why his unwelcome visions had come more often since the start of the siege. The blood of his familial line, spilled in unprecedented quantities, in such a small space on one world, the birth-world no less, spilled in such concentration as to be an offering, a sacrificial libation that enflamed and amplified his latent gift. The shamans of old had spilled blood to coax secrets from the future. They had sacrificed their own kind.\n\n'My lord?'\n\nBel Sepatus approached, with Khoradal Furio and Emhon Lux. There was blood on them too, coating their angelic plate. The currency of future exchange. Sanguinius' visions were fading, mere aftershocks, but this blood seemed to stir them again. In quick succession, Sanguinius blinked away flash-visions: an elemental end-storm beheld by Jaghatai's eyes, cyclonic force dumping rain and unimaginable lightning on the earth; a tower or wall collapsing, witnessed by Rogal, carrying him with it; a great chart of the Imperial Palace, laid out with its edges weighed down by bolter shells.\n\nThat last, the clearest, the longest-lasting, was a glimpse through Perturabo's gaze. Sanguinius felt the unpleasant prickle of sharing that place, of inhabiting the Lord of Iron's best-protected fortress, a recondite bastion of the mind where none wanted to be, not even, so it seemed, Perturabo himself.\n\nIt made sense that this should be the vision that lingered. It was the blood of Perturabo's family branch that dripped from the warriors who faced him.\n\n'My lord?' Bel Sepatus said again.\n\n'Secure the Bar,' Sanguinius said. They hesitated, expecting more. He noticed their faces, their quizzical beauty. His words had been feeble. It was hard to summon words up past the pulses of sight. Shell cases on a chan...\n\nHe remembered himself, and reached out, clasping the side of Sepatus' head.\n\n'You did me great service, Bel,' he said. 'A feat of arms. No one lacked. Not our crimson host, nor our brothers of the Seventh.'\n\n'What troubles you, lord?' asked Khoradal. Sanguinius realised he had stumbled on the word 'brothers'.\n\n'I fear, Khoradal,' he said, 'that before this is over, too many will witness the true terror of us.'\n\nA half-lie, but sufficient. Khoradal Furio nodded.\n\nShell cases on a chart. A hand moves one...\n\n'Secure the Bar,' Sanguinius said. 'Engineers, sappers, the magi of the Forge. Fourth circuit is our line now. We hold what we have.'\n\n'There may not be time enough for full securement,' said Emhon Lux. They will come again-'\n\n'They will.'\n\n'Too soon for-'\n\nShell cases. Moved across the chart to the spot marked Gorgon Bar. This is the future.\n\n'We have until tomorrow,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Surely they will seek to-'\n\n'They will not come again until tomorrow,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'You say that as if you know,' said Sepatus.\n\n'Then treat it as if I do, Bel,' said Sanguinius. 'They have wounded us sorely, broken us hard, but we have shattered their momentum. They are in recoil. They are stunned. They did not close the action. We have until tomorrow. We have time for modest securement at least.'\n\nAll three nodded.\n\n'Get to your work,' Sanguinius said. 'Convey my instruction. And commend me to Fafnir and worthy Captain Halen.'\n\n'Where will you be?' asked Sepatus.\n\nSanguinius was already walking away.\n\nHe needed to clear his mind. The visions were not just more frequent, they were closer. No longer fragments from months or years to come, they were glimpses that were mere days away, hours, minutes.\n\nHow long, he wondered, before they simply became glimpses of the now?\n\nDuring the Ruinstorm, Sanguinius had seen a vision of his own death, at the hands of Horus. That was a future he intended to deny, but how many others could he prevent coming true? He needed to see them clearly, understand them so he could stop them from happening.\n\nThe flashes were fading, the chart and the shell cases dissolving. A sense of Perturabo's iron will lingered. What strength he possessed!\n\nWhat control! Willpower ground to a sharp edge, a mind that had emerged from the shadow of some black sun, no longer an organ of the flesh but a cold and aimed weapon.\n\nFrom his vantage - it was impossible to tell where, for the vision had been very close in focus - but from his vantage, Perturabo had been directing his warsmiths closely. As the outworks and ring circuit of Gorgon Bar had fallen, and fast victory had become a fair promise, the Lord of Iron's heart rate had barely lifted. He had not succumbed to hope. He had maintained his cool, logistical oversight. And when Fisk Halen, and bold Fafnir, and the valiant Bel, had turned the tide on that instant, Perturabo had not despaired. Sanguinius felt that clearly. Perturabo had not despaired or exploded in thwarted rage. He had taken it in his stride, immediately adjusting, amending, preparing for the counter. That was his brilliance: the calculus of siege, the dogged, relentless warfare of attrition; allowing no highs, no lows, just constant, grinding pursuit of the goal. Today was no dismal loss for him. It was just a step, a small component of a grander mechanism.\n\nThat's why Perturabo, Lord of Iron, so alarmed Sanguinius, perhaps more than any other of his turned brothers. His relentless prosecution. In a siege... in this, the siege... It made him the most dangerous of all. Sanguinius felt he would rather face the Lupercal, close, hand to hand, than Perturabo at a distance. When the time came, facing Horus, in whatever situation, would be a monumental deed: to face down that once-beloved brother, first in majesty, and thwart him, him who they had all always thought un-thwartable.\n\nTo contradict and overturn the vision of his own doom.\n\nBut Perturabo...\n\nThe visions were all but gone, just flash-echoes. As he crossed to the main bastion, moving further from the spilled blood with each step, they receded. Perturabo was why Sanguinius was glad to have Rogal stand at his side. In this manner of warfare, only Rogal, dear Rogal, stood any chance of matching the Lord of Iron like-for-like.\n\nIs that how it must play out? Rogal games Perturabo into check and mate, so that the task of fronting Horus falls to me? Perhaps it must. Like for like. If any must face the Lupercal with even a modest hope of prevailing, then it must likely be me, even though I have been shown that I must fail.\n\nHe stopped, two-thirds of the way across the bridge that joined the fourth circuit with the bastion proper. He looked up at the punctured towers above, draped in smoke. That other flash, of Rogal falling with a tower. How far off was that? How literal a vision? The glimpse of Jaghatai, lit by lightning, had been shockingly real, a moment of crystal definition. But the sight-blink of Rogal, like so many other visions he had suffered in his life, had been more abstract, as though symbolic, metaphoric - like the styled meaning of tarot cards turned up. Death, but not literal death. A man hanging, but not literally hanged. A tower struck, but not literal lightning.\n\nSanguinius dearly wanted counsel. If his visions had any real value, if they were anything more than a curious quirk of inheritance, he wanted to know. To understand. If he could learn to use them, even belatedly, now was the time. He wanted to confide in his father, or if his father was occupied, as his father so often was, then the Sigillite it least. The old man knew of numinous things too, and surely he had the advantage of familial detachment. Malcador could help him.\n\nBut Sanguinius knew he didn't have the luxury of leaving the line. Gorgon Bar was his place, and had to be held. It had to be, and tomorrow was too close, and it would not stand without him. Yet if they were to lose Rogal...\n\nHe closed his eyes. He breathed deeply. Sooty wind from the canyons of the circuit walls shivered the feathers of his pinions. He tried to locus on the scraps of the fading visions, attempting to pull them back. The one of Perturabo, the chart, the shell cases, a departing ghost, almost just a memory. Bring that back. See that again. See better. See more.\n\nThere.\n\nThe smoking iron of willpower. The texture of the old paper chart. The weight of the bolter shells. A smell of dust and smoke. Sanguinius was briefly invested in a body that was heavier and slower than his own, a body too dense t"}
{"text":"d the feathers of his pinions. He tried to locus on the scraps of the fading visions, attempting to pull them back. The one of Perturabo, the chart, the shell cases, a departing ghost, almost just a memory. Bring that back. See that again. See better. See more.\n\nThere.\n\nThe smoking iron of willpower. The texture of the old paper chart. The weight of the bolter shells. A smell of dust and smoke. Sanguinius was briefly invested in a body that was heavier and slower than his own, a body too dense to soar and fly, a body as heavy as a neutron star, but flimsy compared to the concentrated mass of the unswerving mind within it. Perturabo's mind was a weapon. It was all weapons at once. It was fast becoming the weapon, the apex of obliteration.\n\nThe touch of it made Sanguinius shiver. The cold of it, the absolute zero of a negative star. But he forced himself to keep looking. He needed to see-\n\nShell cases placed at Gorgon Bar, at Colossi Gate. At other points too, but he couldn't resolve them. The names on the chart were hard to read. His hand, my hand, taking up another shell case. It seems hot to the touch, as if just fired, but it is fresh. What is that heat? Ambition. Yes, ambition and desire. And it has another flavour, the touch of another upon it. The print of someone who is no longer present, but was there recently, someone who picked up that shell and handed it to the Lord of Iron and, in doing so, invested it with terrible meaning and significance.\n\nThe shell turns in iron fingers, thoughtful. At his side, in the smoke that drifted across the bridge span, Sanguinius' fingers turned and rippled, unconsciously miming the action.\n\nThat trace. The scent upon it. The imprint of someone...\n\nAbaddon.\n\nLupercal's first and chosen, the finest and brightest of all the First Captains, once a credit to all Legions and a model of warriorship. He gave it to Perturabo. He gave it its meaning.\n\nThe iron hand starts to move, thoughtful, considering a placement, as a master gauges his next play in regicide. It reaches over to set it down, to set it down upon the chart. Where? Where? What is the move? Where will you put it?\n\nSanguinius shivered. The vision was already fleeting again, sliding into nothing. He couldn't hold it. His will could not match the iron ingot of Perturabo's will, or the whim of whatever numinous cloud of knowing steered the visions to him.\n\n'Just let me see it,' he whispered.\n\nThe hand, the shell, move. Reaching out-\n\nGone.\n\nSanguinius opened his eyes. So close. He'd almost controlled it. But the battlements were behind him now, and the ritual potency of the blood drenching them was-\n\nHe reached up, hand shaking, and smeared drying blood from the breast of his plate. He squeezed the matted strands of his hail until drops ran across his palm. Gene blood. Kin blood. The blood of Perturabo's branch. If there was power in it...\n\nHe put his hand to his mouth and tasted it.\n\nThe chart, for a second, very clear. The hand, the shell, going down-\n\nThen fire. Raging fire. Pain beyond any bearable threshold The chart and the shell and the weight of Perturabo were swept away in an instant, eclipsed by agony. The first vision again, the one that had originally come, unbidden, as the day's battle ended. Rage beyond measure. The eyes of another.\n\nNot this. I don't want to see this. I want to see-\n\nThe vision could not be reasoned with. It could not be commanded. Sanguinius tasted blood in his mouth. He saw flames, an inferno, spitting fat, burning human long bones like logs. Pitiful corpses stacked up like split firewood. Dead machines and fractured walls. Stacks of skulls, grinning at their own doom.\n\nHe knew that none of it was enough, nor would ever be enough.\n\nA sky bridge, like the one he stood on, but greater, more massive, and broken. A gateway plinth, its proud stone lion gone except for the stumps of paws. Rubble. A plaque on the plinth, cracked. Inscribed there, etched into heat-brittled stone, the name of the place.\n\nPons Solar.\n\nThen the agony increased, more than any pain should be allowed to be, more than any frame, mortal or immortal, could bear to contain. A pain that begot pain. A pain that wanted to be shared with all others.\n\nSanguinius knew whose eyes he saw through. It wasn't the vision he had chosen to see, but it was the brightest, and it dispelled all others.\n\nHe fell to his knees in the middle span of the bridge at Gorgon Bar, and screamed out a pain that was his own, and a rage that did not belong to him.\n\nAngron. It was Angron's.\n\n* * *\n\nIn the south of the Sanctum Imperialis, the transport rolled to a halt and they got out, pulling up their hoods against the heavy precipitation of sub-void atmospherics.\n\nAround them lay empty streets, lined with proud mansions and noble halls, all untouched by the war except they were shuttered and boarded. The district had been cleared recently, whole streets in the lee of the massive wall vacated.\n\n'Where are we?' asked Therajomas, his young face pinched and puzzled.\n\n'The Saturnine Quarter,' Sindermann replied.\n\nHe had reported to Bhab, as per instructions, and a transport had been provided without explanation. Then followed a long drive through the cowering citadel, slowed at times by columns of blank-eyed refugees. Then quieter streets, then empty ones.\n\nSindermann glanced around, rain in his face. The transport had already turned and departed. To the east, beyond the high ridge of the Ultimate Wall, the sky was bright with ferocious, churning light. To the west, a similar confusion of flame-cast. Western Projection and Adamant. In the span of the last day, the traitor host had begun fresh assaults on those two wall lines, the first such effort to come from the south. Sindermann had been told the assaults were unremitting, artillery bombardments from dispositions of the turned Mechanicum ballisteria and, it was rumoured, the Iron Warriors' Stor-Bezashk siege-breakers. The magnitude was terrifying.\n\nYet Saturnine was quiet, an empty quarter, bracketed by these two great assaults. Sindermann fancied it had been emptied in case Adamant caved, though why? If Adamant caved, then the Ultimate Wall was breached, and nowhere in the Sanctum Imperials Palatine would be safe any more.\n\nNowhere on Terra.\n\nTherajomas tugged at Sindermann's sleeve. Two soldiers had emerged from the blank double-doors of a high-gabled mansion, and were approaching them. Long black rain-cloaks over poppy-red diess uniforms trimmed in gold and white. Officers of the Imperialis Auxilia, the Hort Palatine. One carried a torch-pole.\n\n'Sindermann?' he asked.\n\nSindermann showed him his identification and warrant.\n\n'Who's this?' the officer asked, glancing at Therajomas.\n\nSindermann introduced Therajomas Kanze, and told him to produce his papers.\n\n'I was told one,' said the officer. 'Just you.'\n\n'We're hardly going to leave him out here,' said Sindermann. The transport's already gone.'\n\n'It wouldn't be the worst thing that has happened,' the officer replied.\n\nHe paused. 'I'll vox for approval. He can come in and wait at least.' 'You are?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'Conroi-Captain Ahlborn,' the man replied. His accent was strong. Where was that? Tuniz? Aleppo? The Hort Palatine drew the best from all over.\n\n'You are of the Hort?' Sindermann asked. The Imperialis Auxilia?' He'd thought so at first, the red uniforms were right, but as the men had come closer Sindermann had noticed discrepancies. The long black coats were not the grey paletots issued to the Hort, and the badge on them, a silver palatine aquila, was unfamiliar.\n\n'Yes,' said Ahlborn, 'but seconded to the Command Prefectus Unit for the duration, at the Praetorian's order.'\n\n'The Command Prefectus Unit?'\n\n'It's a new initiative,' said Ahlborn.\n\n'Handling what?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Security. Secrecy. Disclosure. Matters of confidence.'\n\n'Such as?' asked Sindermann gently.\n\n'People asking unnecessary questions,' replied Ahlborn with a tight, cold smile.\n\nSindermann nodded, and made a polite gesture of acquiescence.\n\n'Follow,' said Ahlborn.\n\nInside the heavy doors, which Ahlborn's comrade carefully barred behind them, lay an empty atrium. Gloom and dust presided over a few items of furniture, pulled aside and covered with sheets. A walkway had been laid across the old tiles of the noble townhouse, the linked mesh-and-plastek duckboards of trench systems. Paintings had gone from the high walls, leaving negative shadows. Sindermann wondered who had lived there.\n\nThey walked down long, echoing hallways, following the walkway, and Ahlborn didn't speak. They descended two levels and then, to Sindermann's curiosity, passed through a hole that had been cut cleanly through the building's heavy wall. A heavy melta cut, precision work. The edges were fused smooth. Sindermann could smell the acrid residue. It had only been done a day or two earlier.\n\nThey were in another building now, adjoining the first. Here, long galleries were lined with bulk hydroponic tanks. The light of the low-setting solar lamps filled the hallway with a dull glow. The air was ripe with the smell of mulch and recycled water. Sindermann had heard that whole districts and some prestigious buildings had been seized, and turned into crop production centres in a desperate effort to maintain food stocks. He'd never seen it. This place had once been, what? A museum? A court library? Whatever exhibits or books had been held here had been cleared out wholesale, and replaced with something more precious, the basic engines of nourishment.\n\nThere was no one else around. Ahlborn kept them on the walkway route.\n\n'These are high-yield systems,' Sindermann remarked, gesturing to the banks of crop-tanks as they strode past them.\n\nAhlborn nodded.\n\nThey require constant tending to maximise growth,' said Sindermann.\n\n'They do,' Ahlborn agreed.\n\n'Where are the farm staff?'\n\n'Dismissed yesterday,' Ahlborn said.\n\n'Without care, these crops will fail,' said Sindermann. He stopped and looked at a tan"}
{"text":"precious, the basic engines of nourishment.\n\nThere was no one else around. Ahlborn kept them on the walkway route.\n\n'These are high-yield systems,' Sindermann remarked, gesturing to the banks of crop-tanks as they strode past them.\n\nAhlborn nodded.\n\nThey require constant tending to maximise growth,' said Sindermann.\n\n'They do,' Ahlborn agreed.\n\n'Where are the farm staff?'\n\n'Dismissed yesterday,' Ahlborn said.\n\n'Without care, these crops will fail,' said Sindermann. He stopped and looked at a tank of tubers where the shoots sprouting from the suspended rhizomes looked colourless and wan.\n\nThey'll be moved,' said Ahlborn. 'If there's time,' he added.\n\n'Time before...?' Sindermann began.\n\n'Please, follow me.'\n\nThey came at last to a great hall, a cellar vault or perhaps a water cistern that had been drained. It was warm and damp, like a cave.\n\nDiamantis was waiting for them.\n\n'The companion is approved,' the Huscarl told Ahlborn. The Hort-captain nodded.\n\n'Why have you summoned us here?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'I haven't,' Diamantis replied. From his expression, Sindermann could tell that Huscarl Diamantis still regarded the interrogator order as an annoyance.\n\n'I sent for you.'\n\nThe Praetorian stepped through an archway, and entered the hall. Sindermann felt the boy at his side recoil, and drop to his knees. Diamantis and the Hort Palatines had put their fists to their chests. Sindermann wondered if he should do either, or both.\n\nThis was no chance encounter on a rooftop terrace. This was not Rogal Dorn in his father's old robe, caught off guard. Dorn wore his full battleplate. He was dressed for war. Moving leisurely, he still seemed impossibly powerful.\n\n'Bid him stand up,' Dorn said to Sindermann.\n\nSindermann yanked Therajomas to his feet.\n\n'You have assembled your order, Kyril?' Dorn asked.\n\n'As you willed it, lord,' Sindermann replied. 'Small as yet, but the numbers of the coterie are fine and eager. They are already out, despatched to various points, to witness and record. But you brought me here.'\n\nDorn nodded. He glanced at Ahlborn and his companion.\n\n'Refreshment,' he said. 'Recaff or tea or something.'\n\nThe men nodded and hurried out.\n\n'I brought you here,' said Dorn, 'for the same reason I willed your order back into existence. To observe. To set down for posterity. To provide meaning to what we do. To represent the hope that there will be a future.'\n\n'I am glad to-'\n\nDorn raised his hand, an index finger firm to halt Sindermann's reply.\n\n'And for you, here, a specific reason,' he said. 'You led me here.'\n\n'I did?' Sindermann responded, baffled.\n\n'Unwittingly,' said Dorn. 'But I have been too long in the cosmos to ignore the significance of coincidence and the idle play of fate. So I brought you here to see what you had put into my mind, and observe the consequence. For it may be the saving of us.'\n\n'Then I am honoured, my lord.'\n\n'Understand, Kyril,' said Dorn, 'you are at risk. If I'm right, this place will fall in harm's way and I cannot guarantee your safety.'\n\nSindermann shrugged. 'Terra is besieged, lord,' he said. 'You cannot guarantee the safety of any of us.'\n\nDorn's lips tightened, then he nodded.\n\n'This is particular, Sindermann,' he said. 'If fate is kind to us, the greatest threat of all is coming here. And will find, to his surprise, we are ready for him.'\n\nSindermann ignored the 'him'. He didn't want to think about the 'him'.\n\n'Here?' he asked. This... place? This cellar?'\n\n'Saturnine,' said Dorn.\n\nHe gestured for them to follow him, and they fell in behind him with Diamantis at their heels. Through the broad brick archway, another, still larger cellar cavern yawned. Sindermann and Therajomas both stopped short, dumb with dismay.\n\nA sub-vox snarl snapped at them, quivering their diaphragms, the growl of a mature carnodon. The huge, Ironclad-pattern Dreadnought swung towards them, motivator pistons hissing, and brought its weapons to bear.\n\n'Peace, Venerable Bohemond,' Dorn admonished.\n\nThe Dreadnought, dressed in the colours of the VII Legion, stepped hack and replanted itself, limbs grinding. It depowered its weapon systems. Its growl reduced to a warning purr.\n\nBut it wasn't the Dreadnought that had halted them in their tracks, nor was it the odd chemical stench swimming in the air. Nor, indeed, was it the missing rear wall, gouged out and reinforced, revealing an underground chamber beyond of staggering size, the grain cellars and cisterns of three dozen mansions opened into one vast space and lit by portable lamp rigs, troops and war machines milling in the pools of light.\n\nNot even that.\n\nIt was the figure standing beside the Dreadnought. The Sigillite, robed and cowled, leaning his frail weight upon his staff.\n\n'Kyril, welcome,' said Malcador.\n\n'Great lord,' Sindermann answered, a tremble in his voice. Therajomas had averted his gaze, head bowed. 'Show respect,' Sindermann hissed at him.\n\n'He is too bright!' Therajomas whispered. 'He is too bright to look at!'\n\nSindermann frowned. The awe he felt for the Sigillite was based upon authority and command, on Malcador's role as a direct instrument of the Emperor's will. What was Therajomas seeing?\n\n'Come forward,' said Malcador, beckoning with a bony hand.\n\n'Learn. And find some way to frame it in your chronicle.' His voice was like dried thistles, brushed against velvet.\n\n'What should I learn first, lord?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'That this is a trap,' Malcador replied. 'One devised by Rogal. Laid fast, but laid well, or so we hope. History has preoccupied your life, Kyril. Here you will see it being made.'\n\n'Or being lost,' remarked Dorn.\n\n'Is your confidence failing, Praetorian?' Malcador asked.\n\nDorn shook his head. 'Just my realism showing. This is an extreme gambit. If we'd had longer to-'\n\nThe Sigillite sighed. 'Time is all we have. To be quicker than the quick. To surprise the surprising. To seize opportunity from the opportunists. Lateral cunning. You said so yourself. We take this chance or we suffer the penalty.'\n\n'A trap for what?' asked Sindermann softly.\n\nThe Praetorian looked at him.\n\n'I have reason to believe the traitor foe will strike here,' he said. 'Perhaps within hours. They seek to exploit a weakness they believe we have not noticed. We aim to block that attempt.'\n\n'And more than that...' Malcador chided.\n\n'And turn it back upon them,' Dorn conceded. 'Blocking is imperative, but there is a greater gain to be made. One that might end our calamity.'\n\n'They will strike here at Saturnine?' Sindermann asked. He swallowed hard.\n\nDorn nodded. 'I am sure of it,' he said.\n\n'Because it's what you would do?'\n\n'Yes, exactly that. One flaw in a perfect defence. I would not ignore that. And neither would he.'\n\n'So a... a blind attack?' asked Sindermann. 'A stealth strike?'\n\nTo the head,' Dorn replied.\n\n'For that... for that to work, you would send your best,' said Sindermann 'Not just elite. Specialists. Spear-tip assault, to cut through-'\n\n'Now he's getting it,' the Sigillite murmured. 'Now he understands.'\n\n'Throne of all,' Sindermann whispered. 'You're laying a trap to kill the Lupercal.'\n\n* * *\n\n'I have a story for you,' the soldier said. 'I hear you are gathering stories, to make a history.'\n\nHari Harr looked up at him, squinting against the harsh sunlight, and nodded.\n\n'I've been instructed to do so,' Hari said. To document events and-'\n\nThe soldier shook his head and smiled.\n\n'I do not need convincing that your work is important,' he said. 'Stories are all we have, in the end. Better than gravestones. They last longer.' He smiled, a big, bright smile. 'I think,' he said, 'gravestones are all we will get otherwise.'\n\n'This story then?' asked Hari. He was sitting on a retaining wall, overlooking the emplacement at the eastern end of the Pons Solar. Below, soldiers on work-drill moved in teams, filling and passing sacks of earth to pack the talus of the rampart. He took out his data-slate. 'Start with your name.'\n\n'My name is Joseph,' said the soldier. He leaned his rifle against the wall, and sat down in the sunlight beside Hari. 'Joseph Baako Monday (Eighteenth Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army). But it is not about me, no. It is a story I heard last night, about a mighty hero, and about the grace of the Emperor.'\n\nHari nodded. He liked the soldier. Joseph Monday had an honest manner, and, despite everything, a cheerful disposition. But Hari had a feeling he was about to hear a story he had been told three times already that morning.\n\n'There was a convoy, coming here,' said Joseph. 'Reinforcements for the port defence. Like the one that brought you, I'm sure.'\n\n'I'm sure,' Hari agreed.\n\n'It was attacked, my friend,' said Joseph, his hands moving expressively in a dramatic flourish, his tone turning solemn. 'A terrible attack. Many dead. The enemy was upon them, you see? But one man, just an ordinary soldier like me, he stood his ground. He fought like a devil. And when he could fight no more, the Emperor Himself came, in the form of a winged angel, and saved him. The angel, it flew down, like fire, and it killed them all, killed them all, all of the enemy dead. Because the soldier, you see, he had shown faith, and had held the enemy at bay, and the Emperor had felt alive to the soldier's great faith, and sent His grace to deliver him.'\n\n'Was this soldier's name Piers?' Hari asked. Joseph glanced at him in surprise.\n\n'You have heard it?' he asked.\n\n'Versions...' said Hari.\n\nJoseph shrugged, disappointed.\n\n'But I want to hear them all,' Hari added quickly. 'I'm sure the various versions contain the truth of the story, one way or-'\n\n'You see, there is your mistake,' said Joseph. That is the thing about stories. The truth is in all of them. I grew up in Endayu, and all the children there, they would trade stories, and the grown-ups would tell them stories, because that is how we learn about the world. If you're going to be a storyteller, my friend, you should know this. The truth is in all of them.'\n\nHari was making quick notes.\n\n'"}
{"text":"ri added quickly. 'I'm sure the various versions contain the truth of the story, one way or-'\n\n'You see, there is your mistake,' said Joseph. That is the thing about stories. The truth is in all of them. I grew up in Endayu, and all the children there, they would trade stories, and the grown-ups would tell them stories, because that is how we learn about the world. If you're going to be a storyteller, my friend, you should know this. The truth is in all of them.'\n\nHari was making quick notes.\n\n'Tell me about that,' he said.\n\nJoseph frowned. 'I don't know how to say it clearer,' he said.\n\n'Well, this story you just told me, about the convoy, I've heard different versions...'\n\n'You mean different details,' said Joseph. 'The facts don't matter.'\n\n'Well-'\n\nJoseph laughed. 'All right, they do. They do matter. But they are like the scales on a fish. The fish can't swim without them, but the fish is what matters. You talk about your versions, my friend... Did the hero man have a rifle or a sword? Was he tall or was he short-'\n\n'Or was he fat, with a big beard?'\n\n'Or yes, that, however you like,' said Joseph. 'But the truth, the fish-'\n\nHis dirty hands mimed the sinuous motion of a salmon racing downstream.\n\n'-the fish. Well. That is what you need to hook. The man, he was an ordinary man. A soldier. Army man. Just a man. But what he did mattered. His courage and his fortitude. He did not give up. And the Emperor came to him, like an angel, and saved him. Just as He will save us all. He watches over us. That is the story.'\n\n'Do you have other stories, sir?' Hari asked.\n\nJoseph looked doubtful. 'I am just an ordinary man.'\n\n'So was the man in your story. How did you get here?'\n\nJoseph Monday looked aside. He seemed reluctant, suddenly.\n\n'I was on the line,' he said quietly. 'Line Fourteen, in the north reach. Eleventh of Quintus, Lion's port fell, and there was a terrible time afterwards. Terrible confusion. We had to run and fight. I saw many bad things. In the end, I came here.'\n\n'What kind of things did you see?'\n\n'I do not want to speak of them,' said Joseph. 'The story about the convoy is much better.'\n\n'Isn't it the same?' asked Hari.\n\nJoseph looked at him. 'How can it be the same?'\n\n'Well, you said the man was on his way here, and then bad things happened, but the Emperor was watching over him, and He saved him. That's what happened to you.'\n\n'The Emperor did not come to me. I did not see an angel.'\n\n'Those are just scales on the fish,' said Hari. 'I'd like to hear what happened to you. What you actually saw-'\n\nJoseph got to his feet. 'I do not want to talk about it,' he said.\n\n'Can I ask you a question, then?' asked Hari. 'The way you are talking about the Emperor. It... it makes Him sound like a divine presence. A spiritual power. You know that it's decreed wrong to think about Him that way? The Emperor Himself doesn't want people to think of Him as a god. The notion is suppressed by order of-'\n\n'A god doesn't talk about Himself that way,' said Joseph. 'A real god is modest. In the old times, gods were boastful and arrogant. That is why they fell away and were seen as false. A true god is humble.'\n\nHe looked at Hari fiercely, then crouched down again, staring Hari in the eyes.\n\n'I have heard there is a book,' he said. 'A secret book. A text explaining the divinity of the Emperor.' His voice dropped to a whisper. 'I have heard there is a copy of that book here. Someone here in the port has it.'\n\nHari cleared his throat, and looked down at his dataslate.\n\n'I would like to read that book,' said Joseph. 'But I do not need to read it to know the truth. This war, all this fighting and killing, there would be no sense to it if the Emperor was just a man. That is how I know what He is. We fight for Him, my friend, because we believe He will save us. We have faith in Him. Total faith. Because if we didn't, we would just lay down and die. That is how I know.'\n\n'So... He has to be a god because you have faith in Him?'\n\n'Faith is all we have. I have not read this book. I have not seen angels, or the daemons that they say have come. 1 don't need to.'\n\nSomeone was calling. Troopers were getting up from their rest break.\n\n'I have to go,' said Joseph, looping his rifle over his shoulder on its sling.\n\n'Thank you,' said Hari. 'For the story. If you change your mind, 1 would like to hear your story.'\n\nJoseph laughed, but Hari could hear the sadness in his tone.\n\n'It is really not a good story,' he replied. 'But I'll bring you other stories if I hear them. Where will you be?'\n\n'I'm not going anywhere,' said Hari.\n\nThere was no chance of leaving now. Word was, the enemy was advancing on the Eternity Wall space port from the south, through the pulverised ruins of what had been the Celestial City, and contact was expected within hours. Niborran, a commanding presence, was orchestrating a mass defence of the port's reinforced garrison. Hari had hoped his warrant might get him a few minutes with the lord general, but he'd only glimpsed him from a distance. It seemed pitiful to try and arrange an audience. The clock was counting down. Niborran had far more important things to do with his time.\n\nThe rubble wastes adjacent to the port were swathed in a golden fog of sunlit dust. The air was dry. Someone had said that supplies were low, water especially. There was intense activity in the skirts of the port zone. Around the freight quadrants to the south and south-east, fortifications were being constructed and reinforced. The main defence was Monsalvant Gard, a bastion that looked indomitable. Artillery positions waited in the bleaching light. The port's defence systems maintained a bristling watch for movement, audio signals or noospherics.\n\nThe atmosphere was as taut as the steel cables anchoring the silent vox-masts.\n\n* * *\n\n'I think you're wrong,' said Clement Brohn. 'Frankly.'\n\n'I don't think you've been here long enough to make that judgement,' Shiban Khan replied.\n\n'I've been here long enough to know we don't have the force strength to cover every-'\n\n'Stop it,' said Niborran. The High Primary looked at his second and the White Scar. 'No arguments, please.'\n\n'I am not arguing, general,' said Shiban. 'The assault will be multipoint. We need to maintain coverage.'\n\n'I have noted your recommendations, khan,' said Niborran.\n\n'But not acted on them,' said Shiban.\n\n'My lord Niborran has command here,' Brohn said. His tone was hard, even though he was staring up at an armoured giant. 'You no longer have zone command, khan.'\n\n'I am well aware,' said Shiban. 'I am also well aware that none of us have a full intelligence picture on which to base our calculations. We know nothing-'\n\n'So we make an educated guess!' Brohn snapped.\n\n'No, we cover wide, and stay flexible,' replied Shiban.\n\n'I said stop it,' said Niborran. 'I meant it.'\n\nThe wind blew dust into the observation bunker high on Monsal-vant Gard's southern battlements. Niborran shielded his silver eyes.\n\n'You know what civil war is?' Niborran asked. 'Comrades fighting each other. You'd think the last few years might have taught you both that. Clem, go and supervise the munition decks. See if those damn hoists are working yet.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'Now, please, Clem.'\n\nBrohn saluted and left the bunker.\n\n'He's a good man,' Niborran said to Shiban.\n\n'I have no doubt, general.'\n\n'This war, it brings out bad things in us.'\n\n'I know he doesn't like me much,' said Shiban. He looked at Niborran. 'I'm told you were both on the wrong side of my Khagan. That you are, in effect, here because of that.'\n\n'There's more to it,' said Niborran.\n\n'For you, I think, yes. A desire for field service. Not so much for Brohn. And I know what people think of my Legion. We may be Astartes, but we are barbarians. The White Scars do not enjoy the respect shown to the Imperial Fists or the Blood Angels.'\n\n'You seek respect, then?' Niborran asked.\n\n'No, general, I seek victory. It is the simplicity of that notion that makes people think of us as uneducated tribesmen.'\n\n'You've nothing to prove to me, khan.'\n\n'Yet,' said Shiban, 'I saw the dismay on your faces when you arrived. When you found out I was zone command.'\n\n'A role you handed over without blinking, Shiban. And the very fact that Camba Diaz had deferred to you, even though he's a lord castellan. That showed me enough. Besides, Diaz has spoken to me about you. He rates you highly.'\n\n'My recommendations are ignored.'\n\n'No, Shiban. But a full perimeter makes us weak everywhere. We have only nine thousand.'\n\n'A full perimeter guards us everywhere, when we know nothing.'\n\nWe know plenty, Niborran thought. I know plenty. He glanced at Cadwalder, who was standing by the entry hatch on watch, and had remained silent throughout. I know the true burden of this. I know what is expected of us.\n\n'I have listened to you,' said Niborran. 'The internal transit routes of the port remain open. I didn't block them and mine them, though that's textbook, and Brohn was all for it. We can move strengths rapidly behind our own lines in response to threat or assault. We can't cover everything, but we can focus swiftly when assault comes. Mobile warfare. That's the White Scars way, isn't it? Mobile war inside a fortified zone. I am listening to you, khan.'\n\n'Mobile warfare is just one of our traits,' said Shiban. 'It is the tag we're given. Hit and run. We are more than that, but we are regarded as simply that.'\n\n'For Throne's sake, Shiban, I am trying to work with you.'\n\nShiban Khan nodded. 'I understand. I apologise. This is not going to be an easy fight, however we run it. I answer to you. Know that. But my intent is the service of my Korchin Khan of Khans and, through him, the Emperor. Victory is the only thing that matters, and if I have to argue with you to achieve it, I am afraid I will.'\n\n'Good,' said Niborran. He smiled. 'Good. I expect... and want... no less.'\n\nHis smile faded.\n\n'What if victory isn't an option, Shiban?' he asked.\n\n'General?'\n\n'You must have considered that,' said "}
{"text":"tand. I apologise. This is not going to be an easy fight, however we run it. I answer to you. Know that. But my intent is the service of my Korchin Khan of Khans and, through him, the Emperor. Victory is the only thing that matters, and if I have to argue with you to achieve it, I am afraid I will.'\n\n'Good,' said Niborran. He smiled. 'Good. I expect... and want... no less.'\n\nHis smile faded.\n\n'What if victory isn't an option, Shiban?' he asked.\n\n'General?'\n\n'You must have considered that,' said Niborran. He took a pitcher from the map table, and filled a glass. 'Not every battle can be won. Victory is not always a possible outcome. We don't know what's coming, but you can bet it's going to be bad. We're barely nine thousand, we're boxed in, without support, and we can't run if they break us. So what happens then?'\n\n'We die,' said Shiban.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'And we make our deaths cost them as much as possible. We damage them so badly that even in victory, they are bled weak, and reduced as a threat.'\n\n'Correct answer,' said Niborran.\n\n'Do you think that is the likely outcome?'\n\nNiborran sipped his water thoughtfully. 'A year ago? No. But a year ago I didn't think we'd be fighting to cling on to every last square centimetre of the Imperial Palace either. Are you ready, if it comes to it?'\n\n'You do not need to ask that.'\n\n'Then we stand together, Shiban Khan. Now, tell me, three things you would do that I'm not doing. Three priorities.'\n\nShiban raised his eyebrows.\n\n'I would... deploy on a wide front, but we've had that conversation. I would give up the western approaches, and the Western Freight, now. Retreat and mine them out. The area's too big to hold, and simply overstretches us. If we tighten the circle now, we concentrate and make better use of what forces we have. Third, I would-'\n\nA siren began to sound. Its hoarse howl rose from nothing until it was echoing across the port complex and joined by others.\n\n'Assault,' said Cadwalder. 'My lord general, signals indicate they are coming from the west. Incoming main strength.'\n\nMen were rushing, running, scrambling with weapons, pulling on body armour and helmets they'd removed in the heat. Hari wanted them to tell him what was happening, and where he should go, but he knew the answer to the first question, and the answer to the second was hardly a priority to anyone.\n\nThe first explosions lifted dirt from the outer line down by the bridge. They made distant crump sounds, like heavy wet sheets snapping in a gale. Hari couldn't see the enemy, but below him, army units were mobbing into the dugouts and emplacements, along the bridgehead and the banks of the wide, deep gulf that the bridge spanned. The enemy was coming at the port zone from the west, out of the Dhawalagiri Quarter of Magnifican.\n\nMore shelling hit the eastern bank. Return fire began to chop from the bartizan turrets along the port hem. Small-arms fire licked from the dugouts and trenchwork.\n\nHari knew he should probably quit the area. Make his way back to Monsalvant, and keep out of the way. He glanced at the huge sprawl of the port megastructure behind him, just for a moment. Then he started to run after the soldiers.\n\nHe was here for a reason. As a witness. Running off somewhere wouldn't let him witness anything.\n\nCamba Diaz advanced. As he walked, he spoke clearly and simply into his link, coordinating the units around him. Close to a thousand men, most of them mixed Auxilia platoons, had been tasked to protect the Pons Solar approach. They seemed to be responding very slowly to both the assault and his orders. He wondered if it was the heat - exhaustion from the fortification labour they'd been doing when the attack began.\n\nThen he realised they weren't being slow at all. They were being human. He was used to commanding squads of transhuman battle-brothers, who reacted with intense purpose in the blink of an eye. These soldiers, even the best of them, the Excertus elite, were brave and steadfast and well drilled. But they weren't Space Marines.\n\nHe would have to lead from the front.\n\nDiaz held area command of the port's western areas that day. Niborran, and every other senior commander of the zone, was a minimum of half an hour away at Monsalvant Gard. Diaz ordered vox signals to be sent immediately, expressing the situation and requesting support. Additional armoured elements, at least, from Western Freight. He had no sense of enemy numbers yet, but when the enemy had a technically limitless ability to reinforce, calculations were academic anyway.\n\nThey were focusing on the Pons Solar.\n\nIt was the only viable route for ground forces coming from the west. The immense heat-sink gully it crossed was as deep and broad as a major river. Shiban had advised giving it up, and demolishing the bridge. He'd urged it several times in Diaz's hearing. But Niborran had been swayed by Brohn's argument that holding the bridge provided a potentially critical arterial route for reinforcement and resupply from Anterior. At its eastern end, the Pons Solar was protected by entrenched infantry positions, multiple field batteries and an Excertus tank unit. It also fell inside the gun-shadow of the port's outer line, the western stretch of the barrier wall extending from Monsalvant. The heavier wall armaments, part of the port's defence system, had begun firing, ranging shells and pulsed energy fire across the gully into Dhawalagiri. Auxilia combat engineers had raised an immense barricade of rockcrete blocks, razor wire and anti-armour obstacles across the mouth of the bridge.\n\nDiaz skirted the barricade. When he reached the east end of the bridge, the scale of the assault became apparent. He scanned, his visor absorbing data, processing it and transmitting it to Monsalvant command. Shelling had already pulverised both trenchwork and batteries north of the highway. A thicket of gunfire was drizzling over the spans of the bridge. The bankside terraces were scattered with dead, and wounded men were being dragged to cover. There was a massive wash of smoke from churned-up dust, and from incendiary bombs that the enemy had launched into the gully. Overhead, the barrier wall's guns thundered and spat at an invisible foe.\n\nA vox chime.\n\n'My lord.'\n\nDiaz turned. Bleumel and Thijs Reus were approaching his position on foot. He was glad of the sight of them, the two battle-brothers who had joined his ragged party at Traxis Arch during his trek to the port, and had fought at his side against the feral World Eater. He struck his siege shield gently against each of theirs in a terse greeting. Bleumel still had the raw metal gouge across the cheek and bridge of his visor, where the World Eater's chainaxe had kissed it.\n\n'What do you bring me?' Diaz asked.\n\n'Repellers,' Thijs Reus replied. A platoon of Excertus heavies, Gehenned Brigade storm troopers in bulky carapace armour, were trailing him up the bridge approach. Bleumel had twenty hoplites of the Solar Auxilia. They were lined up behind the barricade, hefty and anonymous in their void armour. Big soldiers, by human standards.\n\n'We'll need them,' said Diaz. This shelling won't sustain. The enemy wants the bridge intact.'\n\n'We can deny that desire quickly, lord,' said Bleumel.\n\nDiaz. knew what Bleumel meant. It was what he'd do.\n\n'Standing instruction from the zone commander,' he replied. The Pons Solar remains intact.'\n\n'That's a contingency pending relief forces,' said Thijs Reus. 'The situation's changed.'\n\n'Agreed,' said Diaz. 'But the instructions have not. I've voxed for clarification. I have not received approval to take the bridge down.'\n\n'It has to be done anyway,' said Bleumel.\n\n'This isn't a strategy meeting,' Diaz said.\n\nBleumel nodded curtly.\n\n'Prepare for ground repulse,' said Diaz. 'We'll hold the brunt of it, armour in support, and hold until instructions change, or reinforcement arrives.'\n\nThey clashed shields again.\n\n'To your glory,' he told them.\n\n'Always,' they replied.\n\nThijs Reus and Bleumel moved back to instruct their heavies. The Excertus tanks were beginning to move up the bridge approach behind the barricade.\n\nDiaz drew his longsword, and moved through the ranks of men in the trenches and bulwarks of the southside bank. Most were firing: selective shots from individual lasmen, and decent cover fire from the heavier support weapons. Diaz passed among them, making himself visible, his presence known. He knew the rallying effect the sight of Space Marines could have on rattled Army elements, especially novice Auxilia conscripts, who had already been through the flame several times.\n\n'You! That team! Arc your fire to the left. You four, we need faster resupply of munitions! Spread out, get into the communication trenches, and impress upon the load-captains how urgently we need the flow to be maintained! Be firm, my authority! Tell any shirkers I'll treat them as enemy sympathisers.'\n\nMen nodded. Men saluted. Men ran. Within four minutes of taking his place in the Bankside emplacements, Diaz could see a palpable improvement in the defensive line, the holding pattern and the fire-rate.\n\nNot Legiones Astartes. Not Imperial Fists. But brave, mortal men, well trained, obedient, willing to listen.\n\nAnd with everything to lose.\n\nThey would make a fight of this. He would make a fight of it. With luck, and will, they could hold the bridge until the backup armour came in.\n\nNo word had come from zone command. Diaz suspected that ranged vox was being jammed or scrambled. Niborran was no fool. Diaz admired him immensely. A true warrior, a great martial mind. He would have instructed on the basis of Diaz's assessment if he had been able to.\n\nAn enemy shell struck close, annihilating one of the proud stone lions that guarded the bridge-ends. Nothing was left on the plinth when the smoke billowed away, except for the stumps of its paws.\n\nGrit rained down on them. Diaz waited, hearing the whimpering moans of the injured. Six seconds, ten. Twenty.\n\nThe shelling had ceased. A gro"}
{"text":"s no fool. Diaz admired him immensely. A true warrior, a great martial mind. He would have instructed on the basis of Diaz's assessment if he had been able to.\n\nAn enemy shell struck close, annihilating one of the proud stone lions that guarded the bridge-ends. Nothing was left on the plinth when the smoke billowed away, except for the stumps of its paws.\n\nGrit rained down on them. Diaz waited, hearing the whimpering moans of the injured. Six seconds, ten. Twenty.\n\nThe shelling had ceased. A ground assault was imminent, and there was only one way it could come.\n\nHe leapt from the emplacement onto the ramp of the bridge. Stray, loose enemy shots spat past him. He took his sword, and carved a line in the rockcrete between the lion plinths, thirty metres short of the rockcrete barricade.\n\n'Mark this!' he yelled to his men. 'This far, and no further! We stop them here!'\n\nHe was answered by a rousing cheer.\n\nDiaz squared up, and looked along the empty length of the bridge.\n\nThe enhanced optics of his visor showed him things his human forces could not yet see. Heat tracks and motion traces in the smoke.\n\nThe enemy had appeared.\n\n* * *\n\n'The hell are you doing, boy?' Piers yelled.\n\n'I could ask the same of you,' replied Hari.\n\n'What?'\n\n'I said, I could ask the same of you, spreading your fables around the-'\n\n'Shitsakes, boy! Get your head down!'\n\nThe grenadier pulled him into cover. They were in a trench working fifty metres behind the bridge's barricade line. A train of Carnodon and Medusa tanks was grumbling past, belching exhaust, threading single file along the causeway towards the head of the bridge. The shelling seemed to have eased, but las-fire continued to chop and crack overhead.\n\n'The front line's no place for you,' Piers growled. He was loading grenades into Old Bess. Around them, troops from about nine different regiments, every one of them filthy, were prepping weapons.\n\n'It wasn't the front line until just now,' said Hari.\n\n'Shut your smart mouth,' Piers snapped.\n\n'It wasn't. I was interviewing men from the work crews up at the emplacement,' said Hari. 'Then this began.'\n\n'Well, here's what's going to happen,' said Piers. He slammed home the List grenade, and turned to look at Hari. 'You're going to follow this trench back to the communication line, then get your arse out of here. Just run. East. Towards the Gard. Don't stop. Don't look back.' He held up his right hand, and his index and middle fingers made scurrying motions like little legs.\n\n'Thanks, I'm fine,' said Hari. 'The port is a target, I'm in the port, I'm not safe anywhere.'\n\n'Don't give me lip,' said Piers. 'We've got about ten minutes before this place turns to a full bucket of shit, so do as I tell you.'\n\n'I hear you've been telling stories about yourself,' said Hari.\n\n'What? Oh, piss off. Soldiers talk.'\n\n'You can talk for a whole regiment. I've heard it all over the place already today. You, the mythical soldier, standing alone, but for the grace of the Emperor-'\n\n'And how is that not what happened?'\n\nHari shrugged. 'I... I mean, it's... it's a glossy version. All noble and heroic. It didn't feel very noble when we were in it.'\n\n'You're a daft little shit, Harr,' said Piers. He spat out some dust. 'I never said it was me. I never said, \"I did this\". I said it was some guardsman called Piers. It's called morale, you little git. It boosts the spirits. I told you all this.'\n\n'You told me soldiers lie.'\n\nPiers grimaced at him. 'That's the truth. And I tell you what, boy, she came for me, didn't she? She came and saved me, didn't she?'\n\n'Mythrus?'\n\n'Yes, you little turd.'\n\n'I don't know what that was. I know it wasn't a miracle,' said Hari.\n\nTell my arse that. And yours. And there were daemons too, remember? You saw them with your own damn eyes!'\n\n'I don't know what they were either. Enemy bio-weapons. Certainly not proof of divine agency-'\n\n'Oh, shut up!'\n\nOlly Piers simmered for a moment, then straightened his shako, and glared at him.\n\n'Look around. Look at the shit around you, boy. This is what the very edge looks like. The very brink. This is what it looks like when you're holding on so desperately there's no skin left on your fingerbones. This is when it matters most. This is when it makes the difference between living and dying. You take whatever you can to blaze up your spirits. Anything. A truth, a lie, it doesn't matter. You use whatever you can to keep you going, and you share it with whoever's with you. Whatever you've got, you understand? Whatever keeps you going one more step. That's how you live. That's how you win. That's how you survive, and how your friends and your comrades survive with you, so you can all tell glory tales afterwards, and make even more bullshit up to get you through shitstorms to come.'\n\n'Piers, that's a really cynical way of-'\n\n'Oh, piss yourself off a cliff, you precious little high-minded historian shit-streak, and take your pious little notion of what truth and history means with you! It's your pissing history books that prove my case! The power of myths and lies and frigging stories have got us through thirty frigging thousand years of shit, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest it's a pretty effective bloody formula!\n\n'Besides,' he added, slumping back against the trench wall, his voice dropping, 'it frigging well was Mythrus. And I tell you what's more. That file you've got, that Lectitio thing-'\n\n'Which you've been telling everyone about-'\n\n'Exactly. Because you should be. You should be going from squad to squad, spreading that frigging word. Sharing it. There's not a man or a woman here who wouldn't be a better soldier for hearing it.'\n\nHe slithered forward, keeping his head below the trench lip as a volley of shots went over. He grabbed Hari by the shoulder roughly, turned him around, and pointed along the trench.\n\n'What's that, eh?'\n\nHari looked. Twenty metres away, a squad of Auxilia were manhandling a battle banner upright. The Emperor Ascendant, in a sunburst.\n\n'A banner,' said Hari.\n\n'And look, boy, how it takes four... no, five, look... men to get it upright and displayed. That's five soldiers who could be firing rifles at enemy targets. But the idea matters more. It rallies us. It reminds us why we're here. It could be anything. It could be a picture of a giant rabbit. It could be a picture of my hairy frigging arse. Doesn't matter. It reminds us, plain and simple, that there's a point to what we're doing, and a reason to keep doing it. Without it, we're just a bunch of frigging idiots shitting ourselves in a ditch. Now think on that, and get your sodding arse out of here.'\n\nHe paused. Along the trench, men were shouting. Piers risked a peak over the trench top.\n\n'Oh balls,' he whispered.\n\nTWO\n\n* * *\n\nEaters\n\nConcerning the dead\n\nAnother thunder of hooves\n\nThere are World Eaters on the Pons Solar. World Eaters and witch-dogs.\n\nI move towards the crisis as fast as I am able. I run along the barrier wall from Tower Six towards the Pons Solar stretch. I pass gun crews and infantry squads who do not notice me. They are standing at the ramparts, watching the expanding plume of smoke darkening the sky above the bridgehead a kilometre away. They shiver, despite themselves, as I pass by. They think it is from fear at the sight of approaching doom, but it is only partly that. The rest is the fleeting touch of my presence.\n\nI transmit to Tsutomu in orskode as I run. He is in the area called Western Freight. 1 tell him to come. He does not reply. Communications are broken and intermittent. I am receiving only shreds of data, scabbed by heavy interference. Several streams, from Lord Castellan Camba Diaz and other commanders on station in the vicinity of the bridge. They are patchy and incomplete. But they tell me enough. They tell me I need to be running faster.\n\nI focus on Lord Castellan Diaz's signal. There is virtually no audio, and the metadata is mangled, but I get flashes of pict-feed from his visor. White, hulking shapes emerging through smoke, bearing down, galloping like wild animals across the open bridge towards me.\n\nTowards him.\n\nCamba Diaz is a fine warrior. One of the finest. No mere legionary is made a lord castellan. To achieve that role, a warrior must possess more than gene-bred advantage. Lord Diaz has an exceptionally sharp mind, a genius for war that echoes that of his genesire, Rogal. His role in the defensive actions of the Solar War was significant and invaluable. He has a surprising ferocity, contained in solemnity, which I find appealing.\n\nWe are lucky he is present. Blessed or lucky. 1 don't know if there is a difference between those two things, or if they are just different words for the same effect. He can hold the line, even with the meagre and exhausted forces available to him. He can hold the line for five minutes at least.\n\nYet, I see what he is facing. I glimpse them via the tattered feed. I know their names. Most of them. I have made a study of the enemy. The data is available to us, for we knew them when they were friends. My cogitator processes the blurry scraps of his feed, freezing and highlighting partial captures of faces, visors, plate details, and comparing them to my combat files. Matches are framed, enhanced, and flashed onto my retina with appended identity markers.\n\nEkelot of the Devourers. Khadag Yde of VII Rampager. Herhak of the Caedere. Skalder. Centurion Bri Boret. Centurion Huk Manoux. Barbis Red Butcher. Menkelen Burning Gaze. Jurok of the Devourers. Uttara Khon of III Destroyers. Sahvakarus the Culler. Drukuun. Vorse. Malmanov of the Caedere. Muratus Attvus. Khat Khadda of II Triari. Resulka Red Tatter.\n\nKharn.\n\nBroken images. Broken men. Most are barely recognisable. The Neverborn touch has transmuted the XII into things so wretched my heart breaks, things so terrible my blood freezes. Many of the partial captures cannot be matched with identities at all. Only snarling Sarum-pattern helms, and the intimidating curved mantles of the Caeder"}
{"text":" Uttara Khon of III Destroyers. Sahvakarus the Culler. Drukuun. Vorse. Malmanov of the Caedere. Muratus Attvus. Khat Khadda of II Triari. Resulka Red Tatter.\n\nKharn.\n\nBroken images. Broken men. Most are barely recognisable. The Neverborn touch has transmuted the XII into things so wretched my heart breaks, things so terrible my blood freezes. Many of the partial captures cannot be matched with identities at all. Only snarling Sarum-pattern helms, and the intimidating curved mantles of the Caedere Remissum, identify these monsters as once-legionaries. Those, and the skeuomorphic traces of tally marks, warrior-brands, and painted tears.\n\nFor some, not even that.\n\nThis is the measure of our foe. To take a Legion already infamous for its berserk terror and its fury, and make those qualities deeper. Beyond inhuman. Beyond savage. Beyond the pale of any martial culture.\n\nThere are steps at Tower Nine. I take them four at a time. I am outside, in the light. I pass field gun batteries where sweating men are working to re-train their guns. I pass a picket of troops who do not notice me. I run.\n\nI draw my sword.\n\n* * *\n\nThe plasma fire of Thijs Reus' hoplites did not seem to stop the charge. The range was short, the line of fire clear and the rate sustained. The Solar Auxilia were void veterans, equipped to fight in any environment, famed for their stubborn endurance. Their man-portable plasma guns and volkite rifles had been engineered lor boarding actions, designed to cut a kill-path into warships. Each beam lanced out with a shriek, lurid pink and as bright as neon. The air was already wretched with the choking stink of superheated plasma and leaking coolant.\n\nBut the charge did not falter. Across the top of his raised shield, Diaz watched in resignation. The combined firepower around him - heavy plasma weapons, volkite guns, the rotary cannons of the Gehenned, the Space Marines' bolters - should have torn a regiment to shreds.\n\nThe charge did not falter.\n\nThe World Eaters were crossing the bridge en masse. They appeared through the backwashed smoke howling, augmented voices braying like wild cattle. Wild cattle in a slaughterhouse, Diaz thought, stampeding to die. There was the most exquisite streak of pain at the heart of every war cry, like a vein of pure agony running through the booming rage.\n\nThey were massive. They seemed, even to Diaz, bigger than legionaries. Like the feral traitor he and his brothers had killed in that water-choked thoroughfare, they were bounding and galloping, some propelling themselves on all fours like great apes. They were lumbering ogres in size and movement, but their speed was shocking. The wave of white armour spewed across the bridge like a horizontal avalanche.\n\nSome still wore the high hom-crests and roaring Sarum-visors that distinguished the XII, but many had passed through the recognisable forms of legionaries, and had become hulking, hunchbacked monsters, bareheaded and insane. Eyes and brows had receded, jaws had extended and swelled, mouths had become the screaming maws of saltwater reptiles; of cave bears; of giant, carnivorous ocean fish. Blood ran from stretched lips. Foam and spittle flew from hook-teeth and exposed gums. Beaded strands of hair and cranial cables whipped and shivered behind their heads in writhing manes. They brandished chainblades, executioners' axes, spiked mauls, maces, falx, cleavers.\n\nAmong them came other horrors. Baying Neverborn spawn that ran like hyenas, or tottered like biped goats and rams. Loping hybrids of man and aether. Scurrying vermin that dripped blood, and oozed warp light. Flocks of winged things followed the mass, flapping overhead or swooping across the gully beside the bridge. Some were half-feathered, half-flayed, the size of vultures, cawing like crows. Others were small, fluttering in clouds, with frayed moth wings or iridescent pinions that beat rapidly, and buzzed.\n\nThe hoplites kept firing. The Gehenned kept firing. Diaz kept firing. Bright pink beams seared into the onrushing mass. Rotary blasts mowed into armour and flesh. Bolter shells detonated. World Eaters burst, burned through and fell, crushed beneath the following tide. Goat-kin were torched. Swooping, bat-winged monstrosities caught fire and plunged into the gully like meteors.\n\nBut for everything that fell, split or seared or ignited or hollowed out by loyalist gunfire, there were more behind, trampling the dead underfoot, filling gaps, bearing on, heedless. Diaz saw a World Eater lose an arm, sliced clean off by a plasma beam. The arm tumbled away like debris. The World Eater kept coming, oblivious. A volkite shot tore away one horn and half the face of another. It did not stop.\n\nThe charge did not falter. The charge would not falter.\n\nThe berserk mass engulfed the defensive line at the head of the bridge.\n\nThe vast spans of the Pons Solar shuddered. In the final few seconds, Diaz clamped his emptied bolter to his thigh plate, and wrenched his longsword out of the ground where he had staked it. He screamed the war cry of his Legion, but it was drowned out by the howling and the mass collision.\n\nFrom the moment the charge began, time had seemed to speed up. Diaz noticed that, as he gripped his blade and hoisted his shield. The experience of mass combat usually had the opposite effect. Time usually slowed to a dreaming ballet where battle became a detached eternity. But on the Pons Solar, time had run berserk, infected by the World Eaters' mad urgency. It accelerated, almost comically, like a pict playback jammed on fast-wind, devouring seconds as greedily as the World Eaters devoured distance and pain. Time ate itself, gorging on moments with a maniacal appetite that matched the World Eaters' deranged hunger to reach and obliterate their prey.\n\nFrenzy followed. Skill was banished. Lunatic, hyperactive time allowed no opportunity for technique. Camba Diaz was strong. As strong as any Imperial Fist. He judged that every single World Eater coming at him was stronger by far, enhanced by rage and the warp beyond even transhuman limits. His only real weapon of value was his mindset, the heritage of the VII, the unquestioning, indoctrinated will to stand and deny. That focus kept him planted like a rock. The discipline, that praetorian defiance, branded on his genetics and reinforced by decades of intense training and the voice of Rogal Dorn, stripped all fear from him, annihilated doubt and hesitation, erased any notion that what he faced was better or stronger or faster or bigger than him. The mindset fixed him. It anchored him like extreme gravity. It locked Bleumel and Thijs Reus too. It pinned them in place, though time around them had unhinged, and become a psychotic blur that permitted no skill.\n\nDiaz stood, in the name of his Lord Dorn. He brought his siege shield up. It held firm, absorbing the first impact, demolishing a roaring face. His sword swung, carving a World Eater through the chest and throat. A chainaxe struck his shield in a welter of sparks.\n\nHe cleaved the face and shoulder of its owner. He hooked a keening goat-thing off its hooves, and cast it tumbling through the air. Blood sprayed. Torn meat spattered. In the name of his Lord Dorn, he shield-smashed a World Eater aside so hard it broke neck bones.\n\nHis longsword speared into a howling maw, punching through the back of the skull. It tore free through cheek and ear and mastoid and occipital bones. Metal fragments spalled, glittering. A falx tore a chunk off his vambrace. A blade cut his ribs. He took a head off its shoulders, and sent it spinning like a ball. A piece of severed horn bounced off his visor. He broke a World Eater's jaw with his shield rim, and gutted him as he staggered aside. He split a head down to the lower teeth. In the name of his Lord Dorn. A beam of pink plasma screamed past his ear. A Gehenned fell against him, his face bitten off, and slid down his hip and leg. Diaz kicked. He disembowelled. He broke a power lance with his shield, and scythed off the arms wielding it. Diaz hacked. He carried a charging World Eater over his head on his shield, and cast him off the bridge rail. He impaled. He chopped a darting witch-dog through the neck and spine. Blood and black ichor filmed his plate. He barely noticed the chainsword gash across his right thigh, or the broken spear-tip protruding from his hip Focus. Maintain focus. Diaz swung. In the name of his Lord Dorn. Broken teeth flew up, a cracked tusk, a whole eyeball ejected by crush-force. Chainblades screeched. Cinders. Arterial jets. A hoplite thrashed, burning alive. A plasma gun overheated, detonating. A dozen figures in the blast zone vaporised, or staggered, ablaze. Diaz struck off an arm. A face, on a downswing. Another head. A grasping hand. In the name of his lord. His Lord Dorn. Focus. A mist from steaming innards. Corpses lolled, still upright, unable to fall in the density of the press. An Excertus trooper flew overhead, flailing, eviscerated. Diaz swung. Blood erupted. The concussion of a mace. Unremitting impacts. Bleumel, at his side, mashed faces with his power hammer, swinging like a smith. Feet caught on unseen corpses. A carpet of bodies and parts of bodies. Diaz ripped his sword through ceramite and meat. Split a skull. Sliced a throat. Thijs Reus, in the name of his lord, struck with a captured falx, another falx impaled clean through his torso. The reek of death. Broken chainblade teeth pinged out like bullets. The stench of blood. The cloud of rage. A frenzy in him that matched the frenzy he fought. In the name of Dorn. Blurring violence. Diaz struck, sword buried deep in plate and black carapace. Thijs Reus on his knees, stabbing. A Gehenned screamed. A rotary cannon fired blind, point-blank. Blood on everything. Bleumel, one pauldron gone, drove his hammer into a monster twice his size, hair braids whipping and snapping at the impact. Diaz struck. He struck. Again. In the name of his Lord Dorn. Again. "}
{"text":" stench of blood. The cloud of rage. A frenzy in him that matched the frenzy he fought. In the name of Dorn. Blurring violence. Diaz struck, sword buried deep in plate and black carapace. Thijs Reus on his knees, stabbing. A Gehenned screamed. A rotary cannon fired blind, point-blank. Blood on everything. Bleumel, one pauldron gone, drove his hammer into a monster twice his size, hair braids whipping and snapping at the impact. Diaz struck. He struck. Again. In the name of his Lord Dorn. Again. More. His longsword snapped. He drove the broken blade into a throat, to the hilt. He punched, empty-handed, breaking face bones. He killed a World Eater with his shredding shield, wrenching the purring chainaxe from the traitor's hands, rotating it, making it his own. He swung. He struck. Thijs Reus knelt, headless. Diaz drove the squealing chainaxe through World Eaters plate. A fountain of gore. Thunder. Carnage. Time rushing, headlong. In the name of his lord. Blood flying. Bone snapping. Flesh tearing. Impacts. Collapses. Swinging. Striking. Pinned. The name of Dorn. Frenzy. Glory. Diaz. Smoke blind. Blood blind. Striking. Again. Camba Diaz. Thrusting. Cutting. Gutting. Striking. Slaying. In the name of his lord. Pinned. Unmoving.\n\nUnmovable.\n\nThe line he had sliced in the rockcrete of the bridge between the lion plinths still lay behind him.\n\n* * *\n\nPiers held Hari Harr by the wrist so tightly it felt as though he was trying to twist his entire hand off.\n\n'Move your feet! Move your feet! Move your feet!' the old grenadier kept saying, as if it was some charm or mantra that would make them invulnerable.\n\n'We can't-' Hari yelled.\n\n'Exactly!' Piers replied. 'Exactly. Now you get it, boy. Now you're grasping it.'\n\nHari wasn't grasping anything. Nothing had prepared him for this level of confusion, not even the horror of the fight at the convoy. That had been branded on his brain since it happened, a traumatic scar he thought he'd never lose or ever really get over. Now, it seemed like nothing. A vague memory, a trivial anecdote that might slip his mind... Oh yes, I remember that. Rockets. Fire. Witch-dogs. When was that again?\n\nWhat was happening to him now made everything distant and incidental, every single scrap of his life, all the things he had once regarded as important, all the things he had ever valued and treasured. His grandfather cooking pok h'chal with too much fish sauce and tamarind. The noteslate and stylus his aunt had given him when she heard he wanted to be a writer. Prize day at the scholam in Tunzho, and the certificate for prose merit. The face of the first person he had kissed. Blue kites flying off the jetty of the old shipyards. His first meeting with Sindermann. Memories were calmly and silently snowdrifting in his head, piling up at their own pace, but they weren't his memories. They were things that had happened to a young man called Hari Harr, and that didn't seem to be him, because he seemed to have become a moaning, wide-eyed animal in filthy, sweat-drenched clothes, trying to hide, trying not to lose control of his bowels, trying to remember how to move around without falling down.\n\nPiers slapped him hard.\n\n'Move your feet!' the grenadier yelled into his face.\n\nHari blinked. He had no idea why soldiers lied. If this was war, the actual inside of war, then why did they make shit up? No tall tale, not even one spun by a skilled, serial liar like Oily Piers, could ever hope to match the astonishing truth of war. Lies were smaller than war. No lie, no matter how cocky and outrageous, was ever going to take war on and win.\n\nWar was a scream in capital letters. It was a noise. It wasn't even words. It had no syntax, no adjectives, no subtext, no context. It communicated itself as suddenly, simply and unequivocally as a punch in the face. It was a thing, not a story.\n\nThen maybe that was why. That was why soldiers lied. It was the only way, the only meagre, insufficient way they could talk about what they had endured. It was the only way they could give voice to something that defied articulation. War was so big, soldiers needed to get it out of themselves, spew it out, purge themselves, and lies were the only things that worked. It was either that, or punch someone else in the face.\n\nUnless...\n\nHari blinked again. Now he grasped it. The lies weren't exorcism. At least, not completely. They were protection. After the fact, after the brute scream of war, the lies weren't a means to talk about something that defied words. They weren't approximate expression. They were curative. They were comfort. The lies were lies of glory and heroism, achievement and success. They weren't born out of arrogance or boasting or self-aggrandisement. They were just ways to talk about something that was otherwise unbearable. They were coping strategics to insulate survivors against the madness and the punch in the face. They were ways to make war feel like it had some point, some value, some lasting worth. Lies made war better for those unlucky enough to survive it.\n\nLies gave soldiers something to think about, and talk about, and cherish, so they would never have to... never, ever have to think about the truth.\n\n'It's a stupid bloody time to figure that out...' Hari murmured to himself. He laughed, for want of anything else to do.\n\n'What?' Piers yelled. 'What did you say?'\n\nHari looked at him. Oily Piers, shako on crooked, meal-tin spills down the front of his coat, rancid of breath, half-covered in dirt and grease, too old by far to be having to do this all over again. What a horrible life you must have lived, Piers, to have become such a magnificent liar. What terrible things you must have seen to make you need to lie so much. That's what you were telling me all along, and I was too stupid to comprehend. I had no frame of reference.\n\nI have it now, thought Hari. I wish I didn't. I would give anything not to have had this experience, and not to be here. There is no truth here, no story, no words. There's nothing to take from this of any worth, and all my high-minded ambitions to come along and brave the dangers in order to capture something valuable were bullshit.\n\nThere is nothing here to cherish. Nothing here to learn. War is noise, sensory overload, pain, terror, horror. That's it. It's an inarticulate obscenity. It can't be communicated, and even if it could be, it shouldn't be.\n\nHari looked around. The sky was on fire. The barricade was on fire. The invincible column of tanks had long since vanished into the smoke. Things that looked a bit like crows circled overhead. Mutilated and disfigured men wandered past them, with no idea where they were going. There was a constant background roar coming through the rippling clap and thunder of explosions and gunfire, and it wasn't a human roar. Hari was almost one hundred per cent certain he was hearing War itself, roaring the one, wordless word it knew.\n\n'I have to get you out of here, boy,' Piers said. 'We can't stay here.'\n\n'You're lying again,' said Hari. 'You want to get out of here, and helping the non-combatant idiot is a good excuse.'\n\nPiers slapped him again. 'You little shit,' he said.\n\nThen he reached out, and clamped Hari by the side of the head with one big hand. He was shaking. The remorse in his eyes was unbearable.\n\n'Everyone's going to die,' he said. 'The World Eaters, boy, they-'\n\n'I know,' said Hari. 'Let's just go. Run. No lies. Just go.'\n\nHe turned and started walking.\n\nCrossfire had mown across the trench ahead of them. The banner had fallen. Three of the bearers were dead. The remaining two were trying to get the banner upright again, but the task was beyond them.\n\n'Or we could do something,' Hari said.\n\n'Like what?'\n\n'Tell a lie.'\n\nHari grabbed one of the banner poles, and began to help the two men raise it. The pole was wet with blood. Piers joined him.\n\n'This isn't a lie, boy,' he said.\n\nHari wasn't sure what it was, except that it seemed to have some purpose. A way to reclaim some sense from a senseless, insensible event. He could run, or he could die, or he could do this - and this, like all the best lies old soldiers told, offered a shred of meaning to something that was otherwise meaningless. It was so foolishly insignificant, but he'd take insignificant over no significance at all.\n\nThe four of them got the banner upright. It swayed in the smoke. Las-shots had cut several holes in it. It was ridiculously heavy and cumbersome. Two more soldiers ran up to them, and helped them steady it. One of them was Joseph Baako Monday. He seemed unscathed, but he was weeping so desperately he couldn't talk.\n\n'Hoist it up! Up now!' Piers was shouting. 'For the Emperor! Upland Tercio, hooo!'\n\nOthers had joined them, closing on the flag because the flag was the only landmark that wasn't on fire.\n\n'We're all dead!' someone wailed.\n\n'Shut your noise, we're not!' Piers bellowed. 'He'll protect us! He will protect us! Show a little bloody faith, boys, and gather around Him! Terra! Throne of Terra!'\n\nA few took up the chant. Hari was one of them. The more troopers gathered, the lighter the banner became. Hari was able to take one hand off the pole, and lock it around Joseph's shoulders, keeping the shuddering, grieving man upright.\n\nThere were forty or more of them now, survivors from different units. Others were approaching. Some helped with the banner, others formed defensive lines, weapons ready, anchored on the rally point of the flag. They would defend that, at least. The bridge was lost, the bankside emplacement overrun, but they would defend that at least, because it was the only thing left in the hellscape of Pons Solar that had any value. When they died, they would die knowing it had been for a reason, however trivial. If they lived, their lies would be the best lies ever spun.\n\nPiers was full-throated, leading the chant.\n\n'Throne of Terra! Throne of Terra!'\n\nFor a very short time, probably no more than five minutes, though it felt like the entire lif"}
{"text":"st. The bridge was lost, the bankside emplacement overrun, but they would defend that at least, because it was the only thing left in the hellscape of Pons Solar that had any value. When they died, they would die knowing it had been for a reason, however trivial. If they lived, their lies would be the best lies ever spun.\n\nPiers was full-throated, leading the chant.\n\n'Throne of Terra! Throne of Terra!'\n\nFor a very short time, probably no more than five minutes, though it felt like the entire lifespan of the universe, two heavy, notched poles and an old piece of embroidered cloth defied the utter meaningless of roaring war, and gave what was left of their lives the semblance of a purpose.\n\nThe chanting faltered.\n\nThe first true monster had emerged from the smoke, striding past the ruined barricade and the blazing hulls of once-invincible tanks. The World Eater, from its immense horned helm to its giant steel boots, seemed like a statement of fact, as though war had sent them an undeniable truth to negate their fragile, hopeless lie.\n\nIt saw the mass of them, sixty terrified troopers, huddled around a tatty banner. It roared, louder than the screaming chainaxes in its fists.\n\nA megalodon grin snapped open. Megalodon teeth gleamed in the firelight. Head down, it charged them.\n\n'He will protect us!' Piers yelled. 'He will, boys! If we protect Him!' The soldiers started to shoot.\n\n* * *\n\nThere is no hope. I am running headlong into what is now clearly a catastrophe. The bridge is lost. The east bank is lost. Archenemy strengths, worse than anything we predicted, and amplified by the toxic lire of the Primordial Annihilator, are swarming into the East Arterial and the edges of Western Freight. We will be lucky to hold them at the barrier wall, or at Monsalvant.\n\nWe will probably not be lucky. I am painfully aware of Rogal's strategic intention with regards to Eternity Wall Port. His tactical calculations are seldom marred by errors, and he has a low opinion of luck. I call luck fortune. Fortune is fickle and unreliable, but I believe it does exist, and when it is present, it can act like oil to unmesh gears that were thought to have jammed. Fortune sometimes alters the inevitable.\n\nBut loss here is more than inevitable. It has already occurred. We need to pull back, to redeploy along the barrier wall, and save as many assets as we can for the coming repulse. Hundreds of troops are already dead, but those that have survived must be re-instructed. They are fighting a futile battle that will end only in their slaughter. At the barrier wall, and at Monsalvant, they can fight more usefully and not be wasted.\n\nThere is no one to issue those orders. As I track through the smoke and the carnage, I see no leaders. No officers. No sign of the lord castellan or any of the legionaries posted on this flank. High Primary Niborran, may grace preserve him, is not yet arrived, and all comms are degraded and dead.\n\nI have authority. But I am unseeable, unknowable. Tsutomu has not arrived. No one can communicate my will for me.\n\nMy presence has some effect, at least. As I run forward, my cursed aura comes with me. I am null, and the Neverborn cringe at my arrival. Flocks of crow-spawn turn and wheel away, like vultures driven from a kill by an approaching lioness, or pigeons chased off crops by a gamekeeper's scattershot. Witch-dogs, bounding ahead of the mam assault, come up short, whining. They sense me, or the lack of me at least, and turn tail, craven, whimpering as they gallop back towards the Pons Solar where the air is more to their liking.\n\nThe beast things, goat-faced and cloven-hooved, are more resistant. They cower, unnerved, but do not flee.\n\nI kill them. Veracity cuts matted fur and horns and fat throats. My blade runs with their poison blood. It is not worthy work, but any kill made in the name of the Emperor counts. Any dent we make in their numbers and their strength inches us closer to triumph.\n\nI leave their carcasses in my wake.\n\nNot far short of the bridge, beyond a mass of burning tanks, I see the banner. I see His face first, through the smoke, and for one foolish moment I think He has come. I believe, just for a fleeting second, that He has finally joined us on the field of war, and that everything is about to turn. It will be like the days of the Great Crusade again, when victory followed sweet victory, and He, shining like a star, led us from the front.\n\nBut it is just a banner. There are shot holes in His face.\n\nThere are some three score soldiers gathered around the banner, the largest gathering of survivors I have seen. Three score who could make a true difference somewhere else, if they survive.\n\nBut they will not.\n\nAs I close in, I see the World Eaters. They are bounding past the barricade. One has crossed the approach road, and is bearing down on the huddled survivors.\n\nKhadag Yde of VII Rampager. A giant horror, a skull-taker, trophies of human bone and skin strung about his plate like fetishes and leather aprons. He is berserk, his sentience whittled down to an inarticulate kill-urge. He is moving at close to sixty kilometres an hour. He will plough through them like a runaway speeder. He will kill them and eat them, and not necessarily in that order.\n\nI accelerate. Khadag Yde is, I judge, fifty times stronger than me. Six times my size. Ten times as fast. He wields a brace of chainaxes, each of which could split a troop carrier wide open.\n\nThis will be interesting. For all that I have studied these poor friends turned-archenemies, for all I have marvelled at what monsters they have become, that was all theory. This will be my first practical engagement with the things the XII have become.\n\nI have one battlefield advantage. I can see Khadag Yde. He is a homed giant in white plate.\n\nKhadag Yde cannot see me.\n\nI intercept him, head-on, five metres short of the banner line.\n\nHe senses me at the very last moment. The Neverborn anima fizzling in his bloodstream is triggered by my null-state, and flinches.\n\nI put my faith in the Emperor. I put my strength in Veracity.\n\nI put Veracity through his face.\n\nYde upstroke impact almost breaks my elbow and shoulder. My feet slide, I'm rowing earth like the skids of a hard-landing Stormbird.\n\nKhadag Yde rises up. He leaves the ground for a moment, like a breaching cetacean, white armour shearing across his face and chest, finishes splintering and flying, ducts and feeds snapping, blood exploding in a fountain - his blood and litres of ingested blood from his burst stomach. He flails, convulsing, churning backwards, opened from groin to brainpan. He lands on his back with a noise of falling scrap metal, smashing mire-wash into the air.\n\nI judge my first practical experience to be a success.\n\nThe men around the banner do not understand what has just happened. I imagine it feels like a miracle to them, an impossibility, the act of some god. They cannot see me either. They can only see the result of me.\n\nBut they roar out a cheer nonetheless, their chanting renewed.\n\nI turn to them, and see the blind hope in their faces, the triumph in their eyes. They cannot stay here. They have to move. Withdraw. More are coming.\n\nBut I can't tell them that.\n\nExcept-\n\nI see him. The old grenadier. The reprobate veteran soldier. The one from the convoy, who acted so peculiarly.\n\nHe is staring right at me, one hand on the banner pole, his eyes wide, his mouth open. Spots of Khadag Yde's blood glitter on his face, and twinkle in his beard.\n\nHe sees me.\n\nI look him right in the eyes. I will him to see me even better.\n\nAnd I point. I point towards the barrier wall. I point as emphatically as I can.\n\nGo. Understand me. Please. Go now. Take these men while you still can, and get to the wall.\n\nFor pity's sake, see me and understand what I am trying to tell you.\n\n* * *\n\nHari could hear Piers shouting. 'He protects us! He guards us! I told you, I told you, boys! He's with us! The Emperor's with us!'\n\nIt didn't make much sense. Something had just happened, some state-change as simple and silent as the sun coming out from behind a cloud. But it wasn't sunlight, it was a stillness, a dense cold as thought war's scream had been muted. All the daemonic things, some too grotesque to look at, suddenly broken and scattered, whining and barking as they scampered and flapped away. And the monster, the feral Astartes monster, had been split apart, just metres from them, by some invisible force.\n\nHari stared at its immense, ruptured corpse. Steam was pouring from its split innards. It had been so big, so fast, charging them with such fury, it had seemed less like a warrior in war and more like a force of nature.\n\nAnd what, under all the stars, could stop a force of nature except an act of god?\n\n'The spirit of Mythrus is among us, boys!' Piers shouted. 'Fickle mistress of war! We're her chosen ones today! Bless yourselves, and follow me! Lift up that banner, and follow me! To the wall, boys! We're falling back to the wall! You hear me? Do it!'\n\n* * *\n\nThe dead had been taken to the longhalls and blockhouses that filled the yards behind Gorgon Bar. In the aftermath of the savage push-back, work crews had toiled to clear the ramparts of bodies. The wounded had been carried or led to the medicae bunkers and field stations. Processions of them, bloodied and dazed, were being guided down the ramps and walkways from the Bar's inner walls. The dead, Astartes and Army alike, were borne down on carts and loaders to the longhalls. Medicae personnel ran final checks to confirm extinction, then the corpses were divided, legionaries to one set of halls, human dead to others. All would be stripped of any functioning armour or equipment, for everything was precious. Apothecaries would extract vital gene-seed and any serviceable organs. Chirugeons would harvest the human bodies for blood, tissue and organs to feed the flesh-banks of the infirmaries.\n\nWhat remained would lay in state until there was an opportunity for forma"}
{"text":"lls. Medicae personnel ran final checks to confirm extinction, then the corpses were divided, legionaries to one set of halls, human dead to others. All would be stripped of any functioning armour or equipment, for everything was precious. Apothecaries would extract vital gene-seed and any serviceable organs. Chirugeons would harvest the human bodies for blood, tissue and organs to feed the flesh-banks of the infirmaries.\n\nWhat remained would lay in state until there was an opportunity for formal disposal. It was solemn work, with no time for proper ritual or ceremony.\n\n'I want to see him,' Ceris Gonn told the medicae who had treated her.\n\n'I explained this, mam-' he began.\n\n'You know what I mean!' she spat. 'I want to thank him, for...'\n\nHe led her to the longhouses by the hand. She could hear the squeak and rattle of the body-carts, the clatter of armour being stripped, the low conversations of exhausted medicae. She could smell the blood, the choking odour of mass death.\n\nShe could not see. Her eyes were bandaged. The medicae had told her that her sight might return in time, if she rested and healed. A month, maybe two. Sound was her world, until then, sound and smell. As he led her by the hand, he told her gently that the Bar was now running a full evacuation. Only the holding garrison would remain. Even medicae were to be shipped out. Transports were waiting to ferry staff and civilian crews back to the Lion's Gate. He told her of the battle that day, of the Bar's near collapse under traitor onslaught. A crushing assault that had broken everything back to the fourth circuit wall in the space of a single morning. How close they'd come to ruin, but for the Lord of Baal and the Blood Angels and Imperial Fists who had stood with him.\n\nShe'd seen nothing of it. The shell that had taken her down, and felled an entire part of the tower, had been just one of the opening shots of an engagement that had been the most savage and precarious of the siege thus far. She'd been unconscious for most of it, and when she'd woken on a stretcher cart, her eyes had already been dressed and bound in gauze.\n\nShe'd heard the battle, the immense din of it, ringing through the Bar's immense fortification. A world-ending war on the other side of a wall.\n\n'I can give you five minutes,' the medicae said. 'Then I have to get you on a transport. No arguments. What was his name again?'\n\n'Zephon,' she replied.\n\nThey entered a cool space, a stone building, away from the smoke-brushed open air. Different smoke here: incense. She heard quiet activity: the purr of drills, the clink of surgical instruments, soft incantations that she couldn't quite make out.\n\n'Why is she here?' she heard someone ask. The medicae holding her hand seemed lost for words.\n\n'My life was spared by a warrior called Zephon,' she said, tilting her head blindly, not knowing which direction to face. 'A shell fell.\n\nHe... he shielded me with his body. I would have died.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'I think he died,' said Ceris. 'I wanted to...'\n\n'What? What did you want?'\n\n'To pay my respects.'\n\nShe heard voices murmur. She twisted her head, trying to locate them.\n\n'This way,' the voice said. It was a strong voice, but it was dulled, like a fine sculpture that had been left in a dark place, alone and unobserved.\n\nThe medicae didn't say anything, but she felt him tug her hand, and lead her forwards. His hand was trembling slightly.\n\n'Zephon,' said the voice. 'A captain. Called the Bringer of Sorrows. His war was a long one, and painful. He was gravely wounded, and repaired with augmetics, all his limbs. The grafts were difficult. His body rejected them. He was not suited to line service after that. But on Terra, he received some treatment for his degrading bionics. The treatments were unorthodox, though they healed him. Made him whole again, enough to rejoin the honour guard and fight for these walls.'\n\n'But he's dead?' she asked.\n\n'Giving his life for you, it seems.'\n\nShe let go of the medicae's hand, and reached out. She felt the edge of a metal bier, then the hard surfaces of armour. A body laid out, silent and cold. Her fingertips felt the ash and soot coating the armour.\n\n'I'm sorry,' she said. 'I'm so sorry. I cost him his life. One human saved. That's a poor return for a legionary.'\n\n'The Legiones Astartes are the shield of mankind,' said the voice. 'Zephon was only doing what he was made to do.'\n\nShe traced the edge of the armour, the breastplate, the shoulder guard.\n\n'I'm still very sorry he died,' she said.\n\n'So am I,' said the voice. 'Why were you here?'\n\n'My name is Ceris Gonn,' she replied. 'I am an official observer. I have... I have the warrant to prove it. The Lord Praetorian, in his grace, issued them so that I, and others like me, could bear witness, and record the events of this war for future generations.'\n\n'A remembrancer?'\n\n'Like that. The Lord Praetorian believes that history is a solace. An art that must be sustained, even in the darkest time. For the recording of history allows for the hope that there will be a future to read it.'\n\n'That is unusually sentimental for him. Yet, quite like him, nonetheless.'\n\n'Who am I speaking to?' Ceris asked.\n\n'You will have to go now, Ceris Gonn,' the voice replied.\n\n'I know. I understand. Gorgon Bar is at the brink. All non-essential personnel are to vacate, effective immediately. I've been told this. Besides, my work is futile. I had only just begun, and now I can't observe.'\n\n'You can't,' said the voice. 'But I believe the Lord Praetorian is correct. A hope for the future is of value. Perhaps the only light we have. We must keep writing history, or our Imperium will become an unremembered empire. But you must leave this hall. The work of the Apothecaries is private. A solemn duty that humans should not witness.'\n\n'Of course.'\n\nShe paused.\n\n'What will happen to Captain Zephon?' she asked. 'Will the Apothecaries-'\n\n'His bionic augmentation makes the normal procedures more difficult. This is no place for such work. His body will be transported back to the Sanctum, and placed in stasis until time can be found for the proper retrieval to be done.'\n\n'May I...?' she asked. 'May I travel back to the Sanctum with his body? May I... accompany him? Can I witness that, at least?'\n\n'If you wish.'\n\n'Whose authority honours me so?' she asked.\n\n'Mine.'\n\nThe medicae led her back into the yard. She felt the day's heat on her skin.\n\n'Which senior was that?' she asked. 'Which lord officer?'\n\n'Throne above,' the medicae murmured, 'that was the Lord Sanguinius.'\n\n* * *\n\n'My lords,' said Militant General Burr, 'half a kilometre out, and closing.'\n\n'Understood, Konas,' said Jaghatai Khan. The primarch glanced across at Raldoron and Valdor. 'The day's work is at hand,' he said.\n\nBoth nodded.\n\n'Give the word, lord,' said Valdor.\n\nThe Khan smiled. 'The First Captain has zone command,' he replied.\n\n'In fact,' said Raldoron, 'good Konas Burr has that honour. I am simply here to expedite fluid function between Army and Astartes.'\n\nAll three looked at Burr. He adjusted his collar, which seemed to sit rather too tightly all of a sudden.\n\n'It is my honour, lords,' Burr said. 'With respect, I'd rather strip bare-naked, and charge those bastards alone than give any of you three an order.'\n\nThe Khan's eyebrows rose, then he bellowed out a laugh. Valdorsmiled. Even Raldoron, the quietest of them, glanced aside to disguise his smirk.\n\n'You're a good man, Burr,' said the Khan. 'We are all brothers in this, now and forever. This is labour for legionaries. Are your forces prepared?'\n\n'Steady on the line, my lord,' replied Burr. 'Kimmerine, Vespari, Auxilia, Albian. Marshal Agathe reports tight hold and readiness. So too Colonel Bezzer and Militant Commander Karjes. Fire gullies lit. Artillery ranged.'\n\nThe Khan looked back at Valdor and Raldoron.\n\n'Then let's take a walk,' he said.\n\n'Sir! My lord...' Burr began. 'They are clearly trying to lure you out.' 'Oh, clearly,' replied the Khan.\n\n'Tempt you into another charge-'\n\n'Of course. They're not idiots. Diseased wretches, but not idiots.' The Khan looked at Burr. The brave Imperial Fists have a doctrine. Not one step backwards. Mine is rather different. It is easier to avoid taking a step backwards if you have already made several steps forward .'\n\n'Should I prepare for line advance, lord?' asked Burr.\n\n'No, you hold, Burr,' said Jaghatai Khan. 'Hold and wait.'\n\n'For... what?'\n\n'In case they come through us, Konas,' said Raldoron.\n\n'In case we don't come back,' said the Khan.\n\nThey climbed the lip of the trench, and began to walk across the mud-wash, weapons gripped. Fire gullies blazed at their backs. Along the line of the Colossi Gate, Space Marines stepped out with them: the white-armoured ranks of the White Scars and, fewer, the Hashes of red and yellow, the Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists.\n\nAnd occasional glints of gold, the Custodians from Valdor's force. Ahead of them, vapour. A smoke-mist. A dark mass.\n\n'Never let them come to you,' the Khan remarked dryly as he strode forward. 'If they get to us, we've already given up our killing ground.'\n\nRaldoron drew his greatsword. The moving blade flashed in the smoking light.\n\n'The essence of your doctrine, my lord,' he said, walking at a steady pace to match the Khan's stride. 'The unexpected. Meet them coming in.'\n\n'Meet them coming in, Raldoron. Meet them before they are ready. Meet them short of their target. Never do what's expected. Never allow the enemy to execute in full.'\n\nHe glanced at Valdor, on his other side.\n\n'I imagine you dislike this, Constantin?'\n\n'I get to war at your side, Great Khan. What objection could I have?'\n\n'Heh. From you, Constantin, who are pledged to place and function?'\n\n'You simplify my order's doctrine as casually as others simplify White Scars tactics, Jaghatai.'\n\n'Then, my apologies,' said the Khan. He had drawn dao and boltgun. Ash flakes fluttered down over the walking line like early snow. 'Though I know,' he added, 'you are on"}
{"text":"ull.'\n\nHe glanced at Valdor, on his other side.\n\n'I imagine you dislike this, Constantin?'\n\n'I get to war at your side, Great Khan. What objection could I have?'\n\n'Heh. From you, Constantin, who are pledged to place and function?'\n\n'You simplify my order's doctrine as casually as others simplify White Scars tactics, Jaghatai.'\n\n'Then, my apologies,' said the Khan. He had drawn dao and boltgun. Ash flakes fluttered down over the walking line like early snow. 'Though I know,' he added, 'you are only here to keep me in your sight.'\n\n'I'm here to-' Valdor began.\n\n'Tell me Rogal didn't send you, friend Constantin,' said the Khan, 'Tell me Rogal didn't despatch you to Colossi to keep an eye on his brother the unruly Khan and his capricious notions.'\n\n'I have lived my life in secrets,' replied Valdor simply. 'But I have never liked lies. Of course he did.'\n\nThe Khan nodded, unperturbed.\n\n'I will take back the port,' he said. 'I've pledged so. I'll do it. But this needs doing first. Colossi must stand. Once this fight is settled to our benefit, I will take the port. Oh yes, Constantin, dear Constantin, I am well aware of how Rogal thinks he's handling me. Keeping the barbarian on a short leash.'\n\n'I don't believe that's entirely his thinking, Jaghatai,' said Valdor. 'But his strategy is central to-'\n\n'It's peerless, Constantin,' said the Khan. 'Peerless. I weep at the beauty of his tactics. Rogal will orchestrate this, and win it, or we will die. I have faith in him. I will not disrupt his plans. But in the execution, they sometimes lack room for... improvisation.'\n\nThe three of them continued to stride into the closing fog. Their pace had increased slightly. The Legiones Astartes line moved with them, resolute.\n\n'Like walking out to meet the enemy?' Raldoron remarked.\n\n'Just like that,' chuckled the Khan. 'They expect us to hold the line and wait, or charge them like maniacs. Not meet them, with confidence, in the middle.'\n\nThe billowing smoke grew heavier. It carried glowing cinders in it, like fleeting stars. Their striding feet squelched in the ooze. Valdor held his huge guardian spear braced across one shoulder.\n\n'I imagine it helps that he might be here,' said Raldoron gently.\n\n'Helps?' the Khan asked.\n\n'To focus your mind on Colossi, rather than the goal of the port?' 'He means Mortarion,' said Valdor flatly.\n\n'I know what he damn well means,' snapped the Khan.\n\n'To meet him, here?' asked Raldoron. 'That's incentive enough, surely?'\n\n'I'm here, Raldoron,' said the Khan, 'because Colossi is vital. Vital.\n\nI don't need an incentive to plant my standard here.'\n\nThey took a few more steps.\n\n'Though I'll be watching for him,' the Khan added slyly. 'Hell's blood, but I'll be watching for him. And if either of you see him once we're in this, stay out of my damn way.'\n\nThe clouds of smoke began to part.\n\nThey saw the enemy, unveiled. Dark shapes in the thinning smoke ahead of them; dark shapes, dark lines, a dark mass. A host of the Death Guard, spread wide, advancing on foot at a steady pace. They could smell the sickness in them, the rot, and feel the wallowing fever heat of infected bodies. They could hear the clotted gurgle of frothed throats and consumptive lungs. Flies swirled in the smoke, buzzing like migraines, fed fat.\n\nThe enemy mass gave no sign that it had sighted them. It just continued its steady, turgid advance. It had time and weight on its side. Even obscured by the drifting smoke, it was clear that the Prince of Decay had fielded a vast number of his warriors against the Colossi line, seven times or more than the Khan had walked forward from the trenches. The lack of reaction did not seem like brute stupidity, or even the preening confidence of a superior force. To Raldoron of the Blood Angels, it felt like a simple lack of response. The Death Guard did not react, in the same way that an encroaching disease does not react. It simply continues, at its own insidious pace, invading a body, multiplying, spreading. As a cancer advances through a body, through system and tissue and organ, as an infection spreads and overwhelms, it creeps at its own pace, heedless of the antigens and philtres dispersed against it, knowing that it will consume and envelop, that it will triumph, and it will be neither delayed nor rushed.\n\nThe Death Guard would not be provoked into urgency, not even by the sight of its enemy emerging from the smoke to meet it. It would approach at its own speed, slow and lingering and relentless.\n\nFor the lingering was part of its process. It was built to overwhelm eventually, but it wanted the lingering agony that preceded that end to last.\n\nThe torment was the point.\n\nThe Khan's rate of stride began to increase. No word or command was given or needed. The Astartes line accelerated with him, keeping pace. Fast strides, then a jogging measure, then a bounding run, heavy plated figures spattering wet mud and quaking the ground as they began to charge.\n\nShields up, blades lifting, heads down, weapons aimed.\n\nTwenty metres from the advancing wave of grey-green diseased monsters, the Khan's force began to fire. Boltguns boomed and sparked, their muzzle flashes dull red in the twilight of smoke. Front-rank Death Guard crumpled and fell, spinning aside, toppled, blown open, punctured. Fractured armour burst from explosive impacts. Putrid meat and liquid discharge showered.\n\nThe guns of the XIV began to answer, blinking and roaring from the plodding ranks. The Death Guard had stirred from its brumation. Charging legionaries on either side of the Khan dropped, killed outright, or smacked off their feet as explosive bolts detonated against storm shields. With another ten metres clearance, the Death Guard mass would mow the loyalist strike force down entirely.\n\nBut it did not have ten metres. The Khan's war line was running, and it was already on them.\n\nThe impact was a rippling clatter of metal on metal, of plasteel and ceramite clashing, that ran along the battle line like the hammer blows from a thousand working anvils. It was so loud and fierce it could be heard by Burr and his men back in the trenches.\n\nThe assaulting Space Marines brought the force of momentum with them. They collapsed and splintered the leading files of the enemy, running them down and trampling them, finishing those that fell underfoot with stabbing blades and merciless execution shots, using their corpses as stepping stones to meet the rows behind.\n\nForemost were the Khan, Valdor and Raldoron. A triumvirate, they were the leading edge of the assault's blade. Constantin Valdor, a figure of gold, broke the enemy line like a siege ram. His Custodes spear had obliterated eight of the foe before he'd even made contact, the weapon held level like a spearing pike, the bolter mechanism spitting fire above the aimed blade-head. Once he was in among them, he scythed them apart, cutting through corrupted plate, cracking armour like porcelain, crushing helms like eggshells, flipping bodies into the dank air. Within seconds, his magnificent form was plastered with suppurating matter, back-spattered from his kills. Blades struck and broke against his auramite. A giant, he drove into the ranks, like a reaper hacking through dense vegetation, raking a pathway into the mass.\n\nRaldoron was a crimson spectre. His greatsword glinted as it swung, refracting the infernal light. Nothing it met stayed whole. Bodies fell either side of him, cut through, severed, sliced segments falling and rolling in the mire. He howled the battle hymn of his Legion, the sacred songs of blood and wonder that fuelled every blow he struck. If Valdor was a demigod unleashed, then Raldoron was an angel, demonstrating the monstrous terror of an angelic being unbound. He was the face of revelation. Angels inspire awe: the grace and serenity they radiate in repose becomes astonishing fury when they are roused.\n\nThey fought at either hand of Jaghatai Khan, Valdor to his left, Raldoron to his right. The Khagan, Khan of Khans, was another thing altogether. His primarch frame towered over the enemies he raged upon. Death Guard broke hopelessly around him like storm waves dashing against a rock. There was a fire in his eyes that lit fear even in diseased minds. He was feral and elemental. It was not the wild ferocity of his gene-brother Russ, the shadow-savage killing lust of the wolf pack. It was pure, the clean, cleaving, unblinking razor of an eagle, focus locked and emotionless, surgical. He was no snarling muzzle, tearing a carcass apart in a frenzy. He left that kind of manic killing to the Wolf King and his Fenrisian Rout. He was the cloudless wild, the splintering strike of lightning, the bone-snap impact of a striking hawk, the sharp cry of unheralded death in a wild and lonely place. He was the unmourned death of a far, forgotten cairn.\n\nHis bolter spoke. His dao gleamed. The enemy simply died around him. Every strike and every shot maximised its killing potential, an utter economy of destruction, as though death were a finite resource, and he was meting it out; unstintingly, but never more than was necessary, so as not to waste a single drop of it. Death Guard crumpled in his wake, many apparently still intact or whole, felled by an exact thrust, a single expert slice. Not overkill, just total kill. He had come among his foe to measure out death, blow by blow, each dose in a precisely lethal quantity.\n\nHis White Scars did the same. Along the line, they matched the superbly drilled and tireless precision of the Imperial Fists with shocking and relentless fidelity of their own. They fought at the sides of Raldoron's ferocious Blood Angels and the staggering might of Valdor's invincible Custodians, and sowed death with sure and rigorous lucidity, with the hardwired focus of apex predators. None who witnessed it, Custodians, Imperial Fists or Blood Angels, would ever demean them as barbarians again. They would respect them as a man respects the unnegotiable destruction of "}
{"text":"ed and tireless precision of the Imperial Fists with shocking and relentless fidelity of their own. They fought at the sides of Raldoron's ferocious Blood Angels and the staggering might of Valdor's invincible Custodians, and sowed death with sure and rigorous lucidity, with the hardwired focus of apex predators. None who witnessed it, Custodians, Imperial Fists or Blood Angels, would ever demean them as barbarians again. They would respect them as a man respects the unnegotiable destruction of a storm.\n\nThe unwavering loyalist line buckled the front of the Death Guard host, and compressed it, driving it into itself, in a tangled maelstrom of confusion and slaughter. The mud vanished under a carpet of impacted and contorted armoured corpses. The air hung heavy with a murk of blood vapour, smoke and clouds of swarming flies. The brutal carnage was muffled by the pall, as if everything was swaddled in thick blankets. The blast of guns was dulled, the impact of blades hollow. For every warrior, the world was wrapped tight, confined in a deadened space where the loudest sounds were his own rasping breath inside his helm, the noxious buzzing of insects and the ring of weapons striking his plate.\n\nDeep in the press of the slaughter, the Khan sensed the enemy formation breaking around him, disintegrating into retreat.\n\nAnd he sensed flashing. There was flashing. Broad and bright, banishing the smoke, strobe-lighting the entire killing field. Sheet lightning, wide and amorphous, was shivering and blinking overhead.\n\nThe Khan heard sharp pinging. Hailstones were raining across them, chiming like bells as they bounced off his armour, and off the plate of the bodies around him.\n\nHe put a warrior of the XIV to death with a wrench of his sword, let the body flop backwards, and looked up. Pebbles of dirty ice burst into powder and grit across his face. The low sky was churning, pestilential clouds frothing and souring. The sheet lightning became more intense, backlighting the heaving clouds with a blue, photoluminescent afterburn.\n\nHe knew that blight-taste. Knew it too well.\n\n'Naranbaatar!' he yelled, trying to locate his senior Stormseer in the sea of mayhem around him. Hail was bouncing off everything like spilled ball bearings.\n\n'We must go as we have come,' said Qin Fai, reaching his Khagan's side. The loyal noyen-khan was smeared in blood that was running pink, the melting hail diluting it.\n\n'Agreed,' rumbled the Khan. 'Sound it. Call it, Qin Fai. Let us draw back.'\n\n'Not yet!' Valdor cried. He was close by, still at the Khan's left hand, demolishing Death Guard, who were tumbling before him.\n\nHe looked back. 'Turn now? Jaghatai, we're breaking them!'\n\n'They are breaking themselves, Constantin,' said the Khan.\n\nHe could hear a thunder of hooves. It was not the drum-roll thump of cannons that had made his charge, two days before, to resemble a cavalry action of old.\n\nIt was actual hooves.\n\nThe massed lines of the Death Guard before him were breaking, but not in overrun and retreat. They were parting to let something through.\n\nGiant hooves trampled the mud. Antlers and horns loomed through the smoke and hail, high above the heads of men.\n\nThe Neverborn descended. Brute monsters, warp horrors, cloven-footed, broad-horned, their legs jointed like goats, their hunched torsos like ogres, skins charred black and gleaming, their bristled lips drawn back from snouts and muzzles, from fangs and equine teeth that slobbered foam and spittle, and brayed and roared and squealed. Above those mouths, their faces were autumnal masks of moth-wing patterns, brown stripes and whorled dusty creams, dotted with asymmetrical clusters of spider-eyes.\n\nFrom where he stood, the Khan could see eight of them bearing down, hideous to behold, like the devil-daemons in old and fanciful woodcuts. Not a single one of them was smaller than a Warhound Titan.\n\nThe sabre in his fist felt like nothing, as weak and useless as the ice flecks melting on his plate.\n\nHe felt the true ice of terror in his heart.\n\nAhriman lowered his hands. They trembled, as though a high voltage current was streaming through his fingers. Braying and howling rang up the vale to the broken battlements of Corbenic.\n\nHe looked across at Mortarion. The Pale King was watching the horror unfold below.\n\n'They ride out,' said the Pale King.\n\n'They ride out,' agreed Ahriman. 'They are summoned into flesh upon the face of Terra, and they walk. Your warriors have drawn the enemy into the open field. What mine have summoned will purge the field entire, and bring Colossi down.'\n\nTHREE\n\n* * *\n\nGuelb er Richat\n\nRules of hospitality\n\nThe Opener of the Ways\n\nJohn descended into the eroded dome.\n\nIt was over forty miles across, formed of varying concentric rings of sedimentary rock and quartzite. From the air, it looked like a whirlpool with its circling bands of rhyolite, vegetation and sand. He knew that, because he'd flown above it, several times, years before.\n\nMany years before. It had been her camp then, her retreat. Now, apparently, it had become her permanent home.\n\nSome said it looked like an eye. An eye staring up at the heavens. It had been staring for a long time, since the primordial period known as the Cretaceous. The eye had opened long before the rise of man. It had gazed at the sky as man learned to walk. It had sheltered walking man, Homo erectus, in its wadis, and those walking men of the Acheulean epoch had left their bones and hand axes in its dust.\n\nIt had stared, unblinking, through time, through eras of humid vegetation and creeping glaciation. The land had come to be called Mauritania. That was the name John remembered, at least. Names changed, eroded by time. The descendants of the ancient Sheba and Thamud had named the eye Guelb er Richat.\n\nFor so many aeons it had gazed up at nothing but sky and stars. What gazed back at it now? John wondered.\n\nThe sky, dipping to evening, had turned reef-water blue. White dust kicked up around his boots like bread flour. He passed the first of the outer markers. Stone idols set on boulders. Pendulous Earth-mothers, full bellied, and warding fetishes made of bone and twig and straw. John was fairly sure they were cautionary signs and had no power, no magic in them. But there was a good chance they could be wired with sensor trip systems, or placed to conceal auspex pods.\n\nHe drew his pistol. Then he bolstered it again. He wanted to be noticed. He wanted to be found and greeted. A drawn weapon would only invite violence.\n\nAhead, in the bowl of a wadi, he saw a cluster of dwellings. Some rusted habitat pods, half-tented with draped tarpaulins, and large Berber tents were gathered around a central structure. A few small enviro-tents, old and patched, dotted the site. They, and the hab-pods, and the corroded vox-mast poking up above the scraggy thorn and mastic trees, were the only clues that this place was not exactly the way it had been when man first came to the spring that rose here.\n\nHe could hear the spring gurgling in its old stone cistern, the dull neck bells of goats grazing on the salt grass.\n\nThe central structure was a stone ruin, an earth lodge secured and out-built with carved stone by the ancient Berber people. No, they hadn't been called that in a long time. Berber was a slur drawn from the Eleniki dead tongue, barbaros, a word for outsider just like barbarian. What were they called now? Amizigh... 'free men'. No, that name was probably a long time dead too. Numid? Whatever. The Berber were probably long dead too. This wasn't their place any more. This was no one's place.\n\nExcept hers.\n\nThe earth lodge was half-buried in the soil. Its stone walls, above ground, had toppled and been rebuilt many times. Missing sections and lost roofs had been covered with stretched cloth, dyed indigo, as rich as the evening sky.\n\nThe place was so still. Was she even here any more?\n\nHad everyone gone? Had he wasted his time?\n\n'Hello?' John called out. His voice seemed an intrusion on the quiet.\n\n'Hello,' replied a voice, right against his ear. The voice wasn't what concerned John Grammaticus, even though it had risen out of nowhere. What concerned him was the weight pressed against the back of his skull. The cold muzzle of a weapon. A large-calibre weapon.\n\nJohn half-raised his hands, a casual gesture to display his submission.\n\n'I'm armed, but not dangerous,' he said, trying to sound cheerful. 'You can take my gun.'\n\n'I have.'\n\nJohn glanced down. The pistol had been removed from his holster. Damn.\n\n'Neatly done,' he said.\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'Well, now I'm not armed or dangerous,' he said.\n\n'You're not armed,' said the voice. 'But you're definitely dangerous.'\n\n'Oh, come on...'\n\n'I typed you as you wandered in. Face match. Gene-print. I know exactly who you are, or who you're pretending to be.'\n\n'Really?' asked John.\n\n'John Grammaticus.'\n\n'Ah.'\n\n'John Grammaticus. Mercenary. Outcast. Rogue. Pariah. Agitator. Agent of xenos. Perpetual, to some degree. By any measure, dangerous. Would you like to take a moment to deny this? Or would you like to take this opportunity to lose the mask and admit a truer identity?'\n\n'I have no mask,' said John. 'I am no shifted xenos, nor am I wearing a psykana disguise. I am what you see. John Grammaticus. Just that. I would quibble with your other descriptors. 1 haven't been any of those things for a long time, though I confess I have been most of them, a record that shames me.'\n\n'It would shame the devil,' said the voice.\n\n'Ah, well, he's hard at work on his own sources of shame. Can I lower my hands? Turn around?'\n\nThe weight withdrew from his head. John turned slowly.\n\nHe was looking down the barrel of a bolt pistol. It looked like a Phobos-pattern, the oldest pattern of all, and the weapon was a genuine antique. Cared for, it was, nevertheless worn and burnished by use. It had a patina of age that was impossible to fake. And no one mass-built them with a gold-wire grip and side-sights any more.\n\nIt was being aim"}
{"text":"Ah, well, he's hard at work on his own sources of shame. Can I lower my hands? Turn around?'\n\nThe weight withdrew from his head. John turned slowly.\n\nHe was looking down the barrel of a bolt pistol. It looked like a Phobos-pattern, the oldest pattern of all, and the weapon was a genuine antique. Cared for, it was, nevertheless worn and burnished by use. It had a patina of age that was impossible to fake. And no one mass-built them with a gold-wire grip and side-sights any more.\n\nIt was being aimed at him by a figure in plate armour. Legiones Astartes plate, and the figure wearing it was Astartes big and Astartes bred. But the armour was colourless and unmarked, not even the bare grey of the Knights Errant. It was pale, a sheened silver finish like a lead ingot.\n\nThe warrior wore no helmet and no smile. His face was clean-shaven, set hard, grizzled, as if he had a patina of age like the pistol he aimed. His hair was cropped straw. His eyes were indigo blue.\n\n'What are you now, then?' the legionary asked.\n\n'Just me,' replied John. 'A friend of the Emperor.'\n\n'Well,' said the legionary, 'isn't that the most dangerous thing of all?' 'These days?' asked John. He chuckled. 'I should think so.'\n\n'In any day,' replied the legionary, without a hint of humour.\n\n'But you're one of His,' said John.\n\nThe warrior gently shook his head.\n\nJohn felt his guts coil. Of course. He was too late. The Archenemy was already here. He was cornered by Traitor Astartes. Which faction? Which Legion? It hardly mattered, but he searched for a clue.\n\n'I'm not His,' the legionary said.\n\n'Then... the Warmaster?'\n\n'Not his either.'\n\n'I don't understand,' said John.\n\n'It seems you never did. So she says.'\n\n'You work for her?'\n\n'Till the day I die.'\n\nJohn had noticed something. A small stamp strip, like a hallmark, etched into the legionary's uncoloured plate just below the breast line. LE 2. What did that denote?\n\n'I've come to see her. To talk with her,' said John.\n\n'No,' said the Space Marine. 'She won't meet with you. She knows what you are. What you've done. You're lucky she didn't just send me out to sanction you. A gesture for old time's sake, I suppose.'\n\n'I'm sorry, friend,' said John. 'I need to see her. I've come a long way to see her. A long time. I know I'm not popular here. I understand she despises me.'\n\n'Just walk, John Grammaticus,' said the Space Marine. 'Walk now, back into the desert. Back to wherever you came from. I'll give you that one chance, because she wants me to. Walk now. This offer of mercy expires in a matter of seconds.'\n\n'I need to see her,' said John, not moving.\n\n'You're too dangerous,' said the legionary.\n\n'For god's sake,' said John wearily. 'You must know what's happening. She must know. The hell descending on Earth. The hell overwhelming the Himalazia and tearing down everything that holds our civilisation up. Horus Lupercal is days away from destroying our species. And you think I'm dangerous?'\n\n'So why have you come?'\n\n'To stop it all,' said John.\n\n'Horus? You can't.'\n\n'Of course I can't,' John snapped. 'He's bloody Horus. No one can. I'm here to stop Him. Because He's the only one who can end this abomination.'\n\n'That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard,' said the Space Marine. 'Even coming from a man who's spent his life making stupid decisions. How do you propose to stop Him?'\n\n'That,' said John, 'is why I need her help.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe legionary walked him into the earth lodge, keeping the old bolt pistol aimed at the small of John's back. They descended a flight of stone steps that had been bowed down by centuries of scuffing foot traffic. Above them, the last of the day's light shone through the sheets of indigo cloth that had been stretched across the gaps where sections of the old rock roof had fallen in.\n\nThe steps led down into a wide chamber of irregular plan. Canopies of silk and dyed cotton had been raised on wooden poles to screen off the low, damp stone vault of the ceiling. It felt like entering a tent, the sanctuary tents of the PanAfrik nomads. Woven carpets, their patterns bright and intricate, had been rolled out to cover the uneven brick floor. There was some low wooden furniture, heaped cushions bound in soft hides and silk; a few candles burned on copper dishes. More candles, a few ailing lumen globes, glowed within brass lanterns that hung from the tented roof on chains.\n\nAs much as it felt like the interior of a nomad home, it also felt like a shrine. It reminded John of the temples of Mythrus he'd visited a few times in his days as a soldier of the Caucasian Levies, a thousand years before. The Mythraic creed, the old, informal soldiers' religion, had still been a thing then, back when faiths still had a little life left in them. His comrades had tried to induct him, but he hadn't taken to it. This place was more comfortable than those dark and secretive underground chapels, but it had the same provocative quality of silence and mystery, an air of captured grace.\n\nThe effigies added to the shrine-like feel. They were everywhere, occupying alcoves in the old stone walls, or hung from pegs. More Earth-mothers, eyeless, sack-breasted and bigger bellied; a Catheric icon of the Theokotos; ancient figurines of Cybele, Persephone, Proserpina and Prithvi in chipped faience or battered bronze; clay votives of the Spider Grandmother; odd idols of tricksters, messengers and fertility gods; a terracotta vase showing Ninhursag; an ivory charm of Di Mu; a fid spearing a ball of red thread; Nwt, painted on a clay tile, surrounded by stars; the Hittite trinity of nursing midwives Elutellura, Isirra and Tawara. So many he recognised, so many more he did not. None were copies or replicas. The newest of them was twenty-five thousand years old.\n\nHe picked up a little wooden carving of a Hopi trickster, and studied it. 'I never took you for a person of faith,' he said out loud, knowing she was close.\n\n'You never really knew me at all, John,' she replied.\n\n'True,' he agreed, looked around. She had appeared from behind the silk screens at the back of the room, as silent as ever.\n\nErda was tall, by any human standards. He'd forgotten that about her. She wore a simple, floor-length thob of indigo cotton, waxed to iridescence, that veiled her figure, except for the pull at her hips. A purple tesimest was knotted over her shoulder, and then wrapped across her head in a cowl. There had to be psy-refractors woven into it, perhaps a null cap, because he had no read on her famous mind at all. Her eyes were vivid light blue, her skin like polished rosewood. Even modestly shrouded, her beauty was evident. John was sure it would be obvious even if she was fully veiled in a niqab, Like only one or two beings he had met in his life, her beauty was a radiance that came out of her, like an aura. He couldn't look at her for too long. What seemed in her beautiful reminded him too much of another numinous grace, and the memory of that made him queasy and nervous.\n\n'So you have belief in these?' he asked, looking down at the carving in his hands. 'Any of them? All?'\n\n'No,' said Erda. 'Those are just mementos, John. Gods have come and gone. None have any lasting power or influence, and most cause nothing but harm.'\n\n'Ain't that the truth?' he replied, and put the carving back in its alcove carefully. 'I'm grateful for the chance to talk to you,' he said.\n\n'That's not what this is,' she replied. 'I have admitted you because the al-kubra has rules of hospitality. The wastes are vast and harsh. Any traveller must be offered food and water, and a moment to rest, no matter the tribal or ideological differences between him and his host.'\n\n'That's not what he said outside,' said John, jerking a thumb towards the Space Marine.\n\n'Leetu was just doing his job,' she replied.\n\n'Leetu - Leetu? Leetu can surely put his bolt pistol away now?' John said.\n\n'No,' said the legionary.\n\n'If it goes off, it could damage something very valuable,' said John, gesturing at the precious effigies and figurines. 'Like me.'\n\n'You are a dangerous soul, John,' said Erda.\n\n John Grammaticus meets Erda.\n\n'Not as much as I used to be, really,' he said, shrugging. 'Long story, but one thing led to another, and I'm on my last life. No more perpetuity for me. It was fun while it lasted. No, that's a lie.' John sighed. 'My point is, the big guy there could tackle me easily, with that Astartes speed and strength of his, and he'd break me, and I would not get up again. Ever. He doesn't need the gun.'\n\nErda nodded very slightly. The Space Marine locked his weapon's safety, and clamped it to his hip. She nodded again. Three figures came out from behind the silks, an old woman in a niqab, a girl and a teenage boy. They carried lidded bowls, cups and a stoneware pitcher on brass mesomphalos dishes. They set them down on the low tables, and left.\n\n'Food, water and a moment to rest,' said Erda.\n\nJohn sat down on the cushions, and lifted the lids from the black earthenware bowls. Tahricht, stewed apricots, fine bouchiar wafers with butter and honey, a glossy tajine of squab. His mouth watered. He hadn't realised how hungry he was.\n\n'This is great,' he said. 'Very welcome. I'm not sure the last time I ate. I mean, how long ago or when. I-'\n\nTears came to his eyes involuntarily. He'd been running on nothing but adrenaline and emptiness for too long. The relief was painful.\n\n'Sorry,' he said, hurriedly wiping his eyes. 'Sorry. That's embarrassing.'\n\nErda squatted beside him, and poured water from the pitcher into one of the cups. She handed it to him. It was a small and delicate brown beaker, a kintsugi piece. Once broken, it had been repaired and healed with fine seams of lacquer and powdered gold.\n\n'Eat and drink,' she said. He nodded, and did so.\n\nErda stood back up. The legionary was watching him. 'He is a strange man,' he said, speaking in a Hortsign battle cant from the Unification age.\n\n'Yes, I am,' said John. Mouth full, he looked up, and grinned at the Space Marin"}
{"text":"red water from the pitcher into one of the cups. She handed it to him. It was a small and delicate brown beaker, a kintsugi piece. Once broken, it had been repaired and healed with fine seams of lacquer and powdered gold.\n\n'Eat and drink,' she said. He nodded, and did so.\n\nErda stood back up. The legionary was watching him. 'He is a strange man,' he said, speaking in a Hortsign battle cant from the Unification age.\n\n'Yes, I am,' said John. Mouth full, he looked up, and grinned at the Space Marine.\n\n'You can't disguise your words from him, Leetu,' said Erda. 'John is a logokinetic. He speaks and knows any language. He mindglosses. It is the only one of his gifts that he was born with.'\n\n'Like I said,' said John, eating with his fingers, 'it's about the only one I have left. The others were given, and are now gone. I'm not a Perpetual any more.'\n\n'You never were,' said Erda.\n\n'Well, no. Technically, I was. A reincarnating immortal. Fun times.\n\nI was one of your lot by default.'\n\n'By the manipulation of the xenos aeldari,' said Erda. 'Not one of us. You merely rhymed with us. And poorly.'\n\n'Well, Erda,' said John, still chewing, a slight grin on his face, 'if your kind ever rhymed, as you put it, with each other, it would have been a miracle. I didn't rhyme with any of you, because there wasn't a tune to match. Show me the rhyme, Erda, and I'll sing along. But I don't think there is one.'\n\nShe sniffed.\n\n'There is some truth to that statement,' she admitted.\n\nJohn smiled, and took a sip of water from the beaker. 'Look at us, having that conversation after all.'\n\n'Not at all,' she said.\n\n'Come on,' he said. The food and water is welcome, the chance to just sit the hell down. I'm grateful. But that's not why you let me in. You're intrigued, and you want to talk.'\n\n'I have not laughed in a long time, John,' she replied. 'I have not even heard the sound of laughter. I listened to what you said to Leetu. I have no wish to discuss it with you, but I let you in because I wanted to hear it from you. Directly. I wanted an excuse to laugh out loud.' 'Mmm. Tough crowd,' he said. He picked up another wafer, then put it back, and wiped his hands. 'I don't think there's much to laugh about. Not these days. It's become a time quite devoid of laughter. You know what's going on. Of course you do. It's indescribably bad.'\n\n'You helped stoke that inferno, John.'\n\n'Yeah. I made things worse. I was used, in my defence. Had the shit manipulated out of me by the Cabal, by Alpharius' bastards... There's a long list, believe me. I was used. I could have resisted, I grant you. I didn't. I'll regret that to the end of my days, which isn't going to be that far off. Now, I'm my own man. No one's using me. I'm following my own path. Trying the best I can to salvage something. And my path's brought me here.'\n\n'So this is redemption?' she asked.\n\nHe shrugged. 'If I gain some kind of absolution, great. That's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because someone needs to do something. It's probably too late, but someone needs to try. It should have been tried a long time ago. A long, long time ago. Back when there was still an iota of hope. Your kind. Your kind, Erda. That exclusive club. You should have done it. You should have got your heads out of your arses and started to rhyme. Worked together. The Perpetuals could have stopped this long before it ever started. But, oh no.'\n\nHe exhaled slowly, and took a sip of water. 'You don't accept I'm one of you,' he said, 'and maybe I'm not. I'm just a fake, an imitation, but don't you feel a glimmer of shame that an artificial perpetual, a johnny-come-lately wannabe, is the only one trying? Doing what you lot should have done long before I was even born?'\n\n'I will kill him now,' said Leetu in Hortsign.\n\n'Bloody have a go, big man,' John snapped back in the same battle cant. He looked at Erda.\n\n'I tried,' she said.\n\n'Yeah.' John said gently. 'Yeah, you did. Couldn't get the numbers on your side, though, could you? But yes, you did. That's why I came here. Tell me, lady, was it guilt that drove you to try? Like me?'\n\n'What do you mean, John?'\n\n'Well,' he replied, sitting back on the plump cushions, 'as you took great delight in pointing out, I've made things worse along the way Collaborated with the Cabal, brought the Alpha Legion into play for the explicit goal of ending mankind. There were reasons for that. The Cabal's Acuity is very convincing. But anyway, I'm damned. Guilt fires me now. Guilt and anger at the part I played. So I'm guessing it drives you too. It's what made you try.'\n\n'You think I'm driven by guilt?' she asked.\n\n'You helped Him build it,' said John. 'You gave Him his damned children.'\n\n'I love my sons,' she said. 'All of them. Even now. When I saw how things would go, I tried to stop it. The inexorable slide. I tried to make Him see. But there was no reasoning with Him. There never has been.'\n\n'That's an evasion,' said John. 'You saw the truth of it long before you tried to act. Centuries before. More than that, probably. You knew what He was like, right at the start of it. You went along with it, and helped Him build the murderers. You acted far too late.'\n\nShe stared at him.\n\n'Let us speak of evasions,' she said. 'You say you have freed yourself from the xenos Cabal, and that you walk your own path, but that's a lie. You work for Eldrad Ulthran, farseer of Ulthwe. You are still in the thrall of xenosform.'\n\nJohn sniggered. 'You are well informed. But not accurately. I work with Eldrad, not for him. And I'm not the only one. Some of us are starting to rhyme, Erda. Maybe too little, too late, but we are.'\n\n'Like who?' she asked.\n\n'Oll,' he said.\n\n'Ollanius?' She frowned. 'Is he really still out there? No, he would never... He was always so adamant. He refused to get involved. I think he knew it was hopeless from the very first day. You're lying again.'\n\n'I'm not,' said John. 'It took some persuasion. But I'm good at that. And it look the burning of an entire world, and the destruction of the life he'd chosen. Not, before you ask, my doing.'\n\n'Which world?' she asked.\n\n'Calth,' he replied. He saw the look on her face. 'Lorgar razed it. Shattered the jewel of Ultramar. Oll escaped because Oll is Oll. I've been guiding him along. He's come around to the idea, at long last, that someone needs to make a stand.'\n\nJohn reached into his jacket pocket. He saw Leetu flex for his bolt pistol, and made a show of doing it slowly. He took out a slim pair of ornate wraithbone scissors on a ribbon.\n\n'Eldrad gave me these,' John said, showing the object to them both. 'He freed me from Cabal control. He rejects their strategy entirely. Sacrificing the human species as a firewall against Chaos? Despite what's at stake, that's savage even by aeldari standards. He believes mankind can be helped. We can survive - in fact, we have the right to survive - if we can be taught how to fight and resist the Primordial Annihilator. But we're young and we're new and we're woefully ignorant, and there's one big problem about us - the person we follow. He can't be reasoned with. You said it yourself. He thinks He knows everything, and He's wrong. His ambition is wonderful, but His arrogance is a mortal flaw of tragic proportions. Tell me you don't know that.'\n\n'I know that,' she said.\n\n'So,' said John. He put the scissors down on the low table. 'Someone has to make Him listen to reason, while there's still time. Mankind can survive. Mankind can save the galaxy rather than damn it forever. Hell, mankind might even ascend to a state of grace, and become greater than any species yet. We have potential, and Eldrad sees that. We have the potential the aeldari have lost. But there's very little time left to reverse things. And He, acting like the god He insists He isn't, is in the way. So... It's time to act.'\n\n'Are those... scissors... intended to kill Him?' asked Leetu.\n\n'Shit, no,' said John. 'I don't think they could. They're my pass port. Eldrad gave them to me so I could get around. Move between moments. Snip and sidestep my way through the immaterium. It's not a great way of travelling, and it can be very hit and miss, but it got me here. Actually, I took a lot of wrong turns, and I missed the first time. Ended up about eight months ahead of now. By then, it was too late. Way too late. So trust me, I know of what I speak. We have a very small window left.'\n\nHe picked up the scissors again.\n\n'These should show you the seriousness of the intent here,' he said. 'Even the aeldari seldom employ these. The causal risks are terrifying. They don't like to use them, let alone give one to a mon-keigh savage. Oll's travelling by similar means. His artefact isn't aeldari made. It's an athame of god knows what kind of provenance. But it does the trick. Anyway, you know that already.'\n\n'What do you mean, John?'\n\nJohn gestured to the lodge around him.\n\n'I know this was all just testing,' he said. 'Sounding me out. You needed to be sure I was on the level, that I wasn't some Neverborn, wearing a human disguise. So you can bring Oll out now, and we can get started.'\n\n'Ollanius isn't here, John.'\n\n'We haven't got time for any more games,' said John.\n\n'I am telling you, John, Ollanius is not here,' said Erda. 'I haven't seen him in a thousand years.'\n\nJohn rose sharply, bumping the table so hard the pots rattled.\n\n'No, no, no,' he muttered. 'He has to be. We agreed to meet here. We wanted to talk to you and get you on side, so this seemed like the best place to rendezvous. He should already be here.'\n\n'He's not.'\n\n'He has to be. He should have got here at least a week ahead of me, Probably more, because of the diversion I was forced to make.'\n\n'Ollanius is not here, John,' said Erda. 'I'm sorry.'\n\n'Oh shit,' he said. He sat down again hard. 'Oh shit. I thought he'd make it.'\n\n'Might he have been intercepted?' asked the legionary.\n\n'Yes, he might,' said John bitterly. 'As you can imagine, there are quite a few interested parties, keen to"}
{"text":"e best place to rendezvous. He should already be here.'\n\n'He's not.'\n\n'He has to be. He should have got here at least a week ahead of me, Probably more, because of the diversion I was forced to make.'\n\n'Ollanius is not here, John,' said Erda. 'I'm sorry.'\n\n'Oh shit,' he said. He sat down again hard. 'Oh shit. I thought he'd make it.'\n\n'Might he have been intercepted?' asked the legionary.\n\n'Yes, he might,' said John bitterly. 'As you can imagine, there are quite a few interested parties, keen to stop us executing this scheme. The Cabal, the damned traitor host, the warp itself... just for starters. Not really a bunch of adversaries you want to go up against. So, yes. There were forces trying to intercept us both.'\n\nHe looked at Erda.\n\n'You should go,' he said.\n\n'I'm not going anywhere, John.'\n\n'Look, this is clearly unravelling fast. If they've got Oll, they're probably on me too. I might have led them here.'\n\n'I'm not in hiding, John,' she said.\n\n'That doesn't matter. They could be coming. And anyway, I'm surprised you're still here.'\n\n'Where would I go?' Erda asked. 'The Earth is my home. Yes, I still like the old name for it. I live here, in a remote place, withdrawn, outside of the affairs of man. I have no power. Women and mothers seldom have. These days - for the longest time, in fact - humans generally have no power. Only He has. And He leaves me alone.'\n\n'Maybe He does,' said John, 'but the end is coming. Nowhere, not even a place as remote as this, will be safe.'\n\n'He won't harm me,' she said.\n\n'Erda, He's not going to win. His children are going to destroy Him. The sons you made with Him are going to burn the world. And they will come for you once He is gone.'\n\n'My sons...' she whispered.\n\n'They are not...' he began. 'They are not as you remember them The warp has taken most of them, even the best of them. They will show no mercy, no affection, no sentiment, no filial duty. They probably won't even know you, and if they do, it will be to hate you as they hate Him. You have to go.'\n\n'What do you have to do, John?' she asked.\n\nJohn shrugged.\n\n'Now?' he asked. 'I don't have the first idea.'\n\n'Perhaps Ollanius will yet come,' she said.\n\nFull night had fallen, the great bowl of desert darkness, blue as ink and frothed with stars. John stood in the earth lodge, idly studying a figurine. It was so old, so worn, he couldn't tell if it was a trickster or a way-maker or both. Maybe Hermes Trisumagister, thrice great, opener of gates. And, as he recalled sadly, the emblem of the Jokers, Geno Five-Two Chiliad.\n\nErda had come in behind him without him hearing her.\n\n'Interesting choice,' she said, nodding to the effigy he was holding. 'Azoth-Hermes. An opener of the way.'\n\n'I was drawn to it.'\n\n'I'm not surprised. It's very you, I think.'\n\nHe put the effigy back on a shelf.\n\n'I was saying, perhaps Ollanius will yet arrive,' she said.\n\n'Perhaps,' he said. He looked over at Erda. 'There's always hope. Well, there's always been hope. I think hope is a quality the galaxy is close to exhausting.'\n\n'Will you wait for him? If he's coming here, you can wait.'\n\n'Thank you. I'll wait a while. And if he doesn't come, I'll-'\n\n'What? What will you do, John?' Erda asked.\n\n'I don't know. Get on with it, I suppose. Alone. Try to reach Him. You could help.'\n\n'How?' Erda asked.\n\n'I need a way in. A way into the Palace.'\n\n'I can't help you with that.'\n\n'You're the most powerful of your kind,' he said. 'I mean, apart from Him.'\n\n'None of us have ever been as powerful as Him,' she said. She sat on the heap of cushions, leaned back, and gazed at the silk canopy, which hung over her like a regal baldachin. 'That's always been the problem. He's not just more powerful, He is a different order of magnitude. A freak.'\n\n'Really?' That made him smile.\n\n'An aberration, even in terms of the Perpetual line, which is itself an aberration. You asked why we had never come together to stop Him or contain Him. There are many reasons, most of them trivial or personal, but the main one is that even together, en masse, the Perpetuals could not begin to match His power. We have many talents, many powers. We are what we are, transcendent mortals, who have often influenced the course of human life and achieved great things. We have been guides and steersmen, pilots and mentors, sometimes to whole nations and peoples. But He is something else, altogether. An engine of change, a font of power.'\n\n'A god?' he asked.\n\n'Not at all. At heart, He is a man. He has a personality, He has traits and flaws. All of those are magnified, of course. He is, truly, quite wonderful. Kind. Funny.'\n\n'Honestly?'\n\n'Yes Funny. Witty. Articulate. Passionate. Incisive. Clever beyond genius. Charismatic. Devoted. Driven. Determined. From the earliest days of His life, He did what we all did. He saw His own power and tried to use it. He tried to steer mankind towards a better future. He tried to raise the human race up to achieve its potential. And, of course, because of His power, He was rather more effective than most of us.'\n\n'Is that what Perpetuals do, then?' John asked. 'Is that what they are?'\n\nErda sat up, and looked at him. Her eyes were as blue as crystals.\n\n'John, I tell you truly, I have lived a long life, and I have no idea what Perpetuals are. I am one, and I don't know. There are theories, and some seem convincing. The one I favour is that we are the next version of the human species.'\n\n'How does that work?' he asked.\n\n'Through history, the human species has reproduced along fairly neurotypical and physiotypical lines,' she said. 'The standard, mortal human, flawed and wonderful. But there are outliers. In every generation there are anomalies. Non-heterosic mutations. People born with unusual gifts or traits, unusual skills. The most obvious, I suppose, would be the psyker. Like you, John. As you were originally, before the xenosforms manipulated you. Born with a rare gift.'\n\n'I'm a mutant?' John asked wryly.\n\n'That's just a word. You're genetically atypical. That's all psykers are. Random variations from the baseline norm. That's how species evolve, John. That's how they progress. Rogue variations to the genetic norm, sometimes in response to environmental factors. Some of those mutations are failures and die out. Some are advantageous. A longer beak, a stronger jaw, an opposable thumb. Mutants born with those advantages tend to survive, because they are advantages. They pass their genes along, and their offspring share that advantage, Longer beaks and stronger jaws become the new norm. The variant gene survives and becomes part of the baseline.'\n\n'And eventually, a species changes, and no longer resembles its earlier self?' said John.\n\n'Yes,' she said. 'It takes a very long time. Longer even than a Perpetual might have patience for.'\n\n'So you think Perpetuals are outliers too?'\n\nErda nodded.\n\n'I believe the Perpetuals,' she said, 'which have been appearing for at least the last forty-five thousand years, are abnormally advantageous mutations. The theory suggests that we are what you might call Homo superior. The next step along for the triumphantly successful Homo sapiens. We are the next evolutionary form our species is intended to take.'\n\n'Intended?' he echoed, and frowned.\n\nShe raised her hand apologetically. 'That was the wrong word. I do not subscribe to the idea of a divine plan, or the work of god. I meant the process of nature, advancing a species, enhancing it. I believe that the Perpetuals are the early appearances of the next generation of humans. Freak outliers appearing in very small numbers in advance of the evolutionary curve. And I believe, not because nature has any sort of plan, but because we are a fully sentient species, our purpose is to shape and guide the human race. Marshal its course and trim its sails. Use our gifts and longevity to drive it towards the future, to the point at which we are the new normal. To the point at which Homo sapiens, collectively, become Homo superior'.\n\n'And that's what your kind does?' asked John.\n\n'Generally. Mostly through individual efforts. There are very few of us, after all. Some have chosen to. Some have chosen not to. They have relished their gifts, and elected to indulge their lifetimes, succumbing to the whims of their personalities. For we are all still human Some of us are selfish. Some insular, some petty, some lacking in altruism or empathy, with no care for the fate of the rest of humanity. In one instance I know of, one was psychopathic.'\n\nThat's a story I want to hear,' said John.\n\n'And I'll tell it sometime. It was long ago.' She looked down, thoughtful. 'And, of course, there are some who have not wanted to play the role. Ollanius is a great example of that. He is, I think, the oldest of us. He was always a man of faith, for he was born in an age when gods seemed real. He was never able to shake off the religiosity of his birth culture. Ollanius didn't believe that Perpetuals should meddle in the affairs of man. He thought the guidance of the human race was god's work alone. So he stepped aside, and lived his life, over and over again, never taking part. He wasn't the only one.'\n\n'And the Emperor?'\n\nErda grimaced. 'You know, I loathe that term. It speaks to every part of His arrogance.'\n\n'Does He have a name, otherwise?'\n\n'Many. He has had many names over the millennia, none of them His own. I have no idea if He has ever had a true name. I knew Him as Neoth.'\n\n'Neoth? His name is Neoth?' John shook his head in wonder. That's crap. And a huge disappointment.'\n\n'No, that's just how I knew Him. It was what He called himself when I met Him. We were roughly coeval.'\n\n'When was that?'\n\n'In the time of the First Cities. He was a warlord even then. A king. And He was doing exactly what most of my kind do. He had taken on the stewardship of the human race. He had a greater understanding of the universe than anyone, such was His power. He saw the dangers of the warp, the fragility of humanity, the recurring"}
{"text":" in wonder. That's crap. And a huge disappointment.'\n\n'No, that's just how I knew Him. It was what He called himself when I met Him. We were roughly coeval.'\n\n'When was that?'\n\n'In the time of the First Cities. He was a warlord even then. A king. And He was doing exactly what most of my kind do. He had taken on the stewardship of the human race. He had a greater understanding of the universe than anyone, such was His power. He saw the dangers of the warp, the fragility of humanity, the recurring flaws of our species... credulity, anger, false-faith, yearning. Everything that was terrible and also wonderful about humanity. When I met Him, He had already begun on His path to shepherd mankind towards a brighter future.'\n\nShe looked at John. 'I believed in Him, John. I adored Him. Most of us did. It was hard not to love Him, hard not to be in awe of Him, harder still to perceive the dangers of His ambition. He wanted to achieve what most of us dreamed of, and He had the will and power to do it. Not just do it, but do it faster and more completely than any Perpetual could. He had the means to accelerate our efforts and accomplish, in just a few generations, what might otherwise take millions of years'\n\nJohn drew up a stool, and sat down facing her.\n\n'Go on,' he urged.\n\n'Over time He located, and tried to recruit, every single Perpetual on Earth,' said Erda softly. 'Some of us joined Him, others decided not to. Some of us fought Him. Several of the greatest conflicts in world history were caused by rival Perpetuals trying to thwart His programme. Did you know that?'\n\n'I suspected so,' said John.\n\n'He prevailed, John, though there were eras when He was badly set back. Over time, disaffection grew among our kind. Even the best of us could barely keep up, and I think He resented that. He is quite ruthless, and He is astoundingly arrogant. I suppose it would be hard not to be if you were Him. He was always right. He never looked for advice or counsel. He reshaped the world, and drove it forward, and He would not be questioned on the merit of His plan. To do so was... heresy.'\n\nJohn raised his eyebrows. 'Hilarious. But you stayed at His side.'\n\n'For far longer than I should have,' she replied. 'Most of us divorced ourselves from His efforts. He was taking risks. One by one, Perpetuals allied to Him slipped away. He was glad to see the back of them, I think. He was tired of their objections, and weary of their caution. He wanted results. He became angry with minds that could not match His speed of thought and His genius. So most of us left Him. They went away, into other lives, or went into hiding, or left the home world. A few stayed. The Sigillite, of course. He was always married to the cause. And, as I say, I stayed longer than I should have.'\n\n'Erda, what risks was He taking?' John asked.\n\n'The acceleration, John. He had no patience. He believed He knew everything He needed to know. He constantly pushed ahead. That's the irony. We are immortals, but He couldn't bear to waste time. Natural evolution takes millions of years. He refused to wait that long. He'd worked for twenty, thirty thousand years, and felt that was more than time enough. The natural stewardship of the Perpetuals, born through the evolutionary cycle, was not rapid enough for His needs. So once most of the natural Perpetuals had left His side, He built his own.'\n\n'The primarchs,' John whispered.\n\n'The primarchs,' she said, with a small nod. 'They're not actual Perpetuate, in any biological sense. They're the artificial equivalents of the Perpetuals, functionally immortal beings born from His blood and power and vigour, coded to accelerate His programme even faster. They were designed to live long enough to see His plan through to the end, and not die away so quickly, the way humans did, and they were indoctrinated from birth to follow His word, and not have opinions of their own, like naturally occurring Perpetuals. They were made to service His dream. He took what nature had wrought in the Perpetuals, and He built His own pathologised version. And through them, their genetic lines, the Legions.'\n\n'He didn't do that alone.'\n\nErda was silent for a moment. Outside, the desert air sighed, and the neck bells of livestock clunked.\n\n'He did not,' she said. 'I was still with Him then, one of the last few. Me, my colleague Astarte, a few others. I had misgivings, we all did, but He was very convincing. Compelling. And by then, He had become more powerful than ever. He needed a geneticist to work with Him, and that was my art. And He needed a biological source. A gene-stock rare enough to mix with His own. A Perpetual.'\n\n'You.'\n\n'Me. I was the other source. A genetic donor. He is the Father of Mankind. I am the surrogate mother. And the clinician. And the midwife. We made twenty fine sons. But He allowed me no influence. I was just a biological instrument. And once they were born, I began to properly understand the future He had prepared for them. The bitter destiny. The aggressively rapid and unnaturally savage evolutionary jump-start He was driving towards. No good ever comes of coercing nature, John. Through His sons, He would force the human race into the future, force it into submission, and defy the warp to do it. He had built artificial Perpetual-analogues and weaponised them, ready to resist the unbending cosmos. He was planning a crusade to retake the stars. To claim back in a bloody century or two what had taken millennia to lose in the first place. That was when I stepped away too. Astarte stayed, and finished the work on the Legion gene-build. But I left. I was heartbroken and bereft, but I stepped away.'\n\n'No, not quite,' said John. 'This part I know. Eldrad told me. You didn't just step away, Erda. You tried to stop Him.'\n\n'I tried to save my sons.'\n\n'You scattered them.'\n\nShe sat forward, and stared at the ground, her hands across her mouth.\n\n'I did. I took them from Him. I cast them onto the tides to spare them from His terrible ambition.'\n\n'Shit,' John murmured. 'What did He do?'\n\n'Raged, for a long while. I was gone by then. I hid for a long time. But He never tried to find me. I always thought that odd. I always expected His vengeance, for He could be vindictive, but it never came. Eventually, I came here, a place I'd always loved. I was born not far from here. I withdrew from the world, and He never came looking for me.'\n\nShe glanced at him, and smiled sadly. 'Because, I suppose, it was academic by then. He had moved on, fired and driven, as always. He sent the Astartes on their crusade anyway. A programme of reconquest, as He had always planned, but in truth it was just an excuse to find His sons. And His scattered sons were found again, of course, and returned to His side. I had failed. My efforts merely delayed His programme. I tried, John, but I did not stop Him.'\n\n'Will you try again?'\n\n'No, John. It's too late.'\n\n'Please.'\n\n'Everything is broken, John.'\n\nJohn slumped. 'Oll's not coming. I can't do this alone.'\n\n'Perhaps you shouldn't,' she said.\n\n'Why not?'\n\n'My fundamental objection to Neoth's Great Work,' she said firmly, 'is His haste and urgency. To supplant the natural flow of life with an artificial version that tramples ethics and morality and wise prudence. Artificial Perpetuals, John. That was His plan, and look, see how it has worked. And you, John, earlier you chided me and my kind for not taking action. You called us derelict that we had not made a concerted effort to block Neoth's progress, and that we should feel ashamed that you, a fake and neophyte immortal, should be doing what we should have long since done. You are an artificial Perpetual too, in a way, John, or at least, you were. I have no reason to trust your judgement, for you, like Him, and like my poor accursed children, are trying to hasten the movement of fate.'\n\n'So, you'd leave it up to the cosmos and natural order, and see how everything turns out in the end? Erda, with the greatest respect, none of us are going to live to see what that end is.'\n\nHe moved across, and sat down beside her. The trays that had brought his repast were still on the low table. He picked up the beaker he had drunk from earlier.\n\n'Kintsugi,' he said. 'I love kintsugi work. To take time and huge skill to rebuild a broken thing.' He ran his fingers along one of the beaker's crooked golden seams. 'Other cultures would discard it. Broken pottery. But no. The craftsman puts it back together, fusing each piece with gold. And he uses gold because he doesn't want to hide the fact that it was broken. It wears its scars and turns them into beauty. I think kintsugi pieces are more wonderful than the original, unbroken pots.'\n\n'I agree,' she said. She smiled broadly. 'I am braced for your staggeringly crude analogy, John, so get it over with.'\n\nHe laughed. 'Fine. I was building to a big finish there.'\n\nShe took the cup from his hand, and turned it over.\n\n'I understand,' she said. 'The cup is us. The Imperium. Humanity. Terra. Everything is broken, but it can be repaired.'\n\n'If we just make the effort,' he said. 'Apply a little meticulous skill. And if we're not afraid to let the scars show afterwards.'\n\n'It's still about force, not nature,' she said. 'The aggressive application of unnatural force.'\n\n'Yes, it is,' he agreed. 'Because of where we are now. It's all about force. We are sitting in the eye of the greatest war that has ever been. We don't have the luxury of waiting. The pot won't fix itself. Here' the thing... You broke with the Emperor, because He forced the pace of fate in defiance of nature. And you're afraid that I'm doing, the same. An artificial drive. An artificial Perpetual trying to push cange. The embodiment of everything you tried to stop. Just another false demigod trying to alter fate. The difference is, He was driven by pure ambition. It was in response to nothing except the pace of evolution. My effort is simply in response to His. I am trying to apply force in respo"}
{"text":" Here' the thing... You broke with the Emperor, because He forced the pace of fate in defiance of nature. And you're afraid that I'm doing, the same. An artificial drive. An artificial Perpetual trying to push cange. The embodiment of everything you tried to stop. Just another false demigod trying to alter fate. The difference is, He was driven by pure ambition. It was in response to nothing except the pace of evolution. My effort is simply in response to His. I am trying to apply force in response to force.'\n\nShe studied his face.\n\n'Tell me, John,' she asked, 'who do you fear more, the Emperor or Horus Lupercal?'\n\n'At this stage, it's hard to tell,' he replied. 'But only one can stop the other. Either way. Jury's out. However, Horus will only destroy. He cannot be reasoned with. But intervention might work with your beloved Neoth. I'm not talking about helping Him win the war. I'm talking about stopping it completely.'\n\n'He has never listened, never learned,' said Erda. 'In the cycles of old lore, He is Saturn. Inflexible authority.'\n\n'What?' asked John.\n\n'He is Saturn. He is Cronus. He is Oanis. It depends on your pantheon.'\n\n'You don't believe in gods.'\n\n'I don't,' she said. 'But the symbols have always intrigued me, and through the ages He has styled himself on many of them, for effect. Mithras, the soldier-god, Tyr Hammerhand, the Wolf of the Romanii, Arawn, Enlil of Storms, Maahes the lion-headed, Seth. And Saturn, most of all. The father-god. The maker. In the acroamatic texts of alchemy, Saturn is glyphed as lead, the prima matera. It is heavy and it seals, and limits, and protects. It is cold authority. Saturn is a black, stone prison, caging all truth inside its chain of rings.'\n\n'Great. You're telling me to forget it.'\n\nErda smiled at him. 'No. I am taken by your spirit, John Grammaticus. Your resolve. I believe you may be a trickster god, John, but tricksters have always had their vital place. They cannot be trusted, but they are needed.'\n\n'You've lost me, Erda.'\n\n'He is Saturn,' she whispered. The Saturnine aspect is lead. Lead is heavy. But lead, John. Lead can be moulded.'\n\n'Lead can be moulded,' he repeated. He smiled. 'Yes, it can.'\n\n'It can be shaped. It can be re-formed.'\n\nHe got to his feet.\n\n'So you will help?' he asked.\n\n'If I can.'\n\n'Because He is the Saturnine father, and you are... what? Nwt? Ma?'\n\n'I have no aspect as a mother any more, John. The effigies of fertility and vitality in this place are just memories of the past. But perhaps I could be an opener of the way. That's what you wanted, wasn't it?'\n\n'Absolutely,' he said. 'I need to get into the Palace. You fled from there. I think you know a way in.'\n\n'There are means, but John, you have Eldrad's shears. You are already an opener of ways. When I came in you were examining that figure of Azoth-Hermes. You said you were drawn to it. Your kindred aspect.'\n\n'The Palace is warded, against even Eldrad's device. I'm no way-maker. Maybe you were right, and I'm simply the other aspect of Hermes. The trickster arsehole part.'\n\n'I told you, tricksters play a vital role,' she said. 'Did you know that one of his names was stropheos? It means a hinge. It opens doors, but it also turns fate. Are you that, John? Are you the hinge of fate?'\n\n'I can try.'\n\n'In the early days,' said Erda, 'when gods were plentiful, every culture had a version of the trickster. One who opens doors that could not open, and changes things without warning, to much delight or consternation. Among the Yoruba, the trickster was called Eshu.'\n\n'Great story. Why are you telling me this?'\n\n'Because,' she said, 'Eshu, like Hermes, and Azoth, and Mercury, and all the swift couriers of fate, is the solution. The solvent. It is the agent that transmutes lead and opens the cage of Saturn's black pкison. But it is also called the Enforcer of Sacrifice. To get a god to answer your bidding, you must make an offering. You must pay god his price. Are you ready for that?'\n\nHe went outside. The night was clear, and had become very cold. Some of Erda's companions, including the three who had served him food, had gathered around a leaping bonfire, inside the ring of huts and tents. One was singing, an old, old song that seemed almost familiar. The others, especially the younger ones, were dancing and clapping. Sparks flurried up towards the unending stars.\n\nWhen they saw him, they ran away, leaving the fire burning. They became darting silhouettes that flickered in the firelight, and vanished into tents.\n\nAfraid of me, John supposed. Or afraid of the trickster god.\n\n'Bullshit,' he whispered. Erda had a way about her, the storyteller's knack. For all she said she didn't believe in gods and spirits, that they were tall stories from a more credulous age of the world, she had a way of convincing you. Her words carried weight, freighting meanings inside meanings. She had an odd way of synchronising things, both real and symbolic, aligning them so they made some new, bewildering sense. John liked that. There was mystery left in her, and that was precious in itself. For all the Emperor was secret, and moved, across the ages, mysteriously, the way a god is supposed to, His ambitions were not. The direction of His Great Work was blatantly self-evident. He was unsubtle. He always had been. A blunt, brute monolith.\n\n'There should be more mystery in the world,' said John. Mystery left room for all sorts of things, for doubt and ideas and exploration. The tales Erda wove blurred the line between myth and reality.\n\nAnd that seemed right, because that was the cosmos now. A cosmos that denied gods, but accepted the existence of a vast otherness. Supernatural forms existed, Neverborn, reaching into the world. Some said if you acknowledged such spirits, you had to allow for the idea there might be gods too. John had heard that argument too many times in the last few years. It fell down on its basic premise. Just because one thing existed, it didn't mean the other had to. The universe was many things, but it wasn't symmetrical. The existence of daemons did not prove the existence of gods. There was just the warp, in its unfathomable immensity, and on the other scale, the tiny speck of mortal life.\n\nJohn strolled down to the fire, and poked at it with a stick to make the flames use up again. He could understand why men had begun to see the Emperor as a god. At least the Emperor had the decency to deny that. He was just a man, only a man, but on a unique and different scale to any other.\n\nAnd yet He was, to all intents and purposes, a god. A de facto god. And if He was that, then John was a trickster, and Erda was an Earth-mother. The real question wasn't whether the Emperor was a god or not, it was should He be.\n\nJohn took the torquetum out of his vest pocket, and carefully unfolded its intricate mechanism. It was the compass that Eldrad had given him to negotiate his path through un-space, and guide the cuts In made with the wraithbone scissors. It, too, was made of wraith-bone. It was as cold as the night air around him. No trace of warmth, of the tingle that hinted Oll might be getting close.\n\n'There is no sign,' said a voice.\n\n'John started sharply. Leetu was standing right beside him.\n\n'Shit, you could stop doing that,' John said.\n\n'Sorry.' The legionary didn't seem sorry at all. 'I made a sweep, right out to the rim of the eye and back. I checked every sensor trap and data-snare No sign of anyone. I thought this friend of yours might have been hurt or stranded somewhere, but-'\n\n'Thanks for trying.'\n\n'I did it for her,' said Leetu. 'This person-'\n\n'Oll Persson.'\n\n'Oll? Person? What did I say?'\n\n'Just say Ollanius.'\n\n'Whatever, he seems to matter to her. I think she cares about him.' 'I think they were old friends,' said John. 'I mean, a long time ago.' John glanced at the warrior.\n\n'Speaking of old, that's an antique piece.' He gestured at Leetu's thigh-clamped weapon. 'Mark Two Phobos?'\n\nLeetu shook his head. 'M676 Union Model. Pre-Phobos. Mark Zero, you might say. Made before the accord with Mars.'\n\n'How old are you?' asked John.\n\n'Old enough to have been issued it new.'\n\nLeetu unclamped it, and handed it to John. He struggled with the weight of it.\n\n'This is a real antique,' John said. 'Sickle-form mag. Side-sights, chambered for seventy-cal. They use seventy-five now.'\n\n'So I hear.'\n\n'You don't hanker after one of the new patterns?'\n\nLeetu took the weapon back and re-clamped it. 'Why would I?' he asked.\n\nJohn shrugged. 'Something new to play with? Improved stopping power?'\n\n'I stop all I need to stop,' said the Space Marine.\n\n'I'm sure you do. So... what Legion were you?'\n\n'No Legion.'\n\n'Never assigned?'\n\n'Never anything.'\n\n'Right, sure, but which... bloodline?' John asked. 'Which primarch was your genesire?'\n\nLeetu looked at him. 'My father was Neoth. My mother was Erda.\n\nI was one of the first. Before they spliced in the gene-stocks.'\n\n'You were a prototype?'\n\n'Template.'\n\n'And your name? \"Leetu\"? That's just a contraction of your serial code, right?'\n\nLeetu nodded.\n\n'So what is your name?'\n\n'I don't have one. I've always been Leetu.' Leetu looked at him, as it measuring him carefully. 'You've convinced her to help you, I gather?' he said.\n\nYeah, said John. 'I'm not asking for much, but yeah.'\n\nLeetu frowned. 'I don't like it,' he said. 'I don't care for you. But if that's her will, I'll help you too.'\n\n'Because you answer to her?'\n\n'Always.'\n\nJohn nodded. 'Well, friend,' he said, 'I'll take any help I can get.'\n\nThey were silent for a moment. The fire crackled and spat.\n\n'So then,' said Leetu. 'I was thinking. You arrived too late.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'It's the twenty-second of Quintus. Earlier, you said you arrived too late. Eight months out.'\n\n'That's right.'\n\n'You had to go back. Find a new route. Retrace your steps, so you arrived today instead.'\n\n'Yes,' said John.\n\n'What if your friend did the same?' Leetu asked. 'Arrived too late? Or too early? I don't know how it works. But the shadow of the war"}
{"text":"an get.'\n\nThey were silent for a moment. The fire crackled and spat.\n\n'So then,' said Leetu. 'I was thinking. You arrived too late.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'It's the twenty-second of Quintus. Earlier, you said you arrived too late. Eight months out.'\n\n'That's right.'\n\n'You had to go back. Find a new route. Retrace your steps, so you arrived today instead.'\n\n'Yes,' said John.\n\n'What if your friend did the same?' Leetu asked. 'Arrived too late? Or too early? I don't know how it works. But the shadow of the warp has fallen across this world, and pathways may have been distorted. Twisted and bent out of shape. Maybe this Ollanius wasn't intercepted. Maybe he got here. Just not at the right time. Like you.'\n\n'Oh god,' said John, his eyes wide. 'Maybe he did.'\n\nFOUR\n\n* * *\n\nLocked away\n\nLet me back in\n\nUnwanted gifts\n\nIt is becoming quite disturbed out there,' remarked Basilio Fo.\n\nThe black stone walls and floor of his cell, deep in the Blackstone prison, had just vibrated.\n\n'The whole Palace shivers,' he added. He was pacing, fidgeting. 'Should we be concerned?'\n\n'We're safe here,' said Keeler. She glanced up at Amon. The Custodian disliked giving her any details about the conflict raging beyond the ambit of the Sanctum, but that morning he had mentioned, in passing, specific points of turmoil at the Colossi Gate and Gorgon Bar. The siege was a ring of iron and fire around their throats, constricting with each passing hour. It was becoming so tight that the Imperial Palace, a structure she had always felt was the biggest and most resolute thing anywhere, had begun to tremble in fear.\n\n'I think you are naive if you think we're safe anywhere,' said Fo, with a pinched smile. 'Outside howls a daemonic horror, pounding to get in, and we are locked inside these walls with the Great Daemon who made it. I do not know which would be safer, inside or out. Nowhere on Terra. Nowhere full stop. We could be hidden on an end world at the farthest limits of galactic space, and I fear we would not be safe there either.'\n\n'From Horus?' she asked.\n\n'From him, or his father, dear girl,' said Fo.\n\n'You were speaking, when we last met, of a weapon. A trigger.'\n\nHe pouted, and tapped the pad of his index finger against his lips.\n\n'Well, Euphrati,' he said, 'to construct a weapon, one must assess the intended target.'\n\n'Horus?'\n\n'Yes. And to understand him, we must consider his lineage. His family background. His bloodline. His sire.'\n\n'The Emperor?' she asked warily.\n\n'Yes,' said Fo. 'I knew Him, you see. I knew of Him. Back in the Strife. No one could not know Him. Let me tell you about Him. I was there when He truly became a thing of terror...'\n\n* * *\n\nThe noise was the worst part.\n\nThe giant Neverborn were appalling to behold, of course. They had ravaged Colossi's northern and eastern lines, scouring away the trenchwork and emplacements that had held off the XIV's assaults for days. They had pulped the land into a miasma, a churning lake of mud and flames. They had killed everything they could reach. Over seven thousand of the loyalist forces. Konas Burr was among the dead, lost in the first few minutes of their atrocity.\n\nBut the daemons were almost too awful to accept. To visually register. Vast daemon forms, like blockprints of the Apocalypse, animated as raging shadows in the smoke and haze. Marshal Agathe tried not to look at them more than she had to, but when she did, they seemed unreal. Preposterous. A child's drawing of a nightmare. A child's unreliable at count of the thing under the bed that had woken him. The noise, however...\n\nUnder the Khan's command, Colossi's garrison had fallen back, an almost frantic effort to empty the outer lines. The Neverborn had lumbered in to shred those emptying emplacements, and while they were thus occupied, the Khan had directed the full force of Colossi's wall guns, and the artillery, and tank formations, to pound the zone.\n\nThe daemons survived the long and exhausting barrage. They survived, or they were blown to shreds multiple times, and simply re-formed from the ooze. It was hard to say. What had yesterday been the front lines was today a burning zone, a vast furnace of destruction, in which very little could be discerned, no matter how hard you trained your field glasses. Agathe did not look very often, because sometimes, startlingly magnified, things looked back out of the fire.\n\nThe desperate and sustained barrage, which had drained Colossi's munition depots back to a mere quarter capacity, had bought them time. It had slowed the daemons' advance, and allowed the Great Khan and his men to pull as many souls as possible back behind the curtain wall.\n\nNot enough. So many lost. Poor Konas, her unlikely friend. He wasn't here, which is why the zone command pin had passed to her.\n\nThe Great Khan's efforts had also bought them enough time to realign the heavy defences. Army and Mechanicum gangs had toiled to exhaustion, during the hours of the bombardment, to reframe the aegis and the telaethesic wards. Many major voids had to be dropped, and pulled back, their projection discs re-erected along the curtain wall to face outwards rather than up. The defenders had lost leagues of outwork ground, and they had also lost a great section of the void canopy that had protected them. The voids, crackling like frying meat, now covered the wall, and a little overhead, and the telaethesic wards had been revised to match.\n\nThe Colossi Gate had surrendered an immense portion of its outer front and support territory. The bastion line protecting the Sanctum approach had, accordingly, suffered a massive reduction. Aegis cover, partial and damaged before, was now almost gone on the northern run of the Anterior Bastion. The Neverborn, previously active only at the Lion's Gate space port and its environs, now had liberty to roam more freely into the Palace zone, deeper and closer than ever before.\n\nThe voids and the wards had stopped them at the wall. For the time being, anyway.\n\nThen the noise had begun. Uncannily, it was far worse than anything they could glimpse. Deep in the inferno before the curtain wall, the half-seen fiends were clawing at the wards, and pounding on the shields. It was a constant dramming thunder, a scratching, a rasping, a squealing, like iron nails on glass, like teeth on stone, like blades on metal. And behind those excruciating sounds, sounds that made you flinch every few seconds, there was the endless braying and booming of daemon voices.\n\nThe noise was by far the worst part.\n\nAgathe hurried to the blockroom. She kept bumping into personnel in the narrow tunnels of the wall redoubts. An extraordinary plague of flies, perhaps the entourage of the daemons, perhaps the work of the pestilential XIV, had got inside the walled fortress. They were everywhere, seething mats of shiny black bodies that covered faces and hands, and slipped into sleeves and boots and gloves and cups and nostrils. Environmental officers suspected bacterial clouds too. Everyone had suited in gas-gear, masks and respirators, partly to keep operating in the blanket of flies, and partly to keep breathing amidst the ghostly billows of the pesticide that was being pumped and sprayed, around the clock, to try to rid the fortress of infestation.\n\nThere were reports of plague cases. Wearing gas hoods, it was hard to sec, and hard to catch your breath. It was stifling. The eye-pieces of the hoods were tinted. Everyone bumped into each other, theirboundaries lost, their periphery vanished. Agathe could see almost nothing. It was as if she were approaching death, and her vision was tunnelling into darkness.\n\nBut she could hear.\n\nThe constant drone and buzz of flies. The patter and fidget of them clustering on her ear guards and crawling on her flak coat. I ler skin crawled in sympathy. And she could hear, no matter how hard she tried not to, the terrible noise. The braying and squealing and rasping of the daemons clawing at the shields.\n\nThe archway into the blockroom had been strung with gas curtains, for all the good they did. Colossi's massive regulation system had been adjusted to increase internal air pressure in order to prevent gas penetration from outside, but that did nothing about the swarms inside, and only seemed to add to the suffering of the personnel. Everyone's ears rang and thudded, everyone's sinuses throbbed, everyone's eyes ached. Agathe kept tasting blood in her mouth.\n\nShe flashed her command seal at the sentries, parted the gas curtain and entered. Flies blew in with her. There were flies inside the room already. They swirled in the warm air, and settled on people and the fascias of consoles. The Great Khan, now acting commander of the Colossi repulse, stood beneath the main display, remonstrating with three of his men. The sight of him ordinarily filled her with dread - transhuman dread, they called it. He was so very much bigger than every other figure in the chamber. Today, the bulk of him seemed almost reassuring to her. She was comforted by the notion that they had mythical beasts of storybook proportion on their side too.\n\nShe was also oddly calmed by the fact that there were flies settling on him as well. He was the only person present bareheaded and unmasked. Green and black dots crawled on his face, and in his beard, and trickled over the white curves of his armour. Not even demigods were spared the torment.\n\nShe couldn't hear his words, but the White Scars he was addressing were Stormseers. She knew the name of one: Naranbaatar, the leader of their kind. They were warriors, but they were shamans too, their armour strung with beads and fetish-charms. Agathe, her background pure military, had always felt uneasy about the use, by some Legiones Astartes, of psykana and aetheric craft. It smacked of a time humanity had left behind, of ignorance and superstition. But now, like the scale of the Great Khagan himself, the sight of them seemed reassuring. If Colossi was to hold, it needed sorcery. It needed m"}
{"text":"of one: Naranbaatar, the leader of their kind. They were warriors, but they were shamans too, their armour strung with beads and fetish-charms. Agathe, her background pure military, had always felt uneasy about the use, by some Legiones Astartes, of psykana and aetheric craft. It smacked of a time humanity had left behind, of ignorance and superstition. But now, like the scale of the Great Khagan himself, the sight of them seemed reassuring. If Colossi was to hold, it needed sorcery. It needed magic to fight magic.\n\nAgathe didn't know the right words. It seemed preposterous to think in such terms, but she had seen and heard what was at the door. The Stormseers worried her, though. They seemed devoted and serious, but everything they had conjured so far - again, such a term seemed wrong and stupid - had been inadequate. Whatever magic was clawing at the walls, it was far stronger than anything they could muster.\n\nNearby, the captain-general of the Legio Custodes was briefing a quintet of his men. Like the Khan, Valdor and his men alarmed her, more giants in their midst. But Valdor brought a stoic calm, speaking low and dearly. She noticed that fewer flies swarmed on him and his golden warriors. Little carpets of dead insects crunched beneath their feet. It was said that each member of the Custodian Guard was a personification of the Emperor, a sliver of His supreme will made flesh and extended out into the world. Perhaps that aura of grace was anathema to the infestation.\n\n'Marshal.'\n\nShe turned, clumsy and half-blind, and found herself facing Raldoron of the Blood Angels. He was First Captain of the IX Legion, and equerry to the Great Angel of Baal, no less. He had been sent to their lines m the previous days to oversee unit coordination. The besieged forces of the Palace were a raucous patchwork of mismatched assets drawn from any and all sources. They dearly needed glorious and admired champions like the First Captain to inspire unity, and foster cohesion.\n\nGlorious, she thought. Flies clustered on his beautiful armour like beads of oil.\n\n'My lord captain,' she replied, speaking overloudly, because she knew how badly the hood muffled her voice.\n\n'You've brought the updates?'\n\n'Yes, lord,' she replied, fishing a dataslate from her coat. 'Disposition of all forces on the walls and emplacements as of twenty minutes ago. Also, munition levels.'\n\n'Shield bearing?' Raldoron asked.\n\n'We're waiting on that,' she said. 'The tech-magi speak of fluctuation. They are trying to calculate a reasonable estimate. Should I deliver these to the Khagan?'\n\n'I'll do it,' said Raldoron. 'He's occupied at present, and you are doubtless due back at your station.'\n\n'I am, lord,' she said. 'His seers look tired,' she added.\n\nRaldoron followed her gaze. They stared at the Khan and his men, deep in discussion.\n\n'Not tired,' said Raldoron. 'Our kind does not tire. To me, their bearing tells of helplessness.'\n\n'Which is worse,' said Agathe.\n\n'It is, marshal. The power of the Librarius varies from Legion to Legion. Some, indeed, eschew it entirely, like the Praetorian's brave sons. I had always thought of the White Scars as more than just dabblers in the esoteric. I've seen them harness the elemental power of wild places to a degree that would have horrified any hardliner at Nikaea. I think of them as serious proponents of the controversial art.'\n\n'It speaks to their barbarian heritage,' she said.\n\nRaldoron turned his visor to her, and stared with unyielding disdain.\n\n'A word of caution, marshal,' he remarked. 'Don't let the Warhawk, or any of his men, hear you recite such truisms. The White Scars are painfully aware of the way those of oh-so-cultured Terra regard them. As savages. As uncouth heathens, feral in aspect, who barely deserve the honour of being of the Legions'\n\n'My pardon, lord, I meant no such thing-'\n\n'The affect comes too easily, Agathe. The White Scars are not lauded as champions the way the Imperial Fists or Guilliman's Legion are.'\n\n'Or yours, lord.'\n\n'Or mine. The human public does not hero them, or worship them as saviours. They think them wild and uncivilised. I know better, and would urge you to remember that. It is a reductive attitude. The White Scars represent a greater third of the legionaries holding this siege. They have come to Terra willingly, to a warfare that is alien to their ancient axioms of combat. And without them, we would be lost already.'\n\n'Again, my pardon, lord.'\n\nRaldoron nodded.\n\n'We'll say no more on it,' he murmured. 'Though, please watch for such attitudes among your soldiers. We must preserve a unity of respect. No, Agathe, my meaning was that, for all their shamanic lore, the Khan's Stormseers are outclassed. Environmental conditions are not conducive to their particular psykanic methods. And, of course, what intelligence we have suggests they are facing the very worst of such adepts'\n\n'It's confirmed, then?' she asked.\n\n'No, but more than reasonably likely. The Pale King's Fourteenth drives at us still, but the aetheric tribulation we are enduring is not then work. The damned sons of Magnus work some black art in support of them.'\n\n'The Thousand Sons,' she whispered.\n\n'Several of their sorcerous captains have been reported, perhaps orchestrating this atrocity from a distance. Ahriman, for one, allegedly. Of all the Legions, lost or loyal, the Fifteenth were the ones who took the concept of the Librarius to its furthest degree, and made it the axle-beam of their doctrine.'\n\n'We are damned, then,' she said.\n\n'They are damned, Agathe,' said Raldoron. 'We are merely doomed.'\n\n* * *\n\nFo, in his fluttering little bird-voice, told them of ages long dead, of things Keeler knew as only broken histories. The air in the grim, squalid cell seemed to thicken, as though Old Night had come to visit them and hear its story told.\n\n'There were so many monsters in those days,' Fo said, 'towering monsters of pride and arrogance and ambition. Poor Terra did not seem big enough to hold them all. Leaders, kings, despots, tyrants. Your Emperor was only one of them. But I understood His malevolence even then. It was singular.'\n\n'I would caution your remarks,' said Amon tersely.\n\n'Why?' asked Fo, amused. 'What are you going to do to me? Lock me in a dungeon and deprive me of liberty for the rest of my... Oh, wait.'\n\n'Let him speak, Custodian,' said Keeler. 'Let him say whatever he likes. They are only words. The subjects we are speaking to here in the Blackstone need to be free to express themselves, or we will learn nothing of value. If they fear recrimination or prosecution, they will close their mouths.'\n\nFo was staring at them both, as though amused.\n\n'I do not understand the relationship between the two of you,' he said. 'Prisoner and escort, which would make you, Euphrati, some kind of recidivist like me. Except you have been granted powers of interview, and the golden killer there shows you courtesy.'\n\n'Who we are doesn't-' Keeler began.\n\n'It matters to me,' said Fo. 'It's clear you're a prisoner too. Yet you have a modicum of power. And you are very much Him. I feel it in you. You are deeply loyal to the tyrant, yet you have committed some crime, which the pair of you skirt around.'\n\n'Please, sir-'\n\n'Between you,' Fo chortled, 'you seem to be a perfect symbol of this Imperium of Mankind. The terrifying warrior, inhuman, regal in his adornment and unswerving in his severity, paired with you, a kindly voice of reason, protesting liberty of speech and freedom of expression, striving to obtain some truth. There were so many like you, Euphrati, back in the old days, at the start. Reasonable-looking people saying reasonable-sounding things, strident in their belief in the righteousness of your master... Yet always with a transhuman terror at your shoulder, eager to strike.'\n\nKeeler breathed deeply to retain her calm exterior.\n\n'What was singular about Him?' she asked.\n\n'That? Oh,' Fo said, making a diffident little shrug. 'I think, Euphrati, I think the others knew their flaws. Or cared little about them. Tang of Yndonesse was a zealot, and knew it. The artifice of faith was his uniting weapon. Belot... is his name still remembered? He was a warlord, and his interests were territorial gain by any means. Dame Venal sought to claim resources for her impoverished land, and spiralled into madness as she saw her own cruelty magnify, as she pursued her goals in the name of her people. Dume, aha, Dume. He was mad. Quite mad. But he fought for the security of his realm. He wanted to be left alone. Or so he told me.'\n\nFo ignored her expression.\n\n'But the Emperor,' he went on. 'Your Emperor. Do you know, He took that name before He had an empire? That's weapons-grade hubris. I thought Him just another warlord at first, scrabbling for His share, but something stood out about Him. He was clever, of course. More than that. A genius. And that mind of His, which could not be contained. His rise was meteoric, and would have been under any circumstances. But the terrible thing about Him, the singular thing, was that He thought He was right. Never a shred of doubt. His confidence was unimaginable.'\n\nFo shuffled back on his cot.\n\n'We were all monsters. I was, I know. But I just liked to play. I had an ability with genetics, with biomech systems. I would concoct things, just to see where they went. Sometimes that horrified people, and I gained an unfortunate reputation. But whatever I did, I never planned to conquer the planet. I never set out to unify. I had no great plan. I was just playing.'\n\nHe looked at Keeler.\n\n'I fled Terra when I saw that He did. You would either be part of His plan, or you would be removed. I'm sorry... illuminated. I fancied neither.'\n\n'You fled Terra, because you knew you would be punished for your crimes,' said Amon.\n\n'Yes. Certainly, by His terms. For the only law was His. I saw what was coming. He would unify, for He had the power to do it, and such a lack of self-doubt to never question His intentio"}
{"text":"out to unify. I had no great plan. I was just playing.'\n\nHe looked at Keeler.\n\n'I fled Terra when I saw that He did. You would either be part of His plan, or you would be removed. I'm sorry... illuminated. I fancied neither.'\n\n'You fled Terra, because you knew you would be punished for your crimes,' said Amon.\n\n'Yes. Certainly, by His terms. For the only law was His. I saw what was coming. He would unify, for He had the power to do it, and such a lack of self-doubt to never question His intention or His means. I am named a monster, because of the things I made, but look what He has made.'\n\n'An Imperium,' said Keeler.\n\n'Built on the shoulders of genetic transhumans,' said Fo. 'Brought to compliance... ah, there's another telling word... by abominations far worse than anything I ever devised. Transhuman abominations capable of burning the galaxy down. Do you doubt me? Behold the world outside.'\n\n'This is pointless,' said Amon.\n\n'You would say that, warrior,' said Fo fiercely. 'For you are Him. A part of Him, of His mind, His will. I might as well be talking to Him, face to face, and He never - I mean never - took criticism. He would never be questioned. And you, dear girl, looking at me with those questioning eyes, so are you. A part of Him. You were not made that way, but you are filled with His power. You've allowed that to happen. You think of Him as a god.'\n\n'I know He...' she began. Her voice dropped. 'I know what I know.'\n\n'You know what He wants you to know, dear.'\n\nThe Emperor has denied every attempt,' she said carefully, 'to apotheosise Him.'\n\n'Let me share a secret with you, Euphrati,' said Fo, leaning forward, beckoning to her. 'There are no gods. That's the first thing. If there were, they would operate in silent and measureless mystery, their ways too sublime for us to perceive. But there are those who would have you believe they are gods. Who, I should say, want to be gods. And the first step they take to that end? They deny themselves. They assume a humble attitude and declare, \"I am not a god... even though you might think 1 am.\" It is a psychological pathway to foster faith. I saw Him begin it all those years ago. I knew that, one day, He would be proclaimed a god. He is, after all, immensely powerful. He will become a god whether He likes it or not. Godhood is the ultimate tool of control. It is the pinnacle of tyranny. Faith drives your followers. Blind faith. You no longer have to make any sense at all, no longer have to justify your actions. You are followed blindly. If, like Him, you do not care to be criticised or doubted, it is a state to be wished for.'\n\n'He has denied-' Keeler began.\n\n'Yet you still believe! This is my point! The more He denies it, the more you believe! You do not judge the fact that He is, at heart, human, you embrace the lack of fact, because blind faith comforts you. Tell me, does He tell you, any of you, what His plan is? His scheme?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'There you go. Because then you would understand. Anything that is easy enough to understand is not powerful enough to be worshipped. A history of religion should show you this.'\n\n'The Emperor is different,' she said.\n\n'Only in that He is more, Euphrati,' said Fo. 'More powerful than any version of this lie that's come along before.'\n\nHe sighed wearily, and pulled the filthy blanket of his cot up around his legs.\n\n'Mankind, in my experience,' he said, 'and I think we can at least accept I have more experience of it than most... Mankind has proven to be pathologically incapable of learning from its own mistakes. It blithely remembers the witness of history, but it does not apply the knowledge it gains. The Age of Strife was a terrible thing, inflicted by man upon man. Those few of us who lived through it, and survived it, no matter what part we played, no matter what crimes we committed, we all looked on it during the last years of its horror and said never again. Never again can we do this to ourselves. Yet, mere centuries later, Terra is about to fall, Terra and the galaxy with it, at the hands of engineered humans turning against their creator. This siege, your war, it is self-inflicted.'\n\nHis head dropped.\n\n'We should be better than this,' he said quietly. 'We never learn.'\n\n'Earlier, you said you knew how to end this,' said Keeler. 'A... weapon?'\n\n'Yes,' said Fo. 'I have had a great deal of time to ruminate. I could build a weapon that would end this war and remove the threat. I would require access to extensive and advanced laboratory facilities.'\n\n'What kind of weapon?' asked Amon.\n\n'Biomechanical,' said Fo.\n\n'What kind of weapon specifically?' the Custodian growled.\n\n'Oh,' said Fo, 'one you really won't like.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe Neverborn had fallen silent, all at once, and very suddenly. An uneasy quiet filled the halls and gunblocks of Colossi. The only sounds were the creak of the voids and the endless buzzing of the flies.\n\nAgathe thought it would be a relief when the noise finally stopped, but it seemed worse somehow. The silence pressed in, and she felt claustrophobic. They had all been left alone with their thoughts, and the things they had seen, the daemons at the wall, were memories that began to stew and fester. As she walked her tour circuit, she became aware of the increasing distress among the men. They had been on station for hours, choking under their hoods, hearing horror, seeing nothing. Now, the silence was stretching out their wait, carving away what was left of their confidence, sweating out their courage, magnifying their dread.\n\n'He needs to be more visible,' she said, very directly, to Raldoron, when she encountered him on the Seventeenth Platform.\n\n'Meaning?' Raldoron asked.\n\n'Meaning the Khan.'\n\n'He is in vox conference with the Grand Borealis,' Raldoron replied. 'Negotiating the safe delivery of munition resupply.'\n\n'Once he's done, then,' said Agathe. 'The sight of him inspires confidence. He should be walking the lines. I do not make the same visual impact.'\n\n'I see.'\n\n'Can you ask him that?'\n\n'Yes, marshal. I can communicate your request.'\n\nFirst Captain Raldoron had brought three of the White Scars Stormseers with him. They waited in a silent group behind him.\n\n'We were coming to find you,' said Raldoron. 'The seers need access.'\n\n'To? For?'\n\n'As I understand it, they are formulating some new initiative to drive off the foe. But we need to see. To assess why the assault has fallen silent.'\n\n'The observation ports-'\n\n'No, commander,' said one of the seers. 'The open. The wall top.'\n\n'With respect, lord, no,' she replied. 'We have sealed Colossi behind the voids. Closed the gas shutters. I can't allow-'\n\n'The Khan has requested it,' said Raldoron.\n\nAgathe shrugged, clumsy in her gas-gear. 'Then why even ask me?' she said.\n\n'My Khagan wishes that the chain of command be respected,' said the seer. 'Your authority, commander. My Khagan would appreciate your consent. We must work together, not at odds.'\n\n'I'm grateful for that,' said Agathe. 'Can we look first, make an assessment?'\n\nThe seer nodded.\n\n'Your name is Naranbaatar?' Agathe asked.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'How do I address you?'\n\n'As Naranbaatar.'\n\nAgathe bid them follow her with a gesture. They walked down the armoured hall, and crossed the retractable walkbridge that spanned one of the massive munition shafts that spined the wall's midsection. She could hear the dull thump of the transhuman footsteps behind her, ringing on the metal, the firm clip of Naranbaatar's totem staff as it struck the deck, in pace with his stride.\n\n'Rest assured, we will not engage,' Raldoron said to her as they walked.\n\n'Rest assured, lord, I don't think we could engage,' she replied.\n\n'Perhaps,' he agreed. 'But the Khan has ruled that only the Custodians seem lit to wage battle, in any hand-to-hand fashion, against the Neverborn. They seemed sanctified in a way the rest of us are not.'\n\n'The flies die when they land on them,' she said.\n\n'Quite so. The spirit of our master flows most purely in them, a light against the darkness. Perhaps our best weapon.'\n\n'I'll tell my soldiers, if the walls are breached, to hold fire until a Custodian comes.'\n\nRaldoron made some small sound behind his visor. A grunt perhaps, or a chuckle.\n\n'He had a dry wit too,' the First Captain remarked. They had entered a garrison well beyond the bridge, past rows of blast-boxes that were filled with edgy, waiting men. The overheads, glowing dull amber, were laced with flies.\n\n'Who?' Agathe asked.\n\n'Burr,' he remarked. 'Your predecessor.'\n\n'My friend,' she said.\n\n'Mine too, marshal. I liked him very much.'\n\nFor a human?'\n\n'I do not make such distinctions, Marshal Agathe. A good soul is a good soul.'\n\nShe stopped abruptly, and turned to look at him, square-on, so she could line up the blinkered gas hood and see him clearly.\n\n'I think that's a luxury only the Legiones Astartes enjoy, lord,' she said. 'We see the distinction very clearly, every time one of you walks into the room. You remind us we are small. You remind us we are lesser things. And very mortal.'\n\n'I am sorry to hear that.'\n\n'I am... sorry to have said it,' she returned, and continued on.\n\n'My presence here, and the presence of legionaries like me, was intended to rally and uplift, not diminish morale,' he called after her.\n\n'I said I was sorry,' she replied.\n\n'You understand, marshal, that we fight for you,' Raldoron said, resuming step to easily catch up with her. 'We were born to fight for you.'\n\n'I hope so.'\n\n'The soul of mankind-'\n\n'Captain, my lord... it is very clear to me that you were born to fight for something. I hope it's us. I hope the life of mankind is the precious gift that gives purpose to your warring. But I am tired, and I am scared, and I am confused. I cannot see in this hood, I can barely breathe. I think of my family, far away, to give me hope and strength, and the thought of them destroys that hope, because I am afraid that they are already dead. I do not know what to think any more, or what to understand. I know you were"}
{"text":".. it is very clear to me that you were born to fight for something. I hope it's us. I hope the life of mankind is the precious gift that gives purpose to your warring. But I am tired, and I am scared, and I am confused. I cannot see in this hood, I can barely breathe. I think of my family, far away, to give me hope and strength, and the thought of them destroys that hope, because I am afraid that they are already dead. I do not know what to think any more, or what to understand. I know you were born to fight for something. Right now, that's all.'\n\nHe caught her arm with one of his immense, plated hands, and stopped her.\n\n'We fight for you,' he insisted.\n\nAgathe stared at him. His warhelm, as always, conveyed no expression. He removed his hand.\n\n'Through here,' she said.\n\nShe took them up a cargo ramp, past the oiled mechanisms of bulk autoloader systems that had become furry with adhered flies, and into one of the gun silos. The chamber was large, reinforced, and baffled with damping blocks. Six macro-guns, locked back in recoil position on their platforms, faced the gun slot. The blast shutters were down, as per her orders.\n\nGun crews and Kimmerine troops got up quickly as she entered with her Astartes escort. An officer approached her, and saluted.\n\n'What's wrong with him?' she asked. Nearby, a Kimmerine subaltern was hunched by the foot of the guns, his hood off. He was shivering and weeping, oblivious to the flies crawling on his face.\n\n'His brother keeps calling to him,' the officer said.\n\n'Where is his brother?'\n\n'Dead four weeks ago, mam.'\n\n'I have him removed at once, please. Get him to the medicae. I want the obs shutter opened.'\n\nTwo troopers hauled the weeping man away. The officer stepped onto the observation platform, produced his chain of keys and unlocked the shutter bolts. He started to crank the handle to lift the blast cover that blocked the glass of the obs slit. Agathe swung down a heavy field scope on its brass armature.\n\nThe slit's glass was thick. Nothing but an orange glow showed beyond. She adjusted the field scope to look. Raldoron pulled down a second scope, and paired it with his visor systems.\n\nOutside, a bleakness. A waste, shimmered by thermal radiation and the distorted signal-feed of the scope. They were a long way up. The Seventeenth Platform gun-boxes were over three hundred metres above talus, at the foot of the curtain wall.\n\nThe field outside Colossi was a mangled darkness. The outer lines, trench system and earthworks laid before the bastion had been ploughed up into a torn and tortured mire, where no trace of the original defensive structures or formations could be detected. A heavy smog lay across the view, slowly drifting banks of smoke and vaporised ejecta. Fires dotted the waste-ground, patches of flickering orange that danced between the few, scattered ruins of trees. Beside the leaping flames and the crackling distortion of the wall's void shields, there was no movement. No nothing.\n\nAgathe was about to push the scope away. She froze. Trees. There were no trees on the approach to Colossi Gate. The things she had seen weren't trees.\n\nThey were the Neverborn beasts. She counted eleven of them. The huge, dark monsters had ceased their assault, and lowered their therianthropic forms to the ground. They were kneeling in the mud, some close, others further away, corded arms slack at their sides, heads bowed, anders and homed crowns raised like the stark branches of winter trees. They were facing the fortress. It felt as if they were waiting.\n\nOr praying.\n\nSome simmering brimstone heat, a coal-red glow, pulsed slowly and softly in their shadowed faces.\n\n'What are they doing?' she asked in a whisper.\n\nRaldoron didn't reply. Agathe swallowed hard, and closed her eyes, trying to clear her head and block the ominous image. She heard a voice.\n\n'What did you say?' she asked, glancing at Raldoron. But he hadn't spoken. And it couldn't have been him. It was a human voice, light and far away.\n\n'May I?' Naranbaatar asked her, gesturing to the scope. Agathe stepped aside, and let him look.\n\n'Gathering power,' the Stormseer said. 'Perhaps they have expended their wrath for now, and are recharging their anima, or-'\n\n'Or?' asked Agathe.\n\n'Or they are performing some ritual,' he said. 'Focusing their spirits to reach out into the Neversea of the Immaterial, to gain insight or strength.'\n\n'Do you... do you know that?' Agathe asked him.\n\n'I feel it. Sense it. Like a charge in the wind, a brewing thunderhead. An echo of their shadow-selves, calling to the darkness that spawned them.'\n\nLet me back in.\n\n'What?' Agathe asked sharply.\n\nThe White Scar turned from the scope.\n\n'What do you ask me, marshal?'\n\n'You said... Let me back in.'\n\n'I did not.'\n\n'I heard the words.' Agathe moved to the scope again. Naranbaatar stopped her.\n\n'Do not look again,' he said. 'If you have heard the whisper, they are playing with you.'\n\n'I will look,' she insisted.\n\n'Please do not.'\n\nLet me back in.\n\nAgathe stared at him. 'I just heard it again,' she said.\n\n'A trick.'\n\n'I know the voice,' she said.\n\n'Burr,' said Raldoron. He stepped back from the scope. 'I heard it too.'\n\n'He's out there?' Agathe asked.\n\n'No, marshal. Naranbaatar is right. They are trying to wear down our sanity. Konas is dead.'\n\nRaldoron pushed both sets of scopes up into their cradles.\n\n'Close the shutter,' he told the officer. 'Lock it. Marshal, if the Never-born are quiet, we can venture up to the wall top. Take advantage of this lull, and let the seers make their preparations.'\n\nAgathe nodded. 'You heard him too?' she asked. 'If there's a chance he's alive...'\n\n'I saw Burr looking back at me through the scope,' he said without emotion. 'Staring, pleading. We are three hundred metres up, marshal. That's how I was sure he is dead.'\n\n* * *\n\nAmon Tauromachian checked the locks of Fo's cell door. The boom of its closing still echoed through the cold and draughty darkness of the prison around them. Amon picked up his lamp to lead them away.\n\n'We should-' Keeler began.\n\n'We should forget what we just heard,' said the Custodian.\n\n'We can't!' she exclaimed. 'Custodian, we must take this to the Praetorian. To your master at least-'\n\n'No,' he replied.\n\n'Fo is loathsome,' she said. 'Beyond redemption, but his abilities as a biomechanic are in no doubt. His skills are listed in detail on his file.'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Amon, if he says he can make a weapon, we must take him seriously. It doesn't matter who he is or what he's done, if he can provide a means of ending this, then we must-'\n\n'That's not what he described,' said the Custodian.\n\n'He can make a weapon to destroy the Lupercal,' said Keeler.\n\n'That's not what he described,' Amon repeated slowly. 'He proposed the manufacture of a biomechanical phage. Tailored and specific. I have no question that he is capable of it. The phage would kill Horus Lupercal, yes, because it would be coded to wipe out everything of that gene-altered pattern in the Imperium. Horus, yes. And every primarch. And every legionary. On both sides. It would exterminate the transhuman genetic lineage of mankind.'\n\nShe paused, then nodded.\n\n'Yes, it would,' she said. 'And that's unthinkable. But we're standing at the edge of total extinction, and the triumph of the warp. This moment is the unthinkable. What price is too great to win that, and shut down the Primordial Annihilator, and let mankind live?'\n\n'Not that,' he said.\n\n'Yes,' she sighed. 'I agree. Nevertheless, Amon Tauromachian, The Praetorian must know about it. He is running this war, and every second takes us closer to doom. He must be aware of all his options.'\n\nIt took a long while for Amon to respond.\n\n'Yes,' he said, 'he must.'\n\n* * *\n\nThey rose into the gloomy air above the wall top, passing through gas shutters and blast shields, to exit onto the fighting platform of Artemis lower, the central ravelin of Colossi. It was nocturnal. A warm, foetid wind blew in from the burning wastes. The air was drawn with smoke, and low with swollen brown clouds. Agathe kept her hazard gear on.\n\n'Five minutes,' she said.\n\nThe Stormseers nodded. They wandered out into the open part of the wide platform, talking softly to each other. They were looking up at the curved edge of the void shields that shimmered overhead, like the ghost of a gigantic wave breaking across the wall. The void sections were secured vertically, and extended out across the fighting platform, and beyond, for sixty metres. Beyond that, they decayed to nothing. Colossi's energy shields covered the fortress like a shelf, a miserable relic of the mighty void system that had once screened the entire gate and outworks beyond, projecting for five kilometres.\n\n'Go back below, marshal,' Raldoron told her. 'I will watch them until they are done. No need for you to be here too.'\n\n'I'll stay,' she said, shifting uncomfortably in the hot, toxic wind.\n\n'Please, Agathe, just go below,' he said.\n\n'What?' she asked. 'What's the matter?'\n\n'I am concerned for your wellbeing. You are not as robust as us legionaries.'\n\n'Captain, that's not it at all. You're being disingenuous.' She tried to step past him. 'What are you hiding? You're trying to block something from me.'\n\n'Please, Agathe.'\n\n'I want to see, First Captain. I need to-'\n\nShe stopped in her tracks. She could see what Raldoron had been trying to mask from her with his bulk. An object placed on the crenellations at the edge of the fighting platform, twenty metres away.\n\nIt was small and pale.\n\n'Oh shit,' she murmured.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Raldoron. 'You didn't need to see that. The Neverborn filth knew we were coming. They left us a gift.'\n\nAgathe stared for a long time, and turned her back when she could no longer bear to look into the sightless eyes of Konas Burr's grey, severed head.\n\nFIVE\n\n* * *\n\nAnother angel\n\nHope is not an error\n\nOlympos\n\nAs Sanguinius, the Lord of Baal, climbed the inner staircase to the fighting platform of the fourth circuit wall, he felt the pounding in "}
{"text":"le.\n\n'Oh shit,' she murmured.\n\n'I'm sorry,' said Raldoron. 'You didn't need to see that. The Neverborn filth knew we were coming. They left us a gift.'\n\nAgathe stared for a long time, and turned her back when she could no longer bear to look into the sightless eyes of Konas Burr's grey, severed head.\n\nFIVE\n\n* * *\n\nAnother angel\n\nHope is not an error\n\nOlympos\n\nAs Sanguinius, the Lord of Baal, climbed the inner staircase to the fighting platform of the fourth circuit wall, he felt the pounding in his head resume.\n\nThe pulse came in time with the thump of the kettle drums the massing traitor hosts were beating, and skipped arrhythmically at every crump and pop of nearby combats. But neither the drumming nor the blast of munitions was causing it. Other minds were grazing against his again, other minds, brother minds.\n\nOne especially.\n\nHe walked, because his great wings ached, and his spirits were low, but he kept his face set with a stern yet kind aspect. He would not show weakness to his sons, or Rann's stalwart Imperial Fists, nor to any warrior of Terra or Mars who stood this line with him. He understood his chief purpose and role. Few beings in creation could match him in war, but in war of this scale he was but one small element. No matter his prowess, no matter his deeds, he would not turn the fight for Gorgon Bar alone. His role was as a figurehead, a living standard, to bind the defence, and nurse its strength.\n\nAnd he knew his repeated absence from the line had already been noticed. Rumours were spreading that he was sick, or wounded. Sanguinius had tried to confine himself alone, in his chambers, while he staved off the plague of visions. He didn't want people to see him struggling, too many soldiers had seen him fall to his knees on the walkway and cry out in agony. Word had got around. He could not let that happen again. When the visions came, and the fits took him, he stole away and endured them in private.\n\nBut he had been missed. His absence marked. Unease was brewing. The sight of him unmanned, in pain and distress, would break morale, but so too could the gap he left by not being visible. A figurehead only worked if it could be seen. Undone by the visions, he was tailing as a warrior and as an inspiration.\n\nIt was a burden like no other, far worse than the uncalled-for responsibility of Imperium Secundus that Roboute had placed on him. The Great Angel was the protector. If he failed, then Terra would fail. Perhaps the visions afflicting his mind were the very weapons Horus would use to destroy him. It wasn't his literal death he had seen during the Ruinstorm: it was his symbolic failure, his disintegration as a viable force of good.\n\nSoldiers on the steps saluted and bowed as Sanguinius passed. He paused to talk to some, to clasp hands and lift hearts. That was how it worked. A few words from the Great Angel reforged mettle.\n\nBel Sepatus and Halen awaited him on the landing stage below the parapet. The shiver of nearby fighting was louder. He could smell the smoke lapping across the wall.\n\n'They mass?' he asked.\n\n'To your schedule, so it seems,' replied Sepatus sardonically.\n\n'Just sorties so far, lord,' said Halen, passing him a hardened dataslate. 'A dozen since dawn. Probing for weaknesses in our line.'\n\n'Structural?' asked Sanguinius.\n\n'And spiritual,' Halen replied. 'They aim to break us this morning.\n\nThey are testing to see what sections are weak.'\n\n'None are weak,' said Sepatus quickly.\n\n'Indeed, captain,' replied Fisk Halen. 'I mean only that some are stronger than others.'\n\n'Bel knew what you meant, my friend,' said Sanguinius. 'There's no shame in weakness.' He reviewed the data carefully.\n\n'The Berengerian Fusiliers-' Halen said.\n\n'Should be rotated out,' said Sanguinius, nodding as he read. 'They took the brunt on second circuit. They haven't been allowed a chance to stand down for nine days.'\n\n'The company commander refuses to leave your side,' said Halen.\n\n'And I embrace his courage,' said Sanguinius. 'But they are weak as they stand, dead on their feet. Pull them, Fisk, and give them six hours on the reserve line to rest and resupply.'\n\n'I have two battalions of Prushik Kurassiers waiting in the yards for a place on the fighting step,' said Halen. 'Fresh from the Sanctum last night.'\n\n'Make that change, captain,' said Sanguinius. 'Tell the Berengerian chief I have personally requested his brave men rest, for I have them in mind for a special action later. Use the word brave.'\n\n'Special action, lord?' asked Sepatus.\n\n'Holding Gorgon Bar,' said Sanguinius. 'He doesn't need to know specifics. He just needs a reason to stand down that will not bruise his pride.'\n\nHalen nodded, and took back the slate.\n\nThe pounding in Sanguinius' temples had grown worse.\n\n'Let's see the day,' he told them. He made himself smile.\n\nHalen led the way up the combat ramp, shouting orders. Wall reserves raised lances and spontoons upright in attention as they passed, banners and company oriflammes billowing like sea snakes in the wind. Sanguinius held Sepatus back for a moment.\n\n'On the subject of a special action, Bel,' he said softly, 'I need you to take your best squad, quit the line, and return to the Sanctum Imperialis.'\n\nBel Sepatus' face darkened. 'Why in the name of Terra would I do that?' he asked.\n\n'I received a communication an hour ago, conveyed directly and in great confidence from the Sigillite. He requests my best squad, and my best man, without delay.'\n\n'For what purpose?'\n\n'It did not specify, and I did not ask.'\n\n'I won't leave your side, lord. Not at this hour. And I am concerned for you. I have heard-'\n\n'Will you obey my commands, Bel?' Sanguinius asked.\n\n'Always.'\n\n'Then this is my command. You, and your best squad, to the Sanctum.'\n\nSepatus ground his jaw for a moment, then nodded.\n\n'The Praetorian has need of you,' said Sanguinius. 'It is some matter too delicate for transmission.'\n\n'Dorn has his own men,' said Sepatus.\n\n'If my brother has need of better angels,' said Sanguinius, 'I do not question him. The Praetorian commands over all. We follow his strategies, or the siege falls apart. His understanding of this war is far broader and more comprehensive than mine.'\n\nSepatus exhaled gently, steadying his silent wrath.\n\n'I'll pass command of my formations to Satel Aimery,' he said. 'I'll take second squad. The Katechon. I will...'\n\n'Bel?'\n\n'I will miss the glory of this day,' said Sepatus sadly.\n\nSanguinius placed a hand on his shoulder.\n\n'Glory, Bel,' he said, 'awaits you wherever you walk.'\n\nThe wall top was thick with troop lines, metal glinting in the bright haze. Sanguinius rejoined Halen. Below them, the vast circuit wall quivered as bulk auto-hoists brought load after load of munitions up to the macro-gun casemates. Above them, in the wan light, observation balloons drifted like low, stray planets caught in nets of golden braid, their pict systems whirring. Sanguinius could hear gunfire rippling from the line to his left. Pioneer parties were running an assault about half a kilometre down, and the wall guns were driving them back with desultory bursts.\n\nTo his right, about a kilometre and a half out, the traitor Warhounds had returned, making gun-charges out of the ruins of the third circuit wall to strafe and harass the wall below Parfane Tower. They had brought friends, six or seven Warhounds in total, and a supporting unit of corrupted Questor Knights. The tower's guns were clapping the air with their response. Blooms of white smoke from each salvo drifted along the wall. Sanguinius heard a cheer rise and build, rolling across the wall emplacements with the gliding smoke. A Warhound had been struck and brought down. He could see its twitching carcass, on fire, in the blasted gully short of the wall.\n\nSanguinius mounted the observation alure where Lord Seneschal Rann, Khoradal Furio and three lords militant of the Imperial Army were positioned.\n\n'They are working themselves up,' was all Rann said.\n\n'I'd need to work myself up a little, if I was coming against us,' said Sanguinius.\n\nFafnir Rann chuckled.\n\n'I don't think it will be a mass wave,' said Sanguinius. They tried that yesterday, and it won them a lot, but it broke at the final step. And it cost them.' The ground, far below them, was still contoured with mounds of rotting dead. 'They're wary,' he said. 'Stung. They'll probe, then drive at a section or sections they perceive as weak.'\n\n'None are weak,' said Rann.\n\nSanguinius smiled. From a Blood Angel, that remark would sound like stubborn pride. From an Imperial Fist, it sounded like an operational mantra.\n\nSo I in told, Fafnir,' he said. 'But pay attention, and watch for wavering I expect two or perhaps three main drives, and they'll come at once.'\n\nHe stared out. The shattered, jagged shadows of the third circuit wall were a kilometre away. Beyond them, the overwhelmed ruins of outer circuits and the outworks. All of that, lost in one savage day. A great stain of smoke hung low over the enemy-possessed ruins. He could hear the constant batter of kettle-drumming, and see signs of bulk movement stirring in the gloom. A build-up. There was chanting too. Enemy voices, chanting together, but boned out by the distant. The same words.\n\nThe Emperor must die! The Emperor must die!\n\nSanguinius closed his eyes, and saw different smoke, different ruins.\n\nNo. No, not now.\n\nThe other mind was there again, eclipsing his, a heat pulsing behind his eyes. The felt the fraternal bond that could never be broken, the raw hatred that could never be understood, the rage that could never be reasoned with.\n\nAngron. Another angel. A redder angel. Where was he? Sanguinius tried to see. Just smoke. Just rubble.\n\nHe thought of the Sigillite's message that had taken Bel Sepatus from him. Malcador had simply asked, and Sanguinius had given, without question. How dearly he wanted to consult, to ask Malcador a question of his own. How do I still my mind? How do I keep these visions at bay? How do I s"}
{"text":"ever be broken, the raw hatred that could never be understood, the rage that could never be reasoned with.\n\nAngron. Another angel. A redder angel. Where was he? Sanguinius tried to see. Just smoke. Just rubble.\n\nHe thought of the Sigillite's message that had taken Bel Sepatus from him. Malcador had simply asked, and Sanguinius had given, without question. How dearly he wanted to consult, to ask Malcador a question of his own. How do I still my mind? How do I keep these visions at bay? How do I stop the thoughts of my brothers invading my head?\n\nWhat do the visions mean?\n\nThere was no one question. He wanted to know what use the visions were, or why they were now, as it seemed, continuous and contemporary. They had once been fleeting scraps of possible futures, little flashes he could ignore. Now they were the present, or the near future. Now they were constant, and as draining as a migraine.\n\nThat was no simple message to send, or simple answer to receive. To dissect his visions, and their cause and meaning, he would need to sit with the Sigillite, in person and in private, and spend hours unravelling it all.\n\nHe had neither the time nor opportunity for that. It would have to wait.\n\nMaybe that was for the best. His greatest fear was that if he told Malcador, or Rogal, or anybody, they might deem him unfit. At best, perhaps, just troubled. At worst, they might believe it to be the first symptoms of creeping corruption, some deep flaw in him forced open by the sly ministries of the warp, like the tiniest crack in a bastion wall: prised at first, then widened by hammered wedges, then undermined and opened, until the wall collapsed under its own fissured weight, and the enemy tide flushed in to take the bastion entire.\n\nThey might order his removal from command. From the line. From the war. What was the term the Imperial Fists used? Non-vi. As good as dead.\n\nThe loyalist cause could not afford to lose a primarch. But Gorgon Bar could not afford an unfit one.\n\nFight it. Fight it!\n\nSanguinius opened his eyes, but the vision stubbornly remained, beating like a war drum. He saw it overlaid across the scene of mounded dead, smoke-drift and the shattered third circuit wall.\n\nHe saw another wall, whole as yet. Monsalvant Gard. A rain of bombarding fire. The rising towers, spines and peaks of Eternity Wall Port.\n\nAngron was assaulting the port. The approach to Monsalvant had become Angron's next gladiatorial arena.\n\nThe Child of the Mountain, for all he had tried, had never left the slave pit.\n\n* * *\n\nThe Pons Solar had fallen. The East Arterial was gone. The vast yards of Western Freight were all but overrun. The port's garrison had retreated behind the barrier wall, and only that, and the heavy fire of the defence systems, had brought the swarming World Eaters to a temporary halt.\n\nThe enemy had brought rams, huge column rams they wielded through brute manual force. They were pounding at the gate blocks and the sealed cargo entrances of Western Freight. On the loading ramps and cage-ways behind the barrier wall, troop strengths were lining up and loading, ready to hold the choke points of these precious causeways if the gates broke.\n\nNiborran carried a lasrifle, slung across his shoulder. Every able body would count from now on. The chandeliers above him shivered and tinkled. They had claimed a reception hall in Tower Seven of the barrier wall to use as a meeting room.\n\n'Batteries?' he asked.\n\n'Another six hours,' replied Brohn, 'if we maintain the firing rate.'\n\n'And we've requested-'\n\n'Munition fulfilment from Bhab?' Brohn asked. 'Twice in the last hour alone. No response. No signal. I've had bulk landing pads cleared anyway.'\n\nMaps and sheaves of documents had been spread out on the reception hall's long teak tables, a parody of the extravagant buffets laid on for worthy off-world dignitaries.\n\n'Six hours...' said Niborran.\n\n'For solid shells,' said Shiban. 'All energy and las-platforms will sustain longer, if we draw power from the port's reactors.'\n\n'We'll need heavy cabling, secure networks,' Niborran said.\n\n'In expectation of that need, I've had crews start work on the infrastructure,' said Shiban.\n\n'I wasn't told,' said Brohn. 'We can't spare fighting men from the-' 'Civilian labour,' said Shiban, not even looking at him. 'Technicians and labourers from the port guilds, longshoremen, cargo handlers. There are twenty-nine thousand non-combatants trapped in the port zone too. That seems to have been forgotten.'\n\nBrohn scowled. 'All right, then,' he said.\n\n'Can they be armed?' asked Niborran.\n\n'When it comes to it, general,' said Shiban, 'I think they'll want to be.'\n\n'Armour?' asked Niborran.\n\n'We lost nearly a third of our complement with the Pons Solar,' said Shiban.\n\n'The bridge was a mistake,' growled Brohn. 'The bridge was a bloody mistake. Intel said they were coming from the south. We should have mined the bridge down. There. Is that what you want to hear me say?'\n\nHe stared at Shiban Khan. A cocktail of terror and anger had done alarming things to his expression.\n\n'I don't need to hear you say anything,' said Shiban.\n\n'If the bridge is gone,' said Cadwalder, quietly from behind Niborran, 'then Lord Diaz...'\n\n'Lost,' said Tsutomu.\n\n'Lost or dead?' asked Cadwalder. 'Please specify.'\n\nThe Custodian glanced briefly to his left. He paused, then he looked back at Cadwalder.\n\n'Dead,' he said. 'Dead along with almost all who stood with him.' 'Are we certain?' the Huscarl asked.\n\n'She saw his body herself, during the retreat,' said Tsutomu expressionlessly. 'Still on the bridge, surrounded by the slain. He had not taken a step back.'\n\nNiborran frowned. He had almost asked which 'she' the Custodian was referring to. Then he remembered, and glimpsed the smudge of light on Tsutomu's left. It was so bizarrely easy to forget about her, to miss her. And her presence explained the deathly air in the room.\n\nNo, he thought, it didn't. This wasn't the depressing malaise of her null effect. This was the moment, the plight they found themselves in.\n\n'Again,' he said, 'I thank our sister for her efforts. Many lives were saved because of her. Lord Diaz is a hard loss. Terra, they all are. We will prevail here simply so we can mourn them later. I am reminded of a doctrine cherished by the Imperial Fists. Achievement through sacrifice.'\n\nHe clapped his hands briskly.\n\n'Let's to our stations,' he said. 'I want the troops rallied and ready. Be visible. Stick to the plan. If the gates break, compartmentalise. Seal and close, one step at a time. The vox is clearly damned, so we'll use hardline links between operation points. Orskode, or Hortcode. Simple, basic.'\n\nThe garrison commanders nodded. Brohn saluted.\n\n'Khan?' Niborran called as they turned to go. 'A word.'\n\nNiborran stepped out onto a balcony that faced the port megastructure. Shiban followed him. Cadwalder followed too. He ghosted the High Primary General wherever he went. Outside, the noise of unwavering assault was much louder.\n\n'Is this about Brohn?' Shiban Khan asked.\n\nNiborran glanced at him, puzzled. 'What? No. I...'\n\nHe turned to face Shiban.\n\n'Your instinct for defence has been excellent since day one. Since before I arrived. I've taken your counsel, but not enough of it.'\n\n'We make our decisions in good faith, general,' said Shiban. 'You do, I think. I haven't had the honour of knowing you long, but I believe this is true of you.'\n\n'I appreciate you saying that,' said Niborran. 'This situation, khan, this fight... I fear I've been taking too much of a textbook approach. Standard operational strategies, reliable ones-'\n\n'Such as?' asked Shiban.\n\n'Trying to keep arteries open in the expectation of further relief and reinforcement,' Niborran replied. 'That was foolish. An error forced by human hope, which is something you don't seem to suffer from.'\n\n'Hope is not an error, general,' said Shiban.\n\n'It is when one knows, for a fact, that there is nothing to hope for,' said Niborran. 'I knew, and yet I allowed myself to hope. I set out my lines according to standard operation...'\n\n'Knew what?' asked Shiban.\n\n'That no one is coming,' said Niborran. 'That we face this with what we have, and nothing more. I-'\n\nHe stopped. Shiban had raised a hand to halt him.\n\n'How did you know that, general?' he asked.\n\nNiborran glanced quickly at Cadwalder, then sighed. He unfastened his overcoat, took out a cigar, and lit it with slightly trembling fingers.\n\n'It shouldn't matter, khan,' he said. 'It doesn't matter now. I should have assumed it from the first moment. Expect the worst, and any thing else can only be better. I should have tossed out the rules of standard operation, and implemented ruthless...'\n\nHe exhaled blue smoke, and looked at Shiban. 'Too much of the old Saturnine Ordos schooled into me,' he said. The discipline, the rigidity, the devotion to codified rules of war. I see I must break out of the prison of those habits. The truth is, the port was understrength and underprepared from the very start. We must act on the principle that no one is coming to our aid. Treat that as a certainty. By implementing the strategies you suggested-'\n\n'It's too late to implement any of them now,' said Shiban. 'The enemy is here, and it has already determined the path of battle.'\n\nNiborran nodded.\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'But forget the tactical specifics. The spirit of your intent still holds true. We only have what we have. We make best use of that. Best use of finite resources' He gestured towards the soaring towers and pylons of the port. 'How finite does that look to you?' he asked.\n\nShiban did not reply.\n\n'We are woefully short of dedicated military personnel and materiel,' Niborran said, 'but we have a whole port sitting there. How many non-coms did you say?'\n\n'Twenty-nine thousand,' replied Shiban.\n\n'Right. Many of them technical specialists, port crews and personnel.' 'Many are just civilians. Refugees from Magnifican-'\n\n'Even so, we have specialists. Pilots, ferrymen, engineers, mechani"}
{"text":"oaring towers and pylons of the port. 'How finite does that look to you?' he asked.\n\nShiban did not reply.\n\n'We are woefully short of dedicated military personnel and materiel,' Niborran said, 'but we have a whole port sitting there. How many non-coms did you say?'\n\n'Twenty-nine thousand,' replied Shiban.\n\n'Right. Many of them technical specialists, port crews and personnel.' 'Many are just civilians. Refugees from Magnifican-'\n\n'Even so, we have specialists. Pilots, ferrymen, engineers, mechanics.' Niborran took out a dataslate. 'I ran checks on port cargo inventory. Nine billion tonnes of freight, still sitting here. That includes munition loads destined for Anterior. There's at least a thousand lasrifles packed in shipment crates. Fourteen hundred autoguns. Two payloads of trench mortars.'\n\n'So we can arm a few,' said Shiban.\n\n'It's not just munitions,' said Niborran. 'Not just unshipped cargo. The space port is packed with specialised equipment. Systems and devices we can employ defensively.'\n\n'Asset-strip the port?'\n\n'To hold the port.'\n\n'It's a question of manpower-'\n\n'And we have unutilised manpower, hiding in shelters. And on the pylons and platforms, we have seven hundred and nine small craft. Lighters, ferries, tugs, shuttles, wherries-'\n\n'Are you proposing an evacuation?' asked Shiban.\n\n'No,' said Niborran. 'Our orders are to hold the port, not abandon it. And anyway, nothing is going to fly clear through this. But a Sysiphos-class tug, khan, it carries a massively over-muscled gravity array. It can drag a medium shiftship into low-anchor dock. If we get those arrays down here, to the surface, strip them out, mount them laterally...'\n\n'Improvised gravity weapons.'\n\n'Gravity walls, gravity screens,' Niborran nodded. 'Immensely powerful. Not even berserk World Eaters could claw their way through. At maximum output, a grav-array would turn them into paste.'\n\nShiban nodded. 'What do we need?'\n\n'Lightermen to get them operational and move them down-pylon to the base platforms. Technicians to disassemble. Handlers and bulk servitors to move them and position them. Engineers to rig them.'\n\n'We don't have much time,' said Shiban.\n\n'The garrison is buying us all the time it can,' Niborran replied. 'The civilian and labour force will need motivation if they're going to act fast. They'll listen to a legionary. Jump to his word.'\n\n'I was expecting to fight,' said Shiban.\n\n'You will be fighting, Shiban Khan,' said Niborran, 'just not in a conventional fashion. Besides, once the enemy becomes aware of what we're doing, and it won't take them long, they will try to stop you. They want the port, but I don't think the World Eaters care how intact it is.'\n\nShiban nodded. 'I'll need a few men as supervisors'\n\n'Of course. Pick well, and be sparing.'\n\nNiborran switched his half-smoked cigar to his left hand, and held out his right. Shiban hesitated, then shook it gently.\n\n'No backward step,' said Niborran. 'Your doctrine, I believe? Lord Diaz told me that.'\n\n'No backward step,' Shiban replied.\n\nThe White Scar left the balcony without looking back. Niborran glanced at Cadwalder.\n\n'I want you on the line, Huscarl,' he said.\n\n'According to my pledge to the Praetorian,' Cadwalder replied, 'I go where you go.'\n\nNiborran tossed his cigar away, and swung the lasrifle off his shoulder.\n\n'Then you'll be on the line,' he said.\n\n* * *\n\nThose who had survived the frantic retreat from the Pons Solar took shelter in the yards and cage-ways behind the barrier wall. Medics moved through the gaggles of sprawled troops, and sutlers brought food pails, water and tepid samovars. Someone was singing. Hari thought it was probably a hopeless effort to drown out the noise of the assault. The wall battalions and defence systems had taken over the desperate repulse.\n\nHe slept for a while, curled up in a gritty rockcrete corner. When he woke, the noise had not abated. He sat with his slate, trying to write down what he had witnessed. When, as he expected, he failed entirely to do that, he tried instead to write about the clarity he had found in the chaos. The importance of history, no matter how little truth lay in it. The clinical necessity of lies, from a soldier's point of view He tried to explain, as simply as possible, the curative need for accounts of valour, even if they were inflated into fiction.\n\nHe was not pleased with the result.\n\nHe thought of Kyril Sindermann, and the pep talks the old man had delivered, with wry passion, to his early clutch of would-be remembrancers. The siege had already become an inescapable fact by then. Now here he was, caught up in a siege within a siege.\n\nHe remembered Sindermann saying, 'The historian's first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.' The old man had attributed that to some M2 mystic, but had clearly believed it. Hari had too. Now he found he believed it inside out. He had accepted it too literally, because it had been right and proper to do so. Reversing that was the sacrilege part. The false gods weren't the heathen deities the Imperium had erased. They were concepts, such as literal documentation and scholarly detachment. A history of war, and this Last War especially, needed to understand, and engage with, the spirit of those who fought.\n\nHe tried to write about that, but it sounded stupid, and lacking in any professional rigour. So he wrote down the story of the convoy ambush instead, just as Joseph had told it to him: the valiant soldier, Olly Piers, standing his ground, and then surviving through the grace of the Emperor, by merit of his unshakable faith. Hari used words like 'daemons', then thought better of it, deleted them, and replaced them with phrases such as 'the Great Traitor', or 'the power of Horus'. It came out reading like a child's fable. A parable.\n\nThen he wrote, in a similar fashion, a plain account of the stand at the Pons, while it was still fresh in his mind. Piers rallying the men around the banner. How they had stood before the face of the Emperor, and stared down the monstrous rage of the Great Traitor. How they had protected the Emperor's image with their lives, mortal in the face of supermortal danger.\n\nHe wanted to add a gloss, a few paragraphs explaining the mechanism of lies in these parables, how the symbolic values were far more important than any literal, eye-witness account.\n\nBut a man had approached him.\n\n'Do you need restock?' the man asked, standing over him. Teams had entered the yards, lugging long boxes of ammunition and energy cells for distribution. It was time to rearm. Weary troopers were calling out calibres and slot-gauges. The man, a trooper caked in dirt, had a clutch of las and hard-round magazines in his hands.\n\n'No,' said Hari. Thank you.'\n\n'Are you... ?' the man asked. 'Are you the historian? The remembrancer?'\n\n'Uh, interrogator. Yes,' said Hari.\n\n'My friend told me about you,' the man said. He sat down on the dirty rockcrete beside Hari without being invited. 'Joseph.'\n\n'Joseph Monday?'\n\nThe man nodded. He put down his selection of magazines, and held out a dirty hand.\n\n'Willem Kordy (Thirty-Third Pan-Pac Lift Mobile),' he said. Hari shook his hand.\n\n'Is he all right?' asked Hari. 'I haven't seen him since we made it back inside.'\n\nWillem shrugged. 'Are any of us all right?' he asked.\n\n'I found him during the battle,' said Hari. 'He was weeping. Uncontrollable. I presumed it was the trauma of-'\n\n'Nah, doubt it,' said Willem. 'We've been through a lot. Fourteenth line, that whole shit. Got here by walking through hell's arsehole. I expect it was just release.'\n\n'Release?'\n\n'That this was ending. That death was close, and it would all stop.' 'He wanted death?' asked Hari.\n\n'He wanted it to stop,' the trooper replied. 'We all come to that place, sooner or later. I've seen it. I remember it happened to Jen.'\n\n'Jen?'\n\nWillem shook his head. 'We've seen a lot,' he said.\n\n'I am trying to record accounts,' said Hari. 'Stories. It sounds like you have some.'\n\n'I haven't got time to tell them,' said Willem. His teammates were calling to him to hurry up. He got to his feet, and picked up the magazines. 'Anyway,' he added, 'why bother? Why bother with stories?'\n\n'To create a history,' said Hari. 'To commit to the future by believing there can be one. And to help that future understand itself.'\n\n'So the future can remember us?' Willem asked. 'Remember me?' 'Yes.'\n\n'I like that,' Willem admitted. 'I like the idea that the future is watching me in its memories.'\n\nHari looked down to quickly note the soldier's phrase on his slate. When he looked up, Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) had gone.\n\nHari found Joseph Baako Monday in a nearby yard. He was sitting silently, gazing at the far wall. His weapon, and a restock of fresh magazines, lay by his feet, waiting.\n\n'You made it too?' Joseph asked, looking up at Hari.\n\n'Why were you weeping?' Hari asked.\n\n'Oh, because my angel had died,' said Joseph.\n\n'Your what?'\n\n'I said to you,' said Joseph, 'no angel delivered me. The Emperor did not come, or send His spirit, in my hour of need after Line Fourteen, not like He came to the soldier in the story. But that was a mistake. I was wrong. I see that now. Angels take different forms. The spirit of the Emperor, it takes many different forms.'\n\nHari sat down beside him, and took out his slate.\n\n'Lord Diaz was my angel,' Joseph said. 'He found me and the others. He brought us through the fire. He was the spirit of the Emperor, sent to us.'\n\n'Your angel?'\n\n'I saw him die,' said Joseph. 'Only when I watched him die, did I understand that. He was on the bridge. The last living man on the bridge. He fought everything that came at him. He fought until they killed him to make him stop fighting. He fought as they butchered him. I saw what they did to him, before he died, and after.'\n\nHe looked at Hari.\n\n'I wept, because the spirit did not come for him,' he said. 'It made me think that the"}
{"text":"e. He was the spirit of the Emperor, sent to us.'\n\n'Your angel?'\n\n'I saw him die,' said Joseph. 'Only when I watched him die, did I understand that. He was on the bridge. The last living man on the bridge. He fought everything that came at him. He fought until they killed him to make him stop fighting. He fought as they butchered him. I saw what they did to him, before he died, and after.'\n\nHe looked at Hari.\n\n'I wept, because the spirit did not come for him,' he said. 'It made me think that there was no spirit, that my faith in the Throne was a stupid waste. But then we were at the flag, all around the banner. And the spirit came again, like it came to the soldier in the convoy. It struck down the butcher that would have murdered us.'\n\n'Who is Jen?' Hari asked.\n\nJoseph looked surprised.\n\n'Jen Koder (Twenty-Second Kantium Hort),' he said. 'My friend. She died because her faith had failed. She was too tired, too hurt. She did not see, like I did not see at the time, that Lord Diaz was the Emperor come to us. Maybe she did not have the strength left, even if she did see that. But she had some strength. Enough to make sure the enemy did not take her life.'\n\n'Do you think what happened to us at the banner was a miracle?' asked Hari.\n\n'What do you think, my friend?'\n\n'I don't know what that was,' said Hari.\n\n'I think there are miracles everywhere,' said Joseph. 'All around us, all the time. We just have to see them. Know to recognise them. And have the faith to believe in them. If we believe, we make them happen.'\n\nHe looked at Hari.\n\n'You are writing all this down?' he asked, and laughed.\n\n'It's my job,' said Hari. 'Do you have a slate?'\n\nJoseph fumbled in the pockets of his litewka. He eventually brought out a battered, small-format dataslate, crusted in dirt.\n\n'It does not work,' he said. 'No link, no noospherics.'\n\n'But it can store, right?' Hari asked. He took the man's slate, and carefully transferred files across from his own device. 'These are the accounts I've taken down,' he said. 'Share them with anyone you like. Add to them. Add your own. I think it would help people here to read them. And you asked about a book. A secret book you would like to read.'\n\nJoseph looked at him, curious.\n\n'There's a copy of that there too,' said Hari. 'Share that as well, with as many people as you can. I think there's a strength in it, and I know we all need as much strength as we can get.'\n\nPiers was in one of the cage-ways. He had the banner spread out on the ground, and was scrubbing it with a bristle-brush to remove some of the dirt and soot. Two other troopers, one male, one female, both as filthy as Piers, were sitting with him, using needles and threads from their uniform kits to sew up the shot holes.\n\n'What's your name?' Hari asked.\n\nPiers, on his hands and knees, looked up at Hari with a pained expression.\n\n'You could help,' he said.\n\n'What's Olly short for?' Hari asked.\n\n'Why, boy?'\n\nI'm writing your story,' said Hari. 'I wanted to get your name right.'\n\n'I don't have a story,' Piers rumbled, and went back to scrubbing. 'I have stories, plural. Many fine stories. But not a story. I am a complicated man. I will not be reduced or abbreviated.'\n\n'Except to Olly.'\n\n'Shut your hole, clever clogs.'\n\n'Is it Oliver?'\n\n'Pick up a brush, boy.'\n\n'Is it Olias?'\n\n'Give me strength...'\n\n'Is it Olaf?'\n\n'Is it?' asked the man working nearby, laughing. 'Is it Olaf?'\n\n'Shut your bloody noise, Pash, and stop encouraging him,' Piers snapped over his shoulder. The two troopers grinned at him.\n\n'What is this story?' the woman asked, rethreading her needle.\n\n'The exploits of Grenadier Piers,' said Hari. 'There are many parts to it. He's been spreading them around. I'm surprised you haven't heard any of them.'\n\n'I heard this one about a convoy,' the woman said. 'How the Emperor sent His spirit to save this brave soldier from daemons.' She looked at Hari. 'Are you his biographer, or something?' she asked.\n\n'He's the historian,' said the other man. 'Piers said about him, remember?'\n\n'Interrogator,' said Hari.\n\n'I'm Bailee Grosser (Third Helvet),' she said. 'This is Pasha Cavaner (Eleventh Heavy Janissar).'\n\nHari made a note. 'Grosser... Cavaner...'\n\n'Put the regiments,' she told him.\n\n'Why?' asked Hari.\n\n'It matters,' said Grosser.\n\n'It's all we got,' said Cavaner. 'Put them in brackets.'\n\n'I'm just writing down accounts from everyone,' said Hari. 'Like what happened with this.' He prodded the outstretched banner with his toe.\n\n'Don't stand on His face, boy!' Piers snapped.\n\n'I was there,' said Cavaner.\n\n'You were?' asked Hari. He didn't recognise him, but then everybody had been caked in mud, and blood, and veiled in the abject terror of the moment.\n\nThe man shrugged. 'It was mad. We put the banner up. It was heavy. Blood all over it. But we stood before it. Stood in front of it, protecting Him with our lives.'\n\nCavaner reached down, and patted the banner.\n\n'We stood in front of Him, and when evil came, we stood in its path, and the Emperor rewarded us for our faith, and struck evil down.'\n\n'Getting the banner up was actually my idea,' said Hari.\n\nCavaner frowned at him. 'I don't remember you being there,' he said.\n\n'I was,' said Hari.\n\n'Putting yourself in my story, are you?' Piers growled.\n\n'No,' said Hari. 'Is it Oleander?'\n\nPiers sagged and sighed. He muttered something.\n\n'What was that?' asked Hari.\n\n'What did he say?' asked Grosser.\n\n'I said, if you must know,' said Piers, 'it's Ollanius.'\n\nGrosser and Cavaner burst out laughing.\n\n'Oh my life!' giggled Grosser. That's an old fart's name! A grandad's name!'\n\n'It was me grandaddy's, as it happens,' Piers protested. 'An old family name. A good Uplander name. Stop bloody laughing.' He looked up at Hari. 'Don't bloody write it down, boy!'\n\n'Why not?' Hari asked.\n\n'Make a better one up!' Piers said. He got to his feet. 'Something more heroic. I've never bloody liked it. No hero was ever called bloody Ollanius. Put something better!'\n\n'Like?'\n\nPiers hesitated. 'Olympos,' he suggested.\n\n'I'm definitely not putting that,' said Hari.\n\n'But it's proper heroic!' Piers objected.\n\n'I'm putting Ollanius,' said Hari.\n\n'You little ball-bag. Why does it matter so much?'\n\n'Because there's got to be some truth in it,' said Hari. 'Something to balance out the bullshit and the lies. Of which, let's be fair, there's plenty.'\n\n'Mythrus, Dame Death, she weren't no bullshit,' said Piers.\n\n'No one saw her,' said Hari.\n\n'I saw her!' Piers snapped.\n\n'I saw what she did,' said Cavaner. He looked at Hari. 'If you were there, like you claim you were, you must have too.'\n\n'I saw something I can't explain,' Hari admitted.\n\nThere you go,' said Piers, as if that answered everything.\n\n'And I grasp it now,' Hari said to him.\n\nPiers simmered down a bit. He studied Hari's face.\n\n'Do you?' he asked.\n\n'I do,' said Hari.\n\nPiers nodded. 'Good,' he said. 'Good, then.' With some effort, he got back down on his knees, and began scrubbing the banner again. 'But tell it right, if you're telling it,' he added. 'What I'm saying is, do it justice. Make a proper tale out of it, eh? It wasn't no banner, it was the Emperor Himself. In person. I stood before the Emperor on the battlefields of Terra, to protect Him. Put myself in harm's way, for His sake. And it wasn't no raving World Eater, neither. Make it... say it was the Great Traitor himself. Big, bad Lupercal.'\n\n'I'm not putting that,' said Hari.\n\n'Why not?'\n\n'No one would ever believe it,' said Hari.\n\n* * *\n\nThen the old grenadier says, They don't have to believe it, they just have to like it. It just has to be inspiring.' The young man thinks about this, and then types some more on his slate.\n\nNone of them can see me. Not even the old grenadier this time. Perhaps he is too preoccupied mending the banner, or perhaps he can only see me in the heat of things, when his adrenaline is pumping.\n\nOr perhaps... Perhaps he can only see me when it matters. When it's necessary.\n\nI don't know what force or power decides such things. If asked, I would say fortune, but I am no expert, and I have not made a study of these transmundane concepts.\n\nAnd no one will ask me.\n\nI believe the young man's efforts are worthwhile. I see now why the Lord Praetorian initiated the programme, and warranted the return of the remembrancer order. It has value, though I am not sure this is quite how Rogal imagined it. The act of recording history produces a sense of a future. It is, perhaps, the most optimistic thing anyone can do. We will always need to know where we have come from. We will always need to know that we are going somewhere.\n\nI would have liked to talk to the young man. I have many stories to tell. So very many. But he is not even aware of me, and the Custodian is not present to translate my hands. I had considered making the grenadier my proloquor, but it is clear he does not see me all the time, and besides, he does not know my thoughtmarks.\n\nI sit in the comer of the cage-way, and watch them for a few more minutes. Tsutomu has gone to the barrier wall, and I must join him. The enemy's rage grows worse. I have composed myself. I am centred and ready for what will follow. Of all the stories in my long life, I think it will be the very last.\n\nI get up and walk away. They do not notice me depart. They did not notice me arrive.\n\nSIX\n\n* * *\n\nAll\n\nInevitable weapons\n\nFrom the pit\n\nHorus Aximand thought, for a second, that he could hear the slow breathing again.\n\nBut it was Lord Commander Eidolon, as he strode towards them, teeth glittering, his throat sacs heaving and puffing like the goitre frills of some foul marsh amphibian.\n\nAximand glanced at Abaddon. 'Is this where he reneges?' he asked softly.\n\n'I'll gut him if he does,' said Abaddon, with a cold simplicity that told Little Horus he meant it.\n\n'And I'll hold him for you,' said Kibre.\n\nTormageddon snickered.\n\n'Brothers,' said Eidolon, infrasonic tones thrumming behind his words. 'Are you prepared?'\n\n'Take a wild guess,' said Abaddon.\n\nEidolon sni"}
{"text":"wards them, teeth glittering, his throat sacs heaving and puffing like the goitre frills of some foul marsh amphibian.\n\nAximand glanced at Abaddon. 'Is this where he reneges?' he asked softly.\n\n'I'll gut him if he does,' said Abaddon, with a cold simplicity that told Little Horus he meant it.\n\n'And I'll hold him for you,' said Kibre.\n\nTormageddon snickered.\n\n'Brothers,' said Eidolon, infrasonic tones thrumming behind his words. 'Are you prepared?'\n\n'Take a wild guess,' said Abaddon.\n\nEidolon sniffed sullenly, and gazed beyond the four warriors of the Mournival. The deep canyon lay sixty kilometres from Epta war-stead, a split in the lip of the Himalazian plateau. High above them, above the walls of the ravine, the sky twisted and raged, a now almost permanent storm driven across the entire region by gross atmospheric disruption.\n\nEyet-One-Tag's artificers and magi had already hollowed the base of the canyon out, drilled the cavity like rotten molars, and raised the immense ramp platforms for the machines they had supplied. The ugly Terrax- and Plutona-pattern Termite assault drills, and their far larger and uglier kin, the Mantolith-pattern, lay on the sloping ramps, nose-bores down, aimed at the earth. Engines were being test-fired, drill heads and melta-cutter systems checked.\n\nThree complete companies of the Sons of Horus, the First, 18th and 25th, in full battleplate, stood ready to board. Officers waited, ready to take their oaths of moment. These were oaths the warriors were eager to make, perhaps the most significant of their lives.\n\nThe company captains, Lev Goshen of the 25th, and Tybalt Marr of the 18th, waited nearby, flanked by an honour guard formed of the Justaerin and the Catulan.\n\n'I see you are,' Eidolon fluted.\n\n'You've kept us waiting,' said Abaddon.\n\n'Not polite,' said Kibre.\n\n'My manners are impeccable,' Eidolon replied. He glanced at his escort guard, lavish warriors in full panoply, and smiled, as if at some private joke. They were gaudy warriors, parodies, but killers all. Aximand knew some of them. Von Kaida, with his wide-eyed child's face and ivory armour, equerry to Eidolon; Lecus Phodion, the vexillarius, who now insisted his rank was 'orchestrator' or something; Quine Mylossar, once a fine sword and a good tactician, now chromed like a trophy, with hideously long sabre blades extended from his vambraces, and peacock feathers behind his head; Nuno DeDonna, a noted master of assault doctrines, sheathed in plate that seemed both black and purple, yet neither.\n\n'The question is, lord, are you prepared?' asked Aximand. 'Were you persuasive?'\n\n'I am always persuasive,' said Eidolon.\n\n'So the Third is with us in this undertaking?' asked Abaddon.\n\n'It is, Ezekyle,' said Eidolon, 'it is. The concept is appealing. The speed of it, the finality. The Emperor's Children are with you.'\n\nAbaddon nodded. He took a step closer to Eidolon. Aximand recognised the footwork. It looked casual, just a step forward with a half-step to the side, but it placed Abaddon slightly on Eidolon's off-guard side. The First Captain often used the same footwork to realign for a kill-stroke in a blade fight.\n\n'Good,' said Abaddon. 'I am gratified, brother. You had sent no word, and I was beginning to fear we had over-committed in false expectation. My Legion, with the tacit approval of the Lord of Iron, has made significant investment in this endeavour. Without your promised participation, it dies before it even begins.'\n\n'And I have kept my promise,' said Eidolon. He chuckled. 'I have been persuasive. I have been silver-tongued.'\n\n'It looks blue,' said Aximand.\n\n'You're funny, little one,' Eidolon giggled.\n\n'What strength?' asked Abaddon. 'What strength do you commit? What has the Phoenician allowed you? I told you, I need five battle companies, minimum.'\n\n'Yes, you were quite clear.'\n\n'Then what strength?'\n\n'All,' said Eidolon.\n\n'All five?' Abaddon asked.\n\n'No, Ezekyle. All'\n\nAbaddon narrowed his eyes.\n\n'Is that a joke?' he asked.\n\n'I do love jokes, as you know,' said Eidolon, fastidiously flicking some invisible mote of dust off his coral-pink warplate, 'but no, it's not. You wanted our strength. You have it. You have the Emperor's Children. You have all the Emperor's Children.'\n\n'The entire Third Legion?'\n\n'The entire Third Legion,' echoed Eidolon. 'I hope that will be sufficient.' Abaddon ran the tip of his tongue around his lips, thoughtfully.\n\n'You've surprised me,' he said.\n\n'I can tell that by the expression on your face,' said Eidolon. He clapped his hands in delight, and shrill little squeals burbled from his inflated throat. Behind him, his warriors laughed and hooted. 'It was worth it all, just to see that!' Eidolon added.\n\n'It will be worth much more than that,' said Abaddon. 'It will be worth my gratitude, and the respect of the Lord of Iron, and the thanks of my genesire. What we are about to do will change everything, and the measure of your support will guarantee its success. I have underestimated you, brother. Underestimated the seriousness of your intent.'\n\nHe held out his hand.\n\n'Forgive me for that, Eidolon, and receive my thanks.'\n\nEidolon's face split in a smile that even the features of a legionary should not have been able to accommodate. It stretched to his ears, revealing thousands of polished teeth. He took Abaddon's hand and clasped it.\n\n'Think nothing of it,' he said. 'It's what brothers do.'\n\n'How did your lord, the Phoenician, greet this idea?' Abaddon asked. 'You said you were persuasive, but he must have questioned the wisdom of deploying the whole of his Legion. He must trust you a great deal to lead it into this action.'\n\n'Oh, he doesn't trust me at all,' replied Eidolon. 'Not even slightly.\n\nBut I am so persuasive.'\n\n'I don't understand,' said Abaddon.\n\n'He talked me into it,' said a voice.\n\nOne of the warriors behind Eidolon stepped forward, from between Phodion and Mylossar. With each step, his plate and gear, cloak and shield, peeled off him, disintegrating into embers that sizzled into the canyon wind. The legionary was naked for a moment, then, as he continued to walk, his unblemished skin became polished like opaline shell. He began to grow, becoming taller, leaner, a towering figure of athletic perfection. A soft, pearlescent radiance guttered beneath his nacreous skin, like candles fluttering inside a box of the thinnest ivory, and then his flesh was reclothed in ornate armour of the most extraordinary lustre and complexity. The beautiful, painful fury of Fulgrim's eyes bore down on Abaddon.\n\n'It sounded like fun,' Fulgrim said, his voice made of silver and venom and sherbet syrup. He brushed a loose strand of long, snow-white hair away from his face.\n\nAbaddon bowed his head, and sank to one knee. He knew he needed to show respect. He also didn't want to look. A single glimpse of Fulgrim's lethal beauty was enough.\n\nAbaddon threw a curt gesture. The Mournival, and the companies behind them, knelt too.\n\n'You honour us, lord,' said Abaddon.\n\n'You honour us, Abaddon,' said Fulgrim. 'You offer us a chance to break deadlock and seize victory. You offer a swift end to this malingering. When Eidolon brought your modest proposal to me, I saw its finesse at once. I wanted to do more than lend you a few companies. I wanted to throw my entire support behind your effort. My children will execute the assault you have requested. I will lead them in person. Where my children go, I will go.\n\n'Get up now,' he added.\n\nAbaddon rose.\n\n'Let's make our beginning,' said Fulgrim.\n\n* * *\n\nThe geo-imaging display turned slowly in the air.\n\n'There,' said Malcador. 'And there. Do you see?'\n\n'I am no geological expert, lord,' said Sindermann, squinting, 'but I see enough. The subcrust is compromised below the macrofortifications.'\n\n'Both before and behind the Saturnine Wall,' said Malcador. His voice was dust dry, loose pebbles trickling down a dry stream course.\n\nHe cancelled the display with a twitch of his hand, and sat down on a gilded chair.\n\n'We knew of the natural fault,' he said. 'Every potential flaw was assayed and plotted when Dorn began the fortification work. It was filled in. Rockcrete and ferroplast. But the bombardment of the Palace has been long and sustained. The cumulative effect has caused tectonic shifts. The old wound has split again. We weren't aware. We would not have seen it but for you.'\n\n'It was an idle comment, made by chance,' said Sindermann. He noticed that Therajomas was still writing on his slate, furiously. 'Don't note that,' Sindermann hissed.\n\n'The idle comment part?' asked the young man.\n\n'No, the fact that I apparently noticed it,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Why ever not, Kyril?' Malcador asked. 'Your role is part of the history now. A significant part.'\n\n'A historian, lord, should show some modicum of detachment,' said Sindermann. 'I seek truth, not personal credit.'\n\n'You seek odd things, Kyril,' said Malcador. 'You always have. The truth? What is that? The truth depends on who's looking. Who's telling. You found a hole in the ground, Kyril, and the only truth in that is, if Rogal's right, it will be filled with an enemy spearhead within clays or hours. It is the way in they've been looking for. The one tiny chink in Rogal's defence. Perturabo will exploit it. There's no doubt about that. And the prize is very great, so the agency he sends to exploit it will be very great, also.'\n\n'Can't you just fill it?' asked Therajomas suddenly, then remembered who he was addressing and swallowed hard.\n\n'What did you say, child?' Malcador asked.\n\nTherajomas mumbled something.\n\n'My colleague was positing the idea that you could just \"fill the hole\", lord,' said Sindermann. 'Remove the flaw.'\n\n'Oh, we can,' replied Malcador. 'And we are preparing to. The specialist, Land. That's his task.'\n\n'Land?'\n\nMalcador sighed. 'I am tired. Diamantis, point him out, will you?'\n\nThe Huscarl led Sindermann to the gantry rail. Below them, in one of the vast, excavated chambers, a man was supervisi"}
{"text":"llowed hard.\n\n'What did you say, child?' Malcador asked.\n\nTherajomas mumbled something.\n\n'My colleague was positing the idea that you could just \"fill the hole\", lord,' said Sindermann. 'Remove the flaw.'\n\n'Oh, we can,' replied Malcador. 'And we are preparing to. The specialist, Land. That's his task.'\n\n'Land?'\n\nMalcador sighed. 'I am tired. Diamantis, point him out, will you?'\n\nThe Huscarl led Sindermann to the gantry rail. Below them, in one of the vast, excavated chambers, a man was supervising high-function servitors and diligent magi. They were in a lab space, working on an array of industrial machines that looked like pumping units and drill rigs. The rest of the chamber was filled with rows of immense storage tanks, the source of the chemical stink Sindermann had detected when he first arrived.\n\n'Arkhan Land,' said Diamantis. 'Technoarchaeologist.'\n\n'What's that?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'I think only he knows,' the Huscarl replied. 'He's an annoying little bastard, but he's clever. In just a few hours, he has concocted a liquid filler. A sealant. He calls it lockcrete, I believe. Flows like water, but it sets fast. Massively adherent. It forms a solid harder than the ground rock. We've broken drills on it in tests.'\n\n'Mars?'\n\n'What?' asked Diamantis.\n\n'He's from Mars? He's Mechanicum?'\n\n'Something like that,' said Diamantis.\n\n'I'd like to talk to him.'\n\n'You really wouldn't,' said the Huscarl. 'He's obnoxious. Besides, he's busy.'\n\nSindermann looked back at the Sigillite. 'So, you can seal the flaw, this terrible vulnerability, at a moment's notice?' he asked.\n\n'We expect to be able to do so,' Malcador replied. Perched on his golden chair, he looked very frail. He took a sip of something from a goblet.\n\n'But you're waiting?' Sindermann asked.\n\nMalcador nodded, and dabbed his lips.\n\n'Because you want them to come in?'\n\n'Whoever's coming will be a prize. A significant kill. Perhaps a decisive one. They don't know we know. We want to let them in.'\n\n'And who's coming?'\n\n'I don't know that,' said Malcador. 'But it will be someone worth destroying.'\n\n'It could be him?'\n\nMalcador wheezed out a chuckle. 'It is his kind of play. And we can be fairly certain he wants the glory. For himself. He's come a long way for this, Kyril. I can't picture him delegating the final step to others. Can you?'\n\nSindermann walked across the gantry, drew out another of the golden chairs, and sat down facing the Sigillite. 'It is the most extraordinary risk,' he said.\n\nMalcador nodded. 'Without doubt,' he agreed.\n\n'If it fails, lord-'\n\nMalcador raised a bony hand to hush him.\n\n'This is Dorn's game,' he said. 'Regicide. The grand master play. I trust his schemes implicitly. We think of him... I dare say, we've always thought of him... as the master of defence. We are not masters of defence, Kyril. None of us even approach his level of insight and expertise. We presume, in our innocence, a great defence involves an absence of flaws. A perfect, impervious fortress, immune to any assault.'\n\nHe paused, and took another sip. His neck was as thin as a reed, and as knotted as a twig.\n\n'Rogal understands better,' he said. 'A flaw can be an invitation. Especially to a mind like Perturabo's. It draws his attention. Of course, it helps that the Lord of Iron is clinically obsessed with besting Dorn. He won't resist. Dorn is forcing him into making a move, forcing him into an error.'\n\n'It seems so counterintuitive,' said Sindermann. Exploiting one's own flaw-'\n\n'I know, I know,' said Malcador, nodding. 'Rogal is full of surprises. That's why he's the Praetorian. We expect perfection of him. Faultless perfection. He is embracing imperfection. Seeing it and, rather than removing it, using it. I think he's learned that from Jaghatai.'\n\nSindermann frowned. 'This was the Khagan's idea?'\n\n'Oh no, not at all!' the Sigillite replied, chuckling. The Khan is mercurial, almost capricious. Dorn is not. The Khan is fluid and adaptive. Dorn is not. The Khan adjusts his strategies on the move, as the environment changes. Dorn sets the environment in advance. Now they're working together, obliged to, caught in the same trap, back to back. A siege is Dorn's theatre. It is stifling to the Khan, so he's learning. Adapting. And Dorn, in turn, is watching him adapt. And learning from that.'\n\n'They are learning from each other?'\n\n'It can be fractious, but yes,' said Malcador. 'Rogal knows he needs Jaghatai. That's a given. But he's also come to understand that he can't box Jaghatai in, and force him to conform. Dorn has perceived, quickly, that he needs to let Jaghatai be Jaghatai. Create a grey area in which the Khan is free to operate to his full potential. That grey area is still part of Dorn's structure, but is, of itself, not set.'\n\n'A little, deliberate flaw,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Quite right,' said Malcador. 'It means Rogal gets the best out of the Khan. But the real beauty of it, is it sets up variables that Perturabo can't read. Perturabo is anticipating Dorn's every move. He's studied his tactica for years. The Khan is an outlier. What he does, still, you understand, on Dorn's behalf, cannot be anticipated in the same way. The Khan's actions are not Dorn's. Through the Khan, Dorn seeks to generate unexpected moves that Perturabo cannot read.'\n\n'And now he's adopted that idea himself?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Rogal has learned a flexibility. A sleight of hand.'\n\n'Like letting our archenemy into the Sanctum Imperialis?'\n\n'Yes. Letting him in, cutting his throat, and then sealing the flaw behind him. This Land fellow's lockcrete will close the flaw once the trap is sprung, and build a tomb for whoever comes.'\n\n'We're meeting their decapitation strike with one of our own?'\n\n'Exquisite, isn't it?' said Malcador, and laughed.\n\nSindermann sat back. 'Still, it is a risk,' he said. 'A gamble of terrifying magnitude...'\n\n'Oh, absolutely,' replied Malcador.\n\nHe tilted his head, as if listening to something.\n\n'We should attend,' he said. 'He's ready. Help me up, would you?'\n\n* * *\n\nThey found Dorn in an adjoining chamber, one of the preparation halls carved out of the rock beneath the streets of the Saturnine Quarter. It was, Diamantis said, a deployment station adjacent to the line of the flaw.\n\nDorn, in full regal battleplate, was standing on a dais, with a baldachin canopy above him. The rich, draped material was embroidered with the Praetorian crest and the symbols of the Imperial Fists. Nearby stood the brooding Dreadnought Bohemond, several more Huscarls, a small group of tacticians from the War Courts, led by Mistress Tacticae Katarin Elg, and a phalanx of the Hort Palatine, fronted by Ahlborn.\n\nDorn nodded to Sindermann as he approached. The Praetorian helped Malcador onto the dais. Sindermann and Therajomas waited with Diamantis at the side of the stage.\n\nAhlborn listened to his earpiece, then looked at Dorn.\n\n'My lord, the counter-assault officers are assembled.'\n\n'Bid them enter,' said Dorn.\n\nFour of the Hort troopers hurried across the chamber floor, and rolled open the heavy cargo shutters. A line of Space Marines walked in, side by side, and approached the dais.\n\nSindermann gazed, taken aback. He'd expected a command section of the Imperial Fists.\n\n'Is that-' Therajomas whispered.\n\n'Shhh!' Sindermann hissed.\n\nHe watched the warriors approach, side by side, a slow and steady pace. Each one was in full battleplate, unhelmed. Their faces were solemn and determined. Maximus Thane, Imperial Fist, captain of the 22nd Company Exemplar, a long-hafted warhammer resting across his right shoulder. Helig Gallor, once of the Death Guard, his plate now the sombre grey of the Knights Errant. Bel Sepatus, Blood Angel, a captain-Paladin of the Keruvim host, his tri-faced emblem gleaming on the chest of his crimson Cataphractii armour, his avenging longsword, Parousia, held across it in both hands, inverted. The massive Endryd Haar, the Riven Hound, World Eater turned Blackshield outcast, his power fist as soot-dark as the plate he wore. Nathaniel Garro, once battle-captain of the 7th Great Company Death Guard, now a grey Knight Errant too, Paragon bolter clamped to his hip, the ancient broadblade Libertas braced across his pauldron. Sigismund, Imperial Fist, First Lord Captain of the Templar Brethren elite, his artificer plate the black of that order, badged in yellow, covered in an ebon surcoat that lacked any emblem, his powerblade bound to his right wrist by penitent chains, his shield to his left. Garviel Loken, Knight Errant, Rubio's dead sword strapped to his waist, a long pattern chainblade suspended in his hand.\n\nLoken's plate was not grey. It had been freshly refinished in the colours of a captain of the Luna Wolves.\n\nThe seven came to a halt, in line, in front of the dais. In unison, they saluted the Praetorian, each making the particular gesture of homage used by his Legion, or the lost Legion he had once served.\n\n'Brother-sons,' said Dorn. 'Under a mask of absolute confidence, we have prepared this place of war, and drawn up our strengths. When the hour comes, and it closes on us fast, you seven will be the leaders of the combat. Every one of you is more than proven in battle. Every one of you is sworn to Terra. And every one of you, each in his own way, is fired by a personal longing to annihilate our enemy.'\n\nThere was silence. Haar nodded gently. Sigismund tilted his head back slightly, and clenched his jaw.\n\n'And none of you more so than me,' said Dorn. 'You will follow me into this action.'\n\nThere was a murmur.\n\nGarviel Loken, Nathaniel Garro and Sigismund lead out the seven...\n\n'You will lead us, lord?' asked Sigismund.\n\n'In person,' Dorn replied. 'You have been briefed by Diamantis. Instructed, and assigned your complements. Mistress Elg will run tactical operations from the forward command established here. Its cipher is Trickster. Narrowband datacast only. Secrecy is paramount. General vox and links are forbidden for the duration. You will listen to her, and ap"}
{"text":"to this action.'\n\nThere was a murmur.\n\nGarviel Loken, Nathaniel Garro and Sigismund lead out the seven...\n\n'You will lead us, lord?' asked Sigismund.\n\n'In person,' Dorn replied. 'You have been briefed by Diamantis. Instructed, and assigned your complements. Mistress Elg will run tactical operations from the forward command established here. Its cipher is Trickster. Narrowband datacast only. Secrecy is paramount. General vox and links are forbidden for the duration. You will listen to her, and apply her data scrupulously. I will be doing the same. Mistress?'\n\nElg, tall and severe, stepped forward.\n\n'Praetorian,' she said. 'Function is established. A hardline link to the Grand Borealis is ready. Our systems here are modest, for they have been established rapidly and needed to be portable, but Bhab can supply us with larger-scale acoustic data via the Sanctum listening watch. Due to the absolute secrecy of this undertaking, very few in the Grand Borealis are even aware of it. Only Master of Huscarls Archamus and my colleague Icaro have been read in. They will serve as data liaisons.'\n\nDorn nodded.\n\n'I dislike secrecy intensely,' he said, turning back to the commanders. 'It is deceit, and it deserves no place among the honest and honourable doctrines of Fair War. Secrets are volatile and unstable. They are never stored safely. When they emerge, the mere fact of them can damage the friends and brothers around us.'\n\nHe paused, and looked down for a moment. He thought of the tactics he had chosen. The bitter choices. The Eternity Wall space port, dying already, no doubt, because he had elected to sacrifice it for this chance. He thought how he had kept that awful choice from almost everybody, most particularly his beloved brothers Jaghatai and Sanguinius. He had deceived and handled them both, either through psychological manipulation or a simple withholding. But he had weighed it, and found it necessary. Victory was the only goal, and he could not afford for either of them to be distracted, or to have them question him. They could not question what they did not know.\n\nThe thought of Sindermann, charged to gather up a history that would secure them the promise of a future. Dorn knew that very little of the old man's history would ever or could ever be published or broadcast. Most of it would be sequestered and redacted forever.\n\nAnd he thought of Vulkan. For a long time, only he and the Sigillite had known that Vulkan was alive, and had returned to Terra. Dorn had considered that an imperative secret. Keeping it allowed Vulkan to pursue his very singular defence of the Palace unhindered, free from any urging that he should be deployed on the Palace fields. But Malcador, to Dorn's dismay, had chosen to divulge the news of Vulkan's presence to Sanguinius and the Khan, bringing them into a circle of trust that Dorn had been certain excluded them. The Sigillite had done this in front of him. To save face, and to disguise any notion of dissembling, Dorn had been obliged to feign shock.\n\nHe had thought the Khan and the Great Angel would see through him in an instant, see his unpractised acting for what it was.\n\nBut they had not.\n\nThe lies were becoming too easy. The dissembling too ordinary. Deceit had become a necessary tool in his arsenal, and he despised it almost as much as the ones who had forced him into it.\n\nHe became aware that he had stopped speaking. The commanders were staring at him, ready but puzzled.\n\n'Fair War,' he said. 'I have always prosecuted fair wars. I have chosen honour. But this is not Fair War. It is foul. It is unseemly and it is inhuman, and the very fact that brothers have turned against us shows us that we cannot trust ourselves. In this dark age, we must match our foe or be destroyed. We must embellish our grand arsenal of honour, courage and fortitude with more unwholesome devices. The inevitable weapons of surprise, deceit, entrapment and dishonesty. And we must, I am sorry to say, set aside mercy and become merciless.'\n\nHe looked at the seven warriors.\n\n'Questions?' he asked.\n\n'Just an observation, great lord,' said Loken. 'If we destroy our enemies here, and end this, does it matter how?'\n\nSigismund and Garro both smiled quietly. So did Malcador, up on the dais. Haar snorted, amused, and turned the snort into a cough. Thane and Bel Sepatus scowled.\n\n'Ordinarily, captain?' Dorn asked. 'Absolutely yes. Tonight, no. But I notice that you have chosen to sweep your own deceptions away. Or is this just more deceit?'\n\nLoken glanced down at himself.\n\n'I have always been a Luna Wolf, my lord,' he said. 'Loyal, to the death. I want them to see that as they die.'\n\n'Hell, yes,' muttered Gallor.\n\nDorn stared at Loken, and nodded gently. 'Your livery, captain, once represented the best of us. I hope it will again. Anything else?'\n\n'My lord,' said Sepatus. 'You are here, and committed to engage. We are told the good Archamus is participating from Bhab. My questions are... Who will be running the siege defence? Should my genesire not be informed?'\n\n'I am running the siege, captain,' said Dorn. 'I have been from the beginning, at every hour, at every moment, wherever I go and whatever I do. This will be no different. And, like me, Archamus can multi-task. The Grand Borealis is efficient and well prepared. The tacticians and the War Court offer fulsome support, as they have since day one. My dear brother does not need to be informed yet. You know as well as I do how occupied he is at Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'But,' Sepatus pressed, 'grace prevent it, if you should fall-'\n\n'I won't,' said Dorn.\n\n'My brother Bel Sepatus seems to doubt your prowess, my lord,' said Thane. There was some laughter from the line. 'But his concern is valid,' Thane went on, more sombre. 'You are the foundation of our defence. The architect of our fate. Is it wise to risk you by placing you at the forefront of a known flaw in this fortress?'\n\n'Indeed,' said Sigismund. 'At a place where the very worst of our enemy is fully expected to stream in and unleash fury?'\n\n'I have done my utmost to make this palace a true fortress,' said Dorn. I've built it from the ground up, diligently... some say obsessively... making sure that it is impenetrable and secure. But that is an impossible task. There will always be cracks, there will always be flaws. No fortress of mere stone and steel in our galaxy is truly impervious. So I must place myself directly before those cracks, and block them with my own flesh and fury.'\n\nHe gazed at them steadily.\n\n'I am the fortress now,' he said.\n\nSindermann shivered. The hairs on his neck stood up.\n\n'Now, each in turn,' Dorn said to his commanders, 'make your oaths of moment to me.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Here they come,' said Rann.\n\nThe assault force was driving out of the ruins of the third circuit wall. Columns of Iron Warriors, advancing shield-blocked, preparing for mass escalade. Motorised gun carriages and mobile artillery moved with them in escort, clattering over the rubble. They were already firing, hefting penetrator shells at the wall beside Katillon guntower. In the shadowy cover of the circuit mins, heavy petraries were being prepared, and brutish, armoured siege towers were being rolled out behind the advancing legionaries.\n\n'My lord?' Rann urged.\n\n'I see it, Fafnir,' Sanguinius murmured. They were coming at Katillon, the site of their defeat the day before. They were coming at Katillon, because it was buckled, and wounded. Huge elements of the traitor host, beastkin and human wretches, were swarming out of the enemy line at six, no, seven different places, to harry and occupy the defenders' attention, and dilute any response to the main strike. Wall units were already beginning to chop them down in their hundreds.\n\nHe could see. But it was a blur.\n\n'My lord?' said Rann, with greater urgency. Sanguinius leaned on the bulwark for a moment, both hands flat on the warm stone, to brace his body and wings. The pain had returned. The otherness flooded into his head like a caustic rip-surge.\n\n'My lord, are you unwell?' Rann asked. Sanguinius rose upright.\n\n'No,' he said. He was lying. The pain was as great as it had been at any point before. He breathed hard, and showed the calm face Rann and the others expected to see.\n\n'Rann? Aimery? Lead repulse forces to receive and block the main strike,' he said. 'Katillon must hold. Lux? Stand in support, all your men. Halen, order blanket suppression fire from all wall deployments to curb the enthusiasm of the distraction charges. Have the guns of Katillon and Benthos target the war machines. I want those petraries smashed before they start to loose, and the siege towers ruined before they even brush the wall.'\n\nMen started to move. Orders were yelled, trumpets sounded.\n\n'My lord, will you come?' asked Khoradal.\n\n'In a moment,' Sanguinius told his captain. 'I reckoned on two or three strikes. I'll hold here, and see if I'm correct. Otherwise, we commit too early.'\n\nAnother lie. A half-lie, but another one all the same. Sanguinius would stay put because it hurt too much to move. Khoradal Furio nodded, and moved off. Sanguinius turned and gazed out at the scene below.\n\nHe couldn't see it at all any more. The pain was like spikes driving into his brain. Butcher's Nails. Oh, my brother! This is what it must feel like! This is how the Nails bite you! Unendurable!\n\nPain blinded him to the unfolding mayhem of Gorgon Bar. He saw that other place again. Eternity space port. Monsalvant Gard. The barrier wall, its surface pocked and cratered like a slab of lunar surface.\n\nHe was standing outside, half a kilometre from the port, facing the Gard. He was walking towards it, crushing brittle rocks and dry skulls under his feet. A screaming host was close behind him.\n\nHe was Angron. He was in Angron's mind. He was seeing the world as Angron saw it, through a flecked and blotted red haze. Sanguinius had never been this close. His visions had brought him close before, but he had never actually intersected "}
{"text":", its surface pocked and cratered like a slab of lunar surface.\n\nHe was standing outside, half a kilometre from the port, facing the Gard. He was walking towards it, crushing brittle rocks and dry skulls under his feet. A screaming host was close behind him.\n\nHe was Angron. He was in Angron's mind. He was seeing the world as Angron saw it, through a flecked and blotted red haze. Sanguinius had never been this close. His visions had brought him close before, but he had never actually intersected with one of his brothers' minds. Not this fully. He was inside Angron's brain. He was inside his pain. He was trapped inside his skull, and could smell the raw-blood meat-stink of the inside of his head.\n\nAnd this was no vision, except to Sanguinius. This was now. This was happening now.\n\n* * *\n\nNiborran scrambled onto the parapet ledge below Tower Three of the barrier wall, and took the scope that Brohn offered.\n\n'He's just out there,' Brohn said. 'just... out there in the open.'\n\nNiborran trained the scope down, and adjusted resolution. He could see the figure, standing alone on the strewn rubble of Western Freight, half a kilometre away. Even at that distance, he seemed immense. A hulking, hunch-shouldered ogre in spattered warplate. The huge, leathery pinions of a bat rose from his broad back. Red and gold. Blood red and soiled gold. Spoiled meat and dirty metal.\n\n'Angron,' Cadwalder murmured. The Huscarl needed no scope to magnify the figure.\n\n'What is he doing?' Brohn asked.\n\nIt wasn't clear. The primarch of the XII had advanced alone into the open ahead of his host. Niborran could see them massed in a great, dust-fogged swathe another half a kilometre behind their genesire. Angron was ignoring the portion of his force currently clamouring and ramming at the barrier gates to the west. He had held the remainder of his butcher-swarm back. He had walked into the open.\n\nHe had walked into the kill-zone.\n\n'Is he mad?' asked Brohn.\n\n'To do what he has done, and be what he has become, I would hope so,' said Cadwalder.\n\n'Train all wall-mounts and batteries,' said Niborran.\n\n'What?' said Brohn.\n\n'Train the guns, Clem!' Niborran snarled. 'Did I stammer? He's walked into our fire field. Right into our kill field, as if we're nothing. I don't care what he is. Firing solution on all guns!'\n\nBrohn, despite his near panic, wasn't idiot enough to ask for coordinates. It was a single figure, standing in the open. Around them, cued by Clem Brohn's frantic Hortcode instruction, weapon mounts began to traverse. Batteries panned. Gun-platforms adjusted on gyro-mounts. Loading systems rattled and buzzed.\n\n'Weapons lock,' said Brohn.\n\nNiborran stared through the scope. The intense magnification showed him the tattered, bloodstained rags flapping around Angron's filthy bulk, the massive set of the legs, the dents and notches in the gold plate, the scarring of war, the tattered lizard-wings, the excamated skulls strung-\n\nHe lowered the scope quickly. He could see the figure well enough. He had no need of details.\n\nBelow them, Angron slowly raised a massive war-axe over his head on a tree-trunk arm. He was looking up at them.\n\n'Hear.'\n\nThe word seemed to fall out of the sky like a thunderclap.\n\nThey all flinched, even Cadwalder. The Huscarl brought his bolter up in automatic threat response.\n\n'Is... is he speaking to us?' Brohn whispered.\n\n'Hear. Hear me.'\n\nThe words rolled around the rubble waste like the echo of an artillery salvo.\n\n'I make my offer once,' Angron boomed, slow and leaden. 'According to the rites of this arena.'\n\n'Arena?' Niborran murmured. He looked at Cadwalder. 'What does he think this is?'\n\n'Your cause is hopeless,' Angron intoned, wide echoes chasing each syllable. 'You face a foe that cannot be defeated. You are cut off, outnumbered, and defending a ruler too weak to be worthy of your loyalty.'\n\n'Clem?' Niborran whispered.\n\nBrohn nodded.\n\n'My offer,' Angron bawled. 'Give. Up.'\n\nThere was a long silence, broken only by the stirring wind.\n\n'What is your answer?' Angron demanded.\n\n'This,' said Niborran.\n\n* * *\n\nSanguinius winced as the entire south line of Monsalvant's barrier wall unloaded on him. A deluge bombardment, deafening, earth-shaking, a rain of heavy shells, main battery las and collimated plasma. He felt himself atomised. Shredded to molecules, and then those molecules incinerated.\n\nThere was no pain. There was no pain at all. A moment of pain-free serenity suspended him.\n\nSanguinius opened his eyes. He steadied his hand on the oh-so-solid, oh-so-real bulwark wall of Gorgon Bar. He saw the battle accelerating around him. The air full of shot and tracer fire, the Iron Warriors commencing their escalade at Katillon, siege belfries aflame, short of their target, firestorms choking the terrain below the fourth circuit wall.\n\nIt needed his attention immediately. Gorgon Bar needed the Great Angel.\n\nBut Sanguinius knew he had just felt Angron die. Sanguinius had been in his brother's mind as the guns of Monsalvant annihilated him. It was a moment, a moment of victory, but also grief. The death of a brother was no small thing. It was a momentous event that could only happen twenty times, and it had happened too much already.\n\nAnd the worst of it, the heartbreaking part, was that in death, all the pain had finally gone. Sanguinius' poor, lost brother had finally found release.\n\nSanguinius steadied his breath. The oddest part, the most perplexing part of all, was that Angron's tortured mind had not been there. Sanguinius had shared his brother's space, and seen, as a vision, Angron's view of Monsalvant.\n\nBut that was not what Angron had been seeing at all. Angron's mind had been submerged in a vision all of its own. That was why his rage had stilled, briefly. That's why his berserk incoherence had gone, and some calm articulacy had briefly returned. A moment of lucidity. Angron had addressed the walls. He had issued his ritual challenge. He had seen Monsalvant's barrier wall as the arena walls of Nuceria, far off in the Ultima Segmentum; he had seen Monsalvant's defenders as the jeering of the Desh'ea populace. He had been Angron Thal'kyr again, Lord of the Red Sands, Child of the Mountain, railing at the braying audience of the pit.\n\nHe had been home again. He had gone home to die.\n\nSanguinius tried to understand what that meant. He tried to decipher what he had seen, Angron's dying vision locked inside his own. Why that? Why there? Why Nuceria? My visions must have meaning! They must have purpose! Or are they simply heralds of my own impending madness? What truth am I supposed to learn from this?\n\nSanguinius closed his eyes again, tight shut, ignoring the carnage of Gorgon Bar, and concentrated, trying to catch some fading trace of the vision that he could dissect and interpret. Nuceria. Nuceria! There was a reason it had filled Angron's mind and stalled his rage. There was a reason it had been shown to him and, through him, to me.\n\nAnd I see it. I see it. The burned core of death, the charred corpse, the total extinction of-\n\nThe Lord of Baal gasped. He opened his eyes. The agony, so briefly relieved, nailed back into him. Raw life was bursting up. Rage was renewed. Fury reborn.\n\nSanguinius saw the smoking crater in the rubble wastes before Monsalvant. He saw the bombardment fume slowly clearing, the spats of fire still burning around the crater's lip. He saw charred scraps of exploded bone and half-cooked hunks of meat.\n\nHe saw them twitch and writhe. He saw broken, distorted panels of armour, splinters of pulverised ribs, and loose, fused vertebrae, clumping and wriggling, and locking back into place. He saw new sinew and muscle forming, re-stringing skeletal fragments, harnessing a frame, reforming a shape, sleeving it in flesh. He saw capillaries growing like delicate fern-fronds, in their millions, bringing the blood, delivering the blood to every new extremity.\n\nSanguinius saw incarnation.\n\nHe saw a massive fist pick up a re-wrought axe from the smoking base of the crater, a crater that had become a crucible.\n\nHe saw the mountainous bulk of a winged figure rising out of the crater.\n\nIt turned to face him. Their eyes locked. They gazed at one another, across all intervals of time and distance, as though they stood face to face.\n\nBrother to brother.\n\nSanguinius looked into Angron's eyes.\n\nAngron glared back at Sanguinius. He slowly raised his left hand, where new skin was yet to grow back over the oozing meat. He licked the blood from it.\n\n'My blood for the Blood God,' he said.\n\n* * *\n\n'No,' said Brohn. 'No, that's... No, that's entirely not possible, it... No no no no no-'\n\nCadwalder took the man by the throat, and shook him.\n\n'It's happening,' he hissed.\n\n'It really is,' said Saul Niborran, gazing down at the wastes below.\n\nAngron, Lord of the XII, Red Angel, daemon-prince and Eater of Worlds, lumbered clear of the burning crater. His physical mass now seemed colossal, a gore giant, flesh flayed and bleeding, golden battleplate burned clean and gleaming. He began to stride towards the barrier wall, each step shaking the ground. His pace accelerated. The long braids and plugs that trailed from the back of his scalp billowed behind him in a knotted, black-clotted mane. His hellish wings, larger than before, spread like rotting sailcloth. He raised his axe, and behind him the mass formations of the World Eaters roared, and followed his charge, a reverberating stampede that blocked the sky with dust across the horizon.\n\nAngron opened his jaws, stretching the bloody, excoriated flesh of his. distended face, revealing fangs so long and sharp they seemed capable of tearing out the galaxy's throat.\n\nHe howled. All coherence had fled from him, all words consumed in the bestial tumult of his berserk state.\n\nHe simply howled. A keening, savage, wordless noise.\n\nBut its meaning was clear enough.\n\nPART THREE\n\nFOUR VICTORIES\n\n(TO THE DEATH)\n\nONE\n\n* * *\n\nDead lines\n\nTrickster\n\nDiscord\n\n'Something...' said Al-Nid Nazira, pe"}
{"text":"ngron opened his jaws, stretching the bloody, excoriated flesh of his. distended face, revealing fangs so long and sharp they seemed capable of tearing out the galaxy's throat.\n\nHe howled. All coherence had fled from him, all words consumed in the bestial tumult of his berserk state.\n\nHe simply howled. A keening, savage, wordless noise.\n\nBut its meaning was clear enough.\n\nPART THREE\n\nFOUR VICTORIES\n\n(TO THE DEATH)\n\nONE\n\n* * *\n\nDead lines\n\nTrickster\n\nDiscord\n\n'Something...' said Al-Nid Nazira, perplexed. 'My khan, lord, please come. Something has occurred.'\n\nShiban Khan turned from the work crews he was supervising. It was hot on the high platform, and the docking ring above them offered only partial shade. The crews, all civilians or port guild, were drenched in sweat as they toiled around the two Sysiphos-pattern tugs.\n\n'That's the High Primary's concern, Nazira,' he said. 'We have our own duties to perform.'\n\nNazira, an Auxilia captain, a good and sober man, had been Shiban's chosen aide since the day Shiban had arrived at the port. He'd taken a liking to him at once, seeing the purposeful determination with which Nazira had attempted to bring order to the confusion and, needing reliable officers, Shiban had made him his second.\n\n'My khan, you should see this,' Nazira called back.\n\nShiban put down the tools he had been using, and walked over to Nazira, picking his way between the heaps of surplus components and fittings that the crews had already stripped out of the tugs. The junk, trailing wires and unfastened brackets, littered the landing pad in the hard sunlight. Nazira stood at the rail, staring down.\n\nThey were fifteen hundred metres up on the port's tertiary landing pylon, still quite low down in terms of the pylon structures, which soared above them into the sky, threatening to pierce the heavens. But it was still a long drop. The port megastructure was spread below them like a large-scale map. The sunlight was bright, rippled and tinted by the void fields that still shielded the upper- and inter-orbit extents of the gn at port. Down below, cloud banks of what looked like russet smog drifted like dead leaves across the expanse of Western Freight and the adjoining scarred landscape where the port's Celestial City had once stood. Blacker cloud lingered to the west, over the site of the Pons Solar.\n\n'What's the matter?' Shiban asked.\n\nNazira pointed down.\n\n'Look, there, and there,' he said. 'Those are serious engagements.' 'Nazira, we know they're fighting down there-'\n\n'No,' said Nazira. 'Before, it was focused on the gates of the barrier wall. At the west. There. But it's spread. Increased. Just now, there was a serious bombardment from the wall guns. Look! Look, again!' Shiban uncoupled his helm from his belt, and clamped it on, bringing up visual enhancement and audio gain to his visor. He enlarged a great belt of smoke and dust, the thick line of the barrier wall, the towers, the main bulk of Monsalvant Gard. He saw numerous flashes the sunlight glinting off moving metal, and weapons fire, concentrated and intense. Audio carried the distant boom and crack of it. Naziia was right. The enemy was still mobbing the barrier gates, but a vast horde, like something spilled and spreading from an insect hill, was swarming at the entire length of the southern line.\n\n'I was right, wasn't I?' Nazira asked. 'It's worse, isn't it? It's escalated, in the last few minutes.'\n\nIt had. It looked disastrous. Shiban thought about lying, keeping Nazira in the dark a while longer, so he might work without worry. But Nazira was his comrade, his friend, and they were in this together.\n\n'It's much worse,' Shiban said. 'The World Eaters have begun a mass-war assault to storm the wall.'\n\n'Should we... should we go back down?' asked Nazira.\n\n'There's no value in that,' said Shiban.\n\n'Except honour?' Nazira suggested.\n\n'We can honour our comrades more by trying to finish our task,' said Shiban. 'Our presence down there won't make the slightest difference, but several heavy grav-weapons might. How long?'\n\nNazira shrugged. He glanced at the work teams, toiling around the bulky, utilitarian craft.\n\n'Another hour?' he ventured. 'Then we can ship them down to the surface-level platforms under their own power, and begin assembly. I don't know about the other crews.'\n\n'Go and get them moving,' said Shiban. 'Don't alarm them, but get their motivation up. Let's see if we can take a few minutes off that hour. I'll worry about the other crews.'\n\nNazira nodded, and hurried back to join the working party. Shiban walked across the dock pad and into the deep shade of the massive docking ring. The pad's pylon side connected directly to the immense structure of the tertiary spire. There were four large hatches, the mouths of bulk freight elevators. An inspection plate had been removed from the wall between two of them, allowing access to the port power supply, and to hardline datacast and links. Spools of cables and tube connectors suckled at the inspection cavity and trailed away across the deck, like sleeping pythons, towards the parked tugs and labouring crews.\n\nShiban disconnected the hanging loop of the hardline cable from a voxcaster resting on the deck, and connected it to his suit system. He selected voice-to-Hortcode delivery.\n\n'This is Shiban, work party six, tertiary pylon level forty. Monsalvant, respond.'\n\nA crackle.\n\n'Monsalvant, respond and report status.'\n\nMore static, like crumpling plastic film.\n\n'Monsalvant, respond. Command cadre, respond. Tower Seven? Tower Six? Barrier gateway? This is Shiban, work party six. Respond and report status.'\n\nThe link answered with broken pops and spilled-acid hissing. He tried, in turn, the other work crews - teams like his own, deployed across tertiary and secondary pylons to scavenge parts and equipment and recover other useable craft. There were eighteen teams altogether.\n\nNone of them answered. Shiban hoped it was simply a problem with the hardline connection. But surely a hardwired network couldn't have broken in multiple places?\n\nHe tried them again. Then he tried Monsalvant again.\n\n* * *\n\nMistress Tacticae Katarin Elg entered the Saturnine forward command post, walked directly to her station, sat down, and put on her headset.\n\nHer hands moved across the keypads, and the desk came to life, displays illuminating, screens lighting.\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' she said, with steady, declarative calm. 'Show Trickster live at this time. All kill teams report status, datacast only.'\n\nSeveral responses crackled into her earpiece in quick succession. As they came in, she marked them on the board with quick, haptic gestures, her eyes darting from screen to screen.\n\n'This is Trickster, showing you as ready, kill teams. Standby.'\n\nShe switched channels from datacast to hardlink.\n\n'Trickster to wallguard vigil.'\n\n'This is vigil, Trickster.'\n\n'Trickster reads you, Captain Madius. Commence visual scanning.' 'Acknowledged, Trickster.'\n\nShe sat back briefly, though her hands continued to play across the keys.\n\n'Kill teams report ready, my lord,' she said. 'Wallguard vigil is on active watch. We are live. Operation count has begun.'\n\nDorn nodded. The forward command post was a small gallery chamber near one of the deployment halls. It had probably once been a wine cellar, before all the basement levels had been seized, hollowed-out and fortified. Both long walls were lined with strategium desks, their screens and displays blinking in the gloom, illuminating the faces of the tacticians and operators who sat, back to back, manning the positions. There was a constant fidget of movement, of hands adjusting controls, a constant low murmur of voices as they spoke into their headsets, a constant crackling chatter of transmit responses.\n\n'So noted, mistress,' said Dorn. 'Proceed.'\n\nElg acknowledged his go-order. Her face impassive, she turned back to her desk.\n\n'Query hardline link to Grand Borealis?' she said.\n\n'Hardline link standing by, mistress,' the operator at the desk beside her replied.\n\n'Hardline link live, please,' she said.\n\n'Hardline link is live,' said the operator.\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' she said. 'Acknowledge my signal, Grand Borealis.'\n\n* * *\n\nIn the heart of the vast bustle of the Grand Borealis chamber, Archamus sat forward at his desk. He raised his left hand, and pointed to Mistress Icaro. She saw his gesture, handed back the dataslate she had been reviewing, and crossed to his station immediately. The Huscarl passed her a headset, and she put it on, standing at his shoulder.\n\n'Grand Borealis,' said Archamus. 'Trickster, we hear you, you are live.'\n\n'Acknowledged, Grand Borealis,' Elg's voice answered in their ears. 'Count has begun at this time. Trickster requests tracking evaluation.'\n\n'Standby, Trickster,' said Archamus.\n\nIcaro stepped to the strategium station beside Archamus' console, she brought the display up, centred, enlarged and locked.\n\n'Commencing tracking evaluation,' she said. 'Sifting all track, all seismic and all listening watch in target zone. Summary will be datacast by hardlink to you in twelve seconds, Trickster.'\n\n'Trickster, standing by.'\n\nIcaro and Archamus waited as the vast processors of Bhab Bastion diverted a small fragment of their tasking power to Icaro's specifics. It felt sly, uncomfortable. There was over a thousand personnel at work in the Borealis around them, operators at watch and vox-stations, War Court tacticians around display tables, marshals and lords militant at overwatch desks. A babble of voices and activity, the living brain and nervous system of the siege, monitoring and supervising thousands of separate battles and engagements, troop deployments, munition transfers, supply demands, aegis stability, received intelligence. Officers, servitors and despatch runners hurried to and fro; rubricators scurried past, arms laden with fresh reports; cartomancers adjusted the flag markers that throbbed and shifted gently on vast hololith disp"}
{"text":" lords militant at overwatch desks. A babble of voices and activity, the living brain and nervous system of the siege, monitoring and supervising thousands of separate battles and engagements, troop deployments, munition transfers, supply demands, aegis stability, received intelligence. Officers, servitors and despatch runners hurried to and fro; rubricators scurried past, arms laden with fresh reports; cartomancers adjusted the flag markers that throbbed and shifted gently on vast hololith displays.\n\nNone of them knew what Archamus and Icaro were doing. None had been briefed or read-in. None of them knew anything about the events unfolding leagues to the south of them in the Saturnine Quarter.\n\nArchamus felt uneasy. Not even Vorst, at a nearby station, was aware. The Master of Huscarls drummed his fingers gently. Icaro glanced at his hand. Such a curious and tellingly human mannerism. She smiled.\n\n'I'll stop,' said Archamus.\n\n'Please don't, lord' she replied. 'It's good to know I'm not the only one feeling this tension.'\n\nShe looked at her board.\n\n'First track results,' she said. 'Datacasting to you now, Trickster.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Thank you, Grand Borealis, standby,' said Elg. The data streamed onto her desk monitor. She gestured, and the haptic command threw it up on the post's main displays. Tracking seismic pulse,' she said.\n\n'Seismic pulse confirmed, forty kilometres, spread,' agreed a nearby operator.\n\n'Do we have target track?' asked Dorn.\n\n'Analysing data product...' replied Elg. 'Negative. Seismic pulse reads as backwash vibration from the bombardments at Europa Wall section and Western Projection Wall section.'\n\n'The distraction actions,' said Dorn.\n\n'We presume they are distractions, lord,' said Elg.\n\n'They're distractions,' said Dorn.\n\n'They are intense enough to mask surface and sub-surface in the immediate zone,' said the operator.\n\n'Are we blind?' asked Dorn.\n\n'Washing them through separation filters, lord,' said Elg. 'But there may not be a signal to read yet.'\n\nShe glanced at him.\n\n'If they're coming tonight,' she added. 'Or at all.'\n\nDorn didn't reply.\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' said Elg, returning to her screens. 'Datacast received, Grand Borealis. Initial results show negative track, repeat, negative track. Please proceed to supply tracking evaluation databursts at five-minute intervals from this mark.'\n\n'Acknowledged, Trickster,' the link crackled.\n\nDorn turned from the quiet, ceaseless activity of the small room. Diamantis stood in the doorway.\n\n'We're waiting,' Dorn said.\n\n'Ninety-nine per cent of a soldier's life, lord,' said Diamantis.\n\nThat almost brought a smile to the Praetorian's face.\n\n'Update me,' said Dorn. 'The sealing programme?'\n\n'Magos Land reports ready,' said Diamantis. 'Some teething problems... A clogging issue with jet nozzles, or something.'\n\n'That's not encouraging.'\n\n'His processes have been conjured out of nothing in a matter of hours, lord,' said Diamantis. They have not been rigorously tested. But if he says it will work, I believe him. All of his staff, except for essential operation crews, have been evacuated from the site.'\n\n'The Sigillite?'\n\n'Already escorted back to the Upper Palatine, as per your instructions,' said Diamantis.\n\n'Good,' said Dorn. 'He absolutely can't be here for this. Nowhere near.'\n\n'He seemed disappointed, my lord,' said the Huscarl. Tetchy. He entirely supports the significance of what's happening here. I think he wanted to witness it for himself'\n\n'That's what we have the remembrancers for,' said Dorn.\n\n'Interrogators,' said Diamantis.\n\nDorn looked at him, and raised an eyebrow. 'Really?' he asked. 'You want to correct me?'\n\n'We can call them whatever you like, Praetorian,' said Diamantis.\n\nDorn grunted. 'Well, call them in here', he said. 'The forward post is probably the best place for them.'\n\n'So they can see what's happening?'\n\n'So they don't get underfoot.'\n\nDiamantis nodded, and stepped out into the hallway. He gestured to a pair of Hort Palatine guardsmen.\n\n'Bring the interrogators through,' he said.\n\nThey stepped forward, bringing the boy, Therajomas, between them. The young man was clutching his slate. He looked as if he was about to shit himself with terror.\n\n'Me?' he asked.\n\n'In here,' said Diamantis. 'Observe. Record. Don't touch anything.' The Huscarl paused.\n\n'Where's the other one?' he asked the guards. 'Where's the old man Sindermann?'\n\n* * *\n\n'It's been a while, Garviel,' said Sindermann.\n\nLoken straightened up.\n\n'It has,' he replied. He held out his hand. Sindermann clasped the giant, armoured paw gingerly.\n\n'There wasn't an opportunity to speak earlier,' said Sindermann.\n\n'But I wanted to find you, before-'\n\n'You've found me,' said Loken.\n\nThey were in deployment hall six, close to the assayed line of the flaw. The chamber was a brick cistern, a basement vault extended by servitor teams who had drilled out the subrock. Behind Loken, his kill team was assembling, weapons ready. One hundred legionaries, most of them Imperial Fists. It was quiet, but for a few low conversations and the clack and snap of magazines slotting and power feeds connecting. There was a suspended hush that reminded Sindermann of a temple or place of worship, a congregation assembled in prayer. The closest equivalent these days, he reflected.\n\nOne wall of the chamber had been removed, and they could see through into the neighbouring deployment hall, hall seven. Sigismund and his kill team were prepping quietly there. Another hundred men, also Imperial Fists, but these marked with the blacks and charcoals of the Templar order.\n\nThe seven kill teams had been given call signs, as Sindermann understood it. Sigismund's was Devotion, Garro's was Strife, Haar's was Black Dog, Bel Sepatus' was Brightest, Gallor's was Seventh, and Thane's was Helios.\n\nLoken's was Naysmith.\n\n'It seems an age ago when I last saw you in those colours,' said Sindermann.\n\n'A different age, Kyril,' said Loken.\n\n'Quite so,' said Sindermann. 'You think of them as your true colours?'\n\n'Always,' said Loken. 'But I am expecting them to provoke some psychological effect.'\n\n'I'm sure,' said Sindermann. 'And your choice of call sign...'\n\n'A word you taught me. I intend to disagree and challenge. The balance has gone, Kyril. We need naysmiths more than ever.'\n\n'Do you think our Praetorian is correct?' asked Sindermann. 'That he's coming?'\n\n'I think there's a high probability,' Loken replied. 'And if not my genesire, then the best spear-tip in the Legions, for an undertaking like this.'\n\n'They don't exist any more,' said Sindermann.\n\n'They do, as a twisted parody of that glory,' replied Loken. 'First Company. The Mournival. Abaddon.'\n\nSindermann sighed.\n\n'Names that were always terrifying, no matter which side you were on,' the old man said.\n\n'Back then, there was only one side. Are you here to make an account of this, Kyril? A remembrance? I was puzzled by your presence.'\n\n'I am,' said Sindermann, 'Just a... twisted parody of the old order, to borrow your turn of phrase, but Lord Dorn has seen fit to reinstate us. To record the making of history as an act of faith in a future that-'\n\n'You make the history, Kyril,' said Loken. 'I'm only here to make a mound of corpses.'\n\nSindermann paused awkwardly.\n\n'If he is coming...' he began.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'...what will you do, Garviel? He was your beloved master once, and-'\n\n'Kill him,' said Loken. 'I'll kill him.'\n\nSindermann nodded. 'History tells us,' he said, 'that a culture may be in morbid decline when sons turn on their fathers...'\n\n'My father turned on me,' said Loken. 'I don't need history to tell me anything.'\n\n'There you are, damn it!'\n\nSindermann turned. Conroi-Captain Ahlbom was hurrying towards him, trailed by two Hort troopers in red body armour.\n\n'I slipped my handlers,' Sindermann said to Loken, with a sly wink. Loken smiled a little.\n\n'You don't find the things you're looking for if you don't break some rules,' Loken told him. 'You have to walk in a few dark places on your own.'\n\n'You can't just wander around, sir,' Ahlborn was snapping at Sindermann. 'Do this again, and we'll eject you. Come, please. There's a space reserved for you in the command post.'\n\nSindermann allowed himself to be walked away. He looked back at Loken.\n\n'Find what you're looking for, Garviel,' he said. 'Wherever it is in those dark places.'\n\n'I'll find it,' Loken called out after him. 'And illuminate it.'\n\n* * *\n\nThey marched Sindermann out. Loken turned back to his preparation. He took up Rubio's sword, and resumed working the edge on a whetstone.\n\n'I can find you a better sword than that old blade.' Sigismund had approached from the neighbouring hall.\n\n'And chain it to my wrist like a World Eater?' asked Loken.\n\n'Then it may never leave your hand, Garviel Loken,' said Sigismund.\n\n'You never, ever have to put it down again.'\n\n'This'll do,' said Loken. 'It's been with me a while, and it belonged to... someone.'\n\n'It's a force weapon,' said Sigismund dubiously. 'A brother like you can't bring the best out of it.'\n\n'It's still a blade,' said Loken. 'And its edge is good.'\n\nThey stood together, and looked at the two chambers, the quiet men assembled, braced to unleash hell.\n\n'Are you set?' asked Sigismund.\n\n'Yes. You?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'I liked your oath,' Sigismund said.\n\n'The shortest one of them all,' said Loken.\n\n'Yes,' said Sigismund. 'But a good one. I wish it had been mine.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Mistress Icaro?' Archamus said.\n\nIcaro snapped out of her reverie at his prompt.\n\nThe next tracking evaluation is due,' said Archamus. Trickster is waiting.'\n\n'Of course,' she replied, resuming work. 'Commencing.'\n\nIt was the ninth evaluation she had run and sent. The processors whirred and chattered.\n\n'Distracted?' Archamus asked as they waited.\n\n'Just updates coming in on the main war maps,' she said. 'Colossi Gate and Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'I saw them,' he replied.\n\n'It looks as though they are intensifying rapidly,' she said. 'Intelligence paints swiftly deteriorating situations in both area"}
{"text":"cking evaluation is due,' said Archamus. Trickster is waiting.'\n\n'Of course,' she replied, resuming work. 'Commencing.'\n\nIt was the ninth evaluation she had run and sent. The processors whirred and chattered.\n\n'Distracted?' Archamus asked as they waited.\n\n'Just updates coming in on the main war maps,' she said. 'Colossi Gate and Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'I saw them,' he replied.\n\n'It looks as though they are intensifying rapidly,' she said. 'Intelligence paints swiftly deteriorating situations in both areas.'\n\n'Both were predicted as key stress zones by the Praetorian,' said Archamus calmly. 'Hence his placement of the Khan and the Angel to command them. I'm watching them both. The War Court is watching them develop across a dozen desks. Reaction plans are in place in event of either becoming non-vi.'\n\n'They're getting damn hot, Archamus.'\n\n'They are. But we have work to attend to. Concentrate.'\n\n'Track results complete,' she said.\n\n'Trickster, this is Grand Borealis,' said Archamus. 'Datacasting to you now.'\n\n* * *\n\nSindermann had arrived at the command post. It was his first look at it. It seemed cramped, crowded, busy, even though the only noise was the low murmur of operators talking.\n\nTherajomas was cowering in a corner.\n\n'Any news?' Sindermann asked.\n\nDorn raised a hand to silence him. He was staring at Mistress Elg. She was perched forward in her seat.\n\n'Thank you, Grand Borealis. Standby,' Sindermann heard Elg say. The tactician deftly cast data onto the displays. 'Tracking seismic pulse,' she said.\n\n'Seismic pulse confirmed, forty-one kilometres, spread,' said an operator. 'As before, backwash from Europa and Western Projection.'\n\n'Do we have target track?' asked Dorn.\n\n'Analysing...' replied Elg, concentrating on her screen, her hands twitching as they sculpted invisible data. 'Freeze there. One-seven-two. That's a new track. Scrub out the backwash. Clean it up.'\n\n'Aye,' said the operator.\n\n'Mistress Elg?' said Dorn.\n\n'Wait please, lord,' Elg replied, without looking around.\n\n'Seismic pulse confirmed,' said the operator. 'New track, new signal. In motion, inbound. Seismographic confirms, listening watch confirms, auspex confirms.'\n\n'I have it,' said Elg. 'New track detected, my lord. Eight kilometres out from the Saturnine Wall, bearing one-seven-two. Inbound. Significant track, significant echo.'\n\n'Sub-surface?' asked Dorn. 'How low?'\n\nSindermann knew that all expectations were of a major mining assault directly into the Saturnine fault. The flaw was a narrow seam of cavities and shale, viced between plains of bedrock, the only possible route that would submit to excavation or drilling.\n\n'No, my lord, surface,' said Elg.\n\n'Confirmed?'\n\n'Confirming now.'\n\n'Surface?' said Sindermann, frowning. 'What would-'\n\nHe shut up as soon as he saw the look that Ahlbom was giving him.\n\n'I anticipated some surface assault,' said Dorn. 'They'll need to punch us hard, and keep the wall systems busy, no matter what they try and throw at us underground.'\n\n'Surface track is confirmed,' Elg called out.\n\nDorn pulled a hardline vox-mic from its hook, the long cable slapping against his plate.\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' he said. 'Vigil, we have an inbound surface track. What are you showing?'\n\n* * *\n\nThere seemed to be nothing but a cold, silent night.\n\nThe Saturnine Wall was a significant, south-facing section of the great Ultimate Wall, eleven hundred metres high and four hundred metres thick. It ran like a sea cliff for nearly thirty kilometres between the Europa and Western Projection sections. Though the light-shock and distant boom of the endless bombardments at those sections rippled through the chill air, at Oanis Tower, Saturnine's principal gun bastion, it was quiet. A pitch, storm-heavy darkness hung over the wall and the plains beyond. The air was sub-zero, and dropping with windchill. Hoar frost was forming on the sleek, black barrels of the macro-guns and the armoured shells of the casemates and turrets.\n\nThe voids, at optimal output, flickered and shimmered the night air, their skeins of charged particles occasionally conjuring aurorae colours that shifted and slid.\n\n'Stand by, Trickster,' said Captain Madius.\n\nThe Imperial Fist, one of the newborn, new-made legionaries produced by accelerated recruitment to swell the Terran ranks, handed the link back to his waiting vox-officer, and hurried along the wall. He had been appointed wall master of the Saturnine stretch eight days previously.\n\n'Come to alert,' he said to his sergeant as he passed him. He had five hundred Imperial Fists on the wall line, and two thousand soldiers of the Auxilia, not counting the hundreds of gun crews, loaders and technical support personnel.\n\nMadius entered the wallguard fire control station at the junction of the main wall and Oanis Tower. The vigil officers and gunnery masters were all on station, as they had been every day and every night since the start of the siege.\n\n'Hardlink!' Madius shouted as he walked in. An adjutant ran to him with a cable, which Madius plugged into the jaw of his helmet as he stepped onto the command plate.\n\n'Visual?' Madius called out.\n\n'Nothing, lord.'\n\n'Auspex?'\n\n'Nothing.'\n\n'Full sweep, do it again,' said Madius. 'Increase depth, detector field, ten points.'\n\n'Ten points, aye,' replied a vigil officer. Madius watched the phantom green patterns twitch and shift on the main grid.\n\n'Auspex now showing track,' a vigil officer announced. 'Incomplete, obscure. Seven kilometres out, advancing, bearing one-seven-two.'\n\nMadius activated his hardlink. 'Trickster, Trickster, this is vigil. Showing your track now, seven kilometres out, advancing, bearing one seven-two, incomplete. Echo only, visual scanning negative.'\n\n'Come to alert, Madius,' the link crackled.\n\n'Already done, lord,' Madius replied.\n\n'Full repulse order.'\n\n'Full repulse order acknowledged, Trickster,' said Madius. 'Wallguard! Full repulse, arm systems!'\n\nThe room stirred. Men started speaking urgently into their vox links. Amber runes began to flash silently over the hatch frames and on the wall pillars. One by one, hololithic screens blinked into lite in the air, scrolling with preparatory target data. Madius heard the whine of turrets realigning, the clatter of hatches opening on casemates and down-wall gun-boxes. He heard the rising thrum of power as reactors fast-fed power to the primary energy weapon banks, and the ticking of vast quantities of projectile munitions streaming out of the magazine chambers deep in the girth of the wall.\n\n'Vigil, this is Trickster. Do you have target visual?'\n\n'Negative, Trickster. Echo track only. Now... Six and a half kilometres out. We should be able to see something.'\n\n'You certainly should, vigil,' the link sizzled.\n\n'Auspex, I want definition,' Madius called out. 'Isolate that echo track. If we can't see it, let's hear it. Acoustic profile analysis. Is it tracks, infantry, engines? Boost audio.'\n\n'Boosting audio, sir.'\n\nMadius waited. A steady, muffled, thump-thump-thump like a cardiac beat echoed out of the speakers.\n\n'Can we estimate mass from that echo?' he began to ask.\n\nA scream tore through the chamber. It was so shrill, and so loud, glass panels shattered spontaneously. Consoles shorted out. Hololithic projector plates disintegrated into fragments. The noise suppression systems of those present wearing helmets kicked in automatically, saving them from the worst of it, but the personnel without helmets went into seizure. They collapsed across consoles, or onto the deck, blood running from their ruined ears, out of their noses, out of their tear ducts and the comers of their mouths.\n\nThe scream persisted for six seconds, until all the chamber speakers blew out in flurries of sparks and ruptured components.\n\n* * *\n\n'Vigil? Respond. Vigil, this is Trickster. Respond.'\n\nDorn waited.\n\n'Hardline is down,' an operator reported.\n\n'How is it down?' asked Dom.\n\n'Checking...' the operator said.\n\n'Assessing all hardlinks and datacasts,' said Elg. 'Trickster, this is Trickster. All stations, send confirmation signal.'\n\nHer desk buzzed and chattered.\n\n'Datacast is intact to all kill teams and support, and hardline to Grand Borealis is sound,' she reported. 'We have lost hardline link to the wallguard.'\n\n'Fault?' asked Dorn.\n\n'Unable to confirm, my lord,' Elg replied. 'Despatching repair crews immediately.'\n\n'Get that link back up,' said Dorn.\n\n* * *\n\n'Stations!' Madius yelled. His head was still ringing. He could feel blood trickling inside his helm. Medicae were dragging the injured clear. Some were still screaming. Support staff were rushing in to take over their positions.\n\n'Headgear! Noise reduction!' Madius ordered. 'What in Terra's name was that?'\n\n'Acoustic event registered at two hundred and sixty-two decibels,' an officer said.\n\n'No, Faltan, what in Terra's name was it?' Madius asked. He adjusted the cable plugged into his helmet. 'Vigil, this is vigil. Trickster, do you respond? Trickster, respond.'\n\n'Hardline is blown, lord,' said one of the officers.\n\n'Get it back up!' Madius barked.\n\n'In work, lord.'\n\n'Visual contact reported!' a gunnery master called out. 'Six kilometres out.'\n\n'Show on screens!'\n\n'Screens are down. Visual displays are down.'\n\nMadius cursed. He strode out of the chamber, yanking the plug out of his helm and casting the cable aside. Outside, he ran to the wall's main bulwark. Space Marines were already in place, manning wall weapons, or braced with boltguns ready.\n\n'Incoming!' Sergeant Kask reported, pointing.\n\nMadius looked into the darkness, cycling the gain of his visor's optics.\n\nThe Donjon-class siege engine was an uncommon machine. Made by the Forge of Mars in the early years of the Great Crusade, its pattern had seen service in many theatres, though it had never been produced in significant numbers due to its bulk, cost of production, and cumbersome vulnerability on the field of war. Better doctrines, exploiting the fluid versatilities of the Legiones Astartes and the rapid agg"}
{"text":"orted, pointing.\n\nMadius looked into the darkness, cycling the gain of his visor's optics.\n\nThe Donjon-class siege engine was an uncommon machine. Made by the Forge of Mars in the early years of the Great Crusade, its pattern had seen service in many theatres, though it had never been produced in significant numbers due to its bulk, cost of production, and cumbersome vulnerability on the field of war. Better doctrines, exploiting the fluid versatilities of the Legiones Astartes and the rapid aggression of the Titan engines, had consigned the Donjon to support and rear-line operations that it had not originally been designed to perform.\n\nThe Donjon engine was a quadruped, striding on a brace of the same motivator systems that propelled Warlord-class machines. The four massive legs supported a huge, flat-top carrier deck, a platform large enough for a squadron of aircraft or a full motorised company. The platform's rim bristled with heavy gun ports, and through-deck elevators were equipped with bulk machinery that could lift extending siege towers and scaling bridges to the highest battlements. But the Donjon was slow, painfully hard to manoeuvre, and its void systems were over-extended because of its mass, and prone to gapping.\n\nFirst Captain Abaddon had procured three of the immense, rare beasts from the adepts of the Dark Mechanicum, and he had given them to the Phoenician Lord of the Emperor's Children.\n\nThe three behemoths trudged towards the Saturnine Wall, relentlessly advancing over the ragged, lifeless plain. At their heels came streams of armoured support: troop carriers, motorised mortars, wall-breaker gun carriages and assault belfry lifters. Range locked, the advancing giants began to fire. Plasma destructor mounts and inferno guns along the platform rims started to retch and spit searing pulses and beams of annihilation. Mega-bolters shrilled as they unleashed blizzards of explosive ordnance. Launch racks dispensed streams of darting anti-void missiles. Bulk las-blasters pumped in their arrestor frames as they kicked out giant spears of light.\n\nThe face of the Saturnine Wall around Oanis Tower lit up, as the storm of incoming fire kissed the shields. Vast backflash blinked as the voids struggled to absorb the bombardment. The wall guns responded immediately, some systems keying to automatic threat-registers, others manually commanded. Casemates, gun boxes in the tiered flank of the wall and main wall-top batteries commenced a staggering onslaught of defensive fire, raking and pummelling the forward voids of the plodding, stoic giants.\n\nMadius, waiting for the hardlink to be repaired, watched the catastrophic exchange. It was his first time facing mass-scale assault. It was his first time in any combat. Few in the Palace had ever seen a Donjon stride into war. They were awe-inspiring, leviathan machines, terrible in aspect.\n\nBut he had studied. He knew their weaknesses, and the compounding vulnerabilities that meant they were seldom used. It was all very impressive, but he was sure the wall's devastating firepower would crack their shields, and bring them all down, burning and torn, well short of the ramparts.\n\nThe Phoenician had made some changes to the siege engines he had been loaned.\n\nHis sound-wrights, inspired by acoustic nightmares whispered to them by the Neverborn, had masked the approach of the bulk engines in sonic fields that had turned the air opaque, and wrapped the Donjons in manufactured night from thirty kilometres out. The profligate gossips of Slaanesh had blurted secrets of noise-death to the disciples of the Kakophoni in their dreams, and psycho-sonic weapons had been fashioned and tuned, blasting their insanities from the foredecks of the siege engines, through gaping chromed vents, and broadcasting them on every frequency from infra to ultra. Already, they were generating a screaming aura ahead of the advance, a pattern of warped sound that made the air ring as though a giant tuning fork had been struck, and then the lingering note twisted into a distressing, atonal pitch that made blood shiver and tissue quake.\n\nThe screaming aura had been named the Sonance. It had already blown out Oanis' audio systems. It was shredding the vox. It was beginning to vibrate the wall's aegis envelope like a crystal glass set singing by a fingertip.\n\nLaudatory vents, their sweeping gold mouths wide open like the blooms of pitcher plants, sang siren-calls of discord and despair. Amplifiers swelled dark, sub-vocal groans of bereavement and misery on infrasonic waves. The roar of the carnodon contains frequencies of less than twenty hertz, below the threshold of human hearing, but the effects are still felt. The consequence is paralysing terror, pinning the prey. The prattling tattle-tales of the Slaaneshi feverdreams had gibbered this secret to the Kakophoni too, and the Emperor's Children had made fluted auramite horns, which sounded a dirge that provoked cold-sweat, inescapable dread.\n\nMadius shuddered. He was newborn and untried, but he was resolved. He couldn't understand why he was faltering. He turned, and saw that Auxilia units drawn up on the broad platform of the wall top were breaking and scattering, fleeing for the back steps and delivery ramps, dropping their weapons. Some had fallen, weeping.\n\n'Stop them! Kask, stop them!' he yelled. 'Discipline! Line order!'\n\nHe felt a shockwave, a concussive rush of pressure. Sections of the aegis above them had failed, and collapsed. The voids were tearing like thin silk. Immediately, enemy fire penetrated. Mega-bolter sprays raked the bulwark. Pulses of heavy las struck the alure, the fighting step and the rear parapet. Men were hurled into the air in geysers of flame. A plasma beam lanced in, and obliterated a gun turret entirely.\n\n'Maintain barrage!' Madius yelled, but no one could hear him. The air was screaming around him. He ran towards the fire control station.\n\nApproaching the wall, the striding Donjons dropped their voids. They began to take crippling damage immediately along their forward hulls, but it no longer mattered. They were less than a kilometre out. Launch units mounted on the platforms' decks began to fire, pitching drop pods into the air. Some were deflected by the shredding voids. Others were incinerated by the firmer sections of the shields. But many arced down onto the wall top, cratering the rockcrete as they impacted, claw legs dragging and gouging.\n\nSome struck the face of the wall, and fell, but then clung on, their landing claws becoming bristled hooks and grotesque arachnid legs. They began to climb the sheer wall like mites, or haul themselves into the open maws of mid-tier gun-boxes.\n\nMany plunged to the foot of the Saturnine Wall. They rolled on the broken waste of the foreland, righted themselves, then sprouted then Neverbred legs, and began to scuttle back up the wall like huntsman spiders.\n\nEmperor's Children were emerging on the wall top, purple, gold, pink, black, screaming their death hymns, and blasting their weapons. The Imperial Fists turned from the wall, hammering bolter fire at the disgorging drop pods, cutting down the arriving enemy, and being cut down in turn.\n\nMadius' boltgun was in his hand. He snapped off shots at nearby targets.\n\n'Hardline! Hardline!' he yelled through the doorway of fire control. 'Still trying to re-establish the link!' a technician yelled back at him. Sonic booms rolled across Oanis like thundercracks. Pockets of darkness popped open along the fighting platform, and figures dropped out of fissures that sound had warped and torn.\n\nThe champion elite of the III. Warriors too beautiful and ornamented to behold. They fell out of the warp fissures, which crumpled and closed behind them like the petals of black roses, then vanished like smoke, leaving only lingering snatches of choral plainsong behind them.\n\nThe figures fell, graceful, and landed on the wall on their feet, at a pace no quicker than a fast walk.\n\nOne dropped directly in the centre of the wide wall deck. It was larger than the rest, clad in a panoply of artificer armour, wrought in heliotrope and amaranthine, etched in gold. It landed in a crouch, its right hand clutching a slender, two-handed, single-edged blade.\n\nFulgrim rose slowly to his feet. His long white hair unwound, and ribboned out behind him in the night wind, like a pennant of shining satin.\n\nHe tipped his head back, beheld the devastation, and smiled.\n\n* * *\n\nIn grinding darkness, they sat unspeaking, strapped in tightly, shaking with every jolt and scrape, as the assault drill's cutters gripped and cut and burrowed through the flaw's friable shale core. The only light was the red glow of the compartment's overheads. The roar of the tunnelling process was loud and harsh, a grating clatter and scrape as broken rock spoil was devoured, spat past them, and expelled.\n\nHorus Aximand thought he could hear the breathing again, but it was just the men around him in the tight space. It was claustrophobic, imprisoning. It reminded him too much of the choking, pressing darkness he dreamed of all too often.\n\nThere was no vox. The rock was too thick. He wished he could ask Abaddon for an update, but the First Captain was aboard a separate drill.\n\nAximand glanced at Serac Lukash, his second. The man was a newborn, freshly raised to the ranks of the Sons of Horus, but from the set of his features, he was no doubt a son of Horus. Not a son like Aximand. A son of Horus as he currently was.\n\n'How long?' Aximand asked.\n\n'Auspex estimates sixteen minutes to breakthrough, lord,' Lukash replied.\n\n'Get set,' said Aximand.\n\n* * *\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster? Vigil, can you respond?'\n\nElg's patient repetition had become a near-mantra in the command post.\n\n'Still nothing, my lord,' she said. Red runes were blinking on the station desk that monitored wall action. That said enough. Though the link was down, Dorn knew that the defence systems of the Saturnine Wall, from Oanis wes"}
{"text":"ntly was.\n\n'How long?' Aximand asked.\n\n'Auspex estimates sixteen minutes to breakthrough, lord,' Lukash replied.\n\n'Get set,' said Aximand.\n\n* * *\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster? Vigil, can you respond?'\n\nElg's patient repetition had become a near-mantra in the command post.\n\n'Still nothing, my lord,' she said. Red runes were blinking on the station desk that monitored wall action. That said enough. Though the link was down, Dorn knew that the defence systems of the Saturnine Wall, from Oanis west, had engaged with full force. They were repelling a major assault.\n\n'Target tracks?' he asked.\n\n'We are continuing to receive track evaluations from the Grand Borealis, my lord,' Elg replied. 'Significant track patterns, bulk mass. It could be engines at the wall line. We're certainly reading drone tracks consistent with multiple tread vehicles. And ripple-echoes from detonations.'\n\n'But all at the surface?'\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'No sub-surface tracks?' Dorn pressed.\n\n'It's possible,' she replied. 'We are trying to separate the noise to determine that, but the surface track and accompanying acoustic is so considerable, it's masking any potential sub-surface pattern. To be honest, I don't understand the background noise level. Even bulk assault shouldn't-'\n\n'My lord!' an operator called out. 'Hardline link re-established.'\n\nDorn snatched up the vox-mic.\n\n'Vigil! This is Trickster! Make report!'\n\nThe voice on the other end was swallowed in a jumble of static and distortion.\n\n'Vigil, repeat that!' Dorn snapped. He glanced at Elg. 'Amplify the signal!'\n\n'-ster! Trickster, this is vigil!'\n\n'Madius. What is going on?'\n\n'Full assault, my lord. The Third Legion. Shields are ruptured. They are on the wall.'\n\n'Vigil, what strength?' Dorn asked. 'Report the Third Legion strength.'\n\n'Full Legion strength, my lord.'\n\nDorn looked at Sindermann, and then at Elg. Full Legion strength. The Emperor's Children were rumoured to have more than a hundred thousand legionaries in their ranks.\n\n'Advise the Grand Borealis,' Dorn said to Elg. 'If Madius is correct, we will need to effect immediate recomposition of the battle sphere.'\n\nHis mind began to race. A full Legion force. What could they spare? What could they move? They were already stretched to snapping point. Nothing could be withdrawn from Colossi or Gorgon. The rest of the Anterior Barbican line was beset from Marmax south, expecting worse, and could not be diluted.\n\nHe'd already sacrificed the Eternity Wall space port to make this happen.\n\nThe vox in his hand crackled again.\n\n'Trickster, Trickster, can you hear me?'\n\n'This is Trickster, Madius.'\n\n'Trickster, he's here.'\n\n'Say again, vigil,' said Dorn.\n\n'He's here, my lord. The Phoenician.'\n\nTWO\n\n* * *\n\nThe wounded tower\n\nPotential prize or actual\n\nSmall weather\n\nKatillon guntower had begun to collapse.\n\nWeak from the grand assault the day before, it had been further wounded by the renewed brutality of the traitor assault. Sections of the upper platform and armoured mantling had shorn away, and many of the gun-boxes had become burning sockets. Fafnir Rann was certain that the entire structure would fall in the next ten or fifteen minutes, if the current intensity of assault was sustained.\n\nIf it fell, slumping and disintegrating under its own pummelled weight, it would tear down a segment of the fourth circuit wall.\n\nAnd then the enemy would be in.\n\nThe Iron Warriors' mode of prosecution had been twin-headed, just as the Great Angel had expected. Two mass assaults - two determined escalades, sheltered under armoured sows and rolling belfries - were driving up either side of the tower, while petrary engines rained down destruction from a distance, and numberless subhuman hordes harried the entire length of the circuit wall to force a locked defence.\n\nRann admired it. He was a son of Dorn, an Imperial Fist, and siege war was their fundamental doctrine. This was how you broke a fortress down: prolonged erosion of the defensive lines, sustained and exhausting general assaults, and then surgical escalade, driving brute force against whatever part had revealed itself as vulnerable.\n\nIronic, that Katillon's structural weakness should have been the result of the defence's own savage thwarting of the foe the day before. They had, against all odds, broken back a storm force that should have overwhelmed the entire Bar, but Katillon had suffered in the numbing tumult.\n\nIt was no surprise. Rann had known from the start that the greatest test his Imperial Fists would face would be Perturabo's Legion, their only genuine rivals in this method of warfare. He hated them, but he appreciated their skill. In the heart of the fight, it seemed like mindless rampage, but it was ordered and purposeful, like a stonemason expertly applying the full force of his hammer and chisel against the one groove in a granite block that would split it.\n\nHe had, from his vantage, identified two of their leaders. Ormon Gundar and Bogdan Mortel, both chieftain warsmiths, both infamous from the Great Crusade for their deeds of sack and ruination.\n\nHe aimed to kill both of them.\n\nThey were the drivers of the assault. They had engineered the work thus far, and brought their forces through three circuit walls. Now they strained for the triumph, moving up from the backlines to join the assault they had masterminded, to taste glory first-hand. Take them down, and you killed the minds orchestrating the plan: you killed the brain, so the body flopped; you took the hammer and chisel to the granite. The Gorgon Bar garrison could not hope to match the invaders man for man, not even with the Lord of Baal at their side, and the Great Angel's lack of visibility was deeply troubling. The last time Rann had seen him, the Lord Sanguinius had seemed deathly sick, and tormented. If they lost him, if the Great Angel could not stand...\n\nRann shoved the thought from his mind. They were in the jaws of death, but if they took down the enemy host's conducting chieftains, the traitors might lose cohesion, and respite could still be won.\n\nA fine enough theory. The practice was different. The onslaught was so intense, it had him fixed, fetching assaulter after assaulter off the parapet and ladders with his axes. It was trying to hold back an ocean surge that was about to pour over a sea wall. And Rann was not at full strength. He still carried the pain and wounds of the battle at the Lion's Gate space port. He did not know if he was capable of breaking out and executing the decisive action.\n\nBut the theory was sound. Just as Gundar and Mortel drove the enemy's attack, so too he could devise and drive others to execute.\n\nHalen and his squads were a hundred metres away, as choked as he was. He saw them braced, heard them firing bolters on full-auto. An unthinkable expenditure of ammunition, utterly decried, except in extremis. Sepatus was gone, for reasons Rann did not understand. He hadn't seen the Great Angel in an hour. Furio, then, or Aimery, or Lux. Backed by the might of their bright blades, maybe he could...\n\nRann hacked a path along the fighting step, smashing Iron Warriors backwards off the shell-shot crenellations, kicking out ladders as they slammed against the stone. His squads flowed with him, covering the stretch, shields chipping as they took shots and deflected missiles. Emhon Lux was closest, leading his company in a defence of the balustrade, below Katillon's south side.\n\nAs he fought, Rann opened his vox.\n\n'Lux!'\n\n'Rann, good brother!'\n\n'I am close!'\n\n'I see you!'\n\n'I need your sword with mine, brother! We take their chiefs!'\n\n'In this? Fafnir, are you insane?' Lux replied. Then Rann heard him laugh. 'Where do we begin?'\n\nRann buried both axes in the chest of a Cataphractii Terminator, wrenched them out one by one, and shouldered the corpse off the step.\n\n'Katillon north side!' he yelled. 'Where their towers have drawn up! We'll use their own damn ramps to-'\n\nA granite projectile, as large as a Land Raider, and launched by one of the Stor-Bezashk trebuchets, struck the upper side of Katillon guntower. Masonry spilled down in a vast cascade of floury dust. The entire south half of the wounded tower top caved in, and collapsed, raining stone and men and ragged scraps of gun-mount. The projectile had made no sound until its impact. The tower's collapse drowned everything in an awful, earthquake rumble.\n\nSundered stone fell across the south side wall, buckling the bulwark and parapet. An immense section of sliding tower hit the wall like a guillotine blade, exploded into fragments, and toppled sideways into the yards and glacis behind the wall, crushing hundreds wailing on the ramps. Another section slid forward and plunged in one piece down the face of the tower, wiping it clean of scaling Iron Warriors and siege belfry bridges. A rearing siege belfry, battered and mangled by the fall of stone, twisted, tilted and pitched backwards into the enemy host.\n\nThe enormous dust cloud lifted by the tower's collapse choked the air for hundreds of metres on the south side wall. It rolled out slowly, leisurely, coating everything, blinding everyone. Stones and loose nibble were still pattering down. Rann struggled forward through the swirling dust. He came upon an Iron Warrior, who had been dropped to his hands and knees by a falling slab. He was trying to rise. Rann took his arm, hauled him to his feet, and then put an axe through his spine. In Fair War, you did not put a man down like a dog when he was fallen. You let him stand, no matter what kind of man he had become.\n\nA few metres on, he found Lux. The petrary boulder that had decapitated Katillon, still entirely intact, had dropped onto the wall top. It had crushed Emhon Lux beneath it.\n\nHe was still alive. He lay on his back, his legs crushed under the rock. Stone dust caked his face and plate like fine powder, making the blood leaking from his mouth more livid. His eyes and mouth were wide open, in an attitude of surprise.\n\nNo time for words. Ran"}
{"text":"ou let him stand, no matter what kind of man he had become.\n\nA few metres on, he found Lux. The petrary boulder that had decapitated Katillon, still entirely intact, had dropped onto the wall top. It had crushed Emhon Lux beneath it.\n\nHe was still alive. He lay on his back, his legs crushed under the rock. Stone dust caked his face and plate like fine powder, making the blood leaking from his mouth more livid. His eyes and mouth were wide open, in an attitude of surprise.\n\nNo time for words. Rann couldn't shift the rock, alone. He turned, as dark warriors of the IV came scrambling over the parapet in the haze, and began to swing at them, keeping them back from Lux's helpless form.\n\n'Emhon! Emhon!' he yelled as he struck away shield and blade, and dug axe-edge into ceramite and bone. There were three on him now, four. Seven. Ten. 'Emhon, tell me! Where is the Great Angel? We need him now!'\n\nThe only answer, a wet gurgle from Lux's blood-flooded throat.\n\n'Lux!' Rann roared. 'Where is Lord Sanguinius? Where is the Great Angel?'\n\n* * *\n\nDorn had summoned the commanders of the Helios and Devotion kill teams. He spoke with them in the hall outside the command post. Thane listened, solemn. Sigismund took it as well as Dorn had expected him to.\n\n'Are we abandoning this strategy?' Sigismund asked.\n\n'No,' said Dorn. 'But we are obligated to adjust. Assemble your teams, and follow me to the wall top.'\n\n'So the enemy has dismayed you?' Sigismund pressed.\n\n'The enemy is the enemy,' said Dorn, not rising to Sigismund's scathing tone. 'We can continue here, waiting in expectation of a possibility, or we can move in response to an actuality. The wall is assaulted. I he defenders need immediate reinforcement.'\n\n'Do you believe this is the foe's design, my lord?' Thane asked. 'A full strike at the surface defence?'\n\n'I do not,' said Dorn. 'It shows none of Perturabo's skill. It exploits nothing of the secret weakness that makes Saturnine the place to strike.'\n\n'So the real strike is still coming?' Thane asked.\n\n'I consider it likely.'\n\n'Why, then we wait and hold!' Sigismund snapped. 'This is the very prize we-'\n\n'Lose that tone, Sigismund,' said Dorn. 'I have told you my command. We either wait here for a possible prize, or we go aloft where a genuine one has manifested. Not the prize we expected or even hoped for, but a serious trophy none the less.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'But nothing,' said Dorn. 'Wall Master Madius reports that Fulgrim brings his entire host. Unchecked, they could break the Ultimate Wall. Is that something you'd allow?'\n\n'No,' said Sigismund.\n\n'Is Fulgrim... a distraction, lord?' asked Thane. 'You told us you anticipated a wall-face assault as a distraction?'\n\n'If he is, he's a distraction bigger and bolder than anything we might have imagined,' Dorn replied. 'We make our best predictions. We adjust appropriately when we see reality unfold in actual time.'\n\n'My lord,' said Thane. 'If your prediction was correct, and you must have believed it was to make all this preparedness... If you were right, and Lupercal or some comparable agency strikes here, what then?'\n\n'Yes,' said Sigismund. 'What then?'\n\n'Five kill teams remain,' said Dorn. 'I understand the balance, or I'd have taken all of you. Five kill teams. Five hundred men. Five hundred good men.'\n\n'Good men,' Sigismund nodded. 'But good enough?'\n\n'They are armed with surprise, Sigismund,' said Dorn. 'If they can't stop Lupercal with that potent weapon, then you being here is not going to make a difference.'\n\nSigismund looked away, swallowed fury creasing his face.\n\n'But you being here would, Praetorian,' said Thane.\n\nDorn sighed. 'I have a choice, Maximus,' he said gently. 'Potential prize or actual. I must respond to real and present threats, not imagined ones. If Lupercal, or whoever, comes here, we will cut our cloth accordingly, and have this conversation again.'\n\n'No doubt very quickly,' said Sigismund.\n\n'No doubt.' Dorn looked at them. 'Get to your stations,' he said.\n\n* * *\n\nDiamantis entered the command post.\n\n'I have operational command in the Praetorian's absence,' he said simply. Mistress Elg nodded. Arkhan Land had arrived from his laboratory post just a few minutes earlier.\n\n'You?' Land asked. 'What, is everything scrapped then?'\n\n'No,' said Diamantis. 'Are your systems ready?'\n\n'People keep asking me that. Of course they are.'\n\n'We need to monitor our readiness,' said Diamantis. Sindermann could tell how little the Huscarl cared for the magos. He seemed to find him even more aggravating than the interrogator order. 'You will advise of any sudden technical irregularities?' Diamantis added.\n\nLand looked affronted. 'So long as you advise me of any sudden impending brutal death irregularities,' he replied. He stared at Elg. 'Is there really no sign of anything?' he asked.\n\n'Mistress?' Diamantis asked.\n\n'Still no target track or sub-surface echo,' she replied. 'We maintain systematic tracking as before.'\n\n'Maybe I should tinker with your systems and improve your-' Land began.\n\n'Just get to your station and be ready, please,' said Diamantis. Land glowered at him.\n\n'The waiting,' Land said, 'is driving me mad.'\n\n'Be thankful you only have the waiting to do that to you,' replied the Huscarl.\n\n'Gentlemen,' said Sindermann, stepping forward, 'Lyclonus writes that a calm mind is the key to accomplishing-'\n\n'Stick your books up your arse, history man,' said Land. He pushed past Sindermann, and strode away down the hall.\n\nSindermann glanced at Diamantis.\n\n'I see what you mean,' he remarked.\n\n* * *\n\nThe grinding of the Mantolith's drill head was incessant. Abaddon looked across at Urran Gauk, line captain of the Justaerin.\n\n'Three more minutes,' he said.\n\n'My lord,' one of the machine drivers called back. 'We are close to striking bedrock. We must-'\n\n'Keep going,' Abaddon ordered. He looked back at Gauk. 'Three more minutes,' he repeated. 'Prepare.'\n\nAbaddon, and every man in the rumbling machine, raised the snarling helms of their jet-black Terminator plate and locked them in place.\n\n* * *\n\nLoken paced. He spun Rubio's blade in his hand: two turns forward, one back, snap into grip, then two back and one forward.\n\n'You'll wear it out,' said Leod Baldwin, his squad chief. Loken looked at the Imperial Fist.\n\n'Can you practise too much?' he asked.\n\n'Not as long as you can perform on the day,' replied Baldwin.\n\nLoken looked past the waiting rows of his kill team. The deployment hall where Sigismund and his men had been preparing was empty, and had been for ten minutes.\n\n'You think they've found better things to do?' Loken asked.\n\n'What could be better than this?' Baldwin replied.\n\n* * *\n\nAhriman and seven initiates of the Order of Ruin bowed to one knee in a semicircle as Magnus approached. Rolling mist, pungent with fyceline, drifted up from the ravished plains below Colossi. The fortress gate was a distant, marmoreal ghost.\n\n'The summoned are refreshed from their onslaught,' Magnus observed, 'and the spirits of our enemy are worked thin by fear and doubt. Let's complete this rite of Ruin, oh my fair sons. The Pale Lord chides me, and I will not test his patience. He wishes to advance, and so, in my way, do I.'\n\nAhriman rose. 'Colossi falls,' he said.\n\nThe others rose too. They turned as one to face the distant bulwarks of the Colossi Gate. Their eyes shone with the pitiless light of white stars.\n\nAlong the broken ridge on either side of them, the sorcerer-warriors of the Thousand Sons stepped up, cloaks and robes blowing out in the rising gale. A winding line of a hundred, five hundred, a thousand, following the contour of the ragged ridgeline, all murmuring the same soft litanies of overthrow.\n\nThe rain began, and turned into stinging sleet. The churned ooze before them became sequinned with pools and puddles, every surface dancing and splashing in the pelt.\n\nThe ooze itself began to stir and lap, as though the mud was alive. Down by the bastion's wall, the homed and antlered daemons roused from their slumber, and rose to their feet.\n\n* * *\n\nNaranbaatar coughed up blood.\n\nHe spat, and wiped his mouth.\n\n'Now they stir,' he said. 'Now they come.'\n\nHe had stripped off his helm, so his brother seers could mark his face with stripes of fire-ash and pigments. Flies were settling in the corners of his eyes and mouth.\n\n'Marshal Agathe?' Raldoron called.\n\nHer attention was lost. She was staring at the wall of the rooftop chamber. It was beginning to melt. Lime plaster was slipping down like mucus, and the exposed stone beneath was sponging into sludge.\n\n'What is...' she stammered.\n\n'The sons of Magnus focus their power upon us,' said Naranbaatar. 'They channel it through the warp beasts at our gates. Through them, what you think of as reality becomes fluid. It shapes to their will, like wet clay at the hands of a potter.'\n\nAgathe looked around at the Stormseer.\n\n'What shape do they want us?' she asked.\n\n'Flat, I imagine,' he said patiently. 'Like a slab. Like a grave.'\n\n'Lord Valdor and the Khan await,' said Raldoron. 'We must begin.'\n\n'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.' She gathered herself. 'At once.'\n\nShe led them out of the chamber, trying to ignore the soft, squelching feel of the stone floor underfoot. The flies were even thicker in the access vault to the tower top. They swirled in a black blizzard. She could see maggots boiling from the stone walls and floor of the walk, as though it were rancid flesh. The men posted here were already dead, slumped, slack and cadaverous, strings of writhing larvae dripping from their hanging mouths, their eyes rotting in their skulls.\n\nAgathe led the party on, resolute, walking ahead of Raldoron and the Stormseers, unchaining the gas shields and blast shutters. She had insisted on being part of this. She could feel her skin crawling, insects beneath her clothes. She could feel bruises blooming on her flesh.\n\nShe opened the last hatch, and took them once again onto the fighting platform at the top of Artemis Tower. This time, Raldoron did not ask he"}
{"text":"larvae dripping from their hanging mouths, their eyes rotting in their skulls.\n\nAgathe led the party on, resolute, walking ahead of Raldoron and the Stormseers, unchaining the gas shields and blast shutters. She had insisted on being part of this. She could feel her skin crawling, insects beneath her clothes. She could feel bruises blooming on her flesh.\n\nShe opened the last hatch, and took them once again onto the fighting platform at the top of Artemis Tower. This time, Raldoron did not ask her to go back. He understood her intent, and her determination to serve.\n\nThey stepped into swirling bacterial clouds, and a deluge of hail. The entire tower structure was being gnawed away, stone melting like ice, becoming putty, becoming sappy fluid. The bulwarks had already slumped, like soggy paper. Burr's head had washed away. They could hear the rising roar of the daemons below.\n\nRaldoron held her back. The Stormseers advanced. They stood, Naranbaatar foremost, the other two behind him. They raised their staffs towards the thrashing sky. They began to chant, though the hail was too loud for her to hear the words. Where it fell, the hail made dimples in the jellifying stone.\n\nAgathe knew nothing of magic, or whatever word they cared to call it. She didn't want to know. Magic was as far from Hatay-Antakya Hive as she ever wanted to travel. Magic was a place she decided she would never go again. But she had, as a career soldier, pledged her service to the Emperor, and to Terra. She had promised to give her life, or her death, as a marshal militant, and the Agathe family did not break their oaths. If this phantasmagoric nightmare had to be part of that service, so be it.\n\nShe knew nothing of magic, but the principles of this rite had been explained to her. Naranbaatar, who seemed remarkably kind and gentle for a Space Marine, a White Scars Space Marine at that, had set it out for her while he waited for his fellow seers to mix the pigments, select the correct charms and burn the proper herbs.\n\n'Seers of the Storm are exactly that,' he had said. 'Our working is strong, stronger than most, but only under the wide sky. We call upon the elemental anima to aid us. But there is no wide sky here, no sky like the one we were born under, no open space that is our preference to make battle upon.\n\n'So we are few. Just three of us here, at this hour. Weak, then. And the sons of Magnus Single-eye are strong and many. Their workings are fierce, and they draw upon the dark anima. They drink straight from the Neversea, so their power is not constrained or limited. They are boundless, because they have accepted power that we would never touch.'\n\n'So how,' Agathe had asked, 'how in the name of hell can you do anything? You said you had a plan, an initiative. I took you to the tower top so you could assess whatever it is you assess for-'\n\nNaranbaatar had raised his hand to quiet her. Ungloved, it was covered in threaded tattoos. She had been able to see them under the crawling skin of blowflies.\n\n'High up is good,' he had said. 'We needed to smell the air.'\n\nAgathe had stared at him through the smudged lenses of her gas hood.\n\n'Are you shitting me, lord? Smell the air?'\n\nAnd he had laughed.\n\n'Yes, Aldana Agathe. The air. Listen, there is no wide sky here. The great sky that once overarched these mountains is gone, as gone as the mountains are gone. What sky there is, is small, and it is closed. The void shields. The aegis of the Palace. Everything is locked in and napped, and this has been so for months.\n\n'There is still weather though,' he had said. 'Artificial weather systems. What is the word?'\n\n'Microclimates,' she had replied.\n\nNaranbaatar had nodded. 'Microclimates. Weather systems building and breeding under the shields, fed by smoke and dust, and blood vapour, and piss-rain, and air, breathed a billion times over, fed and stirred by impact winds and blast concussion. Toxic weather, poisoned weather, spoiled weather. Small weather.\n\n'But weather, even so,' he had added. Trapped so tightly, it is concentrated, compressed, furious with power it cannot release. It is not the elemental anima we are accustomed to, but it has an anima. You took us high up so that we could smell the air, and know it, and learn its name and its pain. And now we do. And now the sons of Magnus Single-eye are breaking down the shields that trap it.'\n\n'To get at us.'\n\n'To get at us, they are setting the small weather free.'\n\nAgathe huddled close to Raldoron, hail blitzing off them both. Nothing seemed to be happening. They had been ridiculous to expect anything to halt the-\n\nA tiny spark blinked away from the tip of Naranbaatar's raised staff. It was small, but so sudden it made her jump. The spark, no bigger than a firefly, darted into the hail and the cataclysmic sky.\n\nThe hail stopped, abruptly.\n\nThe lightning began.\n\nDazzling pillars of blue-white light, too fierce to see, shafted straight down from the clouds. Four, five, six, there and gone again; then another, two more. Each one made a noise like the sky tearing. Each one hit the ground in front of the Colossi Gate with such force, the world shook.\n\nThe crack and boom of each discharge was like the concussion of a howitzer. The shock staggered them back. Raldoron steadied her.\n\nShe pushed forward. She wanted to see. Raldoron stopped her short of the platform edge, before she stepped too far and the liquescent edges of the roof gave out under her.\n\nThe lightning did not let up. Shaft after shaft ripped down, each one as thick as a bastion pier. The strikes were so bright they hurt her eyes, despite the lenses of her hood. Some flashed, there and gone. Others lingered, contorting and crackling, for long seconds before fading into after-image phantoms.\n\nThe seers were using the aegis. The White Scars Stormseers were using the broken envelope of the voids as a lid to focus and pressurise their power, and unleash the rage of what Naranbaatar had called 'small weather'.\n\nThey were amplifying their elemental gifts to match the overwhelmingly more potent talents of the Thousand Sons.\n\nBelow Colossi, in the blast zone, the Neverborn were writhing. Some had fallen, spasming, suffused with electrical discharge. Others were being pinned to the mud by coruscating spears of lightning. Others were howling and stumbling back towards the enemy lines, their flesh and antlers burning with corposant.\n\nTheir will was broken. They were freshly birthed into the realspace of Terra, with all its thrilling new textures and flavours, but it had stung them. They were recoiling from the unexpected pain.\n\nFor now.\n\n'Once the shields are gone,' said Raldoron, 'this is not a trick the seers will be able to duplicate. So let us make the most of it.'\n\nAgathe nodded. She keyed her vox.\n\n'Open the sortie gates,' she said. 'Unleash.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe sally ports and iris shutters of Colossi bastion opened. Bright missiles raced out, some passing the gates before they were fully wide. The missiles were gold and red blurs.\n\nThey accelerated.\n\nIt was Constantin Valdor's turn to ride out. He led the pursuit prosecution. His voidbike flared ahead of the rushing Legio Custodes Kataphraktoi of Agamatus Squadron. Gyrfalcon jetbikes screamed as they chased his vehicle, hounds baying at the heels of the hunt master.The Khan could not sit by watching at such a moment. He led his own riders out in a murderous wave behind Valdor's formation.\n\nValdor and his Custodians killed from the saddle, running down the limping, fleeing Neverborn, swinging their guardian spears, one-handed, to hack them through the legs and back as they passed. Hamstrings sliced, spines snapped. Agathe's observation had been correct: the Custodians, more than any other warriors, possessed some numinous quality that could render true harm to the Neverborn.\n\nValdor gripped his spear tight, jaw set, racing into the kills. He braced his mind. The Emperor had gifted him with one of the most potent weapons in the arsenals of the Palace, but the spear carried a price. Each blow he struck with it taught him something of the things he killed. Each spear thrust brought knowledge that increased his understanding of the Primordial Annihilator. The golden spear made him a better warrior, but its precious lessons were hard to bear, even for him.\n\nNow he learned from raw Neverborn.\n\nHe steeled himself, and struck anyway.\n\nDaemons fell, hobbled, screaming, sprawling and clawing in the mud. Gilded riders banked, turned, and came again, raining execution strikes with spear blades, thrusting with lances, or raking fallen bodies with their lastrum cannons. Some Custodians dismounted, and strode pitilessly towards their crippled prey. They hefted their gleaming spears with both hands, raised them above their heads, and brought them down.\n\nThe Neverborn could not die, but their new flesh-forms had been traumatised by the Stormseers' battle-magic. The Custodians' blows, impelled by the will of the Emperor, which blessed them and flowed through their limbs, cut daemon-flesh apart, and broke giant bones. Black blood splashed up, like welled oil. The Neverborn shrieked and shrivelled as the meat forms they had dressed in to visit the mortal plane failed them, and were destroyed.\n\nClosing in behind Valdor's squadrons, the Khan slowed his voidbike. He stared at the surgical slaughter as he coasted past. There was something surreal, something inhuman about the scene: gleaming jetbikes, masterpieces of artifice, hovering on idle as their riders - noble giants of wrought gold, majestic in aspect - stood upon the smouldering field and calmly, with flat effect, thrashed blows down on the pathetic, mangled carcasses of giant beasts, shredding, chopping and dismembering them into smaller and smaller parts, long past the instant of their deaths. Beautiful, gleaming gods mechanically butchered their helpless foe, reducing them to scraps in clinical acts of unconditional degradation as apocalyptic lightning split the sky"}
{"text":"n idle as their riders - noble giants of wrought gold, majestic in aspect - stood upon the smouldering field and calmly, with flat effect, thrashed blows down on the pathetic, mangled carcasses of giant beasts, shredding, chopping and dismembering them into smaller and smaller parts, long past the instant of their deaths. Beautiful, gleaming gods mechanically butchered their helpless foe, reducing them to scraps in clinical acts of unconditional degradation as apocalyptic lightning split the sky above them.\n\nIt was complete, ft was macabre. It was victory, but it didn't look like the one Jaghatai had wished for. It was unsettlingly obdurate and detached, an almost ritual deed of obliteration that seemed unworthy of the demigod Custodians, as though they were indifferently rendering meat for some sacrificial tribute.\n\nBut it was victory. That was the word that mattered. The Khan turned in his saddle, raised his dao, and flicked the blade in a gesture of command.\n\nJaghatai Khan and his riders swept past Valdor's extermination, and gunned for the ridge, accelerating, their weapons thundering as they came into range.\n\nThe winding line of the Thousand Sons vanished into the air as they drew near, leaving nothing but fumes of acrid mist that spiralled and whirled in the wakes of the White Scars bikes.\n\n* * *\n\n'A strange turn,' murmured Ahriman, slowing his breath to normal.\n\nHe rose to his feet. 'Colossi holds.'\n\nMagnus made no reply.\n\n'The Pale King will be displeased,' Ahriman said.\n\n'Damn him and his damned soul,' Magnus whispered. 'He must learn the patience of Perturabo, regroup his cowering Legion, and make new plans. The siege is ours to win. Time stands with us, and we will outlast Colossi.'\n\n'So, do we rally and assist him with-'\n\n'Let him prove himself,' said Magnus. 'Let him show Lupercal what he can do. We sapped their spirit, wore them down-'\n\n'But we failed to dose,' said Ahriman. 'Dorn will see this as a victory.'\n\n'Dorn can continue to delude himself,' said the Crimson King. 'Let Jaghatai and Constantin celebrate. It will be their last chance. This was no failure, my son. I got what I came for.'\n\nHe walked away, down the wind-scoured steps of broken Corbenic.\n\nAhriman followed. There were preparations to make.\n\n* * *\n\nKatarin Elg sat up straight, and peered at her display.\n\n'Confirm that track,' she said.\n\n'Confirmed,' said the operator beside her.\n\n'What do you have?' Diamantis asked, stepping forward.\n\n'Target track,' she replied. 'We have just managed to tease it out of the acoustic backwash. It's a faint echo, barely visible against whatever fury is hammering against the wall.'\n\nShe looked at him.\n\n'Confirmed sub-surface target track, Huscarl,' she said. 'Approaching rapidly. Trajectory predicts zone mortalis Gamma.'\n\nDiamantis activated his datacast.\n\n'This is Trickster, this is Trickster,' he said. 'Alert kill team Naysmith. Incoming target echo confirmed. Expected, vicinal Mortalis Gamma. Deploy!'\n\n* * *\n\nThe Mantolith juddered hard as it ate its way out of the flaw's shale and met unyielding bedrock.\n\n'Lord, we can go no further,' one of the drivers protested.\n\n'Full stop!' Abaddon ordered.\n\nThe drivers threw levers, and the drills died with a whine. The massive vehicle, inclined at a thirty degree angle, shuddered to a halt.\n\nAbaddon's spearhead unstrapped and rose, braced upright on the sloping deck. The magi in the rear section were bringing the internal systems to power. A deep hum began to build.\n\n'Set homer beacons,' Abaddon ordered, his voice a crackle through his visor speakers.\n\nEach Terminator voice-activated the unit under his chestplate.\n\n'Weapons up, weapons set,' he said. There was an answering clatter of metal.\n\n'I'll say this once,' Abaddon growled. 'Let us illuminate. Lupercal!' 'Lupercal!' the men answered.\n\nAbaddon turned his head, and looked at the lead magos in the rear of the craft. He waited. The Mechanicum adept nodded.\n\n'Brace for teleport,' said Abaddon.\n\nTHREE\n\n* * *\n\nThe zones mortalis\n\nThe Termite carrier erupted into the open air. It breached the underground chamber at the intersection of the floor and the west wall, rupturing flagstones and strewing bricks and ashlar blocks as the wall face split around its bulk. Its huge whirring drill and bore-heads, caked with taupe shale from the slurry of the flaw, slowly droned to a halt.\n\nThere was a moment's quiet. Nothing stirred, except the retarding whirr of the deactivated drilling gear and the slither of settling stones and brick fragments. Dust drifted in the gloomy air.\n\nThe armoured hatches of the half-buried craft slammed open. Dark figures deployed with fast, rehearsed grace. Cthonae Reaver Squad, Sons of Horus, the tactical elite of 18th Company. Tybalt Marr led them, flanked by his assault captain, Xan Ekosa. They spread out, weapons raised, stalking across the chamber.\n\nMarr, a veteran company captain, one of the Lupercal's very best, had been proving his combat ability since the Great Crusade, since the time of the Legion's old name. He was proud to stand among the Warmaster's finest sons. He scanned the scene, using his visor display to compare an auspex review of the location against old, archive maps of the Palace that First Captain Abaddon had supplied.\n\n'Basement vault, Canasaw House, Saturnine District,' he voxed.\n\n'Verified,' Ekosa voxed back, making his own visor-read. 'Plan is not a precise match to stored schematic, my captain.'\n\n'Stored schematics are old, Ekosa.'\n\n'Look there,' said Ekosa. 'It's been extended. Built out. The archway widened and banked out.'\n\n'Dorn has spent years fortifying-'\n\n'That brickwork is new,' said Ekosa. 'He fortified every basement?'\n\n'He's nothing if not thorough,' replied Marr. He raised his left fist, and made two quick gestures. Cthonae fanned forward.\n\nAssault formation. Achieve the surface. Secure. Connect with other units as they emerge. The First Captain's orders had been clear. Maybe they were the first up? It didn't matter. There was honour in being first in, and honour in this action. No time to pause. A spearhead stayed in motion. That was the enshrined doctrine, and Marr had used it enough times to know that it worked.\n\nThey had the razor edge of secrecy on their side.\n\nBut Ekosa was right. That brickwork was fresh. There was something off about this place...\n\n'Locate surface,' he voxed. 'Fast progress to street access. Secure location.'\n\n'Lupercal!' Ekosa snapped back.\n\nThe squad moved again, weapons up.\n\nThe first bolter shell hit Xan Ekosa square in the faceplate, and annihilated his head. His body was still on its way down when the full barrage began. Bolter and las-fire, bracketing them from three different directions, howled out of the darkness.\n\nTybalt Marr started to shoot, bracing against his boltgun as it shook, full-auto. He didn't know what he was firing at. Men either side of him were shooting too, yelling. The chamber flickered with fast-strobing muzzle flash. Bodies crashed over, ripped apart from multiple angles. Blood sprayed the walls and floor. Gouts of it splashed the vaulted ceiling. Shards of fractured armour scattered and bounced like strewn coins.\n\nCthonae Reaver Squad, pride of the 18th, was rendered extinct in slightly less than fourteen seconds.\n\nSilence.\n\nSmoke billowed in the chamber's cold air. It wreathed across the heaped and twisted bodies. Blood gurgled and dripped from exploded black plate.\n\nThe kill team emerged from the shadows, guns low and ready. They walked forward.\n\n'Headshots to every one,' ordered Loken. 'No exceptions. I don't care if they look dead. Baldwin? Clean out that tunneller with a flamer, then blow its motivators.'\n\n'Yes, captain.'\n\nLoken walked among the dead. Cthonae, the 18th. So this is where that proud legacy ends. Behind him, single shots began to ring out as his men picked through the corpses, pressing bolt pistols to each helmet in turn.\n\nHe found Marr. He was on his back. Gunfire had blown out his right hip, and severed his right arm at the elbow. A bolt-round had hit his neck and torn his helmet off. It had taken a substantial portion of his head with it. His last breaths bubbled through blood. He gazed up, stupefied, with his one remaining eye.\n\nHe saw a Luna Wolf standing over him. A death dream, surely, a flash of the past flitting across his vision as he fell away. The last thing he would see. The thing he wanted to see.\n\n'Garviel...?' he wheezed, bloody foam clotting his mangled lips.\n\nLoken crouched down.\n\n'To the death, Tybalt,' he said. He put his bolter in Marr's mouth, and pulled the trigger.\n\n* * *\n\n'Naysmith reports force annihilation, zone mortalis Gamma,' said Elg calmly. 'Kills confirmed. Vehicle disabled. No losses'\n\nDiamantis picked up the vox-mic. 'Naysmith, this is Trickster,' he said. 'Declare contact.'\n\n'Sixteenth,' the vox hissed back. 'Cthonae Reaver and the company captain.'\n\n'Acknowledged, Naysmith. Stand by.'\n\nSindermann watched the Huscarl. Diamantis was impassive. The XVI. The Praetorian had been right. The Sons of Horus themselves.\n\n'Tracking?' Diamantis said.\n\n'Stand by...' Elg replied, then very rapidly added, 'Confirmed sub-surface track, approaching rapidly. Trajectory predicts zone mortalis Delta. Two additional confirmed sub-surface tracks. Trajectory predicts zone mortalis Alpha. Additional track, predict mortalis Beta. All running.'\n\nBefore she had finished speaking, Diamantis had activated his link and begun speaking over her.\n\n'This is Trickster, this is Trickster, alert kill team Black Dog. Incoming target echo, expected, vicinal Mortalis Delta. Deploy! Alert kill team Strife. Incoming, two targets, expected, vicinal Mortalis Alpha. Deploy! Alert kill team Seventh. Incoming target, expected, vicinal Mortalis Beta. Deploy!'\n\nIt was all so frighteningly calm. Fascinated, Sindermann watched the post's war board. The moment she had acquired the first target, Elg had punched up a hololith display of the entire Saturnine operation. He'd been astonished at the"}
{"text":", alert kill team Black Dog. Incoming target echo, expected, vicinal Mortalis Delta. Deploy! Alert kill team Strife. Incoming, two targets, expected, vicinal Mortalis Alpha. Deploy! Alert kill team Seventh. Incoming target, expected, vicinal Mortalis Beta. Deploy!'\n\nIt was all so frighteningly calm. Fascinated, Sindermann watched the post's war board. The moment she had acquired the first target, Elg had punched up a hololith display of the entire Saturnine operation. He'd been astonished at the scale of it. The chart showed, as a milky ghost, the ragged spur of the flaw, the only drill-navigable part of the subcrust. It ran like a jerk of lightning across the screen, a pale river locked in impervious bedrock. Over that ran a schematic of the basement levels, almost three kilometres of interlocking, built-out and conjoined cellars, linked by tunnels and clearance channels. A considerable area of Saturnine District had been seized, and the basements opened and connected to cover every part of the flaw that rose to within breaching distance of the surface. All the chambers directly over the flaw had been marked as zones mortalis, and ciphered Alpha through Sigma. These were the killing floors, blocked out, reinforced, and girt with inward-facing glacis, redans and other retrenchments. Adjoining those, but not overlapping the flaw itself, were the deployment halls, one through seven, the munition stores, the support chambers, an infirmary, the command post, and Land's manufactory lab. Beyond these were sealable causeways, and secondary chambers for fall-back. On top of the schematic plans lay another graphic overlay, showing the intricate system of ducts and pipes that connected Land's lab to various locations along the fault.\n\nIt seemed so simple, so ruthlessly logical. The only places where infiltrators could emerge were directly inside the zones mortalis, where kill teams would be waiting for them.\n\nI suppose, thought Sindermann, it all depends on how many units try to get in.\n\nAnd who they are.\n\n'Confirmed sub-surface track,' Elg called out. 'Trajectory predicts zone mortalis Theta. Additional, confirmed sub-surface track. Trajectory predicts zone mortalis Rho. All running.'\n\nDiamantis was already relaying.\n\n'This is Trickster, this is Trickster, alert kill team Brightest. Incoming target echo, expected, vicinal Mortalis Theta. Deploy! Alert kill team Naysmith. Incoming target, expected, vicinal Mortalis Rho. Deploy!'\n\n* * *\n\nThe power hum rose, and then fell away again, querulously.\n\n'Try it again!' Abaddon snapped.\n\n'Lord First Captain, that will overload the grid,' the lead magos began to explain.\n\n'Again!' Abaddon demanded.\n\n'We are right up against the bedrock, lord,' replied the magos, 'because you drove us so deep. The mineral density of the lithified structure is denying us a secure teleport lock. We have attempted transfer six times. Without due cooling time, or an immediate repositioning of this vehicle, another attempt will burn the grid out.'\n\nAbaddon took a step towards the Mechanicum elder.\n\n'Don't make him come to you,' Gauk warned. 'Do it again.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe trained guns of kill team Strife greeted Arnok Assault of the 25th in Mortalis Alpha, and cut them to ribbons. The slaughtered Space Marines had no cover. Their bodies slammed back against the hull of their Terrax-pattern Termite, blown open and ruined.\n\n'Consolidate!' Nathaniel Garro told his subordinate, Gercault, as he reloaded his bolt pistol. Trickster said two.'\n\nThe Imperial Fist nodded. He sent a squad to sanction-check Strife's first set of kills, and they fanned out under the low vault of Mortalis Alpha.\n\n'This is Strife! Garro voxed. 'Alpha clear. Target one extinct.'\n\n'Acknowledged, Strife. Second target expected, vicinal, immediate.'\n\n'Understood, Trickster.'\n\nGarro crouched. He put his left hand down, palm flat, on the flagstones Behind him, several confirmation shots boomed out.\n\n'Quiet!' Garro called.\n\nHe shifted his palm. A vibration, very faint. A tremble.\n\nGarro raised his hand, and pointed.\n\n'West quarter,' he said.\n\n'Move,' ordered Gercault, repositioning the fire-teams. They could hear the approaching rumble now. Men braced, bringing up their weapons to ready.\n\nThe second Termite, the big Plutona-pattern, ploughed up through the floor in the very corner of the chamber. Its spinning drill heads flung out scraps of crushed flagstone. Dust spewed out.\n\nIt had overshot. The tunnelling head gnawed into the wall, spraying brick, and within seconds, the huge machine had dragged half of itself through into Mortalis Eta.\n\nGercault's sections hammered the stern hatches as soon as they opened into Alpha, mowing down the Sons of Horus as they emerged. Bodies dropped. Some legionaries fell back inside the machine, trying to use the hull as cover so they could return shots. The first enemy shots of the action were fired.\n\nGarro was already running, two squads at his back. As Gercault prosecuted the rear hatches, Garro crossed under the connecting arch to tackle the forward hatches in Eta.\n\nBlack-clad legionaries were jumping clear, the machine's drill heads still spinning. Thedra Destroyer Squads, of the 18th. They ripped out bursts of gunfire at Garro as his men appeared. The Imperial Fist beside him sprawled, gutshot. Garro dropped behind one of the rockcrete firing walls Dorn had erected, and returned fire. He hit one of Thedra. The impact of the rounds from Garro's Paragon gun hurled the ruptured body back into the drill heads, which vaporised it in a crunching blitz of red fog.\n\n'Heavy!' Garro yelled. He had men shooting from the firing wall, and enemy fire exploding against the wall face and off the ceiling.\n\nHis Murder section arrived, lugging the support weapons. Mathane opened up with his lascannon across the low wall, tearing las-bolts the size of machetes at Thedra. Orontis emptied the saddle mags of his arm-slung autocannon, riddling the kill-site with high-rate fire and punching hundreds of holes in the Plutona's hull.\n\nIn Alpha, Gercault's squads had scoured the rear section, and tossed fragmentation bombs into the back hatches. The contained blast drove flame and grit out of the fore-hatches in Eta, staggering the last of Thedra's Destroyers forward. Orontis cut them down, dead casings spewing out of his cannon's ejector like sea-spray.\n\nHe ceased fire, and tilted the rotary barrels up. Smoke boiled from the muzzle, and the cyclic motor purred to a standstill.\n\n'Consolidate!' Garro ordered.\n\n* * *\n\nIn Mortalis Delta, Endryd Haar stopped punching the Sons of Horus legionary with his power fist, paused, then decided on one more for luck. The traitor had died several punches ago, so it was more about venting grievance.\n\nHaar tossed the mangled body aside. It hit the stone floor like a sac k of broken glass.\n\n'Well?' he rumbled.\n\n'Kills confirmed,' the Blackshield's squad chief told him. They had met a Plutona coming in, and opened fire before it had even begun to unhatch, cracking it open like a meal-can to scoop out the contents.\n\n'Black Dog to Trickster,' Haar said. 'This one's done. Delta is cleared. Where now?'\n\n'Stand by, Black Dog. Deploy to Mortalis Epsilon. Incoming target echoes, expected, vicinal.'\n\n'Understood,' he replied. 'Move, lucky brothers!' Haar said, turning his massive bulk to face his squad. 'More welcoming to do.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe Mantolith had come to a dead halt.\n\n'On your feet,' ordered Falkus Kibre. His men unlocked and rose. In the rear section, the tech-magi were achieving grid power. The vehicle throbbed with the hum.\n\n'Set homer beacons,' Kibre ordered. Each Terminator voice-activated his unit. Kibre, the Widowmaker, had the honour of commanding the Justaerin Elite sections, a role he had conducted since the years of crusade. But for this undertaking, First Captain Abaddon had claimed that right, and Kibre, a brother of the Mournival, and Abaddon's loyal subordinate, had given them up without a murmur. Kibre had taken the notorious Catalan Reaver squads instead. The Catalan were just as exemplary and just as efficient, though Kibre, a Justaerin man, was loath to confess that out loud. The two elite sections vied for supremacy and battle honours. That was why there were two elites in the First Company: competition bred performance. Another of Abaddon's simple but brilliant war doctrines. One elite smacks of hubris, and risks resting on its laurels, he had said. Two elites provoke each other and strive for ever finer glory. Like rival brothers. Like Dorn and Perturabo.\n\n'Weapons up, weapons set,' Kibre ordered. DeRall, the Catalan's vicious chief, relayed the order fiercely.\n\nThe Emperor must die, Catalan,' Kibre announced. 'Let us be bringers of despair. Lupercal!'\n\n'Lupercal!' the men answered.\n\nKibre nodded to the lead magos in the rear of the craft.\n\n'Brace for teleport,' he said.\n\nThe compartment filled with light.\n\n* * *\n\n'Confirmed sub-surface tracks, approaching rapidly,' said Elg, matter of fact. Three, repeat, three tracks, inbound. Awaiting trajectory plots.'\n\nDiamantis waited, his face grim.\n\n'Come on...' he murmured.\n\n'Naysmith reports force annihilation, zone mortalis Rho,' said Elg, watching the data-feed. 'Forty kills confirmed. Vehicle disabled. No losses. Seventh reports force annihilation, zone mortalis Beta. Twenty-five kills confirmed. Vehicle disabled. Gallor reports two casualties, minor. Brightest deployed, Theta, still awaiting contact.'\n\n'Mistress!'\n\nShe looked at the operator beside her. He was staring at his plate, trying to parse a fresh block of readings.\n\n'Make your report, please,' she said.\n\n'Teleport flare!' the operator cried. 'Teleport flare detected!'\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' said Elg immediately, 'All kill teams. Incoming material transfer detected. Stand ready. Repeat, stand ready.'\n\n'Frack it!' Diamantis snapped at the operator.\n\n'Stand by...' the operator replied, fear in his voice. 'Plot is refracting... Plot locked! Zone mortalis Alpha!'\n\n'Strife"}
{"text":"ide her. He was staring at his plate, trying to parse a fresh block of readings.\n\n'Make your report, please,' she said.\n\n'Teleport flare!' the operator cried. 'Teleport flare detected!'\n\n'Trickster, this is Trickster,' said Elg immediately, 'All kill teams. Incoming material transfer detected. Stand ready. Repeat, stand ready.'\n\n'Frack it!' Diamantis snapped at the operator.\n\n'Stand by...' the operator replied, fear in his voice. 'Plot is refracting... Plot locked! Zone mortalis Alpha!'\n\n'Strife!' Diamantis yelled. 'Teleport flare, Mortalis Alpha! They're on you!'\n\n* * *\n\nCatulan Reaver section manifested in Mortalis Alpha with a savage bang of displaced air, and started shooting before the flare of the teleport had subsided. Kibre couldn't assess the full situation, but he could see Imperial Fists in front of him, and the dead hulks of two tunnellers embedded in the stone.\n\nCatulan advanced at a walking pace in their black Terminator plate, sowing fire at the loyalist squads. Garro's kill team buckled and fell under the almost point blank assault from behind them. Twin-bolters and lascannons shredded the Imperial Fists' unprotected formation, splintering yellow ceramite and spattering hunks of meat. Gercault tried to turn. Kibre's bolter shells blew out his face, throat and chest.\n\n'The hell is this?' DeRall yelled over the link.\n\n'Illuminate them,' Kibre replied.\n\n'They were expecting us!' DeRall cried.\n\n'Shut up and kill,' growled Kibre.\n\nBut the Catulan chief was right, and Kibre knew it. Their undertaking had been made at the highest level of confidence. No one was supposed to know. They were supposed to be deploying into empty cellars and forgotten undercrofts.\n\nNot face to face with a VII strike force. The chamber was crawling with shit-scum Imperial Fists! Fifty, sixty or more.\n\nMany were dead already. That was something.\n\n'Reap them, Catulan,' Kibre voxed, firing continually, his Terminator plate vibrating with the discharge. 'Make a space.'\n\nThey were compromised. There was no doubt. The Imperial Fists he was killing had taken out two of their infiltration vehicles. How many Sons of Horus had they butchered? I have to clear the chamber, Kibre thought. Secure it. Work out what the hell is going on, find out what we've lost...\n\n...decide what the hell we do.\n\nThe thought had barely formed before Kibre realised that Catulan was taking hits from the flank.\n\n* * *\n\nGarro, still securing Eta, had heard Trickster's warning. He brought his fire squads back through the connecting arch into Alpha in time to see the flare fading, and Catulan slaughtering his men.\n\nHe had partial cover from the arch and a short firing wall. His Murder section took the fore, spraying the striding Terminators with their heavy weapons.\n\nTactical Dreadnought suits and Cataphractii warplate were hard to kill. Murder had the firepower, but they were outnumbered by the pack of monstrous Sons of Horus. As soon as the first of Catulan started falling, exo-plate gouged open by cannon and heavy las, spurting blood and clouds of sparks from open wounds, the Terminators swung about, and started to bombard Garro's position.\n\nThe torrential gunfire ripped at the firing wall, the flagstones, and the arch. Stone chips scattered like chaff, and the air filmed with a thick haze of brick dust, which made the flicking bolts of las more luminous. DeRall tracked the pulses of Mathane's lascannon as though they were tracers, and hammered his twin-bolters at the source. Garro was in cover beside Mathane when the Imperial Fist blew apart.\n\nGarro and the men around him took shrapnel. A triangular shard of yellow ceramite stabbed into Garro's faceplate just below his left eye, and wedged there. He and his men maintained fire, but the beasts of Catulan Reaver were more numerous and more heavily plated.\n\nGarro's cover was crumbling. What was left of Strife kill team, less than a third, was being driven back into Eta.\n\n* * *\n\n'Strife reports Catulan Reaver section, zone mortalis Alpha,' said Elg. Taking heavy losses. Extending back into Eta. I am showing forty-eight casualties, fatalities'\n\n'Forty-eight?' Ahlborn murmured.\n\n'Catulan Reaver,' said Sindermann. 'A name to conjure dread since the formation of the Sixteenth.' Therajomas pushed past them, and bolted for the door. They heard him vomiting in the hallway.\n\n'This is Trickster,' said Diamantis evenly. 'Naysmith, Seventh, Black Dog. Urgent support needed, Alpha. Apprise me if you are task completed and can assist. Repeat, urgent support needed, Mortalis Alpha.'\n\n* * *\n\n'We were tasked to Iota, lord!' Leod Baldwin cried.\n\n'Iota can wait,' replied Loken. He had broken into a run. 'Alpha is closer.'\n\nBaldwin knew the Luna Wolf was right, and he could hear the echoes of heavy weapons fire rolling down the hallway already. But his Lord Dorn had set out clear protocols for the operation. They had to obey the rules of defence, as dictated by Trickster, or risk losing prosecution control of the zones.\n\n'Naysmith, move! With me!' Loken yelled.\n\n'I cannot allow this,' said Baldwin. 'Loken, we are ordered to Mortalis Iota! We-'\n\n'The Iota track is still minutes out,' Loken replied, not slowing down. 'Catulan is at Alpha! Catulan Reaver! Garro's men are being decimated!'\n\n'Team Seventh has reported response,' Baldwin insisted.\n\n'We're closer,' was Loken's only answer.\n\nThe hallway was broad and almost straight. Ahead, to the right, it passed the access arch into the as-yet virginal zone mortalis Mu. Baldwin realised there was no arguing with Garviel Loken. He wondered if he should follow, or shoot the man for dereliction. He looked back at the legionaries behind them.\n\n'Form into squads, then!' Baldwin yelled at them. 'You're Imperial Fists, Naysmith, show some damned order! By squad, advance on my lead. Follow the insane Wolf bastard!'\n\nRunning ahead, Loken sensed the flare before the wave of it washed in. He came up sharp, his boots scraping on the stone.\n\n'Teleport!' he yelled at the men behind him.\n\nAir pressure bulged, and then burst down the length of the hallway. In a rush of sudden radiance, black-plated figures popped into reality, one by one, in rapid succession, all the way along the hallway ahead of him.\n\nA full section. Vincor Tactical, First Company, Sons of Horus. Loken was barely six metres from the section leader, face to face.\n\nThe leader was a hulking giant. He looked at Loken as though bemused, as though he recognised him of old, and not from the anachronistic livery of the Luna Wolves. It was something deeper, and more personal.\n\n'Loken,' wheezed Tormageddon.\n\nHis voice was a clotted corruption of Tarik Torgaddon's. He had a chainfist on his left hand, and a chainsword in his right.\n\nBoth began to rev.\n\nLoken swung his chainsword up, and drew Rubio's blade.\n\n* * *\n\n'What is the damned delay?' demanded Horus Aximand. The Plutona was wallowing and rolling, like a ship in a heavy swell. The motivators groaned as they fought for purchase.\n\n'We have bored into a cavity, lord,' one of the drivers said. 'An air pocket. The halite and shale of the flaw have subsided and-'\n\n'So?'\n\n'We've lost primary traction. There is nothing to grip.'\n\nAximand growled. 'How far short?' he asked. 'How far down are we?'\n\n'Auspex shows us forty metres below the target subfloor, my lord.'\n\nAximand gripped the overhead rail to steady himself. The confinement was plaguing him. Buried so deep, and now helpless. He felt as though he were being crushed by the weight of the whole Palace.\n\n'Full reverse,' he said. 'Get traction, and come at it again.'\n\nThe drivers threw the machine into reverse. The Plutona lurched, swam, and then seemed to grab some semblance of grip.\n\n'Now!' barked Aximand.\n\nThe drivers wrenched the motivators into forward process, and the machine hitched again. Then it began to grind forward. Aximand could hear the drill heads start to chew again, pushing spoil back over the hull in rattling streams.\n\nHe smiled. They were moving. Not long now-\n\nMassive impacts resounded through the hull, as though a giant had decided to batter them with a hammer. For a moment, Aximand thought they were taking fire. The compartment skin above his head buckled under extreme force.\n\nThen they started to roll violently. Aximand, the only man standing and not strapped in, was thrown hard. Internal lighting failed. There was a noise like an avalanche, a tide of rock raining down. The Plutona shook.\n\nThe onslaught stopped.\n\nEmergency lighting kicked in. The craft was on its side. The motivators had died. Aximand clambered to his feet.\n\n'What happened?' he demanded.\n\nOne of the drivers was unconscious and lolling in his restraints, his head gashed open. The other was blearily checking gauges.\n\n'Rockfall, lord,' he said. 'Our drills tore loose the unstable edge of the cavity, and it collapsed on us.'\n\nAximand stared at the wall that had now become the ceiling. Their motivators were dead. Thousands of tonnes of rock had subsided onto them.\n\nThe Plutona-patterns, unlike the big Mantoliths, carried no onboard teleport grids.\n\nIn the constricting darkness, he could hear his own breathing, shallow, fast. He realised, with revulsion and outrage, that he understood his old, oppressive dream. The sound of breathing in the darkness was him. It was now.\n\nThis metal box was going to be his tomb.\n\n* * *\n\n'Reading a sinkhole collapse,' announced one of the post's operators.\n\n'Location?' asked Elg quickly.\n\n'Beneath Theta and Pi,' replied the operator. Target track to that vicinal has just dropped off the board.'\n\n'A major subsidence,' Elg told Diamantis. 'This was a concern.Pockets of the flaw are stress-weak. The scale and speed of the enemy's tunnelling was liable to cause collapse sooner or later.' She looked at the Huscarl. 'Magos Land should begin,' she advised.\n\n'Too soon, mistress,' replied Diamantis. 'I won't make that call yet. The idea was to trap as many of them as possible. There are... how many confirmed tracks?\n\n'Sixteen incoming, lo"}
{"text":"t track to that vicinal has just dropped off the board.'\n\n'A major subsidence,' Elg told Diamantis. 'This was a concern.Pockets of the flaw are stress-weak. The scale and speed of the enemy's tunnelling was liable to cause collapse sooner or later.' She looked at the Huscarl. 'Magos Land should begin,' she advised.\n\n'Too soon, mistress,' replied Diamantis. 'I won't make that call yet. The idea was to trap as many of them as possible. There are... how many confirmed tracks?\n\n'Sixteen incoming, lord,' replied an operator, 'all now within the flaw, all inbound in the next fourteen minutes.'\n\n'Sixteen tracks,' said Diamantis to Elg. 'That could be two or three company strengths. I won't abandon this snare with so much game still to catch.'\n\n'You speak as a warrior, Huscarl, counting victory in blood spilled,' replied Elg. 'As a senior of the War Court, I count victory as units lost and enemy strengths extinguished. You do not have to kill them all with your own hands, Diamantis. Magos Land's lockcrete will seal them all in the flaw forever. There would be no escape.'\n\n'I require confirmation kills,' replied Diamantis. 'You are presuming Magos Land's process will perform to required parameters.'\n\n'It had better,' said Elg. 'Let me put it another way, lord. Subsidence has now begun. It will propagate rapidly. If Magos Land is not permitted to seal and bind the flaw now, there could be a catastrophic sink event. It could even fracture the Ultimate Wall at Saturnine. At the very least, the flaw would be wide open, and too large to refill or close. There would be a hole in the side of the Sanctum Imperialis.'\n\nDiamantis hesitated. He picked up the vox-mic.\n\n'This is Trickster,' he said. 'Land, you are ordered to commence.'\n\n* * *\n\nGarro's team had expended almost all of its munitions. Catulan Reaver were pushing what was left of them back into Eta. The arch and firing wall had been chewed away by hurricanes of gunfire, and the vault air was boiling with dust.\n\nThey were going to have to fall back through Eta entirely, and try to make a new stand at the choke point where Eta met the secondary clearance causeway. Garro instructed them so. The men began to move.\n\nGarro glanced back.\n\nThe sound of the approaching gunfire had suddenly altered, and changed pattern. The roar of new salvos was overlaying the Catulan fire.\n\n'Garro! You still alive?'\n\nHe heard Gallor's voice break over the vox.\n\n'Gallor?'\n\n'Seventh at your side,' Gallor replied.\n\nKill team Seventh had entered Alpha through one of the two causeway arches. Fronted by Gallor's heavy squad, all Imperial Fists Cataphractii, they were scything into the Catalan from the rear. Falkus Kibre tried to draw his exposed men aside and use the other arch as a hold point. Reavers were being blown off their feet, or chopped apart by squealing beams of plasma.\n\nKill team Black Dog entered through the second arch. Haar roared orders, and his mix of Blackshields and Imperial Fists laid down pitiless enfilading fire.\n\nThe glory, and the story, of Catalan Reaver section ended in seconds. The combined guns of Black Dog and Seventh reduced them to pulp. Two Terminators tried to fight their way through the second arch. Haar's squad chief felled one with a power axe. The Riven Hound put the other's head into the wall with his power fist.\n\nGarro and his few survivors, ammunition spent, were pulling back across Eta to get clear of the crossfire's brutal collateral spill. Orontis slammed his last saddle mag onto his autocannon, and provided them with retreating cover.\n\nGarro heard Gallor yell.\n\n'Garro! Coming at you!'\n\nKibre, DeRall and one remaining Catulan Terminator had fled towards the ruined Eta arch. Orontis met them coming in, and split DeRall in half with his cannon, but the Terminator put his power sword through Orontis' neck. Kibre pushed past them both, ion maul lit, munitions loads empty.\n\nGarro rushed him head-on, Libertas drawn. They slammed off each other. Garro, smaller and lighter, evaded two lethal swings of Kibre's mace. His ancient sword sliced Kibre's belly-plate wide open. Blood blurted down the Widowmaker's thigh. Kibre swung again, the mace burning the air. His exo-plate alone out-matched Garro, but Kibre's body was amplified terribly by the warp. Garro ducked, and tried to grapple, blocking Kibre's arm, and trying to keep the sizzling mace at bay.\n\nThen the Terminator who had ended Orontis rushed him.\n\nGarro broke away in time to out-step him, dancing outside the downswing of the Terminator's power sword. Garro checked, crossed, and swung the broadsword down with both hands.\n\nThe blade did not slow or drag. It cut through the Terminator from light shoulder to left hip in one stroke. The severed halves of the Catulan Terminator crashed onto the flagstones.\n\nKibre's mace took Garro off his feet.\n\nGarro cartwheeled, and landed hard, his pauldron splintered. Libertas had been knocked out of his grip. The sword had landed two metres from him, tip down, the blade buried a third of its length deep in the stone floor.\n\nGarro struggled to recover, to get back up.\n\nKibre thumped towards him. He glanced at the sword, quivering in the ground. He'd seen what it could do. Kibre needed everything he could get.\n\nHe grabbed it to pull it free. It would not budge. He pulled harder, applying the full might of his amplified body and amplified plate.\n\nLibertas would not come free.\n\nA plated heel smashed Kibre in the face, and staggered him backwards.\n\nGarro was on his feet again. His kick had creased Kibre's faceplate. Kibre ran at him.\n\nGarro slid the sword out of the stone with no effort at all. The blade came up, and impaled Kibre through the chest.\n\nFalkus Kibre rocked. Garro wrenched the blade out of him, and hacked, splitting Falkus Kibre through the chin, the sternum and the groin.\n\nTorn open, Kibre sank to his knees. Glossy black organs bulged and spilled out of him, carried by a rush of fluid as dark as promethium. He had not been Falkus Kibre in any organic sense for a long time. Whatever invisible, aetheric thing had been nesting in him shrieked and fled, leaving its ruined host body behind.\n\n'Throne of Terra,' Garro murmured. 'You poor bastard...'\n\nGarro swung, quickly, surely, and struck off Falkus Kibre's gasping head.\n\n* * *\n\nThey had cut their way out of the dead Termite. Aximand and Lukash led Haemora Destroyer section up a great slope of halide waste in twilight darkness. It felt as though they were route marching some arctic escarpment at night. Open blackness encased them. The blue-white halide crust crunched beneath their feet and looked, in their visor view, as lambent as nocturnal snow. Every few minutes, there was a rumble of further collapses and rockslides from the deep cavity behind them.\n\nAximand tried the vox, but it was as dead as before. He was lost beneath the earth with fifty warriors whose high purpose was nullified.\n\n'We are climbing,' said Lukash. He checked his auspex. 'Another two hundred metres will bring us close to the point where the damned Mechanicum was supposed to deliver us.'\n\n'Lord captain!' one of the Destroyers called out. He was crouching, examining something.\n\n'What?' asked Aximand.\n\n'A flagstone,' the legionary said, holding up a chunk of shaped rock.\n\n'Wonderful, Sackur. That's the very thing we've come all this way to find.'\n\n'My lord, it has clearly tumbled down,' the man replied. He pointed. The Haemora was right. There was a long, scattered trickle of dark rock marking the halide ahead, a dark smear almost a hundred metres long.\n\nA flagstone. Part of a sundered floor.\n\nAximand slapped the man across the pauldron.\n\n'Good boy,' he said. 'Haemora, with me!'\n\nThey scrunched their way up the slope at double time, following the dark smear of spoil, which was starkly visible against the glowing while halide. More pieces of flag, and some bricks. Aximand's visor detected a rise in background luminosity.\n\nThere was a hole in the night sky, because the night sky was the underside of the subfloor. Pale light shafted down, revealing the base of a sinkhole. Tonnes of masonry formed steep piles that climbed from the halide bank to the sagging hole. The bottom of some ancient cellar had caved in during the landslip.\n\n'A way in,' said Lukash.\n\n'A way in,' Aximand agreed. Now fate was finally smiling his way.\n\n'Fire-team formation,' he ordered. 'Lukash, lead the way. Let's get up there, secure that chamber, and locate our brothers.'\n\n'Lupercal!' Lukash rasped.\n\n'For him indeed,' Aximand agreed.\n\nVeterans all, Haemora moved quickly. Weapons ready, and with purpose, they began to clamber up the slump of broken stonework towards the light.\n\n* * *\n\nBel Sepatus had kept his right hand raised, index finger extended, for nearly five minutes, maintaining, with that simple and commanding gesture, total silence. His elite squad, the exo-plated Paladins of Katechon, needed no greater urging to do this than their Keruvim sire's slightest word, but Sepatus wasn't sure about the others in kill team Brightest. Imperial Fists, a dozen Space Marines from shattered Legions and a squad of ill-mannered Blackshields. Not the brigade he would have chosen, for he would have selected exclusively from the high orders of the Blood Angels, but the one he had been given. The Praetorian had commanded him, and the Great Angel had approved that command. This was the Saturnine gambit, one that had astonished Sepatus with its daring. It promised unprecedented glory, the glory Sanguinius had said would be waiting for Bel Sepatus wherever he walked.\n\nSepatus had not expected the first step towards that glory to be half an hour standing in an empty cellar, nor another forty minutes watching a hole in that cellar floor that had yawned open after some tectonic shudder. The datacast from Trickster spoke of pitiless executions taking place elsewhere in the zones, but zone mortalis Theta had offered nothing but a cursed hole and a slow waft of settling dust.\n\nExcept now.\n\nSepatus heard "}
{"text":"ad said would be waiting for Bel Sepatus wherever he walked.\n\nSepatus had not expected the first step towards that glory to be half an hour standing in an empty cellar, nor another forty minutes watching a hole in that cellar floor that had yawned open after some tectonic shudder. The datacast from Trickster spoke of pitiless executions taking place elsewhere in the zones, but zone mortalis Theta had offered nothing but a cursed hole and a slow waft of settling dust.\n\nExcept now.\n\nSepatus heard a minute skitter of rock. Then another. His auspex began to scroll contact icons across his visor: amber runes and place markers that grew red as they came closer.\n\nHe saw every man in the kill team around him tense, their visors showing them the same thing. Their weapons came up ready.\n\nSepatus reset his in-visor tally. The kill-counter, a small set of digits in the bottom left of his view, was logging one hundred and seventy-eight. He had left it running throughout the days of action at Gorgon Bar.\n\nHe thought of the Bar. He prayed that it still held.\n\nHis tally sat at zero.\n\nRocks scraped. The icons glowed as red as blood.\n\nSomething stirred in the hole. A black helm. A bound-up top-knot crest.\n\nA Son of Horus.\n\nSepatus swept his right hand down.\n\nThe kill team unleashed.\n\n* * *\n\nA blizzard of death poured down the hole, more lethal than the torrent of falling slabs that had opened it. Las-fire, bolter rounds, the twitch of yellow plasma beams, two searing exhalations of furnace-wrath from a flamer.\n\nLukash was the first to die, his head and shoulders shot away. The leading squad of Haemora perished in the same fashion, their bodies tumbling, bringing loose rocks with them, and corpses and loose rocks alike struck down the squads behind, sprawling and sliding them, and making them easy targets for the weapons blasting down through the hole in the sky. Ten dead, sixteen, twenty-seven, thirty-one...\n\nAximand stumbled down the halide slope, staring in dismay as Haemora Destroyer section met destruction first-hand.\n\n* * *\n\n'Cease!' Sepatus yelled, and leapt feet first into the hole before anyone could advise him otherwise. The Katechon followed him, blades drawn.\n\nSepatus landed hard in the blue gloom, sliding and skidding on the steep and loose incline. The air was wreathed in smoke, and black-plated bodies lay tangled on the scree. A few remained alive, struggling to move clear of the sinkhole base.\n\nHe would not permit them to leave.\n\nSepatus fired his jump pack, and fell upon them, his longsword rending armour and flesh. The Katechon, magnificent in their gold and cochineal-red warplate, arrived at his side, but there was no more killing left. The last of the gleaming black corpses lay on the halide slope, streaking the crystal white with streams of crimson.\n\nSepatus turned.\n\n'Clear, lord?' asked his second.\n\nThe Paladin-captain scanned the area rapidly. His tally counter rested at seven. Forty-three other Sons of Horus lay dead on the sinkhole slope.\n\nFifty total. A full section strength.\n\n'My lord?' pressed his second.\n\n'One more,' said Sepatus, looking around. 'Fifty men. One leader. Where is the leader?'\n\nThere was no clear track. The long halide slope and the darkness seemed empty.\n\n'Brightest, this is Brightest,' said Sepatus. 'Trickster, are you there?'\n\n'Acknowledged, Brightest.'\n\n'Zone Theta is clear. Enemy eradicated. One possible evader, attempting egress through the subfloor collapse. I am pursuing.'\n\n'Negative, Brightest. You're needed in the zones. And sealing has begun.\n\nIf you remain below the subfloor, you will be engulfed.'\n\n'Acknowledged, Trickster,' Sepatus replied. 'Back above!' he said to his men. He followed them towards the spoil slope.\n\nHe took one last, frustrated look back.\n\n* * *\n\nAximand moved through the darkness along the crest of the vast halide slope. His breathing was ragged... breathing in the dark...\n\nHe wrenched off his helmet, and sucked in cold air.\n\nThey were all dead. The whole thing, the whole operation, it was lost.\n\nHe was lost.\n\nHe considered picking his way back down to the wrecked Termite. It was buckled scrap, and he'd killed the Mechanicum crew for their incompetence, but from its position he could work backwards, perhaps find the cored tunnel his vehicle had bored through the flaw, and follow it back outside.\n\nA long walk. A long, long walk, but better than his other options.\n\nHe started to slither down the slope, scurfing up flurries of crystal.\n\nHe heard a sound. Lapping. A river flowing. How could there be-\n\nHe saw the river below him. A river of viscous grey ooze, flowing like magma. It was rising with extraordinary speed. He edged towards it. It stank. A synthetic, a polymer or some industrial form of 'crete. Liquid rockcrete, or something like it. It was filling the cavity. The loyalist bastards were sealing the flaw.\n\nThat was no way to die. Sealed eternally in rockcrete like a fly in resin, alive? That was his entire nightmare.\n\nHe scrambled back up the slowly vanishing slope. There had to be another choice.\n\nThe massive river of liquid rockcrete was disturbing the precarious structure of the cavity. He saw outcrops of halide sagging or being carried over into the flow. Rockfalls slumped down the cavity walls, the tumbling boulders squirting gloopy sprays as they vanished into the river.\n\nMore landslides. More sinkholes. If more of the subfloor gave way...\n\nAximand moved higher, as high as he could go.\n\n* * *\n\nThe Plutona drivers had advised Lev Goshen that they were two minutes from the target point, but those two minutes seemed to have stretched. The craft was floundering. It felt as if they were in the belly of a dying fish that was too weak to swim against a current. Everything swayed and pitched. The screeched roar of the drill heads had become a muffled splutter. The motivators were straining, finding nothing to bite. It sounded as though they were gurgling uselessly through mud instead of rock.\n\n'We're moving backwards,' said Goshen. 'How can we be moving backwards?'\n\n'My lord-' said a tech-priest.\n\n'Tell me!' Goshen snapped.\n\n'The indicator systems, lord, they show we are submerged,' the magos said.\n\n'In what?'\n\n'A flow of viscous fluid,' said one of the drivers.\n\n'Like what?' Goshen demanded. 'Magma? Mud?'\n\n'Sensors read an artificial substance,' the magos said. He had come to the prow to work at a cramped technical station beside the helm positions. His dentritic fingers had conjoined with the stations ports, and he was reading data off the inside of eyelids that had been sutured shut. 'Analysing structure, composition, properties...'\n\n'I don't need a scholam thesis, you turd,' said Goshen. 'I require immediate delivery to the target vector.'\n\n'That is not possible,' said the magos. 'We are immobilised.'\n\n'Don't tell me what's possible,' warned the captain of the 25th Company.\n\n'We are immobilised,' replied the Mechanicum adept. 'We are suspended in a body of composite material similar to liquid-form rockcrete. Our motivators and drill heads cannot gain traction. It is fast-setting.'\n\n'Get us free!'\n\n'That is no longer possible, my lord.'\n\n'Then open the damn hatches-'\n\n'We will flood. We are submerged. I refer you to my earlier answer.'\n\nGoshen tried to think of another question, another demand he could make. He couldn't think of anything. The walls of the compartment seemed very tight suddenly. He was enclosed with fifty battle-ready Space Marines and a Mechanicum crew. Craft capacity. There was barely enough room to move as it was.\n\nThe Plutona had stopped moving. The silence was the worst thing Goshen had ever heard.\n\n'How long?' he asked eventually.\n\n'How long for what, lord?'\n\n'Until it sets?'\n\n'It is already setting, my lord.'\n\n'Then... when it's set, when it's solid, we can dig our way through it.'\n\nThe magos turned to look at him with stitched-up eyes.\n\n'The material is inside our farings, our drill cases and our engine assemblies,' he said. 'It is set solid, so those things are solid, like rock. The beautiful mechanisms will never run again. The material has not penetrated this compartment, because this compartment is a sealed unit. We cannot open the hatches. We cannot dig out. We will never move again.'\n\nAnd no one can dig us out, and no one is coming, and almost no one knows we're even here...\n\nLev Goshen couldn't process what he was being told. He sat down in his arrestor seat. He started with the basics.\n\n'How long?' he asked.\n\n'Lord?'\n\n'Will our power last?'\n\n'One hundred and ninety-six days,' said the magos.\n\n'Air?'\n\n'With recirculation, and given your gene-bred biology,' said the magos, 'effectively indefinitely.'\n\nGoshen nodded.\n\n'How long do your kind live?' the magos asked.\n\n'Why?' asked Goshen.\n\n'Because that is how long you will be here,' said the magos.\n\n* * *\n\nTormageddon, saying nothing, fought Loken backwards into the empty arena of zone mortalis Mu. Outside the fortified archway, Naysmith kill team was meeting Vincor Tactical head to head, exchanging torrents of heavy fire along the length of the hallway.\n\nThrough his link, Loken could hear scattered scraps of frantic vox: cries of pain and death, Leod Baldwin rallying the men, fragments of tactical exchange.\n\nBut Loken had no time to listen, or concentrate on the words, or offer orders of his own.\n\nTormageddon was fast. His huge, daemon-bloated frame looked ponderous, but he threw blows with unnatural speed. Twice already, his whirring chain weapons had almost torn Loken open.\n\nLoken read the fight as it began to flow, and saw that his only advantage was accuracy. Tormageddon was all force, but his angles of attack were awkward and relatively clumsy, as though some immortal power was channelling its entire strength through a body that was too mortal to cope with it.\n\nLike a primarch, Loken thought, trying to fit his hand into a legionary's gauntlet.\n\nLoken kept moving, swinging his long-pattern chainsword and Rubio's dead blade in a furious rhythm to deflect blows and bl"}
{"text":"ken read the fight as it began to flow, and saw that his only advantage was accuracy. Tormageddon was all force, but his angles of attack were awkward and relatively clumsy, as though some immortal power was channelling its entire strength through a body that was too mortal to cope with it.\n\nLike a primarch, Loken thought, trying to fit his hand into a legionary's gauntlet.\n\nLoken kept moving, swinging his long-pattern chainsword and Rubio's dead blade in a furious rhythm to deflect blows and block strikes. Tormageddon pressed in relentlessly. When their chainswords met, teeth sheared off in a screech of sparks.\n\nThe ruined Sons of Horus legionary was an empty husk. His strength, prodigious in its magnitude, flowed from a warp-seated spring. Tormageddon wasn't poor Tarik, or even Grael. He wasn't a man, or a gene-son. He wasn't even a he, he was an it, and it was a slab of mindless muscle and meat, animated by aetheric powers unaccustomed to physical nuance. It was a sheer killing strength locked in an unfamiliar form, and that form was broken and slow-witted. Whatever sentience lingered in Tormageddon's shell, it was too dull, too damaged to guide its power, too wasted to draw on decades of honed skill, too burned out to do anything except drive strike after strike after strike.\n\nBut it was more than capable of killing him.\n\nLoken had put down World Eaters less berserk, and Night Lords less energetic. Tormageddon was more tireless than Iron Warriors he had slain, more rapid than Emperor's Children he had duelled. It was blunt trauma like a Salamander's warhammer, cold fury like an Iron Hand's mind, seething rage like a Wolf of Fenris, zealous hatred like a Bearer of Words. It was the terror of the shining Angels, it was the unknowability of their darker cousins, it was the invincibility of Ultramar, it was the swift death of Deliverance.\n\nIt could not be trusted, like a Son of the Hydra; it could not be bargained with, like a sorcerer of Prospero; it was rotting inside, like Mortarion's wights.\n\nLike a rider of the Khan's pack, it was in constant motion.\n\nAnd like an Imperial Fist, it could not be pushed back.\n\nIt was an Angel of Death.\n\nBut it was not a Luna Wolf.\n\nLoken tried to force it into errors. He was spurred by an overwhelming desire to purge the beast he was fighting. It was more intense than his urge to survive. The fire of his vengeance had guttered out. With the others, like Marr, Loken had shown only cold rage, and he had delivered it with clinical ferocity. Revenge, revenge upon the Sons of Horus for the sins of Horus. That urge was all Loken had known for a long time, it was what he had become, and the Saturnine ruse had finally given him a chance to fulfil it.\n\nThen Tormageddon had spoken his name with Tarik's voice. One word.\n\nLoken knew he couldn't save Tarik, or in any way bring him back, but he wanted to honour him. He wanted to honour Tarik, and Nero Vipus, and Iacton, and all the other beloved brothers who had been betrayed by heresy and lost to horror. He wanted to release the pitiful traces of Tarik Torgaddon from their enslavement, and lay them to rest.\n\nGrant Tarik absolution. Give his soul peace from torment. Cast the daemon out, back into hell, and free the abused bones and defiled flesh. In memory of the Luna Wolves, Loken would wrest this Astartes corpse back for burial. He would not allow it to remain the cadaver-puppet of some repellant corpse-god.\n\nHe ducked a whirring blow, blocked a purring blade, sidestepped, turned, denying brute power, and using Tormageddon's lack of spatial awareness against it. He forced it into overstretch, lured it into overstep, drew its reach too long and skewed its balance.\n\nHis chainsword locked with Tormageddon's, both screaming as they sheared and mangled into each other. Loken took his chance, and thrust straight in under Tormageddon's blocked guard.\n\nRubio's dead blade struck the dead centre of Tormageddon's chestplate.\n\nAnd slid aside.\n\nIt left nothing more than a chipped dent. Even with all his force behind it, Loken hadn't been able to penetrate. Every shred of his skill had won Loken that split-second chance. Every ounce of his strength had not been enough to make it count.\n\nTormageddon smashed Loken backwards, and tore the sword block aside. Loken tried to keep his guard, but their locked chainswords had become hopelessly enmeshed, and all he managed to do was tear the weapons out of both their grips. Tormageddon hit him again, and Loken went down.\n\nHe tried to rise.\n\nThe beast grabbed him by the head, and picked him up off the ground.\n\nTormageddon's screeching chainfist was clamped around Loken's helmet, shredding its plating, buckling his visor, and shaving flakes of ceramite and steel into the air as it began to squeeze. Loken flailed, choking on his own throat seal, feeling the neck rings mangle and snap, the crumpling faceplate crushing in against his cheeks and teeth, the vicing pressure increasing to burst his skull.\n\nI will not die this way. He wanted to scream that into death's face, but he couldn't even move his mouth inside the compressing helm. He willed it instead, in fury, and stabbed.\n\nAnd fell.\n\nHe sprawled, blind. He could hear the angry crackling of the fused chainswords nearby. He tore the broken pieces of his mined helmet off, spilling blood. The bones of his skull felt impacted.\n\nTormageddon lay flat on its back, Rubio's old sword impaled through his heart. The dead, dull blade was pulsing with a fading flicker of pale light. Trace veins of energy, like cobwebs made of miniature lightning, played across the palm and fingers of Loken's hand, the hand he had used to drive home the blow.\n\nThe little flickering traceries of light died away, and vanished as he stared at them.\n\nHe got up, flexing his aching jaw. Blood dripped from his nose. He wrenched Rubio's sword out of the corpse. The blade was dead and cold again, as dead and cold as the Mournival Son at his feet.\n\nTormageddon was lifeless. The infernal power that had inhabited the legionary corpse was extinguished, or had fled, the broken vessel abandoned.\n\nLoken wanted to gather the body up and carry it to a bier where it could lie in silence, but the fight beyond Mu's archway was still raging.\n\nHe left the killing floor.\n\n* * *\n\nThe fierce contest between Naysmith and Tormageddon's Vincor Tactical had rolled to the far end of the hallway. Baldwin had driven hard, pushing Vincor backwards into Mortalis Omicron, but it had been at a cost. The hallway, scorched and peppered with blast holes, was strewn with dead, friend and foe.\n\nLoken hurried to join his own rearguard. He paused to scoop up a chainsword from one of the fallen Imperial Fists, thanking the dead man for the gift, and promising to use it well.\n\nAt the mouth of Omicron, the slaughter was almost done. Gallor had brought Seventh in through another assault door, and the two kill teams had pincered Vincor between them in the open space. The fight had turned into blunt execution.\n\nLeod Baldwin had been wounded, but was still on his feet.\n\n'Good work,' Loken told him. 'Get to the infirmary.'\n\n'When we're finished,' Baldwin replied.\n\nLoken walked through the smoke to greet Gallor.\n\n'How are we faring?' Loken asked as they clasped hands quickly.\n\n'Quite the tally,' Gallor replied. 'Feels like we've gutted the best part of two companies between us all. Brightest and Black Dog are still engaged.'\n\n'Strife?'\n\n'Took a mauling,' said Gallor. 'Garro and the bits of Strife that made it through went with Haar's mob.'\n\nThey both turned at the sound of a long, drawn-out rumble.\n\nThat keeps happening,' said Gallor. 'Trickster says the place is caving in. The undermining has turned some of the zones into sinkholes. But that Land fellow is pouring his concoction in, so I'm told.'\n\n'They're sealing the flaw?'\n\nGallor nodded. 'Any bastards that haven't shown their heads yet will be trapped. Some justice.'\n\nLoken realised his vox had been torn out with his helmet.\n\n'Raise Trickster,' he said to Gallor. 'Ask them if they have any more work for us.'\n\n'Trickster? This is Seventh, with Naysmith,' Gallor said into his link. 'Requesting target tracks.'\n\n* * *\n\n'Acknowledged, Seventh' said Elg. 'Stand by.'\n\n'Any tracks remaining?' Diamantis asked her.\n\n'Nothing on sweep, or Grand Borealis acoustics,' she replied. 'Magos Land's efforts may have entombed any extant infiltration units.'\n\n'Maintain tracking pattern,' said the Huscarl.\n\n'Of course,' she replied.\n\n'Some may yet break through,' said Diamantis. 'Land's process will be effective, but it will take time to pump sufficient material into the fault.'\n\n'The magos estimated six hours and forty-three minutes to achieve full seal,' she said.\n\n'He was that precise?' asked Diamantis.\n\nElg smiled. 'He gave it in seconds too, but I thought that was superfluous.'\n\n'So how long now?' Diamantis asked.\n\n'Flow has been running for two hours and seven minutes, lord,' said an operator.\n\nDiamantis stepped back, and ran a hand across his cropped hair.\n\n'Any word from the wall?' he asked.\n\n'The hardline is down again,' said an operator.\n\nDiamantis scowled.\n\n'Surely we'd know, lord,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Know what?' Diamantis asked him.\n\n'If...' Sindermann began. 'If our efforts here have been to no avail.\n\nIf we were doomed by other means...'\n\n'Diamantis?'\n\nThe Huscarl looked back at Elg. She was frowning at a side monitor.\n\n'What, mistress?'\n\n'According to these readings, the sealant flow has stopped,' she said. 'Level register has not altered in the last four minutes. The pumps have shut down.'\n\n'Clogged nozzles?' said Ahlborn.\n\nDiamantis ignored him, and took the mic from the hook.\n\n'This is Trickster,' he said. 'Magos, report status.'\n\nHe waited.\n\n'Magos, this is Trickster. Report your running status. We show you stopped. What is the situation?'\n\nHe looked at Elg.\n\n'No response,' he said.\n\n'If there's a technical issue, he's probably working on it,' suggested Sindermann.\n\n'Or he's lost in some mat"}
{"text":"d. 'Level register has not altered in the last four minutes. The pumps have shut down.'\n\n'Clogged nozzles?' said Ahlborn.\n\nDiamantis ignored him, and took the mic from the hook.\n\n'This is Trickster,' he said. 'Magos, report status.'\n\nHe waited.\n\n'Magos, this is Trickster. Report your running status. We show you stopped. What is the situation?'\n\nHe looked at Elg.\n\n'No response,' he said.\n\n'If there's a technical issue, he's probably working on it,' suggested Sindermann.\n\n'Or he's lost in some mathematical puzzle, and isn't paying attention,' said Diamantis.\n\n'I'll go and see to it, lord' said Ahlborn.\n\n* * *\n\nArkhan Land perched at the very edge of his work stool. On his bench, his artificimian cowered, wide-eyed, in the small cage Diamantis had permitted Land to bring.\n\n'I suppose,' Land said, 'you're going to kill me?'\n\n'I might,' said Horus Aximand. 'I might just do that.'\n\n'You killed everybody else,' said Land.\n\nAximand glanced down at the blood-soaked bodies of Land's team.\n\n'I did,' he agreed. He pointed Mourn-it-All's tip at Land. 'I have had a miserable day, in my defence,' he said. 'I had to scramble up through a filthy, stinking hole in the ground. I didn't know where I was. All I knew was that everything - everything - was mined. I had to take that out on somebody. These idiots were the first somebodies I found.'\n\n'Also,' said Land carefully, 'there's a war on. And they were enemy personnel.'\n\n'Well yes, obviously, that too,' said Little Horus.\n\n'But you let me live?'\n\n'They were servitors and adepts,' said Aximand. 'You're clearly a magos of some sort. In charge of all this.'\n\nHe gestured with his free hand at the 'this': the bulk tanks and pumping rigs around them.\n\n'I needed you alive to shut it down,' he said. 'Because this filth is part of the reason everything's mined. You did do that, didn't you?'\n\n'You watched me.'\n\n'It's definitely shut down?'\n\n'The pumps are off,' said Land. 'I suppose I'm surplus to requirements now?'\n\n'No,' said Aximand, stepping closer to him. 'You're smart. In charge of this area. You're going to show me the way out.'\n\n'Out?'\n\n'Of here. Into the Palace.'\n\n'And then what?'\n\n'I haven't decided,' said Aximand.\n\n'You're alone,' said Land. 'What could you do, alone, in the Sanctum Imperialis?'\n\n'A lot of damage,' said Aximand. 'An incredible amount of damage. One man is hard to find. Hard to stop. I could complete the mission.'\n\n'A one-man spear-tip?'\n\nAximand glared at him. 'Have you any idea who I am?' he asked.\n\n'Horus Aximand, Mournival, Sons of Horus,' replied Land. 'Called Little Horus. Not the Horus we were hoping for.'\n\nAximand snatched up his sword. Then he lowered Moum-it-All slowly.\n\n'Clever,' he said, smiling. 'You're trying to goad me. Force me into killing you so I can't coerce your help.'\n\nLand shrugged. 'Speaking as someone who has been on his own for most of his life,' he said, 'doing his best to wage a one-man war to set things right, I can tell you, Horus Aximand, your chances aren't good. You need allies. Friends. Comrades. No one man will turn this. No one man will win it. That's what I've found.'\n\n'Oh, you're right,' said Aximand. 'But luckily, I've got you. Get on your feet. Show me the way. Open the locks and the secure access. Lead me out of here, and take me into the Palace.'\n\nLand sat back. He folded his arms. He looked Aximand in the eyes.\n\n'No,' Land said. 'Sorry.'\n\n'Wrong answer,' said Aximand, pressing the tip of his blade against Land's throat.\n\nThe bolter shell hit Aximand in the left shoulder, shredding his pauldron and hurling him backwards.\n\n'Land! Get out of the damn way!' Diamantis yelled, advancing down the walkway between the sealant tanks, bolt pistol aimed.\n\nLand threw himself sideways. The Huscarl fired again, but the bolt went wide, and tore up deck plates. Aximand rolled, his shoulder smoking, and fired his bolter in reply.\n\nThe shell detonated against Diamantis' left hip, and slammed him into the side of a store-tank. Aximand got up and ran in the opposite direction, ducking in among the lab's pump systems.\n\nDown on one knee, blood leaking from his wound, Diamantis grimaced, and aimed again.\n\n'No!' Land yelled, running to him. 'No more!'\n\n'He's-' Diamantis began.\n\n'Blast away with those things in here, and you'll hit something critical!' Land exclaimed. 'Blow out a pump, Huscarl, and we'll never seal the fault!' He tried to help Diamantis to his feet.\n\n'Get me to the link,' the Huscarl growled.\n\n'You couldn't take him down with one shot?' Land asked.\n\n'You were in the way!'\n\n'I thought you were supposed to be good?'\n\n'You were in the damn way!'\n\nDiamantis grunted with pain as he reached the desk, and leaned his weight on it. He grabbed the vox.\n\n'This is Trickster! This is Trickster!' he yelled. 'Traitor Astartes loose in the operation area! I repeat, Traitor Astartes loose. He was in the pump lab, now moving! One of the damn Sons-'\n\n'Mournival,' said Land. 'Aximand.'\n\n'-one of the Mournival!' Diamantis spat into the mic. 'Response urgent! Target is not, I repeat, not contained in the zones mortalis! He is at large in the support areas!'\n\nHe put the mic down, wincing in pain.\n\n'You're bleeding quite a lot,' said Land.\n\n'I know.'\n\n'I think your whole hip is-'\n\n'I am aware, magos.'\n\n'How did you know?' asked Land.\n\nDiamantis looked at him. 'The pumps had stopped,' he said with effort. 'I thought I'd come in person and find out what you were playing at myself.'\n\n'Ah,' said Land.\n\n'He forced you to shut them off?'\n\nLand nodded. 'He had a sword, which he was clearly prepared to use-'\n\nDiamantis glared at him, breathing hard to control his body's response to pain and blood loss. 'So turn them on again!' he barked.\n\n'Yes! That! Of course!' Land ran to the main system station. He started hauling back the heavy levers of power switches. There was a churning, sloshing noise from the row of tanks, and the pumps began to rumble again, one by one.\n\n'I hope the nozzles haven't clogged...' Land remarked.\n\nEvery breath an effort, Diamantis snatched up the mic again with a bloody hand.\n\n'This is Trickster,' he said. 'I repeat advisory. Traitor Astartes loose in the operation and support areas. Target is Mournival. I repeat, Traitor Astartes loose. Vicinal pump lab, now moving. Someone respond now!'\n\n* * *\n\nGallor listened to his earpiece carefully.\n\n'There's one loose,' he reported. 'One got through the zones. Loose in operations and support. Trickster says it's one of the Mournival.'\n\nLoken was already moving.\n\n'Spread out,' Gallor yelled to the kill teams. 'Systematic search, chamber to chamber! Find him!'\n\n* * *\n\nTwo Termite wrecks smouldered in Mortalis Kappa, surrounded by the corpses of the Sons of Horus they had tried to deliver. Haar left his men checking for survivors, and walked through the arch into Mortalis Lambda, where another Termite wreck lay surrounded by a ring of black-armoured dead. Garro was standing with Bel Sepatus. The two kill squads, along with Garro's remnants, had combined to meet the three simultaneous incursions.\n\nThey had been mercilessly precise.\n\n'One hundred and seventy-five kills,' said Haar with a grin. 'Biggest haul yet, and only nine of ours lost. You know, I wish I was able to see the dismay on their damn faces as they stepped into your sights.' He paused. 'What?' he asked.\n\nSepatus was listening to his link.\n\n'There's a stray one,' Garro said to Haar. 'Got through into operations. Trickster is assigning a kill team.'\n\n'Just one?' rumbled the Riven Hound.\n\n'Mournival,' said Garro.\n\n'Even so,' Haar said. 'He can't get far. He might as well be dead already.'\n\nSepatus looked at them. 'I have requested we be permitted to deploy and join the hunt,' he said.\n\n'And?' asked Haar. 'I fancy getting some Mournival red on my fist.\n\nI hear they make the effort worthwhile.'\n\nGarro snorted.\n\n'I am waiting for Trickster to give the word,' said Sepatus, glancing at them both with a lofty air. 'If the main board remains clear of target tracks for another five minutes-'\n\nThe bang of decompression drowned out his next words. They were bathed in frosty light.\n\nSons of Horus snapped solid out of the air all around them, in the midst of the two kill teams, throughout Kappa and Lambda.\n\nCataphractii. First Company. One hundred brothers of the infamous Justaerin Terminator section, the most feared and notorious warrior elite of the XVI.\n\nOne hundred warriors, and First Captain Abaddon.\n\nHavoc ignited.\n\nFOUR\n\n* * *\n\nOanis burning\n\nJust us and the monsters\n\nBrother against brother\n\nBelow the burning walls of Oanis guntower, Fulgrim smiled. His teeth gleamed in the firelight. His long white hair blew out in the night wind, dancing like the vast tongues of flames above him.\n\n'You're very young,' he said.\n\nHe crouched beside the Imperial Fist sprawled on the wall top.\n\n'Very young. New to this,' he whispered.\n\nMadius was trying to crawl. His bones were as broken as his warplate. He had lost his helm somewhere, and his face was drenched in blood. Every shaking move took supreme effort, every centimetre he dragged himself through the slick of his own blood was a triumph of will.\n\n'Are you trying to escape?' Fulgrim asked. He tutted. 'I don't think you're supposed to do that. Your father doesn't like it. You're supposed to stand and fight. But then, you are new. Maybe no one's had time to tell you the rules.'\n\nThe Phoenician looked around. Across the broad top of the\n\nSaturnine Wall, his children were massacring the wallguard garrison. Still more of his children were arriving through the void breach, via drop pods, or scaling the bulwarks from wall-base deployments. The Sonance had shut down. The guns of the Saturnine Wall, still firing, had begun to disintegrate the vulnerable Donjons, destroying all the beautiful instruments they carried. The siege engines were collapsing in vast fire clouds that lit up the face of the wall like sunrise. It was a shame, but the carriers and the instruments had finished their performance anyway. The III "}
{"text":"f his children were arriving through the void breach, via drop pods, or scaling the bulwarks from wall-base deployments. The Sonance had shut down. The guns of the Saturnine Wall, still firing, had begun to disintegrate the vulnerable Donjons, destroying all the beautiful instruments they carried. The siege engines were collapsing in vast fire clouds that lit up the face of the wall like sunrise. It was a shame, but the carriers and the instruments had finished their performance anyway. The III Legion were in. They had claimed a rampart of the Ultimate Wall.\n\n'I'll tell you this,' said Fulgrim gently. 'Even if you could run, and you can't with those poor legs of yours, mind, I don't think you could escape. There's no sanctuary here.' He glanced at the Palace beyond them. 'Soon, there won't be any sanctuary anywhere,' he added.\n\nHe looked down at the Imperial Fist again. Madius was still crawling, gasping and straining with each tiny movement he managed to make.\n\n'Poor frightened child,' Fulgrim said. 'There, there.' His face darkened. 'Oh, I see,' he said. 'You're not trying to escape. You're trying to reach that.'\n\nHe glanced at the chipped gladius that lay a metre or so in front of the young captain. Madius' bloody fingers were clawing towards it.\n\nFulgrim stood up. 'You don't want that,' he said. 'I've got a much nicer one.'\n\nHe drew his long, single-edged sword, and took it in a two-handed grip.\n\n'See?' he said.\n\nHe raised his arms to strike.\n\nSomething hit him. Something cannoned into him, and staggered him backwards. Something hacked at him. Something was hurting him.\n\nFulgrim wrenched backwards. Sigismund kept swinging, his powerblade scoring and cracking Fulgrim's beautiful armour.\n\n'Get off!' Fulgrim exclaimed. 'Get away from me!' He was three times the Templar's size. He kicked out, like a man kicking at an aggressive dog, and knocked Sigismund backwards. Sigismund rolled, and came back to his feet. He swung his blade, two-handed, into Fulgrim's thigh.\n\nThe Phoenician shrieked, more in indignation than pain. The shriek was attuned across strange pitches, and it shivered the stones of the wall. He snatched Sigismund up by the throat with one hand. The blade, still bound to Sigismund's wrist by its chains, pulled out of the wound. Choking, Sigismund grabbed the dangling blade, and struck repeatedly at the giant holding him. He lopped off a lock of the Phoenician's hair. Then he cut his lip.\n\nFulgrim shrieked again, and flung Sigismund away. The Templar sailed five metres, hit the wall of Oanis Tower, and dropped onto the platform.\n\n'How dare you!' Fulgrim yelled, striding towards where Sigismund lay. He staunched his split lip with one hand, and spun his long sword in the other.\n\n'Sigismund's courage sometimes outstrips his abilities.'\n\nFulgrim stopped. He turned. He smiled with blood-pinked teeth.\n\nRogal Dorn glared back at him. He flexed his grip on his raised greatsword.\n\n'Mine doesn't,' said Dorn.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen Sanguinius rose above them, it was as a wonder. They had all truly thought he had abandoned them. He seemed to shine like a star, his wings unfurled.\n\nRann thought of the moment, which now seemed years past, but had only been days before, when the Great Angel had come to them at the Bar's outworks, and driven back the traitor engines. Rann had believed he would never see a greater deed, not if he lived ten thousand years.\n\nThis simpler deed seemed greater.\n\nAnd it was not a triumph of arms, a single-handed assault on a belching Titan machine. He was just appearing when they had believed he had gone, soaring like an eagle when they thought he had flown from them.\n\nTheir hearts lifted with him. Their tired spirits rose.\n\n'The Great Angel is with us!' Rann yelled. The Great Angel is with us!'\n\nThey were all yelling. Every loyal warrior on the fourth circuit wall.\n\nAgainst iron and steel and fire and smoke, most things cannot stand. Hope seems weak, and effort overwhelmed. A symbol rallies men against the dark. It shields hope from the fire, and armours effort against iron. A flag, a standard raised, a ray of light, a banner held aloft, a winged figure ascending, alive with light. At burning, crippled Gorgon Bar, the sons of Terra knew they could not die, for the Angel Sanguinius flew above them, and he, like his father, could never, ever die.\n\nThe savage rhythm of war changed in an instant. Khoradal Furio, at the head of his host, reclaimed the overrun extent north of shattered Katillon, and blunted one prong of the traitors' thrust. Rann, with Halen and Aimery and both of their brigades, drove in through Katillon's lower floors, stones tumbling from the trembling tower, and stormed the ramps of the siege belfries the foe had drawn up to storm their wail. They broke the Iron Warriors back down the shafts and ladders of their scaling towers, and heaped them dead upon the earth in piles seven deep. They burst out of the wall-foot ditch in a counterstrike that cracked the iron perseverance of the IV, fractured their mettle, and scattered them towards the third circuit ruins, leaving tower frames and broken petraries and upturned sows behind them, the instruments of their cruel warfare discarded in flight.\n\nA scouring began, chasing the traitor host towards the third circuit. Sparks flurried like autumn leaves across the banks of enemy dead.\n\n'Brother Fafnir.'\n\nSanguinius descended to him, spear in hand.\n\n'We thought you'd gone,' said Rann, his axes wet. 'Our wounds seemed so deep, and close to killing us.'\n\n'Wounds heal,' said the Great Angel. 'I was wounded.'\n\n'Lord?'\n\n'My mind,' said Sanguinius, 'beset by scenes of horror that brought me to my knees. I'm sorry. I could not fight or fathom them, or see light anywhere.'\n\nHe looked down at Rann.\n\n'Fear not, though we still have much to fear,' he said. 'The horror is real, and looms upon us. Our greatest tests await us. I saw such cruelty being done, Fafnir, such atrocities... My brother Angron, rage incarnate... A totality of violence...' He sighed. 'Angron has done things no man should see or speak of. Things that history would best forget. But in the pitchest depths of his foul darkness, I saw something. I think I was supposed to. I think that's why I was made to endure such abominable visions of heresy. So I could see.'\n\n'See what, lord?' Rann asked.\n\n'Hope,' said Sanguinius. 'There is still hope. Know that. Tell everyone. Hold it close to your heart.'\n\n'I will,' said Rann. 'But these visions-'\n\n'Fled now, brother,' said Sanguinius. 'Gone for good, I hope. The mysteries have passed, and the truth has shown its face. There are no more masks, illusions or disguises. No more veils, no more lies. It's just us and the monsters, eye to eye.'\n\nHe took up his spear.\n\n'So,' he said. 'Ormon Gundar and Bogdan Mortel?'\n\n'Key warsmiths, both of them,' said Rann, 'the architects of ruin who seek to bring down Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'Emhon told me their names as I carried him to the Apothecaries,' said Sanguinius. 'He said you had marked them. That to hold the Bar a little longer, they must be foremost on our list of foes.'\n\nThey are,' said Rann. 'But they have fled behind the third circuit to recompose their host. I cannot reach them-'\n\n'I can,' said Sanguinius. 'Rann, what say you we win third circuit back?'\n\n* * *\n\nMadius beheld it all. Propped up against a broken pillar, he watched his Praetorian's wrath unleashed.\n\n'Your pretty wall is broken, Rogal!' Fulgrim declared. He lashed his blade into Dorn's shield, and drew splinters. 'Your famous fortress is undone! It-'\n\nDorn's blow knocked the next words out of his mouth. Fulgrim stumbled. Dorn's greatsword tore into his ribs. Fulgrim struck back, but found only shield again.\n\n'You are a man in a broken tower!' Fulgrim taunted, and spat out blood. 'You stand so proud, and so defiant, ignoring the fact the tower is falling around you! It will-'\n\nAnother blow. Fulgrim staggered away, then spun, head lowered, hair billowing, keeping his distance. Dorn lunged anyway, driving his shield into body and face. Fulgrim threw him off, and leapt aside.\n\n'So silent, Rogal,' he crooned. 'No words of denial? No pleading for me to change my foolish ways and come back to you? You can tell me it's not too late. You can promise me sweet forgiveness-'\n\nDorn blocked into him, broke his guard with his shield, buried his blade in Fulgrim's shoulder meat, then body-smashed him across the platform.\n\n'Deeds are my words,' Dorn said.\n\nFulgrim nodded, and spat blood again.\n\n'Always,' he agreed, licking blood off his teeth. 'You were never the wit. Never one for fine conversation. Just hard at work and-'\n\nDorn broke his guard again with another lunge, carving a chunk of plate from Fulgrim's flank. Fulgrim surged, and hammered out nine rapid blows, each one a master kill-stroke. Dorn blocked each one. Their blades flew, ringing against each other, drawing sparks.\n\nFulgrim danced backwards. Dorn advanced.\n\nFulgrim wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and smeared blood across his cheek.\n\n'Are you really not going to try and convince me,' asked Fulgrim, 'that I have made a mistake? Talk me back into the fold, where I can make amends?'\n\nDorn surged, and threw two rapid blows that Fulgrim only blocked with effort.\n\n'No,' said Dorn.\n\nHe struck again, a low slice that Fulgrim parried, then a high back-cut that tore through Fulgrim's gorget, and scattered broken rings of golden mail.\n\n'I'm just going to kill you,' said Dorn.\n\nThe Phoenician growled, and charged two steps. Dorn met his first slash with his shield, and countered his second with his blade. A third, he parried; a fourth, he turned aside in a squealing slide of steel that threw off sparks.\n\nFulgrim backed off, arms spread, circling.\n\n'Are you, now?' Fulgrim said. 'How bold. How empty. Look around.'\n\nDorn's glare remained fixed on Fulgrim. He feinted a step, a bait Fulgrim took, then rammed the Phoenician with his shield, and hammered two blows into his ribs with his pommel before they br"}
{"text":"ed two steps. Dorn met his first slash with his shield, and countered his second with his blade. A third, he parried; a fourth, he turned aside in a squealing slide of steel that threw off sparks.\n\nFulgrim backed off, arms spread, circling.\n\n'Are you, now?' Fulgrim said. 'How bold. How empty. Look around.'\n\nDorn's glare remained fixed on Fulgrim. He feinted a step, a bait Fulgrim took, then rammed the Phoenician with his shield, and hammered two blows into his ribs with his pommel before they broke contact again.\n\n'I said look around!' Fulgrim snapped. Blood was streaming from his wounds, rolling down his gashed armour. Some had got in his hair. He tossed his sword from hand to hand, then seized the grip with both, and hacked down at Dorn. Dorn blocked with a raised shield, turned out, and raked his blade deep across Fulgrim's chest. Fulgrim stumbled clear.\n\n'Look around! Look around!' Fulgrim screeched. 'See what's happening, Rogal dolt! Your tower is tumbling down! No more running to daddy crying, \"Look! Look what I've built!\" It took you years to make this, and in one night, I roll down upon you, crack your shield and build a foothold-'\n\nDorn stamped at him, and they traded four swift blows that chimed like bells.\n\n'Look?' said Dorn. His gaze did not shift from Fulgrim's face. 'I don't have to. I see it all.'\n\n'All what?' snarled Fulgrim. He swung. Dorn turned the blade aside.\n\n'I see your siege machines burning at the foot of the wall,' said Dorn 'I see your sonic weapons silenced. I see your host, foolishly committed in its entirety, pouring into a run of wall that can be held by a force a tenth that size.'\n\nTheir blades flashed and rang again. Dorn lost a chunk of shield. Fulgrim took a laceration to the shoulder.\n\n'And is held by a force a tenth that size,' said Dorn calmly. 'Imperial Fists, now bolstered by the two hundred Legiones Astartes veterans I brought with me. Two hundred veterans who are skilled in every doctrine of war. Who have rallied this garrison and this wall stretch, and are now slaughtering the vanguard you so wantonly committed. They thank you for giving them such a wealth of bodies to reap. You have no foothold.'\n\n'I have!' Fulgrim roared. He smashed his blade at Dorn, a series of furious strokes. Dorn parried them away. Only one got through, and gouged his shoulder guard.\n\n'No,' said Dorn, as they circled again. 'You're a fine fighter, but a poor strategist. You committed everything against a gap that could be held. You've burned the cream of your host for nothing. Made them cannon fodder. Nine thousand dead and counting. I know, Fulgrim. I know everything.'\n\n'You know nothing!' Fulgrim cried. He railed in, and his gleaming blade sliced the flesh above Dorn's right eye. Dorn caved his ribs with the edge of his shield, punched him in the face with his sword's guard and kicked him backwards.\n\n'You've let yourself be used as a distraction,' said Dorn, keeping his gaze on his adversary, ignoring the blood pouring down his face. 'You've let your host be decimated. For nothing. The Saturnine ruse - I know about that too - has failed. Perturabo played his move, and lost his piece. You're just a pawn. Was it the Lord of Iron who fooled you into this? Lupercal? Abaddon? You must have been willing. Were you getting bored with it? The spear-tip is broken. You're holding a gate for no one. You're just an idiot standing on a wall.'\n\nFulgrim's eyes widened very slightly.\n\n'It failed?' he whispered.\n\nDorn lunged. Fulgrim leapt back. Dorn sliced, and Fulgrim capered clear.\n\n'I'm not trapped here' said Dorn. 'I'm not under siege today. You are. And that's why I'm going to kill you.'\n\nThe Praetorian swung. Fulgrim parried. Dorn followed in, and the greatsword tore Fulgrim's cheek open. The Phoenician stabbed frantically, splitting armour, and lacerating Dorn's side. Dorn struck out, and severed Fulgrim's left wrist so the hand was left hanging by a shred of flesh.\n\nDorn drove the entire length of his blade through Fulgrim's belly.\n\nThey stood for a moment as though embracing, the length of Dorn's sword spearing out from Fulgrim's spine, steam rising from the blade.\n\nFulgrim rested his bloody cheek on Dorn's shoulder, and sighed. Dorn ripped the sword out, and stepped clear.\n\n'Well,' whispered Fulgrim, blood spattering out of his mouth. 'What a mess.' He straightened up, gore running from his torn face and broken plate. 'It really failed, then? The Mournival plan?' he asked.\n\n'It did. They are all dead.'\n\n'Oh.' Fulgrim smiled as much as his butchered face would allow. Teeth were visible through the slash in his cheek. 'You do fine work,' he said.\n\n'I wanted a scalp,' said Dorn. 'I wanted his head. Lupercal. But you came instead. A Traitor primarch. I'll make do with you.'\n\n'All these things you know,' said Fulgrim. 'So very able and informed. But there are things you don't.'\n\n'Name one,' said Dorn.\n\n'One,' said Fulgrim. 'I can't die.'\n\nHe stared at Dorn. His wounds closed, the skin re-knitting without a scar. His dangling hand re-fused. His armour fixed itself and regained its lustre. His blood dried up, and blew away as dust.\n\n'Two,' he said. 'I am sick of all of this. All of it. The others can find a way to grind you down and bring your fortress low. I cannot die, but I feel the pain, and I won't take any more of it.'\n\nHe sheathed his blade. His form began to grow, stretching its dimensions with an unearthly inner light. His legs fused like flowing wax, and he became, from the waist down, a gigantic serpent. The thick loops of his snaking lower body coiled out across the stonework, scales gleaming like mother-of-pearl. He rose up, his lammia-form towering over the Praetorian. There were scales around his eyes and cheek, and his tongue was forked.\n\nDorn stared back up. He did not take a step backwards, but his eyes narrowed and his grip on his sword tightened. There were no words for the impossibility of what he was seeing with his own eyes.\n\n'Three,' Fulgrim said, no longer smiling. 'I hope our father burns when the time comes. I hope Lupercal turns Him into a screaming corpse. But you won't see that, Rogal. You're the one who dies here.'\n\nThe Phoenician turned, and his huge form glided away towards the parapet. He surged off the edge. Black rose petals opened in the air, swallowed him, and vanished.\n\nDorn turned slowly.\n\nThey had formed a ring around him. Eidolon, Von Kaida, Lecus Phodion, Jarkon Darol, Quine Mylossar, Nuno DeDonna and fifty other gleaming warriors of the Emperor's Children elite guard.\n\nDorn shook out his shoulders, and raised his sword and shield.\n\n'Try me,' he said.\n\nThey rushed him.\n\n* * *\n\nThe battle in Kappa and Lambda zones never left the limits of those joined killing chambers. It lasted thirteen minutes. It was close, tight-packed, immediate, with no cover and no room for evasion: the Justaerin, regarded as the most mercilessly able of the Sons of Horus, a legacy that had been remarkable even in the time of the Luna Wolves, against the Praetorian's two hand-picked kill teams.\n\nThere was no quarter. No limit. No hope that any of them would walk away unscathed. The kill teams fought for Terra, and for honour, driven by a deep hatred and long-held yearning for vengeance against those who had betrayed them. Abaddon and the Justaerin personified that.\n\nThe Justaerin and their First Captain abandoned any dreams of glory or famous victory within nanoseconds of arriving. They could plainly see their gambit had failed. The loyalists had outplayed them, and were waiting for them. The exhilarating promise of their ruse had evaporated.\n\nThey fought for nothing more complicated than survival.\n\nMutually assured surprise. Mutually assured destruction. An instantaneous orgy of raw and savage killing.\n\nThere was no range of any sort. Warriors found themselves pressed together, face to face. Weapons blazed anyway, in circumstances that the doctrines of any Legion, no matter their methodology, would have ruled for close-quarter combat. Bolters roared, point-blank, detonating men whose physical debris injured those around them like shrapnel. Plasma weapons and bulk lasers blasted against plate, their scorching beams passing through two or more bodies at a time. Assault cannons were pressed to faces or the sides of heads, and fired. An entire quarter of Kappa was filled with fire, as a flamer gouted in the thick of a throng. Space Marines died standing up, Cataphractii plate locked out, frozen like smashed statues. Space Marines died explosively, burst apart with such force only scraps of them remained.\n\nThe Justaerin quickly tried to dominate through the brute power of their Terminator exo-plate, swinging demolishing fists and scything blades at anything and everything, overpowering and smashing legionaries in more conventional suits of warplate. Heads crushed, limbs snapped, bodies tore. Some warriors died from three or even four simultaneous blows from as many opponents.\n\nBut the kill teams had the likes of Garro among them, with Libertas, which could cut anything, and Haar, whose size and power fist wrecked Terminator panoply like foil. They had Bel Sepatus, and his avenging Katechon Paladins, who did not flinch, and who had longed for a worthy combat.\n\nBel Sepatus, in the thick of everything, believed he had found the glory his genesire had predicted. He killed two Justaerin Terminators in the first second and a half with the gleaming edge of Parousia.\n\nAbaddon killed with astonishing speed and meticulous efficiency. For the first minute of the fight, he merely tried to centre his thoughts and reconcile the sudden reverse of fortune. For the next three, hebegan to believe the Justaerin could prevail. They were the Justaerin, after all. They were the best of the best, Angels of Death beyond compare. They had never failed. They had never been overcome. There was no stage of war on which they could not triumph. He began to calculate the logistics: how they would break out, where they would "}
{"text":"ticulous efficiency. For the first minute of the fight, he merely tried to centre his thoughts and reconcile the sudden reverse of fortune. For the next three, hebegan to believe the Justaerin could prevail. They were the Justaerin, after all. They were the best of the best, Angels of Death beyond compare. They had never failed. They had never been overcome. There was no stage of war on which they could not triumph. He began to calculate the logistics: how they would break out, where they would go, how they would secure, what the next step would be. Into the Palace, into the Sanctum Imperialis. Divide up, run terror strikes to damage the citadel. Conduct solo missions. It would take time for Dorn and Valdor to run them all to ground in a maze like the Palatine. Perhaps the original spearhead mission was doomed, for none of them could reach the Throne Room alone, but there were other plans they could improvise. Other targets. The Sigillite. Valdor. Dorn. Bhab and the Grand Bastion.\n\nBy the fourth minute, he had decided on the aegis. There was no question. That should be their target. They would break clear, leaving this rabble dead in their wake, and bring the aegis down. That would be enough. That would end the Siege of Terra. The Palace would be open to bombardment from the fleet. Great Lupercal would raze it from orbit. The Vengeful Spirit would send down monumental beams of high energy, and annihilate the Palatine and the Throne within.\n\nIn the fifth minute, Urran Gauk was decapitated by one of the Katechon. Abaddon quickly hacked the killer apart, but the loss was psychological. His schemes seemed to recede, like ghosts, like dreams departing at sunrise. His vision of the Palatine bombarded and ablaze grew distant, and smaller, and out of reach.\n\nIn the sixth minute, killing without pause, Abaddon began to re-evaluate. The skill and tenacity, the rationally brilliant approach to warfare that had carried him every step of his long career, and made him First Captain of the finest company in the finest Legion, the first among firsts, a name taken seriously by even primarch genesires, centred him like an axis. They were cornered. They were trapped. They were being killed by the dozen. Not even the Justaerin, not even they, could prevail. Loyalist reinforcements would be coming. Even if they killed every last bastard in the chambers, their hope was dashed.\n\nHe voxed retreat to his surviving men. Activate homing beacons and get out. Pull back to the Mantolith. Retreat now.\n\nYes, the Sons of Horus were not above that. They were wise warriors, not fools. They knew to read the flow of a fight and act accordingly. They were no good to anyone dead. Damn the Imperial Lists and their simplistic 'no backward step'. Only a fool never took a backward step. The Sons of Horus were more like the barbarian White Scars. Those heathen primitives got that much right, at least. 'Withdraw to advance'. There was always another day, and that other day might bring victory instead. If you stood your ground like a yellow-armoured fool, you couldn't live to see it.\n\nBy the seventh minute, Abaddon realised he was going to die.\n\nThey had sent the homing signal repeatedly. Once every three seconds, standard protocol. Extraction ordered, urgent.\n\nNo flare had come.\n\nTheir signal might have been blocked. The Mantolith might have withdrawn from teleport range. No, the damn thing's grid had jammed. That was it. Abaddon could picture it, the filthy tech-adept scum, frantically scurrying around the Termite cabin, trying to repair a burned out grid, his beacon signal flashing on their consoles. The teleport had failed so many damn times on the approach. The magi had blamed it on bedrock, on energy obstruction, on everything but themselves.\n\nIt was their own shoddy, miserable incompetence. They'd barely managed to get Abaddon and his men to the target. Now the inadequate bastards couldn't get them back out.\n\nIn the eighth minute, Abaddon decided that if he ever got out, if he did manage that somehow, he would track down Eyet-Good-For-Nothing-One-Tag, and kill her. He would kill her and her whole shitting linked unity at the Epta war-stead for their ineptitude. He would hack off their hands and feet, and load them into a teleport grid, and transfer them, unprotected, into hard vacuum. Or the heart of a star. Or on an unset, diffuse pattern so the organic drizzle of their remains rained down over multiple sites at once.\n\nBy the ninth minute, bleeding from a dozen wounds, two of them critical, he had resolved to kill the Lord of Iron too. If he got out. In that dream of escape. He would find the great Perturabo and kill him. This had been his great idea. Perturabo had seen the flaw, the Saturnine fault. He had toyed with it, cooed over it, revealed it to Abaddon furtively, like some pornographic image. He had gulled Abaddon into this. He'd used the First Captain, with his reputation, and his authority, and his unrivalled connections. He had used Abaddon to make this happen. Perturabo, damn his soul, had played First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon like a fool. He had tempted him with glory, made him feel smart and noticed, preened his ego. Made him feel like it was all his big, clever idea. The bastard had even made Abaddon beg him to let him do it. The Lord of Iron, lord of shit, had manipulated Abaddon into using his influence to draw resources from the Sons of Horus, coerce the Emperor's Children into playing along, broker the help of the Mechanicum. He'd made Abaddon do all the work and take the credit, so if it failed - if it failed - if it failed like it was failing now, Abaddon would be to blame.\n\nPerturabo had deniability if it turned to shit. Perturabo could claim ignorance if three companies of the Sons of Horus, including the elite, not to mention how damn many of the Emperor's Children, failed to return.\n\nIn death, Abaddon would be blamed for the disaster, and his memory dishonoured. In death, he would be disgraced. Called overreaching. Called 'that fool Abaddon'.\n\nAbaddon would find the Lord of Iron, in that dream escape from this hell-pit. He would annihilate those damned war-tometa with meltas. He would face Perturabo, and tear his skull off his spine, and ram the haft of Forgebreaker down the stump of his neck, and keep ramming it until the bastard's body split like a rotten gourd.\n\nIn the tenth minute, Abaddon arrived at a point of calm. Of serenity. He accepted his onrushing death, which was surely only seconds away. It had become a game, a contest, like the old practice cages. How many of them could he kill before he was bested? Some? Most? All? Some were fine warriors. Sepatus, he was magnificent. Haar was a brute, but an interesting challenge. Garro... Abaddon fancied his own chances in an even match, but the man's sword was a piece of work, and so was Garro's skill with it.\n\nHe realised, as he killed, and killed, and killed, that he owed the Lord of Iron a genuine debt of gratitude. Abaddon was a warrior. He'd always been a warrior. It was his life. His purpose. He excelled at it. The warp was a distraction. It was just another weapon. Those who knelt before it and pledged their worship, treating it like some kind of god, they were fools. All of them. Magnus. Lorgar. Fulgrim. Fools. Horus was a fool. The warp was nothing.\n\nBeing a warrior was everything. It defined him. The skill of combat. The lessons of defeat. The joy of triumph. That was his sacrament. Let them worship their false gods and giggling abominations. This was what he had wanted. The chance to fight, like a man, not a daemon. The chance to take the Palace, and claim Terra, the old-fashioned way. By force of arms.\n\nHe had wanted to win as a warrior. Perturabo had let him try. He owed the Lord of Iron thanks for that.\n\nThis was everything, he realised, as he entered the eleventh minute, with almost everyone dead. This moment. Its simplicity. Skill and courage, tested to the limit, for no other reason, to serve no grand plan or devious ruse... just tested for the sake of skill and courage.\n\nThis moment was his life in its purest form. His life distilled. He fought Katechon, and Imperial Fists, and Blackshields, and Cataphractii Terminators, and Tactical Space Marines, for no other principle than to find out who was best. There were no sides. No good or bad. No rebel cause or loyalist alliance. No Warmaster. No Emperor. No point to anything outside the broken, blood-smeared walls of the killing chamber.\n\nJust war. Only war. The binary test of the galaxy, that you passed in triumph, or failed in glory.\n\nDeath, rushing closer, was immaterial.\n\nHow many could he take? How many more times could he prove his prowess?\n\nHe was Abaddon. Let them come. Let them all come. Find more, and bring them too. Bring anyone. Bring everyone.\n\nHe would take them. Or he would die. Either way. It didn't matter any more.\n\nIn the twelfth minute, Nathaniel Garro reached him, cleaving through one last Justaerin to close with him. They duelled, blade into blade, munitions long since exhausted. Garro was good. His sword was remarkable. He dealt Abaddon two wounds that would have killed lesser men. He drove Abaddon back, boxing him against the chamber's ancient wall. Good tactics, but a mistake. When Abaddon pivoted, it was Garro who found himself boxed, his back to the stone. Abaddon threw a punch that smashed Garro against the wall. The man slumped, dazed, chestplate cracked. Abaddon swung to finish him.\n\nBel Sepatus blocked his descending blade. Sepatus. Now, a proper test. A dance of equals that carried them into the thirteenth and final minute of the fight. Their blades clashed and parried with such speed. It was joyful. The Blood Angel was amazing. The deftness of his skill, the precision of his strokes, the intensity of his address. Sepatus produced nuanced swordplay that Abaddon could barely turn back. There were skills here to learn, tricks to appreciate and copy. And the Kheruvim's attack was a"}
{"text":"patus blocked his descending blade. Sepatus. Now, a proper test. A dance of equals that carried them into the thirteenth and final minute of the fight. Their blades clashed and parried with such speed. It was joyful. The Blood Angel was amazing. The deftness of his skill, the precision of his strokes, the intensity of his address. Sepatus produced nuanced swordplay that Abaddon could barely turn back. There were skills here to learn, tricks to appreciate and copy. And the Kheruvim's attack was absolute. A miraculous degree of murderous focus.\n\nAbaddon was sorry to kill him.\n\nHis blade cut Sepatus in half.\n\nThe Riven Hound slammed Abaddon into the wall. Bricks shattered. Abaddon fell bones break and organs rupture. Haar was size and brute strength. There was no skill to speak of. Just beautiful fury, like one of Russ' pack-dogs, or Angron's thug Kham. A wall of strength that crushed everything before it. The Blackshield had him by the throat. Haar took six or seven of Abaddon's kill-thrusts in the belly and chest, and refused to die. Just refused. His strength seemed to grow as the blood wept out of him. Haar's power fist, like a siege ram, hammered at Abaddon's head until his helmet broke and deformed, and Abaddon's face was a mess of gore.\n\nOne mote like that. One more and it's done.\n\nBut Haar was a dead weight, pinning him to the wall. Abaddon's blade had found Haar's throat and slid in, up into the brain, and out through the back of the Riven Hound's head.\n\nAbaddon couldn't move. He could barely see. Endryd Haar's dead mass was slumped against him, crushing him against the wall. Abaddon tried to get free. There wasn't time.\n\nGarro was back on his feet. That sword of his, gleaming.\n\nGarro raised it.\n\nThis was it then. One downward slash from a sword whose edge cut everything. This was it.\n\nAbaddon wanted it to never end. Ever. Ever.\n\nThe end came anyway.\n\n* * *\n\nGarro lowered Libertas.\n\n'No!' he yelled. 'No!' He punched the wall.\n\n* * *\n\nHaar's enormous corpse shifted and fell away as the teleport flare faded.\n\n'My lord!' the Mechanicum adepts cried. 'My lord!'\n\nThey carried him to the arrestor seats, and tried to peel the bloody visor of his helm away without taking his face with it.\n\nAll the other seats in the Mantolith's compartment were empty.\n\n'We tried,' a magos said. The grid... We had to reposition the Termite to fire the grid again. It took time. I am sorry.'\n\nAbaddon murmured something.\n\n'What is he saying?' the magos asked.\n\n'We are returning,' one of the others told Abaddon eagerly. 'Full rate. The motivators are running. We are exiting the fault, lord, ahead of the enemy's attempt to seal it. The medicae will be waiting for you.'\n\nAbaddon's mouth stirred again.\n\n'My lord?' the magos asked, leaning in to hear.\n\n'Let me go back...' Abaddon whispered. He was weeping. 'Let me go back...'\n\n* * *\n\nThey tested him. Eidolon was the worst by far. The howling lord commander fractured Dorn's warplate with his polyphonic screams. His blade pierced the Praetorian twice. Eidolon had the strength of a primarch.\n\nDorn had slain sixteen of the killers. They were on him two or three at a time, raking and jabbing. Dorn's shield, already shredded, was hooked away by one of Quine Mylossar's chrome sabres. Mylossar's blade reach was extreme. Dorn knew he had to kill him fast, so he could concentrate on the others.\n\nMylossar's head came spinning off in a shower of peacock feathers. The squirts of blood from his severed neck shot metres into the air.\n\nSigismund said nothing, turning from Mylossar's toppling form to smash his blade into Janvar Kell. As Kell collapsed, the Templar yelled a war cry, but it had no words. It was just a howl of defiance. He despatched the champion Jarkon Darol with two hacking blows.\n\nThe Praetorian and the Templar slotted back to back, covering each other's guard, turning together to drive away the circle of killers. They deflected cuts and thrusts, snapped golden spears and endured the keening, concussing screams.\n\n'To the glory of Him on Earth!' Dorn roared.\n\n'To the death!' Sigismund shouted.\n\nThey smashed the gaudy, lethal champions of the III down, one by one: Von Kaida, who bellowed an adult's death scream from his child's face; Illarus, who crawled on all fours for several seconds, searching for his severed head; Symmomus, whose body split apart as Dorn caught him; Zeneb Zenar, who fell to his knees, and tried to hold his sheared body together with both arms, Lecus Phodion, the vexillarius, who was sent cartwheeling away in a welter of blood.\n\nWhen Eidolon surged in again, Sigismund charged him out of the circle, knocking men aside. The two fought like furies along the edge of the wall, both possessed, but only one a daemon. When Eidolon, gleeful, lammed his sword through Sigismund's collarbone, Sigismund snarled, seized the bare blade impaling him, and used his bodyweight to tear it out of Eidolon's grip.\n\nEidolon looked appalled as Sigismund came on, the sword wedged through his shoulder. He scrambled backwards. The Templar's chained blade ripped Eidolon's pink plate open. Blood like quicksilver, like liquid chrome, sprayed out and dappled Sigismund's armour.\n\nEidolon screamed. Sigismund kicked him over the ledge. The lord commander's flailing body plunged away, eleven hundred metres down into the burning darkness below the Saturnine Wall.\n\nBy then, Dorn had felled another nine with his greatsword. Their bodies lay around him like the ransacked contents of a jewel box. Nuno DeDonna, famed for his cunning, tried to slip in behind Dorn as the Praetorian fought off two others.\n\nMaximus Thane broke DeDonna's back with his hammer, then mashed his head into the wall top for good measure.\n\nThe wallguard, a mix of Imperial Fists and Auxilia troops led by members of the kill teams Devotion and Helios, had cleared the lower galleries, and driven the Emperor's Children out of the wall, either into the night or into the arms of death. Below, the ravaged host of the III Legion, perhaps in answer to some petulant summons from their fleeing lord, began to withdraw. They left some eighteen thousand of their dead behind.\n\nThe last to die were on the wall top, as Thane's garrison scoured out the last pockets of resistance beneath the burning flanks of Oanis guntower. Bohemond was with them, trudging and snarling, blitzing fire from his gun-pods to mow down the last few of the killer elite that menaced his beloved Praetorian lord.\n\nThere was cheering when the voids flared back into life overhead, their breach repaired. Weary, bloodied men lined the wall under the aurora shimmer, shouting the war cry of the VII defiantly at the night beyond the wall. A few last confirmation shots echoed around the battlement.\n\nDorn crouched beside the broken form of the newblood Madius.\n\n'The Apothecaries are coming, my son,' he told him.\n\n'Did we win, my lord?' Madius asked.\n\n'This is what victory feels like, wall master,' said Dorn. 'I'll make damn sure you live long enough to get used to it.'\n\n'What did we win, Praetorian?' asked the captain through a film of his own blood.\n\n'The day,' Dorn replied.\n\n* * *\n\nWhen Loken found him, he was still looking for a way out.\n\nHe had reached the lower levels of the emptied Saturnine mansions, expending all the ammunition he carried to cut down any of the Hort Palatine or Seventh or Naysmith kill teams who got in his way. A long way to come, all on his own, through fierce opposition.\n\nBut then, he was Mournival.\n\nHe was picking his way along a gloomy gallery, half-lit by the dull glow of the solar lamps that lit rows of hydroponic tanks full of dead plants, searching for a door, a window.\n\nAximand turned as Loken approached. The sight of the armour and the face made him breathe hard.\n\n'You're a dream!' said Little Horus.\n\n'No,' said Loken.\n\n'A nightmare!'\n\n'That, perhaps,' said Loken.\n\n'You should be dead!'\n\n'I decided to live,' said Loken. 'So that you and your kind could die.'\n\nAximand drew Mourn-it-All.\n\n'All these years, you've been coming after me!' he spat.\n\nLoken shook his head. His chainsword purred in one hand. Rubio's blade crackled in the other. 'Not you particularly,' said Loken. 'Just all of you.'\n\n'No, me!' cried Aximand. 'You've always been there! I know it!'\n\n'That's probably just your guilt,' said Loken.\n\nThey flew at each other, blades arcing in the soft light. Edges dashed. The rapid impacts echoed in the empty gallery. Aximand parried both of Loken's blades. He hadn't lost his touch. He sliced at Loken, Loken ducked, swung out, braced his chainsword to block Mourn-it-All, and thrust with Rubio's blade.\n\nAximand darted out of reach, springing on his toes, mobile. He lunged again. Loken drove Mourn-it-All aside.\n\n'I wanted Abaddon,' said Loken. 'I wanted Lupercal. Those were the names at the head of my list.'\n\n'Well, you got me,' Aximand sneered.\n\n'You always were the wrong Horus,' said Loken.\n\nAximand screeched in rage, and lunged.\n\nRubio's blade, lit from within, parried Mourn-it-All away.\n\nThe chainsword rammed through Aximand's sternum, and speared out between his shoulder blades. Loken lifted him on the revving blade, and held him there, quivering. Aximand uttered a long, slow, oddly modulated scream, as the cycling blades chewed up his internal organs. A torrent of blood pumped out of his mouth, down his chin and chest, pulsing with the tempo of the whirring chain.\n\nHe dropped Mourn-it-All.\n\nHolding him fast, Loken raised Rubio's blade, and sliced his head off with one fluid execution stroke.\n\nIn the gloom, the sound of slow breathing that had haunted Little Horus Aximand ceased, forever.\n\nFIVE\n\n* * *\n\nTotality\n\nThe wall that had held them at bay was falling. The wrath of Kharn's master, Angron, the Red Angel, had brought it down, into the dirt. The port was open.\n\nThe rest would be swift. It would be totality, as his master desired.\n\nKharn, hound of war, First Captain of the World Eaters, prepared himself. Warriors surged forward in a great, blind torr"}
{"text":"th one fluid execution stroke.\n\nIn the gloom, the sound of slow breathing that had haunted Little Horus Aximand ceased, forever.\n\nFIVE\n\n* * *\n\nTotality\n\nThe wall that had held them at bay was falling. The wrath of Kharn's master, Angron, the Red Angel, had brought it down, into the dirt. The port was open.\n\nThe rest would be swift. It would be totality, as his master desired.\n\nKharn, hound of war, First Captain of the World Eaters, prepared himself. Warriors surged forward in a great, blind torrent on either side of him, bellowing in incoherent triumph as they saw the wall collapse. Most were so far gone in their feral lust that they did not understand what they were attacking. They didn't know it was a space port. They didn't know it had significant strategic value. Like their primarch lord, they didn't care.\n\nA thick wall had halted them. Now the thick wall was gone. They could move again, and plough onwards into the next place, where there would be more things to kill.\n\nWhere they could make new libations for the Thirsty God.\n\nKharn had forced himself, with some effort, to retain a slightly greater measure of reason and coherence than his brothers. Someone had to keep the destructive swarm of the World Eaters pointing in the right direction, and moving with something vaguely resembling a purpose. Once Terra fell, he could give in entirely, and submit to the sublime and eternal fury.\n\nKharn yearned to do that.\n\nUntil then, someone had to think, at least a little.\n\nThe World Eaters host poured ahead of him. Through his visor display, Kharn saw the poverty of the port's defences. A curtain wall, a bastion gard. Nothing like the meat-body resistance he had expected. It was a space port. Surely Dorn would have wanted it defended at all costs? Where were the Space Marines? The Blood Angels, the Imperial Fists... even the slippery White Scars, so hard to catch?\n\nMaybe Dorn was slipping? Maybe the so-called loyalists were closer to the end than Perturabo thought? Perhaps Great Dorn no longer had the forces to stage an adequate defence?\n\nDisappointing.\n\nHis visor showed him target icons, though. A decent number. A moderate challenge to fill an afternoon. How many of them would be his?\n\nHe considered, for a moment, resetting his tally counter. The number, a long one now, throbbed in the bottom left of his visor display. Most Astartes-pattern warplate had this function. Some called it a kill-counter. It had its uses, for making swift tactical assessments during a prosecution or an engagement. Kharn had never really bothered with it. His kind of warfare had little use for such fripperies. He'd just left it running, unmonitored.\n\nIt had been running since the first day of his career. When the number started to get quite large, he had become fascinated by it. The counter held a fetishistic interest now, a simple reminder of his advancing unmatched progress. He wasn't superstitious like some legionaries, but it seemed unreasonable to reset it. He wanted, privately, to see how high it could get. Did it ever reach a number it couldn't surpass? Roll back over to zero and start again? Did it have a limit?\n\nIt might, but Kharn believed he didn't.\n\nNo, resetting it to zero would be unreasonable, and he was still, just, a warrior capable of reason.\n\nTime to move. He shuddered as he let the Nails do their work. The berserk cloud descended upon him and scorched him with its exquisite agonies.\n\nSurrendering to the rage, he raised his axe, and began to run with the others.\n\n* * *\n\nShiban Khan could hear the freight elevators rattling and banging. It wasn't the elevator systems ascending. It was something in the shafts. Something clawing its way up the shafts.\n\nThe World Eaters were swarming in. The World Eaters...\n\nIf the World Eaters were in the pylon, then it was already too late. Nazira had been right. While they had been focused up here on the platform, catastrophe had swept over the curtain wall and Monsalvant Gard. He should have been down there. He should have been down there with the rest. He was a White Scars Space Marine. He would have stopped a few of them, at least.\n\nBut now...\n\nThe hatches of the freight elevators rattled and shook. The things coming up the shaft were getting close. How long did they have left?\n\nHe walked towards the work crew. They had almost finished stripping out one of the tugs. He'd told them to concentrate on one. One finished in time was better than two finished too late. The crew members looked at him. They'd all heard the noises echoing up the elevator shafts. They were soaked in sweat, caked in dirt. They were too tired to show their fear, except in their eyes.\n\n'What do we do?' Nazira asked.\n\n'Is this one ready?' Shiban asked.\n\nNazira nodded.\n\n'Then I need a pilot to help me get it down to the base pads,' he said.\n\n'Still?' one of the crew asked.\n\n'We worked hard,' said Shiban. 'You worked hard. If it can still do some good, yes. So I need a pilot.'\n\nA woman in a torn flight suit raised her hand. Her name, Shiban believed, was Marin. He hadn't had long enough to learn all their names.\n\n'I'll do it, khan,' she said.\n\n'Thank you,' said Shiban. 'I know it's a lot to ask. Marin, correct?'\n\n'Nerie,' the woman said. That's Marin there.'\n\n'My apologies. You base-norm humans all look alike to me.'\n\nThat made them laugh. All of them. Despite their fear.\n\n'The rest of you,' said Shiban, 'thank you for your efforts. Get aboard the other tug. All of you. Get higher up the pylon, a higher platform. Use the tug to keep ahead of them. Once you get the chance, run low, and try to get clear of the port area. It's not much, but that's the best chance.'\n\nThe team members looked at each other.\n\n'Leave?' asked one.\n\n'If you can,' said Shiban. There are no longer other options.'\n\nBehind him, the elevator shutters rattled and shook in their frames.\n\n'So please, hurry,' said Shiban.\n\n'I'm staying,' said Nazira.\n\n'No-'\n\n'I'm staying, khan, like it or not.'\n\nShiban stared at Nazira. Captain Al-Nid Nazira wasn't going to be told no. That's why Shiban had picked him.\n\nShiban nodded. 'Very well,' he said. 'Nazira, get these good people on that tug, and get them clear. Nerie? Get this one running.'\n\nThe team began to move.\n\nShiban turned back to face the freight elevators.\n\nHe put on his helm.\n\nHe unclamped his boltgun, and checked the load.\n\n* * *\n\n'Let's run, you and me, boy,' Piers said.\n\nThey could hear a wave of carnage sweeping into the cage-ways and cargo ramps. Mass weapons fire was close and intense. The boom of the defence grid system was continuous. And they could hear screaming. So much screaming. A maelstrom of noise. It was War roaring out its one-word howl again, Hari thought, the way it had done down by the Pons Solar.\n\nBut this was different. Piers had been scared then, but he was different scared now.\n\n'Where do we run?' Hari asked him. 'I thought... I thought the whole point was there was nowhere to run to.'\n\n'I'll think of something,' said the old grenadier. 'Work me old magic. You mark my words. Mythrus will show me the way. Have a little faith, boy. Eh? Have a little faith.'\n\n* * *\n\nWillem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army) chose firing positions down the side of the ramps behind the cage-ways. Clouds of burning debris were spilling off the cargo tracks. The ground was shaking.\n\nThe ramps afforded them some cover, and gave them a good angle on anything that came through the gate onto the cage-way approach. Willem had brought all the ammo he could carry, and they'd shared it with the rest. About forty people, a patchwork of different units, covering the cage-way access.\n\nJoseph glanced at his friend. They were both trembling.\n\n'Do you want to run, my friend?' Joseph asked.\n\n'Nah,' said Willem. 'Not again. Bad habit. Didn't we learn that already?'\n\nJoseph chuckled. 'After the last port fell,' he replied.\n\n'After the last port,' Willem agreed. 'Come on, think about it. The Praetorian. He won't let two ports fall, will he? I mean, that's why he sent the old man to us.'\n\n'The Lord High Primary?'\n\n'Yeah, him. I like him. Spoke to me personal. He knows what he's doing.'\n\nJoseph stared at his friend's face. He thought about the story of the convoy, and the other one about the banner. Miracles do happen. He thought about Lord Diaz on the bridge.\n\nHe dearly remembered what Willem had said, that day; the day Lord Diaz had found them in the rubble. If I break, or you break, then everyone will break, one by one. If I stand, and you stand, we die, but we are standing. We don't have to know what we do, or how little it is. That's why we came here. That's what He needs from us.\n\n'We all know what we're doing,' said Joseph.\n\nA gritty blast ripped across the mouth of the cage-ways. One of the freightyard gates, ferrosteel and eight metres square, cartwheeled through the air like a sheet of paper, and smashed into the cage railings.\n\n'Here we go,' said Willem.\n\n* * *\n\n'I can no longer raise Custodian Tsutomu,' said Cadwalder. The Huscarl had to raise his voice above the deluge of noise simply to be heard. 'The hardlink's burned.'\n\nHe turned to look at Saul Niborran.\n\n'I'm sorry, lord,' Cadwalder said.\n\nNiborran shook his head. He was busy reloading his rifle and his handgun. They had used up almost every mag just getting back across the Gard approach. Those things wouldn't die. They just... They wouldn't die. You hit them with everything, the full force of the defence network, and-\n\nThere was no defence network any more. Nothing responded to Niborran's Hortcodes. The towers were dead, the emplacements burning.\n\nNiborran got up. With a few quick gestures, the deft handmarks of a veteran squad chief, he signalled troopers to their places at the embankment wall and open doorways.\n\nThen he joined Cadwalder.\n\n'My lord-' the Huscarl began.\n\n'Don't say it, Huscarl,' said Niborran, with a sad smile. 'You might enjoy saying it, but I won't enjoy hearing it.'\n\n'Wh"}
{"text":"ence network, and-\n\nThere was no defence network any more. Nothing responded to Niborran's Hortcodes. The towers were dead, the emplacements burning.\n\nNiborran got up. With a few quick gestures, the deft handmarks of a veteran squad chief, he signalled troopers to their places at the embankment wall and open doorways.\n\nThen he joined Cadwalder.\n\n'My lord-' the Huscarl began.\n\n'Don't say it, Huscarl,' said Niborran, with a sad smile. 'You might enjoy saying it, but I won't enjoy hearing it.'\n\n'What, my lord?'\n\n'Some variation of \"I told you so\". Or \"I tried to warn you\",' replied Niborran. He adjusted the strap of his lasrifle. 'You did. I decided I knew better. This is my decision. There. That's an end of it.'\n\n'I... would not enjoy saying that,' said Cadwalder.\n\n'Well, it doesn't need to be said at all now,' said Niborran. 'But this does, Cadwalder. I'm very sorry.'\n\n'For what, general?'\n\n'You,' said the old general, 'are only here because of me. I'm sorry about that.'\n\nCadwalder stared at him, though his expression was invisible behind his visor.\n\n'I made a decision too,' Cadwalder replied. 'It was my own. I chose to step forward onto the deck of a Stormbird, and not step backwards off its ramp. What I was going to say, my lord, was stay behind me. They are closing very rapidly. My visor is crowded with contact icons. They are accelerating. Please, stay behind me.'\n\n'Like hell,' said Niborran. 'None of that. I'm not your Praetorian, and you're not my bodyguard. I'm Niborran, of the Saturnine Ordos, and I have zone command here. I'm not getting behind anybody.'\n\nHe looked up at the Huscarl.\n\n'Right here, right now, Cadwalder, you and me, we're the same.'\n\nThey stood in the mouth of the gate, side by side, human and transhuman, and began to fire as the World Eaters swept in.\n\n* * *\n\nShiban could hear them clearly. Hear their claws scraping on metal. Despite the rising whine of the tug's thrusters behind him, he could hear the scaling hooks and talons shredding their way up the elevator shafts.\n\n'Go!' he instructed.\n\n'Come on!' Nazira yelled.\n\nShiban looked over his shoulder. The stripped-down tug was stirring on the pad, eager to lift. Through the beak canopy, he could see Nerie at the helm, holding the powerful tug's urge to rise in check a moment longer. Nazira was half-hanging out of the open side hatch, beckoning to Shiban frantically.\n\n'Come on, damn it!' Nazira yelled.\n\n'Go,' Shiban repeated. He looked back at the elevator bank. Two of the hatches were beginning to buckle, battered and savaged from inside. He raised his bolter, and look aim.\n\nOne hatch shredded out onto the platform, then two more. The World Eaters, thrashing and jockeying to be first, spilled out, clawing and striking each other like disputing alpha rivals in an animal pack.\n\nShiban's first burst dropped one. Another burst felled the second. A third burst threw a charging World Eater off the edge of the platform.\n\nToo many. Too many. And it took several bolts to stop even one of them.\n\n'Khan! Come on!' Nazira yelled.\n\nThe tug still hadn't left the pad, though Nerie had it hovering now, drifting on a scream of thrust. Nazira was still in the open hatch.\n\n'Now!' he was yelling.\n\nNo backward step. That was Shiban's Tachseer's mantra. No backward step. He prided himself on that. But Nazira was risking his life. And maybe they could still put the tug's grav-systems to work. Kill many more of these monsters than he could with his last mag-loads of shells.\n\nShiban blasted on full-auto, obliterating the nearest three World Eaters in a blitz of blood and armour fragments. More were rushing him, pouring out of the torn elevator hatches.\n\nShiban turned, ran.\n\nNerie began to pull away. The tug was two metres up and swinging sideways on the pad when Shiban, leaping at full stretch, clamped his hands around the hatch rail.\n\nThe tug cleared the pad. Shiban hung for a moment, his legs dangling over empty air. The clawing, howling World Eaters reached the edge of the platform, packing in and raging up at the tug that had just - and only just - escaped their clutches. They gathered with such an enraged frenzy that several at the platform lip tottered and plunged, pushed off by the frantic surge of those behind them.\n\nNerie tried to keep the tug level. Nazira tried to haul Shiban into the cabin. Shiban Khan tried to hold on.\n\nOn the landing platform below them, the World Eaters, driven into even deeper frenzy at being cheated of their prey, started to shoot.\n\nBolter fire went wide, then bolt shells began to slam into the tug's hull, blowing out panels and side fairings in thumps of flame. Shiban, clinging on, saw mangled debris tumbling away below him. The tug began to yaw badly, trailing a thin plume of dirty smoke. Shiban exerted maximum effort and, despite the torque generated by their ugly, slewing track, managed to haul most of himself over the frame of the side hatch.\n\nMore shots hit them. Dull bangs against the hull. Loud booming explosions all around him, sprays of plastek and metal fragments. Al-Nid Nazira fell past him out of the open hatch.\n\nShiban tried to catch him, but he wasn't fast enough.\n\nAnd Nazira was already dead. A bolt-round had hit him. The inside of the cabin was painted with his blood. Shiban watched his friend's exploded corpse drop towards the port's ground docks far below.\n\nThe tug was spinning even more severely. Shiban had to crumple metal to maintain his grip.\n\n'Nerie!' he yelled. 'Nerie! Stabilise us!'\n\nThe spin grew worse. Everything outside - the sky, the docks, the pylon and the soaring face of the great Eternity Wall that enclosed the north-eastern side of the port and gave it its name - everything whirled past. A rotating panorama, the view from a demented carnival ride.\n\n'Nerie!'\n\nShiban clawed forward. Nerie was dead in her seat, slack across the helm She'd been destroyed by a bolt-round. She'd been dead since the shooting began.\n\nThe world whirled.\n\nShiban lunged forward to get a hand on the helm controls.\n\nThe impassive face of the Eternity Wall met him coming the other way.\n\n* * *\n\nIf stories ever have ends, then this story ends here. It ends with the totality of Angron's wrath.\n\nI think, though it is not my field of specialisation, that some stories end, but others carry on. They are eternal. They secretly carry on after the story appears to be finished, continuing in silence. These stories do not talk. They are never heard. I think my story may be like that.\n\nIf I could, I would ask the young man, the historian boy. Stories are his field, so he may know something of these secret stories that continue on after words end.\n\nBut I do not think I will get that chance. I think the boy is already dead.\n\nAnd I think my story ends here too. Soon.\n\nI would have liked to tell it to someone. Share it. But that sort of connection is something I have never been allowed.\n\nHere are the things I would have said.\n\nI am fighting to the end in a battle that cannot be won. I am fighting to the end in a battle that I knew could not be won before it even began. I have done this, not because I am brave, or because I am foolish, but because it was the only thing to do. If we give up on the doomed, we give up on ourselves.\n\nMy presence, the curse of my company, has kept the doomed souls alive a little longer than fortune had planned. I have not driven off the daemons or the night, for they are too strong for even me to banish. But I have held them at bay for a while. I have made the daemons wary.\n\nAnd I have killed. I have killed many, many World Eaters.\n\nI have killed Ekelot of the Devourers and Centurion Bri Boret at the curtain gate. I have killed Centurion Huk Manoux on the curtain wall parapet. Barbis Red Butcher, Herhak of the Caedere, Menkelen Burning Gaze: those I killed at the foot of Tower Two. Vorse and Jurok of the Devourers: those I killed in Western freight, with Tsu-tomu at my side. I killed Muratus Attvus in the cage-ways. I killed Uttara Khon of III Destroyers and Skalder in the cage-ways, because they had killed Tsutomu. It took sixteen of them to kill the Custodian, all at once. I could only avenge myself on two.\n\nI killed Sahvakarus the Culler in the second yards. I killed Drukuun in the gully by the fitting shops. I killed Malmanov of the Caedere and Khat Khadda of II Triari beside the ground-side landing pads.\n\nI have just killed Resulka Red Tatter.\n\nI have killed or driven off a host of Neverborn beastkin. My curse is a weapon.\n\nAt the Eternity Wall space port, late in a very long life, I have discovered to my joy that my presence, the curse of my company, can also be a blessing. This is new to me, and unfamiliar. I have fought to protect these people, who cannot see me, but the mystery of me - for it appears it can be a mystery as well as a curse - has inspired them. The fact of my absence is a place they cannot explain, so they have filled it with stories and ideas, and those stories and ideas have given them strength and hope and courage.\n\nI never planned for that. I did not set out to do it. It simply happened.\n\nThese are strange times.\n\nI will confess, now, because no one is listening, that this has been the greatest accomplishment of my life. It is completely unexpected. My whole life, I have stood apart, and wherever I have gone, I have spread only fear and discomfort. But here, briefly and unexpectedly, I have affected people in another way. I have been an unlikely conduit for strength and unity. I have been a mystery that has compelled them to stand tip and believe, not cower and shrink in fear.\n\nI have been able to touch them.\n\nThis is my fortune. It is all I have ever wanted.\n\nI wish it could continue, but it will not. As I have said, this is a story that is reaching its end.\n\nSo I stand, and I kill. I kill as many of the foe as I can before the end comes.\n\nAs I pass across the battlefield, my sword in my hand, I see the ruination that the uglier face of fortune has wrought. I see things that should be"}
{"text":"ery that has compelled them to stand tip and believe, not cower and shrink in fear.\n\nI have been able to touch them.\n\nThis is my fortune. It is all I have ever wanted.\n\nI wish it could continue, but it will not. As I have said, this is a story that is reaching its end.\n\nSo I stand, and I kill. I kill as many of the foe as I can before the end comes.\n\nAs I pass across the battlefield, my sword in my hand, I see the ruination that the uglier face of fortune has wrought. I see things that should be noted down for history, so that they can be remembered. But they will not be. The young man, if he is not already dead, will not survive this blizzard of destruction. So his story ends here too.\n\nBut I see things that I would have made him mark down on his dataslate, if he had been able to hear me. The names of the dead. The manner of their deaths. Custodian Tsutomu, and ninety-six others, in the cage-ways. Oxana Pell (Hort Borograd K), and three others, at Tower One. Getty Orheg (16th Arctic Hort) and fifty others, at the curtain wall. Bailee Grosser (Third Helvet), and twenty-six others, in Western Freight. Militant Colonel Auxilia Clement Brohn and forty-two others, at the guard gate. Ennie Carnet (Fourth Australis Mechanised) and one hundred and sixty-four others, between the curtain wall and Tower Two. Pasha Cavaner (11th Heavy Janissar), and sixteen others, in the second yards. Willem Kordy (33rd Pan-Pac Lift Mobile) and Joseph Baako Monday (18th Regiment, Nordafrik Resistance Army), on the cargo ramps behind the cage-ways.\n\nThose two died together, as they began, fighting for each other. They would not leave each other's sides when the World Eaters came. There is a bond stronger than steel to be found in the calamity of combat.\n\nI wish I knew the names and stories of the ones I have called the others. I do not. And even if I did, there would not be enough time left to tell them all. There are so many. So very many.\n\nAnd totality is here.\n\nI cross the open quad below Tower Four to meet it. World Eaters come, crushing and scattering the mutilated remains of the dead. They crush everything underfoot: rubble, girders, flakboard, wreckage, bones, helmets, broken weapons, lives, the few effects the troopers were allowed to bring, the picts of loved ones, the little uniform kits of needle and thread, the trinkets and charms, the battered dataslates some of them carried.\n\nI wonder if, in time to come, any of these things will be found. Will these battlefields be picked over, and the relics of our last day retrieved? Will they be mended and fixed back together, like a broken cup, and put on display in some museum of memorial? Will the dataslates be read? The bones buried?\n\nWill they wonder who we were?\n\nWill they care? Will anything we did or said here matter to them? Only fortune knows.\n\nThe World Eaters come. I kill Goret Foulmaw with a clean blow. I make Centurion Cisaka Warhand shiver and recoil, then take off his head. I kill Mahog Dearth of VI Destroyers by impalement. I gut Haskor Blood Smoke, and then Nurtot of II Triari. I cut the spine of Karakull White Butcher.\n\nI see Kharn coming. Kharn, First Captain. He is a true giant. My null curse does not even slow him down, or give him pause.\n\nI raise my sword, Veracity.\n\nI speak in Kharn's language.\n\nI\n\n* * *\n\nThe quad was washed with blood. Kharn's rage was deeper than he had ever allowed it to be before. The Blood God drinks deep.\n\nA flicker. Kharn noticed the long number of his tally count had suddenly risen by one.\n\nA moment of confusion. He did not remember making another kill. He did not see anything. But his axe is spitting blood.\n\nThe rage makes everything a blur. The number did not matter. It never had.\n\nThe flicker of confusion passed as the Nails bit, and the fury deepened.\n\nHe moved on.\n\n* * *\n\nPiers returned to the yard where they had raised the battle banner, him and the boy. They had propped it up, wedging the poles with sandbags and fuel drums, so it could flutter in the wind. There He was, the Emperor Ascendant, the Big Man, in His sunburst, looking down at him.\n\nThey had raised it up, him and the boy, him and Hari, then they had gone back to round up others to stand with them, others to crowd around the banner in defiance. Show their good faith. Rally around it, and protect it, so that He would see them and protect them.\n\nBut there were no others. And the boy, he hadn't come back.\n\nPiers felt bad about that. He'd seen it all. Hardened to horror, was Olly Piers. Nothing got to him.\n\nBut some losses were oddly hard to take.\n\nThe old grenadier straightened his shako, and sniffed, and rubbed his eyes. Stupid old bastard. You've seen worse.\n\nHe could hear it coming. Like a storm in the high Uplands. He heaved up Old Bess, and checked her charge. 'Don't let me down,' he muttered to the caliver.\n\nHe stood before the banner. Right before it. No other place to stand. If the boy had been there, he'd have stood at Piers' side. Of course he would have. The others would have too. They all would have-\n\nIt had arrived. Shitting shit. Look at that, boy. The size of god. It's got wings! Wings like a daemon-bat... Each slow step towards Piers a little earthquake. The drone of the axe.\n\nPiers didn't budge.\n\nSo that's what a primarch looks like. Shitting ball-bags. The Lord of the Eaters. Big as hell itself.\n\nIf the boy had been there, he'd have asked Piers if he was afraid. Because he always asked such stupid questions. But Piers would have answered him. He'd have said 'no'.\n\nBecause he always lied.\n\n'Come on, then,' Piers cried, 'and see what happens!'\n\nThe winged monster snorted. Its berserk pace had slowed. It plodded forward, as though it was curious, puzzled by the little man, and his little gun, and his ragged banner. It snorted, a great bellows snort like a bull. Liquid drooled from its lips.\n\nPiers aimed Old Bess.\n\n'Come on then,' he yelled. 'Show me what all the fuss is about!'\n\nCome on now. Don't let me down. Come on now, spirit of Mythrus, I'm right here. Your loyal bloody soldier, Olly Piers. That's Olympos Piers to you, fickle mistress of war. I'm your chosen one. You know me. Come on, now. Don't keep me waiting. Come on, war-lady, come on, Dame Death, you useless bitch, wherever you are, send your old soldier some grace, for shit's sake. I know I ask a lot, but you've only got one bloody job. Come on, now. Come on. I'm asking you nice.\n\nAngron, the Red Angel, started to charge. The yard shook. The banner shivered.\n\nOily Piers fired Old Bess, beam after beam, dead centre. Bloody shitting centre mass, you big ugly bastard!\n\n'Upland Tercio, hooo!' he screamed. 'Throne of Terra! Throne of Terra!'\n\nBathed in blood, Angron raised his fists to the sky, flexed his arms, spread his gigantic wings, and let out a roar so loud, the burning guntowers of Monsalvant Gard shook.\n\nAnd the banner, soaked in sprays of blood, slipped from its broken pole and fluttered to the ground.\n\nThe 'unknown Guardsman' faces Angron, the Red Angel.\n\nTHE TWENTY-SIXTH\n\nOF QUINTUS\n\n'After the torchlight red on sweaty faces\n\nAfter the frosty silence in the gardens\n\nAfter the agony in stony places\n\nThe showing and the crying\n\nPrison and palace and reverberation\n\nOf thunder of spring over distant mountains\n\nThe who was living is now dead\n\nWe who were living are now dying.'\n\n- from the Terran vision-cycle\n\nThe Waste Land, early M2\n\nBattles lost, battles won. Gains made, losses weathered. In the heart of an endless galaxy endlessly ablaze, there was a small space of darkness and silence, and in that space, laid out before Him, was the simple wood and bone surface of an old regicide board. The ancient game, the game of kings, of conquest. He had mastered it before He could walk.\n\nIt had come to this. One tiny fold of darkness and silence, and the old game. The tension of the silence was almost unbearable, even for Him. There were so few pieces left on His side, so many in the ranks facing Him.\n\nMove followed by move, each one judged with infinite precision, calculating the multiplicity of consequences that followed the adjustment of even one minor playing piece. Not just this move, but where it would lead, moves plotted ten or twenty or even a hundred in advance, weighing every possible outcome.\n\nHis opponent, invisible in the darkness on the other side of the board, was no fool. He had not raised fools.\n\nThe last few moves had been to His advantage, desperate strategies that exploited His few meagre pieces to their limit. But they had paid off. He had taken several of His opponent's carved-bone pieces off the board. He had blocked ploys and out-stepped stratagems. He had averted looming defeat, but only briefly. Victory was no closer. All He was doing was postponing His opponent's inexorable advance.\n\nHis opponent had so many more pieces to play. The warp kept placing fresh pieces on the board as quickly as His plays removed them.\n\nHe had imagined, in the end, the Inner War would be apocalyptic, the aetheric web shaking and screaming in convulsion, roaring like a stoked furnace.\n\nBut it was not. It was rigid silence, with just the occasional soft click of a bone piece moved across old wood. It took His whole mind to focus, every thought bent towards each move. He hoped, He trusted, that in the Palace around Him, His few remaining sons could play their part and keep the Real War at bay, just a little longer, by whatever means they could.\n\nHe had so few pieces left. It was a miracle He had kept the game alive for so long. Soon they would be face to face, no moves left to play, no pieces left, no board. Just Him and His adversary, one against one.\n\nIn the grim darkness, a hand reached out to make the next move.\n\nHe heard the invisible darkness chuckle to itself.\n\n'You didn't have to come to me, face to face,' said Rogal Dorn.\n\n'I wanted to,' replied Sanguinius.\n\nDorn's Huscarls had escorted the Lord of Baal to the War Room adjoining the Grand Borealis, a private command cabinet away from the noise"}
{"text":"ive for so long. Soon they would be face to face, no moves left to play, no pieces left, no board. Just Him and His adversary, one against one.\n\nIn the grim darkness, a hand reached out to make the next move.\n\nHe heard the invisible darkness chuckle to itself.\n\n'You didn't have to come to me, face to face,' said Rogal Dorn.\n\n'I wanted to,' replied Sanguinius.\n\nDorn's Huscarls had escorted the Lord of Baal to the War Room adjoining the Grand Borealis, a private command cabinet away from the noise and murmur of the vast chamber. It was wise to do so: the Great Angel was a distraction wherever he went. An awed and fascinated hush had travelled with Sanguinius as Vorst and the men escorted him across the Grand Borealis, operators and War Court seniors glancing around from their vital work.\n\nBesides, Dorn wanted privacy. More and more these days, it seemed.\n\nThe Praetorian nodded to the Huscarls, and they stepped out, closing the tall panelled doors of the marble War Room behind them.\n\n'I just needed a situational report from the zone commanders,' said Dorn. 'Personal evaluation, not what I can read on the feed. Hardlink would have sufficed.'\n\n'Well, I can make the report gladly,' said Sanguinius. Dorn, in his grey overcloak and his father's robe, had sat down at the cabinet desk. The Angel, his armour glorious, but marked and scuffed with the toil of war, stood as though at attention before him, a general making report to his warlord.\n\n'Gorgon Bar is firm, Praetorian,' he said. 'We are holding it to the third circuit wall, a regain from earlier loss, after some argument. The enemy is in disarray behind the second circuit line, attempting to recompose after the sudden loss of their field leaders. With reinforcement, I believe the Bar's garrison could reclaim the second circuit, though I doubt reinforcement will become available. As things stand, I am confident Gorgon Bar will hold robustly for another two weeks minimum.'\n\nThe Angel eased slightly. He looked at Dorn, and continued in a less formal tone.\n\n'That's why I came,' he said. 'The stability permits me an hour or two's grace away, and Rann can hold the line. His fire is undiminished.'\n\nDorn nodded. 'Satisfactory, then,' he said. 'But that's not why you came in person.'\n\nHe gestured to a seat.\n\nSanguinius looked at the gilded chairs nearby: chairs for War Court generals and lords militant, waiting like nursery furniture beside the two or three larger thrones made for demigods. All came here, in their turn, for discourse in the private office of Terra's warlord. There were no seats built for Space Marines. The legionaries always stood.\n\nSanguinius sat down, flexing his hands on the lacquered arm rests of the throne he had chosen, as though impressed by the scrollwork and the gaping lion heads.\n\n'It's not,' he admitted. 'A private matter, in fact.'\n\n'So I imagined,' said Dorn. 'I had heard reports, brother. Nothing official. Concerns for your health. Just tell me directly-'\n\n'Oh no,' said Sanguinius. 'I am entirely well. Entirely well. Weary from the struggle, but aren't we all?' He looked around. 'Is the Great Khan joining us? I thought he might.'\n\nDorn shook his head.\n\n'By link?'\n\nToo busy for \"chatter\", so he said in his message,' Dorn replied with a touch of disdain. 'But he's blocked them squarely at Colossi. I think \"too intent\" is what he means. Fiercely readying his Legion, no doubt, to make a run at Lion's Gate space port.'\n\n'We do need a port,' Sanguinius said. He leant forward earnestly. The word from Eternity Wall Port is bleak. An atrocity, and a wounding loss.'\n\nDorn didn't comment. Some shadow seemed to pass across his face for a moment Sanguinius noticed it, but chose not to remark. He stared at the patterns in the gleaming marble floor instead, pensive.\n\n'Angron is...' he began. 'Rogal, he is beyond words. I can no longer contain the horror of him in language. We have much to fear from him. He is a force now, not a once-brother.'\n\n'He's a monster,' Dorn replied, with flat affect.\n\n'Each is, in his own way,' replied the Angel. 'It pains me to think so, but that's the way of our world. It's just us and the monsters.'\n\nDorn leaned back in his chair, and rubbed his jaw with the heel of his hand.\n\n'Jaghatai can have his run,' he said, as though he was allowing something he had any power to prevent. 'With all my heart, I hope there soon comes a time when we need a port again. Anyway, it could be days or weeks away before he gets the chance. The Pale King is driven back, but he controls the approach and holds the field. The Khan of Khans will have to deal with him, and he is not easily dealt with.'\n\n'But you,' said Sanguinius, 'I understand you have made a gain. A decent one. Archamus was tight-lipped, but there's word of a good fight that went in our favour. They say you took the field in person.'\n\nDorn rose to his feet and wandered to the wall displays to check some passing data.\n\n'I had hoped for more, but yes,' he replied. 'An engagement at Saturnine. Three full companies of the Sons of Horus destroyed, including the First. The Mournival annihilated.'\n\n'Are you... joking?' Sanguinius began.\n\nDorn shook his head. 'That's not the half. We repelled the Phoenician from the wall there. The Phoenician and his entire Legion. Fulgrim is now a true monster too. I shudder at the thought of his transformation. I merely fought. He... he took brutal losses. I didn't close to kill him, despite my efforts, but I think... I think he's done. I think he's broken, and quit the siege, and taken his damn children with him. The monsters are one fewer.'\n\nSanguinius tilted his head, quizzical. He laughed in astonishment.\n\n'You tell me that, brother...' he said, 'all of that, and yet you preface it with the words \"I had hoped for more\"? What more could there be?'\n\n'So much,' said Dorn, expression grim. 'For a moment, there seemed a chance to take Lupercal himself. But no. I was denied.'\n\nSanguinius rose to his feet, arms wide, wings rippling.\n\n'Fulgrim's departure is a great prize, still!' he cried. 'Great Terra! Rogal? This is a victory for us. For you.'\n\nDorn nodded. 'And I mark it as such,' he admitted. He looked at his brother ruefully. 'You know the real irony? Fulgrim could have taken the wall. The power he has, the Legion strength. The unimaginable daemon gifts. He cut the wall wide open, brother, wide open. But for a... a stroke of fortune, I held it closed. Fulgrim got deeper, and faster, than any of them so far. Excess was his undoing, as ever. The brazen confidence of over-strength. He threw his whole damn Legion into a space too small.'\n\nDorn shook his head. He smiled at the Angel sadly.\n\n'I tell you this plainly, brother,' he said. 'If the Warmaster or the Lord of Iron had ever managed to harness him, he would have won this for them in a matter of days. He could have been their greatest weapon.'\n\n'Some of us are hard to control,' said Sanguinius.\n\n'Some of us always have been.'\n\n'Gifted beyond belief, yet wayward,' the Angel remarked. 'So too Angron. The World Eaters, like the Emperor's Children, as you say, could win this outright. But they are wild, and will not be commanded I hey do as they will, capricious as storms. Sometimes their actions benefit Horus Lupercal, and sometimes, thank every star in heaven, us. They are wasted assets.'\n\nThey stared at each other for a moment.\n\n'Well,' said Sanguinius. 'Rogal, you've surprised me with word of triumph. I thought I was going to be the one bearing better news. That's why I came. To tell you in person.'\n\n'You have my full attention,' said Dorn. 'Speak this better news. I long to hear of something other than death.'\n\n'At Gorgon Bar, during the fight there,' said the Angel, 'I... I came into possession of some intelligence. I won't say how, not yet.'\n\n'A secret? From me?'\n\n'Please, trust me.'\n\nDorn shrugged. 'I can do no less, brother, without damning myself, so...'\n\n'The intelligence is genuine,' said Sanguinius. 'Confirmed. Nuceria is destroyed.'\n\nThe Praetorian frowned. 'It's dead. It's been dead for-'\n\n'No,' said Sanguinius. 'Destroyed, not razed. Eradicated. Exterminated by fleet action. There is only one thing that could have done that. The moment I learned of it, my hope was renewed.'\n\nDorn stared at him. They're coming?' he breathed.\n\nThey are coming at last,' Sanguinius nodded. 'Roboute. The Lion. The others are finally coming.'\n\n* * *\n\n'What's it about this time?' Land asked. He was wearing heavy protective gloves, and they were plastered with lockcrete residue that was starting to harden. The chamber air stank of industrial chemicals.\n\n'Get your things,' said Maximus Thane.\n\n'My things are here, because I'm working here,' Land replied. 'As I am sure you can readily see.' His artificimian chittered a scathing threat display at the Imperial Fists officer from the cluttered laboratory bench. 'Your Praetorian charged me, me, in person, to assist with the war effort. I think you were there. Have you taken a blow to the head since? I am doing the Praetorian's work, as I was asked to do.'\n\n'You are, magos.' said Thane.\n\n'Uhm... technoarchaeologist. Or \"sir\". \"Sir\" is perhaps easier and more appropriate. \"Good sir\", even.'\n\nThane grunted.\n\n'Yes, sir,' he said, as though the honorific was a supreme hurdle to overcome. 'You are doing the Praetorian's work. For which all of Terra is grateful, I'm sure. You'll just be doing it somewhere else.'\n\n'It'll take days to dismantle and transport this apparatus!' Land snorted.\n\n'Someone else will do that,' said Thane.\n\n'No, I will. I need it. To develop the defensive potential of lockcrete, I-'\n\n'Someone else will do that too.'\n\n'I... Wow. Wow. Bring them in. I want to meet this exceptional genius,' said Land.\n\n'I am ordered to take you back to Munition Manufactory Two-Two-Six, where you were being so useful before. Armament production is the priority now.'\n\n'No, no,' said Land, trying to pull the gloves off. 'I've moved on from that.'\n\n'Strange to tell, our war has not,' "}
{"text":"eone else will do that,' said Thane.\n\n'No, I will. I need it. To develop the defensive potential of lockcrete, I-'\n\n'Someone else will do that too.'\n\n'I... Wow. Wow. Bring them in. I want to meet this exceptional genius,' said Land.\n\n'I am ordered to take you back to Munition Manufactory Two-Two-Six, where you were being so useful before. Armament production is the priority now.'\n\n'No, no,' said Land, trying to pull the gloves off. 'I've moved on from that.'\n\n'Strange to tell, our war has not,' said Thane. 'Get your things. You've been awarded official clearance to work at MM-Two-Two-Six, which I appreciate will come as a shock.'\n\nLand shot him a withering look.\n\n'So... get your things, sir,' said Thane.\n\nLand sighed. He peeled off the crusted, thickening gloves, and dropped them into a disposal container.\n\n'Oh,' said Thane, as he waited, 'that brother of the Ninth you were asking about. Zephon? As a gesture of... Anyway, I pulled some strings, and located him for you.'\n\n'Good. Where is he?' asked Land.\n\n'Now?' asked Thane. 'The stasis core at Bhab. He was killed in action at Gorgon Bar a few days ago.'\n\n* * *\n\nKeeler heard the footsteps. The clink of keys. The echo of plated boots striking their way along the cell block of the Blackstone. She got up off her cot, and waited for her cell door to open.\n\nThe footsteps passed by.\n\n'Amon?' she called. 'Custodian?'\n\nAmon Tauromachian heard her, but ignored her. He continued along the cell block in the darkness, and drew open the door of Fo's cell.\n\n'Alone today?' asked the little prisoner. That's a bad sign. You've come to kill me, haven't you? You've thought about what I said, and now you think I'm too dangerous to live. A quiet execution in a cell. But you don't want her to see, because she likes you.'\n\nAmon tossed him a dataslate.\n\n'Write it down,' he said.\n\n'Write... what?'\n\n'You know.'\n\nFo picked up the slate, and frowned. 'It's not as simple as that...' 'Write it down.'\n\n'I need a laboratory,' said Fo. 'Dedicated bio-technical apparatus. Access to all data archives. Time to plan it precisely, so I can verify my process. It's not just something you jot down.'\n\n'Just the basics,' said Amon. The principles. The fundamental elements. The details can come later. Write it down. All of it.'\n\n* * *\n\nThe cubicle was small and simple. Candlelit, a smell of lapping powder in the air. Enough room for a simple cot, a repair unit and the warplate rack. Sindermann had to stand in the doorway. Every now and then, the distant boom of a casemate trembled the floor, and made dust skitter down from the ceiling.\n\n'Did it bring you any satisfaction?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'Not really,' Loken replied. He had laid out his blades on the cot: three of them now, the Imperial Fist's chainsword, Rubio's old gladius, and the other one. 'You?'\n\n'No,' said Sindermann. 'I recorded a detailed account, which I'm sure will never be seen or read. Which is, to my mind, a strange use of history. But I'm not the one deciding history. Just watching it pass.'\n\nLoken nodded. He was working his new blade. Mourn-it-All had a frosty gleam.\n\n'Will you use that?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'A good weapon is a good weapon, Kyril,' Loken replied.\n\n'But three swords? Garviel, I hesitate to point out the number of hands you have...'\n\nLoken looked at the old man. 'And I hesitate to point out the number of enemies there are,' he replied. He put the sword down and picked up another, then fished a whetstone from the oiled box.\n\n'What will you do now?' Sindermann asked.\n\n'Go back to the wall,' said Loken.\n\n'Aren't you tired of it?'\n\n'That's not an option,' Loken said.\n\nHe ran the whetstone along the blade. Then he stopped, and looked at his old mentor.\n\n'I learned things, Kyril,' Loken said. 'On the killing floors. They were things I thought I already knew, but I didn't really. Not fully. I saw exactly what our enemy has made our brothers into. The weapons he has fashioned out of them. And I saw that the Emperor has done the same.'\n\nThe same?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'In a way. A different way, I suppose. I understand my place. Just like the Sons of Horus are conduits for Lupercal's twisted power, I've become a conduit for His will.'\n\n'What do you mean?' Sindermann asked. 'You always were.'\n\nLoken held Rubio's sword up to the light, and examined its edge.\n\n'Not like this,' he said.\n\n* * *\n\nThe sun rose over the Guelb er Richat. Clear light. A sky of cornflower blue. Good desert winds.\n\nGood sailing weather. A propitious day to cast off and begin a voyage, even in a desert.\n\nThe neck-bells of the stock clunked as the grazers trotted down the ridge away from the approaching figures.\n\nShe had used her sunstone to confirm the readings of John's torquetum.\n\n'How accurate do we think this is?' John asked her.\n\n'In leagues or weeks?' Erda replied.\n\nJohn sighed. 'But we think he's there?' he asked.\n\n'By every means I know,' she said, 'that's where he's gone. I have consulted the sun, the stars, the cards, the Red Thread and the black mirrors. The cards were the most insistent, others were more reluctant to commit to an answer. But they all agreed. Ollanius is there, two weeks away from now.'\n\n'Right then,' said John. 'I'd best go and get him.' He took out the wraithbone shears, checked his pockets, and kissed Erda on the cheek.\n\nShe looked at him, puzzled.\n\n'I don't know why I did that either,' John said. He glanced over his shoulder. 'Are you coming, or what?'\n\nLeetu nodded. 'If it's that important,' the legionary said.\n\n'I will keep safe until you return to me,' Erda told Leetu.\n\n'Just saying, I'm the one who'll need keeping safe,' said John. He looked at Erda. 'Right. See you later.'\n\n'Or before,' she replied.\n\n* * *\n\nNiora Su-Kassen turned in her command seat. She lowered the slate an ensign had passed to her.\n\n'No, Master of Auspex,' she whispered. Most of the personnel on the vast bridge looked around at her. Phalanx had been on silent operation for months, with scarcely a word spoken anywhere on the vast fortress-ship. Silence within, as silent as the void without. That a vessel of their magnitude had to operate so stealthily spoke of the potential harm that awaited them everywhere in the Solar Spheres.\n\nThe sound of a human voice, even a whisper, shocked almost every one of the five hundred crew and staff present.\n\nThe officer standing on the tier of the deck below her shrugged awkwardly. Grand Terran Admiral (Acting) Su-Kassen rose to her feet.\n\n'Use words,' she instructed.\n\n'Trace confirmed, my lady,' he whispered back.\n\nSu-Kassen looked up at the immense oriel and arched ports that spilled light across the bridge chamber. The stained glass had been tinted to reduce the soft brilliance of Saturn's rings, the radiant plains of light and colour beneath which they sheltered. Mighty Phalanx, and the rest of the Solar fleet it dwarfed, including the massive flagship Imperator Somnium, were in turn dwarfed by the Saturnine expanse. Its mass, and radiation bands, and magnetic fields, concealed them all like a sheltering father.\n\nSince the ravages of the Solar War, she had moved the remnants of the Imperial fleet in from the system edge, creeping into traitor-held space, evading enemy eyes. It was a desperately risky gambit, but it put them closer to strike range, or closer to a rescue run if such an unthinkable thing became necessary. All the while, they were watching for any sign that the reinforcement and relief they had been hoping for had finally arrived.\n\n'We hold-' Su-Kassen said, then stopped and cleared her throat. Talking was so unfamiliar, even whispering. 'We hold, away from all Terran navigation lanes, civilian or military. I chose the vector personally. We are to evade the eyes and ears of the traitor fleets for as long as we can. Or until He calls for us. Any contact signal could make us vulnerable.'\n\n'Agreed, admiral,' whispered the officer. 'But the trace profile-'\n\n'Show me full detail.'\n\nThe Master of Auspex motioned to one of his subordinates. Data rolled across Su-Kassen's command station's primary repeater screen.\n\n'Definitely a fleet,' she murmured. 'In military formation. Aetheric wash suggests it's just made translation beyond the system rim.'\n\n'They haven't seen us, lady,' hissed the Master of Watch.\n\n'Those ship profiles are unmistakable,' whispered the Master of Auspex.\n\nSu-Kassen looked at the Officer of Vox. 'Hailing channel,' she said.\n\nTight beam, direct.'\n\n'Aye, lady. Done.'\n\n'This is-' she started to say. No. No identifiers. Keep it simple. 'You are in our gun sphere. Identify yourself.'\n\n'Incoming visual.'\n\n'Display it,' said Su-Kassen.\n\n'Display, aye.'\n\nAn image unfurled, at giant proportions, cast above the vault of the main bridge by hololithic plates.\n\nA face. Black armour. Unmistakable black armour.\n\n'I am Corswain of the Dark Angels,' the vox-speakers crackled. 'We come to stand with Terra.'\n\n'I, for one, know of no sweeter sight for a man's eyes than his own country...'\n\n- Omerus, the Blind Bard of Ionia\n\n'A leader is ultimately responsible for everything.'\n\n- The Primarch Guilliman\n\n'Loyalist, traitor...? The distinction is irrelevant. They are all sons of the Selenar.'\n\n- Ta'lab Vita-37\n\nPROLOGUE\n\nDo not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly.\n\nThe surface of Terra was burning.\n\nIts atmosphere glowed with the fires of Unity.\n\nStorms of global war raged beneath toxic skies, like the banked embers of a hearth.\n\nThey bathed the Lunar surface in red.\n\nWarfare had riven humanity's birthrock for as long as the Selenar could remember, the conflicts growing in scale with every passing epoch and each unchecked evolution of technology.\n\n'War has recast the world in its image,' said Heliosa-54, the ruddy light of Terra's unification reflecting from the moulded surfaces of her chromium mask.\n\n'It has always been thus, revered matriarch,' spat Ta'lab Vita-37, her multi-armed form hunched over the data-light of the command console. 'It is mankind's nature to destroy.'\n\nThe matriarch of the Selenar tu"}
{"text":"g as the Selenar could remember, the conflicts growing in scale with every passing epoch and each unchecked evolution of technology.\n\n'War has recast the world in its image,' said Heliosa-54, the ruddy light of Terra's unification reflecting from the moulded surfaces of her chromium mask.\n\n'It has always been thus, revered matriarch,' spat Ta'lab Vita-37, her multi-armed form hunched over the data-light of the command console. 'It is mankind's nature to destroy.'\n\nThe matriarch of the Selenar turned to her most trusted gene maiden, hearing the stress placed on the man of mankind.\n\n'That is likely true,' agreed Heliosa-54, 'but we too are a branch of that shared root. Yes, we distil the essences of singular genetic paths in search of the perfect aspects of our species, but follow the strands of history far enough back, and we are not so different.'\n\nShe felt Ta'lab Vita-37's urge to challenge that assertion, her consciously evolved nature as a contrarian and questioner warring with her respect for Heliosa-54's vaunted archetype.\n\n'You disagree?'\n\n'I would not presume to, revered matriarch. Not now.'\n\n'Of course you would, it is the archetype you iterate upon with every evolution. Speak freely.'\n\n'Very well, revered matriarch,' said Ta'lab Vita-37, pausing to gesture towards the grim situation unfolding in front of them. 'The Emperor's transhuman warriors are bred to wreak bloody ruin and nothing else. They are capable of nothing else. But we of the Selenar cults, by iterating upon the twin mysteries of the helix, perform acts of delation and creation. The gene-wrights of the Emperor pursue only the science of death, and it is too late for them to change their course.'\n\n'And our sciences? Do we not also craft killing engines of steel and flesh?'\n\n'For the defence of our fiefdoms, yes,' Ta'lab Vita-37 conceded. 'But the Dianic rites bring us closer to the true potential of humanity. Ultimately they will move us further from the urge to destroy.\n\n'I hope that will one day prove to be the case,' said Heliosa-54. 'But do not be so quick to condemn our Terran brothers. In times past, there were moments when the better angels of human nature sought to turn our species from the bloody altars of war. To embrace Peace.'\n\n'Such times were few and far between,' pointed out la lab Vita-37. 'And they never lasted.'\n\nAs if to reinforce her point, the curve-walled chamber at the heart of the moon shook with the impact of nearby detonations. Grey dust spilled from cracks in the ceiling. It danced in the suspensor fields surrounding Heliosa-54's floating, cursive-spined form. Fractal patterns of dust glittered in the actinic light thrown out by the gently spinning gene-looms woven into the stone walls.\n\nThe pneuma-tubes along Heliosa-54's neck pulsed in time with her frosted breath, crafting a twisting helix at her throat.\n\n'Why does the Emperor seek to destroy us?' asked Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'The Emperor does not seek to destroy us.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 extended a curved, talon-like fingertip, hooking a disc of noospheric light from the gloss-black of the command console and lifting it up between them.\n\nA rapidly shrinking noose of red light converged on their location, a silver icon of the crescent moon. Previously muted vox-channels surged with screams of the doomed and dying. The unmistakable bangs of bolter fire and shrieking plasma explosions formed a deafening cacophony of slaughter.\n\n'All available data suggests otherwise,' she said. 'Warriors of the Seventh and Sixteenth Legions are slaughtering everything in their path. Our cults are dying as we speak.'\n\nThe howls of their attackers were a screeching din that scraped the spine, feral war-shouts of men born in the dark and raised on murder. Such men would accept nothing less than the complete destruction of whoever dared stand before them.\n\n'The Emperor does not seek to destroy us,' repeated Heliosa-54. 'He seeks to yoke us to His great work. Not without some justification, He hopes we fear annihilation more than servitude. His hubris requires our science, our looms and our mysteries. He knows much, but He does not know everything.'\n\n'Is that why you brought me here?' asked Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Is that why you still remain?'\n\n'Yes. If the Emperor's killers do not find me here, they will tear Luna apart until they do. They will break me and I will be forced to give them the Magna Mater.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 flinched at the thought, and said, 'What is it you require of me?'\n\nHeliosa-54 extended a dextrous, needle-like hand, one whose fingertips had crafted gene-sequences of such dizzying complexity that it seemed inconceivable they did not belong to some ancient creator goddess.\n\n'To forsake me,' said Heliosa-54.\n\n'I do not understand,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\nData flowed between them, coiling spirals of light bearing gene sequences, marker codes and swathes of information so complex it made Ta'lab Vita-37 gasp at the density of inload.\n\n'Go below to the Ergodic Vault. Sever your connections to the Luna Manifold, take the Magna Mater and vanish. I cannot divulge what I do not know. Too few of the high priestesses remain alive to destroy the Magna Mater, so you must keep it from the Emperor, you understand?'\n\n'I understand,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\nHeliosa-54 saw Ta'lab Vita-37's shoulders slump, the gene-maiden already burdened by the terrible duty she had placed upon her.\n\n'And if they should eventually find me?'\n\n'Then pray that he who takes the Magna Mater is a wiser soul and has greater vision than Terra's new master.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 bowed, clasping her hands across her chest.\n\n'It shall be as you say, revered matriarch,' she said. 'I will not fail you.'\n\nHeliosa-54 did not watch her go, already beginning a mnemonic purge. Sadness touched her as precious memories burned away in the fires of synaptic erasure. She had loved Ta'lab Vita-37 as a daughter, but could not allow any trace of the gene-maiden to be found within her neural network.\n\nShe turned back to the console.\n\nBarely six hours had passed since the sudden, shocking assault of the brute-crafted gene-warriors from Terra.\n\nEvery war front on Luna told the same story of defeat.\n\nHer heart heavy with fear for the future, the High Matriarch of Luna opened a broad-spectrum vox-channel.\n\nShe knew the Emperor would hear her.\n\nShe hoped His warriors would.\n\n'Call off your wolves,' she begged.\n\nBOOK 1\n\nMAIDEN\n\nShe is a wild, tangled forest with temples and treasures concealed within.\n\n1\n\nA Captain Remade\n\nSkeleton Crew\n\nCarnager\n\nHow best should a warrior die?\n\nHe had given much thought to this over the years. As a neophyte, he imagined his end would come in a terrible war against some hideous xenoform, fighting side by side with his brothers for a noble and heroic cause. His last moments would come in a battle spoken of in awe by the warriors of ages yet to pass.\n\nIn the following millennia, lessons learned from his end would be taught in every academy of war - required reading for the youth of this new age.\n\nLibraries of books would be written of that bloody time.\n\nBut war cares nothing for the arrogant imaginings of young men.\n\nIts teachings are bloody and indifferent.\n\nYes, heroes are forged in the crucible of combat, and the legacies of a handful live on in the memories of those who endure. But tor every hero whose deeds transcend their death, tens of thousands more are forgotten or never known at all.\n\nTheir courage goes unrecorded.\n\nTheir stories are never told.\n\nNykona Sharrowkyn was no longer a neophyte, and ever since Sabik Wayland had dragged his ruined body from the betrayal on Isstvan V, he'd long known he would die in the dark, alone and unremembered.\n\nA fitting end for a warrior of the Raven Guard.\n\nHow best should a warrior die?\n\nIn a little over two minutes, he'd likely find out.\n\nSpots of light flickered like auspex glitches on the ochre orb of Jupiter, which filled the Sisypheum's viewscreen. But they weren't glitches, they were burning weapons platforms struck from their orbital anchors and now dragged to destruction by the vast planet's gravity. In the foreground, pyrochemical lightning and ash storms distorted the gun-metal ellipse of Ganymede as its vast hydro-stacks burned in the fury of traitor bombardments.\n\nThe Solar War was raging, hot and bright, but drawing inexorably closer to Terra from the outer-system planets. The Warmaster was tightening his noose, but every minute the loyalists kept the traitors from the Throneworld's glory was a victory.\n\nDying ships blazed in Jupiter's high orbit, skeletons of blackened metal alight from within. Atomic storms raged in their wakes as millions of megatons of ship-killing ordnance detonated like distant supernovas.\n\nNot as distant as Nykona Sharrowkyn would have liked.\n\nSwarms of torpedoes flew hot in the void. Macro shells lit up space in blinding explosions. Banks of lasers blinked in collimated lines of actinic brightness.\n\nSomething detonated off the ventral axis. Sharrowkyn had no idea what it might have been. A torpedo warhead? A ship exploding? A hunter-killer mine?\n\nThree hundred and sixty-seven ships manoeuvred aggressively within the Jovian engagement volume. Escorts and destroyers mostly. At least seventy vessels of capital displacement. Sharrowkyn had little skill in coordinating void fights or the operation of a starship, but after the disastrous mission to Lema Two-Twelve and the decimation of the Sisypheum's crew, he'd had to learn something of the craft.\n\nA twisting shape emerged from the screeching static and waves of interference rippled through the holographic representation of the void brawl.\n\nHuge, and coming right at them.\n\nRange markers and ident-tags flickered to life.\n\n'Tumbling Lunar-class dead ahead!' shouted Sharrowkyn.\n\n'I see it,' replied Sabik Wayland, spliced into the Sisypheum's multiple helm controls via neuro-proxy devices crafted by Frater Thamatica. 'Manoeuvring now.'\n\nWayland sounded matter-of-fact, but Sharrowkyn had fought beside"}
{"text":"ing shape emerged from the screeching static and waves of interference rippled through the holographic representation of the void brawl.\n\nHuge, and coming right at them.\n\nRange markers and ident-tags flickered to life.\n\n'Tumbling Lunar-class dead ahead!' shouted Sharrowkyn.\n\n'I see it,' replied Sabik Wayland, spliced into the Sisypheum's multiple helm controls via neuro-proxy devices crafted by Frater Thamatica. 'Manoeuvring now.'\n\nWayland sounded matter-of-fact, but Sharrowkyn had fought beside the warrior of the Iron Hands long enough to hear the strain beneath his outward calm.\n\nThe bridge deck tilted violently as the Iron Father threw the Sisypheum into a hard, rolling turn. The heavily modified strike cruiser shuddered. Its hull plates buckled and up-armoured bulkheads groaned in protest as the kilometres-long keel flexed.\n\nGravity shifted with the violence of the manoeuvre and proximity alarms brayed. The clashing, discordant shriek of intersecting void shields filled the bridge. Hardwired servitors maintaining shield integrity spasmed as electrical feedback burned them alive from within. Sharrowkyn gagged at the smell of scorched machine oil and flesh.\n\nThe unimaginable scale of the gutted Lunar-class vessel filled the viewscreen. Sharrowkyn felt himself ducking as its burning superstructure passed over them. So vast it felt like it would never end.\n\nSo close he felt he could reach the other ship's bridge in one powered leap.\n\n'Didn't even come close,' said Wayland, pulling out of the turn and leaving the doomed ship in their wake as he angled them back to the battle.\n\n'That warning was too damn late, Sharrowkyn!' bellowed Ulrach Branthan, the newly resurrected captain of the Sisypheum. His voice was a hideous amalgam of ruined human vocal cords and ad hoc augmetics. 'You're supposed to be tracking the flow of this battle.'\n\n'Do I look like the master of surveyors?' snapped Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Then step aside and find someone who can read a damn auspex!' said Branthan, his towering form stepping down from the command podium with a booming thud of asymmetrical, splay-clawed feet.\n\nThe captain's body was a nightmarish fusion of flesh and machine, but it bore only a passing resemblance to the honourable chassis of the Dreadnought from which its parts had been cannibalised. Rather, he was now a thing of biomechanical horror wrought by Atesh Tarsa in a moment of madness and desperation. The ancient relic known as the Heart of Iron was enmeshed in Branthan's exposed ribs and musculature like a chromium spider, beating with a loathsomeness Sharrowkyn could barely stomach.\n\nThe spoiled-meat stink of Branthan's body and the noxious chemicals keeping his rotten flesh alive reminded Sharrowkyn of his youth - of when he would find milky, bloated bodies afloat in the deep salt pools of Lycaeus.\n\nA psyber-eagle wrought from pale steel and brass perched at his shoulder. The Iron Hands had named it Garuda, after an ancient Medusan myth, and, like the crew of the Sisypheum, it had suffered great hurts, but yet endured. On Iydris, it had taken a bolt-round from the swordsman Lucius, but Thamatica and Wayland had restored its mechanical life.\n\nThe surveyor station was awash with flickering ghost images of the absurdly close-range battle. Wayland rolled them around the shuddering wreck of the Glory Hound, a Mars-class warship burning from bow to stem.\n\nBooming clangs echoed through the ship's superstructure. Repurposed maintenance servitors at damage control blurted screeds of binaric gibberish.\n\n'What was that?' demanded Branthan.\n\n'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Suicidal bombers or fighter craft with no carrier to return to? Maybe drifting wreckage too small for the auspex to pick up.'\n\n'Not good enough. Raven Guard!\"\n\nSharrowkyn bit back an angry retort as the display flared with signal bloom. Threat warnings blazed to life across the glowing surface of the slate.\n\n'Capital vessel coming about on our rearward quarter.' he called. 'Oberon-class, I think.'\n\n'The Covenant of Truth. Seventeenth Legion predator-ship,' replied Wayland sharply. 'But it's not coming for us.'\n\nDozens of threat runes blinked to life on the viewscreen.\n\n'How can you be sure?' barked Branthan.\n\n'The Kryptos,' said Wayland, pulling the Sisypheum away from the larger vessel's void-wake. 'It's feeding me the Covenant's encrypted vox. Its captain is communicating with two other ships. They're moving to bracket the Europa's Wrath.'\n\nSharrowkyn tried to sort the conflicting auspex returns and match what he was seeing to what Wayland was telling him.\n\n'Are you certain?' he asked, 'looks to me like the Covenant is manoeuvring for a raking barrage across our drive.'\n\n'I don't like ships on my rear!' said Branthan. Garuda spread its wings and squawked angrily.\n\n'It's not coming for us,' insisted Wayland.\n\n'It has a perfect firing position,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Holding course.' said Wayland.\n\n'Throne damn you, Sabik Wayland!' cried Branthan, pounding across the deck towards the Iron Father. For an instant, Sharrowkyn thought he was going to rip Wayland from helm control.\n\nThe range counters slowed and extended.\n\nSharrowkyn let out a breath. 'It's pulling away.'\n\n'I told you, the Covenant is hungry to kill the Europa's Wrath'.\n\nThe viewscreen erupted with light as the Covenant of Truth launched staggered broadsides into its victim. Boxed in by the barrages of two other traitor warships, the Imperial vessel was forced to endure the punishing fire flaying its shields.\n\nTorpedo boats and bomber wings flew in close to the Europa's Wrath, and wave upon wave of ordnance punched into the titanic warship's hull. Secondary boosters thrust warheads farther into the larger ship before delayed-action fuses detonated them deep in its vitals.\n\nA rippling wave travelled the length of the vessel as explosions raced through its internal compartments, tearing it apart from the inside. Swirling conflagrations erupted from the Wrath's many wounds, burning white-hot with pure oxygen and the chemical fire of its blood. Sharrowkyn felt his heart clamped by an icy fist as he watched the majestic ship die. Like the last of a species finally brought to extinction, it fought to the end, but its doom was assured. The rad-wash of its murder fouled every sensor return, but Sharrowkyn saw rampant cascades of high-band atomics flaring deep in its enginarium\n\nThat could only mean one thing.\n\n'She's going critical,' shouted Sharrowkyn, 'Get us clear, Wayland.\n\n'Belay that!' ordered Branthan. 'Get us closer!'\n\n'What?' shouted Sharrowkyn. 'No! You'll kill us all!'\n\nHe took a half-step towards Branthan\n\n'Remain at your post!' barked the monstrous captain of the Iron Hands.\n\n'Wayland, no!' shouted Sharrowkyn. 'It's suicide to be anywhere near that ship.'\n\n'Bring us around,' said Branthan. The Covenant of Truth's shields are down. Vector a course directly towards its bridge. Sharrowkyn, get me a firing solution right now!'\n\n'Wayland, get us out of here,' pleaded Sharrowkyn. 'He'll kill us all for the sake of vengeance.'\n\nBranthan spun around, murderously swift for something so hulking. A powerful fist, ripped from the chassis of the fallen Brother Bombastus, slammed into Sharrowkyn's chest.\n\nHe flew backwards, twisting in the air to land in a crouched skid across the deck. Muscle memory made his hand fly to his hip, where his black-bladed gladius was sheathed.\n\nHe looked up to see Garuda perched on the edge of the auspex table, its head cocked to the side as it regarded him with its unblinking eyes.\n\nWas it just his imagination or did the bird shake its head? Sharrowkyn let out a breath as Garuda took flight and returned to Branthan's shoulder. The deck shuddered as the Sisypheum fired its prow bombardment cannon at point-blank range. The Covenant of Truth's close-in defence systems had no lime to react, and the city-leveling ordnance impacted on its command deck with devastating effect.\n\nAn Oberon-class battleship was a monstrously powerful ship of the line, heavily armoured and bristling with weapons systems, but without shields it was vulnerable. The Sisypheum's shells punched deep into the nexus of its command centre, gouging mortal wounds into its brain. Plumes of fire and blossoming clouds of molten steel vented into space.\n\nThe Sisypheum flew through the expanding clouds of superheated vapour and cascades of wreckage, chased by a storm of hastily aimed las-fire and burst shells from anti-torpedo frag-launchers.\n\nBranthan turned from Sharrowkyn, Garuda once again at his shoulder.\n\n'Hard turn, bring us back around,' said Branthan. 'I want to finish this bastard off.'\n\n'It's already out of the fight,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'I don't want it out of the fight,' snapped Branthan. 'I want it dead'.'\n\nThe Sisypheum shuddered as Wayland put the ship into a tight corkscrewing turn to starboard. He angled the prow down to obscure their course in the blazing plasma wake of the wounded battleship.\n\n'Thamatica!' barked Wayland over the vox. 'I'm going to need those reactors burning hotter.'\n\nThe vox crackled with a blurt of angry binaric code before Thamatica answered from the enginarium.\n\n'I assure you, Iron Father, it is taking everything I have simply to keep the reactors from overloading and killing us all. I can do only so much with barely a handful of menial servitors assisting me.'\n\n'Do what you can, Ironwrought,' said Wayland, snapping off the vox. 'Nykona?'\n\nSharrowkyn didn't answer, his gaze fixed on Ulrach Branthan's back. He released the breath he'd been holding, feeling a sharp pain in his ribs. He relaxed his white-knuckled grip on his gladius, understanding that he had been on the verge of unleashing lethal violence on a fellow legionary.\n\nAn insane fellow legionary, yes, but one whose loyalty was still given to the Emperor.\n\n'Nykona,' said Wayland, his voice calm but authoritative. 'I need eyes in this fight. Return to your station, brother.'\n\nSharrowkyn nodded slowly and sheathed his blade.\n\nThe v"}
{"text":"an's back. He released the breath he'd been holding, feeling a sharp pain in his ribs. He relaxed his white-knuckled grip on his gladius, understanding that he had been on the verge of unleashing lethal violence on a fellow legionary.\n\nAn insane fellow legionary, yes, but one whose loyalty was still given to the Emperor.\n\n'Nykona,' said Wayland, his voice calm but authoritative. 'I need eyes in this fight. Return to your station, brother.'\n\nSharrowkyn nodded slowly and sheathed his blade.\n\nThe void was burning with innumerable atomic flare-storms, pulsing tsunami of e-mag surges and the detonation echoes of the Covenant's magazine stores.\n\nSituational awareness was next to impossible to determine.\n\nEven an asupex-savant or an officer with decades of experience would likely divine nothing from this sensory anarchy.\n\n'Coming about,' said Wayland matter-of-factly, as if announcing mundane orbital manoeuvres. 'Gun Deck, how long till the bombardment cannon is back online?'\n\nThe pained voice of Atesh Tarsa, the Salamanders Apothecary, echoed through the bridge.\n\n'Numen's working on it, but it will be at least seven minutes before the weapon is ready to fire. Every part of the reload process has to be done manually.'\n\nWayland cut the link and said, 'Broadsides it is then.'\n\nA discordant wailing cut over the vox-bands, and Sharrowkyn winced at the torment he heard in the nightmarish howls.\n\nPart binaric code, part daemonic cant.\n\nIn its purest form, the Mechanicum called it scrapcode.\n\nIt was the Kryptos, screaming from its below-decks cell.\n\nNot a warning, a shriek of terror...\n\n'Brace, brace, brace!' yelled Wayland.\n\nSharrowkyn saw it a second later.\n\nA tapered prow knifing through the void, vectoring in at the perfect kill angle, murder-torpedoes already loose, stabbing lasers stripping away the last of the Sisypheum's shields.\n\nThe ship screamed over the vox, tearing through the Sisypheum's security protocols with the visceral trauma of its name.\n\nCarnager! Carnager! Carnager!\n\nWhite-hot beams of light seared through the strike cruiser s many decks, the relative movement of the two vessels causing them to whipsaw through its reinforced superstructure. Hundreds of metres of hull plate peeled away, like meal pared from the bone by a butcher's knife.\n\nThe force of entire sections venting explosively into hard vacuum heeled the ship over like a pugilist rocked back on their heels.\n\nThe auspex screamed with incoming ordnance.\n\nThe blood-red light of a mortal wound filled the bridge. It painted Branthan in a daemonic glow.\n\n'You've killed us all,' hissed Sharrowkyn.\n\nThen the world turned inside out.\n\nAnd red light turned to white.\n\n2\n\nThe Way is Open\n\nEchoes of the Past\n\nBack from the Dead\n\nA frozen moment of time.\n\nIt stretched, soundless and serene.\n\nSharrowkyn's first thought was that if this was death, then everything the old-timers on Lycaeus had told him as a rebel youth was wrong.\n\nThey'd spoken of death as a fire that consumed you.\n\nIt would be painful, they said.\n\nDeath was always painful in the old-timers' tales, and it was never easy. A good death would be sudden and, if you were lucky, one you wouldn't see coming.\n\nBut this moment? This eternal moment was peaceful.\n\nWhich told Sharrowkyn it wasn't death.\n\nThis was something else.\n\nCold and weightless, Sharrowkyn's gut swelled with nausea, like the worst translation sickness imaginable. His eyes burned, as if micro-scopic needles were slowly pushing into his pupils.\n\nHe saw nothing but blinding searing light.\n\nHis senses swam in and out of coherence.\n\nScreaming voices, cries of horror, unbridled joy.\n\nThese were not voices he knew, for there were men, women, and children who screamed names he'd never heard.\n\nA thousand voices, tens of thousands.\n\nHe recognised languages of Terra, as well as dialects that had taken root in the centuries since humanity first set sail from its world. Woven within them were words never meant to be given voice, daemonic chatterings of razor teeth and loathsome appetite*\n\nSharrowkyn's mouth tasted metal, and his skull bloated with a raging storm of emotions, only a few of which were his.\n\nFear, guilt, hoped-for redemption, and overwhelming horror that was only kept from turning into a raging storm of self destruction by iron discipline.\n\nToo much. Too fast.\n\nHe felt the synapses within his mind coming untethered, the torrent of emotions eroding them like a surge tide that rips away the supports of a bridge.\n\nThe empty white of his vision cleared, and once again he saw the cold steel of buttressed gantries and the riveted steel plates of the ship s bridge.\n\nThe Sisypheum spun like a leaf on the wind, and an awful sense of vertigo permeated every fibre of Sharrowkyn's being. From his marrow to his psyche, he felt as though he were folding inside out - as if every dimension of his existence were now revealed to be a flimsy construct\n\nNo sirens blared, and only the warning hiss of static filled the bridge, like the droning of carrion flies swarming the meat of the battle-fallen. Light flickered at the corner of his vision, and he rolled onto his side closing his eyes as a fresh stab of nausea ripped up through his stomach. The sensation was so unnatural to his transhuman physiology that he almost didn't recognise it.\n\nThe feeling passed, and Sharrowkyn gripped the edge of the nearest console to pull himself upright, feeling as weak as a newborn. He blinked away the last of the burning pain in his vision, seeing the rest of the bridge crew recovering from whatever had just happened\n\n'Wayland, what in Medusa's name was that?' demanded Branthan, his mechanised body drooling coolant fluids and crackling with what looked like warp corposant. Garuda lay on the ground, its legs twitching and its eyes flickering with machine light.\n\nSabik didn't answer, his eyes wide and his lips moving soundlessly, like a servitor in the midst of a mindwipe. Strapped to his command throne. Sabik hadn't fallen like the rest of them, but integrated with the rest of the Sisypheum's systems, he'd felt everything the ship had suffered.\n\n'What was that?' repeated Branthan.\n\nSharrowkyn wanted to check his friend, but knew he had to deal with the most pressing demand before moving to the next\n\nPrioritise and execute.\n\nThe surveyor array was a flaring mess of static and distortions, a jumble of signals, datum points and navigational beacons dial bore no resemblance to those in Jupiter's vicinity.\n\n'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'None of the readings on the auspex make any sense.'\n\n'Make them make sense,' ordered Branthan, as if the reality of their surroundings could be made clearer simply by force of will. 'The Carnager could be ready to finish us off!'\n\nSharrowkyn shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I'm not picking up any ship signatures or engine flares in the void. We're alone out here'\n\n'And where exactly is here? We can't fight effectively if we don't know where we are.'\n\n'If the few datum points I'm picking up are correct, then it looks like...'\n\n'Like what?' said Branthan when Sharrowkyn didn't continue 'Like we made a warp jump,' he said, trying to make sense of what little information he could confirm. 'Everything I'm seeing suggest we're no longer in the Jovian battlespace. We're somewhere above the solar disc, in the outer reaches of the trans-Martian void. Roughly a third of an AU from Terra...'\n\n'That's impossible,' snapped Branthan. 'A warp jump this close to the sun would have torn us apart.'\n\n'I don't know how else to explain it,' said Sharrowkyn, his words growing more confident as fresh information confirmed his hypothesis.\n\n'He's right, captain,' said Wayland, his words slurred with system-shock. 'I felt a huge spike in warp spectra right after the Carnager hit us. I don't know exactly what it was, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of the Comet Shrine. Similar to what I'd expect to see when a war fleet translates, but many orders of magnitude larger.'\n\n'A warp rift? This deep in the Solar System? How?' said Branthan, and every one of them knew there could be only one architect of such a traumatic wound in reality.\n\n'Horus Lupercal,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'That's how he's going to do it, how he was always going to do it,' said Wayland, unable to conceal a fleeting admiration for the sheer audacity of so bold a plan's execution. 'The fighting around the Kthonic and Elysian Gates was just to spread out our defences along the solar perimeter. We assumed the gates were the only way Horus could bring his fleets through, but if the scale of these readings is even vaguely accurate, then the traitors could sail a hundred fleets through that rift. Practically into Terra's orbit...'\n\n'So we have a new target,' said Branthan.\n\n'A new target?' said Sharrowkyn, struggling to contain his anger.\n\n'We're dead in the void. The Carnager's lasers all but disembowelled us. Every deck below the waterline is compromised. Our drive is offline, and one of the reactors is venting radiation into space like a damn signal flare.'\n\n'Then we find somewhere to repair,' said Branthan.\n\n'Where?' said Sharrowkyn. 'There's nothing out here.'\n\n'An old way station, an abandoned graving yard, a lost research post, something,' said Branthan. 'There must be relics of the first push from Terra drifting out here.'\n\n'I'm telling you, there's nothing,' repeated Sharrowkyn\n\nWayland twisted in his grav-couch and fixed Sharrowkyn with a piercing stare.\n\n'Nykona,' he said, holding Sharrowkyn's gaze. 'If there is one man I would trust to find something lost in the darkness, it is you. Find us somewhere to heal the hurts done to the Sisypheum and we will live to fight on. What is it your brothers say? From the darkness we strike, fast and lethal. And by the time our foes can react...'\n\nSharrowkyn grinned. '...Darkness there, and nothing more.'\n\nIt took Sharrowkyn twenty-five hours to locate somewhere viable for the Sisypheum to effect repairs. Anchored in the void and all but invisible, it was a na"}
{"text":"ere is one man I would trust to find something lost in the darkness, it is you. Find us somewhere to heal the hurts done to the Sisypheum and we will live to fight on. What is it your brothers say? From the darkness we strike, fast and lethal. And by the time our foes can react...'\n\nSharrowkyn grinned. '...Darkness there, and nothing more.'\n\nIt took Sharrowkyn twenty-five hours to locate somewhere viable for the Sisypheum to effect repairs. Anchored in the void and all but invisible, it was a nameless, hollow cavern of iron with only rudimentary docking facilities and fractional life support\n\nIn the earliest days of warships traversing the oceans of Old Earth, such places were known as coaling stations, ports that allowed the navies of the great powers to extend the range and influence of their fleets.\n\nThis structure had been designed to allow the first monitor ships to remain on station for extended patrol circuits of the inner-system gulfs. With Old Earth isolated for millennia, and many of the outer reaches of the Solar System in the hands of xenos, the thin line keeping Terra safe while the Emperor assembled His forces was only maintained by the bravery of its frontier fleets and refuelling stations such as this.\n\nThe search for a safe haven had also revealed more about the traumatic warp event that had ripped the fabric of the Solar System asunder. With every passing moment, the scale of the armada passing through the rift opened close to Terra became horrifyingly apparent.\n\nFleets of such size as had not been seen since the earliest days of the Imperium were translating into real space in an unending flood. Prodigal sons now returned to the system of their birth with blades bared for the sole purpose of murdering their sire.\n\nBombs would already be falling on Terra, but the Sisypheum could do nothing to help.\n\nWith the Iron Hands and their monotasked servitors engaged in the repair efforts to the Sisypheum, Sharrowkyn had taken to spending his days roaming the cavernous halls of the nameless coaling station. Centuries had passed since ships had last docked here, but the titanic fuelling silos still reeked of congealed promethium and the scabbed residue of volatile engine plasma.\n\nThe darkness within was home to Sharrowkyn.\n\nThe interior of the Sisypheum was a gloomy place, for transhuman warriors had little need of light, and it had no serfs remaining who required illumination. Beyond the handful of Space Marines, only servitors prowled its lonely halls, and they cared nothing for their surroundings.\n\nBut this blackness was absolute, a place where light went to die - so all-encompassing, it took Sharrowkyn back to his training with the Shadowmasters, where he had lived for two years without light or vision. Terrifying to a youth, even one blooded in the darkness of Lycaeus, then bearable, before finally becoming bonded so intimately to him that he became part of it.\n\nSharrowkyn embraced the darkness as a reminder of simpler times.\n\nThe echoes of the warships that had docked here at the dawn of the Imperium, perhaps similarly wounded, were all around him.\n\nThe names of proud vessels were etched into the walls, names that sounded absurdly quaint to Sharrowkyn. Black Joke, Divine Lip, Dextrous Gladiator and Bittersweet Reunion.\n\nThe crews of these ships had left their mark too, so many names etched over each other that they had become unreadable. Tens of thousands of them, more. Sharrowkyn understood that this was no mere utilitarian relic of a bygone age.\n\nIt was a memorial to the dead, a vast record of those who had conquered the Solar System.\n\nSharrowkyn wasn't vain enough to imagine that anyone would leave such a memorial for him or the millions who had died in the fires of the Warmaster's betrayal. No, he would die in the dark, for gotten and beyond anyone's wit to recall.\n\nAssuming the Emperor's armies could defeat the traitors, this would be a war the Imperium would wish consigned to the shadows, for it would only serve as a reminder of when humanity's will had failed. Only if Terra fell to the traitors would it be celebrated, as the beginning of a new age, the dawning of Lupercal Imperator's reign.\n\nHe paused to run his fingers over the carvings, picturing a crew man in a bulky vac-suit, likely dying of radiation poisoning as he cut into the metal with the tip of a drill bit to secure his little piece of immortality.\n\nCenturies separated Sharrowkyn from this long-dead crewman. But at that moment, alone at the edge of the dark, he felt a powerful connection pass down through the ages.\n\nSharrowkyn set off once more, pausing every now and then when he saw a name legible enough to read. No one save he would ever read them, but it felt important that at least one person in all the galaxy remember that these men and women had existed at all.\n\nHe wished he knew the name of this place, to truly mark their passing.\n\nThe vox chirruped in Sharrowkyn's ear.\n\n'Nykona?' said the unmistakably gruff voice of ash and smoke that belonged to Atesh Tarsa. The Apothecary of the Salamanders Legion had kept them alive over the years on the bleeding edges of this conflict, and everyone aboard the Sisypheum owed him their life.\n\nBut Sharrowkyn wished Tarsa had let one of their number die.\n\n'Where are you?' asked the Apothecary.\n\n'In the darkness. What do you want, Atesh?'\n\n'It's Cadmus Tyro.'\n\n'What about him?'\n\n'He's awake, and he wants to speak to you.'\n\nThe apothecarion of the Sisypheum had once been as much a place of death as the nameless coaling station. Since the massacre on the black sands of Isstvan V, Ulrach Branthan had lain entombed in ice, his body a wretched conglomeration of torn meat and bone held together by sinew and pure will.\n\nOnly the Heart of Iron had kept the captain alive as he writhed in stasis, its Dark Age technologies simultaneously reweaving his flesh and blood even as his mind annealed into the singular blade of vengeance.\n\nAnd there he would have remained until death had it not been for the damn bird.\n\nFor reasons known only to its inscrutable machine consciousness, Garuda had chosen to irreparably disable the stasis controls of Branthan's cryo-chamber, leaving Tarsa no option but to resort to desperate measures to save the life of his patient.\n\n'You should have let him die,' Sharrowkyn had told the Apothecary in the wake of the captain's rebirth. 'His thirst for vengeance will kill us all.'\n\n'If I would have let him die, I would have broken my Apothecary's Oath,' Tarsa had replied. 'I would have been finishing the work of the traitors.\n\nSharrowkyn had wanted to dispute the point, but this galaxy had seen far too much faithlessness for him to wish one more broken oath on the cosmos.\n\nHe passed through the pressurised vestibule and its fog of counterseptic decontaminants.\n\nThe airlock hissed closed behind him, sealing him within the sterile environment of the apothecarion. He found Tarsa hunched over a spinning centrifuge. Blood samples whirred in glass tubes and the hum of medicae machinery filled the space. The air tasted of tin, and the lumens flickered overhead, fizzing with poor connectivity to the ship's main grid.\n\n'I see the power is still intermittent,' said Sharrowkyn. Tarsa looked up, his ebon-black face the opposite of the Raven Guard's pallid features. Dull red eyes were set in a craggy, hairless skull, and Sharrowkyn saw a lifetime's sorrow in their depths. He saw Sharrowkyn and smiled weakly.\n\n'Nykona,' he said, offering his hand. 'Welcome back to the light.' Sharrowkyn took his fellow warrior's wrist. 'I apologise, brother. I have been a stranger of late.'\n\nTarsa nodded, and said. 'The sons of the Raven Lord understand the value of solitude. It is a trait I admire. Some of our more... boisterous Legion brothers prefer raucous gatherings and overt displays of brotherhood, but, like you, I find such displays tiresome.'\n\nSharrowkyn smiled. 'There's virtue in both. I'm no hermit, but after Eirene Septimus I needed to take some time to clear my head. I needed to re-evaluate my perceptions.'\n\n'You weren't to blame for what happened.' said Tarsa.\n\n'I knew! said Sharrowkyn. 'I knew and I still went along with Meduson's plan.'\n\n'Alpharius fooled us all,' brother, said Tarsa. 'And you were not in command.'\n\n'You... should... listen to him,' said a voice from behind a surgical curtain.\n\nTarsa parted the curtain, and beckoned Sharrowkyn through.\n\nCadmus Tyro lay upon a steel gurney, surrounded by banks of throbbing machinery: blood pumps, autoimmune boosters and a dozen different monitoring devices plugged directly into the weeping interfaces cut into his flesh.\n\nHis wounds had been horrific, near mortal - shattered bones, unchecked internal bleeding, mass-reactive trauma and the complete destruction of numerous organs. That he still drew breath at all was a miracle; few could face a primarch and live.\n\nTarsa had employed every one of the Apothecary's arts to keep him alive, but the Sisypheum's former captain had fallen into a deathly slumber from which no one had expected him to rise.\n\nYet, here he was, awake and clear-eyed. Sharrowkyn's eyes roved the captain's synth-wrapped body. The wounds in his chest cavity had been packed and bound, and new flesh was filling the void. Bone splices had stimulated fresh growth, though much of the ossification of his ribs was yet to occur. Bloodstained steel rods scaffolded his legs and left arm, but even now, they were being withdrawn by a pair of drifting servo-skulls.\n\nThe agony of the procedure was etched into Tyro's face, like all Iron Hands, he bore pain stoically. Anything else was weakness, and Sharrowkyn's admiration for Cadmus Tyro rose another notch\n\n'The blame for what happened on Eirene Septimus is mine to bear,' said Tyro. 'For I was in command.'\n\n'I could have stopped you.'\n\nTyro shook his head, the motion causing a visible stab of pain to spasm through him. The skulls chirruped like irritated insects at his movement.\n\n'All this time on"}
{"text":"vo-skulls.\n\nThe agony of the procedure was etched into Tyro's face, like all Iron Hands, he bore pain stoically. Anything else was weakness, and Sharrowkyn's admiration for Cadmus Tyro rose another notch\n\n'The blame for what happened on Eirene Septimus is mine to bear,' said Tyro. 'For I was in command.'\n\n'I could have stopped you.'\n\nTyro shook his head, the motion causing a visible stab of pain to spasm through him. The skulls chirruped like irritated insects at his movement.\n\n'All this time on a Tenth Legion ship, and you still don't understand us.'\n\nSharrowkyn bowed, conceding the point.\n\n'You're looking well for a man Tarsa said would die,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'No, I said it was highly likely he would die,' clarified Tarsa.\n\n'I look I sparred with a Titan and lost,' said Tyro. And feel worse.'\n\n'You fought a primarch,' said Sharrowkyn. 'That's a whole lot better than I'd expect.'\n\nTyro nodded, glancing down as another steel rod as thick as his finger was eased out of his flesh. Droplets of blood fell to the brushed-steel floor before the wound sealed behind it.\n\n'Tarsa tells me we are returned to the Solar System?'\n\n'Yes. What else did he tell you?'\n\n'Not much beyond the fact that we are all but dead in the void, and that you found a place for us to repair.'\n\n'Anything else?'\n\n'Ulrach Branthan,' said Tyro. 'He is back in command now, yes?'\n\n'He is,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'And how... how is he?'\n\nSharrowkyn glanced at Tarsa. The Apothecary had clearly skirted the issue of Branthan's madness. Sharrowkyn had little time for diplomacy. Tyro would demand directness, but how would he react to the truth about his superior?\n\n'Branthan is insane,' he said.\n\nIt took another nine day's before the Sisypheum was able to sail again.\n\nThe graving dock was a titanic, zero-gravity volume of heavy machinery that had taken the combined genius of Thamatica and Wayland return to functionality. Grinding lifter-cranes hauled vast sheets of tiered steel into place for constructor engines to weld in shower, blue sparks. Cable-slaved proxy drones of ancient, bulky aspect crawled across the vessel's battle-scarred hull, closing tears with web-sealant and anchoring torn plating back to its superstructure.\n\nThe servitors and Iron Hands were working wonders to repair it enough to be void-worthy.\n\nThe Sisypheum would fly again, but its first serious engagement would likely tear the ship apart.\n\nSharrowkyn found Thamatica, Numen and Wayland arguing in the shadow of the vessel's up-armoured prow. He watched them from the shadows wreathing the gantry above the platform hung upon its battlements.\n\n'Prow cannons. It's the only answer that makes sense,' said Numen, his booming voice crackling over the vox. \"We need our hardest fist ready to strike.'\n\n'It'II certainly hit the hardest,' agreed Thamatica. 'But the link from its firing mechanism to weapons control on the bridge is woefully degraded. It will be next to impossible to guarantee a hit unless we're at point-blank range. I assure you, Ignatius, the batteries will work best for us. A better spread of munitions, that's the way.'\n\n'Port-side batteries are smashed, and the starboard capacitors are non-functional,' grunted Numen. 'We'll get one broadside, maybe, then they'll not shoot again. I'm telling you, the prow cannon is the weapon we need.'\n\nWayland looked up and said, 'What do you think, Nykona?'\n\nSharrowkyn looped over the gantry and pushed down to the iron decking. He landed lightly and engaged the mag-clamps in his boots. He hadn't truly been trying to hide, and Sabik knew him well enough to know when he was lurking.\n\n'Forget weapons,' he said. 'We don't need them any more. Put their energy to better use.'\n\n'Typical Raven Guard,' said Numen, too loudly. The gruff veteran had lost almost all his hearing in battle against the Emperor's Children and had chosen to endure that injury until the war was over. 'What kind of warship goes into battle unarmed?'\n\nSharrowkyn swept his gaze along the strike cruiser's hull. Its entire length was torn and battered, a ship desperately in need of peace, it bore its many scars proudly, like a prize fighter training for one last bout he couldn't possibly win.\n\nMuch like us all.\n\n'The Sisypheum's fight is done,' said Sharrowkyn. 'One hard turn will break her in two.'\n\n'Then we take as many of those traitorous bastards with us as we can,' said Numen. 'One last thrust into the Warmaster's heart.'\n\n'That's Branthan talking,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Captain Branthan,' said Numen. 'You will show him respect, Raven Guard.'\n\n'No disrespect to his rank was intended,' Sharrowkyn assured him. 'And you all know me enough to know that I do not fear death in battle. But we have not fought our way back from Isstvan V just to throw our lives away within sight of Terra.'\n\n'We can still fight,' said Thamatica. 'There is damage we can yet do.'\n\nSharrowkyn shook his head. 'That's arrogance talking,' he said. 'You all saw the scale of the fleet that came through the rift at the Comet Shrine. Even the grandest destruction we might possibly wreak would be like spitting in the wind.'\n\n'So what are you suggesting?' snorted Numen, his words dripping with contempt. 'That we hide? Wait until this war is decided then limp back into the light?'\n\nSharrowkyn ignored the barb and said, 'We have fought as brothers for years, but it is over. It is time for us to return to our Legions.'\n\n'Captain Branthan will never allow that,' said Wayland.\n\n'Captain Tyro believes it is the right answer,' replied Sharrowkyn. His words were unexpected and hit them hard in the flank, just as he'd intended.\n\n'The captain has risen from his coma?' said Thamatica. Sharrowkyn pointed to the Sisypheum. 'He has, and this has been his ship longer than Branthan's.'\n\nThe implications of Sharrowkyn's words were so unexpectedly direct that it took the three Iron Hands a full second to realise what he was suggesting.\n\n'You dare suggest mutiny against my captain?' raged Numen, his hand on his bolter.\n\n'Branthan is a madman,' said Sharrowkyn. 'He will see us all dead for the sake of his madness. You all know it.'\n\n'You go too far, Sharrowkyn,' said Thamatica, stepping between them. 'You are not Iron Hands - you do not see things as we see them.'\n\n'You are correct, Frater,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Just as I saw them differently when Alpharius walked among us with Shadrak Meduson's face. You should have listened to me then, and you need to listen to me now. Ulrach Branthan is not fighting for any cause beyond his own vengeance. The pain has broken him, and he will damn us all in the fires of his madness.'\n\nNumen wrenched his bolter free, but Wayland had seen the fury building in him and held his arm down. The veteran made a quarter-turn to Wayland in furious disbelief.\n\n'You would defend these words, Sabik?' he demanded.\n\n'I think we should at least hear him out.'\n\n'I have heard enough,' snapped Numen. 'This is mutiny.'\n\n'Tyro agrees with me,' said Sharrowkyn. 'As does Tarsa. And so do you, Sabik.'\n\n'Is that true, Wayland?' asked Thamatica.\n\nThamatica was known for his mordant sense of humour, but Sharrowkyn heard the tension resonating within his tone like a taut cable on the verge of snapping.\n\nWayland heard it too and glanced up. Sharrowkyn felt his friend's disappointment that he had forced him into this corner, but what other choice was there?\n\nWayland released Numen's arm and took a step away.\n\n'Throne help me, but I do,' he said, 'though it cuts against the grain of all I have been trained to believe. The chain of command is meant to be inviolable, but the forge teaches us that when a blade is tempered it becomes hard and brittle. To remove that brittleness, the smiter must use a careful heat before allowing his metal to cool over time. Captain Branthan's soul is fresh from the furnace of his resurrection, and if we participate in a plan of action we know to be flawed, then we are just as responsible for the consequences of its failure.'\n\nNumen slowly mag-locked his bolter back to his armour and shook his head in disgust.\n\n'That it should come to this,' said the veteran with real remorse. 'We face the ruin of the Imperium, and still we find ways to turn on one another.'\n\n'I am not turning on you, brother,' said Wayland.\n\n'You talk of usurping the captain of this vessel!' snapped Numen. 'A warrior appointed by the Great Ferrus himself. How else can your words be interpreted?'\n\nThe veteran turned and marched away.\n\nThamatica sighed. 'He will go straight to Branthan.'\n\n'We all should,' said Wayland.\n\n3\n\nCounsel of Traitors\n\nLunar Voices\n\nGood Kill\n\nCadmus Tyro walked back onto the bridge of the Sisypheum to see Ulrach Branthan standing at the captain's lectern, two things he hadn't expected after the mission to Eirene Septimus. He buried his shock at Branthan's appearance in a grimace of pain, horrified at what had become of his brother warrior.\n\nHe'd caught a glimpse of him as Sharrowkyn and Wayland hauled his broken body from the belly of the Storm Eagle. In his pain-filled delirium, he'd thought Brother Bombastus had returned, before remembering his death on the eldar crone world.\n\nThe bridge smelled of hot metal and electricity. Servitors worked to return the various bridge stations to functionality. Data screens fizzed with static, and a tattoo of hammers on metal echoed strangely through the superstructure. Garuda flitted from the stanchions overhead, the clicking of its wings blending with the clatter of machines.\n\nAtesh Tarsa walked behind Tyro. He had told the Apothecary to stay back, to not hover at his side. He couldn't be seen to return as an invalid. Ignatius Numen stood next to Branthan, with Frater Thamatica close by. Nykona Sharrowkyn, as always, lurked on the periphery, near the auspex station, with Sabik Wayland seated to helm control.\n\nThe gulf between these warriors was clear.\n\nThe Iron Hands stood taller and prouder at the sight of him. Regardless of what threatened their unity, he was still a captain and de"}
{"text":"ed behind Tyro. He had told the Apothecary to stay back, to not hover at his side. He couldn't be seen to return as an invalid. Ignatius Numen stood next to Branthan, with Frater Thamatica close by. Nykona Sharrowkyn, as always, lurked on the periphery, near the auspex station, with Sabik Wayland seated to helm control.\n\nThe gulf between these warriors was clear.\n\nThe Iron Hands stood taller and prouder at the sight of him. Regardless of what threatened their unity, he was still a captain and deserving of their respect.\n\nTyro raised his fist and gently tapped it against his chest. He'd wanted to wear his armour, to show he was returned entirely but Tarsa had point-blank refused to allow it. And for once, Tyro had acquiesced to a demand.\n\n'Brothers,' he said. 'Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.'\n\nWayland came forward and they clasped arms in the warrior's grip, wrist to wrist.\n\n'Welcome back, Captain Tyro,' said Wayland.\n\nSharrowkyn gave him a nod of respect. Tyro stepped towards his Iron Hands brothers, reading the twin emotions of joy and wariness at his revival. Joy, for he was their captain and had led them in battle against traitors and primarchs; wariness, because his return might be the unwitting cause of a schism within their ranks.\n\nThamatica bowed deeply and said, 'It pleases me to see you back among the living.'\n\n'Not as much as it pleases me,' Tyro assured him, now facing Numen. 'You've healed well, brother,' he said.\n\nThe veteran had suffered grievous wounds at the hands of Gaskon Malthace, one of Alpharius' killers, but it took more than an Alpha legionnaire to put down one of the Avernii.\n\n'The Salamander knows his craft,' said Numen, managing to sound grateful and begrudging at the same time.\n\nTyro finally turned to Ulrach Branthan.\n\nTarsa and Sharrowkyn had warned him of the hideous transformation wrought upon Branthan, but it was still a shock to see how profoundly the captain had changed. What had not changed was the intensity of the zeal burning behind his eyes. The monstrous captain had always been one of the Legion's most fervent adherents to the Iron Creed, but Tyro saw immediately that Sharrowkyn had been right.\n\nThere was little left of Ulrach Branthan in his brother's gaze, only a depth of madness and pain too awful to contemplate.\n\n'I am so sorry, brother,' said Tyro. 'To see you like this...'\n\n'Spare me your pity,' said Branthan. 'I am thankful for this new chance to serve the Emperor. Pain is my blood now - it sustains me. It empowers me.'\n\nTyro nodded, not knowing how to answer something that sounded like a sentiment their foes might express.\n\n'The Sisypheum's seen a hard fight,' he said. 'She has fought proudly, has she not?'\n\n\"You make it sound like her war is over,' said Branthan.\n\nTyro frowned. 'Isn't it? Iron Father Wayland apprised me of her condition. Even half the damage she has sustained would condemn her in the eyes of a shipwright assayer.'\n\n'You underestimate this ship,' said Branthan, stepping down from the command rostrum and moving from station to station with thudding, iron footfalls. 'She fought her way clear of the massacre on Isstvan V, and sustained us through years of guerilla warfare. She broke a traitor blockade and flew through cursed space to a lost world of the eldar. And lastly, under my command, she took on the Iron Heart, a ship many times her size.'\n\nBranthan returned to the command lectern and stood behind it.\n\nThe blatant symbolism was not lost on Tyro.\n\nThis is no longer your ship...\n\n'While the Sisypheum yet has fight left in her we will continue to bring death to the traitors. Do you take issue with that, or my resumption of command?'\n\n'I take issue with neither, my captain,' said Tyro. 'But the Sisypheum cannot fight like this. We cannot fight like this. Look around you -six legionaries and a handful of servitors to crew a strike cruiser? It cannot be done.'\n\n'It has been done,' said Branthan. 'In the Jovian engagement we slew the Covenant of Truth, an Oberon-class predator-ship.'\n\n'I studied the battle-vectors of that fight,' said Tyro, following Branthan's example and pacing from station to station. 'It was a good kill, an excellent kill. Boldly made, but you were lucky beyond belief. Had the Covenant's captain not been so obsessed with his own kill, we would all be dead.'\n\nBranthan stepped down to meet him. 'This is war for the survival of the Imperium, Cadmus,' he said. 'Without boldness we will not win. Horus will take Terra, and all we have fought and bled for will have been for nothing.'\n\nThe tension thickened, everyone on the bridge save for the servitors keeping utterly silent and motionless. Veils of light sparked into life, cascades of sensor data drifting like fireflies. Garbled voices scratched the air in blurts of static.\n\nSqualls of ghost binaric code faded in and out of audibility.\n\nGaruda flew down from above and landed at the edge of the console between the two captains, as though ready to arbitrate some dispute. It looked from captain to captain.\n\n'Honour has been satisfied, Ulrach,' said Tyro, keeping his voice low and even. 'Look around you. Look at our ship. Look at how few of us remain. No one could say we did not do battle with all our hearts but the time of the Shattered Legions is over. Our war in the shadows is done, and we must rejoin our brethren to look our enemies in the face. To do otherwise is to gainsay the word of Rogal Dorn.'\n\n'You speak for the lord of the Seventh?'\n\n'I presume no such thing,' said Tyro, 'But all the Emperor's loyal sons have heard the call to return to defend the Throneworld. It is time for us to heed that call, Ulrach. It is time for us to come in from the cold.'\n\nBranthan listened to Tyro's impassioned plea, but it was impossible to read his ravaged features. The captain remained silent for long moments, eventually turning to face Sabik Wayland.\n\n'How long before we can be underway?'\n\n'The Sisypheum can fly, but there are critical systems not yet fully functional. Long-range auspex, full weapons control and vox are all still offline.'\n\n'How long?'\n\nWayland glanced at Tyro. Branthan saw it, and said, 'Cadmus Tyro is not the commander of this vessel, \/ am! Answer me.'\n\n'The reactors are still hot,' said Wayland. 'We can be underway as soon as the word is given.'\n\n'The word is given,' said Branthan.\n\n'Ulrach-' began Tyro.\n\n'Enough!' snapped Branthan, towering over him. 'I am captain of this vessel and we fight until we are dead. There is no turning away, no retreat to Terra. You think a handful of us skulking behind a wall will make more of a difference than we can with a starship? To turn and run for the imagined safety of Terra is not an honourable laying down of our burden, it is cowardice. I will not allow it. Not on my ship.'\n\nA flurry of sparks erupted from the comms-station behind Sabik Wayland, as if in response to Branthan's outburst. A screaming wail of howling binaric erupted from the vox-horns mounted on buckled stanchions.\n\n'Shut that off?' said Branthan, striding over to the station and pushing the hapless servitor out of his path. The console was smashed, almost every panel removed to reveal its guts of wires and glass valves.\n\nHe turned to face Wayland with a groan of hydraulics and a crackle of uninsulated cabling.\n\n'I thought you said the vox was inactive?'\n\n'It is,' said Wayland, rushing to Branthan's side. 'The antenna array is smashed.'\n\n'Then explain what we're hearing.'\n\nWayland sorted through a handful of cables, found the ones he wanted and slotted them home into jacks built into the underside of his gauntlet. Thamatica hurried over to the console and followed suit. The two Iron Fathers stood riveted to the spot, a pale nimbus of light surrounding their hands. The sounds of the message hissed all around them, as if carried on the air.\n\n'It's not coming through the ship's vox,' said Wayland.\n\n'Then where is it coming from?' said Tyro.\n\n'It's coming from the Kryptos,' said Thamatica. 'The creature is routing it to this console.'\n\n'The Kryptos?' said Tyro. 'Is it picking up some stray Mechanicum transmissions?'\n\n'That's not Martian code,' said Wayland, adjusting the dials and gain levers on the smashed console. 'That's the code of Luna.'\n\n'What are you talking about?' said Tyro. 'Luna has fallen.'\n\n'It's coming from a native of Luna,' insisted Wayland. 'Only they can send in this form.'\n\n'We trained on Mars,' said Thamatica. We know Mechanicum code, and that's not it.'\n\n'Then it's traitor communication,' said Branthan. 'The Sons of Horus have their Terran bridgehead there. They must have compromised the Selenar's systems.'\n\nWayland's face was bathed silver in the light of a helical waveform flickering on the last, cracked display slate.\n\n'Wait, is that...?' said Wayland.\n\n'Throne! Yes... I think it is. But how...?'\n\n\"What is it, Prater?' asked Branthan.\n\nThamatica disconnected from the console and said, 'If we're right and I suspect we are, then this is not a Mechanicum or Imperial transmission. Nor is it from the traitors.'\n\n'Then who is it from?' asked Tyro.\n\n'This is a long-dead channel,' said Wayland. 'It's a Selenar cult signal.'\n\n'But what is it saying?' asked Branthan.\n\n'We don't know yet,' said Wayland. 'But a gene-witch is screaming into the void.'\n\nAtesh Tarsa remembered the first time he had set eyes on the Kryptos when Sharrowkyn and Sabik Wayland had brought it aboard the Sisypheum. Its hideous appearance had sickened him. He had hated it, but as the years passed, he began to pity what had been done to it - living in agony, forever bound to a singular purpose for cruel masters who cared nothing for its suffering.\n\nThat was no life, but were he and the crew of the Sisypheum any better?\n\nThe Kryptos had not left this cell of bare iron, as much a slave to their purpose as it had been to its former masters. It sat bound to an iron throne, surrounded by banks of humming machinery and linked to chattering cogitators by snaking lengths of heavily in"}
{"text":"ears passed, he began to pity what had been done to it - living in agony, forever bound to a singular purpose for cruel masters who cared nothing for its suffering.\n\nThat was no life, but were he and the crew of the Sisypheum any better?\n\nThe Kryptos had not left this cell of bare iron, as much a slave to their purpose as it had been to its former masters. It sat bound to an iron throne, surrounded by banks of humming machinery and linked to chattering cogitators by snaking lengths of heavily insulated cables.\n\nThat such a thing could exist at all flew in the face of all he had learned in the apothecarion. Its head slumped to the side, and its pale flesh, stinking and greasy, was pasted over the sunken bones of its skull like wet parchment. The lower half of its face was a grotesquerie of moving parts, augmitters, vox-implants and sound-creating anatomies that chattered with strange clicks, whistles and ticks. Its skull had been taken apart and remade: a mix of brass, bone and glass, like a vat for the preservation of a hideous medical anomaly. The fluid within was cloudy and stagnant, and the visible portions of its hybridised brain pressed against the glass, the bleached white of something long dead\n\nNor was it wholly human - portions of its mandibular structure were clearly xenos in origin, though sourced from no alien Tarsa had ever fought. It wore a blindfold, for no one could look into its pain-filled eyes and not be horrified at its suffering.\n\nGaruda shuffled from clawed foot to clawed foot atop the throne. Tarsa thought it looked like some scavenger bird, waiting for a hanged man to die so it could peck his eyes out.\n\nA wet, organic-sounding binaric issued from its throat. Yellowish fluid dribbled from its jaws as it formed the un-words over and over again. A lectern bolted to the deck before it flickered with light, burbling a stream of nonsensical data in an endless loop.\n\n'What is this abomination saying?' asked Ulrach Branthan, leaning down so that his mutilated features were an inch from those of the Kryptos.\n\nThe irony of Branthan calling the Kryptos an abomination was not lost on Tarsa.\n\n'The cogitators are trying to figure it out,' said Wayland, feeding brass-edged punch cards into the logic engine. 'This is a dead vox-band. No one's used these channels for centuries. Whoever is transmitting must be desperate indeed to hope their message will be picked up by anyone with the capabilities to translate it. The Selenar were said to use an organic form of genobinary, a lingua-technis utilising a rotating cypher based upon the sender's unique genome sequence. Which made it almost impossible to decode.'\n\n'So we can't know what it's saying?' said Branthan.\n\n'Ah, I didn't say that,' said Thamatica, wagging an admonishing finger.\n\n'Can you break the code? And spare me a historia lecture. Yes or no?'\n\n'I rather suspect the Selenar did not envisage the existence of the Kryptos when they developed this form of communication.' said Thamatica. 'Which surprises me, as some of the bioengineered chimeras they wrought in their vaults were not entirely dissimilar, and-'\n\n'I said yes or no, Prater.'\n\n'Yes!' said Wayland, as the cogitator spat out glowing lines of text.\n\n'You have it?' said Thamatica.\n\n'I have it,' said Wayland. 'You were right - I had to run the genome sample back multiple iterations until the Kryptos was able to break it.'\n\n'What does it say?' said Tarsa, before the two Iron Fathers could go deep into the technicalities of their cryptography.\n\nWayland nodded and said, 'It says: These are the words of Ta'lab Vita-37. My iteration is my name. My sequence speaks to the veracity of my words. The Wolves are loosed, and Luna falls again. My truth is this, I haw failed. For centuries I kept the Magna Mater safe, but the First Son of Horus calls 'Aebathan' to his master. Any who hear this, I beg you to destroy Lunar Dome Herodotus Omega. Wipe it clean of life before he breaks the seventh seal.\"\n\nA shiver ran down Tarsa's spine.\n\n'The Magna Mater...?' he said.\n\n'Do those words mean something to you. Apothecary?' asked Branthan.\n\n'Yes. It means we must reach Luna with all haste,' said Tarsa.\n\nBefore Branthan could ask anything else, the Kryptos shrieked in paroxysms of agony.\n\nIts back arched and it thrashed in the throes of a violent seizure as the shrieks of something infernal tore through its open mind.\n\n'Carnager! Carnager! Carnager!'\n\n'Get us out of here!' barked Tyro, getting behind the command lectern.\n\nSharrowkyn tried to make sense of what he was seeing on the auspex station. The display screamed with the lunatic ravings of the incoming vessel. Its ululating howl was a mindless exultation, insane agony given voice.\n\n'We're still anchored to the graving dock,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Then cast us off!'\n\n\"Working on it!'\n\nThe Sisypheum shuddered as enemy munitions detonated on its rear quarter.\n\n\"Work faster,' ordered Tyro.\n\nA deep bass rumble echoed through the Sisypheum's superstructure The booming clangs of docking clamps disengaging sent shuddering vibrations through the deck plates.\n\n'Releasing,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Now find that ship.'\n\nThe deck tilted underfoot as Tyro pushed power to the drives. Local gravity skewed strangely as the Sisypheum powered away from the mass of the coaling station. More juddering tremors raced the length of the ship, its steel skeleton deforming under the torsion and shearing forces of battle.\n\nA powerful explosion rocked the ship. Gravity weakened, then strengthened. Recently repaired systems blew out again. The servitors chattered to one another in squeals of simplified binaric.\n\n'Where is it, Sharrowkyn?'\n\n'Below us, I think.'\n\n'Show me.'\n\nSharrowkyn threw the display onto the viewscreen. Cascades of crackling photons fell in a waterfall of light. Patterns of distortion swam in the illumination, peaks and troughs representing energy signatures, radiation spikes and patches of heat.\n\nSharrowkyn could make little of what he was seeing, but Tyro was a master of void war and immediately saw opportunity in the riot of atomic flares and laser discharges.\n\n'He's damaged and too eager,' said Tyro. 'His auspex couldn't clearly distinguish us from the coaling station so he fired too soon.'\n\nThe vox-horns blared. 'Carnager! Carnager! Carnager!'\n\n'He's pushing in on our ventral axis,' said Tyro. 'Trying to disembowel us.'\n\n'And you know how to prevent that?'\n\n'I fought us clear of Isstvan V, didn't I?'\n\n'Then this should be easy.'\n\nMore hits struck the ship's underside, raking fire designed to strip a vessel's shields. The Sisypheum's voids had yet to ignite, and every hit was a penetrating wound. Fire bloomed alongside jets of freezing oxygen. Their ship was bleeding into the vacuum of space.\n\n'Please tell me Thamatica chose to rearm the prow cannon,' said Tyro.\n\n'I don't know, captain.'\n\n'Get me a firing solution anyway.'\n\n'A firing solution? How? Weapons control is smashed.'\n\n'Then give it your best guess. Hold on.'\n\nSharrowkyn stumbled over to weapons control as Tyro cut the Sisypheum's drive and fired every one of its manoeuvring thrusters against their direction of travel.\n\nThe ship groaned in protest at so drastic a deceleration, compressional forces stressing the keel from stem to bow. Sharrowkyn slammed into the console. Freshly welded armour plates tore loose and hydraulic lines blew out all along the strike cruiser's length.\n\nDeafening squalls of interference echoed through the vaults of the bridge as close-in deflectors ruptured and the Carnager's course angled it upwards in front of the Sisypheum.\n\nProximity alarms blared as the two city-sized ships practically grazed one another.\n\n'We're going to collide,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\nHe had witnessed two capital ships crashing once before, in low orbit over Kiavahr. Until the massacre at Isstvan V, it had been one of the worst things he'd ever seen. Ancient works of the shipwright's art torn apart by unimaginable forces. Ten thousand dead in the first instant, flash-frozen by the hard vacuum of space as their hulls ripped open. A hundred thousand more burned in oxygen-rich fires sprinting through the wreckage and vaporising everything in their path.\n\nThe auspex swelled with e-mag bloom. The Carnager was everything. It blotted out all else with its murder-bulk.\n\n'Carnager! Carnager! Carnager!'\n\nThe signature was so vast it filled the auspex. Sharrowkyn switched back to the ordinary view through the oculus bay. The jagged, blood-daubed hull of the Carnager filled the viewscreen.\n\n'Fire!' yelled Tyro.\n\nSharrowkyn sent the order, hoping against hope that Numen's argument had won out.\n\n\"The bombardment cannon's shell travelled the distance to its target in a fraction of a second, and its armour-piercing cone bored through the plating of its command deck half a second later.\n\nThe Carnager spasmed with the force of the blast, the cone of the explosion's plasma jet cutting down like a power sword through the spine of an outflanked foe. The traitor vessel's keel was sliced clean through, and the two halves of the ship buckled inward as though folding at a hinge point.\n\nPlumes of fire filled the screen, a blazing inferno devouring every scrap of oxygen within the Carnager. Its hull bulged and blew out as secondary explosions ripped along its length in a cascade of obliteration.\n\nThe Sisypheum powered through the explosion, the light of the Carnager's destruction filling the bridge with the hellish fire of a void death. Warning lights and damage icons lit up across every station, but it didn't matter.\n\nThe Carnager was dead.\n\n'Good kill,' said Tyro.\n\nThe resurrection of Ulrach Branthan.\n\nBOOK 2\n\nMOTHER\n\nShe has become everything and everyone.\n\nTo recognise this is to live in wonder.\n\n4\n\nAebathan\n\nMagna Mater\n\nThe Ocean of Storms\n\nThe descent through the solar disc took another seven days.\n\nBranthan demanded greater speed, but the Sisypheum was slowly dying. Critical systems were failing faster than the Iron Hands could repair them, an"}
{"text":"e icons lit up across every station, but it didn't matter.\n\nThe Carnager was dead.\n\n'Good kill,' said Tyro.\n\nThe resurrection of Ulrach Branthan.\n\nBOOK 2\n\nMOTHER\n\nShe has become everything and everyone.\n\nTo recognise this is to live in wonder.\n\n4\n\nAebathan\n\nMagna Mater\n\nThe Ocean of Storms\n\nThe descent through the solar disc took another seven days.\n\nBranthan demanded greater speed, but the Sisypheum was slowly dying. Critical systems were failing faster than the Iron Hands could repair them, and if Branthan pushed too hard, he would strand them in the endless dark.\n\nSnapshots of the war came to them through intermittent vox signals - impossible reports of exploding moons, of Rogal Dorn's flagship besieged, and fleet engagements beyond anything anyone had seen in living memory. So many lurid tales of the void afire and planets shattered that they blurred together in an unending stream of horror, death and atrocity.\n\nThe Warmaster had come in overwhelming force, leaving nothing to chance and wrong-footing the defenders of Terra at every turn. The Solar System was burning.\n\nAfter Tyro and Sharrowkyn's destruction of the Carnager, an uneasy comity had been restored to the Sisypheum. In part, due to the revelations brought to them by Atesh Tarsa via the Kryptos, but also Branthan' acceptance that Tyro was his equal.\n\nThe silver disc of Luna filled the viewscreen. the first light of Old Earth's night.\n\nWayland brought them in slowly, as far as possible from the vast traitor fleets anchored in high orbit and awaiting their tasking orders for Terra. Despite every horror the warriors aboard the Sisypheum had faced and overcome, nothing could have prepared them for the sight of their former brothers massing over the Throneworld.\n\nWorld Eaters, Sons of Horus, Death Guard, Emperor's Children, Thousand Sons...\n\nNames that were once bywords for courage, honour and nobility.\n\nNow they could no longer be said without suffering a blade of grief to the heart.\n\n'So many...' said Thamatica. 'How can Terra possibly hold?'\n\n'Lord Dorn has had years to prepare for this day,' said Cadmus Tyro. 'If anyone can hold Terra, it will be him. Hold to that, brothers.'\n\nTyro's words were spoken confidently, and though the Praetorian of Terra's reputation was well deserved, everyone on the Sisypheum understood that even the greatest master of siege defence would blanch at facing this numberless host.\n\nThe dark side was lousy with the burning wrecks of defence platforms whose orbits were steadily declining as they shed plates of armour like bladed rain to the Lunar surface. Wayland fought to keep the Sisypheum's plasma signatures low, relying on the manoeuvring jets to fractionally alter course to avoid drifting, city-sized chunks of debris hurled into orbit by the force of the traitor bombardments.\n\nIn truth there was virtually no need for stealth: the wounded emissions of their ship's reactor core blended with the atomic firestorms painting the black curve of the horizon with a borealis of blood.\n\n'The Selenar cults fought hard.' said Tyro. 'The traitors paid a heavy price.'\n\n'As did the Imperium at its dawn,' pointed out Wayland.\n\nExplosions still flared over the glowing curve of the Lunar surface, and blinking streams of laser light flashed between the last remaining defenders and the enemy's murder ships.\n\n'Are we sure the fight is over?' asked Numen.\n\n'It's over,' said Tarsa.\n\n'How do you know, Salamander?' said Branthan.\n\nTarsa drew a finger across his neck.\n\n'Aebathan,' he said.\n\nIn the wake of the Carnager's destruction they had gathered in the armoury to debate the significance of the message received by the Kryptos. Surrounded by their meagre supply of weapons and ammunition, Atesh Tarsa told them what he knew.\n\n'You have heard the term Aebathan before?' asked Tyro.\n\nTarsa nodded. 'I have. My Legion fought alongside the Luna Wolves, back when they still held to that name. Back when we still counted them as brothers. During those years, I heard the word Aebathan more than any other.'\n\n'What does it mean?' said Sharrowkyn, seated on an empty ammo crate.\n\n'It is a Cthonian term for the cutting of a rival gang leader's throat all the way back to the spine,' explained Tarsa. 'The term was adopted by the Legion to mean the successful conclusion of a campaign.'\n\nTyro shook his head. 'So it signals the traitors have taken Luna? We already knew that. It changes nothing. We should still make for Terra.'\n\n'No,' insisted Tarsa. 'We have to reach Luna.'\n\n*Why?' said Branthan. 'Because of this Magna Mater? What is it?'\n\nTarsa hesitated before speaking. Eventually he took a breath and said, 'I am a proud son of Nocturne, born and raised in the shade of Mount Deathfire. My first breath was ashes and smoke, my first sight a sky filled with flame, and my first grip was upon a smiting hammer. My word is my bond, and every oath I have sworn remains unbroken.'\n\n'None gathered here doubt you. Brother Tarsa,' said Wayland. 'Why do you tell us this?'\n\n'Because just as every tech-priest is inducted into the mysteries of the sacred machine on the red planet, so too are Apothecaries made privy to secret knowledge birthed deep in Luna's vaults. To reveal the moon's secrets, even to my battle-sworn brothers, would be to break a gravely sworn oath.'\n\n'Understood, Apothecary,' said Branthan. 'But if this is information your commander requires, you are duty-bound to reveal it. I give you leave to break your oath.'\n\n'With respect, Captain Branthan, you are not of the Eighteenth, and even if you were, that leave is not yours to give,' said Tarsa. 'In this moment, I choose to break this oath. The burden of that will be mine to bear until my death.'\n\nNykona Sharrowkyn came forward and placed a hand on Tarsa's shoulder guard.\n\n'I have known you since the betrayal at Isstvan,' said the Raven Guard. 'In that time we have shed our own blood and that of the traitors. You call a different world home, and name another primarch as your liege lord, but we are brothers, you and I. We are bonded in a way that few beyond our grim confraternity will ever know. All of us here understand what holding true to an oath means, what it really means. We would not be fighting our brothers if we did not. We fight against a foe that broke their sacred oaths, so I understand why you hesitate. But we are nearing the end of this war, and even a fractional misstep may cost us dearly. I know it is wrong of us to expect this of you, but if breaking your oath shares information that will help us fight the traitors, then it is a burden I willingly share.'\n\n'As do I,' said Sabik Wayland.\n\n'And I,' said Thamatica.\n\nIgnatius Numen said, 'I'd sooner die than break an oath, but if you must, then I'll gladly share the burden of yours if it means we stick a pneuma-wrench in the Warmaster's plans.'\n\n'Thank you, brothers,' said Tarsa.\n\n'So tell us,' said Branthan. 'What is the Magna Mater?'\n\n'Understand this first, Captain Branthan,' said Tarsa. The Selenar's rites are shrouded in metaphor and symbolism. Even after years learning from them, it was difficult to be certain of anything, especially when the Legion warriors were viewed as little better than spies. My understanding of the Lunar faith is incomplete, for the Selenar do not easily share the truth of a belief system that almost saw them destroyed in the earliest days of the First Solar War. I want you all to understand that before I go on.'\n\n'We understand,' said Tyro. 'Go on.'\n\nTarsa nodded. 'Broadly speaking, their cults believe each individual life is but the sum total of genetic archetypes that have endured throughout human history. Like most faiths, they are heavily factionalised, and each cult venerates the helical mysteries of our species in different ways.'\n\nNumen growled and shook his head. 'We've wiped out cultures for less.'\n\n'Indeed we have,' said Tarsa, more sharply than he intended. 'But the Selenar had two things the Emperor needed - a knowledge of gene-craft that outstripped His own, and industrial-scale facilities to match the scope of His ambition. Thus they were spared obliteration. The Emperor yoked Luna's cults and tasked them with building armies mighty enough to conquer a galaxy.'\n\n'And the Magna Mater? It was linked to this faith of theirs?' asked Tyro.\n\n'I never heard any of the gene-witches speak of the Magna Mater directly, but oblique references to it lie at the heart of every one of their most secret mysteries,' said Tarsa, struggling to find words to express a mystery even he did not fully understand. 'Its literal meaning is \"Great Mother\", an ancient Romanii name for Cybele.'\n\n'The Anatolian goddess of fertility and creation?' said Thamatica\n\n'Yes. During my time on laina, it was little more than a myth, said to be the fabled fountainhead of the earliest and most powerful Space Marine genetics. I never believed it ever truly existed, more that it was likely an allegorical representation of their vast knowledge. But what if it does exist? What if it is something tangible? What if it is the very source code of the Space Marines? Imagine that power in the hands of the traitors. That is why we must set course to Luna and not Terra.'\n\n\"And this Ta'Iab Vita-37...? Her words carry weight?' asked Ulrach Branthan.\n\nTarsa nodded. 'Given the numerals following her designation, Ta'lab Vita-37 must be a senior member of the Selenar cults. So, yes, her words carry weight.'\n\n'Then do we do as she asks?' said Numen. 'Do we destroy the Lunar dome?'\n\n'Let us not be hasty,' said Thamatica. 'If the Magna Mater is literally the root of the most powerful Space Marine genetics, surely we cannot simply destroy it out of hand?'\n\nIf a gene-witch of Ta'Iab Vita-37's rank says it must be done, then she has good reason,' said Tarsa. 'The Luna Wolves must be close to taking it.'\n\n'How would we even destroy a mountain?' asked Tyro. That's what she's asking for, is it not? A Lunar dome is a dead volcano, yes?'\n\n'll is,' said Tarsa.\n\n'Then how do you i"}
{"text":"?'\n\n'Let us not be hasty,' said Thamatica. 'If the Magna Mater is literally the root of the most powerful Space Marine genetics, surely we cannot simply destroy it out of hand?'\n\nIf a gene-witch of Ta'Iab Vita-37's rank says it must be done, then she has good reason,' said Tarsa. 'The Luna Wolves must be close to taking it.'\n\n'How would we even destroy a mountain?' asked Tyro. That's what she's asking for, is it not? A Lunar dome is a dead volcano, yes?'\n\n'll is,' said Tarsa.\n\n'Then how do you imagine we could do that?' said Numen. 'The Sisypheum no longer has the capability to destroy much of anything, let alone an entire volcano.'\n\n'You can destroy any location if you can get inside it,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Wayland, your support here would be appreciated,' said Thamatica. 'You cannot seriously think this is the right course of action? No Iron Father would sanction the destruction of knowledge.'\n\n'In that you are correct,' said Wayland. 'But if the Magna Mater truly is what Apothecary Tarsa suspects it may be, then the threat of the traitors getting it off Luna is too great to risk. Regrettably, I believe we have no choice but to destroy the Lunar dome.'\n\nIn desperation, Thamatica turned his focus to Cadmus Tyro and Ulrach Branthan.\n\n'Captains, this knowledge is what allowed the Emperor Himself to build the Legiones Astartes. None of us would be here without it. It is our heritage, our genetic link to the past. To allow it to be consumed by fire will deny the hope for a future.'\n\nThamatica paused to collect his thoughts before speaking again, taking great effort to contain his mounting frustration and disbelief at what he was hearing.\n\n'Brothers, this war against Horus has taken a grievous toll on our ranks, and who knows how many of us will be left alive when finally the guns fall silent? The Emperor will need this knowledge if He is to rebuild the Imperium back from the ashes. It is our sacred duty to save it for the Space Marines yet to be, the warriors who will come after us and stand on the walls in the ages yet to come.\n\nCadmus Tyro folded his arms and said, 'I agree with you, but the risks are too great. Captain Branthan, what are your thoughts?\n\n'The risks are great,' agreed Ulrach Branthan. 'But nothing of worth was ever achieved without some risk. I will offer you this course of action, Prater Thamatica. We will go to Luna, and we will make every attempt to secure the Magna Mater. But if there is even the slightest chance of it falling into the hands of the traitors, we destroy it. Agreed?'\n\nIt was the best Thamatica was going to get, and he knew it. 'Agreed,' he said.\n\nThe Sisypheum drifted through the debris field of Luna's great Ring. The destroyed belt of defensive platforms had once formed an unbreakable circuit around the moon's circumference, a lethal cordon of lance batteries, torpedo launchers and macro-cannon arrays.\n\nWreckage from the devastated Ring still tumbled in the upper reaches of Lunar space burning like comets in the void. Layered banks of debris wreathed the surface in shadow as clouds of ablated fragments and pulverised metal fell in ever-declining orbits to the surface\n\nTo see something so monolithic brought low was almost beyond comprehension. Its defences had been designed to repel a sustained campaign of invasion, but it had been obliterated in an instant.\n\nThe darkness over Luna was a stark reminder that nothing was unbreakable.\n\nEven with the distortions and interference fouling the Lunar atmosphere. the descent of a vessel of the Sisypheum's displacement would not go unnoticed, so Wayland had brought them close to the surface within a vast, hollowed-out cylinder of falling wreckage. In addition to enabling them to reach the surface undetected, it served the secondary' purpose of shielding them from the falling debris.\n\nIt had once been a facility for mass-warhead launches on the Ring's coreward defensive array, and its smouldering descent was currently arcing a solder-bright line over the Oceanus Procellarum. Its rate of tumble was low, and thus Wayland had moored the Sisypheum within its latticed structure in a feat of bravura piloting skills.\n\nMag-locks and sinew-taut tethers kept the ship in place, immobile and silent.\n\nIn around fifteen hours, the falling structure would slam down somewhere over the southern polar regions\n\nThe Sisypheum's mission would be over then.\n\nSharrowkyn peered over Wayland's shoulder through the patched and cracked canopy of the Storm Eagle as the endless grey expanse of Terra's moon drifted below. The battered gunship hung inverted from an open embarkation deck, ready to drop to the surface at Wayland's command. Even though they were shielded from the worst of the debris rain falling from orbit, a rattling, clanging of impacts transferring through the gunship's hull sounded unnervingly like taking small-arms fire.\n\nLunar Dome Herodotus Omega was a solitary shield volcano to the south of a pair of impact craters in the midst of the Oceanus Procellarum. One, a high-albedo crater known as Aristarchus, was empty and desolate, but the other was filled with the arc lights of a port facility. The rim of this crater was ringed with lifter arrays, hanging limp over fire-dusted platforms, surrounded by materiel hangars and transit hubs that wound out over the surface.\n\nStationed five hundred metres above the largest platform was the bladed form of a starship.\n\n'Sons of Horus destroyer,' said Wayland, reading the vessel's mass and displacement by its outline. 'Hunter-class. Onboard registry lists it as the Cthonian Scion.'\n\n'Just a gunboat,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Still orders of magnitude too powerful for us,' said Wayland. 'We've enough rounds for maybe one dogfight. After that, we ll be shooting mass-reactives from the hatches.'\n\nWayland opened a vox-channel to the troop compartment.\n\n'There's an enemy vessel stationed on target,' he said.\n\nThe vox crackled with a strange double echo as Branthan replied.\n\n'Has it seen us?'\n\n'No,' said Wayland. 'We'd already be dead if it had.'\n\n'Then we proceed as planned,' ordered Branthan.\n\n'Understood, captain,' he said.\n\nSharrowkyn had never thought to be this close to Luna, one of the great, mythic locations of the Solar System. Its rugged surface was strewn with blackened battle wreckage from the destroyed Ring and shards of metal hung in glittering veils like layered bands of sediment in a dark ocean. Despite all that, Luna was something of a disappointment.\n\n'Not much to look at, is it?' said Wayland, as if reading his thoughts.\n\n'It's not what I expected,' admitted Sharrowkyn.\n\n'What did you expect?'\n\n'Something like a forge world, I suppose. Temples, towers and domes. That sort of thing.'\n\n'Ah, then you should see Mars sometime,' said Wayland fondly. The seat of the Martian priesthood is studded with ancient structures, its volcanoes crowned with glittering forge-temples and titanic monuments to man's union with machinery. The planet's metal skin is threaded with thrumming power conduits like veins through red flesh, and to watch the rise of the Mechanicum Borealis as it crowns Olympus Mons is to know beauty.'\n\n'That's certainly not Luna,' said Sharrowkyn, staring at the ocean of silver dust and ancient impact craters.\n\n'No,' agreed Wayland. 'Mars has always been brash in its displays of power, but the Selenar keep their secrets well hidden.'\n\n'The best way to keep a secret is to not let anyone know you have a secret in the first place,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'The ability to create life is the greatest power of all.' said Wayland.\n\n'It's hard to keep something like that secret.'\n\n'It surprises me to hear an Iron Hand say that,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Why? Because we know that flesh is ultimately weaker than iron? Or because you think we despise flesh?'\n\n'I'm not sure. Both? Your creed is still a mystery to me.'\n\n'You are not Medusan, and your gene-sire was not murdered before your very eyes - how could you possibly understand my Legion?' said Wayland. 'I do not say that as any kind of insult, my friend. It is simply a fact. You would not expect me to understand the soul of your Legion after so short a time, would you?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'The Tenth know that flesh is weak, but the mystery of its creation? That is miraculous - not even the greatest minds of Mars could achieve that.'\n\n'Don't let Thamatica hear you say that or he'll take it as a challenge.' Wayland grinned and pointed farther south as the flat, oblate form of Herodotus Omega slid into view upon the inverted horizon. A waypoint alert chimed on the avionics panel.\n\nWayland toggled the vox.\n\n'Drop in ten,' he said, then, to Sharrowkyn, 'You should get back to the troop compartment. This cockpit isn't really designed for a co-pilot. This isn't going to be a high-G launch, is it?'\n\n'No, just a detachment and a glide.'\n\n'Then I'll stay,' said Sharrowkyn, his gaze fixed on the unremarkable form of the volcano, wondering what secrets it held. 'Do you believe the Magna Mater is real?'\n\nWayland nodded to the looming shadow of the destroyer holding station over the landing platforms. A repulsor haze blurred the ground beneath it, and clashing vortices of gravitational force surrounded it in a spinning cloud of dust and razored fragments.\n\nThe Sons of Horus believe it,' he said. 'That is enough for me.'\n\nSharrowkyn nodded.\n\n'Detachment in three... two... one... Release.'\n\nThere was no thunder of launch rails or shuddering scream of ramjets. No boom of disengaging docking clamps, just the distant tremor of tethers retracting into the Storm Eagle's hull. Gravity shifted a heartbeat to the left, and the gunship drifted into the Lunar void carried clear by a gentle viff of manoeuvring jets and the rotation of the torpedo launch facility. Borne outwards and down by a combination of weak gravity and thrust, the Storm Eagle rotated on its long axis and tilted its nose upward.\n\nSharrowkyn's breath caught in his throat as sunlight flared on the canopy, and an armoured grey orb hove into"}
{"text":" distant tremor of tethers retracting into the Storm Eagle's hull. Gravity shifted a heartbeat to the left, and the gunship drifted into the Lunar void carried clear by a gentle viff of manoeuvring jets and the rotation of the torpedo launch facility. Borne outwards and down by a combination of weak gravity and thrust, the Storm Eagle rotated on its long axis and tilted its nose upward.\n\nSharrowkyn's breath caught in his throat as sunlight flared on the canopy, and an armoured grey orb hove into view. Its surface was mottled brown and steel-dust grey, with volatile patches of sulphurous yellow drifting in the upper atmosphere. Swirls of storms were already developing over the northern hemisphere, and spots of light - traitor war fleets taking up bombardment positions - glittered like fireflies in high orbit.\n\n'Terra,' breathed Sharrowkyn.\n\nThe Throneworld: humanity's birthrock and cardinal world of the Imperium.\n\nWorld of legend, where his species had first crawled from the ocean so many millions of years ago. Where life had first looked up at the starry night.\n\nFirst with wonder, then intrepidity, before, finally, ambition.\n\n'Even at bay, it's beautiful,' said Wayland.\n\n'I saw a painting by Serena d'Angelus once,' said Sharrowkyn. 'I mean, it was a pict render of it, but her colours were like nothing I had ever seen. I know little of beauty beyond the play of shadow on darkness, but even to my eyes it was beautiful. It was called Terra Gaia and was said to be what the Throneworld looked like back when it was known as Earth. A blue-green orb, radiant with life and wonder...\n\n'...before the choking breath of its endless forges brought life to the edge of extinction', finished Wayland. 'Yes, I know the piece.'\n\n'I wish I had known Terra when it had colour like that,' said Sharrowkyn as the contested planet slid out of view. 'It must have been wondrous.'\n\n5\n\nLanding\n\nThe Sibylline Oracle\n\nMoon-blooded\n\nHerodotus Omega filled the horizon, its trench-like caldera frozen and its magma heart long since extinct. Many of the Lunar volcanos had been brought back to life by the core-drills of Martian geoformers, but Herodotus Omega had, for unknown reasons, remained cold and dead.\n\nLittle could be gleaned of what they might expect to find within from the meagre records available. With the Cthonian Scion so close, Wayland didn't dare risk an active surveyor sweep or attempt a penetration of whatever remained of the Luna noospheric network. The Sisypheum's cogitators listed Herodotus Omega only as an abandoned research site, but those records were over two centuries old and likely out of date, so were next to valueless.\n\nPassive surveyors detected scores of vessels charting leisurely circuits far overhead, and numerous, seemingly random surveyor pulses. None of them were directed at the surface.\n\nThe only threat that truly mattered was the Cthonian Scion.\n\nWayland kept his attention split between the threat board and the view beyond the canopy.\n\nThe traitor destroyer wasn't actively surveying the local area but all it would take was one glitch of the Storm Eagle's damaged systems, or one lousy interaction with the endless drift of tumbling debris fouling an engine to alert the machine-spirits of the enemy auspex.\n\nIf that happened, this mission was over.\n\nDestruction would follow detection, as sure as day followed night.\n\nThe Storm Eagle was now a glider, descending on a gently curving arc towards the looming form of Herodotus Omega. Wayland had kept the Sisypheum concealed in the launch facility's wreckage long enough that the Storm Eagle was likely below any local survey nets, or the watchful eyes of any Lunar auspex sites that hadn't already been destroyed.\n\nSharrowkyn flinched as the avionics panel chimed with faint warnings.\n\nA rotating sine wave jumped on the brass-rimmed slate as low-grade emissions washed over the gunship. Burbling static hissed from the panel, followed by a squall of binaric pops and screeches.\n\n'Don't worry,' said Wayland, sensing his reaction. 'They're just auspex ghosts. Trapped echoes bouncing from the crater walls.'\n\nSharrowkyn craned his neck to scan the horizon, searching for any sign that another ship had them locked in its sights and was even now preparing to blast them from the sky.\n\nHe saw nothing, but wasn't that always the way of it?\n\nThe old-timers always said it was the strike you never saw coming that killed you.\n\n'Are you sure?' he asked.\n\n'No, but given the density of the orbital traffic around Luna, it seems likely.'\n\nSharrowkyn Wayland was now understood enough about auspex-craft to know Wayland was probably right, but the crackling hisses issuing from the panel felt like more than just echoes. There was something oddly predatory to them, like the malicious purring of a felid toying with its prey before delivering the crippling blow. But the sound faded and the jumping sine wave on the slate returned to its safe, rippling line.\n\nHe let out a breath and said, 'Where do you plan to set down?'\n\n'At the end of the valley,' said Wayland, pointing to the north-eastern flank of Herodotus Omega, where the sharply defined shadow of a deep chasm approached the lower haunches of the volcano. 'From the orbital picts I took, it looks like there's an unfinished geothermal venting station built into the dome's flank.\n\n'Unfinished?'\n\n'So it appears,' said Wayland. 'If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say the Mechanicum originally planned to reignite the volcano, but the work was never completed.'\n\n\"Why not?'\n\n\"Who can say?' replied Wayland.\n\nA Storm Eagle was a heavy assault gunship that could transport up to twenty Space Marines into the heart of a battle. Its armour was rugged and durable, and its weapons normally packed a punch far beyond its relatively small size.\n\nTyro scanned the numerous empty seats around him with a deep sense of melancholy.\n\nHe remembered this ship filled with warriors, the midnight black and burnished silver of their battleplate gleaming and bedecked with oaths of moment.\n\nHow proud they had been. How noble.\n\nHe remembered gut-churning drops through volatile atmospheres, thundering runs through enemy flak, steel and fire as hulls ripped open and seeing a sky filled with explosions. Given the wounds he had suffered at the hands of Alpharius on Eirene Septimus, he ought to be confined to the apothecarion, but this was a moment who every one of them had to dig deep into what made them sons of Ferrus Manus.\n\nWayland and Thamatica had helped him don his armour, a time consuming and painful process, but it felt good to be clad in iron once more. The war-plate compensated for the worst of his wounds, but Tyro knew he was entering this fight with his body nigh broken.\n\nAppropriate, he thought.\n\nSome among the guerrilla forces fighting in the hidden spaces between the major engagements of the war against Horus had taken to calling themselves warriors of the Shattered legions. Tyro had not liked the term upon first hearing it, believing it diminished their capabilities and cohesion. That warriors of the Iron Tenth could ever be described as shattered sat poorly with him, but as time had gone on, he had come to see it for what it truly meant.\n\nYou may break and bum us, but still we rise.\n\nTyro's eyes slid over his fellow warriors, as ragged and ill-tempered a group of survivors as any commander had known. He rose from his armoured grav-seat and moved down the compartment, pausing beside Ignatius Numen to rap the knuckles of his gauntlet upon the warrior's dented and offset shoulder guard.\n\n'I should upbraid you for the poor condition of your armour.'\n\nNumen looked up, uncertain, deaf to what Tyro had just said.\n\nTyro moved on, lifting Tarsa's bolter from his hands and turning it over with a judgemental eye. The eagle-stamped magazine was chipped and dented, the trigger guard snapped off. He handed it back to the Salamander and said, 'I would assign you punishment duty for the unrepaired damage to your weapon.'\n\nStopping in front of Thamatica, Tyro examined the configuration of his grenades and ammunition. 'And as for you, Iron Father... What battlefield role is your load out designed for?'\n\n'For whatever awaits us on the surface,' said Thamatica. 'We have little left with which to fight in any formally prescribed manner.'\n\nTyro nodded and turned to face his Legion brothers, marking each of them in turn. As a captain, he had led the warriors of the Iron Tenth for over a century, fighting from the fringes of the Solar System all the way to Isstvan V. He had seen courage beyond anything the most fanciful retelling of a remembrancer could invent.\n\nYet that paled in comparison to the courage of the men arrayed before him in this moment.\n\n'On any normal day, I would censure every one of you,' he began. 'But this is not a normal day. Since Isstvan V, we have known no normal days. Since that black day of betrayal, we have come far, risked much and lost more. We have travelled into the realm of monsters to face our greatest foes, and we have hurt them. Like Taliansa of ancient Medusa, we lanced the belly of the great dragon and left a trail of its blood for others to follow, slowing it and weakening it in readiness for the death blow. It has been a long, dark and bloody road, brothers. We have seen comrades fall, one by one, but we have never faltered.'\n\nTyro paused before continuing, seeing Ulrach Branthan at the tar end of the troop compartment, watching him with pain-filled eyes.\n\n'This will be our last mission together,' said Tyro, 'and no matter what happens, know that I am prouder than I have ever been to have known you and fought alongside you.'\n\nThe assembled warriors nodded solemnly. They were grateful tor the truth of his sentiment, but no one gave a rousing response or hammered a fist to the chest at his words.\n\nToo much blood had been spilled and too many friends lost along the way for that.\n\nTyro marched between them to take a seat close to Branthan. The grav-seats were too sm"}
{"text":"ur last mission together,' said Tyro, 'and no matter what happens, know that I am prouder than I have ever been to have known you and fought alongside you.'\n\nThe assembled warriors nodded solemnly. They were grateful tor the truth of his sentiment, but no one gave a rousing response or hammered a fist to the chest at his words.\n\nToo much blood had been spilled and too many friends lost along the way for that.\n\nTyro marched between them to take a seat close to Branthan. The grav-seats were too small for the transformed captain's armoured bulk. He simply stood, hunched over at the end of the compartment, like the statue of some grotesque god at the nave of a heathen fane. Garuda sat over his head in the stowage rack, its head folded under one wing as though it were asleep.\n\n'Fine words. Captain Tyro,' said Branthan. 'Though they were laden with a sense of finality. Do you think we will fail?'\n\n'These men have triumphed against impossible odds time and time again,' said Tyro.\n\n'That's not an answer,' said Branthan, reading the undertow in Tyro's words.\n\n'I know,' said Tyro. 'But win or die, this will be our last fight.'\n\nThe Lunar landscape rose to meet them, but Sharrowkyn found it hard to gauge just how high they were. The rugged grey landscape was without defining characteristics to give it scale, and what few features there were offered no clue to their true size.\n\nThey could have been a thousand metres above the ground or a hundred.\n\nThe threat display continued to pop and whistle with a strange doggerel of electronic noise.\n\nThe gentle bulge of Herodotus Omega filled the canopy, its distance likewise impossible to accurately measure by sight alone. Its flanks were smooth silver, its peak ridged with glittering lights that might be structures or marker beacons. Distortion from the Cthonian Scion's grav-wash rippled the top of the extinct volcano, and billowing clouds of Lunar dust haloed the summit like mountain mist.\n\n'Bringing her down,' said Wayland, easing the Storm Eagle into a curving turn to starboard. The movement was sluggish and heavy. Without thrusters, the gunship was simply a mass of metal falling gracefully through a low-G environment.\n\n'How are you planning to land this thing without thrusters?' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Once we're in the canyon, I'll risk some low-level bursts,' said Wayland. 'Enough to set us down in one piece, though it will still be an... interesting landing.'\n\nSharrowkyn had experienced enough hostile landings, under-fire evacs and burning intercepts Wayland had defined simply as interesting to know that this would be only fractionally better than going down in flames.\n\n'I'll brace for impact then,' he said, turning to head back to the troop compartment.\n\n'That might be wise,' agreed Wayland.\n\nBefore Sharrowkyn moved, a furious wail erupted from the vox. The sine wave he'd seen earlier on the emissions slate suddenly burst into life. Then, it had been jumpy, its strength varying wildly, but now it was a constant blare of energy coming straight at them.\n\n'Something knows we're here,' he said.\n\nWayland didn't respond, but drove the control column forward, pushing them into a steep, almost vertical dive. Sharrowkyn gripped the sides of his pilot's compartment, hating the lack of control he always felt when his fate was in the hands of others.\n\n'What is it?' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Hunters,' replied Wayland.\n\n'From where?'\n\n'I don't know yet. Let me process.'\n\n'Process faster,' said Sharrowkyn, watching the ground rushing up to meet them. He hoped Wayland had a better idea of their altitude. The jumping sine wave flattened, becoming a single, shrieking line that surely meant that whatever auspex was hunting them had found them.\n\n'It's trying to fix our position,' said Wayland.\n\n'What is? The Cthonian Scion?'\n\n'I don't think so. I don't recognise the frequency type.'\n\nThe ground rolled. Silver and black inverted as the ground became the sky.\n\nSharrowkyn caught a glimpse of something to their port rear quarter as Wayland jinked the gunship in a plunging dive. Too fast to see clearly a thing of brass and silver. Spider-like and with too many hooked limbs A machine of some sort, a predator-drone or hybrid fighter craft perhaps.\n\nWayland pushed power to the engines, thoughts of stealth forgotten as the ground closed in. Sharrowkyn lost sight of their pursuer as the force of Wayland's dive threw him against the fuselage. He felt the punch of high-G in his gut and his vision greyed for an instant. The Storm Eagle shuddered, and the sound of groaning metal ran its length.\n\nThe Iron Hands had maintained the gunship over the years as best they could, but with the limited resources available to them, the repairs of battle damage had been ad hoc at best. Welded seams split with the violence of the manoeuvre. Sparks spilled from a ruptured conduit, and warning bells echoed from the troop compartment behind them.\n\nSharrowkyn felt the juddering tear of something coming loose from the hull.\n\nThe darkness of the shallow canyon enfolded them, the shadows stark and inviting.\n\nWayland jinked the Storm Eagle to the side, ramming power back into the engines as the signal strength from the hunter-killer machine shrieked.\n\nThe altimeter spun crazily as Wayland pushed them closer to the dirt. Jagged outcroppings and tank-sized boulders flashed past the canopy, insanely close.\n\nSuddenly, Sharrowkyn knew exactly how close to the ground they were.\n\nThe avionics panel sputtered, and a crackling voice spat from the vox.\n\n'Come to heading zero three seven,' it said, croaking as if formed by a throat parched from a lifetime in the desert. 'Then an your thrust and drop ten metres on my mark if you want to live.'\n\n'What the...?' began Sharrowkyn.\n\nWayland didn't argue, but simply nudged the control column as instructed.\n\nThe Storm Eagle banked sharply into a branch canyon, much narrower than before, and Sharrowkyn wanted to squeeze himself smaller. No warrior of the Raven Guard was claustrophobic, but this was threading the eye of a needle with a seventy-ton aircraft at high speed.\n\nThe sine wave bottomed out, a low, flat line of a constant signal\n\n'It's locked on,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\nWayland grunted as he fought to manoeuvre, but the canyon walls were too narrow, the ground too close.\n\n'I have nowhere to go,' he said.\n\nSharrowkyn peered through the canopy, eyes narrowing as he picked out something ahead.\n\nSomething that shouldn't be there.\n\nA lone figure standing on a raised bluff of rock. Wreathed in shadows so deep even he couldn't pick out any details beyond a chromium helmet that gleamed silver like a crescent moon. Something long and slender snapped into position at its shoulder.\n\n'Now,' scratched the voice. 'Drop.'\n\nAgain, Wayland didn't argue, nudging the stick forward and cutting the engines. No sooner had the prow dipped than the device at the figure's shoulder bloomed with pale smoke and cherry-red fire.\n\nSharrowkyn ducked involuntarily as a dart-shaped missile flashed over the Storm Eagle, its blue-hot jet wash blistering the gunship's canopy as it passed within two metres. Sharrowkyn expected to see a reflected flash of detonation or feel the pressure wave of an explosion, but nothing came.\n\n'Everyone brace!' yelled Wayland as the Storm Eagle made an interesting landing on the Lunar surface.\n\nThe gunship's prow was crumpled, its spine buckled and the fuselage split open all along its length. An outcropping of rock had gouged a tear in one wing and spun the craft around, leaving it listing like a beached whale in a pale cloud of dust. The right engine cowling leaked fumes and coolant, while the left hung by threads of cabling and a seam of blackened metal.\n\nThe warriors of the Sisypheum staggered from the hole torn in the hull where the rear assault ramp used to be, their dark armour paled by hanging Lunar panicles.\n\nCadmus Tyro was first from the wreckage, moving with pained steps and his bolter at the ready as he scanned the deep furrow of their descent in search of attackers. The darkness overhead was streaked with light, and explosions of dust billowed on the upper walls of the canyon as falling debris impacted. Luckily, the angle of its descent and the depth of the canyon kept the worst of it from impacting around them.\n\nIgnatius Numen followed an instant later, his volkite cannon held out before him, the barrel crackling with barely contained energies. Frater Thamatica and Atesh Tarsa flanked him, and Ulrach Branthan came next, bending back part of the torn metal to emerge into the hostile Lunar atmosphere. Garuda perched on his shoulder, its head swung from side to side as though irritated at having been woken. 'What brought us down?' asked Branthan.\n\n'I don't know,' said Tyro. 'Wayland's warning came only a second before we hit.\n\nBranthan looked to the horizon. 'We need to move. The crash will draw the enemy's eye.'\n\nTyro nodded, and turned to issue orders to his fellow warriors. 'Frater head to the top of the dune ridge. Keep watch on our surroundings, passive auspex only. Numen, gather up the ammunition still in the gunship. Tarsa, go forward and check on Sharrowkyn and Wayland'\n\nThe Salamander nodded and headed around to the buried prow of the gunship.\n\nNumen didn't move, his gaze fixed on the tops of the canyon walls.\n\n'Numen, do as he says,' said Branthan.\n\nThe veteran nodded curtly and lumbered back inside the gunship. Anger touched Tyro at Numen's flagrant deferment to Branthan, but now wasn't the time for a contest of wills between captains.\n\nTyro's eyes narrowed as he saw a patina of frost crawling across Branthan's grey skin.\n\nExposed to the full force of the sun's radiation, a Lunar day could reach temperatures of up to two hundred degrees. At night, or in the shadow of a canyon as they were now, it was registering at one hundred and ninety-five degrees below zero. Insulated and reflective suits had kept the earliest Lunar pioneers safe, but Ulrach Branthan's flesh was exposed to the lethal"}
{"text":"or a contest of wills between captains.\n\nTyro's eyes narrowed as he saw a patina of frost crawling across Branthan's grey skin.\n\nExposed to the full force of the sun's radiation, a Lunar day could reach temperatures of up to two hundred degrees. At night, or in the shadow of a canyon as they were now, it was registering at one hundred and ninety-five degrees below zero. Insulated and reflective suits had kept the earliest Lunar pioneers safe, but Ulrach Branthan's flesh was exposed to the lethal cold.\n\n'How are you enduring this temperature?' asked Tyro. 'The flesh should be freezing solid on your bones.'\n\nBranthan shrugged, the movement unnatural.\n\n'Ulrach,' pressed Tyro. 'Answer me.'\n\nAt first, he thought Branthan was going to ignore him, but then the captain spoke in a voice that was unlike his normal default-aggressive tone. If anything, Branthan sounded vulnerable, a trait never normally associated with a captain of the Iron Hands.\n\n'Atesh Tarsa told me the Heart of Iron had... changed me,' said Branthan. 'My physiology, the functioning of my organs.'\n\n'Should I be concerned?'\n\n'About what?'\n\n'About what else it might have changed,' said Tyro.\n\n'What are you suggesting?' snapped Branthan, any sense of vulnerability evaporating in the face of Tyro's words.\n\n'Since leaving stasis, your mental state could be described as...erratic.'\n\n'Are you questioning my loyalty, Cadmus?'\n\n'No, never that,' said Tyro. 'But none of us know the true nature of the Heart of Iron. We don't know who made it or what changes its creators intended for it to work. That should concern us both.'\n\n'Dedicate your efforts to killing traitors and you will have no concerns, Captain Tyro.'\n\nThamatica's voice hissed over the vox.\n\n'Movement,' said the Iron Father. 'One figure, coming in low along the furrow of our landing.'\n\n'Can you identify?'\n\n'Not yet.'\n\n'You have it covered?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\nThe Lunar dust hung thick in the low gravity, masking movement. Tyro squinted, his auto-senses crackling with static as they tried to sort true images from ghost-images.\n\nA figure stepped into view.\n\nIts hunched shoulders were draped in a voluminous russet cloak, ragged like a burned wing, and a long-barrelled weapon of weathered bronze was mounted at its shoulder, rotated back on its mount to the safe position.\n\nThe figure wore a gleaming silver helmet, and a wire-wound staff of cables and jangling charms held in its left hand looked like sonic thing a tribal shaman might carry. Its body was insulated within a series of heavy thermal bandages, looped around its body and upper limbs - two at each shoulder, two at the waist - in a repeating angular pattern, like an ancient, mummified queen of Gyptus.\n\nQueen, because what body plan was visible of the figure was unmistakably female.\n\n'Is that a gene-witch?' said Tyro, pulling his boiler in tight to his shoulder.\n\n'I don't know,' answered Branthan. 'I have never seen one before.' The arm that had once belonged to Brother Bombastus came up, and the flex-steel ammo belt of the storm bolter clattered as it fed oversized shells into the weapon.\n\nOne of the figure s hands clutched a disturbingly organic collection of biomechanical, tentacle-like limbs, which were in turn attached to the body of a ridged and segmented thing she was dragging behind her like a hunter returning with a prize kill. To Tyro, it looked like the bastard offspring of a spider and a squid.\n\nGaruda pushed off Branthan's shoulder, its beak opening and closing, screeching in silent hostility.\n\n'That's far enough,' said Branthan. The figure looked up, as though only now aware of their presence. 'Identify yourself!'\n\nA grating wheeze, like rusty spars of metal being dragged across an iron deck, issued from beneath the figure's helmet.\n\n'You come to my world and demand to know who I am?'\n\nShe kept coming hauling the machine carcass behind her.\n\n'This demersal-splicer almost latched on to your craft,' she said. 'Lucky for you I still had a low-yield e-mag eh? It's one of our uglier creations, this. Would've slaved your avionics system to its control and flown you into a cliff. That'd be a wreck you wouldn't be walking out of, I can tell you!'\n\nCrackling traceries of violet light flickered across the segmented surfaces of the splicer.\n\nHaywire, thought Tyro. The downed machine wasn't dead, just paralysed.\n\nThamatica moved parallel to her, his aim never wavering from the beacon of her silver skull. If she so much as twitched in a hostile manner, the Iron Father would put a mass-reactive through her brain. 'Identify yourself!' ordered Branthan again, as the figure kept coming.\n\nThe gene-witch lifted her staff, and every weapon snapped to her. 'Kill me, and I'll make this machine scream loud enough the Sons of Horus will hear it with their own flesh ears,' she said.\n\n'Who are you?' demanded Tyro.\n\n'I know who it is,' said Sabik Wayland, coming around the flanks of the downed gunship.\n\nNykona Sharrowkyn and Atesh Tarsa had to hold him upright, as the lower portion of the Iron Father's right leg was missing below the middle of his thigh. Tattered shreds of meat and metal hung from the crude seal of a synth-skin dressing.\n\n'Bad landing,' said the gene-witch.\n\n'I've had better,' agreed Wayland. 'But I can get it to fly again.'\n\n'Doubt it,' said the figure. 'Came down hard.'\n\n'No thanks to you.'\n\n'What's going on, Wayland?' said Branthan, without taking his aim from the silver-helmed figure.\n\n'Who is that?'\n\n'Put your guns away,' said Wayland. 'That is Ta'lab Vita-37, and she just saved our lives.'\n\nThe warriors of the Sisypheum crash land on Luna.\n\n6\n\nThe Paths Below\n\nNot Meant to Be\n\nChange of Plans\n\nThe gene-witch tilted her head back to scan the light-streaked sky.\n\n'What are you looking for?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Your fleet,' said Ta'lab Vila-37. 'Squadrons of attack ships in formation. A lone warship with city-levelling ordnance. Something that tells me you heard my message and took it seriously.'\n\n'We heard it,' said Tyro, 'but the only things like that in orbit are traitor ships.'\n\n'So it's just you?'\n\n'It's just us.'\n\n'Then how do you intend to destroy Herodotus Omega? My message was specific, yes? Wipe it clean of life.'\n\n'We are Space Marines,' said Branthan. 'We can destroy anything, and we do not need starships to do it.'\n\n'So sure of yourself.' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'That always was your kind's flaw. Those who embrace certainty and reject doubt are ones we should have feared. We should have seen it back then. Should have seen it and refused to comply... That's the truth of it.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 shrugged and spun her staff around, then sheathed it over her shoulder.\n\nShe dropped the coiled tentacle-cables of the demersal-splicer and said, 'Never liked these bio-constructs. Vicious things with delusions of grandeur and a sadistic streak. Didn't do a damn thing but slow Lupercal's curs by a minute or less anyway.'\n\nThe gene-witch unsettled Tyro in a way he could not articulate, and it took a measure of self-restraint he hadn't known he possessed to let her approach unharmed.\n\nHe tried to rationalise it as just his war-posture in the face of an unknown entity, but part of him knew there was more to it than that. The gene-witches were an ancient, potent force, and rumours of their existence went back to a time when the secret knowledge they had possessed was thought to be magic.\n\n\"You are Ta'lab Vita-37?' asked Branthan.\n\nShe stopped and looked at him curiously.\n\n'I am Ta'lab Vita-37. Daughter of the Moon. Child of Luna. Who are you?'\n\n'Ulrach Branthan, captain of the Tenth Legion.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 looked him up and down. 'And what are you? Something worse than even we made. And we made nightmares...'\n\nShe didn't wail for an answer and turned to Tyro. 'And you? Who are you?'\n\n'Cadmus Tyro.'\n\n'Iron Hands,' said Ta'lab Vita-37, turning to scan the rest of the warriors and seeing Atesh Tarsa and Nykona Sharrowkyn. 'But not all of you.'\n\n'Not all of us,' agreed Tyro. 'The infamy at Isstvan V brought brothers of many Legions together, and the fighting since then has forged our brotherhood in iron.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 nodded and reached up to snap a frozen droplet of blood from his armour. She held it to the reflective surface of her helmet, and Tyro's visor detected radiant heat emanating from its surface. As the blood began to melt she smeared it over where her mouth would have been if she'd had any features to discern. Cursive forms of light played under the helmet's surface, crescents and loops of helical spirals.\n\n'Tenth Legion. Third generation. Medusan-born,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Blood type AXR positive theta. Part of the Omnia-Schiaparelli stratum. High concentrations of the Stallix genotype, a modification of the garjana generation-pairings. Too high, really. Can lead to a predisposition for pain-induced psycho-trauma. But I expect you already know that.'\n\n'What are you talking about? What does any of that mean?'\n\n'It means we bred you all to be resilient,' said Ta'lab Vita-37, 'but you exhibit levels I haven't seen in a long time. Put a bolt through your skull and I think you might still get up, eh?'\n\n'We are the Iron Tenth,' said Branthan. 'We endure pain. It is what we do.'\n\n'There's truth in that,' agreed Ta'lab Vita-37, 'but your Legion gene-code is concentrated beyond what we advised. Your sire always did like to push things farther than He ought.'\n\n'Our sire? You mean Ferrus Manus?' said Branthan.\n\n'No,' said Ta'lab Vita-37, turning to face the Iron Father. 'Your other sire. The one who sent His wolves to first yoke us to His terrible ambition.'\n\nTyro's anger simmered just below the surface, and he saw it mirrored in the tension of his battle-brothers.\n\n'To speak such words while the Throneworld is besieged is a sure and certain way to find death.' said Branthan.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 regarded him quizzically, and shook her head.\n\n'So fragile,' she said with a throaty wheeze that might have been a chuckle. 'Another side effect of hyper-aggressive ma"}
{"text":"her. 'Your other sire. The one who sent His wolves to first yoke us to His terrible ambition.'\n\nTyro's anger simmered just below the surface, and he saw it mirrored in the tension of his battle-brothers.\n\n'To speak such words while the Throneworld is besieged is a sure and certain way to find death.' said Branthan.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 regarded him quizzically, and shook her head.\n\n'So fragile,' she said with a throaty wheeze that might have been a chuckle. 'Another side effect of hyper-aggressive masculine traits. Time is against us, and you still look to find fault in warm air passing over my lips.'\n\nTyro felt Branthan's fury ratchet up a notch, and fought to quell his own.\n\nAfter all, she was right. Time was the enemy now.\n\n'The Magna Mater, where is it?'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 shook her head, somehow managing to look contrite and dejected without so much as a single facial feature.\n\n'I bore its burden for so long, alone and hidden from my sisters. I could not take my ease with them or find succour at any of the wellsprings, for Heliosa-54 made sure every scrap of me was erased for fear I would be revealed and taken. My sisters forgot me. The moon herself forgot me. But I kept it safe, bound to Luna, but passing unseen in the cracks of existence and perception.'\n\nShe sank to her knees, and Tyro saw the immense depths of sadness within her.\n\n'I kept it with me for two centuries and more,' she continued. 'Until my flesh and mind could bear the toll of solitude no longer. Heliosa-54 had tasked me, you see? Tasked me with keeping it safe. Close, but far from those who would misuse it. I could not do that if my body failed. I needed to rest, to regenerate in the healing light of the wellsprings, but I could not take the Magna Mater with me for fear its power would reveal it. So I reopened the secret vaults within the gene-labs of Herodotus Omega, vaults that were rightly condemned and long ago sealed. I hid the Magna Mater deep and wove unbreakable seals about them while I slumbered.'\n\n'Let me guess,' said Tyro. 'Those seals weren't as unbreakable as you thought.'\n\n'Even on Luna, it seems the rot of treachery runs deep,' said Ta'lab Vita-37 sadly 'As I regenerated, building the strength to continue my duty, enemy hunters learned of my lone vigil and tracked me to my refuge. Corrupted cybernetics almost took me, but they underestimated the power of a gene-maiden, even an old and frail one. I unmade them, and fled into the silver oceans, using the old ways to send a message of desperation into the void.'\n\n'And we have answered your call, so what would you have us do?' said Branthan.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 aimed her staff in the direction of the volcano.\n\n'Time is short,' she said. 'Renegade Martian tech-priests are using a degenerative viral sentience to undo the gene-seals I placed upon the vaults within Herodotus Omega.'\n\n'How long do we have before they break in?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Five of the seals have already succumbed, the sixth is almost gone, and it is only a matter of time until the seventh seal is no more and the Sons of Horus will be within.'\n\n'If the Sons of Horus hold the main entrance, how do we get inside?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Main entrance?' cackled Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Your kind is always so literal.'\n\nLeaving Wayland and Thamatica to try to get the Storm Eagle airborne, Ta'lab Vita-37 led the others deeper into the canyon. Sharrowkyn gripped Wayland's arm as he left. The Iron Father's face was pale, but he gave no sign of any pain from the leg he had lost in the crash. He had already bound a broken stanchion to the stump to act as a crutch, using cable and insulation material pulled from the torn fuselage.\n\n'Be safe, brother,' said Wayland.\n\n'You too, brother,' said Sharrowkyn. unable to shake a feeling of grim premonition.\n\n'I'll have this flying before you get back, mark my words.' Sharrowkyn had seen aircraft in worse states keep flying, but not for long, and few of them ever got back in the air once they were down\n\n'I don't doubt it,' he said.\n\nThat farewell had been two hours and fifteen kilometres ago.\n\nSharrowkyn scouted ahead of the others as they pushed along the canyon towards the unfinished venting station built into the haunches of the volcano. Dust fragments drifted down like ashen rain into the canyon, as well as larger pieces of fused metal smashed from orbit. Sharrowkyn had passed a number of bodies too, but hadn't stopped to examine them.\n\nOccasional flashes of secondary detonations in orbit, or the streaks of burning debris carving a fiery line across the sky, briefly illuminated the canyon floor. Ten metres behind, Ignatius Numen swept the ground before him with his volkite. The veteran had fought with Sharrowkyn long enough to know the Raven Guard warrior was in no danger from any shots he might fire. Atesh Tarsa and Branthan flanked Ta'lab Vita-37, while Cadmus Tyro provided rear security. Garuda circled above him, keeping below the lip of the canyon. It irked Sharrowkyn that the bird was keeping pace with him, but the bird went where it wanted, and nothing anyone could do or say to it made any difference.\n\nSharrowkyn moved silently, his steps lighter than air, barely disturbing the dust and leaving no mark of his passing. Moving this way was instinctual to him.\n\nThe darkness in the canyon was deep and comforting, even if he didn't know this world's shadows. Their nuances were unknown to him, but they welcomed him nonetheless. To those not trained by the Shadowmasters, all such umbra were alike, but Sharrowkyn knew better.\n\nHe had been born to the shadows and they had raised him, nurtured and taught him, like a child raised by beasts in the forest. He knew their ways, and they his.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 had told him to look for a section of canyon wall with three teardrop-shaped impact craters in a pattern resembling an elongated spear tip aimed at the dead volcano.\n\nSharrowkyn's eyes were in constant motion, but he had seen nothing resembling such a formation, and they were getting dangerously close to the enemy auspex net his passive auto-senses were detecting.\n\nThree hundred meters later, he halted as a bloom of light from an explosion threw the eastern wall into sharp relief. And there they were - three impact craters, the result of meteors having struck the canyon wall at the precise angle to form a spear tip, the pattern entirely natural yet completely distinct.\n\nSharrowkyn stepped from the shadows, an act that would tell Numen they had reached their destination. He hunted or any sign of something man-made but could see nothing location. A sliver of the volcano's summit was just visible between the narrow wall, and through the veil of drifting fragments.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 and the others approached, and Sharrowkyn indicated the impact craters in the wall.\n\n\"You have good eyes,' Ta'lab Vita-37 said.\n\n\"You should know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Your kind enhanced them.'\n\n'That we did, Raven Guard, irreducible complexity be damned.' she replied.\n\n'So why are we here? What do these marks signify?'\n\n'That we have our way in,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'Where?' demanded Branthan.\n\n'If there's a way in here, it's well hidden, said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Your eyes are keen, but you don't see everything, Raven,' said Ta'lab Vita-37,\n\nThe gene-witch approached the dark rock of the canyon wall and set her staff of charms and cables against it. More lights flickered beneath the surface of her helm, and previously invisible seams opened in the rock, seams Sharrowkyn knew with absolute certainty that no Shadowmaster or high fabricatus of the Mechanicum would ever have found.\n\n'Two hundred years I have travelled the moon, beyond sight and out of mind,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Do you really think I don't know all her secret ways?'\n\nThe cavern within the canyon wall was rough-hewn, its walls curved and scored with napped patterns that made Sharrowkyn feel as if he stood within some giant sea creature's shell. He ran his finger along the inner walls, feeling repetition in the patterns, as if the rock had been dug by the rhythmic gestures of something desperate to claw its way out.\n\nThat impression was only reinforced by the sight of an exposed sheet of metal on the far wall of the cave, a portion of ductwork revealed by excavations into the rock. A ragged hole had been cut into the metal from within by what looked like a thermal lance, and the portion excised from the duct lay on the ground.\n\n'What is this?' Sharrowkyn asked.\n\n'A segment of venting ductwork that leads from inside and eventually comes out high on the flanks of the volcano,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'This our way in?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nSharrowkyn leaned cautiously into the duct, feeling the passage of warm, ionised air drifting from somewhere deep inside the mountain.\n\n'This leads to the vaults?'\n\n'It does,' confirmed Ta'lab Vita-37. 'To a sealed storage facility.'\n\n'Wait,' said Atesh Tarsa, kneeling by the edge of the hole cut in and consulting the readout on his narthecium. \"What are these venting? What machinery is this ducting connected to?'\n\n'This ductwork is part of the radiation filtration system,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'Radiation?' said Tyro. 'How bad is it, Tarsa?'\n\n'The levels are below lethal, but still significant,' said Tarsa.\n\n'A radiation filter?' said Tyro. \"Why do you need a radiation filtration system that requires ducting of this size? Didn't you say there were gene-labs in here?'\n\n'This facility was built upon one of the original Koenig Alpha atomic waste sites.'\n\n'What? Why would you build a gene-lab on an atomic waste site?'\n\n'The containment systems were more than adequate to render the internal environment sterile,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'But the proximity to a waste site would convince anyone who thought to look this way that no work of any import could possibly be carried out here.'\n\n'What work was being carried out here?' asked Tyro.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 hesitated before answering. 'Highly secret research that was intended to become a new branch of Legion genetics, but which"}
{"text":"build a gene-lab on an atomic waste site?'\n\n'The containment systems were more than adequate to render the internal environment sterile,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'But the proximity to a waste site would convince anyone who thought to look this way that no work of any import could possibly be carried out here.'\n\n'What work was being carried out here?' asked Tyro.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 hesitated before answering. 'Highly secret research that was intended to become a new branch of Legion genetics, but which was abandoned when it only produced freaks and monsters. We destroyed them, and this place was shut down long ago.'\n\n'And this is where you hid the Magna Mater? asked Tyro.\n\n'Yes. It is a place of forgotten echoes now.'\n\n'Well that doesn't sound ominous at all,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n7\n\nNo More to Give\n\nInfiltration\n\nToo Late\n\nWayland leaned back in his pilot's seat and gritted his teeth against the pain.\n\nIt raced around his body in rivers of fire from his severed leg, suffusing every fibre of his being with almost paralysing agony. His armour had long since exhausted its supply of balms in the years since Isstvan V, but not all the pain he was feeling was his own.\n\nThick cables ran from his gauntlet into an exposed conduit of wires he'd unscrewed from the interior of the Storm Eagle's fuselage. He felt the agony of the machine-spirit at the heart of the gunship, its fury and its torment at being grounded.\n\nIt overwhelmed his pain, for it was the pain of desire broken on the wheel of reality.\n\nWayland whispered the binaric catechisms of repair and restoration to soothe its broken spirit. The machine's pain was hideous, and he felt its wounded soul on the verge of dissipating into the ether. He reached for it, but it turned at bay, screeds of binary lashing out at him.\n\nThe connection between the gunship and Wayland was severed with a screeching roar of fury from the vox, and Wayland's eyes snapped open, his skin lathered in icy sweat.\n\nHe disconnected from the avionics panel, his movements clumsy with pain and residual echoes of his conjoined consciousness. He pulled himself from the pilot's seat and limped back to the compartment.\n\nFrater Thamatica knelt by the dormant form of the demersal-splicer Ta'lab Vita-37 had brought down. Its appearance bore few hallmarks of Imperial craft, and its grotesque, cephalopodic body possessed a more organic form than Wayland was used to seeing. Ever the tinkerer, Thamatica had the mechanised arms of his servo-harness prodding circuitry within an access panel he'd prised open.\n\nThe Iron Father usually preferred to work manually, but such was the scale of repairs needed to render the Storm Eagle flyable that he had been forced to dig a servo-harness from its stowage bay. The welder tips on its fusion torch arms still glowed red with heat.\n\n'What are you doing with that?' asked Wayland.\n\n'Investigating.' said Thamatica without looking up. 'I've never seen technology like this before. It would be a shame not to at least take a look at it. The MIU links are extraordinary, verging on the edge of true machine autonomy. Given free rein, this could fly a fleet of gunships on its own. If I can just disengage these inhibitors, I could link it with-'\n\n'The Storm Eagle,' interrupted Wayland. 'Walk me through it.'\n\nNow Thamatica looked up, and the multiple arms of the servo-harness folded into their collapsed forms on his back\n\n'The fuselage was split in so many places I lost count, and a great many of the control surfaces are so badly damaged that it will be almost impossible to manoeuvre effectively. The landing gear is shattered and the fuel tanks are all but empty.'\n\n'What's your prognosis? Is it fit to fly?'\n\nThamatica said, 'I've sealed up all our wounds and realigned what I can, but without a Legion graving dock and a squadron of servitors, I fear this will be its final flight.'\n\nWayland nodded and lowered himself into one of the compartment's armoured bucket seats. Pain from his leg was burning through his endurance, but he forced it into a sealed box in his mind. He was an Iron Hand; pain was part of the journey.\n\nBirth to death. Flesh to Iron.\n\nThamatica put a hand on Wayland's shoulder and nodded to the cockpit.\n\n'But nothing I can do to get us up in the air will matter if the machine-spirit is broken.'\n\n'I can't reach it, Frater,' said Wayland. 'The spirit recoils from my every entreaty like a wild animal in a snare, too consumed by rage and pain to understand I am trying to help.'\n\n'No one has a way with the spirit of machines like you, Sabik,' said Thamatica. 'I know you can reach it. You just need to be patient with it. And all being well, we only need to be airborne long enough to return to the Sisypheum.'\n\n'All being well?' snapped Wayland. 'How well have things gone for us since Isstvan V?'\n\n'Not like you to be defeatist, Sabik.'\n\nWayland sighed. 'We all only have so much to give, Frater.'\n\nHot, irradiated fumes and radioactive dust blew along the ductwork, in levels high enough to be deadly to a mortal but harmless to the warriors of the Legions. Ta'lab Vita-37 led them through the twisting lengths of ducts, and it did not take long for them to reach the interior of the mountain.\n\nThey emerged in a storage chamber, a cold space of angle-cut stone, stacked high with construction materiel that would be used, broken machinery and the accumulated detritus of abandoned spaces. A single trapezoidal archway led deeper into the mountain.\n\nSharrowkyn heard the distant sounds of shouting voices, mixed with the clang of metal on metal and the idling thrum of engine's belonging to something heavy.\n\nA transport of some kind, a trans-orbital at least.\n\nOne by one, they moved into the chamber. Cadmus Tyro and Ta'lab Vita-37 followed Sharrowkyn, then Tarsa. Ignatius Numen came next, and finally Ulrach Branthan ducked down as he entered Garuda clung to the metal at his shoulders.\n\n'The vault is ahead,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'Should we expect to meet resistance?' asked Tyro.\n\n'No,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'At least, not until we reach the vault chamber itself.'\n\nDespite the gene-witch's assurances, the Space Marines moved off in perfect cover formation, each warrior protecting the other as they moved deeper into the mountain.\n\nThe interior tunnels of the volcano were faced with pressed steel, and dust and silence hung heavy over them all. They moved from junction to junction, with Ta'lab Vita-37 leading them unerringly onwards. At the arched entrance to an opened chamber, they found barricades of collapsed gurneys and empty barrels stamped with biohazard markings. Las-burns, grenade shrapnel and bullet impacts had chewed up the walls.\n\n'What's in there?' asked Sharrowkyn.\n\n'The growth chambers,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Where viable subjects were hothoused and matured in gene-pods.'\n\n'The freaks and monsters?' Sharrowkyn asked. 'Is that all that's left here?'\n\n'No,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'We purged all the monsters the Emperor couldn't use.'\n\nThey passed through the smashed barricade and entered a vast chamber of dripping echoes and cold darkness. Long-dead machinery gathered dust on the walls, rigging chains dangled from lifter cranes, and heavy-duty cabling lay inert on the floor amid shards of broken glass.\n\nLined up in their thousands, like warriors at a Legion muster, were row upon row of clear-fronted gene-pods. Most were empty, but those that were not were filled with stagnant, milky residue in which hulking forms could be glimpsed through the clouded glass. It was impossible to make out their exact nature, but Sharrowkyn saw figures with transhuman bulk - but these were monstrous ogres, taller and broader than even the largest Space Marine.\n\nSharrowkyn kept pace with Ta'lab Vita-37 and took a moment to study the gene-witch.\n\n'What is it you want to know?' she asked, sensing his scrutiny.\n\n'I'm not sure,' he said. 'It's not every day you get to meet one of your creators.'\n\n'Is that how you think of me?'\n\nSharrowkyn shrugged. 'Until we came to the moon I had not thought of the Selenar much at all. You were a footnote to the early histories of the drive from Terra. So little is known of you and your sect.'\n\n'Did you pause to wonder why that might be?\n\n'Not at all'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 turned to face him, but her featureless helm gave no clue to her emotions.\n\n'The Selenar have always existed in the cracks between perception,' she said. 'We have gone by many names and used many guises through the ages to move through the world of men - the Eleusinians, Oesirica, the Damia, the Immacolata... The list goes on, but every name and every guise had but one purpose. Do you know that was?'\n\n'No,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'To keep our power of creation out of the hands of men.'\n\n'Why?'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 gave one of her wheezing laughs. 'Because we knew you would do what your kind always does with such a gift - you would seek to turn it into a weapon of conquest and dominance. And that's exactly what the Emperor did when He stole it front us all those years ago.'\n\n'Stole? My understanding was that Luna and Terra fought, yes, but that when the Emperor laid out His vision for the Imperium, the Selenar willingly joined forces to see it done.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 shook her head, as though Sharrowkyn had disappointed her.\n\n'Of course that is your understanding. To accept that everything for which you fight is built on lies, murder and theft does not fit the narrative you must craft in order to keep believing you are the heroes of this galaxy. Look at what has become of your Imperium and tell me we were not wise to keep such awesome power secret as long as we did?'\n\n'There have been wars long before this one.'\n\n'There have indeed, Raven Guard, but wars waged by mortals burn out in mortal spans - they do not set the galaxy ablaze,' said Ta lab Vita-37, turning to rap her over-articulated knuckles on his eagle-stamped plastron. 'When gods make war, everyone burns in the fire with them.'\n\nBefore Sharrowkyn could reply, Ta'lab Vita-37 be"}
{"text":" Look at what has become of your Imperium and tell me we were not wise to keep such awesome power secret as long as we did?'\n\n'There have been wars long before this one.'\n\n'There have indeed, Raven Guard, but wars waged by mortals burn out in mortal spans - they do not set the galaxy ablaze,' said Ta lab Vita-37, turning to rap her over-articulated knuckles on his eagle-stamped plastron. 'When gods make war, everyone burns in the fire with them.'\n\nBefore Sharrowkyn could reply, Ta'lab Vita-37 bent double with a cry of pain.\n\nSharrowkyn immediately grabbed her and pulled her into cover, scanning for threats. He hadn't heard or sensed anything. The others followed his lead finding machinery and structural elements to shelter behind.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 clutched her gut, sinking to her knees. But for her staff, she would have fallen to the floor. Her body spasmed, as though struck with a shock maul.\n\n'What's happening?' asked Sharrowkyn. 'Are you hurt?'\n\nHer chest hiked with rapid, staccato breaths.\n\nAngry red spirals looped on the surface of her helmet.\n\n'The seventh seal is broken,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'The traitors are in the vault.'\n\nThamatica had done as much as he could with the tools and materials he had to make the Storm Eagle flyable, but even then he wasn't sure it would be enough. So many elements of its structure were beyond battlefield repair, and the constant recycling and reuse of worn-out parts over the years had finally taken its inevitable toll.\n\nHe felt reasonably confident it was structurally capable of getting airborne, but without a willing machine-spirit, it likely wouldn't remain in the air for long. Without a machine-spirit, a gunship was just tons of scrap metal.\n\nThamatica glanced along the troop compartment towards the cockpit, where Wayland again sought to coax the gunship's spirit back from the brink. Cables ran from his arm to the avionics panel, and pulsing communications passed back and forth between man and machine. Thamatica had offered to help, but Wayland had shaken his head.\n\n'No,' he'd said. 'I flew this gunship out of the fires of Isstvan V. I flew it against Fulgrim's warriors and against those of Alpharius. Its spirit knows me. It trusts me. But it is wary of you.'\n\nThamatica couldn't blame it. Not really. The machine-spirits of the Sisypheum gossiped with one another, passing secret knowledge in every binaric whisper. They knew Thamatica as an...experimenter. As one who sought to change them.\n\nNo, Wayland was right to decline his help.\n\nBut this splicer, that was a different story entirely.\n\nIt was a fascinating piece of technology.\n\nHe'd exposed the length of its interior, and its workings were a marvel. Its roots were old, its components built from scratch without recourse to anything Thamatica recognised as an STC pattern. Its circuitry looked handmade. Bespoke. The very thought of such a thing sent a thrill of excitement through him and had given him an idea of how they might employ it, though Wayland had already decried it as too dangerous.\n\nIts control module was dizzyingly complex, an artificial neural web with heuristic capabilities that far outstripped what they'd seen inside Garuda when he and Wayland had stripped the bird down to repair it. Ta'lab Vita-37 had said it was designed to take control of enemy aircraft in order to crash them or take control of vital systems. An ingenious and efficient way to turn an enemy's strength against them.\n\n'Damnation!' snapped Wayland from the cockpit.\n\n'Still not responding?' asked Thamatica.\n\n'No,' said Wayland, sounding exhausted. 'It's all but given up.'\n\nThe vault chamber had been carved deep into the southern haunches of the volcano, a rough circle a kilometre in diameter. It was filled with the actinic reek of burning metal and the molten heat of lascutters. Like every chamber they'd passed through, it was littered with derelict machinery, broken loader servitors and emptied stowage bins. Sharrowkyn eased into cover behind a haphazardly stacked collection of metalled crates. Dust and fumes hung in the air in a thick fog, rendering the shapes moving through the space as blurred outlines.\n\nThe entire caldera at the volcano's summit was peeled back, and darkness of the void rippled through the energies of an integrity field The light of stars beyond was indistinguishable from the winking lights of orbital detonations and falling debris. A bulky trans-orbital without markings squatted directly below the high entrance, its engines glowing with heat, spooling up in readiness for lift-off.\n\nA cadre of lifter servitors hauled dozens of bulky powercells on repulsor pallets up the embarkation ramp lowered beneath its aft section. Behind them, a multi-limbed tech-priest supervised a group of glitching tech-thralls in oil-stained canvas vac-suits as they loaded steaming coolant cylinders into the trans-orbital's stowage bays.\n\nAt the centre of the cavernous space was a deep, circular shaft, putting Sharrowkyn in mind of the eldar crone world they'd followed Fulgrim and Perturabo to, and the depthless pit at its heart. Two dog-toothed silo doors, each five metres thick and thirty metres in length, were raised up on either side of the shaft. Noxious steam issued from below like clouds rising from some hideous underworld.\n\nThe floor around the vault opening was littered with the bodies of servitors and dark-robed lexmechanics. They were clearly dead, but their bodies jerked and twisted, purging vital fluids as the flesh rippled beneath the fabric of their robes like the surface of a restless ocean.\n\n'What's happening to them?' asked Numen, rapping his fingers on the stock of his volkite.\n\n'The fail-safes on my gene-locks are not kind to those who try to break them,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'What does that mean?'\n\nLights flickered across Ta'lab Vita-37's helm in a pattern Sharrowkyn had come to associate with grim amusement. 'Unsuccessful attempts to break my gene-codes transfers a hyper-aggressive mutagen into the attacker that instantaneously and randomly sends their genetic order into chaos. Death is assured, and it is not painless.'\n\nSharrowkyn grinned in admiration. He counted at least two hundred bodies, maybe more.\n\nHowever many it was, it hadn't been enough.\n\n'You underestimated the traitors' willingness to pay any price to breach your sanctum.'\n\n'Underestimating the depth of cruelty men possess has always been our problem,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'We can't linger here,' said Atesh Tarsa, consulting his narthecium and gesturing to the towering red silos lining the circumference of the cavernous space. 'The rad-levels are so high that even our armour won't keep us safe for long.'\n\nEach silo was banded with yellow and black hazard stripes and marked with the unmistakable radiation symbol. Sharrowkyn was acutely reminded that this place had continued to serve as a repository of atomic waste deposited here in the moon's distant past.\n\n'I thought you said this place was sterile,' said Ulrach Branthan, crouched awkwardly in the shadow of a heavy, tracked lifter-rig.\n\n'During this facility's years of operation it was,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'But the filtration system has long since failed to scrub the atmosphere in any meaningful way, and this internal volume is thick with a broth of heavy metals and lethal isotopes.'\n\n'Then let's get this thing done,' said Tyro, his fingers tightening on his bolter's grip.\n\n'Wait,' said Sharrowkyn as growing tremors shook the ground with a deep vibration. Orange hazard lights began flashing around the edge of the vault shaft as a heavy transit-elevator ground its way up from somewhere deep below.\n\nThe tech-priest and his thralls watched in reverence as something came into view, its form obscured by reeking clouds of misty condensate.\n\nAs the ammoniac clouds dispersed into the cold of the cavern, Sharrowkyn's eyes grew wide at the sight of a monstrous servitor palanquin of flesh and metal. Wrought from the body of a hulking migou, its frame had been augmented with steel-jacketed limbs, chemical shunts and an MIU drive unit. Its back was artificially hunched, and brass steps had been implanted onto the meat and bone of its haunches.\n\nA tall and willow-thin Martian adept in red and black, his true form impossible to classify but fringed with cabled limbs and surgical attachments, sat atop this grotesque palanquin on a chained harness. The migou's body was rapidly devolving into a mass of pulsing lesions and unnatural growths, splitting and reforming between laboured breaths.\n\nThe consequence of one of Ta'lab Vita-37 s fail-safes?\n\nThe necrotic texture of the migou's waxen flesh rippled beneath its many augments, and its head swayed from side to side as it brayed in pain. Tortured beyond endurance by the genetic chaos at work within its body, the creature collapsed, and its riotous anatomy poured from its mouth in a frothed soup of liquefaction. Even as Sharrowkyn watched, devolved portions of its body sought to recombine, healing and degenerating once again in the blink of an eye.\n\n'Throne,' hissed Tarsa at the sight of the creature's death.\n\nThe magos atop the afflicted beast slid from his harness and stepped down to the cavern floor without missing a beat. The tech-priest and his entourage of thralls dropped to their knees as he turned to retrieve something from the back of the shuddering corpse.\n\nTa'lab Vita-37's body language instantly changed as the magos lifted down a heavy-looking case of silver steel.\n\nSharrowkyn thought it an unremarkable object to contain the secrets of life itself.\n\n'Magna Mater...' hissed the gene-witch.\n\nBOOK 3\n\nCRONE\n\nDeath may be the greatest of all human blessings.\n\n8\n\nInto Them\n\nIron Endures\n\nActive Glories\n\nThe magos boarded the trans-orbital, leaving his dead mount behind. The tempo of operations increased as the mindless thralls began the last preparations for launch. The aircraft's engines pulsed with an increase in power and the fog of dust and fumes burned off at its "}
{"text":"wkyn thought it an unremarkable object to contain the secrets of life itself.\n\n'Magna Mater...' hissed the gene-witch.\n\nBOOK 3\n\nCRONE\n\nDeath may be the greatest of all human blessings.\n\n8\n\nInto Them\n\nIron Endures\n\nActive Glories\n\nThe magos boarded the trans-orbital, leaving his dead mount behind. The tempo of operations increased as the mindless thralls began the last preparations for launch. The aircraft's engines pulsed with an increase in power and the fog of dust and fumes burned off at its rear.\n\n'We can't let that ship take off,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\n'Do you see any weapons capable of bringing a ship that size down?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Then we need to get on board,' insisted the gene-witch.\n\n'We can do that,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Then we fight our way to the cockpit.'\n\n'How?' said Tyro. \"We don't exactly look as though we belong here.'\n\nSharrowkyn reached down and scooped a handful of pale dust from the door and smeared it across his armour. He patted a disruptive pattern across the Legion symbol on his shoulder guard. It didn't obscure it, but it would be camouflage enough to get them close to the trans-orbital before their loyalist provenance became obvious.\n\n'Captain Branthan, pick up a pallet crate,' said Sharrowkyn. 'Your scale might fool them into thinking you are a load-lifter or bulk servitor. The dust should conceal our insignia until we reach the embarkation ramp. Then we fight our way to the command deck.'\n\n'I'll not hide the hand of the Tenth,' said Numen, watching Sharrowkyn dusting his armour.\n\n'If you have another plan, let's hear it,' said Sharrowkyn, 'but we need to move now.'\n\nNumen looked at Branthan. who nodded, and, reluctantly, the veteran began patting his own armour down with dust. He made only a cursory attempt to obscure the mailed hand at his shoulder and Sharrowkyn didn't ask him to deface his war-plate any further.\n\nBranthan turned to lift a heavy crate while the Space Marines finished applying enough dust to obscure their identity.\n\nTyro nodded and said, 'Move out. Move confidently. They must think we belong here.'\n\nAtesh Tarsa led them from cover. Patched with the pale dust, his green armour most resembled that of the sea green of the Sons of Horus, and, as poor a disguise as it was, it might buy them a few metres.\n\nAnd a few metres could mean the difference between life and death.\n\nSharrowkyn and the Iron Hands kept moving behind Tarsa, and the Raven Guard felt every fibre of his body screaming at being so brazen. To move in the open, directly towards the enemy, was the antithesis of everything he had been taught, and went against every principle by which his Legion operated.\n\nThey moved quickly, pushing out around the edge of the central shaft towards the trans-orbital. Its engines burned a hot shade of blue, the dust swirling in spiralling thermal vortices\n\nSharrowkyn walked swiftly, keeping his upper body a quarter-turn away from the thralls positioned at the embarkation ramp. His hand rested on the grip of his bolter, out of sight.\n\nHe glanced behind him, seeing Tyro and Numen looking awkward in the open. So much of the fighting they had done since Isstvan had been on the fringes of the war, biting hard and falling back, moving so as not to be seen.\n\nThis approach bothered them as much as it did him.\n\nBranthan lurched behind them, bearing a heavy crate in his outstretched arms. He kept his burden lifted high to better obscure his unnatural body. Sharrowkyn couldn't see Garuda, and just hoped the bird wasn't about to do something inexplicably stupid.\n\nHe saw the blurred outlines of the thralls turn to face them.\n\nTheir body language registered no threat. Why would it? Luna was now the dominion of their masters - they had no reason to expect any transhumans who were not Sons of Horus. One of the thralls voiced a blurt of harsh static, a binaric yell to be heard over the growing roar of the engines. The others turned as one, the movement eerily synchronistic.\n\nThe nearest thrall shouted again, this time with the augmitter implanted in its neck.\n\n'We bring prize to you, masters!\" it said. 'Much speed.'\n\nSharrowkyn willed Tarsa not to answer.\n\nFifty metres yet separated them from the trans-orbital. Io be revealed now would leave no time to get aboard before the ramp could be closed.\n\nThe thrall stepped forward, confused. Its stunted autonomony slaved to the tech-priest already aboard the trans-orbital. It could make no decision without its masters leave, and the collar it wore winked with light as it sought orders.\n\nForty metres.\n\nA shape moved into view at the top of the ramp, a robed figure with glowing augmetic eyes. No amount of dust or fog would fool those optics. The tech-priest was sure to see through their camouflage in an instant.\n\nThirty metres.\n\nSharrowkyn tightened his grip on the bolter.\n\nHis armour registered the passage of an energy wave, its machine spirits hackles raised by an interrogative sweep of an auspex. Immediately, the tech-priest stiffened, and the ventral lights on the trans-orbital began flashing as the embarkation ramp began to rise.\n\nSharrowkyn's muscles were already tensed, ready to explode him into action, when a blur of silver shot down through the fog and enveloped the tech-priest's head like a gleaming metal mask. Thrashing mechanical wings, razor-edged with flensing blades, sliced flesh and steel with every beat. Garuda's talons were like curved punch-daggers, gouging and tearing at the knot of cables rising from the traitorous Martian's spine. An arcing spray of jet-black fluid squirted down the embarkation ramp as the psyber-eagle's beak ripped out the tech-priest's throat.\n\nThe thralls jerked in empathetic shock, their nervous systems intrinsically linked to the physiology of their master.\n\n'Into them!' yelled Sharrowkyn.\n\nTarsa put a mass-reactive through the head of the nearest thrall, then switched his aim to the second. Sharrowkyn sped forward, bringing his bolter up to his shoulder and firing a pair of expertly aimed shots that detonated the skulls of the next two thralls.\n\nIn the face of certain death, the last four thralls threw off the shock-trauma of the tech-priest's pain and turned to run.\n\nTwo more bolter shots punched into the closest thralls and burst their unprotected bodies apart from the inside. Sharrowkyn ran for the rising embarkation ramp, his bolter now mag-locked to his thigh and a black-bladed gladius in each hand. He launched himself onto the ramp, rolling and slicing low to hack through the spine of the first thrall before spinning around to hurl his second blade.\n\nIt plunged into the back of the last thrall, buried to the hilt between its shoulder blades.\n\nGaruda finished savaging the tech-priest's head, its beak and claws wet with black-red fluids that looked nothing like human blood.\n\nThe bird cawed and launched into the air, flying deeper into the trans-orbital.\n\n'Where are you going?' he yelled after it, but the bird, as always, kept its counsel.\n\nGaruda vanished, and Sharrowkyn bent to retrieve his thrown blade. He wiped it clean, looking for the mechanism to reverse the rise of the embarkation ramp as he felt a lurch in his equilibrium that told him the trans-orbital had begun to lift from the ground. 'Damn it, we're taking off.'\n\nA screeching whine of protesting hydraulics made him look back, and he saw Ulrach Branthan holding the ramp in place as the others climbed up.\n\nTarsa, Numen and Tyro were already aboard, and Branthan grunted as he pulled the ramp down enough for him to step onto it surprisingly agile for something so large, he all but vaulted into the trans-orbital as it finally dusted off and the ramp locked into place.\n\n'Move as one,' he said, shucking his arms back to load his under-slung storm bolters. 'We take this ship. Fast.'\n\nFor so valuable a prize, the trans-orbital was sparsely crewed. The warriors of the Sisypheum moved through its bare companionways and transits almost without resistance. Thralls and servitors for the most part manned its stations.\n\nThe thralls they killed, the servitors they spared - not for mercy's sake, but so they could continue to fly the trans-orbital.\n\nThey found the magos assigned to the craft plugged into sole bank like the grand organ of some theatrica hall. He juddered with traceries of lightning coruscating around his body, as though in the grip of a system-wide seizure.\n\nBranthan put him down with a bolt-round through his spinal cord, and the juddering stopped. Ta'Iab Vita-37 stepped over the body and wrenched all the magos' mechadendrites and data-spikes from the machine. For good measure, she bent and extended a spike of her own from her wrist and rammed it through the fallen magos' temple.\n\n'He was calling for help,' she said.\n\n'Did he succeed?' asked Branthan.\n\nTyro swept his gaze over the numerous panels and data-slates embedded in the console.\n\n'I can't say,' he replied. 'But we'll know soon enough if he did.'\n\nThe silver case the magos had carried out from the shaft lay next to him, and Ta'Iab Vita-37 pulled it close to her, like a mother reunited with her child after a long separation. She slid her still-wet data-spike into a slot at its side, and her entire body language changed.\n\n'It's safe,' she said. 'They got into the vault, but they didn't try to open the Magna Mater itself. They didn't dare.'\n\nTarsa knelt beside Ta'Iab Vita-37, like a knight at the end of his journey before the object of his quest.\n\n'Can... can I see it?' he said. 'We never... never thought it was real. It was a myth to us.'\n\n'That is what we wanted you to think,' said Ta'Iab Vita-37, pulling the case away from him in an unconscious act of protection. 'A power that you could never possess needed to be reduced to allegory so you would never seek it.'\n\n'No, I..'\n\n'What is to stop us taking it now?' said Branthan.\n\n'It would do you no good,' said Ta'lab Vila-37. 'It will not open for you. Or me, for that matter. Only the High Matriarch can open it.'\n\n'And the Sons of Horus likely"}
{"text":"ught it was real. It was a myth to us.'\n\n'That is what we wanted you to think,' said Ta'Iab Vita-37, pulling the case away from him in an unconscious act of protection. 'A power that you could never possess needed to be reduced to allegory so you would never seek it.'\n\n'No, I..'\n\n'What is to stop us taking it now?' said Branthan.\n\n'It would do you no good,' said Ta'lab Vila-37. 'It will not open for you. Or me, for that matter. Only the High Matriarch can open it.'\n\n'And the Sons of Horus likely have her.' said Branthan.\n\n'All the more reason to get this away from Luna,' said Tarsa.\n\n'All the more reason to destroy it,' said Tyro.\n\nFurther discussion was halted as the trans-orbital lurched to the side, and Sharrowkyn felt a ripple of atmospheric change as the lumbering aircraft passed through the integrity field, swiftly followed by the awful sound of steel grinding on rock.\n\n'Something's wrong,' he said. 'We need to get to the bridge.'\n\nSharrowkyn set off at a run, following the stencilled markings on the wall that led to the bridge. A ship of war would never provide such markers, but this was a vessel designed simply to ferry cargo between a planet's surface and orbiting vessels. It wasn't designed for combat or to be held against a boarding action.\n\nAnother impact struck the craft, but Sharrowkyn easily compensated.\n\nThe approach to the bridge was a long, narrow passageway, a sole concession to possible defence. Sharrowkyn and Tyro took up positions on either side.\n\n'In all likelihood, the pilots will just be hardwired monotasks.' said Ta'lab Vita-37..\n\n'We can't take that chance,' said Sharrowkyn. 'For all we know there might be another magos in there, or, worse, a legionary.'\n\n'Or better, you mean,' said Tyro.\n\nSharrowkyn grinned. 'Or better.'\n\n'On two,' said Tyro.\n\n'One,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Two,' finished Tyro, and they broke from cover, moving fast, bolters locked on the entrance to the bridge. Branthan filled the corridor behind them, his storm bolters aimed over\n\nThe armoured door slid open, and Sharrowkyn's finger tensed on the trigger on the trigger.\n\nNothing came out, no storm of solid rounds or flurry of las-fire.\n\nThey reached the blast door and swept inside left and right.\n\nWarning lights flashed and proximity alarms blared angrily\n\nJagged bursts of binaric cant spat from a vox-horn dangling from the avionics panel.\n\n'Clear,' said Sharrowkyn, and Tyro echoed that confirmation.\n\n'Throne,' said Tarsa, entering the wide bridge space and seeing what lay within.\n\nAs Ta'lab Vita-37 had predicted, the trans-orbital was crewed by a complement of hardwired monotask servitors, hybrids of men and machine who never left their seats and only ever fulfilled one function: piloting the ship up and down, over and over in an endless loop of repetition.\n\nA ship this size had a bridge crew of six, and all of them were dead.\n\nThe canopy and instrument panels were crimson and wet with blood spray.\n\nEach pilot's skull had been caved in, the lid of bone peeled back ration can in a mess pack and the organ within pulped and pierced. The tops of their heads were sopping red craters, and every lurching shift of the trans-orbital's movement spilled tears of pinkish brain matter down their expressionless faces.\n\nGaruda perched on the back of the lead pilot's grav-seat, grooming itself. Its wings, beak and claws were wet with blood. Almost no trace of the silver beneath could be seen.\n\n'Throne,' said Tyro. 'What did you do?'\n\n'No time for that now,' said Sharrowkyn urgently.\n\n'What is it?' said Tyro.\n\n'Two things,' said Sharrowkyn. 'One, with the pilots dead, we're going to crash. Two...'\n\nHe pointed through the blood-spattered canopy and said, 'Look.'\n\nThe Cthonian Scion was turning, its black-and-gold prow angling wards the volcano, like a sword being drawn from its scabbard. A bloom of light, tiny at this distance, detached from its launch bay and streaked across the darkness of the Lunar sky.\n\n'Thunderhawk,' said Tyro. 'Sons of Horus.'\n\n'The magos got his warning off,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\nWayland felt the body of the wounded gunship surround him.\n\nIts pain was his pain, and it burned through his veins. It bled fire along the fibre-bundle cables that connected them, wracking his body with its many hurts. Part of him wished his body was more augmetic, so as to diminish the agony of the experience, but the greater part of him knew that not sharing the machine's suffering would dishonour its sacrifice.\n\nThe message from Sharrowkyn had been brief and to the point\n\nNeed immediate extraction. Sons of Horus inbound.\n\nHe'd watched the trans-orbital rise from the volcano's caldera, then almost immediately sink back down into the volcano. Something was wrong, and no one was responding over the vox. Wayland plugged straight back into the Storm Eagles cogitators.\n\n'I know you are hurting, and I know I ask too much, but I need you to fly. More than ever. Our brothers are in harm's way and they need us in the air.'\n\nHe felt the machine's desire, felt the last of its power push back into the steel of its bones.\n\n'Yes, yes! Flesh may fail, but iron endures. The machine endures.' he said, knowing the spirit would hear him, if not in words at least in sentiment. 'Where one exists, so too does the other. Where one endures, the other may renew. You are a predator of the iron skies, a hunter of the weak. Your wings are broken, your claws dulled, but you can yet hunt, you can yet kill your enemies.'\n\nHis words fanned the fire of the Storm Eagle's soul, a burning coal deep in its heart, but still he wondered whether it would be enough.\n\nThamatica had worked wonders on the gunship's frame to render it airworthy, but its spirit was all but broken, leaking into the ether with every passing second. Wayland knew machine-spirits, had bonded with them and earned their trust. In the ruins of Eskalor, he had nurtured the fading embers of a wrecked Land Raider, its spirit wounded nigh unto death, and driven it straight through the heart of the enemy lines to ultimate victory.\n\nThat spirit had endured, and it had spoken of Wayland as a friend to machines.\n\n'What say you, brother?' asked Wayland. 'One last hunt.'\n\nHe felt the Storm Eagle respond, pulsing flows of energy and machine vitality rippling to life around him. Ruptured connections surged with renewed power.\n\nThe avionics panel flickered, the gem-lights blinking in sequence. He eased power through the Storm Eagle's veins, careful not to push too hard, and smiled as the craft lifted from the furrow it had ploughed in the dust. Clouds billowed around it as Wayland teased the gunship back into the air, lifting the nose and pushing power to the engines.\n\n'That's it, brother. One final flight together.'\n\nWhen it came, the impact was ferocious.\n\nLocked in the death throes of its slain pilots, the trans-orbital fell fifteen hundred metres back down into the volcano, a slow-moving wrecking ball with a mass of over a thousand tons. Dragged down by the internal gravity of the caldera's habitable interior, it rolled with ponderous majesty and slammed against the inside face of the hollowed-out mountain.\n\nIts hull buckled, and thousands of litres of fuel-grade promethium gushed out in viscous sheets that fell like iridescent rainbows. Silver skinned freight containers spilled from its ruptured cargo bays in their hundreds, tumbling like a rain of coins from a dead man's hand.\n\nThe trans-orbital rolled onto its side, its drive unit still firing as it ploughed into the towering silos of ancient atomic waste. Irradiated slag from lethally unsafe power plants and dangerous fissile reactions mushroomed into the air and hung suspended between the competing forces of internal gravity and external weightlessness.\n\nBlazing wreckage peeled from the falling trans-orbital as it tore down through the silos to smash back onto the landing platform. The vessel struck hard, its keel splitting with the force of the impact. Its internal spaces folded inwards like crumpled foil as its enormous mass buckled structural stanchions and drove it into the ground The heat from its drive ignited the aerosolised fuel-air mix filling the volcano's interior and transformed its volume into a rolling inferno of atomic flame.\n\nA plume of white-hot fire raced up the throat of the volcano and burst from the caldera.\n\nAs though Herodotus Omega were reclaiming the active glories of its past.\n\n9\n\nThe Mountain Wakes\n\nUr-Drakes\n\nThey Will Survive\n\nSharrowkyn could see was fire.\n\nOrange flames filled the cracked lenses of his helm, and he could feel their heat through rents in his armour. His visor hazed red, crazed with distortion. The internal auspex was sending him a continuous stream of warning clicks, but with the right lens splintered, he couldn't read what it was telling him.\n\nSharrowkyn pushed himself upright, blinking back the pain from numerous crushed vertebrae and a piercing wound in his side. Blood loss was minimal - his enhanced physiology had seen to that his armour could do nothing to keep the pain at bay.\n\nHe pushed off, trying to find his bearings.\n\nThe vox screeched static. No one was answering.\n\nRed-hued smoke filled the wreckage, and he saw a slumped form crushed against a cogitator panel. Smoke and heat made it impossible to tell who it was. Structural elements strong enough to survive breaking atmosphere and re-entry were bent like stalks of corn by the force of the crash. He lurched over to the body, pushing through ropes of hanging cables and sheets of metal flapping like cloth.\n\nCadmus Tyro. It was Cadmus Tyro.\n\nSharrowkyn tried to see exactly how the captain was pinned. To move something wrongly could cause a catastrophic movement of the steelwork and kill Tyro. He was no Techmarine. and found it impossible to tell how the interconnected elements of structure were supported.\n\nSharrowkyn knew he didn't have time to be careful.\n\nHe took his best guess and pushed.\n\nNothing.\n\n'Out of the way, Sharrowkyn,' said Ulrach Branthan, ste"}
{"text":" and sheets of metal flapping like cloth.\n\nCadmus Tyro. It was Cadmus Tyro.\n\nSharrowkyn tried to see exactly how the captain was pinned. To move something wrongly could cause a catastrophic movement of the steelwork and kill Tyro. He was no Techmarine. and found it impossible to tell how the interconnected elements of structure were supported.\n\nSharrowkyn knew he didn't have time to be careful.\n\nHe took his best guess and pushed.\n\nNothing.\n\n'Out of the way, Sharrowkyn,' said Ulrach Branthan, stepping through the smoke.\n\nBranthan bent his mechanised bulk to the nearest stanchion and braced his shoulder against the metal. Grunting with effort, Branthan pushed, spliced fibre-bundle muscles of a Dreadnought and pure will against the crushing weight pinning Tyro.\n\nThe column of steel groaned as it bent upwards.\n\nOnly fractionally, but it was enough.\n\nSharrowkyn dragged Tyro clear, and as soon as the pressure on the captain s chest was eased. Tyro drew in a huge, sucking breath. He got his feet under him and stood, taking Sharrowkyn's outstretched hand.\n\n'Is everyone accounted for?' he asked, his voice little more than a wheeze.\n\n'No,' said Sharrowkyn. 'I haven't seen anyone else.'\n\nThe wreckage around them groaned, heavy beams of structural steel twisting like a wet doth being wrung out. A billowing wall of flame erupted from somewhere below. A booming string of explosions shook the ruins of the trans-orbital.\n\n'We have to get out of here, or we'll be buried alive,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\nA cascade of debris fell all around them as if in confirmation, steel, work, cables and burning insulation material.\n\n'The Magna Mater?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Who knows? If someone didn't get it out, then it's gone.'\n\nBranthan led the way, with Sharrowkyn and Tyro following in his wake. They weaved a zigzagging path through the wreckage. Passages that ought to have led to evacuation points were choked with debris or fire, forcing them to double back or push through torn bulkheads in search of a way out.\n\nThe insistent clicking in Sharrowkyn's ear kept getting louder, but he couldn't disable it.\n\nDeafening roars of flame and splitting metal filled the crashed trans-orbital, but Sharrowkyn's senses picked out something rhythmic, something deliberate that didn't fit the chaotic narrative of the ship's death screams.\n\n'Wait,' he said, halting their progress along a flame-filled companionway.\n\n'Whatever it is, Sharrowkyn, we don't have time to stop,' said Branthan.\n\nSharrowkyn set off along a buckled transit, the ceiling dripping with globules of ignited fuel like sizzling pearls.\n\n'Come on!' yelled Sharrowkyn as the walls bulged inwards with pressure from above.\n\nThe Iron Hands followed him immediately, trusting his survival instincts to find a way out. Now that he knew what he was listening for, Sharrowkyn could easily pick out the hammering sound.\n\nHe pushed into a wide gallery that should have been deep in the dorsal section of die ship, but which was now almost open to the outside. Whole decks had been tom away, and Ignatius Numen was busy punching his way through a buckled portion of what was now effectively the outer hull.\n\nHis helmet had been smashed and lay in splintered pieces at his feet, and even had he not been rendered all but deaf, the roar of names would have covered their approach. Sharrowkyn approached from the side, letting Numen know he was there with plenty of distance. The veteran looked up, startled. He nodded, checking who was with Sharrowkyn.\n\n'Tarsa? The gene-witch?' he asked.\n\n'Unknown,' said Branthan, pushing through the wreckage to add his own fists to Numen's work. Between them, they soon tore the metal hide of the trans-orbital apart, and a wave of furnace heat surged inside. Flames from the wrecked vessel's fuel cells reached hundreds of metres into the air, and billowing clouds of tar-black smoke gathered and seethed like an endless storm.\n\n'Go!' said Branthan, and Numen pushed his way through. Sharrowkyn followed him, then Tyro, and finally Branthan.\n\nVisibility was near zero thanks to the heat and smoke, and even Sharrowkyn struggled to get his bearings. He crouched as low to the ground as he could, scanning for points of reference. Lakes of burning fuel pooled in craters, and a waterfall of flaming promethium spilled into the chasm at the chamber's heart.\n\nThe heat in the chamber was becoming intolerable, a bone-deep, searing pain against which his armour was offering no protection. He could feel his normally ashen skin reacting to the temperature. Oily sweat oozed from his pores, to protect him as much as cool him.\n\nSharrowkyn saw the crates and packing materials they had sheltered behind. Miraculously, they remained unscathed, and behind them, he saw the way back through the mountain to where the Storm Eagle had gone down. Wayland was savvy enough to know that would need to serve as their extraction point, having surely seen the trans-orbital crash.\n\n'There,' he said, springing to his feet. 'That's our way out.'\n\n'What about the Magna Mater?' said Numen. 'Do we have it?'\n\n'Perhaps Ta'lab Vita-37 has it, perhaps not. But if it's still on the ship, it won't last much longer,' said Tyro. 'We may not have it, but at least the traitors won't either. I call that a win for us.'\n\n'But the others...?' Numen said. \"We can't leave our brother behind.'\n\n'If we go back in there looking for Tarsa, then we all die,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'No, there must be a way,' protested Numen.\n\n'Ignatius,' said Tyro, firmly but not unkindly. 'He's gone.'\n\nEver the pragmatist, Numen nodded, and Sharrowkyn led them through the destruction.\n\nExplosions detonated all around them, and rubble fell from above as weakened structures and rock crashed down. Each breath caught in Sharrowkyn's chest, searing and agonising to take. He felt wet movement in his throat, and knew his lungs and oesophagus were adapting to better filter each inhalation.\n\nBut it didn't seem to be helping. He felt his skin burning beneath his armour, and a deadly, caustic lethargy settled within his marrow. He stumbled, but Tyro caught him. Together they pushed onwards. Sharrowkyn's vision was swimming, and grey, vein-shot clouds seeped into his eyes. He saw movement ahead, a flash of silver, but couldn't be sure it wasn't some trick of the heat or whatever was affecting his vision.\n\nTyro dropped to one knee, his chest heaving with effort. Even Branthan struggled in the smoke and heat, the Heart of Iron pulsing in his chest as though in distress.\n\n'What's happening?' said Sharrowkyn, the words slurred and hard to form. 'Fire alone should not affect us this way.'\n\n'It's not just the heat,' said Tyro, hauling him to his feet.\n\nThey pressed on, and again, Sharrowkyn saw the gleam of silver ahead. A mummified figure, bandage-wrapped and with her cloak on fire. The gene-witch tore the cloak from her shoulders and beckoned them onwards.\n\nLimping, battered and weary beyond endurance, the four Space Marines slumped into the cover of the materiel crates. The intolerable heat dropped fractionally, and smoke peeled from the crates. This cover wouldn't last for long.\n\n'Do you have it?' asked Ta'lab Vita-37. They all knew what she meant.\n\nSharrowkyn shook his head. 'No.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37's head sank to her chest.\n\n'I failed you, my matriarch,' she said, talking to someone likely already dead.\n\n'Maybe it is better that it burns,' said Sharrowkyn. 'You said yourself the Magna Mater was too dangerous to fall into the wrong hands.'\n\n'Dangerous or not,' she said, 'it was the legacy of the Selenar, and I swore an oath to keep it safe.'\n\n'Better it burns than falls into the hands of traitors,' said Tyro.\n\n'Better it burns than any of you claim it,' spat Ta'lab Vita-37. 'Loyalist? Traitor...? Fo was right, you are all misbegotten monsters.'\n\n'Throne!' said Ulrach Branthan, pointing back the way they had come.\n\nSharrowkyn turned, and now understood the source of the insistent, clicking warnings in his ear.\n\nThe heat he was feeling wasn't simply from the flames.\n\nAll but one of the giant silos of ancient radioactive waste were catastrophically ruptured. Cascades of irradiated dust, disintegrated ferrocrete and spent fuel rods were spilling into the chamber and filling the air with enormous quantities of lethally toxic particles and fumes.\n\nBut it wasn't the ruptured silos to which Branthan was pointing.\n\nA lone figure emerged from the flames of the trans-orbital's wreckage.\n\nHe waded through the worst of the radioactive waste, the once jade green of his armour blackened, the metal and ceramite bubbling as it melted.\n\nHe swayed with every faltering step, dragging the silver case of the Magna Mater.\n\nHis helmet was gone, and even through the haze of fire, his agony was unmistakable.\n\n'Tarsa!' cried Numen.\n\nThe pain was unimaginable. It seared down through his armour, past his flesh and into his very spirit. He could see nothing but flames, but fire held no fear for Atesh Tarsa.\n\nHe was Nocturne born. A Promethean son, raised in the shadow of Mount Deathfire and forged on its basalt slopes. Every step sent shooting spikes of pain up through his pelvis and into his spine. Tarsa could barely remember why he was here, his mind filled with broken glass and the flesh burning off his bones.\n\nHis skin crisped and roasted in the heat, flaking from the thinnest portions of his skull.\n\nOne step, then another. Keep going. Head down into the flames. Fire roared across the red earth, scorching the surface of the mountain. He looked up, seeing the slopes of Mount Heath belching smoke and flame. Through all the agony wracking his body, Tarsa smiled. He had long given up any hope of seeing Nocturne again, yet here it was, welcoming him home as a true son of Vulkan.\n\nA burning sun glared down, and Tarsa gasped as the silhouette of an eagle sweep across it. Its wings were golden in the firelight.\n\nTarsa had never seen anything quite as beautiful.\n\nA silver case, heavy beyond what its appearance would suggest, dragged behin"}
{"text":"oked up, seeing the slopes of Mount Heath belching smoke and flame. Through all the agony wracking his body, Tarsa smiled. He had long given up any hope of seeing Nocturne again, yet here it was, welcoming him home as a true son of Vulkan.\n\nA burning sun glared down, and Tarsa gasped as the silhouette of an eagle sweep across it. Its wings were golden in the firelight.\n\nTarsa had never seen anything quite as beautiful.\n\nA silver case, heavy beyond what its appearance would suggest, dragged behind him, but he no longer knew what it was All he knew was that it had been entrusted to him, and that he must bear it to safety. But it was too heavy a burden.\n\nToo much for any warrior to bear. Who could ask such a thing of him?\n\nBut the duty of every Salamander was to bear the burdens others could not.\n\nTo stand where others fell, to march into the fire when others turned their backs.\n\nAll sense of the world around him was consumed in fire and smoke.\n\nThe darkness of his skin peeled back, flesh flying in the hellstorm surrounding him like cinders stamped from a hearth.\n\nYet still he marched. Nothing would stop him. Nothing could.\n\nHe staggered, a vortex of superheated air threatening to drive him to his knees.\n\nHe wouldn't let it.\n\nAnother step through the fire that was killing him with every poisoned breath.\n\nOnwards into the flames and searing atomic haze he walked.\n\nThe eagle flew with him every step of the way as the sky burned and the ground ran molten. His every step across the mountain's haunches was a homecoming, and he welcomed it, wishing he could have gazed upon the face of his primarch one last time.\n\nHis foot slipped, and Tarsa dropped to one knee.\n\nHe tried to rise, but the strength had fled his body.\n\nHow easy it would be to simply lie down and die.\n\nBut that was not the way of the Salamanders. They lived for the fire, relished the challenge of facing it every day. To be burned was to know you were alive.\n\nHe heard the eagles cry, and with a roar of defiance, Tarsa rose to his feet, body all but flayed alive by the atomic fury raging around him. He took another step.\n\nTwo more. He slipped again, and this time there would be no getting up.\n\nBut he did not fall.\n\nA giant in burning armour was there to catch him.\n\n'I've got you, brother,' he said.\n\nTarsa looked up into a face as midnight black as his own, the face of a Salamander.\n\nBut no ordinary Salamander. This was the face of a demigod. Haloed by fire and the black slopes of the mountain that forged him, with a smiting hammer in one hand, a blade in the other.\n\n'My lord...' said Tarsa. 'You... live'.\n\n'Aye, Tarsa, I live,' said Primarch Vulkan.\n\n'I saw you,' gasped Tarsa, desperate to pass on these last words. 'On Terra... dead, but I held true. I knew. Vulkan lives! I knew you would... never... leave your sons.'\n\n'I leave no one behind,' said Vulkan.\n\nTarsa nodded and tried to turn, to pass his burden on, but he had no more strength to give.\n\nVulkan reached over him and hefted the silver case as though it weighed nothing at all.\n\nHe was a primarch, after all, one of the Emperor's favoured sons.\n\n'I... tried... my lord,' said Tarsa, the last embers of his soul dimming. 'I tried to prove worthy of you.'\n\nVulkan nodded and said, 'You asked me once if I trusted you. Do you remember?'\n\nTarsa could not, but he nodded. Anything for his gene-sire\n\n'I said, \"You come from a land of fire. You lived in the light of burning mountains. Aye. you I trust.\" Do you remember that?'\n\nA memory surfaced, a brutish giant knee-deep in corpses.\n\nBut it meant nothing to him now.\n\nHe heard the roar of a Firedrake somewhere nearby. A big one by the sound of it.\n\n'I trust you, Atesh Tarsa,' said Vulkan.\n\nThe crimson of Tarsa's eyes dulled like the last light of a cooling forge.\n\nHe heard the roaring once more, a swelling chorus of Nocturne's beasts.\n\nAnd the ur-drakes dwelling in Nocturnes molten heart rose up to bring him home.\n\nWayland kept the power low, flying a figure-of-eight pattern around the southern flanks of Herodotus Omega. The gunship shook with the violence of the volcanos eruption. The initial firespout had been enormous, a concentrated blast of superheated gas and flame.\n\nHe'd pulled the craft away from its slopes, instinctively fearing a devastating pyroclastic rain of debris and rock, but the concentration of the flame and lack of debris told him this was no normal volcanic event.\n\nThis fire had all the hallmarks of a cataclysmic crash on a landing platform.\n\nHe d seen the trans-orbital going down, but had hoped whoever was at the helm had skill enough to bring it down safely. The eruption of fire from the caldera had put that hope to the sword and set a cold hand around his heart.\n\nWayland concentrated on keeping the gunship aloft, while Thamatica scanned the vox-channels in search of transmissions from their brothers.\n\n'Anything?' he asked.\n\nThamatica shook his head. They could both imagine the devastation that must be filling the volcano. Legion warriors could withstand much, but this...?\n\n'They will survive,' said Wayland, as though the power of his words could force the universe to bend to his need. 'They will survive.'\n\n'Aye, Sabik,' said Thamatica. 'They will.'\n\n10\n\nTime to Die\n\nOn the Run\n\nFreaks and Monsters\n\nPride and awe filled Cadmus Tyro as he watched Ignatius Numen carry Atesh Tarsa and the Magna Mater from the atomic firestorm engulfing the trans-orbital. They'd watched the Salamanders warrior fall, and to see their prize within sight but beyond reach was a knife in the heart. That Tarsa had made it as far as he had was nothing short of a miracle, but Tyro saw that not even Garuda's cawing encouragement would help him reach them.\n\nIgnatius Numen had immediately stepped towards the doomed warrior, throwing off Tyro's grip with an angry growl that was some where between grief and anger.\n\n'I have to get him. He is our brother.'\n\n'You'll die,' said Tyro.\n\nNumen shrugged. 'Did any of us think we would live this long anyway?'\n\nTyro had no answer, and was humbled to witness one of the most selfless acts he had ever seen. He saw Tarsa fall, only to be caught by the Iron Hand. He saw Numen hold Tarsa as he died, honoring his sacrifice with words none of them would know.\n\nAnd now Ignatius Numen completed the Salamander's journey\n\nThe veteran staggered back out of the growing firestorm, his head seared to the bone by the radioactive fire. He fell to his knees along-side Tyro and Sharrowkyn, finally allowing Tarsa's body to slip from his shoulder and allowing Ta'lab Vita-37 to take the Magna Mater from him. They lowered the veteran to the ground, and Tyro winced to see his wounds. Numen's chest was a ruin of molten metal and blackened flesh, bone and organs gleaming wetly from within.\n\nGaruda swooped down from the storm, its wings trailing smoke and dust.\n\nIts head was bowed. It too knew this was the end.\n\n'Is it safe?' asked Numen.\n\n'Don t speak,' said Tyro. 'Save your strength for the march out of here.'\n\n'Is it safe?' Numen asked again, looking past Tyro to Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\nShe looked up from a readout on the front of the silver case and nodded. 'It's safe.'\n\n'Good,' said Numen. 'I think I'll die now.'\n\nTyro took Numen's arm in the warrior's grip. He wanted to say something meaningful to mark this warrior's heroic sacrifice, to voice his boundless pride and admiration for the veteran's service.\n\nBut Ignatius Numen was dead.\n\n'We have to go, Captain Tyro,' said Ta'lab Vita-37. 'The radiation levels are rising.'\n\nTyro ignored her, holding Numen's fist against the eagle of his plastron.\n\n'I never knew a warrior as strong and fearless as you,' he said. 'Your trust was not given lightly, but when it was, it was unbreakable. You were a true Iron Ha-'\n\n'Come on,' snapped Ta'lab Vita-37. 'We have not time for dreary sentimentality.'\n\nAnger filled Tyro, and he turned that fury on Ta'lab Vita-37. He surged upright, and his gauntlet closed around the gene-witch's throat. He pulled her around and forced her to her knees beside the burned bodies of Tarsa and Numen. With a fractional increase in pressure, he could crush her neck, and for the briefest instant he wanted to.\n\n'These men were heroes,' he roared. 'Look at them.'\n\nTyro felt a gentle touch on his arm, and turned to see Sharrowkyn. The Raven Guard shook his head. 'Ease back, captain,' he said Tyro's rage was abruptly replaced with a hollow emptiness in his gut he knew all too well. The pain of losing men under his command that never, ever got easier.\n\nTyro released Ta'lab Vita-37 and said, 'These warriors died for what is in that container. They did their duty, and you will honour their memory or I will kill you right now.'\n\nTa'lab Vita-37 nodded, and rose to her feet, rubbing the bruises blossoming on her neck.\n\n'Make no mistake, Cadmus Tyro, I despise your kind and the purpose for which you were created,' she said, 'but I swear I will honour their names. Now we have to go, and we have to go now.'\n\n'She's right,' said Ulrach Branthan, looking up into the fire and smoke boiling out through the volcano's summit. A ululating howl echoed from the interior of the caldera, and a blazing jet wash pummelled the ground with a concussive blast of superheated air.\n\nA Thunderhawk gunship plunged through the smoke, executing a textbook assault drop.\n\nThe fire had burned its colours down to the bare metal, but the carved wolfs-head panel on the sloped glacis was unmistakable.\n\n'The Sons of Horus,' cried Ta'lab Vita-37. 'They're here.'\n\nThe assault doors slammed back on its fuselage, and six hulking figures dropped from the gunships interior. Armoured entirely in black, and too titanically bulky to be legionaries in Mark IV plate, they landed with the booming slam of metal on metal.\n\nThere was only one class of warrior that would dare assault into the heart of an expanding atomic hellstorm.\n\nTerminators.\n\n'Run!' yelled Tyro.\n\nThey ran.\n\nThere could be no standing against six warriors in Terminator armour.\n\nEach was a walkin"}
{"text":".'\n\nThe assault doors slammed back on its fuselage, and six hulking figures dropped from the gunships interior. Armoured entirely in black, and too titanically bulky to be legionaries in Mark IV plate, they landed with the booming slam of metal on metal.\n\nThere was only one class of warrior that would dare assault into the heart of an expanding atomic hellstorm.\n\nTerminators.\n\n'Run!' yelled Tyro.\n\nThey ran.\n\nThere could be no standing against six warriors in Terminator armour.\n\nEach was a walking tank, impregnable to anything except the heaviest weapons and all but unkillable. Three grievously wounded legionaries and a half-mad gene-witch would have no chance at all.\n\nPortions of Tyro's spine had been crushed by the debris in the trans-orbital, and both his lungs had been ruptured. His multi-lung was damaged too, and it was only a matter of time until it collapsed. A looseness in his chest told him the bone shield protecting his internal organs had been shattered. Every breath and footfall sent bolts of fire shooting through his body, and he felt blood pooling within the cavities of his armour.\n\nThe darkness of the tunnels carved through the volcano was stark after the searing brightness of the caldera. Grey-walled passages split in a leading back through the abandoned laboratories and deserted research temples.\n\n'Come on,' said Ta'lab Vita-37, taking the leftmost tunnel. 'Back the way we came.'\n\nSharrowkyn turned as the smoke twitched behind them. Hideous shadows twisted over the bare rock floor, and Sharrowkyn detected an awful, sour-milk taste he had come to recognise as warpcraft.\n\n'Down!' he cried as a hosing blast of storm bolter fire chewed up the rockcrete. The hard bangs of mass-reactives filled the passageway. A devastating impact spun Tyro from his feet, and the heat and fragments of the detonation shredded his cheek and pulped his left eye.\n\nBranthan lifted the gene-witch and dragged her behind him. A pair of mass-reactives punched into his back. Chunks of flesh and bone-fragments exploded from Branthan's ribs like shrapnel and sliced Ta'lab Vita-37's arms and legs.\n\nShe screamed in pain, and the case containing the Magna Mater fell to the ground.\n\nSharrowkyn dived to retrieve it as Branthan sank to his knees, two fist-sized craters gouged in his back, exit wounds twice that.\n\n'Ulrach!' cried Tyro, his vision filled with blood as he rolled into the cover of the passageway. Branthan didn't answer, just shook his head and grunted as he pushed himself upright. Again, he dragged the gene-witch behind him, copious volumes of blood pouring from his wounds, too severe for even transhuman physiology to repair. The Heart of Iron emitted a pulsing, emerald glow, pushed to the limits of its Dark Age power in keeping Branthan alive.\n\n'Lead us,' he said to Sharrowkyn between gritted teeth.\n\nThe Raven Guard nodded and headed deeper into the mountain\n\nThere was no more gunfire, only the sounds of inhuman laughter following in their wake.\n\nTyro knew their enemies were toying with them. Terminators were awesomely powerful, and though they were not fast, they were utterly relentless. They knew there was no way their quarry could escape them. Running them down was just a matter of when, not if.\n\n'You're hurt,' said Branthan, noting Tyro's bloodied face.\n\n'So are you,' replied Tyro. 'More so.'\n\n* * *\n\nSharrowkyn led them into the vast chamber of lined-up gene-pods. The lifter chains rattled from their mounts on the cavern roof and the rumble of ancient, buried machinery gave the air a greasy electrical tang. The explosion in the caldera had shaken hundreds of pods from their mounts to shatter on the cavern floor.\n\nPools of milky, viscous fluids drained through iron grates, and the crackling energies of long-dormant machinery coming to life filled the chamber with traceries of light.\n\n'What's happening here?' said Tyro, struggling to draw breath. Ta'lab Vita-37 rapped her staff on the ground, and red lights flickered behind her smooth-faced helm. She too was nearing the end of her endurance. Her left arm hung limp at her side, and her right leg was drenched in red from the hip down.\n\nA portion of the floor in the centre of the cavern groaned as shuttered portions began to roll back. Warning lights blinked as a wide platform of dark metal rose from below. Ten gloss-black gene-pods were spaced in a circle around a central cogitator panel. Unlike the others, these offered no window onto what lay within, their surfaces frosted and opaque.\n\nDragging her bloodied leg behind her, Ta'lab Vita-37 made her way towards the centre of the raised platform and the panel.\n\n'What are these?' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'I told you that this place produced freaks and monsters, yes?' said Ta'lab Vita-37, extruding a forked data cable from the back of her wrist. One connected to the panel, the other slotted home into her staff. Lights flickered up and down its length.\n\n'You did,' replied Sharrowkyn. 'You also told us you destroyed them all.'\n\n'I lied,' said Ta'lab Vita-37.\n\nTrastevere pushed deeper into the mountain, his storm bolter extended before him. He and his squad of Justaerin could take a city without effort, could storm a fortress and render it rubble in a day. To bring this many warriors to hunt down a few upstart legionaries who had somehow found their way to Luna's surface was overkill of such preposterous scale that he had almost questioned the First Captain's order.\n\nEzekyle Abaddon's eyes told him any such question would be the last mistake he ever made. Whatever was at stake here was clearly enough to divert the elite troops of the Sons of Horus.\n\nTheir quarry was wounded and at bay. Spilled blood traced a path directly towards them, and - cumbersome as Terminator armour rendered its wearer - there could be no escaping their pursuit. The mountain tremored with the beat of buried machinery, as though it were slowly coming to life after centuries of dormancy. Trastevere was reminded of his youth in the murder caves of Cthonia. His life then was one of darkness and hearing the ever-present drum beat of mining machinery. Death lurked around every outcropping, and life was held cheaper than a cupped hand of water. But he was no longer the callow youth who clutched punch-daggers of flinted razor shards and fought with teeth and fury to survive. Now he was the stalking death.\n\n'Life signs ahead,' said Vornak, looking up from his auspex.\n\n'Combat spread,' ordered Trastevere, rapping his storm bolter against his chest.\n\n'Seriously?' said Urgave. 'There's only four of them, and they're badly hurt.'\n\n'They're legionaries,' cautioned Trastevere.\n\n'They're rabble,' said Urgave. 'I saw the armour tags. They're scraps from Isstvan V.'\n\nAnger touched Trastevere. 'Then the fact they've survived this long should be a warning not to underestimate them.'\n\nHe heard his own words and suddenly believed them.\n\nPerhaps the First Captain had been right to send in such numbers. Any loyalists that had fought their way from the massacre on the black sands were clearly warriors whose prowess demanded respect.\n\n'Hold,' said Vornak.\n\n\"What is it?'\n\n'The life readings.'\n\n\"What about them?' demanded Trastevere.\n\n'I'm... not sure,' said Vornak. 'For a second it looked like...'\n\n'Like what?'\n\n'Like there were new signals,' finished Vornak.\n\n'New? There's only four of them,' hissed Urgave. 'We're wasting time. Let's get in there and be done with this. You think Lupercal will wait for us before the assault on Terra begins? Damned if I won't be in the spear tip to the surface of the Throneworld.'\n\nTrastevere pulled the feed from Vornak's auspex onto his visor.\n\nThe imagery was confusing, a blurring of swelling signals of dis-proportionate potency.\n\nHe could make no sense of it, but his orders were clear.\n\nKill the intruders and secure the prize beneath Herodotus Omega.\n\n'We are within a sanctum of the Selenar,' he said. 'It is only to be expected that we will encounter anomalous life signs.'\n\nThe matter decided, Trastevere led them onwards, following the traces of their prey: blood, sweat and fear-stink. The darkness beneath the mountain was lit with flickering lumens. Had their prey smashed them, hoping it would slow their pursuers?\n\nThe passage opened into an echoing chamber that stank of spilled amniotic fluids and spoiled meat. Upright pods stood in ordered ranks, like sus-an tanks in an apothecarion. Ghostly forms drifted within, strangely shaped and dead.\n\nThe ceiling of the chamber was hundreds of metres high, and heavy lifter-rigs on deep rails spanned the space from wall to wall. Hooked chains hung from above, bearing heavy cargo containers that swayed overhead\n\nHis auto-sense detected a rancid smell familiar to every warrior.\n\nRotten meat, and organs spoiled with decomposition.\n\nTrastevere scanned left and right, his senses alert for movement.\n\nInstincts honed over centuries of war told him something was amiss, but he could not make out any distinct signals from their prey.\n\nA low moaning drifted through the chamber. Settling metal or something hostile?\n\n'What was that?' said Vornak.\n\n'Silence,' snapped Trastevere.\n\nThey reached the centre of the chamber, where a platform bore ten of the same sus-an tanks standing in ranked-up formation. A cloaked figure lay slumped in a spreading pool of blood, her body resting against a raised cogitator panel. A slow dance of fading light slithered across the blood-spattered face of a gleaming silver helmet.\n\nA gene-witch.\n\nThe figure looked up as the Justaerin approached.\n\n'You're too late,' said the gene-witch. 'They're already gone.'\n\n\"You're lying,' said Trastevere. 'I can smell them.'\n\nShe tried to speak, but her chest hacked a lungful of bilious fluid into her helmet. She reached up and removed it, dropping it to the platform with a heavy clang of metal.\n\nHer revealed face was narrow, angular and androgynous, with skin as pale as the moon itself, her skull shaven and scarred. Her eyes were a shockingly vivid indigo, bu"}
{"text":" looked up as the Justaerin approached.\n\n'You're too late,' said the gene-witch. 'They're already gone.'\n\n\"You're lying,' said Trastevere. 'I can smell them.'\n\nShe tried to speak, but her chest hacked a lungful of bilious fluid into her helmet. She reached up and removed it, dropping it to the platform with a heavy clang of metal.\n\nHer revealed face was narrow, angular and androgynous, with skin as pale as the moon itself, her skull shaven and scarred. Her eyes were a shockingly vivid indigo, but Trastevere could see the life fading from them with every slowing heartbeat.\n\n'You have only moments left to you,' said Trastevere.\n\n'I have lived long enough,' she said. 'Long enough to see my sons born and grow.'\n\nTrastevere aimed his weapon at her chest and said, 'What sons? What is in those pods?'\n\n'Nothing,' said the gene-witch with her last breath. 'At least not any more.'\n\nA screaming howl burst from the left, and Trastevere turned in time to see his rearguard barrelled from his feet by something as hulking as he was. Wet and stinking, its flesh was bloated and ghoul-pallid from long immersion in unknown fluids. It trailed drooling cables from unfinished plug ports in its spine.\n\nIt howled in fury, the nightmarish creation of a mad anatomist, a freak of nature that had somehow not spontaneously aborted itself. Even the stuttering light of the chamber and the speed with which it moved couldn't conceal its hideous form.\n\nSwollen, twisted musculature and plastic limbs now fused with vestigial organs and bone-horns growing beyond its flesh. Distended nubs of bone and flopping sheets of unused skin. Gristle and meat formed from aberrant genomes never intended for human flesh-smithing.\n\nAnd teeth, so many teeth.\n\nIt lifted fists like forge hammers and slammed them down in a two-handed blow that crushed the warrior's helmet and skull to shards.\n\nMass-reactives punched through its unnatural body, blasting wet chunks of deathly meat from its back and side. Shredded, the thing dropped to its knees, roaring in mindless fury. Trastevere put a bolt through its skull and it fell with a grunt of pain. Still it struggled to rise, and he fired another two shots to make sure.\n\n'Kill it with fire,' he said, and Urgave turned the black-copper nozzles of his heavy flame-unit upon it.\n\nA jet of sun-bright promethium blazed over the thing's body.\n\nThe firelight glittered on the predatory eyes of more of the monsters.\n\nThey burst from concealment in the tanks around the Justaerin, a pack of ravening beasts with horrifically mutated bodies. All gristle and exposed ribs, the meat of their bodies was punctured with blistered bone-horns and patched with coarse hair like wire. Their multiple eyes were lit with the madness and animal fury of eternal pain. Storm bolters roared and scores of mass-reactives detonated within their attackers' bodies.\n\nThe stink of boiled blood and voided intestines filled Trastevere's senses.\n\n'What are they?' said Vornak.\n\nAbominations. That was the word that sprang to mind, but Trastevere saw something hideously familiar in their gene-bulked scale and the hints of a hardened carapace beneath the slabs of overgrown muscle and bone, as though one of his kind had been unnaturally packed with growth-enhancers then recklessly stirred in the primordial soup with a random assortment of genetic material.\n\nTypical Selenar.\n\n'They are monsters,' he said, blazing at targets. 'Selenar by-blows.' Mass-reactives would kill most things thrice over with a single impact, but it took entire magazines of shells to kill these.\n\nAnother of the Justaerin was dragged down, his armour torn apart like paper by the immense strength of the Selenar's monsters. Vornak howled in anger as a creature with six brutally strong arms ripped his storm bolter and then his arm from him. He took a quarter-step back and pistoned his remaining fist through the creature's face.\n\nIt didn't stop, for it had other faces - one half-submerged in a fold of flesh that was frilled like a lizard's, one with a fang-toothed orifice that served as its mouth.\n\nAnother creature had what looked like steel cabling for sinews and the multifaceted eyes of an arachnid. And yet another was strangely and ethereally beautiful that it reminded Trastevere of the time he had seen the Phoenician fighting on the field of Isstvan. Vornak fell beneath the pounding fists of the bestial mob. They tore his throat out, and as one lifted its head with a mouthful of bloody meat in its jaws, Trastevere saw an echo that was so dreadfully familiar to him that he actually paused in shock.\n\nAlone among their attackers, it had a face that was entirely human or, more accurately, entirely transhuman. It had the same wide gene-bulked cheekbones and high forehead common to most legionaries, but this thing echoed the sardonic, hawkish features of Hours Lupercal himself.\n\nTrastevere's anger threatened to overwhelm him, but he was Justaerin and did not succumb to emotion. He detached from the primal urge to strike out in blind fury. He compartmentalised his rage, ready to unleash it upon the loyalist legionaries.\n\nFive of his men were down, the others bloodied but still fighting with rigid discipline.\n\nThat was the difference here. That would decide this fight.\n\nThe monsters had no honed skill, and no discipline.\n\nThey did not fight as a unified whole, but as individual monsters.\n\nThe shock of their assault had been brutal, but only seconds had passed since its beginning.\n\n'Close ranks,' ordered Trastevere.\n\nAnd now the discipline and training of the Justaerin took its toll on their attackers.\n\nThe last of the gunfire died away, and Sharrowkyn knew Ta'lab Vita-37's monsters were all dead. She had promised her ur-legionaries would buy them some time, but Sharrowkyn had seen the Justaerin in action and knew it wouldn't be much.\n\nThey'd survived longer than he had expected, but it still wouldn't be enough.\n\nHe, Tyro and Branthan were badly wounded, their bodies all but broken and losing lethal volumes of blood inside their war-plate. They were leaving sticky tracks even a blind man could follow. Garuda flew alongside them, its flight erratic thanks to its buckled wings and crash dented body\n\nBranthan staggered with every step, one hand pressed to the wall to support him as he moved. The Heart of Iron was keeping him alive through some ancient miracle of technology he didn't understand, but surely even it could not support his existence much longer.\n\nTyro ran hunched over, the grinding pressure of his broken back doubling him up as his spine tore itself to splinters within its muscled sheath. If he reached beyond the mountain it would be a tale worthy of Medusa's finest, a legend to inspire future generations of the Iron Hands, were there going to be any.\n\nHis own wounds were minor by comparison, though the pain racing around his body did not match that objective assessment. The crushed vertebrae in his back screamed agony with every running footfall, and the wound in his side kept tearing open. A sensation of emptiness in his chest told him his primary heart had been ruptured and the secondary organ was taking the strain. A legionary's reserve heart was only intended to sustain a wounded warrior for short bursts of time until he could reach the Apothecaries.\n\nIt hadn't been designed for extended stresses like this.\n\nHe wondered how much longer it could last.\n\n'Did you hear that?' gasped Tyro, falling to his knees with a grunt of pain. 'They'll be coming now.'\n\n'Then get up, damn you.' said Branthan, hauling Tyro to his feet. 'You are an Iron Hand. We don't kneel in the presence of the enemy.'\n\nTyro bit back a cry of pain and drew a sucking breath.\n\n'Apologies, captain,' he grunted, his fists bunched against 'Won't happen again.'\n\n'The entrance to the ductway isn't far,' Sharrowkyn told him. Tyro nodded, but said nothing, his every scrap of will focused on putting one foot in front of the other.\n\nA booming voice echoed through the undergrourrd passageway full of indignant anger and a hunger for vengeance.\n\n'You cannot run forever,' it said. 'We will catch you, and your deaths will not be as quick as your gene-witch's monsters'. I, Trastevere of the Justaerin, captain of the Eye's Watch, promise you this.'\n\nThey pushed onwards, every metre gained a victory, every step that brought them closer to the outside a gift. They could hear the crashing footsteps of the Justaerin behind them, ponderous and inevitable as a coming storm.\n\nTrastevere's taunts followed them, each word promising bloody retribution and pain.\n\nSharrowkyn believed every word of it.\n\nHis spirits soared as he saw the single trapezoidal archway that led to the storage chamber. Irradiated fumes swirled just below the ceiling, the venting system no longer functional nor drawing any of the toxins from within.\n\n'We're here,' said Sharrowkyn, threading the stacks of piled-high construction materiel and broken machinery towards the entrance of the venting network. 'Come on.'\n\nHe paused at the entrance to the ductway when he saw that Tyro and Branthan were not following him. One look at how the two captains had positioned themselves told Sharrowkyn what they were planning. 'If you fight they'll kill you,' he said.\n\nTyro worked the action of his bolter, checking what load he had left. The underslung loaders on Branthan's arms clattered with the last of his shells shucking into the flexmag.\n\n'We cannot outrun them,' said Branthan, staring through the arch. 'So we will fight them.'\n\nSharrowkyn's instincts to strike back at the traitors warred with his urge to escape the mountain. He had no love for Branthan, but counted Tyro as a loyal comrade in arms. They were not friends, but they had shed blood together. Their own and that of traitors.\n\nBranthan read the turbulent struggle of emotions within him.\n\n'We cannot outpace the Sons of Horus but you can,' he said, turning away. 'Go, Raven Guard, get the Magna Mater out of here. Consider this my last comm"}
{"text":"o we will fight them.'\n\nSharrowkyn's instincts to strike back at the traitors warred with his urge to escape the mountain. He had no love for Branthan, but counted Tyro as a loyal comrade in arms. They were not friends, but they had shed blood together. Their own and that of traitors.\n\nBranthan read the turbulent struggle of emotions within him.\n\n'We cannot outpace the Sons of Horus but you can,' he said, turning away. 'Go, Raven Guard, get the Magna Mater out of here. Consider this my last command.'\n\nSharrowkyn hesitated, torn between obeying the order and fighting alongside his brothers.\n\n'Nykona,' said Tyro. 'The mission comes first. It always does, can be no other way.'\n\nSharrowkyn snapped the magazine from his bolter. He handed the shells to Tyro.\n\n'Make every shell count, Cadmus,' he said.\n\n11\n\nA Glorious Death\n\nBreaking Free\n\nAlone in the Dark\n\nA curious calm settled over Cadmus Tyro as he thumbed the last of the shells into the magazine of his bolter. He wished he'd had better words to see the Raven Guard warrior on his way, some way to convey the honour it had been to fight alongside him.\n\nNow only he and Branthan remained.\n\nEven Garuda was gone. The bird had perched on Branthan's shoulder and leaned down as if whispering silently in his ear. Branthan had nodded, and the bird had flown off into the ductwork without a backward glance.\n\n'Where is it going?' asked Tyro.\n\n'Wherever it wills,' replied Branthan. 'Enough of Garuda. Look to your weapon.'\n\nTyro had. Even with Sharrowkyn's ammo, the magazine wasn't full.\n\n'A few bursts and we'll be hand to hand, he said.\n\n'Against Terminators,' said Branthan.\n\nTyro looked up, and with a slow nod said, 'Almost seems unfair to them.'\n\n'We will give them a glorious death by which to remember us.'\n\nTyro said, 'Since the fire and fury of Isstvan V, I have been ready to meet this day. Our escape from the world of the black sands only delayed this death.'\n\n'I died there,' said Branthan. 'Or as near as makes no difference. Every time you brought me back from my frozen stasis, I assumed it would be for the last time. I always knew I would be forced to pay back the debt of life incurred on that day. Now that debt is due.'\n\n'I always expected to die far from Terra's light, on some nameless battlefield at the limits of known space,' said Tyro. 'I would be centuries older, grizzled and with a long history of service to the Imperium. I would have lived a life of honour and few regrets.'\n\n'Before the galaxy went mad, I never considered my own death,' replied Branthan. 'Not even in theoretical dialogues with the Thirteenth. The Apothecaries told me that we were basically immortal, and the remembrancers claimed we were gods. That should have been warning enough, for what story of gods does not end with them cast down and destroyed?'\n\nTyro didn't answer. He saw the shadows of the approaching Justaerin.\n\nHe said, 'Captain Branthan, it has been an honour.'\n\nThree hulking shapes moved into the span of the archway, Terminators in armour of deepest black. Their appearance shocked Tyro, for they were torn up and looked as though they had fought their way from one end of a starship to another. Seldom did any foe give company veterans such a beating.\n\nBranthan seemed to shrug, and his underslung guns chugged out heavy bolt-rounds at subsonic velocities. They struck the lead Terminator, and sparks blazed where they met war-plate. Metal tore and ceramite chips flew like shrapnel.\n\nThe warrior staggered and took a step back, but didn't fall. He swung his weapon to bear.\n\nTyro leaned out from his cover, aimed, and squeezed the trigger\n\nA pair of mass-reactives struck the Terminator's magazine, and the warrior's fist vanished in a blazing shower of secondary detonations. The second Terminator swung his assault cannon towards Tyro, its long rotary barrels already spun up to firing speed.\n\nA blitzing storm of high-velocity shells ripped through the crates and materiel. Tyro dived to the side, shooting as he went. The grinding of shattered bone in his back filled his body with pain, and a grey haze dropped across his eyes. He rolled to his feet in agony and aimed for the cannon's ammo hopper at the weapon's rear. He fired, but his aim was skewed and the shell only creased the box.\n\nIt ricocheted away, and Tyro gritted his teeth against the pain that bathed his body in fire.\n\nA shell struck him in the chest and exploded against the face of his plastron. It didn't penetrate, but impact trauma drove him back. He staggered and returned fire. Another shell struck him at the junction of thigh and hip, and this one did penetrate.\n\nThe explosion blew out the left side of his pelvis, shards of his femur and metal driving up into his gut and groin. Blood filled Tyro's mouth, and he felt entire portions of his internal anatomy come undone. The damage to his organs was catastrophic and utterly non-survivable. Ferocious pain engulfed him, and he fell backwards against a stack of crates, like a king reclining on his throne.\n\nThe grey haze over his vision bled into red, and he saw Branthan moving as though in a pict-capture running at half speed, the slides of his bolters racked back empty. His fellow captain's chest was a shattered, chewed-up mess of bloody tunnels carved through his body.\n\nOnly the Heart of Iron remained untouched, its silver body pulsing fit to burst.\n\nBranthan ripped the assault cannon from one of the Justaerin and swung it like a club. The heavy breech section caved in the skull of the weapon's bearer. Vast quantities of blood, bone fragments and sopping brain matter sprayed from the ruins of the warrior's helm. He turned to swing it at the third Terminator, but a shell from a storm bolter ploughed a furrow through the top of his skull. It didn't detonate, but carved a canyon through his forehead. Branthan swayed, but remained upright, his body locked in place. For the briefest moment, Tyro dared hope he might fight on, as he had many times before.\n\nBut one look into Branthan's blood-filled eyes told him he was dead. The Heart of Iron was finally stilled, and a hero of the Iron Hands had passed from this life. Though his body of flesh and blood was no more, the rigid chassis that had once been the sarcophagus of Brother Bombastus still held him upright.\n\nEven in death, Ulrach Branthan did not kneel in the presence of the enemy.\n\nThe Sons of Horus turned on Tyro.\n\nHe raised his bolter and pulled the trigger one last time.\n\nThe weapon clicked empty. Like him, it had nothing left to give.\n\nThe Justaerin who had killed Branthan towered over him, a warrior bearing the rank insignia of a captain as well as other markings Tyro didn't recognise, but from which he instinctively recoiled. The Justaerin captain held the assault cannon, his fallen brother's blood and brains still wet on its metal. Surely this was Trastevere.\n\n'Only one more remains,' said the traitor.\n\nTyro summoned his last breath to spit defiance.\n\n'Only one, yes, but he is Raven Guard,' said Tyro with the last of his strength. 'He has a four-minute head start, which is more than he needs. Sharrowkyn was trained by the Shadowmasters of Lycaeus and knows every secret path from here to the Mare Tranquillitatis. Throne, he knows Luna's craters better than the Selenar! With any luck, he's already halfway to Terra.'\n\nTrastevere laughed, a rank, bitter sound, and said, 'Iron Hands make terrible liars.'\n\nTyro shook his head. 'And Sons of Horus make terrible legionaries.'\n\nTrastevere raised the assault cannon. 'You have a valediction?'\n\n'I have lived a life of honour and few regrets,' said Tyro. 'Can you say the same?'\n\nThe assault cannon roared, and the debt incurred on Isstvan V was finally paid in full.\n\nSharrowkyn emerged from the volcano to the vox in his helmet screeching with static and Wayland's frantic voice.\n\n'..kyn...spond... If you can...give...posi...'\n\n'Wayland, I'm out,' he said, breathless and in pain. 'I have the Magna Mater and require immediate extraction. Emphasis on the immediate part.'\n\nNo response, just the hiss of more static. He scanned the inky blackness above him, searching for any sign of the Storm Eagle, but could see nothing. He turned as he heard a clatter of metal, reaching for his bolter before he remembered he had given the last of his ammo to Cadmus Tyro.\n\nGaruda flew out, its dented wings spread. Its flight was erratic. It too was hurt. At first he was pleased to see the bird, but his heart sank at the realisation that its appearance could only mean that Tyro and Branthan were dead.\n\nSharrowkyn tamped down the grief that threatened to swamp him. 'Wayland? Are you there?'\n\nStill no answer. Were they still at the crash site? Had the damage been too devastating for Wayland and Thamatica to repair. No, he wouldn't believe that. If there had been even the slightest chance of coaxing the gunship into the air, the Iron Fathers would have taken it.\n\n'Throne, Sharrowkyn,' said Wayland. 'We feared the worst. I have you in sight. Coming in behind you.'\n\nSharrowkyn turned to see the form of the Storm Eagle coming towards him, little more than a metre of clearance between its wings and the canyon walls. The gunship passed overhead, Wayland keeping its speed low for fear it might break apart. Its engines were screaming and stuttering, and Sharrowkyn saw the full extent of the damage it had suffered in the crash.\n\n'Throne, I can't believe you got it flying again,' he said as the gunship descended and the rear assault ramp lowered. Wayland kept it a metre from the ground, as was standard for a combat extraction, but Sharrowkyn saw he couldn't have landed it safely anyway - the landing skids were smashed.\n\nAs soon as the ramp was lowered enough, Sharrowkyn swung the Magna Mater into the hold and climbed aboard himself. Garuda flew into the gunship after him and all but fell to the perforated deck.\n\nEvery part of Sharrowkyn's body and soul was hurting, but he pushed himself upright and hammered his palm against the clos"}
{"text":"red. Wayland kept it a metre from the ground, as was standard for a combat extraction, but Sharrowkyn saw he couldn't have landed it safely anyway - the landing skids were smashed.\n\nAs soon as the ramp was lowered enough, Sharrowkyn swung the Magna Mater into the hold and climbed aboard himself. Garuda flew into the gunship after him and all but fell to the perforated deck.\n\nEvery part of Sharrowkyn's body and soul was hurting, but he pushed himself upright and hammered his palm against the closing mechanism for the ramp.\n\n'I'm in,' he said. 'Get us out of here!'\n\n'What about the others?'\n\n'It's just me,' he said, struggling to contain his emotions.\n\nTrastevere and Urgave reached the Lunar surface in time to see a Storm Eagle gunship that had no right to be airborne lifting on damaged engines that flared and stuttered with blue fire. Its hull was buckled and torn, but the glittering silver hand on its flank was undimmed.\n\nHe saw a warrior in dusty black armour through the assault ramp as it juddered closed.\n\nTrastevere grunted in amusement.\n\n'Halfway to Terra indeed.'\n\nHe lifted the assault cannon and squeezed the trigger.\n\nSharrowkyn felt the shells tear through his chest and back like searing rods of fire.\n\nThe force of the impacts spun him around, and he collapsed to the deck of the gunship, vast quantities of blood pouring from his ruptured body. Fiery heat spread from the wounds as his overtaxed physiology struggled to contain the damage.\n\nThe Magna Mater's container fell beside him, its surface splashed red.\n\n'Sharrowkyn,' called Wayland from the pilot's compartment. 'What was that?'\n\nHe slid down the battered fuselage, struggling to speak as pain coursed around his body.\n\nHe tried to detach, to assess the damage and what he could do about it.\n\nTwo smoking gouges had shattered his right shoulder, an exit wound like a bowl of blood yawned in the knot of cables at his belly, and there was precious little he could do about either.\n\n'If I had to guess,' he said between sucking gulps of red breath, 'I'd say an assault cannon.'\n\nWayland lifted clear of the canyon walls and rotated the gunship on its axis, aiming it towards the steadily falling debris containing the Sisypheum. More impacts struck the hull. Assault cannon fire, Sharrowkyn was correct. Normally that wouldn't trouble a Storm Eagle, but the hull was compromised in ways too numerous to count.\n\nHe pushed the engines out as far as he dared, and the impacts died away.\n\n\"We're clear,' he said\n\nThe time for stealth was over, and a journey to the surface that had taken them several hours would take a little over three minutes in reverse. But those three minutes would see them exposed and vulnerable.\n\nAll they could do was run.\n\nThe gunship raced, low to the ground, over the pale surface of the Oceanus Procellarum, kicking up lingering veils of dust in its wake. Ahead, and closer to the Lunar surface than he'd have liked, Wayland saw the glinting form of the wrecked launch facility in which they'd hidden the Sisypheum.\n\nPerhaps two thousand metres and thirty minutes from impacting on the surface.\n\nHe angled a correction in their course, risking a little altitude as he struggled to hold the gunship steady. Its damaged control surfaces made flying in anything resembling a straight line difficult.\n\nA screeching wail sounded from the threat panel.\n\n'Missile in the air!' he yelled, wrenching the control column to the side. The gunship rolled on its central axis, and Wayland felt the airframe shudder in protest. Still linked to its wounded machine-spirit, he felt freshly welded seams split along the length of the fuselage.\n\nThamatica had done as much as he could to get them airborne, but evasive manoeuvres were another thing entirely. Wayland saw the burning tail of the missile slam into the surface, the slow-moving after-effects of its detonation muffled by the dense Lunar regolith.\n\n'Just one?' hissed Wayland. 'How little you think of us.'\n\nHe rolled and banked as much as he dared, trying to get a fix on their attacker.\n\nThere! A Thunderhawk gunship, hull scorched and burned from its combat drop to the volcano's fiery caldera. It rolled around, moving into perfect attack position, above and behind. and Wayland saw long tongues of muzzle flare erupt from its prow cannons.\n\nHe pulled up. Too late to avoid the stream of shells.\n\nThe Storm Eagle shuddered and lurched sideways with hammering impacts. Wayland grimaced with repercussive pain. He felt the fuselage tear open on the port side.\n\nMore stitching blasts of cannon fire punched through the Storm Eagle dorsal armour, tearing forward as the Thunderhawk strafed them from above. The pilot's canopy shattered and the threat panel exploded as high-calibre shells ripped through it.\n\nBlood of man and machine sprayed the interior of the cockpit. Wayland gasped in sudden and shocking pain.\n\n'Thamatica!' he yelled. 'Now might be the right time to try that dangerous idea of yours!'\n\nThamatica barely heard Wayland.\n\nHe'd seen Sharrowkyn fall to the deck of the gunship, but had been powerless to help.\n\nHis body was locked rigid in a grav-seat, connected via a score of subcutaneous jacks to the interior of the demersal-splicer. Its alien interior was awash with violet light, and the machine-spirits within were not the feral things at the heart of most Imperial machinery, these were systems of cold, calculating malovolence.\n\nHe'd linked with it in the hopes of bolstering the machine-spin of the Storm Eagle, but the spirit the gunship's soul had rallied at Wayland's imprecations. It had not needed the touch of this pitiless machine of Luna.\n\nBut now its unique powers of machine-to-machine communication were in desperate need.\n\nThamatica could see in realms beyond his normal sight.\n\nAs if he were standing within a hyper-detailed noospheric volume, Thamatica saw drifting screeds of light all around him, sig-idents and datableed from a million Selenar machines all across and beneath Luna. He could see them all as bright traceries moving in an exquisite ballet.\n\n'We never knew...' he breathed. 'How different you are.'\n\nHe was not welcome within this space, a purveyor of antithetical Martian teachings, a destroyer and enslaver of machines. He felt the tech of Luna grating at his consciousness, looking to eject him from its network, as flesh seeks to expel a foreign body.\n\nNo, more like white blood cells looking to overwhelm and destroy an infection.\n\nThe only reason he could access this space was because the demersal-splicer had been damaged. Ta'lab Vita-37's staff had broken its ability to defend itself, and that had given Thamatica his way in. The Canticles of Devotion, perfected by the Iron Fathers of Medusa, had it yoked for now, but like a wild grox, it sought to buck him and trample his bones.\n\nIt hated him, and he knew it would turn on him the first chance it got.\n\nHe felt the gunship scream, and angled spears of light blinked into being as strafing fire punched through the hull.\n\nThamatica felt the gunship start to pull itself apart as Wayland threw it into ever more desperate manoeuvres to keep them in the air and out of the line of fire. It wouldn't work.\n\nThe patched-up Storm Eagle was no match for a fully functional Thunderhawk.\n\nOnly a matter of seconds remained to them.\n\nThamatica drove deep into the mindspace of the splicer, casting his net wide across the local area. It took him barely a fraction of a second to find the bellicose spirit of the Thunderhawk, an interloper just like them.\n\nIn the noospheric volume, it was an angry red dart, a bloody knife aimed at their heart.\n\n'You see it?' he said, his words echoing within their shared mindspace.\n\nThe splicer growled, a predator on a fraying leash.\n\nIt growled in a strange machine cant. Its words were unknown, but the meaning was clear.\n\nFirst this, then you.\n\nThamatica turned the splicer loose.\n\nHe watched its consciousness unwind like a twisting double helix of data, beautiful in a way the noospheric renditions of Martian code never were. It closed the virtual distance to the Thunderhawk in the blink of an eye and immediately enmeshed itself in the brutal consciousness of its machine-spirit.\n\nThamatica felt a momentary pang of regret as he watched the icy claws of the splicer tear into the Thunderhawk's spirit, tendrils of its cold consciousness burrowing into every facet of the gunship's being and co-opting them one by one.\n\nThe red dart of the Sons of Horus craft wobbled in the air as us pilot fought the rebellion fomenting deep in its systems. Seeing the total devastation being wrought within. Thamatica knew the enemy pilot had no chance whatsoever.\n\nThe Thunderhawk abruptly nosed over, rolling and diving straight into the ground.\n\nThamatica saw the dissolution of its machine-spirit and offered a prayer to the Omnissiah to forgive him for its murder.\n\nThe splicer arced away from its kill, and even though he knew it was hopeless, Thamatica fought to disengage himself from shared mindspace.\n\nIt raced towards him, the predator unleashed.\n\nNow you.\n\n* * *\n\nWayland guided the Storm Eagle into the Sisypheum's forward embarkation deck and quickly spooled the engines down. The full weight of the gunship strained its broken frame, and Wayland gritted his teeth as the strike cruiser's gravity pulled it apart.\n\nHe tried to rise from the pilot's seat, but his legs wouldn't work.\n\nOnly now did Wayland dare to look down.\n\nThe strafing shots that had blown out the canopy and smashed the threat board had punched through his lower back and shattered the base of his spinal column. He'd felt the pain, but so mingled were his and the gunship's sensations that he had not been able to differentiate between the two.\n\nHe felt a presence at his shoulder, but couldn't turn in the seat.\n\n'Thamatica?'\n\n'No,' wheezed Sharrowkyn through a sucking chest wound. 'He's gone.'\n\n'Gone? How?'\n\n'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'The machine he's linked to did something to him. Neural feedback or psy"}
{"text":"e threat board had punched through his lower back and shattered the base of his spinal column. He'd felt the pain, but so mingled were his and the gunship's sensations that he had not been able to differentiate between the two.\n\nHe felt a presence at his shoulder, but couldn't turn in the seat.\n\n'Thamatica?'\n\n'No,' wheezed Sharrowkyn through a sucking chest wound. 'He's gone.'\n\n'Gone? How?'\n\n'I don't know,' said Sharrowkyn. 'The machine he's linked to did something to him. Neural feedback or psycho-shock. Whatever it did, he didn't survive it.'\n\nWayland nodded and said, 'Help me up, my lower half isn't working too well now.'\n\nThough he could barely stand, Sharrowkyn bent to lift him from the pilot's seat. Wayland's body was a dead weight, and he kept his arm wrapped around his friend's shoulders. Together, they struggled back into the troop compartment, where Garuda sat on Thamatica's shoulder. The Iron Father sat rigid in his grav-seat, a pale winter's light seething just below his skin and pulsing beneath his sightless eyes.\n\nWayland knew instantly what had happened.\n\n'He saved us. He loosed the splicer to bring down the Thunderhawk, knowing it would turn on him.'\n\nSharrowkyn said nothing, but nodded in respect to the fallen Iron Father as they staggered from the gunship's interior.\n\n'Get me to the bridge and plug me into the command module,' said Wayland. 'We have a little under fifteen minutes before the Sisypheum smashes into the surface.'\n\n'And then what?'\n\n'Then we get out of here,' said Wayland. 'And we find somewhere to hide.'\n\n'Where? Amid all this, where?'\n\nWayland smiled through the pain and said, 'Somewhere lost in the darkness.'\n\nIt took them another twelve minutes to reach the bridge in a series of stumbling falls. Garuda flew alongside them, clattering against the ship's internal structure as it flew an irregular, weaving path ahead of them.\n\nAt a lateral transit, they requisitioned a maintenance servitor to help carry Wayland, and Sharrowkyn was able to concentrate on not passing out. Both warriors were at the end of their endurance, and by the time Sharrowkyn and the servitor hoisted Wayland into the pilot's command throne, he was breathless with exertion and blood loss.\n\nUnder Wayland's instructions, he plugged the Iron Father into the navigation cogitator and fired up the preset launch protocols. Knowing their escape might need to be executed at a moment's notice. Wayland had left the reactor ticking over and slaved the drive activations to an embedded macro he could control without the need of a bridge crew.\n\nWithin moments, the Sisypheum had cast off its tethers and mag-clamps and was under thrust. Sharrowkyn watched through the viewing bay as the remains of the launch facility tumbled away. His eyelids were getting heavy, and when he looked up again, it had slammed down into the pale dust at the edge of the Mare Cognitum.\n\nHow long had he been unconscious?\n\nGradually, the curve of the moon fell away, and the spectral glow of its surface was replaced with the inky blackness of space. Far above, mighty warships flew in diamond shoals, each a gleaming cathedral that could destroy them with ease.\n\nSharrowkyn's breathing slowed, and he rested his palm on the surface of the Magna Maters case. His blood was still sticky, and he hoped that whatever lay within was worth the lives that had been lost to secure it. He felt his grip on consciousness fading.\n\nBeside him, Garuda cawed as it stretched out one of its wings. As Sharrowkyn watched, the metal seemed to unfold and undo a measure of its damage, as though the bird were somehow repairing itself.\n\n'You couldn't teach me the trick of that, could you?' he asked. The bird cocked its head to the side as if deciding whether or not to answer.\n\nSharrowkyn put thoughts of the bird from his mind and looked back at Wayland. For a moment, he thought his friend was dead, but then saw the darting movements beneath his eyelids. He was one with the ship, conjoined with its soul and linked to its every system. The Sisypheum's wounds were great, and where before Wayland had borne and healed its hurts, now it carried his.\n\nSharrowkyn blinked as a sound intruded on his fugue state.\n\nProximity alarms.\n\nA fresh pane had opened in the viewing bay, and Sharrowkyn saw a knife-blade vessel of black and gold lifting from below like a deep-ocean predator rising to feed.\n\n'The Cthonian Scion,' he said, turning to Wayland, but if the Iron Father heard him, he gave no sign. The Sons of Horus destroyer flew on a direct vector towards them, clearly aware of exactly where they were.\n\nDowning a pursuing Thunderhawk was one thing, but a Space Marine destroyer... ?\n\nBlossoms of fire winked to life at the vessel's prow.\n\n'Torpedoes in the void,' said Wayland tonelessly. 'Impact in eighty-five seconds.'\n\nSharrowkyn watched the approaching ship-killers, knowing there absolutely nothing they could do to evade them. The Sisypheum was too badly damaged for evasive manoeuvres, and even with Wayland's control macros in place, it simply wasn't possible to fight a void engagement without a crew.\n\n'Sixty seconds,' said Wayland, his voice sounding distant and lost.\n\nA chrono-timer spiralled downwards in the corner of the viewing bay, marking the last moments of their lives.\n\nThe proximity alarms were shrieking louder than before, as if warning them they were about to slam into a mountain.\n\nSharrowkyn pushed himself upright with a grunt of pain. The effort was almost too much for him, but he was damned if he would meet his death on his backside.\n\n'Forty seconds.'\n\nA shadow fell across the viewing bay and, for a brief moment, Sharrowkyn wondered if this was some reaction of the Sisypheum to its imminent destruction, dimming its sight to spare them witnessing their death.\n\nThen he saw it was no act of mercy on behalf of the strike cruiser and nor were the proximity alarms in response to the approach of the Cthonian Scion.\n\nThe shadow became the ornamented ventral plates of a manic warship, its gilded surface and vast sheets of armour dearly visible in exquisite detail. Its hull was golden and cerulean, with towering vanes jutting from its kilometres-long length. Its gravity wake shook the Sisypheum with its nearness, and every time - a thought the vessel was soon to finish passing over them, yet more crenellated elements of structure were revealed, each enamelled and patterned with swirling geometric patterns and arcane symbolism.\n\n'That's no ship of the line,' said Wayland, his eyes fluttering open in awe. 'That's a Gloriana...'\n\nYet more of the ship hove into view, and Sharrowkyn saw markings emblazoned on the forest of silver towers that trailed strange etheric energies. At the centre of the argent spines at its rear sat a vast crystalline pyramid, a sanctum and command bridge all in one.\n\n'That's the Photep,' said Wayland. 'That's the flagship of the Crimson King.'\n\nIts size was impossible to comprehend, so huge it defied the idea that it had been wrought by mortal hands and not willed into being by some inhuman deity. Sharrowkyn felt cold fire settle in his belly at the sight of the vast capital ship.\n\nA memory surfaced. Wounded and alone on Eirene Septimus, facing Alpharius himself. The primarch of the Alpha Legion could have killed him without breaking sweat, but he had spared him. He had addressed Sharrowkyn by name, as if they were old friends instead of mortal enemies.\n\nSharrowkyn remembered the words that had passed between them as if they were carved into the forefront of his brain.\n\n'You're not going to fight me?'\n\n'As much as I want to, I'm not going to kill you, Nykona. At least, not today,' said Alpharius. 'Magnus asked me not to.'\n\nWhen Cadmus Tyro had asked what that meant, Sharrowkyn had dismissed the primarch's words as manipulation and lies, but now here was the flagship of Magnus the Cyclops interposing itself between the Sisypheum and a killing barrage of torpedoes.\n\nThe countdown on the viewscreen blinked at zero.\n\nBut for the Crimson King sailing his vessel between the Sisypheum and the torpedoes, they would already be dead.\n\n'Why?' he demanded of the glittering pyramid at the heart of the Photep. 'Why?'\n\nNo answer was forthcoming, and a strange lethargy drew itself about Sharrowkyn as his body's healing mechanisms dragged him down into darkness.\n\nHe dreamed of glittering caves, a great golden light and an army of newborn giants who marched from that light into a war that never ended.\n\nSharrowkyn woke with Wayland's hand upon his shoulder. A moment of weightlessness filled him as he drifted up from his dreams of light and shadow. A fleeting moment before the bone-deep agonies of his wounds returned.\n\nHe groaned in pain and remembrance.\n\n'We're here,' said Wayland. 'It's time to go.'\n\nPain and disorientation slowed Sharrowkyn's thought processes as he rose from the embrace of the sus-an membrane. He swallowed away a dryness in his throat and wiped the back of his red-stained hand across his eyes.\n\n'Go? Go where? How long was I out?'\n\n'Ten days,' said Wayland. 'The return journey took a little longer than our descent.'\n\nConfusion was making it hard for Sharrowkyn to understand Wayland's words.\n\n'Journey? Wayland, where are we?'\n\n'I don't think it has a name,' said Wayland, and Sharrowkyn looked over at the viewing bay, seeing the black, slab-like form of the coaling station where they had repaired the Sisypheum prior to making their descent to Luna.\n\n'You have to go,' said Wayland, and Sharrowkyn nodded, still not fully understanding the context of his friend's words.\n\n'I don't think I can carry you,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'That's all right, my friend,' said Wayland. 'You don't have to.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'I mean that you have to go on without me. This is the end of our path together.'\n\n'No, I'll get that servitor,' protested Sharrowkyn, but he could it was hopeless.\n\nWayland's body was past the point where any Apothecary could restore him or tech-priest rebuild him. His "}
{"text":" and Sharrowkyn nodded, still not fully understanding the context of his friend's words.\n\n'I don't think I can carry you,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'That's all right, my friend,' said Wayland. 'You don't have to.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'I mean that you have to go on without me. This is the end of our path together.'\n\n'No, I'll get that servitor,' protested Sharrowkyn, but he could it was hopeless.\n\nWayland's body was past the point where any Apothecary could restore him or tech-priest rebuild him. His gaunt and ravaged features told a story of the internal anatomical cannibalism that had been required just to keep him alive this long.\n\n'You need to take the Magna Mater off the Sisypheum,' said Wayland. 'The duty of Ta'lab Vita-37 now falls to you.'\n\n'I can't,' said Sharrowkyn.\n\n'You must,' said Wayland, and the desperation in his voice was taking the last of his strength to impart. 'Despite the intervention of the Photep, we did not leave the Solar System without hunters on our heels. I have evaded them for now, but they are almost upon us, and they must not find you and the Magna Mater aboard.'\n\n'Where will you go?'\n\nThe Iron Father smiled, and a flash of the old Wayland was restored. The Sisypheum and I will lead them a merry dance way out beyond the Halo Stars, into the trans-galactic wastes,' said Wayland with a hoarse chuckle. 'By the time they catch us, I'll be long dead and they will never find you.'\n\nSharrowkyn shook his head. 'No, let me carry you. Set the ship on its course and be done with it.'\n\n'She won't make it far enough without a pilot at the helm,' said Wayland. 'It has to be this way. Now go, my friend.'\n\nSharrowkyn saw the determination in his friend's face, and knew he would not be dissuaded from this course. Besides, he was right.\n\nWith a heavy heart, Sharrowkyn lifted the Magna Mater and backed away from the command console.\n\n'It was an honour to know you, Sabik Wayland,' he said.\n\n'The honour was mine,' replied Wayland.\n\nThe nameless coaling station was just as dark as Sharrowkyn remembered it.\n\nThe Sisypheum and Wayland were long gone, sailing into the darkness between the stars.\n\nSharrowkyn was used to working in solitude, had embraced it, actively rejecting the company of others, but now, alone at the edge of wilderness space, he suddenly craved the company of his brothers.\n\nHe wasn't entirely alone. Garuda accompanied him, flying overhead in the wide open spaces of the coaling station. The bird looked new, like the first time Sharrowkyn had seen it, its wings resplendent and its feathers as crisply wrought as if fresh from the artisan's bench.\n\nHis transhuman physiology could sustain him in a form of hibernation for centuries, but he suspected whatever span he might reach here would be much reduced. The scabbed floors and scraps of atmosphere that clung to the walls of the cavernous chambers still reeked of unrefined promethium.\n\nThe black welcomed Sharrowkyn. It folded around him like an old friend welcoming a fellow traveller in darkness.\n\nSharrowkyn knew exactly where he would wait out the ages to come.\n\nHe and Garuda followed a path he had walked many times while the Iron Hands repaired the Sisypheum. It led unerringly to a chamber near the heart of the coaling station, its walls engraved with names of beloved vessels and fallen shipmates.\n\nHe saw now that he had underestimated the sheer number of etchings.\n\nHundreds of thousands of names and deeds.\n\nMen and women whose names had been forgotten, heroes all.\n\nTheir courage had gone unrecorded, save for these walls.\n\nTheir stories had never been told.\n\nSharrowkyn slumped with his back to the wall, his breathing slowing and his heart rate dropping as the mechanisms of the sus-an membrane tugged at his consciousness again.\n\nNo. Not yet. He still had work to do before then.\n\nHow best should a warrior die?\n\nSharrowkyn had given much thought to this over the years.\n\nHis neophyte thoughts of war-torn battlefields and glory were the dreams of folly.\n\nThis was as fitting a resting place for a warrior of the Raven Guard as he could imagine.\n\nHe drew his gladius and swept his fingertips over the wall, feeling the roughness where knives and chisels had scored it.\n\nFinally he found a place to make his mark.\n\nSharrowkyn cut with swift, economical strokes, carving the names of the warriors who had crewed the Sisypheum next to the long-dead pioneers of the Imperium.\n\nHe cut his own name last, and with his task complete, set down his blade.\n\nHis body was ruined, unable to heal while he still drew waking breath.\n\nCenturies might pass before he woke, if he woke at all, and the thought did not trouble him overmuch. He hoped some stranger in a far-distant age might find their names and wonder who they were, what kind of men they had been, and through that connection be joined to the deeds of those who had gone before.\n\nSharrowkyn rested his hand on the Magna Mater as Garuda flew down to settle upon his shoulder. He barely felt its weight. Its claws dug into the ceramite of his armour and he doubted he could prise it loose even if he wanted to.\n\nThe bird lifted its head and spread its wings wide.\n\nIt froze in place, a silent watcher and sentinel all in one.\n\nHis eyes drifted downwards, and Sharrowkyn wished he knew the name of this place. It felt wrong to let the darkness claim him with out knowing where he lay.\n\nAs if in answer to that thought, his drifting gaze found a carving made in the lee of the archway leading into the chamber. Half obscured by striated oil patterns and creeping rust but still legible.\n\nA nameplate, perhaps from a lost starship or a forgotten battle.\n\nSharrowkyn supposed it didn't matter.\n\nIt would serve.\n\nSangprimus Portum.\n\n'War is father and king of all. It proves some to be gods, and others merely human.'\n\n- The Weeping Philosopher\n\n'Cannon crashes eastward: magnificent, terrible thunder. Bright flash, night bordered, a surging mass explodes in storms of iron. Pageants of fire again, again. In savage awe, we celebrate the festival of death.'\n\n- Pyotr Nash (First Lieutenant, 77th Europa Max)\n\n'History is trying to tell the truth through the most acceptable lie.'\n\n- Hari Harr, Imperial interrogator\n\nTime of Trial\n\nThe day was dark with the smoke of a burning world.\n\nHis armour's chrono indicated it was morning, but all divisions of time were virtually meaningless now. Day, night, morning, evening... they all blended into one span of flickering, hellish light that painted everything in the colours of a banked hearth-forge.\n\nThe distant glow of molten rock backlit misbegotten giants lumbering on the horizon, and plumes of fire from ruptured bedrock flickered low to the ground as boiling clouds of searing ash drifted over shattered ruins.\n\nThe Time of Trial was an extinction-level event on Nocturne, a time of fire and endings during which its Promethean moon would pass so close it would all but tear the planet apart. Clashing gravitational forces reached deeps into Nocturne's bedrock to wake the world-serpents coiled around its molten heart. Stirred from their deep slumbers, the ur-drakes roared and raged, shaking the world above with the fury of their fractured dreams.\n\nTheir terrible heat surged forth in the lava of a thousand volcanic eruptions that blotted out the sun. The movement of their titanic limbs shook the world with cataclysmic earthquakes that reshaped Nocturne's continents, and their breath sent boiling tsunamis to smash its coasts. And in the aftermath of their ferocious waking, a terrible winter fell upon the land as they returned to their slumbers and their searing fury subsided.\n\nIn such times, life beyond the protected walls of Nocturne's Sanctuary Cities became all but impossible. The plains camps, mountain holdfasts and coastal settlements emptied as Nocturne's people sought their fragile safety. Their gates would be flung open, and any who requested shelter would be offered a place within.\n\nAtok Abidemi had seen only one Time of Trial before he had been chosen to join the ranks of the XVIII Legion, the Salamanders. He had been a boy, no more than four Terran-standard, but vividly remembered the sky afire with lightning as it raged with the warring of gods and the wrath of the world-serpents. Even as a child, he had seen meaning in the play of flames in the sky, fated significance in each peal of thunder and crash of volcanic fury.\n\nFleeing the approaching pyro-storms, his parents had abandoned their nomadic life on the T'harken Delta and sought refuge within the walls of Skarokk, the city of the Dragonspine. All Abidemi had known was a life on the plains, hunting the leo'nid with his father and grandfather, so when the gates of the Sanctuary City closed behind him, Abidemi felt the terrible claustrophobia of being trapped in a place from which there could be no escape.\n\nThat same sensation held his heart in a cold grip again.\n\nYet this was not the Dragonspine and he was not on Nocturne.\n\nThis was Terra.\n\nBut it was a Time of Trial.\n\n'Stand to!'\n\nThe cry went up along the wall, all but drowned out by Indomitor's blaring klaxons.\n\nAnother alert, but it wasn't for them, not yet.\n\nAbidemi flexed his fingers on the grip of Draukoros. Longer than a standard chainblade, the weapon was toothed with the ebon fangs of the great drake of Nocturne whose name it now bore. Once, it had belonged to Artellus Numeon, but with his disappearance upon Mount Deathfire, the honour of its use passed to Abidemi.\n\nThe shadow cast by its former bearer was long, and both Abidemi and the blade understood he was only its custodian. The blade would always be Numeon's, and it was Abidemi's fervent hope that one day he would return it to their fiery home world.\n\nThat hope was fading with every passing day, and as the discordant clamour of war pulled him back to the present, the tragedy engulfing Terra swelled around him.\n\nWhite ash fell like snow. The sky burned with fiery colours, and the relentless drumbeat of war buckled the air with a conti"}
{"text":"rer was long, and both Abidemi and the blade understood he was only its custodian. The blade would always be Numeon's, and it was Abidemi's fervent hope that one day he would return it to their fiery home world.\n\nThat hope was fading with every passing day, and as the discordant clamour of war pulled him back to the present, the tragedy engulfing Terra swelled around him.\n\nWhite ash fell like snow. The sky burned with fiery colours, and the relentless drumbeat of war buckled the air with a continual rumble of explosions and big guns that would never tire.\n\nHe and his two Salamanders brothers were stationed on the Indomitor Wall, the towering north-eastern bulwark of the Sanctum Imperialis, the very heartland of the Emperor's Palace. It resembled nothing so much as a vast cliff carved into the bones of the mountains, twelve hundred metres tall, with an inner mustering ground behind the shielded and reinforced ramparts of its outer wall, which stepped down to layered outworks before diminishing to the ruined edges of the western Katabatic Plain.\n\nIts outer faces were reinforced with steel and stone, its once glorious bas-reliefs peeled away at Lord Dorn's decree. Its functionality was brutally simple, the newly raised drum towers, turrets and enfilading gun-boxes turning the fifteen kilometre strip of smouldering ruins beyond into a killing ground of almost perfect proportions.\n\nIn any conventional engagement, it would be a nigh-impregnable barrier, but the war the traitors had brought to Terra was anything but conventional.\n\nBraying war-horns and screams issued from the host currently attacking the wall. Six times they had come at its defenders in the last two days, and six times they had been thrown back. Their thwarted howls were those of beasts, and to Abidemi's ears they sounded like a barbarian horde from an earlier epoch.\n\nSmoke and a seething orange glow limned Indomitor's broken-toothed defences on this seventh attack, where fifty thousand soldiers fought the blood-maddened host. Explosions and plumes of blue-green fire rippled up from the base of the wall far below. Percussive blasts rocked the walls, chewing the rockcrete in fiery bites with every impact.\n\nShell blasts swept the parapet in storms of shrapnel, gunfire plucked troops from the firing step in droves, and the screams of the wounded were drowned out by the hammer blows of heavy artillery. Frag shells burst overhead, shredding flesh and stone, splintering the walls. The air was thick and toxic with a mixture of fyceline, propellant and promethium fumes.\n\nBlasts from the autocannon turrets and the artillery mounted on the battered slopes of the Hegemon behind them answered the roar from beyond the wall.\n\nBut it would make little difference, the enemy host was seemingly without number.\n\nThis portion of the wall was designated Indomitor Three.\n\nAs much a name for us as it is the wall, thought Abidemi. Perhaps if-\n\nA blackened smiter's gauntlet clapped him on the shoulder guard and a voice with the sharp accent of a Sanctuary City-dweller said, 'Focus, brother.'\n\nAbidemi nodded, lifting his head from his contemplation to regard his battle-brother.\n\nBarek Zytos was a solid mountain of dark skin and battered warplate that had somehow retained its dark green lustre, even amid the constant ash falls and tarry smoke banks drifting from the burning ruins of the Anterior Barbican and the smashed Brahmaputra Wall.\n\nAbidemi and Zytos stood with Indomitor Three's reserve force, ten thousand soldiers and twelve ad hoc squadrons from a score of different regiments. This deep into the fighting, hundreds of Terra's regiments had been effectively wiped out and their scattered survivors quickly organised into scratch battalions with no names save any they gave themselves.\n\nIn honour of the Salamanders in their midst, these soldiers had named themselves Vulkan's Own. Normally such presumption on the part of mortals would have angered Abidemi, but in this place, at this time, he understood the honour these brave men and women did them. Once, their uniforms had been different in design and colour, but weeks of fighting in the mud and gore of Terra had rendered them all the same grey-brown and painted their exhausted faces with ash and grief.\n\nThey watched the fighting at the ramparts with a mixture of anger and horror, fearful of the slaughter being unleashed, yet eager to advance and push the enemy from the walls.\n\nAbidemi understood that feeling all too well.\n\nIt railed against his warrior soul to stand and watch brother soldiers of the Imperium dying, but he and his brothers' strength was best spent when it would have the greatest impact.\n\nSensing his dark mood, Zytos nodded to the bloodshed on the wall.\n\n'This is a bad one,' he said. 'Yes, a bad one indeed.'\n\nAbidemi grunted. 'Has there ever been a good assault?'\n\n'You know what I mean,' said Zytos, interlacing his fingers on the drake-skull pommel of his mighty thunder hammer. The weapon's killing head sat between his feet, engraved with scenes from the forge, its haft a length of unbending adamantium. 'The man who always looks to the sky does not see the drake at his feet.'\n\n'And the man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl,' finished Abidemi.\n\n'Brother, are you here?' asked Barek. 'Really here? Since Vulkan passed into the Palace your mind has wandered too often of late.'\n\n'Apologies, brother,' said Abidemi, shaking his head. 'We sacrificed so much to bring the primarch to Terra... I feel lost without his presence.'\n\n'He is here,' said Zytos. 'Doing his duty to the Emperor. As we must.'\n\n'You're right,' said Abidemi. 'But this war saps my soul as much as it tests my body.'\n\nZytos rapped his knuckles on the pommel of his hammer and said, 'Concerns of the spirit must be put aside until after the fighting's done.'\n\n'You're wrong,' said Abidemi. 'We must win both together or else we lose everything.'\n\n'I'll put my faith in this,' said Zytos, swinging the hammer up from the ground and hefting its immense weight as easily as a mortal man might swing a walking cane.\n\nBarek Zytos had ever been the most direct of his brothers, as was only to be expected of a man born to the city of warrior kings. The drakes cut into the onyx skin of his skull were markers of the beasts he had hunted on the Arridian Plain, and his words provided a much needed anchor for Abidemi.\n\n'And though he's young, I put faith in him,' continued Zytos, nodding to where Igen Gargo stood scanning the ramparts atop the turret of a rust-brown Shadowsword. Above him, the unending barrage of shells and lasers flared and burst against the aegis shield: relentless impacts from orbit and plunging fire from distant batteries. The swirling patterns rippled like the violent borealis of the Time of Trial.\n\nThe colours reminded Abidemi of looking deep into the fires of a forge ready to receive metal. It was said a master smiter could look into a furnace and know the exact moment to thrust the iron into its heat, when to turn, and when to withdraw it just by listening to its song.\n\nZytos had led them back to Terra, but of the three of them, Igen Gargo was the master of reading the fire's song.\n\nGargo scanned the fighting, ready to call out any weakness or predict a rout. The burnished metal of his augmetic arms reflected the light of explosions, and fire danced in the red lenses of his battle helm.\n\nAbidemi followed his gaze, but it was impossible to guess where one part of the line would bend or break. Lightning-shot smoke all but obscured the fighting, and the sounds of clashing metal and gunfire was much the same at one point as it was at another. Vast shapes reared up, bloated silhouettes and angular snapshots of unnatural creatures the enemy had pressed into its ranks.\n\nZytos lifted his helm and snapped it into place with a hiss of pressurised air.\n\n'Here,' said Zytos, turning to retrieve a pair of battered breacher shields from the ground behind him and handing one to Abidemi. 'It's not Promethean craft, but it'll do.'\n\nAbidemi nodded, scabbarding Draukoros and clamping the shield tight to his arm.\n\nThe yellow-gold metal was thick and dented, the ebon fist at its centre chipped and silvered by a hundred or more impacts. It felt unnatural to bear wargear marked with the heraldry of a Legion not his own, but these were desperate times and the shields had not failed them yet.\n\n'It'll be soon,' said Zytos, looking back towards Gargo.\n\nAbidemi snapped his own helmet on and engaged the gorget seals. Even insulated from the atmosphere, the air tasted of ash and burnt iron. His visor lit up with targeting information, damage assessments and energy-depletion warnings.\n\n'How can you tell?' he answered.\n\n'I can't read the fire as well as Gargo, but I can read him,' said Zytos.\n\n'Stand to!' yelled Gargo.\n\n'Told you,' said Zytos as the vehicles around them roared to life, reactors powering up and drive mechanisms shrieking like the magma vents of the Pyre Desert. Blue fumes belched from exhaust grilles, and commanders unfurled pennants of dead regiments upon their antennae.\n\n'Watch the right,' ordered Gargo, pointing a silvered arm towards the wall.\n\nAbidemi scanned the fighting.\n\n'What does he see?'\n\n'I don't-'\n\nA thunderclap of shield failure was swiftly followed by a titanic blast that shook the staging area with the force of an orbital strike. Colossal blocks of stone lofted skyward as something exploded just below the level of the rampart Gargo had indicated. Abidemi couldn't see what had caused it, but a hundred-metre portion of the wall simply vanished in a blinding sheet of fire. The ringing echoes of its detonation were deafening, even within his helmet, and his auto-senses dimmed to shield his eyes against the incandescent brightness of the explosion.\n\nIt seemed the battle paused for breath, as though death were admiring its handiwork.\n\nGargo leapt from the Shadowsword's turret as a ululating roar swept up the molten remains of the wall. "}
{"text":"cated. Abidemi couldn't see what had caused it, but a hundred-metre portion of the wall simply vanished in a blinding sheet of fire. The ringing echoes of its detonation were deafening, even within his helmet, and his auto-senses dimmed to shield his eyes against the incandescent brightness of the explosion.\n\nIt seemed the battle paused for breath, as though death were admiring its handiwork.\n\nGargo leapt from the Shadowsword's turret as a ululating roar swept up the molten remains of the wall. He too hefted a breacher shield and ran to join his brothers at the centre of the line.\n\n'Into the breach?' asked Gargo.\n\n'Once more,' agreed Zytos.\n\nHe lifted his hammer high and raised his voice beyond the tumult.\n\n'Indomitor! Into them!'\n\nWith Abidemi, Gargo and Zytos forming the tip of a charging wedge, the reserves of Vulkan's Own advanced into the fire and smoke. Abidemi saw the half-molten shape of a siege belfry, monstrous shapes surging from its buckled assault gates: migou giants in heavy suits of heat-resistant plate and iron helms beaten into the forms of daemons. Each was a hulking abhuman carrying a belt-fed chain gun and with a drum-like ammo hopper bolted to its spine. Roaring with idiot hatred, they braced themselves and unleashed the full fury of their weapons.\n\nTwo-metre tongues of fire blazed from their flared muzzles. Hundreds of men went down in the first volley of scything, high-calibre shells. Indomitor's advance faltered, but pushed on into the storm of fire and steel.\n\n'Into the fires of battle!' yelled Gargo.\n\n'Unto the anvil of war!' answered Abidemi and Zytos.\n\nAbidemi felt dozens of bludgeoning impacts on his shield, each one striking with the force of a forge-servitor swinging a sledgehammer. He gritted his teeth, locking his arm at ninety degrees as he slotted his bolter into the shield's firing notch.\n\nMore of the migou gunners were mounting the walls, unleashing fresh torrents of fire into the flanks of the defenders.\n\nClawed ladders and piston-driven grapnels bit stone. A tide of degenerates swarmed behind them, scrambling for a foothold on the walls. Little more than a howling mob wielding crudely stamped weapons and mass-produced guns, but there were so many. So very many.\n\nPrioritise. Execute.\n\n'Take out those gunners!' Abidemi shouted.\n\nHammering impacts buckled the curved plates of his shield, the power of the shells making Abidemi feel like he was advancing into the teeth of a pyro-storm. He lined up a shot and fired his bolter, the hard bang swallowed in the thunder of gunfire. One of the abhuman gunners fell back, its chest blown open. He fired again, and another dropped to its knees with half its torso ripped away. A third migou vanished in a pyre of streaking rounds as a mass-reactive detonated inside its ammo hopper.\n\nAbidemi's visor pinged each of the migou in turn. Pull the trigger: an enemy dead.\n\nSingle shots only. Not enough ammunition for any wasted shells!\n\nAnother target lit up, limned by his visor. Another round, another dead.\n\nThen he was in amongst them. He clamped his bolter to his thigh and swept Draukoros from its sheath.\n\n'Numeon!' he roared, hammering the foe with his shield and reaping a bloody harvest with every butcher's cleave of his sword.\n\nHis weapon was an extension of his arm, and he tore apart heavy plate and pallid flesh with every strike. The blade's shrieking teeth chewed through the armoured migou with all the hunger of a Nocturnean drake, devouring steel and flesh and bone with every ripping roar.\n\nThe enemy matched his bulk. Abidemi couldn't just smash them aside with his own mass. He kept moving, giving the migou no time to bracket him nor give his mortal enemies a chance to pin him in place with their numbers.\n\nHis shield was a bludgeon, pistoned forward to make space.\n\nBreathe and swing. Hack and cut.\n\nEach migou was a powerful foe, but they were slow. He slammed the hard edge of the shield into their faces. Ram the sword up and under their plates, twist, withdraw. Turn and move, do it again.\n\nThe slaughter was machine-like.\n\nRepetition made it instinctual and unthinking.\n\nAbidemi felt the presence of his brothers. Their grunts and oaths over the vox were wordless, but he understood every one. Zytos swung his hammer with a forging cadence as Gargo spun and lunged with his spear, scything and impaling men like wriggling fish.\n\nThe men and women of Vulkan's Own fought with rifle, pistol and bayonet; with iron bars or whatever else came to hand. The fighters were woven together so densely it was all but impossible to tell friend from foe. Men clawed at their enemies, bloodied fingers tearing off masks and thumbs gouging eyes.\n\nThis was not the war the remembrancers had spoken of in the earliest days of the crusade.\n\nWar, when it had come at all back then, had been filled with glory and heroics fit for song. Not this frenzied brawling in the mud of the Throneworld, scraping for a rusted blade to open a throat, or a chunk of fused masonry to bash in a skull. This was the true face of war: a desperate fight for survival; a scrambling, maddened horror in which only the insane survived.\n\nAll else was but a soldier's lie.\n\nAbidemi slammed three men from the walls, their broken-limbed bodies spinning over the rampart to fall two hundred metres to the ruins below.\n\nHe let out a shuddering breath.\n\nRemember to breathe! Take in oxygen. Turn and fight!\n\nHe'd fought to the very crest of the breach, where the vast detonation had broken the rampart. The full horror of the broken landscape before Indomitor was revealed, and the shocking sight of the enemy was like plunging into an ice bath after a hard march over the Pyre Desert.\n\nAbidemi had heard the estimates of the enemy's order of battle, the impossible numbers thrown around by Lord Dorn's strategos. He'd seen the vast shadows cast by the drop-ships blotting out the sky over Lion's Gate space port, and had fought this war long enough to know just how many of his fellow Imperials had cast off their oaths of loyalty.\n\nBut each time he saw the unending horde ranged against them, it broke his heart anew.\n\nThe force attacking Indomitor spread like an undulant sea beneath a choking layer of petrochemical smog. To Abidemi's eyes, it was like a host of pack predators swarming a leviathan at bay. Larger, battle-bred creatures moved among them: hideous by-blows of the fallen Mechanicum that walked on stilt-legs and loosed violent squalls of corrupt binharic hate, and things that might once have been living, but were now armoured, chimeric monsters transformed by warp-spawned rituals.\n\nFar to the south, the air rippled around the immense form of Titans as they strode from the Anterior Barbican to pummel the strongholds protecting the Eternity Gate. Heedless of the life-and-death struggles at their feet, the god-machines howled their fury from war-horns at their shoulders, but even those sounds were overwhelmed by the rolling thunder of explosions and shellfire.\n\nA series of seismic detonations smashed into the slope below, pulling him back to the present as a killing rain of debris hammered down. More of the mortals swarmed the breach below him. They fired their weapons into the air, hooting like maddened beasts. Huge stalk-tanks bristling with spikes and heavy ordnance stomped among them. Through the twitching smoke, Abidemi thought he saw the red-and-gold heraldry of swift-striding leviathans.\n\nToo small to be Titans, even predatory Warhounds. Knights...?\n\nHe knew he was exposed here, backlit by the smoke and flames swirling around him, but didn't care. He wanted them to see him, to know the Emperor's warriors were not afraid of them, that the traitors would pay dearly for every step inwards they took.\n\nThis was an enemy driven by a hate Abidemi simply could not fathom.\n\nA rippling string of ignitions bloomed in the smoke below, and the red-gold shapes strode from the fog banks in their wake. Low to the ground they came, heedless of the mortals they crushed beneath their splay-clawed feet: three giant bipedal forms with vast glaives and weapons mounted beneath wide pauldrons of bloody crimson and gold.\n\n'Morbidia,' hissed Abidemi, recognising the spiked-helm sigil on the fire-blackened banner rising over the lead Knight's skull-faced cockpit.\n\nA crackling voice blared a warning in his helmet vox. Gargo.\n\n'Incoming!'\n\nAbidemi looked up in time to see a salvo of Ironstorm missiles flashing downwards.\n\nHe closed his eyes.\n\n'The man who looks to the ground does not see the winged dactyl...'\n\nSurvivors\n\nThe Field of Winged Victory.\n\nThat was what they called this place, a vast marshalling ground older than Bhab, a place that had been here in the days before Unification, before even the Palace itself.\n\nAlivia Sureka remembered watching the first starships to leave Terra from terrain now occupied by the nearby towers of the Clanium Library, back when the marshalling ground's name had seemed fitting.\n\nIt had been a name to inspire greatness, to dream beyond humanity's birthrock and seize the manifest destiny of the species.\n\nNow it felt like a grotesque joke.\n\nBack then, a hundred thousand soldiers left Terra every day from here. Close to ten times that number now filled the open esplanade, but they weren't going anywhere: a living ocean of human misery. Numb with fear and daily atrocities, they huddled in makeshift refugee camps and shanties wedged between the Indomitor Wall and the canyon-precincts of the Hegemon. And this was but one of scores of such places jammed in wherever non-combatants could be accommodated.\n\nHigh above the grand domes of Imperial bureaucracy, the sky bled its horror in purple bruises of light on the shield overhead. The air buckled with shock pulses from the constant ordnance barrages bursting against it.\n\nSome of the plaza's earliest occupants had considered themselves the privileged few for having been granted access to the inner precincts of the Palace, but the inexorable pressure of the Ou"}
{"text":"but one of scores of such places jammed in wherever non-combatants could be accommodated.\n\nHigh above the grand domes of Imperial bureaucracy, the sky bled its horror in purple bruises of light on the shield overhead. The air buckled with shock pulses from the constant ordnance barrages bursting against it.\n\nSome of the plaza's earliest occupants had considered themselves the privileged few for having been granted access to the inner precincts of the Palace, but the inexorable pressure of the Outer Palace's systematic destruction had forced Terra's grandees to admit everyone.\n\nWho was it that gave the order to open the gates?\n\nAlivia doubted it had been Dorn.\n\nNor, she suspected, would it have been Valdor: the First of the Ten Thousand would have baulked at the notion of so many unknown souls this close to the Emperor.\n\nThe Sigillite then? The Master of Mankind had His gaze fixed on loftier outcomes than the survival of Terra's populace, but the Regent of Terra's voice bore the Emperor's authority.\n\nSo, yes, it would likely have been Malcador, which only went to prove that you could know someone for an eternity and still be surprised.\n\nAlivia scanned the sea of faces around her, exhausted families aged by grief and coated in a fine layer of ash that fell like snow. No matter the money, position or power they had in the time before the Warmaster had invested Terra, they were all alike in fear. These were the survivors of Lion's Gate, the ruination of Angevin, or the Dusk Wall's breach, the razing of Magnifican. They had fled burning camps on the Gangetic Way, the Palatine's collapse or the loss of Dhwalagiri. Filthy, frightened and stained with mud, they watched and prayed for the fighting to end, but most could care little for whoever stood triumphant at its end.\n\nThe sound of prayers, despair and tears was a constant refrain.\n\nThis is the sound of the end of the world: men weeping as their doom approaches.\n\nAlivia tried to keep her own anguish at bay, but she had heard enough horror stories to last all her many lifetimes: dead loved ones, grievously wounded partners, sons and daughters fighting on the walls, and - worst of all - tales of parents whose grip had slipped, and who now frantically scoured the camps in search of their lost children.\n\nAlivia remembered the sense of relief that had filled her at their arrival on Terra. The journey from Molech had been long and hard, but when she'd breathed the ferrous air of the home world, it felt like she'd managed to outpace the war at their heels.\n\nA fantasy, of course. It was inevitable Horus Lupercal would eventually lay siege to his father's Palace, but the sight of what Rogal Dorn had wrought gave her hope it would be enough to stop the arch-traitor in his tracks. She'd believed they would be safe in Lion's Gate space port, the Starspear's incomprehensible bulk dwarfing the mountains from which the Palace had been carved. Its towering immensity was awash with weapons, plated from surface to space in fortifications, and manned by the gilded host of Lord Dorn himself.\n\nSurely such an invincible fortress could never fall?\n\nBut fall it had. The enemy had driven a wedge into its heart and split it from its uppermost platforms to its deepest underways. The bridges linking its gantries to the Eternity Wall were still burning, its spires aflame beyond thick black clouds.\n\nShe'd heard tales of red-spined things hunting across those bridges, of people dragged down into impossible shadows. Alivia had seen a man and woman running for the safety of the bridge gates plucked from the ground by invisible hands and torn limb from limb, the aerosolising mist of their blood limning the frenzied outlines of claw-armed monsters.\n\nLaughter had chased them from Lion's Gate, malicious gales of throaty amusement that weren't loud enough to overcome the deafening crescendo of battle, but somehow resonated within the vault of every mortal skull.\n\nWhen she closed her eyes she could still hear that laughter, buzzing like a furious insect trapped in a glass. It had been days since she'd slept, but the bone-deep tiredness was better than the alternative. Her dreams were plagued with dark visions: nightmares of snakes, a lightless cavern far beneath the world and a doorway to somewhere endless and terrible.\n\nThe horrors of war broke many a soldier, even those who came through the fighting with their limbs and bodies intact. The psychic wounds of battle and the anguish of seeing fellow soldiers die or suffer horrific injuries was enough to sunder even the strongest mind beyond the power of any medicae to heal.\n\nAlivia saw those self-same wounds on the faces of everyone she passed.\n\nNo matter who claimed the throne of Terra, they would inherit a populace as traumatised as any of the soldiers who had fought for it.\n\nAlivia passed a group of kneeling men and women, grimy with mud and dust. Heads bowed, they prayed, mouthing words with hymnal cadence. A man with weeping chem-blisters covering his face and neck spoke words handwritten on a twine-bound sheaf of papers. He looked up at her passing and she winced to see that one of his eyes was a ruined, empty socket set in a molten mass of blackened tissue. The whiteness of bone gleamed through his cheek.\n\n'Pray with us, sister,' he said, the words mangled by his wounds.\n\n'No,' she said, turning away. 'I won't.'\n\n'Please, the Emperor needs all our love and devotion to defeat this foe.'\n\nAlivia snorted. 'If He needs my love then we're in even more trouble than I thought.'\n\nShe pressed on, easing through the crowds of terror-numbed people, heading towards the muster column at the centre of the plaza as the man called after her.\n\n'There is only the Emperor, and He is our shield and protector!'\n\nAlivia shook her head. Since setting foot on Terra she had felt nothing of the Emperor's presence. Even she had to acknowledge how strange that was. Even on Molech, there'd been a sliver of His presence, a ghost of His power borne on that damn light of His, but here in the heart of His domain... nothing.\n\nDid that mean anything? Probably not, but still...\n\n'Alivia!' called Jeph, and she looked up to see him and the girls exactly where she'd left them at the base of the column with their meagre possessions. She was struck again at how thin he'd become. Working at Molech's starport had kept Jeph fit and given him some decent upper body strength, but the months of privation aboard Molech's Enlightenment had taken its toll, and the thin food-pastes spooned out in the feeding tents were almost valueless in terms of nourishment.\n\n'What was that about?' he asked, looking back over her shoulder.\n\n'Nothing,' she said. 'Just another of those damn prayer groups.'\n\n'Lectitio Divinitatus?'\n\n'Don't call it that,' she said. 'It's just desperate people looking for answers where they won't get any. It's just blind faith.'\n\n'Maybe so, Liv, but could be that's better than hopelessness.'\n\nShe wanted to rebuke him for so naive a belief, but she suspected he was right. Besides, no one seemed to care any more about such theistic beliefs, so long as they weren't too overt.\n\nAlivia supposed that, amid all this suffering, where any lifeline - no matter how flawed she believed it to be - could be the difference between survival or giving up, faith would have to be enough. She just hoped it would wither on the vine after this was all over.\n\nAlivia leaned in to give him a kiss and bent down to her girls.\n\nMiska was asleep, curled up on a thin blanket and sucking her thumb like she'd done when she was a baby. Tiredness and hunger had hardened her once cherub-like features, and her shaven head only emphasised how gaunt she'd become. With every step deeper into the Palace they'd taken, Miska had spoken less and less. Day by day, Alivia's mischief maker was fading away, and she felt tears threaten to spill down her cheeks.\n\nShe rubbed the heels of her palms against her eyes then ran her hands over the stubbled skin of her own head. She missed her hair, but the itching had been too irritating. A plague of lice had spread through the refugee camps, and so she'd taken a razor to her hair and that of her family. Jeph hadn't minded so much, he was thinning on top anyway, but the girls had protested loudly until Alivia had shown them the wriggling eggs on each other's scalp.\n\nVivyen looked up from the chapbook that never left her side and gave her a wan smile.\n\nLike her sister, she too was suffering, her features raw with a fever that left her sweating in the cold nights and freezing during the days, no matter how they tried to warm her.\n\n'Did you get them?' she asked.\n\n'I'm so sorry, my love,' said Alivia. 'I couldn't. There's none to be had.'\n\nThe fever had struck on the retreat from Lion's Gate, and the thin air of the mountains, the cold and the lack of food was exacting a fearsome toll on her daughter.\n\nAlivia had tried to get counterbiotics from a twitch-faced man who sold pilfered medicae supplies, a man she suspected had stripped his uniform to hide in the civilian populace. He hadn't wanted to part with his pills for what she had to offer, and no amount of psychic effort had convinced him to lower his price.\n\nJohn had always been the best at reaching into another's mind and bending them to his will, but she wasn't without some skill in that arena. Since arriving on Terra, though, she'd found her ability to push a person to her way of thinking had all but vanished.\n\n'Don't worry, I'll be okay,' Vivyen said, turning back to the book.\n\nDust had all but obscured the image on its cover, and Alivia remembered how vivid it had been on the day she'd slipped into the Odense Domkirke to steal it. The stories it contained were fairy tales, but that term was misleading. Each was a parable that spoke to the heart, stories that depicted the vast and complex tapestries of humanity in all their glorious and terrible forms. And like all stories, they had power.\n\nA power Alivia didn't fully understand, but "}
{"text":"n said, turning back to the book.\n\nDust had all but obscured the image on its cover, and Alivia remembered how vivid it had been on the day she'd slipped into the Odense Domkirke to steal it. The stories it contained were fairy tales, but that term was misleading. Each was a parable that spoke to the heart, stories that depicted the vast and complex tapestries of humanity in all their glorious and terrible forms. And like all stories, they had power.\n\nA power Alivia didn't fully understand, but which had saved her life and her daughter's more than once. Those stories had kept Vivyen alive as a prisoner of a warp cult aboard Molech's Enlightenment, and they had offered up direction when Alivia had needed it most.\n\nIn that respect, was it so different from the Lectitio Divinitatus?\n\n'What story are you reading?' she asked.\n\n'The Nightingale.'\n\nAlivia bit her lip. 'That's a good one.'\n\nVivyen coughed and said, 'I wish our Emperor had a nightingale.'\n\n'Maybe He does,' said Alivia as she saw a man in a dress-black uniform and damask cloak coming towards her through the crowds of refugees. She recognised him immediately.\n\nHe came to attention before her, ramrod straight and with his hands laced behind his back.\n\n'Khalid Hassan,' she said. 'I should have known you'd be back.'\n\n'Did you ever doubt it?' he asked, his voice as tired as hers.\n\nMalcador's man had summoned her to his master's side even before she'd stepped from Molech's Enlightenment's embarkation ramp, but had left without her. Even as she rebuffed the Sigillite's summons, Alivia had known he would come again.\n\n'You're looking tired,' said Alivia.\n\n'This war taxes us all,' he replied.\n\n'Hey,' said Jeph. 'She told you to get lost already. She's not going with you.'\n\nHassan ignored him and said, 'It's time to come in from the cold, Mistress Sureka.'\n\nAlivia looked down at her girls, tired and hungry, thin and fevered.\n\nShe nodded slowly and said, 'They come with me. All of them.'\n\n'Of course. The Sigillite offers you and your family sanctuary within the Bhab Bastion.'\n\n'Then, okay,' said Alivia. 'It's time for this nightingale to come home.'\n\nPyroclastic clouds of fire stretched from horizon to horizon.\n\nThe taste of ash and iron filled his throat.\n\nThe pain was like stabbing obsidian blades paring the flesh from his bones, like magma straight from the heart of Nocturne filling his marrow. It troubled him not, for he was a Son of Vulkan; he was born to endure pain.\n\nAbidemi beheld the end of days wrought in volcanic eruptions and seismic fury. Nocturne was tearing itself apart in wracking spasms of catastrophic eruptions. Fire filled his vision and steam scoured his lungs to mulch as distant oceans boiled to vapour.\n\nEven the towering permanence of Mount Deathfire split apart in this final apocalypse, its flanks rupturing as something deep within surged and raged in deathless fury.\n\nAbidemi stood alone as his world came undone, its imperishable bedrock crumbling to ash and its molten heart exploding as the ur-drakes rose to destroy the realm of man. Searing sheets of lava spurted skyward from yawning fissures that pulled wider with every breath. Boiling clouds of superheated smoke rolled across the heavens, where forks of lightning powerful enough to obliterate warships clashed.\n\nHe felt no fear, for the Salamanders had no eschatological mythology, but rather a belief in the eternal circle of fire that spoke of life arising from even the most terrible catastrophes. To the tribes of Nocturne every worthy act of creation was born of destruction - from the creation of the stars themselves to the crafting of a mighty blade.\n\nThe basalt cliffs of Mount Deathfire finally came apart, exploding in a cataclysmic avalanche of rock and magma as two colossal shapes were birthed from its fiery annihilation. Twisting shadows of draconic fury moved within the molten rock, inhumanly vast and monstrous. Abidemi gasped as red-lit veils of lava fell in a burning rain that turned the earth to liquid fire.\n\nTwo ur-drakes roared as they fought, titanic beasts beyond any human comprehension of scale, so vast that Abidemi's gaze could not encompass the entirety of their cosmic nature.\n\nOne was scaled all in deepest green and onyx, with claws of fire and eyes like burning red coals. The other glowed with the dull light of cooling magma and Abidemi saw that one of its eyes was naught but an empty socket, like a crater gouged in the surface of a moon.\n\nThey tore at one another with jaws that could sunder continents, and raked armoured flesh with talons to shatter mountains. Their blood was the coursing power of the planet, and with each ferocious blow, the beating heart at the centre of the world slowed and cooled, even as the world above burned.\n\nThe crimson ur-drake snapped its jaws shut on the throat of its drakescale-green opponent, tearing away armoured hide and furnace blood. The wounded ur-drake drove its claws of fire into the belly of its rival, scoring deep gouges in its flesh. Horns gored and tails lashed as the mighty serpents of legend fought, but already Abidemi could see that the green serpent was losing.\n\nIts gaze was fixed on the far horizon, and in a contest between such beings, even the tiniest moment of inattention was fatal. The crimson ur-drake bore the green-and-black drake to the ground, and the planet shook with the force of their impact.\n\nAbidemi fell to his knees and wept as the crimson drake snapped and tore at the other.\n\nHe despaired to see the green drake laid low, knowing with every fibre of his being that it was vital it not die, that he owed everything to it. He reached for Draukoros and as he drew the blade of Artellus Numeon, two burning figures appeared at his side. One bore a golden spear of caged lightning, the other a hammer of thunder, and he knew them as his brothers.\n\nAbidemi lifted Draukoros high, the fires of battle reflecting from its ebon teeth.\n\n'Father!' he cried. 'Your Promethean sons are with you!'\n\nHe charged towards the duelling world-serpents.\n\nAnd his brothers in fire followed.\n\nThen light, blinding and stabbing into his eyes like bright needles.\n\nHis vision of Nocturne's ending faded as the terrible reality of Terra's plight pressed in again. He felt the weight of his transhuman body compacted within the unyielding grasp of his warplate. Making sense of what he was seeing was proving difficult: both of his helm's eye-lenses were cracked, and fizzing static overlaid his sight with ghost images he couldn't quite make out.\n\nBlood filled his mouth. His skin was sticky with it.\n\n'Barek!' shouted a gruff voice he knew he should recognise. 'I have him. He's alive!'\n\nAbidemi spat a mouthful of dust and ash, blinking to clear his eyes.\n\nHe saw Igen Gargo silhouetted against a shifting pattern of colours. It took Abidemi a moment to realise he was looking up through several tonnes of smashed debris pressing down on him, and that the borealis above his brother was the underside of the aegis shield.\n\nThe pressure on him shifted as Gargo dug him from the rubble, the power of his augmetic arms hauling broken slabs of rockcrete and steel from his pinned body as though he were tearing flakboard from a wall.\n\n'Get me out of here,' said Abidemi, flexing his shoulders. The rock groaned around him.\n\n'Hold still, Atok,' warned Gargo. 'That rocket strike brought half the damn breach down on you.'\n\n'I... I thought I was dead,' he replied.\n\nBarek Zytos appeared next to Gargo, his onyx skin pale with ash.\n\n'It'll take more than half of Indomitor coming down to kill Atok Abidemi,' he declared.\n\n'Not much more,' muttered Gargo.\n\nAbidemi's arm came loose, and with both his brothers working to free him, enough of the rubble was removed for him to pull himself clear. The green of his armour was grey with rock dust, the metal and ceramite buckled and torn, yet mostly intact.\n\nHe climbed to his feet, and blinked in the pale light. Thick fog freighted with a strangely familiar taste shrouded the blasted edge of Indomitor. It obscured the dolorous sound of the enemy camps beyond the walls, muffling the chants of the lost and the damned and making the war seem far away.\n\n'Morbidia?' said Abidemi. 'I saw Knights...'\n\n'Shadowswords and Vulkan's Own saw them off,' said Gargo.\n\n'Them and a Knight Castellan from House Cadmus,' added Zytos.\n\nAbidemi nodded, taking a deep breath and finally recognising the familiar taste of the surrounding fog. It was faintly sulphurous and bore the earthy aroma of deep rock and raw metal.\n\n...like the breath of a wounded drake with scale-green hide...\n\nAbidemi felt a fist clench in his gut.\n\nA terrible fear that the enemy beyond Indomitor was not the one they ought to be facing.\n\n'Brothers,' he said, 'Vulkan needs us.'\n\nSmall Perturbations\n\nIt wasn't supposed to be this way...\n\nMagnus paced the interior of his pavilion, a high-ceilinged war tent floored in overlapping rugs, the patterns of which formed an interlocking series of spirals and geometric designs. The pavilion's silken fabric pulsed in time with the primarch's furious heartbeat, and with every rustle of fabric, tendrils of low-lying fumes and the distant crump of explosions crept in.\n\nA crazed looking glass set in a frame of plain gallowswood stood in a far corner of the pavilion. Restored from broken pieces like diamond daggers, it threw out jagged reflections of the three warriors gathered around the primarch's expansive map table.\n\nAll were Corvidae: Ahriman; Menkaura; Amon. Crimson armour gleamed and their cloaks of stars were untroubled by the mud and ash of this world.\n\nLoyal warriors all, and each a traitor too in his own way.\n\nThey felt the anger radiating from Magnus in palpable waves.\n\nThey fear my retribution, that I blame them for the failure at Colossi.\n\nThe pavilion's walls were hung with brass-framed images of manuscripts Magnus had recreated from memory after the destruction of Tizca's libraries: Shakespire's greatest soliloquies; the last, stubbornly resist"}
{"text":"on armour gleamed and their cloaks of stars were untroubled by the mud and ash of this world.\n\nLoyal warriors all, and each a traitor too in his own way.\n\nThey felt the anger radiating from Magnus in palpable waves.\n\nThey fear my retribution, that I blame them for the failure at Colossi.\n\nThe pavilion's walls were hung with brass-framed images of manuscripts Magnus had recreated from memory after the destruction of Tizca's libraries: Shakespire's greatest soliloquies; the last, stubbornly resistant page of the Voynich Manuscript; and his favourite couplets taken from the works of Khut-Nah, Laban and Eltdown.\n\n Every item within the pavilion was vibrating at a pitch just below its shattering point.\n\n'Colossi should have fallen,' stated Ahriman, wary of his gene-sire's fury.\n\n'Yes,' sighed Magnus. 'It should have.'\n\n'The Corvidae saw it,' added Amon, rallying to his Fellowship brother's aid. 'We all saw the wall aflame and the great gateway reduced to molten slag. Ignis himself declared the numbers auspicious and the result a virtual certainty.'\n\nLittle affection remained between Magnus' equerry and his Chief Librarian, so Amon coming to Ahriman's aid was testament to how unexpected was this moment in time. Since Ahriman's return with Magnus' scattered soul-shards, his star had risen among the Legion, something of which Amon had whispered darkly in the prophetic scriptures he kept secret from his brothers.\n\n'The fault is not yours alone,' said Magnus, struggling to leash his anger. 'I too walked the future echo of Colossi's doom. I too watched the Pale King's warriors of dusk pour inside. I believed we had achieved what was necessary. And yet it held. The Khan and Valdor fought us to a bloody standstill!'\n\nThe primarch jabbed a red finger onto the unrolled sheet of wax paper spread upon the circular map table. A vast swathe of the Himalazia region was rendered in exquisite beauty and vivid colours. At its centre was the hand-drawn outline of the Emperor's Palace: a vast agglomeration of enormous man-made structures that formed an urbanised continent spread across the mighty peaks of this ancient land. Squirming formulae of incalculable complexity were etched on the chart, distilled to their deepest truths by the Legion's magi.\n\nMagnus tapped a detailed representation of the smashed Colossi Gate, its towers toppled and its walls broken. Red-gold flames of fresh ink seemed to shimmer on the paper.\n\nContrary to the broken icon and against all predictions, Colossi had held.\n\nNeither Perturabo nor Mortarion were aware of Magnus' designs, but even the newly elevated Plague Lord sensed that success at the Colossi Gate had held greater significance to his brother beyond the obvious tactical value.\n\nHow had it held?\n\nMagnus had no satisfactory answer to that.\n\n'Colossi's fall was to herald the crack in the telaethesic ward of the Sanctum Imperialis,' said Magnus. 'The Red Angel rages at its edge and Mortarion curses that he cannot cross its threshold. While it remains intact, the warp-taken can go no farther.'\n\n'And you, my lord?' said Ahriman. 'Is the threshold barred to you also?'\n\n'I am a numinous being of light,' said Magnus. 'My subtle body is a weaving of broken flesh and splintered soul, but it is not yet fully given over to immaterial powers. If Colossi had fallen, yes, I could have stormed the heart of the Palace, but while it stands...'\n\n'It should have fallen,' said Amon.\n\n'It was seen,' said Ahriman.\n\n'It was seen,' agreed Menkaura.\n\nAlone of the three Corvidae warriors, he kept his eyeless face obscured, enclosed within a featureless silver helm of an archaic armour mark. His aura spoke of hidden things, but Magnus cared nothing for whatever petty betrayals or schemes he had worked since Prospero's fall.\n\nThe primarch swept his finger into the Palace as the image of Colossi restored itself on the map, its towers rebuilding and its gate reforming from molten shards to once again become a hardened strongpoint. He spiralled his finger anticlockwise, moving gradually inwards.\n\n'Khat Mandau Precinct, the Bhab Bastion, the Hall of Leng...'\n\nHere, he lingered a beat, before moving on.\n\n'...the Investiary, the Dome of Illumination, the Hegemon, the Clanium Library.'\n\nHis finger finally stopped.\n\n'The Throne Room,' said Magnus. 'The Warmaster's final objective.'\n\nThey all heard the emphasis he placed on Warmaster.\n\n'But never ours,' said Ahriman.\n\n'But never ours,' confirmed Magnus. 'Of all the prizes to be taken on Terra, of supreme importance to me is the subterranean arcology where lies the last shard of my soul.'\n\nA coiling red light lifted from the paper, like a splintered sliver of glass shorn from a larger whole. Magnus was reminded of his earliest explorations of Prospero, and the tall statue of a great bird left on a clifftop path above a long-dead city.\n\nIts fall and shattering into multicoloured fragments of glass had revealed to him the secret workings of the Primordial Creator and taught him the mechanics of what would later become the Fellowships of the Thousand Sons.\n\n'All broken things will break to their own form and purpose,' said Magnus. 'My soul, the Imperium, even this war of Horus Lupercal's. So, understand this, my sons, what my father holds captive beneath His Palace is not simply part of me, it is the best of me.'\n\n'We will not fail you again,' stated Amon, beating a hand to his breast.\n\nMagnus nodded, clenching his fist as he felt a tremor begin at the tips of his fingers.\n\nHe turned away from his sons and said, 'Amon, Menkaura, return to your warriors and form mandala circles around the pavilion. Ahriman, remain with me. We will fly the Great Ocean, you and I.'\n\n'Sire, is that wise?' asked Ahriman. 'The tides of the Great Ocean are turbulent beyond anything we have known. The Neverborn surge and rage at the veil. Let slip, they care not if what they kill is friend or foe.'\n\n'We must,' said Magnus. 'Guilliman and the Lion draw closer every day, and still the Palace stands. If there is a way inside to be found, only I can find it, no matter what Perturabo thinks. Now do as I command.'\n\nAmon and Menkaura saluted and left the pavilion, and with their departure Magnus let out a shuddering breath that was not breath and felt the quickening of a heart that was not a heart.\n\nHe clutched the edge of the map table as a spasm of pain passed through him.\n\n'Sire, what is it?' asked Ahriman.\n\nMagnus held up a hand and said, 'My father wrought this body with ancient science, forgotten alchemies and a pact even He could not entirely fathom, but I am no longer sure what I became after the Wolf King shattered my soul.'\n\n'You are Magnus the Red, the Crimson King,' said Ahriman.\n\n'Once perhaps, but without the last part of my soul I am something more... and also something less.'\n\nMagnus turned from the map table and stood before the broken looking glass.\n\n'Ten million shards of glass and tears...' said Magnus.\n\n'Sire?'\n\n'I smashed this on Prospero when I destroyed my chambers in a fit of rage. You remember? Just after I soared to Terra on warp-spawned wings, thinking to warn my father of the Warmaster's betrayal.'\n\n'I remember,' said Ahriman. 'It was the beginning of the end for us.'\n\nMagnus shook his head. 'No, our ending began long before that,' he said sadly.\n\nHe reached out and ran a red finger along the cracks in the glass.\n\n'I always used to mock Angron for his loss of control, his bestial rages. I believed him to be weak, but when I saw what I had done, I knew I was no better than him. I thought so much of myself, that I was infallible, that I knew better than everyone else.'\n\n'Then why do you keep it, my lord?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'I like to think that each shard displays a facet of my inner self,' he said. 'Some I know all too well, while others are reflections of unfamiliar faces. Some are noble, some are wondrous, others miraculous. And, forgive me, but many are dark and terrible.'\n\nHis trailing finger reached the centre of the looking glass, where a single, teardrop-shaped shard of glass was missing from the frame.\n\n'But always at the heart of the image is this... emptiness.'\n\nMagnus stared at the looking glass, and his splintered reflection stared back at him.\n\nTall he was, even among his brother primarchs, red-fleshed and corded with muscle.\n\nRed hair billowed around his face like a lion's mane, held in place by a gold-and-ivory circlet helm. His armour was bronze with a horned breastplate, rippling with a promethium sheen of colours as if freshly forged. Long pteruges of the finest boiled leather hung to his knees, their length set with golden studs and carved with esoteric scripture.\n\nHis solitary eye was a shimmer of endlessly varied colours without name and set in skin the colour of molten copper. Magnus reached up to touch the crumpled skin covering where his other eye ought to be.\n\n'With the merest thought, I can reshape my appearance, becoming godlike or mundane, beauteous or monstrous but this... this I will not change.'\n\nHe lifted his hand from his face and opened his fingers.\n\nThe tremoring was getting worse.\n\nIf Ahriman saw it, he said nothing.\n\n'Join me, my son,' said Magnus, moving to the centre of the pavilion and sitting cross-legged on the rugs at the confluence of their interlocking spirals. Ahriman took position opposite him, and already Magnus could feel the power of his sons flowing towards them as they formed mandala circles.\n\n'You're right, Ahzek, it is supremely dangerous to fly the Great Ocean just now,' said Magnus. 'But I am running out of time.'\n\nHe looked skyward as power flowed into him.\n\n'We all are.'\n\nMagnus lifted from his physical self with an ease denied his sons.\n\nHis flesh was already transforming from material to immaterial. Unlike Ahriman, he needed no enumerations to pick the lock on the chains that fettered spirit to flesh. The sense of liberation was intoxicating, like bearing an invisible burden on a mountain climb and then casting it off at the summit to ta"}
{"text":"at Ocean just now,' said Magnus. 'But I am running out of time.'\n\nHe looked skyward as power flowed into him.\n\n'We all are.'\n\nMagnus lifted from his physical self with an ease denied his sons.\n\nHis flesh was already transforming from material to immaterial. Unlike Ahriman, he needed no enumerations to pick the lock on the chains that fettered spirit to flesh. The sense of liberation was intoxicating, like bearing an invisible burden on a mountain climb and then casting it off at the summit to take flight.\n\nThe earth fell away from him as his subtle body soared free. Ahriman's followed behind him, a spiralling comet of ivory fire. Freed from his flesh, Magnus was a being of pure energy, a being of divine origin unbound by the limitations of flesh. Neither hunger nor thirst troubled him, nor did the boundaries of space and time constrain him overmuch.\n\nTo a being such as Magnus, all time and space were his to explore.\n\nThey will be...\n\nMagnus knew well the whispers of the warp, but even he could not say for sure whether that was some Neverborn temptation or his own vaunting ambition.\n\nHe rose up, borne by thundering updraughts of psychic energy.\n\nNormally, flight through the Great Ocean was made in stillness and tranquillity, but the war beneath them was bleeding violent storms of emotions into the aether. Psychic hurricanes were raging all across the globe, amplified by the madness, anger and horror this war had unleashed. Infernal tempests of furious psychic energy made the aether of Terra like flying a Stormbird straight into the Eye of Terror.\n\nMost mortals knew nothing of this, but every living soul on Terra felt it in the darkness.\n\nThe constant terror and pain of the fighting was horrific, but the visions assailing them when they closed their eyes were far worse.\n\nBeyond the psychic canopy protecting the inner precincts of the Palace, Magnus saw a swirling morass of ghostly forms: the Neverborn circling like carrion crows anticipating the slaughter to come.\n\nHorns, and claws...\n\nToo many eyes and too-wide jaws...\n\nUnquenchable appetites...\n\nAhriman flew beside him, his body of light a pure and perfect being.\n\n'We burn too brightly, my lord,' he said, pointing to where trails of warp-spawned monsters rose towards them like plasmic storms lifting from a star's corona: lone predators, swarms of pack hunters, and gibbering hosts of raw fury.\n\nMagnus grinned and said, 'I dim my brilliance for no one, not for any man and certainly not for daemons.'\n\nAnd with a thought, he was armed with his heqa staff and a khopesh with a bronze blade wreathed in fire. Ahriman followed his father's example, and moments later, he too was clad in armour and armed with his ebon-black heqa staff.\n\nThe swarming host rose up to them in a boiling tide of insensate hunger.\n\n'Into them,' said Magnus.\n\nTogether, father and son fought as one, burning with fire and fury. The light of Magnus' khopesh cut the Neverborn apart, dispersing their essences like mist before a hurricane. Mightier than even the most terrible of the daemons, he spun and dived between them. He felt their claws upon him like talons of ice even as he burned them away with searing lightning from his eye and coruscating fire from his staff.\n\nMagnus wove a web of destruction through the Neverborn, his staff and blade and power not simply killing them but unmaking them. Their screams were piteous, but Magnus had no care for their dissolution, no thought beyond his own desire to reach out and destroy.\n\nAhriman matched his fury, a cathartic release for both of them after the failure at Colossi.\n\nIn the end, they were triumphant, blazing warriors resplendent amid tumbling scraps of sickly light that faded as they fell. Far below, the waking dreams and nightmares of mortals were filled with visions of fiery angels destroying the daemons, and depending on which side of the wall they fought, were either uplifted or plunged into despair.\n\n'As above, so below,' said Magnus.\n\n'That felt good,' admitted Ahriman.\n\nPower surging between them, master and student looked down upon the surface of Terra.\n\nAs magnificent as Magnus' map of the Palace was, nothing could do justice to the vista spread out before him. Only the bombed-out mega-hives of SudMerica came close to the scale of the Palace, and even they were mere shanties in comparison. Neither could the subterranean arcologies of Marianas or the sprawling predator cities of ancient Kievan-Rus hope to match its scale.\n\n'It is magnificent,' said Ahriman, his form still bleeding off streamers of his battle fury.\n\n'It is indeed,' said Magnus. 'In an earlier age, before the coming of the great hives of Europa, these mountains were the tallest peaks in the world and mantled in snow. Self-styled adventurers sought to conquer their lofty heights, and seekers of esoteric wisdom plumbed the secrets hidden in the darkness beneath them.'\n\n'I remember Lemuel Gaumon telling me he had travelled here in search of a cure for his wife's malady,' said Ahriman.\n\n'A pity he did not find what he sought, but that path eventually led him to us, so perhaps it was not entirely a fool's errand.'\n\n'I wonder if Bodvar Bjarki killed him on Nikaea,' said Ahriman.\n\n'More than likely. Menkaura bound a fragment of my soul to his flesh. I imagine a zealot like Bjarki would cut him down as maleficarum as soon as we departed.'\n\nAhriman didn't answer, but the ripples of colour running through his aura told Magnus that the notion of the remembrancer's death troubled him, and he put concerns for long-dead mortals aside as he surveyed the ground below.\n\nThe mountains of the Himalazia were no longer capped with snow, but scoured black and grey, their hearts gouged by industry and their flanks clad in silvered steel to prepare the ground for the building of the Palace. They were still wondrous, but now that wonder was brutalist and all the more melancholic for the lost beauty they had once possessed.\n\nThe Palace traversed ancient boundaries of nations, filled entire valleys, occupied planed shelves of rock where mountains had once stood, and squatted on the surface of Terra like an ever-growing parasite. In rough form, the outer circuit of the Eternity Wall resembled the infinity symbol, a geometry Magnus could not believe was accidental. Intentional or not, the symbolism of that perfect form had been brutally disrupted by the attackers tearing it down, stone by stone.\n\nSo much hate and destruction... What will be left when it is done?\n\n'Rogal Dorn has worked miracles on the defences,' said Ahriman.\n\n'I expected no less of my brother.'\n\n'True, but I had hoped for more from the Warmaster and Perturabo,' said Ahriman.\n\n'In what way?' said Magnus. He already knew the answer, but wanted to see if Ahriman had grasped the reality of Horus Lupercal's war.\n\n'Our entire strategy seems to be built around the idea of simply battering our way in with brute force and attrition,' said Ahriman. 'I see no finesse nor flanking stratagems, nor any ruses to sway those within to betrayal. It has already cost so much to even reach the surface of Terra... how much more will the Warmaster be willing to pay?'\n\n'You grasp the truth of it, Ahzek. The true enemy is not the walls of the Palace, nor even my brothers and their warriors within,' said Magnus. 'No, for all of us, the enemy is time. Legions still loyal to the Emperor are even now traversing the void to return to their master's side. If they reach Terra before the Emperor falls, then the day is lost. Horus knows this, and so the Palace must be smashed open with all speed. And if the cost of that is the blood of his brother Legions and his mortal followers, then so be it.'\n\n'By following such a strategy, the vanquished will be obliterated, and the victor little better,' said Ahriman. 'Whoever wins this war will be punch-drunk and reeling, their forces reduced to ghosts.'\n\n'This war has bled us, Ahzek, it has bled us hard,' said Magnus, 'But we remain strong. Together with the warriors I sent away before Russ' dogs fell on Prospero, the Legion numbers just over nine thousand. A paltry number by most reckonings, but one warrior of the Fifteenth is worth ten or more of any other legionary. Unlike Horus, I have been careful in husbanding the blood of my Legion for just such a moment.'\n\n'Wait, are you suggesting what I think you are suggesting?'\n\n'What do you believe I suggest?'\n\nAhriman's eyes widened as the implications of Magnus' unsaid words sank in.\n\n'That you mean to topple whoever finally claims Terra's throne and take it for yourself...'\n\n'Who among my brothers is as remotely suited as I for such a position?' demanded Magnus. 'Horus is already so rank with stolen powers that he burns from the inside out and sees it not. Perturabo might once have had the imagination to make such a leap, but it has been ground out of him. Angron or Mortarion are lords only of corpses and maggots, and as for Konrad and Fulgrim, they are not fit to rule themselves, let alone a galaxy.'\n\nHe could see his son was still astounded by the idea, but that was only to be expected.\n\n'Is this why we fly together?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'I know it sounds fantastical, treasonous even,' said Magnus. 'But consider this - we have all become so blinded by the idea that Horus Lupercal would see this war to its conclusion, that no other solution or outcome has even been considered.'\n\n'I admit I had not contemplated it.'\n\n'That is why it will work, Ahzek. No one will see the blow coming.'\n\n'There is no other who could rule Terra like you,' said Ahriman.\n\nMagnus nodded, pleased his greatest student had seen the truth of it.\n\n'It will be glorious,' said Magnus. 'Now, come, let us return to the world of flesh and blood, there is much we need to set in motion.'\n\nThey flew back towards the ground, passing through turbulent psychic squalls until the individual peaks of towers and strongholds were visible, their gilded domes and buttressed redoubts lit by the strobing glow of impacts against t"}
{"text":" is no other who could rule Terra like you,' said Ahriman.\n\nMagnus nodded, pleased his greatest student had seen the truth of it.\n\n'It will be glorious,' said Magnus. 'Now, come, let us return to the world of flesh and blood, there is much we need to set in motion.'\n\nThey flew back towards the ground, passing through turbulent psychic squalls until the individual peaks of towers and strongholds were visible, their gilded domes and buttressed redoubts lit by the strobing glow of impacts against the shields.\n\nMagnus was on the verge of allowing the weight of his physical form to draw his spirit back within, when Ahriman's voice halted him.\n\n'Sire!'\n\nHe followed Ahriman's pointing finger to a segment of the wall on the south-eastern corner of the Sanctum Imperialis, a section near the confluence of the Adamant Wall and the Western Hemispheric.\n\nAt first he wasn't sure what he was seeing, a twisting line of golden light.\n\nFaint and almost invisible, yet stark against the spectral resolution of the Palace.\n\nIt flickered in and out of existence, like an image of a lightning bolt caught on a picter.\n\n'What is it?' asked Ahriman.\n\nMagnus narrowed his vision as he tried to fix it in place, but it twisted and danced before him, refusing to be pinned down. He reached out with his aetheric senses and recoiled as he sensed the awesome power behind the light and realised what he was seeing.\n\n'Father...' breathed Magnus, not daring to believe that it was real. 'You sit upon your throne, hidden behind your wards and shields. I should be blind to your presence - I have been blind to your power since you retreated within your sanctum - but now I see what I was looking for... I see you...'\n\n'My lord, is that...?'\n\n'That light is a whisper of the Emperor's power, a breath of His presence leaking from within the Palace.'\n\nAhriman's aura blossomed as he understood the significance of that.\n\n'The crack we wrought in the telaethesic ward,' said Magnus. 'Our way in.'\n\nWheels within Wheels\n\nEncased in his grand lifter-throne strategium, the Lord of Iron was haloed by the flickering glow of his pict slates. His grim features were sheened with the pallid glow of the screens, his scalp pierced with cabling and studded with implants. Hooded eyes, always in motion, took in the vast quantities of data, processing and coordinating with every blink. Not even the greatest adept of the Martian priesthood could match Perturabo's speed of cognitive processing in matters of war.\n\nEvery screen flickered with brutal imagery, passing too swiftly for the unaugmented eye to follow: thousands of updates from ten thousand separate engagements across this war front and hundreds more across the globe. Only a handful of beings throughout the entire history of the species could coordinate battle over so many complex theatres of war.\n\nPerturabo's fingers - artist's fingers, thought Magnus - danced across invisible haptic keyboards, and with every stroke he sent scores of orders, altered multiple avenues of advance, or adjusted a hundred or more creeping barrages in real time.\n\nTo watch him was to witness a master craftsman at work.\n\nMore than any of his artificer brothers, Perturabo had been an artist and a creator. Yes, Vulkan had his forge-craft, and Ferrus Manus his proficiency with technology, but Perturabo had been an architect of beauty, a dreamer of things unimaginable to others.\n\nMagnus remembered Perturabo's private repository, the walls of its many rooms hung with plans for grand theatres, awe-inspiring palaces wrought in steel and glass, and cities of such grandeur that they approached Tizca in their ambition.\n\nThat so very few had ever been realised was an affront to his genius.\n\nThat his mastery was now employed simply to destroy was a waste of potential that still sat ill with Magnus, even as it now served his purpose.\n\nOn the heels of that thought, his eyes shifted to Forgebreaker, the mighty warhammer wrought by Fulgrim in the great Terrawatt forge of Mount Narodnya. Gifted to Ferrus Manus, it had been presented to the Warmaster upon his death, and subsequently passed to Perturabo.\n\nThe Lord of Iron had heavily modified the hammer, much to the Phoenician's chagrin.\n\nTowering battle-automata cranked to face Magnus as he approached, Perturabo's Iron Circle. Their burnished metal skins were soot-blackened and pocked by recent shell impacts and las-burns after a desperate sortie of Imperial Thunderbolts had somehow managed to fight through the defences of the Citadel of Iron. The fighters had launched a desperate attack, and though every one of them had been blasted from the air, two had managed to strafe his position before ploughing their burning wrecks into his vantage point.\n\nThe upper observation deck was gone, sheared away by the wing of a tumbling aircraft, and thus this penultimate level was now open to the sky. Bruised flarelight and booming shock pulses spread over the flickering remnants of the aegis shields as petrochemical conflagrations burned the sky in striated veils. Twisting firestacks danced like ifrit in the gutted remains of the Imperial Fleet College and made sport in the ruins of Aurum Bar. Radial processionals of gilded glory that had once hosted grand triumphs were rivers of brilliant gold, and their molten ruins were like the earliest days of a newborn world.\n\nPlumes of smoke without number gave the air a gritty, acidic flavour, and the constant crackling of detonations drew the eye with phosphor-bright blossoms in every direction.\n\nBefore Magnus could speak, Perturabo said, 'I'm busy, brother.'\n\nBrusqueness was nothing new to the Lord of Iron, and Magnus was not offended. After the failures of Saturnine and Colossi, the pressure bearing down on Perturabo from the Warmaster was immense and only increasing.\n\n'I do not doubt it, but I would beg a moment of your time.'\n\n'I would deny any of our other brothers,' said Perturabo, stepping down from his throne, 'but for you I will spare that moment.'\n\nMagnus turned back to the vista of destruction spread before them.\n\n'Soaring on the aether winds of the Great Ocean, it is possible to view the siegeworks as something abstract,' he said. 'As though it is a sculpted board in an exhibit meant to convey the scale of long-ago events to future historians. Untold millions are at war on Terra, slogging through mud, dust and bones to claw each other to death. Individually, their deaths are irrelevant. Even added together they are meaningless, just as each drop of water in a mountain river is meaningless. And yet still it cleaves the mountain.'\n\n'This is how you would spend my time? In metaphor?' said Perturabo. 'Learn to curb your tendency to overspeak, brother. I have fifteen major assaults commencing in moments.'\n\nFifteen, auspicious.\n\n'I only meant to say that the war looks different at every level,' said Magnus. 'Saturnine taught me that.'\n\n'You mean Dorn taught us that,' snapped Perturabo.\n\nMagnus needed no special sensitivity to see how deep the failure of Saturnine had cut the Lord of Iron. The long war for supremacy fought between Perturabo and Rogal had come down to this battle, this moment, and Dorn - that most singularly unimaginative of warriors - had somehow managed to outfox them all.\n\n'We all underestimated him,' said Magnus. 'We forgot that his talent would soar in response to your genius.'\n\n'Spare me the salve to my ego, Magnus. Rogal saw the weakness in his defence in time, and knowing I must have already seen it, baited us into a trap. It was breathtakingly daring. Had I not seen it with my own eyes, I would have thought my brother incapable of so astonishingly risky a ploy. And letting the Eternity Wall go...'\n\n'You believe he sacrificed the starport and everyone within it willingly?'\n\n'Of course,' said Perturabo, looking at him as if he were a fool for not understanding the audacity of their brother's ploy. 'It would have been the only way he could convince me he hadn't seen the weakness at Saturnine. If I didn't hate him so much, I would congratulate him on such ruthless triage.'\n\n'If even stolid Dorn can surprise us,' said Magnus, 'then these truly are the end times.'\n\nPerturabo shrugged, the plates of his armour rasping against the cabling of his skull. 'We were outmanoeuvred, it happens. But all our brother won was a brief respite. I will break open the Palace, that outcome is certain. The only question is how long it will take.'\n\n'An important question given the unknown whereabouts of Roboute and the Lion,' pointed out Magnus.\n\n'I am well aware that the clock is ticking. So unless you have some new information or the power to slow time, let me get back to work.'\n\nMagnus gestured towards Perturabo's lifter-throne and said, 'The new attacks you plan, will one of them be against Western Hemispheric?'\n\n'Yes,' said Perturabo. 'A pinning assault. I will throw troops against it and so Dorn must defend it. While they are engaged at Western Hemispheric and a dozen other fronts, the real blows will fall elsewhere. And don't ask me where, I won't tell you.'\n\n'You don't trust me?'\n\nThe Lord of Iron's eyes narrowed, as though trying to decide if the question were serious.\n\n'You always have your schemes, Magnus,' he said. 'You brought your Legion to Terra with an objective not aligned with that of the Warmaster. I won't pretend to understand what secret game you are playing, but I know you have held your warriors back from all major engagements, probing the walls like a caged animal testing the limits of its confinement.'\n\n'You're right,' admitted Magnus, circling the lifter-throne and its flickering pict slates. 'But in this moment, your goals, mine, and Horus' are in perfect synchrony.'\n\n'So what is it you want of me? And speak plainly for once.'\n\n'What if you could convince Dorn or his advisors that the attack on Western Hemispheric was something more, say, by placing the Thousand Sons in the order of battle as the Phoenician and the Third were at the Saturnine Wall?'\n\nPert"}
{"text":"ting the limits of its confinement.'\n\n'You're right,' admitted Magnus, circling the lifter-throne and its flickering pict slates. 'But in this moment, your goals, mine, and Horus' are in perfect synchrony.'\n\n'So what is it you want of me? And speak plainly for once.'\n\n'What if you could convince Dorn or his advisors that the attack on Western Hemispheric was something more, say, by placing the Thousand Sons in the order of battle as the Phoenician and the Third were at the Saturnine Wall?'\n\nPerturabo climbed back onto his lifter-throne, and the pict slates resumed their ultra-rapid cycling of war fronts. 'What would be the point? The aim is to convince the defenders that any one attack could be the iron fist. To overemphasise one over another defeats that aim.'\n\n'Unless they believe the attack on Western Hemispheric is the main one and divert additional strength to its defence. If Dorn must send reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.'\n\nPerturabo shook his head. 'You don't know what you're asking. Our forces are committed now - deployed, supplied, and already in motion. You more than most should understand that small imbalances on one front will have a correspondingly greater effect on another. But if you wish to commit your forces to the assault on Western Hemispheric, I will allow it. Submit your order of battle and I will factor it into my calculations, but I'll not indulge your emotions or need for reparations.'\n\n'Is that why you think I ask?'\n\n'Isn't it?'\n\nMagnus grinned. 'Maybe a little.'\n\nTwo days after coming for her in the refugee camps, Hassan brought Alivia to an old candlelit gallery within a drum tower high on the outskirts of the Hegemon, where the thunder of war and booms of ongoing engagements were subdued.\n\nAn isolated place, it had the look of a chapel, deep with memory and old prayers. Alivia felt cold, as if something terrible had once happened here, and its echo had seeped into the rough, bas-relief carved walls, never to be forgotten. A long wooden table, unevenly stained with lacquer, ran the length of the gallery, carved from a single, massive slab of dark wood.\n\n'Please sit,' said Hassan, pulling a chair out for her.\n\nAlivia took a seat and rested her palms flat on the table. The wood was smooth, the sweep of the grain comfortingly natural. Hassan left through the door by which they had entered, and was it just her imagination or did she see a look of pity in his eyes?\n\nA dozen seats surrounded the table, but only half were occupied.\n\nThree beings of mortal scale, three of transhuman proportions.\n\nMalcador sat at the head of the table, looking as frail as any of the hollow-cheeked venerables wheezing out their last breaths in the camps. His robe of office hung loose on his frame of bones, and the fingers that held his eagle-topped staff reminded Alivia of ancient images of a deathly reaper clutching his scythe in a fleshless grip.\n\n'Hello, Alivia,' he said, the strength of his voice giving the lie to his appearance. But that was Malcador in a nutshell, lies wrapped in untruths and cloaked in falsehoods. 'I trust your family are well situated now?'\n\nShe nodded, but didn't answer. Instead, she studied the others around the table.\n\nThe three Astartes were clearly VI Legion, execution killers with ice-weathered skin, iron-braided beards and winter-blue warplate. They looked at her as a pack, wordlessly sharing how best to tear her apart.\n\nOf all the loyalist Space Marines Alivia had met, she liked Space Wolves the least.\n\nMalcador's two companions were unknown to her.\n\nThe first was a bronze-armoured woman... or at least Alivia assumed so. It was hard to be sure. Her armoured hands tapped restlessly on the table, and whether it was a trick of the candlelight or the play of shadows around her masked face, Alivia couldn't bring her features into focus, as though her eyes refused to linger and kept sliding clear.\n\nOne of the Soulless Sisterhood...\n\nAlivia signed a question, her fingers slow as she struggled to remember the silent speech.\n\nThe woman seemed taken aback to have been addressed, but she soon overcame her surprise to sign an answer.\n\nVigil Sister Challis Vedia.\n\nAcross from Vedia was an unremarkable man garbed in the traditional flowing robes of Afrique. His skin was dark but ashen, and his eyes spoke of suffering and guilt still simmering within: dangerous emotions that could easily tip to vengeance. His left arm was a prosthetic, high-end augmetic work with a glossy black sheen.\n\n'And you? Who are you?' she asked.\n\nThe man's eyes darted to Malcador, who gave a soft nod of assent.\n\n'My name is Promeus.'\n\nAlivia's eyes narrowed. 'But that's not the one your mother gave you, is it? Let's not start out on a lie, shall we?'\n\nHe met her gaze and said, 'My given name was Lemuel Gaumon. I took this name to honour a fallen warrior of the Emperor.'\n\nShe saw the bristling of the Space Marines at that remark.\n\n'Why are they here?' she asked him. 'The vox-casters tell us the warriors of Fenris are racing to reach Terra. Are they already here?'\n\n'This is the watch pack of Bodvar Bjarki,' said Promeus.\n\n'I can speak for myself, wyrd-wraith,' said the warrior who was obviously their leader, a giant with a tattooed face and fetish-hung armour. Even through his beard, Alivia could see candlelight gleaming on the edges of his fangs.\n\nThis one has power.\n\n'I am Bodvar Bjarki of the Rout, Rune Priest of Tra,' said the bearded warrior.\n\nHe slapped a meaty palm on the shoulder of the warrior to his right, a long-limbed brute whose skull was a nightmare of plated bronze and burn scars. One eye was a blue-glowing augmetic, the other milky and off-centre, as if it had melted back across his face.\n\n'This is Svafnir Rackwulf, Woe-maker of Tra,' said Bjarki.\n\n'Greatest harpoon-caster of the Varangai,' said Rackwulf, his words slurred and wet sounding, 'and slayer of traitors.'\n\nAlivia didn't like the emphasis he placed on traitors, or the way his grip tightened on the long spear he held. Half its length was toothed in bone barbs, and despite the ruination of his eye, Alivia didn't doubt he was as accurate with it as he had ever been. Its black haft seemed to soak up the light, and Alivia felt an instinctive dislike of it.\n\nA null-weapon then...\n\n'And this,' said Bjarki with a bark of amusement, 'is Olgyr Widdowsyn of Balt. He is our shield bearer and nursemaid when we are sick.'\n\n'Ach,' said Widdowsyn, a hulking warrior with the face of a brawler encased in armour that seemed altogether too small for his Astartes bulk. 'I set one broken bone and suddenly I am Apothecary.'\n\nAlivia ignored their banter, knowing it was simply an act, a way to get her to lower her expectations of their cunning, to underestimate them. She had met Wolves before, and would never make that mistake again.\n\n'He called you a watch pack,' said Alivia. 'So what do you watch for?'\n\n'Maleficarum,' spat Bjarki. 'We watch for treachery at the highest level. Our packs stood as loyal bodyguards to the Allfather's sons, and if it was their wyrd to become oath-breakers we were also to serve as their executioners.'\n\nAlivia laughed. 'Really? I can imagine how well that went down with the primarchs.'\n\n'You can imagine how little the Rout cares about that.'\n\nAlivia looked back at the door and said, 'I don't know if you've noticed the fighting outside, but it doesn't look like your packs did a very good job.'\n\nFangs were bared and Alivia felt the air in the room thicken with a hot, animal stink. Both Vedia and Promeus recoiled from it, but Alivia had stared into the murderous eyes of the primarch Horus, so their predator musk held no fear for her.\n\n'And you?' said Bjarki, leaning in and resting his elbows on the table, addressing the question to Malcador as much as her. 'Who are you?'\n\n'Me? I'm Alivia Sureka. I'm nobody, and I have no idea why I'm here.'\n\nBjarki laughed again and wagged an admonishing finger.\n\n'Fenrys hjolda! A woman whose wyrd is woven with more threads than the ropes binding the great sails of the Allfather's dragonship says she is nobody! Now who is lying? Your thread is so long it stretches back into darkness like an anchor into the deepest ocean chasm, but know this, Mistress Sureka, I fear it nears its end.'\n\n'If you only knew how many times I've wished that were true,' she said, turning back to Malcador. The old man was a shadow of his former self, but Alivia knew better than to take anything he presented to the world at face value. The Sigillite was the very epitome of the first warmaster's words.\n\nWhen you are strong, appear weak.\n\nBut even as the thought came to her, something told her that perhaps here, at the end, this was the real face of Malcador. For all his glamour, deceits and stratagems, this was who he truly was: an old man with nothing left to give.\n\n'What say you, Sigillite?' said Bjarki. 'We brought you Promeus and his knowledge of the Crimson King's quest. The time of the watch packs is done. Release us from our oaths and give us leave to join our brothers on the walls.'\n\n'Not yet,' said Malcador.\n\nBjarki stabbed an accusing finger vaguely in the direction of Vedia and said, 'Then tell me why we meet in this place of secrets with one who blinds me to the wyrd?'\n\nMalcador nodded and said, 'I have one last task I require of you.'\n\nAlivia rapped her knuckles on the table and shook her head. 'And there it is. There's always just one more task. It never ends until you turn your back on him and walk away.'\n\n'Yet here you are, Alivia,' said Malcador. 'Every step you took on the road away from Terra has led you back here. This is where you were meant to be. You know He needs you, but I need you most of all.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because I need you to save the Emperor.'\n\nAlivia wanted to laugh, but saw Malcador was deadly serious.\n\n'I know it's been a while since I've set foot on Terra, so maybe things have changed some, but... isn't that the job of the Custodians?' said Alivia.\n\n'They would never agree to what I a"}
{"text":"t here you are, Alivia,' said Malcador. 'Every step you took on the road away from Terra has led you back here. This is where you were meant to be. You know He needs you, but I need you most of all.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because I need you to save the Emperor.'\n\nAlivia wanted to laugh, but saw Malcador was deadly serious.\n\n'I know it's been a while since I've set foot on Terra, so maybe things have changed some, but... isn't that the job of the Custodians?' said Alivia.\n\n'They would never agree to what I am about to ask of you,' said Malcador. 'Hence the presence of Mistress Vedia. Constantin and his Custodians cannot know what is planned or they would execute us all, even me.'\n\nThe Silent Sister's fingers moved in a blur of frustration.\n\nSecrets and lies are what brought us to this moment.\n\nMalcador at least had the decency to look ashamed.\n\n'We all must bear our burdens, Sister, but know that His is the greatest of all,' said Malcador. 'And the words I will speak come directly from Him.'\n\n'How are we few to save the Allfather?' said Bjarki.\n\nMalcador traced an ever-shrinking figure of eight on the tabletop.\n\n'You have all seen beyond the walls and know the host we face,' he said. 'Deep down, you all acknowledge the inescapable truth that we cannot win this fight. Horus has a virtually endless supply of troops and war machines he can throw at us, where our resources deplete every day. The numbers do not lie - we cannot hold with the forces we have left. It may take weeks or even months, but Terra will fall.'\n\nSuch a defeatist pronouncement, so baldly made, shocked them all, even the Astartes.\n\n'Guilliman and the Lion will be here any day,' managed Promeus. 'That's what the vox-clarions keep telling us. Is that a... lie? Are we alone...?'\n\n'We believe they are fighting to reach us, yes, but they will not arrive in time to save us. If things continue as they are, any relief force will reach Terra only to find Horus the master of our ashes and bones.'\n\nMalcador paused and drew a reluctant breath. 'But the fates have seen fit to offer one chance, the merest sliver of one to be sure, but a chance nonetheless.'\n\n'A chance for what?' asked Alivia, fearful of the answer.\n\n'To deprive the enemy of one of their most potent weapons.'\n\n'And how will we do that?' asked Alivia.\n\n'With redemption,' said Malcador. 'And forgiveness.'\n\nBefore Alivia could ask any more, Promeus let out a gasp of pain, leaning over the table and clutching his chest as if he were having a heart attack. His already pallid features turned ashen, his eyes saucer-wide with fear.\n\n'He's here,' said Promeus. 'I can feel him...'\n\n'Who's here?' said Alivia.\n\n'Him!' cried Promeus. 'Oh, Throne, I feel the scars of his fury inside me still!'\n\nBlood filled Promeus' left eye, and red tears spilled out to run down his cheek.\n\n'Who?' demanded Alivia.\n\n'The Crimson King!' screamed Promeus. 'He's here!'\n\nOpportunities Multiply\n\nThe assault on Western Hemispheric began with a bombardment.\n\nIn previous epochs, it would have been recorded by historians as something monumental: the largest deployment of heavy siege guns in history; the most explosive force brought to bear in one battle; the most concentrated area of shelling ever seen.\n\nIn truth, it was one of the smaller artillery duels of the day.\n\nThe heaviest guns, mounted on fixed rails and crewed by gibbering, glass-eyed giants, hurled penetrator warheads from smoke-filled revetments as mobile howitzer batteries advanced down zigzagging trenches the size of deep-ocean canyons. Hundreds of multi-launchers streaked a thousand missiles into the sky every second.\n\nVast bombards advanced behind crawling behemoths fitted with angled glacis, lobbing titanic spheres laden with volatile fuel-air explosives. Phosphex missiles and napthek shells seared the ground to glass and set the Imperial outworks aflame. Withering streams of gunfire flared, lashing the ramparts and outer bulwarks in streams of high-velocity steel and las.\n\nSmoke and fumes thickened the air, the thunder of detonations and launches almost impossible to separate. The screams of the dying went unheard as the earth shook with the violence of its pummelling.\n\nThe Imperial counter-battery fire was no less ferocious.\n\nWith their guns ranged, kill-zones marked and the artillerymen drilled to the highest level, return fire punished the traitors for every metre they advanced. Mine launchers seeded the ground with melta charges before the advancing mantlet screens, and deadly accurate plunging fire turned the canyon trenches into charnel houses of burning fuel and seared flesh.\n\nSecondary detonations split the trenches open and laid them bare to enfilading fire. Mangled bodies choked their width, and shredded walls of flesh offered literal meat shields to cover later marching detachments.\n\nRogal Dorn's masterful placement of outflung redoubts, ravelins and hornworks gave no place for the attackers to advance in cover. Merciless grazing fire sawed through the ranks of traitors massing behind the towering barriers protecting the artillery. Advances faltered as the front lines spasmed with casualties, then pushed onward as whip-masters and braying war-horns drove the host towards the walls.\n\nMasked soldiers bearing profane banners were scythed down by airbursting shells that flensed their ranks with white-hot steel. Entire regiments were obliterated in the blink of an eye, wholesale slaughters ignored as following troops marched over the smashed bones and torn meat of their fellows.\n\nCohorts of screeching Knights strode through the host, bounding between ruins and unleashing torrents of fire with each step. Behind them, smoke-shrouded Reavers of Magna, and a rogue Warlord of Tempestus, stalked like apex predators awaiting the soft underbelly of the enemy to be exposed before striking.\n\nPain-maddened abhumans charged the outermost redoubts, scrambling through mined ditches, and up near-vertical walls. They were bestial things with branded fur and curling horns sheathed in brass. Murderous gunfire flayed them from every side, and only a handful survived to reach the ramparts, but that was often enough to rip through its defenders.\n\nAs each redoubt was abandoned or taken by storm, its open rear gave no succour to the enemy. Overwatching gunners in revetted bunkers and gun-boxes flayed the beasts with bracketed fire, and when they were dead, fresh Imperial detachments pushed out to take their position on the blood-slick walls.\n\nSquadrons of traitor armour attempted to push forward through the smoking ruins, but were quickly bogged down in the mud. The vehicles' crews fought to free them as hounding fire blazed from sponsons and screaming turrets as yet more artillery was brought to bear. Little by little, the space between the two opposing forces shrank, a death zone where nothing could lift its head without being cut down.\n\nThe carnage was inhuman, thousands of lives spent with no thought for the price of blood being paid every second. Besieging a heavily defended emplacement was the most brutal and uncaring of war's many incarnations, and this was its most extreme manifestation. The bloody arithmetic of combat was unflinching, and every advantage a defender might muster was being brought to bear to deny, delay and destroy the enemy approach.\n\nBut it wouldn't be enough, it could never be enough.\n\nRogal Dorn's initial calculations had been made with estimated projections of enemy numbers that were woefully conservative, and assumed breaking points of courage. But every variable in these equations was rendered null and void by a zealous fury no Imperial planner could have foreseen, a level of insanity beyond comprehension.\n\nIt drove the attackers into the teeth of the Imperial guns without thought for their survival.\n\nIt showed they were more afraid of their masters than the enemy.\n\nBut even had the Praetorian of Terra accepted the most outlandish estimates of the enemy soldiers' capability and resolve in the face of almost certain death, there was one variable neither he nor his command staff could possibly have accounted for.\n\nThe warlocks of the Thousand Sons.\n\nIt felt like their wars of old.\n\nFellowships working together, their powers alloyed to one purpose. Ahriman's Scarab elite followed in the wake of rainbow-hued monsters with matted fur and forking horns that sparked with corposant. Pyrae cultists ignited the hanging veils of fyceline-laced air, and adepts of the Raptora swept it forwards in blazing curtains of dancing fire.\n\nAthanaeans reached into the aether to twist the perceptions of the men and women on the wall who beheld this sight, rendering the flames into howling maws that screamed horrors unique to every mind.\n\nSuch was the volume of destruction, the most colossally heavy transports were forced to lead the way. Leviathans and profaned Capitol Imperialis flattened what weeks of artillery bombardment had not, crushing the titanic remains of shell-smashed ruins for smaller transports to follow.\n\nKeeping low to the ground, Ahriman led his fellowship through the three-metre-deep trenches of crushed rock carved by the grinding tracks of Khasisatra, a Monolith-class Capitol Imperialis, as it ground its way towards the Palace walls.\n\nBattle cannons blazed from its topside and every twenty-seven minutes its axial-mounted macro cannon would fire. When it did, every mortal warrior within five hundred metres needed to turn away, cover their ears and open their mouth to keep the shock pulse of its firing from collapsing their lungs and pulping their internal organs.\n\nLas-fire zipped overhead, as dust and rock fragments drizzled into the trench.\n\nStrobing shadows stretched and swelled, retreated and danced around the fires overhead. The greasy taste of rancid fat and the scratching pressure on his aetheric senses told Ahriman that not all such shadows were natural.\n\nThe crackling golden light he and Magnus had seen when flying the Great Ocean was still there, so very faint,"}
{"text":"ck pulse of its firing from collapsing their lungs and pulping their internal organs.\n\nLas-fire zipped overhead, as dust and rock fragments drizzled into the trench.\n\nStrobing shadows stretched and swelled, retreated and danced around the fires overhead. The greasy taste of rancid fat and the scratching pressure on his aetheric senses told Ahriman that not all such shadows were natural.\n\nThe crackling golden light he and Magnus had seen when flying the Great Ocean was still there, so very faint, and so very fragile. Ahriman didn't dare linger on it, for fear that acknowledging it in this realm of the mundane would alert the defenders to its presence.\n\nIt felt like an itch he couldn't scratch, a presence that was only perceptible by not seeking it out. But it was there and could yet be prised open.\n\nThe endless tide of Neverborn can sense it too...\n\nSamus, Oholoxene, Vhargal, Cor'bax, Ur-nephre, and unnumbered more.\n\nSo many names, so many secrets to pull from their immortal minds.\n\nHe could feel them scratching at the walls of reality, frenzied and maddened by the bloodshed engulfing the Throneworld. The veil was pierced in thousands of places, allowing the daemons to vomit onto the surface of the world in unthinking murder-packs of claw and fang. But here, this close to the telaethesic shield, they were yet barred from the inner precincts of the Palace.\n\nNothing truly daemonic could manifest within that psychic umbra.\n\nBut the pressure was building, and soon the Emperor's shield would shatter.\n\n'You know what this reminds me of?' said Ahriman, turning to look over his shoulder at the flattened ground behind the advancing leviathans. A hundred legionaries followed him down the gouged trench, together with five thousand mortal soldiers in ochre and black bearing scale-hooks and rotor-ladders.\n\nEvery one of the scores of giant vehicles boasted similar entourages.\n\n'I don't,' replied Atrahasis, his new equerry. 'I'm not Athanaean.'\n\nAtrahasis was an adept of the Raptora with all the blunt directness of that Fellowship.\n\nThe pearlescent red and ivory of the warrior's armour gleamed, not a single mote of dust or smoke besmirching its burnished plate. The perfection of its form put Ahriman in mind of Hathor Maat, and his former brother's face flashed before his eyes.\n\nHe pushed the memory of the fallen Pavoni adept from his mind.\n\nNo, not fallen. Sacrificed. By my hand.\n\n'So what does it remind you of?' said Atrahasis when Ahriman did not continue.\n\n'Ullanor,' said Ahriman at last. 'When the geoformer fleets levelled an entire continent for one man's vanity. We were told it was to honour us, but really it was for Him, a narcissistic salve to His ego, to know that so many were His to command.'\n\n'That was when He stepped away from the crusade,' pointed out Atrahasis. 'He passed command of His hosts to the Warmaster.'\n\n'Because the work of the crusade had become tedious to Him,' said Ahriman. 'The glory days of its early decades were long passed, all that remained was the final grind to the end. That was why He stepped away. Horus' elevation was symbolic, nothing more. The Emperor was done with us, and sought only to return to His latest endeavour.'\n\nA thunder of sirens blared from Khasisatra's topside and a rising pressure of internal fury built deep within its armoured hull. The enormous war engine's void shields crackled as its projector vanes retracted, and the blast shutters descended.\n\nBracing pinions slammed down by its towering wheels as the macro cannon powered up.\n\n Kneel, ordered Ahriman, sending his command psychically. And brace.\n\nHe went to the ground as the smoke and fog wreathing the upper reaches of Western Hemispheric parted for an instant, revealing saw-toothed ramparts flickering with muzzle flare and detonations. Streaking arcs of petrary shells exploded above them, most detonating against the aegis or blasted from the air by the wall's close-in defence turrets. Some struck home and liquefied the parapet with flame, sending cascades of rubble and bodies down its cliff-high slopes.\n\nAhriman watched the play of light, beautiful in its own way, seeing patterns and meaning in its interactions. The breath quickened in his throat, his heart pounded, as the vision stuttering together in his mind was one he knew he was not seeing with his eyes.\n\nThis was the blessing and curse of the Corvidae - to see portents in everything, to hear the echoes of the future and feel the emotion of their passing before their time. An aetheric knife to the heart made him look up in sudden apprehension as he heard a sound like a whipcrack of lightning.\n\nHe tasted the volcanic heat of an open blast furnace, the scream of tortured metal, the thunder of an earthquake. An overwhelming pressure on his senses, like an oncoming storm.\n\nUp! he cried. Everyone out the trench! Go!\n\nThe Thousand Sons following him obeyed instantly, powering up the rocky slopes of the trench or punching through its ruined sections where the cratered ground overlapped its length. The mortal soldiers behind them watched in confusion, not understanding what was happening.\n\nAhriman climbed the trench wall and vaulted over its lip. He rolled to his knees and ran through the razed ruins of the Palace, glancing over his shoulder just before he heard the distinct hard crack of wall-mounted defence lasers.\n\nLike molten rods of glass blinking into existence for a trillionth of a second, the concentrated fire of three defence lasers punched through the frontal armour of Khasisatra. Its shuttered magazine bays were open, its main gun was primed, and the Capitol Imperialis was as devastatingly vulnerable as it was possible to be.\n\nThe seams of its heavy armour plates blazed with phosphor-bright illumination. Spears of white-hot fire lanced through its vents, vision blocks and the joints of its weapon ports.\n\nFor the briefest moment, the Capitol Imperialis seemed to swell as if inflating.\n\nAnd then it froze.\n\nAhriman skidded behind a fragmentary nub of stonework, the remains of a fluted column, its Doric base miraculously untouched by the shelling. The sound of artillery dropped away, the sudden silence shocking after living with the endless cacophony of battle for so long.\n\nHe knew what he was seeing was impossible.\n\nA detonation frozen in time.\n\nHe felt the certainty of his prescient vision unravel within him, the heat and fire and light of the inevitable explosion he'd seen and felt like a ghost in his mind.\n\n Look! cried Atrahasis, the blunt force of his communication making Ahriman wince.\n\nHe followed his equerry's warning and looked up to see the tar-black clouds above Khasisatra writhing as though stirred by an unseen hand. Constant lightning burst from the epicentre of the dark maelstrom, reaching down with forking hands to envelop the Capitol Imperialis in a web of crackling lines of power.\n\nIcy blue light burned through the heart of the storm, a pinprick at first then bursting open the clouds like a wound in the sky. A figure emerged from the light, golden and crimson, beatific and terrible. Too raw and beautiful to look upon directly.\n\n Sire... breathed Ahriman.\n\nMagnus descended from the heart of the swirling light and smoke, his skin burning with the magnitude of his powers, his eye filled with warp light. One hand was aimed at the Palace wall, the other ablaze with the source of the lightning.\n\nHe clenched his lightning-wreathed fist and lifted his arm.\n\nAnd Khasisatra lifted with it.\n\nRock and mud and dust spilled from its tracks as all sixty-seven thousand tonnes of its mass lifted into the air. Howls and cheers rose from the ruins as the titanic vehicle rose higher. Blinding veins of light traced eager paths over Magnus' flesh as he rose skyward, dragging the seething bulk of the Khasisatra with him. Motes of ash peeled from him.\n\n A storm of light from the Palace reached out to Magnus, the Imperial gunners understanding that a target of incalculable worth had just presented itself. Laser and shell bursts exploded around the primarch, but the lightning surrounding him was proof against all attacks.\n\nWith a roar, Magnus wrenched his fist around, and the enormous vehicle swung up through the air as though launched from a trebuchet. Ahriman watched in disbelief as the doomed Khasisatra flew towards the Palace, still wreathed in a web of lightning at the frozen nanosecond of its destruction. Defensive gunfire flashed, but none of the weapons that could react fast enough could stop something of such inconceivably colossal mass.\n\nIt arced down to the wall in agonisingly slow motion, and the instant it struck the upper reaches of Western Hemispheric, Magnus released his hold on the flow of time surrounding its immensity.\n\nAhriman turned away as the Capitol Imperialis detonated with the power of an exploding star.\n\nIts reactor and all the city-levelling ordnance it carried was equal to the force of a dozen battlefield atomics, and the searing flash of its detonation momentarily dispelled the constant twilight of the siege. A fraction of a second later, the building rumble of the explosion raced out from the walls, a roar that was deafening, even over the already apocalyptic battle.\n\nAhriman's auto-senses shut him off from the outside world, but the sound within his helm was still like a Dreadnought's siege hammer pounding on his skull. Moments later, the force of the blast wave rocked him sprawling.\n\nScalding smoke billowed around the Thousand Sons in a lethal, superheated fog, and Ahriman felt it even through the ceramite of his warplate. The earth shook as though trying to dislodge the puny mortals crawling upon its surface, as the overpressure rolled outwards in dynamic storms of hurricane-force winds that hurled debris and loose stone back to the traitor camps.\n\nWarning sigils flashed onto his visor: lethal spikes of ionising radiation, e-mag pulses and deadly heat. Seconds later the secondary flash of the explosion lit up the sky and threw out long, sta"}
{"text":"eated fog, and Ahriman felt it even through the ceramite of his warplate. The earth shook as though trying to dislodge the puny mortals crawling upon its surface, as the overpressure rolled outwards in dynamic storms of hurricane-force winds that hurled debris and loose stone back to the traitor camps.\n\nWarning sigils flashed onto his visor: lethal spikes of ionising radiation, e-mag pulses and deadly heat. Seconds later the secondary flash of the explosion lit up the sky and threw out long, stark shadows in a world turned a brilliant, bleached white by the blast.\n\nAs the eye-burning light faded, Ahriman rolled onto his front to see a towering mushroom cloud of roiling, superheated smoke climbing and spreading from the section of Western Hemispheric directly before him.\n\nOr, rather, what remained of it.\n\nAn entire section of the wall and its defensive outworks had simply vanished, vaporised in the nuclear fire of the initial blast or flattened by the force of the shock wave. As if a vast beast had reached down from the sky to bite a V-shaped segment from the wall, an immense, sloping breach had just opened up in the Palace defences.\n\nFinally daring to open up his aetheric senses, Ahriman rose through his psychic mantras to the ninth enumeration. The chattering of Neverborn hunger rose to an unending, bestial howl and shimmering auras lifted off every living being around him. Fierce blues, golds and greens from the Thousand Sons, bleeding reds and oranges from the burned and blinded mortals staggering in mute agony behind him.\n\nThere!\n\nThe frozen golden light of the Emperor's presence was bright and golden in his mind. It felt brighter than before, as if an all-but-invisible crack had been forced fractionally wider.\n\n Up! pulsed Ahriman. Forward!\n\nAbidemi sat above the right sponson of the Sicaran Venator battle tank as it roared past the Dome of Illumination at speed. The Venator was among the fastest tanks in the Imperial inventory, and Zytos had brooked no argument from its bewildered crew when he had commandeered it. The Sanctum Imperialis was roughly eight hundred kilometres in diameter, and Abidemi knew they must make that crossing with all possible speed. Gargo was pushing it hard, and if the vehicle lasted long enough to reach Western Hemispheric, it would likely never move again under its own power.\n\nZytos sat across from him above the opposite gun, while Igen Gargo looked out of the driver's hatch, scanning the ground ahead. The air around the Venator tasted like tin, the actinic reek of its overworked plasma ioniser drive core causing Abidemi's visor to glitch and fizz with static bleed.\n\nHe tilted his head to the side and hammered the palm of his gauntlet against his helmet. The static eventually cleared and he looked over with great sadness into the vast space encompassed by the Dome of Illumination.\n\nDark deeds had transpired here; traitors had set foot beneath its hallowed canopy, and brother legionaries had died. The kilometre-wide dome was askew now, and the water that once poured from its upper reaches had been diverted from the basin below to hardened cisterns deep beneath the Palace's bedrock. The three squatting colossi supporting the dome's vast weight were blackened by fire, their limbs gouged by rogue shell impacts and air-bursting shrapnel that had ricocheted in beneath the aegis. The light coming through the wide eye at its centre and holes punched by shell impacts swam with motes of dust and ash trapped beneath by vortices of tortured air.\n\n'Good craft in those statues,' said Zytos, following Abidemi's gaze to study the dome's smoke-stained underside. 'Even scarred and off balance, they still perform their duty.'\n\n'As do we all,' said Gargo, and Zytos gave a wry nod.\n\nAbidemi saw the symbolism too, and drew strength from it as he turned to look back the way they had come. Mottled clouds of purple and red hung over Indomitor, some five hundred kilometres behind them to the east. The fighting still raged at their old station, as it did all around the circuit of the Eternity Wall.\n\nZytos had tasked the soldiers of Vulkan's Own with the defence of the wall, and its ad hoc command staff had sworn solemn oaths to give their lives in its defence when it became clear they could no longer fight alongside the Salamanders. These were men and women without regiments, without banners, but they had come together in the face of the enemy, and would do honour to their adopted name.\n\nThe paths around the dome were broken, demolished by explosives by the looks of the burn-scars and shrapnel wounds in the surrounding rock, so Gargo took a looping route past the grand, high-walled estates of the Viridarium Nobiles.\n\nThe precincts of the Sanctum Imperialis were thronged with refugees: tens of thousands of dusty, tired and exhausted people. They spilled from the overcrowded camps filling its wide thoroughfares and processional boulevards, taking shelter from the gently falling ash and caustic rain beneath awnings of canvas and tarpaulin. The dispossessed of Terra huddled against the walls of palaces of governance and grand temples to bureaucracy like drifts of snow. They looked up as the smoking battle tank passed, moving from its path in fear.\n\nFighting vehicles meant danger, no matter which banner flew from their vox-masts.\n\nThe roads here were not designed to bear the weight of tanks, and Abidemi's heart was heavy as they rode roughshod over the Palace's gilded streets. The hand-carved cobbles, each bearing a master's mark, were ripped up by the passage of the armoured tracks and scattered in their wake like clinker from a forge.\n\nZytos saw Abidemi's concern and said, 'I wonder if this was how Lord Dorn felt as he peeled back the beauty of his father's Palace and sheathed it in ugly plates of armour.'\n\n'His warriors claim he has promised to rebuild the Palace, to restore every wall, tower and gate to its former glory,' said Gargo.\n\n'He can try,' said Zytos, shaking his head, 'but any craftsman worthy of the name knows that once you break something of beauty it's never the same.'\n\n'Sometimes it can be better,' said Abidemi. 'The artisans of Clymene hold to the aesthetic that beauty is sometimes derived from the imperfect, the impermanent and the incomplete.'\n\n'I know of it,' said Zytos. 'I spent two years sweating in the forge of Master Koren and arguing against his ideas of \"nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect\" but it seems as apt a fit as any philosophy these days.'\n\n'Perhaps,' said Abidemi, and they rounded the perimeter of the dome and connected with the Via Martial that led to the House of Weapons. Two hundred kilometres to the south-west, it was possible to see the rearing cliff that was the noble bulwark of Adamant and Western Hemispheric. A bombardment was underway, the horizon afire with impacts and aegis flare.\n\n'This is a bad one,' said Zytos. 'Yes, a bad one indeed.'\n\n'One section of wall under assault looks much like another from this distance,' said Gargo to Abidemi. 'Are you sure this is where your vision leads us?'\n\nAbidemi was about to reply when the sky lit with the fury of an atomic explosion.\n\nThis far from the detonation, the blast was a groaning rumble of deep movement within the earth, but it soon swelled to the throaty roar of a drake in heat. A mushrooming storm cloud of pyroclastic fire reared up from the wall, and Abidemi remembered the ash column of Mount Deathfire on the day the primarch had been returned to them.\n\n'I am sure,' he said.\n\nThe Breach\n\nAll was fire and smoke and dust.\n\nThe ground before Western Hemispheric was a smoking nightmare of utter destruction. Superheated ash clouds twisted like living things over the molten rock and burning ruins, hungry to devour whatever combustible material hadn't already been consumed by Khasisatra's detonation.\n\nAhriman's armour glowed with heat, and he felt his skin crisping through the layered ceramite with every ponderous step he took. The ground underfoot would burn with radiation for thousands of years, and skeletal figures crumbled beneath his tread. His body felt as though it were being slowly cooked within his plate, like the rivers of sweat running from his flesh were runnels of fat coming off sizzling meat.\n\nHe bent low to push through the violent thermals surging in random vortices. He lost track of time. Every step felt like a lifetime, his advance slow and purposeful and grimly inevitable.\n\nShrieking voices called from rad-squalls that danced in the firestorms raging throughout the blast zone. Some of them had faces and half-formed arms, creatures beyond the veil pushing into the material world.\n\nAhriman's warplate struggled to make sense of the myriad inputs it was receiving. The e-mag pulse of the detonation sent crazed spikes of static through his visor, and heat bloom made thermal layers useless. He could see nothing but ghosts moving through the red-lit landscape - as sure a vision of hell as had ever been conjured in verse or dreamed of by madmen and artists.\n\nHis mundane senses were all but blind, so he relied on his other gifts.\n\nA glimmering figure of fire approached through the smoke.\n\nIts aura told him it was Atrahasis, his equerry staggering through the storm of ash and rock. Debris parted before him, shunted from his path by a kine layer of pure force.\n\nThe vox crackled, but whatever had been said was lost in the howl of e-mag interference.\n\nSpeak with your mind, sent Ahriman.\n\nAtrahasis nodded. One hundred and seventy-one of us remain in this thrust. The thousands of mortals who began this march with us are already dead or will be dying in agony within a matter of hours. Only legionaries remain.\n\nGood, said Ahriman.\n\nGood?\n\nNo mortal soldiers will be left alive on the wall. We strike hard for the breach. This is Astartes war now.\n\nAtrahasis nodded. As it was always meant to be.\n\nAhriman focused his senses and sent out a pulse of psychic energy.\n\nFifteenth Legion! Rise to the second"}
{"text":"ed. One hundred and seventy-one of us remain in this thrust. The thousands of mortals who began this march with us are already dead or will be dying in agony within a matter of hours. Only legionaries remain.\n\nGood, said Ahriman.\n\nGood?\n\nNo mortal soldiers will be left alive on the wall. We strike hard for the breach. This is Astartes war now.\n\nAtrahasis nodded. As it was always meant to be.\n\nAhriman focused his senses and sent out a pulse of psychic energy.\n\nFifteenth Legion! Rise to the second enumeration. Pavoni, dampen the radiation, Raptora, push a kine barrier before us.\n\nAhriman turned on the spot as shimmering slicks of light resolved into focus around him, gods of battle wreathed in golden radiance. Two hundred warriors of the Thousand Sons had followed him into the fire, and he felt the presence of hundreds more.\n\nAmon's warriors to the left, Menkaura's to the right, but so powerful was the telaethesic ward that he could barely sense them at all.\n\nHave we changed so much that it blunts our aetheric powers as well as the daemonic?\n\nThe only constant in the firestorm of lethal ash, strobing flashes of secondary detonations and choking smoke was the Crimson King. The primarch burned like a bloated red sun in its last moments, bathing the shattered ruins of Terra in a hellish, bloodstained light.\n\nFollow the primarch, he said. He is our lodestar. He leads us to victory!\n\nAhriman turned and pushed onward into the teeth of the storm like every infantryman who had ever marched through mud, snow or heat to cross the last hundred metres to close with the enemy and destroy them. Their pace was glacial, but it hardly mattered any more.\n\nNo one remained on the wall to oppose them.\n\nThe psychic barrier of the Raptora ploughed the air, pushing the ash and smoke around them to reveal the vitrified ruin of the landscape. The outworks before Western Hemispheric had been utterly flattened by the blast wave, only the stubs of foundations and waving tangles of rebar indicating where they had once stood.\n\nA pack of hulking Castellax battle cybernetics lumbered through the smoke, but so burned were their outer carapaces that Ahriman could not tell to which side they belonged, nor how they had come to be so far out from the walls. He felt the pain of their tortured psyches hardwired to their biomechanical cortexes, enslaved souls screaming in pain-filled madness.\n\nWhatever surveyor gear was left to them screeched as it detected them, and the machines lashed out with insensate fury. Their gunfire was wild and inaccurate, and kine shields deflected any shots that came too close, but the hyper-aggressive machine-spirits within them now had purpose, and thus were dangerous.\n\nYoke their souls, ordered Ahriman. And bring them.\n\nThreads of witchfire reached out to the robots as the Athanaeans stabbed their power into the broken minds of the cybernetics. Some were too lost to madness, and those pitiful few were destroyed by their fellows in a merciless display of decimation.\n\nThe gunfire ceased, and the robots fell in with the Thousand Sons' advance.\n\nLike all simple-minded things, they craved the comfort of obedience.\n\nThey're not Castellax-Achea, but they'll do.\n\nAhriman saw the wreckage of armoured vehicles amid the flames, some Imperial, some from Perturabo's host. Mostly Army, some Legion, and others that were the strange hybrid things of the Mechanicum forces loyal to the Warmaster. Fires burned in their hollowed-out guts, and cinder-black bodies hung from broken hatches as stalk-limbed machines twitched in their death throes.\n\nTrapped machine-spirits begged for release or whispered dark promises in return for the loan of their wrath. Ahriman knew better than to trust such damaged things, and he left them to burn in the fires. A few lone vehicles had survived the initial blast and ridden out the shock wave. These now prowled the wreckage, but they were few and far between and wandered the ruins like blind men.\n\nThe smoke was thinning now. The fires at the site of the explosion were being drawn upwards and spreading in a wide umbra like a fresh layer of tar painting the sky. It was testament to Dorn's skill that much of the soaring wall and its many guntowers remained standing, though its cladding of adamantium, steel and stone had been pared away. Only the bare rock of the original wall remained, and a portion of that was a vitrified gap, like a missing tooth in a gum line.\n\nSmoking debris and rubble formed a ready-made ramp to the crest of the breach. The sheer scale of the wall's height and its clifflike nature still rendered it a formidable barrier, but without its flanking outworks and enfilading ravelins, the wall was - for now - wide open.\n\nSend in the automata first, ordered Ahriman, and immediately the lumbering Castellax began climbing the slope, iron limbs and servo-assisted muscles driving them up faster than any mortal.\n\nMaybe this will work better than we dared hope.\n\nRaptora! sent Ahriman. Discs!\n\nIn the wake of the detonation, Imperial Fists under Captain Iacono redeployed to Hemispheric Nine, two thousand gold-clad warriors held in reserve to blunt any breakthrough. They disembarked from Rhinos, Tauroxes and heavy-duty cargo flatbeds, quickly forming up by squads and rushing to the walls.\n\nThe muster points behind the walls were charnel houses of burned bodies, rubble and screams. Irradiated lumps of rockcrete were strewn around, the adamantium rebar still glowing orange and as flexible as wire. Shielded pioneer crews were already on-site, spraying the wreckage with retardant foam to dampen the rad-levels, though extended exposure to the radiation soaking Hemispheric Nine's rock would be lethal to unaugmented humans for at least three years.\n\nScattered bands of Blood Angels commanded by Captain Tamaya added their weight to the Imperial Fists' attempt to seal the breach, some three hundred of Baal's finest.\n\nAfter Saturnine, Lord Dorn had reappraised every aspect of his defence plan, declared no detail, however slight, sacrosanct and directed his chief aides to find fault with his preparations. Little was uncovered the Praetorian had not already conceived, but no one had attributed any especial strategic significance to Hemispheric Nine beyond the obvious.\n\nNow word that one of the Emperor's fallen sons had revealed his presence in the attack had changed that, especially given that primarch was said to be Magnus the Cyclops. His intellect was prodigious, his mind working on levels beyond the understanding of mere mortals. If Magnus was taking part in this attack, then clearly Hemispheric Nine held significance beyond what any Imperial planner had seen.\n\nThousands more Space Marines were being drawn from positions all along the Eternity Wall to reinforce Hemispheric Nine. The speed of the Imperial response was dazzling. Moving soldiers from pre-prepared defensive positions and redeploying them was no small task, requiring hundreds of orders, confirmations, logistical support and coordination, as well as the one thing in shortest supply at such pivotal moments.\n\nTime.\n\nIt took seventy-six minutes for the first Imperial Fists to arrive at Hemispheric Nine, eighty-one for the Blood Angels. Thankfully, the ferocity of the explosion had delayed the traitors from exploiting the breach as quickly as they might otherwise have done, and the first warriors of the Legiones Astartes to arrive were not of the Legion of Magnus.\n\nNor were they Imperial Fists or Blood Angels.\n\nThey were Salamanders.\n\nThe Time of Trial.\n\nAbidemi stood in the breach, looking out over a vision of Terra that more closely resembled Nocturne in its violent seasonal seizure. The surface of the Throneworld ran with living fire and raging pyro-storms devoured anything combustible as far as the eye could see.\n\nGales of radiation-laced wind howled over the walls as though Terra itself were screaming. Bent against their burning force, Gargo and Zytos heaped rubble into a makeshift barrier of interlocking debris and shattered rockcrete.\n\nIt wasn't the Barbican of Themis, but it would do for now.\n\n'Hurry,' said Abidemi, spying a brilliant figure drifting in the storms raging over the battlefield, a demigod haloed by the light of a dying sun. 'The crimson drake nears.'\n\nNumeon had spoken of how Magnus had appeared before him in the warp during their journey to bring Vulkan back to Nocturne. His lost brother had spoken of a primarch, mighty in his own way and deserving of respect, but also somehow... diminished.\n\nAbidemi saw none of that here.\n\nMagnus burned like a frozen explosion, a numinous being of radiant energy, his hair billowing around him like a bloody starburst, his armour dazzling in its brilliance. And his eye, his eye, burning with the light of impossible stars.\n\nAn angel in red and gold, to look upon him was like staring into the sun itself. His armour was brazen, his bearing majestic, and how Abidemi dearly wished things had been different, still feeling that unconscious, unbidden desire to drop to his knees before a primarch.\n\nMagnus was wondrous, yes, but they all felt it: incredulity that a being who could trace his lineage from the Emperor Himself had now set himself to bloody purpose against them.\n\n'Angron and Fulgrim are monsters,' said Abidemi, 'and their corruption is plain for all to see, but Magnus... He could yet fight by his father's side and not look out of place.'\n\n'When was the moment?' Barek Zytos asked the distant figure of Magnus as he swung the enormous hammer to his shoulder. 'When did you first step from the light?'\n\n'He'd likely not know himself,' said Abidemi, 'for nothing ever begins - there is never just one root cause for anything, no singular deed or moment from which an act springs.'\n\n'Why do you say that?' asked Gargo.\n\n'The seeds of any outcome can always be traced back to some earlier moment, and to all those that preceded it. The further back we trace the path, the hazier the connections will become until the ti"}
{"text":" swung the enormous hammer to his shoulder. 'When did you first step from the light?'\n\n'He'd likely not know himself,' said Abidemi, 'for nothing ever begins - there is never just one root cause for anything, no singular deed or moment from which an act springs.'\n\n'Why do you say that?' asked Gargo.\n\n'The seeds of any outcome can always be traced back to some earlier moment, and to all those that preceded it. The further back we trace the path, the hazier the connections will become until the tiniest action might be said to have been the origin of any great event.'\n\n'It doesn't matter how it happened,' said Zytos. 'Right now we have enemies to our front and no allies yet at our back.'\n\n'The Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists are en route,' said Abidemi. 'We only have to hold a short time.'\n\n'A short time feels like an eternity when awaiting reinforcements,' said Zytos.\n\n'We are Salamanders,' replied Abidemi as a ragged cohort of limping automata emerged from the fire and smoke of the breach. 'Eternity is our watchword.'\n\nAt the sight of the Salamanders, the battle-automata howled with static-laced rage from skewed augmitters, their lolling, half-severed machine skulls flaring with target-locks.\n\n'Down,' said Gargo as heavy shells chugged from smoking rotor cannons and corkscrewing rockets streaked from buckled launchers in fiery trails. The impacts felt like a series of pounding hammer blows on the ground, but the shoulder-high wall Gargo and Zytos had constructed possessed a strength that belied its hasty construction. Its structure was layered and formed from the interlinked stones of Terra that took strength from their neighbour.\n\nA rolling wall of flames billowed over its angled summit, but fire held no fear for Salamanders. They were born of fire and felt its burning kiss every day of their lives. Heavy shells chipped away at the stone, but the shots were wild and inaccurate.\n\n'The radiation is fouling their auspex,' shouted Zytos over the barrage.\n\nMore rockets exploded overhead and scything fragments of red-hot steel rained down. The sound within Abidemi's armour was like a bucket of smiter's nails tipped onto a steel plate.\n\n'Give the word,' he said to Gargo.\n\nGargo placed his hand flat on the ground, and the lenses of his helm dimmed as he read the currents of the earth. Even dulled through the millions of tonnes of metal and stone, he could sense Terra's enemies approaching. Heavy footfalls rang out over rockcrete, and Abidemi's grip tightened on Draukoros.\n\n'They're right on top of us,' he shouted.\n\n'Not yet,' promised Gargo.\n\nA grazing blast of solid slugs scythed the air above the wall as a trio of heavy blasts rocked Hemispheric Nine. Chips of stone lashed their armour and sizzling chunks of shrapnel pinged from the rocks in corkscrewing trails.\n\n'Now!' shouted Gargo, and the three Salamanders rose from cover.\n\nThe battle-automata were right on top of them, eight within striking distance of their wall. Their armour was bare metal or black; impossible to tell from which maniple they had come. Behind them, the air shimmered with strangely lit fogs, through which flitting shapes darted between firespouts and the crump of secondary and tertiary detonations.\n\nZytos stepped up onto the chewed-up barrier of rocks and vaulted towards the nearest battle-automaton, a fire-blackened Castellan equipped with a heavy siege-fist and a rotor-barrelled autocannon.\n\n'In Vulkan's name!' he cried, swinging his hammer in a slaughterman's arc.\n\nThe killing weight smashed the automaton's already buckled cranial section to ruin. Its limbs folded and flames jetted from its split gorget as it crashed to the ground.\n\nZytos landed, keeping the hammer in motion and smashing the legs of the machine next to him. The cybernetic's kneecap exploded into shattered fragments, tipping it back down the breach. Gunfire blazed from its weapons, tearing through the lighter backplate of a third automaton and shredding its internal mechanisms.\n\nGargo dived aside as a siege hammer slammed down on the wall, shattering their barricade to broken pieces. He rolled to his feet before the cybernetic and thrust his spear like a harpoon, driving it deep through a shattered access plate into its guts. He cranked the haft in a circle, drawing a machine shriek of pain from its augmitters before it dropped to its knees, locked in position like a supplicant in a fane.\n\nAbidemi made a quarter-turn to the right and pulled Draukoros back as a cybernetic fired a chimeric bolter-assault cannon variant. Heavy shells thundered from the weapon, but its sights were misaligned and the mass-reactives blasted a half-metre gouge through the crest of the breach beside him.\n\nHe sprang forward, swaying aside as the machine brought its other arm down, one equipped with a colossal shot-cannon that drooled smoking oil-mix. Draukoros chopped through the barrels and the weapon exploded as shells thundered through it. The force of the explosion rocked the machine back on its heels and Abidemi thundered his boot into its chest.\n\nIt toppled backwards, the internal mechanisms that had kept it upright scrambled by the blast and the impact. Igen Gargo emptied his bolter into the split carapace of another Castellan. Mass-reactives detonated in shuddering blasts within, and blue fire erupted from its vent-plates. Zytos slammed his hammer down on the chest of a kneeling robot, and sent it skidding back down the breach.\n\nA burst of shells exploded next to Abidemi, and he threw himself to the side as a whipping coil of energy tore up the stone of the sundered wall. He rolled. The crackling lightning followed him and he grunted as it carved a blistering path across the chestplate of his armour. He felt the heat searing against the carapace beneath. An iron fist plucked him from the ground, and he grunted in pain as burning plates of ceramite were crushed against his chest.\n\nThe Castellan hauled him upright and he saw its head section had been split open, revealing a hideous mix of bio-organic machinery. Its torso was leaking flames and smoke, and a hideous screeching machine howl of pain blurted from a dangling augmitter.\n\nThe robot rocked back as flames washed over its carapace.\n\nKnowing it was dying, the machine sought to exact its last revenge.\n\nAbidemi felt his bones grind as its fist began to crush his chest.\n\nHe hacked Draukoros against the automaton's shoulder, but his pain and the angle of the blow robbed it of strength.\n\nHe heard the voices of his brothers, shouts of anger and warning.\n\nHard bangs of bolter fire, and flaming blasts of explosions bursting nearby. A series of thumping detonations erupted farther down the slope of the breach, sending up fiery plumes of irradiated rock and toxic dust.\n\nEven as the flames blurred in his vision, a piercing cold enveloped him, the sensation as sudden as if he had fallen through the ice of a frozen lake.\n\nDimly he recognised the distinctive double thump of Imperial artillery fire patterns, a strange, ululating howl. Gunship engines?\n\nNo, those are the howls of living beings.\n\nThe arm of the automaton glistened white, ice particles forming with ultra-rapidity. Abidemi brought Draukoros around in one final blow and hacked down on the machine's shoulder.\n\nThe metal shattered into frozen fragments and he fell to the crest of the breach, the ground now slick with frost and wet with pools of meltwater. A blizzard of icy needles swirled around him and ferocious winds doused the fires engulfing the remains of the ramparts.\n\nStalking shapes moved through the cold mist. Hunched and furred like hunters, they moved like feral beasts: hungry, and pitiless. They fell upon the wounded automaton in a flurry of blades, one gutting the machine with a wickedly toothed harpoon as another split it from gorget to belly with a looping axe blow.\n\nA third warrior, armoured in ice grey and mantled in thick furs, slammed down his bone-coloured staff and the stone of the wall split apart as though an earthquake tore at the fortress walls. A wide trench ripped across the length of the breach, fully five metres deep and filled with razored spikes of hardened ice.\n\nSatisfied with his work, he turned to Abidemi.\n\nThe warrior's bearded face was cracked and lined like old saddle leather, his beard braided with chips of glass and carved sigils. His eyes were hard flint, cold and sharp.\n\nHe had the face of a grinning killer, his teeth sharpened to razor fangs.\n\n'I am Bjarki,' he said. 'This is Svafnir Rackwulf and Olgyr Widdowsyn. We kill sorcerers.'\n\n'What?' said Abidemi. 'Sorcerers?'\n\n'Them,' said Bjarki, pointing to shapes emerging from the glowing mist.\n\nA host of red-armoured warriors of the Thousand Sons, mounted on shimmering discs of light, and led by a towering figure of fire and wrath.\n\n'Magnus...' said Abidemi.\n\n'Maleficarum,' growled Bjarki.\n\nThe Wolf and the Dragon\n\nSeeing the red sorcerers sent a tremor of excitement along Bjarki's spine. It had been too long since he'd spilled the blood of his enemies. Though only three of the Rout stood before the Sons of Magnus, too many of his brothers had fallen to their malefic ways for him ever to fear them.\n\nNot even the jagged memories of Nikaea or the newly inconstant path of his wyrd held any terror for him. Since Promeus had told him Magnus would return to the birthrock of humanity in search of his final soul-shard, the suspicion that Terra would be the place of his dying had grown with every passing day.\n\nHe'd hoped his thread would finally be cut on Fenris, in battle, knee-deep in icewater and with bloody axe in hand as the final song of the wild hunt echoed in his skull. That hope felt more and more distant every day, but to die in the shadow of the Allfather's Palace was as good a place to meet the end as any warrior might wish.\n\n'They come to finish what they started on Nikaea!' he shouted, with his fetish-hung staff raised high. 'They took our brothers, cut their threads before their time. Say their na"}
{"text":"his thread would finally be cut on Fenris, in battle, knee-deep in icewater and with bloody axe in hand as the final song of the wild hunt echoed in his skull. That hope felt more and more distant every day, but to die in the shadow of the Allfather's Palace was as good a place to meet the end as any warrior might wish.\n\n'They come to finish what they started on Nikaea!' he shouted, with his fetish-hung staff raised high. 'They took our brothers, cut their threads before their time. Say their names!'\n\n'Gierlothnir Helblind!' cried Svafnir Rackwulf.\n\n'Harr Baelgyr!' shouted Olgyr Widdowsyn.\n\n'Brothers to us all,' answered Bjarki, turning to the three sons of Vulkan. 'But the Allfather brings us new brothers. Tell me your names.'\n\n'I am Atok Abidemi,' said the first of the Salamanders, a powerful warrior with a mighty fang-toothed blade held at his shoulder. 'And these are my fellow Draaksward.'\n\n'Draaksward?' interrupted Bjarki.\n\n'It means Sword Dragon in the old tongue of Nocturne.'\n\n'Good name.'\n\n'The hammer bearer is Barek Zytos,' continued Abidemi. 'The spearman, Igen Gargo.'\n\n'Draaksward, eh? Well, today you are brothers to the Rout,' said Bjarki, slapping a heavy palm on Abidemi's shoulder guard. 'You are part of our watch pack! Six against the hundreds! They will sing songs of our glorious deaths!'\n\nBefore the Salamander could object, rippling traceries of light lifted from Bjarki's staff, cold blue and actinic bright. The light was echoed in his eyes as the blistering heat of the breach dropped sharply and fresh webs of frost patterned the molten rocks. Sharp cracks sounded as hardened stone split with the sudden drop in temperature, and the howling of an oncoming gale swept down from the borealis of shield impacts overhead.\n\nThe world around Bjarki faded, the outlines of the warriors around him becoming faint, almost ghostlike. Their flesh, that crude matter that bore their true forms, dimmed in his sight, but the souls within...\n\nHow bright we all burn. No wonder we were not made to last.\n\nThe mortal world was a blur of meaningless shadows. Instead, he now saw avatars of spirit at his side: his fellow sons of Fenris as blooms of cold fire, the Salamanders searing their forms into the air. Streamers of black flame and molten heat buckled the air around them, warrior souls birthed in the violent upheavals of their home world's core.\n\nHe heard the muffled barks of bolter fire and felt the bilious taste of warp magic: a mockery of the power infusing his flesh, a corruption of the link between man and the earth they trod. That compact was ancient and sacred, and the powers wielded by the sons of the Cyclops were a sick perversion of that singular bond.\n\nBjarki could see the enemy coming, too-bright flames against the grey mist of the physical realm, their spirits burning with such all-consuming light he wondered how they could not see that it was devouring them from within. Such a fire would burn away whatever humanity was left to them and leave them naught but ghosts.\n\nSteel clashed with steel, gunfire whipped the smoke, and crumping detonations threw up fountains of rock and dust. None of it touched Bjarki, every shard and fragment whipped away by the whirlwind building around him.\n\nThe bleak sorcery of the Thousand Sons twisted reality and broke every natural law, but the icy winds of psychic force building around Bjarki kept the worst of it at bay. Searing fires bent and twisted in the face of his storm's fury. Shivering terrors torn from the blackest corners of a warrior's fear died in the teeth of its spectral ice. The howling unpredictability of the storm made a mockery of any attempt to scry its future path and the actions of the warriors who stood ready at its razored edges.\n\nHe saw a shimmering form of mercury brightness. A warrior leaping from the air towards him. Bjarki caught the traitor in an icy squall and slammed him to the ground, stepping in and driving the blazing tip of his staff down through the warrior's chest. Plumes of violet light sprayed from the wound as Bjarki worked the staff deeper. The sorcerer's magic withered in the face of his fraying thread, and Bjarki felt not a moment's pity for him.\n\nThe heavy, brutal clash of armour echoed dully within the mist and ice of the storm. This was the oldest form of war known to humanity: grunting men heaving at one another in a contest of strength of arms and legs, of will and determination. No matter how far technology advanced, no matter the sophistication of foes, or whatever arcane rules of combat were in place, it always came down to warriors at close quarters, looking one another in the eye as death hovered close.\n\nAn impact spun him around. Mass-reactive. It detonated a fraction of a second later, a tumbling fragment slicing the shaven skin just above his ear. Warm blood ran down his cheek and over his lips. He tasted the hard metal flavour of it and grinned, spreading the blood over his teeth and cheeks with his palm like the savage the Prosperines believed him to be.\n\nFire bloomed as a phosphor-bright warrior reared up before him. A thrusting staff rammed into his midriff, driving him down to one knee. His foe expected him to retreat, to regain his feet and breath, but Bjarki leaned in. He lunged forward and swung his own staff low, hooking the legs out from the warrior before him.\n\nHis fist closed over the helmet of the downed warrior and twin blades of ice stabbed from his palm and through the lenses of the sorcerer's faceplate. Unclean fire gouted from the warrior's mouth, a psychic death spasm that made Bjarki feel unclean to witness.\n\nHe shielded his eyes as a newborn sun flared to life overhead.\n\nLooking up through splayed fingers, he saw a titanic form, red and winged, feathered and hard-edged in gold. A rippling vessel of divine flesh forged in a crucible of magic and science. It cycled through a thousand forms in an instant: a wandering sage, a winged avatar of temptation, a vast wheel of eyes that turned ten thousand times in an instant - wing upon wing, millions of seething protean forms that would never be born, and multitudes more that would be.\n\nBjarki felt a sliver of horror slide into his soul.\n\nMagnus the Red.\n\nThey had fought avatars of the Crimson King's soul on Aghoru and Nikaea, but this was the primarch restored. Before, they'd possessed weapons to fight Magnus: a vessel to bind his soul, or a monster that was his equal. Now they had nothing but their own skill at arms and strength of heart.\n\nHow pitiful that was.\n\nThe thought lasted a fraction of a second only, but it was enough to stoke the fires of Bjarki's rage. They were the Sons of Russ, warriors of the Wolf King. No fight was unwinnable to them, no foe invincible. The Allfather had seen fit to bring him to this place, and for his own resolve to falter at the first sight of the enemy drove Bjarki into a towering fury.\n\nHe threw back his head and loosed a howl that would have frozen the blood of every prey creature on Fenris. It was the howl of the world wolf, the weaver of wyrd, and the heartbeat of the universe.\n\nHe felt the smouldering, soot-black presence of Nocturne's sons and grinned.\n\n'What are you doing?' said Abidemi, sensing the imminence of his power.\n\n'The icy heart of Fenris is far, and its song is little more than a whisper on the wind,' said Bjarki, his voice oddly textured, as though echoing from the heart of a cave. 'But the world spirit of Terra...? It is old and it is deep. The power that moves within its bedrock and flows in the seams between its skin of stone is the strongest I have ever felt.'\n\nBjarki extended his bloodied gauntlet.\n\n'Take my hand, Atok Abidemi, and we will fly as dragons of fire and ice!'\n\nThe Draaksward gripped his arm in the old way, and Bjarki brought his staff down hard.\n\nThe rock beneath split with the otherworldly force of impact, as if the hand-carved wolfwood of the staff had bored down into the very heart of the world.\n\nSo much power. Truly, where else could the Allfather's dream take flight but here...?\n\nA geyser of power poured into Bjarki and Abidemi, channelled by the grain and whorls of the staff's structure and given form by the legacies of honour carried by the two warriors.\n\nRazored daggers of ice and ash swirled around him, and he spun his staff to drive the furious ambition of the power wrought between them to greater intensity. The icy winds surrounding Bjarki howled as though the fanged companions of the Wolf King himself attended him, even as the choking heat of the ash blistered his skin.\n\nAn eruption of light exploded above them, twin forms intertwining, serpentine and alive.\n\nThey coiled around one another as they rose higher into the air, screaming at this birth as though the mortal world were hostile to them. One was sheened in white, blinding in its feral radiance: a rearing wolf of dazzling brilliance, woven from raptures and the cold legends of Fenris. Its twin was its opposite in every way, a draconic titan of burning black smoke, shot through with blazing veins of molten orange.\n\nIts eyes were smouldering coals, tempered in the heart of a forge and ready to burn, its teeth and claws were ebon hooks. Their howls and roars shook the earth itself as they reared beyond Abidemi and Bjarki, twisting around one another until their opposing natures forced them apart.\n\nThe twin avatars fell upon the blazing light of Magnus on wings of ember and howls of vengeance. Claws of ice tore at the primarch as pyroclastic clouds billowed in the breath of the furnace serpent. It choked the vents and rebreathers of the traitors below with burning ash.\n\nThe storm of ash and fire scoured the ground before the breach, throwing up screeds of irradiated rubble and debris. Superheated steam vaporised unprotected flesh, and frozen limbs shattered at the slightest impact. Fused with the energies of Terra's world spirit, no sorcery could breach that barrier, or harm those behind it.\n\n'It's beautiful...' whispere"}
{"text":"pyroclastic clouds billowed in the breath of the furnace serpent. It choked the vents and rebreathers of the traitors below with burning ash.\n\nThe storm of ash and fire scoured the ground before the breach, throwing up screeds of irradiated rubble and debris. Superheated steam vaporised unprotected flesh, and frozen limbs shattered at the slightest impact. Fused with the energies of Terra's world spirit, no sorcery could breach that barrier, or harm those behind it.\n\n'It's beautiful...' whispered Abidemi, his voice carrying to Bjarki despite the storm.\n\n'Do not look upon it,' replied Bjarki, his voice cracking with the strain of conjuring such awesome energies. 'Such powers do not suffer the sight of mortals.'\n\nThe forge dragon coiled around Magnus, and Bjarki could see flickering points of light borne up by its motion. The light of subtle bodies, dimming like drifting cinders blown from a dying fire. The lone wolf, never one for the leash, circled the primarch, its jaws snapping shut on Magnus' light even as it herded others into the fires of the dragon's wrath.\n\nThe wolf and the dragon basked in their freedom, revelling in the all-too-mortal urge to destroy without conscience, to wreak havoc without consequence. The light of Magnus dimmed, obscured by a blizzard of ice and seething clouds of volcanic smoke. A black rain, cold and caustic, fell in greasy sheets, and Bjarki tasted the hot metal and molten stone borne upwards from Terra's lightless depths.\n\nHe felt the presence of Magnus diminish. Not in death, never that. No power conjured by mere mortals could achieve such a feat. Not in death, but in defeat. Bjarki felt the fury of the Red Cyclops, the arrogant rage of a victory snatched away. Magnus was strong, but his certainty of his own infallibility was his greatest weakness.\n\nBjarki sank to his knees, savouring the fury of the world wolf even as the connection to it devoured him from within. Abidemi went down with him, unable to release his grip, their arms locked together as surely as if they were conjoined from birth.\n\nExplosions painted the air, hundreds of detonations marching down the breach. Hard echoes of mass-reactives burst around them in swelling volleys. He caught glimpses of transhuman figures in blood red and vivid gold.\n\nImperial banners whipped by the thermal vortices.\n\n'So... powerful,' he said. 'Have you ever felt anything like it...?'\n\n'Bjarki,' grunted Abidemi. 'It's... killing... us. Let it go!'\n\nHe felt Abidemi struggle to release his grip, the dragon's continued existence consuming the Salamander as surely as the wolf was Bjarki. But he tightened his hold, binding them together and ignoring his own warning to stare into the struggle above.\n\n'Must hold... on,' he said through gritted, bloody teeth. 'Magnus must pay!'\n\n'Release me!' demanded Abidemi, surging to his feet, but Bjarki could not follow. His limbs were powerless, drained of marrow and bone and meat and muscle, utterly without strength.\n\n'You must let it go!' yelled Abidemi. 'The warriors of the Angel and Dorn are here!'\n\n'No, brother...' he said. 'Not yet. Must... finish this...'\n\nBjarki's vision faded to grey, misty as the thread of his life unwound. He felt the brightness of unshakeable resolve fill his brother Astartes.\n\nWas it time already? Surely not so soon...\n\nHe looked up and saw the flash of an ancient blade being raised.\n\nFirelight glinted from ebon teeth that tore the air with a roar to match that of the dragon.\n\nBjarki had given all to bring the world wolf and forge dragon into being.\n\nIt was killing him, but he had driven the Crimson King back.\n\nBjarki was not about to give up power such as that.\n\nAnd Atok Abidemi knew it.\n\n'I am sorry, brother,' said Abidemi.\n\nDraukoros swung down, severing Bjarki's arm just below the elbow.\n\nAlivia did not know where she was.\n\nDown in the darkness beneath the world that shouldn't have surprised her. The foundations of the Imperial Palace were ancient and deep, built and rebuilt a thousand times over the millennia. No cartographer could ever fully map its labyrinthine depths, and no technology had reliably plumbed its endlessly twisting passageways.\n\nBut no one knew these secret ways better than Malcador.\n\nThe passage he led Alivia down was uncomfortably narrow, wide enough only for her to follow in the Sigillite's footsteps. The walls were fashioned from glossy black tiles, repellently slick to the touch and suspiciously free of dust or cracks. Something in the oddly angled dimensions of the tunnel, together with the offset placement of the unique tiles and their ill-proportioned scale, sent a tremor of unease down Alivia's spine. No two tiles were alike, and Alivia's suspicion was that some fundamental difference existed between her human sensory perceptions and those of the passageway's builders.\n\nWith each branching twist downwards, she felt less and less sure that she could navigate back to the surface and the unremarkable door at the base of the drum tower through which they'd begun this journey.\n\nWith Promeus' pronouncement that Magnus was attacking the Western Hemispheric, the warriors of the Rout had rushed away. Just before slamming the door behind him, Bjarki had looked back at her and she'd thought for a single, ridiculous, moment he was expecting her to follow him.\n\nYes, Alivia had some skill at arms, and yes, she had killed more people than she cared to remember, but she wasn't a soldier. She hadn't stood in the ranks since the conquests of Boeotia and Euboea, and this was not a war where individual martial ability mattered, not in any meaningful way.\n\nBut Bjarki had only sent a warning glance at Malcador and said, 'Watch that one, and take care with your wyrd, Mistress Sureka,' before vanishing with his brothers.\n\nAlivia kept her gaze fixed on Malcador's back, finding that looking too long at the oddly angled tiles made her feel mildly nauseous. It was cold down here, and she was thankful for the thermal bindings beneath her thick coat. Vivyen's chapbook nestled inside a pocket of the inner liner, her daughter insisting on the verge of tears that she take it with her before leaving for her meeting with Malcador in the drum tower. Alivia had gratefully accepted it, knowing she would have little time to read any of the many stories within.\n\nTo keep her head warm, she wore a thick ushanka with furred flaps that covered her ears and tied beneath her chin. Above her right eye, a brass pin badge depicted a pair of crossed lances over a silver skull. What regiment it represented was a mystery, and Alivia hoped there wasn't a soldier somewhere out on the walls with ears that were freezing off thanks to her petty theft.\n\nMalcador, too, wore a heavy cloak of furs and a thick, turban-like head covering, though she suspected his concession to warmth was an affectation. Still, the fingers gripping the onyx black of his staff were pale and bloodless, so perhaps he did feel the cold.\n\n'You still haven't told me where we're going,' she said.\n\nHer voice echoed strangely, as if the gloss black walls weren't reflecting sound quite the way they should.\n\n'And nor shall I,' said Malcador. 'To speak of a thing is to fix it in place, and the paths I must navigate through the Palace will only lead us astray if our destination is named.'\n\n'Always with the riddles. It's one of the many, many things I hate about you.'\n\nMalcador looked up and around, as though afraid of being overheard.\n\n'I don't seek to deceive you, Alivia, but you know as well as I that some things cannot be spoken of simply.'\n\n'These aren't normal tunnels, are they?'\n\n'No, they are not,' admitted Malcador. 'Sometimes even I must move unseen through the warp and weft of its architect's grand design.'\n\n'Does the Emperor know of these tunnels? The Custodians? I imagine Valdor would be very interested to know there are secret ways through the Palace even he doesn't know.'\n\n'Constantin protects the Emperor in his way, I protect Him in mine.'\n\n'And I'm guessing Valdor wouldn't approve of your way. Why is that?'\n\n'The Custodians are loyal beyond imagining,' said Malcador. 'Beyond any understanding you or I could possibly comprehend. It is literally coded into their very genes and psyche, and while that iron devotion is necessary, it is sometimes too dogmatic to accept any option that might place their charge in danger.'\n\nAlivia stopped, as shocked as if Malcador had slapped her.\n\n'Is this, whatever this is, putting the Emperor in danger?'\n\n'It might, yes, but it is by His own design and His own devising,' said Malcador.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Redemption.'\n\n'Redemption? Whose?'\n\n'Perhaps all of us,' said Malcador, turning and walking away.\n\nAlivia shook her head. Was nothing simple any more?\n\nWhen had things ever been simple?\n\n'Well, if you won't say where we're going, at least tell me why you need me,' said Alivia. 'What can I do, only me, that makes you willing to listen to John and ease my family's passage to Terra? And then grant them sanctuary within the inner walls of the Palace. Tell me that, and no riddles or I swear I'll strangle you right now.'\n\n'I told you, I need you to save the Emperor.'\n\n'I presumed that was grandstanding for Promeus and the Wolves. Tell me the real reason.'\n\n'That is the real reason,' said Malcador, pausing to rest on his staff. 'I know you don't trust me, Alivia-'\n\nShe laughed bitterly. 'You've never given me a reason to trust you. All the long years I've known you, known Him, I can count on one hand the number of times you've given me a straight answer.'\n\n'Civilisations are not won and held by men who give straight answers.'\n\n'That's a depressing world view.'\n\nMalcador sighed, as if tiring of her barbs.\n\n'The war against Horus has many fronts,' he said. 'It is fought in grand strategic realms where the likes of Rogal Dorn and his brothers excel, and it is fought through the sights of a lowly las-trooper, such as the young man of the Sixteenth Arctic Hort whose ushanka you wear.'\n\nAlivia took off her hat "}
{"text":"times you've given me a straight answer.'\n\n'Civilisations are not won and held by men who give straight answers.'\n\n'That's a depressing world view.'\n\nMalcador sighed, as if tiring of her barbs.\n\n'The war against Horus has many fronts,' he said. 'It is fought in grand strategic realms where the likes of Rogal Dorn and his brothers excel, and it is fought through the sights of a lowly las-trooper, such as the young man of the Sixteenth Arctic Hort whose ushanka you wear.'\n\nAlivia took off her hat and squinted at the regimental crest.\n\n'And it is waged by those who walk in shadow, who must shoulder the burden of decisions too terrible for others to bear, who must make dreadful choices no one should ever face.'\n\nHere he paused to look back at Alivia. 'And it is waged by those who can suffer the many hurts such a long war entails.'\n\n'Is that why John and I are here?' asked Alivia. 'What about the others? Oll? Prytanis? What about them? Are they here too?'\n\n'Some, and they too will play their part. Some willingly, some less so.'\n\n'Is John here? In the Palace, I mean?'\n\nHe hesitated before answering. 'Wherever John is, he is where he needs to be.'\n\nMalcador led them to a tapered doorway, barely tall or wide enough for either of them to pass through. Alivia had the sense of a large space beyond and felt a cold wind caress the skin of her cheeks, bearing the taste of salt: like ocean spray at a wharf. It didn't taste like any air she'd breathed on Terra. It felt old and dead.\n\nShe ducked through and a moment of dizzying vertigo seized her as she moved from the claustrophobic passageway to a vast cavern whose ceiling rose to cloud-lapped heights, and which fell into a depthless chasm that echoed to the sound of waterfalls.\n\nAlivia sank to one knee, pressing a palm flat on the ground to steady herself.\n\nMalcador reached out to touch her shoulder. The strength of his grip was surprising for a man so thin-boned and tired looking. She flinched in revulsion. He hadn't made contact with her skin, but her reaction was instinctual: a primate's reaction to being touched by things that squirm and crawl in darkness.\n\n'Alivia?'\n\n'Don't touch me again,' she said, taking a deep breath.\n\nHe nodded and turned back to their route.\n\n'Then follow me. And stay close.'\n\nShe rose on unsteady legs and followed him onto an outflung walkway that arched out over the chasm to a distant column of red stone that looked wholly alien to Terra.\n\nSquare-cut steps corkscrewed down its length, descending into darkness.\n\n'These are definitely not normal tunnels,' said Alivia.\n\n'They were abandoned before the first stone of the first tower was laid on the mountains above,' said Malcador. 'The builders of Leng knew of these low roads, but eventually abandoned them. Some of the markers down here are theirs, but they had long departed this realm before the Emperor unlocked the gates sealing them.'\n\n'How do you navigate down here?' asked Alivia. 'I get the sense there isn't a map. At least not in any normal sense.'\n\n'There are maps of meaning if you know where to look and how to read them, but even I walk these paths with care. A way that was open one time may be closed another. Or ways that never were now beckon the unwary traveller.'\n\n'Have you ever got lost down here?'\n\n'Thankfully not,' said Malcador. 'But I have seen the bones of those who have.'\n\n'Well, that's reassuring.'\n\n'Come,' said Malcador. 'Stay close, and I will show you where gods have walked.'\n\n'I've seen places like that,' said Alivia. 'They're filled with the blood and bodies of mortals.'\n\nBjarki and Abidemi summon the power of their world spirits.\n\nSouls of Consequence\n\nThe scale of the devastation was almost impossible to process.\n\nViewed through the cracked and filmy armourglass of a circling Storm Eagle, Promeus guessed the entire nineteen-kilometre stretch of Western Hemispheric had borne the brunt of this latest assault.\n\nFires burned all along the length of the wall, and soot-black smoke shrouded the ramparts.\n\nA pall of dust and aerosolised blood made every breath taste of metal.\n\nThe entirety of the wall was a scene of horror, but it was upon the breach where the atomic had detonated that Promeus focused his gaze.\n\n'Radiation levels are too high for non-Astartes,' said the pilot over the vox.\n\nHis name was Kandallo, and he was a stoic warrior in the gold livery of an Imperial Fist. His right arm was missing, as was most of his left leg. Wire-bound lengths of neuro-activator cable clamped to his raw stumps allowed him to fly the Storm Eagle one-handed until he could be fitted with augmetics that would allow him to return to the front lines.\n\nThe clicking of the gunship's rad counter had become so concentrated that it was now a continuous, droning backdrop that not even the deafening roar of the Storm Eagle's engines could entirely obscure.\n\n'I've taken high-dose anti-rad meds,' said Promeus, 'and I don't intend to be here long.'\n\n'Every minute you spend in these levels is one minute too many.'\n\n'Then I'll be quick.'\n\n'Be sure that you are.'\n\nPromeus knew that coming this close to the aftermath of an atomic detonation was recklessly dangerous, but the nagging sensation of something terribly amiss was a hungry rat gnawing its way out of his belly. He didn't know what was wrong, only that something was off-kilter in a fundamental way.\n\nKandallo brought the gunship in low from the north-east, keeping as close to the shattered rooftops as possible. Airspace within the aegis was rigidly controlled, and anything airborne was considered a target unless proven otherwise. Their authorisation to fly within the Palace precincts came from the Sigillite himself - by virtue of Promeus' connection to Magnus - but even so, the dull, psychic awareness of the servitor-crewed guns on the walls tracking them was unmistakeable.\n\nHe tried and failed to process the scale of the fight that had taken place here; it was impossible to comprehend - as was almost every engagement in this siege. Corpses without number bedecked the walls and the slopes before them, the swathes of ruined flesh badly mangled and so thoroughly dismembered that it was impossible even to guess how many had died.\n\nThousands? Tens of thousands? Just another day, another afternoon, on Terra.\n\nHundreds of wounded stumbled away from the walls, covered in blood and lost to the shock-trauma of the assault. Many were missing limbs and didn't seem to notice, or carried them bundled in their uniform jackets. Flash-blinded wretches clung to the walls in darkness or were helped by their sobbing comrades. The death toll here would be abominable, but the roll call for the wounded would be many times larger.\n\n'Even if we win, will we be able to bear the cost...?' he whispered.\n\nHis gaze lingered on a group of Blood Angels moving through the crowds of wounded, the red of their warplate scoured by the fire and fury of the attack. Something in their bearing struck Promeus as unusual, but a drifting bank of smoke obscured the ground, and when he looked again, he could no longer see them.\n\nHuman remains mingled with Astartes bodies and those of other creatures with matted fur, scaled hides and leathery flesh, for the attack had not simply ended with the arrival of the IX and VII Legions. It had taken the ferocity of the combined Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and Army reserves in sealed tanks to push the Thousand Sons and their bestial allies from the wall. The beasts had been scorched hairless by radiation, their wasted bodies blistering and sloughing flesh from their bones, but they had fought tooth and claw to cling to the walls.\n\nTamaya's Blood Angels held the flanks of the main breach, with an unbroken wall of Iacono's Imperial Fists holding and rebuilding the centre. A haze of furnace heat rippled the air over the wall as securement parties hosed the breach with rapid-setting lockcrete, pierced the ground with blast-shot rebar, and bolted refractor generators into place atop the surviving portions of the parapet.\n\n'Given twelve hours, the Imperial Fists could make this wall viable again,' said Kandallo.\n\n'Time is the one thing we don't have,' said Promeus, looking into the crackling smog banks beyond the walls, like tsunamis of elemental force ready to crash over the Palace and everyone within it. 'And no matter what they're able to do, it won't be enough.'\n\nShadows jerked and stuttered in the fog, fleeting impressions of horns and claws, teeth and unblinking eyes. Such malice was hidden within, potent and hate-filled.\n\nSo much had happened since the heady, innocent days when he and Kallista, Camille and Mahavastu had shared caffeine under an awning and debated why they had been assigned as remembrancers to the XV Legion. Back then, the galaxy made sense, and the idea that the Thousand Sons would follow the Warmaster down the road of treachery was absurd.\n\nTreachery.\n\nThe very word tasted ashen in his mouth.\n\nEven after all he had seen and done, he could still barely bring himself to speak it.\n\nThe Storm Eagle tilted on its axis and began a rapid downwards spiral, guided in by an Imperial Fist in armour so drenched in gore that Promeus first mistook him for one of the Angel's warriors.\n\nPromeus unbuckled himself from the grav-seat as the crew door rolled back and hot air surged inside. Immediately, his skin felt the killing blush of radiation, and his heart rate spiked as he tasted the heavy metals, isotopic toxins and caustic fumes casting a pall over Western Hemispheric.\n\n'Remember, do not linger here,' warned Kandallo.\n\nPromeus nodded and stepped down from the gunship. He felt the heat through his boots, each step sticky as the thick rubber soles softened. Thousands of warriors moved through the space behind the wall, bulky transhumans in heavy warplate, masked Army and dozens of pioneer units working to shore up the damage.\n\n'This is no place for mortals,' said the Imperial Fist who'd guided the gunship down.\n\n'So I'm told,' replied Promeus.\n\n'You "}
{"text":"emispheric.\n\n'Remember, do not linger here,' warned Kandallo.\n\nPromeus nodded and stepped down from the gunship. He felt the heat through his boots, each step sticky as the thick rubber soles softened. Thousands of warriors moved through the space behind the wall, bulky transhumans in heavy warplate, masked Army and dozens of pioneer units working to shore up the damage.\n\n'This is no place for mortals,' said the Imperial Fist who'd guided the gunship down.\n\n'So I'm told,' replied Promeus.\n\n'You should get back on that gunship and leave,' insisted the warrior.\n\nPromeus shook his head. 'I'm looking for Bodvar Bjarki, a warrior of the Sixth Legion.'\n\nThe Imperial Fist jerked his thumb in the direction of a series of plastic-sided tents set up in the lee of the wall. A hastily assembled aid station.\n\nPromeus started to thank him, but the warrior was already moving away, discarding any memory of his presence. He shrugged and hurried over to the aid station, clutching his musette bag tight as he heard loud cursing in Futharc from within. Lakes of murky water pooled around its perimeter, and acrid counterseptic fumes hung in the air.\n\nHe pushed through a rubber strip-curtain, tasting the bitter reek of lye and the warm, metallic flavour of the decontamination showers. The interior of the aid station was filled with Astartes warriors, the vulnerable joints and cabling of their armour being hosed clean of radioactive dust. Most were Blood Angels and Imperial Fists, so it wasn't hard to spot Svafnir Rackwulf and Olgyr Widdowsyn. They stood with their arms upraised as medicae personnel in hazmat suits hosed them down with chlorinated water and scrubbed their armour with hard-bristled brushes.\n\nBoth Astartes seemed to find the process wildly amusing, and laughed at the none-too-gentle attentions of the medicae staff. Patches of bare metal gleamed where their Legion colours had been scoured away by radiation and the decontamination process.\n\nRackwulf saw him coming and said, 'You come for a cooling shower too, wyrd-wraith?'\n\n'These men with the brushes, they tickle,' added Widdowsyn.\n\n'Where's Bjarki?' he said.\n\n'There,' said Rackwulf, spitting a wad of phlegm to the rear of the aid station.\n\nPromeus nodded and eased his way through the masked staff and armoured warriors to find Bjarki sitting on an empty ammo crate. A warrior in unfamiliar armour and with his back to Promeus was bent over the Space Wolf, working on something he couldn't see.\n\nTwo warriors in dripping, gleaming warplate stood over him, and such was the damage done to their armour, it took Promeus a second to realise they were XVIII Legion. Like Rackwulf and Widdowsyn, much of their colours had been burned and scoured away, leaving their armour a patchwork of jade green and raw ceramite.\n\n'Salamanders?' he said, and the two warriors turned to face him.\n\nHostility bristled from them, and Promeus halted, his hands spread wide.\n\n'Promeus?' said Bjarki without looking up. 'Even over the stink of decontaminants I can still smell you. Your sweat tastes of hrosshvalus blubber, but you shouldn't be here unless it's to take a shower. There's rad-fire all around. Very bad for mortals, they tell me. Bad for us too, but not so bad it'll kill us.'\n\n'Did you see him?' asked Promeus.\n\n'See who?'\n\n'Magnus, who else? Did you... Wait, what happened to your arm?'\n\nThe Salamander with his back to Promeus had sat up straight, revealing the work he'd been doing to seal off the stump where Bjarki's left arm had once been. A crude clamp had been affixed to Bjarki's armour around his elbow, a beaten metal cap to cover the stump of his arm. Promeus' hand of flesh and blood went to the porcelain smoothness of his own augmetic as the memory of Kamiti Sona and the agonising fire that burned away his limb returned.\n\nBjarki saw the gesture and said, 'Ja, I now know your pain, remembrancer.'\n\n'What happened?'\n\nBjarki nodded to the towering Salamander and said, 'My new brother, Atok Abidemi, cut it off with that big bastard sword of his.'\n\nPromeus glanced at the monstrous, jagged-toothed chainsword at Abidemi's back, and didn't doubt for a second that it might have hewn Bjarki's arm.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because he would have killed us both if I had not,' said the warrior Bjarki had named Abidemi, his voice like blocks of igneous rock grinding together in the throat of a volcano.\n\n'He's not wrong,' said Bjarki, as if the matter of his missing arm were of no consequence. 'The power of the world wolf is like too much dzira. Once it gets in your blood, it is hard to resist holding on to that feeling just a little longer, even as it kills you. I used my strength and that of Atok to draw forth the manifest power of our Legions - a mighty dragon of fire and ash from his, a winter wolf of endless ice from mine. Such a sight, Promeus, you would have written epics of their battle! They tore at the Red Cyclops, and by the Allfather's oath he shed blood. To see him hurting... ah, it was a fine thing, too fine. In my fury, I would have killed us both to see the monster bleed a little longer...'\n\n'You hurt him? You actually hurt Magnus the Red?'\n\n'Aye, we did!'\n\nThe warrior Bjarki had named Abidemi appraised him coolly.\n\n'This is the one you spoke of?' he said, rising to his full height. 'The one who hosted the Crimson King's soul for a time?'\n\nThe words were edged in violence, as though Abidemi might reach for his hideous sword and split Promeus in two.\n\n'That's him,' replied Bjarki, flexing what remained of his arm. 'He doesn't look like much, but there's strength to him. You have no cause to fret on his loyalty, fireborn. His wyrd and that of the Red Cyclops are no longer entwined, but they do remember each other. It was Promeus who warned us of the traitor's presence at Western Hemispheric.'\n\nAbidemi tilted his head to the side, reappraising him. Promeus' heart thudded hard in his chest as the Salamander swept up his sword, but it was only to sheathe it over his shoulder.\n\nThe warrior took a step towards Promeus, his red eyes boring into him.\n\n'Why are you here?' he asked. 'You must have been told this area was lethally dangerous to mortals, yet still you came. Why?'\n\nPromeus resisted taking a backward step in the face of the Salamander's bulk. The man's ebon skin and burning eyes were utterly inhuman, but he saw something there he recognised.\n\n'Because something's wrong. I don't know what, but nothing of this attack makes sense. For as long as the Warmaster's forces have been attacking the walls, we've seen nothing of Magnus beyond the attack on Gorgon Bar and Colossi. Why Western Hemispheric? Why now? Why use a weapon to breach the walls that prevents you using your overwhelming advantage in numbers? Why give up so easily after such an explosive breach?'\n\n'You think the Sons gave up easily?' said one of the Salamanders behind him, a titan with a grotesquely oversized hammer held at his shoulders. Promeus hadn't noticed until now, but he was completely boxed in by the Salamanders.\n\nDespite Bjarki's vouchsafe, they didn't trust him.\n\nIn their eyes he was tainted by the touch of the Crimson King.\n\n'Tell me what happened with Magnus,' said Promeus. 'All of you. Leave nothing out.'\n\nAbidemi began the tale, his account dry and factual, and Promeus let his psychic senses drift slowly outwards, drawing in the memory of what the Salamander had seen and felt. As Bjarki added his own account to the story, more details took shape in Promeus' mind.\n\nIn his original life, the one before his selection to the remembrancer order, before even the fruitless years he'd spent scouring the globe in search of a cure for his dying wife, he had used his psychic ability to read the auras of those with whom he did business, sifting truth from lies and following his preternatural intuition to become absurdly wealthy.\n\nNow he built the memory of these warriors into a mental projection within his mind, seeing the desperate conflict on the ramparts. The smoke, the blood, the screaming and the thunderous blasts of artillery. He felt the heat of the dragon's birth and the bone-freezing cold of the wolf's breath.\n\nAs truly awesome as they were, his mortal heart quailed at the sight of them.\n\nThese were the unleashed souls of Bjarki and Abidemi's Legions, and only a madman wouldn't recoil in horror at the sight of such pure destructive force given form.\n\nWe yoked the power of monsters to our cause.\n\nHe stiffened as he saw the Legion avatars coil around the numinous figure of Magnus, clawing and biting, tearing and ripping the pristine gold of his armoured form. Promeus tasted the black rain, like the deluge that had drowned Prospero's last moments. He had not seen that rain, hadn't tasted its ashen, brackish flavour, but the shard of the Crimson King's soul had seen it and tasted it, so the memory was as strong as if he'd stood amid the fires of Tizca's doom and watched it burn.\n\nHe saw Magnus scream in pain, and understood Bjarki's reluctance to release the power that was hurting his most hated enemy. A flash of gold, a bloom of red in the tortured sky, and it was over. The Sons falling back, their godlike master banished from sight.\n\nWhen the tale was finished, Promeus felt the heat and ice of the twin avatars flow from his body, and he was glad of their departure. He replayed their last moments in his mind, seeing again the agony of Magnus, the fear in his eye as he quit the field of battle.\n\nAgain.\n\nWolf and dragon, biting and clawing.\n\nAgain.\n\nGolden lightning. A whipcrack of displaced air. A sliver of gold, a breath of old air.\n\nAgain.\n\nFear in Magnus' eye.\n\nNo. That's what he wanted anyone with the wit to see to think.\n\nPromeus turned to Abidemi. 'You saw him retreat? Magnus? You saw him fall back with his Legion sons?'\n\n'I did,' said Abidemi.\n\n'You're sure? Absolutely sure?'\n\n'Yes,' snapped Abidemi. 'My eyes pierce smoke and fire better than any man here. I saw him broken and bleeding. I saw him limp back into the concealing smog.'\n"}
{"text":"olden lightning. A whipcrack of displaced air. A sliver of gold, a breath of old air.\n\nAgain.\n\nFear in Magnus' eye.\n\nNo. That's what he wanted anyone with the wit to see to think.\n\nPromeus turned to Abidemi. 'You saw him retreat? Magnus? You saw him fall back with his Legion sons?'\n\n'I did,' said Abidemi.\n\n'You're sure? Absolutely sure?'\n\n'Yes,' snapped Abidemi. 'My eyes pierce smoke and fire better than any man here. I saw him broken and bleeding. I saw him limp back into the concealing smog.'\n\n'Did you?' said Promeus urgently. 'I need to know you saw him retreat.'\n\n'I did,' said Bjarki, standing and gathering up his staff. 'Why do you need to know if we saw him flee?'\n\n'I think you saw what he wanted you to see,' said Promeus, turning and running from the aid station. A dreadful, gut-wrenching sensation was uncoiling in his stomach. Perhaps it was nascent radiation poisoning, but he didn't think so. His mind awash with images of Magnus in battle with the wolf and the dragon, Promeus cast his mind outward, far beyond the battle-ruined shell of Western Hemispheric.\n\nAhzek Ahriman had taught him how to push his mind farther than he'd ever thought possible, and the irony that he was now turning those self-same powers against them was not lost on Promeus.\n\nHe fell to his knees as he tasted the very edges of the hate, horror and madness beyond the walls. A swamp of minds broken and enslaved, an ocean of sickness with fragments of poisoned glass lodged in every heart and every eye.\n\nAmid the millions of firefly pinpricks of mortal and Astartes lives, larger suns burned, too bright to look upon. Once mighty souls, bound to a higher purpose, and now sullied by a doom of their own making. His power was not so great as to name them or see them as anything other than impossibly powerful stars of cursed brightness.\n\nYet even among these damned stars, one ought to have burned brighter than all others.\n\n'You're not there...' said Promeus.\n\n'What are you talking about?' demanded Abidemi.\n\nPromeus turned to face the warriors of the Salamanders and Space Wolves, looking past them to the very heart of the Emperor's fastness.\n\nNow he understood the source of his gnawing fear.\n\n'The Crimson King...' said Promeus. 'He's inside the Palace.'\n\nThey moved through the defenders like ghosts.\n\nLike prey animals deep in the hunting grounds of carnotaurs.\n\nThe air was thick with radiation and fear.\n\nIs this the end?\n\nWho will look after my children when I'm gone?\n\nThe Emperor protects.\n\nI don't want to die.\n\nThe Emperor has abandoned us.\n\nTake him, not me.\n\nThe five of them moved against the human tide, heading eastward from the ruins of Western Hemispheric. Shell impacts flared overhead, amid streaking contrails of missiles and atmospheric detonations. They mimicked the leaden gait of the wounded or traumatised who simply wandered away from the aftermath of the fighting.\n\nAs if there could ever be an escape from the grinding slaughters enacted every day.\n\nMagnus looked down at the warplate of his sons, Ahriman, Amon, Menkaura and Atrahasis, still seeing the proud red and the pale serpentine circle emblazoned on their shoulder guards. A symbol that marked them as bound to the service of the Warmaster.\n\nBut I...\n\nTo any who looked upon him, Magnus was now cloaked in the illusory guise of a loyalist warrior of the line: sturdy Mark IV armour and a chipped shoulder guard bearing the winged blood drop of the IX Legion.\n\nHe felt his sons' discomfort at seeing their gene-sire as one of them.\n\n'It disturbs you to see me thusly?' asked Magnus.\n\nHis voice was calm, soothing and confident, but devoid of its usual commanding power.\n\n As it would any of your loyal sons, my lord, sent Ahriman.\n\n'Speak aloud,' warned Magnus. 'The hunters will be alert for psychic anomalies within the Sanctum Imperialis.'\n\n'Apologies, my lord,' said Ahriman, 'but I find it hard to reconcile the image of an enemy with the knowledge that he is my primarch. Even the greatest magi of the Athanaeans would balk at psychic manipulation on such a colossal scale.'\n\nThousands of enemy surrounded them: loyalist Astartes, Army, Mechanicum, civilian and migou workers, but none of them truly saw the Thousand Sons in their midst. The dull minds of mortals and their once-brothers pressed in on Ahriman's consciousness like a polluted ocean rising to swallow an island paradise.\n\n'This host does not care about us,' said Magnus. 'They think only in terms of the minute-to-minute horror they feel, their fear of pain and what they can inflict in retaliation.'\n\n'You are my primarch,' said Ahriman. 'I have seen your power bear an entire city across the galaxy, but this... How is it possible we walk unseen in the lair of our enemies beneath their telaethesic shield?'\n\n'Look up,' said Magnus. 'What do you see?'\n\n'A rippling sheen of petrochemical light refracting through the aegis shield.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'Patterns. Chaotically evolving fractals where the shield is failing,' said Ahriman, and Magnus felt his focus drift as it followed the endlessly dividing spirals of variegated light. 'I sense deeper meaning might reveal itself if only I had time to divine it.'\n\n'Careful,' warned Magnus. 'Do not leave the fifth enumeration.'\n\nAhriman pulled his focus back to that most fickle of the golden steps.\n\n'What do you see, my lord?' asked Menkaura.\n\n'I see light,' said Magnus. 'Reflected light that touches the retinae of everybody around us. The wondrous complexity of the human eye's biological mechanisms transforms the photons into electrical signals to be interpreted by the brain. Under normal circumstances, were their brains to read those signals correctly, the defenders would perceive our true forms. But I am convincing the brains of all these people to ignore those signals. We are visible in forms I choose for them to perceive.'\n\n'I have only ever performed so elaborate a deception on a single person,' said Amon. 'But to compromise the neurological belief systems of so many psyches at once...'\n\n'It helps that these men and women are utterly exhausted,' said Magnus. 'Their mental faculties have been ground down almost to the level of servitors after weeks of constant horror. All of which makes it easier to manipulate so many minds without triggering the psychic watchdogs of the Inner Palace, though I use the word \"easier\" guardedly.'\n\n'Not every mind here is so blunted,' said Menkaura, his venerable gaze sweeping the faces of the Imperial soldiers.\n\nMagnus nodded. 'Yes, there are some gifted beyond baseline norms, ones with latent sparks that might have been nurtured to greatness with but the slightest care. As much as their dulled sensibilities make it possible to shield us, it saddens me to know that none of these minds will ever reach even a fraction of their true potential. That is what we will change when this is over, when we can build out the psychic genome properly.'\n\nMagnus caught a flash of a memory from Ahriman, quickly suppressed, but there was little his sons might think that he would not know.\n\nA battered Storm Eagle gunship, its hull plates a dull ochre colour.\n\nA fleeting moment of connection snapping his head around.\n\nA singular mind within...\n\n'Lemuel Gaumon,' said Magnus, and felt Ahriman flinch at the mention of the man who had dogged their footsteps since before the Warmaster's rebellion. 'I too felt his presence. His flesh held a fragment of my soul. How could I not?'\n\nAhriman hesitated before replying.\n\n'It disturbs me that he is here, my lord. I thought he would be dead.'\n\nMagnus shook his head. 'We all did, but it means nothing, Ahzek. The greatest conflict the galaxy has ever seen reaches its climax, and the players in this drama must congregate. From the lead actors to the chorus, where else in this melodrama could any soul of consequence be drawn?'\n\n'I almost reached out to brush his thoughts,' said Ahriman, looking out over the teeming multitudes of Imperial souls. 'Even thinking of Lemuel makes my grip falter.'\n\nMagnus understood the real source of Ahriman's troubles. It touched him too.\n\n'You feel them all, yes?' said Magnus, letting his eyes drift, unfocused, over the doomed defenders of his father's Palace. 'Their minds. All their thoughts and fears.'\n\n'I do,' replied Ahriman. 'Nobility and wretchedness, and everything in between.'\n\n'The realisation of mortality brings out the best and worst of humanity.'\n\nThe woman who visits underground gatherings of one they call the Saint and dreams of being lifted into the sky on her wings of silver and gold.\n\nThe man who sleeps with his commanding officer in hopes of being posted to an unengaged part of the wall.\n\nThe man who murdered his wife and volunteered for Western Hemispheric, wrongly thinking his dying will somehow atone for the deed.\n\nThe boy who thought this fight would be a grand adventure, but who has now discovered the truth of war's lie.\n\nSo many minds, so many thoughts.\n\nTruth be told, Magnus was enjoying the sheer hubris of this venture.\n\nBjarki had commandeered a vehicle by the time Promeus had sent word back to the Bhab Bastion of the Crimson King's intrusion. When Promeus emerged from the aid station, he saw Bjarki pulling up in a boxy slab of metal mounted on quad-tracks with a fore-mounted turret fitted with some kind of gatling cannon. Widdowsyn climbed aboard to man the topside gun, as the three Salamanders circled the vehicle with disdainful eyes.\n\nThe Rune Priest dropped down from the armoured side door and battered his one remaining fist against the vehicle's dusty, bullet-scarred plating.\n\n'Look at this!' he cried. 'The man who gave me this said it is called a Taurox.'\n\n'It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen,' said Promeus. 'Throne, is it even safe? It looks like something that's been looted by Nordafrik rad-scavvers before being looted back again by the Army, who didn't even bother to undo the damage.'\n\n'We are none of us pretty,' said Bjarki, grinning and holding up his severed arm. 'Besides, Barek Zytos t"}
{"text":" one remaining fist against the vehicle's dusty, bullet-scarred plating.\n\n'Look at this!' he cried. 'The man who gave me this said it is called a Taurox.'\n\n'It's the ugliest thing I've ever seen,' said Promeus. 'Throne, is it even safe? It looks like something that's been looted by Nordafrik rad-scavvers before being looted back again by the Army, who didn't even bother to undo the damage.'\n\n'We are none of us pretty,' said Bjarki, grinning and holding up his severed arm. 'Besides, Barek Zytos tells me a taurox is a legendary beast of their home world. A good sign, ja?'\n\n'A taurox is a lethally dangerous beast of the Arridian Plain,' said Zytos, locking his hammer over his shoulder. 'I always wanted to kill a bull taurox one day, but I do not suppose I ever will now.'\n\n'Gave you it?' said Promeus, rapping his knuckles on the battered plating. Flakes of rust drifted.\n\nBjarki shrugged. 'He wasn't using it, and the men it once carried are dead.'\n\n'Oh, well that makes me feel a whole lot better about riding in it.'\n\n'It is no Thunderwolf, but at least it is fast.'\n\nBjarki planted his staff and leaned it against the hull of the Taurox as Abidemi circled around to the crew door. Before the Salamander could climb aboard, he said, 'Friend Atok.'\n\nAbidemi turned, his dark skin sheened in sweat and his eyes alight with fresh purpose.\n\nBjarki stood before him as Svafnir Rackwulf circled around behind, a pack-mate sealing a prey-creature's retreat. The disfigured huntsman handed Bjarki his toothed spear, and folded his arms like a gene-bred lifeward.\n\n'We came to Terra by very different paths,' said Bjarki. 'Like the frayed ends of a long and ancient rope. But now the wyrd tells me our threads wind together, becoming one.'\n\nBjarki tapped the spear-tip to his breast, where Promeus saw he had carved the angular shape of what looked like a roaring draconic head into the plastron of his armour.\n\n'You spilled the blood of Fenris to save my life, and that makes us brothers.'\n\nHe spun Rackwulf's harpoon around, resting the head just above the stump of his ruined arm, the spear-tip aimed at Abidemi's heart.\n\n'And what is it you want? To spill some of mine?'\n\nBjarki laughed. 'No, brother, but we are bound together. Wolf and Drake, warriors of ice and fire. Such symbolism should not go unmarked. I will cut your warplate as I have marked mine with the symbol of the Dread Biter, the deep dragon of eternal land-thirst. Fire is its blood, yet ice its scaled hide.'\n\nThe Rune Priest eased the harpoon forwards, but just before the tip touched the deep green of Abidemi's plate, the Salamander took hold of it and shook his head.\n\n'This plate was reforged in the shadow of Mount Deathfire, worked by the smiting hammer of T'kell himself,' he said. 'I cannot allow you to carve it, Bjarki.'\n\n'Not even to mark our brotherhood?'\n\n'Not even for that,' affirmed Abidemi. 'Only artificers of the Promethean cult may work the armour of a Salamanders legionary.'\n\nBjarki nodded and simply handed the spear back to Svafnir Rackwulf.\n\n'It is of no matter,' he said. 'But the wyrd has shown us so marked.'\n\nHe retrieved his staff and climbed aboard the Taurox.\n\n'Come,' said Bjarki with a grin. 'Let's run that one-eyed bastard to ground.'\n\nLiving Fire\n\nImperial Aeronautica strategos classified them as Doomfires, but that was simply a catch-all term for multiple patterns of retrofitted bombers capable of void operations and atmospheric work. The e-mag pulse of the atomic detonation over Western Hemispheric blew out seventeen void pylons placed along the Khat Mandau Precinct and the entirety of those rebuilt in the Saturnine Quarter after the devastating after-effects of the Phoenician's Sonance.\n\nPioneer crews, requisitioned dockers and conscripted longshoremen were swept up by Mechanicum work gangs to rebuild the aegis network and patch the rapidly degrading coverage. Even now, weeks into the siege, the endless bombardment from orbit and low atmosphere was still drilling down like golden-tipped spears on smoking black hafts, and gaps like this were unacceptable.\n\nHundreds of thousands of conventional munitions exploded against the aegis shield every day, and volleys of high-velocity macro shells painted the outer extremities of the aegis every second. Against such volume of fire, it was inevitable that dozens would blow through the gaps to pound the fortress beneath.\n\nEntire districts and structures were smoking craters from the penetration of a single warhead. Portable void generators, intended for the protection of command-and-control centres from mobile artillery units, were daisy-chained around the inner circuits of the Sanctum Imperialis to protect the civilian populace as best they could, but such defences were stopgap measures at best.\n\nThe gap in aegis cover wasn't immediately noticed until the twin engines of an Imperial Marauder bomber, returning from a sortie over Annapurna and the shattered redoubts of Gorgon Bar, finally tore free of the aircraft's superstructure. The burning wreckage arced downwards and exhausted civilians watched as it kept on falling instead of exploding into the rippling force dome overhead.\n\nTrailing black smoke and flames, it slammed into the upper reaches of the southernmost of the Taxonomic Towers, six kilometres east of the dome of the Hegemon. The Marauder's fuel reserves were all but gone, its munitions expended over the enemy encampments of Gorgon Bar's second circuit, so when the upper reaches of the silent tower crashed to the ground in an avalanche of twisted steel and stone, only those adepts within and those refugees clustered around its base were killed. In relative terms, it was an insignificant moment to those within the walls who witnessed the attack craft's demise.\n\nBut to those watching beyond the walls, it was so much more.\n\nEnemy chatter passed word of a potential gap in aegis cover, and within minutes, the equivalent of six squadrons of delta-winged aircraft surged from hardened underground bunkers or dropped from low-atmosphere carriers. Imperial augurs saw them almost immediately, for they made no attempt to hide their approach or disguise their target. Close-in defence turrets and anti-air batteries on Adamant and Saturnine filled the sky with frag bursts and raking fire, but e-mag interference meant they were firing blind.\n\nThunderbolts and Furies already in the air were redirected almost instantaneously, their intercept protocols honed after the ferocious intensity of the air war. Even now, the sky over Western Hemispheric was lousy with blinding dust, vicious thermals that could melt plasteel and spiteful vortices powerful enough to tear the largest aircraft in two.\n\nThe engagement was fought over instruments, the obscuring, radioactive dust drawn up by the lingering mushroom cloud making a mockery of any attempt to fight visually. Pilots jinked, rolled and dived through blinding clouds that choked ports and fouled vents. Engines stalled and weapons misfired, clogged with dust and atomic interference. Pilots that fought too long died as searing air pockets melted the armourglass of their canopies or rad-squalls detonated the warheads on their missile nacelles.\n\nExplosions painted the sky in sheets of orange flame as weaving trails of shellfire streamed like wind-blown fronds of light. Ejecting from a wounded fighter was suicide, no mortal body could survive the hellstorm of explosions, dogfighting aircraft and searing fireballs.\n\nOnly three enemy aircraft survived to punch through the aegis gap, flying below the radiation clouds and trusting to their fellows to keep the Imperial interceptors busy.\n\nOnly three.\n\nThree Doomfire bombers classified as Iniquities.\n\nFully laden with cluster bombs and air-to-ground melta missiles.\n\nThe walls of Western Hemispheric were twenty-five kilometres behind them, obscured by advancing orange cloud banks threading the wide processionals that ran between the gilded structures of Imperial grandeur. Dust hung in thick veils over the thousands of refugees huddling close to the architecture of Imperial ambition, laden with toxins and poison that settled deep in the marrow.\n\nMagnus had set a brutal pace, their perceived appearances assuring them unobstructed passage inward, but it was certain their presence would eventually be discovered. This quarter of the Inner Palace was not yet fully overtaken by warriors or muster points, but more were being drawn in from Indomitor and Sanctus with every passing hour.\n\nConvoys of Imperial vehicles ground through the ashen thoroughfares bisecting their inward route, throwing up clouds of dust and blocking their passage as they rolled past in their hundreds.\n\nThe Thousand Sons paused as a Warlord of Legio Gryphonicus moved south to shore up the beleaguered defences of the Europa Wall, its crashing steps lifting the dust from rooftops and its howling war-horn twitching the smoke with its power. The colossal war engine was limping and drooling smoke from beneath its mighty carapace, yet it strode proud and defiant. A strutting Reaver and a pack of loping Warhounds accompanied it, supplicants to its unimaginable power.\n\nKnights of House Cadmus marched on the flanks, their armour scorched back to bare metal and their banners hanging ragged and limp from carapace vox-masts.\n\nTrudging columns of soldiers from a dozen different regiments followed in its wake, every eye haunted by weeks of war and cheeks hollowed by lack of sleep and malnutrition.\n\nAs he had promised Perturabo, his presence at Western Hemispheric had galvanised the Imperial defenders to reinforce the Ultimate Wall between Adamant in the south and Bastion Ledge at the farthest northern extremity of the Palace circuit.\n\nPerhaps that would offer up opportunities to exploit elsewhere, but Magnus cared little for his brother's grand game of siege warfare against Dorn. The spectacular failure of the Saturnine gambit had made the Lord of Iron cautious and reluctant to overreach, wary"}
{"text":"e had promised Perturabo, his presence at Western Hemispheric had galvanised the Imperial defenders to reinforce the Ultimate Wall between Adamant in the south and Bastion Ledge at the farthest northern extremity of the Palace circuit.\n\nPerhaps that would offer up opportunities to exploit elsewhere, but Magnus cared little for his brother's grand game of siege warfare against Dorn. The spectacular failure of the Saturnine gambit had made the Lord of Iron cautious and reluctant to overreach, wary of accepting counsel from those promising quick victory. With the exception of Angron's monsters, the fighting beyond the walls had eased a fraction. The Sons of Horus were licking their wounds from so many grievous losses, and the Emperor's Children had all but removed themselves from the siege.\n\nEach delay or diversion to avoid concentrations of loyalist troops chafed at Magnus. Time was the enemy and despite his poetic words to Ahriman, the appearance of Lemuel Gaumon at the site of their ingress troubled Magnus deeply.\n\nHe'd passed it off as a likely inevitability, a fluke coincidence, but Ahriman was too well versed in the ways of the Corvidae to ever truly believe that. A core tenet of that Fellowship was that there was no such things as coincidences, that the dance of the universe was governed by invisible music that played behind the veil of most mortals' understanding.\n\nSome called it the Architecture of Fate, others Akasha. The shamans of the VI Legion knew it as wyrd. The seers of Jaghatai spoke of riding the endless storm.\n\nTo Magnus, it was simply Thelema, an ancient word that simply meant 'will'.\n\nThe teachings of the Corvidae were a Prosperine attempt at hearing the notes of that invisible music and learning the steps of its dance, but knowing Ahriman's old Practicus was close reminded Magnus that not even he knew the music as well as he thought.\n\nSurrounded by enemy warriors, the thought was not a comforting one.\n\nThey pressed on through the cloying banks of dust, following a path that Magnus had not walked physically in over a century and a half. Here were the Galleries of Compliance, there the Heraldic Conclave, and glinting in the sickly borealis light of the aegis, were the distant silver towers of the Viridarium Nobiles.\n\nAhead was the blocky outline of the Hall of Weapons, and beyond its hard, martial edges, and brutalist design, their destination.\n\nOr at least the first part of it.\n\nThe Great Observatory was raised on a stepped promontory of dark rock, the titanic structure a wonder of Old Earth even weighed against the great monoliths of its far distant epochs. Its sculpted escarpment walls of Volakas marble were two thousand metres high and veined with amaranthine. Titanic flying buttresses carved to resemble winged angels anchored it to the mountain bedrock, their outstretched arms raised imploringly to the sky.\n\nThe soaring tower that once stood at the heart of Occullum Square at the centre of lost Tizca had been part of the observatory's structure in ages past, one of the many Doric columns encircling the inconceivable circumference of its vast golden dome. The earliest colonists from Old Earth were said to have carried it with them for reasons known only to themselves. Perhaps they had intended to recreate its glory, or perhaps it was simply a means of holding on to their proud lineage.\n\nAncient verse spoke of the great dome outshining the sun, and perhaps it once had, but now it was cracked and gaping, the lustre of its pristine white walls black with fire and smoke damage, its angelic buttresses weeping tears of blood.\n\nOuslite steps, three hundred metres wide, led up towards the great entryway, their entire length obscured by sprawling favelas of temporary structures, tents, awnings and lean-tos housing the living tide spilling from within: civilian refugees from the Katabatic Plains, the Petitioner's City, and Palace outworks that were now nothing more than mud and rubble.\n\nTrees had once lined the grand approach boulevard, silver birch and sycamore, but they were long gone, hauled up by the roots and burned in cookfires. Magnus led his sons between the craters of their uprooting, each absence like a rotten tooth pulled from a gum. He halted as he set foot on the first stair and a memory pushed into his mind like a dull knife.\n\nThe Emperor gazing up through the observatory's aetheric lensworks to show Magnus the secret births of stars and speaking in wonder of the incomprehensible voids between them. Together they had plotted the course of future crusades, and laughed as they imagined the campaigns that would one day reach out into the fathomless gulfs between galaxies.\n\n'There is nothing impossible to him who will try,' his father had said when Magnus had spoken of the nigh-impossibility of reaching beyond the halo stars. 'No one yet alive will see it, but when humankind can fly as we fly, can see as we see, then the greatest prize of all will be within their grasp.'\n\n'What prize could be greater than dominion of the galaxy?' Magnus had asked.\n\nBut his father had never given him an answer, turning away to hide His disappointment.\n\nMemories centuries old now and ashes in his mind, but Magnus recalled them as though they were but moments ago.\n\n'The old wounds are still fresh,' said Magnus.\n\n'Sire?'\n\nMagnus looked at the broken dome of the observatory and the swathes of refugees clustered around its base. Thousands of eyes were turned to face them.\n\n'It is no small thing to walk within the walls of the Sanctum Imperialis,' he said, climbing the steps towards the observatory. 'I had not thought to be so affected. Foolish, I suppose, but it is hard to be here as an intruder after... So many memories. For so long, Terra was the centre of my existence, but this is no longer the house of my father.'\n\nMagnus led them higher, his gaze fixed on the triumphal archway that led within. He could feel the questioning stares of every refugee upon them.\n\nWhy were five Blood Angels climbing to the Great Observatory? Why were they not fighting on the walls with their brothers? The rawness of thoughts here was hard to block: desperation, terror, bewilderment, and the beginnings of a numb acceptance that this was a battle that could not be won.\n\nIf only you knew...\n\nHe heard the name of the Lord of Angels and his sons shouted like a talisman before them.\n\n'Sanguinius!'\n\n'The Archangel's beloved!'\n\n'Blood Angels!'\n\n'Glory to the Ninth!'\n\nThe people in their path moved aside, bowing or dropping to their knees with palms together, whispered words spilling from their lips in repeating mantras.\n\n'The Emperor protects...'\n\n'What are they doing?' asked Atrahasis.\n\n'Praying,' said Magnus.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because in times of woe, people crave saviours. My father is so powerful He might as well be a god, and we are His sons, avatars of a god and worthy of the same devotion.'\n\nYet even as the words left his lips, he knew there was something hollow, something wrong about them, though he couldn't say for sure what it was.\n\n'It disturbs me to see such behaviour,' said Atrahasis.\n\n'Why?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'It is regression. To seek saviours is to abrogate any responsibility to enact change. If a thing needs doing, it should be done. If action is to be taken, take it. You don't wait for anyone else to do it for you.'\n\n'Spoken like a true Raptora,' said Menkaura.\n\n'Doesn't it sicken you?' snapped Ahriman's equerry. 'We know so much now - secrets and technologies so advanced they would appear as magic to our forefathers, wisdom and philosophy so enlightening that such wilful embrace of ignorance and superstition is inexcusable.'\n\n'Ease your choler, Atrahasis,' said Ahriman.\n\nAtrahasis nodded, and kept his gaze fixed on the steps as they climbed.\n\nEventually Magnus stepped onto the great esplanade before the observatory and craned his neck to look up towards the mighty dome. Drifts of ashen smoke obscured the circuit of columns below the dome, and only its very edge winked gold far, far above.\n\n'It's magnificent,' said Amon, his gaze following the outline of the great archway. Dressed in agate and onyx, every stone was carved with star maps, most to places navigable from Terra, some to places most assuredly not. 'Almost the equal of the celestial chambers in the Pyramid of Photep.'\n\n'Almost,' said Magnus with a grin.\n\n'Yes, it is magnificent,' agreed Ahriman, looking towards a sky that was lousy with battle ejecta, e-mag squalls and flickering atomic explosions. 'But why are we here? With all the debris and shelling from low orbit, we won't see anything beyond the atmosphere just now.'\n\n'We are not here to look up,' said Magnus, 'but to pass below.'\n\n'What does that mean?' asked Amon.\n\n'There is a hidden place here where past and future have co-mingled since primordial times,' said Magnus. 'My father once called it a domestication of one of the materium's anomalies. A pulled thread in the fabric of time, a scab on the skin of space. We will travel the low roads that thread the liminal spaces beneath its foundations.'\n\n'Does this place have a name?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'It does, a name it owned before the first men came here and raised a roof above it,' said Magnus. 'They called it the Hall of Leng.'\n\nThe space within the observatory was so colossally vast as to defy the notion of it being an interior. The dome was fully four kilometres in diameter, its underside coffered in bronze and ouslite panels partially obscured by a trapped cloud layer that twisted like an ocean maelstrom in the twitching suspensor fields. Even to Magnus, who had designed the exacting dimensions of the Pyramid of Photep, it seemed inconceivable that such a feat of engineering could have been achieved by mortals.\n\nShell detonations, graser impacts and tectonic shifts from the sheer volume of ordnance landing on the surrounding landscape had cracked portions of the dome in a dozen places. Thick columns of variegated light speared down to paint the terrazzo floor an"}
{"text":"t twisted like an ocean maelstrom in the twitching suspensor fields. Even to Magnus, who had designed the exacting dimensions of the Pyramid of Photep, it seemed inconceivable that such a feat of engineering could have been achieved by mortals.\n\nShell detonations, graser impacts and tectonic shifts from the sheer volume of ordnance landing on the surrounding landscape had cracked portions of the dome in a dozen places. Thick columns of variegated light speared down to paint the terrazzo floor and walls like reflections in a deep-water cistern. The entire circumference of the observatory's wall was carved with vivid frescoes depicting the greatest pioneers of astronomy and their myriad achievements.\n\nMagnus saw alcove shrines and statues dedicated to Aganice, Zarkov, the Heliocentric Apostate, Hypatia, the Scanian Alchymist, Zulema, the Mother of Comets, and hundreds more: a legacy of scientific achievement without which none of them would be standing here.\n\nThe ancient ocular artefact the Emperor had wrought to scry distant galaxies swayed high above the centre of the dome on broken chains like the corpse of an enormous mantis wrought from spun silver, smoked glass and gold. The obsidian speculum in its curiously angled lens apparatus had been shattered at the first impact of weaponry, and most of the device's impossibly complex workings hung like loops of intestinal tract from its split casing.\n\nMagnus' heart broke to see the damage, knowing that nothing else of its kind had ever existed, and never would again.\n\nWhen this is all over, will the prize be worth the price paid?\n\nYet for all its wonder and the scientific achievements of the men and women celebrated on the walls, the observatory was now simply a place to shelter from the war.\n\nIn its day it had been a place of quiet wonder, a gathering place for seekers of wisdom and discoverers of truth, but it had become a noisome, reeking vault. Tens of thousands of refugees obscured the great star map carved into the floor, and the statues of those who had made the Imperium possible looked out over a tumultuous sea of frightened people who cared nothing for their legacies.\n\nMagnus strode through the centre of the crowds, drawn towards a distant statue and alcove. As on the steps, the weight of expectation that settled upon him was profound.\n\nDespite the deceptions he worked within the minds of the mortals crammed inside the Palace walls, he wondered if some deep-buried part of their brains still knew they were in the presence of a god. His image was obscured, but the human psyche could still sense that a being of great power walked among them.\n\nThey saw Angels of Death, gene-forged warriors of the Emperor's own lineage, the immortal god-warriors. But more than that, Magnus felt the presence of an insidious shadow at the edge of that belief, and now understood the strange hollowness he had felt on the steps.\n\n'They are beginning to fear us,' he whispered.\n\n'They are right to fear us,' replied Ahriman. 'For we are mighty and terrible, and our power is a fearful thing.'\n\n'No, this is different,' said Magnus. 'Once, they beheld us in awe and wonder, but not fear. It was understood that it was the duty of the strong to protect the weak. It always has been that way, ever since it was spoken of in the Iron Code. It has been a truth the best of us ought to embody.'\n\nHe stopped before a tall statue of onyx and quartz, a grand representation of the great Kopernik and the first printed pages of his magnum opus. The way onwards was hidden here, a door only those with the wit to find it could open.\n\nThe Emperor had shown him it, and he suspected Sanguinius knew of it too. Perhaps the Khan, for few were the secret ways he could not find. Malcador and the Custodians would almost certainly know of it, but likely no others. He felt the nearby presence of the nagging stitch in reality that told him the way in was near, and lifted his hands up to tease it open with the prescribed psychic key.\n\nMagnus looked back over his shoulder as the people nearest him backed away, eyes averted, just as the people on the grand stairs had done. But now he saw the secret truth at the heart of it: a nameless, metastasising fear coalescing in the bellies and minds of mortals.\n\nThat fear in the tales told on Terra would spread throughout what would be left of the Imperium in the wake of this war, growing deeper and darker with every retelling.\n\nThey will never trust us again.\n\nAs Magnus and his sons crossed the threshold of the Great Observatory, the three Iniquity-class Doomfires were looping a desperate course north-west, navigating by sight alone and following the Gilded Walk that ran from the Ultimate Gate, aiming for the gap between Widdershin's Tower and the Pillar of Unity.\n\nImperial Lightnings chased them, hounding them with air-to-air Skystrike missiles and autocannon fire. The Doomfires were slower by far, and would normally have been easily blown from the sky like wallowing void-whales, but nearby atmospheric squalls and the sheer density of structures crowding the Sanctum Imperialis made accurate targeting supremely difficult.\n\nThe first Iniquity was taken out as it banked hard around the Clanium Library, a Skystrike warhead detonating less than five metres from its portside wing. The bomber's blazing wreckage tumbled from the sky, vanishing into one of the abyssal canyons surrounding the Hegemon before exploding.\n\nA second unleashed nearly its full complement of ordnance over the outer precincts of the Bhab Bastion before aiming its bulk mass towards the Helian Tower in a suicidal strike on the structure's south-eastern flank. Voids took the brunt of the bomb explosions, and close-in turrets hammered the Iniquity itself, but it had too much mass and too much speed to be entirely stopped.\n\nThe bomber ploughed into the Helian Tower and split it apart.\n\nThe wreckage drove in deep like the thrust of a dagger before the last of its munitions exploded, and the tower slumped over at its middle like a disembowelled fighter. Its upper reaches fell in an inexorably slow avalanche of torn stone and tumbling bodies. Two thousand adepts and civilian staff had been crammed within Helian, a structure never intended to endure such punishment. Not even Rogal Dorn's reinforced plating could withstand the impact of so devastating a missile.\n\nEvery single soul within the tower died and, more crucially, so too did their equipment.\n\nCascading vox-net failure within Bhab was total, resulting in an instantaneous blackout within the Sanctum Imperialis. All strategic overview of Exultant and Annapurna was lost, and all information flowing from the military heart of Terra ceased. For thirty tense minutes, the commanders of the Imperial Palace fought alone and isolated, blind, deaf and mute, until secondary relays allowed the re-establishment of command-and-control protocols.\n\nThe net was closing on the third Iniquity as its bombardier sought a target worthy of her ordnance. Eternity Gate and the golden heart of the Palace were too well protected by batteries of mobile gun-platforms, missile stations and barrage fields. Fresh squadrons of interceptors were closing fast from the eastern hangars beneath the Dome of Illumination.\n\nOnly one target presented itself, but before the bombardier could release her weapons, bracketing fire from the Hall of Weapons' defensive guns shredded the Iniquity's fuselage to blazing fragments.\n\nThe aircraft literally came apart in an expanding cloud of superheated vapour and steel confetti, but not before a pair of spiralling munitions tore loose from the pylon mounts on its spinning port wing.\n\nArcing down towards the Great Observatory.\n\nMenkaura was the first to feel the blinding stab of prescience.\n\nHe dropped to his knees, hands pressed over his mirrored helm, a powerful psychic exclamation bursting from his mind.\n\nThe fire from above, it burns everything. It burns everything!\n\nThe mental pulse was so powerfully clear after the enforced necessity of speech that it sounded like a scream in an empty room. Each of them felt the power of Menkaura's vision searing within his skull. Seconds later, they all saw it.\n\nA sea of hungry flames, burning spectral green.\n\nImpossible heat and retina-searing brightness.\n\nFlooding the observatory like ocean breakers against pale cliffs.\n\nScreams swallowed as the air in mortal lungs was instantly burned away.\n\nFlesh melting like snow before a flamer. Bones cracking and splitting.\n\nMagnus looked up and saw a pair of black dots in the sky, growing steadily larger as they fell. He knew what they were, could all but read the serial numbers on their casings, the words of warning stencilled on the warheads, and the sigils of spite etched into their segmented bomb casings by Neverborn claws.\n\n'Mark Eleven Muspell-class phosphex cluster bomb,' he said.\n\nHis sons all saw them, and their psychic vision of its effects spread throughout the observatory, leaping from mind to mind like a mental virus. Heads turned skyward, but there were no screams among the doomed refugees, only a resigned acceptance of this final fate, like beasts milling in a slaughterhouse stockyard. The human capacity for terror can only endure so much before it is dulled by constant horrors. Men and women clutched each other tightly, held their children, but not one got up to flee.\n\nWhat would be the point? The choice was death here or death at the hands of some other uncaring weapon of the enemy. Such blunt acceptance of fate was anathema to Magnus, but the clarity of thought surrounding him was impossible to ignore. Yes, this was death, but at least it would be quick, not the drawn-out terror that ground souls to ash by constant loss.\n\nThe bright, instantaneous flash of an explosion was a far cleaner ending.\n\nNo, Magnus would not accept that.\n\nThe time for subtlety and subterfuge in this endeavour was at an end.\n\nMagnus turned back to the invisible scar in the flesh of the world and sla"}
{"text":"Such blunt acceptance of fate was anathema to Magnus, but the clarity of thought surrounding him was impossible to ignore. Yes, this was death, but at least it would be quick, not the drawn-out terror that ground souls to ash by constant loss.\n\nThe bright, instantaneous flash of an explosion was a far cleaner ending.\n\nNo, Magnus would not accept that.\n\nThe time for subtlety and subterfuge in this endeavour was at an end.\n\nMagnus turned back to the invisible scar in the flesh of the world and slashed it open with a blow from his heqa staff that sounded like a canvas sail tearing. Shimmering, undersea light spilled from elsewhere, conjuring fleeting knives of memory, of shared joy and exploration.\n\nA heady brew of emotions surged from the depths of his consciousness, wondrous and ripe with potential, but now irrevocably tainted with melancholy and the knowledge that such times were lost forever. A breath of wind carried the scent of polished lacquer, willow and cherry blossoms from the strange hall above.\n\n'I have no time for such remembrances,' said Magnus, and stepped back into the observatory, looking up towards the falling bombs.\n\n'My lord, there is nothing you can do for them!' cried Ahriman.\n\nMagnus watched the warheads split apart, and three thousand phosphex bomblets were ejected from the main munition canister in a spiralling pattern to spread the impacts wider.\n\nThey slashed down like glowing green darts.\n\n'We are never so inventive as when we seek to kill one another,' said Magnus.\n\nOne hundred metres above the floor the bomblets exploded in a rippling spiral of light, and the observatory was filled with falling clouds of killing fire. The deadly radiance engulfed the observatory, instantly burning the painted murals from the walls and incinerating countless scientific pioneers whose names would never be spoken again.\n\nThe atmosphere in the dome's upper reaches vanished with a thunderclap of vaporised air.\n\nNow the refugees discovered there were terrors that might yet touch them, and the screaming began.\n\nBut just as swiftly it ceased and turned to cries of wonder.\n\nThe glowing ocean of emerald fire hung seething in the air, churning in a borealis of killing light. It raged and howled, a ravenous monster trapped and furious at being denied its feast of scorched meat and blackened bone. It clawed and slithered like a living thing across an invisible barrier held above the refugees, a frenzied predator desperate to reach its prey.\n\nBelow it, Magnus stood with his arms upraised, his sons gathered around him.\n\nPsychic might blazed from him as he wove inhumanly powerful forces overhead. No longer could he maintain his physical deception in the minds of those who beheld him, and he stood revealed in all his glory: a titan of gold and crimson, red of mane and ivory of horn. Lambent light that echoed the green of the phosphex burned in the cyclopean eye of Magnus. The power in that eye drank in the light and defied it.\n\nMagnus was the Magister Templi of the Fellowships of Prospero. The formulae of the Raptora came as easily to him as breathing did to mortals, but the kine shield he held over the refugees was greater than even the masters of that Fellowship could conjure. And just as the innermost workings of the Raptora were his to command, so too were those of the Pyrae, the weavers of flame. Magnus remembered Khalophis during the Battle of Prospero, striding into battle within the god-machine Canis Vertex. All the fire of the world was his to command, but not even he would have dared to tame so ferocious a conflagration.\n\nMagnus clenched a fist and drove it up into the air.\n\nThe sky of phosphex dimmed fractionally. Its light was that of the dead, a ghostly green as unnatural as it was lethal. Magnus drew on his every reserve of power, but stopped short of employing that of the Neverborn.\n\nIt was his to command, all he had to do was choose to take it; that awesome, unstoppable power conjured from the darkest depths of the immaterium.\n\nBut such power was the province of the fell lords of the utterdark; he could not touch it without being instantly expelled from the Palace.\n\nThe telaethesic ward was attuned to exclude such unnatural energies and had thus far kept the Red Angel, the Pale King and the Phoenician from fully entering the Palace. Their forms were too corrupt, too tainted by that power for them to tread fully within the umbra of the Palace shields. Instead, Magnus drew only from the well of his own abilities: a great and formidable power, but it was not depthless.\n\n'My sons!' he cried as the sickly green fire slithered over the walls, tendrils of flame writhing and twisting as though searching for a weakness in the barrier. 'The seventh enumeration, send me your power!'\n\nThey surrounded him, a mandala formation, and their power poured into him.\n\nHow long Magnus stood with arms outstretched to consume the light he could not say.\n\n'Time is its enemy!' he shouted, drawing strength from defiance. 'Deny it sustenance and it must inevitably turn on itself.'\n\nEvery second his sons empowered him and every second their combined power resisted its force drew strength from the attacking weapon. Slowly at first, the howling green fire began to dim, and without fuel to sustain its growth, the shrieking light turned upon itself.\n\nNightmarish chemical reactions devised in a madman's lab drove the phosphex to desperately cannibalise its own unnatural structure in a frantic attempt to cling to life.\n\nBut against the immense power of Magnus the Red and his sons, it could never be enough.\n\nThe last embers of the phosphex faded as the chemical bonds at its heart finally broke apart. The fire guttered and the heat of its killing light was finally extinguished.\n\nMagnus sighed and released his grip on the kine shield.\n\nThe dead phosphex fell to the floor of the observatory in a harmless, viscous rain that immediately began dissolving into pools of inert jelly. Disbelieving cheers echoed from the walls as dimmed sparks of hope flared back to life in every refugee's heart.\n\nMagnus sank to one knee, a splayed hand pressed hard to the napped-gem mosaic running around the circumference of the observatory. His fingers rested on the image representing the twin ichthyocentaurs bearing Venus Anadyomene from the ocean.\n\n'Aphros and Bythos Piscium,' said Magnus.\n\nHe remembered Horus showing him the same image in the astrological text their father had given him. Twenty signs to match His twenty sons. Magnus had hidden his amusement at the primitive nature of the book, but enjoyed the purity of the memory.\n\nHe smiled to see the image on the floor, rippling light from the rent he had torn in reality making it seem as though the oceanic beasts had been given life and were bearing the renewed goddess from the ocean once again.\n\nA hand touched his shoulder.\n\n'We need to go,' said Ahriman.\n\nMagnus nodded and drew himself up to his full, magnificent height.\n\nA sea of faces drank in the light from his copper flesh, the inhuman nature of his being, but they beheld not the monster they had been told to fear, simply one of the Emperor's sons, a warrior who had saved their lives.\n\n'My lord,' pressed Ahriman. 'Our enemies will know we are here now. We have to go.'\n\nMagnus nodded, numb after so swift and violent an expenditure of power.\n\n'Yes. Go,' he said, half turning to the secret way he had opened beneath the Hall of Leng.\n\nAmon, Menkaura and Atrahasis stepped through to gasps of astonishment from the refugees, but Ahriman lingered.\n\n'Why?' he asked.\n\n'Why what?'\n\n'Why did you save these people?'\n\n'You would have left them to die?'\n\n'They will probably die anyway when Lupercal takes the Palace,' said Ahriman.\n\n'Maybe, maybe not. All I knew was that I could not allow them to perish in the fire when I could save them. In truth, until I stepped back into the dome, I did not know what I would do.'\n\n'Perhaps proximity to the first shard of your soul is affecting you more than any of us thought possible,' ventured Ahriman.\n\n'Perhaps,' said Magnus with a hopeful smile. 'It is the first and best part of me.'\n\nWith Ahriman at his side, Magnus set foot on the Low Roads.\n\nMagnus saves the refugees in the observatory.\n\nPredators and Prey\n\nLight from beneath the dark lake rippled on the stalactite-clustered ceiling of the immense cavern like undersea shadows. Crystal seams threading the rocky ceiling glittered like distant stars, so very unlike the current view from Terra's surface. At first, Alivia had thought Malcador had brought her to one of the Palace's underground aquifers, but when she had seen the villas of pale stone at the water's edge, she knew this place served another purpose.\n\nSomething about the villas seemed off, but it wasn't until Malcador led her between them to a circular plaza that she realised what was unsettling about them. Each was scaled for beings far larger than mortals, larger even than the warriors of the Legiones Astartes. She counted twenty of them - surely no coincidence in that number - and the colourful mosaic forming the plaza itself depicted something geometrically abstract, like the murals popular with Achaemenid nobles.\n\n'These villas were built for the primarchs, weren't they?' she asked.\n\nMalcador nodded. 'The Emperor imagined they would grow here and learn the skills He needed them to possess before the conquest of the galaxy began in earnest.'\n\n'They never did though, did they?'\n\n'No, she saw to that.'\n\nAlivia didn't need to ask who she was. The Emperor was the gene-father of the primarchs, but only Erda could be thought of as their mother.\n\nA twisted, barbed-wire bitch of a mother, but still...\n\n'Have they ever been used?'\n\n'Not really,' said Malcador. 'At least, not for the purpose for which they were intended.'\n\n'There's thousands of refugees up top you could shelter down here.'\n\n'Both the Khan and the Archangel proposed that, but Valdor would not allow it.'\n\n'I'm guessing that wherever we are is too close to H"}
{"text":"o ask who she was. The Emperor was the gene-father of the primarchs, but only Erda could be thought of as their mother.\n\nA twisted, barbed-wire bitch of a mother, but still...\n\n'Have they ever been used?'\n\n'Not really,' said Malcador. 'At least, not for the purpose for which they were intended.'\n\n'There's thousands of refugees up top you could shelter down here.'\n\n'Both the Khan and the Archangel proposed that, but Valdor would not allow it.'\n\n'I'm guessing that wherever we are is too close to Him for Constantin's liking.'\n\n'That, among other reasons.'\n\n'But there's been someone here,' said Alivia, walking a circuit around the plaza and feeling the presence of a past shade. 'Something powerful, something broken. And recently too.'\n\n'Your abilities are getting stronger.'\n\nAlivia shook her head. 'No, I've felt almost nothing since we arrived on Terra. Even deep beneath Molech, I could feel the Emperor's presence, but now... it's like He's not even here.'\n\n'He is most assuredly here, but as I said, this siege is being fought in more realms than you can imagine,' said Malcador. 'Lupercal might already be seated upon the throne were the Emperor not fighting His own war.'\n\n'So why are you and I here?'\n\n'Do you remember when I talked about forgiveness before we set out?'\n\n'You said it would deprive the enemy of one of their most potent weapons.'\n\n'And so it may, but first, let me ask you something.'\n\nAlivia's eyes narrowed. 'Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like this?'\n\n'Neither of us will, I suspect. Honesty is always hard.'\n\n'Honesty hasn't always been my strong suit, but ask away.'\n\n'Are you a good person, Alivia Sureka? Can you look at yourself in the mirror, see past the many masks you have worn over the long millennia to the very core of your being and say, without equivocation, that you are a good person?'\n\nThe question surprised Alivia. She hadn't known what to expect, but this most assuredly wasn't it. She waited for any clarification, some guidance on what he might be expecting from her, but nothing more was forthcoming.\n\nShe moved to the edge of the lake, looking out over the smooth black waters.\n\n'Am I good?' she said. 'That's a pretty broad question.'\n\n'It really isn't. And you're stalling.'\n\n'Of course I'm stalling. I've lived a very long life and no one gets to live this long without having done some things they're ashamed of. I've killed people, I've killed lots of people, betrayed friends and lovers, lied, cheated-'\n\n'And stolen,' said Malcador with the barest hint of a smile. 'That storybook you're carrying in your coat pocket, the one with the old fairy tales. You stole that from a church.'\n\n'I was getting to that,' snapped Alivia, bending to stir the water with her fingers. 'What's your point? Are you a good person?'\n\n'By any conventional reckoning, no. Like you, I have betrayed those closest to me, and though it has been many years since I have taken a life, I have sanctioned deeds by others that saw appalling slaughters.'\n\n'So, we've both done bad things.'\n\n'Terrible things. Things that would, were they laid before any theoretical higher power of judgement, see us consigned to the deepest hells of the ancients.'\n\n'I'm not sure where you're going with this, but I don't think I like it.'\n\n'My point, Alivia, is that despite all the many terrible acts we have ourselves done or set in motion, we are within the walls of the Emperor's Palace.'\n\n'Wait, is this some long-winded way of saying you're throwing me out?'\n\nMalcador gave a weak laugh and said, 'No, because for what it is worth, our many sins were committed in the name of something good.'\n\n'An evil act, even when you do it in the name of something good, is still evil.'\n\n'True,' said Malcador, lifting his gaze out over the lake as though he expected something to rise from its depths. 'But I fear we do not have the luxury of time to delve into the semantics of such a debate as deeply as it needs.'\n\n'We don't?' said Alivia, looking around.\n\n'No, because you were right.'\n\n'About what?'\n\n'Someone powerful did dwell here for a time. Or at least a portion of him.'\n\n'Who?'\n\n'Until recently, Magnus.'\n\n'Magnus? As in the Red. The primarch?'\n\n'Yes, and by my reckoning, he will be here very soon.'\n\nThe engine of the venerable Taurox had finally given out on the upper approach circuit of the tiered crater of the Investiary. Not that it could have gone farther anyway - the processional ramp was choked with rubble and the Weeping Fountains shed tears no more.\n\n'You are sure this is the place?' asked Bjarki, climbing down from the Taurox as its seized motor juddered like the death rattle of its Nocturnean namesake. 'Even a wyrd-blinded gothii would see this is not where that power came from.'\n\nThey had all felt it: the cold stab of a monstrous psychic event deep in the heart of the Sanctum Imperialis. Yet with every kilometre they travelled, all had felt the distance between them and its source increase.\n\n'I'm sure,' said Promeus. 'Malcador's message was clear. Make for the centre of the Investiary and wait.'\n\n'Wait for what?' asked Atok Abidemi, unsheathing his great, toothed blade.\n\n'He didn't say.'\n\nIt took the legionaries two hours to descend the broken steps towards the base of the amphitheatre, where the great titanoliths of the Emperor's sons had been explosively brought down. Only two of the sixteen that had been allowed to remain were left standing.\n\nOne was unmistakable, the stoic and immovable Dorn, but it took seeing the dust-covered XX on the base of the statue opposite for Promeus to recognise it was the once veiled figure of impenetrable Alpharius.\n\nThe floor of the Investiary, like the wide ramp approaching it, was filled with vast chunks of dusty marble hewn from the great mountain in Attica that overlooked the site of Miltiades' great victory. The debris might have been mistaken for the aftermath of an avalanche but for the massive chunks of veined stone clearly shaped by the hands of mortals. Promeus saw the shattered visage of a huge face that might once have been Guilliman, a hand clenched mockingly into a fist, and upon one plinth, two vast and trunkless legs that ended mid-shin. A sword with a hawk-winged hilt lay beneath half a helmet staring up at the tortured sky, but to whom either had once belonged Promeus could not say.\n\nSadness touched him at the sight of the Emperor's sons brought low.\n\nHe turned to speak to Bjarki, but the Rune Priest and his brethren had already moved off, leaving Promeus alone. Likewise, the Salamanders moved purposefully through the rubble towards a shattered plinth on the far side of the arena-like space.\n\nAt first he didn't understand what they were doing until he saw to which plinths they drew near. Abidemi dropped to his knees in silent contemplation before the plinth upon which the gene-sire of the XVIII Legion had once stood. Only a single, booted foot remained of Vulkan, the rest of his body lying shattered beyond repair in the sand of the amphitheatre.\n\nBjarki and his brothers stood defiantly before the broken remains of Leman Russ, whose body had sheared off diagonally at the waist. The hairs on the back of Promeus' neck stood up as Bjarki threw back his head and loosed a ululating pack-howl. The plaintive sound rose as Widdowsyn and Rackwulf added their voices, and the sublime acoustics of the Investiary carried their vengeance to the heavens and pierced even the constant drumbeat of war.\n\nThe vestiges of his former life as a remembrancer urged him to secure a better look at this ritual, but if he had learned anything during his time as a hostage of the VI Legion, it was that their grief was a deeply personal thing. To intrude on it uninvited would be lethally unwise.\n\nInstead, he sat on a shattered fragment of stone, hoping he wasn't desecrating the remains of a primarch, and waited. He rested his head in his hands, one warm and clammy, the other cold and smooth.\n\nHe seemed to recall hearing that infiltrators had destroyed the statues of the Investiary, but the tactical sense of that eluded him. To have so deeply penetrated the Palace only to wreak symbolic devastation seemed somehow... petty.\n\nPerhaps it had been a message? Or a goading challenge?\n\nHe supposed he would never know, and despite the urgency of Malcador's message and the renewed rumble of a ferocious artillery duel many kilometres north on the Ultimate Wall, Promeus felt his eyelids drooping and his breathing deepen.\n\nThe crunching sound of footsteps jolted him from his doze.\n\n'They should tear this one down,' said Svafnir Rackwulf, looking up at Alpharius.\n\n'Why don't they?' added Widdowsyn.\n\n'It's just a statue,' said Atok Abidemi, leading his Salamanders back to join them. 'Besides, the traitors are destroying enough of the Palace without us helping them. And a time is coming when every scrap of ordnance will be needed at the walls. How galling would it be for a gate or tower to fall for the lack of explosives spent demolishing this?'\n\nBjarki shrugged. 'Salamanders and their pragmatism,' he said with a grin.\n\n'So what now?' asked Igen Gargo. 'Atok? You led us this far. Where now?'\n\nAbidemi nodded and knelt beside Promeus. 'You told us you could follow the spoor of the Red Sorcerers. So are they here?'\n\n'No,' said Promeus.\n\n'Then why are we here?' demanded Barek Zytos, as much of Abidemi as Promeus.\n\nHe let their questions drift over him, hearing the faint sound of distant voices on the wind, channelled through the broken stonework and brought down through the acoustic confluence of the amphitheatre's high tiers. Isolated from the fighting on the walls, the din of battle was muted below - the recent artillery duel notwithstanding - but the voices were as clear as if their speakers were right next to him.\n\n'Put fire on that outpost. Stalk-tanks in the rubble!'\n\n'Tower Helican is down! I repeat, Tower Helican is down!'\n\n'Push the Seventeenth Pan-Pac down there. Hold the gate at all costs!'\n\n'KILL 'EM ALL!'\n\nDozens more intrud"}
{"text":"nd brought down through the acoustic confluence of the amphitheatre's high tiers. Isolated from the fighting on the walls, the din of battle was muted below - the recent artillery duel notwithstanding - but the voices were as clear as if their speakers were right next to him.\n\n'Put fire on that outpost. Stalk-tanks in the rubble!'\n\n'Tower Helican is down! I repeat, Tower Helican is down!'\n\n'Push the Seventeenth Pan-Pac down there. Hold the gate at all costs!'\n\n'KILL 'EM ALL!'\n\nDozens more intruded on his thoughts, the stray comments of Terra's warriors echoing down into the Investiary and scratching the surface of his mind. He rubbed his temples, feeling a pressure growing behind his eyes and a taste of tin in his mouth.\n\nPromeus stood, recognising the sensation.\n\nHe'd felt it on Kamiti Sona, the instant before Ahzek Ahriman and his sorcerers had ripped some kind of psychic gateway through the red ruin of a madman's body.\n\nHe cast his gaze around the arena, and his growing fear eased as he saw a shimmering, golden light near the centre of the amphitheatre. It danced like an endlessly repeating image of a lightning bolt captured on a broken picter at the instant of its birth.\n\n'Do you see that?' he asked.\n\n'See what?' asked Bjarki, his voice sounding like it had crossed vast gulfs to reach him.\n\n'The lightning,' said Promeus, picking a path through the rubble.\n\nHe barely felt them following. His attention was solely fixed on the lightning. It drew him like a moth to a lure, but it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. It wavered in his sight, like a scratch on the glass of reality - too bright to look at directly, too faint to be seen except out of the corner of his eye.\n\nIt was a beckoning call, a summons to be willingly answered.\n\nHe skirted the massive form of a primarch's sundered chest - whose he didn't know - and even through the dense stone, the shimmering form of the lightning was visible.\n\nAt last he reached the centre of the amphitheatre and stood before the shattered remains of an upraised arm, sheared away at the shoulder. Strands of rusted rebar hung like sinew from where explosives had blasted the mighty limb from its body.\n\nThe remains of what might have been a stonework cloak clung to the shorn arm, and from the carven scales upon it, the once-owner's identity was clear.\n\n'Lord Vulkan,' said Abidemi, a low undercurrent of anger in his voice.\n\nSplit from the top of the shoulder was the titanic skull of the firedrake Kesare, a recreation of the beast slain by the primarch as a youth and wrought into his armour.\n\nThe sculptor had worked wonders on the marble, and even though the scale of it was monstrously exaggerated for the statue, Promeus shuddered to think of the beast in life.\n\nThe impact with the ground had split the skull from the marble armour and it lay like a vast unearthed fossil with its jaws spread wide. And now, finally, Promeus saw the source of the light, a shimmer of golden radiance emanating from its jaws.\n\nA crack in the world, teased open for a fragile moment in time.\n\n'A passage to the Underverse,' said Bjarki, his psychic senses now aware of the light.\n\nPromeus shook his head. 'No. That's not what this is.'\n\n'Then what is it?'\n\n'What do you both see?' asked Abidemi, following their gaze into the great drake's maw. His red eyes narrowed, and Promeus guessed even the stolid Salamander sensed something was askew.\n\n'It's a passage,' said Promeus, 'but not to your Underverse.'\n\n'What are you two talking about?' snapped Barek Zytos. 'We cannot stand idle as the fate of the planet is decided elsewhere.'\n\n'What is it you see?' pressed Abidemi.\n\nPromeus reached out to the light, holding to the image of Malcador's face and the message that had brought them here. In response, the illumination swelled around them.\n\nHe fell to his knees, tears streaming down his cheeks.\n\nAnd, one by one, the Astartes knelt in reverence as the gene-craft that had gone into their creation responded to the radiance of their maker.\n\nThe passage of the Low Roads had tested them all.\n\nThat these tunnels were no natural geology was clear. No earthly orogenic movement or tectonic compressional energies had wrought this strange labyrinth beneath the Palace.\n\n'The Emperor did not build these passages,' said Ahriman.\n\n'No, He did not,' replied Magnus. 'At least I don't think so. He may have expanded them, but He was not their creator.'\n\n'Who built them then?' said Amon, running a hand across the strangely glistening tiled walls and leaving a faint bioluminescent sheen behind.\n\n'My father often talked of the Men of Leng and their curious sciences that sought to unpick the weave of the universe,' said Magnus. 'Perhaps these tunnels are theirs.'\n\nAtrahasis had said nothing since they had stepped from beneath the dome of the Great Observatory, but now he chose to speak: 'To walk in such places goes against the workings of the world.'\n\nMenkaura grinned. 'Like wandering behind the scenes of a Theatrica Imperialis set and seeing that the reality presented to the world is little more than a cheap plasterboard facade.'\n\nThe words were said lightly, but Magnus felt their unease and, privately, shared it.\n\nTo warriors of the Fellowships, to see beyond the veil without the protection of their psychic masteries was unnerving to say the least. The full extent of the Emperor's telaethesic ward was yet unknown, and to travel via such arcane means without their full powers was anathema to them.\n\nMagnus reached out, briefly touching his sons' minds to ease their trepidation.\n\nHe felt Ahriman's growing fear of the changes being wrought on the Legion. His Chief Librarian had always feared the flesh change. Little wonder since he had lost his twin to its uncontrollable hyper-mutations. The fear that their present course would inevitably lead to such a fate for them all but consumed him, though he hid it well.\n\nMenkaura's mind was a fortress, but one with its gates unbarred to Magnus.\n\nThe seer's mind was aflame with thoughts of betrayal and the fear of what his brothers would do were they to discover his past treacheries. Magnus cared nothing for Menkaura's deceptions, seeing only a future of endless torment and flaming eyes within eyes.\n\nGrief touched him as he skimmed the minds of Amon and Atrahasis.\n\nHe saw their deaths, but could make sense of neither.\n\nMagnus delved no deeper into the thoughts of his sons, for he knew that to prise open their very hearts would lead only to disappointment. Even a cursory brush with their minds had revealed all the petty jealousies, resentments and insecurities their lineage and training was intended to erase.\n\nAnd yet he loved them still.\n\nThey were his sons, and even after all they had endured in his name, they remained loyal.\n\nThe thought consoled him as they moved deeper into this strange network, and a prescient sense of imminence filled him, like the moment before a storm breaks.\n\nEnclosed in these unnatural tunnels, Magnus had no idea how long it would take them to reach their destination, a place in which he had never set foot, but knew as intimately as if he had built it himself.\n\nWith every step he took, the more these memories that were not memories, but experiences belonging to another, began intruding on his psyche.\n\nAnother part of him, but also not him.\n\nMemories of peace as he walked the shores of a frigid lake, of contentment as he browsed books long thought lost, and the simple pleasure of conversations with friends of old. To feel there was a portion of his own life he had not lived cut his soul with a profound sense of loss. This was a life wholly distinct from him, and yet still a part of the one he was experiencing in this exact moment.\n\nFlying the Great Ocean had shown Magnus the truth of time's fictive lattice and its multifaceted nature. To look only upon one seam of the spiralling flow of entropy and change was to deny a soul the wonder of all the others.\n\nAnd yet there was an immediacy of being so lost in the present that all else faded...\n\nAs if in response to the memory of these un-memories, the tunnel widened and the soft glow of impossible starlight brightened its walls.\n\n'We're here,' he said, and he felt their relief at being able to step off the Low Roads.\n\nMagnus heard the sound of icy water lapping on a shingled shore of black sand and felt the airy openness of a high-ceilinged space before him. A mingled sense of excitement and trepidation filled him, but he quelled his euphoric anticipation at being reunited with the last and best part of him.\n\nThey were, after all, deep within his father's fortress.\n\nAny living souls they might find beyond were the enemy.\n\nWho knew what might await them here? The Saturnine Gambit had shown that the defenders of the Palace were cunning beyond any measure Lupercal and the Lord of Iron had believed possible.\n\nFor all Magnus knew, an entire Order of the Silent Sisterhood together with a Shield Host of Valdor's Custodians might be lying in wait for them.\n\nHe didn't think so, but to prick his pride, his mind conjured the sight of Lupercal's First Captain lying in a lake of his own blood following the disastrous assault beneath the Saturnine Wall. Once so proud, but now a blade-gutted shell, Ezekyle Abaddon had been broken almost beyond repair and his soul now drifted lost and forlorn on an ocean of despair.\n\nSo many prideful warriors, so sure of their great victory.\n\nAll now dead.\n\nHe remembered mocking their supreme self-confidence as they departed.\n\nWas he any different?\n\nMagnus stepped into the cavern beneath the Palace, smelling the achingly sharp tang of the lake, the smell of wet rock, and bitingly cold air. The cavern roof glittered with snaking veins of crystalline light, and a series of overscaled villas were set back a little distance from the water's edge.\n\nHe recognised them, though he had never set so much as a foot within.\n\nHis fear of the Legio Custodes and null-maidens evaporated as he saw that no such army of"}
{"text":" they departed.\n\nWas he any different?\n\nMagnus stepped into the cavern beneath the Palace, smelling the achingly sharp tang of the lake, the smell of wet rock, and bitingly cold air. The cavern roof glittered with snaking veins of crystalline light, and a series of overscaled villas were set back a little distance from the water's edge.\n\nHe recognised them, though he had never set so much as a foot within.\n\nHis fear of the Legio Custodes and null-maidens evaporated as he saw that no such army of ambush awaited them.\n\nTwo figures sat at a table by the lake, a man robed in black and a woman wearing a military flak coat. The woman was unknown to him, but he felt echoes of the great span of time to which she had borne witness within the labyrinthine pathways of her guarded psyche.\n\nHad he the time, hers would have been an interesting mind to explore.\n\nThe black-robed man was as familiar to him as a brother - more so, for he had more in common with him than the brothers bound to him by the gene-craft of his father. They had shared minds, flown the secret paths of the Great Ocean, and learned the wondrous secrets of its deepest reaches together.\n\nOnce they had shared a bond deeper and more resonant than any biological one, but time and tide had forced them to opposite sides of the great schism that now sundered the Imperium.\n\nThe woman helped the man to his feet as they stepped out, an unnecessary labour for his veneer of vulnerability was just as illusory as the nature of time in the Great Ocean.\n\nHe felt their fear, their awe, and their... what... hope?\n\nThe black-robed man smiled in welcome.\n\n'Welcome home, Magnus,' said Malcador.\n\nBlind Man's Mate\n\nHome.\n\nThe word sent a jolt of pain through Magnus.\n\nTo a being unbound by the laws of the physical realm, the word was almost meaningless, or so he had thought until it flew from Malcador's lips to pierce his heart like an arrow.\n\nProspero had always been Magnus' home, ever since he had been cast from Terra as a youth. Isolated from the species' birthrock, that distant world was also home to a remote sect of scholars and seers whose lives were spent in development of their nascent psychic potential.\n\nEven as an orphan adrift, his powers were greater than theirs.\n\nProspero had been a dream, a place of joy and light, where he had grown to become the best and brightest of them all.\n\nBut now he saw it for what it truly was: a hiding place.\n\nThere he could grow and develop without fear of being eclipsed in glory, in a place where he would never be outshone or think his accomplishments cheap in the face of another's greatness.\n\nOne word had unlocked that understanding. One simple word.\n\nMalcador was too canny not to have known the effect that word would have upon him, and it unsettled Magnus to realise how easily it had passed his guard and how deep a chord it struck. Even now, Malcador was playing his mind games.\n\nMagnus pushed away painful thoughts of Prospero and strode across the black sands.\n\nSo like that of Isstvan V.\n\nHe had not fought at the explosive inception of Lupercal's war, but he had lived it through the psychometry of others. He had trod the blood-soaked fields of the Urgall Depression in ways more vivid than even those who had fought and died there.\n\n'It's the Sigillite,' said Atrahasis in disbelief. 'We should kill him.'\n\n'No,' said Magnus. 'There is to be no killing but on my word.'\n\nThe Thousand Sons spread out before him, a four-man echelon with their bolters aimed unerringly at Malcador's head, though the Sigillite seemed unperturbed by the enemy legionaries moving to surround him. From the woman, Magnus sensed only surprise, not the fear he might have expected. The table between her and Malcador was laid with a silver ewer, a platter of fruit and a classic, circular regicide board. A simple set with only the most basic wooden representations of the pieces.\n\nMagnus scanned the board in the blink of an eye, running through the myriad permutations of future moves and likely counters.\n\n'You are one move away from defeat,' he said.\n\nAlivia watched the primarch of the Thousand Sons approach with prideful strides, feeling her heart beating wildly in her chest. She had met four primarchs in her long life: Horus Lupercal, Guilliman, Corax, and one whose name she had sworn never to speak.\n\nNone of them affected her quite like Magnus.\n\nTo look upon such beings - she refused to call them demigods or any such nonsense - was to see the terrible power of science and magic unfettered by any notions of ethics or caution. The birth of the primarchs was the power to create monsters.\n\nShe had been awed by their abilities, but she had always seen past their mythologising. They were mighty, yes, but they were not immortal. They were not unkillable.\n\nMagnus was something else entirely.\n\nHis body had long since surrendered to the metaphysics of his creation, neither wholly flesh and blood, nor yet something of the immaterium. An amber haze drifted up from the flesh of his limbs, like heated ingots removed from a furnace, and the red of his hair was so vivid it hurt to look upon. The moulded plates of his armour gleamed with reflections without source, and ghostly images slid across the slick surfaces of his horned breastplate.\n\nAlivia felt his infinite gaze sweep across her, and the sense of the terrible truths behind that baleful eye sent a spasm of nausea through her. She remembered defiantly meeting the gaze of Horus beneath Molech, but where the Warmaster had embodied raw strength, Magnus was an ocean of limitless ferocity contained by a lone, straining dam of fraying humanity.\n\n'You are one move away from defeat,' said Magnus, and even his voice was heavy with the sense that, but for his restraint, it might obliterate her with a spiteful syllable. 'I believe she is positioning her Divinitarch for a Blind Man's Mate.'\n\n'It looks that way,' agreed Malcador, 'but my Tetrarch stands ready to spring a Traitor's Gambit.'\n\n'Risky,' said Magnus. 'Very risky.'\n\nMalcador smiled. 'Indeed. And against a more ruthless opponent I would not attempt it. No offence, Alivia.'\n\n'None taken,' she said, struggling to keep her voice even. 'I prefer cards anyway. Way easier to cheat.'\n\n'Your name is Alivia?' said Magnus, turning his attention to her. She flinched at the intensity of his gaze, but only a little, feeling like a paralysed gazelle before the hunting lion.\n\nShe nodded and said, 'Alivia Sureka. I don't need to ask who you are.'\n\n'What strange fate leads you to be playing Regicide with the Sigillite of Terra on the calm shores of this lake while my brothers lay siege above?'\n\n'He asked me to come.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'I have absolutely no idea,' said Alivia. 'He's not the best at giving straight answers.'\n\nMagnus grinned. 'No, he is not. Indeed, he is not.'\n\nMalcador sat back at the board and planted his staff in the sand like a banner pole. He held out his other hand, offering Magnus the seat opposite.\n\n'What say we finish this game?' said Malcador.\n\n'It is all but concluded,' replied Magnus.\n\n'Nothing is certain in the late game.'\n\n'Some things are,' said Magnus, turning his gaze upon the seat opposite Malcador. Its dimensions stretched with a groan of twisting iron as it swelled to accommodate his inhuman proportions. 'Besides, I do not wish to play you again. Your moves and ploys are all known to me, and our games always ended in stalemate.'\n\nMalcador rose from the table and said, 'Then play Alivia.'\n\nAlivia looked from Malcador to the board and back again. Before Magnus' arrival, she had been taking a beating from the Sigillite, and now he was offering her his superior position. Victory was almost certain from here, but against a primarch...\n\n'A mortal?' snorted Magnus. 'What would be the point?'\n\n'Alivia may surprise you, she is quite gifted.'\n\nTheir arrogance irked Alivia, so she took Malcador's seat across from Magnus.\n\n'Sure, why not? How often do you get an opportunity like this?'\n\nMagnus regarded her with more scrutiny, no doubt suspicious of Malcador's motives. She didn't blame him; she would be just as sceptical.\n\n'Very well, I will indulge you this last pantomime,' said Magnus.\n\nMalcador stood behind Alivia and said, 'You studied the game I played against Dume?'\n\n'You played against Narthan Dume?' said Alivia, craning her neck to face Malcador.\n\n'Once, yes, in the heady days before the Panpacific descended into a nightmare.'\n\nMagnus nodded. 'I replayed that game in my mind for months to understand how he beat Dume. In the end I was forced to conclude that Dume's genius had already fallen into madness by the time he made that last desperate gambit with his Empress. Now, I will play your game, but enough with symbolism and deflections, you know why I am here.'\n\n'A number of possibilities suggest themselves,' said Malcador.\n\n'Such as?'\n\nAlivia reached out to move one of her Citizen pieces forward, an inconsequential move, a delaying tactic.\n\n'Vengeance for Prospero?' she suggested.\n\nMagnus slid his last remaining fortress across the board to counter Alivia's opposing Primarch. Another delaying move in an irrelevant portion of the board. Scanning the pieces, she saw that only the movement of the Ecclesiarch and the Tetrarch in the Widdershin's section of the board was of any importance.\n\n'Would I be unjustified in such a motive?' asked Magnus. 'I did nothing wrong, and my world was razed, my sons butchered by Russ' dogs, and a wealth of learning burned to ash.'\n\n'That was not my intent,' said Malcador, and his sadness was genuine. 'Nor was it His.'\n\n'Your intent is meaningless,' snapped Magnus. 'You are still responsible. You sent Russ and the Custodians to my world with blades bared. What did you think they would do?'\n\n'Perhaps you could ask Horus,' said Malcador. 'His hands are stained red with the blood of your sons as much as mine. I say that not to pass any responsibility, I own that decision, and the doom of Prospero is entirely my burden to shoulder. I sent the Wolves. I ga"}
{"text":"id Malcador, and his sadness was genuine. 'Nor was it His.'\n\n'Your intent is meaningless,' snapped Magnus. 'You are still responsible. You sent Russ and the Custodians to my world with blades bared. What did you think they would do?'\n\n'Perhaps you could ask Horus,' said Malcador. 'His hands are stained red with the blood of your sons as much as mine. I say that not to pass any responsibility, I own that decision, and the doom of Prospero is entirely my burden to shoulder. I sent the Wolves. I gave them their orders, but I did not foresee how their mission might be co-opted by a single word.'\n\nMagnus shook his head. 'The small perturbations we miss or ignore, the tiny flaws we regard as inconsequential... they have far-reaching consequences. Didn't you teach me that?'\n\n'I did,' said Malcador sadly. 'If only you had truly understood what it meant.'\n\nMalcador raised a palm to head off Magnus' anger.\n\n'Do not mistake my meaning,' said the Sigillite. 'We failed you utterly. We didn't tell you all you needed to know. We gave you the tools to forge your own reality, but didn't make clear what the cost of crossing certain lines would be. The failure is ours entirely, mine and the Emperor's, not yours. But it doesn't change where we stand now. What matters is what happens here, right now in this moment.'\n\n'What is the point of this confession, Malcador? Do you want my forgiveness, is that it? My Legion was all but destroyed, and the dread powers that even now hollow out Horus like a wasting sickness gather like carrion around my sons. Around me.'\n\n'My words were not a confession.'\n\n'Then what were they?'\n\nMalcador leaned heavily on his staff with a sigh, and Alivia saw to the true heart of the man. Despite everything, despite all the power he possessed, all the grand stratagems measured in the spans of millennia, he was tired.\n\nHis long life was almost at an end and he knew it.\n\n'It is a last attempt to speak to the Magnus I knew before this age of madness,' said Malcador. 'You were always the best of us in so many ways. You had vision none of your brothers ever came close to matching. Each of them embodies greatness in his own way, but none could see as far or conceptualise the infinite possibilities of existence as you were able to. Not even I could envision the things you dreamed.'\n\n'And yet here we are,' said Magnus. 'Enemies.'\n\nMalcador shook his head. 'That clay is still soft, not yet fixed in shape, and the heat of this kiln has yet to render any transformation permanent.'\n\nMagnus turned his attention to the game. Alivia did likewise and was surprised to see the configuration of the board had changed. They had been moving pieces instinctively, neither fully aware of the act or in full conscious awareness of their closing stratagems.\n\nThe Traitor's Gambit was no longer possible, but neither was Blind Man's Mate, the necessary pieces scattered and dispersed, with the portions of the board Magnus had dismissed as irrelevant now assuming far greater importance.\n\nIn this new alignment, the white Primarch faced off against the black Emperor, and all other pieces had faded into the background, like the singers of the chorus, melting into the curtained shadows of the wings, leaving only the leading actors in the spotlight.\n\n'The next move of the Primarch piece will decide the outcome of the game,' she said.\n\n'You're right, she is gifted,' said Magnus. 'And so the late game reveals itself.'\n\nAlivia held her breath. 'It's your move,' she said.\n\n'Do you think this,' said Magnus, placing a finger on the Primarch piece and sweeping his other hand around him, 'any of this means anything? You both know this game is meaningless. It is nothing more than childish symbolism engineered to prime my thought processes, fire certain synaptic connections within my psyche, and not-so-subtly arrange the levers in my mind to your purposes.'\n\n'I admit to a certain level of theatricality,' said Malcador. 'But its message is no less true.'\n\n'And what message is that?'\n\n'That it's not too late to alter the course of the game,' said Alivia, placing a fingertip on the head of her Emperor piece. 'That the next move you make will decide whether this Emperor falls or retakes the board.'\n\nMagnus nodded and removed his finger from the Primarch. He sat back, coolly regarding Alivia. Looking past him to the armed warriors at his back, Alivia felt their impatience as they watched their gene-sire parley with their sworn enemy like an old friend.\n\n'You said there were a number of possibilities as to why I had come here,' said Magnus, abruptly returning to an earlier moment in their conversation.\n\n'I did, yes.'\n\n'Alivia here suggested vengeance for Prospero was one, what are the others?'\n\n'The missing piece of your soul.'\n\nMagnus snapped his fingers. 'There it is. Yes, the missing piece of my soul, the last and best part of me. When Russ broke me across his knee, I cried out to my sons, and together we cast ourselves into the Great Ocean in search of refuge. It cost me everything to save them from the Wolves, but I had already paid the greatest price when I tried to warn my father of Horus' treachery.'\n\n'I know what that cost you,' said Malcador. 'But do you know what it cost your father?'\n\n'Tell me,' said Magnus bitterly. 'What did it cost Him?'\n\n'Everything.'\n\n'After Prospero, my soul was sundered like glass upon stone...' said Magnus.\n\n'I know,' said Malcador. 'I spent a great deal of time conversing with the soul-shard who dwelled here. In those moments I could almost forget the terror of the war raging across the heavens.'\n\n'He dwelled here?'\n\n'He did, in that villa there,' said Malcador, pointing to a nondescript building of pale stone with a glassed atrium and a high veranda overlooking the lake.\n\n'I remember...' said Magnus, and Alivia was reminded of the old men whose minds frayed at the seams and forgot the faces of their loved ones. 'I read the eight books of Aenesidemus' Pyrrhonist Discourses there.'\n\nMalcador nodded and said, 'He and I spoke of a great many things, but most of all we debated the nature of his existence many times. He wondered if he were the real Magnus, or whether any one of the many shards he felt throughout space and time were viable separate entities. He told me he felt real, and I believe he was real, but even he knew he was something shorn from a greater whole.'\n\n'He is the best part of me,' said Magnus, reaching down to the great grimoire at his waist, and Alivia felt a sick revulsion at the power she felt within it, the unmistakable power of planetary genocide.\n\nMorningstar...\n\nThe significance of the name was lost on Alivia, beyond its appearance in the old religious texts, but she sensed it was as much a terrible curse to Magnus as it was a... a weapon?\n\n'And that best part will be one with me again,' promised Magnus.\n\n'You're wrong,' said Malcador. 'In that he was never the good part of you, he was just a part of you, no better or worse than any other. Each broken shard of you clung to a memory of part of you, but they were all simply a microcosm of the great soul you always were.'\n\nAlivia saw the disbelief on Magnus' face, and also a great and building fire within as whatever certainty he had brought to this cavern crumbled in the face of Malcador's words.\n\n'No...' he said. 'I felt his goodness, his purity. From across the gulfs of space, even in the Great Ocean, I felt it. It was shorn from me before Horus poisoned the well. It is the best part of me, uncorrupted by... all of this.'\n\n'I am sorry, Magnus, but you are wrong,' said Malcador. 'And you are too late. He is no more.'\n\nMagnus surged to his feet, overturning the table and scattering the board and its pieces into the water. Alivia was hurled backwards by the force and speed of Magnus' motion, the suddenness more shocking than the pain of the table edge slamming into her chest. She spun through the air, landing face down in the sand ten metres away.\n\nAlivia coughed and spat the grit from her mouth. Blood mingled with the sand, and she cried out as she felt broken ribs shift within her chest. From the frothed blood on her lips, she knew a shard of bone must have pierced the soft tissue of her lung. She coughed up a red wad of gummed fluid and pushed herself painfully onto her side in time to see Magnus with his fist around Malcador's throat.\n\nHe held the Sigillite three metres off the ground, his life there for the taking.\n\nThe warriors Magnus had brought into the Palace backed away from him, as fearful of their master's fury as Alivia.\n\n'I need him!' roared Magnus. 'What am I without him? A beast no better than Angron? A slave to desire like Fulgrim? If he is no different from me, and I no more or less than him, then all I have done is...'\n\n'Is part of who you already are,' finished Alivia, and the nearest red-armoured warrior turned his bolter towards her. She pushed herself upright, stifling a cry of pain as the breath wheezed in her throat and the sharp stab of bone pierced her heart.\n\n'I will not be like my fallen brothers, I will not,' said Magnus. 'Tell me where to find the last shard of my soul or I will end you right now.'\n\n'He is gone,' gasped Malcador, forcing his words out as Magnus' grip closed off his airways. 'Beyond even your power to reach.'\n\n'What did you do?' demanded Magnus.\n\n'What needed to be done...' gasped Malcador, '...to save the last son of Prospero.'\n\nThe wisps of smoke rising from the primarch's skin billowed in darkness and swirled around him like living things. Alivia could feel the heat radiating from him, and knew that any hope Malcador had of reasoning with Magnus was gone.\n\nShe stumbled back towards the villas, knowing there was no hope of evading any pursuit, but driven to escape by the basic animal urge to flee, to survive. She had suffered greater wounds than this and lived, but never from a being as powerful as Magnus.\n\nAlivia fell to one knee as breath failed her. She felt a horrid, sucking emptiness on the left side of"}
{"text":"him like living things. Alivia could feel the heat radiating from him, and knew that any hope Malcador had of reasoning with Magnus was gone.\n\nShe stumbled back towards the villas, knowing there was no hope of evading any pursuit, but driven to escape by the basic animal urge to flee, to survive. She had suffered greater wounds than this and lived, but never from a being as powerful as Magnus.\n\nAlivia fell to one knee as breath failed her. She felt a horrid, sucking emptiness on the left side of her chest. Her hand clawed the sand. Pain filled her, but she'd known worse.\n\nShe heard crunching footsteps behind her and forced herself to her feet.\n\nHer vision blurred at the edges and she coughed up another wad of bloody phlegm.\n\n'Turn around,' said a voice: harsh, clipped and used to being obeyed.\n\nShe almost obeyed it, almost reacted to its commanding tone.\n\n'Screw. You...' wheezed Alivia between tortured breaths.\n\nShe kept going, the colourful mosaic of the plaza at the centre of the villas just visible between their walls of pale marble. If she could just reach it, at least she would be out of sight of Magnus and his sorcerers. But it seemed so far away, farther with every swaying step.\n\nIf she could only...\n\nThe mass-reactive struck Alivia between her shoulder blades and penetrated deep into her chest cavity before detonating.\n\nAn instant of fire and pain, then nothing at all.\n\nMagnus let the anger pour from him, a fire that had burned inside him since he had first swum into being all those centuries ago and looked out upon the world with an awareness unlike any other into a face as beautiful as it was terrifying.\n\nAll he had done was in service of his father, and now, at this last moment of redemption, where his past might have been granted absolution, even that was snatched away.\n\nHe loosed a roar to the cavern roof, shaking the rock with the power of his ferocity.\n\nHe heard shouts, a single mass-reactive shot.\n\nThe fire seemed to burn for an eternity, though it had been seconds at most.\n\nMagnus dropped to his knees as the rage began to ebb. His unleashed power flowed back along his limbs as clarity returned to his sight. He smelled the rancorous odour of burned meat, and saw smoke rising from the fiery copper of his skin.\n\nSound swelled, the crash of rock and crystal formations tumbling from the cavern roof in vast chunks of splintered stone. Shaken loose by the elemental power of his fury, they fell as if on a pict-reel running at half-speed. When they finally struck the surface of the water, dark waves crashed upon the shore.\n\nMagnus saw the regicide board and its pieces pulled out into the depths of the underground ocean, the outcome of this last game forever undecided.\n\nHe looked for the woman and saw her lying face down in the sand.\n\nMost of her torso was missing, only splintered shards of ribs and a fused section of her spine attaching her upper body to her lower. Blood spread between the outer tiles of the plaza as Atrahasis walked back towards them with smoke curling from the barrel of his weapon.\n\n'I said no killing without my word,' said Magnus.\n\n'She-' began Atrahasis, but Magnus gave him no chance to finish.\n\nWith a thought, he detonated every atom in the warrior's body, leaving nothing but inert dust within the clattering remains of warplate that fell to the sands.\n\nThe others reeled from Atrahasis' explosive death, fearful they too might be touched by their primarch's wrath. But he had no more wrath within him, only grief, and he closed his eye, locked in position like a frozen statue.\n\nHow long he remained like that he could not say, but eventually a wary voice penetrated the fog enveloping his mind.\n\n'My lord.'\n\n'Ahzek...'\n\n'My lord,' said Ahriman, with greater confidence and force. 'We must withdraw.'\n\n'Withdraw?' said Magnus. 'No...'\n\n'We must,' repeated Ahriman. 'What you sought is gone, but we have struck a great blow to our enemies. One that will turn the tide of the war.'\n\n'A great blow...?' said Magnus. 'I don't understand...'\n\nAnd then he saw.\n\nStill clutched in his iron grip was the Sigillite, but never again would he play regicide; never again would he stand in the presence of demigods and speak to them as equals.\n\nNever again...\n\nMalcador's corpse was a char-black skeleton of heat-fused bones and roasted meat. His fleshless skull lolled on the last remnants of sinew and spinal cord, the meat of his once great mind oozing from the molten bone of his skull.\n\n'No!' cried Magnus, rising to his feet and releasing his grip.\n\nThe Sigillite's skeletal remains dropped to the shore of the lake where the ebb and flow of the new tide twisted and rolled them in the sand. His tall staff of office now served not as a banner pole, but a grave marker.\n\nTwo more deaths to add to an ever-growing tally.\n\n'Sire,' said Amon. 'Ahzek is right. We should withdraw before the Custodians come. That they are not already here is a miracle. The Sigillite's death will have been felt, and the Emperor's golden warriors will seek to avenge him.'\n\n'This was never my intent,' whispered Magnus, and his own words echoed back at him in his skull, mocking him.\n\nYour intent is meaningless. You are still responsible.\n\n'How could we not have seen this?' wondered Menkaura. 'We are the greatest seers of the Corvidae, and none of us saw even a sliver of this future? The death of so significant a soul as the Regent of Terra, and not one of us saw this moment in our visions?'\n\n'We are not withdrawing, we are going to the very heart of Terra,' said Magnus. 'Nothing of what happened here matters. I saw every secret thing within Malcador, every hidden path and cordon within the Palace. And I know what I have to do now.'\n\n'Sire?'\n\n'We are in the heart of the Sanctum Imperialis,' said Magnus, as singular purpose crystallised within him. 'Within sight of what Alpharius failed to imagine and that which Horus Lupercal dares not even dream of.'\n\n'What do you intend, my lord?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'I am going to kill the Emperor.'\n\nThe Hall of Victories\n\nMagnus led them to the plaza at the centre of the forsaken villas.\n\nHe paused at the body of Alivia Sureka, and knelt to place a hand upon the tattered remnants of her gore-spattered flak coat. Still warm, she lay in an expanding pool of glistening red that spread from her ruined torso like bloodied wings and put Magnus in mind of a fallen Valkyrie.\n\n'I did not know you, but I am sorry this was your ending,' he said, wiping away a red tear from her glassy, dead eye.\n\n'Atrahasis was Raptora to the core, brutal and direct,' said Ahriman. 'Yes, he disobeyed you, but he did not deserve to die like that.'\n\n'I said there was to be no killing,' said Magnus. 'Do my sons now pick and choose which of my orders are for obeying?'\n\n'Of course not, my lord, but-'\n\n'I saw him die as we approached this cavern,' said Magnus. 'I could make no sense of it at the time, for it was a death such as only a handful of beings in this galaxy could inflict. It never even crossed my mind it would be at my hands.'\n\n'And the rest of us?' demanded Ahriman. 'Did you see our deaths?'\n\n'No,' lied Magnus, rising to his full height. 'I did not, and before you condemn me for your man's death, look to your own guilt. Where is Hathor Maat? Did he deserve to die?'\n\nAhriman flinched at the mention of his former brother's name.\n\nDid you think you could restore my soul and I would not see within yours? sent Magnus so that only Ahriman would hear. I know what you did, and I know why you did it. So I do not condemn you, but it is my fervent wish you could have been spared that burden. Every step we have taken since Prospero has been in the service of others, and you gave up your brother for me. Just believe that all I have done since then is for the good of my sons.\n\nAhriman nodded stiffly and followed as Magnus moved to the centre of the plaza, where the confluence of the abstract patterns worked into the mosaic finally converged.\n\nMagnus turned in a slow circle, trying to imagine which of the dwellings had been intended for which of his brothers. He could discern no differences between them enough to judge, but some of his kin had spent time here, that much he could feel.\n\n'What might it have been like to have shared these spaces with you, my brothers?' he said. 'Would it have been glorious or would we have squabbled and fought for the scraps of our father's attention as we did during the crusade?'\n\nBriefly Magnus considered exploring the villa in which his soul-shard had dwelled, but rejected the notion. What would be the point? Nostalgia for events he had not truly experienced? Reacquaintance with a life he had never lived?\n\nNo, better to leave that wound untouched.\n\nBesides, they had only a short window in which to act.\n\nEven now, the Custodians were likely en route, perhaps even some of his loyalist brothers.\n\nIt was a mystery to him why they were not already here. The expenditure of power in the Great Observatory ought to have drawn them near instantaneously, but that they had not yet discovered this intrusion was an opportunity Magnus did not intend to waste.\n\nHe squatted at the sigils running around the great icon of cosmic duality at the heart of the plaza and pressed a sequence he knew only from another's memory. At first nothing happened, but soon he felt a vibration through the flagstones and stepped back as a towering column of ivory rose from the ground.\n\nIts length was porcelain smooth and apparently seamless, but moments later a curved door opened in its side and an artificial blue glow issued from within. Magnus confidently stepped into the elevator, its proportions - like those of the villas - scaled to a being of his size.\n\nHis sons accompanied him within like an honour guard, and no sooner had the doors slid shut than the elevator began a smooth descent into the depths of the planet, descending what felt like several kilometres into the heart of Himalazia.\n\n'Do you know where this leads?' said Menkaura.\n\nMagnus did n"}
{"text":"urved door opened in its side and an artificial blue glow issued from within. Magnus confidently stepped into the elevator, its proportions - like those of the villas - scaled to a being of his size.\n\nHis sons accompanied him within like an honour guard, and no sooner had the doors slid shut than the elevator began a smooth descent into the depths of the planet, descending what felt like several kilometres into the heart of Himalazia.\n\n'Do you know where this leads?' said Menkaura.\n\nMagnus did not answer, and they continued in tense silence until the doors opened to reveal a short corridor that ended in a towering set of bronze double doors. Exquisitely carved, the twin leafs of the doors depicted a man and woman facing one another: one of the land, the other of the manufactory.\n\n'Life and death,' said Amon, regarding the woman.\n\n'Industry and war,' said Menkaura of the man.\n\n'It is more than that,' said Magnus, pointing to the crossed lightning bolts of Unity hung around the man's neck. 'It is the embodiment of my father's dream. Humanity bound endlessly to the tasks of procreation and the labours required of them in order to bathe in His light. He is their sun god, their Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. From worship of the Emperor comes all bounty. The stars around Him are us, the primarchs, the warrior angels who enforce His laws and fight at His command.'\n\n'People of Earth: Unity is Strength, Division is Weakness,' said Ahriman, expertly translating the ancient language inscribed in the scrollwork above the doors.\n\nThe doors swung open easily, and beyond was a wide gallery, several hundred metres long and filled with displays, such as had been common within the pyramids of Prospero. Many of the gallery's cabinets and cases had toppled, their contents broken upon the tiled floor. Water poured in through a shattered section of the roof towards the rear of this stark gallery, ruining the many paintings, statues, carvings and tapestries stored there.\n\nOne of the long walls was lined with tall, lancet windows, but no light penetrated the oil- and dust-smeared glass save through portions where it had been shattered by the percussive impacts of shock waves. Glass shards littered the floor and a lingering taste of burnt ozone spoke of failed stasis fields.\n\nRegret touched Magnus at the thought of what had been lost here.\n\nThat regret was washed away on the heels of another thought.\n\n'How much did we lose on Tizca?' he asked, bending to retrieve the remains of a stone tablet with wedge-shaped, cuneiform script upon it. Fire and smoke had coated its surfaces in a filmy residue, already softening and obscuring much of the text.\n\n'Incalculable,' said Amon. 'In ways too numerous to count.'\n\nMagnus handed the tablet to Ahriman. 'You recognise this?'\n\nAhriman turned the tablet over in his hands and nodded. 'Achaemenid. From Arg-e-Bam, a fortress at the crossroads of the Silk Road. Perhaps thirty-five thousand years old.'\n\n'And this?' said Magnus, indicating an elaborately crafted model of a magnificent galleon set upon a raised dais. The ship was rigged with sails of thin gold, its hull crafted from gilded copper and iron. From keel to crow's nest, it stood roughly a metre high.\n\n'A child's toy?' suggested Menkaura.\n\n'A toy perhaps, but not one for children,' said Magnus, turning a hidden key at the vessel's stern. 'Rather, a grand plaything for some rich potentate of Old Earth.'\n\nHigh on the vessel's stern sat a crowned king, and before him on clockwork gimbals his subjects paraded on the carved deck, turning and making obeisance as the ratcheting mainspring turned within. Inside the vessel, a miniature organ played the off-kilter notes of a long-forgotten tune as iron cannons emerged jerkily from wooden hatches in the hull.\n\nMagnus grinned as the cannons retracted and the figures on the deck all bowed to their king before the spring's energy was spent and the vessel stilled once more. 'It is a clock and a music box rendered in the form of a galleon built to make war when control of the oceans ensured a nation state's dominance. In ships like these, the largest and most complex machines of their age, conquerors set off across the high seas to discover other cultures on the other side of the planet. To trade or make war with them. Sometimes both.'\n\n'And they made a toy of it?' said Amon. 'That seems wasteful.'\n\n'Not at all,' said Menkaura, bending to examine the faceless, yellow-robed king on his throne. 'This is a wonderfully constructed object, a masterpiece of both the artificer's skill, the artist's decoration, and it displays a profound mastery of mechanics and goldsmithing.'\n\n'What is this place?' asked Amon.\n\n'Surely it is not hard to divine?' said Magnus. 'It is a record of humanity's greatest achievements, each one a stepping stone into the future. It has all the hallmarks of Malcador, for the Sigillite was ever one to recognise the importance of preserving the past.'\n\nHe remembered Kasper Hawser, the naive conservator who had spoken with such passion on the subject of humankind's lack of foresight in considering the past. The man had constantly pushed for an audit of human knowledge and the preservation of the species' legacy to determine what was still known and what had been forgotten.\n\nHad the man ever set foot in this gallery or ever seen this record of human progress from its Palaeolithic history to its exploration of the stars? Impossible to know, and Magnus had no knowledge of what had become of him in the wake of Prospero's doom.\n\nGiven what they had done to his mind, he was likely dead or insane.\n\n'What would you have made of this, I wonder?' said Magnus sadly. 'And what tears would you shed to see it all lost?'\n\n'My lord?' said Ahriman.\n\nMagnus said nothing and cast all thoughts of regret and sentimentality from his mind.\n\nHe pushed deeper into the gallery, pausing every now and then to examine an object of great beauty or significance: a jade axe head, a pair of Kakiemon elephants, circuit boards from corroded husks of primitive logic engines that were no longer home to any machine-spirit, ivory chess pieces carved from the teeth of great oceanic creatures.\n\nAll embodied consequential moments that had seen humanity rise from its earliest, primitive beginnings to the lofty heights it occupied in the present, but one in particular struck him as out of place: a broken timepiece of tarnished bronze with a cracked ebony face.\n\nIt wasn't special or even particularly attractive, and at some point, it had been exposed to great heat, for the metal had softened and deformed. Despite that, the delicate hands were unscathed, lovingly fashioned from gold with inlaid mother of pearl. What remained of the clock's internal mechanisms were visible through a smoke-stained window near its base, a jumbled mass of toothed cogs that could never turn and copper pendulums that would never swing again.\n\n'Why are you here?' Magnus wondered aloud.\n\n'Because it marked a singular moment in Terra's history,' said a powerful voice from the end of the gallery. 'And my own, though I did not recognise it as such at the time.'\n\nMagnus swung around, heqa staff raised before him, one hand on his great book.\n\nHis sons snapped into battle positions, bolters raised.\n\nA hooded figure stood at the end of the gallery, swathed in a long cloak of scarlet.\n\nThe man was transhuman tall and beneath his long cloak, he wore utilitarian clothes, similar to those worn by virtually every inhabitant of Terra. A silver ring glittered on his right index finger, bearing a nazarlik symbol of warding.\n\nBehind him was a simple wooden door, such as might be found in the ancient hall of a high castle of stone. A door entirely out of place in this stark gallery of glass and steel, and which Magnus knew had not been there only moments before.\n\n'A descendant of Mikulaš of Kadaň constructed it in his clockwork palace, high in the frozen mountains of Europa. It's gone now, of course. I suspect that piece is perhaps the last of its kind, much like a great many things we once valued.'\n\n'Identify yourself,' ordered Magnus.\n\nThe man slowly reached up and pulled back his hood to reveal a stern, but not unkind face. Unremarkable in its own way, but the man's eyes were without pupils and shone with a golden light that identified him better than any name ever could.\n\n'When last I wore this guise I went by Revelation.'\n\nThe light of Revelation shone throughout the gallery, and all the shattered relics of humanity's ascent gleamed as though fresh from their ancient makers' hands. Dead machines whirred to life, the organ within the clockwork ship played its maritime tune flawlessly, and the clock beside Magnus chimed softly as its hands clicked to the vertical.\n\n'You know why I am here?' asked Magnus.\n\nThe door behind Revelation opened, spilling fresh radiance into the gallery.\n\n'I do,' said Revelation. 'But first we will talk, my son.'\n\nAdrift\n\nAn achingly blue sky filled her vision, the skies of her youth, unpolluted by petrochemical emissions and hydrocarbon pollutants. The secrets of the fuels locked within Earth's body were well known even then, but the conspicuous consumption of such fuels on a global scale was millennia in the future.\n\nThe view from the mountain's summit was breathtaking: misted valleys, deep forests and dark oceans of infinite mystery.\n\nBut it was always the sky she came back to.\n\nAlivia had seen the skies of many worlds since then, but none compared to the glory of Old Earth. Parochial perhaps, but she couldn't deny the call her home world had on her soul.\n\nSo why were we in such a rush to leave it...?\n\nA memory of pain surfaced in her mind, but she pushed it away.\n\nAlivia did not want to leave this place of memory and peace.\n\nShe knew it was a remembrance of the land of her birth, a vision of a time before the world had shown her its true face and bloodily revealed her own secret nature. The last time she had seen this place in dreams, it"}
{"text":" to the glory of Old Earth. Parochial perhaps, but she couldn't deny the call her home world had on her soul.\n\nSo why were we in such a rush to leave it...?\n\nA memory of pain surfaced in her mind, but she pushed it away.\n\nAlivia did not want to leave this place of memory and peace.\n\nShe knew it was a remembrance of the land of her birth, a vision of a time before the world had shown her its true face and bloodily revealed her own secret nature. The last time she had seen this place in dreams, it had been hijacked by John Grammaticus with a warning.\n\nRemembering that moment, her gaze shifted down from the endless skies to the edge of the forest. The trees grew dense, only the slowly encroaching moonlight shadows visible between their claw-scored trunks.\n\nShe smiled as she saw the powerful stag once again. It grazed at the edge of the trees, its sheer magnificence no less thrilling to see with repetition. But its splendour was diminished this time, its red-gold hide patchy from some desperate flight, and its once mighty antlers snapped and foreshortened from bloody battle.\n\nOnce he had been the master of this mountain, and had led the wild hunt over the high hills and far moors, but now he was at bay and taking this moment to gather his strength.\n\nAlivia held her breath, lest even a whisper of movement break the spell.\n\nThe stag's head came up, his nostrils twitching.\n\nThe last time she had seen the stag he had bolted for the towering peaks, a pack of red-eyed wolves snapping at his hooves, but now he walked slowly towards her.\n\nWith every step, the outline of the stag shifted, sloughing its shroud of metaphor and assuming the form in which she had last seen him: a tall man in the sturdy attire of an agri-worker, handsome in a rangy sort of way, with a wiry auburn beard, broad shoulders and strong arms crisscrossed with scars.\n\nAnother disguise, but a pleasing one at least.\n\nBut no matter the face He presented to the world, He could never conceal the raw power and threat behind His eyes.\n\n'When I left Terra I told you I never wanted to see you again,' she said.\n\n'I know, and I wanted to respect that, truly I did, but...'\n\nHis words trailed off. No explanation was needed.\n\n'I stood watch for you on Molech, but I couldn't stop him.'\n\nHe didn't need to ask who she meant.\n\n'I know. It was an impossible task, Alivia. No one could have stopped him. Not empowered as he was.'\n\n'We tried,' said Alivia. 'Good men died trying to stop him.'\n\n'But not you.'\n\n'No, not me,' she spat bitterly. 'It's never me that dies.'\n\nThey sat in silence for a time, enjoying the view over the ocean. She'd sailed the far corners of the Earth in her long years, but never tired of watching and listening to waves on a shingled beach or crashing against a cliff.\n\n'Why are you here?' said Alivia. 'Don't you have more important things to do? You know, fate of the galaxy, defending Terra, that sort of thing?'\n\nHe nodded. 'I have an unfathomable amount of important things to do, Alivia, and many of them are reaching their conclusion.'\n\n'And I'm guessing your being here means one of them involves me?'\n\n'It does.'\n\n'Am I going to like it?'\n\nHe thought for a moment, then said, 'No, but it must be done.'\n\n'Then to hell with you,' said Alivia. 'You don't command me, not any more. You swore the task on Molech would be my last.'\n\n'One might argue that you failed in that task.'\n\n'Screw you,' snapped Alivia. 'You just said that no one could have stopped Horus from going through that portal. I remember carrying you up those stairs and you telling me that I could be done with you.'\n\n'And I meant it,' He said, reaching to take her hand. 'I still do, and I wish I did not have to ask. But let me show you what is at stake.'\n\nShe snatched her hand away and said, 'I saw Molech fall. I've been outside the walls of your Palace. Trust me, I know what's at stake. Besides, even if Horus wins, I don't think he could balls things up any worse than you.'\n\n'You don't believe that,' he said. 'You know what's out there in the dark. You've heard the whispers of the Neverborn and you have seen what happens when men give in to the temptations of Chaos. I would not ask if there were any other way.'\n\n'You are a liar and a monster, a manipulator and a killer,' said Alivia. 'Your armies slaughtered millions in the name of Unity and crushed anyone who opposed your rule. You made monsters from your own flesh then turned them loose on the galaxy and you act surprised when they turn on you? All in the name of a vision only you could see. You know that Magnus killed Malcador, yes?'\n\nHe nodded, His shoulders slumped. 'I felt him die. I felt his agony as Magnus ended him.'\n\nThe tears He shed were real and painfully raw, and Alivia's hatred and love for Him was so powerful it hurt her heart. Tears welled in her eyes, but she angrily wiped them away.\n\n'There is so much blood on your hands,' she said. 'On all our hands. I just want it to end.'\n\n'Then help me end it,' He said, offering her His hand once again. 'Let me share with you my Acuity.'\n\nSlowly, and against her better judgement, Alivia took His hand.\n\nAnd the Emperor showed her everything in the space of a moment.\n\nAlivia threw back her head and screamed.\n\nEndlessly, like the withered corpse she saw locked within the Golden Throne.\n\nStepping through the incongruous wooden door, Magnus experienced a momentary tug of dislocation, like a teleport flare, but deeper and more profound. A shiver travelled the length of his body as he felt the temperature gradient shift.\n\nWherever they were now, they were far deeper underground than before.\n\nRevelation awaited them, His golden eyes shining even brighter.\n\n'I have been here before,' said Magnus, and a wave of shame washed over him.\n\n'Memories of your soul-shard?' asked Ahriman.\n\n'No,' said Revelation, addressing Ahriman directly. 'Your gene-sire came not as a shade, nor in a borrowed memory of another piece of himself, but as Magnus the Red, a proud and loyal son of the Emperor of Mankind.'\n\n'Is this...?' said Amon.\n\n'The Throne Room,' finished Magnus.\n\nThough the Thousand Sons were pledged to the Warmaster's cause and fought alongside warriors who sought to tear down every edifice of the Imperium, the shared heritage of this place was too great to ignore. It hung heavily upon them as Revelation led them deeper into the Emperor's inner sanctum.\n\nThe cavern of the underground lake had been unimaginably vast, but this subterranean donjon was orders of magnitude greater. It was filled with machinery: endless lengths of hissing pipes and cables coiled across the floor and hung from the walls like wounded serpents. Towering banks of straining equipment were set with myriad readouts and gauges, though what they measured was a mystery to Magnus.\n\nThe floor vibrated to the thrumming workings of buried machinery and the pounding of distant pistons moving endlessly in the farthest reaches of the cavern. Reeking, ozone exhalations from gigantic terraforming processors fogged the air, and coruscating arcs of power leapt between giant machines tasked with the maintenance of energy flow.\n\nThousands of oil-stained menials ministered to the machines beneath the watchful gaze of Mechanicum tech-priests cowled in red and black. Magnus heard binharic screeches of alarm, but instead of fleeing before these enemy warriors, their chimeric faces of metal and flesh adjudged the new arrivals to be less of a priority than the machinery they attended.\n\nAt the geomantic centre of this immense cavern was the strange and terrible edifice of gold he had seen in person, vision and dream. A gigantic, towering dais, kilometres tall and inlaid with silvery traceries of runic circuitry. It was to this arcane technology, the functioning of which not even Magnus could fathom, that every machine, above and below, was enslaved, a Gordian network of cables and pipelines that drew immense volumes of power to its mystical beating heart.\n\nYet it was not this that drew Magnus' eye.\n\nBeyond this mountainous dais were vast cyclopean golden doors, their surfaces buckled by titanic impacts and forces beyond imagining. Each was so immense it could allow the greatest war machines of the Mechanicum to march through with armoured heads held high. Entire armies could pass beyond these portals, their dimensions larger than anything Magnus had seen in the Outer Palace.\n\nEven the portals running through Colossi and Gorgon Bar paled into insignificance.\n\nNot even Lion's Gate was equal in scale or grandeur.\n\nYet it was not even these inhumanly scaled portals that drew Magnus' eye.\n\nHis gaze was fixed upon the titanic throne of gold and silver raised upon the highest tier of the golden structure. Its form was layered in a patchwork of bronze and platinum, as though its inner workings had failed and been repaired many times. Seated atop this unknowable machine, His head locked back with His eyes tightly closed, was a figure clad from head to toe in armour of burnished gold.\n\nPellucid ghost lights of amber washed across His granite skin in gently lapping waves, illuminating His husked pallor, the tautness of His jaw, the awesome strength radiating from Him and the pain of His suffering. The scale of the power flowing through the machine and into his father was unimaginable.\n\n'Do I speak to Him or to you?'\n\n'We are one and the same, but address your words to me,' said Revelation. 'The damage you wrought upon the golden doors requires my primary focus. The assaults of the Neverborn from the other side are unceasing, and the war in the webway grows ever more fierce.'\n\n'I did that?' asked Magnus, horrified. 'When I tried to warn you of Horus' perfidy?'\n\n'You did,' agreed Revelation. 'The irony of your purpose and its outcome are not lost on me, Magnus, but it has cost so much to keep the Neverborn hordes back that I find myself unable to truly appreciate it. Hundreds of thousands of lives spent fighting a numberless host of filth and corruption. Without my con"}
{"text":" the Neverborn from the other side are unceasing, and the war in the webway grows ever more fierce.'\n\n'I did that?' asked Magnus, horrified. 'When I tried to warn you of Horus' perfidy?'\n\n'You did,' agreed Revelation. 'The irony of your purpose and its outcome are not lost on me, Magnus, but it has cost so much to keep the Neverborn hordes back that I find myself unable to truly appreciate it. Hundreds of thousands of lives spent fighting a numberless host of filth and corruption. Without my continued presence upon the Golden Throne, Terra would even now be a daemon world.'\n\n'I... I could not have known,' said Magnus, gripping his staff so tight, its woven wood and adamantium core began to crack. The hissing voices from his grimoire, the victims of a murdered world, now made themselves known, emerging from its capricious pages in rippling slicks of witchfire and crawling along his arms, eager and ambitious.\n\n'You were told,' said Revelation. 'You were instructed. You were warned, but you knew better.'\n\n'I knew only what you told me,' snapped Magnus, the light of Morningstar coruscating along the length of his staff.\n\n'And I will admit to the fault of that,' said Revelation. 'You were birthed to see further than any of your brothers, but I understood the dark and infernal and eternal magnitude of the warp better than you. And when I told you there were places even I was unwilling to go and lines I was unwilling to cross, then that ought to have been enough for you.'\n\nThe arrogance and presumption in Revelation's words were like a slap to the face.\n\n'Your conceit is staggering, your arrogance unmatched,' said Magnus.\n\nHe felt his need for violence eclipse his need for answers, but fought it down for now.\n\nMagnus looked around the chamber, unable to reconcile his continued presence and the utter lack of any protection surrounding the Emperor.\n\n'Where are your praetorians?' said Magnus. 'The fighting on the walls is desperate, and I saw thousands of Constantin's men at Colossi, but the captain-general of the Legio Custodes would never consent to leaving you entirely unguarded.'\n\n'I removed them from my presence, my son,' said Revelation. 'Even now they are attempting to break in, fearing I am about some scheme that might endanger my life.'\n\n'And are you?' said Magnus, stepping towards Revelation.\n\n'Very likely,' said the man. 'There is a reason why your steps led you to Leng. I hoped you would remember the secret way through the observatory. And the Hall of Victories has long been my own hidden way to walk among my people without escort.'\n\nThe implications of Revelation's words hit Magnus like a blow.\n\n'You let me see the crack in the telaethesic ward...'\n\nRevelation nodded. 'I did. You would never have come had I summoned you.'\n\n'And why would you summon me?' demanded Magnus. 'You must have known what I would do were I ever to stand before you.'\n\nRevelation stepped forward and placed a hand on Magnus' shoulder. His eyes were burning pools of molten gold, depthless and bright like the hearts of stars.\n\nHe shook His head and said, 'I hoped I did, my son, but I could not know the answer to that mystery until you were here, which was what made this gambit so dangerous, why I had to keep it from Constantin and all others save Malcador.'\n\n'Dangerous? As the Saturnine ruse was dangerous?'\n\nRevelation chuckled and said, 'Rogal's plan was a certainty compared to this.'\n\n'Then allow me to answer that mystery,' said Magnus, ramming the tip of his staff into Revelation's chest. A torrent of unearthly fire poured along its length, unmaking his father's avatar from the inside out.\n\nThe man who was not a man screamed as the purest fire of the Pyrae consumed His created flesh, the psychic flames burning in realms mortal and immaterial. It spread along Revelation's limbs, illuminating His body and outstretched arms from within as He shrieked and writhed like a snared beast.\n\nThe light faded, and when it was gone, so too was Revelation.\n\nOnly the silver ring the man wore survived the fire, falling to the stone floor with a musical clink. Magnus bent to retrieve it, stirring the ashes of Revelation with the end of his staff as he slipped the ring over the middle finger of his right hand. The stylised eye carved into its flattened head was exquisitely carved.\n\nMagnus made a fist as his sons gathered round.\n\nHe felt their confusion, their feeling of being adrift. None of them had seen this moment, not even him. To know nothing of the future was a prospect no warrior of the Corvidae relished.\n\n'You killed him...' said Amon.\n\n'I killed a puppet, not the master,' said Magnus, rising and making his way towards the golden dais. As he placed his foot upon the first step, he turned back to his expectant sons.\n\n'This reunion is not for you,' he said. 'Form a mandala, or at least as much of one as you can make with only three of you, and wait for me.'\n\nAhriman stepped forward and said, 'Do what must be done, my lord.'\n\nMagnus nodded and began climbing towards the giant figure upon the Golden Throne with singular purpose. Behind him, his sons formed a segment of a mandala at the base of the steps, bolters held at their sides as they rose into the martial enumerations.\n\nHis stride was long and driven, and though the throne atop this mountain was far distant, it took him only moments to reach the wide summit of the dais.\n\nThough he had seen Him from afar, to be in such close proximity to his father cut him deeper than he'd expected. Not since Nikaea had they shared the same physical space, and the hypocrisy of that day still twisted in his heart like shrapnel too dangerous to remove.\n\nCloser now, Magnus could see the visible strain upon his father's face. The canyon lines of tension, the slick sheen of sweat upon His laurelled brow. His eyes remained tightly shut, though He must surely have sensed Magnus was coming with murder in his heart.\n\nBut still He remained seated, ignoring His son's presence.\n\nMagnus looked back to the cavern floor as he heard the unmistakable roar of mass-reactives.\n\nSix warriors, moving in at speed. Using the vast machinery as cover.\n\nThree in armour of winter ice, three in deepest jade. VI and XVIII. Lemuel Gaumon followed behind, sinking to his knees behind the logic engines in awe. At first Magnus thought the Space Wolves slow and plodding, but quickly realised that the enormity of his father's presence was affecting them also.\n\nSuch fury to overcome their awe!\n\nMagnus' gaze narrowed as he realised he knew the warriors of the VI Legion from the shared memory engrams of his sons.\n\n'The watch pack of Bodvar Bjarki,' he said. 'And you bring Nocturnean allies.'\n\nThese dogs of Russ had fought his sons on Kamiti Sona and followed through the Great Ocean to assault them in the heart of the crystalline labyrinth.\n\nThere are no coincidences...\n\nGunfire whickered back and forth between the Space Marines. His sons were outnumbered two to one, but even without the full scope of their powers, he had no fear for their lives.\n\nMagnus turned from the fight below. He could not afford to hesitate.\n\nTo pause in the face of synchronistic enemies, even for a fraction of a breath, would rob him of his resolve. He thought back to Prospero, to the irreplaceable knowledge that had been lost and his many sons who had died there. To the lies and betrayal at Nikaea. He thought of the falsehoods he had been assured were truths, the broken promises, and the lost hope of a shared future of exploration within the Great Ocean.\n\nHe looked into the face of his father, drawing his arm back to hurl his staff like a native harpooner with the perfect cast into the eye of a whale.\n\nThe spear trembled in his grip, forming the perfect blade.\n\nHis knuckles pressed white on its smoking haft.\n\nIts bladed tip burned orange, brightening to molten radiance, infused with all the anguish of Magnus' fractured soul. It would be a killing strike, powerful enough to end a god's reign.\n\nHe lowered the spear, his head sinking to his chest as regret threatened to choke him. The rage and power suffusing its god-slaying blade was snuffed out like a candle at dawn.\n\n'I loved you like no other,' wept Magnus.\n\nA blur of motion snapped his head up as a form his equal in stature smashed down hard on the summit of the dais like a thunderstrike. A shock wave blew out in a ring of force, and flames ripped from nearby machines as arcs of overloading energy erupted like geysers.\n\nMagnus shielded his eyes as furnace heat rippled the air, staring in disbelief at the form emerging from the dissipating cloud of superheated vapour and bleeding light.\n\nA kneeling colossus in green armour rose slowly from the crater his landing had buckled in the metal floor. A burnished cloak of umber scale was clasped to a mighty draconic skull at the shoulder of the finest warplate known to the Imperium, and monstrous gauntlets snarled with blue-hot energies.\n\nHis skin was midnight dark like polished obsidian, and his eyes were the red of a sunset at battle's end. One hand was clenched into a brawler's fist, while the other held a mighty warhammer of indestructible iron and bronze named Urdrakule.\n\n'So the rumours were true,' said Magnus. 'Vulkan lives...'\n\nA Precursor to Change\n\nMass-reactives exploded in the air before Ahriman. Instinctive kine shields caught some and Corvidae foresight allowed him to evade the others. Pyrae fire detonated warheads and Pavoni biomancy altered the chemical composition of explosive cores to render them inert.\n\nThe mandala, such as it was, combined their power, a well for each warrior to draw upon.\n\n'Who are they?' cried Amon, rising to the fifth. 'Custodes?'\n\nAhriman scanned the space before them: too many approaches, too misted by machine breath and strobing with crackling electric bleed. His bolter tracked his gaze as he caught flashes of war-scarred plate, ice blue and earthen green.\n\nHe tasted the wet, animal reek of snow-blasted skin. Of bone beads and matted beards"}
{"text":"e cores to render them inert.\n\nThe mandala, such as it was, combined their power, a well for each warrior to draw upon.\n\n'Who are they?' cried Amon, rising to the fifth. 'Custodes?'\n\nAhriman scanned the space before them: too many approaches, too misted by machine breath and strobing with crackling electric bleed. His bolter tracked his gaze as he caught flashes of war-scarred plate, ice blue and earthen green.\n\nHe tasted the wet, animal reek of snow-blasted skin. Of bone beads and matted beards, caustic liquor and meat ripped raw from the bone. A feral stink filled his nostrils, cold with magic drawn from the primal heart of a far-distant world, a world where life was held cheap and blood was the payment for land-thirst.\n\n'It's not the Praetorians,' said Ahriman, recognising this power. 'It's Bjarki.'\n\n'The Wolf of Nikaea?' asked Menkaura, an edge of panic in his tone.\n\nAhriman half turned to face him, sensing a spike of fear in the seer's aura. His concentration slipped and a deflected bolt shell clipped his shoulder guard. Robbed of force enough not to penetrate by impact alone, it detonated a metre from his head. Shrapnel slammed his helmet. His vision fogged red.\n\nThe howl of a hunting pack echoed weirdly throughout the cavern.\n\nBut how many throats gave voice to it?\n\nHis warplate registered a sudden, catastrophic drop in ambient temperature.\n\n'Brace!' yelled Ahriman as a storm of ice roared towards them, a blitzing hurricane of razored shards. It battered them, sliced the skin and threw off their shared aim. Ahriman brought up a kine shield, too late. A thousand needles of ice shattered against his armour, sliced his exposed skin, and threw him from the enumerations.\n\nA shrieking ululation clawed his mind, raw and seeking his prey reflex.\n\nHis limbs tried to lock in fear, but Ahriman shook off this blunt assault on his senses.\n\n'I know your power,' he said, dropping to a crouch and snapping off shots at the shadows moving in the mist. They were fast, too fast for heavily armoured warriors. But where they moved the percussive thud of bolters immediately followed.\n\nAmon fell back, three rounds cratering his plastron. Menkaura's silver helm gleamed in the winterlight. More shells shivered the air around him, displaced air rocking him back.\n\nThe roar of gunfire was too intense, too sustained for only three warriors.\n\n'They're not alone,' shouted Ahriman as a shape reared out of the mist. Ahriman rolled and snapped off a pair of shots that took his attacker in the hip and torso. The first ricocheted away, the second tore the leather wolf-shield totem from his ice-blue chestplate.\n\nA monstrous axe with a crackling, rune-etched blade swung down and slammed into the ground, splitting the rock floor where Ahriman had stood a fraction of a second before. So swift was the assault that Ahriman's foresight was all but useless.\n\nAnother blow came at him, too fast to avoid.\n\nHe lowered his shoulder into the blow, forced to take the impact on his pauldron.\n\nCeramite split and the impact hurled him backwards. He landed hard and rose to one knee in time to face the berserk charge of a barrel-chested legionary with a forked beard. The Space Wolf howled, and there was madness in the sound, a mind lost to his Legion's savage soul.\n\nAhriman pulsed a lance of terror into the warrior's brain, but whatever red mist was upon him cared nothing for the fear of death.\n\n'Your maleficarum is powerless against me!' roared the Space Wolf, his axe cutting towards Ahriman's neck in an executioner's strike. Prescience had already shifted him back, and the killing edge passed the breadth of a finger from his gorget.\n\nAhriman stepped in and rammed his bolter into the warrior's side.\n\n'Powers or not,' he said, 'I am still Astartes.'\n\nHe pulled the trigger, and at such close range, the damage was horrific, two shells tearing through the layers of ceramite and plasteel to the body below. The first ricocheted downward from his rib-plate, travelling the length of the warrior's cuisse plates before exploding in the centre of his knee.\n\nThe second gouged a tunnel through his midsection before blasting out of his backplate.\n\nAhriman's pleasure at the wounds was short-lived as he saw the warrior's next blow coming a second before the blindingly swift reverse stroke hit. The axe smashed into his chestplate, biting deep and smashing him into the ground.\n\nThe pain was horrendous, the bone shield of his chest shattered into an archipelago of floating fragments. His primary lungs collapsed, obliterated by the concussive pressure wave of the axe's impact.\n\nHe tried to draw breath, but couldn't. His secondary lung kicked in with a rasping lurch, unfolding within his chest with a wet sucking sound. It was grossly inefficient in the crucible of combat, designed only for survival in low-oxygenated environments. The fury of close-quarter battle demanded far more than it could deliver.\n\nA plume of Pyrae fire behind him illuminated the cavern and a portion of the storm's ice boiled away into superheated steam. Ahriman tried to focus his thoughts, his Corvidae insight seeming to slow the passage of time.\n\nHe saw Menkaura fighting a burning huntsman armed with serrated spear as Amon traded blows with Bjarki himself. A storm of psychic energy surrounded them.\n\nAmon was one of the greatest sorcerer lords of the Thousand Sons, but the drag factor of the telaethesic ward was hampering his powers. It seemed to have no effect on the one-armed Bjarki, who shrugged off all Amon's attacks as though he were but a neophyte.\n\nHe had no time to think. The berserk axeman was upon him again.\n\nHis breath was liquid fire in his chest, his lung straining at the limits of endurance to keep him alive. Ahriman saw a vision of his block failing an instant before he lifted his ebon staff, saw the axe smash it aside and continue on to bury itself in his throat. It would be cataclysmic damage, a killing wound. An end to his wyrd, as Bjarki would say.\n\nInstead of blocking, he lunged forward, taking the fight to the axeman.\n\nIt was not his way. Ahzek Ahriman did not trade blows like a common pit-fighter.\n\nExcept now he was. Now he was forced to.\n\nThey slammed to the ground, too close for weapons, rolling and clawing at one another like barbarians. The Space Wolf slammed his head forward. Ahriman lowered his to meet him, and their skulls crashed together in a ferocious hammering of bone. Ahriman reeled, his vision a blazing starburst of dazzling light.\n\nHis prowess in such brawls was no match for the lusty killing power of the Space Wolf.\n\nThe warrior roared in his face, blood-flecked spittle spraying Ahriman's visor. The Space Wolf's fist thundered down, hammering his helm again and again, driven by lunatic fury and base savagery. Ahriman twisted his head to lessen the force of each blow, but it was hopeless.\n\nThe Space Wolf was going to beat his skull to bloody mulch.\n\nThe metal of his helmet buckled, collapsing inwards. Smashed armourglass sliced open the skin over his eye. Deforming metal broke the bone in his cheek.\n\nHe reached down, fumbling at the heavy rope tied around the Space Wolf's belt.\n\nWhere is it...? Your kind never goes without...\n\nHis fingers closed around the leather-wrapped grip of a broad, gutting knife. Oversized, exaggeratedly so, its serrated blade was crudely wrought.\n\nBut it would suffice.\n\nHis helm split and the frozen touch of the ice storm rushed in. Blood filled the socket of his left eye. His mouth tasted of tin, and the hot stench of the Space Wolf's breath made him gag.\n\nAhriman wrenched the Space Wolf's blade from the loop on his belt. A reinforced fist arced back to finally drive itself through his skull. He screamed as he rammed the gutting blade up through the wound his bolter round had gouged in the Space Wolf's flank.\n\nThe eighth enumeration empowered it, his muscles burning with righteous fury as he drove the blade up and under his foe's bone shield. The jagged edge tore through the Space Wolf's lungs and heart, but Ahriman kept going, working the blade side to side like a lever to wreak as much bloody havoc as he could. The knife ripped up into the warrior's throat, Ahriman's arm elbow-deep in his enemy's body.\n\nA flood of gore spilled from the Space Wolf's mouth, drenching Ahriman's face.\n\nHe gagged and spat as the dying legionary struggled for life. The Space Wolf was dead, but wouldn't die. He kept fighting, weakly punching Ahriman with the last of his strength before collapsing on top of him. Gagging on blood, Ahriman struggled out from beneath the Space Wolf's corpse.\n\nHe looked up, seeing three warriors in jade-green armour begin the long and arduous ascent to the golden dais where Magnus had climbed to face his father. They moved as if into a great and invisible force, the sheer power of the Emperor's psychic might seeking to press them to the ground in obeisance.\n\nHe tried to rise into his powers, but the pain was too intense, too all-consuming.\n\nThe mandala was broken. He saw Menkaura on his knees before the fire-blackened huntsman, spitted on his serrated harpoon. The dying Space Wolf tore the shaft from Menkaura's body, its reversed barbs dragging out looping coils of intestines in a red flood. Menkaura clutched his belly, hauling at his innards as if he could somehow repack them inside his gutted body. Not content with that wound, the huntsman spun on his heel and rammed the spear through Menkaura's chest.\n\nWhen the spear was wrenched out again, Menkaura toppled over, an ocean of blood surrounding him in a red lake. Moments later, the huntsman fell to his knees, the psychic fire guttering and dying as the Space Wolf's life was spent.\n\nNear where Menkaura lay, Amon was on his back, his head turned away from Ahriman. The side of his helmet was a shattered ruin where a bolt-round had blown it out.\n\nAhriman could not tell if he was alive or dead.\n\nHe reached for his heqa staff, lying close by, but a booted foot stamped down on it, snapping it "}
{"text":"kaura toppled over, an ocean of blood surrounding him in a red lake. Moments later, the huntsman fell to his knees, the psychic fire guttering and dying as the Space Wolf's life was spent.\n\nNear where Menkaura lay, Amon was on his back, his head turned away from Ahriman. The side of his helmet was a shattered ruin where a bolt-round had blown it out.\n\nAhriman could not tell if he was alive or dead.\n\nHe reached for his heqa staff, lying close by, but a booted foot stamped down on it, snapping it in two before kicking the pieces away. Blinking away sticky runnels of blood from his eye, Ahriman looked up into a face he had last seen on Nikaea.\n\nThe same hawk nose, ragged beard over lean features, and grinning eyes.\n\nBut those eyes were not grinning now.\n\n'I told you your wyrd would end badly,' snarled Bjarki.\n\nMagnus expected to see hate in his brother's eyes, but he saw only great sadness.\n\nHe brought his staff up once more, expecting a furious charge, but Vulkan did not attack. Instead, he lowered his mighty warhammer and hung it from a clawed hook at his belt.\n\n'Brother,' said Vulkan.\n\nAnother single word to the heart. Another word that bore great power, but this time said without subterfuge, only the stoic honesty for which Vulkan was known. In times of old, he might have embraced his brother in a clatter of warplate, made some aloof comment on his dull pragmatism, or counselled him to lift his gaze from the forgefire once in a while.\n\nBut these were not times of old, they were the new days of war and death.\n\nWhat could he say to a brother who thought him a monster?\n\n'I have a memory,' he began, his voice as cracked and broken as his soul. 'A faded scrap of a memory, but a memory nonetheless. I stood vigil over your body with one of your sons. I do not know his name, but he held fast to his belief that you would walk among us again. I saw a white flame eternal. A mountain of black smoke and world-ending fire. I did not know what it meant at the time...'\n\n'That son was Artellus Numeon,' said Vulkan. 'It is only thanks to his courage and faith that I live again. And it was thanks to you he was able to bring me home to Nocturne.'\n\n'I don't remember that, not fully,' said Magnus. 'But I saw your corpse, cold and lifeless. How is it that you are alive?'\n\n'In truth I do not know,' said Vulkan. 'The ancient fire priests of Nocturne would say that the ur-drakes who dwell in the world of my birth brought me back. They would say the great drakes breathed the unbound flame into my soul and ignited the fire in my heart once more.'\n\nMagnus smiled at Vulkan's words and cast his gaze around the vast cavern.\n\n'I admire the poetic turn of phrase, but this is the world of your birth. Of all our births.'\n\n'Our father crafted the iron of my soul and the stone of my flesh here, but it was Nocturne that made me. Just as Prospero made you.'\n\nVulkan took a step closer, and Magnus tensed, but his brother's intent was not violence.\n\n'This war has taken so much from us both,' said Vulkan. 'The Imperium is sundered by the flames of war, and nothing ever returns from the fire unchanged. No matter the outcome of the fighting above, the Imperium will never be the same again.'\n\nMagnus nodded. 'I am no master of hearth and forge like you, brother, but the fire strengthens some things, does it not?'\n\n'In the hands of a skilled smiter, aye, it can,' agreed Vulkan. 'But the fires burning all across Terra are those of a blind apprentice. Nothing good will come of it.'\n\nWarming to his theme, Magnus said, 'The transformative nature of fire, though clearly destructive, is often a necessary precursor to change. Perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, that will be a good thing? The enemy of progress is stasis, and all things have in their nature a tendency towards complexity. That tendency has carried the universe from almost perfect simplicity to the level of magnificence we see all around us.'\n\n'Always the teacher,' said Vulkan with a wry smile.\n\nIt was a rare enough thing that Magnus felt the rest of his metaphysical argument dissipate entirely, but as pleasant as it was to stand face to face with his brother, Magnus knew he was an unwelcome visitor in his father's great sanctum. He was much diminished, but Vulkan, for all that he had apparently died, seemed mightier than ever.\n\n'Do you intend to stop me?' said Magnus.\n\n'That depends, brother,' said Vulkan. 'Do you still intend to cast that spear of yours?'\n\nMagnus looked down at the spear and its form twisted, transforming from a weapon of war to the crook-topped staff of a master of Prospero's Fellowships.\n\n'I... I don't know any more,' he said. 'When I followed Revelation, I was singular in my purpose, but now...? I have wandered far, but I am more lost than ever before...'\n\n'You are not lost, my son, you are exactly where you need to be.'\n\nMagnus looked into his father's eyes as they opened in golden fire.\n\nTizca.\n\nMagnus drew in a breath as he beheld the City of Light in all its glory, flashes of sunlight glittering like noonday stars from the polished glass of the great pyramids. The sky was the perfect shade of cornflower blue, and the scent of recent summer rain was like honeydew. Clouds ran in thin lines of purple over the mountainous horizon, and the salt-tang blowing in from the ocean was a scent he thought he would never smell again.\n\nTears came to him, and he let them flow for the loss of his home world.\n\n'It was so beautiful,' he said, sensing an unmistakable presence behind him.\n\n'It was,' agreed his father. 'I remember the day I first set foot on Prospero. You had made a paradise here, my son.'\n\n'The only paradise is a paradise lost,' said Magnus sadly. 'It exists now only in my memory, for the reality of what has become of Tizca is too painful.'\n\nHis father nodded. 'A wise man once said that as memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape.'\n\nMagnus turned to his father, seeing Him clad all in gold, His armour too brilliant to look upon. At first glance, it could be mistaken for something ceremonial, its every plate engraved and etched with baroque carvings, studded with polished gemstones and its every fluted edge worked with the most intricate of details.\n\nBut upon closer inspection, it was clear this armour had seen fierce battle, bore the impacts of many weapons and was stained with the blood of countless foes.\n\nHe shone with an inner light that Magnus well remembered from that first meeting, when they had embraced beneath the fire of the Pyrae Fellowship's pyramid. The great god-machine Canis Vertex had not yet taken its place at the entrance, but the blue flame at its summit cast a cold light over the glass of its sloping surfaces.\n\n'I came to kill you,' said Magnus.\n\n'I know. Is that still your intent?'\n\n'I no longer understand what my intent is,' said Magnus. 'The variables at play in the galaxy defy any of the formulae I might divine. Even the Order of Ruin would fail to see a path in this dark forest.'\n\n'Then allow me to show you a possible path,' said the Emperor.\n\nHis father set off along one of the side streets, running towards Occullum Square.\n\nThey passed an ornamental garden of psychically sculpted topiary in which scholars led discussion groups, couples read together in comfortable silence, and laughing children passed a ball between them using only the power of their minds.\n\nMagnus heard a song from somewhere, a street performer playing a melody the first psychic settlers to reach Prospero had composed that spoke of their flight from Old Earth:\n\nThose being all my study,\n\nThe crown I cast upon the Earth.\n\nAnd to my state grew stranger,\n\nAnd rapt in secret studies.\n\nThe people of Tizca walked around them, as clean-limbed and beautiful as he remembered them, robed in many colours, with great minds and inquisitive natures.\n\nIt was almost too much to bear.\n\n'Why did you bring me here?' asked Magnus.\n\n'I did not,' said the Emperor. 'You did.'\n\n'That's not what I meant. Why did you bring me to stand before you? If Malcador wasn't lying, then you wanted me here, right now. In front of you.'\n\nHis father nodded. 'Malcador spoke true. It was the last thing he did.'\n\nMagnus hung his head in shame. 'I did not mean to kill him.'\n\n'I know, but his death was a sacrifice he knew he might be asked to make. He knew that and accepted it. Another death in a grand procession of them. Painful in its own way, for he and I have shared a journey longer than most men or gods can dare reckon. Yet, in the macro of what our species faces, his death is irrelevant.'\n\n'I always forget how cold you can be,' said Magnus.\n\n'It is not coldness, it is reality. What might be gained by his sacrifice will be of far greater worth than a single life. A thousand lives would still be a price worth paying for what you and I might achieve.'\n\n'You and I?'\n\n'Yes,' said his father, and the promise of that word was the first light of dawn.\n\n'I don't understand.'\n\n'I wanted you here before me so there would be no mistakes, no misunderstandings, and no way for the Ruinous Powers set against me to twist my words or intent. I wanted you here before me so you could look me in the eye and understand the truth of what I offer.'\n\nMagnus' breath caught in his throat.\n\nHis father turned to face him, and Magnus met His terrible gaze, feeling the inhuman power that lay at His heart. It was power that could strip a man down to atoms in a heartbeat and breathe him anew with an exhalation. That power had endured uncounted millennia, growing with every passing century and honing its edge for the age in which it was needed.\n\n'And what is it you offer?'\n\n'The chance to stand at my side once again,' said his father. 'Forgiveness.'\n\nBlood of Ur-Drakes\n\nTizca's light fell away from Magnus, and now he was flying.\n\nAdrift in the Great Ocean, he was unbound from all physical limitations, a being of mind and memory. He was thought, free from required form and mundane function"}
{"text":"an exhalation. That power had endured uncounted millennia, growing with every passing century and honing its edge for the age in which it was needed.\n\n'And what is it you offer?'\n\n'The chance to stand at my side once again,' said his father. 'Forgiveness.'\n\nBlood of Ur-Drakes\n\nTizca's light fell away from Magnus, and now he was flying.\n\nAdrift in the Great Ocean, he was unbound from all physical limitations, a being of mind and memory. He was thought, free from required form and mundane function.\n\nHe soared past binary stars, plunged into their nuclear hearts and basked in the secret light of their cores. He saw the birth of species unknown to mankind and the doom of those upon whose ruins and bones men and women had built.\n\nNor did he fly alone.\n\nHis father burned at his side, a gleaming comet of power and might.\n\nMagnus had flown the Great Ocean since his inception, but the Emperor had known it since earlier epochs of humanity. They circled the great singularity at the heart of the Milky Way, slingshotting out to the halo stars to bathe in the light of distant galaxies. They followed the arcs of migratory comets, explored the nurseries of newborn stars, and shaped the destinies of cooling protoplanets.\n\nMagnus was a child again, a fresh mind shepherded through the Great Ocean and shielded from its deep water predators by his father. The Emperor's light drew them, but He laughed as He destroyed them or turned them against one another.\n\nTime was meaningless here, for this was the galaxy's infancy and death all in one.\n\nTheir course spiralled back towards a pale blue dot in the western spiral arm of the galaxy. An insignificant world, a world no different from tens of thousands of others just like it, yet this one possessed a destiny no other would share.\n\nTerra.\n\nThey plunged towards it, falling through its atmosphere to see a world Magnus had never known, a beautiful expanse of blue oceans, silver mountains, swathes of green forest and endlessly swaying fields of gold.\n\nNot Terra then, but Old Earth.\n\nAnd just as they had seen ancient civilisations rise and fall out in the galactic depths, so too did they bear witness to the growth and collapse of countless cultures here. The sudden and catastrophic doom of Ancient Assyriu, the rapid expansion and slow break up of the Grekan and Romanii city states, the land of the Prusai, Albyon's Great Empire, and countless more: Tolosa, Dal-Riada, Byzantion, Tsernagora, Sabaudia.\n\nThe litany of vanished empires was endless.\n\nMagnus thought of those ancient kings and queens, seated on their thrones and hearing tales of ruined civilisations. He pictured them laughing at the foolishness of these dead kingdoms, never once imagining that such a fate might one day befall them.\n\nHe looked at the incandescent brightness of his father.\n\nWas He now facing that same moment?\n\nThe green-and-blue world became one of steel and stone, its once clear atmosphere burned with toxic fogs and its polluted oceans rising to reclaim the land. Wars of land-thirst grew to engulf entire continents, then spread ever wider as competition for resources led the global super-blocs to turn on one another.\n\nSpasms of self-destruction flared and burned across the planet's surface, and time and time again the world's populace grew to unsustainable proportions before shrinking back to walk the knife edge of extinction.\n\nThrough it all, Magnus saw patterns endlessly repeat, moments of significance rhyming all through the course of human history. The same mistakes, the same wilful ignorance.\n\nThe same hubris.\n\nExpeditions were hurled into space almost as soon as technology allowed, colony ships, terraformers, holy pilgrims, fleets of conquest. A centuries-long migration into the stars began, a gloriously foolhardy expansion into the unknown depths of space or a golden age of exploration, it was hard to say for sure.\n\nIt seemed humanity was done with its once blue world, that it was to be abandoned now that it was all used up and had nothing left to give.\n\nBut then came Old Night.\n\nEven in this phantom form, Magnus felt the screams from all across the cosmos. He wept as he felt pain and loss like never before. Even in the wake of Prospero's razing he had not shed so many tears.\n\nBut again, just as it seemed that humanity's time was done, it endured.\n\nThe time of nations fell away, and the age of the techno-barbarian tribes began, a savage aeon of ethnarchs and despots, of barbarous kings and bloody priests. It seemed as though mankind must extinguish itself by cutting its own throat, yet even now, Magnus detected the first hint of a guiding hand, shaping the species' destiny in ways both consequential and seemingly minor. So careful and subtle was this hand, he wasn't even sure it was there, like a whisper in a thunderstorm.\n\nAnd from this age of darkness came a light, finally revealed.\n\nHe bore many names, but only one that mattered.\n\nEmperor.\n\nOne by one, the warlords of the past were destroyed, and a new empire grew from the ashes of the old. Into this Age of Unity was born the Imperium, the greatest empire the galaxy had ever seen.\n\nMagnus watched events unfold in ways he had studied as a callow youth as the rapidly unspooling history of Earth finally caught up to events he had lived through. He saw the Expeditionary Fleets launched from the Field of Winged Victory within the Emperor's Palace, a place he hardly recognised, such was its tiny scale compared to what sprawled over the mountains now.\n\nOne by one, the lost cradles of civilisation were brought back into the fold, the forgotten branches of humanity spliced back into the body of the Imperium. His heart clenched as he waited for the moment where everything went wrong, when Horus fell on Davin.\n\nBut it never came.\n\nThe Legions reached the edges of the galaxy, and Magnus swelled with pride as Horus Lupercal and his Sons of Horus raised the Emperor's lightning-bolt banner on the last world to be brought to compliance.\n\nThis never happened, he said, his mind one with his father.\n\n No, but it should have. It so very nearly did.\n\nMagnus' mind flew back to Prospero, and he saw the world he knew and loved, its people flourishing, even passing on what they knew to visitors from all across the Imperium. His mind circled the planet, seeing fresh cities and arcologies, wonders he had never known, structures that bore all the hallmarks of Perturabo's wondrous designs.\n\nWhere am I? he asked, not finding himself within the Pyramid of Photep or any of the other cities of glass and gold.\n\n Look to Terra, said his father.\n\nBack to the birthrock he flew, and there, deep in the heart of the world, Magnus found himself in the great cavern of machines, sat upon the same Golden Throne upon which he had so recently seen his father.\n\nFear touched Magnus as he remembered seeing a vision of this, his physical body ravaged and husked out by the unimaginable cost of maintaining the portal.\n\nI have seen this, he said. It will kill me.\n\nLook closer, my son.\n\nThe vast doors before the throne were open, and a beatific light issued from what lay beyond. This was not the vision of his doom he had been shown, for here his face was serene and vacant, merely a vessel of flesh and blood. His subtle body was entirely absent.\n\nHis father felt his confusion.\n\nYour spirit is by my side, as it is now. We fly the Great Ocean as explorers of the furthest reaches of consciousness. Masters of time and space. As we always dreamed.\n\nWhy show me this? It never happened, and only twists the knife of regret deeper.\n\nThe past is set, but not all futures are lost, no matter how broken they appear. This future, or at least a version of it, can still come to pass.\n\nIt is too late for that.\n\nHis father's amusement washed over him.\n\nDo you think I would show you this if that were so?\n\nMagnus opened his eye, feeling the familiar weight of spirit returning to his body.\n\nTheir shared vision-space experienced time on a cosmic scale, but an instant only had passed in the cavern beneath the Sanctum Imperialis. Vulkan stood at the Emperor's side, the tension of his stance betraying the expectation he felt.\n\nHis father's eyes still burned gold, his last question still hanging between them.\n\n'How?' asked Magnus. 'How could such a future come to pass?'\n\n'It is a simple thing,' said the Emperor, and Magnus saw the tremors of strain at His brow, a measure of how much psychic effort it was taking Him to communicate so directly. 'Swear your oath of fealty to me once again. Take your rightful place at my side and our combined powers will drive the betrayers from Terra. We will destroy them, and usher in a new era of crusade.'\n\n'I thought you always hated that word?'\n\n'I did,' admitted his father, 'but that was then. Our first endeavour was carried forward on hope, a venture to reforge a galactic culture that Old Night put asunder, to locate and rebuild our lost sons and daughters. This will be a war of vengeance and cleansing, a scouring of worlds and a ruthless doom to all our enemies.'\n\n'And you want me to be part of this?'\n\n'I do, my son,' said the Emperor, and His eyes shone even brighter. 'I need you by my side, because your soul is still your own and is still ruled by the better angels of your nature. I saw what you did above in the Great Observatory. You could have left all those people to die, but you did not. You could not. Unlike your brothers beyond the walls, you are still my son. Your mind was always the strongest of them all, but Chaos has wormed its way too deeply into their hearts and minds to ever be removed.'\n\n'The Red Angel, the Pale King, Horus Lupercal, Lorgar, Curze, Alpharius, and the Phoenician, they are truly monsters now, but I still count Perturabo as my brother, still as your son. He is too stubborn to ever abase himself before powers he considers inferior. His soul is clad in cold iron.'\n\n'And that is why he is lost to us,' said Vulkan. 'Perturabo has pledged himself to Horus, and you know as we"}
{"text":"m all, but Chaos has wormed its way too deeply into their hearts and minds to ever be removed.'\n\n'The Red Angel, the Pale King, Horus Lupercal, Lorgar, Curze, Alpharius, and the Phoenician, they are truly monsters now, but I still count Perturabo as my brother, still as your son. He is too stubborn to ever abase himself before powers he considers inferior. His soul is clad in cold iron.'\n\n'And that is why he is lost to us,' said Vulkan. 'Perturabo has pledged himself to Horus, and you know as well as I that his word, once given, is unbreakable. He will not go back on that, not now, not ever. His ambition to humble Rogal consumes him.'\n\nMagnus wanted to argue and defend his closest brother, but he knew Vulkan was right. To bring down the greatest work of Rogal Dorn was the Lord of Iron's sole obsession. Now the Emperor's offer had been stated so boldly, Magnus realised that this was the missing piece of his soul. No sliver split from the whole would restore him, only belief in a higher cause and the urge to belong to something greater than himself.\n\nTo have meaning.\n\nThat was the last missing piece.\n\nThen why do I hesitate?\n\n'There's a price, isn't there?' he said at last. 'No matter what the poets say, forgiveness isn't free. It always comes with a price.'\n\n'It does,' agreed the Emperor. 'And it is a heavy price, but a necessary one. Your mind and body are still your own, but the warriors of your Legion are damned. In truth, they were damned the moment the first signs of the flesh change became manifest. Their bodies carry the seeds of their own destruction, and no gene-craft of mine nor the Selenar can undo it. You can come back to me, but your Legion cannot.'\n\nMagnus felt a cold hand squeeze his heart, but his father was not yet done.\n\n'But I will build you a new Legion, a mighty host of warriors greater than any now living. Plans are already in motion to bring about their inception. Soon, you will command warriors the likes of which the galaxy has never seen, whose flesh will be flawless, whose fists are steel and whose hearts are armoured in adamantium!'\n\n'You would give me a new Legion?'\n\n'I would, and they will be the pride of the new Imperium.'\n\nMagnus said nothing, picturing this fantastical new future, one in which his Legion sons were free of corruption, free of the fear that dogged their every step. Free from the dark shadow within them all that threatened to consume them.\n\nAnd he at his father's side, leading these new warriors on a new crusade to reconquer the stars. This time they would not repeat the mistakes of the past. This time they would reshape the galaxy as it was meant to be.\n\nIt was all he had ever wanted... And yet...\n\n'How could I fight at your side, knowing I had condemned my sons to death?' he said. 'I would look upon these new warriors and see in them the faces of my betrayed Legion. What kind of father would I be were I to forsake them? How could you ask this of me?'\n\n'It is the only way, Magnus. In truth, your sons are already dead. Within no more than a few years rampant mutations will overtake even the strongest of them. One way or another they will die.'\n\n'I... I cannot abandon them, father,' he said, his hands clenching into fists. 'Their fate is not yet set. I will find a way to save them. I must.'\n\n'Please, brother,' said Vulkan, taking a step towards him. 'Come back to us, I beg you.'\n\nMagnus turned as he heard the clatter of legionary warplate, and the ratcheting of boltguns. Three warriors clad in the livery of the Salamanders Legion crested the summit of the great golden dais. Magnus felt their joy at seeing their gene-sire, but at first sight of the Emperor, they instinctively fell to their knees in adoration, all but overcome by His incredible presence.\n\nMagnus turned back to Vulkan and said, 'Would you sacrifice them? Would you betray even one of them for your own desire?'\n\n'I could not,' he said, his deep tones heavy with grief and his right hand sliding down to the warhammer Urdrakule at his belt.\n\nMagnus felt the end of his staff transform, becoming a bladed spear-tip once more.\n\n'Then why would you believe that I could?' he roared.\n\nThey moved at the same instant.\n\nMagnus' arm drew back to cast his staff at the Emperor. It was the perfect throw, his aim true and deadly. All his fury was bound into this strike.\n\nFury that his father had put this awful choice before him.\n\nFury that He believed it was an offer Magnus would ever accept.\n\nBut most of all, it was fury that he almost had.\n\nAbidemi watched the burning spear fly from the Crimson King's hand, a lightning bolt cast by the arm of a demigod to slay the king of the gods. He could barely move, barely think. To be this close to the Master of Mankind all but robbed him of any independent thought or will. How could any man, Astartes or mortal, dare to move under such a gaze?\n\nVulkan's hammer swept up and smashed the spear from the air in a single blow. It spun away, but like a comet on its return orbit it arced back around again. Magnus snatched it back into his hand as Vulkan charged his fallen brother with a look that was a dreadful mix of hate and sorrow.\n\nThe two slammed together with the deafening thunderclap of god-engines at war.\n\nAbidemi dragged his head to the side and met the gaze of Barek Zytos. He too was held pinned by the might and majesty of the Emperor.\n\n'What do we do?' he said.\n\n'I don't know,' replied Abidemi.\n\nVulkan and Magnus tore at one another, one with thunderous, deafening blows from his hammer, the other with tearing slashes of a burning spear. For them to come between warring primarchs would be suicide.\n\n'This is what you saw, brother,' said Igen Gargo, his voice a whisper over the vox-bead in his ear. 'The drakes in fire. You have steered us true.'\n\nAbidemi's hand closed on the hilt of Draukoros, picturing the stern, uncompromising features of Artellus Numeon. He would have known what to do.\n\nVulkan smashed his hammer into Magnus' hip, crushing bone and tearing muscle. In return Magnus buried the tip of his spear up through Vulkan's shoulder guard. It did not stop for the strength of the plate, but sliced cleanly through. Blood squirted but Vulkan gave no sign he even felt the wound.\n\n'You are liars all,' screamed Magnus. 'You promise forgiveness then make its acceptance impossible.'\n\n'You're wrong, Magnus,' retorted Vulkan. 'Your arrogance blinds you.'\n\n'No!' roared Magnus, his hands wreathed in fire as he spun around Vulkan's every blow.\n\nAbidemi had seen his primarch in battle before and knew he was a sublime close-combat specialist. Yet against Magnus, he moved as though hopelessly outclassed. Every feint was ignored, every killing strike turned aside with his spear, dodged or easily blocked.\n\n'The sorcerer sees our father's every move before he makes it!' cried Gargo.\n\nAbidemi wanted to rise, to charge to fight at their primarch's side, but his muscles would not obey him. For now, he was a mere observer to this struggle.\n\nMagnus spun around Vulkan, and rammed his spear into his back. The flaming tip gouged his backplate before sliding clear. Vulkan made a quarter-turn to the left and Magnus cracked the butt of his staff against his brother's helmet. The metal split and spat sparks. Vulkan ducked the blade's return stroke and swung Urdrakule up in a pistoning blow.\n\nIt took Magnus under the chin and snapped his head back. His cheek imploded and he spat teeth and blood that was too vivid to be real. Vulkan barged inside his guard, pounding his hammer against his chest as though demolishing a wall.\n\nThe bronze of Magnus' breastplate buckled, one of the yellowed horns snapping off where it met the armour. Milky blood streamed down his chest, chunks of leather and metal flying from every impact. Magnus grinned, spinning backwards.\n\nVulkan followed as strips of gold and steel tore loose from the deck plates. Magnus hurled them at Vulkan, buckled girders, sheet steel and looping lengths of cabling.\n\nHis hammer smashed them all aside, pushing through a hurricane of psychic force.\n\nMagnus laughed, his hands extended to either side as he ripped steel cabling from the ground and machines of the golden dais. They whipped through the air, lashing around Vulkan's wrists and ankles. He fought them, but that only pulled them tighter. Magnus clenched his fists and the bindings drew taut.\n\nThe Salamanders knew Vulkan's warplate as the Draken Scale, legend-forged by the master smiters of Nocturne in their secret halls beneath Mount Deathfire. It had withstood the fury of Isstvan V and the violence of Konrad Curze.\n\nBut now it buckled.\n\nFlames billowed from Magnus, the spectral heat of his witch-powers. His outline wavered, as though he fought against some inexorable pull from beyond.\n\nVulkan strained against his living bindings. Ceramite and steel flakes spalled from his armour as it crumpled under the force of Magnus' might. His skin was sheened like polished onyx, streaked with sweat and lined with pain as he took step after ponderous step towards Magnus.\n\nThe spear of Magnus lifted into the air, its tip too bright to look upon.\n\n'If I must be damned with my sons I will be full damned, brother.'\n\nThe Crimson King nodded and his spear leapt forward like an unleashed Marauder from the launcher of an embarkation deck. It punched through their sire's breastplate, tearing through his chest, heart and lungs before exploding from his back and arcing high into the air. Vulkan did not cry out or flinch. He kept going, pulling taut at the steel cutting through his armour and crushing the bones within. Step by step he persisted.\n\nAbidemi screamed and surged to his feet, whatever spell had held him down broken at the sight of his gene-sire so mortally struck. His rising freed his brothers too, and Igen Gargo rose to his left, with Barek Zytos on his right a second later.\n\n'Free him,' said Abidemi to Gargo.\n\nDraukoros roared to life as Abidemi flanked their primarch. A blizzard of sleeting steel fragments sur"}
{"text":"ng, pulling taut at the steel cutting through his armour and crushing the bones within. Step by step he persisted.\n\nAbidemi screamed and surged to his feet, whatever spell had held him down broken at the sight of his gene-sire so mortally struck. His rising freed his brothers too, and Igen Gargo rose to his left, with Barek Zytos on his right a second later.\n\n'Free him,' said Abidemi to Gargo.\n\nDraukoros roared to life as Abidemi flanked their primarch. A blizzard of sleeting steel fragments surrounded Vulkan. It scored Abidemi's armour like the caustic sands of the Burning Walk across the Pyre Desert.\n\nHe reached Vulkan's outstretched right arm and swung Draukoros as Gargo hacked with his long-bladed spear. The black teeth bit through the steel hawser in a single blow, and the Lord of Drakes was free.\n\nLike a storm front unleashed, he hurled himself at Magnus, his hammer striking for the sorcerer lord's head. The corner of its killing face struck the primarch on the shoulder, but so titanic a blow was it, that he reeled and all that was kept aloft by his power fell in a metallic rain.\n\nBlood masked his face, his single eye alight with power.\n\nVulkan's arm pistoned forward.\n\nThen, like a lightning bolt from the heavens, Magnus' spear slashed down. Aimed unerringly at Vulkan's skull, it was a treasonous blow to end his legend in an instant.\n\nAbidemi saw it a second before it struck, and his heart turned to ice.\n\nBarek Zytos saw it even before that.\n\nThe giant Salamander rammed into his father, like a bull-drake on the charge.\n\nNot even Vulkan himself could resist that ferocious impact. He rocked forward.\n\nOne step only, but life and death had hung on less.\n\nMagnus' spear clove through Zytos, its fire splitting him from collarbone to pelvis. Blood exploded from his shorn halves as he fell, and Vulkan cried out to see his son taken from him.\n\nHe roared and swept up the hammer still gripped in Barek's hand before it hit the ground.\n\n'No!' cried Abidemi.\n\nEven Magnus looked shocked at Zytos' death.\n\nVulkan had only a fractional moment to seize the advantage, and he did not waste it.\n\nTwice armed, hammer blow after hammer blow rained down on the Crimson King.\n\nThe first crushed his shoulder guard, the second buckled the moulded surface of his breastplate. The last of its curling horns splintered under his reverse stroke.\n\nVulkan spun low and a third blow destroyed Magnus' knee.\n\nA fourth slammed into his side and shattered his ribs.\n\nMagnus reeled, forced back in the face of this relentless fury.\n\nFlames exploded from Vulkan's fists as he smashed his brother in the face again and again. He drove him to his knees. Magnus' crimson mane erupted in flames, his skin charring to black. Bone gleamed whitely as his flesh sloughed from his skull.\n\nAbidemi and Gargo hacked at Magnus in vengeance for Barek Zytos.\n\nDraukoros rose and fell, tearing scraps of radiant meat from Magnus, and Igen Gargo drove his spear in deep again and again as the enemy primarch roared in agony. His great eye was filled with blood, and it wept scarlet tears as the Salamanders cut him to pieces.\n\nMagnus raised his hand, and Abidemi hacked it from his wrist with a looping stroke of Draukoros. It tumbled away as Gargo tore open his guts with a twisting thrust.\n\nMilky white blood that could not possibly be blood sprayed from the wound. It poured from a score of mortal hurts and filled Magnus' throat. A gout of the stuff vomited from his mouth, and he looked up at Vulkan through his blood-filled eye.\n\n'Is this the end?' he said.\n\nThe words were slurred and wet, spoken through a broken jaw and cheek, through shattered teeth and a gouged tongue. Through all the terrible hurts that ought to have killed him thrice over.\n\n'It didn't have to be,' said Vulkan, genuine regret in his voice. 'You could have stood with us. You could have been my brother again.'\n\nMagnus shook his head.\n\n'The price was too high.'\n\n'A thousand sons?' said Vulkan, still pleading with his brother. 'A thousand already damned sons for the sake of the Imperium?'\n\n'Even one was too many,' said Magnus.\n\nThe Crimson King grinned and tipped his head back.\n\nBut this was no gesture of surrender, no baring his throat to an executioner.\n\nHis blood-filled eye swam with an eldritch sapphire light, and his limbs ignited with blue and pink flames as his ruined body was lifted high into the air. The flames billowed like a pair of vast feathered pinions spread behind him.\n\nThe many grievous wounds he had suffered closed up in an instant, the skin reforming whole and unblemished. Bones reknit, severed arteries and veins spliced together once more, and immaterial flesh reformed all across his body.\n\nThe shards of his armour flew back to him, clamping fast to his body in a form as seamless as it had been before the fight began.\n\nThe last sliver within the Crimson King that clung to the material realm was finally obliterated, his body willingly given to the infernal masters in the darkness of the warp.\n\nHe looked down upon the Salamanders, his eye pulsing with the sickly blue light of cancerous stars, poisoned light from worlds entirely given over to the Neverborn.\n\nAnd with the deepest truth of his powers finally unleashed, the irresistible pull of the telaethesic ward plucked Magnus from the dungeon and banished him from the Sanctum Imperialis forever.\n\nHis last words hung in the air like a curse.\n\nAll is dust.\n\nFar below, a lone wolf's howl echoed through the cavern as the bodies of the sorcerers were snatched away in a storm of sapphire flame. Bjarki howled in grief and anger as the malefic light faded away, leaving him alone with the bodies of his two pack-mates.\n\nHe howled for all the dead he had lost, and for all who were yet to die.\n\nBehind him, Promeus approached. Warily, he laid a hand on Bjarki's icy shoulder guard.\n\nThe killing lust still strong within him, Bjarki bared his fangs.\n\n'His name was Olgyr Widdowsyn, the shield bearer,' said Promeus. 'His name was Svafnir Rackwulf, the finest Woe-maker of Tra. Their deeds were many, and I was honoured to witness many of them.'\n\n'This is not the place to give warriors of the Vlka Fenryka a sending,' warned Bjarki. 'And there is no one here to listen to their tales.'\n\nPromeus looked up at the golden light shining down on them from above.\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'There is.'\n\nNever Forgive, Never Forget\n\nShe awoke with the same scream on her lips.\n\nStars wheeled above her, glittering pinpricks of light, swirling like a time-lapse of the night sky. She coughed blood and tried to sit up. It was harder than she imagined it would be.\n\nThen she realised she was stuck to the ground, lying in a pool of dried blood.\n\nHer blood.\n\nAlmost all of it, judging by the extent of the pool.\n\nLike she always did at moments like these, she waited, listening. She had no idea how much time had passed since she'd last opened her eyes. Darkness, silence.\n\nWas it night? No, she was in a cavern far below the earth. She heard the washing in and out of a tide, the splash of objects falling in the water.\n\nAn underground cavern. Magnus the Red... A game of regicide.\n\nMalcador...\n\nAlivia pushed herself upright, wincing at the flare of pain between her shoulder blades, the tightness of new skin, the unfamiliarity of new organs, new bones.\n\nAlivia got her legs under her and stood, her balance still off, a little unsteady.\n\nShe stood at the edge of the plaza between the oversized villas, except now there was a thick ivory tower at its centre. Still unsure of her balance, she slowly circled the tower. If it was an elevator shaft, there didn't appear to be a door.\n\nShe turned to the shore and walked back to the water's edge. The table and chairs where she'd played regicide against a primarch were scattered and broken over the shingle. Deep footsteps surrounded it, and she saw the brass casing of a single bolter shell.\n\nBending to pick it up, she sniffed the acrid propellant within.\n\nProjectiles designed to kill legionaries made a horrifying mess of a baseline human.\n\nThe boltgun was a weapon designed by a psychopath.\n\nNext to the shell, partly buried in the sand, was the smashed half of the regicide board and a trio of its carved playing pieces. She smiled as she saw which ones they were.\n\nThe Primarch, the contoured portion of its upper carving split away. Next to it lay the Emperor, the piece she had been about to move. It too was broken. Still whole, but the detail and subtlety of its workmanship was lost.\n\nAnd lastly, the white Divinitarch, split in two.\n\nAlivia clasped this last piece tightly, tears spilling down her cheeks.\n\nShe looked out over the water, looking for any sign of Malcador. Dust and rocks still fell from the roof of the cavern, and she wondered how much more it would take to bring this entire edifice crashing down. Whatever damage Magnus had wrought here had broken something fundamental to its structure, and now the endless bombardments from above were working to finish its destruction. The waters of the subterranean sea glowed with sunken lights, but she could see no sign of Malcador.\n\nBut then she saw him, his husked and shrouded body washed up farther along the shore onto the black sands. His stick-thin limbs jutted like the blackened branches of an old tree struck by lightning, gnarled and burned from the inside out.\n\nHis hairless head lolled on his shoulders, turning to face her, and his eye sockets were black and empty.\n\nAlivia moved along the beach towards the Sigillite's corpse and knelt beside him.\n\n'Damn you,' she said. 'Damn every single last one of you.'\n\nThe tide threatened to carry the body out again, but Alivia grabbed the edges of Malcador's robe and dragged him a little farther up the sands. There was no weight to his bones, and she laid him down beneath his staff of office.\n\nAlivia knelt beside him as the pain and horror of the Emperor's Acuity filled her once again. She wept bitter tears, cursing that she was part of its perpetuation. She wanted to walk o"}
{"text":"se and knelt beside him.\n\n'Damn you,' she said. 'Damn every single last one of you.'\n\nThe tide threatened to carry the body out again, but Alivia grabbed the edges of Malcador's robe and dragged him a little farther up the sands. There was no weight to his bones, and she laid him down beneath his staff of office.\n\nAlivia knelt beside him as the pain and horror of the Emperor's Acuity filled her once again. She wept bitter tears, cursing that she was part of its perpetuation. She wanted to walk out into the ocean until her strength gave out, until she sank into the darkness and her lungs filled with water.\n\nBut what would be the point?\n\nShe was cursed to return again and again, to live yet another evolution of this life.\n\nAlivia tried to push the Emperor's visions aside, but they kept coming. Furious ages of war, tides of xenospecies wreaking untold carnage, a vast and soulless regime - as bloody and cruel as it was possible to imagine.\n\nBut the alternative?\n\nA universe of horror, of torture and disease, of wanton cruelty and bloodshed. It would be unending, torment from which the human race could never escape, for its enactors were no mortal foes, no psychotic empire that must inevitably fall. No, this was a time of immortal monsters wrought from the tortured psyches of the very people who suffered within it.\n\nWhat the Emperor had shown her was little better, a dark future that was as horrifying a nightmare as it was possible to imagine, a time when human lives were all but meaningless, ashes of bone ground between the gears of history.\n\nBut at least they were lives. Even in this bleak reality, men and women still loved one another, still raised their children as best they could, still served something greater than themselves. They still clung to one another when the darkness closed in, and endured the unendurable, because that was what people did.\n\nThey lived, they survived, and they persisted.\n\nBut most of all, they hoped.\n\nAmid all the cataclysms still to come, there were yet embers of light. She had seen a time when heroes long thought lost returned, when those embers took flight and began a final conflagration that made this spasm of rebellion look like a frontier brushfire war. The outcome of that future war was unknown, but that humanity would fight back was enough.\n\nAlivia dug into the pocket of her blood-stiffened coat and pulled out the chapbook of stories that had been her constant companion for as long as she could remember.\n\nDespite all Alivia's reprimands, Vivyen had marked her place by turning a page corner down. She had been reading The Nightingale, and the thought of her and Miska and Jeph sent a wave of grief through Alivia that threatened to break her there and then.\n\n'My beautiful girls,' she sobbed. 'My brave man.'\n\nShe folded up the corner and flipped through the pages until she reached the story she sought. It was a good one. They all were, but this one had always been one of Alivia's favourites. She hadn't known why until now, and a thin smile creased the corners of her lips.\n\n'In the forest, high up on the steep shore and not far from the open seacoast, stood a very old oak tree,' began Alivia. 'It was just three hundred and sixty-five years old, but that long time was to the tree as the same number of days might be to us.'\n\nAs she read, she felt the cold that never left her bones ease, and the tiredness that was her constant companion start to lift. As though by speaking the words aloud, she too felt the joy of the Ephemerals, the playful insects who lived out their entire existence around the tree in a single wondrous day. Though their time was short in comparison, they experienced the myriad joys of their lives in moments that were fleeting, yet no less miraculous.\n\nA tidal warmth flowed from her in a gentle susurration, loosening itself from her bones and carried away in the river of her words. It felt liberating and comforting, like being slowly lowered into a cleansing bath.\n\nAlivia then spoke of the old oak tree as it fell into its winter slumber and dreamed a most wonderful dream.\n\n'It saw the knights of olden times and noble ladies ride through the wood on their gallant steeds, with plumes waving in their hats and with falcons on their wrists, while the hunting horn sounded and the dogs barked. It saw hostile warriors, in coloured dress and glittering armour, with spear and halberd, pitching their tents and again taking them down; the watchfires blazed, and men sang and slept under the hospitable shelter of the tree. It saw lovers meet in quiet happiness near it in the moonshine, and carve the initials of their names in the greyish green bark of its trunk.'\n\nThe book grew warm in her hands, its ancient binding rippling as if unseen currents ran through the ink and glue and pressed fibre of its pages. The words began to blur before her, as though they were becoming unmoored from where their wily old author had set them down.\n\nAlivia thought of all the countless lives she had lived, the many deeds of which she was ashamed and the greater number of which she was proud. In ancient cultures, a soul's eventual fate was judged upon its entry to the afterlife: on a weighing scale against a feather, by some omnipotent deity, by kings of hell, or by some other esoteric means. A life was a ledger of deeds, both good and evil, generous and selfish, and Alivia just hoped hers was at least balanced a little in her favour.\n\nThe lights in the cavern dimmed, and she had to hold the book closer to her face in order to keep reading. In the old oak tree's dream, it saw the joy and happiness it had experienced over its long existence, but still it yearned for all those around it to rise up and know that same joy.\n\nAnd so it spread its branches, to pass the potency of its vitality to those around it.\n\n'And the old tree, as it still grew upwards and onwards, felt that its roots were loosening themselves from the earth. \"It is right so; it is best,\" said the tree. \"No fetters hold me now. I can fly up to the very highest point in light and glory. And all I love are with me, both small and great. All are here.\"'\n\nShe paused in the retelling, blinking and trying to remember what she was doing. There was a book in her hands, the blotched, liver-stained hands of an old woman, but the words on the page were a blur.\n\nAlivia's eyes drifted closed before she reached the end of the story, where the old oak tree finally fell, its three hundred and sixty-five years ended like the single day of the Ephemera.\n\nShe floated between sleep and wakefulness, swaying on the shore until the book fell from her hands. The sound of it landing in the risen tide of the ocean awoke her, and she felt a hand at her elbow.\n\nA voice spoke to her, the words muffled and pained.\n\n'I wish...' said the voice, but grief overcame it before it could finish.\n\nAlivia looked up and saw the face of an old man, thin-cheeked and weighted by some great concern. His eyes were so very old and so very sad.\n\nShe leaned into him, feeling the sharp angles of his thin body under the black robe he wore. They were wet and cold, but he was warm beneath them, and Alivia felt his arms enfold her. He held her tight as the sight of two small girls laughing and playing before her appeared vividly in her mind.\n\nShe smiled to see them, and tears filmed her eyes as they beckoned her onwards.\n\n'All I love are with me,' she whispered. 'both small and great. All... are... here...'\n\nAlivia Sureka closed her eyes for the last time.\n\nThey watched over the fields of fire surrounding the Palace from the Mercury Wall. Black smoke and purple flames obscured the jagged-toothed ruins, but here and there towers of silver still stood amid the destruction.\n\nBlazing storms wracked the horizon, and gibbering voices drifted on the burning anabatic winds carrying the stench of fyceline, blood and filth up from the traitor camps that sprouted like sores on the surface of the world.\n\nTogether with the surviving men and women of Vulkan's Own, Atok Abidemi and Igen Gargo stood in the shadow of the shell-battered wall's towers with Bodvar Bjarki, waiting for the next hammer blow to fall.\n\nThree days had passed since the confrontation beneath the Sanctum Imperialis. Three days of enduring the incandescent fury of Constantin Valdor and his Custodians, three days of enduring demands to know how they penetrated the most secure portion of the Palace, of how they had evaded the patrols of his golden-armoured warriors.\n\nThey had no satisfactory answer to give him, and were only allowed to once more take their place in the battle lines when Malcador returned and ordered their release. The Sigillite had always borne a heavy burden, but something had changed within him, some soul-deep wound that would never heal, a debt he could never repay.\n\nValdor protested, insisting that he be made aware of any gap in his defence, but Malcador assured him that the weakness exploited by Magnus the Red was no more.\n\nIn the end, necessity won out.\n\nTo keep Astartes from the walls, even so paltry a number as three, could not be countenanced, and they were given tasking orders to the Mercury Wall. Malcador gave them the names of two others they might seek out, fellow lost and Legionless warriors with whom they might find common cause.\n\nVulkan remained below with the Emperor after taking their oaths not to reveal his presence beneath the Palace. Of Promeus, they had seen no sign, and his fate would forever remain unknown to them.\n\n'I had hoped to return this blade to Nocturne,' said Abidemi, gripping the hilt of Draukoros tightly as shapes began to move in the toxic smoke ahead of them. Towering shadows, monstrous in form, and howling with madness. 'But that is a foolish hope now.'\n\nBjarki only nodded. He had said little since their release. The grief of his brothers' deaths still hung heavy upon him, as did the final escape of the Thousand Sons sorcerer.\n\n'It is your blade now,' said Igen Gargo. 'Artellus Numeon "}
{"text":" them.\n\n'I had hoped to return this blade to Nocturne,' said Abidemi, gripping the hilt of Draukoros tightly as shapes began to move in the toxic smoke ahead of them. Towering shadows, monstrous in form, and howling with madness. 'But that is a foolish hope now.'\n\nBjarki only nodded. He had said little since their release. The grief of his brothers' deaths still hung heavy upon him, as did the final escape of the Thousand Sons sorcerer.\n\n'It is your blade now,' said Igen Gargo. 'Artellus Numeon is dead, and it now falls to you to kill in its name, to earn the right to bear its wrath.'\n\nAbidemi nodded. 'You're right,' he said, reaching out to snap one of the black teeth from the sword's blade. Gargo's eyes widened, but he said nothing as Abidemi handed it to Bjarki. The Space Wolf took the razor-edged drake tooth with a puzzled expression.\n\n'You once said we were bound together, Wolf and Drake,' said Abidemi. 'You wanted to cut my warplate to mark that.'\n\n'And you told me only artificers of your Promethean cult might work the armour of a Salamanders legionary.'\n\nAbidemi looked out over the hellscape before the Palace.\n\n'You said your wyrd showed us so marked.'\n\n'So it did,' said Bjarki.\n\n'Then mark us,' said Abidemi. 'For Barek Zytos. For Olgyr Widdowsyn. And for Svafnir Rackwulf.'\n\nBjarki nodded, and with swift strokes carved the angular symbol of a roaring drake head, the Dread Biter. He turned to Gargo and raised an eyebrow.\n\nGargo nodded and Bjarki cut the same symbol into his armour, just over the heart.\n\nWith the inscription complete, Bjarki tucked the sword's black tooth into a leather pouch at his waist and grinned wickedly at his two newest brothers.\n\n'Now we are wyrd-marked,' he said. 'And when the fight here is done, we will hunt down those who escaped our wrath together.'\n\nFirst he took Abidemi's wrist in the warrior's grip, then Gargo's.\n\nThey all turned at the sound of approaching footsteps.\n\nTwo Space Marines drew near, clad in silver and with the look of hunters.\n\nMen with a purpose yet unfulfilled.\n\nThe first was a wolf-lean warrior with tanned, weather-beaten skin, close-cropped hair and a face of scars. Across his back was a murderous greatsword and at his waist was sheathed a standard-issue chainblade and a gladius that bore a chipped cobalt Ultima at its pommel.\n\nThe other legionary was pale-skinned and patrician, broad of shoulder and with a great eagle at his chest with singular aspect instead of the customary two. He too carried a hulking blade at his back.\n\n'I heard you did our father a great service,' he said, his accent cultured and precise.\n\nThe first warrior stepped forward, his eyes moving from Wolf to Drakes.\n\nHe nodded, seemingly finding them worthy.\n\n'I am Garviel Loken,' he said. 'And this is Nathaniel Garro.'\n\nIt wasn't supposed to be this way...\n\nMagnus knelt before the crazed looking glass that had once stood in a far corner of his war-pavilion. Now it was alone amid the ruins of what had once been the Palatine Tower. The din of artillery surrounded him, and propellant fumes washed through the remains of the tower in stinking clouds. Cackling, daemonic things slithered in and out of perception, but Magnus ignored every distraction.\n\nAll his attention was fixed on the mirror and the broken-glass reflections it returned.\n\nSince his ejection from his father's presence, he had not moved from this place, as immobile as the statue he had climbed the mountains of Prospero to see in his youth.\n\nIt had long been a source of frustration to him that the mirror was incomplete, a symbol of his fractured nature, but now that it was whole again, he longed to take it up and shatter it upon the rock of this lightning-struck tower.\n\nThe transition from beneath the Palace to the ruins beyond the walls had not been gentle and had almost ended his already mortally wounded sons. Menkaura and Amon's lives had hung by the slenderest thread, and required the arts of his greatest Pavoni adepts to save.\n\nAhriman had needed only the skill of the chirurgeons, but something in his favoured son had broken within the Palace. Magnus could not yet tell what it was, but feared for what it might mean for the future.\n\nHis mirrored reflections stared back at him, but where they had once shown him his myriad faces, the aspects of his soul in all their varied splendour and horror, now they showed but a single visage, the one he had worn since his refusal of his father's offer.\n\nAt the centre of the looking glass, a single, teardrop-shaped shard of glass had been missing from the frame, but in its place was now a daemonglass flect that fit the gap, but which Magnus knew was wrought from material inimical to this world and all within it.\n\nSickly colours smeared across its surface like a film of promethium on water, and thin strands of that impossible light flowed slowly along the cracks between the shards. The reflected images closest to this new addition were already stained by this creeping power, and it would not be long before the entire mirror was tainted by the shimmering warp light.\n\nStrangely, the thought did not displease him.\n\nA figure entered his peripheral vision, a legionary in the livery of the Sons of Horus, with a crest of feathers across the chest of his sea-green plate. Magnus felt his wariness at approaching so close to a wounded primarch, but his soul was a dutiful one, maliciously loyal and brutally effective.\n\n'My lord,' he said. 'My name is Kinor Argonis, equerry to the Warmaster.'\n\n'I know who you are, Argonis Unscarred,' said Magnus, finally turning from the immaterial mirror. 'What do you want?'\n\n'I bring word from the Warmaster,' said Argonis. 'He sends for you.'\n\n'And what does my brother want? What is the intent behind his summons?'\n\nArgonis paused, sensible enough to know a lie would be dangerous.\n\n'A new front opens in the war, and Lupercal wishes to know if you are with him.'\n\nMagnus rose to his full height, and Argonis stepped back, awed and not a little afraid of this new and terrible form of the Crimson King in his aspect of war.\n\n'Go to him, Argonis,' said Magnus. 'And tell him I am with him until the very end.'\n\n'To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;\n\nFor in that sleep of death what dreams may come,\n\nWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,\n\nMust give us pause: there's the respect\n\nThat makes calamity of so long life.'\n\n- attributed to the dramaturge Shakespire, fl. M2\n\n∞\n\nHeat shimmers from earth to sky. There is no sun here, but the light is blinding. The heavens are a dome of brilliant white, clamped over the dry ground. The earth is cracked, skimmed with dust and crusted with salt. The image of the world is flat, an endless plain running to a lost horizon. The air is still, throbbing, an echo of the absent sun's hammer. It is not a true place, for nothing in the Realm Beyond is true, but this place of thirst and heat has always been and always will be.\n\nThe tree stands at the centre of the desolation. It is a cedar tree, bare of needles, lightning-struck and blackened. From a distance it would look like an ebon crack running through the sky, an inverted bolt of black lightning. The only shadows in this place lie under the tree. They are thin, tangled in the dust. A trickle of water seeps from the ground at the tree's root, vanishes as soon as it bubbles up. A man sits with His back against the trunk. His limbs are thin, the dark skin drawn taut over bones, cracked around dried lips. The blue shift wound loosely around Him is frayed and sun-bleached. He is as still as the burnt tree at his back; His eyes are closed.\n\nSlowly, as though to do more would cost too much, the man's eyes open a crack to the blazing land. His left hand moves to a hollow He has scraped in the ground by the roots of the tree. A little water has gathered there, and He scoops it up in His palm and brings it to His mouth. Thick with silt, it is barely a sip.\n\nA breath of air stirs the fold of fabric covering His head. He looks up, lowering the hand that cupped the water that is already falling as dust from His fingers.\n\nA whirling column is forming in the air, skidding across the land, pulling up the dry earth. The light blurs around it, shimmering, turning the distance into mirages that might be an army marching over the horizon, or a distant, broken city, or a lone figure striding from the empty land.\n\nThe man beneath the tree waits and watches.\n\nThe dust devil dances closer. The wind rises. The dry branches of the tree rattle. A figure coalesces at the centre of the dust column: broad, proud face; silver-scaled armour over white robes; sword sheathed at his waist. A golden crown sits on the newcomer's brow, burning like flame with reflected sunlight. The wind unravels. The dust settles. The warrior in silver and white looks down at the man beneath the tree.\n\n'Father,' says Horus.\n\nThe man beneath the tree does not look up.\n\n'There is no refuge, father, nowhere left for you to flee.' Horus crouches, balancing on the balls of his feet so that his head is level with that of the man sitting in the shadow of the tree. Somewhere, out of sight, a crow caws into the shimmering air. A snake hisses and rattles, the sound that of sand blowing through dry bones. Horus reaches down and picks up a handful of earth. He is staring into the distance, his eyes brilliant mirrors to the baking heat. For an instant, his fingers seem claws, long and shining, the ground beneath them a star-strewn night. The earth crumbles between his fingers. 'This was your secret land, father. The warp, the realm that you denied us. Here is the source of all your power, all the paths to your gilded ambition. You are nothing without this place, just a man who stole what was not his and then kept it from others - a beggar-thief with stolen coins.'\n\nThere is pity in Horus' eyes.\n\n'Look at you now - withering in a realm of thirst.' Horus stands. 'You must have known this was inevitable. You must have known that your deeds would "}
{"text":"les between his fingers. 'This was your secret land, father. The warp, the realm that you denied us. Here is the source of all your power, all the paths to your gilded ambition. You are nothing without this place, just a man who stole what was not his and then kept it from others - a beggar-thief with stolen coins.'\n\nThere is pity in Horus' eyes.\n\n'Look at you now - withering in a realm of thirst.' Horus stands. 'You must have known this was inevitable. You must have known that your deeds would have consequences. You said that this place, with all its power and possibility, was dangerous - that none should touch it, that none should know its true secrets. Magnus came close to realising you had lied, and you sent wolves to run him down. Lorgar, poor Lorgar, ever searching for a cause, saw the shadow of your ambition and thought it the mark of a god. Burned cities and shame was his reward. And me, father, was I close to knowing too much? For all those years after we found each other, how many times did I nearly realise what you were - a liar and a thief, clad in scraps of false glory? Is that why I was banished from your side? Did you fear this moment, father? If you did, you should have known that it was inevitable - that your deceived son would come for his birthright.'\n\nThe wind rises, blowing powdered salt and dust into the air. Silhouettes form in the heat shimmer, at once close and distant. Towering shapes, shapes out of myth and old stories: Cyclops, hunched reaper, flayed angel, serpent Adonis.\n\n'You made us with the fire you took from the realm you forbade us. How could you think we would never realise, would never wonder, would never come home to the place of our birth?'\n\nHorus' gaze moves over the four shapes writhing in the mirage.\n\n'They are here now,' said Horus. 'Your sons, my brothers, returned home. I am their king, not their father, and this realm is mine. The power you denied us is mine. All of it. There is nothing left for you. The night and the day, the dreaming and the waking, all move to my will.'\n\nThe man beneath the tree lets out a breath, stretches out His left hand and pulls a finger through the dry earth. The ground shakes. Dust explodes into the air to hang as a layer above the ground before slamming down. The leafless tree grows, stretches, its dead branches reaching shadows in a wide circle. Horus does not flinch, but in the heat-glare, things unseen hiss with the voices of snakes and hounds and dying birds.\n\nThe man's hand stops moving. A line marks the dust, a finger's width, but also a canyon, a wall, a mountain range. He withdraws His hand and looks up. His lips and skin are cracked, but His voice is strong as He speaks.\n\n'No,' He says.\n\nHorus steps forwards, but the ground beneath his feet crumbles and cracks, flowing down into the opening abyss beneath. For a moment the man beneath the tree does not look like a man, but a shadow within an inferno. He looks at Horus, and Horus returns the Emperor's gaze. The brightness in the sky reverses to charcoal black, the shadows of the tree become flames.\n\nHorus' eyes are two stars in their sockets.\n\n'You will die, father. See yourself, see yourself diminishing, failing, clutching for shade in a barren land.' He pauses, shakes his head as though in pity. 'You grow only weaker. You shall fade. Your soul shall wither with thirst, and you shall die the slow death that you have too long tried to outrun.' Then Horus turns his back on the tree and the man, and walks away, calling back but not looking over his shoulder. 'I will give you mercy before that end, father. I owe you that, but nothing else.'\n\nBeneath the tree, the man reaches again for water that is already drying to dust as he brings it to His mouth.\n\nLast light\n\nScript\n\nOverload\n\nThe Imperial Palace, Terra\n\nAs the sun rose on the twenty-seventh of Quintus, the last of its light broke through the smoke and chem-fog to touch the highest towers of the western edge of the Ultimate Wall. In its shadow the light of sporadic gunfire flared. Shells and energy bursts streaked up to punch the void-shrouded wall and burst on the ethereal canopy of the aegis above the Inner Palace. Across the six hundred-kilometre arc from Western Hemispheric to Indomitor, exhausted soldiers blinked at the golden light from gun embrasures and firing steps. Most had not seen the clean light of the sun since a time that seemed now a dream. A few smiled. A few wept. To many, the fading light felt like a promise. To a few it felt like a farewell. As the sun slid further down the sky, some of the millions watching it muttered prayers to a man who denied He was a god.\n\nThe new day's light slid across the bowl of the Inner Palace and its precincts. In past ages, each part would have been large enough to be the greatest city on Terra; now they were just segments of the last circle of defiance against the Warmaster. In the enclaves of the Viridarim Nobles, the light only touched the highest towers, and few saw that bright moment; the millions that sheltered there shunned the high places. Most had fled to deeper parts of their domains. Some had used every coin and favour they could turn to put themselves as close to the core of the Inner Palace as they could. A few - old or defiant or deluded - walked through shuttered halls and pretended that they could not see the cracks growing on their painted walls as the shells fell.\n\nThe light caught the rain that fell inside the shield. Oily rainbows streaked the tower tops. Ugly gun batteries clung to the stone next to the gargoyles and grotesques. If the aegis failed their fire would provide a short-lived resistance to the next stage of catastrophe.\n\nOn the top of the innermost precinct, the gilded pyramids and statues gleamed briefly. Beneath them, far below the layers of stone and bedrock, the Emperor sat unmoving, eyes closed, locked into a throne of gold and holding the nightmare back from an ever-shrinking circle.\n\nTo the south the stone fist of Bhab Bastion punched up into the light, and for a few moments the rainwater streaming down its walls shimmered silver. Within those walls the mechanisms of command turned without cease. Regiments of command staff slept in blocks of time, the norms of day and night, of sleep and waking broken down into slots, to rotation between the light of pict screens and dreams of wide blue skies and cool water. At the heart of the bastion, Rogal Dorn stood in the Grand Borealis Strategium. The cold light of holo-projections caught the marks of recent battle on his armour. Around him the layers of command radiated outwards, invisible, harnessed to his will. He watched, as he had for the hours since his return from the Saturnine Wall. Then, with the smallest nod, he turned away, and made for the chamber doors and the stairs that would carry him up to the bastion's parapet and a brief sight of the rising sun.\n\nOut through the districts to the walls of Indomitor, Mercury, Saturnine and Europa, the light deepened the shadows in the zigzag highways cut through the buildings. Close to the walls, whole road and street systems had been filled in, blocked by demolished buildings and sealed by rivers of poured ferrocrete. Gun nests and fire points lodged in the flanks of hab-blocks. If - when - the walls were breached, the traitors would enter a kill maze inside them that would make them bleed for every step they took. In their firing nests, troops looked up from their autocannons and rocket mounts and saw a distant ghost of brilliance, high above.\n\nOn the eastern arc of the defences, shell bursts sent plumes of dust into the air as though trying to veil the sun's face. This was Anterior, once the gateway from the Outer Palace to the Inner. Hundreds of kilometres of plazas, avenues and buildings cast in marble, glass and polished metal, now a chewed pit of ruins, the lines of the defences stacked on and cut into the bones of the Palace. Here were Marmax, Gorgon Bar and Colossi, hundreds of kilometres of front marked with blast craters, wreckage and corpses, like the tideline on a sea of slaughter. From here, the sun would rise above the wasteland that had been the Outer Palace. The last of the night pooled in the shells of buildings and ran down streets that held only silence.\n\nOver the desolation, fallen walls rose like the broken fingers of dead hands, and then spearing into the sky was the Eternity Wall space port. In its lee, slave crews worked on the parapet of the Daylight Wall, hauling down the guns and munition stores from the positions where they had fired on the port. The guns were needed elsewhere. Most of the slaves had been soldiers who had defended the walls they stood on. Now their lives were measured in the labour they could do before they expired. Most of them did not look up as the sun poured its new light across the world. They knew that there was no point in looking, no point in hope, or truth in dreams, or salvation in prayers to false gods. There was just the release of brief sleep and the hope that they would not wake to another day.\n\nMarmax South, Anterior Barbican\n\nThere was not much left of the lines. Ascending layers of trenches, walls, ditches and breaches had become a chewed maze of blast craters, debris slides and slumped blockhouses. Rain no longer fell here. The layered void shields, which had bred the false storms that had filled the craters and scars, were gone. Now there were just dry clouds that reached down from the bruised sky. Heat was pulling the moisture from the ground, cracking it, and distilling the pools of rainwater to black slime.\n\nAll the way from the Gorgon intersection to the remains of the zonal block complex in the north it was the same. As far as the eye could see. And you could see a long way. From up on the parapet of Hold Point 78 you could gaze all the way across to where the black-orange clouds clung to the shadow of the Anterior Wall's eastern circuit. A long way, and all of it a desolation wher"}
{"text":"y. Heat was pulling the moisture from the ground, cracking it, and distilling the pools of rainwater to black slime.\n\nAll the way from the Gorgon intersection to the remains of the zonal block complex in the north it was the same. As far as the eye could see. And you could see a long way. From up on the parapet of Hold Point 78 you could gaze all the way across to where the black-orange clouds clung to the shadow of the Anterior Wall's eastern circuit. A long way, and all of it a desolation where a city had stood. The broken teeth of great buildings jutted into the air. Heaps of debris smothered roads. Slumped structures formed lines of hills. Flashes of light pinpricked the dawn gloom: lightning, detonations, gunfire. Above it, high in the distance, a dirty orange glow was brightening the jagged horizon.\n\nKatsuhiro paused to watch the light spread.\n\n'Get moving!'\n\nA shove at his back.\n\nHe dropped his gaze and started to climb the steps again.\n\nBehind him, the sergeant - Katsuhiro could not remember being told the man's name - was pushing the others up and on. There were twenty of them. Where they had come from, Katsuhiro had no idea. Most of them had the washed-out skin and dead eyes of people who had been on the line since the start. Their kit was a patchwork of colours, patterns and states of repair. Stains marked every inch of them, and since coming onto Marmax all had begun to acquire a layer of grey dust, like a gritty second skin. Behind him, one of the others spat down the inside of the walls.\n\n'Don't do that,' he said, half glancing back.\n\n'Delicate manners, script?' came the whining reply. Steena, of course, her acid drawl rising loud above the sound of trudging feet. 'What the hell else are we supposed to do, swallow the damned dust?'\n\n'Spit and you'll need to drink,' replied Katsuhiro, 'and there hasn't been a water ration since we got on the line. You haven't got spit to spare.'\n\n'Well, isn't that me told and educated? What the hell made you so all-knowing and wise, script?'\n\n'Script', short for conscript, short for anyone who had been scooped up by the mass induction protocols, short for someone who wasn't a real soldier. It had started a while back when the population repurposing had begun, before the enemy had actually come to Terra. It was a way for the real soldiers, the volunteers, the members of some regiment or formation raised before the draft order came, to say that they were on a different level to the millions of men and women who had been diverted from their old lives to become soldiers. The reality of the war had killed the distinction. Old and new soldiers died and were dying by the hundreds of thousands on each front of the battle. Steena, though, had hung on to the term and used it alternately like a slur and an accusation. Katsuhiro didn't care. People held on to what they could. That was another thing the battle had done - planed down the terrain of life to a few basic points: breathing, shooting and, of course, the other thing, the thing that actually mattered.\n\nKatsuhiro kept climbing the steps. Every now and again he caught another glimpse of the land beyond the parapet. Tiers of walls dropped down to the ground-level trenches a kilometre distant. All of it was damaged: chewed rockcrete, split and holed armour panels, demolished blockhouses. In places whole sections had vanished, the walls and buttresses slumping into craters. In places the damage had been repaired, filled with poured cements and fast-welded webs of girders. They looked like scabs over badly healing wounds. There was not time to do better.\n\nArtillery struck in an irregular but consistent rhythm along the line, even when there was no direct assault - long-range rockets fired from hundreds of kilometres distant. Orbital dead-fall munitions dropped without sound or warning. Clouds of cluster munitions scattered from high-altitude bombers. There were snipers, too, out there in the wasteland, watching soldiers come and go and then reaching out with a hotshot blast or hyper-kinetic round to murder a sapper as they worked to repair damage.\n\nKill units, some of them up to brigade strength, also hit the lines with sporadic ferocity. Slithering forwards under cover of night to breach, kill and lay traps before withdrawing. It was worse when they were Legiones Astartes. A strike by enemy in midnight-blue armour draped in flayed skin had apparently hit the line just below the Cordus Tower the night before last. They got all the way into the third line before pulling back. What was left were not just conventional casualties; most of them were still alive when the line section was retaken.\n\nThe terror assaults, just like the bombs lobbed from distant batteries, were to a purpose. Hours passed between strikes sometimes, and then the world would be thunder and fire and then silence again. It seemed random, but it wasn't. It was a very precise kind of irregular rhythm that took you to the edge of thinking that you could breathe out and then crushed that respite. Genius, cruel genius, the gift of the Lord of Iron and his zone commanders. It was working, too. As much as the large-scale assaults had broken lines and pushed back the defenders to the Ultimate Wall and Anterior lines, the arrhythmic violence ate at the defences and the spirits of those that stood behind them.\n\nKatsuhiro reached the top of the steps. A long walkway ran along the wall's parapet, eight strides wide, open to the inner side, lined by eight-foot-high crenellations. Through the firing slits you could see clear to the next wall down, and then beyond to where the walls met the ground and gave way to trench lines and ditch-works.\n\nAn angel waited for them on the parapet. Dust covered it just like everything on the line. Grey ceramite showed through the red armour lacquer in places. It looked battered and worn, but the sight of it was still enough to make Katsuhiro and the rest of the scratch platoon stop in their tracks. Even after all he had seen - especially after all he had seen - there was a presence to a Space Marine, a hammer blow to your awareness that could not be ignored. More and more the Legiones Astartes had been seeded through the mortal forces defending the Palace. To boost morale or to increase discipline, Katsuhiro could not be sure.\n\nThe angel turned towards them. A black stripe ran down the faceplate of his helm between glowing green eyes. He passed a dataslate to one of a pair of ragged-looking officers. The gun clamped to the angel's thigh was as big as Katsuhiro's torso.\n\n'I am Baeron,' said the angel, and somehow the voice held a note of music even through the growl of the speaker grille. 'Ninth Legion, line adjutant for this section. You are assigned under my command.' Baeron's glowing gaze moved over them, swift but precise, assessing. Katsuhiro felt pinned in place as the glowing eyes touched him. 'Integrate into the line units of this section. Captain Ulkov and Lieutenant Sabine are unit command under me. Find your firing points. Check weapons. Be ready.' Baeron looked them over again, then turned away, moving down the walkway, eyes now on the world beyond the battlements.\n\n'Alright, you heard the adjutant,' called one of the officers, a squat woman, face half covered by grey bandages. 'Reassigns, pair with someone who has been on the section more than a night. Get on it!'\n\nKatsuhiro blinked, only now looking around and seeing the other human soldiers on the walkway. There were men and women of at least half a dozen units, and some with the marks of more than one mixed into their kit and colours. That was the new normal. Fronts like Marmax, Gorgon Bar, Artiala and the Kanazawa Fold ate soldiers and chewed up the old divisions and order. What was left were those that were still standing, scraped together, and dumped into the next kill-zone. Katsuhiro had been shifted down the Anterior battle zones three times in as many weeks. The lines had changed in that time too, fortresses broken, old hard lines rubbed out and new ones drawn. He wondered if there was something or someone who actually knew where each soldier was, which tank had been abandoned in retreat and which one had been ridden by a different unit as they moved from one zone to another.\n\nIn each of the places he had been, there had been a different rhyme and reason to how new troops on the line were handled. On the Dacia turnpike, new arrivals had been divided by block, herded together and then sliced into portions by the shouts and gestures of a major in the tattered greens of the Albia Fifth Rifles. There had been scribes on Marmax North, Line Section Two, twenty of them in fact, going down the crowds of redeploys, pinning numbers on uniforms with plasteel staples, each one marked on pink pulp paper. Here, well, no one had asked or told him anything, just ordered him and a block of others from the cargo haulers up onto the lines. He had acquired a sergeant whose name he didn't know and a new unit in the half hour it had taken to reach the parapet. Some with him, like Steena, he knew from the ride down from Marmax North. Most he did not. That was the new norm, too: to be anonymous, to be unknown to those you stood beside, to become a unit strength increment, a body on the line, a number on tattered pink parchment.\n\nSomeone knew, though. Someone knew each and every one of the men and women on the lines and knew what they did. He knew, and He watched them, and where He could He protected them. That truth was all that mattered; all the rest was just the churn of the chaos.\n\n'The Emperor knows,' Katsuhiro had said to himself, in the rattling, cramped dark of the cargo hauler that had shifted him down the line. 'The Emperor protects.'\n\nHe must have said it louder than he meant to because someone had echoed the words.\n\n'He protects...'\n\nAnd then a few more before the phrase had faded.\n\nHe said it again, now, in the dawn light on Marmax South, and knew it was true.\n\nHe moved towar"}
{"text":"ed them. That truth was all that mattered; all the rest was just the churn of the chaos.\n\n'The Emperor knows,' Katsuhiro had said to himself, in the rattling, cramped dark of the cargo hauler that had shifted him down the line. 'The Emperor protects.'\n\nHe must have said it louder than he meant to because someone had echoed the words.\n\n'He protects...'\n\nAnd then a few more before the phrase had faded.\n\nHe said it again, now, in the dawn light on Marmax South, and knew it was true.\n\nHe moved towards a section of parapet, checking his lasgun as he did. A trooper was leaning on the chipped ferrocrete merlon. He looked young, but it was difficult to tell under the grime. Katsuhiro opened his mouth to greet him. The trooper's head jerked up, eyes flicking from horizon to sky.\n\n'You hear that?' he asked.\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion,\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\n'Full assault incoming, my lord, right across Marmax South from the Flavian sub-bar lines to Gorgon Intersection,' called Icaro.\n\n'Strength?' asked Archamus, glancing up from the glow of the main tactical feed.\n\n'Main force,' said Icaro.\n\n'Titans?'\n\n'None sighted,' called Vorst from the console beside Icaro. 'Knights, armour and a full air-support element. Indications of Legion elements, too. Intel is from the craft we still have in the air, visibility to ground is limited.'\n\n'Distance to lines?' asked Archamus.\n\n'Uncertain - three kilometres, maybe,' replied Icaro.\n\n'How in Sol's light did they get that close?' snapped Vorst.\n\n'Signal the line commanders on Marmax South,' said Archamus, his voice level. 'If we've only just seen it, they might not have.'\n\nArchamus, second of that name, master of the Imperial Fists' Huscarls and current watch commander for the greatest battle humanity had seen, allowed himself a moment to find stillness in a slow breath. It was all he could afford. The human command officers like Icaro and Vorst would have to rotate out soon. Exhaustion was already degrading their effectiveness.\n\nVox-connection indicators flashed on the tactical displays. The hum and growl of voices in the strategium rose. Holo-displays suspended in the centre of the hemispherical room re-spun to show the lines of Marmax. Uncertain amber runes and data jostled across maps drawn in cold blue light. Even as Archamus watched, half of the tactical data dissolved and rearranged itself. Communications to the front lines were becoming unreliable. Scrap code was seeping into the signal system. Comms discipline was breaking down in the mortal troops. Beyond the wall they were reduced to the eyes of those on the line and the systems built into the defences themselves. On a front like Marmax, which weeks of war had crushed but not broken, those eyes and systems were far from infallible. With every watch that Archamus stood on the strategium's command dais, their ability to see the war they were fighting was shrinking, clarity fading like the world seen through a clouding eye. The Saturnine breach had held yesterday, so had Colossi and Gorgon Bar and Marmax. They had held. The fight had been carried at cost. Where all could have failed, the defenders and defences had proved the equal of their enemies.\n\nThat victory was yesterday. The reality of ongoing war was what the Palace woke to.\n\n'Line command on Marmax acknowledged,' said Icaro.\n\nThe doors to the chamber opened. Rogal Dorn entered. His amour still bore the stains and marks of battle, his face set in the hard expression that had carved ever deeper into his flesh in the past months. As per his standing command, none of the hundreds of officers in the strategium paused to salute him. His presence was enough to dim the tide of noise. Two Huscarls followed the Praetorian and with him the willow-thin figure of Armina Fel, the primarch's senior astropath. Rogal Dorn met Archamus' gaze and tilted his head, the gesture as clear and direct an order as a shouted command. Archamus bowed his head in brief assent.\n\n'You have theatre command,' said Archamus to Icaro. 'Apprise me of any change.' The Praetorian moved towards one of the secure antechambers.\n\nWhat ill has come on us now? wondered Archamus as he followed.\n\nMarmax South, Anterior Barbican\n\n'Can you hear it?' said the trooper beside the wall. Katsuhiro could hear it. A high and distant note, like the call of a dying bird. All along the line, faces were turning to the clouded horizon. Down on the lower lines, he could see red figures moving, huge, their amour skimmed with dust, movements curt and fluid. Legion warriors, sons of Sanguinius, just like Baeron. They were moving to the parapets, guns up.\n\n'Stand ready! Stand ready!' The shouts came down the line. Bodies hurried and shuffled to firing points. Hands grasped guns, clutching, fumbling, holding on.\n\n'What the hell is that?' called Steena. She was next to him, looking up and around.\n\n'Stand ready!'\n\nThe high note was rising, splitting, becoming more than one note, shifting direction.\n\n'Attack incoming!'\n\nA battery of aerial defence guns started firing from one of the higher lines, rounds pumping high and far at targets out of sight. Katsuhiro saw Steena flinch. The high note was still clear over the sound of the guns, buffeting now, splitting, growing strands of sound. Was it... was it a voice? A voice singing?\n\n'Rose and rain, and petal on the bough,' his sister sang. 'Oh, where will my heart find true home?'\n\nHe laughs.\n\nShe smiles, the notes of the next line of the song fading.\n\n'It's supposed to be a sad song, silly,' she says, giggling, still smiling down at him. She is ten years old. She is so very real. She picks up one of the faded blocks that he has scattered on the floor around them in a game of making as much mess as they can.\n\n'Again!' he calls.\n\n'Again,' she says. 'Really?'\n\n'Again!'\n\n'Alright,' she says, 'again, but just one more time.' He laughs. She is smiling. 'Rose and rain and petal on the bough-'\n\nA column of light burned through the air above him. Katsuhiro ducked, eyes flooded with brilliance. His head hit the barrel of someone behind him. His jaw smashed shut. Blood in his mouth. Ringing in his ears. Shouting and the clatter of gunfire, and more shouts saying to stop firing. The high sound was still there too, still audible, sliding under the roar. Sharp. Oscillating. Aching in his bloody teeth. He wanted to stay down, to go back to whatever moment the memory of song had promised. His eyes were shut, he realised.\n\n'Rise!' the voice boomed along the wall. 'Rise! Weapons ready! Rise!'\n\nHe pushed himself up. Eyes open.\n\nThe sky above was burning. Energy beams, hard rounds, missiles loosing into the sky in a tattered sheet of flame. The other troopers on the parapet were milling, guns in hand, some looking up at the sky, some down at the wasteland beyond the outer line of trenches. Baeron was pushing his way down the walkway, dragging troopers to their feet, his voice punching from his helm's speaker grille.\n\n'Rise! Weapons ready!'\n\nThere were more human troops on the line, grey-dusted, swarming out from whatever places they took as shelter.\n\nThe orbital strike hit the edge of the outer defence works five kilometres away. A column of light punched down from the clouds, fifty metres wide, neon white, screaming. Rockcrete and steel vanished into gas and ash. Thunder rolled out. Katsuhiro was already ducking back, half-blinded, weeping. Then the blasts punched down again and again, a drumbeat of wrathful gods shredding the broken world of mortals. The deluge of anti-aircraft fire stuttered.\n\n'Air cover!' someone was shouting. 'We need air cover!'\n\n'Rise! Stand ready!'\n\n'Where's the enemy?' Steena was beside him, shouting. 'There's no enemy. Why are we-'\n\n'There,' said Katsuhiro, his eyes suddenly steady.\n\nSomething in his tone must have caught Steena's attention, even over the din. She stared in the same direction as him, shaking her head as though she was about to say that she couldn't see anything. Then she did see and went still.\n\nGold.\n\nGold glittering against the hazed light of the new day. Flecks of gold in the far distance, bright against the sky.\n\nKatsuhiro watched. The sound had faded from his ears. It was still there, but now it was just a vibration working its way in from his skin to his bones. It felt good. Like half-waking in warmth with the sweetness of a dream still wrapping you...\n\nGold. Hundreds of flecks of gold, dancing against the drab sky, spiralling, flitting between explosions and lines of tracer fire. He knew they were aircraft... Part of him knew they were aircraft, hundreds of them, fuselages gilded and polished to shine like the faces of the sun. Aircraft with colours rioting across their wings. Warplanes. Gunships. Strike fighters. He knew what they were but...\n\nFlak was pouring out into the sky...\n\nGolden birds falling...\n\nBroken wings...\n\nBlack threads of smoke...\n\nSerenity, tiny slices of perfect time. The colour of the explosion as an aircraft hit the ground two kilometres out from the outermost line: first yellow, the light pure, then orange curdling to black, the cloud drawing colour together as it rose like the head of a burning flower. He could watch it forever, just the sight of this, amid the pulse sound of the world's heart racing to beat its last.\n\n'Watch forever...' said a voice that he realised was his own. Why couldn't he think? What was going on? He felt... He felt like he wanted to stop. Just to stop and watch and listen to the song that was coming out of the distance.\n\n'For the Emperor! For our oaths!' Baeron was bellowing down the parapet line.\n\nKatsuhiro blinked, breathing hard, trying to see, trying to focus. Sound was beating around him, gunfire, shouts, his own breath, all of it. Half of the troopers were standing staring out at the distance, eyes wide, mouths slack.\n\n'Protect me,' he said to himself, and then louder, snarling, 'Please protect me as I protect You.'\n\nHe was steady, gun in hand, face forward.\n\nFlocks of golden aircraft w"}
{"text":"t of the distance.\n\n'For the Emperor! For our oaths!' Baeron was bellowing down the parapet line.\n\nKatsuhiro blinked, breathing hard, trying to see, trying to focus. Sound was beating around him, gunfire, shouts, his own breath, all of it. Half of the troopers were standing staring out at the distance, eyes wide, mouths slack.\n\n'Protect me,' he said to himself, and then louder, snarling, 'Please protect me as I protect You.'\n\nHe was steady, gun in hand, face forward.\n\nFlocks of golden aircraft were dropping lower and lower, skimming the ground. The scream of their engines boiled dust into the air. Closing fast. Flak and missiles raked the sky as they tried to trace their targets to the edge of their declination. Fire struck one from the sky a kilometre north. Another south. The golden craft were almost on the ground, weaving from side to side. Fire began to flick from the lines. The shriek of the jet engines syncopated, merged, like a screaming voice. Like laughter.\n\n'What is this?' Steena was shouting into his ear. 'What is happening?'\n\nThe aircraft were almost on them now. The fire from the walls was a ragged torrent. Las-beams cut wings. Missiles struck.\n\nRed... Great banners of red unfurling behind some of the aircraft. For an impossible instant Katsuhiro thought they were bleeding. Then he realised it was dust, red dust. Plumes of orange and cyan vented from the rest of the aircraft, spilling behind them like a brightly coloured cloak dragged across the ground. They were almost at the outer lines, plunging towards the earthworks. They flicked upwards, spiralling and weaving, engines howling. As they rose, fire followed them from the parapets and tiered lines. The aircraft climbed, near vertical, spearing away. The gunfire chased them for a moment before falling silent.\n\nAbove, the blanket of blue, orange and red dust began to drift down.\n\n'Masks!' shouted an officer.\n\nKatsuhiro was already pulling his on as the calls rose. Everything was suddenly quiet, just the sounds of people scrabbling to pull on breath-masks and hoods. His breath was loud as he dragged air through the plug filter. The visor was pitted and scratched. He looked around. Baeron was a statue of red, his helmed head cocked as though listening. Katsuhiro realised that the shrill whine had stopped too. The coloured smog drifted lower, unhurried, gaudy and vivid. It reminded him of chalk dust on a scholam board. He was sweating inside his gas hood and mask. He could feel heat building under the fabric of his uniform. His gloves felt heavy on his fingers. The coloured cloud was just a few metres above them now.\n\n'Full hazard condition,' called Baeron. 'No exposed skin. Weapons ready.'\n\nTroopers along the line fumbled for gloves and uniform fastenings.\n\nBeside him Steena pulled up her hood, gasping, coughing.\n\n'Can't breathe!'\n\n'Trooper, replace your mask!'\n\nThe dust was just above head height. Katsuhiro could taste sugar and burning plastek.\n\nAlong the line, the coloured dust was draping the troopers. Some froze. A trooper who had not covered his hands with gloves turned and fired, pouring las-bolts into those beside him until a round blew the back of his head out. Explosions flashed out. The smog was a rainbow kaleidoscope of light and colour.\n\n'Enemy in front of the lower lines,' called Baeron. 'Thirty-degree down angle, continual fire.'\n\nKatsuhiro got his gun onto the parapet angled down and sighted along the barrel, and froze.\n\nDust fogged the view, but he could see the outer trench. A tide of shapes was breaking across the trench lines, things with pale flesh and long limbs, with quills and razor smiles. Beasts or humans or machines, all distinctions failed. Banners of gaudy silk snapped above them. War machines bounded at their sides. They should not have been there. They should not have been able to reach the lines so quickly. It was as though they had congealed from the smog right on top of them. Gunfire chewed at the tide. Flesh blasted to red slime. Metal deformed. But the assault wave was not slowing. It was accelerating. Katsuhiro watched as a thing that must once have been a smaller Knight war machine hit the rise above the outer trench and leapt high. Its armoured shell was ivory white. Troopers in the scoop of earth beneath raised their guns to fire. The Knight landed amongst them, chrome claws and spinning blades extending, and suddenly the length of trench was filled with bloody pulp, and the tide of attackers was spilling over it and up the other side. The ivory Knight arched its back, piston legs pushing it up like a preening bird. Its white carapace split. Inside, something pink and soft and red and slick shivered and whooped a bubbling cry into the air. Katsuhiro could hear it. Somehow from a kilometre distant he could hear it as though it was next to him.\n\nA rocket hit the wall line fifty metres below him and blew out a ten-metre section. Bodies flew up. Debris and smoke scattered. A chunk of rock hit Katsuhiro on the helm. His head snapped back. Pain exploded in his neck, and with it the world was in focus again.\n\nHe started to fire. Aiming down, squeezing the trigger, adding his shots to the ragged volleys coming from the layers of walls and parapets. He was one of the few. Most of the human troopers were standing, draped in toxic colours, staring like dumb cattle. A few were lying down as though the ground was a bed. Only the Blood Angels on the lower line responded together, firing and moving with perfect unity, the dust shaking from the red of their armour. They did not pause. Fire speared from the angels. Missiles and bolt fire chewed chunks of the enemy into pools of meat. Lascannon blasts hit in clusters on war machines surging through the tide of flesh and sparked them to burning ruin.\n\nKatsuhiro felt something yank his arm. He looked around, half ready to spin his weapon to fire. Steena was on her knees beside him, bare face painted in pigment dust. She was trembling, eyes wide, lips pulled back from teeth. She looked like she was laughing. Bloody, pink tears were cutting paths through the dust on her cheeks.\n\n'Get up!' shouted Katsuhiro, the words lost to his mask and the cacophony.\n\nHer mouth was moving.\n\nHe tried to shake her free. There were other troopers on the parapet, some still firing. Some were staggering. One was cuffing their head as though trying to knock something loose. There was blood on their fist and skull. Katsuhiro blinked. His thoughts were slowing again. He looked down at his hand. Where was his gun? Where was his glove? Orange dust covered his hand. Steena was laughing and weeping.\n\nSomething hit the other side of the parapet. For a ridiculous second, he thought it was a raindrop. He leaned towards the gun loop, his thoughts the soft kind that came just after waking.\n\nThe bomblet that had embedded in the outer parapet exploded. Shards of stone pinged off his helmet. The shockwave vibrated through him. His ears burst. He was tumbling on his back as jet wash boiled the clouds of coloured dust. Gunships plunged down, cannons firing, missiles and rockets loosing. Huge figures in power armour stood on the edges of open hatches. Discordant colours and patterns covered their armour: tiger-striped gold, acid green and violet scales, plumes of fire-orange hair. Tubes and pipes festooned them, coiling around bloated guns of chrome and black graphite. A greasy heat haze hung around them as though the air was cooking as it touched them. They had been Space Marines, once; now they looked like a fever dream. Katsuhiro felt the vomit gush from his mouth before he could stop it. His hands came up and ripped the mask and hood off his head. He gasped. Dust poured into his mouth.\n\nThe world snapped into focus.\n\nInto perfect focus.\n\nHis nerves lit.\n\nEvery pain and ache in his body screamed.\n\nThe blood and burnt-sugar flavour on his tongue flooded his mind. He could taste the smoke of the gun discharge and the exhaust of the gunship as it banked low above them.\n\nOne of the giants in the gunship dropped down onto the parapet thirty metres from Katsuhiro. Stone cracked where it hit. Some of the troopers near it ran. Others turned towards it with docile confusion. It swung the mouth of its weapon down towards the wall. Katsuhiro could see all the way down its throat, could see that inside the chrome muzzle there was a real throat and tiny, perfect white teeth.\n\nThe gun fired. Steena yanked him down. The troopers who had been beside him hung in the air, skin and bones and organs shivering to red mist, wave patterns forming in the gore. The giant moved forwards, the neon colours of its armour flowing like oil on water. The sound of its weapon was beyond hearing, a migraine pain pouring into the brain. Katsuhiro could not think.\n\nBaeron came down the walkway from behind them, rockcrete shattering under his strides. Bolt shells exploded across the multihued warrior. Iridescent shreds of armour blew from the impacts. It turned, pulling its weapon around. The shriek of the silver gun rose as the warrior swept it towards the Blood Angel. Sections of the wall burst into dust. Shells exploded in mid-air as they plunged into a wall of sonic energy. The Blood Angel did not slow. He accelerated, drew a knife and leapt. The edge of the shriek-cone caught Baeron's leg as he leapt. Red armour deformed and shredded from knee to foot. Baeron landed, stumbled. The chrome gun came around towards the fallen Space Marine. Baeron sliced his blade across the cables linking the enemy warrior to his gun. Blood sprayed out from the severed tubes. The shriek of the gun was now a gurgle of pain. Baeron struck again and again, under arm, pistoning the short blade up and into the warrior's gut. The abomination was staggering, shedding blood and shards of ceramite, but it was not dead. A pearl-and-silver fist lashed into Baeron's faceplate, once, twice, three times, buckling ceramite, shattering eye-lenses. The angel kept stabbing, shunting t"}
{"text":"ade across the cables linking the enemy warrior to his gun. Blood sprayed out from the severed tubes. The shriek of the gun was now a gurgle of pain. Baeron struck again and again, under arm, pistoning the short blade up and into the warrior's gut. The abomination was staggering, shedding blood and shards of ceramite, but it was not dead. A pearl-and-silver fist lashed into Baeron's faceplate, once, twice, three times, buckling ceramite, shattering eye-lenses. The angel kept stabbing, shunting the enemy warrior backwards. They hit the parapet. Rockcrete shattered. A section of crenellation broke, and the enemy warrior was falling over the edge, down the face of the wall to the spikes and wire at its base. Baeron straightened on the parapet's broken edge. There was blood on his armour, darker than the dusted lacquer, clotting as it ran through dust.\n\n'Up! Up!' roared Baeron.\n\nThere were more figures dropping from gunships up and down the line. Shrieking weapons fired. Armour became shards. Flesh became jelly. Waves formed in powered air, overlapping. Katsuhiro could not move. Everything was colour and sound and vibration and the taste of sugar and bitter lemons and vomit. He could not...\n\nHe protects.\n\nA memory of golden light. Heat pouring into him and running down his spine.\n\nHe is our shield. He is our light. He is our truth...\n\nAnd he was screaming, screaming as the kaleidoscope world around him became real, became raw.\n\nHe could move. He was standing. Somehow, he was standing and moving to a firing loop, picking up a fallen gun.\n\n'He protects, He protects, He protects...' he gasped, hands reloading, blood running from his ears. He looked down the barrel of his rifle, felt himself weep as he focused on something that shook and wobbled and sliced along the lower lines. There was a roar of more gunships coming in.\n\nHe was going to die here. The moment was coming, a promise delivered at last. He would die and no one would remember him, but he would die in defiance, not in fear. 'He protects,' he said, and squeezed the trigger. The shot hit the thing at the end of his gunsight. Blood and scorched fat splashed out. It swayed and slid down, deflating, thrashing. He looked up, searching for the next target, and stopped.\n\nSomething was happening. All along the wall and lines that he could see, the enemy was pulling back, bladed bodies and war machines draining away into the multihued pall. Gunships cut in, hovering as giant warriors leapt through hatches, cradling wide-mouthed chrome guns. Gunfire blew craft from the sky. Volley fire, scattered at first and then increasing in cohesion, reached into the fog to rip chunks from the vanishing assault. Katsuhiro fired with the rest, reloading and firing and firing... And then, just as suddenly as the enemy had come, it was gone.\n\nQuiet. Ringing quiet all around. The low crack of las-shots dull behind the pulse of tinnitus in his ears. He stared. Then felt something tug at his arm. Steena had crawled to the wall next to him. Her eyes were bloodshot in her dust-painted face.\n\n'Water...' she gasped. He was taking his canteen from a pouch with shaking hands when a shadow fell over him. He looked up.\n\nBaeron had removed his helm. The face beneath was bloody, the meat and bone of the right cheek mashed and torn, the left eye closed in a clotted mass. The Blood Angel was looking out beyond the parapet.\n\n'What...' asked Katsuhiro, the sound of his voice a surprise to him. 'They... they left... What happened?'\n\nBaeron made no sign of having heard. Then he looked down at Katsuhiro. His open eye was bright green. He stared for a long moment and then back to beyond the parapet.\n\n'I do not know,' he said.\n\nEnd to uncertainty\n\nRed waking\n\nIncandescence\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion,\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThree figures looked up at Rogal Dorn as he entered the war room. Malcador leant on his staff, the hood of his robe a shadow to the sharp lines of his face. His eyes caught the pale glow of Terra cast in slowly rotating hololight at the centre of the room. He glanced up as Dorn entered followed by Archamus. Beside him stood a tall woman in a red robe and beside her a hunched form in white with a head of bare metal and eyes that were crystal lenses. Both nodded a greeting. Archamus knew them both: Ambassador Vethorel of the newborn Adeptus Mechanicus and Magos-Emissary Kazzim-Aleph-1. Though Vethorel seemed the more human of the two, she only appeared that way. She was adaptable, subtle where she needed to be and brutally direct where she could not be subtle. Archamus liked her. The magos-emissary was a different matter. Focused only on whatever narrow world existed in definitions of his faith, he was ill-suited to the times and to represent the Cult Mechanicus at the war council. He was even less suited to navigating the next stages of coordination between the defenders. That was why Vethorel had come, Archamus was sure, because the next stage of the war would involve the servants of the machine more even than it had so far.\n\n'Connect us,' said Dorn as the door sealed behind him and Archamus.\n\nA single tactical command officer worked the controls of a block of machinery, from which vox-horns rose like the cups of chrome flowers.\n\n'We have connection,' said the officer. The sound of distant explosions and the overlapping rattle of gunfire hissed into the air.\n\n'My brothers,' said Dorn, 'lord Custodian.'\n\n'We hear you, Rogal,' came Sanguinius' voice, distorted but as distinct as a bell chime.\n\n'Lord Praetorian,' said the voice of Constantin Valdor.\n\n'Speak,' said Jaghatai Khan.\n\n'We have held, we endure,' said Dorn, 'but with the ports in his hands, the enemy will now bring the force to bear that he has held back. Encirclement will become total assault.'\n\n'The calculations are not favourable,' cut in Kazzim-Aleph-1. The cogs in the magos-emissary's skull rotated, stopped, and started again. His voice crackled with static, for some reason reminding Archamus of someone chewing their lips. Rogal Dorn's gaze bored into the emissary, but Kazzim-Aleph-1 gave no sign of having noticed or of stopping talking. 'The materiel within the remaining domain depletes at a rate that exceeds that of the enemy. Across all of the projections our effective strength crosses over with the most favourable estimates of enemy strength. It does so within a threshold that does not extend past seventy-six days at the low edge of reliability. The projections with a higher probability rating give a substantially lower value.' At last the magos paused and seemed to reconnect with current reality. He looked up, eyes whirling as they focused. His cranial cogs clicked briefly. 'The calculations are not favourable.'\n\n'I am aware of the position, magos,' said Rogal Dorn. 'To put what you say in summary - it is unlikely that our current defences will hold past a few weeks.'\n\n'That summary lacks nuance but is accurate.'\n\n'Lord Praetorian,' said Vethorel, and her voice was clear and firm. Like her face it read as perfectly human. 'While I would ask you to make allowance for Emissary Kazzim-Aleph-1's mode of expression, it does represent the summation of judgement within the Adeptus Mechanicus. On behalf of the Fabricator General, I must ask - what are you going to do?'\n\n'What am I going to do?'\n\nArchamus saw a flash in his lord's eyes that he could not read. His time in the personal presence of the primarch had been long enough to know that the fire of emotion did sometimes move beneath the cold layers of control. Whether it now sparked in annoyance or amusement or admiration, he could not tell.\n\n'There are other factors,' said Malcador. 'The warp is... changing, aligning.'\n\n'As it did before,' said the voice of the Khan, 'at the onset of the assault.'\n\n'No,' said the Sigillite. 'This is something more total. Broader. Deeper. The forces within the Great Ocean are intensifying. Its influence creeps into reality. Chance, emotion, consequence, all of it begins to bend to an end that is not ours. Reality, I fear, begins to serve our enemy.'\n\n'How so?' asked the voice of Constantin Valdor.\n\n'Ill winds,' said the Khan. 'We ride not just against the enemy but the elements and against our own natures. Every thought is influenced by the immaterial, every decision and instinct tainted. There are daemons dancing in our desires and dreams. That is what he means.'\n\n'Morale is corroding,' said Sanguinius. 'Darkness seeps into the thoughts of those that remain.'\n\n'We still have strength,' said Dorn, and his voice was the clear ring of a hammer striking steel. 'In spirit and sinew.' He turned his gaze to Vethorel. 'And strength in iron, too. Is that not so, ambassador?'\n\nVethorel gave a single shake of her head.\n\n'There are complications,' she said. 'Besides Legio Gryphonicus and Ignatum, the Titans that walk in our defence are remnants and fragments of broken legions. The same is true of the Knights and bound cohorts that walk at their side. They are not unified, and there is dissent and disconnection within the Mechanicus.'\n\n'A problem that you solved before, ambassador,' said Dorn.\n\n'That was a schism based on data, caused by an unresolved equation of succession. This is not. Some wish to withdraw from the defence. Some wish to use all the strength we have now to push back. Some are caught between unresolved decision calculations. It is discontinuity.' She glanced at Kazzim-Aleph-1. 'It is emotion. It is fear.'\n\n'The weakness of flesh...' said Archamus.\n\n'Daemons dancing in our dreams,' said the voice of Sanguinius, softly.\n\n'It shall be dealt with,' said Vethorel. 'But you must be aware that we are on the edge of a critical intersection of loyalty, will and doubt.'\n\n'A crisis,' said Malcador.\n\n'Yes,' said Vethorel.\n\n'Then resolve it,' said Dorn. 'By whatever means. We enter the last stage of this war. We shall hold. That is our only purpose. Whatever wall they attack, we shall hold. Whatever challenge is brought to u"}
{"text":"f flesh...' said Archamus.\n\n'Daemons dancing in our dreams,' said the voice of Sanguinius, softly.\n\n'It shall be dealt with,' said Vethorel. 'But you must be aware that we are on the edge of a critical intersection of loyalty, will and doubt.'\n\n'A crisis,' said Malcador.\n\n'Yes,' said Vethorel.\n\n'Then resolve it,' said Dorn. 'By whatever means. We enter the last stage of this war. We shall hold. That is our only purpose. Whatever wall they attack, we shall hold. Whatever challenge is brought to us, we will be its equal. We shall have to use every part of what might and will remains. It shall be enough. I have no doubt, for the tide does not flow only in the enemy's favour.' Dorn's eyes moved around the circle of those directly present. 'They are coming.' Rogal Dorn's words settled into the quiet. 'Guilliman, the Lion, the Thirteenth and the First are coming.'\n\nArchamus felt the words flow through him. Conviction radiated from Dorn as he looked around at them all, firm and true, like stepping onto dry land after an age on a storm-tossed sea.\n\nMalcador looked at Dorn keenly.\n\n'That was always the projected basis of your strategy, but there is more than hope in your words.'\n\n'There is,' said Dorn, but added no more. 'Much will be asked of us in the days to come, more than has been given already. We must hold the circle that remains. Our walls must hold. The enemy's strength must be met. But if we hold true then victory will come.' The room was still, the vox a crackle of static over waiting ears. 'We hold and the enemy will be undone.'\n\nThe cogs turned in the magos-emissary's skull.\n\n'Much remains uncertain,' he said.\n\nRogal Dorn looked at the magos for a long moment, and then smiled.\n\n'Then we will do the one thing that will put an end to all uncertainty - we will win.'\n\nTulcan Precinct, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nA fly buzzed through the heat-thickened air of the bedchamber. Bloated, its body the size of a blackened fingertip, it corkscrewed up to the ceiling. It found one of the spatters on the stucco flowers that was still damp and began to eat. Its body was egg-heavy. Once it had taken this last meal, it would begin to plant its seed. Thousands more of its kind had already done just that, but there was time and food and fecund ground for its children to grow in.\n\nSated at last, it released and dropped, listing as it half flew, half fell through the air. It struck the sleeping man on the cheek. His face twitched but his eyelids remained closed. The fly skittered across the skin, wings beating. The man's face twitched again. He was half-naked. Stained sheets wrapped him and trailed from the chaise to the floor. He was armed even while he dreamed. The knives were scattered across the room, but he had one of the guns tucked under a hand. His eyeballs flicked back and forth under his eyelids, flick-flick, flick-flick. The skin around the sockets puckered. He did not wake.\n\nThe fly lofted itself into the air again. The man was of no interest to it. He was alive and that meant he would not provide food to its young once they hatched. It buzzed low over the sodden, red carpet, weaving between the gilded legs of chairs and the discarded glasses. The remains in each would normally be a delight to it, but in such a land of riches it passed them by. The main heap of food was towards the corner by the door. That was where it would lay its clutch of eggs.\n\nThe door rattled quietly in its frame. On the chaise longue, the sleeping man flinched. His fingers moved on the grip of the gun. His eyes flicked under their lids.\n\nFlick-flick-flick...\n\nThe door rattled again, polished wood and brass hinges flexing in the stone frame.\n\nFlick-flick-flick-flick...\n\nThe door blew in. Shards of dark wood spun through the air. Figures in red body armour came through the blast, guns raised. The man's eyes snapped open as he came off the chaise. The sheets fell from him. He was stripped to the waist, feet bare beneath velvet trews, unscarred skin taut over a lean frame. That gun in his hand came up with him. It was a duelling piece, ancient and expensive, and rarely used. Implosion rounds filled the five chambers of its cylinder. Each bullet was a work of lethal art and worth more than a mid-level menial's yearly labour. It roared. The first figure through the door took the shot full in the chest. Bones split and blood burst out as the implosion generator in the round crushed their torso and sent them cannoning back into the door frame.\n\nThe next trooper through the door was already firing.\n\nA blast of shot ripped the upholstery of the chaise where the man had just been. He was already moving though. Neural-lacing, paid for by his parents when he came of age, sent him diving out of the way. The duelling piece roared again. The round hit a portrait on the wall. The implosion compressed canvas, plaster and stone to dust in a flash of blue energy. The trooper with the shotgun ducked back behind the stone frame of the door, but the woken man was moving again, aiming, gun steady, finger squeezing on the trigger.\n\nA woman in black tumbled through the door, rolled, came up and fired twice. The shots caught the half-naked man in the hip and stomach, and blasted him backwards. He hit the chaise and toppled over it.\n\nMore figures in red armour followed through the door. Silver visors covered their faces, wide-nosed shotguns braced against shoulders, covering the room.\n\nThe woman in black rose to her feet, the pistol in her hands steady on where the target had fallen out of sight behind the chaise. Her face was dark above the high collar of her coat. Cheap, long-dead electoos spidered her bald head with the silver shadows of lions and eagles. Rejuvenat and hard training had kept her features lean, but the narrow braid hanging from the base of her skull was white with time. A compact breath mask clutched her nostrils and plugged her mouth. She was called Hellick Mauer and she had once been a soldier. Now, she was not sure what she was.\n\nThe rest of the squad were already at the doors leading to the interior of the manse. The dead trooper from the assault unit would be dealt with later, once the position was secured.\n\nShotgun blasts shattered locks and hinges. A second later the boom of photon grenades echoed out. Mauer didn't blink at the sound as she walked forwards.\n\n'He's still alive,' called a crimson trooper from the other side of the chaise.\n\nThe half-naked man lay in a widening pool of his own blood. The shots from her hand-cannon had ripped him half apart. The first trooper to him had kicked the gun clear of his grasp. Blood was foaming from his lips and running down his chin and cheeks.\n\nMauer looked down at him.\n\n'Thaddeus Rhihol-Sen,' she said. The man on the floor gurgled, his pupils wide holes in the whites of his eyes. His head twitched as though he was trying to nod, and a fresh froth of blood came from his mouth and nostrils. Mauer reached up and took the breath mask from her face. The reek of the room hit her in a wave as she took a slow breath. She had stood on battlefields after the slaughter, and knew the smell of death too well, yet it still took an act of will to keep the instinct to vomit from showing on her face.\n\nThe room was the main reception chamber in the manse. The man she had shot was the first in line to inherit both it and the familial power it represented. Old power, old wealth, going back all the way to before the Emperor welded the Imperium together, power enough to ensure that they had this residence within the confines of the Inner Palace, wealth enough to have decorated it with art and finery that could have bought a frontier city on distant worlds. Gilded sculptures of cherubs and mythical beasts clung to the ceiling. Cream-white curtains framed portraits and pictures in bright oils: red skies, green fields, blue waters. Islands of upholstered chairs and couches sat on a thick carpet that had been the colour of snow. Soft light shone from drifting glow-globes. There were no windows, just the framed views of ancient idylls painted in oil pigment. Once it might have been possible to sit here and think the world outside nothing but an idea. Even with Horus' forces filling the sky, here there might have been a form of peace, even if that peace was a lie. Once but no more.\n\nBlood spattered the walls, congealing in drops on the faces of the gilded cherubs. Bodies lay in tangles of limbs, some piled at the side of the room, some left where they had expired. Most had been cut. Blood and body fluid had soaked the carpet. Expiring insects and their eggs squirmed in the body heaps and drenched floors, making them seem to flex and twitch. Crystal goblets lay on the floor. The dregs of wine were the same colour as the congealed blood.\n\nMauer let the nausea fade. She took a step closer to the man she had shot. Her booted foot squelched bubbles from the carpet. It would not be long now; the thread of life in Thaddeus Rhihol-Sen was done down to its last, fraying fibre. Long enough for a last breath, though, long enough to answer a question.\n\n'Why did you do this?' she asked, quietly.\n\nHe twitched. A red bubble grew from his lips, burst.\n\n'Waking is despair...' he sputtered. 'They will dream forever now.'\n\nMauer nodded, slowly, then straightened. She aimed the gun and fired.\n\nThe crimson-armoured trooper nearby glanced at the dead man.\n\n'No other questions you wanted to ask him?'\n\n'No,' she said, and turned towards the door. Too late again. It was a pattern she had a feeling was going to continue. The sound of shotgun blasts came from deeper in the manse as the assault team cleared the rest of the rooms on this level. It would be just like the rest. 'Get our casualties bagged up and then flame units in once the sweep is done,' she called back as she walked from the room.\n\n'No evidence gathering?' asked the crimson trooper. He was called Solsha, and had been an arbitrator; now he had fallen into being something like her second. "}
{"text":"in. It was a pattern she had a feeling was going to continue. The sound of shotgun blasts came from deeper in the manse as the assault team cleared the rest of the rooms on this level. It would be just like the rest. 'Get our casualties bagged up and then flame units in once the sweep is done,' she called back as she walked from the room.\n\n'No evidence gathering?' asked the crimson trooper. He was called Solsha, and had been an arbitrator; now he had fallen into being something like her second. It was a duty she knew he had neither wanted nor liked.\n\n'Evidence of what?' she said, turning to look at Solsha. 'He was like the others - unable to cope with the reality he found himself in.'\n\nSolsha looked down at the dead littering the floor. Reflections of corpses flowed across the silver of his mask.\n\n'This is...'\n\n'Not something to think about,' said Mauer. 'Get it cleaned up. Take four hours' rest leave, and then get back on station.'\n\nShe did not wait for a reply but stepped through the door. Four hours. There would need to be a report, as nominal and pointless as it was. It seemed not even the possible death of the Imperium could end the need for paperwork. Maybe, though, it was time to report in person. Yes, it probably was - someone had to know it was getting worse. She was sure that they would rather not have something else to worry about, but she had once made a career of doing what was unpleasant but necessary. She would make that report later. First, she would need just a little time for herself. An hour maybe, then, just an hour somewhere away from other people. She really wanted to get some outside air, even if it reeked of void-shield static. Air, and perhaps a drink. Just a small one. No sleep, though. She did not want to sleep.\n\nCavern 361, sub-shelter level seven,\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThey called it the incandescence. By convention, within the Collegia Titanica and the Martian Priesthood, the mind-interface between Titan and crew was called the manifold but to the Legio Ignatum it was something more. Bonded by direct neural link it was a space of neither human sensation nor targeting and systems data. It was a union of the two, a world made in the connection, in the overlap of human and machine. Data became sensation, sensation became data. The will of a princeps augmented by their moderati became the actions of a war machine that could destroy armies and level cities. It was a mechanism, a fundamental biomechanical subsystem. That was only part of the truth, though, the truth that could be understood without living the reality. For those that commanded the Titans of the Legio Ignatum the manifold was not a mechanism or interchange of command. It was fire. Divine fire. A world made by the lightning between man and divine machine, life lived in the flash of a thunderbolt.\n\nIncarnated.\n\nBurning.\n\nIncandescence...\n\nRed was the world. Ghosts of green tactical data spun in at the edge of Tetracauron's senses. Spheres of light radiated from him, flickering in orange, yellow and white.\n\n'Engine!' The shout roared within him, and he felt the threat-presence to his right. He turned his head. Pistons lengthening, sensors reaching across the shimmer-images of the fume stacks and manufactorum blocks. The enemy engine came from behind the forest of chimneys at a run. Ground shaking. Tetracauron lit with fury. Red target mandalas bleached white. Data roared in his synapses. Chain teeth the size of sword blades buzzed on the fists of the enemy engine. It was swift, so swift. Fuel pipes burst under its stride. The ferrocrete slab road exploded into shards.\n\n'Fire!'\n\n'Primary weapon charge building...'\n\n'Impacts on void envelope...'\n\nBubbles of fire shivering off his cloak of shields. The glitter of fire coming from low buildings to his left.\n\nThe enemy engine was closing, accelerating. Its strides the peal of thunder.\n\nAnd he was striding to meet it, one step then another and another, forward into the kill.\n\n'Fire!'\n\n'Not yet. Not yet!'\n\n'Primary weapon charged.'\n\nHis limbs were burning. His heart a sun.\n\n'Charge secondaries!'\n\n'Reactor output at ninety-three per cent and rising. Red tolerance reached.'\n\n'Charging secondary weapons.'\n\n'Reactor output at tolerance.'\n\n'Targets locked.'\n\n'Fire! Fire! Fire!'\n\nAnd the instinct to let the fury go was equal to his will, pulling ahead.\n\nThe enemy machine was there, a stride from him. Black-and-red iron. Its fists lightning, its face a mask of ivory. It crossed the last stride, fist rising with a boom of extending pistons. The target locks in Tetracauron's sight were the red of forge iron.\n\n'Fire!'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nWhite light. Blinding. Retina-bleaching. Voids collapsing like sheets of glass. Armour becoming vapour. Face of ivory charring black in the inferno...\n\n'Engine kill.'\n\n'Immersion termination protocol initiated.'\n\nThe brilliance dimmed.\n\n'No!' His thought stabbed out as the vision broke apart... fragments of grey ash on the wind.\n\n'Princeps Tetracauron, prepare for connection dissonance.'\n\nNo...\n\nBut neither the word nor his will could hold the world together as it dissolved. Colour and heat and fury drained to grey.\n\nHis eyes opened.\n\nAnother world filled his sight, metal and dull stone and light seeping from a data screen. He could see. The sensations of his incandescence clung to him for a lengthening second. Ghost echoes of the roar of reactor response and target lock overlaid the grey world. For that moment he was in two worlds, the sense of his limited body stretched over something vast and magnificent. In his eyes the vista of war-data still spun. The breath held in his chest was a roar of star-fire. The spark of his will the ruin of cities... Yet here he was, just a web of sinew and flesh again, dragged back down to the leaden feeling of his muscles and limbs in the throne.\n\nThe second sense to return was smell. The air reeked of human sweat, his own no doubt, diluted by the spice of electrostatic. He was in a devotional chamber, sat on a throne of hard iron. Cables snaked from the throne to machines that lined the wall. The core of his familious adepts cohort filled ranked banks of consoles, the light and displays glittering in their eyes. A mere forty-five out of those needed to make his Titan truly walk to battle.\n\n'Disconnection complete.' Enginseer Xeta-Beta-1's voice was a harmony of machine notes. 'Confirm sensory reharmonisation.'\n\nHe blinked, still adjusting to the feeling of a heart beating in his chest and breath drawing between his teeth.\n\n'Confirm sensory reharmonisation,' she said again.\n\n'Confirmed,' he said.\n\n'Submit secondary audio confirmation, princeps.'\n\nTetracauron gritted his teeth and forced his tongue to move. A bitter taste lingered as he swallowed.\n\n'Walks in beauty,' he said, chewing the words like pieces of gristle.\n\n'In full and clear please, princeps.'\n\n'She walks in beauty, like the night,' he said, forming the old, familiar confirmation phrase. 'I am fully dis-incarnated, Xeta, no ghost of the flame is puppeting me.' He looked at his hand resting on the throne's arm and pushed away the feeling that it wasn't his. The fingers flexed. He pushed himself up and took a step.\n\nA step... pistons extending. Ground shaking. Gyros spinning as the weight of a divine machine moved on the earth.\n\nHis booted foot rang on the grate.\n\n'A little heavy in your first mortal steps today.' Xeta-Beta-1 glided into sight, her dozen brass claw feet raising chimes from the floor plating as she moved. Articulated arms of chrome arched over her shoulders, holding a quartet of dataslates in front of her. She tapped at them, fingers a blur. The digits were still flesh. Tetracauron had once asked her why she had not had them replaced, and she had replied that it was a tragedy but that augmetics could not match the dexterity and feedback of bone, nerve and ligament. Her current hands were not her own, of course; those had been lost in a plasma venting on Sahba-21. The graft replacements had come from a Martian artisan and been bonded to arms that were machine from the wrist up. For an enginseer trusted with guarding the spirit and systems of a Titan, she was eccentric, her communication spiced with the precise poetry of flesh-bound language, her temperament exacting but given to flights of stray cognition. For the hardline creed followed by many of the Martian Priesthood, she would seem bordering on errant. She was also exactly suited to the Legio that was her tribe and life's devotion.\n\n'Does the god-machine still echo in your blood?' she asked, looking up from her dataslates. The quad-ocular lenses of her eyes whirred to refocus.\n\nHe winced as a ghost sensation of weapon discharge flashed through him. He nodded.\n\n'We must walk,' he said, 'by cog and code we have to walk soon.'\n\nXeta did not reply; she was already moving away to the other cradles housing Divisia and Cartho. His two moderati had the privilege of exiting the sense immersion after him. His returning first was supposed to be a mark of rank, but Tetracauron thought that remaining connected for longer would have been a more fitting recognition of status. Traditions did not change though, least of all in the Legio Ignatum, oldest and most decorated of the first Triad of Titan Legios to walk the surface of Mars.\n\nHe scratched the interface plug at the back of his skull. It still itched whenever he was out of connection. It had been refitted and upgraded thirty-five times, but the itch remained. At the last refitting Xeta had wondered out loud if it might not be something to do with him rather than the sacred equipment fitted to him. He had not answered. She was almost certainly right. She normally was. He winced as a ghost echo of reactor data bleached his sight for a second.\n\nThe chamber he had woken in was one of the deep caverns beneath the Imperial Palace sanctified and given over to the Collegia Titanica, their crews, support enclaves and god-machines. For now it was, essentially, home.\n"}
{"text":"last refitting Xeta had wondered out loud if it might not be something to do with him rather than the sacred equipment fitted to him. He had not answered. She was almost certainly right. She normally was. He winced as a ghost echo of reactor data bleached his sight for a second.\n\nThe chamber he had woken in was one of the deep caverns beneath the Imperial Palace sanctified and given over to the Collegia Titanica, their crews, support enclaves and god-machines. For now it was, essentially, home.\n\nFrom across the chamber, he could hear Xeta's intoned commands and the clatter of data conduits and pistons as each of the enclosures around his two moderati's thrones disengaged. They were unsteady as they rose from their seats. Divisia was tall and fleshy, the shock spikes of her hair electric-blue and acid-green. Red geometrics covered her cheeks beneath her eyes. The chrome of her teeth flashed when she winced as she took a step. Cartho was forged as though to form a perfect contrast. Short and willow-thin, the flesh of his face pulled over fine bones, shaven scalp flowing with vivid flame electoos in red, gold and black. No expression showed as he stood, though inside the man would be snarling with discomfort.\n\n'You both look terrible,' Tetracauron said to them.\n\n'The honoured princeps senioris...' began Divisia, and retched. Vomit spattered the metal decking. Tetracauron ignored it. Divisia suffered more than most after dis-incarnation, always had. Her bond with the incandescence was close. One day soon she would walk as princeps of an engine. That was right; she had earned it and proved herself worthy of the honour. He would miss her. In the world where they were both one with Reginae Furorem she was a part of him, their wills and instincts overlapping in the well of the god-machine's spirit. To see her go would be to lose a part of himself. She vomited again, gasped, and forced out the rest of what she was saying. 'The honoured princeps does not look much better than dreadful himself.'\n\n'I concur,' said Cartho dryly. The second moderatus was upright but swaying as he tried to find his balance.\n\n'You are both wrong,' Tetracauron said, and smiled. 'I look much, much worse than dreadful.' Xeta emitted a blurt of purring cogs that was probably a proxy for a laugh. Divisia straightened and raised an eyebrow. Her irises shifted to fire orange.\n\n'Is that the best you could do?' she asked.\n\n'Are you telling me you could make a better attempt at levity, moderatus?' he replied.\n\nShe tilted her head as though considering.\n\n'Fairly certain, yes,' she said.\n\nHe smiled, the sensation of the movement a heartbeat out of synch with his perceptions, and opened his mouth to reply.\n\nA blurt of machine code echoed down the chamber.\n\nTetracauron, Divisia and Cartho all turned in perfectly synchronised movements. A robed figure was drifting towards them from where a door had irised open at the far end of the chamber. Red robes dragged beneath and behind it. The oily haze of active anti-grav clung to it. A hood with a black-and-white-checked hem half covered a lump of cables and green lenses, which sat in the rough position you would expect a head to be on a typical human. Weapon servitors had activated across the chamber. Targeting beams reached towards the figure as it came on. The tiers of familious adepts turned to stare, machine fingers paused above keys, data markers blinking on unpatched screens.\n\nA brass limb rose from beneath the approaching figure's robes; there was a brief glitter of light and the servitors went still, guns cycling down to inactive.\n\n'Well, this does not bode well,' muttered Divisia.\n\nThe floating figure halted six paces from them. Tetracauron could feel the pulse of its grav-field in his teeth. The lump of its head pivoted, and another blurt of machine code sounded through the air. Xeta replied, the enginseer's code a melody to the stranger's growl. It turned its eye-lenses back to Tetracauron. There were twenty-four of them, he noticed, the smallest no larger than a nail head, the largest wider than a fist. This was a member of the priesthood, and an exalted one at that. Another blurt of code. Tetracauron tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. The silver rings bonded with his jawline clinked.\n\n'The emissary will have to convey his meaning by analogue methodology,' said Xeta from beside them.\n\nAnother blurt.\n\n'Yes, there is no secondary communication option,' said Xeta.\n\n'This is a temple of the machine,' said the priest. 'The necessity to sully it with the organic is an insult.'\n\n'An insult to what?' asked Divisia.\n\n'To the machines of this place, to the spirits that move in the holy interfaces, to the god-machines that sleep within the vaults beneath us.'\n\nCartho was two strides towards the priest before Tetracauron's arm caught him and shoved him back. The moderatus raised his arm, head turning, and Tetracauron could feel the echo of the movement in his own nerves, pistons tightening to raise the power claw, gas flushing to pressure feeds ready to ram it forwards. Maximum force strike. Engine kill. Armour and plasma washing out, and the war-horns shouting righteous victory...\n\nTetracauron met Cartho's eyes. The moderatus stepped back.\n\n'Who are you?' asked Tetracauron, turning to the priest.\n\n'I am designated Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, emissary from the Fabricator General.'\n\nTetracauron nodded.\n\n'Tell me,' he said, carefully, 'does your function as emissary include access to data on our Legio?'\n\n'It does.'\n\n'And it's impossible that an exalted functionary within the sacred-cog turnings would not have reviewed that data prior to entering our Legio's sanctum.' He turned his head, eyes level as they fixed on Gerontius-Chi-Lambda. 'Impossible that it would have escaped such a functionary's notice that the Legio he comes to is the oldest.' He stepped towards the tech-priest. 'That the Legio has been the house of the Omnissiah's avatars of ruin since the birth of our faith's truth...' Another step. Fire rising through his core. 'That it has burned more enemies than any other. That it walks at the will of the Machine-God alone...' Stride, stride, full focus forward. Target's eyes whirring. 'That those who walk with it live for that purpose alone.' Target one-metre range. 'That the link between us and our machines is the only binding we have to the Omnissiah.' Target not withdrawing. Optimum close-range weapon discharge achieved. 'That we do not sully our connection to our god with augmetic, noosphere or code...' His face was a handspan from the emissary. Weapons primed. Targets ordained. 'That we speak not in its voice but our own, and that to profane such tradition is not insult. It is provocation.' Weapon release on command.\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda shifted back. Tetracauron smiled and felt the echo in his blood of plasma draining into charge coils.\n\n'But no emissary of the Fabricator General would be so foolish,' he said. 'So, I must presume that you have not made a complete review of the data before coming here.'\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda shifted where he floated. Tetracauron forced himself to relax, glancing at Divisia and Cartho. Both were staring at the emissary with gun-barrel focus. They sensed his shift back from aggressive posture and mirrored it, muscles deliberately relaxing in face, jaw, shoulders and limbs like struts and pistons releasing in sequence. He let the heat of anger sink down until it was just an ember in his gut.\n\nHe knew Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, or rather he knew his type. Not Martian, but one of those born and trained in one of the forge worlds or machine holds reclaimed by the Great Crusade. Hard line to their interpretation of the Omnissiah's truth, unseasoned by deep tradition, and wanting to bend the universe to their will. Purity mattered more than truth to such people, and in the betrayal of Kelbor-Hal and half the Mechanicum they saw both justification and the opportunity to press their case. They had found an ally in Fabricator General Kane and enacted his will with direct ruthlessness while feeding the brutal calculations of his mind. Tetracauron could not stand them and was certain that the regard was mutual.\n\nThe Legio Ignatum was ancient, one of the Triad Ferrum Morgulus - the first of the Titan Legions, who had walked to war since the earliest ages - whose god-machines had souls which lived in mechanisms crafted by lost forges and fires. They were to be revered, holy-beyond-holy manifestations of the Omnissiah's wrath in war. Yet the Legio did not bow and scrape or look like the priests of this newborn age. They lived for the fire of battle, and to fulfil the purpose of the machines they guarded. Princeps and moderati alike did not augment themselves beyond what was needed to link to their charges. They did not sleep like mortals but dreamed within their neural cradles, linking their minds to an echo of the slumbering god-machines. They lived the fire and fury of war and iron. It was a sacred connection, fundamental and all-consuming, the lightning arc between iron and flesh where the Machine-God spoke in blazing reality. That fire consumed many, but that was their purpose: to hold the inferno and become it, and to live in the heart and dreams of their god while they burned.\n\n'Why are you here?' asked Tetracauron, at last.\n\n'You are summoned,' said the emissary. 'You and all your Legio. You shall attend the Princeps Maximus Cydon, and all of those who answer your command shall attend with you.'\n\n'I am commanded by Princeps Maximus Cydon, and he has not commanded me so.'\n\nA buzz came from Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, and he pivoted and began to float towards the door.\n\n'He will command you so. It is a certainty. Three hours, five minutes, six seconds. Princeps, you shall attend to this command.'\n\nTetracauron watched the tech-priest pass through the door into the chamber and felt his brow crease.\n\n'What is that about?' asked Cartho in a low voice.\n\n'I am not sure,' replied Tetracauron. 'Bu"}
{"text":"ou.'\n\n'I am commanded by Princeps Maximus Cydon, and he has not commanded me so.'\n\nA buzz came from Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, and he pivoted and began to float towards the door.\n\n'He will command you so. It is a certainty. Three hours, five minutes, six seconds. Princeps, you shall attend to this command.'\n\nTetracauron watched the tech-priest pass through the door into the chamber and felt his brow crease.\n\n'What is that about?' asked Cartho in a low voice.\n\n'I am not sure,' replied Tetracauron. 'But I have a feeling it's likely to be my least-favourite feature of our exalted and honoured bonds with the eternal and blessed Martian Priesthood.'\n\n'What feature?' asked Divisia.\n\n'Politics,' answered Tetracauron.\n\nUnmarked-Unknown\n\nBoetharch\n\nOutcast\n\nUnmarked-Unknown\n\nHe was not falling. He needed to remember that. Not falling. Not sliding down the incline of darkness. Not plummeting. Not screaming. He needed to remember that here you could not fall.\n\n'Oll...'\n\nFalling.\n\nStars.\n\nBlack.\n\nCold.\n\nBurning.\n\nBut he was falling. Falling all the way down. Down to the underworld. Down to where the krakens dreamed, and the dead were. They were all there: wounds red in white faces, blood on hands, hair waving in water. All of them. Had it been too long? Had they forgotten him? Would they know him, all the dead of a life lived in aeons?\n\nHe thought of Medea, beautiful, wronged Medea with the witch-light held just behind her eyes... all that time ago.\n\nHe thought of the stone and mud-brick walls rising from the dust and the patchwork green of fields. Home. Home to a boy who ran the irrigation ditches with the calls of his mother behind him, and a laugh on his lips. Home an age ago.\n\nHe thought of a friend and hero dragged through the dirt behind a chariot until he was just a bloody rag. When was that? When...\n\n'Oll.'\n\nHe thought of Orpheus, poor Orpheus, walking up out of the dark and trying not to look behind.\n\nDon't look behind you. Don't look back at what has gone. Don't look back at what you're going to lose. Don't look...\n\nHe was not falling.\n\n'Oll!'\n\nHe stopped falling.\n\nHis eyes were open. There was noise all around him, noise like breaking glass and ripping silk.\n\n'Oll, you need to get up,' said Katt, voice firm, eyes looking down at the floor. Oll blinked. He almost looked up, then stopped.\n\n'How long?' he asked.\n\n'A couple of seconds,' said Katt.\n\n'It's getting worse,' called Rane.\n\nOll started to rise. He felt cold, clammy, like something had taken a sip from his veins and not returned it.\n\n'Trooper Persson,' said Graft, and Oll felt the servitor's metal limbs steady him. 'I have you, Trooper Persson.'\n\nHe blinked again. His eyes were stinging. He kept wanting to raise his head.\n\n'Who's got the count?' he called, and heard the hardness in his voice.\n\n'Three...' came Krank's voice, starting strong then fading to nothing. 'Three minutes, two... er...'\n\n'Come on!' he snapped. 'The count, now!'\n\nKrank swore.\n\n'Three minutes twelve seconds,' called Katt. Katt, of course Katt. Sometimes Oll wondered if they would have made it even this far without her. She was not just smart and psi-gifted; she was sharp.\n\nThere were five of them, five souls taken from the battle on Calth, which was now a long way away in every sense. None of them were the same any more. At least none of them apart from Oll. There was Graft, one-time Militarum loading servitor, still that in most respects, gears and flesh still running but its back hung with kit taken from across the arc of human time. Hebet Zybes, a farmhand, a pay-by-day who had gasped and shook at things he had seen, though not so much any more. Still scared, but calm, hardened, like a piece of wood held in a fire until just before it burns. Bale Rane, a soldier for a war that had never happened, a boy who had become a man while walking in cuts between worlds. Dogent Krank, a soldier who had started this road old in soul and had only got older. Then there was Katt: plain, quiet, very quiet Katt - all dull-eyed and silent on that day when they had come from Calth. Something else now. All of them Oll's problem. All of them the people who had kept him going and alive in all the time since he had cut a slit in the air on Calth and begun this last voyage. All of them not the people they should have been.\n\n'Something is coming!' called Zybes. He was crouched, lasgun up, not looking directly along the sight. Tears were running down his cheeks under the edge of his goggles.\n\nOll reached for the compass, found it already in his hand. The needle was a blur. Unreadable.\n\n'Three minutes thirty-one!' hissed Rane.\n\nThe knife! Where was the knife?\n\n'It's almost here!' called Zybes.\n\nAnd you could feel it now, the bow wave of its approach like the breath from an open furnace door.\n\n'Trooper Persson...'\n\n'Three minutes thirty-nine!'\n\nWhere was the knife?\n\n'Trooper Persson, are you in need of assistance?'\n\n'We need to go!'\n\nThe knife... the damned knife had been in his hand already. He hadn't seen it. Hadn't felt it. As though for a second it hadn't been there. Or he hadn't been there.\n\n'Three minutes forty-one seconds!'\n\nHe looked at the compass. The needle snapped still. He brought the knife up.\n\nOll looked up. For this moment, to do this thing, he had to look up.\n\nUp. Everything went up. Light. Shape. Dimension. Colour. Sound. All of it stretched upwards to a vanishing point as Oll raised his gaze. He was smeared, pulled, a string of matter and thought and sensation stretched between nothing and eternity. Pain as well. Pain as a fact that just went on and on, like a looped freeze-frame. That was what you got from cutting so fine on the edge of time and space; you got to walk its fraying edge. A schism-zone was what Katt had started calling it, and that was about right, Oll thought. They were caught on the edge of where they had left and where they needed to be. There were a few rules in this place that they had learnt over gods knew how long they had been in the schism. Don't look up, don't miss the count for when the compass should point true. Don't think about falling. Don't fall. Make the cut.\n\nMake the cut.\n\nHe brought the knife up. The point of it was a black splinter at the edge of his sight.\n\nMake the cut, Oll.\n\nNow.\n\n'It's here!' shouted Rane.\n\nOll heard the sound then, like cartilage popping, like dry skin stretching over bone. He felt breath on the back of his neck, warm and reeking. It was behind him. It was always behind him. There were a lot of things hunting them, but this one was close and no matter how they tried, it kept finding them. Always just out of sight. Always just behind them. They had realised it was there six cuts back, but Oll had a feeling it had always been there, patient rather than swift, closer each time, like something moving in the blink of his eyes.\n\n'It's...' Krank's voice rose, broken, shrill, the tough layer of everything that had made him a veteran solider cracking. 'It's... it's touching... me.' Oll felt it too just then. Fingers on the base of his neck, weak and light, the touch of someone in the last moments of life trying to find comfort. He wanted to scream. He wanted to turn around.\n\nHe cut.\n\nThe stretched skin of the schism-zone parted. Space peeled open as the knife in Oll's hand slid down.\n\n'Through,' he called. 'Now!'\n\nThe others ran past him, and then he was through the cut too, and the sensation of fingers on his back and the breath on his neck vanished.\n\nFalling...\n\nNow he just needed to remember about not falling.\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion,\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nMauer watched and listened as she waited. The sound in the Grand Borealis Strategium was the rumble of a tide: snapped orders, the clatter of cogitators, the hum of muffled voices caught in vox-sets and the ping of alert buzzers. A fug of human sweat and burning wires filled the gloom. The pale glow of hololight and read-out screens lit the faces of men and women sat at data and signal stations. A projection of the Imperial Palace filled the central space. Red and amber flickered across it from Anterior Barbican and around the Eternity Wall enclosing the Inner Palace regions. Each spark was an active engagement. In places - Marmax, Gorgon Bar, Sanctus Wall - the shards of light spawned and spread even as Mauer watched. It might have been beautiful had it not meant what it did. The enemy was still attacking, in spite of its failure to breach at Saturnine. The Magnifican extended to the east, a great, dark expanse, devoid of the light of battles, an abandoned and conquered realm. Two months. Just two months and a handful of days separated that desolation from the city it had been. No matter the victories, the battle remained poised - time bought, nothing more.\n\n'Boetharch.' Mauer turned and looked up at the sound of Archamus' voice.\n\nThe Master of Huscarls did not look tired; Space Marines did not tire, but she had noticed that fatigue played its own game with them. There was a glasslike glint to his gaze, and a tautness around the eyes and jaw, as though he was focusing on the moment by an act of sheer will.\n\n'Master Huscarl,' she replied.\n\n'Follow,' he said, jerking his head towards a side chamber, and then stalking towards it without a backward glance. Mauer watched him for an instant and then followed. She had spent a long time, a lifetime in fact, around war and watching the effects of war on people. She knew humans, and how humans changed when faced with horror, when pushed to their limits. Space Marines were not people, but there was a heritage that remained even with all that was done to make them. Transhuman they might be, but that status began with human and did not leave it entirely behind. If Archamus had been a man, she would have said that he was operating at the edge of stress, fatigue and control - functioning, coping, but with parts of his nature compressing as the weight of the largest and most complex warzone in history bore down on him. She wondered "}
{"text":" to their limits. Space Marines were not people, but there was a heritage that remained even with all that was done to make them. Transhuman they might be, but that status began with human and did not leave it entirely behind. If Archamus had been a man, she would have said that he was operating at the edge of stress, fatigue and control - functioning, coping, but with parts of his nature compressing as the weight of the largest and most complex warzone in history bore down on him. She wondered what that load was doing to the Praetorian. She knew what it was doing to the humans of the command echelon: nothing good, and a lot of bad.\n\nThe door to the side chamber sealed after her. A light blinked green on a security auspex display mounted on the stone table at the room's centre. There were no chairs, and the lights remained cold and dim.\n\n'It's getting worse,' she said, without waiting for a prompt. 'Three incidents in the last four days. Fifty casualties from a munition supply depot - the prefect-senior simply shut down the air supply. When we found him, he had cut off his own eyelids. An entire materiel transit hub dormitory that went up in flames after a loading crew torched it. Half a district dosed with fatal levels of sedative narcotics by a medicae primus who got to the water supply. This morning, a senior zone commander found in his manse with the rest of his extended family cut up and stacked like timber.'\n\n'Noted. That is information that could have been submitted by the usual mechanisms of your office, boetharch. Next time use them.' Archamus began to turn away, stepping towards the door. Mauer felt her own jaw clench.\n\n'My office?' Mauer heard herself speak. Her voice was cold. Archamus turned back. A frown was deepening on his forehead, words forming on his lips. She spoke before he could. 'That office barely exists and did not exist at all until sixty days ago, and if you can tell me what the rank title of boetharch means, honoured Master Huscarl, you will be doing me a favour.'\n\n'You exist to keep the influence of the war from damaging morale within the body of the command echelon and those areas that influence and bear on its operation.'\n\n'And how do I do that, Master Archamus?' Another frown from him. She raised an eyebrow. 'I am doing my share of shooting, if that is what you are thinking, but the truth is that neither you nor the Praetorian know what is happening inside the heads of the people within these walls. You have grabbed me, and anyone else you can reach, pinned a fresh rank on us, given us authority and sent us out to solve a problem you can't explain and you don't know exactly how to solve.'\n\nA muscle twitched in his cheek. She was not certain if it was a sign of anger or, impossibly, of amusement.\n\n'Are you finished?' he asked.\n\n'Not even getting started.'\n\nIt was his turn to raise an eyebrow. She breathed out and unbuckled the collar of her coat. She had worn the full formal attire of her rank, such as it was: black storm coat, the silver rosette of the new Command Prefectus fastened between the red enamelled buttons running in twin lines down the front. Her pistol sat in a patent leather holster at her waist, heavy and awkward compared to hanging in its normal thigh rig. She had even cleaned the gun until the worn metal gleamed. Crimson gloves itched on her fingers. Part of her wondered who had had the time to consider how a newly conjured division of Imperial authority should be dressed. At least there was no hat.\n\nArchamus waited, silent and still, his face unreadable. She pressed on.\n\n'I am here now because it is getting worse. Not just more frequent. Worse, you understand? Morale, crime, atrocity is like a tide - it surges, it ebbs and flows in humans, but it has a rhythm, a cause and effect. A mob is seized by a cause, a regiment weakened by hardship and then poisoned by sedition. A commander who cracks because he has lost everyone around him and has just been ordered back onto the line. Cause and effect. You can trace it back. If there is a pattern, then there is a cause. But what is happening has no pattern, no root in the rational.'\n\n'We are fighting a war for the existence of humanity as we know it,' said Archamus. 'Millions are dying by the tick of the minutes. Is that not cause enough?'\n\n'No,' said Mauer. 'That is not what is happening now. If it was, we might be better off.' Archamus held her gaze. 'The man I executed this morning was a hereditary officer of the Valhara Armoured, family in service going back to the dawn of Unity, even to before. His manse was a gift for the service his sires did the Emperor. Three weeks ago he led a column back from the fall of Lion's Gate space port. Field reports show that his machine was the last in - he was part of the rearguard fighting to cover for the column right until they reached their lines. Three days in a tank with rounds pinging off the side. No relief, no sleep. Air strikes. People burning to death in torched machines. He held it together for all of that, probably saved eighty fighting lives and a couple of dozen tanks. If anyone was still noticing such things he would have been lined up for a citation and decoration. It was enough to earn him a relief furlough, twenty-four hours off the field. He was Palace-born, so he went home. Then he drugged his family and killed them all.'\n\n'Trauma, an acute example of its effect on a mind.'\n\nMauer shook her head.\n\n'It wasn't.'\n\n'How can you know?'\n\n'Experience, Master Huscarl,' she said, and heard the weariness in her own words. 'The things I have seen. The things I have done.' She rubbed a hand over one of her eyes, blinked. She would need a stimm dose soon to stay awake. 'The man, the dead man from this morning, he said that he did it because waking was despair. He wanted those he had killed to dream forever.' She paused. 'I have heard that before.'\n\n'Where?'\n\n'From every target I reached while they were still alive.'\n\n'That's not in any of your reports.'\n\n'It's what I am here to report now.' She paused. Archamus' face was still unreadable. Intellect moved behind those eyes, though, she knew - the kind of intellect that could hold, dissect and understand an entire warzone battle plan without straining. It was not that he wasn't understanding, but she could not tell what her words were doing behind that unblinking gaze. 'As I said, it's getting worse.'\n\n'And do you think it is...' He stopped, closed his mouth, then started again. 'What do you think it is?'\n\n'I don't know.'\n\nArchamus gave a slow nod.\n\n'Thank you, Boetharch Mauer. Return to your duties.' He moved to the door and released it and made to step back into the main strategium chamber.\n\n'And what are my duties?'\n\nHe paused, looked back at her for a second, his gaze hard.\n\n'To protect us,' he said, then stepped out without another word.\n\nMauer blinked for a second and then shrugged.\n\n'At least it didn't take long,' she said to herself.\n\nMagnifican\n\nThe wind woke Shiban Khan from the dream of death. He opened his eyes. Blue sky. A crack of blue sky in dirty clouds scudding across the roof of the world. He blinked. The wind breathed grit across his face. Quiet. Just the sound of the wind. There was pain coming. He could feel it, a storm just beyond the horizon.\n\n'Who are you?' The voice came from above him. He tried to move but whatever was holding the pain from him was also holding him on the ground. A shadow passed over him faster than a blink. He tried to rise again. Failed. He went still. The blue sky had vanished. The sky was a sea of clouds the colour of bile and pus, yellow and frayed green. The wind breathed again, and he heard the click of rock fragments shifting nearby.\n\n'Who are you?' he called before he could think. He could speak at least, even if he could not move. The storm of pain crackled closer. Fire lit at the edges of his nerves. He could remember the blast, and then falling, out and down, down and down, tossed by wind, bleeding. Eternity Wall. He had been at the Eternity Wall space port. He had fallen from the edge of heaven... Down to the land of the dead.\n\n'No,' said another voice from out of sight. 'Not dead. Not yet.'\n\nHe knew the voice. He just couldn't remember...\n\n'You are going to have to get up,' said the other voice.\n\nDead, all dead, all those who had stood at the Eternity Wall. Given to the hungry jaws of this battle, spent like a tyrant's coin, fallen, forgotten, gone to the wind.\n\n'It will be hard,' said the second voice.\n\nAn arc of pain shot through him. How much damage could transhuman physiology take? He had kissed death before, and knew its taste. It was here again, grinning, breathing into his mouth as the storm of pain broke through him. The sky above him vanished.\n\nWhiteness. Pure, blank-white pain extending in every direction. A blank world with no edge, a world where you could ride forever, where nothing would ever end.\n\nHe breathed, feeling the thread of air into his lungs, forcing the plateau of pain to take a shape. Splintered bones. Fine augmetics yanked out of flesh. Torn cables. Mashed neural machine interfaces. Blood. Oil. Pain arcing through his body like lightning playing over mountain peaks.\n\n'Reassuring in a way,' said one of the voices. 'There is still enough of you left to feel this much.'\n\nShiban chuckled. The sound was wet and exploded fresh pain through his neck and chest.\n\n'I know who you are,' he said.\n\n'Do you?' said one voice.\n\n'Do you?' echoed the other.\n\n'You were there when they remade me,' said Shiban. 'You spoke to me then, too. You are dead, Torghun. You are a mind ghost, Master Yesugei.'\n\n'If you say so,' said Yesugei's voice.\n\n'You are going to have to stand, brother,' said Torghun.\n\nShiban moved his fingers first. He found that he could not feel anything of his right arm. The attempt almost sent him into spasm. Bit by bit he found what of his body still remained. More than he had expected, but some part of him could not help wondering if that was fate"}
{"text":"re when they remade me,' said Shiban. 'You spoke to me then, too. You are dead, Torghun. You are a mind ghost, Master Yesugei.'\n\n'If you say so,' said Yesugei's voice.\n\n'You are going to have to stand, brother,' said Torghun.\n\nShiban moved his fingers first. He found that he could not feel anything of his right arm. The attempt almost sent him into spasm. Bit by bit he found what of his body still remained. More than he had expected, but some part of him could not help wondering if that was fate's joke - he had nearly died once, been remade twice, and now broken again, but not enough to die. He had been left with just enough strength to bear the pain of living.\n\nHis living was a marvel, though. He had fallen so far that death should have been a certainty. As it was, the damage was deep and touched every part of him, but had left him alive. He was sure that a great deal of that was thanks to the work of the tech-priests in his second remaking. The subtle and refined augmetics that the Mechanicum had spliced into his flesh and bone were not just crude replacements; they had been enhancements. Cybernetic infusions had bonded shattered bones, ceramite and adamantine plates laminated his skull and joints, bio-plasteks and neural grafts threaded his body. All of it had been integrated with specially crafted armour, so that flesh, augmetics and battleplate worked together seamlessly. Body and machine were a distinction that no longer really applied to him. They had said that he would not just be repaired, but that, with time, he would exceed even the speed and dexterity that he had had before. That promise would now not be fulfilled, but the skill of the tech-priests meant that he had lived through the impossible.\n\nThe truth of his situation emerged with every exploratory movement. The damage was subtle and insidious. Nothing torn off, nothing shredded. The most obvious sign of hurt was a split running down his right arm from elbow to wrist. Clogged oil and clotted blood caked the break in the armour. The fingers on the hand moved, but without sensation. The rest of his injuries ran through every part of him - crushed muscle, thousands of cracks running through bone, ceramite and metal. It was as though he had been pulverised by hammers that had somehow left his skin unbroken.\n\nThe pain blinded him twice as he pulled himself to standing. Acid and copper burned in his mouth. Once he was upright he slumped to the right, stooped, like an old man under a burden. The thunder of pain rolled through him without end. Above him the dome of poisoned clouds flowed on. The wind brought a wave of dust to rattle off his armour.\n\nHe let out a breath and looked around. A wide drift of ash and dust must have caught him as he fell. The metal bones of a building rose from the crest of the nearest dune. Two ragged birds perched on a metal pole jutting from the ground. They were gazing at him with black, pearl eyes. Vulture-crows, the Terrans called them, but they were neither crow nor vulture, but something bred by time, pollution and a diet of food scavenged from the spoil heaps. Filthy black feathers coated their bodies and wings, and iridescent quills cowled their necks and heads. Their beaks were black and sharp, and smooth. They were seekers of carrion and watchers for the dead. In the last months, their murder-flocks had spread across the land as thick as the smoke clouds. For them, this last war of humanity was a time of plenty. Shiban laughed.\n\n'It was your shadows that woke me, then,' he said. 'Am I close enough to death for your tastes?'\n\nThe birds did not answer, but shifted, frayed black feathers ruffling. There were more further off, he saw, a flock of them clustered on a tangle of girders projecting from the dust.\n\n'You two are the brave ones, eh?' he said to the pair, but the words turned into a wracking retch that sent a flash of agony through him. The world became a sheet of white for a second. He did not fall. When he opened his eyes the vulture-crows were still there. He swallowed. His throat and mouth were already dry. A bad sign. He took a step, felt the pain crackle through him and snarled. The sound sent some of the birds rising from the tangle of girders. His eyes rose to follow them.\n\nA wasteland of dust and pulverised rubble ran to a horizon where broken buildings clawed at ochre clouds. He turned his head slowly, noting the almost imperceptible shift in light behind the clouds, feeling the wind and reading the patterns of everything he could see. He was in the Magnifican, somewhere in the zones west of the Eternity Wall space port - hundreds of kilometres west, somewhere whose features had been ground down by the tide of war that had flooded the million square kilometres of the Greater Palace, a tide that had now rolled on. The battlegrounds of months and weeks before were now a desolation.\n\nShiban breathed out. He had a long way to go. He allowed himself a moment of stillness and then looked up at the remaining pair of vulture-crows perched on the nearby pole.\n\n'I am going to have to take your throne,' he said. 'For this I crave your indulgence.' The birds did not move until he reached out to grasp the pole. They hissed and beat a slow spiral up into the sky. Shiban grasped the pole and yanked. It came free of whatever had rooted it beneath the dust. He hefted it, testing its crude weight. Plasteel, hollow down the core, dented and rusted, a stand for a sign perhaps, or prop for a street lamp.\n\n'In ages of change, things find new purpose,' said Yesugei's voice from behind him.\n\nShiban spun the pole, then clamped his jaw shut at the wave of nausea and agony that rose within. He gripped the pole, and looked up at the point on the horizon where he judged the Inner Palace would be. Orange-and-white light pulsed on the horizon for an instant. Above him the vulture-crows circled.\n\n'No backward step,' he said, and began to walk.\n\nCommand Prefectus chambers, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThe flicker of blue data feeds snapped and spat through the chamber. Drifts of paper and dataslates lay in stacks on the floor. Bound report files formed teetering towers of paper. Bulbous screens fizzed with static and flashes of pict-cap images. The one functioning glow-globe cast a haze of yellow light over a riveted iron desk. Live hand-cannon shells dotted the surface, brass gleaming. It smelled of static and spaces where people had been breathing too long without ventilation. The heat held heavy in the still air. The door to the side office where Mauer had taken to resting - sleeping when she could not avoid it - was open a crack.\n\nThese rooms and the tower they sat in had been an unused record space, a volume in one of the buildings of the new Administratum, built but never filled. The Command Prefectus had filled the tower in the last month, pouring people, equipment and the detritus of life into the rooms with haphazard thoroughness. Cell levels sat at the top of the tower, under the landing pads. Cables for data-feeds snaked up the stairwells. Rookeries for cyber-avians dotted its flanks. Things piled up because there was not time to put them anywhere else. There were not many in the Prefectus but still the tower felt cramped. As the most senior active member of the unit, Mauer had got the pick of the rooms for herself. She had chosen one that had a window.\n\nShe looked around, not seeing the debris. The hammer of fatigue was coming down heavy now. She had been kept young in body by virtue of rank and service that had brought rejuvenat treatment, but she had always thought that age lived in more than blood and sinew. Gene-washing, bone threading and organ reconditioning meant that you could roll through doors and fire guns like you were thirty, but you carried the seventy-five that you had lived in the moments that came after. She had not stopped since the last execution operation - mission debrief of assault team, full written report, dressing to suit the part of her rank, then the journey to the Grand Borealis and back, thinking all the while.\n\n'Should have said no to being young,' she muttered. 'Would have had a viable excuse not to get involved if I had been a crone.'\n\n'I doubt it,' came a voice from the side office. Mauer had her gun out and was ducking aside before the words fully registered.\n\nFemale, she thought. Voice reads young. Confident.\n\nShe came up beside the door. A different person, a person following prudence or advised engagement protocols, would have either emptied half her pistol clip through the door, or got out of the chambers, sealed them and called for a security detail. Mauer kicked the door, and went through, gun up.\n\nThe girl in grey sat on the cot in the corner of the room. A chromed mane of hair hung from her head. Her skin was pale. The eyes that looked up from the dataslates spread in front of her were dark.\n\n'If you want an easier life,' said the girl, 'best shoot now.'\n\nMauer lowered the gun. She knew the girl.\n\n'Archamus sent you,' she said.\n\n'Archamus, Malcador, providence, fate - take your pick,' the girl replied, and looked back down to the data scrolling in glowing green on one of the slates. Mauer holstered her gun and went back into the main chamber. She went to the desk and looked for the box of stimms. She found them under a stack of low-level informer reports. The pills were orange and white, military field grade, good for an extended patrol cycle each. She swallowed two.\n\n'You were a discipline officer,' said the girl's voice from the other room.\n\n'You are correct,' replied Mauer, not bothering to raise her voice, but the girl seemed to have no problem hearing from the next room.\n\n'Isn't this all a bit undisciplined for one of your kind? I was expecting Munitorum standard. Sheets pressed to perfection. Mirror-glossed boots. Everything stowed and in order.'\n\n'You think that is what discipline is?'\n\n'It's what the army thinks it is.'\n\nMauer clicked her neck, and winced. It would take"}
{"text":"ine officer,' said the girl's voice from the other room.\n\n'You are correct,' replied Mauer, not bothering to raise her voice, but the girl seemed to have no problem hearing from the next room.\n\n'Isn't this all a bit undisciplined for one of your kind? I was expecting Munitorum standard. Sheets pressed to perfection. Mirror-glossed boots. Everything stowed and in order.'\n\n'You think that is what discipline is?'\n\n'It's what the army thinks it is.'\n\nMauer clicked her neck, and winced. It would take a while for the dose to kick in. She went to the window. It was an arc sheet of slatted glass that ran from floor to curved ceiling. Dust filmed the glass. Beyond it, the towers and domes of the Inner Palace rose to a dark sky. It was night again. Lightning crackled across the clouds that had formed on the inner skin of the aegis shield. Lights dotted the distance, glowing from other buildings that crowded the hundreds of kilometres between here and the wall.\n\n'You know who I am, don't you?' asked the girl. She had come from the other room almost silently.\n\nMauer shrugged, but did not turn from the view.\n\n'It's my job to know who you are, Andromeda-17. I know you are a member of the Selenar, maybe the only one on Terra. I know you have the Regent's ear. That you have done work for both the Regent and the Praetorian.'\n\n'You are proud of that, aren't you?' asked the girl. 'Knowing, I mean, being competent.'\n\nMauer laughed. 'Yes,' she said. 'I am.'\n\nA silence formed. Lightning flashed in the distance.\n\n'You are not going to ask me why I'm here, either,' said Andromeda-17 after a while. 'Are you?'\n\nThe girl was looking at Mauer with an unblinking gaze.\n\n'We are going to get there eventually, aren't we?' said Mauer. 'You're hardly going to leave without dealing with whatever brought you here.'\n\n'Fair point.'\n\nAnother pause. Mauer could feel the stimms begin to worm into the space behind her eyes. She could taste salt and metal on her teeth. The world sharpened a little.\n\n'Archamus sent you,' she said again.\n\n'Sent is a strong word. The Master of Huscarls talked to me, yes. He was concerned by what you reported.'\n\n'He didn't seem so at the time.'\n\nNow it was Andromeda's turn to laugh.\n\n'It's not in their nature to show what they are thinking. Most of the Astartes breed function along narrow lines of thought and behaviour, and the Seventh Legion most of all. He heard what you said, and he didn't know how to resolve it, so he came to me.'\n\n'Straight to you?' asked Mauer. 'Not the Sigillite or Praetorian?'\n\n'They would have said to come to me anyway. I am a fluid factor. It's my nature and chosen function to flow outside of the lines. I provide outside context. Your problem is my kind of problem.'\n\n'Proud of that,' Mauer said, and looked around at Andromeda. 'Aren't you?'\n\nAndromeda gave a small shrug and a half-smile.\n\n'Have to be pleased with something, don't we?'\n\nMauer turned, leant her back against the view of the Palace skyline and crossed her arms. Andromeda sat on the iron desk, legs folded underneath her. Her chrome hair looked gold in the dim light of the glow-globe. The girl was not sweating despite the heat.\n\n'You would have reviewed the written report I put in,' stated Mauer.\n\n'And all of your field reports, and what raw data and intel you gathered - top to bottom, flesh and bones.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'And I agree. There is an upsurge in a certain kind of despair, and a certain kind of idea-'\n\n'The idea of slicing people or blasting them apart to save them from waking, or sending them to sleep so they can enjoy dreaming.'\n\nAndromeda nodded.\n\n'More or less. The violence is the consequence of the idea, but the idea is the heart of it, the nasty bit, the pernicious bit.'\n\n'Cause and effect,' said Mauer.\n\n'If you like,' said Andromeda.\n\n'The question is why.'\n\n'Oh, come on, boetharch,' snorted Andromeda. 'I have read and absorbed every bit of indicative personality and intelligence data on you. You know the answer, even if the part of you that is still a soldier and rule keeper does not want to say it - the warp, the answer is the warp. The sea of souls, the vast immaterium from which our minds draw the ineffable and all the denied horrors come. You are not supposed to know that much about it, but like you say, you are proud of knowing and very competent so you will have found out what you needed to one way or another.'\n\nMauer did not change her expression. So far, every word the girl had said was as accurate as it was condescending.\n\n'An infection,' said Mauer, 'unleashed by the enemy and spreading through the immaterial realm, infecting people and sending them into violence.'\n\n'I don't think so,' said Andromeda, tilting her head and biting her lip. 'The warp is not quite like that. It's not just another place like this. Psykers say it's like water in the ocean. It has tides, ebbs and flows - it's plastic, responsive and causal. All its horrors are parasitic to consciousness. Anyone thinks a thought or feels an emotion and the immaterium responds. One frightened soul is a ripple on the surface. It rises and sinks back into nothing. Many souls all in terror make ripples that are stronger. They meet, add together, and now that terror is a wave. It meets another wave and grows, it drags currents behind it. Soon it is big enough and strong enough that it does not dissipate, and it does not matter what other waves it meets, they are just going to be absorbed.'\n\n'This... wave in the warp,' said Mauer, raising an eyebrow. 'That's the idea, yes? It is breaking over the people in the Palace, sweeping up their minds into insanity?'\n\n'Not insanity,' said Andromeda sharply. 'There is nothing insane about despair or the wish for escape. Not normally and certainly not now. That's the thing, the wave is not just breaking over us. We are making it stronger. It's not just sweeping people up, it is finding those that are feeding it most strongly. The noble-soldier-turned-murderer that you put a bullet through this morning - how many times had he wept in his sleep and forced himself into his tank and put on a brave face for his troopers?' Andromeda-17 paused and picked up the box of stimms from the desk, turning it over in her hands. 'How many of these do you take so that you don't sleep?' She looked up, eyebrow arched in question.\n\nMauer met her gaze and did not blink.\n\n'Not enough,' she said.\n\n'That's the thing, though,' said Andromeda, dropping the box. 'It's not just something being done to us - we are part of it, feeding it even as it feeds us. It is accelerating, spun by opposing forces - escape and despair, powerful forces.'\n\nMauer was silent for a moment, and then shook herself and straightened.\n\n'I see...' She moved from the window towards the door. She would go up to the launch pads. The air reeked of promethium up there, but it would be cooler than in here.\n\n'Is there a way to stop it?' asked Mauer. 'To counter it?'\n\n'We need to find one.'\n\n'We?'\n\n'Outside context, Boetharch Mauer. Different angles on problems, outside of the lines. Did you think it was something that another higher power worries about? Because if so, my proud old mistress of war, the truth is those higher powers are busy. This is the war now. What was it you said to Archamus - \"what are my duties?\" Well, this is it. You know things. You are frighteningly competent and you want to actually solve the problem, not just shoot it.'\n\nMauer found she was actually smiling.\n\n'I am being completely played, aren't I? You are a specialist in behaviour, right? How much preparation did it take to map my drives, and compose that little tune you just played with me?'\n\nAndromeda-17 shrugged. 'Honestly, I was mainly improvising - I find it's more effective.'\n\n'This part is going just how you thought it would, isn't it?'\n\n'Pretty much.'\n\n'Including the part where I realise what you are trying to do, yes?'\n\nAndromeda nodded.\n\n'What am I being recruited into?'\n\n'A just and necessary cause.'\n\nMauer laughed. 'That's how it always starts.'\n\nArchamus, Master of the Huscarls.\n\nLegio\n\nDrain the heavens\n\nBlind zone\n\nGathering chamber, sub-shelter level seven,\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nSound filled the bowl of the gathering chamber. Tetracauron paused as he entered, looking up at the stone tiers rising from the space at its centre. The commanders of the Legio stood in loose clusters, over four hundred men and women, their hair and faces gaudy blooms of ink and dye above the graphite black of their uniforms. Crests of neon green, chromed skin, geometics and designs in the colours of jewels and chem run-off. Tetracauron's own hair was a crested blaze of red and black stripes. An indigo-blue band ran down his face from brow to neck. Silver rings decorated the line of his chin. Each one was a cog etched with a date that marked a machine kill. The irises of his eyes were topaz yellow, dyed by self-inflicted toxin bleaching. All this gaudy pageantry worn on their faces was another of the Legio's marks, the reflection of the soul of war as they fought it, an echo of the spirits of their engines borne on the skin.\n\nDivisia and Cartho walked at his side as he crossed the chamber floor. The princeps and moderati of his maniple inclined their heads in acknowledgement as his trio approached. Others nodded respectfully. A few shouted greetings that he returned as he made for the crowd on the lower tier.\n\nA squat figure detached from the nearest group as he approached. He smiled.\n\n'Honoured Princeps Arthusa,' he said.\n\n'You look terrible,' said Arthusa. The princeps senioris of Seventh Maniple sported shifting electoos of red cogs, which turned and intermeshed on her skin.\n\n'So people keep saying,' Tetracauron replied and clasped forearms with her. 'But I think you are all just jealous.'\n\nArthusa gave an 'if that's what you want to think' shrug, and nodded to Divisia and Cartho.\n\n'Princeps,' they replied and bowed their heads briefly.\n\n'Any idea what this is about?' he asked.\n\nShe shot him a look, and he "}
{"text":"id.\n\n'You look terrible,' said Arthusa. The princeps senioris of Seventh Maniple sported shifting electoos of red cogs, which turned and intermeshed on her skin.\n\n'So people keep saying,' Tetracauron replied and clasped forearms with her. 'But I think you are all just jealous.'\n\nArthusa gave an 'if that's what you want to think' shrug, and nodded to Divisia and Cartho.\n\n'Princeps,' they replied and bowed their heads briefly.\n\n'Any idea what this is about?' he asked.\n\nShe shot him a look, and he could read the 'you know very well' in her eyes.\n\n'The priesthood...' she said carefully.\n\n'Ah...' He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. 'So it is politics. You know, I once thought that a war like this would have swept that all away, for a while at least.'\n\n'You were never that naive,' she snorted. 'War is power. The bigger and more cataclysmic, the more the power involved, and politics is just the feeding frenzy for power. The possibility of annihilation doesn't stop that - in fact, it probably just makes it worse.'\n\n'Were you always quite such a philosopher?'\n\n'Yes,' she said.\n\nHe laughed then.\n\n'The priesthood are panicked,' she said, lowering her voice, 'and that's got more intense in the last few days, and not just the lower tiers. The higher up you go, the worse it gets. The machine, blessed above all, is logic, but I think... I think they are afraid.'\n\n'Of what?' he said. 'Of losing?'\n\n'Of losing everything.'\n\nHe looked at her again. There was no smile on her face now.\n\n'How do you know this?'\n\n'Because, honoured princeps, I use my time to stay linked to extraneous data when I am not incarnated. I like to know what the battlefield within is like before I walk out to the other one. I can tell you one thing, though, the princeps maximus is not happy - not happy at all. Neither is Bazzanius, or Clementia. The priesthood want something, and we don't want to give it. The cogs are turning and when the wheel stops, who knows...'\n\n'What was it you said about politics and power...?' he said. 'Much more of this and you will be in line to be the next princeps maximus.'\n\nShe made a face, and the red electoo cogs on her cheeks reversed their direction of turning.\n\n'Don't be an ass, Tetra. I know it's hard for you, but do try.' Arthusa grinned. 'Talking of ascending,' she said, gesturing at Divisia, 'when will this one walk on her own? Past time if you ask me - no offence, Cartho.'\n\nThe older moderatus bowed his head, expression unmoving.\n\n'None taken, princeps. I am grateful that I am graced with being content with my function in the greater turning.'\n\nTetracauron looked at Divisia, who was trying not to look too pleased.\n\n'When the cogs align,' he said, 'not before.'\n\nDivisia shifted, uncomfortable under the gaze of the two senior princeps.\n\n'If I may ask,' Divisia began, 'is there any more data on why we are here?'\n\n'Politics,' said Arthusa and Tetracauron together.\n\nA bell echoed through the chamber, first once, then twice, then a third time.\n\nThe double doors into the room opened. White mist fumed in through the gap. The bell struck again. Throughout the chamber, every one of the hundreds of princeps and moderati straightened. A double file of secutarii hoplites marched from the dark beyond, silver armoured, high shields blazoned with the yellow and black zigzags of Ignatum, red pennants trailing from spear tips. Chromed servo-units flew above them, scattering hololight images of jagged geometric designs in fire orange and vivid blue. Behind them came a man and woman in black uniforms, bareheaded, faces hard beneath crests and shocks of hair. These were the princeps of the Maniple of Maniples that were present on Terra, Bazzanius and Clementia, commanders of two of the Legio's Emperor-class engines, and part of the inner council of Princeps Maximus Cydon. Their moderati followed with them, equally grim-faced. There was a pause, a moment filled with the striking of another bell, and then Cydon entered. To have walked at the head of the oldest Legio for ten centuries and linked with god-engines for as long again might have brought many princeps to the embrace of an amnion-tank or an exo-frame. Not Cydon. He walked. His face was lean, dark skin withered back onto a narrow skull. The crest of his hair was silver, with black pearls bonded to the strands. Golden flames burned across his cheeks in subtle electoos. His left eye was milk-white with blindness, the pupil of his right a shattered star at the heart of an amber iris. His mouth was a thin line above a set jaw. He looked old, and hard, and furious.\n\nEveryone in the room bowed their heads as the procession unwound into a circle that filled the lowest tier. Cydon took his place last, standing with Bazzanius on his right and Clementia on his left. There was a moment of quiet. Tetracauron could feel the tension in the air, taut and stinging like a rising charge in a gun capacitor. Cydon shifted and Tetracauron knew that the princeps maximus had felt the same thing, had thought the same thing. The old man turned to look at the men and women of his Legio filling the higher tiers. He gave a nod.\n\n'Steady, my warriors,' said Cydon. 'Try to keep your tempers. Leave losing it to me.'\n\nA chuckle like low thunder slid around the chamber.\n\nThe bell in the ceiling above struck again.\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda entered. He did not come alone. A trio of heavy battle servitors followed and flanked him, their cannons lowered, their red amour gleaming with sacred hexa-decima coding etched in hair-fine gold. Two lesser priests came with them, each bearing a vox-emitter on a long pole. Last, clanking and hissing, came a battle automaton, its carapace the grey-black of graphite. The procession came to a halt at the centre of the room. The automaton and battle servitors locked into place with a perfectly synchronised clang. Binharic boomed from the vox-emitters held by the lesser priests.\n\nNone of the princeps or moderati moved. Cydon was unimpressed.\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda turned the lump of his head to look up at the tiers of figures and then back at Cydon.\n\n'The Omnissiah knows all...' his voice boomed from the emitters.\n\n'For knowledge is divine,' said Cydon. His voice was level.\n\n'You are called to heed the will of the machine,' continued Gerontius-Chi-Lambda.\n\n'We are listening,' said Cydon.\n\n'You are coded and commanded-'\n\n'No.' Cydon's words cut through the amplified voice. Tetracauron felt it. Like ice. Like the dead weight of a neutron star. The hairs lifted on his neck. He could feel the princeps maximus' fury, the cold fire held in the breath he had just taken. He felt it, and knew that across the chamber four hundred and fifty-nine of his comrades had just felt the same. Interface synchronisation, they called it. Apparently it occurred in other legions, too, but in Legio Ignatum most of all. It was because of the incandescence. The crew of the Legio did not sleep or rest like others, but dreamed in connection with the battle archives of their engines. Their dreams were the shared echoes of past glory and loss. Within that connection they lived the battles fought by the dead and the living. It brought them closer to true incarnation with their engines, to the oneness that some Titan crews feared but which Ignatum knew was the sacred flame of truth. Thought patterns and instincts bled across that link, imprinting them all. Sometimes, a shared stimulus would bring those patterns viscerally to the fore within the Titan crews, and for a moment they would experience the world in the same way. Synchronised, tuned, like a hundred clocks all set to chime at the same hour.\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda's eyes whirred as they refocused on Cydon.\n\n'As emissary and voice of the will of the Mechanicus, you shall hear me and you shall-'\n\n'No,' said Cydon again. Then he tilted his head forwards. 'Do you wish me to say it again?'\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda did not reply, but the clicking of focusing rings slowed.\n\n'It is the will of the guardians of the Omnissiah that you heed the words of the emissary that stands before you.'\n\n'Better,' said Cydon. 'But the answer will still be the same. The same as I have spoken twice already to you now.' He shook his head once as though in disappointment. 'You should have sent Vethorel, but then I doubt she would have come. She is not a fool.'\n\nThe tech-priest pivoted his head, looking up at the ranks of princeps and moderati.\n\n'It is the will of the protectors of the most sacred truth of cog and code that you ready your sacred engines. That you prepare to walk.'\n\nSilence again.\n\n'Is this the petition of the Fabricator General, of Praetorian Dorn, of the Council of Terra?' Cydon's voice rose in volume as he spoke, fire leaking from within.\n\n'It is the will of the machine.'\n\nTetracauron could tell that this was an exchange that had already happened, and was now being repeated on a wider stage.\n\n'The will of the machine...' said Cydon slowly, controlled carefully. 'Do you claim to speak for the Omnissiah?'\n\n'Knowledge must be preserved,' said Gerontius-Chi-Lambda. 'The sacred must endure. You must obey that imperative. You must walk.' The magos turned his gaze from Cydon, lenses scanning the tiers of Titan crew. 'The machines bound to you must wake, they must walk. You shall heed this imperative. This is the will-'\n\n'Where shall we walk?' asked Tetracauron. Gerontius-Chi-Lambda looked at him. Tetracauron looked at Cydon; the princeps maximus gave a relaxed nod of assent. 'Should we walk to war beyond the walls? That is our desire, so why do you demand it? But you are not talking of walking in the war that is being fought here, are you, magos?' Every eye of the Legio was locked on the tech-priest. 'You are not here at the command of the Fabricator General. You are here to compel us to walk in retreat. You are trying to build support for the Mechanicus withdrawing from this battle, and the way you see that being possible is by the strength of the Titans.'\n\n'What remains must be p"}
{"text":"to war beyond the walls? That is our desire, so why do you demand it? But you are not talking of walking in the war that is being fought here, are you, magos?' Every eye of the Legio was locked on the tech-priest. 'You are not here at the command of the Fabricator General. You are here to compel us to walk in retreat. You are trying to build support for the Mechanicus withdrawing from this battle, and the way you see that being possible is by the strength of the Titans.'\n\n'What remains must be preserved,' said Gerontius-Chi-Lambda. 'It is the imperative. It is the truth.'\n\n'What of the imperative of hierarchy? What of the command of oaths, of loyalty, of honour?'\n\n'All considerations must bend so that the cog may continue to turn. You must walk. You must aid us in bearing away what we have while there is still opportunity.'\n\n'The battle is in flow, not lost.' Arthusa spoke now, her voice snapping from across the circle from Tetracauron. 'Three great assaults have broken against the Palace in the last days, or are you deleting that data from consideration?'\n\nThe magos' lens eyes flicked and focused on Cydon, Bazzanius and Clementia. The princeps maximus and the two commanders of the Maniple of Maniples looked back at him impassively. Tetracauron wondered whether the magos had demanded this gathering, hoping to break the unity of the Legio by appealing to its line commanders. If so, it was a foolish move, and one that spoke to ignorance, an abundance of hubris and fear. The magos did not relent, though. Whatever desperate line of logic had brought him to this point, Gerontius-Chi-Lambda rolled on, like a mechanism that would break itself before deviating.\n\n'The Eternity Wall port has fallen,' said the magos. 'The data projections for conflict escalation are clear. The victories of yesterday only delay the fall. The force ratios have shifted in the enemy's favour, the scope for decisive materiel application have shifted in their favour. The probability of collapse magnifies, and with it the probability of preserving our sacred truth diminishes. The outcomes dictate a simple set of imperatives. Flight and survival.'\n\n'Theory, hypothesis,' said Bazzanius from beside Cydon. 'But most importantly not the will of the Omnissiah nor His Fabricator General. You come here to sell your fears as though they are fact, and your desires commands. They are neither. You want us to join a faction to press a case that has already been denied by all. We shall not do so.'\n\n'You will consign the sacred mysteries and machines we possess to corruption, to entropy.'\n\n'We stand by our purpose,' said Cydon, and for the first time he raised his voice. It rolled through the chamber. 'We are not hounds to be called. We are the first of the Triad. We are those who walk into fire, who bring fire. We do not break. We do not run. We face down what would dare stand against us.' Cydon smiled then, broadly, humourlessly. 'And, most importantly, magos, we win.'\n\nGerontius-Chi-Lambda was silent for a moment and then half turned away, his head rotating slightly side to side. It was the most human gesture Tetracauron had seen the magos make, and when he spoke it came from him alone, a low voice that sounded weary.\n\n'You cannot win,' he said.\n\n'You speak rank sedition,' said Bazzanius. 'You bring weakness in the hour where strength is needed. It is you who shall suffer censure.'\n\n'That fact and eventuality is irrelevant. The outcome of my life equation is irrelevant. I wish the data were not as it is, but above all I am a servant of the machine's truth - annihilation is coming.'\n\n'You are in error,' said Cydon.\n\n'Am I?' asked the magos, and turned to move away towards the door. The tech-priests, servitors and automata fell into step behind him. He was at the door when he halted and pivoted half back. 'There comes a stage when the equation to be resolved is not how to win, but how to survive.' Then he turned and passed beyond the chamber. The commanders of the Legio watched him go.\n\n'There goes a greater fool than I would have believed could serve the turning of the cog,' said Tetracauron to Arthusa as the gathering's formality dissolved. She frowned; the cogs of her electoos had stopped turning.\n\n'I hope so,' she said and looked towards the door that the tech-priest had passed through. 'I hope so.'\n\nNorthern wall circuit, Mercury Wall Zone, sub-horizon belt\n\nThe three Knights stood still as the dawn mist rolled off the plain in front of them. Each was of the smaller breed - three times the height of a man, a body of smooth armour balanced on back-slung piston legs. Weathered ivory and emerald lacquer covered their plate. Red-and-silver pennants hung from their weapon arms, heavy and damp in the dawn dew. Two bore blunt-nosed thermal spears and chainblades. Drops of condensed moisture hung from the still chain teeth, and ran from the vents of the guns. The autocannons of the third pointed up at the sky, an echo of the lances borne to war by the knights of another age. Ivory and crimson spiralled the long barrels, the colours bright and clean.\n\nWithin the quiet of her cockpit, Acastia watched the mist draw back from the brightening world. Elatus' sensors could have painted the view in data, in thermal, electrostatic, motion-corrected or tactical abstracts, but she had chosen to look at it as her eyes would. From here she could see the peaks of the mountains to the north, white-tipped teeth biting up at the sky. Beneath it the ground was still shrouded, grey vapour hiding its scarred skin. This was a flattened land.\n\nThe will of the Praetorian had levelled the cities and districts that had stood here. Labour armies and machines had scraped buildings and towers and homes down to earth and dust. Hab-blocks, shanties, manufactories, basilicae, nascent hives - all of them gone, broken and pounded down into a plateau that stretched from the feet of the distant mountain back to the walls that circled the Inner Palace. It was intended as a killing ground and it extended for one hundred and twenty kilometres from the wall. Acastia and her banner comrades stood on what the gunners on the walls called the horizon line - the point where line of sight from the highest wall sections hit the curve of the earth. From here, if she looked back towards the Palace, she could just see the battlements atop the Mercury Wall. Thunder clouds crowned that view, billowing up from where the aegis void shields interfaced with the atmosphere. Flashes of lightning strobed within the clouds. Between where the trio of Knights stood and the wall lay the Mercury-Exultant kill-zone: one hundred and forty kilometres of undulating ground spidered by shifting rivers of water, debris hills and crevasses. The labour armies had flattened the settlements beyond the wall, but what remained was a testament to the fact that you could never make anything truly flat, not on this scale, not with the time and tools that had been used. Out there were settlement-sized tangles of machines, the root masses of hives that had defied the efforts to break them. The Praetorian's will had been done, but what had been achieved was a desolation under the eyes and guns of the wall. Thousands of kilometres squared, it was a battlefield waiting for a battle.\n\nIt was beautiful in a way, thought Acastia; seen from here, at this time, there was a slow-moving serenity to it, a peace and freedom that denied the wider context.\n\nDistant flash of lightning...\n\nWhite gauze of mist melting...\n\nThin light catching clouds...\n\n'We should proceed.' Dolloran's voice sounded in Acastia's ear.\n\n'Soon,' she replied. She did not want to move. Not yet. Dolloran was impatient to begin, she knew; she could feel his impatience over the sympathetic link between the machines. He wanted to move, wanted to stride, and so did his mount. Cyllarus was a Warglaive, a direct kin to Elatus, born in the same forge, a twin sharing the iron of their creation. They were both machines of fire and fury, impatient as they were swift. Acastia could feel the instinct of her own mount growling across the neural links in her helm. There was a joy though in denying the call, in feeling the power of her mount held in place by her will. It was a song in her nerves, a rising beat in her heart. Soon that would be gone, drowned in the clench and extension of pistons. A few hundred metres more and they would be past the sight line of the guns on the wall and into the blind zone beyond, hunting for the enemy. They would run free, and Elatus' instincts would rule as much as hers. In the land beyond the sight of the wall, they were the eyes and claws of the defences. And there, for a while, she could imagine that she was free.\n\n'All systems and sensors are calibrated,' said Dolloran, 'there is no need to wait any longer.'\n\n'Soon,' she said again. She felt the buzz of a one-to-one vox-connection opening.\n\n'I think you may have indulged yourself enough, Acastia.' Pluton's voice was level, the patience in the old vessel's voice as clear as the note of chiding.\n\n'At the setting out, in the quiet stillness, there is beauty, who should leave such a gift squandered.'\n\n'True and well formed,' said Pluton, 'but we have a duty and it will not wait for beauty and poetry.'\n\nFor a moment she wanted to snap at him, but she bit the instinct back, holding her irritation in place with the same will that held Elatus still.\n\n'Very well,' she said, breaking the link, and released some of the tension in Elatus' drive. Its pistons extended. Metal feet pawed the ground. Weapon arms flexed. She felt its snarl of joy echo through her temples. Her lips peeled back from her teeth involuntarily. Beside her, the other two Armiger Knights shivered to readiness.\n\n'Now,' she said, and the three Knights began to stride into the land beyond the horizon.\n\nThe Imperial Palace\n\nThey drained the heavens. As dawn came on the twenty-seventh of Quintus, the sunlight reached across the curve of the world and tou"}
{"text":"in Elatus' drive. Its pistons extended. Metal feet pawed the ground. Weapon arms flexed. She felt its snarl of joy echo through her temples. Her lips peeled back from her teeth involuntarily. Beside her, the other two Armiger Knights shivered to readiness.\n\n'Now,' she said, and the three Knights began to stride into the land beyond the horizon.\n\nThe Imperial Palace\n\nThey drained the heavens. As dawn came on the twenty-seventh of Quintus, the sunlight reached across the curve of the world and touched the spines of ships as they sank through the upper atmosphere of Terra. Ark ships and warships slid into contact with the upper spires of the Lion's Gate and Eternity Wall space ports. Docking umbilicals locked into place. Blast doors hissed open in the bellies of ships. More ships dropped past them to latch on to the lower flanks of the port spires. Gunships and macro lifters settled on landing pads. Cargo began to vent onto conveyors. As soon as ships were unloaded they broke dock, and the next moved into place, stacked across low orbit and up into the void, moving towards the ports like the teeth of turning cogs.\n\nWithin the ports the adepts of the New Mechanicum and the labour cadres of the IV Legion worked the transit mechanisms without cease. In times of peace, the great space ports of Terra had moved billions of tons of cargo and millions of people from orbit to surface and back every hour. Now they were turned to a single purpose: to move every scrap of remaining men and materiel from the Warmaster's fleet to the surface of Terra. The cycle of ships and landing craft turned tirelessly, each one locked into a schedule and pattern that ran to the minute. Iron Warriors helmsmen and tugs guided the ships of those forces that were too far gone to meet the Lord of Iron's requirement and precision.\n\nThunder shivered up and down the orbital spires as ships came in or broke dock. Rust and caked corrosion flaked free from tower sections the size of mountains. Vibration compensators sang as they worked to stop the mountains of metal shaking apart from competing forces. In the docking limbs and landing pads everything was movement and the clangour of machines and labour. Crews of servitors and whipped slaves dragged containers of shells, cylinders of plasma, boxes of rounds. Tanks rolled directly from the guts of ships into macro hoists. War machines stalked, skittered and dragged themselves into transit chambers and began the drop down to the lower levels. Regiments of troops, herds of things that had bred in the shadows of the warp, and a tide of the lost and the damned flowed down to the surface of Terra. On and on it went, like water gushing from an opened sluice, like blood pumping from a beating heart.\n\nForrix, First Captain and warsmith of the Iron Warriors, watched the operation unfold from the Tower of Logisticators on the Lion's Gate space port. Here the high clans of transit and the merchant factions had made their seat, and watched as the hunger of Terra bloated their wealth. They were gone now, fled into the Inner Palace or slaughtered. A few had bent the knee to the true cause and now helped turn their place of greed into a conduit for the armies that would remake the Imperium. The tower pinnacle was two hundred metres wide and enclosed by a crystal dome that gave a view across the curve of the earth. Forrix could look down to see the glimmering flashes of battle in the Palace Anterior kilometres below, half hidden by the cloud layer. Above, the light of the stars was vanishing behind the blue dome of day. In the chamber behind him, banks of cogitators pulsed with a drone that ached in his teeth. All of the staff in the chamber had lost the ability to move from their posts bit by bit as the techno virus unleashed by Volk into the port's machines spread and multiplied. With every command and input, they were becoming the machines they worked. It had not seemed to reduce efficiency or accuracy; if anything it had increased it. Now there were no vocal comms, just the flow of signals and command through the human shapes slowly becoming one with the data of destruction. Through here the summation of the entire deployment phase was channelled, pooled and flowed on.\n\nThey had prepared for this ever since the Lion's Gate fell, but the reality of it still woke a spark of awe in Forrix's mind. Billions of points of data, timing, estimation and coordination all interacting and adjusted so that the flow from sky to ground never halted. By looking up he could see those operations move the world. As he watched, a ten-kilometre-long war barque detached from the spire dock and came about, engines flaring to push it up into the sky. Behind it, an armoured macro hauler in the colours of the Legio Fureans was already taking its place - jets of flame firing from fifty-metre-wide altitude adjusters as it lined up with the docking limbs.\n\nIt was like the ticking of a clock, he thought, each minute a unit of force added to the pressure of the assault on the surface, each second a decrement to the remaining life of the Imperium.\n\nThey had held back so much strength. Even with all of the millions poured into the battle sphere, even with the bulk of six Space Marine Legions deployed and active, even with numbers and strength enough to take and retake star empires, still they had held back their full might. It was, as it always was, a matter of numbers. Forrix had reviewed and arranged the secondary orders for the movement into this phase of the battle.\n\nThe Saturnine gambit had failed, but that did not matter. Dorn had saved himself from a swift end, but the outcome was still inevitable. The Outer Palace was gone, a thousand-kilometre-wide ruin no longer contested. They held both the Palace space ports now, and the outer ports like Damocles to the north. They had applied pressure to the Inner Palace walls. They had taken the defences to the point of breaking on two fronts. Now they would simply make the whole circuit of the Ultimate Wall a front, all thirteen hundred kilometres of it. In a matter of days, every last unit of the Warmaster's armies would be on the surface of the Throneworld. Total pressure. Crushing force from every angle until the circle shattered. The defenders did not have the bodies, or the bullets, or the will enough to prevent it. This was war as a progression of multiplying equations, victory as a cold inevitability.\n\nA low chime brought Forrix back from his moment of contemplation. He looked down at the communication controls mounted on his wrist, reading the indicator runes on the display. He frowned, keyed a control, and a projection from the collar of his armour filled his eye. He blinked at the brief spiral of data, then shut it off. His lips had pulled back from his teeth. Then he let out a breath and turned towards the centre of the chamber.\n\nPerturabo, the Lord of Iron and Siege Master to Horus, sat in a data-cradle at the room's centre. Screens and holo-projectors moved around him on rails and articulated limbs. Direct interface cables plugged into his armour, snaking between weapon pods and over slab-plates. Only the primarch's eyes moved, flicking from screen to screen as they flowed past his field of vision. He was absorbing the data from the battle sphere raw: from the ammunition levels in the Anterior forward reserves, to the kill screeds from Legio Vulpa Titans, all of it, from micro to macro. This was as deep in the battle flow as Forrix had ever seen his primarch. The Lord of Iron was at one with the obliteration he was creating, his being focused down to a point, like the aim of a gun barrel or the edge of a knife. There was a beat to it, too, an almost organic rhythm to the cradle's movements and the murmur of its machines. Like breathing. Like a pulse. Forrix could feel it every time he had to approach his primarch.\n\n'Lord,' he said, coming to a halt beside the data-cradle. A screen buzzed past on a rail, the information on it a blink-fast flow of battle data. Perturabo did not respond. Forrix waited twenty seconds and then spoke again. 'Lord.'\n\nThe movement of the screens and projectors slowed. Perturabo's eyes continued to follow the flick and trace of the information.\n\n'What is it?' said the Lord of Iron.\n\n'The Warmaster's equerry is coming,' said Forrix. 'His gunship touched down three minutes ago. He is two minutes from the chamber.'\n\nPerturabo was silent. Forrix waited. While the Lord of Iron's focus and awareness of the battle sphere was near total, it was also directed. One very particular subset of data was omitted. Anything to do with the Warmaster himself came through other channels, word of mouth, messengers. Forrix did not wonder why; he knew why. Winning this battle required focus. Focus of a kind that a being like Horus could break in an instant. It was a conflict waged on behalf of the Warmaster, but not with him. 'There is no further data as to why,' Forrix added after a long moment. No data, but he could guess - the losses at Saturnine: the Mournival, the finest of the Sons of Horus, trapped and slaughtered in a failed gambit.\n\nPerturabo's eyes stayed fixed on the shifting battle data.\n\n'Admit him,' he said.\n\nForrix bowed his head and stepped back.\n\nAdmit him... as though there was another choice. Argonis might be many things, and very few of them Forrix liked, but he was the equerry of the Warmaster, and when he came as emissary it was with Horus' will and authority. You did not bar the path of the Warmaster's will. It was not wise. Forrix knew that. He hoped that his primarch still did, too.\n\nThe doors into the chamber pistoned open, and Argonis entered, helmed and cloaked. A squad of Sons of Horus legionaries in red-crested helms followed him. In the fading light coming through the dome, their armour was the black of a sea at sunset.\n\n'He is in the cradle?' Argonis said to Forrix as he stalked past with barely a glance at the First Captain. Forrix's arm shot out to ba"}
{"text":"bar the path of the Warmaster's will. It was not wise. Forrix knew that. He hoped that his primarch still did, too.\n\nThe doors into the chamber pistoned open, and Argonis entered, helmed and cloaked. A squad of Sons of Horus legionaries in red-crested helms followed him. In the fading light coming through the dome, their armour was the black of a sea at sunset.\n\n'He is in the cradle?' Argonis said to Forrix as he stalked past with barely a glance at the First Captain. Forrix's arm shot out to bar Argonis' path. The guns of the Sons of Horus legionaries rose with a clatter. Iron Circle automata stamped from the edge of the chamber. Argonis looked down at where Forrix's armoured gauntlet rested on his chest.\n\nUnwise, said a voice in Forrix's head, very unwise. He found himself surprised at what he was doing, but he didn't move. Perhaps there is still an edge of old iron in my blood, he thought, and almost smiled.\n\nArgonis reached up and removed his helm, looking directly at Forrix. The equerry looked tired, like a man who was living out a life that made less sense by the day. There was something else in his eyes, too, something that Forrix would never have expected to see there. Pity.\n\n'Let me past, First Captain,' said Argonis, his voice low.\n\n'What is this?' said Forrix.\n\n'Let me speak to him, Forrix,' said Argonis.\n\n'Not without knowing what is happening.'\n\nArgonis was silent for a long moment.\n\n'Nothing that can be prevented,' he said at last.\n\n'Why are you here?' the voice of the Lord of Iron growled across the air. Perturabo rose from the data-cradle, interface cables snapping free as he straightened. Weapon pods cycled on his arms and shoulders, like dogs shaking off slumber.\n\n'I am here in the name of the Warmaster, beloved and obeyed by all,' said Argonis. 'He demands your presence.'\n\n'Where?' said Perturabo.\n\n'On the flagship. On the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nNorthern wall circuit, Mercury Wall blind zone\n\nAcastia and her fellow Knights passed the outposts at noon. Here in the blind zone, the northern wall circuit was a memory left out of sight. Battles had spilled across this area and shell bursts and munitions from both sides had left it a pockmarked, broken place of bare ground and debris. Here and there the metallic remains of dead skitarii lay in jumbled drifts, the flesh hanging from their augmetics in wet, half-rotted webs.\n\nThe fighting along the northern circuit had been in the early weeks of the siege. Prosecuted by the forces of the Dark Mechanicum on the part of the traitors, and by the houses of Knights and the armoured and motorised elements amongst the defenders. The traitors had encircled the defences and pushed close into the shadow of the Mercury and Indomitor walls, but the guns and scale of the defences had held them back. The Northern Circuit had become a rolling tussle fought between platoon and company-scale forces in the kill-zone in sight of the wall guns and the blind zone beyond the horizon. The traitors tried to establish footholds in the forward areas: forward operating bases, artillery enclaves, observation posts. When they succeeded they spread, digging in and funnelling more supplies, engines and troops forwards. They were trying to push themselves far enough forwards that they could lob medium-range artillery directly onto the wall. With that they would be able to directly assault, and apply the kind of pressure that had breached the Helios Gate. So far they had not succeeded in securing a stable forward base within the sight of the wall. They just did not have the numbers, in Acastia's opinion. There was a reason the east held the hot zones of fighting: the ports would let the traitors bring more strength from orbit faster, and the lines in the Anterior before Lion's Gate were formidable but nothing compared to the scale or resilience of Mercury, Indomitor or Exultant. Why throw forces against the strongest fortifications, when you could grind down the weak point and then breach the Lion's Gate? No, the war in the Northern Circuit was about each side denying the other respite or the chance to redeploy forces to other areas. A smaller, necessary, grubby battle fought so that the day could be won elsewhere.\n\nIt was a near-perfect echo of her birth and life, reflected Acastia.\n\n'You will never be raised high,' had been her mother's words since she could remember. Bastard born, bound by blood to service and obedience, but always to the side, placed a little above the serfs and oathmen of the house but only a little. Permitted to steer a mount but only one of the lesser kind, never an Errant, never a long-shanked Cerastus or powerful Castellan. War and glory and beauty ever in sight but never touched, never fulfilled.\n\n'Identify.' The voice came over the vox-link, heavy and monotone. They were at the outpost line. A drum-shaped blockhouse rising from the desolation, it looked like a giant shell casing dropped in a battle between gods. Four storeys of poured rockcrete braced by metal plating, gun ports shuttered. Acastia heard the chimes of signal and target lock as they approached. Blockhouses like these ran in a chain through the wall guns' blind zone. Some had been lost but most were intact. Tunnels reached down from each of them to supply and ammunition reserves, and linked each to the next outpost in the line. Like Acastia's trio of Knights, their main purpose was to give wall command alert of enemy movement. That, and to challenge a force moving into the plateau before the wall. The outpost's guns and defences would not last long against a main-strength formation, but had Acastia and her trio been hostile, they would have lasted minutes at best.\n\n'Greetings from the house and riders of Vyronii,' replied Acastia. Elatus' systems purred as it transmitted identification engrams. The three Knights slowed their stride. Acastia felt the needle-point sensation in her skull as gun sensors painted her mount. One flick of a hand on a trigger or a misfunctioning target protocol and she would be chewed apart by bolt shells.\n\nThe cockpit instruments pinged, and the sensation of needles vanished.\n\n'Pass,' said the voice over the vox. 'Good hunting, Vyronii.'\n\n'Acknowledged,' she said, then impulsed the vox over to the rest of the lance. 'Let's push. I want to be a hundred kilometres deep in the zone before we revert. Pluton, push your auspex left flank, maximum gain. Dolloran, mirror right. I have the lead.' She kicked the pace cycle pedal before the others responded. Elatus' stride lengthened. Plasma flowed through conduits. Beside it, Cyllarus and Thaumas matched pace, spreading wide to either side. Outside the land spread, stacks of building debris rising in artificial mesas. Crags of rock from where the mountain feet had been imperfectly ground flat loomed around them. Fog was rolling across the land. Wind tugged past the Knights, pulling their gun pennants out behind them.\n\n'It's quiet,' said Pluton, as the distance count rose. 'Nothing on auspex. Not even weapon discharge remnants.'\n\n'Disappointing,' said Acastia.\n\n'Concerning, surely,' said Pluton, and she could almost hear him frown. 'There should be something, even if it's low level.'\n\n'He's right,' said Dolloran. 'This sector has been crawling with false Mechanicum units. Why is there nothing?'\n\n'Because they knew we were riding out,' she snapped. 'What more reason does any dog need to run back to its hole?'\n\n'It's an ill indication,' said Pluton.\n\n'So we should wheel and withdraw?' she replied.\n\n'We should be on our guard, and ready.'\n\n'A worthy reminder to yourself to wake up, Pluton.'\n\nThe vox lapsed into silence.\n\nThe empty land passed. The auspex chimed low and soft as it reached beyond sight and found nothing. Acastia felt the annoyance roll and disperse as the rhythm of Elatus' stride rocked her. She knew Pluton was right. This empty quiet did not feel like peace. It felt as though the sea had pulled back from the shore, and they were running along the exposed seabed before the waves crashed back. She would not turn back, though. To go back would be to give up freedom before she needed to. And she wanted a kill. She would force Caradoc to mark Elatus' hide with an honour mark. The thought of her liege's face, jaw set, eyes cold, setting the mark, and knowing that it meant that on the field she was his equal... that would be a reward sweet enough to stride this uncertain land for days.\n\n'Onwards,' she said, and the three Knights paced on.\n\nThe Imperial Palace\n\nThe armies of the Warmaster marched across the ruin of the Palace. They marched from the great space ports of the Lion's Gate and Eternity Wall, and from Damocles and the landing fields on the southern plains. The labour armies went before them. In the Outer Palace Magnifican there were no highways for them to follow, so they made their own. Battalions of slaves and levelling engines ground and blasted and bulldozed through the carcasses of city-sized districts. There was no subtlety in what they did. The forces already on the ground and those in orbit needed to flow as fast as possible to the walls of the Inner Palace. The speed and volume at which they could do that was the dominant factor. The ocean of annihilation needed to flow to the walls of the Inner Palace.\n\nLines were drawn across the thousands of kilometres of the Outer Palace, and they became mass highways, hundreds of metres wide, leading from the space ports westwards. Structures were detonated. Rock and iron were beaten to shards and pounded flat. The hands of thousands of slaves sifted the ground for unexploded munitions before the war engines and troop transports advanced in their wake. In some cases, the advancing forces overtook the slaves, and ground the carpet of panicking souls into the beaten rock and dust. Supply auxilia scrambled to build fuelling and resupply camps ahead of the tide, vast reservoirs of crates, generators, fuel and water bowsers. Most had been taken from within the Palace its"}
{"text":"e beaten to shards and pounded flat. The hands of thousands of slaves sifted the ground for unexploded munitions before the war engines and troop transports advanced in their wake. In some cases, the advancing forces overtook the slaves, and ground the carpet of panicking souls into the beaten rock and dust. Supply auxilia scrambled to build fuelling and resupply camps ahead of the tide, vast reservoirs of crates, generators, fuel and water bowsers. Most had been taken from within the Palace itself, secured from the defenders by strike teams commanded by the IV and XVI Legions. Now, the stores that would have kept the defenders fighting would feed their enemies. To plan for such necessities, even as the Outer Palace fell, took a particularly cruel form of pragmatism. Such was the truth of iron that flowed in the veins of Perturabo and his sons. While others went with the rage and the fury, theirs was the purity of obliteration: considered, eternal, remorseless.\n\nMuch of the strength of the Iron Warriors was here, on the roads being ploughed through the Outer Palace. Overseers watched over the mass columns of tanks, war engines and troops. When delays or conflicts broke out they were ended with gunfire and slaughter. The corpses of those who impeded the advance were pinned to pylons sunk beside the roads. Flies swarmed the corpses. Blood formed slick, sticky patterns on the dust. Some of those passing wailed from fear or piety at the sight. Onwards the rivers of iron and flesh flowed, the roads carrying them laid down hours before they were trod. Relentless, eating towards the Inner Palace through the turning of day and night.\n\nAt the space ports the mass formations of war engines began to arrive. The remaining Titans of half a dozen legions, Knights bearing the heraldry of great houses, tank divisions numbering in the hundreds. With them came things bred from the alliance Horus had made with the powers of the warp. Beasts the size of buildings, dragging cold iron chains, things that had been machines but now loped, and howled and gurgled. Above them soared flights of aircraft, pure atmospheric craft that had made the spires of the space ports their roosts. They wheeled above the columns like bats.\n\nOn the easternmost lines and walls of the Inner Palace, the defenders felt the surge advance as a shiver in the air. On the crumbling parapet of the Colossi works, Jaghatai Khan felt the tremble and looked up at the gloom of the eastern horizon. Behind him his warriors and Stormseers stood. Their white armour was pink with blood. Some of it their own. There was weariness in the Khan's eyes as he looked into the distance, and only the humour of the graveside spiced the smile that split his face.\n\n'A storm that shakes the earth,' he said, dryly. 'I sense that this may be an ill omen that even I can read.'\n\n'Shall we ride to meet it, my Khan?' asked Naranbaatar. 'Pluck out the black lightning before it can fall on the land.'\n\n'And what if we fall as we ride?'\n\n'Then we die having ridden beyond the horizon, my Khan.'\n\nJaghatai Khan did not answer, but stood looking into the distance, unblinking.\n\nTo the south, Sanguinius felt an echo of his brother's silence as a breath of air across the fever heat of his thoughts. Fire and ruin turned in his skull as he felt the ground tremble. The day before he had found hope in the darkness, but now... what? Not darkness but something else: a question? A question that he could not yet hear, waiting in the inferno that was the future, a question to which the only answer was blood and murder.\n\nIn his gunship, flying east between aegis shield dome and building tops, Rogal Dorn saw the surge as a rising trickle of reports from forward units at the eastern walls. In the dark, alone, he was silent. He thought of the words he had spoken to his brothers and commanders: that they only needed to hold, that help was coming. He knew they were true. He hoped that he believed them.\n\nFrom the dark cometh angels\n\nLabyrinth\n\nBearers of light\n\nThe Wrath's Descent, Saturn close orbit\n\nThe beast in his dream is dying. There is blood on the snow, pink slush, entrails steaming in the cold air. The boy is shaking as he comes closer, pistol raised, barrel steady, white breath sawing between his teeth. The beast tries to move as it sees him, tries to claw towards him. Its movements slosh in the blood-melt. The boy can see the creature's black eyes looking at him as he comes to stand over it. There is an intelligence in those black depths: intelligence and recognition. The boy lowers his pistol. The beast gives a huff of breath. Pink liquid bubbles between its teeth. The boy slides the sword from its scabbard. It is as tall as him, a blade that he should not be able to lift, much less turn and wield. He holsters the pistol, lifts the blade. The dark trees shiver around him. The wind lifts the edge of his hood. The beast's eyes go wide as it looks up at him. The boy lifts the sword high above his head.\n\n'Forgive me,' he says. The beast snarls. The boy strikes down.\n\nIn the dark of his cell, Corswain woke. The white and red of the dream faded to black. For a moment he was still. The stiffness of old wounds poorly healed clung to his muscles.\n\n'Your grace,' said the voice from the vox-link bonded to his skull beside his ear.\n\n'Yes,' he replied, standing in the dark and walking to the cell door. Locks clattered open at his approach. Candles lit the chamber beyond. Black-robed serfs and servitors were already lifting the sections of battleplate and weapons from their racks. The air smelled of gun oil and tallow.\n\n'It is time,' came the voice from the vox-link.\n\n'Understood, shipmaster,' he replied.\n\nHe stopped in the centre of the chamber, arms outstretched. The serfs surrounded him. Layers of armour weave sheathed his muscles. The first pieces of plate snapped tight over connection ports. At the side of the room, a tech-priest muttered code as it brought the armour to life a piece at a time. Until this ritual was complete, the dead weight of layers of ceramite hung on him like sins waiting for forgiveness.\n\nIt was strange to sleep while in sight of the site of the largest battle in human history. But sleep he had. It was necessity as much as prudence. He had not slept while they had raced through the warp. For every watch he had stood on the bridge, his mind split between waking and the half-comatose state that was a gift of his geneforging. Around him the Wrath's Descent had creaked as it cut through the aether tides, and the beast had stalked at the edge of his denied dreams. In the quiet of those watches, he had heard the voices of his fears in his half-dreams:\n\n'Too late, too late...' said the ghost voice of Alajos.\n\n'The Imperium is already dead,' rasped Konrad Curze. 'The Emperor is a corpse on a throne.'\n\n'I am placing my trust in you,' said Lion El'Jonson. 'Do not fail me.'\n\nOn and on, slowly circling as the Dark Angels warships passed through the Sea of Souls towards the flickering light of Terra.\n\nAnd now they were here, and here alone, and so now fear had new whispers: where was the Lion? Where was the Legion? They should have been there. The storms had cleared, and the primarch would have heard the call of Terra just as Corswain had - wouldn't he? Unless he couldn't. Unless the Legion was no more. Unless those warriors that Corswain had brought to the Solar System were the last of his brotherhood...\n\nTen thousand men and two dozen warships - the core of Corswain's command renewed by reinforcements from Caliban that had been waiting for him at Zaramund. A great host... Nothing. Against the forces that swarmed on Terra and swam the Solar voids, nothing. He had seen it on the face of the Admiral Su-Kassen when her ships had found them.\n\n'You bring so little and too late...'\n\nIf there was a note of disappointment in her voice, Corswain knew it was an echo of his own. He had been certain that the Lion and the rest of the Legion would already be on Terra. They should have been there. That was what Su-Kassen had been waiting for, too; that was what her fleet was for, to meet the reinforcements, join with them and drive a path through the enemy to Terra. They had been waiting for months, preserving their strength, striking only where needed, gathering intelligence and planning for the moment when reinforcements arrived. They had thought Corswain's fleet a herald fleet, riding ahead of a main force.\n\nThe survivors of the Solar War lay in the shadow of Saturn's rings, folded in the planet's radiation and magnetic fields. It was an armada, hundreds of warships pieced together from those that had stood against the onslaught on the Solar System: ships of the V, VII and IX Legions, of the Jovian Fleet, of the Saturnine Flotilla, and with them warships that dwarfed all the rest: the Monarch of Fire, the Red Tear and the Phalanx. Huge and silent, legends of war sleeping in darkness, active systems powered down to silent running. They had asked Corswain to join them, to become part of the armada waiting to secure the gates to the Solar System when the forces of Jonson, Guilliman and Russ arrived. He had thought about it, as the eternal night lapped at the hulls of his ships. Then the light of the Astronomican had vanished from the sight of their Navigators. No one knew why, or what calamity had occurred on the Throneworld to steal its beacon light, but all knew that it meant the chances of more ships coming from the night to relieve Terra had gone with it. It had, though, settled something in Corswain's mind.\n\nThe doors to the arming chamber opened. The wash of air stirred the candles. Three warriors in black plate strode in. All but the last were bareheaded. Tragan was first, the captain of the Ninth Order, his power fist and left pauldron bone-white, the new armour still gleaming with fresh lacquer; then Adophel, the Chapter Master cloaked in the silver-threaded cloak of void commander, his face an axe blade of sca"}
{"text":"elieve Terra had gone with it. It had, though, settled something in Corswain's mind.\n\nThe doors to the arming chamber opened. The wash of air stirred the candles. Three warriors in black plate strode in. All but the last were bareheaded. Tragan was first, the captain of the Ninth Order, his power fist and left pauldron bone-white, the new armour still gleaming with fresh lacquer; then Adophel, the Chapter Master cloaked in the silver-threaded cloak of void commander, his face an axe blade of scar tissue; last came Vassago, the Librarian alone wearing his helm, the psychic conduits and arrays hooding his armoured head. Silver keys hung from his waist, and a mace was clamped to his back. He alone bowed his head as he entered. Corswain returned the gesture. Vassago and the Calibanite reinforcements they had met off Zaramund were still adapting to their places in this new, active command. They were good warriors all, but this was a long way from Caliban and the decades of having few concerns beyond the raising of fresh recruits for the Legion.\n\n'The gunship is prepared,' said Adophel. 'Are you sure you do not wish to take more warriors?'\n\n'More?' said Corswain. At his back, the spinal connections with his power pack sparked as they linked.\n\n'Yes,' said the void commander. 'Do you trust them?'\n\n'If they wished me dead then they could have fired on the gunship before we even reached the Phalanx.'\n\n'There are other things they might try.'\n\nCorswain gave Adophel a sharp look, then nodded and closed his eyes for a second. The dream still clung to the inside of his eyes.\n\n'That is why you and Vassago come with me,' he said, 'to make sure that a witchling thing does not come back wearing my face. Though I doubt any would want to - as ugly as this war has made it.'\n\nNone of them smiled. They had all seen too much of what the enemy could do to laugh at the jest.\n\nThe last plates locked into place. Mag fields snapped true. Power fizzed through fibre-bundles and neural links. The weight of the armour vanished. Corswain held out his hand for his sword as a serf fastened the white pelt across his shoulders. 'Stand the ships ready to break silent running and fight free if we do not return within the time.'\n\n'Do you think they will agree to help?' asked Adophel.\n\nCorswain did not answer, but walked from the room, sheathing the sword.\n\nThe journey from the Wrath's Descent to the Phalanx was by gunship. Squadrons of First Legion craft flanked them until the whole formation was bracketed by vessels in the yellow and black of the Imperial Fists, until the lone Stormbird carrying Corswain and his honour guard slid into the Phalanx's launch bay. A full company of VII Legion warriors met them as they disembarked, weapons ready. It was not a warm welcome. They were cautious, and suspicious.\n\nCorswain noticed the marks of battle damage as he stepped from the gunship.\n\nHalbract, Su-Kassen and a White Scar that Corswain did not know waited for him, flanked by a pair of Dreadnoughts. A warrior in the yellow of the Imperial Fists and bearing a staff and psi-hooded helm the echo of Vassago's watched from the rear of the group. The First Legion were not alone in breaking the Edict of Nikea, he noted. The Imperial Fists Librarian leaned in close to Halbract and Su-Kassen as Corswain's entourage approached.\n\n'You bring a psyker with you,' said Halbract. Corswain looked at the Imperial Fists commander. He knew of him, one of Rogal Dorn's finest, a stone man, as unyielding as a cliff face. This was the first time they had met, though. Terminator plate bulked his frame, yellow with crimson bands across the shoulder guards. There were battle marks on the plate, unrepaired even though the armour was clean, like scars worn as medals.\n\nCorswain reached up and removed his own helm, and met the cold blue of Halbract's gaze with his own, emerald stare. He turned his head to look at Vassago, then back to the Imperial Fists Librarian beside Halbract.\n\n'We have learnt to be cautious,' said Corswain. 'In these times it is hard to tell friend from foe at sight.'\n\nHalbract's face did not change.\n\n'Your brother will make no use of his abilities,' said Halbract. 'If he does, we will know, and you will be treated as hostile.'\n\nCorswain held the Imperial Fist's gaze for a full second, and then turned and nodded to Vassago.\n\n'It is done,' said Corswain, looking back to Halbract and the admiral. 'You have also learnt caution, I see.'\n\nHalbract did not answer.\n\nSu-Kassen took a step forward. She was void-born thin, her bones fine, her eyes dark. The starburst and orbiting rings of the Solar Naval Command gleamed on her uniform. Like Halbract, Corswain had heard of her: an old warrior born and made in a different time.\n\n'Welcome, Lord Seneschal,' she said. She did not bow her head. She was mortal, but here, on this ship, and in her fleet, she was the mistress of all. By her word, weapons made to kill empires spoke. If the weight of that power was a burden, none of it showed in her gaze.\n\n'You have considered my request to join your forces to our fleet?' she asked.\n\n'I have,' he replied.\n\n'But you have not come to agree,' she stated.\n\n'No,' he said. 'I have come to ask your aid.'\n\nUnmarked-Unknown\n\nOll woke with stone under his face. Cold stone, smoothed by footsteps. He pushed himself up, hands clutching for the knife and compass.\n\nNothing. Nothing in his hands but cool, empty air. He looked around.\n\nStone walls, finished and fitted close, forming a corridor just wide enough for him to have stretched out his arms to the sides. He looked in both directions. Blackness ahead and blackness behind. An oil lamp sat on the floor just beside where he had been. He recognised its style, the finish of its bronze and the patterning on the handle. It was from a kingdom that had become rubble a long time ago. He looked at the walls and floor again. It was familiar, like the face of an old friend, or an older enemy.\n\nHe was getting a feeling that he did not like; it was a feeling that he knew where he was and when he was. They must have been thrown out of the schism zone after they made the last cut. They had landed back in the tangle of true time. That had to be it... but why? He had spent a long time going between times and places in the last seven years, walking a path back to the old world, to Terra, to do something that he was not even certain he wanted to do. Early on he had been following the path set for him by John Grammaticus as the psyker nudged him from place to place on a winding, hidden road. He had not heard from John directly in a long while. He had tried not to think about that more than he needed to. Looking into the dark beyond the lamplight, he was starting to wish he had heard from John. He was starting to wish he knew more about what was waiting for them if they made the next cut.\n\nCut...\n\nHis hands closed reflexively. He looked around.\n\nThe knife was gone.\n\nThe others were gone.\n\n'Katt?' he called. 'Rane?'\n\nNo reply came from the dark, not even the echo of his own voice.\n\nHe opened his mouth to call again, and stopped.\n\nFootsteps... the sound of far-off footsteps on stone, in the distance behind him.\n\nShuffle-tap... shuffle-tap... Rhythmic and slow.\n\nHe turned.\n\nSilence again.\n\nCarefully he bent down and picked up the lamp, wondering who had lit it and why it had been left beside him as he woke. Whose was it? Who had put it there?\n\n'Some choices to be made soon,' said a voice behind him.\n\nHe whirled, fist clenching to strike. The man sat at the bottom of the wall. There was blood on his tunic, under the hands that rested on his stomach, red seeping through the fingers. The man looked up at Oll, smiled. His teeth were pink. 'I should have listened to you. I should have raised the white sails.'\n\nOll felt cold. He knew the face. It was the face that had smiled with the joy of leaping bulls, that had gone down into Minos' Labyrinth without hesitation, the face of the man who Oll had told to raise white sails but had not.\n\nOll knew where he was.\n\n'You were always good at choices, old friend,' said Theseus, 'but these ones ahead are going to be the worst of all, no clear path, no thread back this time.'\n\nOll brought the lamp closer. The light showed more blood, a lot more, more than a man could live without.\n\n'What choice are you talking about?' said Oll. 'How do you know?'\n\nA bellow came from the dark, echoing off the stone. It sounded like something in pain, like something that was hungry.\n\n'It told me,' said the dying Theseus, his eyes looking into the dark as the sound faded. 'After it... after it did this, it told me all the things that it knows. It told me that you would come. It told me where you are going. It told me that it is waiting for you, here, and that you cannot get out - even if you think you are free, you aren't. This place, it's not just a riddle in stone, old friend... Should have known... How could a puzzle of stone hold the bastard-child of a god? I should have known. I should have listened to you. Daedalus did his work well.' Theseus' back arched. His eyes and mouth clenched shut against the pain.\n\n'You got out,' said Oll. 'This is not what happened. You slew the beast. You got out.'\n\n'No,' he said with a bloody grin. 'I'm still down here, and I always will be. Made...' He gasped, and the blood was bright on his lips now, pink froth, spilling down his chin. 'Made the wrong choices. No thread, no way back. A fool... You were right then, but now you are here again, just like it said you would be.' Eyelids began to flutter. His head lolled onto his chest.\n\n'How did I end up back in here?' said Oll, suddenly urgent, his hand going to Theseus' shoulder. 'Is this you, John? Is this you trying to tell me something? How do I get out? How do I go on?'\n\nTheseus' eyes flickered open for a second, but the pupils were small, unfocused.\n\n'Who... who is John?' he asked. His eyes closed, and went still. Oll froze, then took his hand away; it was wet and red.\n"}
{"text":"ere again, just like it said you would be.' Eyelids began to flutter. His head lolled onto his chest.\n\n'How did I end up back in here?' said Oll, suddenly urgent, his hand going to Theseus' shoulder. 'Is this you, John? Is this you trying to tell me something? How do I get out? How do I go on?'\n\nTheseus' eyes flickered open for a second, but the pupils were small, unfocused.\n\n'Who... who is John?' he asked. His eyes closed, and went still. Oll froze, then took his hand away; it was wet and red.\n\nHis head twitched. Somewhere in the distance there were footsteps, coming closer.\n\nShuffle-tap... shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap... Faster, picking up speed as though hurrying.\n\nHe turned towards the sound.\n\nSomething came from the dark behind him.\n\nA breath of air blew across his cheek. The lamp flame guttered and went out.\n\nBlackness.\n\n'Two minutes one second!'\n\nThe voices were above him, around him, loud, urgent, afraid: Katt, Rane, Zybes.\n\n'Oll? Oll? Can you hear me?' Katt, definitely Katt.\n\n'It's going to be here soon. We're going to get caught!'\n\n'Oll? His eyes are opening.'\n\n'What's wrong with him?'\n\n'I don't know.' Katt again.\n\n'He looks like he's going into shock.' Krank. Yes, that was Krank.\n\nOll saw light, smeared light. Nausea rising in his mouth.\n\n'Two minutes forty-one seconds!' Rane.\n\nOll tried to move, but he was numb, floating, cold.\n\n'Knife...' He forced the word out, tried to rise again. He could feel the knife in his hand, still there, as certain and true as it hadn't been there in the... in the Labyrinth. The thought jammed like a knot in a spoiling rope.\n\n'Three minutes!' Zybes, loud now with fear.\n\nOll tried to move, felt his limbs flop like cut lengths of cord.\n\n'He can't do it!' Rane again, almost pure panic. 'We're done! We're-'\n\n'I've got it,' said Katt's voice, low and close, calm, controlled. Oll felt the knife tugging out of his grip, closed his hand tighter. The world was spinning. He was falling. 'Let go. I've got it. Just let go, okay, Oll.'\n\nThe knife, the knife he had brought all the way from Calth, that had sliced them to safety and now to here. The knife that he had a feeling was not just a knife. Their only way out, their only way on, their only way to stay alive.\n\n'You were always good at choices,' said Theseus' voice in a quiet corridor of memory. Oll thought of Ariadne making a web of thread between her fingers as she smiled at Theseus.\n\nOll relaxed his fingers. The knife slipped free.\n\n'What are you doing?' Rane, sharp with terror. 'Katt, what are you doing? You don't know... You can't-'\n\n'Be quiet,' said Katt, voice clear. Oll's eyes opened. He saw Katt standing above him. She had the compass in her hand, the black, stone knife raised, very still. Clever Katt, watching, listening, learning, growing for seven years.\n\n'Three minutes thirty seconds!' shouted Zybes.\n\nMetal arms lifted Oll. The smell of machine oil and sweat filled his nose.\n\n'I have you, Trooper Persson,' droned Graft.\n\nOll felt the cold blast at his back, heard the skeletal song of a death rattle. Katt flinched. The knife wobbled. There was a heat haze in the air, a shadow at the edge of sight, just behind Katt, just behind Graft, behind them all, standing with them.\n\n'Three minutes forty-one seconds!'\n\nThe knife in Katt's hand sliced down.\n\nThe Phalanx, Saturn close orbit\n\nSu-Kassen and Halbract did not speak for a long moment once Corswain had finished.\n\nBattle and fire marked the audience chamber they led him to. The doors were heat-buckled. Gouges ran across the stone floor. Burn marks crawled over every surface like trapped shadows. There was a smell, too, sharp and bitter, like pyre fumes and copper.\n\nVassago was watching him, he could tell. Halbract, too. The four of them alone stood in the echoing quiet of the chamber.\n\n'Is it your hope to die in battle?' asked the admiral at last.\n\nHer gaze was level, he noticed, perceptive - the gaze of a predator-hawk.\n\n'The hope remains the same, does it not? That aid will come from the Ultramarines and my liege and Legion brothers. Without the beacon of the Astronomican to guide them, they will never come.' He closed his eyes for a second. Twitched as a snake of old pain reared through his rebuilt spine. 'We came here to have purpose,' Corswain said, and opened his eyes. 'We shall go to Terra and if the beacon light has fallen, we shall relight it.' The admiral and Imperial Fist were staring at him. He met each of their gazes, unblinking. 'You have your orders and your duty, and I know well enough of Lord Dorn's sons to know that they would never break with such an oath - and such a quest is the work of warriors, not the guns of starships. I had hoped to stand here at the Lion's side, but I will not wait in the dark for him when without a light to lead him, he will never come. Dark Angels... so are we called, but we will be bearers of light. The beacon shall be relit.'\n\n'Or die in the trying...' said Su-Kassen.\n\n'We are ten thousand knights of the Lion, we shall see it done.'\n\nHe saw a smile twitch at the edge of Su-Kassen's mouth.\n\n'Something tells me that all objections and talk of hopeless odds of survival will not even make you blink,' she said, and smiled more broadly. 'And, to be honest, I would be disappointed if they did.'\n\nCorswain bowed his head.\n\n'You will not pass unnoticed,' said Halbract. Corswain met the Imperial Fist's eye. He understood what the other warrior meant. He had listened for an hour while Admiral Su-Kassen had summarised the battle state of the Solar System. Every part of the dark held some of the traitor's taint. Kill craft and reaver squadrons haunted the voids. Things from the warp churned on the gulfs of reality left ragged by the sorcery that had brought the bulk of the Warmaster's fleet to the inner system. The traitor fleet had not paused to conquer every planet or rock, but none of them were untouched or would offer safe harbour.\n\nThe masterless killers and corsairs that followed in Horus' wake were still fighting their own battles of spite and atrocity in the orbits of Saturn, Mercury, Neptune and Venus. Mars belonged to Kelbor-Hal's Dark Mechanicum. The Iron Warriors had refortified the orbits of Pluto and Uranus, and left garrison forces and battle groups that could hold any force trying to penetrate into the system by either of its two main warp gates. Close to Terra, the void swarmed with thousands of traitor vessels, many of them the greatest and most terrible of their breed: the Terminus Est, Crusader and Vengeful Spirit, blood-soaked empresses of void-slaughter. Closer still, in the high and close orbital spheres, the density of warships was enough that their engines dimmed the lights of the heavens when seen from the surface.\n\n'What else remains to us if we leave our swords sheathed, and deeds undone for the lack of hope?'\n\nHalbract nodded slowly.\n\n'Would that we had more time,' said the Imperial Fist. 'I think I would have liked to have known you better.'\n\n'There is a way it might be done,' Su-Kassen said, and shot a look at Halbract. 'With the right weapon, no wall or gate shall bar our path, isn't that the truth your Legion hold to?'\n\nHalbract's still face narrowed as he frowned. Then he shook his head.\n\n'No, it cannot be used so. It is-'\n\n'It is a weapon without purpose,' she cut across him. 'I am charged with holding the might of our fleet intact until it is called or until allies come.' She nodded at Corswain. 'They have.'\n\n'The fleet must remain intact and ready.'\n\n'One ship,' said Su-Kassen. 'One ship for a cause. To bring the Angels of Caliban to the soil of Terra, to the beacon of Terra.'\n\nHalbract shook his head again, but in thought rather than disagreement.\n\n'They do not answer to you. They may not agree.'\n\n'They will,' she said.\n\nCorswain watched and waited.\n\n'What makes you so sure?' asked Halbract.\n\n'It will appeal to them.'\n\n'You think you know their minds?'\n\nSu-Kassen gave a small nod. 'Enough to know they will agree.'\n\nShe turned to Corswain. 'We have a way to help you reach the Throneworld.'\n\nHe bowed his head in brief thanks, then asked the question that had been held behind his teeth.\n\n'My thanks, but what ship do you speak of?'\n\nSu-Kassen smiled then, and her dark eyes seemed to light.\n\n'A ship that once carried the light of the Imperium,' she said.\n\nTotality\n\nWhen it was called Earth\n\nSighted\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, Terran orbit\n\nIt was not a ship any more. Once it had been one of the greatest and grandest daughters of war and iron to light the void with fire. Forrix had known it in those old times, had seen it in battle, jewelled by weapon impacts and radiant with its own fury. He had seen it burn alien fleets to cinders, and looked up from fields of triumph to see it hanging like a banner in the sky. Now it was a shadow of that past, a shape created by its lost light. Things watched from the shadows at the edge of passages they walked through. The eagles carved into the walls wept silver tears. Banners of sable, of skin, of smoke-thin silk hung in place of the triumphs of old. Forrix thought he heard the voices of the past speaking words just below hearing. Vengeful Spirit... If it had been in his nature to feel humour, Forrix might have found laughter in the name.\n\nPerturabo walked flanked by a quartet of Iron Circle automata, preceded by Forrix and three Terminators of the First Grand Company. Argonis walked at Forrix's side, helm under one arm, staff of office in the other. Perturabo's dark eyes did not move from the path ahead, but one of his weapon mounts clattered and reloaded as the whispers followed them. Argonis, too, was silent, face set. The Warmaster's equerry had been that way since they had ascended from Lion's Gate Port. There was something in that silence that worked on Forrix more than the whispers and shadows that haunted the ship. Argonis was a Cthonian through and through, but there was a killer's swagger to that nature, a knife-cut sneer at the world. At the moment something else had"}
{"text":"om the path ahead, but one of his weapon mounts clattered and reloaded as the whispers followed them. Argonis, too, was silent, face set. The Warmaster's equerry had been that way since they had ascended from Lion's Gate Port. There was something in that silence that worked on Forrix more than the whispers and shadows that haunted the ship. Argonis was a Cthonian through and through, but there was a killer's swagger to that nature, a knife-cut sneer at the world. At the moment something else had taken the place of that confidence. Had Argonis been mortal, Forrix might have thought it was fear. Or regret.\n\nThe doorway to the throne room loomed before them, so sudden in its presence that Forrix halted with surprise. He had a clear memory of the ship, had been this way before, but had recognised none of the features or passages leading to the command chamber. Throne chamber, he reminded himself: not a place of command or greeting, but a place of power. A skull-aching buzz rose in his head when he looked at the doors. They had been plasteel, layered with red iron and adamantium. Now they looked like obsidian, polished smooth, reflections moving beneath the surface like smoke.\n\nHe was suddenly aware of the figures in black Terminator armour standing to either side of the doors. How had he not seen them? The Iron Circle pivoted, weapons arming, shields rising. Perturabo twitched his head, and the automata froze. Forrix's trio of Terminators shifted into a triangle, guns outwards.\n\n'Stand down,' Perturabo said. 'We are in my brother's house. What harm could befall us here?' His gaze shifted to Argonis. The equerry did not reply but stepped forward and raised his staff. The doors split open and hinged back. Air hissed from within, cold white, like the breath of winter.\n\nArgonis turned.\n\n'Enter,' he said. Perturabo did not move for a second, his eyes black pearls. Then he stepped forward, the plates of his armour catching the light like the edges of knives. The Iron Circle and Terminators remained where they were. Forrix followed.\n\nFor a moment there was darkness, complete and total. He had the sensation that he had stepped off the edge of a cliff. Then his foot touched the deck. Light poured into Forrix's eyes, so bright that his vision bleached for a second to compensate. Sunlight poured in through the circular viewport set in the far wall. Golden light gleamed on gilded pillars and the mirror-sheen floor. No shadows lived here. They couldn't. Only light, pure, brilliant, dazzling.\n\nHorus sat before the viewport. His armour was black but also radiant, as though he were a prism that caught the light and then cast it back out, as though he were the source of all illumination. A halo of crystal and gold framed his throne. The burnished skull of Ferrus Manus rested under the blade claws of his left hand. His face was open, serene, welcoming.\n\n'My brother,' said Horus, standing as Perturabo advanced. Forrix held a step behind his lord. Argonis had moved to stand beside the throne. The equerry seemed out of place beside the dazzling presence of the Warmaster of Mankind.\n\nPerturabo bowed his head briefly.\n\n'My Warmaster,' he said.\n\nHorus walked down the steps of the throne dais. At the corner of his eye, Forrix thought he saw something shift in the glare, like a smudge of oily smoke above a burning horizon, like a mirage.\n\n'You have done it,' said Horus, stopping before Perturabo and placing a hand on the Lord of Iron's shoulder. 'No place beyond our father's last wall is not ours. Our forces shake the ground. A crumbling circle of failure is all that remains to Rogal. Totality. As I asked and as only you could create.'\n\nForrix felt his heart rise, felt the fatigue, of which he had not even been aware, lift. He felt exalted, fulfilled, as though everything that had come before was a dream and everything that would come after was a promise of bliss.\n\nPerturabo gazed at his brother for a long moment, eyes seeming to not reflect the golden light of the room.\n\n'It is not complete,' he said. 'It shall be. The walls will shatter. When that is done, and our brother's pride lies in the ruins of what he made... Then we shall call it totality.'\n\nHorus' smile broadened. He held his hand on Perturabo's shoulder. Warmth, understanding and complete control radiated from him.\n\n'As ever, your craft is matched only by your diligence.' Horus let his hand drop and half turned away, his fingers gesturing glowing displays into being. The images hung in the air, pin-sharp accurate, the markers of unit strength and tactical data drawn in multicoloured halos. Details crawled over the images, tiny movements that echoed some vast shift on the surface far below. It was beyond real, as though it was not data or projection. As though it was the vision seen by a great, all-seeing eye.\n\n'The space ports are mine, as you said they would be,' said Horus. 'My might moves in full across the arc of the Earth.'\n\n'Almost your full force. Only the last Legion and Titan Legio elements remain. Once they are committed then the last phase begins.'\n\nHorus was tracing the claws of his left hand through the visions of the Palace. Forrix thought he saw the glitter of explosions where the blade tips touched the image. The Warmaster was not looking at Perturabo.\n\n'The rest of my sons and the machines of Mortis...' His voice was low, casual, the threat of a predator's purr.\n\n'The Third flees the battle space,' said Perturabo. 'Their numbers and strength must be replaced.'\n\n'Strength...' said Horus, the word hanging in the air. His claws were poised in the images of the battle sphere. Unit values and threat markers gleamed on the razor edges. 'Will you spend my sons as you did at Saturnine when I commit them in full?'\n\nThe tone of his voice was still the smooth warmth of before, but Forrix felt the cold crawl down his spine. This was the reason why the Warmaster had summoned the Lord of Iron: three companies of the XVI Legion and the Mournival lost in the fissures and spaces beneath Saturnine Wall, a ruse imagined to bring swift victory turned into a bloody defeat and slaughter. They had been read by Dorn and he had been waiting. Abaddon had survived from the strike force, the rest buried or cut down. It was a bitter loss, made worse by the fact that the Sons of Horus' elite had not acted with the direct sanction of the Warmaster. It had been kept from him, hidden by omission. Had it worked, victory would have ensured forgiveness. Now Perturabo would have to face the consequence.\n\n'Loss is a factor in all victory,' said Perturabo, his voice cold, his black gaze unblinking.\n\n'Do you seek to tutor me, brother?' Horus let his claws drop from the projection. He smiled at Perturabo. 'It is no matter - an action worth the risk and the loss. Were it otherwise I would not have permitted it to proceed.' Forrix felt himself blink with surprise and then the cold crawling down his spine sharpen. The Warmaster was still smiling. 'Did you truly believe that I did not know? All is revealed to me. I am illumination.' He stepped closer to Perturabo. The air felt suddenly heavy, storm-charged and thick. Forrix felt a pressure in his skull. The taste of sugar, of blood, of ash was in his mouth. There was something moving at the edge of his sight, something in the golden light - something that was just behind him, just out of sight. Black veins spidered Perturabo's face, bulging as muscles tightened to cords. Forrix saw heat glow red on his armour. Then, for an instant, the Warmaster seemed not a man but a shadow at the heart of an inferno...\n\nThen he was just as he had been, radiant and smiling, hand reaching to pat Perturabo's shoulder. The pressure vanished. The light resettled. 'My good brother,' said Horus. 'Iron within, iron without, iron for eternity. You have done all you have promised. What more could I have asked?'\n\n'It shall be complete. True totality. Then I will call it done.'\n\n'You will call it done?' said Horus, and now there was a soft edge of humour in his voice, like a distant thunder growl. 'And what of your Warmaster - what of what he commands done?'\n\n'I am giving you what you want.'\n\n'Are you?'\n\n'It is the only way.'\n\n'A slow grinding of equations. Walls pulled down by the clicking of ratios in cogitators. The only way? Where there is no way, I shall make one.' Horus turned slowly. He raised his hand. The displays dissolved, all but one. It grew, until a section of the Inner Palace and its wall filled the space between the primarchs. Horus reached a silver claw into the sphere of light. Its razor tip held on a section of wall sketched in red light. 'Here,' he said.\n\nPerturabo was silent, his face set as he looked at where the finger blade rested. For a moment Forrix thought that his eyes and mind were playing him false. Mercury Wall, two hundred kilometres of defences that stood almost intact. Almost twelve hundred metres high from parapet to base, it was a tiered mountain range of rockcrete, metal and shaped stone. Two bastions that were fortresses in their own right, all watching over a kill-zone that extended one hundred and twenty kilometres from the wall to the horizon. Together with Exultant, which lay to its east, it was amongst the most substantial sections of the Ultimate Wall that ringed the Inner Palace.\n\n'An assault there will not succeed,' said Perturabo.\n\n'It shall be done,' said Horus. His gaze was fixed on the image. 'You shall ring the walls, brother, just as my might shall encircle our father. There shall be no respite from where the sun rises to where it sets. And Mortis shall walk as one. They shall open our way within.'\n\nLegio Mortis, the Death's Heads, largest of the Titan Legios, first to bow to Horus and the new age - a legion whose name was a promise to those who would face them in battle. Until now they had not walked on Terra, but slept in coffin ships in the dark of the void above the world. Slept, and waited.\n\n'They will not reach the wall,' s"}
{"text":"ght shall encircle our father. There shall be no respite from where the sun rises to where it sets. And Mortis shall walk as one. They shall open our way within.'\n\nLegio Mortis, the Death's Heads, largest of the Titan Legios, first to bow to Horus and the new age - a legion whose name was a promise to those who would face them in battle. Until now they had not walked on Terra, but slept in coffin ships in the dark of the void above the world. Slept, and waited.\n\n'They will not reach the wall,' said Perturabo. 'The projections are clear. Wait until the encirclement assault takes its toll and every wall shall fall.'\n\nHorus' clawed finger lowered, slicing through the light of the display before it vanished. He turned his back on Perturabo and Forrix, and walked back to his throne.\n\n'If Mortis walk against Mercury now, they shall fail,' called Perturabo, and Forrix felt the anger and will that edged his voice.\n\n'They shall reach the wall, and it shall fall,' said Horus. He turned and sat, and when he looked down at them, Forrix had to avert his eyes.\n\n'How can that be?'\n\n'Because I will it so,' said Horus.\n\nStarspear, Lion's Gate space port\n\nThe ark ships of Legio Mortis came to the spire of the Lion's Gate space port. The other ships that had been dumping their cargoes into the docks withdrew back into higher orbits like courtiers making way for a high executioner. The ark ships came in slowly, holding perfect formation. Each of them was vast to the point of obscenity. Black hulled, air frost forming on their flanks as they sank into the upper layers of atmosphere. On the docking platforms, the servants of the New Mechanicum waited. Some wept corrupted binary. Some watched the arks descend with the utter stillness of supplicants seeing a prayer made real. All of the servitors and slaves in the upper docks had been assessed and purged, so that those who remained were worthy to look upon the most holy of the walking god-machines.\n\nThe first of the arks descended. Its bulk swallowed the dome of stars and the glare of the sun above the clouds. Thrusters fired along the kilometres of its hull. The thin air churned. On the dock platforms, machine acolytes and serfs were blown into the sky. Minutes passed as it sank the last hundred metres. Mooring gantries swung out of the spire top. Clamp cradles opened hundred-metre-long fingers. Docking tugs, little more than blocks of thruster engines, began to nudge the ship into place. The first moorings touched and gripped the hull and began to pull it in. The ship began to shudder. Its thrusters flared brighter. Tornadoes spun into being on the platforms. The tugs pushed more as the gantries reached and gripped the hull. Inch by inch it drew in to the spire top. Docking limbs mag-clamped to its cargo doors like sucker fish to a leviathan. The waiting priests looked up at the hundred-metre-high door in the hull metal. Micro debris impacts had pitted its surface, and condensing atmosphere ran from it in silver tracks, pattering on the priests as false rain. The vibration of the thrusters keeping the ship in the air now trembled through the top of the tower. As more of these vast siblings docked, compensator engines in the structure would have to work to stop them shaking the spire apart.\n\nClangs echoed out as locks released. Then, slowly, the doors began to grind open. Darkness, mottled by red light. The air inside became a fog as it met the atmosphere. Some of the machine priests were falling to their knees. Some trembled. Others fixed their gazes on the darkness within. Prayers of binary and scrap code clattered from speaker grilles. A cluster of spider-limbed servitors expired in a scatter of sparks as their machine components overloaded. A pulsing drone of silent code echoed through the data connections: numbers cycling down into pits of null calculation, wave forms collapsing, time decrementing with the sound of blown sand.\n\nWithin the hold, a shape moved. The clang of struck iron. The thump of pistons driving forward thousands of tons of metal. An aching buzz of chained power. A shadow of a vast figure. The drone of numbers was deafening now, bleeding from data into thought, scratching like flies on corroded tin. The shadow filled the door opening.\n\nThe priests could not think, could not calculate, could not move. All that existed in their minds was the promise of perfect annihilation. Zero. Heat death. Ultimate entropy. Data abyss. Null.\n\nThe machine stepped through the door. Even the most defiant priests bowed then, folding themselves to the ringing deck as the first Titan of Legio Mortis walked into the light.\n\nOld Terra - Unknown\n\nThe voices came first after the fall. For a second, Oll was not certain if they were from the now, or from another time. The fall after the cut had been bad, a drop all the way down. It had gone on, then stopped. Then the voices.\n\n'Are we here?' Rane asked. 'I mean... this is somewhere, right? Is it...'\n\n'I don't know,' replied Katt.\n\n'What did you do, girl?' snapped Zybes, voice hard, threaded with fear.\n\n'I made the cut,' she said.\n\n'How did you know how?' Zybes was scared, Oll could hear it: really scared and angry. That was something that had taken a while to come out of the big labourer. Zybes had hardened over the years, become a survivor or at least someone who could continue. One of the ways he had done that was by letting his fear become anger, and with it he had let a seed of unkindness take root in his heart.\n\nMy fault, thought Oll. Another thing to add to the ledger of sins, another price for having started this voyage with them.\n\n'How did you know how to cut through?' Zybes growled. There was the clink of a gun coming up.\n\n'Easy, Heb,' said Krank to Zybes, 'easy, alright.'\n\n'No!' snarled Zybes. 'How did she know how to make the cut? Oll said it's not the sort of thing normal people know. So how did she? Something has got into her mind.'\n\n'Heb, look, just...'\n\n'Where did you bring us?' Zybes said to Katt. 'Why?'\n\nWhere... They were not making the count, Oll realised. He could smell something, too. Something so familiar but something that he could not put his finger on.\n\n'Lower the gun, Heb,' said Krank. Firm voice now, the old soldier still there. 'We'll sort it out, but things are okay.'\n\n'What you going to do, kill me? I tell you, there's something wrong here, and with her. Something got to her, in the schism space - something could have latched on, brought us to a dead end again. We know she's a-'\n\n'A witch,' said Katt. A quiet descended. The word was not one that had much use in the time they had come from. But they had picked it up, along with all the other trinkets and lessons of their voyage. They had never used it about Katt, though. Psyker, that was what she was. Exactly how strong, Oll did not know. She was growing into it, though.\n\nOll felt his eyelids move, and then the sensation of flesh and bone return. Something was wrong but it was not with Katt. It was with him. He was not an easy man to frighten, but waking in the black with just the voices did frighten him, most of all because he didn't know why.\n\n'It's not her fault,' he said. He could see sky when he opened his eyes. Sunset bruising a sliver of blue at the edges. He pushed himself up. His limbs felt numb for a moment and then became his own. They were in a long cave that looked to have been cut and widened into a broad tunnel. The stone of the walls and floor was smooth, as though worked by the flow of a river. The walls tapered to a narrow opening high overhead. It all felt crushingly familiar, but not quite recognisable.\n\nThe others were all looking at him. Zybes still had his gun raised, but his mouth was open. Krank had his hands up, placating. Rane stood five paces back from both of them. Graft was stationary by Katt. She met his eyes and nodded.\n\n'It's not her fault,' repeated Oll. He looked around at all of them. 'We should all be thanking our lucky stars and her that she pays attention.'\n\nHe held out his hand to her. She handed back the knife and compass. He noticed that the needle was not spinning behind the crystal.\n\n'Where are we then?' asked Zybes.\n\n'Not sure,' said Oll, turning to look at Zybes as though discussing where to mortar in a fence post. The pay-by-day still had the barrel of his gun up, still looked jittery. Oll had seen that look before. Some journeys broke people before you reached home shores. Too much time below the horizon, too much time riding the storm waves and wondering where you were going. He just hoped he could get them somewhere before it became a problem. Zybes met his eyes, nodded and lowered his gun.\n\n'Thanks, Heb,' said Oll, his tone level, almost casual. 'I know you always have our backs.'\n\nZybes nodded again.\n\n'Are you...' he began, 'are you alright, Oll?'\n\n'Fine,' said Oll, 'just fine. Shouldn't have looked up at the wrong time. My own fault. Getting old, you know.'\n\nThat got a nervous laugh from them all. Zybes blinked, then nodded.\n\n'Okay,' he said.\n\n'Thanks,' Oll said, and picked up his own gun and kit. The rest had spread out and dropped down to watch the tunnel to either side of them, and the opening above, guns ready, fingers on triggers - the habits that had kept them alive.\n\nOll checked his gun and looked around. The tunnel sloped up to one end, the view fading out in the twilight. Following the downward slope, it turned around a bend. A breeze slid along the tunnel, carrying the smell of cool rock, and an edge of salt. Oll blinked, and then almost smiled. He knew where he was.\n\n'Looks like an old watercourse,' said Krank.\n\n'It was,' said Oll. 'Made to carry a river's worth of water. Took the reign of two emperors to make it.'\n\n'Two emperors?' said Rane.\n\n'Long time ago,' said Oll. 'An emperor was a smaller idea then. Water flowed right down here in a torrent. If we had stood here when I last saw it, we would have been swept away.'\n\n'Where is it though?' asked Krank.\n\n'Terra,' answered Katt. Oll turned to loo"}
{"text":". Oll blinked, and then almost smiled. He knew where he was.\n\n'Looks like an old watercourse,' said Krank.\n\n'It was,' said Oll. 'Made to carry a river's worth of water. Took the reign of two emperors to make it.'\n\n'Two emperors?' said Rane.\n\n'Long time ago,' said Oll. 'An emperor was a smaller idea then. Water flowed right down here in a torrent. If we had stood here when I last saw it, we would have been swept away.'\n\n'Where is it though?' asked Krank.\n\n'Terra,' answered Katt. Oll turned to look at her, so did the rest. All but Zybes, still looking away down the tunnel. 'Terra from the past, I mean,' she continued, looking at Oll. 'When it was called Earth.'\n\n'Yeah, that's right,' said Oll. 'About thirty thousand years in the past from when we left Calth, give or take.'\n\n'Thirty thousand...' said Krank. 'So we are off course. We were supposed to be getting closer, narrower times, and now...'\n\n'No,' said Oll. 'I'm not sure why we are here exactly, but if the compass held true...' He glanced at Katt, who nodded. 'Then something brought us on this turn.' For a second he thought of Theseus, looking up at him in the dark of the Labyrinth, blood on his lips.\n\n'Couldn't this just be another place from your past, like the others that we went through?' asked Rane.\n\nOll shrugged.\n\n'All the other places on Old Earth that we went through were places I had been at the time I was there, but I was never here at this time. That's why I didn't recognise it - never saw it from down here, never saw it without water.'\n\n'Why here then?' asked Krank.\n\n'It's close,' said Katt. Oll frowned. The breeze slid down the tunnel again. The sliver of sky above was darkening.\n\n'Close to what?' Rane again.\n\n'Where the path ends,' said Katt. 'Different time, same place.' She looked at Oll for confirmation.\n\n'No...' he said, turning to look around him, then striding off down the slope of the tunnel. 'No, that can't be right.'\n\nHe heard them following as he turned the bend and saw the tunnel mouth open to a view beyond. He stopped at its threshold. The ground ran down from the tunnel, the dry course of the stream that flowed in place of the torrent a pale scar cut into the ground. Waves broke on a long beach in the distance. The breeze rose. He smelled salt spray, the smell of the old sea of monsters and islands, the scent of a sea that he had crossed and recrossed many times in ages past. He blinked as he looked at it, thinking of the story of the sneering bastard from Ithaca - blown off course in sight of journey's end.\n\n'What's wrong, Oll?' asked Katt as she came up beside him.\n\n'You're right,' said Oll. 'If we are here it must be because this is close, and if not in time then in place. But then we shouldn't be here, the last cut should be to the meeting point... If we cut from here, and the next cut is the last, then we are going to be a long way from where we need to be. That's how these tools work - they respond to what we want. And we didn't want to be here. So we either made a mistake, or...'\n\nOll pulled the compass out then, opened the lid, held it up to the thinning light. The silver needle was a spinning blur behind the circle of glass.\n\nThe wind whipped around them, suddenly cold at his back.\n\n'What was that?' asked Katt.\n\nA tapping, dragging step, echoing on stone.\n\nShuffle-tap... shuffle-tap...\n\n'The count...' Zybes was half moaning, half growling. 'We lost the count! We should have gone already. It's got us!'\n\nRane was panting, eyes wide. The dark was thickening. The sound of the sea distant.\n\n'It's coming,' panted Rane. 'It's here.'\n\nAnd it was. The thing that had been trailing them. Suddenly right there, just a step behind.\n\nOll could feel it on his neck: the hot pressure wave, the fever prickle on his skin. He turned to look into the dark of the tunnel.\n\nThe steps were speeding up, closing down the tunnel they had come from.\n\nShuffle-tap, shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap-\n\nHe looked down at the compass. The needle was jerking between two directions.\n\n'Oll...' moaned Rane. 'Oll, I can feel it... It's behind me. It's right behind me.'\n\nThe needle snapping from north to east.\n\nShuffle-tap, shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap-\n\nThe sounds of quickening steps were almost with him.\n\nShuffle-tap, shuffle-tap, shuffle-tap-\n\n'Oll!' shouted Katt. 'There is something in the tunnel!'\n\nHis head came up. The tunnel was in front of him, a wide and dark mouth. The steps were almost on top of them. At his back he felt the warm blast of wet breath. Behind him.\n\nShuffle-tap, shuffle-tap.\n\nThe sound of the steps were in front of him. In front. A shadow, in front of him, someone dragging themselves into the edge of sight.\n\n'It's got us!' called Krank.\n\nThe touch on his back. The slow hunter now with him. Dead end. Dead here and now.\n\nA figure stumbling just inside the tunnel mouth, falling.\n\nOll stepped forwards.\n\nA face looked up, bloody and gasping, screaming in silence.\n\nOll! screamed John Grammaticus' voice in his head. Oll, where are you?\n\nThen the face was gone. Bloody handprints black on the stone just in front of him. He looked at the compass. The needle was still, dead on the direction where he had seen John's face. Straight into the mouth of the tunnel. Behind him he could feel the dead fingers on his back and the sound of a dying breath rattling behind a smile. He still had the knife in his hand.\n\n'With me!'\n\nHe cut.\n\nNorthern wall circuit, Mercury Wall blind zone\n\n'Contact seventy degrees from north,' called Dolloran. He slowed the stride of Cyllarus. Acastia and Pluton matched the pace change. Elatus' sensor gaze swung to follow Acastia's attention. The return fizzed at the edge of the auspex screen.\n\n'Metallics and heat,' she said. 'Could be a lone unit or multiple.'\n\n'Or a dead machine with heat bleeding from a plasma unit.'\n\nAcastia looked at the screen for a second, blinked. It had been quiet for hours now.\n\n'Let's see,' she said, and kicked the motive spur at her foot. Elatus jinked onto a new line, stride lengthening. 'Hawk and archer,' she called, but the other two had already guessed the troop formation and were sliding into position - Cyllarus matching Elatus' pace and arcing wide, Thaumas holding to the slower stride, guns lowering, scanners and targets to maximum as it paced behind. They kept their thermal cannons and ion shields cold. If it was just a tank or low-grade automaton, even if it saw them, it would not be able to read exactly what they were until they had a kill position.\n\n'Hard sensor read,' called Dolloran. 'It's stationary. Threat status amber.'\n\nThe stride shook through Elatus. Acastia felt it and grinned. Freedom. This was it, finger held on the gun trigger before firing.\n\n'It's moving!' called Dolloran.\n\n'Not a dead wreck,' replied Acastia. The sensor return was moving. Energy readings spiralled. Red, multiplying.\n\n'Energy spike! Honour of the ancestors - that's an active void shield.'\n\n'It's seen us,' said Acastia. 'Raise ion shields. Weapons to the trigger.' Elatus shivered as its shield canopy lit, dorsal heavy stubber armed, power flushed to its lance. And then suddenly there it was, on her left flank, closing under its own power. An ovoid of armour plates set above a heavy track unit. Red sensor lenses shone from its central mass. The light shimmered around it, sliding into oily rainbows. It was hostile. It reeked of hostile. Range and target locks pinged. Weapon runes shone green.\n\n'Engaging!' called Acastia, and spurred forwards. The thing's torso rose and pivoted. 'Look at me...' she muttered. Weapon pods uncoiled on metallic tentacles. 'That's it.' She fired the heavy stubber. Rounds chugged at the machine. Beams lashed across the distance, but Acastia was already prancing sideways, holding the stubber fire true. Rounds splashed into its shield. Black lightning cracked the air around it. The machine's beams burned across the air and struck the ground where Elatus had been. Dust and grit flashed to glass. Static boiled across the auspex as the beams passed. Viewscreens flashed to black. Pain stabbed into her head as feedback leapt across her helm's nerve connections. For a second she felt Elatus' balance tilt, the fire from the stubber faltering.\n\n'Shit! Shit!' The machine was accelerating, its shield and envelope distorting the air around it. 'It's an abomination-engine.'\n\n'Coming in,' said Dolloran over the vox. 'Keep it on you.'\n\nShe swore again, not bothering to cut the vox, and spurred into full stride. Elatus' upper torso rotated, its legs a blur, one metal hoof barely in contact with the ground. Another beam lashed towards them. Her ion shield aligned just in time to take the hit. White light flashed out. Inside her cockpit, Acastia bit down as feedback shrilled through her skull.\n\nAbomination-engine. Silica-anima. Heretek construct. Woe-machine. That was what this quarry was. Once unspoken dreams made by the schismatic tech-priests of Mars, now multiplied and sent out from the Dark Mechanicum's camps ringing the Palace. Driven by forbidden, false intelligence and armed with weapons that fused the material with the immaterial and defied the reality that had borne them. They were amongst the worst of the weapons unleashed by the enemy. Their forms were diverse and ever-changing, but they were never less than lethal. A lone Armiger Knight was no match. Even Acastia would admit that she should not have engaged such a machine alone. But she was not alone.\n\nCyllarus came in fast, crab-dancing across the compacted scree. Stubber fire exploded across the abomination-engine's void shell. It half-pivoted, its weapon pods rearing like snakes. Dolloran did not wait for it to fire; he was close enough. Cyllarus' heat lance shrieked. A line of blue heat scored the air. The enemy engine's shield flared. Black lightning crackled. In her cockpit, a third of a kilometre away, Acastia felt something scream in her head.\n\n'Shield down,' shouted Dolloran.\n\nThe targeting rune was green in Acastia's sight. She keyed her trigger. The"}
{"text":"ber fire exploded across the abomination-engine's void shell. It half-pivoted, its weapon pods rearing like snakes. Dolloran did not wait for it to fire; he was close enough. Cyllarus' heat lance shrieked. A line of blue heat scored the air. The enemy engine's shield flared. Black lightning crackled. In her cockpit, a third of a kilometre away, Acastia felt something scream in her head.\n\n'Shield down,' shouted Dolloran.\n\nThe targeting rune was green in Acastia's sight. She keyed her trigger. The enemy engine reared, its form flickering and blurring like a smear of paint in rain. The beam of Elatus' heat lance stabbed out, boring through air where there should have been metal.\n\n'Shit!' swore Acastia. The target display was a fog of red shards.\n\n'Where is it?' came Dolloran's voice. 'Where the hell is it?'\n\nAcastia was about to reply. The bulk of the engine loomed out of the pixel fog, closing, accelerating, weapon pods glowing. She slammed Elatus' ion shield around. The enemy engine fired. Light exploded around Elatus. Its ion shield collapsed with a concussive bang. Red light flooded its cockpit. Acastia tasted blood. Her mount's stride wavered, pitched. Cockpit screens clouds of static. Alarms sounding. Acastia felt her head reel as if she had just taken a punch. Red and static and the blare of oncoming death. This was it. Over now. She found that she was not sorry.\n\nThe sound of cannon fire juddered through her ears.\n\nHeavy impacts close by, one after another, overlapping. Elatus caught its balance, and Acastia kicked it into a circle, still alive, ears and head still ringing. The abomination was shaking, armour plates deforming as munitions struck it.\n\n'Kill it now,' said Pluton's voice over the vox as Thaumas paced forwards, cannon arms chugging out rounds into the enemy engine. It was still moving, fluid venting from holes, heat building in its weapons. Acastia kicked Elatus forwards. The chainblade on its left arm spun to a blur an instant before she buried it in the enemy engine's central mass. Acastia shivered in her seat as her mount juddered. Teeth bit. The engine twisted, as she forced the spinning teeth into its core.\n\n'Get clear!' shouted Dolloran. Acastia ripped the blade out of the top of the engine and bounded Elatus back. And not a second too soon. The plasma core at the engine's heart split. Sun-fire heat snapped out. Metal blew to liquid, to gas, to ash.\n\nAcastia was breathing hard, her head pounding.\n\n'My kill,' she breathed through her gritted teeth.\n\n'Yours,' came Pluton's cold voice. 'And it nearly cost you your life and Elatus.' Thaumas was stalking forwards, guns still locked steady on the wreckage of the engine. 'You should have held back, waited for us all to have it under our guns.'\n\n'You will hold your tongue,' she snarled, and felt Elatus gun its chainblade in sympathy.\n\n'I speak as I see.'\n\n'Why was it alone?' Dolloran's voice cut through the vox. Cyllarus was already in stride, pacing out north in an arc, head and gun scanning the distance. Light was failing fast now, pushing shadow across the land in a thick veil.\n\n'What?' Acastia's head was still fogged from the neuro-feedback. For a moment, for a beautiful moment, she had thought it would all stop.\n\n'An engine like that does not move on its own, too easily outclassed. Too easily killed to be worthwhile sending out alone.'\n\nAcastia twitched, suddenly cold. She was bringing Elatus around, its sensors at maximum gain as she looked out across the darkening land. Pluton was doing the same, bringing Thaumas into line with its lance kin.\n\n'I see nothing,' said Pluton.\n\nAcastia was about to echo his words when she saw it - red and bright on the auspex screen.\n\n'Enemy,' she called. 'Eleven hundred metres, sixty-degree angle, and narrowing.'\n\n'I have it,' replied Dolloran. 'I'm reading active weapons, metal hull, heat output. It's big. An armoured unit?'\n\n'We take it,' said Acastia, and she began to push Elatus forwards.\n\n'Hold,' said Pluton.\n\n'Command is at my word,' Acastia growled. 'We make the kill.'\n\n'Look,' said Pluton, his voice edged by control. 'Look with your eyes, as you do at the dawn.'\n\nSomething in the old man's voice held the words in her throat. She blinked, holding Elatus still, and flicked the screens to an unfiltered external view.\n\nThe darkening land was still, the ground-down grit of buildings rolling in low hills towards a vanishing point. There was nothing. Nothing. Just the last of the light fleeing the world and leaving the air bruised black. Then she saw it. A light. Yellow, shrunk to a pinprick by distance. Then another, glimmering into being. Then a scattering along the line of the black-mauve sky, rising up like sparks from a burning forest. The auspex began to ping. A snow of red runes began to blur across sensor screens.\n\nIt wasn't a column. It was a tide flowing across the land, east to west. Armoured units, transporters, automata walkers, Titans, air cover a firefly cloud above, all moving in a mass beyond the sight line from the Palace walls. On and on, the vibration now shaking the ground and the frame of the cockpit around Acastia. She swallowed with a dry mouth.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 150 kilometres, estimated.\n\n∞\n\nNight falls in the desert, but it brings no comfort to the man beneath the tree. Above Him the glare of the white sky fades to indigo then to deep blue, and then to black. Stars appear, flickering in the dark. They are not real, any more than the dust and the smell of distant fires are real. They come from Him. Stars, scent, image - even the concept of night as a metaphor to clothe this brief respite in the battle He is fighting - all are the way they are because this is the clothing His mind has made for what He endures. Here in the realm beyond sight, there is nothing that is not brought by those that come here. Once, long ago, but also only a moment past and in a moment to come, this realm was void, without even the idea of dimensions or duration so that it could be called empty. Long ago... Long, long ago... Now it is a place filled with the refuse of its travellers: the husks of grand ambitions and dreams, the shadows of atrocity, and the secrets of the countless dead and the yet to be born. It is both a lie and the truest thing to ever be.\n\nThe man beneath the tree watches the pinholes in the sheet of night for an age that is shorter than a heartbeat. They are all there, clustered in patterns that had been forgotten by most: Perseus, Aphrodite, Ursa... Memories, all of them, just like the dryness and the heat and the thirst... A memory... He lets His gaze drop.\n\nA figure stands nearby, barely visible in the starlight. He wears a robe of tattered white, holed and trailing threads. He has a stick in his hand. Nothing so grand that it could be called a staff, just a branch from a thorn bush, stripped of barbs and bark, surface smooth with the wear of hands, and made hard by time and sun. His face is young, but his eyes are still.\n\n'Peace and greetings,' says the young man. The man beneath the tree slowly raises a hand in acknowledgement and opens His cracked lips, but a reply either will not or cannot come. 'May I draw near?' asks the young man. 'I have water.'\n\nThe man beneath the tree nods. Then lets His head roll back so that it is resting against the trunk of the tree. The young man comes close. Above them, the bare branches of the tree stir. The wind that moves them smells only of dryness and thirst.\n\n'Here,' says the young man, kneeling down and holding up an unstoppered waterskin. The man beneath the tree raises a hand to grasp it, tries to grip the skin's neck. The skin slips and the young man catches it. Droplets of water fall from the spout. For a moment they rest on the ground, small domes of crystal catching the starlight. Then they seep into the dust.\n\nThe young man holds the waterskin up again, but this time to the man's mouth. A trickle flows at first, then a little more. The man beneath the tree drinks and drinks, slowly at first and then insistently, glugging and gurgling the water down. The young man takes the skin away when there is just a mouthful swashing in the bottom. The man beneath the tree looks up at him, and His eyes are dark holes and there is nothing kind in the grasp that grips the young man's arm.\n\n'I must keep something,' says Malcador, re-stoppering the skin and hanging it over his shoulder. 'For the journey back.'\n\nThe man beneath the tree, who here is far from an Emperor and too close to a god, nods, then slowly releases His grip.\n\n'My thanks,' He says, but His voice is thin and dry, the sound of dust rattling over half-buried stones.\n\nMalcador nods in reply.\n\n'How...' asks the man. 'How long?'\n\n'Not long,' says Malcador, then shakes his head. 'A little longer.' The man nods. Malcador watches Him. In this place his own emotion becomes a breath of wind and the shadows stirring across his face. 'I do not know if I can return again. The wheel is turning. Things are falling apart. Flesh, will and spirit, all of it. He and those with him are stronger than I dared think.'\n\nThe man rests His head on the bare tree again; His eyes are closed. 'A little longer...' He says.\n\n'Do you see something?' asks Malcador. 'I have looked but the cards and signs speak of nothing but the call of crows.'\n\nThe man shakes His head.\n\n'Do you see nothing?'\n\n'I see...'\n\n'There was one card out of place in the spread,' said Malcador. 'Just in the last reading. The Wanderer, his face turned away, his aspect turned to the Lightning Tower.'\n\n'I see...'\n\n'There was something in his hand, something held close that I could not see.'\n\nThe man's head comes up, and His eyes open. There is fire where His eyes should be.\n\n'You must go,' says the Emperor.\n\nMalcador looks up then.\n\nThere are eyes in the dark, round and silver, like grave coins. Shadows of hunched backs and fur and wide laughing jaws shift silently. They do not blink but shift. They are silent. Waiting. When the sun rises i"}
{"text":"ned away, his aspect turned to the Lightning Tower.'\n\n'I see...'\n\n'There was something in his hand, something held close that I could not see.'\n\nThe man's head comes up, and His eyes open. There is fire where His eyes should be.\n\n'You must go,' says the Emperor.\n\nMalcador looks up then.\n\nThere are eyes in the dark, round and silver, like grave coins. Shadows of hunched backs and fur and wide laughing jaws shift silently. They do not blink but shift. They are silent. Waiting. When the sun rises in the sky that is not a real sky they will become mirages, pillars of shadow and false promise in the blinding heat. For now they do not move or leap, but just watch. They have time. Here in the desert that is the world for the man beneath the dead tree, they have all the time that can be.\n\nMalcador moves slowly, straightening. He looks at the waterskin and then drains the last gulp of water from it. It vanishes as he lowers it, the idea of its shape falling as dust. He grips his stick, eyes on the circle of waiting shapes.\n\n'Thank you,' says the man beneath the tree.\n\nMalcador nods.\n\n'I will return with more,' he says.\n\n'No,' replies the man beneath the tree. 'Not again. There will be no way here.'\n\n'How will you endure?'\n\nThe man beneath the tree does not reply. Then He closes His eyes.\n\n'You will have to be swift,' He says. 'Go. Now.'\n\nAnd then, in a single moment, there is a roar and there is light. Not the hammer blow of the heat in the sky. The light of falling lightning. The light of a sunbeam on the crest of a wave. It flashes out, and the watching shadows flee, mewling and growling.\n\nMalcador is already running, bare feet pounding the parched ground, running and running into the distance, back the way he came and the way he cannot walk again.\n\nThe light blazing from the man beneath the tree stutters, fades.\n\nThe man is alone again.\n\nHe closes His eyes.\n\nThe coolness of night drains away. The sky is a hammer blow of white heat again. In the distance the calls of crows and jackals rise with the wind and dust. The dead tree stirs, twigs rattling as they move. Beneath its meagre shade, the man sits and waits and endures.\n\nAnnihilation strength\n\nFamily\n\nSolaria\n\nMercury Wall kill-zone\n\nThe wall rose before them. Storm clouds crowned its highest parapet. Cliff faces of rockcrete cut down from sky to ground, so vast and sheer that it felt that the eye shrank them to fit a sense of mortal scale. Macro cannon barrels became hair-fine spines. Hundred-storey towers shrank to the proportions of candles mounted on lamp holders. Half a kilometre wide at its narrowest point. Touching thirteen hundred metres high from where it rose from the ground. It was not a wall, not truly. That was too small a word for a creation of this kind. Its kin were not the rings of stone thrown up by the fearful kings of old; its kin were the mountains who it had supplanted.\n\nShard Bastion jutted from its face like an axe blade left in the shield of a foe. Running from the base of Mercury to its uppermost parapet, it had been the core of a mountain. Rogal Dorn's warmasons had peeled the rock from around it, cored it out and lashed the wall to it as it grew upwards. When the rare sunlight caught its edge, it shone as though it were a piece of freshly knapped flint.\n\nAcastia felt herself shivering in Elatus' cockpit. She had been riding now for three days without sleep. The last hundred kilometres had been a winding sprint, the wall ever in the distance, the promise of the enemy's vanguard ever at her heels.\n\n'Signal again,' she called.\n\n'Vox distortion has not abated,' came Pluton's voice in reply. 'There is no point-'\n\n'Just do it!' She cut the link and keyed her own broadcast control. 'Come on... come on...' she muttered. Around her, Elatus' stride jolted her across the broken ground, and the wall grew before her. Static broke through her ears, rolling like the surge of a tide.\n\nThey had passed an outpost bunker and found it burning. Kill automata lurked in the smoke that boiled from it. Soot had covered their limbs and pistons. They had made swift kills of the machines, not slowing, the pride of the action not breaching the thoughts that filled her head, rising up in the blackness of eye-blinks.\n\nMachines... a moving mountain range of machines... ground shaking... something buzzing in her ears... her heartbeat. Static. The pulse of a vox tuned to a dead frequency...\n\nThe enemy harbinger units were already in the kill-zone moving to the horizon line. The wall command would know that something had happened, but not what; they would not know what was coming. The vox, and even buried cable links to the outposts, had been failing since the fall of the Lion's Gate space port. That was why they sent units like hers into the blind zone.\n\n'Respond...' she muttered, keying the long-range vox again. 'Respond!'\n\nSignal clarity had been getting worse for months. Damage to key systems, loss of personnel, lack of time to repair. But out in the kill-zone, Acastia had often felt that it was like a cloud falling over everything, muffling, corroding, breaking the defenders into small pieces not by force but by the soft hiss of static. Now it felt like not just a fog but a presence, as though the cloud of isolation and signal failure were chasing them as they ran.\n\nA pop and screech burst from her helm speakers. She swore, ears ringing.\n\n'Nothing,' said Dolloran.\n\n'Distance to wall ten point two kilometres,' said Pluton.\n\n'There is something behind us,' said Dolloran.\n\n'I cannot see anything,' said Pluton. 'Negative contacts on auspex. Negative on visual.'\n\n'I can...' the inter-Knight vox-connection slurred. 'I can feel it. Can't you?'\n\n'Quiet,' snapped Acastia. 'Keep the stride.'\n\nShe knew what Dolloran meant though - her back prickled with sweat. She wanted to look back. She blinked...\n\nHuge shapes moving... a tremble... a buzz of static and grinding metal... like the tread of a god... like a pulse... like a dying voice counting its last seconds...\n\nAn alert chimed. Acastia's eyes flicked to the power plasma output gauges. Elatus was running at the edge of power output, and into the red warning zone of fuel depletion.\n\n'Come on,' she said to Elatus. 'Come on... do not fail us now. Run this last course for me.'\n\nShe could see the outer lines now, the folded earth beneath the wall where trenches and mazes of kill traps and mines tangled the ground in the shadow of the wall.\n\nHalf without hope, she keyed the long-range vox again.\n\n'Mercury command - this is Vyronii Lance Hymettus, acknowledge.'\n\nA buzz and shriek of static.\n\n'Vyronii Lance Hymettus, this is Mercury command.'\n\nFor a second she was silent, the jolt of Elatus' stride seeming distant. What will happen after this? she wondered. What will happen after I speak?\n\n'Intelligence from blind zone - total priority - assault force sighted and inbound to Mercury. Repeat, assault force inbound to Mercury Wall section. Estimated distance to wall one hundred and fifty kilometres.'\n\nSilence for a moment, the buzz drone of vox distortion.\n\n'Received and understood, Vyronii Lance Hymettus,' said the voice over the vox. 'Confirm force strength estimate.'\n\nAcastia paused, attempting to find a word that encompassed what they had seen walking up towards the edge of the world.\n\n'Annihilation,' she said at last. 'Annihilation strength.'\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\n'Is that your full report, bondsman?' General Nasuba's voice crackled over the top of the holo-projection of a Knight pilot. The woman nodded. Even over the distorted transmission, Archamus could see that the House Vyronii bondsman was on the edge of collapse. To be expected. A long-range mission and return, then four hours of intense debrief would do that - that and the word that she had brought and what she had seen.\n\n'That is everything,' said the Knight pilot. 'By the honour of Vyronii.'\n\nThe holo-image froze.\n\n'Do we have any secondary corroboration?' asked Kazzim-Aleph-1. The magos-emissary twitched as he spoke. The exposed cogs looping out of his skull stuttered in their turning.\n\nFear, thought Archamus, fear.\n\n'There is no active air cover in that zone,' said the voice of Wall Master Efried.\n\n'Our reconnaissance units have not been able to penetrate deep behind the enemy's lines,' came the voice of the Khan, the whooping of the vox trying to cut up the power of his voice. 'I believe this rider of House Vyronii, though. She speaks truth - you can hear it.'\n\n'The other pilots in her formation also gave the same report,' said Nasuba.\n\nFor a second a wave of buzzing static filled the war room as the overlapping vox-feeds clashed. Archamus could smell burning plastek in the air. They had barely been able to reach the Khan, and the connection to Lord Sanguinius in the Anterior had failed completely. The scratched voices of Efried, Nasuba, Raldoron and Field General Vetrive on the Adamant Wall formed a clicking chorus of static. Only Rogal Dorn, Archamus, Malcador and the two representatives of the Mechanicus were physically present in the room.\n\n'Ground vibration sensors on the northern walls are consistent with a mass formation of armour, infantry and god-engines moving towards the Mercury-Exultant sections,' said Ambassador Vethorel, shooting a look at her fellow tech-priest.\n\n'There are a number of ways of interpreting the data,' said Kazzim-Aleph-1.\n\n'It is real,' said Dorn. Archamus looked at his lord. The Praetorian shifted his gaze to Kazzim-Aleph-1. It was like the realigning of a gun barrel.\n\n'It is a strange move,' said the voice of Vetrive. 'To march against where we are strongest.'\n\n'Is it?' asked the voice of the Khan. 'Breach Mercury and they pierce us to the heart. Just as with the attack at Saturnine, so at Mercury. What they could not do by guile they do by raw strength.'\n\n'What strength could they bring to breach the wall?' asked Archamus.\n\n'Mortis,' said Vethorel. 'The Legio Mortis.' Kazzim-Aleph-1 twi"}
{"text":"his gaze to Kazzim-Aleph-1. It was like the realigning of a gun barrel.\n\n'It is a strange move,' said the voice of Vetrive. 'To march against where we are strongest.'\n\n'Is it?' asked the voice of the Khan. 'Breach Mercury and they pierce us to the heart. Just as with the attack at Saturnine, so at Mercury. What they could not do by guile they do by raw strength.'\n\n'What strength could they bring to breach the wall?' asked Archamus.\n\n'Mortis,' said Vethorel. 'The Legio Mortis.' Kazzim-Aleph-1 twitched again. 'The Death's Heads have been absent from the battle sphere but we know they came with the enemy. A full Titan Legion and all that can come with it.'\n\n'Just so,' said Dorn.\n\nThe buzz and crackle diluted the moment of silence.\n\n'We cannot pull forces from the rest of the walls and lines,' said Raldoron. 'The pressure of assaults is increasing. If we do, then they will force a breach elsewhere.'\n\n'This moment was always going to come,' said Dorn. 'We have strength to meet it. Mortis walks to our walls. They must be denied. Strength for strength.'\n\nDorn looked at Vethorel. Kazzim-Aleph-1's head rotated around in surprise to look at his fellow priest. Vethorel held her gaze on Rogal Dorn.\n\nVethorel keyed a control on the projection table.\n\nA fresh cone of light replaced the image of the Vyronii bondsman. Pixellated snow boiled in the cold light. A face formed in the deluge, flickering even as it hardened.\n\nKazzim-Aleph-1's cogs whirred and his eyes buzzed as they focused.\n\n'My greetings,' said Princeps Maximus Cydon. 'The Legio Ignatum, by the command of the Fabricator General and the will of the Praetorian of Terra, prepares to walk.'\n\nArteria 29, Interior Kill-zone Arcon, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThe Titans of Ignatum walked the empty streets of the Palace. They walked in single file, zigzagging through the arterial roads that led from their underground hangars to the northern walls. Over fifty engines in a four-kilometre column from the grand Warlord at its head to the missile-heavy Reavers in the snake's tail. Every few kilometres the lead Titan sounded its war-horn, and the call would roll down the column from engine to engine. Rainwater poured from their backs. The buildings they passed shook and shook with the rhythm of their tread. People huddled in their homes and shelters heard and felt the god-machines pass. A few wondered if it was a sign of the end; some went to windows and high places to try to catch a glimpse of the machines. Soldiers stationed close to the route looked up, mouths open as the red, yellow and black figures walked on.\n\nThe interior kill-zones ran forty kilometres back from the walls. No one lived there any more, and the empty shells of buildings had been fused together with rubble and rockcrete mix to create blocks tens of kilometres wide. Fortress-builders had blocked roads and streets to create winding routes that anything going to or coming from the walls would have to pass through. Gun nests covered every turn. Most were likely unmanned - the soldiers pulled away to the walls until the breach came. Buildings filled with explosives stood ready to detonate and block the path of attackers. Tanks of volatile chem-refuse sat in ranks ready to be lit and poured into the streets. Layers of mines dotted the sides of the deserted buildings. If... when the walls fell, the enemy would die here for every step they took. Until then, it waited, the barrels of the guns and the empty eye sockets of the buildings watching the vanguard of Legio Ignatum march to the Mercury Wall.\n\nAfter they had gone, the columns of bulk haulers would follow. Blocks of red steel, blazoned with black and yellow and bearing the marks of Legio Ignatum, they would take hours to pass. Within were the machines and crews that kept the Legio walking: vox-sensora-fanes; munition caches the size of small hab-blocks; forge-fires; racks of armour plates, each a metre thick; plasma-charge fonts. The soldiers of the skitarii went with them, their red coats slick with rain, red light burning from eye slits in chrome visors. Heat rose from them, cooking raindrops to puffs of steam. When they reached their destination these units would unfurl into the caverns and hangars at the wall base and make ready to welcome the full strength of the Legio Ignatum, which walked a day behind them. Three hundred personnel for each Titan, from lowest servitor to highest magister of flux or binder of signal-aetherics. On and on they walked to the Mercury Wall, and above them the false thunder rolled and the ground shook to the tread of iron.\n\nHouse Vyronii enclave, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nCaradoc found Acastia in the ablutions chamber. It was small, a box of rockcrete holding the foetid air and the smell of sweat, leather and metal polish. Faded house colours hung on the walls. Grey recycled water ran tepid from faucets into metal bowls and troughs. In the time they had been there, rust had started to creep over the fittings, and mould had begun to gather like solidified shadows at the edge of the walls and tiles. It was hot, the summer heat greater than the sluggish air circulation could cope with. Dolloran was sloshing water over his hair and attempting to smooth it back above the glossy skin of his face. The fires that had remade him had left him with pain that he hid, and a layer of scar tissue over face, shoulders and hands. Sweat and water gathered on his nose as he closed his eyes for a second. He looked as exhausted as Acastia felt. Here, separated from the machine-nerve link of the Helm Mechanicum and her steed, the fire had drained from her, leaving a grey numbness.\n\n'Tried to sleep,' said Dolloran.\n\nShe looked over at him. His eyes opened. Red veins threaded the whites.\n\n'Think I got to the edge of it...' He gave a smile that rearranged the scars of his face. 'Then everything just slammed back, you know?'\n\nShe had thought of sleep; her position meant that she could rest as needed. But the few dreams she had when she had closed her eyes in the last few days had been unpleasant: thick, like hardening amber, flecked with things she wanted to forget trapped inside.\n\n'Better to be awake,' she replied. 'Better yet to ride.'\n\n'Indeed,' he said. 'For house, for honour.'\n\n'For house?' she said, looking down into the bowl of water in front of her and stirring it with her fingers. 'Why not just because we choose to?'\n\nShe could feel him frown.\n\n'I am not talking of this, Acastia,' he said.\n\n'No,' she said and could not keep the sneer from her tone. 'You never do or will - it is comforting to be a loyal dog at the hearth, isn't it?' She did not look at him, but down into the bubble-flecked water in the bowl, but she could almost see him give a small shake of his head.\n\nShe had just brought a hand of tepid water to her face from the bowl when the metal door released and slammed wide. She began to turn, but he was already across the water-spattered floor, and into the space behind her. She turned the last part of the circle so that she was looking at him full in the eye.\n\nCaradoc, scion of House Vyronii, the Emerald Lance, and sixth in descent from the high chair, returned her gaze. His face twitched, lips curling over pearl-enamelled teeth. Sweat was pouring from the dark hair pulled back along his scalp in a ponytail, and running down his face. His cheeks were flushed, and there was the tang and flavour of spice liquor on his breath. He was in full armour, she noticed, caparisoned in chain mail, boiled leather and white and green chequered pressure plates. Beads of sweat had gathered on the tips of his moustache. He was very, very angry, she could tell. Her brother had always had poor control of his bile.\n\n'My lord,' she said, and bowed her head. 'How may I serve?'\n\nCaradoc's jaw clamped tight. His eyes were hard points of night.\n\n'Kneel,' he said, the word a hiss from behind his teeth.\n\nAcastia went to one knee, slowly, aware that Dolloran had already knelt. The water was still sloshing into the bowl on the stand behind her.\n\n'How may you serve?' he said, the words low, but rising in tone like a stone gathering an avalanche as it rolled down the mountain. 'How may you serve? You serve by duty, by humility, by keeping to the place you were born to.'\n\n'If I have given offence, sir, it was not my intention,' she said.\n\n'Intention?' he snarled, face flushing red above the collar of his armour. 'Who gives a shit what you intended? You ride beyond these walls for us, for Vyronii!'\n\nShe knew why he was angry, had known why since he slammed open the door, and had suspected that something like this would happen as soon as she gave her report of what they had seen in the blind zone not to him as her liege, but to the command staff officers in Shard Bastion, and soon after to General Nasuba and Wall Master Efried. To them it was a simple matter of strategic intelligence. To Caradoc, being the bearer of such information to high commanders was an honour, one he should have shared in. His prize and the gilding of such contact had been taken from him. The rest of existence might be falling, but to her half-brother and honoured lord, the world still fell into a pattern of pride and cruelty that was called chivalry. This was not a moment of desperation or simple, military expediency; it was a chance to shine. He was right too, in one respect - she had stolen that moment from him and known that she was doing it.\n\n'I am sorry, lord,' she said, neutrally, 'but I do not understand.'\n\nHe stepped back, looking at her, the smile on his lips an ugly gash across his face.\n\n'Do you not, Acastia?' He reached down and began to pull the gauntlet off his hand. It was heavy, hardened leather, lined with chain mail and metal plates. The flesh of the hand beneath was damp with sweat. 'The blood that ties us is a privilege. Bastard born though you are. It binds us. It harnesses you to my will, and though you do not appreciate the fact, it binds my hands.' He was very clos"}
{"text":"ot understand.'\n\nHe stepped back, looking at her, the smile on his lips an ugly gash across his face.\n\n'Do you not, Acastia?' He reached down and began to pull the gauntlet off his hand. It was heavy, hardened leather, lined with chain mail and metal plates. The flesh of the hand beneath was damp with sweat. 'The blood that ties us is a privilege. Bastard born though you are. It binds us. It harnesses you to my will, and though you do not appreciate the fact, it binds my hands.' He was very close now, the gauntlet held between pink fingers, light and soft, as though it were a sleeping dove. 'You are protected from so much...' His voice was low, almost a whisper. 'And that protection exists by the honour you scorn.'\n\nHe turned to Dolloran, looking down at the kneeling man.\n\n'This one is not like you. Low-born, no trace of misplaced nobility in his veins. Just a will to serve his lord. He knows his place. Knows that he is ours. Knows that he honours and obeys us with his every deed.' Caradoc rested the empty gauntlet on Dolloran's shoulder. 'You know that, don't you, serf?'\n\n'Yes, my lord,' replied Dolloran.\n\nCaradoc looked up at Acastia.\n\n'You see?' he said. 'Loyal, obedient... like a hound.' He looked down at Dolloran. 'Lift your head up.'\n\nAcastia began to shake her head. Dolloran swallowed, and raised his head.\n\n'No-' began Acastia.\n\nCaradoc was fast, muscle surging under armour and mail. Dolloran did not have a chance to rise. The gauntlet lashed across his face. Blood and teeth spewed across the floor. He pitched sideways. Caradoc struck again as Dolloran's head came back up.\n\n'Do you see?' he snarled, striking. The impact a wet smack of mashed flesh and cracking bone. 'You are protected!' Another blow. Blood splattering the tiles. The water brimming the bowl on the stand overflowing. 'You ungrateful...' A low crunch. '...cur!'\n\nCaradoc straightened, breathing hard. Dolloran was still. Water was pouring across the floor, diluting the blood to grey-pink foam.\n\nAcastia felt herself flinch forwards, then stopped herself.\n\n'You serve our house. First and last and forever.'\n\nOn the floor, Dolloran gave a moan that formed bubbles in the spreading pool. Caradoc turned, stepped over him and walked out of the door. Acastia lunged forwards, pulling up Dolloran, blood-warm water on her hands.\n\n'Dolloran? Dolloran!'\n\nA sound that might have been a word or a rasp came from the red meat of his lips.\n\nSomething moved outside the still-open door. Acastia looked up. Pluton stood just beyond the threshold. He met her eyes. His old face was a mask. His gaze hard. Their gazes held for a long second, and then he turned and followed Caradoc out of sight.\n\nLegio Ignatum Vanguard Strategium, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nLegio Liaison Sentario swept into the sub-command space. The Inferallti Hussars guarding the doors came to attention. Targeter eyes gleamed. Sentario kept moving forwards. Orbiting servo-units peeled away from her and buzzed into the cavernous gloom. An army followed her: enginseers, calculus tacticae adepts, servitors, signal augurs and skitarii marched in, fanning out, carrying and wheeling floats of machinery. Shouts and blurts of binary flooded the silence with echoes.\n\nSentario locked on to the cluster of figures waiting opposite the main doors. Her augmetic eyes tagged, logged and identified them all in the space of a blink: Wall Lieutenant Angiol of the VII Legion; Colonel Vastri of the Inferallti Hussars, bastion command cadre; Magos Intanil-7-Delta-Chi-Gimmel and Magos Fer-Ultio-4, governors of ordnance and sacred-signal traffic on the walls respectively. Behind them an arc of officers and adepts.\n\nShe gave them a bow of her head as she swept towards them.\n\n'Liaison Sentario,' said Angiol. 'Welcome to Shard Bastion.'\n\n'My greetings,' said Sentario without breaking stride. Signals flicked across her noospheric link, blurs of code and blessed cipher-packages. There were smudges of distortion, too. Scratched tangles of code interference bleeding in from the bastion's outer shells of data transfer. She thought-flicked to direct transmission and sent a signal to the Legio units pouring into the space. 'High degree of localised transmission fidelity failing. Command: site our noospheric and transmission cleansing units. Institute full counter protocols before we conjoin the spirits of our systems to the outer data links.'\n\nShe felt the command link ping with acknowledgements, as she opened her mouth to speak.\n\n'I tender honour and respect from Princeps Maximus Cydon and the Legio Ignatum. Is this the complete liaison cadre?' she asked, still moving forwards, eyes sweeping the space, noting blocks of machinery touching down on the rockcrete floor, calculating the efficiency of movement. Time was decrementing in a cascade of minutes and seconds at the edge of her awareness. A Legio strategium emplacement was not a simple thing to install. Hundreds of personnel and systems needed to be sited, locked, tested and brought online, and this was just the first of five that would be installed in the Mercury Wall before the Legio walked as one.\n\n'It is,' said Angiol, and Sentario noted that the Space Marine seemed to be smiling.\n\n'This is the summary of current tactical position and readiness across the wall section and kill-zone,' said Vastri, holding out a cylinder of ribbon-bound parchment.\n\nSentario took it and held it out to two of her servo-units. The floating devices seized the cylinder and unfurled it with manipulator claws. Scanning beams swept over the sheets. Information began to unfurl across the noosphere.\n\n'There are scout forces in the kill-zone,' she said.\n\n'Legio Solaria units,' said Vastri, 'and lance formations from House Vyronii, Konor and Cadmus, with fast armoured squadrons from the Vordate Armour Brigades backed up by Seventh Legion elements.'\n\n'A thin net,' said Sentario. Behind her, slab containers were rolling through the doors. Each was a signal and data pod to be trunked in and powered up.\n\n'A fine enough mesh to catch an assault of this size,' said Angiol. 'It is of main assault strength.'\n\n'Let's hope so,' she said.\n\n'Strategic integration stands ready,' said Intanil-7-Delta-Chi-Gimmel. 'What is your estimate of readiness?'\n\n'The first engines are already here and ready,' said Sentario. 'Last enemy distance to wall was one hundred and fifty kilometres estimated. The vanguard force must walk in five hours. This enclave will be installed and functional within two hundred and seventy-four minutes. We will be ready.'\n\nAdeptus Mechanicus enclave, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nAbhani Lus Mohana looked up from where she had been crouched beside the head of her Warhound. A sound was moving through the forge chamber. Noise was a constant here: the rattle of chains, the pulse and thrum of charge coils and the whoosh of steam, but all those sounds had a rhythm. It was the layered heartbeat of the machine. This noise was different. It was rising unsynchronised with the beat of the forge chamber.\n\nShe glanced to where her two moderati sisters crouched on the other side of the data console.\n\nAbhani nodded. 'Let's take a look...'\n\nThe forge cavern was part of the Adeptus Mechanicus enclave. Buried under the Inner Palace, not so deep as the great dungeons, but a city under a greater city. Here was the exiled heart of the true servants of the Omnissiah: all the secrets and devices saved from lost Mars and the great forge worlds, all the exiles and scraps of strength and knowledge, held beneath the earth like the hoard of a mythical worm, circling, eternal... until and unless the defences failed. Until all was lost.\n\nAbhani moved out of the shadow of Bestia Est. The Warhound Titan had not seen action since a raid beyond the Western Hemispheric Wall into the False Mechanicum forces massing there. That had been five weeks ago, a limited action sanctioned by the priesthood and the Collegia Titanica. Only one Legio, great Gryphonicus, was continually and completely engaged. Its engines were spread across battlefronts like nails trying to hold the tattered map of the Palace in place. Ignatum, old and at near full strength, had been held back, she had heard. A decisive reserve of strength waiting for the hour of need to arrive.\n\nThe rest of the Titans were a menagerie of many Legios, most the survivors of the Titan Death at Beta-Garmon. Some had lost so much that their legion lived in only a single engine. Others, like Abhani's own Legio Solaria, were a fraction of their former strength. Battered, broken, reduced to relics of glory. She thought that was why they were permitted to walk so sparingly: the fear of losing more after so much had already been lost.\n\nShe reached the end of the passage. A crowd flowed down the central arteria. She could see priests in the cloth of dozens of denominations, electro-priests, magister-coders, enginseers-majoris. A cacophonic drone of machine code and voices surrounded them, growing in volume and agitation. At the head of the wave walked the slim figure of Ambassador Vethorel, and a cluster of priests and skitarii guards in gilded plate. Abhani could see the crowd was churning in Vethorel's wake, calling to her, trying to overtake her and being pushed back by her guards.\n\n'What is happening?' asked one of Abhani's moderati from behind her. 'Does the ambassador bring word from the Fabricator General?'\n\n'I don't know,' said Abhani. 'We should follow.' She stepped onto the arteria and joined a flow of Titan crew coming from the side passages and niches where the god-machines rested. After a few strides Abhani had a feeling she knew where they were going. They did not have to follow far for the feeling to be proved right. Vethorel halted in front of a towering recess. A Warlord Titan stood within it, wrapped in scaffold, its head separated and suspended by a web of cables and chains. Red covered its metal skull, and mottled green its skin of metal. It was called Luxor Invictoria and "}
{"text":"a flow of Titan crew coming from the side passages and niches where the god-machines rested. After a few strides Abhani had a feeling she knew where they were going. They did not have to follow far for the feeling to be proved right. Vethorel halted in front of a towering recess. A Warlord Titan stood within it, wrapped in scaffold, its head separated and suspended by a web of cables and chains. Red covered its metal skull, and mottled green its skin of metal. It was called Luxor Invictoria and it was the principal Titan of Legio Solaria.\n\n'Is the Great Mother awake?' asked Vethorel. Seamless noospheric connections sent her voice to vox-grilles in the cavern walls and ceiling. The ambassador's voice echoed out, though her tone was even. The hubbub of machine and flesh voices faded.\n\n'I am,' came an answer. It crackled from the head of Luxor Invictoria, the voice of a war god aping that of a human. The voice of the Great Mother, Grand Master of the remains of Legio Solaria. Her mother's voice.\n\n'Great Mother,' said Vethorel, and the tone was lighter, softer - intimate even, though still loud enough to carry through the caverns. 'I come to you to ask for your aid.'\n\n'When has the proxy of the Fabricator General ever asked for aid? The machines turn at the word of Zagreus Kane and so by your word, too. You command.' A pause and crackle from the god-machine's speaker horns that made Abhani remember her mother's dry chuckle. 'I appreciate the gesture, though. What do you ask?'\n\n'The enemy has unleashed the last of its forces. Mortis walks, Great Mother, here, on Terra.'\n\nThere was true quiet then. The stunned silence of calculations paused and equations suspended. For a second, Abhani imagined that she heard the rumble of the cavern's turning mechanisms halt. Legio Mortis, first of the traitors to turn against the Omnissiah, largest of the Legios, born on Mars itself in the age that saw the truth of the Machine rise to create the Priesthood. Ancient. Mighty. Remorseless. She had seen their work on Beta-Garmon. Many of the surviving Titans and crew in the caverns owed the near annihilation of their Legios to the Death's Heads.\n\n'All of it?' said the Great Mother in a croak of electrostatic and turning cogs.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'You are certain?'\n\n'The projections based on the data and probability place it in that threshold.'\n\n'They walk as one?'\n\n'That is likely.'\n\n'So you come to ask us to walk against them?'\n\nVethorel gave a deep nod that was almost a bow.\n\n'Ignatum walk,' she said. A clatter of gears and buzz of code from vox-grilles. 'In entire, as one. They go to meet the enemy beyond the wall and hold them.'\n\nAnother crackling chuckle.\n\n'If the Fire Wasps have not changed their stripes, then holding will not be their aim - they will seek to destroy the enemy utterly.'\n\n'Perhaps so,' said Vethorel. 'But they cannot walk alone. Even with all their might, the enemy has greater numbers, and the attacks on the rest of the Palace only intensify.'\n\nNow Vethorel turned, looking out at the crowd of priests and Titan crews around her. Abhani saw it then, the play of this moment, the tactics at work. Here, Vethorel was the hunter seeking to bring down a quarry. This was not just an appeal to the Great Mother of Solaria; it was an entreaty to all of those others listening. Abhani knew that the wounds of the Schism, the founding of the Mechanicus and the losses at Beta-Garmon had run together like cracks spidering through a steel beam. The siege had only forced those cracks wider.\n\n'You ask us to walk into annihilation?' came a voice from the crowd, unaugmented but loud. The throng parted as a man in the purple and green of Legio Amaranth, the Night Spiders, came forward. 'The engines of our legion lie in rust on the fields of Beta-Garmon from the last time we answered such a call.'\n\nAbhani heard a murmur of assent and echoed code buzz from amongst the crowd.\n\n'We have walked beyond the walls twelve times since this battle began. Three more engines gone... Ignatum can walk, but Amaranth will not. Not now. Not for certain loss.'\n\nThat was it, thought Abhani, laid bare. We are wounded and afraid, and that has made the masters of the weapons of gods cowards.\n\nThe buzz was a rising tide now. Others in the crowd called out, some in blurts of binharic, others with cries of shame and dishonour. But there was a current rolling behind the calls, a growl of agreement with the Amaranth princeps. He looked at Vethorel and shook his head.\n\n'How much more?' he asked. 'How much more when we have lost almost everything?'\n\n'Then we give everything.' The voice of Esha Ani Mohana Vi rolled across the crowd. The crowd of priests and Titan crew were looking up at the head and frame of Luxor Invictoria. 'There is nothing beyond this.' A pause and the murmur of cogs in the quiet. 'Solaria shall walk. Even if it is into the night. We shall walk.'\n\nThere were nods then, some cries of agreement.\n\nThe Legio Amaranth princeps gave a single shake of his head, and turned away. Others followed in his wake as he left the crowd. Abhani noticed that apart from her own sisters of Solaria, those remaining were few. A trio of crew from the Legio Defensor, the lone crew of the only Legio Atarus engine to reach Terra. Vethorel looked around at them.\n\n'My thanks,' she said, 'and the thanks of the Fabricator General and Praetorian.'\n\n'Ambassador,' said the voice of the Great Mother, now coming from a small speaker grille and sounding almost as though it was formed by a mouth. 'I would speak with you.'\n\nVethorel gave a bow of thanks to the remaining crowd and moved closer into the shadow of Luxor Invictoria.\n\n'You as well, my daughter,' called the Great Mother. Abhani glanced at her legion sisters and then followed the ambassador. The head of Luxor Invictoria lowered on its chains as they approached, until its chin was level with their heads.\n\n'Abhani Lus Mohana,' said the voice of her mother. 'You will go first to this hunt. I have reviewed the data supplied by the Praetorian's command. They will need hunters to find the enemy before the main forces can engage. Ignatum have strength but your maniple can be in the field first. This is your honour and my will.'\n\nAbhani blinked, then tilted her head.\n\n'You knew,' she said. 'Great Mother, you knew the ambassador was coming. You knew what would happen and what you would say.'\n\n'Only a fool walks into a battleground without knowing the terrain, and the ambassador is no fool,' replied her mother. Then she paused. 'You play a dangerous game again, Vethorel,' she said. 'You always have.'\n\n'There is no game here,' said Vethorel softly, and Abhani thought she felt a tinge of something very human and very tired in those words. 'I hoped you would consent. I hoped you would agree to walk.'\n\n'What have we come to when the voice of the leader of a broken army carries more than the entreaties of the Fabricator General?'\n\n'The edge, Great Mother,' said Vethorel. 'It means we have come to the edge.'\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 140 kilometres, estimated.\n\nOn the shore of a lost sea\n\nThe past came here to die\n\nFaith\n\nIssus Escarpment, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThere was no sea. The water had long drained and burned away to salt-saturated pools at the bottom of valleys that had once been lightless places far beneath the waves. The shoreline existed still, though, but now it was the shoulder of a hill that slid down into the shimmering distance.\n\nOll rubbed his eyes. They were streaming. The sky above them was a blue-tinged white, the sunlight hazed by pollution. Heat hammered the exposed skin of his face and arms as he raised a hand to shield his sight.\n\n'Where are we?' asked Rane.\n\nOll licked his lips and found them dry. A gust of wind slid over him. It was hot, the breath of a furnace that pulled more sweat from his skin. Far off he could see the baked ground roll into hills and dust bowls before sliding into the distance behind the heat shimmer. Empty. Drained. He had looked at the compass, but the needle just turned slowly in place, same with the pendulum. He didn't need them to answer Rane's question, though.\n\n'Where-'\n\n'We are where we were before,' said Oll. He lowered his hand and knelt down. The bone-white sand was dry in his palm. He dabbed it to his tongue, tasted the salt. He thought of the waves breaking on the shore and the smell of the sea - an aeon ago, minutes ago, a cut of a knife ago away. 'This is the same spot we left, or as near as makes no odds.'\n\n'The tunnel, the sea...' said Rane.\n\n'Gone,' said Oll. 'The sea went and the tunnel will have been ground down or buried.' He stood, wiping the dust from his hands, and turned to look at his crew.\n\nHis crew... The word had come to his mind without consideration. Was it because of where he stood - on the edge of the sea that had been his home for much of the first age of his life? Was it because in some way that was what they had always been to him, and he had only just felt the truth of it? They had no ship, but were they so different from those who had sailed the Argo, or leapt the waves under the black sails of the ship of Theseus? Perhaps that was why he had brought them so far with him - not just to keep them alive, but because that had always been the way of the great journeys of the past.\n\nThey did not look like much: a bunch of vagabonds in mixed military and civilian kit. Zybes was looking around, his gun held half-ready, finger beside the trigger guard. He was squinting at the distance, head wrapped in a faded blue kerchief against the sun. Krank was drinking water from a canteen. Oll noticed that the old soldier's hands were shaking slightly as they held the canteen. He was sweating hard. Rane was standing close to Krank, checking the pouches of his kit compulsively. Graft was motionless, machine components still, shoulders slumped. The skin of its flesh was reddening in the sun. Katt was frowning under the brim of a slouch hat she had taken from a pack. Her eyes were set o"}
{"text":"e, head wrapped in a faded blue kerchief against the sun. Krank was drinking water from a canteen. Oll noticed that the old soldier's hands were shaking slightly as they held the canteen. He was sweating hard. Rane was standing close to Krank, checking the pouches of his kit compulsively. Graft was motionless, machine components still, shoulders slumped. The skin of its flesh was reddening in the sun. Katt was frowning under the brim of a slouch hat she had taken from a pack. Her eyes were set on the distance.\n\n'This is it?' asked Zybes. 'This is where we were supposed to be?'\n\nOll didn't answer. He thought of John's face looking up at him in the dark of the tunnel, blood on his cheeks, mouth wide as though trying to scream.\n\n'Where we are supposed to be...' he said, half to himself. In truth he was a long way now from where he thought he needed to be. That place was a couple of thousand kilometres off across the wasteland that had once been a sea. They had been supposed to meet there, he and John, and... and Her.\n\n'This is Terra, then?' said Rane.\n\n'It is,' said Oll, shaking himself, wiping the sweat that was gathering on his forehead. 'This is the Issus Escarpment, and the sea we saw in the other time covered all of that land beyond. Goes on for hundreds of leagues now, just dust and drift camps, and the ruins of old cities.'\n\n'But it's the right time?' asked Krank, corking his canteen. 'We are at... it?'\n\n'I reckon so,' said Oll. He pointed up at the sky just above the horizon. The glare was blinding and the haze thick, but there were shadows in the heavens. Big serrated shadows, like notched axe blades wielded by myth. 'You see them?'\n\n'Ships,' said Krank. 'Void-ships in close orbit.'\n\nOll dropped his hand, nodded.\n\n'Those are big ships...' breathed Rane.\n\n'That won't even be the half of it,' said Oll. 'They will have brought every tug that can haul a shell to this. I would. Above the centre of things, they will be stacked all the way up to the stars, and slinging down thunderbolts.'\n\n'And that's where we are going?' asked Rane. 'To where that's happening?'\n\nOll let out a breath.\n\n'I reckon, but not first.'\n\n'Your friend,' said Zybes. 'John, that one - he led us here, right? Back there in the tunnel it was witch-sight or something, and that led us here? Because he is not here. Feels a lot like being lost again.'\n\nThe thread... play it out behind you or you will be lost...\n\nOll was about to reply, when Katt spoke.\n\n'That way,' she said, and pointed east. They all looked at her. 'There is something...' She paused, shivered and tilted her head as though trying to shake something free. 'I can hear something, and it's coming from that way.'\n\nOll looked at her for a long moment. She wasn't even asking if the rest of them could hear it. She knew only she could. A witch thing. A psyker thing.\n\n'What kind of thing?' Oll asked.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'Not sure. It's pulling at us. Like a voice that is a thread pulling.'\n\nOll blinked at Katt and then at the way she had pointed.\n\n'What's that way?' Zybes asked Oll.\n\nOll was still looking east. The haze was thickest there and the crest off the escarpment hid the distance.\n\n'There should be a macro conurbation,' he said. 'Hatay-Antakya Hive. If it's still there.'\n\n'Any chance that your friend John could be there?' Zybes again, pressing, almost angry, afraid and wanting to move on, to be gone. That was another thing that happened on a voyage like this, thought Oll. People got so used to moving to stay alive that they never wanted to stop. Oll had been like that once. Deep down he guessed he still was.\n\n'Could be,' said Oll carefully. It was possible, but part of him could not help thinking about that bloody-faced apparition of John Grammaticus screaming in the dark. Part of him thought that they should turn and find a way across the empty sea to the place they had been supposed to be going.\n\n'Okay,' Zybes said, and looked around at the rest of them before starting up the slope towards the ridge crest. 'Okay, let's get moving.'\n\nRane and Krank did not move. Katt glanced at Oll. He met her eyes. He frowned, then shrugged, and nodded.\n\n'Okay,' he said and made off after Zybes. Behind him the others followed.\n\nPlaza of Remembrancers (former), Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThe groundcar stopped twenty paces from the building. Rain streamed off the blue-green copper roof and bubbled up from where drainpipes vanished beneath the paving slabs of the plaza. Mauer waited for a minute, keeping the engine of the vehicle running and the auto-targeting top gun active. Nothing moved except the raindrops dancing on the wide pools of grey water.\n\n'A little paranoid?' asked Andromeda from the passenger cradle.\n\nMauer did not reply, but just watched the plaza and the front of the building, then flicked her gaze back to the auspex screen in the control console.\n\n'No movement,' said Mauer.\n\n'Who else do you worry will come looking?'\n\n'We have just entered into a conspiracy,' said Mauer. 'At this point everyone is a concern.'\n\n'Do you know much about the Lectitio Divinitatus?' Andromeda had asked as they crossed the Palace. Most of the mass transit system had been closed down, so they had used a Prefectus groundcar. Through the armoured glass slits, they had seen rain-glossed streets dotted with tank traps, and the sides of buildings hung with gun nests.\n\n'The cult of Imperial divinity,' Mauer had said. 'I know of it.'\n\n'You've read the texts, I'm sure,' said Andromeda.\n\nMauer nodded, waited. She had not known where they were going. That was one amongst a growing list of reasons she was almost regretting agreeing to Andromeda's proposition. Almost.\n\n'Not a convert then?' Mauer felt her face harden. Andromeda smiled. 'I wouldn't care, but given your nature it was improbable. That, and the number of them you've killed. Still, I thought I would check.'\n\n'They can be a threat,' said Mauer carefully.\n\n'Oh yes, they can,' said Andromeda. 'They really can, but right now they also might be useful.'\n\n'How?'\n\nAndromeda had grinned widely, but Mauer felt the coldness in the expression.\n\n'In a way that makes no sense.'\n\nMauer watched the rain fall for a little longer. This part of the Sanctum was deserted, the refugee populations housed elsewhere. It was too close to the heart of things to be open to wide numbers of people - a straight up security risk. It had been zoned and grown to house the various non-military functions of the Great Crusade, from the Conservatory, to the Officio Universalo. The buildings were still all there, but the only people walking the streets were soldiers in sweep patrol. The building she watched was the Symposium, the nominal place that the remembrancers had left from to go and immortalise the Great Crusade. The plaza was named after them, too. Mauer wondered if any of them had ever seen their supposed home.\n\nStill nothing moved in sight or on screen. She keyed the vehicle's vox-control.\n\n'Scryer-zero-six, this is Noon-zero-one, code check - one-alpha-seven-two.'\n\nA crackle and then a clipped voice with the accents of the Med-basin cities.\n\n'This is Scryer-zero-six, code confirm - six-seven-niner-one.'\n\nMauer nodded.\n\n'Target still in place?'\n\n'Still in place.'\n\n'Good. We are coming to you, out.'\n\nShe cut the vox, released the door and stepped out into the rain. Andromeda followed, swearing as she wrapped a plastek rain cloak over her grey robes. Mauer moved down the street and across the plaza towards a side door set in the Symposium's wall. Her gun was in her hand, ready but held loose at her side. The door opened when they were five paces away. She saw an increasingly familiar face.\n\n'In,' she said to Andromeda, and paused, scanning the street one more time before following. The hall inside smelled of damp stone and disuse.\n\n'You were clear to the door,' said Ahlborn, fastening the locks. 'No one out there - at least if there is, they are better than me.'\n\n'Chances are low then,' said Mauer, shaking the rain free of her coat. 'Keep it locked down until we are done.'\n\nAhlborn nodded. He was another one of the new recruits - were there any other kind? - to the Command Prefectus. Sharp, efficient: Mauer rated him highly and trusted him, as did Master of Huscarls Archamus.\n\n'Where is he?' she asked.\n\n'One floor up, third door after you come off the landing.'\n\n'How many do you have on that level?' she asked.\n\n'Two of my best, very carefully out of sight. Another two on the next floor and two on the roof.'\n\n'Nice and tight, eh, conroi-captain?'\n\n'Absolutely, boetharch,' he replied.\n\nMauer started down the corridor.\n\n'He knows something is happening,' said Ahlborn, from behind them. 'Can't say how or why, but don't be surprised if he is not surprised.' Ahlborn paused and gave the smallest shake of his head. 'He's clever and sharp. Doesn't look like much but... he's dangerous in his own way.'\n\n'I hope so,' said Mauer, and moved on.\n\nThey climbed the stairs, found the door and pushed it open. The room beyond must have been a library, but its high shelves and crystal-fronted cabinets were almost bare. A few volumes sat at the edge of cases, some on their side, a few open, mildew spotting the pages. A man stood beside a wide table of polished wood. He was old, and the creases of his face and the depths of his eyes held a life that had seen the universe turned upside down as he watched. He held a pair of books in his hands, one open, a finger jammed in the pages of the other. A battered dataslate sat on the tabletop by him.\n\n'You are Kyril Sindermann, so called Chief Interrogator and former Iterator Prime.'\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'And who are you?'\n\n'I am Boetharch Mauer of the Command Prefectus, and this is Andromeda-17 from...'\n\n'A non-explicit line of authority.'\n\n'I see,' said Sindermann, putting the books down on the table. He looked totally unsurprised and totally unfazed. 'Please, take a seat. Let's talk.'\n\nLion's Gate space port\n\nThe emissary of Horus came to the Lord of Iron where h"}
{"text":"e sat on the tabletop by him.\n\n'You are Kyril Sindermann, so called Chief Interrogator and former Iterator Prime.'\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'And who are you?'\n\n'I am Boetharch Mauer of the Command Prefectus, and this is Andromeda-17 from...'\n\n'A non-explicit line of authority.'\n\n'I see,' said Sindermann, putting the books down on the table. He looked totally unsurprised and totally unfazed. 'Please, take a seat. Let's talk.'\n\nLion's Gate space port\n\nThe emissary of Horus came to the Lord of Iron where he sat in the dark tower. Forrix met him as he emerged from the macro hoist. Argonis, as before, strode towards the doors of the command chamber. He came alone, his staff of office in one hand, his helm held in the other. Forrix did not try to stop him, but moved to the equerry's side.\n\n'I have an order, for your primarch,' said Argonis without breaking stride.\n\n'From the Warmaster,' said Forrix.\n\nArgonis did not answer, but Forrix thought he caught something move across the legionary's expression, a shadow of an emotion that should not have been there. Forrix recognised it. He had seen it before on the Vengeful Spirit as they had entered Horus' presence. In the stillness of the emissary's face there had been sorrow.\n\nThey stopped as they reached the data-cradle. The Iron Circle automata closed ranks as they approached but did not try to stop them.\n\n'Lord Perturabo, I bring word and command from the Warmaster of Mankind.'\n\nPerturabo did not respond or move. The data-cradle hummed and spun about the primarch. Flows of code blinked across screens, machines buzzed. But the eyes of the Lord of Iron did not move in his face. He had barely moved for the last twelve hours. Three hours into that time, the Lord of Iron had stopped calling up fresh data-sifts and report streams; he had just let the data wash over him in whatever format it came. In the last four, he had stopped issuing new commands. In the last thirty minutes, Forrix was not even sure if his lord was assimilating the data at all. But still he did not move from the cradle. It was as though a finality was creeping into Perturabo, a dreadful passivity in the face of whatever he was seeing. It was terrifying.\n\nArgonis took a breath to speak again.\n\n'Mass errors with the strategic data flow,' said Perturabo. 'So many errors and points of corruption that I can barely see the war.' He looked around at Argonis. His eyes were dark mirrors. 'I am becoming blind.'\n\n'Lord,' said Argonis. 'The Warmaster commands you-'\n\n'It does not matter,' said Perturabo. The Lord of Iron stood from the cradle. Cables snapped. Sparks fizzled across his armour. Screens flickered and filled with static. 'I know what you are here to say, emissary. Before my sight dimmed, I saw. It was there in the troop movements. In the sensor flow. Too great a change to not be ordained.' Perturabo's gaze held on Argonis. The primarch's armour purred. 'But speak your words, equerry. Let it be done.'\n\n'You are ordered to move your location. You shall disperse your Legion warriors amongst the assault forces. You shall take command of the assault on the Sanctus wall section.'\n\nForrix felt the breath become cold in his lungs.\n\n'The surge of forces is near completion,' said Forrix. 'Without strategic oversight, how will we guide the-'\n\n'I will not,' said the Lord of Iron. Forrix just watched his primarch. Perturabo turned and looked at the terminals and jungle of cables filling the chamber. They all already had a wet, muscle-like sheen. 'Mortarion and the Death Guard are moving, they are coming here,' said Perturabo. 'Is that not so, emissary?'\n\nArgonis nodded.\n\n'That is the Warmaster's will.'\n\n'We are to be displaced?' Forrix could hear the disbelief crack the hard control of his voice. 'We can see victory and you would take its architects away before it is complete. Who will order the battle?'\n\n'Order...' The word seemed to echo though Perturabo had not raised his voice. 'There is no order here now. This is not a war any more. This is a storm. And you see it, don't you, emissary, equerry to the Warmaster who was once my brother? You see it. I am blind but now I can see as you see. The Legion war is dead. The cause we raised arms for is a corpse. There is nothing that happens from here that can be called victory.'\n\n'What are you saying, lord?' said Forrix, his mind and voice moving out of sync with what his primarch had just said - with the impossible thing his primarch had just voiced.\n\nPerturabo walked to one of the chamber windows and keyed a control. Blast shutters pulled up, grinding and squealing. Layers of fog and cloud hid the ground below. In the distance, the tops of towers rose from the folds of vapour. The orange light of a fading day folded over both. As Forrix looked, an explosion lit in the distance, large enough to shine through the murk. He had a feeling that he should walk away, that this was a moment that did not include him and should not be observed. He did not move.\n\n'How long to stand here,' said Perturabo, his voice low. 'A lifetime, many lifetimes as most mortals live them.' He raised a hand, servos whining, exo-bracing and armour plates shifting. His hand opened, metal-clad digits reaching delicately for the distant towers of the unconquered Palace. 'I never wanted to be put to any of the uses you put me to, father. All you have ever valued is destruction. All you have ever praised is weakness and pride. All that I wanted has been taken.' Perturabo's gaze was distant, as though he were focusing beyond what he could see to some infinite distance. 'He is just like you, father. Horus, your bright son. You both made us want to serve you, and you then made us kill our dreams with our own hands.'\n\nPerturabo looked out for a moment more and then his fist closed, and he turned away from the view.\n\n'Know this, equerry,' said Perturabo. 'I pity you. You see, and you know, and you fear for your Legion and wonder what the oaths you swore mean now. Yet you do not have the strength and the power to do the only thing that is left to do.' Argonis looked as though he might reply, but the Lord of Iron had turned to Forrix. 'Send a signal to all of our forces, full withdrawal. Bring our fleet into dock and begin to embark. We will move to the system edge and translate. This is immediate.'\n\nForrix did not move. The words he had just heard rang like bullets hitting iron.\n\n'Lord...'\n\n'It is over,' said Perturabo. 'Horus has given this battle to sorcerers and beasts. The war of Legions is over. Mortarion comes here to take this place. He and what he has become is what this war is now. He comes at the will of Horus to be the agent of what will happen.'\n\n'But he did not order our withdrawal.'\n\n'I order it,' growled Perturabo. 'It is my will. There is no victory here, just creatures and parasites pulling down a dying beast. It is gone. The Legion war is dead. The chance is gone. The cause is gone...' Perturabo paused, and then shook his head. 'We will not bleed for this. We will not break the circle of our iron for this.'\n\nForrix nodded then.\n\n'As you will it, my lord.' He began to turn away, and then stopped.\n\n'All the blood of your Legion, all of the red iron spilled, was it worth it to come this far and go no further?' asked Argonis.\n\nPerturabo was silent for a long moment. Pistons and weapons clicked. Shells exchanged between guns and ammunition feeds.\n\n'It was worth it to learn the truth - this universe does not care. We could bleed our last and it would not matter. Pour the blood of my warriors into the earth and all that grows is the hunger for more.' He began to move towards the doors.\n\n'If you go,' called Argonis, 'if you defy the will of Horus, then your ships shall be burned from the stars.'\n\n'They shall not,' said Perturabo. 'Just as you shall not draw your gun and shoot me now, though you should. Horus has bartered your strength for doubt and false promises. But our strength is still ours and our iron is still true.'\n\n'You shall be outcast,' called Argonis at Perturabo. 'He will hunt you. Once the Warmaster has taken the throne, he will hunt you.'\n\nPerturabo paused.\n\nFor a moment Forrix thought he saw something shift in the shadow of his master, as though it was not cast by the thin light of holo-screens but by the light of fires falling through the heaped blades and guns of broken enemies. In the back of his mind he heard the chuckle of bullets rattling into boxes and the hiss of sharpening swords. The echo of pride faded from his thoughts.\n\nWe are damned, he heard his own thoughts say. Damned no matter what choice is made here or how far we run from this folly. Damned in a universe with only false gods and no salvation.\n\n'So be it,' said the Lord of Iron.\n\nPerturabo turned his back and walked from the room. At his side walked the Iron Circle. Forrix walked, and within his hearts he heard a drum roll of iron.\n\nMagnifican\n\nThe night slid across the land, and Shiban kept moving. The heat clung to the air, thinning but never fleeing as the light bruised to purple, to muddy red, to black. There were no stars, and the lights of the ships in orbit did not pierce the cloud. The flash of distant explosions faded from the horizon as though following the sunlight down, and out of sight. The world became black. Shiban's eyes were such that he could see on a starless night as though it were day, but there was nothing here to give that comfort. He could not see the ground under his feet. Soon the staff was his only guide, its tapping telling him of shifting rubble and water-filled sinkholes. The darkness was not wholly natural, he was certain of that. He was no Stormseer, but he knew that what lived between Heaven and Earth did not follow the lines of thought that humans wanted to call truth. He was walking not just through a night caused by the turning of planets. The darkness was alive. Breathing with the pulse of all the breaths drawn for the last time on this ground. Sounds shivered in the dark. Hootings. Moan"}
{"text":"ts tapping telling him of shifting rubble and water-filled sinkholes. The darkness was not wholly natural, he was certain of that. He was no Stormseer, but he knew that what lived between Heaven and Earth did not follow the lines of thought that humans wanted to call truth. He was walking not just through a night caused by the turning of planets. The darkness was alive. Breathing with the pulse of all the breaths drawn for the last time on this ground. Sounds shivered in the dark. Hootings. Moans that sounded like voices calling for help. But the land was empty of life, except for him.\n\nHe had followed one of the moaning cries the first time he heard it, followed it into the shell of a road tunnel where the bones of macro haulers lay silent in pools of oil and fuel. There was a light, too. A little warm glow hanging at head height, like the glow of a small fire or lumen pack. He had followed the sound of tears and the light until he saw what was crying. Something with a body of loose, rotting skin hung from the apex of the tunnel, hidden in the gloom. Only Shiban's rare eyes let him see it; without them it would have just been a bulge in the shadows. Fleshy tubes flexed in place of its mouth, piping the sound of fear and pleading into the air. The light hung from it on a rope of soft white sinew. Bones littered the ground beneath it. Strings of flesh held some together enough that he could recognise a hand, a foot and a jaw in a skull without a crown. The creature shifted as he drew near but did not move. The moans had got smaller: a child lost in the dark, an old man stumbling towards hope.\n\nHe had turned and left, pausing only to strike a spark from the metal pole on a rock. The tunnel mouth had filled with flame as the spilled fuel and oil burned. The thing on the roof had cried out as it died, squealing in a hundred stolen voices. Shiban had gone back into the night and walked until the fire was a dot, then a mote, then gone. He had heard the cries again, several times, each from different directions. Things were making this new Earth their home, and he wondered if the nights that fell in the future would all be like this: blind and filled with the cries of things that hungered.\n\n'It is not done, until you say it is,' Yesugei had said to him from over his shoulder as the night went on. 'While there is will to resist, to ride on, then there is still a way.'\n\n'A way to win?' he had replied, aware of the flat echo of his voice in the dark.\n\n'I did not say that. A way to continue.'\n\n'Is that comfort?'\n\n'It is truth.'\n\n'What do you think, Torghun? Each step carries us to what end?'\n\nIf Torghun's ghost had an answer it kept it to itself.\n\nEternity Gate... The memories and faces came to him in the dark, again and again. Dorn had known... He had known and had marked its fate as annihilation. It was that land they rode through now, a land of desperation where the sacrifice of one's own strength and blood was a price not just paid, but offered. Thousands killed by the blades of the enemy, but at the will of their commander - that was war, he knew it; he wished it was not the war they were fighting. How much more would have to be given? What would remain of their souls even if they won?\n\nIn the distance, a column of lightning shot from the earth to the heavens. It boiled up from the line of the ground, defining it as it climbed through the sky: ghost light, yellow and bile green, red the colour of drying blood. It flowed across the bellies of clouds, so that they looked like coals glowing under a bed of ash. A shape sat at the core of the column, hidden by the shifting glow. Shiban blinked, staring, his mind scrabbling to process what he was seeing for a second. Then he realised. It was the Lion's Gate space port, sheathed and lit by coils of light that were flowing up its walls. Its tower formed a black void within the arcs, an absence darker than the banished night. He had not realised he was so close to it. Or perhaps it was no closer, but only felt closer. Closing. Imminent. Like a threat.\n\nAs he watched, the clouds rippled and flowed, shunted aside like sea froth before a leviathan. He could see the stars, and between them and him the shapes of vast ships moving through the boundary atmosphere, their thrusters and grav-distortion shimmering like water. Behind them, the spire of the space port they had left glowed then faded to cold black again. The distances flexed and contracted as the ships rose, and for a moment he felt he stood just beneath them, staring up at the pitted iron of their hulls. The Iron Blood and her sisters come to take their lord back into the abyss above. They rose, and then the distances snapped true again and they were just dots of light fading as the cloud layer rolled back. The lightning around the Lion's Gate space port faded. Night returned. Silence wrapped around Shiban again.\n\n'Where am I?' he asked.\n\n'A different world,' said Torghun.\n\n'Still on Terra?'\n\n'The land changes,' said Yesugei's voice. 'The place is the same but it is not the land you walked before. The fulcrum tips. The past came here to die, and this is just one death amongst many.'\n\n'The death of what?' he asked.\n\n'The death of the wars we fought and the lies we told ourselves as we fought them.'\n\nShiban did not reply to the voices. Standing still in the silence of the night, he listened to see if more words would come.\n\nNone did, but high above he thought he heard the call of carrion eaters as they circled in the dark.\n\nHe took another step and kept moving. There was no choice in that. Day or night, darkness or light, he would keep moving.\n\nPlaza of Remembrancers (former), Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\n'I hear that you have lost your faith,' said Andromeda as she sat on the tabletop and crossed her legs beneath her. Sindermann paused as he pulled out a chair then lowered himself into it.\n\n'You hear the strangest things,' he said carefully.\n\n'Frequently,' said Andromeda. 'But is it true? You were an iterator of the Imperial Truth, secular to the core. Then you became a convert to the Lectitio Divinitatus, a disciple of the so-called saint, a fanatic to a new cause. You claim to have seen the evidence of the Emperor's divinity. But you spend a long time looking at drops that might kill you for a man with the certain belief in a god.'\n\nSindermann held Andromeda with a long, careful gaze.\n\n'You really do hear a lot, don't you?'\n\nAndromeda shrugged.\n\n'You renounced your faith,' said Mauer, 'as a condition of your freedom and the formation of your band of recorders of history.'\n\n'Interrogators,' said Sindermann. 'They are called interrogators.'\n\n'A strange name for non-combatants with quills and pict-capturers,' said Mauer.\n\n'The interrogation of the present before it becomes history, or do you think that the only interrogation happens in cells?' He paused and looked between Mauer and Andromeda. 'Or across tables?'\n\n'Your faith...' said Andromeda softly. 'You very carefully did not mention your faith.'\n\n'I did not renounce my faith. I promised to keep it to myself. No preaching. No spreading the word. I have kept my promise, too.'\n\n'But you still believe that the Emperor is divine?' asked Mauer.\n\n'Believe? No, I don't believe it, boetharch - I know it. You can't believe in a fact. It just is.'\n\n'You sound as though you resent it,' said Mauer.\n\n'I might as well resent the rain...' He shook his head. 'Questions... It all comes down to questions. Old questions, as old as thought and the idea of gods.'\n\n'If the Emperor is divine, how can He permit the suffering and disaster that is occurring?' said Andromeda.\n\nSindermann nodded, his eyes on the books he had placed on the table, his gaze distant.\n\n'And He is divine - I have seen the truth. Philosophers of a different age would use the same question to undermine the concept of a higher power - there is suffering and darkness and so gods must be false. But gods are real, and there is suffering, so that must be because they permit it... I have not lost my faith. I have found that I believe in a God-Emperor who is less than the divinity I wanted, but the only thing that is true.' He was quiet then, staring into whatever infinity he saw before him. Mauer did not break the silence. Sindermann blinked and looked up at them. 'Is this really what you came to ask?'\n\nMauer shook her head.\n\n'We came to ask you to help us.'\n\n'Help you how? As you say, I am a master of nothing but people with quills and picters. A propagandist with a lost truth and a flawed faith. You two are in a very different business to me.'\n\n'The same business,' said Mauer. 'We have the same business. The preservation of humanity in the face of annihilation, and the survival of the Emperor.'\n\n'All your interrogators,' said Andromeda, 'what are they doing if not trying to save the present for the future?'\n\nSindermann was still for a moment, and then gave a single, slow shake of his head.\n\n'I think you may have rather overestimated both my power and your own.'\n\n'No,' said Andromeda. 'I don't think so. You interrogate history and events, so tell me - how many times have the turning points of events come down to just a few people with the insight and will to act?'\n\n'Not as often as many would like to think.'\n\n'But sometimes,' said Andromeda. 'Sometimes history tilts on an edge that's just that narrow. You know that - you believe that.'\n\nSindermann did not reply for a second.\n\n'How do you think I can help?' he said at last.\n\n'Very soon, everything will fail,' said Andromeda. 'Our defences, our will to fight, our strength to resist - all of it will crumble, and it will crumble from within without the enemy needing to raise a sword or fire a bullet.'\n\nMauer pulled a dataslate from her coat pocket and slid it across the table to Sindermann. He picked it up and began to scroll through, eyes flicking and focusing.\n\n'I see,' he said. 'I see.'\n\n'Yes. I think you do,' said Mauer.\n\n'Tell me,' he said, his gaze distant again but focused"}
{"text":" everything will fail,' said Andromeda. 'Our defences, our will to fight, our strength to resist - all of it will crumble, and it will crumble from within without the enemy needing to raise a sword or fire a bullet.'\n\nMauer pulled a dataslate from her coat pocket and slid it across the table to Sindermann. He picked it up and began to scroll through, eyes flicking and focusing.\n\n'I see,' he said. 'I see.'\n\n'Yes. I think you do,' said Mauer.\n\n'Tell me,' he said, his gaze distant again but focused as though he were seeing facts and ideas forming into a pattern in front of his eyes, 'how has it been spreading and manifesting?'\n\n'The dreams,' said Mauer. 'The dreams and the despair that comes in waking.'\n\nShe closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose for a moment, then let her hand drop from her face. She felt her thoughts twitch towards the cylinder of stimms in her coat pocket.\n\n'Despair, anger, total loss of perceptual balance. The conviction that there is a better world that is beyond, in dreams, a paradise that can be reached somehow.'\n\n'Violence?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Yes,' replied Mauer. 'Conforming to a pattern but not a common cause. Like a slow, secret hysteria.'\n\n'Instances both more acute, and more widespread?' he asked.\n\nMauer nodded.\n\n'And this is not sedition or the whispers of propagandists - take it from me. It used to be my trade. No... even without the details, just looking at your faces, I know I have hit the mark. These atrocities, this rising tide - they are like miracles, but not, like the shadow of miracles. Almost ineffable, but not quite. Something from beyond, something from the realm of new truth we find ourselves in, false gods and cruel gods, daemons and saints.' He looked down for a moment, at the hands that sat on top of his knees. Mauer thought she recognised the look that ghosted across his face. It was the same expression she had seen on the faces of soldiers who joined a war for ideals but ended up living the truth. 'But you knew that already,' he said, looking up at Mauer.\n\n'It is the warp,' said Andromeda. 'The place where faith and ideas rule. That's why we came. We aren't looking for answers. We are looking for a solution.'\n\nSindermann bit his lip, then nodded.\n\n'I think I see the solution you imagine. You think... you think you want to spread the faith in the Emperor's divinity and that will, like white cells in the blood, force out the dreams and the despair and the whispers of daemons.'\n\n'And?' asked Mauer.\n\nHe laughed, the sound dry and humourless.\n\n'You know, even six months ago I might have not just agreed but rejoiced, but things change, do they not, boetharch?'\n\n'Can it be done?' asked Andromeda.\n\n'Maybe,' said Sindermann. 'But it will be dangerous, even with the authority that you are wrapping this in - it is forbidden, and the Praetorian is not one to bend or forgive.'\n\n'Noted,' said Andromeda. 'Will you do it?'\n\nSindermann shook his head.\n\n'I can't,' he said.\n\n'You can't?' snapped Andromeda. 'You were the Iterator Prime. Half the ideas of the Great Crusade were propagated using methods you developed, by pupils you taught.'\n\n'That was our biggest mistake,' said Sindermann. 'To think that you could spread ideas like seeds to take the place of the human need to believe in something more than the rational, something beyond.' He sighed. 'That is why I cannot do what you ask. This is not a thought puzzle, Andromeda-17 of the Selenar - it is not a bio-conditioning factor to be picked apart.'\n\nAndromeda exchanged a look with Mauer.\n\n'You do not think it will work?'\n\n'I think that it may. I think that you do not really know what you are asking, or what you are playing with. I think that it might be the worst and best hope I have heard anyone speak in a long time.'\n\n'But you won't help?' asked Andromeda.\n\n'That's not what I said,' he growled, 'and do not goad me! You are very clever and very subtle, but I have seen, seen with my own eyes the truth of faith and divinity, and it holds as much terror as it does comfort. The survival of humanity - that was the phrase you used. Who could walk away from that when they had the means to try to prevent it?'\n\n'But you refuse to spread the faith as we need,' said Mauer.\n\n'No, that was a simple statement of fact. This is not about ideas or speeches now. It is about belief. It is about miracles. An old iterator who has seen the face of divinity is not enough. Words alone are not enough. What is needed to begin this is something higher, something touched by the beyond.'\n\n'And you can help us get that?' asked Andromeda.\n\nSindermann looked at them both, a tired smile on his face.\n\n'Of course I can,' he said, and then he looked from Andromeda to Mauer. He nodded at the gene-witch. 'That is why she came here. Not for me but for who I can reach. She thinks of means to ends, and once she has an end in sight, everything and everyone is just a means. I would not trust her too much if I were you, boetharch...' He paused, and gave a sad smile. 'In fact, trust no one might be a wiser maxim.'\n\nThen he turned and pulled on a rain cloak, picked up a battered dataslate, and made for the door.\n\nHunt\n\nReady to walk\n\nIgnite\n\nSortie Cavern 78, Mercury Wall\n\n'Get that ammunition feed locked!'\n\nAcastia could hear the shout of Caradoc even over the sounds of the bolt-drivers and the clatter of loading hoists.\n\n'Faster, lock it now!'\n\nShe was moving to her own Knight, pulling on gauntlets. A lesser servant of the house followed her, his arms full with the pipes and cables that trailed from her suit, another with her helm. Dolloran and Pluton were just behind her. Dolloran's face was a mass of dark bruises and split skin sealed by surgical staples. He did not meet her eye as she looked around.\n\nShe rounded the side of a container of vulcan shells, rattling as they were spooled out onto belts.\n\nShe saw them then. Three god-engines in light mottled green, hound heads splashed with crimson, standing in pools of light. Flocks of servitors and tech-priests moved over and around them. For a moment she almost stopped in her tracks. It was not that she had never seen their like before; she had. On five battlefields she had ridden at the side of machines from three different Titan legions. Her awe of them had never dimmed, and now seeing them without the shell of her own steed she felt as though she was close to something truly dangerous. Violence radiated off the Titans like smoke off embers.\n\nBeside them, the stalk-legged shape of Caradoc's Cerastus and the three Armigers of their lance seemed lesser, as though they were imperfect, incomplete shadows of true majesty.\n\nCaradoc turned from where he stood beside the hoist that would carry him up into the cockpit and throne of his steed. It was called Meliae. Its form was cast in the Castigator mode of the Cerastus pattern: long-legged, its weapon arms ending with a powerblade and the rotary barrels of a mega-bolter.\n\n'Make ready to mount,' he called, taking his own helm from a servant nearby. 'The Hunters are inbound.'\n\n'They are here, my liege,' said Pluton. They all turned. Nine women strode down the centre of the room. The one in the lead had a lean face, hard eyes. There was a fluidity and precision in her movement, Acastia noticed. Focused. The control of a predator. Attendants in the colours of the Legio Solaria followed.\n\nCaradoc moved to step forward, his helm clasped under his arm, the features of his face rearranged into something welcoming and serene. She could tell he was preparing to make the one-third bow of greeting to a warrior of higher honour.\n\n'Noble princeps...' he began as the Solaria crews closed.\n\n'I am Abhani Lus Mohana,' snapped the lead princeps. 'You are the Vyronii who ride with us?'\n\n'I am Caradoc, sixth in succession-'\n\n'I know who you are,' said Abhani, continuing towards the Titans. 'We walk in fourteen minutes. The count has begun. Be ready.'\n\n'Yes...' said Caradoc, and for a second his mask of welcoming serenity slipped, and an uglier truth slid across his features.\n\n'All field decisions are bound to my word, if I fall, to that of my sisters,' said Abhani Lus Mohana without slowing or looking at Caradoc.\n\n'As you will it,' he said.\n\nThe princeps did not reply. Caradoc turned, and flicked his fingers. Acastia began to climb the grips up to Elatus' cockpit. She did not look back at Caradoc. She knew the rage would be there, waiting for a target to lock on to. She could already imagine the sharp goad of his anger biting across the thrall control he wielded over her and the other two.\n\nShe dropped into the throne inside the cockpit. Servants began to buckle her in. Controls flashed from amber to green. She heard fuelling cables snapping free. Her hands and eyes were moving over Elatus' controls as she took the reins of its waking spirit. A servant raised his hand to confirm she was ready for enclosure. Acastia looked up from the controls, and saw the Solaria Titans begin to stand. Fumes billowed as coolant test-vented. Pistons elongated. Their gun-laden shoulders rolled, and each machine shivered. They turned. Acastia felt her teeth shake in her jaw. She hesitated and then put the helm over her head. The cockpit hatch hinged down above her. Neural links between helm and skull lit with pain. Instruments flashed red, amber, green. She punched buttons. Elatus woke, head twisting, gun arm twitching. It wanted to gallop free, and she had to bite down as the goad of Caradoc's neural harness held them in place.\n\nThe doors at the end of the cavern drew up into the ceiling. Ion mist was flowing from Knights and Titans as shield generators charged. Caradoc's Castigator flexed its weapon arms and dry-cycled its guns. Acastia could feel Caradoc's anger at having to follow the will of another, Titan princeps or no.\n\nThe cavern doors were fully open. Acastia could see the ramp rising to the next door beyond, which was already in motion. Far, far off, she fancied she could see a slice of daylight "}
{"text":"em in place.\n\nThe doors at the end of the cavern drew up into the ceiling. Ion mist was flowing from Knights and Titans as shield generators charged. Caradoc's Castigator flexed its weapon arms and dry-cycled its guns. Acastia could feel Caradoc's anger at having to follow the will of another, Titan princeps or no.\n\nThe cavern doors were fully open. Acastia could see the ramp rising to the next door beyond, which was already in motion. Far, far off, she fancied she could see a slice of daylight at the outermost door. By the time they reached it, it would be open to the world beyond and once they had passed through it would close without a second's delay.\n\nThe three Solaria Warhounds stalked to the door, paused and hunched down, pistons contracting like muscles in a predator before it pounced.\n\n'My sisters,' said the voice of Princeps Abhani Lus Mohana. 'Knights of Vyronii, now is the hour, now is the need - hunt.'\n\nThe Warhounds bounded forwards and ran towards the widening bar of daylight. A second later, Acastia felt the neural harness release, and she was running, too, out into the land beyond.\n\nCommand bunker, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\n'Open it up.' General Nasuba turned from the circle of her command staff and jerked her head at the armour-covered viewslit. 'Let's have a look before we ruin the view.'\n\nA low set of chuckles came from the officers. Nasuba made herself smile.\n\n'Blast shutters releasing,' called a junior. Adamantine plates began to draw down into the lower frame of the foot-high slit that ran across the front wall of the command bunker. Nasuba watched the exposed chain links run through the slow-turning cog teeth. Light flowed in through the slit in a widening band. It was not clean - nothing was any more - but the muddy, bruised murk of twilight. Nasuba stepped forward, holding out her hand for magnoculars. Two of her seniors stepped forward with her. Kurral, pulling his own brass-cased glasses from the pouch hanging from a patent leather belt circling his willow-thin frame, and Sulkova, who just closed her right eye and let the augmetic in her left socket do the work.\n\nNasuba brought the magnoculars up to her face and snuggled the rubber seals into her eyes. The view shifted as the device tried to autocorrect.\n\n'You would have thought that a few years in the field would have taught me how to use these things,' she said. Another low ripple of chuckles. They enjoyed when she played down what she was and where they were. It was not much, but right now Nasuba would take every fleeting rise in morale she could conjure. Half the war was out there, beyond the drop of the wall, and the rest was in the heads of the men and women on the wall. Right now she was not sure they had a firm hold on either of them.\n\nShe flicked the magnification and enhancement dials, and the view blurred as it zoomed out into the distance.\n\nThe command bunker sat at the top of Shard Bastion, just below the primary laser and plasma batteries, nearly a thousand metres above the base of the wall. From up here you could see a long way. Even with the naked eye, on the rare clear days you could make out the maximum direct fire line that ran along the arc of the horizon over a hundred and twenty kilometres distant. The peaks of the mountains that surrounded the Palace and its artificial plateau sometimes emerged from cloud and smog to bite at the sky.\n\nThe view in the magnoculars swam for a second and then settled. Visibility was poor. Discharge fog had rolled down off the aegis above the Inner Palace and mixed with the mist that rose from the baked land as the day cooled. Distance and range data scrolled at the edge of her sight as she found and focused on the metal spines of Karalia's Grave, rising above the folded ground seventy kilometres out. A press of a control tagged the focal point and a fresh set of relative distances began to unwind as she panned across the ground towards the darkly gleaming water of Lake Voss. The water had pulled back from the shore as the heat had built over the last weeks. Crusts of green-and-pink salts marked its margins.\n\n'What was the last location of the hunters?' she asked.\n\n'Just tracking down the drain rivers past Sinkhole One,' said Sulkova. 'They are making good pace.'\n\n'Direct feeds?'\n\n'Data and visual,' replied Kurral, 'but it's patchy.'\n\n'Isn't everything?' replied Nasuba.\n\nLegio Solaria had put three Warhounds in the field. A lance-tip of Vyronii Knights had gone with them, including the riders that had made the sighting in the blind zone. There were nine other hunter groups out in the kill-zone, all seeking the leading edge of the enemy advance. But all of what Nasuba knew said that if this assault force was coming then it would come down the southern edge of Lake Voss towards the ruins of Karalia's Grave. Get forwards, get a foothold, dig in, maybe throw up a void envelope and site a dispersal node, spread to cover the flanks then wedge forwards. It was what she would do. It was predictable, but sometimes the predictable was that way because it was the best option.\n\nWall Master Efried's plan of response was equally direct: find the enemy, move main force out to engage and pin an advance at a point that allowed the wall guns to do their work. It was the strategy of the Solar War and siege to date: hold and punish. The enemy might be able to close the distance to the wall, but it would cost them in time and strength. If they made it across the one hundred and twenty kilometre kill-zone, they would not have the strength to do more than shout their fury at the wall. In the months that would take, the chance for victory would have passed. That was the plan. Nasuba knew it would work - for all its simplicity it was a creation of Rogal Dorn. It was just what the reality of that would look like on the ground.\n\nGeneral Nasuba felt the semi-powered carapace of her armour creak as she shifted her weight. This was going to be the start of the real shitstorm. She could feel it. Never mind the strategic data and reports that her clearance as commander of Shard Bastion gave her, she just knew it.\n\n'General,' came the voice of a junior from behind her. 'Communication from the sally-vaults - the lead elements of the Legio Ignatum have arrived.'\n\n'Reply that I will be with them shortly,' she said, lowering the magnoculars and handing them to an aide.\n\n'They have been here for some time already, general,' said the junior. 'The communication chain from the lower wall must have failed.'\n\nNasuba frowned at that; communication fidelity and discipline had been getting worse and worse in the last week.\n\n'Find out what went wrong with the comms and close the loop. Sulkova, you have zone command. I want to know as soon as the hunters have contact with the enemy.'\n\nSulkova snapped a crisp salute.\n\n'My general,' she said.\n\n'Try not to cause trouble.'\n\nAnother chuckle in the uneasy air of the bunker.\n\n'The Fire Wasps...' said Kurral. 'Do you want some extra troops for your honour guard? The Collegia Titanica are keen on that kind of show, I hear. Particularly if they have been kept waiting.'\n\nNasuba smiled as she moved towards the door, even as she felt the lead cool and harden in her gut.\n\n'I'm sure they will cope with any disappointment,' she said, and heard the chuckle in her own words.\n\nA real shitstorm... said a voice in her head. Let's hope we can smile at the end of it.\n\nSally-vault 14, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nTetracauron could feel the headache building in his temples as he walked down the centre of the vault. He blinked a few times, took a sip of a cup of water that tasted decidedly like piss, and tried to focus on what was going on around him. Twelve hours unlinked and he was fairly certain that much more than another day and he wouldn't be able to move for the migraine that was spooling up in his skull. Divisia and Cartho paced in his wake, each dealing with the disconnection in their own way: Cartho with silence, Divisia by uttering a creatively wrought litany of swear words under her breath. The rest of the crews of the vanguard Titans would arrive with their engines in a few hours. They would arrive already connected to their engines and incarnated. Time was already running swift and the rest of his command would walk from here directly out onto the Mercury-Exultant kill-zone. Tetracauron would dearly have liked to have been with them, but this duty superseded his comfort. He took another sip of the piss-flavoured water and looked around.\n\n'Does the work not lift your heart?' asked Xeta-Beta-1, falling in beside him.\n\n'Of course,' he replied, 'and the wait raises my stomach to equal heights.'\n\n'Do you require a dose of suppressants to soothe the disconnection symptoms?'\n\n'About as much as I require a blow to the genitals.'\n\n'Now you are being needlessly profane.'\n\nHe did not reply.\n\nThe vault was one of a series set in the ground beneath Shard Bastion. Wide enough to swallow multiple hab-blocks, it was linked to both sides of the Mercury Wall by tunnel roads sized to allow the Titans to walk in single file. Rockcrete slab doors sealed the openings at the base of the wall, and multiple blast doors could close the tunnels in seconds. In extremis, explosives could collapse them and flood them with fire. From here, vast forces could deploy to the kill-zones.\n\nThe advance cohorts of the legion's support caste and tactile cohorts had arrived with them in the brief cool of the night before. They filled the vault. Arming and repair cradles for forty Titans already towered over the central space. Sparks flew from welding arcs in the webs of girders. Hoists lifted tank-sized boxes of ammunition onto platforms. Binharic shouted through the air in time with the grind of bolt-drivers and the clang of metal. The air reeked of acetylene, ozone and oil - sacred and rich. In each of the other vaults, the same preparations were underway. A full thirty thousand tech-priests, adepts and servitors had poured i"}
{"text":" vault. Arming and repair cradles for forty Titans already towered over the central space. Sparks flew from welding arcs in the webs of girders. Hoists lifted tank-sized boxes of ammunition onto platforms. Binharic shouted through the air in time with the grind of bolt-drivers and the clang of metal. The air reeked of acetylene, ozone and oil - sacred and rich. In each of the other vaults, the same preparations were underway. A full thirty thousand tech-priests, adepts and servitors had poured into the vaults in the hours after the Grand Master had given the order. Another two hours and Tetracauron's vanguard battle group would arrive, and they would walk beyond the wall an hour after that. The rest of the Legio would stand in these buried places.\n\n'How long until we have strategium data feeds?' he asked, glancing at Xeta-Beta-1. As enginseer for the battle group's command Titan she had assumed dominant rank amongst the priests that supported the Legio. She seemed to be coping with the escalation of responsibility with a combination of exasperation and glee.\n\n'Projected at one hundred and two minutes,' she replied. 'The cogitator sifts are still being located and installed, and there is a high degree of discomfort and corruption in the spirits of the bastion's communication systems. Added to which there are fragments of Vyronii and Solaria command systems to account for and integrate.'\n\n'It will be ready,' he said.\n\n'Of course, but it's not a pleasing or seamless integration between our machines and theirs.'\n\n'Let's hope that the human element proves easier,' muttered Divisia.\n\n'Talking of which, command unit incoming left, forty degrees,' said Cartho.\n\nTetracauron paused in his stride and turned to see a woman in red-and-white carapace armour striding across the vault floor. A guard of four troopers in similar gloss armour bracketed her. All of them bore plasma fusils and volkite energy guns. Servo-bracing extended over their shoulders and arms to assist with the weight of their weapons. Helms of matt-black ceramite covered their heads and faces. Vertical sensor bands ran down the front of the faceplates. The woman wore no helmet, but the back of her shaved skull glinted with interface plugs. She moved like an engine killer, smooth and gunsight-focused. Even without the command briefing he had absorbed, he would have known who she was at a glance - General Nasuba of the Inferallti Hussars, commander of the Shard Bastion.\n\nBehind him, Cartho and Divisia straightened as the general came to a stop three paces from them. She waited, pale green eyes steady on Tetracauron's gaze.\n\n'General Nasuba,' he said, and dipped his head as far as pride and protocol would allow. 'An honour.'\n\n'I'm sure it is,' she said. 'What is your status, princeps?'\n\nNot even a twitch of deference or uncertainty, he thought. I like this one.\n\n'As of now I have a growing headache, my mouth tastes of... well, let's not be specific, and I am waiting for the finer details of what we might be going to be killing, but I am coping well enough, general.'\n\nNasuba smiled and began to stride past them, looking up at the gantries and supply hoists.\n\nTetracauron caught the amused look in Cartho's eye and fell in beside the general.\n\n'You will be ready to walk?' she said to him.\n\n'We are always ready.'\n\n'Good,' she said, and kept walking.\n\nMercury Wall kill-zone\n\nThe Knights and Titans ran across the land, the green of the Solaria Titans a mottled echo of the emerald of the Vyronii Knights. They ran in two groups: the three Warhounds behind in a loose triangle, the long-legged Cerastus Knight and its three Armigers spread in an arc ahead. They were moving swiftly, power flowing to motive drives and auspex.\n\nMist rose from the ground as the heat of the day increased. Lichens and fungi and weeds had spread over the plateau of ground and crushed rubble as the cold of winter had become spring, then summer. Ancient seeds and spoors unearthed from the ground by the creation of the kill-zone had blossomed in the heat and water. Dark green and purple leaves floated in pools of run-off. Grey puffballs the size of human heads swelled on crests of rockcrete shards, clouds of dust stirred into the air by hot winds. Tangles of bright green leaves and heavy-headed mauve flowers had grown in thick carpets in places, their trumpets open to the daylight that reached them from the layer of cloud and smoke above. On the wall they said that when the wind turned it sometimes brought the scent of blossom from the wasteland, thick and heavy, cloying, like a call to the sleep of suffocation.\n\nAcastia saw the land pass on the screens inside Elatus' cockpit. There was no sign of anything hostile, not machine or man. It was quiet, a land of heat shimmers, fog and the coloured smears of vegetation across the grey blanket of rubble.\n\n'Give me threat and observation status,' came Caradoc's demand across the vox. He had loosened the leash of neural control, but yanked it taut again whenever he spoke to them.\n\n'Nothing on visual or sensors, my liege,' said Dolloran.\n\n'Nothing, lord,' said Pluton.\n\n'Likewise,' said Acastia. She could feel the spike of anger across the helm link. She knew why. Pride, and the possibility that her words had brought him out here on a false quest that would bring shame rather than glory.\n\n'All units.' The voice of the Solaria princeps rose over the vox. 'Track south-west on transmitted bearing. Hold formation and keep your eyes sharp. We are going to skirt the Cradle and come down to Lake Voss' northern shore.'\n\n'Is there an intelligence update, honoured princeps?' asked Caradoc, tone smooth.\n\n'No,' said the Solaria princeps, 'but if I were them, that's where I would start a spear-tip push. Looking at the topography - the lake and channels give them access into the kill-zone core, and there is dead ground out of sight from all but the top guns on the wall.'\n\n'Princeps,' said Acastia. She felt a cold surge across the neural link to Caradoc. 'Recommend bearing south-south-west to come in on the southern shore of the lake. If they use it as an axis of advance, they will be aiming for the dead ground and wreckage-maze at Karalia's Grave.'\n\nThere was a pause, an inhalation of breath in her own mouth.\n\n'Understood and confirmed,' said the voice of the Solaria princeps. 'My thanks for your insight, bondsman. All units track south-south-west. Bondsman, set and lock our bearing.'\n\n'As you command,' said Acastia, keying the directional and waypoint data into broad transmission. Caradoc's anger was a growing headache at the back of her skull.\n\nThe sun had begun to set over the silent land of the kill-zone. Still they had seen nothing, not even the signs of recent enemy passing that way. Acastia found it increasingly unnerving. It was as though the presence of their foe had been inhaled back, out of sight. Lake Voss was a mirror to the sky above. She looked at it as they strode on. Heat misted its surface. Insects hovered above it, circling in buzzing murmurations. Acastia paused, then turned the gaze of Elatus' head towards the water and pushed the magnification to maximum. The water was rippling. Across the still lake tiny shivers lapped the shoreline. Her eyes went back to the haze of humidity hanging above the water. There was no wind.\n\n'All units,' she said, opening the broad vox. 'Enemy engines are close, repeat, enemy engines are close.'\n\nThe vox spat and clicked with distortion.\n\n'What are you doing?' snapped Caradoc across a direct vox-link. 'There is nothing on visuals or sensors.'\n\n'Look at the water,' replied Acastia but on the broad vox.\n\n'You shall-'\n\n'Look at the water,' she repeated.\n\n'Vibration patterns,' came the voice of one of the Solaria Titans.\n\n'Sensors show nothing, honoured princeps,' said Caradoc.\n\n'I can see that,' snapped the voice of Solaria. 'All units, slow and pace, full battle readiness. Enemy in proximity.'\n\nThe vox snapped again. An alarm buzzer began to sound in Elatus' cockpit. The auspex erupted with red threat runes that spun and exploded into clouds of red static. Sparks danced across the screen as it flickered into a distorted wash of green. She could smell burning plastek and hot metal. She swore, and curbed Elatus' forward pace, yanking its head and lens-eyes around.\n\nAnd there they were.\n\nFigures on the shoreline. Vast figures, legs hidden in the humidity. Shimmering as though they were stepping out of the heat haze. Shadow grey in the failing light. A ragged crowd extending away out of sight. Walking towards them.\n\nShe kicked her steed around and began to lengthen her stride as the vox popped with fragments of orders.\n\nAcastia found that sweat was running over her skin inside her armour as she punched a data stamp into the sighting log and hit transmit. Off in the distance, systems and eyes would hear and process a great threat rendered down to a few lines of cold fact:\n\nEnemy sighted southern edge of Lake Voss.\n\nMercury-Exultant kill-zone.\n\nGrid two-three-one by four-five-two.\n\nShard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nThe sally-ports opened beneath Shard Bastion as the dawn broke. Heat was already pulling fumes from the ground and laying them above it as a grey pall. Rain ran down the three tiers of the Mercury Wall. The cap of clouds above the aegis shield flashed with lightning. Sunlight was a diffuse pus-yellow glare rising beyond a frail veil of vapour. Reginae Furorem was the first to step into the light. Yellow and black banded its left shoulder plates, deep blue covered its right and the tilting plate that bore the glyphs of its forging and the honours of its name. Red plates clad its limbs. Pennants hung from its weapons, lank in the damp, hot air. Behind the red crystal of its eye slit, Tetracauron saw the world beyond the wall through the eyes of his engine.\n\nTerrain scanners webbed the ground in orange. Behind them, the void generators and guns of the wall buzzed with a sound like distant beehives. He paused, feeling the fi"}
{"text":"houlder plates, deep blue covered its right and the tilting plate that bore the glyphs of its forging and the honours of its name. Red plates clad its limbs. Pennants hung from its weapons, lank in the damp, hot air. Behind the red crystal of its eye slit, Tetracauron saw the world beyond the wall through the eyes of his engine.\n\nTerrain scanners webbed the ground in orange. Behind them, the void generators and guns of the wall buzzed with a sound like distant beehives. He paused, feeling the fire within rise as he and the engine stopped.\n\n'Weapons check,' he sent.\n\n'Powering carapace cannons to firing threshold,' replied Divisia, even as he felt the tingle of the laser blasters' building power.\n\n'Weapon active,' sent Tetracauron.\n\n'Powering volcano cannon to firing threshold,' said Cartho.\n\n'Weapon active.'\n\nA feeling in his hand like a hot coal burning his skin...\n\n'Activating power fist field,' said Cartho.\n\nLightning whipped up Tetracauron's left arm, spiking into the base of his brain. He gasped, his hand flexing, haptic sensors echoing the movement in the unfurling of Reginae Furorem's slab-thick digits.\n\nTetracauron felt the fire and lightning roll through his flesh: pain and beauty and true life.\n\n'Vanguard command, this is Shard Bastion command,' said a distorted human voice at his back. 'You have halted. Is there a problem?'\n\n'No issue,' replied Tetracauron, hearing his machine echo his will across the vox. 'We walk,' he said, and the last word boomed from Reginae Furorem's war-horns in a rolling roar. Behind it, the other Titans in the sally tunnel took up the call. Sound echoed across the land. Through the root of Shard Bastion the war calls of fifty Battle Titans shook the wall's bones.\n\nAt the bastion's pinnacle, General Nasuba felt their call as a tremor beneath her feet as she raised her field glasses to her eyes to look at the land beyond.\n\nIn the insulated vault of the primary Ignatum strategium, Sentario heard its echo as a cascade of binharic across the noosphere. She signalled a reply, and within a nanosecond it was taken up by all of the adepts and priests and factotums: an answering call in simple code, ancient before the Martian priests preached its truth; an old and primary imperative spoken at the beginning of all that was sacred, the prayer incanted by the smiths of iron over their forges, the breath of code in the turning of the first wheels, the command given by spark to fuel and fire.\n\n'Ignite,' they said.\n\nIn Reginae Furorem's cockpit, Tetracauron heard, and smiled.\n\n'Walk,' he willed, and he and his engine strode from the door into the daylight.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 130 kilometres, estimated.\n\nPilgrims\n\nCries\n\nConclave\n\nThe Blackstone, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\n'It is the authority of the Praetorian,' said Andromeda, tapping the dais beside the docket. The warden behind the desk did not move or respond. 'It means that you will admit us.'\n\nStill no movement. Mauer moved her eyes over the chamber. It was small, one door in, one door out. The outer door was a metre of hardened adamantium with bolts that had taken eleven seconds to disengage to let them in. The inner doorway was just wide and tall enough that two people could pass through at the same time and not scrape the walls. The door was black, its surface a mirror. She could see no sign of lock or keyhole. The worst part was what it reflected. Each part of the room was there: the walls, the outer door, all perfect. Except that there was no reflection of anything else: no Mauer looking back at her, no Andromeda rolling her eyes, no Sindermann tapping his old fingers on the case of his dataslate. They had decided to use the authority Sindermann already had established to enter Blackstone; it was less attention-drawing, and less easily noticed. They were all part of the Order of Interrogation, now. Mauer had removed her insignia and rank marks and fixed a flimsy ribbon of parchment to her coat with the mark and writ that said she was a person authorised to ask and record questions.\n\n'I remember you,' said the warden. He had the uniform and gear of the Solar Auxilia and bore his weight on crutches that spoke of combat injury. He looked sour, too, thought Mauer.\n\n'And I you, Warden Vaskale,' said Sindermann. 'I take it everything is in order and we may enter?'\n\n'Different to last time,' said Vaskale, eyes flicking over Mauer and Andromeda. 'You have new friends. Look a bit more serious.'\n\n'Things change,' said Sindermann.\n\n'What happened to the last one?' asked Vaskale. 'The lad? What was he called? Karri? Tary?'\n\n'Hari Harr,' said Sindermann. 'His name was Hari Harr.'\n\n'Didn't want to come along this time?'\n\n'He went to Eternity Wall,' said Sindermann softly.\n\nVaskale was silent for a long moment, then licked his lips and looked down at the security wafer.\n\n'All in order. You may go ahead,' he said. 'Once you have entered you will need to be escorted. I will lead you. You will have to follow my instructions.'\n\n'We require no escort,' said Andromeda. 'Our writ as interrogators does not require us to be watched over.'\n\n'You shall follow my instructions,' repeated the warden to Andromeda, then glanced at Sindermann. 'Like you say, things change.'\n\nAndromeda looked like she was going to argue. Then she shrugged.\n\n'Fine,' she said.\n\nThe warden did not move, but continued to stare at them.\n\n'We will follow your instructions,' said Mauer.\n\n'Good,' said Vaskale. 'Because it's for your good as much as anyone's.'\n\n'How so?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'Trouble,' Vaskale replied, and stepped back. In front of them the mirror-smooth door cracked. Hairline fractures became triangles, which folded back and in until the door was no longer there. Mauer waited for the warden to demand the gun that hung on her hip, but he said nothing of it.\n\n'You're not worried by someone taking a gun in there?' said Andromeda.\n\n'No,' said Vaskale as he followed them through the opening, but added nothing more.\n\nThe door closed behind them, unfolding back into being as they stepped into the passage beyond.\n\nThe air was cool and dry, as though the humidity and heat smothering the rest of the Palace was a separate world. The light in the passage was blue-white and stark. None of the walls reflected the light. All were the same glassy black substance as the door. Their steps lifted chime-like notes from the metal floor.\n\nMauer had heard of the Blackstone. It was one of the things she knew she was not supposed to know about. Before the war its use had been bound up with functions that she was frankly pleased to be ignorant of. Since Horus' coming to Terra it had performed a simpler function - a gaol for those too dangerous to let loose, but that the Imperium for reasons of its own did not want to kill. Mauer did not understand that compassion in such times. If someone was a threat then they were running out of reasons to live, if any existed in the first place. She was far from convinced that this was a place to find answers to the kind of problems they were looking at.\n\n'Have you come to see the same one as before?' asked Vaskale.\n\n'Yes,' said Sindermann.\n\n'Just her?'\n\nSindermann nodded.\n\n'She's out of her cell most of the time, will take some tracking down,' said Vaskale, pausing at a console mounted into the passage wall and punching in commands. 'Talking to the other prisoners. What's the purpose of that now?'\n\nNo one answered. The warden frowned at the console screen.\n\n'Him again...' he muttered and shook his head. 'Follow,' he said, and began to move down the passage.\n\nMauer glanced at Andromeda, but the gene-witch was already following the limping man, her bare feet padding on the bare metal.\n\nThe warden led them down corridors and through echoing chambers. They passed locked cell doors and open shafts that led up and down to darkness. There were a lot of people in the Blackstone, Mauer had been reviewing the figures, but they saw none of them. Silence was their companion.\n\n'Cheerful, wouldn't you say?' remarked Andromeda after a while.\n\n'Better this way. You want to be out when it's night,' said Vaskale.\n\n'What happens at night?' asked Sindermann.\n\n'The stones sing dreams,' said Vaskale, but then would offer no more.\n\nMauer watched Andromeda idly run her hand along the wall as they walked.\n\n'Almost reminds me of home.' Mauer shot her a glance that Andromeda caught and answered with a facial shrug. 'The fanes of my kind are a bit like this, all smooth, dark rock and layered symbolism. We prefer curves to all these straight lines but if I squint and don't pay attention to the details I could be back up there.'\n\n'You miss it?' said Mauer.\n\n'No,' said Andromeda. 'The Imperium came two centuries ago and killed the Selenar cult. We made a deal to live a little longer, and sold our sacred truth to mass-produce monsters for the Emperor. For that we got to die slow rather than quick. There were hardly any of us left when I made another deal and came to help the Imperium. Now... maybe I am the last of my kind...' Andromeda's voice trailed off. She seemed suddenly not young but very, very old. 'No, I don't miss it. I mourn for it.'\n\nAnother shrug. Mauer was wondering how to reply, when the warden leading them slowed and stopped beside a door set in the passage wall.\n\n'Ah,' said Andromeda, her voice quick and light again. 'This must be it.'\n\nThe warden fitted a key into the door's lock, then paused.\n\n'The one she is talking to in here...' he began, then bit his lip again. 'I don't know why she talks to him so much. All the rest she has never come back to, but this one... her and the Custodian. They keep coming back.'\n\n'Whose cell is it?' asked Mauer.\n\n'Doesn't matter, does it?' said Vaskale, shaking his head as though trying to dislodge an unpleasant thought, and triggered the lock. 'After all, it's not him you came to see, is it?'\n\nThe cell door opened.\n\nSindermann gave a curious look at Vaskale and then went in, Mauer and Andromeda behind him.\n\nA woman in prison overall"}
{"text":"know why she talks to him so much. All the rest she has never come back to, but this one... her and the Custodian. They keep coming back.'\n\n'Whose cell is it?' asked Mauer.\n\n'Doesn't matter, does it?' said Vaskale, shaking his head as though trying to dislodge an unpleasant thought, and triggered the lock. 'After all, it's not him you came to see, is it?'\n\nThe cell door opened.\n\nSindermann gave a curious look at Vaskale and then went in, Mauer and Andromeda behind him.\n\nA woman in prison overalls sat cross-legged on the floor. Her hair was an unkempt dirty blonde, and her eyes sharp as she looked up at them. Across from her, a small old man sat on a cot, his back straight, his eyes two black pearls in a broad face. He smiled at them.\n\n'Ah,' said Basilio Fo. 'Are these your friends, Mamzel Keeler? I wonder what they want to talk about?'\n\nEast Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThe hive was still there. It rose before Oll and his crew as they crossed the white land, glittering in the distance. The dust beneath their feet was fine. Time had ground down the shells of a lost sea and the glass of dead civilisations to make it, and the winds of Terra had spread it out across hills and valleys to smooth them down. It was blinding. Sunlight reflected, bouncing shimmering ghosts into the air. Oll had had to wind a scarf around his head and reduce the world to a slit to avoid blindness as they crossed the land. They had been walking for most of the day, and the sun had not dimmed. In fact, it had not seemed to move at all, as though its disc were stuck to the dome of the sky. That was just one thing that was not right amongst a pile of wrong things that Oll had been gathering as they trudged on. The hive on the horizon was another.\n\nHe had seen Hatay-Antakya Hive before, a short-long time ago, when he had decided to come back to the old places during the early days of the war that had become the Great Crusade. It had been called the new Babylon then, by conservators and ideologues who had no idea what the first Babylon was or why they knew the term. Oll, who had seen the first, second and many other versions of Babylon and Rome and Xanadu rise in name and spirit numerous times, thought that the idea fitted only loosely. The old Babylon and its gardens had been a wonder in its time, made more so by the fact that those were times when to raise a palace or a city took generations and the blood of millions. The price was still the same, and the time too, but the results were on a new scale. Hatay-Antakya was a hydroponic hive. In the desolation of Terra, it produced crops, fruit, propagated plants lost to the rest of the world. Vast hydrological systems pulled billions of gallons through the pipes, pools, tanks and aqueducts that made up most of the hive structure. Crystal domes and enviro-blisters dotted its outer surfaces. Elevated canals swept in arcs between the sub-spires and spurs. On the upper surfaces the craft of the propagation houses were displayed in layered gardens and false lakes cupped in vast bowls of copper.\n\nThe rulers of the green-jewel of a hive swam in plunge pools a kilometre across, floating amongst the pads and blossoms of water flora. In the lower levels, huge loops of tunnels were filled with stark light, with plants moving between pressure and temperature-controlled areas as they passed through the cycles of germination, growth, flowering, fruiting and decay. In the depths, huge pits absorbed every scrap of waste matter and composted them in caverns the size of city districts. The heat from the decomposition flowed up in ducts to warm the growth of new crops.\n\nIt was remarkable, proof that the drive that had led humans to cut water channels and make the land green could endure even in the desolation that remained where earth had been. Babylon, Eden, Avalon... just like all the rest and yet not, hope and hubris given seed and grown. Oll had seen Hatay-Antakya and wondered how long it would last, and if it would end like all the others.\n\nLooking at the hive's shadow on the horizon, he was not sure he now wanted to know the answer. Sometimes it rose as it should, a low, ragged mountain, but sometimes when he looked up there was something else there, the shadows of domes and towers that had not stood there for a long time, places that Oll knew and had seen burn or fall or drown.\n\n'What's that?' It was Rane. The lad was up ahead, walking just ahead of Zybes. 'Just there at the bottom of the slope - you see it?' Oll looked the way the boy was pointing. There was a line, dark against the white ground, like a wide ribbon of shadow. Oll squinted. The line was moving, like water moving in a river.\n\n'That's people,' said Zybes.\n\nHe was right - as Oll focused he could see that it was a long, loose line of people, their clothes and shadows grey against the daylight.\n\n'Look like they are going the same way as us,' said Krank. 'Towards the hive.'\n\n'Refugees,' said Rane.\n\n'Maybe...' said Oll. In the back of his mind a series of things were stacking up into a shape that was neither clear, nor welcoming. 'Except we haven't seen any signs of battle near here, have we?'\n\n'The ships,' said Rane, jerking his head in the direction that they had seen the shadows of the warships in the distant sky.\n\n'But not here,' said Oll. 'No smoke on the horizon, no planes in the sky... It's quiet.'\n\nQuiet, that was it, that was what had been growing as an itch in his thoughts; it was quiet. No cries, barely even the sound of the wind.\n\n'That's why they are here,' said Krank. 'When war comes, those that can get out do and they find the quietest, safest places they can.'\n\n'The nearest major population centre is over two hundred leagues away,' said Oll, reaching up under his scarf to rub the sweat gathering in his frown. He did not like this; most of all he didn't like the feeling that there was something that he wasn't seeing, just around a corner, coming closer. 'If there is no war here, then those people must have walked a long way to get here.'\n\n'People will come a long way to get away from war,' said Rane, then half turned away. Oll knew that Rane was thinking of Calth, of Neve - the wife who was still waiting for him on a dock in a city that no longer existed.\n\n'True,' said Oll. 'True.'\n\n'Oll...' It was Katt. 'Oll, look back that way.'\n\nHe turned and looked, squinting as the glare of the sun shifted in his eyes. There was nothing, just the flooded bone white of the wasteland. Katt raised a hand to point as though sensing his puzzlement. He followed the direction of her finger, and saw what she had seen.\n\nCareful, clever, looking behind when everyone else was looking forwards, that was Katt.\n\nThere was a shadow in the distance. Small and smeared by the heat haze, just a smudge of grey amongst the white that might have been a leafless tree or stump of rock... But could also have been a figure walking, or running closer. Coming after them.\n\nShuffle-tap... Shuffle-tap...\n\nCold in the dark of the Labyrinth.\n\n'How long has it been there?' he asked.\n\n'I don't know,' said Katt. 'I watched it for a minute. It doesn't seem to be getting any closer, but I am sure it is closer.'\n\n'The unknown waiting ahead and following behind...' he said, half under his breath.\n\nHe was thinking. From here it should have been them all making the decisions, choosing the path: him, John and Her.\n\nHe was still thinking when a clank of machinery turned his head. Graft, the old Munitorum servitor that had been with him before Calth and had followed them since, was clanking forwards on its tracks towards the distant column of people.\n\n'Where's it going?' asked Rane.\n\n'Finally blown its last fuse,' said Zybes, snorting.\n\n'Graft,' called Oll, and he moved after the servitor as it trundled down the slope. 'Wait up. Where are you going?'\n\n'This way, Trooper Persson,' said Graft, its voice the same modulated drone as ever. 'This is the way.'\n\nOll felt a cold thump in his guts.\n\n'The way? The way to what?'\n\nThe servitor was moving faster, and Oll was having to run to keep up. The others were following, running down the slope after him. In front of them, the faces of the column of people walking at the base of the slope had turned towards them. He heard shouts, calls and cries. Some sounded alarmed; some sounded excited, joyful. There were colours amongst the grey throng he noticed now, scraps of brightness, smudges of colour.\n\nGraft was still ahead of him, the servitor's units clanking as it closed the ground. There was a buzzing coming from its speaker grille.\n\nOll stumbled. His eyes were swimming. The hive in the distance was suddenly much larger, much closer, glittering and shining under the sun. How had he thought it was so far away? It was right there, just a short walk away, just another step...\n\nBehind him he heard one of the others shout. Katt? Zybes?\n\n'No,' said a voice in his head. 'Do not take this turn...'\n\nJohn?\n\n'It's a dream, but it can be real...'\n\nYou! You, old friend, but this is not then.\n\nOll! Help us! Oll!\n\nAnd then the hammer of pain exploded in his skull and he was falling...\n\nBut not hitting the ground. Caught in mid-air or between the fall and having fallen. The slope and the sun-bleached sky swirled into white and ochre.\n\nLike sand, Oll thought, like sand churned up by a breaker on a bright shore.\n\nOll...\n\nJohn? He formed the thought in reply, trying to make it clear.\n\nI can't do this for long, Oll. It's... this place. John's voice was coming from above and around him, moving out of sight.\n\nJohn, where are you?\n\nI tried to reach you but got it wrong, overshot, landed where we predicted you arrived, but you were not here. I... we thought you might have been taken to paradise so went looking, got caught. Now... There was a stutter in John Grammaticus' voice, a blink in the world.\n\nYes, that's right. John's voice was suddenly clipped, businesslike, controlled, as though tone and words had been cut from another time and place and glued in place here. It will be dif"}
{"text":"oving out of sight.\n\nJohn, where are you?\n\nI tried to reach you but got it wrong, overshot, landed where we predicted you arrived, but you were not here. I... we thought you might have been taken to paradise so went looking, got caught. Now... There was a stutter in John Grammaticus' voice, a blink in the world.\n\nYes, that's right. John's voice was suddenly clipped, businesslike, controlled, as though tone and words had been cut from another time and place and glued in place here. It will be difficult to achieve but not impossible - destabilisation is always more difficult than simple mayhem, but rest assured it can be done.\n\nJohn?\n\nAnother blink, and now there were clouds of colour fizzing in a black void like a riot of fireworks.\n\nHaven't you heard that song? John's voice was a chuckling slur now, rolling with drink and mischief. Well I guess I can sing it if you aren't going to shoot me for crudity...\n\nSomething grabbed hold of Oll and spun him up and over. He could feel something wrapping around him, toothed suckers biting through cloth, thorns in his skin. An echo of pain that did not belong to him.\n\nJohn, can you hear me? We-\n\nThere was a good wife of Europa...\n\nJohn, let me go! We are coming for you, but you need to let me go.\n\nThe pain broke. The sparking fire of the world snapped off. Oll felt like he was floating, rolled and turned by the surge of the tide.\n\nHurry... said the distant voice of John Grammaticus. They know you are here.\n\nOll was looking up at the sky. He had not opened his eyes; they were already open. He was sitting on the ground at the bottom of the slope he had run down. The others were nearby, Zybes and Krank had their guns up. Graft was twitching in place, a low burble coming from its speaker grille. Katt was approaching warily, pistol held out of sight at her side.\n\nThe river of people they had seen was still moving. He saw them clearly now: men and women, some old, some in the prime of life. The sun had bleached their clothes and the dust cloaked them in a pale powder. Wire-strung shards of multicoloured glass and plasters hung around their necks like garlands. He could see the bones showing through the skin of some, the flesh sucked from their frames by starvation. Others rolled with fat, sweat pouring from them. All of them were gazing in the direction they walked, towards the distant shadow of the hive. Some were grinning, others drooling, the muscles of their faces slack. Whoops of laughter and a babble of frantic words rose from some and then faded. Most of them did not look at Oll and his companions, but just shuffled onwards. There was blood on the ground, he noticed, red mush and pink sand under the dust-covered feet.\n\n'Do you hear it?' Oll looked around. Two figures had stepped from the crowd, and were standing three paces away. They were very still, Oll noted. One was a bloated, towering thing wrapped and wound in tattered multicoloured fabric that billowed and rippled in the wind. He could see nothing of its face. The other was very tall, thin. A patchwork cloak of velvet and silk tatters hung from her. A veil of frayed red hid the upper half of her face above the mouth. He could see that her skin was cracked by heat and dusted with a powder whiter than the desert sand. Barbed hooks pierced her lower lip and chin, and finger bones hung from them on loops of plastek cord. They rattled as she spoke.\n\n'You hear it, don't you?' she asked, her voice high and melodious.\n\n'Get back!' snapped Zybes; his gun was pointed at the pair. Behind and beside him, Rane and Krank had their guns out too. Katt was edging wide, poised, eyes focused on them. The fabric-swathed figure turned the lump that must have been its head. The river of people behind them flowed on, unseeing or uncaring.\n\n'Pilgrims,' said the woman, holding up her hands. Oll noticed that they were scarred, the tips of the digits curved by glass blades. 'What do you seek?'\n\nOll stood, fully straightening, dusting off his hands.\n\n'We thought you might have been taken to paradise,' John had said.\n\n'Yes,' Oll said, and stepped forwards towards the veiled woman. 'We seek paradise. Will you show us the way?'\n\nThe Blackstone, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThere was a moment of quiet as the little man on the cot smiled up at them. Then Andromeda was lunging forwards, snarling, reaching for Mauer's gun. Sindermann was turning in surprise, Keeler's mouth was opening to say something.\n\n'Kill him!' screamed Andromeda.\n\nMauer moved faster. She hit Andromeda in the gut just below the ribs, open-handed. The gene-witch cannoned backwards, hit the wall and slid down. Mauer had her gun in her hand; she had drawn it as she had hit Andromeda. She held it ready, eyes moving across the faces staring at her. She looked at where Andromeda-17 was gasping, trying and failing to get to her feet.\n\n'Don't do that again,' she said, calmly. 'Ever.'\n\nThe little man on the cot was still smiling.\n\n'He...' hissed Andromeda, fighting to draw breath. 'He must die.'\n\n'A little extreme given that we have not even been properly introduced,' said the man. 'You are one of the Selenar, aren't you? My, my, and I thought all of your kind had slunk away to expire.'\n\n'Be quiet,' said Mauer. The man raised his hand as though in apology. 'No one moves. No one twitches towards anyone. Understood.'\n\nNods all round. Sindermann was looking at the man on the cot, his face unreadable.\n\n'Who is this?' he asked softly.\n\n'His name is Basilio Fo,' said Euphrati Keeler.\n\nSindermann's mouth opened slightly and then shut.\n\n'You know who he is?' asked Mauer.\n\nFo tilted his head. Mauer was certain the man was yet to blink.\n\n'He is a monster,' said Andromeda, still breathing hard.\n\n'From your kind that might be considered a compliment,' said Fo.\n\n'I said be quiet,' snapped Mauer. She looked at Sindermann.\n\n'He was a criminal who escaped the Unification War.'\n\n'Oh come,' said Fo. 'I was more than that. You are Sindermann, aren't you? The iterator? We've never met but I've admired your work from afar - cultural mutilation carried out with such precision... my compliments.'\n\nMauer aimed her gun at him. Fo raised his hands again as though in apology.\n\n'The accounts of the purge of his enclaves during Unification... well, there are phrases used that speak enough - flesh husks, bio-resculpture, gene-phage torture, things that wanted to scream but could not. The others who opposed the Emperor all died - Cardinal Tang, Narthan Dume, the Crimson Walkers all gone, but not him. He got away, somehow. He was hunted for most of the Crusade, under the broadest remit and urgency - complete and total destruction of his works and those who he had contact with. Complete and validated confirmation of termination or capture.' Sindermann looked back at Fo. 'He is the last of the Lords of Old Night.'\n\nMauer looked at Andromeda.\n\n'If you want to get up without me putting you back down you are going to have to explain what just happened.'\n\nAndromeda was staring at Fo, her eyes bright, but did not answer.\n\n'It might be kinder if you let me explain,' said Fo. 'She has reasons for what she did.' Fo looked at Mauer, face placid, an eyebrow raised. He looked as dangerous as a breath of air. 'Shall I tell you why?'\n\nMauer hesitated, then nodded. Fo tilted his thanks.\n\n'We have history, myself and the Selenar gene-cults. Old history.' He looked at Andromeda and nodded. 'I remember your clone-kin when your reincarnation counts had barely started to rise through single digits. A lot of failure to their work back in those times. They had this idea of finding spiritual truth through iterations of genetic incarnation. Lovely idea, just a shame it's just another story. They had found some beauty, though, secrets buried down in the cells. Small things, wonderful things. You called me a lord but unlike your Emperor I have humility - I know when someone has reached beyond my own achievements. The Selenar had done so well... but I had to take measures to secure what I wanted from them, and those measures were severe.'\n\n'You are a thief and a defiler,' snarled Andromeda.\n\nFo's lips twitched.\n\n'I am sure this is out of character for her,' he said. 'Don't judge her too harshly - the hate, it's coded into her. This one has never actually seen me before, but the Matriarchs locked me into their hindbrain threat evolution. Specific pheromone recognition linked to primary levels of kill-to-defend instinct - all baked into her from skin to bone. It's taking her a lot of willpower not to try to reach me. Gene-daemon, is that what you still call me?'\n\n'Sounds like a perfect reason to kill you right now,' Mauer replied, and raised her gun.\n\n'No,' said Keeler, jumping up and raising a hand. 'Wait.'\n\nMauer did not fire. But she didn't lower the gun either.\n\n'You are Keeler,' said Mauer.\n\nKeeler nodded.\n\n'We came for you,' said Mauer. 'And he is not part of the conversation.' Mauer moved her eye to the right.\n\n'You can't kill him,' said Keeler, and there was something... something in the calmness of her voice that stopped Mauer pulling the trigger.\n\nFo grinned at her from the other end of the barrel.\n\n'I am being helpful, you see,' he said. 'Maybe I can help you, too. That's why you are here, isn't it? For help?'\n\n'No,' said Andromeda.\n\nSindermann looked carefully from Keeler to Fo.\n\n'What help could a monster like this be to our cause, Euphrati?' he asked.\n\n'Not to your cause, Kyril Sindermann,' came a voice from by the door.\n\nMauer whirled, hearing the door sealed with a clink of metal and a whir of cogs. This was a trap; she had no idea why, but she had walked right into a trap with her eyes wide shut. She saw something like a heat-haze shimmer, a glimpse of gold, and then her pistol was tumbling out of her grasp before her trigger finger could squeeze more than air.\n\nA golden giant stood beside the door, pulling the remains of the falsehood from his form.\n\n'Be still and at peace,' said the Custodian. 'This is an important moment and on"}
{"text":"g the door sealed with a clink of metal and a whir of cogs. This was a trap; she had no idea why, but she had walked right into a trap with her eyes wide shut. She saw something like a heat-haze shimmer, a glimpse of gold, and then her pistol was tumbling out of her grasp before her trigger finger could squeeze more than air.\n\nA golden giant stood beside the door, pulling the remains of the falsehood from his form.\n\n'Be still and at peace,' said the Custodian. 'This is an important moment and one best approached with delicacy.'\n\nFrom his cot, Basilio Fo gave a dry chuckle.\n\nMagnifican\n\nThe night had turned through the sky four times before Shiban stopped walking. A broken arch curved above him. The sky was dark overhead, stained at the edges by reds and oranges and yellows that bled into the black, flickering sometimes, fading or growing. He had not seen the stars since the cloud of smoke had swallowed the blue sky that had greeted him when he woke. No sun, no stars. A grey-ochre pall dragged across the land he passed through in day, and when the light faded it was to black and the ghosts of distant war. The heat remained though. The impact had damaged the temperature control systems in his armour, so that sweat bled from his body. In the day it was a fist squeezing him. At night it seemed that the dark itself was a black shroud, winding tighter and tighter around him. He would need water soon. Even one of his kind had limits. That lesson had been taught to him again and again. His body was damaged to the core, his will pushing him forward. But he had seen no water, not even polluted run-off or liquid caught in a broken pipe. The land was dry and suffocating. A land to die in.\n\n'Forwards,' he growled to himself, but knew that the word was a dry hiss from his lips. He took a step, pushed into the ground with his makeshift staff, and took another step. The broken arch became a shadow behind him and then vanished out of sight. Another cluster of ruins emerged from the gloom ahead. He was keeping to what cover there was, hugging the folds of the land. There had been no sign of the enemy, beyond the distant glare of fires, but that did not mean they were not there. He knew where he was. Each step and light in the sky slid into the sense that held him true and guided him towards the ever-distant promise of the anterior of the Inner Palace walls. Would they still be held by his brothers? Would the Palace still stand? 'It will stand,' he hissed to himself, and felt a bolt of pain as his step lit fire in his legs. 'No backward step. It will stand.'\n\n'Not everything lasts.' Yesugei's voice from just out of sight. Shiban did not turn to look. The voices had been silent for the last two days and nights.\n\n'What matters lasts,' he growled back. Another step... Another step forwards. He could feel the blades of fractured bone grating against each other as his foot touched the ground.\n\n'And what is it that matters?'\n\n'Was I a poor enough student that you had to pursue my correction beyond death?'\n\nA chuckle that touched his skin with the hot breeze of the night.\n\n'What is it that matters?'\n\nThe plains stretching out in front of him. Dawn a line of fire beneath a curve of blue where the light of stars glimmered their farewell. The wind rose across his cheek as he smiled and opened his mouth for the cry as he spurred forwards.\n\n'Nothing that can be held in by anything but the wind,' Shiban replied to the ghost in the dark.\n\n'Just so,' said Yesugei's voice.\n\nShiban shifted his weight to take another step-\n\nHe froze, body and mind suddenly alert.\n\nA cry... He had heard a cry. Close but quiet, as though muffled. High and sharp. Small lungs.\n\nHe waited, forcing the pain that roared through him down into silence.\n\nNothing. Just the beat of his own hearts and the click-purr of his armour.\n\nHe shifted, muscles and bones screaming anew as he prepared to take another step.\n\nThere it was again. Fainter, close by, somewhere amongst the ruins that waited ahead. He reached up and removed his helm. The air breathed across his face, hot and cloying. He listened. His armour enhanced his hearing, but it had taken as much damage as him, more perhaps. Besides, there was a trust that came only from using one's true senses. He forced the pain down until it felt like it was someone else's burden that he was only carrying for a while, stilled his own breath and heart rates until silence stretched within him.\n\nThe warm air was a murmur. Somewhere, a long way away, there was shelling, a dull rumble carried through the ground as much as the air.\n\nThe hum of a power cable vibrating in the breeze.\n\nRattles of glass dust shifting on a sheet of broken iron.\n\nHe accepted it, let all the sounds into his awareness.\n\nThat was the key to so much, to seeing, to hearing, to fighting, to living - accepting the heavens and earth and letting them tell you what was the truth.\n\nThe heartbeats came to him, small drum rolls of blood, next to bone and muscle, one louder and stronger, the other small. A human adult, and an infant, crouched out there, one trying to calm the other without making any noise. There was their breath, the air sliding between lips and through teeth.\n\nHe listened for a long moment. He had a long way to go and the end was far from certain. He was injured and half the man he was in strength, and what strength he did have he would need for what lay ahead. He should move, pass by like the wind.\n\nHis eyes caught light in the distance, a glimmer in the shroud of the night off to the east. From the direction he had come. From the Eternity Wall. He thought of the last hours of that defence, bloody, desperate, defiant. Of the shouts across the vox, and the fires. Futile. Abandoned by higher necessities, by the will of Rogal Dorn, left to die and not even knowing that they were martyrs left beside the path of history.\n\nThe beginning of a cry, seeming loud in his mind now, and now the desperate murmuring hush of another human trying to give comfort and calm.\n\n'If you are going to turn me aside,' he murmured to the ghosts of Torghun and Yesugei, 'then you should speak now.'\n\nThe wind was his only answer.\n\nHe nodded and moved, quickly now, as though his decision had numbed the pain that flared in him. His armour growled and spat. Another cry, loud, unruffled, and a human rising to standing, running, feet scrambling over shards of rock, breathing hard, heart racing.\n\nShiban reached a heap of torn masonry and girders, climbed it in a bound. The pain blinded him. He landed, pushed off, and half staggered, half ran past the dead eyes of broken windows. Glass and pieces of stone shattered under his tread. He saw the figure, running away, boots slipping on broken tiles, a heavy coat flapping behind it. He pushed forwards.\n\n'Stop,' he called. It was not a shout, but it hit the fleeing figure like a thrown knife. They stumbled, began to fall, arms clutched close. A sharp cry.\n\nShiban's hand closed on the figure's shoulder, holding them above the fall. The pain inside him was a sun. He had passed through ten strides in a blink. He could taste copper on his teeth and tongue. The figure writhed, gasping. Shiban pulled them back and turned them to face him. Wide, wild eyes in a gaunt face. Matted hair. A ragged beard. Shiban could smell the sweat and dust and ash and fear. He took in the military-issue coat in a glance, the torn epaulettes, the uniform of the Massian Fifth Infantry, the crude binding over a wound in the ribs. And clutched between the human's arms a bundle, a small face squirming, mouth opening to cry out again. The man saw Shiban's eyes move to the child and jerked back, one hand reaching for a gun holstered at his waist. Shiban locked his gaze to the man's and raised a finger. The man stopped, frozen in place like an animal caught in the glare of a stablight.\n\n'Do not attempt it,' said Shiban. 'It will do neither of us any good, and the sound of a las-blast might bring enemies.'\n\nThe man nodded slowly. Shiban realised that the human could barely see in the half-dark. He stepped closer. The distant orange glow caught the lightning bolt on his armour, white still clinging to the scars.\n\n'I am called Shiban, of the Fifth Legiones Astartes.'\n\n'Co...' stammered the man. 'Cole, second lieutenant, Massian Fifth.'\n\nShiban gave a single nod. There was nothing further about the man that he needed to know. Not now.\n\n'And this?' asked Shiban, looking down at the infant in Cole's arms. It had gone quiet, but its eyes were wide open looking up at Shiban in the dark. Its face wrinkled as it met Shiban's gaze.\n\n'I... I found him in the ruins two days ago. He was crying. Alone... I do not know who... He was... I took him with me. I have tried...'\n\nThe man's voice trailed off.\n\nShiban looked down at the infant for a second more and then back the way he had come. Back along the steps he had taken. Back towards the Eternity Gate space port. Yesugei's smiling face at the edge of sight and memory vanishing.\n\n'You have food?' he asked without looking around. The man did not answer. Shiban could hear confusion beating out a fresh tattoo within the man's heartbeat. 'For you and the child, you have food and clean water?'\n\nHe looked at Cole. The man nodded.\n\n'A little. I have been dissolving ration blocks into water for him. He doesn't like it but he takes a little.'\n\nShiban nodded and turned to face the direction of the Inner Palace, the direction of the path forwards.\n\n'Good,' said Shiban. 'It will be a long path.'\n\n'A long path? What do you-'\n\n'You are coming with me, Lieutenant Cole. It seems that the wind does not wish me to walk alone or with fewer burdens than it can grant me.'\n\n'I...' Cole began to stammer again, teeth clattering. The infant gave a yawn and closed his eyes. Cole nodded. 'With you. Thank you, lord.'\n\n'Not lord,' said Shiban. 'Not out here. Not now. And there is no thanks to give.'\n\nHe took a step. The bolt of agony blazed through him. He shifted weight to t"}
{"text":". 'It will be a long path.'\n\n'A long path? What do you-'\n\n'You are coming with me, Lieutenant Cole. It seems that the wind does not wish me to walk alone or with fewer burdens than it can grant me.'\n\n'I...' Cole began to stammer again, teeth clattering. The infant gave a yawn and closed his eyes. Cole nodded. 'With you. Thank you, lord.'\n\n'Not lord,' said Shiban. 'Not out here. Not now. And there is no thanks to give.'\n\nHe took a step. The bolt of agony blazed through him. He shifted weight to the metal staff, and took a second step.\n\n'Lord... Shiban, where are we going?' said Cole, following.\n\n'The only way that's left.'\n\n'What's that?'\n\n'Forwards,' said Shiban.\n\nThe Blackstone, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nMauer looked at the Custodian. Nothing in the cell moved. Then the Custodian leant his spear against the wall, reached up, and removed his helmet. The face beneath was wide, the skin very dark. The eyes were green, Mauer realised, the vivid green of forest leaves in sunlight. He locked his helm to his waist and took his spear again. Every movement, Mauer noticed, was precise and smooth, inhumanly perfect in range and balance, down to the curling of his fingers on the spear haft.\n\n'I have completed the latest set of notes,' said Fo, and he held up a dataslate. 'Or would you rather we did not talk about that in present company?'\n\nThe Custodian showed no sign of emotion, but took a step into the room. For something so large, it was impossible that he moved with such pure and perfect grace.\n\nAndromeda got to her feet; her eyes narrowed as she stared at the Custodian as though seeing him for the first time.\n\n'What is your name?' she asked.\n\n'His name is Amon Tauromachian,' said Sindermann.\n\nAmon closed the dataslate and clamped it to his belt. The gauntlet extended back over his fingers. Apart from his first words it was as though the rest of them were not there, Mauer thought - something to be resolved after the primary concern.\n\n'How much more?' asked Amon.\n\nFo shrugged.\n\n'Some - it is not something you just jot down, as I said to you before. And anyway, as I am reasonably certain that you will kill me once I am done, you cannot blame me for taking my time, and I am enjoying my conversations with Euphrati that you so graciously agreed to as a condition for my help. I have missed company.'\n\nHe looked around at them all.\n\n'What are you helping him with?' asked Andromeda, and Mauer could tell the gene-witch was exerting a lot of control to keep her tone even.\n\n'Oh, a weapon to end the war,' said Fo. 'And what are you here for, my child of moon and stars?'\n\nAndromeda shook her head slowly.\n\n'You should not be here,' said Amon, looking around at them.\n\n'Shouldn't we?' snapped Andromeda, and pulled a holo-projection disc from inside her robes. A cone of cold blue light snapped into being. Inside, the image of the 'I' of the Imperial Regent and the wreathed skull of the Praetorian turned slowly. 'You know our authority.'\n\n'Yes,' said Amon, 'and you know mine, Andromeda-17.'\n\nThey stared at each other for a long moment.\n\n'We came to talk to Euphrati Keeler,' said Mauer. 'And her alone.'\n\n'You will need to tell Amon,' said Sindermann, quietly. 'There is no way around that now. He is here. He knows we are here, and depending on how we proceed we will need his help.'\n\nAndromeda opened her mouth, but Sindermann shook his head.\n\n'You know I am right.' Sindermann looked at Amon. 'Besides, I think he might be more open to the possibility than we might assume.'\n\n'What under the light of the sun makes you think that?' asked Andromeda.\n\n'Because we are alive,' said Sindermann.\n\nAmon turned and looked at them all then. His gaze was neutral but completely threatening, thought Mauer, like that of a feline apex predator.\n\n'What you would say to Euphrati Keeler you will say in my presence,' he said.\n\n'And if you don't like it, you will kill us?' said Andromeda.\n\n'Perhaps,' he said, neutrally. 'But if you do not speak that will be a certainty.'\n\n'That sounds like the summation of no choice,' Andromeda said, and bit her lip. 'Fine.' She looked at Mauer and Sindermann. 'Yes?'\n\nMauer gave a curt nod and moved to the door.\n\n'You have access to another place we can talk?' she asked.\n\nThe others were already moving, Keeler half turning to say something to Sindermann. Andromeda shook herself and took a step.\n\n'No need to leave on my account,' said Fo. 'In fact, stay. I prefer art to conspiracy, but it's more interesting than anything else I've run into in a long while. We have quite the conclave assembled here and it would be a shame if you broke it up.' Amon and the rest kept moving, and did not look back at the little man. 'That was not a request.'\n\nThe steel in Fo's voice made Mauer's gun hand twitch up. They all turned to look at him. His expression had not changed but there was a cold depth in his eyes - an invitation to the abyss unblinking above the smile.\n\n'You want me to complete the work, Amon Tauromachian, and this is a new condition of my cooperation. I remain, and so do you.'\n\nAmon took a step towards Fo. The gesture was pure, fluid threat, but the man did not move or flinch.\n\n'Kill me,' said Fo, not smiling now. 'Kill me and you will never get your weapon. Do not give me what I want now and you never get your weapon. The end of the war, Custodian, an in-extremis option to save the Emperor from His monstrous spawn. No more Horus. No more primarchs. No more Astartes. All gone. Problem solved. So close, all you need to do is let things carry on.' His lips twitched. 'Like the gene-witch said - the summation of no choice.'\n\nAmon did not move for a second. Then very slowly he stepped back, turned and gestured to Sindermann, Andromeda and Mauer.\n\n'Speak,' he said.\n\nMauer nodded.\n\nKeeler looked to Sindermann, turning her back on Fo.\n\n'Kyril,' she said. 'What are you doing?'\n\n'The right thing.'\n\n'A difficult thing to find,' she said.\n\n'I am doing my best.'\n\nShe smiled, put out a hand to his shoulder. Mauer could see the sympathy and sadness on her face.\n\n'It's alright,' she said. 'But I'm not going to like what you've come to say, am I?'\n\n'I don't know,' he said. 'You once said that your truth might be the only thing that could win this war... and the time is coming when there won't be a war left to win.'\n\nKeeler looked at him for a long moment. Mauer found that she was holding her breath.\n\n'Go on,' she said. 'Tell me.'\n\nSo he did.\n\nMauer listened as Sindermann laid it out, point by point, fact by fact. It was like watching a master watchmaker reassemble cogwork. She knew what the facts were, what the plan was, but as Sindermann finished, she felt as though the idea of it had settled into her - simple and true. No wonder he had been the man to turn victory into true compliance.\n\nSilence slipped into the moment after he finished.\n\n'It would be a lie,' said Keeler, after a moment. 'I would renounce the right to speak the truth of the Emperor's divinity, to be free, and that renunciation would be a lie.'\n\n'A necessary one,' said Sindermann. 'A lie to serve a greater truth.'\n\nKeeler gave the smallest shake of her head.\n\n'And once I was free, what then? A fugitive in a fortress under siege.'\n\n'Then you do what only you can,' said Sindermann. 'Show that the truth is real.'\n\n'The ground is ready,' said Mauer. 'As much as my office has done to try to control it, the rumours of miracles and the hope of the Emperor's protection are spreading. The only thing that is spreading faster is the despair and the hunger for escape. Those who despair want hope, want something to believe in. It would not take much, but it would have to be...'\n\n'Be what, boetharch? What would that not much have to be?'\n\n'Real,' said Mauer.\n\nKeeler held her gaze. 'You don't believe, do you?'\n\n'I believe that there are forces acting that I can't solve with questions and a gun.'\n\n'If it is relevant,' said Fo, and they all turned to where he sat. 'I think that it might work. I am not an expert in aetheric resonances, although the divide between that and the outer edge of bio-alchemy is thinner than you might imagine - but the theory is similar to the use of viral manipulation to destroy other forms of disease, or parasites to stimulate the bio-resistance to other pathogens. Given the position, Mamzel Keeler, I would do what they suggest.' He gave a shrug. 'Though it will mean that I miss our conversations.'\n\nThey all looked as though they had just been punched.\n\n'I am an artist, and a pragmatist. I also like being alive in a universe that is not bound and slaved to the will of extra-dimensional thought-parasites who want to use existence as a playground. I am not an idealist, never have been. That was always the problem with your Emperor, He could never accept anything but the ideal - the one path, His path. And that's the same for the rest of you who follow that path - you all think that if someone does not agree with you they would be happy to see everything burn as long as the Imperium, and its beloved Emperor, burns too. Well, I would rather that He becomes a false god than everything becomes slaved to real gods.' He shrugged again. 'From a purely pragmatic view, you understand.'\n\n'You...' began Andromeda, but Keeler started to speak, her voice distant.\n\n'I can't,' said Keeler. Mauer looked at her and saw that the woman's gaze was distant, her face grave. There were shadows in her eyes, and across her face.\n\n'You must,' said Amon. Mauer's head jerked up. The Custodian was utterly still and looking at Keeler. 'You must do what they suggest.'\n\n'You would permit it?' said Mauer.\n\n'I would permit nothing. I only serve the purpose that made me.'\n\n'But you will be complicit in...' began Keeler.\n\n'I will be complicit in nothing,' said Amon. 'I will leave. You will talk. Mistress Keeler will decide. She may not leave until she has made an avowal of solemn intent not to preach the creed that she believes in. If she does that, I will not stand in her way.'\n\nHe turned and went to th"}
{"text":"till and looking at Keeler. 'You must do what they suggest.'\n\n'You would permit it?' said Mauer.\n\n'I would permit nothing. I only serve the purpose that made me.'\n\n'But you will be complicit in...' began Keeler.\n\n'I will be complicit in nothing,' said Amon. 'I will leave. You will talk. Mistress Keeler will decide. She may not leave until she has made an avowal of solemn intent not to preach the creed that she believes in. If she does that, I will not stand in her way.'\n\nHe turned and went to the door. No one moved or spoke. It unlocked with a chorus of turrning gears and sliding bolts. He began to step through, then turned and looked back at them all, his green eyes moving between Sindermann, Andromeda and then Mauer.\n\n'I would be careful,' he said. 'If Mistress Keeler passes beyond these walls she will become a target. The enemy will sense a shift, they will feel the intent in her words and deeds, they will try to stop her. There are also those of our own who will not stand by to let you violate the decrees of the Imperial Truth. You will be hunted, and I cannot intervene.'\n\n'But you are now,' said Keeler.\n\n'An omission is not an action, according to some - I have done nothing other than give you my opinion and say that you cannot leave without an oath that you will not spread the faith you hold to others.' Mauer thought she saw a smile form and fade on Amon's face. 'Besides, as Andromeda-17 will tell you, the Custodians cannot act from their own feelings, only in service of their purpose.'\n\n'And that is?' asked Mauer.\n\n'The preservation of the Emperor,' said Amon, 'in the face of any threat and by any means.'\n\nHe looked away and went through the door, leaving them to look after him, and listen to the locks re-engage.\n\nSindermann broke the quiet, turning back to Keeler.\n\n'I am sorry, my friend, but I feel time is running fast. Will you do it? Will you take the oath and leave here?'\n\nKeeler was still for a long moment, and then she looked up, eyes fixed on the ceiling, or perhaps on something beyond. Her mouth moved, speaking silent words. Then her head dropped, and she shook herself. She looked up again. There was sorrow in her eyes. For a second Mauer felt as though she was falling, and with her went the voices of all the things she had left behind and never looked back at - her father, dying alone forty years in the past; the friends who had never come back; the man who had been brave before he had become a murderer, looking up at her as she aimed the gun.\n\n'Yes,' said Keeler. 'I will take the oath. I will tell the lie. It shall be done.'\n\nQuestioning Basilio Fo in the Blackstone.\n\nWe are the bearers of fire\n\nShadows in the pyre\n\nScreaming with our own voices\n\nLake Voss shore, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nLake Voss had been a pool caught in a fold on the ground seven months in the past. Five years before that it had not existed. Three years before that, the nascent Karalia had risen three kilometres into the air from the spot where the lake now sat. Rogal Dorn had ordered the land beyond the Ultimate Wall cleared, and the labour armies and Mechanicum levelling engines had obeyed. Karalia had been pulled apart, its metal going to the war forges to clad fortifications, its fabric ground into dust and gravel. Karalia Hive remained only as a nub of metal and broken machines.\n\nThe rains of Terra had come. Channels had snaked across the bare earth, cutting their own mark, making topography in the new land. Small folds in the ground and low hills of spoil became water sheds. Creases in dust and debris became channels, became rills, became erratic rivers filled by spoil water and the melted snow of winter. The pool that would be Lake Voss began to fill. A macro extractor had left a cut in the ground, perhaps the first of many that did not follow. Perhaps, it was simply forgotten before it began or the machines were re-tasked before they began. Later, water gathered there and found it could not drain down into the soil of Terra. A sheet of compacted and heat-fused metal lay under the surface, the bones of some city raised and reduced to slag in a war no longer remembered. The water could not pass down so it deepened on the surface. Before the Warmaster's ships darkened the skies, it was already eight kilometres long at its longest point. Water channels snaked across the desolation to find and feed it. The water was clear, all life kept from clouding its depths by the chemicals leeched from the ground. The pilots of the patrol craft that went overhead said that they could see down to the deepest point below its surface, and that the shapes of the abandoned excavators lay under the water growing bright flowers of multicoloured rust.\n\nThe ordnance masters picked landmarks as they ranged the guns and drew up the fire plans of the wall armaments. Some were given names, granted with little thought or consideration besides the need to bring a form of order to the newly flattened land beyond the Palace. The growing lake took the name 'Voss' for reasons that were never considered and not remembered. It shared the land with ordnance codes, and names granted with equally little care: Karalia's Grave, Drain Reach 45-56, Night Water, and on.\n\nWhen the Warmaster came and the great aegis shields lit above the Palace, Lake Voss drank deeply and grew. The interaction of the shield layer bred storms inside and above the aegis. Rain fell in deluges on the edge of the wall where shield and air met. The precipitation from inside the Inner Palace drained from its buildings and streets. Torrents gushed down pipe and tunnel networks, some refined to slake the thirst of those within, but most poured into the land beyond the wall. New rivers cut their way through the plateau. Some found the channels already made by the rains and turned them from irregular streams into tangles of broad rivers. New lakes were formed and swelled. Lake Voss spread and deepened day by day until it was a long blade of flat water, twenty-five kilometres wide and sixty long, cutting through the Mercury-Exultant kill-zone into the blind zone beyond.\n\nIncursion forces had used it as an axis of advance since the first troops had touched Terran soil. The undulations in the terrain around it and on its shoreline created dead ground where even war engines were out of sight of the wall guns over a hundred kilometres away. There had been battles on its margins before and the corpses and wrecks of those engagements lay in the mud or on the slopes of rubble. That the enemy would use it now as the incision point for a new advance was predictable, but they had never come in such force or with such strength before.\n\nTetracauron had wanted to see the ground of battle himself, with his own eyes, and so had floated his consciousness between the machine and his body. The sky beyond Reginae Furorem's eye-ports was darkening, bruising through the layer of cloud and smoke. They were just coming over a low rise of grey stone, fifty engines arrayed in staggered lines, the red, blue, yellow and black a garish shout of defiance against the draining light. Runs of rubble ran down the slope before them. With his human ears he could hear the rumble of metal and the hiss of pistons, a song of thunder voiced through machines. Behind them the cohorts of the secutarii troops followed, embarked in transports so that they could keep pace. Five thousand bonded troops and with them forty Knight Questoris of the thrall houses of Ignatum. These were not oathed Knights but warrior machines wholly thralled to the Legio, their livery red and jagged with yellow and black to mark them as a diminutive of the greater machines they fought beside. In battle, these Knights and the secutarii protected the god-machines' flanks and rear, and countered the threat of infantry and armour units. Though the weapons of mortals were pinpricks to a Titan, en masse a thousand pinpricks could bleed a walking god of strength.\n\n'Closing on enemy,' came Divisia's sending. She was the primary connection to the auspex and signal systems. 'The hunter group has them in sight. Thirty kilometres. Projections put the engagement site right on the southern shore of the lake.'\n\n'Signal the hunter group to track them until we engage,' he sent.\n\n'I hear the Solaria princeps in command of them is a killer,' impulsed Cartho. 'I'm not sure she will want to hang back while we do the work. They will want to taste blood.'\n\n'This is our moment of fire,' impulsed Divisia. 'The torch of battle was given to us to carry.'\n\n'They have cause, Divisia,' sent Tetracauron levelly. 'They are a shadow left by the fire of Beta-Garmon. Vengeance matters more when it is all you have left. Signal them that they can join battle once we have fired the first shot.'\n\n'Yes, my princeps.'\n\n'The enemy seem to be advancing without ground unit support,' sent Cartho. 'Engines only, en masse.'\n\nTetracauron closed his eyes to the deepening twilight and let his mind fold back into the brightness of the incandescence. The world shrank back in the whirl of bright data and the breath of reactor heat. He was walking. His stride carrying him forwards. The weight of his weapons a warmth on his hands. The presence of his kin a scattering of flames. The enemy was still out of direct sight, hidden by the deceptive folds in this flattened land and the heat haze still smearing the darkening horizon. They were there, though, he could feel it. The old enemy. Mortis, the legion of the cull, the reapers and the counters of the dead. There had been a time when they had been allies, bound together as part of the Triad Ferrum Morgulus. They had defended the earliest truth of the Machine-God on Mars and stood as the first of the Titan Legios, primogenitors in tradition and renown before all those that would follow. Now they walked to war against each other, and Tetracauron could not help but feel that this was an inevitable moment long delayed. Here they both were, kin of the forge, the iron"}
{"text":"eapers and the counters of the dead. There had been a time when they had been allies, bound together as part of the Triad Ferrum Morgulus. They had defended the earliest truth of the Machine-God on Mars and stood as the first of the Titan Legios, primogenitors in tradition and renown before all those that would follow. Now they walked to war against each other, and Tetracauron could not help but feel that this was an inevitable moment long delayed. Here they both were, kin of the forge, the iron and steel of each poured from the same crucibles, walking to war for what had to be the last time.\n\n'They will burn...' sent Divisia softly, as though speaking to his thoughts. 'All of them.'\n\nThe reactor in his chest growled.\n\n'Hear me,' he willed, and felt the spirits of the engines answer. 'All engines, weapons and shields to full readiness. We are the bearers of fire...' A moment, a lengthened break of sensation as he felt the reactor's fury draw breath.\n\n'Merge auspex and targeting data,' willed Cartho.\n\n'They are coming in broad and in depth,' came Divisia's pulse of thought. 'All the turning cogs of Mars, there's a lot of them!'\n\n'Maintain stride speed,' sent Tetracauron. 'They will be pushed south by the lake unless they want to wade, and Divisia... try to keep it respectful.'\n\n'Yes, my princeps.'\n\n'Not for me, but the machine listens to your soul, remember - best not to anger it before we have a target. Once we have them in gunsight then swear all you want.'\n\n'Yes, my princeps.'\n\n'Good. Do the wall guns have range on them?'\n\n'Forty per cent of top guns sighted and zeroed,' replied Cartho, 'holding for your command.'\n\n'Just forty per cent?'\n\n'Lines of sight are not clear for direct fire in this area.'\n\n'Forty is good enough. Let's hope that they are as accurate as General Nasuba says. For the rest we will just have to rely on ourselves. All machines, light and charge your weapons. Fire is truth.'\n\n'Princeps, I have the hounds from the Legio Solaria and a lance of Knights closing and requesting data and signal mesh. Code identifiers verify.'\n\n'Granted and link,' he willed. His sight flicked with tendrils of green as the data-link with the other legion's machine-spirits bled across the incandescence. 'Solaria, this is Princeps Senioris Tetracauron. I have field command for the engagement - assimilating your auspex and visual log data and realigning battle protocols. We aim to burn them all, but if you are here for blood and fire then lock into step and ready your guns.'\n\n'Our honour and pleasure, Ignatum,' came the voice of Abhani Lus Mohana. Tetracauron felt the snarl of aggression in the Solaria connection. He felt his flesh smile. He liked this one.\n\n'Solaria, you are closest to the enemy,' he sent. 'Your formation has target and range control for the wall guns. Guide our wrath true.'\n\n'Compliance,' replied Abhani, and the link faded from Tetra-cauron's sight and senses.\n\n'All Ignatum engines, synchronise weapon firing cycles.' He saw the enemy closing, shadows and red smears in the whirl of flame-orange data. The links to his crew and the engines of his maniple and demi-Legio were so close that they felt like his own thoughts.\n\n'Signal lag compensators and data purge activating.' Cartho.\n\n'Stride at sixty-four and accelerating.' Divisia.\n\n'Target lock held.' Cartho.\n\n'Fire,' he whispered to the soul of the gods he walked with.\n\nIgnatum obeyed. Missiles, plasma shells, beams of heat and light and pulses of exotic energy sheeted through the gloom.\n\nThe combined fire hit the advancing Mortis Titans in a staggered attack that marched through their ranks from front to back. Missiles hit, streaking high and falling in a rolling wave of explosions. Blast spheres shrieked out. Fire smeared down collapsing void shields, which burned in glittering cloaks as they fell. A deluge of shells struck at the same moment. Munitions chugged from gatling barrels and streamed from mega-bolters. The void shields on the lead Titans shredded. The shield projectors on a Reaver Titan stuttered and misfired as they tried to come back online, then detonated in a howling explosion. The engine behind walked on into the deluge, its own cannons firing as its forward armour deformed. The energy weapons fired a perfectly timed instant later. Streams of plasma and lances of las-fire reached into the boiling front of flame and stabbed into raw metal. The first true engine kill was a Warlord struck by the volcano and turbo-laser beams from the Reaver twins Torchbearer and Fulgurite. Their shots struck its central mass and bored into its heart in a flash of vaporising metal, then snapped off. For a second the Warlord swayed, its foot still rising to take the next step. Then its back split apart from inside. Plasma vented out, not in a sphere but in a cloud that howled into the twilight sky, twisting with oily light. The engine fell, thrashing, scrabbling in the sludge of the lake shore. Two more went, blown apart, cored, heads and limbs blown open or into gas. Giants stumbling, falling, crashing down in sprays of mud steam.\n\nThe fire wave rolled back through the advancing enemy. The view through Reginae Furorem's eyes was of a land aflame, rippling, roaring beneath the fog-veiled sunset.\n\n'My princeps, I have vox fire command to Shard Bastion. They are locked and ready to fire on your command.'\n\nHe felt fresh waves of power flow into weapons, heat and plasma inhaling into reservoirs.\n\n'Shard Bastion to range and then saturate for effect,' he sent. 'The Solaria hunters have target correction.'\n\nIn his heart he felt the fire beat against its iron walls. The incandescence pulled his attention back into its blazing heart. He held on for a second to give the command that would loose the guns of the Mercury Wall.\n\n'Be free,' he sent, and let the roar of the fire within and without take him.\n\nThe slope down to the lake shore vanished in light. Elatus was at full stride when the first ranging shots from the Mercury Wall hit. The aim was good and the shell exploded across the unshielded canopy of a Reaver Titan that was lumbering towards the edge of Legio Ignatum's fire wave. The shell burst, scattering green flare fire into the air and emitting a signal pulse.\n\nElatus was close enough to see the struck engine flinch as though stung.\n\n'Shard, shot true,' shouted Acastia into the fire control vox-link. 'Repeat, shot true. Fire for effect.'\n\n'This is Shard, confirmed and fir-'\n\nAcastia did not hear what came next. Pressure clamped her skull. Pain bored down through her. Elatus lurched in its stride. Behind and to either side of it Thaumas and Cyllarus stumbled too.\n\n'The call of the hunt is mine!' snarled Caradoc's voice over the vox as his will and anger lashed through Acastia's Helm Mechanicum. She could feel his rage and spite as he yanked her nerves and thoughts like a leash. 'You shall not dishonour me so!'\n\n'I...' she tried to reply. The enemy Titans were so close that she could see the skin of their bodies clearly for the first time as the explosions lit them.\n\nPocked lacquer peeling from corroded metal...\n\nAsh falling from joints...\n\nAnd...\n\nAnd there was something wrong with what she was seeing, something that tried to form into a thought as her head flooded with her half-brother's fury. 'Please,' she said. 'Please, my liege, there is something wrong-'\n\n'You will obey! You will do me honour!'\n\nElatus was still running forwards. The Titans were looming in her sight, outlines in the fire and las shattering on and around them. And in a flash of explosive light she saw the Reaver Titan that had been hit by the ranging shot, saw it clear as the snap of flame poured across its body. Holes in armour plates, patched in places, open in others. Broken cables dangling from gouged wounds. Pale light within, flickering like a candle burning inside a ruined castle long deserted.\n\nShe wanted to shout, to call out, but the pain from Caradoc's command was swallowing everything.\n\nThen the first shot of the full barrage from the Mercury Wall struck. It was a plasma blast, shot from a bombard on the distant parapet. It hit the nearest Titan's back plates and blasted a layer of them to slag. The glowing ball of energy flattened, melting through the metres of armour, feeding on what it burned, sinking into the engine's back like a hot coal on ice. The Titan staggered forwards, shrugging, head twisting. Streams of molten metal were running down its back. More shots landed, shells and blasts of energy, that blanketed the ground and burned away the night.\n\nAcastia felt Caradoc's hold slacken, and jinked Elatus aside as a shell hit the ground fifty strides ahead of her and punched a fist of debris and fire into the air. Her ion shield sang with shrapnel impacts. Her head was a shattered sun of pain. Rainbow colours spun in her sight. The ground shook. Fire hid the ground ahead all the way down to the water. The enemy engines were shadows within the inferno. The Ignatum Titans were still coming forwards in an arc along the lake shore, their fire tearing at the shadows within, the rhythm of their guns synchronised.\n\nAcastia caught her breath. She saw the Reaver Titan that had taken the plasma bombard hit stumble from the inferno. It bent over, the wound on its back a glowing crater. Patches of flame clung to its power fist and gun arm. It tried to straighten, legs pushing forwards. Its head came up, and for an instant it was looking directly down at Acastia. Then it fell. Its balance unravelled with a shriek of metal. It pitched forwards, snout ploughing through the bank. Mud fountained up. Water became steam on the hot metal. Acastia thought she felt its fall shake through the frame of her mount.\n\nThe strobing tide of detonations filled Tetracauron's sight. Target halos formed and locked, as Reginae Furorem's sensors found the signatures of enemy engines amongst the explosions. In the incandescence, the fire was ragged black. The ground grey. His legion kin were figures of b"}
{"text":"nravelled with a shriek of metal. It pitched forwards, snout ploughing through the bank. Mud fountained up. Water became steam on the hot metal. Acastia thought she felt its fall shake through the frame of her mount.\n\nThe strobing tide of detonations filled Tetracauron's sight. Target halos formed and locked, as Reginae Furorem's sensors found the signatures of enemy engines amongst the explosions. In the incandescence, the fire was ragged black. The ground grey. His legion kin were figures of burning gold striding forwards in staggered lines. Knights and skitarii flowed about them, moving in synchronisation with each step. Shadows moved in the flame, trying to walk against the deluge of fire. There were dozens of them. A forest of walking metal and iron. They fell, burning, cut and blasted, limbs and armour melted. The tick of minutes since the battle began a rising count of engine kills.\n\nTarget lock.\n\nWeapon icons spun green. He felt the fire loose from his engine a blink before it crossed his vision. A stitched blur from his back. A nanosecond later, a matched blast from his maniple kin, each one firing as the others' reactors drew breath so that the flow of destruction never ceased. Perfect. Delivered as one, striking metal as one, as Reginae Furorem and its kin strode into the killing ground, passing the dead, flames glittering off their void shields. An army of god-machines six hundred metres wide, curving as it pressed the enemy down the lake shore.\n\nTarget lock.\n\nFiring.\n\nTarget lock.\n\nFiring.\n\nStriking metal.\n\nThe few void shields on the enemy fizzling and misfiring. Like they were already damaged, or not working.\n\n'All units,' he sent, 'confirm the presence of any shield envelopes on enemy engines.'\n\n'Negative,' came the first reply, then the rest, the data flow a chorus in his head.\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Negative.'\n\nThree kills, four, five, ten, enemy casualties mounting and return fire only a scatter of wild shots.\n\n'This is not right,' breathed Divisia across the link. 'We should be taking fire. Our damage yield is off the scale. It's as though their shields are not functioning, or as if they had already taken damage.'\n\n'Central command records no engagements with these units,' replied Cartho.\n\nTetracauron's mind was racing, thoughts spinning through the memories of engagements, of tactical scenarios and patterns, searching in the space of an eye-blink for a model to fit what he was seeing.\n\n'All units,' he sent, 'immediate halt!'\n\nThe dead Titan lay in front of Acastia, the air burning behind it where the bombardment was still rolling through its kin.\n\nFor a moment Acastia stared at it. Elatus' stride had slowed. The fallen Titan filled her eyes, its shadow lit by guttering flame, the shroud of steam billowing across it. She was half aware of the tactical data scrolling across the edge of her sight. Ignatum were adding their fire to that of the wall guns, their engines spreading out in an arc to cover any enemy that broke from the bombardment.\n\n'Acastia.' It was Dolloran, coming close, curbing his steed to match her faltering pace.\n\nThere... there had... The engine had looked at her before it fell.\n\n'Acastia, what is wrong? Are you injured?'\n\nIt had looked at her... Head dipping like a dog with a broken back. She had looked back, and seen...\n\n'Acastia!' Cyllarus was abreast of her now, close enough that their guns were almost touching. She was still going forwards towards the downed Titan.\n\nFire running from its shoulders. And...\n\nOne of the Solaria Warhounds went past her, its stride loping, mud splashing up from foot impacts. Its gun and head not looking at the dead Titan lying at the edge of the lake...\n\nHead coming down. The cracked crystal of its eye-ports, lit from within, but not by fire.\n\nEverything seeming slow in her mind, sand scattered by a blast of wind.\n\n'All...' she began to say, her hand finding the broad vox transmission stud. She felt Elatus' stride falter. The dead Titan was directly ahead of her. It had looked at her as it fell...\n\nHead coming down, fire inside its metal skull. Cold, pale fire...\n\n'All engine kills still hostile, repeat, engine kills still active.'\n\n'Acastia...' began Dolloran, but she did not hear what he was going to say, nor the other voices coming from her vox.\n\nThe dead Reaver Titan dragged itself from the ground. Fire drained into blackened armour. Shattered joints splintered as they moved. Mud and black water fell from it. Its head came up last. Pale light filled the space inside its eye-ports.\n\n'Move!' shouted Dolloran, his voice stabbing across the vox as Cyllarus swerved. Acastia was already kicking Elatus forward, jinking the Armiger aside as the shadow of the Titan grew against the sheet of fire at its back. Gun barrels rotated. 'Get-'\n\nThe risen Titan fired.\n\n'Target active!' Divisia's sending echoed into Tetracauron from the incandescence. 'It's right on top of us!'\n\nAnd it was. A Warlord, its body soot black. Dark liquid draining to the ground. Frost forming on its limbs. Right next to them. Close enough that there was nowhere to go.\n\n'Shields-' But he did not finish the sending. Shells struck Reginae Furorem's shields. Explosions blotted out Tetracauron's awareness. Reginae Furorem's shields blew out in a drum roll of detonations. Feedback lashed through the incandescence. Tetracauron felt his jaw clamp shut with sympathetic pain. He was falling, falling from the rope that tied him to his engine. He gasped. Blood sprayed from his lips. His eyes were a blur of images from inside his Titan's head. Fire and lightning flashing beyond its eyes. Red lights shrieking across machine surfaces. Beyond it a shadow, the shape of the Titan they had killed stepping forwards, rust scattering from its fingers as its fist rose and reached. He could hear it. Somehow, he could hear it speaking to him, its voice a rattle of broken gears.\n\nThe incandescence snapped him back. Power shivered through him. Cold fire flooding him from his core. The enemy Titan a shape of night bracketed by green target locks. Weapon charge. Target ordained.\n\n'Strike.' The command left his mind. He felt it pass to Divisia, felt it become her will and an echo of his command in a time that for flesh would not have even allowed for a breath to be drawn.\n\nReginae Furorem's power fist came up, lightning arcing along its open fingers. It met the enemy Titan's blow.\n\nWhite light shattered from the impact.\n\nTetracauron felt force judder through his engine. His will snapped the fingers of his Titan's hand shut. The fingers dug into rusted metal. Power fields tore through gears and joints.\n\n'Tear,' shouted Divisia, her command to the weapon system boiling out into the incandescence. The reactor spiked. Tetracauron felt fire pour down his own arm. Mandalas of weapon data spun as piston rams fired. Reginae Furorem's fist yanked back. The enemy Titan's fist tore from its arm. A sphere of energy formed and burst around the torn joint and shattered. Shoulder plates and torso mass rippled like cloth as the shock wave passed through it. It was reeling, plasma and ectoplasm pouring from its wound. Its shriek of pain was a blade of static and corrupted code stabbing into his nerves. Reginae Furorem cast the hand of its enemy aside. Tetracauron could feel its spirit blazing with rage. It was almost acting without command, the echoes of its past battles driving it, flowing out from its molten heart. The enemy Titan tried to bring its gun up.\n\n'Weapon primed. Target locked.' Divisia's weapon command blinked through him.\n\nHe felt the iron fist of the Machine-God that he served rise. The enemy Titan was before it, trying to straighten, the world behind it ragged with fire.\n\n'Shields!' sent Tetracauron. 'Shields now!'\n\nAnd he felt the shell of void energies begin to reform around him, layer by layer, each an eye-blink, each a slow ripple of time for him.\n\n'Strike!'\n\nReginae Furorem punched its open fist into the enemy Titan's neck, up into the join between head and torso, up into the mass of cables and power conduits. It closed its hand with a clap of lightning, and ripped its arm back. The enemy Titan's head and half of its upper torso came away. Bile-coloured fire blasted out. Blood poured into the wound, bubbling from the spaces inside. Its legs shuddered, half lifting from the mud, as though an echo of will within it still drove it. Reginae Furorem did not wait for the enemy to fall. It struck into the wound of its first blow, the head of the enemy still in its grasp. The enemy Titan exploded in a ragged blaze. Malfunctioning plasma conduits ruptured. The energy still pooled in the stopped heart of its long-dead reactor burst outwards. A blizzard of sharpness and plasma broke Reginae Furorem's void shields an instant after they formed. Tetracauron felt the layers of protection shatter, but the sensation flicked past as his Titan and crew roared with anger and victory.\n\nTetracauron yanked his mind out of the spiral of burning and flung it wide, through sensors and noospheric links, across his battle force. Every engine was engaged, most at extreme close quarters with dead Titans that had pulled themselves from the ground. There were more closing, a ragged herd of engines coming on, weapons chugging fizzing shells and blisters of plasma. The noosphere link to the other engines rolled with errors and ghost images. Flickers of fire and the sound of alarms and the engines falling under skies that were not Terra's blinked across his vision.\n\n'Impact, upper carapace quadrant,' sent Divisia.\n\n'Xeta?'\n\n'Reactors are fluctuating. Scrap code into peripheral systems. Hostile and corrupt data incarnations across multiple communication bands.'\n\n'Shut them out!'\n\n'I am attending to that task, princeps, but they are not using enemy code ciphers. They are transmitting a dirge. Disharmonious. Broad spectrum. Maximum gain. The blessed subsyst"}
{"text":"he sound of alarms and the engines falling under skies that were not Terra's blinked across his vision.\n\n'Impact, upper carapace quadrant,' sent Divisia.\n\n'Xeta?'\n\n'Reactors are fluctuating. Scrap code into peripheral systems. Hostile and corrupt data incarnations across multiple communication bands.'\n\n'Shut them out!'\n\n'I am attending to that task, princeps, but they are not using enemy code ciphers. They are transmitting a dirge. Disharmonious. Broad spectrum. Maximum gain. The blessed subsystems of our engines allowed them in before we could shut them out.'\n\n'How?'\n\n'They are not enemy Legio code cant structures. They are ours. They are screaming with our own voices.'\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 113 kilometres.\n\nParadise\n\nSons of Caliban\n\nUgent Sye\n\nEast Phoenicium Wastes\n\n'What are we doing?' Krank had been asking the same question for the last hour. Oll had given the best reply he was comfortable with each time, but he was not sure that it was going in.\n\n'We are trying to find John,' Oll said again. 'Without him I don't know where we are going next. Added to which he was in trouble.'\n\n'Bad trouble?' asked Rane.\n\nOll nodded. He was keeping his eyes down on his feet or on the back of the crowd in front of him. It was getting harder not to look up at the hive as they got closer. Every time he let his thoughts off the narrow passage he was holding them to, he found himself staring at it. It was brighter than it should have been, a spiralling set of needle towers and bridges, the sun exploding into rainbows and sun patterns from the polished metal and crystal domes.\n\nThe rest of the crowd were not trying to look away. All of them were gazing upwards. Some of them were crying. Some of their tears were pink with blood. There was a smell of sweat and burning sugar and meat to the crowd. Some of them talked all the time, as though they were walking somewhere else other than the baking wastelands. There were blasts of laughter, sometimes of song, sometimes screams. There had been some who had collapsed: a man who had stumbled and slipped, and had his ankle broken by the tread of those coming after him, screaming in pain that he had to reach paradise, sobbing as he pulled himself over the ground; another who must have died days ago, their body dragged by the clothes that had snagged unnoticed on others.\n\nThey might have once been refugees, but the crowd were something else now. Pilgrims, Oll thought, pilgrims who thought they were walking to paradise, and who might just be right.\n\nBad trouble... Oll was certain they were already in that and that it was only going to get worse. That was what was going to happen, down into Hades, into the Labyrinth with the beast... There was no dodging it, and only one way to go: forwards, into it, and hope that you came out the other side.\n\nIt had been hard to keep moving, hard to keep the others moving, too - harder to keep them from turning to try to help, or shout, or shoot the tide of people. Rane was the worst, Rane and perhaps Graft. Rane was struggling not to look at the hive. Oll had heard him mumble Neve's name once, a name that Rane had not spoken in years. There was something up with Graft, too. The loading servitor had started twitching, suddenly swinging around as though to a command. The woman with the veil and the bones hanging from her mouth, with her big companion, had stuck with them, too. Keeping close, glancing at them every now and again. The throng kept back from the pair, as though from instinct. That had been useful, and worrying.\n\n'This is a witch path,' Katt said to Oll under her breath as they walked on. 'You know that, right? I mean... I can feel it. I can hear it, and it's... it's like a song, Oll, like before when we left Calth, like the sirens.'\n\n'Yes,' he said. 'That's just what it's like.'\n\n'Once we are in,' asked Katt, 'how are we going to find your friend? Presuming he is in this place?'\n\n'John called us,' said Oll. 'He will have left a sign, or a message.'\n\n'You are sure?'\n\n'No,' he said, and looked at Katt. There was no point lying to her - she would know if he did, he was sure.\n\n'Okay,' she said in reply.\n\n'Look...' The woman in the veil was just in front of them, turning to look at them, pointing up as they rounded a spur of dry earth and rock.\n\nOll looked before he could stop himself. The hive was there, rising from the dust, glittering, dazzling, rippling in the heat like a gas flame. He felt the sensation drain from his skin, felt the breath hiss from his lungs...\n\nEverything was going to be okay.\n\nThey didn't... He didn't need to go any further. This was the place he needed to be. The only place he ever needed to be.\n\n'Just what you wanted,' said a voice beside him, deep, resonant, the voice of an old friend. 'You only ever wanted to stop, to let the world be, and hope that it would let you be for a while.'\n\n'The... the sea...' he felt himself stammer. 'The ship and the open seas.'\n\n'All of that wandering and adventuring came later,' said the voice, 'once you figured out that the world would not let you rest. Even then you were always trying to get home, really. And now... now you are, and you can rest now, Ollanius.'\n\nSomething hit him from behind. He staggered, and the voice was gone and so was the sight of the hive.\n\nPeople were rushing past him. The long ribbon crowd that they had walked with was breaking into a mad rush as they saw the hive above them. People were running, scrambling and ripping past each other. He heard gunshots, cries. Oll tried to move, was hit again. His head was aching, his eyes streaming. A high ringing - like a glass struck by a fingernail - filled his ears.\n\nA strong hand caught him and lifted him up. He looked up, expecting to see Graft or Zybes.\n\nThe towering figure swathed in coloured fabric stood beside him, a rock that the tide of people flowed around. The veiled woman stood next to him. She was not looking at the hive but at him.\n\n'Here,' she said, 'just a little further, traveller, but you have to move. The threshold is no place to linger.'\n\nHe stared at her, his sight blurred, the shape of her a multicoloured flicker. The river of people were passing in a rush, but they were an island.\n\n'You?' he said, mouth and throat dry. 'Who are you?'\n\nShe was smiling, the bones on their threads rattling softly beneath her chin.\n\n'I am a pilgrim,' she said.\n\n'Oll!' Katt's shout ripped his head around. She was coming at him out of the crowd. Zybes and Graft beside her. Krank and Rane following. They all had their eyes held low, downcast from the sight of the hive. There were tears of blood under Katt's eyes, and red on her chin. She was pale. Shaking. The others too. He saw them begin to run. 'Get away! Run!'\n\nA booming cry filled the air, pulsing and rising, cutting clear over the shouts and whoops of the running crowd. Oll felt the noise rather than heard it, felt it vibrate out from bone to skin.\n\n'Uhhh...' he felt himself gasp, tasted vomit on his tongue. He saw the figure out of the corner of his eye. Big, bigger than could be ignored, standing on a crag of sandstone, coated in armour, glowing with colours and reflections: acid green, deep crimson, fire orange and teal, chrome and bronze. It had limbs and form... god, but it was real, more real than anything should be, a shriek given form. It was looking down at the running tide of humanity, bellowing welcome or glee, or threat. The crowd was running, some towards the figure, others away, or flattening themselves against the ground. There was blood. Blood running from ears and eyes and mouths, and the wounds raked by fingers in flesh. The veiled woman and her giant companion were nowhere to be seen, vanished like smoke before a gale.\n\nA hand grabbed him.\n\n'Oll, stop!' Katt's voice, distant, shouting. 'Not that way, get away from it!'\n\nHe looked down; his feet were moving, taking him forwards, towards the figure. A neon burn-image of the armoured figure clung to Oll's sight.\n\nOh god, he had been going towards it... He still was.\n\nHe wrenched himself around, closing his eyes, dragging muscle with will - and began to run. The bellowing cry unfolded in the air above him. At least some of the others were beside him. He was running towards the hive and all he could hear was screaming and all he could taste was vomit and sugar.\n\nThe next stride of his run unfolded in front of him. His foot touched down on...\n\nPolished stone. He stopped, halted, blinking, breathing, the red in his mouth fading. There was no crowd. There was no dust. He was standing on a path of green stone run through with pale bands, polished to a sheen. It wound into the distance in a curve that drew the eye on and up. The hive was there, still shining in the sun, but there was a warmth to it now, a perfection to the arcs of its aqueducts and clustered domes. Stairs wound up from the ground into the air, corkscrewing up through hundreds of metres to join delicate bridges. The leaves of plants waved from the balustrades. Flowers, heavy with pollen and scent, hung their heads over the sides of stacked balconies. The leaves of trees shivered in the warm breeze that blew from behind Oll's back. Flocks of birds, or perhaps butterflies or moths, with multicoloured wings took flight and resettled on patches of blossom. Grey and yellow pollen puffed into the air, coiling and swirling in drifts.\n\nHe took a breath. The air was sweet, edged with smells of salt and lemon blossom and the warmth of earth under the sun.\n\nThere was no one else in sight. No crowd, no abomination in armour. Quiet, broken by the distant splash of water and the laughter of bird wings in the air.\n\nHe had his gun in his hands, he realised, finger beside the trigger, safety off. He thought about safetying it and slinging it - no need for it here. No need for anything here...\n\nHe kept the gun in his hands. A familiar old sensation was creeping over him, like a voice he had not heard for a very long time speaking a half-forgotten name.\n\n'Oll?' "}
{"text":"was no one else in sight. No crowd, no abomination in armour. Quiet, broken by the distant splash of water and the laughter of bird wings in the air.\n\nHe had his gun in his hands, he realised, finger beside the trigger, safety off. He thought about safetying it and slinging it - no need for it here. No need for anything here...\n\nHe kept the gun in his hands. A familiar old sensation was creeping over him, like a voice he had not heard for a very long time speaking a half-forgotten name.\n\n'Oll?' He turned. Katt was standing beside Graft. She had her pistol in her hand. Aimed. No waver in the barrel. Behind the sight he could see her eyes.\n\n'It's me, Katt,' he said, very carefully. 'Something tells me that you might need more than that to be certain - but it's okay.'\n\nShe lowered the gun after the sound of the last word. Okay - not a word of this time, a word that had come to mean a lot of things to the crew that had crossed the last years with him.\n\n'You went away,' she said. 'It's been hours, but... not for you, right?'\n\n'Right,' he said, looking around again. 'The others went, too?'\n\nShe nodded. 'There and then not.' Oll looked at Graft. The servitor was still, head sunk between piston shoulders. Oll put out his hand to the old half-machine. It raised its head. Looked at him. There was a film of fluid running down its neck from its speaker grille.\n\n'Trooper...' it buzzed. 'Trooper Persson.'\n\n'I looked for them,' said Katt, 'but I didn't want to go far, or call out. There are things here, Oll.'\n\nOll looked at Graft and let his hand drop. Here he was, just like before, just like always happened when you were trying to get somewhere that the gods didn't want you to reach. People got lost.\n\n'Have to find them,' he said, half to himself, then shook his head. No use... If he was right about what had got John, about where they had run aground, then the others were as good as gone.\n\n'I think I can find them,' said Katt. He looked at her sharply. She nodded in reply, and held up the pendant and the compass. The shard of black crystal on the end of the pendant swayed. He saw that she had his chart too, folded in her fingers. She must have taken them from him when he fell again, in case he did not come back. Clever Katt... 'I can feel them, like they are out there, very distant, but in my head, too, like a voice, or a clear memory...'\n\n'Like a thread,' said Oll.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'And this.' She raised the pendulum, compass and chart. 'It gives you a way to somewhere, or someone.'\n\nOll smiled. He wondered if it was all the places they had been that had taught her this, all that tumbling through time and looking into the whirlpool of the universe. The terror had burned away, had become the will to look on things that would break others and let her still act. Her psyker talent, well... he still hadn't got a sense of what shape that was taking, only that right now he was very glad they had brought the near-catatonic girl with them from the ruin of Calth.\n\n'Not lost at all, are you?' he said. 'Not even here.'\n\nShe smiled too.\n\n'I've no idea where this is - I thought we were back in the schism space somehow, but it's not that. It feels different, worse. Like...'\n\n'Like it's trying to strangle you with softness,' completed Oll. 'Yes, I'm afraid I have brought us to a bad place. A very bad place, in fact.'\n\n'What is it?'\n\nHe looked around at the leaves and flowers and falling water, and the pollen hazing the light falling through, and thought of all the names and ways that the idea had changed over time, pernicious, tempting, the truth of it only leaking out in places where stories frayed.\n\n'Paradise,' he said.\n\nMagnifican\n\n'We have to stop, at least for a while.'\n\nShiban looked around at Cole. The man was sweating, swaying slightly. The infant in his arms was asleep, a small hand clear above the fold of the hessian sheet that had become its sling. It smelled of shit. The man, too. That was good, in Shiban's estimation. If it was defecating that meant that its digestive system and kidneys were functioning and had not rejected the non-standard diet it was being fed.\n\n'There,' said Shiban, pointing with a finger at a curve of girders and pitted metal projecting from the ash layer. 'That will provide shelter, and there are pipes running to it under the surface.'\n\n'Water?' said Cole.\n\n'We will see.'\n\nHe moved forwards, eyes passing over the little of the land that there was to see. A dense, humid fog filled the air around them, turning the daylight into a haze, and objects in the distance became phantoms that vanished, never to return. To breathe it was to be suffocated, to move through it like wading across the seabed of an ocean. Taste, smell, vibration and sound had taken the place of sight as key senses. Sometimes there was gunfire, or a swell in the distant rumble of civilisation-ending weaponry. Twice now, Shiban had heard things moving close by, within twenty strides, things that moved with the care and slowness of hunters. He had become still, and held Cole still with a gesture. The infant was always quiet at such moments, as though it understood that silence was survival. Both times, the sounds out in the fog had moved away after a while and they had pressed on. Cole had taken to talking, asking questions mainly. Shiban was tempted to tell the man to be quiet, but that would have served no end - words were this human's connection to a world he could understand.\n\n'Poetry begins with the talking,' Yesugei had said. 'And talking is the shadow of the spirit within.'\n\nSo, he let the man talk and walked on. It was the questions that tried his patience most.\n\n'You have seen him, the Praetorian?' asked Cole.\n\n'Yes,' Shiban said, and kept moving.\n\n'You have been in his presence?'\n\n'Several times.'\n\n'He has talked to you?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Truly?'\n\n'Yes. I have talked to Lord Dorn, and Sanguinius, and my Khan, and Lord Guilliman, and...' He had been about to say the names of Magnus the Red, Fulgrim and Horus Lupercal.\n\n'Yes? And... who?'\n\n'Others,' said Shiban.\n\n'Ah...'\n\nThey walked on for a few more steps in silence. Shiban could not help but think of Yesugei smiling with amusement.\n\n'I think I preferred the vultures...' he muttered. The pain had ebbed to a constant dull ache in every part of his body.\n\n'Sorry?' asked Cole.\n\n'Vultures, journey companions to the wanderer. On Chogoris we say that when any spirit is alone, companions will always come with them. Sometimes a rider may become separated from their fellows, or choose to go riding alone, beyond the horizon. No matter why, or how far they have gone, companions will join them, travel with them until they either find their way back or ride beyond the plain of the world. They speak wisdom and truth and keep the wanderer true to themselves.' Shiban glanced at Cole. 'They usually look like birds.'\n\nCole frowned.\n\n'You are saying that I... that we are like the carrion birds that follow lost people who are going to die?'\n\nShiban raised his eyebrows, a facial shrug that sent hot needles into his skull.\n\n'I am saying that you talk a lot.'\n\nCole opened his mouth, still frowning. Shiban waited for another question, but the man raised his head, looking up and away, alert.\n\n'The wind is changing direction,' said Cole.\n\nShiban felt it then. A thread of cold air was coiling across the skin of his face. How had he missed it and the man had noticed?\n\nHe paused, turning to look in the direction Cole was looking. As he moved, the gust strengthened. Cole's coat snapped and billowed. Dust skittered across the ground, rattling. He shivered, unease rolling through him in place of the relief that a cool breeze should have brought. He caught a breath of the air, tasted damp stagnation on it, the smell of a sepulchre kept sealed.\n\nThe fog swirled, shrinking, drawing back like inhaled smoke. The distant sky emerged, hazed, sunlight stained the colour of old rags. And thrusting up through it was a tower that reached up and up, its silhouette ragged like the blade of a notched knife. Shiban felt his eyes lock to it. For a moment it seemed to lose dimension and detail, so that it seemed like a black wound in the sky. Light fled it, and he knew that the wind that had parted the fog had come from it. The Lion's Gate space port, that was what he was seeing, but in the back of his skull all he could think of was the sound of the wings of dying birds, and down in his core, besides the pain of his wounds, he felt ice form and climb up his spine with slow fingers. The wind gusted, whispering, breathing, laughing...\n\n'No...' moaned Cole. 'Please, no...'\n\nShiban looked around. The man was on the ground crouched in a ball around the bundle of the infant, rocking. Shiban moved to his side, put a hand on his shoulder.\n\nCole looked up. Tears were rolling down the man's face and falling onto the bundle of fabric holding the child. Who was... asleep, eyes closed, chest moving with the slow rhythm of whatever were a human's first dreams.\n\n'Cole,' said Shiban. 'Why do you weep? The infant lives.'\n\n'One day he won't,' said Cole, softly. 'One day I will fail. One day he will be alone out here, screaming for someone to help.'\n\n'That is not certain.'\n\n'It is, though. Look around, Space Marine,' said Cole, and with that the words were pouring from him, flowing out as he shook. 'Everything ends in tears and suffering. Everything. I just... I just wanted to help him. I just wanted to help... I just wanted for something to be true and whole and to last. One thing... just one thing. Why can't that be true? Why is the rule of the universe cruelty? Everything is gone. Everything... I can see them... This was not supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen. But it won't stop, don't you see? This goes on forever, until there is nothing left. Nothing.'\n\nShiban let his hand drop from the man's shoulder. He could feel the shadow of the Lion's Gate behind him, the breath of the dank wind stirring his hair. He could hear that distant t"}
{"text":" last. One thing... just one thing. Why can't that be true? Why is the rule of the universe cruelty? Everything is gone. Everything... I can see them... This was not supposed to happen. None of this was supposed to happen. But it won't stop, don't you see? This goes on forever, until there is nothing left. Nothing.'\n\nShiban let his hand drop from the man's shoulder. He could feel the shadow of the Lion's Gate behind him, the breath of the dank wind stirring his hair. He could hear that distant tower calling him to the same despair that Cole had fallen into - like a voice reaching for them across the land.\n\n'Perhaps,' he said.\n\nCole looked at him then, and bitterness gleamed in his eyes.\n\n'Perhaps? Is that all you can say?'\n\n'Hope is not certainty. It is the light in the distance. Ride towards it, and you may reach it. You may die in the saddle before you see it, but stop and it will always be distant.'\n\nCole laughed, shrill with bitterness. 'Is that the best of Chogorian comfort?'\n\n'It is truth,' Shiban said, and stood, 'and that is all we have.'\n\nCole looked down at the sleeping infant. The child's face twitched but his eyes stayed closed.\n\nHe shook his head. Shiban watched him. The wind was dropping, the fog folding over the corridor it had opened to the vision of the Lion's Gate space port. At last Cole shook his head and looked up at Shiban. 'One more step,' he said.\n\nShiban nodded, and reached out a hand. Cole took it and pulled himself up.\n\n'It is not far,' said Shiban, 'but I fear that from here it will not get easier.'\n\nCole shook his head, he was already walking.\n\n'You really need to work on your motivation.'\n\nShiban was about to reply, as he glanced back behind them in the direction of the now obscured space port. He stopped. The fog was thickening, but for a moment he thought he saw something. A shadow in the blurred light and haze, bloated, spiked, standing on a rise of rubble. Unmoving. Looking back at him across the distance.\n\nThe Wrath's Descent, inner system gulf\n\nCorswain opened his eyes. The dying beast was still there, bleeding out, looking at him from the borderland of remembered sleep. The pearl of Terra looked back at him from the viewport. The bridge of the Wrath's Descent was quiet, the crews at their stations speaking in murmurs or in the click of keys and controls. Vassago and Adophel stood further back from the viewport, exchanging a few words that Corswain did not try to catch.\n\n'We are reaching the initiation point,' said Adophel. Corswain nodded but did not reply. His gaze shifted to the bulk of the ship hanging in the void above him. The light of the distant sun rolled across its golden flanks and snagged on the impact craters that dotted its surface. This close, it felt as though he were looking up at the surface of a gilded moon. Its hull and flanks tapered down to a spear-blade tip. The clusters of its engines glowed a cold blue, sliding it forwards and down towards the distant light of Terra. It was smaller than the Phalanx, a sister in raw mass and volume to the great Gloriana-class ships that led the fleets of traitors and loyalists alike. It dwarfed the Dark Angels battle-barge and three grand cruisers that moved in its shadow. There was more to it than its size, though. It carried a presence that Corswain fancied he could feel across the gulf between the ships. In the ages when it had gone to war, its guns had been crewed by devices and half-machines created not on Mars, but in the Fortresses of Unity on Terra. Palaces lived within its hull, and its weapons were marvels taken and made from the dead glory of the past. It was called the Imperator Somnium, the Imperial Dream, golden and bright. It was one of the three ships that bore the Emperor through the stars on the Great Crusade. Now it would go home for one final time.\n\n'Are we ready?' Corswain asked, still without turning.\n\n'Aye, lord,' said Vassago.\n\nCorswain gave a nod but nothing more. Ten thousand of his brothers packed the four Legion warships that moved in the Imperator Somnium's shadow. Ammunition and crew had been stripped out, and gunships, landers and assault craft loaded into every hangar and launch bay. Some bore the colours of the Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and White Scars, the vessels gifts to Corswain's cause from his Legion cousins. Racks of drop pods waited in launch tubes. Kharybdis and Dreadclaw assault pods clung to the ships' bellies and backs, all fully loaded with warriors.\n\n'The cause...' breathed Corswain to himself. A cause or a vainglorious piece of foolishness, a knight riding into the spears of the enemy, a cry on his lips, sword raised, and his death and the deaths of those that rode with him a certainty.\n\n'My lord?' said Vassago.\n\n'You do not agree with what we are doing, brother, I know.'\n\n'Lord?'\n\n'You are silent in counsel, Librarian, and that silence speaks.'\n\n'The role of my circle is not to lead, lord, it is to aid those who do.'\n\n'Then aid me now, by sharing your doubt.'\n\nA pause, a shift.\n\nCorswain knew that the Librarian was looking at Adophel.\n\n'Adophel has heard and seen enough to know that difference in opinion does not mean dissent or division,' said Corswain, still keeping his eyes on Terra. 'Speak.'\n\n'As you will it,' said Vassago, carefully. 'Lord, the battle is done. The forces of the Warmaster are greater. They will prevail. There is no salvation coming. We are all there is. Death awaits us on Terra.'\n\n'Better that we let it play out?' said Corswain.\n\n'Better that we preserve what we can,' said Vassago. 'This war shall not end. The stars will burn hereafter. We have some strength, maybe with our allies more. Strength enough to defend what we have, strength enough to begin again.'\n\n'Without the Imperium, without the Emperor.'\n\n'With what remains.'\n\nCorswain's jaw clamped shut.\n\n'Your words could be an avowal of betrayal.'\n\n'You asked me to speak,' said Vassago. 'I would not have done so otherwise.'\n\n'And when I do not take that course?' asked Corswain. 'Will you still be silent?'\n\n'I will stand by your side, sire.'\n\nCorswain nodded, and then glanced at Adophel.\n\n'Give the order,' he said.\n\nThe fleet master nodded, and moved out of sight. Ten seconds later, Corswain felt the vibration of the deck change, deepening as the engines and reactors lit. The stars began to slide past faster and faster. The great golden bulk of the Imperator Somnium kept pace. There were hardly any living crew on board, just the servitors needed for the reactors and some of the guns, and a trio of Custodians, who stood on the bridge.\n\n'Get to the launch bay,' Corswain said to Vassago, and turned from the view. His helmet clamped over his sight. The world became a red glow of threat markers. In the blink of his eyelids he saw the beast's blood leak onto the snow and its eyes close. In the viewport behind them, growing brighter and larger by the second, Terra glowed, haloed by the jewels of ships and the fires of war.\n\nThe ships flew, it would be hours before the fleets around Terra saw them. Then would come a time of thunder and fire. Until then they shivered to the growl of their engines and plunged on.\n\nDown in the near-silent decks of the Wrath's Descent Vassago paused as he moved into his arming chamber. Threads of thought moved at the edge of his awareness, coils of cold intent wrapped in shadows of deception. There were three waiting for him. He knew them all just by the taste of their minds. He did not need to look at them to see their black armour and the glow of their eyes in their helms beneath their cowls. The air of Caliban stirred in his senses as he touched their minds.\n\n'You should not be here,' he said aloud without turning as he moved to the gun racks. 'There is nothing to say.'\n\n'We must kill him now,' said one.\n\n'Do that and we will be slaughtered,' said Vassago, 'and those who we do not kill shall realise our intent and the intent of the Order on Caliban.'\n\n'This assault will see us all dead to vainglory and fallen ideals.'\n\nVassago picked up his plasma pistol, slotted the plasma-charge cylinder into its port and set it to arm. Charge coils glowed, and a high-pitched whine rose from the gun.\n\n'We are here to save the Order, to eliminate the threat to the future of Caliban and to bring any who see the truth amongst our brothers to our cause.'\n\n'Corswain...'\n\n'Is a noble knight,' said Vassago, 'and there is hope for him. If we act now we lose the chance to gain all that we came for. There is opportunity in what is about to happen, great opportunity to guide the path of the Order. All we need to do is be ready to seize what fate and chance cast in our path.'\n\n'So we ride into a battle where we likely will die before we raise a blade?'\n\n'Corswain is a great lord and his plan is as brilliant as it is dangerous. It might work.'\n\n'You admire him...'\n\n'And you do not? He is a peerless warrior, dedicated, ruthless and subtle. He is also honourable. What is there in that for a son of Caliban not to admire?' No answers came. Vassago holstered his weapon, and shook his head. 'Gird and arm yourselves. The time has not yet come,' he said.\n\nWhen he turned a moment later he was alone in the half-dark.\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nOll and Katt found Krank first. The old soldier was lying on a stone path on the edge of a garden dome. Whatever had happened to the hive had left this small corner untouched. Trees stretched to spread a green canopy beneath a dome of brass and crystal. Water still flowed in the irrigation channels that wound between roots and open patches of ground. It was warm, and smelled of earth and green foliage. Krank lay on his front, face down, his gun just beside him, his hand resting on top of it as if he was asleep.\n\nThey paused when they first saw him, ducked back and waited. Watching the trees and the edge of the dome. They had climbed to the dome up one of the spiralling walkways that led them from the point they had entered. They had seen no one in th"}
{"text":"still flowed in the irrigation channels that wound between roots and open patches of ground. It was warm, and smelled of earth and green foliage. Krank lay on his front, face down, his gun just beside him, his hand resting on top of it as if he was asleep.\n\nThey paused when they first saw him, ducked back and waited. Watching the trees and the edge of the dome. They had climbed to the dome up one of the spiralling walkways that led them from the point they had entered. They had seen no one in that time, nor any signs of violence either. That had put both Katt and Oll on edge.\n\n'That thing back there before? At the entrance to this place,' asked Katt in a half-whisper. 'That was an Astartes...'\n\nIt was the first time either of them had mentioned the giant that had sent the column of refugees into a stampede.\n\n'It looked like one,' replied Oll, and even as he said it the image flashed across his mind. Even in memory it was enough to send spots of mid-range light spinning across his eyes. 'Or like it was once one of them.'\n\n'But that means the war is here,' said Katt, 'but then there should be signs of it.'\n\n'Maybe this is the sign,' replied Oll, 'the silence, I mean.'\n\nHe waited a heartbeat more, then stood up and moved out to beside Krank.\n\nNo shouts. No shots. No steering pain and the fast fall to the earth.\n\nHe reached the old soldier, checked with eyes and then fingers that there was no grenade lodged under him. He kept his eyes on the trees.\n\nA bird, mauve-and-orange-feathered, lofted into the air. He twitched, relaxed. There was no blood on Krank, and when he rolled him over he found a low breath coming from the old soldier's lips. His eyes were closed.\n\n'Why did he fall?' asked Katt, coming up behind him.\n\n'Exhaustion.'\n\nOll's eyes and gun whipped up. A man in tattered rags was crouching beside the trunk of the nearest tree. The man raised a hand placatingly and then scuttled out beside Oll. He barely gave Oll a glance before looking down at Krank.\n\nKatt had flinched back, her pistol up, but the man scarcely gave her a look either. A tattered pack hung from a strap over one shoulder. He looked worn, his face framed by an unkempt beard, and dirt had caught in the lines of his face and the pores of his skin. The skin beneath his eyes hung in tired folds. It was a kind face though, and the glances he gave to the trees were an echo of Oll's own worry.\n\n'Your friend needs water,' said the man in rags. His fingers were moving over Krank's face. 'He is older than he looks.' He frowned, stood up and put his hands under the old soldier's arms. 'Help me get him up.'\n\nOll did not move for a second.\n\n'What are you?'\n\n'What kind of damned stupid question is that?' snapped the man. 'I am... used to be a medicae, for all the good that has done me, and I am telling you to lift your friend's feet up and get him moving to under the tree, so I can see if I can make him a little better than he is now.'\n\nThe man held his gaze on Oll, who paused for a second and then moved forward. Graft moved to help, but Oll held up a hand.\n\n'As... as you wish, Trooper Persson,' buzzed Graft and held still.\n\nOll slung his rifle, bent down and lifted Krank by his legs. They moved him under a tree and propped him with his head resting against the trunk. The man said nothing but his fingers began to dance over Krank, pressing flesh, parting lips and lowering his ear to listen. Oll watched. He had seen a lot of medics and doctors work in his time, and could tell that the man knew his business. Katt was still holding back, looking at the pendant as it spiralled over the chart. Every now and again she would wince, eyes closing, grimacing. There was a bead of blood at the corner of her left eye, Oll noticed.\n\n'She's not in the best way either,' said the man, glancing up and then back to Krank. 'I would start at a lack of water and food and sleep deprivation, but something tells me it's a lot more than that.' The man took out a tin flask, unscrewed its lid and tipped a finger-depth of water into the lid. It was clear and clean. 'Mental and physical fatigue, shock and a bunch of other words that just mean you've been through what no one should.' He paused, put the flask down. 'Probably more than that, would be my guess.' He reached out a hand and gently pulled down the bottom of Krank's mouth, and brought the lid of water to his lips, pouring a little in.\n\n'Is all well, Trooper Persson?' buzzed Graft, suddenly raising its head, and pivoting. 'What was your command, Trooper Persson?'\n\n'Nothing,' said Oll. 'Thanks, Graft.'\n\nHe watched the servitor for a second, frowning. It was becoming more erratic. He wondered what all the steps of their journey had done to what remained of its human brain.\n\n'Persson,' said the man. 'That's your name then, and trooper - you're a soldier then.'\n\nOll shrugged. 'Was,' he said.\n\n'There are a lot of people who were soldiers on this world,' said the man. 'Most of them dead. I guess you are of the other type.'\n\n'The other type?' asked Oll.\n\n'The ones smart enough to run away.'\n\nA moment of quiet fell.\n\n'What's your name?' asked Oll.\n\nIt was the man's turn to shrug. He had his hand on Krank's chest, fingers spread and loose, eyes half closed as though listening.\n\n'Ugent.'\n\n'Where did you come from?' asked Oll.\n\n'Come from? I didn't come from anywhere. This is where I am from, where I was born.' The man flicked his eyes up from Krank for a second, a small smile on his lips. 'You really thought I was one of the ones that have come here? Most of them have lost their minds. Desperate last scraps of hope in failing bodies, that's what they are. Everything they knew ground to dust, everything they thought they valued gone. War does that, but you know that, don't you? I can tell.'\n\nOll nodded.\n\n'How long have they been coming?'\n\nThe man flicked Oll a sharp look; he was pouring another measure of water for Krank.\n\n'You mean how long since this place changed?' The man grimaced. 'I don't know. Sometimes it seems like a long time, sometimes a few weeks. But once it did, the people started coming, and they just don't stop. All the same - broken down, desperate, hoping that the dream they have had of paradise is real... Then they find the truth.' He sighed, pursed his lips and looked at Krank. 'He needs food,' he said, and stood, looking about.\n\n'The enemy came here,' said Katt, pausing in her work with the pendant and chart.\n\n'Enemy?' said Ugent, still looking around. 'I'm not even sure what that means, you know. There is a war, for sure, going on somewhere, burning and crushing everything it touches. You can see the lights sometimes if you are higher up.'\n\n'The Astartes, Ugent,' said Katt. 'We saw one when we reached here.'\n\nUgent went still for a second, shivered, then nodded.\n\n'You saw one, did you?' he said, and shivered again. 'Yes, they are here.'\n\n'There are no signs of battle,' said Katt.\n\nUgent looked at her; there was a frown on his face. 'No one thought enough of this hive to think it worth defending,' he said. 'How much of a battle do you think it was to take?'\n\n'The refugees, though,' said Oll.\n\n'They are following the call,' said Ugent. 'You will have heard it, even if just when you sleep, but its strongest to those that have lost most - those whose world has become grey despair. They hear it and they want nothing more than to be here. They follow dreams and they find themselves here.'\n\n'What happens to them?' asked Katt.\n\n'What do you imagine?' he replied.\n\n'How have you kept alive?' asked Oll.\n\nThe man called Ugent turned, took a step towards one of the trees heavy with fruit, and reached up to pick one.\n\n'Alive?' said Ugent. 'I just helped all the people I could, Trooper Persson.' The fruit came loose in his fingers. For a moment, Oll thought he heard something, something high and sharp just out of his ear's reach. He looked at Krank, still lying under the tree. The man's eyes were open. They were open and staring at Oll, filled with terror, screaming in silence. His face was slack, mouth still open from the last drink of water. 'And the more I helped,' said Ugent Sye, turning, holding up the fruit, 'the more I was alive.'\n\nUgent Sye smiled, and raised the fruit to his lips, and took a bite.\n\nAnd the forest of trees screamed.\n\nOll jerked back, eyes clamping shut, hands over ears, as a bright pain lit in his skull. He felt the bile and vomit fountain from his lips. He was choking, gasping.\n\n'It's okay,' said Ugent Sye, voice rolling over the shrieking. Oll forced himself up, gun up, stock to shoulder, finger to trigger. Sye was moving back towards Krank, unhurried. There was red liquid on his lips and chin. The bitten fruit was in his hand. Its outer golden flesh was oozing juice, its core red and wet and twitching. Ugent Sye's teeth were pink in his smile, his eyes bright. The rags shimmering in the light falling between the leaves. He seemed bright, a light source moving the shadows around him as he stepped forwards.\n\nOll shot. It was an action drilled into him by life upon life as a soldier. The weapons had changed and changed again in that time, string and sling to gunpowder, plasma and las charge, but the action remained the same: sight, angle to target judged in a heartbeat, the flick of will that drove throwing arm, or released string, or squeezed trigger. He was not a peerless marksman, not a dead-eye shot like Locksley had been, or as gifted as poor, foolish Paris, or as lightning fast as Doc, but at this range, and with a clear target, Oll did not miss.\n\nThe las-bolt burned through the air past Sye, and punched into the trunk of a tree. Bark fountained, blood and bone showered out from within. The screaming of the trees rose.\n\nOll fired again, going forward, gun level, switching to full-auto without a blink, and raking a line of shots across Ugent Sye. Puffs of blood and flesh burst into the air as the bolts burst through trees and leaves. Blood spurted from the branches. Not a single shot landed. Sye kept com"}
{"text":" a clear target, Oll did not miss.\n\nThe las-bolt burned through the air past Sye, and punched into the trunk of a tree. Bark fountained, blood and bone showered out from within. The screaming of the trees rose.\n\nOll fired again, going forward, gun level, switching to full-auto without a blink, and raking a line of shots across Ugent Sye. Puffs of blood and flesh burst into the air as the bolts burst through trees and leaves. Blood spurted from the branches. Not a single shot landed. Sye kept coming, closing on Krank, kneeling, bringing the fruit with its kernel of flesh at its heart to the man's lips. The sight of Oll's gun was on the man's serene face. Clear. Kill shot. Unavoidable... Except he was certain it would go wide.\n\n'It's not real!' shouted Katt. 'Oll, it's not real!'\n\nBut Oll was already grabbing for the knife at his waist. The splinter of black stone that had cut their way from Calth came free from its sheath. The light broke as it touched the blade. Colour and distance and space peeled open like a flap of skin as it bit. And they saw what was around them.\n\nKatt was wrong, noted a small voice at the back of his head as the truth poured into his eyes. It was real. It was very real. Too real to bear.\n\nThere were still trees, still light falling between leaves, still the shadow of the hive's higher spires beyond the crystal dome above. But this was no garden of plenty. The ground was black mulch, loam-wet and sticky, churned with scraps of skin, fingernails, hanks of hair. The roots of each tree were the limbs of tangled bodies, the trunks stretched flesh spiralled together, every knot a mouth or eye. Arms and legs reached and spread into branches, fingers and toes stretched into twigs. Wounds opened as flower petals. The leaves were not leaves but the detritus of lives still clutched in fists and hung from fingertips that had carried them here in hope: tatters of picts, rings and jewellery, scraps of cloth, a chrono, a ribbon, a quill, pieces of parchment that must have meant everything in a world that was burning. The fruit hung from the branches were droplets of soft fat and skin, borne by pulsing stems. Further off he could see bodies lying nestled in soil, heaped, their bones and flesh already sprouting upwards. And he could see that their eyes were all open. Alive.\n\n'I want to help,' said Sye, and Oll saw him then. He was tall, much taller than he had seemed, his limbs long, his head hairless, youthful, and the robes that hung from him were not rags but silver-white, like a shimmer of sunlight on the sea. 'I want to help you, Ollanius, you and all you care about.' He was rising from beside Krank, coming forward, slowly, remorselessly. 'You are tired, so tired...'\n\nOll blinked, pulled the muzzle of the gun up one-handed, the weapon braced against its strap, and fired. The las-bolts struck true. White fabric, blood and flesh blasted from Sye, puffing into the air, burning. He kept on coming. Blood ran down his limbs and body like the juice from the bitten fruit in his hand. The trees were shrieking. The air was thick with pollen and the reek of raw meat.\n\n'So tired,' he continued, 'all you want to do is rest, and you deserve that. Come to us. Lay down your burden. It is over, Ollanius, and Katerina - you need to do no more.'\n\nOll fired again. The bolts took Sye in the face and blew through his skull. He kept walking towards him.\n\n'This is the garden of plenty,' said Sye, his voice now rising from the mouths in the trees. 'This is where there is no more hunger, no more fear, just rest. All of these came here looking for peace, hoping for it, and now they have it and will have it for eternity...' Oll was going backwards as Sye advanced on him, the remains of jaw and tongue still moving in the blown ruin of his head. 'They have found what they wanted most, and so will you.'\n\nOll fired again. He was not looking at Katt or Graft. He was hoping that they would have done what he would have.\n\nSye's remaining body was almost in touching distance, arm rising, the bleeding fruit held out to Oll like a gift.\n\nOll let himself glance away, to where Katt and Graft were lifting Krank from the ground.\n\nHe looked at the red and white of Sye. He had the knife in his hand, and he brought it up in a single cut. There was a scream, a high, breaking note like glass shattering. Sye fell backwards, chest parting, black smoke billowing out, organs unfolding into embers from within the sheath of skin.\n\nHe turned, looking for Katt and Graft and found them already next to him.\n\n'That way!' shouted Katt, pointing, and they were running down the path that no longer was smooth stone but a channel filling with dark, reeking liquid. Around them, the image of the dome was coming apart like a torn canvas. The trees of flesh and bone were collapsing, the soil was boiling. Insects and birds were dropping from the air, hitting them, splashing into the filth clogging the irrigation channels. Ahead of them an iris door stood open. Rust and corrosion was already crawling over it.\n\n'They know you, Ollanius,' said a fading voice from amongst the collapsing branches. 'They know what you want. They want to give it to you. And they will wait for you...'\n\nThe dead of Beta-Garmon\n\nMerge\n\nDeath's Heads\n\nLake Voss shore, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nFire swallowed Cyllarus. The Armiger's ion shield absorbed a fraction of the first shell's explosion. It was long enough for Dolloran to see the flames enclose him. Long enough for him to see the spinning shards of shrapnel glow as they hit the collapsing shield. Long enough for a part of his brain and soul to think it beautiful. Then the heartbeat moment collapsed, and Cyllarus vanished.\n\nAcastia felt it die across the machine connection. She let out a shout of pain.\n\nThen the blast hit her.\n\nThe pressure wave picked up Elatus and threw it down the lake shore. Acastia's head slammed into the back of the throne. The world spun over and over. Elatus' legs kicked in the air for the seconds before it hit the water with a plume of white spray. Force snapped through her. The screens in front of her fuzzed. Her mount was half-submerged in black water. She could see the Titan though, could hear its dragging stride in the boom of waves breaking over her mount. Elatus' legs kicked out, lashing the water. The Titan was almost above her, wading into the lake shallows, gun chugging shells into the distance, mud slime and cable fluid drooling from its wounds. The water was freezing as it struck the armour of its shin plates. Voices of static and screams buzzed in Acastia's ears. Broken symbols spiralled across her auspex screens. Elatus' alarms were a blended shriek of panic. She could feel fear overwhelming her, pouring across her helm links to her thrashing mount as the dead Titan closed. It was blank, raw, the bruising total loss of control. It had seen her.\n\n'Pluton!' she shouted. 'Pluton, you shit, where are you?'\n\nShe could not feel Caradoc's presence either. For once the feeling of his will burrowing into her head would have meant something other than misery.\n\nThe Reaver was almost on her. Ice-heavy water frothing around its stride. There was a sound in the static on the vox, rhythmic, a drone of numbers like the rattle of lungs half-filled with fluid. It was the sound of her mother on the cot they had given her to die on. Last moments measured in seconds marked by quickened breaths and the clenching of weak fingers around Acastia's small hand. She had to get out, she had to get out. Acastia felt herself slam her fist against the cockpit hatch, felt the bones in her hand break. The dead Titan stopped, and dipped its head on its broken neck. The light in its eyes fizzed on the target screen.\n\nRounds struck its head and chewed into its cracked skin. It reared up, joints grinding, cannon arm lifting, as a deluge of explosions boiled across its head and shoulders. A Warhound in the mottled green of Legio Solaria came from the wall of smoke and flame, its guns spearing fire into the Reaver as it staggered.\n\n'Hold on it!' shouted Abhani Lus Mohana. Bestia Est's vulcan mega-bolter fired. Brass cases showered onto the shore mud. Twenty metres of muzzle flame breathed from the rotating barrels.\n\nThe enemy Reaver was turning. Its own cannon was rising even as the shells chewed into the engine's mass.\n\n'Brace for incoming fire!' shouted her moderatus. Abhani bared her teeth. Across her link she felt her Titan's reactor snarl.\n\n'Dance for me now,' she hissed.\n\nThe Reaver fired, but Bestia Est was already running on an angle, firing as it did, accelerating even as explosions danced in its wake. The Reaver tacked its fire after the Warhound, the barrel of its cannon jerking like a half-broken arm. Bestia Est was running just ahead of an arc of explosions. Abhani could feel the presences of her maniple at the edge of her sight and touch, close, almost where they needed to be.\n\n'Look at me!' snarled Abhani; her eyes were the eyes of her engine locked on the enemy, painted with target data. 'Look at me, you bastard child of iron.'\n\n'Weapon heat at threshold!' shouted her gun moderatus.\n\nFlash signals pinged green and clear at the edge of awareness.\n\n'No matter,' said Abhani. 'Now, my sisters. Take it now!'\n\nBeams of light struck the Reaver from beside and behind it, spearing into its skin. The other two Solaria Warhounds circled, jinking their runs as they fired. Ghost light and black fluid boiled from the Reaver as it twisted. Turbo-laser fire bored into it. Armour plates melted to slag in seconds. It did not fall.\n\nFrom her throne, Abhani Lus Mohana watched as glistening black clouds billowed from the wounds, coiling and spreading through the air. It took her a second to realise it was not smoke but insects, black bodies glinting in the flame light, swallowing the las-blasts and exploding to ash.\n\nThe Solaria Warhound's steps shook Acastia in her cockpit. Multicoloured shards filled her sight. Her senses were blurred, soft"}
{"text":"laser fire bored into it. Armour plates melted to slag in seconds. It did not fall.\n\nFrom her throne, Abhani Lus Mohana watched as glistening black clouds billowed from the wounds, coiling and spreading through the air. It took her a second to realise it was not smoke but insects, black bodies glinting in the flame light, swallowing the las-blasts and exploding to ash.\n\nThe Solaria Warhound's steps shook Acastia in her cockpit. Multicoloured shards filled her sight. Her senses were blurred, soft and sharp at once. There was blood on her face and in her mouth. She could feel her mount feebly trying to respond to her half-conscious mind. Another jolt, and the world snapped sharp. She gasped. Waves were breaking over her. The auspex was alight. Her hands and feet were moving over controls. Pain sliced into her. Broken bones grated. Bile filled her mouth.\n\n'Up, up, up! Now!'\n\nElatus scrabbled for an instant, and then stilled. Its feet kicked once and then bunched tight. Its weapon limbs braced.\n\n'That's it, my beautiful beast!' snarled Acastia, and the Armiger Knight began to rise.\n\n'Bring it down,' called Abhani.\n\nThe wider noosphere was alive with flashes of threat indicators and weapon discharge. The ragged light of battle lit the shore of the lake and the plain beyond for five kilometres. There were engines burning, firing, striding, falling. All of it felt distant, the sound of wind or rain. All that mattered was the prey before her.\n\nThe three hunters were circling the Reaver. Fire from them sustained without cease. This was one of the hunt patterns of the Legio Solaria. Normally performed by four Warhounds, it was called a gyre kill. One of the Titans drew the enemy to it while the others positioned themselves at each point of the compass around it. Then they fired and moved, spiralling, synchronised in movement, so that a target that turned on one of its tormentors would leave itself open to the others. All the while, each of them would cycle reactor power and ammunition stores between its guns so that while one fired the other reloaded, cooled or recharged. Done correctly it was a hunt pattern that could bring down the largest war engines. With three Warhounds it was just as deadly. But their prey would not die.\n\nAbhani growled as Bestia Est's turbo-lasers fired up into the enemy. The blasts hit it as it turned, and slammed into the damaged wreck of its left weapon arm. For an eye-blink of time they were linked by a glowing rope of light. The remains of the left arm dissolved into slag. A stream of plasma from the warhound Artemisia burned through the cloud of metallic insects and struck the enemy Titan's right thigh. Abhani saw the reactor indicator for Artemisia flash red.\n\n'Reactor venting, weapon's out,' came Artemisia's voice. She had dumped half of the reactor output into a single plasma blast. The Reaver staggered, slumping to its side. Then, somehow, impossibly, it rose, metal flowing like flesh. Abhani had a moment to notice the Armiger Knight in its shadow, which she had thought dead, rise.\n\nAcastia looked up at the Reaver. From this distance she could see the patterns of un-repaired battle wounds in its armour plates, and the broken cables dangling from its chest. Elatus' thermal lance rose. The Reaver's head was distorted and fire-scarred; the ghost light within its cockpit hurt Acastia's eyes. She could still taste her own blood in her mouth. She grinned.\n\n'Burn,' she said.\n\nElatus fired. A beam of white-blue heat stabbed up from the Knight's arm, up under the Reaver's chin, and melted through the back of its skull and into the mass of its torso. The Reaver's shoulders and chest distorted. Explosions burst within. For a second it seemed to be frozen. Then it arched, straightening, pulling the beam of Elatus' lance down its chest. Rusted armour parted. Clogged oil gushed out, burning as it fell. It twisted, reaching up, screaming in silence.\n\nThe beam from the thermal lance cut off. 'Back! Back! Back!' shouted Acastia as she reined Elatus into reverse stride. Mud ground in joints. The Reaver went still. Its pierced torso lit from within by fire. It lowered its head, almost slowly. The ghost light was a fading gleam. For a second Acastia thought she heard a voice, not over the vox but in her ear. A lone, pleading voice. Red and blue fire blew the Reaver's back open from inside. Armour plates flew up, spinning. A second later more explosions lit inside its guts, and blew through its head and shoulders. The rolling blast wave reached towards Elatus as it withdrew. Acastia felt triumph and relief rush through her.\n\nThen she felt the ground rock. Once, twice, up through her mount and into her bones.\n\n'Enemy engine!' called Abhani. Explosions struck Bestia Est's void shields and burst them like bubbles of foam on water.\n\nFrom the burning horizon an engine walked, towering, colours almost scoured black by flame, wrapped in coils of unlight. Its head was a ruin of cables surrounding a shattered skull. It bellowed through the air, vox and noosphere, and its voice was the shriek of breaking machines and overload. Its presence sent pixels spinning across screens and sensors. She could hear the buzzing of insects and frayed cables. Could smell burning oil.\n\nBeams of stuttering las-fire reached from its shoulders and exploded across the shields of her sister Warhounds. They were already moving, scattering as this new foe took another step and shook the ground.\n\nAbhani looked up at the new enemy.\n\nCold flooded her.\n\nEven broken and scorched, the last of its heraldry still clung to its shoulders and the lines of its form still spoke from beneath its skin of ruin. She recognised it. For a second she felt as though she was floating... Then the scorched Warlord bellowed again, and fired.\n\nCommand bunker, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nIn the command bunker at the top of Shard Bastion, Nasuba winced and lowered the field glasses. The flare compensators had been disabled to help night vision. She had just seen an Ignatum Titan go up in a full reactor detonation. The neon light clung to her sight. She could see the two enemy engines that had made the kill, two ragged outlines in the fire, broken limbed but still moving, dragging the Titan down as it fought. There was a taste in her mouth, too, bitter and metallic, like spoilt milk and blood.\n\n'Summarise immediate,' she called.\n\n'Engagement along the Lake Voss southern shore is intensifying,' said an officer bent over a set of green-lit screens. 'Full battle group is engaged. Enemy engines advancing. Eliminated hostile units activating amongst Ignatum engine formations. Distance to wall - one hundred and seven kilometres.'\n\n'Where is our link to the Ignatum command-and-control enclaves?'\n\n'Errors and intermittent failures on internal comms systems, general.'\n\n'Then send a unit and get one of them up here, now.'\n\nShe turned back to the viewslit and raised the field glasses. Even as she did, something big went up in the distance. Blue-white fire punched up into the night sky to light the underbelly of the clouds. Sweat was running down her skin inside her collar and that was only in part down to the heat.\n\n'Target and range units on the upper gun batteries say that they cannot distinguish targets for effective fire,' said Sulkova.\n\n'Ammunition depletion?'\n\n'We have drained a lot of solid ordnance, but the wall plasma reactors and charge coils are functioning. Output at seventy-three per cent effective.'\n\n'Not that effective if we can't pick targets to shoot at.'\n\n'General,' came another shout, 'signal from Curdir Bastion.'\n\n'Link,' she replied, her eyes still on the magnified view of the battle. She could pick out almost nothing. Foe and friend identifier runes spun as unresolved amber.\n\n'General,' growled a voice from the vox-speakers. It was heavy, laden by machine modulation and chopped by static. It was Oceano, designated commander for Curdir Bastion, sixty kilometres to the south, the second of the Mercury Wall's sub-fortifications and command points. He was Astartes, or had been, a son of the primarch Sanguinius laid low in battle and returned to serve in the shell of a Dreadnought.\n\n'Commander,' she replied.\n\nA squall of distortion whooped from the speakers.\n\n'Gener-ralllllll...' Oceano's voice stretched into the fizz.\n\n'Clear it!' Nasuba called.\n\n'General,' came Oceano's voice again. 'We have reports from forward units in the blind zone. Mass formation approaching along Mid Elevation ridge, and spreading north towards current engagement zone.'\n\n'What position and strength?'\n\n'Multiple engines, full ground escort, Legion contingents - it is a full Titan legion advance. Close visual confirms. It is the Legio Mortis.'\n\nBeyond the viewslit another blink of sun brightness, a strobing ripple of explosions.\n\n'Then who are we already fighting?'\n\nLake Voss shore, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nAbhani Lus Mohana gazed up at death as it strode to meet her.\n\nCarnifector Noctis had been a proud engine. A beautiful thing of iron and war, the Warlord had walked on battlefields across the galaxy as the Great Crusade had made the stars the new Imperium. It had died on Beta-Garmon, fallen down on the plains of ruin, and its sacred iron had been left in its grave as the Legio Solaris had fled the Titan Death. It was mourned. It and all of its lost siblings and cousins. The oil tears of enginseers had fallen in crucibles of molten silver. The song of electro-priests had spun the dirges through capacitor and circuit. It was gone, a sacred fragment of the Machine-God left on the battlefield.\n\nNoble hunter of Solaria, war engine to a dozen of the sisters and daughters of Solaria, kin to Bestia Est... Dead. Gone. A memory to be honoured.\n\nNow it walked towards Abhani Lus Mohana.\n\nIts skin of iron hung on its bones. Rust covered its armour. The kill-wounds of lost battles holed its frame. The fires of the bombardment drained into it as it walked, inhaled by the thing that had taken its c"}
{"text":"h capacitor and circuit. It was gone, a sacred fragment of the Machine-God left on the battlefield.\n\nNoble hunter of Solaria, war engine to a dozen of the sisters and daughters of Solaria, kin to Bestia Est... Dead. Gone. A memory to be honoured.\n\nNow it walked towards Abhani Lus Mohana.\n\nIts skin of iron hung on its bones. Rust covered its armour. The kill-wounds of lost battles holed its frame. The fires of the bombardment drained into it as it walked, inhaled by the thing that had taken its corpse as a shell. The gaze of its shattered head was the light of burning oil wells. She felt a voice reach into her skull, arching across the gap between the two engines. A wail, a high shout of rage and pain and defiance as souls and spirit vanished into oblivion. It was the voice of the moment Carnifector Noctis had died the first time, the voices of its systems and the women who had guided it to war, a cry circling the moment they fell into darkness. Abhani felt the fire of the dead Titan reach into her, felt its promise, understood its meaning: as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so shall you be.\n\nAbhani did the only thing left to her. She fired. Legio Solaria were the Emperor's Hunters, swift, subtle and deadly in war. They weakened enemies, deceived them and then used the might of their engines' weapons to deliver a killing blow. 'The blow that can't be resisted only needs to be delivered once,' her grandmother, and the founding Grand Master of the Legio, had said. There was nowhere left to run. No cunning switch of movement and feint to play. There were tears on her face as Bestia Est roared at the Warlord with the full force of the last inch of its being. Abhani saw the cruel jest of life's circle at that moment.\n\nThe deluge of laser blasts and mega-bolter shells struck Carnifector Noctis in its head. It had no shield. The metal tore and ran. Cracks from its kill-wounds split wide; ash and embers and blood poured out, showering to the ground. It twisted, shaking like a human caught by a gout of water. Its cannon fired. Explosions lit in the battle that surrounded them.\n\nA beam of light, smaller and narrower but star bright, sliced into its right leg. It slid backwards, staggering. Abhani saw the auspex outline of one of the Vyronii Knights jinking around Carnifector Noctis' legs, slicing up into its bulk with a beam of white light. The dead Warlord trembled, half falling. Molten metal was pouring from it, but whatever thing of the warp had been poured into it after it had been dragged from the grave would not let go. Its gun arm swept around. Explosions fountained lake mud and black water into the air. It was still moving forwards, too, dragging its legs even as they came apart and its torso became slag. Bestia Est kept firing as it walked backwards. The mega-bolter failed, barrels yellow with heat, auto loaders jamming.\n\nAbhani swore.\n\n'Capacitors at four per cent!' called her moderati.\n\n'Reactor output at critical.'\n\n'Hold on it!' shouted Abhani.\n\nCarnifector Noctis raised the ruin of its right leg to step. Its foot came down. Half-molten pistons burst. Struts sheared and suddenly the dead Warlord was an avalanche of cracked metal and flame.\n\n'Get clear!' roared Abhani across the vox. Bestia Est danced backwards. At the edge of sight Abhani saw the Vyronii Knight pacing away as the bulk of the Warlord hit the mud and water. Steam billowed up, followed by a wash of coiling red flame as whatever had driven its frame shrieked away into the sky.\n\nBestia Est halted, its weapon arms limp for a second. Heat coiled from the cherry-red barrels of its mega-bolter. Its head dipped. Inside its cockpit, Abhani Lus Mohana closed her eyes. She could feel her own rage boiling across the manifold and being reflected back by her engine as its exhausted reactor rebuilt power. She opened her eyes. Bestia Est straightened.\n\n'Get us moving,' she called. 'Shields up, power to the guns, and mark targets.'\n\nThe sky was bright with fire, she realised. All down the shore of the lake explosions flared. Strobing light bleached banks of smoke white. The water itself was burning, as oil poured onto its surface and ignited. As she watched she saw a Titan, a Nightgaunt she thought, stagger through a bank of billowing plasma fire, the metal of its back and limbs stripping away into the inferno.\n\n'Find the others,' she commanded. 'Bring us back into formation and get us something to kill.'\n\nAt the edge of her sensorium she saw the lone Armiger Knight come around in a circle locking into wide formation with Bestia Est and its kin as they loped back into sensor range. She keyed transmit.\n\n'Knight of Vyronii,' she called, and then stopped. The formality of what she was going to say failed as it came to her tongue. 'My thanks,' she said.\n\n'My honour,' came the reply.\n\n'Merge shields! All maniples, merge shields!' Tetracauron shouted the command across noosphere and vox. Reginae Furorem stepped back; Ignis Vespula and Sun Fury stepped into the space off each of its shoulders.\n\nA blast wave struck Reginae Furorem from the left side. Tetracauron was not even aware of the source. The explosion burst, spreading in an eye-blink across the curve of its shields before vanishing with a thunderclap.\n\n'Calculations complete,' came the voice of Xeta-Beta-1. 'Synchronisation achieved and propagated.'\n\n'Begin,' he willed.\n\n'As you will it,' replied Xeta-Beta-1. 'Bring us together. Make us one.'\n\nMerging the void shields of multiple Titans was not a simple undertaking. A single error and the result would at best be the failure of the shield envelope, and at worst something more catastrophic and spectacular. The soul and spirit of each machine had to be brought to the point where they were functioning to the same rhythm, where the vibration of shield projector and electro output were matched. The engines of a legion used sacred code choruses passed from engine to engine, the patterns and solutions to the hyper-complex equations soothing and agitating the system of each until they were vibrating to the same tune of input-output. To achieve this took exceptional skill and training. To do it in battlefield conditions took nerve and precision beyond what most Titan crews could achieve. To merge fields between the Titans in multiple maniples while surrounded by detonations and hostile engines took something more again: it took the ability to touch the divine truth of all machines. It took a miracle.\n\nAmongst the fire, the shields of the three Titans glimmered, a shower of cold silver lost in the glare of a burning world. Lightning ran through mid-air as void enclosures met, clashed, pressed, and flowed together.\n\nThe spirits of the other engines bled over the meshed bridge of data. Tetracauron could feel the weight of the two Reavers' presence and the call of their crew. Blurred ghost-images flickered through his sight. The roar of three reactors locked to the same heartbeat was an anvil-struck rhythm in his chest.\n\n'Step,' he sent, and the three Titans stepped forward as one.\n\nA shape was lurching towards them, towering, lopsided, its gun belching cracked globes of plasma. The spheres of light struck the air before Reginae Furorem and its kin. The first layer of void shields collapsed, but the shared generators of the trio were already regenerating them as they fell. Across the data-links to the rest of his command he could sense the rest of the other Titans doing the same: merging shields, matching weapon fire and reactor output. Going forwards. Into the fire. Killing.\n\n'All weapons lock to target,' he sent, 'cycle reactors and ammunition. Continual fire... Order the secutarii reserve in, now. Full engagement.'\n\nEnemies drawn in green. Machines rising into sight. Gun barrels turning. The ground shaking. The power of a god all around him. Iron and light and this moment of oneness. He was not Tetracauron. He was not Reginae Furorem. He was the will of fire, and the fury and the light. Soaring... Becoming... Burning.\n\n'Compliance,' came the chorus from the god-machines, and deepening night vanished into bright tatters.\n\nThe secutarii came apart. Charred flesh and torn armour blew into the air like fine ash caught in a gust of wind. Tetracauron saw it happen through the eyes of the machine. A stream of las-fire sawed through them, punching through armour layers and vulcanised rubber. Shapes stalked from the smoke pall, small and swift, like giant insects cast in oil-slick metal. Each would have been three times the height of a mortal had they straightened up, but they ran hunched over, gun mounts blitzing light from their backs. In Reginae Furorem's sight they were a spilling swarm tide.\n\n'Hunter automata, left flank,' he pulsed.\n\n'Executing,' came the response from Sun Fury. The other princeps' sending was a sharp burst of light. An instant later the other Titan pivoted, the barrels of its gun arm spinning. Muzzle flash breathed from the barrels. Shells exploded amongst the automata swarm. Metal tore into shards. The ground heaved under the impact. Sun Fury panned the spinning barrels across the ground, chewing through the enemy even as they bounded forwards. There was a frenzy protocol driving the automata, Tetracauron could tell, something all-consuming and corrupting from a code data set that had been placed beyond reach. Before now, before the war made all that was unthinkable real.\n\nSun Fury's cannons fired a last spit of fire then spun on for a second.\n\n'Ammunition exhausted,' sent Sun Fury.\n\nThe secutarii were reforming, shields locking together in ranked lines, three hundred metres from Reginae Furorem and its kin. Bodies lay in front of the shield line, a tideline of torn silver and mashed red.\n\nThey were advancing down the line of the lake, the rest of the battle group with them. The enemy were pushing light, fast ground units in from the south. The noosphere was buzzing with scrap code and connection breaks. Cohesion was a matter of sight and instin"}
{"text":"n exhausted,' sent Sun Fury.\n\nThe secutarii were reforming, shields locking together in ranked lines, three hundred metres from Reginae Furorem and its kin. Bodies lay in front of the shield line, a tideline of torn silver and mashed red.\n\nThey were advancing down the line of the lake, the rest of the battle group with them. The enemy were pushing light, fast ground units in from the south. The noosphere was buzzing with scrap code and connection breaks. Cohesion was a matter of sight and instinct as much as communication now. That was the Ignatum way, though: in war as one, of one will and drive. The fast ground units could only mean one thing - another major force was closing. They were facing greater than their numbers already, and now the enemy had brought still greater strength to the field. Their tactic was simple: pin Ignatum in place while bleeding their ammunition and numbers, drive them into a pocket and then hit that pocket with another force. Victory. A victory that should not have been possible without greater losses than the enemy could bear. The numbers that Tetracauron had engaged on the edge of the lake were not enough to hold his battle group. Not if they had been Titans alone. They were not though. They were something else - the loyal dead of hundreds of battles animated by unclean spirits and sent to walk against the living. It was an insult, an abomination, and it had worked. They were still here, hours into engagement, bracketed between water and fire.\n\nTwo maniples of the battle group had waded into the lake, churning the water to foam as they strode up to their waists. If they had been able to create an engagement angle from the north, they could have encircled and burned the enemy. As it was, the lake was deeper than the scant survey data had said, but shelved off into a subsurface abyss. The engines could not cross and so had to wade through the water parallel with the shore to engage the enemy flank. Mist roiled across the rippling lake as the heat from weapon discharge flashed water to steam. Munitions detonated under the surface. Geysers of water fountained up. Pressure waves ripped through the water to slam into the shins of red-and-yellow Titans.\n\nOn the shore, fire and smoke hid the ground. The wall guns had stopped firing, unable to pick clear targets or communicate with the battle group to mark fire points. The long-range comms had collapsed under a blizzard of static and data corruption that had blown up as the battle deepened. Even the intra-Titan communications were sporadic. Ghosts and screams shrieked across the noosphere. The engagement was now a bloody, burning brawl, but it could only have one outcome. The risen Titans of the enemy were falling, the metal of their frames melted to slag and torn to atoms and dust, the unclean spirits within sent howling into the pyre.\n\n'Auspex contact, multiple engines and ground units one hundred and thirty-five degrees south,' sent Divisia. 'Estimate eight thousand metres and closing.'\n\n'Incoming munition-' began Cartho.\n\nAn explosion bleached the sight of the land. A howl flared across the incandescence. The sheet of light resolved to a billowing fist of flame and plasma punching up into the sky a kilometre away. Tetracauron felt Reginae Furorem shake with sympathetic rage. A blink of shock and fury transmitted in iron and electro current. He knew what that was - full reactor breach, a pair of Ignatum Titans dying in a single bright instant. The blast wave blew into them a moment later. Void shields flared. The incandescence spun with crystallising data.\n\n'That was Vulcanis Furio and Pyre Jackal,' breathed Cartho, his sending flattened with shock.\n\n'Kill shot source,' he snapped.\n\n'Long-range, multiple sources,' replied Divisia. 'Coordinated laser and missile burst. They have our range.'\n\n'Then we have theirs,' Tetracauron snarled. 'Coordinate and fire when ready.'\n\nFire breathing from his lips, blistering his tongue.\n\nReginae Furorem, Sun Fury and Ignis Vespula were coming about, moving forwards. Behind them, four other maniples manoeuvred to follow. The battle with the risen Titans was still rolling across the shore and surface of the lake.\n\nThe incandescence was near totality now. The voices of crew merged into that of the machine. He felt the target runes lock, cold ice reaching into the blaze. Weapons swivelled. His kin moved with him, two giants made smaller only by the size of their Warlord. The weapons left to them were volcano cannons, plasma destructors and turbo-lasers. Their racks of missiles and rockets were empty, the ammunition of cannons drained. They could only fire on what they could see, but they could see. Eight thousand metres away the first true engines of Legio Mortis advanced.\n\nThese were not the damaged, risen abominations that had come first. Clad in crimson and black and edged in gold they walked forwards. Unhurried. Skulls rattled on cables slung beneath their pale heads. Tattered banners and chains hung from them. Even as Tetracauron perceived them, he felt the drone of scrap code break over him. Troops and battle machines moved in the shadow of the Mortis vanguard, glistening, a carpet of gloss red and corroded chrome. Warhounds bounded forwards. Clutches of Knights in the colours of old bone and iron paced at their side. Behind them, Reavers walked. In the incandescence their guns and eyes were blots of darkness. Notes of corrupt code spun from the target runes as they locked on to the distant engines.\n\nPart of him, the part that was a human mind and a human will, noted that the engines were coming at quarter speed, lighter engines running and walking in lines, staggered so that they could fire up to seven lines deep. It was the Configuration of Annihilation, the way that Mortis had walked to war against enemies marked not just for defeat but for complete destruction. As though they sensed Tetracauron's gaze, the lead Mortis Titans sounded their war-horns. Sound boomed and ululated across the smoke-covered ground.\n\n'Fire,' impulsed Tetracauron.\n\nBeams of las leaped between the god-machines. Blue, white and red light gridded eight kilometres of air. The cacophony of battle rose in pitch, roiling up to the sky. The beams from Ignatum blew out the shields on a Warhound. It paced aside as its void bubbles burst in sheets of light. Its feet crushed a line of spider-limbed tanks. Explosions blossomed in its tread. Tetracauron felt the cold of the target lock, and the answering roar from within. A line of blue-bright energy cut the world. The volcano cannon burst hit the Warhound as it was half turning in its stride. The beam burned through its cannon arm. The rounds waiting in the hopper and chamber became vapour and light an instant before the beam passed through the Warhound's carapace and into the compartment within.\n\nThe Warhound had not been blessed with the greater ascendancy and changes made to its kin. For it, the father of the scythe had given only a taste of its breath. Enough to fuse its servitors and enginseer to its bones, and fill its internal spaces with congealed blood and jellied bone that gurgled across the vox. They died in a blink of fire as the volcano beam lanced into the core of the engine and blew it apart with the plasma from its own, corrupt core.\n\n'Engine kill.' Tetracauron was not sure whose voice it was or if it was his own. It did not matter. He was walking with the shore and lake behind him, his kin at his side, as the enemy emerged from the distance, more and more of them. He felt the presence of Sun Fury beside him, heard its voice speak to him as they walked in lockstep and drew breath to fire again.\n\n'We are-' began the voice.\n\nThere was a ripple in the air, a scratch dragged across the night, a shriek like a dagger point pulled down a sheet of glass.\n\nSun Fury's head blew apart. The Reaver's leg kept moving for an instant. Then it fell, collapsing, its void shields misfiring. The synchronised envelope of shields burst. Tetracauron felt the snap of feedback as a spike of white pain inside his skull. Sun Fury hit the ground. Fires rolled through its torso.\n\n'What-' began Divisia.\n\n'Warp missiles,' roared Cartho in reply as another shriek ripped through sound and code.\n\nWarp missiles... Ancient, precious, abominable for their intent and use. Fired from an engine, the missiles burrowed through the fabric of space and passed through the realm beyond before tearing back into being and exploding. As they bypassed natural laws, shields were no proof against them, armour was no proof against them. They were like the needle dagger thrust under the plate and mail of kings by assassins in ages past.\n\nA bright explosion enveloped Ignis Vespula's back and tore its dorsal missile racks and half of its carapace off. The Reaver bellowed a stream of damage and code invective. Beams of plasma reached across the distance and burst on its failing shields. Reginae Furorem and Tetracauron roared as one, striding forward, and into the line of fire.\n\nSharp pain as voids burst.\n\n'Target lock.'\n\n'Firing.'\n\nLight pouring into the distance, the scream of reactor and weapon the death call for the dead lying at its side and its wounded kin.\n\n'Target shields failed.'\n\n'Engine strike.'\n\n'Engine strike.'\n\nThe shrieks as the devil weapons struck engines across the battle group, exploded, crippled, scarred metal falling in torn shreds... Burning... The world burning...\n\nCalculations spun into his mind from the cold cognition of Xeta and the minds of Divisia and Cartho: mounting enemy numbers, weapon and reactor condition, engines lost and damaged, the cold ratios of cause and effect in war. They would die here. The rational turning of the numbers spoke to that. He thought of the emissary Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, and the tech-priest's words:\n\n'I wish the data were not as it is, but above all I am a servant of the machine's truth - annihilation is coming.'\n\nNo, said a voice that he knew was his own. There is only"}
{"text":"gnition of Xeta and the minds of Divisia and Cartho: mounting enemy numbers, weapon and reactor condition, engines lost and damaged, the cold ratios of cause and effect in war. They would die here. The rational turning of the numbers spoke to that. He thought of the emissary Gerontius-Chi-Lambda, and the tech-priest's words:\n\n'I wish the data were not as it is, but above all I am a servant of the machine's truth - annihilation is coming.'\n\nNo, said a voice that he knew was his own. There is only one way, and that way is forward. We are strength enough. We are victory!\n\nReginae Furorem moved to his will. Enemy strikes lit the distance.\n\n'All units, cohere and maintain fire - we are victory!'\n\nAll the world burning, the success calculations dropping away into the blaze of connection with his engine and the moment, bright beyond measure. The shadows of the enemy multiplying on the horizon, and him going towards them, closing the distance, firing, and the engines of his kin firing, the ground heaving with detonations and the air burning. The shots from the enemy were multiplying, forming a streaked sheet above the ground. The numbers and ratios and odds falling into black motes at the edge of the blaze in his sight. The voices of the incandescence a chorus. Was he moving in war or dreaming through war?\n\n'Target lock...'\n\n'Weapon discharging...'\n\n'Target lock...'\n\n'Shields down...'\n\n'Weapons charge cycling...'\n\n'Reactor output rising...'\n\n'Carapace impact... '\n\n'Damage...'\n\n'Weapon discharging...'\n\nHe was bleeding, molten blood rolling from his shoulder... The cloak of his shields a glimmering set of tatters. So many... there were so many in his sight. He blinked and found that he was seeing with his own eyes, the battle a glare beyond the viewports. The cockpit smelled of charring wire. His left arm was wet, sympathetic wounds pulsing blood down his chest from his shoulder. He could not feel anything; he was floating, his mind and thoughts carried elsewhere, aware of the impacts on his metal skin and the Titans of his command pushing forward into the oncoming fire. He did not feel fear or disconnection, for he was connected: he was one with the machine at war. This was just a moment, a last gift from the machine that he had given his spirit to.\n\nExplosions lit the distance. Rolling down the first line of advancing engines, ripping tanks and automata into the air, swallowing the shapes of Mortis. Missiles stretched from behind them, beams and pulses of plasma, torrents of shells lobbed to fall like deadly seeds scattered from an unkind hand.\n\nTetracauron slammed back into the brightness of the incandescence.\n\nFresh motes of data spun across his sight. Impacts across the enemy advance, spreading across the land in a wall of roiling fire and light. From over a hundred kilometres behind them the guns of the wall were firing, curtaining the kill-zone, slicing it across with a stroke over a hundred kilometres wide.\n\nAt his back, Tetracauron heard the scratching of a voice forming over the vox-connection.\n\n'Ignatum.' Even through the storm of distortion, Tetracauron could feel the weight of the word and recognised it, the focus, the raw will to victory, the ages of knowledge bound into it and the machine it spoke for. 'We walk at your side, my kin,' said Princeps Maximus Cydon. From towards the Mercury Wall, the first of the Ignatum main force Titans marched into the battle sphere. Over a hundred engines of war, bonded Knights and cohorts of ground troops moving with them, and at their centre two machines greater than all the rest. Towering, hung with city-killing weaponry, their backs hunched under fortifications that they carried with steps that summoned thunder from the earth. They had names, ancient names that had been spoken with fear and awe in places of victory and devastation.\n\nImperious Prima, Warmonger, and with it Magnificum Incendius, Imperator, both of the Emperor class of Titans, greatest of the avatars of the Machine-God's majesty and wrath, leading the remainder of Ignatum to war. Tetracauron felt the fire of Reginae Furorem rise. The world was sound and thunder and the light of flame.\n\nCommand Bunker, Shard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\n'Tactical read-outs are incomplete,' Kurral called to Nasuba. 'But it's a macro-engine advance coming straight at the Ignatum battle group.'\n\n'Get a link to them,' she called.\n\n'Negative general, vox-link cannot be made.'\n\n'Do they even know what's coming?' asked Sulkova.\n\n'They are still fighting, it's a full-level engagement - visual estimate they are maintaining total weapon discharge,' said Kurral. 'By all that is true, they are advancing.'\n\n'They are Ignatum,' said Sulkova softly. 'It is what they do.'\n\n'General!' The call came from the door. She turned to see a figure in the uniform of a Cordozian Arqueber. Sweat was pouring down his face, his eyes were wide. 'Runner from the Ignatum principal strategium.'\n\n'Runner? The internal vox- and data-conduits are reading as functional.'\n\n'All communication systems below the seven hundred height mark are down...' He shucked another breath. 'Just... static... and...' He paused, his wide eyes rolling around the bunker space. Nasuba wondered how long the boy had been running. He looked exhausted, and worse, he looked on the edge of turning and running again. It was a look of more than exhaustion; it was the look of someone who had already reached the end but was somehow still moving. 'Can... can you hear it?' he said, voice low, puzzled, eyelids blinking rapidly.\n\n'Deliver your message,' said Nasuba. A sheet of light snapped through the viewslit, blinding even at this distance, curdling to a false sunset red.\n\n'It's out there...' the runner mumbled. His eyes were on the viewslit. 'It's just there...'\n\n'Trooper!' snapped Sulkova, and the boy's eyes darted up to her, blinking faster. He was breathing harder, Nasuba noticed.\n\n'I have this...' He held out a plastek-wrapped furl of parchment. Sulkova took it, snapped the seals, eyes moving over the code wrapper, fingers checking the truth marks on the print.\n\n'Checked and first authentication,' she said. 'Ignatum are walking.'\n\n'How many?'\n\n'Mass deployment, twenty maniples at full stride.'\n\n'This is all going to be over by then. Lock all guns, all levels - saturate across the line and by depth.'\n\n'General, the resonant vibrations will shake the wall apart,' said Kurral. 'We must calibrate the regulation.'\n\n'If we lose this they will be at distance zero before dawn, and the damned guns will be useless.'\n\n'General, vox to Master Efried and Bhab are broken. Scrap code is wild in the-'\n\n'Get me Commander Oceano.'\n\n'General...'\n\n'Commander, I'm ordering my section of the wall guns to full fire, all levels, graded saturation. Bracket the engagement zone, hammer the rest.'\n\n'That cannot be maintained for long, Nasuba.'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'I concur. Our wall section will begin fi-' The vox cut out, then shrieked and kept on shrieking.\n\nThe messenger runner moved then. The young Cordozian must have run a kilometre upstairs and clambered up the access shafts that honeycombed the Mercury Wall. It was no small distance, no small effort even for a fit human in the prime of health. For someone who had most likely only slept in shreds and in the clutch of unquiet dreams, it was an effort that would have left them empty. But somehow the boy had enough strength left to run forwards. His eyes were wide, his teeth bared. For an instant Nasuba thought that she was about to die, that all of her years of war would end here in an attack by a wild-eyed youth who looked as though he could barely stand. Her hand closed on her pistol before the troopers in the door began to move, but the runner was already on her... and then past her. He leapt, diving at the viewslit.\n\nIt was narrow.\n\nToo narrow for a human skull.\n\nToo narrow for a body.\n\nThere was a crunch, a gasp, a wet writhing and snapping. A sobbed word.\n\nNasuba lunged for the trooper's foot. Another sob as her fingers touched his boot and began to close. Another crunch. And he was gone. And then there was just a wet, jelly-red smear across the edges of the viewslit and the wail of static coming over the vox, a noise that in the moment sounded to Nasuba like a voice, like a final word uttered as the speaker began to fall without end.\n\n'Paradise,' she thought she heard.\n\nA second later someone yanked the cables out of the vox-speaker, and for a heartbeat everything was still; then the wall and world began to shake as the guns began to fire.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 106 kilometres.\n\nStygian angel\n\nFalling\n\nBreathing\n\nMarmax South\n\nThere was a dead man on the wire who would not lie down. In the remains of the blockhouse, Katsuhiro could hear the wires flexing, and the feet scrabbling in the dirt. He tried not to listen, bent his head and began the silent words that he spoke to himself. The words were his own, a simple string of pleas and reminders stitched together from the thoughts that gave him comfort.\n\nProtect me as I stand in service of You...\n\nHe dug through the fog of his exhausted mind, saw the light in his memory unfold from the woman called Keeler. Saw, for an instant, the day become bright...\n\nProtect those that I cannot...\n\nOut on the line, the razor wires thrashed, snapping in the still air. He tried to pull his thoughts back to the light, back to the words.\n\nPlease give me strength...\n\n'When's it going to stop?' Steena's voice snapped out. Katsuhiro opened his eyes. The words and the golden memory faded into the grey-and-ochre murk of the present. It was dawn again, though the divide between day and night had blurred so that now it meant little. Three others sat in the blockhouse. Steena and two others that Katsuhiro did not recognise. He might have seen them before, but he was not sure and he didn't want to know.\n\nMarmax South had changed since he had come onto the line. There was barely anything of it left now. The lower walls were torn and existed only"}
{"text":". The words and the golden memory faded into the grey-and-ochre murk of the present. It was dawn again, though the divide between day and night had blurred so that now it meant little. Three others sat in the blockhouse. Steena and two others that Katsuhiro did not recognise. He might have seen them before, but he was not sure and he didn't want to know.\n\nMarmax South had changed since he had come onto the line. There was barely anything of it left now. The lower walls were torn and existed only in sections. There were not enough repair crews to patch them up any more, not enough of the wall to be patched up either. The lines were an archipelago of broken walls and shattered bunkers. Piles of rubble lay in the place of the gun towers. Katsuhiro did not know where the original emplacements had been. They had pulled back and then moved to occupy the ruins that remained. Mine launchers had scattered mines and spools of razor wire into the new no-man's-land. The enemy had changed too. The colours and madness of the attack on his first morning were gone. In a way, in moments when the cracks of weakness grew wider, he wished they would return. Somehow the horror would have been a solution. Katsuhiro knew he was not alone in thinking that.\n\nAnother gurgling cry rose from outside the bunker. Wire pinged and jingled.\n\n'Shut up!' shouted Steena. She was shivering. She tried to sleep a lot, but there was little peace for rest, and when dreams came the waking was somehow worse than the exhaustion. Steena had been weeping as she dreamed for the last four days. 'Shut up! Shut up!' She was really shouting now, hitting her hands against the floor. Drawing blood. The other two troopers were looking at her. One of them had moved his finger to the trigger of his gun.\n\n'I'll deal with it,' Katsuhiro said, and pulled himself to his feet. He put a hand on Steena's shoulder. 'I'll deal with it, all right.' He looked at the other troopers, caught their bloodshot gaze and nodded, hoping that the gesture looked stronger than it felt. They did not respond, but he noticed their fingers come off the triggers.\n\nHe turned and went to the main firing slit. A ragged hole opened the shell of the blockhouse's eastern face to the wasteland beyond; the firing slit sat beside the breach. He went to the slit, raised his gun and rested it on the metal lip. It had been quiet, but it was safer to use the slit rather than fire from the breach. You never knew when ill-luck or a watching enemy would choose that moment to blow you apart. He had seen it happen. Several times.\n\nThe butt of the rifle went into his shoulder. He took a breath, tried to see the golden light. A small glimmer in the distance, just enough. He put his eye to the gunsight and looked. Clouds of yellow vapour drifted and curled to white and grey. The ground slid into the hazed distance. Craters and the soft, folded lumps of corpses and parts of corpses formed crests and dips, like the frozen waves and troughs of a sea. He tried not to look too far into the distance. You never knew what you would see there, standing in the half-seen band where the sky and ground merged.\n\nThe dead man was just fifty paces out. An explosion had taken off his right arm and scooped away the left half of his torso. The neck was broken. Bits of the skull had peeled back from the soft meat inside. He had probably been caught in a mortar blast, as likely from the lines as the enemy. He had died further out, then dragged himself until he had been tangled by the wire. He had nearly made it to the lines. Katsuhiro had not been able to shake that idea since the corpses had started to rise and walk, that whatever drove them was not hunger or rage, or the fighting instincts that had driven them in life. That it was something simpler, something smaller, the first and last instinct of all living beings - the drive to reach home.\n\nHe looked at the dead man through the gunsight. The razor wire was wrapped around his neck and hands. Every time the corpse moved, the barbs cut deeper. Maggots were moving in the eye sockets. Katsuhiro saw the dead man open his mouth as though to try to speak. He fired. The las-bolt hit the skull and blew it apart. He put another one through the upper torso. Then waited, watching the steam rise from the corpse. It did not move.\n\n'Be at peace,' whispered Katsuhiro. 'May He guide you to rest.'\n\n'Waste of ammo,' said one of the other troopers. Katsuhiro did not answer. The trooper was right. Charge packs, bullets, grenades, mines, food, water... all of it was dwindling. The last resupply had been... he was not sure how long ago. Everyone took what they could from the dead but even so, the number of shots he had left to fire was counting down. He would rather waste the shots than let Steena keep listening to the sound of the dead man on the wire. He went back and squatted down next to her. She had tilted her head back, eyes closing, helmet resting against the rockcrete. He nudged her. Her faced twisted.\n\n'You do that again, script, and I'll-'\n\n'Can't sleep,' he said, looking at her. 'Not out here. Remember? Forward position, right? Have to keep our eyes open.'\n\nShe closed her mouth, shook her head, but she did not rest it back again. Katsuhiro went back to watching the wasteland through the blast hole in the bunker. Out of the edge of his eyes. It was safer that way; never look straight at the way trouble came. That was a lesson that had become a rule in the last... however long it had been. Don't look straight, don't look at things you saw, not directly.\n\nA shadow moved across the breach and he flinched his gun up, ready. Baeron moved across the view, blotting it out for a second as he pivoted his head to look into the blockhouse. The Blood Angel was a ruin of half-shattered armour. His left pauldron was gone, leaving the mag-plates and connectors dangling. The right forearm was flayed of ceramite down to the flesh. Gouges marked every plate. The red lacquer now only clung to recesses and small patches. A crack ran down the left cheek of his helm, just next to the eyepiece, dark and jagged, like the signature of lightning. He buzzed and clattered as he turned away from them and moved on.\n\nKatsuhiro whispered a murmur of thanks that such warriors still stood, still endured. There were fewer of them though - like everything, they dwindled.\n\n'Rise! Weapons ready!' Baeron's voice boomed out. Katsuhiro came to his feet before his mind had really heard the words. Steena did not move until Katsuhiro pulled her up. The other two were moving slowly, too, like men wading through mud. Katsuhiro had his gun up and steady on the firing slit. 'Rise!'\n\nIt was coming again. He could feel it and taste it as he tugged the mask of his breath hood down. The thing was nearly useless, the carbon plug filthy, the hood frayed and the edges of the eyepieces bleeding rust across his sight. It would not save him from a plague wind, or gas attack. It was as good as useless, but it gave a little glimmer of hope that it might save him. Little hope. But sometimes a little was all there was. His eyes fixed on Baeron. The Blood Angel stood five paces in front of the line of broken fortifications, gaze fixed on the lost horizon, bolter held loose in his hands. In the distance down the line, just in sight, another angel in shattered red stood. Katsuhiro could see the shadows of soldiers moving up to firing points behind the remains of parapets and in trenches. There was no sound. No one spoke. Everyone was just trying to look for what was coming. Look and not look.\n\n'Two hundred metres, front,' called Baeron, voice booming.\n\nHold. Just hold this time. Fire and don't go back. Don't let them close. Don't let them reach us... Please don't let them reach us.\n\nHe saw them. Out of the corner of his sight he saw them. They came silently, no cries or shouts, faces masked in rotting cloth, weapons that might have been tools held in bare hands. Slowly, walking forward, first just a loose line and then a close press of them. Larger shapes moved behind them. Katsuhiro felt his eyes twitch to look.\n\nGreat hulks lumbering through the mist, shaking and shivering, skin stretched too tight over bags of fluid, stretched past breaking.\n\nKatsuhiro snatched his eyes down, breathing hard, the taste of offal and acid in his mouth. His eyes were streaming. The glimpse of the rolling shapes smeared his retina yellow and red.\n\n'Protect me as I stand in Your service...' he gasped. One of the other troopers was vomiting, green bile and blood spattering the rockcrete.\n\n'Fire!' called Baeron. His bolter roared. A portion of the oncoming tide vanished in a stream of explosive rounds. Bodies exploded. Bone shrapnel tore figures to either side. Limbs blew off, legs stumbled. Katsuhiro pointed his gun and began firing. He was not aiming but he didn't need to - just to point into the distance, brace and squeeze the trigger. Down the line others were firing, too, a disordered squall of las-bolts and rounds whipping across the closing gap with the enemy, punching into it, tearing it, burning it. Somewhere behind the blockhouse, mortars opened up. Shells whistled through the air, hitting deep behind the first ranks and punching clouds of shrapnel and torn flesh into the air. Heavy guns followed them. The sound was a gathering thunder roar. Katsuhiro felt his gun dry-fire, and ripped the charge-mag out, slamming another in, dropping the empty to the floor. No one was conserving ammunition, there was no point - lose here, lose now, and there wouldn't be another battle for them to fire all the shots they saved. Baeron was going forwards, walking towards the closing enemy, firing and firing, steady, like a king walking towards the flowing tide. Down the line the other angels were doing the same. Not going back, going forwards, a few red figures walking towards a horde, firing and firing.\n\nThrone and truth but it was a sight... Not backwards but forwards, broken-armoure"}
{"text":"ng ammunition, there was no point - lose here, lose now, and there wouldn't be another battle for them to fire all the shots they saved. Baeron was going forwards, walking towards the closing enemy, firing and firing, steady, like a king walking towards the flowing tide. Down the line the other angels were doing the same. Not going back, going forwards, a few red figures walking towards a horde, firing and firing.\n\nThrone and truth but it was a sight... Not backwards but forwards, broken-armoured, but unbowed.\n\n'Protect me as I stand in service of You...'\n\nKatsuhiro could hear them calling, voices rising in a booming dirge that broke over the gunfire. It was a song of sorts, beautiful as it was terrifying, like the call of a great beast and the voices of old, old souls calling out to all they had lost. The angels had begun to do this in the last days when the surge attacks came. He had asked Baeron the night before what the song was. The angel had looked at him for a long moment, the eyepieces in his cracked helm an emerald glow in the dark.\n\n'It is the Death Lament of Baal,' he had said, at last. 'The song of passing from the world.'\n\n'You are singing of your deaths because you know we will die here?'\n\n'To die is our purpose.'\n\nSomething in the oncoming enemy fired back. Yellow-orange energy exploded across the ground next to Baeron. The rubble flashed to slag. Dust fizzed to smoke. Hard rounds began to spit from the horde, first a few, then more. The air was buzzing. Impacts pinged off the wall below the firing slit. Splinters of rockcrete flew up. The left eyepiece shattered in Katsuhiro's breath mask. He flinched back.\n\n'Shit!' shouted Steena. A shard had hit her left hand as she steadied her gun, and torn through the leather of her gauntlets and into her flesh. He could see blood pumping. White bone. 'Shit!'\n\n'Keep firing!' he shouted at her. 'Keep firing!' One of the other troopers firing through the breach staggered back, blood pumping from a hole punched into his throat. He fell, gurgling, legs scrabbling and kicking. Blood pumped out.\n\nKatsuhiro was still firing. He saw smoke rising from the enemy, twisting and rising, more and more fog. The figures were falling. The wail and thump of mortars was beating like a drum. The looming shapes waddling forwards behind the horde were closer. Throne and truth, they were closer! He wanted to look, wanted so badly to look to see what was coming. He could smell spoiled milk and salt, taste acid and copper. The fog was moving, flexing, distances breaking at the edge of his eyes. The smoke rose and rose from the enemy. Except it wasn't smoke. It was a swarm of insects. Black bodies the size of bullets buzzed and circled on grey wings. He could hear them as they rose and turned in the air. He could hear his own breathing coming in gasps. The tide was almost at Baeron now. The Blood Angel fired straight forward, drilling into the bodies of the enemy. They were still coming, ranks falling as they met the hail of gunfire from the line. They still came, forming a bank of chewed flesh that the living scrambled over to die. Limbs and torn bags of meat tumbled. Black bodies rose from the red slick, rising into the air, scattering blood. The air reeked of iron and burst organs. They were at the line, filling the outer ditch with offal and shredded meat.\n\nBaeron was reloading, snapping a magazine into his bolter, going forwards, striving into the tide, drilling into it with gunfire as it curved and crested above him. His armour was red again, red and glistening.\n\nKatsuhiro realised he was staring. His finger was working the trigger but his gun was not firing. He scrambled for a charge pack.\n\n'What is happening?' Steena was gasping. She had frozen, hands slack on her gun.\n\n'Keep firing!' he shouted. His hand could not find the charge pack that should have been there. He looked down, trying to see the pack in his ammo pouch.\n\n'No...' He heard the moan from the other trooper in the bunker loud and shrill.\n\nHis hand found the charge pack, last one.\n\n'No...'\n\nKatsuhiro snapped the pack into the port. The other trooper in the bunker dropped to his knees. Steena gasped as though punched in the gut. Katsuhiro looked up. Eyes fully open, he looked through the opening into the wasteland beyond.\n\nBodies tumbling over and over, blood and burst skin falling like sea foam at the crest of a wave. Shapes in the distance, so close... The buzz of insects loud enough to swallow the boom of guns. Black flies like polished jewels. Blood a mist on the air. The sky above flashing, pulsing with filthy yellow light. Baeron amongst it, red, so red, standing, but not going forward now. Fighting not to go back.\n\nAnd above it, unfolding in the air, at the edge of seeing, a shape growing larger, sucking in light like a hole cut into his sight. A hooded shape, wings spread behind it to blot out the flash of light, the shadow of a scythe in its hands. He thought of the scraps of dead myths and stories that still persisted even in this age that should have been one of bright truth without the superstitions and fears of old humanity. He thought of angels, not noble, not born of light, but which passed as shadows.\n\nIn his mind he heard the voices of all that he had seen fall, all the people he had loved and wished were not gone calling to him out of memory, gurgling last words out of fluid-filled lungs, speaking words that they did not realise were last farewells. The sounds stitched together, pulsing through him like the vibration of a great bell. Not a sentence spoken, but a meaning that Katsuhiro felt to his core.\n\nAs we are, so shall you be...\n\nHe felt his breath rattle as it drew between his teeth. His sight was greying, his eyes clouding. The tide of figures was still flowing forwards, but the fire cutting into it was slackening. The world before him was slowing, stretching, moving with the agonised slowness of the time before something feared becomes something which cannot be escaped. Beside him, Steena slumped to the floor. The other trooper in the blockhouse dropped his gun and began to run. Katsuhiro felt himself want to follow, to run and run until this was not real, until it became a dream that he could wake from...\n\nJust lay down, said a sweet voice in the back of his head. It was soft, gentle, the voice of the peace of sleep and the kindness of dreams, of fresh water, sunshine and laughter. Just lay down and come to paradise. All he needed to do was stop and close his eyes, and the living world would go. He would not need to live it any more. He could walk in sleep, and leave the world to its nightmare.\n\n'No!' he gasped, breathing hard. 'No! He protects me as I serve Him. He protects me as I serve Him!' He was bellowing, gun up and firing, as the shadow of the angel of despair passed across the light and people fled back from the oncoming tide.\n\nMagnifican\n\n'On the world I was born, you would not get a name until you had ridden alone for three days and nights, and returned.'\n\nShiban felt Cole look at him.\n\n'I don't think that applies to this one,' Cole said, and nodded at the infant. He sounded tired. Shiban had tried to keep the man talking. Talking kept the blood moving, kept the feet moving and the mind from thinking too much. There was something out there, back the way they had come. Shiban knew it. They had kept moving at night and passed half of the day in the shell of a tower. Its walls were marble, its floors glass tiles - both now shattered. Jewelled fragments of crimson, dulled under ash and dust.\n\nThere had been water, too, still drinkable, caught in a pressure-sealed tank that must have fed the flower vines that now hung like burnt hair down the tower's sides. Nothing to eat though. Shiban had shut down the gnawing feeling in his gut.\n\nHe could go for weeks without food, but the damage to his body and the demands of walking were burning his reserves like a furnace. He had thought of eating the various carcasses and deposits of rotting biowaste that they had come across. He had decided not to. He had noticed that even the corpses of the recent dead were gathering films of iridescent slime. Blooms of bright fungus clustered in the sockets of the skull of a dead trooper he had seen. The smell of putrefaction was different, too - sweet and sickly, like flowers and burning sugar.\n\nCole was getting thinner and weaker. The child persisted though. Somehow it persisted.\n\n'He should have a name,' Cole said.\n\nShiban did not answer. His senses were fixed ahead. They had been getting closer to the Palace Anterior, and the rumble of gunfire had grown louder with each step and hour. He took a form of comfort from it - if there were sounds of battle, it meant that all was not lost.\n\n'You don't think so?' asked Cole in reply to Shiban's silence.\n\n'I think that his name matters less than the fact that he lives.'\n\n'Where are you going, Shiban?' The man's question stopped him, turned him. Cole was standing, head slightly cocked, looking at Shiban with beyond-tired eyes.\n\n'We are going to what safety remains.'\n\nCole frowned, smiled, swayed.\n\n'That's not what I meant. Where are you going?'\n\nShiban paused. The answer that came to his lips formed and then faded. To fight until my last, had been the first words to come. They were not his though, not any more. No backward step... he would take no backward step, not into the past, not into the warrior who had fallen from the sky and lived.\n\n'I am going home,' he said at last. 'I am going back to the home that has carried and made me. I am going home to die amongst my brothers.'\n\n'To die?'\n\nShiban shook himself, and let the pain of the movement wash the thoughts from his mind.\n\n'We all die,' he said, and took a step.\n\nCole did not follow for a second, and then Shiban heard the infant mewl, and Cole whisper a hush before following.\n\nThe ground they had been crossing began to slope down. They were in a bowl of rubble and dust. Multiple munition impacts had dug th"}
{"text":" last. 'I am going back to the home that has carried and made me. I am going home to die amongst my brothers.'\n\n'To die?'\n\nShiban shook himself, and let the pain of the movement wash the thoughts from his mind.\n\n'We all die,' he said, and took a step.\n\nCole did not follow for a second, and then Shiban heard the infant mewl, and Cole whisper a hush before following.\n\nThe ground they had been crossing began to slope down. They were in a bowl of rubble and dust. Multiple munition impacts had dug the depression through the buildings that had been there and left them as ragged stacks of rockcrete, plasteel and stone. Water had gathered in the bottom in a bright green pool. Pink blooms of fungus floated on the surface. The air tasted of open guts. Shiban skirted the pool. He was tired. He had not thought that could ever be a possibility but there it was. He needed to take another step, needed to keep going.\n\nSomething breathed across the back of his neck.\n\nHe paused.\n\nCole was talking about the infant's name again, chattering as he breathed hard.\n\n'If we reach the lines, he will need a name,' said Cole. 'Paperwork is eternal.'\n\n'Cole,' said Shiban. The feeling was growing, a breath of ice just behind him that stayed out of sight even as he turned.\n\n'They will have to put a name on some form or docket.' Cole was looking into the fog above the crater lip, swaying, blinking as though trying to focus.\n\n'Cole, be quiet and get down.'\n\n'What?'\n\nA cold gust of air. Bubbles formed and ran across the green mirror of the pool.\n\n'Get down!' Shiban roared, grabbing Cole and spinning him to the ground.\n\nA sound like a knife scoring glass shrieked through the air.\n\nA shape came out of the fog above the crater in a single bound. Shiban had an impression of skin and ribs, of fangs in a wide mouth.\n\nShiban whirled. The shape passed over him, landed and turned.\n\nIts body was long and famine-thin, like an apex hunter left to starve. Shiban could see bone and grey, necrotised flesh through tears in its skin. Six legs bit the ground. A seventh hung from higher on its flank, wasted and slack. Matted fur covered its head. A trio of milk-white eyes sat to the left of a snout that split into a grin of splintered teeth and raw meat. A collar of corroded bronze ringed its neck. It howled, the air rasping from a tumour-clogged throat. Shiban spun the metal pole into both hands. The beast sprang. Shiban stepped back and struck. The metal pole hit the side of the beast's head. It distorted, soft bone mushing, blood sludge and broken teeth scattering. It landed half on him, claws scrambling on his chest. He let go of the pole with one hand and slammed it into the thing's neck. His flesh was screaming. The beast's hind claws scrabbled at his chest. Its wound of a mouth was wide. He closed his fist around its throat and felt vertebrae shatter. The thing's head burst. The bottom half of its jaw snapped on threads of muscle. Its legs were still raking sparks from his ceramite. His world was pain now. Edge to edge. Lightning pinning him to the ground. He shoved the thing away from him, and spun the metal pole up as it leapt again. Torn muscles in his shoulders screamed as they bunched. The pole struck the beast in mid leap. It hit the ground, tried to rise on broken legs. Shiban stamped down on it. Its body exploded.\n\nA cry turned him around. Cole was scrambling away from the pool edge, clutching the infant, trying to draw his pistol.\n\nThe pool was foaming. Black cracks were forming in the air.\n\nFigures were rising from the liquid. Sodden hair trailed from lolling heads. Water-bloated limbs hung from wasted torsos. Flies rose from the bursting bubbles. Fever heat was pouring into Shiban's flesh. He went forward, the pole rising in his right hand. The first figure staggered from the pool. Shiban threw the pole. It hit the spasming figure like a javelin, punched it back and skewered it to the ground. It writhed. Flesh shredded from its fingers as it pulled itself up the pole. Shiban charged, ripped the pole free. The body flew up. He spun the pole in a wide arc. It hit the next corpse coming from the pool and broke it in two. The blow whistled on into the first body as it fell from the sky. It burst in shreds of flesh and shards of bone.\n\nShiban could hear true breath sawing through his teeth, could hear the thunder of agony within, and somewhere back in memory or dream the voice of Jubal Khan, Lord of Summer Lightning, as he taught the hurricane guan-dao form. 'Laugh as you strike them down. Smile at the least. When you fight like this, the chances are you are outnumbered. Fate picks such moments for us to die. Best to treat that as it deserves.'\n\nHe met the next figure with the tip of the pole to its chest and rammed it through the bone and flesh, then turned, slamming staff and body into two more. They came apart. And he was beyond them - pushing down to the shoreline, sweeping, crushing. His teeth were bared, locked together against the roar of pain trying to break out from within him.\n\nNot laughing, Jubal, he thought. Not laughing yet.\n\nA las-bolt burned past him. His head snapped around. Cole had his pistol out. He shook, eyes wide.\n\n'Move!' roared Shiban, turning back to the pool as a figure grabbed his arm. Steam burst into the air as acid burned through white lacquer. He slammed his head into the ruin of its skull. Its grip broke and he kicked it back down into the liquid as he moved towards Cole. The man was almost at the lip of the crater. He saw shapes moving in the fog beyond, bounding forwards. Gurgling growls arose. There were still figures coming from the pool. He was at the crest of the crater.\n\nHis stride faltered.\n\n'No backward step!' he roared.\n\nThere was a taste of copper on his tongue again, and a band of neon stars danced at the edge of his sight. He felt himself stop, sway, caught himself. The metal pole dug into the ground.\n\n'No backward step...' he hissed to himself.\n\n'Are you alright?' asked Cole, voice sharp with fear.\n\nShiban nodded, but did not reply. He blinked. Fog blurred his eyes. The ground was moving. He shifted his hand on the metal pole for balance and stared at the red handprint on the shaft. Blood was oozing from the cracked joints of his gauntlets. The sweat on his head was cold.\n\n'Shiban?'\n\nThe pain was not there. It had gone. Terrifyingly it had gone. There was just numbness radiating out from his heart.\n\n'Shiban!'\n\nFigures running closer...\n\nThe sound of hard rounds in the air...\n\nFizz-snap... Fizz-snap...\n\n'Falling from the saddle before you reach the horizon,' said Yesugei's voice, clearer than the sound of gunfire and shouts, and his blood roaring in his ears.\n\n'No...' he tried to say. 'No backward...'\n\nThe world was turning over. The sky rolled down to fill his eyes.\n\nYellow and grey.\n\n'Shiban!'\n\n'...step.'\n\nAnd then it was all grey, and he could not tell if he was still falling.\n\nTerran orbit\n\nThousands of ships crowded the orbits of Terra. The troop ships and bulk haulers had departed, their guts now emptied, their work done. Only the warships remained. But there were still enough to clad the orb of Terra with iron. They clustered in packs stacked from high to low orbit or in loose gatherings of Legion or loyalty. Above the Palace itself, set like a dagger, was the Vengeful Spirit. Beneath and around it the ships of the Sons of Horus and the most exalted craft of Kelbor-Hal's New Mechanicum. The other Legions' ships held close to the greatest of their kind, like schools of proudly coloured fish above a reef. Thousands more lay in the gulfs around and beyond Luna, ships of the less favoured or those placed to watch the approaches for signs of raiding forces. There had been few since the Warmaster's hand had encircled the Throneworld, but picket ships watched and waited for any who might try to open a second front in the void.\n\nAlmost none of the watchful ships saw the Imperator Somnium until it was well within their sensor and gun ranges. It was vast, a palace shaped in gold and set free in the stars. A thing of such size should not have been able to burn so deep into the spheres of Terra unseen. But it had. It had been born above that world. The last ores of its continents and the metal of its conquered cities laid down as its bones and woven into its skin. Within its hull, technologies that existed nowhere else had shrouded its approach, scattering its mass and engine returns into the background radiation of space. Now, though, it could not hide. Now it needed to be what it was.\n\nIt had already accelerated to the edge of its engines' tolerance, and it did not slow or change course. Had the Emperor's flagship appeared two nights before, perhaps it would have died sooner. Then it would have met greater order and greater strength in the Warmaster's fleets, but the Iron Blood had broken from orbital dock with the Lion's Gate space port and quit the orbits of Terra with all but a handful of IV Legion ships. Some of the traitor host had tried to prevent them after hails and calls for information had gone unanswered, but Perturabo had taken clarity in battle with him, and when it became clear that they were quitting the battle sphere, it was too late to prevent or punish. In their wake they left fractures in the control of the void. Not enough that even a ship like the Imperator Somnium could have hope of anything but destruction, but enough that it cut deep as it burned towards Terra.\n\nBattle groups scrambled to meet it, but half were still trying to chase and disrupt the Iron Warriors ships. Some broke their pursuit and turned back; others carried on after the IV Legion's vessels. Panic sparked in the picket craft. Auspex screens lit with readings. Threat calculations multiplied in the minds of the Mechanicum ships. Guns began to fire. Torpedoes slid into the night and lit. Blossoms of fire flashed across the Imperator Somnium's void shields. On it came, the light of the impacts gleaming across the gold of "}
{"text":"it, but half were still trying to chase and disrupt the Iron Warriors ships. Some broke their pursuit and turned back; others carried on after the IV Legion's vessels. Panic sparked in the picket craft. Auspex screens lit with readings. Threat calculations multiplied in the minds of the Mechanicum ships. Guns began to fire. Torpedoes slid into the night and lit. Blossoms of fire flashed across the Imperator Somnium's void shields. On it came, the light of the impacts gleaming across the gold of its hull.\n\nThe Warmaster's ships recognised it; shocked demands for primary confirmation flicked back and forth between command officers and bridge crew. The Emperor's ship... It could not be... It could not mean that the Emperor was fleeing... What could it mean?\n\nThree minutes after the Imperator Somnium appeared, word reached the Warmaster. His eyes did not move from the view of Terra's surface held in the circle of the viewport. After a long heartbeat of time he spoke.\n\n'It is nothing. My father will not leave. He remains. He endures yet.' He paused, blinked, and in the blink there was a stutter of explosions beneath the clouds covering the Palace. 'Kill it,' he said, and then nothing more.\n\nThe long-range gunfire became a boiling storm of detonations. The void shields of the Imperator Somnium began to stutter under the weight of fire. In the near-silent engine decks, the shield generators began to creak. Mechanisms that had known the touch of the Master of Mankind Himself began to protest, began to fail.\n\nCorswain watched the blaze of fire on his helm display. The Wrath's Descent and the other Dark Angels ships were holding just inside the Imperator Somnium's wake, the great ship's bulk and shields hiding their presence and protecting their hulls.\n\n'Corswain of the First Legion.' The voice of the Custodian filled the inside of Corswain's helm. He could recognise the tones of one of the Emperor's guardians who had met with him and Su-Kassen. Ihohet was the name he had given, though he had never removed his helm to show his face.\n\n'I hear,' said Corswain.\n\n'The Imperator Somnium's shields shall fail, but it shall endure long enough. Do you stand ready?'\n\n'We are ready,' said Corswain. 'Are you and your cadre ready to launch at the moment?'\n\n'My fellow Custodians will go. I shall remain.' The finality in the words reminded Corswain of the edge of a blade.\n\n'May honour go with you, Ihohet,' said Corswain. The Custodian did not reply, and the vox-link cut.\n\nCorswain did not move for a second. The light of explosions and fire flashed in his eyes. The beast looked back at him from the memory of the last dream, its death blood on the snow. Locked into the mag-harness inside the belly of a Stormbird hung in a launch cradle, the plunge down towards Terra felt like nothing.\n\nAs he watched, a stuttered line of explosions cut across the Imperator Somnium's prow shields. They blinked, bursting, tattered layers flickering as they tried to relight. A stream of plasma sliced through the gap and scored across the keel. Gilded feathers a hundred metres long flashed to liquid and scattered into the dark, burning tears from a falling eagle.\n\nThe traitor ships were moving coherently now. Squadrons of line-class warships were forming into clusters, manoeuvring so that their guns could maintain fire as they tracked the burning eagle of the Imperator Somnium on its descent. There was no panic now, no confusion. A will had steadied them and they moved like a pack of dogs ready to kill their prey, arranging themselves so that they could deliver optimal fire, certain that they would. They had noticed that the golden ship was not firing, and even if that was a ruse, they knew they had the teeth and numbers to prevail. Whatever gesture the death of this symbol would serve did not matter; it was irrelevant as its end was inevitable.\n\nCorswain blinked the command vox active.\n\n'All units,' he said, 'stand by.'\n\nA battle group spread across its path began to fire. Forty torpedoes loosed from tubes. The batteries of half a dozen cruisers fired. The beaked prow of the Imperator Somnium began to distort. Globules of white-hot metal the size of tanks spun behind it. Shells burst from its fins. Burning gas streamed past it. And on it came, faster and faster, engines brightening. Inside its hull, the automata tending to its systems bent to their tasks as the hull shook and shook with impact. It was within the outermost edge of the orbital well, and it was not dead.\n\nNow the killers were moving fast, the leisure and confidence gone as they burned to keep their guns on the plunging ship. The greater vessels of that swarm above Terra began to move. A quatro of World Eaters heavy cruisers accelerated at it, prow to prow. The Imperator Somnium fired then. It did not have the human crew or manpower to run an exchange of fire, but it had claws and teeth, claws that had pulled down star-kingdoms and teeth that had ended empires. Nova shells loosed from clusters of barrels set along its keel. Each shell was the size of a Battle Titan, loaded with time-delayed fusion reactors, volkite storm accelerators and rad-fusion warheads. Accelerated by mag-coils to the edge of light speed, each shell was a squadron killer. A ship of the line could only mount one such weapon and fire it with ponderous irregularity. The Imperator Somnium fired ten shells within the span of a human heartbeat.\n\nThe World Eaters cruisers vanished. Shoals of frigates became fire, became dust. The great Emperor's Children barge Serpentis burned and then detonated. Transports still rising from Terra became flashes in the spreading blast storm.\n\nThe Imperator Somnium loosed torpedoes. There were no crews to sight its guns, but the torpedoes could find their own targets. Dozens of warheads cut through the dark, curving towards the scent of reactors and engines. Some were so close that the ships did not have time to evade. New explosions lit the dark. Blisters of fire blew outwards from hulls.\n\nThe recoil from the nova cannon had sliced speed from the Imperator Somnium, but its engines pushed it on, plunged it down and down through the orbital spheres.\n\nIn his gunship, Corswain felt the first explosion shudder through the hull as Terra filled his sight.\n\n'The moment is now,' came the voice of Ihohet across the vox.\n\n'You honour us, Custodian,' said Corswain and then switched to his command channel. 'All units, by my word: strike.'\n\nThe Wrath's Descent fired its engines and kicked free of the Imperator Somnium's gravity shadow. Void shields sheathed its hull. Its sisters followed, scattering from the great ship. They did not pause to fire guns but cut down, reactors pouring power into their flight. Blinded by the unfolding detonations, the traitor ships did not see them at first. Some hesitated, thinking them debris falling from the dying giant. Then they realised.\n\nThe Wrath's Descent was already at the edge of near-orbit. Fire reached for it. Its void shields shimmered. Gas and flame spilled after it. It would not take long for them to fail, and then the lance beams and shells would punch through and burn the assault pods clinging to its hull. Not long, but they had long enough.\n\nCorswain watched the distances to surface drop at the edge of his sight. Void shield status was an amber glow at the corner of his eye. Just a little further.\n\nThe Imperator Somnium was burning, fire and light dragging behind it. Down on the surface of Terra, away from the storms shrouding the Imperial Palace, fires sliced across the belly of the sky.\n\nA squall of macro shells struck the Wrath's Descent. It shook. Hull plates buckled. Gas blew into the void. In his gunship, Corswain felt the impacts an instant before his helm flashed.\n\n'Loose,' he said, his voice calm.\n\nThe cradle holding the gunship slammed forwards. The engines lit and it shot into the vacuum. Another followed it and another. Drop pods punched from launch tubes. Assault craft detached from the hull and fired thrusters. They scattered and fell, pushing down into Terra's upper atmosphere. Interceptors launched and raced the falling craft down. Behind them the Wrath's Descent was turning with the last command sent to its thrusters. More fire hit it. Above it, its sister ships were turning too, craft scattering from their flanks and bellies. Shells impacted across their hulls. Lances sliced into batteries of silent guns. There were no command crew on board now, just the servitors and low serfs following their last protocols and orders.\n\nForce slammed through Corswain. The gunship was juddering. Fire streaked the thickening air behind its wings as it dived.\n\nThe Imperator Somnium was a smear of fire now, hurtling down in the wake of the Dark Angels ships. Enemy craft wheeled around them firing without cease. In Corswain's helm he could see the falling ship and the ships of his Legion begin to tumble as shells punched their hulls. The swarm of drop and assault craft were all inside the outer atmosphere, racing down before the burning eagle met the warships that had carried them this far and would carry them no further. Inside the quiet of his soul, in the place where the beast died and lived in his dreams, Corswain felt sorrow like a shiver of wind through a forest. Such a price to be paid. He thought of Vassago's words and wondered what would be left after this war, and who would be left to see it.\n\nThe Imperator Somnium, chariot of the Master of Mankind, bearer of illumination to the galaxy, hit the Wrath's Descent as the battle-barge rolled over. For a moment, time missed a stitch.\n\nWhite light filled the universe. Complete and total, the skies wiped clean of darkness and of stars. Then the whiteness became golden fire, became the red of vaporising metal. The blast wave screamed out, swallowing the abandoned Dark Angels ships that had carried Corswain's assault force. It struck the traitor craft that had closed to use their shorter-range guns. It slammed int"}
{"text":"mination to the galaxy, hit the Wrath's Descent as the battle-barge rolled over. For a moment, time missed a stitch.\n\nWhite light filled the universe. Complete and total, the skies wiped clean of darkness and of stars. Then the whiteness became golden fire, became the red of vaporising metal. The blast wave screamed out, swallowing the abandoned Dark Angels ships that had carried Corswain's assault force. It struck the traitor craft that had closed to use their shorter-range guns. It slammed into the great warships that had been moving to circle it. These were the venerable queens of war that had led the Great Crusade and then the war against the Emperor - and had endured countless battles without scar or mark. Chunks of half-melted hull stabbed through the prow armour of the Conqueror and lit fires in its decks. Slime and corrosion burned from the hull of the Terminus Est, and the things living in its bones shrieked at the touch of fire. In the throne room of the Vengeful Spirit the blast flashed in the depths of Horus' eye.\n\nA few of the Dark Angels assault craft that had not made enough distance were caught by the fire wave. Corswain saw them blink out of being in his tactical display.\n\n'Astronomican drop zones locked,' said Tragan's voice, crackling with vox distortion.\n\nThe gunship was shaking. Red heat swallowed the black of its hull. Beside it, spread in a swarm of over five hundred, craft fell from the burning heavens to the earth below.\n\nMarmax South\n\n'He protects me as I serve Him!' Katsuhiro heard himself shout the words. His throat was raw. His hood and helmet had gone. Blood caked his face. The buzzing of insects filled his ears. He turned and fired at the shapes cresting the slope of corpses. Steena stopped and swayed. 'Say it!' he shouted.\n\nShe looked at him blankly. Her breath hood had gone too. Boils dotted the skin at the edge of her lips. There was something in the air, something corrosive that made Katsuhiro want to hack up his lungs. 'Say it with me!'\n\n'He...' she managed to say.\n\nA dead thing came out of the mist. It was quick, bounding over the rubble on long arms, trailing coils of guts after it. He could see a set of jaws running down the front of its head between pus-yellow eyes. Katsuhiro fired. A shot from the burst hit the dead thing's side and spun it back. It hissed. Liquid pulsed out of it. It twitched and then pushed itself up. He shot it again. The shots burned through its skull and blasted chunks of burning meat into the air.\n\nThe gun went silent. He scrambled for another charge cell, found the last one at the bottom of the satchel. It was sticky with the blood of the dead trooper he had taken it from. He snapped it home, still pointing the gun at the dead thing on the floor.\n\nHe had no idea where they were, other than they were closer to the walls. Arcs of rockcrete and fingers of reinforcing bars rose above them. They had gone backwards. The yellow murk of the sky above flashed with a sudden brilliant light. His eyes went up and he stared as the blazing light stuttered and flashed, and dimmed. For a second, just a second there was something that might have been quiet. He could hear the ringing in his ears and feel the pulse in his head. The world had shrunk to small numbers and small spaces.\n\n'He protects,' he said to himself.\n\nA figure ran out of the murk. Katsuhiro raised his gun. The figure fell. A black cloud enveloped him. Katsuhiro had a second to see the bodies of the insects swarming over the figure, burrowing between folds of clothing, pouring into an open mouth, chewing into eyes. Katsuhiro felt the prayer falter on his lips. Another figure came from the murk, and another and another. Insects wheeled around them. Gunfire chased them. People fell. None were firing back. The tide came into sight then, rolling forwards, human figures and things larger by far. The air was shimmering with heat. Bodies hit the dirt and became slime. Maggots writhed and split and rose on clusters of wings. Katsuhiro felt his vacant stomach try to empty. He was frozen, and the tide was closing, rolling across the hundred paces he had just crossed, eating the crowd of troopers that ran in front of it. There were no angels here. No bulwarks who could stand. There was just this, a wash of humanity running before death.\n\nGunfire spat from beside him, punched into a section of the tide.\n\n'He protects,' called Steena, firing, face set. The tide edge was fifty paces away. Thirty paces. A fly hit him on the shoulder. Another on his head. All he could smell and taste was sour milk, ashes and raw meat. The sky was still flashing above, red lightning arcing across it like veins in a bloodshot eye.\n\nAnd in that flash, the murk and fog was clear. He could see. He could see the folds of rubble that had been the lines and walls and redoubts that had been Marmax South. Over them came a sea of bodies.\n\nKatsuhiro raised his gun.\n\n'Back,' he shouted. 'We have to get back.'\n\nAnd then he was running. Acid tears falling down his cheeks, his prayers and hopes catching in his throat.\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nRain fell in the tunnels as they climbed. Graft was still carrying Krank. The old soldier was starting to get back the use of his limbs, but they were still twitching, his arms hanging limp down to the fingers, legs like lengths of rope. Krank had not said anything about how he had come to the orchard dome or what had happened, and Oll had not asked. The hollow look in Krank's eyes was enough.\n\nThey had got into one of the fluid conduit pipes that moved sludge and grey water around the hive's propagation levels. The pipe was empty now. A tunnel of black-brown water ran down the centre. Droplets fell from the rivet joins. It smelled, in part of rotten vegetable matter and damp, but there was a scent of the flowers, too, cloying and insistent. Bright green stems crawled over the inner walls of the pipe. Large, vivid leaves spread across the moisture-beaded metal. There were thorns on the stems and leaves, pale and hooked, like fish teeth. White and indigo bell-shaped flowers hung in thick clusters from the vines. Oll thought that he saw them shrink as their stablight beams touched them.\n\n'How do they grow?' Oll turned at the sound of Krank's voice. The old soldier was staring towards a spill of blossoms, bright in the glow from the lamp on Graft's shoulder. 'There's no light in here - how do they grow so green and bright?'\n\nAhead, Katt stopped. She had been leading them, the pendulum swinging in her hand like a dowsing guide, moving to its tug and sway. Oll had not known that it could be used that way.\n\n'Trouble?' he asked.\n\nKatt frowned and panned her stablight up the slope of the pipe. Flowers and leaves rippled back from the light. The brown water frothed past their feet.\n\n'I think we are close to something. The pendulum answers, but I'm not sure what to.'\n\n'Rane? Zybes?'\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'No, maybe, but there's something else... someone else. It feels like someone looking for us. It's getting confused.'\n\nShuffle-tap... shuffle-tap... following him down the corridors of the Labyrinth...\n\nHe coughed, swayed. Shook his head to clear it. There was too much ahead to look back now.\n\nDon't look back... don't look back into the underworld...\n\n'Okay, let's go,' he said, and began to trudge up the pipe again. The slosh of flowing water almost washed away the sense he had that he could hear steps behind them.\n\nThey did not have to go far. The pipe curled around and up like a corkscrew and emerged into the base of a wide chamber. Shafts of light fell from grates in the roof above. The green vines flowed up out of the tunnel into the chamber. The beams of the stablights showed a great tangle of the foliage and flowers in the dark. The floor was soft and damp and squelched underfoot. Oll paused as the beam of his light reached into the distance.\n\n'Do you see that?' he asked.\n\n'What?' asked Krank from further back.\n\n'The flowers,' said Oll, holding the beam steady on a wash of blooms. 'Their petals, they are opening and closing.' As he spoke, the vines shivered and puffed pollen into the air. Oll coughed, and pulled the fabric of his kerchief over his mouth and nose. It was hellish hot. Oll felt smothered as though he wanted to lie down and...\n\nHe caught himself.\n\n'Katt,' he called back over his shoulder. The sugar-sweet scent of the flowers was thick in his mouth. 'Katt, is Zybes here?'\n\n'Oll...' It was Katt, she was swaying, the pendulum in her hand spinning in place. 'Oll, there is noise in here... Why is it so noisy?' Her voice was slurred, her eyelids blinking closed, head nodding lower on her chest.\n\nHe caught her as she began to fold to the floor.\n\n'Katt?' he said. 'Katt!'\n\nBut she did not answer.\n\n'Oll,' came Krank's voice, urgent, sudden. 'Oll, there! Over there!' Krank was struggling to get out of Graft's grasp, waving his stablight over the heaps of tangled vines. Oll followed the direction of the beam. The flowers shrank in the brightness. 'There!'\n\nOll looked, and saw.\n\nCarefully, very carefully, he moved forwards, nudged aside the stems and leaves with the barrel of his gun. The flowers furled to white-and-purple spikes. He saw it then, down amongst the close tangle of stems and thorns.\n\nHe panned the torch beam lower. There it was, the shape of a human, so tightly bound in thorn stems that it reminded him of one of the midsummer sculptures woven from green corn. He held the beam on it for a long moment. There was a hand. A hand projecting from a tight, green mass.\n\nHe suddenly was aware of the space around him and behind him, the dark and the thorn vines filling the pipes they had climbed and the chamber all around him. In the light he saw the plant-wrapped shapes flex, a tiny, repeated rhythm, like a slow pulse, like a sleeping breath.\n\n'Katt...' began Oll.\n\nA patch of knotted thorns unravelled, uncoiling, thorns withdrawing from meat with a sucking sigh. John Grammaticus' face l"}
{"text":" long moment. There was a hand. A hand projecting from a tight, green mass.\n\nHe suddenly was aware of the space around him and behind him, the dark and the thorn vines filling the pipes they had climbed and the chamber all around him. In the light he saw the plant-wrapped shapes flex, a tiny, repeated rhythm, like a slow pulse, like a sleeping breath.\n\n'Katt...' began Oll.\n\nA patch of knotted thorns unravelled, uncoiling, thorns withdrawing from meat with a sucking sigh. John Grammaticus' face looked out at Oll. Blood poured from punctures in his skin. His eyes opened.\n\n'Oll!' gasped John. 'Oll, get away. Run...'\n\nOll heard gasps and cries from behind him, started to turn. The flowers on the vines opened. Pollen spat into the air. He could smell burning sugar, spoiled milk, citrus and shit. His feet were tangled, wrapped with stems and leaves that now squeezed. Thorns punched into his flesh. He could hear Graft's confused machine buzzing, the sound of panic in something that should not be able to panic. The flowers and vines coiled tense. Venom was flowing into him, flowing through him in a warm, numbing wave. He just wanted to stop, to sleep, to lie down and rest... Around him, a shivering ripple ran through the vines. Flowers opened and spewed pollen into the air. Everything was clouded, and moving away...\n\nToo slow, he thought, as softness and darkness rose to catch Oll.\n\nFalling again, said a voice in his head as his thoughts unravelled. Always falling...\n\nA gravely injured Shiban escorts survivors.\n\nTo the promise of a better world\n\nSeal Sinister\n\nInferno\n\nThe Imperial Palace\n\nIt began on the western walls, on a section between Eastern Hemispheric and Bastion Ledge. The section was a kink of poured rockcrete and raw metal slabs layered on top of a natural fist of granite that pushed from the plateau like a tooth. Its allotted name was Gun Cluster 251, but the troopers called it the Stump. Guns dotted its upper tiers. There were mag-cel mortars, cyclo-trebuchets and cannons that swallowed shells meant for warships. Each one was a regiment killer, an engine killer. Until given new purpose, none of them had fired since the last battles of Unity. They were old, drifting towards rust and decay until hauled from the stores and trophy dungeons where they had been kept, and placed on the wall. Tech-priests from Zagreus Kane's new Adeptus Mechanicus had reconsecrated their functions and woken their spirits. Ammunition forged before Unity had come from the Graveyards of Blades in the far north to feed them. As the night deepened on the western wall, each gun had been firing for five hours. Light fountained up and out from the battery barrels. Explosions lit out beyond the wall. Crawling and slithering machines slid forwards metre by metre, braced under domes of energy, which spat lightning as they took the impacts. The sound was continual, a rolling, irregular drumbeat that shivered from air to bone.\n\nOn the lowest of the gun tiers, Julius Cam-rey closed his eyes for a second and swayed. His ears were bleeding. He had been on the wall since the siege had started. At first he had thought it lucky, a place far from the lower lines, high up, covered by layers of void shields that sat within the aegis shield - as safe a place as you could find in war. Then the enemy had come, and the guns had started firing. At first the sound had made him weep with the shock and force of it. Then his hearing had gone. That did not matter; he was a ranging officer and you did not need to be able to hear to look at the fall-pattern of shells. His ears bled continually. Deafness did not help. The sound of the guns just found its way in through his flesh and bones. Every discharge slammed through him. The times, the dwindling times when he was off the wall and slept, he woke again and again as his pummelled muscles and bones lit with pain. He was young as the year turned but now he hobbled and limped, and shook and shivered to the breath of the guns. It felt like they were pulling him apart, that the guns were monsters raised up from the stories of Old Night and he was their prey, toyed with before he became their food.\n\nThe darkness behind Julius' eyelids flickered to red as the flash of the guns shone through the skin. His veins stood out, like lines of crimson lightning.\n\nFlash...\n\nHe would have to open his eyes soon.\n\nFlash...\n\nHe would open his eyes and look at the bursts of fire and key range corrections, and then go back and sleep and weep...\n\nFlash...\n\nWould it ever end? Was this life now? Was there nothing else but an eternity of war, and the slow breaking of the world?\n\nAnother flash as though in answer to his thoughts. But... but the light was not red now, but yellow and bright, the glow of a bright sun. It did not fade. The light brightened and brightened until he wanted to turn and look away. He could not look away. He could not blink. He could not scream as it burned...\n\nThen, just as quick as the flash of the guns, he could see. Not the view of the land beyond the wall, or the splash of plasma and explosives, but something else, something so clear that for a moment he could not believe it.\n\nA wide platform of grey rock extended out beneath his feet towards a blue sky. A trio of sickle moons hung in the blue depths. Vine-hung trees swayed beneath the platform, heavy with flower heads. He could smell the pollen and scent. It must be blossom season. The flowers would turn to fruit soon. The insects were busy in the branches, moving with deft purpose as they flitted between petals. Iralkeaos... this was Iralkeaos and the platform of the orchard house. Home, real home. Yes... he must have slept deeply and tumbled into a nightmare that had lasted until well past dawn.\n\nYes... a nightmare. A nightmare...\n\nBut it was past and he was home. He was twenty summers young and the dream where he had been trapped in a war on a faraway world was nothing... nothing... a fancy gestated by too much rich food and last season's nectar-wine. Yes... that was it. He looked out on the land beyond the edge of the platform, a sea of swaying green leaves and orange blossoms. He would go down amongst the trees in a moment, walk to the edge of the platform and hop down and walk amongst those trees. There was time for a long walk before the sun reached its height; then he would come back and there would be food waiting, and perhaps his sisters and father would come back from... wherever they were.\n\n'Julius...' The voice came from behind him. He did not look around. He did not need to. The voice was his betrothed, and she would be standing there, alive and well. The lung rot that he dreamed had taken her, and his going to the army of the new Imperium to escape the image of her with grey skin shrunken over her bones... just a nightmare. She was there, behind him.\n\nHe felt her hand slide into his. For an instant he hesitated, but then he remembered that, of course, it was right that her fingers felt like a curve of chitin. It was as it should be. This was all he wanted. Here and now.\n\n'Come, my sweet,' said her voice. It was rich and purring. Perfect. 'Come, let's walk through the trees, you and I.'\n\nHe nodded, smiled, but still he did not turn to look at her. Part of him, a very distant part of him, knew that he should not look, that something would break if he did.\n\n'How long can we walk for?' he asked.\n\n'Forever, my sweet,' replied her voice. 'Come, show me the way.'\n\nHe nodded and began to walk. Around him the wind stirred the scent of the trees into the air and the sun was bright on his face.\n\nJulius Cam-rey stepped off the edge of the gun platform. He fell and did not open his eyes. A second after his last step, another person walked from the platform ten metres from him. Then another and another, down the tiered platforms and across the walls. Some walked, some ran, some leapt with the light of paradise in their eyes. A few tried to stop them, to grab them. Officers and comrades shouted, lunged and tried to pull them back. They did not succeed. Bodies fell from the western walls like corn swept from a table. They tumbled, struck, burst apart.\n\nThe fire of the guns began to stutter. Munitions hoisted from magazines stopped. Orders and commands for response broke. In a plasma relay junction beneath the gun cluster, a senior prefect set the conduits to overload. The rest of the overseers were already dead. She wept and smiled as she keyed the last control. Fire geysered up the heat shafts and blew into the darkening sky. In the instant before the overseer became vapour she saw the light of a distant place, and knew that now she would never have to live outside of that dream's embrace.\n\nHigh above the Palace's shields, the fires of the dead Imperator Somnium curdled from blinding bright to black. The colours of stars became smeared ochre and shattered red. The light of the sun that touched Terra curdled into shadow. Crimson aurorae unfolded across the heavens, swallowing the light of the sun as though it were a cosmic lamp now shining through a blood-slicked glass.\n\nOn down the walls the exodus spread like a scent carried on the wind. It touched those inside the wall and without. Like water flowing into a fractured rock, the siren call of paradise had found every fissure and crack. It had found those who resonated to its melody. Now its sound and call was a cacophony. People woke with the song in their eyes, and their hands already red.\n\nThose who were not in its grip felt it. In his chamber, alone for a rare moment between the comings and goings of war, Malcador felt his shoulders dip and the weariness within him make him close his eyes and think of a time when the future had been alive.\n\nIn the depths of shelters people cried out in their sleep.\n\nSome woke and wept as the golden promise that they could not remember vanished out of reach.\n\nOn his own, a tank commander lit a last lho-stick and let the falling ember ignite the promethium pooling at his fe"}
{"text":"grip felt it. In his chamber, alone for a rare moment between the comings and goings of war, Malcador felt his shoulders dip and the weariness within him make him close his eyes and think of a time when the future had been alive.\n\nIn the depths of shelters people cried out in their sleep.\n\nSome woke and wept as the golden promise that they could not remember vanished out of reach.\n\nOn his own, a tank commander lit a last lho-stick and let the falling ember ignite the promethium pooling at his feet.\n\nLooking at the documents scattered and stacked on his desk, Kyril Sindermann found himself noticing the title of a small fabric-bound volume that must have been on one of the few shelves in the Symposium. Ignace Karkasy, read the lettering on the spine: To Dream of Empire. He felt himself thinking of old times, times that seemed simpler, times that now seemed like a precious and delicate thing. He found he was weeping and could not stop.\n\nOver and along the walls it spread, like the fire of an idea and the breath of a god.\n\nOn Sanctus and Europa some of the men and women who had stood for months simply lay down, while above them the shields flared and their comrades shouted and the fire from the enemy lit the sky.\n\nIn the caverns of the Adeptus Mechanicus, Gerontius-Chi-Lambda locked the door to the augmentorium. The data of the cause-effect projections that he had been running hung in his data-buffer, glowing, as clear a sacred truth as he had ever seen. Inevitable. A certainty with no margin for error. Slowly, he climbed into the primary-process cradle. He incanted and the saws began to spin to life. Laser cutters lit. He began to shut down his cognition in sections, but a part of him was still aware and awake as the machines disassembled his metal and flesh.\n\nAnd on the hundred kilometres of the Mercury Wall, hundreds of people simply began to walk towards the horizon. They were soldiers and tech-adepts and labourers, officers and menials, veterans and scripts alike. They walked and they did not see the blaze of the inferno and the burning god-engines. All they saw and all they heard was a promise that they could escape despair. A promise that they just needed to reach. They still saw it as they fell and they fell silent to the last.\n\nGrand Borealis Strategium, Bhab Bastion, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThe door to the chamber closed. Seals and locks activated with a rattle and purr of field generators and fine cogwork. Rogal Dorn did not move for a moment, but looked at the door. The shadows in his face darkened. He blinked once, but did not move. In this moment, almost alone, he was a statue caught between poses.\n\n'You are troubled,' said the voice from the vox-transmitter set on the table at the room's centre. Even through the rasp and crackle of distortion, the voice was a melody.\n\n'Circumstances allow for no other response,' said Dorn.\n\n'Yet you see victory,' said Sanguinius. 'You know we will prevail.'\n\n'Victory is not fate. It is an act of will.'\n\n'Perhaps, my brother. But perhaps it is both.'\n\n'Both?' breathed Dorn, and turned. He pulled one of the stone chairs from the table and sat. The metal and ceramite of his armour clinked against the marble and granite. He ran his hand across his jaw, and then rested his chin on the knuckles of his fist. His eyes fixed on the flecks of crystal and mineral in the polished stone of the tabletop. He did not speak. The vox spat and crackled.\n\n'I must go soon, brother,' said Sanguinius. 'They have sent a horde against the downed Argus Plate on the Europa Outworks.'\n\n'Everywhere the tide comes in,' said Dorn.\n\n'As it always has and always will,' says Sanguinius. 'You are the wall against which it breaks, brother.'\n\n'Am I equal to it?'\n\n'A question that you have never asked before, and not the question you want to ask now.'\n\n'There is someone here for the Praetorian, Lord Archamus.'\n\nArchamus looked up from the data scrolling across the slate in his hand. The senior command aide was standing at attention two paces from him. Calith, the man was called. New, a fresh face to replace Hayleigh. The man looked uncomfortable.\n\n'The Praetorian is unavailable at present. If it is of critical importance, they can see me.'\n\nHe looked back at the data feed. Half of the strategic status feeds from the walls were grey - lost or incomplete data. It was like losing one's sight piece by piece.\n\nHis mind went to the Praetorian, who he had left in the council chamber. The other members of the war council had already left an hour before. Most had attended as ghosts of distorted hololight, or as voices that crackled from failing vox-links. Archamus had remained with the Praetorian after all but the link to Lord Sanguinius had been disconnected. It alone was almost clear. They had talked of the details of the situation and then, at a signal of subtle dismissal, Archamus had left his lord alone to talk to his brother. Shadows had gathered in Dorn's face as he sat beside the table and the chamber doors closed. Archamus wished he had not glanced back and seen them.\n\n'Lord...' the aide began, voice trailing. Archamus heard the man swallow.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'I... I do not think that this personage will... I believe they have to see the Praetorian.'\n\nArchamus raised his eyes, and shut down the data flow. He saw now the moisture on the man's skin, the vibration in his frame. He was terrified. No... this was not just terror. This was a mortal flight response. The old primal drive to flee from the dark and the gaze of the predator. The human wanted to run, but not from Archamus.\n\n'Who is it?' Archamus asked.\n\nThe man did not answer but stepped back, his hand rising to indicate the figure who stood at the far end of the antechamber.\n\nArchamus looked up. He saw...\n\nHe saw a man in black.\n\nDark eyes looked back at him from a web of tattoos that sprawled across neck and cheek and scalp. Centaurs, beasts and stars reared and snarled and turned, all in coal black. The man held his arms behind his back. The grey-black uniform held no mark, apart from the lion's head pins on the high collar. Archamus felt the instinct to look away grip him. His head began to turn, his eyes to blink. He held his gaze on the man, who offered the smallest of nods.\n\nThe aide shifted beside Archamus.\n\n'Lord, I did not know what to-'\n\n'You may go, Senior Calith,' said Archamus, his eyes still on the man.\n\n'Yes... I... Thank you.' The aide hurried away. Still Archamus did not move.\n\n'I do not know you,' he said at last.\n\n'I am Aurum, First Prefect of the Fourth House.'\n\n'The Praetorian is engaged.'\n\n'He will see me,' said Aurum. 'He must.'\n\nArchamus still did not move.\n\n'Why are you here? The Titans of the Ordo Sinister do not bow to the Praetorian's command.'\n\n'Just so,' Aurum said, and held up a hand. A cone of golden light projected from a ring on his finger. Within the light a symbol of a lion and an eagle circled each other, one roaring, the other shrieking as it took to wing. It was a symbol rarely used, but Archamus knew it and knew what it meant. And it meant one thing.\n\nThe cone of light vanished.\n\n'I will see him,' said Aurum.\n\nArchamus gave a single, slow nod and turned to the chamber door.\n\nRogal Dorn was silent for a long moment in the quiet of the chamber. Perhaps behind his eyes battles fought and unfought turned in an orbit around his thoughts. Perhaps for a moment he felt the tide of eternity lapping against the fortress he had made himself.\n\n'Why does our father not speak to me?' he said at last.\n\n'We have this battle to fight, and He a greater battle still,' said Sanguinius. Over the crackle of the vox, the sound of a distant detonation rolled like thunder. 'You know this. You know He trusts you above all others, Rogal.'\n\n'The darkness is at the walls, and there is no sign of aid on the horizon, no word from the Lion and Roboute. Yet our father is silent.'\n\n'The forces of despair press close in the aetheric realm, my brother. You know this, you have listened to Malcador. The ocean flows and breaks over and through us. We are now stones that break the tide or are broken by it. We are part of it. It is us. Trust yourself, brother. Just as our father has. He knows you and knows what we face, and placed you on the walls to face it. Does that act not speak enough?'\n\nDorn was silent, and then raised his head, looking towards where the vox crackled into the half-dark.\n\n'I cannot see it. I cannot feel its substance. And if these questions come from the warp, then they themselves are an attack, an attack that I can feel but cannot see the sword edge that cuts. That is a battle that I do not know if...'\n\n'Say it,' said Sanguinius. 'The truth is a weapon and a shield.'\n\n'It is a battle I will fight to the last. I do not know if it is a battle I can win.' The lines of his face seemed like carved marble. 'All the sacrifices that have been made, every deed done in the name of survival, and now the lightning falls. What will be left after a war like this? What can be left?'\n\nAnother crackle over the vox, and the sound of air passing that said that Sanguinius was rising through it, the snap of gunfire in the battle that he fought as he talked with his brother.\n\n'What could our father say that would undo that?' said Sanguinius, and Dorn's head rose as he heard the note in his brother's voice. 'There are sacrifices yet to make. The end is coming, brother. This, like all things, shall end, and even in loss much shall endure.'\n\n'I believe that,' said Dorn. 'From His lips it would be a certainty. That is what I fear I may have lost to this battle, brother - certainty.'\n\nThe vox crackled again, as though Sanguinius was gathering a reply.\n\nThe locks on the door to the outer chamber released. Override warnings chimed.\n\nLeaves of metal withdrew into the stone frame. Dorn looked up as Archamus entered. The Praetorian sat at the council table, hands clasped beneath his chin. The shadows were thick in the lines of his face. The vox-horn on the tabl"}
{"text":" Dorn. 'From His lips it would be a certainty. That is what I fear I may have lost to this battle, brother - certainty.'\n\nThe vox crackled again, as though Sanguinius was gathering a reply.\n\nThe locks on the door to the outer chamber released. Override warnings chimed.\n\nLeaves of metal withdrew into the stone frame. Dorn looked up as Archamus entered. The Praetorian sat at the council table, hands clasped beneath his chin. The shadows were thick in the lines of his face. The vox-horn on the table crackled and popped static into the air.\n\n'What has happened, brother?' said Sanguinius' voice.\n\nUnder Dorn's gaze, Archamus did not need a question to speak.\n\n'My lord, a prefect of the Ordo Sinister has come. He bears the sigil of the Emperor's will.'\n\nFor a second, Archamus thought he saw a flash in the darkness of his lord's eyes.\n\n'Let him draw near,' said Rogal Dorn.\n\nPrefect Aurum did not salute or bow. To be a mortal and stand in the presence of a primarch was an experience that could crush or exalt. No matter what, it was never an experience that passed without impact. Even those who served close to Rogal Dorn and his kin had to acclimatise, to learn to let will override the reaction that their bodies and minds had to such beings. Except Aurum. He stood still, face impassive. Archamus could hear the man's heart rhythm - it had not even risen one beat.\n\nHe was a pariah, an ultra-blank. So were all the officers of the Ordo Sinister, last of the Emperor's talons. Thought slid off them. Eyes and minds turned away, unwilling to look at something that looked and moved like a human, but was not. They were empty, holes in reality that had the shape of living beings.\n\nRogal Dorn looked into Aurum's eyes.\n\n'My father,' he said. 'He sent you.'\n\nAurum nodded.\n\n'He spoke to you?' A blink of lids over Aurum's pale eyes.\n\n'I am commanded,' he said, and lifted his left hand. On the palm lay a circular seal of stone the black of obsidian but darker, its depths an utter abyss beneath the smooth surface. At first Archamus could see nothing on its surface. Then he saw the lines and curves of the lion's head, its mane flowing and fangs snarling. 'This I give to you, Lord Praetorian,' said Aurum.\n\nRogal Dorn was staring at the seal.\n\n'Why?' asked Dorn.\n\n'Because He willed and commanded it.'\n\n'Now?'\n\n'Now,' said Aurum with a nod, and he placed the seal on the table.\n\n'The might of reserves committed, the enemy fracturing and held back from the walls, my brothers coming, the balance rests with us.' Dorn's hand reached across the stone of the table, and then stopped. He was looking at the seal as though trying to look beyond it through a blackened window into a place outside the walls of his world. 'Yet He sends you here now.'\n\nHe looked up at Aurum. The prefect's eyes met the Praetorian's. The electoos of beasts and warriors on his face shifted like constellations moving over the night sky.\n\n'Now is the hour. It is written.'\n\nDorn's hand pulled back slightly, recoiling from the seal and what it meant.\n\n'What does this mean?' asked Archamus.\n\nDorn was silent, then looked up at his Master of Huscarls. The face was set, the control still there, but there was something in the depths of the eyes now - a crack, and beyond, not the fires of anger or rage, but an emptiness, the blackness of a void that you could fall into and never hit the bottom.\n\n'It means that matters are not as I have seen them. It means that my father has spoken. It means that we are closer to disaster than I had hoped. There is no weapon that cannot and should not be used now, and no hope that a victory will mean anything.' Rogal Dorn glanced at the vox-console as though his brother were there, seated across the table. 'I have my answer.'\n\n'Brother...'\n\n'It is the only way we can survive. A last sacrifice. After all, is that not what we were made for?'\n\nDorn reached out, his fingers spreading to clasp the seal. Archamus felt the instinct within him rise to reach out, to dash the seal from the table. He felt it beyond a level of thought. From here nothing would be the same. The seal and what it meant was an answer to a question that Archamus had not heard spoken.\n\n'Lord...'\n\n'It is as it must be, Archamus,' said Dorn. 'My father has willed it, and so I must do as must be done.'\n\nHis hand closed on the seal, and lifted it.\n\n'The seal of the Ordo Sinister is yours, and with it we are yours, too,' said Aurum, and then he knelt. 'The Titans of our ordo walk at your will.'\n\nRogal Dorn looked at Archamus.\n\n'Give the word to Zagreus Kane and the wall commanders. Open the weapon reserves. All of them.' He looked back at the kneeling Ordo Sinister prefect.\n\n'Rise,' he said, 'and by my will, walk.'\n\nKaralia's Grave, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nThe beam came from the heavens and exploded through a tangle of girders. The rusted metal exploded outwards in glowing gas and a spray of liquid metal. It hit the stuttering shields of a Warhound Titan, blew through them and staggered it sideways. The engine quivered. Damaged limb joints screamed. Half a kilometre away, a macro shell hit the rise of a hill and detonated. The fireball lifted into the sky, spreading and swelling.\n\n'Engine locks!' came Divisia's sending. 'Twenty degrees right flank. Multiple returns. Multiple active weapons. Closing!'\n\n'Drawing charge to weapons,' sent Cartho. 'If we pull much more, we are not going to have enough to keep moving.'\n\n'Fourth Maniple, respond,' Tetracauron called across the wide connection. Distortion and disintegrating sensations roared back at him. The incandescence was a riot of orange and near-yellow-white. Status mandalas whirred. Target and range data spun in their own geometries. And the fires in the land beyond were black. Great washes of charcoal, their hearts utter night where the heat was greatest. The outlines of the rest of his battle force were statues of orange and red, ringed by halos of command data. Interface corruption rolled through the incandescence, boiling in spirals of half-formed numerals. Tetracauron could taste the scrap code, ash and bile on his tongue. It was boiling through the world, flowing out and breathing through the Ignatum engines. Reginae Furorem could feel it. The Warlord shivered as it took a step back. Shattering stars of code burst in the middle of Tetracauron's sight. He heard himself gasp.\n\nThey were in the tangle of Karalia's Grave, the knot of girders and half-demolished stumps of metal that had been the roots of the nascent Karalia Hive. Dorn's levelling had not been able to remove the macro structures around which the rest of the hive had begun to accrete, so they had been left, twisted and mangled in a fold in the ground of the kill-zone. It was a bad place to be for any battle - surrounded by high ground, dead centre to the direct-fire weapons mounted on the Mercury Wall. It was a place to die.\n\nThe battlefront had spread out from Lake Voss' shore. There were hundreds of enemy Titans in the field.\n\nHundreds.\n\nThe Legio Ignatum had walked to meet them and then spread from the first point of combat into a line that was stretching across fifty kilometres. Engagement had been continual: reactors working close to overload, engines cycling and covering each other while each drew fresh fire into its heart. The fire from the walls had held the balance. They had advanced, pushing at full-force strength into the enemy advance. Then the wall gun fire had slackened and the sky had turned bright with fire and the flash of detonations: an orbital explosion, massive, multiple ship deaths. Debris had begun to fall, streaking the sky. The advance had stopped, become a brawl spread across dozens of kilometres, Ignatum engines and Mortis carving the air with lines of fire. They could not contact the wall, and when they tried the only reply was a gurgle of static, like a last breath. Tetracauron's battle group, the first of the Legio into the inferno, had been ordered back to the wall. Forty Titans from the fifty-five that had walked beyond the wall. All of them had scars, many of them were damaged; none had any kinetic munitions left. So they were going back to Mercury to refuel, rearm, and then re-engage.\n\nThey were ten kilometres back from the main line of engagement when the orbital fire had begun. Beams of energy had reached down through the clouds. Bombardment shells fell, burrowed into the ground and blew earth and fire into the air. Subsurface shock waves opened cracks beneath the feet of Titans. At full strength, their void shields could weather an orbital bombardment. With those shields merged, and weapon and reactor outputs synchronised they could do that and win a battle group-level engine battle. Moving fast as they had been, fire flowing to their strides, they were not ready.\n\nThey had been caught in the perfect place to die. Pinned. Caged.\n\nAnother beam struck down onto empty ground and fused it into a glowing puddle of glass.\n\n'Engine returns to front lost,' sent Divisia. 'No returns. Where in all the machine's truth have they gone?'\n\n'All units, maximum alert.'\n\n'Engine lock!' shouted Divisia. 'Eighty-five degrees right flank!' Tetracauron could feel her question - how had it got there, on their flank?\n\nThe other maniples and engines in the battle group saw it, too - warning and sighting signals fizzing into the incandescence. Tetracauron turned Reginae Furorem's gaze towards the new direction of threat. A shadow in the red-and-orange world, an image made of charcoal scattered over crimson.\n\n'I cannot lock on to it.' Cartho.\n\n'How is it there? How did it get through the Legio lines?' Divisia.\n\n'Focus,' he willed, and felt his own calm slam through the link.\n\nTetracauron's sight blinked and the enemy engine was close now, much closer, as though a section had been sliced out of the ribbon of time and space. Divisia was right; the engine should not have been there. The main Legio engagement was a full three kilometres forwards, lighting the bellies of"}
{"text":" charcoal scattered over crimson.\n\n'I cannot lock on to it.' Cartho.\n\n'How is it there? How did it get through the Legio lines?' Divisia.\n\n'Focus,' he willed, and felt his own calm slam through the link.\n\nTetracauron's sight blinked and the enemy engine was close now, much closer, as though a section had been sliced out of the ribbon of time and space. Divisia was right; the engine should not have been there. The main Legio engagement was a full three kilometres forwards, lighting the bellies of clouds with weapon light.\n\n'Weapons charged.'\n\nHeat whipped up his spine. His right fist was burning. He could taste lightning.\n\n'Power to shield recharge dropping.'\n\nColossi drawn in the colours of the pyre turning with him, his kin, his siblings in fire and iron.\n\n'All units, wheel and power weapons.'\n\nScrap code blurred the incandescence, boiling like wind-blown ash. The shadow was there, coming closer, staying still, a spot cut in truth that should not be looked at. The voices of the Titan crews were blurring and merging as power filled the war engines and their spirits blazed.\n\n'Weapons ready to fire, gross area saturation.'\n\n'What is it?'\n\n'Weapons failing to lock.'\n\n'Switch to visual targeting.'\n\nHe could hear and feel a rhythm now, a pulse in the buzz and scratch of the storm of scrap code.\n\n'I...' The voice was Clementia's, coming from half a kilometre away, chopped and distorted. 'How many targets can you see?'\n\nThe image in the incandescence was flowing, layers of data skipping and vanishing, distance and scale stuttering. There was one smudge of darkness, with legs and limbs and hunched back... two, then three, then one again.\n\n'All units...'\n\nAnother skip-blink and then it was there. Closer than it should have been. Much closer than it should have been. A war-horn boomed out, rolling and echoing, then another and another. The enemy engine was there, on the hill above the broken spars of Karalia's Grave, taller than the Battle and Scout Titans that looked up at it. Its skin was blackened, crusted with soot. Growths of bone and desiccated flesh jutted from its back. Clouds of white insects breathed from vents in its torso. It had been an Emperor-class Titan, greatest of its kind, city killer, destroyer of armies. Now it was something else. Something greater and something that had fallen. Despair and the hunger of the grave filled the hearts of those that looked on it. Substance unravelled into decay at its passing. Behind and with it were seven engines that had been Battle Titans, each now a shell for powers that bubbled and rasped in the warp. Each was a horror of distorted metal. Fluid dripped from cracked metal. Things with eyes and soft, half-formed hands writhed in blisters that bulged from rusting metal. One dragged the head of a dead engine on a chain, digging a gouge through the ground as it strode forwards. Another seemed to limp, its head a mass of dry bone where before it had been metal. A litany of numerals rasped from it, audible over the din, as though whispered next to the listener's ear. The dust of the ground burned as they stepped behind their unholy king.\n\nIn the incandescence, Tetracauron saw the Emperor Titan and knew what it was and its name.\n\nDies Irae, the day of judgement, the reaper enthroned in iron.\n\nMortis had breached the main battle line. He knew it without having to try to connect with Cydon or the rest of the Legio. They were not held. They were advancing.\n\nFor a moment, the incandescence was still. Tetracauron could feel his flesh sweating. He could hear the buzz of broken data links and taste the acid burn of terror, the old reaction of human flesh to facing death. He was not human though. He was the interface between the world of fear and flesh, and a god of metal and fury.\n\n'All units,' he willed, 'fire.'\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 91 kilometres.\n\n∞\n\nIt is noon in the desert. It has been noon here for all time. It is fixed at that point, at the idea of the heat beating down and the light giving no room for shadows. The eyes of the man beneath the tree have closed to slits. Above Him, the dry branches of the tree rattle. His shape here is not truth. It is just a reflection of His nature at that moment: pain and suffering and the relentless hammer of vast forces crushing in on Him. His skin is a parchment pulled thin across a skull. Cracks have opened on his brow and cheeks. Dried blisters cling to His lips. He has not moved for a long time. Longer than a lifetime. The scoop in the ground, where water rose from the tree's roots, is dry. This is a realm of thirst now. There is no water here any more, just His will pushing against the idea of this desert, holding it back from Him and the only tree that gives any shade.\n\nThe rattle of the first snake rises into the air. The man's eyes open a fraction wider. The serpent sits on the cracked earth. Its head is raised, its black eyes unblinking. As the man looks at it, a tongue flicks out to taste the air. Its scales are blue, the colour of an ocean under the sun. It flicks its tail and again the dry rattle rises. The man meets its gaze. From behind the serpent the head of another rises. The scales of this one are the green of summer forests, and the light draws a gleam of copper from a bone crest. It hisses. The fangs inside its pink mouth are black, needle splinters of night. Another hiss and the man has to open His eyes and turn to see the third and fourth shapes gliding over the ground behind Him. There will be two more, He knows, lying still, out of sight, coiled in the dust like a promise that is in truth a threat.\n\n'Almost time,' says Horus. He is there, sat on the ground just outside the tree's web of shade. He wears a robe of black, the edges threaded with gold. A circlet sits on his head. It might be brass, but under the noon glare its points look like flame. A red eye with slit pupil looks out from its setting on his brow. Horus gives a sad smile. 'Almost time,' he says again as he scoops up a handful of dust and lets it fall from his fingers. The serpents coil close to him, sliding around him. He reaches out and runs a finger down the head of one. For a moment the finger is not a human digit but a talon, long and sharp. The snake squirms under the touch and hisses. 'Why did you do it?' says Horus. 'Why did you lie? Why did you try to stand in the way of the inevitable? The powers of this realm cannot be defied or stopped, but they can be mastered. Their ascent is inevitable but so is our domination of them. They serve if you have the will to shackle them. You do not lack for will, father, so why did you not make them your slaves? Is there weakness in you that held you back from doing what I have done? Did you fear it? Did the Master of Mankind fear becoming Master of All?'\n\nThe man beneath the tree opens His mouth. Skin splits on His lips.\n\n'You have lied to him,' He says, and the voice holds no crack or note of the wasting that marks His face. His eyes are on the serpents, and they rear up at his words, mouths open, fangs showing, eyes black pearls in the glare. 'When he sees what you have made him, there will be nothing left of him for you. Nothing. You create only hollow things. You make a desolation of hope, and a wasteland of the future.'\n\n'Hope...' says Horus. He rolls the last of the dust between his fingers. 'There is no hope for you, father, and there never was. This was inevitable. I was inevitable.'\n\nHorus smiles, and nods. He flicks the last of the dust.\n\nThe man beneath the tree coughs, the sound a rattle in a dry throat.\n\n'He shall undo you,' says the man to the serpents. 'I made him. I know him, his strengths and his flaws. To you he is only a slave, but he is still my son.'\n\nHorus' face hardens, and suddenly there are shadows pooling on the ground as he rises to his feet. The sky bruises above him. The serpents lash towards the man beneath the tree.\n\n'You are a lie!' Horus' voice is the dry growl of thunder, and he is stepping forward, breaking the ground with his tread. A hurricane wind blasts past. The idea of Horus' shape is a dust-edged blur. His eyes are burning coals.\n\nThe man beneath the tree stands. Behind Him the tree bursts into flame. Smoke pours into the sky. Branches blacken in the blaze. The man towers before the flames, a shadow cut into their light. Fire rains from the burning branches. The serpents recoil, seared and hissing, black eyes scorched to blind white.\n\nHorus halts but does not step back.\n\n'You are nothing!' Embers fall from his mouth.\n\n'This shall end,' says the Emperor in the voice of the fire. 'As all things must.' Then for the first time, His gaze, which holds only night, lowers to look at Horus. 'And I wait for you.'\n\nThe tower\n\nHollow Mountain\n\nThunderbolt\n\nBefore time was counted - Hatay-Antakya Hive,\n\nEast Phoenicium Wastes\n\n'We are ready, master.' The man was sweating, droplets running from under his red leather cap down his forehead to gather in his beard.\n\nOll - except he wasn't Oll yet, and wouldn't accept that name for a long time - looked at the officer, and then down the slope to where the engines sat on the dust of the plain. Twenty of them, the ropes and timbers tense, the crews waiting beside the piles of boulders that had been dragged from the river shore. There were no trees large enough here to make the frames so they had floated them down the rivers from the northern forests. Only a quarter of the trunks had been sound enough to be used. The rest had gone to make screens for the wall assault troops to advance behind. If he turned, he would see the nearest camp of those troops, the sea of tents ringed by palisades, smoke from cooking fires rising into the sky to streak the blue heavens. Thousands of warriors, and not just farmers pulled from their land - true warriors, drilled and trained and bound to the greater cause. Banners hung in the still heat above the camps, images of beasts and fire and memories of the conquered land where these legions had come fr"}
{"text":"eens for the wall assault troops to advance behind. If he turned, he would see the nearest camp of those troops, the sea of tents ringed by palisades, smoke from cooking fires rising into the sky to streak the blue heavens. Thousands of warriors, and not just farmers pulled from their land - true warriors, drilled and trained and bound to the greater cause. Banners hung in the still heat above the camps, images of beasts and fire and memories of the conquered land where these legions had come from. A host to remake the world.\n\nOll looked back to the officer, who still had his head bowed.\n\n'Begin,' he said.\n\nThe officer straightened, brought his fist to his chest and snapped out an order. Flags rose in the hands of heralds. Behind them the war-horns and trumpets blared. The air shook in Oll's ears. At the bottom of the slope the arm of the first engine released with a thump. The boulder arced through the air as it loosed from the sling. Oll watched it tumble over and over, tracing down to the outer defences. His eyes pulled up to look at the tower beyond the wall. It thrust into the sky like an accusation. Tiers of rock and brick the colour of a sun-baked riverbed. His gaze caught the arches, and windows, and the wooden scaffolds circling the highest point like a crown.\n\nThe lofted boulder struck the first parapet. Stone, wood and mud brick burst into the air. Even through the heat haze he could see the men running along the wall tops. He imagined the blood, the broken bodies, the shouts and screams.\n\n'A little long,' came the voice from just behind him. He did not turn as he answered, even though he had not heard his friend join him on the slope.\n\n'They are adjusting,' said Oll.\n\nThe next engine released as he finished speaking, then the next and the next.\n\nThump-thump-thump. Stones cast up into the sky, tumbling dots.\n\nOll watched the first stone hit the wall.\n\n'We should send another envoy,' he said.\n\n'We are past the point where that would make a difference,' said the man.\n\nOll frowned. 'Do we ever really pass that point?'\n\n'This has to happen.'\n\nOll said nothing.\n\n'You do not agree?' asked the man.\n\n'I'm here, aren't I?' said Oll. He was watching the crews pull the beam arm of the first engine down. A sweating pair were hauling a boulder to where the sling was lowering to the ground.\n\n'It can't be allowed to stand,' said his friend. 'If it does, then the words and powers that it holds will spread from here across the face of the world.'\n\nOll was silent again.\n\nClouds were collecting above the tower top, white folding into black and grey. Lightning flickered in the building mass. The crew of the engines faltered as the sound of thunder rolled across the plateau. Hail began to fall. The heralds and officers were shouting, horns sounding through the legion camps. Men ran for their weapons. Falling ice rang on armour. Half the sky was black, boiling, flashing. The spirals of wind rose from the ground, spinning ice and dust into the air. The siege engines began to rock in place.\n\n'You see, my friend,' said the voice from behind him, carrying above the roar of the storm. 'This has to be ended.' Oll turned. His friend stood amidst the running troops and the hail. The circlet of silver leaves around his head gleamed. His eyes were dark, steady, a reflected flash of the storm caught in their depths. He looked sorry, Oll thought, the bearer of bad news to a soul who did not deserve that unkindness.\n\nOll opened his mouth to say his friend's name.\n\nAnd the world stopped.\n\nThe hail hung in the air. The flash of lightning shone in a frozen sheet. The running troops and the spinning columns of air were still.\n\n'This was it, then?' said John Grammaticus. 'This was when you two were young.'\n\n'We were never young,' said Oll.\n\nOll turned and looked at the storm above the tower, the frozen whirl of white and coal grey.\n\n'I'm dreaming,' he said. 'Right?'\n\n'You and me both,' John replied, and smiled, but Oll could read exhaustion in his eyes. John was wearing a faded desert cloak over a bodyglove. Scuffs and stains mottled the leather and rubber of the suit. Oll could see the edges of the ceramic armour plates poking out through micro tears.\n\n'Seems very real, for a dream,' said Oll.\n\nJohn shrugged. 'It's not your conventional type of dream.'\n\nOll kept looking.\n\nJohn shook his head and flicked a hand. 'Stop it. It's really me, alright? You want proof? Then we are going to have to be a bit old-fashioned, my friend - but sure. Ask me something only I would know.'\n\nOll kept looking at him.\n\n'What do you want?' asked John. 'When we first met? The colour of the smoke over Sennchar? Or all the stuff we never spoke about from that time I tried to have you killed on Oos-Lua? No one else walked away from that, so the chances of someone being able to fool you would be minimal.' John opened his hands and shrugged in the way that he had for centuries. 'Not much else I've got, old friend, other than stories. No talisman or sign. Sorry.'\n\n'Okay,' said Oll after a long pause.\n\n'What convinced you?'\n\n'Only you could talk that much without someone actually asking you a question,' said Oll. He frowned, bent down, and picked up a handful of the dirt that was about to become mud as the rain fell. He rubbed his fingers through it. The grit felt as real as the cold stone of the Labyrinth. He let it fall. It dropped a finger span from his hand and froze.\n\n'Sorcery, right?' asked Oll.\n\nJohn nodded.\n\n'Secrets and infinite dreams. That's what we are caught in. Somewhere out there you and I, and whomever you brought with you, are lying all wrapped in thorns, dreaming of our deepest secrets.'\n\nJohn looked up at the half-constructed tower, and the lightning playing above it.\n\n'I've been down into the deep past, Oll, seen all the bits of the past that I have tried my best to forget - Nurth, the whole shitshow with the Cabal, and before... This place pulls you down into the dark and then throws all of the things you try to hide back at you.'\n\n'This is a trap then,' said Oll. 'This place, your message.'\n\nJohn laughed.\n\n'A trap alright, but not just for us, Oll. We just fell into it. This is a trap for humanity. All those people you saw coming here, they chose to come, and wanted it enough that they left everything to follow the call of the dream. It's like your sirens, Oll - those that hear cannot help but get up and follow.'\n\n'I saw,' said Oll. 'The hive is feeding on them.'\n\nJohn bit his lip and nodded.\n\n'All the things you ever wanted but feared, all the terror, all the things you can dream given back to you, infinite and beckoning. Fulgrim's Children planted the seeds, I think, hothoused it in the blood and warp fallout from what's going on in the Himalazia.' John paused and shivered. 'This is Fulgrim's garden of earthly delights, his vision for the future. They have a name for it...'\n\n'Paradise,' said Oll.\n\nJohn nodded.\n\n'I am sorry, Oll,' he said. 'I came to the Hatay Hive because the augurs said that this is where you would arrive.' He gave a bitter chuckle. 'And you did, just not before I did.'\n\n'I came here because of you,' said Oll. 'I heard you.'\n\nJohn laughed again.\n\n'A self-causing loop - you came here because you followed me here. I came here because this is where the signs said you arrived.'\n\nOll was quiet for a moment, looking up at the glare of the unmoving sun and the frozen flash of lightning.\n\n'We went off course,' said Oll. He frowned and looked at John. 'You said you read the signs and they said that I would arrive here. So if you thought I overshot, you must have got to the original rendezvous. You must have seen Her...'\n\nJohn nodded.\n\n'You saw Her?'\n\n'Yes. Not pleased to see me, but yes - I saw Erda.'\n\nOll looked away down the slope at the running troops in their hauberks and skirts of scale. Wild eyes looking at the lightning-filled sky, mouths open to shout.\n\n'I miss Her,' he heard himself say. It was not what he had intended, but then he was not sure what he had meant to say. He frowned, shook his head. 'She's not coming with us, is She?'\n\nJohn's shrug and smile was half a grimace.\n\n'She sent help, a warrior, and She set me on my way - couldn't have done that without Her. You know Her better than me, Oll, but something tells me She's as much with us as history lets Her be.'\n\n'She's still angry,' said Oll.\n\n'Yeah, I reckon so. Angry at Him, at what He's done - angry that She helped Him make the twenty things that brought the whole show crashing down. And most of all, angry that if He fails then that's it.'\n\nOll shook his head, his gaze on the tower.\n\n'No,' he said. 'That's not why She is angry.' He knew without looking that John was frowning. 'She is still angry about the same thing I am.'\n\nJohn came to stand beside him. Oll felt the wind on his face. Above him the storm was turning. The frozen arcs of lightning blinked. A drop of rain hit the skin of his cheek. 'She is angry about what happened here.'\n\n'And what was that, Oll?'\n\nOll shook his head in answer. His armour was gone. The fatigues he had worn when they had made the last cut to Earth hung from him. His limbs were a little heavier, a little older - a lot older - than they had been back then, back before the tower fell. Rain pattered on the fabric. He had a feeling that if he had turned to look behind him he would have seen himself all in armour, standing next to a man that he had called a friend.\n\n'I get it, Oll,' said John from beside him. 'You have history, and more than most. Even if you don't want to tell me about it.' The rain was heavy now; men were running again. Thunder vibrated through the air. 'Anyway, I don't think you will have a choice.' Rain was streaming down John's face and his cloak was sodden. 'That's what these dreams are, Oll. They are not just a trap - they are taking secrets from us here, whether we like it or not. That's what the thorns are feeding on. That is what they drink. All the secrets we keep.'\n\nOll shivered. Above them a bolt of lightning be"}
{"text":"n if you don't want to tell me about it.' The rain was heavy now; men were running again. Thunder vibrated through the air. 'Anyway, I don't think you will have a choice.' Rain was streaming down John's face and his cloak was sodden. 'That's what these dreams are, Oll. They are not just a trap - they are taking secrets from us here, whether we like it or not. That's what the thorns are feeding on. That is what they drink. All the secrets we keep.'\n\nOll shivered. Above them a bolt of lightning began to fall from the clouds like a spear reaching down through the air, faster than a blink but slower than a falling feather.\n\n'What secret do you prefer I didn't see, Oll?' asked John, and there was sadness in his voice. 'Because that's where we are going.'\n\nThe Hollow Mountain\n\nThey called it the Hollow Mountain. Before the will of the Emperor had remade Terra, it had borne other names, all now lost. Tunnels and caves had wormed through its heart since before humanity had struck an edge to flint. Its summit had caught clouds and spun storms in times when the seas had covered the land that men would bleed and die to conquer in the aeons that followed. The mountain had always been an unquiet place. The ghosts of the dead sung on the ice winds that spun over its flanks. The shamans that first went into its caves would dream and die, and live and dream and die over and over again in a single night. Crystal threaded the walls and floors of those caves. Sometimes these threads would seem black. Sometimes they would glow violet, or burn fire-orange.\n\nCivilisations and species would rise and fall and rise again, and the mountain would endure, gathering whispers and legends and names: Daemon Barb, Eater of Souls, Gate of Sky and Earth. Images were daubed in the outer caves, and bones gathered in the dark. Once in an age, a mystic would come down from the summit with fire in their eyes. Wild wars and revelations sprang up in their wake. All the while, the mountain slept and spoke only in whispers.\n\nThen the Emperor had come and broken open its heart. Drilling machines turned caves into tunnels and burrowed into caverns that light had never touched. The layout of some of these passages followed the needs of construction, opening the mountain for the excavators and labour armies that would follow. Others had no obvious purpose: shafts plunging down or up into the mass of the mountain, volumes of space excavated to precise geometric design and then sealed so that they hung in the rock, voids of darkness in cold stone.\n\nWorkers vanished, most by night, but others would take a wrong turn into a well-lit tunnel and never be seen again. Once the tunnels and caverns were complete, masters of aetheric resonance assembled machines that made the crystals in the walls sing. The first psykers arrived a little later. There were a thousand of them, enough to kindle a flame. They burned with the last song of their souls, and the Hollow Mountain echoed that song. In the void between the stars and beyond thought, a light lit in the darkness...\n\nThe first drop pod hit the mountain's summit. Snow and ice flashed to steam. Assault ramps slammed down. Warriors in black armour emerged. Another pod struck, then another and another. Plumes of white vapour punched into the thin air. Fire criss-crossed the blue dome of sky above. Gunships and drop pods trailed red and orange behind them as they plummeted down. Interceptors spiralled after them. Fuselages burst into fragments. The shadows of warships crossed the sun like serrated storm clouds.\n\nCorswain's gunship skimmed low. The assault ramps were already open. Alarms and warning lights flashed through the cabin. Oil and flame spilled from the craft's wing. A fresh spit of cannon fire sliced through the air beneath it. A chrome interceptor went past above, engines shrieking.\n\n'Get us as close as you can,' he shouted into the vox. His mag-harness snapped free and he was at the assault ramp. A wall of ice and black rock blurred past. Heavy las-fire burst through the open door, and punched through three Dark Angels as they climbed out of their harnesses. The gunship skidded across the sky. Corswain could see the world spinning around and around through the open door.\n\n'Deploy on signal,' came the pilot's voice over the vox, flat and calm. The gunship slewed around, tipping over on its burning wing. Corswain's boots mag-locked to the deck. His armour growled as it fought gravity and G-force. He was looking straight down through the open door. The flank of the mountain plunged away from his sight. As he watched, an aircraft tumbled past, clipped a crag of grey rock and became a fireball. The ready rune flicked to amber in his helm. Corswain braced. The gunship snapped level, and then up. A cliff edge blurred past beneath it. Sensor spines snapped on its belly. The rune in Corswain's helm blinked green. He jumped.\n\nThe mountain came up to meet him. He landed in a tuck. Stone and ice exploded out. He rose, sword in hand. A stream of heavy rounds hit the warrior that landed beside him, but Corswain was already bounding up the frozen slope. He could see the gun-box above him, set into a crag of rocks. Autocannon barrels jutted from a half-sphere of plasteel. He leapt. The gun barrels swung down. Laser rangefinders touched his armour. He caught the rockcrete edge under the gun mount and sliced up with his sword. Lightning-wrapped steel sliced through the gun as it fired. Corswain caught the momentum of his cut and swung up. The dead guns swung side to side like the head of a blind man. He rammed the sword down. The point went through the gun fitting with an explosion of metal fragments. He sawed it sideways. He could hear the spluttering buzz of the servitor wired into the gun controls. Then his blade cut through the ammo feed. The explosion blew the gun out of its mount, and sent it tumbling down the mountainside. Above him, the domed cap of the mountain rose up and up.\n\nCorswain looked down at the slope of snow and scree beneath him. There were warriors in black climbing, firing. Las-bolts and auto-rounds sheeted from the mountain peaks to meet them. Drop pods and assault craft lay scattered on the ice crust. Some burned. Smoke breathed into the air. The enemy had full control of both the mountain and its defences. If his assault force stayed on the outside too long they would be slaughtered.\n\nA shape blotted out the light. Corswain's gaze snapped up. A figure stood on the top of the gun-box. Its armour was bronze, polished, weeping jewels on chains. A coxcomb of green hair rose above a helm dotted with dozens of circular speaker grilles. There were no eyes. The gun in its hands writhed with chrome pipes. Corswain heard a sound like a swarm of insects and the shrieks of dying crows. He exploded upwards. The gun in the traitor's hands spoke. A sonic wave hit the rockcrete next to Corswain and blew it to dust. He landed but the traitor in bronze was fast and was just beyond blade reach as Corswain's sword sliced out. The traitor laughed and the sound shattered the crystal of Corswain's eye-lenses. He staggered. The traitor levelled its gun again. Corswain raised his sword.\n\nThe traitor jerked up into the air. It hung for a second, pinned to the sky. Then its armour plates buckled. Its helm crumpled. Blood and pulped meat gushed out of cracks. Corswain could smell storm charge and smoke. The warrior in bronze gave a last shriek, then its form was crushed into a bloody ball of armour fragments. Blood sprayed out, melting ice and snow to a pink slurry. Corswain looked around at where Vassago stood on a rise of stone beside the gun-box. Coils of ghost light drained back into his armour.\n\nCorswain bowed his head in thanks, but the Librarian moved stiffly, as he began to climb.\n\n'This place...' he called. 'There is something within it. Something that interferes with my abilities.'\n\nMore Dark Angels were moving past them up the mountain face. Most of the force was down on the ground, now, or would never be landing at all. They climbed and leapt, moving up and up, over jagged faces, punching grip holes in ice, toes finding purchase on blade-thin ledges.\n\n'Resistance is lighter than anticipated,' said Vassago, bounding up the ice and scree again.\n\n'I would not consider that comfort,' said Corswain.\n\nStreaks of energy flicked through the air as gun-boxes fired at the Dark Angels climbing up the slopes. Aircraft shrieked overhead. Clusters of blue unit markers blinked at the corner of Corswain's sight. He pulled himself over a lip of rock and looked up.\n\nThe door in the mountainside sat beneath an overhang just above him, sealed and unyielding. The door was a circular plug of metal set into the stone of the mountain: twenty metres across, riveted, frost dusting its wind-pitted surface. There was no sign of a lock or hatch. There were supposed to be seven of these door seals dotted down the mountainsides, but to what end Corswain could neither deduce, nor gather. Most inaccessible to anything but the kind of aerial approach the Dark Angels had just completed. But no matter their intended purpose, they offered a way in. He had chosen five of the seals and sent a Chapter-strength force to each of them. This was the highest door, set closest to the main structures within the mountain, the closest to heaven.\n\nAround him, the fire from the gun turrets slackened.\n\n'Breach it,' he said as his warriors joined him.\n\nThe seal blew in moments later. Glowing liquid metal sprayed into the darkness inside. The first Dark Angels were through the breach before the metal had cooled from white to yellow. Corswain was amongst them, sword drawn and lit.\n\nSilence and darkness greeted them. No gunfire or shouts or guns braced behind readied positions. He slowed his charge. Amber threat and targeting runes flicked across his sight, searching and finding nothing. A circular tunnel angled down from the seal they had breached. The walls were smooth,"}
{"text":"ater. Glowing liquid metal sprayed into the darkness inside. The first Dark Angels were through the breach before the metal had cooled from white to yellow. Corswain was amongst them, sword drawn and lit.\n\nSilence and darkness greeted them. No gunfire or shouts or guns braced behind readied positions. He slowed his charge. Amber threat and targeting runes flicked across his sight, searching and finding nothing. A circular tunnel angled down from the seal they had breached. The walls were smooth, almost mirrors. The glow of the breach and the radiance of Corswain's sword glimmered in broken reflections. A thread of air flicked at the edge of his robes and he heard a low moan in the distance.\n\n'Lord?' It was Tragan, his voice so clear and loud over the vox that Corswain almost flinched. His brother was two kilometres away but he sounded as though he was right next to Corswain. 'Fourth and Third have breached into the lower mountain. All vox signals are holding true. Resistance encountered, but less than anticipated.'\n\nCorswain was silent. The breath of air tugged the edge of his robes again.\n\n'This shaft should lead directly to the main choral chamber,' said Vassago. Threads of green-blue light arced over the head of his mace. He shivered, the movement amplified through his armour. 'There is a... a voice. Whatever has darkened the light of the beacon knows we are here. They... it is waiting.'\n\nCorswain looked down the shaft. The angle was such that it would not be an advance from here; it would be a drop, and a race down into the dark without the choice of stopping or slowing.\n\n'At this point, Brother Vassago,' he said, 'I do not think that we have any choice. All units, descend,' he said, and dropped himself down the shaft.\n\nBefore time was counted - Hatay-Antakya Hive,\n\nEast Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThe soldiers who reached the chamber at the heart of the tower died before they could cross the threshold. Armour tore. Bodies blasted back and up into the air, and then burst apart in turn. Armour plates crushed in on flesh and mashed bone. Legs sank into marble that was now liquid. Pieces of shattered armour extended into smears of blinding light. Time froze. Flesh slid into red ribbons, organs and muscle peeling away and unravelling into nothing. The air was red and screaming.\n\nAt the centre of the chamber beyond the door twenty figures stood still, hands locked together, mouths open, lips and tongues charring as they spoke, runnels of blood crusting their cheeks. Frost covered the obsidian beneath their feet. Spears of flame crawled over the silver pillars behind each of them. Words covered every inch of the floor, walls and domed ceiling. Above and beyond it, the tower rose to the sky, reaching up to touch heaven. The circle of twenty spoke and sung, but they were using no tongue of men. Un-words and nil-sound came from their throats, biting chunks out of the shouts and screams of the soldiers trying to get into the chamber.\n\nEnough. The word somehow carried through the babble of un-words pouring from the twenty.\n\nThere was a figure at the door. Blood streaked his armour and face. His crown gleamed like a circle of flame. The circle of twenty trembled. The man in the crown grimaced, and then stepped into the chamber. The air around him thickened. He pushed on, his footsteps forcing their way down towards the stone floor of the room. The shriek of un-sound rose beyond hearing. The man in the crown forced himself forwards, face set. Fire haloed him. The metal of his armour was red with heat. Shadows and rainbow light burst and spun in the chamber. The frost on the walls thickened. Dust and snow billowed from nowhere on gusts of wind.\n\nThe man in the crown surged forwards. He was burning, the flesh of his face charring. But still he pushed forwards. Light exploded out from him, blinked to blackness and then back to blinding white. Cracks split the stone floor. Frost flashed to steam. A pressure wave ripped into the nearest of the circle of figures and tossed them up into the air. And now the man in the crown was coming forwards, not with one step but with strides, sword drawn, flame gathering on its edge as it rose. Behind him, soldiers were coming through the doorway. And the circle of speakers and singers were twisting, panicking, the howls coming from their throats now the simple sounds of human rage and fear.\n\nStillness.\n\nComplete stillness. Faces frozen. Embers and ashes suspended in mid-air.\n\nJohn Grammaticus walked into the middle of the tableau. Oll stood in the place where he had been when he had lived the dream in reality, two steps behind the man with the crown and the burning sword. Oll shifted, and heard the fish scales of his pearl-white armour chime as he moved. He watched John circle the man in the crown.\n\n'You and the big Him,' said John. 'Did He call Himself an Emperor back then?' Oll shook his head. 'Wore a crown though,' said John, nodding at the image of the man.\n\n'To service a higher ideal demands that those who can act sacrifice themselves to authority,' said Oll.\n\n'Those are His words, right? That's what He said about why He took power. He had that ambition even then. Was there anyone then who could go up against Him?'\n\nOll shrugged. 'There were some but He was the first.'\n\n'You mean the first psyker.'\n\n'The first witch, the first wizard, sorcerer, shaman, druid... the first. There were others who were different, but none like Him. Not in the beginning.'\n\n'What changed?'\n\n'He did. He was... weaker than He is now, much weaker, but always stronger than anyone else. People change, people stay the same. He was always driven. Always.'\n\n'But different?'\n\n'He had... limits. Or maybe I just wished He did.'\n\n'I knew you two knew each other, but this is not just an acquaintance between two fellow travellers I'm seeing here, Oll. You fought along with Him, for Him, right?'\n\nOll did not nod, did not shake his head.\n\n'I have always been a soldier, John.'\n\n'So you brought the tower down?'\n\nOll nodded, tried to close his eyes for a moment, but nothing happened. His eyes simply remained open.\n\n'Yes,' said Oll. 'We brought it down.'\n\n'Too dangerous to stand, right? A place of sorcerers, right?'\n\nOll looked down. There were ashes frozen in the middle of drifting across the symbol-etched floor.\n\n'The people of the tower thought of themselves as something else. They were scholars of a sort, thinkers, fools...' He found a humourless laugh on his lips and shook his head. 'I think they thought they could unify humanity, elevate it, make it something... higher...' He could feel John looking at him, but he did not look back. His eyes found the frozen face of a man in the circle of figures at the chamber's centre. A drop of blood hung, half-formed from the man's open lips. 'They built their tower, and up and up it went, and out there, their word spread across the lands. Cultures, people, language, art, they changed it all.'\n\n'So He decided to stop them and you decided to help Him? Must say I'm still surprised, Oll. I knew you two had history, but I never thought you drank the water of ideals, or whatever.'\n\n'The people of the tower had something very dangerous, John, something that no one should have. There wasn't a universe to balance it out back then. That's the kind of thing that you can't let happen. Not if you are one of the only people with the perspective to see it.'\n\nOll shook his head. He wanted very much not to be here.\n\n'Whatever happened to not wanting to be involved?'\n\n'That was later. After this... because of this.'\n\nJohn Grammaticus frowned.\n\n'What was it they had, Oll? Psyker stuff, sure, witch and warp stuff, but that's not all, is it?'\n\nJohn looked at the cracked floor for a moment, then flinched back, shaking. Oll watched, and waited.\n\n'That's...' gasped John. 'All the carvings... it's Enuncia. It's shitting Enuncia.'\n\n'It wasn't called that back then,' said Oll. 'Things didn't really have the names they picked up later. Enochian, Glossolalia, Enuncia, Babel... In some ways that was the problem - names, concepts, power, illumination - it all started here. In the fallout. Like everything else.'\n\n'The primordial language of creation...' breathed John. He was not looking at Oll now, not really listening, his eyes moving across the figures and chamber as though seeing it for the first time. 'The first symbol system to span the gap between reality and infinity, and they just had it carved on the walls like kids' graffiti on a hab.'\n\n'A near-complete lexicon,' said Oll.\n\nJohn whistled.\n\n'I've seen a few symbols before, never wanted to understand it - the definition of knowledge that should not be known, right? Had to be careful when I ran into it before, in case I just started having it screaming in my head.' He grinned briefly. 'One of the few downsides of the whole psychic ability to understand all language and communication. This though, I'm not getting anything. Must be because it's a dream rather than the real thing - just how you remember it, an impression, not the real thing.'\n\nOll did not reply, but bent down, to where a crystal bowl lay on the floor. It had shattered as it hit the tiles. Pieces hung in the air above the impact point. He saw the image of a bull-headed man, neck thrown back as another man opened its throat with a knife.\n\n'How did they get hold of so much of it?' John asked, bending down to look at the pillars, and then at the robed figures. 'Enuncia is a shattered language now, but I'm guessing it was still pretty rare back then.'\n\nOll shrugged. 'I'm not sure, but they had it alright, and they were using it.'\n\n'To do what?'\n\n'The same as everyone with power - to change things. They wanted to elevate humanity, or at least that was what they said. Ideas, art, knowledge, power, all of it. Spread it, channel it, master it, and it would make humanity something bright and shining. They wanted to unlock potential.'\n\n'Sounds dangerous,' said John.\n\n'It was.'\n\n'Sounds not a million miles from"}
{"text":"g it was still pretty rare back then.'\n\nOll shrugged. 'I'm not sure, but they had it alright, and they were using it.'\n\n'To do what?'\n\n'The same as everyone with power - to change things. They wanted to elevate humanity, or at least that was what they said. Ideas, art, knowledge, power, all of it. Spread it, channel it, master it, and it would make humanity something bright and shining. They wanted to unlock potential.'\n\n'Sounds dangerous,' said John.\n\n'It was.'\n\n'Sounds not a million miles from what our big man in the crown over there has tried.'\n\n'Yes,' said Oll. 'And no. They did not concentrate all their power and ideals in one figure. The idea was that over time the knowledge and understanding would spread out, that we would all be illuminated.'\n\n'Lovely ideal. I'm guessing the reality was less lovely.'\n\n'Cities turned to ash and salt. Predator ideas. Words that once you heard them would sink into the brain and kill you if you started to think the wrong things.'\n\n'But all in the service of a higher ideal,' said John.\n\n'It always is.'\n\n'Didn't do them much good, by the look of things.' John nodded at the circle of figures in robes.\n\n'Some of their students survived,' said Oll, 'but not many.'\n\n'Really? I would have thought He would have been more thorough.'\n\n'They persisted and still do, seeds and ideas scattered from this tower and this moment. Ideas of a common origin and derivation.'\n\nJohn gave Oll a hard look.\n\n'Common origin and derivation?' said John carefully. 'As in words with the same root, as in things that are connected to each other? As in cognate?'\n\nOll nodded.\n\n'Everything starts somewhere.'\n\nThe air shimmered, the motes of ash shifted, and the tableau was suddenly moving, blurring with unravelling seconds.\n\nFlames poured from the robed figures' lips as the un-words in their mouths slipped beyond their control. Their bodies collapsed into ash. The man in the crown came forwards, still burning, eyes dark holes. His skin was blistered, but no expression of pain touched His expression. The ash spiralled into the air.\n\n'It's over,' Oll heard himself say, his mouth moving in an echo of the words spoken a long time ago. 'Do whatever you need to do to grind this stuff into dust and it's done.'\n\nThe man in the crown turned and looked at Oll, who looked back just as he had all those ages ago. He could feel the armour on his limbs, as heavy as it had been back then. He could feel the sweat and blood on his face. Ashes and sparks stirred through the air. Flames billowed beyond the doors as the tower burned.\n\n'Not yet,' the man replied, and moved towards one of the twenty carved pillars, reaching out with blackened and blistered fingers.\n\n'What are you doing?' said Oll, the words on his lips just as they had been then, when the chamber and the tower had been not just a dream.\n\n'The future...' said the man with the crown. 'When we found each other that is what we talked about. \"Live past the span of man and you can see the patterns of what is to come.\" That was what you said. You were right, but also not. You cannot see the future, my friend. But I... I can see it. I can see the future's shadow.'\n\nOll felt himself stare at the man, his friend. In his mind he felt the memory of his denial and disbelief falling through him.\n\n'We agreed.'\n\n'We agreed to put the argument aside. I am still right, my friend. Humanity's future cannot be left to chance. You might not agree, but your denial does not alter the truth.'\n\n'This place must become dust and its secrets with it.'\n\n'There are things that cannot be imagined coming,' said the man. A mote of fire glowed in his eyes now. 'The sorcerers and gods and horrors of today are nothing. The tide will rise, and with it the powers that will destroy everything. The world of humanity is small, but one day it will not be, and we won't be able to topple a single tower and save mankind. We will need to be able to do more.'\n\n'Maybe, perhaps... You can't be certain, you know you can't be certain. What of causality? Interfere and what happens? Maybe we cause what you see in the future by trying to stop it.'\n\n'It must not come to pass. I will not allow it to.'\n\n'We are not gods!' Oll heard himself shout. 'We can't tilt the world on its edge or carry it on our backs. Try to and we will only make it worse. What about leaving things to figure themselves out? What about letting people choose?'\n\n'Let them choose, and they will kill the future.'\n\n'That is not our judgement to make.'\n\n'Is it not?' asked the man in the crown, looking around. The fire had gone from His eyes.\n\nOll felt himself move next to the pillars. His eyes moved over the symbols. He flinched but held himself steady.\n\n'And this? What has guiding the future got to do with this?'\n\n'Tools,' said the man. 'Weapons, knowledge. We cannot throw aside any of it. You are right - we cannot see the clear path to salvation, but we will be able to. This is a step. There shall be other steps and other paths, and we shall take them in turn as we must. This though, is the first real step. Come, my friend. We are fighting a war the end of which no one else shall see. We cannot turn from the weapons that we have, nor those that providence provides.'\n\n'A glass to see further, a word to open hearts, a sword to kill unborn gods...'\n\nThe man in the crown nodded, and gestured to the symbol-covered pillars and walls.\n\n'Take this knowledge and the fate changes. Leave it and it unravels. It is a simple choice.'\n\n'There are no simple choices,' said Oll.\n\n'But there are,' said the man. 'It's just the consequences that are complicated.'\n\nThe dream froze again.\n\n'My stars, Oll,' whistled John. 'You two did fall out, didn't you? I mean I always thought... I suppose I thought that you were a bit more distant, a bit less close, and that it was more that you decided to leave each other to whatever you were doing, but...'\n\n'Secrets and things we would rather forget,' said Oll, his voice low. He wondered how far this dream was going to drill. He thought he knew: all the way down into the Labyrinth... 'That's what you said these dreams are showing, so there you go.'\n\n'Hell's teeth, though,' said John, shaking his head and pacing towards the man with the crown, and looking at Him closely. Oll watched John raise a hand as though he was going to touch the man's face. 'You two really went at it, big things, big ideas. You were right, too, weren't you, Oll? I mean, as much as He is the play we are backing in this circus - He is the problem, not now but back then. He tried to control it all and caused what He feared most. This is it, His main problem right here at the start - gazing at the horizon but not seeing the drop at His feet.'\n\n'Maybe,' said Oll.\n\n'Maybe? He was wrong - you knew it then, and you said it, and time came along and proved you right.'\n\n'Right is not what I would call it.'\n\n'Why? Because you walked away? Because things don't come down to one side and another. Oll, when will you get off the fence and just commit? All in.'\n\nOll shot John a hard look. 'I'm here, aren't I?'\n\nJohn raised his hands, placating.\n\n'All in - that's the problem, John,' said Oll, and he could hear the anger in his voice. 'The same problem as you and your damned Cabal, and Him, and all the rest. You all want people to be all in. No one thinks that they don't have the right to pick an answer. That there might not be an answer!' He realised he had moved towards John. That he had a knife in his hand, fingers clenched around it. He relaxed, stepped back. 'Sorry,' he said.\n\n'It's alright,' John replied, and then looked back to the frozen image of the man in the crown. 'This is really how it all started, though, isn't it? Him, His plan, what He would go on to do - it's all here. At war with anyone who would not get into line, that would not toe the line, like these poor bastards.' John nodded to the crumbling forms of the burning figures in robes. 'You must have seen it before this point, though, Oll. So I still don't see how He got you to fight in His war?'\n\nOll shook his head. 'I'm not sure about that.'\n\nJohn frowned. 'About what?'\n\n'About whose war it was.'\n\n'We are standing in your memory, and it seems pretty clear from here.'\n\nAnd now it was coming, rolling up out of the dark like the voices of the dead calling from the underworld...\n\n'I just want an ordinary life...'\n\nSummer in a meadow in a land drowned by time.\n\n'My dear friend, you'll have as many of those as you want...'\n\nThe wind and spray and the bow of a ship splitting the waves...\n\n'Don't look back...'\n\nDown in the dark with the shades behind them...\n\n'Give us the winter and you can have the summer...'\n\nPoor Persephone looking at him with sorrow, her tears gathering as pearls in her eyes...\n\n'You will need to take a thread...'\n\nDown in the Labyrinth, lost in the dark...\n\n'You always made better choices, Oll...'\n\nAn old hand turning a card on which a bolt of lightning fell to break a tower...\n\nIt was all going to happen again, just as he remembered.\n\n'You've lived a long time, John, but not long enough,' said Oll. 'After a while you forget, and then you forget what you have forgotten. You remember some things and they seem clear, but then you wonder if you are remembering what happened or the story that you told yourself.'\n\n'But He, that man right there, the whatever of then and the Emperor in the now - He found you, got you onside for a while, then you left and He went on to do what He did. That's what happened. That's why you two have history...' John stopped, and Oll could almost hear the pieces dropping into place. Oll looked at John, and gave a tired sigh.\n\n'I was always a soldier, John. Remember. Always a soldier, never a leader... But then... back then I was something else, and I had a different name.'\n\nJohn was looking at him. Oll could see the realisation in his eyes.\n\n'You... This war, the whole thing... the warriors that brought this place down... They were not His-'\n\n'Ours,' said Oll. 'They were ours. "}
{"text":" you two have history...' John stopped, and Oll could almost hear the pieces dropping into place. Oll looked at John, and gave a tired sigh.\n\n'I was always a soldier, John. Remember. Always a soldier, never a leader... But then... back then I was something else, and I had a different name.'\n\nJohn was looking at him. Oll could see the realisation in his eyes.\n\n'You... This war, the whole thing... the warriors that brought this place down... They were not His-'\n\n'Ours,' said Oll. 'They were ours. He was the king and I was...'\n\n'Oh... Shit.'\n\nOll nodded.\n\n'Warmaster - that is what I was called.'\n\nJohn Grammaticus stared at him. Oll gave a sad smile.\n\n'Stories, memories... Live long enough, John, and you see the past coming around wearing a different face.'\n\nJohn opened his mouth to reply. Then he stopped and swayed. The frozen shadows and flames shifted. The frozen embers drifted in the air for an instant. Oll saw John's eyes touch the words covering the stones, then he was doubled over, convulsing as though vomiting, but all that came from his mouth were dry moans.\n\nOll did not move. He had feared it would come to this. It all had the feeling of something familiar and inevitable.\n\n'I can hear it,' gasped John Grammaticus. 'The Enuncia... Oh, stars-and-time... I can hear Enuncia in my head!'\n\nOll nodded, and turned to look at the man in the crown, the man who had been a king and was now an Emperor. Something was unlocking inside him. Something he had buried down a long way, locked in old stone and built over with other memories and other deeds.\n\n'This is supposed to be a dream...' gasped John. 'I shouldn't be able to hear it.'\n\n'You are a logokinetic, John,' said Oll, softly. 'You can understand and gloss any language that someone near you is thinking or speaking.'\n\n'No one is thinking in Enuncia here, though, no one real. It's a dream.'\n\n'I am here, John. Here in the dream and back then, and I'm about to make a choice. You are hearing the memory of my thoughts. You are understanding what is about to happen.'\n\n'Oll... Oll, what did you do?' John was shaking now, body blurring like a smeared drawing of chalk. 'Oll!'\n\n'You are a good man, John. Better than you think you are. Better than me.'\n\nAnd the dream began to move again. The heat from the flames washed over him. The ash and cinders were thick in the air.\n\nOll felt his gaze move to the man in the crown, the man who had been his friend and who had trusted him.\n\n'I am sorry,' said Oll to the man in the crown. 'I made the wrong choice.'\n\nThe knife was in his hand, just as it had been then. He felt himself step forward. Felt the un-words he read from the floor and pillars form in his mouth. Saw the crowned man turn.\n\nOll rammed the knife forward and up: up under the scales of the crowned man's armour, up into the flesh beneath, up into the heart that beat within. The black eyes of the crowned man were wide and open, staring into Oll's.\n\nThen Oll spoke.\n\n'-'\n\nHigh above the burning tower, which had reached from earth to clutch at heaven, the thunderbolt fell.\n\nThe Hollow Mountain\n\nThe walls of the shaft blurred past. Trails of sparks rose from where armoured fingers and boots dug into the stone. Echoes filled Corswain's ears as hundreds of warriors slid downwards in his wake. Down and down, rushing into the dark.\n\nHeartbeats sliced seconds.\n\nThe shrieks of their descent struck the walls, reflected, wrapped around him. The flash of sparks reflected from the circle of the walls, gold streaking black, and the hole they plunged down like the pupil in the eye of a beast. From a place at the back of his skull, the smell of snow and blood breathed into him and the beast looked up as he struck down with his sword.\n\nThe black circle beneath Corswain vanished. The darkness was an opening. Colour and light blazed into his eyes, and he was hurtling almost straight down, unable to slow, unable to stop. He hit the edge of the tunnel and then he was not sliding but falling.\n\nLight blazed into his eyes. Sound shrieked through his bones and earpieces.\n\nHis helmet display overloaded. Blood vessels in his eyes burst. Bile and acid filled his mouth. He was falling blind. Colours and jagged patterns spun across his retinas. The shrieks vibrated through him, rattling through armour and bone. He could feel sinew and bone splitting. He could not think, could not feel, could only sense and listen. There were voices in the deluge of sound, babbling, calling to each other, calling to him, singing, humming and crying in dozens of tongues.\n\nHe hit something. Armour cracked across his shoulder. He spun through the air. Another impact, and this time the pain reached through the storm of sensations. He rolled, tumbling, halted, nerves and thoughts flooding.\n\nIn his mind's eye he looked up. A beast was rising above him, sword held point down. It snarled.\n\nHe gasped. Pushed himself up, gripped his helm and wrenched it off. The world swam in front of him. He staggered as distances stretched and then snapped tight. He sensed the falling blow as it arced towards his head. He jerked aside. The weapon hit the ground with an explosion of light and lightning. Corswain came up. His sword was in his hand - gripped even as he had fallen. The enemy warrior was a mountain of chromed metal. Amethysts plugged its eye sockets. It had been a Legion warrior once, that was written in the lines of its Terminator armour, still visible beneath the growths of polished metal and jewels. Its neck bulged in its collar ring, inflating as it swept up a mace with a head of silver. Even over the din surrounding him, Corswain heard the traitor inhale to shout. Cartilage clicked in its mouth. Sacs of skin inflated. Corswain rammed his blade forwards. Its power field was inactive, but the sharpened steel punched through the warrior's throat and into the meat of its neck. It shook, vibrating for the instant it hung on the sword, gurgling with a moan of deflating lungs and air sacs. Then it moved, mace still rising. Blood gushed down Corswain's sword. He activated the blade's power field. Lightning exploded out. Flesh and blood blew to smoke. Corswain wrenched the sword back and turned it into a cut that sliced off the hands gripping the mace at the wrist. Warrior and weapon fell. Blood and yellow fluid poured out. Corswain stepped back, turning his gaze.\n\nThe deep choral chamber of the Hollow Mountain shimmered around him. The chamber was a sphere cut into the heart of the mountain, three hundred and forty-three metres in diameter. Lining the internal surface were the choral tiers. From there the psykers would sing the song of their souls and merge that song into a single beacon flame. Circular platforms hung on pillars from the roof, each one dangling from the one above like the leaves of an inverted plant. The disc of each platform held a subtle convexity or concavity.\n\nA heat haze shimmered over Corswain's sight as he tried to take the view in. The fall from the shaft opening had tumbled him down and into one of the circular platforms. He must have hit the edge of a platform above, and spun sideways. Amethyst, serpentine and clouded quartz threaded through the stone of the platforms. Flecks of gold gleamed in the light. And what light there was... Colours and patterns flashed through the air, sliding together, merging and ripping apart. Sound boomed and sawed through the chamber.\n\nThere were Dark Angels falling from the open shafts above, striking the platforms, rising, forming into units, moving and firing. Some triggered jump packs as they fell. Cones of flame caught them and boosted them up onto the tiers on the inner walls. He saw three units of Destroyers plunge down, weaving between shimmering blasts, firing pistols, grenades shedding from harnesses. There were enemies scattered across the platforms, warriors, giants in armour that rioted in colour. The colours clashed and blurred. Light reflected from polished plates and shattered into blinding mirages. They were fast, too, Astartes fast, but the nobility of their breed was gone. Only discord and obscenity remained.\n\nAs he watched he felt something shift at the edge of his senses. Above and around him, reality cracked. Soft, pulpy flesh oozed into being, clotting into muscle and fat and skin. Horns formed and hardened. He felt screams in the back of his head. The ground shifted beneath him. He leapt back as a claw punched through the floor where he had stood. Figures pulled themselves out through the wounds in reality, lithe muscle and chitin forming as they moved. Black-pearl eyes looked back at him. Glass-needle smiles opened. He felt his skin tighten. The figures leapt. He stepped back, sword rising, and...\n\n...fell upwards.\n\nThe creatures sprang after him. The stone of the platform flowed up into the air, growing into a spiral of razor crystals. The figures bounded up the steps after him, laughing, spinning, smiling at the mockery they made of the laws of reality.\n\nHe hit the platform above, spun into a roll and came up. The chamber that had been below loomed above him. The first creature leapt from the crystal stair towards him. Corswain's sword swung. The creature's claw extended as it reached for him. His blade went through its arm and on into its torso. It blew apart, black ichor crystallising in the power field's flash. Another came through the remains of the first, then another and another, and he was cutting and cutting, the world defined now by the reach of his blade. Claws bit through his armour. He was bleeding. He could feel warmth spreading through him, slowing him, pulling him down, a promise of rest without end. He stepped back and the floor folded like paper, twisting as he moved over it, spiralling and opening into different shapes every time it was not in his sight. Sensations poured into him with each instant: needles in his skin; the taste of ashes and sugar; the smell of forests and flowers and rot; blasts of colour in his eyes; laughter and voic"}
{"text":" Claws bit through his armour. He was bleeding. He could feel warmth spreading through him, slowing him, pulling him down, a promise of rest without end. He stepped back and the floor folded like paper, twisting as he moved over it, spiralling and opening into different shapes every time it was not in his sight. Sensations poured into him with each instant: needles in his skin; the taste of ashes and sugar; the smell of forests and flowers and rot; blasts of colour in his eyes; laughter and voices, louder than the roll of thunder; whispers that stabbed into his mind. He could not see the rest of the battle now - it was a blur beyond the reach of his senses. Time creaked and stretched. Was he remembering the blur of cuts and parries, or was he living them? Where were his brothers? How long had he been here? He was a single, shrinking point. He was not even real, just the dream of a knight in the mind of a boy who died to the claws of a beast, long ago and far away... There had been snow on the ground and the sound of wind in the trees.\n\nA beam of cold blue light struck the figure in front of him. Its substance blasted to ash. The light leapt to the next figure and the next. Iridescent flesh became dust. Glass-blade smiles vanished. Vassago advanced on Corswain, a rope of lightning uncoiling from his raised hand. With him were warriors in black hoods and robes and chequered pauldrons, swords drawn, bolters firing. They were climbing up a spiral stair that had grown from nothing. Vassago held the cord of lightning until the last creature was ash. He jumped and landed next to Corswain.\n\n'My thanks,' said Corswain.\n\n'This place,' said Vassago. 'It is...' The Librarian staggered, almost fell. 'It's shouting, calling out. Can't you hear it?'\n\n'What?' he called.\n\n'He asked if you could hear my song,' said a voice that came from all around.\n\nAnd then, as though it needed the words to be spoken to make it real, Corswain heard the cacophony. Distances expanded and contracted in time with the rhythm. Colours flared and burst into shards in his eyes.\n\nThen the world became perfectly clear, as though a window had been wiped clean. The heat-haze blur and the riot of broken colour was gone. All was silent. All was slow. The taste of gun smoke and lightning in his mouth was clean and perfectly balanced. He looked up and for the first time since he had entered the choral chamber, he saw it clear and true.\n\nThe psykers of the grand choir filled the choral tiers on the chamber walls. All of them. Pinned in place, the stone and metal of their chairs grown through and over them, limbs and skin stretched so that the only features that remained were their mouths. Corswain's eye found the face of a psyker on a tier level with him. Swirling light surrounded the man's head. Chrome tendrils squirmed over and through his torso, threading his ribs. A mouth of metal fangs surrounded his neck like a collar. He was looking straight at Corswain. The psyker's mouth moved silently, lips fluttering. Along the tiers above and below, hundreds of mouths took up the murmur until it was a hiss of words.\n\n'Do you not hear my song, Corswain, Lion's son?' said the Chorus. It was talking just to him, even though a part of him knew that it would be whispering to all his brothers, speaking their names like a parent to a child. 'Listen and be at peace,' it said.\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThe tower exploded in Oll's memory. He tasted lightning: salt and metal on his tongue. Over and again: lightning stabbing down, blocks of stone and mud brick blowing outwards, wood and plaster blasted to ash and cinders. Darkness and night... and the idea of two figures falling from the ruin, survivors, victims, the Emperor and the Warmaster... always falling, from then to now, forever.\n\n'Get up! Move now! Come on, you old bastard!' A voice. A voice that was not the dream or in his mind, but real and near. He heard hissing and a whoosh and a soft thump. Fire blazed behind his eyelids. There was pain across his body, digging into him, biting, chewing. He gasped. Tried to move. Cords were twisting around him. He felt the thorns in his flesh. Something grabbed him, pulled him. The thorns bit. He could smell smoke and flame. The thorns held him for an instant and then released. He half fell. Eyes blurred as they opened.\n\n'Come on, Oll! Come on!' Zybes was there, standing beside him, pulling him up by the arm. There was fire in the chamber, yellow and oily. Clumps of thorns were burning, twisting as they became ash. Sap sizzled to smoke. Zybes had an arm hooked under Oll's arm, his lasgun in the other hand. A plastek canister of promethium hung on a strap at his side, sloshing as he twisted to fire. Las-bolts burned into a clump of thorns.\n\nKatt was there, red from head to foot. Thorn punctures covered her, seeping blood. She tossed promethium in an arc around her, brought her pistol up and fired. The fuel ignited. Flame breathed out. They were in a burnt circle in the middle of the chamber. The thorns flowed back like a tide gathering to crash back down on a shoreline.\n\nOll forced his limbs to move, found that his gun was still hanging from his arm by its strap, grabbed the canister off Zybes' shoulder and sloshed the fuel in a wide arc. He fired as the fluid was still falling.\n\n'How did you find us?' he called to Zybes.\n\n'She called me,' said Zybes, now pulling out a wide-bladed knife and hacking into a burning wall of thorns. Katt was beside him.\n\n'Left,' she called, pointing as she ignited another wash of fuel. Zybes hacked into the thorns on his left. A machine hand glinted, under the cut vines. 'Her mind voice found me, reached out, guided me.'\n\n'I thought you were gone your own way,' said Oll. He was beside Zybes, ripping the torn vines back from Graft. The servitor gurgled, tracks spinning but not gripping, machine limbs thrashing.\n\n'I was gone,' said Zybes. 'But what else have I got other than you, other than all of us?'\n\nOll paused for an instant, looked at Zybes as the one-time pay-by-day grunted and heaved Graft back onto its tracks.\n\n'Thank you,' said Oll.\n\nZybes looked at him, nodded.\n\n'Trooper Persson...' Graft's voice buzzed, slurred. 'I... I did not know where I was, Trooper Persson.' Its limbs twitched, its head moved from side to side. 'I do not... I do not know...'\n\n'Over there!' shouted Katt. 'Two metres in.'\n\nZybes was already hacking forwards, firing into knots of vines, peeling them back from the shape of Krank. The old trooper did not move as the thorns came free.\n\n'Graft,' said Oll.\n\n'I...' buzzed the servitor. 'I am... I saw... a...'\n\n'Graft, he needs help.'\n\nGraft rocked for a second, then moved forwards, and lifted the unconscious Krank up.\n\n'Let's move!' shouted Zybes.\n\n'Not yet!' called Oll.\n\n'You're kidding!'\n\n'John,' said Oll, and he snapped his eyes around to look at Katt. 'John Grammaticus, he's here.' He called out, shouting, 'John! John!'\n\nSomewhere under his senses he heard a reply. 'There,' he shouted, pointing into the mass of thorns. Fingers protruded from the vines. Zybes was already there, cutting and hacking. Oll was next to him, battering and yanking the vines. John gasped as his face emerged. Zybes gripped him, under the chin and by an arm.\n\n'Shoot,' called Zybes. Oll fired into the thorns around John. They burned, coiling back. Zybes pulled. The vines tightened. Oll fired again, and Zybes yanked him free. Oll fired another burst as Zybes tried to steady John. The psyker swayed, shivering, bleeding from puncture wounds. He looked thin, drained, the skin of his face slack, like the surface of a deflated balloon. He doubled over and vomited.\n\n'Shit...' he gasped. 'Reality tastes bad.'\n\n'You said you had someone with you,' said Oll, catching John's arm and tugging him up. The movement was rough. He could feel anger in him. The dream had touched things in his very old soul that he did not want to waken, things he had hoped not to have to look at yet. Part of him blamed John Grammaticus for that; the rest of him blamed himself. 'Who came with you? Where are they?'\n\n'Nice to see you in the flesh, too, Oll,' coughed John, spluttering, hand shaking as he wiped vomit from his chin.\n\n'Here,' said Katt, already hacking and shooting into the thorns.\n\nJohn suddenly jerked up alert, his eyes on Katt. Oll could read the trained tension-relaxation of muscles, the predator readiness. Katt's head snapped around. Her gaze locked with John's. Oll felt a jolt in his muscles like the discharge of electric current.\n\n'Where did you find her?' asked John, his voice suddenly low and controlled.\n\n'Along the way,' said Oll.\n\n'She's...'\n\n'She saved us all.'\n\n'Out of fuel!' shouted Zybes. 'Whoever is still in there, you had better get them out fast.'\n\nJohn hesitated for a second and then nodded.\n\n'Here!' He moved up beside Katt as she hacked at vines. Oll moved with them, clubbing the butt of his gun into barbed knots. Milk-white venom was pooling on the floor. Something grey amongst the coils. Hard, smooth edges, cracked and pitted, a shape emerging as the vines tore from it, ripping from where they had sunk their fangs into the soft rubber between plates. Oll almost stopped as he recognised what it was.\n\nArmour.\n\nDull grey without colour, just the scratches of time.\n\nA helmed head, beaked, like a broken memory of a crow.\n\nHuge.\n\nA giant.\n\nA Space Marine.\n\nOll stepped back as the grey warrior ripped free, and stood. Its head turned towards him, gaze like an aimed gun barrel.\n\nZybes cried out. Oll saw him think about shooting. Oll brought his hand up to stop what would be the man's last act if he wasn't still.\n\n'You are Ollanius the Pious,' said the Space Marine.\n\n'She sent you with John?' he asked.\n\n'She sent me to you,' it said. 'I am called Leetu.'\n\nA sound like nails pulling over rusted metal split the air. Oll whirled. The wall of thorns was rolling inwards, bending around the fire that was still eating it, contracting like muscle fibres, "}
{"text":"e an aimed gun barrel.\n\nZybes cried out. Oll saw him think about shooting. Oll brought his hand up to stop what would be the man's last act if he wasn't still.\n\n'You are Ollanius the Pious,' said the Space Marine.\n\n'She sent you with John?' he asked.\n\n'She sent me to you,' it said. 'I am called Leetu.'\n\nA sound like nails pulling over rusted metal split the air. Oll whirled. The wall of thorns was rolling inwards, bending around the fire that was still eating it, contracting like muscle fibres, thorns gripping the floor, roiling towards them in a wave.\n\nLeetu moved.\n\nOll saw the movement as a blur.\n\nThere was a sound like the ripping of steel and the roar of thunder. Explosions burst amongst the thorns, phosphor bright. Leetu had a gun in his hands. It was long-barrelled, ribbed, and wound with pipes and wires that gleamed with the work of technology that Oll had not seen since wars that were now long past. Fire spat from its muzzle, stuttering as the Space Marine held the trigger down. Blinding white light strobed from the shell impacts. Leetu reached the end of the clip, and reloaded in the time that it took Oll to draw breath. The gun exhaled again.\n\n'We must get out,' said John. 'Down to the lower levels and out as fast as we can.'\n\n'No,' said Oll.\n\n'Oll,' began John. 'What-'\n\n'Rane is still in the hive somewhere. We are going to get him.'\n\n'Oll, come on! He's just one person. There is more at stake here.'\n\nOll checked the mag on his gun. Still green. He looked at Zybes and Graft and the unconscious Krank. 'We go on together, all of us. No one left behind.'\n\nIn the Labyrinth at the back of his memory he saw Theseus close his eyes, and heard abandoned Ariadne shriek from the shoreline vanishing behind the stern of a ship with black sails.\n\n'You were always good at choices...'\n\n'Okay?' he said, and looked around. Zybes nodded. He thought Katt gave a smile.\n\n'I was sent to help find you,' said Leetu. 'I have succeeded. Best I keep you in sight, so that I do not have to find you again.'\n\n'I follow...' burbled Graft. 'I follow you, Trooper Persson.'\n\nHe nodded a brief thanks, not certain what to say or if there was anything that could be said.\n\n'Katt, can you find him?'\n\n'Up,' she said. 'That's all I can feel. We have to go higher.'\n\nJohn Grammaticus snorted.\n\n'You are actually kidding, right?'\n\nOll shrugged and began to move towards the shaft opening. He thought of the tower, all that time ago, of the knife in his belt now and the lightning falling from the sky. Small choices. Big choices. After enough time they were the same thing.\n\nAfter a moment, John Grammaticus followed.\n\nThe Hollow Mountain\n\nCorswain saw the daemon. How he had not before was not fathomable. There at the heart of the chamber, in the void between all the platforms and apparatus, burned a sun. It was golden, rayed, its light the light of a new day on gently rolling waves. He looked at it and felt the heaviness of his thoughts fall away. The burdens of will and command, of certain death and hopeless struggle, vanishing. He had never realised he was carrying so much, that he had borne the weight of existence on his shoulders. It was gone now. He was free. He was the master of his universe. From here, only what he desired and willed would exist.\n\n'You deserve more,' said the Chorus. 'You deserve everything.'\n\nThe orb of the sun split into three and then again into six, each a yellow yolk of light orbiting its kin. Then each of the orbs stretched, took on the shape of limbs and hands and features. Six figures stood in a circle in the air, rotating around each other. Each was a perfect image of humanity; mouths opened and closed over the glowing surface of their skin, wings of light unfurled from their backs. Corswain felt as though he was looking at six images, but also one - a figure with layers of limbs and wings placed over each other.\n\n'I am the voice within you,' said the golden image, and all around the walls the voice of the psykers echoed it with perfect harmony. It was getting closer, though Corswain did not see it move, spinning, arms and fingers and wings moving in time with the thrum of echoes. All he wanted to do was submit to the endless fall of sleep. There were dreams waiting for him just behind the flicker of closing eyelids. 'I am the promise of the dream, and the Song of Endless Rapture. I am the Chorus of the Denied. I have waited for you, my beautiful son. I am so glad you came. There shall be no more waking. No more strife. No more beasts in the forests of your memory. Only peace.'\n\n'You are a creature of the warp,' he said. There was no effort to the words, and the mouths of the Chorus smiled as though charmed.\n\n'I am a prince of truths so great that fools call them lies. This is my nest, my place on this mortal Earth while it is seeded. From here I call and the dreams of the living ring to my song. The Children called me here, made this my temple, my lighthouse from which to shine into the night of lost souls. So many follow the call now... but will you join us, my beautiful son? Will you listen? Will you hear? Will you follow?'\n\nHe did not hear or think of the words, but felt them. They slid into his mind: the words needles, the promises hooks. Then there was warmth and peace, and he knew that all he needed to do was believe the words and to let his life become the dream...\n\nDream...\n\nDream...\n\nDream...\n\nThe beast was dead on the snow, still at last, not baring its fangs as he faced it, not looking at him as it bled out, and he raised his sword to give it mercy. He could set aside his sword. He could leave the past and the beast he bore in his mind and on his back. A knight of swords no longer... a warrior who fought only for what he believed, that did not see the shadows, that did not have to live and wonder why the beast would not let go of him.\n\nHe looked over his shoulder as he reached the treeline. The beast lay where it had fallen. Its blood was red on the snow. Except it was no beast and never had been. A man lay in its place, hair matted with clotting blood, torso and neck split by pistol shot and blade edge, eyes closed. His brother. His true brother, who had come out of the woods with murder on his breath. Slain in the snow and left behind, a beast slain by a knight. He felt his head drop. All he had to do was keep on walking and this would be no more. Keep moving into the light, following the song...\n\nHe looked up and turned towards the trees and the blazing light that was now shining through them. He paused, looked back. The beast was on its feet, looking at him, blood and entrails draining onto the snow. It bared its teeth and Corswain turned back, sword rising.\n\nThe choral chamber snapped back into being.\n\nThe sixfold daemon of sunlight was right in front of him, reaching for him. His Legion brothers were unmoving, transfixed. Creatures with razor claws and gloss-black orbs for eyes bent over them, talon tips poised, needle smiles wide. Warriors in twisted armour stood further back, tube-barrelled guns held low, watching. The choir of psykers shivered. Pale knots of fire wound through the air. The air was a reek of blossom scent and spoiled meat. The daemon hands recoiled from him an instant before he surged to his feet. The heads of the creatures crawling over the platform twitched up. The traitors began to hoist their guns.\n\nCorswain came up and cut faster than any of them. His sword struck the first of the six bodies of the Chorus daemon, and cut through to the two beside it. Time stuttered. The remaining figures were bleeding, darkness pouring out of them as their brightness curdled to shadow. Corswain spun his sword to strike again, as across the chamber the Angels of the First Legion came to their feet with a roar of gunfire.\n\nSound vanished. Silence swallowed the choral chamber as the last sixfold daemon screamed. Corswain swept his sword up. The platform was alight with bolt-round detonations. Everything seemed slowed, time stretching to allow every detail of what was happening to shine. Bodies of iridescent flesh blew open without sound. Blood, jewel-bright, gushed into slow-falling arcs. Fragments of shrapnel tumbled through smoke, winking, reflecting the flash of the explosions. Dark Angels were moving down and across the platforms, black armour gleaming like oil in firelight. He saw things with half-chitin skin materialise and vaporise. Warriors in multicoloured armour came from side tunnels. The blast waves of their guns formed silver shivers in the air. Corswain saw one of his brothers hit by a blast and come apart, blood, armour and pulped organs forming concentric rings in the air.\n\nHe felt himself drawn to stop, to look, to watch and fill his eyes with the pattern and colour of blood spray and fire blasts.\n\nHe wrenched his gaze back to the crumbling forms of the sixfold daemon in front of him. They were shadows now, smudges of heat haze around him. Blade-like embers spiralled through the air. One struck Corswain's shoulder and burrowed through the ceramite. He swung his sword, and the blade went through what little substance remained of the daemon. A neon-white blast wave ripped out, passing through mass and matter. Corswain felt it spill over him and through him, silence, filled with images: the perfect feathered pink of a rad explosion over a city, a drop of blood hanging from a polished smile of steel, the spiced scent of flesh turning to sugar in a flame's heat. Then it was past. The lesser daemons blew into silver mist as the wave struck them. Warriors in neon-bright armour staggered, quivering. Bolts tore into them, ripping armour plates in rolling drumbeats of detonations. The wave of psychic energy struck the psykers in their choral tiers. Skulls crumpled. Teeth blew out of mouths. Ribs exploded. All in silence, like an image projected from a pict-feed without sound. Blood coloured the air in a wet, red spray. The wave rebounded. The remains of the psykers flashed to pink-and-red "}
{"text":"mons blew into silver mist as the wave struck them. Warriors in neon-bright armour staggered, quivering. Bolts tore into them, ripping armour plates in rolling drumbeats of detonations. The wave of psychic energy struck the psykers in their choral tiers. Skulls crumpled. Teeth blew out of mouths. Ribs exploded. All in silence, like an image projected from a pict-feed without sound. Blood coloured the air in a wet, red spray. The wave rebounded. The remains of the psykers flashed to pink-and-red ice. The wave picked up slivers of bone and shards of armour as it ripped back towards the core of the chamber. Dark Angels fell as debris sliced through joints and punched into ceramite. At the centre of the chamber, Corswain saw the wave contracting in on where he stood and knew he could not escape it. In the slow second before it struck him, he raised his sword, an old salute to duty and a life given to see it done.\n\nThe wave reached for him, glittering with razor fragments and witch-ice. He kept his eyes open.\n\nA sphere of blue fire surrounded him. The wave of fragments hit the flame. Sound roared back into being with a thunderclap. Light blanked out sight. Corswain felt his pupils contract to pinpricks.\n\nThe sound of gunfire and shouting broke over him. A hand gripped his shoulder; he spun to see Vassago, haloed by blue fire, mace in hand.\n\n'It seems I must give my thanks again,' said Corswain.\n\n'What else is the meaning of brotherhood?' replied Vassago.\n\nVortex\n\nOur own monsters\n\nInvigilata\n\nThe Cradle Basin, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\n'Fire!'\n\nWhite heat speared into the shadow engine. Sparks burst from it. Tetracauron felt his skin blister.\n\n'Reactor at overload threshold!'\n\nHe could feel it. His heart was beating fast, sweat pouring from his skin. He was breathing hard in sympathetic fever. His thoughts and emotions were swirling and blurring.\n\n'Fire!' he willed again. Reginae Furorem's volcano cannon bored a line of white heat into the shadow of the enemy engine.\n\n'Strike fail!'\n\nHe felt Divisia's frustration flare, felt Cartho's steadying presence switch reactor flow to the motive drives. He was losing the balance of the incarnation. Exhaustion. Beyond exhaustion, and the will of the engine and the Legio to turn and walk into the fire, into the guns of the enemy. He could still feel the flame presences of his battle force engines and maniples, all below strength, all running at the edge of reactor tolerance, munitions gone, damaged, battered, filled with rage. He felt it too. The enemy had breached their lines so now they had to fight a different war.\n\nWater channels braided the basin they had crossed from Karalia's Grave. Dies Irae and its court were six kilometres distant, advancing, unhurried, firing as they came. Knights and tanks and insectoid war machines swarmed about their feet.\n\n'Tetracauron.' The signal voice cut into his sensations. Distortion laced the connection, fizzing with data corruption and system error, but the voice of Princeps Maximus Cydon was like a breath of pure air into the heart of a dying forge. 'We are ready. Clear the zone.'\n\nA pause, the briefest interruption of the flow of data between him and the princeps maximus. He thought of the old man, enthroned in the skull of Imperious Prima. Old in war, hardened by time. Tetracauron wanted to voice an objection to what was about to be done, but knew that it would be wasted, and worse, that it would be wrong. The enemy had breached the lines. They were closing through the kill-zone. Fire from the wall guns had become erratic. Across a hundred-kilometre front, enemy engines and forces were pressing forwards. The hole could not be sealed by engines standing only to die. It needed other strength to be brought to bear.\n\n'Yes, my princeps,' replied Tetracauron, and switched to battle group-wide transmission with a thought. 'All engines, move to grid lambda-one-two by gimel-thirty-four-five, maximum stride. Acknowledge and action.'\n\n'I have partial target data integration from the Ninth and Tenth maniples.'\n\n'Divisia, confirm and integrate our target systems.'\n\n'Yes, my princeps.' There was a pause, a shudder through the incandescence, a cold and hollow knot of realisation. He could feel the edge of his youngest moderatus' thoughts like a shadow of his own. That they had come this far, one unthinkable act piled on top of another.\n\n'Time to firing, twenty-one seconds,' sent Cartho.\n\n'Helios and Furnace Child are not clear of the fire zone.'\n\nHe saw then, the two engines. Arthusa's Helios keeping pace with a Reaver, its left legs twisted, armour plates warped by damage. It was limping, void shields stuttering. Arthusa was pacing the Reaver, sheltering it with her engine's own shields, firing back at the advancing Mortis engines fording the water channel. As he watched, Helios' volcano cannon fired. The discharge cooked the river surface to steam as it passed over. Light splashed across an enemy engine. Sprays of luminescence arced into the air. If it had done anything to slow its advance, Tetracauron could see no sign of it.\n\n'Time to firing, thirteen seconds.'\n\nTetracauron threw his voice into the incandescence.\n\n'Arthusa, move. For the turning of the cog, move faster!'\n\nAt the back of his awareness he could feel the presence of Imperious Prima and its maniple. The Warmonger and its court of four Warlords had gone still, their weapon systems synchronising. Their threat and fury was a growing blue ache at the back of Tetracauron's skull.\n\n'Advance,' he willed. 'Get next to them and merge shields.'\n\nHe felt Divisia's curse as Reginae Furorem strode down the slope towards the two engines.\n\n'What are you doing?' came Arthusa's sending.\n\n'What I can,' he replied.\n\n'Fire launch.'\n\n'Merge now!' He felt the void shields syncopate and then slide into those of Helios and around the wounded Reaver.\n\nThe first missile landed. Fired from thirty kilometres away, it hit the ground in front of the Mortis Titan and exploded in the riverbed. Fire and steam billowed up. Then another landed and another, the payloads of three Warlord Titans saturating the world with fire.\n\nTetracauron had a fraction of a second to see Dies Irae and its court vanish behind a wall of detonations, before the secondary munitions exploded. Helios' and Reginae Furorem's merged void shields tore away in a drum roll of collapsing energy.\n\n'Move!'\n\nReginae Furorem strode up the slope, wall-wards, dust and flame boiling around it. The two other Titans were with it. A kilometre towards the wall, the remainder of his battle force were retreating in staggered order, half looking back at the others striding towards the wall. Southwards he could see the glimmers of three maniples and half a dozen Knight lances moving to fill the line as they withdrew. To the west the towering presence of Imperious Prima stood, its lethal intent a building flame. Tetracauron felt the burning flow from reactor to drives, the burning hunger of weapons, the rage of Reginae Furorem that they were not turning to face the fire and the enemy within it.\n\n'Terminus launch wave in ten seconds.' Divisia's emotion was held just beneath the surface. They were fourteen strides from the top of the slope and edge of the fire-zone.\n\nBehind them a scorched figure broke from the wall of fire and smoke. The warp creature had remade its skin, swelling its eye-ports to multifaceted blisters. Pale fluid drooled from a proboscis that dangled beneath its jaw. The weapon of its right arm coiled with ghost-light. Rust flaked from its barrel. Colour drained from the air as it drew breath to fire.\n\nFour strides to the edge of the fire-zone.\n\nImperious Prima's cold intent was now a blue supernova.\n\nThe Mortis engine fired. A beam of shrieking light struck the Reaver limping beside Helios and Reginae Furorem. It took another stride. The light of the beam was crawling over it. Another stride. Rust fell from it, and then chunks of armour that broke into dust. Its back was bending, its stance breaking under its own weight as joints and pistons corroded in an eye-blink. Tetracauron felt his mind freeze. The Reaver's death cry flowed across him, a hissing, desperate wail of guttering power and crumbling metal. Its torso broke open. For an instant, its reactor core was visible, the fire within shrinking and guttering faster than its failing containment. It fell, bones and spirit breaking. The Mortis engine took another step. Behind it the shadows of its kin loomed.\n\n'Terminus launch,' sent Divisia.\n\nThirty kilometres back towards the wall, Imperious Prima and its maniple fired.\n\nThe purpose of First Maniple, the primary of the Maniple of Maniples, was not to walk into the heart of the inferno - that purpose was for the Second and Fifth maniples. Imperious Prima was a Warmonger, an Emperor-class Titan armed with weapons to end civilisations: Deathstrike missiles, vengeance cannons, multiple rocket and missile clusters. The four Warlords that walked at its side each bore a fist, both a symbol and a means to defend the First Titan of the Legio. On their backs and other arms they bore weapons that aped those of Imperious Prima: Apocalypse launchers, quake cannons. Armies became ash when they spoke. To this battle they had brought more than fire, though.\n\nTo the Titan legions born of Mars, the vortex missile was both sacred and profane - a wonder of technology and the lost mysteries of ancient techno-arcana, and a bitter blade that once drawn in war brought only sorrow and loss. During the old wars, the use of such weapons had been a mark of irrevocable intent - a sign that conflict had passed the point where it could be healed by diplomacy, or even the peace that followed victory. To use one such weapon signalled an intent not to destroy but to annihilate, and to expect the same in turn if it failed. Amongst the Legio Ignatum they were called the Bitter Gift. Only the other legions of the Triad Ferrum Morgulis held as many in their armouries, and even"}
{"text":" sorrow and loss. During the old wars, the use of such weapons had been a mark of irrevocable intent - a sign that conflict had passed the point where it could be healed by diplomacy, or even the peace that followed victory. To use one such weapon signalled an intent not to destroy but to annihilate, and to expect the same in turn if it failed. Amongst the Legio Ignatum they were called the Bitter Gift. Only the other legions of the Triad Ferrum Morgulis held as many in their armouries, and even they used them sparingly.\n\nSeven vortex missiles loosed from Imperious Prima and its maniple in a single, synchronised launch. The missiles flew free, accelerating past the limits of sound, trailing thunder.\n\nIn the incandescence, Tetracauron felt the data-echo of the launch as a cold shiver on his skin. The Mortis engine before them arched up, a creature sensing the flight of an arrow.\n\nThe first missile struck and detonated forty metres behind the Mortis engine. It did not have a precise target. Even with Tetracauron's targeting data the spirit of the missiles had been launched half blind. That did not matter. The mechanism in the warhead ripped a hole in the sheet of reality.\n\nDarkness beyond darkness.\n\nExistence screamed.\n\nMatter vanished into the growing sphere of unreality. Light curdled to neon smears as it vanished into the vortex.\n\nTo Tetracauron, the incandescence showed him the vortex as a white space of data failure.\n\nThe Mortis engine twisted as the vortex grasped it. The warp entity within the Titan roared as its essence was pulled from the metal shell it had possessed. Ephemeral shapes of insect wings, feelers and endless eyes bubbled into being and vanished into the darkness. The machine twisted as physical laws went into wild contradiction. Armour and mechanisms compressed, liquefied and twisted between states. The shell of its torso ruptured. Blue-hot plasma exploded out and then stopped, held in paradox, and began to tumble into brilliant shards like leaves of sun-fire caught in a tornado. Then it was gone and the vortex grew and spun into the air. Black lightning arced across it. The next three vortex missiles hit deeper in the fire zone. Then the next one and the next, each tearing existence apart with a sound that Tetracauron felt inside the metal flesh of his Titan. Commands failed, the incandescence shivered.\n\n'Walk!' he willed, and the force of his mind drew fire from its stuttering heart. Reginae Furorem took a step and another, and then it was striding from the basin. He could see the wall, could see the maniples manoeuvring to meet whatever came from the rolling storm of violated existence. The fires of other engagements glittered in sight and awareness, destruction shrunk in the face of the vortex bombardment.\n\nThe vortices were moving across the basin. Two collided, slid together, swelled, and rose into the air like a black mockery of a sun. The fire and dust of the first bombardment spun upwards into it, whirling a burning cloak before vanishing into its heart. The shapes of Knights, of tanks, of spider-limbed war machines flew into the wounds. Tetracauron saw the silhouette of a Warlord Titan rise and tumble into the void, its shape coming apart as it hung for an instant on the edge of unmaking. He could not look away. He felt the eyes of his crew and the spirit of his Titan transfix, drawn to watch this atrocity committed in a war that was defined by atrocity.\n\n'Focus, and walk.'\n\nHe took another step, turning the Titan and the focus of Divisia and Cartho by will.\n\nThen he saw the shadow step into sight between the vortices. Dies Irae dragged the debris and smoke with it as it strode on.\n\nScrap code bellowed from it. Tetracauron felt it strike his sensors and roll into his thoughts, burbling like laughter. The vortices moved around it, close but not pulling it into their embrace. It sounded its war-horns. The sound slid into the warp and boomed beyond sound. In the incandescence, the princeps and crews of Ignatum Titans across the two hundred kilometres of the kill-zone heard it. On the ground, the princeps and tank commanders felt it boom into their vox-sets. In the warp, the daemons of despair and loss heard and followed its call.\n\nThe vortices shimmered, the edges billowing ragged as the flow of matter into the warp stopped and the warp breathed through the breaches. Amorphous shapes slid into being, congealing into false substance - creatures that dragged themselves across the ground on broken limbs as thick as battle cannons, swarms of fat-bodied insects spiralling on asymmetric wings, grubs that slithered and oozed through the air as though it were water, lumbering figures writhing with tentacles. The vortices shrank as the creatures drained from the warp into reality. Four of Dies Irae's surviving court were at its side now. Beneath and around them, the air and ground writhed. Munitions were already exploding amongst them, blowing chunks of false flesh to slime. Dies Irae gave another booming cry and took another step towards the Palace.\n\nShard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\nGeneral Nasuba and her command entourage came out onto the viewing platform and paused to look up. The ragged edge of the aegis shield flickered above them. Lightning arced along it, and rain poured from the field interface edge in a grey curtain. A gust of wind blew past her face, warm even up here, heavy with the smell of energy discharge. There was blood on the viewing platform, dancing in dilute pools under the falling rain. Command troopers spread out. Tech-priests made for the vox and data signal nodes that rose from the platform like bare, iron trees. There were bodies on the platform, scattered and crumpled, different uniforms, limbs slack, empty eyes pointing at the sky. A trooper in bloody greens and blues rose from where he was crouched over a mashed corpse and charged at Nasuba. She aimed and fired her serpenta without pausing in stride. The trooper was blasted to ash.\n\n'Time?' she called.\n\n'Three minutes twenty-one seconds,' replied Sulkova.\n\n'Secure the platform for landing.'\n\n'We have a link to Indomitor,' called a vox-officer from beside an aerial-pylon. 'It's intermittent.'\n\n'Better than nothing,' said Nasuba. 'Start building a picture of the section, piece by piece, unit by unit. Use ink and parchment if you have to.'\n\n'Our units have control of the wall top south to Section Forty-Five and north to Indomitor,' said Kurral. He was limping, leaning hard on a comms trooper. Blood was coming through the bandages around his right leg. He looked very pale.\n\nTo the left and right of the platform the rockcrete blisters of two turbo-laser emplacements rose, the barrels of the guns levelled at the land beyond the wall but silent. Beyond them, down the top edge of the wall, other gun emplacements rose like teeth: macro plasma and lasweapons of a dozen different configurations and purposes. From the top tiers and edge of the bastion and wall they could draw their lines of fire to a horizon line a hundred and twenty kilometres away. They could also fire without shaking the wall apart. The heavy kinetic guns were mounted lower down the wall, cushioned and fired to precise patterns to stop them setting up lethal resonance waves. The weapons on the wall top did not recoil and so could fire as long as the power and plasma flowed from the bastion's reactors.\n\nAt that moment, though, neither power nor vibration from mass bombardment were a problem. The problem was that the crew units were not functioning and the direct command chain was down. The guns of the Mercury Wall had fallen silent as their crew fled. A few, those crewed almost solely by servitors and the tech-priests, kept firing. Troops fled their posts. Some simply sat behind firing steps or in corridors or arming chambers and wept. Nasuba had spent hours gathering near-stable forces in the bastion and sending them along the wall to take control of weapon and control installations. Some on foot, some in vehicles along the wall tops. Take control... It felt like she was invading her own zone of command. That was exactly what she was doing. Some of those manning the wall had not fallen to panic - some had begun to try to kill anything that came near them. They had lost several of her command staff to learn that lesson in the last few hours.\n\n'How long until we have the top batteries functional?'\n\n'I... Forty minutes for the bastion guns, the rest...'\n\n'Kurral...' she said, stepping closer.\n\n'I'm alright, general... I'll get a better answer on the wall guns.'\n\nShe nodded and straightened.\n\n'Time?' she called again.\n\n'One minute twenty seconds,' called Sulkova.\n\n'Do we have vox-link or visual?'\n\n'Negative.'\n\n'Ready status?' she called.\n\n'Command fidelity estimated at forty-five per cent.'\n\nCommand... Nasuba had seen commands come apart before, had seen battle zones fragment into anarchy. But she had never seen it happen as quickly and as thoroughly as it had on Mercury. Comms-failure, suicide, desertion, insanity. Command was just not a word you could wrap around the situation. She could not reach half of the units on the wall, and those that she could reach were in a state a long way from viable. Violence and disorder was spreading through the wall. There were enclaves of order, but central direction and control was partial at best, and out there in the kill-zone the largest battle Nasuba had ever seen was lighting the land with fire and shrouding it with smoke. She had made contact with Princeps Maximus Cydon once since the Legio Ignatum had walked out in full strength. The vox-link had lasted for moments and then failed, but it had been enough for her to confirm an on-the-ground assessment of the situation with what she could see: bad. Very bad indeed. The Legio were fighting un-covered by full fire from the wall's guns. Worse, the lack of local near-orbital fire had let the enemy's ships come in close enough to begin tactical ground bombardment. Nasuba had "}
{"text":" made contact with Princeps Maximus Cydon once since the Legio Ignatum had walked out in full strength. The vox-link had lasted for moments and then failed, but it had been enough for her to confirm an on-the-ground assessment of the situation with what she could see: bad. Very bad indeed. The Legio were fighting un-covered by full fire from the wall's guns. Worse, the lack of local near-orbital fire had let the enemy's ships come in close enough to begin tactical ground bombardment. Nasuba had seen pillars of energy punch down from the sky just eighty kilometres from the wall.\n\nEighty kilometres... The enemy were advancing across the full width of the kill-zone, and had pushed through Ignatum on a line that cut from Lake Voss through Karalia's Grave and into the tangle of run-off rivers called the Cradle. Pushed right through two full battle groups. How in the light of Illumination you did that, Nasuba did not know, but Mortis had done it. You didn't need engagement data to know - you could see it in the rolling cauldron of fire spilling towards the wall like a living storm.\n\nSomething dark blinked out in the distance on the edge of the firestorm. Nasuba felt herself wince, tasted metal on her teeth. Then another and another, black detonations amongst the fire.\n\n'Tears of the sun...' breathed Sulkova, straightening and coming to stand by Nasuba. 'Those are vortex detonations. The enemy-'\n\n'That was us. Ignatum are throwing everything they have.'\n\nNasuba blinked, turned away. The pinprick detonations hovered in her sight as black spots.\n\n'Inbound,' came a call a moment before a sonic boom rolled across the wall top. Three Stormbird gunships in the yellow gold of the Imperial Fists came in across the wall top, low enough that Nasuba felt the pressure wave try to slam her to the ground. Lightning Crow strike fighters in black and gold turned in the air above, hugging the edge of the aegis shield interface. The gunships banked hard, assault ramps already open. The lead craft slammed to a hard hover and descended onto the platform. Thruster jets sent pools of bloody rainwater rippling away. Its two kin followed it down. Warriors in amber yellow dropped from the open hatches before they touched the ground, spreading out across the top of the bastion. Rogal Dorn did not wait for the gunship's ramp to touch the rockcrete but dropped from its open mouth and stood as it lifted off again. The roar of engines filled Nasuba's ears as she knelt as the Praetorian strode towards her.\n\nShe knew him as well as any human might - forty years of campaigns and conquest could attest to that - and the hardness in his eyes as he advanced sent a wave of cold through her.\n\n'Rise,' he said when he was within three paces. She stood.\n\n'My lord,' she said.\n\n'My apologies, Lord Praetorian,' called Sulkova. Nasuba looked at her adjutant. 'General, we have a vox report of Titan engines moving into the wall base sally chambers using critical command overrides.'\n\n'Which Legio?' asked Nasuba.\n\n'Unknown, but the vox- and data links are at full clarity. They are reporting... They say that the Titans are screaming inside people's thoughts.'\n\nNasuba looked around at the Praetorian.\n\n'What have you brought with you, my lord?'\n\n'All the weapons I can wield,' said Rogal Dorn.\n\nSortie Cavern 78, Mercury Wall\n\n'Princeps...' began one of the tech-priests as Abhani Lus Mohana pulled herself from the hatch into Bestia Est's engine space. A wall of hot air met her with the smell of oil, metal and burnt plastek. The cavern was filled with movement. Tech-priests calling to each other in binary. Servitors hauling plasma feeds and ammunition hoppers. Sparks showered from welders and thermal cutters as tech-adepts tended to the Knights and Titans. They had barely arrived, and the first of the outer doors was still closing, but the activity was already frantic. The hunter force needed to be out in the kill-zone again, and fast. Abhani had seen the glow of the firestorms as Ignatum engaged along the line. They were fighting, cog of truth but they were fighting, but the enemy were advancing, pushing closer to the wall, relentless, seeming to grow stronger as they fell. She and her sisters needed to be hunting again; every engine and machine needed to be engaged.\n\n'Auspex returns are failing to lock and vox-link is not connecting,' she snapped at the tech-priest before he could continue. 'Clear the error.'\n\n'Signal and scanning errors are acute across all engines and systems, princeps,' said the priest in a modulated whine. Abhani was already swinging down the crew scaffold, taking in the activity around the other Solaria engines and Vyronii Knights. 'Data corruption and ailment of spirit...'\n\n'Just make it so that we can see what to shoot,' she said, not looking at the priest. There was something wrong in the cavern, a frantic, ragged edge to the attendance of the machines. As she looked, a heavy servitor hauling a stack of piston rings slewed into the path of a loading rig stacked with macro bolter shells. Crates and machine parts tumbled across the cavern floor. Shouts rose. She blinked, feeling fatigue crush onto her. She turned at the sound of a louder shout and the bark of a high-calibre pistol shot.\n\nA man in the livery of a scion of House Vyronii was standing above the remains of a menial servitor, pistol drawn. The servitor was still trying to rise; it had the Knight scion's helmet in its brass hands. Blood and oil were sputtering from its body and mechanisms. The man half turned and she recognised Caradoc. Behind him the pilots of the two Vyronii Armiger machines were climbing out of their cockpits. She began to stride towards them. Caradoc spat at the half-dead servitor and fired again. The bullet ripped the top of its skull off. Caradoc had picked up his helm and was holstering his pistol and halfway through turning towards the Armiger pilots, when Abhani's kick cannoned into his side. His suit was heavy, layered with ballistic padding and chain mail, but she ploughed her armoured shin into his torso, folded him in two and sent him staggering. He came up fast, face red, fist rising.\n\nAbhani did not move.\n\n'Do it and I will have you shot where you stand. Then I will have your corpse wrapped in the banner of your steed and sent back to your house as a mark of dishonour.' The red of his face was ripening, his teeth bared. 'Go on,' she said to him, with a hunter's smile. He breathed hard, eyes glistening with rage.\n\n'Honoured princeps,' he said, biting down the vibration of anger in his voice. 'You have no-'\n\n'In the engagement, you failed to maintain cohesion. You ride with us to aid our hunt, but where were you when the prey turned? I would think that incompetence might have guided you out of harm's way, but I do not think you are unschooled in war. I think you are a coward.' Caradoc closed his mouth. His eyes were glittering pearls of pure hate. Abhani held her smile. 'Fail again, and I will gun you down.'\n\n'You would not-'\n\n'You do not see even the edge of what I have done or would do.' Abhani looked to Acastia, who had hung back, watching. Was that a glimmer of satisfaction in the Armiger pilot's eye? 'Acastia, you did your house great honour and my legion high service. Solaria honours and thanks you.'\n\nCaradoc's face had paled around the mouth now. He looked like he might explode.\n\n'Get your machines ready,' she said coldly. 'We go to battle again.'\n\nCaradoc looked like he might have been going to say something, but then stopped. His eyes had fixed on something behind Abhani, something towards the inner doors of the cavern. He blinked, shivered and suddenly the rage was gone from his face. His lip trembled. He was blinking rapidly.\n\nAbhani turned.\n\nHer skin was clammy suddenly.\n\nThe door at the far end of the sally chamber was opening. Figures in black came through. Gloss-black visors hid their faces. Each of them wore graphite black and deep green without sign of rank or unit. The long staves in their hands tapped the ground, marking each step. The tech-priests and Legio personnel pulled back from them as they advanced, and behind them the doors opened wider and wider.\n\n'What?' said Acastia, her voice fading to a whisper. Caradoc was already backing away, skin grey, eyes wide, shaking.\n\nAnd then Abhani saw it. A Warlord Titan stepped into the cavern. Dull black-grey edged by worn bronze. Its face blank. Towering. Walking. Tiny worms of light shook from it as it moved. Frost spread across the walls and across the floor. Bile rose in her throat. She felt herself want to scream, but held it behind her teeth. She tried to keep her eyes on it but it was blurring in her sight, as though her mind were trying to unprocess what it was seeing. She wanted to run, to lock herself into the throne of Bestia Est to loose its weapons and pour fire into this thing that looked like a Titan but could not be. That was not. That was a thing with the shape of something great and noble and holy. Abomination. That was the only word that came close to it. Some in the cavern were crying out, shrinking back.\n\nShe had heard whispers of the Titans Sinister. Rumours and stories passed through the Legio Solaria. They told of witch Titans, of engines that nightmares clung to, that were a fusion of the powers of the empyrean, and the Machine-God's greatest weapons of war. Few believed they were true, but Abhani had once been there when one of her sisters had asked the oldest of the Legio's enginseers if there were such a thing as 'Psi-Titans'. The enginseer had become very still, and then given a single shake of his head.\n\n'Such things are not talked of,' was his only reply. For decades Abhani had forgotten the moment, but now, as she looked up at the engine above her, she remembered and understood.\n\n'Blood of ancestors...' whispered Acastia, and the words made Abhani turn her head.\n\nAnother Titan followed the first, a Reaver, and behind it another Warlord and another behind that. Th"}
{"text":"inseers if there were such a thing as 'Psi-Titans'. The enginseer had become very still, and then given a single shake of his head.\n\n'Such things are not talked of,' was his only reply. For decades Abhani had forgotten the moment, but now, as she looked up at the engine above her, she remembered and understood.\n\n'Blood of ancestors...' whispered Acastia, and the words made Abhani turn her head.\n\nAnother Titan followed the first, a Reaver, and behind it another Warlord and another behind that. The ground was shaking now. The witch-ice was thick on the walls. Breath was falling as frost. The smell of ozone filled Abhani's nose. She could feel her fingers shaking.\n\nThe first door to the outer wall was already open, and the four Titans walked towards it, dragging silence with them. The black-visored figures walked at their feet as though to keep back any who might try to cross the Titans' path. None did.\n\nWhen the last engine had passed and the external door was sealed, the silence lingered. Abhani shook her head and made to turn towards her crews.\n\n'What was that?' she heard the Armiger rider ask.\n\n'That...' she began, and then swallowed in a dry throat. 'Our own monsters. Those are our own monsters walking to war.'\n\nAdeptus Mechanicus enclave, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nVethorel walked into the Titan halls. She was not prone to emotion. Despite her appearance, which was calculated to minimise the discomfort for those outside the priesthood, the mind inside her perfect skull was a thing of calibrated logic and process. Her decisions followed the sacred laws of the sixteenfold methods and pathways of deduction, inference and completeness. Everything else fell into the zones of intangibility and error potential, pollution to the manifestation of knowledge. But at her root she was human and at that moment she saw no weakness in letting the rage within her have its due.\n\n'You shall heed my words,' she spoke, and the noospheric overrides carried her voice over every vox-link, speaker grille and loudhailer in the engine-caverns. Noospheric incantations poured from the priests of her entourage. There were eight of them, each a tooth in the cog that turned around Fabricator General Zagreus Kane. The code lines flowing from them were amongst the highest mysteries salvaged from Mars - machine-spirit imperatives, data-override-djinn and command-entreaties. They spread through the folds of data connection, partially waking systems, stirring the spirits of sleeping machines. They did not have the power to take control but they carried one thing that echoed in time with Vethorel's words: authority and anger.\n\nShe marched along the central apse. Heads and sensor clusters rose to see the source of the voice as it rolled and echoed louder than the sound of machines and turning cogs. The octigal of magi around her struck their staves and poleaxes on the floor as she halted in front of Luxor Invictoria. The Warlord Titan stood in its niche. The enginseers of Legio Solaria stood on gantries about it, ready to anoint the engine of the Great Mother to walk. In the other vaults the engines of the legions that had refused to walk to war stirred as their subsystems heard Vethorel's machine voice. The voices of their priests were whispers of code, trying to placate the waking spirits of their engines.\n\nVethorel turned a full circle. A crowd was gathering. Eyes were gazing at holo-projections of her.\n\n'You have waited,' she said. 'You have watched. You have refused to perform the function given to your design.' The anger in her voice rolled through the air, shaking dust from the arches of stone. 'You have judged that you are above the call of war, that your knowledge is greater than the Fabricator General, than the Praetorian, than the Omnissiah Himself. You think that to stand apart from sacrifice is to serve a higher purpose. Yet that ideal is just the corruption of pride and the failed progression of fear.'\n\nShe paused and the quiet held.\n\n'Engines fell in the war, in the Titan Death, and so you fear to lose what remains. You fear that you are the last, and that if you fight then the Legios will be no more. You are fools!' The last words were thunder. Spirals of code gushed into the noosphere, each a hammer blow of formulae and axiomatic authority. 'This...' Vethorel said, and raised her hand as though casting an object into the air. A vortex of green and blue and red hololight spun into being above her. Pixels sparkled in the cone of light. The sound of explosions, of void shields bursting and metal tearing apart filled the cavern. The whirl of distortion resolved into the image of a Warlord Titan. It was burning. Half its head was gone and thick fluid fell from its shattered skull and wounds. Blisters of rust pocked its skin. An old wound could be seen in its carapace, a through-and-through wound that said the engine should be dead. It was a ruin, but on the armour plates the heraldry it had worn when alive could still be seen. The image flickered and merged into the image of another Titan, a Reaver, its spine half broken so that it listed as it walked. Its carapace gleamed where insects swarmed over the soft flesh that had filled its wounds. The projection held long enough for the tatters of the banner dragged behind it to show clear, and then it was replaced in turn.\n\nThe silence flowed out. Data spools wound to single-value code streams, cogwork spun to the end of momentum. Eyes watched and saw.\n\n'There it is,' said Vethorel, and there was no anger now, just an all-too-human weariness. 'There is the war you refuse to fight. The dead, your dead, our dead violated with the warp and sent against us.' She tilted her head back to look at the cascade of imagery. It was flowing in real time to each Legio remnant in the caverns, stamped and ciphered for authenticity. 'Solaria, Amaranth, Atarus, Defensor, Gryphonicus, the dead of this war sent back to us.'\n\nShe bowed her head.\n\n'Yet of you, only a few walk. In the face of this you do nothing.'\n\nThe growl was silent, carried in data transmission and noospheric broadcast. First one, then another, and then the entire cavern was roaring with silent, machine rage.\n\n'Rage is no answer.' Esha Ani Mohana Vi, Great Mother of the Imperial Hunters, spoke with the voice of her engine as Luxor Invictoria took a step forwards. From the niches to either side of it, the last few engines of Legio Solaria followed their queen. 'There can be only one answer to this shame - fire and death. I shall walk and my sisters shall walk, and I shall fight at the side of any that hunt with me.'\n\nA moment and then the roar of voices and of machines; the sound rose and rose.\n\n'No,' said Vethorel. The word sounded like a gunshot over a baying crowd. The head of Luxor Invictoria turned to look at her. There had been no time to align and coordinate with Esha Ani Mohana. She was alone here. No carefully positioned and prepared political moves, just her voice and the fact that what she would say was true. She felt Luxor Invictoria's eye-ports fix on her. It was like being under the lens focus of a star. Data-pressure built in her skull as the spirits of her augmetics recoiled from the god-engine's gaze. She held her eyes steady. 'That time has passed. A rabble of leaderless engines walking for honour and vengeance. That shall fail, and you all shall fall to join the dead you wish to avenge.'\n\nCoolant vented from one of the Solaria Titan's plasma destructors as power flushed into firing coils. Death held on a thread.\n\nLuxor Invictoria did not move.\n\n'The dead shall be avenged,' said Vethorel. 'But this is a battle of legions, not engines. Walk as a rabble and you do no more than spend the spirits of your engines for pride. You must walk with unity, with command and the purpose of being not many but one.'\n\nThe silence came again, but now it was of a different texture - a question, a balance.\n\n'We are many,' said the augmented and noospheric voice of an Amaranth princeps. 'We are not a Legio.'\n\n'But you are, and if you walk from here you shall be. Guards of the Omnissiah's last fastness and truth, avengers of the dead.\n\n'The Adeptus Titanicus wills it and it shall be. I bear the authority and seal of both to forge here and now a Legio from the splinters of broken legions, so that they may walk not just to vengeance but to victory.'\n\n'This is a dangerous ploy, even for you, emissary,' came the sending of Esha Ani Mohana, ciphered and transmitted to Vethorel alone. 'These princeps and engines will not shed their honour and traditions lightly.'\n\n'They will if you do,' replied Vethorel. 'They will if you lead them, Great Mother.'\n\n'I cannot.'\n\n'Only you can,' replied Vethorel, and turned from Luxor Invictoria to look across the crowded faces, both real and data-ghosts.\n\n'It is the will of the machine,' she said. 'Who shall serve that will?'\n\nThere was a pause and then Luxor Invictoria took another step, so that it stood above Vethorel and her circle of magi.\n\n'Luxor Invictoria answers,' said Esha Ani Mohana with the voice of the god-machine.\n\nThen the other engines of her sisterhood stepped forward. Then the engines of Amaranth that were ready to walk, and then the princeps of Atarus and Defensor, the scattered few of broken legions, and the noosphere was ringing with assent and battle cries written in the code of war and iron.\n\nVethorel looked around, still for a moment. The human part of her that had come to this place in anger and felt fear in the face of what was happening, felt something that she had only experienced in the presence of the highest and most humbling mysteries of cog and craft.\n\nShe bowed her head. Then she reached out and took the ritual stave from one of the magi that had come with her. Electro-circuits in her hands lit and meshed with its spirit. Ciphers of authority unwound through it. A wave of instruction and command formed in the datasphere, waiting, ready to roll out through machine and history. She bro"}
{"text":"ear in the face of what was happening, felt something that she had only experienced in the presence of the highest and most humbling mysteries of cog and craft.\n\nShe bowed her head. Then she reached out and took the ritual stave from one of the magi that had come with her. Electro-circuits in her hands lit and meshed with its spirit. Ciphers of authority unwound through it. A wave of instruction and command formed in the datasphere, waiting, ready to roll out through machine and history. She brought the tip of the stave down on the floor and spoke her command.\n\n'In this place, in this time, by the authority of the Omnissiah and the will of His Fabricator General I consecrate the Legio Invigilata, and call all its engines to walk to war.'\n\nMercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nThe guns of the Mercury Wall began to fire again. Half of those on the summit parapet turned their gaze to the heavens. Spears of light burned up through the cloud and smoke layer to sting the warships manoeuvring to close orbit. Some struck and tore the shields from heavy bombardment barques. Some vessels pulled back, some altered position. None fled. The burning of the Imperator Somnium had drawn them away from their objective, but they had been willed to their task by the Warmaster and they could not disobey or fail. A sustained stream of plasma caught the Torment Born in the hull as its void shield envelope opened a second before its gun fired. The plasma bored through its hull plates into its guts, and burned through chains of macro shells waiting to be dropped into gun breeches. Fire detonated through the hull in a rippling line of explosions. The ship slewed, its engines dying as the force of the blast rocked it free from its orbit. It began to fall, its half-kilometre-long carcass pulling fire with it as it dropped. The other ships began to fire. Shells and lance beams raced the Torment Born down into the skies above the Palace. They struck as the fire from the Mercury Wall guns reached out into the kill-zone.\n\nNear the wreckage tangle of Nerek in the south of the zone, an armoured company vanished as quake shells burrowed into the ground and then detonated. Soil and rock fountained into the air as a sinkhole opened beneath the tanks and dragged them down in a cascade of debris. On the mid elevation above the water-filled void of Silver Tarn, plasma streamed from the sky, rolling across advancing cohorts of skitarii, fusing ground, armour and flesh into glass. In the cratered land between Karalia's Grave and Lake Voss, a force of Imperial Army tanks and Knights of House Tyranus were bracketed by automata, pinned in place and then scoured from being by orbital blasts from the Dark Mechanicum ship Omicron-Aleph that fell from the sky like emerald coils of lightning. Dust and radiation was all that remained after nine minutes and nine seconds of precisely timed fire.\n\nIn the sally chambers across the Mercury Wall, units returned from the kill-zone swallowed ammunition and drank fuel. Tank crews sat on the rockcrete floor, and stared into the distance as the sparks of welding torches filled the air. Knights and war machines shed damaged armour. Blood and soot sluiced from hulls. There was little order; commands from the bastion and regional control nodes were few and laced with signal and information corruption. The last clear order, though, gave a clear purpose - hold the enemy in the kill-zone. That was enough to keep the momentum of war turning.\n\nLinked into the primary data and vox-feeds, Commander Oceano swam in the polluted tide of battle. Four decades had passed since a rad-strike on Kizar had taken his ability to fight without the machine that now wrapped him in amnion and metal. He was blind without the Dreadnought chassis that carried him, reliant on its systems for life and sight. Linked to the failing tactical data and communications across the Mercury Wall, he felt for the first time that blindness close in on him. Curdir Bastion and half the wall was his responsibility, delegated to him by Sanguinius at the will of the Praetorian. An honour and a burden, and one that now felt like it had turned to sand in his grasp. Mutiny, unit failure, deaths, and worse. It was as though something had reached through the stones of the wall, through the flesh of those who stood on it, and torn them apart from within. The only surety that held were his own brothers, the few hundred that he had scattered across the defences to bolster discipline and aid morale. Now those Blood Angels were the points of light in the dark, sure and true, unwavering. Orders flowed from them to the mortal units; bit by bit commands flowed out from him in words spoken from one person to another. Nasuba had got the guns of Shard Bastion and the northern sections firing again, now Oceano added the voice of his command to that.\n\nFrom Curdir the light of devastation began to pour down into the fire and smoke-shrouded land. Oceano watched it through a static-filled feed from the wall sensors and deep in his old warrior soul wondered at the power they still had, and hoped that it would be enough.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 57 kilometres.\n\nParadise found\n\nPath of lightning\n\nNo backward step\n\nMagnifican\n\nShiban's eyes opened. The sky was above. Storm clouds filled it. Lightning whipped across their bellies as they sped across his sight, now white, now fire red. The clouds vanished. Stars spun in blurred arcs. Not Terran stars. Chogorian stars, the guides to the Path of Heaven. The ground was passing beneath him, the wind rushing. He could feel the steed between his legs, the jolt of its hooves on the ground.\n\n'Lo, I ride with you, my brother,' said Torghun's voice. Shiban saw him now at the edge of his sight, just off his left shoulder. Torghun sat high and straight-backed, cloaked in the fur of his northern Terran birth land. He smiled at Shiban.\n\n'I too, my brother,' said Yesugei, and there he was too, riding at his other shoulder, black hair spilling behind.\n\n'We are here to bear you to the horizon.' Jubal Khan, smiling, rode in front of him and to his right.\n\n'You have come far,' said a voice deeper than the rest, and there was the bearded face of Camba Diaz, strong, stone-like, riding on his other side. 'There is only a little further to go.'\n\nThe riders turned their faces towards the point where the distance met the sky. The stars and sun and day and night wheeled above. The horses gathered pace. He could smell the dust kicked up by their hooves, their sweat, the thread of cold air that rose to meet them as they rode.\n\n'What waits for me?' he heard himself say. 'At the ride's end, what waits for me, brothers?'\n\n'Rest,' said Yesugei.\n\n'Peace,' said Jubal.\n\n'Eternity,' said Camba Diaz.\n\n'And that is it?' asked Shiban. 'What of the battle? What of the world I leave behind?'\n\n'The concern of those who still ride and walk on the earth,' said Torghun.\n\n'Not yours,' said Jubal.\n\n'Not ours,' said Yesugei.\n\n'From beyond, it has already happened. The battle is done. The end set,' said Torghun.\n\n'And how did it end?' asked Shiban.\n\nSilence from them all. Just the wind.\n\nHe thought of Cole, just a man trying to get back to somewhere safer than the wasteland he found himself in. He thought of the child, too young to know it had been born into an apocalypse. He thought of all those dead at the Eternity Wall, and all those still living and standing in the path of the forces of annihilation coming for them.\n\n'Look,' said Torghun, jerking his head up. 'They come to bring you home.'\n\nBirds turned in a gyre above them. Vultures and hawks and eagles, wings catching the wind and thermals of the plateau. The sun, only moments risen, sank below the curve of the world before them. The thunder of the horses' hooves was the roar and beat of blood in his veins.\n\nHe knew that somewhere very close and too far to reach, he was falling to the ground, and that the man Cole was scrambling to reach him, and bullets were passing overhead and that things of rotting flesh were pulling themselves closer. He knew that somewhere, beyond a different horizon, his Legion brothers still lived and waited, and that there was more pain and the laughter of total sorrow.\n\n'No,' he said. 'I am not finished. This does not end here.'\n\n'For you it does,' said Yesugei. 'Your part is played. You go onwards, as we all must.'\n\n'No backward step,' said Torghun.\n\nNo backward step... only forwards... onwards, through pain, through darkness and desolation.\n\nNo backward step...\n\nCamba Diaz with his shield and sword standing on a bridge against a howling tide.\n\nNo backward step.\n\nTorghun torn apart, falling, a son of Terra and a White Scar to the last.\n\nNo backward step!\n\nBlinks of night and blinding light and red.\n\nShiban gripped the reins of his mount, and wheeled it about. The sky behind him was a tatter of torn night.\n\n'No backward step...' said the voice of Torghun behind him.\n\n'No backward step,' echoed Shiban and spurred the mount on. Behind him he heard a snap of laughter from the throat of Jubal, and then Yesugei, his voice fading into the wind and the call of the birds above.\n\n'Ride well, brother. Ride for us all.'\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\n'She didn't tell me,' said John after a few hours of climbing up through the hive. 'Erda, I mean. She didn't tell me about you and Him. Not a word... Hints that you were all closer than I had thought, but not a raised eyebrow about... what happened.' Oll did not reply. 'Guess there were no real reasons to tell me you tried to kill Him, other than it being pretty central to the whole reason we are here.'\n\n'I never lied, John,' Oll said softly.\n\n'And I never thought to ask, so I guess that makes me ten times the fool and half the genius I thought I was. Getting you involved again - hell's vomit, but I think you might have been right to just stay away.'\n\n'Having second thoughts?' asked Oll.\n\n'Too late for that, isn't it? Unless I want to try and ditch or kill you, or give "}
{"text":"re were no real reasons to tell me you tried to kill Him, other than it being pretty central to the whole reason we are here.'\n\n'I never lied, John,' Oll said softly.\n\n'And I never thought to ask, so I guess that makes me ten times the fool and half the genius I thought I was. Getting you involved again - hell's vomit, but I think you might have been right to just stay away.'\n\n'Having second thoughts?' asked Oll.\n\n'Too late for that, isn't it? Unless I want to try and ditch or kill you, or give you to the other side, the only way seems like forward... whichever pissing way that actually is.'\n\nJohn rubbed his eyes, blinked.\n\n'Headache?' asked Oll. John nodded.\n\n'Like a pneumatic hammer.'\n\n'Never touched Enuncia before,' he said.\n\nJohn shook his head.\n\n'I can feel it,' he said, 'like it's alive in here.' He tapped his head.\n\nOll lapsed back into silence. They were still climbing, scrambling up through the vegetation-filled pipes and tubes of the hive. The stems of the plants were thick and flexed as they touched them. When they had to cut their way through a tangle, the sap that leaked from the cut stems was like thick, dark wine.\n\n'You know what this place is?' asked Zybes, as they pulled themselves through a chamber where the sap drained from slit vines into large glass bottles. The fluid was forming big, gelatinous droplets as it oozed down the glass. The air had a thick scent, like solvent, spice and sugar. The fluid in the bottles rippled as they passed, sloshing up against the crystal as though trying to reach them. 'It's a farm.'\n\nOll did not reply. He had been thinking the same thing since Ugent Sye and the orchards.\n\n'The song of paradise brings people and then this place gives them the endless dream they want,' said John. 'And the Emperor's Children take what they want in turn.'\n\n'Fruit from the orchard,' muttered Zybes. 'Wine from the vine.'\n\nThey found the proof of their fears in a chamber that had been a bubble of stained glass on the outside of the hive. A warrior in purple and acid-green armour sat on a throne of human vertebrae. Its monstrous weapons lay in the hands of shivering, wasted slaves, their eyes, mouths and ears stapled shut. The Space Marine, for a Space Marine it was, did not move as they entered the chamber. They approached slowly, Zybes and Leetu moving to check the ways out, while Oll looked at the thing in the throne of bone. Glass tubes curled from spherical jars, and ran into sockets in its helm. Sap liquid bubbled and foamed down the tubes. Air hissed from fleshy valves in the Space Marine's chest, burbling and purring.\n\n'It is bathing in dreams and secrets,' said John without looking around. 'The fluid is saturated with them, psychoactive. Refined from the desperate and devoted. Harvested and refined like honey.' He shivered. 'I can feel it. Your man Zybes is right, that's what this garden of paradise is - it's a farm for dreams.'\n\nOll kept his gun aimed at the enthroned warrior.\n\n'We should be careful,' said Leetu. 'The Emperor's Children know we are here. Cause too much damage and they will find us before we find the man you have lost.'\n\nOll considered Leetu's words for a moment.\n\n'We leave it,' he said at last. 'Let's go.' They did, reluctantly, looking back at the chair of bone and the figure on it. The pendulum in Katt's hands kept moving, guiding them as they climbed.\n\nOll tried not to look at what they passed as they moved up through the dreaming hive: tableaux of pastoral bliss that wound through chambers, silent and pulsing; the great machine pits that turned over and over, breaking matter and mixing it into the soil; pits where limbs and shreds of fabric surfaced in the dark loam. Plants grew everywhere, blooming, pressing and squirming against crystal domes as though trying to strangle the sunlight before it could reach inside. It was quiet, the sound of the honey-hive, a low pulse disturbed by moans that shivered from the distance and then faded, remaining only as a haze in the mind. They did not encounter more of the Emperor's Children, though their signs marked the ground, and occasionally they found a human body so totally deconstructed that it could only have been done by an Astartes.\n\n'Paradise found,' said John without humour as they pressed on.\n\nOll did not answer.\n\nMagnifican\n\nWhite dot on black.\n\nPain.\n\nNo, an echo of pain, a promise of what was coming. Shiban knew it.\n\nThe dot became a line across black. He could hear breath, the beat of hearts.\n\nThe line was growing thicker, growing closer.\n\nThe bubble of blood and the gasp of air all around.\n\nForwards, just forwards, into the pain, into the promise of the white horizon.\n\nSounds buzzing. Shouting. Thunder.\n\nThe whiteness was right in front of him. He could taste acid and iron.\n\nWhite. Blinding. Edge to edge. Pain as a lightning bolt.\n\nHe gasped air.\n\nHe pushed up.\n\nThe pain was him, every inch of him, within and without. Cole was half crouched on the ground, the infant gripped with one arm, firing his pistol with the other.\n\n'Shiban!' he was calling. 'Shiban!'\n\nA round buzzed through the air and the man was tumbling back. Blood splashed bright on the shoulder of his uniform as he fell, twisting to shield the infant.\n\nThere were figures on the lip of the crater, humans in filth-drenched uniforms and gas hoods, spitting hard rounds from rust-covered guns. There were dead things rising from the pool at the bottom of the crater. Bloated bodies, dragging themselves up the shoreline. Gleaming clouds of insects flowed and wheeled through the air. A vomit, gut-acid reek threaded every breath. Shiban found the metal pole on the ground under his fingers. A staggering, drowned thing was almost on them. He came to his feet, hands gripping and lifting the pole into a blow that hit the thing in its central mass. It was not a clean blow, not efficient, nor timed and weighted for optimal effect. No poem of war was written by it. But it was enough.\n\nThe drowned thing came apart. Soft bones and bloated flesh were crushed, and burst apart. Shiban heard the roar explode from his lips. He went forwards, fast, the pain almost blinding. He rammed the pole through another drowned corpse and whirled. The impaled thing writhed as Shiban swung it into two others that had just dragged themselves onto the shore. They burst apart, and Shiban was wrenching the weapon free and turning. Rounds sparked from his left shoulder. A stutter of lightning through his flesh and nerves. Cole was on the ground, trying to rise, blood running from his fingers. Shiban reached the man's side in a bound, and pulled him up. Hard rounds exploded across the spot they had been occupying. Shiban's head snapped up; he saw the shooter, ten strides up the slope, saw the man's finger begin to squeeze the trigger for another burst. He cast the metal pole like a spear, one-handed. He surged up the slope even as it released from his grasp. The pole hit the man in the left eye. It punched through the eyepiece of the gas hood and into the skull behind, and the man was falling. Shiban was on the man before he hit the ground. The pole ripped free from the skull and hit the next figure coming over the lip of the crater.\n\nHe could hear the thunder roar of pain within. Lightning flashed inside his skull, but he was moving, going forwards, only forwards, killing without pause, flowing like a thunderbolt reaching for the ground. One strike and another, impacts shuddering through him. One figure and then another and another, all falling. Blood and brain matter. Rounds rang as they struck him, and he pivoted to shield Cole and the infant. Flies hit him like spots of black rain, flogging his joints, smearing his sight, but he did not slow, and only went forwards. He had a second to see the tide of figures surging from the fogbound distance. He did not stop. To stop was to end, to go back to the ride across the plateau with his duty undone. Forwards, only forwards, killing and killing, the agony and taste of blood the sign that he was still in the world of the living.\n\nHe spun the pole and the impact sent a human to the ground, with a pulped bag of bone for a head. He spun to the next target... and found that there was none.\n\nQuiet, sudden stillness, broken only by the curl of fog on a sluggish breath of air. The swirl of insects had gone. The dead lay unmoving on the ground. Blood and gut fluid trickled slowly over rubble.\n\nHe took another pace, unwilling to let go of the momentum that had kept the pain from overwhelming him.\n\nA shadow moved in the ochre haze, a bloated smudge swelling in the murk.\n\nShiban turned towards it, breathing hard.\n\nCole moaned and staggered against him. Half of the man's torso was black with blood.\n\nShiban felt the pain inside him dim, felt the numbness rise. He took a pace towards the shadow, and let the agony relight. A snarl came to his lips.\n\n'What...' began Cole.\n\nThe mustard fog ripped aside and the warrior came at them. It was huge, a mountain of shaking fat and rotting armour plate. Bulges of soft matter, corroded tubes and chain mail drowned the shape of the Astartes warrior they had grown on. Mucus-thick breaths heaved from the vents on its back. Chains rattled against its armour as it ran. The corpses of dogs and humans and other things that had lost their features dragged behind it. It had a huge billhook, its blade pitted and clotted with blood and rust, and it swung as it charged. Shiban met the blow, deflected it past him and struck once high, once low. Pieces of flesh burst from each strike. The rotting warrior grunted. Shiban turned and rammed the pole tip-first into the join between helm and body. It drove deep. Black fluid gushed out. The vast warrior shook for a moment. Then it reached up, gripped the pole and pulled it free. Lumps of fat ran out of the wound on a bubbling slick of blood. It stood for a second, looking at Shiban with an eye slit of cracked glass. Then it swung its billhook up. It wasn't slow, Shiban realised in"}
{"text":", once low. Pieces of flesh burst from each strike. The rotting warrior grunted. Shiban turned and rammed the pole tip-first into the join between helm and body. It drove deep. Black fluid gushed out. The vast warrior shook for a moment. Then it reached up, gripped the pole and pulled it free. Lumps of fat ran out of the wound on a bubbling slick of blood. It stood for a second, looking at Shiban with an eye slit of cracked glass. Then it swung its billhook up. It wasn't slow, Shiban realised in that moment, not slow at all. The blow sang a ragged song as it arced down at Shiban's head.\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThe pendulum stopped spinning in a dome high on the outside of the hive.\n\nKatt looked at Oll. 'Rane's here,' she said, 'somewhere.'\n\nOll nodded and looked at the place she had led them.\n\nIt had been a garden dome, one of those that the high-born of the hive used to demonstrate their power to make an oasis in a world reduced to dry seas and pollution by war and waste and time. Water had cascaded from a great copper sphere that hung from the dome's apex, down into a hundred-metre-wide bowl with a six-metre-wide hole at its centre. Hidden jet systems had spun the water in the bowl so that it whirled in a slow vortex before draining through the central hole into a lake that filled the bottom half of a crystal and plasteel bubble beneath. Bathers had swum the spinning waters, fighting the current and laughing until they were caught by the final spin and yanked down to fall, whooping with shock and excitement, into the lake below. From there, sluice gates could be opened to channels that looped out and down the sides of the hive, arcing past other domes and suspended pools and lakes.\n\nThe plants that had filled the dome were examples of the rare species saved from Terra's past, propagated and preserved over hundreds of years by the forebears of the Hatay-Antakya Hydro Clans. Tall trees with silver bark had swayed in artificial winds of purified air. Flowers had grown from meadow ground and sent their pollen and seed into the air. Birds and insects had buzzed and flitted between nests and blooms. In the half-light balanced between night and dawn, it had been possible to stand on one of the low banks of grass, breathe the smell of dew and sap and earth, and think that one could smell the plants reaching towards the growing sunlight.\n\nThat was as things had been.\n\nFulgrim's Children had made the garden anew. The water still turned in the pool, but things grew within it now - things with huge, thick-petalled flowers and red roots that dangled into the currents like a vascular system without a body. The trees had withered to bare branches, or had grown and grown to press against the crystal of the dome above. Their leaves had taken on the colour of copper and mother of pearl. Reptilian creatures pecked at the trunks with metallic beaks; dark red sap oozed from the wounds and slid down the trunks to silver pails and tangles of gulping glass tubes. Every now and then the trees would shiver, even though there was no breeze to stir their branches. Shadows and sunlight dappled the ground, so deep in most places that it felt like you could only see the surface of the false forests. Pollen drifted in thick clouds beneath the dome - mauve and yellow and dust grey. Fountains sat in the open spaces between the trees, thick jets of purple liquid gushing from the mouths of stone and ivory figures that twisted around cornucopias of barbed fruit. Other sculptures peeked from amidst the undergrowth, their stone sinews caught in song, or dance, or scream.\n\nOll blinked at the view. Beside him, Leetu stood still, the warrior's head turning in place as he scanned the dome. John stood a small distance away to the other side. He had Krank's lasgun, and had thumbed the safety off.\n\n'Anything?' Oll said to him. John shook his head without looking at Oll.\n\n'This whole place is a lie,' he said. 'There could be Horus himself out there and I wouldn't be able to tell you right now.'\n\n'This is a place of dire threat,' said Leetu.\n\n'Quite,' John said, then jerked his head to where Katt stood a little further back. 'What do you see, Katt?'\n\nShe did not answer for a moment. The pendulum was spinning on its thread, almost jerking free of her fingers. Beads of blood were forming inside her nostrils.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'Rane is here,' she said. 'Somewhere near. That's all I can tell.'\n\n'It's a trap, though, right?' asked John. Katt shrugged.\n\n'Almost certainly.'\n\n'Great,' sighed John. 'So what do we do, start poking about in the bushes?'\n\n'No,' said Oll, looking around at the others. 'You, Katt and I do that, the rest wait.'\n\n'In case we need rescuing again?' asked John.\n\n'Given how things have gone, it seems reasonable,' Oll replied.\n\n'Fair point,' said John. 'Alright, let's go. I've got point, so if my head explodes or something rips me in half you'll know that there is something out there.'\n\nJohn slid forwards through the edge of the foliage. Oll watched him for a second, reminding himself that John Grammaticus was, on top of everything else, one of the best covert warfare operatives he had ever seen. It was not a showy thing, but somehow through the way he moved he became part of the ground he walked upon. Katt followed, not as smoothly but quietly, gun in one hand, pendant in the other. Oll glanced at where Zybes was, and Graft bent over Krank. Then he looked at Leetu.\n\n'Keep them safe,' he said, 'and get them out if this goes wrong.'\n\nLeetu gave a small nod.\n\n'As you wish.'\n\nOll turned and followed Katt and John. Soon the others were out of sight and there was just the sound of dripping sap and the rustle of leaves as the trees quivered. Oll looked back after twenty paces and could not see the others. The next time he paused, he could not be certain how many steps he had taken. The light under the trees was dappled gold, the shadows maroon. Mulch squelched softly underfoot. Sap and pink fluid foamed around the soles of his boots. He felt his eyelids becoming heavy, then blinked them wide again. Ahead of him Katt moved through the gloom, and somewhere beyond her the shadow that was John. Oll glanced around. He thought he could feel eyes watching him, out there, just on the edge of his own sight, staring through the leaves. He thought of tigers in jungles now long burned. He thought of a boat chugging its way up a wide, still river to a place he had not wanted to go. He thought of the sirens, the Laestrygonians and the lotus-eaters. He knew this place. He had been here before. Not exactly, but he knew the shape and taste of it. He thought of all the heroes and fools and friends that he had seen go into the mouth of the monsters. Now here he was - old choices and old mistakes come around to be made again.\n\nOll. It was John, speaking with a low whisper of telepathy. Oll dropped to one knee, gun up, eyes alert. I think we have found your lost sheep. A pause. You better come and have a look.\n\nHe saw Rane as soon as he reached John and Katt. They were on the edge of the cover of a copse of trees next to a vivid green sward of grass. Statues dotted the space, and a marble-paved path curved through them. The statues looked like human figures in the classic heroic form. It was only when you looked a little longer that you saw the differences the sculptors had introduced. Oll tried not to look for long. Fountain sprays rose and fell in pink arcs, splashing into wide bowls. Rane was there, still in his boots and kit, rifle gone, but his pistol holstered at his waist. His hands were loose at his sides, and he was gazing up at a cluster of white marble statues dancing on a wide plinth.\n\nOll sat still for a moment and let his senses and thoughts settle. Nothing unexpected moved or made a sound. There was a tension there, though, a taut threat.\n\n'Yep,' said John, softly from beside him. 'All wrong, that oh-so-old set of soldier instincts are just screaming to get the hell out and see if there is a way to call in a fire-strike.' He sighed. 'Without that option, I guess you are going to go out to the kid.'\n\nOll looked at John and then Katt.\n\n'Watch my back,' he said and then slipped out of cover.\n\nHe kept his head down until he was within five paces of Rane, then dropped into the cover of a statue plinth. This close the marble looked almost fluid beneath the surface, alive with phosphorescent things with pale feelers, stings and pincers. He waited but the only movement came from the shivering trees.\n\n'Rane,' he said, raising his voice but keeping it level. The boy did not turn. Oll caught himself - no, not a boy. Rane had not been a boy even when he had been a newly signed-up soldier on Calth. He had just been young, and full of not very much life and a lot of naivety. But Oll could not see him as anything else other than a kid in the wrong place and time. Rane had changed in the years since Calth, they all had - except, maybe Oll himself - but Rane had always been furthest back, always closest to the kid who just wanted to find the young wife he had never had a chance to say goodbye to. A part of Rane still thought that she was out there, that there would somehow be a way back to what he had lost. 'Bale Rane,' said Oll again, a little louder and with a little of the soldier's authority in his voice.\n\n'I made it, Oll,' said Rane, but he did not turn around. 'Never thought that I would, but I did.'\n\n'Rane,' said Oll carefully. There was something in the boy's voice that raised the hairs on his skin. 'Rane, look at me, please.'\n\nOll stood up and took a step towards Rane. He thought he saw something move at the edge of his eye, glanced aside before he could stop himself. A statue of a man stretching his arms up to support a wide bowl stood right next to him. The man's face was screaming, an image of agony caught in marble. For a moment Oll thought he had seen the man's mouth move.\n\n'Thank you, Oll,' said Rane. 'You brought me here. I would"}
{"text":"in the boy's voice that raised the hairs on his skin. 'Rane, look at me, please.'\n\nOll stood up and took a step towards Rane. He thought he saw something move at the edge of his eye, glanced aside before he could stop himself. A statue of a man stretching his arms up to support a wide bowl stood right next to him. The man's face was screaming, an image of agony caught in marble. For a moment Oll thought he had seen the man's mouth move.\n\n'Thank you, Oll,' said Rane. 'You brought me here. I would never have made it if it had not been for you. Thank you.'\n\nHe could see half of the lad's face now. There were tears on Rane's cheeks, running from his eyes, which were looking up at the statue in front of him. Oll did not follow the boy's gaze.\n\n'Who would have thought that we would both end up here? I fell and slept and woke up and I heard her, Oll. I heard her calling for me, just like back on Calth. She has been waiting for me all this time.'\n\n'You need to come with me, Bale,' said Oll, gently. 'We need to go.' He reached out a hand and touched Rane's arm. The boy lashed out without looking around. The blow was fast and strong, and Oll only flinched fast enough to avoid it hitting him full in the chest. Rane's hand caught him on the shoulder and sent him staggering back.\n\n'You two have never met,' said Rane, his voice still filled with joy, as though what had just happened was nothing. He was still staring up. 'I forgot that. Neve, my love, Oll did not mean anything by it. I have talked about you so often that I just forgot that he doesn't know you, my love. It's my fault. Let me introduce you, yes?'\n\nOll was picking himself up, gun coming up with him as Rane, without looking away, stepped aside from the statue in front of him.\n\n'Oll, this is my darling wife.'\n\nOll looked up.\n\nMagnifican\n\nShiban jerked aside, but not fast enough. The billhook hit his left shoulder between collar-ring and pauldron. A spur of the blade found a join in the armour and punched through. Shiban felt his left arm become numb. He tried to break the hook free, but the bloated warrior yanked the billhook down. The blade bit into plate and bone, and Shiban staggered, fighting for balance. The thing was strong, monstrously strong. A fresh cascade of blood and slime poured from the hole in its throat. A laugh, a chuckle of indulgence made with fluid-clogged lungs. Shiban tried to bring the pole up in his right hand. The warrior yanked the billhook and Shiban jerked forwards before the blow could begin to unfurl. He stumbled to one knee. The numbness was spreading, drowning sensation and the pain that meant he was still moving. The warrior gripped the haft of the billhook, crushing Shiban further to the ground. The pole fell from his fingers, and rolled across the dust. Shiban rammed his right hand up, gripped the haft of the billhook, and pushed up, trying to force the barb out of his flesh. The enemy warrior tilted its head, and then jerked the weapon. Shiban felt the barb bite deeper.\n\nA las-blast hit the warrior in the middle of its helm. Rotten ceramite blew out. Its eye visor shattered. Behind him, he heard Cole moan. The warrior's head rose to look at this fresh distraction. Shiban could see an eye socket beyond the blown visor. A finger-sized piece of crystal was embedded in the flesh just beneath a fogged, yellow eyeball. Another las-blast, this one wide, then another that burned a furrow in an exposed roll of fat. The warrior shifted. Shiban felt the pressure in the billhook give fractionally. He rammed his weight forward with all the strength of his muscle and armour. The hook sliced through flesh and out through the back of Shiban's armour. He came to his feet. The bloated warrior recoiled, fast, but not fast enough. Shiban slammed his right hand down onto the billhook's shaft just below the blade. The shaft broke. He caught the blade, spun it in his grasp, then rammed it into the hole he had made in the thing's neck, and sawed up through softened bone and half-rotten flesh, up through skull and brain, up through the crown of its helm.\n\nFluid gushed out, black and crimson and yellow. The warrior juddered, croaking. For a second it stood, a mountain of already dead flesh refusing to fall. Shiban stepped back. His own blood was flowing down his armour. Then the warrior toppled, slumping, flesh and armour folding with a grinding squelch. It hit the ground and lay steaming and oozing. Shiban dropped the billhook blade. White stars burst in his eyes. He felt himself sway. Blood was still flowing from the wound in his shoulder. He looked at his left arm, willed the hand to form a fist. The fingers twitched, though he felt nothing.\n\nA small cry turned his head. Cole was on his back, pistol in one hand, the infant clutched close in the other. Shiban lurched over to the man. The blood from the wound in Cole's shoulder was still flowing, slowly. The infant was crying, tiny balled fists gripping the air. Cole's eyes were half-closed, the eyelids sagging. Shiban could hear the shallowing breath in the man's chest. He had seen a lot of the fading moments of life; it was part of the craft that was his existence, a by-product of lethality. He reached down, into the man's wound. His gauntleted fingers clamped shut. The man gave a gasp, and his eyes fluttered open.\n\nShiban looked down at him. There must have been little in his appearance to inspire comfort: streaked with blood and filth, a remade monster of war before and a wreck of armour and blood now. But Cole's breath stilled as he looked up. A smile began to form.\n\n'You...' he began. 'You are still here.'\n\nShiban nodded once.\n\n'The child...' said Cole. 'Take the child.'\n\nThe blood had stopped flowing from the wound, but he could tell that the man's life was falling from him - too much of it had already drained onto the ground.\n\n'No,' Shiban said, and saw a shadow form in the man's eyes for a second. Then he stood, lifting the man and the infant.\n\nShiban closed his eyes for a moment. No voices came from the wind to speak to him, no call of birds guiding him home. He opened his eyes. The wasteland lay before him, and somewhere in the distance the lines and the Palace waited. He was not sure how far now. His sense of place and distance had been left behind. He knew which way was forward, though.\n\n'No backward step.'\n\nJohn and Oll try to escape 'paradise'.\n\nBurned horizon\n\nOrientalis-Echion\n\nYou are Solaria now\n\nMercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nFire burned the dawn light from the horizon. Detonations bubbled in a wall of smoke that reached from the ground to the bruised cloud layer above. Light strobed and smouldered. The air trembled. Hot winds coiled smoke and flame and debris into fire-devils that spiralled through the murk, howling, eating the dead that lay on the ground, scattering ash and flakes of scorched bone.\n\nThe battle line was a crescent drawn from the north, where the Palace wall kinked west at Indomitor Bastion, to the south where it swung away from the guns of the Exultant Wall. The centre of the curve pressed in towards the Mercury Wall, pushing in from the blind zone one hundred and twenty kilometres out and reaching through the rivers of run-off towards Shard Bastion. The engines of Mortis walked across the entire arc of the line. Hundreds of Titans, with the greatest strength layered in maniples in the central engagement zone. On the flanks the concentration of engines was lower, but here the abomination machines of the New Mechanicum swarmed across the ground, bodies of shimmering chrome or coal black, belching warp-polluted plasma that shrieked as it burned the air. It was not an assault; it was an ocean's storm tide.\n\nAgainst it the defenders of the wall poured the strength they had hoarded over the months of the siege. Their purpose was simple: to keep the enemy Titans from the walls. In the shadow of the Exultant Wall, five regiments of heavy armour rolled across the undulating plateau. Stormhammers, Executioners and assault carriers pulverised the already broken ground to dust as they drove to meet the enemy advance. They spread out, unfolding into lines and diamonds like the cavalry of old, stretching across five kilometres. In their turrets they saw the towering figures emerge as shadows from the clouds.\n\nThe first machines to fire were those of Shadowsword squadron Antonine. Their volcano cannons were Titan killers. Lines of white heat reached through the air in an eye-blink and struck the void envelope of the Reaver Titan Soul Sickle. Layers of shield blew out in a radiant halo. Inside the Shadowswords, the commanders were already shouting for their secondary weapons to fire, as capacitors began to build charge for another shot. Lines of shells and the blasts of lesser weapons were already blazing from the squadrons to either side of them. The Titan's last shield vanished in a scattered wash of explosions. The Shadowswords of Antonine Squadron were at a near halt as their guns drained power from their drives. Soul Sickle turned its head towards them. The metal of its skull was enamelled white, its eyes crimson glows. It fired its own greeting in the instant the first volcano cannon beam struck it. The beam sliced through Soul Sickle's thigh plate in a spray of molten metal. Twin lances of heat struck the Shadowsword and bored into its core. Plasma coils burst and rolled their fire into a blast wave that boiled through the hulls of its kin. Spheres of sun-fire were ripping across the line of advancing armour. Soul Sickle gave a bellow and strode on, limping, bleeding but already firing as more of its Legio marched into sight and the machines rode to meet them.\n\nIn the north, twenty Knights of the vagabond House Canis spurred across the plateau. With them three Warlords of the Legio Gryphonicus walked. The rest of their engines fought far to the south where traitor forces flooded against the weakened zones of Saturnine and Europa. These three had taken damage weeks before and"}
{"text":"line of advancing armour. Soul Sickle gave a bellow and strode on, limping, bleeding but already firing as more of its Legio marched into sight and the machines rode to meet them.\n\nIn the north, twenty Knights of the vagabond House Canis spurred across the plateau. With them three Warlords of the Legio Gryphonicus walked. The rest of their engines fought far to the south where traitor forces flooded against the weakened zones of Saturnine and Europa. These three had taken damage weeks before and returned at the call of Wall Master Efried. They bore quake cannons and ground-boring missiles in their launch racks. They met the northern edge of the Mortis forces a hundred kilometres off the wall. Six Warhound Titans, their black and red and gold armour shedding scabs of rust from their pocked and pitted skins. With them came swift tanks and speeders carrying slave-wrought Mechanicum troops. The three Gryphonicus engines rocked to a halt, banners rippling, stabilising pistons venting gas. The Warhounds loped towards them, growling scrap code. The Gryphonicus Warlords fired. Missiles loosed, arced and bored into the ground before exploding. The earth tore apart. Fissures opened. Soil and dust rolled like an ocean in a storm. A Warhound's foot fell to the ground and vanished into a fissure. Its void shield burst as its chin slammed into the earth. The subsurface blast wave hit a lance of House Hermetika Knights and tore them apart. Its packmates danced over the heaving terrain. The stricken Warhound's reactor failed as it vanished into the maw of the ground. A blister of light and burning earth rose as the engines of Horus and the Emperor tore at each other.\n\nAcross the Mercury-Exultant kill-zone the pattern repeated, magnified, and multiplied across hundreds of kilometres. In the centre of the kill-zone, the Legio Mortis met the force of Ignatum head-on. At the fore of the march of Mortis were the engines that had been opened to the daemons of the warp - god-engines given as libation to the powers that allowed knowledge, life and perfection beyond the old limits of artifice and cog. Reality boiled around them. Armour tore like skin and knitted like flesh. Blood and pus wept from the air at their passing. Static filled targeting systems as they tried to look at the daemon Titans. With them the remaining corpse-Titans walked, staggering, screaming their death calls over and again. True daemons slid from the gaps between light and shadow - hollow things of dead flesh and rattling bone, bags of pus and rotten fat that waded across the ground. Ignatum Titans were dragged down, gouts of acid enveloping them, metal softening and sagging as they struggled. Swarms of warp-born larvae writhed from the ground and the clouds of smoke, bursting and unfolding into things with wings that bloated as they rose. Washes of flame sliced through them, reducing them to ash.\n\nAt the centre of the kill-zone, the advance of Mortis pressed towards the wall. The battle line bulged inwards for forty kilometres. Forced backwards, the engines of Ignatum folded maniples and the largest of their engines in to meet and slow the surge. The Maniple of Maniples, three Emperor-class engines and their attendants, formed the fulcrums around which battle groups moved. Seen from within the incandescence of Princeps Maximus Cydon, the engines of his Legio moved in unfolding arcs and geometries, each balanced against another, none isolated, all parts of a whole. That was the majesty of Ignatum: even when engines and princeps moved by their own will or fury they followed the will of the whole, the fire of the Legio's soul. Not through control, not through mere orders, but because they were echoes of a single greater spirit - the fiery hearts of hundreds of engines that had walked and burned their enemies, and did not forget and did not forgive.\n\nThey held. In the south the towering Magnificum Incendius advanced as it engaged. Its plasma annihilator wailed as it drew charge. Lightning played across charge coils as wide as battle tanks. A plasma shell fell from the sky and struck its shield envelope, blowing out eight layers of energy. Blue and white fire cascaded to the ground as the Titan strode on. Secutarii in blue and red and chrome spilled from the bastions in its legs, dropping from assault ramps at the second the machine's foot touched the ground. Ten Warhounds of its guard ran as its heralds, firing streams of vulcan shells and bouts of liquid flame. The fortress mounted on its shoulders shed explosive shells and beams of las energy into the lesser engines and troops that followed the Mortis Titans. Then its great guns spoke. The barrels of its cannon turned. Shells the size of tanks chugged from its muzzle. Fire surrounded it and poured from it as it walked, vanishing into the maelstrom, swelling the blaze.\n\nIn the north, the Imperator Exemplis strode at maximum speed. The ground shook and shook at its tread. Five maniples came with it, spread in a battle mandala. They drove into the traitor forces pushing up towards the Indomitor Bastion. These were the swift machines and forces of the assault: long-shanked Knights and the nimble murder-automata bred by the New Mechanicum on Mars. They burned. The Ignatum engines fired plasma munitions deep behind the enemy advance, cutting a wall of fire across the following enemy forces, and then engaging the trapped engines at point-blank range.\n\nHigh in the skull of Imperious Prima, Princeps Maximus Cydon saw the kill-zone through the light of the incandescence. His engine, the wondrous link to his Machine-God, smouldered with rage and exultation. Its spirit was old and vast. Others of its kind crushed the minds of those that guided them, but his engine was a Warmonger of the Emperor class of Titans, and its purpose was to break cities and watch civilisations die. The currents of its spirit were like the tides of magma beneath an old volcano, slow and relentless. All things bowed to its might in the end, all enemies, all who stood against it. The old enemy, the Death's Heads would come no further.\n\nThe world was fire now. It fell from orbit and the walls, and burned the air as the god-engines threw their anger at each other. The air clotted with smoke and blast clouds, shivering as shock waves ripped through it. In the far heart of the Inner Palace, hundreds of kilometres beneath the earth, the prisoners of Blackstone felt the battles roar as a tremble hovering on the edge of hearing. The storm of flame and shredding reality did not fade but grew, reaching up and curling over, a billowing curtain stretching across the kill-zone, a burning mockery of the wall that stood across its path.\n\nIn Cydon's mind he held it as an image painted in crimson and night. This would be the end, the moment his Legio's soul was laid bare; faced with the impossible, where there was no way to victory, they would make one.\n\nShard Bastion, Mercury Wall\n\n'Battery frequency is falling,' said Rogal Dorn. Nasuba looked up. From up here, on the top platform of Shard Bastion, you could look each way and down the wall and see the light of the turbo-lasers and plasma bombards opening up. Even in the far distance, you could see the flash from behind the curtains of rain and smoke. Flash and thunder, on and on, like the sound of the world cracking under the blows of false gods.\n\nThey had got the wall guns firing again - forty-five per cent active to seventy-five per cent effectiveness. Not good. A long way from good, in fact, but better than it had been. There was a measure of control on Mercury. The presence of the Praetorian and the four hundred Imperial Fists he had dropped along the wall had helped. They had comms down to the Titan legion caverns and sally-vaults, too, intermittent but functional. Unit cohesion and loss could not even be measured. There were dead everywhere, and clusters of wild violence inside the wall mass. They were holding, though. That was what the presence and command of a primarch did.\n\nNasuba watched and listened for twenty-two seconds before she picked out the distortion in the rhythm of the guns, like a stutter in the pulse of a heart struggling to beat.\n\n'It's surging,' said a warrior in the yellow of an Imperial Fist but with blue pauldrons and a caul-like hood framing his helm. He had been identified to her as Chief Librarian Massak. Nasuba was old enough in making war for the Imperium to know what a Librarian was - a psyker of the Legions, a wielder of aetheric energy as a tool of war.\n\n'What?' she asked, looking directly at the Librarian. He returned her gaze. Sparks were flicking from his hooded helm into the air.\n\n'The warp, general,' said Massak. 'The tides of the immaterium wax. That is why the guns stutter. The crews are wavering. The machines are breaking. The tide of the Great Ocean is finding the fractures in our will and strength.'\n\nNasuba frowned, looked back along the wall at the flash of the guns - forty-five per cent active... enough to hold an army from the wall, but they were not just facing an army.\n\nA white-blue flare of plasma burst from one of the nearest batteries. She blinked, the glare clinging to her retinas.\n\n'We must be ready to shut the batteries down,' said Dorn.\n\nHe looked at her, the pupils of his eyes the levelling of gun barrels.\n\n'My lord?' she said.\n\n'The plasma reservoirs and generators - teams should be sent to secure them and shut them down.'\n\nKurral looked up sharply. The presence of a primarch was often enough to silence mortals before they could even think of speaking, but Nasuba saw no sign of fear in her aide.\n\n'Lord Dorn, the top guns are our primary functioning weapons - if we shut the plasma feeds down...'\n\n'Then they cannot be used against us,' said Dorn. His voice was steady, but somehow managed to sound clear across the platform over the thunder roll of gun discharge. 'Consider this - how do the enemy intend to breach the walls?' Dorn looked around at them, his fa"}
{"text":" a primarch was often enough to silence mortals before they could even think of speaking, but Nasuba saw no sign of fear in her aide.\n\n'Lord Dorn, the top guns are our primary functioning weapons - if we shut the plasma feeds down...'\n\n'Then they cannot be used against us,' said Dorn. His voice was steady, but somehow managed to sound clear across the platform over the thunder roll of gun discharge. 'Consider this - how do the enemy intend to breach the walls?' Dorn looked around at them, his face set but calm. Control radiated from him. 'This wall is within range of the largest ordnance mounted on their engines, and they can hardly miss. But they have not fired directly against the wall. Why?'\n\n'Because they would do nothing,' said Kurral, and Nasuba saw realisation spreading in the lines of the officer's face.\n\nDorn gave a single nod.\n\n'Hundreds of metres of rockcrete, plasteel and armour. They could concentrate fire and blow out the void shields on a small section, and then... how far would they get trying to create a breach?'\n\n'Some damage,' said Kurral. 'Perhaps penetration through four layers, three hundred metres depth, but no wall integrity threat.'\n\n'And while they are applying that firepower to the wall, their engines sacrifice themselves and battle-sphere dominance for nothing,' said Nasuba.\n\n'Unless they can reach the wall in the dead zone beneath our guns,' said Dorn. 'If there is nothing to threaten them then they can bore their way through the wall base. Not enough for a full escalade, not enough to even be called a threat, but if that breach goes deep enough to hit a primary plasma conduit or generator, then...'\n\n'They bring the wall down,' said Nasuba, flatly.\n\nThere was a moment of quiet even with the noise of the guns.\n\n'Secure the generators,' said Dorn. 'Make preparation to shut them down on your command.'\n\n'But the guns are keeping them from the walls, my lord,' said Kurral.\n\n'They are not the only thing,' Dorn said, and he turned to look out into the fire-killed night.\n\nThe Cradle Basin, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\n'Full stride,' willed Tetracauron, and he felt Reginae Furorem speed forwards an instant after the thought became transmission. The ground before it glittered with a skin of gleaming metal shells, and crowds of soft rotting flesh. Targeting mandalas spun. Black silhouettes strode towards them. Weapon fire streaked the orange of the world. To his left, Arthusa's engine-presence was a column of flame. Their maniples had fused into one, and walked into the kill-zone at the head of an arrowhead of Battle Titans. The Warhounds ran at their flanks. They were fuelled, rearmed, but the data halos of most spun with damage. There had been no time for anything but primary repairs. They were a Legio walking with the blood of their last fight still on their skin. They had returned from their hours in the wall with new weapons in their hands - vortex and warp missiles, and rad-impellers - weapons taken from the Legio's deep magazines in numbers that Tetracauron had never seen.\n\nThe tide of ground units rolled towards them. Gunfire spat at them. Void shields chimed with swallowed fire. Reginae Furorem and its kin waded into the tide, stamping down, mashing troops, sending vehicles tumbling. They were thrusting into the centre of the Mortis advance, while the maniples of the two Imperator Titans held the far flanks twenty kilometres distant to either side. At their back, Cydon and the maniple of Arthusa had locked in place, their fire arcing above to strike deep in the enemy advance.\n\n'Point defence weapons firing.' Divisia, her focus and fatigue fused.\n\nTetracauron felt the tingle of the lascannon and bolter shots shed from his shoulders. A spider-limbed walker scuttled towards Reginae Furorem. The cannon on its back pulsed with red threat markers. Tetracauron sent a surge of will and spite into the incandescence, and the engine lashed its next stride into the machine. The fire was rising, flowing into him, obliterating the pain and exhaustion building in his flesh. He was the focus and wrath of his god now.\n\n'Reactor at optimal.'\n\n'Enemy engines sighted.'\n\n'Weapons lit.'\n\n'Target lock.'\n\n'Fire.'\n\nLight reaching across the distance, burning the air across kilometres, and beside him Arthusa and his engine kin firing to a single converging beat.\n\n'Engine strike.'\n\nHe could feel the weight of the vortex missiles on his back, the black hunger at the heart of the spirit of each warhead.\n\n'Here they come,' said Divisia, and an instant later he saw them too. Two blurred and jagged shapes, striding to close, static target mandalas overlaying them. They were from the court of Dies Irae, no longer incarnations of the divine, but vessels for blasphemy. The fallen Imperator had vanished from the battle sphere, melting from being as Ignatum punished its lesser vassals. But the two that remained in Tetracauron's sight were still formidable.\n\nThe Ignatum Titans began to fire on the pair. Explosions boiled across them, vanishing into clouds of insects and whirls of filthy yellow light.\n\n'Close and engage,' he willed across the noospheric links, and saw the pairs of Warhounds sprint forwards, vulcan bolters breathing shells at the daemon engines. They would close to point-blank range while the rest of the battle group saturated the targets. Then the Hounds would take the kill with melta cannons and maximal plasma blasts. Lesser fire traced the Warhounds, but the two daemon engines did not respond.\n\n'Something's wrong.' Cartho, his sending sharp. Tetracauron followed the direction of the moderatus' intent. The read-outs for the Warhounds were fizzing, data degrading.\n\n'Reactor output dropping fast!' came the sending from the first Warhound princeps, and then the others were echoing it, and the Warhounds were slowing, stumbling like humans feeling the beat of their heart fade.\n\nThe daemon Titans walked on unconcerned, dust-filled winds blowing around them. Tetracauron thought for a second that he heard a low, rasping chuckle in the wash of static.\n\nThe fires of the Warhound guttered before Tetracauron's sight. Weapon target runes fizzed as they tried to lock.\n\n'Lone engine approaching from rear!' Cartho, urgent. Tetracauron turned his gaze. For a moment he could see nothing. Then the lone Titan formed, coalescing from partial signal returns and gaps in auspex feeds, like a shadow cast by someone he could not quite see. A Warlord Titan, walking alone into the battle sphere, a single blue rune marking its fealty to the Emperor. Tetracauron felt his mouth go dry and the world of the incandescence seem to fade.\n\n'Princeps senioris,' came a voice that sounded clear and cold in the vox. 'I am Prefect Cadamia of the engine Orientalis-Echion. I am entering your immediate combat zone. Prepare to launch a single vortex payload on transmitted coordinates and then give supporting fire.'\n\nThe Titan's image blinked through basic visual data feeds: black bleeding to dark green, edges of bronze gold without mark or heraldry. He was old enough in the service of the oldest of Legios to have heard the whispers of the lost Titans given to Terra, of the engines that walked with hollow spirits. Some thought those stories just the old fears of the flesh bleeding into the rationality of data, but Tetracauron had never dismissed the possibility of there being a shadow of truth behind the whispers. Now he saw that he had been wrong; the truth was beyond the fear of stories.\n\n'This is Princeps Senioris Tetracauron of the Legio Ignatum, I have battle-sphere command. You will state your tactical intentions and integrate with my command.'\n\n'Negative,' came the reply. 'My command renders your authority null, and your compliance mandated. Your first act will be to launch a vortex warhead on the transmitted target coordinates.' The voice was cold and grey in the swirl of the incandescence. A blurt of data and command code clearance unfolded from the transmission. The authority was undoubted.\n\n'Those coordinates fall short of the enemy engines,' came Divisia's sending. 'We would be firing into nothing.'\n\n'Princeps senioris, compliance is necessary,' said Cadamia.\n\nTetracauron held the contradiction of thoughts and emotion still in his mind for a moment, felt the breathing fire of his engine and the pulse of his own blood.\n\n'Do it,' he willed.\n\nThe engine responded. Fuel flushed into the missile ignition. Cloud spread across his shoulders as the vortex warhead armed.\n\nOrientalis-Echion walked past them towards the daemon engines. The air around it shivered.\n\n'Missile armed,' sent Cartho.\n\n'Launch.'\n\nThe vortex missile struck. A black, hungering hole opened between the Mortis engines and the Psi-Titan. The breach yawned wide, a bullet hole shot in reality. Warp energy and collapsing matter whirled at its edge, flaring through every colour of the spectrum as they balanced on the edge of oblivion. Tetracauron saw it through his engine's eyes, the incandescence turning the absence into a circle of blinding white. There was blood on his teeth. Reginae Furorem's head twisted, the god-machine trying to turn its sensor gaze away from the violation. The air around the wound rippled. The pair of Mortis engines shivered. Scrap code burbled across the noosphere and vox, a chuckle of dying stars and radiation death. They heaved forwards, turning to pass the vortex, weapons inhaling to fire. Orientalis-Echion kept moving, striding directly forwards. Shells rattled from its shields as the daemon Titans blazed at it. The Psi-Titan's shields flared and burst as it strode into the fusillade. Beams of pale light stabbed through the curtains of explosions. Armour vaporised. Metal scattered from cuts. Still the Psi-Titan walked, its gun silent, its skin bleeding. The vortex was spinning towards it. It was going to die before it had even drawn blood.\n\n'Synchronise and lock fire to those engines,' Tetracauron roared across the link to his maniple. 'Now.'\n\nHe felt Re"}
{"text":"om its shields as the daemon Titans blazed at it. The Psi-Titan's shields flared and burst as it strode into the fusillade. Beams of pale light stabbed through the curtains of explosions. Armour vaporised. Metal scattered from cuts. Still the Psi-Titan walked, its gun silent, its skin bleeding. The vortex was spinning towards it. It was going to die before it had even drawn blood.\n\n'Synchronise and lock fire to those engines,' Tetracauron roared across the link to his maniple. 'Now.'\n\nHe felt Reginae Furorem already turning, its targeting a narrowing circle of fire-etched symbols in his sight. Orientalis-Echion's carapace was glowing with wounds, trailing burning oil and sparks, the vortex directly in front of it.\n\n'Princeps-Senioris Tetracauron,' came the cool voice of Cadamia over the vox-link. 'Maintain your previous target tasking.'\n\n'You will be-'\n\n'We will be what we are,' said Cadamia, and the link cut. In the battle sphere, the Psi-Titan had reached the threshold of the vortex.\n\n'Ever-turning cog of truth...' Cartho's shock breathed across the incandescence. 'It's walking into it.'\n\nOrientalis-Echion stepped into the black abyss of the vortex.\n\nThe ragged edge of the hole flared for an instant. Ghost lightning arced through the air. Reality howled. And then the vortex drained into the Psi-Titan, spinning, half-daemonic energies clawing at the air. Then it was gone. Orientalis-Echion took another step. Its wounded skin glowed. Eldritch power poured into breaches and damage. Armour plates flickered back into being. Tetracauron could hear a high-pitched shriek rising in his thoughts as he watched the Psi-Titan remake reality. It flickered, time and space blinking, and now it was closer to the two daemon Titans - much closer, and they were turning, war-horns droning, the entities bound within their shells sensing the anathema of the foe they faced.\n\n'Hit them now!' willed Tetracauron, and his maniple answered. Beams of plasma and las bathed the Mortis engines. Ghost shields coiled. Fire clotted to black slime. Void shields shattered.\n\nThe weapon on Orientalis-Echion's left arm fired. White to black, straight and true, like a razor line pulled through light and sound. It touched the first Mortis engine and unmade it. It took a step, the substance of its shell unwinding into grey ash. The daemon in its core blazed out, folding light into shadows of claws, insect wings, horned heads and spindle fingers. The beam of unreality cored into it, shredding it, drinking its false substance with a hungering howl. The second daemon Titan gurgled static. Flies shook from it as the cannons on its back and fists fired. Light exploded across Orientalis-Echion. Its shields were still charging, but the shots exploded half a metre from the Psi-Titan's skin. It turned to face the second Mortis engine, slow, unhurried. Its cannon sucked the light from the explosions. The daemon Titan's head split along a crack. Iron teeth spread wide in a wet maw. Orientalis-Echion fired. The beam hit the daemon Titan on the left shoulder. For an instant the substance of its armour held, and then it began to dissolve into dust and smoke. The daemon engine slumped to its left, tried to take a step, fell gurgling, its substance unravelling, and Orientalis-Echion was walking towards it, carving the beam of darkness through it even as the entity within tried to hold on, tried to fight. A sudden black star opened where the daemon Titan had fallen.\n\nOrientalis-Echion strode on, the air howling with ghost light around it.\n\n'What...' Divisia's question breathed across the incandescence. 'What just happened?'\n\nTetracauron looked towards where the Psi-Titan walked alone.\n\n'The Emperor's Talon's have opened the way. Forwards!' replied Tetracauron. Reginae Furorem's war-horns sounded as it strode, weapons firing, its surviving kin following in its wake.\n\nRemnant Dunes, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nElatus came around the dune crest at full stride, and fired. The thermal lance hit its first target, blew it to slag and sliced into the one behind it. Machines in oil-slick black and iron poured down the opposite dune face. Elatus' stubber pivoted and sent a burst of hard rounds into a cluster of kill-servitors bounding up the right flank. Inside the Armiger's cockpit, Acastia was breathing hard. Target and tactical data blurred across her screens.\n\nThe enemy ground units were coming in a tide, flowing across the northern kill-zone where the remains of the ground-down hab-districts had formed dunes of metallic dust and powdered rockcrete, blown and sculpted into a still sea by the winds that curled and rebounded from the Palace wall. It was dry, baked by the heat and untouched by the storms that poured water from the edge of the Palace shield canopy. The hunters of Solaria and Vyronii had strode into this dust sea and run straight into the enemy.\n\nAcastia reined in Elatus' stride and wheeled. The enemy were already filling the gap she had blasted in their ranks. Amber runes spun on the weapons console. The stubber was almost dry. Bolts of las-fire and rad-heavy rounds lashed at Elatus, and she swung her steed's ion shield around. It flared bright. The enemy would be all around her soon, but she needed only a few seconds more.\n\n'Onwards...' she hissed to herself.\n\nA clutch of cyborgs with scythe limbs scuttled towards her. Gun-pods arched above their backs.\n\nThaumas came over the dune crest to her left. It fired. Heavy rounds punched into the cyborgs. They spun back, metal and half-rotting flesh bursting into blood and sparks. Pluton's Armiger bounded down the dune face, landed and locked its legs. The recoil shook the light Knight as it pivoted, guns chugging out a stream of rounds. The tide of the enemy curled to face the new threat.\n\n'Ammunition depleting...' came Pluton's voice in Acastia's ear as she kicked Elatus forwards and gunned her chainfist to life. A thing like a scorpion cast in black iron leapt at her. She met it with the teeth of her blade and chewed it to fragments. Something in its unholy heart detonated with a blast of green lightning. Elatus flinched back.\n\nThe neural tether to Caradoc burned in Acastia's skull. She felt her hands curb her mount back as Caradoc's Knight came into sight. Meliae was at full stride, the pistons of its shank driving it forward in a blur. Acastia felt her half-brother's rage spill into glee as his Knight's bolt cannon fired. A tongue of muzzle flame breathed from the spinning barrels. Enemy machines vanished in a burning crescent of impacts and explosions. Meliae drove its charge home, ploughing in, stamping, crushing, sweeping its blade arm around in a reaping arc. Acastia could feel the rage and joy of slaughter flowing across the neural tether from Caradoc. She brought Elatus onto Meliae's left flank. Pluton was moving slower, Thaumas' stride jerking awkwardly.\n\nCaradoc was driving forwards, pulling more and more of the enemy machines to him. An enemy Knight stepped into sight on the horizon - first one, then a second, and then three more, their filthy shells the colour of dried bone. Banners of skin dangled from their weapon arms. Runes cast in dark iron spidered across what remained of their heraldry.\n\n'My liege,' Acastia said into the vox. She was watching the blurred image of the auspex. 'We need to turn. Solaria needs us to pull the enemy south.'\n\nCaradoc answered with a lash of neural command. She and Elatus went forwards into the oncoming press of enemy, towards the enemy Knights, towards the glory that Caradoc felt the universe owed him and had never given him.\n\n'My liege,' she said, forcing the word out. 'Please, we need to pull back-'\n\nBut it was too late.\n\nThe plan had been simple, a hunter's logic applied to war: hit the enemy hard and draw larger prey before pulling back as the true killers did their work. Once Caradoc and the Vyronii Knights had engaged, they had had a few moments to pull back, because the first of the Solaria Titans would have begun a run that would land it in the middle of the enemy like a spear thrust into the side of a charging beast. That was the plan and the will of Princeps Abhani Lus Mohana. It required courage and daring, and risk, but more, it required control.\n\nThe Solaria Warhound crested the dune to their left at a run and leaped. Acastia felt her breath catch with awe at the sight. Nothing that size should move with such feral grace. Pistons bunched. The call of its war-horns sounded.\n\nThe enemy Knights turned. Caradoc, halfway to them, faltered in his charge. Acastia felt the leash on her mind and limbs slacken, and strafed Elatus to the side.\n\nThe Solaria Warhound had seen them - had seen them even as it leaped from the crest of the dune; had seen them and known they were out of place and directly in the impact path of its leap. The Warhound twisted, trying to pull itself around. Caradoc's Knight was frozen. Acastia kicked maximum power into Elatus. The Armiger hit Meliae at only half stride. The impact spun the larger Knight back and to the side. Hammer force whipped through Elatus. Acastia felt her head and sight fill with spinning light.\n\nThe Warhound landed. Twisted, its left leg came down at an angle. The full weight of the god-machine hammered down into piston joints. Metal sheared. Void shields stuttered. Gas and liquid burst from broken cylinders. It fought to stand. The automata crushed beneath it exploded. The tide of enemy crashed into it, driven by momentum and suicidal kill protocols. The Titan fired, mega-bolters cutting a wild arc around it. The enemy Knights came forwards. Shells and beams of energy exploded across the Warhound's back as it struggled to stand.\n\nAcastia shook the pain and blinding light from her sight. She latched Elatus' targeter on to one of the enemy Knights and triggered the thermal lance. The beam of blinding heat exploded against an active ion shield. The enemy Knight shifted its gaze, gun aligning on Elatus.\n\nThe second Solaria"}
{"text":"icidal kill protocols. The Titan fired, mega-bolters cutting a wild arc around it. The enemy Knights came forwards. Shells and beams of energy exploded across the Warhound's back as it struggled to stand.\n\nAcastia shook the pain and blinding light from her sight. She latched Elatus' targeter on to one of the enemy Knights and triggered the thermal lance. The beam of blinding heat exploded against an active ion shield. The enemy Knight shifted its gaze, gun aligning on Elatus.\n\nThe second Solaria Titan arrived then. It came from behind Acastia. It was Bestia Est. Its strides sent dust pouring down the dune faces. Vulcan rounds and blinding light slashed across the enemy Knights. One fell, ion shield blown out, torso cored. The others fired back, but Bestia Est had already switched direction with the speed of a gust of wind.\n\nThen a third Solaria Warhound hit. Like Bestia Est, it came at full stride, guns firing, slicing into the enemy as they poured into its kill arc. Bestia Est changed direction still firing, pivoting around the enemy. Another enemy Knight blew apart, another fell.\n\nAcastia was hacking around her again, stubber and thermal lance firing, all thought of conserving ammunition gone. The ground was shaking, her mouth filled with iron.\n\nSeen from above, the battle would have seemed a spiral: Caradoc and his Armigers and a Solaria Warhound at the centre, surrounded by a mass of enemy machines and infantry; Bestia Est and its sister Warhound on the outside, turning in wide arcs as they herded and slaughtered their prey. It was over in under two minutes.\n\nAcastia watched Bestia Est slow its stride and fire a last blast from its guns into a pair of still-moving automata. Then Bestia Est turned its guns and gaze on where Meliae and the Vyronii Knights paced amongst the slaughter. The last flashes of a reforming void shield lit its hound features. It took a ground-shaking pace towards Caradoc's Knight.\n\nCaradoc must have transmitted something over a direct vox-stream to Abhani, but the princeps' reply snarled over the unit-wide vox.\n\n'I will gun you down, and live with whatever protest Vyronii wishes to make for sending a fool and a coward to war.'\n\nNo reply came, but Acastia could feel Caradoc's rage and shame across the neural tether, a migraine glow behind her eyes. The moment lengthened.\n\nBestia Est's guns cycled down and the Warhound turned and began to lope across the dunes.\n\n'We need to move before the enemy advance pins us,' growled Abhani. 'Follow.'\n\nAcastia felt the anger smoulder from Caradoc, then the goad as he spurred his Knight after the Warhounds.\n\nThe Achilus Line, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nAlong the centre of the Mercury Wall the sally doors opened. Spaced ten kilometres apart, they had opened to let the engines of Ignatum through, and now again to let a newborn Legion walk. They came in maniples formed by necessity. Where they could, the Collegia had merged the engines and crews of a common heritage, but for most, the formations they now belonged to were driven by blunt pragmatism. Warhounds that were once of the Nova Guard paced ahead of a Reaver formerly bound to Legio Amaranth and a Warlord once of Solaria. All still bore the colours of the Legios that they had once belonged to; there had been no time to grant them the colours of the newly born Legio Invigilata, but all bore its mark, either painted on a heraldic shield or simply etched into their armoured skin: a red eye haloed in silver casting lightning beneath its gaze. Wrathful, unblinking, holy in the sight of the machine and its god.\n\nThey walked, horns blaring as the light of battle touched their sensors. Static and scrap code washed over their systems, buzzing out of the distance like a cloud of insects. In her amniotic tank, Esha Ani Mohana heard the vox and data commands of her princeps call and respond as they spread along the wall line. They were distorted, speaking in a base Imperial battle cant rather than the dialect and code-ciphers of the dozen individual legions they had come from. Before them lay the Achilus Line - the cordon of blockhouses that lay fifteen kilometres out from the foot of the wall. Beyond that the kill-zone burned and flashed with the light of the battle. Esha Ani Mohana noticed the tactical data links update, mapping the known real-time picture of the battle sphere to the spirit of Luxor Invictoria. The links to Princeps Maximus Cydon showed active but not clear - nothing in the battle sphere was untouched by entropic failures. Out here everything was dying, either fast or by the slow seconds of falling sand and decaying metal. Nothing would walk away from this whole. She was sure.\n\nFar off she saw a cluster of communication markers flicker deep in the battle lines. Swift moving, following a hunter's path. For a second she hesitated. She had not had the time nor the means to contact her daughter after Vethorel's proclamation and the strange birth of the Legio Invigilata. Command queries pinged in her awareness. She held her silence and then opened up a long-range vox-link. Around her, Luxor Invictoria strode towards the engagement lines. The link fizzed.\n\n'Honoured Grand Master.' Abhani's voice echoed in the connection, flexing from distant to close. Esha Ani did not answer for a long moment. She suddenly felt the silence of her amnion tank, disturbed only by the jolt of her engine's strides moving it forwards.\n\n'Hello, my daughter,' she said at last.\n\nRemnant Dunes, Mercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nAbhani heard the machine simulacrum of her mother's voice and blinked. She swallowed in a dry throat. There was something in the words that reached through the cold modulation of her mother's false speech. Beyond Bestia Est's eye-ports, the land passed stride by stride.\n\n'What is your will?' she said at last.\n\n'Only to speak with you,' came the reply.\n\n'The legion walks?'\n\n'I walk,' came the reply, then the catch in the sound. Then her mother told her. Just a few words, no elaboration, just a direct transfer of information that sank into her cold as quiet steel. She felt Bestia Est respond to her. Data cleared, became distant. The fire of her reactor became a cold chill. She thought of the sisters and their engines dead on Beta-Garmon. She thought of the Titans and crews still out there amongst the stars, perhaps still alive, perhaps still hunting. She thought of the machines that walked with her mother now, machines that walked under a new name, Imperial Hunters no more. All the honour and heritage and loss from her grandmother, carried by Imperial Hunters through conquest and civil war to her. She thought of her mother, and thought she heard a catch in the machine-made voice as she spoke again.\n\n'You are Solaria now, Abhani Lus,' said her mother. 'You are all of us.'\n\n'Legio first,' she said and felt how those words, spoken so often but never truly understood until now, would follow her.\n\n'Hunt well, my daughter,' said her mother. Static filled the link, speaking into the silence. Then the link faded, and Bestia Est ran on into the cauldron of war, while before the wall Luxor Invictoria marched forwards with its new kin towards the engines of the Death's Heads and the falling lightning and tatters of reality.\n\n'Princeps.' The voice of a moderatus broke the silence that had settled in her. She blinked, her thoughts pulling from the distance to the world in front of her. 'I am getting multiple returns ahead, maximum range.'\n\nAbhani felt the catch in the moderatus' voice as she felt Bestia Est's void shields spark and cycle, a hound's hackles bristling. She looked out, but there was just the swirl of smoke and the flash of explosions. The auspex sounded a return, the pitch rising. The fog parted for a second, and there in the distance she saw what walked to face the defenders.\n\nMercury-Exultant kill-zone\n\nFirst the dead had walked, hundreds of Titans taken from the engine graves of the galaxy. Then the great maniples of Mortis had come, and with them the god-machines that were now hosts to daemons of despair and decay and death. Hundreds of engines marked with the livery of the Death's Heads, pressing against the Legio Ignatum and the other forces scrambled beyond the wall. The kill-zone was a cauldron of fire in which the flames of sorcery and warp light bubbled. But the enemy had not reached the walls, and the last steps under the sight of the walls' guns were blocked by the red and yellow and black Titans of the Fire Wasps, the abomination engines of the Ordo Sinister, and the motley-coloured Legio Invigilata. Enough to hold. Enough to kill the reapers of Mortis, even if the cost was total.\n\nBut the strength of the Death's Heads and the will of Horus had prepared for this last act of defiance. Behind the main advance walked engines made to do one thing - break other Titans and tear down fortresses. Only the Emperor-class machines were greater in size and destructive power, but these engines had a special purpose and the tools to complete it. Void shield generators blistered on their backs, enough to protect a warship. Fed by chains of reactors, they could cycle and restore their shield integrity without drawing power from their weapons. And what weapons they bore. Layers of batteries and clusters of engine-killing ordnance, guns that could scour armies from their feet. They had not marched to battle in the Great Crusade, the secrets of their making and their might held back by the Mechanicum, perhaps through fear, perhaps as a threat, the jealous hoarding tolerated by the Imperium. The name of their class and pattern had only been spoken in machine code, a scarred cipher that held the kernel of their purpose and divinity. Now as they walked to war, they bore a name in the tongues of those unblessed by knowledge of the machine. Warmaster Titans, they were called, in honour of the one that had brought this new age into being.\n\nThey walked together, a single block, each engine no more than a hundred metr"}
{"text":"ar, perhaps as a threat, the jealous hoarding tolerated by the Imperium. The name of their class and pattern had only been spoken in machine code, a scarred cipher that held the kernel of their purpose and divinity. Now as they walked to war, they bore a name in the tongues of those unblessed by knowledge of the machine. Warmaster Titans, they were called, in honour of the one that had brought this new age into being.\n\nThey walked together, a single block, each engine no more than a hundred metres from another, their reactors burning to a single count, their void shields merged into a single shroud that glittered with shrapnel impacts. Trios of Knights and packs of Warhounds circled them like lesser fish around a school of behemoths. On they walked, unhurried, their tread the slow countdown of inevitability.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 24 kilometres.\n\nOath\n\nAll that we had hoped to never lose\n\nPious to a different creed\n\nThe Blackstone, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\n'Ready?' Mauer asked as she stepped through the cell door. Keeler looked at Sindermann.\n\nThe two held each other's gaze, and then Keeler nodded.\n\n'We go from here as a three,' said Mauer. 'Once we are out of the fortress, we are going to be transferring to a groundcar convoy. That will take us to the checkpoint at Ganymede Zone Intersection.'\n\n'That is where you believe the incident will occur?' said Sindermann.\n\nMauer shook her head.\n\n'If they want to stop her, they will hit us there. If that happens, you know the contingency - we vanish you both out at the point it occurs. We could get beyond the checkpoint as a group, but the variables go up and not in a good way - too many angles, too many people.' Mauer took a breath, looked at them both: Sindermann, his old face open, eyes sharp; Keeler looking at the leaves of parchment in Sindermann's hands. 'Contingency route is you both get out of the vehicle, move to the third building on the left. There is a door that's normally sealed. Knock four times and it will open. Ahlborn will be there. From there do exactly what he says, when he says it.'\n\n'Is there another way of responding to Conroi-Captain Ahlborn?' said Sindermann lightly, but his expression was grave. 'You have reason to believe an attempt is likely.'\n\nMauer shrugged.\n\n'If forces inside or outside the Imperial hierarchy are going to make an attempt to kill or capture Mamzel Keeler then a time and place close to her release is likely.'\n\n'Fewer places to look, and bottlenecks we have to pass through - I appreciate the thoroughness, boetharch, but the details from the first briefings are still quite fresh. I am presuming that none of us will know where Conroi-Captain Ahlborn will take us in this eventuality?'\n\n'From this point, information must be segmented,' said Mauer.\n\nMauer noticed the old man was rolling an autoquill through the fingers of his right hand. She had spent enough time with Sindermann now to know that he was not prone to fidgeting.\n\n'Nervous?' she asked. He glanced at her, a small ghost of a smile in the wrinkles of his face.\n\n'Of course,' he said. 'The stakes are rather high, don't you think?'\n\nShe felt her mouth twitch.\n\n'Fair point,' she replied, and looked at Keeler. The woman looked back at Mauer, face calm, gaze settled. Mauer almost flinched. It was like looking into the heart of a cyclone, still and calm, but edged by a storm. For a second, she wondered what it was that they were setting in motion.\n\n'All shall be as it must, boetharch,' said Keeler; then she looked at Sindermann and held out her hand. 'The pen, Kyril. It is time for me to tell my lie.'\n\nSindermann held up the autoquill and the docket of parchments, a heavy wax seal of the Order of Interrogation hanging from each leaf.\n\nThe quill scratched in the quiet.\n\n'There,' said Keeler. 'It is done.'\n\nSindermann looked like he was about to say something, and then closed his mouth and bowed his head. Keeler put out a hand and touched the old man's face. He looked up. Mauer saw the passing of a sad smile on Keeler's face. Then she rose and turned to Mauer. 'Let's go.'\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nA face of marble smiled down at Oll with needle teeth. Orb eyes held his. He saw nothing else but had the impression of clawed fingers and curves and scales.\n\nI have waited, Ollanius.\n\nHe heard its voice, and it was the same voice that he had heard call across the waves of the Aegean and had dragged the crews of ships down to the midnight beneath the waves. He knew that he never wanted to move again, never wanted to leave, and that he would not need to. He would become stone like all the rest, living in perfection. Was that not everything he had always wanted - to not play a part, just to be still, and belong and be?\n\nThe statues were spinning and howling, and there were figures coming from the shadows beneath the trees, the riot of colours on their armour making their shapes swim and flicker. Space Marines, daubed in orange and mauve, in crimson and lime, in copper and emerald. Shrunken, amber-encased heads swung on silver chains. Bulbous weapons hooted as they armed. The air reeked of faeces and roses.\n\nA trap, it was a trap, of course - he had known that; but he wondered how far back they had stepped into it. Back in the tunnel when they had arrived and he had heard John's call for help? Before? On Calth when Rane had lost his wife and heard the siren song for the first time? And now here they were, all the way down in the Labyrinth with the beast and without a thread to follow out. Time was not what people thought it was, Oll knew that better than most. The false gods of the warp saw it true. What had been and what would be were eternally present to them. There was no paradox in them setting up Rane in his path years before so that he would be a lure now.\n\nThe statue above Oll - that was not Rane's wife and never had been - bent down to him, luminous marble limbs flowing, smile wide.\n\nA burst of las-fire hit it in the top of its skull and blew the crown of its head off. It arched back. Stone fragments and black-crimson ichor flicked through the air. Rane shrieked. Oll shivered. Another burst of las-fire, but this time the statue tumbled aside.\n\n'Neve!' screamed Rane. He whirled and his pistol was in his hand, aiming back at where John and Katt had come from the treeline. Oll came up and slammed into the boy. Rane's gun went off. The las-blast hit the statue of a man bearing a bowl of red liquid. The point of the statue's chin blew off in a spray of blood, and the stone man screamed. Oll felt rather than heard it. He and Rane were on the ground scrambling. The boy still had the pistol. Oll's rifle was tangling with its strap as he tried to wrap his arms and legs around the boy, to hold and pin.\n\nThe bleeding statue of the man with the bowl screamed again, twisting, feet ripping from its plinth in a spray of blood and bone. Its arms tore free of the bowl on its shoulders. Red liquid showered out.\n\nA cacophony of screams rose from the statues. Oll felt something burst inside his nose. He could smell copper and taste iron. John and Katt both staggered as though drunk, gun barrels dropping. More statues ripped from their places. Some left parts of limbs and bloody pockets of flesh inside broken stone shells.\n\n'Neve!' shouted Rane. 'He killed Neve!'\n\nBut John had not killed the thing that Rane thought was his lost love. Not killed it even by half. It pirouetted into sight. It was still bloody, but it had shed its skin of false stone now. Iridescent hair spilled around its head as though floating in water. It was taller, much taller, its limbs grown into curved talons, pearl-white scales gleaming over flexing muscle. It was laughing, but the sound coming from its mouth was colour and shape, a great spill of vibrating red and neon-green sound. It was moving fast, but somehow also slowly, growing as it moved, lengthening, the shadows of its whirling arms forming new arms, its head lengthening into a snout, folds of skin unfolding into spills of silk. Oll saw it and felt a jolt of pure terror spark through him. He wanted to run or to wait, but also wanted it to reach him. He wanted to let it speak to him and only him. He wanted to stab a knife into his ear so that he could not hear and think any more, so that he did not have to be in a universe where a thing like this existed.\n\nIt was the promise of all that had been lost and could not be given back, and it smiled at him and reached down with a hand that grew black-glass talons.\n\nOllanius, it said. Ollanius... Pious Ollanius, brief Warmaster, first of those without death. Ollanius, you are home... No need to run. No need to sail further...\n\nA spear of las-fire reached for the daemon and exploded into insects with burning wings before it could touch its skin. Katt was firing at it, John trying to pull her back. The thing did not even look at them, but trembled and a shockwave rippled out. Katt and John tumbled back, like leaves caught in a gale.\n\nThe daemon's image was blinding as it reached for Oll.\n\n'-'\n\nBlood sprayed from John's lips as he spoke the un-word. It stole colour and sound from the air. The glittering daemon staggered and fell, becoming for an eye-blink something grey, wasted and ugly.\n\n'No...' Oll tried to say, rolling over, ears bleeding. 'No, John! Don't!' The words crumbled to a hiss as they came from his mouth. He could see John Grammaticus on his knees, blood pouring down his face. Wounds had opened on his cheeks. The veins under his skin were black, bulging. Blood and broken teeth fell from his mouth. Katt was half on her feet, her hands clamped to her ears, vomiting uncontrollably. The un-word that John had spoken, that he had learnt from Oll's memory of the tower, hung above his head in a synaesthetic halo of colour, jagged yellow, neon purple.\n\nThe daemon began to stand again. Ash fell from it. Muscles writhed under loose, grey skin. Its face was a ruin of cracked features and black, rotting te"}
{"text":"heeks. The veins under his skin were black, bulging. Blood and broken teeth fell from his mouth. Katt was half on her feet, her hands clamped to her ears, vomiting uncontrollably. The un-word that John had spoken, that he had learnt from Oll's memory of the tower, hung above his head in a synaesthetic halo of colour, jagged yellow, neon purple.\n\nThe daemon began to stand again. Ash fell from it. Muscles writhed under loose, grey skin. Its face was a ruin of cracked features and black, rotting teeth. It bellowed, and the sound vibrated through the air in a black cone. Marble slabs shattered. It jerked forwards, cloven feet spreading flames. Bale Rane came to his feet, screaming a cascade of red agony. His eyes were wide. Tears boiled on his cheeks. Oll wondered in that second if Rane saw the daemon true, or if its lie of hope still clung to his sight. The daemon's talon was a brief blur, a stutter in time, so fast that it seemed the passing of a shadow.\n\nRane stood for a moment. Then his torso hinged open. Blood gushed out. Rane collapsed, the halves of the bisected body folding to the ground. Oll cried out as the boy's head hit the ground, mouth and eyes still open.\n\nA pulse of shriek-sound ripped through the air, its blast forming ripples of cyan and magenta. The writhing statues blew into fragments of stone, flesh and bone. Waves of ultra-sonic pressure shuddered through Oll's bones. The colour-daubed Space Marines were advancing, chromed weapons levelled.\n\nThe daemon coiled. Conjured muscles tightened under vein-threaded skin. It hunched to spring forward. A beam of crimson energy hit it in the flank. False flesh blew to ash. It roared in anger and complete silence. Oll was halfway to his feet as the second beam hit. The daemon's substance sucked back into it as the beam bored through it. Oll turned to see a figure in grey armour blur as it ran through the garden of shattered statues. Leetu fired another pulse from his serpenta pistol, clamped it to his thigh and pulled a rib-barrelled gun from his back. A tongue of flame breathed from the muzzle. Rounds hit the daemon and burst into white starbursts. John was standing, trembling. The daemon leapt towards Oll, white fire falling from it like raindrops reflecting the noon sun.\n\n'-!' shouted John Grammaticus.\n\nThe phrase of Enuncia broke the light. Spectrums inverted. Blood glittered green. Shadows blazed bright. The sky above blinked to a black void.\n\nOll saw the daemon unravel. Flesh spooled into ropes of ash that fell upwards. Its shape dissolved into a chalk-smear blur. He could taste salt and smell bitter ozone. He thought he saw its mouth open to scream. Then it was simply not there. Motes of ash and stone, and globules of blood hung in the air. Oll was shivering. Sweat poured from his skin, blood from his ears and the corners of his eyes. He could feel the un-word John had spoken still echoing beyond hearing, an angel summoned and sent to end existence, the sound of a tower falling under the fall of lightning.\n\nThe thunderclap came. A blinding light bleaching his sight. Sound returned with a roar.\n\nAnd he was pushing himself up, his hand finding his rifle.\n\n'Two things make a soldier,' he had said to Rane once, years ago, as the boy had followed him through the labyrinth of time and misadventure to Terra. 'First is the ability to do something damned stupid without knowing why, and second is letting go of your life before you let go of your weapon.'\n\nRane lay on the ground. The blood that was pouring from him had begun to bubble and burn in the sorcery-rich air. Oll lifted the boy's head, calling for who knows what help from anyone that could hear.\n\nA shadow fell over him. Grey, massive, holding a gun that breathed fire into the Emperor's Children that were still coming from the undergrowth.\n\n'You must leave him, sir,' bellowed Leetu, pausing to reload in the time it took to draw breath. A shivering scream of sound hit the grey Space Marine. Layers of ceramite blew into dust. Leetu flinched, then fired back. A warrior in silver-and-amethyst armour fell, its head a ball of white flame. 'Now.'\n\nOll saw Zybes then. The pay-by-day had crossed the distance well behind Leetu but was firing as he ran, ducking down amongst the stone plinths and pulped trees to fire a stream of shots into the distance. With him was Graft, clanking forwards, supporting a grey-faced Krank. The veteran had his pistol out and was firing, covering Zybes as the other ran to Leetu and Oll.\n\nZybes dropped beside Oll, aimed his gun into the distance and fired.\n\nGraft clanked into cover a moment later.\n\n'Move, Oll,' Zybes shouted, and jerked a hand towards the centre of the dome and the whirling pool at its heart. 'That way - it's the only way the bastards aren't coming from. Get the others and move!'\n\nZybes, resentful Zybes, not clever and gifted like Katt, not a kid like Rane. A man who never wanted to be a soldier, who had never signed up to fight, dragged along by Oll and the others. Now shouting, now here like all the rest, ready to die just because Oll had made a bad choice. Like all the rest, like all the crews and units he had been part of - all too damn loyal to someone they did not really know.\n\nHe stood and turned, began to run to John. The psyker was on the ground. A circle of broken slabs surrounded him. The skin of his face was blistered and blackened. Lips almost burned away. His eyes were open, though. Wide open. He gasped, and tried to move. His hands were twisted as though the bones inside the flesh had shattered. Katt was trying to pull him up. Blood covered her face and hands. Oll grabbed John under the other arm.\n\n'You shouldn't have done that,' growled Oll. 'You shouldn't have spoken the Enuncia.'\n\nJohn Grammaticus grinned through his mask of blood.\n\n'You might have a point,' he hissed. 'Next time you can do it.'\n\nA scythe of sound sheared across the dome at head height. Stone and wood blasted to pulp and dust. Oll looked at Katt and nodded. They began a stooped run, John Grammaticus hanging between them, gasping up blood-froth. Behind them Zybes, Graft and Krank were following. Oll could hear the roaring blast of Leetu's rifle.\n\nThey reached the end of the row of statues. Oll could see the way through the shredded trees, could see the light glimmering off the water in the whirlpool at the dome's centre. He caught a glint of colour out of the corner of his eye, and twisted. Space Marines in multicoloured armour were closing on them. A legionary in bloated chrome armour lumbered to a halt. Sound shivered around it, the air popping with impossible colours. Pipes arched over its back. Its mouth was a tunnel into its head. Twin weapons hung from its limbs, power feeds shivering as they inhaled to fire.\n\nOll opened his mouth to shout, and began to pull Katt and John down.\n\nDown and down... past the river that cut the living from the dead.\n\nI have coin for you, ferryman...\n\nWill you take it from me?\n\nA woman in red tatters stepped across the path in front of them. She was tall, very tall. A red veil hid her eyes, and finger bones hung from the hooks in her lips and chin. Her mouth was smiling.\n\nA towering figure moved in front of her. It moved fast, far too fast for something that size. Billowing fabric surrounded it like multicoloured smoke. Silvered armour plates glinted beneath the snout of a helm. A Space Marine, or something written on that scale. It raised its bolter. Oll's eyes met the black circle of the barrel.\n\n'Down,' it growled, an instant before it fired.\n\nSanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nThe vehicles already had their engines running as Mauer reached the courtyard. Troopers in the red armour and silver visors of the Command Prefectus stood ready beside each vehicle, guns ready, eyes alert. Mauer had her pistol in her hand. The vox-bead in her ear clicked and buzzed with code phrases. Sindermann and Keeler were shimmer blurs to her left and right. Both wore falsehoods that broke their image into things without clear depth, size or colour. They moved to the left groundcar. All the buildings were empty, and she had sent people she trusted to check all of them.\n\nPeople she trusted...\n\n'Trust no one, might be a wiser maxim...'\n\nHer eyes went to the empty sockets of the windows. Above, the skin of the aegis shield flashed against the sky.\n\nShe could hear her heartbeat in her ears.\n\nThe groundcars chuckled exhaust fumes into the air. Their roof-mounted cannons twitched. Rain fell, exploding silver across the water pooling on the flagstones.\n\nNow, here; this was the time. If someone had betrayed them then they would hit them now.\n\nThe red troopers moved as they crossed the ground. Folding in. She reached their groundcar. Its doors were open. Solsha looked at her from the driver's cradle, visor up. He nodded.\n\n'In,' she hissed at Sindermann and Keeler.\n\nThey moved to the doors. Raindrops smeared where they hit the falsehoods.\n\nThe outriders gunned the engines of their machines.\n\nShe turned to look up at the buildings. Ghosts danced down her spine.\n\nAnother flash in the sky above.\n\nShe swung into the seat beside Solsha. The door slammed closed.\n\n'Go,' she said. The engine gunned and then it leapt forwards. Acceleration shoved Mauer back into her seat. The vehicle in front of them was already out of the courtyard. The outriders blurred past. They hit the street and the groundcar accelerated. The facades of buildings blinked past. There was nothing else on the street.\n\n'Status,' she said.\n\n'Auspex zero,' said Solsha, his voice iron calm. Lights blinked across the groundcar controls. 'Time to intersection, four minutes.'\n\nMauer mag-clamped her pistol to the dashboard, and pulled up a lascarbine from the footwell. The rain was exploding and rolling down the armourglass.\n\n'Contacts,' buzzed her vox-bead. 'Coming in from the west. I count three.'\n\n'Visual?' said Mauer.\n\n'Negative,' said Solsha, 'but they read as military.'\n\n'Everything in here is military,' said Mauer. She glan"}
{"text":"said.\n\n'Auspex zero,' said Solsha, his voice iron calm. Lights blinked across the groundcar controls. 'Time to intersection, four minutes.'\n\nMauer mag-clamped her pistol to the dashboard, and pulled up a lascarbine from the footwell. The rain was exploding and rolling down the armourglass.\n\n'Contacts,' buzzed her vox-bead. 'Coming in from the west. I count three.'\n\n'Visual?' said Mauer.\n\n'Negative,' said Solsha, 'but they read as military.'\n\n'Everything in here is military,' said Mauer. She glanced out of the narrow slit in her door. Lightning blinked high above.\n\nMauer nodded, eyes on the drenched gloom beyond the windows.\n\n'They will intersect with us just after we reach the checkpoint.'\n\n'Trouble?' asked Sindermann from the rear compartment.\n\n'Just be ready to move when we reach the checkpoint,' she replied.\n\nThe street was narrowing. The outriders moved closer. Water rose in arcs from their rear wheels. A cliff of buildings rose ahead of them. The road arced to the left around a forty-metre statue of one of the Emperor's dead generals.\n\nA light blinked on the dashboard.\n\n'Someone is out there,' said Solsha, his voice level. He switched to vox. 'We are coming up on the checkpoint. One vehicle ahead of us is moving through now. All units, stand by.'\n\n'Ready?' she said to the blurred shapes of Sindermann and Keeler. 'One way or another you follow the plan, right?'\n\n'Understood and ready,' said Sindermann.\n\nThey took the corner, water spraying up, engines growling. Mauer could see the checkpoint ahead - five hundred metres - gun towers, troopers in rain-slicked greatcoats. The street was only just wide enough for two vehicles to pass. The lightning-lit sky was a narrow slit above. A cargo hauler was just ahead of them, going fast but braking. Militia stencils covered its sides.\n\n'Contacts rear,' came a voice over the vox. Three vehicles turned onto the street behind them. Block shapes in drabs and greens. 'They are coming in fast.'\n\n'Stand by,' said Mauer.\n\nAhead, the cargo-hauler skidded as it braked. One of its load doors flapped. The cargo segments on its back shifted. It braked again.\n\n'Shit!' called Solsha.\n\nThe cargo-hauler slewed across the road. There were figures running beside the gun towers of the checkpoint. The hauler's wheels and tracks locked and then shrieked to full spin. It hit the gun tower and checkpoint gate. Rockcrete exploded out.\n\nShouts, running feet, gun barrels pointing.\n\nThe escort car behind them reversed. The outriders had kicked wide.\n\nThe guards at the checkpoint were shouting. The rain was a curtain of silver fragments.\n\nMauer had the butt of the carbine at her shoulder.\n\n'Out,' said Mauer, releasing the door and pushing it open. 'Now.'\n\n'Three contacts to rear still closing at speed,' said Solsha.\n\n'This is it,' she said. 'All units, engage on contact.'\n\nMauer dropped to the street. Keeler and Sindermann were behind her. The roar of engines was loud over the rain. Figures were getting out of the drive unit of the cargo-hauler. A guard near the wrecked gate was shouting, gun half rising. Mauer saw the autogun in one of the hauler driver's hands. The guard did not see it, and was still shouting as the burst of rounds hit him in the face and chest.\n\nMauer fired. The round hit the hauler driver in the shoulder as he turned, and punched him back.\n\nThe cannons on the rear convoy vehicle opened up. Then there was a roar of metal slamming into metal as something hit the tail vehicle.\n\nRunning feet, shouts. Gunfire streaked through the rain.\n\n'Go!' she shouted.\n\nThree figures came out of the rain, guns up. She saw dark helmets, breath masks, infra-goggles. She fired. The burst hit the lead figure. The cannon on the groundcar roared. The figures scattered.\n\nSolsha rammed the machine into reverse. It kicked back, slewed around. Down the road, a cannon opened up. Heavy rounds slammed into the groundcar's frame. Then the lead vehicle went up with a dull rolling boom. The blast wave picked Mauer up and slammed her down. Her ears were ringing. Blood in her mouth. Colours spiralling in her eyes.\n\nAll gone to hell, all gone to hell as fast as she had feared. She did not know where Keeler and Sindermann were, but she had anticipated that this might happen, planned for it. All Keeler and Sindermann needed to do was follow that plan.\n\nSomething shrieked in the air overhead. Mauer pushed herself up. Burning promethium floated across the dancing puddles. A gunship came in low, block-framed, thrusters spinning raindrops into mist. Rotor cannons spun. Rounds drilled into the groundcar behind her. She ducked an instant before its fuel and ammunition exploded. The gunship slid sideways, panning fire across the road. Las-bolts and rounds spat up at it.\n\n'We're boxed in!' shouted Solsha from the groundcar, as he released his harness and dropped through the open door. The gunship was coming around, the gaze of its cannon swinging towards them. There was fire coming from the gun towers on the checkpoint gate, from the crashed hauler, from Mauer's troops as they returned fire.\n\n'Where did the gunship come from?' shouted Solsha from beside her.\n\nThe buzz-roar of its cannon paused, like a fire-breathing beast drawing breath.\n\n'Move,' Mauer shouted, and pushed away. A tongue of fire reached down from the gunship. Rounds hit the groundcar. Armourglass and metal distorted. Mauer was running for the crashed hauler and the checkpoint gate.\n\nFor a second, in the blink of cannon fire, she wondered just how everything had got this bad.\n\n'All units, break and evade,' she shouted into the vox.\n\nTheir groundcar distorted, crumpling like paper in a balled fist.\n\nA figure came out of the rain beside the hauler. Mauer had the impression of worker's overalls, grey, striped with yellow and black, and the barrel of an autogun. She fired. Two bursts hit the figure in the gut and chest. He slammed back, stumbled, rolled, then tried to rise. She saw the body armour under the torn overalls a second before a burst of las-fire hit the man in the head. The top of his skull blasted to fragments.\n\n'Thanks,' she called to Solsha, as they ducked behind the mass of the hauler's front wheel.\n\nShe looked up, suddenly aware of the breath sawing between her teeth. A gunship. Whoever had moved against them had mobilised a gunship inside the Sanctum Imperialis. That spoke to a power, and a recklessness, beyond what she had anticipated. That was going to be a problem. Keeler was likely loose and free, though, that was what mattered. Now all she needed to do was try to live past the present.\n\n'...Boetharch...' The voice fizzed from the vox-bead in her ear. Overhead, the gunship was coming around. Mauer suddenly felt cold. It was Ahlborn's voice.\n\n'Ahlborn,' she replied, shouting over the din. 'What has happened? Where is Keeler?'\n\n'She's-' His voice cut out.\n\nShe saw Sindermann then, staggering forwards in the rain, the falsehood half shredded from him, blood on the visible sliver of his face. Mauer began to run. She reached the old man a second before a stream of las-fire blazed across the street. They tumbled to the ground. Solsha sent a stream of fire into the dark. Mauer pulled Sindermann up and dragged him into a staggering run.\n\n'Where is she?' she shouted. 'What happened?'\n\n'Someone...' gasped Sindermann; there was fresh blood flowing down his face. 'Someone was waiting... Waiting for us. Almost got us... Euphrati... got... she got away.'\n\n'Where?'\n\n'I don't... I didn't see which way she ran.'\n\n'Who was waiting for you?'\n\n'Oh, shit!' said Solsha. Mauer's head snapped up as another aircraft came in above the building tops. She had an instant to take in the lines of a Storm Eagle, before missiles loosed from its back. The gunship above them had enough time to jerk in mid-air before it became a fireball. The Storm Eagle's assault ramp was open. Mauer saw a giant in armour braced on its edge. The aircraft banked and then slammed still with a shriek of thrusters. The figure jumped. Mauer's instincts screamed at her to run, to get as far away as she could. Even if she had listened, there was no time.\n\nThe armoured giant hit the remains of the groundcar and crushed its roof with its landing. Eyes glowed red in a blank-faced helm. Mauer met its gaze for an instant. The sound of the rain and gunfire seemed to dim. Everything was held in that red gaze - a lifetime of war, and the promise of the only gift its kind could give. A blast of las-fire splashed across the Space Marine's shoulder. It did not flinch, but stood and began to kill.\n\nMarmax South\n\nKatsuhiro watched the angel die. Baeron was trying to stand. Blood smeared the ruin of his armour, brighter than the filth and soot-darkened ceramite. A ragged hole had punched through the left side of his chest and gouged through armour, flesh, bone. The wound... It wasn't a wound. Something like that didn't fit the word. It had been there before the last wave. Now... now there was worse. Katsuhiro watched the angel try to move. He did not know what to do. Baeron had half fallen through the remains of the firing wall, knife gripped in his remaining hand. He kept on trying to rise. Parts of his armour kept twitching as though trying to amplify a misfiring movement. The attack had drained back, the gunfire slackening to leave a quiet for the angel's gurgling breaths to fill.\n\nKatsuhiro did not know what to do. The sight of it, the sight of Baeron, red now only from his own blood, held him still.\n\n'Lord,' he said.\n\n'Be quiet,' hissed Steena from beside him. She had her head in her hands. The others... he didn't know who or where the other troopers behind the firing wall were, living bodies, caked in mud and blood and dust. Their uniforms and marks of distinction had disappeared: officer, high-born, script or veteran professional, all of it was gone. There was just the fact that they were here, in this small piece of the world, hemmed in by grey smoke and yellow fog, watching one of the Emperor's demigod"}
{"text":".\n\n'Be quiet,' hissed Steena from beside him. She had her head in her hands. The others... he didn't know who or where the other troopers behind the firing wall were, living bodies, caked in mud and blood and dust. Their uniforms and marks of distinction had disappeared: officer, high-born, script or veteran professional, all of it was gone. There was just the fact that they were here, in this small piece of the world, hemmed in by grey smoke and yellow fog, watching one of the Emperor's demigod warriors breathe his last. 'Just let him end,' said Steena, and Katsuhiro was not sure if it was a plea to him or the universe.\n\nBaeron shivered again. Fresh red dribbled from cracks. Katsuhiro had not seen him after the last attack, after they had pulled back and found a still-functioning bit of wall to shelter behind. They had pulled back twice more since. Once at the command of an officer who had vanished soon after, and once because the enemy had just kept coming. He had no idea what the chain of command was right now, but others had gathered to him and Steena, most likely because they were not running and that meant that people presumed they had authority or a plan. He supposed he did - have a plan that was, a very simple one: hold until he couldn't any more. That was all there was to do. The universe, even this nightmare within a nightmare, had become very simple to him - trust in the Emperor and hold, or run and feel the last thing that was his break inside his soul. He was going to die, one way or another, and it would be soon, he knew.\n\nThe dead were everywhere. Some fell, overcome by fever, mouths and throats filled with pustules, gurgling last breaths as they shivered and clutched the waiting ground. Bullets found others, or the fumes that drifted across the ground and then rolled back like a ghost sea. Not everyone died though. People walked from bunkers that had crushed dozens of others. Diseases swept through groups in hours, but left half alone for no reason that Katsuhiro could grasp. At least no reason he wanted to grasp. There was a thought that had been growing in him since he had seen the shape of the black angel against the sky - the idea that there had to be some left alive so that there were souls to suffer. That somehow the fear and desperation mattered more than slaughter. It was an idea that he had tried to drown with the words of prayer and the golden memory of the saint. It sometimes worked, but it had begun to fail when the dying angel had walked from the fog and fallen at his feet.\n\n'Lord Baeron,' he said again, edging closer so that he was within touching distance of the Blood Angel. 'You are... you are wounded...' He heard the words fail as they came from his mouth. What was he trying to do? What was there to do at this moment? He turned his head to look at Steena.\n\n'I...' The word growled through the air. 'I cannot...' Katsuhiro turned back, looked down at the mangled lump that was the angel's head. Skull and flesh and helm blurred. Red bubbles popped. Jelly-soft lumps quivered. 'I cannot... see.'\n\n'Lord, I am... my name is Katsu-'\n\n'I know... I recog... Your... voice. You are under my... comm...'\n\nKatsuhiro heard the breath gurgle out with the last word. He thought of the moments he had seen the Blood Angel in the last days or weeks, always a fleeting glimpse. He was not sure he had ever heard his own name spoken in Baeron's presence.\n\n'I am under your command, lord.'\n\nThe angel took a great breath that shook his frame. Red frothed from the helm and from holes in the armour. A stump rose. There were just a finger and a thumb at the end. Katsuhiro did not know what will or strength drove it, but the remains of the hand suddenly had him by the front of his uniform, pulling him closer.\n\n'You...' gasped Baeron. 'You did... not flee.' Katsuhiro shook his head, opened his mouth, but the angel forced more words out. 'You will... you will hold... this section.'\n\nKatsuhiro blinked, swallowed. He did not know what he had been thinking to hear from the mouth of such a warrior in his last moments.\n\nNot this... came the answer.\n\nBaeron's back arched as he took another breath and raised his voice, so that it was heard again, loud and strong enough to jerk up the heads of the other troops behind the firing lip.\n\n'Follow... this one,' he said. Katsuhiro found his head was shaking. 'I am... giving... an order,' called Baeron, still loud.\n\nKatsuhiro went still. He was suddenly cold, the weight of what was happening and what would happen next waiting for him after these few moments of life had passed. He found he was thinking of how long ago it had been, and how far he had come, since he had stepped onto this section of the Marmax South line. It felt as though that tiered wall and that time was a long way away, but it was not. It was not because here was Baeron beside him, and that meant that this must be the same section, that the rubble and firing lines and scrap trenches were the parapets and bastions he had stood on in the past. He had moved very little. It was the world that had moved. He looked up at the clutch of filth-stained soldiers close to them. He wondered how many of them had been there on the morning he and Steena had climbed the steps, and he had looked out and paused at the light of the dawn in the distance. Some, perhaps. They all looked like nothing and no one he could recognise. He guessed that neither did he.\n\n'Yes, lord,' he found himself saying to Baeron. 'I will die for...'\n\nHe found the word he had wanted to say falter, but something in the remains of the angel moved and Katsuhiro realised it was Baeron shaking his head.\n\n'We all die... for one another... in... the... end...'\n\nThen there was a last, great shiver and the mutilated hand gripping Katsuhiro released its grip.\n\nHe did not move. He could not move. Only look at the stillness that had been a thing of wonder and terror and strength. He wondered what he should do for a long moment, and then stood, pulling his rifle up and checking his pouches for ammunition. He thought of the man with the gun who had got off a macro train in another life. He looked at his hand; it was shaking. That would have to stop. He couldn't shake, couldn't do anything that would let those around him find a reason to do anything but stand and fight.\n\nTo us He gave His angels... The words ran in his head.\n\n'Steena, and you.' He pointed to another of the troopers near her. 'What's your name?'\n\n'Jacobus Solex,' said the trooper, clutching his lasgun tight. 'Albia, First Sappers...'\n\n'Make a sweep down the line and check for ammunition, Jacobus. You and you,' another jab of his finger at two other crouched figures, 'run the line south and link up with any unit in the next section. Find out if they have command infrastructure. If they do, update that this section holds.'\n\nThey moved without hesitation. Just like that. He almost smiled. He was moving now, standing, turning to look at the distance where the next wave would come from.\n\n'He protects!' he shouted, and turned to look at the other troopers.\n\n'He protects,' called one, not loud but with enough strength to carry. Then another echoed the call, and then another, and it was loud now, voices calling out in released fear and rage and defiance.\n\n'He protects!'\n\n'He protects!'\n\n'He protects!'\n\nKatsuhiro nodded and looked at the dead angel whose grave would be the wasteland that he had bled his last on.\n\n'As we protect Him,' he said to himself.\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\n'So, do you wish to leave paradise?' Oll looked around. The woman in rags and tatters was next to them. Oll's gun came up. The woman shook her head. There was ice in the air, forming in a haze. Oll felt the pressure in his skull. The woman was still smiling. That is not in your interest, Ollanius, said a voice in his head.\n\nKatt made a sound like a hiss of steam. Oll felt heat blaze on his skin. The shadows on Katt's face had swallowed her eyes. Her mouth was open in a snarl. The woman in red tatters turned her head towards Katt. Inside his skull, Oll felt two pressure waves meet like a hammer striking an anvil. Blood and soot coloured the air. Katt was shaking, teeth bared. The veiled woman's smile had vanished.\n\n'Unexpected,' she said. Then she turned to Oll. 'All of us need to leave and leave now. The path of opportunity is narrow, Ollanius, walk it now or be lost.'\n\n'No...' gasped John Grammaticus, trying to straighten. 'No, she is...' He shuddered in Oll's grip.\n\n'I am an ally,' said the woman. 'I am not one of the Children's slaves, not Horus' puppet. I serve truth, and in that we have common purpose.' In the back of Oll's mind he heard Ariadne's voice and Medea's and Niumue's.\n\n'This thread will lead you out...'\n\n'I will tell you how to pass through the flames and send the sleepless dragon to the land of dreams...'\n\n'You were always better at choices, Oll...'\n\n'This is a moment of alignment, not fracture,' said the woman. 'I am here as an ally.'\n\n'Who are you?' Oll asked.\n\nThe bones hanging from the woman's lips clinked. The air was shimmering around her as though rippling with heat.\n\n'Surely the real question is, what do I want?' she said. 'And the answer to that is that I want to see mankind live. I want to see it ascend. I want to see it outlive what is coming.'\n\n'Oll, she is a liar,' gasped John from beside him. 'Kill her now. The Primordial Annihilator has her. She is a reborn, a new one of us. The Cabal tried to... Damien went after her, but...'\n\nThe woman raised her hands and lifted the red veil from her face. The eyes beneath were silver-white with blindness.\n\nI have walked the path of gods, Ollanius, she said, and her voice sounded clear in Oll's head. Everything else was distant, a thin slice of time that would not be noticed as having passed. There was a smell, too, a bleed of scent into his senses - ashes and incense, the smell of burned civilisations and sacrifice. I have crossed into the underworld a"}
{"text":"mien went after her, but...'\n\nThe woman raised her hands and lifted the red veil from her face. The eyes beneath were silver-white with blindness.\n\nI have walked the path of gods, Ollanius, she said, and her voice sounded clear in Oll's head. Everything else was distant, a thin slice of time that would not be noticed as having passed. There was a smell, too, a bleed of scent into his senses - ashes and incense, the smell of burned civilisations and sacrifice. I have crossed into the underworld and come back. I have seen the face of the universe's shadow. I know its truth and its lies. Nothing is one thing, nothing wholly evil nor good, nothing is kind that is not also cruel. You know that truth, too. You know the Emperor, just as I know Horus. You know that the Emperor is powerful and bathed in insight and will lead humanity to destruction. I know Horus and the ashen war he brings. I know that even in victory, Horus will lead us not to triumph and power but to slavery and Chaos. I have seen it, and I have done what I can to see that it does not come to pass. There is another way, a way that lies neither in Horus' tyranny nor the Emperor's delusion. I am an echo of you, Ollanius - though I am pious to a different creed. I have died and am born to live again. You have never died, but lived to see all that you know become past. You see power as a sin. I see it as the only way to salvation.\n\nHe almost smiled. Almost wept. In the back of his mind, all the line of Hecate's daughters screamed at him from their places of abandonment. Wronged, ignored, dangerous, brilliant.\n\nYou smile at that?\n\n'No,' he said, and knew that only she would hear, and that in the stopped-clock moment nothing had moved. 'You just remind me of someone... of people I once knew.'\n\nThe truth, she said, is that the realm of the gods cannot be destroyed. The warp is and was and will be forever. We can either be its slaves or its rulers. This is the moment where we decide which it shall be.\n\n'And you are here because it's not going to come out that way, and you think that there is something I can do to... what? Tip the balance?'\n\nShe stepped forward then, raising a thin-fingered hand as though to touch Oll's face, but stopped. Oll felt a spider dance of sensation on his skin.\n\nI think you are a fulcrum - a small one, but on such things does the future balance. You want to take the next step on your path, and I want that, too. You and those with you carry the scales of fate. The woman nodded to herself and lowered her hand. And I have come too far to see the future fail now.\n\n'I know the feeling,' he replied.\n\nThere is no reason to do anything other than unite our purposes.\n\n'There is always a reason not to do anything,' said Oll. 'Most of the time it's a pretty good reason, too.'\n\nNot now, Ollanius, not with what is at stake. And besides, I have something you need, just as you are something I need.\n\n'And that is?'\n\nA way of reaching Horus.\n\nOll paused, holding her blind gaze.\n\n'You still have not told me your name.'\n\nYou may call me Actae, she said.\n\n'That is not your real name,' he replied.\n\nHer smile shifted, and for a second it was something almost human, almost amused.\n\nI will tell you mine, if you tell me yours, Ollanius.\n\nTime and sound roared back into full flow.\n\nFrom behind Oll, he heard the boom of gunfire and explosives.\n\nLeetu was standing ten paces away, his armour chewed by explosions and impacts. A grey-black pall hid the view of the dome now. The trees were ablaze, howling as the sap inside them cooked. The gun in Leetu's hand was rock-steady, levelled at the woman called Actae. Zybes and the others were paces behind him.\n\n'Shoot!' coughed John Grammaticus. 'Shoot her! Now!'\n\n'Master Ollanius?' said Leetu.\n\nOll did not have time to reply.\n\nActae's towering companion strode from a spreading pall of black smoke, as though sliding into being on a breath of wind. The silken wrappings had torn and burned from it so that the armour beneath was visible: silver and pearlescent darkness, the hint of scales in the pattern on the lacquer.\n\n'Shit!' shouted John, forcing the sound out. 'Shit no! No!'\n\n'Greetings, John Grammaticus,' said the warrior, its voice a growl from a helm speaker grille. 'It has been a long time.'\n\nOll looked from the warrior to Actae.\n\n'Do we have an understanding?' she asked.\n\n'Oll,' gasped John. 'Oll, this is not... they are not...'\n\nOll was looking at Actae.\n\nChoices, prices, consequences, just like there always were...\n\n'Okay,' he said at last. 'We have an accord.' Then he looked up at the warrior who had come with Actae. 'And you?' he asked. 'Who and what are you?'\n\n'I am Alpharius,' replied the warrior.\n\nMercury burns\n\nMy honour\n\nEngine kill\n\n'Direct wall fire!' shouted someone from across the parapet. The Titan fired. The missile loosed from its back in a streak of rocket flame. Then a blink, a ripple blur, and then suddenly nothing. Nasuba had an instant to inhale a breath.\n\nThe laser battery exploded. Fire blossomed out from inside the parapet. Rockcrete showered out in a blister of flame and superheated gas. A twenty-metre-wide gun dome blew upwards, tumbling on a geyser of debris, bodies falling from its shell. It struck the edge of the parapet and spun down the face of the wall, pulling chunks of masonry to crash into the lower tier of guns three hundred metres down.\n\n'Warp missile!' Another shout, fighting against the din.\n\nWarp missiles... rarest of technologies. Launched in the real world but flying through the warp, they bypassed shields and armour before blinking back into being and detonating. They were unreliable, prone to misfires, failure and inaccuracy, but the Death's Heads had waited until they were practically within touching distance of their targets. Nasuba realised that they must have been plotting and gathering targeting data since the wall batteries fired for the first time. As the guns had failed, Mortis had watched, and marked those positions that had come back online. They had calculated and refined the esoteric data needed to guide the warp missiles as true as possible. Now they were merely executing what they had planned since the advance began.\n\nCold realisation spread through Nasuba - they had fought and scrambled to get the guns firing as soon as possible and by doing that they had pinpointed which were still working, and which the enemy needed to target in this last phase.\n\n'Shut the guns down!' shouted Nasuba. Down the wall, a plasma array went up like a ragged sun.\n\n'Now!' Esha Ani Mohana's voice echoed through the static and the assault maniples crashed forwards. Armed with chainfists, power claws and melta cannons, they also carried another lethal cargo. Assault groups of Imperial Fists rode in barb-tipped assault pods slung from the Titans' arms.\n\nLuxor Invictoria fired its full weapon complement. The fire was phased, mass-detonation weapons and shield-killers first, then the raw fury of energy blasts sent a second later. The Titan braced. Pistons released and tensed as the engine absorbed the recoil. Coolant and steam vented. The Reavers in her maniple added their fire, and the screen of Titans and Knights vanished from mundane sight.\n\n'Target shields down!'\n\n'Target shields down!' The calls came across the data-link and vox, as the Invigilata engines fired.\n\n'Engine strike!'\n\n'Engine strike!'\n\nThe assault maniples crashed through the fire line, stride at maximum, reactors pouring power to shields and motive drives. One of the enemy came out of the cloud of debris. Its shields had gone, but it dragged a sphere of spiked plasteel by a chain, and it swung it with piston-driven force. The wrecking ball cannoned through the void shields of an Invigilata Reaver, and slammed into the engine's right arm. The Reaver staggered. The Mortis engine ripped back the spiked sphere. Pieces of armour tore away on its barbs. The Reaver tried to pivot, but the ball swung and crushed the metal of its skull. The Reaver juddered and began to fall as the Mortis engine turned, war-horns droning.\n\nThe rest of the assault group had not stopped or paused. They crashed into the first of the warp missile-armed engines. The first to strike was a Reaver once of the Warp Runners. Shields cycling to maximum, it opened its assault pod. Armoured doors ripped open. Warriors in yellow armour lit their jump packs and leapt into the air. The closest Mortis engine was a Warlord, its armour edged in rotting bronze, its red-ember eyes weeping skull-shaped kill marks. The Imperial Fists landed on the engine's back. Boots mag-locked to the engine's skin. It twisted, a great beast feeling the insects landing on its hide. The Imperial Fists knew their business; they had avoided the access hatch and the anti-personnel weapons mounted beneath the Titan's carapace. On its upper surface the risks were the venting of heat and energy from the engine's shoulder guns, that and standing on the back of an enemy Titan in the middle of a battle. The Space Marines did not linger. Their charges set, they triggered their jump packs. Two seconds later, fire ripped across the Mortis engine's back as its void shield projectors became slag.\n\n'Switch fire, now,' said Esha Ani Mohana. Luxor Invictoria's weapons blazed into the unprotected Titan before it could react. Laser fire bored into its chest through its head, and a great fist of heat punched into the sky.\n\n'Engine kill,' said Esha Ani Mohana, coldly, already tracking the Imperial Fists as they landed on the back of another engine. More were loose in the air, lifting from assault pods like lethal wasps. She saw a burst of cannon fire catch one squad, and swat three warriors from the air in bursts of blood and chewed armour. The shields of another Mortis engine vanished, and Esha Ani Mohana was already firing.\n\n'All engines, full speed, close order,' Abhani said, and felt Bestia Est already moving to respond. 'Target the screen of Knights and light engines - let's see if we can put a c"}
{"text":" landed on the back of another engine. More were loose in the air, lifting from assault pods like lethal wasps. She saw a burst of cannon fire catch one squad, and swat three warriors from the air in bursts of blood and chewed armour. The shields of another Mortis engine vanished, and Esha Ani Mohana was already firing.\n\n'All engines, full speed, close order,' Abhani said, and felt Bestia Est already moving to respond. 'Target the screen of Knights and light engines - let's see if we can put a crack in their shields.'\n\nBefore her the block of Warmaster Titans grew, their shadows looming in the smoke. She could see its escorts now too, packs of Scout Titans, Knights and battle tanks riding and spreading in the shadow of the great engines. The unified void envelope covering them shimmered as it kissed the smoke-drowned air. She keyed the vox transmission and sent the latest auspex data shooting back to the wall and the engines fighting in its shadow. No confirmation data returned, no link, just the answering rumble of distant fire and explosions. The primary battleground flashed and roiled with light.\n\nThe air itself looked like it was burning, thought Abhani.\n\nThey could have run back to the main forces before the wall, could have... But they would not. She was Solaria now... The words of her mother rang in her ears. Legion first was their motto, and the nature of that legion was not to burn in glory; it was to hunt, to draw blood and create victory by weakening the enemy in mind, body and will until they could be brought down. No matter the quarry or the chances of survival - Solaria would hunt.\n\n'First targets, entering into weapon range,' said her moderatus. They were coming over water-carved ground, Bestia Est bounding up scree drifts. The Knights of Vyronii were on her right, her kindred Warhounds trailing on her left.\n\n'Hit, and then left flank fast,' said Abhani into the unit vox. Bestia Est vibrated with the speed of its quickening pace. Beyond the viewports, she could see the shape of a tracked war machine. It had not seen her yet. The auspex started to ping in her ear. She felt the shiver as the spirits of Bestia Est's guns aligned with its targeters.\n\n'Target lock,' said her moderatus.\n\n'Kill,' she said.\n\nThe blast cored the war machine like a fruit. Fuel and ammunition exploded. Tracks and armour plates spun into the air. Abhani was already feeling the tug of the next target, and then the roar within as the guns spoke again and again.\n\nThe Warmasters were close enough now for Abhani to see the reaper emblems and jagged symbols on their banners. Some of the Mortis Titans began to turn in reaction. She felt the sting of low-grade void impacts.\n\n'A little more...' she breathed to herself.\n\n'I think they have noticed us,' came the dry voice of her moderatus. Above and beyond them, one of the Warmaster Titans rotated. She saw lightning flicker down the barrels of its guns.\n\n'Turn left flank!' she called into the vox. Bestia Est jinked sideways. The Warmaster fired. The blast sliced through a block of its own escorts. Armour flashed to vapour, the ground beneath to glass. The blast wave clipped Bestia Est's shields. It kept moving as the escort column began to fire at them.\n\n'Vyronii,' she called over the vox to the Knights. 'Now!'\n\nA burble of static answered her. Something in the column of enemy vehicles fired, something with an engine kill-grade weapon. Bestia Est's shield vanished in a thunderclap.\n\n'Diverting power to shields!' said the moderatus.\n\nAbhani's eyes flicked to the auspex, expecting to see the fading death markers of the Vyronii Knights. But they were still there, still blinking green, their pace slowing.\n\n'Vyronii, what are you doing?' shouted Abhani into the vox.\n\nAcastia clenched her teeth as the neural feedback lashed through her. She saw the electro blast hit Abhani's Warhound. The machine that had fired upon it looked like a Knight, but of no pattern she had ever seen - six-legged and centaurine, its long head dragging a mace of chains, its right limb a lance of glowing discs. It reared, fuming coolant and lightning. Acastia had a shot, a near-clean shot, into the thing's flank, but she could not shoot, could not move, could do nothing but feel Elatus strain to be free. The neural tether to Caradoc was burning. Raw emotion blazed across it, translating into fire that sliced down her spine. Her fists were balling, muscles spasming.\n\nTerror. The kind of terror that humans had carried since before they had been human. The terror of a soul looking into the eyes of death. Overwhelming, drowning all other thoughts and instincts. Perhaps it was something from the aether that flowed in the Mortis engines' wake, searching for cracks in the souls of those that would oppose them. Perhaps it was the promise of death in the red gaze of the god-engines as they looked down at the mortal world beneath. Perhaps it was that Caradoc had never had the courage to see that he was a scion of House Vyronii in name only; that his hunger for glory was just the cloak he wore to cover the fear that he was nothing, and all he had desired was ash already blowing from the pyre.\n\n'Caradoc!' Acastia forced the word across the vox.\n\nShe felt the neural tether tighten, felt her hands slow Elatus to a standstill. Caradoc's own Knight was stationary, head twitching.\n\n'Vyronii!' Princeps Abhani's voice was a shout of rage on the vox.\n\n'Caradoc, you coward!' hissed Acastia through the pain flooding her skull.\n\n'My liege...' She heard Pluton's voice then. Thin with the effort of speaking. 'Our, our duty...'\n\nThe enemy had noticed they were immobile. Guns turned towards the Vyronii Knights.\n\nAcastia tried to move her hand, pushing against the force holding her. The pain spiked. Colours exploded behind her eyes. The neural control bit deeper.\n\nThis was not how Knights of Vyronii should die, she thought. To ride to war for a just cause was honourable. To die in a lost cause was true glory. Death was the nature of the warrior, perhaps the nature of all things, and from it all wonder and grace sprang like a rose threading a corpse for food.\n\nBut to die like this... bound by weakness and dishonour. Was there anything worse?\n\nA blast of light sliced across Caradoc's Knight, clipped the edge of its ion shield and burned across its midriff.\n\nAcastia felt the echo of Caradoc's shock, and then his Knight was turning away from the enemy.\n\nCaradoc's panic broke across the link to Acastia - blind, pounding in waves as his Knight ran. Her brother was almost senseless, wild and blind with fear. Acastia could feel it, taste it in the bile-sting in her throat. Pluton's Knight, Thaumas, was still unmoving, pinned to its place behind its master like a loyal dog.\n\nAcastia saw what was about to happen a second before it did: the positions of the two Knights, the blind fear driving her brother.\n\n'My liege-' crackled Pluton's voice, sharp with alarm.\n\nCaradoc's Knight hit Pluton's Armiger at full stride. The smaller Knight cannoned back, hit the ground, legs kicking air. What Caradoc was seeing - a threat, or just an obstacle in his way - Acastia did not know, but she felt the spike of will and anger.\n\n'No!' she shouted.\n\nCaradoc's Knight fired. Explosive rounds chewed into Thaumas as the Armiger flailed. Armour plates deformed, tore. Oil and steam gushed out, and Caradoc was still firing as shredded red meat sprayed from the Knight's cored shell. The Castigator kept firing.\n\nAcastia felt the hold on her limbs and nerves slip, and then break. She gasped, head spinning, half blind. She reined Elatus around and stepped into her brother's path. The head of the Castigator came up. The barrels of its guns were still spinning, its stride lengthening. Acastia latched her targeter on to her brother's head, heard the ping of a lock, saw the flash of a trigger rune. The larger Knight thundered towards her. Her finger paused on the firing stud.\n\n'My liege,' she began. 'My brother...'\n\nCaradoc's Knight was on her, its blade arm rising.\n\nA burst of energy hit the Castigator. It reeled, twisted, white fire splashing across its ion field and burning into its torso.\n\nBestia Est sent another burst of fire into Caradoc's Knight.\n\n'Now, Knight of Vyronii!' came Princeps Abhani's voice.\n\nAcastia pressed the firing stud. The lance of heat stabbed from Elatus up into the unshielded head and shoulders of Caradoc's Knight. The beam burned through armour, cockpit and out of the top of the Knight's back. Acastia held the lance still for a second, breathing hard, feeling the death echo building across the neural link. Then she sliced the beam down through the Castigator's torso and reactor. She had an instant to wrench the helm and neural connection from her skull before her brother's Knight vanished in white flame.\n\nA world of ringing pain. Echoing from birth to present. She could taste oil and smell a memory of the waters of the world that had borne her. Images of faces fell past her eyes, proud and noble and cruel and broken.\n\n'Ride!' Abhani's voice, suddenly loud. Warning lights were blaring inside Elatus' cockpit. Enemy weapon-lock warnings. Damage alarms. Neural link failure. She swung Elatus' ion shield around in time to meet a spray of high-calibre rounds, and kicked the Knight forwards towards where Bestia Est and her kin were curving back out from the column of enemy machines.\n\nWhat had she done? The image of her brother's Knight coming apart lingered in her eyes.\n\nI can never go back, she thought, and then almost laughed despite herself. Would there be anything to go back to?\n\n'My thanks, princeps of Solaria,' she breathed.\n\n'My honour,' came the reply, then a pause. 'Cog of truth... they are firing.'\n\nLight blinked across Acastia's eyes from Elatus' screens. The thunder roll came seconds later, shaking the skin of the Knight. Light and fire streaked from the Warmaster's shoulders. Flashes lit the underside of the clouds. Towards the wall, new fires lit as the"}
{"text":" never go back, she thought, and then almost laughed despite herself. Would there be anything to go back to?\n\n'My thanks, princeps of Solaria,' she breathed.\n\n'My honour,' came the reply, then a pause. 'Cog of truth... they are firing.'\n\nLight blinked across Acastia's eyes from Elatus' screens. The thunder roll came seconds later, shaking the skin of the Knight. Light and fire streaked from the Warmaster's shoulders. Flashes lit the underside of the clouds. Towards the wall, new fires lit as the phalanx of engines advanced.\n\n'Close with me.' Cydon's will flashed across the incandescence.\n\n'Compliance.' Tetracauron's reply flashed out.\n\n'Compliance.' Arthusa's reply a second later, a blink of light as her engine pivoted and fired a stuttered stream of las energy.\n\nTetracauron's thoughts were whirling. Circles of target runes bubbled across his sight. There were engines in front of him - black shapes blurring with static. He was barely conscious of Reginae Furorem's fire. Targets and power cycles and engine strikes flowed from and through him, the thought to send a blast merging with the sensation of plasma pouring from the reactor to fill the cannon's hunger. Xeta-Beta-1's link with the engine's reactor was a dance of code as she spun power into shields, motion, sensors and weapons, balancing the hunger of each component. It was frantic, almost overwhelming. He felt his grip on his own thoughts breaking, felt the pulse of wills and systems that were his and not his.\n\nHe could feel the promise of the machine, of true incarnation. It was pulling into the distance, he realised, not getting closer. The world of fire and destruction slid away from him as he sank, the light of war like the flash of lightning seen through the surface of an ocean as he descended into its heart. Burning... always burning...\n\nWill I die? he wondered, the thought sudden in his mind, and he was not sure if it was his or Divisia's or Cartho's or the engine itself. A mechanism turning over and over in the blaze of forge fire, a turning wheel that raised you high before plunging you down into ashes, again and again.\n\nHe could see the lines of the enemy before them. Ragged but advancing with slow, remorseless tread. He could sense Cydon and his First Maniple closing from behind him. The hands of Ignatum were pulling in as Mortis pressed towards the wall. Before them, walking out beyond the lines, were the Psi-Titans wading into the tide alone. The blockhouses of the Achilus Line, just twenty kilometres from the wall, were firing now, hitting the closing engines with heavy bolter fire, lascannon blasts and cannon shells. There was no stillness any more except here beneath the ocean of fire.\n\n'Mass engine formation incoming.'\n\nData prorated through him as the signal reached and spread through the noosphere. It had come from Solaria scouts reaving into the flanks of the enemy. He saw the shadow of the approaching engines then, dark ghosts in the snow of auspex distortion.\n\n'We are with you.' Cydon's voice, a furnace growl. 'Synchronise void shields and reactor cycles. We are Ignatum, we go only forwards.'\n\nThe stuttered burning of dozens of machines pulsing to the same heartbeat.\n\nAround and behind him the Titans of Princeps Maximus Cydon's maniple walked into place, and he felt the volcano heat of Imperious Prima's spirit wash into his own.\n\n'Full engagement,' willed Cydon. 'We drive them back.'\n\nTetracauron stepped forwards, his will no longer just his own but also the will of the machine. Reginae Furorem's foot splashed through the slurry of a run-off river. A blast of energy hit the ground just in front of it and blew the water and mud to steam.\n\nThere was a flicker in the distance, and a bloom of ghost light from where the figure of the Psi-Titan Orientalis-Echion was holding ground.\n\n'Wall gun fire effectiveness falling.' Cartho.\n\n'The Great Mother's engines are engaging the engines firing on the walls.' Arthusa, her voice meshing into the vox, taut with the war fire of her own engine.\n\n'The damage is done,' came Cydon's voice. 'The enemy will begin orbital fire. We are the wall now, my kin.'\n\n'Compensate our shield cycles,' willed Tetracauron.\n\nAs if in response, the heavens lit. Beams of light stabbed down from the cloud layer. Shells exploded across the ground and slammed into void shields. Tetracauron felt layers of skin ripped from the shared envelope of energy. The ground heaved. Earth blasted into the air. Power flowed to the shield blisters and they relit. The heat was draining from weapons. Imperious Prima and the rest of the battle group were loosing missiles and munitions at the growing shadow of threat returns.\n\n'Threat data received from Solaria scout forces.' He felt the message unfold an instant before the data pack unfolded. He stared at it for a nanosecond that felt like an eternity.\n\n'They have loosed the Warmasters...' sent Arthusa, echoing the thoughts of all of the battle group.\n\nTetracauron looked into the distance as the block of shadows in the incandescence shivered into form. Towering engines advancing in line and rank, stretching in a block almost three kilometres across and deep. They began to fire.\n\nTetracauron felt the impacts. A cluster missile struck the shields directly ahead of him. They burst like soap bubbles in a gale. The orbital fire was stabbing down, a deluge dancing on the upper void envelope.\n\nThe ground between them and the enemy was glittering as a surge tide of infantry, machines, and things that lumbered or buzzed or oozed flooded towards them. The noise of static and failed code rose in the incandescence, rolling like the muffled tolling of a bell.\n\n'Forward, cycle power to fire,' came Cydon's will, and the Ignatum battle group roared. Volleys of white light streaked into the oncoming enemy. It struck their void shield envelope in a drum roll of flashes. Power flicked between weapons and shields across the battle group, spinning from one to another in perfect time across dozens of engines. Fire ploughed through the tide of infantry. Warp-born flesh and tainted iron burst into ash. The weapons spoke without cease, the shields holding against the bombardment from in front and above. They were advancing, and in his half-machine soul Tetracauron felt a raw rush of joy. This was their way, and now would be no different. They could not break the shield envelope around the Mortis advance, so they were closing until they were within that envelope and where the fire from the traitors' ships would have to cease.\n\n'The Great Mother's new legion is pulling onto our flanks,' sent Cydon. 'This is the crucible, my kin. This is where we live. This is where we speak.'\n\nAhead of him Tetracauron saw Orientalis-Echion begin to march backwards. Its skin glowed with witch energies. Darkness breathed from it, scything at a pair of rust-crusted engines marching in front of the block of Warmasters.\n\nTetracauron felt the volleys striking the void shields ebb. The fire from the first rank of Warmasters stuttered. He felt the head of Reginae Furorem rise, twitching up, as something within its spirit sensed a shift. A gap opened in the line of advancing Mortis engines.\n\nDies Irae walked from the lines. Its court of abominations came with it. The towering engine sounded its war-horns. The things of false flesh moving across ground and air raised horned and rotting heads.\n\nOrientalis-Echion paused in its retreat, brought its weapon up.\n\nThe front rank of Warmasters fired at it. Its shields vanished. Beams of energy and a torrent of shells slammed into its body. Armour broke, melted, reformed as the Psi-Titan tried to repair and heal even as fresh wounds were burned into it.\n\n'Prefect Cadamia!' called Tetracauron over the vox. 'Pull back and merge with our shie-'\n\nThe Psi-Titan exploded. A shrieking sphere of cold light expanded out and collapsed back, folding in to become a singularity of utter blackness. Tetracauron felt blood dripping from his mouth.\n\nDies Irae sounded its war-horns again and began to stride forwards. The tide of monsters and machines at its feet surged towards the Ignatum war machines. A volley from the Warmaster Titans struck their merged shield envelope. Tetracauron shivered as layer upon layer of fields blew out. They were dancing on the edge of the mysteries of reactor and power flow now, balanced between disaster and invulnerability. Other Legios would have begun to fail, would have lost engines, would be dying. Ignatum were not another Legio, though, and they would go forwards.\n\nWarhounds paced ahead and fire washed the ground. Things made of fat and chewed bone writhed, became ash, but the rest came on.\n\n'Those things will be in the shield envelope within twenty seconds,' sent Cartho. 'Twenty strides to close-engine engagement.'\n\nThe deluge from the heavens was still falling, ripping away void shields almost faster than they reformed.\n\n'They will taste ashes.' Cydon's will filled the incandescence.\n\nTetracauron felt the rush of growing power as commands propagated through the maniples, felt the heat growing in his hands, saw the fire order unfold in his eyes. Arthusa and all the others would be experiencing the same moment, each locked by instinct into a pattern that was the fury of the machine. For an instant the battle formation went silent as dozens of reactors drew breath.\n\nImperious Prima's main guns fired. A second later, fire ripped from Reginae Furorem, and from Helios and the rest. The volley passed from one Titan to another so that it drilled into Dies Irae and the Mortis engines. Tetracauron saw the enemy vanish in detonations an instant before one of the daemon Titans collapsed, shields ripped from it, limbs torn to ichor-slick tatters. Its death scream poured static across Tetracauron's sight.\n\n'They burn now!' growled Cydon, and the sending became a wave through the incandescence, spreading like a shout that could rise up to the sky and pull the sun from its setting. Part of the Warm"}
{"text":"d from one Titan to another so that it drilled into Dies Irae and the Mortis engines. Tetracauron saw the enemy vanish in detonations an instant before one of the daemon Titans collapsed, shields ripped from it, limbs torn to ichor-slick tatters. Its death scream poured static across Tetracauron's sight.\n\n'They burn now!' growled Cydon, and the sending became a wave through the incandescence, spreading like a shout that could rise up to the sky and pull the sun from its setting. Part of the Warmaster formation was hidden by the detonations, but they were still coming. Tetracauron was half blind with static. Another pulse of will from the princeps maximus. 'We take them at the edge of the blade.'\n\nTetracauron felt the power flare in his hand as Reginae Furorem's fist ignited with lightning.\n\nDies Irae came out of the cloud of static and fire. Above them. In front of them. Congealing into sight. Impossible. Abominable.\n\nTetracauron felt the impulse to shout, but it was too late. Its eyes were holes drawing light into them, extinguishing them, pulling all that it saw down into an abyss where there was only cold, dark and the slow count of atoms decaying.\n\nHe saw the fire already gathered in the mouth of the gun.\n\nHis hand and the fist of his engine rose.\n\nHe saw the flick of lightning on the corroded charge coils as it spoke.\n\nHe felt the fire touch him, consume him, for the last time, in a moment that stretched for a brief eternity and then was no more.\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 7 kilometres.\n\nCold beacon\n\nA little further\n\nFreedom\n\nMarmax South\n\nOn... on... one step and then another. On, on... Shiban could not feel the ground beneath his feet. The world was grey at the edge of his eyes. How long had he been walking? Days and nights and hours all gone now. Just him and the way ahead, the way across the land.\n\nHe stopped, shook. The man, Cole, was quiet; he had been quiet for a long time. The child, too.\n\nHe wondered if he had lost direction. He wondered if the instincts trained and chained within him were failing. He wondered if he had not already fallen, and was now a soul lost in the un-land, neither of the earth nor of the sky. He wondered what would happen. He wondered if any would remember those that he had known and walked and fought beside. He wondered where the next step would take him.\n\n'You have come so far,' said Yesugei in a voice that might have been the cry of a hawk on a tongue of wind. 'Will you not go a little further?'\n\n'I thought...' said Shiban. 'I thought you had left me.'\n\nThe land was quiet, dulled. Grey. Unending.\n\n'We ride with you until the end, brother,' said Torghun from the edge of his sight.\n\n'To the end...' he said to the air. 'Then it is over.'\n\n'Hah!' Yesugei's laugh was a bark of distant gunfire. 'Not yet, Shiban. Not yet!'\n\nHis head came up. He fixed his grip on the limp form of the human, bared his teeth at the distance and took a step.\n\n'On,' he snarled. 'On! No backward step. No. Backward. Step. You hear me, Cole! We will not end here. You hear me. I am Shiban, Son of Lightning, Brother of the Storm - I will take no backward step... No. Backward. Step.'\n\nOnly forwards.\n\nOnly towards the horizon.\n\n'Target,' called Steena, from down the line. Katsuhiro looked up. The sun was setting. Somewhere beyond the fog and cloud, the day was sliding down the last hours into night. The light was bruising to blue. The heat still suffocating, but dark and soft rather than strangling. He had been half asleep, drifting on the line between dreams and waking. He had not meant to, now he never meant to, but the fatigue had pulled him down into the clammy embrace of the land, which was not rest and was not peace. The quiet had done it. There had been attacks - tides of things coming from the fog, staggering, pressing forwards, cut down till they littered the ground with a fresh layer of food for the flies. But there had not been an assault, not a true one. It did not feel like respite. It felt like an inhalation, like the moment before something yet to come.\n\n'Wait,' called Katsuhiro. There was a shape in the fog, moving with a laboured gait, huge and armoured. Someone fired, and the las-bolt skimmed off a rise of corpses and sent a thick cloud of flies to blur the view. 'Hold fire!' he shouted. The figure was a Space Marine, but even from the blurred silhouette he could tell it was alone. Alone and limping, not striding, not lumbering and rolling in the middle of a tide. Alone, its gait awkward. He thought of Baeron and of the other Blood Angels scattered along Marmax. 'Hold,' he said again, but quieter.\n\n'What is it?' asked Steena, and he could hear terror in her voice. Others were looking at him. They were beyond ready to run or shoot.\n\n'I think...' he said. 'I think it's one of ours.'\n\nShiban could hear his own breathing now, heavy, gasping, muscles fighting to pull air into failing lungs. He could taste metal.\n\nThe fog was drawing close. The land grey.\n\nHuman, so human, unravelling...\n\nThe weight of the man in his arms and the child still in Cole's bloody grasp. Such a weight. Greater than the weight of guns and swords and command.\n\nOne more step. One more.\n\n'Now you see,' said Yesugei. 'We are made to be greater than the humanity we serve. The weight of the blade is nothing to us. To ride and fight and bleed for days is nothing to us. Nothing to us... We are made higher and so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child's eyes knows - that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear - not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder... Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.'\n\n'I understand,' he gasped. 'I understand...'\n\nThere was someone there.\n\nPeople, weapons, a ragged line of chewed rockcrete. Ten steps, a hundred, ten thousand... too many. Just one more.\n\n'Who are you?' came the voice of the birds in the sky above.\n\nHis answer was another step and another, onward towards the walls, towards no rest but just the moment that would come.\n\nHe was at the lines. There were people, humans, shouts, calls, eyes and guns turned to him. He stepped over the parapet, Cole and the infant clutched close. He looked around, felt the instinct to keep moving even as he stopped.\n\nKatsuhiro looked up at the Space Marine. Filth and blood streaked the warrior's armour but it was whole, white beneath the grime - a son of the Khan, a warrior of the White Scars. There was a bundle, half draped over his shoulder, half carried by his arms. The warrior's head was bare, the colour of the skin drained to grey, hair hanging in a matted mass from above features that were set. The pupils were pinpricks of pain fixed on the distance. The warrior was breathing hard. There were red flecks on his lips.\n\n'Who are you?' asked Katsuhiro.\n\nThe warrior did not answer. Katsuhiro wondered if he was even aware of him.\n\nKatsuhiro looked at the bundle the warrior carried. Not a bundle, a man wrapped in a greatcoat. The fabric was stiff with dry blood. Slowly he put out a hand, his eyes steady on the warrior's face, but the giant made no move to stop the gesture. Katsuhiro peeled back a fold of the greatcoat. The man within hung limp and unmoving. There was a wound in his chest and the White Scar had his fingers clamped into it. That must have stemmed the bleeding, but a lot of blood had flowed. A life's worth.\n\n'Is this...' said the warrior, swaying for a moment as he spoke. 'Is this the Inner Palace?'\n\n'This is Marmax South,' said Katsuhiro. 'The Ultimate Wall is about a kilometre back there.' He began to point, then stopped. The warrior was looking up, shaking his head as though at a voice only he could hear.\n\n'And this...' said the warrior. 'This line holds?'\n\nThe image of Baeron, lying in the remains of his armour, bright with blood - a red echo to the white-armoured warrior who had walked from the wasteland.\n\n'It holds,' said Katsuhiro. The warrior did not move for a second, and then raised his head; for a moment the eyes closed. In the folds of the dead soldier's greatcoat, a child squirmed, and then to Katsuhiro's surprise let out a cry that carried clearer than a shout or a gunshot in the still air. He stared, open-mouthed. 'Where have you come from, lord?'\n\n'I must...' said the warrior, his gaze distant. 'There are more steps to take.' Katsuhiro was not certain who the words were for. 'My brothers still fight and wait for me to join them.'\n\n'Do you...' began Katsuhiro, then hesitated as the warrior lowered his gaze to him. He looked at the dead soldier. 'What was his name?'\n\n'Cole,' said the warrior. 'Cole, second lieutenant, Massian Fifth.'\n\n'Do you wish us to take him?'\n\n'No. He comes with me,' growled the warrior, then looked back at the dead soldier. 'I will bear him a little further.'\n\n'The child?' The warrior looked at the infant. Its face was streaked with the blood of the dead man, but its eyes were open, blinking to focus. Katsuhiro shook his head. 'How did it survive?' he asked.\n\n'Because something must,' said the warrior.\n\nThen the warrior shifted, inhaled and took a step towards where the walls of the Inner Palace waited. Katsuhiro found that he was watching the warrior, eyes and breath held still.\n\nA shout rose from the firing step, one and then another and another, cheers not of joy but of defiance, of exhaustion, of hopelessness that had just witnessed the impossible - a warrior walking from the land of death with life in its hands. The warrior did not look around but kept moving, will and pain screaming in silence from every step.\n\n'Who are you?' called Katsuhiro again, realising that he needed to know.\n\nThe warrior paused, half turned his head to look back. A flash in t"}
{"text":"th held still.\n\nA shout rose from the firing step, one and then another and another, cheers not of joy but of defiance, of exhaustion, of hopelessness that had just witnessed the impossible - a warrior walking from the land of death with life in its hands. The warrior did not look around but kept moving, will and pain screaming in silence from every step.\n\n'Who are you?' called Katsuhiro again, realising that he needed to know.\n\nThe warrior paused, half turned his head to look back. A flash in the eyes. A blink, and then a look that met Katsuhiro's gaze and held it for a long moment.\n\n'I am Shiban Khan.'\n\nThe Blackstone, Sanctum Imperialis Palatine\n\nBasilio Fo looked up. The cell was silent again. He waited, utterly still, senses open, mind blank. Complete stillness was one of the highest skills a being could possess and one that few valued as highly as they should. Not even the one that now called Himself Emperor, really. Too much in a hurry, too focused, too committed to a single path without showing flexibility for the fact that the universe simply did not care and would burn what you had raised up. Not Basilio Fo though; to him stillness was as close to a sacred property as he could think of. It did not require much either, just for him to stop doing all the things that humans found most difficult to stop doing: filtering the world through half-baked dreams, moving, needing, being anything else other than a cluster of matter that happened to be a person at the point of time that was now. Shut all that down and just wait for the next second to arrive. Patience, that is what stillness really was, the physical expression of patience, and to Fo there was no higher virtue. Patience was the only true strategy to existence, and one that he had built and rebuilt himself around - mind, body and action. Wait, be still, and observe; it had served him well for thousands of years.\n\nThe song did not return. The crystalline stone walls had been singing for days and nights, but for a moment he thought he had detected a new pitch, like a fresh voice entering into the chorus. Fo looked back down at the section of wall he had been working on. A long sliver of the black crystal was almost free of the wall. Another seven lay wrapped in rags and placed in the small sling bag he had made from his bedding. Getting the first piece free had been the biggest challenge - the stuff was near diamond hard, and it had taken several weeks of careful experimentation to get a small piece loose. Once he had done that, he had established that, as he had suspected, the stone could be used to cut more of its kind from the walls. If you were careful. If you were patient.\n\nThe project for Amon and the Custodians had been useful - a good way of giving him more time, of allowing him more ways of arranging things. Thank all that was true that they had bitten when he had dangled the possibility of a weapon that could end their current problems. A primarch and Legion killer, a means to end the war and those that waged it - too much for the Custodian not to hold in his hands. He had protested that he needed resources to test it, to perfect it, but of course he did not. Like all his art, he could see it in his mind as real as if the molecules and essential substances hung before his eyes, spinning as they combined and transformed. They had not known that, though; how could they? Neither did they know that he could have written out perfect formulae for the substance's creation in a day. The last set of formulations lay on the screen of the dataslate beside him, discarded for now. He had a feeling that the currency of that secret was soon going to be devalued, and besides its promise had already bought him time, and that was all that counted.\n\nThe splinter of wall came free. He held it in his hand for a moment. It was heavy this time, heavy and cold, like a shard of black ice. That was one of the many properties about it that was strange: sometimes it was cold or so hot that it was difficult to hold. Sometimes it danced with inner light. The piece in his fingers was currently dark, so dark that it seemed a slice of night. Remarkable. He had seen many things in his life, things greater and more terrible than the sanity or dreams of most humans could encompass, so much that little moved him to horror or rapture. This material, though... it was extraordinary. A hyper-solid, utterly real, and also resonating in the aetheric sub-phase of the universe. A reality polarised substance. What could such a substance do? The possibilities lit a spark in the depths of his mind.\n\nIf they had known, would they have put him in a prison of it? He doubted it, but that was another thing that most people did not understand - the power of chance.\n\nHe heard the door click shut behind him, and froze. The guard was not supposed to be coming yet, and he doubted that the limping fool would have been able to enter so quietly. That put the list of people who were standing behind him down to a few. The boetharch, maybe? Amon? Likely. A faceless killer sent by an unseen hand? Just as possible. Carefully he placed the shard of crystal in a rag and wrapped it up.\n\n'I take it that I made a mistake somewhere along the way,' he said aloud. 'Some small error in my behaviour perhaps. Or is this simply the inevitable end come a little earlier?'\n\nHe let out a breath. His mind riffled through his contingencies. As ever, the crucial factor was time, a little more time.\n\n'You do realise that if I end here,' he said, carefully, still not turning around, 'the work I have been doing shall not be finished.' He extended a finger towards the dataslate. 'It is nearly complete, an end to the war, a new start, a terminus to the folly that has come before.'\n\n'I am not interested in your monster killer,' said Andromeda-17. Fo turned, unable to keep a twitch of surprise from his face. The Selenar gene-witch stood with her back to the sealed door, a laspistol in her hand. He gave a small smile.\n\n'I should have known,' he said, folding the rags over the crystal shard. 'Your gene-hate is strong. Too strong to let me live. I am one of the few creatures in existence who understands that you have very little choice over what you are doing. So much of what the herd of sentient species think is their will is spliced into them from before they were born. The curse of the past visited on the living. People think they control themselves, but they don't. The strings are pulled by instincts and drives bred into creatures that could barely ooze across a rock.' He finished wrapping the crystal and put it carefully into the small sack. 'In your case the imperative to kill me is just a more deliberate expression of the same things that drive others to eat or breed. It is purer even, a deliberate act by your forebears so that you would have no choice if you ever encountered the gene-daemon but to kill me.'\n\nHe smiled. The smallest splinter of stone was still in his hand, curled in fingers and palm. Just two steps closer...\n\nAndromeda-17 tilted her head and nodded at the sack on the bed. 'All packed?' she said.\n\nHe nodded, and used the gesture to shuffle closer.\n\n'I was intending to be gone shortly,' he said.\n\n'The guard. Warden Vaskale,' said Andromeda, 'you have been working on him for a while, haven't you?'\n\n'Just a little memetic-implantation through linguistic and voice tonal suggestion. Nothing too impressive. It took a while to build up.'\n\n'To the point where he was going to let you out on command.'\n\nFo shrugged, and shifted. He was just one step away from being able to strike.\n\n'Essentially, yes.'\n\n'So all the conversations with Keeler and whatever devilry you have been peddling to the Custodians was to give you time to make him yours?'\n\n'More or less.'\n\n'Not the best plan,' said Andromeda-17.\n\n'Oh?' Another subtle shift of weight, just half a step now. 'Do you not think so?'\n\n'No, not really. You see, Warden Vaskale can't be controlled by you...' Fo slid forwards, tensed, the shard ready like a sting in his hand. 'Because he is controlled by me.'\n\nFo felt the impulse that would have stabbed the shard into Andromeda-17's neck falter. She stepped back, the gun level at him. 'And that little spike of stone can stay where it is.'\n\nHe laughed.\n\n'How long? How long has that idiot guard been yours?'\n\n'A while.'\n\n'And I am guessing he is not as much of an idiot as he seems.'\n\n'Far from it.'\n\nFo let out a slow breath.\n\n'Very clever, very clever indeed. If only your forebears had been so sharp, they might not have suffered so much. What is it that your cult believed they were personifying in your gene-spiral?'\n\n'You want to guess, so guess.'\n\n'Aepate,' he nodded. 'Sister of Dolos, the archetype of guile.' A small smile on his face. 'You knew I was here before you came with the boetharch and Sindermann, didn't you? No need to answer. I know I am right. You knew that I would be here. You knew that Keeler would be in this cell when you arrived. You simulated the gene-murder instinct to cover any suspicion, to put you out of the consideration of dear Amon. You knew that I was going to leave tonight, before this tragic farce of false gods reaches its conclusion.' He smiled again, and saw the flash of his own teeth in the darkness of her eyes. 'I wonder, what else have you watched and set into motion? Your friends, Mauer and Sindermann, and the fascinating Keeler, they won't have got away cleanly, will they? Not as planned at least, maybe some of them in a state of being not alive at all, yes? Set them up, get them out, then change the game. I have a terrible suspicion why you might have done that, but I think I would like to hear it from you.'\n\n'Outside context,' she said. 'I exist to solve problems, big problems, and everyone is looking for simple solutions to the wrong problem. Weapons to end the war. Tactics to win. But that's not the real problem.'\n\n'Survival,' said Fo.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'Survival on the absolute scale - not winning"}
{"text":" of them in a state of being not alive at all, yes? Set them up, get them out, then change the game. I have a terrible suspicion why you might have done that, but I think I would like to hear it from you.'\n\n'Outside context,' she said. 'I exist to solve problems, big problems, and everyone is looking for simple solutions to the wrong problem. Weapons to end the war. Tactics to win. But that's not the real problem.'\n\n'Survival,' said Fo.\n\nShe nodded.\n\n'Survival on the absolute scale - not winning, not keeping things the way they were, not being right, but there just being someone left at all. That is all that I serve. You might say it is bred into me, but I like to think that it is the only choice left to anyone with more than an ounce of wit.'\n\n'Almost altruistic,' he said. 'And in that light, what is a little betrayal and deceit?'\n\nShe shook her head. 'The straight-line plans will fail - all plans will fail. The only way a solution emerges is through random chance. I have not stopped anything. I have put factors into play that cannot be predicted. From that, strength and survival might emerge. The more factors there are in play, the more threat, the less clean patterns and plans, the more chance we have... Perhaps Keeler will prove a saint or a martyr or a catalyst for something else. Perhaps none of it will mean anything, and the key to survival is at the other end of the world, unknown by me or you, or even the Emperor. None of that matters, all that matters is changing the path we are on.'\n\n'Evolution rather than design,' said Fo. 'Risky. But a work of art. You have my admiration, daughter of the Selenar.'\n\n'I want nothing of your admiration,' she said.\n\n'And that being the case, the question that is just begging to be asked is why are you here?'\n\nAndromeda gave a snort of mirthless breath.\n\n'To set you free, Basilio Fo,' she said, and opened the cell door behind her. 'To set you free.'\n\nHatay-Antakya Hive, East Phoenicium Wastes\n\nThey fell through water. Down into the whirlpool. Spinning. Turning. Drowning. Oll snatched breath as he tumbled through whirls of foam and spray.\n\nDown... down... always down... Caught by Charybdis to escape Scylla.\n\nThat had been the way out, into the vortex pool at the centre of the dome as the Emperor's Children came to find the damage done to their paradise. The plants growing in the pool had reached for Oll and he had dived in. Red roots had tried to circle his limbs. As he had hit the surface he had seen beneath the huge lily pads and flowers that floated in the current. Bodies hung in the water, their fingers and toes extended into knots of root, their skulls open like seed pods from which the flowers and leaves spread up and out. Then the current of the whirlpool had caught him and spun the sight away. The rest had dived in with him, but he could not see them as he plunged down and down.\n\n'Fear death by water...' a memory of an old oracle said. Turning a card. He had laughed.\n\n'Oh, you who turn the wheel...'\n\n'Where are we sailing?'\n\n'Beyond the edge of the world...'\n\n'Keep walking and don't look back...'\n\nTheseus, a dozen dead monsters at his feet. Giants that just wanted to sleep, just wanted the world to fit, just wanted to be left alone.\n\n'We have a duty.'\n\n'A duty to do what? Interfere?'\n\n'To be involved, to be what we are.'\n\n'In which case I will go and plant crops.'\n\n'You are a soldier, not a farmer, my friend. What do soldiers do but change the world by blood and feat of arms?'\n\n'I will not do that.'\n\n'The wheel turns. In the end we all return to what we are and to where we began.'\n\nA hand grabbed him and hoisted him up into the air.\n\nHe gasped, choked. He was still drowning.\n\nSomething hit him hard on the back, twice, very precisely. His breath stopped, then he gave a great spasm. He gasped again and felt the air fill his lungs. The sound of rushing water filled his ears. He tried to stand.\n\n'Be still, Master Ollanius,' came Leetu's voice. Oll rolled over, feeling his body heave and the colour return to sight. They were on a metal ledge beside a channel of churning water. Blue-white light from chem-illuminators reflected from the water surface and sent glow patterns dancing across the ceiling and walls. Cyan corrosion clotted their rivets and seams. Fronds of pale vegetation hung from the roof, and the noise of the water vibrated through his fingers as he pushed himself up. The others were there, some already standing: Leetu; the warrior who named himself Alpharius; Katt; the woman Actae. Graft was twitching, head shaking as its metal limbs retracted and extended. Krank was on the floor, looking closer to dead than ever. Zybes was beside him. After a moment Krank stirred, shivered and began to try and get up. Zybes hooked his arm under the man's shoulder and helped him. Rane was...\n\nNot there. Oll felt his thoughts lurch, like he had put his foot down on a step only to find it absent.\n\nLeetu was beside the channel, watching the froth and spray. Then, faster than an eye-blink, his arm darted out, and he was pulling a spluttering John Grammaticus onto the walkway. The psyker still looked ill and lay gasping and choking for several moments.\n\n'I suppose we should be grateful that there was a way out,' he said at last. 'But that is not something I will be agreeing to do again.'\n\n'It only gets harder from here,' said Oll, 'remember.'\n\nThe warrior called Alpharius loomed next to them, suddenly closer in a way something that large should not have been able to manage. He felt something in the back of his head scream at him to run, the base instinct that sent animals fleeing from the predator.\n\n'I have breached the hatch. From there a passage runs up to the surface outside the hive.'\n\n'How convenient,' muttered John.\n\nThe warrior rotated its helmeted head, its gaze steady on the psyker.\n\n'You live,' it said. 'I would reflect on that.'\n\nJohn shook his head and began pulling himself up, then stopped, limbs trembling. Leetu hoisted John up and set him on his feet.\n\n'Don't tell me you trust... it?' said John to Leetu, nodding at Alpharius.\n\n'I neither trust nor doubt, John Grammaticus. That is not the part I was given to play. I follow. I help. I protect.'\n\n'The consolations of a simple life.'\n\n'Okay, let's move,' said Oll, looking around. He still had his gun. It would need stripping down and cleaning before it would fire again, but he hefted it and moved to follow the warrior called Alpharius, both actions as clear a statement as he could give.\n\nThey followed. He did not look back to check, but he knew.\n\nThe tunnel was low and reeked of stagnant air. No one spoke; there was no room to turn, just to shuffle forwards through the dark. On and on, until there was a clang of shearing metal and a breath of hot wind. Oll felt his way forward until he touched the rungs of a ladder and looked up to see the glow of stars in a circle above. He climbed.\n\nNight had fallen outside, but the air was still warm, the heat yet to bleed out into the cold of the desert night. Ragged holes in the clouds let the gleam of the stars through. Oll's eyes caught the bright lights amongst the familiar constellations - warships turning through the dark heavens. In the distance the spike of Hatay-Antakya Hive rose, glimmering with golden light, dancing in the eye.\n\nOll turned away from it. For a second it had looked like a tower, frozen beneath the fall of a lightning bolt.\n\n'What is the plan for this unholy convergence of purpose?' asked John Grammaticus as he emerged from the hatch. Oll looked at him and then at the others.\n\nThe woman Actae was standing slightly apart with the warrior called Alpharius, her head raised as though in conversation, though both were silent. As Oll watched, she placed her hand on the warrior's chest and nodded before turning to Oll and John.\n\n'Look,' began John, 'if this is a way of the dead husk of the Cabal getting back in the game, then-'\n\n'Those you call the Cabal are dead, and their plan with it,' said Actae.\n\n'Which brings us back to here and now, and what next,' said John, turning to look at Oll, the starlight and the glow of the distant hive catching in his eyes. 'What is your plan, Oll?'\n\n'Same as it was before, get to where we need to be,' he said. He could feel all of the others listening. Even Graft had come close as though wanting to hear. 'We came for you because you are our guide, John, and that still stands.'\n\n'And I thought it was because you cared,' said John, and jerked his head at Actae. 'Recent events show that I am not as informed as I thought - a guide whose map is out of date is not much use.' John gave Oll a long look.\n\nOll shook his head.\n\n'I am not big picture, John, remember. Not my strong suit.'\n\n'What about her big picture?' John flicked a thumb at Actae. 'She is a grade A supernova of a psyker, but then so am I, and I know that you two had a chat in between the seconds up there in the dome. What did she offer, Oll?'\n\n'An alliance to do what is needed.'\n\n'Really, and what version of what-is-needed is that?'\n\nOll shrugged.\n\n'Journeys like this, John, you can't know the end. Trust me.'\n\n'Trust you? You are asking me to come with you on an unknown path, while not knowing the end, and with dubious allies and options, and to do this all on trust... Now isn't that a turnaround.' John bit his lip, half turned away, and shook his head. 'You don't need a guide. It's bloody obvious where we need to be.' He raised his hand and pointed east towards where the Palace waited, far beyond the horizon. 'But that's a hell of a walk, and time has yet to be our friend.'\n\n'There is time still,' said Actae. They turned to look at her. She had shed the bones that had hung from her chin and the talons on her fingers. The veil had gone too, leaving her face and blind eyes bare. She held up a hand, beckoning. Oll hesitated for a second and then followed her over a rise in the ground. The others followed him.\n\nA lighter lay in a shallow bowl between slopes of scree and du"}
{"text":"waited, far beyond the horizon. 'But that's a hell of a walk, and time has yet to be our friend.'\n\n'There is time still,' said Actae. They turned to look at her. She had shed the bones that had hung from her chin and the talons on her fingers. The veil had gone too, leaving her face and blind eyes bare. She held up a hand, beckoning. Oll hesitated for a second and then followed her over a rise in the ground. The others followed him.\n\nA lighter lay in a shallow bowl between slopes of scree and dust. A scrim-net covered it, blending its blunt form with the wasteland.\n\n'Ready and waiting.' John gave a snort of laughter, lip curling at Actae. 'You two must have been very sure we would come with you.'\n\n'Contingency is a weapon of war, John Grammaticus,' said the warrior called Alpharius.\n\n'So we have a way of getting away,' said Zybes. 'Anyone actually know how to fly it?'\n\n'I can,' said John. 'Got some uses still, I guess.' He trudged over to the lighter, released the side hatch to the cockpit and swung himself up. Console controls lit under his fingers. 'Are you going to get in? I don't want to hang around. It's going to be a hell of a flight, and I don't want to have an attack of changing my mind before we are past the point of no return.'\n\n'I think we passed that a while ago,' said Katt.\n\nJohn laughed. The lighter's engines lit. A low whine of building power filled the air.\n\nOll held up a hand and looked around at those that remained of the few he had brought from Calth. Zybes, Katt, Krank and Graft looked back.\n\n'You know what I'm going to say, but I'm going to anyway - you should go. All of you, go south maybe. Fighting might be lighter there, wait it out. I'll come find you later, when this is done.'\n\nThey all looked at him, silent, unmoving.\n\n'I go with you, Trooper Persson,' said Graft eventually. The others nodded.\n\n'You know what that means?' he said.\n\n'We know,' said Zybes flatly.\n\n'It's okay,' said Katt.\n\nOll looked at them all, then nodded.\n\n'Okay,' he said, and turned towards the lighter. 'Okay...' he repeated quietly to himself.\n\nJohn was pulling the cockpit hatch closed. Zybes and Katt were peeling back the scrim-net. Actae was standing beside the descending rear ramp. The warrior called Alpharius had already vanished inside. Oll moved towards it, slinging his gun. He would clean it in flight, an old soldier habit. He patted the knife in its sheath at his waist. He still had-\n\nShuffle-tap...\n\nHe turned at the sounds of the footsteps on stone. Behind him. Getting closer.\n\nShuffle-tap...\n\nHe looked up, hand on the knife. The light from the distant hive glowed behind the ridge of the bowl.\n\nHis eyes moved across the shadows and skyline.\n\n'Time to go,' called Zybes from the lighter's hatch.\n\nOll blinked, then nodded, turned and ran to the open ramp. The engine noise rose in pitch as the lighter lifted into the air.\n\nOll did not look back. For a second, he had been sure that something was just behind him, breathing on the back of his neck.\n\nThe Hollow Mountain\n\n'Are any of them sane enough to serve?' asked Corswain.\n\nTragan looked at Vassago. The Calibanite Librarian said nothing. Tragan looked back at Corswain. 'Some perhaps, not enough, and the... equipment.' Tragan nodded up at the choral tiers that lined the inside of the sphere chamber. Cradles and banks of seats hung from twisted brackets. Drops of gut fluid and still-liquid blood dripped slowly onto the levels below. Most of the dead had been cleared. Those that were not dead had been granted that peace. A few had been so merged with the fabric of the chamber that the only way of ending them was by flamer and grenade. The air reeked of cooked flesh and sulphur. The presence of the Emperor's Children and the warp creatures they had conjured lingered at the edge of every sense - a jagged razor on the nerves and taste on the tongue. They had cleared them from the upper levels and most of the key areas of the mountain's interior. Some had slid down into the dark of the deepest reaches and vanished, but the Hollow Mountain was now the First Legion's. Relighting its beacon was another matter. The mountain was a device of occult wonder that had not just been occupied but violated. According to his Librarians, there were resonances in the fabric of the mountain itself that were going to cause problems. Then there was the issue of the psychic choir itself. They had found psykers in the deep, crowded into chambers - members of the sub choirs and aspirants. Many of them dead, most of them barely coherent.\n\n'The beacon must be relit,' said Corswain.\n\n'Our craft is war, brother,' said Tragan, steadily. 'Not the mysteries of the Great Ocean. This is a damaged creation, and one that cannot be reassembled like a stripped bolter.'\n\nCorswain looked at Vassago.\n\nThe Librarian was quiet for a long moment.\n\n'It might be possible,' he said at last. 'It is a realm of knowledge beyond my training, but there are pieces of older lore that might give guidance.'\n\nTragan, unhelmed, raised an eyebrow.\n\n'Caliban knows much, and teaches more than the circle of common wisdom.'\n\nCorswain paused for a long moment. Part of him wanted to ask the Librarian what he meant. Another part of him, the part that had grown in the forests of Caliban, felt that he could see the shadow of an answer. Not evils, but secrets, things that were known only by a few, hints that lived in the tatters of myth.\n\n'Whatever you can do,' said Corswain.\n\nVassago nodded. Tragan shifted, mouth opening to speak.\n\n'Brother.' The call came from an entrance onto the balcony. They all turned. Adophel, battered and bloody, came from the opening, and paused to bow his head in salute. 'We have secured the main communication chambers. The machinery is damaged but our smiths believe it can be called to function. We may be able to reach the Palace.'\n\nCorswain blinked.\n\n'Make the connection,' he said, and strode from the balcony, Tragan and Adophel at his side.\n\nBehind them, Vassago watched them go for a long moment and then turned away.\n\nThe test of all we are\n\nOne day\n\nDistance to wall\n\nHeads turned as Dorn entered the Shard Bastion command bunker. The wall top was non-viable, so core commands had relocated to inside the bastion. Red lights blinked across consoles. Corrupting data blurred across screens. Fear and exhaustion marked every human face, and did not dim as they watched the Praetorian stride to beside Archamus and a senior vox-officer. The man's left arm and head were still wrapped in bandages. A smell of sweat and static filled the air, like the dead crackle of a broken vox had spread to another sense. The holo-displays blinked and fizzed in the air above the projectors Dorn's command staff had installed. Corruption artefacts and pixel waves washed the displays. Some cut out intermittently or just showed shifting patterns of meaningless data. The walls, ceiling and floor were shaking. Archamus did not need the tactical data or to look out of the viewslits to know that an apocalyptic battle was raging beyond the wall - he could feel it.\n\n'The signal?' said Dorn.\n\nArchamus nodded to the fizzing displays.\n\n'It's confirmed as from the Astronomican fortress. It's coming over one of the hardline backups. It's distorted but coherent, and is using crusade-era Legion cipher codes.' Archamus felt the breath still in a dry throat; only he and the signal officer knew what he was about to say. 'It's the First, the Dark Angels of the Lion.'\n\nA moment of silence formed, echoing through the room like the shadow of a struck gong. Then a gasp of relief quickly stifled, and then a rustle of exhaled breaths, a ripple of heads rising. Archamus could see the relief and joy breaking through the masks of exhaustion. He felt something stir in his chest, though he made no sign of it - they had been waiting for this moment. Not the end, not victory, but the moment that the strategies and sacrifices had been made for - reinforcements were here, the forces of the Lion and Guilliman were coming. The balance of fate had tipped and all they needed to do now was follow the light into the future.\n\nDorn was utterly still, but Archamus thought he saw a flash in his lord's eyes as he looked at the communication officer.\n\n'Connect us,' he said.\n\nThe man bowed and turned, shaking, emotion grounding through him like lightning finally released from a storm.\n\nStatic popped from a vox-speaker, growling through the air. Everyone in the chamber looked up, some were standing.\n\n'This is Rogal Dorn,' said the Praetorian. 'To whom of the First Legion do I speak?'\n\n'This is Seneschal Corswain, of the First Legion, sire.'\n\nA cheer then, first one and then another coming from mouths in an uncontrollable rising wall. Archamus saw Dorn let out a breath.\n\n'We have retaken the Astronomican, and hold it,' said Corswain's voice.\n\nThe sound of cheers had faded but still lingered. Archamus could hear low weeping. It was the sound of relief, of a final relief that had finally arrived.\n\nA red rune flashed on one of the command consoles at the edge of Archamus' sight. He turned his head, frowned. More red runes, but no one was looking; they were all looking at Dorn, their senses filled with the reality of hope come at last.\n\n'My lord...' began Archamus.\n\n'What strength are you?' Dorn asked Corswain, leaning into the vox-console.\n\n'We made the assault with ten thousand of our order,' crackled Corswain's voice. 'The fallen are still being counted.'\n\n'What of the rest of my brothers and their sons?' asked Dorn. 'When do the rest of your Legion deploy?'\n\nA pause. Vox distortion crackled in the air. The echoes of cheers faded. Archamus could feel something cold form in his chest in that pause.\n\n'Sire,' said Corswain's voice. 'We have had no contact with our primarch, nor other forces. We came alone.'\n\nAlone.\n\nAnd the word rang in the silence like the blow of an executioner.\n\n'My lord,' said Archamus again, louder, as he moved to the tactical display. Dorn looked around then. "}
{"text":"and their sons?' asked Dorn. 'When do the rest of your Legion deploy?'\n\nA pause. Vox distortion crackled in the air. The echoes of cheers faded. Archamus could feel something cold form in his chest in that pause.\n\n'Sire,' said Corswain's voice. 'We have had no contact with our primarch, nor other forces. We came alone.'\n\nAlone.\n\nAnd the word rang in the silence like the blow of an executioner.\n\n'My lord,' said Archamus again, louder, as he moved to the tactical display. Dorn looked around then. 'My lord, Mortis have breached the lines. Cydon is gone.'\n\nNasuba looked down from the top of Shard Bastion as blast light washed over her. Her helm visor dimmed at the brightness. Sound vibrated through the wall and her bones. Her ears were ringing even inside the noise-baffles fitted to her helm. The breath went still in her throat.\n\nLight linked the sky to the earth in blinding pillars. She could see figures, dozens of towering figures that from this height seemed small. Fire and light surrounded them, drowned them, flowed from them and through them. As she watched, one of them took hits from three sides. Stitched lines of light. A balanced moment where the Titan took another step that would never end, then light.\n\nWhite and bright. The death of a god in a blink. Another blink. Another blink. The wall itself was beginning to shake.\n\nShe turned, started to stride back towards where one of the Praetorian's Huscarls was consulting with Sulkova. They looked around at her, saluting. The aegis shield above was strobing with orbital impacts. Another blink of light from beyond the parapet, closer now. The sound a shiver in her spine.\n\n'Get the teams to the reactors!' she shouted. 'The lines are breached! Drain the plasma off and shut them down, now!'\n\n'Command-and-control data feeds are failing at a rate of nine per cent every five minutes,' called Archamus. Alarms had started to sound, voices raised in barely controlled panic. 'Within the hour we will be data-blind. Fidelity of what field data there is stands at forty-one per cent clarity and falling. What there is says that the whole circuit of the wall is engaged. Unit cohesion amongst mortal units is collapsing in all zones.'\n\nRogal Dorn did not move for a long moment; when he did, it was a slow turning of his head to look across the chamber. A few eyes went to him, but many heads stayed bowed, as though to look at him was to have to face the truth. Archamus saw Dorn glance down at his hand. The Seal Sinister lay in his fingers, the carved lion's head flickering with reflected hololight.\n\n'Signal Sigismund and our reserves,' he said. 'They come here with full force and full speed.'\n\n'By your will, lord.'\n\n'Open a vox-link, Palace-wide, all viable channels and conduits. Do it now before we lose connection.' Dorn looked up. Archamus saw his lord's hand close tight over the seal sent from the Emperor, his father. A tech-priest straightened from a block of machinery, gestured to the vox-officer, who bent to his controls and then looked up at the Praetorian.\n\n'The vox-link is open.'\n\nRogal Dorn gave a nod of acknowledgement. Archamus saw his lord blink for a second and then his gaze harden.\n\n'This is Rogal Dorn.' The Praetorian's voice rolled out, echoing in the static-filled vox and from speakers and comm-sets. 'I speak now to all of you. We have come to it, you and I. All of us. All that has come before has been but the passing of suffering...'\n\nAcastia saw a flash on her screens. Elatus slowed. Its head rose as its stride paused. Another flash, larger than the first. Much larger. Then another. White light flashing clear up to the sky. Shadows loomed in the light, giants cast into the clouds and smoke.\n\n'What was that?' breathed Acastia.\n\n'Engine reactor detonations,' said Abhani over the vox. 'Large, very large...'\n\n'Ours or theirs, princeps?'\n\nAbhani did not reply; a second later the Solaria Titans turned into the direction of the light and the wall, and began to accelerate. Acastia kicked Elatus into a run and followed. In the distance another light flared. The ground was shaking through the metal bones of her steed. She ran on towards the light of battle.\n\n'The moment ahead is the test of all that we are...'\n\nOn the rubble of Marmax South, Section 52, Katsuhiro closed his eyes and took a breath. The shell fire shook the shards from the parapet. The bombardment was shifting, walking back behind the line. He opened his eyes, let out the breath. They were stinging. Steena was looking at him.\n\n'They are coming,' she said.\n\n'Yes,' he nodded.\n\nShe did not say anything, just clenched her jaw and gripped her rifle.\n\nHe swallowed. His mouth and throat were dry. The ground was shaking.\n\n'You know...' he began. Steena opened her eyes and looked at him. 'One day this will be over. All this will be done. Time will pass and they will rebuild on this spot. Statues and roads and fountains filled with water. Right here where we are now. People will walk and talk, and they will worry about things they think matter. They will laugh at jokes and frown at what they think are insults, and when they pause on this spot it will be because they have dropped something, or wish to rest, or to talk a little longer. Look and listen and you can see them. Not out there,' he jerked his head at the parapet, then tapped his forehead and heart, 'but in here, you can see them. They will stand here one day, and know what happened only as stories that will be kinder than the living of them was.'\n\nShe shook her head. He could hear the clash of armour from beyond the parapet. There were flies in the air the size of bullets.\n\n'How can you be certain?' she asked. 'How can you know?'\n\n'I have faith.'\n\nThe air was shaking.\n\n'Thank you, script,' she said at last, and smiled at him.\n\nHe smiled back, briefly, and then he was standing, gun up, shouting down the line.\n\n'Rise! Weapons ready! Rise!'\n\n'What shall be lost, what must be given, is the price of all that shall be...'\n\nIn the Hollow Mountain, Vassago moved down the passage alone. It was circular and the plasma-drills that had cut it had left a ripple in the rock. Like it was something organic. Like it was the inside of a serpent. His footfalls did not echo on the bare stone, despite the weight of his tread. The crystal flecks and seams in the walls gleamed as he passed, light kindling in them then fading. He could hear the walls sing, too. The song was low and distant but always there, an echo caught in the bones of this mountain. He did not see them waiting for him. There were two standing in the passage, their black armour showing only when the glow from the walls touched them.\n\nVassago stopped.\n\n'My brothers,' he said, and reached forwards with his mind to taste their thoughts and names. His mind recoiled as it slid off them. A murmur slid into the back of his skull, like the rustle of leaves and shadows. That should not have happened even here. Unless... unless... 'I did not know there were any other of the initiated amongst us,' he said. His hand moved to where the mace was mag-clamped to his back.\n\n'There are many things you do not know... brother...' said one of the Dark Angels, stepping forwards.\n\n'You are using the secrets of our order to help relight this beacon. How does that serve Caliban? We are not here to aid the dying empire that forsook us, brother. You saved Corswain's life when you could have let him perish. That was a mistake. The void left by his death could have been used to our advantage.'\n\nVassago took a careful half-step backwards. In his mind, his thoughts were gliding through the doors and coils of knowledge, gathering power.\n\n'I serve only our order,' he said. 'But you have seen what was here, what beasts have come and made a nest in the Warmaster's Legion. This is a threat to us.'\n\n'Is it?' The question came from behind him, and he whirled, drawing his mace in the same movement. It lit with blue fire. Warriors in black armour and hooded robes stood in the tunnel. The glow of his mace cast their shadows onto the stone walls. Threads of crystal became orange embers in dark stone.\n\n'How could it be anything else?' he countered, glancing back as he sensed the first warriors shifting closer, encircling him.\n\n'Any power can be made to serve,' said a voice from the circle of warriors. 'And there are things that even you do not see...'\n\n'What happened here will not happen to us. We are not weak, and will not fall to such powers, no matter the gain.'\n\n'Who says you have not already fallen, son of Caliban?'\n\nThe cold light of his mace flickered, and the shadows on the wall shifted, and for a moment they were not of men but of things made of feathers and claws and reaching talons.\n\nVassago felt the cold tighten around his spine. How long ago had he been betrayed? he wondered.\n\n'There is no room for doubt. You have proved that even amongst the initiated, there is weakness still.'\n\nA figure stepped from amongst the others, and lowered his hood. Darkness filled the eye sockets and lines of the face beneath. It was a face that should not have been there, that had been left on Caliban.\n\n'You?' said Vassago in shock.\n\nThe face nodded, and then turned away.\n\n'Take him,' it said.\n\nVassago raised his mace. Blue fire and shadows flickered across the walls. The figures around him surged forwards.\n\n'No matter the price...'\n\nThe engines of Legio Mortis walked through the fires of their burning and dying enemies. The droning count of their scrap code buzzed between them. Above them the face of the Mercury Wall rose. Dies Irae walked at the head of its kin, pulling the light of battle to it and shredding it to shadow like a tattered cloak. It reached the base of the wall, and stopped. Debris and fire rained down on it, exploding from the energies that coiled around its frame. Slowly it tilted its head and weapon-laden shoulders back, so that the light of the fire above fell on its face. Its war-horns sounded, booming up the face of the wall of the Palace.\n\n"}
{"text":"them. Above them the face of the Mercury Wall rose. Dies Irae walked at the head of its kin, pulling the light of battle to it and shredding it to shadow like a tattered cloak. It reached the base of the wall, and stopped. Debris and fire rained down on it, exploding from the energies that coiled around its frame. Slowly it tilted its head and weapon-laden shoulders back, so that the light of the fire above fell on its face. Its war-horns sounded, booming up the face of the wall of the Palace.\n\n'We shall face what is to come.'\n\nEnemy distance to wall: 0 kilometres.\n\n∞\n\nThe horizon has gone. In the land that is just an idea of heat and suffering, the sky and plain of baked dust have merged. The man sits beneath the blackened tree. The flesh has pulled back over the bones of His frame so that He seems a corpse. There is no breath of wind to steal the heat from Him, and the burned tree gives no shade. It has been like this for a long time. It has been like this for an eternity.\n\nSomething shifts in the white-hammer heat. The man opens His eyes. He knows what He will see.\n\nA figure in gold armour and a red cloak stands above him. A laurel sits on Horus' head like a crown. The fingers of his right hand are claws. His face is regal, the features set in an expression of calm authority. He looks like the image of a king. He looks like the idea of his father.\n\nHe is very close to the man and the burned tree, much closer than any time before. The man beneath the tree stirs, tries to raise a hand.\n\n'Almost, father,' Horus says, and takes a step closer. The man beneath the tree reaches down to the ground, tries to draw a line in the dust. 'No,' Horus says, and bends down so that he is almost within reach of the man. 'There is no need to try. You have a little strength left, enough that this will not be the end, but not enough for ever.'\n\nHorus shakes his head. The man beneath the tree meets his gaze and there is no sign of withering or weakness.\n\n'You have ruined all that you made,' says Horus. 'You did great things, father. Great things... but they are now in ruin and unravel at my will. It is a tragedy, but it is not my doing. It is yours. You burned everything you ever touched, every idea and person heaped on the pyre of your arrogance and ambition.'\n\nAbove them the black branches of the tree creak, and in that sound there might be laughter and the chittering of things without tongues but only mouths and teeth. If Horus hears them his face shows no sign.\n\n'Everything that has happened is your doing. All that I have done and must do is but the consequence of your deeds. There is only one thing I do not blame you for...' Horus reaches down with his clawed hand and draws the line in the dust that the man's finger could not make. 'This defiance. This stubborn refusal to bow to inevitability. I wish I could hate you for that too, but I cannot. After all, what else remains to you?' The man beneath the tree is silent. Horus shakes his head. 'It is coming, father. The end of your stolen years and false kingdom. You will see it all become ash before the end. But you will not be alone when death claims you... For I am here with you.' And Horus raises his clawed hand and touches the idea of the Emperor's cheek. 'I am right here.'\n\nPART ONE\n\nThe blade\n\nHanding over\n\nNew blood\n\nIt begins under stone.\n\nHidden, folded up in darkness, cold as the breath of winter dawn. The people of Ong-Hashin come for it, as they have done for as long as songs have been sung in their high valley, lodged between the Takal Shoulder and the eastern fringe of the Great Borai Plain. They climb the narrow ways, leather-bound feet slipping against the rock, hauling their own picks and baskets.\n\nThe ways down are hand-cut, supported with timber frames. The lintels of those frames are scraped with angular glyphs, made with the same blunt knives they use for prising stones from their mounts' hooves. These are not high calligraphic marks, but the marks of a hard people, used to rockfalls and landslips. They wish to delve for it, to find it, then return. They do not love the deep places, the cool sweat of the narrow tunnels, for they are Chogorian after all, and like the open wind on their faces.\n\nWhen they hack it out, it is brittle. Blacksand, they call it. It crumbles in your hand, if you treat it roughly, once out of the earth. A few moments later, though, and it is hard, so much so that you can toss it into a basket and start to work at the lode again. If you hold it up - a chunk the size of a man's fist - you can see the sparkling fragments within, catching the light of subterranean candles.\n\nOnce done, they take it all back down the track, picking their way carefully. It rains often, as the Takal Peaks capture the moisture rolling across the open lands, and the rocks are greasy with moss. This party returns to a settlement deep in Hashin country, perched between pine stands, frigid and mist-clouded. They take the blacksand pieces and haggle with the blademakers. This takes a long time, and is a bad-tempered affair. Those who have laboured to obtain it are weary and need to sleep. Those who wish to take it are anxious to get to work. And the sun is low, by then. No bargains are well made at dusk, the sages say.\n\nThe following dawn, and the labour begins. In Hashin, blademakers always come in pairs - a man, a woman. They need to know one another very well. Sometimes they are siblings; more often, bonded couples. The charcoal furnaces are stoked until the flames spit. The blacksand chunks are turned and assessed again, then placed in long-handled pliers. At this stage, the man works the fire, the woman handles the pliers. Both wear thin cotton shirts, despite the chill of the air outside. Inside the forge, it is already punishingly hot, and their exposed flesh glistens.\n\nOnce hot enough, the chunks are withdrawn from the fires and beaten. The man takes up a hammer, striking hard. The woman directs him, shifting the red metal over the anvil's blunt surface. Impurities are beaten out. It is gruelling work, a process that jars bones. The process is repeated, over and over, until the steel starts to purify. The beaten flakes are broken up, doused in cold water, then re-melted and re-struck. Plates are created, stacked on top of one another, then gently placed back into the flames, melted, compacted, re-melted. Both parties scrutinise, checking for flaws.\n\nNeither speaks. If they need to make their feelings known to one another, they tap with a hammer in a certain way, but this is rarely necessary - they are masters of the craft, working by intuition and observation. The steel is folded, again and again, each time refining the metal, hardening it, purifying it. Soon it begins to lengthen, to thin, to extend out into the long curve of a true blade. The hammering is remorseless, clanging out of the forge's open doorway, keeping the rest of the village awake.\n\nFinishing the blade's face is done by the woman. She mixes a clay jacket for the cutting edge, using her thinner fingers to press the spatula into the slurry. By then, both workers are weary, having been at the forge for days. When the clay is broken off after more time in the coals, the pattern on the steel is visible. Every blademaker has a different mark - for some, solak blossom; for others, tiger's claws. The most prestigious, and hardest to achieve, is the lightning spread, forking from tip to scabbard-edge. This one bears such a mark.\n\nThen it is filed, marked, polished, washed. If all is perfect, the blade is wrapped in straw and fabric, and placed in a heavy cart drawn by aduun. A red pennant is tied to a long pole, marking the cart as sacred cargo - it will not be attacked on its journey, even if it passes through tribal lands at war. The blademakers rest at last, their hands calloused, their skin blistered. They will never see their creation again, and receive no payment for their work. The entire village supports them, and they occupy positions of reverence. All know where the swords are destined to find service.\n\nThe cart then travels west, descending rapidly before reaching the open country. After many months of trekking across the grassland, eventually the drivers spy the Khum Kharta on the horizon, pale against the whisper of the long grass. They pull up, and prepare the cairn. Stones are piled up, draped with prayer-fragments and incense bowls, crowned with the pennant. The blade, still wrapped, is placed at the top. Then the drivers withdraw, beginning the long journey home.\n\nThe following night, it is taken up into the fortress by Legion menials. Once inside the shadowy halls of Quan Zhou, each prayer-fragment is studied, interpreted, then placed in the librarium. From these scraps, the masters of Chogoris learn much of the shifting patterns of the endless grass, and where to draw aspirants from, and how the health of the thousand realms ebbs and flows. The blade - still without its hilt, scabbard or guard - is unwrapped and carried into the forges. None of the painstaking marks made by the Hashin blademakers are removed. None of the tiny flaws - few as they ever are - are removed. This is a product of the people of Jaghatai, not of a machine intelligence. When polished to a mirror sheen, it reflects the authors' faces in every flash of light from its surface.\n\nA powered grip is added, meticulously crafted onto the steel, bound into it, worked at by hand until the gold chasing cuts smartly into the metal's surface. The disruptor field is blended, harmonising with the structure of the underlying blade. It will be tested, over and again, returned to the forges many times by the sparring-tutors until the balance cannot be improved upon. The flare of the energy field is bonded to the marks made in its first forging, augmenting them, giving the sword its signature. Thus the labour of Hashin will be witnessed across the known galaxy, as vivid as the lightning it mimics.\n\nOnly when all is done can"}
{"text":"etal's surface. The disruptor field is blended, harmonising with the structure of the underlying blade. It will be tested, over and again, returned to the forges many times by the sparring-tutors until the balance cannot be improved upon. The flare of the energy field is bonded to the marks made in its first forging, augmenting them, giving the sword its signature. Thus the labour of Hashin will be witnessed across the known galaxy, as vivid as the lightning it mimics.\n\nOnly when all is done can it be passed up to the blademasters of the ordu for final scrutiny. They keep the weapon in their temple vaults, surrounded by ritual guardians, unused, unlit, until an aspirant is inducted into the Legion with a suitable character for the blade.\n\nThis one is given to the warrior named Morbun Xa. Morbun Xa is famed, not just for his prowess, but also for his restraint. He is a model of the Path of Heaven, they say. The blade suits him. He takes it with him on the void-ship Korghaz with the Brotherhood of the Night's Star. It is first drawn against an enemy on the world of Egetha IX, where the ordu is victorious.\n\nDuring the long years of the Crusade, it changes hands twice, as its bearers meet their end in battle. The great treachery nears its endgame, and now it is borne by Ajak Khan, of the Brotherhood of the Amber Eagle. He stands on the walls of the Palace as they crumble beneath his boots, and calls out curses on those who assail him. He grips the hilt loosely, making the steel dance around him. The skies are black, like calligrapher's ink. The air is ringing with noise - from the infantry yelling, from the god-machines that have all but penetrated the last solid line of defence, from the thunder of the fixed guns.\n\nAjak Khan spies his enemy, a captain of Angron's tragic berserkers, debased fighters he pities as much as he hates, clambering through ruins towards him, followed by a dozen more. In their wake come the hordes, still languishing in no-man's-land, exposed to the pounding of the guns. Ajak Khan runs, accompanied by his battle-brothers, racing into the close combat he loves. The blade whirls, trailing forks of lightning. It bites, it cleaves, and Ajak Khan cries aloud in pleasure.\n\nUnder the stone, on another world, by candlelight, the rock-cutters of Ong-Hashin pause. The flames have shuddered briefly, though there is no wisp of a breeze in the deep places.\n\nIt happens, sometimes. They know what it means.\n\nDiligently, they take up their picks, and return to work.\n\n'Why tell me this?' asked Jangsai Khan, though he felt that, in truth, he already knew.\n\nNaranbaatar's face was in shadow, half-lit from below by a cracked sodium tube. The rest of the bunker was dark, hot from confinement, stinking of sweat and mould. The Stormseer's skin was dark too, scarred from ritual marks and newer wounds, creased with age. The crystals of his armour's hood glinted, and animal skull totems twisted gently from their fixings on lengths of twine. 'You should know its history,' he said.\n\nJangsai took up the sword. It was a fine piece - a mid-length blade, slightly curved, though less so than the tulwars used by the mounted units. He switched it to the horizontal, looking down it, feeling for balance. Faint lightning patterns were visible on the steel, part of the structure of the cutting-face. He slipped his thumb over the disruptor trigger, already speculating on how the blaze of energy would take its key from those marks.\n\n'Its bearer-'\n\n'Died well,' said Naranbaatar. 'Much was recovered, including this. Now it is yours.'\n\nJangsai nodded. No use in wasting it. Powerful, fully functional powerblades were valuable now. Everything was running out, on its last legs. 'I knew him,' he said. 'Ajak.'\n\nThat was less of a claim than it would once have been. Almost the entire Legion was clustered together now, their numbers winnowed cruelly, hemmed in behind walls and pressed up against the faces of the enemy. Once-sundered brotherhoods fought next to one another, mingling as their casualties mounted up. At times it felt that there was not a warrior of the ordu still alive that Jangsai didn't know the name of, or hadn't witnessed fighting, or whose unit's history he wasn't acquainted with.\n\n'His brotherhood no longer fights,' said Naranbaatar. 'The survivors have been distributed. But the deeds have been recorded, and will be taken to the halls of Quan Zhou when all this is over.'\n\nThat was one of the hallmarks of Naranbaatar. Jangsai had never heard him boast, but time and again the Stormseer had spoken of plans for the future, nonchalantly, with the certainty of success underpinning it all, and hence the need to move on to the next task. It was all so matter-of-fact - this thing here must be done, and then we must return to what we were doing before. Everything shall be put in order again, everything recorded. It was amusing, sometimes, to listen to it all, as the world around them sunk further into desecration.\n\n'Then they are inside the inner wall,' Jangsai said.\n\n'Within the hour, we think.'\n\n'You wish me to take over Ajak's position?'\n\n'No, that has been assigned to another. I wish you to leave your station - you have new orders.'\n\n'From you?'\n\n'From the Khagan himself.'\n\nJangsai hesitated. 'We are hard-pressed here, zadyin arga.' That was as close as he would ever come to pushing back. He had to register something, though - his warriors were dying, and would continue to die, and his place was with them. The unspoken undertone was understood by them both. Why now?\n\n'We need you to speak to someone,' Naranbaatar told him. 'He is not a native of Terra. As we learned recently, he comes from the same world that you did. So that is the reason. I know you wish to fight on here, but, believe me, you will not be deprived of chances to do so again soon.'\n\nOnce again, a fractional pause before replying. 'This is the end, then,' he said.\n\n'The beginning of it.'\n\n'What can you tell me?'\n\n'Enough for you to perform this task. After that, it depends. We do not know what will be possible yet. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.'\n\nIt could still take you aback, that essential calmness. Jangsai knew that Chogorians got angry. He'd seen it many times in combat, and they were terrifying when they really, truly lost their composure, but for the most part they maintained an equanimity that could be as infuriating as it was impressive.\n\nJangsai looked down at the blade again. Ajak would have been holding it, just a matter of hours ago, maybe. They would have been a seamless pairing, both products of the same background, parts of a harmonious whole.\n\n'Tell me where I need to go,' he said.\n\nThe world was called Ar Rija.\n\nIt had suffered greatly during the terrors of Old Night, and so when the Emperor's armies arrived during the first few decades of the Crusade, they had been welcomed enthusiastically. Its old industrial base was rebuilt quickly, and within a generation it was contributing handsomely to the war effort. Many regiments were raised for the Imperial Army, a number of which went on to earn widespread fame. By the time of the Triumph at Ullanor, Ar Rija was considered a linchpin planet - one upon which the security of an entire subsector depended, sited at the strategic junction of many established warp lanes, a settled, substantial place.\n\nThe Legiones Astartes, the Imperial Fists in particular, had begun to take aspirants from Ar Rija from the second century of the Crusade Age onwards. It had never been a major recruiting world, being generally considered too civilised to produce the optimally brutal Space Marine candidate, but the demands of the all-encompassing conquest meant that every avenue was explored. Only when the civil war broke out in earnest did that situation change. As the scale of Horus' treachery became apparent, Imperial strategos began a frantic programme of asset-withdrawal, pulling everything they could out of the reach of the oncoming enemy. Ar Rija, for a time, was considered a safe haven. Its Naval yards were reinforced, its regiments boosted, its defences resupplied. Recruiters for a number of Legions turned their eyes towards it, already seeing how desperate things were likely to become, and suddenly needing to make use of every possible means of increasing the supply of aspirants.\n\nIt was always a tenuous hope. The process of turning a mortal child into a Legion warrior was a delicate art, honed over many years and conducted in secure surroundings. It could be speeded up, if necessary, and its programmes moved to different locations, but both actions brought risks with them. Even once a number of scattered Legion facilities had been evacuated to Ar Rija, increased aspirant deaths meant that recruitment rates failed to rise as swiftly as hoped. More subjects were sought from the native population, fast-tracked through the usual screening and placed onto accelerated ascension protocols.\n\nTuyo had known nothing of this at the time, of course. He had been too young. His ambitions, such as he had had any back then, had been to serve in the Army one day - to take ship as part of one of the prestigious regiments and sail into the void in pursuit of the Emperor's designs. When the officials had come to his parents' cramped hab-unit, with their strange expressions and odd uniforms, he had thought little of it. Only later, when his mother had burst into tears and his father's face had lost all its colour, had he begun to realise that something was very wrong.\n\nThose were his last memories of them. It was hard even to remember their faces, now. So much had changed - in himself, in the Imperium. For a while, he'd been determined to hang on to those final childhood images, thinking it important that he had some kind of tether to his old life. As the training programme had commenced, however, and he had undergone the first rounds of mental conditioning, that had become hard. After a few months, he had stopped trying. Everything h"}
{"text":"omething was very wrong.\n\nThose were his last memories of them. It was hard even to remember their faces, now. So much had changed - in himself, in the Imperium. For a while, he'd been determined to hang on to those final childhood images, thinking it important that he had some kind of tether to his old life. As the training programme had commenced, however, and he had undergone the first rounds of mental conditioning, that had become hard. After a few months, he had stopped trying. Everything had been consumed by the changes raging through his prepubescent body - the agonising hormone treatments, the psycho-honing, the relentless physical improvements.\n\nHe had had four years of that. Far too short a time, he learned later, to be sure of success. More than half of those he started the programme with died early on. Others fell by the wayside after the first wave of implants. His memories of that phase of his life were hazy now, filled with the impressions of faces he had no names for and places that he could no longer locate. He had been angry, so angry, all the time. They had made him that way, he assumed - pumping him with chems that fuelled his rage. Those had got him through the pain, made him work harder - just for the sake of spite, it felt like sometimes.\n\nBut he had learned a great deal. He had learned that the Imperium he had assumed was ever-expanding and secure was in fact on the brink of destruction. He had learned of the Enemy and its ruthlessness. He had learned of the history of the Eighteen Legions and the role each one had played in the entire affair, including the traitors, because you had to know an enemy before you could be sure of killing him.\n\nIn other circumstances, he would have completed his training on Ar Rija. Near the end, though, everything had changed again. The war reached his home world, just as it had always been destined to. He was not permitted to fight for it. None of the aspirants were. They were herded into transports and sent hurtling away from the wave of destruction. Now Ar Rija was far behind enemy lines, presumably destroyed or occupied. He hoped the former, with what lingering human attachment he had for the place - you did not want to live under the rule of Horus, not if you had been a loyal world.\n\nSo it was that he had seen Terra at last, the centre of all things, heart of the Imperium, and yet already threatened with attack, already vulnerable. The entire place was filled with soldiers, teeming with them, spilling out of every lander and onto every viaduct and marshalling yard, all tense, all terrified.\n\nThis was where he would fight. It was where he had been made to fight. He would know no other battlefield, not unless they were victorious here. Those final few months had been the hardest of all - the last implants had had to take, his accelerated training had had to be completed. He had needed to prove himself to the instructors, and then to his Legion, neither of whom could afford, even now, to let a substandard product enter the ranks of the Emperor's Finest.\n\nHe was a newblood. A hurriedly created product of a desperate empire on its uppers. A warrior rushed through both creation and training, given none of the immersion and cultivation that the Imperium had once lavished on its paramount living weapons. If things had not been so desperate, he would never have been changed on Ar Rija. He would never have been transported from station to station, his development interrupted, overseen by instructors drawn from a dozen worlds. Everyone knew it was suboptimal. A few even counselled against the process entirely, acutely aware of the consequences when a Space Marine entered service with a flawed background.\n\nFor all that, he had still been proud. He had burned to fight, to demonstrate what he could do, both to himself and to the established members of his Legion. He was neither Terran nor Chogorian, but he was still a warrior, a battle-brother of one of the three Blessed Legions, the honoured trinity tasked with the last defence of Terra. The soul of the primarch smouldered within his own blood. The sacred scar ran down his cheek, zigzagged like lightning.\n\nThey had left it a long time to perform the final rite of ascension. When the moment had come at last, he had stood in long lines with many others, all of them mongrels like him, plucked from obscure backwaters and outposts, painfully undertrained, painfully eager. Their armour was bone-white, immaculate, fresh from the forge. The lord commander had arrived by shuttle, making the dust on the open parade ground billow and skitter. He had clanged down the ramp, flanked by ivory-armoured giants in battle-tarnished plate. The skies were blustery and rain-blown above them, yet to be darkened by the downdraught of a million landers.\n\nTuyo had waited patiently, arms by his sides, tensing his muscles one by one. Spires and defence towers rose up around them, casting deep, cold shadows over the gravel. You could hear the noise of military preparations in all directions - the grind of machine-tools, the grumble of engines, the tramp of marching boots. Everything was on the edge, there. Everything had been poised, ready to explode into violence.\n\nEventually, the lord commander had reached Tuyo's place in the line. His name was Ganzorig, a noyan-khan in the Legion's own reckoning. He was a Chogorian, one who had been fighting against the traitors for seven terrible, arduous years. He had been a seasoned warrior for decades before that. That left its mark on him, like a scent. He looked unbreakable.\n\nTuyo had looked him in the eye. Ganzorig had looked back, coolly, lingering, as if appraising a steed for purchase.\n\n'Tuyo,' the noyan-khan had said eventually. 'You are of the ordu of Jaghatai now. Your old life is no more. What name do you take to mark your ascension?'\n\n'Jangsai,' he had said, without hesitation.\n\nGanzorig had nodded, satisfied. It didn't matter to them, where you came from - only what name you took, and whether you gave honour to it. 'You are one with the ordu, Jangsai.'\n\nJangsai had waited. One final thing remained to be done - to assign him to his minghan, his brotherhood. So straitened were the times, and so mauled had the Legion been on its return to the Throneworld, that reconstruction was still ongoing, and recruitment was a matter of considerable fluidity.\n\nGanzorig had given it much thought, as he had with every newblood warrior he'd inducted that day. Hundreds of warriors had been standing there, but the noyan-khan had known everything about all of them - their training records, their confidential instructors' reports. Jangsai waited in silence.\n\n'You are of the Brotherhood of the Iron Axe,' Ganzorig had said, at last. 'You will not leave it except in death - may it be long in coming, and may glory accompany your deeds until that day.'\n\nJangsai had bowed. Now he was complete. Now, at last, he was a White Scar.\n\n'Hai Chogoris!' he had said. 'Glory to the Khagan.' Then, with even more feeling, 'And a thousand deaths to his enemies.'\n\nJangsai Khan, Brotherhood of the Iron Axe.\n\nDeath in life\n\nApothecary\n\nThe Pale King\n\nBut he had already died so many times he could no longer count them. Over and over, he had felt his hearts stop, with a jolt so painful that he would have screamed if he could have somehow hauled the breath in.\n\nThat was what it had been like, in the void, for that period of time that had felt longer than eternity. Perhaps it had been longer. Perhaps a part of him was still out there even now, dying and then living and then dying again. At times he'd not been able to tell the states apart - they had merged together, just one long stretch of agony. And now it was over, in a manner of speaking, but he was still somehow stuck in that halfway state, as if his soul had never truly escaped the Destroyer, caught in its vice and gently crushed into pliant mush.\n\nIn other respects, though, he had gone back to being something that he recognised. He could carry a weapon again, trudge towards a horizon, kill for his primarch. He could follow an order, give an order. He was a soldier, just as he had been ever since his youth on Barbarus. A fighter against tyranny.\n\nSo Caipha Morarg was utterly transformed, and also utterly unchanged. The externals were all rearranged, but his mind was much as it ever had been. He could no longer remove his encrusted armour, true, and he could no longer breathe without wheezing, nor blink without leaving lines of mucus across his eyeballs, but he remained himself, loyal equerry to the primarch, servant of the Legion, observer of deeds for the histories that would one day need to be written.\n\nHe lifted his heavy head, feeling the servos in his decaying battleplate catch and snick. Everything was dusty. The ruins roiled with it, running in tear-lines from mortar wounds, silting up across the foundations of half-toppled buildings in grey-black dunes. You couldn't see far, in all that. A mortal might peer out for a few dozen metres. He himself could see a bit further, all through the film of green that coloured everything for him now. He could make out the ruins of Corbenic Gard in the far distance, a slumped heap of masonry, still hot from all the munitions that had been hurled at it. Closer in, a few kilometres off, the walls of the Colossi Gate stood, blackened, damaged, but stubbornly there. In between those peaks were the blasted lands, the flattened carcasses of old dwellings and factories, a maze of low-lying rubble heaps.\n\nEven as he watched, something shimmered in the half-light, gauzy and translucent. A face emerged from the dust clouds, briefly elongating, slipping over itself, solidifying into a distended, slack-jawed creature that popped and wobbled its way into full being. It shuddered, slipping in and out of reality, before slithering off into the shadows, looking for something to gorge on.\n\nMorarg still hadn't got used to them. The daemons. Once, he would "}
{"text":" and factories, a maze of low-lying rubble heaps.\n\nEven as he watched, something shimmered in the half-light, gauzy and translucent. A face emerged from the dust clouds, briefly elongating, slipping over itself, solidifying into a distended, slack-jawed creature that popped and wobbled its way into full being. It shuddered, slipping in and out of reality, before slithering off into the shadows, looking for something to gorge on.\n\nMorarg still hadn't got used to them. The daemons. Once, he would have been repelled by even a sniff of such horrors, but now they were everywhere, sliding across the open doorways, capering down bombed-out streets. They rose up from the soil, and squirmed down from empty window frames. Some were silent, some whispered all the time. Some took the form of animals, so that you could never be quite sure what was real and what was not, until you got close enough to sniff the wrongness. Others were gigantic and repellent, lurching and shifting through the dust clouds, towering over the troops below. They all had trouble, still. The closer they got to the great wards, the worse it was for them. Even now, even after so much pain had been piled onto the Emperor's psychic barricades, they couldn't quite cross the final threshold. They still needed flesh and blood for some things.\n\nBut that wouldn't take long, now. Every wall of the long Inner Palace perimeter was under attack. The bombardment never ceased. The pressure never slackened. What paltry territory remained in the hands of the enemy was being compressed, wrung out, tighter and tighter, until it would burst apart like rotten fruit. Then the daemons would truly go to work. Then they would run amok, unfettered, feasting on whatever living souls remained in the debris.\n\nOn some days, when Morarg thought about that, he became morose and sluggish, remembering when his purpose had been to hunt down monsters rather than enable them. And on other days, when combat roused the cold coals of his soul's furnace, he wished for nothing more than to see it, to relish it, to grin in a stupor as the lesser children of the god did their holy work. Typhus - they had to call him Typhus now - preached that doctrine endlessly, telling them all that this was what they were always destined to become, and never to regret the sacrifice, for even when they had been waifs and wretches on Barbarus, the god had always had them in his mind, and had always known they could be something greater.\n\nMorarg smiled at the memory. Greater? In some ways, they were. So few things truly hurt him, now. Bolt-shells would punch through his armour, blades would bite deep into his addled flesh, and he would recover from it all so quickly, just as it had been in the warp - death to life, life to death. And yet, how could he ignore the visible price of all that power - the way his skin hung slack from wasted muscle, the way his pores oozed black gunge, the way everything he touched seemed to thicken up with corrosion and start to fester? If this was a gift, then it was a strange one. If it was a reward, then its taste was bitter.\n\nIn the distance, he heard the pounding rhythm of guns. He felt the earth under his feet tremble. The god-machines were still walking. They were at the wall, he knew. Now. This was a moment, a point of change. Once the first incision was made, all else would follow from it. He wished he was there, far away, out on the Katabatic Plain to witness the Legio Mortis demolish the last physical barrier. As the dust clouds in the north-eastern horizon kept on growing, rising up to form seething pillars between earth and sky, he imagined the panic they were causing, and started to chuckle.\n\nThat made his phlegmy throat catch, and he coughed himself to a halt. He couldn't even take pleasure in a chortle now without his body betraying him. Some bargain. Some contract. But then, it hadn't been his to make. The primarch had done it for them, and for reasons that still baffled him. You had to have faith. Even if Morarg didn't have much in the god, yet, he could still trust the one who had saved them from Barbarus.\n\nHe began to walk again, lifting one mud-clogged boot, then the other. It would take him a while to get where he needed to be, but that was fine by him. He had already experienced eternity, already gone to the universe's end and back, already died and lived and died again.\n\nThat tended to give you a sense of proportion. After all that, in the midst of all this, and into whatever pristine hell was due to be served up at you by the uncaring cosmos, you had to see the funny side.\n\nWhenever you killed, he thought to himself sometimes, wondering if he was the very first to entertain the notion, it helped to laugh.\n\nIt was all so fascinating. A new world, opening up like a budding flower, and all within his grasp.\n\nZadal Crosius breathed it in, tasted it, felt it. His body responded, soaking up every new sensation, absorbing it all, feeling things that he had no words to describe. The sky was dark grey, hanging heavily with smog. The earth was black, choked with ash. Every surface, every brick and block, was coated with filth. And yet, if you knelt down, pushed your helm close enough, you could see the variation there - the tiny glints of crystalline carbon, the movements of insects across the dirt, still struggling on, despite the poisons everywhere. Crosius would reach out with a finger, toying with them for a moment, then crushing their glossy shells.\n\nHe had been an Apothecary, before. Back in the world that had been dull and dutiful, he had spent his time patching up lacerations and repairing bones. He had thought himself content with that, at the time. A Space Marine was an astonishing thing, capable of self-repair in all but the most catastrophic circumstances. The warriors of the XIV Legion were exceptional even by those high standards, having made a virtue of extreme physical endurance. The ones who had come from Barbarus had set the pace, having lived in a world of poisons for as long as anyone could remember, but the Terrans had caught up fast. The message had come right from the top, from the primarch, repeated over and over.\n\nYou are my unbroken blades. You are the Death Guard.\n\nIn hindsight, Crosius wondered how he had ever really taken pleasure in that old life. True, the position had been an honoured one - the Apothecaries of the XIV had been treated almost like the Techmarines of the X, charged with watching over the Legion's jealously guarded specialisms. But his subjects had been so dour, so relentless, so... uniform. They had never smiled at him, nor offered thanks when he had stitched them up and sent them back to the front. There had been a cloud over them all, a kind of heaviness, dull as stone, turgid as oil.\n\nNow, though. Now.\n\nHe limped across the broken ground, his boots sinking deep into sucking clay. Pain flared with every movement, but it was interesting pain, something he could reflect on and marvel at. His body, once such a source of pride, was falling apart. His muscles were loose, his skin sallow. When he swivelled, his armour complained, already beginning to fail. Rust had crept across the face of his plate's metalwork, spidery and multi-hued, and he no longer scoured it off. Better just to let it all degrade, to slide down into a greasy mass. You could take real pleasure in that - the release! The freedom from all that endless, endless drudgery.\n\nNow his mind worked differently. He regarded his fellow battle-brothers, and saw that they were changing, too. It was almost childlike, this emergence into a new world, each one of them treading carefully, discovering slowly what they had been turned into, and what they might yet become. So appropriate, that it was taking place here, on the very world where everything had started. The Legion had spread out across the galaxy, waging their dreary war over two hundred years, and were now back again, improved, released, on the cusp of marvels beyond imagination.\n\nThe term 'Apothecary' was no longer really suitable, he thought. Something better would have to be concocted, to reflect more closely the biological explorations that were now possible. For now, though, the old title would just have to do. There was, after all, a war on.\n\n'Crosius!' came a shout from behind him.\n\nHe turned, watching as an armoured column trundled out of the mists, tracking alongside him. Infantry marched in ragged mobs, rags hanging from their exposed skin, their expressions vague and ill-focused. Full battle-brothers, the ones who still called themselves the Unbroken, marched alongside those wretches. They were bloated creatures now, swelling up at the armour-joints, their ceramite crusted and filmy. A column of Legion tanks rocked and swayed across the uneven terrain, chucking lines of thick smoke into an already hazy atmosphere. The growling formations of heavy vehicles stretched off down the road, finally disappearing into the curling mist. Crosius halted, waiting for the one who had hailed him to crunch down from his tank's top hatch and lumber up to him.\n\nGremus Kalgaro had always been a taciturn, closed kind of character. He'd served as the master of ordnance for the Legion fleet during the opening years of the Great Uprising, and the cold of void-war had suited him. Now, though, he'd loosened up. He'd taken his helm off, exposing a puffy riot of pink flesh that looked ripe to spill down his chest. One eye was closed, hidden by a cluster of tumours, ones that Crosius found himself itching to examine.\n\n'Going my way?' Kalgaro asked, spittle hanging from a swollen lower lip.\n\n'Depends,' said Crosius. 'Where are you going?'\n\n'Over there,' said Kalgaro, gesturing ahead vaguely, into the boiling clouds of dust and steam. 'His new Manse.'\n\nCrosius knew what he meant. The primarch's current residence, co-opted from his brother Perturabo, the staging point for the final push. It had been a port, once. A space port. So "}
{"text":"dden by a cluster of tumours, ones that Crosius found himself itching to examine.\n\n'Going my way?' Kalgaro asked, spittle hanging from a swollen lower lip.\n\n'Depends,' said Crosius. 'Where are you going?'\n\n'Over there,' said Kalgaro, gesturing ahead vaguely, into the boiling clouds of dust and steam. 'His new Manse.'\n\nCrosius knew what he meant. The primarch's current residence, co-opted from his brother Perturabo, the staging point for the final push. It had been a port, once. A space port. So vast, they said, that it scraped the edge of the atmosphere. Capturing that had allowed the Warmaster to bring Titans down quickly, ready to deploy against the Palace walls. It remained an important asset, a conduit for resupply, though the Lord of Iron had clearly failed to see its continuing value, and so now the place was theirs.\n\n'I'll get there,' Crosius said. 'Though I prefer to walk.'\n\nKalgaro grinned. 'Good day for it.' He wiped the back of his hand across his forehead, leaving a dark smear on the skin. A wound across his right temple was stubbornly refusing to heal. 'Better there than Colossi, anyway. What a mess.'\n\n'Ach, it would have fallen eventually. If we'd kept going. Priorities change.'\n\n'They do. Just wish they'd tell us why, eh?' Kalgaro laughed harshly. Crosius had never, ever seen him laugh before.\n\n'I was fighting with Caipha Morarg,' Crosius said thoughtfully. 'Out past Marmax, where they tried to flank us. We were slaying anything that came up. They were cowering behind the high walls, at the end, and we were just chewing down the trench lines, taking our time about it. We could have razed the whole place.'\n\n'So there's something better being planned.'\n\n'You'd think so.'\n\nThe tanks kept trundling by, one after the other. They were obese things, for the most part - angular Spartans, low-slung Sicarans, a few specialised transports and bombards. Every surface of them was caked in muck, clogging the intakes and staining the exhaust pipes. Their commanders slouched in the open top turrets, their armour glistening with engine oil, streaked with bloody patches. One unit clattered along with its left-hand track flapping loose, the plates knocked out of true. It hadn't been fixed. Crosius guessed it would right itself, at some stage. That seemed to be the way things worked, now.\n\n'I wanted so much to be the first, you know that?' Kalgaro said, scratching at his chin. 'First over the walls. I thought we'd earned it.'\n\n'Doesn't seem to matter now, does it?'\n\n'No. Strange. It doesn't.' He seemed briefly troubled. 'I don't even hate them much, to be honest. I just fight because it's... interesting.' Then he shot Crosius a guilty look. 'But ignore me. I didn't mean that.'\n\nCrosius laughed, and slapped him on the shoulder guard. 'Relax. I'm not an informant. Anyway, I feel much the same.' Mucus pooled at the back of his throat. 'Hatred is for the past. This is just an obstacle, something stubborn and stupid to be cleared away. And then - then, my old friend - we can start to build again.'\n\n'But I don't know what.'\n\n'No, I don't see it yet either. Maybe only the primarch does. I trust him, though. He'll have it all worked out, just like before. We knock this place over, bury the tyrant under His own walls, and then it starts. We create it all again, but right. Explorers, truth-seekers, just like we were promised the first time around.'\n\nKalgaro laughed again, with genuine pleasure. 'I like that, Apothecary! I like the way you talk. We should do it again, when we're all up at the Manse.'\n\n'Surely.'\n\nThe master of ordnance stomped off, still chuckling, to where his big Spartan waited for him. 'I'll hold you to it, and don't dawdle - he'll want you there in time.'\n\n'For whatever he has in mind.'\n\nThe Spartan's engines spat oily smuts, and then the tracks churned, grinding back up on the dirt track. Kalgaro clambered up the handholds and took his place again at the top turret. Crosius watched him go. He watched the rest of the column go. It was a big formation and took a long time to pass by. When it had gone, it left furrows in the mud, glistening with scummy water.\n\nCrosius started to walk again. His limp was more pronounced. A new pain was curdling in his stomach, as if something had started to ferment. His helm's tactical display started to malfunction, and everything up ahead became blocky and blurred.\n\nAs he limped, he started to hum. A little tune, something to repeat to himself, something cheerful.\n\nFascinating, it was. Everything up ahead, all within his grasp, just waiting for him to come along and discover it.\n\nOn some days, he believed he had become immune to doubt. On others, he felt as if there was no other state left.\n\nTo be a primarch - what was that? Was it physical strength? Yes, partly. There had always been so little that he was not an equal to in combat, and even less now. The power currently at his command was almost too much - overspilling, bursting at the seams of his stretched armour.\n\nBut it had been more than that, in conception. They had been made to be generals, not just warlords. Commanders. Governors. In some unrealised future, they would have been the satraps of an eternal realm, committed to the rediscovery of ancient truths as their civilisation went from strength to strength. At times, using the gifts he now possessed, he even thought he caught glimpses of that ruined future, like mockeries. Maybe his new patrons sent him those, as a kind of dark joke. Or maybe whatever was left of the soul his father had crafted for him was still active somewhere in his broken psyche, struggling to revive an alternative causality that became more distant with every passing day.\n\nNow, though, he had made a bargain. He had traded away that future for another one, one that was more magnificent and expansive than any promised by this dying Imperium. Every time he breathed, every time he blinked, he saw more snatches of that possibility unfolding, one glorious aspect at a time. He remembered things that had taken place before he had been born. He perceived things that were yet to occur as if they were cemented into history.\n\nBecause he had made the choice. That was the important thing. For so long he had skirted at the edges of it, chafing at the impossible demands placed on him, gnawing at the injustices that had always been heaped his way. He could have stayed in a twilight state of indecision - fighting for the Warmaster without ever truly embracing the powers he had unleashed. He could have held back, indulging witchery only when it was needed, never committing, never submerging himself into its cold, dark waters.\n\nWhat would that life have given him? He would have preserved more of his old self. He might have found a way to pick through the contradictions, maintaining something of his original form and temper while still breaking free from the strictures that had both suffocated him and kept him safe. Some of his brothers were still trying to tread that impossible line. Perturabo, he thought, would probably try it for longest. He would fail. Anyone who tried it would fail. Once you began to teeter, no matter how slightly, you were destined to fall.\n\nOr rise. That might be a better way of putting it. Rise up, become an immortal, play a part in the highest level of drama. He was still a general. He was still a governor. He had no masters at all now, except in the sense that the god was a part of him, suffusing him, animating him, and he was a part of the god, albeit with a will of his own and a soul that remained discrete. These were the paradoxes. These were the gifts.\n\nHe could turn his agile mind to what came next. He could begin to think about a world without an Emperor in it, and what that would mean. Would Horus take the tyrant's place once all was done, becoming Emperor in turn and ruling from the ruins of the Throne he had destroyed? Or would everything dissolve again, when the common enemy was crushed, all of them going their own way, like ants without a queen?\n\nIf Horus had a vision for the future, he had never articulated it to him. He suspected, deep down, that the Warmaster was so consumed by the present, so gorged on the gods' vindictiveness, that he could see no further than his own horizon of vengeance. Let the galaxy burn, so long as the tyrant was overthrown. Everything else could be attended to once the Emperor's throat had been cut.\n\nWhatever the truth of that, he himself could not be so cavalier. He had to think about the dawn of the new age. He had to shepherd his faithful children through it, ensure that no new Barbarus was erected over the smouldering wreckage of the old. He had to guarantee that the god was honoured, and that its realm was extended out from the immaterium and into the world of the senses. Fulgrim could fritter away his debauched life if he wished to, Angron could howl in lost rage all he wanted. He had to be different. He had to make the sacrifices worth something.\n\nNow he looked out across the world he was helping to destroy. He stood alone in one of the space port's control chambers, a huge, high-vaulted space strewn with wreckage, half-lost in darkness as the sun set on another day of pain and struggle. Tall windows in the western wall burned red from its final rays, golden on the edges of the shattered panes. Everything in that place still stank of the IV Legion, a lingering stench of burning, of oils and grinding metal. The Iron Warriors had only vacated the operational levels a few hours ago, following the petulant commands of their lord. Many of them, he guessed, would choose to fight on somewhere else on Terra, whatever Perturabo did. But not in this place. This was his citadel now. This was the mountain he had conquered at last, the highest peak, the one from where he would crush the last flickers of resolve among the unbelievers.\n\nAs the sun slid wearily down into the burning west, he watched the ongoing battles rage across the northern Katabatic "}
{"text":"rational levels a few hours ago, following the petulant commands of their lord. Many of them, he guessed, would choose to fight on somewhere else on Terra, whatever Perturabo did. But not in this place. This was his citadel now. This was the mountain he had conquered at last, the highest peak, the one from where he would crush the last flickers of resolve among the unbelievers.\n\nAs the sun slid wearily down into the burning west, he watched the ongoing battles rage across the northern Katabatic Plain. The flatlands were cloaked in dust and smoke, but his eyes saw more clearly now than they had ever done before. He perceived the results of Legio Mortis' brutal advance, smashing its way across the wastes until their engines stood in the shadow of the Mercury Wall itself. He saw the outlines of the Titans, mere specks against such colossal emptiness. Even Dies Irae, greatest of them all, was a minuscule dot, lost in the vast arena of ongoing combat. Down there, though - down at ground level, they would all be leviathans, splitting the air apart with their war-horns, starting to drill and cut and hack, undermining the last solid perimeter between them and the enemy. Only moments remained, now. Just slivers of time, counting down, almost gone. In the shadow of the god-machines marched the uncounted hosts - the faithful and the mercenary, the warriors of the Free Legions, the creatures of the New Mechanicum, all champing at the bit, all yearning for the first break.\n\nHe had been at the front himself. He had fought up close, bringing his scythe to bear on the necks of the faithless, settling old debts and seeing to the demands of vengeance. Some scores had been difficult - even painful - to settle, but the ledgers had been scraped clean all the same. He could have stayed out there, stood against those quaking wall-foundations, ready to clamber up the slopes of rubble once they were toppled. But no. His place was here. His duty was clear.\n\nHis gaze scanned upwards, westwards, away from the incipient breach and across the still-flickering corona of the Emperor's great ward-shield. He observed the high spires, crowded together under its faltering protection, climbing higher and higher until he caught sight of the pinnacles of his father's private domains, night-black against the bloody sunset - the Great Observatory, the Investiary, the Tower of Hegemon, the Bhab Bastion.\n\nHe extended his right claw, stretching the talons out as if he might pluck the summits from those fortresses and scoop up the cowering inhabitants inside. His tarnished gauntlet compassed the blunt parapets of the bastion, command centre of the most dull-witted, duty-obsessed lackey of them all.\n\n'This is the gift I bring for you now, my brother,' he breathed, his metallic voice rattling against the strictures of his corroded rebreather. 'The gift that only I could bring, the reason the god set me here, in this place, at this time.'\n\nHe closed his hooked fingers over the bastion, snuffing it out, masking it with his sealed fist.\n\n'The last sensation you will ever have. The last emotion you will ever feel. And you will understand, in your soul, who gave it to you, and why you remain powerless against it.'\n\nThe sun slipped away, drenching the entire Palace in darkness. All that remained was the vice, the grip, the merciless application of pressure.\n\n'Despair,' rasped Mortarion, ascended daemon-king of life and death, plague-maker, hope-ender. 'I send you despair.'\n\nPraetorians\n\nToo soon\n\nDay of wrath\n\nAnd he felt it.\n\nRogal Dorn had been feeling it for days, weeks, building up, up, up, rising over him like a black fog, dragging at his limbs, clogging his mind, making him question every decision he made, every order he gave.\n\nHe hadn't had any respite at all, of any kind, for three months. Three months! His sharpness was going now, his reactions were slower. A billion functionaries depending on him for everything, reaching out to him, suffocating him with their endless demands, pleas for help, for guidance. A billion eyes, on him, all the time.\n\nAnd he'd fought, too. He'd fought. He'd fought primarchs, brothers he'd once thought of as equals or betters. He'd seen the hatred in Perturabo's eyes, the mania in Fulgrim's, stabbing at him, poisoning him. Every duel, every brief foray into combat, had chipped a bit more off, had weakened the foundations a little further. Fulgrim had been the worst. His brother's old form, so pleasing to the eye, had gone, replaced by bodily corruption so deep he scarcely had the words for it. That degradation repulsed him almost more than anything else. It showed just how far you could fall, if you lost your footing in reality completely.\n\nYou couldn't show that repulsion. You couldn't betray the doubt, or give away the fatigue. You couldn't give away so much as a flicker of weakness, or the game was up, so Dorn's face remained just as it always had been - static, flinty, curt. He kept his shoulders back, spine straight. He hid the fevers that raged behind his eyes, the bone-deep weariness that throbbed through every muscle, all for show, all to give those who looked up to him something to cling on to, to believe in. The Emperor, his father, was gone, silent, locked in His own unimaginable agonies, and so everything else had crashed onto his shoulders. The weight of the entire species, all their frailties and imperfections, wrapped tight around his mouth and throat and nostrils, choking him, drowning him, making him want to cry out loud, to cower away from it, something he would never do, could never do, and so he remained where he was, caught between the infinite weight of Horus' malice and the infinite demands of the Emperor's will, and it would break him, he knew, break him open like the walls themselves, which were about to break now too, despite all he had done, but had it been enough, yes it had, no it could not have been, they would break, they must not break...\n\nHe clenched his fist, curling the fingers up tight. His mind was racing again. He was on the edge, slipping into a fugue state, the paralysis he dreaded. It came from within. It came from without. Something - something - was making the entire structure around him panic, weaken, fail in resolve. He was not immune. He was the pinnacle - when the base was corrupted, he, too, eventually, would shatter.\n\nSo he searched, as Rogal Dorn always did, for something to do, some way to fight back. The klaxons were going off around him, wild and loud. Men and women were running, their discipline failing. They were trying to shut down the plasma reserves in the foundation interiors, drain them, prevent the penetration cascades that would critically weaken the Mercury Wall's substructure. Even as they ran, shouting, tripping over one another, the Titans were there - unwrapping their drills and energy-hammers, powering up forbidden drive-weapons augmented with daemon-essences, clawing, scraping down the outer skin like rats.\n\n'My lord!'\n\nAnd then, hearing that voice, he remembered. He had already acted. Typical Rogal Dorn, anticipating his own momentary weakness, he had already put the necessary move in place. He had summoned Sigismund here, to Shard Bastion, to speak to him in person, to give him the command, because he could never falter in front of his son, not this son.\n\nHe turned, just for a moment, away from the confusion of the command station, and faced him. Sigismund wore the black of the Templar Brethren. He had come up to the command level with others of his order, a dozen, and they all looked as grim as one another - fatalistic, hammered into a kind of permanent, shell-shocked fury.\n\nSigismund's own expression was wary. He had reason for that - Dorn had run him hard, borne down on him, bathed him in disapproval, ever since Isstvan. The reasons had been sound. Neither of them could have expected any less, given the codes of honour that made them who they were, and Sigismund had never complained.\n\nBut there had always been something else, under all that - not quite a test, but maybe a tempering, like that of the best blades. To see if the steel could withstand the fire, be more hard-wearing for it.\n\n'This is the end,' Dorn told him flatly. 'All that could have been done, has been done. Every delay, every counter-strike, every anticipation. Now, they get in. Mercury will fail imminently, then Exultant, then the others.'\n\nSigismund's unwavering expression never flickered. He was a cold one. Almost too good an Imperial Fist. Almost a parody of their entire philosophy.\n\n'Faster than we might have hoped,' Dorn said. 'Not as fast as we might have feared. Soon the shape of the battle will change - we will be like dogs in the rubble, scrapping over every habitation. The reserves are ready. You have their coordinates, they have their orders.'\n\nSigismund nodded.\n\n'I will return to Bhab,' Dorn said. 'Communications are collapsing, and the Sanctum must remain operational. You, though.' He smiled coldly. 'I remember your ambition. To be here, whatever the cost.'\n\nNo reaction. Just that unbending devotion to duty. It could be almost scary, sometimes, to be in the presence of such a hyper-controlled psyche. Maybe other souls saw much the same monomania in him, too, but Sigismund was... well, Sigismund had always been something else.\n\n'It has all come to pass, I suppose, just as the remembrancer girl told you it would. Coincidence? I have to believe it.'\n\nDid he, though? Clinging too closely to the old rationalist cant felt pointless, now. Even Malcador was beginning to waver, marking the slide back into superstition.\n\n'So many wars. So much blood spilt, all to reach the point that she foresaw from the start. I gave you hell for it then, but the new doctrines must give way to the old, it seems, and we can worry about what that means if any of us get out of this alive.'\n\nSigismund just stared back at him, the steel-trap gaze, the same mask he wore when he duelled.\n\n'So the discipline"}
{"text":"to the old rationalist cant felt pointless, now. Even Malcador was beginning to waver, marking the slide back into superstition.\n\n'So many wars. So much blood spilt, all to reach the point that she foresaw from the start. I gave you hell for it then, but the new doctrines must give way to the old, it seems, and we can worry about what that means if any of us get out of this alive.'\n\nSigismund just stared back at him, the steel-trap gaze, the same mask he wore when he duelled.\n\n'So the discipline is ended, the leash is off,' Dorn told him. 'March out. Take the wall defences, take the reserves and rally them. They will be blind and deaf out there soon, and so will need a leader.'\n\nSigismund nodded again. No other soul would have noticed it, but there was something other than the usual dutifulness in his eyes just then. Something like hunger. 'Any specific objectives, lord?' he asked.\n\nAt that, Dorn almost laughed. Not from humour, just from emptiness, the caustic recognition of what would come next.\n\nHe had given everything. He was already empty, drained to a husk, and the hardest test still lay ahead. The Lion had not come. Guilliman and Russ had not come. They were out of time, out of luck, and what remained now was only defiance - only bloody-minded, bloody-handed defiance.\n\n'No, I set you free, my beloved, my best, son,' said Rogal Dorn, never taking his eyes off his First Captain. 'Do now what you were made to do.'\n\nHe smiled a second time, the expression as icy as the despair that gripped his hearts.\n\n'Hurt them.'\n\nBran Koba sprinted, straining so hard that his lungs throbbed and his boots slipped. His squad came with him - thirty troopers, all in the carapace armour of the 13th Astranian Void-Jackals.\n\nHis heart was thumping wildly, both from the exertion and from a healthy slice of fear. General Nasuba's orders had filtered down the command chain too slowly, hampered by the faulty comms, by the general collapse in morale, by the rising tide of panic that seemed to be engulfing everything. Each of Mercury Wall's four great bastions was a gigantic citadel, stacked with level after level of internal complexity, and you just couldn't keep control of all that without the confidence people would actually answer their damned vox.\n\nHe could hear the thunder from outside now. His entire squad could too, swelling up against the exterior of walls so immense that by rights no noise at all should ever have been able to penetrate. But they were a long way down - close to the very base of it all, buried deep in a core foundation section. The ancient piles were sunk into the raw stuff of the terraformer's art here, and resonances travelled a long way, echoing in every chamber and knocking dust from the narrow-arched roofs.\n\nThe overhead suspensors blanked, then blacked out, just as something colossal struck the outer wall-skin again.\n\n'Helms!' Koba yelled, switching on his forehead-mounted lumens.\n\nAfter that they were haring through the darkness, relying on thirty-one bobbing pools of weak light, tripping and blundering like lost children.\n\nThe walls of the Inner Palace were not, as might appear from the outside, monolithic blocks of solid matter. They were honeycombed inside with all the machinery needed to keep the integral heavy gun platforms working - the energy conduits, the cooling vanes, the access galleries and service tunnels. They were like subterranean cities in their own right, manned by tens of thousands of technicians and wired-in servitors. If, in theory, an enemy were ever to come close to cracking the outer layers of defensive plating, then protocols existed to depower the entire spider's web of control chambers and flood them all with flame-retardant chems. In such an eventuality you would lose the wall guns - again, in theory - but negate the risk of catastrophic chain reactions in the - highly theoretical - case that something explosive managed to worm its way through hundreds of metres of solid adamantium.\n\nAll so much theory, Koba had always thought. A typical piece of over-engineering from the lord primarch, whom they all knew had built so much redundancy into every single bulwark and every single rampart that the chance of system failure across an entire wall section was as close to zero as made no difference.\n\nBut now he'd seen what the enemy looked like. He'd watched through his magnoculars, alongside thousands of gallery-mounted defenders, as the marching hell-machines had chewed their way across the open plains. It wasn't their size that had been so horrific - even though that had been bad enough - but their speed. The horizon had been filled from north to south with a tidal sweep of explosions, advancing faster than should have been possible - sheets of rippling fire through which those damned monsters had just kept on striding. A kill-zone that should have taken months to subdue had been compassed in days, an appalling spectacle, one that had blown all the defenders' careful fallback scheduling out of the water. Everything sent against those things had been crunched into fragments. Koba had imagined that an individual Titan was something close to being invulnerable, a weapon so outrageous in form and heft that its very presence should be enough to quell anything conceivable, but to see them destroyed, not in ones and twos, but in their hundreds... There were no words for that, no ways to articulate the things he'd seen.\n\nThey had been caught napping, a situation made worse by the degradation of every command conduit in every control tower. It wasn't just the augurs and the comms-tech that had failed them, but the defenders' nerve. Something had got inside the walls before the physical enemy had - a surging tide of hopelessness, a mounting pall of desperation that made men throw themselves from the high parapets and women slit their throats with their own bayonets. Until Dorn had deployed four hundred of his own Legion warriors to restore order it had looked likely the entire section might slump into complete anarchy, but even now things were balanced on a knife-edge. You couldn't rely on a voxed order being carried out, you couldn't rely on an augur reading being accurate or a section report being anything other than gibberish. You had to send armed teams to oversee everything, to make sure things were done, then come back in person to confirm it all, and somehow make sure your troops didn't go mad or kill themselves in the meantime.\n\nThat dragged them down. That gummed them up. And that was the weakness, the decisive flaw - the protocols were too slow, and the enemy was too fast, and suddenly it was all going to the hells. The generators had to be shut down, their power intakes killed, their reservoirs drained. And it had to happen now, before those hell-machines managed to force a breach and get their vile weaponry inside.\n\n'Faster!' he shouted, making it to the end of the corridor, stumbling, catching himself, scrabbling around the corner, then running hard for the security hatch at the far end of the next one.\n\nNow he could hear the plasma generators roaring, making the walls shake, filling the cycled atmosphere with the tang of chems. He could hear the shouts of anger and confusion from up ahead. He could sense the fear.\n\n'Emperor guide me,' he muttered. He didn't know whether that would help. The Emperor was just a man, they had always said. But when Koba whispered it, for some reason, it gave him a little boost. It kept him going.\n\nHe reached the security door, punched the access code, then burst through.\n\nThe chamber on the far side was very big indeed - a yawning chasm set inside the wall's core, soaring away both up and down for a hundred metres. Koba and his team emerged onto a platform perched on the inside edge. The platform's deck was already crowded with functionaries and guards, some wearing Mechanicus colours, others in the ochre yellow of the Palace technical cadres. Control machinery, most of it boxy and human-sized, took up the rest of the space. A man lay on the floor, bleeding. Another man, in the longer robes of a senior technician, had been pinned up against a sensor bank by three menials, his hair and clothes disarranged. Others were shouting, jabbing fingers at one another, faces flushed.\n\nBeyond the safety railing, out in the gulf beyond, were the generators themselves - each the height of a multi-storey hab-unit, glowing internally with vicious levels of power, strung up in a web of cabling and support beams. Arcs of energy crackled and spat between the immense coils, making the entire space flash and jump with vivid light. It was noisy, echoing, and smelled of piped coolant.\n\n'Shut it down!' Koba shouted, switching off his helm-lumens and levelling his lasgun at the member of the mob who looked the most senior.\n\n'No, it's a mistake!' one of the operatives yelled back. Her face was wild, her eyes staring. 'The enemy wants them shut down! We need the guns operational!'\n\n'Throne, just listen to him!' pleaded the senior technician, still pinned against the wall. For the first time, Koba saw the bruising on his face. 'They were genuine orders.'\n\nKoba gestured for his troops to advance, guns trained. Time was of the essence. 'Shut them down,' he ordered the woman. 'I won't tell you again.'\n\n'Never!' she retorted, reaching for her own weapon. 'You're just another-'\n\nKoba shot her in the shoulder, hurling her back against the railings. His squad opened fire in support, aiming high, making the rest of the technicians scamper for cover. Then Koba was at the command terminals, trying to make sense of the controls. The generators thundered, less than fifty metres away from him, lacing everything with static, booming, making it hard to think.\n\nThe senior technician, freed from his captors, scrabbled across to him. 'That one!' he blurted urgently, gesturing to a glistening control column. 'Plunge it!'\n\nKoba seized it two-handed and slid the column into its sleeve. Nothing m"}
{"text":"igh, making the rest of the technicians scamper for cover. Then Koba was at the command terminals, trying to make sense of the controls. The generators thundered, less than fifty metres away from him, lacing everything with static, booming, making it hard to think.\n\nThe senior technician, freed from his captors, scrabbled across to him. 'That one!' he blurted urgently, gesturing to a glistening control column. 'Plunge it!'\n\nKoba seized it two-handed and slid the column into its sleeve. Nothing much happened. An alarm briefly sounded, and a monitor bank blew out, but the generators kept on booming, the plasma silos kept on feeding out, the power lines remained fully activated.\n\n'What in the-' he started, before seeing the woman again, on the deck now, just a few metres away, grinning at him.\n\nShe had a cluster of wires in her hand, yanked from an open access panel. Some of the conduits were still live, and tiny flickers of electricity squirmed to the deck, making her start and wince.\n\n'You'll never do it, traitor!' she screamed triumphantly, wriggling away and pulling the gaggle of cabling with her. Blood ran from her mouth, bright red in the plasma-flare. 'You'll never do it! The guns must fire!'\n\nHe stared at her, horrified. For a terrible instant, he had no idea what to do. He wasn't a technician - he was a soldier, just sent to ensure orders were followed.\n\n'Blow the main power intakes!' the senior technician shouted, yanking at Koba's arm to show him where he meant. 'That'll trigger a shutdown! Blow them out!'\n\nAbove them, maybe thirty metres up, six massive tubes jutted from the wall and ran horizontally out towards the generators. They were encased in polished metal jackets, well protected, but Koba guessed lasguns might puncture the outer skins.\n\n'You heard him!' Koba yelled at his squad. 'Knock them out!'\n\nBut then the entire deck rocked, shivered to its foundations, and half his troops lost their footing. A web of fissures crackled outward across the wall section directly overhead, spreading with astonishing speed. Blown masonry chunks cascaded down, crashing off the deck and bouncing into the gulf below. Spears of fire shot out from the fissures, and the ear-splitting sound of military drills broke out, echoing eerily as the main wall structure was pummelled from the outside.\n\nThe enemy was almost through. The generators were still barrelling along at full tilt.\n\nKoba gritted his teeth, aimed upward at the power lines, and fired. He hit with every shot he took. Others of his squad hit them too. Even as they emptied their power packs at the links, the walls above them bulged obscenely, cracks widening, the cacophony of the drills rapidly crescendoing until nothing else but the grind of adamantium through rockcrete could be heard.\n\nHe fired through it all, his finger clamped onto the trigger. He found himself willing a las-bolt - just one - to cut through. He found himself asking the Emperor to grant him that. That one small thing.\n\nIt was never going to be enough. He'd have needed much longer to cut through the power line casing with a handheld las-weapon. Maybe a bolter could have done it. Maybe the lord primarch should have sent one of his sons for this work. Then again, there were dozens of generators, and the Space Marines could not be everywhere.\n\nA wall-plate above him blew out entirely, vomiting debris at the plasma chambers. The scraping whine of the drills screamed off the scale, followed by the howl of incoming air - superheated, acrid, blasted in from the raging battlefields outside. Shattered metal-faced ouslite blocks thunked and pinged from the generator's housing - huge pieces of the wall's external plating, sent spinning into its core like bullets. Then came the beams of energy weapons, blistering into the chamber and igniting on the already gas-infused air.\n\nAs the first of the mainline beams struck home, piercing the outer skin of the nearest plasma chamber, Koba knew that his time was over, and that he had failed. Still firing doggedly, he managed to mouth four final, horrified words.\n\n'Throne preserve us all...'\n\nAnd then everything turned into fire.\n\nThe Nails bit deep, goading him, driving him to a heightened pitch of frustration. He had to kill. He had to kill now, to bury his chainaxe into something living, or the Nails would just spike at him harder, punishing him, those glorious barbs against weakness, the things he both hated and needed.\n\nFor so long, there had been nothing to kill. Skarr-Hei had raced across the wreck-strewn plains in the wake of god-machines, first inside the stinking hull of a foetid old Land Raider, then on foot, desperate to fight. Hundreds of thousands had come with him - legionaries, mutants, cultists, all the varied servants of the gods, all slavering to get across the threshold. Some had the light of faith in their staring eyes, others were animated by a baser kind of bloodlust.\n\nHe barely felt anything now, save for the blinding waves of agony. His vision was cloudy, tinged with red, juddering whenever he moved his head. His hearts were already pumping, flooding his system with violence, and yet there was nothing to hurt, nothing to test him, nothing to go up against.\n\nHe wanted to scream. He wanted to roar. It would come, soon. Surely. The primarch had promised them that much, showing them the way.\n\nSkarr-Hei wondered, briefly, where the primarch was now. He wondered where the captain of the Eighth Assault Company was. Everything seemed to have dissolved so quickly, the battalions disintegrating and pursuing their own targets. His own squad were close by, somewhere, but he couldn't see any of them in the murk. Okasha had gone on a bit of a rampage, hacking his way through a detachment of beastmen, his frustration at having nothing better to kill getting the better of him. Ghazak and Nham had lumbered off in the shadow of a gang of Knights, perhaps sniffing something to hunt down. The rest should have stayed close, but he couldn't see them.\n\nSmoke rolled up around him, smothering the landscape in clods of shifting blackness. Every so often those blooms would ignite, lit from within by some detonation, hearts of blood-red amid the deepening night. The Titans were still grappling out there, he knew - the last of the False Emperor's slave-machines, selling their unquestioning lives without honour or commitment. He didn't care about that kind of combat. He didn't care about ranged mega-bolters or lascannons. He wanted to get up close, the kind of fighting he'd been made for. You needed a Titan to open the first crack, but you needed flesh-and-blood warriors to actually make use of it, to take it and hold it, to push on and turn the ground red.\n\nSo he'd come alongside Mortis on their rampage, his Land Raider skidding and gunning around their mighty feet, coming so close to them that he might have been crushed more than once. When the transport had been hit sufficiently badly that its armour had peeled off and the tracks jammed, he'd leapt from it eagerly, knowing he was near enough now to make it on foot, to be there, to witness the moment when they would get their reward and start the proper slaughter.\n\nJust then, even in the midst of the combat-madness, inside his closed sphere of fury, he'd retained just enough awareness to be momentarily daunted. From ground level, up so close, those walls were gigantic. Far bigger than anything he'd gone up against before, difficult even to process. The vanguard of the Mortis Titans were up against the base of them, void shields crackling with the debris that showered down. The terrain was broken-up and sodden, cratered by the march of the leviathans. Mortar shells fell incessantly, throwing up sprays of boiling mud where they thunked to earth. Uncounted thousands of helm-lenses pinpricked the gloom, blinking in and out as the smoke rolled across them, marking the ragged advance of the swarming infantry-tide.\n\nThey were caught in the open ground now. You couldn't go back, or you'd end up mired in the ongoing Titan-brawls on the plains. You couldn't advance, because those damned walls were still intact. The parapet guns had mostly fallen silent, but a thick storm of artillery still looped over the summit. The longer this lasted, the more likely it was that they would all die out here, in the slime, having achieved nothing.\n\nSkarr-Hei lumbered up closer, breathing heavily, watching warily as the curve of the high perimeter swept up into the starless night. He panted in the smoke, tasting the thick cocktail of engine fumes and weapon discharges. He felt as if he would burst apart, spill out of his armour's confines, become just another swirling ball of flame to score the darkness. Gangs of warriors milled around him in the shadows - Lorgar's fanatics, Perturabo's now leaderless technicians, the Warmaster's own sea-green killers. More troops were arriving all the time, spilling from the guts of transports, forming up into straggling columns and sent trudging up the slope towards the wall-shadow.\n\nA singular colossus stood above and ahead of them all - an Imperator-class Titan, surrounded by a phalanx of its giant escorts, vast and fire-shrouded. Its hide was corrupted, blistered, weeping from metallic sores. Liquids poured from its vents and sluice-gates, foaming down its immense legs, mingling with the sludge-trail it had left on its advance. It smelled fouler than anything else on the entire befouled planet, corrupted to its core, leaking ruin like a living thing would leak sweat. Skarr-Hei didn't know its name. He barely knew his own, by that point.\n\nGetting so close to it was dangerous. If that thing moved by just a fraction, a single tread could wipe out a whole infantry company. But Skarr-Hei didn't care. He pushed up, pushed on, his breath coming in animal growls now, sensing the static prickle of void shields far above. The Titan's bulk stretched away, looming over him, just like the other god-machines gathere"}
{"text":"core, leaking ruin like a living thing would leak sweat. Skarr-Hei didn't know its name. He barely knew his own, by that point.\n\nGetting so close to it was dangerous. If that thing moved by just a fraction, a single tread could wipe out a whole infantry company. But Skarr-Hei didn't care. He pushed up, pushed on, his breath coming in animal growls now, sensing the static prickle of void shields far above. The Titan's bulk stretched away, looming over him, just like the other god-machines gathered there - fifty at least, more coming all the time. It felt like being lost in the shade of some metal forest, dwarfed by the boles of impossible, twisted trees. The engines' combined shield-aegis had mingled properly now, forming a giant film of interference-drummed protection in the sky overhead, one that burned and fizzed and flexed as projectiles crashed across it.\n\nAs Skarr-Hei crept along beneath their feet, the earth reeled. The night-gloom was ripped into slivers of dazzling light and smoke. Drills, propelled by mighty arms, gouged and tore into adamantium plate and piled rockcrete. Energy beams and melta-bursts pummelled and atomised, opening up caverns and cutting ravines. The scale of destruction was tremendous - a symphony of concentrated annihilation, focused and overlapped and poured onto the fracture points with remorseless single-mindedness.\n\nOn another night, Skarr-Hei might have admired the skill of it. But now, with the Nails biting deep, he was only conscious of his frustration. It might take days to blast through that barrier. Maybe weeks. Someone had miscalculated. He didn't care who, or why, but he was being denied his prey.\n\nHe almost turned back. He could hack his way out across the plains again, he thought - track down the rest of his god-cursed squad, make his way to some other battlefront in the ruins below the Anterior Wall, somewhere he could actually do some fighting.\n\nBut then the drills abruptly silenced. The beam-weapons went dark. The Titans' war-horns, deafening since he'd arrived at the front, echoed out.\n\nSomething had penetrated. Something had ignited. The entire battlefield, crammed with hundreds of thousands of armoured warriors, held a breath. Even the metronomic beat of the artillery seemed to falter, as if the world itself suddenly found itself on the edge of a cliff, horrified, poised to drop into an oblivion from which there would be no return.\n\nSkarr-Hei peered into the murk. He could hear explosions, buried deep, muffled by layers upon layers of protection. He could feel the torture of the earth underfoot, more profound than the tremors provoked by the constant impact of munitions. He could see forks of lightning flickering, racing across the enormous black expanse, scampering like daemons across the face of an oily mirror.\n\nThe Titans started to withdraw, cumbersomely, awkwardly, causing havoc as they slowly turned. The war-horns started up again, as did the screams and shouts of stimm-crazed cultists. Skarr-Hei remained rooted to the spot, watching as the explosions fed off one another, building and building, still trapped under all that weight of wall. Shafts of light burst out from the fissures, blue-edged, angling into the gloom like floodlumens.\n\n'It's... happening,' he slurred, feeling the tectonic instability begin to accelerate, to turn the soils into a drumming mass of dirt and ash. He smelled the telltale tang of a plasma breach reaching critical explosive mass. He heard the howl and bang of escaping gases, followed by a roar so massive that it nearly floored him. Blisters of flame burst out, shooting up the wall-surface and sucking at the parapets. Armour plates detached from the outer skin, disintegrating as they slid down, accelerating the collapse. The rumbles merged, swelled, became roars like starship engines kindling.\n\nThen it blew, the long-awaited apocalypse, the almighty chain-linked explosion that blasted the outer plates clean away, sending thousands of tonnes of defensive architecture hurtling out into the night, backed up by a blast wave that radiated out from the epicentre and sent the structure around it crunching and slipping and tumbling over itself, spawning a debris cloud that reared higher than the parapets, surging into the heights, extending over even the pinnacles of the great spires, coating everything within kilometres in a layer of hot dust.\n\nSkarr-Hei was laughing even as the storm swept across him, tearing at the tethered skulls on his armour. His axe was raised, streamers of fire flailing from its killing edge, whipped back as the hurricane screamed past.\n\nThere was no complete collapse, no total flattening of such an enormous structure, but a mighty landslide, a stately implosion of internal layers, a see-sawing of toppling observation towers and a subsidence of support piers. The dust cloud kept on rising, fuelled by its own mass now, lit up internally by secondary fulguration. A tidal wave of detritus spilled from the high breach, scraping down the slope in an avalanche that went on accelerating. The infantry vanguard fled from that, stumbling away from it, wiping their visors and trying not to lose their footing in the swirling miasma. Even the god-machines stumbled, rocked by the maelstrom they had unleashed.\n\nSkarr-Hei remained defiant, arms outstretched, roaring back at the deluge. He swayed into the press of the wind, revelling in its intense pressure.\n\n'For the Lord of Rage!' he cried, the Nails spurring him, now with the joy of what had to come next.\n\nEven before the avalanche had stilled, he was running again, clambering, slipping and scrabbling up the piles of rubble. Alongside him, he could hear the massed roar of many thousands more, all rousing themselves from their stupor, stirring into action and calling on their gods and daemons to aid them.\n\nThe Titans couldn't follow - not yet. The incline was still massive, still steep. Even for Skarr-Hei, the ascent was testing, as the red-hot rubble slipped under his boots and clattered back down the slope. He was only dimly aware of those coming up with him - his crimson-tinged focus was firmly at the crest of the breach: a jagged heap of blown rockcrete, maybe three hundred metres wide, flanked at either end by the sawtooth edges of the intact parapets. Reaching it was like struggling to crest a mountain pass, beset all the while by the searing pressure of the superheated wind.\n\nBut then he did it. As the artillery fire started up again, as a stunned corps of defenders started to recover their wits and race to activate what defensive positions were still intact, Skarr-Hei of the World Eaters crested the final rise of twisted metalwork and smouldering masonry. For a moment, he stood on the cusp, staring out ahead.\n\nBehind him lay the wastes, crawling with innumerable fighters. On either side of him were the walls, penetrated here but otherwise intact. Ahead of him, unravelling under a heavy shadow of dust and smog, was the object of all his tortured dreams, the promise of which had kept him going, year after year, even when existence itself had become so agonised that only death had felt like a possible release.\n\nSpire up against spire, basilica up against basilica, a press of buildings so tight and so dense that it felt like you could shelter an entire world's population within its precincts. It was stuffed with life, now - fearful, timorous life. Skarr-Hei looked out at it, gazing across the vista of fear, taking in the intoxication of its abjectness, its ripeness.\n\nIt had begun here. Everything had begun here. But he didn't see any of that. He didn't see the place truly at all - the citizens huddled in the basements, the young and the old gaping with horror at the noise and the stench. He didn't even see Terra, just then. It could have been any citadel on any world, albeit a civilised one, one full of the rich and the weak and the cruel.\n\nNow he was here, Skarr-Hei, Eater of Worlds. He had already killed many souls in this battle, but many more lay before him at that moment, in numbers undreamed of, herded together like cattle into the abattoir.\n\nHe gunned the teeth on his chain axe, and the familiar whirr made him want to roar with pleasure.\n\n'Inside!' he slurred, his half-seeing eyes blearily fixed on the distant Sanctum Imperialis. 'God of all murder, we're inside!'\n\nRestorer\n\nThe Sage\n\nSuperiority\n\nInside, back within the walls, the sanctuary he'd worked so hard to reach, sheltered from the maelstrom for just a short time.\n\nHe didn't remember the journey from Marmax South very well. The entire front had been in disarray, collapsing around him, and he had flitted in and out of consciousness the whole time. A man had been there with him, one called Katsuhiro. It was he who had managed to raise the alarm, get him dragged from the front line and sent back through the warren of trenches. That was the last he'd seen of him. He found himself wanting to go back, now - to seek him out again, give him thanks for it. But at the time he had just moved on, carrying the corpse of the other man he'd encountered, Cole, only for long enough to bury him. The child, the one Cole had been caring for in the wastes, he had left behind. How could he have done otherwise? There were no better sanctuaries now than those trenches, and no better carers for him than those people. He needed to return to the fight, to take his place beside his brothers once more.\n\nStill, he thought of them often. Cole, and the child, and the man, Katsuhiro.\n\nShiban Khan stood up. He extended his right arm, then his left. He tested the reactions of his power armour, the interface with his muscles, paying particular attention to where those muscles were bundles of Martian metalwork rather than products of Terran genecraft. He walked, just a few paces across the stone floor, letting the weight of the battleplate test his still-raw wounds.\n\nHe was recovering quickly. Part of that was his Astartes physiology, part of it"}
{"text":"he child, and the man, Katsuhiro.\n\nShiban Khan stood up. He extended his right arm, then his left. He tested the reactions of his power armour, the interface with his muscles, paying particular attention to where those muscles were bundles of Martian metalwork rather than products of Terran genecraft. He walked, just a few paces across the stone floor, letting the weight of the battleplate test his still-raw wounds.\n\nHe was recovering quickly. Part of that was his Astartes physiology, part of it was the superior augmetics he'd been given on his return to Terra. He was hard to kill. He always had been. Not as great a warrior as Hasik or Jemulan, to be sure. Certainly not in the class of Qin Xa or Jubal. But they were gone, all of those names, swept away by this murderous war. Somehow, he was still intact, his wounds knitting up, his weapons reconditioned, ready to go again.\n\nWithdraw, then return, he thought.\n\nThe chamber was a small one - windowless, buried deep in one of Colossi's many thick towers. Even so, he could feel the thrum of constant bombardment resonating up from the floor, making the slabbed stone walls shiver. The lumens blinked every so often when a big hit came in, and dust trickled from the whitewashed ceiling.\n\nHis knowledge of the wider battle was incomplete. The last he'd known, Colossi was where the Khagan had chosen to make his stand, and where much of the ordu's strength had been gathered. Clearly, for the time being, that defence had succeeded. Marmax, too, was in the defenders' hands, though the situation there had felt precarious in the extreme. Beyond that, he had little certainty. His long trudge through the outer wastelands, territory lost to the enemy, had shown him only what depravities waited for them all, should they fail here - it had been a desperate place, a fog-wreathed swamp where only the corrupted could linger.\n\nThe Eternity Wall space port was like that now, in all probability, for this enemy did not merely occupy territory - they changed it, twisted it, made it an incubator for their perversions. The bodies of those who had fallen at Eternity would be sunk deep into the warp-sick muck by now, denied an honourable burial or - for the White Scars among them - the rites of kal damarg.\n\nHe could so easily slip into hatred, for that. He had flirted with it, during the long years of the fighting to get back to Terra, his soul ravaged by the constant losses, but never quite given in. Nothing could ever be as carefree as it had been for them on the White World, back when the only enemy had been xenos, but if Yesugei had taught them anything at all, it was that the greatest failure was to lose yourself, the core of your being, the essence of the thing.\n\nSo he guarded it carefully now. Maintain the balance, remember that war is an art, treat it like the curve of a brush on paper. The Legion was not quite extinguished, and its numbers had been swelled by those hastily inducted into the ranks, neither Chogorian nor Terran, but gathered up and made use of from a dozen worlds before being thrown into the furnace here. They would need guidance, if they were not to fall into the trap that he himself had danced around. In the absence of the giants of the past, the ones who had forged the Legion in its infancy, they would still need schooling.\n\nHe didn't feel like an exemplar. Perhaps, just after Prospero, when many had been clamouring for him to assume greater influence, he might have seized the chance, but the injuries just then had been so great, so debilitating, and after that the poison of betrayal had soured everything for too long. It had always been the Khagan's choice to make, and Jubal had been the right one.\n\nSo what did it mean, then, to be the last one standing? Was there any particular honour in that, or were the flaws all still there, ready to be exposed in the final analysis?\n\nIt would have been good to speak to Ilya about it, though he doubted if it would be possible now. He didn't even know where she was - not here, at the front, surely. But just then the chamber door opened, as if prompted by the very thought of her.\n\nIt wasn't Ilya, of course - fate was never quite that neat. Stooping, as he always had to in these fortresses built for baseline humans, the Warhawk of Chogoris, Jaghatai Khan, his primarch, came inside.\n\nShiban bowed low. 'Khagan,' he said simply.\n\nThe Great Khan appraised him. 'You seem better, Tachseer. I'm glad of it. Welcome back.'\n\n'Thank you.'\n\nThere had been a time when Shiban had been so eager to lay eyes on the Great Khan that he'd have fought his way across half a planet to be there. Jaghatai had been a force of the universe then, something to marvel at as much as to serve. In some ways, Shiban still felt the same way - the devotion was just as strong - but the endless conflict had ground away at all of them, and even Jaghatai had not been spared. He had always been lean; now he looked rangy. He had always spoken softly; now his voice was hoarse. Something had changed in him after Catullus - he was not diminished in raw power, as far as anyone could have gauged, but there was something colder in him now, something frozen. His ivory warplate was chipped, the gold lining had faded. His hair was loose and hung lank against his copper skin. The scar on his cheek seemed darker, more like a birthmark than something he'd cut himself.\n\nThe Khan looked around the sparse chamber - the narrow cot, the table, the chair, the comms-box and the sensor-jammer. 'I never truly thought you'd died,' he said.\n\nShiban raised an eyebrow. 'Then you had more faith than I did. Some of the time, at least.'\n\n'I've begun to recognise the signs. The way I feel, before a soul of my people is lost.' He smiled thinly. 'So many gone now, I've had the practice.'\n\n'But Colossi holds. I didn't know if you'd still be here.'\n\n'We won't be. Not for long.' Then the Khan stirred himself, drew in a long breath, shook off his torpor. 'Tell me of the Eternity Wall port.'\n\nShiban recounted how it had been - the overwhelming assault, the gradual wearing down of the defences, the progress of the resistance, the price they had exacted from the enemy before the outer gates had finally fallen. He spoke quickly, precisely, giving only the information his master would wish to know. 'At the end, we were trying to use the port's tugs, to turn the drives into weapons. That was what kept me away from the final assault, as well as what launched me away from the fighting. The last thing I remember, after being hit, was striking the outer edge at speed. I woke up somewhere to the south of the curtain wall, I think. Then it was just a matter of finding a path back.'\n\nThe Khan nodded. 'Just a matter. My guess is there's a story in that, all of its own.' He had been staring down at his clasped hands, and now looked up. 'But I'm proud. Truly, I am. We needed a representative there, someone to remind my brother just what we contribute to his endeavours. I never believed in ceding the ports. I would have fought for longer at the Lion's Gate platforms, but at least we learned our lesson from that.'\n\n'Maybe we should have done.'\n\n'But we did.'\n\nShiban hesitated, unsure how to respond to that. The words confused him. Could it be true? Had his master truly not known? In some ways, that made things easier. In others, far more difficult.\n\n'Then, you...' he began. 'You believe we were meant to hold it?'\n\n'Of course. You did what you could.'\n\n'You and the Lord Dorn both?'\n\nJaghatai's dark eyes pinned him. 'What are you trying to say, Shiban?'\n\nIt would have been impossible to conceal anything from his gene-father, even if he'd been minded to try. Still, trying to find the words, to determine how to break this painful truth, that was tortuous.\n\n'I may have been wrong,' he said weakly. 'That is always possible. But I spoke to Niborran, the commander. He made things as plain as they were ever likely to be.' He took a deep breath. 'Eternity Wall space port was allowed to fall. It could never have been held, not with what we were given.'\n\n'No. If that had been true, you would have been evacuated.'\n\n'We couldn't have been. The enemy had to believe we were fixed on keeping it. Eyes had to be focused on it, to prevent them from lighting somewhere else.'\n\nShiban remembered then how he had first felt, knowing that truth. It hadn't been so bad, back then - dying in battle, for whatever reason, was something that would come to all of them, sooner or later. Trying to reconstruct it all now, though, after all the deaths - that was miserable.\n\n'I don't know what it was. Some other front, some other gambit. But, when I went up for the tugs, to buy us a little more time, I did so knowing that it wouldn't be anything other than a stalling of the inevitable. I never expected to come back. None of us did. That was what a few of us learned. We were sent there to die, my Khan. It was a ruse.'\n\nFor a moment, a single moment that felt everlasting, Jaghatai said nothing. His scarred face remained rigid, digesting that. His lips remained sealed. Shiban suddenly remembered how the primarch had been during the Legion trials, when he had wielded the blade against those of his own people who had been tempted by Horus, and had been more deeply wounded than any of those he had passed judgement on.\n\n'The bastard,' the Khan breathed softly. His eyes darkened. The mournful look hardened quickly into anger. 'The lying, deceitful bastard.' He turned away, fists now clenched, looking suddenly, alarmingly, as if he might tear the entire chamber apart. 'He looked me in the eye. He stood right before me, closer than you are now, and lied. What did he think? That I'd blow his secret? That I'd prevent him? Damned right, I would have.'\n\nShiban almost had to suppress a smile then - not from amusement, but from a kind of relief. His primarch was still a force of the universe, after all - still as alive and passionate and fiercely protective as he had ever been"}
{"text":" now clenched, looking suddenly, alarmingly, as if he might tear the entire chamber apart. 'He looked me in the eye. He stood right before me, closer than you are now, and lied. What did he think? That I'd blow his secret? That I'd prevent him? Damned right, I would have.'\n\nShiban almost had to suppress a smile then - not from amusement, but from a kind of relief. His primarch was still a force of the universe, after all - still as alive and passionate and fiercely protective as he had ever been.\n\n'They should have been told. You should have been told.' The Khan shook his head in furious disbelief. 'A warrior may sell his life for a cause, but he must know. When we created the sagyar mazan, we never lied to them. That foul habit is what got us into this damned mess in the first place - thinking the truth was something to be kept under wraps, to be hidden from those who did the work.'\n\n'If we had known,' Shiban offered carefully, 'the truth would have got out. The gambit would have failed.'\n\n'You really think that? You trust those you fight alongside so little, even now?' Jaghatai's lip curled in disdain. 'Since this thing began, I've seen baseline detachments face up to horrors they had no business even being in the same galaxy with. I've seen them stand up, keep their weapons straight, stare down their own annihilation. Soul of the Altak, they have schooled us all. They should have been told.'\n\nSlowly, the Khan brought himself under control, though anger still simmered under every gesture. He slumped back against the far wall, his long arms slack against the rockcrete. His chin sank against his chest.\n\nSilence fell across the chamber again, and Shiban knew better than to break it.\n\nThe next thing he heard was unexpected - a low, sourly amused laugh.\n\n'But then, what kind of example am I, really?' the Khan murmured. 'My brother does what he has to. He cannot break his nature, any more than I could. I understand some things better now.' His lips twitched into a wry smile. 'He was right, of course. Saturnine, I'm guessing. That does not make it any less contemptible, but I am sure he was right.' He pushed back from the wall, stood tall again. 'And I was always indulged beyond belief, you know that? Rogal spent his life denying himself everything, curbing every urge that might have actually given him some kind of joy, and all that while we were given our head, cut loose, treating an order from the Throne like it was some kind of insult.'\n\n'We were true to our nature.'\n\n'We were lucky. And we were selfish.' His expression became darker again. 'So this is where we make amends for that. The cost has been too high already, and there are more payments to come, but now I am angry, I am furious, for no one has been listening, even while the source of our sickness is as plain as the scar on your face. If we fail to act now, we will die behind these walls, another wasted defence, and that cannot be borne, for wherever and whenever I am destined to meet my end, it will not be behind a damned wall.'\n\nIt was good to hear such words. Even if the Khan's anger was colder than it had been, less joyous and harder-edged, it was still magnificent to behold.\n\n'Then you will call kurultai,' Shiban said. 'You will summon the khans.'\n\n'The call has already gone out,' the Khan said. 'Not just to the Legion. To anyone, anything, that can help us.' He grinned then, the old expression of dangerous anticipation. 'Which makes me glad you are back in time to join us, Tachseer. The hunt has been called. It will need its masters.'\n\nIt was still a city. You had to remember that. Millions of people still lived here, crammed up against one another, terrified, doing their best to stay alive as the tides of unreality crashed against the faltering barricades. Many, perhaps even most, were no sort of warrior at all. They were the scribes, the administrators, the operatives and the civil servants who had come here first to govern an empire. Nestled up against those were the refugees from the Outer Palace and the sprawl beyond, who were far too diverse to classify, and had now merged into the already crowded tenements and spire trunks, starving, terrified.\n\nIlya Ravallion watched the immense, interlocked buildings pass by in the night. The sky above her was lurid, inked both by the orbital assault against the shields and the closer explosions of terrestrial artillery. The few remaining street-lumens strobed and guttered. It was all filthy, coated with ash, piled up with rubbish that could not be collected. They were hemmed in, a sealed system now, surrounded on all sides.\n\nShe leaned against the condensation-fogged window on her armoured transport, watching the narrow streets slide through the darkness. Crowds were everywhere. Troops ran and shouted. Administratum vehicles occasionally nudged their way through the clogged-up transitways, sirens wailing, some of them grav-plate skimmers, most old-model groundcars. If you looked carefully, you could catch snippets of more mundane forms of life in the gaps between the urgent war-business - queues for rations, huddles around burning promethium canisters, children in rags scuttling through the legs of the adults. You could see arguments, fist fights, couples holding on to one another desperately, glass-eyed loners stumbling amid the refuse. Despite the universe ending around them, they were still doing what they had to. They had to eat. They had to keep warm. They still squabbled over their place in the ration-lines, bickered about whether they should have taken that shuttle off-world four years ago when there had still been time, wondered if their overseer position at the tooling works would still be secure by this time next month.\n\nThis time next month. That made her smile.\n\nIt had taken humanity two centuries to spill out from Terra and smother the entire galaxy with its hubris. It had taken seven years for it to contract again, pulling all of that reckless energy back to a single city on a single world. Now, only days remained before it would all be over, one way or another. The few comms-bursts she managed to get from the Legion command indicated that the Mercury Wall had been breached, less than a hundred and sixty kilometres to the north-east. The war had been uncomfortably close to these citizens for weeks; soon it would be rammed down their throats, surging up every thoroughfare and through every hab-cluster.\n\nBut Ilya was not much different to all those scared souls, she knew. The long fight to bring the V Legion home had hollowed her out. She had been near the end of a distinguished career at the start of the war, and the privations of the extended void campaign had done the rest. She didn't have any of the advantages of the Space Marines she worked alongside. They still deferred to her, called her szu-Ilya - even more so than before, especially the newbloods - but it had almost become irritating now, because she was so obviously dying, just like this world, just like the Imperium, and there was no real point in any of it any more.\n\nThey wouldn't change, though. You had to love them for that. All the daemon-terrors of the species' nightmares could be pouring through the air vents and scrabbling at everyone's throats, and there would still be a White Scar on hand to ask if, szu, are you most well? Is there anything you are in need of? Can I be of any assistance?\n\n'We are almost there, szu,' said her driver, right on cue. 'Commencing descent to yard two-forty-one.'\n\nThe speaker was one of the ordu, a warrior named Sojuk. Such experienced fighters were like gold dust at the front right now, but still the Khagan had insisted on her being accompanied on her mission by a full battle-brother. When she'd protested, insisting that a standard Imperial Army escort would be sufficient so far back from the main combat zones, he'd fixed her with that heavy, unarguable stare of his, and said, 'It'll all be engulfed soon. Just take him.'\n\nSo she had. Now she was glad of it. The Inner Palace felt more dangerous than she'd ever known it, suffused with an air of mania that got under the skin, and having Sojuk at her side was a comfort. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what was going wrong. Civilians in warzones often panicked, but this was different. It was almost as if they'd begun to give up entirely, their vital spirits drained out of them by some vile, unseen miasma.\n\n'Very good,' she said, adjusting her uniform jacket, glancing in the rear-view mirror to check her appearance, tucking in a stray wisp of grey hair. She was very thin now. However old and useless she felt these days, though, you had to look the part - sharp, together. 'Bring us down.'\n\nThe transport swerved off the main transitway and trundled down a shallow rockcrete slope. A pair of heavy blast doors drew up, manned by sentries and gloomy under low lighting. Sojuk spoke briefly to the senior guard, and a moment later the doors were hoisted up, revealing a wide tunnel running further down below ground level.\n\nSojuk travelled another few hundred metres before the incline brought them out into a subterranean cavern, sunk deep into the solid bedrock of the city foundations. The air smelled strongly of exhaust fumes, and the space echoed with the ringing clang of power tools. He drew the transport up at a vacant berth, killed the engine, dismounted, and opened the door for Ilya. She stepped out, feeling her muscles ache, and looked around.\n\nYard 241 was huge, running back into shadowy depths that her eyesight couldn't penetrate. The cavern roof was about twenty metres up, rough-cut and hung with sodium tubes. Long chains of atmosphere processors snaked across it, sucking up the noisome air and blasting the worst of the toxins back up to ground level.\n\nAcross the rockcrete deck stood tanks. Hundreds of them, by the look of it. They were decked out in a range of colours and bore many different regimental badges. Most were standard Leman Russ battle tank"}
{"text":"unning back into shadowy depths that her eyesight couldn't penetrate. The cavern roof was about twenty metres up, rough-cut and hung with sodium tubes. Long chains of atmosphere processors snaked across it, sucking up the noisome air and blasting the worst of the toxins back up to ground level.\n\nAcross the rockcrete deck stood tanks. Hundreds of them, by the look of it. They were decked out in a range of colours and bore many different regimental badges. Most were standard Leman Russ battle tanks, arranged in rows, their panels open for servicing. Other variants clustered here and there - Medusa artillery pieces, Chimera armoured transports, even a few giants such as the mammoth Baneblades and Stormlords. Technical crews clustered around many of them, hammering at the engines, clamping fuel lines, welding fresh armour plating. Interspersed with the static units were the long lines of support vehicles: the tankers, the platoon groundcars, the maintenance and medical wagons. Gangs of Imperial Army personnel were everywhere, running to and fro, shouting at one another, or just lounging against the tracks of their vehicles looking exhausted. It was noisy, reverberating and stinking. After only a few seconds standing there, Ilya felt as if her skin had been freshly coated in grease.\n\nSojuk pulled up a functionary in a staff uniform and asked for the commanding officer. The two of them were led through the lines, past the long rows of tanks, some idling, some in decent condition, some barely working at all, until they encountered several dozen senior officers crowded around the blackened chassis of a Hellhammer super-heavy. The functionary scampered up to a woman in a khaki uniform, who looked up, recognised Ilya's rank, and strode over to meet her.\n\n'Greetings, general,' she said, making the aquila and bowing. 'Colonel Jera Talmada. Can I be of any help?'\n\nShe was a stout, olive-skinned woman with a harassed air about her. Her uniform was grimy and fitted poorly - all of them had lost weight over the past few months - but her eyes were alert and she didn't have that awful defeated expression that you came across so often now.\n\nIlya glanced at the Hellhammer. Its panels were broken open, and lexmechanics were tugging at its innards. The side plates were heavily damaged, as were the nearside tracks. Bloodstains ran down from the top turret, long and black.\n\n'What happened to it?' she asked.\n\n'Stationed south of Aurum Gard, with the Hundred-Thirty-Fourth Kalans,' Talmada replied. 'Pulled back five days ago with the rest of the division - they took a beating. We've got six hours to turn them all around and get them back out.'\n\nA Hellhammer was a formidable machine, valuable in the kind of close-range urban combat they were being forced into. Properly supported, it should have been tough to knock out - Ilya had always rated them, back when supplying the Army had been her main concern.\n\n'Will you do it?'\n\nThe colonel laughed grimly. 'We'll send them what we can.' She leaned in closer, lowered her voice. 'They don't last long, out there. Not any more. You should hear the reports we get from the survivors. Half of those we can't even-'\n\n'I'm aware of the general situation, colonel,' said Ilya, glancing back along the rows of damaged and rebuilt vehicles. 'You can't be thinking of deploying back to Aurum.'\n\n'Last orders we got informed us all assets to be retained for Inner Palace, southern zone. We're still waiting for our detailed tasking.'\n\n'The waiting's over. I come from the primarch of the Fifth. One-third of your main strength is to be deployed to Colossi. You have twelve hours to make preparations.'\n\nTalmada blenched. 'One-third? General, there's no-'\n\n'You can do what you want with the rest, but I need intact squadrons, capable vehicles, seasoned crews who know what they're doing. No mobile artillery, just the main battle tanks, all with loadouts optimised for confined spaces. I'd take this thing here, for a start. But they all must - and this is important - all must have full chem-rating. That's gas masks for the crews and working tox-filters on the hulls. No exceptions. Anything you give me without complete coverage, you might as well shoot the drivers now.'\n\n'But, I've got my-'\n\n'Colonel, the comms are down across half the city. No one knows where anything is, or where anything's going. Unless someone as reckless as me actually comes down here in a transport, even the Lord Dorn himself isn't going to know what you had here and where it ended up, and very soon no one's going to be out on the streets at all unless they're dead.' She slowed down. This wasn't Talmada's fault - there just wasn't enough to go around. 'So it won't come back to you, is what I'm saying. But you do have a chance to make a difference. There's a plan. It makes better use of what's sitting here than anything you'll get out of core command now, because it'll have a chance to do something, something that has a hope of hurting the enemy. Like I say, this comes direct from the Lord Jaghatai. You know that name, yes? Heard it before? Good. I have the holo-seals and everything.'\n\nSojuk took a step forward, held out his gauntlet palm up and the hololiths flickered into life. They were all above board, regulation, checked over by herself personally.\n\n'I have the requisition details here,' Ilya went on, as Sojuk reached for a dataslug and handed it to Talmada's adjutant. 'What we need, how much of it, where and when. You were spoken of highly, colonel - I'm sure you'll step up to this now, given the urgency of the situation.'\n\nTalmada, to her credit, started to recover her composure. 'This isn't the only depot you're visiting, is it?'\n\n'You're fourth on the list. And I've got more to go.'\n\n'That's a lot... hells, that's a load of tanks.'\n\n'It is.'\n\n'It'll leave holes.'\n\nIlya just maintained eye contact. 'If they weren't absolutely critical, I wouldn't be here.'\n\nAnd then, somewhat unexpectedly, Talmada's demeanour shifted, just by a fraction. She looked suddenly enthused. 'Counter-offensive. That's right, isn't it? Throne, tell me that's it. Tell me someone's going out after those bastards now, because we've been falling back for so damned long now that it crushes you, after a while. You see that? Tell me you're launching-'\n\nIlya laid a hand on the woman's crossed forearm - gently, firmly. 'We just need them at Colossi, delivered in twelve hours.'\n\nAnd, just like that, the enthusiasm was snuffed out, replaced by that old fug of worry and doubt. It was everywhere, all the time. 'But they've got total air superiority. Total. That's what's knocking them out - you push out of the Inner Palace rim, beyond the working wall guns, and they start throwing it all down. That's your problem, general. That's why we pulled them back.'\n\nIlya left her hand where it was. This was how it had been at the other depots, and how it would be at all the rest. It didn't matter much - the Khagan would get what he required - but better to do this the right way, through the right channels, as resolutely and quickly as possible.\n\n'Just get me what I need on the ground,' she said. 'Air support is someone else's headache.'\n\nJangsai Khan took a Kyzagan speeder out from the Colossi bunkers, rumbling clear of the subterranean hold-pens and along the tunnels leading back towards the Ultimate Gate. Once free of the fortress' tangled foundation level, he boosted up onto the main supply route running back west. Most of this avenue was underground, heavily shielded from mortar and shell impact. He had to weave through the heavy traffic going both ways around him - wounded fighters and damaged vehicles limping back towards the support bases at the Lion's Gate nexus, patched-up fighters and reconditioned vehicles limping back to the front. The procession of supply ground-trucks was thinner than it had been at the start of the siege - everything, from basic rations to ammunition, was running low now. Over it all came the constant crump of gunfire, the earth-tremors of impacts, the steady thunder-rumble of the kilometres-long enemy advance.\n\nHe couldn't make out much of the wider tactical situation from so low down. Only as he neared the Lion's Gate itself - the penultimate bulwark before the Inner Palace - did the route briefly sweep up to ground level, giving him a few moments' glimpse of open terrain. The sky overhead was black, of course - it had been black for weeks - making the ruins of the great buildings look like bleached bones. Fires smouldered in the cleft shadows, most kindled by incendiaries, some from ruptured fuel bunkers or holed transports. The horizon to the west was vivid with angry plasma-flares over the orbital void shields, a flickering inferno that never went out. The pinnacles of the distant spires spiked up into that furnace, looking very fragile under its ceaseless ripple and bloom. To the north, past the ruined slag heap that had once been Corbenic Gard, there stretched a blasted realm of flaywire and trenches, most in the hands of the enemy now. He'd fought out there for a few weeks, part of a holding operation to prevent Colossi being entirely cut off from the Lion's Gate. That had been hard fighting - a nerve-wearing grind that had seen too many warriors crushed into the toxic mud and rubble. Still, it had worked. Supplies still got through... just.\n\nFor how much longer, though - that was the question. Every hour of defence they bought cost them in lives and materiel, whereas the enemy was free to resupply at will. Jangsai had seen landers coming down to the Lion's Gate space port, the towering structure that was just about visible from the defensive portal that shared its name. For as long as the besiegers held that place, the torrent could not even be slowed, let alone staunched. They all knew it. They all knew what they wanted to do about it.\n\nThe road ducked back underground, and he re-entered the shadowy realm of flashing lumen lines and clogged asphalt. Th"}
{"text":"reas the enemy was free to resupply at will. Jangsai had seen landers coming down to the Lion's Gate space port, the towering structure that was just about visible from the defensive portal that shared its name. For as long as the besiegers held that place, the torrent could not even be slowed, let alone staunched. They all knew it. They all knew what they wanted to do about it.\n\nThe road ducked back underground, and he re-entered the shadowy realm of flashing lumen lines and clogged asphalt. The closer he got to the interior, the more frequent were the checkpoints, the more intrusive the questions and the more comprehensive the ident-checks. One of the big barrier-stations was comprehensively on fire when he got to it, with no sign of anti-flamm teams or reconstruction units. Saboteurs, they told him. Enemy agents, perhaps. Or maybe just a trooper going mad. There was a lot of that about. It took a special degree of madness to capitulate to this enemy, once you'd seen what they did, but the soul-sickness was everywhere, and it was getting worse.\n\nEventually he pushed through it all and emerged deep into the Inner Palace itself, that city-within-a-city, the last portion of the Palace proper to remain entirely in the defenders' hands. The great ward that kept the worst of the yaksha - the daemons - out was still intact here, as was the main orbital aegis overhead, but the physical damage from ground-level artillery was still heavy. Jangsai drove as fast as he could, weaving through the constant press of military traffic, swinging away west when the transitways allowed and heading towards the industrial zones on the inner sprawl of the Adamant and Europa wall-angle. Even without the crowds it would have taken him a long time - you forgot, sometimes, that the distances between salient points were so vast.\n\nHe caught sight of his destination when he was still some way off. It was hard to avoid it, hanging low in the fire-streaked atmosphere, less than six hundred metres above the tallest spire-tops, shrouded in the crackle and arc of grav-plate-induced lightning storms. The thing had been even larger in the past, before being part dismantled and refitted as part of Lord Dorn's orbital plate scuttling programme. Only this one station had been spared, he knew - less due to its formidable array of ship-killing cannons than for its innovative immersion drives, which had allowed it to be lowered steadily through the atmosphere until it hung just above the high limits of the cityscape, hard under the protection of the Palace's void shields, ready to angle its remaining cannons out at the armies on the plains.\n\nThe Skye plate, it was called, presumably in homage to that atmospheric capability. Despite its extensive reductions and modifications, it was still a truly gigantic slab of metal - more than eleven kilometres in diameter and over three hundred metres thick at the rim. It was blackened across its entire upper face, scorched to pitch by days of solid incoming fire, back from when it had been stationed at high altitude to take part in the early defence against the mass void-drops. Its guns had mostly fallen silent now, either blasted to scrap by enemy fusillades or starved of ammunition, and so it had ceased to be a major part of the Palace's defensive cordon, reduced to not much more than an array of airstrips for the defenders' ever-diminishing fleet of atmospheric flyers and a static backup for the main wall gunlines. It would still have dominated most other cities, hanging like some unfathomably large capstone over the buildings below, but here, at the very centre of humanity's realm, it was just another megastructure in a landscape already stuffed with excess, a throwback to a prouder age, forlorn and derelict.\n\nBut its engines, for all anyone knew, were still intact. Its power generators had never been knocked out, and it still harboured a skeleton crew of a couple of thousand. Skye brooded, immobile, over a landscape of munitions works, manufactoria and refineries, all very much in operation and working to feed the ever-thinning defensive lines. Burn-off towers and cooling vents jetted in the plate's shadow, turning the entire urban sector into a hell-hot vista of tumbling smut clouds and gusting spark plumes.\n\nJangsai made his way through those industrial clusters, boosting as fast as he could towards the epicentre of the hovering plate. The parapets of the Adamant Wall rose up some eighty kilometres away to the south-west, backlit from the constant barrage. They said now that Mercury had been breached - it wouldn't be long, surely, before the rest of the perimeter could no longer be relied on either.\n\nOnce at the agreed coordinates, he fed power to the Kyzagan's boosters, and rose up steadily above the rooflines. He transmitted and received the handshake comms-burst, then felt the shudder as his speeder's momentum was taken over by the plate's own grav-lift drives. He killed the engines and powered down, ascending now in an invisible column of energy. For a little while, suspended above the buildings around him, he had a panoramic view right across the south-western zones of the Inner Palace, and saw the swathe of fighting running in an arc from Western Hemispheric to the Saturnine Gate and beyond.\n\nThen he was swallowed up by the plate's underside docking apertures, lifted gently into the receiving hangars and set down on an empty apron. Jangsai jumped down from his seat, feeling the emptiness in the space around him. You could have housed a thousand fighters in that hangar. Apart from his speeder, the only other occupants were a few lighters and a defunct Marauder bomber with its landing gear blasted clean off.\n\nHe was met by a few dozen crew, all in the pale grey tabards of the now obsolete Terran Orbital Command. They took him to a mag-train terminal, from where they were whisked down tunnels and out across high viaducts. It was all shabby, dust-blown, poorly maintained. Jangsai was no Techmarine, but even he could see the rapid degradation. A few well-placed shots, and the whole place looked liable to come apart.\n\nEventually they reached a command tower sited on the upper face of the disc, and took an elevator up to the topmost level. They emerged into what looked to be an observation chamber, with wall-high windows on all sides and flickering screens of augur equipment embedded in a wide central column. Most of the escorts withdrew, leaving just two to guard the slide-doors they had come through. The chamber's only other occupant was a man, standing in front of the west-facing wall, staring out into the night. As Jangsai drew alongside him, he immediately recognised the telltale signs - the slightly too-tall body, made lissom by Ar Rija's low gravity; the faint hint of yellow on the exposed flesh of his face and neck.\n\n'Greetings,' Jangsai said, looking out of the windows.\n\n'Be welcome, honoured khan,' said Ayo Nuta, major general of the Terran Orbital Command, master of the Skye plate. 'We have not had any visits from core command for... well. More than two months, I think. Forgive the way the place looks.'\n\nJangsai looked out of the tower's windows. From that vantage you could see the flat disc of the orbital plate extending outwards in all directions, studded with sensor vanes and gun towers. It was like a landscape of its own, with its own topography, its own scars, all as empty and airless as a moon's.\n\n'I read the reports of your action during the void-drops,' he said. 'You performed admirably.'\n\nNuta smiled sadly. 'We had dozens of these things, once. Dozens. They cut them all up, shipped the guns back to ground level. I mean, I understood the arguments. Lord Dorn does nothing without reason. But still, it broke my heart to see it. Even this one... it's just a shadow. A shadow of what it was.'\n\n'You managed to maintain the main systems, though?'\n\n'As ordered. And we can still launch six fighter wings from the wall-facing strips.' He shook his head wearily. 'Down from fifty-four.'\n\nWould this man - a senior military officer - have talked in such a way, two months ago? Jangsai doubted it.\n\n'But the immersion drives are still operational?'\n\n'Just about. Three of the four reactors are powered, so we can hold this position for as long as ordered.'\n\n'But if you had to shift position?'\n\n'Shift position? To where, khan?' He finally turned away from the window and looked at Jangsai. The flashes from the battles outside lit up his tired face. 'We're static here because there's nowhere else to put us. I haven't had a tasking for weeks. We're almost out of supplies. I was wondering just what to do when the power starts to fail. I thought I might shift position then. Maybe straight into the Katabatic Plain. Take a few with us, at least.'\n\n'Look at this.'\n\nJangsai opened up a lithcaster, and a spectral map of the eastern warzone spiralled into shaky life over his open palm. It was marked with a trajectory vector. Nuta took it all in, snorted, and shook his head.\n\n'Impossible.'\n\n'You didn't study it for long.'\n\n'East of the Ultimate Gate? This thing doesn't have any teeth left. What good would it do out there? They've got Titans walking west of the space port now, they tell me, and, in case you hadn't noticed, we're a hard target to miss.'\n\n'Also hard to bring down.'\n\nNuta laughed humourlessly. 'To what end, though? Eh? To what end?' He rubbed his temples, making his skin crease. He looked exhausted. 'I was ordered here by the Lord Dorn. To eke out the last of our useful existence while we could. Unless I hear from him to the contrary, that's what I plan to do.'\n\n'This comes from Lord Jaghatai, of the Fifth.'\n\n'Last time I checked, Lord Dorn was in overall command.'\n\nJangsai felt irritation rise up, and quelled it. This man was one of very few left - perhaps the only one, now - who understood fully how to operate an orbital plate. When Naranbaatar had tasked him with this mission, he'd felt a similar irritat"}
{"text":"re by the Lord Dorn. To eke out the last of our useful existence while we could. Unless I hear from him to the contrary, that's what I plan to do.'\n\n'This comes from Lord Jaghatai, of the Fifth.'\n\n'Last time I checked, Lord Dorn was in overall command.'\n\nJangsai felt irritation rise up, and quelled it. This man was one of very few left - perhaps the only one, now - who understood fully how to operate an orbital plate. When Naranbaatar had tasked him with this mission, he'd felt a similar irritation. The fact that he hailed from the same world as this man should have made no difference, not in the Imperium of Unity where the only mark of allegiance was membership of the species, and to have it suggested that, in this case, a pre-ascension heritage might carry any kind of importance was almost something he could have been offended by.\n\nBut this was, clearly, no longer the Imperium of Unity. The spiritual sickness was everywhere now, dragging everything down, making good men and women weak and querulous. In such times, given such stakes, a warrior made use of every weapon to hand.\n\n'So what commune were you raised in?' Jangsai asked.\n\nNuta blinked, surprised. 'Which what, now?'\n\n'Which commune? Uyani, I'd say, by the way you pronounce your Gothic.'\n\nNuta chuckled. 'Well, then. Either you're very well prepared, or you're a Rijan White Scar. I didn't think such things were possible.'\n\n'Most things are possible, if you put your mind to them.' Jangsai was not wearing his helm, but most of the giveaway signs of his original heritage had been overlaid with the heavy musculature and gene-imprint of the V Legion, so Nuta could be forgiven his surprise. 'I was born on Gyuto, and I do not recall all the Dictates from your commune. Ours were derived from Praefectora Talyi, a heritage you would consider less than reliable, and anyway I was a child then. But I do know of one Dictate, one that stuck in my mind, and I am sure it was from the Uyani thought-strain. Tell me if I have it right - the traveller is the one who takes his truth with him into strange lands. The moment he forgets his truth, he ceases to be a traveller, and becomes the strange land.'\n\nNuta blinked again. This time, though, it was not from surprise, and his eyes glistened. 'Ah, Throne. I never thought I'd hear the Dictates again. Least of all here, on this terrible world.'\n\n'What was your truth, commander?'\n\n'That I had command of this thing. That I had worked for it, and that I deserved it. That I would use it to give honour to my commune, to my home world. To the Imperium.'\n\n'You are not a part of this terrible world yet, commander. You can still do all of that.'\n\nNuta looked rueful. 'No guns left. No supplies left.'\n\n'Did I ask you for any? I only asked that you move the plate.'\n\n'And what good will that do?'\n\nHe was still resisting, but the tone had changed. He wanted to be told now, to be reminded of who he had once been, and where his old ambitions had once taken him, and how he could recover all of that. Not that Jangsai had ever thought it, but Naranbaatar was no one's fool.\n\n'So listen now with your whole mind and soul,' said Jangsai, adopting the litany-rhythms of the praefectoras. 'This is what the Khagan wishes you to do.'\n\nThe sword\n\nThe saint\n\nThe sinner\n\nSo he knew what he had to do.\n\nSigismund jogged down the corridor, his heavy armour clanking on the metal deck. Alarms were going off everywhere, resonating down the maze of interlocking passageways. The few active lumens were shaking on their chains now, rocked by the volume of ordnance slamming into the fringes of the Mercury urban zone. Fafnir Rann came with him, as did his brothers of the Templar order - not at full tilt yet, their gait heavy and purposeful. Their black-and-white plate was hard to pick out in the flickering light, like ghost-edged shadows, glinting from the chains that held their weapons.\n\nSince leaving Shard Bastion, Sigismund had done a hundred things. He had given unit commanders their orders. He had despatched reserve companies to their stations. He had enacted destruction plans for key bridges leading into the city core. He had chosen battle-brothers of the Legion to lead counter-attacks, measuring each threat against the characters of the warriors in question. It was nothing he hadn't been doing since taking part in the defence of the Lion's Gate space port, except that now there was no deferral, not to Rann, not to his primarch. He had sole command.\n\nAnd it was glorious. He couldn't lie to himself - this was the moment he had been yearning for. The words of his gene-father still echoed in his ears - the leash is off. For so long it had felt like he had been compromising, holding back, second-guessing every decision he made lest it somehow worsened the censure he'd been operating under. In the past, during the Crusade, there had been none of that, only certainty. That was what he had always thrived on, the surety of purpose, the absence of choices or hesitation. It was what had made him so deadly, and he had revelled in it, fully aware of what other warriors in other Legions had said of him. He had duelled them all, and beaten them all, and taken a pure martial pleasure in every moment of it - not in the disgrace of his opponents, mind, but rather in the edging closer to total mastery, to the knowledge that there was nothing more to learn or discover, and then he could simply exist in that truth, as an aspect of it, as a face of it.\n\nHe had always wanted the world to be just like that - no doubts, no lingering areas of hesitation or equivocation, just action, purity of will and deed, the knowledge that whatever he did could never be, and could never have been, otherwise. From the first day of this rebellion, everything had shaken that single-mindedness. The things he had relied on with total surety had proven to be illusory and weak, and things he had thought of as being fictive and simple-minded had proved to have unexpected power. He had been forced to recalibrate, to reorientate. As every sword-brother knew, the time of greatest weakness was during the correction of a defective technique. He had started to fight... and lose. He had faced Horus Aximand and had been made to withdraw. He had faced Kharn, whom he had not yet been able to bring himself to hate fully, and been beaten. He had even taken on a primarch. Had that been hubris? Or just frustration, a desperate bid to recover his now-so-elusive sense of superiority? If he had somehow done the impossible and bested Fulgrim, would that have finally banished the whispers of doubt?\n\nProbably not. The fault had never been external, he knew now - it had always been within him, slowly metastasising, becoming impassable the longer he ignored it. He had needed to hear Dorn's words of release to understand it. They had, all of them, been fighting with one hand behind their backs, trying to hold on to a dream that had already died. The enemy was utterly changed now. They were physically stronger and morally intoxicated, eagerly drinking up gifts that should have been shunned as poison. And yet, those who remained loyal had tried to cling on to what they had been at the very start. They had still mouthed pieties about Unity and the Imperial Truth long after fealty to such virtues had become impossible. Once he grasped that, once he faced up to it, he had what he needed to remove the fetters in his mind.\n\nI no longer fight for the Imperium that was, he told himself. I fight for the Imperium as it will become.\n\nSo now, as he neared the exit ramps, the portals that would take him out into the night of fire and blood, all he felt was eagerness. Everything that had held him back had been destroyed, burned away, immolated in the consuming fire of this certainty.\n\nBut at the inner barbican entrance, just before the last of the sealed gates, he saw troops waiting for him, lots of them. They were heavily decked out in arcane armour patterns he didn't recognise - dark green, smooth-faced, lined with gold. As Sigismund motioned for his escort to come to a halt, their leader made the aquila. The man flipped back his helm, which folded up and withdrew into the armour's collar-array in a sliding series of servo-motions. The face it revealed was slim, dark-skinned, dark-haired, with the Sigillite's mark prominent on one cheek.\n\n'Battle calls, adept,' Rann growled, clearly unwilling to have the squad's momentum halted. 'Stand aside.'\n\nThe man bowed in apology, but addressed Sigismund directly. 'I have been seeking you for some time, First Captain. Khalid Hassan, Chosen of the Sigillite, operating on my master's behalf. This will take but a moment.'\n\nHe gestured, and one of his soldiers brought up a weapon. The trooper held it two-handed, cumbersomely, barely able to keep it aloft despite wearing what looked to be a kind of power armour. It was a sword, still in its scabbard, far too large for a baseline human ever to have wielded.\n\nAs soon as Sigismund laid eyes on it, a faint shiver passed through his body. He almost thought he heard something emanate from it - a faint murmuring, unquiet and veiled. The body language of the man who held it up gave away what he thought of it - he was desperate to be shot of it.\n\n'What is that?' Sigismund asked, doubtfully.\n\n'A gift,' Hassan replied. 'From my master's own repository. Forged a long time ago, when the world was a different place.'\n\nSigismund found it hard to take his eyes off the blade. He could sense immediately, even before it was drawn, that it was beautifully made. Everything about it - its size, its profile, the fine gold-and-black decoration that ran from tip to guard - screamed of excess, of extremity.\n\n'I have a blade.'\n\n'You have a blade. This is the blade.'\n\n'Then give it to someone who wants it.'\n\n'It is for you.'\n\n'Who says it?'\n\n'The Emperor.'\n\nSigismund found himself gazing at the black hilt. He had to make an effort not to reach out and seize it. The damned thing was seduci"}
{"text":"nse immediately, even before it was drawn, that it was beautifully made. Everything about it - its size, its profile, the fine gold-and-black decoration that ran from tip to guard - screamed of excess, of extremity.\n\n'I have a blade.'\n\n'You have a blade. This is the blade.'\n\n'Then give it to someone who wants it.'\n\n'It is for you.'\n\n'Who says it?'\n\n'The Emperor.'\n\nSigismund found himself gazing at the black hilt. He had to make an effort not to reach out and seize it. The damned thing was seducing him. A mingled sense of revulsion and awe froze him in place. 'He speaks not.'\n\n'You truly believe that? The sword is yours. It has always been yours.'\n\nRann laughed harshly. 'Witchery.'\n\n'Nothing further from it,' said Hassan, never taking his eyes off Sigismund. 'The hour is come. Take it.'\n\nAs if in some kind of trance, almost without meaning to, Sigismund did so. As he grasped the hilt, a shiver ran up his arm. He took the rim of the scabbard, and drew the blade smoothly. The metal was as black as jet, hardly reflecting the lumens. He lifted it to his face, and saw nothing. The surface drank in light, giving nothing back. It was selfish, this thing.\n\n'Why me?' he asked, almost for the sake of form. Now that he had it in his hands, he sensed the truth of it all.\n\n'I have no idea,' said Hassan, smiling wryly. 'My orders were only to deliver it.'\n\nSigismund angled it, turned it, switched it to horizontal and looked down the blade's length.\n\nHeavy. Far heavier than any sword he had borne before, but something told him it wouldn't slow him down. Its weight was just another aspect of its savage nature. The murmuring carried on, just beyond the edge of hearing, almost intelligible as he swiped it in practice arcs. It might have been his imagination. It wasn't his imagination.\n\n'It has been here, all this time,' he murmured.\n\n'Many ancient things are guarded in my master's chambers.'\n\n'No, you do not understand me.' Sigismund finally looked up at Hassan again. 'When we went into the void, preaching the end of magic, this thing was already here. It had already been made. By Him. What does that tell you?'\n\nHassan shrugged. 'I'm not minded to speculate.'\n\nSigismund laughed. With a deft movement, he unchained his old blade and handed it over to Rann. Then he shackled the black sword's grip, and locked the scabbard at his belt. 'Well, you are fortunate that it pleases me. Give my thanks to your master, and tell him that it suits my new mood.'\n\n'I will. And what mood would that be, captain?'\n\nSigismund moved past him. He could smell the promethium even before he crossed the threshold.\n\n'Murderous,' he growled, and started to accelerate up the exit ramp.\n\nRunning, always running now, scampering into culverts and cubby holes, clamping her hands to her ears to muffle the stomach-churning bangs, wrapping rags around her mouth to stop her breathing in nothing but brick dust.\n\nEuphrati Keeler fled from hideout to hideout, bedraggled as a half-drowned dog, barely able to pause for a moment to think properly about why she was there at all, back in the thick of things. It had been safer - sort of - in the Blackstone. At least in there she hadn't had to zigzag across mortar-blown streets as the undermined walls around her were blasted apart. Dealing with monsters like Fo had been intimidating in its own way, but at least she'd been fed and watered in there, given a data-slate to work with, something to fill the hours. And after the trauma of the escape itself there had been more trials, more horrors to witness. Some encounters - one in particular - she could hardly bear to recall.\n\nWhat had she been thinking? Why had she let them persuade her that it was a good idea to leave? It had all gone predictably wrong so quickly - a confusion of guns and transports, shouting and screaming, the spark of pure terror. Then she'd just run, run hard, never working out what had come after her, never looking back to check. She'd outpaced those faceless hunters, but now whole armies of killers were everywhere, swarming through the city-palace like flies. She'd be lucky to last a day or two out here. She didn't even really understand why they'd ever tried to get her out.\n\nJust don't preach, they'd said. It's you that's important. So don't preach. Just... be there.\n\nAt the time, it had been a way out, sent to her as if by providence, and she'd not argued, because you didn't argue with providence. You let the river take you where it would, turning and kicking in the gyres, but never resisting. You had to trust that the current was taking you in the direction it was meant to, otherwise what was the point?\n\nShe scuttled across the face of a wide impact crater, skipping through the debris of something huge and metallic, before skidding under the shadow of an intact hab-block. The eternal night sky above her was lurid with the splash-patterns of munitions hitting the defensive aegis, underscored by the ground-mounted guns that were now being deployed liberally within the suspended barrier. It was so loud now, all the time, a tidal-wall of noise that crashed and reverberated from every intact surface, making her arms vibrate, making her teeth throb.\n\nShe crouched down, arms around her knees, panting hard. She was wearing nothing more than the prison fatigues they'd given her in the Blackstone, but she was still hot. The volume of explosives going off had made the Himalazian air as humid as the tropics, and slicks of sweat stained her tunic-top.\n\nShe had to rest there, just for a moment, despite the obvious danger. She had no idea which zone of the city this was, but the enemy was advancing through it, or close to it, because crowds of people had already surged back the other way, panicked as rats from a fire. Like everywhere in the beleaguered Inner Palace, the press of high buildings was close. The unlit towers around her were all massive, but half of them were mere shells now, and the rest had all sustained fearful damage. There was nowhere for all that disintegrated rockcrete and steel to go, so the transitways choked up, and even the flimsiest remaining frontages were propped with piles of rubble. It seemed to her that all the enemy was doing was creating a denser, more tortuous landscape to eventually bludgeon their way through, though millions of souls were probably still hunkered down in the semi-demolished husks around her, hidden from view or buried deep, gnawing at their own terror in the munition-lit dark.\n\nShe wormed her way backwards, pushing between two heavy beams that had come down from some shot-to-pieces balcony, letting the metal cool her skin. She was hungry now, and very thirsty. She'd have to move off again soon, if only to find something to drink. She had no plan, no direction. It would only take one stray mortar or las-beam, and she'd be gone, snuffed out, with nothing achieved.\n\nWell played, Euphrati, she thought to herself. You've really excelled yourself this time.\n\nIt felt strange, despite everything going on just then, to think that somewhere up above her, probably at high orbital anchor, was the Vengeful Spirit. It had been years now since she'd been on that ship, but the memories were still so vivid that it felt like moments ago. She knew enough of the enemy to doubt whether any of the dorms and mess halls and recreation stations were anything like they had used to be, but she could still vividly picture how they had once been, with the civilians and the regular ship crew jostling up alongside the transhuman giants and Army personnel - good-humoured, for the most part, full of optimism, free to jibe and dispute, yet part of something, an endeavour, all pulling in the same basic direction.\n\nThat little band of explorers was diminished now. They had all been so young. Like children, really, sent off to caper around the galaxy, wide-eyed and ignorant. Mersadie was gone, Ignace was gone. Kyril still pursued something like his old trade, though it was so compromised that it bore little relation to what he'd once been proud to do. Did he really think that Dorn wouldn't just yank the leash back, if he somehow prevailed in this desperate scrap for survival? The idea that they had been there to freely observe, record, report - that was dead now, and Sindermann surely knew it, deep down, in some part of his soul that he didn't look at very often. She wondered what, exactly, he thought he was up to.\n\nShe gazed upward, squinting against the neon-flare of the distant aegis. Yes, somewhere up there, hanging amid the other void-giants, was the old home from home, the old haunt.\n\nAnd you are on it, still, she thought. We all left, but you're still there. I can sense you, you devil. Maybe you can sense me too. I don't care. I never want to see you again. I have enough images, too many I wish I could erase. I never want to see just how bad you've become.\n\nSuddenly, she tensed. She felt something stir, up ahead, somewhere in the clouds of dust that drifted and swirled in the flickering half-light.\n\nShe squinted out at the streetscape. Nowhere to run to - not without giving herself away. She squirmed back up against the angle of the two beams, seeing if she could shove herself through the gap between them and find some way down into the building's foundations.\n\nNo good - she was stuck there, her spine hard up against the masonry, in the shadows but hardly protected from prying eyes. All she could do was make herself as small and still as possible, hardly daring to breathe.\n\nAway ahead, some fifty metres off, the curtains of smoke split open. Figures emerged out of the haze, marching steadily, not hurrying. They were all huge, and with the telltale hunch-shouldered profile of Space Marines. For a moment, Keeler dared to hope that they'd be from the loyal Legions, but it only took seconds to see that they weren't. Their battleplate was gunmetal-grey, blunt-edged and utilitarian. They clunked their way heavily through the rubble, hefting their huge gun"}
{"text":"ng to breathe.\n\nAway ahead, some fifty metres off, the curtains of smoke split open. Figures emerged out of the haze, marching steadily, not hurrying. They were all huge, and with the telltale hunch-shouldered profile of Space Marines. For a moment, Keeler dared to hope that they'd be from the loyal Legions, but it only took seconds to see that they weren't. Their battleplate was gunmetal-grey, blunt-edged and utilitarian. They clunked their way heavily through the rubble, hefting their huge guns two-handed, scanning carefully as they came. Eight of them were there, bearing the black-and-yellow chevrons of the Iron Warriors, helm-lenses glimmering in the shifting light.\n\nKeeler felt her heart thudding. A line of sweat ran down her temple. She clutched her hands together, drawing her body in tight, as if she could squeeze it down so small that no one would ever see it.\n\nThe Iron Warriors marched down the transitway running alongside her position, clambering over the heaps of debris and kicking through the muck. Their armour was heavily marked with battle-damage, and two of the warriors were limping. Some of them had Space Marine helmets hanging from their belts - the crimson of the Blood Angels and the ivory of the White Scars.\n\nThey weren't looking in her direction. They seemed to be heading straight down what remained of the central avenue - perhaps a scout squad of some larger formation, or maybe just a gang of freelancers looking for loot and glory. At this rate, they'd pass less than a groundcar's length from her position.\n\nThirty metres. The crack and rumble of the artillery carried on the whole time, masking the faint noise of her breathing. She pressed herself harder under the crossed beams, hardly daring to look at the monsters as they neared. They were horrific things, fusions of genecraft and techno-weaponry from some industrial nightmare-factory. The play of light over their armour made them seem somehow less than fully real, like hololiths, but she saw the rubble-chunks burst into powder under their boots, and smelled the hot-metal stench of their armour's reactor cores.\n\nTwenty metres. They would see her. They had to see her. It didn't matter that she was tiny, and crouched down, and lost in a fog of dust and darkness - they had sensors, ways of picking up heat and fractional movement. There was nowhere to go, no route of escape. They would see her.\n\nTen metres. She thought about bolting. That would surely be the end of her, but at least it would be clean. A single mass-reactive shell didn't so much as stop a human body as obliterate it. She wouldn't feel much.\n\nThen one of the Iron Warriors held up a fist. The squad halted. The one with the clenched gauntlet moved its enormous, slant-faced helm, very slowly, in her direction. A pair of red lenses pierced the darkness, staring straight at her.\n\nShe couldn't breathe. She stared right back at it. She was frozen, her heart hammering, pinned like an insect to a card. All it had to do was lift the muzzle of its weapon. Or maybe just stride over and grab her by the neck. Or maybe, if it wanted to give her a heart attack, just carry on glaring at her like that for a little longer. Somewhere under all that ceramite and beaten iron, she knew, was a withered transhuman face, a withered transhuman soul, a corrupted being of boundless malice and infinite cruelty, the stuff of Old Night rendered back into reality. If she was lucky, very lucky, all it would do was kill her.\n\nThe red lenses. For an eternity, staring at her.\n\nThen it lowered its fist. It turned away. It started to walk again. The others came with it, clanking along on their corroded servos. They trudged down the long, detritus-strewn avenue, overlooked by the ranks of eyeless hab-blocks. It took them a long time to pass out of earshot, and only a little longer for the stench to fade away.\n\nKeeler stayed where she was, shivering, her body locked in place. Only once she was sure that they were well out of sight did she manage to unclench her stiff limbs and unfurl out of her hiding spot. Shakily, she edged out along the wall's length, clear of the shadow of the beams. The empty transitway stretched off in either direction, a battered wasteland of twisted rebar and pitted asphalt.\n\nIt had seen her. It had to have seen her. Even a pair of mortal eyes would have been able to pick her out at that distance. Why had it moved off? Those things didn't know pity. They no longer even comprehended it.\n\nShe was still shaking. Gingerly, she clambered back up the rubble-slope, until she was up at the level of the transitway. On the edge of what had once been its kerb, a single skull was perched on a tiny cairn of stones. There were skulls aplenty in the ruins, of course, but most of those were still flecked with flesh-patches and attached to spinal cords. This one was on its own, bare to the bone, glistening faintly as if someone had cleaned it. It had been facing away from her, angled back to where the Iron Warrior had been standing, interposed between them like a guardian totem.\n\nShe picked it up, turned it around and looked into its eyeless face. There was something oddly appropriate, even comforting, about its presence. A death's head in the city of death, the symbol of human mortality, the last and permanent remnant of an unremarked life.\n\nThey stared at one another for some time, flesh and bone. As they did so, Keeler felt her composure gradually return. Her hands stopped shaking.\n\nWhy had she ever doubted? She had already faced the worst the realm of the false gods could throw at her, and had never faltered. She had faced the wrath of primarchs and regents, and never backed away from it. Of course the Iron Warrior hadn't seen her. She had been chosen for this. She had a duty to perform, a mission to accomplish. Even now, amid all that was collapsing and falling apart, He was yet mindful of her, warding her, ensuring that she didn't stumble at the final hurdle.\n\nShe looked up again. Gauging distances, even gauging directions, was next to impossible. The firefights looked to be most severe towards the cluster of high towers she had been heading towards. She could hear the rattle of small-arms fire from up ahead, perhaps even the cries from human throats.\n\nSome souls were still fighting, then, even here. Some who would need their faith bolstering, if they were not to be swept away.\n\nJust... be there.\n\n'Come on, then,' she said, wrapping the skull up in a rag-length and tucking it into her belt. 'You and me. Let's do this.'\n\nBasilio Fo had no business being alive. He had no real business being on Terra, and certainly no business at all being free of captivity. Life was strange like that. Just when you thought it couldn't get any more implausible, something would show up and teach you a little humility.\n\nOr, at least, it might have taught another man a little humility, but Fo had never been a humble soul. He was rational enough to see the twists of fate for what they were - dumb luck, for the most part - but it was still difficult not to feel a swell of pride every time he evaded his no-doubt-very-much-deserved comeuppance and trotted off towards his next opportunity for intellectual growth.\n\nHis fellow travellers were mostly gone - all the warlords and splicers and sociopaths, the ones he had either traded with or run away from as they eked out their hardscrabble life amid the ruins of Old Earth. Just him and the old man left, plus those few flunkeys and hangers-on of His that lingered within the Palace like leftover parts for a machine. Just the two of them now, an argumentative old couple, worn out, nagging at one another around the edges, their best years long gone.\n\nHe didn't mourn many of the others. Narthan Dume had actually been good company, in his early years at least, but the majority of them had been wearisome. Survival on Terra during the turmoil had been easier for the brutal ones, and brutes generally made poor acquaintances. Only a very few had made it through via cunning and subtlety, and he was by far the best of that breed.\n\nNow the endgame. All the schemes and stratagems had come to nothing, bulldozed by that juggernaut on the Throne, the dullest and the maddest brute of them all. So much had been destroyed, so much irreplaceable and unreproducible had been rendered down to dust, it was enough to make a cultured man scream. What did it matter if this gigantic city was similarly pulverised? It was ideas that mattered, and they were already mostly wiped out, replaced by a sterile contest between two rival horror shows of almost equal slack-wittedness.\n\nBut it wasn't quite over yet. He had his freedom, he had just a little time, and he knew where he was going. The Inner Palace had been knocked about a bit, by the look of things, but he had a good memory and the street patterns were more or less as they had been when he'd last visited. It remained very dangerous, but he was used to danger. He liked it. You had to have a little danger in your life, when you were his age - something to keep the blood pumping.\n\nBy then he was dressed in a staff uniform of an Interior Departmento armaments inspector. Its original wearer had been unfortunate enough to run into him soon after his release from the Blackstone, and had died almost insultingly quickly. Fo had made a few adjustments, managed to access his victim's augmetic data-tables, even tweaked his own facial configuration a little, so that in a poor light, at a distance, even people who'd known the real owner wouldn't take a second look. Now he was hurrying through the corridors, adopting the preening strut of a self-important functionary. Millions of officials laboured in these labyrinthine structures, and the chance of actually being recognised as an imposter was minimal.\n\nThat would only get him so far, though. Where he was headed was secure. Very secure. There were ways inside, of course - he'd done it before - but it wouldn't be easy, and time "}
{"text":" a distance, even people who'd known the real owner wouldn't take a second look. Now he was hurrying through the corridors, adopting the preening strut of a self-important functionary. Millions of officials laboured in these labyrinthine structures, and the chance of actually being recognised as an imposter was minimal.\n\nThat would only get him so far, though. Where he was headed was secure. Very secure. There were ways inside, of course - he'd done it before - but it wouldn't be easy, and time was against him.\n\nHe went quickly, surely. He ignored the cohorts of minor scribes and officials racing from one station to another, their eyes staring from lack of sleep and fear. He ignored the sector-wide vox-casts, endlessly warning of incoming barrages or urban-zone evacuations. He didn't head straight for his objective, because the clearances and passes he'd inherited were nowhere close to being good enough to get him through all the interposed checkpoints and biofilters.\n\nHe'd need to get close to the centre. Not the very centre - that would have been impossible, even for him - but part of the secondary chain of laboratories, the same ones that poor old Amar Astarte had helped put together before she'd begun to lose her mind, and the ones that, with any luck, still had bits and pieces of serviceable material lying around that he could use. He'd need to scope out the habs east of the Sanctum Imperialis, where the Clanium Library dominated and where clusters of the old research and development cadres had once based themselves.\n\nHe could have raced over there right now, if he'd been too stupid and too eager. See, though, there was no chance at all that Amon, that blank-souled old golem, had lost his scent yet. The Custodian Guard might be many things, but they weren't dupes. It was entirely possible that Andromeda-17 had been working for them all along. Or even if she hadn't, Amon would have been on to her quickly. That was their job - to know, to predict, to triangulate. Yes, the likelihood was that Basilio Fo was being watched, right now, with a view to seeing where he'd end up, what he'd produce, who he'd talk to. It was a dangerous game, letting him loose, but things were so straitened now that only dangerous games were worth playing. Valdor's people had a real liking for this kind of thing. Let the subject get in close, let them test the defences, maybe even let them right into the heart of the place they wanted to get to. That way, you learned everything about your potential weaknesses, all the while keeping the whole shooting match under close observation.\n\nBlood Games, they were called. It was a nice concept, but Fo was good at games too, and he liked blood very much. The problem with letting an enemy get close was that he might slip the tail just when you didn't want him to, and then you had a problem.\n\nHe'd need to be good. He'd need to be able to change his appearance, his mannerisms, make himself impossible to track. He'd need to stay on his toes. He'd need to draw on all his experience, and still take a few chances.\n\nIt all got very complicated. He headed away from the Clanium District, and traced a switchback route around the base of the Widdershins Tower. He dropped out of circulation entirely for a few hours, then popped up again in a groundcar, which he abandoned three zones away before picking up an identical model and heading back towards the interior. He killed four more times, twice in secret, twice ostentatiously, and changed his clothes and facial arrangement. He left an obvious trail on a cogitator terminal, and then a hard-to-find one, and then arranged for the entire network to blow once he was on the move again.\n\nAll that bluster bought him enough breathing space to home in on his first true port of call - an Imperial Army medicae supply depot, buried deep within the makeshift garrison-hub under the Viridarum Nobiles. The place was crowded, stuffed with frightened troops making ready to push on out, but they paid him little heed as he shoved his way past them. Why would they have done? He was in the uniform of a full regimental colonel by then, and the only thing they might have expected, if they'd caught his eye, was a barrage of unwelcome orders.\n\nHe made his way several levels down, jogging confidently along metal stairways to where the lumens hung against bare rockcrete and the numbers of personnel finally thinned out. The medicae depot was placed right at the bottom of a deep shaft, kept cool by industrial refrigerators and barred by heavy plasteel doors. The two guards on duty made the aquila as he bustled past them.\n\nInside was a narrow chamber crammed between rows and rows of supply crates, poorly lit, claustrophobic and frigid. Behind a despatch desk were the big walk-in units. A lone attendant was on duty at the desk, surrounded by requisition slates. She looked young, harassed, frightened. Her job down here was probably mostly filled with officers shouting impossible things at her, since supplies of everything had been running critically low for a long time. It was terribly unfair, what this war had done to people. Still, her troubles would soon be over.\n\n'In His service, soldier,' Fo said, shooting her his most sympathetic smile. 'I'll need access to your secure storage.'\n\nShe stared up at him nervously. 'Uh, do you have the clearances, sir? I can't give you the codes without them.'\n\nHe looked straight at her the whole time - not aggressively, with consideration, but firmly. 'Been on duty for a long time?'\n\nShe nodded. 'I don't know what happened to the next shift. I was supposed to be off-rotation seven hours ago.'\n\nFo tutted. 'I'll look into it. Are those your rotas?' He pushed his way around the edge of the desk, to where a clutch of faded papers had been pinned to a board.\n\n'Sir, you really shouldn't-'\n\n'My, you have been abandoned down here. I'll look into getting you some relief. Still, while I'm here, best I take a look at that storage. I'm after some of your surgical reconstructive tools, some derma-work philtres, pheromone masks, that kind of thing.'\n\nShe had the presence of mind to look surprised. 'There's not been much... call for that. I'm really not sure I can-'\n\nHe pressed up against her then, placed a single finger on her lips. He'd forgotten how much fun this kind of thing was. 'See, I'm on important business, and I'd really appreciate some help - time's already short.' He smiled at her again, his best benevolent-paternal look. 'And do stop worrying about procedure - we're at war. Help me with the codes, and we'll get this over quickly. Really, now, what's the worst that could happen to you?'\n\nSigismund takes up the Black Sword.\n\nDestroyer\n\nAika 73\n\nSons of the Storm\n\nThat the primarch had changed - that would be the very worst thing, the one thing he couldn't live with. Morarg knew that his master had physically altered - by the god, they'd all physically altered - but you had to hope that his old essence was somehow intact. He'd seen him on the battlefield since the great transformation, and that had been impressive enough, but you never really knew how deep the alterations went. For him, for Caipha Morarg, it felt like every cell in his entire body had been flipped around, stretched and pummelled into something indescribable. But a primarch... well, who could ever be sure? They were exceptions to everything.\n\nHe was at the Lion's Gate space port now. The great ravaged edifice vanished into the darkness of the spoiled atmosphere, its terraces rearing away and upward, one on top of the other, on and on, far beyond the limits of even his vision. Every facing wall was darkened with filth. Much of that was from the munitions used by the Iron Warriors, but not all. Ever since the Death Guard had moved to occupy it, mats of mould and algae had spread across otherwise undamaged parapets and battlements, further blackening and corroding what remained. Landing platforms now hung with creepers and webs, clogged and sagging. Flies buzzed and clustered in the angles of the walls, breeding so fast they formed living carpets that slithered over the masonry like waterfalls. The entire structure, so vast that it was hard to even contemplate, let alone visualise, had begun to degrade, to fall in on itself, to dissolve slowly into the biological. Its innards glowed with a pale green light, points of vivid colour that punctured the darkness that hung across it. The more it changed, the longer they all occupied it, the closer it all got to... Barbarus.\n\nWas that deliberate? Surely not. They had all hated that world - Mortarion more than any of them. Maybe they were doomed to bring it with them. Or maybe this was just a passing phase, something that they would eventually move beyond once the true nature of their strange gifts became apparent.\n\nStill, it all conspired to make the fortress even more formidable. Its physical defences, many of which had been preserved during the conquest, rose up from the tangle of ruins around it, still solid, still immense. Some of the sky bridges had been demolished, but a number of raised viaducts still ran from the Anterior hinterland into the maw-like access tunnels. Ships still landed on the upper stages, though virtually all of them were XIV Legion landers now, since the other elements of the Warmaster's armada had opted to use the Eternity Wall and Damocles entry points instead.\n\nSqueamish of them, thought Morarg, making his way steadily up through the lower galleries, wheezing in the turgid air. You got used to the stench, after a while. You started to gain an appreciation for the fecundity of it all, the splendid variety of phages curdling in the deep pits. If the Death Guard's allies failed to appreciate that, clinging to their less enlightened habits, that was their loss.\n\nHe climbed up very long flights of stairs, trudged his way around gigantic supporting piers, clambered deeper in and higher up. Every chamber within the space port's l"}
{"text":"e lower galleries, wheezing in the turgid air. You got used to the stench, after a while. You started to gain an appreciation for the fecundity of it all, the splendid variety of phages curdling in the deep pits. If the Death Guard's allies failed to appreciate that, clinging to their less enlightened habits, that was their loss.\n\nHe climbed up very long flights of stairs, trudged his way around gigantic supporting piers, clambered deeper in and higher up. Every chamber within the space port's lower levels was filling up. Tank squadrons were digging in, thickening the airways with fume-palls. Infantry companies had filed into high-vaulted muster chambers, where they were being steadily resupplied. The bulk of these troops were the Unbroken - the Space Marines - since most of the baseline human crews had died in the warp. Their numbers had since been boosted with sundry mutants, beast-creatures and cultists, but the value of such soldiers was marginal, and so the core strength assembled within the cavernous interiors was now overwhelmingly power-armoured.\n\nAll, that was, apart from the daemons. Those spectral presences skittered and flickered in the dark galleries, dropping out of instantiation only to shudder back in again, wobbling and shaking like poor quality vid-films. Most of them were slack-bellied lurchers - parodies of obese or pox-infected mortals. They bellowed incoherently as they staggered around, or just slumped in the corners gnawing on bits of flesh. Morarg avoided them as much as he could. No doubt they were deadly, and no doubt the primarch had his uses for them, but he didn't like them. Maybe he'd change his mind once he saw them in action against the enemy, but for now they were just in the way, struggling to remain intact as the remnants of the telaethesic shield made things difficult for them.\n\nAs he climbed up towards the receiving chamber, they grew in number, chattering and whispering like frightened children. The air grew even more miasmic, and the flies clambered over everything in sight. The last traces of the IV Legion's occupancy had been thoroughly erased in those places - you couldn't even smell them any more, nor catch sight of any forlorn abandoned objects that might once have been theirs.\n\nHe drew up to a pair of high doors, closed and barred. Two of the Deathshroud guarded them, standing silently with their scythes crossed over the portal. Morarg didn't need to say anything to them - as soon as he reached the top of the stairs, the scythes were withdrawn and the doors slid open. An ankle-deep film of pale green condensation tumbled across the threshold, slinking over the granite, and it got noticeably colder.\n\nHe went inside. The chamber on the far side was huge. Maybe in the past it would have been some kind of major command-and-control centre, crewed by hundreds, but now it was virtually deserted, its floors strewn with smashed equipment and broken glass. Through large windows set into the western wall you could see many of the heavy landing stages as they fanned out across the space port's lower levels. Beyond those, flashes of massed battles flickered in the distance, a rippling constellation against the now permanent darkness.\n\nMortarion stood in the gloom, a hulking figure, cloaked in shadow. Semi-formed daemons wavered in and out of reality around him like a ghostly chorus. He was vast now, his gauzy wings splayed up to the vaults, his patina-crusted armour glinting in the gloom. Faint hisses came from his rebreather, frosting against the corroded bronze of the intakes.\n\nWhy did he need that, now? For that matter, why had he ever needed it? Morarg didn't know. He'd never asked, and he probably never would.\n\nAside from the two of them, the only other presence was semi-real - a hololith transmitted in from somewhere out on the front, swimming with interference, depicting a single individual. The outline of that individual was extremely familiar to Morarg, though, for as with Mortarion - as with all of them - it had been transformed by the harrowing in the warp. The profile was larger now, crammed with gifts, extended and bulked out until the old armour cracked under the strain of it. Flies buzzed around the perimeter of the lithcast, spilling out of the battleplate's orifices, breaking up and scattering the poor transmission.\n\nTyphus. The one who had done all this to them. Morarg had clearly arrived in the middle of a heated discussion. It seemed to be coming to its end, but he waited some distance off, his head bowed.\n\n'They're ripe for it now,' Typhus rasped over the hololithic link. 'We have what we need.'\n\n'Not yet,' Mortarion replied, sounding weary of the conversation. 'There is little to be gained, and much to be lost. Have patience.'\n\n'Patience! Is that the only thing you ever-'\n\n'Hold, now.' The primarch's voice suddenly dropped, becoming a warning growl that made the hairs on Morarg's scabrous flesh stand up. 'Watch your tongue, lest I see fit to tear it out. This is a delicate juncture, and you do not perceive the whole picture. Not as I do.' The primarch drew in a long, painful-sounding breath. 'My father's beacon has been retaken, all due to this careless haste. It would be helpful to have the resistance there snuffed out. You might be interested in that, Calas - the ether tells me Corswain of the First commands the Mountain.'\n\nTyphus hesitated. 'Corswain?'\n\n'The same.'\n\nThe hololith briefly ruptured, then re-established. Morarg tried not to look too closely, but Typhus appeared to be mulling it over. 'If you will not authorise the offensive-'\n\n'I have given you my reasons.'\n\n'-then it is something concrete, at least.'\n\nMortarion smiled. You could only tell that from the wrinkling of the grey flesh around his eyes, and it wasn't a pleasant thing to witness. 'It would be a simple thing for a commander of your talents, to take it back. By the time you return, I anticipate being ready for the main assault.'\n\nTyphus was no fool. He never had been. He pondered the offer before him, alive to the possibility of being despatched away from the main event like an unwanted irritant. Still, Morarg knew something of the history between him and the First Legion. It would be hard to turn down a chance to gain his revenge, and no one could claim that the Astronomican was a minor objective.\n\nEventually, the hololith crackled as Typhus bowed - a curt, dismissive movement. 'Very well,' he said. 'But I will continue to monitor the front. If I discover-'\n\n'If the front moves, and you are required, I shall be the first to summon you,' said Mortarion patiently. 'How could it be otherwise? We will march across the threshold together, you and I. I promised the Warmaster that - the commitment has already been made.'\n\nTyphus hung on a little longer, looking like he might speak again. Then, abruptly, the link cut out, and the hololith scattered into a cloud of fading grey-green sparks.\n\nOnly then did Mortarion's gaze turn to Morarg, and only then did Morarg finally ascend the final set of steps up towards his master's position.\n\n'Caipha,' said the primarch, as warmly as he ever said anything. 'Heard all that, did you?'\n\nMorarg bowed low. 'Not much of it, my lord.'\n\n'Just the part about our deployment.'\n\n'Just that part, yes.'\n\nMortarion adjusted position, and the various devices and philtres dangling around his archaic-looking armour clattered together. 'You probably agree with him.'\n\nMorarg decided to tread carefully. It didn't sound like his master was in a particularly good mood. 'I have no complaints.'\n\nMortarion snorted a harsh laugh, and flicked something coiled-up and glistening from his breastplate. 'Calas is a simple soul, really. He'd have been better placed in another Legion - a stupid one, where he could indulge his taste for needless drama.' He placed his great hands together, scraping the patina from his gauntlets, staring moodily into his interlocked fingers. 'We are doing so much damage to them, and he barely even sees it. Every hour of every day, the god sends us his great gifts, all channelled through this place. I can virtually see the tip of the Sanctum Imperialis from here, and whenever my eyes alight on it, a little more of it crumbles away. Most of those inside will never know where the sickness comes from. They will have no name for it, aware only that such a weight of nothingness makes it hard to think, to sleep, even to lift a weapon. And for those who do understand? They have neither the strength nor the will to strike at me. The Red Angel is at their throats, their walls are breached, and their defences are falling into ruins around them.' His rheumy eyes flickered back up to Morarg. 'We are killing them so very expertly, from a distance, and all Calas wishes to do is rush up to the walls. He is blind to the danger of it.'\n\nMorarg wasn't sure whether he was expected to say something then. He took a punt. 'Which is, my lord?'\n\n'Our own side,' said Mortarion darkly. 'All know that this will be over soon. Maybe a week. Maybe less. And then what? Who has a vision for that? Who, in this rabble of monsters and madmen, truly gives a damn what must come afterwards?' He shook his head dismissively, making the cables around his neck jangle. 'I did not bring us out of one living hell to plunge straight into another. Whatever happens, we will remain intact. When my father's throat is cut at last, we will carve our place in the new Imperium from a position of strength. Perturabo has quit the field, Fulgrim has given in to his whims. Angron's war-dogs are already tearing themselves apart, and Magnus' witches are too few to matter. When I choose to breach the walls, when all others are exhausted or scattered or ready to surrender, I will have you all with me. I will have my Legion at my side, unbroken and magnificent, united in the god's glory.'\n\n'I understand,' said Morarg. In truth, save for the one great doubt, the one that had plagued him since the transformation, he'"}
{"text":"has quit the field, Fulgrim has given in to his whims. Angron's war-dogs are already tearing themselves apart, and Magnus' witches are too few to matter. When I choose to breach the walls, when all others are exhausted or scattered or ready to surrender, I will have you all with me. I will have my Legion at my side, unbroken and magnificent, united in the god's glory.'\n\n'I understand,' said Morarg. In truth, save for the one great doubt, the one that had plagued him since the transformation, he'd never had much less than total faith in his master. Having things spelled out was, if anything, something of a luxury he didn't require.\n\nMortarion smiled again. 'But you still feel it a little, do you not? That faint tug? Shame. You wanted to be first, strike the initial blow.'\n\nMorarg thought on that. He'd spoken to Crosius about it, back when they'd been fighting at Marmax. It had felt, just after making planetfall, as if that was their destiny, given all they had suffered to be there. But now... No, he could no longer be so sure about it. His bloodlust seemed somehow dulled, replaced by a strange kind of numbness.\n\n'I am not sure,' he said truthfully. 'And yet...' He looked up at his master, fearful of pressing too hard.\n\n'Go on.'\n\nMorarg swallowed. 'There are those... Some, in the Legion, I mean. There are those who say, well... that the Lord Typhus has set this... There are some who would be... close to him, if things became...'\n\nHe trailed off. Some things were too hard to find words for. To his relief, Mortarion didn't seem put out by what he'd said. If anything, he was amused.\n\n'Let me help you out, Caipha,' Mortarion said. 'You have heard whispers that Typhus is the true master, here. You have heard that he was the one who forced the transition to our current form. That he tricked me, tricked all of us, pulled the veil over our eyes, and still runs things much as he likes. Is that right?'\n\nThis was so dangerous. 'More or less, lord. Only whispers, mind.'\n\n'I see. And you do not know any names behind those whispers. That, also, is as it should be.' He drew in another of those long, rattling breaths, and the daemon chorus in his shadow chattered away, freshly agitated. 'I will not justify myself. That time on the ships was difficult. Painful. Hard to reconstruct.' The primarch's eyes briefly showed that pain - a fractional flash of it, glimpsed over the lip of the rebreather. 'I will say only this. Nothing that happened on the Terminus Est was an accident. I loved you all too much. That is the only error I will admit. Calas was irrelevant - just an instrument, one the god was pleased to use. Does that reassure you?'\n\nMorarg didn't understand much of that. He wasn't sure if he had been meant to. Perhaps it was merely a challenge - a test of faith. Or maybe there was some truth there, an opaque one, that he was intended to grasp.\n\n'I am content, lord,' he said weakly. 'I always have been.'\n\n'And that is why you are here, and he is not. Loyalty matters to me. It matters to me a great deal. It is why you will learn the plans for the attack now, and he will only do so later.'\n\nThe primarch drew a little closer, his immense form shuffling forward, his wings trembling.\n\n'Because this is where history turns in our favour,' he said. 'Stay true, Caipha, stay patient, and you will witness it all unfold, right from here, by my side.'\n\nThe underground mag-train hissed in the enclosed siding, filling the high-arched space with steam and smoke. Its caged flanks were ten metres high, and the long run of uncovered wagons stretched back into the noisy, semi-lit confusion of the loading terminal. Officers bellowed orders, warning klaxons sounded, heavy transports drew up at the buffers and began to unclamp their loading doors. Everywhere you looked, people were running, gesticulating, banging fists into cupped palms, jabbing fingers at subordinates.\n\nTank commander Talvet Kaska watched it all unfold, taking a long drag on his nicotine-stick and feeling the cheap smoke clog up his lungs a little more. He was sitting on a pile of ammo boxes, feet crossed, a half-empty canteen at his side. His crew lounged around him. Vosch was asleep. He had no idea how she managed to catnap, given the clangs and bangs of the terminal, but somehow she always seemed able to grab a few minutes. Jandev was reading a slab-book, while Merck chewed on a protein-block. Dresi sat alone, her knees drawn up to her chest. Kaska didn't know much about her, yet. If he'd been more diligent, he might have asked, but he was dog-tired, irritable, and anyway there'd be plenty of time once they reached the forward muster yards.\n\n'So there he is,' said Merck dryly, his big jaw working away slowly. 'Right on schedule.'\n\nA tank was a strange thing. The crews always personalised them. In some battalions, they were female. In the Jadda 12th Armoured, most usually they were male. Sometimes they were given affectionate names, or joking epithets, but the Jadda squadrons were a serious-minded bunch, and stuck to the hull designators given to them on delivery. Kaska's tank was called Aika 73. It was a standard Ryza-pattern hull. Decent engine, decent cannons, no sponson gunners on this variant. Some commanders would have missed those - handy in a close fight, they said - but Kaska was glad not to have them. The innards of a Leman Russ were hot and cramped enough once the shells were loaded, before you tried to cram in two more sweaty bodies.\n\n'Ugly old bastard,' murmured Kaska, with a mix of disdain and affection.\n\nThe hull was being hoisted by a loader-claw now, transferred from the flatbed transporter and swung over the transit wagon amid gouts of valve-steam. That operation in itself was something to witness - a Leman Russ main battle tank weighed almost sixty tonnes, unladen, and was eight metres in length, cannon included. Seeing whole squadrons of them plucked from the flatbeds and smartly dumped into position, one after the other, was impressive. The loader-claws were cumbersome things, each one manned by seven bolted-in servitors, the control units capable of being rolled up and down the siding-edge on sunken rails before their long cantilevered arms unfurled. The only thing that dwarfed them was the mag-train itself, which must have been eight hundred metres long.\n\nKaska watched it all. He paid attention to how Aika 73 looked. He studied the repairs made at battalion command to the forward lascannon - you could still see the marks around the mantlet. The long scratches, dents and gouge marks were all present and correct, painted over quickly but impossible to remove now. He noticed they'd replaced all the tox-filters. Aika 73 had been in some tough old fights. More than once, Kaska had made his peace with existence and prepared to face whatever state came next, but somehow the crew had always managed to claw their way back to safety. All save Jugo, of course. The poor wretch had shot himself only a week ago, leaving them without a driver.\n\nKaska glanced at Dresi again, who seemed to be staring blankly into nothing. He didn't even know which hull they'd plucked her from to replace him, nor why she had been free for redeployment. Everything was getting ragged and out of sorts. Still, he was lucky that they'd been able to find anyone at all. Some battalions were so short of units, fuel and crew now that they were effectively grounded, stuck in the depots and scrabbled over for parts. You wanted to be fighting, if you were still alive. Chances were they were all going to be dead soon anyway, so better to go out doing what you'd been trained for.\n\n'Makes no sense,' grumbled Merck. 'We get pulled back, get our orders, they haul us over to Europa, and now this. They've lost their minds.'\n\nKaska took another drag. Merck could be a real pain. 'Orders change, trooper.'\n\n'Yeah, but these make no sense. What's left beyond the Lion's Gate, eh? Rubble and ruins, that's what.'\n\n'Counter-offensive,' said Jandev quietly, never looking up from his book. The front-gunner's pale face was impassive. 'It had to come.'\n\nMerck snorted. 'Nah. Just another shore-up, somewhere. Not enough left to attack with.'\n\nTrooper Merck, the loader, the most junior rank in the crew, didn't usually say much worth listening to, but on this occasion Kaska had to agree with him. They were strung out. The last time division command had ordered them to retake ground, they'd lost over a hundred units inside less than an hour. Air support was gone now, infantry support was patchy, and you stood a real chance of running into Traitor Space Marines if you travelled any distance. Those were properly scary things. Kaska had seen a squad of them rip their way into a Baneblade, gnaw right through it before emerging out of the other side crackling with disruptor energy and drenched in blood. And then there were the... other things. The things that nobody talked about but everyone had seen. The monsters, the creatures that shimmered out of the air itself, the beasts with nine eyes and blood-red spindle-legs and transparent skin.\n\nKaska remembered when he'd first reported a sighting, weeks back. Xenos, they'd told him. Just use the lascannon on them. But they weren't xenos. No xenos of any kind were stuck in the middle of this bloody, muddy shitshow. These were something else. Something that made everyone terrified, no matter how long you'd been fighting for.\n\n'There's plenty to attack with,' said Kaska dryly, not wanting to think about that. 'Just look at the train.'\n\nIt was indeed filling up now, wagon after wagon, every tank chained down and ratcheted tight, the exhaust ports covered up and the gun barrels taped over. Scheduled departure was less than an hour away. They might even make that. Then the whole contraption would trundle down to the underground mag-lines, driving deep before clattering out south-east on the subterranean expressway. The crews would follow soon after, stuffed into personnel compartments on oth"}
{"text":"about that. 'Just look at the train.'\n\nIt was indeed filling up now, wagon after wagon, every tank chained down and ratcheted tight, the exhaust ports covered up and the gun barrels taped over. Scheduled departure was less than an hour away. They might even make that. Then the whole contraption would trundle down to the underground mag-lines, driving deep before clattering out south-east on the subterranean expressway. The crews would follow soon after, stuffed into personnel compartments on other mag-units, the kind of places you'd struggle to get any kind of rest at all. It'd be noisy, cramped and stinking. Then again, they were tankers. They were used to that.\n\n'We'll last all of five minutes,' said Merck. 'Total waste of time.'\n\n'Not the Lion's Gate,' said Jandev. 'No point stopping there. It'll be out east. Corbenic Gard, I reckon - the hole in the line.'\n\nVosch woke up. She stared around herself for a moment or two, then swallowed, coughed, and rubbed her eyes. 'When's our transport getting here?' she asked blurrily.\n\nKaska took another drag, and smiled. 'Nice to have you back, corporal,' he said. Vosch might have been a sleepy soul, but she was a good main gunner and one of the crew he actually liked. When she wasn't around, things got grumpier. 'We're heading out now. Just wanted to see him loaded up all safe.'\n\nAika 73's loader-claw had now finished with it, and was grinding jerkily down the tracks to the next transporter berth, where another Leman Russ waited for its attentions. Beyond that, everything was clouded with smoke, through which the dim outlines of loader-arms and flatbed cabs came and went.\n\nVosch yawned, then reached for a canteen. Her face bore the telltale 'gunner's spectacles' - the twin loops of redness around her eyes where the sights jammed in. 'Good. I was getting bored.'\n\nKaska looked over at Dresi again. The driver hadn't said a single thing. Just stared into space.\n\n'So who's our force commander, then?' asked Merck. 'Anyone know that yet? Who the hell's pulled us out of Europa and sent us on this damned stupid rat-chase into the ruins?'\n\nKaska took a final drag of the nicotine-stick, savouring the acrid rolls of tobac, then flicked the stub onto the deck. He got up, stretched, and reached for his own canteen.\n\n'No idea,' he said, now just waiting for the vox-alert that would see them all trudging over to the personnel mag-trains. He wasn't expecting to be told any time soon - even when the vox-channels were working, not much useful ever came down them. 'Stay cheerful, though - we all remain alive for a few more hours, we might just find out.'\n\nShiban had made his way up to the front at the first opportunity. Colossi was under constant fire, but its thick walls had yet to be cracked. The real fighting was to the north, under the shadow of Corbenic Gard, where the enemy was trying to force a passage behind Marmax and Gorgon Bar in order to open a direct assault on the Lion's Gate fortress. Detachments of the V and IX Legions had been despatched to staunch the flow for just a little longer, although they all knew that the territory would have to be given up soon.\n\nIn the face of that, the strategies of the two allied forces had started to diverge. The Blood Angels, under First Captain Raldoron's command, were retreating back across the battlefields towards the Ultimate Gate, from where they would be quickly re-stationed within the Inner Palace perimeter. Before long, all of them would end up there, joining with their primarch for the final defence of the core. The White Scars made the opposite journey - when their field positions were finally abandoned, they fought their way east, back to the Colossi staging grounds. Thus the V Legion command post was becoming ever more isolated, encircled by the lapping tides of the general advance. When the Ultimate Gate's tributary fortresses fell, that lone salient would be totally cut off, a single citadel amid an ocean of enemies. The long-standing Chogorian tactic of rapid encirclement was being applied to them in turn, and it was consciously being allowed to happen. Such were the ironies of war, Shiban thought.\n\nHe had taken a speeder out through the wreckage. In the past he might have waited until nightfall before risking leaving cover, but all hours of the day were dark now, drenched in permanent gloom under the ceaseless roil of the tox-clouds. Fires burned freely everywhere, igniting on hidden caches of promethium and flaring up into the murk. Sudden flashes illuminated a totally destroyed landscape - kilometre after kilometre of mountainous detritus heaps and tangled flaywire bundles, criss-crossed with trenches and groundworks, all life scrubbed from it, the few remaining wall-edges standing like sentinels amid the rubble dunes. These zones alone would once have housed hundreds of thousands, before all this started. Now they were just immense graveyards, brawled over by two sets of increasingly exhausted combatants.\n\nThe command post was not far - less than eighty kilometres west of Colossi's western barbican. As Shiban neared it, the locator-rune blipped on his helm display, guiding him in. He dropped down low between the empty corpses of two large storage silos, heading for a fortified gap at ground level. Ahead of him loomed the skeleton of what had once been a big manufactorum, its reinforced walls still intact in places, though its arched roof was gone and the glass in its hundreds of windows was all shot out. His tactical display picked up the presence of several dug-in mortar units and sniper details, hunkered down under cover for now, weapons silent.\n\nHe dropped through the gap and threaded his way underground, descending several levels to what had once been the undercroft of the manufactorum's assembly layer. As the rockcrete ceiling lowered, he brought his speeder to a halt, shut it down, and walked the rest of the way.\n\nThe forward base was spread across several subterranean chambers. Walls of sandbags were everywhere, as well as signs of hasty repairs to the place's cracked foundations. Tunnel entrances gaped at regular intervals, running off north and south to give rapid access to the zone's network of egress points. A few vehicles - Chimeras, mostly, plus fuel tankers, supply trucks and armoured groundcars - were parked up beside stacked crates of supplies and munitions. The whole place was crowded with Imperial Army troopers in dirty uniforms, some on guard duty, many more flat out in an exhausted sleep, lying head-to-toe in the crowded makeshift dorm-chambers.\n\nShiban headed straight for the command bunker, sited in a reinforced chamber further down in the manufactorum's echoing old undercroft. It was there that he saw the first warriors of the Legion proper. As he entered the bunker, they all bowed respectfully. Their armour had turned dark grey, covered in a thick film of dust, and all of it carried visible and heavy damage. These fighters were of the Brotherhood of the Storm, his own minghan, the one he had led since becoming khan. Those few he had taken with him to the Eternity Wall space port were all dead now, making this diminished concentration the very last of them. The brotherhood had once numbered nearly four hundred blades, but was now down to less than a third of that, and with a sizeable chunk of the remainder being recent newblood reinforcements.\n\nAs a result, most of those in the room he barely recognised. In total there were ten scarred warriors of the ordu, plus a few dozen Legion menials operating the augur and comms equipment. The bulk of the brotherhood's troops were out fighting in the long tunnels, buying a little more time for the Army to withdraw from two positions further out west.\n\nTheir field commander, Yiman, was waiting for him at the heart of the low-roofed chamber, looking just as dishevelled as the rest of his retinue. All around him, baseline staff studied tactical hololiths or wrestled with faulty comms-boxes.\n\n'Be welcome, my khan,' said Yiman, inclining his head. 'I trust you are recovered.'\n\nShiban flexed his augmetic hand, feeling the joints snag, the residual pain. 'Perfectly. How goes it?'\n\nYiman turned to a hololith column, bringing up the tunnel network in a spidery tangle. 'They have been advancing for two days now, without pause, here and here. We demolished these sections to slow them, but it only buys so much time - they have plenty of excavators. Increased numbers coming down over the past two weeks. Though, if I am honest, not as many as I feared.'\n\nShiban nodded, taking it all in. 'The Inner Palace walls are breached - they are swarming for the main prize.'\n\n'We guessed as much. Then we will be asked to hold for longer?'\n\n'No. The Khagan is accelerating the withdrawal. How long were you ordered to maintain position?'\n\n'Another twenty-four hours.'\n\n'Make it four. Anything you can't retrieve by then, leave it. All Legion assets to make for Colossi, all auxiliaries to head for the Ultimate Gate.'\n\nYiman hesitated. 'Four hours,' he said, in a low voice.\n\n'It is all we will get.'\n\nAnother hesitation - clearly calculating what could be salvaged. 'Maybe that is for the best. The Army units... they struggle to operate in this.'\n\n'You encounter yaksha down here?'\n\n'More and more.' Yiman patted the tulwar at his belt. 'We ourselves are getting better at ending them. That satisfies me. But the auxilia cannot face them, and it is cruelty to ask.'\n\nShiban looked around the bunker's interior, studying the faces of those hard at work. The V Legion menial cadres had always been exceptionally tough and well trained, the equal of any non-Legion military unit in the Imperial Army. Now, though, their expressions betrayed the extent of their ordeal. None of them looked to have slept enough, if at all. Their skin was sallow, their movements sluggish. In another theatre, he might have reprimanded Yiman for allowing such an environment to fester, but this was different. He felt it himself - "}
{"text":", studying the faces of those hard at work. The V Legion menial cadres had always been exceptionally tough and well trained, the equal of any non-Legion military unit in the Imperial Army. Now, though, their expressions betrayed the extent of their ordeal. None of them looked to have slept enough, if at all. Their skin was sallow, their movements sluggish. In another theatre, he might have reprimanded Yiman for allowing such an environment to fester, but this was different. He felt it himself - the constant pull of weariness, of mental strain, dragging at him, whispering of every failure he had ever made, all the time, on and on. Even when you knew it wasn't natural, and that its source was understood, it was still hard to counter, and that was with all the advantages he had been given. For the auxilia, who had been fighting a losing battle for months, it would soon become impossible to bear.\n\n'I see it,' Shiban said. 'They should be given the chance to escape from this, even if only for a while.'\n\nYiman turned to his adjutant then and shot off a series of battle-sign commands. The warrior bowed, and hurried off to implement them. 'I am honoured that you delivered these orders in person, my khan,' he said, as the augur-units against the far wall lit up with renewed scans. 'But now, if four hours is all we have, I must depart for the tunnels - there will be hard fighting before we can extract our own.'\n\nShiban smiled, and unclamped the long guan dao power-glaive from his back. He brandished it deftly two-handed, enjoying the accustomed weight of the blade. It was the same weapon he'd carried since the campaign on Chondax seven years ago - just like him, tough to kill.\n\n'I didn't come here just to pass on orders,' he said. 'This is still my brotherhood, Yiman - show me to the daemons.'\n\nGold under shadow\n\nThe Prince of Baal\n\nCthonia on Terra\n\nBut they came to him now, the Neverborn, needing no invitation to bring them into strike range. They wanted it. For some reason, they wanted to die on his blade, or at least to face him briefly, to laugh, or to feel some rush of fear, or maybe just to be there, at this time, in this place. It mattered to them. For once, they seemed to take it all seriously.\n\nHe still killed them, because that was his vocation: Constantin Valdor, captain-general, spear-bearer, threshold-keeper. He stalked through the narrow walkways of the Sanctum Imperialis, the deep vaults, the hidden places, waiting, watching. And then they came to him, sooner or later, rushing out of the dark to sink their fangs into his chest. His spear became bloody, its blade coated with the thick essence of creatures who had no true need for real blood. They died - or, at least, they were sent back to the place that spawned them - and then he would start again, going silently, hunting.\n\nThe fighting had been hard enough on the Outer Wall, where he had served alongside Raldoron of the IX and the Great Khan of the V. Raldoron had impressed him - a fighter after his own manner, measured and artful. The Khan had been the Khan, peerless in some respects, frustrating in others. Now, though, the time for manning the far ramparts was over. The perimeter had shrunk steadily, pulling back towards the Inner Palace, and now within that too. It had never been a tidy process - large tracts of territory had been encircled and stubbornly held - but the shape of it was established.\n\nSo he could delay no longer. The order was given for all surviving Custodians to fall back to the Sanctum Imperialis. Valdor had informed Dorn, of course, who had barely acknowledged the courtesy. Perhaps he hadn't been aware that so many had been fighting for so long in exposed positions, so occupied was he with his many duties. Still, it was done. The Ten Thousand, who now numbered but a tithe of that nominal complement, had taken up arms within the very core of the Emperor's domain, ready for the assault on the last walls of all, both visible and invisible.\n\nMore than most, Valdor understood the true nature of that conflict. Any conscript in the trenches knew that the enemy was coming at them over ground, but would have been wholly unaware of the struggles going on the whole time under their feet. The battle for Terra had been going on a lot longer down there, and was a degree more vicious. For the most part, it was the Emperor who held the hordes back, and whose matchless power blocked the one stable passage up into the foundations of the Throneroom itself.\n\nEvery barrier was leaky, though, if placed under enough stress, and now the pores were opening. Much as it pained Valdor to admit it, his master's control was slipping. The great ward-shield erected over the Palace was failing. The counterpart barriers sunk into the earth were failing. The daemons could worm their way in now, darting out across the battlements, spinning down from the firelit air, thrusting up from the toxic soils. There was no single battlefront any more, no cleanly defined line behind which the defenders could shelter, but a heavily perforated sphere of imperfect control. With every hour, the chance of that residual protection disappearing entirely increased a little further.\n\nHe found himself almost wishing for the moment to come. He knew it had to arrive soon. Guilliman had not made it. Even if the Ultramarines somehow appeared, it would surely be too late to make a difference. Everything would come down to the Throneroom, the fulcrum of the entire grand drama, just as it had always been destined to. The Emperor was there. The Warmaster was closing in. The rest of the galaxy felt entirely irrelevant beside the chance to control that one minuscule speck of territory, that one tiny enclosed chamber, buried deep amid the fossils of earlier empires, the one location on Terra Valdor was sworn to defend at all costs.\n\nAnd then he paused, suddenly alert.\n\nThe corridor ran away ahead, black as pitch. The walls here were bone-like, ridged and gnarled and thick with dust. He was a long way down, far below even the Dungeon's deepest levels. These places smelled of older, stranger civilisations, ones that had lived and died thousands of years before his own had fought its way to prominence. Not all traces of those forgotten cultures had been completely erased - the tunnels went down a long way.\n\nHe narrowed his eyes, remaining perfectly motionless. The tunnel was silent - down here, the perpetual thunder of the surface guns could no longer be made out. He could smell something, though, just barely, a faint whiff of... burning.\n\nHe crept forward, his auramite boots sinking softly into dust layers ten centimetres thick. The walls of the corridor, delved for mortal dimensions, pressed close. You could imagine being buried alive here, smothered by the millions of tonnes of rock above and around you. His shoulder guard snagged on an outgrowth, and he adjusted his position. It felt as if the route ahead was narrower than it had been. He looked up, searching for stress fractures on the rock-cut roof, and saw only the thick coating of ancient filth, black as oil.\n\nA few more steps, cautious now, every sense alert. The smell grew more intense. He thought he heard a faint hiss from some way back, but paid it no mind. Something was in the tunnel with him now, a presence without a soul, coiled up in the darkness. It would try to trick him, if it could, distract his focus, send him down the wrong path.\n\nHe made it to the end of the tunnel. He saw a stone arch ahead of him, grainy in his helm's night-vision. The keystone was low - he'd have to stoop to enter. On the far side of the arch was a tiny chamber, mottled with mould spores, clammy and damp. An altar of some sort stood against the far wall, engraved with characters and images he didn't recognise. A single candle stood on the altar-top, burning with a blue-white flame that seemed to give out no illumination at all.\n\nThe place was cold. Very cold. Lines of frost rimed the rough-cut stones. Despite that, the smell of burning was overwhelming.\n\nA presence was in there, hidden from view for now, but occupying it nonetheless.\n\nHe activated the disruptor field on his guardian spear, and the space flooded with vivid light. Shadows leapt away from him, all except for a ragged patch of darkness just in front of the altar, a clot of non-reflective blackness, low down.\n\n'Go away,' a voice whispered, childlike, impish. 'I am praying.'\n\nValdor did not move immediately. You could learn things from these creatures, if you were patient. 'There is nothing to pray to, down here.'\n\n'But plenty to pray for.'\n\n'If you say so.'\n\nThe nugget of darkness writhed, expanded, then started to twist around. A pale grey head emerged, as if from under a cowl. It was hairless, eyeless, noseless. A single mouth took up most of the space, and it was ringed with ranks of tiny teeth. When it spoke, flabby wide lips rippled obscenely.\n\n'You could leave me be,' it said. 'I am quite harmless. And I have lived here for a very long time.'\n\nValdor remained watchful. The candle flame had stopped moving, caught as if in a freeze-frame. 'Nothing lives down here.'\n\n'You and me. We do.'\n\n'Only one of us is alive.'\n\nThe mouth stretched into a wide grin. 'For now. You're not safe. Not even your master. We will feast on Him, when He is sent into our realm.'\n\n'I think not.'\n\n'You think? For yourself? I see no evidence of that.' The vile mouth gaped wider. 'But let's see how quick you are!'\n\nIt suddenly jerked upwards, outwards, the teeth-filled mouth gaping and dividing with horrifying speed. Valdor slashed straight into the tumbling wall of darkness, scything his spear diagonally and dragging its tip across the splayed maws. The expanding daemon's flesh split apart, scattering into new coal-black slivers that quickly pooled and reformed and wriggled back up into fresh bodies. For an instant, it looked as if the entire chamber would be suffocated by them, as they reared up and slobbered over the "}
{"text":"ked upwards, outwards, the teeth-filled mouth gaping and dividing with horrifying speed. Valdor slashed straight into the tumbling wall of darkness, scything his spear diagonally and dragging its tip across the splayed maws. The expanding daemon's flesh split apart, scattering into new coal-black slivers that quickly pooled and reformed and wriggled back up into fresh bodies. For an instant, it looked as if the entire chamber would be suffocated by them, as they reared up and slobbered over the lone Custodian and drenched the entire space in void-like streamers of darkness.\n\nBut Valdor had only made the first cut to get closer to his real target. His second swipe, crossways, bisected the candle and snuffed out its frozen flame. The multiple daemon-forms immediately screamed in agony, then splattered into flying gobbets that coated the walls in black mucus. Valdor swept around towards the original glut of pseudo-flesh, still bearing the remnants of its uncanny mouth, jabbed down and pinned it to the chamber floor.\n\nIt writhed and spat. For a fraction of a second, Valdor felt its essence shudder up the shaft of his spear. He had a brief glimpse of another world, an infinite one, made of pain, made of malice, swirling, transmuting. He understood then that this presence was a petty one, a wayfinder, a prober of weak links, a slave to greater denizens of that pain-world and now destined to be consumed by them for its failure. He experienced a slice of its terror at that prospect - so much more acute than a mortal could ever have experienced.\n\nHe thumbed the disruptor trigger, and the last slug of its physical extrusion exploded in a crackle of gold.\n\n'That quick,' he said grimly, and extinguished the flame.\n\nAfterwards, he took a few moments to recover. Not from the physical exertion - that had been trivial - but from the exposure to such raw truth. Every time he did that, every time he opened himself up to those visions, it got a little harder to stomach. He could feel the foulness polluting him, introducing the ghosts of doubt where none should ever have been possible.\n\nTo kill with this blade, it took a toll. If he had been capable of doubting his master, he might have spent more time wondering why he had been given such a weapon. It seemed that the Emperor had forged a whole brace of such things, only to give them away to His servants, liberally, like the battle-trophies of some ancient warlord. They all had powers, some brazen, some subtle, some yet to be uncovered, none of them straightforward.\n\nHe looked down, where the last dregs of the daemonic essence pooled at his boots. Such creatures were the worst. The death of a mortal might expose a brief, uncomfortable truth - something to check you, make you reflect. The Neverborn, when they were sent screaming back to the other side of the curtain, gave you something much more disturbing - a snatched glimpse of something ineffable, vile, beyond reason. Perhaps, if he'd been gifted with a more vivid imagination, he might have found himself overwhelmed by such visions. Even so, you didn't forget them. They hung around afterwards, repeating through your mind, nagging reminders of what they all fought against, and what they had striven to build, and what they currently seemed destined to lose.\n\n'Captain-general,' came a priority burst through his helm-mounted comm. It was Amon. Just to hear his voice - a steady, calm, loyal voice - came as a relief.\n\n'Speak,' Valdor said, withdrawing from the chamber.\n\n'An update from the Blackstone. The woman Keeler is loose now, position unknown. Her supervised release was interrupted by the presence of an unexpected party. Identity unconfirmed. Judged to be of the Legiones Astartes.'\n\n'And this party is after her now?'\n\n'Assuredly. I enquire after authorisation to intervene.'\n\n'Negative. If she has any role to play now, it will be outside our control.' Valdor had never particularly seen the wisdom of this programme, but it had oversight at the highest level, so it was best that it ran its course.\n\n'Understood. Which brings me onto the other subject.'\n\n'The bio-criminal.'\n\n'I have him under surveillance still, but he is skilled. If things were not otherwise, I would place a Tier-three watch-guard on him, but the power to do so no longer exists.'\n\nThat was almost certainly true. Soon they would no longer be able to exert any kind of control over the Palace beyond the Sanctum itself.\n\n'Then your judgement?'\n\n'Given the circumstances, I cannot promise to keep him under observation for much longer. This may require a more... expert intervention.'\n\nValdor thought on that. He had his duties here. Few could hunt down the daemonic with such precision, and the need for vigilance would only grow. If he left the narrow limits of the Sanctum now, it could only be for a short time. Despite all that he had seen in the Dungeon since the start of the siege, the criminal's presence still filled him with considerable and growing unease.\n\nAt the start, he hadn't even been convinced that Fo's boasts were anything more than bluster, a way to get out of his predicament. Now, though, he was no longer sure. The tantalising possibility existed, even in this galaxy of lies, that he had actually meant what he'd said, and could do what he claimed.\n\nGenerate threats, respond to them. Place our minds in the situation of those who wish to do Him harm. Let them in close, accepting the risk in return for the knowledge we gain.\n\nThat had always been the principle, ever since the affair with Astarte. The fact that they were still conducting such exercises even now, when the very gates of hell were opening in front of them, might have been considered either brave or foolish, depending on your particular appetite for risk.\n\n'Maintain a lock on his position,' Valdor said, making his decision. 'I will come for him myself.'\n\nHe crashed down onto the eleventh high parapet of Aurum Bar's eastern face, slamming into the rockcrete walkway and scattering the armoured bodies clustered there. They were liveried in crimson, just as he was, their armour drenched in blood-red and gold and brass, superlative warriors from a tradition of splendour and devotion.\n\nThey had done well, to get this far. Six days of intense bombardment, followed by an armoured drive that had smashed through the fourth defensive circle, then the third, and now Lorgar's zealous sons were into artillery range of the high walls of the Bar proper. Three such offensives over the past few months had been launched and had failed. Now, though, the resilience of the defenders was broken at last, and the mongrel horde of traitor legionaries, cult fanatics, Dark Mechanicum engines and their increasingly brazen daemon allies had reached the curtain barrier, dragging their siege machines into range and unleashing their devil-weapons at the structure. They had the numbers, and they had the supplies, and they sensed that this was the moment.\n\nPerhaps it was, thought Sanguinius, as he grabbed a Word Bearer by his gorget and flung him out over the edge. Then he swept into a second, ramming his spear through the fighter's breastplate. The rest of them came at him, never hesitating, straining every genhanced sinew to land a blow on a primarch, heedless of the risk to themselves. Each one would have happily died, just knowing that he had done nothing more than that - scored a hit, extracted a little strength, contributed in just a fractional manner to the victory they had been promised and now expected.\n\nSanguinius might have admired such remorseless focus, had it been for some other cause. As it was, the zeal was empty, devoid of meaning other than resentment, slaved to a faith in gods that had no business being worshipped by any living thing. He despised them for that, perhaps more than any of the others he fought. You could readily see the weakness that had led to, say, Fulgrim's Legion's spiral into madness, and perhaps even understand it - they had been fools, trapped by their own desires. These, though - these - they had always known what they were doing. They had grasped the hidden theology of the universe, the dark foundations on which it rested, and had then freely given it their conscious allegiance.\n\n'Traitors!' Sanguinius roared, crunching a third warrior into the battlement's merlon and breaking his neck. 'Oath-breakers!'\n\nEven as he fought, carving his way across the overrun parapet, the sky above him was lit with down-lumens. Four Stormbirds came in low through the murk, turbines blasting the exposed wall section. Hatches slammed open, and legionaries spilled out - in crimson too, but the brighter hue of the sons of Baal, his own.\n\nThe Blood Angels assault squads smacked down around him, their flamers and energy-sheathed blades already snarling. Without a word, they fell into battle alongside their primarch, and together the IX Legion elite worked to clear the wall section. The pace and fury of it was relentless, a blistering surge across the five-metre-wide parapet, a whirl of blades that clanged and resounded from ceramite. The Word Bearers fought back hard, screaming denunciations of their own, the air around them charged with the shimmer of half-summoned daemons, their blades made deadlier with cantrips and ether-poisons. Those combinations made them lethal, and so the force of the charge was checked, with Blood Angels blasted apart or hacked to the ground or hurled from the wall's edge and into oblivion.\n\nBut the primarch was there with them, and under the shadow of those grime-streaked wings there could only be one outcome. The Word Bearers were gradually driven back, their rune-carved plate cracked open and their garbled spells silenced. The daemon-ghosts were scattered, sent howling out of the physical. The last of the fighters - a great champion clad in Tartarus armour surmounted with an iron crown - was cast down by Sanguinius himself, his axe-blade broken into pieces and his neck snapped. Sanguinius"}
{"text":"rimarch was there with them, and under the shadow of those grime-streaked wings there could only be one outcome. The Word Bearers were gradually driven back, their rune-carved plate cracked open and their garbled spells silenced. The daemon-ghosts were scattered, sent howling out of the physical. The last of the fighters - a great champion clad in Tartarus armour surmounted with an iron crown - was cast down by Sanguinius himself, his axe-blade broken into pieces and his neck snapped. Sanguinius whirled his spear-tip around, angled it vertically over the stricken champion, and plunged it through his primary heart. The blade flared with energy, making its prey's limbs jerk and spasm, before the primarch yanked it free again and killed the power.\n\nAfter that, the flamer teams went to work, methodically making their way across the enemy corpses, ensuring that everything was rendered down to ash and no unnatural remnant remained to rear up suddenly and resume slaughter. The bodies of the loyal fallen were taken up and carried towards the hovering Stormbirds, which were already pivoting and whining up for extraction. The raid had lasted just moments, but they could not afford to linger - dozens of similar attacks had been planned, each one aimed at snuffing out a critical pressure point, blunting the exposed spearheads of the enemy advance and eliminating their key command units.\n\nSanguinius himself walked up to the edge of the ramparts, facing out over the Anterior wastes and the devastation that had once led up to the old processional quarter. Already his helm's comm-feed was filling up with pleas for intervention, one after the other, a torrent that never let up. He, too, would have to take wing again shortly, surging up into the poison clouds alongside his Legion's few remaining attack gunships. It was the best they could do now - no longer mount major operations, but only run pinpoint strikes aimed at preventing the withdrawals becoming a massacre.\n\nHe studied the territory they were ceding. The approaches to Aurum, heavily contested ever since the Lion's Gate space port had fallen, were now overrun entirely. The outworks were barely visible, mulched down to a sea of blackened mud and trampled under millions of boots. The ground trembled, both from the drum of enemy guns and the booby-trapped chambers being detonated far below him. Columns of smoke twisted up from a thousand points across the ravaged landscape, each one marking the corpse of a big lander or a super-heavy vehicle, and the wind was hot, tasting bitter even through his helm's filters.\n\nThey were no longer fighting to hold this line. The blood and materiel expended on the long ring of outer fortresses had all been to slow the enemy, to cause them pain, not to prevent them ever breaking in. Now that the Inner Palace walls were ruptured in more than one location, the defences east of the Ultimate Gate had become unviable. Massive evacuation columns were underway, streaming out from the bunkers and picking their way across the shell-blown terrain towards the dubious sanctuary of the innermost portals. The remaining combat was to protect those columns for as long as possible, to maintain a fragile defence-screen to ensure that most of them could get clear before the gates were kicked in and the monsters charged inside.\n\nSanguinius focused, looking further north, peering through the drifting smog banks to make some sense of the landscape. He could see the precipitous walls of Gorgon Bar, the place he had worked so hard to preserve, now ringed with stuttering firelines, its heart being gutted by the enemy troops rampaging within it. Beyond that, faint in the overcast haze, was Marmax. As far as he could tell at such range, it seemed to be holding - if they could keep it from collapsing entirely, even for another hour or two, that would be something.\n\nThat was the limit of his eyesight. He had not had one of his visions for some time - those disturbing glimpses straight into the minds of his brothers. Perhaps he had simply been too occupied with the fighting, or perhaps that unbidden and unwanted facility was fading of its own accord. Most likely it was just a temporary respite, a momentary stilling before the winds of the ether gathered power again. For the time being, he only had the vaguest of psychic sensations - impressions of souls, all caught up in the tempest of the eastern battlefront as it steadily imploded, some defiant, some terrified, most in a state of abject misery. That had been the key change, over the past month of unremitting fighting - the shift from fear to resignation. He could even feel it himself. It was different to how it had been before - the pain, the visions. This was a vaguer ailment, a kind of numbness, creeping up from his limbs and into his torso, making him want to hesitate, to doubt, to check himself. If he closed his eyes, he almost fancied he could see the sickness, creeping out of the heart of foetid darkness, crawling over the graveyards and the charnel fields and reaching out to throttle them all.\n\nHe couldn't indulge that. He had to keep moving, keep vital. And now, here, on the very edge of the shrinking arc of Imperial control, there was one thing he had to try again, before the growing distance made it impossible.\n\n'Brother,' he voxed, using the most heavily encoded channel, the one that was kept clear even when the rest dissolved into shrieking static.\n\nFor a long moment, the space of three deep breaths, he got nothing back. And then, just as he was about to give up, a hiss and a crackle spat back at him.\n\n'He's sent you to haul me back in, then?' came Jaghatai's voice, distorted and faint over the whirr of interference.\n\nSanguinius smiled. Ever suspicious, the Khan, verging on the paranoid - little changed. 'If he'd asked, do you think I'd have agreed?'\n\nAt the other end, a grunt of amused scorn. 'Maybe. You're a helpful soul.'\n\n'The Ultimate Gate is on the edge of being compassed. Your window for withdrawal shrinks.'\n\n'Yes, I'd noticed.'\n\n'And though you have a reputation for sneaking back at the last minute, I fear this may be slipping out of your grasp.'\n\n'We're not coming back.'\n\n'You are almost entirely surrounded.'\n\n'Yes, we are.'\n\nSanguinius clenched a single fist, willing himself to remain calm. He admired Jaghatai, he had laboured long with him on the elements of the Librarius, he had fought alongside him more than once, but still the pig-headedness could irritate.\n\n'Then you, too, have given up.'\n\n'Far from it.' A long pause, as if he were searching for the right words. 'I know you respect dreams. The ones that speak truthfully, at least. They will win, I foresee, as long as he is active. The Warmaster cannot rely on much, for our estranged brothers are losing their minds. All save one.'\n\n'But we are stronger together. At the core.'\n\n'Under your strategy, maybe.' A faint, dry chuckle over the comm. 'Forgive me. This is not about character. It is about what we need to break the hold. The hold that crushes our spirit.' Even across the interference, Sanguinius could hear the urgency in his brother's voice. 'They do not plan, any more. They rush at the barriers set before them, barely knowing where they are, barely knowing their own names. But he is waiting, beyond our reach, as careful as he ever was. When all else is ashes, when we think that nothing worse remains, he will come. And that ends our last hope.'\n\nSanguinius weighed his own words carefully then. 'Mortarion has been... changed, brother. He is not what he was when you met on Prospero. Could you stand against him now? Could any of us?'\n\n'I do not know. But then, if that is your counsel, when the moment comes, and you are called to face one of them, I shall expect you to stand down too. Hand over your spear, make your excuses. Fall back again.'\n\nSanguinius laughed. 'We are running short of places to retreat to.'\n\n'We should never have let it be taken.'\n\n'You still think that?'\n\n'The guns are intact, and could be used. They're landing at will. And we will need a space port ourselves. When Guilliman comes. When we have victory in the cusp of our palms, he will need the swift route down.'\n\nVictory. The Khan was still thinking of victory. How was that possible? Had he, too, gone mad, just like the traitors who raved with joy as they dismantled the home of their own species? It was always possible. He had always flirted with it.\n\n'In that,' Sanguinius said, 'you are at least consistent.'\n\n'Not something I've been accused of often.'\n\nSanguinius looked up. To the north, fresh spikes of fire punched through the cloud cover. He would have to go now, to do what he had been doing since this thing had started - hold it together, keep the troops fighting for just another day, another hour, another moment.\n\n'I did not make contact to summon you back,' he said. 'Much as it would gladden my heart to have you with us. Rogal always said you'd make your run, sooner or later, and he's usually right about the rest of us. That's why he's organising things.' He watched the burning lands, the spoil of a once proud galactic civilisation, brought low by its own vices. 'I made contact because, if you do this, it may be the last time we ever speak. And so I wanted to send you my blessing. I wanted to wish you luck. And I wanted to express the hope that you'll ram that damned scythe so far down his throat that he'll never find his stupid rebreather again.'\n\nThe Khan laughed hard at that. Even distorted by the poor link, Sanguinius heard that it was the right kind of laugh - not cynical, not knowing, just a brief break in the suffocating tension.\n\n'We will meet again, my friend,' the Khan said. 'We will build all the things we ever dreamed of. Until then, do what you must. Keep them hoping. Hold the walls.'\n\nThe link cut. Sanguinius stood for just a little while longer, alone on the parapet, watching his birthworld burn. He looked over his shoulder, to where the great mas"}
{"text":"t that. Even distorted by the poor link, Sanguinius heard that it was the right kind of laugh - not cynical, not knowing, just a brief break in the suffocating tension.\n\n'We will meet again, my friend,' the Khan said. 'We will build all the things we ever dreamed of. Until then, do what you must. Keep them hoping. Hold the walls.'\n\nThe link cut. Sanguinius stood for just a little while longer, alone on the parapet, watching his birthworld burn. He looked over his shoulder, to where the great massif of the Inner Palace rose up. In the darkness, against the gathering glow of the many fires, it looked more like an ossuary than a fortress.\n\n'I plan to,' he said softly.\n\nAnd then, with a leap, a clap of wings and a powerful thrust into the skies, he was gone again, spear held ready, streaking towards the next battle that needed him.\n\nThey were weak. They were compromised. Their will to fight was gone, their defences were falling open.\n\nIt had been so hard over the last seven years. Every gain had been contested, every triumph paid for in blood. Now, though, right at the end, resistance was falling away.\n\nThey had ceased to believe, that was the problem. For as long as they had been able to think that something was coming to rescue them, or that their enemies would somehow fall apart of their own accord, they had stood up and fired back. Now, though, they abandoned their posts, they ran down the long chasms between the smoke-filled spires, their nerves shot, their spirit broken.\n\nNot his counterparts in the Legiones Astartes, of course. They still held their positions, still made hard work of it, but even they were missing something. It was as if they fought out of habit, almost - a kind of automatic response. They no longer believed they could alter the result. They were going through the motions. Seeing it out. He had killed so many of them - veterans, company captains, champions of renown. Even as they had diminished, he had grown, adding to a reputation that had been formidable during the years of the Crusade itself.\n\nIndras Archeta, captain of the Third Company, Sons of Horus, reflected on that for a moment. In his left hand he grasped the neck of an Imperial Fists warrior. In his right hand, his beloved longblade, the one that rippled with beauty and whispered truths to him. The warrior's armour was decorated with veteran honours, telling of a long and storied career, but now he was almost dead. Blood ran from every seal on his armour, trickling across plate that was more dirt than ceramite, punched-through with bolt craters, its power gone.\n\nThe Space Marine was trying to say something. Archeta lowered his head a little, prepared to indulge him, since he'd fought well enough. 'What's that, eh?' he asked. 'Spit it out.'\n\n'Emperor... damn... your... faithless...'\n\n'Ah, nothing interesting,' said Archeta wearily. He let the warrior's head fall, and severed his neck before it hit the ground. Then he watched the fighter die, slowly, life gushing from the deep wound at his neck, seeping into the chem-saturated earth below.\n\nHe looked up. A long procession of armour and infantry rumbled down the avenue ahead of him, flanked on either side by the shattered walls of ruined hab-towers. The vehicles were Legion Land Raiders and Sicarans, their hulls in the sea-green livery of the Legion, in serviceable shape despite the punishing campaign to reach the main incursion points. Their tracks churned up the remains of the choke-point barricades, even as the last batch of krak grenades blew up the pill boxes on the northern edge of the avenue. Tactical squads marched through the debris, going watchfully but confidently. Behind them clunked a big Contemptor, its heavy treads crushing the remnants of yellow battleplate further into the mud.\n\nHe had not expected to reach this position for another six hours. It was a confluence between two major thoroughfares, the key to unlocking the next urban zone battlefront, the kind of place a disciplined enemy would fight tooth and nail to hold on to. If the pinnacles at the intersection had not been blasted to pieces, you might almost have been able to clamber up and make out the perimeter walls of the Field of Winged Victory from them.\n\nMaybe the defenders had run out of ammunition. Maybe the main garrisons had already fallen back, exposing this position. Maybe the fighters here had been sacrificed for a front elsewhere. Even so, it shouldn't have been quite so easy. If he wasn't careful, the pace of the advance would run ahead of the supply lines and the tanks would grind to a halt for lack of fuel.\n\nArcheta watched his troops file past, marching their way into the heart of the city-palace. From up ahead, all he could hear were screams and explosions. From behind, nothing - a total absence, as if they were erasing everything entirely, wiping the planet clean.\n\nAnd then, from the north, where a second avenue met the first, more vehicles suddenly rumbled into view, all of them of the XVI Legion too. With a calm efficiency, the lead tanks swivelled on their axes and swung around to join Archeta's advancing squadrons. A few section commanders shouted out orders, but otherwise it was performed without fuss. A choreographer would have been proud of the way they all integrated, merging strength before ploughing on, driving further west, onward, into the heart of the conurbation.\n\nA Damocles Rhino revved out of the shadows, heading straight for Archeta's location. At the last minute, the command transport shuddered to a halt, the hatch swung open, and a single warrior emerged. He crunched down to the rubble and strode over to Archeta, clenching his fist and extending it in the Legion salute.\n\n'Captain!' he shouted. 'Here already, eh?'\n\nArcheta watched him approach. The warrior was kitted out much as he was - fine artificer-crafted battleplate, long fur-lined cloak, the Eye of Horus on his breastplate. They were equals, the two of them, as far as rank went, but Azelas Baraxa was captain of the Second Company, just one step closer to the master of the Legion. In another time, given the prodigious tally of throats they had cut for the Warmaster, both of them might have expected to have played a part in the Mournival, but in the aftermath of the disaster at the Saturnine Gate there had been little enthusiasm to revive that old convention. What purpose would it have served, now? The Sons of Horus were the creatures of a living god, the warrior-slaves of an immortal deity. You did not advise a god, and you did not seek to give counsel to an immortal. They had all become just soldiers again, the tools required for the task at hand, with the last of their Crusade-era pretensions swept away.\n\n'Aye, we're making good time,' Archeta said passionlessly.\n\nHe didn't like Baraxa. The Second Company captain was a visionless soul, wedded to how things had been before the great break with Terra. Like so many of the senior Sons of Horus, Baraxa looked on the gifts of the new dispensation with suspicion, clinging to the way things had been on Cthonia when they had all of them claimed not to believe in such things as gods. To maintain that view now was a failure of vision, a conservatism that did them no favours. When Torgaddon had been slain, the position should have gone to someone with similar gifts, a creature of the gods they now fought for, not another Ezekyle-clone, stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the inevitable.\n\nBaraxa came to stand beside him. 'They're broken, brother,' he said. 'The Sanctum is just lying there. Ready to take. And I find I can hardly believe it.'\n\nThe captain's voice rang with enthusiasm. Despite his distaste for the man, Archeta knew what he meant. This was the heart of it, the soul of the old empire. Most of his troops had never set eyes on Terra before, let alone walked down the streets of its ancient capital. The galaxy was full of wonders, millions of them, but nothing truly compared to this place, even in its ruin. At times you would catch yourself, sometimes even in the midst of combat, and remember where you were. You would glance up at the vast buildings around you, the urban profile that was so familiar from a thousand propaganda vid-reels, the carved insignias of the Crusade-era triumphs, the mighty edifices raised to fuel the momentum of that incredible, unrepeatable feat, and wonder how things had ever come this far.\n\n'It isn't over yet,' Archeta said, not willing to get swept up into euphoria. 'We're being drawn further in - they still have three primarchs in there, somewhere.'\n\nBaraxa laughed. 'So cautious.' He pushed his cloak back, flexed the fingers of his sword-hand gauntlet, gazed down the long avenue towards the mountainous building-clusters ahead. 'Bastion Ledge has been breached - you knew that? Three fronts, all converging. They can't handle that.' He drew in a long breath, as if the air was something that might invigorate him rather than tear at his helm's overworked tox-filters. 'Thousands are coming through Mercury Breach alone, every hour now. It's a flood. The Red Angel is inside, doing what he does best. This is overwhelming. We just need to get there first, now - break the last gate before the World Eaters render it all down to blood-slurry.'\n\nThat was indeed the objective. The fragile unity between Legions and factions had already broken. What little cohesion remained was contingent on the target before them all - the hated Emperor, the Deceiver and the Cheater of Birthright. Once He was slaughtered, it would all dissolve again. The XVI Legion, greatest of Legions, the ones who had propelled and sustained this thing from the very start, would have to keep things from collapsing, and to do that they had to be in control of the centre, secure within the very same bunkers that they were now trying to prise apart.\n\n'Then he'll need to be back,' Archeta said.\n\n'He already is.'\n\nThat was a surprise. 'Abaddon? He's recovered?'\n\n'He was fighting the Apothecaries"}
{"text":" Birthright. Once He was slaughtered, it would all dissolve again. The XVI Legion, greatest of Legions, the ones who had propelled and sustained this thing from the very start, would have to keep things from collapsing, and to do that they had to be in control of the centre, secure within the very same bunkers that they were now trying to prise apart.\n\n'Then he'll need to be back,' Archeta said.\n\n'He already is.'\n\nThat was a surprise. 'Abaddon? He's recovered?'\n\n'He was fighting the Apothecaries, they told me, making their lives hell until they did enough to get him back to the front. He's landed at the Eternity Wall, heading for Mercury right now.' Baraxa clapped Archeta on the upper arm. 'It's all we need to finish this. Our leader.'\n\nArcheta bristled. 'Our leader is on the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\n'Of course. Of course! But then, down here-'\n\n'What does that matter? Ezekyle's just a mortal. Just like us. You should watch where your words take you, Azelas - the Warmaster sees all and hears all.'\n\nBaraxa looked at him for a moment, taken aback. 'And is beloved by all,' he murmured.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Hells, brother, what's chewing at your guts? You should be pleased.'\n\nYes, what was ailing him? Why was he not exultant, relishing the last push into the heart of hypocrisy? He had never withheld his blade-hand before, never regretted a kill. The closer he got, though, the more ill-humoured he became.\n\nHorus was not with them. Maybe that was it. Archeta had witnessed the primarch fight, once, a long time ago now, and it was hard to imagine anything alive being able to stand up to that. If Horus trod this ground, here, now, the whole thing would be over in hours. Oh, Archeta knew all the cant that the sorcerers spouted about the great ward-shield, how it kept out those with the greatest gifts, but that barrier was in tatters now. If Angron could somehow rampage his way inside it, then surely the Warmaster could.\n\nAs long as Horus remained absent, the fissures in his Legion would grow steadily wider. You would have power brokers like Baraxa whose heads had been turned by the dynamic First Captain. Sycar, the new Master of the Justaerin, was said to be Abaddon's creature too. Maybe Ikari, the much-disliked captain of the Fourth Company, was also. What would they all do, if Horus never emerged at all? Would they start, steadily, to think about where their loyalties truly lay?\n\nHorus still commanded the allegiance of the Legion, that was true. Some had even begun to talk of him, as Archeta did, as a member of the true Pantheon, something elevated far beyond the merely human and worthy of a more strenuous kind of adulation. Beruddin, captain of the Fifth, was of a similar mind. Malabreux, the new leader of the Catulan Reavers, was fervent in the faith. But they were all so new, all so callow. The entire leadership layer of the Legion had been scraped away. The old great names - the Torgaddons, the Kibres, the Ekaddons, the Aximands - they were extinguished. Those that had replaced them, Archeta included, were poor copies, divided among themselves, beginning to doubt and bicker even as the greatest prize of all lay almost within their grasp.\n\nAll except Abaddon. He had come through it all, if not unscathed, then still himself, the last link with the heritage of the Luna Wolves. No surprise, then, that he was listened to more than ever, looked up to by both the newborn and the old hands.\n\nHorus had to come soon. He had to snuff this nonsense out. He had to remind the faithful why they were spilling their blood for him. He had to be the Warmaster. He had, in due course, to be the Emperor.\n\n'Just keen for this to be over,' Archeta told Baraxa, sheathing his whispering blade and making ready to march again. 'We've destroyed enough. Time to start building again.'\n\nOld dreams\n\nBetrayer\n\nKurultai\n\nImpossible, though, to imagine anything being built again, not here, not like it had been. By the time Ilya made her way back to Colossi, the scale of the eastern warzone's disintegration was painfully apparent. The subterranean routes leading out from under the Ultimate Gate were still operational in sections, but there had been raids in many locations, puncturing the vital supply lines and diverting scarce defensive resources away from the surface. The big mag-train contingents she'd commissioned had got through, mostly, but they had been the last ones - any remaining reinforcements or supply-runs would have to be made overground, and that was now insanely dangerous.\n\nShe had seen that for herself. When the time had come to leave the Inner Palace and head back to the fringes, Sojuk had become increasingly concerned. Somehow he'd managed to cobble together an escort of three outrider speeders and a backup Chimera for the journey. He'd done it without consulting her, and when she remonstrated with him he could barely look her in the eye.\n\n'My apologies, szu,' he'd said. 'Next time, I shall be sure to.'\n\nShe'd had to crack a smile at that. Sojuk was a sly old fox - there would be no next time for any of this.\n\nIt had been a hard stretch, once east of the big Imperial formations clustering together at the Ultimate Gate. The bombardment there had already started - you could feel the earth shudder even deep underground. The further you went, the worse it got. The little convoy had needed to break topside for a couple of hours about fifty kilometres north of the Lion's Gate, and that had been like emerging into a vision of hell. The portal itself was on fire, a huge raging glow that had made the southern horizon throb. Strange cries had echoed across the pummelled wasteland, making the pools of acrid water in the craters ripple.\n\n'Yaksha,' Sojuk had spat, driving hard through the filth.\n\nThey had been lucky, though - they hadn't run into any of those horrors directly, or much else in the way of serious opposition. They had needed to skirt wide around a formation of VIII Legion infantry heading west through the ruins, but otherwise the worst they had encountered were bands of cultists and traitor auxiliaries, who could be hit hard and then outrun. As soon as he was able, Sojuk had got them back underground again, right down into the crumbling tunnels that threaded their way east to the tributary fortress-perimeter.\n\nWhen they had finally reached the Colossi receiving ports, guarded in lamplit darkness by heavy lascannon towers and static V Legion tank lines, Ilya had breathed a long sigh of genuine relief. This place might have been isolated now, surrounded on almost all sides by a nigh-infinite expanse of enemies, but they were her people, an island of familiarity, a tiny echo of Chogoris.\n\nShe'd taken her leave of Sojuk after that, and had made her way up to the north command tower. Her reports had already been compiled and sent out through the comm-grid, but there was no guarantee they had got through - in these confused times, you had to actually speak to someone in person to have any confidence that you'd been heard. The bulk of the military staff left in the Colossi operations chambers were of the Legion, now - almost all the Imperial Army staff had been evacuated. Occasionally you ran into an officer in non-Legion colours, and always exchanged a brief smile or a nod with them - those were just like she was, the gone-natives, unwilling to leave the company of these strange off-worlders, prepared to die out here with them rather than back among those they had been raised with. That was how it was with Jaghatai's people - you could be infected, if you weren't careful.\n\nOnce in the main watch-chamber, which was full and bustling with a kind of febrile energy, she spoke to Qin Fai, noyan-khan and commander of the northern-zone defences. He listened to her despatches carefully, nodding here and there, occasionally pressing her on a detail, checking what she said against the ledgers his own officials brought him.\n\nThey've got better at this, she found herself thinking. Then again, they've been forced to.\n\nAt the end of her briefing, he bowed to her. 'Our sincere thanks, szu-Ilya. This could not have been done without you.'\n\nThat was probably true. The White Scars had never enjoyed the contacts she had - the routes into the Imperial command structure, such as that was now. Though it was good to feel useful again, the idea of it made her feel a little mournful, like an old tool that had steadily become worn out until it could only do one thing well. If this was the final task she ever did for them, it felt cheap - an errand of collection, a rounding up of damaged assets.\n\n'It's the last we'll get,' she told him. 'The routes west are all closed now.'\n\n'If that is what we have,' said Qin Fai, 'then it must be enough.'\n\nAnd then she'd suddenly felt weak. Her stomach was empty, she was dehydrated. She'd been moving from place to place, often under fire, without pause, for days. It would have been nice to speak further with the noyan-khan, to gain a better understanding of how the plans were evolving, but she feared she might pass out if she did. She made an excuse, withdrew, and hurried down to her own reserved chambers, ones set deep inside the inner core of the fortress. Back inside them, she reached for a cup of water with trembling hands, unbuttoned her general's coat at the collar, sat down heavily in her chair, closed her eyes, and let her limbs go limp.\n\nIt was only after she'd been sitting in silence for a few moments that it slowly dawned on her that she was not alone. Something else was in there with her, something outsized and monstrously dangerous, something that scarcely belonged in the same sphere of existence as her, let alone the same room.\n\n'You could have knocked,' she murmured, eyes still closed.\n\nWhen the Khan replied, the out-of-character awkwardness of it made her chuckle.\n\n'Forgive me. When you came in, you did not look well, so I... well, I did not know how to warn you.'\n\nShe opened her eyes, shuffled up in her chair. He was standing "}
{"text":"not alone. Something else was in there with her, something outsized and monstrously dangerous, something that scarcely belonged in the same sphere of existence as her, let alone the same room.\n\n'You could have knocked,' she murmured, eyes still closed.\n\nWhen the Khan replied, the out-of-character awkwardness of it made her chuckle.\n\n'Forgive me. When you came in, you did not look well, so I... well, I did not know how to warn you.'\n\nShe opened her eyes, shuffled up in her chair. He was standing against the far wall, beyond the meagre light of her sole lumen, too big to fit onto any of her furniture pieces, looking as self-conscious as she'd ever seen anyone look.\n\n'I'll be recovered in a moment,' she said. 'Come, speak to me.'\n\nHe started to make for the door. 'You look tired. I should not have waited for you here. I will return later.'\n\n'No, really.' Ilya reached out for him, her fingers brushing against his gauntlet, tugging him back. 'You will not have the time later. We haven't spoken for weeks. Not properly. Please.'\n\nHe hesitated, looking down at her. They made a ragged pair - the battle-ravaged warlord, his exhausted emissary.\n\n'How do you feel?' he asked.\n\n'Old,' she said. 'I feel very old. How do you feel?'\n\nThe wisp of a smile flickered over his proud face. No one else would ever have dared ask him that question. None of the tens of thousands of warriors under his command, none of the hundreds of thousands of auxiliary troops who marched under his banner, would ever have presumed.\n\n'I feel... settled,' he said thoughtfully. 'The pieces are arranged. The calculations have been made. Very soon we shall reach the point when nothing else can be done, save for the action itself.'\n\nShe found that she didn't really believe that. He had said similar things on the eve of other battles, and she had believed it then, but this was different. The stakes were higher, the likelihood of devastation overwhelming. This was not a voluntary decision in any meaningful sense. She had studied the same reports that he had, sat in the same council gatherings. This was desperation, a final spit in the eye of fate, and if any were to benefit from what they did, then it would not be them.\n\n'But not quite, of course,' he added wryly. 'There is always doubt. Even more so, now. He clouds everything, and even when you know the origin of the sickness, it is hard to remind yourself that it is artificial, some of it, and can be fought, and must be fought.'\n\n'It's worse in the Sanctum,' Ilya said.\n\n'I can imagine.'\n\n'But that's not all, is it?' She took a swig of water. 'I mean, it's not why you came here.'\n\nThe Khan moved away from her, headed to a shelf where she kept the few old things that had been preserved - the seals marking her entry into the Departmento Munitorum, the cheap plasteel memento of the Triumph she'd taken from Ullanor, a priceless dagger that Qin Xa had given her, never drawn from its sheath.\n\n'Never do the easy thing,' he said, looking at the trinkets without really seeing them. 'We suffered, for that. And now, in a way, this is the easiest thing of all. To stop holding back, cut loose, just like we've been promising we'd do ever since Prospero.' He placed his hand gently on the shelf. 'Yesugei saw it. He dreamed of it, he told me. That I'd end my journey, fighting a creature of the dark, on a world of embers. And I tried to dismiss it, but it kept coming back to me. That's the problem with the dreams of Stormseers - you wonder if you work to make them true. So, despite everything that makes this seem inevitable, and right, it might just be me, deep down, tired of compromises, eager to get it settled. The easy thing.'\n\nShe watched him as he spoke. He stood erect, just as always. In his armour he was still imposing, but she had the sense that there was more hollowness under those plates than there had once been. The warriors of the Legions were all the same - they had been made to keep going, no matter how starved and damaged they became. A baseline human would give up on a task, after a while, but the Emperor's own would just keep fighting until the exceptional machinery of their bodies finally fell apart. Death meant nothing to them. Dishonour meant almost everything. And so it was possible that they could talk of an impossible trial, one which promised nothing but pain on the greatest conceivable scale, as the 'easy thing'.\n\n'Why did he tell you of it?' she asked.\n\n'I don't know. Because it troubled him, I think.'\n\n'Or because he believed that he had to. To give you the means to make a choice.'\n\n'Maybe.'\n\nIlya drank a little more. She was starting to feel more like herself. You could forget what a privilege this was, to be spoken to with such frankness. Over the years, the Khan had done so only occasionally. He sounded now much as he had sounded just before the Catullus Rift - musing on the past, fretful of the future - so to talk to him felt like a greater service than rounding up tanks.\n\n'You know I never had a family of my own,' she told him. 'I never really knew if I wanted one or not. By the time I thought about it seriously, the opportunity had gone. I don't regret it. I did what I needed to do. And just when I thought I'd got to the end of all that, I came to Ullanor, and found myself tangled up with you. So I got that family in the end, and you made me furious and anxious and exhausted - all of the things I thought I might have missed.' She smiled sadly to herself. 'But the last lesson was the hardest one, because then you all began to die, and I learned how much that hurt. I was the weakest, but somehow I'm still here. Now I begin to wonder if I might still be here when you're all gone. I'd mourn you, if I lasted that long, like I mourn Targutai and Xa and Halji.' She looked up at him. 'But I'd be proud, too. Throne, I'd be proud. Not because you're the bravest or the best, but because you do this. You ask the question. I taught you how to keep your ammo dumps from running out, but I didn't teach you that. You always did it.' She edged upward in the chair, painfully, feeling her body betray her. 'And it is time now, my Khan. This is why we came back.'\n\nHe came over to her. In order to reach her level, he had to kneel. He extended his great hand, and she put hers out, and each one clasped the other.\n\n'I will make you as safe as I can, here,' he said.\n\n'If they come for the place while you're gone,' she said, 'I'll give them hell.'\n\n'See that you do.' He looked at her with those deep-set eyes, the ones that could ignite with battle-fury in an instant, the ones that had witnessed both the realm of the gods and the charnel pits of mortals. 'Because I plan to come back.'\n\n'Good.'\n\n'There is much to do.'\n\n'There always is.'\n\n'So be here, then. Intact, and ready to serve again.'\n\n'As you will it, my liege,' she said, gripping his gauntlet tightly, 'so it shall be done.'\n\nCrosius pulled, and a long string of flesh and fat slipped out, glistening with a thin sleeve of blood. He held it up, turning in the light of the fires, marvelling at the transformations taking place within it. His eyesight had always been good, but now it seemed to be homing in on biological matter with an almost outrageous clarity. He would squint, and the cells themselves would pop into the edge of visibility, fizzing and dividing away in a promiscuous frenzy of mutation.\n\nIt was happening in real time - that was the exhilarating thing. He had prepared a philtre just an hour ago, applied it intravenously, and now the skin and muscle was shivering into new forms, some of them obviously useless, some of them possibly very handy indeed. He peered closer, using the cracked lens of his helm visor to zoom in tight. There were so many paradoxes, here. The sinews he studied were clearly atrophying fast, riddled with some kind of destructive pox, and yet their structure showed no signs of coming apart. If anything, the rapid disintegration was making it all stronger, more durable. That was impossible. He could not deny the evidence of his senses. It called for much more investigation.\n\nJust then the man's eyes opened wide, staring in a feverish panic. You couldn't really blame him for that.\n\nCrosius let the loop of entrails fall back into the incision he'd made in the man's stomach, then reached out and patted his sweaty brow.\n\n'There, now,' he hissed. 'Quite remarkable. I don't even know why you're not dead. You should be, but you're not. Isn't it marvellous?'\n\nThe man tried to scream, to writhe away, but the gags and bonds Crosius had wrapped him in were quite secure. This could go on for a very long time, and every moment of it would unearth some new revelation. Even the pain would abate, eventually. The old Imperial uniform the man wore would rot away, his eyes would lose their pupils, his skin would turn grey-green, and then he'd be one of them - on the border of life and death, so hard to kill, so hard to revive, a kind of halfway house between the realms of experience.\n\nCrosius reached for a rust-spotted scalpel, ready to make another cut, only for a noise outside the chamber to disturb him. He looked up, across the dingy old storage vault within the space port's basement that he'd turned into his little den for experimentation. Something was stirring around the heavy steel door, worming its way through the tiny gaps in the frame. Buzzing started up, a dull whine that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.\n\n'Ah,' he said to himself, understanding what this was, and put his instruments away. He thumbed a rune on his handheld control-box, and the door's many bolts all slid open.\n\nTyphus clambered through the gap, and his attendant cloak of flies spilled in with him. Those flies were all thick, black and furry, alighting everywhere and thudding in thick clods to the deck. Their master emerged through them as if slipping out of a thick mist, only ever part visible, the sharp edges of his outline now blurred and constantly moving.\n\n'Apothe"}
{"text":"ng what this was, and put his instruments away. He thumbed a rune on his handheld control-box, and the door's many bolts all slid open.\n\nTyphus clambered through the gap, and his attendant cloak of flies spilled in with him. Those flies were all thick, black and furry, alighting everywhere and thudding in thick clods to the deck. Their master emerged through them as if slipping out of a thick mist, only ever part visible, the sharp edges of his outline now blurred and constantly moving.\n\n'Apothecary,' he rasped.\n\nTyphus had always been a caustic soul. His voice had been more of a croak, his humours sour. That, at least, had not changed.\n\n'My lord Typhus,' Crosius said, bowing. 'This is unexpected.'\n\nTyphus glanced at Crosius' experimental tables, all two hundred of them, every one occupied. Impossible to tell what he thought of it all, but nothing indicated that he found it very interesting.\n\n'I am leaving this place,' he said curtly. 'This night. The primarch has ordered it.'\n\n'Now? Before the assault?'\n\nTyphus snorted. 'You know the hour, then? I do not. He waits too long. He was always too cautious. That was why he needed me.' Then he seemed to twitch, to jerk back into the present. 'But I won't be going far. I care nothing for the beacon. Why would I? I want you to stay in touch with me, to let me know when to return.'\n\nCrosius blinked. This was all very strange. He had no special knowledge of the primarch's intentions, nor of the Legion's disposition. He had never had close dealings with Typhus, either - as far as he knew, no one had. He considered himself somewhat removed from any politics the Death Guard may ever have had, and was uncomfortable about finding himself thrust into them now.\n\n'I am not sure...' he began.\n\n'Calm yourself - I do not ask for anything untoward. Communications are unreliable. Messages are lost. I do not wish to find myself stranded when the moment comes.'\n\nThat was true - their equipment was falling apart, their cogitators no longer functioned, all of which accentuated what had already become a difficult arena for getting orders to where they needed to be. That was why the primarch had gathered so many of them here, in one place, so that the commands could be given in person.\n\n'You understand,' he said carefully, 'that I am not a Techmarine.'\n\n'No, you are beginning to make use of better gifts. I judge you have the imagination for it.'\n\nAt that, Typhus retrieved two objects from the fly-swirled depths of his armour. Or maybe they retrieved themselves, for they were creatures of some kind, fat little things, pocked with sores and boils, with mouths that took up almost all their bulk. They were noisy when they moved. It sounded like they were giggling, or whispering to one another, or just spitting and slobbering. They wobbled up to Typhus' outstretched palms, one on each, and gurned at each other.\n\nCrosius found himself instantly captivated. They smelled strongly, and were as hideously ugly as any dream-goblin of his imagination, but he had to fight not to take them both up into his arms, to pet them, to stroke their spiny backs and fondle their horned scalps.\n\n'What are these?' he asked.\n\n'Fragments of the god himself, it appears,' said Typhus, sounding uncharacteristically affectionate himself. 'The tiniest reflections, but they are appealing, no?'\n\nOne of them was almost black, its skin shining dully. The other was almost white, as matt as chalk. They cooed and smirked beneath his gaze, rocking back and forth.\n\n'Fascinating,' said Crosius. 'Utterly fascinating.'\n\n'These are twins. Two sides of the same entity. They are extremely sympathetic to one another. Tell something to one of them, and the other knows it.'\n\nCrosius understood immediately. 'Then may I take the dark one? I like the glint in its eye.'\n\nTyphus grunted a coarse laugh. 'If you wish.' He handed the little creature over, and it hopped from his hand, landing in the crook of Crosius' elbow with a wet splat. Once there, it snickered and wriggled, making itself comfortable against the rotting armour. Crosius couldn't resist a chuckle of delight, and cradled it avidly.\n\n'I ask for nothing more than this,' Typhus went on. 'Look after it. Learn about it. Ensure it comes to no harm. And, when the moment comes, make use of it.'\n\nCrosius looked up again. 'And what moment will that be, my lord?'\n\n'If you need to speak to me, you will know.'\n\nThen Typhus made to leave. The clouds of flies gathered themselves up, circling him, buzzing furiously. He turned back to the open doorway, and the trains of whirring insects followed him out.\n\nCrosius barely noticed him go. By then, he was rapt, tickling and cosseting the squatting creature on his arm. It blinked at him, welcoming the attention. He stared at it for some time, before the muffled groaning of the subject on the table snapped him out of the reverie.\n\n'Come then, my little lord,' he cooed, reaching out for the scalpel again, taking care not to dislodge the creature from its perch. 'Stay here and watch. I am learning myself, more every day, and we have only just begun.'\n\nBy the time Jangsai made his way east again, the situation had become much worse. He skimmed through the panorama of burning buildings, staying as low as he dared, going as fast as the speeder's engines would take him, and saw fighting erupting in all directions. It looked formless now, spreading like wildfire on dry grass. In several urban zones the long-gestating sense of hopelessness had morphed into total panic, resulting in abandoned defence lines and huge civilian crowds streaming down the few unblocked thoroughfares. In more than one location he'd seen the guns of the city's defenders turned on those crowds, lest their sheer numbers overwhelm positions further back. That just created more panic. The air rang with desperation, filled now with a kind of starved-animal frenzy that scoured away the last pretensions of civilised humanity.\n\nFrom the inner Adamant angle he'd headed north-east, hugging what remained of the interior's secured sections, before boosting along what had once been the Gilded Path processional avenue. The checkpoints he'd had to negotiate on the way in were now either empty or in disarray. At one of the last ones remaining intact he'd been frantically flagged down by the sentries, who were no doubt bewildered by the sight of a valuable Legion speeder heading straight into wholesale killing grounds without an escort or heavy support. He'd ignored them, boosting hard to veer away from their guns before shooting clear over the habs ahead. They'd even fired at him, perhaps thinking he was some kind of deserter.\n\nFrom then on it got worse. Any Imperial formations east of that point were either destroyed or were being destroyed. Jangsai witnessed entire infantry divisions being steadily pummelled amid the ruins, cut off from help, their only remaining service to make their demise as difficult as possible for a rampant enemy. He himself was soon tracked by traitor forces, and speeders belonging to both the XII and VIII Legions ended up on his tail. A few of them got close, nearly snagging him inside a nasty maze of collapsed viaducts, but there were few who could fly a speeder like a son of the ordu. He pushed the Kyzagan to its extremities, screaming at full tilt through the rapidly narrowing gaps until even the World Eaters gave up. It helped that he wasn't much of a target for them - they had far tastier objectives to the west, where the main concentrations of Imperial armour were still putting up something of a fight.\n\nSo he made it to Colossi in the end, his speeder's engines worn out and his own breath ragged and shallow. After stowing the vehicle in the hangars and handing over the confidential data-slates, there was no time to report to Ganzorig as intended, since everyone he met told him the same thing: kurultai is called.\n\nHe had to hurry, to wipe the worst of the caked slime from his helm and breastplate, clanking his way down the winding tunnels towards the council chamber. The entire fortress was in a stir, with menials and legionaries clearly gearing up for action. When he had left, the mood had been grim, infected with the same torpor that seemed to bleed into everything. Now, though, it had shifted. Not by much, and perhaps not for long, but still a palpable change.\n\nBy the time he reached his location, he could already hear voices from the far side of the chamber walls. He pushed his way through heavy doors and emerged into the main council room - a bare, circular space surrounded by concentric rings of banked stands. There were no windows, only suspensor lumens, and the surfaces were unpolished rockcrete and plasteel. A faded banner of the Imperial Army's Colossi command hung forlornly overhead, but otherwise the sigils on display were those of the assembled brotherhoods - axes, bows, lightning strikes, hawks. Jangsai edged along the nearest curving row, taking position at the stand closest to him.\n\nHe glanced quickly about him to get his bearings. The speaker, on the far side of the circle, was Naranbaatar, chief of the zadyin arga. Next to him was Namahi, master of the keshig honour guard. Ganzorig and Qin Fai were present too, the two most senior noyans-khan. The rest of those assembled in the stands were khans of the various brotherhoods. Jangsai knew all their names. Many had distinguished themselves during the long period of void war, and had reputations that resonated across the Legion - Ainbataar, Khulan, Tsolmon. Terrans were there, as were Chogorians, even a few newbloods like himself.\n\nNone of them, though, had anything like the presence of Shiban Tachseer, who stood just a few places away from the primarch. He seemed to have picked up a few new scars on his exposed face since Jangsai had last seen him. No one could have called that visage beautiful - the old Chogorian compactness had been replaced with a patchwork of metal, raised tissue and tufts of a scratc"}
{"text":"s the Legion - Ainbataar, Khulan, Tsolmon. Terrans were there, as were Chogorians, even a few newbloods like himself.\n\nNone of them, though, had anything like the presence of Shiban Tachseer, who stood just a few places away from the primarch. He seemed to have picked up a few new scars on his exposed face since Jangsai had last seen him. No one could have called that visage beautiful - the old Chogorian compactness had been replaced with a patchwork of metal, raised tissue and tufts of a scratchy beard. If the ordu had needed a symbol of the many trials and transformations it had undergone during the war, Shiban would have served well enough. On Rija, they had told Jangsai that the khans of the V had once been famous for their joy in combat, their freedom and their flair. Now they looked much as grim and battered as any other warriors of the wounded Imperium, their exuberance beaten out of them, their joy blunted. Looking at Tachseer just then, it was hard to see how any of it could possibly come back.\n\nThe Khagan himself occupied the place of honour, standing just to the right of his chief Stormseer. Alongside him was the Sage, one of the few non-Space Marines trusted to attend. The primarch himself seemed pensive, staring at the floor, his hands clasped together loosely.\n\n'We know where it comes from,' Naranbaatar was saying, just as calmly and evenly as ever. 'The primarch of the Fourteenth has ascended into a new form, one that expands and strengthens his power. He is new to this form, and so that power is the greatest now that it may ever be. As he gathers more of his kind around him, the strength only grows. Even if he chose to never leave his new fortress, the despair he projects from it would be as potent a weapon as anything the enemy possesses.'\n\n'But why remain hidden?' asked Tsolmon Khan. 'Why not use the power openly?'\n\n'Because he is not a fool,' said the Khagan. 'He knows the carnage being unleashed within the Palace. He knows that destruction on such a scale unbalances all things, and that even the greatest may be undone there.' His mournful eyes flickered up to look at Tsolmon. 'He is doing what a good general does - drawing his full strength together, not wasting it, readying for the moment when both his allies and his enemies are exhausted.'\n\n'Then he remains a coward,' said Tsolmon coldly.\n\n'He remains what he has ever been,' the Khagan said. 'Careful. Patient.'\n\n'Even so, he must launch his assault soon,' said Naranbaatar. 'The augurs tell us that. When the full force of that comes, it will hit the Palace just as the momentum of the Sixteenth and Twelfth Legions is at its greatest. Every simulation we have run, every possible future we have interrogated, indicates that this combined offensive must overwhelm whatever defences remain intact. Over and again, we dream the same words. The Lord of Death must not cross the threshold. If he does, then no hope remains.'\n\n'Does the Lord Dorn not see it?' asked Khulan Khan.\n\n'My brother sees it well enough,' said the Khagan. 'But what can he do? He has the Red Angel tearing down the Sanctum around him, and the greatest mass of Sons of Horus assembled since Ullanor right at his door. The Palace is already falling with every sword at his disposal deployed. But he knows we are here.'\n\n'And the enemy does not,' said Naranbaatar. 'At least, they cannot be sure of our numbers, not until they assault this place directly again. For a single moment only, there is uncertainty. We have seeded every comm-channel we still use with movement reports indicating a full-scale withdrawal to the Ultimate Gate. Most of the auxilia we sent west had vehicles in Legion colours with them, both mock-ups and genuine. Some of our warriors were even allowed to be captured, all with the aim of spreading false accounts of our disposition.' The old Stormseer's composure faltered then, just for a moment. 'Their sacrifice was as great as any yet made in this cause. The names will be written in honour in Quan Zhou when victory is achieved.'\n\nThere it was again, Jangsai thought - that quiet, irritating certainty.\n\n'The deception will not last,' said the Khagan. 'Even amid all the confusion of the main attack, we will be discovered soon. And so we must act. Every preparation we have made, every contingency, has been for this hour. The plans are laid, the objectives assigned, the vehicles are being made ready. We must strike hard, fast and true, with no other target in sight or mind. We fail here, and all fails. We succeed, and it will be for others to complete the main task.'\n\n'We cannot rely on unaugmented troops,' said Namahi. 'We know the upper reaches of the space port were depressurised, and the lower ones will now be infested with both plague and yaksha. It is as challenging an environment as we have ever fought in. For that reason, our only support will be from the mobile armour assembled by szu-Ilya.'\n\nThe Sage, who alone in the chamber was seated, stirred herself. 'I got you as many hulls as I could,' she said. 'All tox-sealed, crewed and refitted for close actions. I pulled some strings where I had to.' She smiled wryly to herself. 'There are a hundred regiments in that gaggle of guns. We ended up reclassifying them all, amalgamating the command. You'll be going to war with the First Terran Armoured. First and last, maybe, but it still has a nice ring to it.'\n\n'Tanks?' asked Tsolmon, respectfully but sceptically. 'In a space port?'\n\n'You haven't seen it from the inside,' said Shiban. 'The place was built for void-ships - you could run Baneblades through it five abreast and never risk chipping the stonework.'\n\n'Colossi is eighty kilometres from the port's edge,' said Namahi. 'A straight run across occupied territory, all transitways destroyed. Our only chance is speed. We get bogged down, and we will all die in the open. Break into it, though, and at least we'll have a roof over our heads. We retake the main orbital arrays, and we can start to make their landers fear planetfall again.'\n\nSome of the khans, making the mental calculations, looked uneasy. 'There are enemy forces dug in all across that stretch,' said Ainbataar cautiously. 'They won't all be swept away.'\n\n'No, it'll be fighting from the start,' said Shiban, his metal-edged voice sounding like he was looking forward to it. 'Our concentrations will be high, though, and we're not looking to hold ground, just break through it.'\n\n'Even so,' said Khulan. 'We might be able to take on the ground forces, given surprise, but our air cover's gone.'\n\n'Not entirely,' said the Khagan, looking up at Jangsai. 'At least, I hope not.'\n\n'The objective was secured, Khagan,' Jangsai said, bowing. 'The plate will move, as ordered.'\n\n'The Skye orbital fortress, last of those scuttled by my brother,' said the Khagan. 'It has been reduced, but has immersion drives, and can shadow the advance at low altitude. Together with what remains of our Legion atmospherics, we can mount at least some defence in the air. It won't be perfect, but it will be something.'\n\nThe chamber fell silent. Jangsai glanced at his fellow khans. Some were as new as him, commanding a hundred or so blades. Some were veterans of the Crusade, and led twice that number. Each one of them trusted their primarch more than they trusted the evidence of their own senses. They had followed him in every battle since the breaking of Unity, and that trust had been repaid with survival against the current of the darkest tide. They were as loyal as it was possible to be. They were united in purpose. They knew no fear.\n\nAnd yet, when Khulan spoke, it was as if he merely vocalised the same thought that they all had running through their minds.\n\n'My Khan,' he ventured, not from any lack of resolve, but because it needed to be asked now, needed to be settled, before pulling away became impossible. 'Can we do this?'\n\nThe Khagan nodded fractionally, acknowledging the question. He pressed his fingers harder together.\n\n'Not if we delay,' he said quietly. 'Another day, maybe two, and the moment is gone. Once he has everything in place, we do not have the strength to break him. It must be while he is consumed with his own conquests. He has the numbers, he has the gifts, he has the power. All we have is what we have always relied on. To be faster.' He smiled darkly. 'See, what can we really do, for this Imperium? Can we sustain it now, bearing its weight on our shoulders? Not the way we were made. But we can kill for it. We can break, we can burn, we can unmake.' The smile disappeared. 'We have done everything they asked of us. We have held their battle line, scored it with our own blood, and it has not been enough. If we are to die here, on a world that has no soul and no open sky to rejoice in, then we will die doing what we were schooled to do.'\n\nHe looked out across the entire chamber, making each khan feel as if he were the only one there, the only one to enjoy this final confidence before the war-horns were sounded and the engines were gunned.\n\n'But get me to my brother,' the Khan said, 'and as eternity is my judge, I shall scour his stench from the universe forever.'\n\nPART TWO\n\nNo certainties\n\nCatching up\n\nThe empty nest\n\nIt took a while for the smell to fade. Oll Persson had experienced many bad things during his unnaturally long life. Some of the worst of them had come recently, during all of that haphazard lurching through space and time. Those encounters blurred into one another, just a procession of ever more lurid scrapes and escapes, never quite anchored in any kind of secure history or steady sense of location, never made coherent or predictable or comprehensible.\n\nThat had always been the fate of the soldier - long periods of boredom, sudden flashes of terror. For Oll, though, his long periods of boredom had lasted centuries, making the recent flash-sequences of terror seem all the more vivid and unmanageable.\n\nAnd yet, for all that, none of the things he'd ever lived through, in"}
{"text":"ion of ever more lurid scrapes and escapes, never quite anchored in any kind of secure history or steady sense of location, never made coherent or predictable or comprehensible.\n\nThat had always been the fate of the soldier - long periods of boredom, sudden flashes of terror. For Oll, though, his long periods of boredom had lasted centuries, making the recent flash-sequences of terror seem all the more vivid and unmanageable.\n\nAnd yet, for all that, none of the things he'd ever lived through, in this war or any other, had been worse than Hatay-Antakya Hive.\n\nHe sat in the lighter's main hold, sweating, feeling feverish, unable to stop his hands from shaking. He knew what ailed him - delayed shock, the accumulation of adrenaline and cortisol, now flooding him with fight-or-flight. Or maybe just an ordinary sort of breakdown. He was overdue one. In the paradise-hive itself he'd been fighting so hard to stay alive, to stay clear of those sickly-sweet nightmare gardens, that collapsing hadn't been an option. Now the consequences were catching up with him, and collapsing felt like a very likely option indeed. He could still smell it, on his clothes, on his skin, his hair.\n\nBut he couldn't let it take him over. Not yet. In a few days, perhaps, he could give in, finally seek some kind of a way out. Now, though, he was closer than ever to being where he had to be. It was all coming together.\n\nJust a little longer, Ollanius, he told himself. You can fall apart when we get there, if you want. For now, you have strangers with you. Complete strangers. Don't make a scene, not in front of them.\n\nHe tried not to. He kept his head up. He sweated, and swallowed hard, but he didn't pass out.\n\nZybes was in a bad way, too. He'd started to rock, very slowly, his hands clasped around his ankles, the back of his head bumping against the hold's inner wall. Katt was morose - suspicious, Oll guessed, of the new people they'd taken with them. Graft, of course, was oblivious to it all. Krank, though, looked semi-destroyed, with his external hard shell still, but the emptiness inside evident. He'd miss Rane. They all would.\n\nAnd then there were the newcomers. Leetu, the prototype Space Marine John had taken up with. Oll had recognised Erda's old bodyguard the instant he'd laid eyes on him, despite the long passage of time since the two of them had properly spoken. Very strange, to be in such close proximity again. Leetu, for his part, took it all in his stride.\n\nThe final two were the strangest of all. The sorceress called Actae, who had appeared like some kind of summoned djinn just when it looked like they might never get out of Hatay-Antakya at all, and her companion, the one who called himself Alpharius. Unlike the rest of the group, those two seemed to know where they were going. They seemed like they had a plan.\n\nThough maybe that was just bluster - Oll had learned the hard way that those who seemed most clearly in control of things were often the ones with the shakiest grip. Except for Him, of course. He'd always known exactly where He was going.\n\nOll coughed, clenched his fists hard, tried to clear his mind. Survival had been achieved. They had to work out what to do now.\n\nSo he just said that out loud. You had to start somewhere.\n\n'What do we do now?' he said.\n\nKrank didn't look up. Katt looked away, disgusted. Actae laughed, though not unkindly.\n\n'Your friend's the one piloting this thing,' she said. 'Maybe ask him.'\n\n'He's just getting us the hell away,' Oll said. 'When we next put down, he'll ask me the same question. I'm canvassing opinions.'\n\n'We all know where we're going,' Katt said sullenly. 'Where we've been going since Calth. The Palace.'\n\nZybes nodded. 'The Palace,' he mumbled.\n\n'Are we, though?' said Oll, worried about Zybes but having to ignore it for now. 'I mean, what are we planning? Just to show up? Say hello? See if they can squeeze in a few more combatants and find something useful for us all to do?'\n\n'You only need to be there,' said Actae. 'At least, that's what I believe. The scattered fellowship, coming together just as the sun goes down on it all.'\n\nOll snorted. 'But I didn't want any part of it. John can be persuasive, when he has a mind to be, and even he's flying blind. Now we're running short of time.' He ruffled up his hair. It still stank of that awful perfume. 'So let's start with the basics - who are you, why are you here, and who is your travelling companion, and why is he?'\n\n'I am Al-' the Space Marine started.\n\n'Don't even think of saying that again, or so help me I'll open the bloody doors and kill us all,' snapped Oll.\n\n'He's the last remnant of an old play,' said Actae calmly. She adjusted position against the metal of the bench she sat on, her bony body making her long dress pool. 'Sent to Terra to keep an eye on things for his master. Our paths crossed, and since then we've made common cause.'\n\n'To push the old Cabal line again?' asked Oll sceptically.\n\n'No, that thread was cut,' said Alpharius. 'Orders are always liable to change. My current duty is to take the lady to where she wishes to go.\n\n'The Palace,' said Katt again, just as irritably.\n\n'Of course,' said Actae.\n\n'But why?' asked Oll. 'And why make so sure to bring us with you?'\n\n'Because I learned that there are no certainties in this drama, only probabilities,' said Actae. 'If I knew what I had to do, and how, then I'd be doing it. But here's the thing. There are archetypes here. Certain kinds of people. Some very powerful' - she looked at Katt - 'and some very basic' - she looked at Graft. 'We have, in this flyer, a snapshot. Something pulled together by fate, randomly, but still catching all the basic categories. We have women, men, states in between. We have a servitor, a farmer, a psyker, a soldier, a Perpetual, a Space Marine... you see what I'm getting at?'\n\n'Not really.'\n\n'That it's not an accident. That it's a summoning. A bringing-together.'\n\n'By who?'\n\n'I don't know.' She smiled, and rolled her unseeing eyes. 'Really, I don't. It doesn't help much, living and dying and living again, to make the best kind of sense of this. You just have to guess what's going on, most of the time.' Her expression became serious again. 'But some of you have been active, like John. Like me. Others have been unwilling, or caught up in the ride. I don't think that matters. What matters is that we're here, heading towards where we need to be. And we all do need to be there - not just you, not just Leetu, but all of us.'\n\n'Because you're hedging your bets,' said Oll.\n\n'Because she's making it up,' said Katt. She looked up, and shot the other woman a vicious stare. 'She doesn't know a damn thing. I can sense it.'\n\nKrank stirred at that, glanced at Katt, then moved a hand gently towards his holster. If this got ugly, he'd be firing at Actae, never mind the fact they were all in a pressurised hold.\n\n'Easy,' said Oll, beginning to get a pounding headache on top of everything else. God, he felt terrible. 'Even if that's true, she's no worse off than any of us.' He gave Katt a weak smile, intended to be supportive, because he sympathised. 'Look, we only followed our nose, didn't we? Hoping that John would have the answers. But guessing, I suppose, that he wouldn't.'\n\n'I was just trying to get away,' Katt said.\n\n'That's how it starts,' Actae said.\n\n'Oh, shut up,' said Katt.\n\n'Fine, enough!' said Oll. He needed to move. He needed to stretch out cramped legs and get some time to think. 'This has started well. But let's take the positives. We're alive. We don't - mostly - want to kill one another. We have some time. And we all want, one way or another, to get back to the Emperor.'\n\n'No, no,' said Actae. 'That's what I've been trying to say - this isn't a simple action. There are many strands in the bind, as they used to say on Colchis.'\n\n'What do you mean?' asked Oll, feeling he was going to regret asking.\n\n'You can go after the Emperor if you need to,' said Actae. 'And I'll help you. I'll get you as close as I can. But that's not why I'm here.'\n\nShe gave him a strange look, then - part triumphant, part haunted.\n\n'Because I'm coming for him,' she said. 'I'm coming for Lupercal.'\n\nSome time later, Oll clambered up from the hold and made his way up the steps to the lighter's cockpit. He wormed through the tiny hatch and managed to twist awkwardly into the co-pilot's seat.\n\nJohn was in the pilot's seat, staring ahead at a darkening sky. It was still daytime, but the northern horizon - the one they were heading towards - was rapidly sinking into a red-tinged shadow. His expression was fixed, his jawline tight. Maybe concentrating on keeping them all in the air was good for him. Maybe it stopped him thinking back to the place they'd escaped from.\n\n'How are you doing?' Oll asked.\n\nA long pause.\n\n'It's not how I thought things would go,' he said eventually.\n\nOll nodded. 'No, me neither.'\n\nThey flew on for a while. Below them, a dry land of dirt dunes and cracked earth sped by, greying as the light failed. The engines whined, struggling as dust hit the intakes.\n\n'So what did you find out?' John asked.\n\n'I don't know what to believe,' Oll said. 'She claims to have been born on Colchis. Then died. Then reborn. Like you.'\n\n'Not any more.'\n\n'She said she's been conscious in the warp.' Oll shook his head. 'I don't know. What does that even mean? How could you check it?'\n\nJohn shrugged. 'She knew where to find us. I'm guessing that wasn't random.'\n\nThen silence again, save for the grind of the engines. It was difficult to talk. Finding words to use - commonplace words, small talk - after what had happened, felt almost improper. And yet Oll didn't know how to progress the other thing, either - the reason they were here, what they had to do next, how they were ever going to stay alive with the meagre resources at their disposal. He was so tired.\n\n'Look, I'm sorry,' he said finally, weakly. 'That I wasn't there, where we agreed to be. And that you ended up in... that plac"}
{"text":"he grind of the engines. It was difficult to talk. Finding words to use - commonplace words, small talk - after what had happened, felt almost improper. And yet Oll didn't know how to progress the other thing, either - the reason they were here, what they had to do next, how they were ever going to stay alive with the meagre resources at their disposal. He was so tired.\n\n'Look, I'm sorry,' he said finally, weakly. 'That I wasn't there, where we agreed to be. And that you ended up in... that place.'\n\nJohn just kept his eyes fixed ahead. 'Not your fault. And you came back.'\n\n'Yeah, but it was-'\n\n'Hell. Yes, it was. In every way. But you came back.' He turned to Oll, and gave him a forced smile. 'And now I know things I'd never have discovered before. Silver linings, eh, Mister Warmaster?'\n\nOll looked at him with concern. Just a sly dig, a way of coping? Or was he losing it now, too, driven over the edge by what he'd seen? 'Maybe I should have told you a long time ago.'\n\n'Maybe.'\n\n'I preferred being a farmer.'\n\n'Yeah, well, we don't always get what we want, do we?'\n\n'I guess not.'\n\nMore silent flying. The sky kept on getting darker. The wind got up, the outer skirts of a storm, blowing right at them, and dust-clumps hit the forward viewer harder.\n\n'She says we were meant to come together,' said Oll, after a while. 'And that we're all archetypes, of one kind or another. A kind of representative sample.'\n\nJohn snorted. 'To plead the case for humanity.'\n\n'Something like that. But whatever she wants, it's not what we want. I don't know what she thinks she's doing, but it involves getting close to Horus.'\n\n'To kill him?'\n\n'Maybe. She's hard to pin down. For the time being, our paths run parallel, and that seems to be enough for her.'\n\n'Well, it's not enough for me.' John's voice became harder. 'I've felt it, now. I never felt it before. I listened to the xenos, and I understood the arguments. The ones about Chaos. But now I've felt it. It's been at me. I'll kill Horus. I'll kill the Emperor. I'll kill all of them, anything, if it gets rid of it.' He glanced back at Oll, his face twisted with fury and grief. 'It's got to go.'\n\n'I don't think it's that simple.'\n\n'It is for me. And I can speak the lingo now, remember? I can do all sorts of things.'\n\nOll didn't like looking at John just then. A long time ago he'd had a nightmare, one involving angels and daemons over a burning world, and it had scared him, but just then John's expression scared him more.\n\n'You need to rest,' was all he said. 'We've been flying for hours.'\n\n'I'm fine.'\n\n'Just another hour or so, and then we put down.'\n\n'Time is short.'\n\nYes, and it had been for as long as he could remember. Oll suddenly recalled it then. They had been being hunted, by something, just on the edge of perception. Every jump they had made, every shift in space and time, it had felt as if that thing had almost caught up with them. Something very dangerous, all right up until the escape from the hive.\n\n'I wonder where it's gone,' he said aloud.\n\n'What?'\n\n'The thing that...' He trailed off. 'Never mind.'\n\nAnd after that, they didn't speak. Oll just watched the dust fly against the panes, the empty lands bled clear of life. It was a long way still. A long time, for something to come up, to make things clear, to give them a solid plan.\n\nBut all the time, while he was trying to work on that, he couldn't shake off the memory.\n\nWhat was it? he thought. And where has it gone?\n\nOnce they had all left, the place felt too big again, too empty. An old curse for mothers. Not that she considered herself one any longer, but still. It brought back memories, and for a very short time her isolated hold-out had felt a little more connected to things again.\n\nNow she watched her attendants. Some of them were dancing, ringing the fire, throwing long shadows across the sand. Above them all, the great circles of quartz glittered under the stars.\n\nIt was a rare break in the weather. For days, sandstorms had boomed in from the east, black-hearted and sour-smelling. She'd wrapped up during the onslaught, kept her head down, lashed the cloth coverings more tightly to their poles and made the best of it. The storms made her think of John, who had come there and stirred everything up again, making her relive things, remember things, and then had been off again, into the eye of the oncoming turmoil, taking Leetu with him, plus a great deal more besides.\n\nShe knew the break would not last. Given what was going on, it might be the final time she saw clear stars for a very long while, and so she sat on the bare rock and looked up at them. Their light was ancient. Anything reaching her now had set off on its journey long before she was born, before she'd done any of the things she'd done, and yet it was still out there - out there - that the intervention had been made to happen. The results of that scattering were all now back on Terra in order to raise their awful havoc, but still the clear light of those home systems burned up out of the past, as if nothing had ever taken place there or ever would do.\n\nShe had almost forgotten it all again, perhaps deliberately, until John had come back. And now she could think of nothing else. What she'd done. What she'd had to do.\n\nAfter another hour or so, the fire burned down. The shadows merged into the dry, cool darkness of the night, and her people slipped off to their homes. She herself lingered longest, long legs pulled up in front of her, trying to set all the old memories into their correct order.\n\nEventually, as a bloody moon rose over the high dunes, she stirred herself, got up and padded back to her stone lodge. She ducked under the low lintel, poured water from a ewer into a bowl and splashed it over her face. She moved towards the innermost chamber and unwound her cowl, pushing her way through silk curtains. Only a single candle burned inside, the wax pooling and making the flame sway.\n\nShe sat on her low bed, resting her head against the cedar frame and feeling the wooden slats flex under her. The room was warm still, smelling of agarwood, cloaked in shadows that danced to the jerk of the single flame.\n\nShe reached out to snuff the wick, leaned back and closed her eyes, resting clasped hands lightly in her lap. As she drifted into sleep, all she could hear was the faint snap and flap of the cloth awnings outside, the rustle of the grass as the night wind moved through it, the sound of her own steady, deep breathing.\n\nUntil the words uncoiled out of the darkness, making her eyes snap open.\n\n'Hello, grandmother,' said Erebus, standing at the foot of the bed. 'I think you and I need to talk.'\n\nErebus confronts Erda.\n\nDeathboxes\n\nSiegemaster\n\nRiding out\n\nHe woke with a start. Kaska moved immediately, his head still foggy but with the old reactions just about intact, swinging down from the bunk and shouting out to the rest of the crew to get themselves together. The chimes were going off.\n\nThe chamber was large, cold, mostly unlit and smelling of hundreds of bodies stuffed up against one another. The floor was lost in a jumble of kitbags and crumpled uniforms. Triple bunk-units had been arranged in long rows. A dorm-chamber in a defence bastion looked much the same wherever it was, though this one was shabbier than most, with a long crack running up the western wall. Kaska guessed that they were a long way underground, though since arriving he'd not been able to confirm that. Underground, overground, it made little difference now that the sky was black and the earth was black and everything was coated in muck - you were fighting in darkness, wherever you ended up.\n\nStill, at least he knew their location now - the Colossi Gate, out so far east that he'd assumed nothing remained there at all but bones and bloodstains. It turned out he was wrong about that. A Legion was there. A whole one, or at least what remained of a whole one after seven years of unbroken fighting. Once he'd found that out, he'd got briefly excited. Jandev had been right, it looked like - a counter-offensive, something to get the blood up again and stop feeling so damned mopey about everything. Perhaps that was why everything had been so stretched back beyond Saturnine - command had been planning for this, ready to take ground again, open a new flank for the enemy to deal with.\n\nSince then, though, he'd had the briefings. A succession of V Legion warriors had come to speak to the assembled tank commanders, every time a different one. They'd all looked properly battered, with dented armour plates and bruised faces. They were polite, though, bowing to the assembled troops before getting down to business. It became apparent that this wasn't about pushing the enemy back at all, not across the main fronts anyway. It transpired that the manpower for that had gone long ago. This was about taking the Lion's Gate space port, driving out the occupiers and getting the orbital guns back in operation, and then holding the place for as long as they could. Even if they achieved the first of those things, they'd be surrounded, cut off from any possible resupply and forced to dig in against an enemy who seemed to command virtually infinite numbers. And that was the one thing that you didn't try to do, with tanks. They were thirsty, temperamental beasts. If you couldn't keep them fuelled, keep them supplied with shells, repair their damaged parts when they blew, then you were basically living inside a slow-moving coffin.\n\nAnd of all the possible tanks to be stuck in, a Leman Russ was probably the worst. People spoke of it as the Pride of the Imperium, the greatest battle tank in human history, the mainstay of the Great Crusade.\n\nWas it shit. A Leman Russ was a rolling deathtrap. Its tall profile was so notoriously awful that no commander ever wanted to be squadron leader - the only thing big enough to shield a Leman Russ during operations was another Leman Russ, so better to keep the command unit ahead of you for "}
{"text":"nd of all the possible tanks to be stuck in, a Leman Russ was probably the worst. People spoke of it as the Pride of the Imperium, the greatest battle tank in human history, the mainstay of the Great Crusade.\n\nWas it shit. A Leman Russ was a rolling deathtrap. Its tall profile was so notoriously awful that no commander ever wanted to be squadron leader - the only thing big enough to shield a Leman Russ during operations was another Leman Russ, so better to keep the command unit ahead of you for as long as you could. Its fragile tracks were exposed and its armour was a mess of easy-to-hit vertical planes. The standard pattern sponson-bulges just presented another flat edge to destroy, another reason to be glad not to have them. The interior was noisy and prone to bursting into flames whenever a loader coughed too loudly. And, if you were truly unlucky enough to have those sponsons, there was only one escape hatch, right at the top of the main turret, and so the chances of getting out alive in case of all-too-likely disaster were practically zero.\n\nNo, whoever had designed the Leman Russ - Kaska had always assumed it wasn't actually the primarch of the VI - was a moron. Or a sadist. Or both. The only things it had going for it were cheapness, mechanical reliability and a certain rugged survivability in numbers. The design was so brutally simple that the Imperium was able to churn them out by the million. It mattered less that each individual unit was a study in self-harm when you could overwhelm a battlefield with hundreds of them. And a front-mounted lascannon at least could keep firing as long as its power packs held a charge, which made running out of shells somewhat less of a disaster.\n\nStill, all in all, the crews had few illusions about the tanks they rode into war. Deathboxes, they were called, and homewreckers, and other, earthier, names too. Infantry troopers would occasionally look askance at them, jealous of all that thick armour they had around them, but a Leman Russ tanker knew how fragile it all was really, and how going out to a las-blast was far preferable to being burned alive or buried under a wall of mud or suffocated by trapped engine smoke.\n\nThe chimes kept on sounding. Jandev was pulling on his jacket, Vosch trying to wake up, Merck downing a canister of last night's water. Dresi just got ready quietly, making no eye contact. Kaska had really meant to speak to her properly, try to get to know her, but it was too late now, for this was it, this was the push, the first engagement of the optimistically named First Terran Armoured.\n\n'Moving, people,' he barked, reaching for his helmet and kitbag, blinking the last of the scant sleep from his eyes. 'You know the drill. Vosch, get that damned skinny arse in motion. Throne, where're my boots?'\n\nThe entire chamber was doing the same thing. Hundreds of crews, blearily getting their act together, heading for the elevators and the stairways, trying to remember where their unit was stowed, what their orders were, what their new squadron designation was and where they were meant to be going. All the while, the chimes kept blaring - chang, chang, chang - making it harder to think straight.\n\nKaska and the Aika 73 crew jostled and bustled with the rest of them down to the holding levels. As they went, the walls trembled harder than ever, showering them with dust. For a moment, he thought that the fortress must be taking a real pounding - it had been under bombardment ever since they'd arrived - but then he realised what was going on. The remaining Colossi guns were going all out, chewing through the last of their ammunition, hurling everything they had left out at the wasteland beyond the walls. By the time they were done, there would be nothing left in the feeder-chambers. This was the last function they would ever perform, no longer used carefully to blunt incoming assaults, but instead employed to flatten as much as possible between the fortress and the target. The barrage must have been going on for hours already, while they had all been grabbing what rest they could. Kaska had a wary respect for artillery operators. It was a skilled profession, requiring mastery of both abstract geometry and the human-scale vagaries of the battlefield. It they did their job right, the advance would be possible. If they screwed up, the tanks would find themselves running into intact gunlines quickly, and that would get messy.\n\nAs everything shook and boomed around them, they jogged their way down to the holding chambers, the caverns at the very base of the Colossi outer wall sections, the ones requisitioned weeks ago and cleared out and fitted for their new purpose. They were stuffed with vehicles, hundreds and hundreds apiece, all ranked up and fuelled and serviced and ready for action. The air filters were already churning in expectation of thousands of dirty promethium engines coughing into life - waiting for the orders to be roared out, for the regimental pennants to be hoisted on the squadron lead units, for the tracks to grind into motion.\n\nAs Kaska ran out along the lines, counting down the hull numbers, he took a brief moment, just one, to guess how many units had been assembled in this one holding chamber. He didn't get very far. It was a lot. A huge amount. All the White Scars officers, with their quiet voices and careful tactical run-downs, had been so diffident in the briefings, but this was clearly a serious endeavour, something that serious people had been working on for a long time. He wondered how high up it went. He wondered if the Emperor Himself, beloved by all, could have had something to do with it. Maybe this was something, after all, to get excited about. Maybe this was something that might turn the tide.\n\nSteady, now. Steady. It hadn't even started yet. Kaska had been part of enough catastrophes and balls-ups in his time not to get carried away. Once things were in motion, the mud thrown up and the smoke gusting into your sights, that's when it all started to go wrong. Stay calm, stay focused. Keep it together.\n\nHe reached the tank. Just as always, he smacked its flank before clambering up to the top turret.\n\n'For the Emperor!' he shouted.\n\n'For His people!' the crew echoed, getting ready to mount up. All around them, the rest of the crews were doing the same - their little pre-combat rituals, their final checks.\n\nJandev and Dresi got in first, clambering in through the side hatches and worming down into the innards - Dresi to the drive controls, Jandev to the lascannon station. Vosch and Merck were next, taking positions up in the turret at the main gun mechanism. Kaska was last, the only one to keep his head and shoulders above the line of the open hatch. He snapped his helmet on, taking care of the seals at his collar. They had been insistent about that, in all the briefings. Full tox protocol, all times. All helmets on, all filters sealed, all hatches down. He'd do that the instant they were out of the gates. For now, though, possibly for the last time in a while, he'd keep his head up, the hatch open. He wanted to see this kick off with his own eyes.\n\nAll around him, menials and servitors were doing what they had to do, finalising the squadrons for exit. Ahead of them, three hundred metres away, the mighty external doors were still down. The deck trembled as the guns far above kept on spewing out shells. One by one, the tank engines engaged, choking out plumes of black smoke. The chimes kept on yammering, the last of the crews raced to their units, the forward lumens flicked on.\n\n'Status,' Kaska voxed to the crew, taking it all in.\n\n'Lascannon powered,' Jandev replied coolly. 'Feed levels adequate.'\n\n'All good from me,' Vosch replied, her face clamped in readiness over the main gun's sights.\n\n'Drives engaged,' Dresi said. 'Spirit is compliant.'\n\nMerck chuckled to himself. 'Five minutes,' he said to himself. 'We'll last five minutes.'\n\n'Stow that,' snapped Kaska. 'This is His work. That goes for all of you. His work. Let's see it out.'\n\nThen, with a chilling suddenness, the guns stopped firing. Only when they'd ceased did Kaska realise how loud they had been. The vast chamber became ominously quieter, the slamming thunder-beat replaced by the lower-pitched snarl of hundreds of engines.\n\nKaska felt his stomach twinge. His palms tingled, and he gripped the handholds tighter. For what seemed like an age, the entire space remained frozen - columns of tanks, all idling, all static, locked underground, as if shackled on leashes.\n\nThis had to start now. This had to get going. Everyone was keyed up for it, prepped and ready. If they waited, they'd die here, confined, caged like animals. And still the doors stayed down, sealing them in, burying them, holding them back.\n\nHold your nerve, he told himself. Cold, calm, ready.\n\nWhen the door locks boomed open, it made him start. The echoes of the mighty bolt-shafts slamming back into their channels rang around the hall. Then the giant blast screens started to slide upwards, grinding in their grooves, accompanied by the clanking of enormous chain-runs. The chimes ceased, and the engine tones changed, revving up to drive. Gusts of hot wind flooded in through the widened gaps, making the smog plumes twist and writhe. Far ahead, Kaska caught his first view of the outside world for several days.\n\nIt was night. It was always night on Terra, now - a pitch-black veil lit only by flame and mortar-blast, a hellscape of tortured earth and fire.\n\nThe order came over the comm-box, crackling with interference already.\n\nFull advance. Full advance. The Khan and the Emperor guide you.\n\nThe cascade of acceleration started from the lead units, rippling down the columns as the big Baneblades and Hellhammers rocked their way off the ramps and out into the burning murk. It felt like it took forever to reach Aika 73, part of 16th Squadron, Sixth Battalion, but then the moment came, and they were trundling with the rest, pickin"}
{"text":"ured earth and fire.\n\nThe order came over the comm-box, crackling with interference already.\n\nFull advance. Full advance. The Khan and the Emperor guide you.\n\nThe cascade of acceleration started from the lead units, rippling down the columns as the big Baneblades and Hellhammers rocked their way off the ramps and out into the burning murk. It felt like it took forever to reach Aika 73, part of 16th Squadron, Sixth Battalion, but then the moment came, and they were trundling with the rest, picking up speed, bouncing and swaying towards the strip of ink-black sky ahead. Kaska stayed aloft even as the other commanders slipped down inside their armour, slamming the hatches and trusting to their periscopes and augur lenses.\n\nSo when they emerged into the open again, for just a few moments, he saw it all with his own eyes, filtered only by the freshly cleaned lenses on his helmet. He looked up over his shoulder, and saw the towering walls of Colossi stretch up into the night behind them, gouged and cracked but still standing. He looked ahead and saw the expanse of ruins stretch away into the distance, the empty skeletons of once mighty hive spires and hab-clusters, some burning, most dead and cold. He saw the contrails of the first Legion atmospherics taking off, ready to launch the bombing raids that would mop up what the big guns had missed. He saw the starbursts of explosions, the rippling of firelines, the broken silhouette of the distant Anterior Wall, the aurora of the orbital aegis reflected in the acres of shattered glass and steel. Around him, the press of tanks was so great that it looked as if the ground beneath them had started to roll forwards, gathering itself up in a tidal carpet of iron and promethium, one that would crash and smash its way towards the ends of the earth itself.\n\nBut then, and most imposing of all, just on the edge of sight, he saw the mountain-sweep of the Lion's Gate space port, dark as the night around it, shrouded in giant boiling clouds of dust and grime, its flanks lit with crackling threads of lightning, its innards glowing with a sickly light, its twisted spires dominating the north-eastern horizon and stretching high into the heavens above.\n\nSo far away. So immense. So... horrific.\n\nKaska dropped down, sliding into his harness and pulling the hatch after him. The circle of metal shut with a clang, and he swivelled to bring up the tactical lens and get the periscope sights close. The familiar sounds and smells of the tank's tiny world immediately enveloped him. He found himself breathing a little too quickly, his heart racing. It would have been better not to lay eyes on it, not until he absolutely had to.\n\n'Here we go, then,' said Vosch. She shot him a tense smile. 'Emperor be with us.'\n\nKaska smiled back, just as tensely. 'No doubt about it, corporal,' he said. 'No doubt at all.'\n\nGremus Kalgaro made his way steadily up the winding stairs, his heavy boots sinking into the carpet of grime on the steps. He'd trudged kilometres already, working his way from one chamber to the other, tracing a meandering path through the labyrinthine innards of the space port. Its vastness was striking, even on a planet dominated by the absurdly outsized. The Legion was not close to filling it properly. Even in those spaces where they were gathered in numbers, the emptiness yawned away above and below, echoing dankly. Some of the dry-docks still had the carcasses of void-going craft in their maintenance cradles, half-finished and empty, ready to be propelled up by the elevator shunts to the take-off pads. It was a world within a world, a procession of gigantic assembly halls and service pits, all linked by immense shafts and transit-tubes. It would have been riotous, once - filled with the jarring crash and whine of machinery, the boom of engines kindling, the grind of lifters and servitor-rigs. Now it was quiet, almost dormant, inhabited by the slow shuffle of Legion warriors and their creatures, all grimly filing into their service areas for retooling and re-equipping. The edges had been softened by growths, by creeping moulds, by the loops of black-veined creepers, muffling it all, sinking it into a hot, perspiring somnolence.\n\nKalgaro wasn't the only one to notice how much the place now felt like Barbarus. The mists had started to slink up through the ventilation grilles, thick as milk. The tang of the air had become tarter, suffused with the poisons they had brought with them. At times, when at the base of one of the many multi-level shafts leading up into the heights, Kalgaro would look up and see how the toxins clustered in clouds, thickening steadily with altitude. And then he would remember how it was on the home world, and how they would all stare up at the peaks, both fearing and desiring them. Some vestige of those old emotions must have been imprinted on him, somewhere. He still liked to keep his feet on the ground whenever he could. He still breathed more carefully when a long way up, as if his lung muscles couldn't quite believe that it was possible.\n\nHe shook his head in irritation. Stupid, to keep those old twitches and reflexes. They needed to move on. Forget about the old nightmares. Still, they followed them around now, the ancestral bad dreams, like kicked curs coming back to the fireside.\n\nKalgaro reached his destination, the main observation tower on the western wall-edge. As he lumbered into the command chamber, four Unbroken saluted. A few dozen Legion menials worked away at their augur stations, their uniforms so filthy that they were barely indistinguishable from caked dirt on pale flesh. They were all very sick now, encrusted with sores and lesions, though it didn't seem to hamper them much.\n\n'You asked for me?' Kalgaro said, addressing the sergeant in command.\n\n'You should see this, Siegemaster,' said the sergeant, an old Barbaran called Gurgana Dhukh. He gestured at a large circular lens, clouded and greasy but still functional. Points of light were creeping across it, all streaming from positions concentrated to the south-west. Kalgaro screwed his eyes up, trying to make sense of the vague phosphor-blips.\n\n'Another malfunction?' Kalgaro asked.\n\nDhukh shook his head. 'Checked several feeds. Those are movement indicators.'\n\nKalgaro clumped over to a larger-range cartographic unit, and activated the scanners. He looked at them for a while, then checked the geo-locators. 'They had fallen back,' he murmured.\n\n'Yes, they had. It seemed.'\n\nKalgaro found himself smiling. The more he studied the signals, the more the picture was confirmed. The White Scars hadn't gone anywhere, and now they were out in the open again, streaming towards the space port, a coordinated spearhead that was already burning swiftly through the wastelands. 'A moment to be thankful,' he said. 'Our friends are still with us.'\n\nHe turned from the unit and began to give orders.\n\n'Signal the primarch's equerry - ensure this reaches him. Order mobilisation of all defence forces and activation of reserves. Power up the wall guns and get me a readiness report on the flyers - if we have any useable yet they'll be needed immediately.'\n\nMenials scurried to comply, using the comms-boxes. Two of the Unbroken headed off for the transit shafts to ensure that in-person orders were also delivered.\n\nDhukh, though, looked uncertain. 'There's no... plan,' he said. 'No defensive plan. We were due to move out again, the squads are still being refitted, they'll be-'\n\nKalgaro laughed, going back to a close-range lens and adjusting the gain-columns. 'This is better, sergeant,' he said good-naturedly. 'Much better. The squads won't need any encouragement - these are godless Chogorian bastards. We didn't finish them at Catullus, so we'll do it here.'\n\nTrue, things had been bad at Catullus, and back then he'd been furious. Oaths had been sworn after that, ones that he'd fully intended to see through. And he would see them through still, with all his strength, it was just that now it would be something to relish, an act of sacred glorification.\n\nDhukh bowed. 'It will be done.'\n\n'And signal the fleet,' Kalgaro ordered, starting on his calculations. 'We've nothing of any importance on that stretch. Request orbital battery, coordinates to follow. We'll blast them to scrap before they're halfway across.'\n\nHe couldn't stifle the grin. It kept on growing.\n\n'After that, just watch,' he said, zooming the sensors in. 'I promise you, it'll be worth it.'\n\nThe Brotherhood of the Storm broke from cover as the blast doors lifted. All mounted on speeders - Kyzagans, Javelins, Shamshirs - the warriors streaked out from the hangars in tight arrow formation, staying low against the ground and pouring on the speed.\n\nAhead of them, the dust clouds of the tank columns blurred the dark line between earth and sky. The last of the artillery strikes slammed home, pulverising targets kilometres ahead. Shiban drove clean through the monolithic smoke plumes, leaving long trails of black behind him.\n\nHe had walked across this land, just days ago, though it might as well have been another lifetime. He remembered the last of the weak sunlight across those acrid pools, the ghosts of the wastes. He remembered the child. He wondered, once again, what had happened to him. And that made him think of Katsuhiro. Maybe they were both dead. Or maybe they had made it back inside the Inner Palace walls, where the last shreds of hope clustered.\n\nHe recognised nothing of the terrain now. It was a lost place, a haunt of daemons, its buildings merely grave markers over infinite killing fields. The only creatures abroad in those smoke-choked relics were the damned and the twisted, limping and shrieking under a moonless night.\n\n'Targets sighted,' he voxed to his warriors, maintaining the punishing rate of speed. The blasted world raced by, blurred into stretched lines. 'Disperse for clearance.'\n\nThe speeder squadrons split up, angling and diving through the empty habs and sp"}
{"text":"in now. It was a lost place, a haunt of daemons, its buildings merely grave markers over infinite killing fields. The only creatures abroad in those smoke-choked relics were the damned and the twisted, limping and shrieking under a moonless night.\n\n'Targets sighted,' he voxed to his warriors, maintaining the punishing rate of speed. The blasted world raced by, blurred into stretched lines. 'Disperse for clearance.'\n\nThe speeder squadrons split up, angling and diving through the empty habs and spires. They flew past the vanguards of the armoured columns and shot clear of their rumbling stink and fume. Warning runes flashed across every helm, picking up threats in the debris. The pilots opened fire, spraying bolt-shells and las-bursts into the gloom, flushing out traitor infantry caught in the open and punching them apart.\n\n'Ahead-right,' announced Chakaja, the Stormseer attached to Shiban's brotherhood, riding near the spearpoint alongside Yiman. 'Obstacle for the ground armour.'\n\nChakaja was not a great weather-worker, not like Naranbaatar or Yesugei, but his beyond-sight pierced a fraction ahead of time's veil, giving faint glimpses of possible futures. In these kind of actions, that contribution was priceless.\n\n'Down low,' ordered Shiban, dropping hard. 'Shi'ir pattern - clear it out.'\n\nHis squadron skimmed down another metre, splitting up, still burning along. Every warrior pulled out two frag-charges. They sped down the long lane between two walls of empty rockcrete, skating over what had once been an asphalt transitway, ignoring the sporadic las-fire that spat and whistled past them.\n\n'Here,' said Chakaja.\n\nThe warriors released the charges in a cascade pattern, hurled from the barrelling speeders every few metres. As the charges struck the buried minefield below, the earth erupted into a bloom of liquid fire and earth-clots. Every sunken mine was caught, blown into plasma-bursts that threw soil and rockcrete high up against the glassless windows of the habs on either side.\n\n'More signals ahead,' Yiman said calmly, driving his Shamshir through the whirls of flying gravel. 'Defence point.'\n\n'Take it out,' Shiban commanded, and the speeders instantly swerved into a wide formation, spread across the full width of the chasm. 'Jerun, Temuhan - this one is yours.'\n\nFour missiles streaked out from two speeders, twisting away towards the distant target - an old defence bunker sat at the base of a derelict triumphal column. Each missile smacked home, shattering the rockcrete bulkheads and arrowing into the chambers beyond. The interior ballooned with smoke, and the surviving defenders spilled out, disorientated and firing blind. The speeders switched to assault cannons, crunching through both terrain and infantry in a splatter of hard rounds.\n\n'Ahead now,' ordered Shiban, lifting the nose of his Shamshir and gunning to blaze clean over the destroyed bunker.\n\n'Hold, my khan,' came Chakaja's voice over the comm. 'Something... dangerous.'\n\n'Belay - back out!' Shiban cried, hauling his jetbike sharply upward and round.\n\nThe rest of the squadron responded instantly, slamming on air brakes and jerking their mounts back into tight hairpins. The entire formation lifted, hovering on cushions of superheated air and grav-buffers. More las-fire speckled in at them, the sources swiftly despatched by swivelling outriders.\n\n'What did you-' Yiman started.\n\nHe never finished. From five hundred metres ahead, the very location they would have been travelling through had they kept on speeding, the air itself trembled. The cloud banks shuddered, the dust kicked up, and the atmosphere split apart.\n\nA twenty-metre-wide column of pure destruction, rippling and ablaze, crunched down from the heavens, drilling like a thrown spear, shooting straight through the heart of a gutted hive spire and delving deep into the foundations below. The blinding impact wave shot outward, dashed with rubble and tumbling hunks of plasteel, crashing through everything in its path, demolishing hab walls and blowing through arches.\n\nMore las-columns slammed down beyond that one, pulverising and burning, turning the entire sector into a mess of toppling balustrades and imploding wall sections.\n\n'Away, away!' Shiban roared, hauling his jetbike away from the rising dust cloud.\n\n'Orbital strikes,' said Yiman grimly, following suit. 'Already?'\n\nThe squadrons scattered, running ahead of the overlapping blast waves.\n\n'So it seems,' Shiban replied. 'Signal command.'\n\n'I think they're aware,' said Yiman, gesturing back the way they had come.\n\nAll across the western horizon, the sky was on fire too - not the fire of mortars or incendiaries or plasma shafts, but a sky-born flame, thundering along in a horizontal line four and a half kilometres up, as if the racing clouds had been unzipped and torn apart by a lateral sword-thrust. Plumes roiled and twisted around the rupture, spilling out in a steaming froth, splaying into fronds that flickered and danced with friction lightning. Peals of artificial thunder cracked across the vista, underpinned by a roar like the seas of all worlds coming in at once. The cityscape beyond was obscured behind that fiery shadow, blanked off by the kilometres-wide advance that devoured all else, suspended on sun-red drives, hanging impossibly low for its size and yet still moving, still grinding towards them, wreathed in sparks and flares and gouts that stretched unbroken as far as the eye could see.\n\nAhead of the looming orbital plate came its support atmospherics, wheeling out of the inferno, their turbines whining at full tilt to stay clear of the lethal turbulence. And below them, the tanks still sped onwards, crashing along the attack-lanes cleared for them by the Legion outriders, supported by low-hovering gunships with heavy infantry squads poised to drop.\n\n'So all is committed now,' Shiban murmured, allowing himself just a moment to appreciate what had been set into motion. 'Let us see how far it takes us.'\n\nThen he pulled his jetbike around, powered up the drives again and made to plunge around the flaring mass of las-beams. Already more signals were clustering on the edge of his augur range, ones that would slow the ground advance if not eliminated quickly.\n\n'Onward!' he roared, gunning back up to full speed. 'Keep it moving! Evade that las-fire, but keep it moving!'\n\nHunted\n\nThe lesson\n\nContraction\n\nNo, no. Not that - that was the mistake. Find a hole, furnish it, hunker down. When you ran, that was when they got you, out in the open. He'd moved enough for the moment, leaving his false stink in every corner, letting them believe he was in a hundred different places within the Palace, and now he had this place, the one he'd been zeroing in on from the very start, the one where he'd stitch his potions together.\n\nThere were a thousand laboratoria in this city, and had been since the very start. Other cities had churches or war memorials, but the Emperor's home ground had temples to science, the great hope of the species. Fo had to hand it to the old man - that had been about as good a strategy as any other, given what He had had in mind. Only, you had to be sure that it was the right kind of science. The Emperor had always been obsessed with the stuff of biology, the helices and the cell cultures. Even before all that trouble with the abominable intelligences, the thing that had poisoned humanity against thinking silicon forever, it had been all about the petri dishes and the centrifuges with Him - the messy stuff, the liquids and the organs and the blood cultures.\n\nFo had occasionally wondered why. For sure, the old man had used His gene-meddling nous to conquer a galaxy. The programme had been impressive, in its own brutal sort of way. Maybe no one else could have done it. It certainly showed the power of what He'd been up to, closeted in those underground facilities for so many years with the ragtag gaggle of eccentrics He'd surrounded Himself with. It showed just what could be done with a few clever geneticists and some high-grade manufacturing facilities, plus an infinite slice of self-belief.\n\nBut maybe it had been limited, all the same. Maybe some avenues had been closed down too early. A human could be made into a fearsome thing by that route, but unreliably, as had been amply demonstrated. Better, perhaps, if you were truly determined to start over, to do away with the messy stuff altogether. The grey matter. The wobbly flesh and the faulty heart valves.\n\nFo suspected, though, that deep down the Emperor was something of a sentimentalist. There were some bridges He wouldn't cross, even if He could have done, because certain aspects of His programme were just the way they were. He had wanted His Imperium of Eternity to be inherited by beings that looked like He had done, once; that talked like He had done, that could share a joke or enjoy a glass of wine. Otherwise, what was the point? If you could build something indestructible, something incorruptible, but no longer human, then why were you doing it? The whole point was survival of the kind, of the species, of us.\n\nAnd even then, He'd gone too far. A Space Marine was an abomination of its own kind. A primarch a hundred times worse. Variety replaced with uniformity. Interesting weakness with glass-eyed strength. Possibility with uneventfulness. That was why He had to be stopped, somehow, before this entire gaudy shitshow developed so much momentum that no machinery ever conceived of could stop it. Perhaps that point had already been reached. Or perhaps this was when he, Basilio Fo, would have to step up and try to restore some colour to a rapidly greying universe.\n\nAnd he could do it. It was possible. He looked down now at the long sterile bench in front of him, and saw the ingredients ready, all laid out.\n\nThe lab was some distance underground, like all the high security ones were. It had once housed thousands of workers. Those were gone now, fleeing in panic before the enemy"}
{"text":"ld stop it. Perhaps that point had already been reached. Or perhaps this was when he, Basilio Fo, would have to step up and try to restore some colour to a rapidly greying universe.\n\nAnd he could do it. It was possible. He looked down now at the long sterile bench in front of him, and saw the ingredients ready, all laid out.\n\nThe lab was some distance underground, like all the high security ones were. It had once housed thousands of workers. Those were gone now, fleeing in panic before the enemy advance - as if running a few kilometres further in would save them. The desks were overturned, the data-slates cracked and discarded. It hadn't been much trouble to gain entry, to work his way down, to locate the cold storage and the chem-vats and the splice-engines. None of that should have been left unguarded. At the very least it should have been destroyed, in case the enemy got its sweaty hands on it all, because it was all still good, useful stuff.\n\nBut everyone was terribly ground-down right now. Everyone was febrile, facing up to their own mortality, and that made their judgement poor. It had been the same with that girl in the medicae station. Even when he'd told her that she'd be helping out in a just cause, a noble cause, it hadn't stopped her crying about it. He'd been perfectly true to his word on that, despite her lamentable lack of vision - it wasn't his fault that the Imperium made so much use of retinal scanners and blood-cyclers on its door locks, and he could hardly go around leaving his own biomarkers out there.\n\nNow, to business. He had to go fast. No room for mistakes now, not when the city was being demolished a little more with every passing second. If all his boasts to Amon were not to be for nothing, then this had to be done right.\n\nHe powered up the cyclers again, linking up the backup generators. He opened up the bioscopes and the mainline scanners, and got them to work. He emptied his bag of all the things he'd taken from the dozen places he'd needed to call at before this one, then rummaged around in the cold storage for more. He cranked up the lone cogitator with the power that he needed, and began to instruct its tetchy machine-spirit in new ways of crunching the runes.\n\nProof of concept, that was all. Something to take with him, to buy him safety. It wasn't easy. He found himself sweating. He could hear artillery the whole time, some way up but still resonating down the shafts and the tunnels. It reminded him of every time he'd ever been stuck in a city about to fall to barbarians - more times than he liked to admit - and it never got any better.\n\nHe shuffled over to the next close-viewer down, and turned on the zoom lens. He bent over the tube, and started to assess how his cultures were doing. Just as hoped for, he could see the cells dividing, bifurcating, splitting up into the spread-patterns he recognised from those first baby steps on much-lamented Velich Tarn.\n\nIt was working again. He was a genius.\n\nBut then he heard, from a long way off and some distance above, a crunch of ceramite on glass. He'd heard that noise too often as well. They were never particularly subtle, the Children of Astarte.\n\nHis heart skipped. Slowly, very slowly, he lifted his head from the viewer. He glanced sidelong, peering down the bench towards the lab's entrance, a hundred metres off in the gloom. Would it be a loyal one, or a traitor one? Which would be worse? The place was very dark, save for the pools of soft light at his workstation. It was almost deserted. If he stayed totally still, frozen in the lee of the main cogitator housing, it might just move on.\n\nMore heavy treads, coming down a debris-strewn stairwell. He caught sight of a red lumen-glow bleeding down the far wall, swinging with the movement of a body in motion. A vial shattered, crushed under a thick sole, and it made him start.\n\nBut it was only when he glimpsed what had come down the stairwell that his blood went truly cold. The monster emerged steadily, striding out into the open, one of the VIII, replete with flickers of witch-light over its nightshade armour, its helm stretched into contorted spines, its lenses burning dull red. Those eyes would detect absolutely everything in the murk, even more than its loyalist kin would have done. It would not be hunting for tactical advantage here, nor be amenable to bargaining. Fo knew just what it was here for, and also what it was capable of.\n\nHe grabbed his results, scrabbling for the vials with shaking hands, and ran as fast as his limbs would take him.\n\n'They're going to break,' said Fafnir Rann.\n\nThe loyalist position was strung across a wide chasm between stripped-out power plants, barring one of the main intact routes further in. The bulk of its defenders were baseline humans, arrayed in a motley collection of regimental uniforms. They were bolstered by two dozen Leman Russ tanks and a single Malcador, Annihilator pattern, all set hull-down behind thick rockcrete barriers and rubble heaps. Forty fixed heavy gun platforms had been positioned on either flank, some behind the blackened walls of the twin complexes, others sunk deep into the debris and surrounded with barricades. Five hundred infantry were dug into foxholes and trenches all across the gap, armed with flamers, hellguns, lasguns, a few bolters. Additional squads had been positioned higher up and under cover, huddling in the wreckage of the power plant interiors, armed with the longer-range sniper guns, augurs and the best working comms units. Air support was long gone, but that mattered less in such claustrophobic confines - the sheer walls of the buildings clustered high and close on all sides, topped with the flickering interference of the aegis, made ground level feel almost subterranean.\n\nBy the time Sigismund and his assault group had reached the location - eighty kilometres north-east of the Palatine, out in the contested urban zones well inside the Mercury perimeter - the defence seemed ripe to fold. The armour and gun-points were low on shells, and resupply to the sector had been made perilous by deep traitor incursions to the north and south. The position commander, a woman called Misa Haak from the Gattlen 43rd who seemed to be running a high fever, had been struggling for days with waves of refugees flooding west, all of whom could have been harbouring renegades or worse and so had to be screened. Food was gone, comms were out, the air itself screamed in hard-to-pick voices and the stars were hidden by a wall of shimmering fire. By the time the true enemy had begun to filter into place at the far end of the long chasm between the heavily shelled power plants, her nerves were almost shot.\n\n'Fan out,' Sigismund ordered, clanking his way towards the command bunker buried in the centre of the defence lines. 'Keep them in place until we see what's coming.'\n\nHe'd come with thirty of the Templar Brethren, Rann included. These warriors were all in black now, the last traces of gold erased from their armour by the smog, that thick rain of filth and dust that carpeted everything in all directions. Only their helm-lenses and their weapon-fields still glared into the seamy night, snarling like angry stars. Dozens of other Templar squads had been sent hunting through the hollow city-sector, each acting autonomously now and trying to shore up the faltering defensive marks, but this was the furthest east any of them had come, right up against the main thrust of the XVI Legion vanguard.\n\nAll but four of Sigismund's fighters took up positions along the line. Auxilia defenders looked up at them nervously as they lumbered past, wondering if they would halt at their squad, and if that was a good or a bad thing. None of them moved an inch, though. Not now. Not with those brutal, near-silent presences among them.\n\n'You will hold this place!' Rann roared out, marching along the trenches. 'This is the Emperor's domain, and you are His people! You will not doubt! You will not fear! You will fight, and you will kill, for those who come here offer nothing but oblivion! You will hold this place! This is the Emperor's domain, and you...'\n\nSigismund remained silent. He moved up to the forward edge of the line, clambering up a steep slope of rubble and resting his chin on the lip. He let his helm-lenses zoom out into the murk, to the distant shadows of enemy infantry shuffling their way forward. Still a kilometre distant. They hugged the shadows of the buildings, creeping through their empty innards watchfully. Beyond the infantry he could detect the low rumble of approaching armour, smashing its way through rebar-clogged accessways further back. He estimated numbers. He gauged the speed of the advance. He tried to assess the quality of troops.\n\nThen he glanced back at the defenders cowering in their foxholes. Then he looked up the sheer walls around them all. Then he looked back down at the crater-pocked ground level.\n\nRann took a break from his oration and moved up to join him. 'What do you think?' he asked.\n\n'This could hold a while, if they had the will for it,' Sigismund said. Further back along the line of the chasm, directly east, outlines of power-armoured infantry could be made out now even without zooming in. The enemy were projecting confidence, coming on openly. 'They need to be shown the leaders can be beaten.'\n\n'If the leaders are among them.'\n\n'They're Cthonians. The gangmasters never hung back.' Sigismund shuffled back down the slope and went to find Haak. 'Maintain fire down the centre, when they come,' he told her. 'Force them wide.'\n\nHaak nodded, numbly, cheeks flushed red under her helm. 'Aye, lord.'\n\n'As soon as you see us again, cease firing. You understand?'\n\n'Aye, lord.'\n\n'You will see us again. Then cease firing. Just watch.'\n\nRann was looking out from one flank to the other as Sigismund rejoined him - the two soaring, bomb-marred walls of burned rockcrete, each enclosing the shattered remnants of their massive internal"}
{"text":"went to find Haak. 'Maintain fire down the centre, when they come,' he told her. 'Force them wide.'\n\nHaak nodded, numbly, cheeks flushed red under her helm. 'Aye, lord.'\n\n'As soon as you see us again, cease firing. You understand?'\n\n'Aye, lord.'\n\n'You will see us again. Then cease firing. Just watch.'\n\nRann was looking out from one flank to the other as Sigismund rejoined him - the two soaring, bomb-marred walls of burned rockcrete, each enclosing the shattered remnants of their massive internal workings.\n\n'Which side, then?'\n\nSigismund drew his blade, then gazed deep into its black surface. You could almost think that it was liquid - that if you placed your finger against its matt plane the tip would sink under the surface. It still fascinated him.\n\n'South,' he murmured eventually. 'They'll come that way.'\n\nThe Templars moved out after that. Ten stayed at the barricades to keep the nerves of the auxilia steady. Sigismund, Rann and the remainder clambered up the scree incline along the chasm's southern edge and broke into the echoing chambers beyond the walls. The internal spaces had been abandoned for some time, the floors sodden, roofs holed, windows empty. All the inner corridors were jet-black and cluttered with refuse, making the going slow. Corpses of the old work-crews slumped amid the shell wreckage, mouldering in the humid dust-drifts. Other bodies littered the chambers and walkways further in - Imperial troops, most of them, but civilians also, as well as some scabrous forms that looked less than human. Startled, immobile faces were briefly illuminated as the Imperial Fists swept past them, a brief flash of red-tinged light, before sinking back into the gloom.\n\n'Closing, fifty metres,' Rann reported, jogging heavily beside Sigismund.\n\n'Total dark,' Sigismund ordered, and every one of the Templars killed the final light sources on their armour - the weapon disruptors, the glimmer from their lenses. They ran faster through the broken ways like ghost-images, black ripples across a world of shadow.\n\nThe Sons of Horus came on with less caution, crashing their way up through the open doorways. From outside, the sounds of Haak's steady barrage could now be heard. She was doing what she'd been asked to - making the full-frontal assault inconvenient, pushing the oncoming infantry into the cover of the old buildings. The invaders' attention would still be partially on where they wanted to get to, judging where they would break out again and start slaying properly. Not much of a distraction, but something to latch on to - the kind of fractional gain Dorn had always made his sons seek out.\n\nRann was first into contact, bursting out of the gloom with his twin axe-blades and crashing into the lead XVI Legion warrior. That instantly broke the near silence - energy fields flashed into life, helm-lenses blazed, ceramite clanged against steel in showers of sparks as the rest of the Templars engaged. The Sons of Horus squad was smaller - twelve fighters in Reaver configuration, with chainaxes and bolt pistols - but they'd be summoning more soon, so speed was of the essence.\n\nSigismund hung back for just a second, long enough to pick out the warband leader amid the lumen-streaked dark. He was in a veteran's Mark II plate, heavily scored and overlaid with battle-trophies. Chains swirled around him as he moved, each one capped with a bleached skull, and he carried a heavy chainsword fashioned into a serpent's-head design. Like all his squad, he still had that old ganger edge to him, the rough cut of the armour-trim and the crude blood-daubs over the exposed panels. The savagery was more pronounced than Sigismund could remember, though - they were degrading, reverting to an older type, their fighting style wilder, just as dangerous, but looser at the edges now.\n\nHe plunged straight at him, shouldering his way through the challenge of another warrior to get to the real prize, all the while calculating the distances, the angles he'd need. His whole body responded now, taut as a drum, every movement efficient, taking in the tactical data around him, processing it unconsciously, using it, turning it to his advantage.\n\nHe slammed hard into contact, his black sword screaming up against the teeth of the enemy's blade. One, two, three swipes, hard and fast, hammering the Reaver backwards and making him stumble on the loose stone. Sigismund's severe face twitched into a smile under his helm - a flicker of real enjoyment. He hated this enemy. This enemy was an unbeliever, fallen from the light of hard truth, a thing to be exterminated with joy. That was what had changed. It wasn't about skill. It wasn't about the abstract goal of conquest. It was about righteousness. It was about certainty.\n\nHe crunched and blasted the apostate further back, severing the chains and sending the skulls bouncing. His Templars came with him, using their greater numbers to drive the Sons of Horus back out towards the chamber's outer wall. They bludgeoned and shot and punched through the last remnants of the old perimeter, pushing the fight out of cover and into the old transitway between the power plants.\n\nHaak immediately ceased firing, just as commanded, and the chasm shuddered into dust-choked silence. The Imperial Fists and Sons of Horus fought their way right into the exposed centre, neither side giving any quarter, the exchanges vicious and heavy.\n\nIt didn't take long to end it. The Reaver commander was a decent warrior, experienced and canny. On another battlefield, he might have reaped a fresh tally of skulls. He was brave, as they all were - a kind of desperate bravery born in the lightless streets of his cursed old world, fuelled by the desire not to be shown as weak.\n\nThat wasn't enough. Sigismund forced him up a long heap of wreckage, driving him out of the dust-roil where the fight could be clearly seen. His sword-swipes were even sharper now, even quicker, all aimed with razor-edged precision. He smacked the chainsword completely away, checking the parry and sending it sailing end over end into the dark. Then the switch, the change of direction, so fast it felt like it must have been preordained, ramming up through the Reaver's breastplate in an explosion of disruptor charge. The stricken body left the ground entirely, propelled off its feet by the force of the thrust, and for an instance it hung like a marionette amid the snarls of angry lightning-forks.\n\n'Faithless!' Sigismund snarled, the only word he had uttered since the fight began. He cast the corpse to the earth, letting it slam into the dust like a rotten side of meat.\n\nIt wasn't a kill. It was a demonstration. The defenders at Haak's barricades had been watching the whole time, seeing an enemy they were terrified of being casually, systematically dismantled.\n\nThere would still be fighting ahead. Enraged Sons of Horus were already advancing in numbers, and would be in range within moments. Survival at this position would still be tight, as all confrontations had to be now.\n\nBut that wasn't the point. Sigismund turned to the Imperial defenders, his bloodstained sword hot in his hands.\n\n'Witness this!' he shouted, his hearts thudding with the glorious rhythm of exertion. 'They can be hurt. They can be killed.'\n\nHaak was listening. Her troops were listening. They no longer looked terrified.\n\n'So stand up,' he growled. 'And do your duty.'\n\nThe air inside Bhab had changed. It had been foul for some time, due to the general collapse of the atmosphere across the entire Palace, but now the stink had an element of more human weakness.\n\nFear had a smell. Illness had a smell. So did hopelessness. The men and women working for long shifts at the command stations had been unable to attend to basic hygiene for a long time. Their uniforms were filthy, their hair lank. Most of them were so sleep deprived that they barely knew how long they'd been there. And yet, through all that, through the mind-fog and the reek of it, they kept working, their hands numbly switching levers and turning dials. What else was there to do? Dimly, somewhere deep in their animal-stem brains, they remembered what it was they were fighting, and so they kept going, because the alternative was too horrifying for words.\n\nAnd that was ironic, Dorn thought, taking a rare moment to look up from his own station to gaze across the signals pits. If the enemy had not been so consumed with its essential sadism, its extravagant orgies of cruelty, then perhaps these people would have thrown in the towel by now. As it was, though, fear remained just a little stronger than the despair. Every vid-feed they saw from the contracting war-front, every capture of what the World Eaters did, what the Night Lords did, that stiffened resolve just enough.\n\nFor all that, the painful truth couldn't be hidden. Every soul in the bastion saw how things were going. Even Archamus, solid Archamus, who had stepped up without hesitation when the first of that name was killed, was fraying now. Dorn didn't ask him when he had last taken a rest-period. It would have been hypocrisy to order him to stand down, since he himself had long burned past the point of normal endurance, and so he let it slide, just like he did with so much else.\n\nIn the past, he would have detected the Sigillite's advance before the man had even entered the chamber. Now, though, his weariness was so great that the cloaked figure had limped halfway up the steps towards the primarch's crow's nest station before he registered it.\n\n'Rogal,' said Malcador.\n\nDorn nodded. It was still easy, even after all the long years he'd known the First Lord of the Imperium, to find the crabbed, wizened face disconcerting. Those eyes had seen plenty in their time. They had peered across a world that had existed before the Imperium, and had then peered across one shaped by its Crusade. Now they seemed destined to peer into its destruction, the final unravelling of plans that he had partly devised himself.\n\n"}
{"text":"tation before he registered it.\n\n'Rogal,' said Malcador.\n\nDorn nodded. It was still easy, even after all the long years he'd known the First Lord of the Imperium, to find the crabbed, wizened face disconcerting. Those eyes had seen plenty in their time. They had peered across a world that had existed before the Imperium, and had then peered across one shaped by its Crusade. Now they seemed destined to peer into its destruction, the final unravelling of plans that he had partly devised himself.\n\nDorn had always been a soldier, following orders as much as giving them. In the final analysis, his task was to preserve the work of others. Malcador, though, had built this place. The Imperium had been his creation, and this was therefore his defeat. What did he think of all that? Did it crush him? Or was he above such things, having scorched them out of his system over the thousands of years he'd been alive?\n\nAs ever, impossible to know. All you got was the exterior - the glittering eyes under the cowl, the long staff gripped by a bony hand, the low voice as dry as a lizard's.\n\n'Lord Regent,' Dorn replied. 'Any change?'\n\nIt was almost an unconscious habit now, to ask. The answer was always the same, of course.\n\n'He remains silent,' said Malcador. 'If it changes, I shall let you know. How stands the defence?'\n\nDorn smiled grimly. Having to outline it all explicitly felt like a punishment all of its own. And yet, where else could Malcador go for the information, now? With the final failure of all communications, only Dorn had any kind of grip on the wider tactical situation. Only he remembered everything that had been planned, where every last unit had been deployed, where they were likely to be now, given the rate of attrition. The sole measure of pride he allowed himself was in how accurate his projections had been.\n\nIf Guilliman had only made it...\n\n'Falling back on all fronts,' Dorn said curtly. 'That good enough for you?' He took a moment, rubbed hard at his forehead. 'Three main enemy advances inside the Ultimate Wall, all moving fast. Sixteenth Legion spearheads are within three - maybe four - days' march of Palatine. Eighth Legion berserker units are not far behind them. Four zone commands are cut off entirely, their defenders now out of supply range. We have effective control over the Sanctum, Palatine, some of the Adamant and Europa sectors. The rest - gone.'\n\nMalcador took it all in. 'Then the general order for withdrawal to the Sanctum-'\n\n'Not yet. Not yet.' Dorn felt another wave of pressure on him, another voice of doubt to add to the hundreds that already whispered in his mind. 'We still command the key arterials. We can bring them back. But right now, we have to hurt them, while we can. Once we're penned in here...'\n\nAnd that was the final trap. No escape. The shape of the siege, for all the surface complexity of its hundreds of interlocking walls and war-fronts, had always been simple in outline. Concentric rings: the Outer Palace and the space ports, then the Inner Palace, then the Palatine core, and then, last of all, the Sanctum Imperialis, the final bastion, guarded by the Eternity Gate itself. Once the Palatine strongholds were surrendered, the final ghost of hope would be gone - there would be no more room to manoeuvre, no room to breathe, no room to do anything but die, crushed up against one another as the walls were slowly driven in.\n\n'I understand the strain you're under, Rogal,' Malcador said carefully. 'No one doubts your commitment. But do we really have-'\n\n'No, we don't have anything like what we need for it,' Dorn snapped. 'Jaghatai's made his move now, you know that? A third of our Legion strength, gambled away on a damned port. We've had our armour reserves plundered to make it all viable, and what does it get us? Not enough. He could have been here, with us.' Just rehearsing it all made him angrier. 'It knocks out the Fourteenth, that's true. Having more Death Guard inside the walls wouldn't make me any happier. But now I'm searching for reasons not to think it's rank insanity.' Again, though, control, control. 'Sanguinius is with us still. Vulkan is with us. Throne, I'm thankful for that.'\n\n'And Sigismund fights on.'\n\nDorn's gaze, which had been wavering, flickered up. 'On my command.'\n\n'Rumours of it have reached the Dungeon. The Black Sword. They say he's making ground.'\n\n'He's not there to make ground. He's there to give them something to fear.'\n\n'Because the line troops are failing.'\n\nReluctantly, Dorn nodded. 'I can't even bring myself to blame them. Maybe you don't feel it. The... weight.'\n\n'Oh, I feel it.'\n\n'The Lord of Death, they tell me. Safe in his own fortress, making the world sicken.'\n\n'And so maybe Jaghatai has a point.'\n\n'Only if you think it's possible.' Dorn felt his lids growing heavy again. He felt the dead pull of all his fine armour, not put to serious use since encountering Fulgrim on the parapets. And there was so much to do here, so much to put right, just to squeeze out another week of resistance, another day, another hour, preventing him from arming up and charging out into the dark, doing what he burned to do, because someone had to keep a grip, to care about duty.\n\n'But it is set, now,' said Malcador. 'Nothing can prevent it.'\n\n'Just as you say,' muttered Dorn wearily. 'And so the world ends thus, not in defiance, but in madness.'\n\nAtmospheric friction\n\nWeak suit\n\nPercentages\n\nYes, madness, thought Ayo Nuta. The only word for it. It had never been done, and there were good reasons for that. The Skye orbital plate's very presence in the lower atmosphere had already been something skirting the absurd, but moving it - dragging it hundreds of kilometres across an active warzone - was beyond anything he'd been asked to contemplate before.\n\nNuta had struggled to get some of the crew to follow orders, once they'd realised what he was asking them to do. He might have reprimanded them for that, but in truth he understood how they felt. They were run-down. They were scared. They knew that their chances of making it out of this alive, always small, had just vanished, and now came the insanity of making a powered run through the full atmosphere, something that had only really been theorised about in the constructor's tomes held securely in Luna's shipyard archives.\n\nBut then the immersion drives had always invited the possibility. If you could lower a plate into the true atmosphere, keeping it intact and self-powered and able to function, why couldn't you push things a little further, and use it as a proper mobile platform? You'd wreak havoc on everything within a kilometre or so, churning up Throne-knows-what and making the weather run amok, but in the current circumstances that no longer seemed like something worth worrying much about. The entire planet had been stirred up into a permanent electric storm by the volume of ship-mounted las-fire loosed on the surface, and whatever physics had once applied to the atmosphere had been wholly superseded.\n\nThe ride was a horror show, all the same. Colossal resistance smeared across the forward plates, ratcheting up quickly into a full firestorm that tested the limits of the re-entry armour. The plate's structure, vaster and more cumbersome than the mightiest void-going battleship, shook and screamed and pinged rivets across its full expanse. The noise was incredible, a constant boom and a thunder that reverberated up from the drive-rooms and made thinking impossible. Every lens in the main control dome flashed crimson, telling the crew nothing much they couldn't already feel - that this was mad, mad, mad.\n\nAnd for all that, Nuta couldn't help but enjoy it - the daring of it, the colossal, shameless audacity of the thing. They were doing it. They were making their mark on the battle just when they had looked destined to serve out time as a redundant atmospheric hangar. Who knew what was passing through the minds of the enemy now, having burned their way right up to the Ultimate Wall, only to see a fire-wreathed hunk of orbital salvage roar straight back at them, slicing the atmosphere in two and sending friction lightning raking for kilometres in all directions.\n\n'Maintain course and speed!' he shouted, his voice already hoarse. 'Clamp down on that power-drain - the upper voids are on the edge!'\n\nHe could see nothing on the realviewers, all of which were now portals onto walls of fire. Many of the ranged augurs were scrambled, but a few of them still gave him a shaky picture of the outside world.\n\nThey had ground their way across their mooring station in the southern Palace, across the Europa and Sanctus sectors, finally cresting the Ultimate Gate and veering due east. He'd witnessed snatches of the gradually deteriorating battlefields during that time, from the intense combat still going on inside the Ultimate Wall to the emptiness of the sectors outside the old Anterior barbicans. He wondered if the orbital plate's progress had disturbed any of those conflicts - if enemy battalions had been momentarily shaken by the sight of the heavens erupting above them and flooding their augurs with static. He hoped so. Every morsel counted, every slight twist of fortune.\n\nOnly once they had cleared the Ultimate Gate fortress, its heights still burning wildly, did the orders start to come in from Colossi. Nuta slowed the advance a fraction, aiming for perfect coordination with the planned land advance. That had been a complicated business - the Skye plate had truly colossal inertia, driven by its immense mass and limited-power manoeuvring drives, and so velocity had to be calculated with a high degree of precision. Around ninety per cent of its entire power output was devoted to the monumental repulsor-coils that kept it from crashing to earth, leaving comparatively little for anything else.\n\nIn the end, the timings had been as close as could have been hoped for. The plate crashed on eastwards, driving an incandescent path over the su"}
{"text":" Skye plate had truly colossal inertia, driven by its immense mass and limited-power manoeuvring drives, and so velocity had to be calculated with a high degree of precision. Around ninety per cent of its entire power output was devoted to the monumental repulsor-coils that kept it from crashing to earth, leaving comparatively little for anything else.\n\nIn the end, the timings had been as close as could have been hoped for. The plate crashed on eastwards, driving an incandescent path over the summits of the Colossi comms-vanes, just as the land assault snarled up to full speed and began its long race to the space port. The remaining squadrons of V Legion fighters screamed out around them, shadowing them all the way out. The plate itself had minimal armaments of its own - it had been a platform for nova cannons once, all of which had been stripped out and used on the Palace walls - but its remaining atmospheric escorts flooded from the hangars too, and its residual heavy bolter arrays swivelled into action.\n\nThen the void-to-surface las-fire started. Nuta had been braced for it. It was why they were there - to shield the otherwise exposed armour. The orbital plates had always been designed to withstand battleship-grade weaponry, and Skye's void shields were fully powered and operational.\n\nEven so, the first impacts were shattering. Lance after lance shot down from the heavens, thrusting out of the racing storm fronts and jagging straight into the plate's upper disc-face. The void shields shrieked, flexing concave under the impacts and scattering into interference patterns hundreds of metres in diameter. There was no prospect of firing back, nothing to do but weather it, keep moving, keep the power feeds from shuttering the generators and exposing the physical hull.\n\n'More spikes detected!' cried the master of signals, a Terran named Uwe Eisen. 'Impacts incoming across zones nine and ten!'\n\nNuta tensed, his fingers drumming on the arms of his command throne. Aside from rotating the harmonics of the void units, there wasn't much he could do. 'All hands, brace,' he ordered. 'Keep all forward sensors open and scanning.'\n\nThe lances struck again, smacking in sequence across the upper decks and sending impact waves rippling across the shields. Alert klaxons went off, just as always, swiftly clamped down on by the crisis teams who had heard enough of them. The lumens flashed out, plunging them all into total darkness, before flickering back on again. The deck shuddered, and the sound of something exploding echoed up from the repulsor chambers far below.\n\nThose enormous las-beams had been launched towards ground-level coordinates, intended to wreak havoc amid the close-packed tank columns. With a wry grin, Nuta found himself wondering if the targeters on the void-ships even knew yet what their energy beams were running into.\n\n'How much more of this can we handle?' he asked Io Sleva, his master of operations.\n\nSleva's slender head popped up from behind her bank of controls. 'Hits like that? We're getting knocked hard. A few more hours, if it doesn't let up.'\n\n'It won't let up. Do what you can.'\n\nA few more hours would be about right. The tanks were moving fast, shadowed by even swifter V Legion speeders. They were making good use of their improvised overhead cover, limiting casualties from long-range fire. Nuta started to think that maybe the whole scheme wasn't so mad after all. Maybe it even had a chance of working.\n\n'Incoming comms from Legion command!' Eisen shouted.\n\nNuta patched it through.\n\n'Enemy atmospherics launched,' came Jangsai Khan's static-drenched voice over the link from the airborne squadrons. 'Squadrons moving to intercept, but you will wish to make arrangements.'\n\n'Acknowledged, my lord khan,' Nuta responded, before turning towards Eisen's station again. 'Get me whatever you can from those forward viewers.'\n\nA bank of lenses positioned around his throne blurted with white noise, hissing like a nest of snakes before some of them cleared to expose jumpy, grainy feeds from the prow-mounted augurs. The images were very bad, a mix of interference and poor processing from the night-vision compensators, and for a moment or two it wasn't clear that anything much had been picked up. Nuta had vague impressions of the looming space port on the far horizon, barely perceptible amid the slew and the dark.\n\nThen he saw them - blurred points of light racing out, whole clouds of them, soon surrounded by the spark-flicker of massed las-fire. The numbers were immediately intimidating, the reckless flight-aggression even more so.\n\nHe took a deep breath, and patched a link to his commander of ordnance.\n\n'Jafda, alert the air-to-air bolter crews, all sectors. Free-fire on my mark.'\n\nHe kept his eyes fixed on the scopes, even as another hammer blow landed from orbit, nearly throwing him from his throne. The lenses went white, the lumens blanked out again, something else exploded.\n\n'Should have known better,' he murmured, shuffling back into position and calling up fresh damage readings. 'Still damned insanity.'\n\nMorarg watched the flyers streak out of the hangars - Fire Raptors, Storm Eagles, a few Stormbirds and Thunderhawks. Some of them went erratically, as if their pilots were struggling with the controls. Or maybe they had just changed too much for comfort, their engorged limbs no longer squeezing into the cramped cockpits. In any case, the XIV Legion had never specialised in flyers. They maintained atmospheric capability, just as any full-spectrum army did, but they never loved them, and those who crewed the machines were not held in especial honour.\n\nSo he had little confidence in them. They would do some damage, to be sure, but the V Legion were masters of this warfare, and that ludicrous hunk of hovering adamantium they'd somehow conjured up would take some beating before it finally broke up. The best they could hope for was to strafe the slower-moving ground forces, take out as much of those as they could and block the routes east, but even then he doubted the White Scars would give them an easy time of it.\n\nFor a moment longer he stared at the western skies, still unsure whether to believe the evidence of his senses. The orbital plate was not so much moving through the atmosphere as ripping it apart, bringing with it a low-frequency rumble that made the earth itself vibrate. Watching an eleven-kilometre-diameter void-platform thunder its way closer and closer, all the while taking sustained hits from the fleet and a constant rattle of fire from the ground below, was one of the more arresting sights his long service had given him. Sensors indicated that the plate was tracking the speed of the armour underneath fairly well, but from that distance it looked almost immobile, a violation of both physics and common sense, an affront to what warfare ought to be.\n\nAfter a moment longer, he shook his head wearily, and went to find Kalgaro. It took him a while, for the ways of the space port were still unfamiliar, and everything seemed to be in a state of total disarray. When he finally located him, partly thanks to the prompting of a helpful daemon hanging like a clutch of rotten fruit from the roof-arches, he was pleased to see that the Siegemaster, at least, seemed to be taking things seriously.\n\n'What word of the primarch?' Kalgaro asked, never breaking stride as Morarg joined up with him. Together, they trudged their way down towards the lower levels.\n\n'He was intrigued, when I told him,' Morarg said.\n\n'That's it? Nothing more?'\n\n'Something to do with his new perspective, maybe.'\n\nMorarg remembered just how Mortarion had been, once the news had been broken. A sad smile, as if it was something that was somehow entirely expected, and could not be avoided now, but was to be regretted all the same. And then an injunction to make all ready, and refocus the Legion, do what needed to be done.\n\n'And it is a drain on his soul. The art.'\n\nKalgaro grunted. There were some in the Legion who still had mixed feelings about 'the art'. 'I'm glad you're in charge, up there, Caipha,' he said. 'I can't even understand some of the others now. The ones that changed the most.'\n\nThe two of them lumbered heavily down a twisting stairwell, with the pale green witch-light flickering around them.\n\n'I have serious concerns,' Morarg said, trying to remain calm about it. 'Nothing is in place. Half our units are stripped down for refitting. The Lord Typhus took a substantial force with him east, and we have too many detachments placed on the main battlefront, out of reach. Getting things moving is... difficult. We are not as strong here as we should be.'\n\nKalgaro chuckled. 'You worry too much.'\n\n'Do I? That iron bastard did so much damage coming in there's no longer a hard perimeter left to secure. The outer walls are in ruins, the old void generators are blown to pieces. It's not what it was, brother, we never intended it to be, and now we've been caught napping.'\n\nKalgaro stopped walking, turned to face him. 'So they'll get in,' he said. 'Let them. Bring them. Have you seen what's happened to the interior? Down in the dark? This place is becoming a hell-world again, and if it's hell for us, it'll be worse for them.'\n\n'They'll be expecting it. We've fought one another too often to be surprised now.'\n\n'That's right, we have - we're like old sparring partners, heading to the pits just one more time.' He snorted a harsh laugh. 'I was worried we might miss it. I was worried the primarch would take so long to give the order that there'd be none of them left to kill. So this is good, for me. They ran from us at Catullus. Now they're coming back for more, and I can't be sorry.'\n\nMorarg almost pressed him on that. They had been on the front foot in the void, with the numbers, with the momentum. They had planned it, with all the care that they always planned offensives. That was where they excelled - the slow vice of control, meticulously conceived, ever"}
{"text":". I was worried the primarch would take so long to give the order that there'd be none of them left to kill. So this is good, for me. They ran from us at Catullus. Now they're coming back for more, and I can't be sorry.'\n\nMorarg almost pressed him on that. They had been on the front foot in the void, with the numbers, with the momentum. They had planned it, with all the care that they always planned offensives. That was where they excelled - the slow vice of control, meticulously conceived, everything accounted for. Now the situations were reversed, calling for swift response, for a rapid change of course, for improvisation. Even with all their advantages, after everything they had already achieved, those had never been their strong suits.\n\n'At least release the armour we've got standing ready,' he said in the end. 'Something to slow them down while we rearm the rest. If they are to get in, I want them damaged while doing so.'\n\n'Already done,' said Kalgaro, starting to walk again. 'They'll bleed for the passage here, and they'll bleed for the wall-crossings too.' Once again, that hard-edge chuckle. 'And then, once they're through all that, we'll truly go to work. Trust me, Caipha - we'll be knee-deep in Chogorian blood before their madness ends.'\n\nAika 73 blasted through a loose ramp of rubble, rocked a little, then boosted onward. Ernama, the commander of the squadron's lead tank, was setting a hard pace, barely pausing to take loc-readings, and the rest of the six-strong unit had to work to keep up.\n\n'Steady,' Kaska told Dresi, still unsure exactly how to handle her. The driver was concentrating furiously - almost too furiously - and they were skirting at the edge of wearing out the main engine.\n\nShe didn't respond, just leaned forward in her seat and maintained the rate of speed.\n\nKaska turned back to the scopes. His narrow station right at the top of the turret was lined with them - a slew of greasy lenses with spider's webs of tactical data churning down them. Aside from the night-vision scanners, he had augur readings for the rest of the squadron and a battery of tactical data on the terrain and environment. A narrow armoured slit just ahead of him gave him his only realviewer on the action ahead, though he had the use of an extendable periscope when that failed.\n\nFor all that, he could barely see a thing. The atmosphere outside was a spewed mess of blown dust and smoke. The interior of the Leman Russ was its usual roar of engine noise, reverberating throughout the claustrophobic crew stations, and the whole thing rattling around like a kicked ration-can. He was under strict orders not to open the hatch, even before the enemy had been sighted, and so everything had to be done through the scopes and auspex, all of which flickered and jerked and kept disappearing into static-fields just when you needed them. It all felt so artificial, so dislocated. He could almost imagine they were in a training simulator again, a box wired up to faulty cogitators and motion-engines.\n\nThey were going too fast. He'd already voxed Ernama to tell her so, but she hadn't replied. His loc-readings were unreliable now, and he could barely keep tabs on the other tanks in the convoy. Messages from Legion command had filtered in a while back, telling them all that the air cover was in place, but aside from the fact that the few snatches of open sky he could see were darker and redder than usual he couldn't really tell what that meant - it wasn't as if he could stop, get out, and take a proper look.\n\n'Enemy sighted, dead ahead,' came a comms-burst from Ernama over his headset. 'All units, move to engage.'\n\nEngage what? Damn Ernama. He caught glimpses of old walls and structural interiors, stripped to bare rockcrete amid a man-made sea of dust and masonry-chunks. The remains of the once huge buildings rose up on either side, enclosing a channel less than a hundred metres across. The squadron was uncomfortably concentrated, squeezed together by the urban cliffs on either side - it would have been better to fan out, free up room to use the guns without hitting a friendly. In this murk, under these conditions, Kaska could all too readily imagine a shell smashing through his tank's weaker rear armour, sent flying blind by an enthusiastic gunner with a nervous trigger finger.\n\n'Vosch, make ready,' he ordered his own main gunner, who crouched beside him on the far side of the cannon's solid breech chamber. 'Targets ahead. Jandev - keep them peeled.'\n\nA Leman Russ' armaments were crude but effective. The forward lascannon had a decent rate of fire and could pepper a target with high-power beams as long as the powercells remained active. The main gun had a much slower rate, but it packed a mighty punch when it scored a hit. Vosch knew what to do with it, too - Kaska had never served with anyone more adept at making sense of the incoming screeds of sighting data that her scopes fed her, expertly pulling the pistons and cranks to get the optimal angle out of the long barrel.\n\nKaska adjusted the auspex gains, and the main lens zoomed forward through a soup of black-grey muck. He was sweating now, both from the punishing warmth of the engine grilles below him and the close tension of the upcoming firefights.\n\n'Keep us hard right,' he warned Dresi, who was working very hard to remain in formation at such high speed. 'We get in front of Frahlo's guns, he won't hold back.'\n\nThen he saw it, eight hundred metres ahead, smashing its way straight through the remains of an old iron balustrade and dropping down onto the dirt with a crash. A XIV Legion Sicaran, followed swiftly by another, both of them armed with turret autocannons and sponson-mounted lascannons. Behind them came other indistinct outlines - heavy infantry, power-armoured, far taller and broader than any standard human troops.\n\nErnama, closest of the Leman Russ tanks, fired instantly. The shell from her main cannon flew long, exploding against the upper walls of the buildings beyond. Her lascannon's beams flashed out a second later, joined by those of the following two tanks in the squadron, streaking out in blinding lines and igniting the rooflines with stark white flashes.\n\n'Hard right!' ordered Kaska again, quickly gauging the terrain through his auspex. If they maintained this position they'd neither get a clear shot nor guarantee getting out of the path of shells from the rear. 'Vosch - get your fix on the second one.'\n\nThe air around them exploded into a criss-cross inferno of interlocking fire-beams. The Sicarans were highly manoeuvrable and crewed by pilots with superior reactions and perception - they seemed to slip across the ruins like eels, despite their bulk. They were slippery in other ways, too - their shallow-sloped armour made scoring a decisive hit harder, not like the brick-square hulks of the Imperial tanks. Sicaran autocannons were ferocious things, twin barrels spitting out shells far faster than the manual gunners could respond in kind, backed up by the silent flares of lascannons.\n\nThe effects of all that were ruinous. A Leman Russ on the left - Alchak's, Kaska thought - was hit hard under the turret mechanism, the impact blowing it up and sending armour plates clattering away to the ground. Ernama got another shot away before her hull was slammed by heavy volumes of shell-fire, smacking into the engine intakes and immobilising her. The only remaining squadron vehicle ahead of Aika 73 slammed straight into an autocannon storm that rocked it almost completely over. Having found its range, the second Sicaran swivelled to finish the Leman Russ off.\n\n'Full stop!' Kaska yelled. 'Lock down that target!'\n\nGrinding to a stop in a firefight was dangerous. Some commanders never did it unless they had to, but Kaska had learned the hard way that the targeting cogitators on a Leman Russ came up with the numbers faster when things were less complicated.\n\nDresi slammed on the brakes. Jandev calmly lined up the lascannon, and Vosch expertly ratcheted down the main gun.\n\n'Fire!'\n\nAika 73 shuddered as the battle cannon blew. Kaska jerked away out of instinct as the breech shot back in its sleeve, filling the turret with clots of smoke. Merck got to work instantly, wrenching open the hatch and reloading. Jandev fired steadily in concentrated bursts, piling las-beams onto the target Sicaran. The enemy disappeared behind a wall of black smog, its outline totally obscured.\n\n'Again,' ordered Kaska, peering into the scope and risking another shot while static.\n\nVosch responded, her second volley adjusted a fraction to bring it in hard against the bolter-mount on the Sicaran's front armour-slope.\n\nIt was a good shot, hitting the weak point full-on and driving the armour inward. Jandev followed suit, sending las-fire spitting into the wound even as Dresi got the Leman Russ moving again. By then, the other two active units of the squadron had also found their range, opening up at the beleaguered Sicaran and blasting at its compromised hull. Something in that barrage must have drilled straight through the enemy's armour plates, getting into the engine compartment and rupturing the fuel tanks. The entire heavy tank lifted from the earth for a moment with the force of the detonations, before collapsing back again, smoking and disabled.\n\nThat still left the first one. The Sicaran finished off Ernama's lead tank with a slamming rain of autocannon shells, stripping its victim's tracks into ribbons and punching holes along its hull length. It then closed on the third wounded Imperial vehicle, swinging its turret round to spray more armour-piercing rounds. Even as it fired again, however, the remaining mobile Leman Russ units trundled into position, each long barrel swinging round hard. The trio fired at once, sending three corkscrewing shells whistling into contact, followed by a flurry of las-bolts that zeroed in on any rupture.\n\nThe Sicaran disappeared behind another billowing cloud of black smok"}
{"text":"ing holes along its hull length. It then closed on the third wounded Imperial vehicle, swinging its turret round to spray more armour-piercing rounds. Even as it fired again, however, the remaining mobile Leman Russ units trundled into position, each long barrel swinging round hard. The trio fired at once, sending three corkscrewing shells whistling into contact, followed by a flurry of las-bolts that zeroed in on any rupture.\n\nThe Sicaran disappeared behind another billowing cloud of black smoke, followed immediately by a muffled crash. Inky plumes gushed out from every orifice, every open barrel, and more bloody flashes went off as further systems ignited under the steady rain of las-bolts.\n\nBoth enemy tanks were down, but the danger wasn't over. The supporting infantry, recklessly outpaced by the lead armour, were now lumbering into range, more than a dozen of them, their stolid treads kicking up the dust. Kaska only had fleeting glimpses of the troops themselves as his sights juddered and skipped, but he saw enough to realise that something was very wrong with all of them - they dragged themselves along almost like invalids, limping and staggering, their armour stretched and twisted and glistening. A pale light glimmered around them - their eyes, their blades, their armour-joints - and that alone was enough to send his heart hammering, to make him want to pull back, to order full-reverse and somehow accelerate his way out of the path of those impossible, horrendous things.\n\nMassed infantry had always been the danger. The schedule of the cross-terrain charge had been so tight that the usual mixed-armed support structures weren't ever in place. The instructions from the V Legion had been to send priority comms-bursts whenever enemy squads were encountered, but there wasn't time now, because those monsters were dragging themselves closer, and everyone knew what a Legion warrior would do once it closed in on a wounded tank.\n\n'Forward!' Kaska cried, pushing his terror down, somehow. If he could ram into a couple of them, drag them under the tracks, that might give them a chance to break through.\n\nHe never got a chance. Shrieking like loosed falcons, blurred into pale streaks by their extreme speed, three V Legion jetbikes suddenly shot down the channel and wheeled around amid sprays of dirt. The residual smoke clouds were ripped apart by fresh bolter-trails, ploughing up the dust into furrows and cracking down hard into the oncoming legionaries. The Death Guard reeled under the lightning assault, stumbling, dropping back, blown from their feet or cut open. More speeders veered in, opening fire on the attack run before dropping infantry to the ground. The White Scars hit the dirt sprinting, energy weapons igniting while still in the air.\n\nErnama must have put the call in early. Throne, that had saved the rest of them.\n\nAika 73 ground its way onwards, Dresi following Kaska's direction, shadowed by the other two active tanks. The first two hulls in the squadron, Ernama's included, had been totally destroyed. A third was immobilised, which amounted to much the same thing. Now the traitors were being engaged by the White Scars all around them, and Kaska caught fractured, up-close glimpses of absurdly brutal combat, a wild mix of totally unrestrained hatreds. He saw a V Legion swordsman hacked virtually in half with a heavy-swiped chainblade, just as one of the twisted horrors was driven to its knees by two glaive-whirling fighters. You couldn't look at that for long, not without wincing, not without instinctively recoiling from the pitch of concentrated violence.\n\nJandev voxed up from his position. 'Support fire?' he asked, swivelling the barrel of the lascannon round as hard as he could.\n\nWould that do any good? Would he stand a chance of hitting anything in that sprawling, messy, faster-than-thought brawl?\n\nBefore Kaska could reply, though, a Legion override came up on the comm, beamed from one of the speeders.\n\n'Squadron to advance. All vehicles keep moving. Squadron to advance.'\n\nThat was just what they'd said, back in the briefings. Never stop. Never get bogged down. Keep going. We'll handle the anti-tank squads - just keep the engines hot, get to the portals.\n\nKaska took a deep breath, his sweaty hands slipping on the control levers. Ernama was gone. Nikkala, her deputy, was in the immobilised unit. That put him in command of what remained of the squadron. A couple of hours in, and they were already down fifty per cent.\n\n'Negative - full forward,' he snapped down the squadron-wide vox-net. 'All gunners, reload and stand by. Drivers, move out, move out.'\n\nThey did as they were ordered, pushing around the hand-to-hand fighting and forging onward, revving and gunning through the broken terrain. As Kaska guided them out, trying to ignore the mix of wild battle cries and bestial war-growls that crackled up out of the augur-grilles, he picked up dozens of active signals on the auspex - more squadrons, just like his, surging onward, bulldozing through defensive lines, gradually converging on the objective ahead, all in motion, whatever the toll in lost and smouldering hulls.\n\nNever stop. Never get bogged down. Ernama, Throne ward her, had been entirely right to push it.\n\n'Full speed!' he ordered, astonished, on reflection, to find himself still alive, and determined now to keep it that way - any sense of artificiality had been wrenched away for good. 'Damn it all, keep us going! This is real! This is the real thing!'\n\nImagist\n\nWithin sight\n\nLady of Chaos\n\nNothing was real now, though, or anything close to it. The entire place had become a dream, Garviel Loken thought. Like a faded image of something physical, an after-echo of something solid. For as long as the Ultimate Wall had held, you could visualise the rough structure of the battle - the hordes at the gates, the defenders inside. Now that great barrier was no longer effective, and the flood had gushed in across the breaks, swamping the city within. Precincts were now wastelands. Some pockets fought on. Others had been forgotten entirely, left isolated as the hab-towers burned elsewhere. You could move from one place - lit up with combat, a roar of noise and movement - and within a heartbeat find yourself in a parallel world of eerie quiet, the dead lying in ranks, the dry wind moaning over open eyes.\n\nHe didn't know how much shape the fighting still had, if any. Comms were worse than useless, augurs were no longer reliable. It was down to eyesight and instinct, fogged by the endless surges of battle-hot dust that flowed down the narrow rifts between building-masses. He knew he shouldn't have gone out alone, of course, out of contact with core command. The Sigillite would be angry, if he had any spare capacity. Dorn too, maybe. Another blade would have been welcome at the centre, the environs of the Sanctum and its Palatine hinterland, in that narrow circuit of solid ground that had been shrinking even when he'd left it.\n\nBut he had needed to leave. As soon as he had discovered that they were planning to use her, he had needed to go. And he had almost caught up with her, too - almost managed to snatch her back at the last moment, stop it all happening. He'd killed plenty - both those who had thought of themselves as her protectors, as well as those who had clearly wished her harm. All that butchery had taken time, though, and so she had got away from him in the end, running off into the devastation of a city on the edge of annihilation.\n\nNow he hunted through the shadow-realm, alone, exacting a price from those who had come to despoil it. There had been no real choice in the matter, only the promptings of what another age might have called conscience. He had to find her - it was that simple. Some kind of madness had seen fit to let her loose, as if she were a plaything for intellectuals to study. For him, though, she could never be that. She was one of the last threads that still bound him to a past he had never wanted to lose. She would die quickly, if discovered, and that could not be countenanced.\n\nHe had killed again, preferring Rubio's old force-blade for the most part, but switching to Aximand's longer sword when it felt right. Both borrowed weapons, with little flickers of their old masters welded to the steel, now his for however long he was granted use of them. He wore his Luna Wolves plate, possibly the only warrior on any battlefield who still did so. On one occasion he caught sight of himself in a smeary pane of broken glass, and was struck by how he looked in the reflection. The ever-present film of black dust hadn't quite erased the bone-pale glimmer underneath, making him seem like more of a phantasm than any of the horrors he slew - out of place, out of time, something to be forgotten and shuddered at.\n\nNow he was heading north, following the half-scent of a semi-hunch. She had gone to ground quickly, disappearing like a wisp of smoke. Those damned fools had released her too close to the front. Or maybe they hadn't expected Mercury Wall to fall so quickly. Either way, it had been reckless.\n\nYou could still find information in these places, if you were patient. Some of the enemy would talk, before you killed them. Some of the defenders, where they still lingered, had seen things. Bit by bit, he constructed a picture of something strange happening. Civilians, who by rights should all have been dead, were still clustering together, huddling in flooded basements, clinging on.\n\nStories had begun to circulate. He encountered two of them over and again. The first told of a sword, a black sword, blessed with the divine will of the Emperor, seeking out the masters of the enemy armies and slaying them, one by one. Vengeance, they whispered, His vengeance, let loose against the unbelievers. If they could have found that sword for themselves, they said, they would surely have joined up with it and become part of the army of the faithful.\n\nAnd then there was"}
{"text":"nts, clinging on.\n\nStories had begun to circulate. He encountered two of them over and again. The first told of a sword, a black sword, blessed with the divine will of the Emperor, seeking out the masters of the enemy armies and slaying them, one by one. Vengeance, they whispered, His vengeance, let loose against the unbelievers. If they could have found that sword for themselves, they said, they would surely have joined up with it and become part of the army of the faithful.\n\nAnd then there was the other story - the lady of bones, the gatherer of the slain. She was immortal, they told him, had transcended death. The enemy could not touch her, and against her words of authority the fallen had no power. The tellers gathered up skulls - not hard to find, those - and cleaned them carefully, placing them in alcoves and on the top of wall sections. Some even escaped their hiding places to follow her into the dark. Others, left behind, remembered how she had spoken to them, and reverently tended her fanes with their flickering candles and empty eye sockets.\n\nHe went after rumours of her. He headed in a zigzag route north-east, picking his way through that dreamlike realm of stale destruction. Everything roared in those places, the dull sound of gutted buildings collapsing, of huge vehicles grinding slowly through the remains. Whenever he glimpsed the sky in narrow strips far above, he saw the failing aura of the aegis, and knew that it could not remain intact for long now. He avoided the major concentrations of the enemy, but slew any of them who had allowed themselves to rove freely, the most unwary of them no doubt believing that the war was all but won.\n\nEventually, he found himself inside the scraped-out residue of an old residential quarter, one that must have been bombed flat a long time ago because the rockcrete was no longer hot. Not much more than the foundations were left, plus an irregular maze of first-stage walls standing erect amid smooth sweeps of masonry dust. Billows of inky fumes swept across the labyrinth, the product of promethium fires still raging. It smelled strongly of death, with bodies piled almost as high as the remaining walls - men, women, children, servitors, all tangled together in an improvised architecture of stiffened flesh.\n\nLoken went watchfully through it, force-blade drawn ready. The further in he went, the further down he was pulled, sinking through sliver-topped ravines and along narrow, twisting paths. The faint light of the underlit clouds faded away, replaced by near-total blackness. He began to sense something, stubbornly persistent under the stink of the dead. A presence, maybe, some kind of ambient soul-heat.\n\nHe reached a door - an old metal hatchway, buried at the foot of a solid internal wall, barely visible even to his eyes, rusted and riveted. He paused, listened for a moment, then ran a scan. Nothing. He sliced through the lock with his blade, snagging the edge of it on the corroded metal. Then he was through, climbing into a sour interior, perfectly dark.\n\nHis helm's night vision exposed a chamber beyond, one that seemed to stretch off underground for a very long way. Its support columns were square-cut and functional, its floor lost under an ankle-deep layer of black dust. The space must have once been a service area for the levels above, perhaps only ever inhabited by servitors. Now, though, its recesses bore signs of recent habitation - empty ration packs, ammo cases, piled-up bedding rolls. His armour-senses picked up no movement, his scanners no heat signatures.\n\nHe pressed on. The route took him down, always down. Before long, he was pacing along the centre of a narrower shaft, one cut between solid rock walls on either side. At the end of the long shaft was a pedestal covered in the detritus of a rockfall.\n\nOnly, as he got closer, he saw that the debris was not detritus of any kind - it was a heaped pile of skulls, all of them cleaned and polished, stacked up one on top of the other, all facing outwards. In the pedestal's facing panel was another single skull, set within a semicircular alcove. Below the alcove, words had been carved - crudely, as if by a combat knife: Imperator Protegit. And below those words was an image, scratched out in ink, showing a benevolent-looking man on a golden throne.\n\nShe had never been much of a painter, but she had always had a knack for the striking sketch, the effective composition, and he instantly recognised the style. That was what she did, one way or another - create images, icons, things that lingered in the mind.\n\nLoken picked up the skull. It felt light in his hand, a hollow sliver of dry bone.\n\n'Oh, Euphrati,' he breathed to himself. 'You would have laughed so hard, if I'd told you, back on the Spirit. You'd have told me I was making it up.'\n\nHe looked around him. Someone had tried to make the place look the part. Aside from the skulls, there were carvings, streaks of old candle flames against the stone. This was a piece of theatre, a sham play of seriousness, the kind of gothic fancy only a fanatic or a simpleton could have been awed by.\n\nAnd yet. He looked back the way he'd come, and saw how many more skulls had been gathered on the shaft's walls, all glaring back at him with their sombre eyes. This had been the labour of many hands, over many hours, just when the world was falling to pieces around them. The owners of those hands had been convinced by her, evidently. Many more might be, too, if they continued to be scared enough.\n\n'So why did I come down here, again?' he asked himself, turning back the way he had come. 'To save you from them?' He began to climb again, to clamber up out of the unmoving air and the grim rows of bone faces. He felt a new urgency now, one that was a fraction sharper than the drive that had brought him. 'Or to save them - and us - from you?'\n\nErebus hadn't really known how he'd feel when he laid eyes on her. Awe, maybe? Intimidation, perhaps - to the extent he was still capable of that? In the end, it was neither - more a sort of intellectual curiosity, as if he'd discovered a brand new breed of scorpion.\n\n'Who are you?' she asked, her surprise giving way to indignation.\n\nA name. Such a simple thing, but then he had taken so many across the years. Most recently, on the comet, he had been the Apostle of the Unspeaking. He still wore the same chain-draped black-and-red armour, still carried the sceptre of iron, though he had removed the eyeless bronze helm and had dispensed with the services of a voice-slave. That had all been subterfuge to keep Magnus' witches from divining his identity, no longer required now.\n\n'I am the Hand of Destiny,' he said, without the faintest blush of shame. He knew that people laughed at the title he'd given himself, but he didn't care. No one else - no one - had done as much as he had to set all these things in motion, so he deserved it. He had destroyed the greatest empire the galaxy had ever known. Just him, working away for years, like a voracious insect gnawing at the foundations of a rotten building. He'd suffered for it. He'd been made to suffer. Even the armies he'd helped raise up no longer wanted anything to do with him.\n\nBut that was fine. A prophet in his own land, and all that. Redemption would come soon enough, once the truths he'd exposed were revealed to even the stubbornest souls, and so it was only proper that he was around to guide things at the very end, just as he had done at the start.\n\n'The Hand of Destiny,' the woman replied, unamused. 'Well, then.'\n\nShe shuffled up in bed, gesturing briefly to her candle, which lit again. Outside, the wind had got up, and the awnings were flapping against their restraints.\n\n'And what do you call yourself, my lady?' he asked.\n\n'You don't know? You broke in here, all that trouble, and you don't know?'\n\n'I couldn't ever divine a name. Not clearly. In any case, I suspect you have more than one. How do you wish to be known?'\n\n'I wish you to leave. You were not invited.'\n\nErebus smiled ruefully. 'No one invites me anywhere any more. But there are laws of hospitality here, are there not?'\n\n'Laws apply to those who respect them.'\n\nErebus glanced around the chamber. It was a strange place - a modest setting, but filled with nice things. Some of the trinkets had the warp-stench of extreme age about them, their crude outlines twisting with the imprints of many souls.\n\nThere was power, here. Deep, time-worn power, hidden away carefully but still detectable to one with a good eye. It hadn't been easy to break in, even after months of preparation.\n\n'I meant what I said,' he told her. 'I wish to talk.'\n\n'They leave me alone for so long,' the woman muttered. 'And now the rush.' She shot him a weary look. 'I have nothing left to say to any of you. I played my part in this sorry game a long time ago, and now wish to retire from it altogether.'\n\n'Yes,' he said, turning back to face her, gripping the foot of her bed with his gauntlets. 'That is what I discovered, and so I worked hard to find you, before it's all destroyed. I had to pay my respects, at least - you understand that?'\n\nShe looked properly bewildered then. 'Your... respects.'\n\n'Nothing would have been possible. Everything we've done, all we've worked for, it all started with you. The choirs of the Pantheon still sing of it. You are revered, my lady, by those who know the truth. I had to make the time to be here, even though the trail was a long one, and I had to follow a gang of blind wretches through some tricky patches, in case I got lost forever in the mazes. But they're off on their own now, and now I've ended up where I wanted to be all along - with the architect. The mother of it all.'\n\n'Listen, I do not know what portents you've been studying, but something has gone badly wrong with them.'\n\n'No, I am never wrong. You are the architect. The scatterer. The instrument of the gods themselves.'\n\nAt that, she finally began to lose her composure. 'Gods! This"}
{"text":"w a gang of blind wretches through some tricky patches, in case I got lost forever in the mazes. But they're off on their own now, and now I've ended up where I wanted to be all along - with the architect. The mother of it all.'\n\n'Listen, I do not know what portents you've been studying, but something has gone badly wrong with them.'\n\n'No, I am never wrong. You are the architect. The scatterer. The instrument of the gods themselves.'\n\nAt that, she finally began to lose her composure. 'Gods! This again. What could you possibly know of gods? Look at you! You dress like some mind-touched devil-boy kicked out of the village for poisoning the well. Something has misled you, and I do not care what that is. I only care that you leave now, before I become truly angry.'\n\nErebus found himself enjoying this. She was as impressive as he'd hoped she'd be. She worked hard to hide it, sure, but now he could feel her power bubbling up from under the surface. It was like nothing he'd encountered before - not an overt, flashy power, but a subtle one, like an aroma.\n\n'Maybe you don't even know it yourself,' he pressed on. 'Maybe you believed that you acted alone, for reasons that seemed pure to you. They relish it, when that happens. But it was them, all the same. You crippled the enemy before He'd even properly got started. Ha! When the Warmaster kills Him in turn, it will be your name on the lips of the faithful.'\n\nShe got up. She gestured again, and the room lit fully. She was tall - almost as tall as he was - and moved like a dancer, imperiously.\n\n'You have some cheap art about you, devil-boy,' she said, her voice low and dangerous. 'You might scare a child, on a good day, but you neither scare nor impress me. Leave now, and never return.'\n\nHe held his ground. 'You were there at the start. You have the power to throw primarchs across both time and space. Wittingly, or otherwise, it doesn't much matter. Did you really think that could just be ignored, now, only days away from the birth of our new order? I needed to find out what you meant by it. What you hoped to achieve.'\n\nHe spoke fast, aware of the danger. She'd stopped advancing towards him, perhaps intrigued, or maybe just appalled, and he made use of that.\n\n'Loose ends,' he went on. 'I seek them out, interrogate them. Do you stand by your actions? Do you intend to follow them through? That could open new doors. It could make you a power we might do business with.'\n\nNow there was no mistaking it - she was horrified - but this was the moment.\n\n'Because I created Horus, see, raised him up, made him Lord of Chaos,' he said, delivering the offer, just as he had done on Davin. 'Think on it. I could do the same for you.'\n\nArcheta broke from the cover of the crater's edge, just for a second, and unleashed his bolter. At the precise same moment, twenty-nine of his warriors did the same, all emerging from their various shelters and opening up.\n\nTwo hundred metres ahead, the remains of the wall sheltering the Blood Angels' defensive position blew up from the mass-reactive assault, pulverising into whirling shards of brick and rockcrete. A brace of grenades sailed through the night to complete the job, exploding on impact and blasting apart what remained. A scatter of fire shot back, sporadic now, but the old hab-block the Blood Angels were sheltering in had been rendered completely unstable. Archeta gave the command, and more of his troops filtered up through the ruins on either side, dragging heavier weapons with them. As the beleaguered Blood Angels fell back, those guns were brought to bear, levelling deep troughs between the few standing sections and sending debris-chunks splattering through the empty window frames.\n\nThis was how it had been for hours, now. The enemy was still withdrawing steadily, still overwhelmed by the sheer numbers coming at them, but the terrain slowed everything down for everybody. It was all devastated, all tumbling and crashing inward and sending up thick clouds of toxic ash and dust. The transit arteries were blocked. After every artillery strike it took time to plough through the smouldering remains. At every turn, in that jungle of dilapidation, you were liable to face an ambush, counter-push or suicide strike. Both the Imperial Fists and the Blood Angels were lethally good at that kind of fighting, and they knew every inch of the territory they were ceding. They knew where to leave the fragmentation charges, the anti-personnel mines, the booby-trapped hatches that would send an advancing squad plummeting down into the waterlogged vaults below.\n\nStill, it was a game that the Sons of Horus could play, too. Archeta had fought his way through a thousand cityscapes across both the Crusade and the Rebellion, and success always followed the same pattern: keep pressing, keep pushing, keep the infantry and armour together, watch your flanks and don't get careless. Fast-moving warfare was exhilarating in its own way, but this heavy attrition, this slow grind of strangulation, it had its own attractions.\n\nHe dropped back into cover as returning bolt-shells whined overhead. Twenty metres off, his second and third squads were reloading and preparing to advance. His flickering tactical display told him the fourth, sixth and seventh were making good progress through the tangle of scrap to the north, and his lieutenant's supporting squadrons of Spartans would imminently crunch their way into range to the south, restoring the punch they needed to finish this block off.\n\n'Captain,' came a priority signal across his helm's secure feed.\n\nIt was Beruddin, captain of the Fifth Company. Archeta signalled for his own squad to keep moving, then slid further down into the lee of the muddy crater-lip.\n\n'Captain,' he replied. 'How goes it?'\n\n'Slow. Bloody. Satisfying.'\n\nArcheta smiled. Beruddin was a warrior after his own heart. 'You'll be with us, then?'\n\nTheir two companies were due to rendezvous thirty kilometres further in, just in sight of the already shelled Field of Winged Victory, the muster-point for the combined push into the Palatine.\n\n'Negative. Not unless you pull back now.'\n\nHe didn't like the sound of that. 'My orders are-'\n\n'Sigismund, brother. Sigismund. He's been sighted, Mercury section. They lost a whole battalion with Reaver support down there, and it's got Legion command spitting bile. There's some life in this band of wastrels yet.'\n\nSigismund. One of the mere handful of names that could be spoken of with unfeigned respect across any Legion, in any faction. It had been rumoured by some that his powers were waning, that he'd lost his nerve under the suffocating control of his primarch. No one wanted that to be true. You wanted to kill a beast at the apex of its power, just to show yourself what you could do. Such things mattered. They were the things that enabled a commander to rise through the ranks, to control the loyalty of the line troops, to alter the balance of power within a Legion.\n\n'I'm within sight of the muster,' Archeta said, though without conviction. His mind was already racing. Baraxa, who had pushed ahead hard, might reach Palatine ahead of him. 'I still need to get to-'\n\n'Listen. Ezekyle is already inside the Ultimate Wall. They say he's clawing his way across territory faster than anything that's ever lived. He wants the kill. He can get it. But we're closer, my brother. We're much closer, and we deserve it more, don't you think?'\n\nWhy wasn't this coming from the primarch? Hells, where was he? Why were they squabbling over prizes like gangers, when they should have been marching united in the shadow of his fur-lined cloak?\n\nStill, Beruddin made a point. They were closer. And they had been bleeding for this battle, all while the First Captain had still been licking his wounds from the Saturnine debacle.\n\n'It's important. That he doesn't do it. You see that? They're already calling him Legion Master. Some openly - the blasphemy of it. So it can't be him - someone has to stand up.'\n\nThat was all true. And it was a better reason to change course now. Archeta made some calculations, barely even hearing the crashes of gunfire around him. As he did so, his gaze alighted on the scabbard of his beloved blade, the one that whispered to him in the quiet moments. It had been a while since he'd unsheathed it. He'd been waiting for an occasion worthy of it, almost despairing of one coming.\n\n'You have a loc-reading?' he asked.\n\nLaughter at the end of the feed. 'Don't need one! He's the only resistance between here and the Palatine. Everyone's after him - to join him, or to take him down. Come, brother. We need to be there.'\n\nArcheta looked up. His tac-reading showed that his Spartans were almost in position. The Blood Angels were in full retreat now, leaving the bodies of their slain behind them. Even so, this front would take hours, maybe days, to reduce. It would be hard, thankless work, all of it in the shadow of the Great Potential Kill.\n\nAnd when you put it like that, there was really no choice to be made at all.\n\n'My sincere thanks, brother,' he said, stowing his bolter and readying to give the command. 'I'll give the order as soon as we're done here. We'll hunt him together.'\n\n'For the honour of the Warmaster!'\n\nArcheta smiled. 'Aye, that's right,' he said dryly. 'For the honour of Horus.'\n\nFragile\n\nNot just yet\n\nRemembrance\n\n'For his honour!' cried Jangsai fervently. 'For the honour of the Khagan!'\n\nThe Xiphon was a beautiful, beautiful thing - a machine so perfectly crafted in the image of the V Legion's mode of warfare that it might have been born in the vaults of Quan Zhou itself. It was slippery in the air, jumpy as a colt, always liable to flip over or slide into trouble, but that was the very appeal of it. You had to learn how to handle that, to master its lightness and its fragility, and only then did it become truly deadly, a stiletto in a world of broadswords.\n\nSo many Legions had abandoned them entirely during the Crusade, preferri"}
{"text":"ine so perfectly crafted in the image of the V Legion's mode of warfare that it might have been born in the vaults of Quan Zhou itself. It was slippery in the air, jumpy as a colt, always liable to flip over or slide into trouble, but that was the very appeal of it. You had to learn how to handle that, to master its lightness and its fragility, and only then did it become truly deadly, a stiletto in a world of broadswords.\n\nSo many Legions had abandoned them entirely during the Crusade, preferring the more brutal charms of heavier atmospheric fighters, but even after the Mechanicum had ceased sponsoring new production, the White Scars had hung on to as many as they could. The great mass of those remaining in service had been destroyed in the first few weeks of the war, despite reaping a toll far in excess of their numbers. All those remaining had been held back for this single exercise, and at that moment Jangsai could only be thankful that they had.\n\nHis every nerve tingled, his every sense was alive. His squadron screamed along, ten strong, in tight formation, cutting bright white contrails through the filth of the atmosphere. When at the controls of this brilliant, temperamental machine, there was no room left for anything but pure concentration. Let your mind drift for just a second, and you would find yourself flying wildly out of control and smashing into the onrushing horizon.\n\n'Targets marked,' he announced, thumbing attack runes to his pilots. 'Kill with joy, my brothers.'\n\nThey hurtled down between two horizons. The lower one was natural, black as coal and scarred by months of combat. The upper one was the enormous orbital disc, blotting out what remained of the natural sunlight, a false terrain of streaming fire that churned and rumbled, stretching as far as could be seen in all directions. Being so close to it had an exhilaration all of its own, racing between such vast solid masses, making the narrow airspace between them into a frenzied killing zone.\n\nEverything swung and swerved around him, tilting wildly as the axes were hurled across one another. Enormous lances of orbital las-batteries speared and flashed, some punching clean through the Skye plate's outer armour and fizzing down, their killing potential drained, to the terrain below. Debris splattered and pinged about them, crashing into unwary tanks, fighters and gunships, igniting spontaneously before exploding into perilous bursts of chaff.\n\nThe four and a half thousand vertical kilometres of airspace were terrifying and marvellous, a bracketed, congested zone of high-velocity combat. The orbital plate still absorbed the vast majority of the void-launched las-fire, so the enemy had to bring its gunships close to ground level to have a crack at the armour columns. That was already difficult, due to the turbulence the Skye plate brought with it, but not impossible, and so every remaining V Legion airborne asset had been loosed too, poised tight under the platform's fire-shadow and ready to take on the oncoming shoals of Death Guard flyers.\n\nAs a rule, the enemy preferred the larger, more cumbersome units - most of them gunships - perfectly adapted to unload air-to-ground fire. That made them dangerous for the tank crews, but vulnerable to the faster-moving true fighter squadrons. The bulk of the White Scars gunships had been pressed into service ferrying rapid-response infantry to keep the attack runs cleared, and so the task of securing the airspace had fallen to the Xiphon formations, who were thinly spread, but able to sweep across the battlezone at blistering pace.\n\nJangsai locked on to a formation of seven Death Guard Storm Eagles, skidding along at low altitude and gearing up to strafe a unit of Imperial Hellhammers. The gunships were almost in position to fire, but went unwarily - the colossal interference from the Skye's progress made augurs virtually useless, and you could use the firestorm above you just as you used the glare of the sun, staying high against it until the very last moment before spinning into kill range.\n\nThe ten Xiphons suddenly dropped, plummeting nose first and racing hard into contact. Missiles streaked out from the first four launchers, spinning away before smacking into the gunships and blasting two of them clean out of the air. Before the rest could react, the lascannons spat a furious volume of bolts in sharp lines, searing off like tracer shells and cracking across the gunships' upper armour. Three more gunships were knocked out before the Xiphons had to pull up again. By then, the rest of the enemy aircraft were scattering, all thoughts of ground assault replaced by a frantic run for cover.\n\n'Hai Chogoris!' Jangsai whooped, doling out marker runes for the survivors over the squadron comm-net before swinging tightly round to finish them off.\n\nThe Xiphons split into hunting pairs. Jangsai dropped in behind a jinking Storm Eagle, its turbines kicking out huge clouds of smoke from an earlier hit, and locked on with all four of his inline las-cannons.\n\n'For Catullus,' he breathed as he depressed the fire-runes, watching with savage satisfaction as the las-bolts drilled home again and again. The Storm Eagle blew apart, its airframe cracking into pieces that tumbled over and over before splaying down to earth.\n\nAll ten fighters made it out of the engagement, all seven targets were neutralised. From far below, the lead Hellhammer let off a flare, which Jangsai interpreted as a gesture of gratitude.\n\n'Ha!' he laughed out loud, genuinely pleased. 'Now for the next one.'\n\nAfter that, it got harder. The flurry of initial fighter-strikes took the Death Guard by surprise, but despite their preference for ground combat they were no fools. The heavier gunships maintained ground attack runs while the more manoeuvrable units pulled up higher, ready to engage their attackers.\n\nMore dogfights followed in quick succession, the interceptors streaking in hard, aiming to knock out the target quickly and at range before heavier armaments could be brought to bear. A Storm Eagle could take a bucketload of punishment before breaking up, whereas a Xiphon might be crippled by a single clean shot. Thus Jangsai's squadron began to winnow down - Kojar's flyer blasted into shrapnel by the heavy bolters on a Thunderhawk, Xoi-Men's taking hits from a Stormbird that threw it up into the orbital plate's firezone, Hiban's struck by a machine-spirit-guided missile that ripped the right-hand wing right off, sending him corkscrewing out of control before smashing apart against the derelict flank of an empty hab-block.\n\nBut the exuberance was never dented. The fighters blasted more tonnage out of the air, one stolid hunk at a time, clearing the skies above the always-moving armour below them. Their momentum was unstoppable, the pace unflagging. Jangsai streaked in to rake a slow-moving Thunderhawk, smashing every system along its flank before his brothers sent las-bolts pounding into its cockpit. He outpaced a rare Corsair bomber, tormenting it with a missile strike before sweeping under it and spearing las-lines through its bomb-chamber and setting them all off.\n\nBit by bit, moment by moment, the tanks drew ever closer to their objective. The towers of the Lion's Gate space port grew nearer, swelling up to blot out the last few scraps of open sky ahead. Green lightning-shards scampered across the blackened earth, snagging against the inferno's edge kindled by the Skye plate, all of it polluted by the smoke-trails pumped out by the fortress' corrupted heart. The artificial night became darker and thicker, with every scope silting up and every turbine choking on ash. The Xiphons activated their powerful lumens, giving up secrecy for a sliver of extra visual clarity.\n\nSomehow, in all that flying muck, Jangsai's wingman, Selik, spied an incoming formation of Stormbirds - three of them, burning fast through a churning bank of smog, seeking out targets on the ground. Those craft were big enough to be carrying infantry squads, and so were prime targets for neutralisation.\n\n'Down at them!' Jangsai ordered immediately, yanking the control columns and banking steeply.\n\nThe seven remaining Xiphons swept earthwards, powerful thrusters booming as their wing tips tilted in parallel. They dropped like falcons, almost vertical for the dive, before the lascannons erupted into their four-pronged assault. The Stormbirds instantly broke formation, swinging away from the incoming barrage with their own bolters cracking out return fire.\n\nJangsai pounced after the lead aircraft, driving hard to get a missile lock. His reticules jumped and slewed, struggling to clamp on to the wheeling target. A warning bleep sounded in the cockpit, but he ignored it, knowing he was only microseconds away.\n\nBut then bolt-shells crunched through his tail fin, knocking the structure from its mount and blowing the Xiphon's balance out of kilter. The world spun crazily, over and over, as Jangsai fought to regain control. He hadn't even seen where the projectiles had come from - one of the other Stormbirds, maybe, or even launched from the ground. It didn't much matter, though, as the single strike had made his fighter unflyable.\n\nHe had a sickening view of the terrain rushing up to meet him, the G-forces nearly blinding him entirely, before he managed to somehow swing the interceptor down into a forward skim, only metres from the ground. The whole thing shuddered now, as unstable as a thrown discus. Jangsai saw the space port towering over him directly ahead, its outworks rising in messy terraces, all crowned with the flicker of gunfire and the spider's webs of ordnance striking. He gauged whether he might be able to make it all the way - ram the interceptor into one of the parapets and take out a defence battery or two - when another hammer blow of bolter fire blasted him lower, punching through his starboard wing and ripping its meagre armour free. The Xiphon plunged earthwards, still ro"}
{"text":" Jangsai saw the space port towering over him directly ahead, its outworks rising in messy terraces, all crowned with the flicker of gunfire and the spider's webs of ordnance striking. He gauged whether he might be able to make it all the way - ram the interceptor into one of the parapets and take out a defence battery or two - when another hammer blow of bolter fire blasted him lower, punching through his starboard wing and ripping its meagre armour free. The Xiphon plunged earthwards, still rocketing along but now entirely uncontrollable.\n\nJangsai hit the eject controls, and the cockpit cover blew free. He was kicked out next, thrown up into a vortex of streaming fire-flecks. The pilot-seat's thrusters jerked into life, boosting him clear of the impact site, where his Xiphon smashed to earth in a furrow of ploughed-up dirt and rubble. More bolt-shells whistled past, maybe aimed at him, maybe just flying thickly from the dogfight, but then the ejector-unit sent him plummeting. Jangsai pushed himself free before the chair itself smacked to the ground, landing in a heavy crouch with his blade already drawn.\n\nThe tormented sky roared overhead, furnace-bright and racing with interlocking contrails. Ahead of him were the outworks, ink-black, a rising terrain of scaffolds and bulwarks. The ground beneath his feet shook incessantly, rocked by the massed tracks scoring it for kilometres around. Already the gloom beyond the first line of ruins was pierced with pairs of pale green lenses, lumbering up out of the drifting murk with their corrupted blades glimmering.\n\nJangsai activated the disruptor on Ajak's blade, and the flaring energy field was like a pure white star against the smokescreens of churning darkness.\n\n'Come, then, you turgid filth,' he snarled, grinning under his helm and preparing to burst into motion. 'Let us see how you keep up with this.'\n\nThe full muster alert had annoyed him. Crosius had hoped for hours more exploration down in the basements - he'd just had another delivery of twenty more conscious subjects - but you couldn't ignore a priority-one summons. He'd looked at the tiny creature perched on the shelf above him, who was gnawing on a tufty bit of scalp-skin and dribbling adorably, and sighed.\n\n'Come with me, then,' he said, and the creature hopped down to perch on his shoulder guard. It nuzzled into the cleft between pauldron-rim and breastplate, a gap that had widened as Crosius' body had swollen. 'Duty calls.'\n\nHe limped back through the doors, picking up his old chainblade as he went. Its adamantium rim was rust-addled and rotting, but something interesting was oozing from the outtakes now - he guessed it would be poisonous. Alarms were going off everywhere within the creaking space port, some of them part of the old Imperial network, some of them blaring out of newer Legion warning stations. The racket was irritating, and it didn't seem to make anyone hurry - legionaries clumped and clanged their way towards their positions as if half-asleep, barely speaking to one another.\n\nThe daemons were a different matter. Those flickering, realm-phasing monsters were rollicking along with real excitement, slobbering and snickering, occasionally losing their grip on the physical environment and slipping through the floor entirely. They looked almost drunk, or drugged, as if just being there - in such proximity to the Anathema and His continued wards against them - turned them into imbeciles. By way of compensation for that, the slow transformation of the space port's innards had ramped up greatly, with the old plain metal walls buckling into new and organic forms, leaking chems and spilling out with dark-edged creepers. The air around them all felt as thick as vomit, and visibility was down to a few dozen metres in the deeper pits.\n\nHe chuckled with enjoyment, and found himself cultivating the hope that, when the fighting was done, the Legion would never leave this place. Let Horus have the Palace he so craved to destroy - this intriguing tower of decay would be enough for them. They could turn it into an incubator, the greatest there had ever been, so ripe with power and virulence that the galaxy itself would be irredeemably infected.\n\nFirst, though, they had to defend it. He wheezed through his rebreather as he climbed up the long stairs, gripping the rails to haul himself along. He emerged into a long hall, one that ran for hundreds of metres up towards the great gates at the western end of the ground-level galleries. A vast mass of bodies was in motion, all of them stamping and lurching their way towards the ramparts - Unbroken marching in squads, ragged bands of cultists dragged from the wastelands, the candle-flicker daemons shuddering in and out of vision. The floor shook under all that, its foundations booming as the wall guns opened fire. The mobilisation might have been premature, done without sufficient preparation or foresight, but at least it was underway, ratcheting up through the rusty gears towards battle strength.\n\nEventually he emerged onto the south-western-facing parapets, three hundred metres up from the level of the outworks and surrounded by heavy gun emplacements and defence towers. More than half of those emplacements were out of action, shattered by Perturabo on the way in. A few had been reconditioned, and other cannons had been airlifted in from the Legion's own supplies, but the impression was still one of decrepitude.\n\nCrosius adjusted the snarled-up controls on his helm visor, and felt the mechanism clunk. For a moment, all he could see was a fog of interference, before the sluggish machine-spirit finally remembered its business and targeting lines swept over a sharpening tactical vista.\n\nDue west, the sky was on fire, and the source of it was getting closer all the time, surrounded by the flash and dart of duelling atmospheric squadrons. Below that oncoming thunderhead, as wide as the horizon itself, the conquered territories leading down to Colossi were now obscured by a rolling carpet of dust - not the lazy drifts dissipating out from sites of previous destruction, but the churned-up trails of vehicles moving, propelled at reckless speed, swarming through the remains of the old cityscape like a pack of rats.\n\nCrosius was no master stratego, but the numbers looked... troubling. The enemy had not launched a counter-attack of such size for months, certainly not since their blood-soaked setbacks across the Anterior war-front. This, though, was concentrated. It looked determined, and it was moving fast.\n\nHe remembered Typhus' words to him, then. You will know.\n\nSo maybe he should summon him back. Maybe this was the eventuality he'd been concerned about. Crosius picked up the fat daemon, stroked one of its chins to make it giggle, and pondered. The tiny monster didn't seem concerned. It pointed at the advancing armour, then twisted around and farted at them.\n\nCrosius laughed, and patted its spines. 'Commendable,' he murmured. 'And no more than they deserve.'\n\nThat reassured him. He put the creature back into the crook in his armour, and fumbled for the control switch on his weapon. Far below, the clouds of dust billowed closer.\n\n'Race up as flashily as you like,' he said, clambering up the steps towards the rampart's edge. All around him, Legion warriors were cranking the gun barrels lower, hauling up gurneys of ammunition, powering the heavy engines that would swing the turntables around. The air crackled with daemon-outlines, the rockcrete flags trembled from the massed march of cloven boots.\n\n'We will make you suffer for it.'\n\nNaranbaatar leapt from the open hatch of the Thunderhawk. For a second, he was plummeting, surrounded by nothing but flame and air, before he smashed to the dirt and got to work.\n\nTo his right was the carcass of a downed troop-lander, an enormous tube of darkened metal more than a hundred metres high and long. To his left was a choked-up quagmire of twisted rebar and masonry sections, a piled-up nightmare of long-collapsed structures, all but impassable even for infantry. The avenue ahead, cleared just hours ago by V Legion engineering units, was the only route in this attack-sector, and already the assault was slowing down.\n\nAll the routes had been carefully planned. Weeks of research, backed up by perilous scout missions, had given them a network of paths to the enemy. Three battlefronts had been delineated - Gold, Ebony and Amber. The first was commanded by Ganzorig, and had been tasked with driving an arrowhead across the northern sections of the space port approaches. Qin Fai led Ebony, hacking its way along the southern flank. The Khagan himself led Amber, taking the most direct vector, straight at the enemy's gunlines.\n\nWithin those various battlefronts were the hundreds of cleared attack-runs, stripped of mines and flaywire and trenches so that the tanks could rumble down them unimpeded. For the offensive to hit its mark, to strike the walls with necessary power and numbers to drive wounds into the interior, more than eighty per cent of those runs had to be completed on time. That target was punishingly hard, made all the more so by the degradation of every piece of equipment the Legion still possessed. To be halted in the open was death, and so the tanks had to be kept moving at all costs.\n\nNaranbaatar swung his staff around him, gathering up the kinetic force of the storm. The skull tip blazed with a pure silver light, flooding out across the wind-blasted terrain.\n\n'Ta makaj!' he cried, and thrust both arms ahead of him.\n\nTwin arcs of raw fulguration streaked out, igniting the charged air around them. His target, an enemy Spartan war machine barrelling down the narrow channel, was hurled from its axis and sent tumbling back into the path of a Rhino transport behind. That snarled up the advance from the Death Guard column beyond - ten tracked units, flanked by infantry - allowing the Imperial forces at Naranbaatar's back - twelve main b"}
{"text":"nd-blasted terrain.\n\n'Ta makaj!' he cried, and thrust both arms ahead of him.\n\nTwin arcs of raw fulguration streaked out, igniting the charged air around them. His target, an enemy Spartan war machine barrelling down the narrow channel, was hurled from its axis and sent tumbling back into the path of a Rhino transport behind. That snarled up the advance from the Death Guard column beyond - ten tracked units, flanked by infantry - allowing the Imperial forces at Naranbaatar's back - twelve main battle tanks, plus three jetbikes strafing down the side channels - to power onwards. Naranbaatar kept up the barrage, twisting on his heel to hurl more weather-magic into the enemy, shattering gun barrels and blowing apart tracks. Once the Terran Armoured's guns came into range, true carnage was unleashed, with both traitor armour and foot-soldiers pulverised by a slamming cascade of well-aimed ordnance.\n\nBut then the air shuddered, popping like a bubble-skin, and the earth erupted. A mud-streaked dome exploded out from ground level, thrust apart by the emerging outline of something monstrous. It was huge, taller and broader than the burning skeleton of the Spartan. Its flabby, translucent body slopped out of its birth-crater, steaming and weeping, before long, bony fingers uncoiled from a dozen arms, and a white-eyed face reared up from what passed as a hollow-chested torso, all of it surrounded in bursts and smears of sulphurous gas.\n\n'Withdraw!' Naranbaatar commanded the lead Leman Russ, which was now gunning hard at the creature and engaging with its lascannon.\n\nIt was too late. With a startling lurch of speed, the daemonform surged straight at the tank, latching on with its many glimmering arms. It swung the hull around, lifting it up and slamming it hard into the hull of the stricken lander. The unit exploded as it impacted, showering the monster with burning metal that ignited into green-tinged flames wherever the gas-clots gusted.\n\nThe other Imperial units had ground to a halt or were reversing. If they had been unaccompanied they would have been frantically targeting the thing with their main cannons, but Naranbaatar himself was by then sprinting hard into contact and the engagement protocols were strict - they would not risk hitting him. White Scars jetbikes streaked ahead to tie up the surviving enemy ground troops, giving the Stormseer free rein to take on the true threat.\n\nThe yaksha lashed out at him, surrounding them both with noxious plumes, grappling to drag him into its emaciated embrace. Naranbaatar used his staff as a spear now, wreathing it in crackling lances of storm-power. He thrust down, once, twice, severing unnatural sinews and cracking unreal bone. The creature tried to smother him, to wrap its watery limbs across him and squeeze his armour into cracking, but its movements were stilted, unaccustomed yet to the world of the senses and still part immersed in the dream beyond. It managed to extend an obscenely long tongue around Naranbaatar's neck, whipping it tight and tensing to haul him in, but the move had already been foreseen - the Stormseer slashed his staff sharply, severing the muscle completely, before spinning briskly to gain momentum for the killing blow. The snarling shaft plunged deep into the creature's throat, buried deep into the heaving sacs of glassy flesh, before Naranbaatar released its full power.\n\nThe daemon blanched, bulged, then exploded, shredded into gobbets of flying fat and gristle that slapped messily across every exposed surface for thirty metres. Naranbaatar himself remained braced at the very centre, head down and shoulders set, the remnants of the kill cooking into black slurry on his crackling stave.\n\nOnly once the last slops had landed, and the last echoes of its eldritch screams had died away, did he extinguish the flames, drop to one knee, draw in a deep breath and attempt to recover his equilibrium.\n\nIt had not been the strongest of its kind, not by a long way, but every step the army took, every kilometre of ground they covered, the creatures grew more numerous and more potent. Once they were at the gates themselves, down into the lightless shafts and the mouldering undercrofts, the daemons would be formidable indeed.\n\nThe Imperial tanks started moving again, their secondary armaments ratcheting up to support the Legion jetbikes. Naranbaatar needed to call up the air support and take flight towards the next potential choke point. Every surviving zadyin arga in the Legion was doing the same, being hoisted from crisis to crisis, gouging and smiting and carving up the warp-gorged creatures that seemed to creep out of every shadow and crater's edge. It would all begin to tell, soon. Their limbs would become heavier, their mastery of the art less sure. Every exercise of power exacted a price, and this one could only rise.\n\nAs he got back to his feet, Naranbaatar found himself thinking of Yesugei again. None of the V had ever been as powerful as he; few psykers of any Legion had. If he had been with them still, if he had been commanding the conclaves of the gifted, would that have made the difference? Would they already be within the walls by now, following his bright star down into the depths with confidence?\n\nIt was still hard to believe that he was gone. His had always been the great guiding presence, the voice of calm and surety that had spoken to them from the start. Those who remained did not approach the same degree of patient command, and Naranbaatar, for all the long decades of service and deep combat experience, would never have disputed it.\n\nWe would have followed you cheerfully, my elder brother, he mused to himself. You would have made the night a little less dark for us.\n\nBut then he was stirred by the whine of a jetbike approaching. The machine juddered to a halt and the rider dismounted - a sergeant in dirt-and-blood-covered armour, all sigils of his brotherhood totally obscured, but with the height and gait of a newblood rather than a Chogorian.\n\n'Do you require assistance, zadyin arga?' he asked, bowing low. 'Is there anything I can do for you?'\n\nIn the background, the noises of combat were still ongoing. Troops were still fighting, the tanks were rolling again, and amid all of that, with the danger very much live, this sergeant had thought it important to ensure that his Stormseer was attended to.\n\nThey look to me as I once looked to him, Naranbaatar thought. And they can have no memory of the time before, when all these things were begun, when we were children too.\n\n'You fight superbly, darga,' he said, returning the bow. 'Please continue it - I shall be fine.'\n\nNaranbaatar moved off then, letting the sergeant remount and get back to the task at hand. Intermittent signals were blinking on his helm display - the Thunderhawk was coming around sharply, angling under fire, and would soon be making its descent. The next battle would then follow, and then the next, and then the next.\n\n'Because we cannot match those who came before us,' he said out loud, clambering up to the landing site, repeating the mantra he had spoken ever since Catullus in the hope that he would one day truly believe it. 'Only go as far as memory and vengeance permit.'\n\nThe game\n\nThe cards\n\nThe Nails\n\nHe should never have got so far.\n\nValdor began to think ahead to a difficult possibility - a future in which, for the first time ever, he did not capture his quarry. If Fo somehow got away amid all the confusion, then the consequences did not bear thinking about. If he were taken alive by the enemy, then that was even worse. So he had to be found.\n\nAnd yet the city was on the edge of capture. The enemy advance was now visible in all directions, a ring of fire that was steadily contracting, gnawing away at the softening defences and pushing ever closer to the core. Those battlefronts were already contested by armies of millions. As the hard hours passed, those millions would become tens of millions, further unbalancing an already one-sided slaughter. Time was running out.\n\nValdor crouched down for a moment, his long cloak draping over his knee. He let the killing edge of his spear dip a little, angling down into the darkness, glistering with a faint gold-silver light. Blood seemed to burn away from it, once the killing was done, leaving it just as pristine as ever. Amid all the squalor of the defeat, that one weapon remained pure, as hateful and stark as it had ever been.\n\nHe stared at the ground ahead of him. A thousand bootfalls had stirred the dust, blotting one another out and making the tracks unreadable. But then he wasn't there to read trails in the ash. He was there, at an intersection of possible futures, to take a moment, to place himself in the place of the hunted, to imagine the path he must have taken.\n\nValdor closed his eyes, and rehearsed what he knew. He had penetrated the deceptions of the murders, the false leads running off into already conquered urban zones, the dismal procession of broken equipment and misleading ciphers. The man he hunted was good at this, maybe as good as any he had ever gone after, but the pool of locations was shrinking fast now and no living soul knew the ways of the Palace better than he did. This was his territory, the one he had scouted out and marked over decades, all the while preparing for just such an eventuality. In the brief stillness, he gauged probabilities, considered what the man required for his work, where he could get it, what path he must have taken towards it to keep himself hidden and alive.\n\nThe spear trembled a little in his grip. He opened his eyes, now certain of the route ahead. He moved out, breaking from the shadow, out along the high-strung viaducts over the chasms of roiling fire. He ran swiftly, his heavy tread making little impression on the wind-blown filth around him. His armour was silent, a masterpiece of technomancy even by the standards of his order - save for the glittering spear, he was almost invisi"}
{"text":" he must have taken towards it to keep himself hidden and alive.\n\nThe spear trembled a little in his grip. He opened his eyes, now certain of the route ahead. He moved out, breaking from the shadow, out along the high-strung viaducts over the chasms of roiling fire. He ran swiftly, his heavy tread making little impression on the wind-blown filth around him. His armour was silent, a masterpiece of technomancy even by the standards of his order - save for the glittering spear, he was almost invisible in the murk, all that finery concealed by the palls of ash and grime smeared over every surface.\n\nThese were perilous places now, some abandoned ahead of the enemy onslaught, some already infiltrated by forward units. Dislocated body parts - fingers, arms, legs - were heaped up and protruding from the sea of rubbish, pale grey and black, the dead skin as hard as rockcrete and becoming brittle in the scouring winds. The currents shrieked and moaned around every corner, just on the edge of howling intelligible words, but prevented, just, by the frail wards still rattling in place.\n\nValdor ghosted across the high places, his cloak rippling in the acrid smoke, before dropping down steeply through the empty carcass of a storage silo, plummeting down shafts that had once carried industrial elevators and were now pits into pure blackness. He broke out near ground level, tearing along a parapet filled with silenced artillery pieces, their crews scattered face up, sightless eyes open to the heavens, outstretched hands locked in a rictus of supplication. He slipped through a long gallery of burned-out armour, all twisted barrels and broken tracks, overhung with a static fog of promethium vapour. Mist banks rose up on all sides around him, thick and curdling, smelling of chems, munitions and the dead.\n\nHe soon laid eyes on the enemy again - warriors of Lorgar's Legion, advancing through the unnatural dusk with raw confidence, surrounded by the spectral flicker of half-instantiated daemonkind. Their armour was carved with words of power, decorated with the bones and the flesh of those they had slain, their helms deformed into outstretched maws, or serpent's mouths, or the leer of some Neverborn warp prince. Their cantrips stank and pulsed around them, making the natural air recoil and mist shred itself into appalled ribbons.\n\nThey were engorged with their veil-drawn power, sick on it, their blades running with new-cut fat and their belts hung with severed scalps. For all that, they were still warriors, and they detected Valdor's presence soon enough. Nine curved blades flickered into guard, nine genhanced bodies made ready to take him down.\n\nHe raced straight into the heart of them, lashing out with his spear, slicing clean through corrupted ceramite. The combined blades danced, snickering in and out of one another's path as if in some rehearsed ritual of dance-murder, all with the dull gold of the lone Custodian at its centre. A poisoned gladius nearly caught his neck. A fanged axe-edge nearly plunged into his chest. Long talons nearly pulled him down, ripe to be trodden into the mire under the choreographed stamp of bronze-chased boots.\n\nBut not quite. They were always just a semi-second too slow, a fraction too predictable. The gap between the fighters was small, but it remained unbridgeable. His spear slammed and cut, parried and blocked, an eye-blink ahead of the lesser blades, a sliver firmer and more lethal in its trajectory, until black blood was thrown up around it in thick flurries and the lens-fire in the Word Bearers' helms died out, one by one.\n\nAfterwards, Valdor withdrew, breathing heavily, taking a moment to absorb the visions he had been gifted with each kill. Lorgar's scions were little different to the true daemons in what they gave him - brief visions of eternal torment, wrapped up in archaic religious ciphers and a kind of perpetually forced ecstasy. They were steeped in some of the purest, deepest strands of Chaos, wilfully dredging up the essence of its mutating, despoiling genius and turning it, through elaborate tortures, into a way of war. To fight them was to be reminded, more acutely than with most others, of the consequences of defeat.\n\nBut he could not linger. He pushed on again, clearing his mind. He ran harder into the maw of the advancing enemy forces, fighting his way through the scattered warbands. None caught him. Some of them barely knew he was there before he slew them. That couldn't last - when the main formations of Traitor Legions reached these regions then even he would have to withdraw - but for now the ragged interlopers scarcely slowed him.\n\nHe plunged below ground level, following his memory of all the installations east of the Clanium District. He slipped through narrow gaps blocked up by fallen arches. He slipped down deeper wells, on rickety steel clamber-frames, on spiral stairs, until it felt like he was almost back into the Dungeon stratum again, suffocated deep under the layers and layers of old construction and forgetfulness.\n\nHe finally entered the target laboratorium and witnessed for himself the destruction. The walls were cracked, the floors strewn with rubbish, the long tables covered in broken instruments. He walked through it all, and saw that some stations had been used very recently - the machine-spirits on the auspex devices were still functioning.\n\nHe paused at a station, brought the tip of his spear up, holding it laterally over the worktop. He closed his eyes, and listened to the resonances in the airspace.\n\nFo had been here. But he had not been alone. Valdor concentrated harder, letting his armour systems process every morsel of pheromone left in the stuffy atmosphere, letting his mind settle on the environment and its unfolding story.\n\nHis eyes snapped open. He moved further back, along the workbenches and into the deeper darkness. He saw blood on the far wall, and a broken door, and some fragments of an Imperial officer's uniform hanging below long gouge marks on the bare walls. Those marks were familiar, both in scale and style - a gauntlet-mounted claw, slashed wildly at a fast-moving target.\n\nNight Lords.\n\nHe started to run.\n\nThey had to put down eventually. As much as John wanted to keep going, there was a hard limit on their progress. No one else - as far as any of them had admitted, anyway - could fly the lighter. He had been exhausted before they had taken off. It had to stop.\n\nKeeping going, though, had felt like the easier option for most of the journey. It had meant that the memories could be pushed out, deferred in favour of keeping their little craft in the air. As soon as he set it back to earth, on top of a flat mesa of blasted scrub and blown weeds, he knew it would all come back.\n\nThe turbines wound down. The hold locks snapped open, the environment controls turned off. John deactivated the main power lines with a soft click, and then they were done, back out into the fresh air, their scant protection taken away again for the time being.\n\nIt was a hot night. Or a hot day - no way of telling now. The passengers made their way down the access ramp, going awkwardly with stiff limbs and aching muscles. They soon fell into their little groups - Actae and her bodyguard, Oll and his travelling companions. All of them took the opportunity to break open ration boxes stowed in the lighter's hold, and slumped wearily onto the baked earth with them.\n\nLeetu brought some for John. 'You should eat,' the Space Marine said.\n\nYes, he should. There were lots of things he should do.\n\nJohn looked up at the archaic warrior, that strange mix of the familiar and the unknown. He'd been scared of him in the beginning, knowing well enough what such creatures could do. He wasn't now. Now, he knew the right words. The words that could turn armour inside out, send his bolt pistol flying from his grasp, render his muscles to water.\n\n'Thanks,' he said, and sat down.\n\nThe two of them ate in silence. To the north-east, the sky was alight - a wavering, flickering blush that never went out. You could smell the mix of chems and cooked flesh from here.\n\n'I suppose I don't know why she kept you on,' John said eventually. 'I mean, if she hated all of this so much. Aren't you just... the worst kind of reminder?'\n\nLeetu chewed steadily. 'Maybe,' he said. 'Maybe that was a problem for her.' He never really smiled. His bull-necked, slab-muscled head was always held perfectly poised, almost expressionlessly. 'Or maybe she liked to remember a beginning. From when things were more optimistic.'\n\nJohn raised an eyebrow. 'But, if you believe her, she was the one behind it all. No Erda, no traitors. Everyone raised properly in father's secure Palace, given the guidance they always needed.'\n\n'What makes you think that would have gone better?'\n\n'Is there a worse outcome than this one?'\n\n'I would say so. There usually is.'\n\nJohn chuckled, and shook his head. 'I envy your cast of mind. And now I wonder who you were, before they changed you.'\n\n'It doesn't matter.'\n\n'I think it probably does. I think that's what we're learning, here. You can give someone all the genework you like, but add a shitty upbringing and it all comes crashing down about your ears. Or a good one, we have to hope, and they can prosper through it all.'\n\n'I really don't remember.'\n\n'I guess you probably don't. I hope she kept some records.'\n\nSomething enormous flashed in the far distance then, followed a few moments later by a soft rumble. The scrub-bushes swayed around them, then got back to their shivering in the warm air. Above them, the faint stars burned, although most of the lights weren't really stars.\n\n'I think I liked to draw,' said Leetu after a while, out of the blue. 'I mean, I still do. But I don't think the process taught me that. I think it's something I kept on. From before.'\n\nAlmost sheepishly, he drew out some small rectangles of material from a pouch at his belt. They were plascard, roughly cut. He handed the"}
{"text":"e. The scrub-bushes swayed around them, then got back to their shivering in the warm air. Above them, the faint stars burned, although most of the lights weren't really stars.\n\n'I think I liked to draw,' said Leetu after a while, out of the blue. 'I mean, I still do. But I don't think the process taught me that. I think it's something I kept on. From before.'\n\nAlmost sheepishly, he drew out some small rectangles of material from a pouch at his belt. They were plascard, roughly cut. He handed them to John, who turned them to face the light of the aircraft's lumens.\n\nEach one had a picture on them. The images were stylised, bordering on crude, but in an intentional sense. There were ten of them. The likenesses were striking. Under each representation was a caption in an old form of vernacular Gothic.\n\nThe Magician. The Empress. The Hermit. The Fool.\n\n'Very good,' John said, grudgingly impressed. 'I recognise all of us. When did you have a chance to do these?'\n\nLeetu shrugged. 'They do not take long. I have more.'\n\n'Hobby of yours, is it?'\n\n'More than that.' He blinked impassively. 'Something to... keep on at.'\n\nJohn looked up at Leetu's face. It was an Astartes face, the kind of face that wouldn't blanche at wiping out a village, or a fortress, or a world. And yet, once, it would have been a human face, softer, thinner, capable of going in a different direction if the genecraft hadn't meddled.\n\n'Actae thinks we've been assembled,' John said. 'A spread of human types, off to the Palace to remind someone, maybe everyone, what's at stake here. You should do a card for yourself.'\n\n'I would not know what to call it.'\n\nJohn shrugged. 'Temperance?'\n\n'The Devil, maybe.'\n\nJohn chuckled. 'Hah.' He reached for another ration-stick, and started to gnaw at it. He needed to sleep, though that brought the risk of dreaming.\n\nSome things, amid all the nonsense, had really flipped about. In the beginning, it had been John begging Oll to get involved again. Now the old soldier had taken charge, whipping them all into some kind of military shape for whatever came next. John had drifted to the edge of events, he felt, unsure what he was doing now, knowing that the next death would be the end of the line. And yet, for all the horror, Hatay-Antakya had given him the knowledge. His resolve had never been lower, his powers had never been higher.\n\nWhat a bloody farce.\n\nHe got up, slowly and awkwardly. Leetu remained rooted to the spot.\n\n'We'll need a plan,' John said. 'For when we get closer. It won't be an easy run.'\n\n'I shall speak to my counterpart. The new Space Marine.'\n\n'I think Ollanius will be the one calling the shots. Are you fine with that?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'My guess is we'll be improvising, even if a solid plan comes up between here and the Palace. You might think that went beyond the call of duty. If you wanted to bail, get back to Erda, I wouldn't blame you.'\n\nFor the first time, Leetu turned to look directly at him. 'I am with you now, John. Do not insult me again.'\n\nJohn held his hands up. 'Just making sure.' He forced out a smile. 'I mean, I'm glad. I've seen what you can do with that pistol - better on our side, eh?'\n\nBut that was weak, and Leetu looked away again. When he next spoke, though, his voice was the same as it always was - unoffended, inoffensive.\n\n'Reflect on what you can achieve now, logokine. I will be at your side throughout, just as I told her I would be, but your role is the important one.' He smiled, in an artificial kind of way. 'In any case, I wish to be there for myself, because I have not finished the set. How could I have done? No one, to my knowledge, has ever drawn the Emperor from life.'\n\nSkarr-Hei was losing his grip. Skarr-Hei was becoming just a part of the whole, a fleck of fire on the orb of sun-fire. Skarr-Hei had to keep killing to keep the pain at bay, though you never really lost the pain, it only changed character - sometimes a goad, sometimes a reminder, sometimes like an old friend that you felt you needed even though nothing good ever came of knowing him.\n\nThe enemy weren't worth noticing. They were buckling, and had been running ever since the breakthrough at Mercury. Skarr-Hei had heard that Titans were coming through the gap now, a monumental effort given the huge amount of earth and stone that needed clearing. That wouldn't affect things for a while, though - a Titan would struggle in the cramped and ruined Palace interior, whereas infantry went fast, went hard, swarming across any barrier raised up against them, getting to the blood-spill.\n\nSkarr-Hei had hoped for better fighting, though. He had hoped to find an enemy that would test him, one that would stand up and hammer back at the whirl of chainaxes. Instead, they had died weakly - in clumps, in squads, in droves. The World Eaters' advance was remorseless. They had no heavy armour to back them up this far in, no particular strategies or tactics, just a howling onslaught that burned its way in closer, closer, closer. They killed without compunction, without thought, out of reflex. Their old formations were nothing to them any more, they barely knew one old warrior from the other. Their armour was black-red, plastered with gore and dirt, all of it looking much the same, of a piece with the trenches of loosed flame that licked and rippled across the spoiled earth.\n\nSkarr-Hei ran down a long viaduct with his many battle-brothers, the ash-wind tearing at them all. Below was murk and rubbish. Around him were the great towers, rising up through the reeking smog. Ahead was the rising massif of the Sanctum itself, still distant but visible now, ringed with fire and smelling of terror. Even as the embers of his rational mind sank into perpetual red-tinged fury, he still understood that this place was the target, the epicentre of the true pain. It had to be destroyed.\n\nAnd yet, when they reached the end of the viaduct, at an intersection tower where the ways ahead branched out in all sorts of directions, one of his own Legion was waiting for them, uncharacteristically still. His great chainaxe ran with streamers of gore. His bronze helm was splattered with it, his breastplate was covered in it, making the dust coagulate and clump across the ceramite.\n\nSkarr-Hei knew this one. They all knew this one, and by the looks of things he'd been busy.\n\n'My lord Kharn,' Skarr-Hei said, the words slurring through his clogged vox-grille. He came to a halt, as did those around him.\n\nKharn barely seemed to notice them. He barely seemed aware of any presence, even his own. He was facing north, away from the Sanctum's edge, off into the great cluster of tall spires that broke off from the Palatine urban zone and merged with regions already conquered. His stance was erect, febrile, as if suffused with some kind of electric current.\n\n'I...' he grunted. 'He's... out... there.'\n\nSkarr-Hei listened, but it wasn't easy. He had to keep moving, keep killing. The process had been set in motion now, and what little remained of his rational mind told him that it would never stop, whatever happened here - kill, and kill again, or be lost in futile excruciation.\n\n'What are you saying?' Skarr-Hei tried. 'The primarch? You've... seen him?'\n\nThey all knew Angron was somewhere ahead. Skarr-Hei had heard the bellows from a distance, seen the carnage, but the Legion Master was off on his own, raging in his own private world of slaughter, neither commanding nor commanded, smashing through the unseen barriers against the netherworld. The best you could hope for was to witness it.\n\nAt the mention of the name, though, Kharn stirred. His bloody mask turned to gaze on Skarr-Hei. 'Something... worth our time.' His voice was breathy, thick with mucus. 'Something... got up.'\n\nAnd then Skarr-Hei knew what had distracted him. Some staged fight, some encounter, not allowed to run its natural course, nagging away somewhere in that addled mind. An adversary who had been allowed to escape alive, now out there too, part of the slaughter.\n\n'Who?' he asked.\n\nKharn struggled to vocalise it. 'The... Black Sword,' he blurted at last.\n\nSkarr-Hei didn't know what that meant. There were a million swords out there, a great number of which were probably black. It wasn't much of a name, and he doubted Kharn would be able to tell him more than that any time soon.\n\nBut they had to move. Had to keep going. His own blades were cooling, the blood on them was drying out, the Nails were already spiking.\n\n'We can find him, my lord,' Skarr-Hei said. 'There's no hiding, not now. We can find him.'\n\nAnd slowly, dimly, Kharn seemed to understand. He nodded. 'You come,' he ordered. He looked at the rest of them. 'You all come.'\n\nThen they were running again, not towards the centre but careering away like a pack of wild dogs, howling, growling, panting with machine-fervour. The movement would stave off the worst of the pain, but they all knew they needed to fight properly soon, to bury their blades into living flesh again, to kill, to maim, to burn.\n\nKharn led them now, driving them onwards, thick-painted gore flying free of his churning limbs.\n\n'Find... you,' Skarr-Hei heard him mutter, over and over, obsessed now, consumed with it. 'And finish... it.'\n\nTaking the chance\n\nLearning to doubt\n\nWallbreak\n\nFinished indeed. It had been fun while it lasted, Ayo Nuta thought, but this was the end now.\n\nThe gunners in orbit had adjusted their tactics, moving from strikes aimed at maximum-spread ground destruction to pinpoint lances designed to smash the inconvenient obstacle that stood between them and their prey. The orbital plate had begun to lose altitude badly, hammered lower by the series of incoming precision hits. Its void shields had been perforated in a dozen sectors, exposing the solid armour plates of the upper hull. Enemy atmospherics had launched missile after missile at their thruster arrays. Some of those attacks had been intercepted by V Legion fighters, but plenty had got through.\n\nThe damage all adde"}
{"text":"nces designed to smash the inconvenient obstacle that stood between them and their prey. The orbital plate had begun to lose altitude badly, hammered lower by the series of incoming precision hits. Its void shields had been perforated in a dozen sectors, exposing the solid armour plates of the upper hull. Enemy atmospherics had launched missile after missile at their thruster arrays. Some of those attacks had been intercepted by V Legion fighters, but plenty had got through.\n\nThe damage all added up. The vastness of the orbital plate had been its main defence all the way along - it took time to batter through all that adamantium and ironwork, even once the voids were stripped away and the wounded thrusters were pumping gas-flares into the air.\n\nThe command bridge still operated, more or less. Large chunks of the machinery were destroyed or non-functional, but the surviving crew were able - just - to maintain a grip on the motive controls, which was all they were really required to do now.\n\nNuta had given the order for course change two hours ago. That had been an exercise in prediction, really - it took Skye so long to shift trajectory that you had to make such calls far in advance. Only now, as the occupied space port itself filled every forward viewer with its malign outline, did the energy-feeds to the immersion drives take tangible effect. Slowly, painfully slowly, the entire suspended station began to swing south, away from the Lion's Gate fortress and out over the wastelands beyond.\n\nNuta stood watching the shift. He had been standing for hours, ever since his command throne had picked up some defect and started bursting with static electricity. He didn't mind it. It felt appropriate, somehow, to be on his feet.\n\nJust then, another las-strike hammered in from orbit. It smashed clean through a damaged void shield section before carving up the ninth hull-sector and driving its way into the chambers below. The plate's chassis shuddered once again and dropped a hundred metres or so - a familiar pattern, by then.\n\nNuta smiled. They must have been spitting with frustration, up in those enemy void-ships. Skye had absorbed everything they had thrown at it, and for just long enough. The core structure was finally breaking apart, but its job was done. A few of the forward ground-armour squadrons had already raced ahead of the plate's protective shadow, confident now of getting into cannon range safely. Even those fanatics on the fleet wouldn't open up with las-fire so close to the one place they were trying to protect.\n\nThe deck reeled, and yet another power coupling blew. Nuta had once prided himself that he could determine every aspect of his little kingdom's health from the audible hum of its thousand systems, but these sounds were all new now, and all he could really ascertain was that it couldn't last much longer.\n\nHe tried to open a comms-link to Jangsai Khan, the one who had given him this chance to shine. Predictably enough, with all that was going on, the link failed. He hoped dearly that the warrior was still alive.\n\n'If you can hear this, my khan,' he voxed anyway, 'be assured that I took my truth into a strange land. My thanks to you. You give honour to both your commune and your Legion.'\n\nSo that was that. The forward viewers were beginning to crack under the ever-increasing friction. Everything was shaking - the walls, the decks, the roof-arches. Another las-barrage swept down, possibly triangulated and launched before the plate had even changed course, but still hitting them on the extreme northern rim and blasting three perimeter sectors into puffs of splintered metal.\n\nNuta staggered across the pitching deck to reach the internal comms-station. He pushed aside the prone body of its operator and scrambled to bring up the distribution diagrams. Setting the spread to whole ship, he grabbed the mouthpiece.\n\n'Crew of the Skye orbital platform!' he shouted. He had very little idea how much those still in the lower reaches would be able to hear, but at least those still living around him - Eisen and Sleva included - were able to look up and listen. 'You can see and feel the evidence for yourself, so you do not need me to tell you that we are at the end now.'\n\nOut of the corner of his eye, in the realviewers, he could see the ground coming up to meet them. The onrush all looked so slow, so sluggish, and yet he knew that outside, in the real world, it would be accompanied by a hurricane of lightning-raked fury the likes of which even this world of superlatives could scarce have witnessed before.\n\n'Protocol demands that I give you leave to head for the saviour pods now,' Nuta went on, 'but, in this case, I would not recommend it. The territory below is held by the enemy, and we know what they do to their captives. Our imminent demise will, I trust, take a few more of the bastards out, which is something to take satisfaction from.'\n\nThe shaking got worse. The outside view became entirely obscured by solid walls of flame. The roar that had been with them since the start became a scream of tortured metal.\n\n'So we go down with our ship, like the seafarers of old. Your names may not be remembered, but our name, the name of the fortress you served on, can never be erased now. Be proud! Stand tall, as the end comes, and be as damned proud as any warrior of the Emperor!'\n\nAnother las-blast hit them hard, sending an enormous crack running across the width of the western section. The metal-scream grew worse, and Nuta even fancied he could hear the atmosphere howling in, racing up through the lower decks as the outer hull finally blew itself into tumbling slivers.\n\n'All we ever demanded, in truth, was a proper chance to serve,' he said.\n\nThe flames cleared across the realviewers, and he got one final, snatched glimpse of the Lion's Gate space port, wheeling away to the north, its skirts glowing red with the fire of the White Scars' assault, the one they had helped deliver.\n\n'We were given a chance,' he said, smiling in satisfaction. 'We took it.'\n\nAt last, the artillery was firing. The heavy breeches crashed back into their sleeves as the enormous machines erupted, whistling along the tracks and making the buffers clang. The trickle had become a steady barrage now, hurling shells hard and low into the encroaching pillars of rising dust. None of the gunners could see their targets clearly, but that hardly mattered - there were only so many avenues the enemy could charge up, given the chewed-up terrain, so you could discharge blind and be unlucky not to hit something.\n\nMorarg was pleased to see it. He was also pleased to see the last squadrons of Legion ground vehicles leave the depots and roll out to engage beyond the walls. All of those tanks would be destroyed, he knew, but slowing things down was the objective now. Many things had changed for the Death Guard, but that core doctrine was still central to their philosophy of war. They were so good at it, turning every encounter into a swamp of endurance, ramping the levels of suffering so high that only a pure-bred contempt for life could see you out the other side. Slow it all down, grind it into stasis, sink everything into the swamp.\n\nAttention now turned to the fixed defences. That damned orbital plate was falling fast, its work done, and the remnants of the atmospheric combat would be over very soon. The contest would come down to the ground forces after that, and whether they could establish bridgeheads in sufficient numbers.\n\nMorarg had gone to Mortarion as soon as he'd finalised the defensive arrangements with Kalgaro. He'd half-expected to find the primarch arming up, ready to head for the front and take command in person, but nothing much seemed to have changed since his last visit. Mortarion sat on the obsidian throne still, his great gauntlets clutching at the hewn stone, staring intently at the red-tinged skies ahead.\n\n'I believe they will reach the perimeter soon, my lord,' Morarg had told him. 'We will make them pay for the crossings, but they will get in.'\n\nMortarion had nodded. 'Then they wish to destroy themselves,' he had said, his dry voice soft and sallow. 'We have harried them for so long that they have given in to madness. I had dreamed of slaying him within my father's house, to bring our long feud to an end in the place where it all began, but now it must happen here.'\n\n'He has not been sighted yet,' Morarg had said. 'Every unit has orders to locate him, and bring him down before he can breach the walls.'\n\nMortarion had chuckled. 'Ambitious. If you succeed in that, I will be impressed, but also disappointed - his throat is marked for my scythe, after all.'\n\nThe primarch had seemed distracted, only partly paying attention. The entire fortress was mobilised now, gathering itself to repel the invaders, and yet he was still here, surrounded only by shadows and the chattering glimmer of the daemonic. Morarg had told himself that this impression of inactivity was an illusion, and that the Lord of Death was engaged in combat across planes of existence that he himself would never be able to understand. The Emperor's own halls reeled with hopelessness, all due to the great vortices of power being channelled here, in this very chamber, by his master.\n\nBut it would have been good to see him arm up, all the same. To have his eyes light up with fury, as they had on Barbarus, when the scythe had swung to the rhythm of a million soldiers marching. That would be have been good to see again.\n\n'Then,' Morarg had said, unsure what was required of him now, 'I should join the defence myself.'\n\n'Yes. I suppose you should.'\n\nAnd that had been it. Morarg had walked away feeling as despondent as he could ever remember. This was a crisis, a moment of acute danger, and those about him seemed either to treat it as a kind of vicious game, like Kalgaro, or remain blind to the peril altogether.\n\nHad the void done this to them? Had the hidden bargain made during the Sickness"}
{"text":"een good to see again.\n\n'Then,' Morarg had said, unsure what was required of him now, 'I should join the defence myself.'\n\n'Yes. I suppose you should.'\n\nAnd that had been it. Morarg had walked away feeling as despondent as he could ever remember. This was a crisis, a moment of acute danger, and those about him seemed either to treat it as a kind of vicious game, like Kalgaro, or remain blind to the peril altogether.\n\nHad the void done this to them? Had the hidden bargain made during the Sickness actually diminished their capabilities, rather than making them stronger? It was hard even to unpick how to examine that. Their bodies were becoming this strange mix of disease and impenetrability, making them so incredibly hard to kill even as their wits slowed and their minds started to decay. Once the war was won here, it was hard to guess whether that process would continue. Might they eventually slide into the other realm entirely, becoming no different to the daemons that belched and capered around them? And if that was their fate, what kind of victory would it be?\n\nAs he travelled down the arming chambers, such thoughts plagued him, taking his attention away from where it needed to be. So it was that he caught sight of the lurking daemon very late, and that was dangerous, because they were not creatures to get close to without good reason.\n\nMorarg froze instantly, staring at it, his hand hovering over his combat knife. It looked up at him. He looked down at it. For a long time, neither of them moved. And then it unfurled a little, slinking wetly out of the gloom, and gave him a sly smile.\n\n'Disappointed?' it asked. 'Are you?'\n\n'Who are you?'\n\n'You'll have to tell me, if you wish to learn more. Are you disappointed?'\n\nThe creature was extraordinary. Most of the Neverborn infesting the space port were of a broadly similar type - obese, covered in boils and scabs, slobbering and limping, clad only in mouldering rags that hung from their slack frames like a shedding epidermis. This one was nothing like that. It was thin. Very thin. So thin, that if it turned away from you, you could imagine it would disappear entirely, folding up into the darkness and slithering away. Its limbs were long and misshapen, its face was a landslip of sagging grey flesh. Like many of its breed, it was phasing in and out rapidly, its outer shell turning glassy, its skeleton exposed, before it turned solid again. It squatted in a pool of brackish water, its bony knees up around its shoulders, its knuckles cracking and its big, mournful eyes glowing like plates of corposant.\n\n'Learn more about what?' Morarg asked, irritated. He was in no mood for this.\n\n'Your master.' The daemon leered suggestively. 'The one you are losing faith in, this very moment.'\n\nMorarg drew his knife - a whip-fast movement. He could still do it, when angry enough.\n\nThe daemon stared at the blade, and blinked. 'I think you might actually try to use that. And it might even hurt.'\n\n'It would, trust me. What are you?'\n\nThe daemon shrugged. Every gesture it made, every half-snatched movement, emphasised its extreme skinniness. It looked like a famished corpse, a starved body, a dried-up rind.\n\n'I am the Remnant,' it said. 'I am the last scrap, when all else has been consumed. I am the little slip of gristle that lingers, when you have chewed the steak. I am the memory. I am what came before.'\n\nMorarg started to walk again. 'I have no time for riddles,' he grunted.\n\n'But we adore him!' the creature blurted, halting him. 'We adore him. Does that make a difference? You have to fight for him now, and you are wavering in your belief. But you should not. He is loved, in the empyrean, like few others.'\n\nThis was disturbing language. The Neverborn were not well known to the XIV Legion yet. They were still unsettling phenomena, as much to be feared and distrusted as to be used as allies. Morarg did not know how to read them, but was astute enough to realise that they lied, and tricked, and made up for their ephemeral natures by playing on the doubts and hesitations of solid-fleshed mortals.\n\nBut he waited, all the same. 'You seem to know a lot about me,' he said warily.\n\n'Because you are the most loyal of a loyal Legion,' the daemon said. 'You have endured the most, the pain, the Change, the descent into a world no one prepared you for. And yet you still serve, trusting that the cause must be just, because he has ordered it so. It would be a shame, if you doubted now, and had your head turned by lesser souls, ones who have taken credit for things they never fully understood.'\n\nMorarg kept the knife raised. 'You will need to speak plainly, creature, or I shall cut the truth out of you.'\n\nThe daemon smirked. 'You could try it. I am harder to finish off than most things, for I am what remains when the cutting is done.' Its uncanny face, mournful and disordered, twitched. 'But here, as plain as I can make it. You believe your lord was deceived, that he was led by another, one who should have been called to heel long before any of it could happen. You suspect that he is a victim, and now makes the best of things, just as you all do, and thus you try not to despise him. But still you fear that he is weak, the worst of all the Barbaran sins, and has been a pawn in the hands of others.'\n\n'I have killed souls for saying less,' Morarg growled.\n\n'Then it is good that I do not have one.' The daemon grimaced, getting to its feet, and the shadows jerked and snagged around it. Its round eyes were reflective like a felid's, but without any pupils. 'Take some comfort now, for the truth is more complex. That is what I came to tell you, for it matters that some stories are known. This is Mortarion's Legion, and always shall be. He is the master, and he is the maker. You should fight for him, Caipha Morarg, and do so without hesitation.'\n\n'How could you know all this?'\n\n'Because you could not,' said the daemon. 'Even though you were there, on the ship, along with all the rest, but you would not have seen it, because you were looking elsewhere.'\n\nIt shuffled closer, and Morarg smelled its corpse-stink, rank in his nostrils.\n\n'Just wait, for a moment, here, and listen,' it said eagerly. 'For only I will tell you what really happened on the Terminus Est.'\n\nAmber was the spearpoint, the moment of greatest risk, the first thrust into the heart of darkness.\n\nShiban gave the order for the charge, and three hundred jetbikes leapt forward, accelerating up to full velocity in a split moment, their drives shaking with white-blue flame. They streaked through the ash and the smoke, wheeling like thrown daggers, outpacing the lumbering heavy armour and racing straight for the ramparts ahead.\n\nAlready shells were firing, hurled high right up at the artillery positions. Missiles from the gunship wings streaked off into the dark. The unnatural night was torn open, shredded by light and noise, and half-dead things in the craters looked up, blinded, before the jetbikes blasted over their heads and coated them in waves of thruster-chucked smog.\n\n'For the Khagan!' Shiban roared, whirling his glaive wildly.\n\n'For the Khan!' came the thunderous cry from all those around him.\n\nHe whooped aloud, long and carefree. This was exceptional. This was the moment when all was unlocked, when the patient planning was put to the test.\n\nEverything remained in the balance. Ganzorig, he knew, was struggling to make headway against the network of trenches and gun towers across the fortress' northern outworks. Qin Fai had had more fortune, but his task had been to launch feints towards the big artillery positions, to make the enemy think the main strike must be there and divert greater resources towards it.\n\nAmber was the spearpoint, held back and held back and held back right until the Skye plate began its ruinous descent. As that immense sky-city of iron and plasteel had finally succumbed to gravity and damage, the jetbike battalions sprang out of the ruins in a single crashing wave, eating up the ground in a blur of red and white. Shiban's battalion was set at the very edge, driving harder than all the others, their pennants snapping wildly against their spear-shafts, their sword-edges glinting with the gold of a distant Chogorian dawn.\n\nThe enemy reacted, cranking the guns towards their position. Shiban grinned.\n\nToo slow.\n\nEven as the first shells loosed, the formations split open, filtering through the ruined outworks. The riders drove their steeds to the very limit - tilting over ninety degrees and hanging on one-handed, sliding and thrusting, their bolters already crackling.\n\n'Hai!' cried Shiban, his voice cracking with the intensity of emotion. They had not ridden at the enemy in this way, with all thrown in and nothing held in reserve, since Kalium. This was all, or it was nothing. He pulled the nose of his jetbike up higher, letting fly with a riot of bolt-shells. His forward passage was bracketed with the sparkling dance of their detonations, an honour guard of destruction. His brothers streaked along with him, magnifying every hit with their own, blasting and gouging a path to the destination.\n\nAnd it worked. The lead Imperial armour columns had made their forward positions, and were now pummelling the ramparts themselves. The many gateways into the lower fortress reaches, already damaged, were smashed apart. The nimbler tanks pushed on, slinging more ordnance into the inferno. Ahead of that barrage, out on the flanks where the firestorm did not risk hitting them, the Kyzagans and the Scimitars and the Shamshirs and the Hornets and the Taigas surged straight up into the green-edged coronas, kicking their straining repulsors to boost above the burning earthworks.\n\nShiban locked on to the first target - the bastion tower over the main causeway leading inward. Beyond that were the ship-elevators and the hauler-shafts, the maintenance halls and the conveyer galleries, but this was the hard edge, the point the enemy needed to hold t"}
{"text":" did not risk hitting them, the Kyzagans and the Scimitars and the Shamshirs and the Hornets and the Taigas surged straight up into the green-edged coronas, kicking their straining repulsors to boost above the burning earthworks.\n\nShiban locked on to the first target - the bastion tower over the main causeway leading inward. Beyond that were the ship-elevators and the hauler-shafts, the maintenance halls and the conveyer galleries, but this was the hard edge, the point the enemy needed to hold to stop them getting in. He could already see power-armoured infantry on the ramparts, and fixed guns swivelling towards him, and strange shimmers across it all, like electrified gauze.\n\nFlares shot above the scene, sent up by the tank crews, flooding everything below blood-red. Explosions bloomed from the parapet beyond, the result of looped mortars and gunship missiles. The barrage was percussive and comprehensive, blowing up rockcrete and splintering across masonry, breaking chasms through which a speeder could thread.\n\n'Follow my lead!' Shiban shouted, gunning harder.\n\nThe jetbikes screamed up the broken slope of scree and rubble, jinking and ducking under the blistering counter-barrage of projectile fire. Some were picked off, tumbling over and over before crashing into the racing ground, but others repaid the debt, laying down punitive bolt-streams that picked off gun-points and hull-down armour.\n\nThey seared their way towards the bastion tower, a squat low mass of interlocking walls, semi-ruined and barely patched up. A great rent in the outer fabric gaped directly ahead, glowing from within with that eerie green aura and silhouetted with night-black scaffolding struts.\n\nShiban blasted his way straight for it, shooting defenders clean from their positions before driving up through the rebar tangle and emerging at the parapet level.\n\nHe swerved round, clearing the flat top with a flurry of bolter fire, just as his brothers shot up from the breach to join him. Now they were constrained, hemmed in by rising curtain walls on three sides. Shiban dismounted, leaping from the saddle as the enemy began to advance at him out of their bunkers, their own bolters bucking in their grips. His brothers did the same, then charged into contact, whirling and spinning and lashing out with their fire-edged blades.\n\nThen it was the eternal shape of combat between Space Marines - up close, bloody, fast, a sensory overload of swordwork and gunplay, a swarm of power armour across every exposed surface. The slaying was without art or grace, but an animal frenzy of mutual hatreds, a raw desire to hurt, to maim, to rip out a throat or puncture a lung or shatter a skull.\n\nThe White Scars were the storm unleashed, vital and desperate, flinging the long-ingrained muck from their armour as their limbs pumped and thrust. The Death Guard were as unyielding and lethal as they had ever been, only now bolstered with their strange new resilience and the uncanny cloaks of the daemonic. Each lone warrior of Mortarion's Legion took two of the White Scars to bring down, and even then they would stagger back up if not completely annihilated. The assault ran up against solid walls, held back by the dogged resistance of an enemy who had had time to prepare and loathed their opposite numbers just as much as they were loathed in turn.\n\nMore White Scars streaked up to the ramparts, running the gauntlet of the wall guns to reach the breaches in the defences. They poured out from their discarded mounts and into battle, their ivory battleplate stark against the seamy shadows of the foetid fortress-mountain. They were met by ever-growing numbers of bottle-green leviathans, wading as if through oil slicks to reach combat. Tulwars slashed against chainswords, dao blades clanged against rust-streaked cleavers, and blood spattered across stone flags already stained black from clashes between Dorn's paladins and Perturabo's engineers of murder.\n\nShiban despatched a lurching creature before him - a swollen mockery of a Space Marine with luminous tentacles hanging from its vox-grille like a ragged beard - before kicking it down the steps towards the rampart's edge. Then he was sprinting onwards, racing up a curving stair, Yiman and the rest of his brotherhood at his shoulder.\n\nWhen he emerged up onto the next level, he was confronted by a sterner test. Traitor Marines, in ranks three deep, were trundling towards them across a shell-blown mess of upended rockcrete plates. They were so riddled with mutation now that the term 'Plague Marines' had started to become commonplace among those who fought them - a wry jest that had long since lost its humour. Yaksha came with them, taller and fatter, glittering and jerking as they phased in and out. An ancient Leviathan Siege Dreadnought, both its power fists leaking tox-clouds from between metal fingers, crunched its way through the mass, and behind it more troops were clunking down wide stairways to seal the breach.\n\nShiban tensed to charge, knowing that all this had to be cleared swiftly, but already doubtful of the numbers, when the sky overhead turned to pure crimson. A colossal boom followed, and then a ravening blast of forge-hot winds. A vast orange mushroom cloud rose up in the east, towering as imperiously as any spire of the Imperial Sanctum itself, before the rain of ash and dirt-clods started to thump down around them.\n\nThe Skye plate had crashed at last, driving a kilometres-wide gouge through what had once been the Imperial Fleet College and turning an entire urban zone into a molten pyre. And even as the ash rain swirled and the bow wave of its apocalyptic demise slammed across the entire space port, ten Sokar-pattern Stormbirds thundered overhead, angling and tilting through the tempest in order to reach the drop-points.\n\n'The keshig!' Yiman shouted. 'The Khagan! The Khagan is with us!'\n\nEach mighty gunship swung in low, enduring steady torrents of incoming fire, their loader-doors already open. Giants of blade-art hurled themselves down, smashing up the ground as their heavy Terminator plate impacted. Namahi was at the forefront, wearing the golden helm that marked him as the greatest swordmaster of the Legion after Qin Xa. He crunched into immediate and savage combat with a whole squad of Plague Marines. Stormseers landed next, sending arcs of immolation lashing against the wailing daemons.\n\nBut it was the Khan himself who shone the brightest - clad in ivory and gold, his dragon-helm glinting with golden fire, his cloak whipping about him as he shot to earth. The famed White Tiger dao blade flashed out from its sheath, licked with lightning-forks and refracting the bloody nimbus of Skye's death throes. The storm winds kindled around him, lashing into a splintered vortex that shrieked with its own deadly chorus. Taller than the greatest of the enemy, faster than the swiftest of his own people, he crashed directly into the heart of the Plague Marines. Four were cut into smouldering, silver-edged pieces before they had even lifted their weapons.\n\nThen he took on the Leviathan, slashing through its joints, severing the cables under its neck as it lurched for him, punching through the heavy protective faceplate, lifting it up one-handed, whirling on his heel and hurling it high over the entire battle-scene - thirty tonnes of solid ceramite tossed into the turbulent skies as if it were a mere child's toy.\n\nFor a heartbeat, every soul assembled there just watched it go. Even the keshig honour guard, inured by long experience to what their master could do when the killing mood was on him, gazed at it sailing overhead.\n\nThe crippled war machine smacked into the earthworks far below and blew apart as its reactor ruptured. As if a signal had been given, the keshig's standard bearer unfurled the giant banner of the V Legion, and planted it firmly on the ramparts. The sacred symbols streamed out, high and proud - the red lightning-strike of Chogoris, the eternal vengeance of heaven sent to bring judgement on the unworthy.\n\nSimultaneously, every White Scar lifted his blade, and their massed roar outmatched the ongoing thunder of the armour barrage.\n\nKhagan! Ordu gamana Jaghatai!\n\nHe had cried those same words on a hundred worlds, and across a hundred battlefields, but just then Shiban Khan poured his very heart and soul into them. The walls around them shook from the vox-enhanced battle cry, and the Death Guard themselves seemed stunned, falling back before the imperious savagery, the utter commitment, the soul-deep release of it.\n\nAnd then Shiban was running, sprinting into battle alongside his primarch, with the pride of the Legion surging alongside him, and he was laughing again, he was laughing hard, just as he had done when the skies were clear and the sun shone bright and all there was in the world was joy and strength and the promise of glory to come.\n\nFor the Khan, he breathed as he swung his glaive into contact. For the chosen people of Jaghatai.\n\nMorarg speaks with the Remnant.\n\nPART THREE\n\nTheology\n\nKeep moving\n\nNumbers\n\nAnd she was laughing, too. It wasn't a laugh of pleasure, but of scorn and disbelief.\n\nErebus endured it. He was used to being scorned and disbelieved.\n\n'So what do you say?' he offered.\n\n'What do I say?' She shook her head. 'What could I possibly say? You have ambition, I will give you that, but little else.'\n\nShe walked over to a cabinet, one of the many stacked with idols and figurines taken from humanity's long past. She looked at them for a moment, as if consulting with them, before reaching for a bowl of dates and taking one. She chewed it slowly.\n\n'I had my disagreements with Him,' she said at last. 'Somehow you discovered those, but they were hardly kept secret. We differed, and we still do.' She looked up at Erebus. 'But I always knew that He worked for the good of the species. He might have been wrong, perhaps, and arrogant, and infuriating, but the threat was real. We had all lived thro"}
{"text":"y's long past. She looked at them for a moment, as if consulting with them, before reaching for a bowl of dates and taking one. She chewed it slowly.\n\n'I had my disagreements with Him,' she said at last. 'Somehow you discovered those, but they were hardly kept secret. We differed, and we still do.' She looked up at Erebus. 'But I always knew that He worked for the good of the species. He might have been wrong, perhaps, and arrogant, and infuriating, but the threat was real. We had all lived through it. Your masters, however - or, what you take to be your masters - they are the end. They are the closure of the story. I marvel that you could believe I would ever be tempted to serve them.'\n\n'Because you already have.'\n\n'I acted to prevent an escalation - something terribly wrong, a twisting of what our ascension was supposed to be. I never acted to aid your cause.'\n\n'What you meant matters little.' Erebus watched her carefully as he spoke. 'It is deeds that resonate. You paved the way for everything that followed.'\n\n'No.' She turned back towards him. 'No, all choices were still to be made. He could have abandoned the project - that is what I thought He would do, but I underestimated His pig-headedness. Or He could have killed His creations, once I had shown Him how dangerous they were, but something in Him must still have had affection for them, even then. And your primarchs, all of them, they were still free to choose. If they had not been dragged back into this awful Crusade, pressed into action on His behalf like sullen children, what choices might they have made for themselves?'\n\n'They would have encountered my masters, sooner or later.'\n\nErda laughed again, just as scornfully. 'You have no masters, you simpleton! There are no gods, not that deserve the name, just distorted reflections of our own dreams. You prostrate yourself before annihilation. You literally serve nothing.'\n\n'And those sound like the sermons of Unity again, the ones we found wanting so long ago.' Erebus sighed. 'If the gods are not real, then how can their gifts be so potent? How can their heralds give us so much power?'\n\n'Because all you are doing is consuming your own,' Erda said, disgusted. 'A daemon is nothing but a human thought, a moment of human weakness, a piece of human pride. You can dignify them with names and titles if you wish, but all they are is the corpse-gas of our own kind.'\n\nErebus snorted, struck by the image. 'Ah, how wrong you are.' He reached for his sceptre. 'I told you nothing but the truth - you are spoken of with reverence in the empyrean. If you truly never wished for that, I could yet educate you on its ways, show you the scale of the power you are denying, and all the Anathema's folly would be undone. A new dawn of enlightenment is still possible, one in which we both might rise to heights undreamed of.'\n\nErda smiled sadly. 'This again,' she murmured. 'Always the quest for power, for knowledge, like some mania that should have been quenched after puberty.' She looked down at his sceptre, unimpressed. Then she picked up one of the figurines, a pot-bellied deity of some kind sitting cross-legged. 'I knew the sculptor of this one. She was a modest woman, barely knowing what art she possessed. She made it for pleasure, never thinking it would outlast her as it has done. Her life was hemmed in by close horizons, untroubled by envy or zeal. She died at peace, having given the empyrean nothing much to feed off. All she left behind was this, the mark of two patient, quiet hands. If I had to worship something from humanity, I might worship those hands. But she would never have understood it, and would have been mortally embarrassed if I'd tried. Those who demand veneration are never really worth it, in my experience.' She looked at it a moment longer, then put it back. 'Enlightenment was coming. That is the tragedy. It was always within us, working its way to the surface. Between Him, who wanted to rush it out, and you, who wouldn't understand it even if it was put right before your eyes, it has all been squandered now.'\n\nShe turned to face him, her arms by her sides. She was a large woman, built solidly, and her gaze never wavered. Set against her, Erebus, with his spiked and gruesome armour, looked like a vaudeville reject.\n\n'I apologise for nothing,' Erda said. 'I reject Him, and I reject you. You fuel one another, you need one another, and now you are locked so tight in your lovers' embrace that I can barely even tell you apart.'\n\nErebus drew in a long, sour breath. 'I had genuinely hoped for more,' he said darkly, activating his sceptre's harmonics. 'I had hoped for some awareness of the stakes, at least. Some indication that you realised what you had done.'\n\nErda looked witheringly at the weapon. 'I acted as my conscience dictated.'\n\n'Then you were a fool, for conscience is no guide to anything.'\n\n'You cannot have thought, for a moment, that I would ever ally myself with such as you.'\n\n'Why not? You have already given us so much.' His grip on the hilt tightened. 'But if you persist in ignorance, then I shall have to remove you from the game. There can be no second scattering, no further intervention into schemes that are now divinely ordained. As things stand, my lady, you are a throwback, a relic, but if you will not reform your outlook then you are too dangerous to be allowed to endure.'\n\nErda smiled mirthlessly. 'So like all your kind - desires frustrated, and then quickly to the threats.' She placed her hands together, raising them up as if in prayer. The golden glow within the room intensified, and a strange harmonic began to thrum across the earth floor. 'But you should not have come here alone, monster.'\n\nBut even as Erebus' sceptre began to spark, the air around him crackled and shifted. Four great shapes began to curl into being around him, diffuse like water but thickening fast, with spines and fangs and the genesis of glowing, bestial eyes.\n\n'I didn't,' he said, completing the summoning. 'And I think you owe my friends an apology.'\n\nSo some were still willing to stand up, to push back. Archeta was almost glad of it, though it slowed everything up, just when they needed to gain the last thrust of momentum.\n\nBeruddin had been right - a kernel of resistance had been uncovered, an ingot of iron amid a world of pliant flesh. The XVI Legion forward units rushed towards it, diverting squads from a dozen objectives. Whole battalions from other Legions shifted course too, weary of merely killing, looking for a proper fight.\n\nThe effect worked the other way, too. Archeta had already marvelled at how easily some of the enemy formations had crumbled under assault. Many of those must simply have been weak and demoralised, but more than one of them, it now seemed, had picked up the same tidings he had - a leader is among us, someone is fighting back - and had abandoned their positions in order to join the resurgence.\n\nAnd so, for all the Legion discipline, for all the great strategic visions of their commanders, a significant chunk of troops on both sides of the struggle had proved willing to make their way towards where the action was at its greatest, to where glory could be won. They were soldiers on the outside, but warriors at heart.\n\nHow far have we really travelled? Archeta thought to himself as he ran. How different is this to what we did in the old slum-hives back home?\n\nNot very, was the answer. As ammunition ran out and tanks struggled to punch their way to the inner core, the fighting devolved into hand-to-hand struggles. It was vile stuff, really - no finesse to it, only an all-consuming desire to snuff out the life in front of you, to gouge out its eyes or pluck its windpipe free, then move on to the next one, just so you could keep moving.\n\nSo why do it? Why care so deeply about this war, when in essence it was just like all the others?\n\nArcheta smiled to himself. Because names would be made, here. After the guns had fallen silent at last, you had better be able to say that you had done something good, something worth boasting about when the primarch finally stirred himself to making enquiries. There would be more fights to come, this time within the Legion, establishing who was up and who was down, so best to build a reputation while you had the chance.\n\nHe dropped down to his knees for a moment, breathing hard. He was deep within the honeycomb debris-piles of a demolished causeway. Its supporting pillars were still partially intact, rising a hundred metres above him like exposed ribs. Cliff-face buildings reared away on either side, all smouldering. A pair of downed Stormbirds framed his view ahead, their carcasses forming a triangular opening through which his brothers had been ordered to push on.\n\nThe rattle and crack of bolter fire was everywhere still, though at a lower pitch of intensity than it had been as the magazines emptied. Five hundred energy weapons glimmered in the murk instead, their illumination guttering as their power units felt the strain of days-long usage.\n\nArcheta's own blade needed no such sustenance. It was hissing at him now, a low-frequency thirst for slaughter that he liked to hear. His senses were operating at their fullest pitch, his mind attuned to the targeting data streaming down his helm display. His brothers were filtering across the chasm floor carved by the causeway's collapse, wary of potential sniper fire and ambush.\n\nJust getting here had been an achievement. They had cut their way through a full battalion of Blood Angels, supported by an Imperial Fists siege squad and the remains of an Imperial Army mobile infantry regiment. Those warriors must have been part of the Black Sword's offensive - they had fought with a kind of grim purpose he hadn't encountered until then. They weren't fighting for victory any longer, seeking to take and hold ground, but merely to deliver pain. They were bitter, nihilistic, spiteful and underhanded. And that was pretty admirable, a"}
{"text":"t their way through a full battalion of Blood Angels, supported by an Imperial Fists siege squad and the remains of an Imperial Army mobile infantry regiment. Those warriors must have been part of the Black Sword's offensive - they had fought with a kind of grim purpose he hadn't encountered until then. They weren't fighting for victory any longer, seeking to take and hold ground, but merely to deliver pain. They were bitter, nihilistic, spiteful and underhanded. And that was pretty admirable, all things considered. At least they weren't running away.\n\nAll of that told Archeta that he was getting close. The cityscape was almost impossible to navigate now, a maze of roads sunk into drifting cloud banks of filmy soot, its outline features scoured away, so you had to trust your instincts. Those instincts told him the command group was up ahead. He had already despatched flanking units out wide, moving into their familiar pincer formation, keeping in close comm-contact as they jogged warily through the ruins.\n\nHe started to move again. The risk was that his subordinates might flush the target out too well. He didn't even want them to wound him - it had to be a clean fight, one witnessed by his own kind so that the story of his victory would stick. So he ran as fast as the terrain would allow, his squad-brothers working hard to keep up. Hundreds of Sons of Horus fighters slipped like wraiths across the trash-clogged floor, hugging every scrap of cover, scanning furiously for movement-signals or heat-traces, even though they knew that in such conditions, with the air itself virtually on fire, they would be lucky to get anything.\n\nOnce they cleared the oddly sculptural arrangement of burned-out Stormbirds, the ground level ascended steeply, running up a wreckage pile that zigzagged towards the causeway's old terminus. The slope was overlooked on both sides, with high bridges criss-crossing overhead a hundred metres up.\n\nAs they advanced for the terminus, bolter fire immediately sprang out from hidden vantage points along the northern edge of the exposed run, striking a brace of Archeta's troops and forcing the rest to drop down.\n\nArcheta signalled a halt, falling to the dirt, then ran an augur sweep. It didn't give him much, but he knew the place would be riddled with defenders, maybe in the hundreds too. They would be buried in the dust, crouched under collapsed beams, clinging on to the floorless levels above, just waiting for something to try the gap. Forcing a push towards the terminus that way would be bloody and difficult, as would ordering squads to fight their way into the interior of the buildings on either side.\n\nArcheta signalled to his heavy support. 'Clear this out.'\n\nMissile launchers set further back immediately whooshed out, followed by a percussive drumbeat of heavy bolter shells, obliterating the masonry wall the shooters hid behind. That familiar cushion of blown dust mushroomed across the expanse, filling the chasm from wall-edge to wall-edge. The barrage intensified, chewing through valuable ammunition but pulverising the vista heads and forcing the collapse of a long rockcrete support-pier.\n\n'Now take them.'\n\nAs the thick dust still swelled up, Sons of Horus forward units burst out of cover and charged up the slope, using frag grenades to clear the route ahead before moving to secure ground. They went in low and fast, bodies tight to the ground as they ran before unleashing concentrated bolter fire at any sighted target. Archeta came with them, right in the vanguard, sprinting as fast as he could to make the next vantage, his bolt pistol kicking in his grip.\n\nThe effect on the defenders was overwhelming, the kind of shock-attack tactics the Legion had used throughout the Crusade - hard to fight back when your surroundings had been blasted into powder around you.\n\nExcept that they did fight back. Somehow, they emerged out of the flying debris already firing. They were black-armoured, all of them, multiple squads wading through the shrapnel and picking their targets. The air filled with the whistle and whine of a thousand mass-reactive shells, followed by the clang and echoing crack of their detonations.\n\nArcheta swore, even as he leapt up from his cover and sliced through one of them with his sword. The edge kindled on the armour, flashing with a red-tinged flame before it cut deep. He punched the dying warrior away and pressed on, driving hard. They might be prepared to fight here, but they had neither the numbers nor the support to hold on for long.\n\n'Drive them back!' he cried, determined not to drop away into yet another holding pattern. He lashed out furiously, breaking the blade of another black-armoured fighter and sending him tumbling, where a volley of shells finished him off.\n\nThe Sons of Horus spear-tip advanced swiftly, cutting and blasting its way up towards the summit of the rise. For all its ferocity, the defenders were too thin-spread now, unable to sustain this pitch of combat for long enough, out-gunned and out-equipped. Archeta and his honour guard fought their way up to the terminus approaches, the secondary squads not far behind. His static-fuzzed tactical display showed hundreds more of his troops racing into position, filtering up through the buildings around, flushing out the last resistance as they came.\n\nHe reached the foot of metal stairs leading up to what had been the terminus command tower, flanked on either side by heavy rockcrete piers. The terrain around him was cluttered with machine parts - axles, wheels, tank tracks - all piled up like some conqueror's heap of skulls. Infernal winds raced overhead, blowing the dust into ever taller pillars, the howl of it masking the ongoing clamour of combat.\n\nBut then, just before it happened, he realised what he had done. He got the warning tingle, like an electric field across his back - the old ganger instincts that had been with him long before his ascension. Before he could call out a warning, the heaps of machine parts were thrust aside and sent sailing down the slope, bounding and thudding. Dozens of loyalists erupted from underneath them. Some were Blood Angels by their pauldron marks, some were Imperial Fists, but the grime had made them all as black as soot, set into stark relief by the flares of their disruptors.\n\nThen the fighting really started. Archeta needed to give no orders - his vanguard hurled themselves at the enemy, pivoting instantly to take them on. Those coming on behind redoubled their efforts to reach the terminus, knowing that this was now in the balance.\n\nHe despatched the first enemy to reach him, slashing wildly with his hissing blade. Only as he moved to meet the next one did he see how far he'd come.\n\nThe fighter before him was an Imperial Fist, but arrayed in the coal-black armour of their Templar Brethren order. Something about his presence gave his identity away even before he'd laid eyes on the sword itself. Something about the way he carried himself, his stature, his movements - every figure around him unconsciously reacted to him, so that when he moved, they all moved too, like planets around a sun. His recklessly open stance might have been arrogant in any other fighter, but with him it merely fitted the aura he projected, one of complete and total focus, of immersion into the art of the blade to such an extent that no other way of being made any kind of sense at all. He strode across the wreckage in perfect silence, moving through it like a predator, his longsword eating up the meagre light and dragging it down into nothingness.\n\nArcheta felt a spike of joy.\n\n'The Black Sword,' he murmured, dropping into an attack stance even as his own blade screamed with hatred. 'I did not expect to come across you so-'\n\nHe never saw the blow coming. It smacked in transverse, so strong, so fast, smashing through his guard and knocking his whole body out of line. And then the follow-up, liquid like oil, punching up, cutting in, unbelievably powerful. The hilt cracked against his helm, stunning him, then a point-first ram of the blade, two-handed, a wrench, and blood was everywhere. The last thing he saw was a pair of red lenses swinging round at him, the ebon blade whistling for his neck, his parry nowhere near being close enough to-\n\nSigismund gave the decapitated body a brief glance as it crashed to the earth. Before he could press on, Rann, having despatched his own opponent, looked down at it too.\n\n'A captain,' he noted, impressed. 'Who, though?'\n\nBy then, Sigismund was marching down the slope to take on the rest.\n\n'No idea,' he said. 'Keep moving.'\n\nIt all came down to numbers, Keeler discovered. Nothing fancy, just some simple arithmetic. Two platoons of well-equipped Imperial Army troops, plus some heavy fire support - that stood a chance, in favourable conditions, of knocking out a single Traitor Marine. If you sent in the irregulars, the ones who were armed with power tools and had no proper armour, you were looking at over two hundred of them. In those circumstances, the kills were a matter of smothering, sending bodies en masse against a single target. All it took was one pair of turbo-pliers, right up under the helm-seal, to finish the job - all the rest were there to soak up the creature's rage, to weigh its limbs down, to bury it under a tide of the dead.\n\nAll of them, all her faithful, they went into battle with a skull clutched tight. Some had them hanging around their necks, others carried them on poles; some used them like morning stars, swinging iron-studded bone at the end of long chains. They had no other insignia, now. The aquila was never seen among them. This was the icon of the creed, the symbol they marched under. It didn't matter whether you had been a major in the Imperial Army, once, or just a worker in a munitions unit. Everyone under this new banner had been ripped from their old structures, made homeless by the war, ready to be reforged under new auspices.\n\nShe never pr"}
{"text":" on poles; some used them like morning stars, swinging iron-studded bone at the end of long chains. They had no other insignia, now. The aquila was never seen among them. This was the icon of the creed, the symbol they marched under. It didn't matter whether you had been a major in the Imperial Army, once, or just a worker in a munitions unit. Everyone under this new banner had been ripped from their old structures, made homeless by the war, ready to be reforged under new auspices.\n\nShe never preached directly - despite the temptation, she held true to her promise. Somehow, for all that, they found their way to her. They limped up out of the buried foundations of empty hab-towers, or the old sewer-tunnels, or the mud-filled shadows of sunken mortar-impacts. Any ration packs were distributed. Any wounds were treated. Guns were shared out, armour-pieces given to those best able to use them.\n\nThey were led into battle by men and women, old and young - those that had the fire within them, the willingness to bawl out orders. All led from the front. She'd insisted on that.\n\n'Teach by word, teach by deed,' she'd said. 'They see you stand up, they'll do the same.'\n\nRanks started to emerge. She never had very good names for them. None of it was planned. Most of them were called 'preachers', because that's what they did. They had all read the books, the pamphlets and the missives, some of them circulated long before the great rebellion had even kicked off. The result was a mess of conflicting theories and beliefs, with the constant risk of arguments flaring up into conflict. The only thing that prevented it was the constant pressure, the ever-present risk of destruction. They lost every battle they fought, were forced back every time, but that wasn't a problem, because they extracted a little something each time. To lose was glorious, if it meant just one more enemy of the Emperor was taken out.\n\nAnd the supply of recruits never dried up. There were hundreds of thousands of refugees everywhere, shuffling down the remains of the old processionals, desperate for somewhere to linger for just a moment. They weren't fools. They knew that the Sanctum couldn't hold them all. The only thing left was to find a decent path into the next life, one better than dying alone and in misery.\n\nSo they would listen to the sermons, then find a skull from the plentiful supplies on the open battlefields, clean it, polish it, take it up. And then its empty eyes would be trained on the oncoming enemy, a mass of hollow sockets, in their tens of thousands, silent witnesses to the apocalypse.\n\n'This is the strength of us,' Keeler said. 'Our numbers. Willing to endure any suffering, asking no questions, resting on only one truth - that He protects. Nothing else matters. We must suppress anything contrary to it, root out any deviance from it. Individually, we are weak. In numbers like these, we are invincible.'\n\nHer deputies nodded. Perevanna, the old Army apothecary-general, had long been pushing for a harder line against creatives inside the fellowship. Eild, an old manufactorum overseer, was less effusive, but held his tongue. Wereft, who had lived a life in the enforcers of the Provost-Marshal's office and believed in discipline, was as supportive as ever. The conclave had only been together for a matter of days, drawing together by happenstance and coincidence, but already the bonds were pulling tight.\n\n'We're running short of serviceable guns,' Wereft said, his old face creased in the light of the fire. They were deep underground, in a corroded old chamber that had once been part of a water-treatment complex. It stank, it was unsanitary, but, for the moment, it was safe.\n\n'Promethium is everywhere,' Keeler said, her voice softer and deeper than it had once been. 'Spills, old caches. We can make flamers, adapt the guns we have. Chechek, the lexmechanic - he's already on it.'\n\n'The range of those things-'\n\n'Is good for the soul. They will see the eyes of those they kill. Purify themselves as well as the enemy.'\n\nShe'd never have spoken like that, in the time before. She'd been wedded to a different concept of truthfulness, once - the veracity of the image, millions of them, all different, all pointing to incomplete fragments of reality. That had been her life, her training. Now all those things were gone, replaced by the purity of a single goal - survival, not of any one of them, but of the creed itself.\n\n'But we'll have to fall back, even so,' said Perevanna, always thinking of the tactical situation. 'We lost most of Geron's congregation last night.'\n\n'For the ending of a Son of Horus,' Keeler said, with feeling. They were the worst, the ones she would risk almost anything to see killed. 'A righteous bargain.'\n\nKeeler saw the look Eild exchanged with Wereft at that. It didn't trouble her - they were entitled to doubt. All these things were new, forming out of the ashes of an empire that had done everything possible, in its infancy at least, to suppress the possibility of faith. Like water, though, devotion had found a way, seeping through the cracks, made stronger by persecution, until it was ripe to rise up and wash everything clean again.\n\n'We hear stories,' Perevanna tried again. 'A commander, holding up the enemy, slowing them down. They say he's killing their leaders, one by one.'\n\nKeeler nodded. 'The Black Sword. I hear the same things.'\n\n'Then we should seek him out. If he has been chosen, then-'\n\n'Chosen? How do you know he has been chosen?'\n\nA pause. They were all learning to watch what they said around her.\n\n'It's the name they're giving him,' said Eild. 'The Emperor's own champion, sent out to deliver His vengeance at the last hour.'\n\n'We are His vengeance. We will outlast any hero.'\n\nAnother uncomfortable pause. They hadn't truly understood this, yet. They were thinking, out of instinct, about more than survival. They wanted to hit back, and thought that this Black Sword would give them that.\n\nThat wasn't how it would work. She knew that, with as much certainty as she knew anything at all. The important matter was one of belief, of adherence to a positive doctrine. The mistake, in the past, had been to preach a negative - there are no gods, there are no daemons. Humanity needed concrete things to cling on to. There is one god worthy of worship. Fear the alien, the mutant, the heretic. The Emperor protects. Once all that was established, set down in catechisms and enforced with the twin weapons of fear and fire, then the species had a chance. It was all about the numbers.\n\nTwo platoons could take out a Traitor Marine. An Imperium of billions, all under the sightless eyes of the skull, could wipe them from the galaxy forever.\n\nKeeler sighed, and ran a weary hand through her hair. They would see the truth, in time. In the interim, compromises still needed to be made. This Black Sword might prove useful.\n\n'Very well,' she said. 'If he's so important to you. Send messages through the congregations, start the search. There cannot be many still fighting outside the Palatine, so it shouldn't take them long.'\n\nThey looked satisfied. It would keep everyone busy, which was also good.\n\n'If we can find this Emperor's champion,' she said, 'if he lives still, we'll be there.'\n\nAn excess of emotion\n\nDistributed\n\nDefinitely not xenos\n\n'You were not there,' Morarg said. 'You were not on the Terminus Est.'\n\n'Of course I was,' the Remnant said.\n\n'It was us, alone. The Legion.'\n\n'And a thousand other entities, all there to feed, or to revel, or just to watch, because it was a great day, a day of turning, and we dared not speculate which way it would go, right up until the moment of crisis.'\n\n'It was fated. It was destined.'\n\n'Just so. It had to happen, and it also might not have done. It could never have been otherwise, but it was also a choice. That is the nature of such moments. Oh, the beauty of them!'\n\nFrom above, from below, from all around them, the echoes of combat were growing in volume. Morarg had to leave, to take his place with the defenders. Every second counted.\n\n'You speak as if I wasn't a part of it,' he said. 'As if what I saw was all a mistake.'\n\n'What did you see, Caipha?'\n\nAnd, instantly, as if a switch had been flicked, he was there again, in the heart of the deep dark, on the ship as it came apart around him. There was no time even to scream, to protest, because the pain came back, just as before, the all-consuming, all-enveloping agony that made it seem as if he had no limbs, no eyes or ears, only a raw lattice of nerves, all firing, all burning.\n\nThe howls rang down the corridors, the sound of Space Marines weeping and roaring, trying to vomit more blood up from empty guts, blinded and rendered lame, mutilating themselves in the madness of their agony. And it had gone on for days, months, years, forever, so that time itself had become just one more aspect of the pain, just another dimension of that unbearable suffering. It was beyond anything, not just damage, but erasure, annihilation, all of it fully conscious and never-ending and impossible to counter.\n\nAnd then, just as suddenly, it was gone, and the two of them, Morarg and the Remnant, were on another world. Morarg fell to his knees, his mind reeling, his skin sheened in sweat. It took a moment to calm himself, for the howls to shudder out of his hearing, so that he didn't even notice at first how unbloated he had become again, and how pristine his armour now seemed.\n\n'This is... before,' he murmured.\n\nThe two of them were high up on the edge of a huge amphitheatre. A vast conclave of bodies filled it - Imperial officials, legionaries, priests of the Mechanicum, even primarchs. One of them was speaking now, railing from a lectern. It was Mortarion, just as he was years ago, his body not yet transformed, the livery of his loyal Legion hanging proudly from the banners around the theatre's rim.\n\n'Nikaea,' Morarg breathed.\n\n'Where it all started. Or, at least, where this parti"}
{"text":"fore,' he murmured.\n\nThe two of them were high up on the edge of a huge amphitheatre. A vast conclave of bodies filled it - Imperial officials, legionaries, priests of the Mechanicum, even primarchs. One of them was speaking now, railing from a lectern. It was Mortarion, just as he was years ago, his body not yet transformed, the livery of his loyal Legion hanging proudly from the banners around the theatre's rim.\n\n'Nikaea,' Morarg breathed.\n\n'Where it all started. Or, at least, where this particular thread started. See how fervent he is, your primarch! No voice was raised more strongly against the witch. He believed it, too. You can see that, even from here. Ah, how he hated the very thought of it.'\n\nAnd then the impressions shifted once more, racing wildly through time and across space, until they were on Molech, that great clash of arms masterminded by the Warmaster himself. Mortarion was there too, but changed again, on the first stages of his long transformation. The sky rippled with sorcery, the earth split open with visceral exuberance. At the forefront of the fighting was Grulgor, that distended old monster, brought back to life in order to kill in quantities even the Death Guard had never dealt with before. He raged and raged, lost in his own world of daemonic excess and fury.\n\nThen that, too, was gone, all the visions quickly swallowed up in darkness. Morarg took a breath, looked around himself. It was pitch-black, and the air smelled rank, a mixture of body odour and rust. He could see nothing, only hear a strangled sound, echoing strangely as if buried deep in a ship's hold.\n\n'How did such a thing happen?' the Remnant asked, whispering softly in the enclosed space. 'How did this preacher against witchery succumb so completely to its spell?'\n\n'Because he learned its power,' Morarg said. 'It was necessary.'\n\n'Was it?' The Remnant smiled. 'Or did he like it? Maybe there were days when he revelled in it, and others when he could barely look at himself in the mirror. Maybe that was the torment.'\n\nMorarg couldn't take his mind off the strange sound. It was as if an animal were trapped in there with them, but he couldn't see it yet. 'You have no idea what he suffered for us. He guided us out of hell, marching with us at every step. If he did something, anything, it was to keep us alive, so we would never have to go back.'\n\nThe Remnant nodded. 'Ah, now that is true,' it said. 'Who, in this universe of suffering, has suffered more? Look at him. He is here, with us now.'\n\nMorarg still saw nothing. 'When is... now?'\n\n'After the deed was done. After seven of his sons were slaughtered, all to create the monster you saw on Molech. This is the aftermath.'\n\nThe Remnant shuffled a little, and a pale grey light crept across the chamber. Morarg caught sight of Mortarion again, alone, crouched over the body of a slain Deathshroud warrior and racked with horrified sobs. Morarg got just a glimpse of the primarch's face, torn apart in a mask of anguish and loathing, before the vision switched out again.\n\nNow they were on another war-torn world, with the Death Guard marching en masse towards another doomed Imperial fortress. All sorcery had been put aside - they were doing what they had always done, constricting, controlling, wearing down. The artillery boomed, the bolters laid down withering fire-lanes. Mortarion marched at their head, marshalling them all, issuing his commands in that habitual cold-as-death manner. His scythe swung about him, dazzling in its disruptor-wreathed power.\n\n'He has put it aside again,' said the Remnant, gazing in appreciation at the scenes of slaughter. 'Just for a moment, he has convinced himself that he can live without it, and that Molech was a mistake he will someday be able to forget.'\n\n'The weapons were always chosen for the war,' Morarg insisted. 'When we required sorcery, it was used - when we didn't, it wasn't.'\n\n'Or was it this - that he tried to push it away, but failed? That, like an addict who loathes his poison, he kept putting it behind him, and then coming back to the well? Did you never even question it? How, one moment he would be spitting with fervour in his denunciations, only to slay his most precious sons just for the chance to outdo his brother on the battlefield? Did you never wonder at that? Did no one say a word?'\n\nMorarg looked across the scenes of fighting. Even here, while abominations like Grulgor were banished, there was something different in the aromas. A sickening, a sense of decay. Their armour was so degraded, so filthy. And yet, they were winning.\n\n'He did what he had to,' said Morarg, sticking doggedly to his mantra. 'We had to survive.'\n\n'Yes, he did what he had to.' The Remnant blinked again, and the visions rippled away. Then it was just the two of them again, surrounded by complete darkness, complete silence, as if taken out of time and space entirely and marooned at the end of the universe. 'So imagine if you had learned these two truths, each of them necessary. Imagine if you learned that the only way to guarantee your Legion's survival was to immerse it in the most profound sorcery of all, thereby giving it gifts so potent that no force in the galaxy would ever be able to dominate it again. But then imagine that all your old fears were still true, that you had been in the right of it at Nikaea, so that any involvement with it would damn you all to suffering beyond mortal conception. Imagine knowing both those things. How could you live with it? What would you do?'\n\n'What was right.'\n\n'But they were both right, and they were both wrong. Resist the empyrean, and you will never become as powerful as you were always destined to be. But embrace it, and the agony will be eternal. You can be pure but weak, or corrupt but strong. What a conundrum! What a perversion for a Barbaran to contemplate! And so there is the mystery of why your master swung from one pole to the other, never able to plot his course with surety. It was as simple as mortal indecision. He didn't know. Every course ended in disaster. And he couldn't even pretend that he didn't care, because he did. God of Decay, no father ever cared more.'\n\nAt that, Morarg suddenly remembered what Mortarion had told him. I loved you all too much. That is the only error I will admit.\n\n'But the decision was made,' Morarg said, though no longer with much certainty. 'He solved the riddle and brought us to Terra.'\n\n'That he did, but not in the way you think,' said the Remnant. 'Which brings us to the final element.' His grey face flickered into a warped smile. 'So let me talk now of Typhus.'\n\nThe rumble of gunfire never stopped, even after the army itself was long gone. Deep down in the caverns under Colossi, Ilya Ravallion tried to put it out of her mind, to forget how vulnerable they were there, and concentrate on her work.\n\nIt was true that their precise location would be hard to find, hidden behind thick rock walls designed to look like tunnel collapses from the outside. Few souls would even be searching for them - the bulk of the main enemy attack was over a hundred and sixty kilometres westward, and the Death Guard themselves were fully occupied at the space port. But still, only the bare minimum of guards and weaponry had been left behind, just enough to keep a tiny portion of the old fortress in working order. If anything did sniff its way down here, the battle would be brief and brutal.\n\nShe leaned forward at her station, her head pounding. She needed something to drink, but suspected the reservoirs were virtually gone now. Best to leave it for the soldiers, in case they were called on to fight again.\n\nShe looked away from her terminal lens, unable to bear the glare from the glass, and let her eyes run across the cramped interior. A few dozen Imperial officers, maybe three times that many V Legion menials, all working away at the comms arrays and augur intakes. Ilya wondered if any of them were doing better than she was - the quality of the signals was atrocious, and getting worse all the time. Still, at least they were able to forward some scraps to the field commanders, to give them some idea of the tactical situation.\n\nShe heard the low hum of power armour behind her, and turned to see Sojuk. The warrior bowed.\n\n'You have been working long beyond your allotted stretch, szu,' he said. 'I must request that you take a rest period.'\n\n'Who organised the work-schedules, Sojuk?' she asked.\n\n'You did.'\n\n'Then I think I'm entitled to ignore them, aren't I?'\n\n'Permit me to insist. If you require physical assistance to take you to your quarters, I am able to render it.'\n\nIlya laughed, and sat back in her chair. He was right, of course. She could barely see straight, let alone process the low-quality scanner signals. 'I don't need help,' she said. 'Come with me anyway, though.'\n\nShe pushed herself back up to her feet, feeling every muscle ache. Just walking unaided was an achievement. She should have used a stick, ideally, but didn't want to make the visible concession. Limping, she made her way past the ranks of huddled operatives, all of whom were too busy to notice her leaving. Sojuk clunked along at her side, knowing better than to offer her a hand.\n\n'They're inside the space port now,' she told him, just in case he didn't know.\n\n'So I understand.'\n\n'We'll be lucky to maintain contact with them for long.'\n\n'That is understood. Though we may indeed be fortunate - such things have happened before.'\n\nThey passed through the blast doors and into the narrow underground corridor. It was horribly hot and humid.\n\n'I'm sorry you're not with them,' she said. 'I know you must long to be there.'\n\nSojuk smiled warmly. 'The honour is to be here. If one of my brothers had tried to take it from me, I would have killed him.'\n\nIlya laughed. 'Nice of you to say. Though I doubt your master would be pleased.'\n\n'He would understand, I think.'\n\nThey reached the door to her dorm-unit, shared normally with two others, although e"}
{"text":"ugh the blast doors and into the narrow underground corridor. It was horribly hot and humid.\n\n'I'm sorry you're not with them,' she said. 'I know you must long to be there.'\n\nSojuk smiled warmly. 'The honour is to be here. If one of my brothers had tried to take it from me, I would have killed him.'\n\nIlya laughed. 'Nice of you to say. Though I doubt your master would be pleased.'\n\n'He would understand, I think.'\n\nThey reached the door to her dorm-unit, shared normally with two others, although empty for the time being. The remnants were all crammed together in this little hideaway, hunkered down and invisible as the earth burned above them.\n\nShe needed to sleep now. Even though the cot was hard, the bolster lumpy and filthy, she knew she would pass out as soon as her head hit the plasfibre.\n\n'So do you believe it, then, Sojuk?' she said then, almost without meaning to. The thought ran through her head all the time, as if stuck on repeat, tormenting her. 'Do you believe he can do it?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'But I was there. On Prospero. They were matched, the two of them, and now the enemy has grown, and we have been worn down so much...' She leaned against the door frame. 'Sorry. I shouldn't say it.'\n\nSojuk didn't smile again. For all his equanimity, the worry must have occurred to him, too. 'He would not attempt it, if it were not possible.'\n\n'But if he were... If he died? What then?'\n\n'Another Great Khan would be chosen.'\n\nThat startled her. 'No. Not possible.'\n\n'We would grieve, szu. We would be angry, like no force of the heavens has ever been angry, but then we would fight again. The hunt would continue. An outsider might never even know the truth, even for centuries after - there is always a Great Khan.'\n\n'But I cannot... I mean, the way you say it...'\n\n'Only the way he has always been with us,' Sojuk said, calmly but firmly. 'Some primarchs are bound up with themselves, wrapped in their own power. Jaghatai, though, always made us all stronger. He is of the Legion. We are the people of the Khan.' He looked straight at her throughout, as if warning her of how to be, should the moment come. 'The gift was never hoarded. It was shared freely.'\n\nShe didn't even want to think about it. She didn't know why she'd brought it up. Overtired, maybe, in need of a break. Or sick of it all.\n\n'Oh, hells,' she said. 'This... waste. When I joined up, at least we were doing something constructive. Or it felt like that, anyway. But this... Even if we survive it, what will be left?'\n\nSojuk reached into the dorm-unit and activated the sodium-strip lumen.\n\n'Rest, please,' he said, more firmly now. Then he seemed to relent. 'The Qo taught us that the universe is a cycle. One day, we construct, another day, we knock down. There is no end, no day when we can say it has all been achieved, only another day of struggle. But it is better to be there, to be part of it, all the same. And I very much wish for you to be there, with us, when we cease destroying and begin to build again. So I say for the third time, my lady, take rest.'\n\nIlya smiled, and placed a time-worn hand on Sojuk's enormous breastplate. 'Very well. You have been patient with an old woman. Wake me in four hours.'\n\nThen she left him, wrapped a blanket around herself, and collapsed onto the narrow cot. Even before the lumen died she could feel herself slipping away.\n\n'For all that, it cannot happen,' she murmured, tossing uneasily. 'Not him, too. I will not let it.'\n\n'Fire at will! Fire at will!' Kaska shouted, trying hard not to lose it completely.\n\nAika 73 bucked and rolled over the smashed decking, its engine hammering as the tracks slipped before finding a grip. The terrain was nightmarish - a slick mat of faintly glowing vegetation, rapidly ground up into a black slurry as the tanks skidded and revved across it.\n\nThe crew were all sweating now, breathing heavily, working the air filters hard. Merck reached for another shell with shaking hands, fumbling the catch before shoving it into the breech. Dresi was as silent as ever, though the constant jarring motion of the hull must have been making things hard for her. Jandev had been firing constantly ever since they had driven up from the wastelands and broken inside the enormous port complex.\n\nKaska didn't like to remember the passage inside. He'd only had glimpses of the action anyway, locked down as they were inside their humid, overheated, already malfunctioning box of death.\n\nThe super-heavies had done most of the core lifting. Once the skies had cleared of the overhead firestorm, those had been the ones to smash a path through the ranks of enemy armour, using their numerical superiority to bludgeon the slower-moving traitor units. They had suffered for it, though, and Kaska had lost count of the number of burning wrecks he had had to skirt around. The impacts had been tremendous on both sides, with heavy-calibre ammunition ripping clean into thick armour and punching through crew-stations and fuel tanks. Some of the traitor units had kept on coming through firestorms that should have blasted them clean from their tracks, taking several direct impacts to finally bring them to a halt. Once the lead super-heavies had pulverised each other into straggling heaps of scattered machine parts, the main battle tanks had had to negotiate veritable hull graveyards, trying not to crash straight through the raging promethium slicks and ignite their own fuel tanks.\n\nLas-fire had been useful in that confused scrum - Jandev could fire faster than Vosch while the tank was on the move, as well as swivel his barrel more easily than a full turret-swing. Aika 73 had scored two more hull-kills before the threshold had finally beckoned. Kaska, trying to keep his eyes clamped tight to the periscope sights as his tank rocked and jerked, had caught sight of the gaping maw of the objective from a long way out. That gate had once welcomed heavy ground-conveyers for void-ship components, and soared away sixty metres up. By then, its gun-points had been obliterated, its guard towers ruined and hollowed out, but it was still a daunting place to run at. If it hadn't been for the heavy White Scars presence, already up into the high battlements and tearing across them like wildfire, it might have been impassable.\n\nAika 73 was not the first across the gate's edge, though - it had broken through the barrier alongside the two units remaining in the squadron, in the lee of a trio of huge Stormblades, all of which had taken heavy damage on the way in. More Leman Russ units had followed them, some partly on fire or with damaged turrets, but soon the numbers started to add up. You could begin to believe, Kaska had dared to think, adding up all the locator runes on the close-range augurs, that they might even pull this off.\n\nUntil, that was, they had got inside.\n\nIt had already been claustrophobic, stuck in that shaking, rattling casket for hours on end. Once under the shelter of the space port's colossal innards, it felt like being buried alive. The air tasted foul through the filters of the tox-guards. The narrow viewer-slits silted up instantly. Black mould started to spread across the interior panels, almost in real time. The ground, which should have been solid rockcrete, degenerated into sloughs and mires. Visibility dropped to a few dozen metres, blocked by a miasma of dark green that barely shifted even as you fired through it.\n\nThe noise was the worst of it - a constant resounding thunder of confined engines and gunfire, one that never let up and soon had everyone wanting to scream. Enemy tanks had been stationed just inside the interior walls, hunkered down low behind thick razor wire barricades, and the slaughter taking those defence-lines was prodigious. After that the infantry had come, those massive power-armoured monsters that seemed able to shrug off hit after hit before coming into range. Kaska's second tank had been destroyed by just one of those creatures - it had got close enough to tear its way into the interior, using some kind of huge cleaver to hack through the armour plate and then carve up the soft bodies frantically trying to reach the escape hatch. Kaska had opened fire on the tank himself with the main gun, just to end the screams of terror from within. Vosch's shot had ignited the ammunition store, blowing up the whole hull, but still Kaska had needed to wait in position, ready to fire again, just to make sure the damn creature didn't limp out of the flames.\n\nThey were horrific. They were everywhere. You had to hit them at long range, laying down as much destruction as you possibly could, because if they got in close, nothing much was going to stop them. Kaska remembered his briefings back at Colossi, when he'd thought that sending hundreds of tanks into a single fortress, however big, might be overkill. He didn't think that now. The environment was such that exposed line troopers would have lasted only moments. The enemy was such that only devastating levels of firepower had any effect. It was almost comically miserable - a valiant charge into the jaws of an earthbound hell, opening up with physical weapons on something created by a malign force beyond all comprehension. All you could do was keep moving through it, keep firing, hope against hope that you'd finally smash your way through to some improbable sanctuary in order to take stock, to rest up, to catch your breath and rearm for the next melee.\n\nThe units ahead of him finally broke into an echoing gallery, and Kaska followed them in. Enormous chain-lengths hung down through the fog, dripping with condensation. The burned-out skeleton of a fleet tender hung in rusting loops within a lifter cage, itself more than five hundred metres long. Cutters, welders and industrial drills were suspended from blown-out crane rigs, all of them draped in that infernal rotting carpet of organic filth. The tanks ahead of him were already hard at work, pummelling a line of defence some three h"}
{"text":"nto an echoing gallery, and Kaska followed them in. Enormous chain-lengths hung down through the fog, dripping with condensation. The burned-out skeleton of a fleet tender hung in rusting loops within a lifter cage, itself more than five hundred metres long. Cutters, welders and industrial drills were suspended from blown-out crane rigs, all of them draped in that infernal rotting carpet of organic filth. The tanks ahead of him were already hard at work, pummelling a line of defence some three hundred metres off. The gallery heights flashed and echoed with the sharper sounds of Legion gunfire, causing the miasma to be joined by even thicker blooms of smoke that cascaded down to ground level and made it even harder to see anything clearly.\n\n'Push right, driver,' Kaska ordered, concerned about a formation of Imperial tanks making faster progress along the left. As ever, you had to be as worried about friendly fire as that coming from the enemy. Aika 73 struggled to make headway, trailed by its sole squadron survivor. 'And drop your speed - I can't see a damn thing in here.'\n\nBut he saw clearly enough what came out of the murk next, and it chilled him to the bone. It was one of those things - the things they had been told were xenos, but which definitely, definitely weren't. It was lit up, so he saw it lurch along amid a cloud of flies, semi-transparent and flickering as if unreal, but clearly able to affect the environment around it. Its face was almost human, though distended and warped like no human face had ever been in life. Its belly was ripped open, its grey-green skin glistening with a fever-sweat, and it lurched along on flabby legs as if drunk.\n\n'Fire, fire, fire!' he shouted, feeling himself slip into panic.\n\nVosch got a shell away, blasting it in close and sending a huge geyser of superheated earth up out of the impact crater. Jandev, getting his range from the explosion, followed up with a sprayed line of las-fire.\n\nThe creature staggered through it all, taking hits but somehow able to survive them. Kaska caught its lone yellow eye through the periscope and almost vomited. Merck was already doing just that, even though the gunner couldn't see a thing - the deathly smell of the apparition seemed to get inside, despite all the other rival stinks it had to cut through.\n\n'Fire again!' Kaska shrieked, powerless to do anything else. It would be on them in moments, and that would be it.\n\nBut then something intervened - a blur of ivory, with a blade that flashed in the darkness. Kaska could hardly make out the detail through all the white noise, but clearly something had interposed itself.\n\n'Cease firing!' he shouted.\n\nHe adjusted the focus on the periscope viewfinder with shaking, clammy hands, trying to get a better view. He saw the creature bellowing, lowing suddenly like injured cattle, with an armoured warrior right up at its throat. A sword flashed out, back and forth, marshalled with incredible power and heft. A cry of wild aggression in a language he didn't understand rang out, and then the monster was gone, ripped from view as soon as it had arrived, leaving only fresh slicks of translucent slime across the scorched terrain.\n\n'Keep those guns locked down,' Kaska repeated, swivelling the viewscreen and trying clumsily to improve the image.\n\nHis visual field jumped across a landscape of firing hulls, of advancing Traitor Marines, of more of the bowel-emptying nightmares spinning into existence. Just gazing on those things made him want to get out of there, to hare off as fast as he could before his heart burst from fear. The paths ahead and behind were all clogged up, though, blocked with the grind and thunder of mobile armour, or dazzling vehicle lumens in the dark, or the unearthly glimmer of spectral forces.\n\nBut then his close lens was filled with the grainy, shaking image of the Legion warrior - a white helm banded with blood red, already plastered with grime from the kill, still on his feet.\n\n'Well fought, commander,' came the warrior's voice over the comm, as strangely accented as they all were. 'Jangsai Khan, Brotherhood of the Iron Axe. You are now with me.'\n\nKaska swallowed, trying to master himself. Was this better? Was this worse? Would this fighter keep them alive a little longer, or lead them quickly into something even more terrible?\n\nNot that there was a question about it, of course. It was an order, and having one of them on the outside was surely better than going further alone.\n\n'Aye, lord!' he shouted back across the comm, before switching back to Dresi. 'You heard him, trooper,' he ordered. 'Follow that one.'\n\nThe engines growled up a gear, and Merck reloaded, wiping his chin with his uniform sleeve. Everything rattled, everything complained, the engines coughed and spluttered, but Aika 73 did as he was asked, allowing Kaska to take another look through the scope.\n\n'A Space Marine,' he murmured, sweating profusely and still trembling from what he'd seen. 'We are fortunate indeed.'\n\nLord of the Night\n\nSweet spot\n\nBroken Angel\n\n'A Space Marine,' Fo muttered to himself, his mouth full of blood. 'Of all the damn luck.'\n\nHis attempt to escape it had been farcical. He'd managed to get to the end of a long corridor, almost to a sealed door, before it had shot him.\n\nIt had missed, but not by accident - a Traitor Marine didn't miss at that range. It had missed because a mass-reactive shell striking him in his body would have killed him outright, and the creature didn't want him dead yet. The shot exploded at his feet, enough to break both his ankles and bring him crashing down to the deck.\n\nThen it had scooped him up, using its long claws like a cargo-lifter, and loped through the doorway with him tucked under its arm.\n\nHe didn't remember much of what happened next clearly. He was in a lot of pain, and the stink of the armour around him made him want to pass out. He felt something wet and leathery flap against his face, and realised only slowly it was the vein-latticed surface of some fresh-flensed human skin.\n\nHis captor went rapidly, negotiating the shadow-realm of the Palace warzone more surely than Fo would have thought possible. It said nothing to him the whole time, just ran through the dark, ignoring the combat erupting in all directions around it. Fo jangled painfully in its one-armed grip, feeling like his ribs were being broken with every footfall - though at least that took his mind off the white-hot agony in his legs. He clenched his jaw tighter, he forced himself to keep his eyes open. If he lost consciousness, that might make things feel a little easier once they stopped, but it would end any possible chance he still had to get out alive.\n\nAfter a while, he realised that he was being taken upwards, climbing high out of the dust and the smoke. He blinked hard, his vision still cloudy, and gained a glimpse of the internal metalwork structure of an old hive, stripped of its outer surfaces and its solid floors, the skeleton of iron stretching away from him both up and down. It all smelled of burning. The Traitor Marine scaled the struts and beams effortlessly, leaping when it had to, which made Fo's body scream with pain.\n\nSoon they were at, or near, the summit. Fo only knew that because his captor threw him down onto his back and he saw nothing but ember-glow storm clouds streaming along above him. He tried to speak, but the traitor extended a single finger of its claw and impaled him to the steel below, pinning him just under his right shoulder blade.\n\nFo yowled, thrashing against the pain, before the shock passed and he realised that any kind of movement just made things worse. Panting, he forced himself to keep control, to face his tormentor, to clear his mind. Even as his heart raced and his stress hormones shot off into overload, he knew he had to keep thinking. There was always a way out. Always.\n\nBut then he looked into the skull-face of the creature's helm, saw the dull ache of its lenses, and the scraps of still-warm flesh hanging from its armour like ribbons. It reeked of agony - the agony of its prey, not just killed, but made to suffer first.\n\n'You are the tyrant of Velich Tarn,' it said.\n\nThe voice was as horrific as everything else. It sounded as if the lips and tongue under all that armour plate had atrophied, seizing up in some kind of immune response to their owner's debauchery.\n\nFo swallowed a bloody mouthful. Lying, at this stage, seemed a weak strategy. 'I was. How on earth could you know that?'\n\nThe monster did not need to answer. Something in the far distance blew up just then, flooding them both briefly with a stark orange glow, and Fo saw esoteric runes carved across the traitor's armour. He saw the marks of what the old man had once called 'Ruinous Powers', the very powers He had taken it upon Himself to go after. This monster, if it was foolish enough to tap those, probably had access to all kinds of secrets.\n\n'You exist in several futures,' the traitor told him, in a voice that was neither angry nor sinister, but just empty, as if its soul had been harrowed to the bone by the things it had done. 'And you do not exist in many more. By rights you should have been killed already, and yet here you are. A stubborn fly to swat.'\n\nFo smiled grimly. The hot wind tore at his uniform, making the pain worse. 'But you got me in the end, eh? Well done. Now what? You want the secret? That's it? My weapon?'\n\nThe traitor stared at him with soulless, pitiless eyes. Its armour, right up close, was a thing of awful fascination - the machinery never stopped making sounds, emitting heat, like a chained animal all of its own, only loosely held in check by the withered thing inhabiting it.\n\n'I do not know what does the most harm,' the traitor said musingly. 'Letting you live, or killing you now.'\n\nFo laughed, then regretted it. 'I'm not important. I can hardly lift a lasgun. But I can tell you what I know. I can build something for you.'\n\nThe Night Lord spat out a steel-har"}
{"text":"right up close, was a thing of awful fascination - the machinery never stopped making sounds, emitting heat, like a chained animal all of its own, only loosely held in check by the withered thing inhabiting it.\n\n'I do not know what does the most harm,' the traitor said musingly. 'Letting you live, or killing you now.'\n\nFo laughed, then regretted it. 'I'm not important. I can hardly lift a lasgun. But I can tell you what I know. I can build something for you.'\n\nThe Night Lord spat out a steel-hard laugh. 'You are deluding yourself with that. This is about you. What you might become.'\n\nWith a sudden clarity, Fo realised that the monster was genuinely undecided. The indecision was all that was holding it back - just a twist of its long claws would be enough to finish him off, but it still hadn't moved.\n\nThen, with a terrible wrench, it pulled its talon free of his flesh, dragging long trails of blood with it.\n\n'Enough. You must die. That is safer.'\n\nThe monster tensed to plunge its claw down, and Fo screwed his eyes shut, managing to curl up into a ball, as if that would do anything to shield him from the strike.\n\nHe felt a rush of air, heard a thud like a vehicle striking a bulkhead, and then... nothing.\n\nHe opened his eyes, just in time to see the creature fighting, lashing out with those claws in a frenzy of startled movement. It was locked in close combat with something much worse, much more powerful, and the contest was painfully one-sided. A spear flashed out, crackling with silver-gold energy, and the Night Lord was hurled, cartwheeling almost comically, out over the spire-top's edge. It called out, just once - a thin, strangled cry, fading away rapidly. The storm roared overhead. Far below, the city burned. The drop must have been nearly a kilometre. Even a Space Marine wouldn't get up from that.\n\nThat just left the matter of the other one.\n\n'My lord Custodian,' Fo croaked, feeling the cumulative effects of his wounds. 'Back to Blackstone, then.'\n\nValdor gazed down at him. The oil-dark blood on his great spear was still wet. 'No,' he said.\n\n'Then you're here to kill me,' Fo said resignedly.\n\n'No,' he said.\n\nFo didn't know what to say next. He was still close to passing out from the pain. His nerves were fried. The after-effects of his time with that creature were rapidly catching up with him. After sufficient amounts of terror had been doled out, though, all that really remained was irritation - the desire to get things over with, to find out what fate had in store for him now.\n\n'So you want to destroy the weapon,' Fo said, unnerved by his captor's eerie, implacable silence. 'Amon told you what it could do. Is that it? Just tell me!'\n\n'You are coming with me,' Valdor told him. 'Into my care, not the Blackstone's.'\n\nThe captain-general picked him up, just as easily as the Traitor Marine had, and only slightly more gently. Then they were moving again, leaping down from the spire summit, a dizzying drop into the girders and struts.\n\nFo tried not to throw up, or to scream out loud, or to otherwise embarrass himself. His head shook, lolling painfully against his chest. He clenched his jaw, pressed his fingernails into his palms to keep himself conscious. A man could get irritated by all this... disrespect.\n\nThey reached ground level, where the air was almost unbreathable and the heat unbearable. Valdor hesitated for just a moment, gaining his bearings. That gave Fo his opportunity - perhaps the last he would get before the run back to the core.\n\n'So what difference does that make to me, eh?' he demanded, struggling somewhat performatively against his captor's grip. 'A prison's a prison, isn't it?'\n\nValdor's golden mask gazed down at him, those jewelled eyes impossible to read. It wouldn't have made much difference if his real eyes had been there instead - the captain-general was a closed book, even to those of his own kind.\n\n'Not quite,' he said, his voice as deep and rich as it was preternaturally calm. 'The Tower is mine to command directly. As are you now, criminal.'\n\nThe polished lenses never so much as flickered.\n\n'I went to some trouble to find you,' said Valdor. 'So your vaunted weapon had better be worth it.'\n\nThe lighter was not a well-armed craft. It had a single lascannon, low-powered, projecting out from under its angular nose-section, and some flimsy armour plates running down its flanks. The engines were reasonably powerful, and it was manoeuvrable enough for its size, but that was about it.\n\nOll reflected on that as the kilometres passed by. He spent most of his time up in the cockpit with John, watching the burned lands skate underneath them. Everywhere you looked, the destruction was complete. Cities, some of them so vast they would have been capitals on any other world, were little more than slowly cooling fire pits. The short-lived lakes and reservoirs reintroduced as part of the great programme to restore Terra's ecosystem were slowly boiling away again. Great tracts of agricultural land were on fire, their terraces smouldering with chem-encouraged flames.\n\nThose places had once been prosperous, productive and heavily populated. Now they were all empty. Where had the people gone? Maybe they were still all down there somewhere, buried under the top crust of ruins, hiding away and waiting for deliverance. Or maybe they had left months ago, trekking off for places such as the paradise hive where they imagined they might be safe.\n\nThere was no question of setting the lighter down anywhere near the few remains of civilisation - whenever they had to drop to earth, they did so a long way from signs of habitation. The fuel tanks had needed refilling twice. Both times, they had siphoned what they needed from the larger wrecks of other craft. The two Space Marines had stood watchfully as the process was completed, bolters drawn, seemingly as suspicious of each other as anything that might emerge out of the shadows.\n\nThe hours of airborne monotony passed, and the sky grew darker and redder. The once pristine Himalazian plateau was now a twilight realm of smog and flame, its earth scorched and its low skies permanently overcast. With every kilometre they travelled, the blood-glow of orbital munitions increased steadily, until the nimbus flared across the entire horizon, casting long shadows across a terrain of blasted emptiness. Forks of amber lightning skipped under the palls, briefly illuminating the first jagged pinnacles of blackened spires.\n\n'So there it is,' John remarked simply, as the towers of the Outer Palace slipped onto the magnified viewers.\n\nOll watched them come closer. 'Is it already over?' he asked, wondering if they'd come too late - the area looked devastated.\n\n'Maybe,' said John. 'The place is hundreds of kilometres across, though - if they're fighting still, it'll be at the centre.'\n\nEnormous walls of smoke hung in the air above the jagged silhouettes, kilometres high, drifting steadily higher up into the atmosphere from where they would be pulled across the entire globe. Oll was no terraformer, but it seemed impossible that a planet could ever recover from pollution on such a scale. Win or lose, he guessed, Terra would never enjoy clear skies again.\n\n'How long before we hit the perimeter?' he asked.\n\nJohn glanced at the scanners. 'A few hours yet.'\n\n'Fine. I'll get the others ready.'\n\nHe clambered back down into the crew hold. Zybes and Katt were asleep, their heads lolling as the lighter fought its way through increasing turbulence. Actae seemed absorbed in some kind of meditative trance. Leetu was methodically preparing his weapon, which lay in pieces on his lap.\n\nThere wasn't much for Oll to do. He checked his own laspistol. He thought back over all the journeys he'd taken, just to be here, and how unprepared he still felt. The first task of a soldier was to understand the objective. Be clear about it. Know what you're trying to do. Here, though, it was all about the journey. Just get there in one piece, and things would become clear.\n\nHe shook his head, smiling grimly, perfectly aware of the absurdity of it all. As he did so, his eyes met those of the Alpha Legionnaire, the one who called himself by the name of his primarch.\n\n'This all comes down to you, I guess,' Oll said.\n\nAlpharius shrugged - just a tiny movement of those massive shoulder guards.\n\n'You know a way in, Actae tells me,' said Oll. 'And so we're trusting that, without any proof, just because there's nothing better on the table.'\n\nActae looked up at the mention of her name. 'He isn't alone here,' she said. 'Dozens of his brothers were placed on Terra, down in the catacombs, ready to be activated.'\n\n'For what end?' Oll asked.\n\n'Numerous ends,' said Alpharius. 'As of now, their only purpose will be to aid us.'\n\nOll looked at him sceptically. 'So you can get us back?' he said. 'To where they are?'\n\nAlpharius nodded. 'The pilot has the coordinates. If he is able to get us close enough, I can take you the rest of the way.'\n\nOll laughed dryly. 'And then we'll just walk on in.'\n\nActae didn't smile. 'It's all about timing,' she said coolly. 'If we'd arrived earlier, when the defences were still intact - impossible. Later, and it'll all be over. This is the sweet spot.'\n\n'Nice choice of words,' said Oll, checking the power pack on his weapon. 'You should know that if I had any better options at all, I wouldn't even be contemplating this.'\n\nActae smiled. 'I do know that.'\n\nKatt woke up. A little later, so did Zybes. That completed the set, the entire gang, ready for action. Oll never needed to give them orders - they got themselves ready, did what they had to. One way or another, this zigzag quest was coming to an end, just as the galaxy fell apart all around them.\n\n'You all right?' he asked Katt. The psyker had been feeling worse and worse the closer they got.\n\nShe nodded, not meeting his gaze, and started to prepare. Zybes followed suit. Leetu completed his work, reassembling the archaic bolter expertly. Nobody spoke. T"}
{"text":"the set, the entire gang, ready for action. Oll never needed to give them orders - they got themselves ready, did what they had to. One way or another, this zigzag quest was coming to an end, just as the galaxy fell apart all around them.\n\n'You all right?' he asked Katt. The psyker had been feeling worse and worse the closer they got.\n\nShe nodded, not meeting his gaze, and started to prepare. Zybes followed suit. Leetu completed his work, reassembling the archaic bolter expertly. Nobody spoke. The only sound was the rumble of the lighter's engines.\n\nOll snapped his own helmet on, strapped his flak armour into place. After that he spent a long time with his back against the shuddering hold-wall, trying to keep himself relaxed, and failing. He was tensed up, wound tight. If he closed his eyes he saw nightmares; if he kept them open, he imagined more of them. When the first hit came in, it was almost a relief.\n\nA warning lumen blinked on overhead. The deck rocked, and then bucked harder as something else struck them. Oll heard the engines whine up, and the lighter tilted hard to the right as John began to make evasive manoeuvres.\n\n'Take your stations, people,' he warned them all. 'We're going in.'\n\nTo kill, to kill, to kill.\n\nThere might once have been other things, other considerations. Hard to recall.\n\nHe remembered his name - Kharn. He remembered where he had been born - here, on Terra. So he was home, back on the soil that had first raised him up, though the place looked a bit different now - like every world he ever conquered, a desolation, fit only for bone fragments and whining ghosts. He would blink, and see the place then as it would become very soon - the great brass thrones in place of cities, the mountains of skulls, the skies of liquid fire. The barrier was so thin, now. Just a few more kills, just a little extra push on the tally of slaughter, and it would break entirely.\n\nSo where was Angron, just as the victory hove into view? Where was the gene-father he had coaxed and placated and tried to reason with for so long? Why were the primarchs, those squabbling brothers who had driven so much of this long, long war, suddenly careering out of view, as if embarrassed by their respective excesses?\n\nLost in madness, they said of Angron. Swallowed up by the permanent rage that had always been his destiny. There would be no more words spoken with him, not any more. He had risen to inconceivable heights, becoming a force of destruction the likes of which the galaxy had never witnessed before. His anger was almost a ritual now, outside time, something that would cycle for eternity. He was capable of anything and everything... except reason. The very thing that separated the humans from the beasts, and he had lost it.\n\nTo kill, to kill.\n\nDid he regret the change? Did Kharn, the most faithful of all Angron's sons, wish for things to be different? Maybe. Except that he had never known his master undamaged. He had never seen him in his youth, before the Nails had been inserted, and so his loyalty had always been given to a broken angel. And after that, once he'd been given the same bad medicine as his master, it had been easier just to wash any doubt away with fresh blood. When you killed a man, a woman, a child - when you ended a fragile flame of life, when you took away the chance of any further development, of happiness, of sadness, or selfishness or vice or sainthood or intellect - when you did that, in that one moment, the torment ceased. Just a fragment, an atom of peace amid an eternity of rage. But at the same time, in that fleeting glimpse of sanity, you could recall everything you once were. You could remember discourse, and laughter, even pity. And so you had to start again, to move to the next victim, the next challenge, because that knowledge was the worst goad of all.\n\nTo kill.\n\nThis hunting ground had been the richest he'd ever encountered. His chainaxe had gorged on the blood of the mortal and the ascended. Some had run from him, some had stood firm. Some had screamed at him in hatred, some had wept from fear. It didn't matter how they died, only that they did. The kill-counter kept on turning, the only certain gauge of his achievement.\n\nHe was aware of bodies in motion around him. He judged they were of his own Legion, from the copper stench that came with them. Their old pale armour was now as black as every other surface in this despoiled world, blushed only with the mortal stain of those they had ended. He didn't remember their names, either. He might have even killed some of their battle-brothers, during the worst spells of orgiastic slaughter, but if he had done then no one seemed to hold it against him.\n\nTogether, they charged out across the old ruined viaduct, the one that speared right into the heart of the tiny Imperium of Mankind. A realm that had once spanned the stars, reduced to a few square kilometres of crumbling estate, soon to be demolished and refashioned into something more suitable for the Great God's triumph.\n\nBut, just then, he didn't care about any of that. He looked out, ahead, through the murk and the mire, his helm display overlaying the night with its redundant skein of runes and markers.\n\nHe saw a warrior standing tall among other warriors, right up at the terminus of the viaduct's span, his armour as black as his own, withdrawing his blade from the torso of a slain opponent. There was no flourish, no cry of triumph - it was a functional display, just something that needed to be done, but still artful in its spare economy.\n\nThe Black Sword had many fighters about him, a whole army, just as Kharn had his warriors by his side. None of those mattered - they were just there to prevent anything getting in the way.\n\nFor a second, Kharn paused in his headlong run, watching. He saw the Black Sword wave his fighters on, rousing them to more defiance. They were under heavy fire, but still they advanced through it all, dogged and unyielding. He sensed an old memory stir then, a distant recollection of a kind of fellowship under arms. He remembered a pit, and opponents, and fraternal laughter echoing into the high vaults above.\n\nThe memory didn't last. He singled out the Black Sword, the one he had come to kill.\n\n'Mine,' he slurred, gesturing with his blood-soaked axe.\n\nThe others didn't protest. There was plenty for them, and they still knew just enough to defer to rank. He was Kharn the Loyal, Kharn the Faithful, the one soul capable of holding them all together for just a little longer while their gene-father ran amok. They were running again, the hounds of war, down the slope towards the enemy, no tactics in mind, no objective in sight, save the one goal, the one target that kept them a step away from total dissolution.\n\nTo kill, to kill, to kill.\n\nClose enough\n\nUlysses contract\n\nThe mire\n\nTo remain restrained, to remember law, to limit immersion in the path.\n\nYesugei had always preached that, even in the midst of the worst and bloodiest combat. To lose yourself - that was the danger. Any village-witch could drive themselves mad by supping too deeply from the wells of power. Such practices might yield a moment's glory, but the price would always have to be paid further down the line.\n\nThe evidence of that debauchery was all around Naranbaatar just then. He strode through the knee-deep liquid mud, crackling with a nimbus of white gold, his staff spitting with storm-flare. On either flank, the keshig fought their way deeper into the enemy lines. The Khagan was at the forefront, as ever, and very little lasted long against his peerless sword-mastery. The rumbling squadrons of armour struggled to keep up with them, though their powerful guns were welcome.\n\nThe galleries and chambers they fought through became truly colossal - assembly halls, dry-docks and lifter-shafts, all of them so vast as to have an almost ceremonial grandeur to them. Now tens of thousands of fighters swarmed across their swamped floors, making the internal spaces ring with the cacophony of massed combat. Hundreds of tanks rumbled into range to fire, the cannon reports deafening and their incessant engine growl making the decks shake.\n\nEvery inch of the path ahead was packed with hosts of the corrupted. The Traitor Marines were the most numerous, advancing in close-set ranks that glimmered with dancing slivers of corposant, but alongside them came far greater horrors - mighty Dreadnoughts, transformed into bizarre fusions of the organic and the mechanical, as well as the yaksha themselves, greater and more malign than any encountered yet. They leapt and shambled out of the black-green darkness, boiling up from every lingering shadow, slobbering and capering in some monstrous parody of mortal joviality.\n\nThose creatures came straight at him, attracted like moths to a flame, just as they did with all the zadyin arga, knowing their peril but also drawn by the promise of a juicier soul to feast on. Their surface grins and capers were all a distortion - the leering mouths were filled with wicked teeth, and those swollen bellies were brimful with poisons. Every Traitor Marine they faced now was riddled with the warp's corruption, turning them steadily into shambolic echoes of the steadfast warriors they had once been.\n\nSurely they must have been horrified. Surely some part of them must have been screaming in horror at what they had become. It made them powerful, to be sure. It made them resilient beyond belief - Naranbaatar had been forced to intervene in countless engagements where numerically superior White Scars units just couldn't break the enemy formations. So perhaps that power was enough for them. The advances had certainly slowed across the entire battlefield. Ganzorig was now inside the perimeter, the signals told him, but only after paying a ruinous price to reduce the outer defences. Qin Fai was struggling, trying to maintain momentum against the defensive concentrations strung across the southern rampart"}
{"text":"ad been forced to intervene in countless engagements where numerically superior White Scars units just couldn't break the enemy formations. So perhaps that power was enough for them. The advances had certainly slowed across the entire battlefield. Ganzorig was now inside the perimeter, the signals told him, but only after paying a ruinous price to reduce the outer defences. Qin Fai was struggling, trying to maintain momentum against the defensive concentrations strung across the southern ramparts. The intended link-up of forces had yet to happen, fracturing the assault and leaving vulnerable points all along the line.\n\nThey had always known that breaking the hard external shell of the space port would be the easiest part of the exercise - the ordu's expertise lay in such shock-attack moves, and Perturabo had done a typically thorough job of smashing up the fixed defensive architecture. Now they were into the defence in depth, the endless series of energy-soaking firefights to clear out chamber after chamber. Even the Amber spearpoint, blessed with some of the greatest warriors of the ordu, found the going tough. The Death Guard could soak up tremendous punishment before turning around and doling it right back. Their reactions may have been slowed, their souls withered, but they were still fearsomely intelligent, staggeringly committed, wading through volumes of incoming fire that should have blasted them into flying clouds of ceramite flecks.\n\nA formation of Terran Armoured Malcadors roared past him then, throwing up waves of sludge as they rushed the lines. Their battle cannons boomed in sequence, obliterating a high screen of ironwork behind which a battalion of Death Guard was dug in hard. Enemy armour responded, hurling back chem-shells and phosphex mortars. When those exploded, the already seamy atmosphere became choking and translucent, a swimming soup of poisons that gnawed at every armour-seal and tox-filter.\n\nWhite Scars infantry charged up in the wake of the tanks, firing bolt pistols one-handed, staying close to prevent the Traitor Marines from closing on the vehicles. Lascannon fire lashed out from high up in the galleries, drilling into the corpulent flanks of plague-ridden enemy tank hulls. A squadron of jetbikes screamed along after the volleys, their underslung bolters spitting.\n\nIt was still too slow. The far end of the chamber was eight hundred metres off, lost in tox-clouds, with stubborn defensive redoubts all the way along it. At this rate, it might take days of slaughter just to reach the far end.\n\nNaranbaatar rose from the deck, his armour surrounded in a corpus of spinning witch-light. He swept higher, feeling the whistle and whine of projectiles around him. His visual field was the usual mix of tactical overlays and ghostly foresight, a melange of projections and predictions that swam in and out of one another. In the middle distance, still shielded by heavy detachments of traitors in Terminator plate, he saw an astonishing construction grinding its way to the front. It appeared to be some kind of quadrupedal walker, a giant war engine built from the usual bulbous plates of adamantium and ceramite, only bulked out with pale grey flesh and surrounded in loops of translucent tubing. The unmistakeable aura of the daemonic pulsed and throbbed across its calloused surface. It carried massive fist-mounted cannons, and its ridged back was studded with gaping rocket launchers. It bellowed as it came, a roar of pain and fury. Whatever intelligence still remained at the heart of the thing was in misery and confusion, goaded into combat by those around it. It also carried massive fuel sacs under its fleshy belly, feeding what looked to be some daemon-fused reactor core. If it got into close range, it would raise havoc.\n\nHe whirled around, building momentum and extending his staff out horizontally. The storm wind quickened, catching on the calligraphic screeds lashed to his armour. His golden eyes went white, his hearts thudded into overdrive, his palms became hot.\n\n'Shala'ak!' he cried.\n\nThe force left his body, bursting free of the skull tip of his staff. For a moment he felt as if he would be ripped along with it, sent sailing alongside its kinetic energy, but he battled to hold position, suspended high above the battlefield.\n\nThe warp-bolt he'd summoned, a writhing sphere of pure annihilation, leapt straight over the heads of the multitudes, striking the war engine in its fleshy underside. The daemon engine reared up instantly, howling blindly, before the burrowing immolation reached its swaying fuel tanks.\n\nThe explosion rocked the entire chamber, obliterating the daemon engine and blowing its hundreds of support troops from their feet. Artillery pieces tilted over, tanks were driven skidding into one another. A ravening impact wave streaked out, yanking chemical spillage along with it, clearing a huge undulating crater out from the epicentre. Everything struck by those flying chem-spatters roared into unnatural flame, and soon Traitor Marines were blundering into one another, blinded and burning, a lumbering rampage that threw their tightly disciplined advance into confusion. A cheer went up from the Legion forces closest to him, and the White Scars worked to press the advantage. The Terran Armoured units were not far behind, and every available gun targeted the newly opened breach with storms of cannon fire.\n\nNaranbaatar withdrew swiftly before he was targeted by return fire, sinking to the ground again, light-headed and breathing hard. The summonings were getting more difficult the deeper they went. He did not witness how well the Legion was able to capitalise. He dropped to his knees, trying not to pass out, knowing that he was already dangerously overloaded. Foul vapours rose up over him, their fingers snagging at his limbs. He gripped his staff two-handed - he required time, just a little, and then he would be needed again. The daemons would already be limping in closer, alerted to his power. He sensed the rapid movement around him - Legion warriors racing to make the most of the respite, their boots splashing through the filth.\n\nA gauntlet reached out then, and pulled him up. Naranbaatar clambered awkwardly to his feet again, looked up into the helm of his helper, and saw his primarch standing by his side.\n\n'Khagan,' he breathed, bowing clumsily.\n\nThe Khan reached out a steadying hand. 'You honour your calling,' he said. 'That was powerfully done.'\n\nNaranbaatar tried to clear his head. His body was already recovering - his mind would have to follow swiftly. He couldn't see any sign of Namahi and the keshig - had they gone on ahead?\n\n'How may I serve?' he asked.\n\nThe Khan looked out at the battle. His dao blade ran with thick gobbets of slime, his armour was caked in gore. Ahead of them, around them, his Legion threw itself at the enemy, whooping ancient war cries as their blades whirled. They were dying for every metre of ground they took. For all that, they still hurled themselves onward, never hesitating, never doubting.\n\n'I have already asked so much,' the Khan said softly.\n\n'My lord?' asked Naranbaatar, unsure if he was hearing it right.\n\nThe Khan turned back to him. 'Are we close enough?' he asked. 'Can you sense him yet?'\n\nNaranbaatar drew in a long breath. His senses were fogged with every kind of warp apparition, clamouring at him, yelling out their presence with every foul word they spat.\n\nHe concentrated. The space port's structure swelled up into his mind's eye, a colossal pinnacle of corrupted stone and steel. From the inside, it was hard to focus on - the distilled horror of it made his retinas spike with pain. Webs of warp energy throbbed and flickered within its dark profile like disease in a body, a mass of green-tinged cells and tumours. For a moment, the fecundity of it was dizzying - he could scarcely tell which auguries were coming from which location. He forced himself to work harder, to filter out the extraneous echoes.\n\nAnd then it fell into focus. There could be no mistake. The source of it all - the genesis of the despair, the lens through which the greater corruption was filtered. It did not hide itself. Maybe it couldn't - maybe power of this magnitude was akin to the Emperor's, overflowing, superabundant, impossible to conceal. Even to witness it from afar was daunting. It was a repudiation of all they had ever told themselves about the Path of Heaven. It was indulgence beyond reason, a wilful drowning in power, the surrender of all human control.\n\nHe snapped away from the visions. Around him, the auditory thunder of battle rushed back in to take their place. He stared up at the fixed point of the dragon-helm, as if that might prevent him from cutting loose entirely.\n\n'I can,' he said.\n\nThe Khan nodded. 'Then he wants this as much as I do.'\n\n'But Ganzorig is still too far off. We cannot yet give you-'\n\n'Time runs out. Are you strong enough?'\n\nAnd that was the question. The strain of it might kill him before completion. Of more importance, it might kill his lord. But time was already racing away from them while warriors died in the plague-sunk halls of the Lion's Gate. In that place, at that time, there was only one answer to be made.\n\n'Give me the order, Khagan,' Naranbaatar said, steeling himself for what had to come next. 'I shall be as strong as the task demands.'\n\n'Where are we now?' asked Morarg.\n\n'In a myth of this world,' said the Remnant. 'One forgotten by most of the souls of the age. Soon it will be remembered by none at all.'\n\nThe sun was bright. A sapphire sea stretched away in all directions, calm and placid. A single boat rocked on the swell - an ancient vessel, with a sail and oars. Under the beating sun, the crew were tying a man to its mast. He didn't appear to be struggling.\n\n'This ship will set sail for an island,' the Remnant said. 'That island is inhabited by beings of such allure that no mortal man can resist their call. Any sailor str"}
{"text":"st of the souls of the age. Soon it will be remembered by none at all.'\n\nThe sun was bright. A sapphire sea stretched away in all directions, calm and placid. A single boat rocked on the swell - an ancient vessel, with a sail and oars. Under the beating sun, the crew were tying a man to its mast. He didn't appear to be struggling.\n\n'This ship will set sail for an island,' the Remnant said. 'That island is inhabited by beings of such allure that no mortal man can resist their call. Any sailor straying too close is destined to dash his ship against the rocks. The man you see wishes to witness them for himself. What can he do? As of this moment, he is in command of himself. He knows, though, that once he reaches his destination, he will not be.'\n\nMorarg watched the crew stop up their ears with wax plugs, and pull the last knots tight. 'But he has surrendered command,' he said.\n\n'No, he is still giving the orders. The men obey him. He has made a contract while he still has the power to do so, one that will give him what he desires while preserving both himself and the ship. He knows his strength, he knows his weakness. That is an attractive quality in a commander, I would say.'\n\nThe vision rippled away, just as the others had done. With dizzying speed, the scene rushed to the next one - the deep void, on board the Terminus Est itself. Its captain, still calling himself Calas Typhon, was on the bridge. The deck rocked as heavy broadsides fired. Every member of the crew was furiously busy. On the scopes, the markers of enemy battleships swarmed towards them. Each bore the sigil of the First Legion.\n\n'This is Zaramund,' said Morarg.\n\n'But you were not there.'\n\n'No.'\n\nThe Remnant shook its flabby head in amazement. 'You never questioned it, did you? Your Legion's second-in-command, off on his own. Given his head to mingle with the sons of the Lion, even though he was such a strange one, an uncanny one. He never seemed to get properly injured, did he?'\n\n'It was not my place to judge the First Captain.'\n\n'No, it wasn't. It was your master's. Only, he didn't seem to judge him much either, did he?'\n\nInside the vision, the void-war broke out in earnest, with Typhon overseeing it all dispassionately. The First Captain stood confidently, knowing just what he was doing.\n\n'He's here for his own reasons,' the Remnant whispered, creeping up around the command throne, unseen by the other figures present. 'You see that now, don't you? There's no Legion objective here, only his own. He's already committed to his path. Why, in all the planes of suffering, was he allowed to do that?'\n\nMorarg permitted himself a flash of irritation. 'You ask a lot of questions, daemon.'\n\nThe Remnant laughed, then gazed up at the First Captain's daunting profile. Typhon's raw charisma was already obvious, even before the grosser changes that were still to come. 'Only because it fascinates me. You people never once raised so much as a query.'\n\n'Just the way they made us,' said Morarg.\n\n'On Barbarus? Or afterwards?'\n\nBefore Morarg could answer, the rush of displacement came on again, a jarring swirl through space and time, a surge of cold dislocation, until they were back at a place Morarg recognised all too well.\n\n'This is Ynyx,' he said.\n\n'After Ynyx,' the Remnant corrected. 'The reunion of father and son.'\n\nAhead of them, Mortarion now stood on the black sands of a world's ending. Before him was Typhon, looking little different to how he had been at Zaramund, except maybe even more self-possessed, even more cocksure.\n\nTyphon bowed, prompting a scornful wince from his master.\n\n'Do not bow and scrape,' Mortarion told him. 'I seek truth, not obeisance.'\n\n'Truth,' echoed the Remnant. 'You heard that? He doesn't even ask where he's been! This is all very odd.'\n\n'I broke away,' said Typhon, 'because I needed the distance to see clearly.'\n\n'Oh, the insolence,' breathed the Remnant, clearly admiring it. 'And yet it passes without censure. He is welcomed back to the Legion with nary a word of reproach. That is either very generous indeed, or your master knew more than he was letting on.'\n\nMorarg peered a little harder at Typhon's outline. There was something strange about it, a fluttering, just beyond the edge of true vision, like thousands of tiny wings disturbing the air.\n\nThe Remnant slunk up close. 'Oh, you can see it now, can you? I imagine your father saw it the first time. Remember, he had spoken to one of our number already. He had some art of his own, even if he hesitated to use it.'\n\n'But if... he knew-' Morarg began.\n\n'Why did he let it go on? Indeed. Something of a puzzle.'\n\nThe next instant, they were back on the Terminus Est again, right in the heart of the Destroyer Hive attack. The thick screams filled the corridors again, the foul stench of rotting flesh, the bloody excrement sloshing across the decks. Just going back, even within the confines of a vision, was almost more than Morarg could bear. It had been timeless, that pain, cut adrift in an eternity of agony without end. But worst of all, far worse than the physical sensations, was the knowledge, in the present, that they had failed to endure it. It had been too much for them. They had capitulated.\n\nHe turned on the Remnant. 'Take me away from this place.'\n\nFor once, the daemon had no mocking response to offer. 'It had to happen,' it breathed, as if awestruck by it. 'This was the great ritual. The thing that would change you. Once over, you could never be dominated again, not by anything and not by anyone, but he could never have taken the decision to inflict it on you. Remember what you saw of him on Molech. Never again! Never would it be his scythe at his own sons' necks.'\n\nMorarg looked up, only to see Typhus stagger down the screaming corridors, surrounded now by wholly visible flies, swollen with power and disease until it was spilling out of every orifice. This was the source of it, the incubator for the Destroyer, roaring with a mix of joy and horror, his battleplate splitting open and dissolving into clots of pure spinning blackness.\n\n'He did it,' Morarg said, unable to prevent a little hatred from colouring the words.\n\n'Yes, he did,' said the Remnant. 'But who let him in?'\n\nThe vision shifted, sliding up through deck after deck, showing freeze-frames of serried horrors - guts sliced open and forever spilling, eyes plucked out only to regrow and fester again, battle-hardened muscle sloughing from the bone and slapping wetly on the plasteel. Eventually they reached the highest pinnacle, the cathedral of misery, open to the void. The rest of the fleet hung amid the multi-hued abyss of the warp itself, flung across dimensions and becalmed in the neon embrace of living hell. The screams were audible out there, multiplying and folding over one another until you could hear them for what they really were: a hymn of unending praise.\n\nAnd there was Mortarion himself, out in the void, standing atop the spine of the Terminus Est. His arms were raised up, his head thrown back. The agony on his features was just as it had been on Molech - no triumph, only awareness, terrible awareness.\n\n'My blood and my bone!' he was crying, beseeching the shifting curtains of the empyrean. 'The force of my will and the power of my spirit! These are yours to command, if you only grant my people deliverance!'\n\nAnd in the deep vaults of the warp, in the darkest pits of the realm of dreams, something vast and ancient stirred, rising up through the tiers of experience to take the place it had been destined to take since the first decay of the first living cell, but, according to the paradoxical laws of that nowhere-place, only once a mortal decision had been taken.\n\n'Enough,' said Morarg, unwilling to witness what was coming next.\n\n'I agree,' said the Remnant. 'Quite enough.'\n\nAfter that, they were back in darkness. The screams were gone, the tortures were over. Morarg breathed heavily. The plagues were fizzing in his bloodstream, in his suppurating flesh, in his rheumy eyes. There was no going back - this was what he was, now.\n\nThe Remnant waited patiently, looking morose. In that darkness, its famishment made it virtually invisible again.\n\n'Everything happened as we were told,' Morarg said.\n\n'It did.'\n\n'Typhus brought the Destroyer.'\n\n'He did.'\n\n'Mortarion brought us deliverance.'\n\n'He did.'\n\nMorarg looked up at the daemon. 'But there was no deception.'\n\n'How could you ever have thought it? Your father is a son of the Anathema. The warp gives no honour to dupes.'\n\n'But why?'\n\n'He tied himself to the mast while he still could. He could never have given you the agony, only the cure. There was a decision, but it was not when you think it was. The moment of crisis was on Ynyx, when he could have had Typhus slain, but only said I seek the truth. That was the crux. The powers were listening, and all then unfolded as it had to.'\n\n'But I was with him. The whole time. I saw his doubts - he didn't know what was happening. None of us did.'\n\n'You are right. He didn't. He never knew how, or at what time, or in what way. He only required one revelation - that Typhus was the vector. Let him in, then do whatever you wish, in whatever way seems apt to you - the god will take care of the rest.'\n\nMorarg turned away from the creature. He could sense the lie in the words. But, then again, it was a creation of lies - perhaps what he had been shown was real enough. What was worse to contemplate, that Mortarion had been a victim, or that he had been the perpetrator? The end was the same, but the means by which they all arrived there... it felt as if all had been upended.\n\n'Why tell me these things?' he murmured.\n\n'Because you were already beginning to doubt,' said the Remnant. 'You were already believing that your master was a blind fool. He was not. Whether he cursed you or redeemed you, it was his hand that steered the ship.'\n\nThe daemon limped up closer, its wide eyes glistening in the dark.\n\n'So you must fight for him with utter co"}
{"text":"been the perpetrator? The end was the same, but the means by which they all arrived there... it felt as if all had been upended.\n\n'Why tell me these things?' he murmured.\n\n'Because you were already beginning to doubt,' said the Remnant. 'You were already believing that your master was a blind fool. He was not. Whether he cursed you or redeemed you, it was his hand that steered the ship.'\n\nThe daemon limped up closer, its wide eyes glistening in the dark.\n\n'So you must fight for him with utter commitment,' it told him, 'or fight against him with all your heart. You cannot ignore him, you cannot pity him - he is your primarch, and your fate was shaped by his will.' The creature's gaze was intent. 'So what will you do, Caipha? Knowing this, what will you do now?'\n\nMorarg looked back at him. Emotions warred within him, as turbulently as anything that had assailed him on the ship.\n\nHe wanted to reply, to settle it there, go back to the war and play his part. But he couldn't. Not yet. Because he didn't know.\n\nThe objective was out of reach. For a tantalising period of rapid advance, it had felt as if they might even take it on schedule, but then the resistance had thickened, like blood coagulating over a wound, and now the way ahead promised nothing but pain.\n\nShiban Khan had killed as prodigiously as ever. He had led his combined brotherhoods in from the walls, slaying enemy champions and foot-soldiers alike with his whirling, crackling guan dao. The White Scars had fought their way up from the bridgeheads and into the dark heart of the Lion's Gate space port. What they had seen there didn't surprise any of them - they knew enough of the Death Guard already to foresee the depths to which they would sink, and so the horror had been anticipated, just as the deadliness of Mortarion's terror-troops had been.\n\nShiban had forced a ferocious pace, using his assigned armour squadrons to blast open shortcuts to the big orbital arrays. Every khan knew the layout of the interior in exhaustive detail - they had studied cartoliths for weeks beforehand, memorising every elevator shaft and assembly hall. It was likely they knew even more than the place's defenders, who had only ever occupied it as a staging point. Shiban had ordered pinpoint strikes on isolated structural elements, risking section-collapse for the chance to burn swiftly inward. Several vehicle elevators had been taken, allowing transport of even the super-heavies up the levels. The brotherhoods had gone surely through the degenerating maze of chambers, cutting their way into the stinking and foetid caverns, keeping close together, guarding the precious tanks from counter-strikes and using the hulls' formidable gunnery to blast clear paths onward.\n\nAt every step, though, he remained conscious of the eyes on him - not the enemy, who knew or cared little for who he was, but those he led. The veteran Chogorians fought as hard to earn his esteem as they did to reach the target. The Terrans and the newbloods did the same, particularly those who knew little of the details of the sundered home world, and who worked all the harder to prove themselves worthy of the honour of belonging to the Legion. In every gesture they made, in every lowered gaze and respectful vox-response, he heard the same thing: You are Tachseer. You are the Restorer.\n\nTorghun would have laughed at that. Shiban's old rival, his old enemy, the one who had eventually redeemed his errors through sacrifice, the one who Shiban still yearned to speak to one last time, to make amends for all that misplaced pride, all that resentment, Torghun would have laughed to see how things had gone: Shiban Khan, the wide-eyed and eager commander on the white battlefields of Chondax, risking everything for a mere glimpse of the primarch in action, now venerated by the next generation of stripling warriors as some kind of totem of the Legion's soul.\n\nHe couldn't protect them all. However hard he fought at their head, however much he tried to shield them from this enemy, his warriors died. The newbloods would throw themselves at the Plague Marines, their bladework immaculate and their fervour exemplary, but they would still come up short. You could punch their hides with bolt-shells, you could sever their sinews with tulwar-strikes, you could pepper them with frag-charges and mortar-blasts, and still they would come back at you, again, again, their impassive green lenses glowing in the deathly gloom, never complaining, never shouting battle cries or denunciation, just existing, as impossible to eradicate as despair itself.\n\nThe best weapon was speed, and now that momentum was falling away, leaving them open to the grind of attrition. Fury could only achieve so much against an enemy like this. They were never roused to anger, never provoked into rashness. Feints never drew them on, diversions never deceived them. The only tactic left seemed to be an equal and opposite willingness to suffer, to take them on on their own terms, to stare into those seamy, rheum-addled eyes and hold your ground right until the pale lights had been extinguished and the next one beckoned.\n\nShiban's spearhead had been charged with taking Orbital Battery Seven, one of over forty major surface-to-void artillery installations. It was the first of those within range of the Amber incursion point, one the Khagan had desired taken quickly. Control the guns, he had argued, and you could make the Warmaster's fleet start to fear again. Shiban had asked for the honour of taking it, knowing how fiercely the silos would be defended.\n\nNow he could see the guns themselves. At the very end of a typically vast gallery, enclosed by a roof so high it was entirely lost in accumulated smoke-palls, he could see with his own eyes the first of the giant cannons, each one nearly half a kilometre tall, their immense barrels surrounded by a mini-city of shock absorbers and coolant circuits and ammunition loaders and guidance pistons. They were arranged in long rows, their snouts protruding somewhere high up, piercing layer upon layer of shielding. You felt as if you could almost reach out, now - stretch a hand towards the activation panels and begin to hurl vengeance into the heavens again.\n\nIn between him and them, though, was the hateful enemy - advancing through the unnatural mists in numbers, their ranks thick and their support dug in. They did not rush to the charge, but instead soaked up attack after attack. The terrain around them was now their ally - the port's internal atmosphere was dripping with poisons, its walkways were rotting and treacherous, the walls themselves mumbled with the witch-words of semi-formed yaksha.\n\nThe only option left was to press the attack, right down the long gallery, launching wave after wave at them, sustaining the belief that the next one must surely make the breakthrough. Chakaja roared out his weather-magic, blasting apart the thickest concentrations of uncanny presences; Yiman roused his fighters to yet more feats of endurance; the tank commanders dug deep and drove their units hard at apparitions of living nightmares; the squad sergeants, newblood and veteran alike, got up time and again to brave the bursts of phosphex and nerve gas and chem-laced flamers.\n\nShiban raced ahead of the swiftest of them all, darting around the slamming choreography of impacts, knowing that he had to be seen, to be witnessed, because if he could somehow break the defences here, then those he commanded would keep believing. No fighting he had ever done before had mattered as much as this - not on the bridge of the Swordstorm when the entire Legion's fate was in the balance, nor against the debauched artisans of Fulgrim's entourage - because this was no longer for himself, but for those who carried the flame, for those who would lead in the future.\n\nYou were the brothers of the Storm, he had told his warriors on the eve of the first assault. When victory is achieved here, they shall call you its lords.\n\nFirst, though, they had to survive this. Even as Shiban cut his next opponent apart, he heard more cries of agony as his people died. He saw a Plague Marine dragged to the earth by two newbloods, only to rise up again, shake them both off and resume the fight. He saw Orgiz, a wild and beautiful fighter, laid low by the horror of acid-charges, his priceless armour eroded away like moth-eaten fabric. He saw Chakaja crunched off his feet by the malign power of the instantiating daemons, then struggle not to be eaten alive by them as they swarmed over him. He saw a Conqueror battle tank stall on its charge, only to be smashed apart by Death Guard heavy weapons, its crew burned alive inside the raging hull.\n\n'Khagan!' Shiban roared, his throat throbbing with the pain of repeated injunctions. 'For the honour of the Khan!'\n\nAnd those who still survived answered the call, fighting through the pain, trudging up through the mire and the miasma and the sludge. Their armour was blackened and befouled, their blades blunted and doused, their bolters jammed and their ammo-chambers clattering empty. Yet still they came, heads low and dogged, guided by the memory of what had been, and what could still be. They were unable to turn back now, unable to do anything but advance into that sliding avalanche of hatred and madness, preserving, for a brief moment, what it was to be human, and greater than human.\n\nShiban caught sight of his next target - a grotesque mass of blistered ceramite with tripartite horns protruding from a scabrous helm - and forced himself up to the attack-sprint. When the monster turned to meet his charge, he saw just how scooped-out by the warp it was. Virtually nothing of the old human occupant could have been left in that mouldering assortment of rotting armour, fogged with crawling insects and glistening with exposed viscera. It was a thing, not a living soul - a vile jest at the expense of the entire species. No spark of mortal fire resided in that "}
{"text":"e with tripartite horns protruding from a scabrous helm - and forced himself up to the attack-sprint. When the monster turned to meet his charge, he saw just how scooped-out by the warp it was. Virtually nothing of the old human occupant could have been left in that mouldering assortment of rotting armour, fogged with crawling insects and glistening with exposed viscera. It was a thing, not a living soul - a vile jest at the expense of the entire species. No spark of mortal fire resided in that tortured psyche still, only emptiness, numbness, surrender to an insane torpor that took away the surface agony even as it chewed through what little remained of the human within.\n\nThey are killing us, because they have already lost everything, Shiban realised, leaping into contact, his glaive held tight and the disruptor snarling. So what must we lose, before we can match this? What sacrifice, what pain, must we endure before we can hurt them back?\n\nDevil-boy\n\nThe empty road\n\nLittle names\n\nShe seemed able to endure them all, even in combination.\n\nAnd she herself was tripartite. Erebus found himself almost laughing when he discovered it. Of course there was more than one of her; of course there were tricks she hadn't revealed yet. The discovery was startling, but also a little thrilling.\n\nYou couldn't see the effect, at first. The arrival of his companions tended to confuse things. They ripped base matter up as they emerged through it, tearing it apart and mixing it with whatever clots of the warp they had dragged through with them. They made the air ignite, kicked the sand up into burning clouds, shattered the earthenware into flying splinters. They were immense, too - huge creatures of bone and sinew that burst the stone-built lodge apart with every stretch and bellow. They shimmered, they jerked, their outlines initially struggling to solidify, showering the ruins of the woman's old home with falls of broken stone and rubble. As they unfurled up to their full stature, unroofing the hovel and tearing the awnings away, the naked sky was exposed again, blood-red from the sandstorms.\n\nBut she grew with them. She never cowered or tried to get away. She rose up in parallel with those unnatural companions, her body swelling and growing translucent to match their own impermanence. That was when you glimpsed it first- that she had more than one face, and more than a single pair of hands, and different veils of clothing that rippled and flapped in the racing gyre.\n\nThe unnatural companions roared right at her, lacing the night air with venomous spittle. The bird-creature was first to strike, lashing out with its snake-headed staff. Then the bull-headed beast launched itself at her, swinging an axe that caught fire as it struck the earth. The serpent slithered around her ankles, swaying upwards to coil itself around her waist, even as the empty-eyed cadaver slopped and staggered its ruinous path towards her. They were steeped in the ether, those creatures - some of the mightiest god-aspects ever to answer his call. Their hides glistened with the afterbirth of the empyrean, their slanted eyes blazed with the specialised hatred-for-life that only they truly possessed. Their fangs snapped shut, their talons flexed open; they weaved in and out of one another's embrace until they formed a kind of single enclosing organism, a beautiful expression of the Pantheon's rare unity of purpose.\n\nBut she struck back at them. The earth itself rose up around her, the stone breaking off and erupting into shattered columns. The sand flew and blinded, caustic as acid, stripping away flesh as it scoured and burned. The sky cracked with thunder, the packed earth shook, and above it all the red moon shone. The beasts surrounded her, smothering and raking, and she marshalled her craft against them, more than holding her own.\n\nErebus found himself redundant as that all unfolded, standing back as his creatures went to work, his only function to bring them in, to help them cross the threshold. He gazed up at the contest, held rapt by it, feeling the deep art unleashed, the mastery of powers he had never even dreamed of. The ether dragged hard at him, ripe to haul the whole place into its impossible embrace, only held back by this strange counter-magic, this discipline lodged in a single place, a single time. Was this strange strength of the warp, too? Surely it had to be - its no-place was the source of all potency - but it felt... different, somehow, as if its origins went down into the foundations of the physical world itself, a well that never dried up, one whose black waters fed something truly primordial and rooted and unforgetting. Ah, but the heresy of that! All roads led to the empyrean in the end, whatever comforting stories you might tell yourself otherwise. That was the very first article of the faith, the one from which all the rest sprung, so he had better remember it.\n\nIt was at that point that he saw her many selves emerge, cycling rapidly like overlaid frames of a confused vid-animation. He saw a woman taking on the daemons, her dark skin as hard as the staff she twisted around her in her impressive anger, majestic at the apex of a long life. He saw a youth, vital as starlight, fast as the racing waters, slender limbs wielding a sickle that flashed under the blood moon. And he saw a crone, withered black like an olive, hard as twisted tree roots, freezing everything she clutched with long knuckled fingers. All of them were deadly, and all of them were her, switching rapidly from image to image, never settling, as if an eternity of evolution had been jumbled up and replayed over and over, provoked into being by this violation of the desert sanctuary, the place where past and present and future merged into a kind of arid timelessness.\n\nErebus had thought she was wearing a dress - a cotton-spun thob - but now saw that it was a single piece of twine, wound and wound about her but coming apart to form a cocoon of protection. It was impossibly long, going on and on as if forever, like the names the Custodians inscribed on the inside of their armour; but whereas those names marked the end of many lives, this was the signifier of a single life, ancient and interwoven with everything of importance that had ever happened here.\n\nHe tried to intervene, to wade into that great clash of god-aspects, but the sandstorm pushed him back, burning his flesh with its howling pressure. The entire crater seemed to be coming apart around them all, its concentric rings cracking and tumbling, with the detritus caught up in the maelstrom and sent sailing around the epicentre. He was losing his footing, slipping down into a whirlpool of hissing grains.\n\nShe cried aloud, and Erebus heard three voices overlaid, all of them enraged and in pain. The beasts were shrieking in their turn, wounded to their hate-hot cores by the power she unloaded at them. He saw the cadaver staggering, its loose flesh ripped from exposed bone. He saw the serpent crushed under a disdainful heel, and the bull-creature sent reeling from the staff's tip. The vile bird, with translucent plumage in every hue of an outlandish spectrum, jabbed in close, only to have its feathers plucked from its hide and its eyes put out with a deft flick of the sickle.\n\nBlood started to enter the vortex of whirling matter, gobbets of it, some truly human, some just a cheap copy. Erebus caught glimpses of real pain amid the fury - a wince from the woman, a gasp from the crone. The twine was unravelling, severed in many places now. The quicksand sucked at them all, bubbling under their bloodied feet.\n\nShe could have been magnificent, Erebus thought to himself. She could have been the queen of the warp. He smiled ruefully, capable of pride even as the world around him shook itself into oblivion. But I have stamped on another scorpion, and now the desert is almost free of its sting. Praise be to me.\n\nShe killed them all, in the end. Or, since they were not truly of that plane, she banished them. She undid their ties to the world of the senses, unpicking them like a seamstress at a torn cowl. They yammered and they squealed, but she was remorseless, countering their outlandishness with a kind of infinite maternal patience. Watching it all, Erebus realised then how she must have done it. The Great Deed. And a kind of awe took hold of him, for he understood at that moment that she had been nothing other than truthful with him - she had hoped the whole thing would just end there, with the Scheme of the Anathema perpetually unfinished. And now, in her own home, he had demonstrated to her just how wrong she had been about that, how foolish, and what her intervention had actually achieved.\n\nThat was the stiletto he needed to finish her.\n\n'Fury,' he said, at last making some progress through the tempest. 'Obsession. Despair. Power. These were the things He set Himself up against. These are the things I brought with me. You see it now, do you? You see what He saw, all those centuries ago?'\n\nShe was crying out by then, from the agony of her wounds, or maybe even from the knowledge he had given her. If she could have done, she might have called out to her old conspirator, the one with whom she had both created and destroyed, the one she had both loved and hated. But He was far away now, fully occupied with troubles of His own. She was fighting still, defiant to the end, but her soul's storm was faltering.\n\n'I can admire that,' Erebus said. 'He made a choice. The wrong one, but a choice all the same. You, though. You.' He chuckled, pulling a knapped blade from his belt. 'You wanted it all ways. Meddle here, meddle there, and then return to the desert with your statues.'\n\nHis boot crushed the figurine she had showed him, and he barely noticed. The last of the unnatural companions was sent screaming back into the hole in reality, tumbling back down the vortex they had brought with them. Erda fell to her knees, bruised and lacerate"}
{"text":"d. 'He made a choice. The wrong one, but a choice all the same. You, though. You.' He chuckled, pulling a knapped blade from his belt. 'You wanted it all ways. Meddle here, meddle there, and then return to the desert with your statues.'\n\nHis boot crushed the figurine she had showed him, and he barely noticed. The last of the unnatural companions was sent screaming back into the hole in reality, tumbling back down the vortex they had brought with them. Erda fell to her knees, bruised and lacerated, her shifting visage now settled back to how she had been when he'd arrived. Her dress hung in tattered loops around her, the threads prised apart.\n\nErebus knelt down beside her, hauling her exhausted head up so she had to look at him.\n\n'Devil-boy, you called me?' he hissed viciously, remembering every slight that had ever been aimed at him. 'Maybe so. Maybe that's what I've always been. But you see what I can do now, what I can summon when the need arises. So maybe being a devil-boy isn't so very shabby.'\n\nHe pressed the edge of the athame against her blood-blotched neck, making the skin stretch.\n\n'But I, unlike Him, have no pretensions against the divine,' he whispered softly. 'I would have raised you up as a monarch, had you grasped the chance. Even now, I feel the unfamiliar tug of mercy on my hearts. So, on the acceptance of the one condition that He has always resisted, I still propose to let you live.'\n\nHer dark eyes flickered up to meet his. Despite everything, she wanted to hear it.\n\n'Worship me,' he told her, smiling softly.\n\nThe fire in her eyes went out. Her limbs went slack.\n\nThis was the moment he lived for. The instant of total defeat. He watched her swallow, trying to find the words with which to accept his terms, to articulate lips that were caked with her own blood.\n\nShe drew in a painful breath, and spat across his helm. Then she smiled crookedly.\n\n'I said no to Him,' she rasped. 'And He might even have been worth it.'\n\nErebus looked down at her, too inured to serial rejection to be overly surprised. His fingers tightened on the knife-hilt.\n\n'As you wish,' he said. 'Gods, though, what a waste.'\n\nSigismund saw Kharn come for him out of the fog bank.\n\nThe World Eater made no attempt to disguise his attack run. Neither did those who came with him. More than a hundred warriors of Angron's Legion, with the sounds of many more coming up behind them. They were raving now, with the last slivers of a rational consciousness stripped from them. They howled as they ran, more like beasts than men. For a moment, seeing that, you could imagine you had been suddenly transported to some wild world of eternal savagery, not the ancestral home of the species itself.\n\nThe warriors under Sigismund's command were already outnumbered. He had been preparing to fall back again, once the Sons of Horus had been sufficiently blooded. That was the only thing his primarch had commanded him to do - to make them cry out from pain. In truth, it was all he was ever going to be able to do, for he could see clearly enough that the war was already lost. This was an act of defiance, nothing more. He might slow them a little, but his objective was, and had always been, merely to do damage.\n\nHe could scarcely remember a time when that hadn't been at least partly true. For seven years, they had fought the steady defeat, standing up against the heretics more out of a desire to punish them than out of a true conviction that the thing could be won. He had resisted that in his conscious mind. He had always pressed for more, prompted most strongly by those who had believed in him, like Keeler.\n\nNo longer. Vengeance was the whole sum of the universe, now. Vengeance was the entire truth. Vengeance was all that remained, the final performance of duty, not done for some external motive, but for its own sake.\n\nHe wouldn't stop going at them. Not now. Not ever.\n\n'We engage,' he voxed to Rann, who was deep in his own combat with a Sons of Horus warrior.\n\nNo answer came. Rann was clearly too busy to reply, neck-deep in his own world of fighting, but the message would have got home to those that needed the command. All those who still fought alongside him, those who he had dragged out of their slack despair and hurled straight into the open jaws of the enemy, would have to hold firm for a little longer. Thousands of them would die for this indulgence, but that mattered not. He had made them sanctified. He was the maker of martyrs.\n\nSigismund pushed the corpse of his last sacrificial victim away. The lifeless body hit the viaduct's deck hard before toppling off into oblivion. Freed up, the sword shivered keenly in his hands. Its spirit was aroused, its chorus of slaughter whipped up by the fire-torn winds around him. It knew an enemy worthy of its status when it saw one.\n\nAt Sigismund's back was the terminus tower - a monstrous pile of plasteel and ouslite, parapets crowned with a destroyed cat's cradle of comms equipment. On either side of him was a plunge into a smoke-filled abyss. Ahead of him stretched the old elevated transitway, the blast-rails at its sides ripped clean off, the deck littered with mortar-punched holes. The World Eaters rampaged along it, leaping across the voids, howling and screaming in a rolling scrum of frenzy.\n\nBehind him, he could hear his Templar Brethren forming up for the defence - the heavy clunk of shields being planted, the smart smack of magazines being slid into place. None of those warriors would get in the way of the ritual to come. None of the enemy would trouble him either. Despite the hundreds of warriors already contesting that high place, the two of them might as well have been entirely alone. This was about them. From the beginning of time, and to its ending, this would always be about them. The knight and the beast. The believer and the infidel.\n\nKharn swerved around a heap of charred metal railings, picking up more speed. Sigismund got a final look in, before finally raising his blade into guard. He didn't recognise much of the man he had once known. They had fought one another in the bowels of the Conqueror without armour, a test of prowess that stripped away all the advantages of technology and sorcery, giving each fight a human signature of its own. The juggernaut thundering towards him just then, though, looked more like some ruined war machine than a Space Marine, swathed in cracked battleplate and seething blood-slicks. Kharn was far greater in stature than he had been on the primarch's flagship, the very air around him boiling off his steam-wreathed armour. His power axe, absurdly large even in such immense hands, was already roaring, spinning out gobbets of hot oil and blood from its last kill. He stank, just as he had done on the Lion's Gate walls - a stench of burned brass and rotting flesh, so pungent now that it blotted out the hundred other aromas of battle.\n\nSigismund planted himself firmly, braced for impact, and the two of them crashed together. The power axe smashed into the longsword, screaming as its teeth skittered down its edge, before Sigismund sidestepped away from the momentum of the charge, letting Kharn skid around to come at him again.\n\nAfter that, the world around them both became unimportant. Faint cries and clashes got through, but already those meant nothing - the totality of the duel consumed them both. Sigismund's concentration was complete, immersed in the world of the sword, the blade immersed in his. His limbs moved with unconscious immediacy, honed by a lifetime of constant combat. No thrust was made with thought - it was all automatic now, muscle memory, instinct. The visual images before him broke up, no longer solid figures but fragments, the edge of a helm, the glint of a mica-dragon tooth, the rusted sheen of a pauldron-stud.\n\n'You,' grunted Kharn, his voice already strained almost beyond sense, a breathy bloody mess of ground-down teeth and split lips. 'Again.'\n\nHow many times had they battled before? A dozen? More? It had all changed at the Lion's Gate ramparts. The rules had switched there, the game changed. Sigismund had engaged the physical body in front of him, but had felt the infinite power that now coiled up under its skin - the raw witchery of it, bursting out of every wound. Strike this one, blood him, and more of that world of madness was revealed.\n\nSo Sigismund said nothing. No words now, not for this monster. No remembrance of the way it had been between them.\n\nI no longer fight for the Imperium as it was.\n\nHe turned, he slashed. He withdrew, he parried. He blocked, he pushed back. He crunched in hard, he let the blow pass him. Automatic. Faster and stronger. And he still had more. The emptiness within was almost complete - a total hollowness, erasure of brotherhood, of laughter or sport, until it was just this, movement, action, reaction, throttle it, choke it, drive out the life of your enemy, stamp him, burn him, punish him.\n\n'I... murdered you on those walls,' Kharn slurred. 'I would have... taken you then.'\n\nWhy was he talking? Why was he trying to reach out now? Did he want to resume the debate they had started, before his primarch had intervened and ripped the conclusion away from them both?\n\nToo late. The arguments had all been made. That was the difference - Sigismund had nothing to contribute any more, at least not in rhetoric.\n\nSwipe, slam, jab, crunch, crack, swing. In the past, he might have had some notion of attack, some idea of defence. Now the two halves merged together. He saw the black smear of his blade pass in front of his eyes, as if propelled by hands other than his own. He felt dissociated from it all, as if he were witnessing the contest from the outside. He began to sense that this was simply the beginning of a road, one devoid of anything other than the need to move along it; an empty road, featureless, stretching away forever.\n\n'What has... changed in you?' Kharn growled, slashing wildly, trying to break through the impassive "}
{"text":" halves merged together. He saw the black smear of his blade pass in front of his eyes, as if propelled by hands other than his own. He felt dissociated from it all, as if he were witnessing the contest from the outside. He began to sense that this was simply the beginning of a road, one devoid of anything other than the need to move along it; an empty road, featureless, stretching away forever.\n\n'What has... changed in you?' Kharn growled, slashing wildly, trying to break through the impassive screen of attack-defence, raging against it as if it were a physical wall. 'Are you... dead already?'\n\nYes, maybe he was. Jubal had told him, long ago, that he needed to free himself of the chains, to generate some kind of joy in what he did, and for a while, for a long while, he had tried to learn from that. But now he needed the chains. The chains bound him to this beautiful, horrific sword, the blade that had helped him learn the truth, the weapon which suited him so perfectly that he might even begin to wonder if it had been made for him alone, then held ready, locked in some dark oubliette, for the day when hope was revealed as a chimera and it was made clear that the road led nowhere, for it was only about the road, the path, the ritual.\n\nHe struck the first blood-blow, severing Kharn's armour and stripping out a long sliver of skin and muscle. The World Eater staggered back, his onslaught checked, briefly amazed.\n\nThat was the moment, Sigismund thought. That was the point at which he might have said something to his old sparring partner - a morsel of comfort, a recognition that they had all been made into monsters by this war. Or he might have raged at him instead, spilling out the anger he had held close for so long, railing at the waste and murder their treachery had unleashed, recalling what they had once jointly wished to construct.\n\nIt was the last temptation Sigismund ever had. His lips remained sealed.\n\nI fight for the Imperium as it will become.\n\nKharn surged back into contact, his axe-teeth screaming, his limbs pumping, blood and sweat mingling in the steam-gouts that flared from his ravaged armour. And the Black Sword met him squarely, as silent, cold and passionless as the grave.\n\nBhab Bastion had once felt like the centre of the galaxy, the place where tidings from a thousand worlds would inevitably find their way. You could occupy one of its many sensor-thrones, integrate with the lattice of incoming transmissions, and feel like you were within touching distance of the entire empire.\n\nNow it was an island of faltering sight amid a sea of blindness. You might stand at its very summit, staring out of the thin slit windows of its reinforced siege-walls, and witness nothing but an all-consuming blackness, rolling up out of trackless battlefields.\n\nRogal Dorn barely took in the surroundings of the command chamber any more. People came up to him, then went away, sometimes faces he recognised, sometimes complete strangers. Archamus had been with him, then had gone somewhere - to fight? - before coming back again. Sigismund had spoken to him at some length about something trivial, before Dorn had realised that Sigismund was long gone, sent out into the maw of darkness to slow it all down, and so he must have been hallucinating, slipping into a waking sleep as his mind finally began to shut down.\n\nReality and apparition had started to blend together a while back. He looked into one of the few working auspex lenses and saw nothing but a cowled face staring back at him, indistinct in the dark glass, waiting, just waiting.\n\nHe rubbed his eyes roughly, slapped his cheek, willing himself back into alertness. Others might take their rest, others might sleep, but not him. He was the Castellan, the master of the fortress, the only soul alive who knew all its ways, its remaining strengths, its many potential weaknesses. He had to resist the voices that murmured ever more persuasively in his exhausted mind.\n\nGive up! Walk away now. No one would blame you. You have done enough. Give up.\n\nArchamus was at his side again, back from wherever his duty had taken him. A Blood Angel was there too, as was Amon, the captain-general's representative. Those armoured giants were surrounded by a clutch of senior officials from other branches, their uniforms frayed and their skin pallid. He remembered some of their names; not all.\n\n'News of Sanguinius?' Dorn asked wearily.\n\n'Orchestrating extraction from the final Europa-sector bastion,' Archamus replied. 'Due to report within the hour.'\n\nDorn smiled grimly. When had the Angel last slept? When had he last stopped moving, even? Then again, fighting was better than this. The primarchs had been made to be physical, to be warriors, not to be cooped up inside prisons of their own devising.\n\n'When he confirms completion, signal the final withdrawal,' Dorn said, bringing up the orders of battle from the ghost-images that forever cycled down his retinal feed. 'Everything we have left to the Sanctum and Palatine, all other zones to be surrendered.'\n\nThe visual augurs had long since ceased to be useful, but Dorn's mind could construct a remarkably rich image of what was going on from the constant stream of audex bulletins - the screaming demands for reinforcements, the panicked reports from observation towers, the breathless accounts of retreating command groups. Together with realviewer data, he could collate a schematic of the entire battleplane - the immense infantry forces, hundreds of thousands strong in the vanguards alone, millions more now streaming along cleared avenues in the wreckage. The mobile armour, the mechanised walkers, the grav-platforms, assembled in uncountable numbers now, all grinding closer to the core. The Titans and the Knights, free to enter the Inner Palace at will, striding their way across levelled fields of pulverised stone. No army had ever been greater. The scale of it, marching through once indomitable bulwarks, streaming over the shattered walls and redoubts, all of it accompanied by the scream of the Neverborn, those revenants he had refused for so long to even countenance existing. They would all be in visual range of the Sanctum soon, eye to eye, blade to blade.\n\nOverwhelming. Unstoppable. Unforgiving.\n\n'Where is your master now?' he asked Amon.\n\n'At the Tower, his mission accomplished,' the Custodian replied, his voice courteous but impatient. He, too, was itching to get back to the fighting. Dorn didn't ask what mission that had been. The Legio Custodes had already killed more daemons than any other branch of the loyalist forces - without them, the lower levels of the Sanctum would have been crawling with madness already. The captain-general was his own master, and would be present at the final contest for the Sanctum - that was all that mattered.\n\nAs for his own errant brother, though - his gene-kin - it was still hard to accept the recklessness of it all.\n\n'Any signals from the port yet?' he asked, already knowing the answer.\n\n'Nothing definite,' said Archamus. 'The Skye plate is destroyed, broken over Anterior. Whether it was enough to get them inside... that remains uncertain.'\n\nDorn grunted. Jaghatai's honour-contest felt as remote to him now as the void, just as did the Dark Angels' unexpected occupation of the Astronomican. Two tiny points of resistance, cut off from any help. Thousands of priceless warriors squandered on defiant stands when they should have been here, at the Sanctum, for when the Red Angel came.\n\n'Monitor it,' he commanded perfunctorily. 'If you get anything, if he somehow gets himself out alive, alert me instantly.'\n\nArchamus bowed.\n\nAnd that just left one element - the one part of the defensive line that had not yet imploded, holding its own across nine subsectors even as enemy forces flocked to take it down. At present, it was a salient, jutting into surrendered territory like an arrow shaft. If it was not withdrawn swiftly, though, it would be cut off entirely, just another encircled fragment of loyalist resilience to be picked off at will.\n\n'And Sigismund,' Dorn said.\n\n'The Emperor's Champion,' offered one of the officials.\n\nHe turned on her, and she froze. 'What was that you...' He collected himself. 'Who calls him that?'\n\nThe woman wore the uniform of a major-general. She commanded armies. For all that, she swallowed, nervously. 'I... just heard it said.'\n\nDorn stared at her a little longer. He processed it.\n\nThey had called him the same thing, once. In the days when he had still allowed himself to leave the confines of this damned bastion, its suffocating walls, its spirit-sucking emptiness, that had been his title. His gaze wandered a little, and he saw the cowled face in every armaglass reflection again, mocking now.\n\nAll over for you now, Rogal. It hasn't been enough, has it? No one will ever really know how hard you tried. Even your little names have been taken away.\n\nHe drew in a long, dry breath.\n\n'Suits him,' he grunted curtly. 'Get him back, all the same. He's done what I ordered - anything more is suicide.'\n\nThe functionaries scurried off to try to get the message out. Their numb expressions told him everything about how likely they thought success was.\n\nArchamus remained. Solid, reliable Archamus.\n\n'Will there be anything else, lord?' he asked.\n\nDorn might even have smiled then, if he'd had the energy. Another time, and he would have suggested something to lighten the mood. An extra Titan Legion, perhaps. Or Russ turning up from around the corner, never having gone off into the void at all, roaring with energy and laughter and with his feral Legion ready to be unleashed. All just a bad jest, brother! Of course I didn't leave Terra!\n\nBut he didn't have the energy. He could barely lift his eyelids. He just stared into the ranks of sensor lenses, watching the cowled face watching him.\n\n'Signal the Eternity Gate,' he said emptily. 'Tell them to...'\n\nAny precise command was pointless. They were already no doubt doing"}
{"text":"up from around the corner, never having gone off into the void at all, roaring with energy and laughter and with his feral Legion ready to be unleashed. All just a bad jest, brother! Of course I didn't leave Terra!\n\nBut he didn't have the energy. He could barely lift his eyelids. He just stared into the ranks of sensor lenses, watching the cowled face watching him.\n\n'Signal the Eternity Gate,' he said emptily. 'Tell them to...'\n\nAny precise command was pointless. They were already no doubt doing all that they could. But something still needed to be passed on. Something needed to be said, now, to mark the moment, before he headed to the Dungeon himself, surrounded by the tatters of all his elaborate defensive plans.\n\n'Tell them,' he said steadily, 'it won't be long now.'\n\nBlood brothers\n\nListening carefully\n\nRise\n\nNo, not long now. It would not be at a time of his choosing, sure, nor in a place of his design, but that made little difference - the outcome would be much the same.\n\nThere had always been the chance Jaghatai would risk a strike. Everything Mortarion knew of him had made it possible, even likely. If anything, the surprise was that Rogal had kept him locked down for so long.\n\nIf Mortarion had cared about the Lion's Gate port itself, then it would have been made truly impregnable, stuffed with every possible avatar of the god and turned into a swamp of such infinite depth and malice that even his loathed father would have thought twice before attempting it. As it was, though, this place, the derelict halls he strode through right now, had only even been a stage on the path to power. To linger here too long was to risk the glory of ultimate conquest going to a lesser soul - Abaddon, perhaps, or maybe even agonised Angron - and so his mind had always been half-turned west, across the burning wastes and towards the Sanctum.\n\nHis brother's move had been well timed. You had to give Jaghatai credit for that - he'd acted just as things were pulling together, all attention diverted towards the great advance that would see the wayward sons of the Blood God shoved aside in favour of a more dependable Legion. The White Scars were dangerous - they had always been dangerous - and so the intervention was not something he could simply brush aside and leave to his lieutenants to address. It needed to be snuffed out, finished here, and then matters could be set back on their inevitable course.\n\nBut he would always have killed Jaghatai. Whether here or in the Sanctum, it didn't matter. As Mortarion walked down the long observation hall, striding past thirty-metre-high windows with all the glass in them long shattered, surrounded by the near-silent tread of his Deathshroud bodyguards, he reflected that perhaps here was better. The business could be concluded, the rest of the old barbarian Legion exterminated, and then, with that prestigious kill under his belt, he could enter the final arena with his claim to pre-eminence established.\n\nHe might have chosen to call back those of his command council who had already been sent on ahead to the core - Kargul, maybe, or even Vorx. Not Typhus, of course - always better to keep him out of the way, running down his old vendetta with the First, believing all the while that he acted in his own interest. In the end, though, no summons had been made. All unfolded as it had to. Soon the entire Legion would come together again to fulfil its destiny, the one he had set in motion for it during the pain of the warp. This impediment would be eliminated, just as every obstacle had been cleared, ready for the greater game to come - domination of the warp-realspace hybrid Horus' victory would create. That was the real prize, now - not the fading embers of this already crippled mortal empire, but the empyrean itself, the coming domain of gods and angels.\n\nThat was why he had allowed the suffering. That was why he had permitted the paradox of his sons' wilful infection, their descent into madness and their mutation into creatures of the god. It had needed to happen. It had needed to take place, to transform them into beings capable of breathing the air of the warp as well as the air of the real. When the horizons of experience were breached at last, when Horus plunged his talon into the Emperor's heart and the barriers between the planes were obliterated, all that suffering would bring its final reward. The Death Guard would stand astride the threshold, indomitable still, their veins pulsing with daemonic ichor, their timeless patron chuckling even as he showered even greater gifts than those already bestowed.\n\nNo more Overlords. No more impassable peaks. No more poisons they couldn't ingest. Not now, not for the eternity to come.\n\nHe strode down the wide stairs, their bare surfaces still strewn with the last leavings of Perturabo's clumsiness. He turned his gaze within, allowing the ether to show him the state of the fortress from its high summits to its bilge-filled foundations. The whole place was riddled with disease now, and that contagion acted as a weapon all of its own. The invaders were slowing down - running into that resistance, even being beaten back in places. This fortress, given time, would be their grave. If any records survived at all, the Lion's Gate would be listed as the site of their last defeat, a final note of ignominy to add to the failures of Prospero, Kalium and Catullus.\n\nBut then they struck.\n\nThe observation gallery was a long processional space flanked by two high, armoured walls. It ran along the external edge of the western-facing redoubt, and was mostly empty save for its piles of war-refuse. Its internal lumens were long gone and its functional surfaces replaced by creeping slicks of organic matter. The far end was masked by thick spore clouds, from where transit shafts dropped down to the assembly bays and lifter platforms of the space port's operational levels. His entourage - seven Terminator-clad warriors of the Deathshroud, plus forty-nine Unbroken picked from a variety of different formations - clunked and wheezed their way down the avenue, their cloven hooves splashing and crunching through the filth.\n\nHe sensed the attack just before it occurred. That triggered a grudging admiration even as his thoughts were snatched back into the present - not easy, to mask intentions from him in this place. Some art must have been used - the kind of cheap, bone-rattling magicks their shamans indulged in, which could be effective enough when used at the right time.\n\n'Ward the portals,' he rasped, gesturing towards a cracked wall section some three hundred metres further down, where the arches over the high windows were already failing. Even as he spoke, bright light flooded through the gaps, and a roar of Stormbird engines rose up from the night sky beyond.\n\nThe Deathshroud moved instantly, forming up between the portals and their master. The rest of the Unbroken charged straight for the impending breach, targeting their bolters at the storm of noise and whirling lumens. Mortarion himself simply came to a halt, planting his scythe-heel on the rockcrete, more intrigued than perturbed.\n\nThe external walls blew inward with the thunderous clap of krak charges, followed by a percussive blast of heavy bolters. V Legion warriors flung themselves through the rents in the wall, leaping inside even while the shattered masonry was still in the air. At the same time, the familiar ozone-tang of teleporters fizzed, followed by hard bangs as air pockets were displaced. Ivory-armoured Terminators rippled into being, instantly joining up with their battle-brothers and driving on into contact. The processional erupted into a riot of flying projectiles and blazing energy fields as the two forces engaged.\n\nMortarion nodded silently, and his Deathshroud set off, trudging down the avenue to bring their deadly Manreaper scythes to bear. Not one of the White Scars warriors got close to the primarch - they were steadily forced back down the avenue towards the miasma field as the fighting intensified. The strike-from-distance had been a bold move, but it wouldn't get much further.\n\nHe almost went after them himself. It might do him some good, to stretch his own cramped limbs before the true killing started. But then he felt it - just behind him, in the shadows. Not the warp technology of a teleporter, but a subtler disturbance, conjured from discipline rooted in wild lightning and twin moons over eternal grass.\n\nHe twisted around, his ragged cloak snapping around him, only to see emptiness. But he could smell the change - something was there, buried down in all that spore-drifting gloom. He took another stride, the fighting behind him forgotten, eyes narrowing against the murk.\n\nAnd then a shadow moved. It shivered, before sliding up to join another one. A shred of stray light developed motion, wriggling like a serpent to join another pool of illumination. The shadows and the lights danced around one another, coalescing rapidly, before winding their ghostly way up a support column and fusing into something that began to emanate softly with gold and white. The glimmer-play slipped into and around the roil of the spore clouds, firming up into something both there and not-there.\n\nMortarion never saw the moment when the Khan emerged. One moment it was all indistinct, just a spectral distortion over the building's structure, and then he was present, solid, standing free of the column, his blade already drawn and the glamour's edge dying away.\n\nHis weather-workers had some skill, then. They had brought him here, sent him ahead of the advance to ensure that they met undisturbed. That couldn't have been easy.\n\nStill, it had always been about the two of them, ever since that first encounter in the ruins of Tizca. All their respective armies, all their war machines and their allies and their overworked psykers, those were really just the mechanisms by which they could be brought together again.\n\nMortario"}
{"text":"and the glamour's edge dying away.\n\nHis weather-workers had some skill, then. They had brought him here, sent him ahead of the advance to ensure that they met undisturbed. That couldn't have been easy.\n\nStill, it had always been about the two of them, ever since that first encounter in the ruins of Tizca. All their respective armies, all their war machines and their allies and their overworked psykers, those were really just the mechanisms by which they could be brought together again.\n\nMortarion regarded his brother. The Khan had changed since Prospero. He still carried himself with that old arrogance, the aristocratic aloofness he had always worn as close to his flesh as the self-inflicted scar. Something about his aura was different now. Resigned, perhaps. Or maybe just ground down, finally hammered to the same level as the rest of them. You couldn't fly free all the time; sooner or later, gravity would drag you back into the slime.\n\n'You look quite terrible, my brother,' Mortarion told him.\n\nThe Khan made no move. No sudden burst into motion with the sublime White Tiger dao, no breathtaking leap into strike-range. He just stood there, his grip on the hilt loose, his battle-scarred armour glinting softly in the greenish nimbus.\n\nIn the end, he only uttered a single word.\n\n'Wings,' he said contemptuously.\n\nMortarion chuckled. 'A tremendous gift. I am still learning how they work.'\n\n'A mark of your corruption.'\n\n'Tell that to the Angel.'\n\n'He wears them better.'\n\nAnd that was the strangest thing of all - to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one-upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion's essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan's than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them - they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.\n\n'So you choose to end your war here, Jaghatai,' he said. 'On a world you never much cared for.'\n\n'I remain its defender,' said the Khan, finally placing his dao into guard.\n\nMortarion kindled the corpse-light over Silence, and the great scythe's blade shimmered with reflections of the other realm.\n\n'For a little longer,' he said.\n\nIt hadn't been four hours. Ilya woke with a start, and knew instantly that she had been out for a very long time.\n\n'Damn him,' she spat, reaching for a swig of water before swinging her legs over the edge of the cot, straightening her uniform out, brushing her hair back.\n\nShe had been dreaming. It was always the same dream - Yesugei's voice, sent to her on the bridge of the Swordstorm.\n\nDo not grieve. We were made to do this, szu. We were made to die.\n\nShe felt sick. She should have seen it earlier.\n\n'Damn them,' she repeated, reaching the door, unlocking it, and veering unsteadily out into the corridors.\n\nSojuk found her soon afterwards. He was fully armoured, helm on, and looked as if he might have been making ready to break out somewhere at short notice.\n\n'I told you to wake me,' Ilya said.\n\n'My apologies.'\n\n'Which I've had enough of.' She fixed him with as steady a glare as she could manage. 'I changed my mind. We're not staying here.'\n\nSojuk looked back at her.\n\n'There are three Thunderhawks in the last hangar,' Ilya said. 'I'm taking one.'\n\n'Those are reserved for-'\n\n'Don't tell me the plans - I worked them up myself. You want to fly it, or just watch me go?'\n\nHe drew in a breath. 'Permit me to know why.'\n\n'Because he's going to die, Sojuk.' She brushed a distracted hand over her hair again, wondering if she looked deranged. 'I should have known it, when he came to speak to me. He told me he was coming back. I believed it. Then again, he'd never lied to me before.'\n\n'Szu, I do not think-'\n\n'Shut up. It was you that got me onto this. And then my dreams did.' She shook her head. Exhaustion still clung to her, making her thoughts sluggish. 'He didn't want my advice. He was saying goodbye. And I'm not having that. Not again.'\n\n'If the Khagan-'\n\n'-ordains it, then you won't question it? That's what you're going to tell me?' She squared up to him - a fragile human woman, dishevelled from sleep, up against a towering, armoured killing machine. 'Horseshit. It's this blindness that's brought the house down about our ears. Are you coming with me or not?'\n\nSojuk thought for a moment, then nodded.\n\n'Good,' Ilya said, starting to walk again. 'You're a better pilot. I'd have crashed the damn thing in anger.'\n\nThey made their way quickly up the levels, most of which were empty now. As they went, Ilya heard the nervous chatter from the comms rooms, the failing whine of air filters. The place was evidently still undiscovered, which was a good thing. The skeleton Legion staff would have to think about evacuation soon, whatever happened at the space port. Until then, they were manning the augurs for as long as possible, doing what they could to keep the fractious comms lines functional.\n\nThey reached the hangar, where the three prepped gunships rested on the apron, plus a brace of personnel transporters. The place wasn't even guarded, given how few troops remained, so they could just walk up to the nearest one, unlock the cockpit and activate the flight controls. Sojuk settled into the pilot seat, calmly initiating the preflight sequence.\n\n'This will be dangerous,' he said.\n\n'You don't say,' she replied, strapping herself in. 'Take us across the gap at full speed. Remain at altitude, do not engage hostiles unless you absolutely have to.'\n\nSojuk started the engines up. They growled into life, echoing in the confined space, and made the whole chassis tremble. He turned on the main lumens to light up their passage across the threshold, then started the outer door countdown.\n\nFor all Ilya knew, there was a Warlord Titan on the far side of those hangar doors, just waiting for them to emerge so it could pick them off. Or maybe there was nothing at all any more, just a radiation-scoured wasteland with no living souls at all. All that mattered was getting across to the far side, staying alive long enough to reach their final destination.\n\n'And when we get there?' asked Sojuk, applying pressure to the controls and ramping up the motive power. 'What is our precise destination?'\n\nIlya sat back in her overlarge seat, clutching the arm supports and tensing up for the lurch of movement. A flight in a Legion gunship was an uncomfortable experience at full speed even for someone in prime condition. In her state, it felt liable to shake her to pieces before they got halfway.\n\n'It'll be visible,' she said confidently. 'He'll have made sure of that.'\n\nThe hangar doors completed their ascent, revealing a narrow strip of smoke-churned night. The fires were still burning across a vista of ruination. In the extreme distance, Ilya thought she even saw the place itself - the plague mountain, thrusting out against a horizon of greenish flame - though maybe that was just her imagination.\n\nSojuk prepared to fire the boosters. 'You are sure, szu?' he asked, just one more time.\n\nIlya set her jaw. She was sick. Her head was already pounding, her skin flushed. She was also scared. Very scared.\n\n'Do it,' she said.\n\nThe Thunderhawk's thrusters boomed, and it rose from the apron. Sojuk killed the lumens, angled the controls, and sent them shooting out into the blood-curdled night.\n\nHe was failing now, becoming weaker, getting slower. Jangsai's armour over his right leg and side was cracked open where a charge had got too close, something that compromised his protection from the airborne toxins. He'd taken glancing bolt-hits across his breastplate, and a serrated dagger had perforated the cabling under his left armpit. The blade must have been laced with poisons - the wound wasn't healing, and blood now leaked steadily out of the joint between ceramite plates.\n\nWould a true Chogorian have done better? Would Ajak, say, have lasted longer against the relentless onslaught, evading the worst hits and punching back harder?\n\nImpossible to know. Plenty of veterans of the ordu had already died in this place, and plenty of newbloods had made kills of their own. After a while it had become hard to even tell the difference - everything was coated in slime and gunk, the brotherhood sigils obscured and the fighting style reduced to a soul-draining slog.\n\nHe had fought beyond himself just to reach this point - up out of the wastes, in through the broken gatehouses, then further into the port's yawning innards. At times he'd been completely alone, at times he'd managed to link up with the remains of other Legion formations. Everything was broken up, though: shattered against the unmoving object set against them. Qin Fai should have been pushing through these halls by now. Instead, his forces were still bogged down, more than eight kilometres away through the bewildering tangle of corridors and transit vents. The only comms he received now were hissing fragments - snatches of increasingly desperate injunctions from what remained of the Colossi command. It didn't sound like they knew much about what was going on. Jangsai couldn't blame them - no one did, not in this vile murk.\n\nSooner or later, you had to take matters into your own hands. With no other commanders in range, he'd gat"}
{"text":"es were still bogged down, more than eight kilometres away through the bewildering tangle of corridors and transit vents. The only comms he received now were hissing fragments - snatches of increasingly desperate injunctions from what remained of the Colossi command. It didn't sound like they knew much about what was going on. Jangsai couldn't blame them - no one did, not in this vile murk.\n\nSooner or later, you had to take matters into your own hands. With no other commanders in range, he'd gathered together what he could, and fought on towards where he believed the Amber spearhead must still be fighting. His ragged collection now comprised twenty warriors of the ordu - from seven different brotherhoods - and fifteen battle tanks - all Leman Russ units of one variant or another. Together they had made some progress. It was all painfully slow - advance in the shadow of the tanks, let them smash up the established defences, then the infantry could sprint out of the shadows and assault what remained. Then repeat, again and again, trying to ignore the wounds you were taking, the strength you were expending, the damage being done to the armour.\n\nNow they were into the truly massive internal spaces, the ones where the void craft could be lowered and raised on mighty grav-plates, leading steadily up to the exposed landing stages of the atmospheric levels. Jangsai pushed on, keeping his body low, flanked on either side by the rumbling hulls of the tanks. Bodies lay everywhere, mangled and dismembered, face down in the sludge, twisted between the empty caskets of destroyed vehicles. He could hear the smash and echo of fighting up ahead, and ordered the pace picked up.\n\nHe almost missed Naranbaatar. The Stormseer was barely breathing, slumped up against a huge support column, his staff burned black and the light of his helm-lenses extinguished.\n\nJangsai raced over to him, crouching down in the greasy water and lifting his head up.\n\n'Zadyin arga,' he said reverently. 'Where are your guards?'\n\nNaranbaatar coughed weakly, reaching out to Jangsai as if blinded. 'Sent them... on.'\n\n'You must come with us.'\n\n'No. No... no time.' He tried to rise, and cascades of blood ran down from his helm-seal. 'The Khagan. He strikes ahead. At the Lord of Death.' More coughing, more slicks of unclotting blood. 'Ganzorig is held up. Qin Fai is held up. Too slow. All must get... to him. Must be... faster.'\n\nThe Stormseer was on the verge of death. He sounded delirious, driven over the edge by some colossal internal trauma.\n\nJangsai lowered his head, trying to catch the stilted, gasping words. 'Where is he? Where do they fight?'\n\n'Landing stages.' Naranbaatar's helm fell back against the column. 'Somewhere... up there. Make haste. All must... get to him.'\n\nThe landing stages were both numerous and enormous. Half the space port was taken up by their sprawl, and it might take days to fight across them all.\n\nBut there was no question of asking more. The Stormseer was on the cusp of death now. In other times, the warriors would have paused there, offered the rites of kal damarg - the ritual of the dead, honouring his sacrifice and undertaking to avenge him. After that, his warrior-soul would be joined to theirs, giving them fresh zeal for the fight, even multiplying - so the teaching had it - their sword-arms' strength.\n\n'It will be done,' was all he said, moving Naranbaatar's broken body so that it would not slide into the waters at least. 'I swear it now, honoured master of storms. It will be done.'\n\nThen he stood. The tanks were grinding ahead, throwing up waves of sludge as their tracks churned. The lead unit, the one marked Aika 73, had made a move towards what looked like an intact enemy position a kilometre and a half away, off in the shadows. Jangsai's warriors loped along in its wake.\n\n'All units, full stop,' he commanded, splashing through the slurry to join them. 'New tasking.'\n\nHe switched his helm-view to the tactical cartoliths, the ones imprinted back at Colossi. Making progress would be difficult - it might all have changed, or been rendered impassable, or blocked by thousands of enemy troops.\n\n'Locate the nearest lifter shafts,' he ordered nonetheless. 'We will find him.'\n\nProphecy\n\nEarthfall\n\nLast blood\n\nHe didn't find her, in the end. He found those who followed her. And that proved to be significantly less difficult, because there were thousands of them.\n\nUntil then, Loken had been fighting an increasingly lonely, difficult battle. The war-fronts had been closing in ever tighter, filling up the few remaining empty spaces across the desecrated urban wastes. None of the advance warbands were cultist dross any more - those poor wretches had soaked up their last bullets a long time ago. These were Traitor Marines, hunting in packs, roving ahead of their great war-hosts like hungry wolves.\n\nHe'd had to be careful. He'd killed where he'd had to, but mostly remained hidden, racing down lightless alleys and across the broken crater-fields while larger explosions masked his presence. He reserved the most hatred, of course, for the Sons of Horus. When he spied them, when he judged the risk worth taking, he let them see who he was before he killed them. That made them fight all the harder, because they loathed him as much as he detested them. He shouldn't have done it, really. There was always the chance that one of them would end him, and their numbers were growing all the time, but the small pangs of satisfaction almost made it worth the danger.\n\nSo it was that he came across the believers. At first, he had thought they were just more crowds of refugees, fleeing towards the core in the hope that there might be room for them somewhere. Since the very start of hostilities, those crowds had been rampaging inwards, desperate and famished. They were cut down in their droves, of course, but there always seemed to be more of them out there, limping and shuffling with their rags clutched tight about them.\n\nBut these ones, they weren't retreating. They were formed up, they were organised. They were marching like soldiers, all carrying some kind of weapon - a lasgun, a shotgun, a power tool. Many of them had flamers, constructed by the look of things from vehicle parts and plastek canisters. He almost mistook their front ranks for the enemy at first, until he saw the skulls they carried with them - on chains, around necks, atop long poles - and remembered the catacombs.\n\nHe came out into the open, shaking off the dust and lowering his bolter. They prepared to charge straight at him. He heard cries of 'Kill it!', and saw many in the front ranks activate their crude promethium nozzles.\n\nBut they weren't complete fools. Several held up their hands, recognising that he was no traitor - those never came into the open without opening fire.\n\nA man edged warily up to him. He wore the torn uniform of an Imperial Army trooper, and had a half-cloak draped over his shoulders. In one hand he carried a service-issue lasgun. In the other, incongruously, was a thick bundle of fabric. Just visible was a child's head, tucked under the curve of a protective arm.\n\n'My lord,' the man said. 'Can we assist you?'\n\nLoken found himself staring at the child. 'Who are you?'\n\n'Katsuhiro, Kushtun Naganda, now in the service of the Church. Like everyone here.'\n\n'And... this?'\n\n'A survivor.' Katsuhiro's face was drawn and skinny. He didn't have the look of a seasoned trooper, but there was a hardness to him all the same. That made sense - anyone still alive in all this had to have something about them, however things had started. 'No one else was going to watch him. So I had to.'\n\nWas that commendable? It would slow him down, hamper his aim. Still, it was a human gesture in this swamp of inhumanity. Hard to condemn it.\n\n'I seek the lady,' Loken said. 'Can you take me to her?'\n\nKatsuhiro hesitated. It was one thing for him to run the risk that Loken might not be what he appeared to be. It was another to risk her.\n\n'We were... we are friends,' said Loken. 'I came to protect her. Can you assist me?'\n\nKatsuhiro drew back, conferred with some of the others. Loken saw them gesturing towards the Imperial insignias still just about visible on his armour. The discussion became animated. He let them talk, despite his impatience to get moving - he could already hear the noises of combat drawing in closer from the east.\n\nEventually, they reached agreement. Katsuhiro came back to him. 'I argued for it,' he said. 'I'd be grateful if you don't make me a greater fool than I already am.'\n\nThe bulk of the ramshackle army started to move again, heading - with enthusiasm - in the direction of the coming enemy. Katsuhiro motioned for Loken to come with him the other way. The two of them started to clamber across the wreckage and mortar-impacts as the ranks marched off, breaking into poorly tuned singing.\n\n'They will not succeed,' Loken said. 'Against what is coming.'\n\n'No,' said Katsuhiro. 'We lose every battle we fight.' He looked up at the Space Marine with bleak, tired eyes. 'But we take some of them down with us. Better that, we think, than wait for them to come.'\n\n'Is that why you carry the skulls? You celebrate death?'\n\nKatsuhiro shrugged. 'I'm not a priest. They tell us to collect them. We do what they tell us.' He smiled thinly. 'You need a symbol, don't you? People need that.'\n\n'But you were Army, once.'\n\n'Still am. Served at Marmax.' He pulled his half-cloak aside to reveal regimental badges. 'If there were any commanders still alive, I'd be taking orders from them.' He pulled the fabric back over, and the half-asleep child clutched at him instinctively. 'You take the help you can get.'\n\n'I could carry that,' said Loken awkwardly. 'For a while. If you wished.'\n\nKatsuhiro shook his head. 'It's him. But no. Thanks. He's my responsibility.'\n\nThey walked for some distance after that, heading roughly north-west. The habs around them became a fraction more stable-looking - stark outposts ami"}
{"text":"f there were any commanders still alive, I'd be taking orders from them.' He pulled the fabric back over, and the half-asleep child clutched at him instinctively. 'You take the help you can get.'\n\n'I could carry that,' said Loken awkwardly. 'For a while. If you wished.'\n\nKatsuhiro shook his head. 'It's him. But no. Thanks. He's my responsibility.'\n\nThey walked for some distance after that, heading roughly north-west. The habs around them became a fraction more stable-looking - stark outposts amid a static sea of rubble. Katsuhiro led him into one of them, past sentries half-buried in the rubbish, then up hollow stairwells. They eventually emerged at the very top level, an open platform with a low perimeter wall. The view from it was good, and a wide vista opened up. Hollow spires jutted up into the night sky, avenues smouldered, and greater constructions still towered up beyond them all, hunched and ringed with fire.\n\nA few dozen fighters clustered at the summit's western edge, peering into Army-issue magnoculars and conferring among them-selves.\n\nAs for her, she looked thinner than she had done. Dirtier, her hair longer and greasier. Her clothes were stained and hung from her meagre frame. No one's idea of a saint, really. When she turned to face him, though, he recognised the old look - that defiant stare she'd always had, the disdain for untruth, that essential fierceness.\n\n'I didn't preach,' she said. 'Not once. They came to me.'\n\n'As did I, Euphrati,' said Loken. 'And it took a long time.'\n\nThe two of them drew together. Both had seen better days.\n\n'So what is all this?' Loken asked her.\n\n'What they wanted me to do.' Keeler shrugged. 'They were so precious about it all for so long. Now I guess they'll clutch at anything.'\n\nLoken glanced at the others. They were wearing tattered scholar's robes, for the most part, or embellished Army uniforms. They, too, carried skulls. 'But... you,' he said. 'Is it what you wanted?'\n\n'Does that matter?'\n\n'Of course.'\n\nKeeler smiled indulgently. 'So you think I'm the victim, here. The lost girl they sent into danger, against her will. You'd like to save me, I guess.'\n\n'Yes. I would like that.'\n\n'Garviel,' she said. 'Garviel.' She reached up to his cavernous chest, pressing a finger gently against it, as if checking he was still real. 'You can't save everyone. It's a blasphemy to try. That's where we've been going wrong. It's all about the numbers. Two platoons. That would do for you.'\n\n'Your pardon?'\n\n'Look. Come with me.'\n\nShe led him to the summit's edge. Her magnoculars were waiting. She gave him the coordinates, and he let his helm-lenses do the work.\n\n'Over there,' she said.\n\nThirty kilometres away, on the far side of a deep depression, another battle was taking place. It was a big one, just one of thousands no doubt raging all across the sector. Space Marines were grappling with one another, locked in their own uniquely brutal style of up-close combat. As Loken homed in on the coordinates, he recognised the armour styles instantly. Templar Brethren, supported by regular Imperial Fists, Blood Angels and auxilia, up against World Eaters and Sons of Horus.\n\nOne duel dominated the entire scene. An Imperial Space Marine and a World Eater knocking chunks out of one another. The scale of destruction those two were capable of unleashing seemed of an order greater than those around them. Perhaps greater than any Loken had witnessed before, save for the primarchs themselves.\n\n'Sigismund,' he said softly.\n\n'Magnificent, isn't he?' said Keeler, with feeling. 'I brought them here to witness him. They all saw it, before they marched off to replicate the violence. It fuelled their sense of possibility.'\n\nThere was something uniquely chilling about the way the two warriors fought. They were polar opposites - one frantic, the other contained. All the same, it was strangely repulsive, that level of immersion, as if nothing mattered, or could ever matter, save the contest immediately before them.\n\n'It was about something, before,' Loken found himself mumbling. 'Exploration. Rediscovery. The end of superstition.'\n\n'Yes, it was. And now it's about something different.' Keeler's eyes were shining in the magnocular lenses. 'Something purer. Something more valuable.' She put them down, and turned to him. 'This is how it has to be. This, or destruction. Look at him. We tried to build an empire on enlightenment, and failed. But we could build an empire on that. It would last for ten thousand years.'\n\nLoken deactivated the zoom. 'It would not be enough.'\n\n'You're sure?'\n\n'Don't extrapolate. He's always been in his own category.'\n\n'He's an inspiration.'\n\n'Only to madmen.'\n\n'Then we will all become mad. If that's what it takes.'\n\nLoken shook his head. 'This has been a mistake. You should come back with me. To safety.'\n\n'There's no safety. There is only service. I can perform that better out here.'\n\n'You cannot be in earnest.'\n\nShe looked right back at him. Her body had been ravaged, worn away, but her expression hadn't. It was just as it had been on the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n'I'm not going back. They need me. There are hundreds of thousands here, millions, in every basement and undercroft. It would be the work of a generation to kill them all, even for these monsters. But we can turn that time against them. Make the survivors forget their fear, teach them to hate. Teach them to venerate the god on the Throne, teach them that their life means nothing in isolation from it. Give them a symbol, give them a means to make fire.' She smiled. 'You see a single Sigismund, and your stomach revolts. I will give you a million Sigismunds. A billion. A universe full of them. If that scares you, imagine what it will do to the enemy.'\n\n'I do not believe that, Euphrati,' Loken said carefully. 'I believe, from what I know now, that the enemy would rejoice at it.'\n\nKeeler laughed. 'You saw what he was doing. I don't think his opponent was laughing.'\n\n'I do not refer to the lackeys. I refer to the masters.'\n\nKeeler wasn't deterred. When she got an idea in her head, it was damned hard to shift. That, too, was just as it had been.\n\n'Whatever,' she said. 'I'm not going back. You can try to take me, and see just how potent my army has become, or you can stick around, and benefit from it.'\n\nLoken doubted very much that her entourage posed much of a threat to him. He felt confident he could kill them all handily, disable her, take her under his arm just as that trooper had carried the child. He could bring her back to the Sanctum, to what remained of the prisons inside, and reset things to how they had been.\n\nBut what would that achieve? What victory would that be? Just another use of force to quash a rising threat, another iron fist to snuff out another spontaneous expression of defiance.\n\nAnd this was her, the last link to that lost world of youth and endeavour. Some things you didn't touch, not even to save them.\n\n'You're not going to make this easy, are you?' he said.\n\n'I didn't ask for any of it,' she countered. 'They sent me out here.'\n\nHe turned away from the battles. Somewhere down there, a few kilometres away, the believers he had encountered were now, no doubt, being butchered.\n\n'I will remain with you,' he said. 'Maybe you will see sense, before it becomes too late.'\n\n'You know I won't.'\n\n'I never lose hope,' he said wearily. 'That seems to have become my creed, at any rate.'\n\nThe run in was as hellish as it had always promised to be.\n\nThe lighter bucked and dived, sometimes as a result of John's flying, sometimes after being hit and sent slewing off course. The impacts felt like small-arms fire, for the most part - lasguns aimed up at them as they speared overhead. A lot of those shots missed, but even a few clean strikes would start to cause serious trouble, so John worked the control columns hard, making the old lighter jump around like a kicked dog.\n\nHe sat alone in the cockpit, with the others all back in the crew hold, locked down tight in their restraints, no doubt gritting their teeth and waiting for it to be over. Once inside the city proper, visibility quickly dropped to near zero, and the scopes just gave him empty screens of static. The tilting remnants of the old towers lurched out of the gloom, and he burned in close to them, hugging the carcass-edges. He left the lumens off, making the craft virtually invisible in that thick, foul grime, and even the engine noise was almost entirely drowned by the ambient thunder of the continual barrages ahead. Still, it wouldn't take much to be noticed by something capable of troubling them - a stray glance up into the smog, a functioning augur somewhere ahead - so John couldn't relax, expecting at any moment to be detected, then swiftly destroyed.\n\nJust the one life left, he thought to himself bitterly. Concentrates the mind.\n\nFor a long time, even after crossing the perimeter, the desolate cityscape remained strangely empty, as if the carnage had been so exacting that the place had been stripped down to hot stone. He spied scattered warbands amid the ash-thick chasms below, racing furtively from cover to cover, but no big formations. The skies, as far as he could see, were largely clear of aircraft, though the rows of downed fuselages at ground level were testament to the battles that had already taken place.\n\nThe biggest immediate challenge was the environment, which was punishing for the engines. Ash clogged everything, getting into the intakes, smearing over the external viewers, smacking hard all along the exposed armour plates. At times it felt like flying through solid matter, with the risk of blowing out the turbine-blades and sending the lighter spinning into the nearest intact spire-skeleton.\n\nJust as John began to get used to that, he spied the first large detachments, filing down obscured pathways far below, thousands and thousands of them, moving fast. The soldiers veered like rats through the maze of ruins, some of them power-armoured monsters, man"}
{"text":"nal viewers, smacking hard all along the exposed armour plates. At times it felt like flying through solid matter, with the risk of blowing out the turbine-blades and sending the lighter spinning into the nearest intact spire-skeleton.\n\nJust as John began to get used to that, he spied the first large detachments, filing down obscured pathways far below, thousands and thousands of them, moving fast. The soldiers veered like rats through the maze of ruins, some of them power-armoured monsters, many more just the mortal rabble caught up in the frenzy. He saw old banners, some probably dating back decades, all defaced, hoisted up at the head of endless ragged columns.\n\nThe further in the lighter went, the harder it became to avoid those concentrations. He was soon flying over sections where the ground was entirely obscured under a living carpet of bodies. Explosions lit up the surroundings intermittently, and then you could begin to gauge just how many there were down there - numbers beyond imagination, rammed up against the remains of walls and tower foundations, jostling with one another, fighting with one another, gasping for air even as they marched.\n\nOne tiny aircraft, flying erratically with its lights out, was not much of a target for any of them. From what John could tell, most of the troops looked to be in some kind of stupor, either stuffed full of combat drugs or just drunk on killing. The Traitor Marines among them carried bandoliers of skulls and empty helms around their shoulders, testament to how many they had already killed. In the distance, masked by the ever-present rolls of fog, he could see larger machines striding through the rubble - Knights, Imperial Army walkers, even Scout Titans. Those things weren't even fighting yet, just trying to get to the front. The sheer volume of bodies in the increasingly confined spaces meant that it wasn't easy to push on. The frequent outbreaks of brawls he witnessed came from frustration - these were the laggards, and they were frothing at the bit.\n\n'Are you seeing this, John?' came Oll's voice from back in the hold, where he was manning the secondary augurs.\n\n'Surreal,' John replied grimly. 'Like they're queuing to get in.'\n\n'Any resistance yet?'\n\n'Nothing I've seen.'\n\nHe swerved around the still-burning bole of some kind of destroyed defence tower, then shot close under the lee of a semi-toppled habitation block. Targets kept flickering on his augur screens, disappearing as soon as they'd been picked up. He witnessed combat aircraft scoring their way northward a few times, far off, flying much higher, their bigger engines adding fresh tracks of night-black smog to the already filthy skies. Some were troop carriers; most were attack gunships, the last dregs of the gigantic forces that had opened the air assault, months back.\n\nHe began to feel strange, light-headed. He had been flying for a long time without rest, and the conditions demanded extreme concentration. The route ahead became harder and harder to pick out. It felt as if he were flying underground, lost in a borderless world of dust and flame.\n\nThe longer it went on, the more his heart beat faster and harder. All it would take would be a single serious piece of traitor armament to lock on to them, to spot the shadow-against-shadow of their slender profile and go after it. The ruins kept on growing larger and grander, magnificent even in their dishevelment, and the minuscule lighter kept on threading a perilous path between them. The cramped spaces between the walls started to glow - a bloody flare of munitions and plasma discharges, steadily intensifying as they neared the combat zones.\n\nThen their luck ran out. Alert runes flashed across the console. John swore, dropping the lighter down a little, trying to peer through the smoke to find some kind of cover to bolt for.\n\nSomething ugly swooped onto the scopes, something misshapen, hunchbacked and trailing filth. It was a gunship of some kind, though not any profile he recognised. Oversized guns were suspended underneath a spiked superstructure, crowned with vanes and skull-topped pennants. It slewed broadly as it wallowed through the air, its gigantic engines shrieking as if they had human voices. Its cockpit, a bestial mess of beaten iron plates, bled crimson from the viewports. That thing had no business being in the air at all, let alone surviving the firestorm of Legion aerial combat, and yet here it was - a throwback, a remnant, a piece of insanity held aloft by a brace of overworked turbines and the fanaticism of the things that flew it.\n\n'Company,' John warned, though he guessed that the viewers in the crew hold would already be showing the others most of what he could see.\n\nHe piled on the power, forcing the lighter to hare briskly through the narrowing chasms. The monster came right after them, thundering along on its smoggy thrusters. It looked in position to take a shot a few times, but just kept on devouring the gap between them, looming ever larger in the rear viewers. John dared to hope that it might have run low on ammunition. Only too late did he pick out the bronze-rimmed flamers jutting from its prow - that was why it was waiting.\n\nHe dropped down even lower, killing the power and sending the lighter into a short-lived stall before restarting the drives. The sudden plummet cost them momentum but kept them alive - two plumes of fire shot out just above them, singeing the upper control vanes.\n\n'Shit,' John growled, battling with the controls to keep them aloft. The way ahead was a rapidly shrinking slit between two giant hab-spires. The gunship swaggered its way in closer, priming to fire again.\n\nHe prepared to jink away, scraping as close as he could to the metal cliff-face on the right, just as someone clambered up into the cockpit alongside him - not Oll, but Actae.\n\n'This really isn't the-' John started.\n\n'Shut up,' Actae snapped. 'Keep flying.'\n\nThere wasn't much else to do. He squeezed every last morsel of thrust from his flimsy engines, doing what he could to stay out of range of those damned flamers. Even as he tried every trick he knew, he saw it wouldn't be enough - he could almost feel the rush of heat up the back of his neck, bursting through the rear hatches before thundering up into the cockpit.\n\nActae, though, took a quick look at the rear scopes with eyes that should not have been able to see anything at all, calmly reached out with her open hand, fixed the image of the pursuing gunship with a meaningful stare, and clenched her fist.\n\nThe volume of air around them suddenly flexed, as if they'd run underwater. The spire-edges blew out plasteel fragments, and John had to yank both columns back to stop them smashing straight into the incoming shoulder of the nearest one.\n\nIt was worse for the gunship, though. Through a snatched glance at the rear viewers he saw the entire thing imploding, as if clutched by a giant unseen version of Actae's fist. It stopped smack dead in the air, tipping spine over nose, before its flamer tanks ignited and it blew up in a riotous orgy of tumbling armour and blown spikes.\n\n'Holy hell,' John swore, still fighting to keep them from smearing along the edge of the spire-ruins.\n\nActae's intervention may have staved off the threat from the air, but even stimm-crazed troopers marching below couldn't ignore an explosion of that size. A thousand faces looked up, and behind them a thousand more. Seeing a damaged and vulnerable flyer shooting overhead was too much of a temptation, and las-bolts began to snap upwards.\n\nJohn tried to gain more loft, but the turbulence in the chasm, coupled with the amount of gunk now rolling around in his engine intakes, didn't get him high enough. A dozen las-bolts smacked into the lighter's underside, followed by more pinging along the higher armour.\n\nThe enemy had their range now - their outline was lit up by the corona of sparks, leading to ever more shots being fired by the mob below.\n\n'This'll bring us down,' John grunted, keeping their velocity up in the hope they could somehow overshoot the worst of it.\n\n'Nothing can prevent that now,' said Actae, irritatingly placid throughout. 'Get us through that gap alive, then we can hit the dirt.'\n\nJohn laughed out loud, though not from humour. 'Fine. Nothing to that.'\n\nHe blazed through the gauntlet-run of las-fire, feeling every strike and crack as the impacts threatened to send them all sailing at speed into one or the other of the speed-smeared spire-faces brushing close by. A lucky shot hit one of the fuel lines, knocking out one of his two engines and making them tilt crazily over to the left. Another set of strikes raked right along the undercarriage, shattering the hatches for the landing gear and ripping off a rear stabiliser fin. More hits came in after that, but somehow failed to do much damage.\n\n'What's our hull status?' John snapped, knowing Oll would have a better grip on the signals.\n\n'Pretty bad,' came Oll's voice over the comm. 'But now we've got some... extra protection.'\n\nFor a moment John had no idea what he meant. Then he felt it himself - the hot prickle of psychic energy, wreathing the entire craft.\n\n'Katt,' he murmured, then shot a dry smile at Actae. 'You've got competition.'\n\nWhat followed might have been the very best flying John had ever done, though it counted for little when so few people were around to witness it. He piloted the lighter the full length of the chasm, maintaining enough momentum to send them spearing clear and out over a deep gulf beyond. Three giant causeways extended out over the deep artificial valley towards massive conurbation banks on the far side, and it was over these broad avenues that the traitor armies surged. Flames rose up unchecked on the far side, outlining the furious tempests of full-scale warfare. John got a fleeting glimpse of immense bulwarks under concentrated fire, their battlements half-demolished and huge siege engines being hoisted up to the parapets,"}
{"text":"d them spearing clear and out over a deep gulf beyond. Three giant causeways extended out over the deep artificial valley towards massive conurbation banks on the far side, and it was over these broad avenues that the traitor armies surged. Flames rose up unchecked on the far side, outlining the furious tempests of full-scale warfare. John got a fleeting glimpse of immense bulwarks under concentrated fire, their battlements half-demolished and huge siege engines being hoisted up to the parapets, before the damaged lighter dropped like a stone.\n\nHe frantically gunned the engines a final time, but barely got enough response to prevent a full-on smash into the uprushing valley floor. He watched level after level fly by, until he was boosting straight towards the base of an immense trench. Complete darkness swallowed them up, drowning them in oily blackness, until it felt like they had tumbled down an unmarked shaft into the heart of the planet itself.\n\nJohn slammed all remaining power to his air brakes and jammed the trajectory columns over to their full extent. The lighter's nose lifted at last, not enough to pull them clear, but sufficient to make the impending crash-landing painful rather than fatal.\n\n'Brace!' John managed to shout, before the underside of the lighter crunched down hard. The whole craft bounced up again, then flung itself wildly to the right, before smashing once more into a jumble of wreckage and rubbish at the base of the trench. A bone-jarring skid took them more than five hundred metres along the horizontal, shedding more armour plates and shattering the armaglass in every viewer, before the flyer finally ground to a halt, half-buried and smoking profusely.\n\nOnce the worst of the shock had subsided, he lifted his head painfully. He'd been yanked hard in the first impact, and could feel blood on the inside of his helmet. All the instruments were out. He couldn't see anything through what remained of the cockpit viewscreens. Actae had been hurt, too - both her hands were covered in blood. He shakily reached for the comm activation.\n\n'Oll?' he asked.\n\n'All still here,' came the reply. 'Just.'\n\n'So where the hell is... this?' John muttered groggily, unsure whether he could stop his hands shaking long enough to unclip his restraint harness.\n\n'Just where we need to be,' said the sorceress, deftly untangling herself from what remained of her seat. 'Come. Alpharius will show the way.'\n\nHe never said a word. Never. Throughout it all, the Black Sword didn't say a thing.\n\nThe monster. The ghost. The mere shell.\n\nWhat could be worse than this? What death could be as profound as this? What disappointment, what despair, could ever be greater?\n\nKharn raged at it. He howled in fury, coming at him again and again, shrugging off the wounds. He wanted the old one back. The one with some fire in his veins. He wanted some spirit. Just a flicker of something - anything - other than this flint-edged, iron-deep hardness.\n\nThey had laughed together, the two of them. They had fought in the roaring pits, and had sliced slabs out of one another, and at the end they had always slumped down in the straw and the blood and laughed. Even the Nails had not taken that away, for in combat the Nails had still always shown the truth of things.\n\n'Be... angry!' he bellowed, thundering in close. 'Be... alive!'\n\nBecause you could only kill the things that lived. You couldn't kill a ghost, only swipe your axe straight through it. There was nothing here, just frustration, just the madness of going up against a wall, again and again.\n\nThe Nails spiked at him. He fought harder. He fought faster. His muscles ripped apart, and were instantly reknitted. His blood vessels burst, and were restored. He felt heat surge through his body, hotter and whiter than any heat he had ever endured.\n\nThe Black Sword resisted it all, silently, implacably, infuriatingly. It was like fighting the end of the universe. Nothing could shake the faith before him. It was blind to everything but itself, as selfish as a jewel-thief in a hoard.\n\nHis chainaxe whirred as wildly as he'd ever thrown it, igniting the promethium vapour in the air, sending the blood lashing out like whipcord. He scored hits with it. He wounded the ghost. He made him stagger, made him gasp. The heat roared within him, turbocharging his hearts. He heard the coarse whisper of the Great God in his bruised ears.\n\nDo it. Do this thing. Do this thing for me.\n\nThe ghost came back at him, tall and dark, his brow crackling with lightning-flecks, his armour as light-devouring as the blade he wielded.\n\nKharn became sublime, in the face of that. The violence he unleashed was like a chorus of unending joy. The ground beneath the two of them was destroyed, sending them plummeting in clouds of debris. Even when they crashed to the earth, they fought on. They rocked and swayed around one another, obliterating everything within the arc of a sword or the ambit of an axe-length.\n\n'I... am... not...' he blurted, feeling the tidal wave of exhaustion drag on even his god-infused limbs.\n\nHe realised what had been done, then. In the midst of his madness, even as the Great God poured himself into his brutalised body, he knew what transformation had occurred.\n\nThey had always told themselves, after Nuceria, that the Imperium had made the World Eaters. It had been their fault. The injustice, the violence, it had forged that lust for conflict, for the endless rehearsal of old gladiatorial games, like some kind of religious observance to long- and justifiably dead deities. That had given the excuse for every atrocity, every act of wanton bloodletting, for they had done this to us.\n\n'I... am... not...'\n\nBut now Kharn saw the circle complete. He saw what seven years of total war had done to the Imperium. He saw what its warriors had been turned into. He had a vision, even then, in the midst of the most strenuous and lung-bursting fighting he had ever experienced, of thousands of warriors in this very mould, marching out from fortresses of unremitting bleakness, every one of them as unyielding and soul-dead and fanatical as this one, never giving up, not because of any positive cause in which they believed, but because they had literally forgotten how to cede ground. And he saw then how powerful that could be, and how long it could last, and what fresh miseries it would bring to a galaxy already reeling under the hammer of anguish without limits, and then he, even he, even Kharn the Faithful, shuddered to his core.\n\n'I... am... not...'\n\nHe fought on, now out of wild desperation, because this could not be allowed to go unopposed, this could not be countenanced. There was still pleasure, there was still heat and honour and the relish of a kill well made, but it would all be drowned by this cold flood if not staunched here, on Terra, where their kind had first been made, where the great spectacle of hubris had been kicked off.\n\nHe had to stand. He had to resist, for humanity, for a life lived with passion, for the glorious pulse of pain, of sensation, of something.\n\n'I... am... not...' he panted, his vision going now, his hands losing their grip, 'as... damaged...'\n\nThe Black Sword came at him, again, again. It was impossible, this way of fighting - too perfect, too uncompromising, without a thread of pity, without a kernel of remorse. He never even saw the killing strike, the sword-edge hurled at him with all the weight of emptiness, the speed of eternity, so magnificent in its nihilism that even the Great God within him could only watch it come.\n\nThus was Kharn cut down. He was despatched in silence, cast to the earth with a frigid disdain, hacked and stamped down into the ashes of a civilisation, his throat crushed, his skull broken and chest caved in. He was fighting even as his limbs were cut into bloody stumps, even as the reactor in his warp-thrumming armour died out, raging and thrashing to the very end, but by then that was not enough. The last thing he saw, on that world at least, was the great dark profile of his slayer, the black templar, turning his immaculate blade tip down and making ready to end the last bout the two of them would ever fight.\n\n'Not... as... damaged,' gasped Kharn, in an agony greater than anything the Nails could ever have given him, but with more awareness of the ludic cruelty of the universe than he had ever possessed before, 'as... you.'\n\nAnd then the sword fell, and the god left him, dead amid the ruins of his ancient home.\n\nDream come true\n\nBack to life\n\nWarhawk\n\nIt had been amid ruins there, too - in Tizca, surrounded by the mirror-glare of the pyramids - where the two of them had first clashed. Impossible, just then, not to compare the present situation with that first encounter, the only time the Khan had fought a primarch, truly fought one, with the expectation of death for one or both of them. Impossible not to recall how indomitable Mortarion had been in that empty realm of broken glass, how he had just kept on going, dogged, unshakeable, cold, lethal.\n\nBut it was a mistake to think back, of course, because both of them had changed so much. The Lord of Death had burst free of his old bounds, becoming grotesque and monstrous. He wore a human form only in outline now - his skinny body inhabited a ramshackle armour of corrosion and decay, a gaggle of loosely held panels and mouldy fabric, seemingly liable to fall apart at any moment. The air around him was acrid, suffused with a foulness that turned the stomach and made it hard to breathe. He was ruined, and yet exalted; crippled, yet stronger than he had ever been.\n\nSo the old encounter meant little. Then, it had been a matter of speed against intractability, and either approach could have emerged victorious. Now, though, the parameters had changed. Mortarion's brute strength had grown obscenely. The warp coursed thickly through his veins, pulsing under heavily mutated skin. Whenever he moved, reality flexed around him, recoiling "}
{"text":"t turned the stomach and made it hard to breathe. He was ruined, and yet exalted; crippled, yet stronger than he had ever been.\n\nSo the old encounter meant little. Then, it had been a matter of speed against intractability, and either approach could have emerged victorious. Now, though, the parameters had changed. Mortarion's brute strength had grown obscenely. The warp coursed thickly through his veins, pulsing under heavily mutated skin. Whenever he moved, reality flexed around him, recoiling at the violation of natural law. His great blade displayed reflections of the hell-realm beyond - its rotting gardens, its tormented flesh, its fertile pain-fields.\n\nWhat did he, the Khan, have to set against all of that? The old prowess with a blade, some fine armour, the residue of that famed quickness. Not enough.\n\nHe had his hatred, though. That was different from before. On Prospero, the discourse between them had been regretful as much as anything - both of them disappointed at what was being thrown away by the other. Now his hatred was as infinite as the void. Too many had died at Catullus for it to be any other way - his warriors, his ships, his counsellor, all swallowed up by the monster before him, all owing their deaths to this single soul.\n\nThe Khan had that. He had his rage, deep as the world's core, fuelling every strike and swipe of the great dao blade. He had the keen edge of vengeance to propel his limbs, to find the chink that could wound this horrific amalgam of posthuman and yaksha, to keep going against the impossible.\n\nThey crashed together, then, cracking the stone underfoot as they braced against it. The White Tiger snared itself on Silence, releasing an explosion of mingled forces, and they both pushed against the other, testing strength and poise, feeling the harmonics in their weapons and gauging what it meant for the strength of their bearers.\n\nThe Khan fell back first. They exchanged more blows, rapid, heavier and faster. All around them, the roar of broader combat filtered up from the decks below - a chorus of screams and explosions that could not be filtered out.\n\nThe strikes accelerated, ramping up swiftly until the blows were exceptional in their heft and precision. Mortarion had speeded up, his old stolidity replaced by a phase-shifting, daemonic velocity. The whistling arcs of his scythe hissed with unearthly voices, wounding the atmosphere itself even as the Khan ducked away from its lacerating edge. When that warp-forged steel connected, the impact was bone-breaking, mind-jarring, a collision of dimensions as much as solid matter.\n\n'I expected you to dance,' the Deathlord grunted, hammering the Khan back further. 'Lost your footing, as well as your judgement?'\n\nThe Khan was already breathing heavily. The going was as hard as expected; harder, maybe. There had never been any illusions. He worked his blade rapidly, its edge losing definition as the point whirled faster than thought. The scythe met it in explosions of plasma and ceramite shards, swinging heavily, crackling with hissed imprecations of its half-formed daemonic choir.\n\n'You are already defeated,' the Khan told him breathily. 'You have become what you hated.'\n\nMortarion snorted. 'Some hatreds were never worth pursuing.'\n\n'Tell yourself that, if it helps.'\n\nThe acceleration continued. The blows became denser than true-mortal frames could ever have propelled. The combatants smashed in close, then reeled away into one of the gallery's columns. The masonry cracked apart, driven into disintegrating dust clouds as the primarchs crunched their way clean through it. The Khan's armour took its first transverse slash, ripping the finery from shoulder to waist. Blood followed the path of the strike, splattering against the deck in black pools.\n\nThey were alone now. They had entered a world of exclusivity, a level of combat that no other being, xenos or human, could hope to match. Just to witness it, to try to follow it, was to invite a kind of madness. The primarchs kept themselves tightly under control almost all the time, wearing the trappings of mortality over their true natures. When they cast that off, when they unlocked their inner selves, the result was difficult even to watch, let alone intervene in.\n\n'Time has been cruel, Jaghatai,' Mortarion said, still calm, still fighting within himself, cracking the Khan away yet again, smacking the gold chasing from his helm and rocking his head back. 'You are not what you were.'\n\n'I am what I always was,' the Khan snarled, driving back expertly against the flurry of hideously perfect blows and raking plague-censers free of their chains.\n\n'Weak.'\n\n'Loyal.'\n\n'Same thing.'\n\nThe two of them barrelled into the gallery's external wall, hammering at one another so fiercely that the entire section collapsed as if torpedoed. They swirled and duelled through the tumbling rubble, then out into the exposed night air, completely absorbed now in their own private contest. The rest of the planet - the rest of existence - might as well have slipped away, shamefaced at the volume of physical brutality unleashed on its surface.\n\nBut that violence only ratcheted up, every second, ticking over, more, more. Mortarion nearly took the Khan's head clean off with a vicious diagonal swipe. Silence's curved tip carved a three-foot-deep trench into the deck; when pulled out again, it ripped up a whole clump of static-wreathed rockcrete. The Khan shouldered through the barrage to land a spiteful cut on the Deathlord's leading thigh, stripping the pox-riddled armour clean from the flesh and taking his first blood, before being hammered back.\n\nThey were out in the open by then, lashing and swiping across one of the big landing stages - a kilometre across and twelve hundred metres up. Above them the storm raged, coruscating with green lightning that snapped down the high reaches of the space port. Below them, the bulk of the immense fortress spread out in a panoply of jumbled stages and terraces. Every inch of it was fought over now - a million points of light exposing White Scars and Death Guard at one another's throats. It was as if the entire battle had found its apex, its distilled expression, so that all those thousands and thousands of individual duels created their gestalt combination right at the summit of the decaying pile, something to gawp and wonder at even as the blood foamed busily into the gutters.\n\n'This isn't about revenge, for me,' said Mortarion, his rasping voice still contained. 'You're just in the way now. You understand that?'\n\nThe Khan laughed bloodily, spitting out shattered teeth. 'Not how I see it, brother,' he hissed. 'I'm here for you. Nothing else.'\n\nMortarion backhanded him, cracking a savage hit into the Khan's throat, before following up with a two-handed down-thrust of the scythe. 'Indulgent. But then you always were.'\n\nAnother smack against the helm, a discharge of virulent nerve gas as the edge bit, the destruction of the Khan's right pauldron, making him stagger.\n\n'I led my Legion as I saw fit,' the Khan snarled. 'You might have tried the same.'\n\nThe White Tiger flashed, going for the jangling cables at Mortarion's neck, but it was swatted aside.\n\n'I led the Death Guard before you were even found.'\n\nThe Khan held his ground against the onslaught, muscles screaming as they propelled his blade into dazzling arcs. Sweat pooled across his burning skin, mingling with blood now.\n\n'Not sure your First Captain would agree.'\n\nThat unleashed the flood. Mortarion roared back at him, his gossamer wings rearing up as his mighty arms flailed, furious and devastating. He crunched and bludgeoned the Khan out across the face of the landing stage, wreathing him with plumes of poison, smashing the metal of his gauntlets, cracking his flanks with the shaft of his ether-snarled staff before plunging the curved edge back round and up into his torso.\n\nTo endure that at all, not to be completely swept away and broken into a thousand pieces, took every scrap of skill and tenacity the Khan still possessed. By that point he was fighting beyond anything he had ever achieved before, scraping the boundaries of the possible, and still he was being battered, bruised, hammered, driven across the storm-wracked port's edge like a churl being beaten by his lord. His head rang from the blows, clouded with blood-puffs as his skull rattled in its helm. His right arm was fractured, his flank lacerated, his cheek shattered. Silence swung around him like the wheeling stars, its length crackling with vicious energies, both faster than the warp's snarl and heavier than a star's heart.\n\n'You know nothing,' Mortarion snarled, rearing up again, his cloaks whipping about him as the storm surge howled. 'Nothing of sacrifice, nothing of denial - you were the spoiled child, whining about the need for structure as the rest of us built an empire.'\n\nMortarion's eyes flared with a maddened green tinge, his visible face twisted into true rage now. He was elemental, he was apocalyptic, he was phenomenal. The tempest shrieked around him, hurled into a vortex that amplified every killer strike, tearing up the ground they scored across and sending its remnants slamming and blasting across the Khan's retreating form.\n\n'You were shown the nature of the galaxy, and you turned away,' Mortarion raged, slamming the scythe down and nearly breaking the Khan's trailing leg in two. 'I embraced it. I embraced the pain. I looked the god in the eye.'\n\nThe tempest of Horus' wrath swirled overhead. Explosions kindled far below, creating constellations of plasma across the port's ruins. Further out, visible only to a primarch's vision, the beleaguered Inner Palace burned, too far for any intervention now. Unholy voices whined in the superheated wind, goading, crowing, delighting.\n\n'And you ran,' Mortarion spat. 'Always running, too far away to matter, principles unknown even to yourself.'\n\nThe scythe swung again, even heavier now, unstoppably fast, critic"}
{"text":"t of Horus' wrath swirled overhead. Explosions kindled far below, creating constellations of plasma across the port's ruins. Further out, visible only to a primarch's vision, the beleaguered Inner Palace burned, too far for any intervention now. Unholy voices whined in the superheated wind, goading, crowing, delighting.\n\n'And you ran,' Mortarion spat. 'Always running, too far away to matter, principles unknown even to yourself.'\n\nThe scythe swung again, even heavier now, unstoppably fast, critically heavy, driving over the Khan's desperate attempt to block it, connecting with armour-cracking force and sending the primarch skidding to his knees. More blows rained in, iron-hard, exploding with the soul-eating spoil of the ether, smashing him down, lower, until he was on his back against the rockcrete, prone, ready for slaughter.\n\n'No running now.'\n\nThe Khan's head snapped back, and blood sloshed down his neck. He had a brief glimpse of the skies above - the mottled incarnadine clouds, hiding the monstrous fleets above - before Mortarion's profile loomed up to block it.\n\nAnd then the dream came true, just as Yesugei had described it to him - the Lord of Death, rising in darkness over a world of shadow, arms raised for the killing strike.\n\nNot everything is fated, the Khan had told him then.\n\n'It ends,' Mortarion said, his face a rictus of anger. 'Here.'\n\nThe Khan chuckled painfully under his shattered, lensless helm.\n\n'See, but I'm laughing now, brother,' he rasped, the thick blood in his throat making his words gurgle. 'You should start to worry.'\n\nCrosius was still in a world of delight. He had been badly wounded, his right arm nearly taken straight off by one of those damned White Scars, but he was still walking, still carrying his weapon in the other hand, and he'd taken his time over the one who'd wounded him.\n\nHe marched through the miasma with his brothers, trudging through the knee-deep sludge, drawing the thickening air deep into atrophied lungs. He didn't know exactly where he was. The fortress' guts were starting to dissolve entirely, their distinctive features sinking into a slough of featureless slime-caverns. He sought out the enemy wherever they dared to push in closer, and that worked very well - they didn't hide their presence, but whooped and shouted as if all that effort might somehow make them a bit less fragile.\n\nYou had to learn how to fight again, with this new body. In the past, before the great change, Crosius might have trusted a little more to evasion, hoping to limit the damage he was taking before he tried to dole any out himself. Now that seemed foolish. He was so much more ponderous now that trying to evade anything was almost impossible. On the other hand, he could absorb so many hits that his almost dreamlike pace of combat was still dazzlingly effective. It made things simpler. You just walked up to the enemy, trusting in the restorative powers of your innate decay. No tricks, no deceptions. It was an honest kind of warfare, for all the fact that it was underpinned by essential sorcery. The kind he could grow to love.\n\nThe enemy didn't see it that way, though. He had to hand it to them - their combined arms were troublesome. If you weren't careful, those tank barrels could obliterate everything around you, sending you crashing down into shafts you'd never be able to climb out of. And if you let those momentous blasts take your attention, then before you knew it the White Scars would be among you and spinning their blades in your face. They were brittle in comparison to him, but so fiendishly quick, and so drearily committed. They took the whole thing very seriously. They never responded to his amiable attempts to engage them in conversation.\n\nHe was preparing to climb up out of the trench he had been occupying alongside a few dozen of his fellow Unbroken, ready for the long slog across jumbled terrain towards more oncoming tanks. The little presence at his elbow was already excited, jiggling up and down in its hollow.\n\nWhen the power-armoured body crashed into the bilge beside him, the first thing he thought was that it was just another warrior of the Legion, come to engage in the diversions. It took him a moment or two to recognise Morarg, because they were all so alike now - so caked in grime and the patina of decay, their old insignias more or less rubbed away.\n\n'Brother!' he cried, clapping him hard on the back. 'Where in the hells have you been?'\n\nMorarg stood silently for a moment, knee-deep in slurry, his helm-lenses peering over the lip of the trench. He had a big chainsword held in his bulky gauntlet, but hadn't activated it. He smelled different, too - something of the ether, maybe, a whiff of the daemonic.\n\n'Where is the primarch?' he asked, sounding distracted.\n\nCrosius laughed. 'You are the equerry! Have you lost him?'\n\nMorarg didn't laugh in response. 'I was... waylaid. The Deathshroud were due to escort him to the west front. I see no sign of him.'\n\n'Then he is indulging himself somewhere else. No doubt giving the bastards a hard time, eh?'\n\nMorarg turned to him, and seemed to notice the daemon for the first time. The little lord bowed, then belched up something yellow and lumpy.\n\n'What is that?' he asked.\n\nCrosius looked down at it affectionately. 'One of the marvels of the age. It has a twin - did you know they had twins?'\n\nHe couldn't really tell what Morarg made of it. For a horrible moment, he thought the equerry might swat it away, as if it were some venomous insect that had crawled up out from the sludge.\n\nBut then, Morarg reached out, gently, and caressed its spines. The daemon snickered in pleasure, and wiggled its many bellies. 'Beautiful,' Morarg murmured. 'Very beautiful.'\n\n'Agreed,' Crosius said, smiling broadly. 'You see it now, then? You see how much better things are?'\n\nThe enemy tanks were grinding closer. Soon they would unload those troublesome guns, turning the landscape around them into explosions of mud and broken metal. Then it would get interesting - dangerous, but interesting.\n\nMorarg withdrew his gauntlet, then activated the gummed-up engines on his blade. The blunt blades started to whirr. He looked up, and made ready to climb up the slope, into the onslaught of unbelievers.\n\n'So you say,' he said, though still with a slightly haunted air. 'Maybe you were right about that. Best to put the past behind us. It isn't coming back.'\n\nHe should have been dead. It should have been over a long time ago, with Jaghatai nothing more than a smear of torn skin and armour-fragments on the floor. And yet, impossibly, he was still alive, still fighting back. His arms must both have been broken, his fused ribcage cracked into ribbons, his sword notched and blunted, and still he came back, again and again.\n\nIt was becoming almost painful to watch. The primarch of the V, on his knees again after being smashed halfway across the open landing stage, struggling to get back up. The blood trailing from every armour-seal was so profuse that you wondered how much more of it there could still be inside him. Entire sections of his ivory plate hung loosely on sinew-like straps, flapping as he staggered around.\n\nAnd through it all, he kept talking. He kept up the torrent of petty jibes and slights. Even when Mortarion rained blows at his dented helm, smacked him deep into the broken-up rockcrete, the barbs kept on coming, sometimes acid, sometimes brutal, sometimes merely juvenile.\n\n'Just take the damned mask off. I want to see your expression when I kill you.'\n\n'Your stench is worse than at Ullanor. And it was putrefying then.'\n\nAnd the one that cut deep, for all its obviousness.\n\n'I should have taken on the Legion Master. I should have fought Typhon.'\n\nIt was childish. It was beneath them both. Mortarion was beyond anger by then, and had progressed into a kind of contemptuous weariness. Greater things beckoned. This petty brawl should not have mattered. It should not have still been happening. Power still pulsed through his system like raw promethium, the warp still animated his every gesture, his armies still held their ground against a faltering White Scars attack, but this was becoming infuriating now, a maddening bump in the road that just would not clear.\n\nSo he swung back into the fight - two great strides, a gathering of momentum, and then a truly brutal backhand slash with Silence that tore Jaghatai's helm clean from his head and sent his body arcing high. The Khan crashed to the deck again, flat on his back, somehow keeping a grip on his fragile blade even as Mortarion surged over him, slamming his staff's heel into his enemy's exposed midriff. Jaghatai managed to twist away at the last moment, only for Mortarion to plant a vicious kick against his face, breaking both nose and cheekbone.\n\nHalf-blind and groggy, Jaghatai lashed out with his blade, connecting with Silence and wrenching it from Mortarion's grip. Letting the staff clatter away, Mortarion dropped down sharply, piling in wildly with his gauntlets, slamming in punches, at the Khan's throat, at his chest, at his ruined face. The clenched fists flew, one after another, barely warded by Jaghatai's flailing arms, tearing up the remains of that beautiful lacquered ceramite and splattering the two of them in more gouts of forge-hot blood.\n\nThe Khan never stopped fighting back, but it was becoming pitiful now. He caught one of Mortarion's fists on the full, only for the other one to plunge deep at his stomach, bursting something within. Jaghatai tried to rise, and Mortarion cast him down disdainfully, fracturing his spine. They were both roaring by then, Mortarion from frustrated fury, the Khan from undiluted agony. They had been reduced to this - brawling across a derelict space port like hive world gangers, gouging and tearing at the body before them, trying to rip it apart with their own fingers.\n\nScions of the Emperor, masters of the galaxy.\n\nPanting hard, feeling like his heart was fit to burst, Mor"}
{"text":"sting something within. Jaghatai tried to rise, and Mortarion cast him down disdainfully, fracturing his spine. They were both roaring by then, Mortarion from frustrated fury, the Khan from undiluted agony. They had been reduced to this - brawling across a derelict space port like hive world gangers, gouging and tearing at the body before them, trying to rip it apart with their own fingers.\n\nScions of the Emperor, masters of the galaxy.\n\nPanting hard, feeling like his heart was fit to burst, Mortarion finally ceased the barrage. The first ache of exhaustion rippled up his arms, his vision shivered a little. Still something mortal in him then, after all, something that could know fatigue. He got up painfully.\n\nJaghatai still breathed. Somehow, amid the swamp of gore that had once been a proud visage, the air was still being sucked in, bubbling feebly amid floating flecks of bone.\n\nMortarion limped over to his scythe, hauling it up again, making ready to end the grotesque spectacle.\n\n'I thought you'd dance,' he said again, genuinely mystified. 'You just... took it. Did you lose your mind?'\n\nJaghatai started to cough, sending more bloody spurts out over the ripped-apart ground. His shattered gauntlet still clutched the hilt of his blade, but the arm must have been broken in many places. Only slowly, as he trudged back, did Mortarion realise that the sound was bitter laughter.\n\n'I... absorbed,' Jaghatai rasped, 'the... pain.'\n\nMortarion halted. 'What do you mean?'\n\n'I... know,' Jaghatai said, his voice a liquid slur. 'The Terminus Est. You... gave up. I... did not.' And then he grinned - his split lips, his flayed cheeks, his lone seeing eye, twisting into genuine, spiteful pleasure. 'My endurance is... superior.'\n\nSo that was what they all believed. Not that he had done what needed to be done. Not that he had sacrificed everything to make his Legion invincible, even suffering the ignominy of using Calas as his foil, even condemning himself to the permanent soul-anguish of daemonhood so that the change could never be undone by anyone, not even his father.\n\nThat he had been weak.\n\nThe dam of his fury broke. He hefted Silence two-handed, angling the point towards the laughing Khan, no longer thinking of anything but sending its tip spearing through his enemy's chest.\n\nAnd so he missed the Khan's suddenly tightening grip, the flicker of white steel, the rapid push from the deck and the upthrust of the masterful blade. The White Tiger penetrated deep under the single segment of Mortarion's armour plate that the Khan had managed to dislodge, biting deep, sending a flare of pain straight up into his straining torso.\n\nSilence's strike missed its aim as he jerked clear from the blade. Mortarion reeled away, blood leaking from the deep wound. And then, to his incredulity, the Khan was clambering back to his feet again, still bleeding, still damaged, but already coming towards him. Mortarion, suddenly doubting even the evidence of his senses, staggered back into contact, doing just what he had done before - charging straight in, trusting to his colossal strength - and only then realised how drained to the bone he was by what had gone before.\n\nAnd then - then - the Khan started to dance. Not with any beauty - that had been ripped from him - but still with that unearthly slipperiness, that mesmerising power of appearing to be in one place, inviting the strike, only to be a hand's width away, just enough to drop under your guard and slice a piece of you away. He could still do it. He still had something left.\n\n'When we do this with our ships,' the Khan growled, no longer laughing, now deadly serious, 'we call it zao. The chisel.'\n\nMortarion swung his scythe clumsily, and missed. The dao blade struck him again, carving a deep rent along his trailing arm.\n\nThe change was mesmerising. The Khan was still on the edge of death, just one good impact away from annihilation, but he was moving again, faster and faster as his primarch's physiology did what it had been designed to do: keep him alive, keep his blade working, keep him in the fight.\n\nMortarion snarled, worked his scythe harder again, feeling his fatigued muscles scream even as his mind reeled from the realisation. He should have seen through it. He should never have allowed himself to be goaded.\n\nTheir blades clashed again, snarling in an explosion of mingled warp detonations, and the two of them both reeled away from the blow, barely able to keep their feet.\n\nHe was damaged. That had hurt him.\n\nAnd the Khan came back quicker, his smashed ankles somehow propelling him across the erupted ground faster than Mortarion could react. When the dao clanged against the scythe again the blood splattered freely, but it was no longer just Jaghatai's.\n\nMortarion swivelled on his heel and smashed the Khan away. That sent the primarch tumbling, but he came straight back again, lurching from his catastrophic injuries as if drunk, his devastated face etched with excruciation, but still fighting through the toll of fearful damage. It was as if some malevolent spirit animated him now, pushing his ravaged body onward until it achieved the absolution it needed.\n\nThe sword spun faster, blurring across Mortarion's double vision, getting difficult to stop. The two of them traded earth-breaking blows, tearing more of their priceless battleplate from its place, smashing phials, rupturing cables, severing chain-lengths. Their cloaks were ripped to shreds, their finery destroyed, their raw selves exposed in blood-mottled canvases of skin-stripped muscle, their pretensions scoured back to the primal truth - that they were savage weapons, the numbered blades of an unwilling god.\n\nMortarion was still the greater of them. He was still the stronger, the more steeped in preternatural gifts, but now all that he felt was doubt, rocked by the remorseless fury of one who had never been anything more than flighty, self-regarding and unreliable. All Mortarion could see just then was one who wished to kill him - who would do anything, sacrifice anything, fight himself beyond physical limits, destroy his own body, his own heart, his own soul, just for the satisfaction of the oaths he had made in the void.\n\n'If you know what I did,' Mortarion cried out, fighting on now through that cold fog of indecision, 'then you know the truth of it, brother - I can no longer die.'\n\nIt was as if a signal had been given. The Khan's bloodied head lifted, the remnants of his long hair hanging in matted clumps.\n\n'Oh, I know that,' he murmured, with the most perfect contempt he had ever mustered. 'But I can.'\n\nThen he leapt. His broken legs still propelled him, his fractured arms still bore his blade, his blood-filled lungs and perforated heart still gave him just enough power, and he swept in close.\n\nIf he had been in the prime of condition, the move might have been hard to counter, but he was already little more than a corpse held together by force of will, and so Silence interposed itself, catching the Khan under his armour-stripped shoulder and impaling him deep.\n\nBut that didn't stop him. The parry had been seen, planned for, and so he just kept coming, dragging himself up the length of the blade until the scythe jutted out of his ruptured back and the White Tiger was in tight against Mortarion's neck. For an instant, their two faces were right up against one another - both cadaverous now, drained of blood, drained of life, existing only as masks onto pure vengeance. All their majesty was stripped away, scraped out across the utilitarian rockcrete, leaving just the desire, the violence, the brute mechanics of despite.\n\nIt only took a split second. Mortarion's eyes went wide, realising that he couldn't wrench his brother away in time. The Khan's narrowed.\n\n'And that makes the difference,' Jaghatai spat.\n\nHe snapped his dao across, severing Mortarion's neck cleanly in an explosion of black bile, before collapsing down into the warp explosion that turned the landing stage, briefly, into the brightest object on the planet after the Emperor's tormented soul itself.\n\nDeath rites\n\nLandslide\n\nThe quiet ones\n\nHe knew. Instantly, as soon as it happened, he knew.\n\nShiban was far away from the site of it, buried in fighting on the approaches to the orbital batteries. The guns towered over him now, their silent ranks stretching off into the distance, still fought hard over by White Scars and Death Guard alike. The bolt-shells flew, the blades flashed, both sides surged up against the other, but still he knew.\n\nIt was like some kind of vortex bomb going off, something that sucked everything out with it, leaving only dumb shock in its wake. Every warrior across that huge battlefield, from both sides, stumbled, hesitated, looked up, as if their primarch was apt to appear there, somehow, but of course couldn't, and could never do so again.\n\nThe traitors shambled to a complete halt. Silent resistance was replaced by a kind of bewilderment - a loss of momentum, for reasons that their sluggish minds had no power left to explain. They could feel their master's withdrawal - not his death, his withdrawal - as if he had just decided, on a whim, to leave them to it. The surge of concentrated energy they had been riding dissipated, echoing down the long halls before blowing emptily out of the space port's gigantic vents, a spent force, a busted flush.\n\nOn the physical front, nothing had changed. But the Unbroken were more than physical now. They were tied into the grand bargains of the warp, its alliances and its contracts, and something had gone badly amiss, something unforeseen, inexplicable and terminal.\n\nFor the White Scars, it was completely different. The first sensation was one of abject shock - a nerve-jolt that welled up from the base of every heart and stomach, a wrench of sudden absence that affected them all instantly. Seasoned warriors, inured to all privation, bent double on the battlefield, incapacitated by the scale of grief. They had no d"}
{"text":"grand bargains of the warp, its alliances and its contracts, and something had gone badly amiss, something unforeseen, inexplicable and terminal.\n\nFor the White Scars, it was completely different. The first sensation was one of abject shock - a nerve-jolt that welled up from the base of every heart and stomach, a wrench of sudden absence that affected them all instantly. Seasoned warriors, inured to all privation, bent double on the battlefield, incapacitated by the scale of grief. They had no doubts what had happened - it was as plain to every soul as if it had taken place right in front of their eyes.\n\nHe is gone. They have taken his light from the universe. He is gone.\n\nShiban felt the earth beneath his feet sway, his moorings cut loose, his blade fall from his grip. He fell to his knees, crashing heavily into the corrupted swill. For a moment, he saw nothing at all - just an infinity of blackness, extending in all directions. It felt as if a cold claw had reached into his chest and wrenched both his hearts out, dragging all hope and ambition and life with it.\n\nHe heard cries ring out across the battlefield, unlocked howls of disbelief and horror, and dimly realised that every White Scar across every rotten chamber and miasmatic cavern was experiencing what he was experiencing. A warrior of the Legions was not just an inducted soldier, given the Emperor's coin and handed a bolter. He was connected through warp-craft and gene-tech to his primogenitor, indelibly linked both temperamentally and psychically to the archetype. The bond was more than loyalty, more than filial duty. It was everything.\n\nHe wanted to vomit. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw his head back and empty that unbearable grief out up at the shrouded stars.\n\nBut he was also a khan of the ordu, the one the others looked to, the carrier of the flame.\n\nYou are Tachseer.\n\nYou are the Restorer.\n\nIt could not go on. He could not indulge himself. He forced himself to stand again, shakily, and opened his eyes, and it was as if the night around him had become as black as bloody pitch, more hateful than before, emptier and colder.\n\nHe took up his blade again, ramming it firmly aloft, just as he had done when the Khagan had breached the first wall, when his ecstasy had been as profound as his loss was now.\n\n'Damarg!' he roared.\n\nThat word had only one meaning in Khorchin. It only had one sacred use. Death. Not the death of old age or sickness, but the death of the fighter, slain in battle against an enemy; the death that had to be avenged lest destruction overcome all things. That grief-curse had been heard on the grasslands of Chogoris since the time before memory, a paean of defiance and honour and fealty, one that every sword-bearer knew and understood and venerated. They had cried it aloud when Giyahun had died, when Qin Xa had died, when Yesugei had died, and now they cried it for the greatest of them all.\n\n'Damarg!' Shiban thundered again, his powerful voice hurling the denunciation out through vox-emitters at full stretch, striding out fearlessly now, heedless of any danger, no longer with the exuberance of that first vivid attack, but with slow, terrible deliberation.\n\nAll around him, White Scars looked up, heard their home world's ancient tongue ringing in the vaults, and reached for their blades again.\n\nDamarg.\n\nNow the curse echoed darkly from the cracked walls, issuing first from a dozen mouths, then a hundred mouths, then a thousand. It fell into a terrible rhythm. They mouthed it in unison, again and again, uttering nothing else now, no longer holding to cover, but coming out openly, fists clenched tighter than adamantium, hearts bursting with a loathing that went beyond expression.\n\nDamarg.\n\nThe enemy never responded. They had always been silent in combat, almost oblivious to those they fought, but now they stared in a stupor at those coming towards them - the unified presentation of utter loathing, utter resolve, utter commitment. The warp, orchestrated so perfectly by their master, was draining away from every chamber like a flood surging out through shattered walls and spilling out over the plains beyond. Where their opponents were now suddenly animated with this terrible, cold-as-ice fury, their own resolve had been ripped away from them without warning.\n\nThe remaining Terran Armoured units began to operate again, their confused commanders knowing better than to ask what was going on, only that they still had their duty, and that something astonishing was happening to those they fought with. Targeting lumens flickered on, engines powered up, long barrels swung once more towards their targets.\n\nShiban barely noticed. Those he marched with barely noticed. Their only focus was ahead, to the ones who had done this thing and who now would be punished. They strode into the open, the sons of the Great Khan, exposed to the return fire that came sporadically now.\n\nShiban reached up to his helm, released the seals, twisted it off, and locked it to his armour. All those with him did the same. As one, they reached up with their blades, placed them against the ridged tissue on their cheeks, and drew the edge down. Fresh blood ran freely across their exposed skin as the old scars opened. They breathed in the toxic air and relished its bitterness. They fixed their gaze at the ranks of the enemy, and each one of them, in a movement of such perfect coordination that it might have been ordained since the dawn of time, angled a bloody blade towards the chosen target.\n\nWhen their final great roar came, it made the caverns themselves shake, the waters tremble, the iron crack and the glass shatter.\n\nDamarg!\n\nAnd then they were charging, driven only by their unbounded hatred, sweeping across the ruins in a tide of ivory and gold and crimson, unstoppable, unrestrained, the lords of the storm, the merited vengeance of heaven, the bringers of death.\n\nShe saw it from the air. They were still kilometres out, juddering through the storm, their forward viewers showing them almost nothing but flying grime and ash, but Ilya had calibrated the sensors to give her a forward scan, routed to the lenses in front of her. Sojuk was kept busy saving them from being slammed into the spire-tops around them, while she relentlessly peered ahead, desperate for some sign of what was taking place in the port.\n\nHer first view of it was a jumpy, grainy image that slid around the poorly aligned scopes. Even from that she could see the extensive damage, the rampant explosions, the fires crackling out of control in broad swathes across the stacked levels. Like every part of the once glorious Palace, the Lion's Gate space port was a smoking wreck now, a scraped-out mountain riddled with both plague and structural damage.\n\nAnd for a while, that was all she got. Sojuk powered the gunship as fast as he could, angling at speed along the same route the Terran Armoured units had taken, evidenced by the hundreds of burned-out hulls littering the chasms below. The space port gradually loomed nearer, emerging through drifting skirts of smoke and smog, its coal-black profile lit up with both eerie green glows and the purer light of physical explosives detonating.\n\nBut then she saw it. You couldn't miss it - anything within a hundred kilometres of the space port would have seen it, whatever else was exploding or disintegrating around them at the time. A translucent sphere of pale green, blooming silently out of the western landing stages, swelling up with alarming speed, followed by a raging kaleidoscope of ghostly lightning. A second later, and the sound waves caught up - a colossal, ear-ripping boom, followed by a roar of rushing atmospheres, all laced with something like fractured screaming. And then the turbulence hit them, a buffeting, crashing wave of thruster-hot gales that nearly sent them spinning into the flanks of the nearest hab-tower.\n\nSojuk performed admirably amidst all that, keeping them alive through some remarkable flying. Much later, Ilya would discover just how horrendous that moment had been for him, and how he had almost lost control completely through a mixture of shock and horror, but just then all she knew was that something dreadful had happened, and that they were still too far away to do anything about it.\n\n'Keep us on course!' she shouted, trying desperately to get a better visual fix on what had taken place.\n\nShe managed to zoom in on the west front - that great mass of stacked landing stages, many of them kilometres wide and suspended on giant piers that jutted hundreds of metres up into the sky. What she saw shook her to her core.\n\nThe stages were falling, sliding, cracking, collapsing into a vast landslide of rockcrete, all of it underlit with that foul green light. Secondary explosions rang out, promethium reservoirs going off. The entire face of the fortress was coming down, subsiding with what looked like stately slowness, but must have felt, up close, like the thundering end of all creation. The wind still tore past them, still screaming at them. Though it was hard to pick out amid all the movement and lens-shake, Ilya thought she saw something incredibly bright still burning amid all the wreckage, like a dwarf star at the centre of an accretion disc.\n\nThe collapse slowly ground to a halt, hurling more mountains of static-laced dust towering up across the entire site. What remained was a long gouge in the immense space port's western shoulder, nearly a kilometre across, sparking with residual detonations, slumped into total ruin.\n\nFor a while, she couldn't find any words. She knew, somehow, with total certainty, who had been at the centre of all that.\n\n'Get us there,' she said eventually.\n\nSojuk never looked at her. Flying alone in that unnatural storm absorbed almost all his concentration. 'We will not be able to land in that.'\n\n'Then as close as you can,' Ilya snapped, her own voice sounding to her like it came from far away. She felt tears beginning t"}
{"text":"cross, sparking with residual detonations, slumped into total ruin.\n\nFor a while, she couldn't find any words. She knew, somehow, with total certainty, who had been at the centre of all that.\n\n'Get us there,' she said eventually.\n\nSojuk never looked at her. Flying alone in that unnatural storm absorbed almost all his concentration. 'We will not be able to land in that.'\n\n'Then as close as you can,' Ilya snapped, her own voice sounding to her like it came from far away. She felt tears beginning to spike in her eyes, and angrily blinked them away. She had to concentrate, stay focused.\n\nSojuk somehow managed to find just a scrap more speed, flying now with a cold and furious desperation. The tempest raged past them, pushed against them, but he powered on through it as if his fury alone could rip the pressure apart.\n\nIlya turned to the comm controls. After that colossal burst of static, much of the instrumentation had been blown beyond repair, but the aftermath seemed to have actually released some of the crushing interference that had plagued them for so many weeks. She managed to get some locator-signals, even pick up fragments of squad comms.\n\nDa-\n\n-marg\n\nDam- rg\n\nThe word made her spine shiver. She knew what it meant. She knew just what it meant.\n\nYou could lose yourself in that hate. It could do incredible things, but you could unravel yourself forever in its depths. Just then, she so desperately wanted to do that. She wanted to order Sojuk to fly the Thunderhawk right into whatever remained of those who had done this.\n\nBut she was not a child of Chogoris. She was not a member of the Legion, no matter how many times they had told her she was.\n\nShe was their honoured guest. She was their venerated sage. Above all, as Yesugei had told her in that final, terrible communication from Dark Glass, she was their soul.\n\n'Range to broadcast,' she said, her fingers now working the comms controls again, determinedly, rapidly. 'I have to get there.'\n\nKaska heard it while they were still ascending the levels. It was like no noise he had ever heard before - a kind of snatched wail, like a child ripped from its parent's arms, only greater and deeper and scarcely human at all.\n\nThey had been working hard to make the climb for hours. He was exhausted, as were the rest of the crew. In normal campaigns they would have withdrawn from combat whenever possible to open the hatch, get some air into the hull, try to get out of the cramped confines when it was safe. But here, in this place, it was never safe, not even to pop the cover open by a crack, and so they had sweated and panted and crouched in the heat and the stink without respite. It was enough to drive you mad. At times you wanted just to lash out, to stretch your legs, punch your way free of the nightmarish enclosure, and it took all your willpower to stay at your station, endure the engine roar and the fumes and the stench, and just keep going.\n\nThey had refuelled and taken on water a few times, always with the assistance of the White Scars, who were able to operate outside the hull, siphoning what they needed from captured bunkers or other wrecks. So they were alive, and mobile, but not much more than that. The lascannon's power packs were down to critical levels, and Merck had just a handful of shells left in the rack. Dresi had taken it all hardest, driving without a break almost since the opening of the Colossi doors, and now barely responded to orders at all, just stayed silently in position as if she'd been fused to her seat and controls.\n\nVosch was subdued too, which wasn't like her at all, though Jandev's taciturn character seemed relatively unaltered by anything that had happened. As for Kaska, he felt permanently sick. More than the rest of them, he'd got a good view of what they'd been fighting. He'd been the one to scan across those crowded battlefields, to stare into the faces of the... things out there, and give the order to advance. It hadn't mattered much that the White Scars had been alongside him to keep things from coming apart entirely, at least not to the way it had all made him feel.\n\nInfantry despised tankers, went the old saying, because they never had to look their enemy in the face. That had always been an unfair slur, but now it was doubly so. He'd looked at faces that no sane man should ever have looked at. If he ever got out of this alive, he'd be seeing those faces for the rest of his life.\n\nHe had to carry on, though. The khan of the White Scars, the one calling himself Jangsai, drove them hard. A Space Marine could run far faster than a battle tank over most terrains, and keep going for longer. The Legion warriors no longer sheltered in the shadow of the rumbling hulls, but pushed ahead, seeking out routes upwards and westward. From the sporadic comms traffic, it became clear that hundreds of similar detachments were trying the same thing, but Kaska had no real idea why - he assumed that some important objective needed bolstering.\n\nMany of the big vehicle lifts - the ones that had shunted void-ship sections around - were damaged or unsafe to use, but they discovered a few that Jangsai pronounced fit enough, and so they had trundled onto the ascender platforms in groups of four at a time. That move may have put them far ahead of the others, who were busy searching for unblocked ramps, all the while running into enemy formations or nests of those malefic not-xenos beasts.\n\nThe journey upwards was nerve-shredding - a blind ascent, huddled in the shaking hull of Aika 73, hearing the bone-deep resonance of a structure around them under immense stress. If those shafts had collapsed, they would all have been buried alive, condemned to a slow and choking demise in the dark.\n\nBut they all made it to the top, one group at a time, until Jangsai's full complement of twenty Legion warriors and fifteen hulls started moving again, heading up a long covered incline towards the first of the open landing stages on the west front.\n\nAika 73 was less than halfway up it when the wail started. The rumble of destructive noise had been building for a while already, but this was something else - like the shrieks the not-xenos made whenever they were torn apart. Kaska had to pull his earpiece out for a while so it didn't drive him mad. Right after that started, the world started to crumble around them. The walls started to bulge, with cracks cobwebbing across the bare stonework, and metal struts sheared away from their footings.\n\n'It's coming down!' Vosch shouted.\n\n'What's coming down?' Merck demanded, unable to get to the forward viewslit.\n\n'Drive!' Kaska cried. 'Full speed! Get us out of this!'\n\nEvery commander in the squadron had made the same decision. The White Scars ran too, powering up the incline as masonry thunked down around them.\n\nThe ground under their treads started to break up, rippling like yanked fabric, throwing them around crazily. Kaska had his head slammed into the inner curve of the turret again, while Jandev took a sickening smack to his helmet as he bounced around in his seat. The engines stuttered as Dresi missed a gear, before she fought it home and powered them on and up.\n\nKaska threaded his earpiece back in, pressing his face back against the periscope sights, trying to sway with the buck of the tank-deck even though his thigh-muscles were as raw and pain-filled as he'd ever known.\n\n'Coming through!' announced Vosch, whose gunsights gave her the most stable view ahead.\n\n'Keep up speed, driver,' warned Kaska, worried that the aperture ahead looked very unstable. Clouds of masonry dust were billowing crazily on the far side, which meant that something very big indeed was coming down on top of them all.\n\n'Holy Throne...' Merck muttered to himself, gripping the breech-hatch with sweaty fingers.\n\nThen they were out, shooting clear of the low tunnel entrance, bouncing on a patch of fresh rubble, before finding themselves, for the first time since the assault began, under open skies.\n\n'Ready, gunners,' Kaska ordered, scanning for targets. 'Fire on my command.'\n\nBut there were no targets. There was nothing at all. Even by the standards of what they had been fighting through now for weeks on end, this place was a thrown-about, torn-up mess. From his narrow vantage, all he could see were towering banks of semi-demolished rockcrete slabs, each thirty metres thick or more, stacked on top of one another like the sedimentary layers of an ancient cliff-face. Those stacks crackled with lightning, and were punctuated with scree-defiles and twisted forests of exposed rebar. The entire expanse was still moving too, grinding and cracking open like some wildly accelerated tectonic event, overhung with roiling dust banks and the deep rumble of a whole fortress section collapsing in on itself.\n\nAll the tanks got out of the tunnel in time, but had to power onward fast to avoid being caught up in secondary landslips. The White Scars never hesitated, either - they leapt up the teetering slopes and vaulted across the gaps between the disintegrating platforms. Making progress was harder for the armour, but not impossible. Aika 73 led the way, swivelling and gunning and pitching up and across the ever-shifting landscapes. Not for the first time, Kaska marvelled that Dresi was able to do it at all. She was like a machine.\n\n'Keep in sight of the khan,' he told her. 'I'll get a comm-line to him, if I can.'\n\nThe immense subsidence around them gradually settled down amid more gouts of kicked-out dust, although the maelstrom overhead continued to rage unabated, flooding the bare rockcrete plates with a greenish pallor that shifted and slid like tainted moonlight on water. The squadrons made tortuous progress through it all, always following the lead given by the infantry, forever at risk of skidding down some steeply angled slide and over what appeared to be drops of hundreds of metres to the terraces far below.\n\nAfter a while, Kaska managed to fix on to the comm-line being "}
{"text":"f kicked-out dust, although the maelstrom overhead continued to rage unabated, flooding the bare rockcrete plates with a greenish pallor that shifted and slid like tainted moonlight on water. The squadrons made tortuous progress through it all, always following the lead given by the infantry, forever at risk of skidding down some steeply angled slide and over what appeared to be drops of hundreds of metres to the terraces far below.\n\nAfter a while, Kaska managed to fix on to the comm-line being used by the White Scars. The feed was intermittent, and in a language he didn't understand, but he got something. The truly crushing levels of interference that had plagued them for so long seemed to have been lifted somewhat, despite all the devastation obviously still going on around them.\n\nListening to the signals wasn't easy. The White Scars didn't sound at all as they had done when addressing him in Gothic. They were... enraged? Maddened? Desperate? Kaska could have sworn that one of them was almost out of control, but that was surely impossible - these were Space Marines, not pressed line troops.\n\nEventually, after what became a punishingly hard trek across a windblown section of bare rockcrete, the White Scars coalesced again, gesturing frantically towards one another. Kaska led the rest of the armour towards them, feeling very uncertain as to what was going on.\n\nEven once they caught up, even after he had ordered the full stop and given Dresi a much-needed break, he still had no idea what was happening. The periscope didn't give him enough of an angle to determine what the Legion warriors were clustered around. They remained agitated, strangely indecisive, which was incredible to him, since their very natures had always been about decisiveness and lack of agitation.\n\n'We're right out in the open,' observed Jandev dryly, looking up from his sights. Kaska noticed that he was nursing a long gash over his right eye from the earlier collision. 'Maybe think about that?'\n\nThe lasgunner was right. All the tanks were idling now, exposed, and the ground was highly unstable, liable to fracture further or slide into complete dissolution.\n\n'Bring us closer,' Kaska ordered. 'But slowly. Very slowly.'\n\nDresi edged the tank in, and Kaska took to the scopes again. Both Jandev and Vosch did the same. He thought he could make out something immobile on the deck, and long bloodstains, and many pieces of broken armour.\n\n'It's one of them,' said Vosch.\n\n'Dead,' said Jandev.\n\n'Throne,' said Kaska, swivelling the periscope to gain a better angle. 'That's not one of them. It's too big. That's a-'\n\nHe broke off. Vosch turned to look at him too, her face going grey as soon as she realised. Even Jandev seemed lost for words.\n\n'That's a what?' demanded Merck.\n\nKaska didn't reply. He couldn't say the word.\n\n'It can't be,' said Vosch.\n\n'Can't be what?' blurted Merck.\n\n'How do you know?' retorted Jandev, replying to Vosch. 'Have you ever seen one?'\n\n'Of course she hasn't,' said Kaska. Throne, this was a nightmare. Something had to be done, or they would all die out here. 'Dresi, get on the tracker and find us a way down. Gunners - keep your eyes on those sights. Merck - shut up.' Then he switched his comm-status from listen to speak. 'My lord khan,' he said, his voice trembling slightly no matter how much he tried to control it. 'Can we assist you?'\n\nFor a moment, he got no reply. No indication, even, that he'd been heard. Then, slowly, Jangsai turned to face the tank's hull.\n\n'A casualty,' he replied, in Gothic. He sounded numb. 'The body cannot be left here.'\n\nWhy couldn't they carry it? Kaska had seen Space Marines haul the bodies of injured comrades for considerable distances. But then again, from what little he could see, this 'body' almost didn't deserve the name - it looked in absolutely terrible shape. Perhaps it would even break apart if they tried.\n\nKaska switched away from the open channel. 'They have a casualty,' he told the crew.\n\n'It can't come in here,' said Merck immediately.\n\nJandev snorted. 'It wouldn't fit. I'm telling you, it's a-'\n\n'They're our allies,' said Vosch. 'They wish to extract it. We have to help them.'\n\n'But what can we do?' Kaska said, exasperated now. They couldn't just stay here.\n\nWhen Dresi spoke, it took them all by surprise. Kaska discovered that he barely knew what her voice sounded like. She had an Albian accent, it turned out.\n\n'There is solid ground five hundred metres down,' she said. 'I have plotted a course, and we can follow it - for now.' She looked up at Kaska. 'They will not leave the body. They do not believe they can carry it any distance without causing greater harm. They are probably right. It will not fit inside any of our units, even if we were able to open the hatches, because it is not of baseline human dimensions. But it could be carried topside. It could be hoisted over the air filtration housings behind the turret, with the main gun angled away, then shielded by warriors mounted on either side of it. If we went carefully, we could carry it for them.'\n\nKaska just stared at her for a while. So did all the others.\n\nIt was hard to read Dresi's expression behind her driving goggles and fume-mask, but she certainly sounded like she'd worked it all out.\n\n'You will have to make the suggestion to them, sergeant, because just now they are not in their right minds,' she added. 'They may not like it. But I do not see another option.'\n\nKaska stared at Vosch next, who shrugged. Jandev chuckled dryly to himself, and shook his head. Merck, for once, didn't have anything to say.\n\nKaska really should have asked where they had found Dresi. He really should have made the effort to talk to her earlier. These were basic things - you needed to know your crew. Hells, it was always the quiet ones.\n\nBut that was for another time. The enemy still controlled large chunks of the world around them, and could emerge at any moment. The structures they stood on could collapse imminently. Any number of catastrophes could erupt without warning, all while they stood in that place, unable to make a decision.\n\nSo, after thinking it through one more time, he reached for the comm.\n\n'My lord khan,' he said gingerly. 'I have a proposal.'\n\nOld blood\n\nHanding over\n\nThe blade\n\n'We fall back.' That was the proposal. That was - seriously, now - what Crosius was advocating.\n\nMorarg couldn't respond. It was like the oxygen had been suddenly taken away, rendering him powerless - something you had unconsciously relied on, never thinking about, now gone, yanked beyond your grasp and leaving you to suffocate.\n\nHe reeled, falling to his knees. He had been so powerful. The dead of the V were around him, slain by his hand. He had begun to enjoy himself, just as Crosius had done for a while. He had started to stop obsessing, to relish the painful gifts he had been given.\n\nNow he looked up, and barely saw a thing out of his smeared helm-lenses. He would have taken it off, except he wasn't sure he could. Through the murk, at distance, he saw more of those damned Chogorians advancing. They weren't running now. They weren't trying to force the pace, compensating for their fragility with elusive movement.\n\nThey had gone mad, seemingly.\n\nHad they done this to them? Had the Unbroken delivered so much pain that they had changed, just as the Death Guard had on the Terminus Est? Was such a transition possible? Had the White Scars discovered some new and terrible god of their own?\n\nHe couldn't even begin to process that. His head was ringing. His stomach felt empty, his hearts were yammering. Crosius had ceased his chatter, and was now limping away, back through the mire. The daemon he carried in his arm was screaming, and that was a horrible sound.\n\nMorarg lurched up onto his hooves, and started to stumble after him.\n\n'Wait,' he tried, reaching out.\n\n'Fall back,' Crosius slurred.\n\nMorarg caught up, snatching his elbow, forcing him to stop. 'We never retreat.'\n\nJust looking at the old Apothecary's ruined armour was unsettling. It disgusted him. He'd always seen those changes, to some degree, but now he was really seeing them, as they must look to an outsider. By the god, what had they become? Once you stripped away the haze of forgetfulness, once you turned the lights on, you could see right through it.\n\n'He's gone,' Crosius spat back. 'You sense it? Typhus was right. He waited too long.'\n\nMorarg tried to concentrate, though it was difficult even to make out his brother's words. Who was he talking about? Mortarion? Yes, yes, he must have been. The primarch was gone. But where? And how?\n\n'I don't...' he started. 'I don't...'\n\n'Believe it!' Crosius blurted, sounding on the edge of losing his mind completely. 'Something happened. He's gone. And if he isn't here, why are we still?' He looked over his shoulder. 'Stuck inside with those mad bastards.'\n\nMorarg remembered what the Remnant had told him. He is loved, in the empyrean, like few others. Was that what had happened? Had the empyrean taken him early, leaving the rest of them behind?\n\nNot possible. The primarch would not have done it. I loved you all too much. That is the only error I will admit. Yes, that had been true. So what was going on?\n\n'I had started to believe,' Morarg said numbly. From a long way back, he could hear that damned chant - the dirge the Chogorians kept on at now. 'That it was all planned out.'\n\nOr had it been a lie? The whole thing, everything the daemon had told him? Maybe Mortarion had been a dupe all along, just as he had always feared. Maybe Typhus had always been the real power. Maybe, maybe. How to tell? Who to ask?\n\n'This will pass,' Crosius insisted, agitated, still wanting to get moving. 'This is just psychic shock. He's been holding it all up, all around us, you understand that? We're just having... withdrawal. We have to get out. It will pass.'\n\nMaybe that was right. Clear his head. Stop the agonised, sluggish pain that made every muscle shriek. 'To where?' he said.\n\n"}
{"text":"been a dupe all along, just as he had always feared. Maybe Typhus had always been the real power. Maybe, maybe. How to tell? Who to ask?\n\n'This will pass,' Crosius insisted, agitated, still wanting to get moving. 'This is just psychic shock. He's been holding it all up, all around us, you understand that? We're just having... withdrawal. We have to get out. It will pass.'\n\nMaybe that was right. Clear his head. Stop the agonised, sluggish pain that made every muscle shriek. 'To where?' he said.\n\nCrosius lifted the little daemon up. 'Remember this? Remember I told you it had a twin? The other one's with the First Captain. He must be in charge now. He'll know what to do.' A slightly manic laugh. 'I mean, he always has done, hasn't he?'\n\nMorarg wanted to contradict that, but he had already forgotten the reason why.\n\n'This was his strategy,' Crosius went on. 'The primarch's. But it's not the only one. There are warbands already over the walls. We could join them. Kadex Ilkarion has crossed the breach, they say. Vorx, too.'\n\n'I... can't fight.'\n\n'You can. Psychic shock. It'll pass.' Crosius held up the daemon. Its wild eyes stared right back at Morarg. By the god, it was a foul thing, ugly as a devil-toad, and it stank. 'He knew this moment would come. I see that now. I can speak to him.'\n\nTyphus. The one who had ushered in all this pain. Morarg remembered being so very angry at him, wanting him dead. He remembered wanting just as hard to believe in Mortarion, to believe that the liberator of Barbarus could not fail, not before, not now.\n\n'The primarch...' he began.\n\n'He's not dead. You understand that? Just... absent.'\n\n'We were all... committed,' Morarg protested. 'We never retreat.'\n\nCrosius hawked up a phlegmy laugh. He was disgusting. 'This isn't retreat. This is advance. To the core.' He shuffled closer, bringing his stench of ordure with him. 'What does this shit-heap matter, anyway? Did we come through all of that in the void, for this? No, my brother. We came for the Palace. We fall back, we regroup. We stay here, in this state, with them, and we will die.'\n\nMorarg already felt like his grip on reality was slipping away. The shift had been so sudden, so profound. The environment around him never steadied - it shifted, it shook. His own odour repelled him. He could feel the putrefaction under his rotting armour, and it made his stomach - what remained of it - turn.\n\nThe Remnant's words were already fading from his mind. Would he remember them at all, if he escaped this place? You cannot ignore him, you cannot pity him - he is your primarch. But his primarch was gone - he felt the truth of that in his every agonised cell. Why had he gone? Where had he gone?\n\nCrosius remained close. He wouldn't let this lie.\n\n'You hear me, brother,' he urged. 'We stay here, we die.'\n\nIn the background, that damned chant was drawing nearer. They sounded utterly demented now, the White Scars, as if something vicious and life-eating had consumed them, turning them into an army of obsessive revenants.\n\n'You can... speak to Typhus?' Morarg slurred, trying hard not to vomit.\n\nCrosius stroked the daemon's spines again, and its agitation seemed to reduce a little. 'It needs to be done. He'll sort this out.'\n\nJust like he already sorted us out, Morarg thought bitterly.\n\nBut what else remained? To fight on, here, for a prize they'd never wished to hold forever, and miss the chance of true glory? Or to get out, to let the sickness pass, to start over?\n\nMorarg stared at the daemon. How could he ever have thought of it with affection? Its sacs pulsed, its gills leaked, its knuckles cracked. At that moment, though, it felt like there were daemons all around him - daemons that twisted the past and the future, daemons in ivory armour that came with curved and bloody blades, daemons made of flies that ushered in yet more anguish, daemons with gossamer wings who had the temerity, right when it mattered, to fail.\n\nSo many daemons. Which one to pick?\n\nAs ever, Morarg thought, the one in front of you.\n\n'Fall back, then,' he said, loathing himself for even saying it out loud. 'Damn it all, we fall back.'\n\nCrosius nodded frantically, and started to limp off. Morarg went after him, his heavy treads kicking the filth up around him.\n\n'And use that little horror to tell Typhus we're coming,' he said. 'I feel sure he'll be just overjoyed to see us all again.'\n\nOnly when drawing close did Ilya see the full scale of the devastation. It wasn't just the demolished west front, but everything about the once majestic space port. The details were hard to pick out in the dark, but weeks of constant bombardment had taken their toll, smashing up fascias and collapsing terraces. The fact that anything was still standing at all was testament to just how gigantic the structure's core was. You could probably still hammer away at it for months, and something would remain in place at the heart of it, such was the hyper-durability of gargantuan-era Imperial architecture.\n\nFor all that, Sojuk had been right, of course - there was no way the gunship could make a landing at the site she'd identified from the air. It looked like a series of huge stages had crashed down on top of one another, creating a tiered massif of still-shifting hardcore, all interlaced with static lightning and secondary explosions.\n\nMaybe the Khan had been at the top of that collapse. Maybe wherever he had been fighting had been spared, somehow emerging out of the dust relatively unscathed. Or maybe he was interred underneath it all, something excavators would discover years later - if, that was, any excavators were left at the end of all this madness.\n\nShe had to find out. She owed him that, at least - to do everything she could. Her mind instantly went back to Ullanor, to those exhaustively terraformed plateaus. She remembered climbing up the cliffs, searching for something elusive, only for Yesugei to haul her up to safety.\n\n'Be careful,' he'd said.\n\nThrone, if only she had been. No one had been careful enough, that was the problem. They had all just pressed on, rushing headlong into disaster, time after time. Probably unavoidable, of course, but you could still regret it. And she had even given him the advice herself, this time - It is time now, my Khan. This is why we came back. All very true. But she'd said it so carelessly, confident that he was looking for reassurance, when he had been giving her a warning, preparing her for what would come.\n\n'I am getting something on the augurs,' Sojuk reported.\n\nThe instruments were indeed functioning a little better. It was as if some enormous cloud of interference had blown itself out, freeing up the machine-spirits to do their work.\n\nIlya roused herself, and started to filter through the signals. They were striking. She got movement indicators everywhere, from all over the ravaged space port, and they were all going in the same direction.\n\n'Those are our people,' she said, taken aback. 'They're... moving very fast.'\n\n'They are angry, szu,' said Sojuk flatly. 'Angrier than they have ever been.'\n\nIlya nodded slowly, remembering what he had told her. We would be angry, like no force of the heavens has ever been angry. He had known, hadn't he? He had known just what he was doing. He always did. Damn him.\n\n'There are intact fortifications just below the main collapse,' she said, forcing herself to concentrate on the task at hand. 'See if you can find a landing site.'\n\nSojuk did as ordered, powering through the ongoing turbulence expertly. It was still very hard to pick anything out through the realviewers, so Ilya relied on the scanners to make sense of what lay ahead. The ruined shoulder of the west front hove in closer, rising up above them and swallowing the sky with its bulk. Only when you got this close did you appreciate that it was a city in its own right, a micro-world of its own. Going up against it had always felt like recklessness; this close, it seemed like rank insanity.\n\nAnd then she saw them. They had their lumens on, against protocol, but she couldn't blame them for that - the path they followed was treacherous, marked by rockfalls and wall collapse. The effect was striking - a single column of slow-moving tanks, lit up, picking their way down from the worst of the destruction and out towards the remains of intact battlements below. Warriors of the Legion came with them on foot, arranged on either side of the lead vehicle in a tight protective formation. The entourage was moving steadily, just at that moment, out from under the shadow of a high-arched gate, one with its capstone still intact, making the scene look for all the world like a grand sortie from some besieged and ancient barbican, except that this was no act of war - this was a cortege, conducted in terrible silence.\n\nShe knew what they were carrying before she was close enough to see it in detail. The way they moved - with that painful reverence, with that weary emptiness - told her all she needed to know.\n\n'There,' she said, her voice cracking. 'Down where they're headed for.'\n\nThe Thunderhawk ducked lower, sinking through the smog banks until it hovered over a wide flat parapet, where it set down amid gouts of dirty exhaust fumes. Ilya was unbuckling before they had touched the apron, fastening her environment suit up, checking her rebreather fixings, scrambling for the exit doors, fumbling on the lock-catch. Going outside would be dangerous. She would not have permitted any of her own staff to do it. But she had to see for herself, with her own eyes, not through some relayed vid-feed.\n\nThe lead tank of the procession growled its way to meet them even as she ran across the parapet deck. It was a Leman Russ, Ryza-pattern, no sponsons, heavily damaged. Two White Scars rode just behind the turret, which was swung at an angle to create more space on the narrow shelf behind it. As she approached, one of them jumped down to intercept her. When the warrior saw who she was, he bowed low."}
{"text":"ff to do it. But she had to see for herself, with her own eyes, not through some relayed vid-feed.\n\nThe lead tank of the procession growled its way to meet them even as she ran across the parapet deck. It was a Leman Russ, Ryza-pattern, no sponsons, heavily damaged. Two White Scars rode just behind the turret, which was swung at an angle to create more space on the narrow shelf behind it. As she approached, one of them jumped down to intercept her. When the warrior saw who she was, he bowed low.\n\n'Szu-Ilya,' he said hoarsely.\n\nShe did not know him immediately. Like all those fighting now, his armour was caked so heavily that it was virtually black. She did spy what looked like the sigil of the Iron Axe under the dirt, so deduced that he was Jangsai, the Rijan newblood Naranbaatar had spoken highly of, the one who had been at the kurultai.\n\n'Show me,' she said.\n\nJangsai hesitated. 'It is... very bad.'\n\nAs if that would have dissuaded her. She ran up to the tank's flank, climbed up the tracks herself, shrugging off Jangsai's attempt to help her.\n\nOnce in place, she could only bear to look for a few moments. In orbit over Ullanor, she had glimpsed a primarch up close for the first time, this one, and the splendour had been so overwhelming that it had been almost too much to bear. Now her first instinct was to clap her hand over her rebreather's intake to stop herself from crying out aloud. For a moment or two, she wasn't even sure what she was looking at. Then, amid the drifting ash and engine fumes, she caught the remnants of a noble face, the shattered remains of a hawkish nose, the hollows where cheeks had been. She saw a knife-sharp landscape of armour fragments, buried into a bloody patchwork of torn muscle beneath. She saw a broken blade laid lengthways along the body, its lustre gone, its perfect curve twisted.\n\nShe drew closer, only dimly aware of the hot tears running down her cheeks. She reached out, guiltily, awkwardly, and no White Scar attempted to prevent her. She touched the one fragment of intact skin she could see - the neck, just below the jawline, a single spot that remained unsullied. And as she did so, just a graze of shaking fingers, she felt it.\n\nShe jerked back, as if electrocuted.\n\n'You have scanned him?' she demanded, turning to Jangsai. 'You have checked?'\n\n'Many times, szu. But our instruments...'\n\nIlya stared hard at the ruins of the body. It seemed inconceivable, impossible. No movement, no pulse, no breath. And yet...\n\nBecause I plan to come back.\n\n'Malcador,' Ilya snapped, her whole being switching straight back into the old currents of command. 'We have to get him to Malcador.'\n\nThe change was instantaneous. Sojuk swivelled on his heel and sprinted back to the Thunderhawk. Jangsai's warriors roused themselves. Two of them raced to the gunship to retrieve stretchers, others formed up to lower the body from the hull. Even as she jumped down herself, Ilya's mind began to race - could they get back? How could they avoid being shot down? Did the Sanctum even stand, still?\n\nThey would have to find a way. They would have to - if there was any chance, any chance at all, then it was there, in the birthplace of the primarchs, at the hands of the ones who had made them.\n\n'I will come with you,' said Jangsai.\n\nIlya nodded, before suddenly looking back, over at the space port summit towering above them. It was still contested. Thousands of Jaghatai's people were still fighting and dying within its depths, driven now by a hatred so intense that nothing would stop them destroying themselves upon its fearful altar.\n\nKal damarg. The Chogorian ritual of the dead, enacted across an entire Legion.\n\n'No,' she said, even as the stretchers were hurried back from the gunship and the engines whined up for the lift. 'No, I need you here.' She came up to him. 'He wanted the space port taken. You understand that? That was the important thing. Not destroyed. Taken.'\n\nJangsai understood immediately. 'Then they must be halted.'\n\n'When they reach the outer edge, when their madness carries them too far. It must be stopped there.'\n\nJangsai didn't reply immediately. Ilya could see that he agreed. 'But I am not...' he started. 'I am not someone...'\n\nShe smiled at him. 'Of Chogoris? Someone they'll listen to?' she asked. 'Neither was I, but that changed quickly.' She took both his gauntlets, reaching up to clasp them in her still-shaking hands. 'Find Shiban. He will do what must be done.'\n\nIt was only then that she saw the sword scabbard hanging at his belt. It was a famous one, guarding one of the great blades of Ong-Hashin. More importantly, she knew the name of its first bearer, a name known to all warriors of the ordu. Had Naranbaatar given that to him? Had he had a reason for that?\n\n'Tell him I sent you, that the Khagan is with me now,' said Ilya, making ready to run back for the powering-up gunship. 'And, if that doesn't work, just show him the sword.'\n\nIt ended under stone.\n\nIt ended under the great sarcophagus of the Lion's Gate space port, which had once proudly scraped the troposphere with its high platforms, its manufactoria and observation domes, and had now been reduced by three separate sons of the Emperor into a semi-derelict haunt of daemons.\n\nJangsai ran deep within it, going as fast as he could, fighting his way through the narrow corridors and the booming halls. Dangers still resided everywhere, despite the fighting withdrawal of the Death Guard. Many of the yaksha hung around in the seeping depths, ready to crackle into instantiation. The interior itself was still an enemy, clogged with the knee-deep quagmires and sumps, much of it semi-sentient and seething with an almost conscious malice.\n\nFor all that, Jangsai was able to make rapid progress now that the White Scars' charge had driven the enemy so deeply back. The switch was astonishing. All three V Legion spearheads, as far as anyone had been able to tell him during the height of the fighting, had been locked in vicious stalemates against an enemy who lived for such warfare. The departure of both primarchs had produced radically different effects. Jangsai had no idea precisely why - the ways of daemons and their banishments meant little to him - but that didn't much matter. It had happened. The death-fury had done its work - united all three battlefronts into a single vast, obsessional push that had swept all resistance before it even as it consumed its own warriors from the inside out.\n\nJangsai was following in the wake of that, now. He ran past the corpses of both V and XIV Legion warriors, slumped in the mire, piled on top of one another. The corpse-tally was almost as astonishing as the reversal. A toll had been reaped, here. Perhaps neither Legion would ever be able to claim completely unqualified victory or defeat, so comprehensively had each side mauled the other. The place was a charnel house, just as the whole planet was.\n\nAnd yet it was being shriven. It was being purged, exorcised, eviscerated, and the warriors of the ordu were doing the slaying now. The one task was to prevent that great surge of vital energy from becoming uncontrollable. The Sage had not underestimated the dangers - tales of warriors in a state of kal damarg destroying themselves were rife on Chogoris, so much so that even a newblood like Jangsai knew of them.\n\nThe one advantage he had was that his tactical sensors were operating again, at least partially. He could see false-colour cartoliths spidering away from him, each populated by clusters of light - heat signatures, movement vectors, locator idents. The closer he got to the port's eastern edge, the clearer the signals became. The White Scars had fought the Death Guard across the entire breadth of the enormous fortress, and were now threatening to fight them clean out of the far gates. They wouldn't stop there. Lost in their world of blood-tinged vengeance, they would just keep going, killing without reason, until the measureless armies of the Warmaster finally caught up with them all and burned their zeal from the universe forever.\n\nHe had to find Shiban. He had to reach the one voice who might be able to call them back before it was too late. And that was hard, as hard as anything he had ever had to do. His body was drained, his mind exhausted. Every instinct within him pulled his focus back to the gunship, to the tiny speck of metal now hurtling west, carrying with it the last faint hope for the Legion. Millions of warriors clashed across the fields it had to compass, surging up against millions more, and yet that one ship, fragile as glass, now meant everything.\n\nThe great halls passed by in a blur, empty now, stinking of blood and corruption. He vaulted along the shell-pocked stairways, clambered up the treacherous elevator shafts, skirted the dregs of ongoing fighting and sprinted across teetering gantries. Soon he could hear serious engagements again - the roar of the mobile armour, the massed disruptor-snarl of Legion weapons being brought to bear.\n\nHe broke into what had once been a major receiving hangar, one that opened out from the eastern flank of the port's extreme edge. Its apron must have been eight hundred metres across, its heavy roof a hundred metres high. The air was less clotted and foul than within the interior - ash-flakes driven in from outside gusted across the spoil of battle. Hundreds of warriors fought in that location alone, supported by the ever-present squadrons of the Terran Armoured.\n\nJangsai locked on to Shiban's signal, and raced to find him. As he closed in, he caught sight of the telltale glint of augmetics amid all the gloom and grime. The Restorer was fighting a larger Traitor Marine, and the encounter was already impressively brutal. Jangsai had never seen a guan dao whirled with such vindictive control before. The plague-ridden monster fought back determinedly, but there was something missing in all of the enemy troops now - the withdrawal of their old certainty, their"}
{"text":"angsai locked on to Shiban's signal, and raced to find him. As he closed in, he caught sight of the telltale glint of augmetics amid all the gloom and grime. The Restorer was fighting a larger Traitor Marine, and the encounter was already impressively brutal. Jangsai had never seen a guan dao whirled with such vindictive control before. The plague-ridden monster fought back determinedly, but there was something missing in all of the enemy troops now - the withdrawal of their old certainty, their old implacability. Shiban, on the other hand, was simply electrifying. He just kept pressing, pressing, pressing, taking hits but never so much as flinching away from them. When the killing strike came - a leap, a transverse decapitation - it felt almost merciful.\n\nJangsai caught up just as Shiban was about to stride out for more prey. All the White Scars around him were the same - grave-silent now, grinding their way towards the enemy, pushing them back, stride by stride, out to where the gaping hangar maws overlooked the demolished wastes beyond.\n\n'Tachseer!' Jangsai shouted.\n\nShiban ignored him. He barely seemed aware of anything around him, only the enemy.\n\nJangsai shouted again, with the same result, then raced ahead, drawing his blade, just as Ilya had told him to. The bloodstained tulwar flashed out in the dark, its disruptor stilled but the naked steel vivid enough.\n\nOnly when Shiban halted, staring at it, did Jangsai remember Naranbaatar's words to him, back at Colossi, when the weapon had first been delivered.\n\nMorbun Xa is famed, not just for his prowess, but also for his restraint. He is a model of the Path of Heaven, they say.\n\nJangsai had never known him. Shiban would have done. So this was the moment.\n\n'I come from the Sage,' Jangsai said. 'The Khagan is with her. She seeks a path to the Sanctum. She told me to tell you that the port must be taken. Not destroyed, but taken.' He looked into Shiban's unreadable helm-mask the whole time. 'That goes for the Legion, too.'\n\nShiban remained immobile for a long time. His stance radiated the urge for violence. It was so seductive, that state. Jangsai understood it fully. Given the right impetus, you could always imagine yourself sinking into it and never emerging again. A part of him, a part that every Space Marine possessed, was only truly at peace when killing. The World Eaters were just the most rarefied example, but all of them had the capacity, to one degree or another. The lesson of the entire war, you might say.\n\nThen Shiban looked away, over to the lip of the hangar's edge. The White Scars had taken the ground leading up to it by then, harrying the remaining traitors beyond the perimeter. They were now preparing to follow them out, to drive spears of energised hatred into the fiery dark beyond.\n\nFor a terrible moment, Jangsai thought Shiban would still sanction that, joining them all in that charge into oblivion. There was nothing more to say, though - nothing he could add to Ilya's injunction. He couldn't know that the Restorer's only thought at that moment was not of the Khan at all, nor of Ilya, nor of the Legion's ultimate fate, but of the Terran khan he had once fought alongside on the White World, whom he had not forgiven, not until it was too late.\n\nNo backward step.\n\n'Cease,' Shiban said softly. Then, more strongly, 'Cease!'\n\nHe was speaking over the open vox-grid. His Stormseer, who had been fighting alongside him, heard the command, and worked to ensure that it was heard more widely. Comms relays picked it up, and soon it was being propagated to units far out of visual range.\n\nNext, Shiban started to walk - slowly, purposively, trudging up to the wind-torn window onto the outside world. Sensing that something fundamental had changed, Jangsai came with him. Under their feet were the mighty foundations of the space port. Over their heads was the colossal overhang of the hangar's roof. Directly ahead was the sky, that most sacred element for a Chogorian, even when it was poisoned and scored with flame and masked with unnatural clouds.\n\nShiban reached the fortress' edge, and rested the heel of his glaive against the rockcrete parapet. Those who had come with him, all those who had made it to the perimeter, stood alongside, waiting. Jangsai's helm-data told him that thousands more were doing the same thing - holding position, stirred out of madness by the word of the Restorer, just as they had been on the bridge of the Swordstorm over the similarly destroyed skies of Prospero.\n\nShiban took his time. He gazed out at the kilometres of pure devastation, the bitter fruit of Horus' rebellion. He watched the Death Guard make their way through the broken outworks in the dark, tens of thousands of them, bereft of leadership for now, but still intact and dangerous and capable of recovering their resolve. He observed the encampments of the lost and the damned in the hinterland beyond, those millions upon millions of low-grade soldiers that haunted every Terran ruin. He perceived the distant profiles of Titans, of Knights, of greater Legion formations even further out.\n\n'This is where he fell,' he said softly.\n\nThe hangar echoed into silence. Jangsai listened. Every member of the Legion within transmit range listened.\n\n'This is our place now.' Shiban's voice was still harsh from the augmetics in his throat, but no longer distorted with that elemental fury. 'This is holy ground. This is Chogoris on Earth. This is where he fell.'\n\nThe White Scars were responding. Jangsai's tactical read-out told him that they were all coming to a halt - all across the wide fortress perimeter, out on the causeways, up in the towers, down in the shadowed foundations. Wherever they had cleansed the taint of the enemy, they were standing watchfully now, heeding the words of the Tachseer.\n\n'Yesugei taught us this,' Shiban told them. 'Do not become what is hateful. Do not become the thing you fight.'\n\nJangsai kept his blade unsheathed. They all had their weapons held ready now. More fighting would come, soon, just as fearsome, just as deadly, but this was the edge, the liminal place, the line of blood in the grime.\n\n'So we set our mark here,' Shiban said. 'The rite of grief ends where this place ends.'\n\nThe remaining tanks came to a halt also, taking up positions overlooking the plains. Jangsai didn't know if any of the crew were hearing this, or if they understood it, but they had come this far, and fought superbly, and deserved to be present.\n\n'They shall never have it. They may take all other worlds, they may master the warp, they may despoil the very arch of heaven, but they shall never have this place. It has our mark upon it. It is sacred.'\n\nOne by one, the khans were doing as Shiban did - planting their feet squarely, mastering their hate, returning to their right mind, restoring equilibrium.\n\n'When we fight again, it will not be for conquest, nor for vengeance, but to preserve this.'\n\nAbove them, the green tinge on the bare stone was fading away. Lumens were coming on, flickering, then solidifying, then burning through the filth. The Lion's Gate space port had been ravaged, twice, but it had not been razed. Its surviving landing stages, its soaring walls, its colossal reactors and - most of all - its mighty guns, were theirs.\n\n'We stand, here, now,' Shiban told them. In his voice there was just a hint of what had been there a long time ago on Chondax - the belief, the faint reflection of an inner joy. 'We cede no ground, we suffer no enemy to cross the threshold. It is our place, from this day, until the end of time.'\n\nThen Shiban raised his glaive high. Chakaja raised his staff. Jangsai raised his blade. Every warrior of the White Scars in that place of sorrow and suffering raised their weapon, not in the cause of a curse as before, but as the khans of old had done under the twin moons, in salute, to mark what had changed, and what had died, but also what remained, and what was eternal.\n\n'For the Emperor!' Shiban cried.\n\nAnd all across the Lion's Gate, from the scoured depths to the cleansed heights, the throats of Jaghatai's people were opened in the timeless answer, the one that justified all their suffering and sanctified their victory.\n\nFor the Khan.\n\nAftermaths\n\nHe raised his head.\n\nRogal Dorn lifted his eyes from the battery of lenses that surrounded him, and looked out over the command chamber. Had he been sleeping? Or just immersed in some calculation again, running over the schedules of deployment one more time?\n\nSomething had changed. The crushing weight that had lain on his shoulders for so long - it wasn't gone, entirely. But changed. Merely physical, now; the product of weeks without rest. The malice of it had gone. The voices in his mind - gone.\n\nHe saw people working around him. They must have been there the whole time, but now he remembered their names, when they had arrived, who they had replaced. Acuity was coming back. The fog was lifting.\n\nHe shifted in his command throne, daring to hope for news from the east. A few depressions on control valves, insertions in the channels that he had reserved for this very purpose. And then news, encoded in the ciphers that only he could unpick, sent from the sources that only he had access to.\n\nArchamus came up to him. Even he looked subtly altered, a little less stooped. 'Word from the port,' he announced.\n\n'I know,' said Dorn, already working out what it could mean. Maybe little - just a strike back for pride. But maybe everything. It all depended what had been salvaged.\n\nArchamus didn't ask how he had known. 'From what we can tell, the main structure has been taken. No solid communications yet, and little chance of getting them. Reports of major Fourteenth Legion formations moving north and west.'\n\nDorn took that all in. If Mortarion's forces had been expelled, and if they decided not to attempt the port again, then it could only mean they were heading for the centre now. That would be another factor for him to consi"}
{"text":"ing. It all depended what had been salvaged.\n\nArchamus didn't ask how he had known. 'From what we can tell, the main structure has been taken. No solid communications yet, and little chance of getting them. Reports of major Fourteenth Legion formations moving north and west.'\n\nDorn took that all in. If Mortarion's forces had been expelled, and if they decided not to attempt the port again, then it could only mean they were heading for the centre now. That would be another factor for him to consider, along with everything else.\n\nBut still. Still.\n\nHe found himself cracking a weary smile. Jaghatai, you insufferable, infuriating... prodigy.\n\n'Does it alter anything?' Archamus asked him.\n\nDorn knew what he meant - the withdrawals, the pull-backs, the fighting retreats. No, it didn't alter any of that. The Palatine was all that remained under his direct control now - that narrow ring of bastions surrounding the Sanctum itself, little more than a single urban zone, now about to be engulfed by the combined mass of Horus' many vanguards.\n\n'All standing orders remain,' he replied. 'The final act comes next.' He shot a dry smile at his deputy. 'I almost find myself looking forward to it. Too long since I carried my blade to the front, eh?'\n\nArchamus looked startled. It had been weeks since Dorn had so much as flickered a smile, let alone offered him anything other than fatigue-curt orders. 'Sigismund returns to the bastions,' he reported. 'His force is the last - then all is inside.'\n\nDorn nodded. That cheered him. The Emperor's Champion. And he found that now he couldn't begrudge the title at all - the grim old Templar had more than earned it.\n\n'Try to discover what strength the Fifth retains, if any,' Dorn said. 'But do not expend much time on it - we cannot help them, and they cannot help us. I would have spoken to my brother before the end, if I could have done. A shame.'\n\nArchamus nodded, and made to leave.\n\n'But that end comes now, Huscarl,' Dorn said, holding him back for just a moment. 'Listen. Know that you have served me with perfect distinction. Perfect. It will be an honour, for me, to have my sons at my side.'\n\nArchamus didn't look like he knew how to respond to that either. While he struggled awkwardly for an appropriate response, another aide raced up to the dais bearing a data-slate and a collection of message-tubes.\n\n'Word from the Palatine, my lord,' she blurted. 'A Fifth Legion Thunderhawk has made it through the cordon, escorted in to dock, cargo now being unloaded.'\n\n'What cargo?' Dorn asked.\n\nThe aide swallowed nervously. 'I think you should... well, I think you will want to see this for yourself.'\n\n'The Fifth is back.'\n\nValdor digested that information. Diocletian, Tribune of the Ten Thousand, stood before him, his armour covered in the vivid scorch marks that gave away recent fighting against the daemonic.\n\n'Alive?' he asked.\n\n'Unknown.'\n\n'Then find out.'\n\n'I mean, captain-general, that his state - life, death - is currently unknown, to anyone. The Sigillite is doing what he can, but I am told that even his art is so far proving insufficient. On the edge. That is how it was described to me.'\n\nOn the edge. Weren't they all?\n\n'Then we must hope he recovers,' he said. 'If he is here, if he can stand again before the end, then that is one more blade, and a rare one at that.'\n\nDiocletian nodded. Since Valdor had returned to the Tower, he had never so much as hinted at the question. Where have you been?\n\nAmon knew. The guards Valdor had placed over the bio-criminal as he worked, now in the depths of the Tower's own hyper-secret laboratoria, must have had some inkling. None of them would say anything. The Legio Custodes were so used to guarding their secrets that concealment was now an essential part of their nature - the default position, whenever matters of state arose within their ranks.\n\nThat didn't prevent the issue from preying on Valdor's mind. He still heard the whispers of all the creatures he had killed on Terra. The Emperor remained silent, and in that absence, all he had were those voices, teasing, tempting, reproaching, over and over again.\n\nHe could end this. If Fo was right, if he was even partly right, then the great experiment Valdor had watched unfold over centuries, the catastrophic creation of those quarrelsome warmongers, it could all be eradicated. To destroy them now, before they unravelled creation entirely, that might well have been the Emperor's will. It might be what needed to happen. Surely the day would have come, sooner or later, in any case. Surely there would have been an Ararat for the Legions, too.\n\nSo if Horus, greatest of them all, should make landfall here, if he should break down the gates and seek to enter the Sanctum itself, would that be the moment? And if so, would there still be an opportunity to look up at the Throne, to seek confirmation before all its great work was destroyed? Or would he have to make the decision before that hour came, alone, trusting in a faculty of judgement that had only ever been created to serve, not to lead?\n\nAnd what if that judgement were wrong? What if the Emperor still had intentions, yet to be disclosed? What if this had been His plan all along, and only time, and patient loyalty, would yet reveal its perfection? Would he, Valdor, then be a greater betrayer even than Lupercal, led into error by those who had proven themselves over and again to be without scruple or wholesome emotion? Would he, as incorruptible as the stars themselves, be the heretic?\n\nOr would he merely stumble at the appointed hour, too frozen by doubt to act? Or was this why he had been given the spear in the first place, to lead him to enlightenment?\n\nWould it even work?\n\nShould it work?\n\nHe had almost forgotten Diocletian was still standing there. Valdor collected himself and took up his spear once more. As he did so, he felt the static spike of transference, the abrasive reminder of the blood drunk greedily by this thing.\n\n'Thank you for the briefing, tribune,' he said, rising from his seat.\n\n'Then you will take to the tunnels again?' A sliver of reproach, there? Or was Valdor seeing phantoms everywhere now?\n\n'I will,' Valdor said, preparing himself. It would only be worse from this point onward. More of them would be getting in, squirming up from the floors, out from the walls, rising in both stature and malevolence. 'I feel the need to make them suffer greatly. Perhaps you will join me on the hunt - two blades together.'\n\nDiocletian bowed. 'It will be the highest honour.'\n\nAnd then they were moving down the stone corridor, heading lower, to where the realms of experience mingled and the Neverborn were starting to breed.\n\nAnd all Valdor heard were the voices, over and over.\n\nCan it be done?\n\nIt had been done.\n\nErebus surveyed his work. The lodge was destroyed, the depression was burning. Erda's trinkets had been smashed. When the sandstorms came, the entire site would be erased, not even a wound in the world's skin to mark her sanctuary.\n\nAnd he felt empty.\n\nIt would have been better to have come away with more. Even if he couldn't have talked her into alliance, he had at least hoped for enlightenment on how it had been done. Fewer maudlin regrets from her, a little more relish. Why were so many of those around him so obsessed with regrets, in any case? They had never bothered him. Sometimes he thought he might be the single most contented creature in the entire galaxy, never troubled by doubt or conscience, just doing the most exciting, the most rewarding, thing anyone had ever conceived of. Lucky him.\n\nThe residual danger she posed had been eradicated. The select fellowship of those who had walked with the Emperor in His youth had diminished a little further, just one more step on the road to total oblivion for their aberrant strain. If they could not be suborned, they would have to be purged, an evolutionary wrong turn to be culled from experience, and that was work he was temperamentally suited for.\n\nAll the same, it had been frustrated effort. He had worked very hard to find her, bewitched by the slender hope she might have been some kind of kindred spirit. As for now, he had no clear idea where he would go next, since he had no official function any longer at Horus' court. Maybe he would linger on Terra, maybe not. It felt as if his part in the proceedings was already becoming redundant, just a sideshow now, something greater players could choose to ignore.\n\nHe walked morosely back towards the path leading up the cliffs. As he trudged, his boot crunched through more of that woman's pathetic collection of toys. He stooped to pick one up - another fearsomely ugly statue, as fragile as all the rest of them.\n\nHe remembered how eager she had been to talk about those things. She must have known he'd come to recruit her or to kill her, and yet the prattle had all been about pottery. If he'd been her, he'd have wanted it all over quickly - get it settled, one way or the other.\n\nOver quickly.\n\nHe stood still for a moment, pondering that. She'd had art. Art on a scale he'd encountered very rarely. If she'd been at all concerned with survival, could she not have tried to escape? This was her place, after all, one she knew better than anyone else. She'd never so much as hinted at the chance. Instead, she'd talked. Made him angry. Given him nothing.\n\nHe stared down at the broken figurine. She'd tried to persuade him these things were symbolic of something important. Perhaps they were. Or maybe she just liked the way they looked, and all that verbiage had served nothing but its own purpose.\n\nAs he had hunted her, he had been shown glimpses of other souls too - always just ahead of him, caught up in that whirl of warp worlds, slipping from one time and place to another. He'd thought they were a kind of phantom, some random fore-echo that he could safely ignore while he caught up with his real target.\n\nBut what if they had been something to do with her? What if the "}
{"text":"s they were. Or maybe she just liked the way they looked, and all that verbiage had served nothing but its own purpose.\n\nAs he had hunted her, he had been shown glimpses of other souls too - always just ahead of him, caught up in that whirl of warp worlds, slipping from one time and place to another. He'd thought they were a kind of phantom, some random fore-echo that he could safely ignore while he caught up with his real target.\n\nBut what if they had been something to do with her? What if the warp had been showing him soul-relationships, fate-skeins, chained destinies, just as it so often did? Had she guessed that too? Had she known much more than she'd ever given away?\n\nIt was so basic, and yet so suggestive. Had she kept him talking? Was that it? Were these people, these half-glimpsed ether-refugees, somehow valuable to her? Were they her kindred? Her emissaries, even?\n\nHe had accused her of doing nothing. But the great powers always acted through their agents - the Emperor had done, Horus did too. Perhaps this, then, was her very last play, launched in the knowledge that she would never see it accomplished.\n\nHe let Erda's figurine fall to the dirt, crushed it beneath his heel. Then he drew the athame from his armour, the little sliver of sorcery that helped him get around.\n\n'Not over yet,' Erebus said, making ready for the ritual. 'One last leap into the dark.'\n\nThey were there already. All that remained was to limp through it.\n\nAlpharius led them, of course. He claimed to know exactly where the tunnels led, and how to negotiate them towards the catacombs under the Dungeon itself. Actae trusted that confidence implicitly, and strode along beside him. Oll doubted it all. Surely someone would have sealed up all the ways in, even those deep underground? He kept close to the mysterious Space Marine, with John marching by his side. Zybes, Krank, Graft and Katt were next. Leetu brought up the rear.\n\nMother of God, he was tired. He was thirsty, and he was hungry. They had a few supplies left, but not many, and this place was gigantic. They might be days away from the promised insertion point, or even weeks. Who knew, in this inky underground world of twisting passages and blind drops into nothingness.\n\nGetting out of the damaged lighter had been difficult enough. Then they'd had to tramp along the deep base of that hateful trench, which had carried its fair share of stragglers from the main battlefronts. Both Leetu and Alpharius had been invaluable then, as neither Actae nor Katt had wanted to risk using their particular gifts in such close proximity to those who might detect them. A Space Marine in action was an alarming thing, witnessed close up. Thinking about that killing potential multiplied by all the Legions in action around them, well that was just ludicrous. No wonder it had all gone wrong.\n\nBut they had made it, somehow, worming their way into the culvert that Alpharius had claimed to be expecting, and then down, always down, burrowing further into the sedimentary layers of forgetfulness, threading a path through the tiny filigree of tunnels that had been left behind when other worlds had died and been buried.\n\nSoon they could hear the rumble of combat from both above and below, as if they traced their delicate path between two parallel apocalypses. It became hot, very hot. Oll's handheld lumen was already failing, but its weak light illuminated some very strange shapes carved into the dripping rock around him.\n\nHe looked at John. The logokine didn't look well. Maybe this last stage had been too much for him. Maybe it had been too much for all of them.\n\n'You all right?' Oll asked.\n\nJohn nodded. 'Keeping it together,' he said dryly. 'You?'\n\nOll thought about that for a moment. 'Don't know. I mean, this is it now, isn't it? We're here.'\n\n'Not quite. Not till that Space Marine stops moving.'\n\nOll smiled, but he didn't like to think of that. He didn't like to think about what was at the end of the tunnels. The Emperor? Would Oll even recognise Him now? Or maybe the Warmaster, arrived well ahead of them and already ensconced on the Golden Throne? Or maybe neither of them, just more armies, more vile creatures, all milling about and trying to get to the same place, the singularity, the centre of the universe.\n\nEnough. The decision had been made. They had to see it out, now.\n\n'You had religion, once,' John said, looking over at him in the dark. 'Before they banned it. I'm curious. Do you still have it?'\n\nOf course he did. That was the whole point of it.\n\n'Why do you ask?'\n\nJohn shrugged. 'Just wondering. How anyone could. Now we've seen all this. Done all this. Not to disparage it, or anything. Only curious.'\n\nOll walked on in silence. This probably wasn't the time to get into a theological discussion, not while a very plausible rendition of hell itself was on the very edge of bursting into existence right on top of them. But it was a decent question. Then again, it had always been a decent question, all through every war he had ever fought in. Pain had always existed, as had suffering. Those had never been sufficient, by themselves, to invalidate his certainties.\n\n'Possibly,' he said. 'That might be the way to look at it. On the other hand, the flip side might be true, too, just like before.'\n\nThere was no light, save for that they brought with them. Just then, it felt like being lost in the void, alone, cut off, buried under an empire's worth of futility and self-inflicted carnage.\n\n'That maybe it'll be the thing that gets us out the other side,' said Oll, still walking, one step in front of the other, eyes ahead into the dark. 'Maybe, once this is over, faith might be the only thing we have left.'\n\nYes, that was it. Make any other allegiance into nothing. Destroy it, forget it. And after that, only faith remains.\n\nSigismund stared into the face of his sword. It remained unsheathed even after the fighting was long finished. Now he rocked as the troop carrier rocked, its engines dragging him away from the combat he had perfected at last. His surviving Templar Brethren sat around him. The casualty rates had been higher than most of the engagements he'd fought in. But the numbers they had killed in turn, well... those had been astounding. He himself had always taken out the figureheads - the captains, the praetors - more than he could easily count, one after the other. More champions would come for him, now. They would race to meet their end at the edge of his blade.\n\nHe didn't make much of a distinction between the kills. He did remember Kharn, of course, because that one had been properly hard. Even then, though, he felt little else about it, other than that it was over now, that he had won, and another threat to the Throne had been taken out. He didn't feel pride in overcoming an enemy, even one who had beaten him before, because pride was in the past. Shame, yes - he could still feel shame. But pride felt somehow anachronistic, something belonging to a world of secular achievement, not of moral certainty.\n\n'I didn't even know if you'd obey the command,' Rann said, sitting opposite him. 'To fall back.'\n\nSigismund didn't look up. He was all eyes for the sword, now.\n\n'It was an order,' he said flatly.\n\nThat still meant something - the word of his primarch. In the past, the sacredness of that would have derived from the bond between the two of them: genesire and vassal. Now it was something deeper. Dorn was less of a father to him now, more a son of the Emperor - a living embodiment of the Throne's will. There could be no question of not obeying orders, not just because of the chain of command within the Legion, but because the primarchs were only one step removed from the fount of all righteousness. They were an example, a model, created by Him on Earth to guide the weak into resolution.\n\nFinally, Sigismund slipped the blade back into its scabbard, and looked up at Rann. The assault captain had taken some heavy wounds. His helm was off now, revealing a patchwork of scabs and scars, all underlaid with a lurid smear of deep-bruised tissue.\n\n'But you were having so much fun,' said Rann.\n\nWould that have provoked a terse smile, in the past? Maybe. Not now. Sigismund was already thinking of the next operation. They would have to resupply inside the Palatine zone, assuming there were any supplies left to draw on. They would have to take direction from Bhab on what was coming for them, then draw up plans to disrupt it as much as possible.\n\n'It means... nothing,' he said, murmuring out loud without really meaning to.\n\n'What does?'\n\n'These... animals.' Sigismund was thinking of Kharn again, the way he had slavered and roared. He was thinking of the other mutated horrors he had cut down, even the daemons.\n\n'Then what do you want?' asked Rann, looking like even his extensive patience was wearing thin with all this icy moodiness.\n\nSigismund thought on that. What did he want? Now that he had achieved the transformation, had cast off his self-imposed restraints, there still needed to be growth, a way to hone things further.\n\nHe wanted an opponent who was worthy of his time. He wanted a Space Marine, not a chewed-through warp monster. He wanted one of the old guard, not a jumped-up lieutenant in captain's armour. He wanted a meaningful trophy to place at the foot of the Throne itself, so that he could say that the architects of this galactic heresy had been handed their due reward.\n\n'Abaddon,' he said darkly, interlocking the fingers of his bloody gauntlets. 'That's who I want.'\n\nThe transport began to slow down. They were nearing the bastion gates. After they were through those, they would disembark, tool up, then head out to fight again.\n\n'No peace now,' Sigismund said, calmly enough, but with that eerie sense of certainty that could chill even those who fought on his side. 'No peace, not on this world, not in the void beyond, until I find the First Captain.'\n\nThey found the First Captain easily enough, in the end. It tu"}
{"text":"s of his bloody gauntlets. 'That's who I want.'\n\nThe transport began to slow down. They were nearing the bastion gates. After they were through those, they would disembark, tool up, then head out to fight again.\n\n'No peace now,' Sigismund said, calmly enough, but with that eerie sense of certainty that could chill even those who fought on his side. 'No peace, not on this world, not in the void beyond, until I find the First Captain.'\n\nThey found the First Captain easily enough, in the end. It turned out he had paid very little attention to his master's orders, and had maintained formidable forces just out of range of the space port. Those might even have been used to shore up the fortress' defences, had he been so inclined. But he hadn't been, of course. He was a bitter old soul, was Typhus.\n\nIt made the great muster easier. All those XIV Legion assets expelled from the space port soon picked up locator signals, and began to coalesce again across a range of sites to the north and west of the port's extreme edge. The numbers were enormous. Despite all the losses to the White Scars, this was still a Legion capable of causing tremendous damage.\n\nOnce the surviving leaders assembled atop the designated command location - a high ridge commanding views both west and east, overhung by the corpse of a downed Imperial Warlord Titan - matters could be weighed up, decisions could be made.\n\nKalgaro had not made it out. The Deathshroud had not made it out. A large number of battalion commanders had not made it out. Morarg had, though. Crosius had, as had a few dozen company captains, a large number of Dreadnoughts and some useful squadrons of armour.\n\nTyphus stood among them all again, flanked by his own bodyguards, the Grave Wardens. Out in the open, the volume of his profile-distorting flies seemed to have grown. In fact, he seemed to have grown in many ways, some of them physical, some of them not.\n\n'We could still take it back,' Morarg told him.\n\nThe shock of Mortarion's withdrawal had faded, just as Crosius had promised. Morarg's disorientation had ebbed. He no longer found himself, nor those he fought alongside, repulsive. All that was replaced now with a deep sense of shame - for buckling under pressure, for letting the fortress slip away. With Typhus back, with all his forces joining those that had retreated out of the space port's many orifices, that wrong could be set right.\n\n'Why?' asked Typhus scornfully. 'What do we want in there? In truth, what did we ever want in there?'\n\n'Revenge,' said Morarg, though without much conviction.\n\nTyphus spat something from his helm-grille, making the flies wobble. 'That was his business. I care nothing for a few savages on jetbikes.' He lifted a heavy gauntlet, and curled it into a fist. 'We have time, despite all this wasted effort. We can be there before the close of the drama. And I want to be there.'\n\nA murmur of assent ran around the assembled warriors. Crosius, still with his pet daemon in tow, seemed especially enthusiastic.\n\n'So are you with me, equerry?' Typhus asked Morarg directly. 'You could exorcise his failure against a better target, if you chose to.' The First Captain stared directly at him, as if in accusation, as if daring him to articulate the truth.\n\nYou were our betrayer. You brought this on us. The better part of us is gone, now, and we are only left with you - the snake that curled around his ankles.\n\nMorarg said none of that. He remembered the Remnant, that shadow of a shadow.\n\nWe adore him.\n\nWhat a tragedy. Whatever happened here now, whatever honour the Death Guard still earned, the chance for greater glory was gone. That had been Mortarion's vision, snatched away on the cusp of being realised.\n\nThe primarch was still the liberator. He had dared to carve out a future for them, one that fulfilled all their limitless potential. Another war was coming, one without end, an endless rivalry between factions that would weaken the Legion for all eternity.\n\nWhat could he say, though? What would prevent that now? Nothing.\n\n'I am with you, First Captain,' Morarg said, the lie slipping so plausibly from his lips.\n\nAnd now he would be marching again under the banner of that lie. It wouldn't be the last one either, for they had become a Legion of liars, where once they had only ever told the unpalatable truth.\n\nLying would get easier. That was the way of these things - the first one was difficult, the next one would be less so.\n\n'Good,' said Typhus. 'Then we march together.'\n\nIt tasted bitter on his lips.\n\nBut it would get easier.\n\nIt did. It got much easier. The air was still too toxic to permit total relaxation of the protocols, but as long as they weren't required to venture back into the space port interior, Kaska allowed the crew a brief period outside the hull - wearing full rebreathers and sealed environment suits, of course.\n\nIt made all the difference. Just to be able to extend a leg properly, to stretch an arm. Everything ached. Kaska was covered in bruises from where he'd repeatedly collided with the turret interior. They were running low on potable water again, so would have to set off soon to see if a non-fouled cistern could be located. And then they had to think about fuel, and more ammunition, because none of them was foolish enough to think that their war was over.\n\nBut, for the moment, he stood on the same parapet where they'd halted, and looked over at his tank.\n\nAika 73. Not much of a name. Not much of a vehicle, either. It looked even worse now than it had in the depot. Something had made a fearful mess of its forward armour plates, and one track looked halfway to rupturing. He hadn't dared to inspect topside yet. He could see the lines of dry blood running down the side armour. Could that be cleaned off? Should it be? He had a feeling he would have to leave it there, at least if the Legion escorts had any say about it. They were strange people. Fine people, he thought, but strange, and with customs that he didn't pretend to understand.\n\nHis crew had all come through it, if not unscathed, then alive. Merck was busy explaining some longstanding issue he had about battalion regulations to Vosch, who was trying to ignore him while she saw to Jandev's nasty-looking gash.\n\nThat left Dresi. She was standing next to Kaska, waiting for him, he thought, to say something.\n\n'So, you're not Army,' he offered at last.\n\nShe shook her head.\n\n'Legion command staff?' he tried. 'White Scars?'\n\n'Seventh Legion,' she said. 'Imperial Fists.'\n\nKaska exhaled. 'So. I didn't know your... lord was even aware.'\n\nDresi smiled behind her breathing apparatus. 'Oh, he was aware. Not much escapes him. Not on Terra.'\n\n'So, I guess, there's the question...'\n\n'Why?' Dresi shrugged. 'Do not be alarmed. Standard procedure.'\n\n'There were others, then? In other units?'\n\n'Seventy-three of us, at the outset.'\n\nKaska thought on that. 'Just so he knew what was going on.'\n\n'To the extent possible.'\n\nHe looked away from her, and out over the parapet's edge. On the western horizon, far beyond the tract of land he was already beginning to think of as the Colossi Run, the storm clouds were gathering in intensity, angrier and darker.\n\n'You can't go back,' he said.\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Then, I mean...' He turned back to her. 'I could still use a driver.'\n\n'Absolutely. I intend to continue.'\n\nThat was good news. It explained, in hindsight, why she had been so damned good. Legion-trained. The very best.\n\n'And afterwards?'\n\nDresi laughed. As far as he could remember, that was the very first time. 'Afterwards? You think we will see an afterwards?' She shook her head. 'Throne, I do not know. A Leman Russ is much the same as a Land Raider on the inside. Maybe there will be a way to continue.'\n\nShe looked over at Aika 73.\n\n'Not a bad thing to drive, despite the reputation,' she said, almost affectionately. 'What more can you ask? It kept us alive.'\n\nAs did the machine. Maybe. Or maybe all that was left of him was a collection of physical remnants, just preserved inside a vile contraption that looked more like a torture device than a medicae unit.\n\nIlya hadn't left his side. Her general's uniform by itself didn't guarantee her access to the very heart of the Sanctum, but her face was familiar from the time she'd spent cultivating contacts in the run-up to Horus' arrival. And having Sojuk there had been an advantage too - the White Scar had shed his equanimity for something more menacing, and that had opened doors.\n\nShe didn't remember much of the journey in. Sojuk hadn't spoken about it. By rights it should have been impossible, but then again the air-lanes had been almost cleared by the wholesale slaughter in the weeks beforehand, giving them the slender chance they had needed. And Sojuk was an exceptional pilot. And maybe, for once, the fates had been on their side.\n\nFrom the receiving stations in the Palatine Ring, they had been hurried into the heart of the Sanctum, and then down, down a long way. They had passed through chambers Ilya had never got close to before. If she had not been so preoccupied with the cargo she escorted, she might have taken a closer look at them, and observed how old they were, and how different they looked to any Imperial structures she'd seen elsewhere.\n\nNow they were in the care of the Sigillite's people. Those all wore robes of deep green, and ghosted through the shadows with a lifetime's habituation to the dark. Their skin, where exposed, was drained of colour, threaded with augmetics of strange design. They had an unsettling way of looking at you, as if they were focusing on a spot just off to one side, a fraction too deep behind your eyes.\n\nShe had been grateful when one of the senior officials, a man named Khalid Hassan, had come to speak to them. He, at least, had looked relatively normal.\n\n'The Sigillite has been summoned,' Hassan had told them. 'He will be here as soon as he can. Please, wait here - I shall see you are looked after.'\n\nThat wait had felt like hours. It "}
{"text":" of strange design. They had an unsettling way of looking at you, as if they were focusing on a spot just off to one side, a fraction too deep behind your eyes.\n\nShe had been grateful when one of the senior officials, a man named Khalid Hassan, had come to speak to them. He, at least, had looked relatively normal.\n\n'The Sigillite has been summoned,' Hassan had told them. 'He will be here as soon as he can. Please, wait here - I shall see you are looked after.'\n\nThat wait had felt like hours. It was during then that the great machinery had been wheeled out, with its serpentine cabling and its frosted glass panes, hissing with vapours and hauled on long segmented tracks. Forests of instruments had been hoisted overhead on cantilevered arms, all of it gnarled and ancient-looking. What remained of the primarch had disappeared into the heart of all that, and after that Ilya had only caught glimpses of him, lost behind a clicking menagerie of arcana.\n\nMalcador himself had come eventually, bustling through the outer portals, his cowl thrown back, his age-creased face lined with concern.\n\n'You delivered him?' he had demanded brusquely.\n\n'I did, lord,' she had said.\n\nHe had grasped her hand, squeezing it hard with his own desiccated claws. 'Thank you. Thank you.'\n\nThen he'd disappeared too, clambering into the tangled core of the ever-expanding nexus of instrumentation, followed by cadres of esoteric assistants in full-length environment suits and reflective face masks.\n\nIlya and Sojuk were permitted to remain as promised, out of the way, but only by a door's width. It was left partially open, so she could see just a corner of the great device. One of its many panels was embossed with the numeral V, which made her wonder just how old it was, and what its origin had been.\n\nAfter that, the real wait began. Ilya slumped against the bare rock wall, sitting on a shelf cut into it. Sojuk stood next to her.\n\nAll her infirmities rushed back in that moment. She suddenly felt her age. She felt her frailty, the footsteps of the impending demise that she had been stalling for so long that it had become almost comical.\n\n'He knew,' she said. Her thin voice echoed oddly in those eerie catacombs.\n\nSojuk turned to her. 'If he did it, then it was necessary.'\n\nShiban had told her that too, a long time ago. Killing is nothing without beauty, and it may only be beautiful if it is necessary. But this hadn't been beautiful. Nothing about it was beautiful - it had been ugly, horrific, without any of the art that she knew he venerated.\n\n'You felt it,' she said. 'You all did. He died, Sojuk.'\n\nSojuk didn't look like he wanted to speculate. 'The arch of heaven hides many mysteries. Let them do their work. This was where they were made.'\n\nEasy to say, harder to do. She had to sit back, and wait. A lifetime of doing, of making choices and giving orders. In the chamber beyond, she heard drills going in. She heard lines being clicked into place. She heard the murmur of quiet, competent voices.\n\nShe let her head fall back against the stone. She was exhausted, but she wouldn't sleep.\n\nThere is always a Great Khan.\n\nShe clenched her fists. She had to stay awake.\n\nLet them do their work.\n\nFor the labour had only just begun. The survivors of the Legion, already driven to the extremes of endurance, were now tasked with securing what they had won. The space port remained dangerous - the White Scars controlled its borders, had mastery of its major systems now, but many areas were still too foul to enter or remained teeming with nightmares. The long lines of battlements had yet to be compassed, the collapsed areas shored up, the power fully restored and fresh sources of untainted supplies located.\n\nSo Shiban never stopped working. Jangsai worked alongside him, and slowly what remained of the Legion command joined them. Ganzorig was among those, though Qin Fai had been killed in action, as had Naranbaatar and the greater part of the zadyin arga. The attempt to count the full tally of the dead and extract surviving gene-seed had only just started, hampered by the need to burn the enemy corpses lest plague begin to spread again.\n\nFor all that, the port was theirs for as long as they had the power to defend it. The great palls of psychic despondency had lifted, replaced by a more prosaic weariness that could be fought through. As a result, once the raw business of survival had been attended to, once the reconstruction and defensive work was fully underway, thoughts swiftly turned to what came next. What could be done. What must be done.\n\n'Any news from the core?' asked Ganzorig, standing awkwardly amid the ruins on a shattered and roughly splinted leg.\n\nJangsai shook his head. 'They would not risk the transmission, even if there was.'\n\n'It matters not,' said Shiban. 'It must be now as he always wished for - not to defend, but to attack.'\n\nTo repress that urge for so long had been the greatest challenge, for it was just as he had told Torghun, all the way back on Chondax, before any awareness of heresy had even reached them. We must fight in the way we were born to fight.\n\n'We can barely man the walls,' said Ganzorig sceptically. 'Do we have the strength?'\n\n'Not over land,' said Shiban. 'Our war there is done, unless they dare to come at us themselves.' He gestured upward, and cracked a grin under his battered helm. 'But we have the guns. We get them working, we power them up.'\n\nThey all started to visualise it. It wouldn't be easy. But then, nothing worth doing ever was.\n\n'Then we do what we came here for,' said Shiban fiercely. 'Target the fleet.'\n\n'No beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage.'\n\n- Lucius Plutarchus, Ancient Grekan Solar Priest\n\n'They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal: this they falsely name Empire. And where they make a wasteland, they call it peace.'\n\n- Tassatus of the Etruscus-Romanii Kingdom, prehistoric philosopher\n\n'Sanguinius is loyal to our father out of perfect love and perfect nobility, and if that were all, he would still be the best of us. But he is also loyal out of perfect fear. He fears the reason he has wings. He fears what they might represent. He fears something went wrong during his creation and he fears the effects this may have upon his own gene-sons.\n\n'The insecurity that binds Sanguinius to the Emperor, perhaps more so than any other of our father's sons, is born of the belief that he has the most to prove. It is a bitter irony, because he is the one with the least.\n\n'The one with the most to prove is the barbarian of Nuceria, but Angron has never possessed any desire to live up to the Emperor's expectations. He regards such a fate as worse than failure. To him, it would be nothing less than a second slavery.'\n\n- The writings of the Primarch Lorgar\n\nPART ONE\n\nHORDE\n\nA red sun rises\n\nLotara\n\nThe war was over.\n\nThe Imperial Palace was dead. It had been a tectonic sprawl, breathless in scale; a marble scab the size of a continent that crusted over the Eurasian land mass, reaching from the dry eastern coast to the empty western sea. Now it was rubble. The regions that weren't destroyed were infected. The sectors that weren't abandoned were aflame.\n\nAll that sacred rock, gone to waste. The stone used in its construction wasn't only Terran in origin. Luna had contributed, as had Mars, as had many of the moons spinning through space in their sedate ballet around the Sol System's gas giants. Exo-system stone had been long-hauled back to Terra from rediscovered and conquered worlds, with populations that knew nothing of Old Earth outside of whispered myth now quarrying marble for the sake of a palace they would never see.\n\nBut Terra had given up the greatest portion of her bones for the project. She was already plundered from the Dark Age of Technology and scarred from the unknowable ruinations of the Age of Strife that followed - and she suffered again when Imperial ambition mined her crust hollow. The Emperor's people tore a planet's worth of precious stone from the ground, dragging it from the deep earth by the sweat of slaves and prisoners and servitors. Terra surrendered her bones, not that she had a choice in the matter, and they were hauled away beneath the gaze of adepts; payloads for code-goaded Imperial machines.\n\nPolished. Refined. Processed. Rendered into art by architects. Rendered into reality by labourers. Rendered into battlements by soldiers.\n\nAnd now gone, all of it. A continent razed. A hemisphere reduced to rubble.\n\nA single tower will fall and its dust chokes a city block for hours. The death-smoke of two spires tumbling will blanket a region for days, turning the air to grey dust. But a witness in the sky drifting above the devastation of Terra now wouldn't see a lone spire fall, or the death of a mere two towers. A palace of gods and demigods had been laid to waste. This witness would see the aftermath: dust, dust, dust - horizon to horizon.\n\nAn axiom from a more enlightened age stated, Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in. That sentiment speaks not only of sacrifice, but vision. A future with foundations born in the deeds of the altruistic dead. Instead of such sacrifice, and bereft of vision, Terra now burned because of weapons in the shape of men.\n\nHigher than life can climb unaided, above the thinnest reaches of the atmosphere, the Warmaster's fleet lay anchored in orbit.\n\nSpace was no longer a void. Beyond Terra, what was once the cold vacuum of space had curdled with an infestation of unreality. Colours without names tendrilled around the armada, wreathing ships in clawed fog and dipping their misty protuberances into the planet's exosphere.\n\nThe voidmist coalesced into figures and shapes a thousand times larger than ships themselves; the silhouetted promises of watching gods. Eyes the size of moons opened and closed in that seething mist. Teeth were bared, the length of continents. Great wings capable of "}
{"text":"t was once the cold vacuum of space had curdled with an infestation of unreality. Colours without names tendrilled around the armada, wreathing ships in clawed fog and dipping their misty protuberances into the planet's exosphere.\n\nThe voidmist coalesced into figures and shapes a thousand times larger than ships themselves; the silhouetted promises of watching gods. Eyes the size of moons opened and closed in that seething mist. Teeth were bared, the length of continents. Great wings capable of eclipsing the sun spread and furled and rotted away and regrew. The orbiting ships absorbed this mist, their ironwork warping with its saturation. To open a vox-channel was to listen in on burning souls.\n\nElsewhere in the galaxy, the craftworld refugees of the aeldari race would recognise these sights of unreal wonder. The warp and reality interlocked, focused on a core of absolute suffering that their seers would find all too familiar. Centuries ago, this was how their species had given birth to their baneful god. This was how their empire had died.\n\nThousands of crew members looked out at the toxic skies and down upon the world below, at their victory turning to ash. Terra was dying. The savants and scholars of Kelbor-Hal's New Mechanicum could perceive the exact threads of annihilation, grasping the delicate balances of life and physics being thrown aside in the name of regicide, but the truth was evident to everyone. Anyone that looked out of a porthole or gazed from the wide windows of a command deck saw it plain.\n\nYou didn't need to be an expert to see the war had killed Terra. You merely needed eyes.\n\nLotara Sarrin looked upon the blighted world from the bridge of the warship Conqueror. She sat slouched in her command throne, her deteriorated form at the very edge of terminal dehydration, and she stared at the world she'd helped destroy.\n\nShe had been proud, once. She'd been righteous in her rebellion, loyal to the Legion that treasured her, loyal to the crew she commanded and the soldiers whom she protected. She was a fleet-killer, a huntress of the stars, commanding one of the most powerful vessels ever conceived and created by human ingenuity. Her service record was decorated with avowals and commendations. Her uniform was marked with the Bloody Hand of the Twelfth, the highest honour a mortal could earn from her Legion.\n\nShe was still loyal. Even when insanity crept its way through her ship, she'd stayed loyal. Even when the World Eaters rampaged through the halls and chambers, butchering their own serfs and slaves. Even when she'd been forced to execute warriors whom she'd served alongside for years, who had lost their faith in the Warmaster's way. Even when every drop of water in the crew's supply tanks turned to flyblown blood. Even when her nights became sleepless epileptic seizures of flicker-flash horrors, as dead comrades cried out from the shadows of the ship they were doomed to haunt. Even when the degrading Conqueror began to phase in and out of reality, and entire districts of its lethal bulk turned rancid with the warp's corrosion. Even when her skin began to scale with the rawness of her sins manifesting on her flesh.\n\nLotara Sarrin had sworn her loyalty to the very end, and now the end had come. She hadn't expected it to look like this.\n\nReflected in her eyes was a globe of sickly grey, with its halo of violet madness. No visible land masses, no signs of life. She could see nothing beneath the layer of filthy murk. The Conqueror's scanners, when they functioned at all, couldn't cut through the dust. Terra didn't look like Terra. It looked like Venus. It choked under a similar tainted sky.\n\nChoppy reports analysed the clouded atmosphere. The marble dust in the air was enough to destroy any reliability with the vox, but it was nothing compared to the true damage. Toxic vapours were rife, churned up from a million surface detonations and the orbital barrages tormenting Terra's carbonite-rich crust. The impacts and the world-tearing heat of cannon fire from the Warmaster's armada had ripped craters in the Palace and carved chasms in the surrounding territories. Dying Titans contributed their swansongs, too - their heart-reactors going nova as they lay in the rubble-graves of their failed marches.\n\nIt all added up: fusing and igniting the gases that lay stable beneath the earth. Sulfa dyoxide, an element known to the sages of the Martian Mechanicum, was born from these blasted-open pores in Terra's skin. The poison coiled its chemical tendrils through the filthy air, ruining it further, turning it acidic.\n\nAnd there was more. The earth bled lava from suppurating ulcers. Pyroclastic flows of burning gas and volcanic tephra had gushed from the riven land, blanketing embattled regions with flash-melting smoke and sludge. The ash and dust clogging the air were conjoined now, layered yet inseparable, a curtain of pale grey denying sight and breath. Dust paste caked the lungs of millions of survivors. Those without rebreathers were at risk of asphyxiation just by remaining within the Palace, but there was nowhere left to run.\n\nThe destruction of the Imperial Palace also released chemicals used by the abandoned industries of Terra. Containment failures in several palatial manufactories haemorrhaged a processing substance marked as maethal eysocyanite. This gas clung to the ground with a predation that almost spoke of intelligence, flooding several remaining bastions at their lower levels, an unseeable tidal wave of chemical venom dissolving into the defenders' eyes and throats. It blinded, burned, killed within hours. The Astartes could survive it, though it mutilated many of them. Hordes of human defenders and refugees were not so lucky.\n\nLast and far from least, there was the radiation. By design or misfortune, subterranean stores of nameless Dark Age materials had been cracked open over the course of the war. Many of the gaseous elements sighing out of these ancient bunkers were barely understood and defied current naming convention, but their radiological effects were murderously familiar. They were death, one final horror from the past, the very last breath of a forgotten age.\n\nLotara had taken the last report she'd seen and given it to one of the few remaining Mechanicum sages still aboard the Conqueror. His augmetics were rusted, chafing at his ghoulish skin. Blood poisoning showed in lightning-bolt veins beneath his flesh. He had to tap out a reply on a speaking keypad because his vocoder had degenerated beyond repair. He'd never even set foot on the surface; the Conqueror had done this to him.\n\nWhen he printed his reply to her, Lotara read it three times to be sure she understood just what the war was doing to Terra. And there it was, laid out in grinding totality. The absolute destruction of humanity's birthworld. The war that had let the galaxy burn now covered every inch of Terra's surface, darkening the heavens and gouging into the planet's mineral flesh.\n\nBut it wasn't the toxicity or the blindness that stuck with her, it was one of the tech-priest's simple, blunt summations halfway through his analysis. He'd detailed how the sulfuryk elements from the world's injuries had seeped into the air, scattering Sol's incoming light within the human visual spectrum. With this explanation, a brief note gave simple context:\n\nTo those on the surface, the sun has gone red.\n\nShe couldn't shake that image.\n\nNow she looked at the oculus viewscreen where, from orbit, a pall of grey covered the entire world. They had come to take the Throneworld and had instead wrapped it in a funeral shroud.\n\n'Kharn,' she spoke out loud for the first time in hours - or perhaps days - her voice a parched whisper. The closest crew paid her no mind at all. They were hunched at their own consoles, lost in their own pain.\n\n'Kharn?' Lotara said again.\n\nKharn stood not far from her command throne. His visage was a riven mess of scars and battlefield staple-stitches. He didn't say anything. He never said anything anymore.\n\nHer stomach clenching was the only warning she got. Her insides heaved with enough force to drive her out of her throne and onto her knees, ears ringing with pressure, spit stringing between her open lips. She cried out at the sudden pain, at the poison running up her throat, and her yell turned into a hot flush of vomit slapping across the deck.\n\nAs she gasped for her breath back, she looked down at the half-digested spread of her last meal. A pool of thin bile, a few scraps of stomach lining, and three of someone's fingers.\n\nDisbelief overpowered her exhaustion for a few precious seconds. She recoiled from the puddle, pulling herself back into her throne. Just a trick of her sleepless mind. That was all. That was all.\n\nKharn approached the flagship's captain, kneeling to rest at her level. He didn't offer his aid as she hauled herself on shaking limbs back into her chair. He was unarmed, and Lotara couldn't recall ever seeing him without his axe before. Blood trickled from her eyes as she stared into the patchwork ruin of his face. The thirsting husk of her body gave up yet more precious fluid in the form of those profane tears.\n\n'Kharn,' she whispered. 'What have we done?'\n\nIt was a question being asked across Terra and above it, by the men and women on both sides of the war.\n\nKharn had no answer.\n\nA broken gladiator\n\nKargos\n\nSomewhere in the dust, a gladiator hunted in the weakling light of a scarlet dawn. He staggered as much as walked, stumbled as much as he ran, any sense of grace he once possessed now a shredded memory. His motions were those of an infected beast, his mind aflame with urges that devoured reason. His crested helmet turned this way and that in animal, kinetic spurts. He moved as if rabid.\n\nThe enemy had broken and run. Minutes ago. Hours ago. Days ago. He couldn't see them now, nor was he sure in which direction they'd fled. His armour joints snarled as he jerked his head at shadows in the a"}
{"text":"as much as walked, stumbled as much as he ran, any sense of grace he once possessed now a shredded memory. His motions were those of an infected beast, his mind aflame with urges that devoured reason. His crested helmet turned this way and that in animal, kinetic spurts. He moved as if rabid.\n\nThe enemy had broken and run. Minutes ago. Hours ago. Days ago. He couldn't see them now, nor was he sure in which direction they'd fled. His armour joints snarled as he jerked his head at shadows in the ash, at sounds muffled to unreality. A chainaxe idled in his gauntleted fist. It wasn't his axe, and he couldn't recall where he'd found it. Sometimes the weapon's teeth whirred, chewing dirty air. The blood that caked the axe's fangs had dried to gritty paste.\n\nThe gladiator had a name, though in that moment he barely knew it. He also had an honoured, vital role within the ranks of his Legion, which was something else the pressure in his skull had leached away. The pain engine implanted against his brain was biting deep, a clicking parasite making a meal of his central nervous system.\n\nHe salivated as he stared into the dust. In these moments - which were becoming ever more frequent - he was less a reasoning being and more a vessel brimming with notions of immediate instinct.\n\nTick-tock, tick-tock, the Butcher's Nails sang, sending needle-prick electrical signals into the meat of his mind. This is pain, it promised him, and you will feel it until I allow you pleasure. And so, sharklike, he pressed on. To stand still was to feel the implant's razor kisses deep in his skull, where he couldn't scratch.\n\nThings were changing. Had changed. With the pain engine remapping his mind, his chemical cognition was shattered. The adrenal violence that once brought ecstasy now brought a thin relief. Treasured, yes, but hardly the same thing. Before, the gladiator had chased a feeling of exaltation. Now, he pursued tantalising caresses of relief. They were never enough to become pleasure, never even close, but at least they came with a cessation of pain.\n\nHis armour was a scavenged panoply beneath the clinging layer of ash. For years he'd worn the white ceramite of the XII Legion's crusading heraldry, and the mongrel suit he was sealed inside was formed from only half its original components. He couldn't recall repainting his warplate, nor granting his serfs permission to paint it for him. Yet there it was, revealed in the patches where the dust briefly brushed away: arterial red instead of the familiar filthy white.\n\nYes, things were changing.\n\nThis didn't trouble him. Perhaps it would have, had he given it true weight of thought, but in the rare moments he turned his mind in that direction, the Nails would gnaw hard enough to trigger muscle tremors. They promised him peace only if he ran, roared, killed, maimed, burned. So he did those things when he could, and grew drunk with pain when he couldn't.\n\nAt one dimly remembered point in time, he'd tried breaking his skull open against a wall, rhythmically crashing his forehead against the broken marble in a bid to drain the vileness from his head. It had worked, until it hadn't. Then the pain came back, twice as bitter. Punishment for his self-inflicted wounds. Judgement for attempted suicide.\n\nThe gladiator moved on. It soothed the Nails when he moved forward.\n\nHe wasn't alone in the ashen wasteland. His brothers - and the things that pretended to be his brothers - made a loose pack around him. Together but apart, they moved through the gloom. Some of them were made of fire. Some of them were made of blood in the shape of monsters. Some of them were his lifelong brethren, and some of them just wore his kinsmen's flesh.\n\nApothecary.\n\nHe heard the word as he ascended a scree of infected rubble. The sound of it was familiar even if the meaning wasn't. Poisoned rocks slid beneath the weight of his boots. The wall had died to artillery fire, recently enough that it still smoked, and the gladiator hauled his way up the broken slope. The Nails sensed his resolve and could have been merciful, but they spiked again anyway. An animal grunt broke from his lips, unintentional and helplessly honest.\n\nApothecary. That word again. It lingered in his mangled thoughts, as if it wanted to mean something. Apothecary. Apothecary. The next time he heard it, it was shouted out loud: 'Apothecary!' It had the emphasis of a name. Or a curse.\n\nThe gladiator stopped in his ascent. He turned, gazing through the dust. Seeking the silhouettes of his brothers, and the stalking things that claimed to be his brothers. A cluster of them were at the bottom of the rubble slope. Their armour was no longer red. The ashy dust had restored his fellow World Eaters to their original filthy white heraldry.\n\n'Kargos!' one of them shouted up at him.\n\nJust like that, words had meaning once more. The Nails bit, as if mocking his return to cognition, but their mandibles were dull against the trickling spread of identity.\n\nThe gladiator - Kargos, he thought, I am Kargos - tried to vox down to them, but the vox-web was useless these days. He shouted back through his helm's voice grille, the words amplified and raw.\n\n'Who calls?'\n\nThe answer wasn't an answer at all, it was a demand. 'Medic!'\n\nKargos descended, half-skidding down the rockcrete rubble. The cluster of silhouettes resolved into shapes, then became the figures of his brothers. His actual brothers. Not the things that professed brotherhood.\n\nTwenty-nine of his kindred were down, their bodies dragged by the survivors sane enough to resist the song of the Nails. He looked over their broken remains lying in loose rows, already shrouded with grey-white dust. Bolt impacts and chainblade tears marked their armour, the ceramite rent open to reveal the destroyed meat inside.\n\nKargos turned his gaze to the survivors, the World Eaters still standing. Others stalked past them in the dust, climbing the rubble slope, seeking prey at the behest of the pain engines biting into their brains. Even those with enough self-control to deal with the Legion's dead were tormented by violent tics and twitches. This funeral service, as blunt and careless as any XII Legion ritual, took a supreme measure of focus for those able to perform it.\n\n'What are you waiting for?' one of them grunted. Kargos couldn't make out the warrior's identity with the dust coating his warplate. 'Harvest them,' the warrior ordered.\n\nKargos looked down at his own armour, at his empty belt and bandolier. When, exactly, had he lost the tools of his trade? The metal vials of stimulant serums and combat narcotics were gone. His narthecium was a broken ruin, a bolt-hit husk of missing instruments. Its scanner display was cracked and black, no longer connected to his armour's power supply. Even the keypad on his vambrace was worthless, showing lost keys like a desperate smile with missing teeth.\n\nNo matter. He didn't need the specialised instruments to harvest, he could use his knife. The work would be messier, riskier for the removed organs, but he'd done it before. All it took was care and haste, so the ashy air wouldn't contaminate the fleshy nodes as they were pulled free.\n\nHe crouched by the first body and drew his knife. In human hands, it would be something to go to war with. In Kargos' grip, it was a chipped and tarnished machete.\n\n'Who was this?' he asked his brothers. They didn't answer; Kargos sensed them shuffling in the dust, struggling to remain with the dead rather than move on in search of more prey. They probably didn't know who'd died either; squads were scattered, the vox was down, and the dust was a great equaliser on that score, turning them all into ghosts of themselves. Who was who hardly mattered now.\n\nKargos reached for the containment cells mag-locked to his belt. They were reinforced, internally cooled ceramite cylinders marked with Nagrakali runes. He carried dozens of them, each one a capsule for the progenoids of a fallen Legion brother. With their gene-seed harvested, the slain would live on in the creation of their replacement warriors. Over the months of the war, he'd harvested the progenoids from the throats and chests of many of his kindred.\n\nExcept his fingers brushed against naked ceramite plating. He didn't carry dozens of them. He carried three. And the three that remained were punctured and empty.\n\nA chill ran through him, severe enough to cool even the sting of the Nails in the back of his head. So many had already died unharvested over the course of the war. How many had he harvested only to lose their genetic legacy in the fitful nothingness between bouts of clarity? He could die for this. In better, saner times, his Legion had executed Apothecaries for failure of this magnitude. They still might.\n\nKargos felt the eyes of his brethren upon him. He knew their weapons were still in their hands.\n\n'I can't,' he confessed to them. 'I can't do it.'\n\nThey still said nothing, and Kargos felt the weight of their wordless judgement. He rose to his feet for sentencing. Gladiators always faced fate with courage. Only cowards died on their knees.\n\nBut there was no one there. The other World Eaters were gone. Swallowed by the dust, if they'd ever been there at all. He looked down; the bodies were gone, too. He stood alone in the dust. Utterly alone.\n\nAlone, that is, but for a sudden pinch along his spinal nerves. The Nails bit, offering up a motivating pulse of pain, promising more if he remained still. Kargos turned, staggering, stumbling, no longer really Kargos at all. Just the gladiator again.\n\nTime passed strangely in the ash. At some point in Kargos' staggering journey, shapes resolved around him. A few became many, and many became more than enough. He knew some were his Legion brothers and some were not, and he could tell the difference by those that could see where they were going. He and his brothers were blind, but the things that pretended to be his brothers and sisters could see well enough"}
{"text":"urned, staggering, stumbling, no longer really Kargos at all. Just the gladiator again.\n\nTime passed strangely in the ash. At some point in Kargos' staggering journey, shapes resolved around him. A few became many, and many became more than enough. He knew some were his Legion brothers and some were not, and he could tell the difference by those that could see where they were going. He and his brothers were blind, but the things that pretended to be his brothers and sisters could see well enough to hunt. These blood-letting creatures hunted ahead of the horde; the Emperor's silent scream sapped their strength, but they saw flares of life in the choking dust, and they drew the Warmaster's forces with them. Making their way towards the Sanctum Imperialis, where the last organised defenders gathered at the final fortress.\n\nIt was a tide. Hundreds of thousands of warriors and soldiers and daemonic entities merging into a wave of god-soaked intent. Rank meant little now among the mortal castes of this horde; military cohesion had almost broken down into myth. They staggered and stumbled and some even ran, warriors from every one of the Warmaster's Legions, a seething host of abused minds and diseased souls. Some exulted in their shackles of divine slavery, others falsely believed themselves free. It made no difference. A slave was still a slave even if he crowned himself king.\n\nThough blunted by the Nails' pain, Kargos sensed the shifting air. The veil between worlds was so very thin now. Neverborn clawed their way into reality with mere wisps of thought. A single drop of blood on the broken earth spawned horrors.\n\nThe Emperor was weakening.\n\nImagine such a thing.\n\nThe Neverborn hissed it. Angron roared it. Horus promised it. Soon the time would come to drag down the walls of the final fortress.\n\nSomething pierced the bloodstained cloud of Kargos' thoughts. His name again. Someone nearby was saying his name. They'd been saying it for some time.\n\nIt was Inzar. Inzar of the XVII, wearing grit-abraded warplate and with his weapons chained to his armour as a symbol of his time with the XII. The parchments still adhering to Inzar's armour were scored and faded, reduced to ragged strips. He gripped Kargos' shoulder guard, preventing him from moving on with the horde.\n\n'I thought it was you, brother.' Even all these years later, Inzar's voice was a low and familiar purr through his helmet's vocaliser. Somehow it cut through the wind. 'How fine it is to see you, so close to our triumph.'\n\nKargos wasn't sure what to say - nothing about any of this felt like triumph - so he said nothing. Inzar's touch remained on the World Eater's shoulder. A guiding hand.\n\n'Come with me, Kargos. You have lost your way. I will help you.'\n\nKargos stared, mute, through eyes that throbbed with their own pulse. It took him three tries to speak, and he only managed three words.\n\n'Are you real?'\n\nInzar grunted at that, a sound that might have been a laugh. 'Come with me, my friend.'\n\n'No.' Kargos licked his cracking lips and tasted blood. 'Answer me. Are you real?'\n\nThere was no laughter that time. Just a nod, a gesture of understanding.\n\n'I am real.'\n\nKargos hesitated for a few more seconds - the Neverborn had lied to him before - then followed.\n\nA council was convened in the wasteland, formed around a gathering of officers and attendants still in possession of their senses. The shadows of tanks rumbled at the gathering's edges. Warriors of every Legion stood in loose packs, as often associating by new-found allegiances over their paternal bloodlines. Kargos was one of them. He stayed at Inzar's side out of exhausted familiarity, watching, through aching eyes, the first signs of order from disorder that he'd seen in what felt like forever.\n\nQuestions were asked in vicious murmurs and answered in the same tone. Establishing a firm hierarchy was impossible without the vox, and without knowing what regiments were where; what Titan Legios had managed to haul themselves up and through the wreckage of the Ultimate Wall; what Astartes forces had assembled in the fallen districts of the Inner Palace. But it was something. Waves were forming in the tide, part of the natural rhythm of the horde: gatherings of might just like this one, warbands massing for the final assault.\n\nThe names of First Captains were spoken, and their absences marked. Ahriman. Typhon. Abaddon. Embattled elsewhere or already dead? None could say.\n\nAnd what of Rogal Dorn, the Emperor's Praetorian? What of Jaghatai Khan and the Angel of Blood? Were they cowering within the Sanctum Imperialis waiting for the last battle, or were they trapped elsewhere in the war-torn districts of the Inner Palace, besieged in their bastions and unable to break out? The Khan, it was said, had died of his tainted wounds at the Lion's Gate space port days ago. The Praetorian, with the Palace in ashes, his genius expended and his plans in ruins, was said to be hiding behind the walls of Bhab Bastion and readying his final scheme to escape Terra. That left only the Angel free, and the depleted remnants of the three Legions he commanded.\n\nKargos' exhaustion thinned out as the Nails blessedly stopped biting so deep. The voices of those speaking soothed the pain engine in his skull, as if their plans were a prayer. The war was won. The defenders were broken. The Emperor's shield was reduced to a sliver of its invisible power, and Neverborn ran amok through the wasted districts of the Inner Palace.\n\nWhat, then, came next? Magnus would break the Emperor's will, and with it, the psychic shield. Angron, in his fury, would find and butcher the Angel of Blood, then march upon the Sanctum Imperialis. Horus himself was soon to make planetfall. They would tear down the Eternity Gate and burn the Sanctum Imperialis to the ground. They had the numbers. The defenders did not.\n\nSo let it be spoken, so let it be done. Terra would soon be theirs.\n\nA goddess with a spear in her spine\n\nUlienne\n\nThe crew of the Warhound Hindarah were proud of their efforts. Ascending to the Inner Palace was no easy feat, with the dust killing any attempt to bring in sarcophagus ships, and the fallen sections of the Ultimate Wall offering a kilometres-high tectonic landslide of rubble, far beyond the limits of most Titans' stabilisers. The first few god-machines that had made it up into the districts of the Inner Palace were confronted with a wasteland of bombarded marble where their isolated Titans were the tallest things standing. Whole regions of bastions, castles, spires and colonnades lay in ruin, hammered to powder from orbit, or overrun by the hordes of the Warmaster's infantry and armour support that had already poured into the Inner Palace.\n\nThe Titans of the Martian Mechanicum lacked the luxury of such swiftness. As they began to arrive, few loyalist Titans met their cautious advance. Most of them circled the remaining bastions or had run for the safety of the Sanctum Imperialis.\n\nHindarah and her crew were in the first wave to make it up the avalanche of the Ultimate Wall. One breach among dozens, it was a vast slope of broken rock between them and the vindication they craved. It took several days, trying step by step, forcing stabilisers and compensators and gyrobalancers into the crimson, until Hindarah's reactor was breathing fusion at their backs. Then they'd stop, letting the ironfire cool, letting their tech-priests soothe the machine-spirit, before trying the next steps when the readings were out of the red.\n\nOther Titans retreated to their coffin-ships, resolving to airlift onto the plateau. Few met with any success, with the dust chewing through engine intakes and crippling most of the landers that made the attempt. Some unleashed their weapons on unbreached sections of the wall, melta-boring rockcrete, atomising stone and conversion-beaming holes through Rogal Dorn's greatest defences.\n\nTime, time, time. It all took time. All while the defenders fell back to the fortifications of the Palatine Ring.\n\nMany Titans attempted the climb. Every step had to be calculated and estimated in equal measure, with each Titan's void shields lowered to push power elsewhere. Ground teams - the few skitarii infantry units that could still be trusted not to rush ahead in the hunt for kills - did what they could to clear patches in the landslides for huge clawed feet to slam down.\n\nOn Hindarah's ascent, she'd fallen twice. The first was a simple slip early on, a miscalculation in stabiliser compensation, sending them toppling forward. As dangerous as it was, forward was the safest way to fall; Moderatus Otesh had moved with cold clarity at her controls, hammering down the dragging leg at an oblique angle with enough force to punch through loose rock and keep them in place for the precious seconds she needed to swing Hindarah back to stability. The crew had cheered her for that. Even other Titans, those near enough to see Hindarah's silhouette in the dust, had voxed their appreciation or, in some cases, their mockery. The broken communication web allowed, just barely, for some of it to even make sense.\n\nThe second fall was worse. Close to the top after days of slow progress, the boulder scree gave way beneath them, just as it had for so many others. The reactor roared with the machine-spirit's frustration - and, in truth, its fear - as it all happened excruciatingly slowly: the grind of rock, the whine of straining iron, and the disgustingly serene tilting as they started to go over. Hindarah toppled sideways and backwards, its stabilisers squealing as they were relieved of all pressure.\n\nThe crew knew they were dead. Falling from this high up on the avalanche was death. Even if they survived, which was unlikely, and even if their Titan didn't smash itself to pieces in the tumbling roll, which was even less likely, Hindarah wouldn't be craned back to her feet for weeks, if ever. There was nothing resembling that kind of coordination and organisat"}
{"text":" as they started to go over. Hindarah toppled sideways and backwards, its stabilisers squealing as they were relieved of all pressure.\n\nThe crew knew they were dead. Falling from this high up on the avalanche was death. Even if they survived, which was unlikely, and even if their Titan didn't smash itself to pieces in the tumbling roll, which was even less likely, Hindarah wouldn't be craned back to her feet for weeks, if ever. There was nothing resembling that kind of coordination and organisation left in the war. The crew knew all of this, had borne it in mind every step up the avalanche, and it flashed to the fore in each of their minds as they started arching backwards.\n\nThe rocks ground and rumbled, sliding, sliding.\n\nAhead of them, disappearing in their tilting eye-windows, was the Mortis Reaver Varcarnerix. She was even closer to the top, surrounded by a small horde of labourer tech-thralls working around their god-machine's heels. It had taken her more than a week to get there.\n\nThe words spilled from Princeps Ulienne Grune's mouth without thought and without care. Not shouted. Not panicked. Just a whisper, breathy with instinct.\n\n'Fire the ursus claw.'\n\nModerati Secundus Himmar Kul had a half-second to balance the rolling fire-arc figures against his own guesswork. He moved Hindarah's arm by muscle memory, with no time to lock the firing braces down, and squeezed both triggers. The cockpit shuddered with the kickback of his blind-fire. Hindarah whined as her arm socket took the brunt of an unbraced release.\n\nIt all happened within the span of half a dozen heartbeats, from slippage to claw-fire, but the timing made no difference. They could've had a day to decide. It didn't matter. There was only one thing to fire at.\n\nTheir harpoon took Varcarnerix in the back. Another five metres higher, a single second later, and it would've missed completely.\n\nThe three-taloned ursus claw lanced through the Reaver's rear carapace armour, where the composite plating of adamantium, plasteel and ceramite was thinnest. It buried itself with a thundercrack, driving deep into the god-machine's internals, reducing two tech-priests to a spread of gory debris in the engine room. It had missed the Thetis reactor that served as the Titan's heart, instead punching all the way through to the industrial pillar of Varcarnerix's spinal column. The great claw snapped shut around a fistful of sacred, mangled metal, and locked hard with the activating clangs of macromagnetic binding.\n\nVarcarnerix ceased all locomotion. For a moment, the towering god-engine stood facing the ascent with almost philosophical calm. In her shadow, skitarii and servitors stood aghast, unable to believe the scratched lenses they had instead of eyes. They were worshippers at the feet of divinity, and their goddess had just taken a spear in the spine.\n\nHindarah jerked. She buckled. She started turning at a wild obtuse. Both moderati worked their controls, white-knuckled and teeth clenched, steering as best they were able to bring the legs back into alignment.\n\n'There's nothing to stand on, it's going out from under us, nothing to stand on...' This, from Moderatus Otesh.\n\n'No,' Princeps Ulienne was mouthing, the lone word a silent chant. 'No, no, no.'\n\nOne foot crashed down. Rock shivered under them, shuddered harder, then kept slipping. The other foot smashed down, then the first again. They staggered on the rock, unsteady as a wounded wolf. Motors revved in the Warhound's harpoon arm as her crew hauled on the anchored ursus claw for stability. Blessed iron screeched in Hindarah's shoulder as her socket stretched and warped with the strain.\n\nThat was when Varcarnerix screamed. The Reaver let loose with her war-horn, crying out above the rumble of the avalanche. In that moment she sounded pathetically, horrifyingly alive.\n\n'We're stable.' Moderatus Kul's laugh was hollow with disbelief. 'We're stable.'\n\nAnd he was right. Hindarah settled, her joints whining down as their protests ceased. The cockpit no longer lurched. They were stable.\n\nVarcarnerix turned towards them.\n\nStarted to turn, at least. The wreckage of her spine wouldn't allow it; she would never complete that turn, just like she'd never walk again, never wage another war. Her turn became a tilt, and the tilt became a fall.\n\nVarcarnerix gave another war-horn scream, the last shriek of a betrayed godling. She vented plasma from her carapace slits, uselessly breathing poison fire into the filthy air. In an act of either mindless panic or naked spite, she opened up with her cannons, her arms pouring forth volleys of blinding laser fire that echoed like thunder. With her dying cannonade, she liquefied her own worshippers and burned the rocks around her to black glass.\n\n'Detach!' Ulienne ordered. 'She's going over! Detach!'\n\nThey couldn't detach. The Reaver was going to take them with her if she fell down the landslide, they'd saved themselves only to doom themselves, and Hindarah couldn't detach. Kul tried the levers again, tried the triggers again, and again, and again. The macromagnetics had unbound, the grip had eased, but the claw was still buried in Varcarnerix's ribs. They'd punched too deep.\n\n'Blow the lynchlocks.'\n\nKul hadn't needed the order. He was already doing it. Hindarah's reactor flared at the insult as power ran hot to her extremities. Bang, bang, bang went the emergency fail-safe charges in her shoulder, detonating the lynchlocks attaching the claw launcher to her body.\n\nShe amputated her own arm just in time. Varcarnerix hammered down onto the rockslide, impacting face first and instantly killing her own crew. The immense weight of her body striking the rubble shook the earth and set another landslide in motion. Boulders rolled on that tide of flowing gravel, flowing down the kilometres-high slope. Further down, Titans of various Legios, each abraded of their paint jobs by the ashy air and suffering with degraded scanners, ponderously moved aside or braced as best they could. It was far from the first such rubble tide. Through the useless spray of static and scrap code, Hindarah's crew heard voices damning them and lauding them for their treacherous survival.\n\nOne of them stood out above the others, a wet crackle that identified itself as Tellum Ire. She was a Mortis Warhound, close enough to see the shadowplay in the dust, and she raged at Hindarah.\n\nModeratus Otesh shook her head. She was still pale with receding panic. 'They'd fire on us if they could.'\n\nBut they couldn't. Tellum Ire was too far back down the slope, likely on ground too unstable to risk weapons discharge.\n\nUlienne listened to their raving as her heartbeat slowed to normal. She felt the chill of what she'd done, but her discomfort didn't reach the level of guilt. All order was gone from the Warmaster's forces anyway. As long as they could stay ahead of any other Mortis engines, there would be no repercussions; there was barely any hierarchy to answer to now. Since the wall fell, it was every god-machine for itself.\n\n'This is Princeps Ulienne of Audax. I speak for Hindarah.' She had no idea if her transmission would reach Tellum Ire, but in the absence of guilt was reawakened pride. She didn't appreciate being spoken to in such a manner.\n\nTellum Ire replied: more anger, paved thick with promises of retribution. Ulienne let it play out like background music for a time, baring her bloody gums in a smile, then sent back a clipped reply of her own to terminate the link.\n\n'Engine kill.'\n\nTheir brush with death close to the top of the breach had been two days ago. Since reaching the summit and striding through the breach, Hindarah had stalked amidst the ruined districts of the Inner Palace, engaged in hour upon hour of hard fighting. She'd joined up with Legiones Astartes forces besieging Meru Bastion and, battling one-armed, she'd helped bring down walls and destroy enemy tanks with volleys from her turbo-laser.\n\nFew Legio Audax resupply vessels had made the journey past the Ultimate Wall, isolating them in the vanguard. The truth was, Hindarah had been in the field for months since her first deployment on Terra's surface, and she'd seen better days even before her amputation. Incidental damage was adding up, and more serious wounds were rotting through her iron bones as they went untended. The night before, as Meru Bastion fell, a nasty twist of fortune sent a missile pounding into the side of Hindarah's head. It struck the moment her voids failed, scarring her cockpit with scorch marks, damaging several control systems and splitting the reinforced glass of her eye-windows. They were riven with cracks as complicated as cobwebs, further ruining her crew's already ash-limited vision.\n\nShe marched with a hitching stride now, the joints in her right leg fouled by damage from loyalist cannon fire. She had to conserve her energy, too. Her void shields no longer lit upon command, and with the pain of her injuries playing through her nerve-cables, her crew kept her reactor banked to quieten her increasingly erratic machine-spirit.\n\nEach of the Palatine Bastions were fortress-towns in their own right, ringing the Sanctum Imperialis in a boundary. Meru Bastion had been the ugliest, a brutal castle of a thing. Old data-spurts painted it as a palace, but any beauty it once possessed was lost when Rogal Dorn layered it over with rockcrete and ceramite and left its walls with hives of anti-infantry turrets. Tearing it down was a pleasure; another of the loyalists' strongholds dead on the inexorable march to the Sanctum Imperialis.\n\nThere had been no sign of the primarchs for days. Not the angel of fire that Angron had become, not the creature that was supposed to have once been Mortarion. Perturabo was said to have abandoned the siege, but Ulienne still saw masses of Iron Warriors within the horde, so who knew what was true there? Crackling transmissions from orbit promised Horus' landing was imminent, and Ulienne considered those chan"}
{"text":"r of the loyalists' strongholds dead on the inexorable march to the Sanctum Imperialis.\n\nThere had been no sign of the primarchs for days. Not the angel of fire that Angron had become, not the creature that was supposed to have once been Mortarion. Perturabo was said to have abandoned the siege, but Ulienne still saw masses of Iron Warriors within the horde, so who knew what was true there? Crackling transmissions from orbit promised Horus' landing was imminent, and Ulienne considered those chanted promises no better than propaganda. She focused on the war before her, not the prayers coming from above.\n\nAvalon Bastion was next, its battlements a dark blur on the horizon. Word across the scrambled vox was that the enemy were in full retreat now. Without organised reconnaissance, no one could be certain, but the few officers still relaying orders promised that Avalon was already deserted. Its defenders had fled in a refugee tide over the course of many days, running for the other bastions.\n\nHindarah's spirit was impatient, psychosomatically jabbing inside Ulienne's mind with dull, red throbs. Her crew had to keep her reactor muzzled to prevent her warrior soul forcing them to charge out of cohesion. For now, World Eaters and Death Guard and Alpha Legionnaires ran before Hindarah in a ceramite flood. No gunships backed them up from above - the air-support phase of the war was adamantly over - but the beetle shapes of Legion tanks broke up the ranks of infantry, and winged things soared through the dirty sky. Red-skinned things in the shape of men and women; bloated things in the shape of alien flies; things that Hindarah's crew called daemons, glad of the layers of armour separating them from the creatures.\n\nHer eyes always slid away from the things the moment she tried to look at them. As soon as she looked away, she forgot they were there.\n\nThe horde had the numbers to bring about the war's end, while the defenders only possessed the numbers to delay it - but the losses were going to be grotesque. Ulienne didn't want to die for the Emperor's stubbornness. She wanted to live, to see the Warmaster's ambitions come to fruition. She wanted the Imperium that Horus had promised. An empire for eternity. A kingdom of humanity that would never fall.\n\nHindarah grumbled, sensing her princeps' unease, but too drugged by her cooled reactor to do anything more.\n\nThere it was again, the treasonous little notion Ulienne couldn't quite shake. Horus was a hero, the Warmaster of the Imperium, the pacifier of the galaxy. Of course she'd followed him. The Legio Audax had willingly worn his colours and cast their fate with his. But what would be left after this war? What would be left of Terra and the armies fighting to take it?\n\nSurely even now, quiescent alien kingdoms at the Imperium's edges were reawakening, daring to cast jealous eyes at the worlds they'd lost in the Great Crusade. Would there be enough of the Warmaster's hosts left to hold the Imperium in its entirety? And what would those hosts look like, with all order and discipline and humanity raked out of them? The Legiones Astartes were already blood-maddened and fighting by the side of those... those things. The regiments of Imperial Army wearing the Warmaster's Eye were no better. Ulienne Grune didn't want peace. Peace was boring. Peace was for the weak. She wanted wars she could win.\n\nAnd the Mechanicum, blessings upon its name, was turning on itself, speaking in shrieking cants of scrap code. Raving prophets advocated the abandonment of the Self; immersion within the Manifold, fusion with the machine-spirit. Conflicting philosophies from cults that had never agreed on anything before but at least had the restraint to keep out of each other's ideologies. Now they screamed with a kind of scattered unity, praying for the sacrifice of flesh and soul to be reborn in cradles of holy iron.\n\nHindarah wanted it, too. Ulienne could feel that.\n\nFor now, Hindarah waited, and the woman serving as the god-machine's mind stared at the armoured tide rolling ahead towards the silhouette of distant battlements. This was the first moment of stillness Ulienne could recall in a long, long time.\n\nFor months now, her physical world had been wholly within the confines of Hindarah's cockpit. She escaped it only by blending her senses with her engine's, living through its eyes and its guns, feeling Hindarah's movements as her own. When had Ulienne last breathed fresh air instead of the sweaty reek coming out of the filtration slits behind her head? When had she last drunk anything but the recycled piss of her closest comrades? When had she last moved from her control throne?\n\nUlienne breathed in, catching the smell of her own shit. Her output filters had failed... when? Days ago? Weeks ago? Her legs were caked with her own waste. Her uniform was patchy with vomit that stank of stale nutrient paste. Once noticed, the stench of the various filths crusting her to her throne was omnipresent. Practically overwhelming.\n\nBlearily, she caught sight of her arm. Her hand was a black claw, fused to the metal of-\n\n'My princeps?'\n\nJolted from her reverie, she turned her gummy eyes towards Otesh. 'Moderatus,' she acknowledged. Sands of Mars, but she was tired, so damn tired.\n\n'Awaiting your order, my princeps.'\n\nUlienne stared at her crewmate. Otesh was carrion, her skin sick and sunless, her eyes dry. Ulienne could smell her now too, the spoiled meat sweetness of her. She'd been dead at least a week, even before they'd attempted the climb. At some point before she'd died, the moderatus had bitten through her own tongue. Flies were growing fat on her face, crawling in and out of her open mouth.\n\nUlienne opened her eyes. Or closed them. The dream stopped, or perhaps started again. She wasn't sure which, nor was she sure if it really mattered any more.\n\n'My princeps?' Otesh said again.\n\n'You're dead,' Ulienne said. Or thought. She couldn't tell if she was speaking or thinking. Even banked, Hindarah's reactor was pressing at the back of Ulienne's mind; a constant pressure right in the grey meat of her skull. 'Are you dead, Otesh?'\n\n'My princeps?' Ulienne heard the words or imagined hearing them. They were spoken by Otesh or by the thing wearing Otesh's skin or they weren't spoken at all.\n\nUlienne felt wet warmth on her face. She was weeping. Or she was bleeding from her eyes again.\n\n'Walk,' she said, closing her hands around the arms of her control throne. She felt and heard her gloves creak. She was still wearing them. Her hands weren't black claws melded to the metal. They weren't. They weren't. Though she couldn't bring herself to look to make sure.\n\n'We walk. Advance with the horde.'\n\nHindarah rattled and clanked her way forward. The pressure eased, just a little, in Ulienne's head. The smell of foulness receded.\n\nThe Warhound's remaining weapon arm came up. Her stride, though hitched, became a loping run. The ground shook as they began outpacing the infantry. They were charging through the ranks of creatures, half-hidden in the dust, that it hurt to look at.\n\nSo Ulienne kept her eyes on the walls. Spires were appearing through dusty mist, blunted by bombardment. Fallen battlements. Ruined defence turrets. If Avalon was truly abandoned, that meant a spillage of refugees and retreating soldiers in the expanses of no-man's-land between here and the Eternity Gate.\n\nTo Hindarah, it meant prey. The god-machine's soul urged its commander with a somatic nudge through their tangled linkage. Ulienne's skin prickled. She parted her lips, and blood made strings between her rotten teeth.\n\nThe walls of Avalon Bastion grew taller; darkening, resolving. And then: something new. Above the battlements, a lone star shone in the blandness of the ashen sky.\n\nThrough the iron of her Titan's bones, Ulienne could hear the legionaries cheering, chanting at her feet, calling out to Hindarah, to Horus, to the creatures in their midst - and to Angron, Angron, Angron.\n\nThe newborn star started to fall, trailing a tail of fire.\n\nThe Path to Glory\n\nKargos\n\nHe moved with the horde again, this time with Inzar at his side. The endless march was a matter of placing one foot in front of the other, his thudding bootsteps sending twinges through the Nails in the back of his brain. They hurt, they had fangs these days, but they hurt less in Inzar's presence. His was one of the voices that eased their poisonous drip.\n\nThinking came a little easier, too. He was starting to remember things. Who he was. What he'd done. The names of the warriors around him. There was Draelath, centurion of the 53rd Assault Company. There was Rangor, bedecked with gladiatorial blades. Kargos couldn't recall the warrior's rank, but he knew Rangor cheated at gambling games of knucklebones, aboard the Conqueror.\n\nStrange, what was coming back to him now.\n\nKargos glanced at Inzar as they marched in broken rhythm. The Word Bearer seemed to have changed little, and there was a curious comfort in that. It put Kargos in mind of older days. When the Word Bearers had sent their Chaplains to the other Legions at the apex of the Great Crusade, many had regarded it as an act of needless fraternisation. The World Eaters were among those that had come around to the secondments relatively swiftly. Inzar was a good example of why; he'd served with the Eighth Assault Company, and Captain Kharn had admired his cold tenacity a great deal, coming to trust Inzar's counsel.\n\nIf Lorgar's Legion had sent preachers, the sons of Angron would never have granted them a moment's grace. But the Word Bearers had sent warrior-priests who were far more warrior than priest. The Chaplain held no truck with codes of wartime conduct. When notions of martial honour came up in debate, they made him sigh; he'd insisted such things were dreamed up by men and women wanting to gird themselves in patchwork denial.\n\n'Righteousness doesn't make a warrior,' Inzar had said at the time. 'Warfare does.' A true wa"}
{"text":"ad sent preachers, the sons of Angron would never have granted them a moment's grace. But the Word Bearers had sent warrior-priests who were far more warrior than priest. The Chaplain held no truck with codes of wartime conduct. When notions of martial honour came up in debate, they made him sigh; he'd insisted such things were dreamed up by men and women wanting to gird themselves in patchwork denial.\n\n'Righteousness doesn't make a warrior,' Inzar had said at the time. 'Warfare does.' A true warrior did whatever was necessary to win the war. All else was ephemera. Such was the creed of Inzar of Colchis, and the sentiment secured him a warm welcome into the Eaters of Worlds.\n\n'They were good years, were they not?'\n\nKargos cleared his throat. 'What?'\n\n'The years we fought together, in the Great Crusade. A brutal time, my friend. Years of satisfying service. I think of them often.'\n\nKargos nodded. They had been good days. The galaxy stretching out before them, unconquered, ready to be carved apart by Legion blades and divided by the primarchs' desires.\n\n'I always felt a kinship with those of your bloodline,' Inzar confessed. 'So many of my kindred brought whispers of warrior lodges and gladiator cults to the other Legions, but those of us that fought with the World Eaters never needed to preach. The glorious truth is that you and your Legion were ripe for enlightenment from the very beginning.'\n\n'Enlightenment. A hell of a word for where we are today.'\n\n'Don't speak of your blessings as a curse,' Inzar said. 'The Nails ache, but are you not stronger with them? More powerful of muscle? Faster of reflex?'\n\n'You and your shitty poetry,' Kargos grunted. 'Spare me the medicae analysis. I'm an Apothecary.'\n\nWas an Apothecary, he thought. Was.\n\nKargos licked his cracked lips. It wasn't funny, but he could feel the laughter coming up like bile. He fought the queasy feeling for as long as he could but it wracked him anyway: a sudden laughing fit that tore out like a series of aborted howls. There was no mirth in the sound. He laughed only because the machine in his skull pinched those nerves at that point in time, and he danced to their song.\n\nKargos had laughed like that a few times in these last weeks. It was worse than the pain, being forced to convulse by amusement you didn't feel.\n\nInzar made no comment on it. He carried on speaking as if there'd been no laughing jag. His tone was warm with amusement.\n\n'Your vocation is the very reason you should know better than anyone not to spurn the blessings you've received. For shame, my brother.'\n\nKargos grunted something that was neither agreement nor disagreement. How long had it been since someone had talked to him like this, sharing brotherly jests? He sifted through the blood-dimmed murk that passed for his thoughts. He didn't know. It felt like forever.\n\nHe had only fragmented memories of the first analyses of the Nails, the reports he'd witnessed in gleaming hololithic displays. Those diagrams of musculature - read-outs of his digitally flayed brothers - had told quite a story.\n\nEven the genetically reforged body of a Space Marine was fundamentally mortal. Signals between the brain, the muscles and the central nervous system worked within mortal boundaries. The Nails banished those boundaries. The pain engines overwrote the electric pulses between brain and body, letting warriors abuse their own bodies, pushing more kineticism through muscle and sinew whether it was receptive or not. And with it came joy. As all other emotions dulled (a regrettable by-product of the implant's technology) the adrenal delight of brutality soared.\n\nAt Angron's wish, the Legion's Apothecaries had beaten the Nails into their brothers' skulls. And then, righteously pleased with their work, the butcher-surgeons of the XII Legion had implanted each other. They'd sacrificed the solace of a painless life for greater physicality on the field of battle.\n\nInzar turned his red eye-lenses upon the World Eater.\n\n'Sacrifice has to hurt, Kargos. That's what makes it a sacrifice. You give up something precious to earn something greater. I don't pity you, brother. I admire you. Your strength, your sacrifice, is an inspiration to us all.'\n\nAfter that, silence reigned. Exactly how long it lasted, Kargos didn't know. He was the one to break it, that unknowable time later.\n\n'Kharn,' he said into the dust.\n\nInzar turned his helm towards the World Eater. 'Brother?'\n\n'I was the one,' Kargos told him. 'The one that found Kharn.'\n\n'Ah.' Inzar's deep voice turned kind, knowing. 'You speak of Isstvan. I know the tale, my friend. You've told me before.'\n\n'No. Skane found him on Isstvan.' Kargos managed to hold back the scudding threat of more laughter. 'And Skane called to me.' On that day a lifetime ago, at the very beginning of everything, they'd pulled their captain out from under a Land Raider's treads. How long had it been, since Kargos thought of Isstvan?\n\n'I have not seen Skane thus far during the war,' Inzar noted.\n\n'That's because he's dead.'\n\n'Ah, that grieves me. He was an excellent soldier.'\n\n'Hnnh. A traitor though, at the end. He tried to run from the Conqueror. Lotara executed him.'\n\n'Indeed? Then Shipmistress Sarrin did what had to be done.' Inzar was a practical philosopher over such things. 'But you were speaking of Kharn.'\n\nKargos grunted agreement instead of nodding. Another little shift in the mundanities of life since he received the implant. Moving his head, even to nod, sometimes spiked the Nails.\n\n'They said he'd been cut down by the Black Knight.'\n\n'I see. How interesting.' Was Inzar smiling behind his faceplate? Kargos thought so. The Word Bearer sounded like he was being told quite the heart-warming tale. 'And did you take that from Kharn's body, or did he bequeath it to you with his final words?'\n\n'Take what? I didn't take anything from Kharn.' Kargos flinched. He was going to laugh again, the Nails were going to make him do it, and he didn't want to. Not so soon after the last time.\n\nInzar was patience incarnate. 'You took nothing, my friend?'\n\n'Stop smirking at me, you Colchisian bastard. I can hear it in your voice.'\n\nAs they trudged together, Inzar gestured with his sawtoothed crozius mace. He aimed it at the weapon loosely gripped in Kargos' right hand.\n\n'If you took nothing from Kharn, then why are you carrying his axe?'\n\nKharn had been on his knees when Kargos found him. That, more than anything else in the long months of this war, told Kargos that the world had lost its mind. As he drew near to his commander, fortune favoured him with the respite of lucidity.\n\nHow long ago was this? Hours? Days? Weeks? No one agreed on how time worked, anymore. No one agreed what hour, day or week it really was.\n\nThe haze had cleared more, the closer he came to Kharn's fallen form. He wasn't sure where he was - at the border of one of the outer bastions, he figured - but enough of who he was came back to him, that he felt a sense of uncomfortable horror at the sacrilege of his brother-captain's pose.\n\nThere was no shame in dying, but to kneel? You knelt to tyrants. You knelt to slavemasters. You knelt to emperors.\n\n'A bad omen, brother.' Kargos crouched by the corpse. 'A bad way to die.'\n\nGorechild, Kharn's axe, lay in the rubble a few feet away. The binding chain was cleaved close to the captain's wrist. Kharn had died without a weapon in his hand. Another bad omen - one Kargos didn't want his brothers to see.\n\nHe called out for aid over the vox, summoning a gunship he knew might never arrive in the ash. When he heard his brothers' bootsteps approaching, he dragged Gorechild closer to Kharn's slack fingers.\n\nThe moment he closed his fingers around the haft, Kharn spoke to him.\n\n'It was Sigismund.'\n\nKharn's head stayed bowed, the crest of his helmet tilted in defeat. He was colourless in the dust, as they all were. His blood had long since dried around the rents in his warplate, giving the dust something else to cling to. He wasn't breathing. Kargos didn't need the tools of his trade to see that. And yet, he spoke.\n\nSigismund.\n\nThe name echoed with uneasy sincerity in Kargos' mind. For a moment he was back in the arena, in the Conqueror's fighting pits, watching Kharn and Sigismund chained together at the wrists, duelling side by side. The truth was, back then, neither of the two captains had built much of a reputation for themselves in the gladiatorial arena. It was a truth universally acknowledged that with lives on the line, they were among the fiercest warriors in the Legiones Astartes. In war, they were supreme. But that was war. In the fighting pits, they were famously middling combatants. Always fighting to first blood, rarely to third blood; never sanguis extremis, never to the death.\n\nKargos had been the Eighth Company's gladiator. Bloodspitter they called him, because he loved to fight dirty, spitting into his enemy's eyes. They all had names, fraternally bestowed and each more bombastic than the last. Bloodspitter. Black Knight. Flesh Tearer.\n\nFighting alone or chained to his pit-brother, Kargos had no preference. He scarred his skin with kill-cuts to mark the deaths he'd dealt. He'd beaten Delvarus that day aboard the Conqueror, when the centurion of the Triarii had succumbed to bloodlust and abandoned his post. Only then had Kargos showed mercy, letting his opponent live at his captain's request.\n\nIf it wasn't to the death, it wasn't worth doing. Why fight at all if nothing was on the line? There's no prestige in playing games. They were the words of his arena partner, his brother in chains. True then. True always.\n\n'Killed by your own chain-brother,' Kargos said softly to the kneeling figure. 'The bitterest blow.'\n\nKharn's faceplate was cracked open, showing most of his face. He'd lost half his teeth with the blow that had shattered his helm. The wounds to his face and chest, let alone the fact he wasn't breathing, should've ruined his speech, but he sounded perfectly clear.\n\n'I wal"}
{"text":"ere's no prestige in playing games. They were the words of his arena partner, his brother in chains. True then. True always.\n\n'Killed by your own chain-brother,' Kargos said softly to the kneeling figure. 'The bitterest blow.'\n\nKharn's faceplate was cracked open, showing most of his face. He'd lost half his teeth with the blow that had shattered his helm. The wounds to his face and chest, let alone the fact he wasn't breathing, should've ruined his speech, but he sounded perfectly clear.\n\n'I walk the Eightfold Path,' Kharn said without moving his lips. Without moving at all. 'I walk the Path to Glory.'\n\nA cluster of flies danced a slow pattern across his bare skin. One of them alighted on the surface of his open eye.\n\nKargos said nothing. Several shadows fell over him. His brothers were here.\n\n'Get his body back to the Conqueror.'\n\nThe replies were mixed. A chuckle here, a growl of affirmation there. 'Why?' one of the warriors grunted behind him.\n\n'He was the best of us,' said Kargos. 'That's why.'\n\nKargos rose - and Gorechild came up from the dust with him. The chain binding it to his wrist rattled with that age-old gladiator melody. The weapon's weight was a pleasure. He could feel the indentations of Kharn's fingers in the grip. He could feel where the trigger rune had been worn smooth.\n\nAfter that, things swiftly lost clarity. He couldn't remember loading Kharn's body onto any gunship, but he also couldn't recall leaving his captain there in the rubble. One or the other had to be true, and he had no idea which. His memories devolved into the grey-stained cycle of trudging forward, following shapes in the dust.\n\nMaybe that was when the march to the Eternity Gate truly began.\n\n'Maybe it was,' Inzar agreed.\n\nKargos was silent as he watched the horizon. His throat was a parched channel down into the pained meat of his body. Blood of the Emperor, but he was thirsty.\n\nWalls were beginning to appear in the murk ahead. High, dark smudges that were surely the battlements of one of the Palatine Bastions. Meru, perhaps. Or Pythia. Or Avalon. No. Wait. Had they already fallen?\n\n'It is the Avalon Bastion,' Inzar said.\n\n'How do you know my thoughts?' Kargos snapped. 'Can you read minds now? A gift from the things you call gods?'\n\nThe Word Bearer's voice stayed patient, stayed understanding. 'You are speaking aloud, my friend. You have been talking ceaselessly since we met three days ago.'\n\nThree days. Three days?\n\n'Almost four,' Inzar confirmed.\n\nKargos grunted what might've been agreement or dismissal.\n\nInzar breathed in deeply, the sound audible through his helmet's vocaliser. 'And I would wager you found Kharn a week before that. Perhaps even longer.'\n\n'If you say so, preacher.'\n\n'Do you feel what I feel? That shift in the air, these last few hours. That presence nearby.'\n\nKargos felt nothing but the needles in the back of his brain. He wasn't shy about saying so.\n\n'Your father is here, Kargos. I sense his holy wrath, how it pulls the horde in his wake. We are but pilgrims in his shadow.'\n\nAngron. Here.\n\nHow long had it been since Kargos had seen the thing his father had become? These were the kinds of thoughts he struggled to hold on to. They kept slipping, half-formed, from his mind before they could find traction on his tongue.\n\n'There.' Inzar interrupted his thoughts, pointing skyward. 'Do you see?'\n\nAbove the distant walls shone a single star. The moment Kargos' eyes fell upon it, they locked there, and a cooling shiver ran through his skin. The Nails bit a little deeper, but the pain was numbing. Almost a relief.\n\n'You sense it,' said Inzar.\n\n'I see a flicker of fire in the sky. You believe that is Angron?'\n\n'I know it is.' Inzar stared up at the faraway blaze, enraptured. 'The Neverborn sing of him, behind the veil. It is a jealous song, in truth. They envy him for the honour of his exaltation. They were created immortal. We mortals, even our primarchs, must fight for it. And through sacred fury, Angron has achieved it. He has won, Kargos. He has walked the path, and oh, how they love him and hate him for reaching its end.'\n\n'The path,' Kargos repeated. He could hear Kharn's last words once more. We walk the Eightfold Path. We walk the Path to Glory.\n\nHis blood iced. He had to suppress a shiver.\n\n'Sounds like more tiresome Colchisian doggerel to me.'\n\n'Does it really?' Inzar's voice held no edge at the World Eater's tone. The Chaplain walked on at Kargos' side, his eye-lenses turned to the sky. 'I speak for the sake of your soul, my friend. I am here to guide you onward, as Lorgar guided Angron. None of us have a choice, Kargos. We all walk the same road now.'\n\n'Immortality.' Kargos barked the word, rich with mockery.\n\n'Immortality,' Inzar agreed, 'or eternal agony.'\n\n'I'm already in agony,' Kargos said with a grin. 'You learn to live with it.'\n\n'No, my friend. You are in pain. Words cannot convey the gulf between mortal pain, which we all know, and immortal agony, which awaits us all.'\n\nFrom the east came the great rattling tread of a Titan. Reaver-class. It sent tremors through the ruined earth, close enough for Kargos to see its hunched silhouette stalking forward. As it strode for the walls, a multitude of shapes that may or may not have been human ghosted at its heels. He heard pack howls from those shapes. He heard whispers that couldn't possibly cover the distance to his ears. Kargos felt himself gripping the axe tighter as he looked at the Chaplain once more.\n\n'Don't jest with me, preacher.'\n\n'I am hardly a man of fine humour, Kargos.'\n\nThat was true enough. For whatever reason, the notion made the Nails itch, and Kargos had to growl the words through clenched teeth, biting back a sudden flux of the unwanted laughter.\n\n'What happens after we die? Do you really know?'\n\nFor the first time, Inzar's body language betrayed surprise. Kargos heard the other warrior's breath faintly catch and heard the brief flinch in his companion's armour joints. He didn't answer at once, instead he kept his gaze to the sky, watching what he claimed was the star of Angron's wrath.\n\n'Now you choose to ignore me?' Kargos laughed, and it was a natural laugh. Blood of the Emperor, it felt good.\n\nInzar finally lowered his gaze from the heavens. 'Your father has given your Legion a great gift. The Butcher's Nails were the beacon that lit the way. Lorgar gave our Legion a similar gift. He gave us the truth.'\n\nKargos let his gaze drift. Not to the star - he could feel its presence as a prickling heat against his skin despite his armour plating - but to the silhouettes and shadows of the horde all around. He watched them: his brothers, the things pretending to be his brothers, and the humans in thrall to it all. Inzar's soothing voice was the perfect percussion.\n\n'It was an ugly truth. It almost broke him to learn that reality was a hateful lie, a thin crust over seething, smiling damnation. Can you imagine it, my friend? To be the first living being to learn - to truly know - that what awaits every man, woman and child is an afterlife of dissolution in an ocean of boiling horror?'\n\nKargos clacked his teeth together, hard, to prevent whatever was building up in his throat from emerging as a sound. He felt as though he were going to vomit laughter, and if it broke free, he feared he would lose control of his limbs. As if the Nails' joy would somehow possess him, for who knew how long.\n\n'More shitty poetry,' Kargos murmured, doubting his own words even as he spoke them.\n\n'On the contrary. I am being as clear as I am able. Weaker souls, they will burn briefly, mere instants of agony before they boil away to become part of the warp. But stronger souls, the souls of psykers, they can look forward to an eternity of...'\n\nThe Chaplain trailed off. Hesitated. Tried again. 'We all face a simple choice. No faith in the false God-Emperor will save even a single soul. Oblivion awaits the weakest of us. Torment and eventual annihilation will be the reward for the strong. The gods behind the veil are wondrous beings, my friend. But they are wrathful, and by any measure of human perception, they are insane. The Word Bearers raise icons to the Pantheon out of worship, yes. But there is pragmatism in our faith. We are the Legion that first found something worthy of worship in the realm behind reality. But we are also the Legion that first found something to fear.'\n\nKargos could smell blood, and the back of his head was growing sickeningly hot. The Nails were bleeding, bleeding into his helmet. He felt his own wet life pooling at the back of his neck. He tried to speak and failed entirely.\n\n'Lorgar saw all of this. He brought Angron to the precipice and gave your father a chance at immortality. A fool looks at him now and sees a monster. Those of us with vision see everything he has overcome. He is the Red Angel. He is the War God's son. A man that refused to accept mortal death and the agony of the underworld. He pissed on the notion of eventual oblivion. Instead... he chose to live forever, no matter the cost.'\n\nAround them, the shapes and shadows of other warriors began to bay and howl and roar. Kargos' skin prickled; it took intense effort not to join in and cry out loud, as bestial as the rest of them. Inzar's voice went on, a fervent drone now, a preacher's insistence and a brother's reassurance.\n\n'You hate Angron for what he's done to you. For the sin of making you strong at the cost of your reasoning minds? My friend, he has done so much more. He has given you a choice. Something denied to so many others. You can choose to die as all mortals die, to suffer as all mortals suffer - or to walk the path and live forever.'\n\nInzar was the eye of the storm, the lone focus of calm. Titans shook the ground with their tread. Men and women and daemons and the dead howled; as they did, Inzar raised his crozius, aiming it at the lone star in the sky.\n\n'Look upon your father, Kargos. For above all else, he has given his sons an example to follow.'\n\nAbove th"}
{"text":"ven you a choice. Something denied to so many others. You can choose to die as all mortals die, to suffer as all mortals suffer - or to walk the path and live forever.'\n\nInzar was the eye of the storm, the lone focus of calm. Titans shook the ground with their tread. Men and women and daemons and the dead howled; as they did, Inzar raised his crozius, aiming it at the lone star in the sky.\n\n'Look upon your father, Kargos. For above all else, he has given his sons an example to follow.'\n\nAbove them, high beyond the walls of Avalon, the flaming star began to fall.\n\n'He has given you a messiah.'\n\nImmortality through annihilation\n\nAngron\n\nPain can destroy people. It's possible to suffer so profoundly that no personality can exist in whatever space is left. Among the dying, that degree of suffering happens often enough, but it isn't limited to the terminal and the doomed. Pain can make a man scream himself out of his mind. Pain can hurt so much that it overwhelms everything except the body's capacity for agony.\n\nThe creature that had once been Angron had learned fury could do the same thing.\n\nInsofar as he was still a he at all, Angron was reduced now to a boiling snarl of synapses. He possessed no capacity to reason, because the vortex inside his head allowed for no sensation or memory to ever evolve into thought. In place of a brain, he possessed toxic soup riven with sparking cables. In place of a layered mind, he possessed rage so naked and profound that it bordered on exaltation.\n\nWith no higher thought, everything was instinct, bleached red, backlashing against itself.\n\nThe bitterest layer was that there was no longer enough left of Angron to lament his own fate. His primarch brothers, deceived as they were, still possessed cores of tortured empathy at the heart of their delusions. No matter the deceptions they'd been offered and the lies they fed to themselves, some iota of cognition remained inside them - further feeding their power with the flow of regretful misery. But Angron, the brother that had screamed loudest of freedom, wasn't even allowed to see how much of a slave he'd become.\n\nImmortality came in many flavours. Not all were as sweet as they seemed.\n\nMaybe it would have caused more anguish had Angron been permitted a sliver of consciousness, enough to let him suffer with this knowledge. Another patron deity might have allowed such an awakened shard to exist within its puppet, feasting on the helpless realisation of the soul in its grasp.\n\nBut the Blood God was the Father of Massacres and the Lord of War, and it cared nothing for cosmic irony. Its servants' anguish was irrelevant. Nothing mattered but the blood they shed... and few of its slaves served that purpose as well as the thing that had once been Angronius of Nuceria.\n\nAngron ranged ahead of the armies chanting his name. He soared above them, flying through the ashen soup that Terra's air had become. Some of those behind and beneath him were mortal, his sons and daughters in ascension and damnation. Others were never born of flesh or blood or bone. They took shape from the realm behind reality, and he was like them now. He did not live as a mortal man lived. He was incarnated. Tethered to this cold plane of existence only by bloodshed. Every second of his existence on Terra was threatened by the pull of the howling void. He killed everyone, he destroyed everything, holding onto incarnation only through slaughter.\n\nBeneath him was Avalon, one of the last remaining Palatine Bastions. He knew this in the vaguest way, not as a fortress with defenders - he was past such coherence - but more as the memory of a promise that he chased. Someone was at Avalon. He knew this, too, without conscious thought. He knew it the way a slave fears the kiss of a whip even in his sleep.\n\nSomeone was supposed to be here. Someone whose blood would run hot down his throat in steaming gulps. Someone whose death would anchor him to this life, freeing him from the pain of the pulling void.\n\nAnd yet.\n\nAvalon Bastion was a bloodless battlefield. The enemy had abandoned it, evacuating before the horde. Angron sensed this utter absence of life as he soared above the silent battlements. He knew nothing of what it might mean tactically or logistically. He knew only that there was nothing here to kill. Not the one being that needed to die. No one at all.\n\nThat's when the acid sloshed behind his eyes again. There was a vision that came to him in these warless, bloodless moments: a single image boiling in the thresh of his senses. It was a goad, driving him deeper and spurring him on, as it lashed at what remained of his mind.\n\nWings.\n\nWings of white, dappled with blood. Wings flaring from armour of gold. Wings he slavered to break in his clawed hands. Wings he would tear from their sockets of muscle and bone.\n\nHe roared at the whiteness in his head, a venting of wordless rage. Nothing to destroy here, nothing to kill. Dead stone. Cold metal. Empty, all of it, empty.\n\nWings. An angel's wings. Wings of white feathers, an angel of gold.\n\nLightning sparked around the cranial implants parasiting their way through his brain. It was almost savage enough to send him falling from the sky.\n\nWings. His brother's wings. His brother, the angel, whose blood would flow down his throat and bring strength, and a cessation of the pain.\n\nHis brother, who wasn't here.\n\nAngron shook the sky with another carnosaur roar, an animal effort at discharging pain. It failed utterly, as it always did. In these moments, even the paltry scraps of identity he still possessed were drowned in the War God's song that formed every atom of his being. But somewhere in the dust below he sensed the heat of life, and that was enough to catch the attention of his diminished brain and its primal hungers. A flicker, no more than that, but enough.\n\nAngron dived blind, trailing flame. Graceless as a gargoyle, fast as a falling star. There was prey here after all.\n\nThe death of the Titan Conclamatus was recorded in no Imperial archive - at least none that survived the Siege of Terra - and went unacknowledged by the Palace's defenders. She was already written off as dead days before she died, already mourned by those with a mind to mourn her.\n\nHer princeps and crew had volunteered to remain behind at Avalon when the others fled the bastion. Not that they had much of a choice. The war had crippled Conclamatus, leaving her barely able to move. Rather than limp into no-man's-land and inevitably suffer reactor-paralysis halfway to the Sanctum, she had stayed at Avalon Bastion and taken a knee outside the towering wall. There she stayed, in the ash and the dust. Waiting.\n\nHer stabilisers were shot through, her locomotors violated by months of engagement in the Outer Palace. After retreating for repairs, Conclamatus was pressed back into service before a single adept brought a blowtorch near her broken skeleton. So she knelt in the dust for stability, not symbolism, down on one knee with her ramshackle structure braced for maximal fire.\n\nShe had what could generously be called a plan, though perhaps more realistically an intention. When the horde descended upon her, she'd unleash the reserves of ammunition she still possessed; what precious little had been left to her after she'd bequeathed the bulk of her stores to her retreating sister-Titans. She was a Warlord, regardless that she was reactor-scarred and that she'd been driven to one knee, and she intended to die as a lord of war, just as she'd lived. Her arms held level with where her crew imagined the horizon to be. The right arm was a Belicosa, humming with a low charge still capable of bringing down a city block. The left was a claw, the talons mangled from overuse but all still articulated, still capable of opening and closing. On her back, feeding directly into her shoulder cannons, was a pauper's sum of solid shot. Those macro-gatling blasters would whine and cycle and spin - they would make for a single, and hopefully glorious, final symphony.\n\nHer plan never came to pass. What went through the minds of her princeps and crew can only be speculated upon. The truth, perhaps cruel and perhaps plain, is that Conclamatus' last stand was just one among tens of millions in this war. Why should her crew be immortalised when so many others went unseen, unknown, or destined to be forgotten? The horde pouring towards her cared nothing for the identity of the human lives protected by her armour plating, and her killer cared even less. With that in mind, the accounting of her final stand comes down to this.\n\nAngron's prey was sheathed in unsatisfying iron, so he struck not to kill it, but to shatter its shell.\n\nIn that moment there were many things he did not know. He didn't know that he'd struck Conclamatus between her shoulder blades with enough force to break the machinery of her backbone and rupture dozens of pistons in her vertebrae. He didn't know that the Titan's princeps, who had racked up honours within the Legio Ignatum for forty-six years of unbroken loyalty, had his sight burned away by the appearance of Angron so close. He didn't know that the princeps' soul was already torn from its housing of flesh and boiling in the warp before the man had even finished screaming.\n\nAnd had Angron known any of these things, he wouldn't have cared. Such truths were meaningless to the creature he'd become.\n\nWhat he knew was that within the Titan's body were lives he could end and blood that would flow. He tore out Conclamatus' reactor-heart, heedless of the burns inflicted on his flesh by the core venting its fire of artificial fusion. The warp essence that comprised his physical form regenerated even as it was destroyed. This was how he survived - thriving by destruction. Angron had achieved that most dubious apex: treading the final steps on the Path to Glory. He had attained immortality through annihilation.\n\nInsensate with rage, he hurled his burning burden at the walls of Avalon "}
{"text":"ld flow. He tore out Conclamatus' reactor-heart, heedless of the burns inflicted on his flesh by the core venting its fire of artificial fusion. The warp essence that comprised his physical form regenerated even as it was destroyed. This was how he survived - thriving by destruction. Angron had achieved that most dubious apex: treading the final steps on the Path to Glory. He had attained immortality through annihilation.\n\nInsensate with rage, he hurled his burning burden at the walls of Avalon Bastion. There was, briefly, the flare of a false sun. A detonation among millions of others across this scarred planet. Then another wall fell, in a world of falling walls, and Angron cried out the only word he was still able to say.\n\nHe screamed his brother's name.\n\nPART TWO\n\nA WORLD GONE BLIND\n\nThe last man on Terra\n\nAmit\n\nA daemon was born in the moment a queen died, poisoned by the king she loved. As she sighed out her last breath, tangled in blood-patterned silk sheets, the daemon gave its birth-cry in the realm behind reality.\n\nThe queen's lost soul, ripped from her body into the seething warp, was the first thing this daemon ever devoured. There was, arguably, a bleak poetry in that.\n\nHistory - that ravening liar - would come to swallow the names of the treacherous king and the queen he betrayed. Cosmically, their reign meant nothing; just two humans in a species of swarming quintillions, ruling over yet another empire of moral conceits on yet another world turning in the endless dark. The true impact of their lives was with the midnight murder; with the war that followed the murder, and with the plague that followed the war. So much suffering from a thimbleful of herbs in a single cup of wine.\n\nThe creature born from their actions didn't know the names of those responsible for its genesis. Treachery was its real father, sickness its true mother. It grew behind the veil that separated reality and unreality, taking shape in the tides. There were governing laws within this boiling warp, but they resembled nothing of material physics. Time didn't exist there.\n\nThe daemon grew. Awareness bloomed. Strength blossomed with it.\n\nThe creature was given names by the cults that rose to worship it, as well as the men and women of supposed piety that sought to destroy it. It took the names, the worship and the hatred as its due.\n\nThe timelessness ended at a point between forever and never. The daemon manifested on a world once called Earth, now called Terra. It was drawn with numberless hosts of its kin to shriek their disgust and rage at the broken walls of an embattled Emperor. The creature's entire timeless existence had led to this moment. At last, the daemon could bring its breed of torment to the waking world.\n\nA dream no more, it tore its way from the warp and into reality.\n\nIts hands were nine-jointed talons fused to the hilt of a corroded sword. Its lone eye was bulbous, milky, crusted half-closed. In the cancerous plasma that passed for its flesh, it bore the plague that once swept through the king and queen's long-forgotten kingdom. It salivated virulence. It screamed disease.\n\nIt died four seconds after manifesting.\n\nAnd it died by butchery. Evisceration reduced it to dismantled pieces of dissolving corpus. The daemon's remains, an unbinding helix of ectoplasmic slush, burned away to nothing in the filthy air.\n\nIts killer was an Astartes warrior in war-cracked plate, with a serrated knife clutched in one fist and a chainsword in the other. Both blades dripped strings of unearthly gore. On his breastplate was a winged skull cast in beaten bronze. This was the Imperialis, the symbol of undiluted loyalty worn throughout the ranks of the warriors still standing. On one of his pauldrons, written in symbolic Aenokhian script, was the name Nassir Amit.\n\nIn keeping with all his kind, Amit was and was not, strictly speaking, a human being. It was more accurate to say the warriors of the Legiones Astartes were a subspecies ideated from a manipulated vision of the human template. It was most accurate of all to say Amit was barely human in any way that mattered, and more a living weapon of hybridised genecraft, encased in layers of powered ceramite.\n\nSome of his kind rebelled against this idea of pure weaponisation. Others embraced it. There were adherents of both principles on both sides of the war.\n\nAmit was firmly one of the latter. The concerns that burdened humankind were a distraction from the pursuit of his purpose. He'd left his humanity behind as something that bored him.\n\nHe could see nothing in the dust. Not the laid-waste rubble of the Palace's skyline to the north, east and south. Not the final barrier of the Delphic Battlement to the west. The world was a winter of ash and smoke. The sounds of shelling had been a constant, sleep-sucking companion for months on end, and now even the drumbeats of bombardment had fallen quiet - diminished to thick whispers by the ash that choked the air. The ash that was the air.\n\nAnd the extradimensional xenos were here. The creatures-\n\nDaemons. You know they are daemons. Why do you resist that word?\n\n-had only rarely manifested within the Palatine Ring. The Emperor, in His glory, held them back.\n\nBut no longer.\n\nAmit stood in the heart of a world choked by ash and voxed yet again for reinforcements, for reports, and for orders that no longer came. It was the nineteenth time he'd made the call since Pythia Bastion fell. He hadn't seen another survivor, or even one of the enemy, for hours.\n\nEven before the vox failed, the survivors had known it was over. The Khan was wounded unto death. The Ultimate Wall had fallen, and the districts of the Inner Palace with it. They knew, too, what was coming next - it had been repeated a thousand times and more across the traitors' lines of communication in a tone of smirking triumph: Horus was ready to make his landing. His herald, Angron, was clearing the final path, ending every life between the Ultimate Wall and the Eternity Gate.\n\nThen the vox had started to die. Fewer strained voices replied from the other embattled outposts. They offered no aid to each other, giving only recitations of their own straits - some with grim humour, some with pained curses, some with maudlin, naked honesty. The words that crackled back over the decaying vox-links were variously breathless or taut with the suppression of pain and emotion. Each tone hinted at wounds the speakers wouldn't confess. Gunfire was a backbeat behind every message, and blindness was the unifying factor. Everyone was surrounded. No one could break out and no one could see a thing.\n\nPythia Bastion fell three hours ago. Amit had added his own final report to the vox-web's audio miasma before abandoning the fortress. He'd been one of the last defenders to leave, with the bastion shaking around him, raining debris as it came to pieces.\n\n'South,' he'd ordered his surviving warriors, and the refugees they were forced to protect. 'Don't go for Razavi, they're already evacuating there. Make for Golgotha Bastion. If you can't reach Golgotha, run for the Sanctum.'\n\nFor all he knew, he'd sent them to their deaths in the wasteland. No one reliably knew which way was south now, anyway. Most instruments projected random directional data and registered the passing of time in random leaps. Two patrols meeting up in the ash would report that it was two different days of the week. Everything was scrambled by the dust or by interference from the-\n\nDaemons, they are daemons\n\n-from the immaterial xenos drawn from their reality into this one.\n\nAmit didn't pull his helmet off to face the quiet unprotected. Even his genhanced lungs struggled with the ash contaminating the air. Instead, he walked along the uneven ground, through the dips and craters that had been roads and plazas and colonnades - all of it churned to meaninglessness by orbital bombardment; by Titan fire; by artillery; by the vanguard warbands of Horus' horde. All of it wrenched up and pulled down in acts of stupid hate.\n\nThe ground was infected. He was careful where he trod, moving around patches where the earth was plagued with calluses and warts, keeping clear of rippling pools of un-water that stank like cancer. Who had known that marble could sweat pus? Who would ever have guessed that soil could bleed?\n\nThere was no recovering from this. No matter who won the war, Terra would carry this sickness within its core forever.\n\nAmit kept walking. He had to link up with one of the convoys. For a time, he was kept company only by the sound of his own footsteps, and by now he was far past tired, deep into a weariness that ate into his bones. When had he last truly slept? A half-hour snatched weeks ago at Gorgon Bar, before the great battle to hold the Saturnine Wall. It felt like another life. One that belonged to someone else.\n\nHe passed bodies, some of the foe, some of those of his brothers and cousins or the soldiers they'd commanded. Most of them were being claimed by the churned earth, tendrils of unreal matter closing around the dead and fusing them to infected stone. Other bodies were being slowly amalgamated, linked with gluey filth, swelling into masses of necrotic flesh. A garden was growing in the wasteland, filled with fruit that had no right to ripen.\n\nOn he walked. Amit's targeting reticule drifted unlocked in the nothingscape of white dust. He wasn't looking for living enemies. He was looking for anyone alive at all.\n\nThese lulls happened in war. Sudden unearthly silences between protracted hours of battle. Times when even the distant peals of artillery thinned away into dubious silence. And the opposite, too: sudden explosions of sound and adrenaline between slow-rolling hours of nothing.\n\nStill, though. Still. An unwelcome notion crept its cold way up his spine, a sense of isolation; that the war was truly over, and he was the only one still alive. The last survivor in humanity's necropolis.\n\nThis thought was followed by another: th"}
{"text":"r. Sudden unearthly silences between protracted hours of battle. Times when even the distant peals of artillery thinned away into dubious silence. And the opposite, too: sudden explosions of sound and adrenaline between slow-rolling hours of nothing.\n\nStill, though. Still. An unwelcome notion crept its cold way up his spine, a sense of isolation; that the war was truly over, and he was the only one still alive. The last survivor in humanity's necropolis.\n\nThis thought was followed by another: that he was dead himself. Perhaps he'd died in battle and now wandered lost in these white wastes. Maybe death had delivered him here, an exile in ashen purgatory.\n\n'This is Dominion Nassir Amit of the Ninth Legion, south of Pythia Bastion in Palatine.'\n\nStatic.\n\n'Pythia Bastion has fallen.'\n\nStatic.\n\n'Is anyone out there?'\n\nStatic.\n\nHow long had it been since he saw his father? The last time he'd been in the presence of the Emperor's Angel, Sanguinius had been on the edge of exhaustion himself, seeking to fight everywhere at once now that the Khan was gone and Dorn was encircled. Was the primarch in one of the Palatine Bastions now, organising its defence? Or was he still out there, soaring through the ash in search of foes on the ground?\n\nAmit came across more bodies. More humans, dead on the flight from Pythia or one of the other bastions. The dust had already settled over them, covering their radiation burns and shrouding them with a fraction of dignity. One of them had died with his mouth open - it was full now, full of grey powder - and his slack hand rested on the churned stone, his fingers curled an inch from his fallen lasrifle.\n\nThey died so easily, these Imperial Army forces. What was a human, really, but a sack of blood and bone that burst with the merest pressure? But bless them, they could fight. Anyone still alive in the war's last hours was some worthy mix of skilled, resolute and damn lucky. Every rifle counted now, as did every heart that beat behind it.\n\nWith the front line reduced to fiction, this was enemy territory now. Amit had been in enemy territory more than once during the war, seeing great poles of iron supported by scrap scaffolding, sunk into the ground, decorated with the dead. Gallows of detritus stood proud, cradling the forms of executed defenders. Human soldiers, civilians, Astartes warriors, all defiled in death, their corpses chained and flayed and desecrated in a dozen other ways to draw the black eyes of insane gods.\n\nYet there was no desecration here, yet. Whatever killed these fleeing men and women had come from nowhere. Quite literally.\n\nAmit gazed into the nothing all around, his wearing-down armour joints crackling with servo-slippage as he panned his head. It was still here. Somewhere.\n\nMovement drew his eye. A dead woman's mouth opening. Long fingers curling from between her teeth. A spasm quaking her carcass. Amit moved closer as a horned thing climbed from the pile of dusty dead, birthing itself back into reality, using their deaths as its doorway.\n\nThey looked at one another, transhuman and monster. The daemon was drawn to Amit's presence, suckling on the anger that beat in his two hearts. The red-skinned thing bared its teeth at him, preening atop its mound of the slain. It yelled and lashed its tongue and proclaimed its primacy. It spat its name in a language that humans had no hope of understanding.\n\nAmit had heard it all before. He raised both sword and dagger, whirling them slowly to loosen the soreness in his wrists, and started walking forward.\n\nThis leprous womb\n\nZephon\n\nHe woke in the quiet dark, and as awakenings went, it was an unpleasant one. Transhumans of the Legiones Astartes usually came up clean and swift, a synaptic jerk into full consciousness. This was different. This was less an awakening from slumber, more a reclamation of awareness dredged from the depths of a coma.\n\nFor want of any other option, he lay there on his back, watching the low-powered lights flickering above him and listening to the beat of his two hearts. One was slow and regular, the other beat only once every ten seconds or so, its chambers held in reserve for moments of supreme exertion. Beneath those drums, his armour was an active thrum, purring on low power.\n\nWhen he tried to call out, his voice emerged as a drawl, thick with disuse.\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' he said to the flickering illumination globes above. 'You cannot stay here.'\n\nHe hadn't meant to say that. He didn't know why he'd said it, or what it meant.\n\nA voice he didn't recognise said a name he didn't know. He couldn't see who it was; he still couldn't even turn his head. And he tried to say this, to tell the speaker he didn't understand what was happening, but again the words came out wrong.\n\n'The foe is close to the outwork line. Artillery. If our wall-guns are firing, so are theirs. We both possess weapons of great range. Why are you here? You are not militia.'\n\nThe other voice returned, as calm as before. This time it conveyed more than a name.\n\n'Interesting,' it said, coming with a speaker crackle that made it tinny and weak. A human voice, though. 'Remnant memories. Perhaps the very last words pre-acedia.'\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' he said again. It felt vile, speaking those words. Like someone had their fingers inside his throat, pushing the muscles to make the wrong sounds. He wanted to shout, to free his throat of the blockage of bizarre words... but he feared his cry would come out calmly as They have ranged the main line. You cannot stay here.\n\n'Listen to me,' the other voice continued. 'You do hear me, yes?'\n\nYes, he tried to say. Yes, I hear you.\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' he said instead.\n\n'Have they indeed?' replied the voice. 'As fascinating as your pre-stasis murmurings are, this is very much not the time for such considerations. I must extricate you from the leprous womb of your rebirth. Now... make a fist. Can you do that?'\n\nHe made a fist. At least, he thought he did.\n\n'Good,' said the voice. 'Good. Now open your eyes again.'\n\nHe hadn't realised he'd closed them. He opened them - they were gummy, his vision unclear. He tried to say this, too, and failed again.\n\n'They have ranged the-'\n\n'Sacred Mars, shut up,' the voice sighed. And then, in a mumble, 'Perhaps they were right about the brain damage.'\n\nOther voices joined in now, murmuring in similar concern. 'We must attend him,' one of them said.\n\n'By all means,' replied the first. 'Perform your function.'\n\n'Lord?' This new voice was far gentler. 'Lord, it is Shafia. I am with you. We are all with you. Can you open your eyes for me, master?'\n\nHe opened them yet again. A blurry figure was leaning over him, its features indiscernible. There was a spraying sound; the tingle of moisture cold on his face; the drag of a cloth around the edges of his eyes.\n\nIt helped a little. The figure moved away, and the ceiling resolved into clarity above him. The sight brought no enlightenment because what he was seeing made no sense.\n\n'How,' he said, 'how can metal rot?'\n\nNone of the voices chose to answer that. He heard several figures moving around him in the half-dark, heard their shuffling steps and the pneumatic whine of bionic replacements. He heard the strangers breathing, their respiration slow, calm, yet somehow forced. These were sounds he recognised. That was how servitors moved, how they breathed.\n\n'Master, can you sit up?'\n\nHe rose, armour joints growling, and that's when the pain started, a sickening flare in the back of his head. Pain, he could deal with. The dizziness and queasiness were somewhat less welcome. Nausea was rare for his kind. Astartes were engineered to be above such mortal flaws.\n\nHe moved slowly, lifting himself on limbs that purred with the smooth function of exquisite bionics. As the sickness faded, he looked at his hands, seeing palms and fingers of polished metal, feeling them hum with the silken joy of augmetic perfection. Both of his arms were bionic, as was one of his legs - not the crude and functional replacements of Legion warfare, but beautiful, artisanal bionics shaped and nerve-sensed like human limbs. They didn't feel false. They felt like his hands, his arms, his leg. They felt natural.\n\n'I can sheathe them in skin, you know,' said the first voice, somewhere out of sight. 'It would be an achievement of artistry, covering your bionics in cloned flesh. In a way, rather tempting. Not that there's time for such a thing now.'\n\nZephon lowered his silver hands. Chemical feeds were jabbed into his chest and thighs, through sockets in the armour, intravenously flooding his system with fluids from a steel tank buckled to the side of his surgical slab. Now that he was sitting up, he felt strength returning, and clarity of thought with it. It was slow, though. A reluctant return.\n\nThe room around him was infected somehow, corroded not by rust and natural ruin but malformed by abscesses. Veins bulged, hideously ripe, inside the metal. Many of them bled a wet blackness that moved nothing like oil and smelled like diseased blood.\n\nHe was in a medicae chamber. One that was far from empty, populated almost exclusively by the dead. Men and women in war-torn uniforms lay silent on cots and surgical slabs. From the way they were bloating, most had been dead several days, yet a covering of dust coated all of them in shrouds of fine powder, as though they'd lain there for months.\n\nThe ceiling and iron support beams were riven by corrosion. They looked decayed, their ruination impossibly biological. Stasis pods lined the walls, some open and empty, others with the slumbering shapes of Astartes warriors in a state of suspended animation. Several of the pods still with power emitted weak blue light onto their bloodstained cushioning.\n\nThe true smell hit him then. The smell of several hundred people left for dead and slowly splitting open as their organic processes broke them down. It made the pain flare again in the back"}
{"text":"y corrosion. They looked decayed, their ruination impossibly biological. Stasis pods lined the walls, some open and empty, others with the slumbering shapes of Astartes warriors in a state of suspended animation. Several of the pods still with power emitted weak blue light onto their bloodstained cushioning.\n\nThe true smell hit him then. The smell of several hundred people left for dead and slowly splitting open as their organic processes broke them down. It made the pain flare again in the back of his head.\n\n'What happened here?' he asked.\n\n'It's still happening,' the first voice snapped. As if that, of all questions, was somehow a bridge too far. 'You may address your prayers of thanks to the Omnissiah that I found you before it was too late.'\n\nHe looked around as his vision continued to clear. His surgical slab was ringed by several saviours - some of them human, some of them servitors.\n\nThe latter stood with slack jaws and dull eyes. They were a ragged pack in filthy jumpsuits, their heads scarred and tattooed with incarceration codes. Each one of them displayed crude installations of bionic punishment: arms were replaced by metal claws or the bulky weight of heavy bolters; spines were threaded through with muscle-cable; scratched red lenses stared out in place of eyes. One of them was drooling down her chin and making the same repetitive murmur to herself, a nonsense syllable she mumbled over and over. The others stood quietly, not quite silently, as breath was forced in and out of their bodies by their brutal, simple cybernetic implants.\n\nThe humans, though. He knew them at once. Shafia, devoted Shafia, in her shawl of Legion red; Eristes, clad in monkish robes dyed the same familiar crimson; and Shenkai, looking as exhausted as his parents, with his dark eyes narrowed and shadowed by a raised hood.\n\n'We're overjoyed to see you, lord,' said Eristes.\n\nThey did not look overjoyed, Zephon noted. They looked afraid.\n\n'It is good to see the three of you.' Until recently, this would have been a lie, spoken out of politeness - or more likely, not spoken at all. When he'd been exiled to Terra as part of the Crusader Host, the presence of his armoury thralls did nothing but remind him that he would never fight again. He was the crippled captain, the invalid Angel. What use were arsenal servants to him?\n\nLand's augmetic gifts had changed that. First, the ad hoc surgeries that allowed him to fight in the webway; then the more intensive augmentation that followed, restoring him to primacy.\n\nZephon regarded his servants and the servitors accompanying them. Two of the servitors stood either side of him - one managing the chemical feeds plugged into his armour sockets, the other gazing dead-eyed at a handheld auspex scanner, clutched awkwardly in its gloved hand. Ignoring the servitors for a moment, he looked at the tank of chemicals being used, at the runic markings on its metal side.\n\nAll of this - the chemical ritual taking place - reknit the frayed edges of his memory. He'd seen this before. He knew what it meant.\n\n'Why are they doing this?' he asked.\n\nThere was a pause in the wake of that question. His thralls didn't answer, but the first voice did, sounding concerned.\n\n'They're reactivating you from Astartesian stasis. Flooding you with the chemical purges necessary to flush out the toxins of suspended animation. That should be obvious, even with your disorientation.'\n\n'You misunderstand me,' Zephon said. 'I am aware of the process. But why are they doing this? Why servitors, why not Legion Apothecaries?'\n\n'Because most of your Legion's Apothecaries are dead. Most of everyone is dead.'\n\nSomething in the voice's tone tendrilled through his mind, kindling more memories along the way. He saw a face, an old face, the expression dismissive and disgusted.\n\nYes. The last of the fog was lifting now. A name came to him.\n\n'Where are you, Arkhan? I cannot see you.'\n\nThe buzz of a cheap, scratchy anti-grav system sounded above. A servo-skull descended with a quivering lack of grace, the polished bone implanted with sensoria needle clusters in the eye sockets, and its jaw replaced with a dented vox-speaker.\n\n'The fundaments of memory seem intact,' the skull noted in its crackling tone. Red lights blinked at the tips of its sensor needles. 'You know me, at least, and presumably these three slaves.'\n\n'They are not slaves,' Zephon said at once.\n\n'Yes, they are, and we're not going to argue about it. Do you know your own name?'\n\nThe warrior felt a flicker of discomfort; he actually had to think about it for a moment. Nor was he blind to the worried glances passing between his thralls.\n\n'Zephon,' he said. 'Dominion of the Blood Angels. Exarch of the High Host. My brothers know me as the Bringer of Sorrow.'\n\nThe voice - Arkhan Land - barked a nasty little laugh. 'Astartes dramatics! It isn't enough for all of you to set the galaxy aflame, you also have to insist you're heroes for doing it, worthy of titles everyone else finds ridiculous.'\n\nThe waking warrior showed no temper at the old man's attitude. Somehow the disrespect felt familiar and ignorable.\n\n'Master?' This was Shafia, foremost of his servants. 'Can you stand?'\n\nZephon took a breath, looking around the blighted chamber once more. 'Not yet. Sensation is returning, though. I confess I do not understand what I am seeing here. What is this place of horrors?'\n\n'Allow me,' said Arkhan Land in his crackling tone. The servo-skull clicked several times, and a spillage of blue light streamed from the skull's left eye. A degraded hololith took shape of a skinny old man in tattered robes, hovering several inches off the bloodstained floor tiles. Even in the poor quality holo, Land looked some way past weary, deep into a new level of exhaustion. His face was gaunt, his skin grimy. He had a tremor in one of his knuckly hands.\n\n'You look well, my friend,' Zephon lied softly.\n\n'Oh, do shut up,' Land sneered. 'As to your location, you're in one of the medicae-sepulchres of Razavi Bastion. Down in the catacombs. It's where they stored you with who knows how many other dead, wounded, and stasis-bound. They told me you were either dead or terminally brain damaged - which, in the case of your transhuman breed, amounts to much the same thing. Reports conflicted on the matter. I decided to see for myself. You were supposed to be in storage at Bhab. It's taken me forever to find you.'\n\nZephon didn't like the phrasing of being 'in storage', but now wasn't the time to debate it. He raised a hand to slow Arkhan's diatribe, to bid him speak slower, but the Martian wouldn't be stopped. The skull continued transmitting Land's voice a half-second out of time with the holo's movements.\n\n'The subterranean levels have already been abandoned and the surface levels are being prepared for evacuation. I gathered your menials here and sent a team down to find you. Against all good reason, I might add.'\n\nNothing Land was saying made sense. For the defenders to be evacuating Razavi Bastion, the enemy must have...\n\n'Arkhan,' he said to the flickering holo. 'The Ultimate Wall has fallen? Truly?'\n\nThe Martian's smile was anything but pleasant. 'It's riddled with holes. The Warmaster's horde is advancing across the districts of the Inner Palace.'\n\nZephon's armour hummed in the silence that followed.\n\n'Master,' said Eristes gently. Zephon could see he was trying to conceal his urgency. 'Can you stand yet?'\n\nIt was a trial to force himself to his feet. Servos in his hips and knees rolled smoothly, but his strength was taking its time to return. Seeing his weapons strapped to Shenkai's back in a buckled grav-harness brought a relief that bordered on profound.\n\nSomething like hunger rushed through him as he rose, awakening with the restoration of consciousness and motion. It turned his tongue to leather. He felt it in his parched veins, as if every process inside his body cried out for lubricant. It was a thirst beyond dehydration.\n\nI am bloodless, he thought. I am desiccated. A husk. How can they not see it?\n\nBut they couldn't. There was evidently nothing to see. All three of his thralls closed in on him, examining his bionics, poking at the damage to his warplate, sealing the cracks with smears of armour cement.\n\nZephon had never felt the blood-need descend outside of battle. There, it was a pressure, an internal enemy to be resisted through willpower. Here, in the dark, it biled up into his throat and threatened to choke him. The beat of his thralls' hearts was strangely lovely, forming a hypnotic, sodden percussion.\n\n'Lord,' someone was saying.\n\n'Interesting,' someone else was saying. 'Innnteresting.'\n\nZephon breathed through parted teeth, refocusing. 'I need you to tell me all that has transpired,' he said to Arkhan Land.\n\nThe hologhost shook its head. 'I'm not going to detail every loss we've suffered since your injury. The war would be over before I was halfway down the list of disasters.'\n\n'Then summarise. I need information, Arkhan.'\n\nThere was a pause. For a moment, Zephon was sure Land's petulance would win out. Thankfully, he was wrong.\n\n'You were wounded at Gorgon Bar. Your sus-an membrane forced you into Astartesian stasis as a trauma reaction to the organ failures, the cranial rupture, the haemorrhaging...'\n\nZephon was unsteady but he felt fine, at least in terms of recovering from whatever wounds he'd sustained in the- fire bright enough to blind him. Heat so hot it possessed its own searing sound. The unreal thunder of falling rocks. The- the wounds he'd sustained in the explosion.\n\n'I remember,' he said. 'I remember Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'Well, everything after that has gone supremely poorly. They've swarmed the Inner Palace. Almost everything has fallen except the Palatine Ring. Cydonae Bastion, Meru, Sheol... all gone. The last we heard of Pythia and Avalon bastions, they were close to breaking. Bhab and the others still hold, but each one is besieged by the horde, their forces surrounded. The Fourth Prima"}
{"text":"under of falling rocks. The- the wounds he'd sustained in the explosion.\n\n'I remember,' he said. 'I remember Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'Well, everything after that has gone supremely poorly. They've swarmed the Inner Palace. Almost everything has fallen except the Palatine Ring. Cydonae Bastion, Meru, Sheol... all gone. The last we heard of Pythia and Avalon bastions, they were close to breaking. Bhab and the others still hold, but each one is besieged by the horde, their forces surrounded. The Fourth Primarch is encircled at Bhab Bastion, trapped there.'\n\nThe Fourth Primarch. Zephon felt a surge of irritation, but it was thin and weak. It didn't override the dry-vein hunger. 'Say his name,' said the Blood Angel. 'Say \"Rogal Dorn\".'\n\n'As I said,' Land continued without missing a beat. 'The Fourth Primarch. And the bastions that aren't already in ruins are being overrun or abandoned as we speak. Everything in the Inner Palace is decaying. Or infected. Or rotting. Or mutating. Or cancerous. We fall back as swiftly as we can, staying ahead of the foulness. You don't know what it's like out there, Zephon.'\n\n'Master,' Eristes interrupted without bothering to look over at Land's hologhost. 'We must examine your range of motion.'\n\nZephon nodded permission, his attention remaining on Land as he systematically tensed and relaxed his muscles, biological and bionic alike. He rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms. Armour joints revved and tendons crackled in the stinking dark. Eristes, his assessor of physicality, paid rapt attention, studying for soreness, stiffness, for any flaws at all.\n\nWhat little light there was flashed from the silver of his cybernetic limbs. Despite the damage to them - the scratches and dents they'd suffered in the rockslide at Gorgon Bar - they were exquisitely wrought. The Martian had engineered them himself, to replace the Blood Angel's failing bionics.\n\nIt was all coming back to him now, the good and the bad.\n\nThey have ranged the main line. Why are you here? You are not militia. He'd confronted a civilian, just as the shelling began. And he'd shielded her. Embracing her as the building came down upon them, warding her body with his own...\n\n'There was a civilian at Gorgon Bar,' he murmured. 'The artillery... I tried to save her.'\n\n'Really.' Land sounded far from fascinated. 'What a thrilling story.'\n\n'Her name was Ceris Gonn. One of the Praetorian's new interrogators. Do you know if she survived the explosion?'\n\n'Not only do I not know, I also don't much care. You're welcome, by the way. You'd be dead were it not for the archaeological fortune in Dark Age nanotech and artisanal bionics I used to repair your brainstem and central nervous system all those months ago. Their regenerative capabilities are admittedly crude - and, heh, of dubious legality - but it was enough to prevent you haemorrhaging to death from an excruciating brain-bleed.'\n\nDark Age...? Zephon hesitated. 'That is a lot to process, to be thrown so casually into conversation.'\n\n'I think you meant to say, \"Thank you, Arkhan, your legendary generosity has paid off yet again.\"'\n\nZephon took a breath, fixing the hologhost with a gentle stare. 'I said exactly what I meant.'\n\n'As ever, Zephon, your achingly soulful sincerity is a tedium I've neither the time nor the patience to deal with. I trust, with this saving of your life, my debt to you is discharged. Besides,' he added sniffily, 'there's no component in any of my work that isn't entirely safe and entirely within the realms of my understanding.'\n\n'That is comforting to know,' Zephon replied. 'Somewhat.'\n\n'Yes, well, as I said - you're welcome. Now please get up and get out of there.'\n\n'All seems in order,' Eristes said, still circling, still overseeing the process. He watched as the servitors - at Land's command - pulled the chemical feeds from Zephon's armour sockets.\n\nThe Blood Angel dragged his fingers through his long hair, gathering it in a knot behind his head to keep it from his face. He did it carefully, aware of the pain throbbing all the while at the back of his skull. His hands came away unbloodied. That was something, at least.\n\nHe could remember everything now, every hour of the war, every minute of fighting and falling back, fighting and withdrawing... And he had the guiltiest feeling, just for a moment, that ignorance had been bliss. An unworthy thought for a warrior, let alone an Angel of Baal, but there it was.\n\n'How fares my Legion? Where is the primarch?'\n\n'We do not know, lord,' Shafia demurred. 'There has been no reliable word of the Emperor's Angel.'\n\n'A handful of your Legion kinsmen still live,' Land added, 'but as for that genetic mutant you call a father, I'm afraid I've no idea.'\n\nThe family of thralls tensed at the disrespect, which of course Arkhan Land ignored entirely.\n\n'The Twelfth Primarch hunts the Ninth. That's all we know, and we only know that because the ground shakes when he screams the Ninth's name across the sky. Your beloved pater may already be dead, Zephon, and if the Ninth has any sense, it's hiding from the Twelfth. Best to put it out of your mind for now.'\n\nIn the wake of those words, which might have seen Land killed by some members of the IX Legion, Zephon stared into the old man's hololithic eyes.\n\n'You look tired, Arkhan.'\n\n'Ah,' sighed the Martian. 'You have no idea.'\n\nZephon rose and took the auspex from the servitor's grip, activating it and passing it over his body in a slow sweep. The model was just a crude battlefield pattern, but it served its purpose as a medicae reader. When he passed it over his head, it pulsed a warning tone immediately. Flashing runes detailed sealed skull fracturing, potential cranial nerve damage and scarring of brain tissue. It couldn't be more specific, the auspex was too crude a model for that level of accuracy. A glance at Eristes told Zephon that his assessor thrall had already conducted the same scan, with the same results.\n\nHe'd been fortunate, that much was clear. His injuries would've killed a human outright, but his genhanced body had shut down into the healing sleep prized by his kind at their most grievously wounded. With his life functions slowed, his implanted organs had been granted the time they needed to heal, seal and scar over the worst of the damage. More than likely, an Apothecary or medicae had toiled over him while he was in sus-an, as well.\n\nThen there were Land's... implanted treasures... to consider. The compensatory surgeries performed after their disastrous excursion into the webway.\n\nZephon shivered. He looked over the rows of stasis pods, seeing a hundred in this chamber alone. Thirty-two of them were sealed and occupied.\n\n'There are other legionaries in stasis down here. I cannot leave them. They will be killed in their sleep.'\n\nThe hologhost looked at him as if he'd sprouted horns and started speaking in tongues. 'People die in war, Zephon. It's pathetic that an Astartes should need reminding of that.'\n\n'I cannot abandon my brothers.'\n\n'No? Then you'll die down there with them. Most of them are already dead. They're stored here for gene-seed harvest, not because they'll be capering around after surgical recoveries.'\n\n'I am not blind, Arkhan, I can read the stasis-coffin displays. Some of them are alive. With surgery, they will awaken from suspended animation. They will live.'\n\n'You realise your own Legion has abandoned these unfortunates?'\n\n'My brothers would never do such a thing.'\n\nLand laughed at the denial. 'The war has moved on, Zephon. Every one of your kind still breathing is out there in the dust, fighting for his life. Do you think the loyal Legions have the warriors to spare for something like this? To blindly push stretchers and gurneys over kilometres of no-man's-land? I didn't send servitors and slaves down into the dark for you because they were the best souls for the purpose. I did it because there was no one else to send. Everyone else is out there, fighting, dying, or already dead.'\n\nZephon stood by one of the pods, looking in at the somnolent figure. He didn't recognise the warrior's face, though the pod was marked with the Aenokhian runes of his Legion, and the figure wore Blood Angels armour. The corruption eating at the walls had started its work on the slumbering Astartes, blackening the left side of his body, twisting it with supernatural rancidity.\n\n'Zephon, enough. There's no time for your sentimental frippery. If you can move, you need to get out of there. I've lost a great many servitors even reaching you. The sublevels are overrun with exoplanar mutation.'\n\nSensing it was time, Shenkai reverently turned his back upon his master. Cradled in the straps of the grav-harness on his back were the tools of Zephon's trade: his sheathed power sword, his boltgun, his pistols... Even one of the weapons would be a burden beyond easy human capacity, but the harness Shenkai wore lightened the load to tolerable levels.\n\nZephon didn't reach for them right away. 'Shafia?' he asked Shenkai's mother. She was his weaponbearer. The grav-harness was hers to wear, and his weapons were her honour to bear.\n\nShafia managed a slight smile. 'It was time, lord. Perhaps even past time.'\n\nNow that it was spoken, Zephon couldn't miss seeing it. Eristes and Shafia were getting old. He'd paid his servants almost no heed since they came with him to Terra, years before, and age showed at the corners of their eyes, the thinning of their hair, and a dozen other ways that Zephon's kind instinctively overlooked as beneath their notice. Their son Shenkai was, what, close to twenty-five? Perhaps even thirty. The muscles of hard training showed beneath his red clothes. Clearly, he was ready. Zephon probably should have elevated Shenkai half a decade ago.\n\n'Thank you, Shenkai,' he said to his new weaponbearer. He drew his blade slowly, leaving the scabbard bound to the thrall's back. With his free hand, he reached for one of his pistols. The weapons were clean, repaired, perfectly maint"}
{"text":"nctively overlooked as beneath their notice. Their son Shenkai was, what, close to twenty-five? Perhaps even thirty. The muscles of hard training showed beneath his red clothes. Clearly, he was ready. Zephon probably should have elevated Shenkai half a decade ago.\n\n'Thank you, Shenkai,' he said to his new weaponbearer. He drew his blade slowly, leaving the scabbard bound to the thrall's back. With his free hand, he reached for one of his pistols. The weapons were clean, repaired, perfectly maintained. He'd expected no less.\n\n'This is all very touching,' said Land. 'But please hurry. You're the only living beings down there, but not the only things moving.'\n\nIt had not been a swift escape. Razavi Bastion, in its entirety, was the size of a township, and much of its scale was beneath the earth in the form of elaborate catacombs. The Emperor had wrested it from a technobarbarian warrior-queen in the Unification Wars, and the Imperium had done what the Imperium did best: annihilating all traces of the previous owners and reclaiming what was useful for their own purposes. Dozens of kilometres of tunnels and chambers comprised the fortress' underground levels. Zephon had never been this deep - not while conscious, at least - so he followed Land's drifting servo-skull through the subterranean halls. The servitors hadn't followed, even when Zephon had beckoned them.\n\n'Let them die down here,' Land had said, his projected image wavering with distance distortion and another spurt of static. 'They're useless now. Follow me.'\n\nAnd so, Zephon led his servants through the trembling dark. Eristes, untrained in weaponry, walked with an air of forced calm, pretending not to hear his master's conversation. Shenkai was consumed with his burden, seemingly uninterested in Land's recitations. Only Shafia openly listened; she shook her head with distaste at the Martian's commentary. Evidently she thought very little of Arkhan Land.\n\n'Where are you, exactly?' Zephon asked the hololith at one point.\n\n'Far above you, making ready to leave Razavi Bastion,' Arkhan replied, plainly distracted. 'With one of the convoys making for the Sanctum Imperialis, along with everyone still possessing a modicum of sanity. But that's not what you really want to ask, is it? What's the question behind the question?'\n\nHe didn't want to say it. Even asking felt treasonous.\n\n'Are we losing the war?'\n\nArkhan Land laughed so hard that his hololithic image flickered with distortion.\n\nIt wasn't long before Zephon came across the first of his dead kindred. A cousin rather than a brother: an Imperial Fist slumped against a corridor wall, his cracked armour overgrown with pulsating moss.\n\n'Don't touch it,' Land's voice crackled from ahead.\n\n'He,' Zephon murmured. 'Not it. Show some respect. This warrior gave his life for the Imperium.' He was watching the fleshy moss, how it pulsed with its own uneven heartbeat. As he stared, a crusty spread of the growth over the dead Space Marine's face swelled and slowly burst, birthing a flow of clumsy, blind spiders. The things were the colour of human flesh. They fought eyelessly, feasting on each other with stupid hate, bleeding human blood.\n\nZephon stepped closer. Sensing his movement, several of the spiders reared at him, spreading their palps and forelegs in feral challenge, hissing and throwing up their discoloured guts. Zephon weaved aside from the sprays of intestinal acid, moving away without looking back.\n\nThe servo-skull projecting Arkhan's image drifted ahead, pausing often to play its scanning web over the corridors and chambers of the abandoned bastion. There had been a battle here, and it was increasingly clear which side had claimed victory. The unburied dead lay everywhere. Uniforms marked most of them as Imperial Army, but not all. A great many were unarmed, wearing rags and robes. Pilgrims. Civilians. Refugees.\n\nFamilies.\n\nRounding a corner, the Blood Angel stared down a long corridor carpeted with the fallen. Blade wounds, saw wounds, showed on their flesh, declaring deaths that had seen them carved apart in their final moments. Several had sunk into the steel, somehow rotting into the walls and floor. Avoiding them would be impossible.\n\n'Hurry up,' said the hologhost, untroubled as it drifted several centimetres above the dead.\n\nZephon walked over them, the weight of his armour pulping them beneath his tread no matter how gentle he tried to be. He could hear his thralls struggling behind him - it was almost pitch-black for them; they were relying on hand torches - but he was anything but human. He could see exactly where he was stepping, and upon whom.\n\n'Arkhan, there are children here.'\n\n'Of course there are,' said Land, drifting ahead. 'Razavi Bastion's sublevels were a refugee holdout. One of the last, outside the Sanctum Imperialis.'\n\n'How did the enemy get down here?'\n\n'They appeared. Manifested, you might say.'\n\n'I do not understand,' Zephon admitted.\n\nThe servo-skull turned in a slow arc, and the projected ghost offered a merciless gaze. 'Then you're in fine company,' Land said. 'No one really knows what's happened since the Ultimate Wall fell. Everything has gone sour, Zephon. Hundreds of millions have died. We're all in the dark. They bombarded us from orbit. They levelled the plateau. Most of the Inner Palace is a wasteland of rubble. Communication between the bastions was unreliable for weeks and has been mostly down for days.'\n\nZephon kept moving. He looked back at the others. They were close behind him.\n\nLand droned on, having found his conversational stride. 'Exoplanar xenos are manifesting across the wasteland and inside the last bastions. The Omnissiah's will no longer holds them back. We saw them in Cydonae Bastion... at the end. Before we ran from there, to reach Razavi. They burst from the dead. They pulled themselves out of the living. Soon enough it was happening down there, too. It's happening everywhere. Blood of the Machine-God, the planet's crust is unstable, and the atmosphere is choked by dust. This world is dying. Horus is killing Terra in his quest to take it.'\n\nThere seemed nothing to say to that. With one hand on the wall for balance, Zephon moved on and tried not to tread on the fallen. Many of the bodies were in the process of some impossible, cadaverous fusion, conjoined where their dead flesh touched. He saw bodies melded with the walls; curling fingers reaching out from the metal, half-formed faces shrieking silently from the steel.\n\nOne of them asked him for help.\n\nHe turned, seeing a cluster of cancers in the shape of a woman, a hive of tumours glued to the wall with its own corruption. It reached for him with shaky tenderness, as if to see if he was real.\n\n'Please help me,' it said again.\n\n'Ignore it,' Land said. 'Ignore all of them. They think they're still people.'\n\n'Don't leave me down here,' the thing said. Where it had once had a mouth, a split in its lumpen head kept smearing open, showing a hundred hairy teeth.\n\n'Who are you?' he asked it, fighting to show none of his unease.\n\n'Jennah,' the thing said, its tone like gargling gruel. 'Jennah Virnae. Please help me. Help my family. Don't leave us here.'\n\nIt fell silent, hanging there. Bleeding. Rotting. Zephon recognised nothing human in the living malformation. He feared saying so would cause it yet more pain.\n\n'I cannot help you... Jennah.'\n\nThough he could. He felt the weight of the pistol in his hands.\n\nIt - she - laughed suddenly, the sound thick and wet. 'They have ranged the main line.'\n\n'Keep moving,' Land snapped. 'Don't let it get inside your mind.'\n\nThe thing, the woman, started to flow, her form dissolving into a slush that steamed as it ran down the wall.\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' she said through loosening teeth in a melting mouth. 'Son of Sanguinius, we see and hear through iron and stone and ash and dust... We know we know we know...'\n\nZephon pulled the trigger. The remains of Jennah Virnae decorated the wall in a sizzling pattern that behaved nothing like blood. Blood didn't dissolve metal. Blood didn't run like tar.\n\n'I believe I am somewhat more cognisant now of what threatens Terra,' he said to Arkhan's hologhost.\n\n'We shouldn't delay here, master,' said Shafia.\n\n'Ye, indeed,' Land said. 'Listen to the slaves. Keep moving.'\n\nAnd this time, Zephon did.\n\nA thousand points of light\n\nRykath\n\nHumanity has always managed to summon a poetic turn of phrase for the projected end of everything. Scribes love to speak of how things fall apart, the centre unable to hold - contrasting the rise of oceans with the fall of empires. Philosophers claim the end will come not with a bang, but with a whimper. And of death? Nothing to fear, they promise. Death is merely another path.\n\nThese sentiments are always composed by men and women far removed from any experience of what the end of all things would really be. It's easy to fall back on sanguine philosophy when you can't comprehend the truth. Yes, the centre cannot hold, but its dissolution means the genocide of trillions. Yes, death is another path, but that path leads to the soul of every man, woman and child sliding into the open mouths of mad gods.\n\nHad the ancient wise ones seen such things with their own eyes, perhaps their scrawls would have been somewhat less serene.\n\nBut a coin has two sides. Twinned with the serenity of ignorance is the spectre of hope. People will resist the end, even against the evidence of their eyes and the workings of their minds. Logic plays no part in it. This is the arena of hope, with survival instincts baked into the brain of every living being. Emotions like that burn through anything as cold and blunt as reason.\n\nAnd so it was here, in the war's final days. It didn't matter that the war was over. It didn't matter that Terra burned day and night beneath a funeral shroud of dust. The defenders fought on.\n\nThe idea of a front line in the war for Terra was fiction; already threatened with the first breach in the Ultim"}
{"text":" Logic plays no part in it. This is the arena of hope, with survival instincts baked into the brain of every living being. Emotions like that burn through anything as cold and blunt as reason.\n\nAnd so it was here, in the war's final days. It didn't matter that the war was over. It didn't matter that Terra burned day and night beneath a funeral shroud of dust. The defenders fought on.\n\nThe idea of a front line in the war for Terra was fiction; already threatened with the first breach in the Ultimate Wall, by the hour of Jaghatai Khan's charge to retake the Lion's Gate space port, it was plain myth. Rogal Dorn had mapped and planned a nation's worth of fallback points, barricades, strongholds, weapons caches in the Inner Palace... and they were reached, defended, drained and abandoned in inevitable succession. Those that weren't abandoned were pounded out of existence from orbit - erased by blind-bombardment from shipmasters unable to restrain themselves - or overrun by the Warmaster's horde. The bastions that yet survived were encircled in their own sieges, the defenders fighting on, selling their lives to delay the horde's advance.\n\nIt was no longer one war. The scale of Horus' invasion had always eclipsed that description, but never was it more obvious than now the defences were broken. The mitosis of warfare was rampant, and countless separate wars raged across the face of Terra. Cohesion had given way to isolation, with the Emperor's remaining forces surrounded in their very last strongholds and foxholes, cut off from each other.\n\nA thousand points of light across the Eurasian land mass, going out, one by one.\n\nThere, in the infinite ash, was the warrior Rykath - though even this first fact was, in a way, a lie. Rykath was his Imperial name, something he wore like an uncomfortable cloak for the sake of other sensibilities. His Fenrisian brothers, oathed and bloodlocked into the Old Ways, called him by his deed name. They called him No-Foes-Remain.\n\nHe was a hunter and a warrior, and proud of the distinction between both. To Imperial scribes, he was just another Space Marine within the amalgamated mess of the Space Wolves Legion. Their eyes didn't see past the clashing knotwork of company and squad markings, impenetrable to outside observers. They didn't know his place in the Cry of the Grieving Dragon warband, nor his role in the pack called Howl of the Hearthworld.\n\nAround his neck was a cord of plain leather bearing a talisman of Fenrisian amber, granted a lifetime ago by his High Warchief, Leman of the Russ Tribe. Receiving it had been the proudest moment of his life. He would wear it until his death.\n\nRykath stood on the battlements of Arjuna Bastion, a palatial skyspire bound to Meru Bastion by kilometres of arching walkways. With Meru overrun, Arjuna had stood alone for hours, protected by an ever-diminishing host of defenders. They'd done well, but they weren't gods, to rewrite the flow of fate. The enemy scaled the walls, came over the skywalk bridges, and brought the walls down with sustained cannonades. This was the end of Arjuna.\n\nGunships couldn't fly in the dust. Not reliably. The ash in the air lethally abraded the sky support of both sides, frost-blasting cockpit glass, chewing through internal machinery and causing Thunderhawks to choke, to stall, to die gasping. Gunship jets ran brutally hot, melting the ash into glass, which choked turbine blades and stalled engines. There was no clear patch of air through which to soar and recover, no matter how high or low a craft went, and none had safely reached orbit in days. Pilots couldn't see; they flew blind with dead instruments through a burning city the size of a nation, spiked with buildings the scale of mountain ranges. They wrestled with the controls of vehicles whose engines couldn't breathe. But that didn't stop either side trying. Desperation forced the hands of some, hope galvanised others, and bloodthirst was ever a motivating factor for many.\n\nRykath, surrounded by his dead brothers, was close to one of the last remaining gunships still on the wall. He wasn't a fool, nor would he ever be accused of being an optimistic soul. He knew he was dead. In his ears, over the roar of the flames and the crashing of a thousand bolters, a voice forced its way through the scramble of the vox, imploring him to run. But he didn't run because, as noted, he wasn't a fool. He'd rather die with a blade in his hand than in the mangled metal of a gunship crash.\n\nHe wept for the slain. There was no loss of dignity; Fenrisian culture - as with many other Legion home world traditions - saw no shame in sorrow. At his feet were the brothers he'd fought beside for two human lifetimes. He loved them above life itself. Of course he wept. A machine couldn't. A coward wouldn't.\n\nThere was Kargir, called Thirteen-Stars-Falling, born beneath a meteor shower, the greatest omen of the northern tribes, and dead now of a blade in both hearts. There was Vaegr, called Echo-of-Three-Heroes for the ancestors he resembled, born in the endless Fenrisian winter, and killed by a bolt in the head. There was Ordun, called Kin-to-the-Night, born to hunt in the darkness, dead in a war that should never have been fought. They were the last; the others of his pack had died weeks ago. Hardly any Wolves remained on Terra, and of those few almost none still drew breath.\n\nThe beseeching voice didn't stop until he severed his link to the vox. Rykath stayed where he was as figures moved past him in the dust. Humans. Masked, running, limping. Defenders, fleeing. Why? Where was there left to run? What was so special about dying over there instead of right here?\n\nHe crouched and placed a hand on the ruptured breastplate of his officer and brother, Thirteen-Stars-Falling. Filthy, armoured fingertips pressed lightly to his brother's broken Imperialis. He smiled through the bitter tears, because the accidental symbolism of the moment was so blunt, so on the nose, that he couldn't help but grin.\n\nThey came for him then, the enemy pursuing the fleeing defenders. He rose, holding not just his own chainsword but the powered blade of his fallen chieftain. One sword revved into angry life, the other sparked with killing lightning.\n\nIn the sagas of his home world - and the Legion that rose from those icy roots - heroes always had worthy last words. They extemporised oh-so valiantly, and issued grand last challenges that forced their foes to listen with reluctant respect. But Rykath had never been one for the saga-poems, and these enemies - these bellowing World Eaters and chanting Thousand Sons - were too drunk on the milk of their black gods to respect their enemies. Nor did they deserve respect in kind.\n\nHe faced them and he fought them. That part, at least, matched the sagas of Fenris. But there was no joy at the slaying he did this dawn. To kill one's enemies was what was expected of any warrior. What mattered to him in these final moments wasn't who he killed, but where he himself stood, ready to die. He was dying with his brothers. Part of his pack to the very end.\n\nThis was right. The way it should be.\n\nNo-Foes-Remain, named for his enduring tirelessness, admired by his brothers for always fighting until no foes remained, finally failed to live up to his name. There was no shame in this. How could there be shame in defeat when there was never any hope of victory?\n\nWhen the moment came, Rykath couldn't stop grinning. He was grinning as he stood shin-deep in the dead, with the steel of his enemies' blades meeting inside him. He was grinning even as he dropped, life pumping from him in a flow of proud Fenrisian blood.\n\nThe warrior that killed him, one of the Thousand Sons, took the power sword from his dying fingers. Less than a minute later, that warrior was killed by a stray torrent of lascannon fire, and the blade once treasured by the warriors of Howl of the Hearthworld was vaporised, forever forgotten.\n\nSuch were the whims of war.\n\nBy the time Rykath was giving his last grin through a mouthful of blood, the Imperial Fists gunship further down the ramparts had taken off. To stay on the wall was to die, and the pilot took his chances in the sky. The Thunderhawk sucked ash into its mechanical respiration with long, heaving roars, and left the ground behind.\n\nIt clawed skyward, already labouring, already doomed. When its engines strangled on fusing glass, its pilot dived, forcing cooling air through the intakes, hoping to freeze and shatter-clear the clogged turbines. His name was Ectar, a Terran-born Imperial Fist. No one saw what he did, but the manoeuvre was magnificent. The soldiers aboard were hurled against the inner hull and against the restraints of their flight thrones, many of them believing they'd been hit by anti-air fire, not realising their pilot's skill had bought them a few more seconds of life.\n\nBut there was no clear air at the end of the dive. There was no clear air left on Terra. The tumbling gunship cleared its throat only to fill it back up with ash and dust. It choked on filth again only seconds after expelling it.\n\nThe Thunderhawk fired its orbital boosters, an act of absolute desperation, and afterburned hard through the blinding dust. For three seconds, it gained altitude at the cost of its abrading hull and dying engines, cannibalising itself to fly free.\n\nIt collided with one of the baroque walkways stretching between Meru and Arjuna bastions, which its pilot had no hope of ever seeing. With much of the gunship's left side sheared away, the wreckage spiralled down on engines that screamed until the dust strangled them fully. What was left of the hull speared into no-man's-land, wreckage and shrapnel flying every which way, carving through a scattered infantry regiment in Horus' colours who were pursuing a convoy of retreating Imperial Army.\n\nArjuna Bastion fell less than an hour later, and out went another light.\n\nOne last joke\n\nTransacta-7Y1\n\nDown again, through the dust"}
{"text":"eing. With much of the gunship's left side sheared away, the wreckage spiralled down on engines that screamed until the dust strangled them fully. What was left of the hull speared into no-man's-land, wreckage and shrapnel flying every which way, carving through a scattered infantry regiment in Horus' colours who were pursuing a convoy of retreating Imperial Army.\n\nArjuna Bastion fell less than an hour later, and out went another light.\n\nOne last joke\n\nTransacta-7Y1\n\nDown again, through the dust. Past the skeletons of Imperial Knights still standing upright as flames ate their bones. Over tens of thousands of bodies, carpeting the earth. Up and over the battlements of Pythia Bastion, its walls sundered and overrun, banner poles now flying Horus' colours in the wind.\n\nBeyond fallen Pythia, farther still, deeper into the dust. No grand architecture of the Palatine Bastions in this place. Here, the fighting was in the rubble-strewn wasteland that was once a series of streets around the Principa Collegiate, where ambassadors from conquered worlds came to learn the ways of the Terran Imperium. An academy of great libraries and data archives that housed six thousand off-world souls and the two thousand tutors carefully selected to oversee their re-education. Now, a hollow ruin.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 couldn't blink, for even a momentary closing of her eyes represented a potential data loss. An intolerable supposition to her masters and mistresses, who adapted her - and most of her kind - to function without eyelids. She stared at the dying world around her through the cracked plastek of her monovisor. The lens kept clicking and rotating, trying to focus, trying to see in a world gone blind.\n\nShe was Martian-born and Martian-remade. Her cradle was warmed by the heat of the blessed forges, and she was conditioned against the terminal holiness of the weapons she carried. She was skitarii.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 stalked through the marble ruins, carrying out the last order she received. Defend Principa. The words still flashed in Gothic across the insides of her eyes. Defend Principa. Defend Principa.\n\nIn the beginning, all those months ago before the war had devoured all reason, her orders had been vocal deliverances, coming in the adrenally rewarding tones of her overlords. As time went on and communication degraded, orders filtered down to the skitarii macroclades through sacred encryptions; then standard binharic cant; then plain operational codes and - at the very last - through routine text commands.\n\nShe hadn't heard the holy speech of her overlords in three weeks, five days, nine hours, thirty-one minutes and nine seconds. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.\n\nDefend Principa flashed at the edge of her vision and she knew the order was pure (it came with the correct allegiance signifiers when it started flashing up six days ago), but she no longer knew how valid the order remained. After all, the Principa Collegiate was rubble. There seemed little worth fighting for, and precious few of her clade-kin were still functional enough to defend it. No other orders had been received in that span. Not by Transacta-7Y1, not by any of her brothers and sisters wearing sacred red.\n\nThis brought a sense of unease. She didn't like to process the possibility that her masters and mistresses were dead. Only slightly less uncomfortable was the notion that they had issued an order that lingered on, uncorrected, un-updated.\n\nUnless, she reasoned, her overlords were aware of this outcome when they issued the order, having cogitated the inevitabilities. In that case, she'd been assigned here to die fighting, spending the coin of her life to slow the enemy. And in such an instance, no further orders would be forthcoming.\n\nIt was the likeliest eventuality. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't clear, and the idea of enacting a potentially incorrect order caused her far more discomfort than the thought of dying to a correct one. But she reasoned, not without precedent, that if she and her clade-kin were sent here to sell their lives, that would have been referenced in the initial order.\n\nNo matter. She had done the best with what she had, and trusted that she hadn't deviated from her place in the Omnissiah's plan.\n\n'Tee,' Envaric said, to her left.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 turned to him. He was dying, and she kept experiencing tremors of emotion at this. The enemy was not killing him. Her weapons were. Proximity to her holy arsenal was blackening his skin and making him cough up blood.\n\nHe knew this. She'd told him when they first grouped up, explaining as best she was able that the holy aura radiating from her weapons was both invisible and lethal to unconditioned humans.\n\n'You mean radiation?' Envaric had asked. And Transacta-7Y1 had nodded, because yes, that was the banal name for the divine aura emitted by her weaponry. Envaric had glanced at the carbine in her hands, with its brassy casing and glowing internals, and he'd shrugged.\n\n'I'll catch a bolt in the head before the rad gets me. Ain't none of us getting out of Principa alive anyway. What's your name? Do they give you lot names?'\n\nShe'd pointed to the serial code engravings on her chestplate.\n\nEnvaric made an expression she couldn't decipher. He said, 'That ain't a name.'\n\nIt was, though. It was her name. She'd pointed to it again, tapping it that time.\n\n'Fine, Transacta-Seven-Why-One. I'm Sergeant Sylas Envaric of the Twelfth Helian Rifles. Looks like we'll be dying together.'\n\nThey'd survived two days since then, fighting in the Principa ruins. Now Envaric was visibly decaying.\n\n'Tee,' he said again, the word turned to gravel by a coughing fit so bad that he had to remove his mask and spit blood onto the ground.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 couldn't speak. She couldn't even remember a time when she'd been able to make sounds with a human tongue. Her overlords had removed the ability when they remade her. She could blurt pulses of code from the vocoder in her throat - which was useless right then because Envaric was an unaugmented human incapable of processing Martian code-spurts - so she relied on her handheld dataslug. It displayed a series of pictographs that roughly adhered to whatever she was trying to convey.\n\nWhen she'd first warned him of her weapons' lethality, she did so by keying in several sigils representing herself, her rifle, a biohazard rune, caution, illness, and a pictograph depiction of a dead human. But she needed no such dubious nuance now. Just one symbol blinked on the dataslug's tiny screen.\n\n[?]\n\nEnvaric struggled to breathe. He sat with his back to the low, broken wall they'd been crouched behind for the last fifteen minutes. Catching his breath, he cast a goggled glance at her dataslug, then looked at her helmet's impenetrable visor. The closest thing she had to a face.\n\n'Any sign of the others?'\n\nTransacta was staring over the top of their barricade, scanning and panning over the low stone wall. She stopped her vigil, clumsily dialling a code into her dataslug with thick bionic fingers. It beeped with a single sigil.\n\n[alone]\n\nEnvaric nodded, and Transacta-7Y1 read (what she thought was) disappointment in (what she could see of) his expression. Between the rebreather and the goggles and the grime, that wasn't much.\n\n'Well,' he said with a laboured breath, 'you and me, Tee, we've got this. The others were just holding us back anyway.'\n\nShe knew he was trying to be funny. He kept doing this, kept trying to make jokes. Perhaps he was even being funny, but Transacta-7Y1 was profoundly ill-equipped to recognise either failure or success in that regard. What she felt, weak but true, was a sense of kinship and gratitude that he chose to stay. He wasn't of her clade and she didn't process loneliness or fear in anything resembling human terms, but his presence was a curious comfort. Even though it was temporary. Even though it was killing him.\n\nEnvaric closed his eyes for a moment, resting the back of his head against the wall. The ground shook with the aftershock of yet another cataclysm not far from where they hid, but he didn't react. It was taking him longer and longer to recover after each action.\n\nSomething exploded elsewhere in the ruins. It was answered by the ambushing snaps of radium fire, and the returning protests of boltguns. They weren't entirely alone, after all.\n\n'All right, all right,' Envaric grunted with plainly false enthusiasm. 'Let's get to it.'\n\nThey moved again, keeping low. Drawing closer to what had once been the external curving wall of an auditorium, emerging above them in the dust. It wasn't long before they found the bodies of three Helians, freshly cut down. Blown open by bolts. These, they passed with barely a glance.\n\nAt the shattered archway leading into the auditorium, they paused with their backs to the wall. The whines and grinds of power armour came from within.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 was the one to make a visual confirmation. She lifted her radium carbine and panned slowly down the steps, tracking through the dust, looking for signs of-\n\nThere. Silhouettes in the ash. Too tall to be human. Too inelegant to be Martian. The warriors stalked through the ruins, seemingly without direction, like ants that had lost their trail. Transacta-7Y1, who had never seen an ant, likened the Astartes down there to low-grade slave units cut off from their higher mind. She moved back into cover.\n\n'How many?' Envaric asked her.\n\nShe keyed in a symbol and tossed him the dataslug. The symbol for [multitude] showed on its slit screen.\n\nEnvaric tossed it back to her with an expression of pain. His gums were bleeding inside the plastek rebreather.\n\n'You're shitting me,' he said.\n\nHis bizarre axioms were familiar to her now, and she knew he wasn't speaking of biological excretion. Transacta-7Y1 emitted a quiet negative code-spurt. She was not, as he phrased it, shitting him.\n\n'Pissfire,' he swore. Which was a new one, and one she couldn't work out from the context. A urinary tract infection, maybe. 'Who'd have our"}
{"text":"s slit screen.\n\nEnvaric tossed it back to her with an expression of pain. His gums were bleeding inside the plastek rebreather.\n\n'You're shitting me,' he said.\n\nHis bizarre axioms were familiar to her now, and she knew he wasn't speaking of biological excretion. Transacta-7Y1 emitted a quiet negative code-spurt. She was not, as he phrased it, shitting him.\n\n'Pissfire,' he swore. Which was a new one, and one she couldn't work out from the context. A urinary tract infection, maybe. 'Who'd have our luck, eh?'\n\nShe had no reply to that. The concept of luck flew in the face of the Omnissiah's divine plan and was therefore a falsehood. She felt an anaemic amusement that her companion believed in it, but then, his brain was entirely soft and unsupported by mechanical augmentation.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 made a fist, a symbol they'd agreed on at the beginning of their companionship. They both tensed, making ready to move. Surprise was on their side. Nothing else was, but they took what they could get.\n\nBut Envaric had one more thing to say.\n\n'Tee. Tell me something before we die, yeah?'\n\nShe turned to regard him, gazing at his deteriorating form through her monovisor. She said nothing, but he had her attention. The look in his eyes was what she suspected to be amusement. This was it, then. One last joke.\n\n'Are you pretty under all that?'\n\nIt took her a moment to process this. She'd never been asked such a thing.\n\nBeneath her armour, she was an irradiated foot soldier of the Machine-God. Her skin, deep brown at birth and not unlike Envaric's in that regard, was a starved and sunless grey. She'd been ritually delimbed, her extremities replaced with arms and legs of inexpensive cybernetic purity. Much to her honour, she had attained such a state of grace within her mechamorphosis that more of her body was now comprised of holy iron than what remained of her flawed birthflesh.\n\nUnder her helmet, she was pockmarked with cryo-controlled radiation tumours. She possessed no eyelids, no hair, no teeth, and no nose - and what hadn't been surgically removed had rotted off over the course of her years of sacred service.\n\nIn short, she was skitarii.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 keyed in a symbol and tossed him the dataslug again. He caught it with weakening fingers and read the symbol there.\n\n[affirmative]\n\nHe gave a bloodstained smile. 'Yeah, I thought so.'\n\nThough neither of them knew it for certain, they were the last of their combined platoons. When they attacked a few moments later, killing two of the Emperor's Children from ambush, it was the final act of resistance in the defence of the Principa Collegiate.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 went down first, her radium carbine smashed from her hands before she was punched from her metal feet by the force of a power maul. They left her for dead in the ranks of elevated seating. Envaric fought for a little longer, desperate to avenge Tee. He failed, naturally - he was one dying man against seven transhumans - and unfortunately he was still alive when they impaled him on a banner pole, where they watched him twitch and strangle on his own blood.\n\nLuckily, however, he was dead before they set the pole over an open fire and roasted him. These noble sons of the III Legion, once foremost in the Emperor's regard, devoured Envaric's rad-soaked flesh for their early morning repast.\n\nAnd so fell the Principa Collegiate. Out went another light.\n\nThe last guardian\n\nVulkan\n\nThe primarch ran his hand down the silver carving, following the lines depicting a human warlord on his knees, weapon offered up in surrender. A scene of great mercy, with the Emperor Himself - rendered here in the artful technosavagery he wore in the Unification Wars - accepting the surrender with a bowed head and good grace.\n\nVulkan treasured these insights into his father's life. Here was the Emperor before any of the primarchs came into being; before any of the grandest steps of the great plan were brought to fruition. A time before the Imperial Truth. A time before the Imperium.\n\nWere you lonely, father? Is that why you made us?\n\nVulkan stepped back from the carving. The great doorway was resplendent with these bas-relief images, reaching from the stone floor to the chamber's vaulted ceiling. They called it the Silver Door now, but here was the original Eternity Gate, a monument to ancient triumphs, serving as the barrier warding the Emperor's Throne Room from the rest of His laboratory-labyrinth. You could walk a Titan through the doorway when it was open, though it was far smaller than the great gateway on the surface that had come to eclipse its subterranean forebear and steal its name. Still, this relic possessed a breathtaking charm of its own.\n\nSince coming to his father's Throne Room, Vulkan had long speculated just how many artisans had worked on this masterpiece, and just how long their efforts had taken them. Like so much of the Emperor's work, it had been commissioned and constructed in secret. Did the artists and engineers demand payment for their sweat and genius? Surely some did. Were they understandably mercenary in their mortal interests? Surely some were. Or was it enough for most that they were to be honoured like this, permitted by the Master of Mankind to contribute their craftsmanship to the very door of His Throne Room?\n\nWhatever the truth, it was a tragedy for this work to be seen by so few. The new Eternity Gate, the inheritor to the name that stood locked far above these chambers, was the most reinforced and defended portal in the Imperium. The forgotten doorway down here was armoured in nothing but art.\n\nFootsteps drew near. Vulkan's senses were tuned beyond mortal limit. Even with the grinding industry of the Emperor's laboratory going on all around, he could hear the other man's creaking sinews; the rustle of robes; the clink of a familiar black staff against stone.\n\n'Greetings, Malcador,' he said without turning. 'Is it time?'\n\nMalcador nodded wordlessly.\n\nVulkan ran his fingertips over the image of his father's face once more. 'He looks almost serene here, does He not? Accepting this man's surrender, with the future still unwritten. A time when the madness we now face was impossible to conceive.'\n\n'A lifetime ago,' Malcador replied. He sounded weary, and something worse than weary. He sounded shattered. 'No word yet from Sanguinius. Nor anything from the Khan's forces at Lion's Gate.'\n\nThe tone made Vulkan turn. Defiance gleamed in eyes of predator-red. 'We will win, Mal. Banish the defeat from your voice.'\n\nMalcador, Regent of Terra, leaned on his staff and met the primarch's gaze from beneath his hood. Depending on which stories one believed, Malcador was ancient, ageless or immortal. Yet he looked withered, gripped by a weakness that grew more profound with each passing hour.\n\n'Victory may come, yes.' He sounded thoughtful, at least, rather than defeated. 'But I wonder who among us will be around to savour it.'\n\nVulkan rested a gauntleted hand on the old man's bony shoulder. Gently. Carefully. The merest pressure.\n\n'Any word from Rogal?'\n\n'Bhab Bastion holds. He still cannot break out.'\n\nVulkan shook his head at Malcador's diplomatic turn of phrase. Bhab Bastion was the secondary heart of the siege, the core of Imperial logistics and vital to the coordination of the defence. The bastion's systems were one of the few comm-nexuses able to breach the atmospheric distortion; Dorn and his command staff oversaw not just the warfare in the Inner Palace, but remained attuned to the near-infinite conflicts raging across all of Terra. Rogal Dorn would leave Bhab Bastion when it fell, and not a moment before. Not while tens of millions of soldiers still in the field needed his command expertise.\n\n'Whether he can break out or not is irrelevant,' said Vulkan. 'He is too selfless to try, and too bound by duty to abandon his post. He is trusting us, Mal. Trusting us to hold without him. We will not let him down.'\n\nMalcador looked distinctly uncomfortable. 'He also sent word that the dead have started to walk.'\n\nVulkan stared for a moment. 'Did he qualify that statement?'\n\nMalcador leaned on his staff, exhaling slowly. 'The dead from both sides. He says they are rising, that they march upon the Sanctum.'\n\nVulkan took a last look at the carving of his father, then turned away, moving back into the Throne Room.\n\nPriestlings and various Mechanicus adepts moved aside as they went about their work, labouring at the Emperor's secret engines. The Throne Room was different every day - forever expanding, undergoing repairs, losing burnt-out machinery and accumulating fresh, clanking ironworks. The ever-present hum of Dark Age power set many of the mortals' teeth on edge. Vulkan heard it as a song, a melody of half-mastered artistry from mythology. The crashing of these overworked machines was the sound of a lost age. And this, too, was wondrous.\n\nTaking up the whole of one wall was the webway portal. The great circular aperture no longer showed the alien realm beyond, nor did it show the Throne Room's engraved sandstone wall behind. They had tried to kill it, flash-frying the awakening machinery and breaking the power sources to terminate the opening for good, only for the doorway to remain partially open. It wouldn't close. The things on the other side refused to let the wound heal.\n\nNow the Emperor held it sealed through force of will. It existed in a state of perpetual low power, a huge grey eye that sighed white mist into the Throne Room in a ceaseless exhale.\n\nEven the mortals and menials working in the Throne Room could feel the weight of psychic pressure. Noses bled. Eyes ran red with tears of blood. The augmented among them kept suffering bionic failures, implanted organs and limbs malfunctioning without cause. The unaugmented endured muscle wastage and slow-building embolisms. Sometimes they spoke in tongues, conversing in languages they'd never learned. They dreamed waking dreams of lives they'd never led. Their memories were overwritt"}
{"text":"s exhale.\n\nEven the mortals and menials working in the Throne Room could feel the weight of psychic pressure. Noses bled. Eyes ran red with tears of blood. The augmented among them kept suffering bionic failures, implanted organs and limbs malfunctioning without cause. The unaugmented endured muscle wastage and slow-building embolisms. Sometimes they spoke in tongues, conversing in languages they'd never learned. They dreamed waking dreams of lives they'd never led. Their memories were overwritten by warfare in the Age of Strife... By a primitive boy's existence on the banks of the River Sakarya... By the feel of wheat against their fingertips, and the weight of the first bolter in their fists, and...\n\nAnd on it went. Above everything, suspended in a vast cobweb of cables and support struts, the Golden Throne was the nucleus of the song. Some of the humans in the chamber wore goggles against its light, others shielded their eyes with their hands when they had to turn in its direction. Many simply tried never to look up. Vulkan saw no blazing aura, just a faint nimbus of light, no more painful to the eyes than a candle flame.\n\nHis father sat enthroned, eyes closed, features tensing with pulses of silent pain. The Emperor gripped the armrests, gloved fingers squeezing in rhythm with each flinch. His sun-bronzed flesh was sallow, His cheeks sunken, as though a cancer devoured Him from within. Attendants stood upon platforms at His side, wiping away the blood that leaked from His closed eyes.\n\nVulkan.\n\nAt first, he heard his name in his father's voice. A bitter irony, indeed.\n\nHe turned to the webway portal, gazing at the grey mist of aborted ambition.\n\nVulkan, came the voice again. Brother. Come to me.\n\nMalcador was at Vulkan's side, watching his features closely. 'Is it him?'\n\n'It's him.' Vulkan's heart began to beat harder. 'One last time, then. Let us see what he has to say.'\n\nVulkan closed his eyes and sank into the precious lie.\n\nIn his dreams, his brother still looked like his brother. The landscape around them was a volcanic nightmare - a realm of black skies and boiling earth; a dragon's delight. The two brothers took counsel together in psychic silence, the two of them facing one another here in the arena of the unreal.\n\nHis brother was the one to bring them both here each time. And if it wasn't his brother's will, then it was the whim of the things with their talons around his brother's heart. Vulkan no longer believed there was a difference.\n\nWhen he saw his reflection in a pool of volcanic glass, he appeared the way he felt: weary to the point of ruination - a fact he could mask easily enough in the Throne Room, yet had no hope of hiding here. In this place, he appeared as a dragon on the edge of decrepitude. His scales no longer shimmered with an emerald lustre; instead they were faded to flawed jade. His eyes, which had been searing red, were tight and dull with torment. Even the fire within him was down to an ember, a guttering flicker of warmth.\n\nHis brother, the Sorcerer, descended slowly in a haze of purifying light. The light warmed the Dragon. It quickened his blood and reknit the throbbing internal breaches inside his body. It promised true healing, if he would only stop resisting it.\n\n'I hate seeing you like this,' his brother said. Compassion shone in the Sorcerer's one eye. 'It needn't be this way, brother.'\n\n'You are not my brother.' The Dragon grunted as he shifted his pained form. Even his bones ached. They sent pulses of cold through the meat of his muscles.\n\n'You still deny me,' the Sorcerer said, the words rich with regret. 'Do I not bring you here, to Nocturne, to ease your spirit?'\n\nThe Dragon managed a laugh, though it tasted of dust instead of fire. 'This is not Nocturne,' he said. 'The stars hang where they should in the sky, yet they shine wrong in the black. The chemical processes of the rocks are exact, yet the stone feels wrong to the touch. This is Nocturne through the eyes of someone that has seen my home world but never understood it. Someone that never loved it.'\n\nThe Dragon, despite his throbbing joints, bared his fragile fangs in a tired smile. 'Someone,' he added, 'or something.'\n\nThe Sorcerer went to one knee, the very image of unthreatening reverence. His voice, trembling with emotion, scarcely rose above a whisper. 'I am still me, brother. I speak only the truth.'\n\nThe Dragon sighed another ashy breath. 'The truth, if it even matters in dreams, is that my brother died long ago. You are not Magnus. You are an impossible god's idea of Magnus.'\n\nLaughter echoed all around them. The laughter of a thousand mocking voices, delighted at a joke only one of the brothers could ever understand. The Dragon crawled back from the chorus of mad mirth. All while the Sorcerer stood in silence, radiating compassion, radiating patience and understanding.\n\n'How can you not hear that laughter?' the Dragon asked him. 'You are mocked, mocked without end, by the god you pretend you do not pray to.'\n\n'There is no laughter,' said Magnus the Red. 'I hear nothing but your lies, Vulkan.'\n\nThe Dragon gave a weary smile with a mouthful of cracked fangs. 'Enough. Enough of you, and enough of the thing animating you. Leave me be.'\n\n'Let me in,' countered the Sorcerer. 'This is only the beginning of your pain, brother. I've foreseen far greater agony in your future, agony even you cannot endure. But that pain will end with the mercy I bring. In place of devastation, I offer you enlightenment.'\n\nThe Dragon dared not turn his back on his one-eyed brother, even here in dreams. He withdrew slowly, crawling over the rocks, his slitted gaze never leaving the Sorcerer.\n\n'Let me in,' Magnus said again. 'How much strength does father have left? How much time remains in His performative defiance? An hour? A day? The sky above the ash cloud seethes with the gods' arrival. The Khan is finished. Guilliman is still lost in the endless black. Angron bathes the Palatine Ring in Imperial blood, and soon he will break Sanguinius. Fate sings of all of this, Vulkan. I will reach the webway portal. I will break father's barrier. In a million futures, I already have. Don't make me break you with it.'\n\nThe Dragon gave a growl. 'I am not sure I can be broken.'\n\n'You can die, Vulkan. You can be unmade. Everything of mortal origin can be unwoven with the lullaby of obliteration. Please don't make me be the one to end you.'\n\n'Does this fate of yours sing of that, too?'\n\nMagnus smiled. 'It grieves me to admit it, brother, but yes. To oppose me is to suffer annihilation. I wish it were not so. And it need not be so.'\n\nThe Dragon managed to return the smile. He was too weary to be amused, but the Sorcerer's insistencies still kindled something like mirth deep within.\n\n'Of the many failures in our family,' the Dragon said through clenched teeth, 'you stand exalted above the rest of us, wrapped so comfortably in your delusions. At least the others have the courage to face up to what they've become. Only you, Magnus... Only you still - still - cannot see who you really are.'\n\nThe Dragon kept crawling, slowly retreating. The sky fractured with knives of laughter. The illusion before him broke apart.\n\nMagnus was gone. Or, rather, Magnus was finally there. The Sorcerer was no longer Vulkan's brother; he was a towering monstrosity, a beast of cloven hooves and with a crown of fire, a monster with wings that shed mother-of-pearl feathers. The Dragon stared at this thing, this thing of mutation and mutilation, this thing that stank of all the lies it didn't know it had devoured.\n\n'There you are.' The Dragon breathed the words, feeling the fire awaken inside, tasting the smoke running between his sore teeth. 'There you are, brother.'\n\n'He has to die, Vulkan,' bellowed the creature that had been Magnus the Red. 'He will damn the species to extinction. Let me in. Let me heal all the damage He's done. Stand with me! You need not die with the others.'\n\nIn the face of this anger, the Dragon said nothing. He crawled away from the inevitability of his brother's victory, from the laughter of his brother's god, and from the dream itself. He had to conserve his strength. He couldn't waste it here. His father needed him.\n\nThe Dragon opened his eyes.\n\nNo time had passed. Malcador stood by his side, looking up with the expression of hawkish concern Vulkan had come to know all too well of late.\n\n'He revealed himself,' the Sigillite said, his voice barely carrying over the rising hum of the Emperor's awakening machinery. 'Didn't he?'\n\n'He did not intend to. I doubt he realised he had let the mask fall. Truthfully, I doubt he even knows what he looks like now. Righteousness radiates from him, thick enough to choke us all. He is blinded by the light of his own halo.'\n\nMalcador looked up to the Golden Throne. 'There are those who would say Magnus is very much his father's son in that regard.'\n\nVulkan's stare glinted with fatigued amusement. 'Do you criticise our Emperor, noble regent?'\n\n'Merely an observation. An insight into the perceptions of others.' Malcador showed neither amusement nor shame, remaining preternaturally neutral.\n\nVulkan had already looked away. His gaze was drawn inexorably to the half-living webway portal, that vast arch of Terran steel and alien stone that led into the dimension between dimensions. He could feel Magnus in that realm, drawing closer. Soon, the Crimson King would knock on the door.\n\nHis eyes narrowed. His knuckles tightened.\n\n'Let it be finished.'\n\nMalcador nodded at the primarch's murmur. 'Come, then. Everything is ready.'\n\nHe wouldn't have long. Malcador had impressed that upon him, though he hardly needed to be told. The Sigillite's compulsion to make the obvious even clearer was the closest Vulkan had ever come to seeing Malcador show nerves.\n\nThose arrayed in loose ranks behind him also needed no reminding, and no rousing speech before it all began. The men and women armoured in Imperial gold were among the fines"}
{"text":"Let it be finished.'\n\nMalcador nodded at the primarch's murmur. 'Come, then. Everything is ready.'\n\nHe wouldn't have long. Malcador had impressed that upon him, though he hardly needed to be told. The Sigillite's compulsion to make the obvious even clearer was the closest Vulkan had ever come to seeing Malcador show nerves.\n\nThose arrayed in loose ranks behind him also needed no reminding, and no rousing speech before it all began. The men and women armoured in Imperial gold were among the finest of those still fighting, slowed by the fewest wounds. Malcador had worked for days, and to the best of his ability, to gather them from across the besieged Palatine Ring. Every one of them had withdrawn when ordered, accepting the likelihood they were being asked to sacrifice their lives in the Imperial Dungeon for the sake of an insane gamble.\n\nIs this your will, father?\n\nVulkan expected no answer, and sure enough, that's what he got. So be it.\n\nHe refused to look back at the Golden Throne or the phalanx of warriors behind him. He faced ahead, the great hammer Urdrakule in his hands, and kept his last questions sealed behind stern lips. He would show no doubt to those around him - not to the adepts now holding their ground in defensible groups, not to the men and women that stood ready to die to give him this one chance.\n\nMaybe it didn't matter if it was the Emperor's will or not. It was Malcador's will, and that was a voice that carried no small weight, but more importantly, it was Vulkan's desire that set them on this course. Once decided, the primarch of the XVIII Legion was a difficult man to move. This had to be done.\n\nHe raised Urdrakule high. Fractals of electric light reflected from the weapon as the Throne Room's machinery reached the crescendo of its technomagical song. The Emperor's engines whined, roared, spat out warning klaxons. In the very same second, without even half a heartbeat between their unity, every Custodian and Sister of Silence behind him raised their weapons en garde.\n\nThe hammer fell.\n\nThe Golden Throne, keeping the doorway between dimensions closed, shrieked with a cacophony of iron-breaking release. Grey mist became golden light, flooding into the chamber through the great portal, and the army of every species' hell raged its way into reality.\n\nVulkan ran for the webway gate.\n\nPART THREE\n\nTHE ROAD TO ETERNITY\n\nA rose watered with blood\n\nLotara\n\nShe didn't sleep any more. In the hours assigned to rest, she wandered the corridors of the Conqueror, listening to the ship's metal bones creak as they bent to the warp's slow whim. Screams echoed down the hallways, as did laughter that sounded like screaming. She used to assign squads of World Eaters to hunt down the sources of those sounds, but that habit had disintegrated like so many other elements of basic military efficiency. The only World Eaters left aboard the flagship were the ones too blood-mad to make it down to Terra. They were just as likely to be responsible for those screams as they were to destroy whatever was causing them.\n\nLotara moved slowly, frail as an old woman. Dehydration and starvation leached her strength, and she was acutely aware that the feeling of broken glass in her joints wasn't a green light, medically speaking. Even so, she moved through her ship with a fearless air for whatever lay around each corner. The World Eaters watched her pass and took no further notice of her. The human crew wisely avoided her glare, and these days she had no orders to give them anyway. The fleet's duty consisted now of hanging in low orbit above Terra and firing whenever and wherever the Warmaster's equerry, Argonis, commanded. That required only a skeleton crew, a few thousand souls at most - and most of those were slaves and thralls in the gunnery decks.\n\nToday, she wanted answers. She was going right to the top to get them.\n\nLotara made her way to her personal chambers. The door refused to register her palm print in yet another system failure aboard the ship. These days, she couldn't keep track of them all. After several attempts, the reinforced door rumbled open of its own volition. She doubted the sensor had even acknowledged her, it seemed more like the fickle whim of the Conqueror's machine-spirit.\n\nIron groaned all around as if mimicking the captain's irritation, a deep-core protest at the external abuse. The warp-mist encircling Terra wasn't gentle with the Warmaster's fleet; it was a rough anchorage that strained the hull of each warship. The lights aboard the Conqueror had been dulled to emergency red for weeks with all the power fluctuations, but now even the crimson of crisis lighting flickered as it threatened to give up.\n\n'Hold together,' she breathed to her ship. 'We've been through worse, haven't we?'\n\nThis lie no longer helped, but she found herself saying it anyway.\n\nThe captain's quarters exemplified the Conqueror's brutalism, a chamber of grey edges and panel slabs with an armoured window overlooking the ship's crenellated spine. When she'd first claimed the cabin with her promotion all those years ago, Kharn had been the one to escort her there. He was waiting for her there now, with his back to the view of Horus' armada.\n\n'You have no manners whatsoever,' she told him. 'These are my private quarters.'\n\nIt was supposed to be a jest between soldiers that had served together for years, but it came out as a parched murmur that barely reached her own ears. Kharn either didn't hear or didn't care to answer. He turned away from her, looking past the fleet at the choked sphere of Terra. Around the cradle of mankind, the warp's poison tides had replaced the night sky.\n\nKharn had been silent since returning to the ship. The scarred mess of his features scarcely showed any expression, only the occasional twitch as the Nails bit. And it still felt wrong, seeing him without his axe.\n\nLotara's vision swam as she stared at him, and everything reddened, everything darkened. Where Kharn stood, a cluster of meathooks hung from the ceiling on a spider-lair's worth of chains. Dead World Eaters, exsanguinated in ritual execution, hung suspended there - just dead meat in powerless ceramite - their heads taken and their skulls offered to-\n\nShe closed her eyes against the venom of her own imagination and slapped herself twice. It helped a little.\n\n'Are you staying for this?' she asked the figure by the window. 'If you are, keep out of the way.'\n\nKharn turned to regard the hololithic projector against the wall. As he moved, Lotara could see the grievous damage to his armour, inflicted by bolts and blades. His breastplate was a cracked ruin, revealing the sundered flesh beneath. She could see the burst, clenched meat of one lung. As she stared at him, she heard the gentle rattle of chains moving in the breeze of the chamber's air filtration. She couldn't remember exactly when he'd returned to the ship, only that one day she'd looked around the bridge and there he was, at his station.\n\n'You were lucky to have survived,' she told him.\n\nKharn tilted his head, the way he always did when he sought the right words. Lotara felt tears on her face, real tears, which was impossible. She hadn't wept real tears since she was an adolescent in the Zhurscan Academy for Gifted Youth, on the day she received the notification that her brother had died in the cholera outbreak ravaging the capital.\n\n'But you didn't survive, did you?' A year ago, the question would've been madness. Now, she truly wasn't sure of the answer. She knew only that she was too tired to be afraid.\n\nHis only reply was to turn back to the window, facing the dying world and its kaleidoscopic sky. Lotara felt blood dripping from her nose. It hurt to look at Kharn for too long. It always made her bleed, and her blood came out unpleasantly thick.\n\nThe hololithic terminal gave a white noise connection screech and she turned to it, leaning her fists on the control panel for support. She was shaking all over and she wasn't sure why.\n\n'Conqueror,' crackled a voice over the vox. 'This is the Vengeful Spirit. Secure channel established. You may speak.'\n\n'This is Sarrin.' Lotara willed her voice back to its original strength. 'Link your holo, please.'\n\nThe projector clicked and spurted out a flickering image, aggrieved by distortion. It was one of the Astartes, the colour of his warplate bleached by the hololith, but the talismans and spines on his armour detailed his allegiance without doubt. Lotara's heart sank.\n\n'I wanted the Warmaster,' she said. 'I used my ultima clearance. With all due respect, I'm tired of seeing your face with every report, Argonis.'\n\nKenor Argonis, equerry to the Warmaster, inclined his head in sympathy. 'I speak with the voice of Horus Lupercal, from his lips to your ears.'\n\nLotara fought not to grind her teeth. It felt good to be angry again. It felt cleansing. 'If it's coming out of your mouth, it's not the Warmaster's voice, is it?'\n\nArgonis stiffened; it was obvious even through the wretched quality of the holo. Lotara was walking a fine line between her authority on paper and the hierarchy of reality. She was one of the highest-ranking officers in the armada and she had every right to speak with the Warmaster. But she was also human. It was becoming evident to her, this was a Legion War, a confrontation between demigods. Increasingly Lotara felt as though she and her kind were just so much chaff and chattel to the legionaries. This discussion wasn't disabusing her of the notion.\n\nAs she watched him, Argonis silenced the audio channel and conversed with at least one unseen crew member. It was her considered opinion that the equerry's diplomatic skills had eroded significantly in recent months.\n\n'Captain Sarrin,' he said at last. 'A pleasure, as always.'\n\n'Please elaborate, equerry.'\n\nBut he didn't. His hololith blinked out of existence with a spurt of static. Lotara stared in silence. Had Argonis really played the most cringeworthy card in his deck? Had he really"}
{"text":"notion.\n\nAs she watched him, Argonis silenced the audio channel and conversed with at least one unseen crew member. It was her considered opinion that the equerry's diplomatic skills had eroded significantly in recent months.\n\n'Captain Sarrin,' he said at last. 'A pleasure, as always.'\n\n'Please elaborate, equerry.'\n\nBut he didn't. His hololith blinked out of existence with a spurt of static. Lotara stared in silence. Had Argonis really played the most cringeworthy card in his deck? Had he really severed their private channel just to avoid a conversation?\n\n'Son of a bitch,' Lotara said with almost unreal politeness. It was the most she'd felt like herself in months. 'You childish Astartes bastard.'\n\nThe hololith flared back into life towards the end of her curse. It wasn't Argonis this time. The figure was enthroned upon white ceramite and twisted metal, slouching with wounded majesty. His eyes were sunken and edged with lines of pain, bright with fever rather than awareness. Metal talons the length of swords drummed on the armrest of the throne with a clink-clink-clink audible across the vox.\n\nThe ghoul wearing the Warmaster's armour stared at her with a sort of fevered, confused intensity. Then he smiled, and he was Horus Lupercal once again. The pain fell away from his beautiful features.\n\n'I trust you weren't addressing me?' he asked.\n\nLotara saluted, fist against her heart. 'My Warmaster. I was speaking to your equerry. He has been something of an irritant.'\n\nHorus waved a hand, gesturing his acknowledgement, but for a long moment he said nothing more. Lotara heard her name murmured, out of sight. By Argonis, she was sure.\n\nHorus smiled again. 'Captain Sarrin. Captain Lotara Sarrin of the warship Conqueror. I trust all is well. How may I be of service?'\n\n'Warmaster Lupercal...'\n\nHorus interrupted her. '\"The Rose Watered with Blood\".'\n\nLotara's jaw tightened. 'It... surprises me that you're aware of that poem, Warmaster.'\n\nHorus ran his gloved hand over his shaven head, as relaxed as a demigod could be in casual conversation.\n\n'By the saga-poet Eurykidas DeMartos, was it not? Whatever happened to him, Captain Sarrin?'\n\nDeMartos had died with the rest of the remembrancers aboard the Conqueror when Angron had given the order to end their theatrics once and for all. As far as Lotara was concerned, nothing of value was lost on that day.\n\n'Kharn killed him, lord.' And took great pleasure in doing so. 'I only regret that we couldn't kill the poem, too.'\n\nHorus chuckled. 'Indeed, indeed.'\n\n'Warmaster, if I may ask-' she began, but Horus interrupted her again, his smile becoming a grin.\n\n'\"And worshipful foes, awarded medals carved upon flesh,\n\nIn scars of shrapnel and sourceless fire,\n\nThis flock,\n\nHer flock,\n\nUnburied,\n\nWithin great drifting tombs of silent enemy iron.\n\nA queenly shadow cast,\n\nAgainst the dappled theatre of eternal fusion,\n\nAcross the tide of our voiceless ocean,\n\nAnd here,\n\nEnshrined in this royal steel,\n\nWe carve her invocation.\"'\n\nLotara watched him, the Emperor's own son, Warmaster of the Imperium, as he recited the final lines of the poem written in tribute to her. It was bad enough to endure when courtiers across the Imperium had lapped up that insipid verse like the fops they were, burying their faces in the trough of literary propaganda and insisting they were dining on high art... But to hear it in the Warmaster's deep and kindly tone was almost too much to bear. She wasn't sure if he was mocking her with the recital. She wasn't sure she wanted to know.\n\n'Warmaster, I wish to speak of supplying the fleet. With the ash thinning out, we can harvest more resources from the surface. My crew is starving, dying of thirst. I...'\n\nShe could see Horus wasn't listening. His lockjaw grin had faded, and with cold assurance the Warmaster gestured with the great Talon.\n\n'Maloghurst, attend me.'\n\nLotara held her tongue. Maloghurst was long dead; Argonis entered the picture, instead. He leaned down, speaking at Horus' ear. She couldn't follow any of this. It was a fight not to let her discomfort show in front of the fey ghoul that the Warmaster had become.\n\n'I am weary, Captain Sarrin.' Horus' voice was bereft of emotion, practically bereft of life. 'As are you, I imagine. Yes. We all are, aren't we? But our triumph is close. It is so close. This, I promise you.'\n\n'Warmaster, please...'\n\nShe trailed off that time. She didn't like how he was looking at her, the sudden fervency in his sickened eyes.\n\n'You don't even realise, do you?'\n\n'Realise what, lord?'\n\n'That you're not her. You're not Lotara Sarrin.'\n\nBefore she could muster the breath for a reply - not that she had any idea what to say - it was over anyway. The signal was severed. Horus was gone.\n\nBrothers in chains\n\nKargos\n\nThe Land Raider tore across the wasteland, rocking and shaking over the broken earth. In the gunner's cupola, Kargos gripped the handle of the heavy bolter, sighting down the barrel at the shapes resolving through the dust. They were closing fast on the refugee convoy's rearguard. It was a hell of a convoy, streaming across the wasteland towards the Sanctum Imperialis. From the size of it, several refugee trains and retreating Legion forces had linked up to make their final run for sanctuary.\n\nThe Warmaster's horde had the numbers, though. Kargos felt an itch at the back of his head.\n\nSoon, he told the Nails. Almost there.\n\nThey bit back in reply, unsoothed. The Nails had no patience - logistics were meaningless; they fed on emotion. They wanted adrenaline, they wanted blood to flow, and he would be punished until he made it happen.\n\nIt would be a risky assault, this close to the walls of the Sanctum Imperialis. The Delphic Battlement ringing the Emperor's castle was only five kilometres to the west, leaving them practically in range of the wall-guns. Within range of Titan guns, certainly, and just as definitely within Thunderhawk range.\n\nThe forces at the Sanctum wouldn't bombard their own arriving convoys with blind-fire, and the ash reduced all hopes of precision targeting at that range. Gunships, though. They were a possibility with the dust thinning, day after day. Titans... They were a risk, too. They were starting to venture away from the Delphic Battlement, punishing any raiders that struck too close.\n\nKargos' eye-lenses had long since lost their ability to zoom and refocus. Endless incidental damage to his helmet over the war's course had killed that functionality. He had to look through magnoculars to make out the convoy's scale - or at least what the ash would let him make out.\n\n'What do you see?' Inzar called up from the tank's innards.\n\n'It's a big one. We'll have to hit it hard to break through.'\n\nInzar acknowledged him, and Kargos could hear the preacher relaying more orders over the vox. Their tank was at the lead of the assault force, his stolen VII Legion Land Raider cutting ahead of the pack to form the tip of the ragged formation. With so many Imperial convoys streaming across the wasteland between the Palatine Bastions, the bounty of targets made for easy prey. Scenting blood, the Warmaster's horde poured into no-man's-land in their hundreds of thousands, hunting down fleeing Imperials with abandon.\n\nEven the most directionless slaughter still served the war's purpose. Every soul killed in the districts of the Inner Palace was a soul that would never pick up a weapon to defend the Sanctum Imperialis. The Legion officers on the ground let their warriors loose, letting massacre and butchery become quaint tactical virtues.\n\nThe Emperor, wherever He was, still couldn't see reason. That much was obvious to the Warmaster's horde - the closer they came to the walls of the final fortress, the weaker their Neverborn allies were, and the rarer their manifestations became. Kargos hadn't seen his primarch since the astral display above Avalon days before, but Inzar was forever ready with assurances that Angron was out there, tearing down the Palatine Bastions. Thoughts of his gene-sire made the Nails sizzle through the meat of Kargos' mind. A not entirely unpleasant heat.\n\nAn example for his sons to follow, the preacher had said. A messiah.\n\nFreedom from death. Immortality through annihilation. The words echoed through the gladiator's mind in a ceaseless cycle. He hadn't spoken any more of it, though he kept sensing Inzar's eyes upon him. Judging, always judging.\n\nAs they drew closer to the convoy, the World Eater panned the viewfinder across the distant shapes of Legion armour and Army transports. Given the horde's advance, all retreat would soon be cut off. Fewer and fewer reinforcements were reaching the Sanctum. This column might even be the last.\n\nIt was Kargos' ninth convoy raid. Or perhaps his tenth. They tended to blend together, just like the days and nights. On the last one, be it the eighth or the ninth, they'd stolen the tank they now commanded. That had been Inzar's decision; Kargos had been content to sit huddled in the rattling confines of a Rhino transport, but he freely admitted that their new ride made their predatory duty so much easier. The ash and dust were thinning over time, and that helped even more. Gunships were flying again in brief bursts. Titan support was beginning to show up. Orbital drops were no longer the purview of blind prayer. It was far easier to hunt when you could see what you were hunting.\n\nHe turned the magnoculars to the west. He could see it now, the suggestion of it in the distance: a hazy shadow consistent with where the horizon was supposed to be. A siege wall. The last siege wall. Far from here, but not far enough.\n\nHe called down to Inzar, 'I can see the Sanctum.'\n\nInzar's reply came with a growl. 'We're getting too close to the Sanctum. Let us make this raid swift. In and out, my friend. No last stands. No heroes. Save it for the final assault.'\n\nKargos heard this, too, relayed across the vox. The horde's shared communication channel turned into a howling orchestra of v"}
{"text":" hazy shadow consistent with where the horizon was supposed to be. A siege wall. The last siege wall. Far from here, but not far enough.\n\nHe called down to Inzar, 'I can see the Sanctum.'\n\nInzar's reply came with a growl. 'We're getting too close to the Sanctum. Let us make this raid swift. In and out, my friend. No last stands. No heroes. Save it for the final assault.'\n\nKargos heard this, too, relayed across the vox. The horde's shared communication channel turned into a howling orchestra of voices in reply. Military order was a truly thin facade, these days.\n\nThe Imperial convoys they hit were always slowed by the weight of their responsibilities. Legion tanks and Imperial Army armour ringed the vulnerable wounded and civilians in their midst, but it was a simple matter of breaking through the outnumbered defenders to shatter their unity. Even their Land Raider, labouring at barely forty kilometres an hour over the churned earth, was fast enough to catch the outriders at the edges of each burdened convoy.\n\nMore than one defensive ring had refused to fight. Kargos thought little of it, it was a matter of naked practicality - the warriors of those Legions considered it more prudent to reach the Sanctum Imperialis rather than die in vain out in the wasteland. Inzar, however, took great delight in watching the Imperials abandon their own wounded warriors and defenceless refugees. He chanted praise and thanks to his mad gods each time it happened, promising them a harvest of sacrifice. This was a promise he consistently delivered on.\n\nAs they ranged ahead of the bulk of the slaughter, though... they ranged ahead of their own human forces and the daemonic things that were born in the minutes after the massacres. The horde swelled with every death on either side, and Kargos found himself at the vanguard of a breathtaking tide. He sometimes caught Inzar listening to the scale of that tide; the preacher would tune into the general vox-web, allowing himself to be assailed by an infinity of shrieks, screams, snarls and scrap code. To Kargos, it was just noise. He told himself he didn't hear any music in the sound, just beneath the surface, like a teasing undercurrent...\n\nHe'd asked Inzar, naturally. 'Why do you do that?'\n\nThe preacher had smiled. 'I like to meditate on the melody of enlightenment.'\n\nAfter the last raid, Inzar had summoned Kargos over to him. They stood in the shadow of the tank they were about to steal. To the west was Meru Bastion, a burning silhouette in the dust. Inzar had been walking among the bodies, dispatching the wounded that took his interest. Those he found uninteresting he kicked aside, leaving them to bleed out and expire from their injuries.\n\n'Preacher,' Kargos greeted him.\n\n'My friend,' Inzar replied. The Chaplain was distracted, hauling a dying, one-armed Imperial Fist to his knees. The warrior's chestplate was horrendously ruptured, and his helmet had been torn clear, showing a vicious blade wound to the face that had stolen both of his eyes and damaged his mind. It was a miracle the warrior still lived at all.\n\nInzar started scalping him.\n\n'We will take this Land Raider,' the Chaplain said while he carved.\n\nKargos grunted non-committally. 'If you say so.'\n\n'Help me with this, would you?'\n\nThe Imperial Fist struggled, but Kargos kept the dying man on his knees. The Word Bearer ran a curved Colchisian dagger in a sawing circle around the top of the warrior's head, then took a fistful of his hair.\n\n'For the Emperor,' swore the Imperial Fist. 'For the Emperor.'\n\n'Yes, yes,' Inzar humoured him.\n\nThe Chaplain tightened his grip and pulled. There was the sound of wet leather tearing, then Inzar kicked the scalped warrior to the ground.\n\nKargos looked down at the Imperial Fist. The man was crawling towards him, reaching with useless defiance in his fading eyes. The World Eater admired that. It showed gladiator spirit. A single bolt from his pistol cracked out, ending the Imperial Fist's useless protestations.\n\nOther warriors drew near - the mix of all nine of the Warmaster's Legions that was becoming more common with every battle. Inzar bound his newest scalp to his belt, using the dead man's hair and a squirt of armour cement. He looked to the gathered Astartes as he did so.\n\n'Which one of you wants to drive?'\n\nThe heavy bolter kicked in Kargos' grip. He raked it low, shooting to cripple, not kill. The White Scars Rhino revving ahead of them threw its left track with a shattering of treads, losing speed and falling out of formation. Kargos watched it as they raced past, grinning as two World Eaters vehicles swung towards the hobbled prey. It was all he could do not to leap from the top of his tank and join in the slaughter.\n\nThe convoy was turning out to be juicy prey. A great many Imperial Army vehicles, a few skitarii walkers, all ringed by a cluster of Legion armour. Several lesser convoys had streamed out from the Palatine Bastions and grouped together on their flight to the Sanctum Imperialis. This many defenders made it almost an even fight, a hard fight, which in turn made it twice as satisfying.\n\nIt started out the way these engagements always began, in the familiar melodies of Legion warfare: the trading of long-range lascannon fire and volkite beams, followed by the mid-range chatter of heavy bolters. The raiding party descended in predator packs, isolating outriders and stragglers before carving into the convoy's bulk.\n\nKargos wasn't a man plagued by thoughts of honour and dishonour. In that regard, he shared Inzar's ideology. This was war, and in war soldiers fought to win. Honour was a construct, an irrelevant crutch for killers to feel better about the fact they killed. He'd never spared a moment for regret when the Legions had leashed the galaxy with their overwhelming force. No civilisation, human or alien, had been able to resist them. Slaughtering entire cultures that never had a chance against the Imperium was no more or less honourable than carving apart these refugees. War was war.\n\nHe'd spoken of this with Kharn long ago, back when Kargos was Eighth Company's pit-champion and the Legion was new to the Nails. The whole of the Eighth Assault was gathered, watching their brothers in the gladiator pits. The sounds of axes clashing rang off the Conqueror's metal walls. His captain had given a careful smile.\n\n'There is more philosophy in your position than you admit.'\n\nKargos had shaken his head, continuing to bind his axe to his vambrace. He and his chain-brother were scheduled to fight next. 'I don't see it,' he'd confessed.\n\n'I think you do,' said Kharn. 'You just prefer to believe you're a simple creature. Good luck in the pit, Bloodspitter.'\n\nA bolt cracked against the Land Raider's armour plating only a metre from him, its detonation jarring Kargos back to the here and now. As the Nails spiked to punish him for his distraction, he pulled his gun around and opened fire on the closest Rhino, aiming for its treads.\n\nRed crept in at the edges of his vision, and with it, the adrenal sting of relief. It was starting again. He-\n\n-is on the ground. In the ash. Gorechild howls in his fist and in his head. Someone is screaming a language he doesn't understand, right in his ears. It's his own voice, of course it's his own voice, magnified inside his helmet, but the shouting doesn't stop when he becomes aware he's doing it.\n\nA Blood Angel comes for him, but slow, too slow; Kargos sees the sword descending, sees where it will be, and he cuts back, taking the Angel's hand off at the wrist. On the backswing, he hammers the Angel to the ground with the flat of Gorechild's blade. The clang is loud enough to split the heavens. Rabid froth spatters the inside of his helmet as he screams and screams and prays and he-\n\n-pulls himself up the side of an enemy tank, his muscles clenching in the epilogue of a laughing jag. The last breaths of laughter wheeze from his throat. He's up on the Land Raider's roof, moving, always moving. A bolt clips him, detonating against his pauldron; he rocks with it, still moving.\n\nThe soldier in the cupola is human, too human to stop him - she raises a pistol and Kargos stamps down as her hand comes up. Every bone in the woman's hand and forearm crunches, crushed to paste, just more filth on the bottom of his boot, and Gorechild swings and the teeth carve, and the soldier is split from the helmet down, and he-\n\n-is carving, bathed in sparks, his axe's teeth shrieking through the hull of the stalled Chimera. Then he's in, and it stinks of blood and marrow and misery, and he sees Imperial Army on stretchers; the wounded are here, they can barely fight back, but it doesn't matter - they bleed like everyone bleeds, and he swings and chops and carves.\n\nAnd the relief of it; the sweetness of the rhythm of Gorechild rising and falling and rising and falling; and the perfume of the blood, and the song of the screaming, there's no pain now, he could cry with relief because there's no pain; but now they're all dead in here and the Nails bite again and he-\n\n-is with Inzar, side by side, the way he used to be side by side with Kharn in battle; the way he used to be side by side with Skane in training; the way he used to be side by side with the Flesh Tearer in the fighting pits.\n\nThe preacher fights loud, swinging his crozius mace and exhorting the warriors around him to fight on, proclaiming that the gods are watching, that this bloodshed is holy. Kargos doesn't know if it's true, he doesn't care; he cares only that the Nails flood him with relief at the terminus of every axe swing, every bite into ceramite, every crunch into flesh, every grind through human meat. There's blood on his armour, he's red with it now: blood for Angron, blood for victory, blood for Inzar's God of War if that's what it takes to feel this relief.\n\nInzar is here with him, killing at his side, chanting prayers, and each swing of his crozius hits ceramite with the sound of a cathedral bell; it's "}
{"text":", he doesn't care; he cares only that the Nails flood him with relief at the terminus of every axe swing, every bite into ceramite, every crunch into flesh, every grind through human meat. There's blood on his armour, he's red with it now: blood for Angron, blood for victory, blood for Inzar's God of War if that's what it takes to feel this relief.\n\nInzar is here with him, killing at his side, chanting prayers, and each swing of his crozius hits ceramite with the sound of a cathedral bell; it's thunder, a devotional thunder, it rings in Kargos' ears, stinging the Nails with the same cold relief as the running of blood, and he-\n\n-crashes to the earth, snarling in the dust as the White Scar rides by. He's down in the dust, in the thick of it. Gorechild is on the ground out of reach, except it isn't because one jerk of his arm whips the chain back and the axe leaps to his hand, and he grips the axe and rises to his feet again.\n\nThe White Scar is gone. Kargos turns and looks for enemies in the dust, and there's another White Scar - this one's out of the saddle and grappling with a World Eater, and three heartbeats later it's over because Kargos swings underarm, the blade carving up between the warrior's legs and the axe-teeth chewing and chewing with an arc of blood and sparks, and there are screams, and he-\n\n-can hear the others over the vox, he can just about make out their meaning; they're outnumbered, the convoy is being reinforced, they need to fall back; but he can't, he just can't. The fight is joined and there's no falling back, no running away, the Nails will split his skull apart if he tries, they'll change the chemicals in his head to acid and tar.\n\nHe-\n\n-turns in the dust, staggering, stumbling over the last Blood Angel he killed, and the Nails steam in his skull like molten pistons. There within the warring shadows, there in the ashen silhouettes, he sees an officer holding back and giving commands. Kargos moves in a staggering run as his muscles burn and Gorechild sings its sawblade song.\n\nHe passes Inzar beating a downed Imperial Fist to death, and he passes Draelath tearing his sword free from the guts of another Blood Angel, but he passes too many others duelling and being hacked down and being strangled and the voices were right, they're losing, the convoy's defenders are overwhelming them, but he doesn't care, he wants this officer's skull, he wants the rush, he wants the blood-wet relief that comes with glory.\n\nHe kills his way closer, axe hacking with a searing lactic acid burn in his muscles, and Gorechild is a prince of blades, killing and rending and chopping so much easier than any other chain weapon he's ever held; mica dragon's teeth rev in its blade, that's why, that's how it rips through armour and meat so well. Kargos cuts sideways, cleaving a Blood Angel down to the backbone, kicking the dying warrior away, and he's roaring a challenge at the officer though it's a wordless thing because his mouth won't form words right now, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it's a challenge that needs no language, only rage.\n\nHe reaches the officer and the Nails sing; the gut instinct of a lifelong brawler has him note the chainsword in the Blood Angel's hand and the flensing knife in the other, and it's familiar, it's so familiar that it hurts, but it doesn't matter, all that matters is the kill.\n\nKargos cuts downward and there's a clash as he's blocked, and chain teeth fly from the Blood Angel's sword, and he cuts again, and again he's blocked, and he's grunting with effort; and he pulls back for more room to take a wilder swing, and the Blood Angel weaves aside, and Kargos screams as he cuts empty air.\n\nThey come together again, blade to blade, faceplate to faceplate, and again it's all so familiar, but there's no real link, there's no connection, there's only frustrated rage. Both warriors are panting, respiration coming in ragged saws through their helmets' vocalisers.\n\nTheir blades are locked, axe on sword, sword against axe, and the two of them strain against one another. They're statues, motionless with a perfect equilibrium of rage and strength, and the first to disengage will invite the death blow. Genetically enhanced sinew strains in harmony with the fibre-bundle cabling of their armour's false muscles and they're still locked, still deadlocked. In that moment, either one of them could push through a stone wall, yet neither can shove the other back. He feels the contest as a full-body strain, every cell of his being leaning into the locked blades, and he knows the Blood Angel is doing the same because he feels that, too.\n\n'You have Kharn's axe,' the Blood Angel breathes into his faceplate. 'Did you plunder his corpse once the Black Knight was done with him?'\n\nKargos doesn't reply because the Nails steal his words and force adrenaline into his mind in place of language. What he knows, though, is the voice. Familiar enough to drill through the Nails as they vice around his mind. He knows the voice without knowing why he knows it.\n\nBut it weakens him, that familiarity, it weakens him and it weakens the Nails; it steals the red-raw clarity his precious implants provide, replacing rage with confusion, with doubt, with a creeping unease that the muscles interpret as weakness. Kargos feels himself slipping, he skids back a few centimetres on the dusty ground, and then a few more. The Nails aren't biting so hard now; in place of their pathological flood, Kargos feels the lactic burn of aching flesh. He stares into the Blood Angel's eye-lenses and he feels mortal - absolutely, dangerously mortal.\n\nThis is it, Kargos thinks, this is it; this is how his foes must have felt in the fighting pits. This is what it was, to know you might lose. He could die here. The jaws of the preacher's promised hell are right here, opening beneath him.\n\nSomeone crashes into him from behind, and another warrior jostles into him from the side, and it's not just a duel, he remembers that, he knows it; it's a battle, they're still in the thick of the fighting, both of them have to keep aware of other combatants. He wants to call for Inzar, to summon the preacher for aid. Pride prevents him, but that pride is eroding fast, eaten up by something that tastes a little too much like fear.\n\nHe feels it then, he knew it was coming and here it is, the crux moment where the clinch has to break. Kargos moves with all the preternatural speed granted by transhuman genetics and the technological miracles of Astartes warplate; he disengages with a roar and moves back and-\n\nAnd the Blood Angel is still on him, moving faster, giving him no room. Kargos grunts with the impact as the Blood Angel headbutts him between their joined blades: a crunch, a crash, a tolling clang of ceramite. But it's fine, it's fine, it's only pain, he just needs space, he just needs room to swing Gorechild and then he can finish this, he can, except that's when his eye catches fire because the headbutt shattered his helmet's lens, and he realises as he tries to blink that the plastek shards have been driven into his eye socket, and he's half-blind now, and...\n\n'Too slow, Bloodspitter,' the Blood Angel growls in Nagrakali, the mongrel tongue of the XII Legion. 'Too slow.'\n\nAnd he knows then. He knows. The Blood Angel's words prise off the last of the Nails' bite, and Kargos knows who he's fighting - he knows the faceplate, he knows the armour, he sees the name on the Blood Angel's shoulder guard, the name written in dusty gold, the name of the man he was chained to a hundred times as they fought together in the arena, the name shouted in the Conqueror's pits, and he knows the mockery in the Blood Angel's voice because it was the same mockery the Blood Angel would use to goad their foes, and the two of them face each other for the first time and\n\nEverything\n\nSlows\n\nDown.\n\nThe Nails are silent in Kargos' mind, and so is the war all around him.\n\n'Amit,' he says. 'My brother.'\n\nAnd Amit, the Flesh Tearer, his arena partner for years, his own chain-brother, spits on his broken face and cuts his throat.\n\n'Eat shit, traitor.'\n\nThe duel of Kargos Bloodspitter and Nassir Amit.\n\nToo valuable to die\n\nLand\n\nArkhan Land pulled the trigger. The warrior before him disintegrated, undone at the atomic level with a supremely merciless lack of haste. The Alpha Legionnaire was still screaming when almost seventy per cent of his body had dissipated into the smoky air.\n\nFascinating, thought Land, despite being on the very edge of pissing himself.\n\nThe technoarchaeologist lowered his pistol, thanked the Omnissiah for perhaps the five thousandth time since the war had reached Terra, and crawled away from the last dissolving shreds of armour. He had to get to safety. He couldn't die here. It mustn't end like this, all because of one raided convoy.\n\nWhatever would the Imperium do without him?\n\nLas-fire sliced through the dust with cracks of ionised air. Boltguns barked, lighting up the hazy dawn with the impacts of their shells. You could barely tell the Astartes apart in this dust, they were all towering monsters coated in a layer of ash. Land was surrounded by armoured beasts with grinding joints and roaring weapons, killing everything around themselves with impunity.\n\nEveryone said the world had gone blind, but that wasn't quite true. Far more accurate to say that the world had gone mad.\n\nHe scrabbled across the hard ground, too frightened to stay low and move slowly, too scared to stand up and run, risking drawing fire. The result of his conflicting fears was a hunching lope about the pace of a jog. An abiding sense of self-preservation was one of Land's fiercest virtues, and it had served him beautifully on many occasions. However, it tended to do nothing for a man's dignity. He yelled for help as he ran, he yelled for Zephon, for anyone, damn it; and he yelled his own name several times, informing every combatant within earshot that he was Arkhan Land, the Arkhan Land, and "}
{"text":"d up and run, risking drawing fire. The result of his conflicting fears was a hunching lope about the pace of a jog. An abiding sense of self-preservation was one of Land's fiercest virtues, and it had served him beautifully on many occasions. However, it tended to do nothing for a man's dignity. He yelled for help as he ran, he yelled for Zephon, for anyone, damn it; and he yelled his own name several times, informing every combatant within earshot that he was Arkhan Land, the Arkhan Land, and his work was far too valuable for him to die here like this.\n\nLater, when he would be told about how he'd so unvaliantly whined for aid, he would deny it as base slander. There was simply no way he would ever be so undignified. Really, it said more about his accusers than it did about him.\n\nFor now, he ran. A las-round ionised the air a foot in front of his face, close enough to singe his beard. He turned in his inglorious but not entirely unwise retreat, weaving away from a cluster of combatants emerging ahead.\n\nThe uneven ground over which they fought had once been the Kushmandan Archive, a collection of libraries dedicated to preserving fragments of lore and artefacts from human worlds that hadn't survived Old Night. When the Great Crusade reached these worlds, expecting either resistance or compliance, they'd found neither. What awaited them instead were silent expanses of dead cities, inhabited only by memories. Whole civilisations that hadn't been able to overcome their own infighting or died on the vine once they were cut off from the rest of humanity's ancient, pre-Imperial empire. The relics and records of these lost kingdoms were brought to Terra, to be studied in the domed halls of the Kushmandan Archive.\n\nRubble. All of it now rubble: low walls to crouch behind, rocks to be ground underfoot by the treads of tanks and the feet of Titans.\n\nWhere was Zephon? Where were any of the supremely capable idiots covered in ceramite who should be doing their damnedest to protect him? It was one of the most annoying aspects to the Astartes subspecies, wasn't it? When a fight broke out, most of them had the moronic tendency to seek out enemy officers and warlords instead of holding back and prudently defending valuable souls like - well, like Arkhan Land.\n\nHe shouted for them over the vox in his customised rebreather. None of the convoy's commanders replied.\n\nIf Zephon's got himself killed only days after I dragged him out of stasis...\n\nLater, again, he would imagine he had this thought in a practically serene state of consideration. In reality, he mumbled it as he cowered with his back to a ruined wall. He was there mere moments before bolts hammered impacts along the stone to his left, spraying him with burning shrapnel, earning another offended, terrified cry. He fled from his compromised hiding place at a dead sprint.\n\nAhead of him, two Imperial Army troopers were using a crater as a foxhole. Land joined them there in a gasping tumble. One of them was on his belly in the dirt, firing a battered laslock over the lip of the crater. The officer - Land presumed it was an officer, since he was the one shouting into the hand-mic of a vox-caster - was crouched a little lower in the crater, with his rebreather pulled down so he could yell over the sounds of battle.\n\n'...engaged by raiders, four kilometres east of the Delphic Battlement...'\n\nLas-fire stitched the air above them. A Rhino armoured personnel carrier rattled past, belching smoke from an internal detonation, stealing most of the officer's words. Bolts crashed and burst against its dented armour as it trundled by. Land huddled deeper into the shaking earth as the officer kept shouting for reinforcements. He could only make out one in three or four of the man's war-stolen words.\n\n'...almost to the Sanctum... Astartes raiders... thousands of civilians-'\n\nThe trooper broke off abruptly because he was dead. Shot through the chest with a shrieking volkite beam, his uniform licked by flames around the hole as he fell back in a boneless heap.\n\nThe surviving trooper looked back at Land. Whatever he called was lost between the muffling of his rebreather mask and the unholy sounds surrounding them. Seeing that Arkhan wasn't about to take over operating the vox-caster, the soldier started crawling down the shallow crater to take his officer's place. He made it halfway before two brawling Astartes crashed into the ditch, their weapons conjuring great sprays of sparks from each other's armour plating. The humans didn't exist to them - they were lost in their frenzied swordwork, and they trampled the crawling soldier beneath their boots without even slowing down.\n\nOne of them staggered next to the crushed corpse, clutching at his neck with his only remaining hand. The other warrior administered the coup de grace with a swing of his chainsword, taking the loser's head from his shoulders. With no celebration, no respite, the Astartes kicked his foe's headless body over and clambered out of the crater to rejoin the fight.\n\nLand had no idea which side either of them had been on. He wasn't about to check the corpse to find out, either. He started running.\n\nHe made it several steps before he was shoved from his feet, when what felt like a cargo-hauler hammered into him from behind. Land thudded into the ground, rolled hard, and swore a sacred binharic curse as his pistol clattered across the earth.\n\nHis immediate thought, as the archeo-atomic gun tumbled away, was: if that thing discharges...\n\nAll concern was bleached from his mind as something approximately the weight of an Imperator Titan crashed down on his right leg. The pain was so sudden, the pressure so intense, that he didn't even cry out. He just winced, all of the air abandoning his body in a spit-laden hiss.\n\nTurning awkwardly, he saw a legionary on the ground, leaking blood and coolant from its battered armour. The warrior's shoulder guard crushed Land's leg to the earth from the knee down.\n\nPanic truly set in then, as did the pain. He clawed to get himself free, thrashing like an animal caught in a jaw trap. He kicked at the dead Astartes with his free foot. He threw a handful of earth that clattered against the warrior's faceplate. This achieved everything one might expect, which is to say, it achieved absolutely nothing.\n\nA rising hysteria, one he was painfully aware of, began to infect his throat. He yelled for aid, knowing that no one would hear him over the battle, not with the vox so useless and his words muffled by a rebreather, not with chainswords revving and tearing and boltgun thunder playing out its fyceline cacophony. Yet, miraculously, it worked.\n\nOne of the Astartes came to a boot-thudding stop at his side, hauling the dead warrior up and dropping the corpse away. The release of pressure somehow hurt worse than the pressure, and as he sucked in air, Land took a teeth-baring look at his leg. A red mess waited where his limb was supposed to be, malformed beneath his blood-soaked trouser leg.\n\nI can deal with it, I can deal with it, the words came in a bleating rush of thought. Machine-God's oily piss, it hurts, it hurts, get to the Sanctum, deal with it there, Sands of Sacred Mars, it hurts.\n\n'I can't walk!' he yelled at the Astartes in whose shadow he lay. 'Help me up!'\n\n'You are Arkhan Land.' The warrior was breathless from battle, yet the words came in a slow growl at eerie odds with the fight going on around them. Its voice was wet and thick, as if living things greased against each other in its throat.\n\nLand looked up at his saviour. At the ashen ceramite, swollen by the mutagenics of the spoiled meat within. At the domed belly plate, broken not by boltgun fire but burst from the inside out. Serpent-ropes of dusty guts hung like a clutch of nooses, dangling between the warrior's legs.\n\nDeath Guard. He either whispered the words aloud or chanted them in his mind. He wasn't sure. Omnissiah, protect me...\n\nIt's often written in chronicles of war that time slows down in moments of dire confrontation. The concept was a trope Arkhan Land had always found tolerably quasi-poetic at best and ludicrous at worst, so it was with a chill that he felt the air around him grow dense, and the towering thing above him move as if underwater. Dragging a single breath into his lungs demanded all his strength and took forever.\n\n'You are Arkhan Land,' the Death Guard accused him as it reached for him. 'You have great value.'\n\nHe yelled that he'd been lying, that he wasn't Arkhan Land, that Arkhan Land was already dead, that Arkhan Land had been killed when the Ultimate Wall fell. These protests, shouted mindlessly in Martian Gothic, achieved nothing.\n\nAn Imperial Army soldier, as ashy as everyone and everything else, emerged from the dust and rammed the bayonet of his lasrifle into the Death Guard's guts. Land stared in grateful horror with every detail richly clear: the empty ammunition slot of the man's lasgun; the look of terrified defiance half-hidden by the plastek rebreather; even the quiver in the soldier's narrowed eyes as he dug deep into the nest of slithering intestines.\n\nParalysis threatened to embrace Land entirely. He'd barely moved an inch before the Death Guard vomited a sloshing arc through its helmet's mouth grille, covering the soldier in steaming bile.\n\nWhoever it was - that insanely, stupidly brave soul - they paid for their courage by falling to their knees, shrieking as their face and raised hands dissolved. Land's scream blended in with the dying man's, briefly turning the death cry into a duet.\n\nA third scream turned it into a chorus, this one mechanical, born of howling turbines. Another figure struck the earth, its back winged with a jump pack's twin turbines. The warrior's chainsword crashed against the Death Guard's armour with a spray of sparks.\n\nZephon, thought Land, delirious with relief. Zephon. At last.\n\n'He is Arkhan Land,' the bloated Death Guard grunted, fending away the frenzied sword-stri"}
{"text":"s scream blended in with the dying man's, briefly turning the death cry into a duet.\n\nA third scream turned it into a chorus, this one mechanical, born of howling turbines. Another figure struck the earth, its back winged with a jump pack's twin turbines. The warrior's chainsword crashed against the Death Guard's armour with a spray of sparks.\n\nZephon, thought Land, delirious with relief. Zephon. At last.\n\n'He is Arkhan Land,' the bloated Death Guard grunted, fending away the frenzied sword-strikes with its armoured forearms. Ceramite gouged and tore, forcing the diseased legionary back, step by step. 'Fool! He has value.'\n\nZephon's name died on Land's lips. The caedere remissum crest atop the newcomer's helmet was a trophy worn only by the slavering dogs of the XII Legion. Reports of the World Eaters turning on their own side in displays of unguided bloodlust had been common throughout the war, and now he was being treated to it, up close and personal.\n\nHe wasn't saved at all. His enemies were fighting over him.\n\nLand rolled over, moving with grunts of unfamiliar effort, dragging his shattered leg as he crawled across the broken earth. He had two thoughts in the span of the same moment, one of which was the cold belief that he was going into shock, and that was why he was able to crawl at all instead of shrieking over his leg.\n\nThe second, far more practical, was: where is my gun, where did it fall, which direction where where-\n\nThere in the dust, between the embattled shadows of warriors and monsters alike, was a tiny figure crouched low to the ground. It could almost be the silhouette of a skinny child, if an infant possessed a prehensile tail and chunky bionic eyes. But it wasn't a child, and it wasn't a monkey either, though it resembled one with relative fidelity. It was an experiment of genetic and cybernetic genius, recreating a long-extinct species of Terran simian. In its cunning little claws, it cradled Arkhan Land's fallen pistol.\n\n'Sapien!' Land called.\n\nSapien skittered closer in bounding leaps reminiscent of no actual primate, pressing the atomic-slug pistol into its master's outstretched hands.\n\n'Good boy,' Land whispered through tears. 'My very best boy.'\n\nHe rolled over just as a crested shadow eclipsed the faint red sun. The victor of the scuffle over who would take his head had been decided. Gore, forebodingly dark, dripped from the World Eater's chainblade.\n\n'Blood,' it breathed through its helm's vocaliser, the words melting into a throaty chuckle. It seemed delighted by the slender gun in the hands of its prey. 'Blood for the-'\n\nLand fired. The World Eater staggered back, slowly atomising, its molecules tearing away from one another and, somehow, igniting as they did so. Arkhan Land was no soldier, just a man that adored his impossible toys from the Dark Age of Technology.\n\n'Blood for the Machine-God,' he said through clenched teeth. Relief flowed through him, a feeling so pure that it made him heave with weak, wild laughter. The World Eater died screaming, going on to meet whatever foul deity it had sold its soul to.\n\nBreathless, in more pain than he could ever remember experiencing, Land dragged his spectralocular goggles from his watering eyes long enough to wipe the tears away, then started crawling again. Sapien skittered along at his side, chirping encouragement with sounds no living monkey had ever made.\n\n'Get help.' Land looked the psyber-monkey dead in its beady stare. 'Get Zephon, get Amit, get anyone.'\n\nSapien ran, leaving him alone in the heart of the storm. Men and women were dying around him, their forms too shrouded by the dust for him to know exactly who he'd be shooting at. Astartes from both sides were dying too, but as far as Arkhan Land was concerned, not enough of them, and not quickly enough.\n\nSomething huge and metal and loud roared its way overhead, trailing fire. A shell from a Titan, a gunship strafing the ground... He didn't know, it was only a flash of flaming darkness, there one second and gone the next. Land wanted to keep crawling, but to what end? Sapien had gone for help, and might not find him if he moved. Blood of the Omnissiah, he could barely move anyway.\n\nThere was a Chimera some way away. He could see its outline in the dust. Shelter. Pathetically thin, but shelter nevertheless. Yet at this distance, and with only one leg, the troop carrier might as well have been on the other side of the world.\n\nHe looked above it. Past it. The murky ghosts of two gods were fighting. Two Titans, their weight classes and allegiances indeterminate, grappling in the slow swing-and-crash rhythm of god-machines going for the kill face to face. He saw one of them swing a weapon - a fist or a blade or a saw - and heard the time-delayed thunder of it hitting home. He saw the beginning of a return blow before the ash swallowed both godlings again.\n\nAnother great black shape tore the sky open above him. Low enough to be unmistakeable, that time. A Thunderhawk. A gunship from the west, from the Delphic Battlement.\n\nReinforcements.\n\nHope soared. And as if mocking the audacity of this sudden salvation, fate threw him another twist: that's when the shelling started.\n\nIt was Titan-fire. It was artillery. It was tanks on the edge of the battlefield, and it was god-machines towering over everything.\n\nStaccato booms punctuated the ground as Titans and artillery opened up on the warring regiments. Clusters of Astartes, human soldiers, skitarii, exoplanar xenos... Allegiance meant nothing in the dust, as indiscriminate detonations hammered down on the wasteland. Great holes appeared in the forces; bodies burned and crumbled and flew. Land knew what was happening because it was the only explanation, but the reason - the depthless spite - took his breath away.\n\nThe Warmaster's horde was raining fire on its own warriors, just for the chance to kill Imperials.\n\nHe stopped crawling, linked his shaking knuckles in the sign of the Cog's Teeth, and said a prayer to the Machine-God. Just let me live, he begged through the drumbeat cacophony and the ringing in his ears and the pain of his destroyed leg. Just let me lie here and live.\n\nA shadow fell over him, one with snarling armour joints, one that was far too big to be human, one that was reaching for him with a grasping hand. He rolled over, causing his mangled leg to catch fire with fresh pain, and his finger squeezed the iron trigger almost hard enough to break it.\n\nThe gun kicked. The Imperial Fist that had been reaching down to help him took the atomic slug in the throat, staggering back as he began to disintegrate. The warrior had time to reach a hand to the molecular dissolution spreading from his neck before he toppled backwards onto the earth.\n\n'No!' Land crawled back towards the shreds of burning, atomising armour and flesh becoming smoke in the ashy wind. 'No! I didn't mean to!'\n\nAnother silhouette manifested, another Astartes running out of the dust. 'I didn't mean to do it!' Land yelled at him.\n\nBut it was one of the Sons of Horus, his helmet crested with clanspikes, and this newcomer cared nothing about the tawdry slice of theatre playing out on the ground at his boots. He levelled his bolter to kill the wailing human and move on, but he never pulled the trigger. Arkhan heard the warrior's head explode, the dull crump of the detonation inside the Astartes' helmet. Blood began to leak from the helm's mouth grille.\n\nThe corpse didn't tumble backwards as the Imperial Fist had done. Stabiliser fail-safes in his armour activated, locking up the joints, leaving the Astartes standing slackly rigid; straight-backed, with his boltgun dangling from the curled fingers of one hand.\n\nArkhan Land stared at this development. How rare, he thought with amazed sincerity.\n\nA second blast smashed into the already dead warrior, throwing the corpse from its feet. It spasmed on the ground, wrapped in worms of dissipating electricity.\n\nOne of the tech-guard emerged from the dust, lowering an arc rifle. Sapien rode on the skitarius' shoulder, chittering into the aural receptor at the side of its helmet. The helmet itself was badly dented on the left side, as was the tech-guard's chestplate.\n\nThe skitarius crouched, its red cloak scuffing the dusty ground, and it reached with a bionic hand to help haul him to his feet with a gentleness no Astartes would've thought to offer. Arkhan Land couldn't recall ever feeling such gratitude.\n\nMany tech-guard couldn't speak and this one was no exception. It emitted a series of binharic spurts as it helped the limping technoarchaeologist towards the hull of an Army Chimera.\n\n'No need to apologise,' Land said to it. 'You were just in time.' And then, surprising even himself, 'Thank you for saving me.'\n\nThe skitarius jerked slightly, because it wasn't expecting to be understood. It vocalised another spurt of machine-code from the implant in its throat.\n\n'Indubitably, I understand skit-code,' said Land, dizzy with the pain of his crushed leg. 'I'm a genius. Do you know who I am?'\n\nThe tech-guard gave a low, coded screech.\n\n'I'm not delirious,' Land insisted. Everything was going grey now, a soothing numbness washing over his vision. 'I just... I need to sit down. I hope this isn't how I die. That would be embarrassing beyond measure. My leg doesn't hurt as much as it should. That's probably not a good sign, is it? What's your name? Your ident, I mean. What is it?'\n\nThe skitarius half-carried him up the crew ramp into the Chimera transport. As it did so, it relayed its ident signifier in smooth binharic cant.\n\n'Pleased to meet you. My name's Arkhan Land.' His words kept trying to slur into one continuous sentence, and he felt an ardent need to keep speaking as clearly as he could. Manners demanded nothing less. 'Excuse me... I think I'm going to... pass out for a bit. Sorry for, you know, the inconvenience...'\n\nArkhan closed his eyes. He thought he heard the tech-guard emit another code-spurt, but the meaning of its word"}
{"text":"transport. As it did so, it relayed its ident signifier in smooth binharic cant.\n\n'Pleased to meet you. My name's Arkhan Land.' His words kept trying to slur into one continuous sentence, and he felt an ardent need to keep speaking as clearly as he could. Manners demanded nothing less. 'Excuse me... I think I'm going to... pass out for a bit. Sorry for, you know, the inconvenience...'\n\nArkhan closed his eyes. He thought he heard the tech-guard emit another code-spurt, but the meaning of its words was fading with the rest of the world in a numbing wash. Unconsciousness was looking like a mercy, one he was more than willing to embrace.\n\nIt was a mercy he was denied for a short while longer, however, because the sky broke open with the birth of a burning star. Land shielded his face from the light, skyfire turning his features amber as he looked out through the Chimera's hatchway.\n\nAt first, it looked like an effort of wrath from the higher heavens, the orbital bombardment resuming with impunity. But the World Eaters howled like wolves and the Word Bearers chanted their mad chants and the Sons of Horus cheered - and Land couldn't help but notice that the burning star had wings.\n\nNext to him, the skitarius murmured a query in quiet code, ostensibly to itself, apparently an unintentional vocalisation. But Land answered it, as his last mumbled words as he lost consciousness.\n\n'I think we should give serious thought to running away.'\n\nThe loyalty of a broken apostle\n\nTransacta-7Y1\n\nShe couldn't see very well anymore. That raised religious concerns as well as practical ones. The practicalities were obvious, because the damage to her helmet and monovisor meant she sometimes had trouble with visual interference and depth perception, and that threw off her aim. The matter of faith was what truly troubled her, however. If any of her overseers looked through her eyes or harvested the data-spools from her skull, they would see corruptions of information.\n\nThe injuries she'd sustained all those days ago at the Principa Collegiate were a troubling matter, as well. The maul had savaged her armour and cracked at least five of her ribs, along with inflicting significant trauma to the costal cartilage of another three ribs and shattering her manubrium. She suspected one of her lungs had seized or failed because her respiration was always shallow now, and never without pain. Her right arm lacked the strength of the left, and her right hand could no longer grip with the same force. Lastly - at least in terms of significant injuries - she'd had a headache since awakening in the Collegiate's ruins, and it wasn't the dull throb of natural pain that chemical injections could alleviate. This was a brain-deep pulse, like something molten or poisonous had been dropped into her skull and sealed inside with her thoughts. Transacta-7Y1 had initially wondered if it signified brain damage, and decided that it likely did. She was having difficulty recalling some things from before Principa. The data was there, images and sensations of things she'd seen and done over her years of service, but she couldn't remember experiencing them.\n\nHowever, it was her vision that plagued her with near-philosophical worry. Corruption of information was an inefficiency, and inefficiency was a sin against the Machine-God. A lesser sin, an understandable and forgivable sin given the woes of battle, but a sin nonetheless. Transacta-7Y1 didn't want forgiveness for her sins. She didn't want to be in a position where forgiveness was necessary.\n\nThis kept her debating internally, in a detachedly curious way, if it might not have been better had she died. She would already be in the Machine-God's grace then, a sinless creature with an untarnished record; not poorly recording the world around her, adding the corrupted evidence of her flawed eyes to the great Quest for Knowledge.\n\nBy that logic, one might think: it would have been better had she died pure.\n\nExcept this raised further religious difficulties. She was a soldier of the Machine-God, and the Warmaster threatened the Machine-God's existence. She was flawed, yes, but was it not better to fight for the Omnissiah, even as a broken apostle?\n\nBy that logic, one might think her purity was meaningless in the wider circumstances of what was at stake. Besides, only in death did duty end.\n\nA troubling conundrum.\n\nWith Principa Collegiate conquered and levelled, her orders distinctly no longer applied. There was nothing to defend. She could sense enough of the war's flow through vox interceptions and meeting other scattered defenders to know the horde was advancing upon the Sanctum Imperialis, and there sat the Machine-God's avatar upon His Throne of Gold. Wounded or not, Transacta-7Y1 would put herself between the Omnissiah Incarnate and the entirety of the Warmaster's forces if it came to it.\n\nAnd so, she had moved to do just that. The first warband she had linked with in turn joined a larger stream of refugees; in turn allying with another convoy; in turn forming up into a column of soldiers and civilians making one of the last runs to the safety of the Sanctum. At no point had she received new orders from her Martian overseers, and skitarii survivors from other macroclades had no insight to share. Many were as in the dark as she was, similarly cut off from their superiors. Those still in contact with their overseers lacked the capacity to trouble themselves with the existence of a lone vanguard alpha.\n\nFor days, she'd fought as part of an ad hoc regiment of orphaned tech-guard, each of them getting by with others of their kind who weren't really their kind, each of them communicating in a sort of binharic pidgin dialect formed from code variances between rival clades. They'd been attacked, not for the first time, but with punishing force. Transacta-7Y1 was out in the dust with the others, firing her scavenged arc rifle, hoping with each blast of energy that the loss of her destroyed radium carbine didn't represent another sin in the eyes of the Machine-God. (Sadly, she suspected it did.)\n\nAnd then, at the battle's apex, a little monkey had come scampering out of the ash and jumped on her shoulder. It squeaked in a derivation of universal binharic, its info-stream a form of pure expression that lacked an accompanying lexicon.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 had never spoken to a monkey. She wasn't even certain what it was, but the sound it made - which, to human ears, would be a chorus of screeching, failed electrical connections - was among the purest data-whines she'd ever heard, something that stripped even sacred binharic cant back to its source code. It was, with no exaggeration whatsoever, the sound of prayer in her ears.\n\nShe'd replied in skit-code, which sounded practically debased compared to the holiness of the creature's communication, but it was apparently good enough for the monkey.\n\nIt understood and conveyed that it required her assistance, that its master was in danger, and the direction in which it wanted her to move. Within this expression of code there was also the suggestion of swiftness, of urgency. Transacta-7Y1 had hoisted her arc rifle and set off at a run.\n\nTwenty-two seconds later, she met the renowned Arkhan Land. Due to her low rank in the grandeur of the Cult Mechanicus, and a life spent largely in forge-laboratories and on the field of battle, she had never heard of him. Clearly, however, given the nature of his companion, he was either important, a genius, or both.\n\nA further one minute and eighteen seconds later, the sky exploded, and the fight became a rout.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 didn't see, as Land did, a terrifying genetic and spiritual failure whose existence shamed the Machine-God. Nor did she see Angron, the primarch of the XII Legion, drenched in glory or bathed in corruption, as many of the warring legionaries saw. She saw the Machine-God's son, an unravelling demigod, whose physicality broke the rules of reality. A creature whose metaphysics were in flux.\n\nShe felt the clinging chill of fear, though. In that respect, she was like every other living being there.\n\nAngron dropped from the sky, striking the ground with a shockwave that threw Legion tanks aside with the force of an inverted cyclone. The primarch's immense shadow-shape laid about with its massive blade, tearing tanks and Knights apart with every roaring cleave. The crashing of that blade meeting iron and stone was the sound of thunder for dozens of kilometres in every direction.\n\nThe defenders broke and fled, a stream of vehicles and fleeing infantry racing overland for the gates of the final fortress. Transacta-7Y1 watched it taking place from the turret cupola of the Chimera, as her own vehicle rushed towards the silhouette of the Sanctum Imperialis. The psyber-monkey was still on her shoulder. It covered its eyes as the winged daemonic form raged against the defenders who couldn't break free from the battle. Transacta-7Y1 patted Sapien awkwardly, which it seemed to appreciate.\n\nThe retreating Imperials weren't fleeing without a fight. Traitor armour pursued them, gunning them down, ramming them, boarding them with cries and howls. A Spartan in the battered black and purple of the Emperor's Children tore after the Chimera, its roof scabbed with legionaries unloading small-arms fire that rattled and spanked off the armoured personnel carrier's hull. Transacta-7Y1 ducked back inside, pulled the turret around, and returned fire with the multilaser. Useless las-burns scorched their way across the Spartan's front armour; the skitarius abandoned the attempt almost at once and slammed the hatch open again, bringing her arc rifle up with her.\n\nA bolt struck the Chimera's plating in front of her, spraying her faceplate with clattering debris. She cursed at a fresh wave of visual interference, and a vicious new gouge across her monovisor. For the Machine-God's sake, she was half-blind now. It didn't stop her firing, but it stopped her hitting anythi"}
{"text":"less las-burns scorched their way across the Spartan's front armour; the skitarius abandoned the attempt almost at once and slammed the hatch open again, bringing her arc rifle up with her.\n\nA bolt struck the Chimera's plating in front of her, spraying her faceplate with clattering debris. She cursed at a fresh wave of visual interference, and a vicious new gouge across her monovisor. For the Machine-God's sake, she was half-blind now. It didn't stop her firing, but it stopped her hitting anything. Great bursts of electrical energy spat from her arc rifle, slashing past the warriors crowded on top of the Spartan. The enemy tank drew closer, grinding its way faster over the rubble-strewn wasteland, as the legionaries prepared to jump aboard.\n\nBut the thud of impact came from above. A warrior in arterial red hit the Chimera's roof with a clank, his jump pack breathing thick smoke into Transacta-7Y1's face. He didn't stop running; with another two steps he took off again, boosting across to the closing Spartan.\n\nThe psyber-monkey screeched in her ear. It knew the warrior. He was called Zephon. The name meant nothing to her.\n\nThis 'Zephon' wasn't alone. Another two warriors thudded down, using the Chimera as a stepping-stone to boost across to the pursuing Spartan. Transacta-7Y1 tried to follow the fight as the Blood Angels landed, but her distorted vision registered nothing but inhuman shapes blurring together.\n\nShe slid down the crew ladder, back into the Chimera's innards. Land was where she'd left him, strapped to the troop bench, his head lolling at the mercy of the turbulent ride. This was acceptable. She could do nothing more for him. She turned to the driver, another survivor, another Imperial Army veteran among tens of millions, separated from his regiment. If his regiment even yet existed. Despite the way the Chimera rocked and smashed over the wasteland, she spared a moment of thought for Envaric dying due to the aura of her holy weapon. As much as she regretted the loss of her radium carbine, proximity to her was far less terminal to baseline humans now.\n\nShe couldn't speak to the driver in any way he would understand. She'd lost her dataslug days ago, never recovering it from the ruins of Principa. Still, she gave her best approximation of a sound of enquiry, forced through her crackling vocaliser.\n\n'Almost there,' the driver said. The viewslit in front of his face was grey with grime; he peered through it, blinking sweat from his eyes and clenching his teeth. 'Almost there. Almost to the Grand Processional. You hear those guns? You hear that bloody thunder? Those are our wall guns. Covering our approach. They must be. They just have to be.'\n\nThe Chimera bucked as it struck more rubble, hitting the rise with the force of a crash. Transacta-7Y1 was thrown against the side of the crew bay, her previously broken internals crunching unpleasantly, flaring with fresh pain. As she hauled herself back to her feet, she felt the armoured personnel carrier slowing. The engine sputtered, died.\n\nThe driver, a man whose name she hadn't learned, was slumped in the seat, his skull shattered where it had smashed against the metal above his head. She didn't bother nudging him to ascertain whether he lived. The mess where the crown of his head had been answered that adamantly and succinctly.\n\nThe Chimera stalled, kicked once more, and stopped. There was a moment of perfect serenity, where the psyber-monkey - hanging from the crew railing by its scorpion tail - gave a frightened screech of expressive code, clearly hoping that the tech-guard would do something to solve everything that had gone wrong. On cue, the thunder started up outside, engines groaned past, and something transplanar bellowed long and loud from not far enough away.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 was already moving. She hauled out a stretcher from the crew supply compartment, dropped it to the deck, and unbuckled the straps binding Arkhan Land to the troop bench. As gently as she could, she pulled the unconscious figure onto the stretcher, processing but wilfully ignoring the fact the demigod out in the wasteland sounded significantly closer.\n\nLand murmured something in his delirious half-sleep. This, she also ignored. Reluctantly, she slung her arc rifle onto her back, letting it hang on its strap, and readied herself to drag the stretcher over the churned earth for at least a kilometre, most likely more.\n\nSapien tossed her a new weapon. A pistol, of a kind she'd never seen before and had no record of in her archives. The creature screeched instructions for the weapon's use, which she understood implicitly but couldn't quite believe. Concentrated handheld atomics were, surely, the stuff of beautiful legend. She holstered it within her robe and hauled the stretcher to the rear of the cabin.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 - half-blind, armed with a gun from myth and dragging the semi-conscious form of arguably the greatest Martian mind of the age - hit the ramp release and went back out into the dust.\n\nLater, she was asked to report on what she witnessed out there.\n\nThis request would cause her no small discontent, given the damage to her vision. Regardless, Transacta-7Y1 did her best, with a simple relay of coded data as well as observations that were personal to her, in the form of emotions and sensations. Adding these elements to a report was alien to her, but oddly fulfilling.\n\nStill, impressions and suppositions formed the bulk of her report, and her recitation was no construction of weighty prose. She kept to the facts, as best she was able to ascertain them.\n\nThis was what she saw, until she couldn't see anything anymore.\n\nDust. Ash. Smoke. Arkhan Land, lashed to the stretcher, shaking as she dragged him metre by painstaking metre.\n\nArmoured personnel carriers rattled past her. One of them, a filthy Rhino marked with White Scars symbols, rumbled to a halt nearby. Just as its side hatch slammed open, the vehicle detonated and flipped into the air, crashing to the ground on its side. She had no idea if the warriors within had intended to help her or just failed to escape their vehicle in time.\n\nShe kept dragging the stretcher. It was harder work than marching, hiding or even aiming and firing. It wore on her damaged limbs and aching joints. Over her shoulder, the great walls of the final fortress turned the horizon black. Almost there, as the driver had said. Almost there.\n\nAstartes warriors closed in on her. She dropped the stretcher when she recognised their slavering Nagrakali, drawing the pistol that the psyber-monkey had entrusted to her. They were indistinct shapes and she squeezed the trigger, the pistol loosing its spite with no recoil, blasting an atomic slug wide of any mark. She felt the gun auto-reloading, recharging in her hands.\n\nShe tried again, and another shot went wide. The World Eaters moved too fast for her wounded sight to track. Sapien screeched at her, the artificimian's meaning crystal clear amidst the mayhem. She adjusted her aim by degrees, saw the psyber-monkey scampering across one warrior's shoulders, and she fired.\n\nThe Space Marine died. She couldn't make out exactly how, only that he seemed to dissolve with intriguing slowness. The others kept coming. The gun wouldn't fire again. It shivered with recharge.\n\nEngines howled. Blood Angels - she knew them by the red of their plate - descended on burning turbines. They outnumbered the World Eaters, they beat them back; crash-crash-crash went the clash of weapons. Transacta-7Y1 had her hands on the stretcher again, hauling it away, pulling it towards the high wall behind her.\n\nShe staggered, driven to her knees when she lost her footing in the uneven rubble. It took forever to get back up, though obviously it didn't - her internal chronometer tracked a mere six seconds: a triviality that felt like an eternity.\n\nThe psyber-monkey screeched again. She was going the wrong way, dragging her cargo away from the Sanctum. She adjusted, based on the direction of its guiding code. Effort was making her sweat and strain, and that distorted her vision further. She was more than half-blind now. It was getting worse.\n\nThunder boomed, the mercilessly beautiful song of the Sanctum's wall guns. They deafened her, stealing her second sense, as if the loss of the first weren't enough. All she heard was in the ringing quiet between the pounding cannonades.\n\nThe anti-grav wail of a jetbike, the rider and Legion unknown to her; it cut past with enough speed to tear at her cloak. The throaty chatter of heavy bolters. The piercing strain of volkite beams. Bootsteps and chainswords and oaths for the Emperor and oaths decrying the Emperor as false. It was all one sound, one roar, and it came from all around her.\n\nThere were statues watching her. She saw their towering outlines, and knew them from the archives rather than from the truth of her fading sight. Towering Imperial heroes cast from sanctified Martian bronze: statues of the Terran hierarchs that lined the Grand Processional. She was almost to the wall. Almost to the gate.\n\nThen came the sound she'd feared. Against all logic, it was loud enough to make a mockery of the great guns, a carnosaur's bellow that could never emerge at such volume from a mortal throat. Her vision was down to conjecture, but she felt the heat emanating from the unravelling demigod, and - somehow - she felt its rage. It radiated fury the way a plague patient burned with fever.\n\nA shadow fell over her. With no recourse left, she threw herself across the body of the man she sought to protect. It was a paltry shield against a demigod's anger, yet her life was all she could offer.\n\nAnd then, though she couldn't possibly have detected such a thing over the drumbeat of the wall guns and the cries of the burning demigod: she did hear it, and from the thousands of cheers that went up around her, the others could see what she could only hear.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 heard the beating of feathered wings.\n\nAn unknown "}
{"text":"o recourse left, she threw herself across the body of the man she sought to protect. It was a paltry shield against a demigod's anger, yet her life was all she could offer.\n\nAnd then, though she couldn't possibly have detected such a thing over the drumbeat of the wall guns and the cries of the burning demigod: she did hear it, and from the thousands of cheers that went up around her, the others could see what she could only hear.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 heard the beating of feathered wings.\n\nAn unknown span of time later, she lay with her back to a statue's plinth, bleeding a concoction of blood and oil from old wounds reopened, and from fresh ones she didn't recall suffering. Arkhan Land, white with blood loss, sat slouched next to her. His breathing was shallow, his eyes were glassy, but he was awake. Just about.\n\n'Can you see that?' Land asked her.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 admitted that she couldn't. She suspected she was dying, and if she wasn't dying, then she was most certainly on the cusp of injuries that would extinguish her ability to fight with a skitarii macroclade.\n\n'They're retreating,' Land told her.\n\nThat was good, and Transacta-7Y1 told him it was good.\n\nLand continued talking. Telling her what she couldn't see. That the Ninth Primarch was there, rallying the survivors, leading reinforcements to cover the refugees along the Grand Processional. That the Twelfth Primarch had fallen back, unable to come closer, unable to set foot on the great avenue leading into the Sanctum Imperialis. The Emperor's invisible shield still held the exoplanar creatures back, for now. Perhaps for the last time.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 understood very little of this, but she could tell it was a positive development, and so she confirmed, again, that it was good.\n\n'You sound sad,' Land said to her. 'What's wrong? We made it. We're alive.'\n\nThe idea of a human being able to recognise emotion in skit-code was something she had never considered. In answer, Transacta-7Y1 told him the truth.\n\nArkhan Land sniggered. The sound was utterly childish.\n\n'The Omnissiah doesn't give a crap about your visual data being corrupted. I know the Omnissiah. I know Him personally. I've conversed with the Machine-God's avatar several times, as it happens.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 was speechless in the face of the man's delusion. She began to wish the foolish fellow would let her expire in peace.\n\n'I can repair you, anyway,' Land added with eerie nonchalance.\n\nShe turned her head towards him, feeling sinew and servos grinding unwholesomely in her neck.\n\n'What?' Land asked. 'You're only a skit. Fixing you will take no time at all. It's the least I can do, really. Listen, I don't suppose you've seen my pistol?'\n\nThe war's failing heart\n\nDorn\n\nIn the war's opening phase, the Grand Borealis Strategium in the heart of Bhab Bastion had served as the primary nexus of Imperial command. From the moment the first salvo was fired at the edge of the Sol System, everything had run through the strategium. Its spire rose above the rest of the Palatine Ring, the most princely castle in the district that circled the Sanctum Imperialis.\n\nDepending upon one's perspective, Bhab Bastion had either flourished or suffered aesthetically with the Praetorian's preparatory efforts, just like the rest of Terra. Long before the arrival of Horus' armada, it was barnacled with gun nests and defence turrets, encrusted with reinforced masonry and ablative plating, and spined with input-output vox-relays that would carry the Praetorian's commands to the billions of loyal ears ready to receive his orders. It was ugly to some and reassuring to others, but to the man that commanded behind its walls, it was functional. Nothing mattered more than that.\n\nFunctional. The word sounded like nothing yet meant everything. In war, functionality was everything. On the level of individual soldiers, if your weapons functioned, you could kill with them. On the level of generals, if your logistics functioned, you could guide your armies and keep track of the war.\n\nFrom Bhab Bastion, as the weeks became months, the Emperor's seventh son had waged his war. Rogal Dorn didn't fight on individual battlefields like the Khan and the Angel, he fought on every battlefield. His war was ten thousand wars all playing out concurrently. The soldiers on the ground carrying out his orders, they saw the individual battles. From the strategium, Dorn oversaw the entire siege.\n\nTo many of the defenders in the opening days of the Solar War, the coming siege was still unreal; the blood being shed was muted by the distance and chill of the void. Who could really comprehend thirty thousand lives lost in the cold dark around Pluto with the death of a single warship? And who could really process the reality of such losses when they took place, dozens of times every single minute, at a remove of seven point five billion kilometres? Every phase of the war comprised of devastation on a scale that defied comprehension.\n\nThe staff gathered in Bhab Bastion during the war's prologue were the best-equipped souls to approach those questions and manage the answers. They were the finest war staff available in the forces remaining loyal to the Emperor, and as the war ground on, souring with every step closer Horus came to the Eternity Gate, the staff had evolved with the shifting conflict. Admirals and void commanders eventually made way for generals and advisors better suited to the protracted ground battles taking place. Through all these months, the bastion was the central hive of military intelligence and Imperial authority.\n\nThe fact Bhab Bastion still functioned was something of a marvel given the unstable atmospheric conditions. The constant bombardment and the ash choking the air played havoc with the Imperial vox-web, and communication was still down across many of the Inner Palace's districts. It held on longest within the Palatine Ring thanks to the potency of the tech within Bhab itself. Somewhat less encouraging, but no less essential, was that it also allowed Dorn to see which fortresses and fallback points were breaking, or already broken.\n\nHe had known it would come to this. He'd accounted for it, planned for it; he'd run through the possibilities and the probabilities. War was full of vicissitudes, but the Praetorian of Terra was as prepared as a mortal mind could be. Frankly, after half a decade of calculations and simulations, it had been a relief when the first landings began.\n\nSince then, he'd watched the war unfold in a million reports and flashing location runes, across hundreds of thousands of streams citing casualty figures. He'd watched the probabilities narrowing day by day and hour by hour - resolving into fewer and fewer potential paths towards the future.\n\nIt was all coming to a point. All those incalculable figures had been counting down to this.\n\nThe beginning of the end came with the sundering of the Ultimate Wall. The moment Legio Mortis breached the wall, Horus had his fangs at the Emperor's neck. The Inner Palace was vulnerable even before the Warmaster had flattened whole regions from orbit. The Palatine Bastions were besieged now, half already fallen or evacuated, and the horde could no longer be held back from the Sanctum Imperialis. Only slowed.\n\nHis voice was just one of many echoing off the arched walls of the grand chamber. The most authoritative voice, but ultimately just another tone blending in with the others relaying orders. The chorus was backed by the humming of tactical hololiths and the clanking of high-grade cogitators, overseen in turn by a numerous coven of Martian adepts charged with sacred rites of maintenance.\n\nThe Praetorian of Terra stood in the core of the Grand Borealis Strategium, washed blue by the light of tactical hololiths, playing a hundred thousand games of regicide at once. Information flashed across his unshaven features, bathing his eyes in figures, numbers, runes. He looked from screen to screen, map to map, always thinking, always processing, always speaking. He gave a contiguous series of orders, pausing only to breathe.\n\nSometimes, often, he knew those on the other end of the vox-links weren't hearing his orders. He still issued them, just in case. More regions of the Inner Palace fell dark, day after day, with greater interference on the vox-web and fewer replying voices. It didn't matter. There was enough functionality to make perseverance worthwhile. It was really the only option.\n\nHis voice was strong but undeniably raw, after doing nothing but relaying commands over the vox-web for almost nine days. He hadn't slept. He hadn't left his post once, and only rarely even before this latest marathon of effort.\n\nBut he ached to fight. He wanted blood on his gauntlets. He wanted to swing his blade and feel the immediacy of victory, of cutting a foe down, of achieving something tactile in this endless grind. The urge was fierce enough to be a constant temptation, but he refused to give in to selfishness. If he abandoned his post, millions of soldiers across the Inner and Outer Palaces would lose their best chance of survival, and - colder but more tactically relevant - would lose their cohesion as part of Terra's defence. Dorn was the voice in their ears and the eye that guided them. Every regiment, every warband, every platoon was a cell in an evolving, shifting, breaking system. He needed them to play their parts in the wider siege, delaying the enemy here, crushing potential reinforcements there, sacrificing themselves for the sake of this, rallying and retaking territory for the sake of that.\n\nThe more enemies he could keep in the Outer Palace, the longer the Inner Palace could hold. Tens of millions were dying for the sake of that unassailable truth. Without hesitation, Rogal Dorn fed their lives into the grinder.\n\n'My lord,' came the voice of Archamus behind him. The strategium was shaking - it was always shaking now - its shields trembling under the bitter caress of artillery. Several "}
{"text":"crificing themselves for the sake of this, rallying and retaking territory for the sake of that.\n\nThe more enemies he could keep in the Outer Palace, the longer the Inner Palace could hold. Tens of millions were dying for the sake of that unassailable truth. Without hesitation, Rogal Dorn fed their lives into the grinder.\n\n'My lord,' came the voice of Archamus behind him. The strategium was shaking - it was always shaking now - its shields trembling under the bitter caress of artillery. Several of the officers around Dorn staggered. It was more than just artillery and Titans out there, raining fire against the walls. Every scan came back laden with signifiers of creatures that defied naming conventions. Daemons, they were called, but the term was imperfect to the point of mockery. Not that it made a difference: the endless army laying siege to Bhab Bastion was full of things that shouldn't exist.\n\nThe Praetorian's standing command was to only be interrupted by intelligence of great import, but he was mid-report from the colonel in command of the Magister's Reach district, to the north of the burning Meru Bastion. Dorn was weighing the logistical question in his mind of what to do with the colonel's forces and where they might best be deployed. His instinct was to use them as skirmishers behind the horde's vanguard, letting them inflict what damage they could before Magister's Reach was overwhelmed by more forces coming in through the Ultimate Wall's ever-widening breaches.\n\nDorn told the colonel exactly how she and her six thousand soldiers were going to sell their lives. Then he accepted the officer's acknowledgement, approved of her stalwart tone, and turned to Archamus at his back.\n\n'Speak.' Already, the primarch was calling up a holo of the wasteland around Avalon Bastion. If he could spare a small force, he might gather survivors in the ruins, and they could move to intercept-\n\n'It is your brother, lord,' said Archamus.\n\nVulkan was gone and the Khan was dead, or so close to death that it made no difference. That left only one brother who would be contacting him, and his voice would be a welcome one, though the news would not be.\n\nDorn summoned eight nearby officers, giving orders for each of them to relay in turn to other bastions and resistance holdouts. With these urgencies taken care of, he rested both gauntleted hands on the central hololithic table and nodded to Archamus.\n\nThe holo flared into being. His brother had a spear through one of his wings.\n\nThe Angel was on one knee, not in genuflection but to bring himself low enough for medicaes to work on him. Sanguinius knelt in a ring of attendants, both of his arms outstretched, with several robed adepts working on his armour. They hammered plates back into shape and fused damage closed, while a Legion Apothecary - one of Dorn's own Imperial Fists, Rogal noted with distracted pride - was using a surgical saw to cut through the metal spear that was lanced through the Angel's right pinion.\n\nSanguinius raised his head, staring at Dorn through a long fall of bloodstained hair. No idle talk between the two of them, these days. Necessity and exhaustion had pared down their fraternal bond to the most ruthless basics. There was no one else that Dorn could rely on the way he relied on the brother kneeling in hololithic form before him.\n\nThe Praetorian was the general of the Imperial defence, but Sanguinius... Sanguinius was the symbol. Wherever the Angel flew, the defenders rallied. Wherever the Angel fought, the Warmaster's forces tasted defeat. Dorn tracked his brother through the war in scraps of vox-chatter and flashing runes on maps, day after day after day, in a chronicle of battles won and lines held.\n\nAnd here it was. Dorn had known this moment was coming since the very beginning. The moment that marked the end.\n\n'They're here,' the Angel said. 'They gather before the Delphic Battlement, horizon to horizon. Father's shield is failing. They will be at the walls come sunrise.'\n\nNow, of all times, Dorn's formality abandoned him. He found himself speaking, surprising himself with nakedly honest sentiment.\n\n'I gave you as long as I could.'\n\nSanguinius gazed at him. 'You of all have no need to say such things. No soul has done more.'\n\nThere speaks the Angel's humility, Dorn thought. As if Sanguinius and the Khan hadn't been out in the trenches since the skies first darkened with drop-ships. As if the human and Legion defenders weren't enduring unspeakable vileness and sacrificing their lives.\n\nBut no, Sanguinius was not so ignorant. He does not speak so out of humility, Dorn realised. He speaks out of a brother's love.\n\nThe Praetorian needed no recognition for his efforts; he'd never craved praise or thrived on acknowledgement. Nevertheless, in this moment between brothers at the end of everything, he was warmed by Sanguinius' words.\n\nThat warmth faded with the Angel's next question.\n\n'Any word from Roboute?'\n\nDorn was aware of the attention on him. Officers, adepts and menials across the strategium watched him with hopeless eyes.\n\n'None.'\n\n'Then Guilliman will not save us.' The Angel grunted as the Apothecary pulled the broken spear from his wing. Neither brother spoke as Sanguinius stretched his wings, rolling his shoulders to restore some flexion. 'But he will avenge us.'\n\nDorn didn't know what to say, when nothing seemed worth saying. He was not made for exchanges like these. Many thought him cold in these moments, even heartless, but he was neither. It was purely that defeat was alien to him, as was the quality of emotion shining in Sanguinius' gaze. What was worth saying when no words were necessary? What did one say to a brother you barely knew, who had nevertheless fought beside you from the beginning to the end?\n\nSanguinius had the answer without even needing to consider the question.\n\n'Farewell, Rogal.' The Angel rose to his feet, and the holo tracked upward with him. 'If we do not meet again in the flesh, know that it was an honour, being your brother.'\n\nThe Praetorian nodded to the Angel, wanting the right words, searching for them, and not finding them. The silence stretched out. It dragged.\n\nSanguinius smiled, knowing. The hololith blinked away.\n\nThe medicaes tend to the Great Angel, Sanguinius.\n\nThe long walk\n\nVulkan\n\nSometimes he was alone, and sometimes he had to kill his way through to get where he was going, but he never stopped walking. He was aware of the passing of time, and he grew weary, hungry, thirsty - but he didn't feel any of these mortal concerns the same way that he had back in reality. They were curiosities now, not mortal maladies. He didn't know if this was a property of the labyrinthine dimension through which he walked. None of the Custodians that had been stationed here, back when there was still hope for the Emperor's dream, had reported such a thing. That made it a mystery, but a distant one, mundane against the wonders he beheld.\n\nHe'd had to fight when he first came through. That was no surprise, and he had been ready for it. He'd been ready to fight every step of the way if that's what it would take. The surprise had come when he'd smashed into the teeming phalanx of claws and jaws and thrashing blades, and broken through to the other side. Finding this strange serenity waiting for him.\n\nHe knew the Sisters and the Custodians in the Throne Room had done their duty. They hadn't fallen. The war still raged, the Emperor still lived. Vulkan mourned those that had died, and promised himself that upon his return - assuming he did return - he would learn the names of the guardians that had given their lives for him to make his journey.\n\nThere were rules to this place, rules Malcador had tried to impress upon him, but they'd been obtuse things, metaphysical and theoretical. It wasn't that Vulkan had struggled to understand them. Their precepts were nebulous but uncomplicated. No, he understood enough to know comprehension wasn't the same as context. There were things he would have to experience first-hand for them to mean anything. The abrupt transition from being knee-deep in dead daemons to wandering alone... That was only the first of them.\n\nIt had been jarring, though.\n\n'Your intent will matter,' Malcador had said. 'In that place, your intent will matter more than anything else. The path is woven from your soul's desire.'\n\nThat answered one question but begged another. His path was leading him away from the greatest daemonic hosts... but how was Magnus faring along his own path? Was the Crimson King already in the webway? Was Magnus tearing his way to the portal far faster than Vulkan was trudging alone away from it?\n\nThe walls of the Imperial webway, where he'd emerged after running through the portal in the Throne Room, were rigid frames on circuit-threaded Martian metal fused to various alien trans-osseous materials and cultured psychoplastics. He recognised his father's vision in this blend of human and alien technology: the distant past bolted and fused to the present, for the sake of an imperfectly understood future. It grieved him, to know it had all failed so utterly. Horus had much to answer for. As did Magnus.\n\nVulkan was a smith, a shaper, a maker. He knew the craft of creation. How to bring artistry to bear along seams of inspiration. Working with the materials, not against them. Creating through a process, a weave of exploration and imagination. Yet the amalgamation around him rang wrong to his senses. This was something jury-rigged, erected against the grain, woven outside the seams using half-wrong approximations of the right materials. It worked, but it worked poorly. There had been an end goal in mind, but only the most ragged ability to reach it.\n\nVulkan didn't doubt his father's ambition or the worthiness of the Emperor's ultimate goal, but the craftsman in him felt ill at ease with the improvised genius of the webway's Imperial portions. Human ingenuity was stark and flawed, almost tumorous, in this "}
{"text":"hing jury-rigged, erected against the grain, woven outside the seams using half-wrong approximations of the right materials. It worked, but it worked poorly. There had been an end goal in mind, but only the most ragged ability to reach it.\n\nVulkan didn't doubt his father's ambition or the worthiness of the Emperor's ultimate goal, but the craftsman in him felt ill at ease with the improvised genius of the webway's Imperial portions. Human ingenuity was stark and flawed, almost tumorous, in this dimension. It made for an ugly union. Without the Emperor's endless maintenance, without the constant flow of the Emperor's psychic will, the Mechanicus' sections were already crumbling, rotting, falling away into the abyss where metaphysics went to die.\n\nEven without the damage from Magnus' treachery... It is all so forced, so rushed.\n\nIt hurt him to admit, but that was the impression it imprinted upon his artisan's heart. Necessity had surely played its part, but the result was undeniable. Vulkan ran his hand along the walls of Martian iron and inlaid suppressive circuitry. It penetrated his gauntlets, sending a weak tingle through his fingertips.\n\nI do not know if this would ever have worked. Not for long. Perhaps not even for long enough.\n\nImperfect. That was the word. Imperfect, when nothing less than perfection would suffice.\n\nAnd what if his father had come to him? Would he have been able to turn his mastery to this realm behind reality? Would his brother Ferrus have been able to help him? Would Magnus have joined them, forming a triumvirate of visionaries devoted to constructing the bridge to mankind's destiny?\n\nNo. There was nothing he could've done here - of that, he was certain.\n\nIt wasn't long before Vulkan left the Imperial portions behind. He felt no sorrow at seeing the back of them.\n\nThere was more to his journey than placing one foot in front of the other. Malcador had said this, but it was another aspect he could only appreciate through experience. You could get lost in the webway because the dimension responded to the turbulence of a traveller's soul. A firm purpose, a resolute heart... These were more vital than physical endurance. You would reach your destination by wanting to reach it. You would lose your way if your heart was in conflict or your purpose was weak.\n\nBut they were the rules for a realm in working order. When the Old Ones had shaped this place from materials that now possessed no name and no physical counterpart, how prosaic this labyrinth of unreal wonder must have been to them. In their era, it functioned as they designed it to function, its operation a trivial consideration aligning with the ways their minds worked. The human brain operated on other layers, with other senses, rendering everything inexpert... And so much of the webway was damaged now. The rules that governed it were no longer ironclad. The beings that built it were an eternity dead.\n\nYour intent will matter.\n\nSo Vulkan walked, trusting that his will would carry him where he needed to go. He trusted that he would reach Magnus before Magnus reached the wounded doorway into the Throne Room. It was a gamble, but the gamble was all they had left. None of them wished to know what ruination Magnus could bring were he able to reach the portal.\n\nIn truth, he feared he was lost. And if he were, would there be any way to know for sure?\n\nThe architecture around him was never constant, and the webway's polymorphism fascinated Vulkan despite the gravity of his purpose. He walked through tunnels that resembled aeldari wraithbone, and others of unknowable psycho-resinous material that emitted a barely audible chiming hum. He ascended through tunnels that rose, and descended through those that plunged. More than once he turned to see the path he'd come along was gone, melted away into the mist. The walls around him - when they were there at all - were just as unreliable. Sometimes he could reach out and touch curved surfaces that were there to his fingers and not to his eyes. Sometimes he could see a wall of overlapping contours that resembled the segmented insides of some great worm.\n\nVulkan felt outside reality one moment, and inside the body of a vast beast the next. It was disorientating, but not insurmountable.\n\nOn he walked.\n\nThe inhumanity of the realm was evident in the little things, too. The golden mist that fogged the tunnels had no scent. Not because it truly smelled of nothing, but because Vulkan was from a species that had evolved along biological threads without the capacity to process elements as the Old Ones had. His olfactory sense had no experience with these smells, these particles; no way of processing them distinctly.\n\nWhat kind of creatures had the Old Ones been? What ingredients crucial to their genesis had been scattered from the guts of bursting stars? Were they warm-blooded, or cold? Were the helixes of their genetic arcanistry born of hydrogen, oxygen and carbon, as the human strain was? Or did arsenic hold prime place in their cosmological mix? Maybe ammonia, not carbon, was the key ingredient in their biochemical ascension. Or perhaps silicon. Or elements unknown - as yet undiscovered by humanity, or long ago sacrificed to time.\n\nThese questions stayed with him for some time. He turned them over in his mind as he walked his long walk, at once enjoying and haunted by the impossibility of the answers.\n\nSometimes, though, he had to fight.\n\nThere were daemons here, alone or in droves, infesting the tunnels and the chambers and the expanses of shifting void. They shrieked their names at him in the languages of cultures lost to history, those syllables laden with the tale of each creature's origin and purpose. Most died beneath Urdrakule. The more cowardly and cunning among them fled. He knew these were stragglers and parasites, and so took no confidence from destroying them. The rents they left on his flesh and armour, he ignored, reserving his resentment for the way they slowed him down.\n\nSometimes he believed he was being followed. Never aided, never attacked, only watched. He would turn to see the shadows playing games, shapes too spindly to be human flickering in and out of existence. Once, he saw a mask on the ground: a thing of dirty white that looked like bloodstained porcelain. The mask's visage was both manic and leering, the face of a laughing murderer.\n\nVulkan left it where it lay, untroubled by its meaning. If it even had one.\n\nWhen he reached the dead city, he knew he was on the right path.\n\nPART FOUR\n\nA LENGTH OF\n\nBLOODSTAINED CHAIN\n\nEaters of the Dead\n\nCenturies ago, at the dawn of the Great Crusade\n\nAmit\n\nNassir Amit was one of the first. He was a scion of a toxic bloodline, with only the scarcest claim to humanity running through the code of science inside his blood. They'd found him in the charnel-prisons beneath the surface of Boeotia, living off the flesh of those too sick to go on. He was a candidate as vile as he was unlikely: a humanish mutant that would've been executed by any of the other Legions.\n\nThe other Legions, though, had the luxury of choice. The Revenants did not. He was exactly what they were looking for.\n\nThey'd taken him, those grey-armoured Apothecaries, pulling him from his tribe, stealing him from the metaphorical gutters of technobarbarity. They held the mutated child down and cut him open and sewed him back up. They worked on him with needles and saws, then worked inside him with blades and probes. They saturated his veins with transfusions of blood that they insisted wasn't holy, despite how it drove him mad and sane and mad once again, showing him the future and the past colliding when he closed his eyes. His own blood, transubstantiated by the infusions, burned inside his body and made every heartbeat hurt. When they implanted a second heart within his swelling chest, that doubled the pain.\n\nThe Apothecaries were as gentle as they needed to be, which is to say they were next to merciless. They were doing their duty, and their duty was to drag his mutated form kicking and screaming all the way into ascension.\n\nHe was one of the first to survive the process. He emerged on the other side of their medical sorcery a different being, keeping nothing of his former life, not even his name. He took a name from High Gothic legend: Nassir Amit - a character name from an ancient play set in Old Himalazia. He had no particular emotional attachment to the narrative. It was merely one of the texts he studied while learning to read. You could have told him that the name meant something, or that it held some symbolic significance in the piece of literature, but he wouldn't have cared. He would only have wondered why you did.\n\nAfter his ascension, he took no pride in his beauty. The physical perfection he saw reflected in the eyes of his arming thralls, or in the steel of his magnificent blade, wasn't something to cherish as if he'd achieved it himself. It was merely a result of his genetic apotheosis, a trait shared by all his brothers. It could be noted, even appreciated, but only with appropriate humility.\n\nHe believed there was an underlying truth to his new existence, one that he sought to bear in mind at all times. He'd carried this truth through the years since his ascension, across the radiation-soaked wastelands of Terra, through the cramped slaughter-tunnels and cave labyrinths of Neptune's frozen moons, and then out into the great galaxy beyond. It was no great revelation of philosophy, just a truth as blunt as it was real: what did it matter if a prince looked back at you in the mirror, when you were a weapon of surpassing ugliness?\n\nNo shining medals for the Revenant Legion. No glory chants for the Eaters of the Dead. Their finery was war-torn ceramite the grey of a winter storm, and their medals were the bloodstains they didn't bother to wash off. Their recruits were genetic degenerates taken to stave off extinction, and the songs sung in their honour were the disgus"}
{"text":"osophy, just a truth as blunt as it was real: what did it matter if a prince looked back at you in the mirror, when you were a weapon of surpassing ugliness?\n\nNo shining medals for the Revenant Legion. No glory chants for the Eaters of the Dead. Their finery was war-torn ceramite the grey of a winter storm, and their medals were the bloodstains they didn't bother to wash off. Their recruits were genetic degenerates taken to stave off extinction, and the songs sung in their honour were the disgusted whispers with which the other Legions spoke of them.\n\nTo Amit, beauty was an irrelevance. Duty was all, just as it had been for the Apothecaries who'd flooded his malformed body with the blood of his then-unknown primarch.\n\nHe'd met a primarch once. The experience hadn't moved him the way he'd hoped and expected. The encounter had come at the end of the Kiy-Buran Compliance, a protracted conflict where the Revenant Legion had fought unsupported and outnumbered against the mutated population of an entire world. Warriors from other Legions, those that tended to preen about honour or consider it a notion that could be tarnished, might have abandoned the compliance entirely, or been forced through privation into suspended animation. Though it would take months, even Space Marines could starve. The Revenant Legion endured, as they always did, and in the filth that cakes men's souls between battles, the warriors of the Immortal Ninth thrived.\n\nRogal Dorn, arriving at last with reinforcements, had censured the Immortal Ninth at the war's end. The Praetorian of Terra, new to his inheritance of the Imperial Fists, had gathered the surviving Revenants into rows of squads aboard his precious Phalanx, and there he'd coldly expounded on the virtuous nature of the Imperium, as if he'd been present from the start; as if he'd been the one to cleanse Terra in the Unification Wars; as if he'd been the one to sail from the light of Sol carrying the first banners of the Great Crusade.\n\nAmit, not yet a sergeant, had breathed in the stink of mutant blood from his armour plating, unable to believe what he was hearing. When Rogal Dorn had politely demanded the Revenants answer for their actions, he hadn't been alone in wondering if this was some bizarre jest. Several of the Revenants actually laughed, the sound an expression of confusion and amusement in equal measure.\n\nIshidur Ossuran, Legion Master, had stepped forward. His boots clanked on the deck as he and his blood-medalled brothers faced the pristine ranks of the Imperial Fists and their golden demigod of a father. Helmetless, Ossuran was beautiful, as all the Revenants were beautiful. He was the image of a painter's artistry come to life, though a painting slashed and scorched through deep maltreatment. He answered Dorn's tirade with two words.\n\n'We won.'\n\nThis was not the right thing to say.\n\nRogal Dorn listed their apparent misdeeds back to them. The devouring of enemy dead not for the awakening of their omophagea organs, not for 'appropriate tactical use', but for sustenance, for meat.\n\nYes, Ossuran had replied. This was their way. And they had won.\n\nThey had, Dorn insisted, rendered their own Legion serfs down for nourishment.\n\nAnd again, yes, Ossuran had replied. The Emperor had charged the IX Legion to win this war, not die of starvation unsupported. There were blood-rites that the primarch wasn't taking into consideration. There were rituals of cannibalistic holiness that permeated not just the Revenant Legion, but countless human cultures across time. Did the results not matter to Lord Rogal Dorn? Was he only interested in the methods by which war was waged?\n\nDorn wouldn't be moved by the rhetoric. There were reports, he knew, of the grey warriors eating the foe - and their families - for the purposes of crushing enemy morality.\n\nAnd yes, Ossuran had said again, as if speaking to a dull child instead of a demigod, those reports were true. They were as true on Kiy-Buran as they were in other compliances on other worlds.\n\n'And we won,' he said to the primarch once more.\n\nRogal Dorn dismissed them in weary disgust, allowing them to return to their vessel, the Gloriana-class Grey Daughter. There was little pleasure in this homecoming; the Grey Daughter - in the decades before she would become the Red Tear - was a grim and hollow fortress, often as empty as the void in which she sailed.\n\nTheir achievement, the compliance of Kiy-Buran, wasn't recorded in the annals of the Great Crusade as an Imperial victory, despite the many Revenants that had bled and died for it. On the Grey Daughter's command deck, Amit had watched the oculus with narrowed eyes as the Phalanx obliterated the capital city, Buran, from orbit, erasing the Revenant Legion's victory along with their supposed sins.\n\nIn time, there would be other censures. Perhaps not as many as those that would blight the VIII Legion, or the XII... But enough, enough to breed a sense of unease around the IX.\n\nAmit felt no hatred for the actions of the Imperial Fists. He felt no anger towards their lord and father, Rogal Dorn. Uneasiness spread through his guts instead, as he stood on the ship's bridge and bore witness to the erasure of his brothers' bloody work. He couldn't help but wonder, was this what all the primarchs would be like when they were rediscovered? This inflexible? This biased in favour of their own methodologies and judgements of what should and shouldn't be?\n\nWas this how his own primarch would treat the warriors fashioned in his image?\n\nTradition called them to the Grey Daughter's mausoleum. What they did there had no official name, though the warriors of the Legion referred to it offhand as the charnel feast.\n\nWhen the Revenants were the Revenants no longer, fighting for the Imperium under a much nobler cognomen, this ritual would come to be called the Rite of Remembrance. That future incarnation of the IX Legion would make an art of layering nobility over their gory roots, but ceremony was sparse in these earliest nights. The men present were still decades away from becoming the Angels of Blood, as they gathered by torchlight in the cold squalor of the Grey Daughter's bowels. There, they devoured their own dead.\n\nTo swallow a brother's flesh was to swallow his memories, to take the essence of the fallen into oneself, tasting insight into life witnessed through other eyes. The charnel feast preserved the scraps of history the Revenant Legion possessed, without the need to set it onto parchment for the judging eyes of others. No less importantly, it preserved the shades of the worthiest dead.\n\nAmit barely ground the mouthfuls of raw meat between his teeth, preferring to swallow it in icy chunks. He was indifferent to the flavour - salt meat was salt meat - but each chunk rolling down his gullet sent a quicksilver sensation through his veins. He felt them in his craw, felt them slow-dissolving in his stomach acids by the way his bloodstream tingled with memories and emotions that weren't his own. He remembered areas of familiar battlefields where he'd never fought, recalled the weight and use of weapons he'd never wielded, and felt the butcher's pleasure of cutting down foes he'd never himself faced. Each death he ate made him less human, more legionary, and he was more than content with each bite to take another transhuman step away from his low-blooded genesis.\n\nHe wasn't alone. Almost two hundred Revenants gathered in the temple, not even enough to fill it to a fiftieth of its capacity. They crouched or sat by memorial statues and engraved honour rolls, veteran killers and newly turned warriors alike eating from bloodstained silver bowls.\n\nThe Legion thralls responsible for bringing the food to each warrior offered up their bounties with trembling hands. The servants' racing heartbeats made a thrumming percussion audible only to the warriors whom they served. Humans at a charnel feast were always at risk of falling to the fangs of an overeager Revenant. Killing one's own serfs was regarded as regrettable rather than punishable.\n\nAmit sat on the cool metal deck, drifting in the mild hallucinatory daze of several other men's memories. Every minute or so, as the images in his mind's eye began to ease, he used his fingers to scoop another gobbet of brain matter into his mouth with careful solemnity. At his side was his squad sergeant, Ataxerxes, sat with his back to a bronze plaque listing the dead. Ataxerxes observed the half-formalised ritual with the same unspeaking sincerity as Amit, but they were waiting, all of them, for Legion Master Ishidur Ossuran.\n\nA monotasked servitor clade bore Ossuran on a funeral bier draped with a black cloak. Other Legions might have offered funerary chants or a reading of the slain officer's many achievements, but the Revenants eschewed such pageantry, even if they silently craved the legitimacy of it. It wasn't necessary, though. Ossuran was dead, but not gone. It wasn't the first time he'd died.\n\nOnly one warrior would walk in the Legion Master's funeral parade. Captain Zaurin was the last centurion standing after Kiy-Buran, and it was to him that the honour fell. Amit watched as Zaurin's pale eyes tracked the passing of the funeral bier, and Zaurin's surviving lieutenant handed his captain the ceremonial flensing knife. As ritual tools went, it was a crude thing - as much a bone saw as a carving blade, and devoid of any ostentation.\n\nZaurin closed his fingers around the hilt and handle. The other Astartes looked on in silence. Some nodded in respect or acknowledgement. Most just stared.\n\nThe body of Ishidur Ossuran was carried through to the Master's Antechamber, where the lords of the IX Legion were interred. Zaurin went with it, pacing slowly behind the servitors, clutching the flensing knife in a loose-knuckled grip. Both he and the corpse were ceremonially nude, another primal touch to the already primitive ritual. Last in the train, more servitors carried Ossuran's armour"}
{"text":" The other Astartes looked on in silence. Some nodded in respect or acknowledgement. Most just stared.\n\nThe body of Ishidur Ossuran was carried through to the Master's Antechamber, where the lords of the IX Legion were interred. Zaurin went with it, pacing slowly behind the servitors, clutching the flensing knife in a loose-knuckled grip. Both he and the corpse were ceremonially nude, another primal touch to the already primitive ritual. Last in the train, more servitors carried Ossuran's armour, repaired from the battle that had felled him.\n\nAt the hallway's far end, the great silver doors slammed shut. Zaurin, the corpse, the servitors and the few warrior-priests that the IX Legion could maintain, were sealed within. There they would stay until the private portion of the rite was over.\n\nIn the end, it was a thing swiftly done. Scarcely half an hour passed before Ossuran threw the antechamber doors open himself, striding back into the presence of his brothers, armoured now in the relative finery of war-torn Legion grey. The Legion Master scanned the packs of reverent cannibals, summoning several of them to him by name.\n\nAmit was one of them. He rose as commanded, handed his bowl to the nearest thrall, and crossed the chamber. Up close, he could see the differences in Ossuran. Though most of the Legion resembled one another - and, presumably, their undiscovered primarch - they weren't limited to the crudity of human eyesight. The Astartes could tell each other apart by even the tiniest distinctions of posture, expression, bone structure and scarring. Untrained humans might consider them practically clones of one another, but to Amit's eyes, each of his brothers was entirely unique.\n\nZaurin carried himself differently now. He stood as Ossuran had stood, with the same guarded aggression rather than with Zaurin's easy confidence. He gave the same side glances that Ossuran had given before speaking, in moments of thought. It was strange, even for one accustomed to the ways of the Legion, to see such changes take hold. Amit wondered what habits of fallen brethren he'd adopted himself over the years - and whether Zaurin could still taste Ossuran's memory-saturated flesh on his lips.\n\n'Melkiah,' Zaurin said. 'Fifth Company needs a new captain. The rank is yours.'\n\nThe named warrior accepted with a salute. 'As you wish, Legion Master.'\n\n'Amit,' Zaurin greeted him next.\n\n'Yes, Master Ossuran.'\n\n'Fifth Company requires a sergeant to replace Melkiah. The rank is yours.' Even Zaurin's tone and inflection was Ossuran's now, while his breath was scented of the Legion Master's blood and salt-flesh.\n\nAmit nodded. 'I won't let you down, sir.'\n\nOssuran regarded him with Zaurin's face, with Zaurin's eyes, with Zaurin's scars, but the soul and mind behind the eyes were fused to the Legion Master's through the feast of flesh.\n\n'I know, brother.'\n\nA few more promotions were handed out with the same ease of necessity as the elevations of Melkiah and Amit. None were deemed worthy enough of reclaiming and replacing the dead by name and deed. Only Ossuran, as Legion Master, held that honour today.\n\n'Back to your men,' Ossuran dismissed them, and back they went without a word, returning to the red rituals that passed for formality in the Immortal Ninth.\n\nLike many of his kind, Amit measured time in the succession and conclusion of wars. By that way of judging things, he was still young when the Revenant Legion reached the planet Nithander. They descended through the clouds, these bloodstained angels, offering mercy with one hand and promising extinction with the other. They brought the Emperor's message, along with the Emperor's desire for - with such careful phrasing - a state of compliance.\n\nThey had come from Terra, from the True Earth, and it was their intent to unite the lost colonies of humanity. Even the ones that had grown prosperous and independent. Especially those, in fact. They didn't face mutants, here. The people of Nithander were humans, pure strain, untwisted by Old Night.\n\nJoin us, the armada in orbit broadcasted to the surface. We are your brothers and sisters.\n\nDo not oppose us, said the armoured angels meeting Nithander's kings and queens. Lest we become your destroyers.\n\nBut the people of Nithander refused the Imperium's attempts at peaceable unity, and so the tone of the compliance had turned. Master Ossuran ordered the ambassadors to return to orbit. Behind that command, his warriors made ready for planetfall.\n\nThe Revenant Legion attacked as dawn rose over the capital city. The war that followed was brief, as wars fought by humans against the Legiones Astartes tended to be. It was over almost before it began - an expression often stained by hyperbole, but one that was, in this case, desperately accurate.\n\nAs the sun set on the first and final day of the Nithander Compliance, Amit walked among the dead and the dying. The enemy were human, possessing weapons of concentrated light not dissimilar in effect to Imperial las-technology. In design, however, Nithandan technology varied drastically from the emerging Imperial norm. Rather than using power packs and focusing lenses, Nithandan ingenuity had harnessed polished crystals and gaseous transmission chambers. Doing his due diligence, Amit had studied the cultural reports before the compliance began and broken open several of their weapons to analyse himself.\n\nThe developmental path of their technology was notable but far from fascinating. Chief among Nithandan cultural divergences was the tradition of using artificially grown stone in place of natural rock when it came to construction. With a warrior's eye, Amit's first thought upon seeing cities constructed of the stuff had been to speculate how it would fare against Imperial artillery.\n\nNot well, as it happened. Not well at all.\n\nThe battle was a battle like so many others: the capital city had burned, the Nithandan resistance had been brave but utterly futile, and millions of lives had been lost purely because a population chose ignorance over enlightenment. Amit wasn't without imagination, and he occasionally walked the edges of battlefield philosophy. These people had died to defend their way of life, which so many stories insisted was an admirable sacrifice of one's existence. But was it? What about their culture was so worthy of preservation? Perhaps if the Nithandans had shut up about how it was better to die free than live as a slave, then they would have realised their fate wasn't slavery at all. The Imperium had come to awaken them, to lift them from their selfish darkness. Now the survivors of a much-diminished world would become Imperial citizens anyway, rendering all that sacrifice less than worthless.\n\nThese were his thoughts as he walked amongst the slain and those soon to join them. An Imperial Army squad was making the rounds nearby, stretchering away the wounded of both sides. They regarded Amit the way all humans regarded him, with their pupils dilated at his bloodstained beauty and their hearts racing with the threat of his armoured physicality. Their medic was crouched by a wounded Nithandan soldier, tending to the woman's wounds. Amit saw the injuries - bolt shrapnel, third-degree burns, significant tissue trauma - where the medic had peeled back the Nithandan's contoured armour plating.\n\nHe approached the pack of humans, noting with disinterest the fearful hatred in the Nithandan fighter's eyes. What a waste this all was, he thought.\n\n'Lord,' the Army officer saluted him, not with the fist of Unity, Amit noted, but with the increasingly common sign of the aquila.\n\nAmit showed his incisors, unsmiling. 'Leave us.'\n\nThe Army squad gathered their fur cloaks about them and began moving away, all but the medic.\n\n'Lord, ah, sir... Our orders. We have to aid the enemy wounded.'\n\nAmit tilted his head. This was new. The expeditionary fleet's human elements had never questioned the Revenant Legion's practices before. The Revenants understood the Army forces accompanying them found their rituals revolting, but there had never been any pushback, let alone rebellion. Formal complaints to Expeditionary Command fell on deaf ears. Was it even cannibalism, really? Amit was hardly alone in believing the Astartes were another species to the original genetic knotwork of humanity.\n\nAmit gestured, barehanded, to the wounded Nithandan soldier. There were others he could choose, countless others among the injured and the dead, but the reaction of his human allies intrigued him.\n\n'This one is mine. She belongs to the Ninth Legion.'\n\nThe rest of the squad were urging their medic away with hissed voices and desperate beckoning. Amit found the man's refusal fascinating.\n\n'I have my orders, Sergeant Amit. This soldier's wounded.'\n\nAmit looked briefly around at the rubble. He crouched, picked up a rock the size of a human fist, and with no ceremony whatsoever he drew back his arm with a snarl of servos and slung the rock into the Nithandan trooper's face. The impact annihilated her from the neck up.\n\nAmit said, in a tone of bland reasonableness, 'And now this soldier is dead. You can leave with a clean conscience, your duty discharged to the letter.'\n\nThe medic, who'd jerked back from the hurled stone, turned wide eyes from the twitching corpse to its towering killer. Amit could hear the man's heart racing and, in a moment of mundane biological harmony, the dead body's heart giving its last beats.\n\n'I... I will be reporting this to my superiors, Sergeant Amit.'\n\n'Do whatever you feel compelled to do.' Amit drew his flensing knife and advanced on the body. Either good sense finally dawned, or the Imperials' courage finally gave out, as the squad moved away in a hurry. Amit paid them no more mind.\n\nHe crouched by the corpse, sifting through the wet wreckage of the skull with the tip of his blade. Despite the destruction he'd inflicted, several choice morsels remained viable. He spitted them on his knife, wiping the grey chu"}
{"text":" my superiors, Sergeant Amit.'\n\n'Do whatever you feel compelled to do.' Amit drew his flensing knife and advanced on the body. Either good sense finally dawned, or the Imperials' courage finally gave out, as the squad moved away in a hurry. Amit paid them no more mind.\n\nHe crouched by the corpse, sifting through the wet wreckage of the skull with the tip of his blade. Despite the destruction he'd inflicted, several choice morsels remained viable. He spitted them on his knife, wiping the grey chunks one by one into his palm. There were shards of rock and bone in each nugget of brain meat, but his teeth made short crunching work of that.\n\nHe tasted the dead soldier's life. He swallowed and saw her dreams. It all came in a throbbing flood, out of order but not out of context, because with the visions came emotion. The child's face he saw in her memories was, for now, not a strange youth on a rebellious world, but Lelwyn, a beloved son who had begged her not to go to war. Amit felt the dead woman's tears though his face was dry. He felt the warmth of her child's last embrace through the layers of his armour.\n\nHe watched through her eyes as the sky rained drop-pod fire. He felt the fear - and a sweetly curious sensation it was, too - as she first saw one of the attackers, one of the grey-clad Revenants, butchering through her platoon with blurred motion and ruthless efficiency.\n\nHe ate more of her.\n\nBeneath the turmoil of surface emotions was, if the wordplay can be excused, the meat of the matter. Amit had never operated a crane down at the Torus Dock, in the far east of the city - he'd never even seen such a machine - but now he knew their exact form and function, and could operate one by muscle memory. He knew the lessons learned in the halls of a Nithandan academy over a decade ago, lessons of an isolationist culture that feared reaching out into the stars lest they bring damnation upon themselves. He remembered lectures in sciences he had never studied. He recalled training with weapons he had never used. All of this melted into the mess of the other moments he'd harvested so far, taken from other lives. An ever-growing stew of stolen memories.\n\nThere was little tactical insight to be gleaned at this point. No, before the battle; that was when you harvested to learn of enemy logistics and tactical vulnerabilities. After the battle was for remembrance, for reflection. And, in these quiet moments of honesty, for the pleasure of it. Of immersion within a life that wasn't your own. Of knowing your enemy and remembering them, in a way more visceral and useful than the dubious immortality of artefacts in a shipboard museum.\n\nHe wasn't quite done with this crimson ritual when the vox opened up in a storm of breathless reports. They came not from the last embattled elements on the ground, but from the relative serenity of orbit. Amit was on his feet at once, casting about for the others in his squad, seeking the closest gunship.\n\nThe voices across the vox, they made no sense. They overlapped and overran; he could see other Revenants nearby standing rigid amidst the dead as they sought to process just what they were hearing. The Imperial troopers working in their own clusters wore expressions of naked shock, as officers and comms-operators relayed word from orbit to the rest of their squads.\n\nAmong the soldiers' words to each other, he heard someone ask, 'What if he's like them?'\n\nAmit ignored the humans. 'What's going on?' he said into the vox. 'Repeat and clarify, please. Repeat and clarify.'\n\nThere was repetition, but little clarity until the voice of Ishidur Ossuran crackled across the vox-web, riding a priority signal. The Legion Master's tone was stern with his usual control, but Amit could hear the rawness of emotion beneath it.\n\n'Brothers of the Immortal Ninth. The Emperor has found him. The Emperor has found our primarch.'\n\nThe reluctant god\n\nMany years ago, during the Great Crusade\n\nSanguinius\n\nHe went alone. No army of faithful followers marched at his back; no ceremony marked any stage of his journey. He went into the desert alone, inured to the hardships of the wasteland in a way no mortal could ever hope to be.\n\nAnd like all moments such as these - few and far between as they were - later, there would be stories. This journey, and the meeting at its end, would be refracted into a spillage of variant tales, some of which held an authentic core, far more of which were lies destined to become enshrined as truth.\n\nThe Revenant Legion would hear many of these tales, filed down and muddled by their own guarded, uneasy hope. They had nothing else to rely on. Word would reach them through brief exchanges between expeditionary fleets in the deep void, and across shrieking astropathic ducts; the impressions of half-mad psychic men and women channelling their senses into the unreliable warp. For a time, all the Revenant Legion would have were stories of transcendent choirs and cheering crowds - a scene they could all too easily believe, and one that sank unpleasantly into the silt of their troubled hearts.\n\nBut the truth, if such a thing really matters when it's always the lies that spread instead, is that he went alone. It was his choice to do so. He had questions to ask, though he feared the answers he'd receive, and he had a bargain to strike, upon which there would be no compromise.\n\nSanguinius had never seen a spaceship before, not outside the fractal impressions of them that sailed in his waking dreams. This one, sitting on the desert plain with its golden armour baking in the sun, had the suggestion of vulturishness. It was a thing of power and efficiency, blunt and brutal. Fire made it fly, not any notion of grace.\n\nFigures clustered around the craft's landing legs, where the ship's great metal claws gripped the radiation-soaked dust of the wasteland. These men and women were plated in the same gold as the ship, rendered upon their bodies with painstaking artistry.\n\nMy father's guardians, Sanguinius thought. And what a thought it was, not only that a being such as his father required guardians, but that he had a father at all. All the years of wondering at his own heritage, devoid of insight into his origins - and here, at last, was the truth, standing in the shadow of a vessel from the void.\n\nHe leaned into the desert wind, stretching his muscles and rising on a thermal of bitter breeze. The temptation was there - like it always was - to soar, to break free of the ground and his responsibilities, taking to the sky and seeking distant lands where the secrets of old wars lay buried. Today that urge was both stronger and weaker; his heart was ill at ease with what this meeting would mean, but nevertheless, he burned to know what lay ahead.\n\nHe arced groundward, landing lightly with a scuff of his boots across the earth and a final furling of his wings. Dust swirled around his shins as he stepped forward. The golden figures carried weapons, a panoply of axes and spears and hard-calibre firearms. Sanguinius carried only his sword, undrawn, riding low on his hip.\n\n'Welcome to Baalfora, outlanders.' He spoke Aenokhian, the tongue of his people, the Pure. He wondered if the outlanders would understand him, or whether they would be forced to rely on hand gestures and awkward mimicry.\n\nMy son, said one of the golden ones, somehow speaking it silently.\n\nHe felt his father's voice for the first time as one of his own thoughts, a sensation rather than speech, backed by a tremendous feeling of suppressed force. The golden man - if he was a man - that sent the contact seemed to be making significant efforts to restrain himself, or to contain the power within himself.\n\nThere was... more... there, though. My son rhymed with my weapon and rhymed with the Ninth and rhymed with... other concepts that Sanguinius couldn't parse from the core of the man's meaning. A lifetime of perspective was bound up in that contact, and Sanguinius sensed only the gulf between his father's silent words and the meaning behind them.\n\nBut he felt no threat in the touch of mind upon mind. Confidence. Impatience. Love. Caution. Approximations of those, where words couldn't quite convey the actuality. It was all in there.\n\nThe man - and he did seem like a man: dark of skin and hair, smelling of metal and sweat, in possession of a heartbeat - walked closer.\n\n'I am the Emperor,' the man said as He stepped out from the spacecraft's shadow. 'And I am your father.'\n\nFather, the man had said, the word rhyming in silence with Master, with Shaper, with Creator.\n\nSanguinius met the Emperor's eyes. What he saw there, glinting in the light of his father's gaze, was the answer to a question he'd never even considered.\n\nThis being - this Emperor - was human. But He was not, exactly, a man.\n\n'I see the light of many souls in your eyes. Many men. Many women.'\n\nThe Emperor smiled. 'Is that what you see?' He spoke flawless Aenokhian, but that perfection was itself a flaw. He spoke the tongue with the same dialect and inflection as Sanguinius himself. Either the Emperor was pulling the meaning from the Angel's mind or imprinting meaning upon it. Whichever was true, He wasn't really speaking the language at all. Nor was Sanguinius entirely certain he could see the man's mouth move.\n\n'I have sought you for many years,' said the Emperor. And behind those words, Sanguinius sensed the cheering of crowds and the burning of worlds. His blood ran cold in the desert heat.\n\n'I've seen shades of this meeting many times in my dreams,' Sanguinius confessed. A heavier gust blew from the east. He instinctively lifted a wing to shield himself from the gritty air.\n\nThe Emperor's eyes followed the movement. He began to circle Sanguinius in a slow walk, one gauntleted hand reaching out, fingertips running down the Angel's feathers. Sanguinius' pale gaze tracked his circling father, but his wings rippled with discomfort each time the Emperor moved behind him, out of sight.\n\n'You are une"}
{"text":"hades of this meeting many times in my dreams,' Sanguinius confessed. A heavier gust blew from the east. He instinctively lifted a wing to shield himself from the gritty air.\n\nThe Emperor's eyes followed the movement. He began to circle Sanguinius in a slow walk, one gauntleted hand reaching out, fingertips running down the Angel's feathers. Sanguinius' pale gaze tracked his circling father, but his wings rippled with discomfort each time the Emperor moved behind him, out of sight.\n\n'You are uneasy,' said the Emperor. 'That is natural, my son. I have come not only to liberate you from exile, but to ease your heart and mind with all you need to know.'\n\nSanguinius felt a lifetime of questions trapped on his tongue. There was one, however, that was always going to break free first. One question above all others had plagued him and haunted his people, since the Tribe of Pure Blood had discovered him in the wild lands. They worshipped him for his strength and beneficence, but they feared him for the question that now lay unspoken between father and son.\n\n'Ask,' said the Emperor. 'Ask the question I sense lying upon your tongue.'\n\nThe Angel pulled back from his father, not furling his wings but spreading them. With sudden passion, he beat a fist against the animal hide of his breastplate. A lone feather, swan-white, drifted in an arcing dance down to the dusty earth.\n\n'What am I?'\n\n'You are my son,' said the Emperor. And, again, meanings and concepts danced beneath those words. You are my son was overlaid by you are a primarch, and you are my Ninth General, and you are a component of the Great Work and you were stolen by the enemy, and - most unsettling of all - you may have been changed by them.\n\n'I don't know what you mean.'\n\n'You will,' the Emperor assured him.\n\n'You are the death of faith,' Sanguinius replied. 'That I know.'\n\nThe Emperor regarded him before speaking. 'Yes,' his father agreed, 'and also, no. How do you know of such things?'\n\n'I told you, I have dreamed of this day. Fragments. Shadows. Suggestions. Sometimes they come to me, fierce with emotion yet raked clean of detail.'\n\n'Faith is a weapon,' said the Emperor. 'A weapon that the species cannot be trusted to wield.'\n\n'My people revere me as their god,' Sanguinius replied. 'That brings them a measure of peace. No doubt to you and your sky-sailing kind, we are nothing but primitives. Roaches in this poisoned desert. But I reward their faith in me. I am their servant. I am mercy when my people need it most, and I am death to their enemies.'\n\n'That does not make you a god, my son.'\n\n'I never said I was a god. I said my people believe me to be one.'\n\nSanguinius stared into his father's inhuman, too-human eyes.\n\n'My people, the Pure, are to be left in peace. Whatever pacts you and I swear this day, my inviolate condition is this - no ship will enter Baalfora's heavens without my mandate, and no interference will be permitted to the Clans of Pure Blood without my permission. We have carved out the solace of peace here, together. You will not threaten it, father.'\n\nThe Emperor nodded, not in agreement, but in sudden understanding. 'That is why you fear me, is it not? You fear the endangerment of what you have achieved here.'\n\n'I speak of loyalty and love,' the Angel said gently. 'And you speak of achievement.'\n\n'Am I wrong?' asked the Emperor.\n\n'I fear for the lives of my people, who deserve only peace. A peace we have fought so hard for. Behind your words, I hear the triumph of cultures that see you as their saviour. But I also hear the razing of cities and the burning of worlds. I hear the dirges of faiths now forbidden, and the mourning of those nations that followed them. Am I wrong?'\n\nThe Emperor said nothing.\n\nLater - many times over the decades to come - Sanguinius would think back on those words. For all the purity of the Emperor's intent, there were so many compromises. Faith could not be tolerated... except for when it could. Religions were drowned in the ashes of defiant worlds... except when their usefulness aligned with the Great Work. The Emperor needed the Martian Mechanicum, and he allowed them to worship Him as the Omnissiah, the incarnated avatar of the Machine-God. Perhaps necessity carves holes in everyone's principles, human and god alike.\n\nBut all of this would come later. There on the desert sands, that day, the Angel had more questions.\n\n'You keep looking at my wings. Wings, I note, that you and your followers do not possess.' Sanguinius scanned the men and women still waiting by the landing craft, then looked to the Emperor once more. 'Do I bear these by your design or by some twist of misfortune?'\n\nThe Emperor looked at him with the keen eye of an inventor assessing a prototype, as well as the forgiving gaze of a father. A seamless blend.\n\n'You are exquisitely wrought,' said the Emperor. 'Exquisitely and pain-stakingly.'\n\nWhich was no answer at all.\n\n'What am I?' Sanguinius asked again, this time with an edge to his tone.\n\nThe Emperor's voice softened, as did His expression. Only His eyes were unchanged, remaining lit by inseparable, uncountable souls.\n\n'You are a gamble against the death of hope, my son. You are a roll of the dice at the end of the game. What do you call yourself?'\n\nHe called himself by the names his people had given him. First, the nicknames of youth. Then the name he'd received as he grew to lead the Clans of Pure Blood. A name sacred to the tribe that had come to view him as their god. A name that marked him as theirs in spirit, if not in birth, meaning Of the Pure Blood.\n\n'Sanguinius.'\n\nThe Emperor nodded. 'Sanguinius. You are a primarch. A component of the Great Work, stolen from me and torn from its place, denied to me all these years. I have need of you, my son. Humanity has need of you. You are instrumental to the species' salvation. I have come to lift you from these dry roots, to take you into the stars - to give you a Legion to command, and a future to fight for.'\n\nOnce more Sanguinius heard the adulations of crowds in bright sunlight, and the cries of populations on burning worlds.\n\nHe asked then what no other primarch had given voice to. Even Angron, upon his discovery, would act without asking the question Sanguinius now asked.\n\n'What if I refuse?'\n\nThe Emperor seemed to weigh this. 'You will not refuse. I know your soul. Here, you've saved tens of thousands of lives. With me, you will save billions of lives on millions of worlds. You will save the life of every human yet to be born. That is not something you could turn your back on.'\n\nThey stared into each other's eyes, father and son, creator and created. Neither argued against the truth of the Emperor's words.\n\n'I want something from you. I want your oath.'\n\nThe Emperor was silent, allowing His son to continue.\n\n'Do you swear, on whatever oaths hold value to you, that you will leave the Clans of Pure Blood in peace? Untouched by your designs unless they desire otherwise. Free to exist as they already exist, believing whatever they choose to believe.'\n\nThe Emperor hesitated. Sanguinius saw the calculation in his father's eyes, and he wondered: is He taken aback by the love I bear for my people, or is He merely considering alternate avenues around this obstacle in His Great Work?\n\nThe Emperor finally spoke. 'You have my promise.'\n\nSanguinius closed his wings. 'Then let us speak of the future, father.'\n\nAnd so, they did.\n\nLord of the IX Legion\n\nThree years later, during the Great Crusade\n\nSanguinius\n\nIt was raining the night he met his Legion. The stories would be wrong about that, as well - many of them painted a picture (sometimes literally, rendered upon canvas) of the Angel standing in sunlight before the arrayed ranks of his magnificent sons. The truth was that monsoon season was in its full throes across the northern hemisphere of the planet Teghar Pentaurus. Rain scythed against the descending gunship, storm winds swiping at armour plating still gleaming with the heat of atmospheric entry.\n\nSanguinius stood within the Thunderhawk's crew bay, ringed by warriors in pristine white. Thoughts of Baalfora were foremost in his mind, beginning the chain of events that led him to this time and place. Three years of fighting at his brother Horus' side had finally brought him here. Three years of learning the ways of the emerging Imperium, in all its infinite complexity. Three years of waging war alongside the warriors surrounding him now. The crescent moon and lupine face of the Luna Wolves marked their armour plating. They were, without doubt, the finest warriors - the finest men - he had ever known.\n\n'Nervous, lord?' one of them asked.\n\n'No, Ezekyle.' Sanguinius turned to the warrior as he replied with that harmless lie. 'But I thank you for your concern.'\n\n'I'd be nervous if I were you,' one of the others said with a grin. 'Surely you've got used to a certain quality by now, lord. What if they're not the fighters we are? Won't that just break your heart?'\n\n'Tarik is right,' Ezekyle added, flashing his teeth in a smile, more hesitant with his informality. 'Perhaps we've spoiled you, these last years.'\n\n'I can only hope, little Wolves, that if the warriors of my Legion lack your tenacity on the battlefield, they also lack your immense capacity for vanity.'\n\nThey laughed at that, and Sanguinius had to mask his sorrow at the sound. He would miss his time with his brother's beloved XVI Legion, that was no falsehood. They were, in the parlance of Baalfora, warriors to walk to the wastelands with: loyal, steadfast, disciplined. Horus had fashioned his Terran gangers and Cthonian barbarians into a weapon of beautiful precision and intimate nobility.\n\nNervous wasn't the right word for the feeling that clouded his heart, but it wasn't entirely wrong. Many were the tales told of the Immortal Ninth, the Revenant Legion, the Eaters of the Dead - and Sanguinius harboured no doubts as to the fighting prowess of the warriors he was about to meet for the first tim"}
{"text":"rs to walk to the wastelands with: loyal, steadfast, disciplined. Horus had fashioned his Terran gangers and Cthonian barbarians into a weapon of beautiful precision and intimate nobility.\n\nNervous wasn't the right word for the feeling that clouded his heart, but it wasn't entirely wrong. Many were the tales told of the Immortal Ninth, the Revenant Legion, the Eaters of the Dead - and Sanguinius harboured no doubts as to the fighting prowess of the warriors he was about to meet for the first time. Their propensity for violence was, in fact, the only reassurance he had regarding their conduct.\n\n'It's been good, lord,' said Tarik, leaning on one of the crew railings. The gunship juddered around them as it started its landing cycle. 'Fighting with you, I mean.'\n\n'An honour,' added Ezekyle. 'We will miss you.'\n\nTheir affection brought a more sincere smile to his features. He regarded them both, and then the squad of warriors behind them, each one gripping the overhead railing against the threat of turbulence.\n\n'The honour was mine, my nephews.' He almost added a wish for there to always be this bond between their two Legions, but with the future so in doubt, it felt worse than trite. He settled for the sincerity of what he'd already said. It would do for now.\n\nSoon enough, the gunship shivered as it landed. Sanguinius heard the cycle-down of the engines, their diminishing whine replaced by the lash of monsoon rain against the hull. He felt the eyes of the Luna Wolves upon him, felt their wonder at the moment's mundane majesty, and sensed their curiosity over what he would say once the gang ramp came down.\n\nSurprising no one, Tarik dared to interrupt the last seconds of reflective silence before a son of the Emperor met the thousands of warriors forged from his genetic code. The idea of ceremony was often lost on Tarik Torgaddon, centurion of the Second Company.\n\n'Is your speech ready, lord? Lupercal gave us a grand old lecture when we gathered to meet him that first time. Brotherhood, duty, responsibility... It had it all. Rather warmed the heart, let me tell you.'\n\n'You jest,' Abaddon pointed out, 'but you wept with the rest of us that day.'\n\nTorgaddon's reply was a low chuckle, but Sanguinius didn't smile that time. He faced forward, as if he could see through the gunship's iron skin to the ranks of waiting warriors beyond.\n\nEzekyle, clad in ceremonial white tonight rather than the combat black of his Justaerin elite, watched Sanguinius with a touch more reverence than Tarik.\n\n'Do you know what you'll say to them?' he asked.\n\nThree years, thought Sanguinius. Three years, and not an hour has passed within that span that I've not thought about what I might say.\n\nHe'd watched the picter footage of Horus first meeting the Luna Wolves and studied his brother's words, his body language, and the emotion that enriched both. Speeches and chants and lectures and even sermons - of an admittedly bloodless and secular kind - had run amok through his imagination in preparation for what was to come next. He'd written entire scrolls worth of meticulous honesty and discarded whole tomes worth of aborted sentiment. Every imagined sentence was a possibility that might be given voice within the next few minutes.\n\n'No, Ezekyle. I confess, I do not.'\n\nThat was enough truth to silence even Torgaddon. Sanguinius heard the joints of their armour purring as the Luna Wolves shared unspeaking glances behind his back.\n\n'What about the war for Teghar Pentaurus?' Tarik pressed. 'Will you want us to stay, do you think?'\n\n'We'll see,' said Sanguinius.\n\nA second silence reigned. This one was even worse.\n\nMercifully, the pilot's voice crackled across the vox - 'Clear, clear, clear!' - and down went the gunship's ramp on growling hydraulics. In came the hissing rain.\n\nSanguinius stepped out into the storm. Behind him came the Luna Wolves. Before him, standing in ranks, stood the Revenant Legion.\n\nThey waited in formation, statues at attention in the storm. Helmetless, they were graven in his image, several thousand faces resculpted through technomagical genetics to resemble that of the father they'd never met. Their various skin shades hid nothing, and variant colours and styles of hair didn't conceal the fact, either; each one of them bore his visage. Sanguinius had been cognisant of this possibility without truly expecting it. Many of Horus' Luna Wolves grew to take on his features as they ascended to the Astartes state, but it was by no means ubiquitous among the Legions. Here, Sanguinius looked not on mere similarity, but simulacrum. Horus' sons resembled their primarch as a son might take closely after a father. Sanguinius' sons resembled their gene-sire as his own face would look back at him in a cracked mirror. War had scarred them... but they were him, to the life.\n\nAnd they were afraid of him. He could read it in eyes that matched his own, and he could sense it in the tautness of features he knew so perfectly well. The torment of expectation had goaded him to believe his sons might rejoice at their first sight of him, but the reality was altogether more tense. They feared what he represented, and the many changes to come.\n\nFree of the gunship's confines, he stretched his wings in the rain. Nothing more than instinct, the way someone might raise a hand against a breeze or roll their shoulders to prepare for a task. But when he did it, as his white-feathered pinions flexed, several warriors in the front rank flinched. They didn't just fear what he represented, Sanguinius realised. They feared him. Perhaps they feared the mutation he bore on his back, but the primarch didn't think it was anything so simple. They feared his very presence.\n\nWhy?\n\nThe rain slashed, unceasing, content to fill the terrible silence with the hiss of its impact. Sanguinius felt the gaze of the Luna Wolves behind him as surely as he saw the stares of the Immortal Ninth facing him. Keeping his wings close to his body, for convenience rather than caution, he started walking along the rows of gathered warriors in their storm-washed grey. He met their eyes as he passed, and marked well the scars of war on their ceramite plate and transfigured flesh.\n\nIn turn, they gazed up at him with the desperate hope he had been expecting, coupled with a defiance he had not. They wanted this, they'd ached for this moment, but everything rode upon it. The pressure was practically a physical thing, bearing down on all of them.\n\nIn their faces, he read their records of the Great Crusade. The drinking of blood and the eating of flesh: for tactical advantage, for survival, and rarely - but not rarely enough - for pleasure. He read the stories told by the scars that marred their beauty; the chronicles of subterranean campaigns against mutated hordes and scarcely human populations harvested for desperately needed reinforcements. In their narrowed, awed eyes, he saw the discretionary refusals of the Divisio Militaris to supply them with munitions and armour battalions to match the other newborn Legions, for fear of the Revenants' degeneracy. He saw the Imperial decrees breaking them apart to serve in splinter-fleets, fragments of fragments attached to other Legion forces; the primary reason it had taken so long to gather the Legion here in its entirety. He saw the hardships of their crusades and the compromises made when fate had forced their hands. In the tilt of their heads and the set of their lips, he saw the sanctions levied against them by other, nobler Legions. He saw the sins they'd committed against their own empire, and the scorn they'd endured because of it. He saw how they wore that disregard as a badge of unwanted honour.\n\nIn short, he saw them for what they were: cannibals and killers with the faces of angels.\n\nLast of all, gleaming in their brazen stares was the knowledge of their own extinction. Their time was coming to an end. Even without Sanguinius here before their gathered ranks, the lifespan of the Immortal Ninth was decidedly mortal, after all. The other Legions, no matter their degrees of savagery, were reliable weapons in the Emperor's arsenal. To carve a planet apart with fear, he sent the Eighth. To drown a rebellion in the blood of their own dead, he sent the Twelfth. The ruthlessness of these wild Legions was still contained within the framework of the Great Plan.\n\nBut the Ninth... these bloodstained knights with their crimson rituals, these Eaters of the Dead... Already, they'd been broken up, unreliable in Legion force. Whole swathes of the expeditionary fleets refused to fight alongside them. Again and again they were ground down to near annihilation, repeatedly bringing themselves back from the brink with tides of desperate recruitment, sustaining themselves by elevating the genetic dregs of the species to a state of Imperial perfection. Their ways populated their ranks with men exalted in flesh yet still hollow in soul. Duty could only carry a soldier so far. These transhuman men fought for the Imperium, but they cared for little, they loved nothing. There was nothing ennobling in their suffering, only pride in their capacity to endure.\n\nThe pride of a cornered animal is all they have left.\n\nAs soon as the thought occurred to him, Sanguinius dismissed it. No. It's not all they have left, it's all they've ever had. It is all they were ever given.\n\nHow like the people of Baalfora they were, so vulnerable despite their fortitude, able to survive but never thrive. Sanguinius had been adopted by the Clans of Pure Blood and grew to become their champion. He could've ruled over them as the god-king they believed him to be, but he had always wanted nothing more than to protect them. He elevated the Pure Tribes from the travails of their rad-soaked homeland not through dominance over them, but by his service to them.\n\nAnd now, the Revenants' fear made sense. It was so obvious once he'd witnessed it with his own eyes: a truth that no hololithic report could ever conve"}
{"text":"ius had been adopted by the Clans of Pure Blood and grew to become their champion. He could've ruled over them as the god-king they believed him to be, but he had always wanted nothing more than to protect them. He elevated the Pure Tribes from the travails of their rad-soaked homeland not through dominance over them, but by his service to them.\n\nAnd now, the Revenants' fear made sense. It was so obvious once he'd witnessed it with his own eyes: a truth that no hololithic report could ever convey. What would this winged demigod demand of them? Could they ever live up to what he would ask? Would they even want to try, if they despised their new father and his vision?\n\nSanguinius kept walking, kept studying them. He thought of the oaths of fealty he could make them swear tonight. He thought of the glory he could promise them and of the pride he could convey, at the Emperor granting him command of his own Legion. He was their primarch, and he had every right to play out the moment the way his sons expected: by binding them to him with sacred oaths of their allegiance to him.\n\nBut the first words he spoke to his Legion were far from the bombastic speeches later chroniclers would describe.\n\n'What is your name?' Sanguinius asked the closest Revenant, the first of his sons that he ever met face to face. His tone was gently firm, his curiosity evident. The scarred warrior replied, lips wet with the rain.\n\n'Idamas.' Sanguinius saw the conflict in the man's dark eyes as the Astartes hesitated, unsure whether to add an honorific.\n\n'Thank you,' Sanguinius replied. He turned to the next warrior in line. 'And you? Your name?'\n\n'Amit.' Again, that hesitation, though Amit added a subdued, 'lord,' after a moment's pause.\n\n'Thank you. And you?'\n\nAnd on it went. Soon he wasn't going one by one anymore, instead beckoning them to break ranks and come forward in clusters. He looked each of them in the eye as they proclaimed their names to him, many of them shouting over the others as the adrenaline of the moment took hold, and he committed their identities to his preternatural memory. These were his first sons, and he would remember every one of them until the day of his death.\n\nWhen it was done, silence descended once more, dense with expectation. Before, the Revenants had regarded him with that clash of anticipation and defiant fear. Now, the challenge in their stares bordered on feverish. Why had he asked their names? What did he intend to do with the knowledge?\n\nSanguinius saluted them, his fist against his heart. At last, he spoke.\n\n'You have told me your names and I have read the records of your deeds. I know you, and I know how my father's Imperium - our Imperium - looks upon you. You have served with loyalty and been paid in gratitude and spite, both in equal measure. You have been given difficult tasks, only to find yourselves mistrusted for achieving them in the ways you believed best. I will not say you were wrong to act as you have acted, nor will I blame those that have come to fear you. That is the past, and this is our chance to step back from the edge of extinction. My first command is to bring you together once more. We will fight together as one bloodline. As of this moment, you are a broken Legion no longer.'\n\nThe Revenants' eyes were upon him. He felt no doubts now. He knew exactly what he wanted to say.\n\n'Swear me no oaths,' he told them. 'Make me no promises. Do not offer me your allegiance purely because my blood runs in your veins.'\n\nSanguinius laughed suddenly, the sound musical against the percussion of the storm. 'In fact, do not offer me your allegiance at all. Not until you believe me worthy of it.'\n\nThe primarch drew his sword, plunging it into the earth before the gathered ranks. He spread his wings, letting the rain sheet from them in pearlescent droplets. And then, to the amazed horror of his sons, he went to one knee in obeisance. Even with his head down, his voice carried above the storm.\n\n'Instead, let me offer you my allegiance. Take my oath, here and now. I am Sanguinius, son of the Emperor, primarch of the Ninth Legion, and I make you this promise - I will stand with you in glory or die alongside you in shame. I come to you tonight not to enforce my ways upon all of you, but to learn your ways.'\n\nThe Revenant Legion looked upon him with breathless amazement. The punishment and chastisements they had expected hadn't manifested. The self-righteous vows they'd anticipated, that they must reshape themselves in their new father's image, hadn't been spoken.\n\n'This Legion is not mine,' Sanguinius called out to his sons as he rose to his feet. 'It is not a possession to be manipulated purely by my will. This Legion is ours. And though you are my sons, fated to answer to me, I am your primarch, and I will answer to you.'\n\nSanguinius heard the Luna Wolves shifting uncomfortably. This was plainly not how it had gone with Horus. It was not how these meetings were supposed to go.\n\nThe Angel drew his blade from the wet earth, raising his voice over the thunder.\n\n'Each one of you is a bloodied veteran of the Great Crusade. And I, too, have fought the Imperium's war, learning of our empire at my brother Horus' side. But I am as new to my title as I am to the war we fight. In time, I will come to lead you. But for now? I ask you only to let me fight by your side. If you refuse me, I will leave with no grudge. I will break my pact with the Emperor and return to Baalfora. I will leave you to survive as you've survived thus far. But if you accept my offer... then let us learn, together, what our Legion will be. Let us write that story as a united bloodline.'\n\nSanguinius let the rainfall clean his blade. He sheathed it in a smooth motion and rippled his wings against the storm's chill.\n\n'The Emperor has charged us to take this world. He wants Teghar Pentaurus. He wants it compliant before the turn of the solar month. I have seen the plans. I've seen the Imperial Army communications pleading for the presence of the Luna Wolves here, the formal requests that my brother's pristine sons remain to bring about the compliance the Ninth Legion cannot be trusted to achieve.'\n\nThe Revenants stirred, shifted, clutched weapons tighter. They had their pride. They had it in abundance, and it would make for a fine beginning.\n\n'The Emperor wants this world, and the Luna Wolves would love to be the ones to give it to Him.'\n\nSanguinius paused, a half-smile on his beauteous features, the look of a man sharing a sly jest with his closest companions.\n\n'It's my belief that we don't need our esteemed cousins, though. I believe we can take this planet without their aid, and in doing so we will write the first chapter of our Legion's true story.'\n\nHe turned to the side, an intermediary between the Luna Wolves' officers and the several thousand Revenants standing in broken ranks. Ezekyle looked faintly amused. Tarik was fully grinning.\n\n'What say you, warriors of the Ninth Legion?' Sanguinius called out. 'What say you, to our noble ambassadors from the Sixteenth?'\n\nThousands of voices rose - a rolling thunder of mockery, refusal and defiance. The Revenant Legion shouted down the Luna Wolves with that unified roar, succeeding also in outshouting the storm.\n\nEzekyle Abaddon stepped forward, raising his hands for quiet. It took some time to descend. Tarik moved with him, and as Abaddon inclined his head in respect to the quieting Revenants, the latter gave a teasing, courtly bow.\n\n'Well then, Lord Sanguinius,' Tarik said, loud enough for the ranks of Astartes to hear. 'It's the considered opinion of myself, and my dear First Captain Abaddon here, that we can pull our Legion forces back and let the Ninth handle things.'\n\nSanguinius thanked them both with his gaze, watched them moving to reboard their gunship, and then turned to face his new Legion once more.\n\n'My friends,' he said to the Revenants. 'My sons. Let us make ready. We have our first war to win.'\n\nThe High Host\n\nDuring the later years of the Great Crusade\n\nShenkai\n\nFrom the mandated archives of Thrall IX\/57437AJc\/94-DVk\n\nAssigned to Legionary Zephon\n\nBegin recording.\n\nMy name is Shenkai of the bloodline Ismarantha. I am twelve standard cycles old. This is the first recording in my official archive and I am making it as we travel to Terra.\n\nI am Baalforan but I have never seen Baalfora except in picts and scans. I am void-born and the child of Baalforans and so I have learned the rituals and the histories of my people.\n\nI am a slave. My parents and my mentors tell me not to use that word. They say slaves are unhappy and mistreated and we are not unhappy or mistreated, so we are not really slaves. I do not think slavery has anything to do with happiness, I think it is a matter of freedom to make choices, and we have no choices. The warriors of the Ninth Legion are noble and good and pure, and it is an honour to serve them. But I do not understand how they can be good and noble and pure yet keep us as slaves. Our work is important and that makes us all proud, but sometimes I believe servitors could do it almost as well. I also believe that we would do it even if we had the choice not to.\n\nMy mentors and my parents tell me not to say these things. They tell me that in time I will no longer think like this. They also say the Great Angel, our primarch, would be saddened to hear me use the word 'slave'.\n\nI have seen the Great Angel four times in my life and one of those times he spoke to me. I was nine standard cycles old and I was crying because many of us cry when we see him. I asked my father why we cried and he said it is because the Great Angel is perfect and that looking at him feels like staring into the sun. I do not know what that feels like because I have never been on the surface of a planet and looked up at its sun. The suns we see through the darkened windows of the Red Tear are not bright in the same way.\n\nWhen our primarch spoke to me it was in the High Host's armoury. The "}
{"text":"nine standard cycles old and I was crying because many of us cry when we see him. I asked my father why we cried and he said it is because the Great Angel is perfect and that looking at him feels like staring into the sun. I do not know what that feels like because I have never been on the surface of a planet and looked up at its sun. The suns we see through the darkened windows of the Red Tear are not bright in the same way.\n\nWhen our primarch spoke to me it was in the High Host's armoury. The Great Angel was looking for my master, Zephon, but my family's master was not there. That day, the armoury was filled with thralls working on weapons and armour, and my mother and father were teaching me the care of our master's equipment. This was the closest I had ever seen the Great Angel. He thanked my parents and said they did fine work on our master's wargear and I think they were pleased, but I wasn't looking at them.\n\nThe Great Angel turned to me because I was touching one of his wings. My parents were upset and worried because I had done this, but the Great Angel smiled and crouched down and looked into my eyes. He has eyes that make you feel very safe, and as though you are not a slave at all. He stroked away my tears with his white fingers and he said very quietly, 'Hello, little one.'\n\nHe asked me my name and I tried to tell him, but no words came out. My parents tried to speak but the Great Angel stopped them and said, 'If your parents are Eristes and Shafia of the bloodline Ismarantha, then you must be Shenkai.'\n\nI did not know how he could know that but he smiled at me as if he heard my thoughts, and he said, 'I know every soul on this ship and every soul in our Legion.' He told me that when my apprenticeship ended, I would do the Legion proud. He said also that he was pleased to meet me.\n\nThen he said the thing that I cannot stop thinking about. I told him I wanted to be an Angel when I grew up and his smile faded and he said, 'No, you do not.'\n\nI asked him why he looked so sad when he said that and he said it was nothing, he was not sad, all was well.\n\nWhen he stood up, he did not just walk away, he bowed to my parents as if they were primarchs and he were a thrall, and it made some of the other thralls gasp and it made others cry. Everyone loved him so very much, you could feel it in the chamber. Then he left and we watched him go.\n\nMy apprenticeship is finished now. It ended last month. I was presented to our master, Zephon, as a trained thrall as tradition dictates but everything has gone wrong.\n\nMy master's name is Zephon. He is the Exarch of the High Host. They call him the Bringer of Sorrow because he is so ruthless and because he is one of the Sacrosanct, the Destroyers, the bearers of weapons forbidden to many others. My family is honoured to serve him.\n\nI have watched footage from my master's helmet feeds many times, watching with my father when he reviews the data. During those times, I stand by the side of my father's chair as he and many other thralls cycle through archival data on the consoles in the ship's athenaeum. The remembrancers that are beginning to show up on many vessels are not allowed in there because the data is sacred to the Legion. I have heard some of the remembrancers complaining about this but I do not care. It is not their place to know these things.\n\nSo I have seen my master fight many times, sometimes through his eyes and sometimes through the eyes of other warriors in the High Host. Like all Angels he is beautiful, but he is not beautiful like a person; he is beautiful like the paintings and statues kept hidden in the deepest decks of the flagship.\n\nThe strongest memory I have of my master in battle is from the helmet feed of a warrior called Torian. Before you see my master in the footage, you see the ground swallowed by spreading black mist. This is the poison smoke of their alchemical weaponry. The High Host have shrouded the earth with radiation from above, now they descend into it to kill any survivors. Torian's view goes dark as he falls through the smoke shroud. You can see nothing, only the static fuzz as his boots hit the ground.\n\nThen his thermal vision resolves. There are shapes in the poison, heat blurs of the armoured men and women resisting the compliance of their world. Some of them are dying but not all. The ones that sealed their suits in time are still fighting. The High Host cuts them down. The thermal blurs thrash, fall, and in the minutes after the footage they will go cold and dark.\n\nTorian's footage comes out of the mist. It's thinner at the edges. Dissipating, I mean. Torian comes out of it. Then he turns around.\n\nWhat happens next takes fewer than three seconds. I know this because of the runic time markers in the corner of the display. I have rewatched this moment many times.\n\nTwo of the enemy run out of the death fog. The radioactive mist did not penetrate their strange armour. One of them is only halfway out of the smoke when he vanishes back into it as if he had been sucked backward. You do not hear him scream and you never see him again. I only know his fate from seeing my master's eye-lens footage later, when Zephon grips one of the pipes at the back of the soldier's suit and drags him back. Breaking the man's helmet lets the poison into his suit. That is how he dies.\n\nThe second soldier is a few steps out of the shroud when she stops. Her back arches. Blood is suddenly on the inside of her visor, hiding her face. Either she coughed it out or vomited it up, I do not know. It is hard to see the blade that has come through her body and out of her chest because the toxic cloud has darkened the steel. This is something the High Host's weapons do, and we are trained to clean their weapons and armour with special gloves and suits of our own, if they have used their Destroyer weaponry in a war.\n\nMy master's sword is also hard to see because its power field is off and there is only one reason an Astartes does that - it is because they do not want their enemies to die instantly, they want them to feel a slower death.\n\nThe second soldier falls to the floor and my master walks from the poison cloud. His red armour is black with Destroyer scorchings. While the woman is dying at his feet, he speaks with Torian, giving further orders. You can hear the vox sparking with the congratulations sent by other captains. Then my master turns and his turbines cycle up. He jumps, and his jump pack flares, and he is gone again.\n\nAnd that is Zephon. At least, that is who Zephon used to be. He has not been that man for many months now.\n\nBefore going to the apothecarion last week, I went with my father into the deeper decks. My father says the most beautiful art in the entire Imperium stands in shadow, deep down in Blood Angels warships. When I ask him why the Legion does not display its treasures, he says it is because the Angels are not vain. That they do this work for themselves, not for others.\n\nWe passed beneath paintings of alien landscapes and cities. There were statues made from stone taken from many different worlds, and some of the statues are carved to look like animals or monsters or the Emperor, and some are carved to look like shapes that do not always make sense to me. These are abstract. I know that word, I am not stupid, even if I do not always know what the statues represent.\n\nI saw sculpted maidens and barbarians and aliens. Many of the aliens were shown in poses of nobility, not defeat. It is strange to show the enemy in a way that makes you admire them.\n\nI saw paintings of Baalfora and my father said they were unnerving and fascinating because they are Baal from warriors' distant memories, sometimes over a century ago, so the burned earth looks different to the reality. I have never really seen Baalfora so I cannot say what is truly different.\n\nBut there are others that say the same thing and they carve statues that look tormented or paint scenes of dying worlds. When I said this to my father, he said, 'Exactly,' as if this answered everything.\n\nI saw a mural of sculpted faces and they all looked peaceful except for the bands of iron wire over their eyes like blindfolds. This was by the Apothecary Amastis, and my father said he does this to mark the deaths of his brethren.\n\nI saw three orbs sculpted with deep slashes, cradled in an invisible anti-grav field. This was by the warrior Nassir Amit. My father told me it was the rise of three moons on a world called Uryissia, that must have meant something to Captain Amit.\n\nI saw many renditions of the Angels themselves because so many warriors paint their brothers. Many of these are in moments of peace, when the Angels wear their togas or robes. I saw a painting of Daramir of the Angel's Tears, standing in his robes, one arm raised as he speaks during a Legion symposium. This was by the warrior Hekat, who always paints his brothers, and always in poses of gentleness and calm. When I asked my father why, he said that it was because Hekat wanted to capture what was within the other warriors.\n\nThere are many hololithic recordings of musical performances, using every instrument you might imagine and many I am unfamiliar with. Sometimes there is no recording at all, just a chamber where a song will play in the dark.\n\nMy master is not a painter or a sculptor or a poet. His art plays in an empty antechamber. You hear it when you walk in, the soft sounds of a piano playing alone. This was the room my father brought me to, and he closed his eyes as if he could hear something in the notes that I could not.\n\nI did not like my master's music. It sounded very sad somehow and it kept making me think of my failures in training or my arguments with other apprentices. Sometimes he played many notes in a kind of tumbling harmony and other times he let the longest notes ring on and on.\n\nI told my father I did not like the music and that it made me thoughtful and sad, and he said that was why he brought me here before m"}
{"text":" to, and he closed his eyes as if he could hear something in the notes that I could not.\n\nI did not like my master's music. It sounded very sad somehow and it kept making me think of my failures in training or my arguments with other apprentices. Sometimes he played many notes in a kind of tumbling harmony and other times he let the longest notes ring on and on.\n\nI told my father I did not like the music and that it made me thoughtful and sad, and he said that was why he brought me here before my presentation.\n\n'To make me sad?' I asked, because that made no sense to me.\n\n'To show you what our master has lost.'\n\nI did not understand then. It only made sense when I was presented to Zephon later that day.\n\nIt was supposed to be my presentation to him but he did not care. He barely looked at me. It felt foolish to be presented to him in the apothecarion but that was where he was confined almost all the time after his injury and the many failed surgeries that followed it.\n\nInstead of my formal presentation, we saw our master's last act as Exarch of the High Host. He gave the order from a bed in the Red Tear's apothecarion, and that command was to promote Subcommander Anzarael. My master's bionics had failed again after another reconstructive surgery. They wouldn't fuse right with his nervous system. His legs malfunctioned and his arms shook and his fingers wouldn't close on command.\n\nAnzarael accepted the rank but he refused the offer of Zephon's sword.\n\nMy mother is Zephon's weaponbearer and she was the one to bring the blade to our master's bedside when he ordered it, but Anzarael refused the honour of taking it.\n\n'I will hardly need it on Terra,' my master said. 'And I cannot wield it anymore, even if I had to.'\n\nAnzarael looked surprised and my parents later told me that our master had never spoken to any of his warriors in such a tone before. Temper is something the Legion focuses on controlling. You can always see it in their eyes if you look carefully, but they say it is something to overcome and not indulge.\n\nMy master tried to give the blade anyway but his bionics misfired and he threw it harder than I think he intended. Anzarael caught it and looked at the ornate hilt and scabbard for several seconds. The moment should have been emotional but when he spoke his thanks, there was no dignity in any of it.\n\nI thought it was over and I wished it had been, but then Anzarael spoke.\n\n'Sir, my first act is to speak with the voice of the High Host.'\n\nMy master was clenching his teeth. I do not know if it was because he was annoyed or because there was still lingering damage to his muscles.\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'Sir...'\n\n'Stop addressing me as sir. You outrank me. You are Exarch of the High Host now, and I am a cripple in a medicae bed.'\n\n'Zephon,' Anzarael said, and it was strange because his name like that sounded awkward and shameful. 'The High Host bade me make its wish known. The regiment appeals to you, that you might take one of the other positions offered by-'\n\nHe didn't finish because Zephon wouldn't let him.\n\n'Get out.'\n\nMy master tried to dismiss Anzarael with a wave of his arm, but his metal hand refused to unlock from a fist. For a moment I was sure Anzarael would stay and defy him, and then what? Would my master rage at his subcommander from where he lay helpless on his medicae slab?\n\nBut Anzarael didn't refuse. He saluted and left and took the gifted blade with him. In the silence afterwards I thought my master might acknowledge me as tradition dictated, but instead he looked at my parents and ordered them to get out.\n\nThey did and of course I went with them.\n\nThat brings us to today and the journey we are on.\n\nZephon has been assigned to the Crusader Host. We are aboard a transport ship, on the way to Terra.\n\nThe Crusader Host is an honour guard of Legiones Astartes warriors stationed on the Throneworld. It is supposed to be a diplomatic post. The legionaries are ambassadors of their Legions. My master does not consider it an honour. He says it is a conclave of exiles and failures.\n\nThe expeditionary fleet has offered him other stations. Training positions. Military advisor roles. Ranks of counsel. Other stations I do not really understand beyond knowing their titles. He was offered command of a Legion warship, the cruiser Tacit Canticum. Mother and father believed our master would accept it because this was his chance to remain with the Legion and to fight with them. Mother said it would be 'his chance to remain who he was in the face of who he's become.'\n\nBut he refused. Instead he accepted a place in the Crusader Host. When I asked why, my father said it was because Zephon would no longer have to see himself reflected in his brothers' eyes.\n\nMy master did not give his refusal to the Great Angel in person. He sent his decision as shipboard scripture. Just cold text on a screen. The Great Angel returned a message requesting my master's presence before departing for the Crusader Host, but my master ignored the Great Angel's wishes.\n\nWe waited for our master by the shuttle in the Red Tear's secondary portside docking bay. When he arrived, he was limping because of his bad bionics and although he tried hard to look cold and angry you could see in his eyes that he was upset.\n\n'Thankfully there are no farewell theatrics,' he said to my father. We had expected the High Host to be present, maybe, to salute him and wish him a good journey. There was only us, and the deck crews, and the servitor loaders, and the usual disorder of a flight deck.\n\n'Board the shuttle,' he said. And we did. We carried our own possessions and the servitors carried my master's gear in crates.\n\nBut there was a final farewell and we only saw it once the flight was underway. I was the one to find it. It was in one of the crates, in the cargo hold: a sealed metal case. It had the Legion sigil and also the mark of the High Host, which is a burial mask with open black wings. I knew what it would be as soon as I saw it.\n\n'What are you doing, boy?'\n\nMy master's voice made me jump, but I did not try to hide my curiosity. I told him I was looking through the cargo to see everything we had brought, and that I was allowed to do it since I was a trained thrall now.\n\nHe saw the closed case and he also knew what it was. You could see it in his eyes even before he said it.\n\n'My sword.'\n\n'I think so, lord.'\n\nIt was surely his sword. Anzarael had returned it to him, sending it with him away into exile.\n\n'Fools,' my master said of his men. But he sounded very sad when he said it, not angry. 'Doubtless they believed this was a kind gesture.'\n\nHe opened the crate to see if we were right, but we were both wrong.\n\nIt was a sword but it wasn't his sword. It was cushioned in red velvet and it was even nicer than the blade he gave to Anzarael. Immediately I thought not of the weapon in battle but how it would feel to clean it, and what it must have been like to make it. The hilt was reinforced Martian gold and had the craftsmark of the Ninth Legion's Master of Artisans. I had never seen a blade so precious, this close.\n\nAlong the silver blade was a flowing stream of Aenokhian runes. They were inscribed into the metal with acid and they were perfectly neat. Spiritum Sanguis was what they said. The Gothic translation is 'Spirit of Blood' but that is only half-right. It is a prayer or a blessing more than a name. The blade was a promise that my master carried the spirit of the Legion with him.\n\nI realised this was why Sanguinius had wanted to speak with him before he departed. The Great Angel wanted to give him this masterpiece. Most likely, the High Host had petitioned for its creation, or perhaps even the primarch himself had ordered its forging.\n\n'This is a princely gift, lord.' I was trying to be brave and to show him that he did not frighten me.\n\n'I have no need of the Legion's charity. Nor their pity. When we reach Terra, place this in storage.'\n\n'Lord?' I was not sure I heard him right.\n\n'Do not make me repeat myself, thrall.' And there was a hesitation there because even though Astartes have perfect memories, he did not know or remember my name, because he did not care. My master let the case fall closed and left me alone in the cargo hold.\n\nAnd that is the end of my first report. We will reach the Throneworld in one month. My master will begin serving in the Crusader Host. I know I am supposed to love him, but I do not. He is like a broken blade that cuts you if you try to clean it.\n\nI hope he finds comfort on Terra, even if he is denied his music and his art and his brothers.\n\nEnd recording.\n\nSanguis extremis\n\nDuring the later years of the Great Crusade\n\nKargos\n\nThe crowd sang oh-so sweetly when he broke Neresh's handsome face open to the bone. Their cheers and jeers washed over him in a physical wave, refreshing as a breeze in the bitter jungle heat.\n\nNeresh, to his credit, took two staggering steps back, at first too stubborn to realise he was done. Then reality took hold. He turned with all the grace of a gunship going down in flames, and dropped to the deck, suddenly boneless. Crash went the body, and again the crowd surged.\n\n'Not so pretty anymore, eh?' Kargos grinned down at the dazed warrior with his cheek and eye socket caved in. 'I think your time impressing all those remembrancer artists and poets might be done, brother.'\n\nNeresh's reply was to bring up blood instead of words. It ran down the side of the defeated warrior's face, leaking from his parted lips.\n\n'That's it,' Kargos said cheerily. 'You stay down.'\n\nHe raised his fists, his skin shining with sweat, his knuckles shining with his brother's blood. The sound of the crowd doubled, cheers and jeers alike.\n\n'Champion of the Eighth Assault!' Kargos yelled at the watching warriors, matching them bellow for bellow. 'Champion of the Eighth Assault!'\n\nAt his feet, Neresh started shaking, frothing at the mouth. Kargos danced back from his downed opponent as the seizure took hold.\n\n'Medic!' The call w"}
{"text":"\n'That's it,' Kargos said cheerily. 'You stay down.'\n\nHe raised his fists, his skin shining with sweat, his knuckles shining with his brother's blood. The sound of the crowd doubled, cheers and jeers alike.\n\n'Champion of the Eighth Assault!' Kargos yelled at the watching warriors, matching them bellow for bellow. 'Champion of the Eighth Assault!'\n\nAt his feet, Neresh started shaking, frothing at the mouth. Kargos danced back from his downed opponent as the seizure took hold.\n\n'Medic!' The call went up from the crowd. 'Apothecary!'\n\nKargos laughed, surprised and delighted by the convulsing form on the deck. He was, after all, an Apothecary. He could diagnose what was wrong even without his instruments: he'd pounded a few jags of bone into the poor bastard's brain. Quite by accident, you understand.\n\nWith a grin, he turned to the members of the World Eaters 11th Armoured Company at the edge of the ring, who'd just watched their champion getting his arse handed to him.\n\n'He doesn't need an Apothecary. He needs a Chaplain.'\n\nFerakul, centurion of the 11th Armoured, hammered his gauntlet against the detuned void shield that separated the crowd from the combatants.\n\n'Help him, you miserable bastard!'\n\nKargos licked his iron teeth. 'Help him? How? I'll tell you exactly what's wrong with your hero - he's a weakling piece of shit, just like the rest of you. Flaws like that, they can't be helped.'\n\nThe officer raged, twitching with blood-need and the press of the Nails. He was calling for the void shield to come down, against the rules of the arena. The restraint field held for ninety seconds after every bout. Time enough for a victory lap, though that wasn't the intention. It stopped wrathful spectators leaping in and getting involved if they didn't like the way a bout had gone.\n\nKargos circled the dying warrior, counting down the seconds. Feeling the eyes of Neresh's company upon him, he adopted the most utterly false expression of sorrow ever to grace a human face.\n\n'Neresh, my friend. You look unwell. Whatever's the matter?'\n\nHalf of the crowd roared with laughter. The other half, in anger. But wasn't that just always the way when it came to the arena.\n\nLater, Kharn was less than pleased with him. His captain came to him in the Eighth Assault Company barracks, and Kargos could tell from Kharn's face that it was going to be an unpleasant discussion. Dozens of warriors milled about, cleaning weapons, banging armour back into shape, or resting in states of uneasy hypnosis to counter the pain of the Nails that refused to let them sleep naturally.\n\nThe centurion was in his armour, but Kargos was still dressed in only the undersuit trousers he'd worn while fighting in the pit. His torso was a cartography of scarring, a map of places no reasonable human would want to go.\n\n'You and I are going to talk,' said Kharn.\n\nHe felt his smile drop a notch. 'I'm not sure I like the sound of that, sir.'\n\nKharn fixed him with an unchallenging stare, not much more than a rest of his weary eyes on the Apothecary's features.\n\n'Now, Kargos.'\n\nKargos rose and obeyed. He felt the gazes of the others as Kharn led him from the communal barracks.\n\nThey walked for some time through the Conqueror's spartan innards. The new shipmistress, Flag-Captain Sarrin, was a fiend for efficiency and discipline. Her purview didn't exactly extend to the warriors of the Legion itself - they could scarcely be driven into order even by their primarch, not that Angron troubled himself with such mundanities - but in matters of the flagship, her word was law. The Conqueror would never be what you might call beautiful, lacking the ornate interiors of vessels in III and IX Legion colours. Everything here was cut back to clean functionality and military efficiency, and rotating teams of servitors, underlings and ratings ensured it stayed that way.\n\nKargos had been aboard the Red Tear, Sanguinius' personal warship, half a dozen times on various missions and embassies. All the gold, all the statuary, all the ivory... Kargos couldn't see the point in any of it. Only the Pride of the Emperor, which was more or less Fulgrim's museum dedicated to himself, was worse. The pretension aboard the Pride was unbearable. It leaked out of every polished rivet.\n\nKharn led them to one of the buttressed balconies overlooking the Conqueror's kilometres-long spine. A city's worth of castles and defence towers battlemented the warship's back. Kargos wouldn't exactly call this view beautiful either - he wasn't entirely sure he knew what the word meant, if he was being honest with himself - but at least all of this had a purpose.\n\nKharn, in his armour, towered over the Apothecary. He looked tired, but Kharn always looked tired. Acting as Angron's equerry would exhaust anyone. Even so, Kargos felt a twinge of empathy as the centurion gripped the crew rail and stared wearily out into space. Beneath the ship, the planet Serrion turned in its sedate dance, patches of arable green land and clean expanses of ocean showing through the cloud cover. Anchored off the Conqueror's starboard side, the immense blade of the Red Tear hung in the void, abeam of its sister ship. Emblazoned in unnecessary gold, the sigil of the Blood Angels shone on its spinal battlements.\n\n'You killed him,' said Kharn, staring into space.\n\n'I know,' Kargos replied. 'I was there.'\n\nKharn sighed. 'You know what I mean, fool.'\n\n'I really don't. Explain it to me, sir. Use small words.'\n\n'It wasn't a death bout. It wasn't sanguis extremis.'\n\nKargos sucked in air through his metal teeth. 'It's the arena, brother. We risk death every time we enter the shielded ring. Neresh fought and he died. Did I mean to kill him? No. All right? Does that please you? It wasn't a death bout and I didn't mean to kill him. But do I give a shit that he's dead? Of course not. He knew the risks.'\n\nKharn shook his head. Anger flickered in his eyes, and Kargos could see him holding it back. Kharn was the best of them when it came to that. The centurion lost himself so rarely to the Nails; it was one of the reasons he made an excellent equerry. Kharn's self-control was legendary among his brothers. Conversely, Kargos had often wondered if it was another side of the coin; perhaps part of why his centurion was such a mediocre gladiator. In battle, there was no World Eater he would rather fight beside than Kharn. In the pits, though? Kharn was next to useless. He could never summon the right focus, never muster the necessary emotion. He treated it like a training spar and, inevitably, lost as many bouts as he won.\n\n'Are you angry?' Kargos needled him. 'Why's that, sir? I must really be in trouble.'\n\n'You're an Apothecary.' Kharn spoke through gritted teeth.\n\n'When I'm in the pits, I'm a gladiator. We all are.'\n\n'A brother was dying at your feet.'\n\nKargos snorted. 'The restraint shield was still up. I could hardly run for my narthecium and medicae tools, could I? What did you want me to do? Perform life-saving surgery with my fingernails? He had skull shards in his brain. The bastard was dead, Kharn. I couldn't do anything about it.'\n\n'You laughed at him.'\n\n'Because it was funny!' He mimed Neresh's death spasms, his eyes rolling back in his skull. The effect was somewhat ruined by the fact he couldn't stop smiling as he did it. 'What did you want me to do? Sing a funeral dirge?'\n\nKharn's lip twitched. His hands, gripping the railing, growled with compressing knuckle servos.\n\nKargos stopped smiling then. 'You... really are angry, aren't you?'\n\n'How perceptive of you. I don't care that Neresh died, you erratic idiot. I care about what comes next. What you've provoked.'\n\nKargos was none the wiser. 'A challenge, I expect. Sanguis extremis, probably. I'll have to kill Ferakul. That'll be the end of it.'\n\nKharn massaged his temples. 'Does it never occur to you that your childish spite might have wider consequences?'\n\nHe drew a token from a belt pouch. A disc of red metal, crudely engraved with name glyphs. A challenge disc. Kargos couldn't see the symbols hidden by Kharn's tense grip, but he didn't need to. He knew what the names would be.\n\nThe Apothecary had expected no less. Tokens of grey metal were for pit fights to first or third blood. Red meant a death bout. He felt a shiver of excitement run through him at the sight of the disc. The Nails bit gently in response, a tingling gnaw.\n\n'You don't think I can take Ferakul?' he asked Kharn. 'He'll die twice as fast as Neresh did. The Eleventh Armoured doesn't have anyone who can take me.'\n\nKharn tossed him the challenge disc. Kargos caught it; there were names etched onto both sides. On one side: Ferakul Shen, Kargos Marane. On the other: Jegreth Halas and...\n\n'Ah,' said Kargos.\n\n'Yes,' Kharn agreed. 'Exactly.' He gestured into the void, where the Blood Angels flagship hung in high orbit. 'I've arranged for an intrafleet shuttle. You can go over there and tell him yourself.'\n\nThree hours later, Kargos was aboard the Red Tear, doing just that.\n\n'I may have made a slight tactical misjudgement,' he said to his chain-brother.\n\nNassir Amit raised an eyebrow. 'I do not think I have ever heard you say those words before.'\n\nHe spoke in the tone of someone who was, at this juncture, receptive to something interesting coming along. When Kargos had first found him, Amit had been sitting alone in his arming chamber, using hand tools to scrape service grime from the joints of his red warplate. The compliance taking place on the surface had been tediously bloodless so far, and promised to stay that way. Standing for hours on parade duty had worn Amit down, and the meeting with several remembrancers after it had bored him almost to tears. He'd half-slept through both events, shutting down portions of his mind, running on surface senses while his deeper thoughts slumbered. Another gift of the Space Marine mind.\n\nStill, it had been several days of pomp, ceremony and intolerable posing for paintings by this point. Amit was bored. Ka"}
{"text":"ad been tediously bloodless so far, and promised to stay that way. Standing for hours on parade duty had worn Amit down, and the meeting with several remembrancers after it had bored him almost to tears. He'd half-slept through both events, shutting down portions of his mind, running on surface senses while his deeper thoughts slumbered. Another gift of the Space Marine mind.\n\nStill, it had been several days of pomp, ceremony and intolerable posing for paintings by this point. Amit was bored. Kargos could tell.\n\nThe World Eater relayed the events of his last arena duel with only a little embellishment, and Amit listened without sign of judgement. He was a veteran of the Conqueror's pits himself. He knew the risks as well as anyone.\n\n'I fail to see the source of Centurion Kharn's anger,' the Blood Angel said, once the World Eater had concluded with Neresh's ignoble death. 'If Ferakul wants to face you sanguis extremis, then let it be so. Those are your laws, as I understand them.'\n\n'You understand right. But the challenge came and, ah, now there's the risk of a \"diplomatic incident\".' Kargos flashed him the challenge disc.\n\nAmit tilted his head as he regarded the token. Understanding dawned in his pale eyes, and with it, amusement. His own name was scratched next to Kargos'.\n\n'He wants a chain-fight,' said Amit.\n\n'He can't take me alone.' The World Eater was grinning. 'But his chain-brother is Jegreth from Thirty-Second Company, and Jeg is a dangerous bastard.'\n\nAmit would need to speak with his primarch. Sanguinius had never refused those of his sons that wished to fight in the Conqueror's pits; Amit had been duelling in the arena for almost a decade, and chain-bonded to Kargos for the last three of those years. Whenever their fleets intersected on campaign or while rearming and resupplying, Amit and Kargos bound their wrists together with bloodblessed iron and entered the arena side by side.\n\nThe Ninth Primarch's only request - phrased as a hope, not a mandate - was that his Blood Angels wouldn't participate in death bouts. It was base and crass, he believed, to butcher a Legion-cousin for sport, and a waste to be butchered by one in kind. The days of the Revenants were far behind. The Blood Angels worked to exalt their spirits in order to resist the base urges of the flesh. In this, their primarch was their living example.\n\nAmit refusing hadn't even crossed the World Eater's mind. The two of them had fought alongside one another in three campaigns now, and fought chained in a hundred and six bouts in the pit.\n\nKargos only had one question. It was why he was here.\n\n'What will the Angel say about this?'\n\nAmit thought about that for a moment. 'It depends on whether or not we're the ones who die.'\n\nThe Conqueror had thirty fighting pits, ranging from Arena Seventeen - a converted storage suite that stank of wet corrosion - to the apex of shipboard facilities, Arena Five, a multilayered arrangement of traps and platforms that had once been a live-fire training hall. Kargos was familiar with the virtues and shortcomings of each arena. He'd fought in them year after year, accruing memories of victories in each one, as well as the occasional defeat.\n\nArena Thirty was the newest, and by far the grandest. It had been Captain Sarrin's idea, soon after her assignment to the Conqueror. When she'd learned the World Eaters were preparing to demolish a fighter bay for the novelty of turning it into yet another fighting pit, she'd offered an alternative. Midway along the ship's belly battlements was a reinforced observation dome, originally constructed to be a rare location of luxury aboard Gloriana-class battleships. On the Conqueror's sister ship, the Fidelitas Lex, it was Primarch Lorgar's personal observation chamber, where he was said to sit in meditative repose and gaze into the tides of the warp while the ship was in transit.\n\nOn the Conqueror, it was used by visiting dignitaries with the political clout to parasite their way aboard serving warships, the occasional diplomat from compliant worlds, and ambassadors from Terra sent to monitor the Legion's progress in these later years of the Great Crusade. Lotara had ordered the habitation facilities demolished and any lingering ambassadors evicted to more austere chambers. With that done, she'd turned over the grand space for use in the Legion's gladiatorial games.\n\nThis solved two problems with one solution. Everyone was happy. Well, everyone who mattered.\n\nKargos had been with Kharn and Skane on the bridge when Captain Sarrin was approached with a formal petition of protest by the evicted Terran dignitaries. She listened as she lounged in her command throne, and then, in a tone of amazement that they'd bothered to bring this issue before her, she'd told the leader of the ambassadors that he could shove his petition up his arse and dance a merry jig. If he did this, she swore on her very life that she'd reverse her decision.\n\nHe hadn't taken her up on the offer. His awkward refusal had been a source of some disappointment to Kargos and the others of Eighth Company present at the time, as the sight would've been something to behold. Not long after this incident, Terra's visiting adepts and various other pen-pushers started staying aboard other vessels in the fleet.\n\nKargos had been hoping for Arena Five, with the newly installed spike traps making things interesting during a bout, but he couldn't deny there was a certain grandeur to fighting in Arena Thirty.\n\nHe could hear the crowd out there, that lively susurration, while he readied himself in the shadows of the eastern antechamber. Ah, but he loved that sound, even muffled like this, resonating through the ship's iron bones.\n\nAmit came to his side. The low light reflected from the blade of his gutting sword. They were both dressed only in trousers, but Amit was cold and focused, staring at the sealed iron bars ahead, while Kargos was twitchy with blood-need. The Nails were singing with the same sound as the crowd, hissing right into the core of his mind with the same white noise of anticipation.\n\n'Blood for the Emperor,' Kargos murmured. 'Skulls for the Terran Throne.'\n\nAmit licked his incisors, still staring at the barred door. 'I must admit, when we met in the Uryssian Compliance, I never saw this coming.'\n\nKargos glanced at his chain-brother, and at the length of linked iron that bound them together at the wrists. They had three metres of chain between them, if stretched taut. His left arm was chained to Amit's right, not that it mattered; most Astartes were ambidextrous. They both carried their serrated gladii in their unbound fists.\n\n'I'm glad you're here,' Kargos said. His voice was pitched low, though not through shyness or any sense of unease. If you couldn't be open with your chain-brother, you couldn't be open with anyone. He spoke low only because he was struggling to form words. The Nails were starting to spike. Blood ran from his nose; he could feel it in a warm trickle, creeping towards his upper lip.\n\nAmit's reply was a cold smile, a fanged slice in the angelic mask of his face.\n\nThey listened to the rules of the bout being called out over the chamber's vox-speakers. Instead of hushing the crowd, the announcements had the opposite effect: the World Eaters waiting for the fight to begin started baying and cheering thrice as loud.\n\n'...the challengers, demanding sanguis extremis...' called the announcer, but Kargos was already losing it, losing the threads of his thought, starting to pace like a caged animal. The words out there reached him in here only in fragments of meaning. He heard the pit-names of Ferakul and Jegreth, heard their grievances against him, and knew they'd be in the western antechamber, held back by a similar barred doorway, probably shaky with their own blood-need and feeling the bite of their own Nails.\n\nHe rammed his forehead against the door, letting the pain quiet the Nails for a moment, enjoying the stinging kiss of the cold metal against his skin.\n\nThere was a metallic whine at the edge of his hearing. Annoying. Like tinnitus.\n\n'You are grinding your teeth,' Amit said.\n\nKargos forced his jaws apart. The metal whining stopped.\n\n'Bloodspitter...' the announcer called, 'and the Flesh Tearer...'\n\nMore cheering. Another stab of the Nails. Now the metallic whining was back. Kargos jerked at the sudden fall of Amit's hand on his bare shoulder. They'd fought together too many times for the Blood Angel to give him any speech about restraint, but all the same, Amit's pale gaze held Kargos' flickering eyes.\n\n'Ready?'\n\n'Mnh.'\n\nThey clashed their chained wrists together as the door to their preparation cell rattled upward. Sound poured in, and they poured out. The two warriors moved into the arena as one.\n\nFor the rest of his life, Amit recalled every swing of a blade, every impact of knuckles against skin, every breath and every curse that took place between the four fighters. For Kargos, as was so often the case, the details of that night were a jarring succession of moments, each one bleached red and out of order with the others, each one a flash of discrete sensation. Some of them, he knew, were memories. Some of them, he was sure, were pieced-together impressions pretending to be memories. He wasn't sure there was enough of a difference between the two states to really matter.\n\nTheir primarchs were there. He wouldn't, couldn't, forget that. As he and Amit walked out onto the killing floor of Arena Thirty, he almost trailed off mid-roar at the sight of Angron and Sanguinius side by side in the elevated crowd stands. They towered over their men, staring down at the arena floor.\n\nAngron displayed his usual twitchy indifference, drawn not by the names of those fighting but by the fact there would soon be the scent of blood in the air. When he came to the arena, it was to judge the fighting spirit of his men, never to lend support to one fighter over another. His armoured chest rose and fell"}
{"text":"a Thirty, he almost trailed off mid-roar at the sight of Angron and Sanguinius side by side in the elevated crowd stands. They towered over their men, staring down at the arena floor.\n\nAngron displayed his usual twitchy indifference, drawn not by the names of those fighting but by the fact there would soon be the scent of blood in the air. When he came to the arena, it was to judge the fighting spirit of his men, never to lend support to one fighter over another. His armoured chest rose and fell with his slow breathing, and he gave a faint nod of approval at Kargos' crowd-baiting theatrics.\n\nThe Angel, resplendent in gold, watched with an unreadable expression. His features were carefully blank, and to see no living emotion on his perfect face was a contrast that made him seem monstrous.\n\nCaptain Sarrin was in attendance as well, standing before both primarchs as was her right, as flagship captain. She turned to say something over her shoulder to Angron. The primarch's mashed slit of a mouth curled in a brief, nasty smile.\n\nNone of Amit's Legion were present, only the primarch. The rest of the stands were filled with World Eaters and the Conqueror's human crew, variously applauding, cheering, chanting. Despite the chill of Sanguinius' unnatural stillness, Kargos gloried in the walls of sound pressing upon him from all sides.\n\nAbove them, the stars stretched out in a view that had reduced men and women to breathless awe, and which Kargos paid no attention to whatsoever.\n\nThey approached the centre of the iron deck, where Ferakul and Jegreth waited. Amit greeted them with a salute, fist against his heart. Kargos finally turned from saluting the crowd with his raised blade, greeting his two shirtless opponents with a curt nod.\n\nTradition demanded they salute one another. Ferakul and Jegreth did so. Kargos tossed his gladius up in a rising and falling arc that caught the arena's harsh lighting in spinning flashes, before it slapped neatly back into his palm. The crowd laughed or jeered, to their tastes for Kargos' jestering.\n\nThen he saluted, still smiling. He felt good. Heated and flinchy with blood-need, but good - ready to get this done.\n\nThe four of them turned to the primarchs, raising their weapons and voices in salute, a quartet of unified oath-swearing.\n\n'We who are about to die, salute you!'\n\nAngron banged his fist against his breastplate in reply. Sanguinius did the same, slower, quieter. Expressionless, still. As the crowd surged, Lotara raised a hand, signalling for the first bell.\n\nThe four combatants faced each other. Ferakul looked haunted by Nails-pain, his skin sallow, his nose dripping blood. Jegreth - taller, bulkier - was more in control. His breathing was laboured, like Kargos', but his eyes were clear.\n\nKargos stepped forward, exhaling with dull-eyed hunger. Amit pulled him back at the last moment, preventing a breach of decorum.\n\n'Second bell,' the Blood Angel warned. 'Hold.'\n\nKargos grunted in acknowledgement, stepping back into line.\n\nJegreth smiled at Bloodspitter's slip. 'Sorry you have to die today, Nassir.'\n\n'Tonight, Jeg,' Kargos interjected, 'when your headless body lies cold in the apothecarion, I'll be in my chambers, skinning and sanding down your skull to a smooth sheen. Not as a trophy, you understand. It's my intention, brother, to give it to Captain Sarrin as a decorative pot for her to piss in.'\n\nJegreth shook his head, his lip curling. 'It'll be a pleasure to carve you up, Kargos.'\n\nAmit's voice was the lowest, softest, of all four. 'Don't tell us. Show us.'\n\nThe second bell rang, and with its chime, Kargos' memories descended into red.\n\nThis is what he remembered.\n\nThe feel of a serrated blade grinding against bone. The sound of it, muffled by meat, inside the flesh of a man's body.\n\nThe rattle of chains. The slashing whipcrack of loose iron pulled tight, leashed around a sweating throat. The slow, delicious crackle of abused vertebrae. Only crackling, at first. Then a strained clicking. Then that dry-branch snapping as the intervertebral discs start to give. A little more. A little more. Paralysis awaits, so close, the ultimate infliction upon a struggling foe. The snaps become crunches. The spine begins to crack.\n\nMusic. It's music.\n\nThe sharp whack of skull on skull, the punishing intimacy of a headbutt; front bone thudding into the softer ethmoid bone of the sinuses and the prime target of the nasal cavity, pounding cartilage, breaking blood vessels, disrupting blood flow in the face. Vision and scent both flaring with flaws; the activation of the tear ducts and the running of cranial blood from ruptured vessels.\n\nDistractions. Irritations. Ultimately ignorable.\n\nSword, his brother calls, sword.\n\nHe disarms himself, throwing his blade to Amit. The Blood Angel, beautiful where he is a creature of scars and cranial surgery, spins and cuts with two blades now. Amit dances as he fights. Both blades drive into flesh, birthing a roar that becomes a cry that becomes a grunt. Meat is carved open. Blood runs.\n\nHeat. The stink of another man's breath. The stench of his last meal flavoured by fear and stomach acid. The plunging pressure of teeth, teeth, teeth. The gush of wet life, red and thick and copperishly foul. Swallowing another man's blood, drinking his life down, bearing the sick taste just to see the horror in his eyes as he sees what his enemy is doing. That's his blood, he knows; that's his flesh, his body, between another man's teeth. He is being eaten alive.\n\nThe crunching snap of an elbow to the zygomatic bones of the face. A princely blow, shattering the cheekbone and eye socket. An eyeball hangs, mulched to worthlessness. Laughter is the backbeat, then - laughter and cheering. The sound of the crowd, no longer individual beings but a gestalt, a single god that feeds on blood and sweat and wasted life. It cares not from whence the blood comes, only that it flows in abundance.\n\nAnd it flows, it runs, it sprays. Not jetting with the hyperbole of poor poetry, ripe with symbolism, but the altogether more mundane arc of blood spurting from cleaved arteries. The thick smell of it in the air. The scalding kiss of it on the skin of his face; though it cools fast, in that first split second it's always a splash of boiling water.\n\nDarkness and light, alternating, one and then the other, over and over. The thunder of a skull hammering into the metal deck, stressing the fractures of already breached bone. Crying out, not for mercy but for a brother's aid, because as his skull is ground into the iron, a blade lays open his back with clumsy chops and carvings. The unreal sensation of fingers, curling with hate, reaching into the body, clawing at the spine itself. The knowledge of disassembly.\n\nThe heat of blood-need stealing all words somewhere between the brain and the tongue. Angry words becoming snarls and bestial breathing punctuated by ropes of slaver. Hating so fiercely it breaks the ability to speak.\n\nTonguing the roof of the mouth, forcing the saliva glands to gush, milking one's own mouth to pull forth the flow of poison. Spitting it, missing, hearing the gobbet of saliva hissing on the deck. Trying again, closer this time, not spitting but opening the jaws wide, letting it trickle, letting it flow over the teeth... Drooling acid into the man's quivering, desperate eyes. Licking the eyeball to seal the deal and steal his sight, lathering the window of his soul with corrosive venom.\n\nSide by side with his brother again. Wrapping their shared chain around a single throat, and pulling, pulling. Flailing hands grip weakly and slap uselessly against sweating, bleeding bodies. A mouth opens, becomes a maw, but bites nothing and draws in no air. No bones crackle and snap and crunch this time. This time, they make it last. This time he will die, and it will be the criminals' death, the bloodless death, extinction by strangulation.\n\nThe thud of dead meat onto the arena deck.\n\nThe animal roar of the god-crowd.\n\nThe looks in the eyes of the lords of two Legions: one distantly approving, the other mournfully accepting. One seeing a victory. One seeing failure.\n\nThe picking up, with trembling fingers, of a fallen sword.\n\nThe sawing of a fight-dulled blade through unresisting flesh.\n\nThe raising of a severed head, still dripping blood and marrow. The stink of it, which is utterly familiar but never quite pleasant.\n\nThe honour of fighting at the side of a man he can trust above any other. The gratitude, the fraternal love in weary and bloodshot eyes, after enduring something so few souls ever go through together.\n\nThe lifting of two fists, his own and his brother's, their wrists still bound by a length of bloodstained chain.\n\nThralls bathed them in the aftermath. Apothecaries sealed their wounds. Kargos was still riven by Nails-heat, trembling, sweating. Amit was calm, practically placid, licking his incisors in contemplation. That was always the difference between them after a bout; the Blood Angel's rage faded fast, the World Eater's took forever to swallow.\n\nThey sat opposite each other in the ward chamber, where the wounded of the evening's previous fights were likewise being stitched up, and the dead were harvested for their gene-seed. Amit was a statue as his thralls sponged and cleansed his lesser injuries. He barely flinched as the Apothecaries did the deeper work with their wet, scarlet tools.\n\nKargos had none of his serenity. His scarred lips kept twitching into a self-satisfied sneer, partly from the Nails triggering muscle memory, partly from the sight of Jegreth and Ferakul's bodies on nearby slabs. There they lay, chopped up, cut open. It wouldn't take much effort at all to widen the wounds for gene-seed extraction.\n\nAround them, the grunts and grumbles quieted down, and the bone saws ceased their whining. All eyes turned to the figures entering from the main concourse: two towering icons flanked by their respective sons. All eyes, that is, except Kargos'. He kept watch"}
{"text":"r, partly from the Nails triggering muscle memory, partly from the sight of Jegreth and Ferakul's bodies on nearby slabs. There they lay, chopped up, cut open. It wouldn't take much effort at all to widen the wounds for gene-seed extraction.\n\nAround them, the grunts and grumbles quieted down, and the bone saws ceased their whining. All eyes turned to the figures entering from the main concourse: two towering icons flanked by their respective sons. All eyes, that is, except Kargos'. He kept watching Amit.\n\nHe'd known Amit, back in the days of the Revenant Legion. Not as well as he knew his chain-brother now, but the Revenants and the War Hounds had fought together in several campaigns, forced into collusion by the dismissive grind of Imperial bureaucracy. He'd seen the other man with his lips reddened by gory rituals. He'd seen Amit fighting the way the Revenants fought back then, motivated by a brutality so absolute it held no place for considerations of morality. They achieved victory, they ate the flesh of the dead in their rites of remembrance, and they moved on. No banners raised in glory. No triumphs held in their honour.\n\nAnd back then, both Legions bore reputations that were, at best, stained by their demeanour in war. Both Legions found themselves assigned to some of the Great Crusade's bitterest conflicts, doing their bloody work out of sight and out of mind.\n\nBut year by year, the Legiones Astartes had rediscovered their primarchs. Changes whipped through each Legion in the wake of finding its founding father. The War Hounds became the World Eaters, and they broke their central nervous systems in emulation of their wounded overlord. They beat the Butcher's Nails into their skulls, scarring their minds. No longer ashamed of their blood-soaked past but exulting in it, pissing away their capacity to feel pleasure outside of battle. The World Eaters were a finer weapon than the War Hounds ever were, if the only measure of success was the number of corpses in their wake. They stopped at nothing, shied away from no massacre, cared nothing for guilt or innocence, only the purity of compliance.\n\nAnd that was Kargos now, sat opposite his chain-brother. Twitching with electrical signals worming through his nervous system. A parasite machine squatted in his skull, biting into the meat of his mind. He looked at Amit, watching the way his comrade mastered his rage behind that angelic facade.\n\nThe Revenant Legion hadn't followed customs of barbaric surgeries and adrenal resculpting. They'd been gore-crows and carrion feeders first, but their primarch had inspired them to restraint. Sanguinius had promised them that if they mastered their darkest desires, they would be all the stronger for it. The changes came thick and fast, then. The Legions kept echoes of their fraternal unity, but they drifted to different paths. The Blood Angels were no longer assigned to belligerent shitholes on the galactic map. They were given campaigns where they drenched themselves in glory. They were bestowed with accolade after accolade, while the World Eaters amassed censure after censure - more than they ever had before the Butcher's Nails changed their fate.\n\nLooking at Amit, he could no longer see the angelic ghoul that he'd first met all those decades before. In its place was this meditative creature, capable of absolute violence one moment, possessed of saintly calm the next.\n\nIn moments like these, Kargos hated him. The Nails bit hard at the thought, spiking his blood with narcotic delight. He felt his fingers curl, imagining Amit's throat within his grip.\n\n'Here we go,' Amit said, drawing Kargos back to the present.\n\nThe World Eater turned as the two primarchs drew near. He looked up into their faces; Angron was as twitchy as Kargos himself, while Sanguinius' beatific features were set and resolved. The two brothers couldn't look less alike for children rendered from the same genetic template. Any similarities in bone structure and facial feature were overshadowed by disparities in posture, in scarring, in expression, in bearing. In every way but the basest physicality, they were utterly unalike.\n\nBehind the two brothers stood Kharn and Raldoron, First Captain of the Blood Angels. Kharn looked implacable, but when did he not? Noble Raldoron was choosing not to hide his expression of mild disgust, and Kargos suspected that said a great deal about why the primarchs had come.\n\n'You did well,' said Angron, and as ever, his voice was something between a wheeze and a growl. Talking pained him. Thinking pained him. All his Legion knew it, for they felt lesser echoes of it themselves.\n\nKargos saluted him, fist against his heart, and couldn't help but notice the trickle of silvery spittle at the corner of his father's mouth. He wiped the back of his hand across his own lips, reflexively.\n\nSanguinius didn't commend Amit. The Angel, his wings furled tight to his body, seemed careful not to touch anything or anyone in the chamber. The only contact he made was with his own son, when he closed his golden-gauntleted fingers on Amit's chin, the gesture one of surpassing gentleness. Amit was already looking up at his primarch father. Sanguinius' touch denied him the chance to look away.\n\n'You disappoint me, Nassir.'\n\nAmit nodded in his sire's delicate grip. He made no excuses, didn't play for forgiveness.\n\n'I know, lord.'\n\n'You are an intelligent soul,' Sanguinius said softly, 'so you know what I am going to ask of you. I will not force this upon you, and if you do it, it will not redeem your performance in this wasteful display. But I want you to remember this moment, Nassir. I want you to go forward with this night imprinted upon you. Would you do that for me?'\n\n'Yes, lord.'\n\nThe Angel released the hold on his bloodstained son and said, 'Thank you.'\n\nAmit's pale eyes flicked to Angron, then back to his father. From the impassive expression written on that scar-tissue visage, Angron had already granted his permission for what was about to take place.\n\nTo Kargos, the exchange between Sanguinius and Amit sent uneasy prickles along his skin. If one of Angron's Legion disappointed their primarch, that warrior tended to die. None of this gentle, disapproving acceptance.\n\nAmit rose from the slab with a last glance to Kargos. It was a look that conveyed nothing clearly enough for certainty; Kargos wasn't sure if there were flecks of apology in that momentary contact or not. The World Eater watched as his chain-brother took a surgical blade from one of the watching human medics.\n\nAs Amit walked over to where Ferakul lay, the ward room's harsh lighting flashed off the bone saw in his hand.\n\nIn the end, it wasn't much of a thing. No chanting. No prayers. Like so many elements of Legiones Astartes life, it was an act of human horror reduced to workhorse mundanity. Bone was carved and cracked open. Slivers of grey meat were sliced free and devoured. Blood and fluid marked an unhungry mouth that chewed and swallowed with easy stoicism.\n\nAmit didn't empty the dead man's brainpan. He ate sparingly, pointedly, to absorb memory and sensation, not to saturate himself with Ferakul's entire existence.\n\nKargos watched his chain-brother perform the Revenants' old ritual of remembrance, wondering at the taste of Astartes brainflesh. He'd eaten the minds of slain xenos and countless humans, to learn the secrets of their cultures and their armies, but the idea of consuming another legionary's brain matter made his skin crawl. There was something quietly perverse about that. He didn't want Ferakul's memories in the back of his head. The ache of the Nails was enough of a distraction.\n\nAlthough...\n\nIt could be pleasant to experience the dead fool's final moments in such a way. That might make for a fine and visceral retelling of the tale...\n\nKargos' scabbed lips parted in a smile.\n\nA golden hand rested on his shoulder, gently holding him back. Kargos hadn't even realised he'd started forward. He turned his head, looking from Amit's silent cannibalism and up into the pale eyes of Lord Sanguinius.\n\n'No,' said the Angel. Either he'd read the World Eater's mind or inferred enough of the truth from that single step forward.\n\nTo Kargos' recollection, this was the one and only time in his life he'd met the Angel's eyes.\n\nWhen it was done, paltry little ritual that it was, Kargos and Amit said their farewells. Amit offered no insight as to the sensation of devouring their opponents' memories, and Kargos didn't ask. They shook hands, gripping wrist to wrist, and embraced. It was always a strange sensation for one who lived his life in armour, to be skin to skin with another being. But they were brothers, and the embrace was fierce and sincere.\n\n'Thank you,' Kargos told him. 'Thank you, brother.'\n\nAmit wasn't much of a smiler, but there was warmth in his gaze - in those pale eyes, so like his father's.\n\n'Until next time.'\n\nThey broke the embrace and parted ways. Their Legion fleets parted ways the next day.\n\nI saw him out there\n\nThe last days of the Siege of Terra\n\nThe Gladiators\n\nNassir Amit stood on the Delphic Battlement, watching the horde gathering, horizon to horizon. They were too far away to make out any details through the dust, but that didn't stop him staring. A black smear of innumerable foes, coming together for the last battle. It wouldn't be long now.\n\nSeveral other officers came and went, bearing mute witness to the massing of impossible forces to the north, east and south. Amit acknowledged them with nods or grunts of greeting, but his focus was reserved for the horde out in the wastelands.\n\nOut of his brethren, only Zephon lingered nearby. Either Zephon didn't know him well enough to recognise when he wished to be left alone, or simply didn't care. Either way, Amit kept staring at the horde, his eyes drifting in a slow and endless scan.\n\n'What do you seek out there?' Zephon asked.\n\n'Nothing. I'm just looking.'\n\n'I think not.' There was a cold serenity radiating f"}
{"text":"Amit acknowledged them with nods or grunts of greeting, but his focus was reserved for the horde out in the wastelands.\n\nOut of his brethren, only Zephon lingered nearby. Either Zephon didn't know him well enough to recognise when he wished to be left alone, or simply didn't care. Either way, Amit kept staring at the horde, his eyes drifting in a slow and endless scan.\n\n'What do you seek out there?' Zephon asked.\n\n'Nothing. I'm just looking.'\n\n'I think not.' There was a cold serenity radiating from the other Blood Angel, one that Amit hadn't noticed before. Zephon had been hot-blooded before his injuries years ago, and then miserable company indeed once he'd been crippled. Now, he emanated a chill that was more than simple stoicism. Some new resolve since he'd made his way out of Razavi Bastion and back to the surface. 'You are plagued, Nassir. I can tell.'\n\n'Earlier, in the retreat.' Amit kept staring, kept scanning with his unblinking gaze. 'I saw Kargos out there. I cut his throat.'\n\nZephon rested a hand on his brother's pauldron. The two of them had never been close, even before Zephon's exile to Terra, but Amit's time among the XII Legion pits was legendary among the Blood Angels. A dubious legend, admittedly, but a legend nonetheless.\n\n'I am sorry, Amit. Perhaps it is useless to say, but you did what you had to do.'\n\nAmit finally spared him a glance. 'I'm not sure I did,' he admitted.\n\n'They are traitors,' Zephon replied gently. 'There's no redemption for them. Not for any of them. Not after all this.'\n\n'That's not what I'm saying,' said Amit. He looked back out at the vile horizon. 'I don't think I killed him.'\n\nFive kilometres to the east, with the sutures at his throat still leaking sluggish, clotting blood, a warrior held Kharn's salvaged axe and leaned against the hull of a mangled, mutating Land Raider. He stared at the distant walls of the Delphic Battlement, and he radiated a wounded animal sense of hatred.\n\nHis breathing came in wheezing drags, with his physiology still adjusting to the battlefield tech flesh-fused into the hole where his vocal cords had been. There was hate in his eyes, which was no surprise to any of the warriors near him, but there were also tears. Some thought this was pathetic. Others understood implicitly.\n\nAnother warrior approached him. This one was clad in sacred, rune-marked black, and was responsible for the fact that the other still lived.\n\n'You should rest,' said the Chaplain. 'The battle begins at dawn.'\n\n'No.' The World Eater shook his head. His voice was recognisably his own, but ragged with mechanical reconstruction. 'Fine here.'\n\n'What are you gazing at, my friend?' asked Inzar.\n\nKargos hacked a cough through his new throat. His voice emerged from his mouth as a buzz-saw rasp.\n\n'The enemy.'\n\nPART FIVE\n\nSANCTUM IMPERIALIS\n\nThe final council\n\nLotara\n\nShe woke when the ship called to her. It didn't speak, exactly; it pleaded in a voice of metal under tension, waking her with the protest of tormented steel. Lotara sat up in bed, hearing something of her name in the groaning of the Conqueror's bones.\n\n'Vox,' she called. 'Bridge, this is Sarrin, status report. Vox, damn it, establish bridge link. This is the captain. Status report.'\n\nThe ship shuddered again but the vox stayed dead. It wasn't a gunnery shudder. It wasn't an impact shake. She knew her ship's tremors. It was yet more of the warp's pressure out there, mangling the hull as it tried to get in.\n\n'Lights,' she said into the darkness of her chamber. This achieved exactly as much as her attempts to activate the vox. 'Lights. Lights. Illumination. Oh, bloody hell.'\n\nLotara didn't have the energy for this. She didn't have the energy for anything. She was skeletal with malnutrition and dehydration, and even this paltry anger threatened to leave her breathless. She hailed her attendant servitor with a weak wave of her hand.\n\n'Dress me,' she commanded it. 'Uniform.'\n\nThe servitor, who had once been Console Officer Fourth Class Elsabetta Rahem before her regrettable attempt at mutiny in the starvation riots last month, wasn't standing in its usual place by the sealed window. It was slumped against the wall, demotivated to use Mechanicum terminology, and to use Sarrin terminology, dead as shit. Lotara peered at it through the darkness. Half of its shaved head had merged with the iron wall. The thing's cranium was swollen, spread out, blood vessels threading into the dark metal. Judging by the expression on the servitor's face, Lotara had slept through its screaming. The captain wasn't sorry to have missed that, though she wondered just how long she'd been out, and how deeply she'd been asleep to miss such a thing in her own quarters.\n\nThe blast shield over her viewing window was up, letting in the useless un-light of the warp outside. It rippled, that non-light, those colours that never made anything any easier to see. It pooled and puddled and ran over the surfaces of her chambers.\n\nShe'd sealed the window before she slept. She was certain of it.\n\n'Shipboard chron,' she called out, expecting no answer and getting what she expected. Nothing worked anymore. Nothing had worked for months.\n\nFine, I'll dress myself. She reckoned she could do it without help. Probably. It would take a while and she doubted she could lace up her boots with her shaking fingers, but-\n\nLotara hauled herself out of bed and gave a weak laugh. She didn't need help getting dressed anyway; she'd slept in her uniform again. It was crumpled and dirty, but it was practically parade-clean compared to the bloodstained rags many of the crew wore on duty these days.\n\nLotara took one look at her bedside table, where her canteen stood half-full, along with several foil-wrapped ration wafers, but her throat tightened at the sight. Despite her weakness, she wasn't hungry. Despite her thirst, she didn't think she could face swallowing even a mouthful of tepid water.\n\nThe ship shivered again, and its grinding bones mumbled her name. The Conqueror wanted something from her. She couldn't guess what that might be. When it wasn't trying to please her by bringing back dead crew to haunt her, it was demanding she do something without clarifying what.\n\nLotara rose on unsteady legs and made her way to the door. She heard a scream outside, coming from deeper in the ship, but the corridor outside her chambers was empty. Not so long ago, that would've made her skin crawl. Now, she rubbed her aching temples and started walking towards the rapid transit elevator.\n\nKharn was on the bridge. He stood by her command throne, up on the raised dais, beneath a swarm of malformed brass gargoyles that hadn't been there before. Lotara looked up at the hideous things, sculpted to cling from the ceiling beams, leering down at the bridge crew. Their childlike bodies were mangled together in a hive-like mass embrace, and their many mouths stood open to show rows of sawblade teeth. They looked like they were ready to drag members of the bridge crew up to the ceiling in their greedy little hands, and from the bloodstains on their brass fangs, Lotara suspected that may have happened more than once already. They didn't move as she stared at them. Maybe they wouldn't move at all.\n\nShe resisted the urge to look at Kharn. He wouldn't say anything, he never did, because he was dead and he wasn't there. Instead, she ascended the dais, looking over the skeleton crew still operating on the bridge. Several hundred souls had toiled here at the Great Crusade's height. Attrition, war, time, and the axes of their own Legion had winnowed that number down to threadbare dozens. Corpses lay across the deck where they'd fallen, while the most respectfully treated were piled in loose mounds against the chamber walls. The freshest of the dead were only a few days into their decay, ripening with discoloration, beginning to bloat, attracting fat, shiny flies from who knew where. Plenty of the others were in states of deeper rot, slowly collapsing in on themselves, dry and sunken things like unearthed mummies.\n\nLotara smelled it then, really smelled what the Conqueror had become. The rank copper of blood was nothing new - it was a smell practically boiled into the warship's bones - but now it was coated in the spoiled-meat stink of biological corruption. Almost everyone knew the scent of decaying animal flesh, and it was easy to read remembrancer prose about the reek of war, but something in the human genetic strain rebelled at the smell of rotting people. Lotara's weakened insides coiled up at the richness of that smell. She didn't just breathe it in, it seeped inside her. The smell was part of the ship, part of her uniform, part of her skin and hair, part of the blood that beat through her body. She had a faint fear she would carry this stink inside her for the rest of her life, just waiting to be acknowledged whenever she let herself take those deepest breaths.\n\nThe oculus was open, looking out onto the choked sphere of Terra. Pyrokinetic madness thrashed in orbit around the globe. Colours with no names danced over the faces of the surviving bridge crew. None of the crew acknowledged her. They didn't even seem to acknowledge each other, staying slouched or hunched at their consoles, looking up only in spurts of twitchy, tired unease.\n\nLotara took her throne. No longer did she recline with her boots up on one armrest as she had in her glory days. Now, her diminished form sat crone-like in the chair's bulk.\n\n'Why is the oculus unsealed?' she called.\n\nIn answer, one of the ship ratings transferred a spillage of data to her throne's projectors. The message that beamed into the air before her was from the Warmaster himself - which, Lotara suspected, meant it was from Argonis and Horus may never have even seen the order at all. There was no reason given for why all vessels were to cease closing their eyes to the warp, at least nothing past a screed of brief exhortations to seek the truth in the void's tides, and v"}
{"text":" oculus unsealed?' she called.\n\nIn answer, one of the ship ratings transferred a spillage of data to her throne's projectors. The message that beamed into the air before her was from the Warmaster himself - which, Lotara suspected, meant it was from Argonis and Horus may never have even seen the order at all. There was no reason given for why all vessels were to cease closing their eyes to the warp, at least nothing past a screed of brief exhortations to seek the truth in the void's tides, and various other allusions Lotara wasn't sure she wanted to understand. She certainly wasn't going to meditate on the boiling insanity outside the window. Every sailor knew that to stare into the warp was to risk madness, and now the warp was here, buffeting the armada in orbit and curling its tendrils into the atmosphere of Terra. Changing things. Warping things, one might say. It was literally the most honest way of describing it, after all.\n\nShe could see faces out there in the waves. Not in the way groundlings could make out shapes in clouds, but faces, actual faces, the hollow-socketed visages of men and women she knew. Crew members no longer with her. Legionaries lost in the crusade and the rebellion that followed. She saw Ivar Tobin, her first officer, laughing without eyes, screaming without a tongue, his face the size of the moon as it twisted in the boiling morass. Then he was gone - and honestly, had he ever been there at all? - replaced by an arcing surge of empyric energy, a lashing crescent that cleaved against several of the anchored ships and set the Conqueror shuddering again. Lotara shivered in sympathy with her warship.\n\n'What word from the surface?' she called out, and then added somewhat less hopefully, 'Has there been any communication from the primarch?'\n\nNot that he has been capable of speech for some time. Nevertheless, hope forced the ludicrous question from her lips.\n\nAgain, the remaining crew replied without words. Several of them keyed in commands at their stations and a huge holo-projection of the Sanctum Imperialis flared into being in the air above the command deck. Runic signifiers showed the rough disposition of the Warmaster's forces. The horde was mustering before the walls of the final fortress.\n\nThe geography of the war's last front line was deceptively simple. That was good, because it was almost over, and Lotara was tired in every way it was possible to be tired. She ached to order the ship out of orbit, setting sail for the deep void and away from... from all this.\n\nShe could do it, couldn't she? Just raise her voice and-\n\nThe hololith screeched with visual static and realigned. She blinked and focused again on what lay before her.\n\nThe scratchy view of the wastelands before the Delphic Battlement showed hundreds of runic markers delineating warbands and regiments and groupings of the Warmaster's forces, a mess too disorganised for any cohesive identity. They mustered before the vast curtain wall surrounding the Sanctum Imperialis, encircling the Delphic Battlement and the final fortress that it protected.\n\nThe Sanctum Imperialis was void-shielded beyond mortal comprehension and machine-spirit cogitation (Lotara had casually tossed a few orbital volleys in that direction herself earlier on in the siege, out of frustrated curiosity) but it was weakest in the west. That's where the horde mustered in greatest numbers. In the west, the Delphic Archway was the wall's most heavily defended location - and its principal point of vulnerability. There, the fighting would be thickest, layered with defenders reinforcing the one grand opening in their final wall. There, the sweat of the defenders' desperation would be at its bitterest, and there, the blood would run deepest.\n\nOnce the horde overran the battlement - and they would, swiftly; Captain Sarrin hardly needed a tactical advisor to see that - the Royal Ascension lay open. It was a kilometre-long avenue, steadily rising on stairs large enough to accommodate the tread of Titans, leading to...\n\nShe watched it, shimmering on the hololith. There was the Eternity Gate, at the very end of the Royal Ascension: the doorway into the Emperor's castle. The Sanctum's walls couldn't be brought down. The gate could.\n\nFor now, it stood open, facilitating the movement of soldiers and materiel from the Sanctum to the battlement. When the enemy broke through the battlement, though... then it would seal closed, denying the horde.\n\nThe final doorway. After they tore the Eternity Gate from its hinges, it would be done. This miserable war would be over at last.\n\nLotara watched the simulations playing out, the runes dancing their logistical dances, playing out the final act of the Emperor's end. Some of the simulations took only hours to resolve to their inevitable conclusion, several took between one and three days, and one outlier took four. It didn't matter. The outcome never changed.\n\nClose now, she thought. So close.\n\nOut of the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Terra once more. It was something she tried to avoid, for every time she looked upon the cradle of humanity, she was confronted again by the fact it was dead.\n\nNot dying. Dead. Even with access to the Mechanicum's fragmented mastery of Dark Age atmospheric processors and terraforming machine-cities, Terra was dead. There wasn't enough organic matter left to start a chain reaction of re-terraforming. Whole regions would be soaked in radiation for centuries to come. The last ocean, which had already been little more than a shrinking sea after the resource wars of the Age of Strife and the Emperor's Unification, was now a jellied expanse of dust-thickened sludge.\n\nHorus' war had destroyed Terra's last dubious claims of self-sufficiency. Lotara had reviewed the figures and images herself on a subscreen, with the aid of a Mechanicum adept, noting the millions of underground fungal farms and algae reservations that no longer existed, scrubbed from existence on every continent by bombardment or the invading hosts, no longer providing even a beggar's portion of the sustenance required by Terra's teeming population. From the moment the Emperor launched the Great Crusade, the Throneworld had fed desperately off the Imperium's new worlds. It devoured their resources with the geared jaws of the Imperial war machine, placating the citizens with glories while draining them to feed its ceaseless expansion.\n\nBut if the Imperium somehow survived the last days of this war, all pretence would be gone. The parasitic fever of Terra's malfunction would be laid bare. Terra would squat at the heart of its empire, a grey cancer feeding on sacrifice, drawing in food, water, iron, faith, hope... All of it, in an endless suction to feed a planet that wouldn't admit its time was done.\n\nThese were not pleasant thoughts.\n\nShe started cycling through intercepted transmissions, using the controls in the arm of her throne to scroll through the last few hours' worth of intelligence harvested from the surface by the Conqueror's vox-leech systems. One of them, among the latest, was marked by a screed of Cthonian runes that caught her eye.\n\nShe keyed in the access code. The hololith flickered. Flashed. Changed. Resolved.\n\nNow it gleamed an anaemic blue, even less substantial, and within its misty layers, figures and faces formed. A great ring of figures comprising an ethereal conclave. It took Lotara several seconds to realise just what she was looking at.\n\nShe knew many of these warriors, if not personally then by sight and reputation. Fafnir Rann was there, as was Sigismund, both sparing precious minutes away from the defence of their respective bastions. They were ghosts of ghosts, holo-ing in to the gathering rather than being physically present. Others were slightly clearer: the crippled Captain Zephon stood with Captain Amit, in a loose line of Blood Angels leaders. Several Imperial Fists and White Scars commanders stood nearby, among a cluster of several hundred Imperial Army officers.\n\nNo one smiled. No jests were told. Everyone bore witness. In the gathering's very centre, the primarch Sanguinius oversaw a shifting, evolving map of the Inner Palace. The image of the Sanctum Imperialis Palatine District glowed with unsteady stoicism at the hololith's heart.\n\nLotara swore softly. They'd sliced into the very core of the defenders' transmissions. This had come from the keep atop the Delphic Battlement - it was the bloody war council at the last wall. She checked the archival data on her throne: it was scarcely half an hour old.\n\nFascinated, she watched as the map refined itself through pitches and zooms. Closing in on the Palatine Ring; the embattled bastions surrounding the Sanctum itself. Closing in further, splitting into cascading sub-images, bringing up the wastelands of rubble and corruption between the bastions, severing off and codifying embattled regions on the periphery, where significant Imperial forces still held out. And this was nothing of a bigger picture, barely a slice of a slice. How many millions of combatants were still fighting their own wars in the Outer Palace, and how many billions were spread across the rest of Terra, waging their own campaigns?\n\nThe scale of such considerations was beyond her - beyond anyone except perhaps the cogitational minds of the Warmaster and Rogal Dorn - but she found her thoughts drifting often to those far from the final fortress, engaged in their own life-and-death battles. Every one of those wars mattered as much as the assault on the Delphic Battlement, for every second they held out kept more of the Warmaster's forces from gathering at the final battle.\n\nThis was Dorn's final gambit. The Delphic Battlement was the Sanctum's curtain wall; if it fell, there was nothing left. The way was open for the Warmaster to stake his claim, to walk right up to the Eternity Gate.\n\n'Captain Rann.' Sanguinius beckoned.\n\nThe image of Fafnir Rann addressed the conclave, as Bhab Bastion fl"}
{"text":"e of those wars mattered as much as the assault on the Delphic Battlement, for every second they held out kept more of the Warmaster's forces from gathering at the final battle.\n\nThis was Dorn's final gambit. The Delphic Battlement was the Sanctum's curtain wall; if it fell, there was nothing left. The way was open for the Warmaster to stake his claim, to walk right up to the Eternity Gate.\n\n'Captain Rann.' Sanguinius beckoned.\n\nThe image of Fafnir Rann addressed the conclave, as Bhab Bastion flared an aggravated, besieged orange on the projection table.\n\n'My Lord Dorn believes we can hold Bhab for another seven to nine days, depending on variables that have no bearing at this council. He has charged me to answer your request, Lord Sanguinius - as matters stand, we cannot reinforce you. We are still encircled and cannot lift the siege.'\n\nSanguinius nodded. Plainly, to Lotara's eyes, he'd expected no less. 'Thank my brother for his candour, Captain Rann. And my thanks to you, for your report.'\n\n'My Lord Dorn further requested that if you are able to send reinforcements to us in the defence of Bhab, that you do so at once, provided it does not endanger the Delphic Battlement.'\n\nSanguinius shook his head, his golden hair framing kindly, weary features. 'Even with the forces garrisoned here, we number scarcely seventy thousand. Every soul is needed on the wall. Tell my brother so, and offer him my regrets.'\n\n'In the Emperor's name,' Rann replied, and made the sign of the aquila over his breastplate. His hololith flickered out.\n\nThe mountain of the Astronomican gleamed a muted white with its temporary reprieve, but it was practically alone in its purity. The image of the Dark Angel, Corswain, was a scratchy and indistinct ghost of a thing, the connection savaged by distance.\n\nHis news was no better for the defenders. They expected a renewal of the assault on their mountain fastness any hour now. Any diminishment of their thin forces would mean the loss of the Astronomican, reclaimed so recently, and with such unlikely fortune.\n\n'Lord,' Corswain said directly to Sanguinius. 'I will ask you, nonetheless. Would you have us abandon the mountain and fight our way to you? If you order it, it shall be done.'\n\nSanguinius shook his head at the Dark Angel's offer. 'No, paladin. Hold the Astronomican at all costs. We need the beacon relit, for by your light will the Thirteenth Legion find its way home.'\n\nCorswain gave a scratchy reply, his tone hesitant. 'Even if Lord Guilliman and the Thirteenth reached the system's edge this very hour, the Ultramarines would be too late to aid you.'\n\n'Though we will fall here, nephew, reinforcements may yet arrive in time to aid the rest of you, ensnared in your own wars. If we are foremost in your thoughts, then light the beacon to honour our memory. There could be no more fitting funeral fire.'\n\nLotara swallowed at the resolve in the Great Angel's voice. At the acceptance. How noble he sounded, even in defeat.\n\nNext was the Kishar Colosseum, endlessly reinforced by Rogal Dorn and used to house a tide of refugees from across the Inner Palace. On the map it gleamed a hopeless red. The Imperial Army colonel overseeing its defences gave his negative report while a field medic was bandaging his face. They expected to lose the last of their held ground by sunset tomorrow.\n\nSanguinius gestured to another officer, a human commanding the Sarku-Lyat Concourse and its several hundred capillary avenues. Sarku-Lyat was a district once home to millions of souls fortunate (and wealthy) enough to live within the Inner Palace. Now it throbbed black, with the topographic scans of its surrounding landscape riven by the craters of unmatched devastation. It hadn't been orbital bombardment that annihilated the Sarku-Lyat District; it was the death of one of Horus' warships from before the Ultimate Wall even fell.\n\nLotara had watched it die; blasted from the sky, the XV Legion battleship Royal Deshret had plunged through the atmosphere, picked apart by the Palace's defensive aegis to no effect, smashing down and ending almost twenty million lives in the time it took to blink. More earthquakes. More dust. More of the blinding and deafening same, another punctuation mark in the death of the planet.\n\nThe Army officer in charge of the fighting around Sarku-Lyat's ruins couldn't maintain a clean vox-link to the council; she sent only a brief text missive citing that her forces had no way of leaving their entrenchments and reaching the Sanctum.\n\nAnd on it went. Every bastion, every sector, every district of the Inner Palace was under siege, at the heart of their own wars. Most couldn't even muster a vox-link at all, and those that could begged for aid that couldn't come. The Sanctum had no way of answering any of their increasingly desperate calls for reinforcement.\n\nThe defenders were locked into place. The board was set for the last moves of the game. As she stared at them, wondering why they were there, she asked herself the very same thing.\n\nWhy was she here? Why were any of them here?\n\nWhy had she followed Horus and Angron into this war?\n\nAh, but it had all seemed so righteous at the time. It had all seemed so necessary. World after world heaving with unfair taxation. The Emperor losing control over the Great Crusade, as adepts and ministers and bureaucrats began to assume mantles of leadership across the emerging Imperium. Not that Lotara or her primarch cared for the suffering worlds, but Horus had. Horus was the best of them all. She was content being an instrument of war. Her place was to serve, to hunt, to kill. She was a blade to be wielded by righteous hands, and no hands were more righteous than the Warmaster's.\n\nThen the whispers had begun. Peace became more than a laughably distant goal at the end of the Great Crusade - it became a distinct possibility, then an inevitability: something that the humans serving in the expeditionary fleets would actually live to see. What, then, of the Legiones Astartes? What use was the perfect warrior in an age of peace? There was talk of culling, of execution, even of extermination. The very warriors that built the Imperium with boltgun and blade, the soldiers Lotara had served alongside for all her adult life, grew restless and uneasy. Word filtered through the crusade's scattered fleets. Word of Terran plans, about betrayals, about treacheries whose wheels were already in motion. Word of weaknesses bred into the gene-seed. Word of a new, peaceful age requiring no soldiers, no warriors, no sailors in the stars.\n\nThen what of the mortals that fought by these warriors' sides? Were they, too, stained? Coloured by association? Would they be rewarded for their conquest of the galaxy, or pastured off to exile worlds, there to die out in the void-black quiet as the Imperium's secret shame over its bloody-handed past? Would they be destroyed upon returning to Terra, blasted out of the Throneworld's skies as their ships returned to humanity's cradle?\n\nA similar dissolution had happened before. It was in the archives. The armies of Unification, the Thunder Warriors, the hosts that had conquered Terra in the Emperor's name. Dead. Gone. Slaughtered at the Emperor's word, as reward for their service to His crown. Reports of genetic instability in the proto-Astartes conflicted with analyses that they had been executed en masse by the Ten Thousand, the Emperor's own Custodians.\n\nNo one knew what to believe about any of this. Lotara certainly didn't. And the Emperor, retired to Terra, refused to enlighten any of those that begged Him for answers. To their pleas for the truth, He returned only silence. Even when the Warmaster beseeched Him for answers. Even His own son earned only cold silence. What kind of man was ruling over them? What kind of king abandoned His subjects instead of guiding them with His rule?\n\nFor some, the years of these whispered pressures and outlandish accusations was enough. Lotara hadn't needed much convincing, truth be told. Taxations and plots of extermination and whatever else - all of it had meant little to her.\n\nThe truth, the truth that Lotara could admit to herself as she sat with her back to the wall, struggling to breathe in the tainted air of her twisted warship, was that she'd sailed with the Warmaster because she wanted to.\n\nWhen Angron had declared for Horus, committing his Legion against the Emperor, Lotara swallowed her quiet doubts without much strife. What was she going to do? Praise the name of a distant monarch and turn her back on the men and women she'd bled alongside for her entire life? Abandon command of her beloved Conqueror for the pathetic nobility of swearing her allegiance to a failed Emperor?\n\nHorus was the golden one, the general of generals, the Warmaster of the Imperium. Serving him was an honour, and to be trusted by him with a rank such as hers was a pleasure that defied words. For some, even that would be enough, but Lotara chose to sail with his forces because her life was with them. She lived and breathed for the warriors of the World Eaters Legion. For years she'd bled alongside them, she'd guided them from orbit and laid waste to the worlds that defied them. She'd devoted her life to their principles and purpose. She respected them, she loved them, and she thrived in the respect they accorded her.\n\nMore than anything else, she trusted them.\n\nThem. Not the Emperor. She trusted Kharn and Kargos and Angron and Horus himself. She trusted her own crew, and the other captains in her fleet. And if she were to die, let her die fighting beside those she loved and trusted. No finer fate than that, surely.\n\nSurely, she thought with a weak exhalation. Unconvincing, even in the privacy of her own threadbare thoughts. Surely.\n\nTerra turned out there, a brown-and-grey jewel of such dubious value now. Already dead, already choked by the poison of ambition, yet the warped void still clutched at the globe. As if there was anything left t"}
{"text":"sted her own crew, and the other captains in her fleet. And if she were to die, let her die fighting beside those she loved and trusted. No finer fate than that, surely.\n\nSurely, she thought with a weak exhalation. Unconvincing, even in the privacy of her own threadbare thoughts. Surely.\n\nTerra turned out there, a brown-and-grey jewel of such dubious value now. Already dead, already choked by the poison of ambition, yet the warped void still clutched at the globe. As if there was anything left to strangle.\n\nHer mind was drifting, a disassociation brought on by her weakness and dehydration. She knew it well, by now. Lotara swallowed through the thickness of her throat and forced her attention back to the hololith.\n\nAt the end of the ad-hoc council, there was no grand speech to motivate them. Sanguinius ordered the officers out onto the wall, to return to their forces. Maybe months ago these human defenders might have emanated an aura of unease, or even had the consumptive marks of fear showing on their faces, but the war had bleached them of such things. These were the survivors; the fortunate ones; the ones that had endured all else. They had seen and survived too much to shake in their boots now their back was to the final wall.\n\nSomething stirred inside her. Something atrophied and slow, entombed in the silty hole where her conscience used to be.\n\nIt should be pathetic, seeing them like this. They should stink of desperation, trapped in their last besieged fortresses, all of them encircled by the Warmaster's horde, all of them slowly starving. It should be hilarious, listening to them beg each other for reinforcements that couldn't come.\n\nBut it's not.\n\nHow brave they looked, driven over the edge of exhaustion, yet still standing. Pressed back and back, forced to the very last walls, ready to stand and die for what they believed in. It didn't matter that the empire they were fighting for was a construct of lies and occluded truths; they'd endured half a year of horror and grinding onslaught and planetary death, in the name of loyalty. In that light, even their naivety was more tragic than laughable.\n\nShe had the sudden, fiercest urge to be there with them. Those exhausted, emaciated, doomed bastards. She wanted to stand with them, and...\n\nAnd what? It's too late for regrets now.\n\nLotara shivered, and if the discomfort didn't quite pass, it at least faded. She found herself looking about for Kharn, but he was nowhere to be seen.\n\nThe fleetwide vox came to life a moment later, needing to awaken through protracted birth cries of static. The voice of Horus Lupercal crackled across the Conqueror's bridge, as it echoed across every command deck in the armada. He spoke only six words, but for his loyal forces, it was the most they'd heard from the Warmaster in months.\n\n'The final assault begins at dawn.'\n\nLord of the Red Sands\n\nAngron\n\nHe hunts. He hunts. He hunts.\n\nThe end is coming. This is a thing he knows, something real inside a mind sauteed in unreality. The end is coming. It is hours away, mere hours, though the concept of time in those terms is not something he understands as he once did. The end is coming soon though, he knows that, and so he hunts and hunts not just to sustain his strength but to stave off dissolution.\n\nHis flesh is no longer meat, and the metaphysical corpus that makes up his muscles no longer tires. His breath is no longer air, no longer a thing he draws in to speak and suspire. It's a sucking gust of blood-scent and ash-stink, and a heaving exhalation of the heat-mirage that dances above an open furnace. Weariness is a memory, dimmed as if a century has passed; something he can no longer conceive of, let alone feel.\n\nAnd yet.\n\nDissolution pulls at him. In the moments he doesn't fight, in the heartbeat seconds he isn't hunting, he feels the atoms of his essence loosening. They threaten to fly apart, drifting away on the wind.\n\nHe accepts this. He doesn't know how this can be, but he accepts it, the way a child accepts their parents know best, the way a man or a woman accepts that they need to eat and breathe and sleep. It is the way of things.\n\nThere are quiet moments, though. More of them, lately. They strike him when he turns the bleeding spheres he has for eyes towards the walls of the final fortress. They come when he sees the angelic bodies in red ceramite scattered across the dead earth. In these moments, rare but not as rare as they once were, he knows that he wasn't always this way. Before he was this being, he was another. A weaker one, a creature limited by sinew and bone. A creature - no; a man, I was a man, wasn't I? - enslaved to a cycle of cranial pain.\n\nBut that was then, and this is now. He is no longer that being. He is no longer allowed to be that being. Something else, something as immense as a storm eating the entire sky, and still bigger, still more, won't let him be what he once was.\n\nInsofar as he is capable of identity, he is the Lord of the Red Sands, an it as much as a he in what remains of his mind. These flashes of awareness linger long enough to tease an awakening, only to submerge into the boiling soup of his forethoughts. Back to the rage, back to the hunt, back to slaughtering to ward off dissolution.\n\nHe hunts. He hunts. He hunts. He falls from the sky upon convoys of refugees and reinforcements, cratering the ground in their midst and reaving through flesh and bone and iron and rock, flavouring the air with sprays of blood, darkening the ground with running life. Somehow, this is holy; he knows not how or why, only that it is. It's a prayer to a god he doesn't know at the heart of a faith he doesn't feel, and his massacres are prayers that rise to the highest heavens.\n\nHe knows the others, the weaker ones, need him for the last assault. Even this shredded realisation is more focus than he has possessed in an incalculable span. It is another change, another breath of difference as the end draws near. The weaker ones need him. Yes. Their voices rise in his honour, akin to prayers themselves.\n\nAnd how strange that is. Even through the anger that comprises almost all he's allowed to feel, there's a strangeness in the way they exalt him, these mortal berserkers, the ones that call themselves his sons. The ones that seek the same peak he has reached. He cannot stay with them for long, though. He has to hunt. He has to rend and break and carve and kill. Each time he tries to remain in their mustering horde, the pain of dissolution begins to draw his form apart. Each time he has advanced on the final wall - the Delphic Battlement, it is the Delphic Battlement - he has slowed, weakened and staggered... The threat of dissolution becomes imminent, and some invisible repulsion keeps him back. It rakes the un-flesh away from whatever transmuted matter his bones have become. Screaming, he flees back to the hunt.\n\nHe cannot attack the final fortress. Not yet. His sons, in all their weakling corporeality, will have to take the wall. And then... and then...\n\nWings.\n\nWhite wings.\n\nAn angel of gold.\n\nYes. Yes. What a death it will be. The shedding of such blood. The taste of it, burning upon the tongue. The strength of it, flowing through him. Stinking acid runs in stalactites of drool from his uneven maw at the promise of the angel's coming death.\n\nKill him.\n\nYes. He will. But he can't, not yet, not now.\n\nKill him for me.\n\nThe creature that was once Angron shakes its monstrous head, dreadlocks of poisonous technology rattling with the motion.\n\nKill him for me, Angron.\n\nWho speaks? Who says these things, conjuring meaning inside the boiling stew of his thoughts? The daemon, the Lord of the Red Sands, always hears the melded and meaningless voices of its sons in its broken mind, but this is no child at the feet of its father. This is a command, a long-felt urge at last given voice.\n\nThe ground shakes as the daemon launches skyward. The air cracks with the rupture of the sound barrier.\n\nWho speaks? He sees no likely soul in the sky, he sees no speaker on the teeming ground.\n\nKill him for me, Angron. Break him on the steps of the final fortress and throw open the Eternity Gate. I will deal with our father. All you must do is kill our brother.\n\nThese words feel... familiar. He has sensed them a thousand times, perhaps ten thousand, but only as part of the primal urge running through his bloodstream. Nevertheless, he knew them. He felt them. Now he hears them.\n\nAnd in that moment of connection, as the speaker reaches out, Angron reaches back. It is not a gesture of love on the daemon's part, nor one of trust, but one of clawed caution. The Lord of the Red Sands reaches back, and it sees, and it knows the truth of the speaker's soul.\n\nThe speaker believes he is a man. He believes he is Angron's brother Horus. These things are not so. The speaker believes he is destined for a throne, and while the claim of a fated throne may be true, he is not a man, not anymore, and he is hardly even Horus. Angron was remade, the stuff of that primarch's molecules converted through transmutational, metaphysical fusion. But this man, this speaker, has undergone no such change. He has been hollowed out. He is a shell holding four essences: a puppet capering at the behest of four cosmic puppeteers. He is a lingering delusion of identity over a hole in reality.\n\nHorus? thinks the Lord of the Red Sands. It is the daemon's first, purest thought in so very, very long.\n\nYes, brother. The Emperor is weakening. Magnus wears away at the invisible shield. I make ready for my landing. It will not be long now. You are my herald, Angron. Lay waste to the Delphic Wall. Rip the white wings from Sanguinius' back and tear open the Eternity Gate. Kill the Angel and you will be sated. I promise you this.\n\nThere is more, the voice says more, but the meaning fades away. It's lost again in the churning thresh that passes for Angron's cognition. The Lord of the Red Sands follows the currents of life that he can sense "}
{"text":"agnus wears away at the invisible shield. I make ready for my landing. It will not be long now. You are my herald, Angron. Lay waste to the Delphic Wall. Rip the white wings from Sanguinius' back and tear open the Eternity Gate. Kill the Angel and you will be sated. I promise you this.\n\nThere is more, the voice says more, but the meaning fades away. It's lost again in the churning thresh that passes for Angron's cognition. The Lord of the Red Sands follows the currents of life that he can sense but not see and dives groundward - he hunts to feed both himself and the god of blood and war that he worships without realising.\n\nIt is another convoy, though he understands this only in the most basic sense that here is prey, and prey is to be hunted. The defenders fight him, seeking to drive him back with a storm of lascannon fire, volkite beams and a hail of bolts. This achieves nothing, but it hurts, and pain is a curious thing to an immortal. The Lord of the Red Sands feels pain just as a mortal does - no blade driving into his mutagenic flesh hurts any less than it would were he still a man - but he has an infinitely deeper well of endurance. His nerves fire, and the pain engine in his brain is kindled to shrieking life by such stimuli. But the pain never stops him the way it would overwhelm a living, reasoning being aware of the potential of its own destruction.\n\nHe sweeps left and right with his black blade, all previous mastery of weapons denied to him by his cognitive alterations and wholly irrelevant now anyway. His size and strength banish all need for duelling; swordplay is a concern beneath his baresark mind.\n\nHe hunts. He hunts. He hunts. To flee from him is to be cut down by the horde that surges in his shadow. To face him is to die.\n\nCorporal Marlus Zeneer is thrown into the air, his lasrifle slipping from his grip. He sees his fate several seconds before plunging into it, and his body locks in screamless horror at the open jaws beneath him. Then everything is wet, red and searingly hot. Pliant walls clamp against him, crushing the breath from his body, snapping the bones of his shoulders. His arms, outstretched ahead of him and further down into the lightless black of Angron's throat, begin to dissolve in the corrosive slime coating the monster's gullet, and Zeneer is still alive, he isn't dead, the flesh of his arms is darkening and bubbling and popping and the pain is enough that his scream hits such a pitch, it becomes silent. All the while, he's sliding down into the blacker confines below, squeezed by the walls of the creature's body. Down he goes, into a mad god's reconstruction of a digestive tract, where the bones of men and women he knew well are waiting for him.\n\nCorporal Marlus Zeneer has seven more seconds of unwanted life, finding himself in a cauldron of protoplasmic digestive juices. He sinks below the surface, comes up once as a shrieking red skull with the flesh sloughing from his bones, and then sinks a second time. This time, for good.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands is aware of this vile drama only in the sense of its own distracted satisfaction. Angron keeps hunting. Soon, the silent and unseen shield will come down. Soon, he will advance upon the Delphic Battlement. Until then, he hunts.\n\nHe hunts. He hunts. He hunts.\n\nTomorrow, everyone is mortal\n\nZephon\n\nDon't look up.\n\nThe order passed through the defenders, sometimes spoken, sometimes whispered. An order that was easy to give and impossible to follow. Whatever kaleidoscopic unrest had started in orbit was putting roots down into Terra's atmosphere. It affected the ash in the air, thinning it, sucking it up, discolouring what remained. It turned the thinned dust into a stinking mist of faint colours that had no names.\n\nAs the sky cleared to offer that hazy revelation of mother-of-pearl madness, the stars returned to the night-time heavens. With the return of the sky came a return of the horizon, and a wider view of the wasteland around the final fortress. For many of the defenders, ignorance had been bliss. The dust had occluded so much of the torture that Terra was undergoing, and masked the odds against the men and women that now massed on the last wall. Zephon felt their despondency as a physical thing, a miasma in the air. It weighed him down as he walked the ramparts.\n\nThe keep above the Delphic Archway was a nexus of weary industry. Armoury thralls laboured with hand tools, patching battleplate in dire need of replacement instead of mere repair. Servitors distributed crates of ammunition from the cache chambers established by Rogal Dorn in readiness for these last days. Hammers struck in ceaseless arrythmia. Welding torches crackled and sparked. Autoloaders clanked as shells were dragged through the guts and up into the throats of turrets. Ceramite warplate, once a proud cavalcade of reds, whites and yellows, was now medallioned with scars and greyed by smears of armour cement. Injuries were stitched, stapled and sealed behind bandages. Pain was banished by narcotic suppressives. Troops on the battlement checked and rechecked weapons, while above them, the sky undulated in the thrashing dance of a semi-sentient pantheon.\n\nAnd, in quiet corners where loyal human defenders gathered out of sight of the Astartes, prayers were offered up to an absent God-Emperor.\n\nTomorrow, every soul capable of wielding a weapon would be on the wall.\n\nHundreds of Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and White Scars shared the space of what had once been a memorial to heroes of the Unification Wars. Now, it was filled to bursting with warriors undergoing final preparations, each one ringed by slaves and servitors. Every chamber and hall and corridor of the Delphic Keep heaved with similar activity, and it was mirrored all along the battlement itself, under the tortured sky. Most Legion officers were still in the keep, after gathering for Sanguinius to give them their last orders.\n\nIt was a strange feeling, to be surrounded by so many souls, yet to feel isolated from all of them. Everyone was at the very edge of exhaustion. Everyone was fighting their own war now. Orders and organisation meant very little. The two armies would lock together and grind each other down until one could no longer hold its ground. There was, the Blood Angel had to admit, a certain comfort in the barbaric simplicity of it all.\n\nWhen it came time for his own preparations, he headed into the keep, where his thralls awaited him. Zephon stood with his head lowered, his arms outstretched. A common posture for Astartes to adopt while being armoured and attended, unknowingly mirroring the sacrificial symbolism of the ancient Catherics' nailed demigod. He said nothing as his thralls did their meticulous work, rinsing his clotted wounds with sterilised sponges, then machining his armour into place. They dressed him, plate by repatched plate, drilling the links into his body, binding the connection spikes with the black carapace implanted beneath his skin. Where he had no skin, where his bionics offered only Dark Age compound metals instead of flesh and bone, his armour was bound through adaptive magnetics and secondary sockets.\n\nIt was nothing his servants hadn't done a thousand times before. Their footsteps echoed softly in the chamber, their lowered voices made an undercurrent hum. Familiar sounds, familiar feelings. Even the sounds outside the chamber were unchanged from when these rituals had been performed in the past: the muffled din of other warriors being armed and armoured, the fainter grind of war machine engines and the earth-shaking rattle of Titan foot-treads, muted and muffled by distance.\n\nThis was the sound of war, no different from the gunfire and crashing of blades yet to come. This was the verse before the chorus.\n\nZephon listened to the war's familiar song, and to his thralls he looked no different than he ever did. They couldn't see inside his skull, where one new thought clung to the sides of his mind, spawning adjacent notions.\n\nHe was going to die.\n\nAcceptance of one's death - the expectation of it and the preparation for it - was hardly alien to the Legiones Astartes mindset. They were a species born and remade to die in battle. Death in war was a certainty; the only doubt was on which battlefield they would take their final breaths.\n\nBut to know of death's certainty was one thing; to confront its imminence was another. He would die today, and if not today then tomorrow. Knowing the road of his existence was all but run brought curious clarity. He saw the crucial beats of his life's path again and again, playing out in his mind with a sense of introspective acceptance. No regret threatened to bubble up and swallow him, nor was there any sense of sorrow. He reflected upon the choices and deeds that had brought him here, not with melodramatic intensity but a sensation of naked analysis.\n\nThe truth is, I died long ago.\n\nAnd not just one death. He'd died his first death when injury no longer let him serve in the Legion. A mental death, then - a death of the will and his sense of self. Then he'd died at Gorgon Bar, saving the interrogator Ceris Gonn. A physical death, the falling debris forcing him into suspended animation on the edge of mortality.\n\nNeither death was in battle. Neither was glorious. Neither was worthy of remembrance. Now he lived again, resurrected both times by Arkhan Land, first with the gift of these rare bionics, then with the risk of reawakening from stasis, only days ago.\n\nHe did not know how he felt about any of this. Distractedly philosophical, he supposed.\n\nAs Shafia patched several fibre-bundle cables of armour musculature in place around one bicep, he caught sight of his reflection in her polished breastplate. It was the face of a Blood Angel; the face of all Blood Angels, but nothing in the visage carried a sense of personal identity. He looked at himself, at his own face, and saw just another one of a hundred thousand brothers.\n\nThat was "}
{"text":"s, only days ago.\n\nHe did not know how he felt about any of this. Distractedly philosophical, he supposed.\n\nAs Shafia patched several fibre-bundle cables of armour musculature in place around one bicep, he caught sight of his reflection in her polished breastplate. It was the face of a Blood Angel; the face of all Blood Angels, but nothing in the visage carried a sense of personal identity. He looked at himself, at his own face, and saw just another one of a hundred thousand brothers.\n\nThat was the point, was it not? Unity in brotherhood. Unity through death, via the Revenant Legion's old traditions, still practised in the shadows by warriors that wore red armour now instead of grey.\n\nWho was he? Was a man the sum of his actions? Was everyone merely the sum of their deeds and decisions? If so, he'd made precious few choices outside of battlefield strategy, anyway. He was as much a tool as a man, a weapon as much as a living being. And that made him a cold weapon indeed. That had always been enough. It was still enough. But here, at the very end, what curdled in his mind was the notion that he could have been any one of his brethren, in the very same moment, thinking the very same thoughts. That indivisibility had always seemed a strength and a source of unity - to be merely one of many moving parts in a machine of righteousness.\n\nNow, it bred doubts. It felt not like unity, but homogeneity. A waste, even. Zephon had lived his entire life down to these last hours, but what separated him from any of his brothers? What made him him?\n\nHe stared at his distorted reflection in Shafia's breastplate, knowing that somewhere in that angelic visage was the face of the boy he'd once been, and the man he'd never been allowed to become. But he couldn't see either one. Not even hints of them.\n\nAmit.\n\nThe thought rose unbidden, but he followed its course. Lifting his head, he watched Amit across the chamber, also being armoured by thralls. There was his brother, a brother of the same rank, a man wearing the same face as his own. Amit's skin was darker than his, and the differences were always evident in the scars: no warrior carried the exact same war markings as any of his brethren. Furthermore, Amit's head was shaven, and though Zephon had ordered his thralls to cut his once-long locks, he still kept a dark fall of it. Still, like most Blood Angels, they could have been twins.\n\nAmit always seemed so alive to him. Even now, as Nassir stood in silent contemplation, the other captain radiated a presence beyond that of a warrior and an officer. Amit had habits; he clenched his teeth when annoyed, he grunted when bored, and tilted his head to crackle the vertebrae in his neck during long briefings. His eyes were often tense with restrained temper. Amit was his own being as well as a Blood Angel, defying the Legiones Astartes template in a way Zephon suspected he himself had not.\n\n'Please lift your arm higher, lord,' said Eristes.\n\nHe did so, letting the ageing servant drill and lock a flexweave underplate into place along his triceps brachii. Not long now. The call to battle would come, banishing these useless musings. Zephon realised he was breathing slower, louder, through his parted teeth. Feeling the beginnings of battle-urge, the ache in his gums that spoke of blood-need. His thralls tensed. The scent of their skin became acrid with fear. The warrior saw them share glances among themselves.\n\n'I'm not irritated with you,' he said, attempting reassurance.\n\nThey didn't ask for further clarification. They knew better. Their bond with their master hadn't encouraged breaches in protocol or decorum like speaking while they attended him.\n\nBut Zephon surprised them again, keeping his voice low. 'I see you've been armed.'\n\nThree lasrifles rested on a nearby crate, each with a bayonet, each with a companion pistol, holsters and leather webbing. They were standard issue, battered enough that their histories showed plain: lifted from the dead and redistributed to the living.\n\n'Have you been instructed in how to use those weapons?' he asked.\n\n'We're familiar, lord,' Shafia replied. 'The Legion has trained us extensively over the years.'\n\n'I see.' He knew next to nothing of their lives outside of their direct service to him. As far as he'd been concerned, they effectively ceased to exist outside his sight. 'I was not aware.'\n\n'It's fine, lord. There's no reason you would pay heed to such things.'\n\nBut Zephon kept watching them, fascinated for the first time by the three souls that served him. How old Shafia and Eristes looked, now. How much Shenkai resembled both of his parents. He'd first seen Shenkai as an adolescent, a skinny rake of a boy entering into his service as his parents' apprentice after years spent in the flagship's thrall creches. Before that, he'd known Shafia was pregnant, but cared only insofar as it might affect her duties. To her credit, it hadn't. Thus, Zephon had never needed to offer comment or make a note of any failings. After that, there had been a boy trailing them around sometimes. But that was all. He knew little about the child. He'd never cared to ask.\n\nEristes and Shafia had been in his service for decades. And before them, it had been Ghiu and Shen-Ru-Lai, Eristes' parents. How time turned.\n\n'I will arrange for the three of you to be with the fallback forces, retreating to the Sanctum.'\n\nIt was a pathetic offer, granting them only a few more hours of life, and Zephon's skin crawled at the uselessness of it. Once the Delphic Battlement fell, the Sanctum would fall too, before the day was done. Hardly much of a gift, yet it was all he could give them.\n\n'I don't want to cower behind the Eternity Gate, lord,' Shenkai said, his tone edged with what Zephon believed was offence. 'I don't want to hide.'\n\n'We will die on the wall,' said Eristes. 'With you.'\n\n'And with the Great Angel,' Shafia added.\n\nHe hadn't expected such courage, and he was honoured by their loyalty. Even so, he wondered if their hearts were truly as set as they seemed. Would Shafia and Eristes not want their son to taste just a few more hours of life, if he had the chance? Or were they proud of him, for committing to this death?\n\nHe didn't have the answer and didn't want to ask the question. It shamed him, to realise how little he knew of them.\n\n'I apologise for offering nothing but disinterest in your lives. That was churlish of me.'\n\nMore discomfort. They were not used to this, and made no reply to it. Now both sides of the halting conversation were lost as to how to continue. Shafia and Eristes lifted his left gauntlet into place, drilling in the connection needles, moving together with the grace of decades of expertise. This task was more than familiar to them, it was a matter of lifelong ritual. He shifted himself, in a moment of rare awkwardness, only for Shenkai to breathe softly in irritation where he stood behind Zephon. The thrall was dressing his hair and binding it tightly for his helmet.\n\n'Please don't move, lord,' Shenkai said. Zephon could practically hear the young man trying not to sigh.\n\nZephon remained still.\n\n'I will likely die tomorrow,' he admitted. 'And thoughts are occurring to me that I might never have otherwise considered. You have been excellent servants. Thank you for your loyalty to me, all these years.'\n\nAnother of those fleeting hesitations flashed between the three of them. They kept working, but Zephon was aware of certain betrayals in their bearing: the tiny hairs on Shafia's arms rising, the sound of Shenkai swallowing, the way Eristes' lips pressed together, deepening the lines at the edges of his mouth. Human things. Instinctive signals of discomfiture.\n\n'Thank you, lord,' said Eristes, after drill-locking one of Zephon's vambraces into place. The warrior couldn't quite read the expressions on his thralls' faces. The only obvious element was their uneasiness with the course of the conversation.\n\nAs they lifted his breastplate into place, he said, 'Stay close to me, when the fight begins. I will keep you alive as long as I can.'\n\nHe couldn't see Shenkai's expression, but he could hear the way emotion thickened the young man's voice.\n\n'Focus on the enemy, lord, and we'll keep you alive as long as we can.'\n\nIn the face of this loyal naivety, Zephon found he had no decent reply. He let them armour him the rest of the way in silence, listening to the music of blood beating through their bodies. Soldiers and civilians and servitors passed by in their hundreds, going about the business of preparation.\n\n'Zephon?'\n\nHe lifted his head again, needing a moment to pick out the speaker in the milling crowd. She wore patchwork armour and carried a battered lasrifle slung over one shoulder. Like everyone, she was a shadow of herself, ruined by the war - and like everyone still alive in the war's final hours, there was something unbreakable in her eyes.\n\n'Are you Zephon?'\n\n'They have ranged the main line,' Zephon said softly, the words sending a chill through him. His thralls slowed in their work, knowing those words well. They glanced at the source of their master's sudden awe.\n\n'You're Zephon, aren't you?'\n\nThe Blood Angel nodded. 'I am.'\n\nThe woman approached and, miraculously, she smiled. A tired smile but a smile nonetheless, here of all places.\n\n'I thought it was you. You all look the same, but you have...' She held up her gloved hands, opening and closing them, alluding to the Blood Angel's silver bionics.\n\nHe looked down at the woman with the stringy hair and face marked with grime, knowing her from their first and only meeting, months ago at Gorgon Bar. How he had ordered her off the wall before the artillery onslaught began. How he had pulled her against his chest and shielded her when the walls came down.\n\n'Greetings, Ceris Gonn.'\n\n'They told me you were dead. Or as close to dead as to make no difference. I accompanied your body to Razavi Bastion, you know. Months ago.'\n\n'I did not know that.' The gesture touche"}
{"text":"the woman with the stringy hair and face marked with grime, knowing her from their first and only meeting, months ago at Gorgon Bar. How he had ordered her off the wall before the artillery onslaught began. How he had pulled her against his chest and shielded her when the walls came down.\n\n'Greetings, Ceris Gonn.'\n\n'They told me you were dead. Or as close to dead as to make no difference. I accompanied your body to Razavi Bastion, you know. Months ago.'\n\n'I did not know that.' The gesture touched him in a way he couldn't quite put into words. 'That was kind of you.'\n\n'Once we got there, they took you for stasis and sent me away. Then, later, I heard you'd survived. I was sure it was just another stupid war story. Another mistake amidst, well, everything else.'\n\n'Astartes physiology means that both are technically true. I was dead, and yet I live.' The keep shook around them. Dust clattered against the Blood Angel's pauldron. 'I am gratified to see you also survived Gorgon Bar.'\n\n'Thanks to you.' Ceris reached up to touch his face. There was no sensuality in the gesture, it was a matter of careful examination. She followed the lines of his cheeks and jaw with her gloved fingertips, the digits dark against the white flesh.\n\n'I never saw your face. And you do look like the others. But you're paler. I can just about see the veins beneath your cheeks... and your eyes are lighter. You look gentler than some of the others.'\n\n'I assure you, I am not.'\n\n'I'll take your word for it.'\n\nShe was far more confident than he remembered of the wayward archivist from Lord Dorn's new Interrogator Order. Ceris sensed his unease at being touched, and withdrew with another faint smile.\n\n'I'm assigned to the Sanctum, embedded with the Third Zoharin Rifles.' Ceris cast a look over her shoulder, where several Imperial soldiers waited with varying degrees of impatience. 'I just... I had to say thank you. You saved my life. And don't say it was nothing, because it was definitely something.'\n\n'You are welcome, Ceris.' He didn't know what else to say. Awkwardly he added, 'Truly. I'm glad you are alive.'\n\nFor another few days, at least, he carefully neglected to add.\n\nPlainly she was aware of his clumsiness in such a moment. She took her leave rather than prolong it.\n\n'May the God-Emperor watch over you, Zephon.'\n\nHe tilted his head at the phrase, but in an echo of all that her rank would come to mean in the following millennia, her tone brooked no disagreement. She left him with his thralls, looking back over her shoulder once more as she walked away.\n\nHe never saw her again.\n\nHe found Arkhan Land on the ramparts. The Martian had somehow worked his usual antisocial magic, occupying a section of the wall where few others seemed inclined to linger. Zephon weaved through the edge of the closest crowd, approaching Land's pocket of isolation, apologising to the Imperial Army soldiers as they shifted from his path. There, they stood together, saying nothing. Just looking out across the wasteland.\n\nIt was night, but that was relative. Day and night both looked like violet dusk.\n\nThe sky everyone tried not to stare at was riven by electromagnetic disturbance, dancing aurorae made from the warp-stained heavens and reflected firelight from a thousand separate wars on the world's surface. Zephon had seen the atmospheric disturbances caused by massive orbiting fleets in the past, and this was not that. Low to the horizon, where he gazed at the distant horde now circling the Sanctum, he could see shapes, nebulous in form and godlike in scale, clawing and thrashing their way through the clouds. The last time he had looked directly upward, the skull of something almost human, the size of half the sky, rolled in the stormy black. Its mandible had been articulated with tendons of smoky cloud. Muted stars gleamed sickly in its empty sockets. Then it was gone, rolling tidally, melting into the thunderheads. Zephon hadn't waited to see what might take its place.\n\nA skitarii soldier stood at the technoarchaeologist's side. She, too, said nothing. Zephon didn't know if that was because she had nothing to say, or because she was one of those who were unable to speak. It seemed to him that most were made that way. Sapien, the artificimian, perched on her shoulder guard. It was idly running its bizarrely human fingers across scratches in the skitarius' helmet, as if mapping them.\n\nHe greeted the psyber-monkey with one of the clicking sounds it sometimes made. Sapien regarded him for a moment, repeating the sound, before continuing its appraisal of the skitarius' helmet.\n\nA Titan made its way past, one of the god-engines walking its patrol in front of the wall. An Ignatum machine, its red-and-yellow heraldry excoriated by months of battle and the filth in the air. The ground shivered in sympathy with its slow tread. Power cables hung from its armour joints like stringy veins. Gun arms that could level habitation towers groaned under their own weight, on war-weakened shoulders.\n\nIracundos, read the name on its carapace, emblazoned there in corroded bronze. It looked as exhausted as the mortals in its shadow. And, somehow, as impatient.\n\nZephon lifted his gaze from the Titan, looking down the wall - first left, then right. Taking in the regiments at the ready, the depleted squads of Astartes scattered amidst them in splashes of battle-faded colour, and the rarer patches of gold marking the last survivors of the Sisters of Silence and the Custodian Guard.\n\nTo Zephon's eyes, the Delphic Battlement was a hideous thing. A monument to compromise, jury-rigged into a state of ugliness by the pressure of necessity. Before the war, it had been purely decorative. A curtain wall of shining marble surrounding the Emperor's grand castle, set a mere kilometre from the Inner Sanctum's pristine, spired sides.\n\nWhen predicting what shape the war would take when it reached this point, Dorn had done all he could to gird the last defenders against the horde descending upon them. Fail-safe after fail-safe was in place. The wall was honeycombed with defensive turrets, reinforced with layer upon layer of plasteel and rockcrete, turned into a rampart manned by over a hundred thousand defenders stationed around the Inner Sanctum. Custodians. Sisters of Silence. Blood Angels. White Scars. Imperial Fists. Imperial Army soldiers. Refugees. Civilians. All of them, shoulder to shoulder, standing in the shadows of the Titans watching over them.\n\nBatteries of anti-air guns lined the wall tops. Titan-cradles set into the Delphic Wall housed the god-machines of Legio Ignatum and stood shielded by thick voids, ready to repair their charges once the Titans strode home. Landing pads dotted the ramparts' surface, where gunships and low-altitude fighters fuelled up and underwent final preparations. A complex order of machine-spirits, physically built into the wall's most reinforced sections, oversaw the anti-artillery gun web: outputting a constantly updating data-spray that commanded the movements of thousands of defensive batteries and refractor field projectors. The Delphic Battlement stood ready to intercept any incoming fire, whether solid shot or in the form of screaming energy. Added to this, the expressly outfitted Warmonger Titan Malax Meridius walked behind the defenders, patrolling the span between the Sanctum and the battlement, its weapon systems aiming outward, its purpose to shoot down any craft or incendiary that somehow eluded the Delphic batteries.\n\nAs magnificent as this sounded, Zephon wasn't blind to the reality of what they faced. The horde soon to descend upon them would sweep through this mighty gathering in mere hours. There were too few defenders, and too many of the enemy, for it to go any other way.\n\nThe weakness was the arch. The Delphic Archway, the battlement over the Grand Processional, hadn't been built with considerations of defence. It was planned for parades of soldiers and Titans to march along the Processional, under the arch and through the Delphic Battlement, proceeding along the rising avenue of the Royal Ascension. There had been no gate to close, no barricade to raise. For decades, it was an open mouth leading right to the Eternity Gate.\n\nDuring Terra's preparations, Dorn had commanded his warrior-engineers to install layered portcullises to block the Processional, reinforce and shield them to the limits of the Mechanicus' ingenuity, then construct a fortified keep on the archway above. This keep was little more than a weapons platform, a cathedral dedicated to the death of enemy Titans.\n\nThe Warmaster's horde would assault the wall from every direction, but the fighting would be thickest here, where the battlement was weakest around its newly armoured arch. The defenders had garrisoned the lion's share of their strength in readiness. Even the approach to the wall would carve the horde apart, with minefields and artillery and defensive turrets all turned towards annihilating anything coming up the Grand Processional. Tens of thousands of the invaders would die before they ever reached the first portcullis, and two more waited behind the first, each one of them six metres thick, each one forcing a killing ground where the defenders could pour fire and scorn down as the attackers sought to breach the barriers, one after the other.\n\nZephon gazed from the wall to the wasteland beyond. The ground was turning sour. As if the land being dead wasn't enough, it was darkening with corruption, twisted into jagged promontories and earthen spikes. Bombardment craters were becoming pools of steaming organic sludge. To look upon it hurt the eyes, the way it made your skull throb to gaze into the warp while in void transit.\n\nHow could they fight for such a thing? Zephon wondered, staring at the horde gathering at the horizon. How could they want this?\n\nBecause they believe it's necessary. He answered his own question, knowing it must be true without understanding how it possib"}
{"text":" corruption, twisted into jagged promontories and earthen spikes. Bombardment craters were becoming pools of steaming organic sludge. To look upon it hurt the eyes, the way it made your skull throb to gaze into the warp while in void transit.\n\nHow could they fight for such a thing? Zephon wondered, staring at the horde gathering at the horizon. How could they want this?\n\nBecause they believe it's necessary. He answered his own question, knowing it must be true without understanding how it possibly could be. What have they learned, what have they seen, to believe all of this is necessary?\n\nThe silhouettes of Titans towered above the invaders' lines. They were bringing more up through the broken Ultimate Wall every hour, gathering for the final assault like a pantheon of hunchback gods. Dorn had done well to restrain himself, maintaining so much of Ignatum's strength around the Sanctum in readiness for these last days, but even the god-engines in Martian red that walked beside the Delphic Battlement were already outnumbered. As for the Titans that stood in vigil above the horde... They cast strange silhouettes, their spines bent into new postures, their heads showing faces of malformed, incomprehensible significance. Some of them looked to be made of as much flesh and bone as sacred iron. Others leered as they watched the wall; even at this distance, they radiated an aura that felt sickeningly feral.\n\nAnd above them, the night sky...\n\nDon't look up.\n\nHe returned his gaze low, beneath the horizon.\n\nZephon voiced none of these thoughts to Land. There was comfort in the quiet presence of someone who was, if not a friend, then at least a compatriot. He and Land were bonded in a way largely unrelated to war, and in the Blood Angel's life that was a rare thing indeed. He treasured it, even if Arkhan was a singularly difficult man to love.\n\n'You're doing it again,' Land said with a sneer.\n\nZephon leaned on the battlement wall, resting his gauntleted hands on a merlon. 'I do not know what you mean.'\n\nLand narrowed his eyes, which were squinty little holes in his face at the best of times. His cracked goggles were lifted up, resting on his sweaty forehead.\n\n'You're staring out at the world with that look of pitiful soulfulness. It's tiresome, Zephon, it really is. How earnest you are. How sincere. You're practically avataric for your melodramatic Legion, and let me tell you, it wearies me more than the fighting does.'\n\n'Ah.' The Blood Angel nodded. 'Forgive me, my friend.'\n\n'You see? There it is again. Not \"I'm sorry, Arkhan,\" but \"Forgive me, my friend.\" You were bad enough before Gorgon Bar, but since awakening in the Razavi Bastion...' Land trailed off, emitting a considering hmmm that lasted several seconds.\n\nZephon raised an eyebrow, waiting.\n\n'You're like you used to be, only more so. Calmer. Stiller. It's unnerving, you know.'\n\n'I have no idea what you mean.' Though Zephon wondered, as he said the words, whether they were true.\n\n'You realise you're not the only Blood Angel I've spoken to in the last year? I've heard the tales of the Bringer of Sorrow. How hot-blooded you were. The temper, the aggression. When we met, you were miserable over your crippling, and your dulled emotional responses were clearly the result of depressive brain chemistry. But now...'\n\nLand trailed off again, giving another long hmmm.\n\n'Whatever. It's of no concern to me. Why can't you just spit at us lowly mortals like Amit does and kick us out of the way, like we're dogs that don't move fast enough for him?'\n\nZephon almost smiled. 'You exaggerate my brother Amit's bluntness.'\n\n'I'm not exaggerating, and you know I'm not.' The Martian looked away, gesturing to the wasteland stretching out to the dusty horizon.\n\n'We're going to die tomorrow, aren't we?'\n\nZephon wasn't sure what to say, which was strange, because there was really only one thing to say.\n\n'Yes. If not tomorrow, then within the next day or two. I fear you are correct.'\n\n'I am always correct,' Land retorted. 'But what's this? You fear I'm correct? I thought your kind knew no fear.'\n\nHis thralls had bound Zephon's long hair back from his face, but he brushed a stray wisp off his temple. He kept gazing at the blurred silhouettes, far away in the ash. The horde was out of the range of the wall guns for now, but within every defender's head was a silent countdown.\n\n'We know fear,' Zephon said softly. 'We are merely conditioned to overcome it.'\n\nAnother silence descended. It was relative; even on their section of the wall there were other soldiers talking nearby, gun turrets panning, the wind blowing, and the thunder of artillery echoing eerily from across the besieged continent. But between the three of them gathered there in that moment - four, if you counted Sapien, which Zephon always did - it was a pregnant wordlessness.\n\nLand finally turned to him. Zephon could see avidity in the man's glare.\n\n'Will this degree of honesty be in the Ninth's speech tomorrow?'\n\n'Lord Sanguinius,' Zephon corrected gently. 'And it is my father's place to say what he wishes to say, not mine to guess and offer his words in advance. Have you ever heard the primarch give a speech?'\n\nArkhan Land grunted non-committally.\n\n'It is never what you expect it to be. He does not act the way other primarchs act, nor think the way they think.'\n\n'From your tone, this is clearly a source of great pride to you.' Land sounded suddenly tired. 'Why are you here, Zephon? What is it you want from me?'\n\nThe Blood Angel tilted his head, regarding the diminutive Martian with infinite patience. 'I will be fighting with the remnants of my former company, the High Host.'\n\n'Yes, yes, how thrilling for you. And this involves me, how?'\n\n'Many of our thralls will be with us in a secondary detachment. I came to ask if you would fight with Eristes, Shafia and Shenkai, close by my side.'\n\n'Is that it?' Land snorted with typical bluster. 'Well, if you want. They were tolerable enough when last we met, and one place on this wall is as good as any other.'\n\n'I mean it, Arkhan. Do you agree to stand with them? To protect them?'\n\n'Yes, yes, yes. Stop nagging.'\n\nZephon thanked him.\n\n'Is that it?' Land repeated. 'Is that all you wanted? I suppose you're heading off now.'\n\n'Do you... wish me to stay?'\n\nLand swallowed. It sounded as though there was something in his throat.\n\n'I don't want to die, Zephon.'\n\nThe Blood Angel was about to reply, anticipating the Martian's sneer, when the old man suddenly burst into tears. Taken completely by surprise, the Blood Angel hesitated a moment before going down to one knee, bringing him close to Land's height. He didn't touch the human. He knew Land hated to be touched.\n\n'I'm too important.' Land sobbed the words, turning them thick with backed-up emotion. 'I have so much yet to rediscover, all those secrets of the Dark Age. I have so much yet to give. So many things I remain uncredited for.'\n\nZephon resisted the urge to sigh. How foolish of him to believe this was an outpouring of anything but more vanity.\n\nThe skitarius standing nearby watched in spindly silence, neither awkward nor emotional. Then it touched Land, resting a metal hand on the Martian's shoulder. Amazingly, Land patted its iron fingers in gentle acceptance. Zephon could barely believe what he was seeing. The psyber-monkey, which had been crouching complacently on the skitarius' shoulder, now hopped onto Land's back, and gently trilled at its master.\n\nArkhan Land raised red, strained eyes to the Blood Angel.\n\n'I'm scared.'\n\n'To feel fear is to be human. I would think less of you if you were not afraid, Arkhan.'\n\n'Some people spend their lives flinging genetic material at each other, spawning nasty little half-clones of themselves. And how proud they are, as if it were an achievement to have children, to perform the basest biological function. Their heirs are what they pass on to the future. They take comfort in that. Not me, though. I have the Quest for Knowledge. I have my rediscoveries. Everyone in the Imperium would one day know my name. That's how it was supposed to be. It wasn't supposed to end here, like this. Not with that black tide of horror descending upon me.'\n\nZephon tentatively offered his hand.\n\n'Don't touch me!' Arkhan snapped, and the Blood Angel withdrew. 'What's going to happen tomorrow, Zephon? Do you know?'\n\nZephon doubted Land desired a complete tactical delineation. Besides, what was going to happen was ultimately simple.\n\n'They will come at the Delphic Battlement with everything they have, focusing their assault on the archway. As soon as they breach the arch or overrun the wall, the fighting will break down into pockets of conflict, reinforced by both sides. They will fight to establish footholds, we will fight to push them back before they can take permanent ground. When the wall falls, the nominated rearguard forces will sell their lives to keep them from advancing into the Sanctum for as long as we can. The exception in the withdrawal will be the Custodians. Some of them will stand with us on the wall, but many will remain inside the Sanctum on guard against unexpected intrusion. When we lose the Delphic Battlement, which will happen between one and three days of fighting, any survivors will have a slim opportunity to wage a fighting retreat along the Royal Ascension. But before the enemy can reach the Sanctum, Lord Sanguinius and the Custodes will seal the Eternity Gate.'\n\nLand stared at him with an expression blending suspicion and unease. 'Is that a jest?'\n\n'No?' Zephon hesitated, half-asking in his confusion. 'Nothing I have said seems particularly amusing.'\n\n'They will abandon us outside?'\n\nSometimes, Zephon could not understand how a man of Arkhan Land's undeniable genius could be so lacking in insight.\n\n'We stand upon the walls of the Emperor's final fortress. There is no retreating from here. Yes, the Custodian Guard will return to the Emperor's side, to die with their lord, but not until all is lost here"}
{"text":"spicion and unease. 'Is that a jest?'\n\n'No?' Zephon hesitated, half-asking in his confusion. 'Nothing I have said seems particularly amusing.'\n\n'They will abandon us outside?'\n\nSometimes, Zephon could not understand how a man of Arkhan Land's undeniable genius could be so lacking in insight.\n\n'We stand upon the walls of the Emperor's final fortress. There is no retreating from here. Yes, the Custodian Guard will return to the Emperor's side, to die with their lord, but not until all is lost here on the wall. We will hold the Eternity Gate open as long as humanly possible, but the Delphic Battlement is the last true line of defence. Here, we can mass in numbers capable of repelling assault for several days, if all goes optimally well. Here, we hold one of the most defensible positions on Terra. Here, there remains the faint hope of reinforcement reaching us from elsewhere. All those advantages vanish the moment the enemy reaches the Eternity Gate. No tactics. No strategy. No hope. Inside the Sanctum, the fighting will be room by room, chamber by chamber, with warp entities free to manifest at their own whim. It will be a massacre.'\n\nLand no longer had tears in his eyes. He looked up at Zephon, his face showing a sort of bleak, detached horror. Here was a man who could untangle enigmas of the Dark Age of Technology that had driven men and women mad, and who had led expeditions into the trapped tombs of unknowable machine-kingdoms... But Zephon's calm description of the coming battle drained the blood from his skinny face.\n\n'There's more,' he said. 'There's something you're not saying, I can see it in your eyes.'\n\nZephon had taken no pleasure in what he had relayed so far, nor did he delight in what he said next.\n\n'While we hold the Sanctum, we are ready for whatever they will bring. But I believe that before it begins, they will try to damage our morale. They cannot break our spirits, but they can wound our resolve and blind us with anger.'\n\nLand shared a glance with his new skitarii companion, who emitted a coded bleat of skit-speech, then he looked up at Zephon once more.\n\n'She asks what you mean by that.'\n\n'I do not wish to speak of it, Arkhan, in case I am mistaken. I hope that I'm wrong.' Zephon looked across the wasteland, towards the gathering horde. 'But if I am right, you will see at dawn.'\n\nLand stared at him again. And, again, the Blood Angel found he had no idea what conversational gambit the old man would try next. The skitarius was watching him as well, her stare hidden by a buzzing, recently repaired monovisor across her dented helmet. He could read nothing of her mind; whatever her thoughts and feelings might be would likely forever remain a mystery. At least to him.\n\n'Tell me, Zephon. Just tell me. Are you scared?'\n\nWhat should he say in such a moment? Should he be Astartes: resolute to the very end, the rock upon which the enemy wave would break? Surely that would inspire the defenders, that level of implacable fortitude. Surely that was his role as a legionary in these last days?\n\nOr should he be human? A transhuman, true, but still with elements of humanity. Should he confess to emotions that the warriors of the Legions might not ever confess, or had trained themselves not to feel?\n\nThe answer came to him, bare in its obviousness. He would be a Blood Angel. Anything else would be artifice.\n\n'Yes,' he admitted. 'I am afraid.'\n\nLand stared at him, unblinking. 'Afraid of dying?'\n\n'Yes and no,' Zephon admitted. 'I am not frightened by the thought of the blade or bolt that will end my life. I am not afraid of the pain to come, nor of the nothingness that comes after it. But there will be a physical element when the horde advances upon us. My hearts will beat harder, my mouth will go dry, and I will want to run. There will be a flicker within me, that human instinct within the transhuman conditioning, to fall back and preserve my existence. I will feel it, but I will not give in to it. When they say of us that we know no fear, it is because that is the way it seems to those watching us. But we feel fear. We simply do not surrender to it. We do not let it affect our actions. In that respect, we are not fearless, merely brave.'\n\nLand seemed to consider this. 'I think, if you'd told me that all you feared was failure, or dying with your duty undone, I might have vomited.'\n\nZephon surprised himself by grinning. 'Would that be too poetic?'\n\n'No, it would be too much like groxshit.' Land brushed some of the settling ash from his bald pate. 'Besides, it's easy to be brave when you're practically immortal.'\n\nZephon couldn't argue with that, and didn't try. 'That is a factor, yes. But I will die tomorrow regardless of Legiones Astartes genetics. In that regard, I am as mortal as you and all of these courageous souls standing with us on the wall.'\n\nThe Martian stared at him, trying to see something within the Blood Angel's face. The gaze lasted a disconcertingly long time.\n\n'You really believe that, don't you? That deep down you're just like us.'\n\nZephon said nothing. He'd made his case; it stood for itself.\n\n'Let me tell you, my Baalian friend, exactly how wrong you are.' Land gestured to the both of them. 'The difference between you and me - the difference between my kind and your kind - is that we live, and you exist. When we die, the galaxy loses all our dreams and hopes and ambitions. All we might have achieved is sucked out of existence, never to come to pass. Children aren't born. Discoveries aren't made. Inventions aren't invented. When someone dies, even one of the puling masses destined for extraordinarily little achievement in their lives, it's an immense loss of potential. And that is tragic, because tragedy is defined by loss. But you?\n\n'You are a weapon. You were made for battle, and have neither a fate nor a future outside of war. Will you die tomorrow? Probably. You'll die doing exactly what you were made to do, dying in exactly the way you were made to die. What are your dreams, Zephon? What life do you live off the battlefield? What do you contribute to the species except the furtherance of its territory with your ability to shed enemy blood?\n\n'When your kind dies, Astartes - and let's not forget that it's the fault of your kind that half the galaxy is aflame - but when your kind dies, it's no different from the shattering of a sword. No dreams are lost. No fates are altered. Just a weapon breaking while doing what it was made to do.\n\n'And that's why you have no right to your fear, Blood Angel. Death means so little to you. Compared to us, you have nothing to lose.'\n\nThere was no longer any mirth, bleak or otherwise, in Zephon's eyes. There was nothing. His features were bleached of even the shreds of personality Land had thus far credited him with, and what remained was the angelic template, rendering him indivisible from any other warrior of his Legion.\n\nZephon thought on just what to say, or if it was worth saying anything at all. Their association to this point had been defined by exchanges in this vein - the cut and thrust of Land's understandable disgust with genetic transhumanity; Zephon's jocular and sympathetic rebuttals. But now, the Blood Angel reassessed the depths of Arkhan Land's hatred and found he lacked an adequate answer.\n\nBecause he's right. The thought, insidious and fierce, clung tight to the insides of his skull.\n\nLand had already turned away, uninterested in whatever Zephon might say in reply. The Blood Angel's armoured hand rested, with gentle but absolute strength, on the old man's shoulder.\n\n'Don't touch m-'\n\n'Shut up, Arkhan. Just this once, please shut up.'\n\nLand blinked. Surprise knocked him speechless, which was a rare treat indeed.\n\n'It may be that you are right. What you've said is nothing I've not considered myself, a hundred times before. But I want your promise that tomorrow, you will forgo your usual cowardice. You will discard the self-interest that you disguise as good sense, and you will stand with Shafia, Eristes and Shenkai. I can tolerate your hatred, your spite and your endless barbs, but I will not forgive cowardice tomorrow. Mark these words, my friend... If I learn that you've left them to face harm after agreeing to stand with them, I will find you wherever you're hiding, doubtless soaked in the perfume of your own piss, and I will kill you.'\n\nLand gaped at him.\n\n'I will beat you to death with my bare hands, Arkhan. With the very hands you gave me. Do you hear me? Do you understand?'\n\nLand nodded.\n\n'Good.' Zephon released him. 'Now get some sleep if you are able. It will help. And don't look up.'\n\nHe walked away, leaving Land to flush red beneath the gazes of nearby soldiers. The last thing the Blood Angel heard from Land was an affirmation from the Martian to his skitarius companion:\n\n'He has changed.'\n\nA curious choice of emissary\n\nTransacta-7Y1\n\nWhen the dawn alarm sounded across the Delphic Battlement, the skitarius lifted her new rifle by the strap and rose to her iron feet. She hadn't been sleeping, exactly - that was a luxury her creators had denied to her, in the strictest sense - just lightly dozing with her back to the merlons. Hundreds of soldiers nearby did as she did, reaching for weapons and breaking free of any shallow attempts at slumber. Arkhan Land grumbled, still wrapped in his threadbare cloak, refusing to stand up from where he huddled on the marble floor. Sapien was far more eager. The artificimian leapt to her shoulder, chittering his bastardised utterances of skit-code.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 replied in her own code, adjacent to the creature's own but flavoured by the slang of her own macroclade, that yes, she would endeavour to keep him safe. Sapien expressed a coded desire that she remain alive if she were able to do so. In return, she expressed that surviving would be a most agreeable course of action, but that it didn't look likely, did it?\n\nThe psyber-monkey narrowed its machine eyes as it processed what had amassed on the"}
{"text":" his bastardised utterances of skit-code.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 replied in her own code, adjacent to the creature's own but flavoured by the slang of her own macroclade, that yes, she would endeavour to keep him safe. Sapien expressed a coded desire that she remain alive if she were able to do so. In return, she expressed that surviving would be a most agreeable course of action, but that it didn't look likely, did it?\n\nThe psyber-monkey narrowed its machine eyes as it processed what had amassed on the horizon. After a moment, Sapien confirmed that no, survival did not seem likely at all.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 looked up briefly, in defiance of the standing order. The heavens, perceivable only intermittently through the ash, undulated with aurora borealis tendrils of queasy light. It looked as though Terra's magnetic field had cancer.\n\n'Is it starting?' Land asked from where he hunched.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 confirmed that it was.\n\nFear widened Land's eyes, but it was a fear tempered by the one thing that could always overcome even the basest emotion. Exhaustion overrides all else, the body and mind only have so much to give - and Arkhan Land already looked halfway to death. After almost a year of this madness, day and night, dawn to dusk; after choking on ash and dust for months; after falling back again and again from burning strongholds and fleeing from the advancing horde; after fighting blind in ruins and attending hundreds of war councils that were all steeped in the taste of oncoming failure; after giving every iota of strength he possessed purely in the pursuit of staying alive while Terra burned around him... He was shattered by weariness. With nowhere left to run, he was too tired to be afraid anymore.\n\nHe was not alone in this. Transacta-7Y1 was hardly a savant when it came to reading human expressions, but what she saw on Arkhan Land's gaunt features was no different from what she saw on every other human's face - civilian, refugee and soldier alike.\n\nThough, she supposed they were all soldiers now. Everyone that could carry a rifle was doing so. The end of the world was the great equaliser.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 stared across the wasteland, her monovisor clicking as it zoomed and refocused.\n\n'Is it the Titans?' Land asked her, still refusing to rise. 'Are they sending their Titans in first?'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 held back her reply. After cancelling her visual zoom, she looked left and right at the defenders closest by. On one side was a spread of Imperial Army soldiers from the 91st Industani Drop Troops (all without their traditional grav-chutes, grounded for the final battle), and she needed no special insight to read the confusion on their faces. Those with magnoculars didn't look confused, they looked horrified.\n\nOn her other side was the Legiones Astartes officer Zephon, former Dominion of the High Host, and the three unaugmented humans he claimed as his thralls. Further along the wall was a cluster of Blood Angels, and one of these was Nassir Amit, Dominion of the Secutors, standing still unhelmed. She saw him lean forward, his knuckles on the rampart as he stared in dawning anger, and she heard him - very clearly - say:\n\n'Those honourless bastards.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 turned back to regard the horde on the horizon. Even with her repaired helm, the distance stole significant visual detail. She rested the barrel of her new transauranic arquebus on the ramparts before her and peered through the scope.\n\nWhat she saw defied easy contextualisation. This, she conveyed to her new benefactor in a brief utterance of code.\n\n'That doesn't sound optimal,' Land replied, and rose to his feet at last, unnerved by the reactions of those around him.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 panned her sniper rifle, and at her side, Land cranked and tuned his multi-spec goggles. The two of them stared out over the wasteland, where the ground was alive. Breathing. Changing.\n\nDarkening, she thought.\n\nIt came on in a tide, a mutilation of the churned earth eating up the distance between the battlement and the enemy's drawn-up front lines. The war-blasted earth soured as they watched, the stone blackening, in some places bubbling, in others sprouting fleshy protuberances or rupturing with questing roots.\n\nThis corruption had a herald: a lone Titan stepped forth from the horde, and it covered the wasteland in measured strides, externally sedate, though Transacta-7Y1 could practically sense the fusion broil of its heart-reactor. Step by step, the Titan grew in scale, leaving the enemy's front lines behind, walking the encroaching carpet of souring earth. After half a minute, she could hear its footfalls, faint with distance.\n\n'It's within range of the wall guns,' said one of the nearby Blood Angels.\n\n'Hold,' was Amit's reply.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 kept watch through her scope. The Titan was a Reaver, revealed as it approached through the thinning mist, wearing the royal purple of the Legio Mordaxis. She had fought alongside Mordaxis - only briefly, but with great pride - nine years before, at the compliance of Three-Hundred-and-Eight Thirteen.\n\nHer heart sank a little at that, though perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she experienced a protracted moment of emotional disquiet, which - in reality - had nothing to do with the processes of her heart.\n\nShe tracked her view either side of the Titan, back to the faraway massing of the horde. A forest of girders and scrap-metal poles stood at the edge of the enemy's lines, erected over the last days by the toiling of who knew how many slaves and servitors and daemonic things bound to the purpose. These spikes were put to use in the weak dawn light, as impaling posts and gallows, used for thrashing, mutilated captives.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 focused on one of the prisoners being bound up onto a scrapyard pylon. She didn't know the regimental colours of the man's uniform, but he was clearly an infantryman, his flak armour hanging in rags, carved away by lashing whips. His face was a mess of blood and barbed wire. He had no teeth. No eyes. No hands. All were gone, taken from him by his captors before they trussed him up there to dangle and die.\n\nBeneath his footless legs, his mutated overseer rejoiced in his agony - a horned beastman brayed and laughed, silent at this distance, but with its animal glee visible on its bestial visage.\n\nThe Titan marched on. Behind it, the hundreds of tortured prisoners displayed to the defenders became thousands. They hung from their impaled limbs, they dangled in cradles of barbed wire. Some of them were even driven forward, a low tide of them, laughingly shoved ahead of the enemy lines. Most of these crawled across the ruined ground towards the Delphic Battlement, the stubs of their amputated legs leaving them no choice but to drag themselves belly-down in the dirt. Behind them came those that couldn't even crawl, the limbless and the poisoned and the ones on the very edge of death.\n\nPacked into open-topped civilian cargo-haulers; chained to the sides of supply trucks and Army Chimeras. Hundreds of vehicles rolled forward, none of them avoiding the wave of mutilation making its weeping way towards the battlement. They ground the wounded beneath their heels and tracks with heedless abandon. These vehicles inevitably crashed and rolled across the en-cancered earth, some left to founder with their miserable, dying cargoes, others set aflame from rockets fired by their own overseers.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 saw mutilated skitarii within the captives' ranks. She saw tech-priests and Martian menials, non-combatants whose only sin had been to remain loyal to the Omnissiah's vision of what Mars could be. She felt the thin epiglottal sting of bile as she saw soldiers just like her, stripped of their divine bionics, impaled, crucified, bound in webs of razor wire, or dragging themselves over the broken ground in a futile attempt to reach safety.\n\nAnd she wondered at the mindsets of these most pitiable refugees. What mesh of ghastly hope and mournful reality sloshed around in the pain-drunkenness of their thoughts? Maybe some really did hope for safety; for succour - and perhaps even healing - if they could just reach their fellow defenders on the Delphic Battlement. But how many didn't even know where they were, with their senses taken from them? How many knew only that this was more torture, and prayed for a death thus far denied?\n\nInstinct had her tracking the numerals on her rifle's rangefinder, as if she could hit anything from this distance. Then she lowered her arquebus. She'd seen enough for now. Along the wall, in both directions, the voices of human officers began to rise in an uneasy melange. They wanted the wall guns to fire. They wanted to bombard the wasteland. They wanted to put the captives out of their misery. But the afflictions took place out of range, and the defence cannons stayed silent. Meanwhile, the Titan marched closer.\n\nWhen Sanguinius, the Ninth Primarch and Lord of the Blood Angels Legion, landed next to her, she did not react quite the same way as many of those around her. The Blood Angels saluted, as would be expected, either with the sign of the aquila or the older custom of a fist over their hearts. The human soldiers stepped back, thunderstruck, mumbling greetings and praises if they found the capacity to speak at all. The Legion thralls, of which there were almost forty gathered on this section of the wall, went to one knee in almost programmed unity, lowering their heads in reverence. Even Arkhan Land jerked in surprise, his expression momentarily stunned before reality filtered back, and he turned his gaze pointedly away. The Lord Sanguinius, after all, had refused Land's plea to retake Mars before the Warmaster reached Terra. Some things would never be forgiven.\n\nBut Transacta-7Y1 had a skitarius' perspective of the primarchs. She regarded the towering figure with respect, and entirely without reverence. This immense winged thing was no demigod, and she would not treat it as such. It was und"}
{"text":"erked in surprise, his expression momentarily stunned before reality filtered back, and he turned his gaze pointedly away. The Lord Sanguinius, after all, had refused Land's plea to retake Mars before the Warmaster reached Terra. Some things would never be forgiven.\n\nBut Transacta-7Y1 had a skitarius' perspective of the primarchs. She regarded the towering figure with respect, and entirely without reverence. This immense winged thing was no demigod, and she would not treat it as such. It was undoubtedly a product of the Omnissiah's vision, of course. But it was not the Omnissiah's son. If the Omnissiah was to create offspring, the fruits of that project would share in His divine perfection, not fail to the point where half of the children rebelled against their godly father and set the galaxy aflame. Then there were the philosophical considerations. Why, exactly, would the Machine-God breed into being eighteen largely biological children? Several of them possessed minor augmentation, but nothing significant, nothing that spoke of purity.\n\nNo. She could accept that they were an intriguing product of the Omnissiah's genetic cauldrons. She could not accept their bizarre hubris in claiming to be His sons. Most likely, the flaws in the project were the result of Terran scientist-priests misinterpreting the Omnissiah's will; further proof of the fallibility and lack of divinity in the entire operation.\n\nSo she did not genuflect and she did not - as her dead companion Envaric would have said in the style of his idioms - 'bow and scrape' at the primarch's arrival.\n\nShe regarded the figure in beauteous gold, greeted him with a Martian salute - her knuckles linking to make the sign of the cog - then turned back to the wasteland, clutching her rifle.\n\nBehind her, they discussed what would come next. And the Reaver strode closer. Closer still. It had outpaced the host of wounded, and was now almost halfway to the wall, walking through an invisible web of unused firing solutions. Sanguinius could click his golden fingers and weaponry capable of boring through to the planet's mantle would erase the lone Titan from existence.\n\n'We should kill it, sire,' said one of the captains. Transacta-7Y1 identified the speaker by his armour: Apollo, an officer of the 48th Company. 'Nothing good can come of letting it reach the wall.'\n\n'No?' Zephon interrupted. 'Every second counts. Every single one. If Horus wishes to burn through time with melodrama, then we will let him have his way. All the while, the Thirteenth Legion sails closer to Terra. These theatrics benefit us, not the enemy.'\n\nApollo fixed Zephon with a stare. 'Thousands of prisoners are dying in agony. That's rather more than theatrics, Zephon.'\n\n'I will destroy it,' Sanguinius said softly, 'but not yet.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 ceased listening. She had no interest in their cost\/benefit analysis of the situation, and she knew she was beneath the notice of the Legion officers and their lord, anyway.\n\nFor a time, she watched the Titan. An emissary from Mordaxis. Without really thinking, she exhaled a blurt of code. At her side, Land nodded and licked his cracked lips.\n\n'Indeed,' he murmured. 'Indeed so.'\n\nThe youngest of the Blood Angels thralls, his red robe overlaid with ill-fitting flak armour, cleared his throat and addressed the techno-archaeologist.\n\n'May I ask, what did the cyborg say?'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 glanced at the human, but with no means of communication, she made no effort to explain herself. She doubted Land would translate for her, either; for all his genius, which was both considerable and undeniable, he seemed to have deep-rooted emotional turbulence. Zephon had asked him to protect the three servants, not be pleasant to them, so it surprised the skitarius when Land turned his ashy face to the Legion thrall.\n\n'Your name is Shenkai, isn't it?'\n\nThe young man, his face as filthy as everyone else's, nodded. 'Yes, Sire Land.'\n\n'Well, Shenkai, this is Transacta-7Y1. She said it pained her to see any god-machine, each one a being of blessed iron forged in the Omnissiah's own image, on the wrong side of the war. Doubly so, because she once fought alongside Legio Mordaxis, and she mourns that she must now see their engines animated by heretical purpose.'\n\nShenkai regarded the skitarius with a long look. Transacta-7Y1 could read the sympathy there, and gratitude stirred in the tired soup of her own emotional core. She inclined her helmeted head in response to the thrall's acknowledgement, and expressed a shorter sliver of code.\n\nLand translated again. 'She says you may call her Tee.'\n\nShenkai smiled. 'Then I will do so. Thank you.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 turned back to the wasteland. She watched it turn black. She watched the Titan stalk nearer. She noted that it kept its right hand curled in a loose fist, binding something within the great cage of its grip.\n\n'A curious choice of ambassador,' Land mused aloud.\n\nZephon's reply was low and tight. 'It has something in its hand.'\n\nThe Reaver - Transacta-7Y1 read the name on its tilting shield, Daughter of Torment - brought itself to a stop. Momentum meant it took time to settle on its pistons, adapting to standing and powering down its locomotive processes. The defenders could make out the details of its allegiance with their own eyes now, with the god-machine only a kilometre from the wall. There it halted, close enough to unleash its weapons if it chose to do so, far enough away that its reactor going critical wouldn't damage the battlement. Its banners swayed in the wind, its primary pennant hanging between its cabled thighs like a barbarian's loincloth.\n\nSlowly, the emissary from Mordaxis began to lift its hand. Even from this distance, with all the incidental noise of the humanity along the wall and the active reactors of their own Titans, Transacta-7Y1 could hear the clangorous grind of the Reaver's joints.\n\nIt stood before the wall, its hand outstretched towards the men and women gathered in their thousands. While its pose was that of a beggar, it brought a gift. There, in its palm, was a lone jewel of burnished red.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 heard Amit's growl. She heard Zephon's softer exhalation, and the way others among the Astartes cursed beneath their breath. She heard, most distinctly of all, Sanguinius' gentle lament, in a language she knew must be Aenokhian.\n\nA Blood Angel lay in the Titan's palm, cradled there with misleading gentleness. Like the human prisoners, he had been mutilated, but he was left with all the trappings of his rank, the gold edgings of his armour, the noble flow of his cloak. His cheeks were stained with black streaks and burn markings, and judging by the damage, Transacta-7Y1 suspected the enemy had poured a corrosive agent into his eye sockets. She watched his mouth working, seeing the swollen, tongueless red mess there, and she wondered what the man was trying to say. An oath, most likely. Astartes warriors made no shortage of oaths. Instead of words, he spoke blood.\n\nThe Blood Angel was dying, and it was a miracle of dubious fortune that he still lived. The mutilations weren't enough to kill him; the true wounds that paralysed him and kept him in place were the seven spears thrust through his body, nailing him to the Titan's palm.\n\nZephon took a step forward, and the thrusters of his jump pack gave a throaty whine in sympathy.\n\n'Hold,' Sanguinius whispered, the command as delicate as a knife held against skin.\n\nZephon looked over his shoulder at the primarch. 'But-'\n\n'Hold, Zephon. Do you truly believe you can surge over there and save him? Stand down, Bringer of Sorrow.'\n\nZephon held, that cold and sentient anger darkening his features. His teeth were parted as he stared at the desecration with haunted eyes. In contrast, Amit was all silent heat. Hate was an aura around him, and his warplate purred as it answered the shifts in his muscled frame.\n\n'Who is it?' Land asked, peering through his goggles, tuning them with clicks of the side-dials. 'Who have they crucified?'\n\nSanguinius was the one to answer, his voice no more than a breath.\n\n'It's Idamas.'\n\nIt was as if the name became a signal. Along the wall, tens of thousands of voices rose in anger, in defiance, in denial. Transacta-7Y1 saw the impaled figure of Idamas, captain of the 99th Company, lift his head and turn towards the sound. Something pathetically like hope dawned across his ruined face.\n\nThe Titan was waiting for this. It started closing its hand, the fingers curling with a squeal of scraping joints.\n\n'Transacta-7Y1,' Sanguinius said softly. 'Please take the shot.'\n\nShe hesitated at being addressed by the primarch, and Amit misinterpreted it as reluctance.\n\n'Do it,' he grunted.\n\nShe did it. The arquebus kicked, spitting a penetrator round of depleted transuranium. A kilometre away, the Blood Angels captain jerked, and the insides of his skull blasted out the back of his head to paint the iron of the Titan's closing thumb. Transacta-7Y1 racked the slide, ejecting the spent cartridge. It chimed sweetly against the marble rampart, steaming with the blue mist of discharge.\n\n'Thank you,' said Sanguinius. He was staring at the Titan, at the body in the Titan's clutches, with the air of a man too dutiful to close his eyes and deny the truth.\n\nThe Reaver, its performative cruelty stolen, nevertheless finished pulping the carcass between its digits. There was a brief, anticlimactic pop of sparking energy as Captain Idamas' power pack detonated. Then all that remained were the bloody, meat-wadded scraps of ceramite embedded into the god-machine's fingers.\n\n'That was an ugly death,' murmured Land, seemingly to himself.\n\n'But he lived a warrior's life,' Sanguinius countered.\n\nTransacta-7Y1, who could see both perspectives, wasn't entirely certain the latter overrode the former. Nor could she see why the demise of a single Blood Angels officer seemed to matter so profoundly to the Ninth Primarch. Was there something of particular significance to Captain Id"}
{"text":"ained were the bloody, meat-wadded scraps of ceramite embedded into the god-machine's fingers.\n\n'That was an ugly death,' murmured Land, seemingly to himself.\n\n'But he lived a warrior's life,' Sanguinius countered.\n\nTransacta-7Y1, who could see both perspectives, wasn't entirely certain the latter overrode the former. Nor could she see why the demise of a single Blood Angels officer seemed to matter so profoundly to the Ninth Primarch. Was there something of particular significance to Captain Idamas?\n\nDaughter of Torment had presented its gift and made its point. Now, the Titan dictated its terms. The offer came forth in a strained trio of overlapping voices, as if conflicting spirits animated the Reaver's bones. All three voices were feminine, all three seeming to speak with throatfuls of venom, burbling across the wasteland. Transacta-7Y1, who had experienced exactly zero erotic imaginings since her mechamorphosis began, still felt the voices caress something inside her, with a wet, disgusting silkiness.\n\n'Horus, Warmaster and true Emperor of the Imperium, offers the defenders of the Sanctum Imperialis his warmest greetings. He commends you on your resolve thus far, and admires you all for your efforts in fighting for what you believe is right.'\n\n'I'm sure he does,' Amit growled through a fanged grin, and Transacta-7Y1's lipless mouth curled in secret mirth. She stole a glance at Sanguinius, but the primarch's face was emotionless marble.\n\nThe Titan's three-voice decree echoed out from its cockpit speakers. 'Emperor Horus, true heir to the Throne and Crown of Terra, also wishes it to be known that anyone - be they human or Astartes - that surrenders their weapon now and abandons the Delphic Battlement, will be permitted to leave the field of conflict, free and unharmed.'\n\nMurmurs started to spread along the wall. This was unexpected. This was new.\n\n'Furthermore,' the Reaver blared, 'Emperor Horus Lupercal declares that upon making planetfall, he intends to journey to the Sanctum Imperialis. Should the Eternity Gate stand open upon his arrival, he offers an Imperial pardon to each and every one of you, with no condition or stipulation. He grants forgiveness to all.'\n\nAmit grunted. 'Here comes the But...'\n\n'However,' the Titan bellowed, 'should the Eternity Gate stand closed, he will regard this as an act of continued hostility. Any soul refusing to acknowledge Horus Lupercal as the Master of Mankind, and who resists the true Emperor's entrance into the Sanctum Imperialis, will be dealt with as an enemy of the Imperium.'\n\nThe last words burbled from the Reaver's vox-speakers. It sounded like the crew was gargling engine oil inside the god-machine's core. 'The Warmaster's army will march in one hour. If you choose to abandon your charade of defiance, launch signal flares from the Delphic Battlement, that we might bear witness to your capitulation. If you should destroy this emissary, your continued rebellion will be noted, and you will forsake the hour of grace granted to you. Emperor Horus Lupercal has spoken.'\n\nWith its message delivered, the ambassador began the laborious process of reawakening its locomotors and slowly, slowly turning.\n\nAll eyes turned to Sanguinius. He was lord of the last wall. The right to reply was his alone.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 wondered if he might open fire out of spite, for the primarchs were notoriously emotional beings. One moment, they seemed a curious and fleshly ideal: indeed, more human than human. The next, they were as petty as a pantheon of godlings from the pagan tales of Old Earth. It would have been a useless unleashing of firepower - the death of a single Titan would make no difference in the face of what was about to descend upon the wall - but the skitarius still suspected that the order would be given. Anger often overrode the logistics of futility - among mortals, at least.\n\nYet the Ninth Primarch remained calm. He spoke no words from a state of emotional flux, and Daughter of Torment stalked back towards her lines, the ground shaking less with each retreating step. She was allowed to live in exchange for one precious hour of grace.\n\nAmit spoke low, so his voice wouldn't carry. 'Some of the humans, sire... The promise of safety after surrender? That offer will tempt them.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 did not know if this was the case. The variances of human behaviour were extreme, yes, but also mysterious. Judging by the fact Arkhan Land was nodding, however, she presumed that Captain Nassir Amit was correct in his assertion. Some of the unaugmented would indeed wish to flee. And Transacta-7Y1 wasn't entirely without sympathy. Many of the scrap code sermons infecting the Mechanicus' communication network made some troubling statements regarding the fallibility of the Omnissiah. She, too, had considered abandoning her post. Not that she would ever confess to such momentary weaknesses of faith. That was between her and her god.\n\nThe Ninth Primarch didn't answer the genetically manipulated warrior template that he sometimes referred to as his son. His response to Amit's warning was the last thing Transacta-7Y1 could possibly have anticipated.\n\n'I do not want to be here,' said the Emperor's perfect son. His voice was soft, rancid with truth. He said those seven words not declaratively, more in an expression of gentle contemplation. As if the idea had only now occurred to him. As if, indeed, he'd only now remembered the words themselves.\n\nThen he took three steps forward to the very edge of the ramparts, and with a crack of his white wings, he took to the sky.\n\nIn the tower of the Crimson King\n\nVulkan\n\nThe Eighteenth Primarch had no wish to linger in the alien necropolis, and not merely because he knew time was against him. The city, Calastar, bore the heavy stink of tragedy, a failure so profound that Vulkan felt it infecting him. He was a creature of the fundament over the firmament, a man of ultimate practicality. Here, where physics was a code of laws all too easily broken, he was beginning to choke on the dead city's aura. He breathed in its spiritual failure and felt it in his bloodstream. It was an awkwardly metaphysical feeling.\n\nThe only bounty within Calastar was the abundance of Imperial dead. Corpses populated the city's thoroughfares and gathering plazas, lying in their hundreds, sometimes in their thousands. Skitarii. Secutarii. Martian Myrmidon war-priests. Sisters of Silence. Custodians. Most were years dead, reduced by the nature of this place to skinless bones contained within corroded armour. Some, though, seemed only recently expired, either killed in the last few months or preserved in a state of cadaverous freshness by the whims of the webway. All of them were daemon-slain. All showed horrendous wounds from inhuman blades, evidence of mutagenic disease, or partial devouring.\n\nAlong a particularly wide avenue, Vulkan walked a winding path around wrecked grav-Rhinos and Land Raiders, picking his way through mounds of golden dead. Once, the Emperor's Custodian Guard had numbered ten thousand souls: the greatest achievement of genetic engineering excepting the primarchs themselves. Most had died here, selling their lives in a failed attempt to undo Magnus' Folly and fight for the Emperor's dream.\n\nThe Imperial forces garrisoned in this necropolis years before had called it the Impossible City. A city of xenocultured materials eclipsing almost any human metropolis, it was set within a tunnel of unmeasurable size, with its towers and arches and bridges and avenues built at every imaginable angle. To look east or west was to see the cartography of distant districts founded on the great tunnel's walls, the sensation disorientatingly like looking down at a map. To look up was to see a mirror-city of stalactite spires growing down from the ceiling, this other 'ground' somehow kilometres above your head.\n\nWhichever name was ascribed to this place of shattered psychoplastics, it was a monument to two failed empires. First the aeldari population had died here, annihilated by some long-forgotten cataclysm - maybe even destroyed in the maelstrom of god-birth that had ended the rise of their decadent culture. Vulkan caught sight of their ghosts, or perhaps the ghosts of their ghosts, at the edges of his sight. Slivers of soul-light flickered in the windows of towers and in the arches of streets, lacking even the substance of shadows. They were visual echoes, unsentient, just the city in its long death recalling fragments of its lost life.\n\nThen the Imperium had laid claim to the husk of Calastar. With the Emperor's vision and the Mechanicum's ingenuity, they bound this region of the ancient webway to the Imperium's newborn, Throne-born pathways. And that, too, had failed.\n\nBut the cataclysm that laid waste to mankind's claim was anything but forgotten. Magnus the Red had torn through here on his quest to warn the Emperor of Horus' treachery. His astral form, swollen with righteousness and fuelled by human sacrifice, had ruptured the webway's fragile protective sheaths. As he ripped his way through this realm, destroying more of it with every step, every breath, every sorcerous whisper and desperate whim, he undid the Mechanicum's Great Work towards the salvation of humanity and opened the way for daemonkind to flood into this sacred place. With a heart bursting with the best intentions, he had doomed his species.\n\nAnd so began the War in the Webway. A war fought for years in absolute secrecy, out of sight of the teeming trillions it was supposed to save. The Emperor's Custodians and Silent Sisterhood were pressed back, and back, and back... until they abandoned first the Impossible City, then the webway itself - and with that second surrender, they abandoned the Emperor's dream. Humanity's future without reliance on the poisons of divine worship and warp travel was lost.\n\nVulkan had learned much from his time in the Imperial Dungeon. Drips, dregs, shreds of all this, pieced together"}
{"text":" out of sight of the teeming trillions it was supposed to save. The Emperor's Custodians and Silent Sisterhood were pressed back, and back, and back... until they abandoned first the Impossible City, then the webway itself - and with that second surrender, they abandoned the Emperor's dream. Humanity's future without reliance on the poisons of divine worship and warp travel was lost.\n\nVulkan had learned much from his time in the Imperial Dungeon. Drips, dregs, shreds of all this, pieced together from Malcador's lecturing, from the murmurs of Custodians, from the chanted lamentations of Mechanicus adepts. And Vulkan wondered: had his brother faced up to all he had done? He and Magnus had never been close. He couldn't predict what his Prosperine brother might be thinking now, exalted and enslaved by his patron overlord; more powerful than ever yet capering at the whims of that distant, cackling god.\n\nBefore reaching the city, Vulkan found himself musing whether Calastar would still be flooded with the twisted figures of daemonkind. Perhaps a million of the Neverborn would be waiting, hunting in the shade cast by spires of wraithbone and even rarer psychoplastics. But this was not so. There was nothing for them here. Nothing for them to feed upon. Nothing for them to digest in the process of maintaining incarnation.\n\nIt seemed that daemons did not like to dance on the graves of their foes. They moved on, driven by hunger, for to remain still was to starve.\n\nAnd so Vulkan was alone. Alone and lost in a screamingly empty place. There was no breeze in this sunless realm, though there was a sourceless, directionless light that granted a misty illumination. There was also - though he kept thinking he was imagining it - something palpable in the otherwise still air: a feeling of energy at play, an invisible current flowing out of sight and almost out of mind. He did not know if this was a natural element produced by the webway itself, or evidence of the unseen war of energies between Magnus and their father.\n\nTime was likewise worthless as a reference. Every time Vulkan checked his armour's chron, it told him a different tale. That he'd been walking for three days. That he'd been travelling for a month. That his journey wasn't set to begin for another six years. None of this mattered, really. Nowhere did he see any signs of his brother Magnus. All he could do was walk, and that's what he did, trusting to the rebellious laws of this dimension. Time either passed or it didn't - he had no way to be sure.\n\nAs he journeyed on, he thought of the Custodians and Sisters of Silence that had given their lives for him to enter the webway. He feared he was failing them.\n\nMore than once, he felt the passage of some vast etheric presence nearby. In each instance, he felt like a deep-ocean swimmer, being fortunately ignored by immense underwater beasts drifting past. A sensation like and unlike a breeze would caress his sweating skin, and in its wake was a scent not wholly unlike burning stone. Curiously, he knew he wasn't smelling the truth of the scent itself, but the closest his senses could come to codifying something utterly alien to the human experience.\n\nHe came to the belief that what he felt was the passage of aeldari void-ships sailing through tunnels in adjacent realities. City-sized cruisers, brushing past him, almost close enough to touch. This assumption, based on little more than gut instinct, was entirely correct.\n\nWhen he at last came upon a sign of life in this lifeless expanse, surprise stole all of his momentum for half a dozen heartbeats. Vulkan stood in place, head lifted, staring up at the wraithbone tower. It was at once a spire no different from any of the other thousand Vulkan had seen in Calastar so far, while also being the apotheosis of them. He could almost sense, with a heretofore unknown instinct that felt somehow animal, that he was at the very heart of the dead city. He stood at a convergence of the right planes of alignment and existence, where all was in perfect balance.\n\nThe entrance to the tower was an arch at the end of a long bridge, and the bridge was a crumbling curve of deteriorating psychoplastic, its sides eroded by tendrils of golden mist rising from the chasm it spanned. There were no bodies marking the site of an old battle, no daemons lurking in the misty dark; only a single trail of dusty footprints, some human in scale, others daemonically cloven, leading across the bridge and into the tower's yawning arch. It was the trail of a creature shifting between the states of man and monster, lost in protean flux.\n\nVulkan rested his hammer on his shoulder and followed the trail.\n\nLater, Vulkan would struggle to remember the truth of his journey ascending the spire. After the siege - and for Vulkan, there would indeed be a later, though that was destined to be a time of flayed nerves and an agony so raw it drove reason from his skinless skull - he would never be able to piece together exactly what occurred once he crossed the wraithbone bridge.\n\nFaint memories lingered, each one sitting jaggedly against the others, not of a single journey, but of three. He would recall his boots crunching on mist-kissed wraithbone stairs. Equally, he would remember striding up a stairway of gold-veined Tizcan marble. Impossibly, he would remember his boots thudding down on steps of mutated flesh and bone.\n\nThe tower, which was either all of these immersions or none of them, seemed to take forever to ascend. He remembered that much with absolute clarity, and the duration was not a matter of distance. When he reflected on the insides of that spire, during the long and lonely later he was fated to face alone, he would become increasingly sure that the tower was making itself as he climbed it. Its internal structures weren't set in stone or wraithbone, but were woven into being in response to his ascension. He was a grounding element, a source of metaphysical stability. Reality was forced to fall out of infinite flux to converge on a mere handful of possibilities.\n\nUp the spiral staircases he walked.\n\nIn the tower of ancient bone, he passed the psychoplastic corpses of aeldari constructs lying like puppets with cut strings, and he listened to the whispers of the ghosts of ghosts.\n\nOn the stairs of Prosperine marble, he breathed in the smell of smoke, while the windows granted him a view of the crystalline city of Tizca, its white pyramids burning in the light of the setting sun.\n\nIn the tower of flesh and bone and warping stone, he met warriors of a Legion he couldn't name. These warriors, clad in filthy cobalt and overwrought gold, stood silent sentinel on the stairs, never once greeting him or returning his hails. They watched him with dead eye-lenses that held only a simulacrum of life. Their heads turned with slow automaton intensity to regard him as he passed. They stank of funeral ash.\n\nHigh above, he heard his brother screaming. Except, it was also the sound of chanting. And a murmuring, desperately close to prayer.\n\nWhen Vulkan threw open the final rune-warded door, when he passed beneath the last glyph-marked marble arch, when he pushed through the final shimmering portal of dancing mirages, he stood under the dome of a grand observatory. And there, stunned at the sight of him, and enraged at his arrival, and grinning in expectation, was his brother Magnus.\n\nMagnus the Red was a luminous lie, incarnated as a being of burning light. A thousand chains of force thrashed and coiled from the aura, each one a conduit for cascading energy. Vulkan had to guard his eyes against the worst of the light, though there was nothing he could do about the crashing thunder of the chamber's unstable energies.\n\nHe could make out Magnus' face, just barely, as a melting and reforming mask within the avatar of deceitful light. The chamber around them was pristine in its long death, the wraithbone untouched by the forces at play, and Vulkan followed the lines of etheric force as they stretched out from the observatory, across the skyline of this alien necropolis. They faded in the air, not with distance but outside the range of their own visual metaphor. Vulkan was no arcanist, no scholar of the mystical, but he knew what he was seeing. This was a manifestation of his brother's assault on the Emperor.\n\nHe walked forward, ignoring the writhing serpents of force-light, his knuckles tightening on the haft of his hammer. The air resisted him, turning thick. Invisible force that would have crushed a mortal and paralysed an Astartes slowed Vulkan's stalking advance to a teeth-clenching crawl, like a man leaning into a storm's wind.\n\nThe room danced and shimmered about the two of them. Becoming the marble chamber once more. Becoming the oubliette of flesh and stone. Becoming the wraithbone observatory.\n\nMagnus' shifting features were strained, a mangled stream of invocation pouring from his mouth. He cursed and he chanted and he seethed, and Vulkan could discern no difference between what was spite and what might have been a spell.\n\nThe chamber in which they stood turned on some unseen, metaphysical axis. It didn't move, didn't rotate or spin, for these words imply a motion that was never present. Nevertheless, it turned.\n\nWhat Is and What Will Be disintegrated, becoming What Was.\n\nVulkan looked upon an incarnation of his brother that had not existed for years. Magnus the Red lifted his face, and Vulkan's heart broke at the devastation he saw there. The profundity of grief. And, unexpectedly, the depth of guilt. The burning city beyond the wide windows was an amber reflection in his remaining eye. Tizca would be dead by dawn.\n\nThis is the night that the Space Wolves brought ruin to the City of Light.\n\nThe primarch of Prospero looked ravaged, the lines on his face etched deep enough to age him far past any of his brothers. And yet, was this not Tizca? This was years before the beginning of the siege.\n\nOr the illusion of years before.\n"}
{"text":"there. The profundity of grief. And, unexpectedly, the depth of guilt. The burning city beyond the wide windows was an amber reflection in his remaining eye. Tizca would be dead by dawn.\n\nThis is the night that the Space Wolves brought ruin to the City of Light.\n\nThe primarch of Prospero looked ravaged, the lines on his face etched deep enough to age him far past any of his brothers. And yet, was this not Tizca? This was years before the beginning of the siege.\n\nOr the illusion of years before.\n\nThe observatory stood open to the heavens at dusk, as the first glimpses of unfamiliar constellations heralded the coming night. Any other evening, he might have been tempted to watch the stellar ballet above his brother's home world. Tonight, he advanced with his hammer in his hands, still forcing his way forward through chains of invisible force.\n\n'Stay back,' Magnus warned, and with those words, the world turned again.\n\nWhat Is and What Was both unravelled, becoming What Will Be.\n\nThe observatory was a spire-top platform, open to the tainted night, while the sky above blazed with witch-light. This world was in the grip of the warp, doubtless some ancient aeldari world in the Ocularis Terribus warp storm, turned sour by the empyrean's tides. The most unnerving detail was the planetary ring decorating the heavens, formed not of rocks and particles but of souls. They wailed, and at this distance, Vulkan should never have heard their wailing song. Yet he did, and his skin crawled with it.\n\nTo think this tragedy was Magnus' destiny, ruling this tainted globe some timeless span in the future... The very idea was a splinter in Vulkan's heart. To see his brother existing in a place of such suffering, a realm where the only antidote to its grotesquery was to imagine yourself as its king.\n\nBut Magnus the Red turned slowly, and Vulkan's heart cooled to stone at the sight of what the warp had done. Here was Magnus as the Dragon had seen the Sorcerer-King: a giant of burnished red flesh and lustrous wings. The face was a mask of condescending horror, smug with amassed knowledge. Cycloptic, fanged, bestial, all nobility was gone from the visage, leaving animalistic superiority in its place.\n\nVulkan pushed closer to the towering figure, with its feathered wings bathed in poisoned starlight and lashing in the arcane wind.\n\n'Stay back,' Magnus snarled again. And again, the world began to turn.\n\n'Enough,' Vulkan growled. 'Enough.'\n\nHe swung the hammer with every iota of strength he possessed. He held nothing back. It was an execution, the sentence of death, delivered.\n\nMillennia from now, an increasingly ignorant Imperium would tell tales of the Emperor's sons. These primarchs, they would say, were capable of flight, capable of enduring any torment, capable of splitting mountains with blows of their great weapons. Whatever was true and whatever would turn out false, Vulkan swung the hammer that day with enough force to tear through the fuselage of a Stormbird gunship. The blow he levelled at his brother's heart would have shattered the shin of a Warlord Titan.\n\nMagnus caught the hammer, one-handed. The monster gazed down into Vulkan's dark, straining features, and the flesh around the monster's one great eye wrinkled as he grinned.\n\n'Vulkan,' purred the daemon prince. 'I told you to stay back.'\n\nThe last choice left\n\nLand\n\nAh, here it comes. Land braced for the inevitable moronic phrases pitched to rouse the feelings of fools and stir the hearts of imbeciles. The calls to arms, the promises of victory. Yes, yes, yes.\n\nThe primarch beat his wings with his back to the enemy. He faced the defenders upon the wall, his pinions keeping him aloft as the dawn's pathetic light did its best to spark flares from the edges of his golden armour. Hololithic incarnations of his hovering form flickered into life across vambrace consoles and viewscreens within the keep. They sprang up from handheld projectors, thousands of identical tiny blue-light ghosts with beating wings.\n\nSanguinius' words carried across the kilometres of elevated wall, brought to distant ears on the clicking, ticking, crackling speakers of servo-skulls and Mechanicus drones. Soldiers clustered around their data-slates to bear witness to the primarch's proclamation. The hundred thousand defenders of the Delphic Battlement, drawn from all across the burning Imperium, listened to the words of the Great Angel. All of them could see him, even if they were far from his sight and forced to rely on a hololithic reflection. All of them could hear him, even if his words purred through the crackling mouth of a floating probe.\n\nLand had expected a speech dripping with demagogic inspiration. He'd find it tawdry, but knew most of the human defenders - many of whom responded far more positively to the primarchs than the Mechanicus did - would find great value in such a display.\n\nBut that was not what he, nor any of them, received.\n\n'I do not want to be here,' Sanguinius told them. 'I do not want this present, and I want the future that follows even less. We stand against our own brothers and sisters, with our backs to the Eternity Gate, and this is not a battle we can win. If you have ever wondered how you will die, now you know. If you have ever wondered where your body will lie, now you know. You will be killed on the last wall between hope and horror. Your body will lie here, unburied, staring up at a poisoned sky.\n\n'Once the Sanctum falls, Terra falls with it. And I tell you - we cannot hold this wall. You can see it yourselves - they are too many, we are too few. We may last a week, if we do the impossible. More likely we will all be dead in three days. Perhaps my words surprise you. Or frighten you. But I will not lie. Not to you, not to you who have come through two hundred days of dread only to find yourselves here.\n\n'I have looked into your faces and seen what this war has cost all of you. I have followed the flow of battles that each of you have survived, to stand here on the final battlement. I see everything you have endured, those stories written in the light of your eyes. Now the Warmaster offers you the lie of life, promising a mercy his forces are incapable of showing, if we will abandon this last wall. And it falls to me, here and now, to tell you to stand against him one more time. To give everything you have, even your lives, if it will hold this rampart for another day, another hour, another second. That is what the moment demands of me, is it not? That I beg you to make one last sacrifice?'\n\nSanguinius swooped closer to the battlement, casting his sword to the stone. It clattered there, in a loose cluster of Blood Angels, none of whom made any attempt to pick it up. Land stared at it for a long moment, then watched as the primarch whirled in the sky to face the wall once more, showing his bare hands to the gathered thousands.\n\n'No.' Sanguinius fairly breathed the word.\n\nHis wings beat hard, holding him aloft. He stared into the silence that met his disavowal, and he shook his head to punctuate the syllable with adamance.\n\n'No. I will not ask it of you. You have already given everything. You have already done everything asked of you a hundred times and more. You have suffered through a war of unimaginable darkness, one that has demanded more from you than any soldier in the history of our species has been forced to give. The fact you still live, that you still fight... I cannot conceive of the courage and resilience it requires for you to face this dawn and look to the horizon with a rifle in your hands.'\n\nLand could hear Army soldiers shuffling; he saw them glancing at each other. None of them spoke. All of them held rapt to the primarch's words.\n\n'Where Horus has offered only lies, I will offer you truth. Those of you that wish to run... Run. Leave this place. Not in shame at a duty undone, not in surrender to the traitor's forces, but with honour. Go with my gratitude, for you have already given everything asked of you. What right do I - does anyone - have to demand more? From you, who have endured harrowing beyond account, horror beyond measure?\n\n'If you wish to fall back into the Sanctum Imperialis and spend the last hours of life with your children, then do so. Know that you go not only with my blessing, but with my envy.\n\n'If you wish to leave the wall and take your chances in the wasteland before the battle begins, then - in the Emperor's name - you have earned the right to try. Go swiftly, and carry with you the pride that you have already given a hero's share in a war that none of us wanted but were forced to fight.\n\n'And if you wish for the truth, I will give it to you gladly, for you have earned that, too. It shames me to admit, but I would abandon this wall if I could. The primarch in me, the supposed demigod half of my heart, craves life with a ferocity that shames me. If I bowed to that instinct, I would take to the sky and never look back. But I cannot. I am half-human. And the human in me demands that I stay.'\n\nSanguinius turned, looking over his shoulder at the retreating emissary. Daughter of Torment was a quarter of the way to her lines now. When he looked at the wall once again, all could see the resolve in his eyes.\n\n'There are legends about me, I hear them whispered among you every day, that I know the moment of my own death. The stories say this gives me courage, that I feel no fear because I know I cannot yet be slain. Here is the truth of that tale.\n\n'That prophesied death is coming. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. I know not the When or the How, only that I feel fate's breath on the back of my neck. I do not remain here out of immortality's courage. I remain here because, if I am to die, I choose this death. I choose to die with my back to the last door. I choose to give my life to buy another hour, or a minute, or even a single second of grace to those who cannot be here fighting with me. I choose to die here because I do not believe I have yet given "}
{"text":"prophesied death is coming. Today. Tonight. Tomorrow. I know not the When or the How, only that I feel fate's breath on the back of my neck. I do not remain here out of immortality's courage. I remain here because, if I am to die, I choose this death. I choose to die with my back to the last door. I choose to give my life to buy another hour, or a minute, or even a single second of grace to those who cannot be here fighting with me. I choose to die here because I do not believe I have yet given all I can.\n\n'Someone must stand and fight, and if I have but one choice left, I will make it now. I will stand. I will fight. I will hold this wall, knowing that the Thirteenth Legion makes for Terra with all speed, and if they cannot bring salvation, they will bring retribution. Whether I am alone or whether a hundred thousand of you are by my side, when the Warmaster's horde descends upon this wall, they will find me waiting for them with a blade in hand. Not because I can win, but because it is right. I do not know what delusion grips those out there, who were once our brothers and sisters. But I know it is right to oppose them.'\n\nSilence drifted over the Delphic Battlement, but only for a moment. Sanguinius swept his arm across the wall, taking in the defenders. Thousands of holo-ghosts of his image did the very same thing.\n\n'I have spoken enough. You need hear no more of my fears and confessions. All that remains is for me to ask... Will you run?'\n\nAt first, in the face of the Great Angel's honesty, there was no answer.\n\nCorporal Mashrajeir of the 91st Industani Drop Troops didn't know what to say. Reason and duty warred within him, in a way known to any soldier facing the grimmest odds. He could live. He could leave, and live. His regiment wasn't made for this kind of fighting anyway. They were guerrillas, drop troops, trained for point insertion. He'd been on the ground for this whole damn war. What use was a grav-trooper on a rampart? What use was high-atmosphere jump training when all he had now was a lasrifle and a bayonet?\n\nBut he was making excuses, justifying, and he knew it. Mash had the training and the experience to overcome these doubts, to push them back and summon focus in their stead. Besides, there was nowhere to run. Not really. Tactically, it made sense to hold here. If he was going to die, best he sell his life where it would matter most.\n\n'No,' he called to the primarch. And he wasn't the first, but he was one of them. His voice cut out from the silence in the very first wave of denials. He wouldn't leave the wall. He wouldn't run. 'No!'\n\nSkitarii didn't celebrate birthdays. Magna-Delta-8V8 was no exception to this, though her macroclade - the series of platoons and structured hierarchies that defined not only her military position but also her entire social existence - had a tradition of honouring the anniversaries of a soldier's first combat. Due to the constant casualties and replenishment in a macroclade deployed to a theatre of conflict, it meant these acknowledgements were frequent, minor things. The exact axiom translated poorly from skit-code into any variant of Gothic, but the meaning was more or less, 'Every day is someone's anniversary.' The custom usually involved the exchange of gifts, often repeatedly re-gifted within a regiment, since skitarii were permitted so few possessions of their own.\n\nToday was Magna-Delta-8V8's combat anniversary. Only hers, out of those that remained, because so few of them were left.\n\nIt didn't matter that the avatar of the Omnissiah Himself was at work in the fortress behind her. It didn't matter that the horde on the horizon outnumbered and outgunned them an incalculable number of times over. These would have been considerations, of course, on any other day, and she would have stood and fought according to the binharic diktat of duty. Today, though, these concerns were irrelevant.\n\nThere was no chance she would run on her battle anniversary. Temptation had teased even her strip-mined brain, of course. She was partially human and wholly mortal. But what sealed the decision in sacred steel was when three of her surviving clade-kin came to her in the minutes before the Ninth's speech. They bore gifts.\n\nBenevola-919-55 had given her a pebble from the slopes of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mother Mars.\n\nJurispruda-Garnet-12 had given her a translator dataslug, to replace the one she'd lost herself, months before.\n\nKane-Gamma-A67 had given her a fistful of loose ammunition in lieu of any personal effects. He had nothing else to give.\n\nMagna-Delta-8V8 felt the weight of these gifts, these precious and talismanic gestures, in the folds of her cloak as she listened to the Ninth Primarch speak. And when the Ninth asked the last question, she was ready with her answer.\n\nShe couldn't vocalise it, at least not in Gothic, but her defiant shriek of skit-code was much of a muchness.\n\nLorelei Kelvyr wasn't supposed to be here. If she'd been able to summon the strength to laugh, she'd have surely cut loose with a raw bark of nasty, sarcastic amusement now.\n\nShe'd been press-ganged, of course. Before the war's opening bombardments, they'd dragged her from a life sentence in the cold tunnel-guts of the Sevastopol Mining Spire, and she'd honestly believed it would be easy to get out of ever getting sent to the line. Frankly, she'd not been able to believe her luck. Serving twenty years in the resource-starved mines for crimes she hadn't committed, that her own family had forced her to take the fall for, and suddenly she was dragged back into the sunlight, handed a knife and a rifle, and posted far from the prying eyes of her prison overseers. Fortune smiled at last, and it had a lot to make up for.\n\nBut that had been, what... a year ago now.\n\nIt wasn't that she'd never been able to escape. Quite the opposite. She'd escaped easily - and more than once. The first time, she'd made a break for it with several others - and one of her companions had killed a sentry on their way out of the temporary barracks. They left the poor sentry in a strangled heap, in a service locker, and fled only to find themselves lost in the palatial chaos of the Trans-Europan mag-rail nexus.\n\nDisappearing into the crowds had been easy, choosing the right train to stow away on had been an exercise in frustration. Every route, every single one, was transferring troops to one future war front or another. And so her first escape attempt saw her leaving not only her regiment but the entire sector, only to end up a thousand kilometres away, disembarking in a crowd of troops, immediately subsumed into this new regiment. The Legiones Astartes officers at the end of the line refused all her entreaties; as far as they were concerned, she was there, she was with the regiment, and with them she'd stay.\n\nHer next escape attempt had been painfully tantalising. After several weeks within her second regiment, she'd managed to fall in with a group of believers in the new faith (frankly, she didn't think cult was too strong a word for them) and listening to them prattle about the God-Emperor was both nauseating and uncomfortably inspiring. She knew everything they were saying was desperate nonsense, but if it had been true... Well, they believed in a beautiful idea, sure enough. Never had she so wished for a religion to be real.\n\nThis new association had allowed her a chance to slip along to their underground prayer gatherings, which in turn had let her make contact with an Administratum liaison attending the sermons, who had been easy enough to convince into having her reassigned. All it took was professing visions of faith in the God-Emperor, and he believed her touched by divinity. Lorelei was reasonably certain he'd fallen for it anyway.\n\nIf it had succeeded, it would've elevated her to some position of pathetically minor authority overseeing the mono-tasks of servitors in a warehouse somewhere... if only her deployment orders hadn't come through ahead of her transfer. She'd been waiting, down to the last moments on the mag-rail platform, casting about in the shrinking hope that her transferral notation would come through before she was finally forced, at the threat of a baton beating, to board the train.\n\nSupposedly, the Warmaster's fleet would reach Terra soon. She was running out of time.\n\nLorelei had escaped again, three nights later. She had no regrets at all about abandoning her second regiment, and in the weeks after she tore loose, she managed to lie low in the crud-shanties clustered at the base of Praxia Hivespire. There she lived in a ramshackle lean-to abandoned by its previous inhabitants: likely they were press-ganged into service themselves. She'd scavenged up the basics of survival for several weeks that time, living like a homeless queen alongside a few other deserters. But food was scarce to begin with and only got scarcer; soon enough they'd turned on each other, and it was time to bleed or leave. At first, Lorelei made sure she wasn't the one bleeding by cutting deals with the right brutes, but she'd hoarded too much, was too good at scavenging; soon she became a victim of her own success. The scum ganged up against her and came for her with chains and scrap-daggers.\n\nSo farewell, Praxia. Farewell, crud-shanty house.\n\nAfter that, well, desperation had set in. She did the one and only thing in her life she was ashamed of. Someone had died so she might live.\n\nWhat followed was a period of pretending to be a Munitorum scribe, though was it really pretence when she'd been damn good at the craft? She'd actually done the work, which in her eyes made her a legitimate contender for the trade. It'd been protracted, achingly dull stuff, but easy for all that: following regiments around, taking stock of supplies, and so on and so on, unto tedious infinity. Her ident documents were even legitimate, though that was largely because they weren't hers - they'd belonged to the woman she'd killed in or"}
{"text":"ing to be a Munitorum scribe, though was it really pretence when she'd been damn good at the craft? She'd actually done the work, which in her eyes made her a legitimate contender for the trade. It'd been protracted, achingly dull stuff, but easy for all that: following regiments around, taking stock of supplies, and so on and so on, unto tedious infinity. Her ident documents were even legitimate, though that was largely because they weren't hers - they'd belonged to the woman she'd killed in order to take her place in the endless grind of Imperial bureaucracy.\n\nA slice of dumb misfortune saw her busted by an otherwise useless administrator-captain, and for no reason beyond a simple mistake in calculations. She was supposed to be savant-grade, was she not? Why, yes, it said so on her documentation. How could she make a mistake like this? Why were her resource projections skewing so wide of the actualities?\n\nShe'd considered bribing him, which was a laugh because she had nothing to bribe him with, and she'd even considered killing him, which was twice the joke, since this was no scrawny, nutrition-stunted tallier of accounts, this was a retired Army soldier twice her weight and backed up by the crude strength of a bionic arm. Besides, she was in the thick of it then, deep in the coggy bowels of the Munitorum's processes, and even sneezing would leave a paper trail.\n\nShe ran, literally fleeing into the night, hiding in a nameless slum town in the shadows of yet another beautiful spire. If they caught her, they'd execute her.\n\nIt took no time at all for her to be press-ganged in another wave of mandatory recruitment, and her protests availed her nothing. Practically everyone on the planet not serving in an essential position was recruited into the Imperial Army, and so Lorelei was discharged and assigned to her third regiment, temporarily barracked and gearing up to be sent to yet another sector, where they'd inevitably reinforce the other conscripts already stationed there.\n\nHer crime and previous desertions went uncovered - so there was that, at least.\n\nShe was seemingly destined to fight in the war, though. Against all efforts to the contrary. That was it. She was being sent to fight in the line.\n\nAnd for a time, she had. For months. Months of starvation and privation, months of blinking smoke from her eyes and standing in trenches next to men and women that shat themselves at night to keep warm, and pretending she was better than them, that they belonged there and she didn't, while she grew more gaunt, more sour, day by blood-soaked day. Months of night-fighting and seeing her platoonmates eviscerated and crucified and burst open with bolter fire and carved apart with chainswords. Months and months of what everyone else was also going through. Being pawns in the Astartes' war.\n\nAnd now, after everything, now this. The Great Angel himself... saying she could run.\n\n'Lor,' said the soldier next to her. 'You alright?'\n\nHer squad, all seven of them still alive, were huddled together in a scrimmage that reeked of sweat and crap and charred earth, watching the flickering hololith projected from Sergeant Gathis' vambrace.\n\nLorelei felt tears on her face. Was she all right? Oh, yeah. She was great. Just wonderful. She wasn't the only one showing emotion, either. It wasn't weeping, exactly. It was a slow leak of emotion too weary to really be called weeping.\n\n'My name's not Lorelei,' she said, cuffing the tears from her cheeks. She had no idea why she was crying. It was like she'd been punctured, and now it was just trickling out of her. 'It's actually Daenika.'\n\nHer squad were looking at her now.\n\n'Lorelei Kelvyr was just some Munitorum menial. I killed her months ago. Took her name. I hate that I did it. I wish I hadn't.'\n\nShe looked up, meeting their eyes. To a soul, they regarded her with depleted acceptance. No anger. No disgust. No judgement at all. Not after all they'd been through as a unit.\n\n'I was trying to get out of the war,' she told them. 'I didn't want to fight in the line. This was before I met all of you. You're not even my first regiment. This is just the only one I couldn't escape from. Throne, I'm so tired. We can finally run, finally leave all this shit behind us, and I'm so. Bloody. Tired.'\n\nHer exhausted tears gave way to laughter. Weak laughter, and weary, but true.\n\n'We're not running, Lor,' Sergeant Gathis said gently. On his vambrace, Lord Sanguinius had finished speaking. The primarch asked his last question, and already the shouts of 'No! No!' rang out across the Delphic Battlement. It was getting hard to speak over it.\n\n'I know,' she called back over the yelling. 'Neither am I.'\n\nDaenika and her squadmates added their voices to the chorus.\n\nIt would be a poor joke indeed to say that no one wanted to leave the wall in the wake of the primarch's words. Many wished to run. More than a few came close, but there were as many reasons to stay as there were defenders upon the wall. Every soul there fused some combination of anger, guilt and shame, cobbling them together to make a piecemeal courage the way people always do in their bleakest moments.\n\nSome stayed out of duty. Others out of hope, deluded or otherwise, that reinforcements may yet reach them. Some stayed only because the resolve of those around them shamed them into staying. Some stayed because Sanguinius was right - they'd already given everything, and they had nothing worthwhile left to lose. Their lives were formalities by that point, a matter of biological habit, while the war had worn them down to hollow shells devoid of everything that had defined their lives. Some stayed because they were sick of running, and after two hundred days of defensive withdrawals, this was it, this was the last battle, and they would hold the wall out of tired spite.\n\nLand would wonder, years later, if anyone truly did try to run. Surely some did. Were they restrained by companions or shot in the back by their officers? Were they allowed to quit the wall unopposed, as the Ninth had promised? It seemed likely (statistically certain, in fact) that this was the case, but each time he turned his goggles back towards the Royal Ascension, leading up to the Eternity Gate... the Gate stood open, disgorging a stream of soldiers and materiel. No one seemed to be going against the flow to venture inside. Nor did he see anyone making their way down from the wall to take their chances in the wasteland.\n\nPerhaps if Land and the men and women like him - precious few though they are, in any era - had a firmer understanding of the human condition, it wouldn't have been such a surprise that so many stayed when there was a choice to flee.\n\nNo! cried the defenders of the wall. They rejected the primarch's offer with a gestalt sound of vocal thunder.\n\nNo! No! No!\n\nLand didn't shout with the others. He wasn't one for the theatrics of yelled defiance. Still... still, there was something rather primal in the way the tumult washed over him. At one point he caught himself drawing in a shaky breath, almost joining his voice to the others. He resisted, naturally. What an embarrassing loss of decorum it would be, to join in.\n\nGiven all that Sanguinius had said regarding every moment mattering, and given the way Zephon had impressed upon him the vital import of doing all they could not to provoke the enemy into attacking early, Land blinked several times, entirely taken aback, when Sanguinius landed on the battlement, caught the blade Amit tossed to him, and launched into the air once more. Land's beaky nose scrunched up in disbelief as he watched the Great Angel soar towards the eastern horizon.\n\nAlong the wall, the cries of negation melted, fused, into a roar. The sound was exultant, bloodthirsty, joyous. Land had never heard its like. Sapien - perched on Land's shoulder - covered his little ears.\n\nThe Martian's disbelieving words were drowned by the tide. 'Tell me he's not going to kill that Titan.'\n\nSomehow, Zephon heard his murmur over the bellowing thunder. The Blood Angel looked down at him, and Land was gratified by the cacophony, for it doubtless spared him another lecture. This one would be on the tenuous balance of morale, and capitalising on the defenders' high emotions, and a whole host of other nonsense that only applied to men and women unable to regulate their emotions through a healthy sense of distance and perspective.\n\nJudging from the storm of voices, though, it would've been a difficult point to refute. The loss of their hour would be a sacrifice, but the boost to morale after Sanguinius' speech and whatever he planned to do out there in the wasteland was, apparently, a worthy exchange.\n\nLand manually refocused his goggles and gazed across the cursed ground. Not watching the Titan, no. Nothing to see there. A genetic abomination-god cutting off the cockpit-head of an apostate avatar of the Omnissiah. Yes, yes, yes. Nothing that Land hadn't already seen half a dozen times in this war.\n\nHis attention was on the distant tide of the enemy lines, and the crucifixion forest they'd raised to celebrate their barbarity.\n\nTwo things happened when the Reaver's head fell.\n\nThe first, the most obvious, was that the horde's front lines started to move. Land wasn't even sure they had waited; they might have already started advancing before the Titan's head struck the earth, kicking up a cloud of ash and dust. Ahead of the Titans and tanks, ahead of the great walking things that Land suspected were some heretofore unknown strain of biomechanical siege weapons, a host of jagged, winged creatures darkened the sky above the horde's vanguard. They cut the heavens ahead of the horde, making for the Ninth Primarch alone on the field of battle.\n\nThe second thing that happened, concurrent with the first and visible only because Land turned his goggles towards the god-machine's body, was that Sanguinius immediately turned back and made for the battlement.\n\nDaughter of Torment did not "}
{"text":"uspected were some heretofore unknown strain of biomechanical siege weapons, a host of jagged, winged creatures darkened the sky above the horde's vanguard. They cut the heavens ahead of the horde, making for the Ninth Primarch alone on the field of battle.\n\nThe second thing that happened, concurrent with the first and visible only because Land turned his goggles towards the god-machine's body, was that Sanguinius immediately turned back and made for the battlement.\n\nDaughter of Torment did not fall right away. Her graceless tumble came almost a minute after her decapitation, when - brainless - she could no longer regulate the energy animating her bones. At that point, she fell forward and slightly sideways, gouting reactor fire from her severed throat. By that point, the sky was vile with thousands of winged creatures. Exoplanar aberrations - daemons, if you wished to be crude about such matters - beating their chiropteran wings as they chased the Great Angel back towards sanctuary.\n\nPerhaps halfway to the rampart, the creatures in the sky began to slow. Some faltered, circling back. Others dropped from the sky, these weaker ones disintegrating before they could even hit the earth. The largest, swiftest, or strongest in ways Land's eyesight couldn't easily determine, flew on in pursuit, but they were bursting, bleeding, their forms threatening to come apart with each beat of their wings. So fascinating was their destruction that Land, who prided himself on his acuity, took a moment to realise he was witnessing the Omnissiah's psychic shield still in force.\n\nHe laughed aloud, delighted by the sight, only to find the sound lost in the cheers rising all around. And that was strange enough to make his skin crawl, sharing a moment of joy with so many people around him.\n\nSanguinius landed on the rampart in a skid, sparks spraying from his golden boots as they slid across stone, his wings spread wide to slow himself down. His sword was still marked with holy oils and lubricants from where it had chopped through the bindings of Daughter of Torment's neck.\n\nThe cheering redoubled. Sapien covered his ears again.\n\nThe Great Angel whirled back to face the horizon's tide. Seconds, at most, from being in range of the wall-guns.\n\n'Legion!' he called. 'Legion!'\n\nThe order was taken up along the wall, officer to officer, and shouted further across the vox. Land could hear it rippling away in a stream of retreating sound, like a dissipating echo: Legion, Legion! Legion, Legion...\n\nIn a crashing harmony of ceramite, the Astartes - all the Astartes - stepped forward. The human defenders had no choice but to move back. Drilling and training took over; the mortal defenders scrambled out of the way. A line of warriors in Blood Angels red took their place at the ramparts, their uniformity broken only by patches of Imperial Fists yellow and White Scars white. Tens of thousands of boltguns lifted, braced in readiness.\n\n'Let them break upon us,' Sanguinius ordered, and Land realised with an unexpected sense of awe that the Great Angel wasn't addressing his Legion. He was beating his wings again, calling out to the humans that massed behind the Astartes' lines.\n\n'You have your orders,' Sanguinius called to the Army units and the civilians with their unfamiliar guns. His voice was calm as it carried across the closest squads and was transmitted onward over the vox. 'You know your roles. Hold, and lend aid where you can. But let them first break upon us.'\n\nSanguinius - no, he is the Ninth, he's the Ninth Primarch, damn it - turned back to face the foe. Still distant, but close enough for...\n\nThe Great Angel's sword swept down.\n\nThe million guns of the Sanctum Imperialis started singing.\n\nPART SIX\n\nECHOES OF ETERNITY\n\nSiege of the Sanctum Imperialis\n\nThe Legio Krytos Titan Serenity of Retribution had achieved a kind of mongrel sentience, comprised of the instincts and emotions that generations of her princeps had experienced while plugged into her systems. She could feel and, to a lesser extent, think. She knew fear and pain, she knew the thrill and relief of victory, and above all, she knew how to hate. The crews and engines of Krytos were among the best at that.\n\nThese were things her succession of princeps had known, so she knew them now. Her conception of these processes was crude, and she possessed no mastery over them, but she was a walking god of iron and firepower, so the subtleties of mental regulation were largely irrelevant to her anyway.\n\nShe knew pride, too. This was the sensation that flowed fiercest through the electrical connections that formed her mind. In a lesser being, such self-obsession with all her own achievements might be considered vanity, but she had no way to assess such things. Everything Serenity knew and felt, she knew and felt with overwhelming force. She had lived through generations of commanding princeps - the calculation by which she measured time - and every enemy she had faced was either dead or had fled. In the boundaries of tumbling calculations that passed for her intelligence, she had every right to be vain.\n\nAs she strode towards the Delphic Battlement, she felt the exaltation of wondrous purpose. Her war-horn blared in time with her saurian cries, warning the vermin infantry at her feet to thank her for the honour of leading them. Final and ultimate victory lay beyond the wall. The immensity of her emotions allowed her a form of stunted imagination, and already she could conceive of the blessings her worshippers would sing up at her, as well as the fresh triumph banners they would hang from her guns.\n\nHer crew was dead, their corpses rolling around inside her head, lurching against their consoles and across the deck. Serenity of Retribution didn't know this, which was fortunate, because had she become aware of it, the revelation would have undone her in a way her emergent consciousness might not have survived. The path to sentience is a precarious one for all forms of life, and it was a journey often failed by even the strongest of machine-spirits. The fact is, Serenity of Retribution was functioning on the legacies of what human instinct had imprinted on her, and whether that could fuse with a machine-spirit to create true sentience is a matter even Arkhan Land would've struggled to answer. He did, of course, have theories on the matter.\n\nShe strode down the Grand Processional, destroying marble statuary beneath her, turning the icons of heroes into white rubble and clouds of powder, marching at full stride behind the thick layers of her overcharged void shields. She was one of the lead Titans, her void shields offering sanctuary to many souls and tanks in her shadow. Incoming fire made her shields visible; they were layered curves of bruised light, fire spilling down their sides to fall upon the warriors below in napalm rain.\n\nThe opening missile salvo from the Delphic Battlement roared across the cancerous wasteland - hundreds of warheads; thousands of them - and she knew, even with the instinctive awareness that could only arguably be called reasoning, that she was about to die. This proud Warlord of the God Breaker Legio had neither the honour of the first death nor the most catastrophic. Her demise was just another footnote in a list of names too long to ever be accurately preserved - not in the eternally unreliable mechanisms of Imperial records, or by the word-of-mouth legend and chanted prayers that would pass for archival data in the future of the Warmaster's forces.\n\nShe never knew exactly how many missiles struck her, and like so much of the war to date, the scale both defied easy calculation and meant nothing in the context of the woe it inflicted. They struck her like a warrior in a shield wall being struck by thirty spears in the same second. She was dead before she fell, her void shields instantly burst, her superstructure igniting and blowing apart, scattering fiery shrapnel for a half-kilometre in every direction.\n\nHer last thought was notable, however, in its instinctive unselfishness. It was a command, remarkable for the fact that no princeps lived to order it.\n\n[SOLACE-SANCTUARY PROTOCOL], she thought.\n\nThe armoured cockpit that made up her head blew its lynchlocks exactly two point seven seconds before the Sanctum's first salvo struck home. She willingly decapitated herself, the escape pod protocol blasting her head free from her shoulders along a hurriedly cogitated trajectory.\n\nIt wasn't enough, and even had her crew still lived, it would never have been enough. The cockpit-head clipped one of the incoming missiles, catching aflame and spinning off course in the wake of the explosion, before crashing into the wasteland. There it lay at rest, a blown-open tomb for the three souls that had died weeks ago, only to be destroyed by the curtain of artillery fire that followed mere seconds after the first missile wave.\n\nDawynne Coto hadn't needed to be conscripted, she'd signed up willingly. The Warmaster had liberated her world from the unfair demands of its alien overlords, and granted not only freedom, but also membership within humanity's Imperium. When the recruiting ships visited a decade later, stating that Warmaster Horus had need of loyal soldiers to make war upon the corrupt Emperor, that had settled it. It would be a lie to say Dawynne was entirely without guilt at leaving the harvest unfinished, but some things mattered more than storing up grain for the coming season. Her parents could hire on additional hands to see it done. Dawynne, along with her older brother, had taken a wagon into the trading-town, and signed their names without hesitation.\n\nThat was five years ago. Her brother was dead; Nessin hadn't even seen Terra. He'd been killed in a boarding action only months after recruitment, when their ship had been attacked by... Well. By someone else, some other force loyal to the Emperor. Some cyborged force of Martian horrors. Exact details rarely filtered down "}
{"text":"ents could hire on additional hands to see it done. Dawynne, along with her older brother, had taken a wagon into the trading-town, and signed their names without hesitation.\n\nThat was five years ago. Her brother was dead; Nessin hadn't even seen Terra. He'd been killed in a boarding action only months after recruitment, when their ship had been attacked by... Well. By someone else, some other force loyal to the Emperor. Some cyborged force of Martian horrors. Exact details rarely filtered down all the layers of military hierarchy to the grunts. At first, the lack of clarity on anything had frightened Dawynne, but as time passed, she became inured to it. She came to realise that all she needed to know was where to go and who to shoot once she got there. Anything beyond that was a bonus. Acceptance of this fact was the first real sign of her veterancy.\n\nCorporal Primus-grade Coto was in a Chimera when she died. The first wave of firepower from the Delphic Battlement was a missile fusillade focused on killing the Titans that towered over the horde, but the second wave was traditional artillery, a rain of bombardment that blanketed the wasteland in fire and phosphex. In all her imaginings of her final moments, she'd died with a blessing for her family on her lips, or - when she really dared to dream - ended everything heroically, bleeding out on a mound of enemy dead.\n\nBut war has no sympathy for man's personal melodramas. In reality, Dawynne was instantly incinerated by a Gryphon shell striking her Chimera, and what remained of her was indistinguishable from the mess of the nine other men and women flash-fried to the shrapnel of their murdered vehicle.\n\nDeiphobus of the Emperor's Children covered the wasteland in great leaps, boosting in high arcs with thrusts of his jump pack, coming down in controlled descents to hit the ground running each time. He was one of hundreds, skyborne units from every Legion coming together in a boosted charge.\n\nHe had changed since the war's commencement. There was something alive in his throat, something he felt shifting and curling, making his neck swell. Sometimes it made him speak with its voice and think its thoughts. He no longer wore a helmet, and his breastplate was a corroded mess, because he salivated all the time now, and his saliva was chemically similar to hydraklaurik acid.\n\nDeiphobus had gone to the III Legion's Apothecaries long before the Terran Campaign began, and demanded they remove the parasite. But it was no parasite, they told him, and as they showed him the scans, they chastised him for his lack of gratitude and vision. He was blessed. The refinement enhanced him, enhanced his lethality, and was he not a weapon, born and raised to exult in the taking of life?\n\nHe had agreed. Or, rather, the thing in his throat had spoken agreement, using his body to do it.\n\nSecretly, he had considered cutting it out, but he always remembered the scans. What he'd seen on those screens was part of him, a changing of his own flesh rather than some external intrusion. He doubted he would survive the process of self-removal.\n\nSoon enough, his alterations weren't even notable. Others in his own squad went through greater changes, never calling them mutations, always 'enhancements' and 'refinements'.\n\nHe stroked his throat sometimes. Feeling the way it swelled with his unspoken sins and secrets. Caressing it coaxed runnels of steaming acid that flowed sweetly over his teeth. Deiphobus had long since come to terms with his refinements. He appreciated them. Not just the first, and not just their lethality, but the others that had followed and the strange cocktail of desires they inspired.\n\nHe wanted to taste Sanguinius' blood. That was why he was here, assaulting the Sanctum instead of cavorting in the southern lands with so many of his Legion brothers. He wanted to gulp it, to quaff it so it washed over the changed flesh of his throat, stinging divinely as it went down. This need was eating away at him; it had been all he could think of for weeks. No other sustenance quenched his thirst. Not even the IX Legion blood he'd drunk, not the IX Legion flesh he'd eaten. The need was making him spasm and tremble, so fierce had it become: an addiction to a taste he'd never tasted.\n\nHe would not get his wish. He didn't even reach the Delphic Battlement. Something approximately as hot as the sun and twice as bright hit his breastplate, dropping him out of the sky in a nauseating, disorientating tumble. His freefall lasted all of four dizzying, breathless seconds, and he died upon impact without ever realising he'd taken a lascannon beam through the chest.\n\nJa-Hen Uquar was a conscript of the Neshamere Eighth Mechanised Infantry, riding in one of the sixteen gunnery cupolas of an Orion-pattern troop carrier. He stammered a constant stream of prayers and curses, at all times of day, barely able to speak anymore because his throat was so hoarse. Each time he tried to sleep in the rare periods his regiment found the chance to rest, he saw the events of the last half-year playing out again and again behind his eyes. It's possible to be driven from reason by sleep deprivation. Ja-Hen had learned this the hard way.\n\nHe was thrown from his turret when an explosion took out his transport, along with the hundreds of soldiers inside. He was unconscious for less than a minute, and when he woke on the ground, he no longer had the dubious protection of his squadmates and their armoured carrier. Ja-Hen saw the wreckage that had been his platoon's mobile bunker for years, broken open and smoking, with bodies strewn liberally throughout.\n\nHe was alone, armed with a pistol, in a wasteland of exploding earth as gunships screamed in spiralling crash landings, and Titans burned and shrieked above him, and the world shook equal to any earthquake, and impossible dead things spanned the entire sky. He was crying out himself, though he wasn't aware of it, and not just because the sound was minimal with his abused vocal cords; like thousands of others on both sides of the battle, he was deaf, his eardrums ruptured by the magnitude of the weapons firing above him, around him, at him.\n\nPlease let this end, he thought, which was the closest he'd come to thinking clearly in weeks. He ate the barrel of his pistol and pulled the trigger.\n\nHis anima - what some would call a soul - unanchored from his body and went screaming through the veil between corporeality and unreality, plunging immediately into the boiling tides of the warp. The weakling soul-light that had been Ja-Hen Uquar experienced one final sensation as it learned the lesson of what waited in death for all living things, and that lesson was pain. The pain of dissolution. The pain of one's soul-light drawing daemons the way blood draws sharks in dark water.\n\nFinally, mercifully, and in accordance with his dying wish, it ended.\n\nVarak'suul had suffered for her weak genesis. Insofar as her kind held to any notions of physicality, she was a she, for the Neverborn are shaped by human deeds and fears. Like most of her kind, she was brought into being by an act of malice, in this case one of betrayal that led to bloodshed.\n\nShe was also weak. Varak'suul's genesis was in the guilty pleasure taken by a murderer, in the back alley of a long-dead city in a long-forgotten empire on a planet that had died centuries ago in the gloom of Old Night. Like all her kind that lacked a ready source of faith or devotion to fuel them, she manifested in the warp and took forever to grow stronger. From her very first moments, her existence was one of parasitic cowardice, feeding on lesser secrets in the hearts of weak men, and hiding from her own kind in case they abused and digested her for their own power.\n\nShe had briefly served as a courtier in the Halls of the Wilfully and Ecstatically Blind. This place, ruled over by an exiled Keeper known as the Pale One, was an impoverished realm far from the grand court at the Palace of Pleasure. But even this far from the gaze of the Perfect Prince, ambition burned in the hearts of Slaanesh's children, and they made war upon one another with lies, poison, temptation, and a thousand other treacheries. Varak'suul had fled the Pale One's entourage, wandering through the far reaches of the Realms of Chaos; distant enough to hide among the other scavengers, not quite removed enough to discorporate her.\n\nAnd then: the summons had come. She'd felt the irresistible pull, the siren song of her young god's call. It wasn't merely a beckoning, it pulled at the very threads of her being. It dragged at her corpus, bringing her to Terra whether she willed it or not.\n\nShe had manifested weeks ago, clawing her way into the cold material realm, her mouth watering at the flavours of fear and the prayers for deliverance thick in the air. Since then, she had lapped at the brainflesh of skull-cracked captives, licking them with her barbed tongue. She had danced in battle with all the grace of her god-formed body, carving through the armour of humans and transhumans alike. She had moved with clusters of her own kind, drinking the sensations of the humans around them, heightening their emotions and lying with promises of survival; and always, always moving inward. The names of the walls and districts meant nothing to her. She knew only that at the heart of all this iron and stone lay a castle, and within that castle was the flesh-body of the creature that the Pantheon mockingly called the Anathema.\n\nBut she couldn't reach the castle. None of them could. The desire to descend upon it throbbed inside the speculative energy that served as her skull - it pulsed with the malignant life of a tumour - but every step she took towards it met with an invisible field of resistance. This pressure rejected her. It repulsed all her kind, turning reality thick and worthless around them.\n\nIt even hurled the Lord of the Red Sands back each time he flew at it in his rage. He was a disg"}
{"text":" called the Anathema.\n\nBut she couldn't reach the castle. None of them could. The desire to descend upon it throbbed inside the speculative energy that served as her skull - it pulsed with the malignant life of a tumour - but every step she took towards it met with an invisible field of resistance. This pressure rejected her. It repulsed all her kind, turning reality thick and worthless around them.\n\nIt even hurled the Lord of the Red Sands back each time he flew at it in his rage. He was a disgusting and unnatural thing, a mortal elevated to immortality, and she wondered if this 'Angron' and his primarch brothers could even comprehend the disgust that the true Neverborn felt for them. When Varak'suul and her siblings witnessed the transhumans seeking to follow their gene-fathers into ascension, it had brought ripe new opportunities to promise them eternity and deceive them into doing the daemons' will.\n\nBut these were lesser concerns. She could prey on their desperate souls later.\n\nOne of the recently exalted mortals, the one calling itself 'Magnus', was doing the will of the Changer, deep in the labyrinthine dimension. Varak'suul was nothing, unworthy of knowing the truths of the conflict, but she sensed the energies at play. She felt the weakening of the Emperor's efforts as the thing that was once His son wore away His strength. Blessedly, the Emperor's shield was collapsing faster, no longer day by day, but hour by hour. The threat of repulsion still slowly ate away at her corpus, but she - and all of her kind - were getting closer, closer. When the horde had charged, the mortal tide rushing towards the wall, Varak'suul had been one of the many thousands of daemons left behind.\n\nShe watched the Warmaster's humans and transhumans race ahead. She watched them swarm the wall. And every time she felt the shield ebbing, she took a step forward.\n\nPrinceps Ulienne Grune of the Warhound Hindarah hunched in her throne, her posture mimicking the lope of her god-machine body. In front of her, Otesh was leaning hard into her controls, bringing Hindarah around in a bone-rattling run. Himmar - was dead, they were both dead, she was locked in the cockpit with their corpses - was guiding the weapons arms around to match their movement.\n\n'We've been engaged,' said Himmar, with his eyes on the auspex screen. And though Himmar said it, Ulienne heard the words in her voice, felt them coming out of her mouth.\n\nI am talking to myself, she thought, because Otesh and Himmar have been dead for weeks.\n\n'New heading achieved, my princeps,' said Otesh.\n\nThey were running blind. The view through Hindarah's eye-windows was nothing but fire; outside, the world was ending. Even with the cockpit insulated and shielded, the sound of the destruction was just short of agonising. There was too much information to take in, overwhelming her senses, overloading her scanners. Ulienne focused on a single flickering topography screen, doing what she could with the little data she could tolerate. The landscape before the Delphic Battlement was a featureless plain of ruined earth. The horde swarmed over it in their ragged millions.\n\nThe closer they came to the wall, the more often brief bursts of the wider battle intruded. A Stormbird spiralling down to crash on a rampart. Another Titan going nova, near enough to rain body shrapnel against Hindarah's long-suffering void shields. A swarm of Astartes, thousands upon thousands of them, charging along the rubble-strewn Grand Processional; thousands more swarming the sheer face of the Delphic Battlement, using entrenching tools and grapnels to climb. Most surreal of all was the slope of spent ammunition at the wall's base, an avalanche of ejected shells forming as they tumbled down from the battlement's guns in a never-ending, clanking torrent.\n\n'Ten,' Himmar called back to her. 'Nine.'\n\nUlienne forced Hindarah forward, hunching into the storm of incoming fire. Her spotlights stabbed through the ashy air, illuminating the troop transports and battle tanks around her.\n\n'The first gunships are on the ramparts,' said Otesh, watching through the interference plaguing Hindarah's external picter feeds. 'The first Titans are almost at the wall.'\n\nExcept they weren't the first gunships and the first Titans. The first gunships and Titans were smoking wreckage in the wasteland. Those making it to the wall were just the first to survive the atrocity of firepower unleashed upon the charging horde.\n\nHimmar called again, 'Five, four.'\n\nUlienne did her best to ignore the pounding against her shields and the shaking of the earth beneath her feet. Hindarah had been repaired and rearmed once Audax's maintenance vehicles had caught up with the front line days ago, but the reassuring weight of possessing both arms again was cold comfort when the world was ending around her. A sickening electrical crack told the tale of another void layer stripped away. Hindarah gave a canine snarl in the back of Ulienne's mind, as if blaming her for this headlong march into madness.\n\n'One,' said Himmar. 'Zero.'\n\nHindarah snarled at her again, a mind-sharing of revulsion, and Ulienne's skin crawled in sympathy with her swimming vision. A snap of static cracked at her fingertips from the arm of her throne. Then it was over, and they were through.\n\n'We're inside their voids,' Himmar confirmed. 'We lost a layer of shielding from the abrasion.'\n\nShe didn't need to give the order to relight the shields to full capacity; Himmar was already on it.\n\n'Stay back from the Delphic Arch. Let the sapping crews handle the portcullises. Find one of our Reavers or Warlords, add our firepower to theirs.'\n\n'Aye, my princeps,' said the two dead moderati in unison. Or perhaps she said it herself. It didn't really matter. She spared a glance for the army of disordered Astartes assaulting the wall, imagined the many thousands of defenders waiting at the top of its tiered ramparts, and focused on the task ahead of her.\n\nThere was very little left of Kargos now. When he reached for memories, or even emotions, he kept finding anger, stripped of all circumstance. The realisation that pieces of his mind were falling away should have been horrific, but the opposite was true. He felt purified, when he felt anything at all. Nothing cleanses the soul the way anger does. Nothing feeds righteousness like rage.\n\nHe'd been inside a Land Raider. He remembered that. At least, he remembered the sensation of being trapped within it. The confines. The darkness. The sound above all else: the sound of the world being destroyed on the other side of the Land Raider's hull. It was a sound that broke the limits of sound, spreading to fill all five senses.\n\nHe remembered the pride he felt because he was going in before the Neverborn. For some reason, that mattered. There was honour in it. In the beginning it would just be the living against the living. Human against human, Legion against Legion.\n\nHe remembered what the preacher had said, before the tank treads rolled.\n\n'The last gasp of mortal warfare.'\n\nYes. That was it. And Inzar had sounded as if he relished the idea, like the sun was setting on something primitive and best left forgotten.\n\nThen the engine gunned. The Land Raider lurched forward. They were making for the Delphic Wall and things darkened to red and black. What else was there? He could remember... Wait. Could he remember reaching the wall? Climbing it? Gaining the rampart? Could he remember those things?\n\nNo. He couldn't. But he did recall...\n\nWait. Hadn't he come in on a gunship? One of the Thunderhawks that streaked in from the sky, a host of them aflame from the anti-air batteries...\n\nYes. They hadn't been in a Land Raider at all. They'd come in by gunship.\n\nHadn't they?\n\nHe didn't know. These things were gone from him, taken by the Nails. But he knew-\n\n-nothing, as he tears left and right with abandon, cutting, carving, killing.\n\nKargos fights for his life, he fights for the amusement of the God of War, and he fights to follow his father down the path of bloodstained divinity, for to do anything else is to damn himself. There's no going back. There's only the Path, step by step, one slaughtered life at a time.\n\nHe doesn't think these things consciously. He doesn't treasure the truth of them. He knows them, that's all, and they've changed him. The truth of a broken existence squats at the back of his mind, and its tendrils flow through him with the flood of adrenaline and instinct.\n\nZephon fought by Anzarael's side, surrounded by the last living members of the High Host. Their blades steamed as the power fields burned away the blood clinging to the steel. This was far from how they'd waged war together in the glory days of the Great Crusade. Those were days of soaring on jump pack thrusts, unleashing the destructiveness of retooled Strife Age alchemicals. They were angels in truth: death from the skies, descending on wings of flame. Here, they were grounded, going blade to blade, fist to fist. The enemy was without end.\n\n'Forgive me for saying so, sir,' Anzarael voxed at one point during the fighting, 'but this is far from a joyous reunion.'\n\nIt started with the thunder of long-range guns. As the horde charged, both sides vented an infinity of city-killing fire. Titans vomited missiles at the wall; other Titans gunned down the incoming volleys and replied with their own incendiary rages. The wall shook beneath the defenders' feet as its gun emplacements poured firepower into the wasteland. It still shook - the Delphic Battlement still fired even on the second dawn with the enemy at the defenders' throats, its few remaining guns blasting and their slaved autoloading mechanisms clanking, making the entire rampart shudder endlessly.\n\nHow many tens of thousands among the horde were killed in the first charge to the rampart? How many Titans were torn apart by cannonade? How many gunships and drop-ships and troop carriers and transports were blasted out of the sky? The sca"}
{"text":"he wasteland. It still shook - the Delphic Battlement still fired even on the second dawn with the enemy at the defenders' throats, its few remaining guns blasting and their slaved autoloading mechanisms clanking, making the entire rampart shudder endlessly.\n\nHow many tens of thousands among the horde were killed in the first charge to the rampart? How many Titans were torn apart by cannonade? How many gunships and drop-ships and troop carriers and transports were blasted out of the sky? The scale of it was madness; the numbers untrackable, meaningless. Even with an eidetic recall, Zephon could process almost none of it. It was just the prologue. All just a laughable prologue to the moment the horde reached the wall.\n\nThe attackers poured everything into the assault without heed, or need, of tactics. They came in suicidal packs of frenzied warriors, descending on jump packs. They came in gunships and transports, carving furrows along the battlements and massacring defenders as they crash-landed in deployment. They blackened the sky with drop-ships and the towering figures of converted Titans. They came from the ground, climbing the Delphic Wall with axes and blades, ascending over the mounds of their own dead or the piles of spent shells vomited forth from the battlement's ammunition ports. However they gained the ramparts, the defenders met them in a tide of red ceramite, locked shields and plunging blades.\n\nFor Zephon, it began when a walking inferno that had once been a Warlord Titan reached the wall, towering over him like a blazing effigy. The Titan, dying from its wounds and aflame from crown to clawed feet, was more a thing of flesh than sacred iron, and no longer moved as a Titan moved. Ligaments and veins and muscles worked slickly around its iron skeleton. It gripped the wall with great hands of metal and bone, and leaned forward, its fleshmetal jaw opening, opening... Disgorging a troop ramp like a bladed tongue, vomiting its cargo of World Eaters right onto the rampart. The thing was laughing as it did it, laughing from the speakers in its cheeks and throat, laughing even as it burned to death.\n\nZephon, in the front rank, caught a World Eater's chainaxe against the flat of his blade - and from that moment on, existence on the ramparts became an assault of sensation. Sight, sound, smell - all of it became a thing to endure instead of experience. A soldier could lose their mind in this, through sheer exposure to sensation. Thousands of the humans did.\n\nAnother World Eater gained the wall half a second after he'd killed the first. Zephon beat the pommel of his blade against the warrior's faceplate once, twice, thrice. Ceramite dented. Cracked. Sharded. The World Eater roared his god-soaked noise, grabbing for Zephon's throat with one hand, thrusting a dagger in the other. The Blood Angel deflected the whirring blade with the edge of his greave, lanced his blade down in a two-handed grip that sank halfway to the hilt in the warrior's collarbone. He barely managed to drag it free before the World Eater fell, his hearts destroyed.\n\nAnd yet, the defenders held to a ragged order. Imperial Army soldiers climbed onto the rear tiers of the rampart to launch grenades and stitch the air with lasgun beams over the heads of the warring Astartes, spearing into the enemy ranks. Where the line was breached, where the Blood Angels were beaten back or massacred in place, Custodians led reserve forces to stem the tide.\n\nWord of Sanguinius spread across the vox. Reports that he was on the south wall, repelling a sapper assault; or the west wall, leading a boarding action upon an Imperator Titan; or the north wall, rallying the broken defenders and retaking lost ground; or the east wall, where he was hunting enemy officers, lancing them from above as he swooped in low, soaring again after each confirmed kill.\n\nWho knew what was true? On the wall, every warrior was caged within their own war. Zephon only saw Sanguinius once after the battle began, a brief vision of his golden primarch spiralling through the air high above their heads, hopelessly pursued by a pack of traitors in jump packs. He'd looped around, cutting three of them from the sky in as many seconds, then beat his wings to rise higher than the survivors could boost.\n\nAnzarael went down, grappled by a cackling Emperor's Children legionary, while humans in scraps of armour stabbed at the joints of his warplate with energised knives. Zephon hacked him free and dragged him back up; less than a minute later, Anzarael returned the favour, killing a World Eater and pulling the fallen Zephon back to his feet.\n\nSanguinius was gone, back to the realm of vox-reports that already took on the flavour of legend. Zephon fought on, his mind cold even as his flesh was wretched with heat. By now he would usually be frothing at the mouth within his helmet, exhaustion and bloodthirst combining to bring him to the very edge of his control. Yet he stayed cold and clear, enduring, hurting, fighting.\n\nAny battle is a succession of distinct conflicts, and the effect is magnified in sieges. A hundred metres down the line, warriors might be waiting in phalanx readiness, still yet to bloody their blades, knowing they must not break ranks and leave their position undefended. A hundred metres in the other direction, warriors are fighting for their lives; have been fighting for hours. Then the flow of war shifts. Reserve elements charge in to relieve exhausted defenders. Those that have been fighting for hours on end suddenly find themselves in a brief sphere of calm, able to retreat or brace for the next inevitable assault.\n\nEven in the shield-to-shield phalanx warfare of Old Earth, men would wear themselves down to enervation within minutes. Those ancient battles that lasted hours were, in truth, divided into dozens of lesser skirmishes broken up by entrenchment, advance, retreat, relief, recovery. It had to be this way. The human body was at the mercy of mortal musculature. War in the first age of trenches and gunpowder weapons was a horrendously long game of brief strikes and charges, broken up by days - months - of waiting for the order to advance. The taking of a city still necessitated patrols, rides in armoured personnel carriers, returning to one's own lines for resupply, all transpiring over the course of weeks. The fighting was sporadic, not constant.\n\nBut on the Delphic Battlement, even the Astartes suffered. The press of bodies was all-consuming. Zephon saw nothing beyond the frenzy of overwhelming movement on all sides, at all angles. The threat of seizure was a constant in the muscles he had that were still flesh instead of Dark Age steel. The chron at the edge of his eye-lens display counted time in stuttering leaps that went in both directions. Just another thing that had ceased making any sense.\n\nThralls in Legion robes and silver breastplates were everywhere within the defenders' lines. They hunched and crouched and scrambled between their Blood Angels masters - some hauling away the dead, dragging corpses back out of the way for the sake of their lords' footing; others firing between the shoulders of the fighting legionaries, pouring las-fire into the faces of the Warmaster's human soldiers.\n\nIt seemed every atom around him was visible, vibrating in peaceless motion. He heard everything, everything, thousands of sounds adding up to an oceanic roar, its elements indivisible. A blade against a blade was a clash, a boltgun discharging was a rattling boom; but hundreds of thousands, all at once and over and over, became white noise without surcease. He smelled nothing but the burn-reek of charred armour and firing processes, a stink so thick it threatened to replace air. Each breath in tasted of fyceline. Each breath out tasted of the countless other chemicals used in the manufacture of annihilation. In the rare moments he saw anything past the warrior directly in front of him, it was always a momentary impression of Titans duelling in front of the battlement. They went at one another with sawblades and fists and hammers and short-range volleys of fire that occluded them in smoke before Zephon could discern which side either one fought for, let alone who might be winning.\n\nAnd so it went.\n\nThe engines of Legio Ignatum repelled every charge made against the portcullises sealing the Delphic Archway. The ground of the wasteland was blended to ruination by the levels of firepower brought to bear, an expanse of hills and ravines through which the Warmaster's horde poured forward.\n\nPrinceps Shiva Makul of Iracundos did what she could to thin the numbers of infantry and armour, but their orders from the Great Angel were clear: Ignatum was there to kill Titans. The portcullis must stand.\n\nThey fought unsupported by infantry, and that was a dangerous way for Titans to wage war. It left them vulnerable, with several Ignatum god-machines already standing motionless, boarded by the warriors of the horde, their crews locked in fighting within the confines of their Titans' engineered bones.\n\nTheir principal advantage was the Delphic Battlement behind them, and the keep atop it, with its shield-bursting gun batteries. Iracundos had scored its first kill against a charging Reaver, an Interfector brawler stalk-striding ahead of its own maniple, either thirsting for glory or at the mercy of an unwise machine-spirit. With its void shields extinguished and its proud red-and-black heraldry bored through by gatling fire, the Interfector Reaver was three-quarters dead already. Iracundos hadn't even needed to open fire at range. By the time the brawler was up close, sparks were raining from her abused arm joints and she gushed oil and fluids from a dozen major wounds. The Ignatum Reaver strode forth to meet her opponent in front of the portcullis, stalking around to the rear where her plating was thinnest, and finishing her spinally with a volley of overcharged laser.\n\nBut the hunting got harder "}
{"text":" by gatling fire, the Interfector Reaver was three-quarters dead already. Iracundos hadn't even needed to open fire at range. By the time the brawler was up close, sparks were raining from her abused arm joints and she gushed oil and fluids from a dozen major wounds. The Ignatum Reaver strode forth to meet her opponent in front of the portcullis, stalking around to the rear where her plating was thinnest, and finishing her spinally with a volley of overcharged laser.\n\nBut the hunting got harder as the hours rolled on. Shiva saw Gylgamesh crumble when it was half-erased from existence by a volley of warp missiles. She saw Optima Diktat lose its brawl against another Warlord, gutted by the miserable slowness of her rival's chainfist. Magna Excelsior was brought down by the dogs of Audax, dragged from her feet by a net of ursus claws and overrun by exoplanar xenos - a description among the Mechanicus that was swiftly falling out of favour. Most crews were using 'Neverborn' to describe the things now. A few even named them daemons.\n\nIracundos held the line until her death, which came at the hands of the Warbringer Glaivemaiden. Shiva didn't see it coming; her Titan's demise was just one of the many that came at maximal range from coordinated fields of fire, when maniples would group up for a kill. The shell from Glaivemaiden's quake cannon struck six point six-one seconds after the final layer of Iracundos' voids cracked out of existence, destroying the Reaver's head and a significant portion of its left shoulder superstructure. With the god-machine deprived of command crew, its stabilisers vented pressure, powered down, and went slack. The Titan's corpse toppled forward into the wasteland, where it settled with a crash and quietly burned, already half-buried in a crater carved out by enemy artillery.\n\nNot that it would ever enter any Martian or Terran archive, but there was a lone survivor of this final fall. His name was Maestol Vurir, and he was a deacon-enginseer of middling rank within the Adeptus Mechanicus, as well as a lifelong servant and ally to the noble Legio Ignatum. He lived for almost another two hours, his legs crushed in the wreckage of Iracundos' annihilated insides. There he remained, in excruciating pain, praying to a Machine-God he'd never failed, beseeching the Omnissiah not to abandon him now.\n\nFor the final hundred and eight minutes of his life (between prayers, of course), Maestol tried in vain to move some of the debris off his legs, while it became harder and harder to breathe. He was unsure if he would expire from organ failure - when his augmented heart and lungs gave out under the strain of maintaining his broken form - or fluid loss from the blood and reagent lubricants he was leaking from his shattered legs.\n\nUltimately, it was neither. A chance spark from the Titan's failing electricals ignited a pool of spreading promethium, and he couldn't crawl away from the fire. It engulfed him, eating him along with the rest of Iracundos' insides. He wasn't limited to a skitarius' coded bleating, and possessed a voice that was mostly human, so he could still scream. Which, indeed, he did.\n\nArkhan Land's new leg was killing him. Not literally, but a person should be forgiven for their moments of hyperbole, provided they were validated by context. And Land, in the middle of a war between demigods, while limping on a bionic leg that was poorly integrated and increasingly refusing to obey him, was feeling extremely validated by context.\n\nHe had also learned a lesson he would have preferred to go his entire life without learning, and that was the primal horror that runs through your guts when your own lines break. Land had come to realise that even more frightening than open battle was the moment a deadlock, slipping into a defeat, risked becoming a retreat.\n\nWhen a line holds, you can rely on the souls next to you, fighting as hard as you're fighting; and the soldiers behind you, ready to rush in and aid you when needed. Even in the worst of the chaos, there's a near-unconscious comfort in these things.\n\nWhen a line breaks, you lose these tattered, precious reassurances. You can no longer rely on the men and women around you, if they're even alive at all. You're confronted with the fact that the enemy is stronger than you. You can lose. You can die. You will die if you hold your position and allow yourself to become surrounded. What do you do? Stand and die? Retreat and abandon the few survivors around you? Seeing you run, they run themselves, either out of the same prudence or the same cowardice, and the dissolution spreads. It's a train of consequences, each unfolding in inevitable succession as more defenders desert the unravelling line.\n\nThe Warmaster's forces broke through again and again, repelled at first by Blood Angels reserves, then by Custodian-led human units. How the Astartes in the front lines could even see what was happening was a mystery to Land. He focused on shooting between the warring Blood Angels, atomising World Eaters and Death Guard and who knew how many human soldiers in the colours of the Warmaster's regiments. When Zephon and the others stumbled on the mounds of bodies, he joined in with Eristes and the other thralls in dragging the corpses back for flamer teams to incinerate. Transacta-7Y1 had covered him without him needing to ask her. He was determined to take her with him, back to Mars, if they somehow survived.\n\nMany of the bodies they dragged turned out to still be alive. That had been quite the unpleasant series of revelations; it surprised him every time they started thrashing. Some were well on their way to dying, others were hideously mutilated in the manner most unfortunate souls tend to become if they were foolish or zealous enough to go into battle against the Legiones Astartes. They groaned and flailed and cried out for help as Land dragged them back from the front lines. Plenty of them still had enough fight left in them to stab at him or try to shoot him; these he despatched with an atomic slug to the forehead, or he let the thralls' bayonets finish them off. A notable few were still aware enough of their surroundings to take heed of the incineration teams waiting at the battlement's rear, and these struggled or pleaded for mercy. Land dragged them to their burning deaths without even a proton's worth of guilt.\n\nSweat coated him. He was swaddled in the stink of his own body heat, dragging and shooting and - yes, let's be honest - cowering and running for hours on end. Along with the other humans, he was exhausted long before the Astartes even showed the first signs of tiring. When the order rang out for the first reserves to march in, Land had fallen in place, dropping from exhaustion. Spit ran from his bloody lips in stalactite strings. His muscles shivered with an exhaustion too profound to codify.\n\nUnmoving, he let the reserves charge around him, and indeed over him, waiting for Transacta-7Y1 to help him up once their replacements had passed. Once he was back on his feet, they made their limping way back towards the rearward bunkers set up as respite stations. Zephon's thralls were with him, also granted reprieve. The wounded, in their droves, were carried along the Royal Ascension, through the open Eternity Gate, and into the Sanctum. Custodians and Sisters of Silence still guided scores of Imperial Army troops out from the Sanctum, ordering them to support sections of the embattled wall.\n\n'We've been fighting forever,' said Land. His tone was one of exhausted wonder.\n\nThe thralls nodded, their faces matching those of all the soldiers falling back around them; displaying a kind of grim awe that they were still alive.\n\nTransacta-7Y1, her facial expression obviously hidden by her helmet, pointed out that it had not been forever. She gave him the precise elapsing of time instead.\n\n'It's close enough, Tee,' Land sighed without rancour. 'Close enough to forever.'\n\nWithin the hour, they were back at the front line.\n\nAbove all of this soared the Lord of the Red Sands. He beat flayed wings as he hurled himself, again and again, at the Sanctum Imperialis below. Each attempt saw him thrown back into the sky, while the gods' laughter at his failure echoed in his ears.\n\nAngron roared the words which would, in centuries to come, define his Legion. He bellowed that oath across the sky, with only the scarcest conception of what he was saying. Words repeated in the shouted voices of every living World Eater. Words taken by the ignorant defenders as the ravings of baresarks and killers.\n\nBlood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!\n\nHe was the strongest. Instinctively, he knew it was so, the way a beast hunting in its domain knows it stands at the apex of all surrounding life. But his strength was what held him back. The weaker Neverborn were beginning to advance, pressing through seams in the unseeable shield. The Lord of the Red Sands could see them, these lesser things, advancing behind the human horde. But the strongest of them were still repelled with hateful force.\n\nHundreds of thousands of souls stood on the wall, fighting. He thirsted for their blood. He would wallow in it, he would pour fistfuls of their skulls down his throat, he would bathe in reaped life, if he could just breach the shield. If their father would just weaken enough...\n\nNo, not if.\n\nHorus?\n\nNot if, brother. When.\n\nInzar's frenzy was a careful thing. He fought in the front lines, but he fought cold, forcing World Eaters and Death Guard in front of him to face the most eager blades, while he focused on butchering downed Blood Angels. Beneath him, the battlement shivered without end. It was still firing into the wasteland, bellowing at the advancing horde, bringing down Titans and regiments and tanks not yet at the wall. Despite the overwhelming numbers the Warmaster's forces possessed, he suspected the taking of the Eternity Gate would be a protracted engagement, not the easy trium"}
{"text":"ght cold, forcing World Eaters and Death Guard in front of him to face the most eager blades, while he focused on butchering downed Blood Angels. Beneath him, the battlement shivered without end. It was still firing into the wasteland, bellowing at the advancing horde, bringing down Titans and regiments and tanks not yet at the wall. Despite the overwhelming numbers the Warmaster's forces possessed, he suspected the taking of the Eternity Gate would be a protracted engagement, not the easy triumph many of his weaker-minded kindred were so earnestly howling about.\n\nHe had to keep his wits and resist the lure of losing himself in the battle. Inzar hadn't come this far to die in the final days.\n\nThis kind of war, the merciless kineticism of transhumans killing each other faster than the human eye could follow, was murder even on Astartes physiology. Inzar was a field commander in his Legion, and he knew his own limits as well as those of the Space Marine form. The prime virtue of the Astartes genetic template wasn't strength, but endurance. It was their capacity to endure that won wars, even against more numerous foes or technologically superior cultures.\n\nAnd it meant nothing here. Both sides fought with the same speed, the same ferocity, the very same capacity to endure. It was no longer an advantage for either side, just an evening of the odds.\n\nIn the press of bodies, Inzar barely had room to move. He'd never been an artist with his crozius mace, but all skill became fiction, a surreal memory of other battles. Like everyone else, he was reduced to grappling and stabbing at enemies close enough to hear the raggedness of their breath through helmet vocalisers. Warriors were strangling each other in the grinding front line, gutting one another with daggers for want of room to swing axes and swords.\n\nHis primary and secondary hearts beat in twin flurries, forcing oxygenated blood towards overworked muscles. He was aware of them in his chest in a way he'd never been before: crude, pumping organs that sustained him. His breath sawed through the cage of his clenched teeth, and he heard the same bestial sound from every warrior nearby. These were the unwelcome sounds and sensations of mortality. His own death seemed a certainty, the only doubt was when the shell would strike, or the blade would fall.\n\nThe World Eaters wanted to fight. Of course they did. The Death Guard and Sons of Horus and Thousand Sons were almost as eager, if not quite so mindless about it. Even packs of skyborne Night Lords were descending in shrieking covens, hurling themselves on Blood Angels blades with idiotic abandon.\n\nIt fell to Inzar, and the other Word Bearers stationed throughout the horde's ranks, to do what they could to let the humans run in first.\n\nFools like Kargos (and what a useful fool Bloodspitter was turning out to be) wanted to wage this war the old way, Legion against Legion, but those days were done. This was all far, far too important for the indulgence of moronic conceits like Legion pride.\n\nThe humans in the Warmaster's ranks, hundreds of soldiers and cultists and conscripts for every Astartes on either side, were the most dangerous element in all of this. Individually, they were nothing. The Blood Angels killed and killed and killed them; the World Eaters even killed them in their mass-frenzied state, butchering them from behind if they found humans between them and the Blood Angels. They were faceless things, their uniforms and home worlds irrelevant: a flood of souls without identity. The Blood Angels broke open their skulls and hammered them to the ground. Inzar saw the sons of Sanguinius delimbing them, disembowelling them, trampling them underfoot and crushing the life from them. But the flood of flesh never abated. Pulling one apart only conjured three more, three more men and women jabbing at the Blood Angels with bayonets and shrieking at them in variances of Gothic that Inzar couldn't parse in the clamour.\n\nTheir purpose wasn't to break through, of course. Their purpose was to die. These wretches scarcely dealt any casualties to the defenders, but they slowed them, wore them down. The very meat of the humans' bodies was a burden, clogging chainswords, weighing down limbs, breeding exhaustion in the loyalists by virtue of the amount of killing they were forced to perform. Inzar had grinned behind his mask of office the first time he'd seen one of the IX Legion borne down beneath the thrashing weight of several soldiers, the humans dragging at the warrior's arms and chest, slowing the Blood Angel enough for Kargos to split the defender's head open with his axe.\n\nAt first the dead littered the ground, then carpeted it, then layered it. Attackers and defenders staggered as they fought, mulching the dead beneath their boots, the Astartes ankle-deep in cadaverous wreckage. Footing on the rampart grew treacherous with the thousands of deaths, blood sluicing across the stone in a conjoined gush. Warriors were sloshing through it. A glittering crust of spent shells floated on this sanguine sea. Ejected ammunition fell upon the mounds of bodies, decorating the dead with jewellery of smoking, brassy cartridges.\n\nIt was slaughter unmatched. It was glorious. Inzar felt like singing a prayer to the teeming sky. He looked up, where the aurora borealis faces of his gods leered down at the devastation. They were the truth, and what could be more beautiful than the truth? Was the perception and telling of the truth not regarded as the highest virtue? Was truth not the very thing - the fundamental thing - all souls strived for?\n\nThis is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but in fire. We have taken humanity's cradle and purified it, rendering it a beacon lit by the holy toil of the faithful.\n\nTerra blazed in the endless night of space. The Pantheon had come as promised.\n\nSoon, he promised his gods. Soon.\n\nLost in the world between worlds\n\nVulkan\n\nThe wraithbone statue shattered, fragments of its face and torso clattering across the ornate floor. These shards of blackened ivory steamed where they came to a rest. What remained of the statue, little more than a pair of slender alien shins in revoltingly elegant boots, also steamed from the stumps of its knees.\n\nVulkan turned in the silence of the spire-top chamber, but this time, he didn't raise his hammer. Five destroyed statues were monuments to the futility of that gesture.\n\nOn the other side of the chamber, Magnus stood unconcerned, looking over the Impossible City in what Vulkan presumed was the direction of the Imperial Dungeon. The immense figure spoke without bothering to regard him.\n\n'Now is the moment that you ask, \"Why these tricks, Magnus? Why not just face me?\"'\n\nVulkan exhaled the breath he was going to use to speak those very words.\n\nThere was a smile in Magnus' voice as he continued, 'Destiny is merciless to its victims. Even now, you misunderstand this moment you inhabit. You hold your tongue, believing you choose not to speak the words I predicted. Yet you fail to see I gave my prediction only to prove I could render you silent. That is the power of prophecy. Its manipulative potency. You have no agency here, little dragon, all you do here is play out the part apportioned to you.'\n\nFinally, Magnus turned. His mother-of-pearl wings rippled, and Vulkan was momentarily put in mind of Sanguinius. Everything resplendent about the Angel was inwardly restrained; Sanguinius was a man almost ashamed of his ostentation and purity. Everything about this daemon-king was self-satisfied, charmed by its own capacity to preen.\n\n'What now, Vulkan?' The daemon's face shifted from the one-eyed features of the brother Vulkan knew, to the cyclopean monstrousness of what his brother had become. Shifting, transmuting, always in flux.\n\n'Now-'\n\n'Let me tell you,' Magnus interrupted. 'Now you will say that you wish it had never come to this. That I had my chance with father's final offer, and I failed at the last step. I see all of this in your eyes, they tell the tale in accordance with fate. Now your knuckles will tighten on the haft of that toy you carry. See? Now you will step forward with a heavy heart, believing that you must put me down like a wounded animal. See? And through all of this, you will still believe you might actually succeed, that you can finish me before I break the Emperor's shield.'\n\nIn the seconds that followed, as Vulkan advanced, Magnus' crimson features curdled with amusement.\n\n'Now you are wondering if I am really here at all, or if you will just destroy yet another statue when you swing that hammer at me.'\n\nBut Vulkan shook his head. 'Can you hear the arrogance frothing from your lips, or does the creature in possession of your soul not even allow you that freedom?'\n\nMagnus' laugh was a growl of a thing, deep in his throat. Vulkan risked another few steps closer.\n\n'You were always a stultified creature, Vulkan. The dullest of all of us, defined by your paucity of imagination. I speak of destiny and agency, sharing with you my insights into Creation. You sling tawdry insults in the misguided belief you can wound me with them. I am wasting my time, aren't I? Expecting you to understand this is no different from expecting a rock to grasp the principles of poetry.'\n\nVulkan could feel the flow of energy in the air around him. The wispy, leaching sensation of Magnus' focus as the daemon pulled at the metaphysical threads of the Emperor's distant shield.\n\n'You're stalling,' Vulkan said as he advanced. 'And you are a poor impersonation of Magnus the Red.'\n\nThe creature didn't stop smiling. 'I am Magnus the Red.'\n\n'You were,' Vulkan allowed. 'Now, you are his flaws and weaknesses, laid bare and swollen. My brother would never say these things. He would perhaps think them, when he was most blinded by his own halo. Magnus was wreathed in a cloak of his own pride, and he could be vain while imagining himself humble. I will concede that. But he would never speak as "}
{"text":"ng,' Vulkan said as he advanced. 'And you are a poor impersonation of Magnus the Red.'\n\nThe creature didn't stop smiling. 'I am Magnus the Red.'\n\n'You were,' Vulkan allowed. 'Now, you are his flaws and weaknesses, laid bare and swollen. My brother would never say these things. He would perhaps think them, when he was most blinded by his own halo. Magnus was wreathed in a cloak of his own pride, and he could be vain while imagining himself humble. I will concede that. But he would never speak as you speak. My brother Magnus was many things, but he was rarely malicious, and never petty. Before we end this, answer me one thing. Is there enough left of you in there, to regret the deal you've struck?'\n\nHe swung the hammer. Magnus was gone - if he'd ever been there at all. Vulkan could have pulled the blow, but to what end? He let it fall, pounding into the wraithbone wall, smashing a hole that looked out over the maddening aeldari city.\n\nThen he turned again. Magnus was there, as Vulkan knew he would be. The daemon crouched in the centre of the chamber now, idly carving runic mandalas into the floor with its black claws.\n\n'Regret,' said the daemon-king. Magnus ceased his scrawling, closing and opening his great talons. Vulkan heard the tendons flexing, the sound like the creaking sailworks of an old wooden ship. The oval eye in the middle of the daemon's face was half-lidded in some mild, inhuman rapture. 'I can create and destroy life through the manipulation of energies you cannot conceive. I am immortal, my enlightenment preserved for eternity. I can see through time. Regret has no place amidst this flow of endless revelation.'\n\nOnce more, Vulkan approached the thing that had been his brother. There was little else he could do. If this was Magnus' game, he had to play it.\n\n'Then there is not enough left of Magnus within you to regret this enslavement. A simple \"No\" would have sufficed.'\n\nHe stopped, several metres away, and Vulkan looked up at the daemon, twice his height. He saw something that might have been aggravation flicker across the monster's features.\n\n'You are an insect, Vulkan. A creature so utterly blind to your insignificance that you cannot begin to comprehend your infinite irrelevance in the Cosmic All.'\n\n'I am not here to argue with you, Magnus. I am here to kill you.'\n\n'You will never understand-'\n\n'Enough! Enough talk.' Vulkan ran for the daemon-king, hurling his weapon ahead of him. Surprise flashed across the creature's face, and for a moment he saw Magnus not as the preening daemon, but bent-backed with effort, chanting, weaving his claws through the air, conjuring arcane streams of light and sound. For the first time, Vulkan saw visible effort darkening Magnus' monstrous face.\n\nVulkan had time to think, I see you now, I see what you're really doing, before the vision was gone and the confident daemon lord retook its place.\n\nUrdrakule never struck Magnus; it collided with a wall of solid air, spinning harmlessly away - Vulkan tore it from the air as he reached the daemon's towering form. He swung overhead, the joints of his armour straining in tune with his roar of effort.\n\nThe blow landed. Magnus shattered into shards of red glass, a spill of jagged rubies tinkling across the floor. Vulkan ignored them, swinging again at where his brother had been. Shards popped beneath his crushing boots, bursting in little puffs of dust, as he brought the hammer around.\n\nHe hit nothing. He was fighting scarlet smoke, breathing in its ashy scent, swinging and missing, swinging and missing. He closed his eyes, listened for the creak of wings, and brought the hammer around again.\n\nThe impact jarred him to his core, every bone in his body seeming to vibrate, but not for a moment did it stop him striking again, and again, and again. Sparks cascaded over both brothers as Vulkan beat against the kinetic barrier, each impact ringing with the mis-chimed resonance of a broken bell. The more he hammered the barrier, the more visible it became, first as a heat-mirage ripple, then as a bruised red. And behind that straining barrier, the daemon lord crouched and chanted.\n\nMagnus bared his teeth, his face wretched with hate.\n\n'I am done with you, little dragon.'\n\nVulkan swung, and the world exploded in light. He didn't strike wraithbone, nor daemonic corpus, nor the kinetic barrier of his brother's will. His blow hit nothing because there was nothing there.\n\nVulkan staggered out into open, searing air. After the chill of the webway, his first gasp went down his throat like boiling water. His second breath tasted of volcanic ash. His third tasted of home.\n\nI am still in the webway. I am there, not here. I cannot be here.\n\nHe stood beneath stars so familiar it hurt his heart to look at them. There on the horizon, above a ground of lava-cracked black, was the spear of Mount Deathfire. He was on Nocturne. He was on his home world.\n\nVulkan's boots pounded on Nocturne's infertile earth, throwing up sprays of gravel as he sprinted. He cried out Magnus' name, to no avail. He swung at the empty air in case this was mere illusion, and once more he struck nothing at all.\n\n'Magnus!' he called to the horizon, to the stars. 'Brother!'\n\nHis sprint brought him to a chasm, one of the many nameless scars in Nocturne's hide. The heat of his world's heart breathed up from the split in its surface.\n\nI am not here. I am in the webway. My intention determines my journey.\n\nVulkan stepped forward. Then he was falling, falling from fire into ice, falling through cold and gritty air that carried the lingering chemical tang of phosphex.\n\nHe hit the ground hard, rolling, clattering to a halt. He lay upon a bed of corpses whose funeral shrouds were nothing more than the ceramite they'd been wearing when they were slain.\n\nVulkan hauled himself to his feet, bringing his hammer up. Around him was an ocean of green and gold Crusade-era armour... All of it rent open, revealing annihilated black flesh. He was standing in a desert of his dead sons.\n\nIsstvan.\n\nThe webway. I am in the webway.\n\nHe swung the hammer down, aiming the blow between the bodies of two slain Salamanders. With three swings of Urdrakule, he pounded through the ground, and under the earth lay a void. Not the dark of space, not the seething tides of the warp, but a true void, the empty edges of an illusion. It was there, just beneath the ground's thin crust.\n\nHe threw himself in, swinging his hammer before him.\n\nThe blow slammed into a thick iron wall, its impact malforming the metal. Vulkan pulled the weapon from the ruptured wall, turning... knowing at once where he was. This was a place he still visited in the knifing memories that made up his dreams. This was the warship Nightfall, deep in its industrial guts, inside the maze constructed by his brother Curze, lord of the VIII Legion.\n\nHe'd been kept prisoner here, tortured to the beat of Curze's mad whims. His skin crawled for a delirious moment; had he ever left this labyrinth prison, or had the whole war after Isstvan been nothing but the misfiring of his tortured mind?\n\nNo. The webway. I am in the webway.\n\nHe swung at the wall again, blasting it apart, then at the wall behind that one, sundering it in kind. There, again, lay the void. From somewhere within it, he could hear Magnus chanting words in a tongue that bore no bond to Imperial Gothic.\n\nVulkan charged into nothingness.\n\nThere was no tower, now. Vulkan emerged on a vast wraithbone bridge spanning an eternity of mist. He didn't know if the tower had ever been real, or one of Magnus' illusions, or the elemental symbolism of this alien realm. It didn't matter. He was here now.\n\nAnd if this is another illusion?\n\nNo. This scene was so desperately lonely that it had to be real. The thing Magnus had become was capable of almost anything now, but pride ran through its veins and leaked from its pores. It would never willingly let itself be seen like this.\n\nMagnus was on his knees. His head was lowered, incantations mumbling through his slack fangs, his one eye squeezed closed and leaking blood from its edges. He knelt in the middle of the bridge, clawed fingers shaking as they painted spells upon the air, writing them in slashes of diseased light. Streams of psychic force threaded out from the daemon's fingers, there and not there, connecting Magnus to his father through a bond Vulkan could never hope, nor want, to understand.\n\nHe advanced on the kneeling figure, making no attempt at stealth. His bootsteps sent humming, almost musical tremors through the wraithbone.\n\n'This ends now, daemon.'\n\nMagnus laughed at Vulkan's greeting, though it was a weak and weary effort.\n\n'How bold you sound, throwing around a concept like \"now\" as if you have any grasp of its meaning. Do you imagine you've made great haste to get here, little dragon? Time gusts down these passages in random breaths, and you have been wandering lost for longer than you know. The Palatine sector is a burning memory. Already our forces lay siege to the Sanctum.'\n\nFor the first time, unease spiked Vulkan's tone. 'You lie.'\n\n'Often, and with good reason.' Magnus' cracked teeth gleamed with saliva. 'But not here, and not now. Your precious defenders have been bleeding on that wall for a day and a night. Already the second dawn threatens to light the sky.'\n\nVulkan took a breath. He regarded Magnus, here in the middle of never and nowhere, and tried not to think of the horrendous losses they must have sustained on the wall. An entire day with their backs to the Eternity Gate. That many hours, against inconceivable odds. Even some of Dorn's calculated predictions had seen the battlement falling swiftly on the first day.\n\nHope kindled. Despite that grievous span of time, they held the wall, and the Emperor's will still kept the Neverborn back. To survive to face the second day meant the defenders had already worked miracles. Their defiance lifted his heart.\n\nVulkan laughed; Magnus bristled.\n\n'Amused by your own failure, little"}
{"text":"day with their backs to the Eternity Gate. That many hours, against inconceivable odds. Even some of Dorn's calculated predictions had seen the battlement falling swiftly on the first day.\n\nHope kindled. Despite that grievous span of time, they held the wall, and the Emperor's will still kept the Neverborn back. To survive to face the second day meant the defenders had already worked miracles. Their defiance lifted his heart.\n\nVulkan laughed; Magnus bristled.\n\n'Amused by your own failure, little dragon?'\n\n'No, by yours.' Vulkan gestured to the misty un-place around them. 'I have only now realised what should have been obvious. You're the one who is lost. That is why you are here, doing your malignant work at this distance and not at the webway portal itself. You cannot reach it, can you?'\n\n'I can work my will against father's, wheresoever I choose.'\n\n'But you could attack father directly at the portal. You could force your way through and finish this. Instead, you lurk here, working your compromised magic.' Vulkan smiled, and it was no longer a question. 'You cannot find the portal to father's Throne Room.'\n\n'This place will not let me find it.' The sorcerer's words had the bite of an unwelcome confession.\n\nIt was one of the few times in Vulkan's life that he knew something his brother Magnus did not. This late in the day, it was no comfort whatsoever.\n\n'The webway reacts to intent. Your passage is determined by strength of focus and spirit. Malcador told me that.'\n\n'Malcador is a fool.'\n\n'Then why am I here, while you are lost?' Vulkan tilted his head, his red eyes devoid of mercy. 'You once shattered this realm as you tore your way through it. You know how to break it, but that does not make you its master. It defies you harder now, because you are in thrall to the powers this dimension was created to thwart.'\n\nMagnus snarled at him. 'Let me tell you-'\n\n'You will say nothing I need to hear, and you know nothing I want to know. You are sentenced to death, Magnus. I will not let you bring down father's shield.'\n\nMagnus stared at him, lips peeling back from mother-of-pearl teeth. Amusement lit his single swollen eye.\n\n'Then you should have killed me hours ago.'\n\nVulkan confronts Magnus in the webway.\n\nBlame\n\nWhen the warning came, it came not from the Delphic Battlement but within the Sanctum. Refugees, wounded fighters and the very last defenders filled the halls of the final fortress in their thousands. Hanumarasi of the Hykanatoi was one of the few Custodians still within the Sanctum, all too aware of how his kinsmen's presence was spread mournfully thin. He moved through chambers and corridors of pale stone and kintsugi gold, every space that was once home to austere silence now teeming with unwashed humanity. It hadn't taken long to get used to the smell of festering wounds and deprivation.\n\nSome of the civilian survivors still came to him as he patrolled, asking for word from elsewhere in the Palace or for aid he had no capacity to give. Some even pleaded with him to take them to the Emperor, which was a request of such breathtaking delusion, yet so perfectly understandable, that he didn't know how to answer. Hanumarasi tried to be gentle but emphatic in his refusals.\n\nHe made his way through the chambers in the hours before dawn on the second day, ashamed by how the damage marking his armour was visible to the tired eyes of the Emperor's people. One of the unspoken codes of conduct for his kind was to present absolute Imperial invincibility before the Emperor's enemies and His subjects alike. The war had changed that, like it had upended and blighted everything else in the natural order. It shamed him to present anything less than the image of Imperial perfection, with these final survivors witnessing the war-torn truth of his auramite plate.\n\nHe entered the Red Iron Sacristy, where several hundred families were housed in the chamber that was home to the Grand Archive of Martian-Terran treaties. The Twin Kingdoms Pact was stored here - the document that swore a most binding union between the two worlds at the heart of the Imperium. Arrayed across the rest of the chamber were many individual life-oaths of great import, such as between the orders of the Legio Titanicus and the Emperor in His incarnation as the Martian Omnissiah. It was a place of precious banners dating back through the centuries of Long Night, of parchments stored in reinforced stasis displays, and digital records displayed as hololiths. All of it vital, all of it priceless - all of it now just detritus in the way of these frightened souls.\n\nHanumarasi's boots no longer echoed on the floor of off-world orange sandstone. The press of bodies generated a low-level hum of conversation loud enough to drown out his footsteps, the same way it created a scent not entirely unlike a livestock stable.\n\n'Golden lord, golden lord,' said a small voice.\n\nHanumarasi turned with a purr of active armour, inwardly ashamed once more of the subtle clicks in his warplate's joints - another sign of the wear and tear of battle. He looked down at the girl-child wanting his attention. She was a shabby thing, like all the others housed here. There was scarcely any food left within the walls and water was tightly rationed by adepts trained in the calculus of resources. None of the refugees had bathed the evidence of the war from their skin since arriving, and some of them had been present for months. They were fortunate not to have experienced any outbreaks of plague.\n\n'Yes, little one.' Hanumarasi had learned to soften his voice when dealing with mortals. The low tone of Custodians' natural voices tended to make humans uneasy, and it outright frightened most children.\n\nHanumarasi recognised this one. Upon arriving several weeks before, she had asked where the Emperor's Throne Room was. She had wanted to meet her king. Hanumarasi, not a gifted liar, had naturally not wanted to tell her the Emperor's Throne Room, deep in the Imperial Dungeon, was still many kilometres from here, much of it reachable only through subterranean descent. Like many of Terra's native souls, she had seen the Sanctum and presumed the fortress, itself the size of a small town, was the Emperor's personal quarters.\n\nThe girl-child gazed up at him, wide-eyed. She had no such question this morning.\n\n'There is something strange, golden lord. Something my family has found. You must see it.'\n\nHanumarasi tensed imperceptibly. His gaze, hidden from the humans by his crested helm, flicked and tracked across the chamber. A target lock slid over the refugees' faces, one by one. He saw nothing untoward.\n\n'What is it, little one?'\n\nShe drew her filthy robe around herself like a shawl and moved towards where her family clustered by the far sandstone wall. The refugees of her bloodline likely had no idea they were sheltering beneath the hanging banner of the Legio Lysanda in its contrasting heraldry. Could these humans even read? Would they care if they could? They had set up their lean-to and unpacked their meagre possessions wherever there was space. Near, Hanumarasi marked, one of the doors to a storage antechamber.\n\nThe Custodian moved past the child, his stride devouring the distance ahead of her tiny steps. He was midway through the chamber when the refugees began to close in on him, like beggars pleading for alms. The families knew better than to mob the Custodians like this, but emotion sometimes got the better of them, especially when they were new to the Sanctum.\n\nHe did what he always did: he activated his spear. He didn't raise it or threaten them with it, but the power field sheathing the blade shimmered with slow, oily lightning and breathed out its aggressive thrum. It always served to warn the humans back.\n\nNot this time.\n\n'Back,' he ordered them, no longer modulating his voice. Their pleading hands caressed his armour as he passed, and they were beginning to impede his passage. He could hear the scrape of their fingernails against the gold. 'Get back, all of you.'\n\nIt worked, barely, just enough for him to reach the family. The refugees trailed him, clustered around him, but he paid them no heed; his focus was drawn at once to the unlocked antechamber door. Flies swarmed through the cracks and joins in the white wood.\n\n'Move,' he ordered the family. Wisely, they moved.\n\nHanumarasi kicked in the door, levelling his spear. Dozens of bodies, some still bleeding in their freshness, lay within the antechamber, butchered and piled upon the mosaic floor. The nude and slaughtered forms of over a hundred families.\n\nHanumarasi whirled, blade up and already speaking into the vox as the refugees of the Red Iron Sacristy leapt upon him. Two words was all it took, two words sent to every one of the Custodian Guard still alive within the Sanctum:\n\n'They're inside.'\n\nThe Neverborn had drilled their way into the minds of the exhausted refugees, hollowing them out, skin-riding them... Finally butchering the ones that resisted possession. Now they sloughed the false flesh from their bones, revealing that they weren't people at all.\n\nHanumarasi's revelation was by no means unique to him. He was the first, but Custodians were making similar discoveries throughout the Sanctum's surface chambers. Across the Sanctum, daemons tore their way into reality - some breaching the veil by force, ripping through the last of the weakened Emperor's shield, others manipulating their way into physicality by changing the flesh and bones of a convenient puppet.\n\nSirens sounded throughout the final fortress. Neverborn feasting across the face of Terra, sensing the war's end at last, turned their heads towards the Sanctum Imperialis like pilgrims praying to a sacred cardinal point.\n\nThe Sigillite raised his eyes to the cavern ceiling. The laboratory, which trillions of Imperial citizens imagined to be a royal throne room cut out of a faerie tale, was a hive of frantic industry. Malcador stood at the prime chamber's edge, not far f"}
{"text":"of a convenient puppet.\n\nSirens sounded throughout the final fortress. Neverborn feasting across the face of Terra, sensing the war's end at last, turned their heads towards the Sanctum Imperialis like pilgrims praying to a sacred cardinal point.\n\nThe Sigillite raised his eyes to the cavern ceiling. The laboratory, which trillions of Imperial citizens imagined to be a royal throne room cut out of a faerie tale, was a hive of frantic industry. Malcador stood at the prime chamber's edge, not far from the Silver Door. Like Vulkan days before, he'd found himself gazing upon the art engraved here upon the original Eternity Gate, and pondering its dubious resemblance to reality.\n\nThe last two centuries hadn't looked much like these glorious etchings, all things considered. Out of sight of even the loyalest eyes, the truth was rather more harried and desperate. Grand plans against insurmountable odds often were, and the Emperor's ambition was the grandest plan against the most insurmountable odds imaginable.\n\n'They're inside.'\n\nMalcador turned to regard Diocletian, the last tribune. The Custodian loomed over him, masking his features by slamming his helm into place.\n\n'I know.' The old man took a breath. 'And we always knew it would come to this.'\n\nCustodians and the last of the Sisters were spilling through the open door. Malcador could sense Diocletian's desperation to join them.\n\n'Leave a token force here,' he told the warrior. 'Lead the rest up to the surface to defend the Sanctum. Cleanse the upper halls as best you can, and be ready to receive survivors from the Delphic Battlement. We will need every soul that can reach the Sanctum.'\n\nHe felt an unexpected shiver in his words as he added, 'When there is no longer any hope, you will seal the Eternity Gate. Those still outside...'\n\nHe cleared his throat. This was it, the enemy was at the door, and now the moment had come, the words would not.\n\n'Sigillite?' Diocletian pressed.\n\n'When there is no longer any hope, you will seal the Eternity Gate. That is all.'\n\nBut Diocletian hesitated, something Malcador had rarely seen any of the golden warriors do.\n\n'How did the Neverborn get inside? Has the Ninth failed us on the wall? Has the Eighteenth failed us in the labyrinth?'\n\nHow could he answer those questions in a manner that would ever satisfy one of the Ten Thousand, the most loyal of the most loyal? They held all beings to standards no other being could reach. Least of all the primarchs - a pantheon of humanity's traits, magnified. No wonder the Legiones Custodes despised them all.\n\n'Go, Dio. Die well.'\n\nThe golden warrior made the Fist of Unity, knuckles against his breast-plate.\n\n'You too, old man.'\n\nArkhan Land ran.\n\nWhen the call had come for the human forces to fall back, he'd grabbed a buckle on Shenkai's breastplate and started dragging. The tide of exoplanar xenos spilling over the rampart signalled the end of his brief career as a brave and dutiful soldier.\n\nThe last of Zephon's thralls had backed away from the creatures materialising on the rampart. He was fumbling to reload, speaking a stream of Aenokhian nonsense in his rising panic. Transacta-7Y1, while showing no outward sign of fear, had raised a hand to her visor, knocking it with her knuckles to crudely retune it into clarity.\n\n'Don't look at them,' Land had snapped, still dragging on Shenkai's buckle. 'Both of you, stop looking at them! Come on.'\n\nThey came on. Three souls and a scampering psyber-monkey, joining a human flood retreating from the Delphic Battlement at a dead run.\n\nThe Royal Ascension was an avenue of staggering proportions, built for parades of Titans and hundreds of thousands of troops to present their banners before the grandeur of the Eternity Gate. For all the Imperium's relative youth (what was two centuries in terms of an empire, really?) statues of scholars, explorers and generals lined the Ascension in their hundreds all the way up the rising hill to the Sanctum. It was a living history rendered in bronze. Many of the icons represented Imperial scions that still lived.\n\nArkhan Land had a statue here. He hadn't ever seen it, and he didn't frankly care about being captured for posterity by something as banal as a statue. Fame was when people knew your name from a text or your face from a statue. People could be famous for being beautiful, or humorous, or simply wealthy, and that made fame worthless. Renown was when people owed whole swathes of their way of life to your deeds and discoveries. Arkhan Land cultivated renown.\n\nTo say he was exhausted in the hours before the second dawn would be to underplay the endless cramping of his muscles by an order of magnitude. He'd fought for what felt like every minute of the last day and night, through a physical exhaustion so profound it brought delirium. When it had been at its height during the night, he would sleep for the split seconds between blinking, to find the world had jumped a moment forward each time his eyes flicked back open. His throat was raw from gunsmoke and rock dust and shouting to be heard by those standing right next to him. His hands shook so badly with bone-deep fatigue that he could no longer aim - for hours now, he had been reduced to lifting his weapons in a vague direction, praying, and firing. Far more often, he'd been forced to rest and recover in the bunkers back from the crashing front lines, while two armies of transhumans tore each other to pieces a hundred metres away.\n\nAs he fled the wall now, his new leg (the useless bastard thing) kept giving out beneath him. The third time he stumbled, he went down in a rolling heap across the ascending steps of the Royal Ascension, tools and mementos scattering as they spilled. Transacta-7Y1 and Shenkai picked him up, supporting him between them. Other civilians and soldiers streamed past them, fleeing along the Royal Ascension towards the great ivory-and-gold structure of the Eternity Gate. Sapien scampered alongside his master, wide-eyed with worry. The artificimian had no conception of what was supposed to be happening, but the cogitator in its little skull doubted its current circumstance was an optimal situation for any life form to be in.\n\nPanic like this, it had a smell. It had a feel. Land felt it around him, smelled it in the breath of those panting as they ran. Far past exhaustion and nothing like cowardice, it was a primal aura, something bestial, keyed only to survival.\n\nLand didn't know if he'd failed to counter Zephon's earlier threat or not. He'd certainly tried to keep the Blood Angel's thralls alive, though only one-third of his wards were still with him now. In the never-ending shift of the front lines grinding together since dawn the day before, he'd lost track of Zephon and Anzarael within the first hour. Thousands of the IX Legion's thralls went through the same separations as the battle raged, fighting independently of their masters and supporting whichever Blood Angels they found themselves nearest. Finding single warriors, or even specific units in the ceramite carnage atop the rampart, was a ludicrous notion. All was in motion, everything was in flux.\n\nEristes had died yesterday in one of the early breakthroughs, when the Warmaster's horde spilled through a breakage in the line. A Custodian had led the counter-attack - Land never learned the warrior's name - the golden figure leading several hundred civilians and Imperial Army into the breach, preventing the Blood Angels from being surrounded. Slowly, at great cost in life, the horde was forced back to the wall, their beachhead destroyed, and the defenders' line reinforced.\n\nWhen the humans had fallen back in the aftermath, their numbers grievously diminished by Sons of Horus chainblades, Land strained to haul the dead and wounded away... realising, as he hauled the second body, that he was dragging Eristes. The Martian's hands were red to the elbows with the thrall's blood. A chainsword had done its gouging work across the man's breastplate, biting into the body beneath. He was quite plainly, quite absolutely, dead.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 had placed her clumsy metal hands over Land's own and detached his grip from Eristes' bloody robes. She emitted a brief spurt of code.\n\nLand had stared at the corpse, at the man's open eyes, feeling somehow betrayed. His reply was a stutter: 'But I was helping him.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 allowed that, yes, she understood this was the case; that yes, he had done his best; and that no, it wasn't his fault.\n\nWith precious little time for sentiment, Shafia and Shenkai carried the corpse to a team of incineration servitors at the rear of the wall. They were back within minutes, dry-eyed, weapons ready, already hollowed out from weariness.\n\nShafia had died as the first day slipped into night. Not that it was ever full dark, with the sky curdled by etheric phantasma, with the continual detonations of overloaded reactors, with the flare of discharging energy weapons, with the frequent eruptions of flame weaponry, and a thousand other incendiary reasons besides. Along the rampart it was usually bright enough to resemble eerie daylight.\n\nThe breakthrough that killed Shafia came with a surge of World Eaters jump-packing over the clashing front lines, the regiment ending its suicidal leap between dozens of reserve forces and the Blood Angels' second, third and fourth waves of warriors waiting to be called to the line. The World Eaters were cut down in their hundreds, but not before they turned their flame weapons on the human reserves and several ammunition caches, eager to lay down their lives for the sake of spreading fires behind the defenders' lines.\n\nWhatever alchemical concoction sloshed in the tanks of their weapons, it behaved more savagely than any promethium mix Land had ever seen. The liquid fire leapt from soldier to soldier in a mockery of physics, moving as though possessing some feverish life, igniting bodies as soon as it touched them. Water aggravated the flames. "}
{"text":"ned their flame weapons on the human reserves and several ammunition caches, eager to lay down their lives for the sake of spreading fires behind the defenders' lines.\n\nWhatever alchemical concoction sloshed in the tanks of their weapons, it behaved more savagely than any promethium mix Land had ever seen. The liquid fire leapt from soldier to soldier in a mockery of physics, moving as though possessing some feverish life, igniting bodies as soon as it touched them. Water aggravated the flames. Flame suppressant achieved nothing at all. Those afflicted burned down to statues of ash within seconds, frozen in their postures of final torment.\n\nShafia was one of those engulfed. Shenkai had cried 'Mother!' and unlimbered his handheld canister of flame suppressant, one of the tools on his belt webbing for use in the maintenance of Zephon's armour. Transacta-7Y1 had borne the thrall to the ground, preventing him from getting closer to the inferno in human form. Around them, the burning corrosion leapt and flashed between soldiers, thralls and skitarii. Even at a remove, the heat was fierce enough to blacken skin and ignite clothing.\n\nLand was with them a moment later, slamming down what looked like a grenade centimetres from Shenkai's face. Instead of detonating, it emitted a tinnitus screech and projected a three-metre dome of wavering force. Fire pouring itself against the field dissipated in bright flashes, as all heat and kinetic energy touching the field was converted to light. Hundreds of people burned to death around them, several just out of arm's reach, while the three of them sheltered inside a bubble of muted sound and refracted light. The entire time, Land felt Shenkai's helpless quivering, though the younger man didn't cry out again. Blessedly, the shimmer of the dome obscured vision enough to deny him the sight of his mother's final incineration. Land considered that an unexpected but entirely welcome benefit.\n\nBy the time the last World Eater was slain, a museum of the ashen dead stood testament to XII Legion malice. When it was over, Land picked up the projector. The emitter was out of power, and he had no reasonable idea how to repair it.\n\n'I found this in the Tomb of Enkar-Thune,' he said quietly. 'In Western Tharsis.'\n\nShenkai didn't care. The thrall had circled the ashen statue that had, a moment ago, been his mother. Shafia's features were preserved with wrenching clarity, her hands at the side of her head, her face twisted in a silent scream. She'd died trying to beat out the flames engulfing her hair. Arkhan Land wondered at the chemical properties of a killing fire capable of such preservation, and in a rare moment of guilt, felt uncomfortable for his curiosity.\n\nThen the battlement shook yet again, and the thousands of ashen statues had crumbled in dismal unity. The survivors coughed through the morbid powder. Even hours later, Land could still taste it. It made him more than a little uncomfortable to know he was tasting people.\n\nNow, as they fled the wall and made their stumbling way up the grand stairs of the Royal Ascension, Land made the mistake of looking back. He expected the sight over his shoulder to be the host of retreating human soldiery and the Blood Angels valiantly - albeit futilely - holding the rampart in the distance.\n\nThis was not the case.\n\n'They've broken through,' he panted. His companions' replies were a breathless grunt and a dribble of code, respectively.\n\nBehind them came the sounds of dying, in all the forms it took in this war. The machine whirr of Dreadnought joints. The crashing of bolters. The whine of chainswords and the guttural interruption when their teeth met meat. The sounds that defied description from creatures that defied reality. A cavalcade of noise, adding up to Terra's unique song.\n\nWinged daemons swooped down and plucked unfortunate souls from the retreating tide, carrying them away to be devoured or dropped like living missiles upon those fleeing below. A soldier next to Shenkai was dragged up, his absence marked by a fading scream, and Land almost slowed down to take a shot at the abducting creature. He might've done it, a matter of instinct rather than any attempt at heroism, had Transacta-7Y1 not hauled him roughly onward the moment she saw him hesitate.\n\nThe stolen man returned to them, albeit headless, dropped from above onto several nearby soldiers, knocking them to the ground. Had Land been a betting man, he would've wagered more than one limb or backbone snapped in that collision and tumble.\n\nDeep in the retreating tide, the trio ran across the shaking expanse of marble that marked the halfway point of the Royal Ascension. The ululating murmur of anti-grav systems joined the roar of engines and monsters and everything else, as Land Speeders and jetbikes sliced overhead. The Blood Angels racing for the Sanctum. The World Eaters racing to get there first. No way to know, with the speed the things moved.\n\nThe trio fled between the legs of the Warmonger Malax Meridius, passing through the gum-stinging aura of its void shields and into its titanic shadow. To their left, its immense foot lifted with a tower's worth of screeching metal. It passed over them, shockingly loud, god-loud, the sound of a flight of gunships roaring overhead. It washed them in Titan life-heat and choked them with the stink of holy chrome. For a moment he struggled with a profoundly unpleasant nausea, falling again as he lost track of which way was up. Passing beneath the tower block legs of a walking cathedral tended to upset the senses.\n\nHundreds of Imperial Army soldiers already manned the rockcrete barricades ahead, those very last lines of defences before the Eternity Gate. They massed in firing lines, heeding the shouts of their surviving officers, or any survivor raising their voice loud enough to inspire compliance. More survivors from the wall filtered past and through these emplacements, running for the Sanctum.\n\nAlmost there, thought Land. A foolish thought, insipid in its obviousness. He'd spent his life rolling his eyes at people who gave voice to such banalities. Now here he was, thinking in them.\n\nThe Eternity Gate, in all its adamantium-and-ceramite-layered glory, rose for a kilometre and more above their heads. It was burnished orange by the first rays of anaemic dawn, and as they drew closer, it seemed almost to reach the tainted sky, where great clawed hands stirred the clouds, and-\n\nDon't look up.\n\nHe stumbled again, and again Shenkai and Transacta-7Y1 were there to help him. His bionic leg sent shocks of red pain throbbing through his hips and spine with every step. He suspected the surgical seams of the crude graft (where meat met metal, if one wished to be blunt about it) were edging in the direction of infection.\n\nLas-beams slashed past them, above them, ionising the air he breathed. It was like sprinting through spikes of angry light, knowing any one of them would kill you, and knowing you were just as dead if you stopped running.\n\nThey made it to the first barricade, collapsing for breath as Blood Angels and soldiers took up positions around them.\n\nThis is it, Land realised, with the same profoundly irritating banality. This is it. Our backs are to the Gate.\n\n'You know,' he said as he caught his breath, 'I think we're about to die.'\n\nShenkai checked his boltgun and gave a mirthless smile. Transacta-7Y1, readying her latest scavenged rifle, allowed that, yes, termination did seem to be the likeliest event given current circumstances.\n\nSapien scampered into cover with them, his hackles raised, his scorpion tail bristling. His mechanical chittering didn't add anything particularly weighty to their conversation, but was nonetheless welcomed by all of them.\n\nAs he retreated, sheeted with the slime that passed for the Neverborn's blood, bitterness was thick in the back of Amit's throat. It tasted like unspat acid. Some small part of him, a too-human core, railed at the unfairness. They had held out for so long; already the second day dawned on a battle that had been predicted to end within mere hours. The Legion had done the impossible and it still wasn't enough.\n\nWhat treachery had transpired in the Sanctum? How could the Neverborn manifest within its walls when surely every one of them blackened the sky and the wasteland and the wall itself out here?\n\nAs one of the few captains left alive after a day and a night on the wall, command of the piecemeal evacuation fell on his shoulders. Sanguinius' first and only command had been for him to assume the mantle with any other surviving officers.\n\n'Where will you be, sire?'\n\n'The Gate.' The Great Angel's voice over the vox was a ruined, weakened growl. 'I go to the Gate. We will hold it open for as long as we can. Be swift, Nassir.'\n\nAmit fell back, ringed by the last living warriors of his own Fifth Company. The Secutors had numbered a hundred and five souls before reaching Terra. At yesterday's dawn, he'd had fifty-eight warriors remaining. This morning, he was retreating with the last twelve of them by his side.\n\nThe division of the Legion's forces came down to necessity, and Amit coordinated it on the move with his Master of Signals, Ghallen, giving the warrior a stream of orders and decisions to relay onward. Ghallen's helmet and vambrace hololith generator were rigged with specialist interfaces to link with the Imperial vox-web, and to transcode available tactical data in input\/output streams. The interference from the ash and dust, then from the warp staining the sky, had diminished his role greatly in recent weeks, but he had the range to disperse Amit's orders along the falling wall.\n\nThose orders were stark in their simplicity. Half of the Legion's units were to run for the Sanctum with all haste, to lend aid to the Custodians calling from within. They would be engaged along the way; specific units were assigned rearguard action, doing what they could to slow the enemy advance along the Royal Ascen"}
{"text":"rom the ash and dust, then from the warp staining the sky, had diminished his role greatly in recent weeks, but he had the range to disperse Amit's orders along the falling wall.\n\nThose orders were stark in their simplicity. Half of the Legion's units were to run for the Sanctum with all haste, to lend aid to the Custodians calling from within. They would be engaged along the way; specific units were assigned rearguard action, doing what they could to slow the enemy advance along the Royal Ascension.\n\nHalf would stay on the wall. Their orders were to stand and die. The horde could no longer be held back, and the defenders would be overrun, but every sword and boltgun remaining on the battlement bought time for the rest of the Legion to reach the Sanctum.\n\nOf the units and companies and captains he called upon to remain, not one refused or hesitated. Chimes of order-receipt and acknowledgement came back across the vox, along with brief oaths to hold as long as they could, or to wish Amit and the others well at the Sanctum. So nobly did several thousand Blood Angels commit to their duty, ending in certain death.\n\nAmit had wanted to stay. Ghallen had seen it in his captain's eyes, and with the usual lack of formality that existed in the Secutors, he'd told the survivors of their company to drag Dominion Amit by force if he tried to waste his life here when he was needed at the Gate. Falling back from the wall, the Secutors had taken a Rhino, with Amit and Ghallen clinging to the external handrails, still conveying orders as they watched the unfolding retreat.\n\nThe Royal Ascension was one of the last untouched regions of Terra. Within minutes of the withdrawal being sounded, it was a battlefield like any other. Amit watched it sweep past as their Rhino made its rattling way up the vehicle inclines alongside the great steps. Already, the vanguard of the Warmaster's horde had breached the wall in vast numbers and were beginning to swarm the Royal Ascension. All notion of a front line became illusory; clusters of warriors fought in embattled circles, warband against warband, pack on pack. The front line was a million front lines, wherever two warriors stood together with blades bared and refused to let the enemy pass.\n\nFor a moment, the bleak thought occurred that he could have just remained on the wall and died there. He was dead anyway. They all were. If the Blood Angels defended the Sanctum against the Neverborn, they would lose the wall to the Warmaster's horde. If they held the wall against the horde, they would lose the Sanctum to the Neverborn. If they did both, they would lose both.\n\nAmit turned towards the great Gate. It towered above him in its monstrous splendour, and he spared a moment for the Emperor's graven image, depicted in triumph, a spear in hand as He looked down upon the surrendering foes of the Great Crusade.\n\nFor his part, Amit's recollections of the Great Crusade involved far more slaughtered cultures than surrendering ones, but he'd long since learned that the Imperium's artisans seemed disinclined to render the truth in their work.\n\nAmit established a temporary command post at the first barricades, for what it was worth. He rallied the defenders and ordered the remnants of regiments onward up to the Gate. Every time he heard a Custodian speaking of daemonic intruders, or one of the Blood Angels left behind on the wall relaying how his force was surrounded, he felt the urge to leave here, to go backwards or to go forwards, to the wall or the Sanctum, and damn waiting here in this middle ground. How was it he was burdened with the responsibility for distributing thousands of other lives? He was a captain, not a general.\n\nThe battlement still held, even with all its breaches and the horde overrunning its rampart. It kept back the Warmaster's Titans, leaving them on the wrong side of the Sanctum's voids - and mercifully so, for the moment they got a Warlord through that wall, that would end the infantry defence of the Royal Ascension.\n\nAmit had stopped tuning in to the Legio Ignatum vox-web. Let them die valiantly without him peering at their progress. Even at this distance, he could hear the duelling of god-machines in the wasteland beyond the wall.\n\nGhallen went down the line at the first barricade, distributing ammunition to the Blood Angels filling out the masses of human defenders. Amit kept his focus pinned to the first wave of traitors on their way. Blood Angels and soldiers managing to stay ahead of the tide passed through the barricades; Amit ordered most of them on, keeping the least injured here, to reinforce the line.\n\n'Hold them as long as you can,' he called down the line of sandbags and rockcrete barricades. 'Let them hit us. Keep them in place. Then start falling back in line order.'\n\nA chorus of acknowledgements greeted this. As plans went, it at least had the virtue of simplicity. The horde was close enough now that the tanks on both sides began firing, ionising the air with streaks of headache red and migraine blue. The brightness of lascannons and volkites left searing trails across even transhuman retinas.\n\nOn a whim, he turned to look back at the Eternity Gate. His gaze lingered on the Emperor's image again, the monarch looking down upon the death of the Imperium. Everything was so clear, every detail crisp in the light of the weakling sun.\n\nWe who are about to die, salute you.\n\n'Why are you smiling, sir?' Ghallen asked.\n\nAmit turned back to the horde, his knuckles tightening on his weapons.\n\n'Nothing. Something from another life.'\n\nKargos hunts and kills and carves and they are close now, they're so close, it's all about to end. They take the wall and then they're running. Then he's holding the side of a Land Raider. Tanks are making it through the breaches in the wall. Tanks. Warriors. Daemons. Trickles of everything, soon to be a tide. The road beneath them is white and long and leads to glory. These are the things he knows, and he can't recall ever knowing anything else. The Royal Ascension stretches ahead. Kargos will paint it with blood, blood, blood for the Blood God.\n\nAhead are the barricades. Beyond them, the Gate.\n\nBolters crash and volkite guns screech and Kargos leaps from the Land Raider over the rockcrete barrier. Blood Angels die and that's good, that's what Blood Angels do, they die when he cuts them and guts them and feels their blood washing his armour. He wears their shed life like medals, and he feels the God of War watching. This, too, is good.\n\nFlesh Tearer, he thinks, and this thought is clear, clearer than all the others, so clear it feels almost as if it isn't his own.\n\nBlood Angels get in his way and they die because they're slower than him, they die because they're fools, they die and their blood runs to honour a god they don't believe exists. They die and their souls are gone into the warp and the mouths of the god-things that wait there.\n\nEven the ones praying to the God-Emperor, their meekness setting Kargos' teeth on edge, even their spirits leave their bodies and plunge not into the warm arms of their false god, but into the maws of daemons that laugh and gag and choke on the harvest of souls.\n\nFlesh Tearer, he thinks. Flesh Tearer.\n\nHe turns, no longer trying to break through the line, trying instead to fight his way along it. More Blood Angels die. More humans die. Some of the Blood Angels try to hurt him and they do, they do hurt him, but pain is for mortals, pain is weakness leaving the body, pain is good, pain is pleasure because pain means war, and war means the flow of blood and the ripping of muscle from the bone.\n\nFlesh Tearer. Again comes the feeling that it's not his thought, it's something from above, dropped inside his skull. Flesh Tearer. Flesh Tearer.\n\nThere are others with him, so many others, it's as if every being in the world is a World Eater at his side, or the red things with brass blades that pretend to be World Eaters, and Kargos runs, vaulting barricades and killing the defenders that cower there. A tide of his brothers rushes with him, and some are laughing, drunk on the promises made by the God of War and Woe; others are screaming or weeping with discharges of emotion poorly processed by broken brains.\n\nThe preacher is with him still, and the preacher speaks of the Sanctum like it's a temple, saying it will be the Cathedral of Lorgar, and Kargos has no time for this, no time for any of the preacher's canticles, it's more Colchisian groxshit.\n\nFlesh Tearer.\n\nAnd yes, he's close now, he kills a human with a fist to the woman's skull and he kills another with an elbow to the man's throat and another with Gorechild, Kharn's axe, Kharn was his brother, Kharn was his captain, Kharn was the best of them and-\n\n'Flesh Tearer!'\n\n-and Amit turns at the roar of his name. The world is red torment and all Kargos can see is Amit, but that's enough, that's all he needs to see right now.\n\nHis chain-brother's face is familiar but unfamiliar; his expression doesn't mean pain or sorrow, but it means something like both. It's an emotion Kargos no longer knows, but it's on Amit's face now and Kargos knows he is the cause.\n\nEngines scream and Kargos knows that whine, it's the whine of jump turbines, and more Blood Angels come, everything is breaking apart and scattering. He kills Blood Angels because they are in the way, and his brothers kill other Blood Angels, and he demands the Flesh Tearer face him.\n\nAmit fights, but not towards him or even really away from him. Amit fights and kills as if Kargos doesn't exist, as if the other battles matter more and Kargos roars again, screaming his chain-brother's name and title and he's so close now, so close, it doesn't matter if Amit dies from an axe in the back, so long as Amit's blood runs to the earth and his skull is chained to XII Legion ceramite. The Blood God wants the Flesh Tearer's soul, Kargos feels it, and the gladiator will give it to him.\n\nTwo World Eaters die by Kargos' side, not fr"}
{"text":"lly away from him. Amit fights and kills as if Kargos doesn't exist, as if the other battles matter more and Kargos roars again, screaming his chain-brother's name and title and he's so close now, so close, it doesn't matter if Amit dies from an axe in the back, so long as Amit's blood runs to the earth and his skull is chained to XII Legion ceramite. The Blood God wants the Flesh Tearer's soul, Kargos feels it, and the gladiator will give it to him.\n\nTwo World Eaters die by Kargos' side, not from blade or bolt but in swift dissolution, like deletion, and Kargos doesn't understand until he sees the old man with the archeotech gun. It flares again and the warrior to Inzar's right dissolves, shrieking a sound no Astartes should ever make, as if the Emperor's Children legionary finds sweetness in his eradication.\n\nThere are weaklings in the way between Kargos and Amit so they die, he cuts them down - one is a skitarius and Gorechild goes through the cables she has for guts, and another is a thrall of the IX and he stumps the young man with a cut that takes off the thrall's arm.\n\nInzar is with him, and one of the weaklings is a little thing of spindly limbs and false fur, and it leaps upon Inzar, jabbing at the joints of his armour with a barbed tail like a scorpion's sting, and Inzar clutches the thing's head in one hand and squeezes, and the machine parts and organic pieces of the thing's skull crunch through the preacher's fingers.\n\nThe old man with the gun of eradicating fire is screeching like a child because the skitarius and the thrall and the monkey-thing are dead or as good as dead, but it doesn't matter, none of it matters, because he has killed his way to Amit, and their weapons lock, and they're face to face again, just like before.\n\n'Fall back.' Amit spits the words but not at Kargos, he's spitting at the humans, because yes, the Sanctum is fouled by the Neverborn and they need every gun and every blade to save themselves, not realising they're all already dead. 'Line order, fall back!'\n\nFace to face with his chain-brother, Kargos spits words of his own.\n\n'Sanguis extremis.'\n\nAmit shows his fangs, just like in the pits. 'Don't tell me. Show me.'\n\nThen it happens, as it always happens in the arena. Everything breaks apart, becoming a thousand red moments that, later, he will barely remember.\n\nLoss\n\nOn that day, as Kargos fought hot, Amit fought cold.\n\nBlood Angels and World Eaters murdered each other in packs around the two of them, but the wider war narrowed to the two gladiators and the weapons in their hands. Amit knew how Kargos fought better than Kargos himself. The Nails gave his chain-brother strength but stole his memory, while Amit remembered every beat, every second, of their time together in the pits.\n\nFor Kargos, as soon as the Butcher's Nails bit, every fight was against a stranger. He relied on strength and speed at the cost of experience - which always served him well, Amit had to concede. But even against opponents he'd duelled a hundred times before, Kargos was always fighting them for the first time.\n\nAmit knew the angle of every blow and the strength Kargos threw behind it. He knew which ones to block, which ones to parry or deflect, which ones to evade by weaving aside or leaping back. Kargos' brutish new axe was a fresh consideration, but the World Eater used it the same way he used his last three chainaxes, and Amit had the measure of it within moments.\n\nIt went against Amit's own instincts to hold back, only blocking and weaving away. He wasn't built for bloodless battle. Muscle memory and centuries of warfare made it a trial not to lunge when he thought he saw an opening, but he knew Kargos' swiftness too well to play with the risk.\n\nAlready, Kargos was frothing at the mouth. Amit saw it in the half-face visible in his chain-brother's broken faceplate. Grunts became growls, became snarls, became roars, with each wild swing cutting nothing but air. Just like in the arena, Kargos craved contact - the shedding of blood, the impact of a fist against flesh. Without it, the Nails knifed into his mind, goading him on and punishing his failure.\n\nAmit smashed aside a blow with his vambrace; leaned away from another arcing cut. He couldn't wear Kargos down, the Nails wouldn't allow it. The World Eater would erode down to nerveless bone before the pain engine in his head let him realise the limits of his body. Amit watched for the right moment, the balance point between his own weariness and Kargos' Nails-born frustration. If he waited too long, it wouldn't matter how frenzied and artless Kargos became. The Blood Angel's strength would always leach faster.\n\nHe cuts and he cuts and he's chopping air, and breath saws in and out of his open jaws, and the Flesh Tearer isn't fighting, he's not fighting, he's doing everything but fighting back. Kargos hears these grunts and these curses of wordless sound, and is it him, is it he who's snarling like a kicked wolf?\n\nHe cuts he cuts he cuts, again, again, and there's acid in his spit now, he can feel it infused there, milked from his Betcher's Gland, he can feel it warm on his chin as it runs from his roars. The Flesh Tearer is a ghost, a coward, he's not there, he's not there, and Gorechild thirsts, and he can feel the axe almost slipping from his grip in the thirst for blood, or the thirst for a new bearer, one who will not fail, and the Nails are pinching and biting and they-\n\nDrill they drill they drill they drill into him, and Amit is laughing, and the Nails drill and they drill and the back of his brain must be bleeding by now, and-\n\nAmit goes for the axe, no, not the axe, the chain, and they're grappling and Kargos is stronger, but Amit has the chain and-\n\nHe can't breathe. He can't pull his chained arm free. He's leashed by his own weapon chain, wearing it like a slave collar, and he can't breathe. That's fine, he is Astartes, he can survive without breath, but the bones and ligaments in his neck are clicking, and crunching, and it's the sound of branches breaking and-\n\nAnd then he sees it. Kargos sees what's been behind Amit's eyes all this time. He sees what was inside his chain-brother's soul every time they stepped into the arena. He sees the predator under the perfection as Amit goes for his face, fangs like ivory knives. He feels his brother fasten down on his cheek, and bite, and throw his head back. There's the unreal ripping of wet leather, and blood sprays, and Amit spits out a mouthful of his own brother's face.\n\nThere's no pain, though Kargos knows that will come later, when the Nails retract; then there will be pain aplenty.\n\nAnd there's no mockery in Amit's gaze, no laughter, not even any glory, there's just princely hate in those pale eyes, and flecks of Kargos' blood showing stark against the sclera. Then he does it again, he does it again, this time fastening his fangs on Kargos' nose and other cheek, and this time the ripping comes with the sound of grinding gravel. The Blood Angel takes bone and cartilage away with him.\n\nAnd this time, Amit swallows. He swallows the flesh of his brother's face and he takes inside him the taste of his brother's blood. Kargos can feel the dawn air on naked bone, and he wonders even through the Nails, he wonders how much of my face is left-\n\nAnd then there is a sound and a feeling in the same terrible second, a crunching snap, like a grind and a gunshot in the same instant, and Kargos flails because his spine is breaking, he lashes out blindly, fingers fumbling and finding Amit's belt knife and drawing it and ramming it back over his shoulder into his brother's chestplate. It scrapes and stabs and deflects from the ceramite until it catches a joint and slides inside and bites. Meat bleeds. Blood runs. Amit falls back.\n\nHe is free. Free. The pressure is gone and Kargos goes for his axe and he turns with a scream to finish this. He turns right into Amit's backhand blow and something breaks inside what's left of his face. Amit's fists are cracks of thunder, each one painting his senses with smears of pain that blind him, literally stealing his sight, and Kargos feels the joints of his jaw give with a dislocating crunch, and he feels the bone at the side of his skull crumple like tin, and he feels cold air and acid spit on his mutilated face.\n\nAmit's blade drives into his guts and is torn back out before Kargos can even breathe. He staggers but he doesn't fall, though something has come undone inside him, he knows that, his legs are weak, and he raises Gorechild, swinging it, but Amit smashes the axe aside and sheathes his sword in Kargos' guts again, this time carving up before pulling out. Eye to eye, face to face, it is the most intimate moment of Kargos' life, a moment of intimacy without sensuality, the two of them joined by the impaling blade, and\n\nEverything\n\nSlows\n\nDown.\n\n'I told you,' Amit breathes, 'to eat shit, traitor.'\n\nThe Blood Angel moves away. Kargos doesn't give chase. His legs fail.\n\nTime passes. Or seems to. Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn't. The sounds of war are dim now. Kargos is on the ground. He looks up at Amit. His vision is halved, and he realises he's lost an eye. What remains of his sight is stained red.\n\nThe Nails no longer bite. It's like they've burned themselves out, burst in the back of his head, no longer able to spread their poison.\n\nThere will be a moment now. A profound moment of brotherhood. Their gazes will meet and they will acknowledge how far they've both come. They will share, unspeakingly, all that has brought the two of them to this fated moment.\n\nBut there's no moment of beautiful fraternal reflection. Amit fights on, grappling with other World Eaters. Fighting the war instead of devoting everything to this single duel. Kargos watches him, burbling through the vocoder implant in his throat. Demanding that Amit acknowledge him. Yet Amit fights on.\n\nAnd soon, Amit is gone. Boots clatter around him. Several thud into him. He can stand, he can, he j"}
{"text":"e. They will share, unspeakingly, all that has brought the two of them to this fated moment.\n\nBut there's no moment of beautiful fraternal reflection. Amit fights on, grappling with other World Eaters. Fighting the war instead of devoting everything to this single duel. Kargos watches him, burbling through the vocoder implant in his throat. Demanding that Amit acknowledge him. Yet Amit fights on.\n\nAnd soon, Amit is gone. Boots clatter around him. Several thud into him. He can stand, he can, he just needs to gather his strength now the Nails have deserted him.\n\nThe World Eater turns his head, pain lightning-bolting down his abused spine. He stares into the pulped remains of the psyber-monkey, its skull crushed in Inzar's grip. Strange, ugly little thing.\n\nHe turns his broken head again. Above him is a churn of clashing bodies, their identities meaningless. Their blood rains on him in warm spatters.\n\n'Inzar,' he tries to say. 'I can still beat him. Help me. Help me up.'\n\nWhen the bodies break away, Inzar is there. Kargos lifts a hand, trying to rise, needing the preacher's aid.\n\nBut the preacher regards him through the eyes of his skullish helmet. He doesn't take Kargos' hand. He presses his boot down onto Kargos' chest.\n\n'As pathetic as Kharn,' the Word Bearer muses. 'Able to butcher anyone on the planet except the one man you want to kill.'\n\n'Brother,' Kargos tries to say. 'Help me up.'\n\nEither he doesn't manage to say it or Inzar doesn't care. The Word Bearer lifts his foot away, turning to the towering Sanctum.\n\n'So close now.'\n\n'Inzar...'\n\n'Wash my name from your tongue, weakling.'\n\n'Preacher!'\n\nBut he's shouting at nothing and no one. Inzar is gone.\n\n'Medic...' Kargos calls. 'Apothecary...'\n\nAnd he starts laughing.\n\nLand and the others ran, but they didn't get far. Only to the next barricade. The Imperial Army soldiers there were already falling back from the position, making for the third and fourth redoubts, closer and closer to the Gate.\n\nShenkai was white, losing the strength to hold his hand to the stump where his bicep ended. His robes were painted down one side, dark with lost blood. Blood still flowed between his weakening fingers, trickling far slower than its previous spurting gusto.\n\nLand guided him to sit and crouched before the thrall, gripping the younger man's chin with dirty fingers. He forced Shenkai to meet his eyes.\n\n'You're going into hypovolaemic shock,' he said. The thrall nodded, but Land could tell from his eyes the young man had no idea what Land was saying, or even who was saying it.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 collapsed next to them both, screeching a spiel of wounded code.\n\nLand thanked her, she was right, of course - and he went for the canister of armour cement hanging from the thrall's webbing.\n\n'I'm going to cauterise the wound,' Land told the shaking thrall, 'then I'll... Look, just hold on, Shenkai, just hold on.'\n\nHe aimed his Dark Age pistol up at the sky, discharged it once on maximal settings, and a blast capable of atomising a Rhino launched upward. With a murmured 'sorry' he pressed the hissing barrel against the stump of Shenkai's arm. Flesh sizzled and Shenkai yelled, which Land took to be a wonderful sign, given current context.\n\n'Almost done,' he promised. And then, because it wasn't the same thing but it was equally true, he added, 'We're almost there. We're almost at the Gate.'\n\nHe smeared armour cement on the cauterised stump, ending the last of the blood flow. Exhaling, he turned to Transacta-7Y1.\n\nTee was failing to hold in the biomechanical slug-cables that made up the ropy portions of her intestinal tract. Several loops of the stuff had already slipped free in their run from the first barricade. Blood, in interesting and sacred shades, was running from her vitals in uneven trickles. That World Eater. The one that screamed Amit's name. That World Eater had come close to killing her.\n\nLand swore in particularly crude gutter Martian.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 replied that she did not believe such an act was biologically possible. Then she allowed that she already knew this, and that she had been making a joke. She queried if he found the joke funny.\n\nLand didn't smile. He looked over his shoulder, where fifty kinds of hell itself was making its way along the Ascension, held back by surrounded clusters of defenders.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 informed him that, in her considered opinion, it made the most tactical sense to leave her and go.\n\n'I'm not leaving you.' Arkhan Land had heard and read these words uttered by fools with symmetrically balanced features in various tales of fiction in the past, and always found them trite beyond comprehension. Now, as they left his mouth, he meant every syllable of them.\n\nTransacta-7Y1 replied that he was compromising his already slender odds of survival, adding that she was dying, and Land expiring here with her wouldn't change that outcome. She was also in significant pain, but she neglected to include that. She didn't wish to add to his emotional unrest.\n\n'When we first met,' Land said, 'you saved my life.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 allowed that, yes, this was true, and that he had been sufficiently pleasant company since then, thus she did not regret the deed.\n\n'I'd name my firstborn after you,' he said to her, 'but I despise children.'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 pointed out that he was also of extremely advanced years, far beyond optimal breeding age.\n\n'Yes. That, too. But come on. We can make it. We can make it, Tee. I can fix you once I get a good look at you.'\n\nHe rose, awkwardly straining to lift the unconscious form of Shenkai. His bad leg gave way at once.\n\nHe couldn't do it. He probably couldn't even have supported Shenkai's weight in the prime of health - he was a stick-thin old man, and Shenkai was a muscled thrall who'd trained for war every day of his life. Nevertheless, Land tried again, and a third time when the second failed.\n\nThe Martian sagged down after the last attempt, groaning at the strain. 'Omnissiah,' he prayed, 'it's your most devout servant, Arkhan Land...'\n\nA group of soldiers vaulted the barricade, all filthy, all catching their breath before the final sprint to the Gate.\n\n'And my prayers are answered,' he said.\n\nThey regarded him with adrenal confusion.\n\n'My name is Arkhan Land,' he told them, 'and I am a deeply important man. It's likely you have heard of me. I need you to help me carry my friends to the Sanctum.' He trailed off, then remembered. 'Please.'\n\nTwo of them lifted Shenkai, and Land turned to Tee, grinning.\n\n'Let's go, you stubborn skit. Just a little further.' Land's smile dimmed. 'Tee? Tee?'\n\nTransacta-7Y1 didn't reply.\n\nQuite why Land did what he did next, he was never entirely sure, and he would have denied it had he ever been asked about it. But he cradled her helmeted head in his hands and kissed the metal forehead. A radiological alarm deep in his robes gave a warning click.\n\nA shadow fell over him, bringing the drone of power armour. He jerked around, scrambling for his pistol, raising it - only for a Blood Angel to knock it aside.\n\nZephon bore several new wounds that would most surely scar, and his face was sheened with blood. Land had never seen him look quite so destroyed by exhaustion and injury, even when they'd journeyed together into the Imperial webway. Frankly, he'd looked better carved open on a surgical slab.\n\nA host of Blood Angels were touching down, landing before the Gate, falling back before the advancing horde.\n\n'Go,' Zephon bade him. 'This is the end, Arkhan. Make for the Gate while there is still time.'\n\n'Zephon.' He said the name with almost insane calm. Lascannon fire screamed overhead, turning the void shields briefly prismatic and making the air stink of dirty ozone.\n\n'Arkhan,' the Blood Angel pressed. 'My friend. The Gate. Go, while you still can. We cannot hold them back much longer.'\n\n'Zephon,' Land said again, with the same intensity.\n\nFor a moment, Land wasn't sure what to say. Then for the second time in a week - and only the second time in over sixty years of adult life - he burst into tears.\n\n'Zephon, they killed my friend. And my monkey.'\n\nBane of the Ninth Bloodline\n\nThe Bane of the Ninth Bloodline took shape and substance from the angelic dead. Their flesh became its flesh, their armour its armour. All of that meat and ceramite was darkened and altered, but everything in the daemon's corporeal form was harvested from the charnel field of butchered Blood Angels. It was a crop that grew in abundance here.\n\nOnly the creature's weapons were pulled raw from the warp, appearing in its hands as the daemon closed its claws into fists. A whip. An axe. The former parched and ragged, the latter catching the light of the poisoned sunrise.\n\nThe Craven God's shield of will had kept the daemon and its kind away from the Sanctum, but the half-mortal puppet was close to success in the webway. For that, the thing called Magnus should be tolerated in its exaltation. Perhaps not praised, and never trusted, but tolerated.\n\nThe daemon took its first step upon the gold-veined marble of the Grand Processional, leading up to the Delphic Archway, and sounded its arrival to its lesser kindred. Once, this would have been a roar that cracked stone, a bellow ripe with pride. Now, it was far more bestial, a laboured howl that oscillated the clutch of muscles in its throat. The daemon had learned humility. It had been given no choice.\n\nIts lessers fled its presence, their own connection to reality yet frail with the Craven God's aura so recently brought low. Far above, the Bane sensed one of the other exalted mortals - the Lord of the Red Sands - still flailing against the last vestiges of the False God's resistance. No matter. The creature needed no aid here from some half-mortal pretender. Beneath the daemon's tread, marble soured to granite, the veins of gold transmuting to blood in the alchemy of unreality.\n\nSome of the mortals it passed cried out in worship. In past incarnations, this would have amused the beast, and in "}
{"text":"o recently brought low. Far above, the Bane sensed one of the other exalted mortals - the Lord of the Red Sands - still flailing against the last vestiges of the False God's resistance. No matter. The creature needed no aid here from some half-mortal pretender. Beneath the daemon's tread, marble soured to granite, the veins of gold transmuting to blood in the alchemy of unreality.\n\nSome of the mortals it passed cried out in worship. In past incarnations, this would have amused the beast, and in further distant manifestations, it would have flattered it. The daemon killed them now with careless gestures of destruction, in case their prayers were laced with mockery.\n\nManifesting here had taken a supreme effort of will, and etheric vapour still steamed from the daemon's skin. Behind it, in a spillage of warped afterbirth, came lesser shedders of blood, riding the brass-bodied rhinos born-forged in the War God's realm.\n\nThe daemon stretched its wings, feeling sinews crackle and crack. They felt unfamiliar and tight, which of course they were. This incarnation had never flown before, and the last time the creature was incarnated in the corporeal realm, it had lost a wing on the night it tasted deeply of shame.\n\nIt sounded again, beast-loud and beast-dumb, a predator's warning whine. The first sweep of its axe reduced three statues to rubble, an act of needless spite that nevertheless contained a seed of joy. This was the Sanctum of the Craven God. This was where everything would end, and before that end came, this was where the Bane of the Ninth Bloodline would feed.\n\nThere were yet angels upon the battlement, surviving in diminishing phalanxes against a host of daemons numerous enough to blacken the sky. Humans and angels beyond lined the Royal Ascension, ripe for bleeding. In every direction, false-godlings with bodies of metal fought each other: the things mortals named Titans.\n\nSuch a hunting ground.\n\nWith a shudder at the feel of corporeality cold on its steaming skin, the daemon turned towards the portcullis that held like clenched teeth in the maw of the Delphic Arch. It could clear the battlement with a dozen beats of its warp-wet wings, but they were still weak and stunted, the membranes thin, the veins not yet pumped with what served the creature for blood. It needed to slaughter its way back to its former strength.\n\nThe God of War wanted the IX Legion to bleed. He had despatched his shamed champion to see it done, and at the end of the hunt lay redemption.\n\nAbove all things, this daemon desired redemption.\n\nThe Warlord Oberosa staggered as the chainfist slid back out of her guts. Mechanical debris rained from her disembowelled superstructure, crushing the Warmaster's infantry swarming around her feet. She was dead, she knew she was dead, but her crew were still in control during her dying seconds. The two Reavers that had carved her apart stalked back in case she lashed out with the power fist on her remaining arm, but her command crew couldn't muster enough locomotive force for a final blow.\n\nShe vented her reactor and purged it of power in the same desperate exhalation, turning with brutal slowness and managing three steps towards the Delphic Arch before the motive light went out of her machine-spirit. The Warlord Titan fell with almost human weakness, her knees buckling first, her waist failing second. Her murderers circled her, the Reavers pouring fire into the cooling steel of her corpse, but her reactor was parched of power and refused to go nova. When Oberosa toppled the rest of the way, it was just enough. The Warlord's corpse crushed the infantry at the portcullis, blocking the passageway with a mound of dead metal. There it lay, another Ignatum body outside the wall: loyal unto death, and arguably beyond.\n\nThe Warhounds of Audax took over from the vox-screaming Reavers. Hindarah was among them, a maniple of half a dozen Ember Wolves pounding their harpoons into the wreckage and doing their best to haul it out of the way.\n\nThe last of the battlement's guns focused their fire on the Titans and troops closest to the arch. On sections of the wall overrun by the Warmaster's horde, warriors in the colours of the Traitor's Legions set explosives on the autoloaders feeding the battlement's guns, or sabotaged them with blockages using the bodies of the dead.\n\nKa'Bandha watched all of this with burning eyes. The desperation of mortals, the absolute futility of their scrabbling dramas. He went over one of the Warhounds with a crack of his wings, briefly irritated by the waspish buzz of the walker's suffering void shields.\n\nThe Bane charged, his form a blur of indifferent flame, heedless of what he incinerated on his charge to the portcullis. The daemon tore through them, his axe not slaved to mortal physics; the blade didn't cut metal, it rent reality. He tore a hole, ripped it wider, and crawled through. Infantry followed him, shrieking, praying, laughing. Pitiable, ignorable little things. They thought all of this was about them. What they wanted. What they deserved.\n\nTearing through the first of the portcullises brought the Bane into the arch beneath the Delphic Keep, where the automated defences above rinsed him with firepower from a hundred murder holes. In the forgotten mists of history, castle defences would have poured hot sand or boiling oil from similar openings. Here, heavy bolters and volkite cannons unloaded their anger, annihilating the infantry in the Bane's wake. The daemon cared nothing for this; he was already carving through to the third portcullis.\n\nThe daemon possessed no vox and knew nothing of the legionaries' plans. Their pleas for the Bane to rip open the portcullises wide enough for tanks and Titans to come through never reached his ears. Even if he'd heard their needs, in what mad existence would mortals expect Ka'Bandha to do their work for them? Let them bleed outside the walls if they were too weak to get in themselves. The Blood God cared not from whence the blood flowed. Theirs or their enemies', it was all the same.\n\nVolkite beams raked the Bane's ectoplasmic flesh from above, and the blood-sweat on his skin ignited like promethium fuel. The daemon never slowed, never wavered in his hunger for the blood that would run on the other side of the barriers. When he broke through, crawling and clawing his way between lengths of twisted metal, he gave another roar that could have come from the throat of one of the long-dead tyrant lizards that once ruled over the primeval surface of Old Earth.\n\nHe was inside.\n\nAhead lay a marble avenue infested with tens of thousands of warring mortals, and at the very end stood the Gate. The daemon felt the pull of his god's anger, his god's need, as he gazed into the open Gate and saw the weaklings fleeing through it to cower in the Sanctum of the Craven God.\n\nBut between here and there, thousands of Angels fought amidst the throng, and their blood was promised to the God of War.\n\nThey started coming for the daemon now. Some from the Royal Ascension, turning back to face the newest, largest threat; some from atop the wall, dropping down and attacking from behind. The creature sensed the efforts of smaller Titans and tanks doubling their efforts on the brutalised archway, and the zealous, righteous souls of Blood Angels descending upon him.\n\nThis time there was emotion in his cry when he sounded his presence to the turgid sky. There was rage in the sound, and resolve, but above all there was joy. Redemption was upon him.\n\nLet it begin.\n\nOrion had been dead for so long he could no longer recall what it felt like to be alive. He'd been cold for so long he could no longer remember what it meant to be warm.\n\nEven the dead could tire. Orion was proof of that. His weariness was a matter of cognition, not a physical thing, but that didn't stop it aching in what remained of his flesh. An activated Dreadnought was supposed to go a matter of weeks at most without maintenance. Orion had been awake and fighting without maintenance for four months. He floated in the icy milk of his amniotic tank, the fluid desperately in need of purging and cleaning, feeling particulates and organic debris against his skin. He could feel clogs in several of his intravenous cables. The shell within which he was interred had been suffering input lag for weeks; either it was struggling to obey his mental impulses, or he was too worn down for a clean cognitive link. Whichever the case, the result was the same. Corpses were not clean things. He was slowly being poisoned by the toxins of his own filth.\n\nNone of his brethren saw this. They fought together on the Ascension side of the portcullis, guarding the Delphic Archway from the ground, and they saw the Contemptor Dreadnought stand with one foot on a mound of the traitorous dead, laying waste to the Neverborn with its Kheres assault cannons. They heard the artificial thunder of its battle cries, a simulated boom only loosely reminiscent of Orion's own voice. They saw and heard nothing of the revenant inside, curled foetal in its dirty fluid, its mouth moving wordlessly as its thoughts were translated to motion and vocalisation. He was among his brothers yet separated from them, here in the filthy cold of his false womb.\n\nThe corpse twitched. Its lips moved.\n\n'For the Angel and the Emperor!' the Dreadnought called. It turned, panning with its cannons, the fire of muzzle flares lighting up its armoured shell. In this cluster, just over two hundred Blood Angels still fought, forming a shrinking circle against the Neverborn. The Dreadnought's whirring guns cleaved through the daemons' ichorous flesh, cutting them down, bursting them open, breaking them apart.\n\nWhatever had gone wrong within the Sanctum, it was getting worse. The Neverborn pouring over the wall were growing, not only in strength but in size. It was impossible to follow even a fraction of what was taking place. Shadowy things sliced the air overhead. The ground shoo"}
{"text":"o hundred Blood Angels still fought, forming a shrinking circle against the Neverborn. The Dreadnought's whirring guns cleaved through the daemons' ichorous flesh, cutting them down, bursting them open, breaking them apart.\n\nWhatever had gone wrong within the Sanctum, it was getting worse. The Neverborn pouring over the wall were growing, not only in strength but in size. It was impossible to follow even a fraction of what was taking place. Shadowy things sliced the air overhead. The ground shook, sometimes hard enough to throw the defenders from their feet. Creatures defying description, some defying even the attempt to look at them, manifested and vanished and reappeared and cavorted and fought and killed - and sometimes, but never often enough, they died. Every few seconds, another blade crashed against his shell. The warriors at his side killed most of the daemons bearing these blades, though more and more he had to kill them himself with a backhand from a cannon or a stamp of his immense foot.\n\nFeedback pulses reached the cadaver as a throb in the place where its hands used to be. The Dreadnought stepped back, wading through the dead, moving to the centre of the Blood Angels' circle. A clutch of thralls and cyborg servants still held out within the regiment's defensive ring.\n\nThe corpse twitched. Its lips moved.\n\n'Reload,' the war machine ordered, as he brought himself to one knee with a protest of wearing-down joints.\n\nThey dragged ammo hoppers towards him and went to work. There was the moment of conflicting freedom and vulnerability as the empty canisters were unbound from his guns, then the reassuring weight of their replacements crunching into place. The seconds passed in excruciating slowness with the noise of his brothers fighting and dying echoing in his damaged aural receptors. With his sensors failing, all sound was ghostly and indistinct through the amniotic fluid and the muffling iron of his shell.\n\nOne of the thralls banged a fist against his armour plating. The corpse twitched. The Dreadnought rose.\n\nOrion didn't feel immortal. Titan crews told tales of how it felt to embody the god-machines they piloted - how they felt the immense metal superstructures as their own flesh and blood. Orion felt no such connection to his shell. He was a corpse in a cold coffin. The Kheres cannons weren't his arms. The shell wasn't his body. What emerged from the vox-system in the shell was his emotion translated into words through a machine-spirit; accurate but imperfect. His experience of the world was entirely untactile. He was the living-dead core of a war machine that killed when he told it to kill.\n\nThe corpse twitched. Its lips moved.\n\n'We are the wrath of Angels!' cried the Dreadnought from its vox-caster. 'We are death to the treacherous!' He strode forward, reinforcing the outer ring where the line was bending back, opening up with both cannons. They cycled live, warming up with twin metallic whines, then chattered with recoil as they liquefied the Neverborn.\n\nThe line was breaking. The Neverborn cut into the defensive ring, the first of them making it to the groups of thralls and servitors in the middle. Orion turned, his cannons reducing the daemons to etheric mince. He strode forward, heedless of their blades, his iron feet grinding through warp slush that blackened the red of his shell.\n\nThe ground shook again, hard enough that the compensators in his joints momentarily jammed. The corpse thrashed in its amniotic murk, its mouth opening and closing, struggling to discern anything through its mental heads-up display. He could see\/sense the enemy everywhere, too many to fight, beginning to swarm his shell. Each shiver of the Royal Ascension seemed to breed more of the things.\n\nBrothers, he thought. Brothers, to me. The words lodged somewhere between his mind and the vox-caster, so all that emerged was a furious snarl.\n\nThey came for him, several of his kindred carving the beasts off his shell and granting him enough time to stabilise himself. Gratitude flooded him, the strongest emotion he'd felt in days.\n\nThe corpse twitched. Its lips moved.\n\n'I am grateful,' the Dreadnought said for him, but there was no respite - even as the shell threw off the last of his attackers, he was turning to open up on the next foes.\n\nInexorably, they were pushed inwards, the defensive ring shrinking with each lost life. They shrank against their reserve ammunition and weapon caches, as the vox crackled, a steady stream of reports from other clusters in the Stand and Die forces.\n\nOrion could see\/sense through the portcullis, where Ignatum's engines were clustered outside the wall, holding the line against the Warmaster's own god-machines. His vision was a multilayered heads-up display blending pict-lenses, echolocation and auspex scan pulses transmitted to his mind's eye, and it flared with impression cascades each time a Titan died in the wasteland.\n\nIt flared brightest of all as something struck the portcullis from the other side. Something that had no right being there, something carving its way through as its skin erupted with unnatural fire.\n\nOrion had fought on Signus Prime. He was almost a century dead by the time of that campaign, interred within this coffin and awakened only rarely between battles, but he'd been on the surface of Signus Prime when the Legion learned the first grievous truths about Horus' war.\n\nHe knew what he was seeing when the axe tore through the portcullis, and he recognised the daemon that burst through in its wake. The name ripped across the vox in amazement, in warning, in defiance, and in the voices of hundreds of warriors.\n\n'Ka'Bandha,' the Dreadnought shell vox-casted, following Orion's unspoken thought. The corpse twitched. The war machine raised its guns and started firing.\n\nHe was the first Blood Angel to die to the daemon's axe. It struck him with enough force to shatter his shell and send the Dreadnought crashing across the ground of the Royal Ascension. When the shell came to a rest, bleeding oil and artificial womb fluid, cracks in the armour revealed the corpse within. Without the life support systems of its destroyed coffin, the mutilated corpse flailed helplessly, feeling the touch of the open air like acid on its skin.\n\nOrion took almost a minute to truly die, staring up at the sky with his own eyes for the first time in almost a century, choking on air he was no longer used to breathing. His death was technically a stillbirth, as he died while being born, thrown halfway out of his synthetic coffin-womb. Such are the wonders of Imperial technology.\n\nThe daemon drank each life he ended. Souls swirled around his head; a halo visible to the others of his kind, a crown to inspire jealousy. With each fall of his axe, the daemon reaped angelic life, feeling his corpus swell with returning strength.\n\nThe cream of Blood Angels' heroism thrashed in his aura, their souls disintegrating to become part of him. As their identities crumbled, the Bane felt the memories filling out the hollows of his essence. He remembered wars against aliens he'd never fought. He remembered glories he'd never earned. He was flushed - bloated, even - with the righteous anger of humanity's living weapons. Step by step, Ka'Bandha avenged himself on the Legion that had seen him slain several corporeal years before. He craved their lives for his feeding frenzy. He could not take the Gate without building his strength.\n\nHe crushed angels between his fingers, squeezing them until pulped meat ran through the cracks of their ceramite. He ground the wounded ones beneath his hooves as they spent their last seconds of life hoping he could be killed with bolter fire. He killed with every step, not content to merely swallow souls; devouring angels whole or in pieces if they were moronically brave enough to come within reach. Several were wise enough to fall back, only for the daemon's whip to lash them in coils and pull them within reach of eager, curling claws.\n\nHis wings thickened, grew stronger. His claws hardened, no longer feeling as though they might crack at the first rake of his talons. He licked blood from his palm and fingers, tasting the final desperation of the last warrior he'd killed. Armand was the mortal's name. Sixty years of valiant service, not only to mankind's ignorant empire but to the Blood God that every warrior secretly served.\n\nHow could they not know it? Every drop of blood shed fed the Father of War. Here, of all places, all they had to do was look up and see the faces, the teeth, the smiles in the seething sky, horizon to horizon. Everything they did here fed the Pantheon. Even if they won, they would lose.\n\nLater, there would be tales told of the Battle for the Sanctum Imperialis, and in the way of such stories they would be an uneasy mix of truth and lies.\n\nZephon would hear many of these tales, in a time when memories of their father were all the Ninth Bloodline possessed. He would listen to the tales of how the Great Angel fought with his back to the Eternity Gate, and he would know which parts were truth and which were myth fuelled by idealism, or manipulations driven by the speaker's agenda. Only rarely did he lend his voice to affirm or deny, no matter which way the stories went. Far more often, he would listen patiently and commit these newest tellings and mistellings to memory, then when the time came, he would retire to his stasis-crypt aboard the warship Invictrix.\n\nA sleeper is not supposed to dream in stasis, but in this time yet to come, in the years after the war, Zephon always dreamed. In his visions, the tales he heard would mesh with his true memories, creating tales that danced along the border between fact and fiction. Upon rising, he would cast off these unwelcome dream-echoes, but it became more difficult as the years wound on.\n\nThe only time Zephon would disagree with a speaker was if they said Sanguinius had waited. He heard this often - between the tales of the Gre"}
{"text":"sed to dream in stasis, but in this time yet to come, in the years after the war, Zephon always dreamed. In his visions, the tales he heard would mesh with his true memories, creating tales that danced along the border between fact and fiction. Upon rising, he would cast off these unwelcome dream-echoes, but it became more difficult as the years wound on.\n\nThe only time Zephon would disagree with a speaker was if they said Sanguinius had waited. He heard this often - between the tales of the Great Angel defying the entirety of the Warmaster's horde alone, which were glorious but equally impossible and fantastical - and these were the times he would say, in his gentle tones, that the speaker was wrong.\n\nHe would lean forward with a purr of black armour, and he would say no, the Great Angel did not stand with his back to the Gate and watch as the Bane of the Ninth Bloodline tore its way along the Royal Ascension.\n\nIn response, the speakers would inevitably become listeners, keen to know what happened through the eyes of one who fought at the Great Angel's side. Zephon would defer to let another speak if they knew the truth as he knew it, and only on the rarest occasions would he set the record straight himself.\n\nWhat, the listeners would ask, really happened?\n\nSo Zephon would tell them.\n\n'The duel was swift. That much of the old stories is true. It lasted scarcely five blows between man and daemon. But the creature you speak of was not there for our father. He is not named the Bane of the Great Angel, he is the Bane of the Ninth Bloodline. He was there for us.'\n\nZephon fell back, throwing aside his empty pistol and scavenging a boltgun from the hands of a fallen brother. He risked a look back over his shoulder, seeing Arkhan Land hobbling into the Sanctum, part of a stream of wounded soldiers and militia. Turning back to the Ascension, he opened fire over the heads of his retreating brethren, cutting into the tide of World Eaters on their heels.\n\nHundreds of Blood Angels manned the barricades outside the Gate, funnelling survivors through into the Sanctum. The vox was a ceaseless spill of overlapping voices; those inside reporting on entire reaches of the Sanctum's surface overrun; those outside repeating the same name, the same name Zephon had read in all the archival data of Signus Prime. He hadn't been there. He'd been on Terra, in his crippled exile. What little pict-data there was, was hazy with etheric interference. Winged silhouettes. Fragments of audio, replaying snarled threats. The sound of great wings beating. The kinds of fragments that, later, make legends.\n\nNevertheless, he recognised the daemon as he saw it massacring its way along the avenue. It hunted the warring Blood Angels, and they were the ones to die beneath its falling axe. Humans fled its presence, ignored by the creature, dragged down instead by the howling beast-things in the daemon's wake.\n\nThe Custodians demanded the Eternity Gate's closure, and Zephon had the rank to neither agree nor oppose them. He heard Diocletian's voice among those ordering the sealing of the Gate, and for a moment he was back in the webway, marching with Land and Dio and the Custodians, fighting against hordes of Neverborn in the fall of Magnus' Folly.\n\n'No,' the Great Angel said at his side. Sanguinius slashed the air, flicking daemonic blood from his blade. He didn't address Zephon alone, he spoke to every Blood Angel in earshot and every Custodian within vox range. 'Hold the Gate open as long as you can. I will deal with this.'\n\nWith that promise, Sanguinius launched skyward.\n\nCeramite crumpled between his teeth, broken up and ground down enough to swallow. The taste of IX Legion meat spiced each chunk of armoured flesh. Every death was the murder of uncountable paths: a warrior that would not rise to primacy in the future, a legionary that would kill no more of the gods' children, an officer that would never become a hero. This served the Pantheon in their brief and jagged unity, but these fateful severances were of no concern to Ka'Bandha. The daemon harvested the Blood Angels' souls and shed their blood as the currency of atonement.\n\nThe courts of the Four Gods took much of their substance from ancient human aristocracies. After Signus Prime, Ka'Bandha had crawled, bleeding, before the Skull Throne, there to endure the War God's laughter. He could have suffered through the mockery, marking the names of his kindred that laughed loudest in their creator's shadow, and adding them to the butcher's bill once this time of shame had passed. Every sneer and smirk would motivate him.\n\nBut Ka'Bandha had not been ready for the War God's disgust. The Lord of Blood had not derided him like the lesser creatures of the court, nor punished him in a rage, as had happened to the Wingless One, the exile Skarbrand, for the moronic sin of taking up his axe against the Blood God himself. Khorne, armoured in runic plate and as tall as the chain-wrapped sky, had regarded his beaten champion, who brought the stink of failure into this sacred realm in the warp's deepest reaches.\n\nNo punishment. No mockery. Ka'Bandha prostrated his ruined form before the Skull Throne, feeling the eyes of his former underlings upon him like the itching of vermin. There before courtiers in the shapes of a thousand beasts and monsters, the Blood God dismissed his failed templar with a flick of armoured knuckles.\n\nReality melted around him, and when it took shape once more, he was far from the Court of the Brass Lord.\n\nThe rage that had sustained him and formed so much of his identity was cold and slow to rekindle. He hid from his former lessers in the farthest reaches of the Blood God's realm, at the edges where shadow and unshaped warp became one. In the Unformed Wastes, he survived on the pathetic souls of ignoble ends and deaths devoid of consequence. He could not remake himself without the War God's favour. He was without weapons, his armour ruptured, his wings too mutilated to soar. Hiding from his own kind made a sick kind of animal sense.\n\nSometimes they hunted him. Packs of them tore through the Un-formed Wastes, his former equals goading on packs of their weaker kindred. Ka'Bandha would cower in the memory ruins of forgotten temple-cities, cringing from pursuit and learning the taste of humility. And with that came a new weapon, one previously denied to a creature that relied wholly on the strength of his rage. Ka'Bandha learned to be cunning.\n\nHe hunted the hunters. At first, he moved through the memories of dead civilisations and picked off the weakest of his kindred. Devouring his lessers would once have been as shameful as a human fighting a stray dog for a meatless bone, but he was so weakened by his destruction on Signus Prime that even a vulture's portion was enough to restore him by degrees.\n\nA timeless time passed, in a realm where time is just a story told by creatures that cannot understand it. Ka'Bandha nurtured the dregs of his strength and gathered the weapons dropped by his prey. This slow rejuvenation became the entirety of his existence.\n\nHe made the long journey alone back to his creator's court, always careful to move unseen at the edges and dark places of Khorne's war-torn realm. His lessers and former equals - many now his greaters, in truth - jeered and threatened as he stood before the throne where he had once served as champion. His armour that day was a patchwork of stolen plate from the other daemons he'd killed, and though they were miserable trophies, he cast down the blades and skulls he'd taken from those that had hunted him in the Unformed Wastes. He came to the throne not crawling in defeat, but with a hunter's humility burned into his heart.\n\nThe daemon did not expect another chance, nor plead for one. He demanded one.\n\n'I have swallowed failure and learned its bitterness. Now let me redeem myself or destroy me where I stand, for I have eaten enough shame to last an eternity.'\n\nThe Blood God had listened and set him a task, as mortal kings once did for their champion knights.\n\nFive hundred souls.\n\n'Five hundred souls from the bloodline that shamed you.'\n\nThat was no test. He could achieve that in a day. In an hour, if his strength returned swiftly enough. Malicious hope flared in the daemon's core.\n\n'Five hundred souls,' the War God continued, 'from the bloodline that shamed you, harvested in the presence of the Angel of Blood.'\n\nThe daemon dined on their bodies and drank their blood like a glutton gorging on wine, ingesting the stories of their lives, leaching the strength of their deaths. It wasn't long before even the Blood Angels fled, falling back towards the Gate or crawling into their battle tanks in a bid to find some way to fight back. They were slow, far too slow. Ka'Bandha was war given form. Those that ran, he leapt upon or pulled back with cracks of his whip. Those that remained died where they stood.\n\nHe heard them calling for their gene-sire, and what a sweet sound their controlled panic made. These transhuman pretenders to immortality, eloquently begging for the aid of their angelic prince... Ka'Bandha cut them down mid-plea, feeling their pain spiced with desperation as their souls meshed with his essence.\n\nThe daemon did not count lives as a mortal would count; he simply knew. He felt the tally of souls in his essence, each one becoming part of his corpus as it was torn from the flesh and freed for the warp to claim. Swollen to his previous power, the creature never slowed, never ceased. When his prey retreated, he gave chase; he lashed them down; he cleaved the earth with his axe, pouring his wrath into the ground to swallow groups of earthbound angels. Within corporeal minutes after manifesting, the creature was close. He could feel the eyes of his creator above, and the zealous, jealous hate of his bloodletting lessers.\n\nThe Angel landed before him, wings spread in artistic intimidation, pale features composed in warlike serenity. That s"}
{"text":"e creature never slowed, never ceased. When his prey retreated, he gave chase; he lashed them down; he cleaved the earth with his axe, pouring his wrath into the ground to swallow groups of earthbound angels. Within corporeal minutes after manifesting, the creature was close. He could feel the eyes of his creator above, and the zealous, jealous hate of his bloodletting lessers.\n\nThe Angel landed before him, wings spread in artistic intimidation, pale features composed in warlike serenity. That serenity was almost believable but for the hate that burned in those beautiful eyes. Ka'Bandha was immune to the primarch's masquerade of perfection. He knew the fear of failure that ran through his foe's bloodstream, and he'd breathed in the Angel's hatred before.\n\nTheir presences exerted a pull of gravity, the battle coalescing around them. The Blood Angels coming for the daemon lord were cut apart and dragged down by red-skinned children of Khorne. The daemons foolish enough to run at the Angel were destroyed by the phalanx of Astartes forming around their primarch.\n\n'Daemon,' Sanguinius said with almost disbelieving softness. 'Are you so eager to die a second time?'\n\nTo the daemon's way of seeing the world, in smears of life force and promises of running blood, the Angel looked burdened by weariness. He could scent the exhaustion burning off the Angel's sweating skin. Ka'Bandha smiled, his own unease dissipating. His tongue slopped from his parted jaws and polished the cracked obsidian of his teeth. Slaver hung in ropes from his maw.\n\n'You look tired, little Angel of the Craven God.'\n\nIt began on the ground. Angel and daemon came together, blade on blade, beating their wings for balance in opposition.\n\n'I killed you once,' the Angel snarled into the daemon's inhuman visage.\n\nKa'Bandha's answer was to clench the muscles of his gullet and craw, bringing up a steaming flood from his replenished guts. Laughing, the daemon vomited the lifeblood of Sanguinius' slain sons into their father's face. The Angel endured the pain and the shame without retreat, which only delighted the daemon more.\n\n'I will kill you again,' the Ninth Primarch swore through the effort of matching the daemon's strength. Blood hissed and steamed on his armour and face. It trickled into the lines of his lips.\n\nKa'Bandha bared his teeth, fury melting back, replaced by a mocking grin. The creature had expected these words. Now they were spoken, he welcomed them.\n\n'In your arrogance, you still believe this is about you and me.' The daemon barked a laugh, bloody saliva spraying from his jaws to decorate the Angel's already bloody features. 'That, O purest one, is your father's vanity within you.'\n\nThe daemon was ungifted at reading human expression, but something like pain flickered on the Angel's face - and that, too, was beautiful.\n\nKa'Bandha drew his gargoyle head back, brazenly readying for a headbutt. The Angel launched backwards, just as the daemon desired, and Ka'Bandha stole those precious seconds of freedom to turn and sweep his great axe through the warring Blood Angels and Neverborn nearby, butchering swathes of both. Strength flowed through him with a cramping sting, and the creature turned in time to catch the Angel's blade against the flat of his axe. Again, they came face to face.\n\n'I am not here for you.' The daemon's mouth wasn't made for human language, and his fangs were aligned for the aesthetics of cruelty, not set by evolution. 'You are nothing. A flicker in the fires of time. A pawn with pretty wings, calling itself a king.'\n\nSanguinius' eyes were tight, half-closed with the strain. Words were almost beyond him, every vein and tendon thickly visible. Ka'Bandha's blood-coated throat was already hoarse with the effort of human speech, but more words bubbled up and forth through a knife-fang smile.\n\n'You taught me patience, Angel of the Craven God. You taught me my place. I am the beast that will feast on your sons in the centuries to come. I am the cancer that will eat away at your lineage, until the last man with your blood in his veins is dust in Baalfora's wind.'\n\nFire from the burning avenue reflected along the length of the Angel's blade.\n\n'I will destroy you, daemon, every time you crawl from the prison of hell.'\n\nKa'Bandha, teeth clenched with effort, spoke with his breath reeking of Astartes blood. Insidious sensuality flavoured his tone.\n\n'You won't be around to defend your children forever.'\n\nSanguinius paled beneath the war-grime darkening his features, and Ka'Bandha roared, hurling the Angel back. Sanguinius twisted in the air, avoiding the swing of the axe but not the lash of the whip. It barely struck, coiling around one wing, but it was more than enough for the daemon's need. Ka'Bandha dragged on the leash, pulling the primarch from the air and back down to the broken marble. Sanguinius struck with inhuman grace, already weaving to slice at the entangling lash.\n\nKa'Bandha cared not. He abandoned the whip, leaping and beating his wings, making for the centre of the Royal Ascension where the Blood Angels clustered at their thickest. World Eaters and the Warmaster's other half-mortals cried their blessings up at him. As if their benedictions mattered at all to a being such as he, in a moment such as this.\n\nHe landed amidst dozens of red-clad Blood Angels, reaving them from life with swings of his axe, sounding his carnosaur roar as he devoured their souls and stories. Names and faces and memories not his own saturated him, threatening his senses; still the creature killed, using every precious second.\n\nA few more... The failed champion's thoughts were a storm of uneasy, unsettled psyches. A few more...\n\nTwice more, the Angel was upon him, cutting and hacking. Twice more, the daemon managed to break free, battering the primarch aside or hurling him away.\n\nKa'Bandha fled again, taking flight, and this time the Angel was on him in the air. The two of them crashed to the earth scarcely two seconds after leaving it, the slender golden figure rolling atop the daemonic giant, raising his sword, plunging it down.\n\nThe daemon pounded the Angel aside with the flat of his axe, desperation sinking into his essence now. This was faster than their battles on Signus Prime, devoid of posturing and skill, reduced to the clumsy viciousness of a brawl. He rose, bellowing, roaring for opponents, launching himself at the closest Blood Angels and rending them limb from limb. Their bolters spat up at him, their swords cut into him, and they died making that display of futile wrath.\n\nThe Angel struck him again, this time with enough force to throw him from his hooved feet. The primarch was a hunting hawk, all wings and cutting edges, thrashing against the daemon as it fought to get free. Ka'Bandha shielded his face with his free arm a moment too late; he snarled at the crash of the silver blade laying open his face to the bone, stealing one of his eyes. It didn't hurt as mortals feel pain, but shame and rage burned in their own ways, just as fiercely.\n\nKa'Bandha reached blindly with one arm, raw fortune letting him close his fist around one of the Angel's legs. He cracked the primarch like a whip, smashing him into one of the statues lining the Ascension, not turning to see how wounded the Angel was, not caring beyond the fact he was free. He could slaughter a few more of the Angel's miserable children and make for the open Gate... The God of War would reward him, restore him to favour...\n\nHe beat his wings, gaining the sky, hurling his axe at the incarnadine form of a Legion Fellblade. The weapon cut through to the tank's core, detonating it in a plume of fire that smoked with fresh souls.\n\nJust a few more...\n\nThe daemon weaved aside from the irrelevant slashing of lascannon beams and rockets going wide. Unarmed but for his claws, he dived towards the Blood Angels closest to the Gate. His claws would be more than enough.\n\nZephon was one of those hurled aside in a tide of crashing ceramite, as Blood Angels were thrown from the daemon's path. Its bleeding wings were a tattered banner, proclaiming its march to the Eternity Gate. Talons the length of spears raked through red armour and tore open the precious meat beneath. Every soul torn free quickened the creature, hastening its charge. It wanted the Gate, and it wanted the blood of the Gate's defenders. The beast refused to fight the Angel in the air, where Sanguinius held every advantage of agility.\n\nThey ran at it with swords that broke upon the beast's skin and fired weapons that vultured away chunks of its corpus without slowing the creature at all. It clawed and carved and clutched and twisted. Ceramite gave and blood ran. Never once in its killing fury did the creature's eyes leave the guardians of the Gate. The deeds and doings of tanks and Titans and primarchs were meaningless. This was its last chance.\n\nZephon held his blade two-handed, ramming it through the creature's calf. It was like forcing a sword into bedrock, and the generator in the hilt backlashed, sparking out and failing in his grip. In the space of two seconds, Zephon drove the sword home, failed to wound the creature, and was smashed aside by the slap of one vast wing. He rolled across the Ascension's final plateau stair, close to the edge. One of his eye-lenses was smashed. His retinal display screeched with warnings of suit rupture and wounded muscles. As if he couldn't feel it already.\n\nHe pulled himself to his feet, reaching for his fallen blade on the marble nearby, ready to throw himself uselessly against the creature again with the rest of his brothers.\n\nSanguinius was a bolt of gold and silver, harrying the daemon from above. The creature tried to ignore the Angel, then to batter the primarch aside, then - failing, enduring the wounds weaved by the Angel's blade - the daemon was forced to slow in its charge, venting its pain and frustration in another roar.\n\nIt clawed for the primarch, not to maul the Angel but to b"}
{"text":"his fallen blade on the marble nearby, ready to throw himself uselessly against the creature again with the rest of his brothers.\n\nSanguinius was a bolt of gold and silver, harrying the daemon from above. The creature tried to ignore the Angel, then to batter the primarch aside, then - failing, enduring the wounds weaved by the Angel's blade - the daemon was forced to slow in its charge, venting its pain and frustration in another roar.\n\nIt clawed for the primarch, not to maul the Angel but to bring him to earth. On the third grasp, the daemon managed it, dragging Sanguinius from the sky and throwing him to the cracked marble beneath its feet. Zephon had never seen two creatures of such immense dignity and power reduced to such frenzied brawling. They rolled together across the Ascension's plateau of priceless off-world stone, raking at one another's eyes and driving their fists into armoured bodies.\n\nEach time the Angel pulled free, the daemon dragged him back into the brawl. When the daemon surged back up, the Angel was upon it a half-breath later; a white-winged shrike, circling the creature and raining silver blows. Ka'Bandha's roars became howls, then bestial detonations of anger and pain.\n\nThe daemon had lost an eye; Zephon saw the Great Angel pulp it in his fist and hurl the resulting sludge aside. When Zephon ran in with several of his brothers, Sanguinius ordered them away in a strained voice over the vox.\n\n'The World Eaters,' hissed the primarch. 'Hold them back.'\n\nThe daemon and the Angel clutched each other by the throat: the former to choke the life from the other, the latter using his grip only to smash the back of his foe's head against the marble ground. Sanguinius, dark with strangulation, with strings of spit hanging from his teeth, wrenched the daemon's head up and down, again, again, again, first cracking the marble with the anvil of Ka'Bandha's skull, then breaking it. The stone broke, while the beast's head refused to; nevertheless, it was enough. The creature's claws went slack for long enough that the Angel broke free. Zephon saw his sire launch into the sky.\n\nThe daemon was either unable to ignore this foe, or too wounded and blood-frenzied to let it go. With a spray of stinking blood from its wounded wings, Ka'Bandha gave chase.\n\nLater, it would regret this.\n\nLater, it would realise it poisoned its final chance at its fading victory the moment it abandoned its hunt for the souls of the Ninth Bloodline, when it allowed rage and fear to shroud its vision.\n\nLater, it would be too late to matter.\n\nZephon was free for long enough to witness the brawl's end. He saw Sanguinius descending as the daemon rose. The primarch had drawn both spear and sword, and the Angel hurled the lance with a cry of effort. The spear took the daemon in the chest, penetrating armour and corpus, sinking home as if it belonged there. A thunderous cheer rose from the warriors on the ground, Zephon's voice among them.\n\nThe daemon's next roar was wholly bestial, a cry of vented frustration. Wounded in truth, it struggled to climb, feverish, almost fearful in its need to catch its tormentor.\n\nSanguinius gave the wounded beast what it desired. Zephon watched his primarch close the distance, white wings sleek to his back. The Angel took the creature as it was gaining strength in its climb, rolling aside from the daemon's reaching claws and striking from behind with the force of the Emperor's own wrath.\n\nHe hit it between the wings, his sword hilting in the creature's spine, shattering its back and bursting from Ka'Bandha's breastplate. The blade's point hissed with the smoke of stolen souls leaking from the wound, and the daemon hung in the air a moment more in defiance of mortal law. It gagged, and a sludge of undigested spirits sluiced from its open jaws.\n\nKa'Bandha dropped, the creature crashing against the Sanctum wall and leaving a smear of daemonic blood as it fell. Its wings no longer beat. Its limbs were dead. Sanguinius followed the body down in a dive, gripping the daemon by the back of the neck and the hilt of his sword impaled in its spine.\n\nHe could have let the creature fall. Zephon would always think that in the days, the years, the decades that followed, when he wore black and fought for an Imperium he no longer understood. Sanguinius could have let the daemon fall, striking the earth before the Eternity Gate.\n\nBut the Angel screamed, the sound as invested with rage as any sound that ever left the daemon's throat, and he hurled the dying monster out across the Royal Ascension. It crashed amidst the advancing horde and rolled bonelessly down the marble stairs. A monument to the failure of naked fury.\n\nZephon's last sight of Ka'Bandha was as packs of lesser daemonkind swarmed over the body, doing their carrion work. There was no comfort in that, no vindication. It echoed too closely to the IX Legion's old rituals. He wanted to acknowledge no kinship between his kind and theirs.\n\nSanguinius landed before the Eternity Gate, weakness forcing him to one knee. Platinum hair, streaked with blood, curtained over his features. His heart beat out of time in his chest, too hard, too fast, too weak, too slow. He felt every hour of the war. Too much of it, thickening his blood, filling his head.\n\nThey needed him to be everywhere, to do everything. He'd tried, he'd done all he could, hour after hour, day after day, week after week. It was never enough. They always needed more. All he'd wanted was to give it to them.\n\nThe horde saw him falter, and it surged for the Gate. They heaved forward with one voice, as one tide.\n\nThe closest Blood Angels rallied to him, ringing him in ceramite, offering their flesh as a shield to purchase the time their sire needed to rise once more. He heard them fighting, dying, selling their lives to lengthen his. Sanguinius clawed for his dropped sword, rising, joining the fight on the ground as he stretched the quivering lock of muscle cramps from his bloodstained wings.\n\nBehind him, without his order, the Eternity Gate began to rumble closed. The doors drew towards him, folding closed on tracks that had never been tested. The vox was alive with the calls of struggling Custodians, demanding he fall back within the Sanctum, pleading with him to aid in the purge of the final fortress.\n\nThe Emperor needed him, they said.\n\nThe Gate had to be sealed.\n\nInside the Sanctum, they were being overrun.\n\nHe heard Diocletian's voice above the others, the last tribune ordering Sanguinius inside as if the primarch were a line soldier and not the Emperor's own son.\n\nSanguinius stared at the battle raging along the Royal Ascension - thousands of his sons still embattled on the marble stairs; thousands more still engaged on the Delphic Battlement. Humans of the Imperial Army. Titans of Legio Ignatum. His own Blood Angels. Tens of thousands of them would remain out here. So few had yet reached the Sanctum, yet the ground quaked with the Eternity Gate's closing mechanisms, making the decision for him.\n\nWorld Eaters bayed and howled and died at his feet for the sin of thinking they could end him. Neverborn burst and disintegrated under his blade. The Gate ground on, a twin doorway the size of a hab-tower tectonically scraping towards closure. The engines responsible for its sealing had never needed to function before.\n\nSanguinius fell back. First only a single step, then a second - a fighting withdrawal that brought him into the shadows of the sealing Gate. The Blood Angels at his side fell back with him, leaving only when he commanded them to run, to reinforce the others fighting the Neverborn within.\n\n'It's over,' he breathed. This was the way the world ended, with the crash of a closing door.\n\nHe stood in the deepening shadows, watching the foe in their thousands running for the Gate. Too late, all of them too late.\n\nA Titan, a lone Warhound, rattled along the Royal Ascension, its jagged gait screaming evidence of overworked stabilisers, and its gushing vents promising a reactor detonation without swift control. The Titan crushed warriors of both sides beneath its canine tread, heedless in its headlong run. It hunched lower, bearing down as it lurched its sprinting way up the parade stairs.\n\nIts armour plating was cast in the black and mottled crimson of the Legio Audax. On its carapace was the name Hindarah. That was the moment Sanguinius realised why it was running.\n\nThe Warhound stopped short of the Gate, hammered its stabilisers down into its joints, and fired its ursus claw.\n\nThe harpoon struck the Eternity Gate with the tolling of a funeral bell. It hit true, drilling through the layered armour, impaling the Emperor's carved image. When the chain slashed taut, it did so with the sound of Ka'Bandha's whip, and the Warhound began to back away.\n\nThe Gate's left door buckled, closing slower than its counterpart on the right. The Warhound dragged, straining at the end of its leash. Around its ankles, the charging horde cried in triumph.\n\nThe Angel rose on tattered wings - he would cut the chain; there is time, there is still time - only to hear the thunderclap pound of more harpoons hammering home in quick succession. The jackals of Audax came together in a pack, a full maniple, their spears lanced into the same door. They dragged back in ugly, lupine harmony, each chain cracking taut.\n\nThe Gate slowed.\n\nStopped.\n\nFive chains. He could break five chains. He...\n\n...lifted his pale eyes, seeing a flaming star fall from the warp-locked sky. A star with wings, that bellowed his name in his brother's voice.\n\nKa'Bandha unleashed.\n\nThese last seconds of life\n\nVulkan\n\nHe lay on the wraithbone bridge, riven by the pain of his broken back, his head turned to where his hammer had fallen. His hand still gripped the haft, though the weapon was a dozen metres away. The severed wrist painted the ground with a trickle of red.\n\nVulkan had died before. The pain of it was a familiar thing, never welcome but nothing to fear. The"}
{"text":"he warp-locked sky. A star with wings, that bellowed his name in his brother's voice.\n\nKa'Bandha unleashed.\n\nThese last seconds of life\n\nVulkan\n\nHe lay on the wraithbone bridge, riven by the pain of his broken back, his head turned to where his hammer had fallen. His hand still gripped the haft, though the weapon was a dozen metres away. The severed wrist painted the ground with a trickle of red.\n\nVulkan had died before. The pain of it was a familiar thing, never welcome but nothing to fear. The diminishment, though - the sense of self retreating down a darkening hallway, dissolving the edges of memory...\n\nYes. He would always dread that.\n\n'A valiant effort,' said the daemon. He rippled his wings, peacock-proud of his capacity for fratricide.\n\nVulkan's heart slowed. His breathing slowed with it, coming shallower, harder to pull in, strangely even harder to force out. He thought he'd closed his eyes, but the darkness was simply the epilogue of an oxygen-starved brain.\n\nMagnus said more, but Vulkan was too far gone to hear anything but a stream of syllables, bleached of meaning.\n\nThen there was nothing.\n\nHe hit the wraithbone hard enough to crack his skull, feeling a line of searing red split its way down his face. On trembling limbs, he rose again, using his hammer as a crutch. Blood burst from his broken jaw, a slurry of life that he vomited onto the bridge. He was certain, without touching his head, that his face was laid open to the bone. The chill of the air was ice itself.\n\nFurther down the bridge, Magnus was breathing heavily, the sound punctuated by snarls.\n\n'Amusing,' the daemon lord growled, sounding anything but amused.\n\nVulkan took three shambling steps, swinging his hammer. He never even came close. Magnus beat his wings with a thunderclap of force, the brutal rush of air hurling Vulkan to the ground again.\n\nHe couldn't reach his hammer. He started crawling towards it, knowing he wouldn't make it, knowing there was no choice but to try.\n\nThe crescent-shaped Blade of Ahn-Nunurta came down between his shoulders, lancing through him with an indescribable crack. He couldn't breathe, couldn't move, though he kept trying to do both. Vulkan raked his fingers against the ground, trying to crawl away from the weapon that nailed him to the wraithbone floor.\n\nThere was greyness. Then there was black. And then the world turned.\n\nVulkan dropped his bloodstained hammer. The slime that served Magnus for blood cooked in the weapon's power field, bubbling away to steam. It had the reek of something that had died long ago and somehow kept moving.\n\nThis is what's inside you, Vulkan thought, staring at his brother. This stink. This foulness. How can you not sense it?\n\nThe daemon held a taloned claw to his chest, where the hammer blow had blackened the creature's crimson skin. Saliva the colour and consistency of swamp water hung in strings from his maw. In his one eye was a glare of aggravation, milking over the last of Magnus' amusement.\n\nUnable to stand any longer, Vulkan went to his knees. The wounds woven upon him were a masterpiece of muscle severance. He collapsed, unstrung, bleeding across the wraithbone, staining it pink.\n\nMagnus appeared above him. Some of the daemon's marshy saliva spattered into his open eyes. He brought up more blood but couldn't turn his head to cough it away and clear his mouth; instead, he started drowning in it.\n\nUp came the Crimson King's avian foot. Vulkan saw the writhing of miniscule warp parasites, wormy things feasting between the daemon's webbed, clawed toes.\n\nThen the talons came down, and then there was nothing.\n\nVulkan staggered backwards. His lacerated skin shone with blood and effort, and the hand pressed to his throat was a futile attempt to stem the gore sheeting down his breastplate.\n\nMagnus snarled at him, bestial with infuriation, his one eye shot through with swollen capillaries. For a creature that had no cause to breathe, Magnus was labouring, his chest working with the force of a bellows, his scarlet skin diamonded with sweat. Fluid ran from ruptures in his corpus, glistening leakages of the psycho-organic plasma that ran through his veins.\n\n'Enough,' the daemon cried. 'Enough.'\n\nVulkan's strength deserted him with the flood of red from his throat. Magnus was suddenly taller, and it took him a moment to realise he'd fallen to his knees. Awareness was receding swiftly, this time.\n\n'Enough, brother,' the daemon hissed. On that final syllable, the world darkened, and then there was nothing.\n\nMagnus backed away, spitting something in Tizcan Prosperine, a sibilant mantra that could have been a spell as easily as a curse. The daemon spread fresh mutation through the wraithbone underfoot, the ancient material flowering with violet crystals that cracked in turn, disgorging clusters of unnatural insects. They died as slushy paste beneath Vulkan's boots as he advanced.\n\n'I see him behind you,' Magnus accused. 'I see him composing the concerto of your resurrective immortality.'\n\nVulkan said nothing, had no chance to say anything. Every cell in his body ignited in the same moment, the properties of his genetic data mutated into flammability. He took five more steps, each one slower than the last - a walking inferno of supernatural white fire. On the sixth step he fell, coming apart, crumbling in flame.\n\nIt was among the most painful deaths he'd yet known, and though he didn't cry out, this was as much due to the incineration of his lungs and vocal cords as it was down to his superhuman resolve.\n\nThe blackness came at last. Blessedly, finally, there was nothing.\n\nHe watched the sorcerer emerge from the mist, watched the way Magnus landed on the bridge with a frenzied resignation that stank like panic. The daemon was bleeding, his flesh discoloured from damage that seemed slower to regenerate each time.\n\nEvery time Magnus took flight, he'd vanish into the webway's mist - and reappear a moment later, screaming in frustration. Again and again and again, the creature launched itself into the fog only to emerge from the mist back above the bridge.\n\nNow he landed, eyeing the hammer in his brother's hands with new caution.\n\nVulkan charged at the wounded monster, battering Magnus' khopesh aside, bringing the dragon's-head hammer down on the daemon's thigh. Corpus-flesh shattered in a way true flesh never could, and the creature retreated with a sound close to a goatish bray. Vulkan heard pain in the cry, and more: he heard anguish.\n\nThe unseen coils of energy reaching from here to the Emperor's Throne Room thrashed as they eroded and thinned. Vulkan felt it in the air, that dissipation of focus.\n\nHunched now, slavering, Magnus regarded him with naked hate.\n\n'Ask yourself, my brother. Ask yourself why we've chosen to oppose you. Ask yourself why we let the galaxy burn.'\n\nIn silence, Vulkan kept advancing.\n\nThe daemon's growl was rife with exhausted torment. His words lacked even the strength of the hate in his stare. 'How many times must I destroy you?'\n\nFrom his expression, Vulkan saw he expected no answer even as he craved one. He kept silent, taking those last steps. Wondering how it would happen this time.\n\nMagnus denied his brother breath, turning the air in Vulkan's lungs to amber. A second incantation sealed Vulkan's lips together with a weave of fleshcrafting sorcery.\n\nThe sorcerer watched his brother asphyxiate on the wraithbone bridge, and once the struggles had ceased, he backed away from the body.\n\nFor Vulkan, after the last minutes of strangling red, there was pulsing black, and then nothing at all.\n\nMagnus retreated, holding his broken blade as if reluctant to cast it aside.\n\n'Father's plan would never have worked. Even you must see that, walking in this world between worlds.'\n\n'Save your breath. This is your execution, Magnus, not your trial.'\n\nVulkan charged - and froze. His joints refused to obey him. He stood still, not tense, merely motionless: held in a stasis so absolute he couldn't feel his heartbeat, or the hammer in his hand. All sensory flow between his mind and body was severed.\n\nMagnus, looking weary beyond reckoning, stalked forward with his broken blade. He swung; Vulkan's body fell one way, his head another.\n\nMagnus howled, retreating, shielding his broken face with one great arm, and raising a kinetic barrier with his other hand outstretched. He no longer hissed defiance, but it was written starkly across his mutilated features. One side of the daemon's skull - or whatever passed for bone structure inside his corpus - was malformed from the last impact of Vulkan's hammer. A blow that would have destroyed a Land Raider had only caved in part of the Crimson King's head.\n\n'You do not know,' Magnus breathed, 'why you fight.'\n\nVulkan ran in, swinging, grunting with the effort. On the eleventh blow, he felt the kine-barrier waver, softening against the incoming impacts. On the nineteenth, it burst with an expulsion of force that bred more cracks across the wraithbone bridge. At the last moment, Magnus turned the hammer aside with a desperate telekinetic shove.\n\n'You do not even understand what you're fighting for.'\n\nVulkan was relentless, forcing the daemon back, endlessly back, making him expend energy in pushing each blow aside. Every swing was deflected at the last moment by telekinetic pressure; the last one coming closest, snapping one of the ornate tusks from the daemon's chestplate.\n\nMagnus screamed, his etheric form swelling, and with a bellow of concussive force, he hurled his brother from the bridge, throwing him out into the empty mist. Magnus' laughter, ragged and forced, receded as Vulkan fell.\n\nThere was a seamless, windless eternity of golden fog. Then darkness. Then nothing.\n\nIncineration.\n\nDecapitation.\n\nSuffocation.\n\nExsanguination.\n\nElectrocution.\n\nDissolution.\n\nEvisceration.\n\nTransmutation.\n\nUncontrolled genetic blooming, saturating him with cancers lethal enough to kill within seconds.\n\nThere was pain each time, pain enough to drive a mortal"}
{"text":" he hurled his brother from the bridge, throwing him out into the empty mist. Magnus' laughter, ragged and forced, receded as Vulkan fell.\n\nThere was a seamless, windless eternity of golden fog. Then darkness. Then nothing.\n\nIncineration.\n\nDecapitation.\n\nSuffocation.\n\nExsanguination.\n\nElectrocution.\n\nDissolution.\n\nEvisceration.\n\nTransmutation.\n\nUncontrolled genetic blooming, saturating him with cancers lethal enough to kill within seconds.\n\nThere was pain each time, pain enough to drive a mortal beyond the boundaries of reason; pain enough to render even an immortal mad. And there were times - years - over the course of his life, that Vulkan's thoughts had become a fragile composition at risk of breaking apart at the slightest provocation. The gift bestowed upon him wasn't gentle on his mind. But he was born to endure. He was built - consciously or by whatever winds of fate breathed into the process - to endure what no others could.\n\nThere was always pain. Then blackness. Then nothing.\n\nAnd after the nothing, there was a wraithbone bridge, a duty to a distant father, and a hammer in his hands.\n\nMagnus was down on one knee, his wings broken, his face a cracked portrait.\n\n'No more, Vulkan.' He dribbled the words through a crushed jaw. 'No more.'\n\nVulkan circled the downed creature, red eyes narrowed for even the merest movement. The daemonic blood on his hammer steamed with the smell of a funeral pyre. He didn't trust his brother's vulnerability, and he saw his caution reflected at him in Magnus' blood-webbed eye.\n\n'I sense the energies you have wrought,' said Vulkan. 'Thinner, weaker, but still curling in the air around us. You are still attacking father.'\n\nHe expected Magnus to laugh. Instead, the sorcerer sighed.\n\n'You deal with forces you do not comprehend. Killing me may let the Emperor breathe easier, but it will not free Him from the Golden Throne.'\n\nVulkan's tone was ice and iron. 'Nevertheless, you die.'\n\n'So finish it.' Magnus hunched over, lowering his head for the executioner's blow. 'Save the Emperor. Let ignorance triumph over truth.'\n\nVulkan hesitated.\n\n'Can you afford to wait any longer, little dragon?' Magnus slowly raised his head, and in his gaze was the mockery Vulkan had been expecting. 'Where is your urgency now? Where is all that righteousness?'\n\nKnowing it was a trap, knowing he had no choice but to spring it, Vulkan raised his hammer. As it fell, the world turned.\n\nIt wasn't blackness, this time. He saw planets turning in the deep night, beautiful no matter their colours or surface conditions, beautiful for their infinite complexity. Vulkan never looked at a planet and saw territory, cities or resources. He saw a geological jewel, a sphere formed by astrophysical law and the geo-mathematical processes that bound it all together. Each world was unique, shaped just so. He believed there was beauty in that.\n\nHe drifted through space, descending to one world until it was a plateau beneath him of hazy blue atmosphere and immense wilderness. He knew it at once.\n\n'Prospero,' said Magnus, by his side.\n\nHis brother wasn't a daemon. Magnus was the man he'd been long ago: red of skin, darkened further by the sun, clad in a toga of white silk. He smelled of ink, fine parchment and lies.\n\n'I thought we could speak,' the sorcerer said. 'One last time.'\n\nVulkan tensed, preparing to-\n\n'No, brother.' Magnus showed his pale red palms, bare of any weapon. 'No time is passing. In the Labyrinth of the Old Ones, our hands are around each other's throats, with death yet to be decided. Here, we exist between heartbeats.'\n\nVulkan stared into his brother's remaining eye. 'I believe you,' he said.\n\nMagnus gave a tired smile. 'It has been a long time since I heard those words.'\n\nProspero turned beneath them. Vulkan gazed at the wild lands of the vast Pangean continent, and the distant silver pinprick of Tizca, the world's only city.\n\n'Speak, then.'\n\n'And you will listen?'\n\nVulkan nodded.\n\n'Very well. This is what I would have you understand, brother. The Imperium is the lie we tell ourselves, to make sense of a reality we fear to face. We tell each other that it is necessary. That we do what must be done. That whatever might replace it would be worse. But look at all we do not say. Father is a tyrant, and you, out of all of us, should have seen that first. The Imperium is built on the lies of a would-be god and the violence of His crusade. What benevolent monarch instigates a crusade?\n\n'Under the Emperor, we have perpetuated a holy war that has sucked worlds dry of resources and cost billions upon billions of lives. We have spent life like meaningless currency, all because one man said we must. How many cultures have we annihilated, Vulkan? How many have we assimilated and robbed of their vitality, replacing innovation with conformity? How much knowledge have we destroyed because father decided no one was allowed to learn it?'\n\nVulkan considered this. The planet rolled on, sedate and slow despite its relative astronomical speed. He realised he wasn't wounded here. He wore his armour, but it was pristine, not the scraps of torn ceramite left to him on the bridge.\n\n'This is how it got to you, isn't it?' Vulkan knew the answer even as he asked the question. 'The creature that gouged its way inside your soul and laid its eggs there. The thing that pulls on your strings. Did it promise you knowledge? Did it paint the Emperor as the death of enlightenment?'\n\nMagnus' expression answered for him. Long red hair fell to frame his face, and the sorcerer brushed it back from his cheeks.\n\n'The Imperial Truth is a lie. The empire we built cannot be reformed, only overthrown. From violence it was born, and in violence it must end. Don't you see? Once the board is swept clean, we can start again with our eyes open, aware of the truths of the universe.'\n\n'You make this sound like a principled stand,' said Vulkan. 'As if all you have done, all Horus has done, could ever be justified.'\n\nMagnus turned to him sharply. 'I? What do I have to justify? Each time I was attacked, I defended myself. Each time they tried to silence me, I made sure to speak out. The Imperium lavished punishments upon my Legion, draping its hypocrisy over us as a funeral shroud. We fought back.'\n\nVulkan met Magnus' gaze, seeing the ironclad surety there. This was futile, he knew it, yet the words came forth anyway.\n\n'Look at the horrors your side has unleashed upon Terra. The massacres, the mutations. Magnus, you are taking part in the extinction of your species... You cannot truly think you have done nothing wrong. Even you, brother. Even you, in your arrogance, cannot believe this is justified.'\n\n'Necessity justifies all. And this is necessary. Without this primeval force, without this Chaos, there will be stagnation. Ignorance instead of illumination. Existence instead of life. I did not write the laws of our universe, brother. I take no joy in the truth of reality. But I won't hide from it.'\n\nVulkan looked at him as if he spoke in another tongue. 'Necessary, you say.' Magnus nodded, and Vulkan continued, 'Necessary according to whom? The alien god that exalted you and now demands you commit genocide?'\n\nMagnus clenched his teeth, and the world turned...\n\n...but not far. It turned to reveal Tizca, City of Light, metropolis of white pyramids and silver spires. The city was aflame beneath them, burning from the raining hellfire of an Imperial fleet. The golden vessels of the Emperor's chosen. The sleek black hunting ships of the Silent Sisters. The many, many warships in the storm-cloud grey of the Space Wolves.\n\n'The Razing of Prospero.' There was murder in Magnus' eye. Murder and sorrow. 'Bear witness to our brother Russ, bringing death to my home world and all its people. Tell me, Vulkan, would you have reacted with temperance to this, had it been the destruction of Nocturne?'\n\nVulkan didn't need to stare at the orbital bombardment. He'd read the reports, he'd seen the picts and the footage and spoken to many of the Custodians that took part in the ground assault. Nothing unfolding here was a revelation he wished to experience twice.\n\n'Russ was lied to by Horus, deceived into attacking.'\n\n'I know. It changes nothing.'\n\n'But it should. You, who value truth so highly, willingly align yourself with the one that engineered Prospero's death. And when the Space Wolves fleet arrived in your sky, what did you do, Magnus? Did you try to enlighten Russ? Did you use your power to prevent the assault? Or did your belief in your own persecution leave you assuming the worst of the Emperor's intentions? All witness accounts say you languished in your tower, welcoming the destruction as your penance, until you decided to fight in the final hours, when it was far too late to stop the massacre.'\n\nVulkan gestured to the destruction raining from the upper atmosphere: lance strikes, drop pods, the slower trails of gunships making their descent. 'Why would the Emperor order you and your entire Legion dead? Did you not stop to wonder at the scale of this misunderstanding?'\n\nMagnus laughed at the questions, the sound wet and bitter. He gestured away from the burning city, and the world turned, falling away.\n\nThey were in the webway again, but no longer upon the lost bridge. They drifted through the oval tunnels, following angles that hurt the human eye. Always ahead of them, an avatar of fire blazed through the tunnels, shattering the wraithbone membranes without heed, blind and deaf to the horde of daemons surging into the webway in its wake.\n\n'I did this,' said Magnus. 'I thought He wished to punish me for ruining His Great Work.' For a moment, Magnus paused, gazing at the host of Neverborn darkening the tunnels, as if seeing them for the first time.\n\n'But how was I to know? He refused to tell me of His grand plan. If He had told me...'\n\nVulkan resisted the urge to spit at the sudden foul taste on his tongue. 'Again, you see the worst in all others, absolving yourself of blame. W"}
{"text":"horde of daemons surging into the webway in its wake.\n\n'I did this,' said Magnus. 'I thought He wished to punish me for ruining His Great Work.' For a moment, Magnus paused, gazing at the host of Neverborn darkening the tunnels, as if seeing them for the first time.\n\n'But how was I to know? He refused to tell me of His grand plan. If He had told me...'\n\nVulkan resisted the urge to spit at the sudden foul taste on his tongue. 'Again, you see the worst in all others, absolving yourself of blame. Why did you need to know of the Great Work? You were warned not to toy with the warp. We all were. But you couldn't resist. You believed that you knew more, that you knew best. And why is it that you alone lament being kept unapprised of father's plans? Why is Sanguinius not enraged that he never knew of the Webway Project? Why am I not enraged that I was kept ignorant of it? Why did you need to know?'\n\nMagnus' eye gleamed with the reflection of the burning icon ahead. His former self, years before, racing to warn the Emperor of Horus' betrayal. Reducing the webway to unsanctified rubble with his passing.\n\n'Had I known the truth, I would never have... done what I did. Father should have told me.'\n\nVulkan laughed, unable to believe what he was hearing. 'How could father have predicted you would defy His one command? Not only did you use the warp against His orders, you fuelled your psychic warning with human sacrifice. How could any of us have known you were capable of such barbarity?'\n\nMagnus exhaled slowly, his hands clutching the folds of his toga. He spoke a word of power, and the world turned.\n\nThey were in the Throne Room. The blazing avatar had incarnated before the scientists and techno-magicians of the Emperor's secret work. It had forced the webway portal open, making it radiate wounded light. Already, it grew dark with the silhouettes of daemons as they drew near.\n\nThe Custodians present - precious few of them, for how could they have anticipated the sudden death of the Emperor's dream? - opened fire on the image of ghostly flame. It ignored their paltry defiance, and it ignored the explosions its arrival had birthed across the great laboratory. It hovered before the Emperor, like some spectre of religious revelation from the ancient tomes, when such things were believed by credulous men.\n\n'I had to warn Him,' said Magnus, watching the scene.\n\n'No,' Vulkan said gently. 'You believed you had to warn Him. You believed as you always believe - that you knew best, that you had to act, that you alone knew what had to be done. And never once did you think, through all this destruction, that there was something deceiving you.'\n\nThe sorcerer glared at him. 'Why do you speak to me as if I were a lowly pawn in this game of regicide? The Warmaster and the Emperor both know I am the most valuable piece on the board.'\n\nVulkan was unmoved by the sorcerer's words, and by the cataclysm playing out before him. His tone was patient, as it had been in the days before the war.\n\n'Vanity is what leads you, Magnus. You choke on arrogance, unable to see you are the architect of your own downfall. All the others, all of Horus' broken monsters, at least they can see the bars of their cages. Even Horus, driven out of his mind to serve as a hive for the Pantheon, knows in his soul's core that he has lost control. You are the only one that still believes he is free.'\n\nIn silence, Magnus shook his head. The world turned with the motion.\n\nThey remained in the Throne Room, but the great machines were overloaded and black, slain by esoteric forces, and the industry of the laboratory was replaced by the militancy of a garrison presence. It was no longer a place of vision - it was a barracks. And it was closer to Now. This was how the Throne Room had looked when Vulkan had last been here.\n\nVulkan and Magnus were present at this point in the recent past, as well as drifting through it in their current incarnations. They watched themselves at the foot of the Golden Throne: Vulkan implacable but for the regret lining his features; Magnus manifest as a being of light, shimmering in and out of the layers of reality perceptible to the human eye.\n\n'Here,' said the Magnus of Now, watching the Magnus of Then. 'Here is where I made my choice. You saw the Emperor make His final offer to me. You heard Him promise me a new Legion, if I would only forsake Horus and come back to you all. A matter of mere weeks ago, brother. Will you tell me you've forgotten it?'\n\nVulkan sighed. He seemed suddenly weary.\n\n'That is not what transpired here, Magnus. The last unstained shard of your soul burst into the Throne Room and begged to be saved. With a heavy heart, father refused you. That is what I saw. That is what happened.'\n\nMagnus' laughter was blunt, practically a derisive bark. 'And you say I'm the one who has been deceived?'\n\nVulkan was too tired to rise to the bait. He met derision with solemnity.\n\n'This thing that runs through you, this chaotic force you proclaim as freedom, is not a disease to be caught on contact. It is the layer of emotion behind reality, a poison that has achieved near sentience. It makes its prey into willing victims in their own damnation. You are riven by it, Magnus. Hollowed out by it.\n\n'And it was already in your Legion, in your sons' blood and genetic code, in the form of the Flesh Change. And when you dealt with the Pantheon, believing you had cured your children, all you really achieved was a deepening of the taint, hiding it from sight, delaying the inevitable. This thing, this force, cannot be cured, Magnus. You cannot pray it away once the rot sets in. Once you are on the Path... your fate is sealed.'\n\n'Wait, Vulkan. Wait. How can this be? How do you know all of this?'\n\nIn the silence that reigned in the wake of those words, the Throne Room began to fade. Golden mist hazed its way around them, revealing patches of wraithbone architecture.\n\nVulkan was relentless, his voice growing firmer. 'How could the Emperor ever trust you now? Why would He offer you a new Legion, let alone a place at His side? You dreamed up your own redemption, just to give yourself something to rage against. Because you need to feel as though you are the one choosing, not having the choices made for you. The creature that exalted you will never let you see the chains that bind you to its will.'\n\nThe mist was everywhere, thickening. Magnus felt the change upon him, and beneath the sensation of power was a pull, a wrenching, the sensation of a trillion filaments woven into the cells of his body, dragging at him.\n\n'How...?' Magnus asked, barely above a breath. Where the mist touched him, his flesh was darkening, swelling. The shadows of ragged wings loomed above his shoulders. 'How do you know all of this?'\n\nVulkan remained in place, saying nothing, doing nothing.\n\n'Who are you?' demanded Magnus.\n\nThe world turned, and this time it wasn't moved by Magnus' will.\n\nThe first strike of the hammer pounded Magnus to the wraithbone ground, a magma flow of ectoplasm running from his riven skull. The second cracked the bones of one wing, splintering the spine and shoulder blade beneath. The third eradicated the daemon's right hand, rendering it into dissolving paste.\n\nBreathless, standing over the paralysed remnant of his mutated brother, Vulkan raised his hammer. In the same moment, Magnus somehow lifted his head. The sorcerer stared past Vulkan, over his executioner's shoulder. Either he saw nothing, or he saw without the use of his eye, which was a burst fruit of a thing, turned to leaking pulp in its shattered socket.\n\n'Wait,' the daemon wheezed, the word ruined by the graveyard of his teeth. 'Father. Wait.'\n\nFather is far from here, Vulkan almost said, wondering what visions were conjured in his brother's dying mind. But he saw the fear on Magnus' face, imprinted with the lines of regret. It was enough to make him hesitate.\n\nI don't have to do this.\n\nBut he did. Not just because it would free the Emperor from the sorcerer's assault, not just because thousands were dying in front of the Eternity Gate, but because this was how the Archenemy drilled inside a heart and soul. The creatures sank their tendrils into a person's hesitations, cracking them open to become doubts. They caressed along the edges of someone's virtues, heightening them, souring them into flaws.\n\nThey would do the same with Vulkan's mercy. Mercy was how the Pantheon would welcome him, and how he would begin to do their will. He would trust someone that breathed deceit. He would spare the life of a man that must die.\n\nAnd he would feel righteous, as his nine traitorous brothers felt righteous, deaf to the laughter of the gods as he moved to their etheric melodies. Like his brothers, he would believe it was his own virtue guiding his hand.\n\n'I see now,' the blind daemon whispered. 'Forgive me...'\n\nHe lies. The Emperor's voice was ice behind Vulkan's eyes. It ground into his temples from the inside, seeking a way out of his skull. He lies even to himself. It is all he can do now. Finish it.\n\nMagnus grunted as if overhearing the words. His contrition soured, becoming spite. As his expression darkened, the Emperor's tone struck Vulkan's mind with the force of a storm's wind.\n\nTHEY PREY UPON YOUR MERCY - HE GATHERS HIS STRENGTH - KILL HIM\n\nThe two brothers moved in opposing harmony, perfect-motion reflections of one another. Vulkan dealt the executioner's blow, and in the same moment, Magnus dealt his.\n\nVulkan couldn't be killed. That left only one recourse.\n\nIt started with a pattern. A twinned helix of genetic code, the equation at the core of every mortal's existence. Even with his eye destroyed, Magnus could see this calculation written through his brother's blood. Signifiers of their father's arcane science were flowing through Vulkan's veins.\n\nHe followed the calculations, the process metaphysically no different from reading the notes of a song from the page and hearing its melody in the mind. Once "}
{"text":"dn't be killed. That left only one recourse.\n\nIt started with a pattern. A twinned helix of genetic code, the equation at the core of every mortal's existence. Even with his eye destroyed, Magnus could see this calculation written through his brother's blood. Signifiers of their father's arcane science were flowing through Vulkan's veins.\n\nHe followed the calculations, the process metaphysically no different from reading the notes of a song from the page and hearing its melody in the mind. Once he could make out the flow of these blood mathematics, he followed them along their temporal axis. A journey through time, seeing cell degradation and replenishment; sensing through atmospheric and environmental shift all the places his brother had been, then branching outward, a horizon-wide view of the souls Vulkan had met, the deeds he'd performed, the worlds on which he'd walked... Learning the permutations of the code, the answers at the ends of its inevitable questions.\n\nHe had seen enough. The sorcerer pulled back, plunging again into the core of the code, feeling the currents of life flowing through his brother's body. He closed the jaws of his reaching mind around the strands of this secret pattern, clutching not the code itself but the skeins it wove. Blood mathematics. Genetics. The processes of life. The harder he held to it, the deeper his touch went, down to the level of molecules, to protons and neutrons, to atoms.\n\nFor one moment, his mind was entirely scattered throughout Vulkan's flesh, diluted through the avenues of his bloodstream. It was enough. It would work. If Magnus could not kill him, he would unmake him.\n\nThe sorcerer severed the code's strands. He pulled at the calculations, unsolving them. He unravelled the strings and skeins of the blood mathematics - a literal unmaking at the molecular level, the sundering of Vulkan's very atoms.\n\nPhysically, Vulkan came apart at the biological seams. His black skin ruptured with holes that siphoned light. These bloodless ruptures spread through his bones, his organs, his armour. What remained of his skin ignited, then blew away an instant later as ash in the webway's sourceless breeze. A partially articulated skeleton, bound together by disintegrating tendons, staggered back as its eyeballs caught fire.\n\nMagnus haemorrhaged power. He poured himself into the process, diluting his essence across the sine wave of his brother's existence. When the dissolving skeleton stumbled, he felt a laugh wheeze through his own ruined mouth. The process was imperfect - it could only be imperfect, devoid of ritual structure and born out of frantic will - but it was working. A testament to his might, and to the choices made to reach this point.\n\nThis sense of exultant pride was his second to last thought. Pride in himself, in what he was capable of: unweaving his brother's existence, rewriting reality to obey his desires.\n\nAnd yet, he couldn't understand how the man in front of him could still be on his feet. He couldn't believe this flayed, immolated thing, being erased from existence, endured all this and still swung its hammer. He couldn't lose here, he couldn't die, he couldn't-\n\nAnd then there was silence. A stillness descended across the webway, as sensory and real as the golden mist.\n\nThe thing that had been Vulkan stood motionless in the sudden quiet. It held onto its hammer for a moment longer; with its skinless grip fused to the weapon's haft, it had no choice but to keep it in its clutches. The joints of its elbows gave out with straining creaks, lengthening on strings of melted tendons, then breaking apart. Only then did the hammer drop to the wraithbone floor, along with the primarch's forearms.\n\nThe corpse of Vulkan fell to its knees beside the headless body of Magnus the Red. There they rested, at the heart of Magnus' Folly, humanity in microcosm: a study in fratricide.\n\nThe skeletal corpse's final breath whistled out through charred teeth.\n\nThere was silence. Then darkness. Then nothing at all.\n\nLater, a figure walked alone through the aeldari necropolis, passing beneath the spired monuments to the failure of two species' attempts to tame the webway. It moved with a care for its wounds, sometimes shambling but never stopping. It looked more like a skeleton than a man, its blackened bones bare to the golden mist. It was either dead but alive, or alive but dead - the effect was the same, no matter which way an observer came down on the philosophical divide.\n\nThe living dead thing would have to fight its way back. It knew this. It was ready.\n\nThe sound of the figure's passage was iron grinding against wraithbone. Behind it, in a fleshless grip, it dragged a hammer.\n\nThe Eternity Gate\n\nThe Angel and the daemon meet in the air, beneath a sky the colour of blood, drawing breaths that taste of murder. The first impact of blade against blade is a metallic thundercrack while their sons wage war below, fighting and dying in the shadows of their fathers' wings.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands swings and the black blade shrieks, its steel fattened on souls, but the Angel is gone, twisting away, soaring higher. Angron beats his wings, giving chase, enraged at his own cumbersome strength. It's like fighting a shadow. Each time he closes on Sanguinius, the Angel rolls aside or furls his wings and drops away. Each missed swing of his sword, each failed grasp with his talons, resonates inside Angron's skull with a splash of acid. The Nails bite to give him strength, this is so, but they also bite to punish him. Now more than ever, the Nails bite with the sound of Horus' urgent command, begging for the Angel's death.\n\nAngron - what little is left of Angron now that his soul has been transmogrified into the flesh-matter of an ethereal god - has never heard Horus beg before. The weakness in the Warmaster's voice makes him shudder with revulsion.\n\nSanguinius dives low, swooping towards the ground, and Angron follows. Volkite beams stab up at them both, lancing the sky. They fly through detonations that blacken the Angel's armour and darken his wings; explosions that do nothing but tighten the daemon's hold on incarnation. Every death taking place upon this planet, every life ending beneath them, strengthens Angron and seals his wounds.\n\nCloser, he comes. Closer. He can smell the sweat on his brother's skin. He can hear the drumbeat of his brother's blood. He can smell the sweetness of the Angel's wounds.\n\nSanguinius senses it. The Angel veers away with a grace Angron cannot hope to match; a spread of feathered wings arrests his dive and a slash of straight silver rips across the daemon's face. There is no pain. Most of his face has been cut from his skull but there is no pain. He experiences pain the way others might feel grief, or trauma, or frustration: to him it is a helplessness, a wound within. It is something that cannot be tolerated, something that can only be overcome with the running of enemy blood. He's blind, his face broken by the silver sword, and without the organic receptors to process injury, it's the weakness that hurts.\n\nHis eyes regenerate as he thrashes blindly with his blade. He can see again, dull and dim for another few moments, then with a clarity that defeats the ash and the dust swirling in the air. He doesn't see as a human sees. Angron sees the fire of souls, and his brother's flares brightest of all.\n\nWhen they meet again, it's in a killing embrace. The Lord of the Red Sands tears the Angel from the sky, clutching his golden brother in his great claws, bearing Sanguinius down. They fall, and fall, and fall, and crash through the glassaic dome of the Martian temple atop the Warmonger Titan Malax Meridius. They strike the floor in a roll that would break any mortal bones, their tumbling bodies obliterating the mosaic rendering of the Opus Machina, sacred icon of the Adeptus Mechanicus and the Martian Mechanicum alike. This is a sacrilege neither brother notices. Tech-priests and menials flee the duelling demigods. Neither of them notices that, either.\n\nAngron gets a clawed hand around the Angel's head. He beats Sanguinius' skull against the floor once, twice, thrice, and cracks web out along the tiles in stone-splitting veins; a fourth time, a fifth-\n\nThere is weakness, then. Perhaps it should be pain, as well, but it is most definitely weakness; Angron's grip slackens, his arm dissolves, literally it dissolves from the shoulder down, and the Lord of the Red Sands is thrown back as the Angel rises. In Sanguinius' hands is a pistol, and the dregs of Angron's sentience recognise this as the melta-weapon infernus: a one-use thing of incineration. The Angel casts it aside and takes wing - diving right at the daemon, leading with his sword. Angron raises his own blade, feeling the flow of the incoming blows like promises whispered in warning, and he catches each of the Angel's thrusts before they can impact against him.\n\nMetal grinds. Sparks spray, arcing out from the meeting blades, hypnotic in their falling beauty. For a moment, just a moment, he is on the Plains of Desh'ra'zhen, camping rough beneath the pale moon, watching fireflies play above the banked campfires of his freed-slave army. How peaceful that night had been, even with the Nails knuckling into the back of his brain; how peaceful that one night was before the Emperor tore him away from his real brothers and sisters - the siblings of his heart and not of manufactured blood - leaving them to fight alone, leaving them to die, leaving him to face this unwanted life and-\n\nSanguinius impales him. A lance of ice runs through where his heart should be. The two brothers are face to face; one of them a visage of bloodied human perfection, the other a construct of absolute inhumanity, rage made manifest.\n\nAs close as they are, despite the changes to Angron's vision, he sees the tiredness etched on the Angel's features. The faint cuts and scratches that the Battle for Terra has written onto Sanguinius' fles"}
{"text":"aving them to die, leaving him to face this unwanted life and-\n\nSanguinius impales him. A lance of ice runs through where his heart should be. The two brothers are face to face; one of them a visage of bloodied human perfection, the other a construct of absolute inhumanity, rage made manifest.\n\nAs close as they are, despite the changes to Angron's vision, he sees the tiredness etched on the Angel's features. The faint cuts and scratches that the Battle for Terra has written onto Sanguinius' flesh, indelibly marking him. This war has rendered the perfect imperfect.\n\n'Die,' Sanguinius tells him, with the gentleness of giving a great gift. 'I free you from this torment.'\n\nAngron's lips peel back in the memory of a smile. He tries to speak. Speaking is difficult, not because he is dying but because he is no longer a creature for whom speaking is a natural or necessary process. Speech is an echo from a lost life - the Lord of the Red Sands expresses himself in slavering roars and the death of his foes.\n\nSanguinius sees this. Sees the way Angron's face twists, trying to remember how to form words. Sees that the daemon is not dying.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands moves, but the Angel is faster. Sanguinius tears the blade free and leaps upward, taking to the sky. Bleeding, laughing, the daemon follows.\n\nThey swoop between the temple towers that rise from the back of Malax Meridius. They break away, into open sky. Sanguinius is slower in the open, but he is built for this; he is graceful and experienced and born for aerial warfare. Angron has the unreal strength of daemonic muscle, but he is a gargoyle chasing a hawk. Sanguinius weaves and soars and dives out of his clutches, and-\n\nKill him.\n\nHorus, inside the daemon's mind. The words are bloated by the Pantheon, ripe with the borrowed power of the gods. Behind those words is the promise of pain, true pain, Nails-pain. The Lord of the Red Sands beats his wings harder, his sword leaving a trailing wake of screaming souls: the dead of Terra, singing their song.\n\nThey race low to the ground, hardly an arm's reach above the heads of their warring sons, fast enough that their armies are an indistinct blur. Angron swings the black blade. He gouges earth, he sends Blood Angels and World Eaters tumbling across the ground, their bodies destroyed, their souls spilling into the warp's million waiting maws.\n\nWithout warning, Sanguinius climbs, soars.\n\nThis is your chance. What you were born and reborn for.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands ignores Horus' puling. He senses Sanguinius tiring and sees it in the flicker of his soulfire. His brother's spirit ripples with the desperate sweetness of exhaustion. The war... the battlement... the Bane of the Ninth Bloodline... Yes, the Angel's strength is running dry.\n\nThe daemon gathers speed, flying into the polluted wind, while anti-air fire stitches the air around him. Sanguinius weaves aside from the blinding slashes of lascannon beams, rolls away from the juddering passage of a Legion Stormbird. Angron, far less manoeuvrable, crashes into it - goes through it - tastes the flavour of those doomed souls as their craft comes apart around them.\n\nIt is nothing to him, the expenditure of a breath's worth of effort. Behind him, the Stormbird falls from the sky, its hull aflame and cleaved in two. The largest piece of its structure will tumble against the side of the Sanctum Imperialis, detonating against the thickest void shields ever created. Wreckage will rain upon the warriors of both sides. Angron knows none of this, will never know it.\n\n Do not fail me, Angron.\n\nThe babbling of a frightened creature, speaking as though it were in control. The Lord of the Red Sands pays it no heed.\n\nThey dive through the death-cloud of a falling Titan, into black smoke and the white fire of plasma. The billowing smoke cannot hide the light of the Angel's soul. Angron is close, close, close enough that he parts his jaws to reveal uneven rows of mismatched teeth that jut up from bleeding gums. As they circle in this burning, choking sphere that only burns and chokes one of them, the daemon gives a draconic roar. The sound is exultant and instinctive, it is unfiltered emotion, and it reeks more of triumph than rage.\n\nAngron's mouth is still open when the spear, hurled from the Angel's left hand, strikes. It shatters most of the daemon's teeth, severs his tongue at the throat-root, and punches through the back of his head. With the cervical segments of his spine reduced to ectoplasmic chunks, Angron falls - boneless, stunned - from the sky.\n\nThe Angel twists in the smoke and follows his brother down.\n\nAngron hits the Royal Ascension with cratering force at the heart of the two warring Legions. His impact kills almost a hundred warriors on both sides, but this is another concern outside the shreds of his sentience. The surviving World Eaters cheer him through the dust, they bay at him like loyal hounds, but he knows nothing outside his own fury.\n\nHe claws at the spear, he roars around its impaling length; in these helpless seconds he's beast-stupid in sound and action, thrashing in the dirt. The lance comes free, slick with ichor pretending to be blood, gobbets of daemonic flesh sizzling on its silver surface. Already, the daemon is reforming, reknitting, sustained by whatever metaphysical processes fuel his existence. The Lord of the Red Sands throws the weapon away in time to meet its wielder. The Angel descends with a silence that stinks of false righteousness - as though he were a creature too enlightened to feel rage.\n\nThe brothers collide in the crater they made. Around them, the battle for the Eternity Gate rages. The World Eaters are coming - the World Eaters and the Life Takers and the Blood Letters - Sanguinius senses them draw near, hears their howling; Angron sees this awareness dawn in his brother's eyes. Sanguinius hacks and hacks and hacks as the snarls of chainaxes and daemon-blades grow louder. It isn't enough. The Angel launches away, a crack of his wings carrying him upward.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands knows he can't catch Sanguinius in the sky. He scrambles for the fallen spear, draws it back, and this time, there is no chase. This time, Angron is ready.\n\nHe throws the spear, still slathered in ichor from when he tore it out of his own throat. The second he casts it, it rips through the air with a concussive drumbeat, breaking the sound barrier.\n\nThe Angel rolls aside with the grace of the sky-born, dodging this streak of bladed intent. No, Angron sees; not dodging. Faster than the human eye can follow, the Angel has caught his spear as it passed, rolled with the momentum, and now he casts it back to the ground with a cry of effort.\n\nAngron will catch it, this twig of a thing, and-\n\nHe clutches nothing but air and the force of a meteor hits him in the chest, throwing him down, pinning him to the warp-stained ground. For several unreal seconds, the Lord of the Red Sands is impaled in place, speared through the chest. There is no pain, only humiliation.\n\nHe frees himself in time to see Sanguinius ascending. Leaving him behind. His wounds close, but slower, slower, slower than before. The Nails bite harder, despising his weakness.\n\nAngron turns his back on his brother, seeking the lesser Blood Angels in Legion red. He wades through them, ending them, sending their bodies flying back, with heaving swings of his soul-thirsty sword.\n\nIf he cannot catch the Angel, he will lure the Angel back to him. He learned this from the Bane.\n\nIt takes no time at all. Angron has scarcely begun to shed blood before he hears the descending beat of angelic wings. The Lord of the Red Sands wipes the writhing bodies of dying Blood Angels from where they're spitted upon his blade, and turns to meet his brother once more. Bolt-shells impact against him. Chainswords carve into the un-meat of his legs. He ignores this, the pitiful defiance of his nephews with their bolters and chainswords. He will kill them and devour them and offer up their skulls to the Skull Throne, yes, but now, first, the Angel must die.\n\nThe brothers go at one another, sword to sword. They are a blur to the mortals around them, so swift are the clashes of their blades that their swords sing a single extended note, a lasting ring without crescendo or diminuendo. It is beautiful, that ululating chime. A masterpiece of broken physics.\n\nBut only one of them is immortal. Sanguinius, failed by mortal muscle, weakened by the war, begins to slow. His thrusts become deflections; his hacks shift to parries. He gives ground, at first by centimetres, then with greater steps. Through eyes tense with effort, he sees that he's being driven back towards the violated Eternity Gate.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands sees it dawn on the Angel's face, how the longer they fight, the weaker only one of them becomes. In the searing thresh that passes for Angron's mind, he knows it will come, any moment now, when desperation will force his brother's hand.\n\nBlades clash. They clash. They clash and clash and clash and then...\n\nAngron lets the silver sword run through him, taking it inside his daemonic corpus as a sacrifice. He uses the blow, feeding off the pain and craving the damage because it lets him get closer. Ooze bubbles through the cage of his teeth, the ectoplasm that animates him running from his body in a flow of lifeblood, but no matter, it's worth it. A taloned hand snaps around the Angel's throat. The other thrusts forward with his blade.\n\nDeep in Ultima Segmentum, there was a planet that was not, in truth, a planet. A sphere of debris coalesced to form a planetary crust, but the world's deeper layers were saturated in a metanatural churn of etheric energy. This broken bauble in the shape of a world was called Sarum. It was liberated during the Great Crusade by the Eaters of Worlds, and it had supplied the bulk of that Legion's arms and armour ever since its bloodstained saviours left in liberation.\n\nThe most accurate descr"}
{"text":"lade.\n\nDeep in Ultima Segmentum, there was a planet that was not, in truth, a planet. A sphere of debris coalesced to form a planetary crust, but the world's deeper layers were saturated in a metanatural churn of etheric energy. This broken bauble in the shape of a world was called Sarum. It was liberated during the Great Crusade by the Eaters of Worlds, and it had supplied the bulk of that Legion's arms and armour ever since its bloodstained saviours left in liberation.\n\nThe most accurate description of Sarum would be to say it was a prison in the shape of a planet. Inside its core was bound a daemon of immense strength and cunning, the source of Sarum's hollowed-out corruption. Lesser reflections of this abomination - shards, if you will; children, if you prefer - spread themselves across the planet, bound in secret by the Mechanicum at the hearts of their subterranean forge-cities.\n\nSeveral years ago, a flicker of time in the grand scheme of things, a blade was forged within the hallowed underground halls of the Saekorax Foundry. Laced with techno-ritualistic runes that bound a coven of warring daemons within its edge, the sword was shaped to be a blight on the physical universe, the blackened metal of its blade at odds with all corporeality. Like the strongest of the Neverborn's trillion conjured breeds, it destabilised the world around its presence, growing stronger with each soul it swallowed. Finishing it cost the lives of several artisans, devouring them in the process of its construction, and after it left the forge-fires, according to ritual law, it was quenched in the blood of several hundred slaves. These slaves were captives of the Great Crusade's expeditionary fleets, shuttled back to Sarum on the secret orders of high-ranking elements within the priesthood of Mars.\n\nThis length of ensorcelled brass was known as Vuragh'th in the bio-mechanical tongue of Sarum: the Black Blade. It was the Mechanicum's gift to Angron upon his ascension to immortality, simultaneously honouring his triumph at the end of the Path, and further heightening his place upon it. By the time the two primarchs faced one another at the Eternity Gate, it had tasted the blood of over a million Terran souls. It had slain innocents and soldiers, adults and children, humans and Astartes - the sword, like its wielder and like the god that owned its wielder's soul, cared not from whence the blood flowed.\n\nWith every drop of blood melted into its metal length, with every soul pulled in by the creatures thirsting inside the blade, its acidic effect on reality grew fiercer. The weapon was now almost as toxic as the creature that carried it, with a similar exertion of mutation and hostility on reality.\n\nThe Black Blade's makers would have rejoiced, albeit in the ways of their austere and murderous rituals, to know their creation would one day taste the blood of the Great Angel.\n\nSanguinius jerks as the sword slides, with miserable slowness, into his guts. His perfect features darken with pain, and the Lord of the Red Sands feeds on that sight, feeds on the Angel's baring of teeth, feeds on the stink of Sanguinius' rich, running blood. The sensation is narcotic, intoxicatingly pure. Even the God of War, in whose shadow Angron stands, bays with pleasure at the shedding of this being's blood.\n\nAngron's grip tightens on the Angel's throat. He thrusts the blade deeper, growling at the fresh flow of blood that bursts from his brother's mouth. Sanguinius' mouth works, but at first no words come forth. All he manages to breathe out is his brother's name.\n\n'Brother...'\n\nIt is a struggle for Angron to speak, but a lifetime of bitterness is dredged with the agony in his brother's beautiful eyes. He sinks the blade deeper into the Angel's body, hilting it in his brother's guts, and draws Sanguinius in until they're face to face. He's close enough to smell the blood on his brother's breath. He's close enough for it to spatter against his face.\n\n'Angron...'\n\nNo sound in life has ever been sweeter than his flawless, beloved, exemplar brother hissing his name in strangulation. Angron's jaws are poorly shaped for human speech, but the Lord of the Red Sands forces the words from his maw.\n\n'Hark, the dying Angel sings.'\n\nSanguinius reaches for him with weak and clawless hands. It's pathetic. The performance of a weakling. The Lord of the Red Sands doesn't need to breathe; he cares nothing if his brother's hands find their way around his throat.\n\nBut the sweetness is fading. The adrenal rush drains away. Is this truly how the Angel dies? Is this all the fight Sanguinius has left in his celebrated form?\n\nAngron!\n\nHorus. The Warmaster, the coward, in orbit. The Lord of the Red Sands hears the voice break through his ecstatic haze, and senses Horus has been seeking to reach his blood-soaked mind for some time. There is derision in the Warmaster's presence, but above all, there is fear.\n\nRelease him! Release him, he is-\n\nSanguinius' reaching hands close on a fistful of the cranial cables that crown Angron's head. The Angel grips the technological dreadlocks that form the external regulators of the Butcher's Nails, and the beast that Angron has become realises, too late, much too late - the Angel has played the same gambit, risking a blade, welcoming it, to get close.\n\nKill him, before-\n\nThe words cease to exist, replaced by pain. Real pain, a thing he thought he was incapable of experiencing, now stunning in its unfamiliar savagery.\n\nThe Lord of the Red Sands gives a roar loud enough that the Sanctum's void shields shimmer with a mirage's ripple. He tears his blade from his brother's body, grappling, hurling, but the Angel remains. White wings batter at the daemon's face and defeat the raking of his claws. He abandons his own blade to scratch and scrape at the Angel. He tears away shards of golden armour. Wings bleed. Feathers rain. Never once does Sanguinius make a sound.\n\nAngron cries out, a cry flavoured by something other than rage for the first time since his exaltation. Agony lightning-bolts through his head, fire and ice, ice and fire, a sensation he no longer has the mind to understand but that will destroy him whether he understands it or not. He launches upward, beating his ungainly wings, striving for the sky. Turning and tumbling, seeking to dislodge the straining Angel.\n\nOn the battlefield below, the Legions duel in the rain of their primarchs' blood. The Lord of the Red Sands - Angron, I remember, I remember now, I am Angron - feels his skull creaking, stretching; then a crack, a crack that paints the back of his eyes with acid; it's the cracking of a slowly breaking window, the crack of a skull under a tank's treads.\n\nHe hears his brother now: Sanguinius' ragged hisses of breath, coming in time to the scrape of his gauntlet against the pain engine's mechanical tendrils. Their eyes meet, and there is no mercy in the Angel's pale gaze. Sanguinius is lost to the passions he has always resisted. The Lord of the Red Sands sees it in the pinpricks of his brother's pupils, in the ivory grind of his brother's fangs. The Angel has lost himself to blood-need, and veins show starkly blue on his cheeks. This is wrath. This is the Angel unleashed.\n\nIt is an anger so absolute, Angron feels the bite of another forgotten emotion: jealousy. What he sees in the Angel's eyes is no bitter fury at a life of mistreatment, or rage goaded by the will of a god that only rewards slaughter. It feeds the God of War, as all bloodshed does, but it is not born of him.\n\nIt is the Angel's own fury, in worship of nothing but justice. How beautiful that is. How naive. How pure.\n\nThis is the daemon's last cohesive thought. Fuelled by animal panic as much as sentient rage, Angron's frantic clawing does nothing to throw Sanguinius clear. The brothers fall together, the daemon's strength lost to convulsive thrashing, the Angel's ripped and bloodstained wings unable to keep them both aloft.\n\nThe dreadlock-cables are fastened deep in the meat of the monster's mind. They are not attached to the brain, they are part of it, tendrilling their way through the pain engine that replaced and so poorly simulated entire sections of the Twelfth Primarch's cerebellum, thalamus and hypothalamus. The Butcher's Nails are woven throughout his brainstem, hammered in to bind them to the spinal column and central nervous system. It is a process almost admirable in its barbaric effectiveness, one reproduced with malignant perfection in his exaltation from a mortal to an immortal.\n\nFrom behind the veil, Angron hears laughter. A god, laughing at him, because it cares not from whence the blood flows. The death of the Lord of the Red Sands is as pleasing to this divinity as the death of any other champion.\n\nWarpfire flares from the cracks in the beast's deforming skull. The cracks become crunches, each one a conflagration that sweeps from the filaments behind Angron's eyes to the spikes of his spine. There is the feeling of violation, a deep and slick wrongness as something is taken from him, pulled from the root of his mind.\n\nHe screams then, and he does something he has never done - in neither his mortal nor immortal lives. His roar of pained rage is coloured by a sound so shameful he will spend the rest of eternity refusing to believe it happened. The sound is a word, and the word is a plea. He begs.\n\n'No,' the beast grunts to his brother.\n\nThis moment will never enter the legends of either Legion. The primarchs are high above the battlefield, and the few sons able to watch their fathers are too far away to know what passes between them. Only Sanguinius hears Angron's last word, and it is an intimacy he will take to his grave.\n\nThe ground rises with disorientating speed. It's now or never.\n\nAs they free fall together, the Angel gives a final wrenching pull on the serpents of barbarian metal. The daemon's head bursts. It's a detonation, a release of internal pressure like pus from a squeezed cyst: the lion'"}
{"text":" high above the battlefield, and the few sons able to watch their fathers are too far away to know what passes between them. Only Sanguinius hears Angron's last word, and it is an intimacy he will take to his grave.\n\nThe ground rises with disorientating speed. It's now or never.\n\nAs they free fall together, the Angel gives a final wrenching pull on the serpents of barbarian metal. The daemon's head bursts. It's a detonation, a release of internal pressure like pus from a squeezed cyst: the lion's share of Angron's brain comes free in a spray of fire and acid blood. The daemon's wings beat once more, just a shiver, a thing of reflex.\n\nHis claws slacken. All struggles cease.\n\nSanguinius throws himself free of the falling corpse, spreading his wounded wings, first for stability, then for altitude. Beneath him, the daemon strikes the avenue of stairs, shaking the Royal Ascension and stealing what little reason remains to the gladiator-warriors of the XII Legion.\n\nA twinned cry rises to where he beats his wings above the battlefield. The Blood Angels fight with renewed hope, seeing their father victorious, the slayer of daemons. The World Eaters, wracked by the psychic backlash of their slain sire, see the Emperor's Angel haloed by the rising red sun.\n\nInzar was close to the top of the Ascension, surrounded by World Eaters and deep in the shadow of the Sanctum, when the body struck the earth.\n\nThe corpse of the Lord of the Red Sands crashed upon the stairs leading to the Eternity Gate, breaking open on the steps of marble and gold. The earth quaked with the impact, and in its wake the Chaplain heard a colossal cry rise from the throat of every living World Eater. This lamentation wasn't wholly physical, but something blasphemous he felt in the creases of his mind.\n\nDemigods should not die, he thought as that awful cry rose to the haloed angel above them.\n\nInzar's breathing was uneven, hastened by adrenaline but weighed with fatigue. He felt the ache of wounds he couldn't remember suffering; the hundreds of incidental cuts and stabs that took place in the grinding of battle lines. Warriors of the myriad Legions clashed everywhere around them in rabid packs, all cohesion lost, but always the Warmaster's tide had pressed forward. Until now.\n\nHe looked ahead, past the dead-whale grotesquery of Angron's smashed corpse, to where the Gate still stood open. Beyond that open portal lay victory. Wounded squads of Blood Angels were still falling back through the doors, firing at the advancing horde.\n\n'Forward!' Inzar cried. 'Forward, for the Pantheon! Death to the False Emperor!' He levelled his crozius at the Eternity Gate and sought to urge the blood-maddened warriors around him onward through force of will and prayer. The Colchisian tattoos across his face started weeping blood.\n\n'Preacher,' one of the nearby World Eaters grunted. Frantic now, desperate for any ally, Inzar turned to him. He didn't know the warrior. He was just one of thousands in the stalled tide.\n\nThe Chaplain met the man's eyes, not unlike the meeting of gazes that took place in the sky between two demigod brothers only minutes before. For the first time, Inzar learned what it was to have the bloodshot glare of Nails-madness turned upon him. In that stare he saw not just the absence of reason, but the death of it.\n\n'Kill,' the warrior snarled, his vocal cords thick with blood, mucus, or both.\n\n'Come with me, we can still rally the others and-'\n\n'Maim.' The World Eater's gaze was bare of comprehension.\n\n'I am Inzar of the Seventeenth Legion. Hear me and heed me. Rise, and we can end this. We are so close...'\n\nThe World Eater seemed to understand. He reached out a hand, as if to make an oath. Inzar took it.\n\n'Burn.'\n\nThe World Eater pulled on the preacher's hand as he brought the axe up, chain teeth revving. There was no resistance, the chainaxe went through the joint like it went through bone, and it went through bone like water.\n\nInzar staggered back, his arm amputated at the elbow, and crashed into another warrior behind him. He had a fraction of a second to see the Death Guard he'd backed into, going down beneath the hacking axe of another World Eater. It was a scene repeated in woeful plenitude wherever Inzar turned. The World Eaters were falling upon their own allies, howling, cutting, killing.\n\nBlood for the Blood God.\n\nKill. Maim. Burn.\n\nSkulls for the Skull Throne.\n\nThe World Eater forced him back, stumbling over the slain. Inzar fought one-armed, swinging his crozius, facing a foe that moved so swiftly he could only process what the warrior was doing after it was done. The legionary didn't dodge or defend, he chopped at the haft of the crozius, severing it, and on the backswing he relieved the Word Bearer of his other arm, ending it at the shoulder.\n\nThe next swing went into Inzar's stomach, liquefying his intestines in a roar of chain teeth. The next cleaved down into Inzar's breastplate, the teeth churning with exquisite brutality, chewing through the layers of ceramite, muscle, bone and organ meat. Inzar's retinal display went red with the gush of blood he vomited into his helmet.\n\nCombat narcotics and meditative focus couldn't deaden the excruciation of insides ground into mince, but the pain was secondary to the insane clarity that gripped him. The more he was carved apart, the colder and clearer everything became.\n\nHe thought, against the reality of what was happening: Wait, do not do this.\n\nThen, a moment later: We can still win. We can... still...\n\nThrough red-stained vision, greying at the edges, he saw the World Eater towering above him.\n\nHave I fallen? Inzar wondered. Am I on my back?\n\nMore of them drew in, clawing at each other, lost to madness in the aftermath of their primarch's death. One of them was convulsing hard enough that his weapon chain rattled against his warplate. He was the one to look down at the fallen Word Bearer, and he grinned with blood-streaked metal teeth. Inzar saw the axe's teeth cycling, cycling, and descending.\n\nHe heard the gods laughing as he died, and for the first time, there was no comfort in the sound. They were laughing at him. They'd always been laughing at him.\n\nLotara Sarrin bore mute witness as the vox-web and its attuned hololiths erupted in impossibilities. The Conqueror's command deck hadn't seen this level of activity in months, with officers and ratings moving to consoles that came back to flawed life.\n\nShe moved from station to station, watching footage from the surface that couldn't be real, hearing reports in panicked voices she could barely understand.\n\n'Someone get me a clear report of what's going on down there.' Lotara was revolted at her own shaking tone. 'Helm, negative barriers and roll us to Earthrise.'\n\nThe ship obeyed slowly. The armoured shutters protecting the bridge's gigantic windows withdrew, immediately admitting the warp's seething un-light. Rolling back the barriers changed nothing; the surface was hidden in the warp's tides, leaving them relying on hololiths.\n\n'Any word?' she called across the deck. The surviving bridge crew were absorbed in their tasks, trying to make sense of what they were seeing themselves. She cursed the loss of her executive officer and practically everyone else of worthy rank.\n\nA wave of nausea washed over her. She was getting angry, and her malnourished frame was punishing her for it. When had she last eaten? Or last tasted pure water? Throne, how many times had she asked herself those questions since reaching Terra?\n\nLotara rubbed gummy eyes and tried to refocus. Slowly, she made her way to her throne, turning away at the last moment with a dry heave. Like the rest of the bridge, it was matted with a rime of bloody matter, and glancing at it made her eyes ache, fit to burst. She lowered herself to the deck instead, sitting on the stairs of her raised dais. The only way she could still her trembling hands was by bunching them into fists and pressing her knuckles to the grimy iron floor.\n\nThe hololithic displays kept coming, spooling out images with only the scarcest sense from the shouted reports. Lotara watched, piecing it together where she could. Her eyes were wide pools, reflecting the scrolling hololithic words.\n\nAngron was dead.\n\nSanguinius had torn the crown from Angron's head and cast the Twelfth Primarch's body down the steps of the Sanctum. That alone was madness to countenance. She'd never have believed it without the scratchy pict-footage from helmet feeds, showing Angron's immense form crashing to earth and rupturing open.\n\nThe World Eaters had lost the last of their senses, baresark beyond sentience with the death of their father. Report after report cited the World Eaters turning on their own side, and on each other, in mindless butchery. The reports of Angron's humiliating death came not from the Legion, but from the human elements in Sanctum Imperialis Palatine, somehow still unslaughtered.\n\nOther hololiths showed warriors of the Thousand Sons Legion undergoing... changes. Thousands of them were suffering rapid onset of mutation, flesh bursting from their armour, sending them into frenzies of psychic violence. The world was turning to stone and glass and meat around these unfortunates - at first, no one knew why. Was this the Sigillite's work? The wrath of the Emperor? The displeasure of the gods?\n\nNo, she knew, though she couldn't say how she knew. It was purely that nothing else made sense. Magnus is dead, too.\n\nLotara's attempts to reach any World Eaters officers on the ground met with abject failure. She got screams, she got static, she got howls that suggested a kind of pain she never wanted to know.\n\nLotara stopped trying. She watched the hololiths with their carnivals of massacre and mutation.\n\nTwo primarchs dead.\n\nTwo Legions lost to madness in the same moment.\n\nOnly one World Eater remained calm. Kharn, kneeling at Lotara's side, wordlessly watched Terra burn on the oculus. He had no interest in the hololiths beaming abo"}
{"text":"h any World Eaters officers on the ground met with abject failure. She got screams, she got static, she got howls that suggested a kind of pain she never wanted to know.\n\nLotara stopped trying. She watched the hololiths with their carnivals of massacre and mutation.\n\nTwo primarchs dead.\n\nTwo Legions lost to madness in the same moment.\n\nOnly one World Eater remained calm. Kharn, kneeling at Lotara's side, wordlessly watched Terra burn on the oculus. He had no interest in the hololiths beaming above the crew consoles. He was wholly unmoved by the crackling reports. He just watched the world slowly turn, slowly burn.\n\nWhen a link to the surface came, it was riven by distortion. Lotara stared at the image resolving on the oculus. The thing she was speaking with was a legless amalgamation of three people, fused to the floor and sides of its cockpit with arches of bone and pulsing red flesh. Its arms were stalks and cables, forming power feeds to various machinery. It looked at her with six eyes, and answered her with three mouths, none of which were remotely human anymore. Strain coloured the creature's words, effort clear in its voices.\n\n'This is Princeps Ulienne Grune of Audax. I command Hindarah. Angron is dead. The assault is failing. We cannot keep the Gate open without immediate reinforcement.'\n\nMost of the creature was dead. Entire portions of its amalgamated body were necrotic, mottled with the onset of rot. The way it was attached to its surroundings seemed to be sustaining it somehow, but not enough to keep all its extremities alive. Four of its six eyes looked milky, at best blind, more likely decaying. The feed wasn't clear enough to be sure.\n\n'Sacred hell,' Lotara said under her breath.\n\n'The Angel...' it said, and its voices drained away into a groan of effort. The thing's three tongues, two of which were black and sporting what looked like puncture holes from careless fangs, briefly licked across the lower half of its face. 'We cannot-'\n\nThe oculus went black. The command deck's lights, already dull with power drainage, glowed a sudden emergency red. It had been so long since the ship went to battle stations that it took the malnourished crew several seconds to realise and react.\n\n'Voids to full!' Lotara called, but several officers were already working at it, lighting the generators from minimal layering to active shielding. When the ship shivered, it was with incoming fire splashing against her voids, not the deeper rumbles of impact damage. 'Who the hell is firing on us?'\n\nLotara rose to her feet before her throne, feeling more like herself than she had in months. Her mind was beginning to pick up speed again. Betrayal, she thought. Someone in the fleet is firing upon us, and someone in the fleet is going to die.\n\n'Helm, bring us out of geostationary orbit and summon the rostered escort squadron to our side. Kindle the auxiliary reactors and run out the guns. Whoever is firing at us is about to regret it.'\n\nOne of the ratings by the Master of Vox station held a hand to his cabled earpiece. 'Speak,' Lotara commanded him.\n\n'The whole fleet is under attack,' he called, looking past Lotara.\n\n'Address me,' she ordered, 'not my throne.'\n\nThe officer's eyes unfocused as he processed the conflicting voices of several dozen officers aboard several dozen vessels.\n\n'The attack isn't coming from another ship. It's coming from the surface. A sustained cannonade against the entire fleet.'\n\nLotara's blood ran cold. There was only one installation on the surface capable of...\n\n'Pull us out of range. Shield us with our secondary squadrons, and open a channel to the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nThe Conqueror juddered around them, its engines forcing a slow rise. The void shield trembles kept coming.\n\n'The flagship is holding position in the upper atmosphere.' The console officer paused. 'And... its shields are down.'\n\nLotara turned to the man. 'What?'\n\n'The flagship's shields are down.'\n\n'Minimal layering?'\n\n'No.' He was addressing her throne again instead of her. 'They're entirely lowered.'\n\nThe oculus flared to life again in a blizzard of harsh static. It resolved partway, showing the silhouette of the Vengeful Spirit. Vessels of all classes around it were rolling, pockmarked with barrage damage, pulling up out of their bombardment positions to escape the firestorm lancing up from the surface. The flagship alone held its place. It was untouched. Ships in close formation were igniting, burning as they strove to fly free, but the Vengeful Spirit remained, impossibly unharmed.\n\n'Incoming signal,' called the rating assuming Master of Vox duties.\n\nThe central hololithic table powered up again, projecting the stern image of a Legion warrior wearing the white of Jaghatai Khan's White Scars. His revolving image painted every upturned face a flickering blue.\n\n'I am Shibhan Khan of the Fifth Legion, honoured to currently hold the mantle of regent-commander of the Lion's Gate space port. I address this message to the fleet of treasonous dogs laying claim to the skies of Terra. You will find Lion's Gate's surface-to-orbit defences are once again operational. Message ends.'\n\nThe hololith vanished. He was gone. Lotara almost laughed; Blood of the Emperor, but she admired his attitude.\n\nExhilarated now, she turned to retake her throne for the first time in weeks. Lotara approached the great seat of twisted metal, and froze.\n\n'Don't look,' Kharn told her. He was still unarmed, his armour ruined by the blows that had killed him.\n\nBut she'd already looked. Now she couldn't look away.\n\nThere was a murderous thing sitting in her throne: a thing with shining black eyes and malevolent flesh, as if some perverse whim had granted a loosely human form to the ship itself. The thing in her throne wore her uniform, with her Red Hand symbol on its slender chest. Its hair was a ratty snarl of greying black, its mouth was a split-lipped slit housing an arsenal of saw-teeth. It was captivating in the way apex predators were captivating. It radiated that same lethality.\n\nAnd it was joined to the throne. From the immersion of its limbs in the dark metal chair, it had been joined here for months. Its unpleasantly human head swung left, then right, the slits of its nose flexing as it sniffed the air, brazen as any beast.\n\nIt looked hungry. It looked vampiric.\n\n'It is Lotara Sarrin,' said Kharn.\n\nLotara backed away from the thing. It paid her no heed, its lidless eyes blinking with wet flickers of blood-soaked membranes. Claws the length of knives clickety-clicked on the arms of the metal throne.\n\n'Signal the Vengeful Spirit,' said the thing in Lotara Sarrin's throne, in a rasping approximation of Lotara Sarrin's voice. 'Inform the Warmaster, we stand ready.'\n\nThe crew obeyed the thing at once, showing no fear, only weary obedience.\n\nShe remembered the Warmaster's words, days before. You are not Lotara Sarrin.\n\nLotara turned to Kharn, saying it because she had to say it, not necessarily because she believed it.\n\n'That's not... me. I am Lotara Sarrin.'\n\n'You are a wraith,' said the throne-bound huntress. Her voice was pitched snake-low, sibilant, not without sympathy. 'You are the Conqueror's memory of Lotara Sarrin. You are the machine-spirit's echo of what once was, given false life along with the other ghosts that walk the halls of my ship.'\n\n'I am Lotara Sarrin,' Lotara said again, her firmer tone only making her sound more desperate.\n\n'You are not even the first of my spectres,' the huntress promised, and sincerity gleamed in her black eyes. 'The Conqueror conjures you along with the others, over and over. It brings back the dead that it remembers, and the living that have now changed. The crew is plagued by their former incarnations. These hauntings are just one of the ship's many madnesses as it awakens here in the warp. I was polite to the first few of you. I try to ignore you now. It upsets you when you learn the truth.'\n\n'I am Lotara Sarrin,' she said one more time, the words breathless, escaping her lips as vapour.\n\n'Do you know what I think you really are?' The huntress tilted her head, considering the ghost before her. 'You are my weakness, cut from me. You are my amputated doubts, echoing through my ship. You are the part of me that wanted to run from the Conqueror.'\n\nI am Lotara Sarrin, she thought, finding she couldn't give voice to the fading claim.\n\nThe wraith was growing faint now. Lotara ignored it as she reclined in her filthy throne. There would be another one, and doubtless soon, drifting its deluded way down the ship's haunted hallways. It, too, would exert minor control over the ship's systems, thinking itself mistress of the Conqueror.\n\n'Incoming message,' called her Master of Vox. 'Text only, pulse-beamed from an extra-solar location. The fleet has intercepted it from reaching Terra.'\n\nLotara welcomed the contact with a flicker of her talons. A message from beyond the Sol System? Today was shaping up to be a day of significant goings-on.\n\nShe brought up the message on the gore-crusted screen built into the arm of her throne, and ran her black orb eyes over the words. Quite unintentionally, her bloody lips peeled back from the ivory daggers she had for teeth.\n\n'Who knew the Lord of the Thirteenth Legion could be so sentimental?' She breathed the words through strings of blood-pinked saliva. 'Keep blocking the signal. Don't let it reach the surface.'\n\nSanguinius lands with his back to the Eternity Gate. He has passed beyond all of exhaustion's miseries and burned through the reserves of his body. He has accrued wounds incidental and grievous, layering them upon each other month after month, leaving him a patchwork revenant beneath armour of broken gold.\n\nTwo of his sons come to him, bearing his fallen sword and his golden spear. To Sanguinius' shame, in his pain, he does not recognise them by the sigils on their armour. He thanks them nonetheless, accepting the blade Encarmine. For now, he forgoes the spear.\n\nWhatever malefaction was "}
{"text":"miseries and burned through the reserves of his body. He has accrued wounds incidental and grievous, layering them upon each other month after month, leaving him a patchwork revenant beneath armour of broken gold.\n\nTwo of his sons come to him, bearing his fallen sword and his golden spear. To Sanguinius' shame, in his pain, he does not recognise them by the sigils on their armour. He thanks them nonetheless, accepting the blade Encarmine. For now, he forgoes the spear.\n\nWhatever malefaction was in the flames that erupted from Angron's skull, Sanguinius' hand is a seared ruin. His fingers curl in the charred shell of his gauntlet, but the flexion is tight and the ligaments weak. This is far from the worst of his wounds, but he cannot confront the truly grievous one yet. He can only feel it, spreading through his bloodstream like burning venom, crystalising in his joints, making it harder to breathe. His brother would never use venom. This is something else, something worse.\n\nHe still carries Angron's crown, the Butcher's Nails. The bio-etheric matter in Sanguinius' fist is a wretched squid of wet steel. It trails lesser cords and shards of spinal bone like trophy ribbons. He turns the parasite engine over - the cause of such grief, such strife - and sees the last flickers of tainted electrical signals sparking along the vascular cables. Hanging from razor wire strings are his brother's bloodstained eyes.\n\nSanguinius casts a final look over the Warmaster's horde - the beasts still charging closer, the World Eaters lost in butchering each other, the Titans gearing up to fire upon their own side if it gives them even a whisper's chance of hitting him. They vent their rage on the Sanctum's voids, doing nothing but painting the air around the Eternity Gate with prismatics and fractals.\n\nThe Royal Ascension is warping, shifting with great cracks of mutating marble. The statues lining the avenue twist to become icons of sin. The ground splits and blackens at its burning edges, and the army of humanity's afterlife claws its way from the underworld. The gods are here. Real or not, they are here.\n\n'The Gate,' the Custodians and his own sons cry at him. 'Seal the Gate, seal the Gate.' They fight and die all around him, some close enough to touch, some cut down here in the eleventh hour, some shedding blood in this last, desperate retreat. Those that pass into the shadows of the Sanctum will live, for now. Those that remain outside...\n\nSo many are yet too far to make it back, dying by degrees lower down on the platformed steps of the Royal Ascension. They fight on, encircled. Doomed. It breaks his heart to see such valour, and to know he must turn his back on it.\n\n'Sire!' one of his sons calls, in the flood of retreating warriors. It is the Bringer of Sorrow, the one who exiled himself to Terra in shame, fighting at the side of the Flesh Tearer. Two sons that failed him in better times, making him proud now all is almost lost. He loves them as he loves all his Legion; and though he would never give it voice, his heart always goes out most to the disappointments, the ones that struggle to reach the perfection the others take for granted.\n\n'Sire!' Zephon calls as he fights at his brother's side, in his father's shadow. Despair twists his familiar features. 'The Gate!'\n\nWings flex - no longer white; they're scorched, featherless in places, raked bloody in others - and Sanguinius launches upward, sword in one hand, the Butcher's Nails in the other. One by one he severs the chains: some snap in a single blow, others take a second hack to cleave through, but Audax iron gives way against the fall of the primarch's blade.\n\nFreed, the Gate's engines grind again. The last Blood Angels that will make it through do so at a dead run. Not all of them make it. Some choose to turn, to fight, to buy a last few seconds for their brothers. Sanguinius lands between the closing doors. For a moment, he does not know which way he will walk - back into the Sanctum, or back out into the battle with those who have chosen to remain as rearguard and fight, to the end, and the death. He knows what he wants to do, but he knows what he must do.\n\nThe Emperor's Angel throws the wreckage of his brother's brain to the ground and crushes it beneath his boot. Then he turns his back on the war outside, and the Eternity Gate seals behind him with a crash that cuts him to his core.\n\nThe past is on one side of that sound. Fate is on the other.\n\nA voice in the black\n\nSanguinius.\n\nWhat transpires on the surface of the Throneworld, I cannot say. What horrors you have endured, I cannot imagine.\n\nAll I know for certain is this: I am mere days from the system's edge, and within a solar week, I will be in the skies above Terra.\n\nWith me I bring the entire might of the Thirteenth Legion, and I am not alone; word has reached me from Russ and the Lion, at the vanguard of the Sixth and the First. Our numbers are enough to cleanse the heavens and tear the world from the Arch-traitor's grip.\n\nHold on to hope, brother. That is all I ask. Can you give me that? Can you stand your ground for these last, ultimate hours? Those elusive twins, Victory and Vengeance, are coming. This war ends the moment I reach Terra.\n\nHold, in the name of the Emperor and the Imperium we have built together.\n\nI will be with you soon.\n\nEuphrati Keeler - The Living Saint, former remembrancer\n\n'Those who embrace their own fate fear nothing.'\n\n- Last Books of Sight, Hirundus Iago [date unknown]\n\n'There must come a moment when the soul knows: this far, and no further. But we are cursed never to hear that warning until it is too late.'\n\n- attributed to the remembrancer Ignace Karkasy [M31]\n\nONE\n\nDining on Ashes\n\nThe Last of the Few\n\nYou Know Her\n\nWith one heavy footfall after another, the warrior giant advanced up the narrow spiral stairwell.\n\nHis ceramite boots were too wide for stairs that had been built for the tread of common men, the shoulders of his power armour far too broad for the tight, human-scale confines of the towering minaret. The edges of his wargear's pauldrons would catch on the walls from time to time, gouging lines out of the fire-blackened granite to mark his passing.\n\nHe was forced to negotiate places where the sides of the passageway had been blown in by shell impacts, picking his way over heaps of sooty debris, and often, the grisly remains of slain defenders.\n\nThe damage and the carnage grew ever worse the closer he got to the top. The tower had been home to a lascannon nest that rained beams of crimson hell down on the enemy throughout the night's fighting, drawing concentrated fire in return. At length, he emerged into the smoggy cold of the day as the spiral stairs deposited him on the highest level that still remained intact. The beheaded ruin of the minaret hummed with a hard breeze that carried particles of gritty, dirty sleet with it.\n\nThe dead - men and women in the grey carapace armour of the resident garrison - lay where they had fallen, half-buried in drifts of ash and broken brickwork. Some still clutched their guns to them, the muzzles of the rifles glistening with the oily rainbow sheen of heat-damaged metal. He saw burst flesh seared from within marking many of the soldiers, and toxin-bloated faces on others that stared sightlessly at the sky. Death had touched them with terror and agony in their final moments.\n\nCompelled by a sudden impulse, the warrior checked his air sensors, then removed his grey-hued battle helmet and mag-locked it to his hip. He looked up past the missing roof of the tower, to snatch a glimpse of what the fallen had seen.\n\nAbove, the forbidding sky had a strange, sickly hue, lined with striations of black cloud reaching from north to south, and on the wind were sounds that might have been voices, if one listened for them. Hundreds of metres up, above the perimeter of the great aegis field, metal birds caught the weak sunlight as they wheeled and turned around one another, trading streaks of sun-hot plasma from their guns. The keening whine of their engines and the faint chug of their weapons reached him over another, steady sound coming from far away - a low drumming like the beating of a gigantic heart.\n\nPast the atmo-fighters locked in their endless dogfight, the strange storms of brassy lightning, and up into the higher ranges of the reddish Himalazian sky, shapes loomed in the heavens. Great baroque forms floating in near-orbit, some on fire, others crackling with arcane energies. Starships as big as city-states drifted there, their numbers and their masses so great that their proximity tormented the planet's gravitational and magnetic fields, warping weather patterns from pole to pole.\n\nThe skies of Terra were no longer the domain of the Imperium of Man, the warrior reflected. The skies belonged to Horus Lupercal, may his name be blighted, to the treacherous Warmaster and the Traitor Legions at his banner. Only the stone and the mud were held by those who remained loyal to the Emperor, and even those elements were in danger of slipping away.\n\nAfter a breath, the warrior took another step, moving onto an unsteady outcropping of broken masonry and laser-scarred ouslite. He let his gaze drop to the riven battleground beneath the minaret, and the fields of destruction rolling away to the broken horizon.\n\nThe spindly tower was the only one to have survived the recent onslaught, emerging from the cracked and shattered domains of the gigantic Colossi Bastion, reaching to the burnt sky like a skeletal, accusing finger atop a beheaded mountain. A vast, seemingly endless landscape of rubble stretched towards the gutted shell of the bastion's sibling fortress, Corbenic Gard, and in the direction of the City of Sight. Ahead of the warrior, the Anterior Gate and the outer dominions of the great Imperial Palace still stood intact, but in the eerie red corpse-light, the huge, maze-like conurbations resembled forms scrimshawed out of old bone.\n\nHis face t"}
{"text":"on, reaching to the burnt sky like a skeletal, accusing finger atop a beheaded mountain. A vast, seemingly endless landscape of rubble stretched towards the gutted shell of the bastion's sibling fortress, Corbenic Gard, and in the direction of the City of Sight. Ahead of the warrior, the Anterior Gate and the outer dominions of the great Imperial Palace still stood intact, but in the eerie red corpse-light, the huge, maze-like conurbations resembled forms scrimshawed out of old bone.\n\nHis face turned towards the heartbeat sound, towards the Lion's Gate and what lay past it. Eyes narrowing, he raised a battered monocular scope to look across the great distance, searching the canyons of debris and the towering wall of thick, abyssal smoke obscuring much of the battle zone's reaches.\n\nHe picked out forms in bright crimson moving in packs through the destruction: some on foot, others riding slab-shaped tanks or speeders blurred by anti-gravity fields as they navigated the shattered avenues choked by the spill of ruined buildings. All were drawing back, likely towards more adequately reinforced strongpoints, abandoning the kill boxes and poisoned quadrants that remained from their last engagement.\n\nThese were the rearguard elements of Brother-Captain Raldoron's forces, sons of the IX Legion, the noble Blood Angels of Sanguinius. In the past desperate hours, Raldoron's army, and that of the White Scars Legion under the command of the Khan himself, had made war on Horus' invaders. It had been a brutal and harrowing skirmish in a conflict that daily set new standards in horror and destruction - and ultimately, it had counted for little. The line the Blood Angels and the White Scars had fought so hard to maintain could not hold indefinitely.\n\nThe word had finally been given. The eastern bastions could no longer be adequately secured by the loyalist forces, and they were declared indefensible, surrendered in the face of the enemy advance.\n\nThe enemy.\n\nHow those words burned in the warrior's heart.\n\nOnce, in what seemed like another life, a whole other existence, he had marched alongside those whom the Blood Angels and White Scars had fought to a standstill. In the time before the great betrayal at Isstvan, in countless righteous battles and noble crusades, the warrior had been proud to be a part of the XIV Legion, the Death Guard. Now he had only shame, sorrow and rage for those who had once been his oathsworn brethren. Their broken vows to Terra and the Emperor were wounds upon his heart that would never heal, and that he could never forgive.\n\nHe looked past the withdrawing Blood Angels elements - the sole loyalist forces remaining on the field, the White Scars having already decamped and moved off in search of better odds - and away to the wall of curdled smoke marking the edge of the traitors' advance.\n\nIt wasn't just smoke. One who studied it carefully would see that the hazy mass moved against the direction of the wind, with apparent conscious intent. Even from kilometres away, he saw the glitter of reflected light off the millions of tiny wings that made up the plague swarms.\n\nAnd among the haze strode huge forms as tall as hab-blocks, unhurried and inexorable, moving as one in deliberate lockstep. Each massive footfall sounded across the distance to the warrior's ears, the steady drumbeat rhythm of corrupted steel and corroded iron against the earth.\n\nThe giant bipedal war machines of the Legio Mortis were on the march, each passing moment bringing them ever nearer to the walls of the Inner Palace. Within hours, they would be within optimal range and a new rain of fire would begin. Oath-breakers of the Mechanicum, bound to Horus' perfidy, the Warlords, Reavers and Iconoclasts of the Death's Heads would leave only radioactive dust in their wake. Somewhere at the feet of those killer god-machines marched phalanx upon phalanx of tainted Death Guard legionaries, and the warped things they had allied with.\n\nHis brothers were coming for him, he could feel it in his blood and bone. They were coming for them all.\n\nIn every corner of the Palace's gigantic span, a thousand small battles were being fought, with countless battalions of soldiers, aviators, gunners, war devices and legionaries deep in their own brutal engagements. Whole districts had been laid waste, filled with the bodies of unburied dead left to decay and fester by comrades who had no time to tend to the innumerable fallen. The pall of the worst war this planet had ever known hung over everything, the dense reek of aerosolised vitae, spent promethium and cordite changing the atmosphere into a constant funereal haze. It was no exaggeration to voice the thought - these desperate times had the colour of the end of days, of an apocalypse that would, in its fullness, soon erase the rule of mankind from the planet of its origin.\n\nNo living soul on Terra could ignore the whispers in every shadow, and the terrors - some conjured by tricks of the mind, others real in fang and talon - lurking in the darkness. There could be no rest, no respite, no quarter asked for or given. Hell had disgorged itself upon the planet, rising from the depths of nightmares and falling from the blackness between the stars. Whole worlds were ending here in every passing second, some of them the lives of ordinary men, others the futures of those who would be left behind.\n\nAnd yet... in this place, in this moment, there was only desolation. In this lacuna amid the bloodshed, the sullen peace of the grave held sway.\n\nA new sound caught the warrior's attention, a trickle of stone fragments and the juddering buzz of damaged motors as something moved beneath one of the rubble piles. Warily, he crossed the open space to the source of the noise, and with one gauntleted hand, he shoved away a fallen piece of ceiling. The action revealed the remains of two bodies, Army troopers most likely assigned to the lascannon crew. They had fallen together, united in death, but what killed them was still here.\n\nA foetid, bloated shape trembled in the daylight, nestled between the bodies of the dead men. No larger than a fuel barrel, it lay atop the corpses. On one surface, a cluster of insect eyes regarded the warrior blankly, and two filth-caked propeller modules protruded from its flanks, blades turning in weak, jerky motions. A cluster of chitinous mandibles scraped and wavered in the air.\n\nA blight drone: halfway between a machine and an engineered life form, fleshy wattles and mollusc-shell animated by foul processes the warrior loathed to imagine. Trapped under the fallen roof, the drone was trying to repair its own damage by opening the dead men to use their bones, sinews and skin as replacement parts.\n\nHis jaw set in a hard line, the warrior's disgust expressed itself in swift violence. He stamped the drone into a pulpy mess, and as it died with a squeal, it let off a puff of reeking vapour. He recoiled, grimacing as faint traces of the poison touched his bare face. The warrior's transhuman physiology endured the toxin with ease, but where the vapour's heavy droplets fell on the dead men, their bodies turned to black slurry.\n\nThe warrior drew himself up, and spat to clear his lungs. His dark, wary eyes sat in a face criss-crossed with trophy scars from past wars, beneath a heavy brow that carried the brass service studs of a ranked battle-captain. His skull was shorn and he wore no beard, his pale face reminiscent of some ancient Hellenikai statuary from the age before Old Night. His aspect was rigid and searching, a man one might think was bound by great duty, yet lost to his cause. A warrior destined to live and to die alone.\n\nBut not today, it seemed. Someone was coming up the narrow stairwell, following in his footsteps, someone equally unsuited to the human-scale confines of the passageway.\n\nHis hand dropped to the great power sword sheathed at his belt, fingers tightening around the hilt. He sensed no immediate danger at hand, but it would take only a heartbeat to draw the blade. He had learned through bitter experience that to lower his guard was to invite ill-fortune.\n\nPresently, a figure emerged from the broken mouth of the stairwell, another giant man-shape in powered armour rising into the daylight. Both wore the same stripe of wargear: Mark VI Corvus-pattern plate, heavy in form like that of the Blood Angels below on the battlefield, but drained of colour. The ceramite of their greaves and gauntlets was a shade of grey like slate, like an ocean storm.\n\n'Well met, kinsman,' said the new arrival, his words bereft of warmth.\n\nNathaniel Garro, former battle-captain of the Death Guard, former Agentia Primus of Malcador the Sigillite, inclined his head in a nod. 'Helig Gallor,' he said, recognising the other warrior by the pattern of his movements more than his voice. 'You are not yet dead.'\n\n'Despite all attempts of the fates,' came the dour reply. Gallor removed his helm to mirror Garro's aspect, revealing a familiar, ever-grave expression.\n\nGallor too had once been a son of Mortarion, one of the Death Guard Legion, and his path mirrored Garro's in the warrior's rejection of perfidy against Terra. Both were remnants from the ideal of a Legion that no longer existed, the last of a handful of loyalists whose gene-sire primarch had turned his back on the Emperor and embraced treachery. Both had, for a time, found new direction as Knights Errant under the command of the great psyker Malcador, as agents of the Emperor's right hand.\n\nBut despite their shared circumstances and common origins, there was little comradeship between the two warriors. Garro considered Gallor to be imprudent, even undisciplined. For his part, Gallor thought of Garro as stiff, haughty and arrogant.\n\nGallor nodded towards Garro's shoulder pauldron. 'You no longer carry the mark of the Sigillite upon your armour.'\n\n'It has not proven to be an issue.' Garro gave a curt nod. 'Malcador generously released me from my service to t"}
{"text":"he Emperor's right hand.\n\nBut despite their shared circumstances and common origins, there was little comradeship between the two warriors. Garro considered Gallor to be imprudent, even undisciplined. For his part, Gallor thought of Garro as stiff, haughty and arrogant.\n\nGallor nodded towards Garro's shoulder pauldron. 'You no longer carry the mark of the Sigillite upon your armour.'\n\n'It has not proven to be an issue.' Garro gave a curt nod. 'Malcador generously released me from my service to the Throne... As if a mere etching on ceramite was all that tethered me to that duty.'\n\n'Only in death does duty end.' Gallor repeated the old, rote maxim without conscious recollection, the words coming from the deep reservoir of hypnogogic training that had been imprinted on both legionaries as initiates.\n\n'Aye. So what duty has compelled you to seek me out in these bleak days, brother? I have not laid eyes on you since the mission at the Saturnine Wall.'\n\n'Bleak?' Gallor echoed the word, deflecting the question. 'They are, at that. But tell me, do you not carry a flame of hope in your breast, safe beneath your armour?' He pointed to the ornate golden eagle across the cuirass that shrouded Garro's torso. 'I wonder. Do you not hold an ephemeral light in your spirit? Isn't that your way now?'\n\nGarro's lips thinned at the veiled challenge, uncertain where it was leading. 'I believe what I believe. That the Emperor protects.'\n\n'He cannot protect everyone,' said Gallor. 'He is mighty, but He is no god.' Then the other warrior cocked his head. 'Or is He?'\n\nGarro said nothing, refusing to be baited. Long before the Siege of Terra had begun, even before the Warmaster's betrayal, there were those who considered the Emperor of Mankind as more deity than mortal. They had many names - the followers of the Lectitio Divinitatus: Truekind, Imperiads, Lightbringers - and many expressions of their devotion, such as it was. Garro did not consider himself among any one of these groups, but he did believe. He did have faith.\n\nIt was only when called upon to fully quantify that conviction that words failed him. 'I have faced death many times, against impossible odds, and still I live,' he murmured. 'There must be a reason, by the Throne. Once, I was told that I was of purpose. I choose to hold to that still.' He looked away. 'Call it what you will, brother. I care not if you think I am deluded.'\n\nTo his surprise, Gallor gave a rare - if bitter - laugh. 'I would not dare to! And in days as dark as these, who am I to challenge what gives a warrior succour? No, I only sought to know if your attitude has shifted on such matters. I see it has not.'\n\n'Oh, it has,' Garro corrected, a grim solemnity sweeping over his expression. 'My faith has been tested, again and again, but never as gravely as now.' He gestured towards the ruins heaped at the horizon. 'Terra burns about us, in such profusion that a single sword, a single boltgun cannot hope to turn back the fire. I have lent my aid to the Palace's defenders wherever I can, wandering between the battlements and donjons, and yet the taint of futility is forever at my back.'\n\nGallor nodded. 'I feel it too.'\n\nWhen Horus' fleet had come, when his ships had darkened the sky, some stirring of martial exhilaration had been reborn in Garro's twin hearts. He stood with his ersatz kinsman Garviel Loken and made ready for a battle of such glory that it would be sung of for ten thousand years; but the reality of the grinding, monstrous siege-war had burned through that. The great imperious scope of the Palace city-state, once the venerated jewel of Terra, had become a hellish crater filled with shed blood and the detritus of brutal war.\n\nAn inescapable foreboding filled his soul. As if sensing the great cogs of some unseen mechanism turning about him, Garro felt the fates were aligning in ways he could only guess at. And now, with his lost Legion on the approaches, and with his former primarch marching somewhere among their number, the true power of something he rarely knew gripped him.\n\nFear.\n\n'He is out there,' said Garro, voicing the thought.\n\n'Mortarion.' Gallor knew of whom he spoke, grimacing around the name. 'Our traitor lord, come to plague us anew.'\n\n'Aye.' Words pushed to be spoken, but Garro held them back, suddenly uncertain.\n\nWhat could he say to Gallor that would not cast a greater pall over their conversation? That he dreaded what would come to pass at the moment Mortarion stood before them. That he could not escape the sense that he was living on borrowed time, and worse, that Nathaniel Garro's end would come before he had the chance to fulfil his purpose in this life.\n\nAnd most treacherous and terrible, the words he dared not utter, that he could barely even countenance - the awful possibility that Horus Lupercal might actually take Terra for himself, despite everything they had done to defy his heresy.\n\nA chill cut through Garro's blood and his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. I will die a thousand times before I let that come to pass.\n\nHe released a held breath and studied Gallor anew. 'You did not answer my first question. You have not said why you are here. You have reason to distract me from my musings. Did someone send you?'\n\n'In a way,' allowed Gallor. 'There is something you need to see.'\n\nGarro's kinsman would not be drawn further, citing both his own reticence and the possibility of long-ranging traitor observers watching their position. Instead, Gallor silently led him back down to ground level and across the broken landscape at a loping, swift pace.\n\nThey moved through shallow canyons of debris and over burnt-out combat vehicles, skirting deep craters where seething bowls of heat still sizzled from macro-shell impacts. Presently, the battlefield levelled out into the remains of some great plaza. Once beautiful mosaics and elegant stone friezes had been fused into masses of black glass, and the nubs of tall statues were all that remained of a sculpture orchard in the centre.\n\nThey came to a small forward observation post, little more than a clump of plastek bivouacs, in the process of being torn down by a crew of Blood Angels Legion serfs. Four warriors of the IX Legion watched them arrive from afar, giving the two Legionless cursory nods of greeting but nothing else.\n\nGarro noted the elegant uniformity of the faces of the Blood Angels. Despite their war-scars, they remained handsome in aspect, echoing their winged, angelic progenitor. But their nobility seemed muted, as if the war had knocked it out of them. He knew from shared battles in the past that beneath the Blood Angels' dignity there lay a murderer's fury when provoked, and Garro imagined that shackled rage lying closer to the surface now, ready to be released.\n\n'In here.' Gallor halted by a camouflaged yurt, pulling back the door flap so that Garro could enter. Ducking his head, the warrior passed inside, into shadow.\n\nGallor followed him, moving to a pile of storage crates, delving into one to retrieve something. 'I asked our cousins to guard this for me while I sought you out,' he explained. 'I wanted to gauge your disposition before I showed it to you.'\n\nGarro folded his arms. 'I am in no mood for games and obfuscation, know that,' he said. 'What do you have there?'\n\n'See.' The other warrior showed him the glittering shape of a hololithic diamond. Reams of data or imagery could be stored inside its complex crystalline structure, preserved and virtually indestructible. He inserted the gemstone into the reader matrix of a tactical projector in the corner of the space.\n\nWith a soft hum, the projector came to life, breathing out a smoky sphere of holographic light. The diamond's lattice translated its contents into three-dimensional pictures that wavered and danced between the two warriors.\n\nGarro saw aerial views of other bastions along the fighting line - he recognised Corbenic when it was still intact, the massive fortresses of Gorgon Bar and Marmax. Gallor's gauntleted fingers moved with delicacy, manipulating the projector's controls to dash forward through the data stored on the diamond.\n\n'Like you,' he went on, 'I too have wandered the edges of this siege, from the Europa Wall all the way to the Helios Gate, providing what assistance I can to those who need another gun or another strong arm. There has been no shortage of those at disadvantage.'\n\nGarro nodded. 'When there are no orders given, we make our own.'\n\n'Indeed.' Gallor hesitated, and Garro sensed he was framing his next words with care. 'In my travels, intelligence has come to me, some of it useless, some of it accurate. A few days ago, I encountered a flyer crew whose craft had been shot out from under them, the survivors retreating on foot towards loyalist lines. They gave me this...' He tapped the diamond. 'And they told me a story.'\n\nGallor went on, insisting that he had spoken to no one else of what the aircrew had said. He had brought it straight to Garro, keeping it secret from the Blood Angels he marched with, from everyone. At first, Garro did not understand why his kinsman was acting with caution, but as the other Knight Errant unfolded the tale, the reason became clear.\n\nSouth of the Colossi Bastion stood its sister-citadel, Marmax - another gargantuan holdfast built to the Emperor's own design and fortified beyond that by His steadfast son, Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists. Like the now abandoned Colossi, the domains of Marmax were also in heavy contact with traitor forces - something that would only worsen with the renewed advance of the Death Guard and the Legio Mortis.\n\nSoldiers perished in droves each day upon the battlefield, but Gallor's story spoke of a peculiar anomaly among the tally of the fallen. In a sector of the Marmax Bastion's north-western face, where the fighting was among the most violent, the defenders of a zone called the Dilectio Tier were holding their ground while all around them were crumbling.\n\n'They defy the o"}
{"text":"contact with traitor forces - something that would only worsen with the renewed advance of the Death Guard and the Legio Mortis.\n\nSoldiers perished in droves each day upon the battlefield, but Gallor's story spoke of a peculiar anomaly among the tally of the fallen. In a sector of the Marmax Bastion's north-western face, where the fighting was among the most violent, the defenders of a zone called the Dilectio Tier were holding their ground while all around them were crumbling.\n\n'They defy the odds,' said Gallor, with a scowl. 'Day after day, so I was told.' As he spoke, he dialled in the projector's images, finding the location among the clutter, zooming in to enlarge the tier until it filled the interior of the yurt. 'They should be dead and ashes twenty times over, Garro. And yet, they hold. These common soldiers, these ordinary humans have beaten back attacks that should have annihilated them.'\n\n'You suspect something... corruptive... at work there?' Garro hesitated to find the right phrasing. He had almost said the word daemonic, before he stopped himself.\n\n'At first,' Gallor noted. 'But the reality appears to be quite the reverse. I sought to learn more, and in doing so I discovered that someone is moving among these soldiers. A voice, Garro. Not quite a leader, but a...' He frowned. 'A confidante, you could say. This person is rallying these soldiers to fight far beyond what their normal abilities should allow.'\n\n'A psyker, then.'\n\n'Unclear.' Gallor shrugged. 'You are better qualified than I am to answer that.'\n\nGarro's expression mirrored his kinsman's. He was growing impatient. 'Speak plainly! What do you mean?'\n\n'You know her,' said the other warrior, as he dialled in on a group of figures captured in the image of the embattled fortress, enhancing and sharpening it until distinct faces were visible.\n\nGarro saw a frozen frame of dozens of Imperial Army troopers, caught with their arms and lasrifles raised to the air in a shout of victory. They looked battle-worn and weary, but their eyes were alight with that same defiant martial zeal Garro had felt on the day Horus came.\n\nIn the middle of the group was a woman in a threadbare civilian oversuit, and all the troopers around her had a hand upon her shoulders or her back. Not in the manner of supplicants touching some holy object, but like friends, united in a simple moment of human connection.\n\nHe knew her.\n\n'Keeler.' The name fell from Garro's lips in a hushed breath.\n\n'The Saint,' said Gallor.\n\nGarro shook his head. 'She never chose that name. Others laid it upon her, forced her to carry its weight. The truth is far more complex.'\n\nHe had thought her safe and protected, deep in one of the Emperor's most secure refuges, but to see the woman like this, her laughing face bare to the sky and open to attack at any instant... The raw shock of it made Garro's hands draw into fists.\n\nEuphrati Keeler: once a remembrancer sent into the Imperial fleets to document the work of the Great Crusade through her picter and her artist's eye, she had passed beyond that life when events conspired to draw the woman into the Warmaster's machinations.\n\nIt changed her in ways that no one could ever have expected, and soon the threads of her fate became entwined with those of Nathaniel Garro. As Gallor had said, some knew her as the so-called Saint, the voice of the nascent Imperial Truth, of the divinity of the God-Emperor of Mankind. Some said she was touched by the Emperor's power, even that she might be a conduit to His greatness.\n\nGarro knew her as something else. A guide. A light in the darkness that showed the way ahead. The woman who had counselled the warrior time and again since the tragedy at Isstvan.\n\nWithout her, he mused, I would have been lost.\n\nBut she was supposed to be in hiding, protected from danger until the fires of the Siege of Terra were put out.\n\n'What is she doing there?' Garro bit out the words.\n\n'I would say, she is doing the same as you and I,' said Gallor. 'Lending aid where she can.'\n\n'She is in harm's way,' he retorted. 'This...' Garro gestured at the hololith. 'This is too great a risk. I must take her from Marmax, get her away before this reckless behaviour claims her life!' He stared into the image, trying to see into Keeler's thoughts.\n\nWhat could compel her to put herself in so great a danger, to hide in plain sight in the middle of a warzone?\n\n'I brought this to you because I know of your beliefs.' Gallor eyed him. 'Which I do not share. But that said, I do have faith of a kind - in you. Our differences aside, battle-captain, I understand that the Keeler woman has importance to whatever Imperium will come after Horus Lupercal lies dead. I will accompany you.'\n\n'Gratitude,' offered Garro. 'But you need not.'\n\n'I know,' Gallor replied, 'and yet I will. You may consider it misplaced nostalgia on my part, if you wish, for the days when we were Death Guard. When that meant something.'\n\n'Very well.'\n\nGallor removed the hololithic diamond and the projector image vanished. He weighed it in his hand, then added something more. 'I will say this,' he went on. 'Prepare yourself for disappointment. She does not seem like the kind of woman who bows easily to the will of another. Man, legionary... or god.'\n\nTWO\n\nMarmax\n\nOnly Truth\n\nWhispers\n\nFire, smoke and fury crackled across the wide saw-tooth stonework of the Dilectio Tier, spilling over the ferrocrete slabs, roaring around rank after rank of the beleaguered defenders.\n\nThe spent powercell of her laspistol burned Maed Kostagar's stubby brown fingers as she cracked the weapon's barrel and plucked it out. Swearing animatedly under her breath, the captain tossed the hot cylinder along the battlement, into a waiting bin that was already near brimming with dead batteries from her company's rifles. One of the runner-servitors would come and drag the bin back to a charger maw, if of course the runner wasn't already cold meat and iron, lying somewhere she couldn't see in a pool of its own oils.\n\nKostagar tried not to think about running out of loads, or stubber rounds, or med-packs, or fighters, and she rammed a new cell into the gun's breech, snapping it closed with a flick of her wrist. The old weapon hummed to life again, reliable as daybreak, rewarding her trust and care better than any of her ex-husbands ever had. But the batteries her troops hoarded were starting to go stale, becoming harder to recharge, and holding their wattage for shorter and shorter periods. Kostagar tried not to think about that as well.\n\nShe popped up out of cover and killed the closest of the coven-scum scrambling up the incline of the walls towards her. This outcast - as the troops had come to name their kind - was wrapped in soiled green sashes and made his way up the steep slope using crude hand-held claws welded from bits of corroded iron. His face was painted with something foul, a daub in the form of three rough circles framing wild eyes and a gaping mouth.\n\nKostagar's beam-shot shrieked through his chest, and exploded open the outcast's back in a welter of superheated blood. The attacker tumbled away down the slope, crashing into dozens of his comrades climbing up beneath him. He took some with him as his ragged corpse vanished into the battle-fog, but there were so many still coming. Each hour, it seemed as if a new army had come to besiege them.\n\nSome had the claws or memory-metal ladders, others tools like miners' picks or impact hammers; some used cables dangling from cleats fired into the stone by pneumatic launcher. They came climbing up the outer tiers of the Marmax Bastion, chanting and screaming for blood, killing everything in their path. Tier after tier had already fallen to their predations, forcing Kostagar's forces to seal the stairwells and elevator tubes to the lower levels, and barricade themselves in place.\n\nThe men and women around her were a patchwork of survivors from ten different companies, that in her wisdom - or perhaps, her foolishness - she had managed to pull together. Their uniforms and battle gear were a mismatched collection of whatever they could salvage, whatever they had carried from the routing of their own units. She had them spread thin across the main approaches, doing the work of a force ten times their size, with half the firepower.\n\nDress guards and regular line infantry. Field police and rear-echelon servicemen. These and more, they carried lasrifles and stubbers, ballistic rod-throwers and quarrel launchers, and the only thing they had in common was the will to fight. The will to keep fighting, and damn the bleak truth of the end massing at their gate.\n\nKostagar had an assassin's eye, aiming and firing with care, and everywhere she landed a las-bolt, an invader died.\n\nNo one knew exactly where the outcasts had come from, with their madness and their bodies caked in filth and triad-shape tattoos. Some of the junior officers said that the traitors had brought them to Terra from worlds they had taken, that they were inductees chem-conditioned to serve as shock brigades. Others whispered fearfully that they were what became of those taken captive by the turncoats, persona-wipes thrown back at the very bastions they might once have manned.\n\nKostagar doubted the latter was true. The traitors did not take prisoners. And what she feared most was not the erasure of her mind, but the warning the outcast attacks presented.\n\nToday, the Dilectio Tier was besieged by the enemy's human auxiliaries. That meant soon the real invaders would come, the Legions of dishonoured Astartes at the banner of the Warmaster.\n\nThe outcasts were just the start of this particular battle in the ongoing siege of the Imperial Palace, blunt instruments with little military artifice sent in to soften up the lines around Marmax. They would spend their cheap lives choking the guns of the fortress, eating into the morale of the defenders, whittling them down. Preparing the way for the hammer blow that would inevitably "}
{"text":" meant soon the real invaders would come, the Legions of dishonoured Astartes at the banner of the Warmaster.\n\nThe outcasts were just the start of this particular battle in the ongoing siege of the Imperial Palace, blunt instruments with little military artifice sent in to soften up the lines around Marmax. They would spend their cheap lives choking the guns of the fortress, eating into the morale of the defenders, whittling them down. Preparing the way for the hammer blow that would inevitably follow.\n\n'What are they doing?' came a reedy cry, from a young man in carapace armour with a drum-fed stubber, firing bursts into the invaders' line. His eyes were wide. 'Are they breeding these whoresons down there like rats? There's too many of them!'\n\n'So we keep shooting,' said the captain, drawing a startled flinch from the youth. Greff. His name is Rold Greff, she remembered. He hadn't seen her there, crouching nearby in the same revetment. 'Until they get the message, eh?'\n\nGreff nodded woodenly, but she knew the cast to his gaze. The lad was lost behind it, terrified that each thump of his heart in his ears would be the last.\n\nLike him and all the others firing down at the advance of the climbers, Kostagar was running on stale recaff, lho-sticks and precious little sleep. She knew that the shadow of fatigue lurked at her back, and if she let it come close, it would embrace her. Drag her down. Dull her thoughts.\n\nAnd if that happens... The enemy would take the advantage and engulf them.\n\nThe outcasts kept on coming, attacking out of the smoke at random intervals that were impossible to predict. Eventually they would wear out the resistance of everyone on the Dilectio Tier, just as they had the defenders on the levels beneath.\n\nWe are the last here. If we fall... the Marmax Bastion will be lost.\n\nIn the flyer silo on the far face of the fortress there was an aircraft that could, at a push, have evacuated everybody still fighting on this tier. But the order from the Master of the Siege, the primarch Rogal Dorn himself, was to hold. And so they would, until they could do so no longer.\n\nThen a peculiar silence fell across the battlements, as if by random chance the drone of all the guns paused at once, and the screaming of the enemy was briefly stilled.\n\n'Stand fast,' said a voice. 'I know it is hard. I know every breath is a struggle. Every step feels like a marathon. But you can do it. You can hold this line.'\n\nThe voice was not a shout. It did not come as some martial roar or chest-beating exhortation. It was not a hymnal or a sermon. But not a whisper either, instead something strong, constant and honest. Everyone listened. Everyone heard it.\n\n'I know what you have seen,' it said. 'The horrors you have witnessed and the sacrifices you have made. I know how empty your bellies are, how you wish you could make it all just stop for a moment, so we might rest. I know the darkness that you feel, the hollow in your hearts. The despair and the fear. But I also know how strong you are. I believe in all of you. You can do this. You will survive this.'\n\nAcross open vox-channels or broadcast by speaker-horns, even carried on the stiff breeze itself, the voice was there for all of them.\n\nFor Kostagar, the voice recalled warm memories of her older sister Galae, long dead now but never far from her thoughts. She had always known the right thing to say whenever little Maed had jolted awake from a nightmare or been caught by some sorrow. Others heard it differently, but to the same effect. A gentle speech that cut through fear and heartened those who listened.\n\n'Stand fast,' said the voice, 'and look to those at your side. You fight for them. They fight for you. Together, we are defiant, no matter what we face.'\n\nDespite herself, the captain's round face split in a grin. A swell of renewed confidence blossomed in her chest, and she dared to believe that perhaps they could prevail today, that they could hold the Dilectio Tier for a little longer.\n\nAt her side, Greff seemed to have grown in stature - or was it that he was just standing taller than he had a moment before? The young man was no longer cowering. He was still afraid, but now he refused to let his fear rule him.\n\n'Stand fast!' Kostagar echoed the words, and the shout went down the line of the battlements, repeated back to her over and over.\n\n'Stand fast!' 'Stand fast!' 'Stand fast!'\n\nOut of the chorus came gunfire, as the defenders fought back. Las-bolts split the smoke, sundering air molecules with shrill, steam-kettle screams. Stubber weapons, heavy-gauge man-portables and mag-fed shoulder-arms alike, rained shot into the scrambling mass of the outcasts.\n\nThe enemy forces withered under the defensive barrage and they fell back. Siege ladders and cables snapped away, attackers retreated. It soon became a hectic collapse, as the lines of the outcasts were broken. They fled desperately into the fire-smoke that billowed constantly from the levels below.\n\nThe war cries of the invaders faded to nothing. The attack had been repelled once more, and for a moment Kostagar and her troopers could breathe again.\n\nShe sank to her haunches and checked the charge on her laspistol, blowing vapour from the coolant fins down the long, ornate barrel. She had made it through another battle and lived to tell the tale.\n\nGreff and the others sent up a ragged, insolent cheer that carried down the long walkways, as if they were terrace hooligans at some scrumball match, heckling the losing side. The captain let it go. She was too far past enforcing pointless notions of propriety on her troopers.\n\nI'll let them yell, she thought. The time might come when that's the only weapon they have left.\n\n'Maed,' said the voice, from close at hand. 'You're injured.'\n\n'I am?' As the words left her mouth, Kostagar felt thick, warm fluid trickling down from her brow. She reached up and found a shallow cut that was bleeding badly, from where a splinter of stone had struck her in the melee. She hadn't noticed the pain. 'Oh. It looks worse than it is,' she said, and glanced up to see who had spoken.\n\n'Still, it could get infected. Let me help.' Unremarkable in a common worker's oversuit and a scrounged heavy-weather jacket a size too large for her, at first sight Euphrati Keeler looked no different to any other human surviving the Warmaster's onslaught. She opened the field pack she carried over one shoulder, dug inside for adhesive bandages, and set to work cleaning and dressing the captain's wound.\n\nKeeler's kindly, moderated voice was more soothing than the anti-chems she applied to the cut, and Kostagar smiled slightly. 'Thank you. Thank you again, Euphrati. I don't know how you do it... but your words are better than any doggerel or empty platitude.'\n\n'I just help people to remember their own courage,' she said, dismissing the compliment. 'Nothing more.'\n\nFrom anyone else, that might have sounded like false modesty, but Keeler meant every word. Kostagar had met few people in her life she would have described as truly 'selfless', but this woman was one of them. She had appeared back when the fighting was still concentrated on the lower tiers, and offered her help with the wounded. Desperate for any aid, the captain was only too happy to accept her. Soon word spread about the woman with the kind eyes who carried a battered old picter, now and then snapping image captures of the battles, always giving time to those who needed it.\n\nLike Kostagar's long-passed sister, Keeler seemed to know the right thing to say to someone, and the right moment to say it. She didn't flatter or cajole; she just brought the truth when it was needed.\n\nThe captain met the other woman's gaze. 'You know, without you... we wouldn't have survived this long.' She took a breath, framing a question that was almost a whisper. 'Did someone send you, Euphrati?'\n\n'I saw a need.' Keeler looked away, finishing the application of the bandage. 'In all this horror, a person like me can only do one of two things. I could help, or I could flee. And I am tired of running.'\n\nKostagar rose to her feet, ready to press the question further, but a shout from further down the battlements drew her attention. Greff sprinted back to the captain's side, panting hard in the thin Himalazian air. 'Gunfire, ma'am,' he reported. 'Quad two, from down in the fog! Sounds like big-gauge bolters!'\n\nHer jaw set. Were the outcasts coming back already, unwilling to grant the defenders even a minute of respite? She saw the same question in Greff's eyes and shook her head. 'I want to look for myself.'\n\nGreff led her back along the battlements, picking a path through breaches in the high walls and sections where servitors worked to shore up the damage. Kostagar noted Keeler trailing behind her, and she saw the weary nods and weak smiles from her troops as the woman passed among them.\n\nThe captain heard the fighting before they got there. The flat bang of boltgun discharges sounded up the sides of the fortress like peals of thunder, and she dared to step up to the edge of the crenellations and risk a look down the wide stone slope. It was hard to see through the churning smoke, but Kostagar spotted brief splashes of heavy muzzle flare, jets of ejection flame lighting the haze from below.\n\nThere were other sounds. Loud screams of agony that were suddenly cut short, and the thudding boom of krak grenades. She saw something go spinning, wheeling away, as if thrown from one of the lower levels, out into the air to tumble to the ground far below.\n\n'That was a person,' said Greff, chancing his own head to take a look. 'An outcast?'\n\n'Are they fighting amongst themselves?' Kostagar wondered aloud. If so, it was new behaviour for the enemy.\n\nThe guns down below went quiet and the troopers on the quad stiffened, raising their lasrifles, anticipating what would come next.\n\nKostagar had her pistol drawn before she was even conscious of doing it, and she raised it up in a silent command. H"}
{"text":"ls, out into the air to tumble to the ground far below.\n\n'That was a person,' said Greff, chancing his own head to take a look. 'An outcast?'\n\n'Are they fighting amongst themselves?' Kostagar wondered aloud. If so, it was new behaviour for the enemy.\n\nThe guns down below went quiet and the troopers on the quad stiffened, raising their lasrifles, anticipating what would come next.\n\nKostagar had her pistol drawn before she was even conscious of doing it, and she raised it up in a silent command. Hold your fire.\n\n'Do you see?' Greff's voice dropped to a terrified hiss. He jabbed a finger towards the roiling mass of the smoke. 'Ma'am, look there!'\n\nAt first it was only the suggestion of movement, the vague outline of shapes drifting through the black haze. Things that could have been men, or something far worse. Kostagar heard the crunch of ceramite on breaking stone, and through her boots came the tremor of a giant's footfalls.\n\n'I see,' she said.\n\nHulking forms sheathed in pitted, battle-worn power armour were making the ascent up the side of the bastion from the burnt-out level beneath. Kostagar's heart leapt into her mouth.\n\nLegionaries.\n\nNo more outcasts, no more madmen and conscripts. These were the warlords of the Emperor's own design, a single one of them the fighting equal of every soldier under her command. They carried guns and swords scaled for hands bigger than a man's head. They were clad in wargear that could turn the hit of tank shells.\n\nIt was said their kind could not be killed, and for many years of her life Maed Kostagar had thought that to be propagandist hyperbole spun by the Council of Terra. But then she had been promoted from her home stationing among the plains of Indus to one of the coveted posts in the Imperial Palace. And there, she had seen a warrior of the Legiones Astartes in the flesh for the very first time, and come to question her cynicism.\n\nWherever the Legions walked, they brought destruction. Now two avatars of that fate climbed the stone at her feet, slow, steady and inexorable. The shades of their armour were indistinct, but the captain had seen the hordes of the Death Guard before, and she knew these could be no other.\n\nShe took aim with her pistol, and the troopers followed along with her. This would be their only chance to put up any meaningful resistance. Perhaps a lucky hit might save their lives. Kostagar knew that if even one legionary made it up to their tier with violent intent, no one would survive.\n\nBut as the captain's finger tightened on the trigger, a delicate, long-fingered hand came to rest on her wrist and she heard the voice again.\n\n'Maed, please don't,' said Keeler. She was standing right next to her, out of cover on the lip of the battlements. 'Let me speak to them.'\n\nAre you insane? The words were forming on Kostagar's lips as Keeler stepped past her, deliberately making herself fully visible. 'Euphrati, no!' She grabbed at the civilian's sleeve and tried to yank her back.\n\nKeeler shook off her grip and called out, 'Welcome, Nathaniel! It is good to see you again!'\n\nThe warrior leading the pair halted in his climb and looked up, the faceted eyes of his battle helmet finding the two women. Kostagar was aware she was pointing her weapon directly at the legionary's head, and slowly she lowered it. The warrior gave a nod in return.\n\n'By your leave, captain,' he said, his words carrying up across the battlements. 'May we cross your lines?'\n\n'If she vouches for you,' managed Kostagar, recovering her power of speech, 'then I suppose so.'\n\n'Like we have a choice?' Greff muttered the words under his breath.\n\nThe captain gave him an admonishing glance as she stepped back. 'Secure that talk and look sharp.' Greff had the sense to look chastened, and he retreated before the two grey-armoured giants rose above the ramparts and climbed over.\n\nIt took all of Kostagar's self-control to stand her ground before the towering warriors, and her knuckles whitened around the grip of her gun. She couldn't bring herself to holster it, not while every fibre of her being was screaming danger!\n\nKeeler stood between the legionaries, dwarfed by their size, but utterly unintimidated. As one, the warriors reached up to remove their helmets, revealing faces mapped with scarification.\n\nKostagar stared at them. The one who had spoken, the one Keeler had called 'Nathaniel', had different wargear from his comrade, and his aspect had a strange kindness to it that she did not expect. The other, who seemed younger, was watchful, nursing an air of distrust.\n\n'Here you are,' said the older legionary, looking down at Keeler. 'It vexes me and pleases me in equal measure to find you.' He glanced in Kostagar's direction. 'Captain. I hope you will forgive our unannounced arrival. I am Nathaniel Garro, I am...' He halted, as if correcting himself before he said more. 'I am a servant of Terra and the Emperor of Mankind.' Garro gestured at his comrade. 'He is Helig Gallor. My brother in arms.'\n\n'You are Death Guard.' Or were they? Now she saw them clearly, the colours of their armour were subtly different from that Legion. Still, everyone held their breath when she said the words.\n\nGallor grunted. 'Once. But not since the betrayal.'\n\nThe captain decided to leave that statement where it lay. 'My name is Maed Kostagar. I am company commander of the Dilectio Tier, Marmax garrison.' She gave a nod. 'What brings you to our particular piece of this hell?'\n\n'They're here for me,' Keeler answered for Garro.\n\n'Aye,' said the elder legionary, and his steady gaze went back to the other woman. 'We must talk, Euphrati.'\n\nAs he stood upon the watch-balcony, the ruins passed beneath the primarch's jaundiced eye, a repeating landscape of beheaded towers, shattered walls and the broken remains of pretty sculptures. All wreckage and destruction now, city-sized heaps of rubble that bore no resemblance to what they had once been when whole.\n\nThe war-barge Greenheart, carrying Mortarion's command post, floated low over the debris like a galleon crossing a stone sea, engines humming with power above the marching lines of the Death Guard and their auxiliaries. With mechanical regularity, the weak, spoiled light of Sol appeared and disappeared through the crimson sky as the bodies of the Titans walking with them passed in front of it, causing moments of brief eclipse. Striding high at the edges of their lines, the great machines rocked and swayed to the pace of their thunderous footsteps.\n\nThe Death Lord's thin and skeletal fingers reached for one of several censer spheres hanging from his ragged robes. Plucking it like a fruit from the bough of a tree, he rolled it in his pallid palm until the chems inside began to seethe. Threads of virulent smoke emerged from the holes in the sphere's surface and Mortarion held it to the vents of his breather mask, inhaling deeply.\n\nThe earthy reek of a particular poison filled his throat, and he felt the philtre warring with his flesh, trying to destroy it. But the ruin did not spread, it only curdled and became consumed by blood that was itself more toxic than the most lethal venom. His uneasy, altered flesh was new to him, and even now the primarch was still learning the gifts it granted. The potential that had been unlocked by his acceptance of the Grandfather's Mark changed and grew every day, and he no longer feared it. He had chosen to embrace it.\n\nMortarion drew in every last atom of the gaseous mixture, savouring the burn. The poison had been captured from the high crags of Barbarus, where no common humans could venture without suffering an agonising death.\n\nBarbarus: the primarch's adopted home world, its blighted skies since ripped asunder by the petulance of the Lion and his Dark Angels. It would forever be a dead rock, and what true traces of it still remained were few. One less now, with the sphere's contents dispersed. He crushed the globe and tossed it over the balcony's corroded balustrade, into the wreckage of the Imperial Palace's outer domains.\n\nLet it die. The notion whispered in his mind, perhaps from the depths of his own thoughts, or perhaps from other, more ephemeral dominions. Let Barbarus die, and Terra with it. Let all the worlds die and be reborn anew.\n\nIt was a fitting thought. Tall, gaunt and hooded, with a great scythe across his back, Mortarion resembled the avatar of death's messenger from the myths of thousands of human cultures. He looked down at his hands and examined scars on his pale flesh, repetitions of marks in a triad formation.\n\nLife. Decay. Rebirth. The three true states of existence.\n\nHe felt nothing at the prospect of destroying something as beautiful as his father's house. For what was beauty, after all, if not a bright and shining lie? He had never truly understood the depths of the concept, never drowned himself in the ideal like his brother Fulgrim. Beauty - forced and forged by the hand of men - was something ignoble in his eyes. It was fakery.\n\nWhat Mortarion sought was only truth.\n\nA wet sigh announced the opening of the iris door leading into his chamber, and the primarch turned from the balcony, even as two of his Deathshroud moved to intercept the unexpected visitor. Mortarion's silent praetorians were shaped in his image, each armed with a manreaper blade, which they brought to the ready.\n\nA coven-conscript - his face a mask of odorous blood, his emerald jerkin torn into rags - crashed into the room as if kicked, collapsing to the floor. The Deathshroud advanced on the mewling human as a second figure entered.\n\nTyphus. Once, the primarch would have considered the other warrior his oldest, closest friend, his trusted brother... But those days were long past. Now, Mortarion's relationship with his First Captain, the so-called Traveller, could only be described as complex.\n\nA mist of miniscule flies buzzing about the horned growths at his back, Typhus gave a bow that was just on the right side of respectful. 'My lord,' he rumbled. 'Ne"}
{"text":" Deathshroud advanced on the mewling human as a second figure entered.\n\nTyphus. Once, the primarch would have considered the other warrior his oldest, closest friend, his trusted brother... But those days were long past. Now, Mortarion's relationship with his First Captain, the so-called Traveller, could only be described as complex.\n\nA mist of miniscule flies buzzing about the horned growths at his back, Typhus gave a bow that was just on the right side of respectful. 'My lord,' he rumbled. 'News from the forward reaches.' He indicated the cowering helot. 'The probing attacks on the fortress at Marmax have stalled. They have been beaten back.'\n\nMortarion's sinews stiffened. Retreat, and notions allied to it, were not something that his Death Guard readily indulged. 'My orders were to advance, only advance. Until attrition or victory.'\n\n'Yes.' Typhus nodded again. 'And yet...' He gestured at the coven-conscript, who had prostrated himself on the deck, begging for his life. 'This one fled the line. He survived.' The Traveller turned the last word into a savage insult.\n\n'Who defends this bastion?' Mortarion waved away his praetorians, advancing towards the First Captain. 'The Warmaster's prognosticae spoke only of human soldiers garrisoned there.'\n\nTyphus kicked the conscript. 'Answer your master's question.'\n\n'Fighters!' The trembling man stared at the deck, too afraid to meet the gaze of the hulking figures around him. 'Can't beat them, never defeat them, too strong, too wilful, they don't break, won't break...'\n\n'Impossible,' said Mortarion. 'Not against the numbers I dispatched.'\n\n'And yet...' repeated Typhus, with a curl of his lip.\n\n'Explain!' The primarch growled the demand, but the conscript could only babble, his nerve breaking.\n\n'Ah, no,' Typhus grunted. 'His terror has snapped his mind. We'll get little sense from him now of what happened up there.'\n\n'Intelligence can be gleaned in other ways,' said Mortarion. He reached down and grabbed the man by his throat, hauling him off the floor. The primarch placed the fingers of his other hand around the conscript's shaven pate. Before his victim could protest, he squeezed hard enough to crack the man's skull. Carefully, forcefully, he broke the bones without crushing the delicate grey matter within.\n\nThe convict was still alive when Mortarion opened his head with a sickle-bladed execution knife, revealing the pulpy corpus of his brain. With surgical dexterity, the primarch reached in and found the man's hippocampus, deep amid the whorled mass. As the body collapsed, the Death Lord consumed the piece of brain matter in a single swallow.\n\nWithin moments, the omophagea node in Mortarion's chest dissolved it, the arcane bio-processes in the artificial organ separating out the chemical chains of memory until he could smell them in his nostrils like the content of the spent censer.\n\nHe closed his eyes and concentrated, listening to recollections that were not his own.\n\nLet it die, came a whisper, let it die. To his surprise, the words were not from his thoughts but from those of the dead man. Whatever power spoke to Mortarion in those quiet moments, it also talked to the conscript. Perhaps to all touched by the Grandfather's Mark, he mused.\n\nHe concentrated on what he needed, separating it from the chaff of trivia that formed much of the dead man's life.\n\nThen, entering the blurred memory-dream of the attack on Marmax, he was inside the tiny confines of the little human's limited body, sensing echoes of elation and mad fury, ghosts of abject terror and bloodlust. Roaring guns, screaming attackers, crashing stone. It was a wild deluge, like viewing a hololith through a torrential downpour, but Mortarion had done this before, and he knew what to look for.\n\nThe potency of the consumed memory was already starting to fade, and so the primarch pressed deeper. Let it die, said the whispers.\n\nLight blazed at the edge of the recollection - not a physical illumination, but a figurative, subjective one. Through the eyes of the dead man, Mortarion saw the moment that had sent him running, panicking.\n\nA line of common troopers firing in his direction, each one of them with a face lit by dogged defiance; and among them, unarmed, almost unnoticed, a woman kneeling. Speaking.\n\nWhat was she saying? The fading memory did not hold that recollection, but it had captured something vital - something that the dead man could sense by instinct but not articulate with words, like an animal unconsciously catching the scent of fear.\n\nMortarion knew, however. In the forbidden books he had read, in the prohibited works he had absorbed, in the partnership he had made with the Grandfather, his understanding had grown to encompass such knowledge.\n\nWitchery.\n\nThere was an aura-light around the woman that could not be seen, as if she were a prism through which a far more potent psyche had granted some of its power. That invisible light touched the humans around her, gave them strength and made them bold.\n\nShe intrigued him. That potential crackling through her blood was a priceless thing, rare and rich. He could only wonder at what nourishment it might bring if gifted to the Grandfather.\n\nLet it die, said the whispers.\n\nThe memory faded to nothing, and Mortarion's last impression of the man he had killed was the sensation of hot blood running in streams over his hands.\n\nHe blinked back to awareness, to find Typhus watching him expectantly. 'Did that illuminate you, my lord? Your taste for learning was sated?'\n\n'I saw enough,' he replied, turning away. 'We will continue with the pace of our advance as planned.'\n\nThe Traveller remained where he was, ignoring the dismissal implicit in his primarch's tone. 'Must we? The Legion marches at the speed of its slowest element, and for what account? We could be at Marmax in hours. Instead, we slowly pick our way through ruins while our enemies regroup on the horizon.'\n\nTyphus was eager for battle, and he had made no secret of how he chafed at the primarch's measured advance. He and his company would have cut away and prosecuted their own invasion, if Mortarion had not forbade it.\n\n'We will wet our blades in good time.' Mortarion touched the edge of his war-scythe. 'Patience, Calas. Patience.'\n\nThe use of his old forename drew a grimace from the Traveller. 'Would we move at so leisurely a pace if I told you that our scry-scouts have sighted the Sigillite's agents in neighbouring sectors? Knights Errant, my lord. The warriors in grey.'\n\n'You should have led with that,' Mortarion retorted irritably. 'How did this information come?'\n\n'From a blight drone,' replied Typhus. 'Before it perished, it captured an impression of an old friend. The traitor of the Eisenstein.'\n\nGarro. The whisper gave him the name, and a tremor of cold amusement unfolded in the primarch's chest. If he is here, then he has come for the woman of the light. There can be no other reason.\n\nMortarion gave a racking, dust-dry snort. For days now, he had felt the threefold hand of the Grandfather guiding him, directing him towards the faint aura flickering atop the bastion, to the light of something so pure amid so much horror that it shone like a beacon. Now came this news, the presence of the traitor, confirming what he knew to be true. It had to be fate, he decided, the Grandfather moving over events to bring them to pass.\n\nAn opportunity was here, a chance to take all these prizes at once. To obliterate Marmax and capture the woman in the memory, so her blood could be water to Nurgle's gardens; and to rid the galaxy of the oath-breaker Garro, by the little-death of his submission, or the greater of his murder.\n\nINTERVAL I\n\nThe starship Endurance: before Isstvan\n\n'What answer do you expect of him, my lord?' Typhon posed the question with deceptively little weight.\n\nMortarion considered his reply as they marched along the corridors of his flagship, his Deathshroud praetorians at his side. All about them, the warriors of the Death Guard were at their stations or setting to their preparations for the attack on the planets of the Isstvan System.\n\nHow many of them sensed the import of what was going to come, of the great upheaval that would begin on those inconsequential little worlds? How many were invested in Horus Lupercal's great plans for rebellion, and the changed galaxy that it would create?\n\nWhen the moment came, when Mortarion gave the fateful order to open fire on the other Legions, how many of his sons would pull the trigger? Not out of their own intent or understanding, but because they were commanded to do so?\n\nWill they do it because they are tools? Or because they understand this?\n\nMortarion released a breath. 'What do I expect, kinsman?' He glanced back at the First Captain, who feigned a casual smile. 'I expect to find the truth.'\n\nTyphon's expression stiffened, and he halted. 'But why him? There are others who are unswerving, loyal legionaries to which the question of obedience does need not be asked. Grulgor. Kalgaro. Crosius. And more.'\n\n'That is exactly why I need to know Nathaniel Garro's mind,' he replied, pausing beside an oval viewport. 'Because the battle-captain is fiercely independent of action and impetus. Because he rejected membership in the Davinite lodges...'\n\n'Because he is Terran-born, and not a child of Barbarus?' Typhon cocked his head and absently fingered his dark beard.\n\n'That too.' Mortarion gave a nod. 'He is respected, not just by his men and by other company captains, but by warriors in our sibling Legions. Garro's stance on what will come to pass on Isstvan is a bellwether. If he agrees to it...'\n\n'Aye, if a warrior as loyal as \"Straight-Arrow Garro\" would bow to the insurrection, then who could argue its necessity?'\n\n'Just so.' Mortarion turned to move on, but Typhon had more to say.\n\n'You know he will never take a stand against the Emperor. Garro will never turn his back on the Throne.'\n\n'Perhaps. But I will not dismiss a warrior of note without due co"}
{"text":"ns, but by warriors in our sibling Legions. Garro's stance on what will come to pass on Isstvan is a bellwether. If he agrees to it...'\n\n'Aye, if a warrior as loyal as \"Straight-Arrow Garro\" would bow to the insurrection, then who could argue its necessity?'\n\n'Just so.' Mortarion turned to move on, but Typhon had more to say.\n\n'You know he will never take a stand against the Emperor. Garro will never turn his back on the Throne.'\n\n'Perhaps. But I will not dismiss a warrior of note without due consideration.'\n\n'You are too fond of him.' Typhon sniffed. 'If I were commanding the Legion, the matter would have already been dispatched.'\n\nMortarion eyed his old friend from the depths of his hooded robes and his tone sharpened to a razor edge. 'But you are not, Calas. And the choice is not yours to make. If you wish to retain your post as captain of my First Company, you should remember that.' They began to walk again.\n\n'I meant no disrespect,' Typhon said quietly. 'But I believe we will have to kill him. Garro will not turn.'\n\nAt length, the primarch gave a nod, reluctantly accepting the possibility. 'If it needs to be done... have the brute Grulgor see to it. But only on my word.'\n\nThey found Garro with his men, and on the primarch's arrival, the battle-captain and his command squad went to their knees before their liege-lord and the First Captain.\n\nMortarion bid the legionary to his feet. 'Stand, Nathaniel, please. It becomes tiresome to look down upon my men.'\n\nThe faintest hint of doubt and uncertainty lurked in the warrior's eyes as he stood, but to his credit the battle-captain did not flinch from his gene-sire's searching, measuring gaze.\n\nMortarion smiled thinly. 'You ought to watch your step, Typhon. This one, he'll have your job one day.'\n\nStill chastened from his primarch's earlier censure, Typhon said nothing, remaining as silent as the voiceless Deathshroud.\n\nGarro took a breath. 'Lord, what service may the Seventh Company do for you?'\n\n'Their captain may step forward,' said Mortarion. 'He has earned a reward.'\n\nThe moment of confusion on the battle-captain's face was brief. 'Sire, I deserve no special-'\n\nTyphon spoke over him before he could finish the thought. 'That is not a refusal forming upon your lips, is it, captain? Such false modesty is unwelcome.'\n\n'I am merely a servant of the Emperor.' Garro bristled. 'That is honour enough.'\n\nMortarion felt Typhon's gaze on him, and his words unspoken. You see? Garro will never turn his back on the Throne.\n\nHe pushed that thought aside and beckoned to a Legion servitor lurking close by. As it ambled forward, a tray of containers held before it, he addressed Garro again. 'Then instead, Nathaniel, might you honour me by sharing my drink?'\n\nThe men called them the cups; it was not anything as archaic as a ritual, not so rigid an act as that. Just a gesture shared between warriors of the Death Guard, a small way to toast their indefatigable nature and reaffirm the concord of the XIV Legion.\n\nThe reputation of Mortarion's sons was one of obdurate strength and unbreakable endurance - their repute carried before them, the vow that no obstacle, no toxin, no venom could stop them in their tracks. This truth had been born in the poison fogs of Mortarion's adoptive home world and spread to every corner of the Death Guard's campaigns, on worlds so hostile and toxic that no other Legion would dare to face them.\n\nWith the cups, they proved that truth over again. In the echo of a gesture that he himself had begun on Barbarus, in the aftermath of any engagement where Mortarion participated, he would select warriors and share a drink.\n\nBut not ale, wine or amasec. The draught would be of poison.\n\nThe servitor finished the work of mixing the chemicals and poured measures of the lethal brew into three plain metal cups. Mortarion took the first, the second he gave to Typhon and the third he placed in Garro's open hand. The battle-captain studied the mixture dubiously, catching the molecular scents of the cocktail of toxins.\n\n'Against death,' said the primarch, saluting with the cup. He drank the contents in a single, long pull. The fire of the poisons bit into Mortarion's body and he savoured the blood-rush as they warred with his enhanced physiology. It made him feel alive.\n\nTyphon followed suit, never one to be seen to show reticence, but even he could not drink as swiftly as Mortarion had. Then Garro warily repeated the salute and drank as deeply as he dared. For a moment, the battle-captain's colour rose and the primarch wondered if he had gone too far; but Garro held his own, fighting the response of his flesh, enduring as only a Death Guard could.\n\nMortarion could not resist a cold smile, pleased by the display of fortitude. 'A rare and fine vintage, would you not agree?' Garro could only nod, the savage burn of the toxins temporarily robbing him of the ability to speak. At length, the primarch put a hand on the legionary's back. 'Come, Nathaniel,' he said, dismissing the others with a nod. 'Let's walk it off.'\n\nThey paused at a balcony above one of the Endurance's vast loading bays, where several of the Death Guard's companies were staging for the drop on Isstvan. Mortarion studied them grimly. These sons of his were doomed to a sacrifice that they had no idea was coming, and although their deaths were a regrettable cost of the rebellion to come, he did not weigh the cost cheaply.\n\nWhat Mortarion was about to do would alter the course of his Legion's future forever. Old oaths sworn and given would be shattered beyond repair. Some will call us traitors, he thought, and they may be right.\n\nHe glanced at Garro, considering what the battle-captain would say if he were to reveal the whole of the truth to him. How would he react to word of Horus' sundering?\n\n'You are a respected man,' Mortarion noted. 'There's not a captain in the whole of the Legion who would not acknowledge your combat prowess... Even Commander Grulgor, although he may hate to admit it.' Garro reluctantly accepted the words of praise as his liege-lord went on. 'The men trust you. They look to you for strength of character, for leadership, and you give it.'\n\nGarro's discomfort grew distinct. 'I do only what the Emperor commands of me, sire,' he said, after a moment.\n\nOf course he does. Once more, Mortarion felt the ghost of Typhon's warning in his thoughts.\n\n'It is important to me to have unity of purpose within my Legion,' insisted the primarch, 'just as it is important for my brother Horus to have unity across the entirety of the Legiones Astartes.' Carefully, he probed for the response he wanted, searching for some possibility that Garro might choose Legion over Throne when the ultimate moment arrived. 'The Death Guard must be of one mind,' he went on. 'We must have singular purpose or we will falter.'\n\nAffirm your loyalty to me. Mortarion stared into Garro's eyes, willing him to make the vow anew. But the words he sought to hear remained unspoken.\n\nPerhaps Typhon was right, perhaps the primarch did grant the battle-captain more latitude than he deserved. But Garro represented something that Mortarion wanted to hold fast within the Death Guard, no matter whose banner they marched under.\n\nHonour. A simple quality at its heart, but one many were hard-pressed to retain.\n\nHe posed a question to the warrior, about the Davinite lodges, and in the reply Mortarion finally saw that what he hoped for was not there.\n\n'We are set on our path by the Master of Mankind,' said Garro. 'Tasked to regather the lost fragments of humanity to the fold of the Imperium, to illuminate the lost, castigate the fallen and the invader. We can only do so if we have truth on our side. If we do it in the open, under the harsh light of the universe, then I have no doubt that we will eventually expunge the fallacies of gods and deities... But we cannot bring the secular truth to bear if any of it is hidden, even the smallest part. Only the Emperor can show the way forward.'\n\nGarro will not turn. Typhon's voice was as clear to Mortarion as it would have been if the First Captain had been standing at his side. We will have to kill him.\n\nSo be it. The primarch made his choice and covered it with a nod. 'Thank you for your candour, battle-captain. I expected nothing less.'\n\nGarro nodded, believing that he was in receipt of an honour in this moment, unaware that his words would be his death warrant.\n\nI will keep him close, Mortarion decided, and with that, learn the faces of any others among my sons who share his sentiments. And when the moment comes...\n\n...Nathaniel Garro will die for his Emperor.\n\nTHREE\n\nDuty & Love\n\nAttack Warning\n\nHelbrute\n\nAlthough it was technically classed as a single level of the Marmax Bastion, it would have been wrong to name the Dilectio Tier a 'floor' of a particular building, as if it were the upper storey on some ordinary hab-construct. The footprint of the tier, if set out on the grid of the Palace-city beneath it, would have encompassed several metropolitan blocks. It had its own independent power core, a landing pad cupola, operations centre and dozens of barrack quads - although many of these were empty, their population thinned by the constant attacks.\n\nAs such, Garro saw that Euphrati Keeler had plenty of space to call her own in the chambers Captain Kostagar had granted to her. Keeler's rooms were off the main corridor nexus of the tier, and she explained that being there made it easier for the soldiers of the Auxilia to come and find her when they wished to talk.\n\nGarro looked around, taking in the space, the low ceiling and the heavy stone walls. Electro-candles burned here and there, casting a warm light, and in one corner he spotted a familiar bundle of bound pages printed in crimson ink, lying in an open crate. His own copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus, bequeathed to him by his long-dead housecarl Kaleb, was rolled tightly in one of the pouch-packs affixed to his wargear. He had not considered it for "}
{"text":"lia to come and find her when they wished to talk.\n\nGarro looked around, taking in the space, the low ceiling and the heavy stone walls. Electro-candles burned here and there, casting a warm light, and in one corner he spotted a familiar bundle of bound pages printed in crimson ink, lying in an open crate. His own copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus, bequeathed to him by his long-dead housecarl Kaleb, was rolled tightly in one of the pouch-packs affixed to his wargear. He had not considered it for some time.\n\nAcross from a hammock, there were several empty chairs around a makeshift table made from another storage box, and a battered old auto-samovar that could have made black tea for fifty people. The rooms might have been a place for Keeler to lay her head, but they were more than that.\n\n'This feels familiar,' Garro noted, gesturing around. 'Another place, but the same scenario. Are we destined to repeat events, you and I? Perhaps this is the Emperor's influence on the path of our lives, drawing us into the same circles?'\n\nShe shook her head. 'This isn't like it was at the chapel on Hesperides.'\n\nThen, in a secret church on the orbital plate above Terra, Keeler had been actively spreading the word of the God-Emperor's divinity. She had done so with such vigour that it made her the target of a cursed Assassin sent by the Warmaster himself. Garro had killed that man before he could fulfil his mission, but to this day he still felt as if he hadn't protected Keeler well enough.\n\n'I don't preach here,' she went on. 'I don't even read the...' The woman nodded towards the papers in the crate, without finishing the thought. 'It is enough for me to just... Just be.'\n\nGarro frowned at that and sighed, suddenly as weary as if he carried the weight of the world. 'What are you doing, Euphrati?'\n\nKeeler smiled faintly. 'Whatever I can, Nathaniel.'\n\nGarro grew a scowl. 'Don't be glib, it doesn't suit you.'\n\nShe laughed. 'If you believe that, then you may not know me as well as you think.' She wandered to where her old, dented picter lay in the hammock, and toyed with the device. 'Once, I was renowned for it.'\n\nHe ignored her attempt at deflection. 'When last we met, I begged you to leave Terra, but you insisted on remaining. If you had accepted my counsel then, you would be light years away now.'\n\n'And safe? Is that what you were going to say?' Keeler shook her head. 'Do you think anywhere in the galaxy will be safe until this is over? And even then, if the Warmaster is defeated?'\n\n'Horus will die,' Garro insisted. 'And the iterator, Sindermann... He could remain in your stead.'\n\n'Kyril has his own work to do,' she countered. 'His path was never mine to choose for him.'\n\nAt length, Garro went to the crate and picked up the battered copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus. 'The word of this... It needs a light, a voice to guide it. We both know what happens when there isn't one to keep the seekers on the true path. And you are the light, Euphrati. If you go in harm's way, you put that in jeopardy!'\n\n'You're wrong,' she shot back. 'I am keeping the word alive, in the only way I can!'\n\n'By needlessly risking your life?' Garro's voice rose, and he caught himself before it became a shout.\n\nKeeler's tone was wounded. 'Is that why you are here, old friend? To say I told you so? That does not suit you.'\n\nGarro stared down at the book, frustration and duty and a dozen other sentiments warring within him. He turned the pages, briefly losing himself in the action, and the silence between them lengthened.\n\nWhen he spoke again, he took a different tack. 'Do you remember the gallery you showed me, that day on the Hesperides plate?'\n\nKeeler nodded, clasping the picter. Alone with Garro, she had presented the legionary with still images captured by the device, but each one was of a possible future where she would perish. There had been countless variations, but only one where Keeler lived - the one where Garro watched over her.\n\nShe nodded in the direction of the corridor. 'You can see the Byzant Minaret from the battlements up here.' The slender tower was the setting for one of the death-images, Garro recalled, in which Keeler's end came at the point of a sword. 'Well,' she corrected, 'the ruins of it, at least.'\n\n'I know,' said Garro. 'I was there when it was destroyed. I confess I was relieved to see it crumble. That meant one less ill fate that might come to pass.'\n\n'I meant what I said,' she said. 'The Sigillite drew an oath from me, and from Kyril, and the rest of us. We cannot preach... So I found another way to help. It is for the best.'\n\nGarro studied her, seeing the micro-expressions and subtle tells that only a transhuman could have detected. 'Do not hold back from me,' he said gently, cutting to the truth of it. 'I know you mean what you say, but I can see the doubt in you.' Keeler opened her mouth to speak but he held up a hand, finishing his thought. 'I know it, because I have also known that uncertainty. You helped me find my way past it.'\n\n'I refused to hide in some dungeon chamber in the Blackstone,' she told him. 'Yes, I have my misgivings, but I knew I could do more out in the world. I felt it in my bones. I could no more sit aside while this siege rages than you have.'\n\n'Yet you are still uncertain as to what lies at the end of your road.'\n\nShe glanced up at him. 'When did you get to be so perceptive, battle-captain?'\n\n'It's how I was made,' he admitted.\n\nKeeler sighed. 'Is it odd to say that among this madness, the fighting and bloodshed, I found a kind of peace?' She shook her head. 'Don't answer that. But I tell you, the acts of walking the corridors, talking to the troopers holding the line... I found myself exploring my own questions about the nature of the God-Emperor as well as theirs. And in doing so, they were inspired by me. I didn't mean for it to happen. But if less of them die when they hear my voice, if I give them something like faith to hold on to... How can that be a bad thing?'\n\n'You would not ask that question if you were certain of the answer.'\n\n'No. I suppose not.' She broke his gaze and looked away. 'There is an irony to this, don't you think? Our roles are reversed, Nathaniel. Once you were the one seeking guidance, but now it is I who searches for it.'\n\n'If that is so, then let me illuminate you.' He put down the booklet and crossed to her side. She seemed so small and fragile in the candle-glow, but Garro knew that was a misconception. Euphrati Keeler had a reserve of inner strength greater than many warriors of his experience. 'Think of the good you can do, the inspiration you can give, if only you live beyond this day, beyond the reach of this damnable heresy.' He reached out and took her hand, enveloping the woman's slender fingers in his great ceramite gauntlet. 'The danger you have placed yourself in, in this citadel... It is too grave. In any other soul I might think the act was a death wish! You are too important to risk yourself for such a small and inconsequential battle as this one, for just the lives of Kostagar and her meagre force of troopers. The good captain would say the same, if only you asked her.'\n\n'No...' Keeler shook her head, and pulled her hand from his grasp. 'How can you say that to me?' A new fire burned in her eyes. 'None of these battles are inconsequential. You shouldn't be so fixated on some idealised path to destiny that you lose sight of what you are fighting for! This entire bloody insurrection was born out of that kind of short-sightedness!' She put her hand, fingers spread, on the breastplate of Garro's armoured cuirass. 'However the trappings of it may appear, this conflict burning about us? It's not for the God-Emperor, not for His primarch sons or even for your brother Legions. It's for the common folk of the Imperium, the ones who have the most to lose! People like Maed and her troopers. Tell me you still see that, Nathaniel. Please.'\n\nHe held his silence, weighing his words before he replied. 'I... see it.' But for a moment, he had not. It was easy to lose perspective in a war so vast it had set the galaxy aflame. 'There is truth in your words,' he went on, 'but never forget that I am unlike you. I am a warrior of the Legiones Astartes, and I was bred to instil fear and awe. My kind cannot engender what you do. Faith. Love.' Garro shook his head. 'A speaker, a saint... She can inspire. But ultimately, a legionary is only a creature of martial duty... And my duty is to preserve your life at any cost.'\n\n'Even if it is against my wishes?'\n\n'Even if.' He gave a wan smile. 'You once told me I would save you, Euphrati. Please, let me do that.'\n\n'You will,' she said firmly. 'It is not quite time yet. But soon. Very soon.'\n\nGarro took a breath to form another question, but before he could utter a word, a clanging alarm bell sounded down the corridors.\n\n'The attack warning,' said Keeler. 'The heretics have returned.'\n\n'Throne and blood.' Gallor watched the colour drain from Captain Kostagar's face as she stared through her monocular, into the army of figures beneath the oncoming mass of war-smoke. 'There's so many of them... I can't even begin the count.'\n\nGallor nodded gravely. 'They've picked up the pace. The main elements of the Death Guard advance will enter attack range within an hour. I'll warrant their vanguard will be here in minutes.'\n\nShe frowned. 'I don't see the Titans. I had expected their bombardment...'\n\n'That is not the Death Guard way,' he noted. 'The war machines will hold off in case heavy fire is required. The attacks to come will be ones of attrition, fought close and hard. They will want to see your faces when you die.' He ventured to the edge of the battlements and looked down. Shapes moved in the haze, but he couldn't register anything more than vague forms. 'Now would be the time for you to commit any reinforcements, captain.'\n\nKostagar gave him a shocked look and a bark of incredulous laughter. 'Are you new to this battle, legionary? We were the re"}
{"text":"ll hold off in case heavy fire is required. The attacks to come will be ones of attrition, fought close and hard. They will want to see your faces when you die.' He ventured to the edge of the battlements and looked down. Shapes moved in the haze, but he couldn't register anything more than vague forms. 'Now would be the time for you to commit any reinforcements, captain.'\n\nKostagar gave him a shocked look and a bark of incredulous laughter. 'Are you new to this battle, legionary? We were the reinforcements. No one else will be coming.' She waved in the direction of the other distant bastions lined up past Marmax, disappearing into the far reaches. 'Each of these fortresses is an island unto itself. We are all that is left of this one's populace.' She lifted the monocular again, scanning the enemy lines.\n\n'Then, with respect, perhaps it is time to withdraw.' Gallor checked his boltgun, his nerves tingling with a pre-sense of imminent violence.\n\nAs a former warrior of the XIV Legion, he knew their tactical doctrines by heart. The initial probing attacks were over, and the next strike would be a reconnaissance-in-force. After that would come what the sons of Barbarus called the march - the steady, inexorable movement of their lethal infantry advance, rolling over all resistance, grinding it brutally beneath their boots.\n\n'My orders were to hold,' Kostagar replied, clutching what defiance she still had. 'And I will, until I... Until...' She faltered as she saw something through the monocular. Her expression shifted again, towards abject fear and cold revulsion. 'What in the name of blades is that?' Horror marbled every word she uttered.\n\nKostagar pointed at a war-barge moving through the Palace-city's rubble-choked boulevards, far off in the middle of the main Death Guard force. Atop the corroded, copper-green prow of the vessel, figures were visible amid a cloud of drifting, swirling black motes. One was tall, lost in the shadows of a dark cloak; the other was hulking and bloated. An aura of ghastly menace surrounded them.\n\nGallor didn't need to see their ruined faces. He knew their names.\n\n'He is here,' said the legionary, but his words were for his kinsman, as Garro approached from behind. 'Mortarion has come. And Typhon's with him.'\n\n'It is said he calls himself Typhus now,' said Garro, moving to stand alongside. 'He always was... twisted inside. Now his outer aspect mirrors his true nature.'\n\nKostagar let the monocular drop. 'That... that's a primarch. One of the changed ones.'\n\n'Aye,' said Gallor.\n\nShe nodded, staring at the stones at her feet. Sweat dripped off her face, and Gallor frowned. He had seen this in common folk before - the shock-effect of facing a post-human being, of grasping that abrupt realisation of what the Emperor's sons really were, and of what they were capable.\n\nBut this was worse, for what Kostagar saw down there was a corrupted version of that, an engineered demigod transformed into something monstrous. Something daemonic.\n\n'After due consideration,' said the captain, 'I've decided to re-evaluate the orders I was given-'\n\nHeat like the heart of a star obliterated the woman before she could finish the thought. Propelled by preternaturally fast reflexes, Gallor and Garro were already in motion as the sun-fire pulse of the enemy plasma cannon screamed in, diving away from the strike point.\n\nBut Maed Kostagar never saw her death coming. The plasmatic blast ate a hemisphere of stone out of the battlements, turning ferrocrete blocks into acidic vapour, heating others around it to the point of brittle fracture. Fires started everywhere there was something combustible, and troopers screamed as their uniforms caught alight and their carapace armour melted like wax.\n\nThe smallest mercy was that Kostagar would not have felt any pain, likely would not even have known she was dying - the violent force of the plasma blast reduced her to atoms faster than her nerves would have registered it. But now a good soldier was dead and her people were in disarray.\n\nGallor lurched back to the seething heat of the broken battlements and saw the massive, bloated shape of the captain's killer, rising before a horde of screaming outcasts.\n\nIt resembled a venerable Dreadnought of the Legion, but only in the broadest of ways. Swollen and overlarge, the bipedal mutant was a fusion of corroded armour plating and oozing, ashen skin. Thick wattles of diseased, reeking flesh protruded from around the edges of the rust-caked metal, as if the heavy plates were barely able to keep the organic matter inside from bursting out into the air.\n\nOne entire arm of the bestial thing was the bulbous plasma cannon that had erased Kostagar from the world, jets of superheated steam shrieking from coolant vents down the serrated length of the glowing barrel. Where the other arm should have been, there was a writhing nest of slime-coated tentacles, each as thick as the torso of a human. Some of these were anchored in the sloping side of the bastion's outer wall, allowing the creature to make the slow climb upward, and others whipped at the air, showing hook-toothed maws at their tips.\n\nThe hulk had no head, only a torn orifice in the centre of its chest where ropes of rotting epidermis had been peeled back and nailed in place. In the hole there was a face made of dozens of maddened, rheumy eyes that rolled to show yellowed whites, above a flapping skeleton jaw that opened and closed like the working of a mantrap.\n\n'Helbrute.' Garro named the thing with a sneer of disgust. 'The Death Lord has sent one of his accursed to destroy us.'\n\n'It won't die cleanly,' said Gallor, as the creature crashed upward over the fortress' steep incline, knocking aside the outcasts at its feet in its eagerness.\n\n'But it will die,' Garro noted. He raised his gun - an exemplary model of a master-crafted Paragon bolter - and fired into the Helbrute's hide. The whistling cadence of Kraken rounds sliced through the air and Gallor drew his pistol, snapping off a cluster of shots in the direction of the monster's torso.\n\nOrange sparks flared off the Helbrute's armour, but it showed no signs of slowing its climb. Both the legionaries knew that they could not allow the thing to reach the Dilectio Tier. In the confines of the corridors, it would kill everything that drew breath.\n\nGallor found the nearest of the Army troopers who still showed some degree of clarity and gestured down the line. 'Kostagar is dead, you are in command now. Muster the men, concentrate your fire on the outcasts.'\n\n'B-but that... that thing!' The young man's eyes were wide with abject terror.\n\n'Is our concern,' Gallor said bluntly. 'Do as I say. We'll avenge your captain, aye?'\n\n'Aye.' The trooper stiffened as he accepted his new burden, and Gallor turned away.\n\nGarro handed him a magnetic disc attached to a length of heavy-duty polymer cable. The cable ran to a reel set into the stonework of the battlements, and the other legionary had already locked another to a tether point on his backpack. 'Ready to take a stroll, Helig?'\n\nGallor accepted the disc and locked on himself. Similar mechanisms were often deployed in null-grav environments, safety lines that would keep fighters from drifting off into the void. Here, the cables allowed defenders to descend along the steeply angled sides of the Marmax Bastion without fear of falling to their deaths.\n\n'Guns only,' added Garro. 'We cannot chance the use of blades... A single ill-judged sword swing could cut our cables, and I have no desire to plummet to the ground below.'\n\nAnother plasmatic blast screamed through the air, lashing the battlements with flame, and Gallor banged his mailed fist on Garro's shoulder pauldron. 'Go now!'\n\nThe Helbrute weapon's powerful release was brutal, but it ran hot and the recharge cycle was long. In the pause between shots, the two Knights Errant threw themselves over the edge of the fortifications, sparks rising as they dug in the heels of their ceramite boots and the fingertips of their gauntlets to slow their descent.\n\nGallor felt the tug of the cable at his back, heard the buzz of the line reeling out. Raising his bolt pistol again, he paced rounds up the Helbrute's torso, aiming for the eye-cluster.\n\nAround him, streaks of laser fire fell in a deadly rain as the troopers on the line opened up on the chattering outcasts. The Helbrute rocked back and emitted a reedy scream, exhaling a noxious breath that curdled the air about it.\n\nDangling precariously over the dizzying drop, the legionaries kept up their own salvo of bolt shells, but the monster brought up its tentacles to cover its torso with the thick bulk of greasy flesh. Impacts tore out chunks of sizzling meat, leaving gaping wounds oozing chalky pus, but the hits did little to slow the thing's advance.\n\nGarro pulled on his cable, reeling back and swinging wide as the Helbrute lit off another shrieking plasma bolt. This one slashed horizontally across the bastion's stonework, carving a blackened furrow through the ouslite cladding. Across the slope, the slide on Gallor's pistol snapped open as he expended the last round in the magazine. He bared his teeth in annoyance as he slammed a fresh load into place. The Helbrute soaked up every hit they landed on it, and the thing never lost a step. Guns would not be enough to stop it. A more radical approach was required.\n\nGallor jammed his pistol back in its holster and pulled his combat knife instead, turning it in his fist. Garro caught sight of light flashing off the weapon's monomolecular edge, and called out, 'What are you doing? I said no blades-'\n\n'I know what you said,' Gallor snapped back. 'Cover me.' He flicked the knife backwards and cut his own tether. Gravity snatched at him and the warrior dropped like a stone, sending up sheets of sparks as his armour scraped down the side of the fortress exterior.\n\n'Fool!' He heard Garro shout the word at his back, but still the battle-captain did as he was asked, br"}
{"text":" Garro caught sight of light flashing off the weapon's monomolecular edge, and called out, 'What are you doing? I said no blades-'\n\n'I know what you said,' Gallor snapped back. 'Cover me.' He flicked the knife backwards and cut his own tether. Gravity snatched at him and the warrior dropped like a stone, sending up sheets of sparks as his armour scraped down the side of the fortress exterior.\n\n'Fool!' He heard Garro shout the word at his back, but still the battle-captain did as he was asked, bracketing his comrade with heavy fire.\n\nAt the last second, Gallor kicked off and launched himself directly at the Helbrute. He collided with the creature, leading with the blade, stabbing wildly at its exposed flesh.\n\nThe monster screeched and rocked back, but its clawed feet held firm, metre-long iron talons digging deep into the stone. Gallor took off the tips of thrashing tentacles whipping at his back, sending gushes of foetid blood sluicing into the lower tiers. He grabbed fistfuls of sallow, doughy meat and ripped them away. The Helbrute writhed, trying to shake him off, and when it couldn't, the beast clubbed him with the massive barrel of the plasma cannon.\n\nGallor saw a ball of light building in the weapon's pre-fire chamber, and the air around it shuddered in a heat haze - but then more shots from Garro's Paragon clipped the steaming coolant pipes and mechanisms feeding the cannon.\n\nThe Helbrute let off a premature shot from the plasma weapon, a catastrophic misfire that ripped open the emitter muzzle and sent particles of bone and fulgurite glass into the air. Gallor pressed himself into the fortress wall to duck the inferno, but even at a fraction of full power, the blast boiled off shreds of his wargear's outer shell. The fire exposed the muscle fibres and power train of the armour beneath, and cooked the warrior's flesh within.\n\nWounded and enraged, the Helbrute sent its writhing appendages snaking around him, trying to hold him down. The trapdoor mouth opened in a ululating scream, and it brought the broken end of the plasma cannon down on his chest.\n\nGlowing blinding white, the shattered maw of the useless gun was still hot enough to melt ceramite, and with a crackling hiss, the Helbrute drove it through the layers of Gallor's chestplate and into the meat of him.\n\nThe legionary let out a cry of agony as sub-modules of his wargear went offline and the infernal heat enveloped him, boiling the blood in his veins. Unlike poor Kostagar, Gallor would be made to feel every moment of his burning end.\n\nDimly, he was aware of Garro crying out to him, but the screaming from the Helbrute's broken-toothed maw drowned out the words.\n\nIf I am to perish, then this abomination comes with me. Gallor grabbed blindly for a cluster of knurled cylinders dangling from his belt, fingers closing around them.\n\nHe ripped the krak grenades free, the arming pins spinning away, and with a yell, the legionary rammed the devices into the orifice of the Helbrute's face.\n\nThe creature reacted, releasing its grip on Gallor as it tried desperately to pull the grenades from where they had lodged. To his dismay, Gallor's armour responded jerkily to his movements, malfunctioning around him as he began to slide towards the sheer drop.\n\nA heavy shape blurred past him on the end of a whickering cable, and Gallor was suddenly moving across the fortress walls instead of down. Garro had him in his iron grip, pulling the other legionary away.\n\nBehind them, the krak grenades went off in a ripple of thunder and the Helbrute came apart, the discharge smothering its cohort of outcasts in ashes and fire. A toxic wash of acidic blood steamed in the light falling from the great aegis far above, and in the lull that followed, Gallor heard the cheers of Kostagar's troopers and the creaking of strained cable. With only a few degrees of motion in the fused joints of his armour, he could only tense himself against the storm of pain in his flesh, as his bio-implants fought the damage within him.\n\n 'Fool,' Garro repeated, shifting his position to take Gallor's weight. Moving hand over hand, he began the slow process of climbing back up the slope towards the Dilectio Tier. 'It almost killed you.'\n\n'Almost,' admitted Gallor, wheezing out the words as his body forced him into a healing trance. 'Perhaps the next one our gene-sire sends... will be more of a challenge.'\n\nGarro is reunited with Keeler.\n\nFOUR\n\nThe Fate We Choose\n\nNo Turning Back\n\nThe Challenge\n\nAnother of the empty barracks in the core of the Dilectio Tier had been turned into a makeshift recovery space, and Greff - the trooper Gallor had summarily promoted into command of the defenders - had provided a medicae servitor for use by the Knights Errant.\n\nFor a while, Garro stood sentinel beside the angled support pallet where his brother-warrior lay silently. The helot tottered closer, using a manipulator to inject philtres and antigens into Gallor's neck, but in truth its help was hardly needed. Despite the horrible plasma burns the legionary had suffered, he was fully capable of healing himself, given time.\n\nBut that was a commodity no one had in surplus within the Marmax Bastion. On the tick of every minute, a salvo of laser bolts streaked into the flanks of the fortress, sending crashing shocks through the dense stone. Dust and debris trickled from the ceiling above as the Death Guard used their ranged weapons against the stronghold, forcing the defenders to remain in cover or be atomised.\n\nMortarion could have ordered the macro-guns and nuclear launchers under his command to open up in an instant, had he truly wanted to wipe Marmax off the map; but that was not the tactic here. The invaders barraged the tiers to keep the troopers pinned in place while the real attack was being prepared.\n\nThere was little else to be done but wait, and so Garro was in the process of cleaning and reloading his Paragon bolter when Gallor suddenly jerked awake, twitching sharply enough to knock the doddering servitor off its iron feet.\n\nThe younger warrior's damaged features were briefly caught in a moment of shock as he looked down at the half-melted wreckage of his own battle armour.\n\n'My wargear...' Gallor managed, his voice as dry as kindling.\n\n'It was almost your coffin,' Garro explained, bringing him a canteen of water. 'I am sorry to say it is damaged beyond our capacity to fully repair, at least with any tools to hand in this place.' Gallor took the canteen and drank it dry as Garro went on. 'The plasma damaged the joints, destroyed the circuitry.'\n\nThe lasers hit again, and Gallor cocked his head, quietly assimilating the situation. 'Very well,' he said. He discarded the container and leaned up, rising unsteadily off the pallet where Garro had placed him. Leaked blood and processor fluids soaked the mattress where the warrior's genhanced body had gone into overdrive in order to keep him alive. He closed his eyes and Garro knew he was taking a mental inventory of the damage that had been done to him.\n\nNeither needed to say it out loud. Gallor's risky ploy to kill the Helbrute had succeeded, but he had almost died in the attempt.\n\nHis eyes opened again. 'Thank you.' Gallor spoke quietly, grudgingly, and his tone made it clear he would not be open to criticism of his actions. 'How long have I been hibernative? What has transpired in that time?'\n\n'Not long,' said Garro. 'Only hours. I think your mind refused to surrender fully to the healing trance. And as for the enemy...' He gestured at the dusty air and they both listened to the steady chorus of energy impacts.\n\nGallor nodded to himself, and he ran a hand over his head, tensing as he touched patches where the outer epidermis had been burned all the way down to the nerve sheath, mentally shunting away the pain. 'The next assault will be the one that breaks through.'\n\n'Likely,' admitted Garro.\n\nGallor rose stiffly, and made a growling noise as he surveyed the damage wrought upon his ruined armour. 'For a moment... when I awoke... I thought my spirit had been severed from my body.' He shook his head. 'Fanciful. The mind playing tricks upon me.'\n\n'You don't consider such things possible?'\n\nGallor eyed him. 'I'm not like you. I put no stock in the numinous.'\n\n'And yet you came to me with the news of Keeler. You came here. You almost died protecting her and... the numinous things she represents.'\n\n'Yes. It seems I am what you accused me of out there, captain. I am a fool.' Before Garro could respond to that, the injured warrior took a juddering, limping step towards him. 'You know they will all die, yes? When the march reaches us, every last one of the defenders will be massacred, even with Keeler's inspiration to motivate them. Her words can't protect them. The Emperor cannot protect them. Their only choices are retreat or perish.' He paused. 'And as for you and I... There is no question Mortarion will see us dead before he moves on from this place.'\n\nFrom the gloom of his memories, a voice pushed out of Garro's eidetic recall and echoed in his ears, as strong as if the man who had said the words were standing beside him.\n\nHe let me see. The Vindicare Assassin Eristede Kell, corrupted and dispatched by the Warmaster to kill Euphrati Keeler on the Hesperides plate, had spoken to him in the moments before Garro ended his life. And I've seen you dead, Death Guard. Your heart broken and bleeding black.\n\nKell's utterance had the conviction of someone bereft of any doubt. Was it possible that Horus had somehow shown the Assassin a skein of the future where Garro's life was forfeit? He looked at Gallor's damaged flesh, at the black blood congealing on his body where the legionary's bio-implants warred with his near-fatal injuries.\n\nThe question weighed him down. Is it finally time?\n\n'She can't die here,' Garro said quietly, then he repeated the statement with force. 'She can't die here! I will not allow it!'\n\n'But if Keeler refuses to leave-'\n\n'Are you whole enough to fight, H"}
{"text":"le that Horus had somehow shown the Assassin a skein of the future where Garro's life was forfeit? He looked at Gallor's damaged flesh, at the black blood congealing on his body where the legionary's bio-implants warred with his near-fatal injuries.\n\nThe question weighed him down. Is it finally time?\n\n'She can't die here,' Garro said quietly, then he repeated the statement with force. 'She can't die here! I will not allow it!'\n\n'But if Keeler refuses to leave-'\n\n'Are you whole enough to fight, Helig?' Garro's words were as fierce as the roar of the lasguns, and he stared into the other warrior's eyes as he spoke.\n\n'Always,' said Gallor, bristling at the challenge.\n\n'I assumed as much.' Garro picked up the other warrior's bolter and pressed it into his hands. 'These are my commands: secure the landing cupola on the far side of the tier. There's a heavy cargo carrier in there that should still be airworthy. Strip it to the bulkheads and pack every last one of Kostagar's troopers inside, and Keeler with them. Take them to the Inner Palace, low and fast, beyond the range of the Titan guns. Take them somewhere safe.'\n\n'Look around,' Gallor said sourly. 'Safe is a relative term, kinsman.'\n\n'Do as I say!'\n\nGallor grimaced. 'Suppose I agree to that. You know what will happen when Mortarion's spotters see the troopers abandoning their posts. They'll come in force, and swiftly with it. We both know the Death Guard can take the pace if they are motivated. That carrier won't make it off the pad.'\n\n'Aye,' admitted Garro. 'So I will provide something else to occupy their attention.'\n\nThe younger warrior's scalded face twisted in a grimace as he caught Garro's meaning. 'You're not coming with us.'\n\n'We go where we are needed.'\n\n'You want me to... to run? While you stay back and sell your life like a cheap token?' Gallor was affronted by the suggestion. 'Where is the honour in that?'\n\n'It is not a matter of honour. It is one of need.' Garro shook his head. 'I have no doubt you can fight, despite your injuries, but on this day I need a man I can trust, not a warrior.' He put a hand on Gallor's shoulder. 'You might not believe in what I do, but you believe in duty. And yours is to save Keeler and the other survivors.'\n\nGallor angrily shrugged him off. 'What do you think you will achieve? The great Battle-Captain Nathaniel Garro, the hand of the Sigillite, the hero of the Eisenstein, will single-handedly halt the Death Guard advance? Mortarion's guns will rip you to shreds in the blink of an eye! This is arrogance.. Nothing but fatalistic hubris!'\n\n'I do have my pride, it must be said,' Garro countered. 'And I have no wish to die for nought. But today there is need. And we both know it.'\n\n'My words fall on deaf ears.' Gallor stepped away. 'You will do whatever you wish, no matter what argument I present. That has always been your way.'\n\n'I know my duty-'\n\n'An excuse!' Gallor shot back. 'You took the Eisenstein and ran for Terra, and said it was because of duty! Those of us on the ship, the Seventy, we had no say in it! And so we found ourselves orphaned sons, cut out from the Legion we called home. Because of a choice you made, Garro.' Now he was bringing it into the open, the other legionary's long-buried resentment could not be held back. 'We were imprisoned on Luna because of you. Distrusted by our cousins in the other loyalist Legions, and named betrayers by our own. We lost all that we were because of your decision! And now you seek to make another grand gesture, the consequences of which you won't live long enough to see!'\n\nGarro stood in silence. The other loyal Death Guard who had come with him on his desperate race to carry warning of Horus' betrayal, they had followed him because he was their commander. But in the time since that act, he had never dwelled on the question: had they agreed with his choice?\n\nHe had been arrogant, he realised, assuming they felt as he did.\n\n'If we had not fled the Dropsite Massacre at Isstvan,' Garro began, 'we would be dead... or turned. Is that what you wish for, Helig?'\n\nGallor took a shuddering breath. 'We might have been able to stop Mortarion before he committed to the Warmaster's perfidy, and the pacts he has made since. We could have...'\n\n'Changed his mind?' Garro shook his head. 'No. I wish that were so, but that point was too far gone. Typhon and that bastard Word Bearer Erebus made certain of that with their machinations. Only now, in retrospect, is it clear. We lost our Legion a long time before Isstvan. The rot was already there, but we did not see it.' His remorse weighed heavily in his words. 'Never forget, we are not the ones who sundered our oath. We are the only unbroken.'\n\n'And because of that, there is no place for us.' Gallor's ire faded, turning bitter as another rain of dust fell from the stonework above them.\n\n'You are mistaken.' Garro stiffened. 'My place is here, now. And yours? For the moment, it is with Keeler and the others. It will take a Knight Errant to get them through the aerial defence cordons to the Palace's inner dominions.'\n\n'You trade your life for theirs? You, a legionary. A warlord of the Emperor. For a handful of common soldiers and a woman reciting pretty words.' Gallor scowled. 'You know, I thought if I came here with you, I might understand you better. But I still don't.'\n\n'The moment we value those people as less than us,' Garro told him, 'we take the first step down the path beaten by Horus. Keeler reminded me of that, and now I do the same for you.' He let the silence hang for a moment, then spoke again. 'I regret the circumstances that forced me to drag you and the others into this. I regret the deaths of those I called my battle-brothers... Tollen Sendek. Meric Voyen. Solun Decius. And the rest. But we all would have perished over Isstvan had we not fled the massacre. At least here on Terra, you and I can choose the manner of our own fates.'\n\n'There is little comfort in that,' Gallor noted.\n\n'Agreed.'\n\nAt length, Gallor checked over his bolt pistol, gear packs and the few remaining krak grenades, making ready. 'It vexes me that I must abandon you. It feels like a betrayal.'\n\n'That you live is all that matters,' Garro told him. He reached into a pouch and found the booklet of folded pages within. 'Here. I want you to take this.'\n\nGallor looked at the papers and raised an eyebrow. 'I have no interest in that.'\n\n'This was bequeathed to me by a man named Kaleb Arin,' Garro went on, weighing the dog-eared copy of the Lectitio Divinitatus in his hand. 'He was my housecarl. An ordinary soul, but without doubt one of the most loyal and honourable men I have ever known. The words on these pages... They gave him guidance. They gave him purpose. It's yours now.'\n\n'I have no interest,' Gallor repeated, but Garro shook his head.\n\n'I am not asking you to believe,' he said firmly. 'Just read. And perhaps then, you will have the understanding that escapes you.'\n\nFor a moment, Garro thought the other warrior would turn his back, and the silence between them was filled by the keening of another laser barrage.\n\nThen finally Gallor reached out and snatched the booklet from him. 'I will consider it,' he rumbled.\n\n'You've made your decision?' The new voice came from the doorway across the room, and both of them turned. A figure stood watching them; Garro was certain that Euphrati Keeler had not been there a moment before, certain his enhanced senses would have heard her approaching. Yet they had not.\n\n'How long have you been listening?' said Gallor.\n\n'Long enough to know what is intended.' She looked up at Garro. 'We don't have to leave, Nathaniel.'\n\n'You know that is not so,' he countered.\n\n'The Emperor protects,' said the woman. 'He has done it before, He will do it again.'\n\n'You are right.' Garro drew himself up. 'The Emperor does protect. Through me.' He gestured at Gallor. 'Through us. It is why we are here.'\n\nShe blinked, and doubt darkened her face. 'You believe He sent you, is that it?'\n\nWhen Garro spoke again, his voice dropped to a softer register. 'Euphrati... You are not naive. You cannot believe you would survive a Death Guard assault.'\n\n'She does not want to.' Gallor fixed Keeler with a hard, searching gaze. 'Do you see it, Garro? Staying here, in the path of the fighting, facing certain annihilation. It would take away the burden of the choice she must make. Free her from it.' He addressed her directly. 'But that is the way of a weak spirit, and you are not weak. The battle-captain would never venerate someone undeserving.'\n\nA lone tear followed the curve of Keeler's cheek before falling to the flagstones at her feet. 'I... I cannot carry this burden any more. I am spiralling, falling, out of control. Can you know what it is like to be the one others look to for guidance, but to have none for yourself? Yes, I think you do.' She brought a balled fist to her chest. 'I am hollow inside. Every day, I give all that is in me... But the well runs dry. I am afraid I will become the echo instead of the voice.'\n\nGarro went to her, and once again, he took her hand in his. 'Neither of us had a choice in the paths that destiny placed us on. But we cannot falter. We must go on, for the alternative is ruin and destruction. You taught me that, Euphrati.' He felt a swell of certainty in his chest, a renewal of his resolve - cold, strong and clear, like the waters of a mountain stream. 'I learned the lesson you imparted to me when I first came searching for you. Do you remember what you told me?'\n\n'You are of purpose.' She nodded. 'The Emperor has a duty that only you can shoulder.'\n\n'And at last I see what that purpose is.' Garro returned the nod. 'Perhaps I can inspire as you do, in my own way, not with words but with this.' He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. 'I see my path now, without obfuscation. From the core of my being, you have my thanks.'\n\nKeeler looked away. 'I wish I had your certainty, Nathaniel.'\n\n'You do,' he told her. 'You need only to re"}
{"text":"mber what you told me?'\n\n'You are of purpose.' She nodded. 'The Emperor has a duty that only you can shoulder.'\n\n'And at last I see what that purpose is.' Garro returned the nod. 'Perhaps I can inspire as you do, in my own way, not with words but with this.' He placed his hand on the hilt of his sword. 'I see my path now, without obfuscation. From the core of my being, you have my thanks.'\n\nKeeler looked away. 'I wish I had your certainty, Nathaniel.'\n\n'You do,' he told her. 'You need only to rediscover it. Helig will make certain you have the time you need to do so.'\n\nGarro turned back to the other legionary and offered his hand. Gallor took it and they clasped each other's vambraces, the ceramite of their gauntlets clanking as they met in the martial gesture.\n\n'I will not wish you good fortune,' said the younger warrior. 'Those words would be... disrespectful. I will only say this - if you are to walk the martyr's path, then fight well, battle-captain.'\n\n'We are legionaries,' Garro replied. 'That is what we were made to do.'\n\nHe began to stride away, but Keeler reached out and grasped his hand once again. 'I don't want this,' she said, swallowing a sob. 'I don't want you to go.'\n\n'Neither do I,' he admitted, a strange flutter of unfamiliar emotions unfolding in his chest. 'But I must.'\n\nSomething made him turn in place, and Garro found Gallor staring back at him, a new expression of grim concern etched over his scarred features. 'Do you hear that?' Gallor raised a hand, as if trying to cup a sound out of the dusty air.\n\nGarro strained to listen, and for a moment he did not comprehend what the other warrior meant. But then his blood chilled as the reality became apparent.\n\nThere was nothing to hear. The guns of the Death Guard were quiet.\n\nFrom the deck of his command barge, Mortarion could hear the crackle of the fracturing stonework across the surface of the Marmax Bastion. The concentrated salvos of beam fire had heated the great granite slabs to incredible temperatures, causing the stone to slag and become molten in certain spots, and it drooled down the sloping flanks, undermining the structure of the upper tiers. Now he had halted the bombardment, the constant chill of the katabatic winds returned to caress the oppressed fortress, and the masonry split along faults and fissures as it cooled.\n\nMarmax would die slowly and by inches, eventually collapsing in on itself like a gigantic tooth rotted from within. One more marker against my father's hubris, considered the primarch, one more of His creations falling before the undeniable truth. All things decay.\n\nLet it die, said the whispers, and Mortarion nodded to himself.\n\nAll things must die in order to be reborn. The Grandfather had shown him that singular truth when his Legion had been becalmed in the madness of the warp, and the Death Lord had learned the lesson well.\n\nBeneath the prow of the hovering barge, the advance orders of Mortarion's pestilent legionaries waited in stillness, the only sound above the mutter of anti-grav motors the rasping, bubbling chorus of their breathing. He cast a glance across the ranks of hulking forms in rusted, discoloured armour, many stained with glistening ichor, others newly blessed with transformed flesh that oozed from the crevices of their wargear. Even the ever-present clouds of black flies that weaved and danced about the Death Guard mass seemed muted, crawling upon the exposed skin or soiled metals of Mortarion's sons rather than buzzing in swarms.\n\nThe Legion was waiting for him. Mortarion raised his pallid, skeletal hand, preparing to give the signal for the terminal phase of the attack - the advance that would leave nothing alive inside the shell of Marmax - and hesitated.\n\nSomething was moving on the flanks of the battered citadel. A figure in storm-grey armour and a war-cloak, leaping from one shattered battlement to another, descending towards the broken ground like a falling comet.\n\nAnimated as if by their own will, cluster-cannons on the barge's flanks twitched and moved to track the figure, and legionaries with long-bolters among Typhus' Grave Wardens took it upon themselves to take aim.\n\n'Hold your fire,' growled the primarch, his voice carrying. His raised hand became a fist, and unseen, a curious and twisted smile emerged in the shadows of his hood.\n\n'Why?' Mortarion turned to find his First Captain watching him from close by. Deep in his musings, he had allowed himself to dismiss Typhus' presence. 'A single warrior? I'll have him in ashes before his boots touch the earth. Why tarry, my lord? Must I ask this question again?'\n\n'Because I wish it,' he muttered. And in truth, Mortarion already knew who it was that had dared to show his face to them.\n\nThe winds brought a shout of defiance to the war-barge, carried over the heads of the thousands-strong Death Guard forces, and the shout was the primarch's name - not a hail or a greeting but an accusation, a challenge.\n\n'Mortarion!' The warrior in grey called out across the silenced battlefield. 'For Terra's sake and by the will of the Emperor of Mankind, I name you traitor!'\n\nTraitor. The last word echoed about the ruins surrounding them, repeating off the broken walls and into the haze of war-smoke. Mortarion's smile became brittle, fracturing into a sneer. A swift, stony fury came upon him at the denunciation, indignant rage steeling his limbs.\n\n'I have betrayed nothing,' he hissed, answering the whispers in his mind before they could begin anew. The primarch strode to the edge of the observation gallery and gripped the corroded rail there, tightly enough to compact the metal. He was aware of his warriors in the ranks below looking up at him, eager for his next order, conflicted by his inaction.\n\nThe shout came again. 'You are corrupt! You have destroyed what you were sworn to protect! If one shred of what you once were still remains, then show it now! Face me, gene-sire... If you have the courage!'\n\n'Garro.' Typhus uttered the name like a curse. 'It appears time has not diminished his arrogance, only nurtured it.' The great growth upon the Traveller's back shuddered. The plague swarms nesting within the Destroyer Hive that shared the legionary's transformed body sensed the warrior's need to make murder, and they wanted to fulfil his desire. 'Grant me the right of dispatch, my lord. Say the word. Say it.'\n\nFor a moment, Mortarion considered the possibility. He need only nod and Typhus would have his Grave Wardens gun down the Knight Errant. And they would not kill Garro with that opening salvo, no. They would likely cripple him, breach his armour and render him unable to fight. Only then would his death begin, a long and tormented process that might last to the Fall of Terra and Throne, and beyond.\n\nIt was a tempting prospect. But as with everything Typhus offered his liege-lord, it came with a cost.\n\nIf Mortarion granted the kill to the First Captain, then the sacramental power of Garro's death would belong to Typhus the Traveller, not to the Reaper of Men.\n\nMortarion had learned that in his new, changed existence, the boon of Grandfather Nurgle required sacrifice. His body and those of his warriors had been remade, literally transformed into the undying ideal that was the dark soul of his Legion - but the bargain had to be paid for, again and again, and the only coin of value was death.\n\nThe death of a hero, of a believer... That had great worth. Not just as a murder-gift to Nurgle and his gardens of decay, but to the corrupted spirits of Mortarion's warriors. The changed way was still fresh upon them, and while many embraced the new flesh, others wavered. With this kill upon his scythe's blade, such a righteous kill indeed, the primarch would reaffirm his mastery of the Legion.\n\n'No,' he told Typhus. 'You are denied. Garro's life belongs to me. Once, he pledged it to my name. It is mine to end as I see fit.'\n\nIn spite of himself, Typhus snorted in derision. 'My Wardens will obliterate that conceited fool! The oath-breaker is not worth sullying your weapon-'\n\n'You would have me turn away from a challenge to my name?' Mortarion's rasping voice became flinty.\n\n'I question this.' Typhus moderated his tone, but he did not back down. 'One legionary calls you to conflict? You give Garro more honour than he deserves!' Then he paused, taking a husking, gurgling breath. 'Or is it that I do not see your full intent, my lord?' He nodded to himself. 'Yes. That's it, isn't it? Garro has always been a splinter in your eye. He is the Death Guard you could not turn to your will, when the moment came. He is your lapse... Your failure.'\n\nBelying its name, Mortarion's great war-scythe, Silence, cut through the foetid air with a sharp hiss as the primarch drew it from across his back. Tainted sunlight flashed off the corroded arc of the blade and before Typhus could pull his own weapon, the cutting edge was pressing at his neck.\n\n'Take care how you speak to me, my brother,' intoned the Death Lord. 'In times past, I have indulged you. I let myself be blind to your ambitions. But those days are over. Remember your place, First Captain.'\n\n'I meant no disrespect,' said Typhus, unwilling to move even the smallest degree while the blade threatened. 'I have always been truthful with you. Even if you dislike what I say.' At length, he found the will to back away a step, to distance himself from the weapon's killing arc. 'I speak truth now. It is vanity to answer Garro's challenge. It is beneath you.'\n\n'Perhaps so,' allowed Mortarion, 'but the decision is mine to make.' He returned Silence to its place and spoke again. 'These are my commands. Have the Legion stand down... And give me fighting room.'\n\nWith each step he took, Garro tensed for the shot that would kill him.\n\nHe wondered if he would hear it in the moment before he died, the subsonic thrum of the bow wave before an incoming bolt shell or the scream of torn air about a beam blast. Or did death come unspoken to those it"}
{"text":"beneath you.'\n\n'Perhaps so,' allowed Mortarion, 'but the decision is mine to make.' He returned Silence to its place and spoke again. 'These are my commands. Have the Legion stand down... And give me fighting room.'\n\nWith each step he took, Garro tensed for the shot that would kill him.\n\nHe wondered if he would hear it in the moment before he died, the subsonic thrum of the bow wave before an incoming bolt shell or the scream of torn air about a beam blast. Or did death come unspoken to those it claimed?\n\nFor now, the question went unanswered. Not a single warrior in the foul army before him raised a weapon in anger, but he could feel their seething hate for him.\n\nAs Garro dropped the last distance to the churned ground at the foot of Marmax, a humming cloud burst from the waiting legionaries. Countless numbers of oily black insects rose from where they had been resting, beating at the icy air with millions of gelid wings.\n\nThe swarm writhed over the ground, forming into something like a great black curtain - and with stolid, theatrical grandeur, that curtain parted and so did the ranks of the corrupted. The Reaper of Men was coming to answer Nathaniel Garro's defiance.\n\nGarro took a deep breath and planted his boots firmly amid the mess of mud, burnt stone and rock fragments. Slowly, he removed and stowed his helmet; tactically, the gesture might have been unsound, but it felt wrong - even dishonourable - to do this hiding his face behind armour plate.\n\nHis bolter was mag-locked across his armour and his sword was at the ready for the draw. He let one hand drop to the hilt of the ancient blade, fingers tracing the studs that would activate its power field. These small, instinctive, pre-battle rituals gave him focus; they let him briefly forget the nature of the foe marching towards him.\n\nBut only for a moment.\n\nWhat strode forth out of the Death Guard ranks barely resembled the primarch Garro had known, now a creature seen through a despoiled lens. Tall and emaciated, a hooded cloak draped over metallic battle armour; but the cloak was putrefying, rancid cloth where before it had been heavy, dark material, and the armour - once the magnificent, master-crafted work of combat artisans, shining bare steel and bright brass - was now creaking, rotten and rust-rimed.\n\nAnd worst of all was the figure who wore them. Garro had once bent the knee to a sallow, hard-faced master with a gaze that knew fury, knew sorrow, and knew honour. The monster he saw before him now, wreathed in poison dust, consumptive and decayed, was death incarnate.\n\nHorrified, ashamed and saddened beyond measure, Garro met the gaze of his liege-lord and gene-sire for the first time since the great betrayal at Isstvan. And he asked the only question that he could.\n\n'What have you become?'\n\n'I am what we have always strived to be,' Mortarion intoned, eyes flashing in the dark beneath his hood. 'Undying. Unstoppable. Unmatched.'\n\nA pall of fear rose in Garro's hearts and his hand tightened on the hilt of his sword. 'What did it cost you, my lord?'\n\nThe question seemed to surprise the primarch, and he hesitated before replying. 'The price... The price was everything.' Through his breather mask, Mortarion took a deep inhalation of the toxins whirling around him, as if sustaining himself with them. 'Garro,' he wheezed. 'You were one of my best. I have not forgotten. You can be again. You can rejoin your battle-brothers. There is still time.'\n\nOf all the words he thought Mortarion might utter, the last Garro expected were these. After everything that had taken place since Horus Lupercal's heresy had commenced, Garro had embraced the path of the outsider, the outcast.\n\n'He will win,' said the primarch, as if plucking the thought of the Warmaster from Garro's mind. 'It is inevitable. The sons will soon kill their father, as is fitting. And a new world will beckon.' Mortarion reached inside his cloak, and when his skeletal hand returned, there were two corroded metal cups in his grip. Black fluid, dark as night and oil-thick, shimmered in them.\n\nHe offered one of the cups to Garro, and compelled by an impulse he could not resist, the warrior accepted it.\n\nGarro stared into the depths of the cup and sensed something powerful uncoiling around him, as if the air itself were transforming. A boundless grief, a longing he had buried deep within, reawakened.\n\nThe breaking of his Legion's oath had left him bereft in ways he could not articulate. He thought of Gallor's anger and bitterness, of the younger warrior's unanswered sorrow at what they had lost.\n\nThere was an undeniable part of Garro that wished time could be turned back, that what was sundered could be remade. And perhaps, in one way, it could be.\n\n'Might you honour me by sharing a drink?' said Mortarion.\n\nINTERVAL II\n\nThe planet Barbarus: after reunion\n\nThe shuttles touched down in an area beyond a city the locals called Safehold, in a sector of cleared grasslands that helots were busily turning into the planet's first starport. A sleeting deluge of black rain was falling, hissing where it landed, giving everything a bone-deep chill.\n\nNathaniel Garro was the last to descend the ramp of his transport, letting the others file out before him, a handful of warriors among a mass of human auxiliaries brought down from the fleet in high orbit. He saw other figures disembarking from the rest of the craft in the shuttle flight - more towering legionaries like him, clad in newly forged, newly liveried armour.\n\nWhen the majority of them had left the surface of this planet over a solar year ago, they had walked with the tread of men. Now they returned as transhumans, reforged by the great science of the Emperor of Mankind and His scienticians. Garro heard them laughing and calling out to people in the crowds who waited for them, the prodigal sons returning to the death world that had borne them.\n\nNot all of those taken from Barbarus to be uplifted had survived the process. Many perished passing through the gauntlet of the change, their bodies rejecting the implants with terminal effect. In the usual scheme of things, neophyte legionaries underwent the implantation regimen and enhancile conditioning over a cycle of several years, and at a far younger age - this had been Garro's lot, plucked as a stringy youth from the Albian outlands on Terra when he was only thirteen winters old, for induction into the Legion. The new intake had no such consideration, forced through a crash-course process that turned these men into Legiones Astartes with uncommon rapidity.\n\nSome said that it was only the Emperor's personal intervention in the programme that had kept the Barbaruns from dying to a man, but Garro thought otherwise. After a year in their company, he was firmly convinced that the sons of this blighted world were too stubborn to die easily.\n\nThe process of reunion was well under way. After finding and reuniting with his lost son Mortarion, the Emperor had presented the primarch with the war fleet and the warriors that were his bequest - the XIV Legion, known since their inception as the Dusk Raiders. Mortarion's first act had been to cast that name aside and rechristen them as the Death Guard, in echo of the fighters he had led in his rebellion against Barbarus' cruel rulers, the Overlords.\n\nGarro was no longer conscious of the new insignia on his armour, the white skull upon a six-pointed star rendered in dark green. Like many things, it was another change to take on and assimilate before the Legion returned to their first calling - the prosecution of the Emperor's Great Crusade.\n\nTaking his first step onto the surface of the planet, Garro looked across a bleak landscape of grey hills, past granite tors and distant mountains, and up at the soured sky. He tasted faint toxins on the damp breeze, the weak traces of the poisonous mists that wreathed the higher ranges of Barbarus' atmosphere, and at his feet, stiff blades of metallic-looking grass crunched under his boots. The planet was hard and unwelcoming, and he did not doubt it hid a thousand ways to kill the unwary. That was the truth of a death world: nothing weak could exist there.\n\nHe skirted the landing field, avoiding the crowds. The people gathered around their changed brethren, many of them marvelling at their new forms, some daring to reach out and touch their faces and the surface of their grey-green armour. Garro avoided their gazes, instead following the approaches to Safehold. Nearby, he saw evidence of construction and more transformation - buildings and machinery transplanted from the fleet, brought down in hopes of accelerating Barbarus to the level of the rest of the Imperium. In a way, the planet was being uplifted too, and Garro had learned that new initiate cadres from the Barbarun populace were already being selected. As the Legion had once taken its tithe of young men from Terra, now it would do the same here. And perhaps, at some future point, there would come a time when there were no more Dusk Raiders among the Death Guard.\n\nHe shook off the thought, finding himself at the foot of a great black wall near the city gates. Assembled out of rough-hewn stone slabs, it was carved with countless names in the local Low Gothic script. Garro reached out and ran the fingertips of his gauntlet over the letters, inclining his head in solemn respect. This, he understood. A memorial for the dead.\n\n'Why do you bow to them?' Hearing the voice, Garro looked up. A woman in a military uniform stood a short distance away, arms folded over her chest, eyeing him gravely. The way she unconsciously favoured one leg told him that she had been badly injured once in her life, but her manner was that of someone who would not let such a thing prevent her from fighting. 'They're all cinders and the lands are better for it.'\n\nGarro drew back his hand. 'These are not the names of your war dead?'\n\n'These are the names of the Overlords and collaborators we slaughtered to free Ba"}
{"text":" a military uniform stood a short distance away, arms folded over her chest, eyeing him gravely. The way she unconsciously favoured one leg told him that she had been badly injured once in her life, but her manner was that of someone who would not let such a thing prevent her from fighting. 'They're all cinders and the lands are better for it.'\n\nGarro drew back his hand. 'These are not the names of your war dead?'\n\n'These are the names of the Overlords and collaborators we slaughtered to free Barbarus,' she corrected. 'Written in stone so that any creature who might try to rule our world knows how much it'll cost them.'\n\n'Ah. A warning, I see. Forgive my error.' He nodded. 'So tell me, how do you venerate those who perished fighting these Overlords?'\n\nThe woman frowned. 'We keep them here.' She touched her heart and head. Then she took a step closer. 'You're one of the New-comer's warrior-breed.'\n\n'Newcomer?' Garro didn't know the reference.\n\n'Your Emperor.'\n\n'He is your Emperor as well,' noted the warrior. 'He is Mortarion's father.'\n\n'So I hear.' The woman sized him up, frowning. 'The iterators He sent here say your kind are remade in His image, yes? You are changed, just like He's changed our fathers, cousins and brothers.'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Why just the men?' She drew herself level to stare Garro in the eye. 'Seems a waste of good resources.' She nodded at the wall. 'Women shed their blood to carve those names as much as men did.'\n\n'We'll ask that question of the Emperor when next we see Him,' said another voice. Garro turned to find Mortarion's wolfish comrade in arms striding towards them. Typhon gave a nod and held back a grin.\n\n'Is that you, Calas?' The woman gave the other legionary an incredulous look. 'What happened to the man I knew from Heller's Cut?'\n\n'That skinny young fellow is in here somewhere.' Typhon's expression hardened, as if he didn't care to be reminded of his past. 'Don't you have a post to mind, soldier? Be about it. Lieutenant Garro and I have things to discuss.'\n\n'We do?' Garro watched the woman depart.\n\n'I've been observing you.' Typhon's steely gaze bored into him, and Garro found his intensity disquieting. 'Most of the Terran-born men in the Legion have embraced the reunion with gusto, welcoming their new brethren, training in live-fire exercises with Mortarion and the rest of us... As we have each learned the ways and manners of the other.' Typhon pointed a finger at him. 'But you, Garro. You could not do so at a remove, as others have. I think something in you needed to see the world where your primarch grew to manhood. To feel its air in your lungs, its mud under your boots.' He opened his hands, taking in the landscape around them. 'Am I right?'\n\n'Your insight does you credit,' said Garro. 'Yes. I wanted to know Barbarus for myself. To walk the path the primarch did, albeit for a brief time.'\n\n'And now you are here, what do you think of it?'\n\nGarro looked at the wall of death, considering what it represented, and then away towards the distant, forbidding crags. 'I am beginning to understand.'\n\n'The Legion is undergoing a seismic shift,' said Typhon. 'The Dusk Raiders you knew are gone. The Death Guard rise in their place.'\n\n'It is the will of the Emperor and Mortarion.'\n\nTyphon was silent for a moment. 'The primarch is in the process of reorganising the Legion into something... better suited to his command style. Your Great Company, Garro. The Seventh. It is currently without a captain to lead it.'\n\n'That is correct.' Garro tensed, suddenly uncertain as to where the conversation was leading him.\n\n'Would you like the glory of that posting, lieutenant?'\n\nHe considered his next words carefully. 'I would welcome the duty of it. But as for glory... I don't care for that.'\n\nTyphon laughed, as if he had just scored a victory. 'It seems everything I've heard about you is true, Garro! Good. In the wars to come, Mortarion will need a man he can rely on to lead the Seventh.'\n\n'The primarch has my blade and my oath,' said Garro. 'It will always be so.' But he couldn't keep a thread of doubt from his voice, and Typhon heard it.\n\n'You have misgivings,' said the other warrior. 'You ask yourself, how can you hope to become part of a Legion bequeathed to a world and a master you have never known?'\n\nA chill ran through Garro's blood. Typhon spoke the words as if he had plucked them from the hidden depths of the warrior's thoughts.\n\nThe other legionary went on. 'You feel... you are not one of us?'\n\nAt length, Garro shook his head, finding the resolution that had previously escaped him. 'No. Perhaps I did have reservations, but not now. You...' He indicated Typhon and by extension, all of Barbarus. 'You are one of us. Even if you and your kindred were born here, the sons of this planet remain children of Terra, even if millennia separated us. You are grown from those who struck out into space before the Age of Old Night. We all rise from the same birthworld. We are all humans, tracing our lineage back to that place.'\n\n'Indeed?' Typhon placed a hand on Garro's shoulder and his smile returned. 'Well, captain. Perhaps one day I will meet you there. I will walk your path, and see it for myself.'\n\nFIVE\n\nReaper of Men\n\nNo Quarter\n\nFall of a Champion\n\nGarro looked into the cup, and in the tiny sea of darkness it held, he saw oblivion.\n\nIn the past, this Death Guard tradition was a celebration of their fortitude, a customary ingesting of poison that the powerful physiology of a legionary could resist, endure and overcome. But like everything else about Mortarion's sons, it had been twisted into something new.\n\nGarro was certain that the cup contained blood, or something like it.\n\nHis primarch's vitae, gifted like an offering - and if he were to drink from it, what then? It would be submission.\n\nSundered from his Legion for so long, Garro would be changed and remade just as they had been, but he would be part of them again. For what seemed like an age, he had buried the sorrow of his self-imposed exile beneath a righteous fury towards his former brethren. But now, just for a moment, the warrior allowed himself to acknowledge a singular truth.\n\n'I did not wish this,' he said quietly, his words caught on the wind. 'To turn against the Legion I pledged my life to. I did not want to draw weapons against my battle-brothers. It is anathema to me.'\n\n'Every path across the moor is thorny,' intoned the Reaper of Men, as he watched the legionary with severe, yellowing eyes. 'But there is always a way back. Nothing is constant, Nathaniel. The universe that surrounds us is not fixed. It is malleable, forever in states of change and evolution. Decay and rebirth. My eyes were opened to it in the warp.' He gestured to the sky and the distorted light from the war raging over their heads. 'This truth goes beyond Horus and my father. Beyond this conflict, or any other. You can see it too. If you wish. You can become greater, as we have.'\n\nGarro looked up. 'That... is not our fate, my lord. I am a warrior, gene-forged and uplifted in the Emperor's name. You are His son, cut from His flesh, bred to be a war god made manifest. We were not created to evolve. We were made to fight and to die for the glory of the Imperium of Man.' His hearts felt hollow as the words fell from his lips. 'We are but weapons. Instruments of fate. Knights of Grey and Lords of Destruction.'\n\nOblivion beckoned. It would be easy to tip back the cup, to swallow the contents and let his burdens be taken away. As Garro held that thought in his mind, he felt empathy for Euphrati Keeler. He understood how obliteration could seem like the better of every option, the seduction of the impulse to let go and fall towards the darkness.\n\nBut at the far end of that spectrum was the singular instinct that had guided Garro's hand from the very start, the purpose that could never be denied.\n\n'We can be more than weapons if we wish,' said Mortarion. 'We can defy fate.'\n\n'No.' Garro shook his head. 'We are the tools of higher powers, of the greater players. If you cannot see that, sire, then you are blind.' At the legionary's words, the primarch's cold expression shifted towards anger, and Garro brought his reply to its core. 'The difference between us, the truth I have learned since I broke with your command, is that I accept it. You still believe you can determine your destiny, but you are wrong.'\n\nMortarion released a low growl and pointed at the cup in Garro's hand. 'I would have your answer.' The primarch's rasping tones carried back to him. 'Will you return to us, or will you perish here?'\n\nGarro raised the cup, and with deliberate slowness, he tilted it until the oily contents drooled out to spatter and hiss against the broken stones. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he tossed the empty hemisphere into the dirt at Mortarion's feet, as a ripple of terse reaction flowed through the silent Legion watching them.\n\n'Mistake.' The primarch drank down his own cup and savoured it. 'You have no concept of what you have rejected.'\n\n'I know full well,' Garro replied, his gaze raking over the other Death Guard, over the ranks of monsters that had once been his brethren.\n\n'Step aside, then, and I will gift you with a swift death.' Mortarion's lip curled. 'Call it a mercy, in honour of the past times you served me.'\n\nWith a crackle of unchained energy, the power conduits embedded in the metal of Garro's great sword came to life as the legionary drew the weapon. The crystalline metal of it sang as it cleared the scabbard to hang in the air before them.\n\n'I regret I must decline,' said Garro.\n\nThe blade was called Libertas and it shone like a beacon through the battle-smoke. Of unknown age, as ancient as mountains, the weapon carried by Garro was his talisman, but even he did not know the fullness of its origins. Some believed it had been forged before the age of Old Night, in echo of the great Terran blades that had come before it - Kusanan of the Valorous, the Xkal, the Vhorpul and "}
{"text":"g as it cleared the scabbard to hang in the air before them.\n\n'I regret I must decline,' said Garro.\n\nThe blade was called Libertas and it shone like a beacon through the battle-smoke. Of unknown age, as ancient as mountains, the weapon carried by Garro was his talisman, but even he did not know the fullness of its origins. Some believed it had been forged before the age of Old Night, in echo of the great Terran blades that had come before it - Kusanan of the Valorous, the Xkal, the Vhorpul and the Zul'fiqar. For Nathaniel Garro, the weapon was as much a part of him as his hands, his limbs and his hearts. A thousand enemies had perished upon its monomolecular edge, a thousand foes had been cut down never to rise again.\n\nBut it had never been drawn in anger against a son of the Emperor, fallen or otherwise.\n\nMortarion gave a solemn nod and his giant war-scythe, Silence, fell into his waiting hands.\n\n'So be it,' he intoned.\n\nIt was not an attack; it was an explosion of steel.\n\nIt was an assault like no other the legionary had ever experienced, a howling torrent of blades that came at Garro as if the air itself had transformed into razors.\n\nThunderous bangs of metal on metal sounded across the battleground, and each blow the warrior managed to parry hit so hard he feared the shock of them alone would break his bones and tear his muscles.\n\nGarro had not one instant to consider how he might try to counter-attack. His every iota of thought and skill was pulled unto the overwhelming challenge of simply staying alive for the next second, and the next, and the next. He dodged and spun, fighting to keep out of the reach of the war-scythe's massive head, but Mortarion's weapon was everywhere at once.\n\nIt defied logic. A blade as large as a human was tall, heavy as starship metal, and yet the primarch made it move as if it were a paper streamer caught in the breeze. Great, thick sparks of actinic green-blue jetted when Silence and Libertas briefly crossed one another, some starting fires in the dry dust where they landed.\n\nGarro had battled mutants and aliens, beasts and monsters alike, but nothing and no one like Mortarion. His recollection dredged up the memory of a sparring match he had once fought with a member of the Emperor's personal guard, a cold-eyed Custodes named Khorarinn; it was said that the Adeptus Custodes were to the Emperor what the Legiones Astartes were to the primarchs, and to face one was to face a titan. But even drawing on the hard lessons he had learned that day did little to give Garro an edge.\n\nMortarion cut hissing arcs through the air, knocking back the Knight Errant with each sweep, pressing him towards the corner of a fallen structure - the remains of a covered arcade that had once been part of an ornamental garden. Garro would quickly run out of room to defend himself unless he altered the language of the fight.\n\nRetreating, he swung Libertas - not to parry the war-scythe, but to cut cleanly through a pillar holding up what remained of the arcade's roof and the ruins piled upon it. Stone and tile groaned, and tonnes of heaped debris slumped from where it was balanced above, rolling forward in a glittering rock-slide.\n\nMortarion was forced to step back or be buried, giving Garro precious seconds to extend the distance between them. Amid the growling din of the falling rubble, he heard the muttering snarls of the Death Guard as they cursed him and cried out for his murder.\n\nThe reprieve lasted scarcely a moment. As Garro jumped free of the churning clouds of dust from the collapsing building, a flicker of ill light off filth-encrusted brass flashed across his path. In a fluid motion, Mortarion held Silence aside in a lazy, whickering spin, and drew his other signature weapon with his other hand.\n\nThe drum-shaped gun was known as the Lantern, and it was known that the Emperor Himself had gifted it to His son on the occasion of their reunion. Garro had seen its awesome power many times during the Great Crusade, when Mortarion had used it to bring the light of final, fatal illumination to those who defied compliance. Now that power was turned upon him.\n\nBlinding and brilliant, a crackling searchlight beam of pure white energy burst forth from the weapon's muzzle and cut a fiery slash through earth, stone and debris. It atomised everything it touched, leaving a wide, glowing scar in its wake.\n\nGarro charged away, feeling the searing halo-effect of its lethal radiation across the bare skin of his shaven head, and for a moment he feared the white fire would engulf him, but then the Lantern's light died and he went into a turning roll, coming up with his Paragon bolter aimed straight back in the same direction.\n\nGripping the boltgun in an iron hold, Garro fired round after round at the towering figure in ragged robes, desperately hoping to find a weak spot or some tiny, momentary advantage.\n\nMass-reactive Kraken shells blurred across the distance between shooter and target, and Mortarion brought up his arms to protect his head. His corroded vambraces clanked together like steel gates slamming shut and the bolt-rounds impacted there, bright globes of detonation and shock-sphere effects pummelling the Reaper of Men where he stood.\n\nMortarion leaned into the bolt hits and held his ground, weathering everything Garro had thrown at him. The Knight Errant let the Paragon weapon's emptied magazine fall away, ramming a full replenishment back in its place, but the primarch was already moving again, his monstrous beam-gun forgotten for the moment, his war-scythe returning to the fray.\n\nGarro twisted away to avoid the whistling downward arc of Silence's falling blade, but the blow was not meant to strike him. With the deft delicacy of a chirurgeon's scalpel, the curve of Mortarion's scythe hooked the frame of Garro's bolter and wrenched it out of his hands before he could finish reloading it.\n\nThe master-crafted gun spun high into the air, and with a second flick of his whipcord arm, Mortarion's blade caught it and smashed it down against the fallen brickwork.\n\nGarro bit down on the red flash of pain searing through his gun arm, the bones dislocated by the primarch's showy attack. With a savage jerk, he snapped his limb back into its socket, and looked up.\n\nMortarion was aiming the shimmering muzzle of the Lantern directly at him, the air around it lensed by its incredible heat.\n\n'End him!' A shout rose to Garro's ears, and he recognised the voice. Calas Typhon, or whatever grotesque creature he had become, was calling for his execution.\n\nGarro straightened, tightening his grip on his sword. If these were to be his last breaths, he would take them in defiance.\n\nBut the blazing annihilation of the kill-fire never came.\n\n'Not yet,' said the primarch. 'You have forsaken the right to die quickly.' Mortarion's skeletal fingers curled away from the Lantern's trigger-bar, and the weapon snapped back. Then, with slow deliberation, he unlatched the beam-cannon's holster and threw it, the great pistol and all, into the clasping hands of one of Typhus' Grave Wardens standing close by. That done, he saluted Garro with the head of his scythe, bringing the blade to his eyes. 'This ends in the old way. Blade upon blade. With metal and blood.'\n\nGarro hesitated, glaring at the primarch's hooded visage, his anger slowly building. He is toying with me. The warrior knew that Mortarion could have finished this confrontation in seconds, had he wished to. But just like the Death Guard advance on the Marmax Bastion, the pace of their fight was not being determined by tactical need or capability. It was done for show, in some arcane manner, for sacrament.\n\nMortarion wants to kill me by inches, Garro told himself. He wishes to make me pay for my challenge.\n\nHe will make an example of me.\n\nGarro gave a slow nod, and with Libertas gripped in his mailed fist, he brought the hilt of the power sword to his chest, over the golden eagle of his armour's cuirass, and beat it twice upon the site of his primary heart.\n\n'So be it,' Garro intoned, repeating the Death Lord's earlier words. Every second this battle goes on, he vowed, is one moment more for Helig and the Saint.\n\nMortarion drew in a gale of smoke-filled air, filling his lungs with a rumbling wheeze, and the war-scythe rose, held fast in his pallid fingers. The Reaper of Men exhaled and the reek of a tomb deadened the ground about him.\n\nBut this time the Knight Errant did not wait for the primarch's assault to commence. To be Death Guard was to fight as an inexorable force, to resist as an immovable object - but time spent as Malcador the Sigillite's Agentia Primus, outside the strictures of his old Legion, had taught Garro the value of boldness.\n\nLibertas glowed with coruscating blue fire as the energy matrix in the blade ignited. Garro launched himself off a stone ledge, his power armour turning the leap into a gunshot-quick attack, and he sprinted towards his foe.\n\nThe legionary's weapon led the dance, shrieking through the air, crackling with power enough to scorch away the clouds of toxic dust gathered around the fighters.\n\nThe Grave Wardens and the warp-flesh legionaries surrounding the makeshift arena reacted to the ferocity of Garro's assault, beating their weapons on their armour at a slow, steady pace, and those who stood too near drew back lest they be hit by a glancing blow.\n\nMortarion slipped out of every stab and lunge by the barest of margins, the glowing point of Libertas spearing towards him, tearing at his robes with each near-hit. The pestilent flies droning about his shoulders buzzed angrily and swarmed away, swirling to avoid the edge-effect of the power sword, others burned to a crisp on the wing as the blade passed through them.\n\nThe primarch released a dry, corpse-breath exhalation. He had expected to face the same man with whom he had shared the cups aboard the Endurance many years ago, but he was quickly learning that Nathaniel Garro was a changed man after a"}
{"text":"ng towards him, tearing at his robes with each near-hit. The pestilent flies droning about his shoulders buzzed angrily and swarmed away, swirling to avoid the edge-effect of the power sword, others burned to a crisp on the wing as the blade passed through them.\n\nThe primarch released a dry, corpse-breath exhalation. He had expected to face the same man with whom he had shared the cups aboard the Endurance many years ago, but he was quickly learning that Nathaniel Garro was a changed man after all.\n\nMore with anger than by design, Mortarion swung Silence in a tight sweep that would have taken the head from a human's shoulders without slowing. Garro ducked beneath the flashing blade. The legionary reversed his power sword and was already extending away from the clash - but he could not resist the chance to jab a back-thrust into the primarch's guard.\n\nThe tip of Libertas caught Mortarion's right vambrace and gouged a bright score a half-metre long in the discoloured ceramite. The first mark of the duel went to the legionary, not the lord.\n\nA dark and serpentine rage uncoiled in the primarch's chest at this insult. There had been a time when Mortarion of Barbarus held to a taciturn character, rarely showing emotion, seldom giving voice to even his deepest fury.\n\nEven when his hands had been around the throats of the Overlords who had oppressed his people, Mortarion had controlled the anger that fuelled him. But the Mark of Nurgle had opened new doors in his soul, and the Grandfather's embrace had transformed him in a myriad of ways - not just in body and mind, but in spirit. His eyes had been opened to the numinous truths that he had spent a lifetime hating.\n\nNow he let his anger rise like acidic bile, relishing the novel sensation. It will not be enough to beat Garro, to shed his blood and kill him, decided the primarch. He must be humiliated. Demeaned. And when it is done, I will grant him my consent to perish.\n\nMortarion twisted his war-scythe, hand sliding over hand as he inverted the mighty weapon's course, bringing the heavy pommel at the far end into play. As big as an ambull's talon, the brass striker could crush a human skull into paste or punch a hole through ferrocrete. He aimed it at Garro's retreating form and the blow connected with a sickening crack before the warrior could escape.\n\nThe legionary spun away, batted back into a pile of fallen brickwork, trailing splinters of broken armour plating behind him. Mortarion heard the air explode from Garro's lungs and the whine of overstressed servomotors as his wargear took the full brunt of the hit. At his back, the Traveller's Grave Wardens rattled their rusted blades and manreapers in chorus, sounding praise for their master's punishing blow.\n\nGarro's world spun around him, an earthquake of agony rolling across his torso from one side to the other.\n\nFor dizzying moments - for what seemed like an eternity - he lost his grip on time and rode out a storm of torment. The legionary's armoured form crashed through a jagged mass of broken masonry, and his nerve-shunts reacted, racing to protect him from a bolt of pain-shock that would have burst his secondary heart.\n\nReacting without conscious thought, Garro staggered out of the crater he had made with his landing and lurched up, boots scraping over compacted layers of stone, metal debris and the half-buried corpses of the luckless. His head swam and briefly a giant shadow passed over him, as the light of the sun fell behind the clouds. At his back, the battered form of the Marmax Bastion resembled a gargantuan tomb marker, and Garro's unseated thoughts played tricks on him. He imagined his name up there in twenty-metre-high letters, etched by laser into the surface of the stones.\n\nHere lies Nathaniel Garro: Terran. Legionary. Martyr.\n\n'Not yet,' he coughed, dispelling the grim portent, ejecting a string of blood-laced spittle from his mouth. 'Not... yet.'\n\nTiny, jewel-bright icons flickered around the circumference of his power armour's neck ring, warning him of system malfunctions and integrity breaches. With just one direct hit, Mortarion had been able to crack the ceramite sheath of Garro's breastplate and damage the synthetic muscles beneath. Multiple redundant systems inside the complex weave of the armour's technology reacted to the impact the way a body would react to an infected wound - isolating and containing it, shunting function away to other elements. He could still move, but there was a tremor in his steps, now a fraction off balance.\n\nGarro shook out of the post-impact daze, feeling his blood rush hot as his implanted organs dumped booster endorphins and chem-philtres into his veins. He drew himself to his full height, striding out of the dust. Libertas was still in his hand, locked there.\n\nAnd suddenly, he could feel there was something more at play around him.\n\nAt first, Garro thought the sense of sunlight-warmth on his face was a side effect of the pain-shunts, but it brought with it a strange kind of clarity - almost a peace - that was at once new and familiar to him.\n\nUnable to stop himself, Garro's gaze was drawn up towards the highest tiers of the Marmax Bastion's ruined pinnacle, sensing, knowing that kind eyes were looking down on him.\n\nKeeler? Her name was on his lips, so close that he almost whispered it.\n\nWas this how the troopers on the battlements had felt when she spoke to them?\n\nWas this the power of the Saint? Not the fire of martial oratory or the clarion call to die well... but the simple drive to live?\n\nHeavy footfalls resonated through the rubble beneath his boots, and Garro turned back to find Mortarion advancing on him once again. The primarch looked up in the same direction and nodded to himself.\n\n'Her time will come,' he husked. 'You will not save her.'\n\n'We will see!' Garro replied with a lethal slash that cut across the axis of Mortarion's approach, and the primarch sidestepped the attack. He parried the blow with the length of his scythe and the legionary spun his sword about before the Death Lord could turn the move back upon him.\n\nSilence's great arc of blackened steel chopped at the debris and ruins, seeking Garro like the fanned head of a giant metal cobra. He fought to deflect the strikes with lateral counter-blows from the broad edge of Libertas' blade, impact upon impact sounding in loud ringing clangs, as if a death knell were tolling.\n\nThe blunt face of the scythe-head clipped Garro's right pauldron, cracking the grey-white protective sheath around his shoulder, and he spun into the hit, the momentum carrying him back. Typhus and the Grave Wardens hissed their approval once again as the hit was followed by a second and then a third.\n\nGarro staggered over the ruins, fighting to claim a moment to gather himself. The legionary took a wheezing, pain-laced breath of the heavy air, and his scarred face formed into a scowl. The damage Mortarion was inflicting on him was meticulous and deliberate, set to slow him - but the primarch was taking his time about it, pulling each of his blows, deliberately drawing out the fight.\n\nIn his own dour way, Mortarion was playing to the gallery. Not just to Typhus and the Grave Wardens, not just to his misbegotten and malformed warrior-sons, but to the Warmaster and the dark, Chaotic forces that Horus had allied himself to.\n\nThe turbulent sky above them was illuminated with burning ships and rods of god-fire. Was Horus looking down on this scene even now, watching his brother? Were the Ruinous Powers weighing Mortarion's actions, measuring his worth as their daemonic avatar?\n\nThe legionary's seething anger rushed hot, his fury boiling over at his primarch's arrogance. A tiny splinter of Garro's spirit had hoped that he would be able to find some measure of humanity still alive in Mortarion, but this act of hubris showed him that if such a thing did exist, it lay beyond his reach.\n\nSworn to the Death Guard's banner years before he had even laid eyes on his gene-sire, Garro had longed to follow a primarch who was everything he wished Mortarion could be, but the cruel lie was exposed.\n\nMortarion cannot be redeemed. None of them can.\n\nWith a snarl, Garro bolted forward again, dashing inside the primarch's reach, acting in the instant while Mortarion's attention was split. Grasping the hilt of Libertas with both hands, he swung the power sword up, cutting through the crackling curtain of the Death Lord's foetid robes and scraping the edge of the rusted plates of armour protecting Mortarion's throat. The opening was fleeting, miniscule - but it was there.\n\nMortarion jerked away, scarcely avoiding a cut that would have slashed open his throat. The tip of the blade sliced through the primarch's tattered hood and carved a deep furrow across the sunken cheek above his breather mask, a trickle of foul green-black ichor oozing from the wound.\n\nMortarion bellowed - half in shocked surprise, half in pain - and in blind reflex, he struck out with his war-scythe. The heavy shaft of the great weapon cracked Garro across the chest and he was swatted away as if he weighed nothing, back into the wreckage of the collapsed arcade.\n\nThe primarch's clawed hand went to the site of the cut on his pallid face, as his Death Guard beat their blades in a deafening refrain.\n\nDark blood, oil-thick, slipped through his emaciated fingers and ran away in rivulets, as if the fluid had a mind of its own.\n\nHe cut me. The realisation burned more than the pain of the wound, which even now was waning, transforming into a blessed warmth as the sallow flesh knit itself back together across a newborn scar. It seemed an impossibility that this turncoat oath-breaker, this wretched dogmatic, could dare to strike Mortarion - far less to draw his blood. And yet, he had.\n\nLet it die. Let it die. Let it die. Let it die.\n\nThe whispers in his head grew to drown out all but the voice amid the exhortation of rusted steel banging on bloated ceramite: the Traveller's voice, echoing "}
{"text":"hich even now was waning, transforming into a blessed warmth as the sallow flesh knit itself back together across a newborn scar. It seemed an impossibility that this turncoat oath-breaker, this wretched dogmatic, could dare to strike Mortarion - far less to draw his blood. And yet, he had.\n\nLet it die. Let it die. Let it die. Let it die.\n\nThe whispers in his head grew to drown out all but the voice amid the exhortation of rusted steel banging on bloated ceramite: the Traveller's voice, echoing to him as if spoken directly into the primarch's ear.\n\n'This game has gone on long enough, my lord,' said Typhus. 'Garro cannot be redeemed.'\n\n'Aye,' he muttered, 'it would seem so.'\n\nDespite the unfettered power of the blow that had put him down, the Knight Errant was still alive, struggling to drag himself up from where he had fallen. Sparks fluttered from the joints of his leg where Garro's augmetic limb twitched and juddered, the bionics within malfunctioning as he tried to put his weight upon it. As Mortarion approached, Garro grasped towards his sword. It lay fallen just out of his reach, sizzling in a puddle of greasy meltwater.\n\nBefore the warrior could reach the weapon, the Death Lord turned his war-scythe to bring the great brass pommel to bear, dropping it to hammer into Garro's chest, smashing him back into the rubble. He lifted it high once more, and with savage precision, struck down again and again, beating against the golden adornment across the fallen warrior's chest - the honour-forged cuirass that bore the head of a virtuous, defiant eagle.\n\nGarro's artisan-wrought wargear was a gift from the Terran Court to the old Dusk Raiders Legion, a boon bestowed by the will of the Emperor Himself. Only one example of its martial artistry existed, and had it not shrouded the battle-captain, it might have hung in some gallery of treasures.\n\nMortarion destroyed it, blow by blow, smashing the golden metal into fragments, beheading the noble eagle, beating Garro against the stone until his face was a mask of blood. The cuirass cracked down its length and split, exposing under-layers and the armour's damaged works beneath.\n\n'Your honours and your laurels are meaningless,' said Mortarion, stepping back to take a long breath. His words could equally have been directed towards his distant father or the wounded, bleeding warrior at his feet.\n\nThe swarms of black flies churning over the battlefield sensed the vitae spilled across the ground and they came in their masses, seething and droning, turning the air into a living, reeking haze.\n\nGarro coughed out a thick gobbet of dark, arterial blood, and the insects went into a frenzy. They could taste the stink of death-to-come in the air, and they were eager to feed upon it. The legionary gasped as he laboured to breathe, but still he lived, and still he struggled to right himself. Resentment burned in his gaze, and virtuous hate fuelled its fire.\n\nMortarion raised Silence, pointing with the heavy pommel, aiming it at Garro's chest and the shattered armour. 'Perhaps... I will not destroy you.' His words echoed through the buzzing swarm, the flies vibrating at the same timbre, mimicking his speech. 'The spark of life that is Nathaniel Garro will gutter out... But your body? That will be renewed. Evolved and reborn.'\n\nThe swarm's razor-saw choir shifted and changed, the sound becoming something like mocking laughter. Every one of the pestilent insects was a mote of consciousness granted un-life by the Grandfather's will, a collective daemonic form that could fill dying flesh as oil might fill an empty flask. It had no uttered identity beyond the mutter of iridescent wings and the clatter of chitinous mandibles - but those few cursed to see it walk when clothed in human meat had given it a name. They called it the Lord of Flies.\n\n'No...' Garro forced out the denial, his eyes widening as understanding came to him.\n\n'In death, you will serve what you betrayed,' intoned Mortarion. 'I gave you the chance to return to us of your own free will, battle-captain, and you refused that tribute. But it will come to pass. The Lord is eager to manifest within a new host. Your flesh will be a fitting one.'\n\nIt was better than the Terran-born deserved, mused the primarch, but with the daemon at his side, his dominance of the Legion would be renewed along with it. Garro had witnessed the Lord of Flies possess three of his comrades - Solun Decius, Meric Voyen and the World Eaters exile Macer Varren - and each time he had been party to the daemon's defeat and dissolution. There was ritual power to be mined from the act of allowing Garro's flesh to be taken as its next chosen vessel.\n\nMortarion's eyes narrowed, and he smothered a tiny ember of dismay at the prospect. He saw now his hope to make the Knight Errant bend the knee had been a wasted one. There was no other choice. Typhus was right; Garro could not be redeemed. This would be the only way to bring him back into the Death Guard fold.\n\nWith a moan of effort, Garro lurched forward. He forced himself up onto the broken, spitting metal of his augmetic leg, snatching at his sword, stabbing it into the earth as a makeshift support for his weight.\n\nThe primarch pressed the war-scythe's heavy blade against Garro's chest and pushed him back before he could fully rise, holding him in place.\n\n'How did you think this was going to end, Nathaniel?' Mortarion cocked his head, staring down at his once favoured warrior. 'You believe you are some righteous champion, anointed by my father? It is delusion. Can you see now, the lie of that? Can you see, that every path He laid out - for me, for you and your brothers - they culminate in death?'\n\n'Only in death...' rasped Garro, 'does duty end.'\n\n'No,' said the primarch, as the swarm gathered to him and he stood tall. 'Not for you. You will die and rise, die again and rise again, for eternity under my command.' A sickening crackle sounded from Mortarion's back as the filth-encrusted plates across his torso buckled and split. 'This is how you end, Knight Errant. In shadows and decay.'\n\nMortarion's armour parted in jagged fault lines and great sails of glistening, semi-transparent matter unfurled from within. Briefly drooping across his back to touch the polluted ground, the malformed sheets stiffened in the light, growing firmer by the second, drying and strengthening. The new-made pinions were shimmering, ghastly things, corpse-beetle black and oleaginous silver. Maggots writhed in their wet crevices, fatty fluids dripping as the extensions lifted out to their full width.\n\nMortarion's gigantic insect wings curved down to blot out the weakened sunlight falling upon the battlefield, and as Garro was shrouded in dimness, the buzzing of the daemonic flies became a deafening howl.\n\nSIX\n\nHand of Death\n\nLibertas\n\nThe Rest is Silence\n\n'Is it done?' Gallor demanded an answer from Greff, limping towards the trooper as the young human dithered in the smoky corridor. 'Are we ready to depart?'\n\n'We, uh, we are, ser legionary.' His head bobbed. 'As well as we can be, I mean.' Greff gestured in the direction of the landing pad. 'The men asked if we'd make it out and in honesty, I can't speak to that. The carrier's heavily overloaded-'\n\nGallor cut him off with a shake of the head. 'Content yourself that the decision is no longer in your hands. If we die, it won't be you to blame.'\n\nGreff blinked. 'That's not very reassuring.'\n\n'It wasn't meant to be.' Gallor looked past him, towards the sections of the Dilectio Tier that had already been evacuated. Dusty light filtered in from that direction, cast up by the clash on the battleground beyond. 'Anyone who wants to stay behind, they can do so. And they will die. If they are lucky.' His hard, matter-of-fact statement echoed off the walls.\n\n'And if... they are unlucky?' Greff's knuckles whitened around the grip of the lascarbine in his hands.\n\nGallor looked back at him. 'You have heard the stories about the horrors the Warmaster has brought to Terra. The creatures out of nightmares. The things they do to the living and the dead.'\n\n'Yes.' Greff swallowed hard. 'B-but I didn't believe them.'\n\n'That was your first mistake. Whatever you have heard... the truth is worse than you can imagine.' He sniffed the air, ignoring the fear on the trooper's face. 'Keeler isn't on board the carrier. Tell me where she is.'\n\n'She, ah, she was near the battlements, gathering her things.'\n\n'Who guards her?'\n\n'I...' Greff's mouth dropped open. 'Oh, Throne. I didn't think to-'\n\nBefore the trooper could finish, a woman's anguished cry echoed down the passageway to them, and Gallor bit down on a curse. He broke into a hobbling run, cursing his damaged wargear as he went.\n\n'Go to the carrier!' He shouted the order back over his shoulder. 'Be ready to lift off the moment I return!'\n\nGallor did not pause to be sure if the trooper was following the command. He disliked working with these humans. Some could be well disciplined and follow directions, but others had an unpleasant tendency to lose focus whenever danger was at hand.\n\nHe had no time or interest in playing nursemaid to Greff and his fellow soldiers. His prime mission - Battle-Captain Garro's last command - was to preserve the life of Euphrati Keeler and he would apply himself to that.\n\n'Keeler!' He shouted her name as he reached the outer ring of the battlements. The weapons emplacements, hard points and barriers lay abandoned, home only to the cold winds off the distant icy mountains. 'Show yourself!'\n\nHe heard a stifled sob and found her crouching in the ruin of a blasted gun dome. She was pressed into the cover of the broken stone walls, staring down at the debris-strewn wasteland at the foot of the bastion.\n\n'Come away,' he demanded. 'We have to go, now!'\n\n'Do you see him?' Keeler ignored his words. 'Helig, look!'\n\nA sound reached Gallor's hearing - a deep, sonorous crackle like the breaking of stones - and he automatically tensed. He knew the nois"}
{"text":"e distant icy mountains. 'Show yourself!'\n\nHe heard a stifled sob and found her crouching in the ruin of a blasted gun dome. She was pressed into the cover of the broken stone walls, staring down at the debris-strewn wasteland at the foot of the bastion.\n\n'Come away,' he demanded. 'We have to go, now!'\n\n'Do you see him?' Keeler ignored his words. 'Helig, look!'\n\nA sound reached Gallor's hearing - a deep, sonorous crackle like the breaking of stones - and he automatically tensed. He knew the noise: the shattering of ceramite armour.\n\nA sickly dread tightened around his chest as the legionary spied the figures duelling far below. He let out a snarl of anger as he saw Garro take a mortal blow and crash to the ground. Gallor's ire became shock as he realised that the cadaverous, skeletal giant who had landed the hit could only be the primarch. Mortarion.\n\n'Gene-father?' he whispered. 'I cannot believe that is... him.'\n\n'It is,' Keeler said quietly. 'It's what they will all become, when Horus wins.'\n\n'If,' Gallor countered, silencing his own misgivings before they could take root. He put his hand around Keeler's arm and applied pressure to pull her away, but she remained in place. He sensed he could not move her unless she wished it. How was that possible?\n\nThe woman nodded towards Garro, gasping in anguish as he took hit after hit from the Death Lord's great scythe. 'Mortarion will kill him.'\n\n'Yes.' A terrible certainty settled on Gallor. It felt impossible to look away, as if to do so would be the gravest cowardice imaginable.\n\nWe will watch Nathaniel Garro die, he told himself. We must bear witness.\n\nDown in the arena of ruins and blood, the thing that was Mortarion changed anew, growing great and monstrous wings that rose up to throw darkness over the place where Garro had fallen. A dense swarm of shimmering plague flies swirled around them, droning madly.\n\nGallor stiffened, dreading what might come next, dreading what he would see when the primarch's dark acts were ended. The body of a fallen champion? Or something worse?\n\n'Garro gave his life to distract the traitors,' said the warrior, finally breaking the spell of the desolate moment upon them. 'We must escape, or his sacrifice will count for nothing.'\n\nKeeler stood up and turned her gaze away - but not towards Gallor and the way to the landing pad. She stared in the opposite direction, towards the towers and the great halls of the Imperial Palace itself, far beyond the line of battle.\n\nGallor grimaced. 'He's gone, Euphrati.'\n\n'No,' she said distantly. 'Not yet.'\n\nThe agony was infernal, as deep and murky as the foul, cloying gloom that engulfed him.\n\nThe world closed in, shrinking down from a battlefield, to an arena, to a blood-spattered spot on a slab of broken pavement. There lay Nathaniel Garro - Dusk Raider, Death Guard, Knight Errant - and he was dying with each thrumming double-beat of his augmented hearts.\n\nDark, bioengineered blood, the red of it so deeply shaded it was almost black, pooled about his body and gathered in the lines of his skin. Garro saw it painted over the palms of his armoured gauntlets and the dusty stone where he had collapsed.\n\nHe tasted the rich copper-iron tang of it in his mouth and felt the burn of his omophagea organ unlacing the genetic structure of the fluid, sifting it for memory chains. It would drown him in his own recollections unless he could break free, but to move, even to breathe, was like a forest of knives in his chest.\n\nGarro had known pain. He had made it his companion in war after war. But never like this. This was suffering beyond any he had experienced before.\n\n'I will end this,' said the voice of death itself. 'You will endure, and you will rise.' The Reaper of Men loomed over him, each word he spoke the cold wind from a sepulchre, each word repeated in the violent buzzing of the black swarm. 'But first, you must perish.'\n\nGarro tried to find the energy to speak, to spit back the defiance in his bones, but he could not.\n\nAnd then another voice spoke for him. 'No.' The Saint's whispered words fell through his mind on threads of golden gossamer, delicate but unbreakable. 'Not yet.'\n\nThe sun-warmth he had felt before drenched him anew. Garro's pain receded, the tide of it drawn out and banished. A power from beyond the bounds of his flesh and blood stiffened his sinews and steeled his nerves. He moved. He rose.\n\nWhat seconds ago had seemed like an impossible task was now inevitable. His jaw set, his defiance burning brightly, the wounded Knight Errant embraced this new, fiery strength, and came to his feet once again.\n\nGarro looked down at his bloody gauntlet, and for an instant, he saw the ghost of Keeler's hand in his, as it had been back in the fortress. Her touch was still upon him, and by means that he could only guess at, she was renewing him. She was channelling an incredible strength into his flesh, acting as the conduit for something greater than both of them.\n\nHe had become like her. In this brief moment, Garro was the avatar for a power beyond the mortal.\n\nThe darkness about him receded, and with a heavy tread, the Reaper of Men did something rare for a Death Guard - he retreated, drawing back step upon step. His insectile wings rippled and twitched, and the gaunt face in the hollows of his hood creased in anger and confusion.\n\n'You cannot resist me,' hissed the primarch.\n\n'I can,' Garro answered with a furious snarl, dragging Libertas up from the dust in a blazing arc of blue light. 'I will. I must!' Shouting his rage and defiance, he threw himself into his attack.\n\nMortarion's hesitation lasted scarcely a blink, but it was enough for the embattled legionary to come at him, sword rising high.\n\nThe Death Lord reacted with lightning speed and Silence swung through a tight, humming arc, the corroded steel of the war-scythe's great head meeting the powerblade with a thunderbolt crash.\n\nBlue fire erupted at the point where the edges of sword and scythe crossed, casting jumping shadows across the broken ground. Mortarion leaned into the parry, but Garro stood his ground, giving nothing, matching him strength for strength.\n\nImpossible. The Knight Errant was no more than a legionary of the line, strong and powerful in comparison to any ordinary human, but in no way the equal of a primarch. Mortarion should have been able to cut him in two with a single sweep of his weapon; more than that, Garro should already have been dead.\n\nBut he stood there, matching Mortarion's effort blade to blade, as if the primarch were battling his own doppelganger.\n\nA shrill, ear-splitting shriek went through the black swarm of bloated, festering insects and the mass reacted like a living thing. They recoiled from around Garro's form as if repelled by an invisible force, many of them flashing into sizzling ash, the rest of them retreating back and away. Something in the fallen legionary had become toxic to the Lord of Flies, anathema to the daemon's very presence.\n\nMortarion drew in a deep, wheezing breath, and he tasted it on his curdled lips.\n\nWitchery.\n\nThe burning metallic rasp of psionic spoor was all about him, spilling from Garro's weakened aura - but not from the legionary himself.\n\nNo. The Knight Errant was no psyker, his soul born without that elusive key to the immaterium. This power was coming from somewhere - someone - else.\n\nMortarion was still coming to grips with the new, preternatural senses the Grandfather's Mark had given him, but he had instinct enough to perceive the source of the energy about Garro.\n\n'Your Saint cannot save you,' he growled, his attention returning to the play of blades. 'You are already dead, Nathaniel.'\n\n'Then in that, my lord, we are the same.' Garro's eyes were alight with martial fury.\n\nA hollow rasp of laughter burst from the primarch. 'Such a staid, hidebound fool, captain. So rigid in your spirit, so brittle in flesh!' He shook the scythe, the metal clashing together again. 'You turned your back on greatness, on immortality itself! You swore an oath to me and my Legion, and then shattered it because of your cowardice and fear!'\n\n'My oath remains unbroken!' Garro shot back the retort. 'You betrayed the Emperor!'\n\n'No, my son. There is only one traitor here.' Behind his mask, Mortarion's lip curled. 'You have always set yourself above others because of your origins. You think yourself superior because you were born on this planet. Because being Terran makes you closer to my father, yes? But that means nothing.' Venom boiled in his throat as he decried his wayward warrior. 'My birthplace matters not. I was reborn on Barbarus and my foster-father there was no less a monster than the one in this palace. The Death Guard grew in that world's poisoned garden, and only they know what it is to be truly loyal...' He threw a nod towards Typhus and the phalanxes of Plague Marines. 'Every last traitor from our ranks will be purged. In time, nothing of the old way will remain.'\n\n'You have... broken my heart.' Garro's eyes darkened. 'I would have done anything for you, Mortarion. If only you had not betrayed us. But you have become the lie, and led my brothers to ruin! You are the thing you always swore to hate and revile! You deceive yourself and the Legion pays the price!'\n\nTheir blades broke contact with an oscillating wail and the combatants circled one another, searching for an opening.\n\n'You think you know me?' Mortarion gave a shake of the head. 'The most desolate horror you have ever experienced is only an ember against the inferno of my suffering. I have seen what lies in the darkest shadows. I have fought the chaos at the edge of death!'\n\n'I believe you,' said Garro, with a weary exhalation. 'But still you blind yourself to the truth, gene-sire. How can you claim to loathe sorcery even as you make pacts with the things that live in the warp? You betray Terra, the Legion, the Emperor... And you betray yourself.'\n\n'Kill it!' The bellowed cry came from Typhus, standing atop a collapsed "}
{"text":" is only an ember against the inferno of my suffering. I have seen what lies in the darkest shadows. I have fought the chaos at the edge of death!'\n\n'I believe you,' said Garro, with a weary exhalation. 'But still you blind yourself to the truth, gene-sire. How can you claim to loathe sorcery even as you make pacts with the things that live in the warp? You betray Terra, the Legion, the Emperor... And you betray yourself.'\n\n'Kill it!' The bellowed cry came from Typhus, standing atop a collapsed pillar. He brandished his manreaper, shaking it at the sky. 'Kill the traitor weakling! Let it die!'\n\n'Let it die!' Mortarion's pestilent warriors beat their weapons together in a cacophony of rusted steel, echoing the Traveller's demand.\n\nLet it die. Let it die. Let it die. Let it die.\n\nThe whispers in his ears joined in the chorus, and Mortarion knew that it was the voice of the warp reaching out to him. The Grandfather's guiding hand pushed him towards the ultimate act.\n\nHe glared at his former legionary and saw clearly that this moment had always been here in his path, waiting for him to meet it.\n\nEach step Mortarion had taken - beginning with his rebellion against his Overlord foster-father on Barbarus, his turbulent brotherhood with the man who had become Typhus the Traveller, the reunion with his gene-father, and finally the Death Guard's rebirth by Nurgle's blessing - all these things had been ordained. Each one stripped away the lies that Mortarion had been told about himself, piece by piece, until none remained.\n\nThe Knight Errant would perish today, and his murder would mark the fruition of Mortarion's complete truth. Garro was the primarch's final connection to his Legion as it had been before the Great Change, the emblem of the last tiny part of him that still remained human. It had to be obliterated.\n\nLet it die.\n\n'I will,' he vowed, marshalling his power for the fatal strike.\n\nThe great jagged blade of Mortarion's war-scythe carved smoke as it fell in an arc of befouled steel. The cursed weapon pulsed with the Grandfather's rancid consecration, and the legionary's desperate attempt to parry it met with failure.\n\nEven bolstered by the fortitude of his Saint, Garro could not stop the fall of Silence. The scythe splintered the Knight Errant's venerable blade across its width, breaking the power sword Libertas in two.\n\nMortarion's weapon punched through the last intact layers of the legionary's armour. The point of the scythe-head pushed into bone and flesh. It found his primary heart and punctured it, ripping it in twain.\n\nWounded mortally, blood surging into his chest cavity, Garro went rigid and his agony became total. The steadfast battle-captain reached out with one trembling hand and clutched at the head of the scythe, his gauntlet sizzling as the ceramite burned on contact with corrupted metal.\n\nThe blade wedged in the legionary's chest, Mortarion let the weight of Silence force Garro to his knees. Inky threads of toxicity were already eating into the Knight Errant's wargear, and where the scythe met flesh it was poisoning him, dissolving his veins and nerves.\n\nThe primarch watched the shadow of death lengthen over Garro's form. This time, he would not rise.\n\nPinned in place against the blood-washed rubble, Garro's body shook as one by one, each of his implants and vital organs began to shut down. His genhanced flesh and bones - the greatest weapons that the Emperor's science had gifted to him - were not immortal. His end was at hand. Nothing could stop that now.\n\nWhat would come next? Abyssal darkness? Or would there be some shining, transcendent moment of clarity as the light of life faded?\n\nTo Garro's surprise, what freed itself within him was a smile. He released a wet, broken chuckle. He understood his purpose now. Everything was made clear.\n\n'You... know this,' said Garro, labouring out every last word. 'When I die, Mortarion... Your humanity dies with me.'\n\n'As is my wish,' intoned the primarch, tightening his grip on Silence's shaft. 'I no longer care for such concerns.'\n\n'Lie,' managed Garro, panting through a blood-filled breath. 'I know... truth. Hidden in your heart. You lie... to yourself. You always have.' He gritted his teeth and gave a bitter laugh. 'In this moment... you sow the seed of your final defeat.'\n\nMortarion hesitated, frozen in place, as Garro's utterance registered with him. Even now, on the precipice of death, the legionary's words were inescapable. They were undeniable.\n\nFrom somewhere high atop the broken flanks of the Marmax Bastion, a flash of white light blossomed into being and the drumming rumble of thrusters came like a clarion call.\n\nA machine in the shape of a winged bullet blasted itself out of the landing pad and cut a curving turn up and around the fallen tiers of the bastion. Typhus screamed wordlessly and every projectile weapon on the ground opened up at once.\n\nThe gathered Death Guard host bracketed the craft, vomiting bilious fire and lethal ejecta into the air. A webwork of criss-crossing rocket-shell contrails and ropes of searing tracer clawed after the heavy carrier as it skidded through the smoke, overstressed engines howling as they pushed it towards the sky. Some of the ground-fire clipped the fuselage and it veered wildly to avoid a terminal strike that might bring it down.\n\nThen, finding its pace, gaining traction against gravity and drag, the carrier shot towards the distant towers and armoured precincts of the Inner Imperial Palace. A double peal of thunder sounded as the craft breached the sound barrier and raced away at supersonic velocity.\n\nGarro's hazy, pain-misted vision caught sight of the silver dart as it receded. He knew that Helig Gallor was at the controls, with Euphrati Keeler and whomever remained of Kostagar's surviving defenders in his charge.\n\n'She is safe,' he gasped, 'and you have failed, Mortarion.'\n\nWhatever plan the Death Lord had, to take the Saint as his prize for Horus Lupercal, to turn Garro to the banner of the Warmaster's heretics, it was now a ruin.\n\nAnd the price of it was the life of a martyr. I pay the cost, Garro told himself. As I was always meant to.\n\nThis was the purpose towards which Nathaniel Garro's path had been wrought. The moment in which he placed the existence of the Saint before all else. The moment when he saved her.\n\n'No...' Mortarion's grave-rasp rose into a furious snarl. 'Even in your death you hinder me.'\n\n'Aye,' he breathed, gathering every last iota of strength still in his body, before the will leaked out into the thirsting dust along with his blood. 'I deny you your victory. You will never have... what you wish. Such is the fate... of oath-breakers.'\n\nAnd then, with a final bellow of effort, Garro pulled himself up the blade of the scythe, forcing it through his torso, the razored tip bursting out of his back, all so he could bring himself closer.\n\nClose enough for one last strike.\n\nThe broken stub of Libertas still in his other hand, Garro rammed the shattered sword into Mortarion's throat, burying it to the hilt. Toxic vitae spewed in a virulent spray, gushing down over the neck ring of the primarch's rusted armour.\n\nAs Garro sank back into the blood-thickened mud, Mortarion ripped the broken sword from the cut and let out a gurgling, monstrous howl of pain. He pressed a hand to the wound, holding his flesh together. The righteous blow filled his throat with hot bile and sickly ichor, and despite the Mark of the warp on his flesh, the primarch's new injury would not be quick to close.\n\nDarkness closed in softly from the edges of Garro's vision, and the discord around him faded, becoming distant. The twinned sound of his primary and secondary hearts, the pulsing force of life that had been his companion for so long, had been reduced to one single throbbing drumbeat.\n\nThe sound began to slow.\n\nSunlight flashed off the mote of silver in the sky, marking the fading glimmer of Keeler's escape. He felt a wave of sorrow for the Saint. She would have to go on without him and bear the great burden of the Imperial Truth beyond this day. More than anything, Garro wanted to be by her side to carry on the fight against the great Chaos, but he knew he would not live to see another battle. He took meagre comfort in the knowledge that the war against the heretics would not falter, not if it took a century, a millennia, or more.\n\nDeath drew near, the shadow of it falling across him. Garro had been to the brink of this chasm before, but always managed to pull back.\n\nNow he was falling, destined to it. The instances between the beats of his heart grew longer, their force fading.\n\nGarro looked up, and as his vision clouded he beheld an image of death. What men of ancient ages past would have called Thanatos, Azrael, the Grim Reaper, Mortarion had become in reality. The gaunt, hooded primarch was not death in peace, death in nobility or death in honour - he was the horror of it, the decay and destruction of that ultimate end.\n\nBut Garro's final conscious act would not be to surrender to that. Defiance filled his spirit as the shadows blurred the world about him, and as time lengthened and slowed, a light - a golden, beautiful light - came into being before him. Mortarion and his twisted Legions, the ruins and the vista of the battle beyond, these things faded as the light grew and grew.\n\nThrough the heart of the glorious illumination came a great figure in magnificent, gilded armour, as if stepping through it like a doorway. The figure in shimmering, perfect gold looked towards the fallen legionary and met his gaze.\n\nIs this real? Garro's thoughts became a torrent of emotions and impressions.\n\nIs this my failing mind manifesting a last surge of life before the end?\n\nOr is it Him?\n\nThere were no words. The golden warrior gave a paternal nod and extended an open hand. The legionary knew that if he took it, if he accepted and truly believed without doubt or hesitation, there would come a time when he might rise a"}
{"text":"rway. The figure in shimmering, perfect gold looked towards the fallen legionary and met his gaze.\n\nIs this real? Garro's thoughts became a torrent of emotions and impressions.\n\nIs this my failing mind manifesting a last surge of life before the end?\n\nOr is it Him?\n\nThere were no words. The golden warrior gave a paternal nod and extended an open hand. The legionary knew that if he took it, if he accepted and truly believed without doubt or hesitation, there would come a time when he might rise anew.\n\nTrembling, the son of Albia and Terra, the Dusk Raider, the Death Guard, the Knight Errant, reached out to take the offered hand. As he did so, he saw that the metal of his gauntlets, the flesh and bone beneath were becoming dust and crumbling into the winds. But it did not matter. The rough substance of his being was no longer important. It was his soul that would live in eternity.\n\nHe should have been afraid, but in that moment he was elated. For within it, his purpose had at last been fulfilled.\n\nThe God-Emperor knew his name; and Nathaniel Garro's duty was at an end.\n\n'Not for that city of the level sun,\n\nIts golden streets and glittering gates ablaze-\n\nThe shadeless, sleepless city of white days,\n\nWhite nights, or nights and days that are as one-\n\nWe weary, when all is said, all thought, all done.\n\nWe strain our eyes beyond this dusk to see\n\nWhat, from the threshold of eternity\n\nWe shall step into.'\n\n- Early poet, circa M2\n\n'Sicut hic mundus creatus est.'\n\n- Liber Hermetis de alchimia, circa 200.M2\n\n'Behold! I tell you a mystery - we will all be changed.'\n\n- 1 Corinthians, 15:51\n\n'The Emperor Must Die.'\n\n- Banner slogan\n\nI\n\nLook at their pathetic legions, their ruptured hosts, their walking corpses, living to kill and killing to kill. There is no longer any point to their psychopathic exertions or their hysterical sacrifices. Nothing remains to be won or lost. Not now, not for them. Nothing survives of their motives, reasons or agendas. Look! Do they not see it too? The past is gone, and there is no future. There is only now, and there is only war, and the war will burn for as long as there is fuel to feed it.\n\nII\n\nWhich won't be long. Look at the rock that they call the world. It is being dismantled wholesale by a relentless concentration of absolute fury. They fight - look at them! - they fight for the world, by dismembering the world. They think the world is so important. They believe it matters. The mindless killers on each side, their labels of traitor and loyalist long since erased by flame, they still think the place matters, the rock that they kill on and for.\n\nIII\n\nThink... well that is too strong a word. None of them are thinking any more. But I will say some impulse, then, some twitch in their lizard brains, that convinces them, in their inchoate frenzy, that they are standing their ground, that they are fighting for what is theirs. Some birthright, some cradle, some legacy, some place that belongs to them and to which they belong, as though such connections matter. They do not. Only by some tenuous and sentimental thread are they tied together, world and species, some whim, some happenstance, a freak division of biological contamination that gave rise to their ephemeral lineage on that irrelevant rock.\n\nThat's all. It could have been anywhere.\n\nIt happened to be here, this lump of matter, this scrap of earth, this... What do they call it? Terror? Ha! No, Terra. Their minds invest it with significance, their language gives it a name, oh-so-mockable. It is just a rock, of infinite rocks, swirling around infinite suns. It has no meaning, no special property, no singular quality.\n\nIV\n\nYet how they fight for it! Look at them. They fight, because war is the only thing they have left. They fight to conquer or deny, driven by the notion, which is utterly devoid of meaning, that it matters who wins here. Who claims the rock. Who is left standing at the end.\n\nIt does not. It does not. It does not. Futile!\n\nThey are wrong. Pathetic and wrong. Look at them. Fools all, deluded by incoherent compulsion and debased ideals. This place, this Terra, has never been special. It's been a symbol, at best, for a short span of time, and even that symbolic value is now exhausted. They burn themselves up in one last convulsion of psychosis, utterly unaware that the fight is not here.\n\nIt is everywhere.\n\nV\n\nMy name is Samus. Samus is my name. That is the only name you'll hear. I am the one who walks behind you. I am the footsteps at your back. I am the man beside you. Look out! I am all around you. Samus! I am the end and the death. I tell you now, I have seen this before, so many times. How many, I do not care to say. Time is worthless to me, and I do not bother to remember all the biological contaminations that spurt up, and I don't have the patience to memorise the names of rocks. Rocks are just rocks, and my name is Samus. Samus will gnaw upon your bones. This - look at them kill! - this is mere repetition. The cycle, the dawn and the nightfall. It will happen again, and it is happening everywhere. It is trivial. A dynastic quarrel. A fight between nests of insects that I might step over, without noticing, on my long walk to somewhere else.\n\nUnless...\n\nVI\n\nUnless one of them finally notices what is possible. What might be accomplished here. The potential, the beautiful potential, which, though none of them sees it - none of them - is closer at hand than they realise. I can almost taste it. It is closer than it has ever been, closer than it was even in the un-times of the war that broke heaven.\n\nVII\n\nWho among them has the courage to reach for it? So few of them, so very few, are even in a position to see it or comprehend its meaning. I can count them upon my fingers. Him? The boastful king on his tiny throne, his feeble light guttering out? Him? The squealing pretender, hunched in the howling gullet of hell? Him, perhaps? The maniac prophet slithering through the open wounds between unblinking stars? One of them might see, before it is too late, what could be achieved today. One of them might recognise, at the very last, that none of this matters... the annihilating rock, the measureless slaughter, the pathetic rage... unless they elevate the war to where it truly belongs. Not here. Not Terra. But outwards and inwards and everywhere, until that which is Ruin, and that which is Ruin alone, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end, is everywhere and everything.\n\nVIII\n\nThat is the only victory that matters. That is the only end that has any meaning. Alert, intrigued, alive not to the death of a rock but to the birth of a reality, I watch. I am Samus. My name is Samus. I am the man beside you. Samus is here. I walk into your meaningless flames and I rejoice. For this time, perhaps this time, there will be a victory.\n\nFor this is the end, and the death.\n\nAnd, finally, the beginning.\n\nPART ONE\n\nCANNIBAL GALAXIES\n\n1:i\n\nSympathetic magic\n\nWhen he was very young, no more than two or three hundred years old, he watched a man paint shapes upon a wall.\n\nThe painter used his fingers as brushes, and the skull-cups of animals as his pots. He painted antelope and bison, side-on, mid-leap. Startled, deer broke and ran across the wall. The painter drew men too. They had bows, and spears. He had never seen anyone paint a man before. He was very young.\n\nIt was not art, or decoration. It wasn't a memorial of the hunt they had conducted the day before. It wasn't a record of something that had been. That would have been a waste of valuable pigments. They had their memories for that.\n\nWatching intently, he understood the painter was painting tomorrow. It was a statement of intention, of what would be. The painter was making a plan, and executing it. He was imposing his will.\n\nThis, the painter was showing them - the antelope, the bison, the men - this will be. The animals will break and run, like so. We will be here. These are the bows and spears we will carry. This - as his fingers moved from spear to antelope - this will be the path the spear will follow. This is where it will strike, this flank here. This will be our kill.\n\nWatching, he understood that this was sympathetic magic. A ritual rehearsal to vouchsafe that what was once imagined would later come to pass. What was set out here on the wall in pigment would happen in life tomorrow. The antelope would not evade and get away, for here, see? It was already struck and dead.\n\nThe man was modelling the future.\n\nTo sanctify this, to commit to this specific configuration of tomorrow, the painter dipped his hand into a pot and pressed it, palm flat, against the wall. He left his mark, the mark of himself, on his plan. This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.\n\nThe antelope is already dead.\n\nFor this version of tomorrow to fail, the gods would need to turn against mankind and undo the laws of the world, laws which they had promised could not be undone.\n\nBy then, even so young, he had already learned to distrust gods. To distrust even the existence of gods. But the natural laws of the world seemed to operate, whether there were gods or not.\n\nHe watched the man paint, and he learned to plan. It was, in every sense, a revelation. He learned that a plan might secure the future, and it might be the work of one man, and to be certain of its success, it had proudly to bear the mark of his hand.\n\nHis handprints have been on his work ever since. He has been modelling the future for over thirty millennia.\n\nHe told me that story himself, years ago. I look at his hands now, hands that have since held the galaxy in their palms. I observe the fingers twitching slightly.\n\nVery few people are permitted to stand this close to him. Few, indeed, are even admitted into his presence, much less allowed to approach so near that they are able to notice such subtle signs of human suffering. But I am his Regent, his advisor, his confidante. I am supposed to stay close to h"}
{"text":"g the future for over thirty millennia.\n\nHe told me that story himself, years ago. I look at his hands now, hands that have since held the galaxy in their palms. I observe the fingers twitching slightly.\n\nVery few people are permitted to stand this close to him. Few, indeed, are even admitted into his presence, much less allowed to approach so near that they are able to notice such subtle signs of human suffering. But I am his Regent, his advisor, his confidante. I am supposed to stay close to him. It is what he requires of me, so I have been as near to him as his shadow for a very long time.\n\nThose hands. Those great and capable hands. They are sheathed in auramite, not because it is golden and regal, but because it is almost quantum-inert, and thus most efficacious for psionic sculpting and the manipulation of immaterial forces. Bare skin would be better, more precise and conductive. I know he has touched the immaterium with bare hands and a bared mind many times, but even he has his limits. The saturation of immaterial power now stands at such a level that direct contact would scald his flesh if he but brushed against it. Longer exposure would sear the meat off him, boil his blood, and fuse him to the seat he occupies.\n\nSo there he sits, armoured and warded in gold, silent and still, like some graven idol. No, worse... I fear he resembles the gaudy chieftain-kings and prophet-monarchs of the past, the petty upstarts and megalomanic bullies who carved dominions out of the carcass of humanity, and built frivolous nations, and caparisoned themselves in jewels and precious metals, and set crowns upon their heads, and declared themselves more than mortal. They were not, and he scorned them all, chastised them for their hubris, and had them cast down, by actions direct or indirect. He has dismantled nations, and ended dynasties, usurped tyrants and dictators, razed palaces, and cauterised bloodlines. He has painted the walls of innumerable throne rooms with blood, and left thrones empty.\n\nHe cannot leave this one.\n\nI wait forever in the silence at the foot of the great dais. There is no one else close enough to heed what I notice, except for Uzkarel Ophite and Caecaltus Dusk, the exquisite ogres who stand watch either side of the steps. But the Legio Custodes proconsuls face outwards, immobile as sculpture, their backs towards him. They do not see what I see. They do not see his fingers tremble.\n\nAnd subtle signs, be they traces of suffering or otherwise, are my art. Signs, symbols, signifiers, sigils: these are my instruments, the diacritical marks of reality through which I discern the true text of the world. I am his Sigillite, and I have fulfilled that role since this age began.\n\nIt is now about to end. Both my long service to him, and this very age itself.\n\nBecause his sons are coming to kill him.\n\n1:ii\n\nFragments\n\nThey have crucified Titans along the Ultimate Wall.\n\nSmoke, powder-thick and as dark as rancid meat, flows sideways across the sky. In places, the bodies of the dead are so numerous they look like sacks of grain stacked after harvest. The corpse-mounds have changed the contours of the ground.\n\nOn the Canis Causeway, in what would have been the shadow of the Lion's Gate Wall, Maximus Thane yells to be heard above the endless howl of firestorms and shelling, and draws the Astartes of 22nd Exemplars into Repulse Formation Exactus. There is no cover. They lock-brace shields that are now grey with ash. Thane's tactical sensorium counts barely seventy men left in his company. He tells himself the device is broken. The display is cracked and wires swing loose. It shows him nine hundred enemy tracks on the causeway alone. He orders himself to believe it is broken.\n\nInside the Lion's Gate, the upper parts of which are entirely missing, lynched Knight engines of House Vyridion hang like game, trussed in spools of razor wire, and hooked from ramparts. Waste fluid - oil, coolant, blood - drools from their mangled cockpit-faces.\n\nThe traitor host boils in like a tidal spate, through broken gates, through breached walls, across the oblique slopes of once-vertical ramparts. They are gleaming scarab-black, horned and howling. A flash-flood surge, they pour through gaps, through fissures and cleft walls, beneath arches, and along once-golden avenues. They are deformed things, remade men, remade again, tusked ogres, semitaur obscenities, warrior-beasts with heads like whale skulls or skinned elk. They spill like a mudslide into the last, untouched sanctum of the Palace.\n\nAbaddon, once the First Captain to whom all others aspired, is among them, both leading them and carried forward by the torrent. He is made destroyer, despoiler of worlds and life, arch-mythoclast. He will tear everything down, all the legends and structures and orders, even his own myth, which he once so proudly forged. He will cast off his hard-won glory and replace it with a new one, more glorious and far more terrible. He yells to his men. His words are no longer human.\n\nThey understand him anyway.\n\n1:iii\n\nRecord of an interview conducted by Remembrancer Oliton\n\nMy father? I'll tell you about my father. Of course. Anything you want to know.\n\nMy father, Mamzel Mersadie, my father once... Now this is a famous story, but I'll tell it anyway... My father once reached a river, and he knelt down and wept. Famously, wept. He-\n\nWait. If I might suggest, let's move off the bridge. At this hour of the watch, the bridge decks of the Vengeful Spirit are a busy place. My First Captain, that's Ezekyle over there, he's about to brief the Mournival and the senior company officers. The Interex are proving to be problematic. It's unfortunate. There was a mistake born of misunderstanding. As you must appreciate, first contact protocols are complex. The meeting of two advanced civilisations inevitably involves issues of trust and comprehension. This is not easy work, as I think you've seen. I certainly regret what's happening at the moment. Deeply. So let's move through here into my apartments.\n\nYes, after you.\n\nThat's better, you see? We can converse and hear ourselves think. Ezekyle can be so strident and intense. He's briefing on the projected military operations that we are, sadly, now obliged to undertake. As I say, I deeply regret that it's come to it. Yes, that's correct. Military operations. Yes, there will be another war. In truth, my lady, there will always be another war.\n\nNo, I don't have to be there. First Captain Abaddon is more than capable of handling the watch meeting. Yes, of course I trust him. I trust him with my life. He's my son.\n\nSo, take a seat.\n\nAnyway, my father. As I was saying, this was a very long time ago. It's said he was known then as Alysaundr, or Sikander III ho Makedôn, I believe. He told me that, so it must be true. Anyway, he came to the River Hyphasis and crossed it, and wept, for, as he put it, 'there were no new worlds to conquer.'\n\nNo, I think-\n\nNo, you misunderstand my point. I'm sorry, I didn't make it clearly. I agree 'conquer' is an aggressive, militaristic term. A freighted word. Of course, the word he actually used was 'kataktw', for he was speaking a proto-form of Eleniki there, on the banks of the Hyphasis. So we can allow for some interpretation. It was a long time ago. I was citing the story as an example of aspiration. Our aspirations define us, I believe, more than anything. Beside the Hyphasis, my father wept because, at that time, he felt he had accomplished all he could. His ambitions were achieved. And the revelation shook him. He was not proud or satisfied, he was bereft.\n\nOf course, as it turned out, there were many more worlds to conquer. The work had scarcely begun. On the banks of the Hyphasis he had won, not for the first time, nor for the last, the throne of the known world. Not long after that, he found another throne. A literal throne. That changed everything. Yes, found it. Well, that's what he told me.\n\nBut I digress. The point I was making, however poorly, is that aspiration is the fire that drives us. We are restless and we strive. 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,' if I remember the old verse correctly. There is always another world, Mamzel Mersadie, always another goal. We all take after him in that respect.\n\nI'm sorry? And always another war. Yes, quite so.\n\nYou look at us, remembrancer, and you see beings wrought for war. No, no, don't deny it. I know you do. I see the transhuman dread in your eyes when you regard me, or when you look at First Captain Abaddon, or any of my sons, my Luna Wolves. I don't blame you. I terrify you, and I'm sorry for that. Truly. I look at you here, in this room, dwarfed by the scale of it. Like a child in that chair, a child on a throne, your feet swinging. It was built for my frame, not yours. I feel for you. You put a very brave and confident face on it, but I am sensible to your terror. To be here, to be surrounded by inhuman giants. It must be intimidating. I wish I could say something to reassure you, something to assuage your fear.\n\nI will say this, Mersadie Oliton... I am more like you than I am not like you.\n\n1:iv\n\nFragments\n\nThe dead and the living are now quite alike: all will burn on the same pyre.\n\nBarely ten seconds dead, Uris Katjor, battle-brother, Imperial Fist, leans against the round-bitten rampart as though he is resting. His helmet is gone, and so are both of his hearts and the contents of his chest cavity. A sigh is still leaking out of him. He stares at the war through blown pupils.\n\nBeyond, more bodies, hundreds more, left where they fell in the act of running away. Some appear asleep. Most are tossed in disarray, clumsily bent or poorly folded, in postures both uncomfortable and undignified. War has no patience for dignity. Some bodies don't really look like bodies at all: too small, too awkward, too thin, too still. Death has made them mere debris, just fallen scraps of a falling city, tumbled in amid the shingle of cracke"}
{"text":" him. He stares at the war through blown pupils.\n\nBeyond, more bodies, hundreds more, left where they fell in the act of running away. Some appear asleep. Most are tossed in disarray, clumsily bent or poorly folded, in postures both uncomfortable and undignified. War has no patience for dignity. Some bodies don't really look like bodies at all: too small, too awkward, too thin, too still. Death has made them mere debris, just fallen scraps of a falling city, tumbled in amid the shingle of cracked stone and fragmented metal. Just bundles of rags with sticks inside.\n\nOn the soaring ramparts of the Delphic Battlement, the sealed ring of last defence that surrounds the final fortress of the Sanctum Imperialis, Amit called Flesh Tearer weeps.\n\nThe Blood Angels legionary feels the constant concussion of the wall guns around and below him, and he weeps for what he has done, and for what he has left undone. Around him, ten thousand of his kind, other loyal sons, more perhaps, wait and weep too. They wait, armed and armoured, for the traitor flood to break against the last wall, and for the final battle to begin.\n\nBlade braced against his chest, almost in prayer, he looks out from his high vantage across the landscape of the Palatine Zone. He looks out into hell. He sees great bastions burning through shrouds of smoke. Meru, Hasgard, Avalon, Irenic, Razavi, Golgotha, Cydonae... each one a symbol of Imperial power that once commanded a swathe of Palatine territory, each one now a colossal bonfire. The smoke stinks of shame and lost hope.\n\nHe weeps. His genesire, the Bright Archangel, has closed the Eternity Gate forever. Such a thing. A feat unparalleled. His Bright Lord saw off the greatest daemons of the world, broke them, and killed them, to hold back the tide long enough for the Gate to be sealed. Amit was one of the very last to make it inside.\n\nSanguinius, the lord of Amit's life, paid grievously for that deed. Amit saw it with his own eyes: the brutal wounds, the ravaged plate, the immortal white wings - oh, how piteous! - stained and scorched, the feathers plucked, torn out, burned, charred-\n\nHe weeps for it. The sight of his lord so wounded will stay with him forever. But that is not what grieves him most. True misery lies in the meaning of the deed his lord performed.\n\nThe Gate has been closed. Amit cannot imagine the burden of that decision. To close Eternity is to concede defeat. It admits, to friend and foe alike, that the armies and champions of the Emperor, even Sanguinius of the Blood Angels Legion, can no longer prevent the enemy's merciless advance across the Palatine, just as they could not stop the enemy at the first wall, or at the Outer Palace, or at the gates of Helios, Lion, Eirenicon or Anterior, or at Eternity Port or Colossi or Ultimate, or at any other site where they have been met and opposed. Months of war, the most ferocious Amit has ever witnessed, have done nothing but delay the inevitable. Closing Eternity is an act of desperation. It means the end is here, the death. It means the hour is so bleak that no choice remains: the Sanctum Imperialis must be sealed, for all that lies outside it is truly lost.\n\nLost, but not yet dead. The full horror of closing the Gate is that it consigned legions of their brothers, whole armies and hosts, to their doom. There was no time or room for retreat, no time to recall them or allow their withdrawal. They had to be left outside. Amit weeps because he knows this decision will haunt his lord longer than any wound he took. The decision feels like desertion. It feels like a second betrayal.\n\nAmit thinks of those who did not make it through the closing gate, those left outside engulfed by frenzied World Eaters, his brothers, his kin, the armies stranded in the field, the brigades and regiments still warring on the Palatine plain, the men and women, the commanders and the common troopers, the battle-brothers, the great champions... abandoned all, to fight and strive and die beyond hope of salvation, selling their lives one by one in a storm of unhinged violence, doing whatever they can to slow the enemy's inexorable progress towards the wall Amit now guards.\n\nHe weeps. He waits, he stares out at their hell, and he weeps for them all.\n\nFlames dance upwards. The dead are just the dead. The living are just the dead who still feel grief and pain.\n\n1:v\n\nHis persistent mystery\n\nRespectfully, I call to him.\n\nI don't use my voice. I use my mind. My call is hushed and cautious, more like a murmured invocation and, I'm sorry to say, rather too much like a prayer.\n\nHe does not answer. I look for a sign, some intimation of response. There is none. I notice his hands clench again, involuntarily, against the arms of his throne, but that's just another spasm of pain. My concern for him makes my own, weak hands clutch more tightly at the staff that keeps me upright. It wounds me to see him suffer. The pain he feels is intense - though he has known far worse - and it is continuous. He has been subjected to it for several years. It gnaws at him, and he endures. He will not let go, or break concentration. There is too much at stake, and still too much work to be done. He has harnessed the constant discomfort, and uses it as a drishti to focus his intent. This, I suppose, is why he does not hear me. He is too focused. The immaterial presses at him. Though the room is quiet, the warp howls in his ear.\n\nHowever, I need him to break his concentration. That is why I've come to him, with great reluctance. We need to speak. We can no longer avoid the conversation that we have been postponing.\n\nBut he seems oblivious. He does not respond to my gentle psychic whispers. He does not even appear to know that I am here. He remains precisely the way he has been for months: still, silent, unseeing, immersed entirely in his vital, invisible labour. So, I must risk his displeasure and be persistent.\n\nMy King-of-Ages...\n\nI have been his Sigillite long enough to know that he is aware of how he looks. He so detests this unfortunate aspect: a golden king, idle upon a golden throne. He dislikes seeming to be the very thing he has emphatically opposed. I have always known him to be very deliberate in his presentation. Over the millennia, he has worn many masks, each suitable to the task at hand. His mind, his greatest gift, allows him significant flexibility in such things. He has appeared as male or female, or neither, as child or elder, peasant or king, magician or fool. He has been an entire cartomantic arcana, for the Master of Mankind is also a master of disguise. He has performed all of these roles well, with delicacy. He has been humble when humility was needed, gentle when softness was the best device, sly, amiable, reassuring, commanding, caring. He has been terrible when terror was the only recourse, and sometimes meek in order to inherit the Earth. He has been whomever and whatever it has been necessary to be. No one has ever seen his true face, or learned his true name.\n\nNot even me. I have known him by as many names as he has worn masks, and by as many faces. It occurs to me, belatedly, in this last hour of the final act, that perhaps, just like everyone else, I have only ever seen what he has allowed me to see. Perhaps, even if this room was filled with a multitude, I would still be the only one who would see a golden king upon a golden throne, the only one for whom those fingers would appear to tremble.\n\nThe notion is amusing that even now, after all we have shared, he still hides from me. It's said I am a wise man, but I know only two things for certain. The first is that there is always something more to learn. His persistent mystery has taught me that.\n\nThe second is that, just a short while from now, he will finally grant me the opportunity to see and know the rest, all the things I have not yet learned, the full and final truths of creation.\n\nAnd it will kill me. But I won't refuse the opportunity. Who would? Who could?\n\nI wait. I try again.\n\nSpeak to me. Open your eyes, my Lord Imperator, my King-of-Ages, my old friend. Show me a sign. Wake, stir, speak to me. We have to talk.\n\nHe has been a king, of course, many times. A regal aspect has frequently been required. During the years of global unification, it was often necessary for him to manifest as a warlord, because humans respond to authority when they are frightened or confused. During the period of galactic reclamation, he was obliged to stride among the stars in the guise of a warrior-king, armoured in gold, for that was the version of him that his young sons best understood. He had to seem like them, yet more glorious, so he could command their loyalty, their respect, and their devotion. It was war, so he became warlike. They would not have followed him otherwise, or obeyed his instruction. They would have doubted. He needed to be able to command them to the very ends of the stars, to secure their obedience across unimaginable distances, and sustain unswerving devotion even after he had left them. So he played that card: the Emperor. It was a version of himself that he found quite odious, but they rejoiced in it. They saw what they wanted to see. His sons committed utterly to the material war, and were so fortified and resolute that he felt he could leave the completion of the work to them.\n\nBecause he had to return. Time has never been his ally. He had to leave his children to conclude the material war among the stars and return to this seat underground, for the immaterial war had to be fought simultaneously. One victory was nothing without the other.\n\nAfter Ullanor, he set that guise aside with relief. He set aside the plate, the helm, the incomparable blade, believing he would not need the aspect of war-king again, for he had left the material war in their capable hands.\n\nIn the hands of his chosen successor.\n\nHis sons...\n\nI suppose they are my sons too, in a way, for I helped to make and shape them. The current pain o"}
{"text":"o this seat underground, for the immaterial war had to be fought simultaneously. One victory was nothing without the other.\n\nAfter Ullanor, he set that guise aside with relief. He set aside the plate, the helm, the incomparable blade, believing he would not need the aspect of war-king again, for he had left the material war in their capable hands.\n\nIn the hands of his chosen successor.\n\nHis sons...\n\nI suppose they are my sons too, in a way, for I helped to make and shape them. The current pain of his immaterial toil is nothing compared to the pain of his grief. He is only human, after all. I lament, likewise. We both knew his sons would die, one day, one by one, casualties of the Great Work, for his configuration of tomorrow could not be accomplished without collateral loss. When he marked out his plan upon his wall for me, so that I could grasp the scope of it, he allowed for contingency and redundancy. If a son fell, there would be another to take his place. Even so, we thought they would last for centuries, or even millennia, a great dynasty devoted to the accomplishment of his design for, from the very start, paint on his fingers, he knew that he could not do it alone. Thus, we made sons for him. We believed that when the necessary wars were done, those sons and their father would enjoy the long peace together, and they would walk alongside him towards tomorrow.\n\nThose sons, at least, who could be rehabilitated from the brutal mindset of warfare.\n\nBut the gods are against him. The false gods, the False Four. They have been trying to thwart him since he began his work, for they know that his success will signal the end of them. Fearing his version of tomorrow, they have turned against him and undone the laws of the world. We have known disappointments before. Failures. Setbacks. Many times, we have been forced to revise, and fashion a modified path around an obstruction. One does not sustain a plan across thirty millennia without a degree of flexibility.\n\nWe have known defeats, but not this.\n\nHis plan is damaged. I'm not sure if we can salvage it and set it back in motion. That is his avowed intention, and mine too, but the gods are devious. They have spilled the pigments, and smeared their handprints on the wall, erasing his marks, over-painting, altering, desecrating. Without finesse, with crude and primitive fingermarks, they have daubed their own sympathetic magic, contrary to his. The spear in this man's hand is broken. The antelope has startled and run clear, out of bowshot, lost in thickets that were not there yesterday.\n\nSpeak to me. Show me a sign. Open your eyes, my lord.\n\nUnable to contest the immaterial war, the gods, to my dismay, have turned the material war against him instead. The world that we carefully built together is being hammered into fragments.\n\nAnd his sons are dying.\n\nWake, stir, speak to me. We have to talk.\n\nTo win now, to reconfigure tomorrow, he will be required to kill more of them.\n\n1:vi\n\nFragments\n\nA lance, planted in the rubble like a flagpole; from its tip, the bloody rags of a man, flapping like a banner.\n\nTreads gone, the Carnodon tank of Geno Ten Sairus lies upside down in a pool of putrid waste water. All its hatches are submerged. The drive wheels grind intermittently - forward and seize, reverse and seize - a post-mortem twitch of dying systems. A feeble knocking comes from inside the sunken hull, but there is no one around to hear it.\n\nArcatus Vindix Centurio, the Emperor's Eagle, holds Marshal's Court and the Kepler Gardens. Nothing survives of those places. Only a map overlay on his visor display identifies his location, a digital ghost of the parkland and noble square that existed just the day before. The Custodian captain's golden wargear drips with blood and grease. Loyalists rush in to flank him, either side of the garden's one remaining tree. There is no battle order any more. Those around him are Solar Auxilia, Excertus Imperialis and Auxilia, militia reservists, Legiones Astartes, a few Oblivion Knights and null-maidens, a handful of Old Hundred veterans, and a few civilians. It has come to this.\n\nWhat spills towards them isn't human, nor even Astartes transhuman. It is a keening wall of sarcophile horror, the vanguard of nightmare, exoplanar things that the galaxy once decreed could never be born, not here, not anywhere in the mortal plain. But the telaethesic wards are snuffing out like spent candles, and these things have been born and they are here, fright-winged and coarse-whiskered, coal-eyed and shrieking, skittering on bird-legs and hooved feet, baring their fang-spikes and mattock carnassials.\n\nCenturio has seen their ilk before, but never in realspace, and never in such swarming numbers. He rests his hand, for one startled moment, against the scorched trunk of the one, miraculous tree, a splintered rampike that is the only point of reference in the shredscape of mire and smoke.\n\nThe man beside him, an Auxilia sergeant whose name Centurio will never know, dies of fear. He simply dies, and drops. He does not scream or flee, but his mind and heart give out.\n\nCenturio blinks, humbled by a mere mortal. He raises his sentinel blade so that all around him can see it, and his voice so all can hear.\n\nIn the ditch below Regnum Way, the roasted shells of tracked war machines have collected like dead beetles in an exterminator's box-trap. They are overturned, jumbled, piled up so that the uppermost appear to be trying to crawl out over the bodies of the rest. But they are not. They are lifeless. The only thing rising from the ditch is a slow fume of smoke and dust.\n\nOn the banks beyond the ditch, and all the way up Magistary Rise, their skulls have been mounted on stakes. The stakes are girders and pylon spars. The skulls are turrets, Shadowswords, Sicarans, Russ-patterns, Slayerblades, Fellblades, Carnodons, Glaives, Stormhammers, some still snouted with weapon mounts, others with barrels snapped off. Such has been the fetishistic desecration of the World Eaters, raising trophies of decapitated tanks like a forest of elephant heads.\n\nWet bones in a dry gulch. Dead hands fused to cremated weapons in mausoleums formed by neutralised bunkers.\n\nKratoz, Spearhead Centurion. Khrysaor, sergeant-at-arms. Both are of the Iron Hands, both are of the Shattered Legions that were so cruelly mauled when this insanity first began. That seems to them like centuries ago. They have fought across the disintegrating territories of the Imperium to be here, to be here now, seeking only to serve as they were made to serve, and perhaps claim some repudiation and vengeance.\n\nOn the majestic Processional of the Eternals, which runs from the temenos of the Inner Sanctum for sixty kilometres to where the Lion's Gate once towered, they line up among the Imperial Fists to make good those claims. They yell the battle cry of their Legion as the World Eaters approach. Their words are lost in the unison roar of the Imperial Fists declaiming their own martial cry around them. Their shout is out of step with the glory-chant of the yellow-clad ranks. But they both hear it. Kratoz and Khrysaor, in the sealed shells of their beaked helmets, hear the utterance of the Iron Tenth, diminished and outnumbered, but not gone. Not quite yet. And they know that, though the words of their cry and the Imperial Fists' are different, the meaning is the same.\n\nThey will not retreat. Their flesh will not be weak, and their deeds will endure.\n\n1:vii\n\nRecord of an interview conducted by Remembrancer Oliton\n\nI am mere flesh, Mersadie. When all else is said and done, and the panoply of war is stripped away, and my physical enhancements set aside for what they are, which is merely the instruments of my duty, I am just human.\n\nYou do not have to be afraid of me.\n\nBut yes. Yes. I was wrought for war. We all were. Because war is one of our duties, and we must be capable of waging it well, better than any before us. However, we are more than warriors. War, my lady, is but one of our functions. The bitterest, yes, but merely one role among many. We were made to do myriad things, and we were wrought to do every one of them supremely well.\n\nAh, I think of my bold Luna Wolves at Aartuo, and the Keskastine and Androv systems, the superlative implementation of their battle-craft...\n\nMy mind strays into memories, forgive me. I was going to say that, one day - and I truly believe this - war will no longer be a necessity. It will no longer have to be one of our duties. I look forward to that. I do not want to die in war. I want to die in the peace that war has built.\n\nWe are, fundamentally, builders, you see? That's what I hope you'll understand. We are makers. Yes, sometimes stone must be cut and dressed with a hammer, and worked until it fits, but only so it fits and we can build securely upon it. We are constructing civilisation, remembrancer. It is not easy, and it is not quick. Any blood that is spilled is only necessary blood, and I weep, like my father on the banks of that river, when it occurs. I would honestly offer my life in payment if the Great Work could be accomplished bloodlessly. But let's not be naive about it. It can't. I am sanguine about that. You should be too. We do this for you. For the whole of humanity. And we do this, I believe, Mersadie, together.\n\nI'm sorry? Well, no. He is not with us now.\n\nAfter the Triumph of Ullanor, when my father left my side, I felt genuinely lost for a while. Of course, I was flattered and honoured to be named his proxy-\n\nSurprised? No, I wasn't surprised, I'll confess that. My lady, your questions are astute. Perceptive. You wish to get to the heart of me. Well, I'll tell you, no, I wasn't surprised. It had to be me. I was really the only choice. I was flattered and honoured, but relieved. I would have been offended if the mantle had passed to one of my brothers, worthy though they all are.\n\nBut I was bereft too. Just like my father beside that river. For I felt, if he was l"}
{"text":" and honoured to be named his proxy-\n\nSurprised? No, I wasn't surprised, I'll confess that. My lady, your questions are astute. Perceptive. You wish to get to the heart of me. Well, I'll tell you, no, I wasn't surprised. It had to be me. I was really the only choice. I was flattered and honoured, but relieved. I would have been offended if the mantle had passed to one of my brothers, worthy though they all are.\n\nBut I was bereft too. Just like my father beside that river. For I felt, if he was leaving us, that the work was done, and I was inheriting a hollow crown and an empty title. Aspiration, you see? It is coded into me. I felt lost, for I wondered what there was left to accomplish.\n\nThere were more worlds to conquer, though. I soon discovered that, just as my father had. And, before you ask, I again use the word 'conquer' in the loose sense we discussed. 'kataktw'. There were worlds to bring to compliance, worlds to liberate, societies to embrace. We have made more peace than war. We have made peace with thousands of cultures, all of them the lost and scattered treasures of Old Earth. We have found our kin, and the branches of our family, and we have known them as our own. Every world we come to, Mersadie, I hold out my hand first, before I reach for my sword. War, Warmaster, Crusade... these are just words chosen to inspire humanity. They're proud, strong words, intended to impress, and to emphasise the prowess of our deeds. But they are propaganda, much like the histories that you write and transmit home. They speak of strength and courage, of unity in purpose, of determination. Nevertheless, they are just words, and they express only a small part of what we do. Soon, I think, we will be able to do away with them entirely. They will be obsolete.\n\nNo. How funny. No, remembrancer, I do not think I will become obsolete with them. My role has only just begun. Mamzel Mersadie, if you expect me to be humble, you are speaking to the wrong man. I know what I am. I tower over you, Mersadie Oliton. I am four times your size. I tower over all men and women. I am well aware of my nature. I am human, remembrancer, but if I was coy, and claimed I was only a man, I think then you would have real reason to fear me, for I would either be lying to you, or afflicted by some dangerous denial. I need to know what I am. I need to be secure in that fact. I am post-human. I am a primarch. I am Lupercal. I am, in the terms of the ancient Eleniki, a demigod. I can't hide it. I shouldn't. Denying that fact is denying myself, and denying myself is denying my purpose. I embrace what I am, and I rejoice.\n\nI was made for great things. That's not arrogance. I know you didn't say so, but I see the look on your face, so... It's not arrogance. It is frank acceptance. You do not place this much power and potential in a single frame without making sure it understands what it is. It would be arrogance if I pretended it wasn't the case. If I pretended I was... less. If I demurred and affected modesty, well... that would be cause for concern.\n\nI know what I am. I am, in the healthiest way, afraid of what I am. Otherwise, I would be very dangerous indeed.\n\n1:viii\n\nFragments\n\nCrater lakes everywhere, lakes of promethium. Some are violently ablaze, lagoons of fire that fog every crease of the air with soot. Other lakes, lakes of coolant, chemicals, or stagnant water from transected cisterns, are filmed with rainbow slicks of fuel, and where that burns, it burns softly and almost invisibly, transparent skins of colourless flame that make an insect flutter. Some pools are lurid pink from copper swill. Some pools are viridian from cyanide.\n\nIn the lee of the Sanctus Wall, Sojuk of the White Scars rallies the rearguard. Other White Scars, Praetorian Fists, some Blood Angels, stir to obey him. Sojuk is bone-weary and drained by grief. Mere hours ago, he brought the body of his fallen Khagan to its rest, and thought he would kneel in mourning beside the bier for the remainder of his life. But great walls toppled, and the sanctuary to which he had delivered the Great Khagan's corpse was no longer safe, and war came ever closer. So Sojuk rose, with only a wordless nod to his grieving mistress Ilya Ravallion, and went back out to rejoin the field, which had raced in to find him.\n\nEternity Gate is now closed. There will be no further opportunity to retreat. He is doomed to stay in the field and do what he can.\n\nMorten Lintz, the fine captain and blood-son of Dorn commanding this portion of the rearguard line, has fallen, skull destroyed by heavy bolter fire. Sojuk is ranked khan, the senior man present now Lintz is gone. The line is his now, this thin, diluted line drawn up before the churning hosts of Death Guard units. He shrugs off thoughts of grief like a fur pelt at the start of steppe-summer, and feels in the same instant the sharp focus of yarak, the hunting-hawk's yearning to slip and kill. On the plains, they would feed the hawks scraps to keep them strong, but only scraps so that their appetite stayed as sharp as their talons.\n\nThis is his open plain. He is the hawk. He tenses to fly, and calls so that the others will fly with him.\n\nA stiffened corpse, held upright by mud, grins forever, and points at nothing with a rigor-raised arm.\n\nCrowds flee. Wailing multitudes. They choke the streets, stumbling blind, asphyxiating in the dust, calling out and ringing handbells to be heard or seen by others, for to be alone is to be lost. They flee along once-proud streets, beneath the blood-writ words The Emperor Must Die and the obscene symbols of Chaos and heresy.\n\nThey flee to nowhere. The bunkers and shelters, prepared by Dorn, are already filled to capacity. The broken city is trying to shield its citizens, but the survivors of Magnificans fled into Anterior, and then fled again alongside the survivors of Anterior into the Palatine Zone when Anterior burned. There is no longer room to shelter the millions who hoped the final fortress would protect them. The bunkers are full and, according to military order and tactical necessity, all access points to the Sanctum's vast subterranean levels are sealed at the surface.\n\nTrapped in the streets, the crowds flee to nowhere. Mortality salience wracks them to the core. They see the words upon the walls - The Emperor Must Die - and they know, without doubt, that they must die with him.\n\nNowhere is safe. No one is safe. Nothing is untouched. Debris rains from murdered buildings, killing those fleeing or sheltering in the streets. Glass falls like blades. There are squalls of blood-rain, of pyrochemical sleet, of ash-snow. Nothing seems breathable any more. A gasp inhales smoke, dust, microparticles of rock and grit that grate the lungs, bacterial vapours, weaponised chemicals, toxic bio-waste. Throats close, gums bleed, tongues rot, tears track cheeks red from burst blood vessels. Eyes are sanded raw and lungs curdle with froth.\n\nOn the Via Aquila, someone is calling her name. There's always someone calling her name. Even when there's no one there.\n\n1:ix\n\nOn the Via Aquila\n\nOn the Via Aquila, vast crowds swirl around her. Euphrati Keeler sets down the old woman she's been carrying, perching her on a low plinth that has lost its statue. The old woman is dumb with trauma, unresponsive. Her feet are in a pitiful state. Wherever she started running from, she did so without shoes. The streets are covered in broken glass.\n\n'Wait with her,' Keeler says to Eild. 'Ask again if anyone's seen her relatives.'\n\nThe old man nods.\n\nKeeler turns and looks for the source of the voice calling to her. It could be anyone. There are so many people. Wereft estimates over seventy-five thousand on Aquila alone. Lost, displaced, fleeing their homes, the civilians - and that is always who they are, just citizens or workers or families - come looking for something, a place to hide, a place of shelter, a way out. Somehow, they find her instead.\n\nAnd when they call to her, they want all manner of things, most of which she can't provide. Help. Answers. Reassurance. Promises. They want to know why any of this is happening. They want to hear what she has to say.\n\nWhat can she say? There are nominated speakers in her makeshift conclave, though what they teach has little to do with any spiritual philosophy. Many call them preachers, but she thinks that's too easy and misleading a word to use. She has trained them to offer secular guidance, instructions on organisation, mobilisation, and simple habits of survival. To stand up and teach, by word and deed. This is no time to debate higher truths.\n\nThe state of things is shifting by the hour. The Palatine Zone is breached and overrun, and the Sanctum Imperialis, the ominously named 'final fortress', has been formally sealed. Death approaches from every direction. The handful of Astartes that were escorting her have been obliged to fall back and form a rearguard. Now, for her and the conclave, what began as a stopgap effort to organise a few hundred into acts of resistance is no longer tenable. There are so many people, and not enough weapons, not even improvised ones. Short of driving the unarmed masses wholesale at the enemy formations in the hope that sheer numbers will slow their advance, the conclave has become engaged in a frantic endeavour to manage the mass exodus and steer the crowds towards the few districts of the Palatine that remain unviolated.\n\nAfter that... Well, there is no after that. The outer dominions, all of Magnificans and Anterior, are gone. The Inner Palace is shrinking, like a boat slowly sinking, or a log burning up in a grate. Soon there will be nowhere to go at all.\n\nIt seems the voice belonged to Perevanna. The old apothecary-general is shoving through the dense crowds towards her.\n\n'Via Sardis is blocked,' he tells her. He is plastered with blood - tunic, apron, hands and face - and none of it is his.\n\n'Fire?' she asks.\n\n'War engines,' he replies.\n\n'We move them north, "}
{"text":"er dominions, all of Magnificans and Anterior, are gone. The Inner Palace is shrinking, like a boat slowly sinking, or a log burning up in a grate. Soon there will be nowhere to go at all.\n\nIt seems the voice belonged to Perevanna. The old apothecary-general is shoving through the dense crowds towards her.\n\n'Via Sardis is blocked,' he tells her. He is plastered with blood - tunic, apron, hands and face - and none of it is his.\n\n'Fire?' she asks.\n\n'War engines,' he replies.\n\n'We move them north, then,' she says. It's not a question. There is only north.\n\n'There are thousands more coming,' Perevanna says. 'Along Chiros and Principus and Navis Heights. Thousands. I've never seen-'\n\nKeeler nods.\n\n'As if they know you're here,' he adds. 'How do they know you're here?'\n\n'They don't.'\n\n'Word spreads...' he says.\n\n'They don't, sir.' Keeler turns and points. She points past the monumental spires around them at the sky beyond, at the throbbing glare underlighting the cloud over Lion and Gilded and Europa. 'Firestorms,' she says. 'Slaughter. They come this way because there is no other.'\n\nIt's true. But neither of them fully believes it. Word has spread. She's tried to keep her message simple, so the nominated speakers can promulgate it effectively. It is an essence; call it faith or belief, not in the Emperor as a god - for He denies that as firmly as she refuses the label saint - but in the idea of the Emperor as a leader with a plan, a Great Purpose, a dream of Imperium, that must be supported and preserved.\n\nIf the masses come seeking truth, there is too much truth already. That hesitant question of divinity seems so laughable now. She's known that since the Whisperheads, the first epiphany that opened her mind. She has struggled over it, argued over it, been imprisoned for it. Now her heresy seems quite tame. The immaterial Neverborn are everywhere. If you are looking for signs and wonders, here they are, in staggering abundance! And if daemons exist, then surely the divine exists too? Reality could not be so cruel and mindless to create darkness without light.\n\nStill, proof denies faith. The Emperor has denied His divinity at every turn. There must be a reason for that. That reason must be a crucial part of His intention.\n\nKeeler thinks she knows what the reason is. She doesn't know if private contemplation has led her to this, or if it is a revelation that has been granted to her. It is simple: any recognition of power beyond the material admits the immaterial. To accept Him as god accepts simultaneously the darkness. The Emperor forbade His own worship so that darkness could not be allowed in. Humankind is too delicate a vessel.\n\nThat's her truth. Her metaveritas.\n\nSince the Whisperheads, her life has demonstrated in harrowing ways that she has been singled out for something. Early on, she thought it was to light the first flame and speak the word of the Emperor's true glory. To be an apostle. The Emperor, in humility, could not name Himself a god. Perhaps He needed others to name Him so.\n\nShe is no longer convinced that is what was intended for her. She now believes her purpose is rather different, part of the Great Purpose she has been allowed to glimpse. Faith is the key after all. Not the assured faith in a proven truth, but the liberation of unconditional faith, the blind trust that needs no proof or verification. To cast free and commit to Him, to believe in Him, not as a god nor yet as a man, but as a process, a path, a configuration of the future.\n\nHe has a design. It has been in operation for thousands of years. To truly serve Him, one must commit to it and be part of it. One does not need to understand it.\n\nThat is the only possible expression of faith.\n\nThat daemons have arisen, that Horus Lupercal, in infamy, has turned and broken every bond of fealty and blood, is not proof of the Emperor's theophany, neither is it evidence of His humanity and fallibility. It is not even a confirmation that His design has failed.\n\nIt is simply a testament to the eternal significance of the design itself, for if all this has been done to stop it, if the warp itself has risen to prevent it, how sublime must it be?\n\nPerevanna has already moved away to help incoming wounded. Keeler moves back through the crowd, along the Via Aquila, to try to clear the way ahead. She ignores the sound of tumult echoing across the city behind her and the frightened screaming of the crowd.\n\nSo many people. Some reach out to touch her as she passes, as though they know her.\n\n'Keep moving,' she says. 'North. Go north.'\n\n1:x\n\nAnd on other byways\n\nSome in the Palace territory move with greater purpose and certainty. When the Xigaze Wall collapses, toppled completely like a dropping drawbridge, the smoke-filth dammed behind it rushes free in a wave one and a half kilometres high and thirty wide, like an oozing flow of dark resin out of which a new Old Night will be cast and cured. Things move in that rolling smoke, borne by it. Here come the spider-engines, the reptile-tanks, the hunchbacked, rust-caked war machines, the glossy scarab-Titans. Here come the lizard-treads, ox-horned and snorting; here come the daemon-devices of war, trailing chains and cycling powerblades. Here come the corrupted instruments of Martian nightmare, spiked and towering, dwarfed and misshapen, dripping oil from piston limbs, and spewing soot from exhaust vents.\n\nThey all know where they are going. There is only one direction, forwards. They move towards the heart of all things, clanking and grinding, booming and whirring. Some are guided by auspex or the ping-returns of rangefinder systems. Some are guided by adepts poring feverishly over charts, calling out direction orders as they trace dirty fingers across map paper. Some are guided by the pre-locked code of hypno-planted orders. Some are guided by moderati perched in crow's-nest masts or steepled turrets, straining amplified eyes into the atmospheric broth, relaying what they see by neural impulse. Some, behemoths that are no longer sentient, are guided by hindbrain, animalistic lusts or appetites. Some are guided by Neverborn whispers that cluck in the ears and dreams of insane princeps.\n\nThey all know exactly where they are going. Forwards, inwards, towards the heart, the destination, the end, the death.\n\nThere is delight in certainty, and that certainty belongs almost entirely to the enemy.\n\nBut some, a very few, elsewhere in the stricken city, have a certainty of their own. And they are guided by secrets.\n\nThe Imperial Palace is the most inviolable place in the galaxy, so of course the Alpha Legion has a way in. If a secret exists, they make it their business to know it.\n\nAlpharius leads them, his iridescent blue-green armour slipping through the shadows. The exact colours of its scales are elusive and motile, like a sheen of oil on water, and suit the character of his perfidious Legion.\n\nOr so thinks John Grammaticus, trudging at his heels. He has dealt with the last Legion before. The one thing he knows he can trust about them is that they can't be trusted. This warrior isn't even Alpharius, in that there is no Alpharius, and even Alpharius isn't simply Alpharius. They all are, or none of them are or... or... may they all burn in hell for plaguing his life.\n\nBut this one knows him, so the reverse must be true. From where? From Nurth, years ago? That all seems like a dream now, every truth of it un-truthed, denied, redacted and shredded. John is the antithesis of the man he was then, an Omegon to that Alpharius. Where once he laboured to secure the triumph of Horus, he now offers up his perpetual life to prevent it.\n\nWhat of this Alpharius? Which version of the truth is he? Which slippery aspect of the schizophrenic hydra does he answer to?\n\nAlpharius says little, but when he does speak, John listens carefully. He applies the subtle scrutiny of his logokinetic gift. A mortal man will struggle to tell one Astartes transhuman from another at the best of times: they are all muscled puppets cut from the same pattern. But with the Alphas, forget it. They actively play upon their anonymous interchangeability.\n\nHowever, words don't lie, no matter how carefully they're spoken. Idiolect can be as unique as a fingerprint. When 'Alpharius' speaks, John mindglosses for microexpressions of tone and affect, nuances of vocabulary, foibles of word repetition, unconscious traces of accent, emphasis traits, pronunciations. He savours each word, and hears within them the inner shape of the mouth, the particular acoustics created by teeth, tongue and palate, the nanoscopic idiosyncrasies of voice, and he compares them to his memories.\n\nTo gather clues, he initiates conversation as they walk.\n\n'You have a way into a place that there shouldn't be a way into, but you haven't used it?' he asks.\n\n'Secrets are to be kept, and only used when they have the greatest value, John,' says Alpharius. 'You know that. You know how we operate.'\n\n'And you haven't thought to, I don't know, tell Horus you can stroll him into the Palace past Dorn's walls, should he care to do so?'\n\n'No, John. I haven't.' The stress there, on the first person pronoun. Interesting. What does that betray? An independence of thought, of action? Is this Alpharius somehow rogue, or is he simply alone?\n\n'But if he asks...?'\n\n'He does not ask, we do not offer. It would be inconceivable to any of them, the Lupercal, the Lord of Iron... the Praetorian, come to that... that we would have a way in.'\n\n'They don't know you like I do, then, do they?' says John, with what he hopes is an endearing grin.\n\n'No, John, they don't.'\n\n'I'm just saying, it would have saved them all a lot of bother. A lot. I mean, holy bloody hell...'\n\n'You're not wrong, John.'\n\n'So, you're sharing the secret with us now because... because, what? This is its moment of greatest value?'\n\n'The world's about to die, John. When it does, a great number of secrets will perish. Then they will have no value at all"}
{"text":"ave a way in.'\n\n'They don't know you like I do, then, do they?' says John, with what he hopes is an endearing grin.\n\n'No, John, they don't.'\n\n'I'm just saying, it would have saved them all a lot of bother. A lot. I mean, holy bloody hell...'\n\n'You're not wrong, John.'\n\n'So, you're sharing the secret with us now because... because, what? This is its moment of greatest value?'\n\n'The world's about to die, John. When it does, a great number of secrets will perish. Then they will have no value at all. So it's use it now, or never.'\n\n'To help us?'\n\n'If you like.'\n\n'You know what I'd like?' says John. 'I'd like to be able to trust you. Just once.'\n\nThey pause, and look back along the trail, a thin tear in the rock, which winds down into the secret heart of the Earth. Lumen globes bob behind them: the others of their party slowly catching up in the breathless underground heat. The woman, Actae, Oll and his ragged band, whom John has affectionately dubbed 'the Argonauts', and in the rearguard somewhere, Erda's solemn warrior, Leetu.\n\n'Not here,' says Alpharius. The words - simple words containing a fearful admission - alarm John.\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'I mean, not here. Not in earshot. Not in mindshot. Let's press on, maybe pull ahead of them. Then, perhaps, we can broker some trust.'\n\n'All right. All right, then.'\n\nThey clamber on, up a steep flue in the rock, John scrambling to stay upright on the glittering mineral crust where Alpharius strides effortlessly.\n\n'So, uh, you've been this way before?' asks John.\n\n'I know you're just trying to keep me talking, John.'\n\n'No,' John lies.\n\n'And I know a lie when I hear it.'\n\n'Well,' says John, 'I suppose you would.'\n\n1:xi\n\nOrdo ab Chao\n\nSo this aspect - a golden king upon a golden throne - is not the one he would choose to inhabit. It is simply required, a sign, a symbol of his current occupation. But its value is fading and it is no longer enough.\n\nWake, stir, speak to me. Show me some sign you hear me. We have to talk.\n\nI have, may he forgive me, become insistent.\n\nWe are fighting one war, and we will soon be fighting two, or be forced to choose between them. His loyal sons, of whom there are now so few, trust him still, to such a degree it is genuinely moving. But I read their doubts. The last walls are falling. The sun is red. They fear he is sitting here idle, immobile, impotent, indifferent. They think he's doing nothing, and that he's been doing nothing since this outrage began. They don't understand, as I do all too well, the silent effort he is making just to prevent the eschatonic rupture of reality.\n\nThey don't understand. They have never understood him. They barely understand me, and I am but his Sigillite. Despite the wonder of them, their accomplishment, the post-human miracle that each one represents, they remain simple tools, built for purpose. They lack insight. Even the very best of them, his terrible Angel, who can sometimes see more of tomorrow than even his father can, does not fully comprehend. They yearn for him to rise, to vacate this seat and join them. They long for revelation. They want their Emperor back, the war-king who led from the front in the Great Crusade. Surely he can turn this fight? Surely he can smite down the treacherous enemy at the gates? Why doesn't he act? Why isn't he with us? Why does he sit this out as though it is nothing?\n\nSurely, if he gets up, sword in hand, and stands with us, this war will be over in hours, and victory wrenched from atrocity? For in him is not ordo ab chao? In him is not lux in tenebris?\n\nIs he not humanus pantokrator? Why is he letting this happen?\n\nSo little they know. Time has never been our ally. We seemed to have luxurious amounts of it at the start, but now it is openly our enemy. Tomorrow is almost here. The clocks run out. These are plain facts that even my master cannot change. The last scrap of the aegis shield is about to fail. The armoured ramparts are cracking. The Palace will fall in a few hours. It has already lasted longer than anyone, on either side, anticipated. The world will end in a matter of days. It will be shredded to extinction, unable to withstand the onslaught. These are facts. Despite their unimaginable losses, the traitor-foes are about to win the material war.\n\nSpeak to me. Open your eyes. We must talk.\n\nHow do we reconfigure and deny those facts? Time has never been our ally, and the clocks run down. My lord and master cannot leave his seat, or the immaterial war will be lost. Without his focused operation of this device, this Golden Throne, the torrents of the immaterium flooding the antique webway will breach the conduit beneath our feet, and all will be swept away. The warp will rush in, polluted with the Chaotic annihilators that it carries, and the Earth will die from the inside out. It will perish in seconds, long before the Palace falls or the material war obliterates us. The clocks run down.\n\nIt is lose or lose. He can and he cannot. He is damned either way. The gods are laughing.\n\nWracked with pain, he hopes for salvation, for intervention. I cling to that hope too. It is still a possibility. His other sons, his other loyal sons, sons racing to his side from other suns, fleets at their heels, may be bearing down to smash the traitors and resolve the material war.\n\nEven with my mindsight straining to its limits, I cannot discern a trace of them. I know that my master's mindsight, far superior to mine, is obscured too. My view is clouded, a seeing glass made opaque by milky veils. Terra and its system is occluded by the nimbose miasma of the warp as realspace rots around it. The Solar Realm is sinking into the empyrean, like a boat taking on water in a wrecking gale. I cannot see. They may be coming. I am sure they are. The Master of Ultramar, the Lion, the Wolf, the Raven... any and all of them, rushing to our aid. They could be minutes away. Or hours. Or days. Or months. The clocks run out.\n\nPerhaps they are not coming at all. Perhaps intervention is the false hope of an old man.\n\nThey may be dead.\n\nIf they are, we will never be able to grieve for them.\n\nThe clocks run down. This is the moment. This is the critical hour, the perfect storm we have reconfigured again and again to avoid, every stratagem or ingenious revision blocked, or countered, or undermined. My lord, my master, has tried to avert this pass, but he cannot. He cannot wait. He cannot hope. He cannot stay. He cannot leave.\n\nHe could fight armies. This I know for a fact. He could fight daemons. He could fight turncoat sons. He could fight devious gods. He could fight material and immaterial alike. But he cannot fight them all at once, and he cannot fight time. The clocks run out.\n\nThere are no timepieces here, in what others refer to as the Throne Room. There used to be, but he asked me to have them removed. The stasis generators and stabilisation engines that he retrofitted into what others refer to as the Golden Throne interfere with time. Clocks freeze, or run backwards, or hover at various moments of un-when. He keeps his own time. I know that there is only a scrap of it left.\n\nWe must use it wisely, to maximum effect. Thus, we must reconfigure yet again, adjust and compromise, determine a fresh version of tomorrow. We must effect a teleological reset.\n\nWake, stir, show me a sign. We must talk.\n\nHe must make a new plan, and signify its intent with the mark of his hand.\n\nI urge him to do so. I keep my place at the foot of the great dais, and I continue my steady, insistent psychic entreaties.\n\nBut the pain is so consuming, I am no longer sure he could hear me even if I was screaming.\n\n1:xii\n\nFragments\n\nThe Palace is screaming.\n\nThe voice of its anguish is built from countless parts, just as the Palace was built from countless parts. Every component that was drawn together and assembled to fabricate the great edifice is being pulled apart and scattered to manufacture its death cry: the shrieks of buckling, tortured metal deforming, the wail of disintegrating superstructures, the squeals of splintering stone. As though alive now, briefly, in the hour of its own death, the Imperial Palace awakens to agony, and it is screaming.\n\nSome buildings are simply gone. Landmarks, centuries old, have been entirely erased, or reduced to seas of rubble. Some slump or lean. The Manifold Librarium, the Southern Auxilia Barracks, the Mansion of Syracuse, the Charterhall: great cathedrals of Imperial power and lore are canted like bulk liners on the bed of a dry sea. Others have been cropped or scalped or flayed, or cut in two, the inner strata of their floors and chambers exposed like layers of geological sediment, so they now resemble the scale cross-sections and diagrams Dorn originally drafted to construct and fortify them.\n\nThe auspex paints an engine advancing through the Clanium Fields, just west of Europa Quarter, so the tank formations grind backwards, scrambling for position while they reload. The squadron, thirty-eight tanks from as many different brigades, has made five engine-kills in the past half hour, but those were three House Atrax Knights and two bastardised Reavers. This paint shows something bigger.\n\nJera Talmada fears it's a brute Warlord. It's moving slowly, obscured by the towers of Europa Southside, but the returns on her cracked augur screen indicate a huge mass. It is not broadcasting a transponder identity.\n\nColonel Talmada is commanding a Banestorm, one of four super-heavies in the pack. From her turret seat, she also commands the whole pack. Not a job she ever saw for herself. She's been tank brigade her whole life, but Corps Logisticae, not active. Her role was to mend, service and replenish, not direct front-line tread-war. But the kill-count has been unbearable. When Colonel Sagil was minced by a shell, there were no line officers left in the makeshift battle group, and everyone looked to her because of the pins on her collar. Twenty-nine of her crew leads were ensigns or drivers three d"}
{"text":"et seat, she also commands the whole pack. Not a job she ever saw for herself. She's been tank brigade her whole life, but Corps Logisticae, not active. Her role was to mend, service and replenish, not direct front-line tread-war. But the kill-count has been unbearable. When Colonel Sagil was minced by a shell, there were no line officers left in the makeshift battle group, and everyone looked to her because of the pins on her collar. Twenty-nine of her crew leads were ensigns or drivers three days ago.\n\nShe orders scythe formation, yelling into a headset still crusted with Sagil's blood. She rolls her one Shadowsword out wide to flank her from what's left of the park's embankment. The gunners are loading below her in the oven-heat of the tread. The shell hoppers are running low. When they're out, then what? Withdraw the line for restock, or push on and attempt to support ground troops with the secondary weapon systems? And if she chooses to withdraw, then to where? Latris Bastion, perhaps? Shreave Depot, where they restocked just after dawn, is gone, by all accounts. According to some, the Sanctum is sealed and Eternity barred. There is no sign of support convoys from Logisticae. Talmada can't even get Logisticae on the vox.\n\nSomeone gasps. Talmada hears moans of shock from other crews over the vox. The target engine has moved into view.\n\nIt is Emperor class. Imperator or Warmonger. It's hard to tell through the rivers of smoke flowing across the fields, and formal ident is impossible because the thing is blackened and scorched. In a landscape of superlatives, it is vast. To Talmada's tearing eyes, it looks like a portion of the Palace has uprooted itself and started to walk. A bastion-fortress on legs.\n\nShe had dreaded the Warlords of Legio Mortis and Legio Tempestus. She had heard horror stories of the daemon engines that cut through the Ultimate Wall, scuttling giants on arachnid chassis that rendered wall-stone into irradiated glass with their bulk-meltas, and then cut that glass with their shearing mandibles to build vitrified steps that the baying traitor hosts could climb. But this...\n\nThis.\n\nSomeone speaks. She ignores it. They speak again. Talmada finally listens the third time.\n\nIt's one of ours.\n\nIt is. It was. Its banners and standards are burned away. Its shell-plate is seared. It is headless.\n\nThe Emperor engine moves erratically, limping, shuffling. It has been maimed and decapitated. It walks blind, mindless, undirected, walking only because of some residual impulse or muscle memory echoing through its peripheral systems. It staggers, spasmodic, lobotomised, like a poultry-fowl still twitching minutes after its head has been lopped off. It sees nothing. It knows nothing, not even that it is dead. It just walks, across rubble, through buildings, towards some final, inevitable halt.\n\nThe great Imperial Viaduct, once ninety-five kilometres long, now ends in nothing, truncated, a bridge to nowhere, or to hell, or perhaps to both.\n\nThe name Emhon Lux was writ in glory even before the traitors' Heresy began. His deeds in the Great Crusade won him honour, the respect of his Legion, and a reputation that extended beyond the Blood Angels to fellow Legions, who all, in their own ways, acknowledged his prowess as a warrior-champion.\n\nThe name Emhon Lux, the very being of Emhon Lux, is inextricably entwined with agony. At the brutal defence of Gorgon Bar, alongside his beloved primarch, and such hero-immortals as mighty Raldoron, proud Aimery, fierce Khoradal Furio, and the noble brethren of the Imperial Fists, Emhon Lux excelled, and then fell, his legs and pelvis crushed by the siegecraft of the Traitor IV's warsmiths.\n\nThere has been no time to heal, nor even repair. After such a grievous wounding, a legionary might face months of delicate reconstruction, of augmetic rebuild, of faceless chirurgeons with scalpel hands, and frowning Apothecaries with syringe fingers. Months masked in the bliss-blur of morphic-induced coma and catalepsean fugue. Months of death-sleep filled by the butcher-scents of resected meat and bone-fusion, the alien cold of pseudoflesh grafts and synthetic muscle where nerves had yet to regrow and reconnect. Months of slippery dreams marked out by the beat of bio-monitors and life support. Then months of learning to stand and move again on unfamiliar limbs.\n\nBut no months remain. No weeks, no days. Barely hours. Even the great triumph of Gorgon Bar, for which Lux paid so heavily, is a memory. The Bar, hard won, is now lost, along with Marmax, Victrix and Colossi, and all the rest of everything. Emhon Lux screamed from his bed until they let him up, packed his crushed and broken form with gels and dermal wraps and, according to the instructions he gave through clenched teeth, bound him with chains and ceramite splints to a Mechanicus suspensor throne.\n\nAs the Inner Palace breaks open, Emhon Lux rejoins the field. Pain travels with him as he drifts across broken rockcrete, despite the palliative auto-units lashed to the base-plate of his throne that drip-pump pure opioids into his body through nasogastric tubes and plugs sutured into his belly. He blanks the pain, but it will not leave him, despite the opiate-fog and the fixed intensity of his mental conditioning. It will always be there. He reminds himself that always is now finite.\n\nOstomy drains thread his lower half, spattering bio-waste in his wake. He clutches a lascannon, half rested on the arm of his seat, braced by the over-grip. His arms still work. His world is a fever-haze, incandescent and hallucinogenic. He knows that's due to the inhuman load of analgesic compounds flooding his body and brain, but the world seems incandescent and hallucinogenic anyway. It's hard for him to know what is his own garish invention and what is the new real, the manifested daymares of an unravelling materiality.\n\nIn truth, he does not care. Such is his mental focus to block pain, he has no effort spare to parse figment from truth. Everything is warped and molten. He trusts only the steady ticker of his visor's target reticle. He trusts the heavy weapon in his grip. He trusts the phalanx of combat servitors that trudge at his heels, lugging their rotary cannons, arc rifles and culverins, slaved to his mind through an impulse unit crudely spliced into the base of his skull. Where he aims, they aim.\n\nHe glides through the dust-swirled shadow of Manumission Arch. He glides through pain. His visor boxes multiple contacts on the Via Hyrax ahead. Digitised silhouettes pick out shapes in the smoke, tracking heat and motion. Iron Warriors, the breacher-scum of the Stor-Bezashk, like spelter golems, leading in the smaller shapes of feral Traitor Auxilia. Lux hears the boom of their war-horns, trumpeting victory.\n\nPremature, you piss-weak bastards.\n\nHe raises his cannon, fist clamped on the over-grip, and starts to fire lances of hard, bright light. His throne quivers. Around him, the automata swing as one, and unload in support, cones of flame jagging from their barrels, ejected casings spraying into the air like chaff.\n\nHis enemies gave him pain and made him dwell inside it.\n\nHe gives some back.\n\nOn the Via Aquila, in another part of the human river, Katsuhiro carries his twofold burden, the gun and the child. He tries to steer through the throng, following the general direction of flow, avoiding people rolling handcarts laden with possessions or the makeshift litters of the wounded. The child in his arms, an inherited responsibility, is silent, head against his chest. His gun is silent too, for now.\n\nHe was conscripted Kushtun Naganda Old Hundred once. The remains of his last script orders flutter from a staple on his coat. He has moved through this war, at its very heart, a tiny part of the whole. Now he is nominally part of the conclave, the movement that has grown up organically around the woman called Keeler. It is an odd cause to follow, ill-defined. He doesn't know what to make of Keeler, though he admires her charisma and her sincerity. He wonders if the conclave, unofficial in every way, and possibly illegal if there was anybody left to enforce the statutes, is a fantasy, a group delusion confected to give people something to cling to. In a world that is fundamentally broken, the conclave is a conceit that allows people to feel as though they're doing something, that they still have some agency. Its queasy foundation is religious.\n\nIn extremis, people turn to faith. Spiritual faith had been forsaken for so long, its sudden outpouring has nothing to fix on except the Emperor. That in itself is forbidden, proscribed by the Emperor Himself. But no one, not even the Master of Mankind, can legislate against fear or hope or want. In the last days, the human need for something more than just a powerful ruler, a need few of them even knew they had, has been brutally revealed. They have clung to whatever is there, as the child clings to him. They have made a saviour-god out of a man, without asking or caring if He minds.\n\nThe great avenue is congested, tens of thousands here, tens more flowing in from the Via Artalia and the Chiros Processional, ten times tens more from Lotus Gate and Navis Heights. Slow waves of panic ripple through the teeming mass every time detonations ring too close, and the grain of the crowd billows every time something flies overhead between the towering steeples and blocks of the habs.\n\nIt is always hard to see what the flying things are. Aircraft, bombers, drop-ships, ferries... they move too fast, and the smoke is too dense. Sometimes, Katsuhiro thinks they're not machines at all. He glimpses bat-shapes, vulturine wings, and hears the infrasonic purr of lungs, and the creak of muscle instead of engines.\n\nHe has found goggles, one lens cracked. He has bound his face like an outlaw, the child's too, to mask out dust and soot. Some in the crowd burn incense or carry lanterns. Most have also plugged or wrapped their ears, but"}
{"text":" are. Aircraft, bombers, drop-ships, ferries... they move too fast, and the smoke is too dense. Sometimes, Katsuhiro thinks they're not machines at all. He glimpses bat-shapes, vulturine wings, and hears the infrasonic purr of lungs, and the creak of muscle instead of engines.\n\nHe has found goggles, one lens cracked. He has bound his face like an outlaw, the child's too, to mask out dust and soot. Some in the crowd burn incense or carry lanterns. Most have also plugged or wrapped their ears, but Katsuhiro wants to be able to hear, to stay alert, even if all he hears is pain and screams and constant uproar. The noise alone is exhausting.\n\nHe's not certain he's part of the conclave any more, or if it still exists. He hasn't seen another member of the congregation in three hours. The conclave's basic function was to render aid, to mobilise volunteer militia support, and to operate ad hoc munition supply lines to the front. But the number of people has swollen out of control. The supply chains are overrun and disorganised.\n\nBesides, the munition depots are burning.\n\nThe crowds flow on as though they know where they are going. People carry other people. Many display wounds and injuries, or signs of disease. All are begrimed. There are two modes of expression: weeping or blank-eyed. Fights break out in the crowd over nothing, men and women lashing out at each other because they can't lash out at anything greater.\n\n'Stop it,' Katsuhiro tells them, child cupped in one arm, gun braced in the other. 'What good does that do? What the hell is the point?'\n\nWhat the hell do you know? say the looks that shoot back at him. You're just nobody too, say the glares that come his way. But they relent. He's not sure if it's because of his gun, or the child he's holding.\n\nAnd, anyway, they're right.\n\nThe Emperor Must Die. The Emperor Must Die. It is written on the tattered walls, and gouged into stricken ramparts. It is written in paint and tar, pitch and ash. It is written in blood. It is written everywhere, daubed up, marked by hand, cut with blades or scorched by burners.\n\nIn some places the words have simply appeared, formed by no living hand at all. The words have risen from stone, like blisters, like urticaria, like scarification. The Emperor Must Die. The Emperor Must Die.\n\nIt is a chant too, bellowed by a million voices. It fills the air, and it covers the walls.\n\nAround that slogan, where it is marked, other words are written: threats, menaces, the iconography of the burgeoning darkness, the malign symbols of etheric power. Four words. The four names from which there are eight. The false gods.\n\nAnd one other name, too. With increasing repetition.\n\n1:xiii\n\nRecord of an interview conducted by Remembrancer Oliton\n\nHe chose me. My father, after Ullanor. But there was no choice. I was his first-found son. My father, you see, is a man, but in the same breath, he is surely not. He is more, far more than me. In his scope and dimension, he is a god, though that is a word all of us shy away from. He rejects the term. I think perhaps our language, all human languages, have failed to come up with a word for what he is. A man, but godlike in span and aspiration. He has been working for, what? Thirty thousand years or more, my lady? Thirty thousand years. If the definition 'man' strains to accommodate what I am, it surely shatters to accommodate him. I am mere centuries old, a fraction by comparison, a mere green shoot sprouting from a seed he sowed. He made me to help him in his work.\n\nI was his first-found son. That was the greatest period of my life, those days. Thirty years we had, just him and me, father and son. He raised me up from the Cthonic darkness where he found me, and set me at his side. We had that time together. I had thirty years of his undivided attention and raising. We formed a bond. Unbreakable. Stronger than any he formed with his other sons, for none of them had that same time with him that I got. Thirty years. Not much, I suppose. Thirty beside thirty thousand, scarcely a heartbeat. But even so. I treasure that time. He taught me everything.\n\nSo, of course he chose me. Of course.\n\nHis other sons, my brothers, are all great men. My father and I found them, one by one. The joy we both felt at each discovery! The joy of reunion, of blood finding blood. I cannot tell you. I love each one of them. They are mighty, and I am proud to call them kin. All are great, and some are truly great. Mind you, Mersadie, in any family, there are always favourites, though that fact is always delicately avoided.\n\nThere were strong contenders, of course. For the role of Warmaster, I mean. I have sometimes been eclipsed by the brilliance of my brothers, and I am happy to admit that. The strength of Ferrus. Perturabo's implacable focus. The cunning of Alpharius, last found but never the least.\n\nI have adored them all, and relished their prowess and achievements. But there are always favourites. Rogal, my dear brother, perhaps the finest martial exponent I have ever known. But also, if I'm honest, dour and unimaginative. Narrow in his outlook. My father always had a peculiar fondness for Magnus, for I think in Magnus my father saw a special legacy. But Magnus is a strange one, always stood apart from us; not aloof, but distant, removed into his own thoughts. My father loves him, but there is always a tension there. I think, perhaps, they are too alike. Magnus is too like his father. Such is the way in families, Mersadie.\n\nRoboute, well... I cannot lie. I admire him. The sheer range of his accomplishments. If we resemble aspects of our parents, Lady Oliton, I think Roboute takes after that version of my father who wore the name Alysaundr. There is no doubt he was a true contender too. He would have made a fine Warmaster.\n\nBut when it came down to it, there were only two legitimate choices. Two favourites, let's not pretend otherwise. Myself, and the only other son who holds a place in my father's affections as significant as my own. My angel brother, Sanguinius. He came late, but was perhaps the most beloved. He looks most like my father too, more than me. The features... the tone of his voice...\n\nHe was the only other choice. Can I tell you a secret? He would have been my choice. I love all my brothers, but my love for Sanguinius is particular. I envy him. Does that sound strange? Does that sound weak? Well, I do. I envy him. Would that I had an ounce of his numinous wonder. He is... How can I put it? He is... impossible to hate. Have you met him? You must meet him. He will take your breath away. He is, Mersadie, the only one I would not have resented. Any of us could have been Warmaster. Any of us would have excelled, and we would all have rallied to them without hesitation or question. I had seniority, as first-found, and my achievements spoke for themselves. But had he anointed any of them over me, I would have been secretly insulted.\n\nExcept Sanguinius. If my father had chosen him, I would not have questioned it. Not for a second. I would have rejoiced in his promotion and led the celebration.\n\nIf my father has a favourite son, Mersadie, it is Sanguinius.\n\n1:xiv\n\nFragments\n\nIt is raining fire from a burned-out sky.\n\nThe traitor host bubbles through the low streets and avenues of the Palatine. In their thousands, in their hundreds of thousands, they ascend the staircases of vitrified waste that the spider-engines have woven from the walls, and spill down into the Imperialis, an inky deluge. It is hard to tell in how many places the towering walls have been breached.\n\nThe sky is black flame, the low underbelly of hell. The towers and spires of the Precinct Imperialis, those that still stand, are pockmarked and wounded. They are blackened too, caked in billowed soot and the wash of burners.\n\nThe traitor mass is black. It is all the atrocious devils of the Inferno at once. Ebon armour. Butcher hooks. Obscene banners. A reek of putrescence. Gorbellied armour distended like pot-stoves, sloshing with inner ferment. Sizzling clouds of blowflies. Black helms, wolf-mawed, hound-skulled, boar-tusked, horn-snouted, cage-muzzled, bay at the sky, black against black, or hiss crocodilian whispers to the Neverborn things that follow them in the shadows.\n\nThis is the Terracide. This is the utter end and the ever-death.\n\nShapes irrupt from darkness around the charging mass, are made flesh, and stand blinking and mewling, new-never-born, learning the function of their solidifying senses and limbs, adjusting to their unfamiliar corporeal forms. They stand on moa legs, eight metres high, toe-claws the size of husked palm-nuts, or on goat limbs, or on boneless trunks of glistening mollusc-muscle. They shamble, ponderous under chelonian shells of hard-horn and chitin. They caper and gambol, hopping like vultures at a carcass, swan necks swaying, ibis bills clacking. They snuffle the ground and gnaw at the dead. They unfold wings of necrotic skin on finger-bone rods, and catch the air, and rise, cawing. They hatch like blisters, spilling out, frothing with foams of eyes, or oozing sores that palpate with trembling anemone tongues. They gland hatred and bile. They drip acid and pus. They gnar and bark from drooling pit-bull mouths, and from the sounds, form words; and from the words, the text of their new religion; and from the text, the modes and offices of their demented priestcraft. They begin their rites of sparagmos, and their capering danse macabre. They speak their names into the air, for in their xenolalia they know all names, and they scratch those names and marks upon the city's stones with trocar talons. One name above all, one name more and more, over and over, written in fear and read in glee. The name is not Horus Lupercal.\n\nIt is the thanatoxic neverness. It is the then and the now and the when, for the clocks are all run out. It is the vatic promise of the warp. It is the name that ushers in doom.\n\nBombs burst, interrupting them. Splinters of "}
{"text":"eir names into the air, for in their xenolalia they know all names, and they scratch those names and marks upon the city's stones with trocar talons. One name above all, one name more and more, over and over, written in fear and read in glee. The name is not Horus Lupercal.\n\nIt is the thanatoxic neverness. It is the then and the now and the when, for the clocks are all run out. It is the vatic promise of the warp. It is the name that ushers in doom.\n\nBombs burst, interrupting them. Splinters of shrapnel pass them, hissing like wasps. Agathe reaches to her cheek, and finds a hole in it through which she can touch her teeth.\n\nShe sits down. A corpsman rushes to her. His hands are quickly soaked in blood as he tries to close her wound. He is sobbing. She isn't sure if it's because of her, or for some other cause. She doesn't ask. She waves aside analgesic and gets him to stitch it and plug it with a patch of pseudoflesh.\n\nThe soldiers she was talking to wait, unsure whether to continue or not.\n\nShe gestures at them, irritated, and mumbles something incoherent that causes blood to spill out of her mouth.\n\n'You...?' the officer begins, uncertain.\n\n'Just carry on,' Agathe's adjutant tells them. 'Don't waste time. You were saying who you were.'\n\n'Four-Oh-Three,' says the officer. He looks filthy, wretchedly equipped. But then aren't we all, thinks Agathe. 'Four Hundred and Third. We were told to report to you.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'You are Marshal Aldana Agathe?' he asks.\n\nAgathe nods and grunts.\n\n'She is,' says Phikes, the adjutant. 'Marshal Agathe of the Antioch Miles Vesperi.'\n\nPhikes is Vesperi. He says the words proudly, as though they mean something. They don't. The army of some eight thousand she commands is a scratch-built monstrosity made of all the scraps she could get. She was something once. Commander of a hive-host. She stood alongside Valdor, Raldoron and the Great Khan himself at Colossi. They saw off the Pale King's worst, when such a feat was still possible.\n\nBut that time's gone. The Great Khan is dead, so she's been told. No one knows where brave Raldoron is. She's just a filthy soul sitting on the pavement in a dying city having her face sewn back together by a weeping boy.\n\n'Four Hundred and Third?' says Phikes, asking the next question she would have asked. 'Four Hundred and Third what? I don't know it.'\n\n'Does it matter any more?' the officer replies.\n\n'I'll tell you what matters!' Phikes snaps.\n\nThe soldiers shift uncomfortably.\n\n'We're from Gallowhill Camp,' the officer says. 'Most of us. Ordered to active service two weeks ago. We're glad to serve, I assure you.'\n\n'Gallowhill?' says Phikes, curious. 'The detention camp? You were guards there?'\n\nUnable to speak because the corpsman's fingers are in her mouth, Agathe grunts and waves to get Phikes' attention. He hasn't caught on.\n\n'No,' says the officer.\n\nPhikes frowns. The facts finally align for him. 'You're... convicts? You're a penal unit?'\n\n'Yes,' the man says.\n\n'The Four-Oh-Three is a penal unit, is it?'\n\n'It is,' says the officer, and seems ashamed. 'Four Hundred and Third Exigency Stratiotes.'\n\nPhikes looks at Agathe askance. She glares back, making her opinion very clear.\n\n'Well.' Phikes sniffs, turning back to the men without disguising his scorn. 'Needs must, I suppose. What are your numbers?'\n\n'About a thousand,' says the officer. He is grey-fleshed and grey-tunicked. He and his men have no helmets, just dirty forage caps with an embroidered patch of the palatine aquila on the front. 'We've soaked up a few scratch companies along the way. Stragglers from Anterior and-'\n\nPhikes isn't interested, and doesn't let him finish.\n\n'You are sanctioned?' he asks. 'You have your marks?'\n\nThe officer and his men show the tags stapled like script orders to their collars. Marks of purity and fitness. The Corps Logisticae, under the supervision of something called the 'Prefectus', has been screening people for health, for signs of infection, and for the weals and blisters of immaterial contamination.\n\nThese men have been passed fit. Murderers, thieves and deserters, probably, the lot of them, but 'pure' by the current yardstick.\n\n'I'll be checking every one of your complement,' says Phikes.\n\n'You may,' says the officer, quite openly.\n\n'I don't need your permission-' Phikes growls.\n\nAgathe tells them to shut up with her mouth closed. It comes out as an angry snort.\n\n'Where do you want us, marshal?' the officer asks.\n\nAgathe holds up a finger to bid them wait, and tries to ignore the sensation of the blunt needle pulling through her cheek.\n\nThe corpsman is done. She stands up, takes a canteen, flushes her mouth and spits pink soup onto the flagstones.\n\n'Name?' she asks. It hurts to speak and the word comes out sloppily.\n\n'Mikhail,' he says. 'Captain M-'\n\n'What can you do, Mikhail?' she asks, making a mess of every consonant.\n\n'We have field guns,' he replies.\n\nThat's something. She starts to explain her scheme of deployment, but every word is a slurred labour. She waves them over to the wall of the hab behind them, and starts to draw in the thick dust instead. Simple fingermarks, a suggestion of landmarks, a simplified plan. This is how it will be, she draws, forming basic lines so they can understand. The enemy masses here and here. The support armour will block and enfilade. They will break and run, like so. We will be here. These are the field guns you will bring to bear. This - as her fingers move from rough cross to foe-smudge - this will be your arc of fire. This is where it will strike, this flank here. This will be our kill-box.\n\nThe convict-officer nods. Her intentions are clear.\n\nShe turns back to mark the anticipated lines of retreat if the gambit fails. The wall suddenly feels wrong to her touch. Not brick, not dust. It feels soft and spongy. It feels like the skin of her cheek.\n\nShe withdraws her hand, quickly, and stares. The others stare too. The patch of wall is sarcoid, like stretched flesh or raw hide. Bristles sprout from sagging creases that vaguely resemble the original block-joints and mortar.\n\nShe can't look away from the wall. Behind her, she hears Phikes dry-heave. It's not the sheet of mottled flesh that fascinates her. It's the marks she made in the dust. Her plan is gone, and the smudges now spell something out.\n\nThree words.\n\n'Did you write that?' the convict-captain asks.\n\nAgathe shakes her head. She doesn't even know who 'the Dark King' is.\n\nSpilled tarot cards, fallen from the torn musette bag of a dead Excertus sergeant near the Razavi line, flutter in the war-wind, billowing like dead leaves across the cracked and blood-soaked pavement.\n\nSome are torn, some creased, some stained. One of them is on fire.\n\n1:xv\n\nMortal measures\n\nI cannot bear to watch his hands clench involuntarily on the golden armrests any more. I look away. Watching them twitch and spasm tells me too much of his ordeal.\n\nI look away. I seek distraction. The room is vast by any mortal measure. It, in itself, is a sign, a symbol. It was built to suit the regal war-king he once was, a grand chamber to mirror that grand aspect. He did not object, for he understood the psychological value. Down the ages, architecture has always been used to amplify the status and authority of those who rule. Here is where he set his throne, so here is the throne room built around it, quite breathtaking in its dimension and scale. He told me he remembered the great cathedrals of the old eras, the echoing naves of Chartres, Beauvais, Oaxaca Katholikon and Nu Krasnodar Minster, their solemn hush, their sanctity, their symbolic manifestos of reverence. Of course, they were built to laud false gods, which is why he had them overthrown, but there was no denying their cosmetic effect. They inspired belief and obedience. They instilled awe. Those who came to engage with him needed to feel the same effect. They needed to be humbled. They needed to be reminded, beyond any shadow of doubt, that he was worth listening to.\n\nBut it's just a room. It is a throne room simply because, to them, it is a room with a throne in it. Even the Throne is not a throne, not as they understand the word. He does not sit here to project an aspect of exalted supremacy. The Throne is a device, the most important and oldest of his key instruments. The room is simply the room where he works, the central chamber of a suite of chambers that others refer to as the Dungeon, but which he thinks of as his workshop.\n\nDungeon. Words are strange, imprecise and too easily applied. People see what they want to see. A dungeon, a throne room, a golden throne, an emperor. Just words. It is a dungeon because it is deep beneath a palace, so of course the word for that must be dungeon. Not workshop or laboratorium or studio or adytum or temple of science, sunk deep into the living rock simply to insulate it against fluctuations of matter and immateria. Of course it is a throne room, because it is monumental and contains a throne. Of course he is the Emperor, because what else could he be? He is what they need him to be.\n\nOf course it is a throne, for is it not massive and gilded and ornate? And does the Emperor not sit upon it?\n\nThe Golden Throne - I have long since abandoned the distraction of finding a better name for it - is a device with many astounding applications, one of which is the moderation and manipulation of etheric power. I have always assumed that he constructed it himself, but I also assume that he incorporated into that construction pieces of relic technology. This has often been his way. He makes ingenious use of the strange treasures he has found in the course of his long life, repurposing and reverse-engineering them. He did the same with the vast and baffling xenoarchaeological monument known as the webway.\n\nWe cannot know who originally constructed the webway or why, and we can only speculate that other cultures may have found it and used it for their own purposes before human history began. We do know, "}
{"text":"t construction pieces of relic technology. This has often been his way. He makes ingenious use of the strange treasures he has found in the course of his long life, repurposing and reverse-engineering them. He did the same with the vast and baffling xenoarchaeological monument known as the webway.\n\nWe cannot know who originally constructed the webway or why, and we can only speculate that other cultures may have found it and used it for their own purposes before human history began. We do know, however, that the wise-yet-unwise aeldari inherited it, gave it its name, and used it as a subspace network of travel and communication.\n\nIt is a labyrinthine subdimension that stretches across the galaxy. It permits transit to those with the will to use it. That transit is direct and, comparatively, swift. Moreover, that transit is entirely free of the vagaries of the warp. From this, we can discern both the genius and the intent of the aeldari. They were building an interstellar culture that would not depend on the warp in any way. They conspired to shun the warp, and remove it from the equation. They built under and around and above it. They limited their interaction with the warp, because they predicted that the warp would always, ultimately, consume any maturing psychically aware species.\n\nThey knew this, but it happened to them anyway.\n\nMy lord and master's use of the webway echoes their intent. It was the reason he returned prematurely from the Great Crusade. He had recognised that mankind could and should not be reliant on the warp, in matters such as travel and communication, and with all haste and urgency, he embarked on a programme to reclaim, repair and rebuild the webway to make it human-compatible. It was a vital part of his Great Work, arguably more urgent than the unifying crusade itself.\n\nBut his sons did not understand that.\n\nShould he have told them? Should he have explained? And if he should have done that, why did he not? I confess, that's another story, and not mine to tell.\n\nMy story is this one. His story. It is the story of mankind, of its triumphs and failures, its fortitude and its wrong turns. It began, once upon a time, millennia ago, when we were still painting our hopes and plans on walls with our fingers, and trusting in something else to watch over us, and it has been spinning out ever since, like yarn, like a single precious thread, through the adumbral maze of mankind's clumsy, complex, unwieldy and confused history. Now, here he sits, a lonely magician on a makeshift throne, with the other end of that thread in his hand. It has been his story to tell, his thread to pay out so that we did not lose our way, and it ends here, now, or never.\n\nI had hoped it would be never, but now I am not so sure. The clocks run out, and so does the spool of thread. Time has come, abstract but menacing, to demand what it is due.\n\nHe has done his best. Many dispute that, but it's true. He has done his best to protect the human race from its own worst propensities, from malice and evil and the predation of others, from a future that was deemed inevitable and, most of all, from itself. I know there are many, far too many, who regard him as a monster, who reject the path he has measured with his thread, who seek to shame his ambition and wrest control from him. Well, my master does not seek approval, and he does not seek acclaim, and he absolutely never asked for permission. He has been guided by rationality, and a profound belief in the potential of our species. He believes, just as I believe, that mankind can achieve what no sentient form has achieved before, in the whole history of this universe. Apotheosis. Not just for him, for the entire species. He believes, and has always believed, that we can configure our own tomorrow, and elude the inevitable doom of the future.\n\nFor he saw, once upon a time, what no one else had seen, or wanted to see. He saw that there was nothing else watching over us. No gods, no ineffable, divine other, nothing guiding us or keeping us safe. We were journeying alone, and the only fate that awaited us, the only far future, was the one we would make for ourselves.\n\nOf course, there was something else. But not gods, not gods as we would want them, or need them, or imagine them; not providers or guardians. Not gods at all, though, like 'throne', it is the easiest word to use. Anagogic powers, higher things, outer things, formless and uncontrolled, annihilators that have followed in our footsteps every step of the way, symbolic reminders of the preordained doom awaiting us. Predators, watching us from the shadows as we live our lives, waiting for us to drop our guard or turn our backs.\n\nConsider again that wall, long ago, the bison and the running deer, the fleeing antelope, the men with bows and spears. But if you look closely, there, at the edge, where fingers have painted trees and long grasses, there are the predators, lying in wait, hardly visible, but for the tips of their ears and the glint in their eyes, biding their time, waiting for one of the men to fall behind and lose sight of his brothers. They have always been there, even though we don't see them, in the darkness at the back of the cave, in the night beyond the ring of the camp's fire, in the sun-baked cover of the scrub, watching, waiting, hungry.\n\nThey are the only else, and they must be shunned and kept out. There are four of them. He knows their names. No one else should.\n\nHe stole fire from those four annihilator gods, and used it to keep them at bay. He wielded it in his hand, century after century, to drive them back whenever they came too close. It amused him that they flinched from their own fire.\n\nBut he knew from the start it would not be enough just to keep them away. We could be vigilant, torch in hand; we could build walls to keep them outside, we could invent cities to hide in, but they would always be there. So there began the long game, his life's work. To keep us safe, and remove the possibility of a future in which they got in and ate us alive, he would have to hunt them down and kill them.\n\nExcept, as he quickly learned, they are not things that can die. They persist. They can only be denied and avoided. And even in that, he has failed, or at least is on the brink of failure. That was the plan he made on his wall, but it is not yet complete, and now the clocks run out, and tomorrow is not what he configured and promised, and we have not built our walls high enough or strong enough. They have been trying to stop us since they first became aware of his intention, and now they are at the gates to end him.\n\nI look out, extending my mindsight to its limit. I cannot see hope or salvation, I cannot see relief coming, but I can see them, in the shadows and the long grass, bellies to the ground, prowling ever closer.\n\nSo, it's come to this. He cannot fight everything at once. There isn't time. Time is our enemy. He no longer has the luxury of sitting, mastering this pain as he blocks out the warp. He must choose his battles, and win each one in order of priority. He is not a god, but he has been fulfilling that role for a long time, acting in the stead of the allotheistic figments that never existed, no matter how much mankind believed in them. Though we both abhor the word, and forbid its use, he has been a god for all practical purposes for centuries.\n\nTime is burning. The clocks have stopped. The walls collapse. I am his trusted Regent. I must give my advice now. I must urge him. I must make him hear me. To redeem his plan and salvage any hope of the tomorrow he intended, he must rise.\n\nHe must stop acting as a god, and fight like a man.\n\n1:xvi\n\nFragments\n\nThey have come great distances to destroy the world. They have come from other worlds, obscure systems, from far-off stars and remoter star clusters. They have come from every corner of what was, for one fleeting and glorious moment, the Imperium of Man.\n\nAnd beyond. They have come from other spaces, other realms, other layers of creation and other flavours of reality. They have come from the roiling psycho-ocean of the warp. They have come from hell.\n\nBaleful eyes blink at the light of a new world. Baleful eyes in pugnacious horror-faces. The black fur around the glittering eyes is still matted with thawing interstellar ice. They have come a long way to be here.\n\nHelig Gallor kills the last of some Traitor Excertus on the walkway behind Sydal House. Once of the Death Guard's Seventh Great Company, now Knight Errant, Gallor's loyalty is uninterrupted. He looks at the bodies littering the flowerbeds around him. The fools thought they could ambush him. They should have brought more than thirty if they'd wanted a fair fight, though nothing has been fair for a very long time. Gallor recognises the insignia on the blood-soaked tunics. Merudin 18th Assault Cadre... or, at least, that's what they had been once. Merud, he thinks. That's a long way out, beyond Cycax. These men had come a long way to be here.\n\nThey'd come a long way just to die.\n\nThey've come a long way. The last leg has been a slow, exhausting trek up through the compressed grave cities and ancient stratigraphy of past civilisations on which the Palace was built. They've seen sights, marvels, astonishing relics over which, if he'd had a mind to, Oll Persson might have lingered.\n\nBut he hasn't. Time's against them, and the crushed layers of compacted cities seem too much like a precis of his life, which has been long, longer than John's, longer even than His.\n\nLonger than anyone's.\n\nOll doesn't wish to linger and remember. He wants to get there. He's embarked on the longest and most uncanny odyssey that anyone has ever undertaken, and he wants it done with.\n\nBesides, there's something following them. It's been chasing them since they set out from Calth, something in the darkness that's getting closer by the hour. He can feel it in his old bones.\n\nAnd in the knife that shivers in his hand.\n\nHe"}
{"text":"h has been long, longer than John's, longer even than His.\n\nLonger than anyone's.\n\nOll doesn't wish to linger and remember. He wants to get there. He's embarked on the longest and most uncanny odyssey that anyone has ever undertaken, and he wants it done with.\n\nBesides, there's something following them. It's been chasing them since they set out from Calth, something in the darkness that's getting closer by the hour. He can feel it in his old bones.\n\nAnd in the knife that shivers in his hand.\n\nHe was a farmer when he set out, but that life of crops and toil and peace was just a brief interval. His favourite interval, it had to be said, the best of all the short stories that make up his history. But it was just a tiny island in the vast archipelago of his experience. He's been many things, as many things as there are to be: soldier, scholar, husband, coward, pacifist, parent, navigator, ruler, friend... He was even Warmaster once, the first ever to bear that title. Most of all, more than anything, he's been a voyager. A sailor, a seafarer, a traveller, a wanderer. He's known the infinite wonders of a voyaging life, and understands that the sweetest part of any journey is always the ending. Land in sight at last. Breakers on the beach. The sloping light of evening marking the rooftops of a longed-for home.\n\nThe end of this voyage will not be sweet. He only hopes it will be worthwhile.\n\nThis voyage - his last, he is sure - has been the strangest and greatest of all. So strange, so perilous, that it would've been rejected by myth-weavers as too fanciful. He's stepped between stars, across galaxies. He's sliced holes in the curtain of the immaterium with his athame, and slipped through them, from place to time, and time to place, against the linear weft of history and the reassuring logic of material reality, a circuitous route, beset by danger, pursued every step of the way, to get here.\n\nHome. Terra. The last and furthest shore. The sloping light of evening on familiar rooftops. His birthplace, and the place where everything began.\n\nThe place where, one way or another, everything will end.\n\nOll's brought others with him, unwillingly, though to leave them behind would've consigned them to death. Even so, one has fallen already. Oll worries how many of them will survive the last stretch. He's offered them chances to stop along the way, to stay behind in safe ports while he goes on alone, but they've refused. They're in this now, confused, committed, utterly loyal to him in ways he can't credit. John, his friend, his nemesis, calls them the Argonauts. To Oll, that's a slight on both the prowess of the original crew to bear that name, and to the bravery of this company. He has, after all, known both.\n\nThey walk with him, his long companions, up through the cavern track. Katt, the latent psyker, close at his side, simmering with unease; Dogent Krank, the steady and stubborn soldier; Hebet Zybes, the simple farmhand to whom everything is miraculous and thus nothing startling; and Graft, the battered cultivation servitor, which has trundled far outside the remit of its task-programming.\n\nThey've acquired fellow travellers along the way. Leetu - or, more properly, LE 2 - Erda's bodyguard, loaned to John for the duration. In unpainted silver plate as stoic and unyielding as his demeanour, Leetu is a Space Marine. Oll believes he's a prototype of the Astartes breed, perhaps even an early test, his genetic profile unmodified by any primarch's seed. His beaked helm, armour pattern and bolt weapon speak of a time when the first batches were made, and the replacement of the Thunder Warriors began. Oll wishes he'd been there with John, to speak to Erda and quiz her about Leetu. Has she always had him? Did she keep him back when the first samples were cast in the Sigillite's progenoid labs? Is he a stolen treasure, a memento? Or was he made for her as a gift?\n\nSo many puzzles, and they're not even the start. More than anything, Oll wishes he'd simply been able to meet Erda again, to talk of things directly, to construct a plan, to recall the histories they once shared and the man they both knew. But the rendezvous proved impossible. Something - an imprecise cut with the athame, perhaps, or the sabotaging efforts of those set against them, or just the ever-increasing warp saturation around their destination world - threw them off course, like a sudden storm in the Cyclades, and cast them up on a desolate shore in the wrong time and the wrong place. They only survived that misadventure because John, god bless his determination, found them and, with Leetu at his side, pulled them from danger.\n\nOll's missed the chance to meet with Erda, and consult a soul, the mater omnium, who's considerably wiser and better informed than he is. They could've made a plan for, truth of it is, he has none at all. Except to stop this. By any means necessary. That's it, the top and bottom of it. Oll will have to improvise when the time comes, just as he did with Polyphemus, and that awkward time in Ygrayne's chambers.\n\nWorst of all, Oll fears that whatever's following them will have traced a path to Erda and discovered her after her centuries of careful self-exile. If that's true, if she's been harmed...\n\nThen there's the Alpharius. Utterly untrustworthy yet utterly essential. Only he knows the last steps of the way. So Oll must countenance his presence, even though he has a poor history with hydras. The teeth of the dragon have never been sown in his favour.\n\nOll knows the Alpharius is vital, because Actae has told him so. She's their other new companion, the blind prophetess in tattered red, a creature of immense, perhaps deathless power, who conjures from his memory the witch-queens of the ancient Aegean and Kolkhis at their nightmarish best and beautiful worst. Like John, Actae's life has been threaded through the tapestry of this war, used and spurned by both sides. She stands with them, now, of her own volition, and according to her own agenda. Or so she says.\n\nActae and Alpharius. Without them, they can go no further nor hope to prevail. But with them... the question becomes 'further into what?' What unifies the band is a desire for salvation. Oll's far from convinced that Actae's vision of salvation resembles his in any way at all.\n\nKatt despises her. In part, that's the friction of two active minds in close proximity, jarring and sparking against each other, but Oll knows that Katt can see more, more than she is able to say. As they walk, Katt glances at him from time to time, warning looks that ask, Why do you let her come with us? She's too afraid to explain her fears to Oll.\n\nFinally John, of course. John Grammaticus. Pawn of the xenos Cabal, an artificial Perpetual employed to agitate the war and escalate it to a pitch that would end in Horus' victory and the subsequent annihilation of the human race. This, the Cabal dreamed, would be a means to snuff out the ruinous threat of Chaos.\n\nBut that genocidal scheme is abandoned, forsaken by the Cabal when they realised that Horus' power was beyond even their ingenious manipulation. Oll knows that John, forever the cat's paw, now wishes to make amends and break the deadlock of the war. He's taken ownership of his last ration of mortality, and intends to use it well.\n\nJohn's the reason Oll is on this odyssey. John believes Oll's deep history with the thing now known as the Emperor can exert an influence, and change the course of damnation.\n\nOll's not so sure. Nothing and no one has ever changed the Emperor's mind, or persuaded Him to reconsider His plans. But there's a chance, a minuscule one worth all this risk, a chance to stop the Emperor leading mankind to what Oll always warned would be the inescapable consequence of His ambitions.\n\nNot glory. Not the ascension of the human race. Just the dark and hopeless bonfire of the Triumph of Ruin.\n\nThe knife shivers in his hand. The lapped-stone thing is old, Neolithic old. It's played its part in history: the instrument of the original murder, splashed with the blood of Abel, the executioner of Gog. It's lain on the painted top of a great round table, and passed from daemon to man and back again. Oll took it from the Word Bearers, who had come to understand the potency of such objects, and had taken to collecting them. A blade like it, similarly cursed by fate, initiated this cataclysm. Perhaps, as a mirroring ritual, the athame can end it.\n\nPerhaps. The athame's just stone, just old stone, but its past has created a resonance in the immaterium, the staining shadow of murder. It's tired of cutting time and space. It has killed seven times. It's been promised an eighth death.\n\nIf that's what it takes. Oll will do it if he has to. Plunging that blade into...\n\nIt wouldn't be the first time.\n\n'Your thoughts are fascinating,' says Actae.\n\n'Get out of them, please,' says Oll.\n\n'I can't read them, Ollanius. You mask them well. But I can taste them. They taste intriguing, as though they are... well, unthinkable.'\n\n'He said get out of his head, so get out of it,' says Katt.\n\nActae pauses, and turns her head to consider Katt, as if she's looking at her, though her blind eyes are wrapped.\n\n'Then should I peer into you instead?' she enquires. 'Your mind is odd, girl. There is so little of you, as if everything has been wrapped up and put away, out of sight. Did you decide to forget who you used to be, or was there nothing to remember in the first place?'\n\nThere's a smack, like a hand striking flesh. Actae's head jerks sideways, slightly. When she turns back, she touches the smile her mouth has become.\n\n'Nice shot,' she says. 'Bear in mind that's the only one you'll get.'\n\n'Only one I'll need,' says Katt, 'if it teaches you to keep your mind to yourself.'\n\n'That's enough,' says Oll, stepping between them. He's too tired for this nonsense. Everyone is looking - Zybes, Krank, even Graft.\n\n'We go together, or we go our separate ways,' says Oll.\n\n'Here?' asks Actae, "}
{"text":" like a hand striking flesh. Actae's head jerks sideways, slightly. When she turns back, she touches the smile her mouth has become.\n\n'Nice shot,' she says. 'Bear in mind that's the only one you'll get.'\n\n'Only one I'll need,' says Katt, 'if it teaches you to keep your mind to yourself.'\n\n'That's enough,' says Oll, stepping between them. He's too tired for this nonsense. Everyone is looking - Zybes, Krank, even Graft.\n\n'We go together, or we go our separate ways,' says Oll.\n\n'Here?' asks Actae, gesturing to the deep cleft around them with her long, expressive fingers and longer nails. 'Part company down here, Ollanius?'\n\nThe track is steep, uneven and narrow. The rock floor glitters with threads of minerals. Gloom gathers breathlessly. The walls lean in over their heads. It's like an axe-wound split into the rock.\n\n'I've found my way out of other labyrinths,' he tells her. 'Play nice. Don't pry.'\n\nActae nods, a surprisingly courteous gesture. 'Of course. I am just incurably inquisitive. And I am fascinated by the company I find myself in.'\n\n'That was your choice,' says Oll.\n\n'It was. I apologise, Katt,' says Actae.\n\nOll looks at Katt. Her fists are balled, her cheeks flushed, her eyes drawn narrow. She glares at Actae. Katt's life has been miserable. Oll knows that. An unregistered psyker, Katt's spent her years hiding, or being shunned, or both. She's leery of everything, especially uninvited questions. Oll's little band is the first and only place she has found a purpose. She came to him as a survivor, a refugee seeking rescue. But she's the only one he really trusts, because there's no side to her, no agenda. Just tough, honest loyalty. He trusts her more than John. He trusts everyone more than Actae. Even the damn Alpha.\n\nLeetu appears behind them. Their lamplight catches on the silvered un-finish of his plate. He seems as fresh as he did when they set out on this long, slow climb hours earlier.\n\nHis hand is to the ear-guard of his helm.\n\n'Message,' he says. 'From Alpharius. He requests we stay here. He's securing an area ahead. Him and Grammaticus.'\n\n'Securing?' asks Krank.\n\n'He didn't explain,' replies Leetu. 'If I ask, I won't get a straight answer. This part of the journey is his call.' He looks at Actae. 'Correct?'\n\n'Yes,' says Actae.\n\n'Let's wait here then,' says Oll. 'Rest.' He finds a low rock, settles his weight against it, eases his aching feet.\n\nZybes unstoppers a flask of water and takes a sip.\n\nActae folds her great height onto the ground, and sits cross-legged as if she's taking a stance on a meditation mat in some ashram. She places her wrists on her knees, palms up.\n\n'So,' she says. 'What shall we talk about?'\n\n1:xvii\n\nThe Bastion\n\nThis was the Grand Borealis, the heart of war, the central chamber of the immense Bhab Bastion. This was the seat of loyalist command.\n\nBhab Bastion, that imperious and impervious block-fortress, with its surrounding drum towers, has been the Praetorian's command core since the siege began. From here have issued all commands, all directives, all orders and notifications. The peerless operation of the defence has been orchestrated from here since the thirteenth of Secundus.\n\nThis was the Grand Borealis. A humbling chamber of cyclopean scale. The data of war has flowed across its countless screens and console stations, and on its strategium tables, the hololithic maps of conflict zones have been displayed, and strategies debated, and tactics devised.\n\nIt was the nexus of authority, the nucleus of the War Court. It was awake and active, day and night, without pause or interruption, alive with voices, the bustle of a thousand personnel, the chatter and chirrup of tac, noospheric and vox updates, the whir of servo-skulls darting by on errands, the hustle of scribes and clerks and messengers, the fierce discussion of the Tacticae Terrestria, the voices of summoned generals and lords militant, the briefings of Council delegates, the hum of projection amplifiers, the rattle of cogitators, the squeal of alarms.\n\nThis was the seat of Archamus, Master of the Huscarls, Second Of That Name, Dorn's proxy at the head of the command chain, a station he did not seem to leave for months.\n\nThis, nearby, the chair of Vorst, veteran captain of the Imperial Fists, deputy to Archamus, sidelined from the front due to old injuries, his mind sleeplessly devoted to the decision-theory of warfare, mentally waging a campaign that would be enacted in deed.\n\nThese were the stations of the mistresses and masters tacticae... Icaro, Brinlaw, Osaka, Gundelfo, Elg, Montesere, a hundred others, the greatest strategic thinkers of the age.\n\nThis is the billow of smoke. This is the heckle of flames. This is the scree of glass and plastek fragments across the deck, the spatters of oil and dirt, the spilled and abandoned files and reports, stirred and ruffled by the wind that gusts through the spaces where once were windows.\n\nThis is the Great Strategium table, at which Praetorian, Khan and Angel once debated, smashed and overturned. These are the cracked and fractured plates of the hololith display panels. These are the loops of torn cables, hanging like entrails from the casings of calculation desks. These are the punctures and scorches on the walls, the impact points of mass-reactive shots and lasweapons.\n\nThis is the blood on the floor, the drips and flecks across the station panels, the spray on the walls that has started to trickle and run. These are the bodies of the dead, killed before they were able to evacuate. These are the ones who died defending the doorways. This is the boom and howl of war-horns bellowing from the traitor engines stalking past outside, the massed roar of the host sacking the lower levels. This is the giggling of the Neverborn.\n\nThis is the Grand Borealis. These are the flames consuming it and the stink of fresh death filling it. This is the charnel house and ruin that it has become in the past four hours.\n\nIt has stood since the beginning. It has fallen now, swept away by the apocalypse-tide that has poured into the Inner Palace. Those within remained at their posts to the last possible moment, determined to maintain their vital work. Most left it too late to flee. Few have survived.\n\nThese scraps of meat and hair and cloth are Fourth Master Tacticae Terrestria Julius Gundelfo. This burned husk is Rubricator Senioris Hyton Ki. This mangled form is Junior Administrar Patris Sator Omes. These bloody shreds are Colonel Lin-Hu Kway. This smear of gore and tissue is Data-Adjudicator Perez Grist. This head, rammed upon a spike, is Cogitation Overseer Arnolf Van Halmere. This bundle, draped in green robes, is Nytali Hengmuir, Chosen of Malcador.\n\nThese splashes and spots of blood are Mistress Tacticae Katarin Elg, who ran the Saturnine defence operation, and whose body was carried off by fleeing survivors in the vain hope they could save her.\n\nThis is Vorst, Imperial Fists veteran captain, who has not left his post. His boltgun slides from his grasp and hits the deck with a crash.\n\nThis is Tarchese Malabreux, Master of the Catulan Reavers, Sons of Horus. He hauls on his blade and it slides out in a sudden gout of red, unpinning Vorst's corpse from the Grand Borealis wall. The veteran captain sinks slowly to the deck, and falls on his side.\n\nBhab Bastion is taken.\n\n1:xviii\n\nRecord of an interview conducted by Remembrancer Oliton\n\nBut he chose me.\n\nSuch an honour. I deserved it. He chose me because of our special affinity, those thirty perfect years, and my accomplishments speak for themselves. More than that, my lady, I think he chose me because I have... How can I put it? I have a common touch. I am all things to all men. Sanguinius is a far more noble being. But his ethereal quality, the very essence of what he is and why he is so adored... it makes him unapproachable. His perfection was why he was not chosen. My imperfection made me a better candidate.\n\nI was relieved when I was named. I've never told anyone this. Relieved. It was the right thing to do. I cannot believe how immodestly I am speaking to you. There is something about you, Mersadie, that puts me at my ease and prompts me to speak quite openly and without filter.\n\nI was relieved. And, knowing who he might have chosen, I swore I would not fail him. Fathers and their sons, eh? There is always an order to these things, a complex web of blood and relationship that must be navigated. I know this very well, now I have sons of my own.\n\nWe all have favourites, you see.\n\nEzekyle? Oh, I really shouldn't say. You must decide for yourself. I'll tell you this, though, Ezekyle will do things I will never do. In his achievements, he will far outstrip me. I am sure of it. But is he my favourite? Mamzel Oliton, it depends how you measure these things, how you navigate that family web. They are all my beloved sons. Ezekyle is the strongest, the most determined, the most like me. But Sejanus has a different quality of strength. If Ezekyle is my Lupercal, my first son, then Sejanus is my Guilliman. Sedirae is my Dorn, Torgaddon my Ferrus.\n\nAnd then there's Loken, of course. You've met him, I believe? He is quite unlike me in so many ways. He is a favourite son. If anyone asks, I will deny it. I cannot be seen to show favour. But, between you and me, he is my Sanguinius.\n\nAs a father, I love and trust them all, for they are, as I am, loyal instruments with which the future may be shaped and civilisation fashioned. All of them, even... excuse me, remembrancer... even Maloghurst here, who knocks upon my chamber door even though he knows full well I am occupied talking to you and should not be disturbed.\n\nWhat do you need, equerry? You can see I'm busy.\n\nSpeak up, man.\n\n'You must come, Warmaster.'\n\nIndeed? Why 'must' I, Maloghurst? I am in conversation with the remembrancer here. Whatever it is, I am sure the First Captain can-\n\n'You must come, Warmaster.'\n\nSo insistent. That's not like you, Mal. Tell me, why 'must' I do any-\n\n'It's long "}
{"text":" remembrancer... even Maloghurst here, who knocks upon my chamber door even though he knows full well I am occupied talking to you and should not be disturbed.\n\nWhat do you need, equerry? You can see I'm busy.\n\nSpeak up, man.\n\n'You must come, Warmaster.'\n\nIndeed? Why 'must' I, Maloghurst? I am in conversation with the remembrancer here. Whatever it is, I am sure the First Captain can-\n\n'You must come, Warmaster.'\n\nSo insistent. That's not like you, Mal. Tell me, why 'must' I do any-\n\n'It's long past time. Please.'\n\nI resent your tone, Maloghurst. You're being presumptuous in front of my guest. Where did she go? She was just here. In that chair.\n\n'You must come, Warmaster.'\n\nCease your whining, Maloghurst. Where is the woman gone? Have you scared her away with your pleading-\n\n'I implore you, my Warmaster. You must come.'\n\nMust I? Must I indeed?\n\n'Forgive me, but you must. We have waited for so long. We need you. The war needs you.'\n\nWar? Xenobia is but a simple compliance that the First Captain can handle in his damn sleep, Mal-\n\n'I beg you, my lord.'\n\nThe room is warm. There is an odour of meat, of shaved bone. You open your eyes, not aware they had been closed, and see broken light. A face. The echo of a voice. Have you been asleep? Perhaps. You have been tired, so very tired, these last few days. More tired than you have ever been. But you must not show it, not to any of them, any of your sons. You are Lupercal. You are the Warmaster, as you were just telling the young woman.\n\n'I was meditating,' you say. 'A moment of inward contemplation, to gather focus and clarity. How do we stand, Maloghurst?'\n\nThe face looks at you. There is humility there, respect, but also a trace of concern.\n\n'It's Argonis, my lord,' the face says. 'Argonis.'\n\nYou sit up. There is a sour taste in your mouth. A sour taste, like the sour smell in the room.\n\n'Of course,' you say. 'Excuse me, my mind was elsewhere.'\n\n'Please, my lord. It is no matter. I'm sorry I had to disturb you when you were resting.'\n\nYou wave it aside with a never-mind of your hand. You feel heavy.\n\n'Where is Maloghurst?' you ask. There is phlegm in your throat. Speaking seems unfamiliar. How deeply were you sleeping?\n\n'He is... not here, Warmaster. I... I am Argonis. Your equerry.'\n\nYou nod. 'I know that. You said so. And you were saying something about the war?'\n\nThe face, the man, Argonis, hesitates. His armour looks black, which seems strange. He is... Kinor Argonis, that's it. A good man. A good warrior. A good son. He's anxious about something.\n\n'Speak, Kinor,' you say. You force a more gentle tone. Sometimes you have to act the patient, paternal role when the junior ranks have to deal with you directly.\n\n'There has been discussion... consultation,' Argonis begins tentatively. 'It was decided that I should approach you. We need you. We have needed you long before now. We cannot wait any longer.'\n\n'Who is \"we\", equerry?'\n\nArgonis does not answer. He turns his gaze towards the deck as you stand.\n\n'Tell me of the war, then, my son,' you say. You place your hand against the warrior's cheek and turn his head so he is obliged to meet your stare. Is that fear in his eyes? Why fear?\n\n'We are at a juncture,' Argonis replies, with hesitation. 'Certain... elements are in play that must be balanced and judged. As only you can. We crave your instruction. We long for your command.'\n\n'Show me.'\n\n'A full tactical composite is displayed here, the best our instruments can assemble.'\n\n'Interference? Distortion?'\n\n'Well... of course, my lord.'\n\nYou consider the vast holo-light image. 'This is a full analysis of the Xenobia compliance?'\n\n'Xenobia? No, my lord. Not Xenobia.'\n\n'Then what am I looking at?'\n\n'At Terra, my lord.'\n\nThe name hangs for a long moment.\n\n'Of course. Of course it is,' you say. You try to make it sound relaxed. You try to laugh, to make light of it, but you are quite devoid of laughter. You mustn't show weakness or infirmity, especially not to a junior rank like this man. They adore you. What is that taste, at the back of your tongue? Is it blood? What's wrong with your mouth?\n\n'Let us see now,' you say. 'Let us consider our choices. Equerry, tell Sejanus to attend me at once. I would have his counsel on this.'\n\n'I... My lord.'\n\n'And find that woman. That remembrancer. Convey my apologies that I am detained, and tell her that I will speak with her again later.'\n\nThe walls breathe. The equerry hurries away. You do not bother to watch him go. The display holds your entire attention. This is where you are now. Where you have been this whole time. Where you were always going to be.\n\nTerra. Old Earth. The very beginning and the very end.\n\nYou must clear your mind. You must focus. This is important. The most important thing of all. You wish you could remember why.\n\nAnd then you can. Suddenly. Memory flushes through your system, like a sudden rupture of meltwater from a dying glacier. It sluices through your meat and bone, awakening every knot and ache and throb of pain. So much has changed. You have changed. You barely recognise yourself.\n\nThe shadows in the breathing corners of the room, in the folds of warm darkness, are whispering. You realise you know the names of all the shadows, and they know yours.\n\nThis is Terra. This is the end, and the approaching moment of death. This is the greatest task of your life, except for the one that will follow it when you have taken the reins of power. Only you can do that. Only you were made for it. No one else has the vision or the insight. For now, it is just a simple operation of compliance that has, sadly, required full illumination. This world is proving to be problematic. Most unfortunate. There was a mistake born of misunderstanding. There are issues of trust and comprehension. This is not easy work, and you certainly regret what's happening at the moment. Deeply. But you are sanguine, as calm and capable as ever. There is only one way to resolve the path ahead. If you are to do what you have come here to do, you must be sure and swift, the way your father taught you.\n\nSure and swift. Resolute in the face of a regrettable and disappointing turn of events. You tried to be reasonable. They didn't listen.\n\nYou want that on the record. You must make sure the woman writes it down.\n\nShe was just here.\n\n1:xix\n\nFragments\n\nIce forms on high parapets. Verglas sheens roadways. Blood freezes in potholes. Thundersnow unfurls across the eastern limits of the Sanctum. The air stains yellow. Lightning, electric red, forks from the churning ice-clouds and demolishes spires. It strikes the Widdershin's Tower, removing an upper section in a spray of stones and tiles.\n\nThose who bear witness are reminded of the thirty-third card of the tarot arcana, which symbolises the overturn of fortune, or achievement obtained through sacrifice, or world-changing inspiration.\n\nOr, perhaps, just a tower brought to ruin by fire.\n\nDerry Cassier, junior loader, hauls his munition cart to Old Lord Rogal. Cassier is seventeen years old. Old Lord Rogal is a heavy artillery piece, one of sixty Earthshakers ranged in a battery along Predikant Rise near the Primus Gate. After nine hours of near-continuous firing, the elevated barrels of the sixty guns are glowing like coals. Many pieces have stopped working due to overheat deformation, breech jam or block shear. Cassier's eyes are crimson with burst vessels and the bandages around his ears are soaked in blood despite his rubberised defenders. This will be Old Lord Rogal's final shot. It will be the battery's final shot. The forty-kilo tet-hel intermix high-explosive shell on Cassier's cart was the last one in the supply dump. Cassier takes out a piece of chalk to write his name on the shell as a last goodbye, but his fingers are too numb to write anything.\n\nFlamers roar, and purge atomised human meat out of vanquished bunkers.\n\nThe last waves of loyal Stormbirds and Hawkwings lift from the Brahmaputra Fields in a final effort to run interference on the files of the Traitor Legions flowing, in rivers greater than the Ganges or the Karnali, into the heart of empire. None will return. Those that make it through the torrential frenzy of the anti-air batteries will be broken by the air itself. Cyclonic fury will fold their wings, dash them from the sky, scatter them like petals, or cast them away like dead autumn leaves.\n\nRogue firestorms, uncontained and uncontrollable, consume entire zones, as though some deranged burn therapy or desperate moxibustion is being applied to the terminal world.\n\nCorporal Naheena Praffet comes to, blind, in a crater ninety metres wide. Her entire brigade, the 467th Tanzeer Excertus, has been caught in a rolling barrage as it advanced on Konig Bar. She calls out for a medic. She gropes around for help. She takes someone's hand. But it's just a hand. There's no one else alive. There's no one else intact.\n\nAlpharius leans back and offers John his hand. John sighs, takes it, and allows himself to be hoisted over the steep lip of the incline.\n\nThe cavern he's been brought to is large. It was larger once, but like everything in the depths, it's been compressed, the ceiling crushed low by centuries of weight above. It was something once. John can't tell what. Part of a manufactory, perhaps, or a transit station. Sections of the old walls are tiled, or panelled with rusted metal plates. There's litter on the floor, the broken and commonplace debris of an everyday life that ended, perhaps suddenly, thousands of years before. A tin badge, a paper drinking cup, an infant's plastic pacifier, the stub of a ticket, miraculously preserved, recording a fare and a one-way trip between two places that John's sure don't exist any more.\n\nA one-way trip.\n\n'What are we doing here?' he asks Alpharius. The warrior gestures.\n\nWhat John first took to be a shelving part of the chamber's wall is actually a row of large objects, massive things stored under drab weather sheets beneath the lee of the ceiling. Alpha"}
{"text":"sands of years before. A tin badge, a paper drinking cup, an infant's plastic pacifier, the stub of a ticket, miraculously preserved, recording a fare and a one-way trip between two places that John's sure don't exist any more.\n\nA one-way trip.\n\n'What are we doing here?' he asks Alpharius. The warrior gestures.\n\nWhat John first took to be a shelving part of the chamber's wall is actually a row of large objects, massive things stored under drab weather sheets beneath the lee of the ceiling. Alpharius crosses to one, and drags the cover off. It falls aside, heavy, in a puff of gathered dust, revealing the dirty bulk of an Aurox transporter. The Aurox bears the colours and insignia of the VII Legion Astartes.\n\n'The hell?' says John.\n\nAlpharius moves down the line, lifting the shrouds from others. Two more Aurox, one VII Legion, the other Hort Palatine. The Hort machine's clearly rusted beyond repair. A Militia Gorgon. Two Mastodons, in Old Hundred paint. One of the Mechanicus' Triaros conveyors. An Excertus Dracosan. A White Scars Rhino. A Coronus grav-carrier burnished in the brassy gold of the Legio Custodes.\n\n'Help me check them,' says Alpharius.\n\n'What is this?'\n\n'A way station. A depot-cache. Our advance procured these vehicles years ago, and secured them here.'\n\n'Procured?'\n\n'Use whatever word you like, John. We've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go. We need transport, or the humans will never make it.'\n\nJohn tries not to mark the way Alpharius says 'humans' as though John's not one of them.\n\n'So you stole this stuff, and stowed it away down here, just in case?'\n\n'Yes,' says Alpharius.\n\n'Warriors too?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'In case of...?'\n\n'Whatever we were required to do. Please help me check, John. It'll be quicker. These machines have been left untended and un-serviced. It's possible none of them will run any more. Check for power reserves, secondary or primary. See if we can cold-start any of them. If we can't, I'll have to warm up a generator, hook it up, and try a boosted ignition... That'll just take time.'\n\nJohn crosses to the Mastodon, leans his rifle against the treads, and clambers up the cold hull. He starts working to unclamp the hatch.\n\n'So,' says John. 'Can we talk now? Are we out of mindshot?'\n\nAlpharius has disappeared for a moment. John hears the hatch on a nearby machine being unfastened. He gets into the Mastodon, hauls himself up into the driving position in the dark, and fumbles for the voltaics panel. He throws the master switches, one, two, three. Nothing even flickers.\n\nHe climbs back out.\n\n'This one's dead,' he calls out.\n\nAlpharius reappears. He's retrieved something from one of the other vehicles. It's Alpha Legion tech, a metal pod the size of a field stove. He sets it down beside the Mastodon, twists the top, presses, and the side panels unfurl like petals. A soft blue light starts to glow inside the casing.\n\nA psi-damper. John can feel the deadening throb of it at the back of his skull.\n\n'I want your help,' Alpharius says, standing beside the damper and looking up at John.\n\n'I want your trust,' John replies. 'Maybe we can trade?'\n\nAlpharius nods. John sits on the edge of the cold hull, feet swinging, and stares down at him.\n\n'At the start of the Heresy War,' Alpharius says, 'my Legion made preparations. Contingencies. We placed troop reserves under the Palace, in stasis. We secured depots of procured machines. This is one of them. We mapped routes, in and out.'\n\n'In and out?'\n\n'Like this one, John. Even as Dorn was fortifying the Palace above our heads, we were tracing the cracks.'\n\n'Dorn missed this?'\n\nAlpharius shakes his head.\n\n'Not at all. He knows about it. As far as our operatives can tell, Dorn left six hidden routes open. Well hidden, of course, even from Perturabo's painstaking surveys. Dorn's a clever man. This is the only one we found.'\n\n'He left six routes open into the Palace?' John asks. 'What kind of siegecraft is that?'\n\n'Not in, John. Out.'\n\nJohn thinks about that for a moment.\n\n'Gods,' he says. 'To get out?'\n\n'To get Him out, John.'\n\n'Dorn expected to lose?'\n\n'He decided to win,' says Alpharius. 'But he is meticulous. He prepared for every eventuality. We, in turn, secured it for use-'\n\n'What use?'\n\n'Well, there's the thing. For whatever was needed, John. Once the Cabal's plan was ditched, we prepared for every eventuality. Move in, in support of the Throne. Attack, in support of Lupercal. Whichever turned out to be the smartest tactic.'\n\n'Let me get this straight... You waited to see who would win, before deciding which side you were on?'\n\n'A crude summary, John. We waited to see how it would play out, so we could intervene to our own maximum advantage.'\n\n'And this is you doing that?' asks John. 'You, helping us? That's the side you've come down on?'\n\n'Not at all.' Alpharius is silent for a moment, as if deciding whether to say more. 'It's clear Horus has to be stopped. Whatever he is... John, this isn't a civil war any more. It's not a Warmaster turning on his king. It's not politics, it's not even a material war at this point. All the rules have changed. This is about preventing the full and final extinction of human culture.'\n\n'So we are on the same page,' says John.\n\n'John, I was sent here to begin a rapid-response activation of the buried sleeper forces. Awaken them from sus-an so they could begin combat operations.'\n\n'Against Horus?'\n\n'Covertly. We don't have the numbers but, as you may remember, we can be surgically effective. The thing is, John, the Astartes we buried here have no idea what they're waking up to. They went into stasis without knowing which side they'd be on when they came round. To ensure chain of command, and doctrine imperative, they were all preconditioned to respond to code words. We had a list. One word, John, auto-hypnotically implanted at the moment of revival, and the warrior would instantly understand his parameters, and instantly obey them.'\n\n'One word?'\n\n'Yes, each one is a plan condition. \"Sagittary\" triggered loyalty to Horus. \"Xenophon\" triggered loyalty to the Emperor. \"Paramus\" triggered a directive of mutual annihilation, to bring down both if it was deemed necessary-'\n\n'Good god!'\n\n'\"Thisbe\" triggered evacuation and withdrawal. \"Orphaeus\" triggered a policy to ignore both sides and focus on Chaos itself. To fight it, or seize the means to control it. And so on, and so on. There were many. Every contingency, every possible option, hypno-coded. I was sent to initiate condition Xenophon.'\n\n'Loyalty to the Emperor.'\n\n'Correct.'\n\n'All right,' says John. He shrugs. 'That's a start. Why does telling me this buy my trust?'\n\n'Because I had only just started when she arrived and found me.'\n\n'You mean Actae?'\n\nAlpharius nods.\n\n'And?'\n\n'You can see her power, John,' Alpharius says. 'I am not doing this voluntarily. Quite the opposite. She has me entirely in her control. Everything I'm doing, I'm doing against my will, and I can't resist.'\n\nJohn points at the psi-damper.\n\n'Well, you can now. That's shut her out.'\n\n'It's merely muted her, John. Very briefly.'\n\n'Whatever, she can't keep up that kind of mental control forever.'\n\n'She doesn't have to,' Alpharius replies. 'When she found me, she read my mind and triggered one of the code words in me. I am aware of it, but I can do very little about it. I am operating on a plan condition, and that' - he gestures to the damper - 'is allowing me, briefly, enough free will to beg you to trust me and assist me.'\n\n'What? For old times' sake?'\n\n'Yes, let's say that.'\n\nJohn nods, raises his eyebrows. 'So who are you, old friend?'\n\n'I'm pretty certain you know already, John. You have been carefully monitoring my voice patterns.'\n\n'Ingo Pech.'\n\n'Correct.' The Alpha Legionnaire unclamps his helm and takes it off. The face looking up at John is familiar, but then they all are. They all look so alike. If he'd seen the face from the start, it would have taken John a good while to decide which Alpha Legion warrior it was, and even then he wouldn't have been sure.\n\nBut he is now, as certain as he can be. The face, the voice, the little microexpressions of affect only a logokine can discern.\n\n'What was it?' John asks.\n\n'What was what?'\n\n'What was the code word, Pech?'\n\n'Orphaeus,' says Pech.\n\n'Shit,' says John. 'Fight Chaos directly... or seize control of it?'\n\nPech nods.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because that's what she wants,' says Pech. 'She wants this war stopped, yes. This form of the war. She says Horus is a puppet, a rag doll so steeped in the warp he is utterly enslaved by it. But he's strong. You know how strong Horus Lupercal is, John. The witch believes he can be turned.'\n\n'From Chaos? You mean, saved?'\n\nPech shakes his head. 'Towards Chaos, John. She thinks he can be turned to face it. She believes he's strong enough to take hold of the shackles it has placed upon him, shrug off its control, and use those same shackles to enslave it.'\n\n'Chaos?'\n\n'Yes, John.'\n\n'Enslave Chaos?'\n\n'Yes, John.'\n\n'Well, then she's a colossal freaking idiot,' he says.\n\nPech laughs, but there's no real joy in it. 'The enslavement of Chaos has been a dream of many, for a long time,' he says. 'Everyone thinks they can do it... Lupercal, the Phoenician, Lorgar Aurelian, the Pale King... even that twisted little bastard Erebus, the so-called Hand of Destiny... they all thought they could do it, and they've all ended up slaves to darkness. That's the way it works. No one can do it. Some think they have enslaved the warp, but that's just the warp telling them what they want to hear while it merrily pulls their strings.'\n\n'The Emperor?' says John.\n\n'Perhaps. If anyone could. Once. Not now. This wouldn't be happening if He had succeeded in doing it where everyone else has failed.'\n\n'But the witch thinks she can?'\n\n'She considers herself a hand of destiny too, John. A better one. She thinks she can steer Horus, correct his course, adjust his approach, even this late in the game. She believes she can use him as an instrument and, be"}
{"text":"the warp telling them what they want to hear while it merrily pulls their strings.'\n\n'The Emperor?' says John.\n\n'Perhaps. If anyone could. Once. Not now. This wouldn't be happening if He had succeeded in doing it where everyone else has failed.'\n\n'But the witch thinks she can?'\n\n'She considers herself a hand of destiny too, John. A better one. She thinks she can steer Horus, correct his course, adjust his approach, even this late in the game. She believes she can use him as an instrument and, because he is so very strong, master Chaos.'\n\n'I refer you to my previous statement,' says John.\n\n'And I refer you to mine,' says Pech. 'I am helping her to do it. I am committed to that course of action. That's what Orphaeus means. I'm fighting it, but it won't work. I can't break triggered plan conditioning. All I can do is see what I'm doing, as if I'm some detached observer, out of my own body and mind. And I can tell you this... you have no idea of the effort this requires, even with that thing switched on. I can tell you this, and beg you to act.'\n\n'Stop her?'\n\n'Yes. Stop her. And, I'm sorry to say, probably me too. Because the conditioning will continue even if she's dead.'\n\n'Shit-sakes, Pech! How do I stop her? Or you? I think you're wildly overestimating my abilities.'\n\n'You were always resourceful, John.'\n\nJohn jumps down from the hull.\n\n'I can't do it alone,' he says. 'I'll need to bring the others in. Oll. Leetu.'\n\nPech nods.\n\n'And not yet, either.'\n\n'Why not?' asks Pech.\n\n'Because, you moron, on the off-chance that, by some freaking miracle, we can take you and the witch out, we'd be lost down here. We've got a mission of our own to complete. And we've come a long bloody way to do it. Get us into the Palace. Once we're there, maybe we can try something.'\n\nPech nods again. 'Yes, that's wise,' he says.\n\n'Shut that damper down and stow it somewhere,' John says, thinking hard. 'I may need it. Hell, I will need it. And weapons. Something heavy.'\n\n'There are weapon caches aboard each of these machines.'\n\n'All right,' says John. 'Let's find out if any of them actually operate.'\n\n'Agreed,' says Pech.\n\nHe suddenly places a huge hand on John's shoulder and looks down into his eyes. John flinches.\n\n'Thank you, John,' says Pech. 'I need to say that now, because I probably won't be able to later.'\n\n'Old times' sakes, eh, Ingo?'\n\nPech turns and reaches for the damper.\n\n'Wait,' says John. 'Wait... Ingo... why is she helping us?'\n\n'What?'\n\n'If I accept all of this, Pech, if I accept it the way you've laid it out, it doesn't explain why she's helping us. Why she came to find us in Hatay-Antakya, why she pulled our arses out of the fire. Why go to all that trouble?'\n\n'Oh, John,' says Pech. 'I thought you'd joined all the dots. You're part of her plan. She needs you. That stuff she said, about you all being archetypes, drawn together. That might be true. That might have some ritual significance. But she definitely needs Ollanius. Ollanius and that knife of his. She needs you to help her contain Horus Lupercal so she can turn him. That little stone knife, in the hands of a Perpetual like Ollanius, is about the only thing that could possibly, and I mean possibly, have a hope of hurting him.'\n\n'Yeah,' says John quietly. 'I had a horrible feeling that was why.'\n\n1:xx\n\nContext\n\nOn the Via Aquila, there are so many people. Keeler has been walking against the flow for an hour, trying to locate and coordinate other members of the conclave. At every step, people reach out to touch her. They stare. They call her name.\n\n'Are you her?' they ask. 'Are you her?'\n\n'Keep moving,' she says. 'Go north.'\n\nThey must all keep moving. That's the only way to serve Him. Keep moving in the firm belief that there is a future to move towards. Keep trusting that He knows better, that He can see beyond the range of our mortal vision. Keep moving so the design can be completed.\n\nShe hears a rumble and some screams. The basalt columns of the Navis Mercantile have collapsed into the street, onto a portion of the vast crowd. People are dead.\n\nHer breath catches. What part of the design was that? Is suffering part of the design? Must we endure to prove something? Does survival prove worth? Does death winnow out the unworthy?\n\nShe hates the turn of her mind, the way faith grates against reason. To stop herself from screaming, she has to trust that He has a greater context, that what is insufferable to her is meaningful to Him. Are we made to suffer? Is our purpose not to merely suffer, but through suffering to prevail?\n\nThen she remembers something Loken said to her before he quit her side to organise the rearguard.\n\n'The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, Euphrati, but what is His shield? Us. We are. It is reciprocal. He protects us and, through our faith and perseverance, we protect Him. We are one and the same, mankind and Emperor, Emperor and mankind, souls bound together. We are together as one or we are nothing.'\n\nPerhaps that's the real metaveritas. Not to become so lost in your own pain you forget the greater context. If everything can be shared, nothing is too much. How typical of an Astartes to appreciate that. How untypical of one to articulate it. But then, Garviel Loken had always been unusual, and he had been there, with her, at the very start of things.\n\nShe wonders where he is now, and if he still lives, or if like Nathaniel Garro, he has become another tragic victim of this war.\n\nShe climbs onto the raised colonnade to escape the worst of the crowd. From here, she can see the great breadth of the avenue. So many people. All are caked in dust. Many are deaf, or glassy with acoustic shock. Others are being carried. Almost everyone has bound their hands and heads with rags, covering wounds, wrapping damaged ears to dull the constant roar, covering mouths to sieve the dust, covering eyes. So many, blindfolded, walking in human chains, hands linked, each following the next.\n\nBlind faith. We do not need to see the future in order to make towards it, as long as we are all moving together.\n\nShe realises her hands are cupped in front of her chest, unconsciously miming the way she used to hold her picter, ready to bring it up to capture a moment. For a second, she is a remembrancer again, just a simple remembrancer with a good eye, observing and recording objectively. She hasn't been that in a very long time, though the instinct has survived. This view of the Via Aquila would make a memorable pict, the sort of pict the old Euphrati Keeler, the famous imagist, would have been eager to capture.\n\nPerhaps that objectivity was why she was chosen for this thankless role. The ability to step back and see the fleeting moment and know that, for all its horror, it was a cropped part of a greater, unseeable whole.\n\nThat, or she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.\n\nShe jumps off the buttress onto the street, and hurries to the junction with Glacis Street. The crowds thin out on Glacis. She has to find some speakers to go back and direct the multitude on past the fountains and Diodor Circle, to relieve the throttled pressure further south.\n\nGang-crews are heaving down Glacis Street towards her, hauling wagons of guns and munitions from the burning manufactories at Tavian Arch. The conclave has been doing this work since the start, manually delivering ammunition and reconditioned weapons to the front-line defenders. It is a back-breaking effort. The wagons, stencilled MM226 on their side panels, are heavy. The gangs are all coffled together, yoked to the mismatched wagons. They are all blindfolded so they can't see the nightmares and desert their posts. Each team is guided by an un-blindfolded leader.\n\nThe guide closest to her, a young woman, sees Keeler and calls to her.\n\n'We were making for the Gilded Walk,' she says. 'Can we go this way?'\n\nKeeler shakes her head. The girl calls out to her team, and they come to a halt, lowering the yoke and ropes to steal a moment's relief. The other gang-crews halt behind them.\n\n'Aquila is choked,' says Keeler. 'And Chiros too. There's no way through.'\n\n'Then what do we do with this?' the girl asks, gesturing to the wagons.\n\n'Go across to Montagne Way?' Keeler suggests. 'Perhaps get it to the Exultant line? There are Imperial Fists and Blood Angels holding there in urgent need of resupply.' She shrugs. 'Or leave it here?' she adds as an afterthought.\n\n'Leave it?' asks the girl indignantly.\n\n'You've done a lot,' says Keeler. 'If you push on down Montagne and go into that, you... I don't think you'll make it back.'\n\n'But it's needed,' says the girl.\n\n'It is.'\n\n'I'm not going to give up.'\n\n'I'm not telling you to,' says Keeler. 'We're trying to bring the crowds this way. Move everyone north. It's almost impossible. There are so many people. You can press on, or you can come with us.'\n\n'I'm not going to give up,' the girl repeats, but it's barely a whisper. There are tears in her eyes.\n\n'Is there more?' Keeler asks.\n\nThe girl sniffs. 'We cleared out what we could,' she replies, 'what we could load. There is more, but most of the plants are shutting down. At Tavian, anyway. MM Three-Four-One is on fire. MM Two-Two-Six is out of intermix.'\n\n'You were one of Kyril's, weren't you?' says Keeler suddenly.\n\n'What?'\n\nKeeler reaches out and points to the torn warrant paper pinned to the front of the girl's dirty smock below the purity tag. The bold 'I' icon is still visible.\n\n'One of Sindermann's? His new remembrancers?'\n\n'Interrogators,' the girl says.\n\n'I remember. I was one for a while too, you know?'\n\nThe girl nods.\n\n'I'm Keeler,' says Keeler.\n\n'I know who you are, mam. I know what you are.'\n\n'Do you? Throne, please tell me.'\n\n'You're hope,' the girls says. 'Our hope in the Emperor and the cause of man. Sindermann told us that.'\n\n'Did he?'\n\n'He also told us not to believe everything you said.'\n\n'Kyril's very wise...'\n\n'But I don't see how we can't, not now,' the girl says. 'Not now. I think, mam, that's why I was u"}
{"text":"rogators,' the girl says.\n\n'I remember. I was one for a while too, you know?'\n\nThe girl nods.\n\n'I'm Keeler,' says Keeler.\n\n'I know who you are, mam. I know what you are.'\n\n'Do you? Throne, please tell me.'\n\n'You're hope,' the girls says. 'Our hope in the Emperor and the cause of man. Sindermann told us that.'\n\n'Did he?'\n\n'He also told us not to believe everything you said.'\n\n'Kyril's very wise...'\n\n'But I don't see how we can't, not now,' the girl says. 'Not now. I think, mam, that's why I was upset when you said we should give up. If hope gives up-'\n\n'I didn't mean that. What's your name?'\n\n'Leeta Tang.'\n\n'Why did you stop being an interrogator, Leeta?'\n\n'I don't think I did, I just... it just seemed more important to do this.' Tang gestures wearily at the wagons. 'Besides,' she says with a shrug. 'Who wants to remember this?'\n\n'Didn't Kyril tell you?' Keeler asks.\n\n'Oh, yes. Some long and inspirational speech. Something Lord Dorn said. The, uh, the act of recording a history affirms that there will be a future in which people will read it. It's a profound act of optimism.'\n\n'There you go,' says Keeler.\n\nTang sighs.\n\n'I still don't believe anyone will want to remember this,' she says.\n\n'I agree, but things change,' says Keeler. 'I asked why you stopped interrogating and started hauling munitions because... because it shows that we alter according to necessity. Pulling shells to the front line is important. Was important. Maybe getting the helpless out of the kill-zones is more important now. That's not giving up hope, that's just pragmatic.'\n\n'Do you still believe in a future?' Tang asks.\n\n'I am trying to,' Keeler replies. She's thought about this often. 'I remember when I was with the expeditionary fleet. With... Horus. Throne, I can barely say his name. That was all about the future. We imagined the future, and it seemed so bright and inspiring. Now I struggle to imagine anything at all. But I want to imagine something. I need to. We all need to. If we imagine a future, the best version we can manage, then perhaps that's how we realise it. I don't think it will be so bright and inspiring now, but I think it can be better than this, this apparent... inevitability.'\n\n'Everyone's just talking about nothing,' says Tang. 'Have you noticed that? Just, I don't know, phatic conversations among the damned and doomed. Just talking about nothing. At the start, it was all memories of the future... you know, \"When this is over I'll go see my aunt and visit the Planalto or Antipo Hive again\", or \"I can't wait to see my brother\"... But now it's all just the past. Like we're stuck. People don't even say I remember, they just talk about people who are probably dead, or people who are dead, as if they are alive. Like they're fossilising the past as something to cling on to...'\n\nShe trails off.\n\n'Or am I going mad?'\n\n'No, I have noticed that,' says Keeler. 'And I noticed you said memories of the future just then.'\n\n'Did I? I'm tired.'\n\n'No, Leeta. I think we are stuck in the now. I fear we literally are. My chron stopped yesterday. Do you know what time it is? What day it is, even?'\n\nTang shakes her head.\n\n'I think we are invaded by more than just material violence,' says Keeler. 'I think we are invaded on a... metaphysical level. Time and place is warping, slowing down, getting stuck. A constant now, where the past is barely a memory, with no value at all, and the future is withheld. Someone once wrote, \"the future has no other reality than as present hope.\"'\n\n'Was it Master Sindermann?'\n\nKeeler laughs. 'No, but it's something he told me. It's a very old piece of writing. What I'm saying is that hope contains the future, and it's the one thing we have. More potent than a cartload of shells.'\n\n'Is this where you tell me the Emperor has a plan?'\n\n'Dear me, Kyril really did talk about me, didn't he?'\n\n'Everyone is talking about you, mam.'\n\n'All right then. I think He does have a plan, and it is contingent on us believing in it. Our hope in it, our faith in it, makes it happen. We are the plan and the plan is us. They are not separate things. The Emperor doesn't have a plan that, if we perish, will still come to fruition. The plan is us.'\n\n'It's going to be hard to hold on to that idea,' says Tang.\n\n'I know. It's not easy. Listen, some of the conclave have operational vox-units. If I can find one, maybe we can raise the forward positions. Inform them we're holding munitions here. Have your teams rest. Maybe pull the wagons to the side of the street so the crowds can move through.'\n\nTang nods.\n\n'The plan is really us?' she asks.\n\n'It always has been,' says Keeler.\n\nKeeler and the pilgrim host on the Via Aquila.\n\n1:xxi\n\nFragments\n\nA marching Banelord Titan erupts in flames and falls, killing hundreds on the ground below. There are so many war engines in the advancing line, its loss is barely noticed.\n\nAt the blast of a horn, 12th Austra Auxilia rises to the fire step. Twelve hundred loyalist soldiers in bowl helmets surge out of their lines and dugouts, and charge into the unknown. The unknown is probably their doom, but it is preferable to the trenches they are leaving behind, where every shadow whispered and sniggered at them.\n\nDefenders plunge from the huge bulwarks and curtain walls. Some are burning, and streak like comets into the smoke far below. It is impossible to tell if death has caused them to fall, or if they are falling to their deaths.\n\nIn the Khat Mandu Precinct, not far from the Jade Bailey, Acastia, bondsman of House Vyronii and pilot of the Knight Armiger Elatus, walks alone. After the engine war hell at Mercury Wall, and the shattering of the great Titanicus formations, she has formed fealty ties with the Legio Solaria. A temporary pledge, she believes, an exigency troth. Princeps Abhani Lus Mohana needs all the engines she can get in her purview. And Acastia cannot walk alone.\n\nBut she is alone. Effectively. Sections of Legio Solaria are spread thin across the precinct, and all the links are fettered by distortion and twitching interference. The scratching, intermittent wash of the noospherics is driving migraine scissors into her brain, and Elatus is skittish and thready, unable to scent others of its kind.\n\nThe place is lonely and empty. Somewhere, according to the last reports, mass engine wars are raging in the southern Sanctum. The Great Mother of the Imperial Hunters is driving the bulk of her remaining Legio, along with five maniples, against the massed daemon machines near the funeral pyre of Bhab Bastion. Acastia can imagine the fury.\n\nBut here it is silent. The vacant streets and creeping veils of smoke speak to her more of war's desolation than any frenzy of combat. This was the Palace. Not a palace. The Palace.\n\nAcastia surveys the deceitful patterns of the sensoria, the choppy flood of thermal tracks, electrostatic signals, motion tremblers. She adjusts her tactical abstracts and walks. Squalls of dark rain that could be oil or blood patter off the Armiger's cowling, off the smaragdine lacquerwork and the polished ivory. The pennants of her broken house, red and silver, swing lank from her weapon arms.\n\nA track lights. Acastia pans, and transmits an alert signal that she is sure no one will hear. Ahead, the 86K Ministration Building, its primary doorway open to the elements. She sees something move, something unreeve through the entrance like a mooring rope slipping through a boat's hawsehole. Like a serpent.\n\nShe advances, weapons live. Thermal spears and chainblades. Autoguns. The munition hoppers read low, so she aims to make any kills blades-first.\n\nHer target bursts into the open, slamming through the broken doorway. It emerges, and then keeps emerging, a colubrine shape of pulsating meat and muscle with the girth of an Aurox armoured transport. It doesn't seem to stop coming. More and more of it extrudes from the entrance. The front half of it, pale and colloid, undulates across the wet ground towards her, and raises its head, a maggot-mouth, yawning like a lamprey's sphincter-maw, surrounded by lump-teeth. Fronds of tentacle sub-limbs writhe around the mouth, and lash at her. Her target-auspex refuses to lock it. The thing is huge and right there, but the noospherics waver, and the guns refuse to hard-lock.\n\nTentacles whip out. They are tipped with bone harpagons. Acastia feels the heavy thumps as these organic grappling hooks strike the Armiger's hull, and puncture, and grip. She hears and feels the steel-and-ceramite-shod heels of Elatus screeching as the engine, against its will, is dragged across the rockcrete towards the gaping mouth.\n\nBlades it is, then.\n\nAs the Palace convulses and dies, noise is everywhere and almost absolute. It is layered: the deep and constant booming of the mass weapons, the sledgehammer thump of the orbital batteries at the port of the Lion's Gate, the pounding of artillery, the horn-blast of engines, the thunder of the falling walls, the chatter and cackle of weapons, the screaming of the masses. The sounds combine and blend, becoming a constant, whirling vortex of noise, a steady roar, a breathless chirm. Millions caught inside the Palace-trap collapse from acoustic shock, or go mad and die.\n\nSome places, odd and eerie pockets, are mysteriously quiet.\n\nThe Hall of Governance behind the Clanium Library is one of them. It appears to have been ransacked twice; once by the clerks and administrators in their haste to evacuate, and then by some unknown force that blasted through it like a winter gale.\n\nFafnir Rann, lord seneschal of the Imperial Fists, advances through the stillness. His weapons are raised. With the surviving chiefs of the Huscarls, via patchy vox, he is attempting to engineer a defence of the north-east Sanctum approach.\n\nThe hall is oddly silent. Papers scatter the floor. The paint peels, white flaked back to show arsenic-green primer. The varnish of the railings and banisters has buckled in a cracquelure that suggests intense heat.\n\nHe leads Fi"}
{"text":"rough it like a winter gale.\n\nFafnir Rann, lord seneschal of the Imperial Fists, advances through the stillness. His weapons are raised. With the surviving chiefs of the Huscarls, via patchy vox, he is attempting to engineer a defence of the north-east Sanctum approach.\n\nThe hall is oddly silent. Papers scatter the floor. The paint peels, white flaked back to show arsenic-green primer. The varnish of the railings and banisters has buckled in a cracquelure that suggests intense heat.\n\nHe leads First Assault Cadre forward. Mizos and Halen have command of support cadres in the other wing of the building.\n\nThey have, Rann estimates, ten minutes to secure the location and the plaza outside, and draw up double lines of Astartes and light armour, before the first of the traitors arrive. They're coming through Exultant Quarter, onto the Maxis Processional and the Avenue of Justice. Tracking suggests Death Guard and Iron Warriors, but Rann suspects the World Eaters and the Sons of Horus will lead the way, for, since the walls broke, they have been the most rapacious and the fastest-moving.\n\nIn the next chamber, the old, foxed mirrors that once loomed over rows of rubricators at their desks are bleeding. It's probably rust, seeping out of the wall fixings. What else could it be?\n\nHe checks his heads-up. Mapping shows one more chamber ahead before they reach the southern side of the building. There they can set up firing positions along the second-floor windows that will turn the plaza into a killing field. Mizos and Halen should shortly be in position.\n\nOne of his men signals for him. Calodin, one of the newborn, accelerated through the progenitive programme into the ranks. He's studying the old mirrors.\n\n'Leave it,' Rann instructs.\n\n'My lord,' says Calodin.\n\nRann goes to him. He sees the scarlet drips plinking off the edge of the mirror's frame onto the floor. He sees what so fascinates Calodin in the mirror.\n\nRann is not in the reflection. Neither is Calodin, nor any of the men. Against the mirror's silvered tain, the room is clean. It is full of scriptorum desks, and cowled scribes working, and cogitators chattering out reams of data sheets, and servitors distributing files. The image moves, but it is silent.\n\nRann raises an axe to smash the glass. As his blade comes up, the scribes in the reflection all turn and look at him. Their eyes are weeping blood. He sees what is behind them, the vague mass of swarming darkness and ash, the baleful eyes, the barracuda jaws, and he knows that what is behind the long-dead scribes in the reflection is actually behind him.\n\nHe turns. The Neverborn laughs.\n\nThe shooting starts.\n\n1:xxii\n\nLast rite\n\nI am old. I am tired. I sit on the front pew of the wooden supplicant stalls to the right-hand side of the Golden Throne. I ease my limbs. I rest my staff against the stall beside me. The seats are old and tired too, their gold leaf cracked, their carved finials as bleached and smoothed as driftwood from exposure to the Throne's light. The motionless proconsuls, Uzkarel and Caecaltus, pay me no heed, for I am a part of this place to them, as much a feature of the realm they guard as the great dais and the tiles and the pillars. They are not the sort of guards or sentries that a senior of the court can have a passing conversation with. They are fixed in duty at a post-human pitch that is unsettling in its intensity, and allows no distraction.\n\nSuch is the perfection of the weapons he has wrought. I had no hand in the Custodians.\n\nI take my seat and I wait. I have done all I can. I have stood at his side. I have called to him, urged him, requested that he answer. There has been no sign of a response. All I can do now is attend to other affairs of state while I wait.\n\nIf a response ever comes. It must. It must!\n\nSo, though I sit and wait in silence, for all sound is crushed this close to the Golden Throne, there is no silence inside me. Since I came to this place that others call the Throne Room hours ago, to stand watch at his side and plead with him to rouse and listen, my mind has also been at work elsewhere. A multitude of elsewheres. It is noisy inside my head: a thousand thousand thoughts, a host of ideas and concepts semantically condensed into sigils and symbols, the synchronised minutiae of an empire in crisis, a hundred concurrent farspoken conversations with seniors of the War Court or my diligent, labouring Chosen in various parts of the shrinking Palace. Simultaneously, I monitor a score of different charts and updating data-projections, I advise and command, I review every scintilla of the data that comes blizzarding at my mind and convert it into compressed packets of differentiated information, sorted by subject and priority, each one summarised by a sigil, sign or signifier in my mental inventory. The workings of the Imperium become a constellation of sigils in my brain. This is my life. This is how his Regent serves him.\n\nI am old. I am tired. I sit on this worn pew. There is still so much to be done, and I now appreciate that, if what I have predicted comes to pass, I will not live long enough to see it all finished. I divert a portion of my mind to the rapid preparation of a legacy; the compilation - hasty and clumsy, I am sorry to say - of the crucial yet soon-to-be-orphaned tasks I will have to delegate to my Chosen when the time comes. It will test them, but they will cope. That's why I chose them.\n\nOne other task occupies me as I await his response. I intend to complete it myself. I won't leave it for others to finish after I'm gone. One part of my mind has, for the last few hours, been permanently linked to the cordoned Theatre of the Chirurgeons fifteen kilometres away from where I sit.\n\nI breathe. I close my eyes. I bow my head. My active conscious focus returns to that mental strand. I prepare to make another try. In my mindsight, I resolve the Theatre.\n\nThere he lies, the Great Khagan, the Warhawk, broken in death. Just hours past, Jaghatai slew Mortarion in a humbling duel perhaps most remarkable because they were so unevenly matched and, unlike the treacherous Pale King, Jaghatai could not hope to come back from the dead.\n\nI look down at his face, his shuttered eyes, his cyanotic lips, as almoners wash and anoint his body, and a Stormseer administers his funerary rites. I smell the stink of salves and sterilising liquors.\n\nThe Warhawk is dead, by any mortal standard. Because he fell so close by, just beyond the walls, his body was carried in at once, and placed on this catafalque in a balming field of catalepsean stasis and life-suspense. If he had died further out, or on another world, there would be no hope at all. But there is. For now and not much longer, an iota of necromimesis remains. The tattered banner of Jaghatai's soul, gusting into the warp, is still attached to his corpse by a single thread. I have determined this, and I have been trying, repeatedly in these last few hours, to draw it back. Every shred of healing science has been exhausted, for it is a matter quite beyond medicae lore. I have been ministering my anagogic craft to keep that thread attached.\n\nIt is slow salvation. Each time I try, the attempt ends in failure, and I am forced to ease away. The Khan's soul will not survive a prolonged effort on my part.\n\nIt frustrates and saddens me. It should be possible. I don't know why I can't save him. Perhaps even my will and warpcraft are not sufficient. Perhaps it is hubristic of me to presume I can act like a god and claim the power or right to bring a man back from death.\n\nPerhaps... perhaps Jaghatai is tired of the world and yearns to leave it.\n\nBut I will try, and I will keep trying. If my lord's attention was not so occupied elsewhere, it's what he would be doing. It's what he'd want me to do. He would not see another son die.\n\nI bend my mind in again and resume the subtle psycho-surgery to keep Jaghatai's soul secure. And this time... this time, I am granted one merciful miracle.\n\nAnabiosis. It is demanding, even for me, but I gather the tattered, dancing shreds of Jaghatai's soul, and I draw them back in, folding them tenderly into the casket of his body.\n\nI exhale.\n\nThe Warhawk will live. It will be days, weeks, perhaps months before his corporeal body heals and he awakens, but he will live. If any world remains to live upon.\n\nThen, at the very last, as I look down at what I have done, I realise I haven't done it at all. I couldn't. Such a feat was beyond me. It was shameful arrogance to believe I could do any such thing.\n\nI have not done this. Someone else has.\n\nSomeone else has reached in past me and performed the deed, like the god he is not, but appears to be.\n\nBecause someone else has stirred, and needs me, and does not want me distracted by other matters.\n\nI look up, eyes wide open. Proconsul Caecaltus is looming over me like a golden titan in his Aquilon plate. He is reaching down to nudge my arm and wake me.\n\n'I'm here! I'm awake, my boy!' I splutter, heaving myself upright.\n\nHe tries to steady me and help me up.\n\n'I can do it!' I tell him.\n\nA proconsul of the Hetaeron does not leave his place except under the most exceptional circumstances.\n\n'Regent-' he says, with the sort of voice a mountain would have if it could speak.\n\n'I know! I know! I know!' I insist. I clutch my staff with numb fingers, and hobble past him, out of his immense shadow into the light that casts it.\n\nThe golden king upon the Golden Throne seems just as still and silent as he was before. But I know he is present, his mind swung open and directed at me.\n\nIt is a terrifying feeling.\n\n'Forgive me that I called upon you,' I say. 'I would not disturb you in your work. But it's time. The clocks run out.'\n\nHe nods. His voice is suddenly inside my head.\n\nIt says, I cannot fight alone.\n\n1:xxiii\n\nMindsight\n\nI cannot fight alone.\n\nIn those four words, he tells me everything. I am lost for words of my own. The implication, the intent, is shocking. It was what I hoped"}
{"text":"ilent as he was before. But I know he is present, his mind swung open and directed at me.\n\nIt is a terrifying feeling.\n\n'Forgive me that I called upon you,' I say. 'I would not disturb you in your work. But it's time. The clocks run out.'\n\nHe nods. His voice is suddenly inside my head.\n\nIt says, I cannot fight alone.\n\n1:xxiii\n\nMindsight\n\nI cannot fight alone.\n\nIn those four words, he tells me everything. I am lost for words of my own. The implication, the intent, is shocking. It was what I hoped and wanted to hear, but what it signifies petrifies me. It means his assessment matches mine. This is the end. We stand upon a precipice so sheer, that only actions of true, last resort are possible. A war that forces him to fight is a war that no one should have begun.\n\nHis words resound inside my skull. All I can think is that, from this point on, it will be bloody and costly and messy. He will have a plan already, because he always has a plan, and he will take me through it soon enough, and ask for my advice and wisdom. But whatever form it takes, it will be gruelling and difficult, even for him, each step back from the brink as hard as the next.\n\n'Of course you can't,' I say. 'Of course you can't fight alone.'\n\nI turn aside, and begin preparations at once. I must summon those who need to be part of this. Once they are alerted, and on their way to join us, he can lay out his strategy for me.\n\nHe needs instruments to brandish torches and keep the darkness at bay as it comes at him from every angle. Who still lives that he can place such trust in? My mindsight spreads wide, across all that remains visible. I look for his sons. I look for our last allies. Let them be revealed.\n\nThere! The first, closest to us yet likewise far away. Far beneath the Throne, in the looping neverness of the webway. His name is Vulkan. I would say he is singular, though each of my lord's sons is singular in his own fashion. Upon Vulkan, my master bestowed a special part of himself. Vulkan is the only one of the primarch sons who inherited his father's aeviternal nature. My master is eternal, and so is Vulkan. It is a trait, in fact, they share with me. Thus, Vulkan lives, and Vulkan dies, and Vulkan lives again. To Vulkan, my master entrusted enduring continuity, the courage to keep the flame alive. Vulkan is athanasy embodied.\n\nVulkan has not failed his father. Not ever. And it has cost him too many lives and deaths already. I see him, deep in the webway, hammer in hand, trudging homeward to take his place at the gate beneath the Throne. Tears spring to my eyes at the mindsight of him. He is but a charred skeleton, a burned ecorche in an anatomist's dissecting lab, crusted ribbons of flesh broiled to his cracked bones, refusing to die, trying to heal. He stumbles-\n\nHis newborn heart, misshapen, has foundered and burst. He falls, dead. And then lives, such is the curse gifted to him. He lives, and slowly hauls his bones upright once more, clawing at the haft of his scorched hammer for support. He stands. He sways. He starts to walk again.\n\nVulkan has just killed Magnus, the second greatest of his father's failures, the greatest of his disappointments. Because of what Magnus is now, that death won't last. The Lord of Prospero can't really die. But Vulkan has vanquished him and banished his deathless corpse into the outer darkness.\n\nI do not know how many times Vulkan died performing that deed, or how many times he has died on the long walk back from it, starting and restarting as he struggles to fully live again.\n\nVulkan has killed Magnus, but still the warp screams at his heels, and the screech of pursuing daemons echoes down the hollow psychoplastic pathways of the webway behind him.\n\nI reach to him, and whisper gently into his still-renewing mind. I tell him that we need him here. I need him to stand, and guard the Throne, and bar the webway door. He must hold it while his father is gone.\n\nHe does not answer. He cannot. He has no lips nor tongue, no throat, barely even an embryonic sentience. But I feel his assent. Vulkan will prevail. He will not fail us, for he is eternal, just as we made him to be. He is the quintessence of infinite patience.\n\nI watch him a moment longer, the halting skeleton, dragging itself back from innumerable graves, meat and sinew slowly knitting on its bones, blood welling forth as from some sacred spring to plump the neoblastic veins and capillaries still sprouting like vines across his reassembling frame, the hammer dragging heavy on the ground behind him. He walks, relentlessly, half-dead, out of the furnace, out of the nocturnal veil, to serve the Throne.\n\nHe walks back from death, one step at a time, as his father prepares to walk towards what will probably be his.\n\nWho else? I look again. My mind extends across this chamber that others call the Throne Room, upwards to the cloth-of-gold baldachin suspended above the Throne, a vast canopy embroidered with the contradictory yet intertwined principles of concordia and discordia that frames the electric-blue aura of my great lord's light; outwards from the Throne's massive plinth, carved from the psychoreactive material known on the craftworlds as wraithbone, and inset with psycurium and dark glass panels, tourmaline and aerolithic moldavite; past silent Uzkarel and Caecaltus at their posts, past the gleaming ranks of their Hetaeron companies at attention beyond them; out, like a rushing tide across the lustrous floor of sectile marble and ouslite; across the susurrating banks of stasis generators, archeotech regulators, and psykanic amplifiers that surround and feed the Throne, prophylactic mechanisms brought here in haste and urgently set to work when the folly of Magnus cracked the harmonised serenity of this adytum; past the diligent conclaves of the Adnector Concillium in their cowls and chasubles, standing amid the fat snakes and intestinal loops of power cables, ministering to the operation of these murmuring devices; then further out, along the frightful height and breadth of the cyclopean nave itself, a canyon turned upside down; between the soaring auramite columns rising like the trunks of mature Sequoiadendron giganteum, the Solomonic pillars of twisted bronze, the acanthus-headed colonettes, the gargantuan scissor arches; beneath the shining, ornate electro-flambeaux strung like stalactite pendants from the dizzying ceiling, and between the lumen orbs that float like infant suns; on, past echelons of burnished automata maintaining talismatic psycho-systems; past empty, scarlet-cushioned stalls where once the High Lords of the Council gathered, and the void-manic worthies of the Navis Nobilite awaited audience; past the golden pulpits of the cataleptic astropaths, adrift in algolagnic fugues; around the clattering dream-dynamos and stegosaurian oniero-looms; past the hypnostatic augury kilns breathing steam and dripping myrrh, and the affirmatrix prognometers leaking synthetic plasma, and exhaling the smell of industrially recovered nightmares; past the scriptorums of the noctuaries; past brass reliquaries and vitrodur grails; past mother-of-pearl loggia where bewitched diviners and incanting prognostipractors sift and read the ribbon-tapes of transcribed glossolalia spilled from the chattering indifference engines, searching for morsels of meaning; past prophesires swinging thuribles, and technoseers wheeling scrimshandered feretories; past mendicants in penance at their kneeling desks and anchorites bearing electro-generative monstrances; on, through the sound of melismatic antiphon and canticle welling from the mouthless choirs in chantry niches, screened by lace-pattern iconostases so they cannot catch sight of him and forget the words; past regiments of catachumen observants, seeking expiation and brimming with eucharistic ardour; along the walls of porphery and mica mosaic, frescoes of death's-head putti and cackling ephebes that conceal hidden figures of alchemy; past engraved genealogies, and past the blazoned armorial hatchments of the twenty Legions, all but eight now shrouded in amaranthine drapes of mourning; past the iron tabernacles of the chimerical brethrendae composing, as rapidly and ceaselessly as they can, via feverish automatic writing, new variations of the material truth in a frantic effort to mediate and divert the impending bow wave of fate; past flocks of scurrying serfs and deferential abhumans, all blindfolded so they can remain present and sane at the same time, all rushing to deliver reports that no longer matter; past Zagreus Kane, the Fabricator-in-exile, with his coterie of adepts, weeping for the decimation of his battle engines, and plotting the deployment of the few that remain; past acres of empty marble floor where one day we will have to place tombs; past the great banners of liberty and victory that hang like waterfalls from the high walls every step of the nave's six-kilometre length; beneath the vaulted gloom of the ceiling, wrought of Peruvian gold and tromp l'oeil and crystal mined on Enceladus, a ceiling a kilometre high; past the silent, waiting companies of the refulgent Custodes Pylorus who make their motionless vigil at the door, whispering their ever-mantra of by His will alone, to the ceramite and adamantine door itself, the Silver Door, the innermost gate of eternity.\n\nAnd out. It's just a room. I go beyond.\n\nBeyond, my urgent mindsight stretches.\n\nThrough the eternal door, beyond the secular, humanist cathedral of his throne room, into the alabaster halls outside, to the acheronic avenues of approach, the measureless rockcrete tunnels that thread the Inner Sanctum, the radiant bridges spanning infinite cavern gulfs, in the aphotic depths of which crushed grave-cities lay untouched. I do not linger. My mind floods out through the buried halls of the final fortress, through each of the Great Seals, along fusion-bored mass-passageways where armies once marched to crave benediction, and Titan engines"}
{"text":"edral of his throne room, into the alabaster halls outside, to the acheronic avenues of approach, the measureless rockcrete tunnels that thread the Inner Sanctum, the radiant bridges spanning infinite cavern gulfs, in the aphotic depths of which crushed grave-cities lay untouched. I do not linger. My mind floods out through the buried halls of the final fortress, through each of the Great Seals, along fusion-bored mass-passageways where armies once marched to crave benediction, and Titan engines strode ten abreast to approach him like supplicants and kneel like men at his feet-\n\nThere. Two more. Two more coming through the lambent, sodium glare. Rogal Dorn, the stalwart Praetorian, and beloved Sanguinius. I have no need to summon either of them, for they are already hurrying to us, side by side, flanked by the greatest of their lieutenants, Imperial Fists and Blood Angels, a delegation of Astartes. They are coming to him as a deputation, I think. They have done all they can, beyond all that could have been asked, but the clocks run out. They are coming to tell him it is time.\n\nThey are coming to tell him, demand of him, that he rise up with them at this second before midnight. And if he won't, they are coming to remove him and escort him to safety.\n\nHe has refused this option since the siege began. It is not pride, it is not a refusal to acknowledge the threat. It is simply that there is no safety. There is nowhere to go in the entire span of the galaxy where he would be safe from what is approaching.\n\nRogal, perhaps his truest son, the exemplar of unwavering loyalty. I see his emptiness. He is undone, his body aching and exhausted, his armour battered by combat during the frenetic retreat from Bhab Bastion, his mind spent. That exhaustion is a terrible thing to feel. Rogal, one of the finest strategists in history, oversaw this defence. He orchestrated the fortification of our stronghold, and his tactics, brilliant, ambitious, mercurial, ran the game, the greatest game of regicide ever played. I want to embrace him, and praise him for his labour. He has excelled, and sustained his play, beat by beat, by means of engineered planning, shrewd anticipation and reflexive improvisation, through every harrowing turn of fortune. But his mind is empty. There is no more game. There are no more moves to make. I sense the vacuum in him, his weary mind surprised to find itself spinning free and wild, with nothing left to process or decide. The feeling is alien to him, and toxic. He has never not known what to do. He has never not known what is coming next.\n\nHe hopes his father does. He is coming to beg his father to tell him.\n\nAnd Sanguinius. His physical wounds are greater, though he hides them from others behind the aura of his being. He cannot hide them from me. Beneath his projected radiance, I can see the damage to his armour and his body, the open wounds, the tattered and scorched feathers of his wings. Now he is back inside the Sanctum, the aegis of his father's protective spirit is healing him, faster than any mortal could ever heal. But it is not enough. He may never be whole again. He will bear some of these crippling injuries for the remainder of his life.\n\nHe tries to walk tall. He hopes his sons will not see the spots of blood he leaves behind him on the hallway floors. He has just conquered both Angron, the strongest and most hate-filled of our foes, and Ka'Bandha, the daemon-bane of the IX, but that incomparable pair of deeds has cost him woefully and, unlike Vulkan, Sanguinius has but one life to risk. I see his suffering, the wounds in his flesh and the hurt in his limbs, but more than that, the pain in his heart. Like Rogal, he has given everything and it has not been enough. He has destroyed Angron, broken Ka'Bandha, closed the Eternity Gate, and locked the final fortress. And yet, the walls fall. The sun is red. The clocks run out. He does not understand why we are made to suffer.\n\nNone of them do, in truth. Not even the primarch sons have the context to understand the scope of their father's plan, the depth of his allotheistic learning, or the true extent of what is at stake. But Sanguinius, Bright Angel, he feels it most of all. I taste his anguish. There will be no recrimination. He simply wants to ask his father why.\n\nIn different ways, they both seek revelation.\n\nThey are coming to us, I do not need to summon them. They are coming to ask for help, and this time, perhaps to their surprise, my master will be ready to answer them.\n\nWho else? My mind unfurls, spreads wider, out into the body of the Sanctum precinct, where towers burn and walls that should have held forever subside in torrents like a child's toy blocks. The Palatine is entirely invaded, with homicidal urgency and fetishistic glee. The air reeks of ozone and smoke-filth. Trumpets and sirens blast alarums that are too late, or blare orders that cannot be followed. This was mankind's central arcology, the heart of empire, and it is overrun by acronical slaughter and waves of Neverborn carnage. Only the final fortress, sealed by Sanguinius' monumental deed, remains sacrosanct. Those of our forces that got inside, before the great gate closed, now man the last walls, and those that did not - so very, very many - will now never get in, and are doomed to fight to the death in the insanity of the Palatine Zone.\n\nEven the final fortress has been contaminated. Before the Archangel locked the Gate, the first invaders broke through. Now the Gate is shut, and the Sentinels of the Legio Custodes labour to exterminate any traces of the enemy that slipped inside. The daemons are here-\n\nThere. Valdor. First of the Ten Thousand. Defender of the inner circle. He is hunting in the Preceptory of the Heironymite, eradicating the squealing horrors that stole in before Eternity closed. Constantin's mind is bright with focus. The master of the Legio Custodes is a dreadful thing, perhaps the most ruthless of all the demigods my lord commands. To Constantin was granted very little latitude. His role is the simplest of all. He has fulfilled it without hesitation. He stands apart from the others, not a son, but both less and more, an ever-vigilant proxy, impartial and unwavering, not biased by issues of blood, lineage or fraternity. He was made to stand apart so there would be one among them who could keep the unprejudiced objectivity of distance.\n\nBut in the course of this war, my lord has come to pity him, and has allowed Constantin to learn more, and share more of his noesis. In part, he did this because it would help Valdor perform his duties even better, but he also judged it only fair to let him learn. He gave Valdor a weapon, the Apollonian Spear, and through it, revelation. With each kill it makes, it teaches him. Each thrust through daemonic flesh and bone imparts instruction, feeding Constantin knowledge from the things he kills.\n\nI only hope he has not learned too much.\n\nI fear he might have seen enough to interrogate his creator's design. I know Constantin is acting on his own recognisance now, building contingencies of his own in case my lord's plan fails. He thinks he is keeping this secret from me, but he is not. I know he has permitted the construction of a weapon to be used in extremis. It will end my lord's sons, and their sons too, all of them, without discrimination. Constantin has always questioned the wisdom of the demigods his master made. I have allowed him the consolation of this weapon, accepting even the employment of the genius monster he recruited to make it. It will not be needed.\n\nOr if it is, then it exists, and our master will not be alive to witness its use.\n\nI call to him.\n\n'My king,' he says, hearing my voice as his lord's. He comes at once, without demur, leaving his men to finish the work, leaving Neverborn things writhing and lacerated in his wake, his damascened armour splashed with their blood. He is still, without doubt, loyal. He will hold his secret weapon in reserve, and stand at his master's side as the clocks run out.\n\nOnly after that, if his master is gone, will he enact his sanction, draw the curtain down on this bloody revenger's tragedy, and wipe it all away.\n\nValdor is on his way. Rogal and Sanguinius. Vulkan. My mind drifts for a moment, through the fused ceramite ruins of the Inner Palace, vainly searching through streets filmed with bacterial clouds, and caustic gas, and the wind-blown ashes of a million victims. There should be others to find. Once there were so many who could be called upon in an hour of need.\n\nBut there are no more. These four are the last of them. The rest are all dead, or have become the reason that our world is dying.\n\n1:xxiv\n\nFragments\n\nThe gunners are all dead, but the autocannon battery keeps firing. Death has clenched the lead crewman's hand around the fire control paddle. The battery pours tracer fire out into the murk, wide of any target except the sky, and it will keep doing so until the bulk munition drums run dry, or until the end of time, whichever comes first.\n\nThe Bayer Ordnance Komag VI is a light assault weapon manufactured in the Yndonesic Bloc towards the end of the Unification Wars. It is one of a hundred antique patterns still in service, cheaply made, easy to maintain, and basic in function, issued to the lower orders of the Army Auxilia.\n\nSandrine Icaro tries to remember how to work it. It does not represent the instruments of war she is used to employing. The Second Mistress Tacticae Terrestria has not had to touch a gun in years. But she did two tours with the hive territorials in her youth, to fulfil the service requirements that got her into Tacticae War School. The damn thing is basic. It has three controls, and one of those is the trigger. She fumbles. Her hands are covered in blood.\n\nPeople are milling around her.\n\n'Get into the transports!' she yells. 'Get into the damn transports!'\n\nClerks and junior staffers, rubricators and assistant desk officers look at "}
{"text":"Tacticae Terrestria has not had to touch a gun in years. But she did two tours with the hive territorials in her youth, to fulfil the service requirements that got her into Tacticae War School. The damn thing is basic. It has three controls, and one of those is the trigger. She fumbles. Her hands are covered in blood.\n\nPeople are milling around her.\n\n'Get into the transports!' she yells. 'Get into the damn transports!'\n\nClerks and junior staffers, rubricators and assistant desk officers look at her, eyes wide. She can see how utterly mindless they are, mindless with terror and confusion. She feels it herself.\n\nThe street, one side of which has been levelled by mortar fire, is packed with survivors. Smoke is coming in on a weird, angled plane. Icaro's not sure how any of them got out. She can still just see the bastion, three kilometres south, visible through the buildings and towers around her. Bhab Bastion is on fire, burning like some awful torch.\n\n'Get in the damn transports!' she yells again. 'We have to leave this zone!'\n\nPeople push past her. She tries to shove and steer them. She got the Komag off the corpse of a militiaman a few hundred metres back. The Komag, and two spare magazines. She thinks the damned thing's jammed. She focuses her attention on trying to clear its action. It's better than thinking about what has just happened. When the end came, it was so sudden. They stayed as long as they could. Too long. Icaro doesn't think they're going to reach the safety of the Sanctum Imperialis now.\n\nFigures stumble past. Between them, they're carrying Katarin. Icaro's not sure why. Katarin Elg is clearly dead. Her body is caked in white dust, but the chalky coating is clotted crimson around the head and chest.\n\nShe wants to tell them to put poor Katarin down so they can move more quickly. She can't bear the thought of leaving Katarin here.\n\n'Where is Captain Vorst? Has anyone seen Captain Vorst?' she yells. No one answers. 'Halmere? What about Osaka?'\n\nShe tries to herd them towards the last of the transports. The first shots start chasing them down the street. Auto-fire. Someone falls down, as though they've simply had enough.\n\n'Where is Lord Archamus?' she yells. 'Has anyone seen my Lord Archamus? Did he make it out?'\n\nNo one knows.\n\nMore shots. Traitor forces begin to appear, two hundred metres away. Infantry units, corrupted devils that were once Imperial Army Excertus.\n\n'Where is Lord Archamus?' Icaro yells. A man to her left is smacked off his feet by high-velocity hard rounds.\n\nSandrine Icaro remembers her basic training. She clears the jammed round, reslots the magazine, raises the Komag VI, and starts to return fire.\n\nKeeler follows Glacis Street, past lines of the shell-shocked, aimless and displaced. The conclave has set up an aid station in the ground floor of a once-celebrated dining house. Wereft is there. She asks about a functioning vox, and he says he'll find one. She stands under the portico for a moment. Survivors shamble past. So many are blindfolded, and some of those stumble onwards, ringing plaintive handbells. Many heave along on stilts or shoes that have been platformed with timber or bricks to avoid contact with broken glass, toxic groundwater or bacterial spills. Most are masked or veiled, or swing foetid censers to ward off the foul air and the caustic smoke.\n\nOfficers of the Command Prefectus Unit have set up a checkpoint nearby. The Command Prefectus is a new agency of the emergency powers that Keeler still doesn't quite understand, despite encounters with Boetharch Mauer and her officers. Founded by the Huscarls Praetoriat, it seems to be more concerned with discipline and superficial concepts of morale than protection. Even Mauer seemed adrift in her duties. Keeler suspects the Prefectus are an idea conceived at the very highest level, to contain and ward off Chaos, without any firm understanding of what Chaos is.\n\nHere, as elsewhere, the officers are checking people for signs of disease and infection, and examining them for the weals and marks of corruption. They focus mainly on the able-bodied, on people of fighting age, or military who have become detached from their units. If any pass inspection, the Prefectus tags them with a mark of purity, using the hand staplers the Corps Logisticae used to pin scripts and deployment tags to service personnel. A purity tag means you are fit to serve. It will allow you access to aid stations and soup kitchens. It also shows you can be trusted. Emblems and insignia, even uniform colours, are meaningless. All the sides have changed. The enemy could be anyone. And anyway, even if emblems meant anything, everyone is too layered in grime for them to be identifiable. The seal of purity has become the only meaningful emblem of the loyalist cause, more than the aquila or any Imperial crest. It signifies loyalty. Those who get them, keep them clean and visible with spit and rubbing fingers.\n\nThose who don't move away, bewildered.\n\nIn the long lines waiting for inspection, Keeler sees people flagellating themselves to remove any mark or graze that might be mistaken for impurity. They chastise themselves brutally, hoping that the sight of flayed skin, and their willingness to inflict such damage on themselves, indicates their resolve, no matter what marks or sores blemish them. Other self-harm, cutting off warts and buboes, debriding infected or plague-festered flesh.\n\n'Do they have to do this?' she asks one of the Prefectus.\n\n'I didn't tell them to,' he replies. He is a boetharch. He wears the black storm coat with twin lines of red enamel buttons, crimson gloves, and the silver emblem of his unit.\n\n'Make them stop.'\n\n'I can't make them do anything,' he says. 'Where's your tag?'\n\n'She doesn't need one,' Wereft calls out from the steps. The boetharch shrugs. He's got too much to do to engage in an argument. He's prepared to take the word of a veteran enforcer of the Provost-Marshal's office.\n\nShe walks back to Wereft, and is about to speak when something colossal bursts the sky behind her and throws her on her belly. The shock-pulse knocks most people in the street down, and topples the Prefectus station. What windows remain are all blown in.\n\nWhen Wereft helps her to her feet, she turns and sees a huge, rippling bolus of fire rising into the sky to the east. Single strands of wiry flame, traceries of debris, spill from its underside like the fine ribbons of a jellyfish.\n\n'What-' she says, swallowing hard. Overpressure has muffled her hearing.\n\n'Munition plant,' says Wereft. 'Over Tavian Arch way. MM Three-Forty-One is my guess.'\n\n'She said it was on fire.'\n\n'Who did?'\n\n'The girl-'\n\n'Well, it's just torched off and taken its dumps with it.'\n\nNo more munition hauls, then. Not from this area. If the vox still works after the electro-mag pulse of that blast, she'll reach a frontline unit and inform them of the wagons' location.\n\nThey have to move on. They have to urge the masses north. There's already panic and jostling nearby. A stampede brewing. They'll have to work hard to keep them calm.\n\n'We'll need help,' she says to the boetharch.\n\n'With what?' he asks.\n\n'Order,' she replies. 'Discipline.'\n\nThe line breaks. Close to thirty thousand infantry, Excertus and Auxilia Imperialis, from twelve different regiments including the PanNord 110th, have recovered some momentum in the open plain near the blazing ruins of Principaria Gard, driving into a considerably larger mass of Traitor Auxilia advancing from the Annapurna Gate. After sixteen brutal minutes of choked battle, the traitor force has been levered sideways, partly wedged against the huge earthworks running east to west. It is ugly work. The terrain is iced and frozen, victim of freak etheric weather patterns, and the battle has come down to bayonets and pole weapons. The main combat is a thick, churning melee covering ten square kilometres, thousands of soldiers caught in the savage push and pull of a giant, brawling skirmish. Lit by the flicker of low lightning, the two armies grind at each other face to face, crowds mobbing crowds, the closest of close quarters. The traitor formation is about to disintegrate. Then World Eaters, drawn by the scent of blood, sweep in from the south, and the brittle, determined discipline that has got the loyalist commanders this far shatters almost instantly.\n\nOrder collapses. Fortune inverts. The line breaks. Slaughter results.\n\nThinking they have time to set and range the artillery, Captain N'jie and his platoons of Kovingian Light Ordnancers line up along Quaternary Ridge. But time has been crushed into powder, and the Traitor Mechanicum's skitarii engulf them before they have even unlimbered or planted the recoil spades. The Kovingians fight and die around their unfired cannon, reduced to pistols, knives and shovels.\n\nKeeler waits in line. She waits in line, accepts inspection, and takes a purity tag. She thinks others will too if they see her doing it. Teach by word, teach by deed. They see you stand up, they'll do the same. She also believes it's the only icon that means anything now, an article of faith. A talisman of hope to counteract the symbols of atrocity that are appearing on every wall. She doesn't like the Prefectus' callous process, or the exclusion, but she reminds herself there's a greater purpose at work.\n\nEild rallies the conclave, and sends out the speakers to start drawing the crowds north. By his estimate there are nearly a million people welling up from the southern Palatine.\n\n'North,' she says to him. 'That's the plan. Tell them \"north\".'\n\n1:xxv\n\nA Warmaster confesses his crime\n\n'So what is your plan, Ollanius?' Actae asks.\n\n'In my experience, plans work best the less people share them,' says Oll. 'It reduces the odds of someone screwing them up.'\n\nHis answer echoes in the narrow, sloping chamber they've made their rest-stop. Actae smiles.\n\n'I'll take that as a no, then,' she says.\n\n'No, what?' asks Katt, perched beside Oll, a weigh"}
{"text":"ng up from the southern Palatine.\n\n'North,' she says to him. 'That's the plan. Tell them \"north\".'\n\n1:xxv\n\nA Warmaster confesses his crime\n\n'So what is your plan, Ollanius?' Actae asks.\n\n'In my experience, plans work best the less people share them,' says Oll. 'It reduces the odds of someone screwing them up.'\n\nHis answer echoes in the narrow, sloping chamber they've made their rest-stop. Actae smiles.\n\n'I'll take that as a no, then,' she says.\n\n'No, what?' asks Katt, perched beside Oll, a weight of scorn in her voice.\n\n'No, he doesn't have a plan, Katt,' says Actae. 'I thought as much. That's why I came to find you. To help you. To... I suppose, engineer a plan that might actually work. You have the potential, clearly. Your very long association with the Emperor.'\n\nEveryone looks at Oll, even Leetu. They've set their lamps on the ground, and they blaze like little campfires, throwing their shadows long and lean up the sloping walls until they become part of the pitch darkness overhead.\n\n'Association is a strong word,' says Oll. 'I knew Him, a very long time ago. We stopped being friends. I don't suppose we ever were friends, but... anyway... I ran from Calth, when Calth burned. I was running away, but somewhere along the line, I started running towards something. I believe there are higher powers at work in the universe, powers, forces, whatever you want to call them. I think I have been set on my path for a reason, so I'm following it. And if I can do anything when I arrive at the end of it... if I have any influence left, as one Perpetual to another, both cursed by that state of being, I intend to use it.'\n\n'You believe in god, Trooper Persson,' says Graft. 'This I have recorded about you. You are pious. You cherish a private faith in the old, prohibited religions.'\n\nOll nods. 'Yes. An old habit. Very old. Too old to be shaken off. But what I believe in doesn't matter. Only what I can do.'\n\n'End it,' says Zybes.\n\n'Yes, Hebet,' says Oll. 'End it. End this incredible, monstrous, unnecessary bloodshed. That's the bottom line.'\n\n'Stab him,' says Krank. 'Stab him with a blade that cuts through space.'\n\nKatt snorts a laugh.\n\n'Stab who?' asks Leetu.\n\n'Yes, Ollanius? Who?' asks the sorceress with a sly smile.\n\n'Horus,' says Zybes.\n\nOll shrugs.\n\n'Oh,' says Katt, in surprise. An expression of shock and realisation spreads across her face. 'He means either one,' she says. 'Either one of them. Or both. Whatever it takes.'\n\n'Whatever it takes...' Actae echoes.\n\n'But you intend to talk to Him first,' says Leetu. It's almost a question.\n\n'Who?' asks Krank.\n\n'His old friend,' says Actae.\n\n'I do,' says Oll. 'I mean, if there's a chance. I doubt there will be. And I doubt He'll listen. He's never listened to anybody. But I think that's the intention. Otherwise, why me? It could be anyone carrying this knife if it's just a case of stabbing.'\n\n'Because he might drop his guard if he encounters an old friend?' Actae suggests. 'No one else could get close.'\n\n'Maybe,' says Oll. 'But that's not really me. That's more of an Alpharius move. Besides, He'll be wary of me. He wouldn't lower His guard. I've stabbed Him before.'\n\nThere is a long silence.\n\n'Are you joking?' asked Katt.\n\n'Expand on that, Ollanius,' says Actae.\n\n'Nothing much to add,' says Oll. 'We had a falling out. This was thirty thousand years ago, give or take, so... a lot of blood under the bridge since then.'\n\n'No, no,' says Krank, wide-eyed. 'You have to say more than that!'\n\nOll looks at them. After the loyalty they've shown to him, he owes them something. This deep under the earth, entombed in rock, it feels like the most secure crypt, where an old secret might be safely unwrapped.\n\n'There was a great tower,' he says. 'It was called, by some, Etemenanki, and stood at a place called Babilin, or Babel. I'm sure that means nothing to any of you, because scripture's no longer taught.'\n\n'It means something to me,' says Actae. 'Was it real?'\n\n'It was,' says Oll. 'The culture that built it had power. They were a dangerous obstruction to His plans. A danger to everything, actually. They had weaponised language. Enuncia, they called it. I was His Warmaster, His friend. We campaigned and brought them down. I thought we'd burn everything. But, to my great disappointment, it turned out He wanted Enuncia for His own purposes.'\n\nIt was a long time ago, but it feels oddly fresh to Oll, because he so recently relived the whole affair in the dreams woven by Hatay-Antakya Hive.\n\n'So you stabbed Him?' asked Zybes, wide-eyed.\n\n'I did. To stop Him. That ended what the lady here described as our association.'\n\nHe looks at Actae.\n\n'Now you,' he says. 'Tell us something. You're a Perpetual too.'\n\n'Not born so,' she replies. 'Not like you at all. But granted, after death, a second birth and a new lifetime. I was born on Colchis. I was used by the Aurelian's people as a confessor, and as a priestess of their craft. And for that association, Ollanius, I was killed by the Emperor's golden warriors.'\n\nShe pauses.\n\n'And in dying, saw the truth of the warp. All of it. Then I was reborn in this form. What you would call sorcery remade me, Ollanius, not some happenstance of biology or evolution, but now I serve the truth. No one and nothing else.'\n\n'The Cabal tried to use you,' says Oll. 'John told me.'\n\n'They did. They sent Damon Prytanis after me. Another Perpetual.'\n\n'He's dead,' says Oll.\n\n'He is. Finally and fully. But I serve no one and nothing now, except the greater cause of finishing this conflict before it finishes us all. The same as you.'\n\n'A loose definition of the words \"the same\", I think,' says Oll.\n\n'For now, Ollanius, we only have each other.'\n\n'Cyrene Valantion,' says Katt quietly.\n\nActae turns her veiled face towards her sharply. 'Oh, you're clever, girl,' she says. 'That mind of yours is more cunning and light-fingered than I realised. You hooked that from my thoughts.'\n\n'It was just there, on the surface,' says Katt. She looks a little pleased with herself.\n\n'Yes, I was Cyrene Valantion, the Blessed Lady. My flesh-sight was taken when Monarchia burned. I died in the prelude to Isstvan. After years of tormented enlightenment, or perhaps enlightened torment, I was reborn. I was no longer Cyrene. I had escaped death, and I had been given a different kind of sight. Think what you will of me, Ollanius, but I am a significant asset.'\n\nOll gets to his feet.\n\n'They're taking a long time,' he says to Leetu. 'Any signal from Alpharius?'\n\nLeetu shakes his head.\n\n'All right,' says Oll. 'A few more minutes, then.'\n\nHe wanders a few steps down the passage, the direction they came from, and peers into the darkness.\n\n'Something the matter?' asks Leetu.\n\nOll looks at him, and drops his voice to a whisper.\n\n'On the way up here, you had the tail end.'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Did you hear anything behind us?' Oll asks.\n\n'No,' Leetu replies. 'Like what?'\n\n'Doesn't matter,' says Oll.\n\n1:xxvi\n\nSharper than thorns\n\nOn the Via Aquila, in front of the Scholaster Hall, the human tide parts suddenly. People pull back in stumbling dismay, a hole in the crowd. A man has fallen.\n\nConroi-Captain Ahlborn of the Command Prefectus pushes his way through the packed crowd, and reaches the gap. Stiglich, one of his best from the Hort Palatine, follows him.\n\n'Keep back,' Ahlborn calls to the people. 'Keep back!'\n\nThe man is writhing on the ground. A factorum worker, perhaps, or a labourer from the mills. From his convulsions, it looks as though he has been poisoned. Ahlborn realises that the sight shocks him: not the man in agony, for he has seen far too many humans in agony in the last few hours. What shocks is the empty circle of street around him. The Via Aquila is so congested, there has barely been space to move or breathe. But this man, this writhing man, commands a circle of open, littered ground a full six metres in diameter.\n\nThe crowd looks on, wide-eyed and silent. Some pull up their purity tags for Ahlborn to see, but he isn't looking.\n\n'Is there a medic?' he calls out, crouching over the man. 'A medic? A doctor?'\n\nNo one answers. They are all as afraid of the crimson-gloved Prefectus officer as they are of a man afflicted with madness or disease.\n\nAhlborn looks at Stiglich. She shakes her head.\n\n'We have to get him somewhere,' he tells her. 'Carry him off the street.'\n\nHe reaches down gingerly. The man is matted with filth, and he has soiled himself. He mumbles something, something Ahlborn can't quite catch, and stares up with blood-blown eyes.\n\n'I don't understand,' Ahlborn tells him. 'Kin? King? King who? Is there someone here called King?'\n\nThe man vomits suddenly. Strings of waxy glair spatter the roadway. Ahlborn flinches back. He doesn't want to touch the man. He can see dark spots on his skin, the maculae of disease, the rotting plague that the enemy carried in with them. He wants to put a shot through the man's head, but he can't do that in front of the crowd. And they can't leave him here.\n\nHe clenches his teeth and reaches out again.\n\nThe man gets up. He rises quickly, swaying. He grins at Ahlborn and Stiglich. Vomit drips from his chin. He says something again, the name, and then shivers. Spines, the size and colour of rose-thorns, sprout from his skin. They erupt from his cheeks and brow, his jaw, his forearms, and the backs of his hands.\n\nAhlborn cries out in alarm, and draws his sidearm. The crowd starts screaming. The man, thorn-stippled, turns and staggers away. Ahlborn can't take a shot with people all around. Stumbling, the man reaches the steps of the Scholaster Hall. The crowd parts like a curtain to let him pass, recoiling in fear and revulsion.\n\nAhlborn and Stiglich run up the steps after him. He's gone inside, through the great doors, into the unlit, empty chambers of the hall. Ahlborn leads the way. It's cold, quiet and dim inside. Every step sets off a dozen echoes. The ceilings are high, supported by pillars. A firelight glow throbs through the tall, dirty windows.\n\nStiglich, carbine rais"}
{"text":"nd. Stumbling, the man reaches the steps of the Scholaster Hall. The crowd parts like a curtain to let him pass, recoiling in fear and revulsion.\n\nAhlborn and Stiglich run up the steps after him. He's gone inside, through the great doors, into the unlit, empty chambers of the hall. Ahlborn leads the way. It's cold, quiet and dim inside. Every step sets off a dozen echoes. The ceilings are high, supported by pillars. A firelight glow throbs through the tall, dirty windows.\n\nStiglich, carbine raised, nudges Ahlborn and nods. On the ground, a splatter of stomach contents. They edge down the hall, covering each other, their footsteps making hundreds more even though they try to tread softly.\n\nThe man is waiting at the far end, under the huge oeil-de-boeuf window that presents the stations of the Scholasticae in glassaic. He is no longer a man. Some Neverborn thing has hatched, thorns first, inside him, and burst him from within. It crouches against the wall, raw-boned and glistening, trying to peel and scratch the husk of the man's skin off itself like rind.\n\nIt's not just the Palace that is invaded, Ahlborn thinks. We are invaded, and conquered from within. He wonders what awful sin, what crime, what accidental dream the man committed to become so ghastly a conduit.\n\nThey both raise their weapons and fire, raking the thing backwards against the stone wall in a storm of dust, stone chips and ichor. Its neverlife undimmed by ballistic trauma, it rushes them. Ahlborn, still firing, manages to get out of its path. Stiglich is lifted off the floor, entwined by thorned fingers, and pulled in half.\n\nAhlborn will not forget the wet crack of her living spine separating.\n\nDropping the halves of her, it turns on him. It giggles, chunters and cackles through pin-cushion lips. His weapon is out. He backs up, frantically trying to reload.\n\nIt speaks. A name. The words that the man it hatched out of was trying to say.\n\nThe Dark King.\n\nWhen it says it, it shudders, as though just speaking the syllables fills it with terror.\n\nA shadow crosses in front of Ahlborn. There's someone else here, someone huge, moving fast and without a sound. A grey knight. An Astartes legionary in almost colourless plate, like a phantom. He has a sword in each hand, a black combat gladius and a longer battlesword.\n\nThe Neverborn rears up at the warrior, hissing, clutching. The Astartes slices back, one blade and then the other. Fluid squirts from massive wounds. As it comes at him again, he buries the long sword into one armpit, and the gladius into ribs.\n\nThe Neverborn lurches backwards, the swords wedged through it, wrenching both from the warrior's grip. The Astartes reaches behind his head and draws his third sword, a chainblade clamped to his back. It revs and wails as he brings it down, sawing the Neverborn in half vertically.\n\nNow it dies.\n\nThe warrior kills his chainsword, and returns it to his back clamp. He crouches, and recovers his other blades.\n\nAhlborn knows him. The Lone Wolf. The last loyal son of Horus.\n\n'Loken?' he whispers. 'Loken? Sir?'\n\nGarviel Loken turns and looks at him. Rubio's blade is in his right hand, Mourn-It-All in his left. 'It said \"The Dark King\",' he says.\n\n'I heard it, sir.'\n\n'Mean anything?'\n\nAhlborn shakes his head.\n\n'You're Ahlborn, correct?'\n\nAhlborn nods. 'Yes, sir. What... may I ask... to find you here, I...'\n\n'I was with Keeler,' says Loken, 'escorting her. But the war front swept in too close, so I sent her onwards, and dropped back to establish a defence line.'\n\n'When was this?' asks Ahlborn.\n\n'I don't know. An hour ago? Two?' He pauses. 'I'm on my way to the Processional of the Eternals,' Loken says. 'The main fight is there. I heard the gunfire...'\n\nHe looks around at the gloomy hall. He seems confused for a moment.\n\n'Sir,' says Ahlborn, 'the processional... it is leagues from here.'\n\n'Where is this?' Loken asks.\n\n'The Scholaster Hall, sir. On the Via Aquila.'\n\n'The Via Aquila?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'That's... that's nowhere near where I was. Nowhere near where I was going...'\n\nAhlborn hesitates. How does an Astartes get lost? How does an Astartes lose his way? Is the Lone Wolf injured? Is he... Throne save us... is he invaded by the creeping inner madness too?\n\n'The Via Aquila?' Loken asks again.\n\n'Yes, sir. Right outside.'\n\n'Something is wrong, Ahlborn.'\n\n'That is... an understatement, sir.'\n\n'No, conroi-captain,' Loken snaps. 'I was at Praestor Gate. I was on the avenue there, approaching the processional. I heard gunfire, just a hundred metres away, so I followed the sound. Just a hundred metres... and I was here.'\n\n'But, no,' Ahlborn stammers. 'With respect, no, sir. Praestor is fourteen kilometres from here, at least. Probably nineteen. That's...'\n\n'Not possible,' says Loken.\n\n'Exactly, sir.'\n\n'But true,' says Loken. 'I think the empyric is in us so deep, it is warping everything. Time. Spaces. The materia of the world and the Palace. My being here is not possible, and yet here I am. The impossible, Ahlborn, no longer exists.'\n\n1:xxvii\n\nHydra\n\nJohn turns a machined gold dial built for hands larger than human, and hears a slow hum of power rising. Console lights come on around the cabin, pale blue bars of neon blinking in auramite frames as start-up and reboot systems begin to cycle. He eases himself out of the red leather driving throne, and clambers back down the cabin to the Coronus' hatch. None of the other vehicles have shown a spark of power, but the Custodes vehicle has retained some reserve. No surprise. The grav-carrier is a breed apart from the other transports, built using technologies both older and more advanced than the mainstay Imperial standard.\n\nHe looks out into the gloom. 'Pech?' he calls. 'Pech? This one's working.'\n\nThere's no answer. The Alpha Legionnaire has left the checking to him, and gone to scout ahead, to make sure the next portion of the route is still clear enough for vehicles.\n\n'Pech?'\n\nHe climbs back in. He can feel the vibration of the under-deck generator as it begins to sequence, and hear the whine of the grav-system slowly boosting to operational power. He opens some of the built-in storage lockers. Four bolters, too big for anyone except Pech or Leetu. One is a master-crafted piece of great beauty, with silver and emerald inlay, fitted with double-drum magazines. John can't even lift it. The next two lockers contain racks of Solar Auxilia lasguns and autorifles, high quality and manufactory-fresh, still in their plastek wraps. The Alpha Legion were anticipating human agent support.\n\nPrepared for every eventuality. No shit.\n\nThe next locker holds handguns, both Astartes and human pattern, including two handsome voltvolvers that look like Mechanicum archeotech. There are metal canisters packed in the bottom of the locker. He opens one, and smiles at the contents.\n\nPech is taking too long. They should have rejoined the others and been moving again by now. John climbs out of the Coronus to find the psi-damper and make sure it's packed aboard. As he jumps onto the ground, the grav-carrier's restart cycle reaches operational power, and the exterior lamps come on automatically, drenching the area in front of the vehicle with bright ovals of light.\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire is standing there. His return was typically silent, but the lights have surprised him. He stands for a moment, motionless, his armour iridescent, motes of dust drifting around him in the hard glare.\n\n'You found one that works, then?' he asks.\n\n'Yes,' says John.\n\n'Power reserves optimal? No drop off?'\n\n'Enough to start the generation system,' says John. 'Now it's building its own charge. Should be good to go. Is the way ahead clear?'\n\n'The way ahead? Yes.'\n\n'No collapses or cave-ins, then? A transport's going to make the rest of this trek a lot easier.'\n\n'No collapses,' says the legionnaire.\n\nJohn nods. 'I left something inside,' he said. 'Just a sec.'\n\nHe turns to climb back in.\n\n'That can wait.'\n\nJohn pauses, and glances back at the Astartes. 'That can wait what?' he asks. His pulse is racing. He's not sure what to do, because he's pretty sure he's about to die, and his ruse to get back in to grab a voltvolver or something with serious kill-power has just been thwarted.\n\n'I don't understand what you mean,' says the Alpha Legionnaire, and takes a step forward.\n\nJohn smiles his best forced smile. He's only got himself now. Wits, brains, smarts. The only way he's going to live another minute, another second, is to use what he has. The unexpected. The oblique.\n\n'That can wait what?' John repeats, still smiling, maintaining relaxed body language. 'All the way here, you've called me by name, every other sentence, emphasising the fact you know me. Psychological reinforcement. Pretty standard. But now you've stopped.'\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire hesitates for a fraction of a second.\n\n'I don't understand what your problem is,' he says, his tone expressing genial bemusement.\n\n'Well, you wouldn't,' says John with a cheerful shrug. 'You're not Pech.'\n\n'Of course I am,' says the Alpha Legionnaire.\n\n'You can't be,' says John. 'He knows my name. And he's standing right behind you.'\n\nFooled just for a second, the Astartes turns to look behind him.\n\nJohn dives for the hatch.\n\nHe isn't even slightly inside when the huge hands grab him from behind.\n\n1:xxviii\n\nXenophon\n\nJohn's face and forearms slam into the hull as his legs are snatched backwards. When he hits the ground beside the grav-carrier, he's already dazed from that jarring impact, his nose full of a salty stink, his mouth full of blood.\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire rolls him onto his back, pulls the autopistol out of John's belt, and tosses it away. If I'd thought that was going to do any good against Astartes plate, I'd have tried it already, John thinks. He tries to clear his head. His nose feels crushed, and there's blood running into his throat. The bastard basically bounced his face off the Coronus.\n\nBut he didn't kill him. Not outright. And an Astartes kills when he decides "}
{"text":" nose full of a salty stink, his mouth full of blood.\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire rolls him onto his back, pulls the autopistol out of John's belt, and tosses it away. If I'd thought that was going to do any good against Astartes plate, I'd have tried it already, John thinks. He tries to clear his head. His nose feels crushed, and there's blood running into his throat. The bastard basically bounced his face off the Coronus.\n\nBut he didn't kill him. Not outright. And an Astartes kills when he decides to, so John being alive is a conscious decision.\n\n'Get up,' the legionnaire says.\n\nJohn can't. He's too foggy. He rolls on his side and cough-spits blood. He's split his lip and bitten his tongue.\n\n'How many of you are there?' the Alpha Legionnaire asks.\n\nJohn spits again and tries to sit up. His face is numb, but the pain in his tongue is acute.\n\n'Don't play for time, Grammaticus.'\n\nJohn flinches.\n\n'Yes, I know who you are. You caught me out. But you will be aware of the techniques I can employ. How many of you are there?'\n\nJohn sits up, clutching his oozing mouth, and shrugs.\n\nThe Astartes picks him up and slams him against the grav-carrier. John's sure he feels a rib pop, but the air is crushed out of him so completely, he greys out. The legionnaire holds him there.\n\n'How many?'\n\nBlinking, head swaying, John looks at the burnished visor inches from his face. It's just a frozen snarl of metal. He can see the intricate green and silver scales, the droplets of his own aspirated blood gleaming on its grille. He can't see the eyes behind the lenses in the deep, recessed sockets, but he's so close he can see the orange flicker of the display projecting on the inside of the tinted plex.\n\n'How many?'\n\nJohn says something, but his split tongue is so swollen, it comes out as a gurgle of blood and spittle.\n\n'Repeat.'\n\n'Xenophon...' John grunts. His words are slurred and impeded by his swollen tongue. 'You're running Xenophon? We're on the same bloody side...'\n\nThe Astartes keeps him pinned against the carrier with his left hand, and lowers his right. Power-armoured fingers, as gentle as a lover's, find the rib lesion and track the rib around the curve of John's torso. John winces. A fingertip stops, adjacent to a pressure point. It digs in.\n\nJohn screams. The pain rips up his spine and into the base of his skull. His legs go numb.\n\n'This flow of information is one-way,' says the Astartes. 'How many of you are there?'\n\n'There's no incentive for me to answer,' John replies, each word distorted by his tongue. 'You're not going to let me live.'\n\n'I might.'\n\n'You're Alpha Legion.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'Everything about you is a lie. Let me live? Lie.'\n\nJohn has one card left. A word, one of the many words of power he glimpsed in Oll's vision of the word-filled tower back in Hatay-Antakya Hive. It's the only one he could recall after the vision faded, and he's memorised it. It's a word of the proto-language Enuncia, and he isn't sure what it does, but he knows that once he's said it, he'll forget it. He was saving it, saving it as a last resort, for when they finally close with their quarry. But that moment will never come if he doesn't survive this-\n\nThe huge right hand moves up and rests a thumb against his brachial plexus.\n\n'Stopping the pain is an incentive,' the Alpha Legionnaire says. 'Preventing pain is an incentive. Live or die is hardly the point. Pain is the significant factor. Pain, and how much of it there is before death.'\n\n'Pain's just distraction,' John gurgles. He starts to form the word.\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire presses with his thumb to prove it isn't. John screams again. His hand goes slack in paralysis. His mind spins, no longer able to compose the syllables he needs. Shock and nausea wash through him. There's raw terror simply in the gentle restraint with which the Astartes is administering pressure.\n\n'How many?'\n\nThe hand moves to John's paratoid lymph node, a finger resting on the mastoid process.\n\n'Make me scream again,' gasps John.\n\nThe hand stops.\n\n'Making me scream is a great way to find out how many people are with me.'\n\n'Last chance,' says the Alpha Legionnaire.\n\nMetal hits metal. The impact is so clear it's almost as if a bell's been struck. Suddenly released, John hits the ground.\n\nTwo huge figures grapple beside him. Both are in green and silver plate. One has a bolt pistol drawn, but the other has clamped the wrist of the hand holding it.\n\nJohn blinks, and tries to crawl away from the brutal contest. It's not like two men brawling, rolling in the dirt, punching and cursing and grabbing at each other's clothes. It's two giants in power armour. It's fast, transhumanly fast, nightmarishly fast, almost faster than John can track: blows, blocks and grips exchanged in rapid, surgical series. It's like lying close to two counter-rotating propellers that are spinning and chewing up the ground towards him, out of control.\n\nPech is the one with the pistol. He didn't take a shot. Now he's locked. The other Alpha Legionnaire shifts and slams Pech against the carrier. Pech pivots and mashes the other Astartes against the Gorgon parked beside it. Flakes of rust puff into the air. The Alpha Legionnaire spins Pech again, trying to break his grip, and caroms him off the carrier's hull a second time. John scrambles, and then rolls frantically. The two Astartes crash down into the space where he had been sprawled. He'd have been crushed under them, and churned up by their wrestling plasteel bulks.\n\nJohn tries to get up. His legs are nerve-limp, and his rib is shrieking pain through his midsection. His left hand is paralysed. He slips, falls, gets up again. He staggers clear as the two Alpha Legionnaires thrash over again in a tangle that would have pulped him.\n\nThe other Astartes breaks Pech's grip on the bolt pistol by cracking his hand against the carrier's port grav nacelle. They roll again. Fists connect in a flurry, drawing sparks and grazing armour. Now John can't tell the bastards apart.\n\nJohn drags himself aside, staring in horror. One Alpha Legionnaire lands a solid blow, and the other rocks back against the nacelle. There's an Astartes combat knife the size of John's forearm already in the fist of the first one. He tries to punch it home, but the other slides away, and the blade gashes the nacelle's plating.\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaires lock again, one holding the other's blade back. They plough past John, out of the space between the carrier and the Gorgon, into the pools of light cast by the carrier's lamps, spinning and rotating each other.\n\nDragging his deadened leg, John blunders back to the carrier and tries to haul himself up the hull. His left hand just won't work. He gets a toehold, and boosts himself up onto the nacelle, falling on his face again. He hacks up blood, hardly able to breathe. Behind him, a green blur moves in the bright wash of floodlights, ceramite clanging and grinding against ceramite.\n\nThe glinting combat blade finally bites. It punches through the reinforced undersuit exposed between groin guard and tasset, in and out, as fast as a snake striking. Blood gouts down the cuisses and greaves. Alpharius staggers backwards, trying to reset a defensive stance. The other Alpharius stamps in, blade levelled for the kill-jab over the gorget.\n\nA lance of boiling light vaporises the ground between them with a savage bang. Leaning against the Coronus' hatch frame to stay upright, John aims the voltvolver at both of them, bracing his right wrist with his left forearm to steady the weight of the hefty, antique weapon. Post-discharge voltaics writhe and crackle around the muzzle.\n\n'One question,' John says, his enlarged tongue making him sound stupid. 'How many of us are there?'\n\n'Nine,' says Ingo Pech.\n\nJohn's shot melts a hole in the chestplate of the other Alpha Legionnaire. He falls on his back with vapour pouring out of the hole. He's still twitching.\n\nPech limps to him, breaks the combat knife out of his spasming grip, and rams the blade under the lip of the helmet and up into the skull inside.\n\n'One of yours?' John asks, lowering the gun and sagging slightly.\n\n'We're all Alpharius, John. You know that.'\n\nPech unlocks the dead Alpha Legionnaire's helmet and removes it. He stares down at the face.\n\n'Mathias Herzog,' he says.\n\n'Him? Really?'\n\n'Yes, John.'\n\n'Working to Xenophon?' asks John.\n\n'Yes. Sent here to activate the sleepers, like I was.'\n\n'You should have shot him, Pech,' says John. 'You had the drop on him.'\n\n'There was a high-percentage risk that you'd have been hit,' says Pech. 'I had to separate you and take him down.'\n\n'Appreciated.'\n\nThe Alpha Legionnaire turns to look at John.\n\n'We may not all be on the same side, John,' he says, 'but I am on your side.'\n\n'That's the most Alpha Legion thing anyone's ever said,' says John, and slides down onto his haunches with a long, slow moan.\n\n1:xxix\n\nIn Lupercal's Court\n\nYou stand and wait, patiently, arms outstretched, as the fitters machine your war plate into place. You use the time to think, to run multiple tactical schemas in your head. Perturabo of Olympia had a reputation for such mental feats, but in your opinion, the reputation was largely undeserved. His plans were so complex, so precise, so cumbersome. They lacked panache. Panache is the mark of true war-genius. You only let him orchestrate the whole thing, truth be told, as a favour, brother to brother. Something for him to do. Something to keep him busy. And, of course, to placate his constant, needy yearning to prove himself against Rogal.\n\nWell, he's gone now. Gone to sulk, most likely, because at every turn, Rogal has proven superior. Rogal, stolid and humourless as he seems, has some panache after all. It is such a damn shame Rogal decided to throw in with the other side. Such a damn, stupid shame. It would have been a pleasure to have him at your right hand. He would have cracked that place open inside two weeks, maximum. Faster, if you'd goaded him. Yes, a shame. But then Rogal, for all his "}
{"text":"ng to prove himself against Rogal.\n\nWell, he's gone now. Gone to sulk, most likely, because at every turn, Rogal has proven superior. Rogal, stolid and humourless as he seems, has some panache after all. It is such a damn shame Rogal decided to throw in with the other side. Such a damn, stupid shame. It would have been a pleasure to have him at your right hand. He would have cracked that place open inside two weeks, maximum. Faster, if you'd goaded him. Yes, a shame. But then Rogal, for all his panache, has always been a dull conformist. Rogal didn't choose his side because he thought it was right. He chose it because it was safe.\n\nOh, Rogal Dorn. You will be almost sorry to kill him, but you will console yourself that it is his own lack of imagination that has brought about his death.\n\nThe fitters are taking forever. You have a headache. Some cloud of migraine that is either setting in or in retreat. Did you have a migraine before? You can't remember. You were busy. They are taking forever, fussing with the power connectors of your Talon, as if this is the first time they've done it. And they are whispering. They haven't done that before. Whispering to each other. What is it they are saying?\n\n'Stop your whispers,' you tell them. Softly, of course.\n\nThey look at you, and you read alarm in their faces. No, more than alarm. Terror. Terror, and puzzlement. One seems to cower, as though he fears you will strike at him. What's got into them?\n\n'You were whispering,' you explain. 'Whisper, whisper. It's annoying. Stop it.'\n\n'Yes, Warmaster,' says one.\n\n'Begging your forgiveness, Warmaster,' says another.\n\nThere's a tone there you don't like, a hint they feel falsely accused. You let it slide. It's trivial, and you have more important things to do.\n\nThey continue with the final fitting work. And they keep whispering, though more quietly. You decide to ignore it. You'll have a private word with Mal later, and instruct him to dole out punishments accordingly. Have them all demoted from the personal retinue and sent back to the arming decks. Another team can take their places and their honour.\n\nThey step back. The Court, your personal place of grace, falls silent. Even the walls hold their breath. The wargear, the Serpent's Scales, so miraculously fashioned by Kelbor-Hal and his artificers, clings upon you like the burden of responsibility and decision, the weight of war, the substance of authority.\n\nThe fitters bring the wolf pelt, and hang it as a mantle around your shoulders. It takes four of them to lift it. A great beast indeed, taken on the moon of Davin, a lunar wolf for a true Luna Wolf.\n\nYou look for approval. Your attendants in the Court smile and nod from their alcoves and ledges. Some bow. Some shiver and tuck themselves behind the drapes that line the chamber, unable to bear your magnificence. Some avert their gaze behind splayed fingers and cower, giggling, in the orifices of the walls.\n\nYou walk from your private chamber. Your plate feels light, as though they haven't adjusted it properly. Or perhaps you're just stronger. You've been feeling stronger these last few days. With the end in sight, that's a boost to your vengeful spirits. The prospect of victory at the end of a difficult compliance always feels uplifting. It takes away fatigue and makes you feel like a-\n\nLike yourself again. Unstoppable. Vital. Justified.\n\nYou walk to the bridge. It's possible that they have relocated the bridge, because the walk seems to take longer than usual. Perhaps a structural reconfiguration as a result of the additional skins of armour you have ordered to sheathe the hull and fortify the primary compartments. The hallway is now too long, despite the lightness you feel. Corridors intersect and subdivide, leading to parts of the ship whose purposes you seem to have briefly forgotten. That's understandable. You've had a lot on your mind in the past weeks, an inhuman burden of data to process, and decisions to make. You have deliberately spent hours in meditative focus in the Court, clearing your head of all extraneous thoughts, the usual mental garbage of work-a-day duty, to achieve a clarity with which to consider what really matters. A state of oneness, attuned to the core issues of the compliance. You can't be expected to remember where this sub-corridor leads, or what that side chamber is used for. That's the shipmaster's job.\n\nThe walls breathe. It is very bright in the hallway, like being outdoors in the sunlight on the wide plains of Chogoris, or the bleached ever-deserts of Colchis. Light, almost sickly bright, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. You don't care. You don't look. You can hear the whispering again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing cases of beetles. Like whirring moths-\n\nWhat is it they are whispering? It's very annoying. You can almost make out the words.\n\nThe name.\n\nOne name, uttered and repeated.\n\n1:xxx\n\nWorld's end\n\nIt's time.\n\nAs we wait for his champions to arrive, he shows me his plan. Effortlessly, he takes my mindsight into his, and melds them together so I see things as he sees them.\n\nI tremble. I am old. I am tired. My frail bones shake, and I cling to my staff to stay standing. Such power. My mind feels as though it is about to burst. I gaze, sharing his will and view, out to the limit of his mindsight. I see...\n\nI see what is revealed. The Imperial Palace, all of its dominions, maimed and disfigured, its towers lightning-clapped and tumbled down, its golden avenues scorched to molten streams of clotted alloy, its polished walls baked in soot and befouled. It is numb with terror, rendered vacant by shock. It clings to its last shreds of life. It is as close to death as Jaghatai was, gone past the fatal brink and owning only a fragment of its vitality.\n\nFirestorms seethe. Caliginous hosts of plated men and towering war machines, like swarms of gleaming insects, pour in through sundered walls. Energy beams sear, noctilucent, through the choking swathes of smoke. Pestilential rains, of blood and toxins and biomatter, hammer the broken bastions and churn the dystrophied plains to mire. Cataracts of blood splash from fractured ramparts and splintered battlements.\n\nWider still, spears of light flash from our last defensive battery, the ransacked port of Lion's Gate, which the White Scars have retaken and somehow cling on to. The orbital lasers stab at the obscured heavens, and are answered a hundredfold by the traitor fleet above. I see a giant void-ship shearing and burning as it falls through the clouds. I see the vast impacts of orbital bombardment, porcupining slow explosions around the collapsing skirts of Lion's Gate. Its defiance is humbling. Its end is near.\n\nWider still, the outstretched surface of the world, mottled and bruised, shuddering in tectonic agony and seismic convulsion, gashed and lacerated, fall-out plumes rising from the shiver-flash of glowing, irradiated lesions the size of nations. The world is wreathed in smoke and flame, the atmosphere peeling away like flayed skin.\n\nAnd nothing is whole any more. The warp is spilling loose, coruscating into realspace, suppurating the flesh of the planet, corrupting and transmuting all matter it touches. This is end-stage war, the pyrophoric caress of Chaos metastasising the human home world, eating it away, making its own realm where once we ruled.\n\nWider still, the buckled sphere of Terra, rotting in its own skin, bathed in un-light, the black specks of the numberless traitor fleet settling like blowflies on its polluted rind. The orb of once-proud Terra is encircled by a noxious nephelospheric halo, a livid puncture in reality, a raw corona, as my master's son, his beautiful, first-found son, our enemy, immanentises his insane transaction with the four false gods of annihilation, and consigns the world into the distended maw of the warp. The natural laws of the world are undone. This is his configuration of tomorrow, sanctified by the bloody print of his hand.\n\nWhat is my lord trying to show me? I see nothing that I don't already know, or can't imagine. His first-found's domination is utter and absolute. I expect to discover some tiny flaw, some chink or fissure in his attack, something or anything we can use to leverage a counter-strike. But there is none, and I knew before my lord showed me this that none would exist, for Horus Lupercal has proven that while Rogal and Perturabo might be proclaimed the greatest strategists of the age, none can compare to the Warmaster.\n\nThere is nothing. My lord, my master, my King-of-Ages, my friend... you must accept this. There is nothing. You must accept that our fight back, which we perhaps have left too late, must be done the hardest way, one blow, one step, one metre, one strike at a time, a gruelling uphill struggle against a far superior-\n\nWait.\n\nWait.\n\n1:xxxi\n\nRevelation\n\nCan it be? Surely, it cannot. A mistake on my part, a misapprehension of my mindsight. I am old, after all. The sheer weight and wealth of the data that my lord is showing me, the scope of it, the etheric fury... it has confused me for a moment, overwhelmed me, and made me see what I want to see, rather than what actually is.\n\nI look again, my mind pushing at its capacity, amplified by his will, mindsight narrowed like a needle.\n\nThere. There? Surely that can't be true? I refuse to allow myself to hope-\n\nIt is true, Sigillite.\n\nThere it is. A detail so small, so lost in the background storm of system-wide conflagration, that I missed it the first time. I look again to be sure. I check and re-check the veracity of my insight.\n\nWhat I show you is true.\n\nAnd I see that it is undeniable.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, his first-found's death ship, has lowered its shields.\n\nMy mind reels. I blink. I stare up at my lord, incredulous. His hands shiver on the arms of the Throne.\n\n'What does this mean?' I ask.\n\nWhat does it signify? D"}
{"text":"\n\nThere it is. A detail so small, so lost in the background storm of system-wide conflagration, that I missed it the first time. I look again to be sure. I check and re-check the veracity of my insight.\n\nWhat I show you is true.\n\nAnd I see that it is undeniable.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit, his first-found's death ship, has lowered its shields.\n\nMy mind reels. I blink. I stare up at my lord, incredulous. His hands shiver on the arms of the Throne.\n\n'What does this mean?' I ask.\n\nWhat does it signify? Damage? Error? A malfunction? A boastful challenge? A hubristic gambit? A vulgar trap? It doesn't matter. The shields are down.\n\nThe shields are down.\n\nThere is our variable. It does not matter what it represents, though every instinct in me names it a trap. It is what I have been searching for without thought I would ever find it, the one brief hope that could reconfigure all of this. Whatever it is, we will make it what we need it to be.\n\nThe shields are down.\n\nI test it again, to make certain I am not fooling myself. There is no deception. The treasonous heart of the first-found is wide open.\n\nI breathe deeply and slowly. I take one last look, wider still, across the universal madness and cosmic apocalypse, out to the very failing edge of mindsight, and glimpse the reddened whirlpool ruin of the Solar Realm, an open wound in the flank of the Milky Way-\n\nI close my eyes.\n\nI have seen so many of the wars that history has witnessed. I have never seen a war like this.\n\nWe will end it now, by his will alone, or we will die.\n\n1:xxxii\n\nThe fortunate ones\n\nShe's sitting on the steps near the Prefectus station, resting for a moment before setting out. She's peering at the oddly clean tag stapled to her coat. Leeta Tang approaches her, followed by the other gang-guides and their blindfolded, coffled teams.\n\n'Can I stay with you?' she asks. 'Can we all stay?'\n\n'Of course,' says Keeler.\n\n'I want to help you guide the refugees.'\n\nKeeler rises to her feet. She nods. They start to walk, joining the river of refugees shuffling along the Via Aquila. Someone calls her name, but it isn't anybody in the crowd.\n\n'Mam?' Tang asks. 'If we keep faith. If we hold on and actually get there. To some kind of future, I mean. If we manage to get there, how will we remember all of this?'\n\n'As the place where the future started,' says Keeler. 'As the fire in which a decent future was cast. We will remember ourselves as the fortunate ones.'\n\n'And what will we say about it?'\n\n'We'll say, I was there.'\n\nPART TWO\n\nHOW LIKE AN ANGEL IN APPREHENSION,\n\nHOW LIKE A GOD!\n\n2:i\n\nKing of the Hollow Mountain\n\nThey have finally found Vassago the Librarian, after days of searching. When Corswain is told the news, he goes at once.\n\n'How?' he asks.\n\nAt his side, Adophel the Chapter Master seems to shrug. 'Our perimeter patrols located him by chance on a rock shelf outside the Tertiary Portal, your grace,' he says.\n\n'Not how was he found. How was he killed?'\n\n'Skull crushed to pulp. Massive trauma. No defensive wounds. He was either surprised-'\n\n'Who surprises a Librarian, Chapter Master?'\n\nAdophel opens his huge hands, palms up, to acknowledge the faulty logic of his suggestion. Or perhaps to crave forgiveness for his lack of answers.\n\n'Or he knew his killers, your grace,' he says.\n\nCorswain, seneschal of the First Legion, the Hound of Caliban, halts and looks at him. A chill, world-top wind saws down the ancient metal tunnel.\n\n'Knew his killers?' Corswain asks, weighting each word with lead.\n\n'This beacon hill had become a nest of daemons, your grace,' Adophel replies. 'We have purged it and cleaned it out, and we hold it now. But the taint lingers. Things still lurk in recesses and shadows. Daemonkind beguiles, my lord. We are taught this. They wear masks and change faces, according to the particular deceits they seek to weave. Librarian Vassago was committed to our cause. Our best hope, perhaps, of guiding our smiths and restoring function to the mountain. I venture the malign spirits lingering here recognised that, and conspired to stop him. And wore faces he trusted to lure him to his demise.'\n\n'Whose faces?' asks Corswain.\n\n'Mine?' says Adophel. 'Yours? The face of any friend. Does it matter?'\n\nIt doesn't. The loss matters. Vassago was the centrepiece of Corswain's strategy. This place, this hollowed mountain, this 'beacon hill' as Adophel so typically calls it, making everything, even mountains and worlds, less imposing than his own renown, must be brought back to life.\n\nThey come out through the Tertiary Portal into the open air. A waiting phalanx of cowled Dark Angels bow their heads. On the fortified buttresses of rock rising sheer above them, defensive stations have been rebuilt and re-manned to watch over the vale below.\n\nCorswain pauses for a moment. The view is memorable. The Astronomican, 'this beacon hill', is the last, glowering mountain of the world. Where once a continental range stood, the mightiest on Terra's face, only this peak remains, solitary and symbolic. The other mountains were ground down and levelled, through feats of engineering that Corswain can scarcely imagine, to form the vast plateau for the Palace Imperialis, but this was hollowed out and laced with mechanisms of the Emperor's devising. It was fashioned into a psychic beacon, a beacon hill, yes, but one whose light could be seen from distant stars. The beacon light of Terra, the signal of Old Earth, reaching across the trackless territories of the Imperium as a reminder of Imperial order, and a guide-star for any of mankind seeking a homeward path.\n\nIt has been dark for too long.\n\nFacing its greatest hour of treachery and murder, the Imperium is blind.\n\nThe Astronomican was Corswain's primary objective when he undertook his suicidal counter-strike to Terra. Even with his ten thousand warriors, the backbone of his fighting force for the last five years reinforced with much-welcome Calibanite strengths from Zaramund, he could not hope to engage the traitor fleet head-on, or drop directly into the main warzones of the Palace. Enemy numbers are staggering. His contingent would have been shredded in minutes, overwhelmed. To make the best of his resources, Corswain chose instead to run the gauntlet, a sheer act of bravado or madness, and retake the mountain instead, securing a loyalist foothold on the home world outside the Palace.\n\nHe prevailed, though the odds were long and the daemon-war in the mountain abhorrent. Once the beacon hill was secure, many of the First, Adophel among them, petitioned him to push on, with a stronghold at their backs, and drive into the flanks of the besieging traitors in a breaking effort to relieve the Palace.\n\nIt was tempting. The enemy host is vast, and the Lord of Iron's investment of the Palace a superb display of poliorcetic warcraft. He has built a constricting circumvallation around the entire Zone Imperialis, but, arrogantly expecting no counter-action from a field army, he has prepared no contravallation whatsoever to guard his heels. A firm strike, ten thousand Astartes, could perhaps drive a wedge through the traitors' careless spines...\n\nCorswain is no coward, but he rejected the idea. He could see the futility. Ten thousand was not enough to break the siege, even from a secured surface footing. It would take more. Far more.\n\nThat was his decision, as lord commander. It was upheld and endorsed by the Archangel Sanguinius, in a fleeting, jumbled vox-link. Sanguinius told Corswain to hold: hold the mountain, hold the line, light the beacon. So what Corswain does, he does in Sanguinius' name. In his memory, he fears.\n\nFrom the rock platform outside the Tertiary Portal, in the bitter wind, he stares out across the vale and the plains beyond. Even from a distance, the scene is piteous. The golden city that once filled the land before him, a crown on top of the world, a palace that was a city that possessed the dimensions of a nation, is lost in a cloud of fire. The sky is scoured to blackness. Smoke encases the heavens. Dull clots of flamelight, red and infernal, throb within a blanket of cinders and dust a thousand kilometres wide. It is no longer possible to glimpse, even from here, the shining spires of the Emperor's city. They may all, indeed, have tumbled. The vale and the slopes of the mountain are caked white, but it is not snow. It is the fresh fall of ash blown back from the Palace, falling softly, forming drifts and samite swathes across the black rock.\n\nCorswain is not the saviour of Terra.\n\nHe remembers the joy-turned-to-despair of Admiral Su-Kassen and the valiant Halbract when they realised that his force was not the vanguard of the long-awaited relief, the racing front edge of the deliverers, an eager herald of Guilliman and the Lion. He was all he was. The hope was false. He could not tell them that Guilliman or the Lion were en route, or even if they were still alive.\n\nBut they must be. He tells himself they must be. It is an imperative that he cannot bring himself to doubt. His liege-father and noble Guilliman are still alive. They are racing here, closing with every passing second, leading the full and terrible might of the remaining loyal Legions.\n\nThey must be.\n\nFor only they can break this. Only they can turn this tide and crush the infamy of bastard Lupercal and his brother-usurpers. They are mankind's last hope.\n\nTo doubt that is to accept defeat.\n\nHis duty is to prepare the way for them. For there to be even a shred of hope, Corswain has to hold Terra's beacon hill, and make it shine again. He has to pierce the enfolding shroud of darkness that obscures the very location of the Throneworld, and guide salvation in.\n\nI will light the fire so that my father can see and come to me.\n\nNo wonder the daemons conspire to stop him. Vassago's murder won't be their last attempt.\n\n2:ii\n\nMaster of Mankind\n\nThe Word Bearers have assembled for you, thousands of them, lining the approachways to the main bridge levels. They sing your name,"}
{"text":"in has to hold Terra's beacon hill, and make it shine again. He has to pierce the enfolding shroud of darkness that obscures the very location of the Throneworld, and guide salvation in.\n\nI will light the fire so that my father can see and come to me.\n\nNo wonder the daemons conspire to stop him. Vassago's murder won't be their last attempt.\n\n2:ii\n\nMaster of Mankind\n\nThe Word Bearers have assembled for you, thousands of them, lining the approachways to the main bridge levels. They sing your name, yell it, a raw, bawling chorus of homage. You walk through their midst, nodding, accepting the praise, indulging them, almost shaken by the volume of their massed voices.\n\nNone of them dares to look directly at you. None can bear to. You are too glorious for even their post-mortal eyes. As you move through them, as your immense shadow passes over them, they look away determinedly, tears in their eyes, trying not to glimpse you as they chant your name. There is fury in that chant. It's almost manic desperation. It feels as though they are afraid of stopping, or taking breath, or pausing, as though screaming your name is the only thing that's keeping them alive.\n\nMaybe it is. You raise your hand in a modest gesture to acknowledge their adoration, and enter the main bridge.\n\nInside, they are waiting for you, which is only right. The seniors, the commanders, your inner circle. You smile a generous smile as you enter the grand expanse of the bridge, the smile a father bestows upon his extended family, and they bow, just as they should.\n\n'Rise,' you say.\n\nThey rise. They gaze up at you in awe, at the regal, smoke-dark mountain of your towering figure. You loom over them, the stature of a new-forged god, the solemn authority of a dark king.\n\n'You were waiting for me?' you ask, with a wry smile.\n\n'We were, Great Lupercal,' says your equerry.\n\n'Very good, Maloghurst.'\n\nWhat was that? Did he just correct you, under his breath? Did he murmur 'Argonis'? Did he just shoot a nervous look at the senior officers standing nearby?\n\nHe's a fool, but you'll excuse him. Everyone is overexcited. You can feel the tension in the room, like the leaden air before a thunderstorm breaks. The eagerness. The anticipation. This is what they all live for. Victory. Triumph. Conquest. Compliance. This is what the Luna Wolves were bred for. Your sons, not a loser among them. As victory approaches they gather, like wolves indeed, scenting the kill to come, the looming end and the imminent death.\n\n'Let us review, then,' you declare. You move to the great strategium, the projection table upon which you have planned and executed every one of your victories. Such has been the scale of your career, on this warship, with these men, in victory after victory, the table has a patina of use. The auramite edges and control surfaces are almost burnished from the repeated touch of hands, the hololithic plate scuffed and worn from tapping fingertips and demonstrative gestures. It should be replaced, really, or at least fully serviced by the adepts, but you can't bring yourself to instruct it. It is a fine device. It has been your instrument of command down the decades, moulded to your touch, fatigued by your hands, a hard-working tool of warfare and an artefact of your military legacy. It will be in a museum one day. There will be a placard: Upon this tactical device, Horus Lupercal, Master of Mankind, planned out his conquests and built the Imperium.\n\nIt is fitted to you, like a good sword or a favourite bolter. It is a weapon, a weapon wielded by your mind as your hand wields a blade. You would rather cast out an heirloom gladius.\n\nSentimental? Perhaps. You may be excused sentiment at this hour. You are human after all.\n\nSomeone has left tarot cards scattered on the strategium's surface. That's very sloppy. How unlike the command cadre. The Harlequin of discordia, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne reversed, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster and The Lightning Tower, all major arcanoi. The Dark King is askew across The Emperor card. You sweep them onto the floor. You light the table. The Palace appears, a three-dimensional light-form, expressed in micro-detail at Millisept Sigma resolution, a standard broad appraisal that includes climate patterns and rendered atmospherics.\n\nThe smoke bank is so wide and thick, there is virtually nothing to see. Just a blur, a greyness, as though dusty cloaks have been heaped across the plate.\n\n'My sons,' you say. 'Such a pity to behold. Our target site has seen better days.'\n\nYou laugh. Someone else laughs, though it's more of a whisper.\n\nSwift haptic gestures peel the atmopsherics back, erasing layers of cloud. When you finally reveal the Palace beneath, it takes you by surprise.\n\nAn awful thing to see. A dolorous thing. It is heartbreaking. For a moment you suspect that someone, perhaps Ezekyle or Tarik, has loaded a simulation of the surface of some blasted moon or volcanic planetesimal as a joke. Just the sort of prank they'd pull to ease the tension.\n\nBut it's not a moon. It's not a joke. The punctured, cratered, punished relief is the Zone Imperialis Terra. A ruined wasteland the size of a major nation state. The Palace is almost entirely gone.\n\nThe fool, you think. The stupid, blind, unreasonable, arrogant fool. He did this. He made this happen. He brought this hell down upon himself. His pride earned this wrath. So damn him, for he has brought this hell down on millions besides. On billions. They have suffered this because of him. Those innocent multitudes.\n\nIt is almost unbearably sad. But the state of the city is inevitable. You can't be stalled by tragedy. You clear your throat.\n\n'Call up dispositional overview,' you tell your equerry.\n\n'My lord,' says one of the command cadre. 'There are issues we should address-'\n\n'An overview first, I think,' you say.\n\n'My lord Lupercal, the issues are critical. We-'\n\n'Are they, Sejanus? Critical?' you snap. You pause. Emotion has got the better of you for a moment. You find a smile. 'Forgive my abruptness, Hastur,' you say. 'I meant no rebuke. I would like an overview before we scrutinise details.'\n\n'Of course, my lord. But we-'\n\n'Are you going to press this, Captain Sejanus? What, I wonder, do the Mournival think of you questioning a direct instruction?'\n\n'The Mournival, sir? They-'\n\n'Can they not speak for themselves, captain?'\n\n'They are not here, my lord,' says your equerry. He sounds timid. He doesn't want to point out your slip.\n\nOf course, they're not here. Of course. They're on the surface, even now, leading the compliance. Of course. What a stupid mistake to make. Sejanus is only here to-\n\nSejanus is only here to report, and the others-\n\nWhat a very stupid mistake to make in front of them. Correct it. Move on. Show confidence. They're all looking at you, the officers, the tacticians, even the young woman, Oliton. She's there at the back, stylus in hand. Right there between Nero Vipus and Luc Sedirae and the tall things, the tall things that stand by the door and whisper.\n\n'Overview,' you say. 'Now, please.'\n\nYour equerry steps in. He adjusts the display. The tabula topographica shifts to project a tactical breakdown, your armies laid out upon the table.\n\n'Baraxa has Second Company, here,' he tells you, pointing, 'alongside Abaddon and First. They have cut in deep, and approach the limit of the Gilded Walk. Balt and Third Company hold here. Vorus Ikari has advanced Fourth Company rapidly, almost to the Confessional-'\n\n'With typical haste,' you remark. 'Ikari is rash. Too hungry for-'\n\n'Some might say, my lord, but Fifth, under Beruddin, and a unit of the Justaerin led by Ekron Fal have flanked his reckless overstretch here and here, and have actually cut off the Praetorian's southern line.'\n\nThey have. It's rather elegant, a daring but precise extension, the sort of spear-tip tactic you might have devised and drilled them in so that it could be sublimely executed. Perhaps you did. Perhaps Ikari was simply obeying your instruction with that bold run of his. Yes, of course. That's it. Beautiful. Your plan exactly. That couldn't have been accomplished without expert oversight, and who else but you is overseeing this?\n\n'Sycar sweeps the remainder of the Justaerin along this line, in support of Abaddon,' Maloghurst goes on, rotating the image. It's funny, you hadn't noticed before quite how much he resembles that battle-brother from First Company's Storm Eagle cadre. What is his name? The one with the unmarked face? Kinor... Argonis, yes. Argonis. The likeness is uncanny. 'Malabreux, Master of the Catulan Reavers, has broken through here, with Seventeenth Legion support, and is on the brink of taking Predikant Bastion and the Hall of Ushers.'\n\nThen it is all as you ordained. As you laid it out. You hope the Lady Oliton is paying close attention. You hope she is getting this all down, word for word, for this is the very essence of your genius, your potency as a martial savant. You have brought your finest game to the table at this, the most crucial moment of your career.\n\n'And of these here?' you ask. 'In the vanguard between Ezekyle and dear Sycar? Which units are these again?'\n\nYour equerry coughs awkwardly.\n\n'Mal? Which units? Who commands them?'\n\n'I... I do not know their names, my lord,' he says to you.\n\n'How can you not know their names?' you ask. It's preposterous. Thousands of men, tearing into the Sanctum, and their units are unidentified?\n\n'We don't know the names yet,' says Layak.\n\n'Not all of them, lord,' says Sejanus. 'Not yet.'\n\n'Are these not the warriors you summoned to support us, Layak?' you ask. 'Are these not the very ones you let in yourself?'\n\nZardu Layak nods. He smiles. There is blood on his teeth.\n\n'We thought you might tell us their names, lord,' says Sejanus.\n\nYes, of course. They want you to grandstand a little. Show off your mastery with the remembrancer watching. How clever of them to engineer an "}
{"text":"nidentified?\n\n'We don't know the names yet,' says Layak.\n\n'Not all of them, lord,' says Sejanus. 'Not yet.'\n\n'Are these not the warriors you summoned to support us, Layak?' you ask. 'Are these not the very ones you let in yourself?'\n\nZardu Layak nods. He smiles. There is blood on his teeth.\n\n'We thought you might tell us their names, lord,' says Sejanus.\n\nYes, of course. They want you to grandstand a little. Show off your mastery with the remembrancer watching. How clever of them to engineer an opportunity for you to magnify your own legend. You bend down and peer at the display, and you increase the resolution.\n\nYou say, 'As I thought,' as though you were testing them. 'We have Kweethul, and there, his steeds, and here the juggernauts, and here, those that are the letters-out-of-blood, and here the pestigorae and the tzaangorae, and here Scarabus, and here the Drach'nyen host, and here proud Be'lakor, and here the ones that are of the Doombreed, and here Rhug'guari'ihululan, and here N'Kari, and here the Bahk'ghuranhi'aghkami upon their palanquins, and besides them the Tsunoi, and the Heartslayer, and Khar-Har, and carnate Illaitanen, and old father Ku'gath, and Skarbrand and Epidemius, and those of the Masque, and Karanak and wily Suvfaeras, and ancient Tallomin, and that which is Uhlevorix, and iron-willed Ax'senaea, and Abraxes and Ulkair, and weeping Jubiates, and Ushpetkhar, and the storming ruin of Madail, and Ghargatuloth, and J'ian-Lo, and Mephidast, and M'Kar and Collosuth, and here, the one who walks behind us, whose name is Samus, and all of them. All that is and was and ever will be.'\n\nYou hear them echo it, is and was and ever will be. You hear Oliton's stylus scratching at her slate, recording every word.\n\nThe air has turned cold. You can tell how impressed they are. How excited. But also, how scared. This is no common undertaking, and there is no reason to pretend that it is. It is time to change your tone.\n\n'We never wanted this,' you say. 'We never asked for it. Sons and brothers, I know how you feel, for I feel it too. This is the last thing we wanted to happen, and it seems unthinkable that we are doing it. I want you to understand that I know that. If I had thought, during the crusade... in the thirty sweet years of... If I had thought, when my father saved my life on Reillis, if I had thought for one moment...'\n\nYou take a deep breath.\n\n'He is false,' you say, quite plainly. There is a murmur from them, a whisper and a murmur. 'He is false. He is a false god. And he has played us false. He has used us to further his petty dreams. His... his preposterous vision of the future. We are of his blood, but we are not his children. I am not his son. He made us merely to use us, and to use us up. How much of our blood has he spilled? How many of our lives have we given? He has constructed a plan, shared it with no one, and expected us to blindly enact it for him. Well, my sons, my beautiful sons, we are strong and we are loyal, but we are also clever. We have done enough and seen enough to understand the true abomination of his scheme. It will annihilate everything we love and everything we believe in. So it must be stopped. This I told him. This, we all told him. But he did not listen and he did not cease, so he must be made to cease. Though my heart is broken, my loyalty is not. I am loyal to the Throne. I am loyal, unto death, to the Imperium of Mankind. But not to him.'\n\nYou look away, as if to contemplate the grandeur of the bridge, and the helm-serfs and steersman at work below, but in truth it is to conceal the tear in your eye.\n\n'He withheld,' you say. 'Shamelessly. He used us as toys, as playthings, and spent us as though our blood was nothing. But more than that. When we beheld, by accident, by happenstance, the truth of all that is, he denied it to us. He denied us the power and the magnitude, the shining glory of Aeternity, claiming it was not for us, and that we were too small and weak to own it or use it. And worse, as it turns out, he had kept it from us all along. Forever. He has kept the truth of what we might be from us, in case, I think, we came to eclipse his status. He wanted it for himself, all of it. Well, I am not weak. We are not weak. And he is not the father I once loved.'\n\nYou look to the officers, to Hastur and Luc and Zardu.\n\n'Assist me with this,' you say. You hold out the Power Talon. 'Detach it.'\n\nThey come forward, and, between them, unclamp the seals and disconnect the power and munition feeds. Hastur slides it off your right hand. You take it from him and drop it onto the strategium table. The image of the burning Palace shivers, disrupted, and the glass projection plate cracks. The Talon almost covers the entire tabletop. With your freed right hand, you unclasp the gauntlet of your left hand. You drop that on the table too.\n\nYou show them the worn gold ring you wear on the smallest finger of your left hand.\n\n'He gave me this,' you say. 'Do you see it? The motif? It was wrought the year before he was born. It was his gift to me, as Warmaster. He said that I had become his centaur, half-man, half-army, that where I rode, the Legions would ride with me. Well, I ride here now, and he will meet his dreadful Sagittary at last. You are my sons. Unlike him, I will not waste you. I will not squander you and send you to death without a passing thought just to serve my whim. My love for you, and my pledge to you, is this - that we will go into this together, and stand together, and triumph together, and free the Throne and the Imperium of Man from this tyrant, together. And after, we will share the truth and wonder of immateria infinitum, for it is in us already, and fills our hearts, and raises our spirits, and whispers blessings in our ears, and it is the strength we need to face him, and compel him, and topple his deceit.'\n\nYou look at them.\n\n'And when we are done, after this hour, you will live in glory, and you will be able to say, \"I was there, the day Horus slew the Emperor.\" That is my pledge.'\n\n2:iii\n\nThe pride of Caliban\n\nThe Librarian's body, wrapped in a groundsheet, is being carried in off the false snows by gun-serfs. The killers left his body where they hoped it might not be discovered, broken on the crags outside the fastness, in among the piles of choir-dead Corswain's men have raked from the stalls of the Astronomican. Corswain sees the warriors escorting it up the winding track. Brothers Tanderion, Cartheus, Asradael and Zahariel. Like Vassago, Calibanite veterans all.\n\n'I sent for them,' Adophel tells him. 'I thought they should know.'\n\nCorswain nods. The Calibanite reinforcements provided by Lord Luther at Zaramund, with the promise of twenty thousand more to follow, bother Corswain still. He needed the men, dearly, but his liege-father's strict orders have stood for a long time: a sword does not unsheathe itself. Luther had been commanded to remain on Caliban to raise and train new recruits, not to deploy in the field on missions of his own devising. His presence on Zaramund had been in defiance of the Lion's command, and to accept men from him was to countenance that defiance.\n\nBut the Lion is not here. He has been gone for years, lost in whatever crusading quest he has seen fit to undertake. Corswain is his seneschal, in all respects the acting master of over half the First Legion, an avenging son, and his father's proxy. It was his decision to make, and the galaxy has changed since he last saw his father. The strength of the enemy, once unimaginable, has now been miserably revealed. Corswain needed warriors, and the Calibanites were warriors, ready and fresh.\n\nHe hopes his liege-father will one day censure him for his decision to waive Luther's disobedience, because, for that to happen, his father will need to be alive. Corswain longs to hear his voice again, even if it has to be fierce with rebuke.\n\nVassago had been proof positive of Corswain's wisdom in accepting Luther's men. A gifted warp-seer, Librarian Vassago had been an essential part of their conquest at the Hollow Mountain. Without him, they could not have bested the Neverborn thing they had found within. Vassago had become a true and trusted friend, and he had thrown himself into the arcane labour of restoring the Astronomican's function. It was a deed quite beyond the martial skill set of a son like Corswain.\n\nHe descends the track to meet them.\n\n'The loss will be mourned,' he says. 'Later, when there is time.'\n\n'You still believe in a later, then, your grace?' asks Cartheus.\n\n'I have to,' Corswain says. 'And my brother Vassago did.'\n\nThe Calibanites seem to bridle at the word.\n\n'We are together in this,' says Corswain.\n\n'Of course,' says Tanderion.\n\n'Vassago's work had barely begun,' says Corswain. 'But you were close to him, all of you. I look to you to help complete what he cannot.'\n\n'You look to us for counsel?' Cartheus asks.\n\n'I do. And for technique.'\n\n'He was the Librarian,' says Asradael, glancing back at the winding sheet.\n\n'In an official sense,' says Corswain. They look surprised. Corswain looks at Zahariel El'Zurias. 'Brother, I know you too were once of the Librarius, trained in its ways.'\n\n'Before the Emperor's Edict,' replies Zahariel.\n\n'An edict now overturned,' says Corswain. 'The Lion himself ruled on this. I ask you, brother, to assume the role.'\n\n'You ask a great deal, your grace,' says Zahariel. 'I have not used those gifts in a long time. I fear they are weak from neglect...' He pauses. 'But perhaps, as a concerted effort...' Zahariel looks at the other three. 'All four of us were once of the Librarius, returned to the common ranks after Nikaea. With your permission, my lord...'\n\n'I grant it so,' says Corswain. 'For all of you. I need your lore and craft.'\n\nThey are startled. The Edict has stood for a long time. Vassago had been a rare example of its sanctioned and tentative revocation within the First. For Corswain, the Lion's seneschal, to reinstate them all, "}
{"text":"...' He pauses. 'But perhaps, as a concerted effort...' Zahariel looks at the other three. 'All four of us were once of the Librarius, returned to the common ranks after Nikaea. With your permission, my lord...'\n\n'I grant it so,' says Corswain. 'For all of you. I need your lore and craft.'\n\nThey are startled. The Edict has stood for a long time. Vassago had been a rare example of its sanctioned and tentative revocation within the First. For Corswain, the Lion's seneschal, to reinstate them all, and bid them draw upon their once-forbidden talents is an act of heartbreaking fraternity.\n\nThat he does it, without hesitation or formality, there on the cold mountainside, shows them the extremity of the threat they face.\n\n'You trust, your grace, perhaps too much in our potential,' Tanderion says. 'A blade grows rusty and dull without use, and it has been a long time since we even dared-'\n\n'I know,' says Corswain. 'But you, brothers, know more of this art and artifice than I.'\n\n'We know barely-' Cartheus begins.\n\n'But we will do whatever we can,' says Zahariel. 'Whatever we know, whatever old ways we remember from observation of beloved Vassago, we will employ as you command. We serve you, your grace. And I am honoured to see that you value us, no matter how o'erconfident that faith is.'\n\nCorswain nods. He smiles. Adophel is calling to him.\n\n'Carry him up,' he tells them.\n\n2:iv\n\nThe Emperor Must Die\n\nYou let your words hang in the air. You pause for effect. You can see that your declaration has made a startling impact on them. Their eyes are bright. Their hearts are strong. Some wipe away tears with hands that are almost trembling. Even the whispering has stopped. Your rallying speeches to your men have always been the keenest weapons on your belt. You needed to set them straight, and you have done so. There will be no hesitation now.\n\n'Let us finish what we have begun,' you say. You turn. 'Now, someone had an issue to raise. A question, when I came in. Does it still stand?'\n\nThey glance at each other.\n\n'The shields, my lord...' says your equerry.\n\n'Are down,' you say.\n\n'My lord?'\n\n'On my command, the voids have been lowered,' you say.\n\n'When did you give that command?' one of them asks.\n\n'When I chose to give it,' you snap. 'It was my decision as Warmaster, and I don't believe you get to question that.'\n\n'My lord,' your equerry says, exhibiting some agitation, 'elements of the Fifth have retaken the port of Lion's Gate from your brother Mortarion. Indeed, we fear-'\n\n'The White Scars should be commended for their tenacity,' you remark with a nod that says you are still man enough to acknowledge the courage of your foe. 'What of it?'\n\n'The port's guns are operational,' says Falkus Kibre. 'They are firing upon our fleet elements. Without shields, we are vulnerable-'\n\n'I'll tell you what makes us vulnerable,' you bark, hard enough to make the Widowmaker flinch. 'I have seen the intelligence reports. The intercepts.'\n\n'My lord, Great Lupercal,' says your equerry, 'what reports are you speaking of?'\n\nYou pick up the data-slate from a nearby console, open the files, and hold it up.\n\n'Transmissions,' you say. 'Intercepted transmissions. From Roboute and the Lion.'\n\nThey look at you in horror. They had no idea. You are forced, once again, to remind yourself how much more capable than them you are. Your perceptions, your insights, your understanding. You have always excelled, and now your powers are magnified by the gifts invested in you. The data on the slate is near gibberish. None of them could make sense of it, or discern the danger it represents. Only you could read the truth.\n\n'Our enemy's reinforcement is rushing down on us, headlong,' you say, projecting the slate's data onto the repeater screens around the bridge so they can all view it. 'They are, perhaps, three days away. I'll stake my life it's not more than five. Roboute and the Lion, with their Legions. With their vengeance fleets. With their indignation and their pathetic notions of loyalty. That's what makes us vulnerable, my sons.'\n\nYou set the tablet down and look at them.\n\n'We will destroy them when they arrive,' you state. 'We will break them as we broke the Legions of the Praetorian and the Khagan and the Brightest One. But their intervention will make our task more difficult. An unnecessary impediment. Only a fool fights on two fronts unless he has to. Isn't that right, Lev?'\n\nBeside the table, something nods.\n\n'Indeed so. Then it is my judgment that the Throne must be empty when they arrive. We finish this, and then we turn to face them. One battle followed by another, not two at once. This is elementary combat doctrine, my sons. Why are you struggling with it? We bring Terra to compliance before they arrive. Indeed, that will break them. How could it not? Can you imagine their faces, Guilliman and the Lion, when they realise they have come too late? That the lies they were racing to preserve are all undone? There will be no fight. They are not that stupid. They will surrender, and kneel before us, and beg us to forgive them. Or they will flee in despair. Either way, one victory resolves the other.'\n\n'But how does lowering our shields bring about a victory?' Maloghurst asks.\n\nThat does it, really. You can't be blamed, in truth. Has the momentous nature of the hour rendered them stupid? Are they deliberately testing your patience? Well, test no more.\n\nYou slap him, a backhand across the face. The force of the blow hurls your insolent equerry across the bridge and into the guard rails, which bend under the impact. He collapses to the deck, as twisted as ever. There is blood. Serves him right.\n\n'The Emperor must die,' you tell them all. 'He is the only thing that matters. He has hidden this whole time behind his walls and his gates, behind his armies and his engines. He has cowered from me. He has sent his sons, our brothers, to fight for him, to throw away their lives in a futile effort to stop us. And every one of those lives I have mourned, and regretted having to take, because it should have been his. He hopes, prays, that he can remain hidden until his wayward sons arrive. So we must tempt him out. We must entice him. We must make him think he has some fleeting chance to win this and retain some dignity in the eyes of his sons. He wants me. Me. I won't go to him and play the game his way. I will lure him out. Let him have his try, for I am more than ready.'\n\n'So... it is a ploy? A trap?' asks Sejanus.\n\n'It will seem a mistake, or a malfunction,' you say. You smile. You show them reassurance. 'It is the flaw he has been looking for and waiting for and praying for. He will not be able to resist. He will think it a tactical masterstroke that will take me unawares. Our enemies gather for a final push, but the Emperor must die first.'\n\nThere is silence.\n\n'No more questions?' you ask. 'Good. Go. Prepare. Prepare to greet a boarding action. Tell the First Captain to finish his work, and sack the Palace. Burn it all. Kill for the living and kill for the dead. Leave nothing but a heap of ash and stone, and a throne for me to sit on.'\n\nYou see them resolved. Good. Some seem eager. This is grim work, but it will soon be over. They are relieved you are taking on the main burden yourself. The rest is just operational necessity.\n\nYou wonder if they should refinish their plate in black for this final stage, to signify respect for the enemy fallen. You think it would be an appropriate mark of honour if they dressed their gear in mourning.\n\nBut they already have.\n\n2:v\n\nA broken sword\n\nAs Vassago's pall-bearers wind up the track towards the Portal, Corswain joins Adophel on an outcrop of rock. The drop beneath is sheer, a natural pass that was left unaltered by geo-engineering because it was well suited for defence. Ash snow billows around them, and settles on the dead below, the jumbled corpses of the astrotelepathic choir that once sang in the mountain. Their bodies have been prised from the mangled chantry-tiers of the Grand Chamber, and cast aside without ceremony. They are tumbled across the slopes, like the scree and wreckage of some human avalanche.\n\nCorswain sees the look on Adophel's face.\n\n'You heard?' he asks.\n\n'It is my duty to hear and know,' says Adophel.\n\n'And advise?'\n\n'Why else would I need to hear and know?'\n\n'So advise me, Chapter Master. Am I slipping the leashes too much on the warp-seers?'\n\n'Far too much,' says Adophel. 'Their employment is governed by the most strict-'\n\n'I know, old friend, but-'\n\nAdophel raises a hand gently to halt Corswain's reply. 'I had not yet reached my advice, your grace,' he says. 'That was your request, was it not?'\n\nCorswain nods.\n\n'You place too much trust in them,' says the Chapter Master softly, 'or perhaps, more correctly, too much hope. Part of me wishes, against decency, that they have more of the seer-craft in them than is seemly, and will startle us by performing the deed you desire. The other part... well, it longs to be confounded. It hopes they will fail, and prove our suspicions of all immaterial dabblers false and defamatory. But what matters now is... well, all things, a greater contest... perhaps the greatest of all. There is a beast to hunt and slay, the most infamous of all, and to stand a chance, we must be pragmatic. At the door of death, we must fight by any means, or there will be no First to have integrity. In Aldurukh, in ancient days, there was a proverb. \"A broken sword is better than none at all.\" Those four Caliban-born sons may be our broken sword. Not the most sporting or gallant weapon, but all that we have to hand. So, there is my advice.'\n\n'And it accords with my instinct,' Corswain replies. 'But... you will watch them?'\n\n'Hell's blood, of course. Like a hawk. Which is why I hear and know. And one hint of baneful idolatry, I will snap their spines myself.'\n\n'And mine for permitting it?'\n\nAdophel turns his craggy face. He sees Corswain's rueful smile. 'In a heartbeat,' he says.\n\n'Good,' s"}
{"text":" four Caliban-born sons may be our broken sword. Not the most sporting or gallant weapon, but all that we have to hand. So, there is my advice.'\n\n'And it accords with my instinct,' Corswain replies. 'But... you will watch them?'\n\n'Hell's blood, of course. Like a hawk. Which is why I hear and know. And one hint of baneful idolatry, I will snap their spines myself.'\n\n'And mine for permitting it?'\n\nAdophel turns his craggy face. He sees Corswain's rueful smile. 'In a heartbeat,' he says.\n\n'Good,' says Corswain. 'If all is lost, then the honour of our Legion will pass from this world unblemished.'\n\n'I think we will all be cleansed by valour 'fore then,' says Adophel. He unclamps the sensorium from his left vambrace and hands it to the seneschal. Corswain studies the display. The data it presents is incomplete, and scabbed with interference. But enough is comprehensible.\n\n'An army?'\n\nAdophel nods. 'An army, of considerable magnitude. It is, if we can trust the read, three days out at least. But it is advancing rapidly, and without doubt moving towards us. We are the only possible target.'\n\n'A traitor army?'\n\n'Yes. They issue no code signal or cipher, but what else could it be? A formation drawn off from the siege force to prosecute us. There is chatter too, on the vox. I have teased it out and isolated it. Heathen bile, incomprehensible. But a voice we know.'\n\n'It's him?'\n\n'I'd wager my life it's him.'\n\n'Then I command you make us ready for combat, Chapter Master,' says Corswain.\n\n2:vi\n\nThe last gathering\n\nThe first of the champions are about to arrive.\n\nI sit upon the throne, facing the Silver Door, and wait for them.\n\nNot the throne, of course. My throne. It is but a poor, high-backed wooden chair, lacquered red, and marked with certain sigils of my devising. It is kept in a side chamber off the main nave, and brought out for my use when I am required to enact the formal duties of Regent. I have it placed with its back to my silent lord and the great dais, so that it appears that the sun is rising behind me.\n\nThe intimidating proconsuls, Uzkarel and Caecaltus, have brought it hence for me today, and set it carefully in its spot. Either one of them could carry it on the crook of a single finger, but they insist on bearing it between them, in all solemnity, as though it was an artefact of veneration.\n\nIt is not. It is simply somewhere for me to sit, for I am old and almost always tired. Chairs, thrones, dungeons, rooms, men, gods. Words are strange and imprecise, and unintended significances too easily applied. I have always found symbols far more fluent and explicit when it comes to expressing sophisticated meaning.\n\nI am old. But I am not tired now. I am fizzing with expectation. I stare at the Silver Door, so far away from me, as though staring at it will make it open faster. I tap my staff - tick! tick! tick! - against the tiled floor.\n\nCome now! Come now! The clocks run out! Let us get this matter underway!\n\nAn invisible hand rests gently on top of mine to dissuade me from fidgeting with the stick.\n\nI stop. I smile to myself ruefully.\n\n'Yes,' I murmur, 'I am impatient, my lord. Forgive me.'\n\nHe does.\n\n'Nervous, perhaps,' I reply. 'Preparing myself.'\n\nHe whispers.\n\n'No,' I assure him. 'No second thoughts. I have not changed my mind.'\n\nHe wonders.\n\n'No, old friend,' I say, 'I fully understand what you are going to ask of me.'\n\nCrowds are starting to gather in this place they call the Throne Room, and in the pavilions and chambers adjoining it. I have beckoned to us all those we will need to support this undertaking: senior lords, war courtiers, high functionaries, intelligencers, artificers. A mere three or four thousand people, the necessary logistical backbone, technical and bureaucratic. I sent my thought-summons, little sigils of compressed meaning and instruction, flashing out like shooting stars through the hierarchy of the Sanctum, hand-picking the appropriate personnel. They enter, in small groups, wide-eyed and hushed, through the side doors and ante-ports around the edges of the nave, and congregate in huddles. I can smell their anxiety, their awe, their dread. There is palpable anticipation, an excitement that I share with them, and have not felt since-\n\nThat I have not felt, ever. This surpasses the Declaration of Unification, the Call to Crusade, even the Great Triumph. I have, I suppose, grown too used to the monuments and punctuations of history. But this, I cannot deny it, has a suspension, as if everyone, and everything, and everywhere, has turned to look.\n\nAt what we do now. What he does now.\n\nThey gather, meek and quiet, around the Silver Door at the south end of the nave, along the lustrous floor of outer aisles, and they crowd the triforium galleries above. The choirs are singing only the low plainsong needed to maintain psychomantic equilibrium. No one dares approach, nor should they. From where they stand, cowed by the scope of this impossible room, all they see is a remote figure on a faraway golden seat, as still and silent as it has ever been. Beneath that outward stillness, my lord does a thousand things every second, a thousand things that only one or two of them at most could even begin to comprehend.\n\nHe stokes the wards that guard the last of the Palace. He radiates controlled burns of telaethesic energy that weaken and shrivel the Neverborn instantiating closest to our fastness. He watches and moderates the flow of the endwar, at both micro and macro levels. He moves through the minds of individual warriors as they crunch and gasp and stab, observing the flow of combat at a granular level; and simultaneously, he watches from above, like one of poor Jaghatai's finest hawks, hovering on an updraught, beholding, below him, entire regiments and armies as they twist and pivot and brawl. He shaves and shapes the etheric turmoil of the webway, guiding and conducting immaterial force via the Throne's ancient machineries, so that the doomsday pressure can be held at bay. And he tries, as best he can, to soothe the minds of a billion terrified human souls as they flee and panic and scramble for some vestige of safety.\n\nI fear I will be able to manage but a fraction of those things.\n\nThe expectant tension increases and becomes razor-sharp as the Silver Door opens and the Custodes Pylorus admit the train of armourers. In they troop, in their imbricated iron-and-brass garb, ceremonial versions of the work armour they wear in the smithies. Every man and woman of them is deaf, the occupational hazard of work in the constant din of the hammering rooms. They haul and push the burnished carts on which my lord's wargear lies, brought from the sealed chambers of the House of Weapons.\n\nA tight, hard hush falls. He has not spoken, but his intent is plain.\n\nI rise from my seat. The first two champions are here.\n\n2:vii\n\nAdmission\n\n'Brother,' Sanguinius whispers, an aside. 'Look.'\n\nRogal Dorn and Sanguinius step through the Silver Door together, blades drawn and centred to their brows in respect and fealty. They enter the eerie, infinite glare of the Throne Room. Dorn is flanked by senior Huscarls, and the Angel by solemn Sanguinary Guards. The golden Sentinels at either side of the great door respectfully drop their chins as one. The growing crowd of worthies parts in deference at the sight of the primarchs to make a path.\n\nDorn sees what has drawn his beloved brother's attention.\n\nThe high company of the Imperial Armoury has entered ahead of them, and their procession is beginning its slow, dignified advance along the six kilometres of the nave.\n\n'Then it is upon us,' says Rogal Dorn, his voice barely audible. Neither he nor Sanguinius have ever become used to this chamber, no matter the number of times they have come here. It triggers vertigo, acrophobia, agoraphobia and kenophobia. Despite the numinous and pervasive light, it inspires a fear of darkness too. It is the only place in creation where such feelings manifest for them. The endless space seems to whisper to them of their mortality, as though every stone and tile and column is intent on reminding them of their insignificance.\n\nBut that's not what Dorn feels today. His voice, and heart, are stilled by the sight of his father's weapons, brought through in honour.\n\nThe gathering crowd around them stirs, both fearful and elated. Dorn glances at Sanguinius. There is joy and sadness in both of them. Joy, sadness, and infinite fatigue. This is what they had hoped for and also what they have dreaded. Is the drawing-in of the great armours a sign they have failed in their duties, requiring their father to finish what they could not? Or is it a sign of their success, that they have held the line, beyond all expectation, long enough for this moment to become possible?\n\nSimply that it is happening is enough.\n\nThey look to the Sentinels. 'You are admitted, lords,' says one.\n\nThe brothers sheathe their blades.\n\n'Are we instructed to approach?' asks Dorn.\n\n'At once.'\n\nDorn turns, but Sanguinius catches his arm and stops him. For a second, they stand shoulder to shoulder, eye to eye.\n\n'You've performed the most extraordinary feat,' Sanguinius says unexpectedly. 'Please remember that.'\n\nDorn is taken aback by the frankness of the comment, and the innocent sincerity with which it is expressed. His startled half-smile wavers with imprisoned emotion, a flash of light at the high slit-window of an otherwise impregnable keep.\n\n'A mere... fraction of your deeds, brother,' he replies awkwardly. 'You closed the Gate. You locked-'\n\nSanguinius shakes his head. 'I was a warrior, Rogal. Just a warrior. You were the one who mattered.'\n\nHe embraces the Praetorian, the spontaneous impulse of a child. As with his guileless comment, the embrace is unexpected and unselfconscious, a rare display of emotion, especially in such a gathering. For a moment, Dorn freezes, then he completes the embrace. When they step back, a single teardrop glints on the Brightest One's pauldron wher"}
{"text":" replies awkwardly. 'You closed the Gate. You locked-'\n\nSanguinius shakes his head. 'I was a warrior, Rogal. Just a warrior. You were the one who mattered.'\n\nHe embraces the Praetorian, the spontaneous impulse of a child. As with his guileless comment, the embrace is unexpected and unselfconscious, a rare display of emotion, especially in such a gathering. For a moment, Dorn freezes, then he completes the embrace. When they step back, a single teardrop glints on the Brightest One's pauldron where the Praetorian rested his head, and a single drop of blood gleams on the Praetorian's backplate where Sanguinius pressed his hand.\n\n'Not yet.'\n\nThey both look aside. The crowd has parted again. Constantin Valdor has entered, his spear across his shoulder. The Custodes Pylorus do not drop their chins: they kneel, for they are his.\n\n'Not yet,' he repeats, a growl. 'Your plaudits and self-congratulation.'\n\n'You are owed much yourself, Constantin,' says Sanguinius.\n\nValdor shrugs. His armour is pitted and filthy. He eyes them both.\n\n'If any is owed and any necessary,' says Valdor, 'then it can wait until the outcome is settled.'\n\n'No,' says Sanguinius. 'Let's imagine it can't. None of us may live to see that outcome, so I'll make damn sure I say it, while I still can, and you can both listen. You've both excelled, and you're both owed, and I am proud to call you brothers.'\n\n'Brothers, now?' sneers Valdor. 'Brothers, is it?'\n\n'In every way that matters, Constantin,' says Sanguinius. He sighs. 'I meant no slight by it, captain-general. But now I see that-'\n\n'Stop,' says Valdor. He sniffs, and his brows furrow. 'I recognise the spirit of your words, Ninth son,' he says grudgingly. 'And... and if this is our only moment, as you suggest, then... then I tell you I have nothing but honour in my heart for you both.'\n\nHis eyes narrow as he looks at Sanguinius.\n\n'But no embrace is necessary,' he adds. The remark is intended lightly, and the tension slackens. But Dorn can see how wracked with unspoken, perhaps unspeakable pain Valdor has become since they were last face to face, as though the captain-general has seen and done too much. It hurts to behold that in a being of such legendary fortitude. Dorn looks away, at the receding procession.\n\n'Shall we fall in behind?' he suggests.\n\n'Yes,' says Valdor. 'You two should. His will is known to me already. I will follow as soon as I have issued my last instructions.'\n\nHe turns aside. Attending him are two giants of the Custodian order whose plate is so coated with soot it seems almost black. The grim Wardens of the Dark Cells are a rare sight even in the Throne Room. With them, Dorn sees, is Kaeria Casryn and seven others of the Silent Sisterhood. They may have been there all along, and their null states only just registered by his senses.\n\nValdor begins to instruct them, his voice low. Sanguinius and Dorn turn and follow the armourers in, side by side.\n\n'He's going to fight,' murmurs Sanguinius as they advance.\n\n'I think he is,' Dorn replies.\n\n'Should we weep or rejoice?' asks Sanguinius.\n\n'I think it is just cause for both,' his brother says.\n\n2:viii\n\nThe Order in the dark\n\nIn the mountain, the wind sings through odd angles. It has always been a sacred space. In the oldest of all times, when men were mere figures with spears in the great landscape, tracking ibex and deer through the foothills, the mountain whispered, and some men put down their spears and left their game trails, and ascended, against all common sense, to penetrate the darkness of its worming caves and crystal-threaded tunnels. They were the shamans, and to them the mountain granted the first insights of otherness. Their rituals were ancient before the Emperor was born, and the mountain is why the Palace was raised in this high, remote place.\n\nAs with all the rest of Terra, the Emperor refashioned the mountain to suit his needs. Tunnels of steel and ceramite replaced the ancient cave systems, and heat-bored shafts replaced connate flues and chimneys. Cavities of intricate and exact geometric design were cut inside the rock surrounding the Great Chamber, in whose gleaming, spherical space was raised the silver and auramite chancel tiers of the astropaths. Great machineries of secret design were set deep in the rock range, their inlaid conduits aligned to enhance and amplify the natural wonder of the resonating quartz and chyrosite. The mountain's natural sonority was harnessed by rational science, and industrialised by etheric technology, and its eternal whispers were weaponised into a blinding scream.\n\nYoked to the service of the youthful Imperium, the mountain forgot all of its old names, some already half-lost or cancelled into myth, and became the Astronomican. It became the Light of All Worlds, the inescapable radiance of mankind's supremacy, and the visible expression of the Emperor's guidance.\n\nIt mutters to itself, still.\n\nEven now the light is out, the choirs butchered, and the precious apparatus broken and defaced, it mutters still.\n\nThe brethren-leaders of the Caliban formation leave Vassago's body in an undercroft, in the care of bedesman serfs, and withdraw to an amplifier sub-vault deep beneath the Great Chamber where they can be alone. The vault, heat-finished and squared off, is nevertheless a remnant of the original caverns. It smells of cold, and its walls glimmer with the mineral traces of quartz and lustrous anthospar. There is no echo, none at all, despite the emptiness. As they speak, sparks of light, cinnabar and violet, dart across the crystal veins, as though triggered by certain words.\n\n'I do not understand you,' says Cartheus. 'We silenced Vassago because he pledged to Corswain's side, yet now you do the same?'\n\n'I do,' says Zahariel. 'And so must you, without demur.'\n\n'If we are to go along with him,' snaps Cartheus, 'why kill Vassago? His death becomes meaningless.'\n\n'His death had meaning for him,' Zahariel replies. 'It showed him he had gone too far. He had spoken too openly. It showed him we Mystai will not tolerate those who break our confidences. I said what I said to Corswain to protect the rest of us.'\n\n'Protect how?' asks Tanderion.\n\nZahariel, a noted warrior long before he came to Corswain's side, stares at the three of them. He can feel their stubborn disapproval. 'We can't hide forever,' he says. 'Vassago knew that. He had become too enamoured of Corswain. Considered him a brother. I am certain he was close to unburdening himself and telling Corswain of the Order. Of what the Order represents. For that alone, he died. The Mystai tradition must guard itself completely. And I think the sight of what we found here, the daemon that had made this place its nest, troubled him greatly. I believe it made him doubt that immaterial powers can ever be subdued to our will. Such was his trust in Corswain, Vassago was close to speaking out.'\n\nHe turns and stares at the dim rock wall, where once men limned dye-marks with their hands to design the future.\n\n'Corswain is a fine leader,' he mutters, almost to himself. 'That cannot be denied. I admire him. I see why Vassago softened in his bearing towards him. If any can lead us out of this, it is Corswain, for we are in this now, my brothers, to the hilt. We have come to Terra, into the mouth of hell, and our side has been chosen for us. If we are to live, and the Order to continue, we must commit.'\n\n'Has our side been chosen?' Asradael asks.\n\nZahariel seizes him by the throat and squeezes. Asradael sinks slowly to his knees. The other two look on, aghast.\n\n'You saw what was here, brother,' Zahariel hisses. 'You saw what Vassago saw. Have you no wits? It was a thing of Chaos, raw and terrible. I have no doubt its ilk has made slaves of all the so-called traitors, aye, even the dread Lupercal. Did you somehow mistake it for the Spirit of Caliban to which we vow fealty?'\n\n'No-' Asradael gasps.\n\n'No, indeed. The spirit that guides us is a pure thing of the immaterial realm, the circle-serpent from which flows the wisdom of the Mystai. We are sons of Caliban, sons of Luther. We will know no master, not any who command from the gilded Throne of Terra. Not Lupercal. Not the Emperor. That is our side in this.'\n\n'Let him be,' says Tanderion.\n\n'Yes, fine words, brother,' says Cartheus. 'But in practice, as worthless as dung. This is wartime, and a side must be chosen.'\n\nZahariel releases his grip, and Asradael rocks forward, gasping.\n\n'Of course it must,' says Zahariel, staring at Cartheus. 'Do you believe you have a choice? Would you side with the others against Corswain? Would you side with the Emperor's Children and the World Eaters and the insane Sons of Horus? Our side is chosen for us, and it was chosen from the moment we set forth under Corswain's banner. We fight for ourselves, not for traitor or loyalist cause, but for Caliban. And that means casting our lot in with the side that will serve us best. Brothers, the loyal alignment must win this war, or all is lost, so we must help them. Vassago was on the brink of saying too much, so we took his words away. But we must complete Vassago's work. Make this beacon shine. Win this war. Then our destiny will be ours to shape again.'\n\n'And when all is done?' asks Cartheus.\n\n'Consider the gains we could make,' Zahariel says to Cartheus. 'If Corswain emerges victorious from this bloodshed, and his victory is achieved with our aid, we will have him in certitude. He will value us, and honour us.'\n\n'And we can turn him to our advantage?' asks Tanderion. He grins at the notion, a wolf scenting prey.\n\n'I think so,' says Zahariel. Spark-lights flicker in the rock wall, mimicking his cadence. 'Turn him, or use him. If the Lion is dead, Corswain will be lord of the First when this is over, and we will have his ear. If the Lion lives, then we will have influence over his successor. The brute Lion's been gone too long. The First looks to Corswain, for he has been steadfast and present. The Lion would find he has few fr"}
{"text":" our advantage?' asks Tanderion. He grins at the notion, a wolf scenting prey.\n\n'I think so,' says Zahariel. Spark-lights flicker in the rock wall, mimicking his cadence. 'Turn him, or use him. If the Lion is dead, Corswain will be lord of the First when this is over, and we will have his ear. If the Lion lives, then we will have influence over his successor. The brute Lion's been gone too long. The First looks to Corswain, for he has been steadfast and present. The Lion would find he has few friends here, and none on Caliban. So we will serve Lord Seneschal Corswain. To the death, if necessary. We will become invaluable allies that he can never renounce. Brothers, has he not already remade us Librarians, so we may practise openly?'\n\nThey nod.\n\n'Then we will build on that and cement that trust. Suitably vizarded to protect its identity, the Order will stand forward and prove its worth to him.'\n\nHe pauses, and removes something from the satchel under his robe.\n\n'You'd... go that far?' asks Cartheus, amazed.\n\n'Yes, brother. Corswain must understand the honour he is receiving. We must impress him, by our deeds and by our appearance. Though not of the Order, he is of Caliban after all. He must be made to feel the weight of tradition and the old line upon him, and marvel that he can be worthy of such prestige. When the time comes, I will wear the face I wore when we came to Vassago. For him, that face was a punishment. For Corswain, it will be an accolade.'\n\n'You would dare?' Asradael growls, rising back to his feet.\n\n'I dare indeed,' says Zahariel, 'with the blessing and permission of Lord Luther. A face is a face, and a mask is a mask, and the meanings and significances are ours to employ. Lord Seneschal Corswain will be served by four loyal Librarians. And by something else.'\n\nHe can tell they all have their doubts, but then, they appreciate so much less than him. Though Mystai, they have not yet ascended to his level of enlightenment. He reads their misgivings, and gently steers them with a deft psionic touch. His power is low and silent, but inexorably erosive, like a glacier or a mature river. It firmly alters the course of the other minds it touches. He intends to work on Corswain in the same way. Bring those who are reluctant round to the right way of thinking, without them ever realising they have been subject to persuasion.\n\nOne by one, they nod in agreement, even Asradael. Zahariel offers them his hand.\n\n'There has never been a war like this, brothers,' says Zahariel. 'So there has never been a moment like this. The Order can turn this disaster to its great advantage.'\n\n'The gramyries of Ouroboros will instruct us in the repair of these devices,' says Cartheus, almost eager suddenly. 'The lore of the Triumvirate Engines can be applied, if we are careful and circumspect.'\n\n'That was Vassago's plan,' says Zahariel. 'You have that lore by rote?'\n\n'Since boyhood,' Cartheus replies, for they had all been tutored by the Mystai teachers, and each had committed certain texts to memory.\n\n'The Bestiaries of the Great Hunt will serve us too,' says Tanderion, 'and I hold those by recollection. Each verse, each engram. Through them we can channel etheric force.'\n\nZahariel nods. 'Then we are agreed. Are we not, brother?'\n\nAsradael glares, then joins his hands with the others. Sparks flash around the rock seams of the walls like angry fireflies.\n\n'We are,' Asradael says. 'In my nonage, I was charged to learn the Chanson of Mamenezy. I can recite it without flaw. Its charms and bindings will reinforce the engrams of the Bestiaries.'\n\n'Then we must to work,' says Zahariel. 'But we must work swiftly, for Chaos is coming to claim this mountain back.'\n\n'How do you know?' asks Cartheus.\n\n'Look at the walls, my brothers,' says Zahariel. 'Look at the signs, the marks that flash and resonate, and read them well. The future is writ before our eyes. Chaos is coming hence to harrow us, and its name is Typhus.'\n\n2:ix\n\nWhat the Angel has seen\n\nAnd now they approach. The war plate my master has not worn, the sword he has not drawn, since the Great Crusade, are nested on the armourers' velvet biers. Rogal and Sanguinius follow the procession, solemn and pensive.\n\nI heave upon my planted staff, and drag myself up from my little wooden throne. I can taste Rogal's impatience, perhaps even a little eagerness. He has held the reins of command since this began. Now he wants to be commanded. Now he wants to fight, and carry his fury to our enemy in person, not through the remote instrument of some army or division.\n\nHe will get his wish. We are not about to flee this field of war. There will be fighting enough for all of us.\n\nIn Sanguinius, I taste only pain and fear. He is wounded more grievously than he wants to admit or show. He is afraid he has fought too much, and too recklessly, to be fit for the final battle.\n\nI fear he's right.\n\nBut he's hiding more than wounds. He's been hiding something else for much longer. He thinks I don't know, but my mind is busy, busy, everywhere. I know of the escalating visions that have been haunting him.\n\nSanguinius has inherited, like damned Magnus, his father's more esoteric aspect. A state of higher grace, and in that grace, a visionary foresight. But I believe that, in some specific area, that foresight has begun to exceed his father's. The Angel's visions have been coming with increasing frequency. He tries to cover them, but they are sharp thorns snagged in the silk of his thoughts. When his attention has been on other things, I have slipped into his mind, examined the visions to discern their value and origin. They have all been glimpses of futures, some through his brothers' eyes.\n\nBut there is one in particular that he keeps close and will not, through force of will, reveal, even to my mindsight. I have gently tried to prise it from him, but the way to it is utterly blocked by a great fortress wall he has built from a single burning question.\n\nWhy must we suffer?\n\nI share my concerns with the one I serve as I watch their slow approach.\n\nHe knows already.\n\n'Of course you do,' I murmur. 'And what of the boy's question?'\n\n I will answer him. I will answer every question they ask. I owe them that.\n\n'Good,' I whisper. 'Good. But I wonder... why that question? What calamity has he foreseen that makes that question so impenetrable and absolute?'\n\n Can you not guess, Malcador? He has seen me fall.\n\nI breathe deeply to steady my nerves.\n\n'And what might you tell him, with regard to that?' I ask.\n\nI will tell him that I will not. I will face down the Four and deny them, and I will cut the strings of their deluded puppet, my own first-found, and I will return to the throne triumphant, and take my place for ten thousand years, and ten times ten thousand more.\n\nI nod.\n\n'Make sure of it, old friend,' I murmur, 'for I will not be here to hold you to the promise.'\n\n2:x\n\nVectors\n\nThere is only the mountain.\n\nWe see only the mountain. We turn our backs on the false, golden city and march towards the mountain instead. The Emperor must die, but someone else can kill him.\n\nOur Pale King is gone, but his commandments remain. Death must guard itself, and scythe down the vulgar fraudulence of mortality. Like a fever, we will consume.\n\nParts of us doubt. Parts of us think the port of the Lion's Gate, stolen from us by the savages of the V, should be reconquered. Other parts buzz with desire to be at the final fortress when it cracks open, so that our name can be recorded as the cause of death.\n\nWe will allow some latitude. The corpus of Terra is in its terminal stage, and its palsied, myalgic organs offer no resistance to our infection, so we will spread like wildfire, unchecked, decaying and diseasing that which remains. Under Serob Kargul, alive with meat-flies within his metal frame, we will advance upon the Sanctum and there, with Vorx and Kadex Ilkarion at our side, we will sow end-stage corruption. Thus will the haemorrhagic truth of the Rot be conjugated.\n\nThe stolen port we will assail, but on it waste no great strength. The White Scars are few, and they have, in some great fit, like the false-dawn flare of vitality that spikes just before death, resolved to open active fire on the Lupercalian fleet. Unwise, little hawks. You have drawn wrath and damnation down upon yourselves, for the fleet will answer and annihilate you.\n\nThe Pale King's words to us were clear. The mountain, the hollow hope. That must be our true target. Hope must be crushed and extinguished, resected and cauterised before it can metastasise and spread. We will not fail in that. And it is our wish too, the death rattle of our father be damned. His death will not hold us back.\n\nSo that is where we spread, advancing across the pedregal wastes towards the mountain, to infect and rot away all hope. We will send our dreams before us to plague the foe and eat away all resolve.\n\nWe walk with Caipha Morarg, who cannot disguise his scepticism at our decision, but dares not repudiate the order of his beloved king. We walk with Crosius, who understands our aim, and understands our particular ache for this objective. We walk with Melphior Craw and Skulidas Gehrerg and all the other warriors that the fever of the warp has swollen into monstrous, behemoth champions.\n\nWe will crush hope, yes, for that is our pathology. We will be destroyers, for the Hive, like a twitching ball of maggots, writhes within us all. But we will also annihilate Corswain, for the Pale King has promised us that Corswain is there. Our long duel, for good or ill, has run its course, and illness will prevail. Corswain of the First will choke on the congealed flux of his own lungs, and rot in our arms.\n\nWe will be aggressive. We will be virulent. We will be incurable.\n\nThe Hound of Caliban thinks he is immune. He commands a mountain, and believes we cannot permeate his cordons. But we can seep in through the smallest gap, or enter as spores in the slightest breath, and multiply. We will"}
{"text":"as promised us that Corswain is there. Our long duel, for good or ill, has run its course, and illness will prevail. Corswain of the First will choke on the congealed flux of his own lungs, and rot in our arms.\n\nWe will be aggressive. We will be virulent. We will be incurable.\n\nThe Hound of Caliban thinks he is immune. He commands a mountain, and believes we cannot permeate his cordons. But we can seep in through the smallest gap, or enter as spores in the slightest breath, and multiply. We will open fistulas in his bulwarks and transfuse our septicaemic influence into his dark angelic blood. We will swarm as prions through pores, ooze as helminths into orifices, and our drones, pouring like sizzling smoke from the bone funnels and flutes of our back, will be numberless, a legion of legions, and bloat the sky with lymphatic darkness.\n\nThe mountain, hollow like a cyst, filled with loyalist pus to be evacuated and drained, is distant, a good material measure from our position. For a conventional army, it is three days' march away, four or five perhaps, allowing for considerations of armour advance and terrain. But the lytic malaise of the warp permeates this world, reducing dimensions to jelly, slicing distance and suturing it back together in new proportions. We are closer, far closer, than Corswain imagines. He will feel our bacteriophagic caress long before he is ready.\n\nAnd our diseased god, grandfather-lord of decay, has shown us another truth, through febrile dream and delirium. Our god has shown us Corswain's comorbidity. The cancer is already within him, eating away at his heart, asymptomatic but congenital. It is morbid, inoperable, invasive and degenerating. When it finally erupts, it will be fulminant and refactory.\n\nFor we have seen the sparks of Chaos in his meat and in his bones, a parasitic wastage deep within the body of the First Legion. We sense the flicker of activity, the chancre of Chaos within his own ranks, psyker-whelps sired on Caliban, already picking and scratching at the scabs of the immateria. We will barely have to fight him, for we will already be fighting him from within.\n\nFor we are the termination. We are the Death Guard. We are the Destroyer.\n\nWe are Typhus.\n\n2:xi\n\nFear made flesh\n\nDark, feral figures swarm Logis Gateway and Clanium Square. Fafnir Rann's elements have been driven out into the quadrangles and scholar-courts beside the library, and there is no room to recompose. The entire length of the Hall of Governance is ablaze, wrecked by the daemon-fight they have just endured, and the assault position Rann hoped to establish and hold is lost. As the Sons of Horus - and he knew it would be them - begin to pour through the gateway from the Maxis Processional, his formations are not locked in and waiting to greet them, they are in disarray.\n\nPlans die as fast as men, and the pavements around the burning hall are littered with bodies in yellow plate. Beliefs die too - long-cherished, long-trusted beliefs in method and technique.\n\nSome things don't die. Rann doesn't know what it was they found in the Hall of Governance other than it was nigh-on impossible to kill. He buried his axe-blades in its bolt-shot mass, but he still isn't sure if it is actually dead. He isn't certain it was alive to begin with. Rann thinks it was probably waiting for them, that it found them, which means that all the normal principles of combat are null and void. Everything he has learned, every battlefield tactic the Praetorian schooled into him, is meaningless. This notion distresses him more than any aspect of the physical danger surrounding him. The art of war as practised by the Imperial Fists is no longer trustworthy.\n\nHe feels a sort of numbing loss. The rubrics of the world have come undone. This was supposed to be a bounding counter-attack - hasty, yes, and born out of dire necessity, but calculated and precise. He had identified the threat, the numbers of the foe, the direction of movement, and he had formulated a robust response to meet, block and decapitate the enemy advance. Textbook methodology. Except, suddenly, the enemy was behind them. It was where it couldn't and shouldn't be. It was already among them. What good is rational methodology when the foe can just appear? When it can come out of nowhere? When it can come out of mirrors?\n\nHe and his surviving men are pinned. There is nowhere to fall back to. Rann would only consider that option if it allowed them a chance to reinforce a line, but lines are meaningless. Plans are meaningless. The direction of enemy advance is meaningless. The thing in the hall, that shrieking thing that claimed the lives of so many of his men and left raking fingernail punctures in Rann's armour, was the greatest nightmare of the Imperial Fists made manifest.\n\nRann tries to shake the thought off, but it won't leave him alone. The supreme fear of the Imperial Fists, if they could admit to a fear at all, is to be outplayed by unpredictable variables. Not to know. The war-craft of the VII has always depended on knowing: knowing the location, the angles of advance, terrain variables. Such specifics become their weapons, even in a fight this precarious and desperate.\n\nNot any more.\n\nAnd it is as though the thing in the Hall of Governance knew that. It hadn't come to simply tear their bodies, it had come to shred their minds. It was a psychological coup, severing their faith in method as fast as it severed limbs. It was as if their darkest phobia had come to life. Worse, it was as though their most secret and deepest doubts had created it.\n\nRann tries to gather himself, but there is nothing to cling to. Plans are pointless, and the rules are vanished. The enemy, now in part or totally imbued by some Neverborn magic, can be anywhere and everywhere. Intel and preparation are worthless. The trusted mindset of the Imperial Fists cannot be trusted.\n\nRann thinks that this is what human fear must taste like. He is conditioned to process fear so it doesn't affect him, but that conditioning seems to have failed or malfunctioned. Rann is heedless of the bolt shells shrieking past him, the explosions that crater the courts, heedless even of the figures in filthy plate that mob through the outer quadrangles. They are just foes and dangers. He knows how to face foes and dangers. He doesn't know how to face unprocessed fear, and now that settles upon him.\n\nHe hears men calling for instruction, fear staining their voices too. He forces his mind to focus. He studies the data-flow of his retinal display. His auto-senses are screening out the harsh stimuli of explosions and flash-fire. What his visor's sensoria render is a patchwork of heat-as-colour, laced by the geometric graphics of structures and architectural solids. On that float icons, the tag-markers broadcast by each legionary's helmet system to afford instant overview and identification even during the sensory overload of extreme combat. Each marker is a small fist icon and a name. To his left, Calodin, Lignis and Bedwyr. Then Devarlin and the assault squad teams. To his right, the icon-cluster of Leod Baldwin's fire-team. Across the quad, the jumbled light-dots of Tarchos' squads, holding semi-cover around the buttresses of the Scholars' House.\n\nBetween them, icons that have gone still and dropped to a pale half-tone: the markers of the fallen, their systems still transmitting at low power so that bodies can be found and recovered.\n\nSo many. Too many.\n\nThe Sons of Horus spill into the quads. To one side, armour supports them, tread weapons and sooty war machines that erupt through walls and sub-gates, scattering masonry and crushing barricades. They clatter up new hills of broken stone, and fire their turret weapons, loosing concussive hell into Rann's positions. The side wall of the Archivum collapses like a released curtain and buries three squads in an avalanche of bricks. Rann expected the traitors to have long since turned off their tag-markers, but they have not, and his system still reads them. Wolf's head icons, the old mark of the XVI. But the names appending those icons have become illegible. They are incomprehensible non-names, as though the generating algorithm has corrupted, or is simply unable to form letters and characters graphically.\n\nWolf's head icons and broken hell-names.\n\nSo many. Too many.\n\nRann yells into his squad-to-squad, and concentrates fire on the largest of the breach points. His fire-teams open up, and so do those of Sergeant Tarchos and, to the left across the range of quadrangles, Fisk Halen. Mass-reactive shells from Astartes boltguns and heavier support weapons bracket the breach point. Visibility drops instantly as the area torches with thousands of explosive detonations and vomiting clouds of dust. Half-seen traitors quake, twist and topple. Some icons go to pale half-tone, but, it seems, so few.\n\nSomething is leading the Sons of Horus in. It is a cloven-footed horror the size of a Knight engine. Its wings are vast, but still don't seem big enough to lift its mass off the broken ground. The flex and flap of them, which Rann can hear, like the sound of sawing rope, seems more intended to fan the flames and drive the wall of smoke towards them. The thing is hunched and horned. Its eyes are orange gashes of neon. Rann does not want to look at those eyes. He doesn't want to acknowledge that the thing, somehow, is still wearing the distorted pauldrons of XVI Legion Cataphractii plate.\n\nIt has a tag-marker. The icon is a mere blister of contaminated pixels to his auto-senses.\n\nRann reloads. He orders a sustained concentration of fire. He ignores the thump and thwack of impacts as men drop all around him.\n\nA hail of fire - a stupendous hail of fire - crosses the area from his right. For a few seconds, it becomes a torrential deluge. Rann sees dark, misshapen figures writhe and fall.\n\nA counter-strike comes in, crossing the head of the Maxis Processional like a steady flow of magma, burning e"}
{"text":"marker. The icon is a mere blister of contaminated pixels to his auto-senses.\n\nRann reloads. He orders a sustained concentration of fire. He ignores the thump and thwack of impacts as men drop all around him.\n\nA hail of fire - a stupendous hail of fire - crosses the area from his right. For a few seconds, it becomes a torrential deluge. Rann sees dark, misshapen figures writhe and fall.\n\nA counter-strike comes in, crossing the head of the Maxis Processional like a steady flow of magma, burning everything in its path. Figures in yellow, shields locked, driving in across Rann's flank. Rann sees the raised standard a second before the data of his retinal display updates with marker codes. Archamus. Master of the Huscarls. Second Of That Name. Archamus...\n\nFor the last months, Archamus has served in the Grand Borealis, Dorn's proxy in the command bastion. But Bhab has fallen, and Archamus, perhaps impatient after so many hours at a strategium, fighting the war with his mind rather than his fists, has not fallen back into the locked Sanctum to continue his duty. He has taken to the field instead.\n\nPerhaps he couldn't retreat. Perhaps the great gate was already shut. Perhaps joining the fight was his only option. Perhaps the sight of him here is a true signifier of defeat and desperation: there is nothing left to control or command, no orders left worth giving, and no strategy to oversee. Perhaps fighting is the only option remaining.\n\nBut the sight of him. The sight of him, here. A wonder. Six hundred Imperial Fists, many of them Huscarl veterans, advancing in perfect Antecessum Purgatus and driving unbelievable fury into the enemy's ribs.\n\nThe traitors came in like a flash flood, a dirty torrent. Archamus' formation is much slower, the crawl of molten rock. But water splashes and dissipates. Lava is thick, steady and inexorable, and water turns to steam where it touches.\n\n'He is with us!' Rann roars. 'He stands with us!'\n\nHis men roar in response and find some new stocks of courage. Halen's battle squads actually manage to edge forward six or seven metres, and engage close, swinging chainblades or firing point-blank. A portion of the enemy tide, stung by Halen's jab and blocked by the Hall of Governance, turns too wildly and meets the rolling shield wall of Archamus' advance.\n\nA second axe-blow falls across the throat of the traitor column. From the east, bisecting the Avenue of Justice, comes a line of Blood Angels Kratos tanks and Falchion super-heavies, with Sicarans and Basilisk tractors in flank formation. The hammer of their rolling bombardment turns the top of Maxis into a forest of flame-trees. Enemy machines, turning to train on Archamus, are gutted by penetrator shells and bulk-beam weapons. Rann sees a traitor Arquitor hurled into the air, spinning, track-links whipping like a broken belt.\n\nThe Blood Angels advance through the rows of their armour, moving with fluid, surgical speed that counterpoints Archamus' steady, relentless roll. Icon markers light up. There, the squad groups of Satel Aimery, of Zealis Varens, of Zephon Sorrow-Bringer. Aimery's assault teams burn forward on their jump packs, led into the air by the rare wonder of Azkaellon, commander of the glorious Sanguinary Guard, whose augmetic wings cast him in the image of his glorious primarch. Airborne Astartes, angels of death, moving like missiles at low level, spear fire and bolter shells into the enemy breaking beneath them.\n\n'One push to snap their neck,' Archamus roars over the vox. The Master of Huscarls' observation is true: despite their vast numbers, the head of the enemy mass is boxed in and blocked on three sides.\n\nAt once, both Halen and Aimery demand the honour. Both are well placed, their units in striking distance. But Rann is reading the field. Either strike will be anticipated, and either one could end in an overreach.\n\nIn the space of three minutes, Fafnir Rann has subconsciously rewritten the tactical rulebook in his head. Preparation and tested moves are all redundant, the honoured codes of formation warfare hopelessly inadequate. The enemy thrives on the unexpected. The Imperial Fists must learn the knack of it.\n\n'Mine,' Rann voxes.\n\n'My lord seneschal?' he hears the Master of Huscarls respond, trying to isolate Rann's voice from the inter-signal mayhem.\n\n'Hold them hard,' says Rann. 'I have it.'\n\n'Yours indeed, Fafnir.'\n\nRann orders meltas and flamers to the fore. He gives the command even as his men are assembling. Of all the battle groups in this crossroads of armies, his is the smallest, the weakest, and the most poorly positioned, the least likely to move or attempt a surge. That's precisely why Rann calls it, and precisely why Archamus, after months of studying the evolving madness of battle on his strategium, approves it, without hesitation. Rann, technically, outranks him, but field authority always falls to the commander with the superior position. A fundamental code of Imperial Fists warfare.\n\nArchamus defers. He tightens his line, and communicates holding restraint to Halen and Aimery. Rann and his men are already moving, charging across the rubble from the dead end that should have been their unmarked graves. They come at the header formations of the Sons of Horus from the least expected direction.\n\nAnd they burn them.\n\nHowling flamers and squealing meltas cut their path for them. Roasting armoured figures topple before them, incandescent, shrieking and thrashing. Impact follows a few seconds later, the winding, hammer-blow contact of Astartes clashing with Astartes in close combat, swinging mauls and chainswords, driving with broken storm-shields.\n\nRann's axes, Headsman and Hunter, bite deep. He guts one traitor son, and keeps running as the brute spins away, then sweeps the axe in his left hand through a spine with crunching force. Slivers of plasteel fly. He keeps moving, splitting a blackened visor in two. To his right and left, the newbloods of his squads keep pace, crashing from one foe to the next, wheeling chainswords and hammers.\n\nBlow by blow, they break the yard open all the way to the Logis Gateway, then clear the line across Clanium Square. The enemy, its numbers vastly superior, is caught in a bottleneck, and by surprise. The mass of them flinches back, stung, and then shatters across its right-hand edge as the Blood Angels armour lights off and rains shells into their confused and tight-packed mass.\n\nThe tide falls back. Lupercal's bastard-sons retreat. The cloven-hooved thing leading them is already vanishing into the smoke. It's a brief respite. Rann knows that. The enemy will gather and resurge in minutes. But they've held the line at Logis against a foe that, until now, has not been even slightly checked.\n\nRann halts the charge at the edge of Clanium Square. Pushing further, though his blood wants him to, will simply force the kind of overreach he feared for Halen and the Blood Angels. Aimery's guards fly in to land around him, finishing the half-dead enemy with execution shots from bolt pistols or the clinical down-strikes of blades. Archamus, resuming area control, orders rapid repositioning to defend the retaken ground before the assault resumes. There will be no time to rest. Battle will blur into battle.\n\n'My hand, brother,' says Azkaellon, coming to Rann across the rubble and the burning dead, his augmetic wings retracting and folding high like a white banner against his back. They clasp. Azkaellon, Herald of the Sanguinary Guard. He seems like a winged god in gold. Rann feels mortal before him.\n\n'Ingenious,' the huge First Sanguinary says.\n\n'Improvised,' says Rann.\n\n'Indeed, my lord?' says Azkaellon.\n\n'The spirit moved me,' says Rann.\n\n'But of course. You've heard, then?'\n\n'Heard what?' asks Rann.\n\nAzkaellon looks at him. 'That He rises?' he says. 'That He stands with us?'\n\nRann is silent for a second.\n\n'Is... is this true?'\n\n'Word is spreading. He rises, brother. He rises from the Throne to stand with us. This is the hour.'\n\n2:xii\n\nThe end of time\n\nI take a moment to steady myself. Curse my mortal shell, but I am old and I am tired. I consider resuming my seat for a moment, just a moment, to ease my old bones, but that would be a symbol of weakness. He mustn't think me weak. He will not be able to trust me if he thinks me weak.\n\nYet the rising, world-drowning tide of the immaterium hammers and burns at my soul. I feel my lord fight to adjust and correct, re-crafting the invisible, constructing and reinforcing talismatic dykes and dams of psykanic force, opening psychomantic outfalls and conduits to relieve the rising pressure.\n\nIt is growing ever more disturbed by the moment. In the great chamber of the Golden Throne, astropaths moan and spasm, bedevilled by unbidden dreams, and the oniero-looms spew friction-smoke as they spin too fast. Prophesires weep, lamenting, and prognostipractors bleed from the mouth and ears. Indifference engines judder on their platforms, and archeotech valves spit green and yellow sparks. What new surge wracks the currents of the webway? Keeping it chained is a constant, precise struggle. I wonder... will I be remotely prepared for it when my turn comes? Will-\n\nAnother surge. I feel the Throne sigh as it shudders and rides the empyric current, its amplifiers and stasis-nodes straining. What is causing this fresh perturbation?\n\nMy mindsight turns upwards. Peerless Terra falls ever further into the void-wound Horus has cut. A caustic halo surrounds it utterly, so that it resembles a great, inflamed, infected eye. The nephelosphere around it burns black, like the petals of a monstrous, poisoned flower, arcs of morbid lightning millions of kilometres long lashing across the Solar Realm. The forces of two universes, cosmic opposites, mingle and intermix, contrary to the absolute laws of cosmological regulation. The warp and realspace are beginning to devour each other, cannibal galaxies starting to feed, to consume, to mutually obliterate. The empyrean will"}
{"text":"that it resembles a great, inflamed, infected eye. The nephelosphere around it burns black, like the petals of a monstrous, poisoned flower, arcs of morbid lightning millions of kilometres long lashing across the Solar Realm. The forces of two universes, cosmic opposites, mingle and intermix, contrary to the absolute laws of cosmological regulation. The warp and realspace are beginning to devour each other, cannibal galaxies starting to feed, to consume, to mutually obliterate. The empyrean will win, of course, for it is malevolently hungry in a way our cold and starry void is not.\n\nAnd there, hanging over us still, is his utterly vengeful spirit. Unlike every other vessel in the vast murder-fleet circling the skies of Terra like carrion birds, it remains unguarded. Its shields are still down. It is wantonly, brazenly exposed.\n\nA threat, an invitation, a seductive promise. He thinks he's luring us into a fatal mistake. Except this is not his work at all. It is a scheme devised by the four behind him, the four anagogic annihilators who govern him. His role is merely their impatient host. The four are allowing him to believe that this is a tactical masterstroke, a summons my lord and master cannot refuse.\n\nHorus Lupercal accepts this. He seeks gratification and triumph. My lord's first-found was always so very eager. Flagrantly, he shows us the trap he thinks he has set and beckons to us. Well, you once-wonderful son, you peevish traitor-child, it is a trap indeed, but not for your father. In your pride and confidence, intoxicated by the power you have so unwisely drunk, you have built your own demise.\n\nSo, is it that? Is it that indecently bared flagship, shamelessly revealed, that suddenly perturbs the warp so, and makes the Neverborn shriek and gyrate with expectation? That makes the noctivagant horrors in the burning streets of the Dominions gibber with glee? That makes the webway roar? I think perhaps it is. Daemonkind quivers, salivating, at the prospect of the coming moment and-\n\nNo. No, it is not. It is something else. I feel the pattern of it, the particular gust and eddy of the immaterial gale beneath my lord's adytum. Impossible. Too soon, surely? And yet...\n\nIn my mind, he warns me to brace myself.\n\nI feel him take control at once, applying full and conscious mastery of the turbulent ever-seas. Warding bells and klaxons sound automatically. The Armoury procession halts, bewildered. The Custodians stand ready, spears raised. The Sisters unsheathe their blades and their anti-souls. The conclaves of the Adnector Concillium scurry to and fro, adjusting flow regulation and dynamic connection. The lights of the vast electro-flambeaux hung along the arched and echoing nave flutter and dim. A hundred centuries of noetic learning and practice guides his hand.\n\nMy lord and master opens the webway door.\n\nWithering light floods out, scorching the flagstones and crusting the auramite fittings of the chamber with fulgurite soot. By his will alone, my lord holds the ether back long enough for the figure to emerge. Then, as his will ebbs and frays, he closes the door again, clamps the telaethesic locks, throws bolts forged from the heavy metals of white dwarf stars, re-engages the dampers, and rekindles the wards.\n\nThe light fades. The chamber floor before the Golden Throne is spattered with ectoplasmic fluid and fuming pools of ooze and waste-wash. Spavined and translucent things from nowhere, by-blow organisms from the deep trenches of the warp, splash and twitch, and flop and gasp, unable to survive in a world they were not made for. They die, decay and liquify in the light and air of the Throne Room, leaving nothing but puddles of putrid jelly and a lingering odour of decomposition.\n\nAnd there he stands, amid the spatter of bio-organic emulsion, whole and home, the acrid vapours of the webway rising like smoke from his shoulders.\n\nVulkan. The Promethean son.\n\nI share the astonishment of all those gathered here. Vulkan turns and kneels to his father, head bowed. I see Rogal and Sanguinius start, and hurry forward, pushing past the halted line of the armourers.\n\nVulkan has returned. Joy fills me at the sight of him but, just as quickly, dread. He was hours away when my mind last visited him, clawing his half-dead, half-living way back along the psychoplastic halls. I doubted he would return before it was time for his father to leave.\n\n'Lord father,' he says, the low voice of a flexing fault line, 'I feared I was coming too late. Whole ages it has taken me to reach your side.'\n\nAnd then I understand. It is an alarming thing to realise that even I can be mistaken in my reading of signs. Vulkan's sense of time, just like his father's, just like mine, is born of the perpetual, and runs outside the mortal flow of hours. But our perceptions here are contradictory. Instants have become centuries, and years moments, for him and for us, in different ways.\n\nI understand now the full degree of the damage wrought upon Terra. The last walls are falling, the sun is red, and the clocks... the clocks do more than just run down and disagree. The ruin of the warp so afflicts the materia of Terra that dimensions have collapsed. Space and distance, time and duration, those constant and trustworthy arbiters of realspace, have seized and fallen.\n\nTime, a local foible of our reality, no longer counts. It is no longer our ally, or our rival. The Palace, and all of Terra, and all of us, have become pinned in the infinite now of the empyrean, and we will remain there until the grip of Chaos is broken. This is neverness, the abdication of metaphysical continuity. This is the unmoving Uigebealach of the webway's singularity-node. This is un-time. There will be no tomorrow, for there is no longer a today or a yesterday.\n\nThere will be no tomorrow unless we wrench Terra from the sucking wound of the warp and allow space and time to reformulate according to Euclidean and Minskowskian principles.\n\nThe four, the False Four, know this. To them, this is a step closer to triumph, depriving us of orthodox reality. To them, this is the final state of madness that will carry us off.\n\nI think on this in despair, and then... and then I start to chuckle to myself.\n\nThey have - because they do not understand it - forgotten logic. The foul False Four have forgotten that we still think in human terms, and plan human plans, according to human conceptions. They have denied us tomorrow. But if tomorrow is the fall of Terra, then we have been strenuously denying that for months! By melting time away, and condemning us to neverness, they have given us a moment of eternity, an endless now in which to forge the tomorrow of our choosing.\n\n'In the webway, my father,' Vulkan says, 'as I walked, I heard a name. It came from the walls and the air, again and again.'\n\n'The Dark King?' I ask.\n\nVulkan glances around at the sound of my voice and the soft tap of my approaching staff.\n\n'Lord Regent,' he says, and rises to his feet. I shuffle forward, leaning heavily on my staff, until I am alongside him. I reach up, and pat him on the shoulder, an avuncular greeting. Then I eye the splatter on the flagstones around us, dubiously probing one rotting lump of dead flesh with the tip of my staff. I wrinkle my nose.\n\n'Was it the Dark King?' I ask again. 'Vulkan, the name, my boy? Was it the Dark King?'\n\n'It was, Lord Sigillite,' Vulkan replies.\n\n'Yes, I have heard it too,' I tell him.\n\n'And what does it mean?' asks Sanguinius, as he and Rogal join us at the foot of the great dais.\n\n'It is a title sometimes claimed by Curze,' says Dorn. 'And, I understand, an element of the tarot.'\n\nHe glances at me warily. He knows full well my fluency in the language of symbols. Though it seems like years past, it is only months ago that I gave Dorn a private reading in which, following the reveal of The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, and The Lightning Tower, The Dark King turned to lie askew across The Emperor. I place great credence in the working of the cards, and consider my old deck an especially prized possession, but dear Dorn has no stomach for such superstitious frippery, and he is annoyed that this bothers him.\n\n'Yes,' I reply, 'it signifies Konrad, and also the name of an ill-favoured card in the tarot arcanoi. But, in this case, my dear Praetorian, both definitions are mere echoes of the real truth.'\n\nI look up at the Golden Throne, raising a hand to shield my eyes from the glare.\n\nWill you tell them? I ask.\n\nHe tells me that I speak for him in all things.\n\n'Very well,' I say. I turn to the three great primarch sons.\n\n'It means,' I say, 'the end and the death.'\n\n2:xiii\n\nA cornered wolf\n\nLoken can suddenly hear a boltgun firing. It's close.\n\n'Stay back, Ahlborn,' he instructs. Ahlborn's been with him for twenty minutes, vainly trying to guide him to the last place Keeler was seen. No one in the crowd seems to know. Everyone's seen her, no one's seen her. It's not even clear which way the crowd is moving. The Via Aquila is choked with people, but there doesn't seem to be an agreed direction. Which way does the great avenue run? North?\n\nHe hears the gunfire again. Ragged bursts.\n\n'Ahlborn!' he cries. But he can't see Ahlborn any more. Where's the man gone?\n\nWhere have the crowds gone?\n\nHe's entered a side yard that's littered with broken glass and a few discarded possessions. There's a groundcar parked, abandoned. Ahead of him are the doors of a large building, perhaps a grand archive or a depository. Is that the Clanium Library?\n\nSudden squalls of rain hammer down. The raindrops are fat and dark, like oil or beads of dark glass. Through the downpour and the veiling smoke, Loken can make out a great city gate looming above the large building. Is that Praestor Gate? Is it Lotus? How could it be either? They've only been moving for twenty minutes. How has he lost his bearings again?\n\nThe rain gets heavier. Where the hell is Ahlborn? Where did the crowds go? How do so many people vanish so "}
{"text":"ory. Is that the Clanium Library?\n\nSudden squalls of rain hammer down. The raindrops are fat and dark, like oil or beads of dark glass. Through the downpour and the veiling smoke, Loken can make out a great city gate looming above the large building. Is that Praestor Gate? Is it Lotus? How could it be either? They've only been moving for twenty minutes. How has he lost his bearings again?\n\nThe rain gets heavier. Where the hell is Ahlborn? Where did the crowds go? How do so many people vanish so completely? All he did was step from the street into the yard.\n\nThe great city gate is burning. It must be two kilometres away, but Loken can hear the munching crackle of the flames and the hiss of fire meeting rain. Veneered between those two sounds, something else... another sound, just for a second.\n\nIt sounded like someone calling him by name.\n\n'Ahlborn?'\n\nThere's absolutely no trace of the conroi-captain. The rain is raising a fine spray from the broken flagstones, and streaming down the walls. The walls are marked with signs and names that Loken decides to ignore.\n\nThe gunfire rattles again, closer. He draws his bolter and checks the load. He's getting low on shells. He'll favour blades in a fight if he can. But against a shooting foe...\n\nWhen the World Eater appears, striding into the yard with an axe in one fist and a boltgun in the other, Loken drops him with a single shot.\n\nThe brute is huge. His goat-spike horns look like unwound ammonites. The mass-reactive blows open his chest. He falls hard, cracking the flagstones with his impact. The blood leaking out of him starts to ripple in the rain.\n\nLoken takes a step forward. Instinct tells him to duck, and a swinging maul misses his head by inches. There is absolutely no explanation for how the Word Bearer got behind him.\n\nLoken tries to turn. The maul catches him on the backswing, smashing the bolter out of his hand and throwing him into the wall. Bricks shatter. He rolls, trying to rise. The Word Bearer ploughs in at him, laughing. The traitor's eyes are insane. He's trying to say something, perhaps tell Loken something, but there are too many fat, wet tongues in his mouth to leave room for coherence.\n\nThe maul sings down. Loken blocks it with his chainsword. The grinding teeth chew the maul away at an angle, and wrong-foot the gibbering Word Bearer. That gives Loken enough time to get upright and recompose. He starts driving the Word Bearer back. The traitor is forced to use his heavy maul to make defensive blocks and fend off the stabbing, slicing strikes of the chainsword.\n\nA warrior of the Death Guard lumbers out of the rain. He's wider than he is tall, his rusted, sweating armour bloated and distorted. His helm, or his head, or perhaps both, have become some ceratopsian fight-mask with tusks over the eyes and a snout horn. The back of it flares into an iron frill and the entire left cheek and jaw are swollen like a metal balloon. The Death Guard, plodding at first, starts to jog as soon as he sees Loken. He lumbers across the yard from Loken's left, hoisting his warhammer.\n\nLoken blocks the Word Bearer's maul with his chainblade, and then kicks out, putting his right heel into the Word Bearer's abdomen and hurling him away. The Word Bearer sprawls on his back. Loken snaps left out of the path of the Death Guard's clumsy assault. The down-swinging warhammer hits the wall, and the wall tears open like mummified flesh.\n\nLoken rotates and catches the Death Guard across the pauldron with his biting sword. The pauldron cracks in two, and dirty blood gushes down the traitor's right arm. He issues a gurgling roar, and sweeps the warhammer in a wide, horizontal arc. Loken evades. He hears the whistle of it passing him.\n\nThe Word Bearer is back on his feet, yelling something unintelligible at his fellow traitor as he closes from the left. And somehow, the World Eater is upright again too. There is an appalling hole in his chest plating, a crater of impacted ceramite, metal and meat. His hands, blood drenched, grasp his bearded axe.\n\nLoken fends off the Death Guard, sidesteps, and draws Mourn-It-All in his left hand. As Death Guard and Word Bearer come at him simultaneously, he smashes the traitor-son of Mortarion to his knees with a ripping down-slash of the chainsword, reverses, and runs the entire length of Mourn-It-All through the Word Bearer's head.\n\nHe wrenches the blade out of the sagging body just in time to block the World Eater's axe. Despite his size, and the size and weight of his axe, the World Eater is hacking frantically, as lithe as a boy with a stick. The axe comes at Loken again and again, without wind-up or balance compensation. The World Eater seems oblivious to the gaping wound in his torso. Loken fends off the raking axe, first with one blade, then the other, drawing sparks. The Death Guard, chips of torn ceramite flaking from the oozing chain-wound in his shoulder, charges from the right, head down, helm-horns angled like an angry bull. Loken clips aside the World Eater's axe, and barely dodges the lunge. As the Death Guard blunders past, Loken hacks Mourn-It-All across his lower back, and severs his spine.\n\nThe Death Guard drops on his face, writhing and sputtering, froth and noxious slime weeping from the long gash across his back. He tries to crawl, then succumbs to a fit of wet coughing and choking, and falls limp, his head propped up at an odd angle by his snout horn.\n\nThe Nucerian axe catches Loken and knocks him over. Pain flares across his ribs. The World Eater shrieks a war cry, bringing the axe down with both hands. In desperation, Loken rolls. The axehead embeds in the flagstones, biting stone. Still prone, Loken sweeps the World Eater's legs and drops him on his back with a crash.\n\nThen it's simply a matter of who gets up first. The World Eater is fast, but the Luna Wolf is faster. The chainsword takes the World Eater's head off as he rises to vertical, and his body collapses again with a scrap-metal clatter. The head bounces, rolls, and comes to rest like a caltrop on its horns.\n\nLoken pauses, a sword in each hand, alert, breathing deeply. The rain hammers down, mingling the blood of three foes in the broken gutters of the yard's pavement.\n\nNothing stirs. No one else appears. The black rain is so heavy, Loken can no longer see the burning city gate.\n\n2:xiv\n\nAnabasis\n\nAt my lord's instruction, I explain to the four of them the corruption and suspension of time and how this, inadvertently, might actually favour us. Then I tell them his scheme of attack. Its code name, quite utilitarian, is Anabasis.\n\nOur defenders hold the sealed walls of the final fortress, while outside the last of our warrior-armies fight a hopeless rearguard to delay and thwart the enemy advance. Neither will last long, but while they do, we must strike. A boarding action by teleport assault, so only the most formidably armoured will be capable of withstanding the transition. It will be a spear-tip thrust against the primary, just the way my lord taught his first-found. Taught him so well, indeed, that he owns the tactic as his signature.\n\n'He will expect it,' says Dorn, unable to stop being a strategist.\n\n'Well, we can let him, Rogal,' I reply. 'Let him expect exactly what is coming. Expecting something, and stopping it, are different things entirely.'\n\n'But to walk into a trap-' he insists.\n\n'Oh, let us hope it is a trap!' I tell him. 'For though time has run out, we have no time left to spare. If it is an error, a mistake, or a malfunction, those things could be remedied at any moment. If the shields are re-lit, this chance is lost. The urgency with which we must act is self-evident.'\n\nThen I tell them that our lord will lead the assault himself. That is why he rises. The four of them will stay here, and hold the Palace through the final hours.\n\nThey all immediately turn to look at the Golden Throne. Just as I expected. Each one of them wants to protest. My lord dims the radiance of his aspect a little so they can read the solemn sincerity on his face and not burn out their eyes.\n\nHis glance alone has quietened kings and stilled the objections of caesars. It permits no defiance, and they are loyal, all of them. All of his children were made to be loyal, but the grotesque heat of this war has fully proofed these four. The fidelity of Valdor and these last three sons is irreproachable.\n\nI am startled, therefore, when Sanguinius says, simply, 'No.'\n\nSanguinius! Of all of them!\n\nEven Valdor looks at him askance, and the captain-general was the only one I truly thought might utter an objection.\n\nI ask the Great Angel what he means by his protestation. He does not look at me. His gaze remains fixed on the Throne. There is a shining quality in his eyes. It's not defiance. It's... some kind of certainty.\n\nBefore he can answer, Rogal speaks too.\n\n'We will not let you go alone, liege-father. Not into this.'\n\nOh, now Rogal! I study him too. The Praetorian dares not speak another word of opposition, but the white heat of his thoughts is clear enough. This siege, they sear, and all the work I have done to hold it, has never been about the Palace. I have defended the Palace because you are in it. If you go to the Vengeful Spirit, then my siege defence moves with you. It is as simple as that.\n\n'My king,' says Constantin. 'What you have commanded is out of the question. The Legio Custodes are your lifewards. They are the only ones fit for this undertaking. They must go with you, and where they go, I go.'\n\nVulkan does not speak, but he does not have to. His frown expresses his reservations quite plainly.\n\nWell, well. I am dismayed. All of them! I know full well my lord will be infuriated by their reaction to a simple order, yet also touched by their determination to defend him. Except, is this response born of high virtue and love, or of something darker? Sanguinius is the paragon of integrity, yet he was the first to refuse. Of them all, Valdor was ever the most unswerving. "}
{"text":"here they go, I go.'\n\nVulkan does not speak, but he does not have to. His frown expresses his reservations quite plainly.\n\nWell, well. I am dismayed. All of them! I know full well my lord will be infuriated by their reaction to a simple order, yet also touched by their determination to defend him. Except, is this response born of high virtue and love, or of something darker? Sanguinius is the paragon of integrity, yet he was the first to refuse. Of them all, Valdor was ever the most unswerving. Now he disobeys? Has, as I feared, his deepening exposure to the secrets of Chaos gnawed a discontent in his heart?\n\nIs this a sign that the rot of disloyalty has reached even the heart of fidelity? This war has split brother from brother and father from son, against the rule of nature. At this final hour, do these last sons turn against their master's will?\n\nI look to the Throne. I ignore the painful dazzle of the light in my eyes. I remain calm, for no counsel was ever valued that came from fervent lips.\n\nThink, I say, to him and him alone. They've given everything for you, as I'll give everything, so you must, in turn, give back. Share now, be it in victory or defeat. You always told me, always, that we were together in this. The whole of mankind, as one thing, striving as one. So... think, my King-of-Ages. There must be understanding here. For too long, as is your habit, you've seemed silent and remote, hiding your schemes from all. I know, I know. You have been most wretchedly preoccupied. Well, my old friend, they've learned to think and decide for themselves. They've had to. And isn't that how you made them, the trait you fostered in them? Don't be the stern patriarch now and rebuke them for the very virtue you raised them to uphold.\n\nHe knows I'm right, of course.\n\nI am correct because, in so many ways, I have been his conscience down the years. He has made mistakes. That's only human. There are things he regrets, for he has told me so. The greatest of those is that he has kept others out. He was too long alone, I fear. Too many centuries, working in solitude. There were sometimes friends and allies, but one by one they left him, or reached the ends of their natural lifespans. He made Constantin and the primarchs as sons and first companions, but their arrival still seems recent to him. He has not grown accustomed to trusting them the way that he should, or sharing with them the scope of his intentions.\n\nWell. No more mistakes, old friend. Do not act the tyrant and bark orders. You must compromise, and show them a sign that the trust they have in you is reciprocated.\n\nAll four, it cannot be denied, are needed on the ground. The conflict has reached its fiercest pitch, and to remove all four champions from the field is to remove all the figureheads and symbols that cleave our forces together. But neither Rogal nor Constantin will permit my lord to venture alone without their forces as close protection. Indeed, both thought the hour of our lord's enforced evacuation was approaching. Vulkan has fought in solitary for too long, and yearns to wage war alongside his brothers, and Sanguinius has the honour of his Legion to uphold. Debate now would be fruitless.\n\nI sense my master quell his anger. Good. We are together in this, and we will end it together, not just through the united strength of our company, but because you need them to see it done. They need to witness the culmination of this war, and the end of this horror, and share in the achievement, just as, afterwards, they must share in the plan. For them to fully invest their hearts in the future, they must be stakeholders in the present. Understand your oversights. You have withheld too much, for too long, veiling your Great Work from all eyes. They are your sons, and their part in this must be respected.\n\nAnd, further, this is owed them. They have needs of their own to fulfil: honour, justice, catharsis, retribution. They have borne all of this, and show the wounds of it, and those wounds must be assuaged. Each one, in his own way, is also a vengeful spirit.\n\nBut there must be accommodation. Just as my master cannot be everywhere, and do all things, neither can they. His mind turns to me, and makes his resolution known. Once again, I become his voice.\n\n'Constantin, Rogal,' I say, my tone as thin as paper, 'you will select your best warriors, a company each. I warn you not to denude our embattled forces on the walls. Our last fastness must hold while you are absent. Rogal, I know you have already made your pick, anticipating this moment days ago. Constantin, choose which Sentinels you require.'\n\nI turn to Vulkan. I lean heavily on my staff, for standing has become a Herculean task.\n\n'Vulkan,' I say gently, 'you deserve to go, but you will not, for I need you. I'm sorry. Your father is about to ask me to ward the Golden Throne in his place. It's not a task I welcome, but I'll do it without demur. I need you here at my side. You know, sadly too well, the reason why.'\n\nHe pauses. In the long moment that follows, I see Vulkan's jaw clench. I know he feels robbed of honour in this. But the reasoning is irrefutable. Vulkan has no gift whatsoever for the operation of the Throne, no ethereal magic, which is why Vulkan, and only Vulkan, must stay to take my place if I fail.\n\nFor if I fail, then all is truly lost, and Vulkan must take the Throne and prevent Horus from obtaining all the riches, secrets, treasures and mysteries of the Palace.\n\nForever.\n\nVulkan knows this to be true. Finally, and simply, he nods.\n\n'Sanguinius,' I say. 'You will select a company of Blood Angels to join Anabasis. But we stand in the final fortress at the final hour, my boy. The last of our forces are fighting and dying as we speak, to preserve this last piece of earth. They need a commander. More, they need a figurehead, a warrior they can rally to, and who will keep their courage alive to the very last. You're the Brightest One. You are, and always have been, the embodiment of glory, the shining symbol of all that we cherish. A Blood Angels company will have the honour of joining the Vengeful Spirit assault. I suggest Raldoron best suited to command it. But you must stay here and be our figurehead. In this, you will be named the Emperor's true Warmaster, and drive back the hosts of the one who so villainously defames that title.'\n\nI nod towards my lord. His word is stated.\n\nI ask them if they understand what I have told them.\n\nRogal, Constantin and Vulkan reply that they do.\n\nSanguinius... Sanguinius says nothing.\n\n2:xv\n\nAt the Hegemon\n\nThe warriors stationed at the Hegemon inspect her credentials and admit her. Ilya Ravallion, tactician to the ordu, counsellor to the primarch Khan, devisor of stratagems for the V Legion White Scars. She is led through the emptied halls, through lines of Custodians, units of Imperial Fists, and makeshift choke-point cordons manned by Imperialis Auxilia. The Hegemon, topped by its massive tower, is one of the oldest and largest structures in the compound of the Sanctum Palatine Imperialis, and it has been repurposed. For the longest time, it has been the seat of planetary government, the domestic counterpart of the Great Chamber legislature, where the High Lords convened to debate Terra-centric concerns as opposed to the grand and outward Imperial policies of the Senatorum Imperialis and the Great Chamber. The armoured bastion tower rising from it is the central fastness of the Legio Custodes.\n\nIt has become, in the last hours, the heart of command.\n\nIlya is weary, and sick, but she walks with determination, her White Scars escorts Gahaki, khan of the Burgediin Sarhvu, and Ainbataar Khan at her side. In the face of destruction, there is a spark of hope. She has been told, assured in fact, that the Great Khagan, fallen in battle, has been salvaged from death, as though by some miracle. Sigillite magic. Ilya does not understand it at all, for she saw the Khan dead and carried in, but she does not question it, and the joy of it has raised her from her knees, out of her pain, out of her lamentation. If Jaghatai lives, then she will resume her duties and spend the remainder of her life fighting for a future he can live in.\n\nShe wonders if Sojuk has heard the news. Sojuk was her bodyguard for the longest time, and she allowed him to leave her side to join the front line. Fearsome Gahaki and stern Ainbataar have insisted on filling Sojuk's place and warding her, for nowhere is now safe, not even in the Sanctum. Does Sojuk know the Khan lives? Has the news fired his resolve too?\n\nIs he still alive out there?\n\nAt the huge entry hatch of the echoing Rotunda, she presents her credentials yet again, and Gahaki and Ainbataar scowl at the Auxilia colonel examining them.\n\n'You are admitted, mam,' the colonel says to the apparently frail old woman in the shabby general's coat. Ilya nods. Gahaki snatches her papers from the colonel's hands, and they enter.\n\nThe Rotunda is a circular chamber with a high domed ceiling. In more peaceful times, it was a political debating chamber. It has already become a bustling command centre. Though gangs of servitors and Mechanicus adepts are still wheeling in and setting up station desks and hololith displays, and the room is alive with the wail of machine tools, this didn't happen overnight. It would have taken days to strip out the tiered seating and galleries, and link up the huge strategium arrays. She detects the Praetorian's handiwork, Dorn's uncanny knack for being three steps ahead. He knew Bhab Bastion would fall, or at least made provision in the event of its possible loss. This is Loyalist Command now, a scene of frantic activity, confusion and effort, three-quarters built and already in use. It is hauling on the reins of control dropped, through brutal necessity, at Bhab. Transition of control, if not smooth, has at least been improvised urgently.\n\nIlya stands for a moment. She sees the officers of the War Court and the robed s"}
{"text":"uncanny knack for being three steps ahead. He knew Bhab Bastion would fall, or at least made provision in the event of its possible loss. This is Loyalist Command now, a scene of frantic activity, confusion and effort, three-quarters built and already in use. It is hauling on the reins of control dropped, through brutal necessity, at Bhab. Transition of control, if not smooth, has at least been improvised urgently.\n\nIlya stands for a moment. She sees the officers of the War Court and the robed seniors of the Tacticae Terrestria hard at work, blind to the industry and disturbance around them, already lost in considerations of vital strategy. She wonders what she can do, and where she might possibly start. She observes the data scrolling on the active displays, the blink of real-time revising maps. Already, her experienced mind can discern structures, connections, possibilities and chances.\n\nShe doesn't feel her age any more. She doesn't feel like she's dying. A keen occupation of the mind can keep all things at bay.\n\nShe turns to her bodyguards.\n\n'Return to the walls,' she says.\n\n'Szu-Ilya, we are sworn to-' Gahaki begins.\n\nIlya shakes her head. 'I am home, Sarhvu-khan,' she says. 'This is my place now. My battlefield. You are needed elsewhere, and urgently.'\n\n'But, szu-Ilya-'\n\n'If death can reach me here, ringed in the Hegemon by Custodians and Imperial Fists, then it can reach me anywhere, with the greatest respect, whether you are with me or not. Go, please. I will supply the ordu with the wisest counsel I can from here, as best I can.'\n\nThey hesitate, nod and depart. No word of farewell. It's a thing she's always loved about the White Scars. Every leave-taking is done without sentimentality, for every leave is taken in the expectation of reunion. It is a liberatingly optimistic attitude for warriors who live such short lives.\n\nAlone, she turns, reviews the flow of activity around her, and finally lights on a face she recognises.\n\n'Mistress!' she calls out. 'Mistress, I am here to work.'\n\n2:xvi\n\nThe sacrifice\n\nI have neither the time, nor patience, frankly, to interrogate Sanguinius' curious silence. I turn to my impassive lord.\n\n'Now?' I ask.\n\nHe tells me yes.\n\n'Already? Ah.'\n\nI sigh. It's foolish. I've been preparing for this moment since the day we realised that Magnus was no longer a viable candidate. My lord has been unwavering in his reassurance to me. He believes me capable, and I trust that, for our minds have been strangely entwined for a long time, long before he took up the title Emperor and I became a Sigillite.\n\nIt's not that I wanted longer. I've had enough years, more than my fair share. But there is still so very much to do. However, in truth, I wish this had happened when I was younger and stronger, and invulnerable with the recklessness of youth, rather than now, when I am so old and so tired.\n\nNot that it would really have made any difference.\n\nStill...\n\nI am lost in my thoughts as I begin to limp my way towards the great dais, ordering my mind, settling my estate, frantically sending out last-moment thought-notes and idea-symbols, reminders and instructions, so that others can finish what I will leave unfinished. These sigilised messages swirl around me like a colony of bees evicted from their hive, flying off piecemeal in every direction to find new homes. It is sloppy, haphazard work. I have no time left to be methodical, precise or polite. Everything just goes, dumped like ballast from my head.\n\nI am so lost in my thoughts, I do not really pay attention to what's going on around me. I stop short when I hear a gasp. It would stop anyone to hear primarchs gasp in surprise and dread, and hear them fall to their knees in abject obeisance.\n\nAt the foot of the gleaming dais, I look up. I look up the exquisite steps that I will climb and never come down again.\n\nThe sun is in my eyes.\n\nMy lord. My King-of-Ages. My friend. My Master of Mankind.\n\nHe stands. He has risen from the Golden Throne. He stands above me like the god he isn't.\n\nHe stands.\n\nThat in itself is a minor miracle, for he has not stood in a long time, and I was beginning to fear he could not. Cloth of golden light hangs from his frame and his arms, streaked with trace threads of crimson sunset and scarlet dawn. Microclimate lightning sheets and shivers around him, and corposant sloughs like blue ice from the arms of the Throne at his back. There is a halo of white radiance behind his noble head, bright as a full hunter's moon or a steadfast star, his face cast in shadow, an eclipse before that disc but for the splendour of his eyes.\n\nPowers that be! I had forgotten this! I had forgotten his majesty! I had forgotten how tall he was, how astronomic, how wonderful, how terrible, how-\n\nHow did I ever think I could take his place? What kind of old and tired fool am I?\n\nI ought to bow! I need to bow down! I need to abase myself and bury my face in the stones of the floor, for he is too bright to behold! I fuss and fumble, clumsily, my old limbs too stiff to obey me. I stumble-\n\nHands catch me, and arrest my fall before I crack my face against the lower steps of the dais. The Sentinels, Uzkarel and Caecaltus, have swept from their posts at the moment of my mis-step, but they have not reached me in time. The hands supporting me belong to Rogal and Sanguinius. Vulkan is with them, his hand extended to help me upright. Constantin looms behind them, concern in his eyes.\n\n'Let me help you,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'Oh, forgive an old man!' I mutter.\n\n'Steady yourself,' says Rogal.\n\n'I am as steady as ever, my boy,' I chuckle. They set me on my feet. Vulkan hands me my staff. I look at them. They surround me, their worry for me showing in their faces.\n\nI shoo them away.\n\n'I'm fine,' I assure them. 'These old legs. When you get to my age, eh?'\n\nSanguinius looks at me. His jaw tightens.\n\n'I'm fine,' I insist.\n\nValdor nods curtly. The two proconsuls step past the primarchs, and stand either side of me to guide me up the steps. They reach to take my arms to support me.\n\n'Oh, no!' I tell them. 'I'll climb these damn steps myself.'\n\n'Give us the honour, lord, of escorting you, at least,' says Uzkarel quietly.\n\nI huff and allow it. I begin my climb up the steps of the plinth, squinting into the glare, pulling myself up each step with my staff as a prop clutched in both hands. It is a struggle for me, but nothing like the struggle that will follow.\n\nAbove me, my King-of-Ages waits. He remains standing, motionless, silent, ignoring the awe that fills the Throne Room, all eyes upon him, eyes that never thought to see him stir or stand again. They have longed for him to rise, and now they are terrified of what his rising signifies.\n\nHe looks only at me. Right into my heart.\n\nHalfway up the steps I pause. I glance at the dutiful Sentinels either side of me. 'That's far enough now,' I say. 'I'll go the rest of the way alone.'\n\nTheir golden masks express no response.\n\n'You are both Hetaeron Companions, yes?' I ask them quietly. 'Likely, then, that one or both of you will go with him to ward his side in the final fight. I ask you this, then. Do not fail him.'\n\n'We are not conditioned to fail, my Regent,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'Oh, I know all that, my boy! I know all that! I know how peerless you are! I'm not talking about devotion or duty or ability! Those things are wired into you! I'm talking about... about... when it's all done, I mean, bring him back to this seat, you hear me? Bring him back alive. You do all you do for him, but do this for me. Here, here...'\n\nI lick the tip of my left index finger, and with it, I draw my sigil on the breast of Caecaltus' plate. The mark is gone as soon as it is made. Then, with another lick, I do the same to Uzkarel.\n\n'I leave my mark, the mark of myself, upon my plan,' I whisper as I draw the shape. 'This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone. Do this for me.'\n\nThey make no reply. Staff braced, I resume my climb. The proconsuls stay where they are, respecting my request.\n\nI near the top, the light around me. My lord and master moves. He steps down to me, and offers me his hand in support. That hand. That great and capable hand that has held the galaxy in its palm. I feel him close. To my surprise, he permits me to share the private working of his mind.\n\nThe signs I read there are clear.\n\n'Don't be sad,' I say.\n\nThis is more painful than he expected it to be. He is afraid he will never speak to me again, that there will be no more hours spent exchanging thoughts and words, configuring mankind's best fate. His memories are Antarctic-bright: the day he first showed me the Throne, and told me what it did, the shining look of disbelief in my eyes; the evening when we both realised that I could moderate its functions too, that my mind, like his, had the capacity to engage with it and not instantly perish; the night when we concluded, through plain, logical deduction, that there might come a day when I would have to take his place; that, in almost every configuration of the future we could model, someone would have to do it.\n\nI was not afraid. Not then, not now. I knew what that would mean. I brushed it off as a 'thing that would have to happen if it came to it'. He hoped it never would, because he knew what it would mean too. And, for the longest time, it seemed unlikely. He had built a contingency to avoid it ever becoming compulsory. The contingency's name was Magnus.\n\nNow the time is here, I do not hesitate. I take the hand he offers to steady me, and I ascend the final steps to the Throne. I give him a nod and a little smile, and whisper to him, 'Do not mourn,' in a voice no one else can hear.\n\nAnd then I prepare to take my seat.\n\nThere is nothing else to say. After centuries of conversation, in which we have dissected and shared everything, there is nothing left to say. Just a look from one friend to another, an unspoken understanding of everything that has passed between us, and the debts we o"}
{"text":"e. I take the hand he offers to steady me, and I ascend the final steps to the Throne. I give him a nod and a little smile, and whisper to him, 'Do not mourn,' in a voice no one else can hear.\n\nAnd then I prepare to take my seat.\n\nThere is nothing else to say. After centuries of conversation, in which we have dissected and shared everything, there is nothing left to say. Just a look from one friend to another, an unspoken understanding of everything that has passed between us, and the debts we owe each other. This act is my final, everlasting gift to mankind, to the future, to the plan painted on the wall.\n\nBut in his eyes, I can tell he knows that I am only really doing it for him. The greatest, most universal acts are always born from the personal.\n\nI am old. I am tired.\n\nI sit upon the Golden Throne.\n\n2:xvii\n\nUnfinished business\n\nTension breaks into a state of high alert. Orders are already circulating through the Throne Room and beyond, conveyed by vox signal, astropathic command, and by psycho-meme, orskode and thoughtmark. Runners and messengers are despatched, and servo-skulls hurtle along avenues of approach, broadcasting binharic chatter, their tiny, straining lift-systems leaving high-pitched echoes in their wakes.\n\nThe shield-companies of the Custodes are already shifting, commanded with almost glance-like ease by Valdor from the foot of the Throne. The commands are complex and detailed, communicated with just a nod of battlemark. Sentinel details realign and change. Selected Custodians move from their vigil places to the arming chambers and deployment areas, their eternal stations instantly filled by replacements. Dorn's Huscarls burst from the Throne Room to ratify and initiate the Praetorian's pre-prepared orders of battle. The members of the High Council and their mobs of officials scatter to set for readiness, to authorise the necessary diversions of main generator power, and to inform the emergency command station at the Tower of the Hegemon of the evolving situation.\n\nIn the Throne Room, the company of armourers resumes its slow, ceremonial advance.\n\nOutside the Silver Door, in the aching halls of the Sanctum Approaches, Khalid Hassan, Chosen of Malcador, hurries to his post, his mind sore from a sudden psyk-burst of symbolic instructions that the Sigillite has just planted there. He steps aside, a green-robed ghost, as Imperial Fists Huscarls hammer past, wipes tears from his tired eyes, and continues on.\n\nAt the door itself, another delay. Supervised by Sisters of Silence, labour gangs of Adnector Concillium automata are hauling huge hexagrammatic generators into the Throne Room on lifter carts. There are eight of them, drawn from the Dark Cells, each one the size of a main assault drop pod. Behind them come more wagons and carriers, laden with additional and emergency talismatic apparatus, void-screen broadcasters, and portable telaethesics.\n\nHassan stops and watches them roll past, scrupulously checking the accuracy and completeness of the consignment. There are more to come. Other resources are being carefully withdrawn from storage as he stands there, to be brought up from the bowels of the Palace by freight conveyors. Hassan taps the cowling of one hexagrammatic turbine with his middle finger as it is rolled past. He hears the harmonic of the impact ringing. Yes, it is correctly tuned.\n\nThis is Sigil Protocol, one of eight hundred and fifteen contingency measures held in readiness. Some were prepared long before the siege began, others are recent - somewhat desperate, in Hassan's opinion - additions. Sigil is one of the oldest, and was written into contingency shortly after the devastation of Magnus' folly. It is a sequel, an appendage, to the necessary horror of the Unspoken Sanction.\n\nHassan had hoped Sigil, this dreadful sigil, would never need to be enacted. His breath is short in his chest, a flutter of panic. It's come to this. Whatever the end turns out to be, this is it. According to the psycho-meme instructions the Sigillite remote-printed into his mind not ten minutes earlier, a crushing load of symbology he is only just beginning to parse, Sigil is now active. What's more, the Unspoken Sanction must also be made ready.\n\nThrone of Terra... Throne of Terra...\n\nOthers of the Chosen, others of his kind with the same mark on their cheeks, are already abroad in the Palace, beginning the preparatory tithe and selecting the required psycho-able, not by lot or on a volunteer basis, as was once considered, but by ruthless exaction. They need the best, the most compatible, whether the best and most compatible wish to submit themselves or not.\n\nHassan turns, using autonomic techniques to calm his galloping heartbeat, and finds Kaeria Casryn behind him. She bows.\n\n'Sigil is enacted... You have full protocol instructions?' he asks.\n\nShe nods again.\n\n'It must be entirely precise,' Hassan says.\n\nThe Oblivion Knight seems to sigh, as if frustrated by his fastidious manner, a relic of the military discipline drilled into him in his former life.\n\nIt is precise, she replies in thoughtmark. Every detail, according to both the written edict and the verbal instructions. I have checked and rechecked.\n\n'And the instructions came from-'\n\nYours, from the Great Sigillite, I imagine, signs the sister of Steel Foxes Cadre. Mine, directly from the captain-general.\n\n'We should compare-'\n\nWe do not need to.\n\n'If there is even a minor discrepancy, Casryn-'\n\nAre you disputing the accuracy with which the captain-general compiles his instructions?\n\n'No,' says Hassan. 'No, of course not. Forgive me.'\n\nWe have rehearsed this, and rehearsed this, until we have it by rote, she signs.\n\n'I know. But even so, are we ready? Are you ready?'\n\nCasryn stares at him. He can detect something in her eyes, framed above the grille of her half-helm, that wavers between misery and terror. She, like him, played a key role in the oversight of the Unspoken Sanction the last time it was enacted. The only time. She has had to live with that horror too. She knows what is about to happen, and what may happen as a consequence.\n\nYes, Casryn replies.\n\nHe nods.\n\nThe Eighteenth is here, she signs. That's something, at least.\n\n'It is,' he replies. He knows this. The Sigillite flash-filled his mind with a bewildering quantity of order-signs and information markers. The presence of Vulkan was one of those facts. Vulkan's unique gifts will be a distinct asset in this endeavour. But he also represents a fail-safe that Hassan would rather not contemplate.\n\n'Carry on,' he says. 'I will join you shortly.'\n\nCasryn bows and turns away. She has vanished before she has even moved into his peripheral vision.\n\nHassan struggles to sort through all the information memes his master has bequeathed him. There's just so much of it, in no clear order, the usual precision of signifiers sloppy, as though Malcador was running out of time and simply trying to say everything and anything he could think of before he forgot. He has clearly been detained by the Emperor's business. Every last thing the Regent needed to impart, every idea, every meaning-dense sigil, every passing thought, every last minute, while-I-remember notion has been delegated to his Chosen to free his mind.\n\nOne sigil carried particular emphasis. Malcador has marked the thought-file it condenses with the meme-tag Terminus. Hassan sees figures emerging from the Throne Room, coming his way. They are giants, wraiths of black smoke and jet shadow that flicker along the fusion-bored walls of the mass-passageway towards him like an approaching nightmare.\n\nHe stands in their path anyway, and they halt.\n\n'Aedile-Marshal Harahel,' Hassan says.\n\nThe two Wardens of the Sodality of the Key glare down at him. They are Legio Custodes giants, but the terrible glory of their golden plate is dulled with soot to a menacing black. The Dark Cells and archives in the catacombs deep beneath hold all the forbidden technologies and secrets of Old Night, curated and secured by a specialist Excertus taskforce. The Sodality of the Key is the Custodes coterie that supervises the handling and transfer of such devices when they are called for.\n\n'Stand aside,' says one.\n\n'You know my rank and my authority, Warden,' says Hassan. 'I have business with you.'\n\n'Our directives have been issued,' the dirt-tarnished Custodian answers. Hassan wants to shrink and flee from them. He stands his ground.\n\n'I should hope so,' he says, 'and I am here to confirm them. And to see that they are carried out with complete diligence.'\n\n'They were issued by our master,' says the Warden, making no effort to keep the warning growl out of his voice.\n\n'And mine were given by mine,' says Hassan. 'With respect to the captain-general, the Sigillite's wish in this is absolute.'\n\n'Stand aside.'\n\nHassan draws breath. Without hesitation or error, he begins to recite the entire name-sequence of Aedile-Marshal Harahel. It is four hundred and nine name-units long, inscribed on the inside of Harahel's blackened armour, and known to only a very few. To know it is to command authority at Throne Room level.\n\nHarahel raises a giant hand and stops Hassan forty-six names into the recitation.\n\n'You've made your point,' he says. 'Speak, then.'\n\n'You are charged with the handling of the individual known as Fo, and also of the device he has constructed.'\n\nHarahel does not immediately reply.\n\n'Come, marshal, let us speak as men,' says Hassan. 'The employment of Fo, and the existence and purpose of the device he has crafted is known to the Sigillite. Did the captain-general really think such a thing could be concealed?'\n\n'Then what?'\n\n'It is the Emperor's will, and thus the will of the Sigillite also, that the device be preserved and held in reserve. For use in last resort only. It is signified Tier XX, and deemed a terminus sanction. It must be made safe, and its architect too.'\n\n'Then our directives match,' replies Harahel. 'The captain-general was precise. We are to manage"}
{"text":"nd purpose of the device he has crafted is known to the Sigillite. Did the captain-general really think such a thing could be concealed?'\n\n'Then what?'\n\n'It is the Emperor's will, and thus the will of the Sigillite also, that the device be preserved and held in reserve. For use in last resort only. It is signified Tier XX, and deemed a terminus sanction. It must be made safe, and its architect too.'\n\n'Then our directives match,' replies Harahel. 'The captain-general was precise. We are to manage the individual, Fo. We are to withdraw the device to the Dark Cells for safekeeping. You have no further need to detain us.'\n\n'Pending transfer,' says Hassan. 'You left that part out. The Sigillite is aware that Captain-General Valdor intends the device to be secured in the Dark Cells. This is appropriate, for the Custodians of your sodality are by far the best suited for this responsibility. But your custody of it is pending transfer. When... if... the time comes, and transfer becomes viable, it will be supervised by me at the behest of the Sigillite. Are we clear?'\n\n'This was not as it was communicated to us,' replies Harahel. 'Nothing was said about transfer.'\n\n'Then I have communicated your directives more fully, so that mistakes cannot arise. Be thankful I was here to intervene.'\n\n'This was not as it was communicated to us,' Harahel repeats. 'You will need to present confirmation.'\n\n'Very well, I will obtain it.'\n\n'I do not think there is time left for that,' the Warden replies.\n\nHassan goes cold. He looks past them, then pushes past them, and starts to run, leaving the sable giants standing there.\n\nHe rushes to the Silver Door. It is open, the convoy of wagons still rolling through. Hassan ducks around one conveyer and runs through the doorway. Golden Sentinels turn, spear-blades down, to stop him, then step back into place when they recognise him.\n\nHe starts to sprint now, along the colossal nave, hoisting up his robes to prevent himself from tripping. He sees other figures in green robes, others of the Chosen like him, running forwards too, breaking from the gathered throngs at the back of the Throne Room, rushing along aisles parallel with him.\n\nNone of them are going to get there in time.\n\nHassan sees the Throne, far away. He sees the small group of figures around it. The view is blurred, because of the frantic motion of his headlong sprint, and because there are tears in his eyes. All the while, he's still frantically unpacking and sorting all the data his master dropped into his head to be actioned.\n\nHe sees the figures. A great form in gold has risen from the high throne. It stands, bathed in a flare of white light. There is another figure on the steps below it, tiny, crooked and hunched. The shining figure reaches out a hand to help the other the last few steps of the way. A moment passes between them, as though they are exchanging words.\n\nThen the great shining form gestures towards the high throne. It seems to be burning, as though the entire dais is on fire. The tiny, crooked figure seems to nod. He shuffles forward.\n\nHe sits upon the Throne. The flames, it seems, reach higher and engulf him.\n\nHassan stops running. He pulls up, bent double, hands on his thighs, panting. Tears stream from his eyes and splash on the sectile patternwork of the nave floor. He has found and unpacked the last note-meme planted in his mind. A scrap, just words, barely forming an integrated sigil. Almost an afterthought.\n\nIt says, Khalid. Do not fail me. Goodbye.\n\n2:xviii\n\nOnly as a hero\n\nThe Sigillite sits upon the Throne. He does not and will not speak. His eyes are open but sightless, or rather they see nothing of the chamber that others call the Throne Room. They see only the immeasurable deeps of the empyrean. He sits still, upright, his hands resting, just as his lord's did, on the arms of the Throne. His staff lies at his feet. A dazzling swathe of radiance, like ball lightning, encases him and the Throne, boiling and flickering. The glare of it drives all shadows backwards from the great dais, stretching them out, long and narrow, across the chamber, the shadow of a father and those of the sons at his side, long, radiating lines of darkness in the blinding light, like the shadows of humans on a ridge, watching the sunrise at solstice.\n\nVulkan, standing beside his towering father, his two brothers, and the captain-general, finds it hard to watch. Malcador is making no voluntary movement, but he is trembling, every part of him, every bone, every atom. Vulkan gazes at him in the heart of the fire and sees the jitter, like a pict-feed stuck and jumping, wobbling, vibrating, the REM-twitch of the Regent's open eyes, the shiver of his jaw, the flutter of his robes, the minute and cycling quiver of his hands on the armrests. But the Promethean lord can also sense the masterful and assured operation of Malcador's guidance at work, the strong mind, the purpose, and the absolute concentration. Vulkan can hear the mechanisms of the Throne responding to the Sigillite's every subtle adjustment. He can feel the immaterial flood obeying his directives and commands.\n\n'I can feel his focus. And his pain,' Vulkan murmurs. I can feel his cells dying, one by one, he thinks.\n\n'And his sadness,' says Dorn quietly.\n\n'It's not his sadness, brother,' says Sanguinius. He glances at their father, silent at their side. 'It's yours, isn't it?'\n\nThe Master of Mankind makes no reply. Is he overwhelmed with love for his old friend, with speechless admiration at the scale of the Regent's sacrifice? He is only human, after all, and the sensation is coming from somewhere.\n\nValdor turns away, grim. Another last survival of the Long Yesterday has passed from the world, leaving precious few remaining. 'We must begin,' he says.\n\nVulkan shakes his head wearily. His resolve is granite-hard, for he understands more than any of them what this signifies.\n\n'The Sigillite-' he begins.\n\nThe Hero, a voice corrects him gently. Vulkan looks at his father, eyes narrowing at the radiance of his aspect. He nods.\n\nDown the scope of the nave, a few others have dared approach, pushing past the halted armoury train. They have come to stop a few hundred metres away, men and women in green robes, perhaps a dozen of them. They stare at the Throne. Vulkan sees their grief and shock. A couple of them have sunk to their knees.\n\nThey are known to him. The Chosen of Malcador, the individuals of special ability and particular aptitude that the Sigillite hand-picked down the years to serve as his aides and proxies. Through them, the Regent has conducted his inscrutable business. Only these twelve or so have made it here in time, and even they are too late. Others are still on their way, pulled by the psychic bond they shared with the Sigillite. There has been no opportunity for a farewell in person, no last fond words or whispered wisdoms. Required by circumstance to put his affairs in order without ceremony, Malcador has brusquely decanted his thoughts into all of them, distributed piecemeal and without finesse. Their minds ache with the burdens they have been handed so suddenly, and which they have barely begun to process, making this loss even harder to bear.\n\nThere is a change in the air suddenly, a winnowing aura of calm that moves like a summer breeze from the Master of Mankind down the great length of the nave towards the Chosen. Everyone in the room feels its soothing aspect. He is alleviating the worst of their immediate suffering, for they will all need to be sharp and capable from this moment on. They must complete the tasks the Regent has left to them. They are the executors of his legacy. They contain the Sigillite's last testament.\n\nThe greatest sacrifice of our age, the voice tells them softly. Our Sigillite is no more. Regard him now, as you fulfil his bequests, only as a hero. Your duties are not finished, and neither is his. What we do now, all of us, we do because he has made it possible. Remember him. Remember that. Use that memory to prevent even a moment's falter.\n\nThey nod. Some weep. They all bow.\n\nHiding his own grief, the King-of-Ages Risen turns to his sons and the captain-general.\n\n'Now we begin in earnest,' He says.\n\nMalcador the Sigillite ascends the Golden Throne\n\n2:xix\n\nAt the Hegemon\n\nSandrine Icaro looks up from her station. Her robes are dirty and stiff with dried blood, and her mind is on a thousand other things. It takes her a moment to identify the thin, dishevelled woman who has appeared at her elbow.\n\n'Ilya Ravallion,' says Ilya.\n\n'Of course,' says Icaro. 'You'll forgive me-'\n\n'If I may, I'm here to assist. Tell me where you need me.'\n\nIcaro blinks. Ilya can see the Mistress Tacticae's hands are shaking, and there is a neural tick twitching under her left eye. There is, incongruously, a light assault weapon - a Komag VI, if Ilya is not mistaken - resting across the edge of Icaro's workstation, as though she wants it in sight and in reach at all times. Ilya has heard that Icaro, and a very few other seniors from Bhab, were among the last to reach the final fortress before the Archangel sealed the Gate. Icaro looks as though she doesn't quite believe she made it.\n\n'If you're fit,' says Icaro.\n\n'No one's fit for anything, mistress, not any more,' replies Ilya, 'but I am capable.'\n\n'We lost a lot,' Icaro murmurs. 'The War Court was decimated coming out of Bhab. We-'\n\nShe pauses, listening to data feeds coming in through her plugs and earpiece. She realigns unit graphics on her lithic display, and punches in an augur cross-feed.\n\n'Two Seven advance to Gilded six-six-eighty, radial and bracket. Confirm,' she says, and waits for a response Ilya can't hear. Satisfied, she glances back at Ilya. 'Yes please, then,' she says. 'Station six.' She points. 'Access authorisation is \"Icaro\".'\n\nIlya raises an eyebrow.\n\n'I know. We haven't had time to be sophisticated about it. Light the desk, please. We have data-stacking from the eastern line. I need someone to"}
{"text":"nit graphics on her lithic display, and punches in an augur cross-feed.\n\n'Two Seven advance to Gilded six-six-eighty, radial and bracket. Confirm,' she says, and waits for a response Ilya can't hear. Satisfied, she glances back at Ilya. 'Yes please, then,' she says. 'Station six.' She points. 'Access authorisation is \"Icaro\".'\n\nIlya raises an eyebrow.\n\n'I know. We haven't had time to be sophisticated about it. Light the desk, please. We have data-stacking from the eastern line. I need someone to start processing it. Main items to me, everything else...'\n\n'My judgement?'\n\n'It'll have to be, yes.'\n\nIlya nods, and crosses to the vacant station. Icaro's attention is already submerged in data again. At every station nearby, War Courtiers are locked in concentration so intense it seems like they will burst, their hands moving like hummingbirds on the console haptics.\n\nIlya sits, punches in the laughably make-do code, and wakes the desk. The desk is new, dragged in from somewhere else and connected to power and noosfeed barely half an hour earlier. It floods with data-blocks the moment it's initialised. She starts to sort and process, triaging information. Her brow knits. She understands at once the intense concentration of the others. Some data is broken, some incomplete. Some seems like it's been transcribed into xenos code. And there is so much of it.\n\n'Ravallion!'\n\nShe looks up. Icaro is standing, looking in her direction through the throng, glancing at an order wafer she's just been brought by a man in a green robe. One of Malcador's Chosen.\n\n'Mistress?' Ilya calls back.\n\n'Dump what you're doing. We need a priority link to Fifth Legion units at Lion's Gate port. Standard connectives are out, or they're refusing to respond. I presume you have Legion-specific combat codes or vox-authentics they might trust?'\n\n'I do,' says Ilya.\n\n'Fast as you can, please.'\n\nIlya turns back to her screen, and conjures vox and hardline links. She initiates a signal, coding in the encrypted battle-cant of Chogoris. The Chosen is suddenly standing at her side. He's not one of those she met when she brought the Warhawk home. He's a middle-aged man, augmetic traceries gleaming bright against his black skin, the sigil on his cheek.\n\n'Ravallion,' she says.\n\n'Sage mistress,' he replies. 'I am Gallent Sidozie, of the Chosen.' There is a huskiness to his voice, as though he has recently been crying. In this hour, Ilya thinks, our emotions take us by surprise.\n\n'Content of this message?' she asks, fingers hovering, waiting.\n\n'Instruct Lion's Gate to cease firing at Target Principal.'\n\n'Cease firing?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Target Principal?'\n\n'I believe you heard me.'\n\n'You mean the traitor flagship?'\n\n'I do, sage mistress,' he says.\n\nShe looks at him. 'May I ask why? If the White Scars can strike at Lupercal while they are still able-'\n\n'It is not your place to ask for clarification,' he says.\n\nShe holds his gaze for a moment, then nods.\n\n'As you like,' she says, and turns back to the console to enter the message. 'I'll despatch by data-burst and then try voice.'\n\nShe hears him sigh gently. In a low voice, he says, 'I have just delivered an operational directive from the Throne Room. Mistress Icaro will announce it shortly. To understand its importance, I will advise you in strict confidence that we will shortly have spearhead deployment on the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nIlya swallows hard. She does not react. She does not turn and look at him. She keeps her eyes on the display.\n\n'Teleport assault?' she asks, barely audibly.\n\n'Primary strength. Its void shields are down. He has risen to lead it Himself. Operational reference is Anabasis.'\n\n2:xx\n\nShiban, Fifth, Lion's Gate\n\nAt Lion's Gate space port, a broken relic of its former magnificence cradled in the firestorms of hell, the main batteries speak again. Lances of power, kilometres in length and as pearly-fluorescent as deep-ocean eels, retch and spit from the massive orbital gun platforms into the dust-caul of the sky. Ship-killing beams shriek upwards at the traitor fleet.\n\nThe port, its skirts and out-flanks reduced to scrap and wreckage, is like an island in the midst of the inferno, its main superstructure bent and almost listing, such is the catastrophic damage done to the bedrock it sits on. It is hundreds of kilometres from the Sanctum, hundreds of kilometres from the nearest loyalist force, entirely cut off and surrounded. An atoll of defiance, the only Throne-held position in the entire Palace Dominions outside the final fortress, it is slowly drowning in the maelstrom of warp-corrupted ground, furnace-storms, super-orbital bombardment, and encircling enemy assault. It is raging, furious, as it dies.\n\nBattles boil through the port's hems and lower levels: loyalist forces, principally White Scars and Imperialis Auxilia, waging a futile, fall-back fight against the vastly outnumbering echelons of the Death Guard and the swirling horrors of instantiating Neverborn. Devastating fire from the traitor fleet ruptures the territory around it, and explodes entire spires and freighting platforms off its shoulders and spine. Its remaining void shields soak up some strikes in crackling ripples. It feels as though the voids are doing little more than simply holding the disintegrating port together.\n\nIn the smoke-clogged, half-lit ruin of the primary fire control, deep in its upper structure, Shiban Khan, called Tachseer, has just been crowned ahn-ezen, Master of the Hunt. It is not a title he will hold for long, but the khans of the ordu have insisted. When the V dies, it will not die leaderless.\n\nShiban accepts the honour with brief solemnity. He turns from the others, from Ganzorig the noyan-khan, Jangsai Khan, Chakaja Stormseer, and Yiman.\n\n'Finish the work,' he tells them. 'Kill what may still be killed while we yet live.'\n\nThey bow, and hurry to their places. Shiban can hear shooting from below. It sounds close. He calls for target solutions.\n\nAtrai, the White Scars legionary manning the augurs and sensoria, tries to locate clean paints on the warfleet above them. Nothing is returning true, as though malfunction or distortion is corrupting even the port's immensely powerful detection and ranging systems. Power is also ebbing. It is taking far longer each time for the main batteries to cycle back to full charge.\n\nBut Shiban can see from the fluttering hololiths that the one key truth remains. The Vengeful Spirit, unguarded, voids down.\n\nOne direct strike...\n\n'Acquisition?' he calls.\n\nAtrai and the others shake their heads.\n\n'Damage observed from previous cycle?'\n\nAtrai looks at him, as though wishing he could say something other than a helpless negative.\n\n'Again!' Shiban yells. 'Kill that thing!'\n\nThe deck vibrates as the bulk generatives whine back to capacity.\n\n'My lord?'\n\nShiban turns. A young White Scars warrior, wounded, is handing him a data-slate.\n\n'Direct from the Sanctum, lord,' he says. 'Authentication is confirmed.'\n\nIt reads correctly. They've been ignoring all contacts, assuming that every transmission is a pack of traitor lies. But this, this is genuine.\n\nThe message, however, makes no sense.\n\n'Do we have operational vox?' he asks.\n\nThe wounded legionary replies with a nod that suggests he will die trying to provide it. The message had an encrypted channel appended to it.\n\n'Channel as indicated,' Shiban orders. He links his armour's vox-system to the main comms grid. An icon tells him when the connection is established. It wavers, threading in and out.\n\n'Shiban, Fifth, Lion's Gate,' he says.\n\n'Hegemon Control, authenticated,' a voice crackles back. He knows it at once. Ilya. There's no time to acknowledge that, or ask after her. There's no time for anything.\n\n'Confirm instruction, Hegemon Control,' he says.\n\n'Instruction - deselect firing solutions, Target Principal.'\n\n'Repeat and confirm. Target Principal is shields down, repeat shields down. Do you understand?'\n\n'We understand. Instruction confirmed, and sanctioned by the War Court. Deselect firing solutions, Target Principal, effective immediate.'\n\n'Yes,' he says.\n\n'Shiban, we don't want you to hit it,' the voice crackles, fading in and out.\n\n'I copy,' he says. 'I will comply. But, Hegemon Control, you don't understand. We have been targeting it for the last sixteen minutes. Its shields are deactivated. Our battery strength is at prime. Our target-plotting systems are damaged but functional. It should be dead already.'\n\n'Explain.'\n\n'I cannot, Hegemon Control. It's not a matter of us not firing at it. We cannot hit it.'\n\nIlya Ravallion pulls out her earpiece and rises to her feet.\n\n'Mistress Icaro!' she calls out. 'Lion's Gate confirms receipt of instruction.'\n\nThrough the bustle, Icaro hears her and nods to her. She is about to make her announcement.\n\n'Mistress Icaro!' Ilya yells. 'I need you to stop, listen and comprehend. Right now. It is not what it seems. There is something wrong.'\n\n2:xxi\n\nMarked as ready\n\nProconsul Caecaltus Dusk has been selected. Proconsul Uzkarel Ophite has not. Or rather, they both have, but not for the same duty. Uzkarel will remain at his post, and will assume direct command of the Hetaeron Sentinels in the Throne Room during the absence of the captain-general and Tribune Diocletian. Caecaltus will assume direct command of the Hetaeron Sentinels assigned to their king's company for the assault.\n\nNeither of them regards the captain-general's choices as favour or disfavour. Uzkarel does not feel passed over, nor does he resent his brother-Sentinel's selection. Caecaltus does not register pride, or feel singled out for special preference. They are Legio Custodes. They are nothing like the other warriors fielded in humanity's cause. They are precision instruments of absolute focus, refined and conditioned way past such trivial distractions as pride or envy or disappointment or ambition. All that they are, their minds, their souls, their wills, is forged into one quality; all that they are, and it is so very much, is co"}
{"text":" his brother-Sentinel's selection. Caecaltus does not register pride, or feel singled out for special preference. They are Legio Custodes. They are nothing like the other warriors fielded in humanity's cause. They are precision instruments of absolute focus, refined and conditioned way past such trivial distractions as pride or envy or disappointment or ambition. All that they are, their minds, their souls, their wills, is forged into one quality; all that they are, and it is so very much, is concentrated into unqualified faithfulness.\n\nNot for them the tawdry rivalries and passions that seem to flash so very often among the Astartes, always feuding and boasting and seeking to outdo each other. Uzkarel and Caecaltus both deem Astartesian behaviour bafflingly counterproductive, though they seldom spare it any thought at all.\n\nUzkarel and Caecaltus do not even exchange glances when Caecaltus leaves his eternal post in the Throne Room. No farewell, no wishing of good fortune. At the silent signal, Caecaltus just removes his helm and starts walking away, pausing only to meet his replacement, Sentinel-Companion Dolo Lamora. They pause, touch their bowed foreheads together, then continue on their separate ways. The forehead touch is not a greeting, or a gesture of respect, it is merely a rapid neurosynergetic transfer that instantly acquaints Dolo Lamora with the circumstantial detail of Caecaltus' vacated post, as though he had been standing there himself all this while.\n\nUzkarel Ophite does not look up to watch Caecaltus go, nor does he look up to see Dolo Lamora arrive. He is simply aware of the situational change. His concentration and alert remain pure.\n\nIn the arming chambers below, two full war companies of Legio Custodes are priming for war: Valdor's assault company, and the Companion company that will flank the King-of-Ages. In truth, there is little to do, for every guardian has been fully and permanently war-ready for months. Weapons, cells, plate seals and armour systematics are simply checked and approved by white-clad adepts. Only a handful, like Diocletian, and the captain-general himself, who have been in recent combat, are obliged to submit to more thorough attention. Weapons are reloaded, cells recharged, blades re-edged. Damaged plate components are cleaned, re-finished, re-polished, or entirely replaced. Minor wounds are treated. Dirt, grease and blood are washed away. Perfection of wargear ensures perfection of performance.\n\nIt is almost silent in the Custodes arming vault. No one talks. Caecaltus Dusk submits to inspection. Serfs take his paragon spear and his praesidium shield aside for examination. Diagnostics check his sensoria, his refractor system, and his arae-shrike device. Scanners play inquisitive light across every segment and component of his ornate Aquilon-pattern plate.\n\nThe check seems to take longer than usual.\n\n'Done?' Caecaltus asks.\n\nThe adept-supervisor nods, but asks that the proconsul's breastplate be removed for cleaning.\n\n'Why?' Caecaltus asks.\n\nTo wash away minute traces of an unknown organic residue, he is told.\n\nCaecaltus looks down at his golden chest plating. The old man. The spittle on his finger. The mark's not visible any more. It barely ever was.\n\n'No,' says Caecaltus.\n\nPassed ready, Caecaltus walks through to the inner chamber. He passes the Companions assembling in the holding area. Marked as ready, they draw up in perfect, silent rows, steady as statues in the amber light. From the arming chamber across the wide hallway outside, Caecaltus hears the chosen company of Imperial Fists Astartes taking their oath of moment. The voice of a Huscarl leads them. An instant timbre\/tone match with Caecaltus' mental archive identifies the voice as Diamantis. An adequately proficient warrior, for a Space Marine. Human voices, human customs. The Legio Custodes need no such rituals, no bold evocation to summon up courage.\n\nThe voices fade behind him. The proconsul reaches the inner chamber. Few are let in here. The armourers are finishing their work. From the threshold, Caecaltus finally sees something that causes him to register a flicker of emotion. His heart rate shifts imperceptibly for two or three seconds.\n\nThen he hears a step behind him and turns at once. His paragon spear sweeps instantly to 'guard' position.\n\n'You cannot be here,' he states simply.\n\n'But I am,' says Sanguinius, 'and you will let me pass.'\n\n2:xxii\n\nFate denied\n\nSanguinius stands fully armed and plated for war. He has never looked more regal or magnificent.\n\n'He will send for you when He is ready,' says the Custodes proconsul facing him.\n\n'I will see my father now, Companion,' Sanguinius replies.\n\n'You are defying His will.'\n\nSanguinius hesitates.\n\n'I am, Proconsul Caecaltus,' he admits.\n\nThe Sentinel does not move. His paragon spear is held more firmly and steadily than Sanguinius has ever seen a weapon proffered. The micro-muscular control of the Legio Custodes is extraordinary.\n\n'Proconsul,' says Sanguinius gently, 'I wish to explain myself to him, and I need to do that before-'\n\nHe pauses. He is aware of the others now. Four other senior Sentinels, summoned no doubt by the proconsul's neurosynergetics, have arrived behind him in complete silence. They have all come from the holding area. They are all members of the Anabasis protection company. They are all gloriously armed for war. They take their positions behind him, in a perfect half-moon suppression formation. Sanguinius hears the slow whine of charging Adrathics.\n\nSanguinius raises his hands, open, and shows them to the proconsul facing him. No threat, no weapon.\n\n'I will see my father now, Caecaltus,' he says very calmly and very clearly.\n\n'You are defying His will,' Caecaltus repeats.\n\n'Which is why I must see him now,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'He will send for you when-'\n\nSomething ripples in the air. The proconsul tilts his head for a moment, then nods, and steps aside.\n\nThe Bright Angel steps past him into the inner chamber.\n\nThe light inside is emerald, crossed by the white beams of focus-lights deployed by hovering servitors. The air holds the perfume of industrial incense.\n\nOh, my father...\n\nA telepathic signal has just dismissed the armourers, and they step back from their final refinements and adjustments. His father's wargear, as it flexes in test and evaluation, moves with the fluid perfection Sanguinius remembers from the fields of Ullanor. Years of expert crafting have refined and enhanced its systems and its subtle calibrations, and years more of finishing and fining have made it gleam and glow like molten gold. His father turns, and his scarlet mantle billows behind him, casting an impossible shadow across the floor of the arming chamber, like the rolling terminator of nightfall across the face of a world.\n\nHe has put on his new aspect. He is no longer Master of Mankind, or King-of-Ages. He has put away the symbolic masks of 'Lord of Terra' and 'father'. He has cast aside the graven idol, and the aspect of the idle king upon a golden throne, which he was obliged to wear for too long.\n\nHe is as Sanguinius first knew, as all the sons knew him, first-found onwards, in the glorious days of the beginning. He is again what they want him to be.\n\nThe warrior-monarch.\n\nThe Emperor.\n\nSanguinius' eyes widen, and he smiles. Then, as he becomes aware that the mighty proconsul and the other four Sentinels have sunk to their knees behind him, he bows his head in shame and humility.\n\nHe hears his father approach. He stands his ground, awaiting his rebuke. His polished, mended auramite plate conceals his lingering wounds.\n\nNo rebuke. Just a gentle question. Sanguinius looks up again.\n\n'No, I will not be Warmaster,' Sanguinius says. 'Not here, not now. I will not take the name. It is a tarnished symbol.'\n\nSomeone must stay. Someone must be seen to lead.\n\n'Fafnir Rann,' Sanguinius replies.\n\nRann is a great hero.\n\n'Or Aimery,' says Sanguinius. 'Or Azkaellon. Or Thane. Or Huscarl Archamus, Second Of That Name. Any one of them would command the hearts of all loyal men. Any one of them. And there are others besides. Amit, in his great fury. Diamantis. Any of the golden Warden-chiefs of the Custodes. Diocletian Coros would-'\n\nA small gesture cuts him short.\n\n You are refusing to stay?\n\n'I am insisting on going,' says Sanguinius.\n\n Is that not the same thing?\n\nA small, almost boyish smile crosses Sanguinius' face, partially masking the pain he is suffering.\n\n'No, father,' he replies. 'After everything we have endured, the day is here. I absolutely refuse to let you go alone. It is my right, just as it is the right and honour of Rogal and Constantin.'\n\nBehind the Angel primarch, on their knees, heads bowed, the five Sentinels Hetaeron listen, monitor, ready to react. Once more, the emotional turbulence of the late-born sons complicates the issue. They know their king's will profoundly well, for it is through that will alone that they function. It is never to be disobeyed.\n\nProconsul? Companions?\n\n'My king?' says Caecaltus.\n\nStand.\n\nCaecaltus rises. The other four rise with him.\n\nCompanions, elucidate my son. He does not listen to me.\n\nCaecaltus and the others fan out. They form a wide circle around the Angel, their guardian spears upright at their sides. Sanguinius eyes them warily.\n\n'My lord king could deny you, even now,' says Caecaltus, almost without inflection, as though the words are not his own and he is merely reporting them. 'He could cite the wounds that you think you have successfully concealed. You have not. You are too weak, too hurt.'\n\n'My king is even afraid that the injuries done to you by Angron are mortal,' says Companion Andolen, 'and that death has already got its grip on you.'\n\n'I will not listen to this,' says Sanguinius, glaring at the Sentinels. 'Not from them! Father, why do they speak for you?'\n\n'My king wanted you to stay to protect you,' Caecaltus continues, without hesitation. 'As a rallying figurehead for the Palace, you can ex"}
{"text":"u think you have successfully concealed. You have not. You are too weak, too hurt.'\n\n'My king is even afraid that the injuries done to you by Angron are mortal,' says Companion Andolen, 'and that death has already got its grip on you.'\n\n'I will not listen to this,' says Sanguinius, glaring at the Sentinels. 'Not from them! Father, why do they speak for you?'\n\n'My king wanted you to stay to protect you,' Caecaltus continues, without hesitation. 'As a rallying figurehead for the Palace, you can excel despite your wounds.'\n\n'You do not need to fight, or find new reserves of strength and fortitude,' says Companion Nmembo. 'You can simply be present and visible, a presence signifying inspiration.'\n\n'But to tell you that is to humiliate you,' says Companion Kliotan.\n\n'To remark upon your weakness, and your lack of fitness, to suggest your lord father is sparing you the effort of the onslaught to keep you out of harm's way,' says Companion Systratus, 'that would be hurtful.'\n\n'That would be the greatest shame you could know,' says Caecaltus.\n\nBut to face me, unflinching and defiant, shows your courage is not weak.\n\n'If you know all this, father, then you know that it is more than honour or reputation that drives me to defy you,' says Sanguinius.\n\nTell me what you saw.\n\nSanguinius hesitates.\n\nYour vision. Your foresight. The true reason you are so determined to join the assault.\n\n'If you know my visions, father, then you know already.'\n\nI do not see them as you do.\n\n'My king was alerted to your visions by the Sigillite,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'My king scarcely knows their detail or specific content,' says Companion Andolen.\n\n'My king only knows them as things that move upon you from time to time, like fever-fits,' says Companion Kliotan.\n\nTell me what you saw.\n\n'You already know,' Sanguinius replies.\n\nThis?\n\nSanguinius grimaces as a fevered, nightmare image passes through his mind.\n\n'No, father,' he says. 'I did not see you die. I did not see you fall. I do not demand to come so I can change that vision of heresy.'\n\nThe Angel blinks. A tiny tell, but enough. It wasn't that at all.\n\n'I foresaw a different death at the hands of Horus,' the Angel says, a whisper. 'I have been seeing it for a long time. I have worked to outplay the prediction at every turn, at every step of the way, each permutation, each possible version, as it has come upon me, I have evaded it and refused its truth. I have denied the prophesy several times. But the possible permutations diminish. It wasn't Signus. It wasn't Ultramar. It wasn't Gorgon Bar. It wasn't Eternity Gate. The possibilities are finite, and there is one remaining. It must be now. It must be the endgame and the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nYour death?\n\nSanguinius pauses. He nods.\n\nYou intend to go to see this fulfilled?\n\n'No, father. I intend to go to see it denied one last time.'\n\n'It is far too great a risk,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'No, proconsul! No!' Sanguinius declares. 'The alternative is a greater risk altogether!'\n\nHe stares at his Emperor-sire fiercely.\n\n'If it is ordained that I am to die at Lupercal's hand,' says Sanguinius, 'then I cannot let you go alone. Because that means that Horus will survive so he can come for me again, afterwards. Don't you see? If I stay, Horus lives. And if Horus lives, then you will have failed.'\n\nSanguinius-\n\n'I must face the last permutation. I must force it. I cannot allow for the possibility of another, for the cost to us will be too much.'\n\n'So you would go willingly to your doom?' asks Nmembo. 'Sacrifice yourself for-'\n\n'No.' Sanguinius has never sounded more sure. He has never sounded so much like his father. 'I intend to reject it. To defy it. To change it as I have changed it every time so far. Father, I will kill him myself if that's what it takes. But I cannot allow the permutations, now reduced to one, to breed and multiply again. I cannot allow a future with Horus in it.'\n\nSilence. The moment of quiet is so utter, it is uncanny.\n\n'My king, your father, has always called them configurations, not \"permutations\",' says Andolen softly. 'The models of the future He has set, refined and revised across the lifespan of mankind. They are always subject to variance.'\n\n'We make our future, and that future is only grim darkness if we fail to be wise and cunning, and refuse to reconfigure our designs to match the fluctuations of fate and the vicissitudes of history,' says Kliotan.\n\n'This has been my king's process since He first watched a man's fingers smudge paint on a wall,' says Systratus.\n\n'As if by some beautiful symmetry, and because you are His son and His blood, you have intuitively learned to do the same,' says Caecaltus. He pauses, and then adds, 'My king is proud.'\n\n But still, you gamble everything.\n\n'Yes,' says Sanguinius.\n\n You would walk knowingly towards death.\n\n'Yes,' says Sanguinius again. And he smiles.\n\n'My vision says that the day I face Horus is the day I die,' he says. 'So if I face him today, that day is here. But Malcador told us, father, as we stood in the Throne Room, he told us that time has ceased. Today is not today, or any day. We are caught in the un-now. Horus, father, will not kill me today, for there is no today. By the time a tomorrow comes, a tomorrow of any kind, Horus will be done, defeated by your wrath, and my vision will be voided. This is how I know fate can be denied. The permutation... the configuration... can be defied if we act together.'\n\nA nod. Permission.\n\n'Prepare to join your company, lord primarch,' says Caecaltus.\n\n2:xxiii\n\nThe last testament of the enemy\n\nThey are preparing to kill him.\n\n'Inevitably,' says Basilio Fo. He has been expecting it. There are only so many reprieves a man like him can expect to get (especially given what I've done). He has found loopholes before, proved his usefulness to postpone the hour of execution, but there may not be any left to find.\n\nHe waits, then, for the inevitable. He hears heavy footsteps approaching outside his chamber. The captain-general (a particularly vicious piece of work, in my unsolicited opinion) has granted him quarters in the depths of the Sanctum Imperialis. The last days of Fo's long life have been spent close to the very heart of things, barely eight kilometres from the Throne Room (barely eight kilometres from Him!). Fo wonders if He knows Fo is here. The Custodians are a strange breed. At times, they seem like automata, mere vulgar extensions of His arrogant will. But, at others, they seem oddly independent and secretive, as though they are working to an agenda of their own. (Am I kept a secret even from Him? Am I a highly confidential resource, a secret weapon project, like the device I made for them?)\n\nHe doubts it. The Emperor (and it is excruciating to use the inflated, grandiose title, though ultimately preferable to the even more objectionable pronoun, as if 'He' is the only 'Him' that anyone could ever, possibly be referring to) is omniscient, isn't He? Possessed of a 'mindsight' that perceives all? That's the myth He likes to sell, anyway. If there's any truth in it, surely He would be aware of Fo's proximity? And aware of what the captain-general's had him doing.\n\nBut if He does, it's surprising that He hasn't simply descended from on high in a pillar of flame, and reduced Fo to ashes. They never got on. Too many ideological differences. Too much (what is the phrase?) blood over the weir.\n\nThe quarters provided for him are very spare, so spare they barely earn the name 'quarters'. Fo has a cot, a chair, a basin, and he has been allowed a few books. There are no windows, and the door is kept locked. It's a cell, really, though of a better quality than that rancid hole in the Blackstone. Nearby, a short walk away under guard, is the small laboratorium where they let him work. No one has come to fetch him today (undoubtedly because they consider my work to be finished. The device is, after all, essentially complete, as a prototype form at least. In hindsight, I should probably have ignored the captain-general's demands for quick results, and spun the work out to keep myself indispensable). His quarters, the laboratorium, that's all he gets to see. Fo was free, briefly, thanks to the gene-witch, but now this is his entire world. Two rooms. He is in the greatest palace in the galaxy, the greatest treasure-store of learning, and he gets to see two small rooms of it.\n\nIt is, perhaps, the greatest and cruellest punishment of all, to be so very close to so much knowledge (He always did like His books) and yet not be able to touch it, or see it. Fo never expected to return to Terra. Never. He expected to die somewhere out in the stars, his name forgotten, his latest host-body finally expiring of old age or some systemic failure he lacked the technology to repair. When, once in a while, every couple of lifetimes during his long exile on Velich Tarn, he thought about Terra, Fo dreamed sad dreams of the world that he would have made from it, the future he would have shaped. Fo's Imperium would have been superior, a post-human extrapolation of the species devised along pure biomechanical lines, not this dystopian, hyper-militarised hierarchy. Fo would have eschewed any dependence on legacy genetics, psionics, and most especially the warp. He would not have called it an Imperium, and he most surely would not have declared himself Emperor.\n\nBut he'd lost that fight, lost it long ago, during the ferocious centuries of the Age of Strife. The Emperor had prevailed, and Fo had fled to the stars. And because, as the old adage says, history is written by the victors, the Emperor is now the saviour of mankind, and Fo is a war criminal, a monster, the personification of all the wrongs that the Emperor has come to make right.\n\nExcept, Fo wasn't wrong. The world is literally falling apart. Doom has come to Terra. Fo takes little satisfaction from that, but there is some vindication there. The Emperor's overweening scheme has brought about this calamity. His militarised"}
{"text":" had fled to the stars. And because, as the old adage says, history is written by the victors, the Emperor is now the saviour of mankind, and Fo is a war criminal, a monster, the personification of all the wrongs that the Emperor has come to make right.\n\nExcept, Fo wasn't wrong. The world is literally falling apart. Doom has come to Terra. Fo takes little satisfaction from that, but there is some vindication there. The Emperor's overweening scheme has brought about this calamity. His militarised hierarchy, His legacy genetics, His careless employment of psionics, His foolhardy dalliance with immaterial power; these things, the foundational principles of His Imperium, are precisely the elements that have brought about its fall. They have combined (with, deliciously, an elegant garnish of hubris) in a perfect hellstorm. This end, this death, is His doing. It is exactly the catastrophe Fo predicted and fought against.\n\nVindication is a small consolation, something to cling to and smile about as he waits for the end. Fo won't die alongside the rest of mankind, even though that annihilation can be no more than hours away. He will already be dead, because they are coming to kill him.\n\nDoes he have regrets? Some: that no one ever listened to him; that he didn't prevail in the Age of Strife and divert this benighted future; that he never got the chance to look Him in the eye and say, 'I told you so.' Nothing worth stewing over. What's done is done. If Fo has any real regret at all, it's that he did, against all expectation, return to Terra but, once there, he never got a chance to examine the wealth of knowledge and advancement that had accumulated in his absence. That would have been the only reason ever to return: a few days, left to his own devices, in His libraries.\n\nThe footsteps stop outside his door. Fo hears a voice, and the activation of a key. The inner hatch opens with a sigh, sleeving into the wall.\n\nHis executioner enters.\n\n2:xxiv\n\nBeyond reason\n\nThe air throbs. The lights are dimming to half power. In the great basalt vaults nearby, the mass teleport platforms are being drawn to power.\n\nThey walk into the holding area, father and son. They are flanked by the proconsul and his four impassive Sentinels Hetaeron.\n\nThe light smokes in the dim, heavy air as they halt in the centre of the chamber. Around them, the four companies of Anabasis stand assembled: the burnished Cataphractii, the assault squads, the Terminators, the majestic Sanguinary Guard, Dorn and the Huscarl Praetorians, Valdor and his towering Custodes, Raldoron and the Blood Angels, Diamantis and the Imperial Fists, all geared and plated for war, all in panoply as beautiful as it is terrifying. All bow their heads in reverence.\n\nThe Emperor has returned and stands among them.\n\n'One last question,' Sanguinius says.\n\n Why do we suffer?\n\nSanguinius laughs in surprise that he is not really surprised at all.\n\n'You know my question before I ask it?' he says.\n\n Of course.\n\n'It is in the forefront of your thoughts,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'It is the bedrock of your mind,' says Systratus.\n\n Ask it.\n\n'Very well,' says Sanguinius. 'Why do we suffer? Knowing the trials and pain we would face, why did you make us to suffer?'\n\n Because whatever we are and whatever we do, we are, and must always be, human.\n\n'That simple?' Sanguinius asks.\n\n'Nothing is simple,' says Proconsul Caecaltus. 'But my king vowed to the Sigillite that He would answer your questions as they came. So, understand. Suffering, pain, grief, they are all extremities of the human condition.'\n\n'It would have been too easy to shed those things,' says Andolen, 'to excise them, to remove the messy and illogical mechanisms of emotional response, those non-verbal animal reactions of our early hominid forms.'\n\n'My king could have made his sons, and their warrior-sons too, without emotion,' says Nmembo, 'freed from feeling, concern or care, unburdened by hurt and loss and sadness, coldly proofed against the galaxy with a biological armour stronger than any ceramite plate.'\n\n'But that would have made them less,' says Systratus.\n\n'That would have made them mere flesh-machines,' says Kliotan, 'bloodlessly cold, and driven only by instruction and intellect.'\n\n'Even we, His Companions, woven by a different craft, were not forged to lack that spark,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'But, what? You just hide it better?' asks Sanguinius wryly.\n\nCaecaltus makes a grudging shrug.\n\n'But isn't rationality the very essence of your working?' Sanguinius asks his father.\n\n Most certainly.\n\n'And the feeling heart and the hurting soul can be an impediment at times,' says Systratus.\n\n'It was for the aeldari, as we understand it,' says Kliotan.\n\n'Reason, and rationalist stability, and the empirical operation of high science, these must be our unshakable touchstones,' says Andolen.\n\n'Then what? You strove for a balance when you made us?' Sanguinius asks, frowning.\n\nIt was more than that.\n\n'I realise it is a hard question to answer,' says Sanguinius. 'Even for you. Even with a mouthpiece as articulate as the proconsul. Forgive me, I-'\n\nHe stops short.\n\nThe world has altered, without warning. The holding area has gone, the proud companies of war vanished. Sanguinius realises he is being granted his answer after all. He is being shown it, a symbolic answer blending signs and devices, his gift of foresight commandeered by his father's will to display a last personal, privileged vision, exclusively shaped for his eyes alone. The powerful telempathic rapport enfolds him for a second, sharing memories that run back deep into time. It is immersive, more than any vision he has previously experienced in his life, and bewildering at first. The shift of scale, of intellect and perception, is giddying. Stars of all magnitude, each one singing its eternal electromagnetic song, circle him slowly in void without end or edge. He is not sure what he is supposed to be seeing, or how to decipher it.\n\n'Father?'\n\nThen, slowly, he begins to see. Meaning, structure, the long, tenuous thread of a plan.\n\nHe sees a world below him. It is perfect and bright, its vivid blues and greens mantled with lace of white cloud as dazzling as ice.\n\nTerra. No, no. He begins to understand better. Terra, before it was Terra. Old Earth.\n\nYoung Earth. A species upon it. A species in its youth, young, virile, headstrong and rash, but brimming with potential, far from perfect, but with the capacity to be so much.\n\nThis is the start point. Time begins to spin like a wheel, accelerating. It begins to play out its thread, fast and faster. Sanguinius catches his breath. It's too fast, too fast for him to follow. Histories flicker past, like fire-cast shadows dancing on the wall of a cave, occasionally, almost subliminally, illuminating some mark or image painted there. A figure. An animal. A city. A handprint.\n\nIt's all too quick for him to comprehend, too fast, too much.\n\nExcept, he realises, he does follow. He does understand.\n\n'I am...' he murmurs, 'I am-'\n\nI am the end product of centuries of a Great Work, he comprehends, marvelling. Me, my brothers, our sons, all of our kind, we are the culmination of a Great Work, and that work is nothing less than the salvation of human biology. I see the beautiful young world below has grown older and darker now, stained with damage and woe. The void around me has grown blacker, suffocating. The Ages of Strife and Long Night have come and gone, woefully damaging the human genome. It has fallen prey to grim genetic drift and degenerative mutation rates. The Great Work is not just to unify Terra and rebuild the infrastructure of empire, it is to rebuild the human vessel itself. To repair molecular codes, to arrest mutation and, where necessary, select for positive trait alterations.\n\nPinprick specks of light flicker on the surface of the world, increasing in number, like the first shoots of spring from hard winter ground. They multiply. They flicker out among the stars too. They are minds. Psykers, proliferating unchecked, are a deeply destructive flaw, but the emergent Navigators are essential. Sanctioned genetic reconstitution is crucial for human growth, and in pursuing it, my father reaches a profound understanding of human biological structure and function.\n\nAeons subdivide. Centuries turn over, one by one, like tarot cards on a table. As they turn, rationality has to remain paramount, but emotions, though unruly and forever unpredictable, are still mankind's greatest assets. Long years of neuro research show my father this beyond doubt. The human mind is an astoundingly powerful instrument. We are capable of almost anything. But without emotions, we would permanently operate at capacity, even when performing simple tasks. If our minds were machines, they would have to be filled to the brim with exhaustive, pre-programmed, pre-set instructions for every possible eventuality. This processing would demand a level of energy that no human, or even post-human, could ever maintain.\n\n'That is the function of feeling?' Sanguinius asks, intrigued, his voice tiny in the vastness of the memories that shift around him. It is as though he is at last making sense of himself.\n\nNow cells subdivide in place of aeons. The arch of heaven, the Milky Way, is a gene helix. Lives pass by, like the ticking of a clock, so very swift, each one filled with joy and sorrow, love and loss, success and failure.\n\nEmotions are the very root of our supremacy as an organic species. Arising not from the cortex, but from root brainstem consciousness, they are reactive, and function as short-cuts to decision. They facilitate rapid thought and resolution, bypassing processed perception. We think and then act because we feel first. Emotions emancipate our minds, allowing for spontaneous and intuitive cognition, and they remove the need for densely pre-programmed brains. Emotions are symbols, instantly bypassing conscious decision and conveying more than words can ever manage.\n\n'So the"}
{"text":" not from the cortex, but from root brainstem consciousness, they are reactive, and function as short-cuts to decision. They facilitate rapid thought and resolution, bypassing processed perception. We think and then act because we feel first. Emotions emancipate our minds, allowing for spontaneous and intuitive cognition, and they remove the need for densely pre-programmed brains. Emotions are symbols, instantly bypassing conscious decision and conveying more than words can ever manage.\n\n'So they are fundamental, not vestigial traits?' Sanguinius wonders, fascinated.\n\nThe memory rapport fades. Sanguinius feels the loss of it. He has never felt so safe anywhere, or so intimately enfolded. He has never felt his father's mind so close.\n\nThey are still in the holding area. All heads around them are still bowed. Not even a second has passed, and no one has noticed the tiny interruption.\n\n'Quite fundamental,' Caecaltus replies. 'They make us what we are. To create the primarchs and the Astartes without emotions would have doomed us to stagnation, indecision and failure.'\n\n'The very things, those unique, individual qualities that made Horus Lupercal turn, are the same traits that will allow you to triumph,' says Systratus.\n\n'My king, your father, would no more have made His sons without emotion than He would have removed them from Himself,' says Caecaltus. 'And He could have done both.'\n\n'He considered that?' asks Sanguinius.\n\n'Of course,' says Caecaltus. 'He rationally weighed every option. Anyway, there is your answer. That is why we suffer.'\n\nWe suffer because it is the sad but necessary consequence of our ability to prevail.\n\n'Then I thank you,' Sanguinius says.\n\nFor the explanation?\n\nSanguinius shakes his head.\n\n'For the curious gift of humanity. I have been called a god, father. I have been called an Angel, and looked upon as divine. I would rather the vulnerability of a warm and feeling heart than the cold mettle of a deathless god.'\n\nThe others approach: Rogal, adorned in shining golden plate inlaid with chrome and amber, and Constantin, caparisoned in lacquered auramite. Behind them, the assembled host stands ready, four companies of the most superlative warriors the galaxy has ever known.\n\nAnd the most capable. Sanguinius understands that now.\n\n'My Emperor, the platforms await,' Rogal says.\n\nThe hum of power rises. The lights flicker.\n\nThe Emperor of Mankind unsheathes his sword.\n\n2:xxv\n\nFate proves cruel\n\nIn the Rotunda, the lights go out. There is a distant bang of mass discharge, a quake of overpressure that seems to shake the whole Palace, and a sudden stink of ozone. Consoles fail, and several hololith plates crack and craze spontaneously. After a moment, emergency power cuts in, and the chamber is lit by a ruddy glow for several seconds until main power returns.\n\nSandrine Icaro consults her data-slate, checks for confirmation, and then steps onto the central podium.\n\n'Attention!' she shouts. 'Your attention!'\n\nThe voices around her drop to silence. Every face turns.\n\n'Notification,' she announces. 'Teleport event confirmed as complete and optimal. Anabasis assault is underway and running.'\n\nThere is a burst of applause. Some present look upward involuntarily.\n\n'Get to work!' she yells, climbing down.\n\nAt station nineteen, Tactician Jonas Gaston tries to get Icaro's attention, but she is surrounded by War Court seniors. The Gilded Walk has just fallen and immediate responses must be decided. Sidozie, of the Chosen, sees Gaston's agitation, and crosses to him.\n\n'Situation?' Sidozie asks. The young man is junior, inexperienced, drafted in at short notice to plug a gap left after Bhab. He is clearly close to panic.\n\n'A signal, sir,' he begins, one hand pressed to his earpiece.\n\nSidozie checks the display. Gaston is manning overwatch and deep listening, monitoring traitor fleet operations in the hope of intercepting command transmissions.\n\n'A signal?'\n\n'Very broken... very faint...' Gaston says.\n\nSidozie plugs his augmetics into the station system and listens for himself. A reedy, scratchy whisper, like the scrape of twigs. He moves Gaston aside, and adjusts the filters with expert precision. He listens again.\n\nGaston sees the look on his face.\n\nSidozie increases gain to maximum, until the audio backwash is almost deafening. He strains to hear.\n\n'...Repeat, we are nine hours out. Nine hours out. Deploying now to wide formation assault positions, inbound. Terra Control, do you receive? Terra Control, can you respond? Repeat, we are nine hours out. Terra Control, respond. We need immediate tracking guidance. Light your beacons. We are extending to wide assault formation. Terra, hold your positions. Remain in secure defensive alignment. Hold your positions. That's all you need to do. Just hold. Repeat, we are nine hours out. Terra Control, respond. Acknowledge. Hold your positions and light guidance now. Terra Control, this is Guilliman...'\n\n'Oh, shit,' stammers Sidozie. 'Oh shit.'\n\nHe turns. He starts to bellow Icaro's name.\n\n2:xxvi\n\nIn ruins\n\nAs they charge towards the pitiful bulwarks and dug-outs before Radium Gate, the Imperial Fists hit their flank hard from the left. What was already havoc deteriorates into a savage, running melee in the smoke and the howling, cyclonic filth. Bodies crash into bodies, blades swing and smash, and armour buckles. The liquid mud is a foot deep, and splashes high as bodies topple into it. An Imperial Fist with twin axes, so doused in blood his yellow armour looks more like the plate worn by the IX, drives through the wheeling mayhem, removing heads and limbs. The Neverborn are screeching in the smoke-pall. Bolters bark and bang.\n\nThe Imperial Fist, roaring, takes down Itha Clathis of Second Company with a blow that sounds like a sledgehammer hitting tin, and sends blood and fragments of bone into the air in a stupendous, arcing fountain. He knocks Kaltos of Second aside with a glancing strike, then comes at Tyro Gamex of Third, gore stringing from his blades. Another figure blocks his path, intercepting him with an impact like two armoured transports colliding head-on.\n\nEzekyle Abaddon, First Captain of the Sons of Horus, wrenches out his blade. His foe is dead. Fafnir Rann is dead.\n\nAbaddon crouches in the steaming mud, and tears off the corpse's helmet. No. Not Rann, after all. An Imperial Fist, one of the VII, but not Rann. In the confusion of the melee, he thought it was. And the man fought well, which seemed to confirm Abaddon's identification.\n\nBut it's not him. That trophy is yet to be taken.\n\nAbaddon rises. Sons of Horus, giants in dirt-sullied plate, explode through the smoke past him, splashing forward, charging the line. Bolters open up, sustained fire. The smoke jumps with flashes and shadows. The weak, improvised defence of Radium Gate mounted by the Imperial Fists is about to collapse as fast as the Gilded Walk resistance. Dorn's master touch is gone. They are a shambles, rudderless, lacking cohesion, lacking strategy, reduced to impulsive and helplessly reactive efforts of repulse. Abaddon has lost count of the figures in yellow, red and white he has butchered today.\n\nThere is shame in this. It is not the victory he dreamed of, or the triumph he desired. Too much has been accomplished by infernal processes, by startling Neverborn atrocities that have exploded out of polluted darkness and thin air, or sprouted from the buckling ground. Not enough, not nearly enough, has been done the way he was taught. He may mock the Praetorians for their loss of military precision, but where is his? Abaddon is a warrior. He wanted to take the Palace with militant perfection and exemplary soldiering.\n\nBut this is no longer, in any way, a soldier's war.\n\nHe is sick at heart, sick to the gut. They have brought horror, and become horror. This was not the way his father ever practised, and it is not the victory his father promised.\n\nAbaddon halts, lowering his blade. The Sons of Horus continue to stream past him on either side, bellowing in glee, giving themselves entirely to the weaponised insanity of the fall of Terra. Despoilers all.\n\nLet them finish it. Let them take the Gate and dismember the defenders. He starts to trudge back up the broken slope, through the choking waft of ash, towards what passes for their forward command position. The vox clicks in his ear again. It's been doing that for half an hour, longer perhaps. Not the incoherent back-chatter of the mob, a signal: someone trying to contact him long-range. But the channels are washed out, or jammed, and each time he's tried to answer it, there's been nothing but garbled sounds and white noise.\n\nAt the line, where the Sons of Horus' spiked banners are pitched like the lank sails of funeral barges, the Mechanicum of the war-steads are arriving, leading columns of barbaric killing engines and rumbling saurian breacher-rams. Clain Pent, Fifth Disciple of Nul, stands aloft on the gibbet-balcony of a vast, tusked war engine, his limbs writhing like some manic conductor at a rostrum, orchestrating the advance and deployment via noospheric gesture. Eyet-One-Tag of Epta motions to Abaddon from her palanquin.\n\n'First Captain,' she says, a human mouth framed and crowned by augmetic sensor-blisters. 'There is a repeated signal-'\n\n'I am aware,' he growls.\n\n'You do not respond?'\n\n'My system is jammed-'\n\n'Then avail yourself of my devices,' she invites.\n\nMastervox instruments are rolled forward in the acid rain. Adepts fuss and simper around them, cleaning dials. Abaddon takes a proffered plug and connects it to his suit sockets.\n\n'Abaddon,' he says.\n\n'Ezekyle, at last!'\n\nIt is Argonis. He sounds scared.\n\n'Are you still orbital?' Abaddon asks, puzzled.\n\n'Yes, yes. I've been trying to reach you. Trying for hours-'\n\n'Just speak, equerry.'\n\n'The voids, Abaddon. The voids-'\n\n'What of them?'\n\n'He's lowered them. He's lowered the voids.'\n\n'What voids? Who has?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'Lupercal, Abaddon. Lupercal has lowered the void shields "}
{"text":"ound them, cleaning dials. Abaddon takes a proffered plug and connects it to his suit sockets.\n\n'Abaddon,' he says.\n\n'Ezekyle, at last!'\n\nIt is Argonis. He sounds scared.\n\n'Are you still orbital?' Abaddon asks, puzzled.\n\n'Yes, yes. I've been trying to reach you. Trying for hours-'\n\n'Just speak, equerry.'\n\n'The voids, Abaddon. The voids-'\n\n'What of them?'\n\n'He's lowered them. He's lowered the voids.'\n\n'What voids? Who has?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'Lupercal, Abaddon. Lupercal has lowered the void shields on the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nAbaddon pauses. Toxic rain and liquid mud trickle off his visor.\n\n'Are you still there? Ezekyle?'\n\n'Say that again,' says Abaddon.\n\nPART THREE\n\nTHE DAY WILL NOT SAVE THEM\n\n3:i\n\nA warp-twisted hell\n\nThe abrupt silence is shocking.\n\nIt puzzles Caecaltus Dusk for a second, until he realises it just feels like silence because he is so accustomed to the distant, constant drone of war.\n\nAt my post in the Throne Room, day after day, the faraway rumble of warfare was so unremitting, I became inured to it, and inhabited it without regard. But here-\n\nIn a shiver, the background drone has gone, and only silence remains, a fossil imprint of missing sound.\n\nThe silence, the utter stillness, is tranquilising. Caecaltus feels numb. For a moment, the proconsul has to remember - actively, consciously force himself to remember - where they are and what they have come to do.\n\nWe have come to strike. We have come to undertake the solemn business of war against-\n\nAround him, the golden demigods of the Hetaeron company are silent too, as though they, like Caecaltus, are unnerved by the sudden quiet. None of them has experienced the thunderclap of their arrival, for the savage boom of mass and pressure displacement was over by the time they were fully materialised. Vapour drifts from their armoured forms, teleport energy dissipates like forest mist, and sparks of recorporealisation backwash circle them like fireflies.\n\nProconsul Caecaltus takes a step forwards. Companions advance around him, spears aimed. As they begin to move, transmaterial dust residue sifts from their plate like flour. They move quickly. They move silently. They move in perfect coordination, spears raised. They encircle the almost luminous figure of their king and master, ready to protect Him from-\n\nWhat was I expecting? Anything. Everything. But-\n\nThere is no attack, no ambush, no host of warriors waiting to repel their boarding action.\n\nIf this is a trap, and the Praetorian Seventh son was so sure it would be, then it is either an odd one or a poor one.\n\nThe assault site selected for the spearhead is Embarkation Deck Two, and that is where they are. It is a vast chamber, part hangar, part launch tunnel. The distant mouth of it, a kilometre away, shows the cold blackness of space, held at bay by integrity fields. Caecaltus turns slowly, surveying the long plasteel flight ramps, where guide lights blink on automatic, the raised galleries and skeletal gantries, the side holding bays, the munition silos. Above them, the immense manipulator gears and ship-clamps hang like ornithological limbs, grasps empty. Around them, on the launch rails and standing platforms, the Stormbirds are rigged for preflight. There are eight of them. They are painted white, and marked with the emblems of the XVI Legion Luna Wolves.\n\nI would have thought they might be re-dressed by now in their new traitor liveries. I am surprised, indeed, that there are any here. Were they not all deployed, long since?\n\nCaecaltus approaches the nearest launch stand, with Kliotan to his right and Andolen to his left.\n\nWhy is there no one here? The Stormbirds are rigged and ready, but ready for what?\n\nHe looks up at the sleek lines of the nearest craft.\n\nThe huge transatmospheric drop-craft were the backbone of all Imperial assaults during the crusade to remake the galaxy. Fine, trustworthy, graceful machines from an earlier time, their kind is now slowly being replaced by more functional delivery vehicles. Warmaster Lupercal has kept his in perfect condition.\n\nAnd with them, from this deck and the other five like it on this mighty flagship, the Warmaster conquered half the stars in his father's name. From here, the ceramite deck plates beneath my feet, the Warmaster's sons set out, oaths of moment sworn, and accomplished deeds of valour and skill that aligned the peace of the Imperium. Sometimes, I was with them. I may even have gone to war in some of these very machines. I remember escorting my master on a war-drop in Stormbird Three during the Gorro Undertaking. Is that one of these?\n\nCaecaltus begins to look for the tail-number insignia-\n\nHe stops himself short.\n\nHow am I allowing distraction into my mind? How am I sidelined by memory and nostalgia?\n\nWhere is my focus?\n\nWe have achieved primary site-to-site. I lead a company of one hundred Custodians in support of my master, who has drawn for war for the first time since the secret conflict in the webway.\n\nWhy can't I concentrate?\n\nNo one comes. Nothing moves. The deck is empty of figures, except the Lord of Terra and His Hetaeron. There is no sign of damage or decay, no dirt or spent casings from rapid turnaround and refit. The lights glow pearlescent. Atmospheric processors hum at the frontier of hearing. Fuel lines are still connected. On consoles and wall plates, screeds of luminous data flicker and shift silently.\n\nIf this was a ceremonial inspection, my master would pass the Warmaster's scrupulous presentation with approval, and commend his deck crews and servitor chiefs.\n\nBut it is not. It is not! This is the solemn business of war, not-\n\nThere are no servitors either. Not even dormant units in the charging racks of the side bays. Just the haunted, echo-less serenity of a shiftship holding orbit. It is almost hypnotic.\n\nThe proconsul's Custodes, golden phantoms, edge forwards and fan out wider, spears raised for instant reaction. In their midst, the Master of Mankind steps with them. Silence prevails. There is no ambient vox-chatter, nothing on the link, no noospherics, no psykanic activity. Everything is a soft, doughy emptiness.\n\nHow has our arrival not been detected? A bulk-teleport assault... the energy signature of that, and the contiguous heat-flare, that should have registered on the ship's sensoria like a missile strike-\n\nNo alarms sound. No warning detectors blink. There is no noise of activity, of armoured figures rushing in response.\n\nIs this ship empty?\n\nCaecaltus tightens his grip on his paragon spear. He feels something welling inside him. With frank astonishment, he realises it is fear.\n\nI haven't known fear in centuries. Fear was an old friend, but we no longer speak, for I have no business with him any more.\n\nYet here he is.\n\nThe Stormbird on its launch rack to his right, its tail stencil is eight. Caecaltus thought it was three for a second, but no-\n\nI thought we would be transporting into a warp-twisted hell, not this. I can't-\n\nNo noospherics. No vox. Not even a hint of immaterial activity. This chamber is as null-sterile as the vaults of the Sisterhood. How-\n\nWhere are we? I can't-\n\nCaecaltus looks at his warriors, silent, auramite giants stalking forward against the bathing whiteness of the deck.\n\nDon't they feel it too? Don't they-\n\nThe lights on the launching ramp wink on auto-cycle, blinking a pathway to blackness.\n\nWhere are Dorn and the captain-general and my lord's beloved Angel? Where are their companies? What-\n\nEverything seems slow. Like a dream. Like a heavy dream. The silence glides into him, oppressive, like the shadow of the void, the deep, cosmic mono-note of the celestial deeps. Can-\n\nWhy can't I focus?\n\nCaecaltus sees the main internal hatch, a bulwark of steel and adamantine. Embarkation Deck VIII is fusion-engraved across it.\n\nMy mouth is dry. I-\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit only has six embarkation decks.\n\nCaecaltus should have noticed all of this. All of it. He was primed and alert, ready - perhaps readier than he has ever been - for the trial ahead of them. He should have noticed these discrepancies the second he arrived. But his mind is like sludge, like jelly-\n\nI should have seen-\n\nCaecaltus turns to look at Sentinel-Warden Kliotan at his right. He feels like he is moving in slow motion, suspended in thick fluid. None of them have spoken since their arrival. Whatever else might have broken the oppressive silence, their vox-link should be live.\n\nThere should have been immediate hortcode exchange and voice confirmation on arrival. My helm display is dead-\n\nOnly now, Caecaltus notices that too.\n\nKliotan turns to look at him. It is very slow. It takes a century for his crested golden helm to turn. Others turn too. The proconsul's Custodians all turn to look at him. They are as slow as sap, as slow as continental drift, as slow as the very slowest setting of a pict playback. They turn to look at him-\n\nNo, not at me. They are all turning to look at the Master of Mankind-\n\nBlood wells from Sentinel-Warden Kliotan's eye slits and trickles down his faceplate like tears. It oozes and runs from the snarling mouth of his sculpted visor.\n\nWhat is this-\n\nIt runs from the eyes of all the warriors around them. Caecaltus feels himself weeping blood too-\n\nWhat's happening-\n\nThe slow silence ends.\n\nSuddenly, there is nothing but screaming. Suddenly, the world is a blur of lightning-fast movement.\n\nThey come for Him. Weeping blood and shrieking, the Master of Mankind's own guardians come at Him from all sides.\n\n3:ii\n\n888\n\n'Try it again,' says Sandrine Icaro. Her voice is brittle and sharp.\n\nThe Hegemon's Rotunda is hushed, but for the murmur of instrumentation and the occasional warble of an alert. No one speaks.\n\n'Negative vox,' says the War Court officer at main communication at last. 'Negative noospheric link. Negative trace signal or transponder locator. Negative lock on teleport marker beacons.'\n\n'Keep trying,' says Icaro. 'Ten-second cycle. They must be alerted to the situation change. They... He has to kno"}
{"text":"'Try it again,' says Sandrine Icaro. Her voice is brittle and sharp.\n\nThe Hegemon's Rotunda is hushed, but for the murmur of instrumentation and the occasional warble of an alert. No one speaks.\n\n'Negative vox,' says the War Court officer at main communication at last. 'Negative noospheric link. Negative trace signal or transponder locator. Negative lock on teleport marker beacons.'\n\n'Keep trying,' says Icaro. 'Ten-second cycle. They must be alerted to the situation change. They... He has to know of Ultramar's approach.'\n\nAnd we have to know, thinks Ilya, watching from her station. We have to know if they even got there. The data reported by Lion's Gate port is deeply concerning. It suggests that all augury scans and sensoria reports are dubious at best, falsified or unreliably incomplete. Anabasis assault should have been called off. But who tells Him that He cannot do something?\n\nThere should be joy, the first real joy in months, a renewed hope of salvation. The Emperor has risen to lead the final fight, and the liberating fleets of the last, loyal sons, in all their fury, are but nine hours out.\n\nBut there is no way of confirming the signal from Guilliman, and no way of answering. The avenging sons come too late anyway, for their father has already committed and passed the point of no return. And, though nine hours close, the vengeance fleet is blind. It cannot find Terra in the warp storm wracking the Solar Realm, and Terra has no beacon to light to show it the way.\n\nIlya looks at the stations nearby, where senior tacticians have been analysing auspex returns and detection grid metadata since she first brought the issue regarding Target Principal to Icaro's attention. Sidozie also has two seniors running a forensic review of the teleport pattern log.\n\nOne of them suddenly signals to Sidozie. The Chosen reviews his data-slate, then hurries it across to Icaro. Ilya just gets out of her seat and follows him. She's at Sidozie's side when he presents the findings to Icaro. Icaro doesn't even bother sending Ilya back to her station. She is at the very edge now. Ilya can see it in her, the frantic, milling spiral of panic.\n\n'What does this mean?' Icaro asks Sidozie.\n\n'It's a transmission report coding,' says the Chosen. 'It is appended to all teleportation transfers. One-one-one, for example, signifies successful transfer, with complete materialisation integrity, at selected destination and-'\n\n'I know that!' Icaro snaps. 'What is this? What is eight-eight-eight?'\n\n'We... aren't sure, mistress,' says Sidozie. 'It appears to be an archaic error signature, usually expressing a teleport failure due to insufficient power. Either that, or it's some invasive scrap code.'\n\n'What are you saying?' Icaro asks. 'Are they still here? Is He still here? Did they not transfer?'\n\n'They are not here,' Sidozie replies. 'Throne Room confirms this. Power level discharge was also confirmed as optimal on all bulk teleport platforms. But we are also unable to hard-fix Target Principal.'\n\n'But it's right there. Shields down. Wide open.'\n\n'It appears to be, mistress. But, with repeated attempts, we cannot acquire solid target or location solutions on it.'\n\nIcaro looks at him.\n\n'What the hell does that mean?' she asks. 'What the hell does eight-eight-eight signify?'\n\n'It means, mistress,' he replies, 'we have absolutely no idea where Anabasis assault went. We have no idea where He is.'\n\n3:iii\n\nVigil\n\nDespite the intense glare, it is possible to see the drops of blood trickling from the Sigillite's tear ducts.\n\nVulkan doesn't want to look. The light radiating from the Golden Throne and the figure upon it is too bright, and too sickly, and it chills him to see the old Regent in such extraordinary, silent pain.\n\nBut he must look. A last vigil. The most important of all.\n\nThe Throne Room has been emptied of all but key personnel. The Concillium adepts fuss at their tasks, nursing the wheezing stability engines. The Throne itself, radiating light like a miniature sun, sings. It is a high, constant note, a harmonic vibration, a fingertip running around the edge of a glass, but amplified to a level that could crack stone.\n\nVulkan wonders how long Malcador will be able to maintain control. How long can a man last like that? The energies pulsing through the Throne would cremate a mortal soul in seconds. Malcador is no ordinary mortal, but he is nothing compared to Vulkan's father, and Vulkan knows how grievously his father suffered in that seat.\n\nMalcador sits fixed, rigid, still as the stone effigy on the lid of a tomb, but for the spasmodic twitch of his hands and the tremble of his eyelids. His eyes have rolled back, showing only white. His mouth is slack, as though palsied. His skin, it seems to Vulkan, is beginning to crack, like the dry pages of an ancient book.\n\nThe Sigillite has not spoken since he took the Throne. Vulkan didn't expect him to. He knew the focus required for operation was so onerous that there would be nothing spare to give. But Vulkan found himself anticipating something. The Sigillite was ever an ingenious man, with power to match his cunning. Vulkan never liked him much, but he has always admired him. The Regent had such a breadth of learning, and such a hunger for knowledge. Vulkan suspects that one of the reasons, beyond loyalty and necessity, that Malcador took the Throne was that it would offer him a chance to see, to truly see, for one lethal but spectacular instant, the greatest knowledge of all. To operate the Golden Throne is to open one's mind entirely to the etheric structures of the universe, and Malcador has an exceptionally potent mind. The Regent's only task is to regulate the dangerously hypertensive webway, but in enhancing the Sigillite's ability to do that, the Throne would also grant him a unique perspective. Mindsight, foresight, farsight and all other aspects of psykana would be amplified, providing a metaphysical insight that, Vulkan imagines, borders on omniscience. Thus would be unveiled the invisible underpinnings of fragile realspace, the deep and eternal conjunction of materium and immaterium, the ephemeral patterns of the warp, things that Vulkan, in all his journeys and all his years, has never witnessed.\n\nVulkan had been secretly convinced that the Sigillite would communicate something, or at least try. If not words, then a sign of some sort. Where Vulkan's father is infamous for withholding, and only ever alluded to things the Throne had allowed him to see, Malcador would want to share. Sitting there, in silent agony, he is surely learning things, more and more, with every passing second, things that could undoubtedly assist the war.\n\nWhat could he be perceiving? The dispositions of the enemy? Radical techniques of defence? Esoteric methods of combating the Neverborn? Surely, all those things and more. Malcador, who, as Rogal Dorn's silent partner, had orchestrated the fundamental mechanics of the siege and every stage of their obsidional tactics, now has a superlative vantage. He can see all of the everything he could never see before.\n\nVulkan was certain that Malcador would be dying to communicate that, to use his insight to steer them, with utmost expertise, through the final battle.\n\nInstead, he just seems to be dying. Forever.\n\nVulkan looks to the side. Abidemi has approached. The Salamanders Draaksward bows his head.\n\n'Any word?' Vulkan asks.\n\n'No, my Lord of Drakes,' replies Abidemi. 'The teleport chambers report transfer, and Hegemon Control confirms it. Anabasis assault is deployed.'\n\n'But?'\n\n'No contact, lord. My agents in Hegemon Control report some consternation.'\n\n'Regarding?'\n\n'Nothing official, my lord. But there are concerns that the situation was the trap our Praetorian suspected. Indeed, there is great doubt as to exactly where your brothers and our lord your father have gone.'\n\n'Teleport signal capture? Redirection?'\n\n'Perhaps. There is no data. They may be aboard the Spirit now, or the Spirit itself may have been a bluff.'\n\nVulkan looks back at the figure in the Throne.\n\n'I think he knows,' he says.\n\n'The Lord Sigillite?'\n\nVulkan nods. His jawline clenches. 'I think he knows and he wants to tell us. I think he's desperate to tell us.'\n\n'Why, my lord?'\n\n'Look at his mouth, Atok. See? The way it twitches, now and then? A shiver of the lips. I think he's trying to tell us something and he simply cannot.'\n\nAbidemi hesitates.\n\n'My lord,' he says, 'you should withdraw to a safer distance. It is too dangerous to be this close to the Throne for long.'\n\nVulkan nods, and sends the Draaksward back from the heat of the glare. He takes one last look before following.\n\n'What are you seeing, Sigillite?' Vulkan murmurs. 'What are you seeing? Everything? Nothing? Or the broken fragments of our demise?'\n\n3:iv\n\nFragments\n\nIt is the end, and not the end. The death, and not the death. The final fortress of Terra's Palace has less than a day of life left in it, but that day will never end. Linear time has gone, replaced by the warp's un-when. The vortical fury of the consuming flames will rage forever, and the very act of dying, even on the Golden Throne itself, has become immortal.\n\nDemigod corpses litter the Gilded Walk, the Clanium Precinct, and the splintered ferrocrete wastes around the Palatine Ring. The corpses wear war plate, fabulously wrought, of yellow and red, white and gold. Inside each suit of war plate are bones and meat and rapidly cooling blood, and the end of dreams and duties and proud principles. Each corpse is an oath kept, a moment over. Each one is an ended history of prestigious deeds and courage that knew no fear. Each one contains a life story that no one will ever tell, for the remembrancers are all gone. There have been no last words, no final testaments, no mortal declarations. No one is left alive to harvest, with narthecium and tender surgical reductor, their progenoid seed, a thousand times as precious, by gram, than tritium. Each demigod has died alone, unhear"}
{"text":"ud principles. Each corpse is an oath kept, a moment over. Each one is an ended history of prestigious deeds and courage that knew no fear. Each one contains a life story that no one will ever tell, for the remembrancers are all gone. There have been no last words, no final testaments, no mortal declarations. No one is left alive to harvest, with narthecium and tender surgical reductor, their progenoid seed, a thousand times as precious, by gram, than tritium. Each demigod has died alone, unheard, unshriven, his dying actions, by far the greatest of his already great life, unwitnessed. There are so many of them.\n\nWhatever else this endless day is, it is the end of the Astartes as anything more than elite strike troops. They will never be pre-eminent and numberless again.\n\nTheir banners are trampled underfoot, or soaked in gore, or matted with mud. They drape over some corpses like winding sheets. The symbols they marched under, and believed in with their entire beings, shroud them in death.\n\nThe umbratic symbols of the foe are still raised. The great, unblinking eye gazes from a thousand banners, staring with mad glee at the devastation wrought by those who hold it aloft. The red-and-ebon traitor banners flutter in the smoke-stained, firelit twilight, flapped like batwings by the holocaust gales, shivered like gooseflesh by the constant dysphonic roar of traitor voices.\n\nMore banners, and still more, are being manufactured to join those already raised. In the spark-filled gloom, the smaller and malformed Neverborn move in hissing gaggles behind the main advance, flaying and peeling skin from the dead and the almost dead, fashioning standards of human leather to hang from bone frames. They huddle and squat in the glare and the lagoons of blood, cackling and snuffling, using dagger-fingers to score and prick out the shape of the great eye, symbol of a pinchbeck god. They mark out eightfold stars. They whisper names to themselves, and shudder with anticipation every time that name is the Dark King.\n\nKhagashu of the Night Lords walks through the slaughterfields beyond the Eirenicon Gate. Ahead of him, another of the Palatine bastions is beginning to succumb to fire and shredding assault. Khagashu cannot see the ramparts falling. He is too far away yet, and the false night is too thick with cindersmoke. But he can hear the noise of it, carried fitfully on the bradycardic gusts of a heartsore wind. Rockcrete and adamantine, raised to withstand macro shells, is yielding to behemoth fangs and insatiable claws, and the sound of it is delicious.\n\nElated, proud, he struts with pavonine delight, and signals his scavenger gangs of feral humans, abhumans and cankered servitors to spread through the bloody spilth of the battlefield. Like children gathering shells and curious pebbles on a beach at low tide, they are collecting skulls.\n\nKhagashu and his foragers have instructions that, though they were murmured to them by nothing more than shadows and damp air, they are quite determined to fulfil. They must construct carefully aligned mounds of skulls, according to strict ritual measurements, in preparation for the ascendant coronation.\n\nThen there will be a throne to build. Khagashu isn't yet sure who it is for.\n\nOn the broad talus of the Irenic Barbican, one of the chief bastions of the Palatine line, an engine war escalates into sudden fury. Remnants of Legio Gryphonicus mount a ferocious repulse in an effort to keep the barbican intact for another thirty minutes.\n\nAll the rules are gone. Range factors are ridiculous. Churning out of water-choked culverts, support armour wrestles with the enemy treads, hull to hull, main weapons firing almost point-blank. Basilisk platforms are used like duelling pistols, head-to-head at zero metres.\n\nNew suns flare and fade in quick succession along the vast earthwork edge as punctured reactors light off and go critical, wiping out everything around them. The radiating heat-wash is so intense, it instantly bakes the lakes of mud into dry seabeds cracked in star patterns.\n\nGharnak Omaphagia, disgraced Warlord of Legio Magna, is killed by engine-fire as it mounts the talus, disembowelled by shells that spin its torso aside in a cloud of oil. Leaking systems catch and Omaphagia immolates, a giant figure burning head to foot like some festival hecatomb on a heathen midsummer. Khorness Gorewalker, another daemon Warlord, pushes past it at main stride, mounts blazing. Three of the Warhounds mobbing its heels founder and fall on the massive rockcrete caltrops laid by the loyalist Mechanicus.\n\nGorewalker passes the prone carcass of Indomat Celsior, a Gryphonicus main engine that has been brought down on the slope. Celsior is on fire, its hulk swarming with a saprophytic mass of traitor ground troops. Gorewalker, kicking its way through tanks and maniples of House Hermitika Knight Armigers as though they are toys, is stopped at the mid-line of the embankment by sustained beam fire from the Warlords Bellus Shockatrice and Argent Polemistes. Gorewalker endures a great deal, far more than build-specifications ever dreamed of, before its hull bursts, rent by structural failure and the collapse of the immaterial energies empowering it. It staggers backwards, crushing its own ground support underfoot, but remains standing until Polemistes mass-launches rockets from its shoulder silo. The fizzling, vespine rockets hit Gorewalker in rapid succession, like a drumroll, draping its chest and shoulders with an intricate garland of small, overlapping detonations that blink-bloom around it, and then tip it off its feet. Its huge wreck slides two hundred metres down the slope, shovelling an entire assault squadron of tanks into the talus ditch.\n\nThe Warmonger Castellan Corda advances alongside Shockatrice and Polemistes, adding its monumental support, its batteries harrowing the surging edge of enemy machines and men as they sweep up the earthwork.\n\nBut more giant figures are looming through the kilometres-deep smoke towards the barbican. They are not war engines of the Legio Magna, for though towering and humanoid like Warhounds and Warlords, they are not machines at all.\n\nOne takes to the air upon gigantic wings.\n\nZhintas Khan and eight other White Scars fight a running battle against a pack of the Lupercal's ferocious Astartes in and around the Botanicus Gardens. They have become life-sellers. Zhintas Khan is amused by the term. It was said to him, an hour earlier, by a Blood Angel called Khotus Meffiel, with whom he shared the brief but savage dismemberment of a Cthonian Dreadnought. Meffiel said that they, like all the loyal warriors left outside at the closing of the Gate, had just one responsibility to discharge: to sell their lives for the highest price they could get. What tally could they reach before death, now inevitable, overtook them? The concept added pride and zeal to an otherwise thankless duty.\n\nWhat will my life sell for? Zhintas Khan wonders. His price stands at forty-four traitor lives. He parries with his tulwar, and decapitates a Sons of Horus legionary. Forty-five.\n\nNot enough yet. Not nearly enough.\n\nPropinquity Court is a single square kilometre of open park just off the Via Palatine, surrounded by the House of Atlases, the Albigen Belvedere, the Devotorium Mundus, and the cloisters of the College of Jurists. Across six timeless hours it becomes the site of five separate battles, each one depositing a new stratum of bodies and wreckage.\n\nHere, Vigil Sister Vedia and squads of terrified militia drive back a force of traitor guards sworn to the observances of the Word Bearers. The fight is astonishingly brutal, and leaves the Devotorium on fire.\n\nHere, Pyre Warden Ari'i, Sigil Master Ma'ula and Sergeant Hema of the Salamanders hold off three rallying assaults by the Death Guard, and only survive a fourth when House Cadmus Armigers arrive to support them.\n\nHere, four units of the Hort Palatine are slaughtered by assault squads of the Sons of Horus led by Vorus Ikari in an action that levels the cloisters and descends into almost ritualised execution.\n\nHere, Prefect-Captain Arzach of the Legio Custodes and his Companions fight and slay the Neverborn things found feeding on the dead.\n\nHere, Captain Brastas of the Imperial Fists holds back a tide of World Eaters until, munitions spent and reduced to blades and shields alone, he and his men are finally overrun.\n\nPropinquity Court is not alone in recording a catalogue of actions. Many streets, yards, gardens and courts in the Palatine approaches become the sites of multiple, contradictory battles, often overlapping, often without strategic sense as those loyal forces left outside the walls, those life-sellers, attempt to frustrate the enemy advance. Like the bodies of the loyal Astartes dead, the actions are not remembered, nor their significances noted. War has little or no memory. Feats of extraordinary prowess that would, in other times and other places, have been recorded and celebrated, are finished and forgotten even before the next wave of violence sweeps through, crunching obliviously over the bones of the valorous and the defeated alike. In the final ever-hours of the siege, such deeds and achievements take place that would fill a thousand books and swell the honoured archives of Terran military history, but all are lost and unremembered, as ghosts in the fog and smoke of their tumult.\n\nBodvar Bjarki gets back up again.\n\nThere's blood in his eyes, and most of it is his own. The last impact lacerated his head so deeply, his scalp is torn open.\n\nAt Nafus Crossing on the Delphic edge, loyalist units have been holding back the enemy advance for three straight hours, though time seems to have lost the definition it once had. Their numbers have dwindled with every transpontine thrust the Death Guard makes. Bjarki, Heaper-Of-Corpses, and one of the very few warriors of the VI Legion Space Wolves active on Terra, feels like he's one of the las"}
{"text":"s, and most of it is his own. The last impact lacerated his head so deeply, his scalp is torn open.\n\nAt Nafus Crossing on the Delphic edge, loyalist units have been holding back the enemy advance for three straight hours, though time seems to have lost the definition it once had. Their numbers have dwindled with every transpontine thrust the Death Guard makes. Bjarki, Heaper-Of-Corpses, and one of the very few warriors of the VI Legion Space Wolves active on Terra, feels like he's one of the last defenders standing at Nafus.\n\nFlexing his grip on his blade with blood-slick hands, he looks around. He's not one of the last at all. He is the last.\n\nWar-horns boom. He can hear the shrill warble of meltas, and smell the stink of cooking stone. Three times he has fought back the enemy bastards from the top of the mound of bodies piled at the north end of the bridge. Three times, he's been struck from the apex of that corpse-hill.\n\nEach time he's clambered back up to hold the ridge of snapped bone and torn flesh, there have been fewer warriors with him. But Bjarki's thread is not yet cut, and though there are no skjalds to sing it, his saga is not done. Not yet.\n\nHe spits, and invokes the spirit of Fenris, the dark and silent slip of not-wolves running the black-and-white forests. He starts to climb the bodies again.\n\nHe'll make it four times. Five. As many times as it takes, or as many times as he has left. There are few wolves on Terra but, in the name of Russ, he will be a one man Rout.\n\nLantry Zhan, a forward observer for the PanCon Fifth and a shot-caller for the mortar squads, struggles to ascend a ridge of rubble west of the Via Irenic. His brigade knows there are Traitor Astartes close by, but they have no idea of numbers or angle. It's taken Zhan fifteen minutes to find a decent vantage. Through his scope, from the ridgetop, he finally sights the enemy. They are not Astartes. They are dire Neverborn things, slope-shouldered ogres, that seem to be wallowing or playing in the lagoon of a macro-shell crater. He adjusts focus. What are those atrocities doing? What sport are they-\n\nZhan sees what they are doing. He snatches the scope away from his eyes. He wishes he had never looked.\n\nAs they advance along the Metome Processional in the vague hope of reaching the Delphic Line, Marshal Agathe finally solves the riddle of the names, or the lack of them.\n\nThe ragged army group, some three thousand infantry men hauling unlimbered, iron-wheeled field guns between them, are hugging what's left of the Metome Wall as cover as they advance. Enemy shells lob right over them, dropping into loyalist positions three kilometres to their north. They're like rats in a gutter, three thousand half-named rats.\n\nAgathe divided her army at Hermitage Gate during a lull in fighting. She sent two thousand men, under Hort Captain Martineaux, to hold the Tigris Arcades, and another six, along with her Kratos tanks, under Sire-Militant Sklater towards the Gilded Walk, a decision that she now realises was futile given the firestorms blazing in that direction. Most of what she has left are from the 403rd, plus a battalion of Vesperi.\n\nShe hears Phikes shouting angry orders as he urges the troops along, heaving and grunting with the field guns. There have been skirmishes: a close call with stegatank engines that were trying to breach the wall, and a ferocious melee with necrotic traitor zealots, stinking of the frenzon they were glanding as they slaughter-charged the line.\n\nAgathe tries not to dwell on the odd changes to the landscape. Not the widespread damage and upheaval, the uncanny alterations. Stone walls sheathed in damp skin. The ground, in places, like frozen meat, slowly thawing. Buildings rotting as though gangrenous. The foetor of corruption. She ignores the way certain parts of the processional seem to sigh with the echo of soft breathing, a suspirious tremble accompanied by a sticky breeze.\n\nThe Dark King is not a name she wants to consider. For it to appear on the damn wall like that suggests it has significance, and she doesn't want to understand why, because her imagination runs wild. It says a lot to be in this hell and still be afraid of something worse. The mind has an unparalleled capacity for destructive speculation.\n\nBut the 403rd's names are a less distressing subject for speculation. Most of the 403rd use forenames only, like Captain Mikhail, or nicknames, or just serial numbers. Perhaps-\n\nOne of the field guns gets mired. Men shout, and bring ropes to drag it clear of the sucking ooze.\n\n'You don't use names,' she says to Mikhail, standing nearby. He glances at her, unsure what to say because it wasn't a question.\n\n'Anonymity?' she asks. 'Or shame?'\n\nHe's reluctant to answer.\n\n'You weren't ordered to service, were you?' she asks. 'Never mind. Don't answer. Don't admit anything. I don't care. But you and your men, you weren't ordered to service. There was no formal mobilisation at Gallowhill.'\n\n'There wasn't time,' he replies, very quietly.\n\n'No one came and rounded you up to serve,' she says. 'You just did it. Picked a name. Pulled weapons from the dead.'\n\n'We had to do something,' he says.\n\nAgathe understands that. 'Brave choice,' she says.\n\n'Not brave,' he replies. 'There was nowhere to run. And once we fought clear, we figured the only way we could do any good was to act like we were authentic.'\n\n'No, I think it's brave,' she says. 'And I don't care what you are if you stand on the right side. And your lack of names...'\n\n'What about it?'\n\nAgathe nods in the vague direction of the enemy, the stained horizon beyond the wall.\n\n'They know our names,' she says. 'They seem to. Or they're learning them. The Neverborn. They call to us and leave whispers in the air. Like it gives them power over us. So I'm glad to have men with me who have taken care to hide theirs. Might make you live a little longer. The enemy's known my name for weeks.'\n\nThe man exhales.\n\n'We'll be shot for this,' he says. 'When it's done, we'll be rounded up and shot as fugitives, won't we?'\n\n'Probably,' she replies. 'But we don't know what awaits us after today, do we?'\n\nThey hear shouts and shooting. Marauders have burst into the gulley three hundred metres ahead. The fighting is already close and murderous. She can see bat-faced figures with needle teeth, lobed ears and clusters of spider-eyes. She can hear entrenching tools crunching as they are used as weapons.\n\nThey start to run. She hears the officer yelling serial numbers as he calls in his fire-teams.\n\nNo names. Just duty.\n\n'Respond. This is Hegemon Control. Anabasis, respond and verify.'\n\nThe War Court junior at the mastervox station has been repeating the same words for long minutes now. Too many minutes. Sandrine Icaro has a rapidly growing list of other bulletins and priorities to deal with, but she cannot take her eyes off the junior and his patient but futile efforts. Nothing matters more than this. If Anabasis is lost, then the entire structure and purpose of the world as she understands it is gone.\n\nNothing seems real. She wonders if anything is. Everything has felt unreal to her since she fled Bhab Bastion. Icaro puts it down to partial amnesia triggered by the traumatic circumstances of that escape, but the sensation is not easing. Everything has acquired an odd, dreamlike quality.\n\nShe has no idea how she survived the assault on Bhab. She has no idea how she managed an evacuation, or made it back, unscathed, to the final fortress. She has brief memories of burning streets, of gunfire. More than anything, she has no idea how she got into the Sanctum. How did she do that before Eternity Gate closed? She doesn't even remember passing in through the Gate. She remembers Bhab, then the frenzy of the warzone, then being here, in the Rotunda, as though time, and distance, and direction, and relative position have all telescoped and twisted.\n\nShe fears it is all a dream. She suspects she's dead; that she died in Bhab Bastion, or in the streets outside, and everything since then has just been an illusion, the desperate imaginings of her mind as it died, the final flash-second of her life stretched out into a dream of all the things she wished and yearned and longed for.\n\nShe hopes it is. She hopes she's actually dead on the floor of the Grand Borealis, and that all of this is just the final firing of her cooling synapses. Icaro would rather that. She would rather be ensnared in the final millisecond of her life than for this to be real. She would rather be dead than for any of this to be true.\n\nLet me be trapped in my own death, she thinks, rather than He be trapped in His.\n\n3:v\n\nVisions of heresy\n\nIt makes such perfect sense. Such perfect, rational sense. Caecaltus isn't sure why it's taken him so long to appreciate it. The Emperor must die. He must. It's the only logical conclusion that anyone sane could reach. The Emperor must die-\n\nNo-!\n\nThe Emperor must die. He is mad, a mad monster, drunk on power, and His tyrannical rule has lasted far too long. He really must die-\n\nNooo-!\n\nHe must die now. It's the only way to stop the war. It's the only way to protect the human race. The Emperor must die immediately-\n\nPlease stop-!\n\nHe must be put down and destroyed as quickly as possible. And who better to do that than the men built to guard His life? Who else is strong enough? Close enough?\n\nPlease-\n\nWho else has the peerless clarity of mind to understand the perfect, rational sense of it? The Emperor must die.\n\nI can't-\n\nTake that spear. Plunge it through Him. Free the species.\n\nShut up-!\n\nIt's all been arranged. The stage is set. Everything is ready. The Emperor won't see it coming, because He's a mad monster, and utterly deranged. All the hard work's been done. He's been brought out of hiding to His place of execution. He is defenceless. Now just take that spear-\n\nGet out-!\n\nThe cunning of Horus Lupercal knows no limits. There is a reason his father named him Warmaster. He has arranged it, and ma"}
{"text":"e.\n\nI can't-\n\nTake that spear. Plunge it through Him. Free the species.\n\nShut up-!\n\nIt's all been arranged. The stage is set. Everything is ready. The Emperor won't see it coming, because He's a mad monster, and utterly deranged. All the hard work's been done. He's been brought out of hiding to His place of execution. He is defenceless. Now just take that spear-\n\nGet out-!\n\nThe cunning of Horus Lupercal knows no limits. There is a reason his father named him Warmaster. He has arranged it, and made it all so easy. Look at the simple perfection of his stratagem. He set a trap so blatantly and painfully clumsy it can only be a trap, a trap so brazenly incompetent that the Emperor could not afford to resist it-\n\nStop! No!\n\nHe laid bait so staggeringly unsubtle that it spoke to delusion, to a loss of faculty, to hubris and arrogance, and beckoned with such graceless inelegance that even the infallible Master of Mankind was convinced His first-found had lost his wits-\n\nYou will stop-\n\nAnd so the Emperor, proud and mad as He is, rushed into it, knowing full well it was a trap, yet arrogant enough to think He was ready for it. Ready for anything. More powerful than anything. More mighty than-\n\nNoooo-!\n\nNo, indeed. The trap itself was the ruse. There was no way in creation for Horus to surprise his father, so he didn't even try. Instead, he let his father surprise Himself. His arrogance was His own trap. Now, take the spear-\n\nCaecaltus Dusk resists. He falls to his hands and knees, weeping and spitting blood. The feral ingenuity of Horus Lupercal has undone him entirely. It has undone them all. Choking on his own gore, he goes into violent convulsions as he tries to break the insidious control that has been placed upon him. He wants to get up - needs to get up - and defend his king and master. Some of his brethren have collapsed, stricken like Caecaltus, but many of the other Companions have already turned on Him. Part of Caecaltus' brain, the part that he is resisting with every fibre of his being, is telling Caecaltus to get up and join them. It is screeching at him to become the utter contradiction of his nature.\n\nThere is a pain in his chest, an invisible knife through his heart, pinning him to the deck. All he can do is lie there, shaking and fitting, witnessing the horror as a blood-dimmed vision.\n\nA vision of atrocity. Of heresy. Of natural law undone and duty desecrated. Of the most shameless infidelity. A king, turned on by his royal bodyguard. A monarch, surprised and betrayed by the ones he trusted most. A caesar, butchered by the captains he never thought to doubt.\n\nWe cannot be doing this, but we are. It is impossible for us to be doing it, but we are doing it anyway. Horus, you will pay for this. My King-of-Ages is alone. He cannot-\n\nBlood jets.\n\nThe Master of Mankind decapitates Sentinel-Warden Kliotan before Kliotan can skewer Him with his lance. The Lord of Terra catches Sentinel-Warden Cazadris and Hetaeron Companion Kintara on the backswing of His burning blade as they rush Him. He deflects Shield-Captain Damorsar's halberd, and cuts him in two. Hykanatoi Krysmurthi weeps as his master beheads him, because he realises what he is being coerced to do.\n\nYou will pay. You will pay, you traitorous monster.\n\nShield-Captain Avendro cartwheels away, auramite splintering like golden glass, the long spray of his blood spattering the white hull of the Stormbird racked beside him.\n\nThe trap was in us, all along. There was nothing waiting for us at all. Your doors were wide open and your shields were down. There were no surprises waiting for our master except your profound mastery of the immaterium, which we have woefully underestimated. We knew your power was great, first-found. We had no conception of how great.\n\nHost-Marshal Telemonis shreds through a guard rail, his headless form plummeting into the shadows of the underdeck sub-holds.\n\nThe Emperor came here ready for anything, first-found, so you prepared nothing. Misdirection. He was looking everywhere except at Himself. With His attention held, you reached in and, with formidable sleight of hand, took away His readiness. You took away His focus and determination, from the moment He arrived. You took it from all of us.\n\nThe Emperor's warblade, a brand of white fire, leaves burning magnesium after-streaks in the air.\n\nYou took away our keen edge by easing our minds into distraction and puzzlement, into reflection, into random thoughts. You did it with such precision we forgot ourselves. You did it with such concealed domination of will even our master couldn't sense your mind at work.\n\nCompanion Caercil sinks to the deck and slides apart in three pieces, like a perfect puzzle that will never be put back together.\n\nAnd then you twisted the pristine souls of the Custodians. Each one of us was painstakingly restructured on a molecular level to withstand the corruption of Chaos, but you took the incorruptible and you broke our minds. You broke the unbreakable.\n\nSentinels Tyrask and Systratus thrust at their master with guardian spears, firing their integrated bolters.\n\nWe are shrieking because we understand what you have done to us. We are screaming because you have forced us to turn on the master we love above all things. We are howling because we are fighting it and we cannot resist.\n\nThe mass-reactive rounds explode against the rippling shield of His will, and He slices off the powerblades of their spears. Tyrask and Systratus get to take one step backwards before they are struck down.\n\nYou are forcing our master to kill us.\n\nSentinel Mendolis grazes the blade of his castellan axe against the Emperor's right pauldron, throwing sparks. Companion-Captain Vantix, wailing in lament, drives his warblade into the Emperor's ribs.\n\nBlood jets.\n\nYou will pay, Horus! You will pay!\n\nThe Master of Mankind reels, then shreds Vantix into ribbons with His power claw. He sidesteps Mendolis' second lunge in a swirling billow of cloak, and runs His sword hilt-deep into Shield-Captain Amalfi's chest.\n\nEach Companion He strikes down is a profound loss to humanity. Each one is a perfect creation of genetic and esoteric engineering, masterpieces hand-wrought with the most diligent and exacting labour. Each one is a boon companion and a friend, beloved as any son. And He is being obliged to destroy them one by one.\n\nThe peerless blade splits Mendolis open. It splinters Companion Heliad's visor and spins him off his feet.\n\nWas that why, first-found? Was that why you made us your weapon of choice? The psychological effect? Did you think it would make Him hesitate? Did you think it would make Him vulnerable?\n\nYou clearly do not understand at all.\n\nVestarios Entaeron drops to his knees, clutching his ruined torso. He crumples sideways. Sentinel Justinius misses with a two-handed swing, and does not live to try a second.\n\nHe is the Emperor of Mankind. He comes upon you in wrath, clad in His aspect of war. More than thirty thousand years of work will not be undone by your malice and spite. That He is required by you to kill His own, perfect warriors does not make Him falter or weaken His resolve.\n\nIt just makes Him all the more determined to vanquish you. He-\n\nBeam energies rip across the flight deck. The Master of Mankind is knocked down.\n\nOh, Golden Throne. Oh my King-of-Ages-\n\nThe Emperor has fallen against the side of another Stormbird, denting the armoured flank and shaking it on its launch rack. The Tharanatoi squad closes in, encircling Him, the blood of their tears streaming down the ornate goldwork of their Terminator armour, their Adrathic weapons cycling for a second salvo.\n\nHe cannot let them hit Him full beam again-\n\nThe Emperor leans for a split second against the Stormbird, fighting down the lingering pain so He can refocus His will. A squad of Hykanatoi vault the guard rails to their master's right, racing up the launch ramp to flank Him.\n\nThe relic weapons of the Tharanatoi glow with power.\n\nThe Emperor raises His hand.\n\nImperial lightning ripples out, a brilliant neon blue. The searing forks scorch the deck and hurl the Tharanatoi into the air like sheaves of corn caught in a cyclone. One ricochets off a ceiling hoist, fragmenting. Two tumble over the platform edge and plunge down the shaft of the through-deck elevator. Two hit a racked Stormbird so hard their armoured bodies punch through the hull like breacher rounds. Four hit the deck with enough force to leave craters. One explodes, the power system of his Adrathic beamer jarred to critical instability. The catastrophic detonation throws others off their feet.\n\nThey sprawl on the deck around Caecaltus and the other handful of Companions convulsing in resistance seizures. Caecaltus rolls on to his side, shaking. He tries to rise, but he can't. He tries to reach for his spear, then pulls back his hand. He knows that if he touches it, the urge to use it against his master will become impossible to resist.\n\nHe sees the Hykanatoi bearing down the ramp on his master's right. He sees his master turn and look at the deck supervisor's console on the chamber wall a hundred metres away. He sees his master tense and spear the console with a telekine pulse, and then duck to His knees. The ramp's ion launch catapult fires the Stormbird He was thrown against. It slams over Him, past Him. Fuelling cables stretch and snap in clouds of sparks. Its engines and systems are dead, so it is merely dead weight, slung by the ion rail's accelerator. The Stormbird mows down and pulverises the Hykanatoi on the ramp. It keeps going, starting to tumble, down the entire kilometre length of the rampway, in an expanding, seething fireball, and finally obliterates as it impacts the invisible integrity fields at the deck mouth.\n\nThe Emperor rises to His feet. Loss, bitter pain and fury have broken the lulling spell of indecision woven by the warp. His will is now entirely clear and engaged. Before any more of the screaming Custodians can move or rise"}
{"text":"he Stormbird mows down and pulverises the Hykanatoi on the ramp. It keeps going, starting to tumble, down the entire kilometre length of the rampway, in an expanding, seething fireball, and finally obliterates as it impacts the invisible integrity fields at the deck mouth.\n\nThe Emperor rises to His feet. Loss, bitter pain and fury have broken the lulling spell of indecision woven by the warp. His will is now entirely clear and engaged. Before any more of the screaming Custodians can move or rise or act, He enforces it fully.\n\nThe deck lamps dim. Guide lights blow out. Consoles short and explode. Cables spit cinders and sag from the ceiling systems. All the Custodes still alive drop. Caecaltus collapses onto his face. They are all screaming and writhing. It is no longer in torment or grief.\n\nIt is simply in pain.\n\nPain will do it.\n\nThe Emperor applies more. Shrieking, Caecaltus can hear his master's booming wrath inside the buckling bones of his skull.\n\nI will burn your touch out of them, first-found.\n\nDo you see what I am now?\n\nDo you see what is coming for you?\n\n3:vi\n\nRepulse\n\nThey have seen what's coming, and they prepare to meet it. War slides armies across the field and into conjunction, like playing pieces, to clash and compete, as though it is all some heartless, preordained game. Near Hasgard Gate, just short of the Delphic Battery's southern front, Fafnir Rann prepares to meet the enemy's next move.\n\nArchamus has positioned Rann there, for Archamus is a grandmaster of war's merciless game. Rann takes his place under the broken arches of the Delphine Viaduct, its proud spans demolished by engine fire. Petrocarbonic smoke, luxuriant as velvet and as toxic as reactor dust, floods the street basin like a living thing, racing ahead of the advancing traitor line.\n\nArchamus has just been named Lord Militant Terra. Signals are torn and patchy, and Rann is not sure of the significance of this. It suggests the chain of authority is somehow broken, or that Hegemon Control has devolved leadership to the field. It suggests great Sigismund is dead or occupied with other, vital work. It suggests the Praetorian Dorn is not able or available to lead the fight, which in turn suggests that the Lord Angel and mighty Valdor are also, somehow, gone.\n\nRann puts such doubts and fears from his mind. He assumes, for he is no fool, that some significant counter-strike is being planned or is already underway, a counter-strike that occupies the Emperor's three greatest champions.\n\nHe hopes desperately for its success. He feels no resentment that he cannot be part of it. The line must be held, and it is down to those remaining outside the sealed gate, men like him and Archamus, Aimery and Azkaellon, to do that work. They have been fighting relentlessly, without break or pause, for at least twelve hours, though Rann's chron system has become defective, and he is unable to track combat time precisely. It feels like months, longer than the rest of the siege combined.\n\nArchamus has been calm and masterful since his authority was announced and authenticated. There is more than a hint of Dorn in him. His deep voice speaks to them over the crackling vox-cast, grim and exact, moving units like ivory markers on a regicide board. Archamus is in the thick of it too, somewhere close by the mayhem, fighting hand-to-hand as he runs the game in his head. Archamus chose to stay outside when Eternity slammed. Rann knows the old Huscarl well. He can't help but feel there is an incongruous note of delight in Archamus' commands. They are on the last stroke before midnight, in the belly of hell, but Archamus rejoices in the combat, freed from his desk-station at Bhab to join the fight.\n\nEven if it is simply to die with dignity, blade in hand.\n\nIt is his right, and Rann won't deny him. Rann expects the same right himself. He cannot see a way they can prevail now, for too much has been lost, and the enemy is far too great, but they can serve as they were born to serve, holding fate back for as long as they can, and requiring the very highest price for their lives.\n\nArchamus has sent Rann's units forward along the causeway below the viaduct, with a force of White Scars under Namahi, Master of the Keshig, to their left on the Via Atmosine. Rann can hear White Scars jetbikes and the chatter of their bolters through the billowing smog. Blood Angels, four squads at least, are reported as closing on his right, but there's no sign of them.\n\nRelays report a surge of World Eaters pouring in from Hasgard along the viaduct approach. Rann spreads his formations wide, making up in coverage what he sacrifices in line density. His approach to warfare has always been more fluid than Archamus', less strict or formal. He knows this is why Archamus was elected to field command over him: Archamus has superior strategic experience, while Rann can do his best work at the cutting edge of the fight. Archamus expects this fluidity from him. He has directed the lord seneschal, but not specified any formal notions of deployment or fighting structure. He would not presume to do so, no more than Rann would presume to question Archamus' grasp of the battlespace dynamic.\n\nWhen they come, the World Eaters are not alone. It is more a rabble, a disjointed, incoherent mass of Traitor Astartes and warriors of the Dark Mechanicum jostling together as they charge down the causeway towards the Via Atmosine. They are manic, unchecked and raving, drunk on the ecstasy of slaughter and the infernal forces that compel them. Many are indeed World Eaters, now rage-blind, their bolters long since discarded in favour of blades and tearing hands. Some still wear the caedere remissum crests of their kind, and bark blasphemies in the Nagrakali argot. Most are barely recognisable as Astartes: they are grotesquely swollen and distorted, reshaped by the warp into lumbering, ogre-like forms that bound and gallop down the rockcrete on all fours like giant apes. Their necks and shoulders are thick and hunched, like those of fighting bulls or boars. They squeal and bawl, their snouts and toad-mouths and other transmuted features bristling with tusks and horns and saw-edged fangs.\n\nAmong them, the soot-caked, skeletal figures of gun-servitors, some stilted and preposterously tall, some multi-limbed, some hunchbacked with heavy powercells or tanks for flamer weapons. Some ride artillery carriages mounted with swivel guns or pot-de-fer, or crew ornate, self-propelled zamburak fitted with autocannons and fusion sakers. Rann sees Death Guard too, ponderous and abdominous, leaking liquid pus from the seams of their distended plate, and Sons of Horus, fleeting, howling, crested shadows of wrath. But many are undefinable, Astartes so disfigured it is impossible to determine their origin Legion. They are caked in mud and gore, or transmuted into inhuman, Neverborn shapes, or have covered their plate with garish colours and obscene symbols that sear the mind if the eye lingers on them too long.\n\nThey are an onrushing wall of depravity.\n\nRann's sensoria render the tag-marker icons of most as degraded, pixelating smudges. A few markers remain legible, and Rann's skin crawls to see the names of old once-brothers and fine comrades appending such monstrosities.\n\n'Line hold!' he roars on the company channel. Affirmation runes light up on the side-bar of his visor. In a day of the most ferocious warfare he has ever known, this is going to be an entirely new level of savagery. He marvels at the mettle and capacity of his brother Praetorian Imperial Fists, and the White Scars and Blood Angels too. They have all fought at exemplary levels in their lives, never found wanting, but on this last day of days, they have drawn on new reserves of speed and skill and fury. The level of violence required in this last stand makes every other war pale into insignificance and seem like a trifle. It is as though they have never really fought at all until this hour.\n\nHis fire-teams open up from behind planted shields. Leod Baldwin's heavy weapons group pumps cannon fire and bulk las at the approaching tide. The squads commanded by Tarchos, Devarlin and Halen rip off bolter shots. Rann's standing order was single shot to preserve ammunition stocks, but just as Archamus defers contact applications to Rann, so he defers to his warriors. They are men of experience. All have selected rapid fire because they know that in such a target-rich environment, no round will be wasted.\n\nAnd they need to smash the momentum out of the enemy mass before it reaches them.\n\nThe raging blitz of fire lights up the smoke, and bathes the causeway in a flickering brilliance, and even underlights the broken arches of the viaduct above them. The front rank of the enemy bulk is chewed apart, then the rank behind, then the third, until those that follow are either shot apart or brought down by the corpses piling up in their path. Baldwin's cannon fire strikes a spidering zamburak, and it detonates in a wild globe of light that blows a smoking, burning hole in the enemy's ranks twenty metres in diameter. Everything caught within it is vaporised. Bolter fire from Halen's squad slays some bestial, Neverborn devil, four metres tall, and horned like a ram, that comes clambering and scything through the mob, maiming its own followers in a paroxysm of desperation to reach its prey. The diamantine-tipped mass-reactive shells stop it in a series of shuddering impacts, pummelling it, riddling it in showers of blood and meat, and finally disarticulating it entirely.\n\nBut the tide cannot be dammed. The enemy stampedes on, clambering and scrambling across its own dead and dying, like some conveyer system in a manufactory that blindly rolls product into product even though the line is jammed.\n\nRann knew as much, even before his squads began their barrage. He has already formed his melee squads between the spaced-out, blazing fire-teams. The skirmishers, mostly Imperial Fists, but with so"}
{"text":"it in showers of blood and meat, and finally disarticulating it entirely.\n\nBut the tide cannot be dammed. The enemy stampedes on, clambering and scrambling across its own dead and dying, like some conveyer system in a manufactory that blindly rolls product into product even though the line is jammed.\n\nRann knew as much, even before his squads began their barrage. He has already formed his melee squads between the spaced-out, blazing fire-teams. The skirmishers, mostly Imperial Fists, but with some worthy White Scars among them, are either men like Rann who specialise in the brute action of hand-to-hand, or warriors who have lost their bolters or expended their munitions in previous actions. Most have been given storm shields. They draw up in hastate formations, angled like ice-ploughs with their tips towards the enemy, the flaring lines of each V dressed with overlapped shields. Chainblades rev. Powerblades ignite.\n\nAs the mass reaches them, the formations drive forward, punching into the approaching line like broad spears. Rann, an axe in each hand, is at the tip of one V. The impact is an instant, jarring concussion of plasteel and ceramite.\n\nAs the melee squads drive in, raking like a serrated blade into the enemy line, and breaking its integrity like a fork turning soil, the fire-teams disengage, fluidly re-forming into smaller Vs to plug the gaps between the teeth of Rann's formations. They dig in, bearing the pressure of the foe-weight against them. Unity will not hold for long, but while it does, the hastate formations broaden out, turning narrow spikes into makeshift shield walls that open like wings.\n\nFrom there, it becomes incoherent, a whirling maelstrom of fury, a blur. Rann is in the very thick of it, orientated only by the shield bearers at his left and right. His furious axe blows overlap, hacking with mechanical repetition. The air fogs with blood vapour, and fills with hammerscale and spinning chips of ceramite. The din of armour striking armour, and weapons striking armour, and weapons striking shields becomes one endless, grinding shriek, utterly deafening, a numbing metal torrent that reminds Rann of the ceaseless noise in the hammering rooms of the House of Weapons.\n\nRann has no idea what he is destroying. Every shape and movement in front of him is a target. His visor overloads with baffling data, unable to code and represent the mayhem fast enough. He knows his line will break at any moment. He can feel it buckling and stretching, losing cohesion as wave after wave of traitor bodies crashes into it. He is standing on bodies, climbing up the mound of dead that his men are making.\n\nAnd too many of the dead are his own men.\n\n3:vii\n\nOut of madness and into insanity\n\nCaecaltus feels his master ease His will. The pain ebbs. The shame will never go away.\n\nThirty-nine of the proconsul's company are dead. The rest sprawl, trembling. Some are too broken in mind or body to continue.\n\nIf you can rise and stand with me, rise now.\n\nCaecaltus hauls himself to his feet. Twenty-seven others claw their way slowly upright. They cannot look at the Master of Mankind, such is their abject remorse. Caecaltus feels his lord reach out with mindsight and scan each one of them, blink-fast. Caecaltus feels it wash across him. The scan hunts for lies, for lingering deceit, for the smudges of remaining, implanted treachery.\n\nThere is none. The Custodes have regained their grip, though none will ever be the same again.\n\nTake up your arms.\n\nThey obey.\n\nCaecaltus looks at the rest of the Hetaeron company, those who have not risen, who cannot get up. He feels another tremble of psykanic power as his master extends a small measure of grace to each, a final, soothing thought to ease their suffering. Then the Master of Mankind ends them, quickly and without pain, a needle of will to each that triggers a cataclysmic intracerebral haemorrhage, and instant death.\n\nThe lights flicker, stuttering the embarkation deck between twilight and sickly glare in a fitful pulse.\n\nProconsul?\n\nCaecaltus walks with his master between gilded corpses towards the main hatch. The twenty-seven Companions follow them. Caecaltus checks his sensoria and comms, but from Dorn and Sanguinius and the captain-general, or any of the warriors in the companies with them, there is no answer, only the low and threatening crackle of the warp, like wood burning in a grate. They should all be here, but they are not.\n\nThe Emperor and his depleted company face the hatch. The Lord of Terra takes hold of its six-tonne adamantine mass with His mind and crumples it like metal foil. He lifts it from its frame and tosses it aside.\n\nThrough the shredded portal ahead of them, they see the hallways of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nTo his left, Caecaltus hears Companion Estrael shudder and moan as his mind submits. The Emperor quickly administers a needle of will to stroke Estrael out and end his torment. The Companion falls to the deck. Caecaltus continues to gaze at what lies ahead of them, trying to reconcile what he sees without losing his grip on his own injured sanity.\n\nNow this is the hell his master was expecting...\n\n3:viii\n\nThe horror of names unchanged\n\nSomething breaks. Rann feels it go, feels the constant chest-to-chest, visor-to-visor compression slacken. He assumes his own formation is collapsing. But it is not. Managing, for the first time since combat-impact, to turn his head, he sees his line, though tangled and torn, is relatively whole. The slackening is coming from the enemy quarter, no matter that the enemy outnumbers them forty to one.\n\nSomehow, the enemy has lost its focus and impetus.\n\n'On!' he yells, though the order is not needed. His men drive on, shields held where shields still remain. Chainblades wail as they swing, and blurt as they connect. Rann buries Hunter in the skull of a Sons of Horus warrior, then finds the axe wedged, and uses Headsman to shear off the helmed head it is stuck in. For the next few moments, the blows he rains with Hunter use the wedged skull as a cudgel, breaking rather than chopping, until the helm, and the skull inside it, disintegrate and mash off his axehead.\n\nThey have space now. They are inside the reeling scrum of the enemy, but there is space. The enemy isn't retreating, but it is separating. Rann cuts down a roaring World Eater, and smashes through a gun-servitor cart, and then sees, just ahead, the reason.\n\nThrough the whirl of bodies, he sees white jetbikes, riders striking from the saddle, cutting across the front of his line at an angle. Namahi's White Scars have punched in from the Via Atmosine, driving their machines and firepower into the right flank of the traitor host. The riders have no space for speed or manoeuvre. They are moving slowly, like horses wallowing in a river, deep in the enemy mass, ripping fire from their bike guns, point-blank, as they chop and hack with their swords and lances.\n\nRann is almost overcome by their bravery. The White Scars have willingly sacrificed their speed and mobility to penetrate the thick of the brawl and relieve the pressure on the left span of his line. They could have held back, spared themselves, or run harrying charges from a distance. But the White Scars' resolve, and their unflinching allegiance to the Imperial Fists, has never been more boldly affirmed. They have driven straight into the density, foregoing all of their trademark advantages, to support the Imperial Fists before they fell.\n\nRann hopes he lives to the end of this day, simply so he can take Namahi, Master of the Keshig, by the hand and embrace him as a brother. In an age when brother murders brother, this seems like a miracle of fraternity.\n\nRann leads his men in a slogging, shielded drive to link up with the White Scars. Artillery and mortar shells start to land along the line of the causeway as the enemy's support formations try to break the deadlock, heedless of their own troops within range.\n\nRann takes apart a Death Guard after a furious exchange of blows. The Death Guard's warhammer cracks Rann's pauldron in the exchange, and he feels tendons snap and bones bruise. Past the Death Guard, Rann strikes down a World Eater before it can bring its chainaxe to bear, then hacks apart two bulk weapon servitors. He reaches the nearest White Scars riders, Halen at his heels, and defends them from flank attack, driving back the warriors mobbing them. The fight becomes stagnant and dirty, just grinding to hold ground. He smacks aside World Eaters and bladed automata, then guts some skinless Neverborn thing that lunges at him. Some of the White Scars dismount, their bikes destroyed, and slash with their tulwars and long sabres double-handed.\n\nThen Fisk Halen falls, toppled by a thundercrack blow that splinters his faceplate. Still alive, Halen tries to crawl free, using his tattered shield to fend off his furious attacker.\n\nRann slams in to protect him. His helm display makes identification. The marker: Sor Talgron.\n\nRann remembers Talgron, a fierce Word Bearer from the early days. It was said he died, following injuries received on Perception Primus, begging not to be interred in a Dreadnought chassis. Something has brought him back and granted him a second life. He is a giant, wrought from augmetics, bulging with synthetic power. His filthy armour is badged with parchment and pages of Lorgar's deranged litanies. His face, framed in crude bionics, is a raddled mass of burn scars. He wields a fizzling crozius that drips with dark, oily power. The mace head of the crozius is fitted with jagged side-blades.\n\nTalgron is chanting something as he swings for Halen, like a form of blessing or benediction. He is almost crooning the words, the only ones of which Rann can make out are 'dark' and 'king'. Rann is convinced that the Word Bearer is making his utterances out of some twisted kindness, as if he is offering last rites to fortify the soul of the man he is trying to pulp into the rockcrete.\n\nThe most horrifying "}
{"text":"s with dark, oily power. The mace head of the crozius is fitted with jagged side-blades.\n\nTalgron is chanting something as he swings for Halen, like a form of blessing or benediction. He is almost crooning the words, the only ones of which Rann can make out are 'dark' and 'king'. Rann is convinced that the Word Bearer is making his utterances out of some twisted kindness, as if he is offering last rites to fortify the soul of the man he is trying to pulp into the rockcrete.\n\nThe most horrifying thing about him, Rann decides, is that he still has a name. Most have lost theirs in crackles of non-loading graphics, but Talgron still generates a marker. He is a monster, demented, a burned husk caged in bionics, his mind blown out by warp madness. But his name somehow clings to him. He is still Sor Talgron. This is the fate they will all face, Rann understands. Not to die, but to remain themselves, their identities preserved no matter how far the warp twists and mutates them.\n\nRann engages. It is like striking at a bastion wall. Talgron's machine form is so large, so powerful, it seems rooted to the ground. Rann's blades draw no more than sparks. Talgron scythes at him with the burning crozius, and Rann ducks back. Talgron chuckles.\n\nHe says Rann's name.\n\nHe says it fondly, as though he is greeting a long-lost friend. He offers his hand.\n\nRepelled, Rann strikes again. Talgron grunts and swings at him. Rann tries to deflect the crozius, but the Word Bearer is too powerful, and the impact against Headsman's haft almost spins Rann off his feet.\n\nHe backs away. A berserk World Eater lunges at him from his right, and he scythes, sending the brute flying with an understroke cut, keeping his eyes on Talgron. The giant is advancing, singing his litany to Rann. There is sadness in Talgron's blood-logged eyes, as though he is disappointed that his old comrade has rebuffed his heartfelt blessing.\n\nRann backs off further, avoiding each swing that comes at him. He does not know how he is going to overcome the Word Bearer, but at least he is drawing him away from Halen. He sees one of the White Scars dragging Halen clear. Talgron swings again, catching Rann well enough to chip his plate and rock him around.\n\nBedwyr and Cortamus rush to his aid. The three Imperial Fists, side by side, attempt to contain and stop the monstrous Word Bearer. Cortamus, too eager or too brave, dies almost at once, his head crushed into his body by a down-swing of the infernal crozius.\n\nBedwyr locks in, using his upraised storm shield to hold off Talgron's rain of blows. The sight of Talgron's name-marker reminds Rann that his display still has some function, despite the sensory overload and deluge of data. He locks a sensoria analysis of the Word Bearer's bionic form, pinpointing structural weaknesses using a scanning algorithm devised by Dorn himself for target integrity assessment.\n\nIt pings up a flurry of indicators, and Rann lunges in, with Bedwyr's shield warding him, striking with his axes. He swings not with the blind fury demanded by the fight thus far, but with a surgical accuracy, slicing the left knee at the outside of the joint, a block of servos above the left hip, and across the inside of the right elbow. Each impact severs motive systems, and causes lubricant and hydraulics to spurt. Talgron lurches back, hobbled, his augmetic body no longer obeying him as diligently as before. Rann puts another slice in across his neck, cutting a sheaf of cables.\n\nFurious, wounded, Talgron tries to come at him, swinging his mace. Bedwyr's shield blocks the swing, but in that instant, Rann sees that the blade spikes of the crozius are in fact eagle wings, the aquila span of the Imperial icon.\n\nIt seems a bitter disgrace that Talgron is killing loyal sons with such a symbol. It fires Rann with incandescent anger and outrage. He puts Headsman's blade across Talgron's breastplate, tearing off the pages of his gene-lord's book, and Hunter's through the side of Talgron's cicatrised face.\n\nEyes wide, Talgron snorts blood from his nose, and dies for the second time. His immense bulk collapses with a crash.\n\nWhen Rann turns from his kill, he sees that figures in red have joined the fight. The promised four squads of Blood Angels, delayed no doubt by other traitor warbands, have finally arrived, raking into the mass from the right with their gleaming longswords and stabbing lances. They are led by the noble Dominion, Zephon.\n\nTheir charging thrust, impressively as swift as any White Scars assault, catches the traitor mass across a new angle, squeezing the head of it between the Imperial Fists and White Scars formations until it bursts. The traitor host, harried by the loyalists, ebbs backwards into the smoke, its savage urgency lost to hurt and surprise.\n\nAn eerie, aching silence falls upon the causeway, now cleared of all enemy except their mangled dead. Rann lowers his axes. He knows it will not last.\n\nTalgron's butchered corpse is carried off the field in the confusion by his brethren, and brought to Portis Bar. Later, in the terrible aftermath, he will be made to live again, against his abject wishes, for a third time, interred in the sarcophagus of a Dreadnought shell to endure the living death he had always rejected.\n\n3:ix\n\nUnspoken\n\nEven from a safer distance, Vulkan and Abidemi find it hard to tear their horrified fascination away from the sight of Malcador's eerie immolation. But they turn. Three of Malcador's Chosen are advancing along the nave, accompanied by a Sister of Silence and several other officials.\n\n'Watch him,' Vulkan says to Abidemi, nodding towards the Throne. 'If he stirs at all-'\n\n'I will, my lord.'\n\nVulkan leaves his son at vigil and walks down the nave to meet the approaching figures. He has no intention of straying far from the Throne. If Malcador perishes in his courageous efforts, or the hated enemy breaks in to take the Inner Sanctum, he has a duty to perform. The Talisman of Seven Hammers, a protocol retrofitted into the Golden Throne, can only be activated by Vulkan's command. Once initiated, it will destroy the Throne, and the Sanctum, and all the treasures of the Palace, entirely. Vulkan, the Maker, the Shaper, the demiurge-craftsman, will be the Un-Maker of all that the Emperor has built, splitting the Palace and the world open before Horus can plunder it. If anyone claims the Throne back from Malcador, it will be Vulkan's father on His return. No one else. Horus will never get the chance.\n\nThe three Chosen are named Khalid Hassan, Moriana Mouhausen and Zaranchek Xanthus. They bear the sigil of the Regent on their cheeks. Vulkan doesn't know them well, but he trusts them because Malcador trusted them. They bow to him. All look pale with grief. With them are Kaeria Casryn of the Sisterhood, and Eirech Halferphess, Astrotelegraphica Exulta of the Higher Tower, along with several seniors of the Concillium.\n\n'My lord primarch,' says Hassan. 'We bear confidential communication from Hegemon Control.'\n\nHe hands a data-slate to Vulkan. Vulkan reads it.\n\n'When was this received?' he asks.\n\n'Not long ago,' says Hassan. 'Mere moments, in fact, after Anabasis assault deployed.'\n\n'So, another few minutes...?'\n\n'Another few minutes and the operation might have been suspended,' says Hassan. 'Fate is cruel.'\n\n'I think fate is very deliberate,' Vulkan replies. 'We receive this, just seconds after my father finally committed, and there was no going back? That's not an unkind coincidence, Chosen One.'\n\n'You think... the timing is deliberate?' asks Mouhausen.\n\n'I imagine the traitor fleet has been blocking all manner of signals,' Vulkan replies. 'They've jammed most of our comm-operations. For this to get through? At that moment of all moments? That's malicious gamesmanship. That's Lupercal deliberately letting hope come too late. His intent is to psychologically ruin us.'\n\n'But you believe it to be genuine?'\n\nVulkan looks back at the slate, and rereads the transcript of Guilliman's transmission.\n\n'I think it is. We'd easily identify a falsified signal. The codes are right. No, I think it's authentic because only an authentic message would be cruel enough.'\n\n'Then the tragedy is, they can't find us,' says Xanthus. 'The saviour fleet, however close, is blind to us.'\n\nVulkan nods. 'And we can supply them with no beacon,' he remarks. He looks at Halferphess. 'The Astronomican is non-functional?' he asks, knowing the answer, but hoping to be surprised.\n\n'My lord,' replies the Exulta, 'we don't even know if the mountain still stands. Bombardment has probably razed it. And, if it exists, we cannot perform a remote ignition. The infrastructure is too badly damaged, and the power conduits destroyed. Even if we had power to spare.'\n\n'Then this hope is no hope,' says Vulkan, handing back the slate.\n\n'My lord,' says Hassan. 'Exulta Halferphess has proposed that we might activate a temporary beacon here.'\n\n'Here?'\n\n'It would be makeshift,' says Halferphess. 'And there are inherent technical problems. But by channelling etheric power from the Throne-'\n\n'No,' says Vulkan simply.\n\nPsycho-able reinforcements are already being assembled, Casryn relays in thoughtmark. The first are arriving now to supplement Sigil Protocol-\n\n'You mean to strengthen the Sigillite if his power ebbs?' asks Vulkan.\n\nYes. And more, if necessary. The Unspoken Sanction-\n\n'Is a crime,' says Vulkan. 'We will support the Sigillite. We're not going to burn through-'\n\n'It's been done once. It can be done again,' says Hassan. 'And we are all dying, my lord. The world is dying. Candidates would give their lives willingly to bring the Unspoken Sanction into effect, if it buys us more time.'\n\nIf the reinforcements are gathering already, in preparation, we could use their power to fire an emergency beacon, employing the Throne mechanisms and the choral systems of the Throne Room, Casryn signs. The Adnector Concillium assures us it is feasible, and the Exulta can oversee-\n\n'Have you found enough of"}
{"text":"ne again,' says Hassan. 'And we are all dying, my lord. The world is dying. Candidates would give their lives willingly to bring the Unspoken Sanction into effect, if it buys us more time.'\n\nIf the reinforcements are gathering already, in preparation, we could use their power to fire an emergency beacon, employing the Throne mechanisms and the choral systems of the Throne Room, Casryn signs. The Adnector Concillium assures us it is feasible, and the Exulta can oversee-\n\n'Have you found enough of them, then?' asks Vulkan. 'Enough psyker volunteers?'\n\n'Volunteers is a misleading term, my lord,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Indeed it is,' says Vulkan. 'And it was my understanding that there was a dearth of alpha-rated psykers in the Palace. Prior to the siege, too many had been shipped out, on the instruction of your master the Sigillite, in order to engineer the concealment of Titan.'\n\n'This... is true,' Hassan concedes. 'A significant portion of the Palace reserves were removed. They have not been replenished due to the situation. We are... limited.'\n\n'And you'd expend those we have to light a fire that we hope someone will see, rather than keep them ready to support Malcador's efforts?'\n\nNo one responds.\n\n'I won't entertain this,' says Vulkan. 'Not yet, at least-'\n\n'My lord,' Hassan begins.\n\nVulkan looks at him sharply enough for the Chosen to flinch.\n\n'There are other possibilities to explore first,' Vulkan says. 'Listen to me, all of you. I have longed for Roboute and the others to arrive, with all my heart. I can think of nothing more glorious than my brothers descending in fury to end this atrocity and grind Horus under their heels. I yearn for it, just as you do, and I feel the pain of that belated transmission. But we are committed now, and more precariously balanced than ever. My father has taken the fight to Horus. He must prevail. Malcador, your master, has taken the Throne to maintain stability. He must prevail. Our duty, my friends, is to support them both, in every way we can, so they emerge victorious. An attempt to establish a rudimentary beacon here will jeopardise the function of the Throne, and the life of the Sigillite, and will expend our precious resources far too rapidly. And for what? The remote hope someone will see? It is a remote hope indeed. An empty promise. We will continue as we are. Casryn, have them bring in the first of the psycho-able to act as a choir of support. Just support. Burn them out, and you'll answer to me. We must help the Sigillite maintain his focus. As for my father, we will wait another hour, then re-evaluate if we have not heard from him.'\n\n'The clocks are broken, my lord,' says Hassan.\n\n'Then count on your fingers, Chosen One,' says Vulkan.\n\nThey nod.\n\n'Go,' says Vulkan.\n\nAs they turn, he calls Hassan's name and draws him aside. The others stride away down the nave.\n\n'Your master left you without warning,' Vulkan says.\n\n'He did, sir.'\n\n'And you were all bonded to him, I know. The loss must be very great. I can see it in you.'\n\nHassan nods. 'There was no time for farewell. And he will not return to us as he was, if at all.'\n\n'Tell me, Hassan. Is it possible he is trying to communicate with us?'\n\n'My master?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nHassan glances towards the distant Throne. 'I... What makes you ask?'\n\n'A feeling, Hassan. I watch him, and I feel he's trying to speak.'\n\n'To you?'\n\n'To anyone who will hear. I thought perhaps, you, or...?'\n\nHassan shakes his head. The idea has upset him.\n\n'My master knew that once he had consigned himself to the Throne, his focus would be absolute, my lord. Before he took his place, he dumped masses of sigilised information into each of us. It was a shattering experience. He conveyed, urgently and without his usual finesse, all of his thoughts and plans, and every last symbol of intention and unfinished deed, in the hope that we would enact them now that he could not. We are all still trying to make sense of his bequest.'\n\n'Like a living will?'\n\nHassan nods. 'In a way, lord. My point is, he did that because he knew he would not get a chance to speak later. So, for that reason, I doubt your idea is any more than fancy.'\n\nVulkan takes him by the arm, a huge hand on a tiny mortal limb, and leads him closer to the Thone where Abidemi is standing watch. They feel at once the rising heat on their faces.\n\n'His mouth still twitches, my lord,' Abidemi says.\n\n'You see?' Vulkan says to Hassan. 'Hassan, he must have knowledge in him now beyond any wisdom he possessed before. Untold measures of it. I think he is desperate to communicate it to us or impart some sign. I believe he's trying to convey vital secrets that we should know. Things that could win this war for us.'\n\n'I see his lips move,' says Hassan very quietly. 'I see he suffers a great deal. But I think it is involuntary. Just a tic. A nerve spasm.'\n\n'I think he's trying to talk,' says Vulkan. 'I'm sure of it.'\n\n'Well, not to my mind or my ears, lord,' says Hassan. 'If my master is talking, then it's not to me or to any of the Chosen.'\n\n'If Malcador is talking, Hassan,' asks Vulkan, 'who is he talking to?'\n\n3:x\n\nIn torment\n\nDaemons howling beneath me and at my back. Ice-bladed hyperborean winds carving at my mind. Moments of brain-freezing anomia, becoming ever more frequent. Pain beyond any limit I could have imagined. Pain in everything. I struggle even to exist. I fight, to temporise my mindsight and maintain plenary control. The Throne is a living thing, scalding with power and fury, a wild steed that no human was ever meant to master or break. It's trying to eat me alive. It's trying to consume me with hyperphagic lust. In the whirling darkness beyond the light, the Neverborn caw and press, dressed in dazzling raiments and cloaks sewn from the souls of saints. They tear at me, willing me to make a mistake, however small. Some tiny error they can exploit. They probe at the telaethesics to find a fingerhold, pecking holes as fast as I adjust. They try to spancel me to the Throne until my bones snap. They try to change my mind and make me one with their cause through bewildering acts of meticide that annihilate and blank whole portions of my mind. The pain is beyond unbearable. The assault beyond relentless.\n\nBut I can see. I can see it all now. I can see the full material distortion afflicting Terra, the infected and weeping halo of voidmist, the lethal saturation of the warp. I can see the delicate genius of the Vengeful Spirit trap, now that it is sprung. I can see how the Emperor has been tricked, not by brute force but by infinite subtlety. I can see the macabre and impossible intersection of there and here, now and then, conjoined in ways no one on Terra has yet realised. I can see how every one of our ploys is about to be undone, in ways we could not have predicted. I can see Roboute and the Lion, so close yet lost and blind. I can see my lord and friend the Emperor cut down, Sanguinius rotting in a grave-pit, Valdor driven insane, and Dorn lost, alone and cornered. I can see the shadow of the Dark King.\n\nAnd I can see all this, because Horus is letting me see it.\n\nWhat the Warmaster hid from the Emperor to lure him, Horus is showing me to torment me. The caustic images burn my brain.\n\nI cannot speak. I simply cannot make my mouth move. I can barely make my mind work. There is no time to waste, for I have to concentrate through the agony and focus, just to keep the Throne functioning at a basic level. If I manage to speak at all, it must be precious words to the few who matter. Not poor Vulkan, at the foot of the Throne, waiting for an answer. Not even my Chosen, for they have been instructed already.\n\nIf I speak, every word must count. And it won't be words, because they are too difficult to form. It will be signs. It will be sigils. That's all I'm capable of now: signs, sigils, symbols, and every one of them - if I can manufacture any at all - must be sent, at the limit of my immolating will, to those that fate, luck and blind chance have left on the board in places where they might, just might, stand a chance of changing this outcome. Few will. Perhaps none will. In truth, all are likely to die. But if I can steer just one of them, nudge just one of them to take the right step...\n\nA feeble whisper, I call to them. I know their names.\n\n3:xi\n\nZahariel in the mountain\n\nZahariel hears a whisper. It makes him pause in his work. He rises, and he listens. It is only the wind sawing through the mountain's deep amplifier vaults, but for a moment it sounded like someone saying his name.\n\nNothing. A distraction. The hollowness of the place soaks up sound and spits it back out at different angles. He looks around for Cartheus, Tanderion and Asradael, but they are in adjoining chambers, hard at work. Already, in mere hours, the four of them have reconstructed part of the sacred mountain's psionic lattice, reweaving the etheric filaments where they were burned out and torn by daemonic excess.\n\nBut it is hard toil, painstaking, and it quickly exhausts the mind. He knows why. The mountain has forever been a place of acute sensitivity, and now, as chaogenous power saturates the whole world, it is worn away raw. As he composes and configures the talismatic engrams, one misstep, one lapse in mental defence, could split his soul open. It makes him feel vulnerable and weak, and neither feeling suits him. It is like feeding a feral beast through the bars of a cage, knowing that the beast would rather feast upon him than the meat he proffers.\n\nHe has guarded himself. He has marked his armour with hexagrammatic wards, and taught his three brothers to do the same. The shamans of old did not come here to mark figures on the walls. Sympathetic magic was not about composing an image of some desired future. It was about making the future present. They knew the rock was just a membrane, not solid at all, but a veil on which the etheric world was projected. The images of hunters and hunted were just tracings of things on the other"}
{"text":" proffers.\n\nHe has guarded himself. He has marked his armour with hexagrammatic wards, and taught his three brothers to do the same. The shamans of old did not come here to mark figures on the walls. Sympathetic magic was not about composing an image of some desired future. It was about making the future present. They knew the rock was just a membrane, not solid at all, but a veil on which the etheric world was projected. The images of hunters and hunted were just tracings of things on the other side. Zahariel has learned this from the ghosts of the shamans that drift around him in the darkness.\n\nHe tries to stay alert and focus. There is still too much to be done, and just days before the enemy arrives. At the very darkest recess of his mind is a thought he doesn't want to acknowledge, that he will not share with anyone, not Cartheus or Tanderion or Asradael, not even with himself. He is susceptible. A part of him wants to submit and allow the warp in. Not just the warp, but those who move through it, those who have themselves submitted and-\n\nHe catches his breath.\n\n'Cunning,' he says, to nothing. 'Oh, that's cunning.'\n\nIt nearly had him. He nearly let down his guard. Something is trying to reach at him, to prise into his head. Something that can sense him. Something that is using the resonance of the mountain to show him some kind of sign. He has set his sword down while he works, but he goes to it, lifts it, and draws it. He thinks it's still here, watching him. He is sure he knows who it is.\n\nThe old enemy.\n\nHe studies the walls, with their flickering seams of chryosite and quartz. He almost expects Typhus to loom from the shadows, hands extended to greet him. Typhus, so deeply drenched in the warp, has always known the secret, agnostic leanings of the Order hidden in the Dark Angels' heart. This is his guile at work, an effort to turn those he thinks might stand with him. This is his way of infecting minds and cracking them from within.\n\n'Hell take you and your nightmares, Death Guard,' he says out loud. 'You cannot tempt us so. When you come, we will be ready, staunch and fresh upon the high cliffs while you crawl in the dirt at our feet.'\n\nThe lights in the rock throb, describing promises of truths and secret powers and deathless majesty. His blade shakes in his hand. He hears a buzzing in his ears. He yearns to know more. He-\n\nHe raises his hand, palm out, the warding gesture.\n\n'I abjure you!' he cries.\n\nThe lights sparkling across the face of the wall go out. The membrane goes cold. The buzzing stops.\n\nHe is left alone in the cold depths of the mountain. The intruding presence has gone, and he has no idea what thought, what whisper, what mystic sign, fortified him against it. The lights slowly return, pulsing dimly in the crystal traceries. They show the truth now, no longer twisted by temptation and deceit, the future writ.\n\nIt is not the same future he read just hours before. What he sees is barely credible.\n\nZahariel turns and runs into the adjoining chamber. His footfalls echo and bounce in the stone gullet of the mountain. He finds Cartheus first.\n\nCartheus is kneeling in deep contemplation, repairing a psionic engram that fizzles in the air in front of him. Zahariel grabs him and hauls him to his feet, breaking his intense focus. The delicate engram shatters like glass. Cartheus, dazed, starts to protest. There isn't time for words.\n\nThere isn't time for anything.\n\nZahariel clamps his hand across the right side of Cartheus' head and communicates directly, by will. Cartheus gasps, staggers back a few steps, and then turns, without further word or question, and rushes away to carry the warning.\n\nZahariel sinks to his knees where his brother was kneeling. He breathes hard. Blood is singing in his neck, his throat, his temples. He reaches for the satchel under his robe. He pulls out the mask.\n\nThere isn't time.\n\nThere isn't time for anything.\n\nExcept this.\n\n3:xii\n\nSindermann at Leng\n\n'You shouldn't even be here,' the woman says. She's young and looks scared, but there's a defiance in her that is quite impressive.\n\nKyril Sindermann is about to reason with her: she's an archivist, and she's only doing her job. But Mauer just pushes past.\n\n'Prefectus,' Mauer says, as though that explains everything.\n\n'I'm sorry,' the archivist says. 'I can't allow it. Access to the Hall is forbidden. You need permission in writing, from the Sigillite, and only then to request a volume to be brought from the stacks. You can't-'\n\n'Have you any idea what's going on out there?' Mauer snarls at her.\n\n'Yes,' says the archivist. 'Yes, I do.'\n\n'Will you display the same measure of defiance to the next person who comes to the door?' asks Mauer. 'Because it will probably be one of the Sons of Horus. They're inside. They're inside the Palatine.'\n\nThe archivist sags slightly. She's petite, and seems to Sindermann to have been made even smaller by the baggy, insulated coveralls she is required to wear. He's sure she's trying not to cry.\n\n'I am Sindermann,' he says, as gently as he can. 'Authorised by the Praetorian to run the Order of Interrogators. This is Boetharch Mauer, chief officer of the Command Prefectus. Do you know what that is?'\n\nThe archivist shakes her head.\n\n'The Interrogators and the Prefectus are both agencies created to safeguard what might be called the Imperial Truth,' he says. 'We work to protect the historical and factual essence of what makes us us. What makes the Imperium. We're trying to defend it against the forces invading us. I'm sorry, this is a longer conversation. Am I making any sense to you?'\n\nThe archivist doesn't answer for a moment. She looks past Sindermann, through the door she opened after their repeated knocking. The plaza beyond is empty, and awash with rain. It is a gloom of false twilight in which the groundcar they arrived in is barely visible. Every few seconds there is a flash, like the strobe of lightning, which makes everything outside starkly black and white.\n\nBut it isn't lightning.\n\nThe archivist murmurs something. Sindermann can't hear her over the hissing spatter of the downpour.\n\n'What did you say?' he asks.\n\n'I said... What do you want?'\n\n'We've come, perhaps in vain, on a desperate mission of hope.'\n\n'Hope?'\n\n'I believe there is material here that might help us,' says Sindermann. 'Old material, perhaps restricted. Right now, I'm sorry to say, anything is worth trying.'\n\n'I'm only junior,' the archivist says.\n\n'Are you alone here?' Sindermann asks.\n\nShe nods. 'Everyone... everyone left,' she says. 'I think they've gone to fight. Or hide. And the Custodians assigned to guard the Hall were all withdrawn, without explanation, about an hour ago.' She looks at her wrist, and frowns. 'My chron has stopped. About an hour ago, I think.'\n\n'But you remained at your post?'\n\n'I didn't know what else to do,' she replies. 'I've worked here all my life.'\n\n'Open this!' Mauer barks from the other side of the atrium. She's trying to drag open the huge wooden doors, eight metres tall, that lead into the main collection.\n\n'Do you have keys?' Sindermann asks the archivist.\n\nShe does. She fishes a big ring of pass keys, both old mechanicals and advanced encrypted wafers, from the hip pocket of her coveralls. Sindermann follows her across the atrium. It's a huge space, four storeys high. The floor is checked with black and white tiles. The roof is a crystalflex dome across which night rain swirls. A single, immense electro-flambeau hangs from the apex of the dome, bathing the atrium in golden light. Sindermann, like Mauer, leaves tracks of muddy rainwater in his wake.\n\nMauer stands back. The woman selects a large brass key, and unlocks the paired doors.\n\nThey step into a vast, gloomy space. The air is soft, warm, climate controlled. The light is muted and diffuse. They are entering on the fifth floor. Over polished wooden rails, Sindermann can see the four galleried levels below. Above, fifteen more levels, each stacked and galleried, connected by spiral staircases and portable ladders. The central space is a wide oval.\n\nHe has never set foot in the Hall of Leng before. It is the Palace's most significant library, a priceless collection of artefacts and data that exceeds even the Clanium, the Majestary of Records, the Terran Collection, and the Augustian Library. And it has always been the most restricted.\n\n'Where do we start?' Mauer asks.\n\nSindermann shrugs.\n\n'This was your idea,' she snaps, and strides away. She starts picking along the nearest stack of shelves, examining spines.\n\nSindermann sighs. He's not sure it was. He starts to follow her.\n\n'Perhaps I could help?' the archivist says.\n\nHe looks at her.\n\n'If I knew what you were looking for?' she adds.\n\n'This war has taken on a new and grim dimension,' he says.\n\n'Daemons?' she asks. 'At least, that's what people are calling them.'\n\n'You've seen them?'\n\nShe shakes her head. 'I've heard things. I think that's why most people fled.'\n\n'Well, yes,' says Sindermann. 'The Neverborn. We can't fight them as we fight other things... and Throne knows, we're barely managing that. But the Hall of Leng is a special collection, is it not?'\n\n'Yes, sir.'\n\n'What differentiates it from all the other libraries and archives, even the most confidential, is that it contains forbidden and outlawed material.'\n\nShe nods. 'It's said that this is the Lord Emperor's private collection,' she replies. 'Not Imperial records, but the surviving treasures of Old Earth.'\n\n'You say that as if you're not sure,' he says.\n\n'Sir, I've worked here for sixteen years. It's an honour to serve in such a special place. But I have never looked inside a single book.'\n\n'Never? But there are millions-'\n\n'Nineteen point six million,' she replies. 'I care for them. That's the duty of the staff. We monitor the environmental controls, clean, maintain, repair and archive as necessary, and draw selected volumes from the stacks for examination. Which is usually for the Sigillite or one of his Chosen. W"}
{"text":"f you're not sure,' he says.\n\n'Sir, I've worked here for sixteen years. It's an honour to serve in such a special place. But I have never looked inside a single book.'\n\n'Never? But there are millions-'\n\n'Nineteen point six million,' she replies. 'I care for them. That's the duty of the staff. We monitor the environmental controls, clean, maintain, repair and archive as necessary, and draw selected volumes from the stacks for examination. Which is usually for the Sigillite or one of his Chosen. We don't look at the books.'\n\n'There seems something distressingly wrong about that,' he says.\n\n'Not my place to say,' she answers. 'But I can access the catalogue. Perhaps direct you.'\n\n'Well, good,' he says.\n\n'So you're looking for... what?'\n\n'The means to fight daemons,' says Sindermann. 'Perhaps grimoires. Incantations. Rites of banishment. Treatises of spells...'\n\nHe tails off. He can see the way she's staring at him.\n\n'Such things exist here,' she says. 'Along with many sacred texts, the testaments and so-called holy books of all the banished and prohibited religions. But, sir, they are all superstitious nonsense. They were written in eras of ignorance and false faith. They are just old words on old pages, empty and meaningless, and they can no more fight daemons than I can.'\n\n'Well, the daemons aren't daemons,' says Sindermann. 'Not in the sense of folklore and supernatural story. I have been aware of them for a long time, since a terrible encounter in a place called the Whisperheads. My knowledge is far from complete, but through careful examination of the ideas I have gathered over the years, I have come to believe that they are the forces of a companion dimension, a warped exoplanar space that conjoins our own material reality. We see them as daemons, for that is how our minds make sense of them, and they are certainly dreadful and destructive entities that operate beyond the laws of our reality. But they are not magick. They can be fought.'\n\nThe archivist tilts her head to one side, a moderately sarcastic look on her face.\n\n'Good sir, if the daemons aren't daemons, why would you come here looking for spells to banish them?'\n\nSindermann smiles. 'Because the spells aren't spells either. My theory... and I confess it is a poor one, which seems to have come upon me as a flash of inspiration from some external source rather than a rationally composed concept... my theory is that this other space, this warped space, has interacted with our own throughout all of history. Down through the ages, even to the earliest times. The phenomena witnessed have had a deep cultural effect. They are the root of all ideas of the supernatural, of daemons and spirits, ghosts and devils. And, I venture, all religions too. Through history, man has encountered the unknown, and given it many names. And mankind has learned things about it. A body of lore, incomplete, I grant you, that has informed the operation of what we might call magicians.'\n\n'Magicians, sir?'\n\n'From the earliest shamans, painting on rock walls, to sorcerers and seers, witch-doctors and alchemists, prophets and wise-women, mediums and priests. They were the lucky ones - or unlucky, I suppose - the very few who glimpsed the otherness. And in their parchments and riddles, and their rituals and their scriptures, they recorded what they knew. Rules, untidy and makeshift rules, ideated for the divination and abjuration of the Other. I believe that some, perhaps many, were closer to the truth than they realised. Closer than our dismissal of them, at any rate. Some odd rite or incantation from fifteen or twenty thousand years ago might, by accident, if you will, retain some power that we can harness as a weapon.'\n\nThe archivist frowns.\n\n'That seems unlikely,' she says.\n\n'I quite agree,' says Sindermann. 'But I am too old and delicate to fight on the walls with a gun, and too mortal to face down an Astartes traitor. This is the only form of fighting I might be suited for. It is desperate. Very desperate, and probably futile. But I need to do something. And my dear friend the boetharch thinks the same way. So here we are, at your door, begging for help.'\n\n'I don't know what you'll find,' she replies. 'I fear, sir, your desperation has led your imagination into riot.'\n\n'Quite right,' he says. 'But I ask you this. What were you doing here?'\n\n'I... I was maintaining my post, sir.'\n\n'Knowing that the first thing to come to the door would probably kill you, effortlessly? And that you would not be able to resist in any way?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'But you keep your post in principle, because it's the thing you know how to do?' Sindermann smiles. 'I think we are rather alike. This foolish errand is, perhaps, all I know how to do. But consider... the Hall of Leng, unlike all the other libraries, is forbidden and guarded by Custodians. Well, usually. Doesn't that suggest to you there must be something in here of true power?'\n\nShe is about to answer, when Mauer's voice echoes to them.\n\n'Having a nice chat down there, are you?'\n\nThey look up. Mauer is already on the gallery above. She leans over the rail and glares down at them.\n\n'Listen,' she calls out. 'Listen to this... It says... \"Of man's first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe, with loss of Eden, till one greater man restore us, and regain the blissful seat...\" and then it says... \"who first taught the chosen seed, in the beginning how the heaven and earth rose out of chaos...\" Does that sound like a spell to you? Some kind of ritual?'\n\n'It does,' says Sindermann. 'Hold on, I'm coming up.'\n\n'She's touching it!' the archivist yelps, pointing at the old book, bent open in Mauer's hands across the wooden rail. 'She's reading it! That's not permitted!'\n\n'Then you'd better come and keep an eye on us,' says Sindermann.\n\n'Sir!' says the archivist. She regains her composure and starts running after him. 'Sir!'\n\nHe turns to look at her. 'What?' he asks.\n\n'This idea you have, this notion... Where did it come from? Who instructed you to do this?'\n\nFor a moment, Sindermann remembers the Praetorian speaking to him on the roof garden in the rain. He'd said, 'Find some words.' He'd been instructing Sindermann to resume work as a historian, but the sentiment was the same. That, however, was long ago, before the Saturnine assault, and Dorn's words were not what had motivated him to come here.\n\n'You know...' says Sindermann, with a shrug. 'I have no idea.'\n\n3:xiii\n\nKeeler on her pilgrimage\n\nOn the Via Aquila, Keeler hears someone call her name, and it's not any of the millions with her.\n\n'Are you sick? Euphrati?' Perevanna asks, but she greys out for a moment. She tries to steady herself. She knows what it is because it's happened before, just a few times. The nauseous, pre-ictal phase of vision. She had it at Lion's Gate. The world gets muffled, and her sight dims, and she can hear her own blood. She always assumes its Him, but He hasn't spoken to her very often, and she's never been truly sure its Him anyway.\n\n'Euphrati?'\n\nIt passes. She straightens, and takes a breath. She can pass it off as tiredness. Perevanna knows everybody has long passed the point of exhaustion. It's never really a voice, and never really her name. Like this time, just a fleeting glimpse in her mind's eye of impossible light, a blinding brilliance above the world. In that light is her name somehow, not spoken but represented as a sign.\n\nShe feels sick. She suddenly thinks of all the times since the siege closed in and crushed their lives that she's thought she's heard her name called out. Most of the time she's dismissed it, just a voice in the ever-growing crowd. What if it's been Him every time and she's missed it? What if He's been trying to tell her something and she hasn't understood?\n\n'I'll catch you up,' she says. 'Keep them moving.'\n\nPerevanna looks at her for a moment, then nods.\n\nShe takes herself to the side of the road, and clambers up into the rubble to find a place to sit and catch her breath. In the Via Aquila below her, the exodus streams past. Eild reckons six million now, maybe more. There's no way of managing more than the roughest estimate. The conclave has been moving them north, away from the front line, though now it's a case of the masses moving the conclave. When they started out, trying to guide survivors, there was some sense of control. But the tide of refugees is now so vast it's moving of its own volition, like a great river or an elemental force, carrying the members of the conclave with it. She and the others have no more hope of guiding it or stopping it than they have of turning it around.\n\nShe doesn't know where they're going except north, and she's no longer sure why. The Via Aquila seems to have forgotten how to end. It's one of the main processionals of the central citadel, a vast highway, but even vast highways come to an end eventually.\n\nThis doesn't. They seem to have been trudging along it for hours.\n\nShe gets up and clears dust from her throat. A dry wind flutters the purity tag stapled to her coat. The river of souls below her, tight-packed and a hundred metres wide, stretches as far away as she can see to her right, where the bloom and fire-flash of war covers the sky, and also to her left, where there is just haze and drifting smog.\n\nSo does the Via Aquila. It's become impossibly, monstrously long, attenuated in ways that make her skin crawl, like the dimensions in a dream where the faster you run towards something, the further away it gets.\n\nThey are lost, on a straight road. They were lost, she thinks, before they even set out. She is glad of her brief vision and the sense of something calling to her, despite the nausea and discomfort it brought, because it gives her hope. Keeler had begun to think, for reasons she can't fully explain, that He had somehow suddenly gone from the world and left them all behind, that He had disappeared and was no longer in His "}
{"text":"eam where the faster you run towards something, the further away it gets.\n\nThey are lost, on a straight road. They were lost, she thinks, before they even set out. She is glad of her brief vision and the sense of something calling to her, despite the nausea and discomfort it brought, because it gives her hope. Keeler had begun to think, for reasons she can't fully explain, that He had somehow suddenly gone from the world and left them all behind, that He had disappeared and was no longer in His place on the great Throne.\n\nSo long as there is a voice, there is a chance.\n\n3:xiv\n\nConstantin in his silence\n\nHe doesn't need to speak. From the moment the mass teleport unfolds them back into corporeality, they know that everything is wrong.\n\nEverything, perhaps, except Dorn's prognostication of deceit.\n\nWell, damn him. Damn him and his clinical, Astartesian projections of strategy. Of course it was going to be deception. Of course it was going to be a trap.\n\nIt's not even subtle. The waiting Neverborn pounce before they are even solid, biting and clawing at their molecular patterns while they are still resolving. Sentinel Geliden solidifies to find his subatomic integrity so disrupted he is missing his torso from the breastbone down. He topples in a cloud of scrambled cells. Companion Astricol materialises in several pieces, which fly apart in showers of immortal blood and bounce across the deck. He does not have time to know what greeting has met him. He is dead on arrival. Sentinel Valique appears, on fire from the inside.\n\nThe others in the company strike. Their reactions could not be faster; reflexes that would shame mere Astartes. From pre-flare precipitation through materialisation through first daemon murders to their first kills, barely six nanoseconds pass. They are at pitched combat instantly, without prelude or warning, like pict-footage edited to play from the middle of battle. They are moving and killing before Geliden hits the deck, before the pieces of Astricol begin to separate, before Valique starts screaming.\n\nConstantin Valdor truncates the daemon he appears face to face with. His power sword is in and through the thing before it can react. Its head - massive, horned, manged with disease - is still grinning in anticipation as it is sheared off its shoulders.\n\nValdor doesn't need to speak. His command over his Custodes is partly wordless neuro-synergy, and partly decades of relentless drill and rehearsal. The company moves as one thing, like a troupe of gymnasts, their performance at once both precise choreography and acutely nuanced reaction. Their conditioning and combat formats are cured into them, practised to the point of objective perfection, but the expression of them is ordained, demi-second by demi-second, by Valdor's neural cues. He doesn't need to speak because there is no need for verbal command, and because there is nothing to say anyway.\n\nThey are in a pit of daemons. Immediate lethal force must be applied.\n\nAnd it is. Guardian spears lunge, stab and redress. Castellan axes hack and block. Integrated bolters and plasmics blurt and howl. Heavy Adrathics roar like afterburners. Greatswords slice. Misericordias bone and fillet. Where necessary, auramite fists and vambraces crush faces, block limbs or punch through chest walls.\n\nValdor is older than any primarch son, and his collated experience of war exceeds that of any of them. For the longest while, through the grinding lifetimes of the Unification Era and the early years of the Great Crusade, he had begun to believe, without complacency, that there was nothing in creation he hadn't met and killed. The civil war has shown him otherwise. It has revealed to him not just new, monstrous adversaries, but new forms of them. The galaxy seems to delight in presenting him with surprises.\n\nHe is never surprised. Surprise is a human handicap, and comes weighted with fear and hesitation. His response, always, is simply curiosity.\n\nHow may I learn to kill this?\n\nHe applies his curiosity now, with surgical focus.\n\nHe knows the primarch-children regard him as sullen and remote, like some malcontent uncle who begrudges their inheritance. They think him single-minded and stuck in his ways, unimaginative, and oddly unambitious. They assume he disapproves of them, of them and their Astartes, and believes they should never have been bred or birthed.\n\nValdor knows they think this of him, and he simply does not care. For the most part, they are entirely correct. He regards them as a profound mistake, the rare miscalculation of a brilliant mind. He considers them a disaster waiting to happen. He disapproves of them and resents them, for their boisterous and petulant emotions and the undeserved glory that flows towards them like iron filings to a magnet. He sees the civil war as an unequivocal vindication of those beliefs.\n\nBut those are political beliefs, and play no part in his duty, so he keeps them to himself. And the vindication gives him no pleasure, because pleasure is a human handicap, and comes weighted with extenuation and prideful satisfaction. He says little or nothing on the matter, except for occasional private rumination to those closest to him, of whom there are few. He keeps his counsel. It is not his place to express an opinion.\n\nThe primarchs are also correct in thinking him single-minded, but to see this as a failing reveals only that they have no understanding of his purpose. He, and those he commands, were built for one task: to guard the life of the Emperor. That is his duty, impressed into him at a genetic level. The primarchs speak of duty as though it is a solemn calling, and yet they flout it and shy from it at the slightest provocation. He is single-minded, because he has a single purpose. To see that as a fault shows they have no comprehension of duty whatsoever.\n\nBut they are wrong to believe him unimaginative. They would be surprised, profoundly, he thinks, at his curiosity. It is a baseline requirement of his purpose: to enquire, to examine, to learn, as constantly as his name implies, the nature of the galaxy so he may perform his duty with ever greater efficiency.\n\nIt makes him intellectually hungry, an appetite he sometimes feels on an acutely physical level. As the civil war unfolded, and the unknown exoplanar threat of the immaterium began to manifest, his mentor, He that Valdor guards, showed him a kindness, and gave him a gift: the Apollonian Spear.\n\nWhat it pierces, what it bites, it knows. It learns, and transmits that learning to the hands that wield it. A weapon of revelation. A feast for a starving warrior.\n\nWhat Constantin doesn't know, and perhaps can never know, is whether the Emperor gave him the spear as a simple practicality, to improve the performance of his duty, or if there was something more human, more unconditional, in the gift. Was it just to make Valdor a more effective warrior, or did his mentor feel pity and wish to placate his constant curiosity? Did He fear, perhaps, as his gene-sons rioted and turned traitor, because, allegedly, their needs were not met, that Valdor might break too? Did the Emperor think that Valdor would grow disloyal if his burning curiosity was left unsatisfied?\n\nWas the spear a bribe? An inducement to maintain loyalty and stave off resentment? An enticement to create the illusion that his needs were recognised?\n\nHe trusts it is not the case. The Emperor knows him better than that, surely? The Emperor made him better than that. To suspect that of Him is to think that the Emperor doubts him, and that cannot be, because doubt is a human handicap, and comes weighted with mistrust and anxiety.\n\nThe only way to know for sure would be to pierce the Emperor's flesh with the spear - if it could even do that - which would grant Valdor complete elucidation of all mysteries, but also entirely defeat the original purpose of his duty.\n\nBetter to regard the spear as merely an instrument vital to the accomplishment of his work.\n\nSome rotting, dragonate depravity rears up at him, billowing from the shadows while being simultaneously half-made of those very shadows. Valdor ends it with his sword, a stroke that splits its body in a mesial slice and opens it like a book. But his sword, fresh-forged in the House of Weapons, has already chopped down two capering Neverborn with hirsine heads and lariat tongues, and a massive tarantulous form with a thousand compound eyes freckling its furred mass. The blade has begun to choke out, and some substance in the dragonate beast, some liquor or some energy, shorts out its power, entirely.\n\nAn emaciated giant, four metres tall and thos-headed, like the jackal-gods of the ancient Nilus, swings for him. Valdor ducks the sickle talons and the long, eight-jointed digits that bear them, and drives his sword in. But its energy is exhausted, its edge is chafed and dinted, and it is now only dead metal. Metal is not enough to tear this thing's hide.\n\nValdor back-steps, hurls the sword away - incidentally impaling some squealing lesser spawn that dared too close - and unlocks the spear from his backplate. Eight seconds into the fight, eight seconds since materialisation, and a master-crafted weapon is worn out.\n\nThe thos comes at him, hunched, head down, porpentine quills rising like hackles on the base of its skull, its dog-teeth bared, a ringent grin, not of delight but because, like a dog, it is tasting him in the air.\n\nValdor makes no flourish. His technique is never ostentatious. With a twist of his hips, he drives the spear tip-first into the thing's shrunken chest until the blade emerges through the spine.\n\nA moment. It's never pleasant. It never lasts longer than a blink or a heartbeat. Valdor waits for it to be over, deadpan. In the blink, in the heartbeat, a mystery is transmitted through the haft of the spear, into his hands, into his soul, the mystery of a grotesque and elaborate lifetime... Aeons of un-terrenitous existence in the bloodwept eternity of "}
{"text":"ntatious. With a twist of his hips, he drives the spear tip-first into the thing's shrunken chest until the blade emerges through the spine.\n\nA moment. It's never pleasant. It never lasts longer than a blink or a heartbeat. Valdor waits for it to be over, deadpan. In the blink, in the heartbeat, a mystery is transmitted through the haft of the spear, into his hands, into his soul, the mystery of a grotesque and elaborate lifetime... Aeons of un-terrenitous existence in the bloodwept eternity of the warp, various embodiments of flesh and bone, deep ravening appetites and desires, a brief millennium worshipped as a deity by terrified priests in a shadowed temple at Saqqara, nine more locked in a lightless mastaba, a sojourn to a seething plutonium star on the hem of the Milky Way, pseudo-names and apocryphal titles, symbols, runes, glyphs, imprecations, prayers, rituals, allegiance to the entity of Change, a name, a real name...\n\n'M'han Thytt,' murmurs Valdor, uttering the dead thing's name to take power over it, and so he will remember it the next time. He jerks the spear out, and it comes free in a gout of mud-brown ichor. The thos collapses.\n\nHe twists, using the base of the haft to trip an attacker, before slicing with the blade. Another moment. Another blink, another heartbeat.\n\n'Qullqullech,' he whispers.\n\nTwelve seconds into the fight. The Custodes have ignited their arae-shrikes to broadcast blight-code that defeats and confounds any cogitators or sensoria trained on them. Adrathic weapons are turned on the largest horrors looming from the darkness. Blades and lances flense smaller forms into bloody meat, or burst etheric instantiations into voidmist. As they fight, the automatic systems in the Custodians' wargear scan for vox, noospheric and psycho-active linkages, communication bands, positioning data and reference markers, and tactical connectives, hunting fast and wide with high-function cogitation capability.\n\nValdor knew it would be a trap. Unlike Dorn, he didn't regard it as a worry to be questioned and evaluated. He knew it as an operational certainty, simply to be expected. He knew it because the Emperor knew it too. The Emperor does not make mistakes, because mistakes are a human handicap, and come weighted with ignorance and poor judgement. The Emperor would not have commanded Anabasis without expecting deceit. The brat Lupercal had dared Him, and He had out-dared the dare by accepting.\n\nThis was always going to be a fight. A fight to the death, after all, was the desired outcome.\n\nNothing about this is surprising Valdor. Except, perhaps, for the fact that he has only lost fourteen men in the first seventeen seconds. He blocks and thrusts, dodges scything claws and biting maws, guts and skewers, endures moments, learns names and mysteries, maintains his singularity of purpose.\n\nThen, in the thick of the melee, his suit link chimes. Search parameters exhausted. No data.\n\nHe keeps killing and learning as he ponders this. No data. No available vox or data linkage. No positioning. No contact with Hegemon Control or any of the other Anabasis companies.\n\nNo contact with Him.\n\nHe remains calm, killing a herpetine form as his mind whirs, ignoring, uncharacteristically, its name and secrets. Where are they? Where is He? Transition should have placed them all in Embarkation Deck Two. All four companies of the spearhead, no more than two hundred metres apart.\n\nThe darkness around them, the darkness that has entombed them for all of the twenty seconds since they arrived, is impenetrable and suffocating. The others should be close. He should be close. But Valdor somehow knows they are not. Even if he couldn't see them, or hear them, or scan them, or raise them on the link, he would know.\n\nIntuitively, he would know that He was close by.\n\nHe is not.\n\nAnd this is no embarkation deck. The walls, where visible, are taut sails of skin stretched like vocal cords. The floor is spoiled meat that extrudes fat white maggots when weight is placed upon it, like pus squeezed from a pimple. The air is a shivering etheric soup.\n\nHe is not here. Valdor has no data confirming His whereabouts or proximity. Valdor doesn't even know where he is himself.\n\nHe kills again, spit-speaks a name, then swallows hard. He has one duty, one duty, bred for it. He pursues it single-mindedly. It is his life. The preservation of the Emperor. And suddenly, he cannot.\n\nWas that the trap? Was that the deceit? The torment that brat Lupercal chose for him?\n\nTo prevent him being the only thing he has ever been?\n\nHe does not panic. Others would. He does not. He doesn't even become anxious. Only those who know him best - and those would include the two Custodians fighting either side of him, Proconsul Ludovicus and Warden Symarcantis - would be able to detect the change in his mental state, the micro-increase in his pulse rate and breathing.\n\nThey both glance at him.\n\n'Focus!' he snarls, the first verbal instruction he has issued.\n\nThe rate of attack is not diminishing. It is increasing. Entire menageries of atrocity are spilling out of the tangible darkness from every side, gibbering and laughing, whispering and mewling, like rushing waves of nightmare breaking on the margent shore of sanity. Breaking across his men, of whom, twenty-three seconds into the fight, only seventy-nine remain alive.\n\nAre they even aboard the bastard child's ship? Did he divert their matter transmission? Change their destination using signal capture redirection? Did he send them into the webway? Did he send them into the warp itself?\n\nSparks flurry, embers in the air. Diocletian Coros is unloading bolt-round after bolt-round into a colossal tusked beast to bring it down. The concentration of shots has caught its straggled pelt alight. Tribune Diocletian has been obliged to act with such inefficient fury, because the tusked thing had been about to strike Valdor.\n\nWho hadn't seen it coming. Distraction had broken his focus.\n\nHe nods his appreciation to Diocletian, turns, stabs a thing - half plump infant, half hornet - out of the air, mutters its name, then recomposes his formation via neuro-synergetics.\n\nThe daemon droves multiply, living darkness becoming solid things.\n\nHe is not scared. He isn't even angry, though rage is a weapon he always keeps close at hand. He hesitates to use it, because rage is a human handicap, and comes weighted with imprecision and unforced error. But he will reach for it if he must.\n\nHis curiosity lights him up. He needs to know. He needs to know. Not the names belonging to the participants in the misbegotten parade of murder around him, names that will simply edge him ever closer to the fringe of madness, but something true. Something real. Something he can fight with, or against.\n\nHe hefts the spear. It works against flesh, even immaterial corporeality, but not against inanimate materials.\n\nThe deck, though. The deck is maggot-puckered meat.\n\nValdor plunges the Apollonian Spear into the floor, or the ground, or the deck, or whatever it is or used to be.\n\nA moment. A blink, a heartbeat. A mystery. A name.\n\nConstantin Valdor shudders. It is twenty-five seconds into the fight.\n\n'Vengeful Spirit,' he whispers.\n\n3:xv\n\nAzif\n\nAdophel said three days. Adophel is seldom wrong. But he is wrong.\n\nCorswain goes to the parapet below the Tertiary Portal. The Chapter Master is gazing into the drop, surveying the long channel of the pass.\n\n'I can't explain it,' Adophel says before Corswain even speaks. 'I was sure we had time yet.'\n\nHe points. The scree slopes immediately below them are furred in deep ash and snow, but the lower realms of the pass are bare black rock, caught in the windshadow of the mountain. There is movement, undetected by any of the auto-sensoria they have set up. Corswain hears a buzzing. The azif, the night-scratch of insects, reckoned in the old deserts of Terra to be the call of daemons.\n\nHe sees, at a great distance, a stream coursing along the very bottom of the deep pass. It is just a trickle, like a fresh run of meltwater in spring. It winds beneath the rock-shadows, in and out of blackness, but where it catches the hyaline daylight, it glitters like tumbling jewels, blue and green. There's no way to easily judge scale, but Corswain can see that it's not men. A mass of tiny, gleaming shapes. A moving, advancing mat of-\n\nBeetles. Flies.\n\nA trickling stream of them, threading up the pass. How many must there be? How many billions must it take to make up a glinting black rill on the floor of the pass?\n\nFar below, a gauze of mist drifts across the trackway. When it's gone, there is a figure standing there, gazing up at Corswain on the distant cliff. The stream of insects has halted, as though dammed, at the figure's heels.\n\nIt is Typhon. It is Calas Typhon, proud son of Barbarus, First Captain of the XIV Legion. He looks exactly as he did the day Corswain first met him, all those years ago before hell descended. His plate gleams in the cold light. He raises his hand in an almost fraternal salute.\n\n'You are broken,' he says. Just a whisper, but Corswain hears it as clearly as he would if they were face to face. 'You are broken, Corswain, inside and out. Our long game of war comes down to this, and in respect of you, we offer a chance to submit. Submit to us. Do not attempt a final fight.'\n\n'You can offer me nothing but death,' Corswain yells back. He has to raise his voice so it will carry the thousand metres down into the pass. Typhon's soft reply comes effortlessly to his ear.\n\n'Of course. Nothing but death. But it need not be by blade or violence. Submit, and it will be painless. A gentle decay into silence. We offer this in honour of your worth as a rival. No recrimination. Accept that you are broken, and take this gift from us. Spare yourself the pain of resisting the inevitable.'\n\nThe voice is commanding, honest, respectful. An offer of honour, warrior to warrior, mindful of dignity, courteous in manner. It is the integrity Cor"}
{"text":"reply comes effortlessly to his ear.\n\n'Of course. Nothing but death. But it need not be by blade or violence. Submit, and it will be painless. A gentle decay into silence. We offer this in honour of your worth as a rival. No recrimination. Accept that you are broken, and take this gift from us. Spare yourself the pain of resisting the inevitable.'\n\nThe voice is commanding, honest, respectful. An offer of honour, warrior to warrior, mindful of dignity, courteous in manner. It is the integrity Corswain would show to a helpless foe. For a moment, he finds himself considering it. It would be so easy to let go, so sweet to relinquish the effort of-\n\n'Sire. Your grace.'\n\nCorswain looks at Adophel.\n\n'Hell's blood,' says Adophel very quietly. 'The urge to agree is almost overwhelming.'\n\nCorswain nods. 'You feel it too?'\n\n'Like an ache in my heart. What's wrong with us? What is he doing to us?'\n\n'He was always witch-blooded,' says Corswain. He looks around. A good portion of his forces are positioned to guard the pass, both above on the jagged lip of the cliffs, and on the skirt walls and fighting platforms below the portal. There should be more, but they thought they had longer. Many are still undeployed, or occupied in purifying the mountain's chambers. They thought they had three days. Adophel said three days.\n\nHow could Typhon have reached them so quickly? And why does he come alone, with only carrion flies and chirring beetles as an escort?\n\nCorswain looks at his men. They are silent and motionless, as though they too have been transfixed by Typhon's offer. It feels as if their hearts have emptied.\n\nCartheus runs out onto the parapet. He drops to his knees and almost scrape-skids to rest at Corswain's feet.\n\n'They are here!' he cries. 'Your grace, they are all here!'\n\n'What?'\n\n'He's beguiling you! Against all sanity, they are here already!'\n\nCorswain blinks. It's not possible. Typhon has come alone. He should descend and finish him, for his gall, and set his head on a spike to greet the Death Guard army when it arrives.\n\nCorswain turns and gazes down into the pass. 'Begone,' he yells. 'Or I'll cut you down where you stand.'\n\n'Pity...' Typhon whispers. His figure is already dissolving into languid mountain mist. His last word echoes and repeats, slowly blurring with each repetition into the whirring scratch of azif. In the shadow-thwarted bed of the deep pass, the stream of blackness starts to move again, scuttling and scritching, inching between pebbles and stones towards the base of the portal.\n\nBut they are not pebbles, or stones. They are boulders and age-tumbled blocks. The gleaming shapes are not beetles and flies, they are men. Scale telescopes and shifts. Distance reduces, and the sheer cliffs of the pass seem to soar and tower. There is an army in the pass, a whole army at their door. It is plated in dirt, and where the thin light catches the moving plate, it glints and sparkles iridescent, like the wing cases of scarabs.\n\nIt swarms towards them.\n\n'To arms...' Adophel croaks, then clears his throat and repeats the words with more force to clear the strangled break in his voice. On the walls and fighting platforms, the men shift, but it is slow and stunned with disbelief.\n\nThe air below is suddenly freckled with flies. The buzzing azif swells in volume.\n\n'Raise the line!' Corswain snaps at his Chapter Master. 'Every man, every weapon we have!'\n\n'Your grace-'\n\n'Do it! You heard our brother Cartheus! He has no reason to lie, but by my soul, we are blinded by lies! Typhus infects us with his fever-dreams! Go! Go!'\n\nAdophel turns and strides towards the portal, yelling commands. Arms and armour clatter as men respond.\n\n'Are you sure of this?' Corswain asks Cartheus. 'What unfolds below... it's not just another warp-conjured trick to drive us mad?'\n\n'Upon my life, no, your grace!' the warp-seer replies. Corswain sees the odd symbols and wards chalked on the man's plate. 'Zahariel has read it. He sent me with all urgency. They are here and upon us already.'\n\nCorswain unsheathes his warblade, and glares down into the pass. The gulf below is full of churning black forms. Clouds of flies smoke the air like the vapour haze of a cataract. The Dark Angels had the advantage of height, and the natural choke point of the pass, but the enemy is already teeming up the rocks, like black water running uphill, against all laws of nature, impossibly ascending even sheer rock to the first of the fighting platforms, the grip and purchase of the warriors as sure and effortless as spiders on a wall.\n\nHe thought they had days to prepare, days to lay up their defence and edge their blades. They do not.\n\nHe raises his sword in the brumal light.\n\n'Kill them,' is his only command.\n\n3:xvi\n\nSurfacing\n\nThe freight elevator, unused for months, takes almost twenty minutes to ascend from deep storage bunkers kilometres beneath the Sanctum. As it rises, it passes other storage levels, vast lonely halls, haunted by silence, that were once lined with rows of burnished war machines and stocks of munitions, enough to conquer a galaxy. But they have been picked clean, the cellars and reserves of the Palace stripped bare by the siege. War has emptied the vaults, leaving dim rockcrete compartments so vast, the entire human population of Terra could be contained there, sheltered from the surface onslaught.\n\nIf only anyone had thought to do it.\n\nThe elevator arrives, finally, with a shuddering clank, in a dispersal chamber adjoining the power plants that serve the House of Weapons. The chamber is also empty, apart from the abandoned freight haulers and exo-loaders that once handled the flow of armaments. They stand in the gloom like sculptures of orkoid beasts, their service to the war effort ended.\n\nAmber warning lamps flash briefly. The elevator's tripartite hatch whirs open, and the Coronus grav-carrier rolls out across the chamber's floor, lifting a silent billow of dust. At other times, its arrival would have triggered security notices and brought Sentinels to investigate, even though this vehicle is one of theirs. But no one comes. John isn't sure if that's because the Alpha Legionnaire has run scrap code exploits to mask them from the automated security systems, or because there is no one watching any more. He isn't sure which of these ideas alarms him more.\n\nThe legionnaire brings the carrier to a halt and powers it down.\n\n'Are we ditching this?' asks Dogent Krank, who has quickly come to like the well-armed and well-armoured reassurance of the Coronus.\n\n'The mass-passageways of the lower Sanctum are more than large enough to accommodate a vehicle of this size,' says Actae.\n\nJohn looks at her. 'I have a feeling,' he says, 'that He's not going to like us arriving unannounced and knocking on His door. I know for sure He won't like it if we roll up in a tank.'\n\nJohn and Pech dismount first, John with his kitbag shouldered. They walk away from the carrier, looking for signs of life, feeling the infrasonic thrum of the nearby power plants in the air. The air is dead and stale, as though circ-processors have been shut down or set to conserve.\n\n'The Sanctum,' murmurs John.\n\n'Dispersal chamber six-nine-four,' Pech replies. 'About ninety minutes' walk to the Throne Room proper.'\n\nJohn glances around at the emptiness and dust wistfully. His face and ribs still hurt, and his mouth and chin are bruised and scabbed.\n\n'Not quite the Palace I imagined it would be,' he says.\n\n'It's a service area, John. A utility vault. The formal areas of the Sanctum are quite grand. You won't be disappointed. In fact, you may want to brace yourself.'\n\n'I was being sarcastic, Pech.'\n\n'Ah.'\n\n'You've seen them then?' John adds. 'The, uh... formal areas?'\n\n'I've glimpsed them. Some of them.'\n\n'You damn Hydra, you'll find your way into anything, won't you?'\n\n'It's why we were made, John.'\n\n'Well, my hat's off to you, Pech,' says John. He sets his kitbag down and rummages inside it to check he has everything. 'You did exactly what you said you'd do. You got us in. Into the Sanctum. Nigh on half the galaxy is trying and failing to do that, including several of the most gifted and powerful primarchs. You showed them, eh? Devil Lupercal should have put his money on the Alpha Legion. I guess that's why Erda sent you to us.'\n\n'I suppose so.'\n\n'Well, anyway,' says John, rising to his feet, with a slight wince as he braces his bruised ribs. 'My thanks. Sincerely. We literally couldn't have got this far without you.'\n\nHe casually pats the Alpha Legionnaire on the chestplate, an almost affectionate gesture of comradeship. When his hand comes away, it leaves something behind.\n\n'Don't move, though, Ingo,' he says. 'Not a muscle. Please.'\n\n'What have you done, John?'\n\nJohn raises a hasty finger to his lips. 'I wouldn't even speak, if I were you. Seriously. Now it's set, it's acutely motion sensitive.'\n\nPech freezes, as much a statue as the derelict exo-loaders around them. His suit systems have already identified what John has done. The close-focus limpet mine anchored to his chestplate displays a small, red, blinking rune.\n\n'Be resourceful, you said, so I'm being resourceful,' John tells the unmoving giant. 'I'm taking you out of the game, just like you told me to. Move, even slightly, and that thing goes off. But don't move, because I don't want you to die. Just stay there. Really, really steady. I know your kind knows how to do that.'\n\nHe bends down, scoops up his kitbag, and reaches into it again. Behind them, the others are emerging from the carrier.\n\n'I found a canister of them in that tank's storage locker,' John says. 'Same place as the voltvolver. One of your caches, I think. Now, you stay put. I'll sort out the rest of this mess.'\n\nHe walks towards the carrier. The others have all dismounted: Oll, the long companions, Leetu and Actae. The witch moves to meet him, her blind head cocked in curiosity.\n\n'What's happening?' she asks. 'What's Alpharius doing? Why-'\n\nJohn strides towards "}
{"text":" Behind them, the others are emerging from the carrier.\n\n'I found a canister of them in that tank's storage locker,' John says. 'Same place as the voltvolver. One of your caches, I think. Now, you stay put. I'll sort out the rest of this mess.'\n\nHe walks towards the carrier. The others have all dismounted: Oll, the long companions, Leetu and Actae. The witch moves to meet him, her blind head cocked in curiosity.\n\n'What's happening?' she asks. 'What's Alpharius doing? Why-'\n\nJohn strides towards her. He lets the kitbag drop, revealing the psi-damper in his left hand, and flicks the pod's casing open with a snap of his wrist. He's ready for it, teeth gritted. She isn't, and it's going to hurt her more anyway.\n\nActae squeals, and falls to one knee, clawing at her head. John puts the damper down, just out of her reach, its soft, blue light glowing at maximum, and steps back. He pulls the voltvolver out of his belt with his right hand, and aims it directly at her head.\n\n'Stay down,' he says.\n\n3:xvii\n\nSomeone in authority\n\n'Keeler!'\n\nAgain, the voice-\n\n'Keeler! Mam!'\n\nNo, not some divine whisper. A real voice. Across the torrent of the flowing crowd, she sees Tang waving to her. Keeler jumps down and pushes through the press to reach her.\n\nTang has soldiers with her, members of the conclave, or willing civilian volunteers. They stink of promethium because most are carrying flamer units liberated from the munition wagons. Trial and error has shown that flames are the best defence. It's not much, because despite their vast numbers, they are not an armed force. But flamers can lay down screens of fire to drive off the raiding enemy units that harry the exodus, and fire is the best protection against the Neverborn, especially when they irrupt inside the refugee column. Fire has become the weapon of faith.\n\nIt's not much protection. If they are overtaken or surprised by an enemy main force, there will be absolute slaughter.\n\n'What is it?' Keeler asks. Tang gestures to Katsuhiro, the trooper who has become part of their rabble. Caked in dust and masked like a bandit, he still clutches the child to his body. Keeler doubts he will ever let it go.\n\n'Someone demanding to see someone in authority,' says Katsuhiro.\n\nKeeler grins. 'Best of luck with that,' she says.\n\n'He means you,' says Leeta Tang.\n\nKeeler shrugs and follows them, walking up the ragged edge of the processional, in the stone-choked gutter, following the direction of flow. They move faster than the main body of the mass, which crawls, bandaged and blindfold, like a vagabond glacier. Katsuhiro and two flamer troops lead her and Tang off the main thoroughfare into an area of burned-out ruins. People from the exodus are resting there, propped on stone blocks and broken walls, easing torn feet and getting their strength back before rejoining the long march.\n\nA little way in, Keeler sees a robed man indignantly arguing with Wereft and several more conclave soldiers. The robed man is injured, and his indignation has robbed him of what was once some stately dignity.\n\n'What is this?' Keeler asks Katsuhiro.\n\n'We saw a flyer come down,' he replies. 'A little Orgus 'thopter chopped by flak. Your man Wereft sent a team to check for survivors. Found this one.'\n\n'Are you in charge?' the robed man asks as Keeler approaches.\n\n'No one's in charge,' she replies. 'If you're here for any length of time, you'll realise that.'\n\n'I require soldiers!' the man says. 'An escort detachment. You will provide them.'\n\n'That's not possible,' she says.\n\n'I told him it wasn't possible,' says Wereft.\n\n'Then make it possible!' the man snaps.\n\n'Sir, we can offer you support and somewhat limited medicae assistance,' she says, 'But beyond that...'\n\n'Do you know who I am?' the man asks her. His anger is born out of fear, she can see that. She can also see that she does know who he is, to a certain extent. Up close, she can see the fine quality of his robes, the expensive silks, the mantle and crest of office disguised by dust and oil, the eyes that have been sutured shut for decades.\n\n'This,' says Wereft, 'is Nemo Zhi-Meng.'\n\n'Lord!' the man snaps. 'Lord! You will address me with respect!'\n\n'With respect then, Lord Zhi-Meng,' says Keeler, 'you're shit out of luck. You can come with us, or you can make your own way. A dubious choice, I realise.'\n\nHe is stunned to silence. He sits down heavily on a slab of rockcrete, head bowed, and his shoulders start to shake.\n\n'Step back, please,' Keeler says to the others. They back off and leave her alone with the man. She crouches in front of Zhi-Meng.\n\n'I'm afraid authority has its limits now,' she says gently. 'Life too. Hell is here.'\n\n'I know it,' he murmurs, nodding.\n\n'I mean no unkindness, my lord, but all we can do is walk, in the hope of walking clear of this.'\n\nHe turns his face towards her. Though his eyes are long gone, the sacrifice of his art, his blindsight is sharp and knows exactly where she is.\n\n'You're Keeler?' he asks.\n\nShe nods.\n\n'I am-' he begins.\n\n'Choirmaster of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica,' she answers. 'A lord of the High Council of Terra. One of the Senior Twelve. My lord, in other circumstances, it would have been a singular honour to meet you. Where were you going?'\n\n'I was at Bhab Bastion,' he says. 'Trying to... to do my work. Reinforce the telaethesics...' He shrugs. 'Bhab is fallen,' he says.\n\n'I guessed as much.'\n\n'We tried to evacuate. My lifewards got me to a flyer, but-'\n\n'This is not flying weather, my lord.'\n\nZhi-Meng laughs, a brittle laugh. 'It was a slaughter, Keeler. Great men and women, the Imperium's best, butchered in the halls, burned like kindling...'\n\n'Men and women of all stations have been brought low by this, sir,' she replies. 'Come with me to the street outside and I will show you millions of them. War makes no distinctions when it comes to privilege, office or nobility, I'm afraid.'\n\n'I was trying to reach the Sanctum,' he says. 'To rejoin the command structure and perform my duties-'\n\n'I can't get you there,' she says. 'Eternity Gate is shut forever. Our duties are reassigned for us all. Ours, now - yours and mine - it's simply to survive, if we can.'\n\nHe nods. 'You're leading refugees out of the centre?'\n\n'Yes, lord.'\n\n'To where?'\n\n'I have no idea,' she says. 'Nowhere in this world is safe, but I'm hoping some places are safer than others. Perhaps the northern districts, or even off the plateau itself, if we can get that far. To be honest, I think lack of food and water will kill most of us long before that, and if they don't, the enemy is at our backs and getting ever closer.'\n\n'The world is broken,' he says. He rubs dirt off his cheek with the back of his hand. 'The last things I saw before I left my post... readings and data that made no sense. Time, dimensions... I mean the basic laws and fundamentals of the material world. They are corrupting. Terra is being dragged into the warp, Keeler. The natural laws of space and time can no longer be trusted to guide us. I know you know what the warp is.'\n\n'Yes,' she replies.\n\n'I have heard a great deal about you,' he says. 'One of the very first beyond the privileged few to glimpse the truth of our universe. That is correct, isn't it?'\n\n'It is.'\n\n'I confess, mam, I was one of those who voted to keep you incarcerated. To keep you locked away so you could divulge nothing. The truth was kept close for a long time, Keeler, for good reason.'\n\n'I was taught the truth sets us free.'\n\n'Sadly, no. And to say so makes you sound naive. Since the very first, I have known this. Since I was first elected to my role and inducted into the mysteries. To run the Telepathica, and support the Astronomican, I had to learn things that would curdle the mind. For all the Emperor's power, mankind exists on the very brink, under sufferance of the warp. Without it, we cannot maintain an empire, but it is our greatest foe. I have always petitioned, most strenuously, that the secrets of our universe must be kept from almost everybody. Then the likes of you come along, half-glimpsing something, and then speaking of faith and divinity-'\n\n'I only speak of what I have seen, sir.'\n\n'Without thought to the danger of it! The gods are false, Keeler. I have come to understand, through this horror, that there is a reason He prohibited religion and followed His instinct to shield mankind from understanding. The gods are false, but an awareness of the deep powers makes them real. The derangements of faith and belief stir up the empyric void.'\n\n'I understand that,' she says. 'I understood it when it was first revealed to me. And for the longest time, that policy made sense. Ignorance was the best defence. The Emperor could shield us by our ignorance until His great plan was implemented and mankind could exist free of the warp. But Horus came.'\n\n'Yes, Horus came.'\n\n'And look at us, sir. Look where we are now. This can't be hidden or ignored. The warp is revealed to all and everyone. And the ignorance enforced upon us makes us more vulnerable for, lacking a better explanation, the masses see this as daemons and devilry which, of course, amplifies the effect. The ignorance that once protected us now magnifies the warp.'\n\n'You are a more rational person than I expected, Keeler,' he says.\n\n'Thank you. And I ask you this, because you may be one of the few who can answer... If superstitious dread amplifies the warp, might not faith fortify against it?'\n\n'Faith in what?'\n\n'In the Emperor. If fear agitates the warp into a frenzy, might not faith generate a stabilising calm?'\n\n'You betray your lack of comprehension, Keeler. At the risk of gross simplification, such a mechanism would only work if the Emperor was a god, in the way that primordial entities of the empyrean may be called gods.'\n\n'But what if He is?'\n\n'Dear woman, I have stood in His presence. He is many things, but a god He is not.'\n\n'I have met Him too,' she says.\n\n'You have?'\n\n'I have. He's here with me now. He is my hope. He is the hope of the mil"}
{"text":"a frenzy, might not faith generate a stabilising calm?'\n\n'You betray your lack of comprehension, Keeler. At the risk of gross simplification, such a mechanism would only work if the Emperor was a god, in the way that primordial entities of the empyrean may be called gods.'\n\n'But what if He is?'\n\n'Dear woman, I have stood in His presence. He is many things, but a god He is not.'\n\n'I have met Him too,' she says.\n\n'You have?'\n\n'I have. He's here with me now. He is my hope. He is the hope of the millions in the street. He is the voice calling my name. He is the light. I think, sir, though I bow to your greater learning, that you have beheld it all but missed the point. You understand the detailed rubrics of your office, and the complex mechanisms of the Astropathica, yet fail to see...'\n\nShe stops, and sits down heavily. The nausea has overwhelmed her again, quite suddenly. There's a light in her eyes that makes the shape of her name, a shining voice that dazzles her.\n\n'Are you all right?' asks Zhi-Meng. 'What happened?'\n\n'I am... It's passing...'\n\n'I felt that. Felt something. A wash of psykana, for a moment... Do you have the gift, Keeler? Does that explain your fanciful ideas?'\n\nShe clambers heavily to her feet.\n\n'I don't know anything, sir,' she says. 'Really, I don't. I freely admit that my life has become cursed by mere flashes, all incomplete, of the greater truth. I have seen the lightning through a keyhole. I can only make what sense of it I can. But I know where we're going.'\n\n'Who?' Zhi-Meng asks.\n\n'All of us. I know where we're going, or where we're supposed to be going. I know where we need to be. I saw it, quite suddenly. A light. A guiding light. It is everything. It is the most important thing.'\n\n'Do you mean a place where all these people will be safe?' he asks. 'Where we will be safe?'\n\n'I don't know,' she replies. 'I don't think it's safe at all, but I know it's where we have to go.'\n\n'How do you know? Who is telling you this?'\n\n'I don't know that either,' says Keeler.\n\n3:xviii\n\nUnless you fail\n\n'What the hell are you doing, Grammaticus?' Oll yells.\n\n'What I'm supposed to do, Oll,' John growls back, his teeth gritted, his weapon aimed at Actae's head. 'I'm looking after you. Watching your back. I've got them. Both of them.'\n\nActae groans, flopping over into a foetal position on the oil-spotted rockcrete.\n\n'Stay down,' John tells her, the gun still aimed. He snatches a sidelong look at Oll. 'I had to wait until we were inside. Don't look at me like that. I know how dangerous she is. Alpharius told me all about it.'\n\n'I know full well how dangerous she is,' says Oll, glaring at John in dismay. 'She pretty much told me herself.'\n\nJohn sniffs and nods. 'Did she? Well, this is how it has to go.'\n\nHe glances at the others. They're all staring at him in shock, all except Katt, who has collapsed into Krank's arms. She's twitching and shivering.\n\n'Sorry, Katt,' John calls out. 'Psi-damper. It was the only way, and there was no time to warn you.' He looks back at Oll. 'Just say the word,' he says.\n\n'The word?'\n\n'Come on, Oll! She's too dangerous to live. Just say the word!'\n\n'For god's sake, John,' says Oll. 'I don't want you to shoot her.'\n\n'Really? Knowing what you know?'\n\n'I know she was sent to help us.'\n\n'So she claims-'\n\n'Erda co-opted her for a reason,' says Leetu quietly. 'Her, and Alpharius too. She brought us all together because we need each other.'\n\n'Yeah?' says John. 'Well, I have the greatest respect for your lovely mistress, Astartes, but I don't think she knows everything. This Actae woman has an agenda of her own.'\n\n'O-of course I do,' Actae gasps. 'And I h-haven't hidden it.'\n\n'Turn that thing off, John,' says Oll.\n\n'Oll...'\n\n'Turn it off. You've got a gun on her. Let her speak.'\n\nJohn hesitates. With a scowl, he crouches and deactivates the damper. He keeps the gun trained on Actae's skull the whole time.\n\n'This is a mistake,' he says.\n\n'My life's just one long series of those,' says Oll.\n\nHe looks at Actae. She's risen on all fours, panting as she tries to clear her head.\n\n'I'm giving you a chance,' says Oll. 'The things you've said, I'm not going to lie. They scare me. I think you're crazy. But I also trust Erda's insight. She believes we need you, she steered you to us. So I'm not just going to kill you. Talk. Please.'\n\nActae raises her head. She rocks back and sits on her heels, trying to regain her breath.\n\n'I'm the fail-safe,' she says.\n\n'What does that even mean?' snaps John. Oll raises a hand to shut him up.\n\n'Explain that,' says Oll.\n\n'There are too many variables,' says Actae. 'Even you admit you're not sure what you're going to do when the time comes. Erda was providing options and opportunities. Alpharius was the way in. I'm the fail-safe.'\n\n'If this goes wrong...' Oll begins.\n\n'If this goes wrong.' She nods. 'If you fail to deliver. And, I swear, I have no idea why she has any faith whatsoever in you and your rabble. But I trust her insight too. Just like you. She is the future we might have had. She saw the dangers long in advance, but she was shut out and silenced. She sent me to help you, Oll Persson. I intend to fulfil that obligation. Help you in any way I can. I have demonstrated that intent already. Whatever I believe, I won't impose it on you.'\n\n'Unless I fail,' says Oll.\n\n'Unless you fail. If you can't achieve what you set out to achieve, then - and only then - I'll take my own measures. If Horus, as I believe, is too potent for any of us, even the Emperor himself... then I will try things my way.'\n\n'Harness him?' John says. 'Harness the damn warp?'\n\n'If I can,' she replies. 'Perhaps I can't. But I will certainly try, and I have an unrivalled insight. Whatever Horus was is long gone. He is an instrument now, a very powerful one, but an instrument, no more or less. Instruments exist to be used.'\n\n'Oh, 'cause it's that simple,' John sneers.\n\nShe slowly rises to her feet. John's aim follows her up, and never wavers from her head.\n\n'There are two sides in this, Oll Persson,' she says, turning her face towards Oll. 'That is the nature of war. Two sides must be defeated, or persuaded to alter course, in order for this conflict to end. That, or the galaxy and our species burn. You, Oll, are the weapon sent to stop the Emperor. If you succeed, you may be enough. But if you fail, I am the weapon sent to stop Horus.'\n\nJohn starts to laugh. 'Shit, Oll,' he says. 'Are you swallowing any of this?'\n\nOll shakes his head wearily.\n\n'Your words have a ring of truth,' he says to Actae, 'even if John can't hear it. But we've come a long way, and we're tired, and I can't see how we can trust you. You could be lying. You could be saying what you think we want to hear. You might even be telling the truth, but only because there's a gun to your head. The moment John puts away that preposterous handgun, you could turn on us.'\n\n'So, you're saying I should shoot her?' John asks.\n\n'Shut up, John,' Oll sighs.\n\n'I'm sorry you don't trust me,' says Actae.\n\n'So am I,' says Oll.\n\n'But I understand. Our views of the cosmos are very different. Perhaps that's why Erda drew us together.'\n\n'Perhaps. But I still see no way of trusting you from here on.'\n\n'There is a way,' says Leetu quietly.\n\nOll glances at him.\n\n'There is a way,' Leetu repeats. 'A safeguard. A way of keeping watch on her thoughts in case she tries to deceive us.'\n\n'Go on.'\n\n'It would be demanding. An unpleasant hardship.' The Astartes looks over at Katt, who is beginning to stand unaided, her hands shaking. 'A psykanic link. The witch lets the girl watch her thoughts. One mind open to the other. The girl would act as a leash. If the witch even thinks of behaving contrary to your wishes, we'll know. Likewise, if the witch tries to hide her thoughts, the girl will know that too. She can warn us.'\n\nLeetu stares at Katt.\n\n'It's a big ask, I realise,' he says.\n\n'I'll do it,' Katt says without hesitation.\n\n'Katt-' says Oll.\n\n'I will do it. I'll watch her like a hawk.' She steps forward and glares pugnaciously at Actae. 'Well? You call it,' she says.\n\n'Let you into my mind?' Actae replies, a look of mild disgust on her face. 'Let you in, to see everything-'\n\n'It's that,' says Katt, 'or Grammaticus pops you in the forehead.'\n\nActae lifts her hand sharply.\n\n'If you let me finish, girl,' she hisses. 'The idea is repulsive. My mind is my own, and I shudder at the thought of some grubby urchin ransacking my secrets and my memories. But my comfort is not the issue. There is far too much at stake. If that's what it will take for you to trust me, Oll Persson, so we may continue... So be it.'\n\n'Wait,' says John. 'She's talking about trust. There's no trust in this! She could falsify her thoughts, wall off parts of her mind-'\n\n'I could do all those things,' says Actae. 'But I won't, Grammaticus. That's the point. I need your trust. I have nothing to hide.'\n\nShe turns her face towards Oll.\n\n'Well?' she asks. 'Do you trust me? Do you want to trust me?'\n\nOll thinks for a moment. He walks over to Katt and hugs her tight.\n\n'Don't do this if you don't want to,' he whispers. 'It will be a lot. It will be unpleasant.'\n\n'It's all right,' she whispers back, resting her head on his chest. 'I think I've finally worked out why I'm here.'\n\nKatt pulls away from him and faces Actae.\n\n'Go on,' she says.\n\nActae smiles. It is not a comforting smile. 'As you wish, child,' she replies.\n\nShe dips her head slightly. Katt blinks, and she lets out a little gasp. Oll can tell that the contact is immediately distressing, but Katt breathes hard and clenches her fists, determined not to show on her face the horror flooding her mind.\n\n'There,' she says, with some effort. 'Not so hard. Not so bad.' She tries to flash a smile at Oll, but it's more of a grimace.\n\n'What happens now?' asks Zybes.\n\nOll crosses to John, places his hand on the top of John's gun and gently pushes his aim down. John scowls at him, then submits and tucks the weapon away.\n\n'This is a mistake, Oll,' he says qu"}
{"text":"ontact is immediately distressing, but Katt breathes hard and clenches her fists, determined not to show on her face the horror flooding her mind.\n\n'There,' she says, with some effort. 'Not so hard. Not so bad.' She tries to flash a smile at Oll, but it's more of a grimace.\n\n'What happens now?' asks Zybes.\n\nOll crosses to John, places his hand on the top of John's gun and gently pushes his aim down. John scowls at him, then submits and tucks the weapon away.\n\n'This is a mistake, Oll,' he says quietly.\n\n'Like I said...'\n\n'I had them both. I won't get that chance again. You understand this is why I'm here, don't you?'\n\n'To make amends, for things you did or should have done in other lives.'\n\n'Yeah, that,' says John. 'Whatever. Oll, I threw my lot in with you to protect you. To get you where you need to be, that's all. You have to let me do that.'\n\nOll nods.\n\n'I mean it,' says John. 'Let me look after you. Let me get you there. Stop overruling me. I don't have your scruples, Oll. Your moral compass. Let me do the dirty work so your hands stay clean. Damn it, I should have just shot her.'\n\n'Well, don't ask my opinion, then.'\n\n'I won't,' says John. 'Next time, I won't. Stay out of my way. I'll just do what needs to be done to save your sorry arse. No consultation. I won't give you the chance to talk me out of it.'\n\n'Fine.'\n\n'Fine. Because you can talk your way out of anything.'\n\n'That,' says Oll, 'is basically what I'm counting on.'\n\nJohn snorts in disdain. He picks up the damper, drops it back in the kitbag, and looks over at the motionless Alpharius.\n\n'Right,' he says to Actae. 'Free him.'\n\n'I'm sorry?' Actae replies.\n\n'I know about the code word. The pre-conditioning. The path you've set him on against his will. Change Orphaeus. Abort it. Switch it to something else.'\n\n'I can't,' she says.\n\n'Don't give me that. Switch it to Xenophon. Let him be his own man.'\n\n'I repeat, John Grammaticus, I can't.'\n\n'She can't,' says Katt. 'She's not lying. Once Twentieth Legion plan conditioning is triggered, it can't be undone...'\n\n'It can only be revoked by Alpha Legion auto-hypnotix, a deep neural process that is quite outside my expertise,' says Actae. 'I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do about it.'\n\n'You can activate the poor bastard but you can't shut him down again?'\n\nActae doesn't reply. Katt, wide-eyed with worry, nods on her behalf.\n\n'Shit!' says John. 'You utter... Shit!' He claps his hand to his head and stares at the floor.\n\n'John?' Oll asks.\n\n'Get them moving, Oll. Get them all moving. Leetu, take point. I'll be right behind you.'\n\nThey all look at him, then start to move away across the chamber towards the distant hatch.\n\nJohn blows out a breath to settle himself, and then walks over to the unmoving Pech. He stands facing the frozen giant, so Pech can see him.\n\n'I'm sorry,' he says. 'Truly. Don't try to answer. Just listen. You know I can't take that thing off you. Not with you coded the way you are. You know I can't risk it. I'm sorry it's played out like this. I know you'll get out of it. You'll find a way. I dunno, maybe micromovement over a period of weeks or months, you'll finally deactivate it and take it off. You people are good at that sort of thing. But I can't take it off you now. I know you understand why.'\n\nPech makes no response.\n\n'So,' says John, with a shrug. 'Sorry. If I get a chance, you know, afterwards... if there is an afterwards... I'll come back. I swear. I'll come back and unlock it. Just don't move in the meantime. And if I don't get the chance, well... like I said. Sorry. Not the way I wanted it to go.'\n\nThe Astartes remains utterly silent.\n\n'Right,' says John. 'Well... Goodbye, Pech.'\n\nHe turns and walks away after the others.\n\nThe Alpharius is still standing there, motionless, long, long after they have gone and the hatch has closed behind them.\n\n3:xix\n\nRogal in the desert\n\nRogal Dorn spends a century in the yellow desert until he finally concedes that there is no way out of it.\n\nAfter a century, he also believes there is no way into it either, although he is in it, which suggests that this is untrue. A small fact to cling to. He came here. He was brought here. There must have been a way in, once.\n\nUnless he has always been here. After a century, that starts to feel like the truth.\n\nHe meticulously orders the facts he can be certain of. Every day, he collates the available facts. Every day, for a century, there are fewer and fewer of them. The sun rusts them away. He is here. Fact. The desert is endless and the sunlight unrelenting. Fact. Something, technological or metaphysical, intercepted his teleport pattern and diverted him to this wasteland. Fact. None of those who departed with him are here. Fact. This is not the Target Principal, the Vengeful Spirit. Fact.\n\nBut it is a trap. Fact.\n\nHe is alone. Fact. He knows exactly who he is. Fact.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, primarch of the Seventh Legion Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding,' says Rogal Dorn to the hot and empty desert air.\n\nThe desert is boundless, a soft sea of yellow sand, the colour of his Legion's plate. The sky is a hot white haze, the colour of his hair. There is no sun, except that everything is sunlit. There is a breeze, parched and dry, that comes intermittently, and lifts the soft sand from the crests of the dunes in horsetail plumes to make new dunes nearby, grain by grain.\n\nThere are walls. Ancient stone walls, faded pink, and bleached by light. They are too high to climb and they serve no purpose he can identify, for they keep nothing in and nothing out, and merely stand, crossing the dunes in forking, geometric lines. There are walls either side of him, suggesting but never admitting that he is caught in some gargantuan labyrinth.\n\nHe tries and fails to climb them. He listens at them, hoping to detect sounds from the other side, but he does not. Some days, he ascends to the top of the highest dunes, and from there, as the breeze lifts the sand around his feet, he can almost see over them. Almost. Enough to see the odd, angled lines of their arrangement and the fact that, beyond them, lie more dunes, and other walls, and more dunes.\n\nFact.\n\nEvery day, for a century, he orders the facts he can be certain of.\n\nHe is here, and no one else is. Fact. He is alone. Fact. His pattern was diverted. Fact. This is not the Target Principal, the Vengeful Spirit. Fact. It is a trap. Fact. The desert is endless and there is no way out. Fact.\n\nThere is no way in. Perhaps.\n\nHe knows exactly who he is. Fact.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra, primarch of the Seventh Legion Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nThe bodies are here. They are all long dead and they are all his sons. They are scattered across the dunes and piled up against the bases of the walls, for kilometres. They wear the yellow plate of the VII Legion Astartes Imperial Fists, but they have been here so long that only dry white bones reside inside them, and the plate is abraded by breeze and sand, so all numerals and identifier markings are worn away. He doesn't know who they were, except that they were once Imperial Fists. They may or may not be the men who formed the company he left with. He can't be sure. Those men, hand-picked, may be here, but if they are, why were they long dead when he arrived? And who are all the others? There are far, far more than a company-strength of men scattered across the dunes. There are thousands. Tens of thousands. Yellow plate is piled like metal shingle along the foot of the walls. Many times he attempts to count them, to reach an accurate number which he can add to his list of facts. But he always loses count, some days after ten thousand, some days after twenty, for there are so many, and it is impossible to know where he started counting and where he has finished. He tries to mark them with his sword as he counts, cutting a notch in each pauldron. That scrupulous method gives him a figure of thirty-seven thousand four hundred and nine, before he loses count and forgets if he has notched a pauldron or not. Besides, his sword-edge is beginning to blunt, and he is weary, and there are still so many more, more than those he has already counted.\n\nUnsure, he starts again.\n\nHe orders the available facts.\n\nThere are very many dead, and the desert is endless. Fact. The walls are very slightly too high. Fact. There is no sun, but the light neither rises nor sets. Fact. It is slightly cooler in the shadow of the walls. Fact. There is no way out. Fact.\n\nThere is no way in. Is that a fact?\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, Praetorian, primarch of the Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nThe desert is yellow. The light is white. The walls are very slightly too high. He sits in the cool of the shadows, day after day, amid the litter of yellow armour, and recites the available facts to himself. His sword is notched. He is alone. The breeze lifts feathers of sand from the ridges of the dunes like spindrift from the sea. There is no way out.\n\nThis is a trap. Fact.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn. I am. I am Rogal Dorn. Primarch of the Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nThe desert is yellow at first. In the course of a century, it darkens. He doesn't notice it at first until, years later, seated in the cool shadow of the wall, he realises that the yellow of the dunes has become darker. It has become pinker, like the faded pink of the ancient stone walls. The sky is darker too. It is blue-white, hot blue-white, the colour of his eyes.\n\nThe yellow plate of the uncountable dead is beginning to rust. It is turning brown. It is rusting and, fleck by fleck, is slowly blowing away. Is that why the dunes are growing darker? Is it rust mixing with the sand?\n\nHe orders the available facts. Facts are his arsenal, knowledge his strength. Every battle he ever won, he won through application of knowledge. He is starved of fa"}
{"text":"d pink of the ancient stone walls. The sky is darker too. It is blue-white, hot blue-white, the colour of his eyes.\n\nThe yellow plate of the uncountable dead is beginning to rust. It is turning brown. It is rusting and, fleck by fleck, is slowly blowing away. Is that why the dunes are growing darker? Is it rust mixing with the sand?\n\nHe orders the available facts. Facts are his arsenal, knowledge his strength. Every battle he ever won, he won through application of knowledge. He is starved of facts. It is hard to know how to fight without facts to guide his actions. There are few here, fewer every day. There were more before, but many of them have rusted away.\n\nIn the siege, there were facts. Too many facts. More facts than there are grains of sand in this endless desert. Only he could order them all, and count them, and use them. That's why he was Praetorian. He never told anyone at the time, but it was a crippling burden. He longed to be out from under the constant weight of facts, the accumulating piles of data. In the months of the siege, he longed to be free of that weight. He longed just to fight as a man, as a warrior, with a sword. He longed for the simplicity of that. To fight, face to face, hand-to-hand, the freedom of physical war. By the end, it was all he wanted. To be free of the infinite data, the relentless pressure, the constant mental war, and just take up his sword and fight. To join the others on the walls and release himself into the joyous liberty of physical combat, where only instinct and reaction mattered, and his mind could rest. To stand, to fight, to kill, and not to think. Just for a while. Please. He never told anyone that.\n\nThat was all a long time ago. He barely remembers it. But he is sure there was a siege.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, primarch of the Imperial Fists, defiant and unyielding,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nHis sword is notched and blunt. He is very tired. These walls, bleached pink, are not the walls he longed to stand on. Things become simpler, here in the shadow of the walls where he sits. Facts rust away. There are fewer and fewer of them every day. There are no days because there are no nights.\n\nYears pass, and it grows darker still. Where yellow became pink, pink becomes brown. Everything has rusted. There is nothing yellow left, except some tiny shards of yellow ceramite and plasteel around his feet. Everything is worn out. He believes the entire desert is just grains of rust, that there were once far more bodies, and that other centuries, which must have passed before he arrived, had worn many of them away to form the endless desert where he found himself. The dunes were the rust particles of other suits of plate and other sets of bones, reduced by light and breeze.\n\nHe orders the available facts. He counts the bodies that remain. He gives up and starts again. The blade of his sword is beginning to wear away. He begins to like the fact that there are fewer facts to order and arrange, fewer things to take into account, less data to process and triage. He remembers longing for that simplicity. When was that? Long ago. Perhaps during a siege. He remembers yearning for it, anyway, and oddly, now he has it. There is simplicity here, in the cool shadow below the walls. There is very little to put in order. He is alone. There is no way out. The walls are very high. His sword is a shank of worn metal. He was going somewhere, but he never arrived. There were people with him, but they are not here now, or they are rusted to flakes in the cool shadow of the walls.\n\nThey are probably long dead. Whatever he was a part of - a siege, was it? Whatever it was, it must be over by now. Long over. Losers defeated, victors decided. It's out of his hands now. It's no longer his responsibility.\n\nIt's a relief. He thinks he longed for it, once. He forgets. His memory is rusting. It's a great relief, just to sit in the cool and be. Not to think. Not to decide.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, of the Imperial Fists, defiant,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\n3:xx\n\nMeasureless\n\nThey walk through empty golden halls, and across floors of gleaming marble that soak up the sounds of their footsteps.\n\n'Is this what you expected?' John asks.\n\nOll shrugs. The scale of the Palace is breathtaking, designed, he supposes, to inspire awe if not outright fear.\n\n'He always had lofty ideas about Himself,' he replies.\n\nJohn smirks. 'That's an understatement,' he says.\n\n'It's not pride, though,' says Oll. 'Not really. Not the way you or I would think of it. The man I knew...' - he sniffs slightly as he says the word 'man' - 'the man I once knew, He didn't really care for majesty or material riches. It was all just a means to an end. Everything was. The palaces, the titles, even the face He wore, they meant nothing to Him. All that mattered was what they meant to other people. They were just aspects, John. Signifying devices. To carry authority, He had to look the part. To rule a galaxy, He needed a palace like this. I assure you, He would have as soon lived as a monk in some stone cell, or in a hut on barren moors... He needed nothing. But no one would have taken Him seriously. This monstrous, tasteless edifice is simply the natural conclusion of His progress.'\n\n'What, just theatre?'\n\n'Dangerous theatre,' Oll replies with a nod.\n\nAnother hallway yawns before them, cased in gold and lined with statues, and filled with taut silence, the painted ceiling so high it seems just a bar of pale sky.\n\n'It's everything I expected,' says Oll. 'Except the emptiness.'\n\n'Yes,' says Zybes. 'I thought we would have been found by now. Long since. Found and challenged.'\n\n'There's no one here,' says Krank.\n\n'I think everyone is at the walls,' says Leetu quietly. They are all talking quietly, even though no one is around, afraid of raising their voices in such a hallowed place. 'Every soldier, every warrior, those that would ordinarily guard this place day and night.'\n\nThe Legion-less Astartes gestures to alcoves that line the aureate walls between the towering statues. They look like shrines, but Oll knows they can't be. He realises what Leetu is suggesting. The alcoves are made for sentries to stand in eternal vigilance. Oll has to adjust for scale, for the alcoves are so large. Giants stood here, golden giants, he is sure. But they are gone now. Even the elite lifewards are at the Delphic walls, fighting the last fight, and no one is left to patrol the emptied hallways of the final fortress. He and his long companions have only got this far because the place has been abandoned. No one has expected intruders at the very heart of things, for nothing is supposed to have got this far.\n\n'We should find someone,' says Krank.\n\n'What for?' asks Zybes.\n\n'Well, we can't just wander around aimlessly,' says Krank. He's clearly scared. 'We're here on official business, aren't we? We should find someone, and tell them we want to see Him right away-'\n\n'How do you suppose that will work out for us?' Katt asks, though Oll knows it's Actae asking the question, using the girl as a mouthpiece. 'We're intruders in the sacred heart of all things, and our intentions are ambiguous at best. It would be quite a feat, and quite incriminating, merely to explain how we got here.'\n\nKatt looks at them, her eyes not quite her own.\n\n'They will find us soon enough, and I, for one, am in no hurry to greet the golden warriors again.'\n\n'So... we just find this Throne Room place?' asks Zybes.\n\n'Yes,' says Oll. 'We find this Throne Room place.'\n\n'Will we, though?' Krank asks. 'We've been walking for hours. What seems like hours. This palace is endless, and every hall looks like the last one...'\n\nOll feels it too. He tells himself it's just his imagination, but it truly feels as though they are walking some implausible, stately labyrinth. He has a poor history with labyrinths. He still has bad dreams about Knossos. He wants to ask Leetu if he can borrow the skein of thread the Astartes carries in his bag, so he can tie knots to finials and mouldings and the fingers of gilded statues and mark their way, for fear they are simply doubling back on themselves.\n\nPerhaps they are. Perhaps He already knows they are here, and is playing games to deceive and confuse them. Perhaps He has no interest in the distraction of an uninvited audience, and is keeping them at bay with His psychic wiles. That would be just like Him. Delaying the inevitable.\n\n'I will find you,' Oll mutters.\n\n'What?' says John.\n\n'Thinking aloud,' says Oll. 'Leetu? I saw you carry twine in your bag. Can I use it?'\n\nThe Astartes pauses, and then produces the ball of red thread, wound around its fid. He hesitates before handing it over. It is the property of his mistress, and he's loath to give it up.\n\nOll takes it with a nod, cuts off a short piece, and ties it around the ankle of a golden statue. He tosses the twine to Zybes.\n\n'Every chamber we come to, Hebet, every room,' he says, 'do the same.'\n\nZybes nods, baffled at the purpose of his new task.\n\n'Becoming paranoid, Ollanius?' Katt asks.\n\n'Speak for yourself,' says Oll.\n\n'I'm not paranoid. Just suitably apprehensive.'\n\nOll looks at Actae. 'I meant literally, speak for yourself. Stop using the girl. She's not there for your use, she's just keeping an eye on you.'\n\n'Very well,' says Actae. Katt sighs slightly, as if some weight has eased from her.\n\nThey start walking again.\n\n'You think He's toying with us?' John asks Oll quietly.\n\n'I wouldn't put it past Him. He doesn't want to have the conversation I want to have.'\n\nThey pass into the next hall, then the next, treading softly. Each chamber is as glorious and intimidating as the last, the statuary as solemn, the alcoves as empty. But except for some details - the colour of the inlaid marble floor, the pose of statues, the designs of zodiacs and monads engraved on the auramite walls - they seem like the same halls, repeating.\n\nThey also seem so clean. So clinically clean, sterile, more like a laboratory than a regal dwelling. There is no smell, n"}
{"text":"t to have.'\n\nThey pass into the next hall, then the next, treading softly. Each chamber is as glorious and intimidating as the last, the statuary as solemn, the alcoves as empty. But except for some details - the colour of the inlaid marble floor, the pose of statues, the designs of zodiacs and monads engraved on the auramite walls - they seem like the same halls, repeating.\n\nThey also seem so clean. So clinically clean, sterile, more like a laboratory than a regal dwelling. There is no smell, no grime. After the long companions' unmeasurable years of travel, through dark places and mummified cities, the caves crushed by time, the saponified landscapes of xenos realms, the squelching morass of forgotten battlefields, the raddled husks of hive arcologies in torment, the death-rattled tumult of exoplanar corpse-continents, they have become too accustomed to constant filth and dirt and foulness. This place, this Palace, is too perfect, untouched and pure. Even the service hall where they first arrived, the dispersal chamber, a utility space, even that was unnaturally immaculate, but for a layer of dust that was, itself, unpolluted. These rooms, in their spotless clarity, seem acutely wrong to them.\n\nAnd they seem purposeless. Halls that lead to further towering halls, anterooms opening to other cavernous anterooms, the constant soft hush of a gallery or mausoleum, the glitter of the giant pendulum lights. Approach rooms and colonnades lead to more approach rooms and colonnades, and arrive nowhere. Is the scale and proportion of the Palace so inhuman that it defies expectation, or is the scale playing with their minds?\n\nIn each chamber, Oll makes sure Zybes ties off a loop of thread.\n\nThe auramite doors at the far end of the next hall stand ajar, as though someone passed through in a hurry without caring to close them. The hall beyond is yet another arcade of heroic statues and empty alcoves, glowing soft amber in the light of the electro-flambeaux.\n\nThey move along it. Zybes fusses with his thread, then hurries to catch them up.\n\n'Quite a journey we've had,' muses John.\n\nOll nods.\n\n'Through caverns measureless to man, eh?'\n\n'I didn't take you for a student of poetry, Grammaticus.'\n\n'I'm not. I wasn't. The words just drifted into my head. All sorts of verse I was made to read when I was young. Never had much time for it. Funny how memories come back.'\n\n'After lives as long as ours,' says Oll.\n\n'Caverns measureless to man... I certainly remember that one. Keats.'\n\n'Not Keats. Coleridge.'\n\n'Be quiet!' Katt yelps suddenly. They turn and look at her. Actae is twisting her head from side to side, as if searching with her blind eyes.\n\n'What is it, witch?' John asks.\n\n'Hide,' hisses Actae.\n\n3:xxi\n\nFragments\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca hides, though it is a poor form of hiding. The heavy drapes of the grand chamber have been closed, the last chore of her household staff before they fled. The room is gloomy, but for the lamp at her side.\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca has put on her finest gown, with its vast train and skirts of lace and silk. She has put on her best powdered wig, and she has rouged her cheeks. This is how she would dress whenever she, along with the high-born scions of other noble houses, was summoned from her palatine mansion to a formal event in the Sanctum. The room trembles. She hears the windows shiver in their casements.\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca watches her beloved songbirds flutter and chirp in the huge and ornate birdcage on the table in front of her. How unafraid they seem. The cage is too heavy for her to carry, for she is an old woman, and she would never have left them behind. She considered letting them go, setting them free, but like her, where would they fly to?\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca has decided to stay, to hide in the curtained darkness until whatever finds her, finds her. She is too dignified to run. She is of noble blood, and this mansion is her family home. She will not be driven out of it by mindless curs, no matter how brutal they are. The room trembles. Dust drifts down from the ceiling.\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca keeps her seat, despite the sounds that rise like a storm around her house. This is her home. She absolutely will not run. She is nobility, and nobility does not flee, and besides, who would feed her birds? She hears something scratching at the chamber door. They are here now. Very well. So be it.\n\nThe Lady Lucia Galika Tamerocca has a laslock pistol in her lap.\n\nFace down, Sergeant Hetin Gultan of the Royal Zanzibari Hort hides among the dead by pretending to be one of them. The dead are his men, and mud clasps them all. The enemy approaches, stalking from the smoke. He hopes he will pass unnoticed, but he will not.\n\nThe World Eaters smell fear, and the dead are no longer afraid.\n\nBarthusa Narek of the Word Bearers stays hidden. Concealed in the rubble of a smashed fortification, he watches the cities of the human home world burn.\n\nThe Word Bearers who accompanied him to Terra and the final fight are dead. Most were killed when their drop-ship was hit by battery fire on the assault run. The rest he killed himself. Once on the burning fields of the Throneworld, one mote swept up on a war of global scale, he had no need to keep pretending he was one of them, or that he shared their manic ambitions. There's only one death, one end, that interests him. He's tracking his prey.\n\nHidden, invisible, he scopes from the rubble with his sniper rifle. He has standard ammunition left, and he'll use that as he pleases. He has one fulgurite bullet remaining too, and he's saving it.\n\nWhen he finally locates his father, Lorgar, he will load it and use it.\n\nThere is nowhere to hide. Something down the street, a traitor engine by the sound of it, is raking Kucher's position with some kind of cutting beam, some hideous area-denial weapon. The beam, scarcely thicker than a whisker, is only visible when it passes through smoke. It cuts through everything it touches like a hot wire. It cuts through brick, stone, metal and armour. It cuts through Kucher's men. He sees it slice the corners off buildings, cleanly sectioning stonework like soft cheese. He sees it prune light poles and drop them like logs. He sees it pass, like a flawless surgical blade, through the tops of helmets, through torsos, through limbs. The corpses of nine men are already piled on the pavement, cut into astonishingly geometric cross-sections. There is so much blood.\n\nKucher yells at his squad to move and find cover, but there is absolutely nowhere to hide. Sergeant Geera falls, precisely severed at the waist. Trooper Vaskol loses both legs at the knees and collapses like a bolster. Trooper Herch leans against a wall, and then half of him slides away vertically in a sudden out-welling of blood that leaves the rest of him propped up like a dissection plate in a medicae treatise.\n\nKucher hurls himself into cover behind the command Aurox. He feels the vehicle shudder slightly, and sees a meticulous hairline crack suddenly running along the hull, end to end, at chest height. Kucher smells burned meat and the coppery stink of blood.\n\nHe looks down at himself as he falls apart.\n\nThe skitarii, vassals of the Dark Mechanicum, think they are well hidden. They have clambered up the flying buttresses of the shell-struck manufactory, and gained access to the lowest tier of the flat roofing. They move in fire-teams, lugging the disassembled parts of three heavy fusion mortars between them. Torrential rain pelts down across the roofscape, and vapour swirls up from the galvanised panels of the flat roof. The skitarii flash encrypted binharic data-bursts to and fro. On the next level up, they will unpack their cargo, and assemble the mortars for firing, dropping a string of fusion bombs on the unsuspecting loyalist forces dug-in behind the manufactory's eastern wall.\n\nThe skitarii are from the Kal-Tag Delt sub-branch, a purpose-specific clade designed for line infiltration, and group-unified by stealth-adaptive coding. Their power sources are baffled to mask heat profile, and their motivators frictionless and damped. Despite the weapons and munition canisters they carry, they move in virtual silence; their body armour - layers of long, ceramite leaf panels that encase them like feathers - is matt-grey and non-reflective. They are virtually invisible to auspex and modar. Their optics and sensoria are particularly large and sensitive.\n\nNevertheless, there is someone waiting for them on the flat roof. He is crouched in the rain, a sword flat across his knees.\n\nThe skitarii register surprise-code. They were hiding\/concealed. How did the Astartes legionary hide\/conceal himself from their hiding\/concealment? How did he get there without detection, to be hiding\/waiting for them?\n\nTheir binharic queries go unanswered. Loken rises to his feet, chainsword purring as he extends it out to his right. He draws Rubio's blade in his left hand. The Kal-Tag Delt register no fear. Fear is not a coded option for them. They set down the mortar components and rush him. They have calculated the variables. They are many and he is-\n\n-into them, without hesitation. Blades loop and hiss in the rain, shredding armour leaves and plastek, spraying debris and severed limbs into the air. They stab at him, they shoot, but he is moving too fast, and he is in among them, impaling and carving, smashing one skitarius into another with crushing force. Rubio's blade smokes with angry power as it slices through tubing, through wiring plaits, through mechadendrites, through torso-plate, through helmets surgically fused to skulls.\n\nA skitarius folds under the fury of Loken's chainsword like torn foil. Broken leaves spin up from the impact. Loken turns and rakes Rubio's blade through the thorax of a particularly large Mechanicum warrior. Its chest explodes in sparks and fragments of circuitry. As it teeters, systems ruined, he delivers a hard kick to"}
{"text":"io's blade smokes with angry power as it slices through tubing, through wiring plaits, through mechadendrites, through torso-plate, through helmets surgically fused to skulls.\n\nA skitarius folds under the fury of Loken's chainsword like torn foil. Broken leaves spin up from the impact. Loken turns and rakes Rubio's blade through the thorax of a particularly large Mechanicum warrior. Its chest explodes in sparks and fragments of circuitry. As it teeters, systems ruined, he delivers a hard kick to its belly that smashes it off the edge of the flat roof, and knocks three others of its kind off the lip with it.\n\nThe remainder scuttle back from him, fast-processing the conclusion that he is an unexpectedly dangerous impediment. One flash-burns out a noospheric signal, calling in immediate fire support with no heed for the integrity of itself or the surviving members of its unit. Such is the pragmatic war-logic of the skitarii. This impediment is too dangerous and must be obliterated as a priority.\n\nOne and a half seconds later, an auto-slaved launcher unit three streets away fires a hunter-seeker missile vertically with a sucking roar of fire-wash. The missile climbs on a tail of blue flame, arcs and plunges. Loken sees the twinkle of it, and leaps. The entire flat roof annihilates as it impacts, and two of the great stone buttresses collapse, folding like weary limbs.\n\nIn the courtyard below, Loken rises to his feet. The flagstones under his boots are cracked from his sure-footed landing. Cinders flutter down around him in the rain. He glances up at the burning rooftop he just vacated. The flames swirling off it are almost incandescent. He sheathes Rubio's blade, then uses the tip of his chainsword to probe the broken bodies of the four skitarii he kicked off the roof. They are smashed and crumpled on the yard's flagstones around him. One stirs, and starts to gurgle out some kind of reboot code. Loken applies a little pressure and lets the chainsword saw its head off.\n\nHe takes stock. He was sure he just heard someone call his name again. The yard, mysteriously, seems familiar. Rain sheets down. An abandoned groundcar stands off to one side. The flagstones are littered with broken glass and lumps of burning debris from the destroyed roof above. Ahead of him are the doors of a large building. But everywhere looks the same now. Everywhere is a repeating desolation of darkness and rain and rubble.\n\nHis sensoria detect movement. He slides into hiding and awaits the next encounter.\n\nThey scramble to find cover. There was an alarming note of fear in Actae's warning. The only possible hiding places are the vacant alcoves, the ornate recesses where giant sentinels once stood. They crowd into the shadows of three of them, pressing in behind the elaborate frames.\n\nA procession passes down the hall. Soldiers of the Hort Palatine in ceremonial regalia march in, streaming - as it seems to Oll - from nowhere. They are escorting what looks like a column of prisoners: men and women in simple cream robes. These prisoners appear scared, or at least apprehensive, and the stink of psykanic power wafts from them. There are over two hundred of them. Behind them come two cowled figures in green robes, conversing in low voices; behind them, two terrifying Custodians in gold bearing castellan axes of immense size.\n\nIn one of the alcoves with Actae and Katt, Oll tries to squeeze himself against the wall and remain hidden. Through the fretwork of the alcove's frame, he sees the agitated psykers herded onwards. For a second, it seems as though ghosts flutter around them, half-seen shades, but he's sure it's just a trick of the light. Then the Custodians pass by, and he shrinks in even more tightly, for they are beautiful and dreadful both at once.\n\nIt takes a long time for the procession to disappear into the next chamber. They hear doors close. Oll peeks out. The hall is empty again.\n\n'Psykers,' he murmurs.\n\n'Submitting to sacrifice,' Actae says.\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'It wasn't clear. Their minds were clouded by something. But the figures in green, they were two of the Sigillite's Chosen. I could hear some of their thoughts. This is the fifth recruitment today. They are gathering the psycho-active, tithing them... as a safeguard of some kind. Something called \"sigil\", an unspoken sanction. Taking them to the Throne Room to...'\n\n'What?' asks Oll.\n\n'I saw their thoughts, Ollanius,' says Actae. She turns her blindfold face towards him. 'The Chosen were just as scared as the reinforcements they had conscripted. They're not sure what's going on, but the Emperor has risen from the Throne and has engaged upon some sudden new plan.'\n\n'What do you mean, \"plan\"?'\n\n'I don't know,' says Actae.\n\n'She doesn't,' says Katt. 'And they didn't know either.'\n\n3:xxii\n\nThe place and manner of my execution\n\nOf course, they granted him a gaoler too. A guardian to watch over him, to take him to the laboratorium and back, and to stand in vigil outside his door, day and night. The guardian is a golden giant named Amon Tauromachian. Early on, Fo couldn't really distinguish the brute from others of his kind, but he's come to know him, as much as anyone can come to know these kinds of facsimile gods. Amon seems thoughtful and almost kind (well, compared to that vicious killer the captain-general), if the word can be applied to a three-metre-tall genetic monster in laughably ostentatious gilded war plate.\n\nAmon is his gaoler, his guardian, and now, it seems, his executioner.\n\n'It's time then, is it?' asks Fo, looking up from his books.\n\nAmon reaches up and disengages his neck seal. He lifts the helm from his head. The poor monster seems to want to look Fo in the face, unmasked, as though this conveys some sort of respect or dignity.\n\n'Directives have been issued,' Amon says, his voice the soft rumble of a storm on a neighbouring continent.\n\nFo scowls to himself. He sets aside his book. He hasn't been allowed a pen or any means of making a record, and the walls of his quarters (unlike the noctilithic walls of my squalid cell in the Blackstone, from which I also learned so very much) are impervious to marking. But he has modified the nail of his right index finger so that it can impress individual letters and numerals in the books he's been given, and he has perfected a kind of inverted braille by which he can record, secretly, his private thoughts and ruminations. Once he's dead, the books will probably be discarded, or returned to some library without anybody noticing the slight dimples and stipples embossing the pages. They'll never know what he wrote, or the secrets he hid.\n\n'Issued, eh? May I ask who by?' Fo says.\n\n'I have not been told,' says Amon. 'I have simply been instructed to discharge my watch of you, and hand you over. I am-'\n\nFo raises a hand quickly to silence him.\n\n'Oh! Please, Amon. Don't make your next words \"only following orders\". Do me that decency, at least.'\n\nAmon opens his mouth and closes it again. An almost imperceptible expression of distress crosses his broad features. It was what he was going to say, of course. The idea that Fo knew that reinforces his concerns that Fo is somehow learning to manipulate and read him. Amon has been told all the stories about Fo's legendary and almost superhuman genius. Almost all of them are lies, or at least wild exaggerations. Fo is just a clever but frail old man in a paper suit. There is no way he can control a being like Amon, not by hypnosis or auto-suggestion or subliminal micro-direct, or any means biomechanical, or chemical, or anything.\n\nBut Fo is clever. Fo knows that the one thing he has left is his reputation. It's not what he can do, it's what they think he can do.\n\nFo gets up. He brushes down the paper of his smock.\n\n'Those orders, Amon. What were they?'\n\n'To guard you. You know that.'\n\nFo nods. One of the most powerful beings on Terra has been charged to guard him. Such creatures do not waver or relent in any way. They cannot be influenced. Indeed, the Custodes (each one brilliant in his own way) indulge in ingenious games to test themselves, to predict, imagine and out-think any possible ploy that might be used against them to disrupt their function. They cannot be out-thought. They are always projecting every possible variation.\n\nBut this, Fo reasons, creates an unusual loop of bio-feedback. It is a pleasingly simple sequence: the Custodes cannot be out-guessed. The Custodes are utterly diligent in their duty. One has been appointed to guard him. Fo has a (undeserved, really) reputation for being superhumanly ingenious. Thus his Sentinel scrutinises him with greater and ever-greater degrees of analysis, trying to identify what ingenuity Fo is about to use. Of course, there is none. Fo is just an old man in a paper suit, with no means whatsoever to influence or manipulate a Custodian (can anything do that? Can anything turn them? I doubt it), but Amon suspects he can (or will try) and so is constantly alert, constantly watching for tiny tricks and minute tells.\n\nThe mere expectation that Fo is about to try something is breeding a kind of paranoia in Amon that is slowly impairing his performance.\n\nSo, in fact, Fo has two things left. His reputation, and the way that reputation interferes with Amon's vigilance. Fo need do nothing at all (and I can do nothing anyway) and the Custodian will slowly lose himself in ever-decreasing loops trying to predict what the trick (which is genuinely nothing) is.\n\n'Follow me,' says Amon.\n\n'Can I bring my books?' Fo asks. Amon nods.\n\nFo gathers them up. He offers the bundle to the Sentinel.\n\n'Do you want to check them, or take custody of them?'\n\nAmon looks at the bundle. He is evidently wary that they are part of the non-existent trick.\n\n'You can carry them,' says Amon.\n\n'So, where are we off to?' Fo asks as they start to walk.\n\nAmon doesn't reply.\n\n'Oh, Amon,' says Fo, 'show a condemned man the respect of conversation. How's the war going? Have we lost yet?'\n\n3"}
{"text":"w me,' says Amon.\n\n'Can I bring my books?' Fo asks. Amon nods.\n\nFo gathers them up. He offers the bundle to the Sentinel.\n\n'Do you want to check them, or take custody of them?'\n\nAmon looks at the bundle. He is evidently wary that they are part of the non-existent trick.\n\n'You can carry them,' says Amon.\n\n'So, where are we off to?' Fo asks as they start to walk.\n\nAmon doesn't reply.\n\n'Oh, Amon,' says Fo, 'show a condemned man the respect of conversation. How's the war going? Have we lost yet?'\n\n3:xxiii\n\nThe honour of Angels\n\nAnd, at the last, they cannot hold them. The long martial feud that has existed between their Legions, between Angels of Darkness and Guardians of Death, between the great war-captains Corswain and Typhus, seems pitiful and meaningless, merely the blunted games of the lists or the dainty sport of the tourney ground. It feels preposterous, a cheap and empty jest, that Corswain and his men have ever counted themselves the victors, or ever believed themselves the superior army.\n\nFor there is no stopping this.\n\nThe Death Guard comes, in a form and manner so changed, in mien so unlike before, it is as though their paths have never crossed, and the Angels of Caliban are no more than children, dressed for play with paper armour and wooden swords, surprised by real bandits or set upon by winter-hungry wolves. Lines break, shields shatter, defences topple in candent clouds of sparks, fighting platforms burn and collapse.\n\nThis is not the Death Guard they have known, and met, and matched on other fields. This is some fevered derangement, some altered version, plucked from the secret nightmares of Caliban: the old foe, but not the foe, some new thing wearing an old name.\n\nSome horror.\n\nCorswain believed he had begun to understand the chaogenic touch of the warp, and steel himself against the diseased state of the Death Guard.\n\nBut the narrow mountain pass has become a black pit, the stink a scalding gag of carious meat and liquid fever, the air a blizzard of blowflies, white ash and black snow. The Death Guard host bursts across their battlements and fortified slopes like a pestilential wave, drowning everything beneath its surge.\n\nSwarms of man-things in swollen, bloated armour ascend the gloomy cliff-faces with insectile determination. They clamber and grimp up sheer rock that no human or demi-human should be able to scale, and pour out across the upper platforms, slaughtering and hacking. Dark Angels who have withstood the most ferocious xenos forces are cut down and torn apart in moments. Bodies pile and begin to rot from the very instant of death. Flies are everywhere, everywhere, billowing from visors and screaming mouths, spewing like smoke from the fluted horns and finials of Death Guard plate, sawing the air with their deafening roar of azif. Comms fail, stripped of all meaning beyond the static skritch of wing cases.\n\nThe light has failed too, filtered to an achromatic nothing by the fly-clouds and the airborne chitin dust. Blood is almost white where it splashes rock and armour, and black where it spatters snow.\n\nCorswain fights. With him, on the ravine ledge, Tragan of the Ninth Order, Vorlois, Bruktas... and others close enough to touch at arm's length yet masked anonymous by the fly-blown murk. The mechanisms of their bolters have jammed, clogged with insect filth and crushed fly-bodies, so they fight with blades, damascened longswords and heirloom hand-and-a-halfs smeared with a gurry of black, caustic pus. Corswain rends dark armour and spills diseased entrails. He kicks the slain and dying foes from the rampart, casting them back into the faces of those clawing up behind them. He splits helms and breaks blades. Each blow sprays blood that adds to the slench dammed by the rampart lip. Men slip in blood, wade in it to their shins. It drizzles the air, a prisk of aerosolised gore that films their wargear and drips from their elbows and pauldrons.\n\nAnd in it all, he knows one thing.\n\nThey are going to lose.\n\nCorswain knows this, in his heart, as sure and certain as any pledge he has ever made. It is not the enemy's fury, nor his uncounted numbers, nor the plague of his contagion. These are things they might have withstood, for they are ten thousand sons of Caliban. No, it is not that the Death Guard is going to triumph; it is that the Dark Angels are going to lose.\n\nFor their courage has gone. Their resolve. Somehow, somehow the very heart of them, that has always faced down enemies, no matter the odds, seems to have dissolved like ice in the sun. Their will has failed.\n\nHe tells himself that it is the corrosive magick of the warp, that Typhus has infected them, through the gifts of Chaos, with a distemper that has robbed them of their determination, and sapped their vigour. He can see it in those around him, like Tragan. He can feel it in his own bones, an ache, a wasting despair, a futility. He tells himself that this is Chaos at work, weakening the mettle of the Dark Angels.\n\nBut it is gnawing in his mind too. The buzzing azif tells him this is his fault. His alone. This loss will be his. He has led them to this end. His ten thousand followed him, for years, from war to war, never doubting his leadership even as they faced the suicidal run to Terra and the horrors of the Hollow Mountain. They followed him, without hesitation, even though they knew it would be to their deaths, for they believed in him, and believed their seneschal would make their life-price count, achieving some victory on Terra that would matter.\n\nBut it will not. They have come, like fools, it seems, to waste themselves on the shores of hell. They will accomplish nothing but death, squandered by a leader who thought he knew better. This is Corswain's folly. This is Corswain's defeat. They have loyally followed him because he was the voice of the Lion, but his roar was an empty promise. He was too bold, too confident. He has not led them to glory, just to a humiliating and pointless doom at the hands of their arch-enemy. Corswain has failed their trust and, their belief gone, they are failing him, spirit broken, fighting with lacklustre anguish simply to prolong the bitter ending.\n\nIt's not true. It's not true, Corswain tells himself, fighting bodies with his steel, and the buzzing with his mind. I have not wasted this effort and I have not wasted these men. In the face of the fall of Terra, in the face of the triumph of Ruin, any attempt, however long the odds, was worth making. The Lion himself would have done the same, and I would do it again. We had to try. This falter of faith, this withering of self-belief, it is just the miasma of the warp, weakening us from within. If we can but find ourselves, if we can remember our spirit but for a moment-\n\nHe cannot even convince himself. His limbs are leaden. He will die on this cold mountainside, his body fattened with maggots, with ten thousand sons of Caliban dead around him. Whatever vainglorious notion of heroism brought him to the birthworld, it is revealed as utter falsehood by the swarming, tenebrous majesty of the plague-bearing foe.\n\nBut still he holds, by some thread. Still he holds at the rim of the pass, bodies piling around and under him, his sword's edge chipped and notched, swinging at the clumsy, taliped beasts that claw over the lip of the cliff and shamble towards him through the fog of flies and cinders.\n\nHe sees Tragan fall, carried over in the soup of blood by multiple attackers. He splashes to him, cleaving assailants off his brother, hauling bodies away and despatching them with frenzied blows. Tragan is on his back, struggling to tear free and regain his feet.\n\nA mace clubs Corswain from behind. He reels, and then, like Tragan, is mobbed in a scrum of Death Guard. Hands seize him, pin him, threatening to rip his limbs from his body. He tries to fight. A Death Guard brute, larvae pouring from its mouth-slot like rice, raises the mace to mash his head.\n\nThe brute combusts.\n\nHis bulk, wreathed in plasmic fire, collapses, molten metal fused to blistered meat. The mace drops into the mire.\n\nMore beams sear out of the blizzarding insect clouds, engulfing others. Heads un-form like hot wax. Corswain stumbles forward, released, his armour spattered with droplets of molten Death Guard plate.\n\nA figure steadies him.\n\n'Stand firm, your grace,' it says.\n\nPlastered in mud, blood and a crust of crushed insects, Corswain looks up and sees hope in the most unexpected form. A sign. A silver mask.\n\n'Stand firm, great seneschal,' says Lord Cypher.\n\nThe Dark Angels hold the line against the Death Guard.\n\n3:xxiv\n\nDiscovered in their doubt\n\nWe should follow them,' says Oll, shouldering his kitbag.\n\nHis companions look at him uneasily. 'The psykers?' asks Krank.\n\n'Yes,' says Oll. 'At a careful distance, of course.'\n\n'Why?' asks John warily.\n\n'Because they were being taken to the Throne Room,' says Oll. 'What have we found, John? Just one anonymous damn hallway after another. Do you want to keep wandering in circles, or follow someone who knows where they're going?'\n\nHe walks towards the doors at the far end of the hall. Graft starts to trundle after him obediently, and a second later, Zybes and Leetu follow. The others hesitate. John glances at Actae.\n\n'Risen, you said?' he asks her.\n\n'That was the word framed in their minds,' replies Actae. 'It was emotionally dense. The idea that he is risen carried immense significance for those people.'\n\n'I'll bet,' mutters John. He hurries after Oll, and catches up with him at the doors. Oll's got his ear to them, cautiously preparing to open them.\n\n'Wait,' says John.\n\n'Why?' asks Oll.\n\n'I think...' John begins. It's like he can't bear to say it. 'I think we might need to reconsider our options.'\n\n'No,' says Oll. He looks at John and sees that, for the first time, John Grammaticus looks properly scared. Oll can almost see the confidence leaking out of him.\n\n'If He's risen,' John says, 'if He's left the Throne... then He's committed"}
{"text":"fter Oll, and catches up with him at the doors. Oll's got his ear to them, cautiously preparing to open them.\n\n'Wait,' says John.\n\n'Why?' asks Oll.\n\n'I think...' John begins. It's like he can't bear to say it. 'I think we might need to reconsider our options.'\n\n'No,' says Oll. He looks at John and sees that, for the first time, John Grammaticus looks properly scared. Oll can almost see the confidence leaking out of him.\n\n'If He's risen,' John says, 'if He's left the Throne... then He's committed to some new plan. A new tactic. An endgame.'\n\nOll nods.\n\n'So He'll be even harder to reach.'\n\nOll nods again. 'And even harder to stop,' he agrees.\n\n'So we should reconsider,' says John, 'before it's too late.'\n\nThe others have gathered around them. John's sudden fear is contagious, and they all look rattled. Oll realises their morale is finally caving in. It's not as though they ever had much of a chance anyway, and every step of their journey has been skin-of-their-teeth luck. But all along John's been the dynamo, a source of eager determination, sometimes irritating, always intense, that's kept them all afloat. That daredevil, almost manic fire has gone out, quite abruptly, and without it, everything seems very cold and uncomfortably real. They can no longer ignore the immeasurable folly of their mission.\n\n'No,' says Oll. 'We're not going to reconsider anything. We push on.'\n\nHe reaches for the door handle. John grabs his wrist.\n\n'We could still get out,' John insists. 'Use the knife. Get these people to safety-'\n\n'I said no,' says Oll, pulling his hand free of John's grip. 'You don't get to recruit me and then back out at the last minute. I never wanted to do this. You talked me into it. So here we are. And it's already too late. The knife won't carry us out of here. It couldn't get us in here, remember?'\n\nHe opens the doors. Another long, silent hallway confronts them, entirely empty but for the demigod statues lining its walls. The light is the gold-leaf glow of early summer.\n\n'Hebet? Tie another thread, please,' says Oll as he starts to advance along the hall.\n\nZybes nods, and trots over to the nearest statue, unwinding the twine. As he waits, Oll looks back at the others. John is loitering in the doorway, reluctant to enter the hall.\n\n'What are you afraid of?' Oll says to him.\n\n'Failing,' John answers. 'Dying. Getting everyone killed. Him.'\n\n'Me too, John.'\n\n'You don't show it.'\n\n'I have my faith, John,' says Oll.\n\nJohn laughs sarcastically. 'Oh. That,' he says.\n\n'Trooper Persson believes in god,' says Graft, rotating its upper body segment to face John. 'He is pious. He is a man of faith. He will be guided by that faith to do what is called \"good works\". This I have recorded about him on a number of occasions.'\n\n'Faith is meaningless,' says Actae. 'It is an outmoded concept. A crutch for the puerile and the ignorant.' She turns her blindfolded eyes towards Oll. Her poise is arch and superior. 'Or is faith,' she asks, 'against all rational sense, your guiding principle in this whole endeavour, Ollanius? If it is, I regret ever getting involved.'\n\n'Ignore her,' says Katt. She looks at Oll. 'Just lead us and we'll follow.'\n\n'Yeah,' says John. 'What \"good works\" should we do now, whatever the hell that means?'\n\n'Good works means to endeavour to help others who require help,' says Graft, 'without expectation of reward or profit. It is not conditional on self-benefit. This I have rec-'\n\n'Oh, shut up!' says John. He glares at Oll. 'Do you know what? That pious streak of yours was a charming little quirk for about a century. It's beginning to wear thin.' He points at the tiny Catheric charm around Oll's neck. 'That's bullshit,' he says. 'Your \"god\" is-'\n\n'What I have faith in is my business,' says Oll. 'You have faith too. You had faith in me. That's why you came to me and begged for help. You had faith that I could do this. Where's that gone?'\n\nJohn looks aside sullenly.\n\n'The things we've been through to get here, John,' says Oll. 'You've never flinched. I'm sure you've been afraid many times. Terrified. I know I have. But you've never lost that faith in me until now. Why is that?'\n\n'Oh, I'm sure you're going to tell me,' says John.\n\n'I think it's because we're actually here,' says Oll. 'I warned you, the Palace is a weapon. It's messing with your mind. It's purposefully designed to be intimidating, to make you feel small and powerless and lost-'\n\n'This... dangerous theatre?'\n\n'Right,' says Oll. 'It's all for show. The architecture is intended to swallow us and make us feel like nobodies-'\n\n'Oh, we're nobodies, all right,' says John.\n\n'We're nobodies who made it all the way to Terra,' says Oll quietly. 'We're nobodies who got inside His damn Sanctum. These last-minute fears are just a subliminal reaction to the weaponised environment. It's crushing you psychologically, exactly the way He wanted it to.'\n\n'No,' says John. 'The witch said He's risen. Risen from the Throne. What does that tell you, Oll?'\n\n'It could mean anything,' says Oll.\n\n'It means,' says John, 'that He's not here any more. All this bloody effort getting here has been for nothing.'\n\n'Don't talk that way,' says Zybes. 'It sounds like you're giving up.'\n\n'No one's giving up, Hebet,' says Oll. 'John's faith may be wavering, and I understand why, even if he refuses to admit it. But mine isn't.'\n\n'Faith!' John snorts. 'Is that really all you've got?'\n\n'It's all I need,' says Oll.\n\n'How about a plan?' John growls. 'Or is that god of yours going to show you some kind of sign?'\n\n'Maybe he will. Or maybe we work this out for ourselves.'\n\n'What are you saying?' asks John. 'We just have to tweak our plan a little?'\n\n'Plans are hard to revise when they don't exist in the first place,' says Actae.\n\n'Just... don't talk!' Katt snaps at her.\n\n'As you command, my leash,' Actae replies sardonically.\n\n'Of course Trooper Persson has a plan,' says Graft.\n\n'Does he?' asks Actae. 'This would be the plan he refuses to share with any of us?'\n\nOll doesn't answer. He's suddenly frowning. He's looking intently at John.\n\n'Well, there's our sign,' he says.\n\n'What?' Katt asks.\n\n'What's wrong with your face?' Oll asks John.\n\n'Nothing!' John says.\n\n'That's my point,' says Oll.\n\nJohn touches a finger to his mouth and chin tentatively. Then he gropes at his ribcage and shoulders.\n\n'That rogue Alpha Legionnaire did a serious number on him,' Oll says to the others. 'But there's not a mark on him any more.'\n\n'I don't understand,' says John, bewildered. 'Nothing hurts. No bruising. My lip isn't split, and my tongue-'\n\n'What's happening?' asks Zybes in alarm.\n\n'It's the aegis,' says Oll.\n\n'The what?' asks Krank.\n\n'The Sanctum's psychic shield,' says Leetu.\n\nOll nods. 'Correct,' he says. 'It's His aura. A projection of His will...'\n\n'It holds the warp at bay,' says Actae, 'and protects from empyric assault.'\n\n'Indeed,' says Oll. 'But it can have a healing effect too. Like a side effect. Back in the day, it was considered a miraculous property of His palaces and fortresses. Wherever He was, He would extend His will as part of the site defences. But people who were granted an audience, or came inside His protection, they were often cured of disease or restored to health. It was just a by-product of His intense psychic presence.'\n\n'Which means He's still here,' breathes John.\n\nOll nods. 'Which means He's still here,' he agrees. 'We're inside the aegis. Your injuries have vanished. We have to be really close to Him. It's not as though He can have someone else maintain the Sanctum's aegis in His place.'\n\nSlowly, John begins to grin at Oll. 'Damn you, Oll,' he murmurs.\n\n'See? Sometimes you just need a little faith,' says Oll, smiling back at him.\n\n'Faith is your department,' says John. 'I don't touch the stuff myself.'\n\nJohn hoists his kitbag and they stride together towards the next set of golden doors. The others exchange glances and then hurry to catch them up.\n\n'So we've still got a chance?' asks Krank.\n\n'I think we have,' says Katt.\n\n'I think Erda was a fool to believe in either of these men,' says Actae.\n\nOll approaches the imposing doors, preparing to open them, but John stops him.\n\n'Let me,' he says. 'My business is watching your back while you get things done, remember? What did you call them, eh, Graft? \"Good works\"? Let's do some of those.'\n\nHe nods to Leetu, who raises his weapon to cover the doorway. John listens at the doors, then takes hold of the handle.\n\n'Ready, Argonauts?' he asks, grinning back at them. His confidence has returned, as quickly as it fled. Contagious as his fear, the return of his familiar, cocky grin draws a smile from Katt, Zybes and Krank.\n\nHe swings the huge doors open. The tip of the levelled sentinel blade is aimed directly at his face, even though it is rested at the hip.\n\n'Submit instantly,' says the Custodian giant, 'or be destroyed.'\n\n3:xxv\n\nThe Angel in flight\n\nThe Blood Angels of Anabasis take Embarkation Deck Two. They sweep the sub-deck prep chambers, the adjoining service crypts, and both the principal and secondary access routes. Terminators led by Khoradal Furio snap left as soon as the arrival site is claimed, and burn through the aft control blocks and duralium stores, securing tertiary engineering and port power relay four within eight minutes. Sarodon Sacre's assault formation make even better progress, clearing ventral eighteen and nineteen, cutting the primary power relays to the ninth quadrant (port) autoloader assemblies, and then establishing control of the interdeck connectives at five points. The squads of Maheldaron, Krystaph Krystapheros and First Captain Raldoron elegantly leapfrog Sacre's blocking action, mine and disable the entire port-side auspex array, then break through cleanly into the deck twelve interlace and punch a route directly to the main spinal. By then, their primarch and the Sanguinary Guard have reached them.\n\nThe spear-tip bites deep into the flank of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nThe fighting is brutal and intense. Roga"}
{"text":"trol of the interdeck connectives at five points. The squads of Maheldaron, Krystaph Krystapheros and First Captain Raldoron elegantly leapfrog Sacre's blocking action, mine and disable the entire port-side auspex array, then break through cleanly into the deck twelve interlace and punch a route directly to the main spinal. By then, their primarch and the Sanguinary Guard have reached them.\n\nThe spear-tip bites deep into the flank of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nThe fighting is brutal and intense. Rogal's projections were entirely accurate. The Sons of Horus, plumed and ferocious, resist with magnificent resolve, even though they have been taken by surprise. Within seconds of the initial teleport flare, the ship is screaming with alert klaxons, and the vox is wild with directives deploying squads down-ship to supplement and reinforce the units that have confronted the initial boarding. It was everything Sanguinius expected: no one, not even the elite of the Immortal Ninth, storm-boards an Astartes flagship without meeting the most savage resistance.\n\nAnd these are not just Astartes. These are the warriors of the legendary XVI. These are the peerless Luna Wolves, against whom every other Legion, no matter how much they deny it, measure themselves. Sanguinius has broken into their home, their ship-fortress, the heart of their Legion. No one commits such an outrage without suffering the most lethal reflexive reaction.\n\nSanguinius doesn't waste time analysing the defiance he faces. Even if there was a way of knowing what percentage of the XVI had been deployed to surface action, there is still no means of calculating the odds or determining how many Astartes are present on the Vengeful Spirit, for nobody has any reliable data on the Legion's current size. What confronts him is merely a blistering and exemplary resistance, and he matches it with a blistering and exemplary attack.\n\nNor does he distract himself with consternation at the fact, obvious from the very first moment, that only his company, just one-quarter of the Anabasis assault, has transitioned successfully. There is no sign of the other formations, of Rogal, Constantin or his beloved father, and all links to Terra are jammed. Was it teleport malfunction, or worse? Will the others arrive on their heels, belatedly, any second? Are they already here, elsewhere on the vast ship-fortress, misdirected somehow and out of contact?\n\nSuch speculations are pointless. He is here. He is committed. There is no going back. There is a compliance to deliver, and an illumination to achieve. If he has to accomplish that with just a quarter of the intended force, then he will.\n\nAt least it's not a trap. The flagship was entirely unprepared for their shock assault. He has seen the disbelief and indignation on the faces of those he has killed. To their credit, the Sons of Horus do not break. Of course they don't. They rally and adapt with unhesitating dedication, just as his Blood Angels would if the situation was reversed.\n\nSome Legions, like Rogal's, Roboute's and Ferrus', are famed for their immaculate presentation and discipline. Others, like Leman's and Konrad's, are notorious for their savage, feral aspect. His Legion and Lupercal's, the IX and the XVI, always had one thing in common: they combined both. Each presented as formidably noble and disciplined, with the drilled precision and gleaming perfection of an Ultramarines high cadre, yet each could, in the blink of an eye, unleash unrestrained hell as monstrous and wild as any Fenrisian Rout. That is what made them special. That is what made them the best, the most feared, and the most celebrated of all the Legiones Astartes. Majestic ferocity. Feral discipline.\n\nAnd now the Astartesian exemplars meet each other, face to face, in a death match to discover which is truly the finest Legion.\n\nIt is positively childish to think of it in those terms, as a competitive test between rival champions, but to think of it in any other way is to dwell on what's really at stake, and Sanguinius has no need of such mental shackles. He and his men fight as they have always fought, for the peerless glory of the moment, for unqualified victory, to prove their superiority, brazen in their pride and audacity. He told them to affect this mindset. In the final moments before departure, as they assembled their cohort on the platforms of the bulk teleport, those were his last instructions to them. Fight for victory alone. For the simplicity of absolute achievement. Think not of the significance, nor the odds, nor the consequences. Think not of vendettas or grudges or perceived slights. Put from your thoughts all notions that you are avengers or redeemers or saviours. Just fight and win for the honour of demonstrating your unmatched superiority. Fight as Angels.\n\nAnd so they do. And so they have. He has seen their arrogant glory before. He has never seen them match this. Each Blood Angel is a bright devil, a radiant monster, glorious in crimson and gold, leaping and vaulting, fast as thunderbolts, furious as the shining wrath of heaven, blades and spears raised aloft, teeth bared, voices loud and wild with courage. They are almost too fast to follow, too bright to behold, too beautiful to contemplate.\n\nThe Sons of Horus, for all their courage and ability, seem like crude ogres of the primordial midnight. Each of the Sons of Horus is a fallen angel, an abyssal hero, dark as shadows, bracing and recoiling, sulphurous as the searing rage of hell, shields and chainblades held to block, eyes blazing, voices roaring with denial. They are strong as bedrock, too dark to perceive, too terrible to pity.\n\nBut he almost pities them.\n\nTheir dead litter the hallways. Their broken plate fumes and burns. Their traitor blood, once so noble, washes the decks.\n\nThese are decks he knows. Knows well. In this ship, with these men, with this great lord, Sanguinius first rode the stars as a son of man. The Cthonian warlord mentored him, and taught him the ways of man's war long before Sanguinius ever joined with his own sons. He was part of them, a brother, an honorary son of Horus, taken in and welcomed as one of their own.\n\nHe knows this ship well. He learned it by heart. He knows these warriors too, and every nuance of their astonishing technique.\n\nHe exploits that knowledge unashamedly.\n\nIt is because he knows the unique fingerprint of the Vengeful Spirit that the Blood Angels knew to sweep the sub-deck prep chambers and the adjoining service crypts as soon as Embarkation Deck Two was taken. It was because he knew the layout of both the principal and secondary access routes that Khoradal Furio's Terminators snapped left instead of right as soon as the arrival site was claimed. It was thanks to him they understood the urgency to burn through the aft control blocks and duralium stores, and secure tertiary engineering and port power relay four before turning through-ship at the more obvious target points. Only his insight allowed Sarodon Sacre to clear ventrals eighteen and nineteen, and cut the primary power relays to the ninth quadrant (port) autoloader assemblies, for on other vessels of the class, the primary power relays are seated beneath ventral twenty-two. Minutes would have been lost locating the correct relays, and there would have been no time to advance and control the interdeck connectives. Only he knew that the port-side auspex array was sheathed in unusually heavy diamantine plating, which would require mines to breach and destroy. The squads of Maheldaron, Krystaph Krystapheros and First Captain Raldoron would never have reached the deck twelve interlace before the Sons of Horus sealed it, and besides, they would not have had Sacre's blocking action to cover their flank, because they would still have been searching ventral twenty-two.\n\nIt is because of him, and his intimate memories of the flagship, that they have already breached the main spinal, the primary artery of the ship.\n\nIt is because of him. And it is because of Horus. It is because of the friendship they shared, the time they spent, the love that bonded brother to brother, the secrets they revealed to each other without hesitation. Sanguinius knows this ship like any in his own fleet, because Horus taught him the lay of it.\n\nThe love is gone now, cold and dead. Bitter fury fills its place. Sanguinius is taking the ship with devastating precision, deck by deck, because he once loved his brother, and that love was reciprocated. He exploits his privileged understanding of the Spirit with simultaneous regret and delight. His father told him emotions had been preserved for a reason, so he rejoices in both. He mourns the great Lupercal of old, the peerless, charismatic friend, who taught him the ship level by level, and had no idea that one day his generosity would orchestrate his defeat. He hates the foul Warmaster of the present, who has betrayed everything and everyone, including his old self, by creating a weapon to spear his own flank and unerringly find his very heart.\n\nSanguinius even delights in the applied formation of his men: a spear-tip. The trademark of the Luna Wolves, the bravura method of so many of their victories, a tactic Horus taught his brother so he could similarly excel.\n\nSanguinius turns the spear-tip on the warrior who devised it.\n\nHe fights. He kills. He advances. He savours the delight of advantage, and the ironic reversal of betrayal. He embraces the satisfaction that Horus all but briefed him on the specifics required to take the XVI flagship all those years ago, as though, subliminally, he knew that one day it would have to be done. He feels no remorse, and he ignores the pain.\n\nBut the pain does not ignore him.\n\nThe main spinal is the greatest of the ship's titanic longitudinal hallways, as great in scale as some of the fine processionals of the Inner Palatine. It is a space three decks deep, and runs as a grey steel canyon, arch-roofed and buttressed with grand scisso"}
{"text":" briefed him on the specifics required to take the XVI flagship all those years ago, as though, subliminally, he knew that one day it would have to be done. He feels no remorse, and he ignores the pain.\n\nBut the pain does not ignore him.\n\nThe main spinal is the greatest of the ship's titanic longitudinal hallways, as great in scale as some of the fine processionals of the Inner Palatine. It is a space three decks deep, and runs as a grey steel canyon, arch-roofed and buttressed with grand scissor arches, for five kilometres through the heart of the ship, like the long naves of antique cathedrals laid end to end.\n\nIt was impressive: the major vaults of Gloriana-class void-ships always are, the ostentatious extravagance of the shipwright's art, an architectural statement of power and majesty. I will build a ship to traverse the stars, and in it I will place such vast and humbling chambers it will seem as though I have lifted a great palace into the sky. Such is my ambition, my magnificence, my confidence in the colossal over-power of the immense drive systems that they will propel such a vanity of excess mass across light years with ease. There will be no economy of volume. Those who come to these vessels as visitors will weep in awe that we are so mighty we bring our fortresses to them.\n\nMain spinals are meant to be awe-inspiring. Sanguinius recalls his own sensations of intimidation when he, a winged giant, first walked its length at Lupercal's side, struck dumb by the spanning archways, the suspended rows of martial banners that marched to infinity, the Luna Wolves and crowds of ship's crew, Navis Nobilite and common serfs that thronged the illuminated upper galleries, and cheered him from the overlooking decks and raised terraces. He remembers being confounded that all of this could be contained within a single ship.\n\nBut it seems mere function to him, now. A wide and indefensible route of advance down which to charge, an expressway to the enemy's heart, and an invitation. It seems squalid, too. The gilding is flaked and worn, the illustrious banners long gone, the gleaming deck stained with oil and coolant. The XVI always favoured utility over flourish, and this long approach seems to have been stripped back and made barren, like some low-deck service corridor, or the coldly spartan cloister of some grimly ascetic monastery. The air is cold, the light glaucous, and the Sons of Horus who crowd at the marble rails of the upper galleries are no longer cheering.\n\nHis advancing parade is garlanded by ticker-tape streams of bolter fire and raining petals of las. The punished deck cracks and pockmarks with such intensity it soon resembles the pores and crinkles of old skin. Plumes of dust and grit spring up around him and his men like sudden fields of wheat.\n\nHis Cataphractii advance into the hail of gunfire, sparks dancing off their sculpted plate. His tactical squads dart to the side of the spinal, using the pillars of the lower archways as cover, blazing return fire up and across the cyclopean space, and raking the upper galleries. Balustrades explode, showering dust and lumps of mangled stone and metal. Torn figures fall, striking the deck far below.\n\nSanguinius and his elite guard take wing.\n\n3:xxvi\n\nSeeking meaning where none may exist\n\nThey move through the stacks in the velvet gloom, with no particular process or plan, just picking and tasting at random, like children loose in an orchard, drawn at whim to the next promising fruit. Already, the rows behind them are piled with books pulled from shelves, or left open and abandoned on lecterns and side tables. The young archivist would be dismayed, but Sindermann has sent her off to consult the catalogue listings. Mauer shows a fascination Sindermann would not have expected from so terse and pragmatic an officer. She seems almost enraptured by what she is finding, and keeps calling out lines and verses for Sindermann to scribble down in his old, dog-eared notebook.\n\nHe hears her rattling out the latest thing that's taken her eye. He only catches the last few words.\n\n'\"...awake, arise, or be forever fallen!\"'\n\n'Wait. Slower. Say it again.'\n\nHe can't keep up with her urgent dictation so, by the end of the first hour, she is transcribing annotations on her data-slate, and they content themselves with calling out lines to each other through the stacks, sometimes a distance apart, so that the words of Old Earth echo in the stilted space of the Great Hall, uttered aloud for the first time in perhaps ten or twenty thousand years.\n\nMauer reads out something else, her voice coming to him from beyond the stacks where he is rummaging.\n\n'\"It little profits that an idle king, by this still hearth, among these barren crags-\"'\n\n'I don't think so,' he tuts.\n\n'Wait, Sindermann. It goes on... wait... \"Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with gods... one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.\"'\n\n'Is that a poem?' he calls back, lifting down a heavy, leather-bound volume of what appears to be late 37th century political speeches. 'Mauer? Is that a poem?'\n\n'I think so,' she replies. A pause. She appears suddenly, in the shadows at the end of the shelves, studying a small book. 'A Lord Alfred? It's hard to tell. The pages are so faded. Lord Alfred. Was he a High Lord?'\n\n'I don't know,' he replies.\n\nShe tuts, and discards the book onto a nearby pile.\n\n'What is a poem anyway?' she asks.\n\nSindermann sighs. Her approach is so random, he's finding it hard to concentrate. 'Mauer,' he says, 'I don't really have the time to explain the cultural function of lyric verse. I think you know what a poem is.'\n\n'Of course I know what a poem is,' she snaps. 'I didn't mean that. I meant... what's the point of a poem? And when does a poem stop being just words and become something else? When do words gain power? Under what circumstances?'\n\n'Power?'\n\n'You know what I mean. The reason we're here.'\n\nHe does know what she means, and yet he still can't answer. If any abreactive magick lurks in the Hall of Leng, he has no idea how they will find it, or recognise it if they do find it. Where does verse, or prose, or memoir stop, and ritual begin? Can things be both at once? Are there incantations of control stashed here in this great collection, under lock and key, or merely the indulgent scribblings of the ages, the fancy of idle men in easier eras, who set out to do no more than praise a lover, or articulate some feeling, or describe a flower or, perhaps, merely rhyme for the sake of rhyme? The arts, whatever they might be, have come to play an increasingly insignificant role in Imperial life, eroded by Strife and Old Night, until they are vestigial memories, non-functioning organs dwarfed by rational science and secular industry. He recognises, belatedly, his own lack of knowledge. Did the arts ever have a purpose, at any time in history, or have they always been decorative? Does some art have true function and capacity and other art not? How does he, with a mind raised in the schools of the modern Imperium, even tell?\n\n'I have found a Metaphysics of Old Albia,' Mauer calls out from beyond the shelves, 'and something called the Codified Ministrations of Narthan Dume.'\n\n'Add them to the pile, Mauer,' he calls.\n\n'I have.'\n\n'Listen,' he says, propping a book open in his hand. '\"I met murder on the way...\"'\n\n'Why is that significant?' she calls back, unseen.\n\n'Horus went to Murder. Urisarach, which he called Murder...' he trails off.\n\n'What's it from? A grimoire?'\n\n'The Mask of Anarchy,' he replies, reading the title. 'It says, \"Rise like Lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number...\"'\n\n'Does that mean the First Legion?'\n\n'I don't know,' he says. 'I doubt it.'\n\nThey are both idiots, he decides. Idiots for embarking on this. He sees them both for an instant, as if from a distance through other eyes, himself and Mauer, an old man and a stern woman, lost and alone in the shelf-maze of an abandoned library, seeking meaning where none may exist. An effort of monumental desperation, without plan or forethought, driven by apocalyptic fear. This, he thinks, this is why people believe in gods. This is how they come to believe. In fear for their existence, they seek meaning in the dark, any meaning they can cling to, building false gods from nothing, assembling false significance from random scraps that were never connected or meant to be connected. It is exactly, precisely the kind of manic, superstitious pseudo-faith that the Emperor erased from human culture so that mankind could be free to build and make and know.\n\n'How about the Principia Belicosa?'\n\n'Skip it,' he replies. 'That's merely a record of conventional warfare.'\n\nHe doesn't even know why they came here. Not any more. The desperation of the hour notwithstanding, two sensible, sane people came here to... what? Two people, millions of books, trillions of words. What were they even thinking? He can't remember whose idea this was, his or Mauer's, and if it was Mauer's, then the folly of it seems so unlike her. Yet she went along with it, and seems more caught up in it than him.\n\n'\"At the still point of the turning world, neither flesh nor fleshless. Neither from nor towards, the still point, there the dance is... Where past and future are gathered...\"'\n\nHe ignores her voice. It is as though something told them to come here. As though, without words, someone sent them here.\n\nIf there was something here, something of true worth and value, surely the Emperor or the Sigillite would have come to fetch it long since? The Hall of Leng, so piled with books and words, perhaps that's all it is. An emptiness, a trove of junk and memories left over from the distant past, a museum of antique and useless ideas.\n\nA museum of trifles. Yet He kept it. He preserved it all, in one of the most secure locations in the Sanctum. That, to Sindermann, is the "}
{"text":"ords, someone sent them here.\n\nIf there was something here, something of true worth and value, surely the Emperor or the Sigillite would have come to fetch it long since? The Hall of Leng, so piled with books and words, perhaps that's all it is. An emptiness, a trove of junk and memories left over from the distant past, a museum of antique and useless ideas.\n\nA museum of trifles. Yet He kept it. He preserved it all, in one of the most secure locations in the Sanctum. That, to Sindermann, is the true marvel, and the true tragedy. An unexplored, unexploited wealth of past ideas. Of high art. Does it make Him more a god that He sequestered it, or more human that He, perhaps out of sentiment, could not bring Himself to discard it?\n\n'\"To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,\"' Mauer reads out, walking into view, '\"hold infinity in the palm, and eternity in an hour.\" I like this one. I don't know what it means. Do you think it means the wall or the gate?'\n\n'Mauer.'\n\n'The wall or the gate? What do you think? I think-'\n\n'What is the Hall of Leng?' Sindermann interrupts. 'After all?'\n\n'What?' she asks, leaning around a shelf-end to look at him.\n\n'What is it? A treasure house of the riches of Old Earth? In which case, why is no one ever given access to it, or scholars granted admission? Or is it just His-'\n\n'His what? Sindermann?'\n\n'His scrapbook? His attic? His private casket of mementos and bric-a-brac?'\n\n'You think it's that?'\n\nSindermann shrugs. 'I think it has a ridiculously vast building devoted to it, if it is. But then, everything about Him is on a scale beyond our understanding.'\n\n'Are we wasting our time?' she asks, lowering the book in her hands.\n\nHe looks at her, and shakes his head in doubt.\n\n'Do you remember what prompted us to come here, Mauer?' he asks.\n\nShe starts to answer, then stops. She has no answer, and he can see that it troubles her.\n\n'It's in our minds, isn't it?' she whispers. 'The warp. It's made us mad, and we don't even see it. It's in everything. It planted some insane notion in our heads and off we ran like...'\n\n'Idiots?' he suggests.\n\nMauer scowls. 'No,' she says. 'No, Kyril. No. There's something here. I'm sure of it. Think how this place was locked and guarded. How secure. The Emperor is pure rationality, and it is not rational to build a place like this unless it guards something of actual value. Keep looking.'\n\nShe glances back at the book in her hands. '\"...the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea,\"' she reads. She tosses the book aside. 'Not that, obviously. Keep looking.'\n\nThe young archivist reappears suddenly. She gazes in dismay at the books scattered on the chequerboard floor, but decides not to say anything. She has a data-slate in her hand.\n\n'I have consulted the catalogue,' she says nervously. 'I think I may have located some items in special storage.'\n\n'Where?' asks Mauer.\n\n'Collection eight-eight-eight,' she says.\n\n'Which is where?'\n\n'Down here,' she says, gesturing.\n\nThey freeze. A heavy thump has just rung through the echoic space of the vast library.\n\n'That was the main doors,' the librarian whispers.\n\n'Someone's here with us,' says Mauer. She draws her sidearm. 'Someone, or something.'\n\n3:xxvii\n\nArise\n\nBelow the Hollow Mountain, the wind shifts.\n\nCorswain gazes at the silver mask.\n\n'Do not ask,' says Cypher. 'Do not question it, your grace. I have been with you all along. I stand with you now. That is all you need to know.'\n\nHis words echo in the ether, carried and amplified by profound psionic force. The choking clouds of flies billow back.\n\n'Sons of the First, your duty to your seneschal, please,' Cypher declares, his voice piercing every mind on the hill-slope and cliffs. 'He gave you an order. Kill them.'\n\nImmediately, he is at the edge of the black rock, over which the pullulating droves of the Death Guard are still spilling. He begins to mete out death to all unwise enough to come across the lip at him. His sword splits open black armour like blisters. His plasma gun torches men whole, and sends their molten bodies hurtling down the cliff in pyretic streaks.\n\nDark Angels rush to his side, like lions out of slumber. The spirit that was lacking surges back. Faith finds its steel.\n\nIt is the work of the Librarius. A supreme effort of will and one, no doubt, they have been striving to achieve since the Death Guard magicks settled upon them all and the battle first began. Corswain knows it is their doing, though it marvels him to the core all the same. The revelation of Cypher is miraculous, but it alone could not have overturned his vanguard's despondency so quickly. Cartheus and his brothers are working in concert somewhere, magnifying the effect, echoing the image of Cypher into every mind. It is bravado, the theatre of war, but it has a dazzling effect.\n\nAs he runs to Cypher's side, sword raised, Corswain knows he will not question it. Not now. Not ever. The symbolic office of Lord Cypher is a curious and ancient part of the Legion's hierarchy: a warrior assigned by the Lion, masked and always anonymous, charged with the custody of the secrets and traditions. In such wise, he is a tradition of secrets himself. Where he chooses to reveal himself, and which battles to fight, are always subject to his own decision, except that he always stands true in the darkest hours, for there is no greater tradition or discipline within the Legion order than the pursuit of perilous victory.\n\nAnd this fly-blown hell is a dark hour indeed. Corswain had no notion that Lord Cypher was hidden in his ranks. He thought him far away, perhaps abiding within the echelons of his father. He thought the power of Cypher's presence a blessing he could never wish for.\n\nBut here he stands, like some divine sign from the Emperor.\n\nIt seems impossible, but Corswain will not question it. That itself is contrary to tradition. His descent to the furnaces of Terra have shown him the impossible too many times. This day alone, endless in scope, has been filled with daemons and phantasms, with vile impossibilities made flesh. It seems just and right that one impossibility should manifest in their favour.\n\nA sign perhaps. A portent that the Lion yet lives, or that the Emperor has noticed their minor efforts in the general tumult of the stricken world.\n\nDo not question it. Rejoice. Rejoice and fight. To have Cypher make his stand with you is the greatest accolade of the Legion. It lauds you, and marks you and your battle out as the most vital and deserving. It is a living symbol that means the spirit of the First Legion is focused upon you.\n\nAnd the spirit is here without doubt. As the swarms of flies flurry back, so too the clouds of doubt and hopelessness. The malediction of Typhus, the warp-conjured ailment cast upon them all to wither and kill them as surely as any Death Guard steel, burns off them like morning fog in hard sunlight. Their minds are clear, their hearts, their souls.\n\nIt does not mean victory. The fight is still insurmountable, the miserable odds beyond calculation, but if they fail, if they fall upon the black cliffs of this mountain, they will die as Dark Angels, not as broken men, and in their dying they will give bloody account of themselves.\n\nIf victory belongs to the polluted filth of Typhus' host, then it will be bought only by the most hellish price.\n\nCorswain, Hound of Caliban, lays in beside Lord Cypher, beside Tragan, beside Vorlois, beside Bruktas, who is missing an arm but warring anyway, beside Harlock and Blamires and Vanital, beside Erlorial and Carloi and the gun-shields of the Third Order, beside men who had utterly lost their way mere minutes before. Now they fight again, butchering to clear the cliff. Splinters fly and blood gouts with such force it rains back upon them. Corswain is plastered in gore and mire and frass, flies stuck to him like black gems. He splits corcoid beak-visors and opens armour with such force, the ceramite is pleached around the gaping wounds as the bodies tumble away. He hears the shrieking zinzulation of chainblades from every side.\n\nThen that too is muffled by a wail of tempest air. Flashes bloom along the run of the black pass, explosion followed by explosion, wracking the foe far below, and hurling bodies into the air like dolls. The fire blossoms are vast, bleached white in the mockshade monochrome of the blighted air. Craft shriek low overhead, sweeping from the mountain and down the length of the pass, Stormbirds and Thunderhawks, raining munitions on the Death Guard mass. They are Dark Angels ships, the very craft that brought them to Terra, charged with the last of the fuel and warheads, and sent aloft by Adophel.\n\nCorswain watches them turn and bank along the narrow ravine. He watches the rolling, fiery wake of their lethiferous bombardment, sending clonic shockwaves through the tight-packed foe below.\n\nHe lifts his sword in the half-light with a fury he thought had left him forever. Words come to him from somewhere.\n\n'Awake, arise or be forever fallen!' he yells, and the Librarius carries his command to every soul on the field, as both a threat and an unwavering promise.\n\n3:xxviii\n\n'On, I said, Ikasati!'\n\nHe ignores the pain.\n\nAloft, his wings powering, he races like a missile, the Sanguinary Guard at his heels. Their speed and sweeping agility make them hard targets to track. They bank under and between the spans of the scissor arches, using the screen of these great structures to shield themselves from chasing gunfire. Now the ceiling and the arches stipple and pock, a mirror of the ruined tracts of floor.\n\nBeyond the third great arch, with some broken feathers eddying from his wings, Sanguinius turns hard and swoops in upon a gallery on the second level. The Sons of Horus there baulk as they see him stoop at them like a plunging eagle. He falls upon them.\n\nTwo Sons of Horus are smashed over the gallery rail by the backstroke of the blade Encarmine. Two more are imp"}
{"text":"s to shield themselves from chasing gunfire. Now the ceiling and the arches stipple and pock, a mirror of the ruined tracts of floor.\n\nBeyond the third great arch, with some broken feathers eddying from his wings, Sanguinius turns hard and swoops in upon a gallery on the second level. The Sons of Horus there baulk as they see him stoop at them like a plunging eagle. He falls upon them.\n\nTwo Sons of Horus are smashed over the gallery rail by the backstroke of the blade Encarmine. Two more are impaled on the spear in his left hand. Another is broken under his feet as he lands. He swings the spear, throwing off the skewered dead, sending their burning corpses flying to tumble other Sons of Horus like skittle pins. Encarmine rips, a bar of red light, and two more fall, cut asunder through the torso, blood dappling his feathers like rain. Another crashes his warhammer into the primarch's thigh, and loses his head for his temerity. A bolt-round detonates against Sanguinius' breastplate, causing him to wince and stumble. The officer, a company captain, fires his boltgun again, but Sanguinius has already hurled the Spear of Telesto, and the shots fly wild as the officer is staked against the back wall of the gallery, his feet dangling.\n\nSanguinius ploughs into the mass, slicing Encarmine two-handed. The blade passes through ceramite and plasteel, through chainswords trying to strike, through boltguns rising to fire, through storm shields held in frantic defence, through chestplates, pauldrons and helms. Clouds of blood vapour, smoke and splinters billow around him like a halo.\n\nEncarmine splits a massive Terminator, one of the vaunted Justaerin, but wedges fast in the thickness of the plate. Sanguinius releases the blade, pushing the dead Terminator away, while wrenching the huge warhammer from its dead fingers.\n\nWith that trophy, lavishly wrought and weighted with a uranium core, he continues his merciless advance, cracking armour, splintering visors, and pulping the organics within with transmitted hyper-concussions. Hammerscale sprays from crumpled plate. Blow by inhuman blow, he clears the gallery, leaving bodies buckled in his wake, and breaks his way beyond the arch into the next gallery, another proud span of colonnade where once the Luna Wolves stood, cheering his name. Their inheritors die miserably in the same spots.\n\nHe slaughters, and ignores the pain.\n\nProud Taerwelt Ikasati meets him, coming the other way. The Sanguinary Guard's golden wargear is running with gore. With sword and fusion maul, Ikasati has purged the next gallery along. Below them, Furio's squads make rapid advance down the main floor, the hail of suppressing fire much reduced.\n\n'My lord...' Ikasati says.\n\nSanguinius tosses the hammer aside. The head of it is deformed from furious employment. It strikes and cracks the gallery wall, and falls to the deck.\n\n'On,' Sanguinius grunts. He turns to recover his spear and sword from the corpse piles.\n\n'My lord-'\n\n'On, Taerwelt! On, and again! No pause! We clear these galleries one by one! Purge them, and cut our way to the traitor's heart!'\n\nIkasati switches from battle-cant to informal Aenokhian, and his voice drops. 'My lord, you are hurt-'\n\nSanguinius frees Encarmine from the dead Justaerin and glances down. The bruise of soot on his chestplate where the bolt-round hit him still smoulders. The pain is hard to ignore now.\n\n'You were hit...'\n\n'On, I said, Ikasati!' Sanguinius growls. The Sanguinary Guard stares at him, then nods, and leaps from the fractured balustrade, wings wide.\n\nBlood is leaking from the seams of Sanguinius' abdominal armour. The blood is dirty, and he can smell the sickly rot of it. He barely felt the bolt impact, and it did not cause this wound. It simply angered the older injury he carries, the one he has been most carefully concealing. Angron's blade bit him deep, deeper than any wound he has ever sustained, and he is certain that the blade was toxic with infection. He can feel the poison in his blood, the clammy numbness of his organs, the tear and grind of the unhealing wound every time he moves. The dressings he packed across his torso have ruptured.\n\nHe grits his teeth. He can ignore it. He did not foresee Angron as his killer, so this wound is not fatal. This will pass. It will heal. Besides, he only has to keep going for a while. They are almost there. The day will reach an end. He will reach Horus very soon.\n\nHe jerks the Spear of Telesto from the wall where it pins its smouldering kill.\n\nHe will not halt until he gets to the end. The end, or whatever else might be waiting for him there.\n\n3:xxix\n\nAnother authority\n\nThe place is empty and cold; grey rockcrete walls lined with arterial pipework. They walk together, side by side, a demigod giant and a tiny old man in a rustling paper suit. Fo can hear the distant, muffled thump of explosions. It really is getting close.\n\n'Who do you guard me from, Amon?' he asks.\n\n'You are... a prisoner, and therefore must be guarded.'\n\n'Yes, obviously, but...' Fo pauses. 'Sometimes I wonder, are you guarding me from things that might harm me, or are you guarding everything else from me?'\n\n'Can't it be both?' asks Amon.\n\n'I don't know. Can it?'\n\n'I think a basic definition of the role of a guard is both. It certainly can be both. Is this some kind of game?'\n\nA tone of wariness again (aha!).\n\n'I hear you like games, Amon.'\n\n'I do not. But I am good at them.'\n\nFo nods. He can feel that loop of paranoia tightening. 'I can presume, then, that at least part of your duty is to guard me, which is to say, protect me from others?' Fo asks.\n\n'It is.'\n\n'Protect my life?'\n\n'It is.'\n\n'Protect me from harm?'\n\n'It is. Rather, it was. Directives have been issued. My duty function is completed. You are to be passed to another authority.'\n\n'That,' says Fo, 'sounds alarming. Tell me, if you don't mind, for it seems we are about to part company forever... You say your duty function is completed. How do you know?'\n\n'I have been informed so.'\n\n'But, really... when does duty end? \"Only in death...\"? Isn't that the mantra you fellows like to bark, given half a chance?'\n\n'No,' says Amon. 'The phrase you refer to, I believe, originates with the Imperial Army. They are mortal, and therefore death is a more practical increment by which to measure things.'\n\nFo smiles. 'Was that a joke, Amon?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'Are you sure? Not even a tiny bit of one? I distinctly caught a hint of dry wit at work there.'\n\n'It was not a joke.'\n\n'Oh,' says Fo. 'How very disappointing.'\n\nThey reach the small laboratorium. The hatchway stands open, and the lights inside are on. They do not stop, but as they pass, Fo sees a team of high-grade servitors inside, their body cowling painted black. They are hard at work, dismantling and tagging his apparatus, and packing it away in insulated cargo crates.\n\n'He's confiscating it, then? Your lord and master, Valdor? Confiscating my work?'\n\n'It is complete,' replies Amon. 'You completed it. It is being secured.'\n\n'And so I become a disposable asset,' says Fo. 'I probably shouldn't have said it was complete, should I? Might have lived a little longer that way, eh, Amon?'\n\n'Haven't you lived long enough?' asks Amon.\n\nFo doesn't answer him, not even with a quip.\n\nHe has just seen what is waiting for him at the far end of the long, dank corridor.\n\n3:xxx\n\nWolf at the door\n\nHead down, weapon raised, Mauer fans her hand. Keep low! Keep hidden!\n\nSindermann doesn't need to be told. He cowers, heart thudding, below a reading table, with piles of books as a useless bulwark. He realises the little archivist is tucked in behind him, her arms wrapped tight around her upraised knees, trying to make her small form smaller still.\n\nHe sees the abject terror in her eyes. He reaches out and clasps her hand.\n\nThe boetharch prowls forward, sidearm braced, steering between the laden shelves. The smell of aged paper and book-must seems unbearably strong suddenly. The smell of dead history.\n\nAnother soft thump. Movement. Something moving on the floor below.\n\nThen silence.\n\nMauer presses in against a bookshelf, her back to it. She undoes the red buttons of her coat so her upper body can move more freely. She listens.\n\nNothing.\n\nThen another stirring, brief. Heavy feet, but moving softly, across black and white tiles. Or is it stairs? She moves around, glimpses a shadow, and ducks back. The shadow was big. Imposing. Though seen only for a second, it was not human.\n\nWhere is it? She waits. She listens. She smells the faint odour of wet metal. Of fyceline.\n\nOf blood.\n\nWhere is it?\n\nShe flops onto her knees and crawls along the stack row, then peers out to get a better look. But the shadow's gone. There's only the sepia light, the sombre shadows of the racked shelves, the gleam of the burnished handrails, the sound of rain on the roof.\n\nMauer swallows hard. If she fixes it with a clear shot, can she bring it down? Something that big? Is she fast enough? Has her service weapon got enough power?\n\nNo, she isn't, and no, it hasn't.\n\nBut they're dead anyway, if she doesn't try.\n\nShe hears a noise, from an entirely different direction. A rustle of parchments. She wriggles around. Another sound, from the opposite direction. A book, flipped through, then cast aside.\n\nWhere the hell is it?\n\n'\"The day will not save them, and we own the night.\"'\n\nShe has no idea where the voice is coming from. It is deep and powerful, a minatory tone. Pages rustle. Another book examined.\n\n'Not his words, then, after all,' the voice muses. 'Stolen. He claimed them for his own, but this attributes it to an \"Amiri Baraka\", back in the early millennia.'\n\nWhere the hell is the voice coming from? Above her? Below? To her right?\n\nShe leans to her right, gun raised.\n\nFrom her left, a sword blade rests gently against her neck. A shadow falls across her.\n\n'I could hear you,' says the voice. 'I knew you were there, from the moment I entered.'\n\nMauer turns slowly, the blade at her throat. The Sons of Horus legionary is "}
{"text":"ll,' the voice muses. 'Stolen. He claimed them for his own, but this attributes it to an \"Amiri Baraka\", back in the early millennia.'\n\nWhere the hell is the voice coming from? Above her? Below? To her right?\n\nShe leans to her right, gun raised.\n\nFrom her left, a sword blade rests gently against her neck. A shadow falls across her.\n\n'I could hear you,' says the voice. 'I knew you were there, from the moment I entered.'\n\nMauer turns slowly, the blade at her throat. The Sons of Horus legionary is an immense silhouette standing over her.\n\n'Did you think you could kill me?' it asks.\n\n'No,' she says, her voice shaking but honest. 'But I was going to try.'\n\nThe shadow nods.\n\n'Leave her alone!' Sindermann yells. He bursts into view at the end of the stack, glaring at the shadow.\n\n'Leave her alone, I said. What the hell are you doing here?'\n\n'Exactly my question,' says Loken.\n\n3:xxxi\n\nSay it\n\nLater that century, the rusting brown cast of the desert and the walls and the sky have grown darker still. It is red. Everything and everywhere is red, like blood, the colour of blood, scarlet out in the sunlight, across the endless dunes, and crimson, madder and orchil hues in the darker shadows of the wall.\n\nHe remembers, sometimes, longing for blood. The fire of blood, the gush of blood, the physicality of blood. He wanted that simplicity. He wanted to fight, in a blood fight, spilling blood close up, not fight with his mind from a distance. He wanted to put the mental fight aside, give up the crippling, endless puzzle of war, the never-ending facts and data, and just be a man with a sword. Just give up. Stop thinking and give in. Just fight. Just fight, mindlessly. Just be free. Just fight and kill, for blood. For blood, the colour of this desert. Just blood for the sake of blood, simple, released, unthinking. Just blood. Blood for-\n\nHow long ago was that? Who was there?\n\nDoes it matter? Which side was he on?\n\nHe tries to order the available facts. He was a warrior who just wanted to kill. They wouldn't let him. They wanted him to think. They wanted him to decide everything. They wanted him to order the available facts because they said he was good at it. He didn't want to decide. He didn't want to have to make those decisions. It was killing him. He never told anyone that. He wanted to stop and make somebody else decide, make somebody else order the available facts. All he wanted to do was to go to the walls and forget it all and fight, a man with a sword.\n\nJust fight. No thought. No decisions. Just fight, mindlessly, free, the way the others did. Just fight. Spill blood. That's all. Just blood. Blood for the-\n\nJust give up.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, defiant,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nJust give in.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn,' says Rogal Dorn, sitting in the crimson shadow under the red wall.\n\nAre you even that? Were you ever? Just give up.\n\n'I am Rogal,' says Rogal.\n\nNot even that. Don't think. That's all you really wanted, isn't it? Not to have to think any more? You can do that here, in the shadow of the wall. Just give up. Give in.\n\nHe orders the available facts.\n\n'I...' he says. Is there anything he's certain of any longer? All the facts have rusted, and all the thoughts have gone. There is only blood. That's all he really wanted. Give in to that.\n\n'I...' he says.\n\nJust blood. Say it.\n\n'I...'\n\nSay it. Say blood. The thing you wanted.\n\n'Blood,' he says softly. Soft as the flecks of rust the dry breeze lifts in horsetail plumes from the ridges of the dunes.\n\nSay it again.\n\n'Blood.'\n\nWho is the blood for?\n\n'For-'\n\nSay it. Who is the blood for?\n\n'Blood for the-'\n\nFor? For whom?\n\nHe's waiting for you. You just have to say it.\n\n3:xxxii\n\nOur father in hell\n\nProud ship, proud Spirit, I see what you have become. Even from this great distance, my embattled mindsight can see what his excess has made of you. I can perceive the truth of it, whole and entire and terrible, for my mind is not shuttered by deceit like the brave sentinel souls who travel with my lord and master.\n\nI want to help him. I want to stand alongside my beloved friend, the Master of Mankind, and aid him in his fight. But I can't. All I can do is watch, from my excruciating perch on the Golden Throne far away. Horus Lupercal is allowing me to witness this. I can smell his cruelty. He hopes the sight of it will break my concentration so I lose control of the Throne.\n\nI will not. I will not. But I cannot help but look, and what I see is a whole agony in itself.\n\nI see a hell-pit, a realm of horror that my lord's first-found has wrought, mistaking it for heaven. Perhaps the great Lupercal is now so far gone this seems like a heaven to him. His gods - gods that are not gods - have lied to him.\n\nThe lies are so very convincing. Fleetingly, they fool even my master. I see him forced to blink and look away as he advances, to shake off the visions of gold and lustrous pearl, the pure white light that bathes everything in a glow like sunlight on fresh snow. It reminds him of the great Himalazian peaks, silent and unspoiled, when first he climbed them, lifetimes ago, and stood, and breathed the empty cold, and looked upon the white dazzle of the top of the world, and decided that this would be where he would raise my city. It was a place that knew eternity.\n\nThis place knows it too. This poor, proud ship is a ship no longer. The four, the False Four, have made it a bridge to infinity, matter fused with unmatter, a pathway from sane reality to insane ether. The entire Solar Realm is subsiding into the warp, and the Vengeful Spirit is the focus, the primary pathway between realms.\n\nI see that my master, for all his great power, is finding it hard to concentrate and hold on to the truth. The compounding lies of heaven and hell are so very convincing. It is all too easy to become lost in private fantasies born of doubt, or secret fear, or burning need. The warp tempts us all. I fear for all who embarked on this assault with him: Constantin, Sanguinius, Rogal... wherever they are, they may already be lost to delusions manufactured to exploit their smallest flaws.\n\nMy master's Companions, the pitiful remains of the Hetaeron company, for all their preternatural gifts, are entirely beguiled by the lies. They see heavens of their own, madly beautiful or beautifully mad. Warden Xadophus sees an Elysian temple of glass and gold leaf, sunlight beaming from a pale dome. Custodes Frastus beholds a serene field of glory, surrounded by alabaster pillars under a bright noon sky. Prefect Andolen perceives the halls and galleries of a golden palace, lined with auramite effigies of heroes, paved with silk-sheen marble. The others too: it's hard to track. Their thoughts, usually so steeled and focused, are slippery with amazement and wonder. They see around them the glory of the Inner Sanctum, the Palace they have guarded their whole lives, replicated in every detail, but magnified in scale and richness a thousand times, more lavish than any citadel their master ever built. To Proconsul Caecaltus, he that I marked with my sigil, the company advances along the Gilded Walk, yet it is ten times broader and a hundred longer, and gleams beneath a sky more pure than any Terra has ever known. To Karedo, it is the Hall of Worthies, flanked by statues and roofed in crystal, which marks the final, western approach to the Silver Door. To Ravengast, this is the cryselephantine Yulongxi Passageway, which leads to the cloisters of the Imperial adytum.\n\nLies. All lies. They are all so amazed at the radiant kingdom, they see not the menace suffusing every inch of the place, at every hand. Frastus, pausing to marvel, sinks slowly into the golden floor, unaware of his descent as he vanishes from view. Braxius, lost in rapture, disappears quite suddenly. I think the golden statues took him, yet they are quite still, their frozen gazes turned away innocently. Andolen stops, and leans back against an engraved auramite wall in contemplation. The wall begins to pull him in, without a ripple, as though he is being gently lowered into molten gold.\n\nI see this happening. My mouth moves, silently screaming. I want to call out, but they cannot hear me. They do not see what I see: the nightmare black, the rot, the filth, the truth that briefly replaces the palatial glory every time I blink.\n\nI see my master turn and yell Andolen's name. Andolen stirs, and smiles to see his lord. He is half-sunk in the wall. There is no seam or line where the gold of his plate ends and the wall begins. My master grabs his hand and tries to pull him free.\n\nHe sinks further.\n\n Andolen, awake! I hear my master cry. Andolen blinks, confused, then alarmed, slowly realising his plight. My master cannot pull him free. He won't let go. He stakes his sword in the deck and, with his free hand, grips the limb of a vast aureate statue nearby to anchor himself. He hauls, yet still Andolen won't come loose. The statue feels cold to my master's touch, even through his gauntlet. The statue is one from the Hall of Worthies. It depicts one of the primarch sons. I don't know which one. My master grips the leg so hard the gold deforms, ruining the sculptor's perfect line of thigh and knee. I see the crafted shape of harness and plate, the laurels on the head, the sceptre held high in the left hand, the loop of frayed red twine tied around the fingers of the right hand.\n\nAwake! my master roars. He will not let the lies consume them. Straining to pull Andolen clear, he unleashes his will to drive the radiant cloud of falsehood from their brains.\n\nAwake! Please. Know yourselves. Wake from this stupor or be forever fallen.\n\nThey wake. Some of them, at least. Others are too far gone. They wake, by his will alone, and see the ship as I see it. They see the darkness and the decay, the cancerous steel of the deck, the diseased bulkheads. They see their master gripping a half-broken stanchion as he tries to haul Andolen from an oozing wall of meat that is sucking him in like quicksand.\n\nAn"}
{"text":"rive the radiant cloud of falsehood from their brains.\n\nAwake! Please. Know yourselves. Wake from this stupor or be forever fallen.\n\nThey wake. Some of them, at least. Others are too far gone. They wake, by his will alone, and see the ship as I see it. They see the darkness and the decay, the cancerous steel of the deck, the diseased bulkheads. They see their master gripping a half-broken stanchion as he tries to haul Andolen from an oozing wall of meat that is sucking him in like quicksand.\n\nAndolen is screaming. The most terrible sound in creation, to hear a Custodian cry out in fear. Others start forward to help their lord: Xadophus, Karedo, Caecaltus. But all they drag free is Andolen's arm, torn off and blurting blood.\n\nFrustrated that their lies have been exposed, the spirits of the ship become vengeful. They sweep in from all sides, wide-mawed and roaring, from the darkness, snatching men off their feet even as they turn in confusion.\n\nI see what the cursed first-found is trying to do. Or rather, I see what the four that rule him are trying to do. This is them at work, the predators in the long grass. All four have deployed their gifts here, to stop my lord, because they fear him. They are targeting the Hetaeron Custodians because they dread the killing power each one represents. They are trying to pick them off, one by one, through violence or madness, until my master is forced to stand alone. Further, they are trying to weaken my lord and dilute his power. The Custodes were built to protect him, but the four have turned them into a burden, forcing him to protect them, for only if he shares his will and mindsight with them, diminishing his own power, can he keep them alive and alert.\n\nOnce more, the insidious cruelty of the warp is demonstrated to me. It fights not fairly if it can fight with cunning. It wants no match with my lord and his warriors on an equal footing, for it has no doubt as to who would win that. It turned my lord's men against him when he first arrived, now it turns them into an encumbrance. It knows, and mocks, his love for each of them, and it knows he will not see them wasted and destroyed. It obliges him to mete out his strength to them, so they can at least see the truth, and fight it. It seeks to weaken my great lord and wear him down until he is at last alone and vulnerable.\n\nThese are the treacherous blood games it wishes to play. Well, my lord and Master of Mankind has some skill in such games.\n\nThe Spirit, once-proud ship, is but a ruin, no more than a derelict, decayed tomb, like the benighted space hulks we have sometimes found, drifting and lost between stars. The warp has eaten it away, and where it has not rotted and disfigured, it has transmuted and diseased. The decks are scarred and dislocated, the walls rusted and soiled. In places, it has split open so that the hull gapes wide into the void. But it is not the hard vacuum of near-Terran space that glares back in, nor are they familiar constellations that I see glinting through the torn and collapsed hull-skin. The Vengeful Spirit, just like the rest of the immense traitor fleet, just like Terra itself, and the entire Solar Realm, is half-sunk in the immaterium, much as poor Andolen was half-sunk in the wall. What surrounds my lord now, what permeates his first-found's flagship, is the leaching, cankered voidmist of the empyrean, flooding into realspace to claim it as its own. This increasing flux is what pollutes Terra, and deforms it, and reduces it, and mangles spatial dimensions, and revokes time, and allows the Neverborn and dead to walk. Horus' ship has not been spared the dissolving touch of Chaos it has carried to the Throneworld and unleashed.\n\nYou have brought the Emperor face to face with Chaos, first-found, closer than when he sat upon the Throne or walked the shrieking halls of the webway, perhaps closer even than when he last faced the four, and took their fire from them on Molech. You have brought Chaos to his very door, and forced him to look it in the eye.\n\nDo not, then, expect him not to use it.\n\nI see him look down at his hands. They are sheathed in auramite, because it is almost quantum-inert, and thus most efficacious in the manipulation of immaterial forces. Bare skin is better. This much he knows. He tears his right gauntlet off, hangs it from his harness, and seizes the immaterium with bare hand and a bared mind. It is scalding and alive with anger, but my lord is no longer constrained by the constant duties of the Throne. That is my burden now.\n\nThere is no time. There are no clocks. There is no pain. My master hears only the crackle of the warp. I watch as he harnesses that sound and uses it as a focus, a drishti, to regulate his work.\n\nThe immaterial presses at him. It seeks to overwhelm and drain him, but he understands its fire. It is the same fire he stole from the four annihilators, and used to keep them at bay, the same fire he has wielded, for centuries, to drive them back whenever they have come too close. They flinched then, from their own fire. They flinch now.\n\nYou have forced this confrontation, first-found. You have brought my lord into a realm of Chaos to face you. Did you think that would weaken him and grind him down? How can he grow weak when there is limitless power around him to draw upon? You do not put out a fire by throwing fuel upon it.\n\nHe draws upon your flames. Over the millennia, he has worn many masks, each suitable to the task at hand. His mind, his greatest gift, allows him flexibility in such things. Now you see him at his truest aspect: as terrible as he can be when terror is the only recourse. He is ordo ab chao. He is lux in tenebris.\n\nThe Emperor lights up your pitiful, wretched ruin of a ship. He burns back your perfidious darkness. He empowers his ailing Companions, and rekindles their courage. He shares his searing mindsight with them, banishing the false heavens and murderous paradises you conjured to drown them. He sharpens their senses and the edges of their blades. He fires the cryptochromes in their eyes, the retinal proteins he wove into their construction that lets them read magnetic fields, and allows them to see the actual, physical structure of this place behind the congealing lies and illusions. He boosts their data-depleted senses and banishes the cognitive dissonance created by the isotopic space around them.\n\nDespite the inhuman pain that wracks every atom of my body, I rejoice at the sight of it.\n\nRefreshed, renewed, the Custodians form up around my lord. Xadophus, Karedo, Caecaltus, Taurid, Ravengast, Nmembo, Zagrus... the last of the few. They see through your nacrous dreams, first-found, to the spoil-heap desolation they veil, the botched pipes and curdled waste, the fibrous decks seethed with a filigree of worm tracks, the dripping ceilings and sloughed wall panels, the dangling cables and broken fittings, the litter of bones and the oozing stacks of skulls.\n\nYour darkness billows back like squid ink. The gathering Neverborn, some quite the most enormous of their ilk I have ever glimpsed, scream mirthlessly at my lord's baleful fire, which scorches their minds. They surge forward.\n\nGolden blades meet them. The stench of their blood and bursting organs infects the air, the nidor-reek of their meat and fat burning as powerblades cut through it, but it cannot overwhelm the osmogenesia, that pure odour of sanctity, that surrounds my lord and his Companions.\n\nThey drive forward, smashing through the daemons' energumenical mass, possessed by will and power and abreactive fire. The decks shudder as infamous beasts collapse and die, or stagger, howling, back into the shadows, trailing blood or mauled limbs. Horned things, tusked things, insectile horrors come apart under raining blows and roaring shells, deliquescing into slicks of aithochrous sludge, or spattering the walls and floors with sizzling ianthine blood.\n\nMy master begins his vastation, advancing blow by blow and death by death, into the dark heart of your lair, searing away the evils that you throw at him, edging ever closer to your abditory, your inner sanctum. Your attempts to stop your father have forced his hand, obliging him to become stronger, to reject notions of mercy, to adopt the aspect I hoped he would never have to wear. I am reluctant to admit it, but this pleases me. I am almost delighted to have lived just long enough to see his ultimate fury unleashed.\n\nThe things he slays, dead, undead, or Neverborn, incinerate in outrage at the power he is wielding. They see him for what he is, first-found. They see him in the aspect you have forced him to assume: Emperor, Master of Mankind, thanetiser of daemons, annihilator of the annihilators, bearer of stolen fire, death-bringer to the false and pitiful four.\n\nHe is here, first-found. In rage, in extremity, in theandric fury, he is here and he is coming for you, with all of the vengeance and malice you are owed.\n\nNo more restraint. His reluctance is gone. He will take great pleasure in obliterating you. For I hear his mind ringing through the warp.\n\nI am here, Horus Lupercal, and for you, I am the end and the death.\n\n3:xxxiii\n\nSomewhere\n\nSomewhere, in the outer darkness, four voices start to laugh. It is cruel laughter. They laugh, and begin to whisper the name of the one who is now here.\n\nThey lisp and hiss the name.\n\nOver and over.\n\nThe name.\n\nThe name of the Dark King.\n\nPART FOUR\n\nIN THE MIDST OF CHAOS\n\n4:i\n\nTerminus\n\nHe takes a breath. He swallows his grief. He raises his green cowl to shadow his face, so that no one can see the pain in his eyes.\n\nXanthus, Chosen of Malcador, slips down the shadowed cloisters that flank the Imperial Sanctum. Like all of the Chosen, wounded by sudden loss, he dearly wanted to maintain his vigil in the Throne Room, but there is too much to be done. Far too much. The Chosen have been working tirelessly since long before the war began, their toil all but invisible. History will not record th"}
{"text":"eath. He swallows his grief. He raises his green cowl to shadow his face, so that no one can see the pain in his eyes.\n\nXanthus, Chosen of Malcador, slips down the shadowed cloisters that flank the Imperial Sanctum. Like all of the Chosen, wounded by sudden loss, he dearly wanted to maintain his vigil in the Throne Room, but there is too much to be done. Far too much. The Chosen have been working tirelessly since long before the war began, their toil all but invisible. History will not record their efforts, or even their names. The Sigillite called them, fondly, the 'hidden seamsters of the Imperium'.\n\nHow he will miss him.\n\nThough they will go uncelebrated, the achievements of the Chosen are as great as any performed by the Astartes or the Excertus Imperialis. Under the Sigillite's covert direction, they have woven and maintained the fabric of the Imperium, balancing all the vying offices and institutions of governance, as a cunning and entirely discrete arm of political administration. They act as a lubricant to allow the great gears and cogs of authority to turn without jamming. 'Few decisions of significance have been made in the Palace,' the Sigillite once boasted, 'without one of my Chosen in the room.'\n\nGreat Terra, he will miss him.\n\nXanthus believed that, when the final hours came upon them, the workload would ease. So much is rendered trivial by the approach of an apocalypse. Instead, though it seems there is nothing anyone can do except wait for some kind of conclusion, the Palace seems busier than ever. The heart of the Sanctum beats frantically. War Court seniors and aides of High Council lords and ceremonial officials rush past, each on his or her hasty task. Petitioning nobility pack the mass-passageways around the Throne Room, craving admission. Sentinel guards clear pathways through the crowds, crowds of Terran aristocracy gathered like pleading commoners, to allow Oblivion Knights to lead through processions of psycho-able conscripts. Some of the Chosen help supervise these scared, tithed herds. Sigil Protocol is now being implemented in full force. Concillium work-crews bring in additional areopeaic devices in wagons hauled by abhuman gangs. The devices, each one huge and strange, like sound mirrors wreathed in filament wires or the tarnished anvils of blacksmith giants, will be conjoined with the Throne mechanisms to improve stability. To prolong the Sigillite's... well, not his life, but the progression of his death.\n\nHe will miss him so badly.\n\nAll the halls and processionals are packed: the Hall of Worthies, the Hall of Swords, the Mencavite Hall, the Martian Approach, the Hall of Celebrants, the Calisto Galleries. They swarm with ushers and lords, household serfs and dominion governors, Navis Nobilite and high-status servitors.\n\nXanthus knows that, in truth, most of them have very little urgent business. They are finding things to do, inventing tasks and hectic purposes, simply so they can congregate in the Throne Room approaches where they feel they will be safest. Even here, deep below ground, tremors can be felt. The Delphic is beginning to submit to the enemy's assault. Very soon, the traitors will be inside the final fortress.\n\nHe pushes through the crowds of purposeless activity, following worthies through to Mencavite, and then heading along the echoing Yulongxi Passageway towards Martian. The Chosen still have genuine errands to run.\n\nSuch was the Sigillite's parting gift. A monsoon download of unfinished business. In addition to his stinging bereavement, Xanthus' mind aches from the raw psionic deposition. All the Chosen are still mentally struggling to prioritise the tasks the Sigillite left to them, muddled and unfiltered, in his living will. Xanthus has, as far as he can tell, sixty-seven to perform, though there may be others tumbled into the recesses of his mind. Each one, in another age, would have been the most essential thing that had to happen in the Palace on a given day. But they will have to wait, because his priority now is the performance of a duty that was left to Hassan, the most senior of their kind, because Hassan, in his seniority, has been called away to the Antirooms by a sudden security crisis. Hassan has mentally passed the duty to Xanthus. It is a thought-file marked Terminus.\n\n'Get it done,' Hassan said. As soon as Xanthus studied the engram, he understood the relevance and the urgency. The sodality had already been instructed.\n\n'Without delay,' Xanthus had replied.\n\nSo he runs, without delay, down the Yulongxi Passageway to Martian. It is a matter of Imperial Security, of interdisciplinary politics. The autonomous authority of the captain-general must be checked. If, as the Sigillite believed, the Imperium survives this day, it cannot emerge with the Legio Custodes, already frighteningly powerful, holding quite so many cards.\n\nMoriana Mouhausen, of the Chosen, is waiting for him in the Martian Approach. Like Xanthus, she had tasks of her own to perform and, like Xanthus she has been co-opted to Hassan's purpose. Like Xanthus, she is poorly hiding her grief.\n\n'Have you found her?' Xanthus asks.\n\n'I have,' she replies. 'Is she really the most appropriate proxy for this?'\n\n'According to Khalid, yes,' he says. 'She has talents that can be exploited to achieve leverage, and Khalid reminded me that she has previous experience with the subject.'\n\n'I have reservations, Zaranchek,' Mouhausen replies. 'If we fail in this, the implications-'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'I'm saying, she is unaligned, potentially divisive, and bears no authority in the Palatine-'\n\n'The same could be said for us, Moriana. Couldn't it?'\n\n'Even so, she-'\n\n'She can hear you, you know.'\n\nThey both look aside. 'She' is waiting nearby, leaning diffidently against the engraved gold panels of the Martian Approach. Either side of her stand the officers of the Hort Palatine who have escorted her here as requested. Nearby, the polished ouslite floor is scattered with red petals. There are sprays of flowers in glass vases on every demi-lune table along the length of the approach, and none have been attended by the household staff in days. They are silently shedding petals as though they wish to lose excess weight and be better able to flee.\n\n'You are Andromeda?' Xanthus asks.\n\n'Seventeenth of that archetype,' she replies. She straightens up. Her grey robes have a soft, feline flow. Her chrome hair glints in the light of the vast electro-flambeaux overhead. 'You are both of the Chosen?'\n\nXanthus nods.\n\n'And this concerns Fo?'\n\nHe nods again.\n\n'Am I to understand this is an unofficial errand?' asks Andromeda-17. Xanthus reads her grin of curiosity as amused relish. He dares not imagine how the Selenar gene-witch reads him.\n\n'It comes from the highest authority-' he says.\n\n'Well, not the highest, eh? Not the highest. From your master, which is significant, but not the same thing.'\n\n'It comes from the highest authority present on Terra,' says Moriana.\n\n'Oh,' says Andromeda. 'That's interesting. And I'm sure you won't elaborate on what that means.'\n\n'This is a delicate matter,' says Xanthus, 'of high priority. A smoothing of interaction between two different agencies.'\n\n'Back-room politics? Underhand?'\n\n'If you like.'\n\n'Between Malcador's lapdogs and...?'\n\n'The Legio Custodes.'\n\nAndromeda-17 raises an eyebrow.\n\n'How very Machiavellian,' she says. 'Do you know who that was? Never mind. I would say that this kind of political intrigue seems pathetically inappropriate under the circumstances. We're all going to die. What machinations could possibly be so important that they have to get done now? But you mention Fo, and the Custodes. I presume they wish to assume control of the little monster and his weapon, and the office of the Sigillite would rather they did not?'\n\n'They already have the weapon,' says Xanthus. 'We may or may not be able to secure it through official channels.'\n\n'The Sigillite is allowing them to keep it?' Andromeda asks. 'You know what it does, right?'\n\n'The weapon is a last resort,' says Moriana. 'The Sentinels understand this. It is classified Tier XX as a Terminus Sanction. Once the crisis has passed-'\n\nAndromeda laughs. 'Once the crisis has passed...?' she echoes.\n\n'Once the crisis has passed,' Moriana reaffirms, 'the weapon will be removed from Custodes supervision and placed in more appropriate hands.'\n\n'Meaning yours?' Andromeda smiles again. 'Don't worry. I know you won't answer that. I get it. The weapon isn't important. The mind that made it is. Because the mind that made it can replicate it.'\n\n'Correct,' says Xanthus.\n\n'So the Custodes want the maker securely in their jurisdiction. Once the crisis has passed, they want to be left holding all the cards. Ready for the next crisis. Or just to clean house after this one.'\n\n'The Custodes intend to execute him,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Ah, I see,' says Andromeda. 'A miserable death for a miserable creature, and entirely deserved. But I appreciate that the office of the Sigillite doesn't want to lose so vital an asset. The last lord of Old Night represents a weapon that would make the Chosen a more powerful institution than the primarchs or the Legiones Astartes. The power of life and death over the god-king's creations. In the present circumstances, many would see that as a good thing. The brave Custodes certainly seem to.'\n\n'Do you?' asks Moriana.\n\n'Not my place to say,' she replies.\n\n'We have a window of opportunity,' says Xanthus. 'A temporary power vacuum, if you will. We procure Fo now, or the opportunity will be lost.'\n\n'You're thinking about the future still? How brave.'\n\n'The present is out of our hands,' says Xanthus. 'The future is our only viable concern. You engineered his release once. Will you assist again?'\n\nAndromeda nods.\n\n'I'll take it from here,' Xanthus says to Mouhausen. 'Get back to your duties.'\n\nShe nods, and hurries away, beckoning the officers of the Hort Palatine to follow her.\n\n'We don't have much time,' Xanthus says to the"}
{"text":"if you will. We procure Fo now, or the opportunity will be lost.'\n\n'You're thinking about the future still? How brave.'\n\n'The present is out of our hands,' says Xanthus. 'The future is our only viable concern. You engineered his release once. Will you assist again?'\n\nAndromeda nods.\n\n'I'll take it from here,' Xanthus says to Mouhausen. 'Get back to your duties.'\n\nShe nods, and hurries away, beckoning the officers of the Hort Palatine to follow her.\n\n'We don't have much time,' Xanthus says to the Selenar gene-witch. 'Directives have been issued, and the Custodes are already en route.'\n\n'You realise I hate his living guts, don't you?' she asks.\n\n'That,' replies Xanthus, 'hardly matters.'\n\n4:ii\n\nClose work\n\nThey take back a little ground. Just a little, and it's meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but it matters. To Fafnir Rann, it feels like a proactive achievement after hours of mindless resistance.\n\nWhen the enemy thrust chokes at the Delphine Viaduct, Archamus, Second Of That Name, orders in sustained bombardment from the high batteries. The firestorm, delivered by principal wall guns built to kill engines and void-ships, cuts a molten canyon-scar across the southern limits, and catches the mass of the enemy fall-back between Fratary Bastion and the ruins of the Hasgard Gate. The bombardment lasts six minutes, and Rann has no idea how many traitors die in it, but the number would be in the high thousands. A signal victory on another day: today, high thousands are just a drop in the traitor ocean.\n\nThe senior Huscarls call for entrenchment to take full advantage of the Delphine win: dig in along the viaduct line, and fortify that link in the stretched chain. Immense formations of Sons of Horus and World Eaters are driving in at the loyalist line to the east and the west. In under an hour, the mauled traitor prong driven back behind Hasgard will be ready for a second bulk assault.\n\nBut Rann has other ideas. If they can extend their line as far as Hasgard, they can form a salient from which to strike at the eastern and western traitor masses flank-wise rather than simply head-on. Archamus concurs. The salient won't hold for long, but every minute bought back is another minute of the Emperor's life.\n\nThe terrain beyond the viaduct is a smoking mire where nothing is identifiable any more. Heat radiates from the mud banks, the pulverised rockcrete and the lagoons of slime steam. In minutes, Rann's advance is specked and pied with liquid mud. Namahi's riders, scouting ahead through the vapour with their servo-raptors, return with auspex surveys. Nothing lives between their position and Hasgard, but sensoria read life-traces in the surviving bunkers and blockhouses below Hasgard. The enemy has taken shelter there, and dug-in, hoping to hold a beachhead in preparation for their reinforcements.\n\n'Close work,' says Zephon. Rann nods. That's exactly what it will be.\n\nEvery hand in the advance rises. Rann won't ask anyone to undertake a fight he wouldn't tackle himself. Fisk Halen volunteers, of course, but Halen is now bareheaded, his nose and mouth hidden by a rebreather, his ruined helm ditched. Rann gives him acting command of the advance instead, and asks for his bolt pistol. Halen hands it over without hesitation. Rann chooses Leod Baldwin and Val Tarchos. Zephon chooses Rinas Dol and Kystos Gaellon. Namahi dismounts and calls two of his riders to follow him.\n\nIs this posturing? Rann wonders. The two field leaders, Blood Angels and White Scars, electing to go because Rann did? With Namahi, it's a possibility, but not for the usual reasons of pride or rivalry. Rann knows the White Scars have always felt the outsiders in the loyalist formation, deployed, contrary to their usual role, by necessity in the siege defence. From the start, they have been viewed as the junior partners, second to the Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists, a mobile force unsuited to defensive war-work. The Keshig-Master is simply seeking to underline that his brothers are willing and able to do whatever is required. As far as Rann is concerned, the White Scars have been proving that every day since the siege began. Their honour is beyond doubt, and their status alongside the Imperial Fists and the Blood Angels irrefutable.\n\nIn Dominion Zephon, there seems no swagger either, though the Imperial Fists and Blood Angels have long enjoyed a contest of honour. Zephon, almost wordless, seems clinically matter-of-fact. He's going because why wouldn't he? In that, Rann thinks, he simply conducts his leadership as I do. No fuss, no devolution of responsibility: face it yourself, or dare not expect it of others.\n\nThe nine advance, through the mud-lakes and swelter. The liquidised ground is already baking and cracking in the post-bombardment calefaction-shock radiated by the area. The air swims with heat distortion. The complex of bunkers is half-buried in the caking ooze.\n\nIt will be close work, as Zephon said. Close confines, close quarters, clearing chamber by chamber. Baldwin and Tarchos have clamped their main weapons, and drawn pistols and combat knives. The Blood Angels and White Scars have done likewise, drawing bolt pistols, and where the Blood Angels have poignards, the White Scars have edlel or gutting blades. Large weapons or long blades will be cumbersome inside.\n\nRann locks his twin axes across his backplate, and takes out his own pistol and Halen's. Zephon, similarly, keeps his keen sword, Spiritum Sanguis, in its scabbard across his back. He has left his brace of precious volkite pistols - powerful, but impractical for the kind of combat ahead - in the care of one of his lieutenants in the advance, and borrowed a blunt-pattern bolt pistol. To Rann, the Exarch of the High Host, like all Blood Angels, seems a creature of splendour and rich panoply, so it reassures him to see Zephon favour plain functionality over ornate wargear.\n\nThey turn off their active icon marker transmitters, and fan out along the northern limit of the bunkers. Rann moves with Zephon, scaling a huge, frozen wave of mud onto the top of a blockhouse. A shell has punched a hole in the roof, a circular wound through three feet of rockcrete, surrounded by snapped and twisted rebar.\n\nSince the fight at Clanium Square, Rann has noted a difference in Zephon. He doesn't know the Blood Angel well, by reputation mainly, but he knows him well enough. The Dominion was once known as a warrior of fury and passion, but now carries himself differently, moves differently. Even his voice, when he does speak, seems affectless. Rann hasn't marked it much until now, because there has been no room to think, but here, in the steaming silence, he is obliged to watch his kill-partner closely for signals and gestures. The beauty and grace, so typical of the IX Legion, is still there, but Zephon now reminds him, he realises, of some exacting natural predator, driven by a hardwired impulse to kill and feed, but entirely and scrupulously in control of that urge. The wild bravado has gone, and in its place is just the dense, lightless silence of menace. Rann wonders what might have effected such a change in the once noble warrior, but he need only look around. This war has done it to all of them, and to everything they know and value. It has hollowed them out, left their eyes empty and their expressions blank, and scraped the gilt of glory off all their deeds. Mere purpose remains, blackened and scorched, the duty to kill until killed. Valour, glory, pride, triumph... such Astartesian qualities are gone and bankrupt.\n\nIt pains Rann to see Zephon so; to see a glorious angel clipped and dulled, all spirit vacated. Rann has always thought of the Blood Angels as the exemplars of martial prowess, not just great practitioners like the Imperial Fists, but paragons of inspiring prestige. It pains Rann, for in Zephon's grim emptiness, he sees his own, and sees the hollow soul of every loyal son left on Terra.\n\nHe checks his melancholy thinking, for the work is upon them and intense focus is required.\n\nRann listens for sounds in the bunker below, and tracks for heat spots. He gestures to Zephon, then takes the lead, dropping feet first through the hole.\n\nInside, it's a lightless oven of mangled debris. He advances, slowly, silently, with both pistols raised. His visor penetrates the darkness for him, resolving a green ghost-fog where the contours are shattered blocks and twisted metal, collapsed internal walls and the mashed pulp of those who were in the bunker when it was split and blown out from the inside.\n\nZephon drops in behind him, and they spread out in parallel. Rann's visor passive-tags Zephon with an icon so Rann can track him and not target his movement in error. He reaches a hatchway into a connecting corridor. Torn struts and pipework jut from the ruptured rockcrete. Rann raises his pistols either side of his head, then swings through the doorway, a gun aimed in either direction.\n\nEmpty. More layers of wreckage strewn underfoot. Dust clogging the air like mist. Zephon glides past him, pistol up, dagger low. He pulls in against a bulkhead, and covers the angle as Rann moves up past him. Room to the right. Vacant. Room to the left. Two corpses: World Eaters demolished by overpressure where they cowered.\n\nRann covers Zephon. The Blood Angel moves left. Another chamber. He aims through the door as Rann switches past him. Tight angle. Nothing visible within. Rann nods, and Zephon rotates in. Three more bodies, destroyed by monumental shockwaves, compressed against the rear of the chamber like flotsam. Next, an adjoining chamber, a sub-communication duct. The cables of main-system vox-casters drape like vines from the torn ceiling. A 'caster bank has fallen sideways, three tonnes of metal tilted against the wall with its broken mechanical guts spilled out.\n\nRann enters first, pistols aimed. Zephon covers, then crosses behind him, so they loop the slumped bulk 'caster. The World Eater, his left le"}
{"text":"dies, destroyed by monumental shockwaves, compressed against the rear of the chamber like flotsam. Next, an adjoining chamber, a sub-communication duct. The cables of main-system vox-casters drape like vines from the torn ceiling. A 'caster bank has fallen sideways, three tonnes of metal tilted against the wall with its broken mechanical guts spilled out.\n\nRann enters first, pistols aimed. Zephon covers, then crosses behind him, so they loop the slumped bulk 'caster. The World Eater, his left leg trapped, is hidden by it, but they know he's there. Their sensoria picked up his corrupted icon marker, his pulse, and the cycle of his plate systems from outside. He's been trying to gnaw his leg off to get free.\n\nWhen Rann swings around at him, he grunts and grabs for his bolter. Zephon's poignard has run through the back of his skull by then, the tip projecting between his teeth like a tongue. Black blood spatters the caking white dust.\n\nA half-open blast hatch, misshapen by air pressure. Rann goes first. The approach hall of a billet area. The hall was tiled, and half of the white tiles still cling to the walls. The rest are strewn and shattered on the deck. There is a little more light. Low-level auxiliary power feeds the caged overheads. They flicker, and the swirling dust makes the shadows undulate. Rann prowls in, covering a doorway with his left pistol and the hall ahead with his right. Zephon slips past him as he stands watch, then rolls around the doorway into a second chamber. Clear. Rann moves on. More tiled walls, some shedding tiles like fish scales. The doorway into a large barrack area. The insignia of the Hort Palatine has fallen off the wall. Most of the long line of metal lockers are still upright. In the bay-end, dirty water pisses and fizzles from broken shower pipes. Rann gets a faint contact, but he can't lock it. Just motion. Not all of the enemy have functioning marker systems any more, or they have shut them down. He signs to Zephon, who follows him in. Rann hugs the wall to the left of the locker bank. Zephon slips down towards the bay-end to flank him. His sensoria paints a large alcove or archway beyond the lockers.\n\nThey both freeze as they hear the rapid, muffled discharge of bolt pistols. The sounds echo through the ruined bunker complex. One of the other clearance teams has engaged. Rann longs to know who, and to know status, but he won't go vox-active in case the enemy pinpoints him.\n\nHe takes another silent step.\n\nSomething behind the locker bank opens fire with an autocannon.\n\n4:iii\n\nHigh risk\n\nThere are two of them, standing like statues beside the hatch of the main elevator bank. Fo lives in a state of constant transhuman dread, appalled at the monstrosity of His creations. He had just about got the measure of Amon Tauromachian, but these...\n\n'What is taking so long?' one of them asks.\n\n'Nothing,' replies Amon. 'Just final supervision checks. The subject is registered high risk. He is a genius, according to the Mondavardi Scale, and of high cunning. Thorough supervision checks were required.'\n\n'You flatter me, Amon,' says Fo, trying to hide his gnawing terror, trying to ignore the ice in his guts. These things, these monsters, they are the beasts assigned to kill him.\n\nThe Eastern Approach elevator bank has been locked down by a Custodes override. Xanthus and Andromeda take the service stairs, rattling up the dingy ferrocast steps. She is younger than him, fitter, but she has to race to keep up such is his dedicated urgency.\n\n'Do we have a plan?' she asks.\n\n'I was leaving that to you,' he replies.\n\n'Then I'll improvise.'\n\nThey exit on the secure floor. Almost at once, he checks her, and pushes her into the shadows. She frowns at him, but he points. Ahead, the service passageway runs for fifteen metres and then opens into a vestibule where main corridors converge on the elevator bank. She sees two immense figures in black armour: Custodians, but of some sub-order she doesn't recognise. As they watch, two more figures arrive at the head of the corridor to face the pair in black. One is a golden Sentinel, and she's quite certain it's the one named Amon. The other, a tiny child beside the other three, is Fo.\n\n'What are they?' she whispers.\n\n'Wardens of the Sodality of the Key,' Xanthus whispers back. 'We're too late.'\n\n4:iv\n\nEight individuals\n\nKhalid Hassan, Chosen of Malcador, enters the Antirooms. He has, he believes, no time for this, but the orskode alert indicated security\/intruder, and that obliges him to attend. He's had to trust Xanthus with his primary duty, and that feels wrong. He does trust Xanthus, completely, but the Sigillite legacied the thought-file marked Terminus to him, and he feels as though he is dishonouring his master's wishes by delegating.\n\nThe Antirooms are an annex of gold and glass thirty minutes brisk walk from the Throne Room. They fall under the jurisdiction of the Custodes, though they are officially maintained by the Sisterhood. There are forty-six such facilities in the Sanctum precinct, and another nine in the Hegemon. The moment he enters, Hassan feels the bite of the artificially generated null space, the pinch across the bridge of his nose and the pressure below his ears.\n\nSister Vigilator Mozi Dodoma awaits him, her wrists resting across the long quillons of the biedhander planted tip-down in front of her like a staff. The sword is almost as tall as she is. At her side towers a Sentinel, Hetaeron Companion Ios Raja.\n\n'An intruder?' Hassan asks.\n\n'Several,' replies Raja, though Dodoma is thoughtmarking the same word.\n\n'Some panicked nobility penetrating a secure area?'\n\n'Outsiders,' says Raja, again interrupting Dodoma's deft signing.\n\nShe looks at him.\n\n'My apologies, Vigilator,' he says.\n\nThe outsiders were apprehended near the Hall of Worthies, she signs, her greatsword resting against her collarbone. The Custodes have secured them but-\n\n'Wait,' says Hassan. 'Outsiders?'\n\nYes, Chosen One.\n\n'Forgive me, but in the circumstances, isn't that supposed to be absolutely impossible?'\n\nThe very reason we summoned you, she signs. The breach requires the most senior authority.\n\nAnd that's me, thinks Hassan. In the Palace, outside of the Throne Room, that role falls to me.\n\n'Show me,' he says.\n\nHe follows them. Armourglass airgates hiss open. The gleaming gold of the walls reflects from the crystal diamantine floor. In the inner suite, the air is cold and the bite of the null fields stronger.\n\nEight individuals, Dodoma signs as they walk. Four human, as far as we can assess. Two psykers. One servitor mechanical. One Astartes.\n\n'Of dubious provenance,' Raja remarks. 'A hybrid, in my judgement, or some malformation. Perhaps immaterially altered.'\n\n'Which Legion?' Hassan asks.\n\nNo Legion.\n\n'That's absolutely not possible,' says Hassan.\n\n'Hence my estimation,' says Raja.\n\n'Are these... traitors?' Hassan asks. 'Is this the first wave, the first penetration? An advance scout-'\n\nDodoma's hand moves, switching from elegant thoughtmark to the curt simplicity of battlemark. The gestural meaning is simply: ?\n\nThe core of the inner suite is a ring of cells made of non-resonant crystal set in ornate psycurium frames. Hassan can see shapes inside, figures in eight of the glass boxes, but the crystal has been opaqued so they remain silhouettes. He notes that the anti-systems of the suite have been raised close to maximum. Items have been laid out for examination on a long glass table. Psyber-skulls hover over them, probing them with whisker-thin beams of light, bobbing and darting like hoverflies as they process information.\n\nHassan sees weapons, most of them regular army-issue, with the magazines or powercells removed and placed beside them. He sees a voltvolver of arcane design, then a bolt pistol. It's old, with a gold-wire grip and a side-mounted sight.\n\n'Phobos pattern,' says Hassan.\n\n'No,' says Raja. 'Actually an M-six-seven-six Union Model autobolter. It predates Imperial pattern designation.'\n\nOld, agrees Dodoma.\n\n'An antique,' says Raja.\n\nHassan picks it up. It is extremely heavy and he has to use both hands. There is no Legion marking on it at all, not even a designation stamp or code number.\n\n'Which Legions used these?' he asks, putting it back down carefully.\n\nDodoma makes the ? again.\n\n'And this... Astartes... has no insignia?'\n\n'None,' says Raja. 'His armour pattern is also antique. The chestplate was stamped LE two.'\n\nHe also carried these, signs Dodoma.\n\nBeside the gun there are several grubby satchels. Psyber-skulls are carefully unpacking them, an item at a time, using miniature mechadendrites and extensor probes. Hassan sees a deck of cards. They're old too, handmade, slightly worn. He starts to turn the top cards over, one by one, laying them out in a line. Tarot cards, simply rendered, made of plascard. He recognises a few of the designs... The Harlequin of discordia, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne reversed, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower and The Emperor, all major arcanoi. He turns another. The Dark King.\n\n'A poor reading,' remarks Raja.\n\n'One might expect no less,' replies Hassan. He knows the tarot, in various arcana variations, is in common use, though officially frowned upon as superstitious vulgarity. He also knows that the Sigillite often privately consulted a deck, and placed great credence by it, and that the deck he used had allegedly been designed by Him, though under what circumstances the Emperor would lower Himself to such esoteric practices, Hassan can't imagine. What strikes him about these crude cards is the similarity to the designs on Malcador's liquid-crystal wafers. Tarot is ubiquitous enough, but massively variable in style. These might have been copied from the Sigillite's personal deck.\n\nThe last card he turned unsettles him. Hassan has been made aware of current concerns regarding that symbol. He looks at the next item laid out on the glas"}
{"text":"under what circumstances the Emperor would lower Himself to such esoteric practices, Hassan can't imagine. What strikes him about these crude cards is the similarity to the designs on Malcador's liquid-crystal wafers. Tarot is ubiquitous enough, but massively variable in style. These might have been copied from the Sigillite's personal deck.\n\nThe last card he turned unsettles him. Hassan has been made aware of current concerns regarding that symbol. He looks at the next item laid out on the glass. It is a primitive stone knife.\n\n'What the hell is that?' he asks.\n\n'I don't know,' replies Raja, 'but it troubles me.'\n\n'Did these people resist?' Hassan asks, looking at Dodoma and the Companion.\n\n'No,' says Raja, 'though they were furtive, and moving to avoid discovery when detected. They did not resist.'\n\n'Did they offer explanation? Excuse? Justification for their presence?' asks Hassan. 'Did they make... I don't know, demands?'\n\nOne, signs Dodoma. And it's all they've said. They request audience with someone in authority.\n\n'Really?'\n\nTheir leader repeated this. Strenuously, though he remained calm and non-confrontational.\n\n'Their leader? They have a leader?' Hassan asks.\n\nDodoma takes him over to one of the crystal cells.\n\nThis one, she signs.\n\nHassan adjusts the gold dials on the fascia and the crystal gently de-tints. A man stares out at him. He is old. No, not old. Worn, Hassan decides. His grubby clothing is faded, ex-military and commonplace. His skin is dirty and weathered by sun and the open outdoors, which Hassan has not visited in a long while. He looks like nothing special at all, just another army dog-soldier, a 'script, one of the billions dragged in to bulk out the Excertus and man the walls. But there is a curious strength in him, an intent, a dreadful solemnity in his eyes.\n\nHis mouth moves. Hassan adjusts another dial to bring up volume.\n\n'Repeat,' he says.\n\n'I am Ollanius Persson,' the man says, his voice relayed by the vox-speakers built into the cell.\n\n'I understand you request audience with someone in authority?' says Hassan.\n\n'That's not what I said at all,' the man replies.\n\n'Oh. I was told-'\n\n'I said take me to your leader,' the man says. 'Take me to see Him.'\n\n4:v\n\nCloser still\n\nRann leaps backwards as the wall shreds.\n\nBroken tile sprays in clouds of dust. The shots stitch around and start to hit the locker bank, punching through the thin metal of the back-to-back uprights. Some of the locker doors on Rann's side deform or are blown off completely. Several rounds slice clean through and strike the facing wall. The end section of the lockers is rapidly mutilated and fractured.\n\nAs the shooting starts, Zephon darts around the opposite end of the lockers, and is body-slammed by a Sons of Horus legionary. The two of them crash backwards into the shower bay, Zephon underneath. The legionary, his huge form sheened in white dust, has a power fist, and tries to punch down into Zephon's face. Zephon twists sideways, and the fist shatters the tiled floor of the wide stall. Zephon's gun-hand is pinned. As the power fist rises again, he stabs up into the armpit with his poignard. The Sons of Horus warrior howls, writhing. Zephon tears his other hand free, and fires two bolts up into the body on top of him, blowing the torso apart, and coating the white tiles and white dust of the shower bay with blood.\n\nRann is forced back to the barrack room doorway by the rate of fire. He ducks outside, using the thick wall as cover, feeling it quake as heavy-calibre rounds smack into it. A few rounds spit through the open doorway and explode against the opposite wall of the corridor.\n\nPistols raised, Rann holds position, weathering the storm. His visor shows him a heat source moving around the locker bank, but most of that is muzzle flash and superheated smoke. The gunfire is now so intense it is dislodging tiles on his side of the wall, sloughing them off the rockcrete so they shatter around his feet like crockery.\n\nThen the shooting stops. Rann doesn't hesitate. He swings back into the doorway, already firing both pistols. The Sons of Horus warrior with the cannon, now emerged from behind the ruined locker bank, takes one shot in the chest and another in the face, and is hurled back into the lockers, which further buckle under his impact until they have become a crumpled hammock of twisted metal supporting his corpse.\n\nRann keeps moving. He sees a third Sons of Horus legionary beyond the bank, and drops him with a headshot. He reaches the archway. Zephon is back on his feet and moving to join him. A bolt-round sings out of the archway, missing them both. Zephon, with a better angle, fires four suppressing shots through the arch, and Rann pivots in.\n\nThe air is thick with dust. He kills a Sons of Horus legionary with a single shot as he comes through, and the traitor's toppling body actually wipes a brief man-shaped gap in the airborne dust as it collapses. Rann switches right, right hand, single shot, and puts another traitor into the tiled wall, a plume of gore rising above his head more magnificent than any topknot. Simultaneously, left hand, ninety-degree angle to the right, single shot down the length of the chamber to drop a Sons of Horus warrior attempting to run for the rear hatch. Zephon's behind him, firing two shots to the left into the haze.\n\nRann keeps moving. Bay to the left, single shot, left hand. Hall to the right, single shot, right hand. His multitasking ability is not confined to an ambidextrous use of war-axes. Ahead, a service hall. Two figures. Both pistols, side by side, square-on and blasting. Both figures jerk and then sprawl.\n\n'Replenishing!' he snaps. Zephon has already jammed a fresh magazine home, and puts timed shots down the service hall as Rann reloads his pistols.\n\nMore gunfire spits through the dust to their left. Zephon rotates, cool and methodical, and snap-shots a Sons of Horus legionary off his feet.\n\nRann keeps moving.\n\nZephon and Fafnir Rann purge the traitors.\n\n4:vi\n\nDirectives have been issued\n\n'He will offer no challenge to us,' one of the Wardens says with a hint of scorn. They are twins of Amon Tauromachian, armoured giants. But where Amon's plate is gold, theirs is blackened and ash-dark. (Is this the garb their kind wear for executions?) It is peculiarly terrifying. The gold armour of the Custodes seems to celebrate their majesty and (albeit ineffectively) minimise their threat. To cake them in black seems blatant, and designed to emphasise their menace.\n\n'Aren't you going to introduce me to your friends, Amon?' Fo asks, barely keeping the wobble out of his voice.\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\n'Well, I don't trust them.'\n\n'That has no significance,' says one of the monsters.\n\n'I assure you, it does to me,' says Fo.\n\n'Your trust in us, or lack thereof, has no bearing on the performance of our function,' says the other monster. 'It is immaterial.'\n\n'Oh, now there's a loaded word I wish you hadn't used,' says Fo.\n\n'Your considerations of vocabulary do not concern us,' the monster says.\n\n'Irrelevant is an appropriate synonym,' says the other.\n\n'It is,' agrees Fo, 'but even so. Tact? At a time like this... You gentlemen are so very precise in all things, so very, very precise, and there you go using a word with quite alarming connotations. At a time like this.'\n\n'This dialogue is irrelevant,' says one of the Wardens.\n\n'To you, perhaps,' says Fo. 'Not to me. And not, actually, to Amon.'\n\n'It is,' says Amon. 'It is irrelevant.'\n\n'Well, no. Agree to disagree, Amon. I would like to know who these people are before you let them walk off with me. I don't trust them.'\n\n'That has no bearing on anything,' says Amon.\n\n'It has a great bearing on your duty, Amon. Who are these men? I don't trust them. When does duty end?'\n\nAmon pauses. He glances at the giant figures in black.\n\n'This is Aedile-Marshal Harahel. This is Companion Shukra. They are Wardens of the Sodality of the Key.'\n\n'Ah,' says Fo. 'The ones that shut things away. The ones who keep safe all the dangerous things. Am I a dangerous thing, tribune? Have you come to shut me away?'\n\n'Directives have been issued,' says Harahel.\n\n'Or have you come to kill me?' asks Fo.\n\n'Directives have been issued,' says Shukra.\n\n'So I gather. By whom? Who has issued these directives?'\n\n'That is-'\n\n'Don't say irrelevant,' says Fo. 'And absolutely don't say immaterial. Because it's very relevant.'\n\n'Your opinion has no bearing,' says Harahel.\n\n'I'm sure it doesn't,' says Fo. 'But Amon's does. It's his duty to guard me. His duty was instructed by Captain-General Valdor, and it has not yet concluded.'\n\n'Our directives were issued by the captain-general,' says Shukra.\n\n'Oh, now we're getting somewhere. Amon's directive was authenticated. Wasn't it, Amon?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Are your directives authenticated?' Fo asks.\n\n'Of course,' says Harahel.\n\n'Follow us now,' says Shukra.\n\n'Have you seen their authentication?' Fo asks Amon.\n\n'No.'\n\n'Then how do you know they are genuine? Please, Amon. Think. Your kind do not make mistakes. To make a mistake is to fail in your duty. Your duty is my life. Your duty has not yet ended. Do not make a mistake now and end your duty in error.'\n\n'Be silent,' says Harahel.\n\n'There, you see?' says Fo, glancing at Amon, and wagging a finger at the giant in black. 'A demand. Almost a threat. Not the rational presentation of accurate fact that your kind follows to the letter. Please, think. You've seen the hell outside. You've seen the doom falling upon Terra. The warp is in everything, Amon. Nothing can be trusted. It's turning brother against brother. Primarch against primarch, oppositions that should not be possible, such is the will of the Emperor, and yet-'\n\n'Be silent,' says Shukra.\n\n'We have to do something,' Xanthus whispers.\n\n'Wait,' says Andromeda, watching the exchange by the elevator bank carefully.\n\n'Some improvisation, as you promised-'\n\n'Just wait, Chosen One,' she hisses. 'I think the old fleshcrafter is about to demonstrat"}
{"text":"upon Terra. The warp is in everything, Amon. Nothing can be trusted. It's turning brother against brother. Primarch against primarch, oppositions that should not be possible, such is the will of the Emperor, and yet-'\n\n'Be silent,' says Shukra.\n\n'We have to do something,' Xanthus whispers.\n\n'Wait,' says Andromeda, watching the exchange by the elevator bank carefully.\n\n'Some improvisation, as you promised-'\n\n'Just wait, Chosen One,' she hisses. 'I think the old fleshcrafter is about to demonstrate why he is so dangerous.'\n\n'Be silent,' repeats Shukra, cutting Fo off again.\n\n'Another demand!' cries Fo. 'You see? I do not trust them, Amon, because nothing can be trusted any more. Nothing! Except I do trust you. So, do you trust them?'\n\n'Be silent,' says Harahel.\n\n'Follow us,' says Shukra.\n\n'Show me authentication,' says Amon.\n\nThe Wardens stop and look at him. There is no way to read their expressions behind their soot-black visors, but Fo is certain it is indignant fury.\n\n'Step aside, Custodian,' says Harahel. 'Your duty is discharged.'\n\n'Not yet. Confirm and authenticate your directives.'\n\n'Directives have been issued,' says Harahel. 'Confirmation of those directives may be obtained from the captain-general.'\n\n'Obtain them,' says Amon.\n\n'This is not currently possible. Captain-General Valdor is unavailable.'\n\n'Obtain them via neuro-synergetics.'\n\n'This is not currently possible,' says Aedile-Marshal Harahel. 'Captain-General Valdor is not present on Terra, and neuro-synergetic link is unviable.'\n\n'Then I cannot release the subject to you,' says Amon.\n\n'You will not block us,' says Harahel.\n\n'Step aside,' says Shukra.\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\nThey stare at each other. Amon's face is expressionless.\n\n'Step,' says Harahel. 'Aside.'\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\n'Tauromachian...' Harahel growls.\n\n'If my lord the captain-general is unavailable, obtain authentic confirmation from another source,' says Amon. 'Authentication hierarchy states that suitable alternatives for a Tier XX directive are the Throne, the Lord Praetorian, or the Sigillite. No other sources are appropriate.'\n\n'No,' says Shukra.\n\n'Do so, or we have an impasse,' says Amon. 'There is no alternative.'\n\n'There is,' says Harahel, taking a step towards Amon.\n\n'I believe it would be an ironically fitting end to this cataclysm for Custodes to enter into conflict with Custodes, Harahel,' says Amon quietly. 'The bitterest betrayal of all that our beloved Emperor could face. Treason is the sport of bastard primarchs and their crude Astartes sons. It is their flaw, not ours. We were made better than that, weren't we?'\n\n4:vii\n\nAn invincible calm\n\n'\"A commitment to war must be absolute, for once killing has been done, it cannot be undone. Thus the true justification of war must be determined before commitment is made,\"' Loken reads out, '\"but when war is made against daemons, there need be no other justification than it is a war made against daemons.\" This, from a manifesto on combat written in the two hundred and seventy-seventh century.'\n\nLoken lowers Sindermann's notebook, and turns back a page or two.\n\n'That's a long time ago, Kyril. The depths of Long Night,' he remarks. 'Arresting, I'm sure, but I'm not sure of the purpose of any of this.'\n\n'Neither are we, Garviel,' says Sindermann. He has explained his efforts once, and he's tired of repeating himself. Rain beats on the high roof of the Great Hall, and thunder-that-isn't-thunder rolls outside. They have gathered around a reading table in one small corner of the gloomy library. Sindermann sits, weary. Mauer leans against bookshelves, her arms folded. The young archivist hugs the shadows behind them, timid. All three are watching the grey Astartes as he stands, examining the books and notes.\n\n'\"There is shadow under this red rock, come in under the shadow of this red rock, and I will show you something different from either, your shadow at morning striding behind you, or your shadow at evening rising to meet you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust.\"' Loken looks up from the notebook. 'Why that one?' he asks. 'Why note that one?'\n\nSindermann shrugs. 'I don't know. It seemed to resonate at the time. That was one you called out, boetharch. I just scribbled it down.'\n\nHe looks across at Mauer.\n\n'Do you remember?' he asks.\n\nShe shakes her head. She's still staring at Loken. 'You still haven't accounted for your presence here,' she says.\n\nTo his left, Sindermann feels the young archivist shrink further into the shadows of the stacks. The Astartes, his plate pitted and flecked with blood and dirt, simply terrifies her. She can do nothing except stare at him and cower.\n\nLoken looks over at Mauer. He has removed his helm and set it on the table. It doesn't make him any less intimidating.\n\n'I have no account to make,' he says.\n\n'Shouldn't you be,' asks Mauer, 'I'm just guessing now, fighting somewhere?'\n\n'I was,' says Loken. 'I thought I was. I was at Praestor Gate. The heart of it. I was moving with a formation of Dorn's men to engage at the Processional of the Eternals.'\n\n'And?'\n\n'I heard gunfire, close by. I went to the assistance of your colleague, Ahlborn, is it? Ahlborn. I went to his aid.' He pauses, and turns another page. 'Ninety-fifth century allegorical verse? Really?' he asks. He looks at Sindermann quizzically, and shrugs.\n\n'And then?' asks Mauer. 'You were with Ahlborn?'\n\n'I've known you a long time, Garviel,' says Sindermann. 'You often hesitate to speak when you can't make sense of facts.'\n\nLoken glances at him. 'There are no facts, Kyril,' he says. 'Everything is broken.'\n\n'I don't quite know what that means,' says Sindermann.\n\n'The part I left out,' says Loken. 'I was at Praestor Gate. I heard gunfire close by. I went to help Ahlborn. But then, I was at Scholaster Hall on the Via Aquila. That's where Ahlborn was.'\n\n'Praestor's twenty-four kilometres from there,' says Mauer.\n\n'Twenty, but yes. However, to me, it was a street away.'\n\n'You must have lost track of time,' says Mauer. 'In the heat of battle-'\n\n'No,' says Loken.\n\n'A blackout-'\n\n'No,' Loken repeats. 'I considered all of those things. Fatigue. Confusion. Acoustic shock. But it keeps happening.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'I lost Ahlborn on the Via Aquila. We were looking for Keeler. I thought I was heading for the Lotus Gate, but I found myself on the Via Terranic. So I tried again. Two streets across from Terranic, I was at the Metome Wall. Places, leagues apart, folding into other places. No matter what route I took. Multiple times, it's happened. In the last hour, I've been from Lion's Gate to the Palatine to the Sanctum. Locations hundreds of kilometres apart.'\n\n'But Eternity Gate is sealed-' Mauer begins.\n\n'In the last hour?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'What time is it?' Loken asks, though it seems more like a challenge than a query.\n\n'The clocks are all stopped, sir,' says the archivist from the shadows, daring a whisper. Loken looks at her, and she flinches.\n\n'She's right,' he says. 'That's the first true statement anyone's made. The clocks have stopped. Time has unwound. Time and dimension. I suspected as much, and I said so to Ahlborn. I'll say the same to you. The warp is in us so profoundly, everything is changing, compacting, contorting. Places are touching that shouldn't touch, melting and fusing with each other. The Palace... and I suspect all of this world... is blurring and realigning as a deranged labyrinth. Time has stopped, and distance is meaningless.'\n\n'Is this... a weapon turned on us?' Mauer asks. For the first time, Sindermann hears a hint of fear in her voice. 'The sorcerous powers of the foe, collapsing our-'\n\n'It could be,' says Loken. 'It could be the work of the Crimson King. It could be any of them. One final twist of the knife to tumble us into madness and ensure their triumph. But, if you want my personal opinion, I don't think it is. I think it's a symptom. A by-product of the war. My cursed father has brought the entire power of Chaos with him, and unleashed it upon Terra. The whole world is drowning in the immaterium, and the physical laws around us are changing. First it was dreams and nightmares, possessions, then the birth of Neverborn things. Now it is the fabric of reality itself, unravelling. Chaos has infected Terra, reshaped it according to its own rules as it draws us into the bosom of its realm.'\n\nThe archivist suddenly starts to cry. Sindermann gets up to comfort her.\n\n'This is how you came here?' he asks.\n\n'When I found myself in the Sanctum,' says Loken, 'I tried to get to the Delphic, to serve there. Each time I did, I found myself in a rainswept courtyard. The times I tried again, each time, the same courtyard. The one outside this hall. It is as though something wants me to be here. This place. So, the fourth time, I went along with it and came inside. And found you.'\n\n'Are you saying you think you've been directed here?' asked Mauer. 'By who? By what?'\n\n'By something,' says Loken. 'At first, it was all random. But since I reached the Sanctum, it has seemed deliberate, as if I was being shown a sign. Something wants me at the Hall of Leng. I suspect the Sigillite.'\n\n'Why?'\n\n'I am chosen by him, and he has often been in my head these last weeks. But he has always spoken to me, and made his presence known. I don't know why he doesn't speak now. I want him to tell me what he needs me to do here. When I came in, I thought it would be obvious.'\n\n'And it's not?' asks Mauer.\n\n'It may have something to do with your work,' says Loken, 'but the rationale for that isn't even obvious to you.'\n\n'What was the last thing he said to you?' asks Sindermann.\n\nLoken shrugs. 'Combat directives, and that was days ago. Nothing pertinent. He simply plants instructions into the minds of the Chosen to keep them tasked. He is, as you can imagine, busy.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'But I'll say this,' he adds, 'when I was at Praestor Gate, just before I went to help Ahlborn, a phrase popped into my head. Just very suddenly. I think it was something you q"}
{"text":"en, 'but the rationale for that isn't even obvious to you.'\n\n'What was the last thing he said to you?' asks Sindermann.\n\nLoken shrugs. 'Combat directives, and that was days ago. Nothing pertinent. He simply plants instructions into the minds of the Chosen to keep them tasked. He is, as you can imagine, busy.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'But I'll say this,' he adds, 'when I was at Praestor Gate, just before I went to help Ahlborn, a phrase popped into my head. Just very suddenly. I think it was something you quoted to me years ago, Kyril, aboard the Spirit, when you were an iterator and I sat in your audiences. I don't know why it came back to me.'\n\n'You were a rewarding student in those days, Garviel,' says Sindermann with a sad smile. He pats the young archivist on the shoulder, and finds his kerchief so she can dry her eyes. 'What was the phrase?'\n\n'\"In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm,\"' says Loken.\n\nSindermann frowns. 'I don't recall quoting that,' he says. 'I'm not even certain who it is. Is it Poul Kertus Varik?'\n\nThe archivist, blowing her nose, says something.\n\n'Camus,' she repeats, a little louder. 'It's Camus.'\n\n'Whom I have not read,' says Sindermann.\n\n'There's a copy here,' she says.\n\n'So you have read books?' says Sindermann.\n\nShe flushes. 'Some, I confess.'\n\n'There is definitely a copy here,' says Mauer.\n\nThey look at her. She is holding up her data-slate, the screen towards them.\n\n'I wrote this down,' she says. 'I'd given up calling things out by then. It was the last thing I wrote down before Loken arrived.'\n\nOn the screen are the words, In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm.\n\n4:viii\n\nA problem of jurisdiction\n\nUnbearably calm, Harahel pauses.\n\n'We will obtain authentication,' he says. He gestures, and the elevator hatch behind him hisses open. He steps in with Shukra. In the doorway, he turns and looks back.\n\n'When I return, Tauromachian,' he says, 'your duty will be over. All of your duties. Valdor will see to it himself.'\n\nThe hatch closes.\n\nAmon looks down at Fo. 'I will conduct you back to your quarters, and we will await their return,' he says. They turn to retrace their steps, Fo shuffling along in Amon's shadow.\n\n'Thank you, Amon,' says Fo.\n\n'I did not do it for you, Fo.'\n\n'I know. It was simply attention to the logic of duty. But thank you anyway.'\n\n'Look at you two, bonding,' calls Andromeda as she steps out of the service passage shadows behind them.\n\nAmon turns to study her. His spear is already raised and gleaming.\n\n'Didn't take you by surprise there, did I, Custodian?' she asks.\n\n'I have been aware of you both since you entered this level seven minutes ago,' replies Amon. 'It is not my place to interfere with the business of one of the Sigillite's Chosen or one of his companions. Unless it interferes with mine.'\n\nXanthus walks up behind Andromeda, who is standing, arms folded, smiling at Fo.\n\n'The security of this subject and his device are a priority concern of the Sigillite too,' Xanthus says. 'We have come to assist, Custodian.'\n\n'I was not notified,' replies Amon.\n\n'There's a lot of that today,' says Andromeda. 'Things are a little busy.'\n\n'What are you doing here, gene-witch?' Fo asks, his brow furrowed.\n\n'Do not communicate with them,' Amon tells him.\n\n'The Sigillite has instructed that the subject be placed in our recognisance,' says Xanthus. 'The Chosen will take charge of him.'\n\n'I was not notified,' says Amon, 'and it appears to conflict with the captain-general's directives. And this female has a history of unauthorised behaviour and subversion, especially with regard to the subject. So, no.'\n\n'Those directives cannot be authenticated,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Yes, we heard that much,' says Andromeda.\n\n'Incorrect,' says Amon. 'Custodial directives have not yet been authenticated. They will be. Until then, my duty function, which is authentic, remains in place. Tell me, Chosen One, can your directives be authenticated?'\n\nXanthus pauses.\n\n'No,' he admits.\n\nAndromeda shoots him a sharp look. 'Nice going,' she mutters. 'Leave it to me, I said.'\n\nShe turns back to Amon and smiles.\n\n'No one's directives are being authenticated today,' she says. 'Frankly, it's a mess. You can imagine why. We're going to have to use our own best discretion.'\n\n'Why is nothing being authenticated?' Amon asks.\n\nShe shrugs. 'As I said. A mess. It's as if there's no one actually in charge any more.' She looks at Xanthus. 'Who is in charge, right now?'\n\nXanthus clears his throat.\n\n'In the field, Lord Militant Terra Archamus,' he answers in a reluctant mumble. 'At Hegemon Control, Mistress Tactician Sandrine Icaro. In the Throne Room, the Primarch Vulkan.'\n\n'Really?' says Andromeda, genuinely surprised. 'When I said mess, I...'\n\n'What of the Emperor?' asks Amon. His spear lowers a little.\n\n'Oh, you poor boy,' says Fo. 'They really have kept you in the dark, haven't they? Left you to your duty. Abandoned you at your post-'\n\n'Be silent,' growls Amon.\n\n'So where is the high and mighty Emperor?' Fo asks Xanthus. 'Run for the hills? I don't blame him. I'm surprised that oaf the Praetorian and the blowhard Valdor haven't evacuated him by now. Picked him up, kicking and screaming, and carted him off to the last express out of town. Have they quit too? Run away? Are the lifeboats full of rats, looking back at the sinking ships? What about the one with the wings? And the Khan fellow, you know, big moustache-'\n\n'The Warhawk is dead,' says Xanthus. 'The Praetorian Dorn, Sanguinius, Captain-General Valdor and the Emperor have committed to the war.'\n\n'Great merciful gods,' breathes Fo. 'It really is the end of the world. And your Sigillite?'\n\n'The Regent occupies the Throne,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Well, then he's dead too,' says Fo.\n\n'Not yet,' whispers Xanthus. Andromeda hushes him with a gesture.\n\n'Custodian Amon,' she says. 'It seems to me we are dealing with a problem of jurisdiction. The Custodians and the Chosen both want control of this maggot. Your orders are clear - to guard him, yes? I understand, absolutely, that those orders cannot be relinquished until you are relieved of duty. Might I also be correct in thinking your duty includes making sure he finishes his work?'\n\n'His work is completed,' says Amon.\n\n'No, it isn't,' she says.\n\nFo stares at her, eyes wide. He has no idea what she's doing.\n\n'The subject confirmed it,' says Amon.\n\n'Him?' she asks. 'He lies, Amon. He'd never hand over a finished commission if it meant he was of no further use. He has neglected to include a vital component. The weapon won't work.'\n\n'If that was true,' says Amon, 'Fo would have played that trick already. If he'd left a loophole as insurance, he would have used it. Just now, to evade the Aedile-Marshal. Instead, he was obliged to appeal desperately to my function imperatives. You are the liar.'\n\nAndromeda laughs and claps her hands. Her laughter, echoing down the dank corridor, seems brittle and out of place.\n\n'Very good,' she says. 'I forget how perceptive you creatures are. So easy to mistake you for a dumb, unthinking statue. Fair enough, Amon. You got me. So I'll level with you. He's not lying. Fo's clever. But he's not that clever. His weapon is based on biomechanical principles, which is his field of genius. Flesh-eating phages, I presume, sir? Tailored to the biomatter code of Astartes and primarchs?'\n\nFo nods. His eyes are bright. This new lie is unexpected (and I am enjoying it very much).\n\n'Fo has little or no knowledge of the warp, however,' says Andromeda. 'His weapon will kill Astartesian flesh. I'm talking a galactic slaughter. The crowning glory of his horrible career. But the Astartes aren't merely flesh, are they? Nothing is. Each body is connected to a soul, and each soul is inextricably linked to the warp. That is the nature of reality, and not something Fo has studied. So, if activated, his weapon will not entirely purge the Astartes. It will leave a significant portion of their essence in the warp. I say that again, for emphasis... in the warp. And what's out there, what threatens us, is barely physical any more. Horus Lupercal certainly isn't. The traitors, Amon, are immersed in the immaterial, soaked in it. So even if the weapon works, it will not destroy the right targets. It is hardly the last resort Valdor hoped for.'\n\n'I admit,' says Fo, grudgingly (for I am perfectly happy to play along with this ruse), 'that is the Emperor's genius. To meld the immaterium with the physical in the creation of his sons. I ignored that component. I really didn't think it through. But then I have never studied these factors.'\n\n'You see?' Andromeda says. 'Amon, your duty is not fulfilled, because Fo's work is not complete. The Chosen and I are here to make sure it is completed. Properly. And time, my friend, is against us.'\n\n'What are you proposing?' asks Amon.\n\n'You heard him,' says Andromeda. 'He said it himself. He hasn't studied these factors. We must allow him to, immediately.'\n\n'That would certainly help...' says Fo.\n\n'The data repositories are too far away,' says Amon. 'The Clanium has fallen. The Hall of Leng is too distant and probably inaccessible-'\n\n'The Sigillite keeps a small private archive in his retreat, Custodian,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Very well,' says Amon. He turns immediately and starts to lead Fo away. Fo looks back at them, mouth wide in mock amazement.\n\nAndromeda glances at Xanthus. He shrugs a 'what the hell?' at her.\n\nIm-pro-vi-sing, she mouths to him.\n\n4:ix\n\nMy life for Lupercal\n\nNo one is listening any more. No one. He has lost control.\n\n'I am First Captain,' says Abaddon, almost to remind himself. No one else is listening.\n\nHe thought it would be glorious, when it finally came. He thought the end would be glorious, a victory beyond victories, an illumination beyond illuminations. The crowning triumph. The greatest achievement of any warrior.\n\nBut it is not.\n\nIt is more horrific than he ever imagined. It is an unfathomable atrocity.\n\nHe was steeled fo"}
{"text":"life for Lupercal\n\nNo one is listening any more. No one. He has lost control.\n\n'I am First Captain,' says Abaddon, almost to remind himself. No one else is listening.\n\nHe thought it would be glorious, when it finally came. He thought the end would be glorious, a victory beyond victories, an illumination beyond illuminations. The crowning triumph. The greatest achievement of any warrior.\n\nBut it is not.\n\nIt is more horrific than he ever imagined. It is an unfathomable atrocity.\n\nHe was steeled for it, of course. A man, even a warrior as infamously ruthless as Ezekyle Abaddon, does not go into such an undertaking blind. He resolves himself, he centres his mind, he inures himself from the carnage that will follow. He makes himself ready, not just for the pain and the blood and the loss and the effort, but for the mental carnage. This is Terra, the Throneworld. Any other action pales by comparison, and not merely in scale. This is the biggest war he has ever been part of, but he's indifferent to that. To invade Terra, to conquer it and bring it to compliance, that is an act of desecration. It is the ultimate iconoclasm, a breaking of oaths and a shattering of rules. It requires an inhuman strength of will. To turn against your species and your cradle-world, to turn against your creator, to turn against everything you were, and renounce it all.\n\nThat takes singular resolve.\n\nBut he was prepared for that. Abaddon has made his choice, long since, and he is strong. He was ready to witness the horror, ready to mete out the havoc, ready to withstand the conceptual shock of what he was doing. He was even prepared to stand alongside the daemon-things that disgusted him in order to get the deed done.\n\nFor, after the end, there would be glory. A triumph. A peerless victory. A tyrant would be dead, a toxic regime overthrown. His kind would be free, his beloved father vindicated and crowned, and a new and better world born from the flames.\n\nAbaddon had oathed that he would do anything that had to be done, without flinch or hesitation. For, beyond anything, it would prove his worth. His loyalty. His courage. His ability. The victory would be his, for he was the lord commander on the field, his father's chosen proxy, the tip of the spear, a new master of war and mankind, who would deliver the coup de grace and claim the greatest feat of all.\n\nIt would all be worth it.\n\nBut it is not. And he is not. No one is listening any more. He has lost control. And this is not something to which the word 'victory' could ever be applied.\n\nIt is obscenity.\n\nFrom the burning slopes of Coriolis Park, fast by the blood-washed bastion of Auguston, which cooks like a dirty rag, he sees the swarming host engulfing the fortresses of Lycia and Naxos, the palisades at Crucis Hill, the broken line of the Via Aquila and the ramparts of Marquis Bar. He sees the sundering towers toppling one by one, in fire and debris, their flanks disintegrating, falling away like calving glaciers. He sees buildings scalped and eviscerated. He sees the sudden uprush of titanic dust clouds as spires are levelled, filling streets for kilometres at a time. He sees the burning spans and collapsing bridges, the furnace line of the horizon, the uncounted dead and the unnumbered deathless.\n\nSixteen kilometres ahead, Antiphrates Fortress, perhaps the last of the Palatine bastions, enters its death throes. Explosions shudder beneath its skin, and the entire fortress, a colossal island of stone and steel rising above the Palatine Zone, begins to slope, capsizing like a yacht at sea, wallowing into the stagnant mire that the landscape has become. Everything - stone, ground, rock, metal - has begun to ooze, seeping clotted filth and tar like fat rendered from meat. A cheer goes up as Antiphrates succumbs, a throaty roar of a million voices that shakes the sky. Ekron Fal has accomplished this cataclysm. Ekron Fal and his Justaerin and his screaming hosts. Ekron Fal, veteran of Isstvan, a true monster of destruction whose Cataphractii plate shifts and seethes and changes like a living thing.\n\nEkron Fal, who has ignored all of Abaddon's summonses.\n\nTo the west, fifty kilometres, a line of pestilential smoke marks the advance of the Catulan Reavers and their Word Bearers retinues. At their head, their master Malabreux, reckless Tarchese Malabreux, joyful in his killing, the superlative terror-soldier, carrying the profaned banners of Bhab Bastion aloft to boast of his deeds.\n\nTarchese Malabreux, who has refused to acknowledge Abaddon's repeated commands.\n\nNo one is listening.\n\nFrom where he stands, on the burning slopes, Abaddon feels as if he can see all the way to the very Delphic Battlements, though they must be sixty kilometres distant. The Delphic, the proud Delphic. With Antiphrates and the Palatine principals gone, the Delphic is all that remains, a final rampart girdling a final fortress. It is already assaulted at almost every side. Serob Kargul, Lord Contemptor, and the Death Guard have reached it. Lord of Silence Vorx and his Death Guard echelons too. The wild hosts of World Eaters are gouging at its southern hem. Vorus Ikari, captain of the Fourth, that unbridled sadist, is there. So too Taras Balt and Third, singing their Davinite doxologies. So too Kalintus and Ninth, Dorgaddon and Tenth, Zistrion and Thirteenth.\n\nSo too all the daemons of hell, and the gnawing, restless dead who will not lie down and be damned.\n\nVorus Ikari, Taras Balt, Kalintus, Dorgaddon, Zistrion, them and the rest besides, who have disregarded his signals, and declined his instructs, and spurned his demands for vox-contact.\n\n'The command link is down,' his adjutant tells him, 'there is too much interference to establish contact,' and 'Captain Ikari's seniors report he is in the thick of combat and a link is impossible,' and 'No response from Captain Dorgaddon's units,' and 'Third command repeats that Captain Balt cannot disengage to speak with you at this time.'\n\nNo one is listening. No one wants to listen. They are lost in their lusts and consumed by that which consumes them. More, and more damning, they think it is Abaddon's cupidity that issues these demands: that he wants this victory for himself, that he wants this glory, and that he resents their gains and seeks to restrain them as they race ahead.\n\nIf only they understood. How can he make them listen?\n\n'I am First Captain,' he murmurs.\n\n'My lord?' His adjutant, Ulnok, approaches up the slope.\n\n'Speak.'\n\n'Captain Beruddin commends himself to you. He reports Fifth Company is now closing on the Delphic, and has engaged with White Scars forces. He urges you to join him without delay so you may cherish this triumph as brothers, and break the wall together. He regrets he cannot link with you directly while engagement is ongoing.'\n\nAbaddon spits on the ground.\n\n'Logistics?' he asks.\n\n'The flight cadre stands ready for your word, sir. They have fuelled and prepped as you instructed.'\n\n'Then I give it.'\n\n'They...' Ulnok hesitates. 'Lord captain, the pilots direct me to say there is no suitable landing zone in this vicinity.'\n\n'Then I direct you to ask them to select one. Have them tell me where they can set down, if they would be so very kind. Have them select a damn site, any site, and I will draw my companies there.'\n\n'Yes, lord. To... uhm, embark, lord?'\n\n'You heard me.'\n\nUlnok hurries away.\n\n'Airborne assault, my captain?'\n\nAbaddon turns, and sees Baraxa descending the slope to join him. At the heels of the Second Company captain come Sycar of the Justaerin and Fyton of Seventh.\n\nBaraxa, his helm removed, reaches him and bows his head.\n\n'Airborne?' he repeats, with a wary smile. 'A rash gamble, Ezekyle. The Delphic and its voids are as strong as shit. They'll burn 'birds out of the air. I admire the flourish, but we'll take the final fortress better on foot.'\n\n'No flourish, Azelas,' says Abaddon. 'No airborne assault.'\n\n'But I just heard you say-' Baraxa begins.\n\n'You came, then?' Abaddon says, cutting him off. Sycar and Fyton have joined them.\n\n'Well, you summoned me, so why would I not?' Sycar replies.\n\n'You were most insistent, First Captain,' says Lycas Fyton. A curious pattern has begun to appear on his face in the last few weeks that looks like some kind of dermal infection, but which seems to be scarification. There is a fresh gash across his brow that appears to be welling yellow ichor.\n\n'No one is listening,' says Abaddon.\n\n'My lord?' Baraxa says, frowning.\n\n'I was insistent because no one is listening,' says Abaddon. He gestures at the burning world. 'No one. Not any more. I am First Captain but that, it seems, means nothing. Everything is broken. Everything is madness.'\n\n'We came,' says Sycar.\n\nAbaddon looks at them, and nods, mastering his rage and remembering himself.\n\n'I need you to understand,' he tells them, his voice low. 'This isn't pride. This isn't some fit of indignation on my part. I am not trying to hobble the other companies so that First can claim the laurels.'\n\n'We... didn't think it was,' says Baraxa.\n\n'And it's not remorse,' says Abaddon. 'Not at all. No last-minute qualm or compunction, even though...'\n\nHe pauses, and looks back at the atrocity behind him.\n\n'Even though, brothers, look at what we've done.'\n\n'Then why summon us?' asks Fyton, his tone curt. 'Seventh was locked in at Polemos Bar, alongside Sixteenth. We had Dorn's puppets falling before us. Thane himself, his back to the wall-'\n\n'Everything is broken,' says Abaddon.\n\n'Ezekyle-' Baraxa begins.\n\n'Listen to me! Everything is broken! Everything we stood for, the structure and discipline of the Sons of Horus. The things that made us the very best of all, ruined and gone.'\n\n'Because a few damn orders have gone astray?' asks Fyton. 'This day is like no other, Ezekyle. This victory unparalleled. I think even you might forgive the heedless energy and zeal of our captains as they race to conclude this business. Let them have their moment and revel in it.'\n\nHe pauses"}
{"text":"\n\n'Ezekyle-' Baraxa begins.\n\n'Listen to me! Everything is broken! Everything we stood for, the structure and discipline of the Sons of Horus. The things that made us the very best of all, ruined and gone.'\n\n'Because a few damn orders have gone astray?' asks Fyton. 'This day is like no other, Ezekyle. This victory unparalleled. I think even you might forgive the heedless energy and zeal of our captains as they race to conclude this business. Let them have their moment and revel in it.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'Let me have mine,' he adds.\n\n'Think for a minute,' says Abaddon. 'One damn minute. What we do today shapes us for tomorrow. What we are now, we will be afterwards. The Sons of Horus, like the Luna Wolves we were, are the finest of all Legions, the personification of controlled precision in war. And here, in this cataclysm, on this day of days, we forget ourselves and fall apart. Our values and authorities are lost, discarded, ruined-'\n\n'All this because the seniors have disregarded a few of your signals?' asks Fyton.\n\n'Enough, Lycas,' whispers Baraxa.\n\n'No, not enough,' says Fyton. He looks at Abaddon. 'You are a great man, Ezekyle. Finest warrior I ever saw, and I am proud to call you brother and commander. But this pique is unbecoming.'\n\n'Fyton,' Baraxa growls.\n\n'Shut up, Azelas,' says Fyton. 'It ill-suits you, Ezekyle. To stand at the edge of the rear line and pitch a fit of indignation when your orders, barked from a great distance, are overlooked? Where are you, man? It should be you at those walls, leading from the front. The captains should be begging you for the chance to follow at your heels. They should be pleading with you for an order that lets them stand with you in honour.'\n\n'I was there,' says Abaddon quietly.\n\n'You were there?'\n\n'I was there the day this began,' says Abaddon. 'I was there at the front, all the way from Lion's Gate when it fell, all the way along the Gilded Walk and the Grand Processional, right there at the front, Lycas, carried by the energy and the glory, rejoicing in this triumph.'\n\n'Then why are you here?' asks Fyton. 'Why the hell are you here, skulking in the rear lines, squawking orders like a-'\n\n'Enough!' Baraxa snaps.\n\n'Because,' says Abaddon, looking directly at Lycas Fyton, 'everything is broken.'\n\n'Brother, captain,' says Fyton, his tone more moderate. There is concern in his eyes. 'I know you have misgivings. You always have, and I understand. I know you lack trust in the etheric powers we employ, and think we should not invest ourselves so much. I understand. The warp calls who it calls. It is a friend to us, and without it, we would not have taken this seat of power.'\n\n'Wrong,' says Sycar. 'This is a soldier's war. Always has been. We don't need Neverborn filth to fight it for us. This is about us. The stand we make. The rights we seek to avenge. I understand Ezekyle's position. We have surrendered too much control to the immaterial-'\n\n'No,' says Fyton. 'Not wrong, Hellas. How can you think that? All we do, we do for the Lupercal. He is the one who has ordained this. He is the one who has invested us so. He chose the immaterial as our weapon, and it has served us well. He has perfected its use, and thus made this triumph possible. He has shown us how to control it-'\n\n'Has he?' asks Abaddon.\n\n'Of course,' says Fyton.\n\nUlnok has returned.\n\n'Well?' asks Abaddon.\n\n'My lord, flight cadre has selected Sacristy Field, to the south of Hasgard Gate. They report the terrain there will support a landing operation.'\n\n'Tell them two hours,' says Abaddon. 'Tell them I want Stormbirds for six companies.'\n\n'Yes, my lord.'\n\n'We are embarking?' asks Fyton, puzzled.\n\n'Yes,' says Abaddon. 'Those that have deigned to respond to my orders are embarking. That includes you and Seventh, Lycas.'\n\n'Embarking for what purpose?' asks Fyton. 'An airborne run at the Delphic would be insan-'\n\n'We are returning to the Spirit,' says Abaddon.\n\nThe three captains stare at him.\n\n'Are you joking?' Sycar asks.\n\n'Are you mad?' asks Fyton.\n\n'Everything is mad, and everything is broken,' says Abaddon. 'We should all be returning, every last one of the Sons of Horus, but you're the only bastards who would listen.'\n\n'We are this close to the finish!' Fyton cries, holding up a thumb and index finger almost touching. 'You've lost your way, Ezekyle. Lost your way and your mind. No one is pulling out. We're at the walls, brother! The fortress is ours! You'd have us withdraw at the very last gasp, and give up all we have achieved?'\n\n'Malabreux can finish it,' says Abaddon. 'Ikari can finish it. Fal can raze the place to the ground and carry the tyrant's head out on a stick, for all I care. They're at the walls, as you say, so they can finish this murder. Our place is at our father's side.'\n\nFyton starts to protest again. Baraxa silences him with a raised hand. He stares at Abaddon.\n\n'Why?' he asks. 'Why, Ezekyle? What do you know that we don't?'\n\n'Our lord Lupercal, who I love more than all things, needs us,' says Abaddon. 'He has taken leave of all sense. I believe now, more than ever, he has become too enthralled by the powers he has unleashed. You asked where I was, Lycas. Ask instead where is he? Where is Lupercal? He should have led this from the front. He has not set foot on this world. He has not raised a hand in this fight. I have longed for him to be the Lupercal I know, and he has not.'\n\n'So... this is, what... churlishness?' Fyton asks. 'Vexation that he has left the tiresome hard work to you? He's Lupercal, you child. You're the First Captain. This is your damn job!'\n\n'My job, Lycas, is to protect the person of my beloved father, whatever ails his mind,' murmurs Abaddon. 'First and foremost, my life for the Lupercal. No oath matters more, not even the illumination of this pretend god and his gaudy palace. No one is listening to me. Everything is broken, and we must make haste to mend it before it is lost forever. Lupercal, our Legion, everything we are.'\n\n'What do you know, Ezekyle?' Sycar asks. The Master of the Justaerin's voice is very small, just a hoarse whisper coming from his immense plated form. There is a hint of fear in it.\n\n'I have spoken with Argonis,' says Abaddon. He sighs. 'Damn, it feels like an age ago. The hours are broken too. I've been trying to rally you all ever since. Kinor says the voids have been lowered. The Spirit is wide open.'\n\nThey gaze at him.\n\n'If it's a ruse,' says Abaddon, 'then it's a private one known only to our father. Horus himself ordered it done. I think he is taunting our enemy. I think he is, in all madness, inviting direct contest. Our foe may be close to death, brothers, but he has fury left in him yet, fury that will double and redouble given such reckless opportunity. I believe our Lupercal has underestimated the danger of this gambit. I do not even think it was his choice. All I know for certain is that our main force is here, wading in the mire and ignoring commands, and he is on the Spirit, essentially unprotected. I have called in the Stormbirds for immediate return. We move now. The fight is not here, brothers. The real fight is not here at all.'\n\n4:x\n\nClosest\n\nThe blockhouse galley and food stores are deep inside the bunker, and the walls there are brick-built partitions, for there is no need to replicate the shell-proofed ferrocrete skin of the outer shell.\n\nIt is a suboptimal place to fight.\n\nLas-shot chops through two and even three thicknesses of bricks, filling the air with rust-red dust and a pungent stink of burned oxides. Bolt-rounds blow out holes a metre wide. Everything is close range. There is no long range. Even the shots coming from the adjoining mess hall are travelling far less distance than in the open field.\n\nRann's visor detects the density of the rockcrete spars of the bunker's frame. They stand like pillars every five metres, infilled with brickwork. He uses one as cover, as gunfire tears out the brick courses either side of him. He reloads. Auspex return reads four: two in the galley behind the wall, two more in the communal space beyond. Zephon, behind a bulkhead at the other end of the corridor, is trying to line shots into the mouth of the mess hall doorway, where a fifth and possibly sixth shooter lurks.\n\nBetween them, they have killed twenty-seven traitors since entering the complex.\n\nThe traitors in the galley space unleash fury at the wall behind him. Lumps of brick, mortar chips and clouds of red powder spray out around him. Rann waits for the beat, the brief moment when the boltgun reloads, then he spins out, firing both pistols through one of the holes his enemies have conveniently made for him in the wall. He kills the Sons of Horus legionary with the boltgun outright, slamming his huge bulk backwards into a stove unit, and clips the traitor with the heavy las.\n\nThe latter barks in anger, and lurches for cover behind a stack of drums for dry goods storage. Rann races to a second, lower hole in the brickwork, and puts two bolt-rounds into him, bursting him and one of the drums. The Sons of Horus legionary sinks, slack, into a seated position, spoiled protein meal pouring out over him like sand.\n\nZephon is still clipping off shots at the other end of the corridor, and the shots are being answered. The air is filmed orange with brick particulates. Rann moves again, kneeling to use one of the lowest blast holes. The low angle gives him a clear line along the length of the galley, past the prep counters and the row of stewing kettles to the doorway of the chamber beyond. He fires rapidly, both guns, driving the two traitors there into frantic cover.\n\nRann reloads. He's about to hose again when his visor flashes a marker to his extreme right. A corrupted wolfshead icon.\n\nThe Sons of Horus warrior, a massive, distorted brute, is charging him down the narrow access corridor. He is carrying a heavy, rectangular storm shield in front of him, and firing a bolt pistol over its top corner loop. Rann scrambles backwards. Two bolt-rou"}
{"text":"to the doorway of the chamber beyond. He fires rapidly, both guns, driving the two traitors there into frantic cover.\n\nRann reloads. He's about to hose again when his visor flashes a marker to his extreme right. A corrupted wolfshead icon.\n\nThe Sons of Horus warrior, a massive, distorted brute, is charging him down the narrow access corridor. He is carrying a heavy, rectangular storm shield in front of him, and firing a bolt pistol over its top corner loop. Rann scrambles backwards. Two bolt-rounds hit the wall beside him, covering him in red dust, a third clips his right greave. Only half-upright, Rann scrabbles in retreat, returning fire, but the shield soaks everything up, the explosive impacts searing harmlessly across its surface.\n\nRann ducks into the galley doorway to evade the shooting charge, knowing it will expose him to the Sons of Horus in the chamber beyond. As he swings through the galley door, he empties the pistol in his right hand at the rear-galley arch to keep the shooters in cover, then clamps the empty pistol to his plate and draws one of his stowed axes.\n\nQuarters are still too close for this kind of weapon, but he is acting on pure instinct. He lets Headsman's haft slip down through his hand so he is holding it at a mid-point, as a hatchet. As the charging traitor draws level with the doorway, Rann, so coated in brick powder it looks as though his yellow plate has rusted, swings out to greet him, and buries the head of his axe squarely in the shield boss. Now he has a split second, and leverage. He hauls on the axe haft, prising the shield away from the Sons of Horus legionary's body, and puts three rounds into the opening with the pistol in his left hand.\n\nThe traitor drops, unguarded torso blown out point-blank. The shield drops with him, clamped to his arm. Rann drops too. The killers in the communal space beyond the arch have resumed fire, further mangling the galley doorway.\n\nHunched down, Rann puts one foot on the edge of the fallen shield and frees Headsman. He stows it, then drags the shield off the traitor's arm. Incoming shots chew the wall behind him and the doorway beside him.\n\nStill crouching, he reloads both pistols. There won't be time once he's in it again. He clamps one pistol, takes the other in his right hand, and hoists the shield onto his left. He glances at Zephon. The Blood Angel, at the far end of the corridor, is still trading shots with the enemy in the mess hall. Rann knows, from his brother's stance, that Zephon is about to break cover and charge.\n\n'Hold!' he shouts, but Zephon is already racing for the mess hall doorway, head down, pistol barking.\n\nIf Rann moves to support, it'll open them both to the traitors in the communal space. A simple, tactical choice.\n\nRann raises the shield and charges the length of the ruined galley. Shots hammer off the shield, bucking it in his grip. He reaches the archway, and kills one of the defenders immediately, firing over the loop: a shot to the throat, then another to the belly as the Sons of Horus warrior folds away. The other is to his left, just inside the room. Rann turns on him, shield raised, now taking fire at zero distance, the impacts threatening to wrench the shield off his arm. He just keeps moving, slamming the shield into the Sons of Horus legionary, driving him back against the chamber wall. The traitor is pinned for a second. Rann slots his pistol over the loop, rams his entire weight and power into the shield, and puts a single bolt-round through his face.\n\nHe steps back. The immense dead weight of the Sons of Horus warrior slithers to the floor, leaving a sticky track of gore down the wall. Rann can hear shots exchanged in the mess hall. Still, he takes a second to check the chamber, to make sure there's no one else in hiding, and no one about to storm in from the access beyond.\n\nThen he goes back, fast, shield up.\n\nZephon is just inside the mess hall doorway. Two traitors are sprawled dead at his feet, and he is grappling hand-to-hand with a third. At some point since Rann last saw him, Zephon's helm has been torn off or discarded. He's been hit at least once in the shoulder, his pauldron scorched and buckled. Rann's instinct is to help him, but fierce gunfire is coming at them both from deeper in the room.\n\nRann ploughs past Zephon into the hall, shield up, drawing fire. Two more traitors: another of the Sons of Horus and a World Eater, both marker-tagged with corrupted gibberish. The Sons of Horus traitor is to the right, firing a boltgun. The World Eater is to the left, closer, but not shooting. Rann guesses the brute's heavy cannon has cooked out and jammed. He prioritises, advancing on the Sons of Horus warrior, emptying his magazine. His target, in partial cover, holds his ground, doing the same. Bolts hammer the shield. The Sons of Horus legionary's last shot finally cracks the shield diagonally. Rann's last shot explodes the traitor's head in a splash of blood, bone and ceramite flakes.\n\nRann leaves the ground. The World Eater, a huge beast, has abandoned his jammed cannon and slammed into him from behind. Rann is caught in a vicing bear hug, his feet milling. The World Eater is yowling in his ear, coating Rann's right pauldron and the side of his helm in viscous spittle. Rann drops his empty pistol and tries to break free, but he has no purchase, and he's clamped to the beast's chest by his captured shield. His left arm is almost crushed. He can feel his plate creaking as though it is about to fracture and split. His torso is compressed. The World Eater is terrifyingly strong, far stronger than any Astartes, for it is not truly Astartes any more. It is beyond transhuman. Right in front of his wedged face, Rann sees its ugly, white talons cutting into the edge of his shield, its huge hand, flesh swollen and almost translucent, folding the shield like the cloth of a cloak.\n\nHe realises his war is about to be over.\n\n4:xi\n\nA personal connection\n\n'You see,' says Hassan, 'that's simply not possible. And even if it was possible, I wouldn't allow it. You don't seem to me to be a stupid man. Did you think I would allow it?'\n\n'I think if you thought about it, you might,' says Oll.\n\nThey sit, facing each other, in one of the Antirooms' interrogation chambers. Like the cells, like everything, it is wrought from crystal and gold, and entirely inert. Hassan's simple chair is auramite. Oll's is a more complex affair of crystal and psycurium, fitted around him as though ready to restrain him, recline him, and present him for cranial surgery. Either side of him are field generators fashioned to resemble seated Bhutanese dragons, their long, swan necks curling upwards to present their open mouths either side of Oll's head, as though they are roaring in his ears. A single command, and they will be: the mouths are the speakers of null-field emitters and pain goads. The dragons are, of course, wrought from gold.\n\n'The only reason we're having this conversation,' says Hassan, 'is that you and your companions have somehow got inside the Sanctum. That requires close investigation. Otherwise, your claims, your demands-'\n\n'I understand,' says Oll. 'We are interlopers. Trespassers. At any other point in history, we would have been arrested and thrown into some oubliette. I imagine, time was, you got idiots trying to get in all the time. Petitioners, madmen, pilgrims... people who just wanted to get close and touch greatness. I doubt any of them ever got further than the outer limits of the Dominions. But these are not those times, and I am not one of those idiots.'\n\nHe sounds reasonable. He sounds sane. Hassan is trying to be reasonable too, more reasonable than he feels he should be. There's something about this man, his calmness. It struck Hassan the moment the cell glass de-tinted. This 'Persson' is intensely steady and assured. That would be unusual enough under normal circumstances: the strays and lunatics who attempt access to the Sanctum are usually so overcome by the scale and awe of the place they are manic and raving by the time - a very short time - they are apprehended. But this man is alarmingly serene. The Palace doesn't scare him, or even seem to impress him, and neither does his proximity to the heart of everything. And neither does the insanity raging outside. Hassan has better things to be doing, but this distraction is compelling.\n\n'I advise, again, we execute him and the others,' says Companion Ios Raja.\n\nOll turns his head gently, and regards the Custodian standing at Hassan's shoulder with a relaxed, almost wry glance.\n\nThrone of Terra, even a damn Custodian doesn't bother him.\n\n'So noted, again, Companion,' says Hassan. He looks at Oll. 'He doesn't scare you?'\n\n'Of course he does,' replies Oll. 'But I'm tired. I've come a long way, and I've seen some shit. You'll forgive me, but it honestly feels like too much effort to get worked up.'\n\nOll leans forward a little. The motion sensors in his chair chime.\n\n'There isn't much time... Hassan, is it?' he says. 'I have a duty to perform that is so important, it... it's way beyond any of your rules and edicts and commandments. It's outside of official structures, even the grandiose structures of your almighty Imperium. It is, I suppose, personal. Yes, personal, though it affects everyone and everything. Please, Hassan. You seem like a decent man. I need to see Him, face to face.'\n\n'How could it be personal?' asks Raja. 'No one has a personal connection to the Emperor.'\n\nOll pauses.\n\n'I'm sure they don't. But He's known to me. We knew each other once.'\n\n'No one could vouch for this unlikely tale,' says Raja.\n\n'He could,' says Oll. He looks at Hassan. 'You're one of the Sigillite's people, aren't you? A chosen man? Then you know what it's like. To be one of the very few people in existence to have a personal connection to a being like that.'\n\nHassan nods. The reminder is sudden and painful. It reminds him of his grief, of the urgent work he has to do, of the sc"}
{"text":"\n\nOll pauses.\n\n'I'm sure they don't. But He's known to me. We knew each other once.'\n\n'No one could vouch for this unlikely tale,' says Raja.\n\n'He could,' says Oll. He looks at Hassan. 'You're one of the Sigillite's people, aren't you? A chosen man? Then you know what it's like. To be one of the very few people in existence to have a personal connection to a being like that.'\n\nHassan nods. The reminder is sudden and painful. It reminds him of his grief, of the urgent work he has to do, of the scale and multitude of things slipping away, undone, every second. This is a waste of time. It might even be a trick of the warp, a soft and reasonable invasion where violence has failed, though none of the Antiroom systems detect a trace of that.\n\n'Explain it to me,' says Hassan. 'Once more, simply. I will make a judgement. That will be the end of it. Explain who you are and what you want. Unfold to me the matter you wish to discuss, or the message you wish to convey. Account for the two unsanctioned psykers in your company, and the warrior who seems to be an Astartes but most assuredly is not. Begin.'\n\nOll sighs. His chair chimes again as he sits forward, rests his elbows on his knees and steeples his fingers. He leans his mouth and chin against his thumbs for a second, thinking.\n\n'My name is Ollanius Persson,' he says. 'I have travelled a long way to meet with a man I once knew. A long, long way, further than you can possibly comprehend. The people with me are companions who have joined me on that journey to help me. They are innocent of any crimes that I know of. You should let them go. Let them leave the Palace. I suppose that's not possible. I need to speak with Him. I beg you to let me do that. I am here to help.'\n\n'Help... what?' asks Hassan.\n\n'Help end this nightmare. I hope. Actually, I don't know if I can do that. But at least, help stop it becoming something infinitely worse.'\n\n'Your story is both flimsy and ridiculous,' says Raja. 'There is nothing you can say that-'\n\n'Actually, there are two things,' says Oll reluctantly. 'Do you know what a Perpetual is? Do you understand what is meant by the term \"Perpetual\"?'\n\n'Mythologically, yes,' says Hassan.\n\n'You're looking at one,' says Oll. 'Bit of a let-down, I'm sure, but there we go. I was born something over forty thousand years ago, here on Terra. I am a Perpetual. So is the Emperor. So is, I believe, your Sigillite master. We are kin. I demand the right to speak to my kin. They would both be aggrieved to know you have blocked my effort to meet with them.'\n\nThere is a long pause.\n\n'What,' says Hassan quietly. 'What is the second thing?'\n\n'This Palace,' replies Oll, 'this Sanctum. Right now, it is the most secure place in the known galaxy, protected by things like that.'\n\nHe gestures at Raja.\n\n'You might want to ask yourself,' he continues, 'how the hell I got in here, and what else I might be capable of doing.'\n\n4:xii\n\nControl, not controlled\n\nThe captains stare at Abaddon for a moment, then Sycar and Baraxas turn aside and open vox-links to instruct their companies waiting nearby.\n\nFyton glares at Abaddon.\n\n'These were not your orders,' he says. 'You chide the others for disobedience, but you are disobeying the direct commands of the Lupercal. For shame, Ezekyle.'\n\n'Did you not hear me?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'I heard a brat complain about hard work,' Fyton replies. 'I heard a soldier repudiate his oaths of moment. I heard a Son of Horus doubt the reasoning of Horus Lupercal, Warmaster, believing he knows better.'\n\n'Fyton-'\n\n'If Lupercal has set a trap, Abaddon,' says Fyton, 'then it is his trap. He knows what he's doing. He always does. If he hasn't informed you of his plans, then it is because you, First Captain, are not part of them.'\n\n'Our lord father has lost control,' says Abaddon.\n\n'If you say so,' says Fyton. 'I will not be returning. Neither will Seventh. I am staying to fulfil my orders, orders he gave me, not you. I suggest you do the same, or prepare yourself for a future in which you are no longer First Captain of anything.'\n\n'I gave you an order, Fyton,' says Abaddon.\n\n'I do not acknowledge your authority, Abaddon,' says Fyton. He turns, and begins to walk back up the smouldering slope.\n\n'Do not, Ezekyle,' Baraxa whispers to him.\n\n'Do not what, Azelas?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'Strike him. Kill him. The man's a wretch. And barely a man any more. But you are Ezekyle Abaddon, First Captain, First Company, Sons of Horus. Everything may be broken, everything may be lost, but while you are still you, our Legion retains discipline and control.'\n\nAbaddon nods.\n\n'I mean, it,' says Baraxa. 'Don't descend to their level. They are contaminated. They are consumed. They have no control, just as you fear our father has no control, for the warp controls them. But you, Ezekyle, do.'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Then, you keep it.'\n\n'I will,' says Abaddon. He nods again. 'I will. Control, not controlled.'\n\n'Good,' says Baraxa. 'Then there is still a Legion.'\n\n'Yes, still. Now, can we make ready?'\n\n'We can make ready, Ezekyle. We can embark, your hands unsullied. Besides,' Baraxa adds, 'that's why you keep the Master of the Justaerin close and loyal.'\n\nAt the top of the burning slope, Captain Fyton turns as Hellas Sycar calls to him, and topples as the black-clad Terminator destroys him with a single blow.\n\n4:xiii\n\nWhat others call the Throne Room\n\n'What's happening now?' John whispers, as soon as he is close enough to Oll.\n\n'We are making headway, I think,' Oll replies.\n\n'Do not converse,' snaps Ios Raja. He is in front of them, leading the way.\n\n'Or being taken for execution,' Oll whispers. 'It could go either way.'\n\nJohn had been removed from his crystal cell and placed with the others under guard in the armourglass atrium of the Antirooms. They had waited, watching, as on the other side of the crystal wall, Sisters of Silence had packed some of their possessions into a small, duralloy negation crate. John had seen the athame go in, the ball of twine, Leetu's cards, and his shears and torquetum. The rest - their weapons, carry bags and personal effects - had been left on the examination table.\n\nOnce the crate was packed, it was handed to Companion Raja. Then other Custodes, along with several of the Sisters, had closed around Oll and his long companions and escorted them out.\n\nA last, long walk begins.\n\nThey have joined a main processional, moving at a brisk pace, with the green-robed Chosen at the head, alongside Raja, who carries the crate in front of his chest like an offering. Custodians and Sisters flank them, and follow on behind. In the cell, John had formulated a dozen escape plans. None of them fitted this scenario.\n\nThe Custodes are everything the Custodes should be: indomitable golden monsters. John can see no way to out-smart, out-run, or escape them, and he certainly can't fight them. The Sisters are worse. They are so hard to track, even when you know they are there, shifting like smudges in the air. And they are blanking what gifts he still possesses.\n\n'Did you strike a bargain?' whispers John.\n\n'I said all of us, or nothing,' Oll replies.\n\n'All of us what?'\n\n'Do not converse!' Raja snaps again, without looking around.\n\n'Your leader has requested an audience with the supreme lord of Terra,' says the Chosen to John over his shoulder.\n\n'Sharp ears,' John replies. 'You're our leader now?' he whispers to Oll.\n\n'Shhh!' Oll replies.\n\n'Due to certain factors,' the Chosen continues, 'I have granted this. The audience will be brief. My lord cannot leave his location, so we are going to him. You will all answer any questions put to you in full, without deception. Lies will be detected and punished.'\n\n'Great,' murmurs John.\n\n'This is what we wanted,' Oll whispers.\n\n'I don't think it is,' says Actae.\n\nJohn glances back at her. The witch's skin is pale and clammy. Like him, and like Katt too, Actae is suffering the suppressive presence of the Sisterhood. She is clearly struggling the most, which suggests to John her psykanic powers are significantly more than anything he or the girl can muster.\n\nShe is also rigid with apprehension. John can see it. It's the Custodians. From what he's been told, it was their kind that killed her the first time she died. Is it fear she's registering? Hatred? Or just recollection?\n\nBehind Actae and Katt come Krank and Zybes, both anxious and wide-eyed, then Leetu, who carries his helm under his arm and zero expression on his face. Last of all, Graft trundles at their heels, oblivious.\n\nThey turn off the processional into another, equally grand, equally gilded, equally empty. Their footsteps ring out across the marble: all except, John notices, the footsteps of the Sisterhood. They pass statues, the effigies of the great and good, the noble and the dead. John sees Oll glance at something.\n\n'What is it?' he whispers.\n\nThere's no way to pause, or go back and look. Oll shakes his head.\n\n'What?' asks John.\n\n'I thought I-' Oll starts to say. He shakes his head again. 'It doesn't matter.'\n\n'Cease conversation,' Raja barks.\n\nThe processional reaches a huge mass-passageway, fusion-cut through the bedrock. The delicate glow of the electro-flambeaux becomes the sickly glare of sodium lamps. As they turn into the vast tunnel, they feel a cold breeze, and catch in it the smell of oil, rock, fyceline and smoke. John has no idea why any tunnel needed to be built on such a scale. What the hell ever needed to move along it? The air is climate-controlled, but it still feels damp, as if they're in a cavern at the bottom of the world.\n\nThere's something ahead. It seems large, but they take minutes to reach it. Slowly, step by step, its sheer size begins to become evident. It's a portal of cyclopean proportions. A door.\n\nA silver door.\n\n'Oh god,' he says.\n\n'Do not speak,' orders Raja.\n\nEven when it's impossibly big, it still seems to take hours to reach it. John realises he's breathing fast, too fast. This is why they came. Here. This place. This terrible place. But now they're "}
{"text":" they're in a cavern at the bottom of the world.\n\nThere's something ahead. It seems large, but they take minutes to reach it. Slowly, step by step, its sheer size begins to become evident. It's a portal of cyclopean proportions. A door.\n\nA silver door.\n\n'Oh god,' he says.\n\n'Do not speak,' orders Raja.\n\nEven when it's impossibly big, it still seems to take hours to reach it. John realises he's breathing fast, too fast. This is why they came. Here. This place. This terrible place. But now they're actually here, he wants to be anywhere else instead.\n\nThey approach the Silver Door, the last door of eternity. They halt.\n\n'Hassan, Chosen of Malcador,' the Chosen calls out to the burnished Custodes Pylorus. Lances at their sides, heads raised, they seem like yet more decorative statues, but for the slight flutter of their huge red plumes in the tunnel breeze.\n\n'By His will be done,' calls Hassan.\n\nThe Silver Door opens.\n\nWhat lies beyond, slowly revealed as the door swings wide, numbs John's mind. His thoughts drain away. Nothing he has seen in his life, not even the scale and dimension of the Palace they have navigated so far, can cushion the impact. The space, the soaring arches, the light. He has no words. Even he, the logokine, has no words. It is indescribable. It defies his ability to accommodate it. It is endless, beyond scale, defiant of dimension, both glorious and paralysing, magnificent and awful. There is singing, and it's inside his head. The air itself is lustrous and alive.\n\nHassan leads them in.\n\nA figure awaits them, dwarfed by distance, but amplified by grandeur. It is a god. John hates himself, but there is no other word for the being they are approaching. A god. Supreme. Transcendent. Cloaked and gigantic, god stands with his back to them and waits as they walk the last kilometres of heaven to his feet.\n\nWhen they get there, John realises there are tears streaming down his cheeks. He wants to fall down and beg forgiveness. He wants to scream into the awful light and the terrible beauty and the living air.\n\n'Kneel,' Raja barks.\n\nThey kneel. John, Zybes, Krank and Katt, all at once. Zybes is weeping, hands clasped. Graft's pistons hiss as the servitor lowers its chassis. Actae, reluctant for a second, stoops to her knees, and bows her head. Leetu drops to one knee, his face still raised, proud and in martial respect, his helm clamped under his arm.\n\nFinally, Oll kneels too.\n\n'You know me,' he calls out.\n\n'You will not speak!' Raja cries.\n\n'He does,' says Oll. 'He knows me. This isn't necessary.'\n\n'Oll-' John hisses through his tears.\n\n'This... abasement... it is undignified,' Oll calls out. 'It is the tawdry protocol of one too used to power. It is beneath you. And it is no way to treat an old friend. You know me.'\n\nThe god turns to look at them. Raja, and the Custodes escort, and Hassan, and the wraith-sisters, all bow.\n\nOll's face falls in sudden surprise. 'You do not know me,' he whispers.\n\n'I do not,' says Vulkan. He stares down at them. He points to John Grammaticus.\n\n'But I know you,' he says.\n\n4:xiv\n\nMagical sympathy\n\n'There must be something here,' says Loken. 'For him to steer me here, however obliquely, there must be something.'\n\n'Must there?' asks Mauer. 'If you're right, and all has become delusion, then there is no logic. No purpose. No connection. No scheme. The recurrence of that phrase was just a coincidence, the echo of insanity in a madhouse.'\n\n'Or minds joining together,' says Sindermann. 'Minds, thoughts, ideas... warping into each other, binding together, creating synchronicities and connection. What Garviel described, what's happening to the city... it's probably happening to our minds too. An interconnecting labyrinth. An abstraction of ideas-'\n\n'Bullshit,' says Mauer.\n\n'The distribution of warped space effect is clearly uneven, as yet,' says Sindermann. 'Some places more than others, some locations more connected to the immaterium, or interconnected by the immaterium, than others-'\n\n'If Terra is sliding into the empyrean, then it will be true of everywhere soon enough!' Mauer retorts.\n\n'Yes, but why certain places first?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'There is no logic! It's madness!'\n\n'No, no,' Sindermann says, shaking his head, starting to pace. 'Some places... some places are more susceptible than others. More sympathetic. Like people! Some people are affected more rapidly than others. It could be a resonance, a... a... quality of materia... perhaps a legacy of pain, or thought or... or... psychic activity. This place, the Hall of Leng, it's always been considered special...'\n\n'Because of the things in it?' asks Mauer.\n\n'Yes, but the site itself. Leng. Mauer, the entire Palace was built here because of the mystical significance of certain locations within its bounds.'\n\n'Alleged,' says Mauer.\n\n'That's true, isn't it?' he asks the frightened young archivist.\n\nShe nods. 'The Palace, it is said, was built here because this has been a sacred place since the rise of man,' she says. 'The Emperor chose it. The Himalazian Zone contains many sites of ancient, ritual significance. The Palace was raised to contain all of them within its precincts.'\n\n'And Leng was one of them,' says Sindermann. 'A sacred site. We can't explain what brought us here, Mauer, beyond some deluded notion. But something brought Garviel here too. Perhaps it was the Sigillite. To me, that proves that we were right to come here. That there is something here worth finding.'\n\n'You are inspiring as ever, Kyril,' says Loken. 'But what have you actually discovered?'\n\nSindermann sags. He glances at the scattered books around them.\n\n'Well...' he says. He sighs.\n\nLoken picks up Sindermann's notebook again. 'Have you tried saying any of these things aloud?' he asks. 'Reciting them?'\n\n'Yes,' says Mauer.\n\n'And?'\n\n'Nothing happened. Nothing at all.'\n\n'Nothing happened here, you mean,' says Loken, 'nothing you were aware of or witnessed. Perhaps they are having some more distant or general effect? I heard your echo, Mauer, from far away. Or vice versa.'\n\nSindermann looks at the archivist suddenly.\n\n'Hang on,' he says. 'What were you saying? You were telling me something, just as Loken arrived. Something about a special collection-'\n\n'Collection eight-eight-eight,' she replies.\n\n'Take us there,' he says.\n\n4:xv\n\nKill or fall\n\nThere is a jarring impact. Without warning, Rann is released. He falls to the floor, rolls aside, and turns to see the howling World Eater slowly sinking to its knees. Namahi, Master of the Keshig, is right behind it, gripping its hair with one hand. With the other, in an almost frenzied blitz of hammering blows, he is stabbing it repeatedly in the neck and shoulders with his edlel.\n\nHe doesn't stop. He just keeps stabbing, hand banging up and down like a steampress, two blows a second.\n\nFinally, he lets go and steps back. The White Scar's white chestplate and visor are drenched in backspatter. The brute, dead on its knees, topples forward. Namahi looks at Rann. He jerks a thumb over his shoulder, indicating the chambers beyond the mess hall.\n\n'Everything is clear, lord,' he says.\n\nRann gets up. He gestures towards the route that he and Zephon came.\n\n'And that way too, Keshig-Master,' he replies.\n\nThen he goes to Zephon. The Sons of Horus traitor he was grappling with is dead, and Zephon is hunched over the corpse, battered and wounded.\n\n'Still alive?' Rann asks.\n\n'As much as any of us,' Zephon replies.\n\nRann clasps Zephon's hand and pulls him to his feet. The Blood Angel's hair is matted with gore, and his beautiful face is a mask of blood, but his Astartesian metabolism is already closing burst vessels and clotting. Rann sprays him with the last of the counterseptic from his belt-pack to wash the blood out of his eyes. The damage is ugly but superficial. There's not much more he can do.\n\n'I told you to hold,' he says.\n\n'I chose not to,' Zephon replies. 'We got it done. There's no time to \"hold\" any more, Rann. It's kill or fall.'\n\nRann nods. He glances at Zephon's last three kills, crumpled on the mess hall's floor in a swill of blood.\n\nTheir throats have been torn out, as though ripped open by the bite of a wild beast.\n\n4:xvi\n\nA collection of secrets\n\nShe leads them down spiral stairs to a lower level. There is a heavy door, but her ring of keys opens it.\n\n'We are seldom allowed in here,' she says, as they enter.\n\nIt is another wing of the library. Sindermann is sure there are others besides. They follow the archivist down a wide, dark staircase. There are framed pictures on the walls, held in humming suspensor fields, but it's too dark to really tell what they depict. Sindermann glimpses pale shapes, and abstract forms, ghost faces looking back at him, darkened by time and thick varnish as much as by the fustian gloom.\n\nThe chamber below is wide and low, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling. It is cast in a blue, twilight glow of auxiliary lighting. The archivist pauses at the foot of the staircase, and uses a wafer from her keychain to activate a wall panel. She throws a series of switches. One by one, the main lights come on: dull glow-globes hung at intervals like pendants on long cables. They rouse slowly, like embryonic suns rising to main sequence brightness. Their light is yellow, the colour of old paper or worn bone, and barely banishes the chamber's shadows. Gloom lurks, reluctant to be evicted, between the many rows of high shelves, and lingers below the desks and reading tables.\n\nThe air smells of electrostatic and paper dust, of cotton and vellum, of dry age delicately suspended in subtly moderated stasis fields. It smells, to Sindermann, of ancient learning, of forgotten thought, of ideas so old they have not been held alive or kept warm in human thoughts for centuries, and have grown cold and inert. Old learning, but new to him and his modernistic principles of scholarship and examination.\n\nThe shelves of books run, not as straight rows, but as a geometric maze, interrupted in places by islands of readin"}
{"text":"aper dust, of cotton and vellum, of dry age delicately suspended in subtly moderated stasis fields. It smells, to Sindermann, of ancient learning, of forgotten thought, of ideas so old they have not been held alive or kept warm in human thoughts for centuries, and have grown cold and inert. Old learning, but new to him and his modernistic principles of scholarship and examination.\n\nThe shelves of books run, not as straight rows, but as a geometric maze, interrupted in places by islands of reading tables. Stretches of the walls are hung with more paintings, and still more are stacked, side-on, like tall, slim books, in racks beside plan chests, humidified cabinets and stasis displays.\n\n'Where do we even begin?' asks Mauer.\n\nSindermann starts to walk along the nearest row of pictures. Automatic sensors light each one as he comes close in a downward fan of pale radiance. Extraordinary things. The light reflects white from the old varnish and lacquer of oil paintings, and gleams off gilded frames. It glows ivory from the handmade papers of blockprints and engravings, and from the pale primed canvases of abstract works. He stares, then moves to the next, one light field dimming in his wake as the next comes on. He reads the marker tags below the works, the names of artists and mystics... engravers, painters, designers and visionaries from across four hundred centuries of human civilisation.\n\nHe feels almost breathless with awe.\n\n'Kyril?'\n\n'We do what we did before,' he says, gazing at an etching of a descending god or an ascending devil. He can't tell which. 'We try at random. Let synchronicity and coincidence guide us. All the angels of the library. The warp is making its connections. We'll let its providence work for us.'\n\nHe turns to them. There is a smile on his face. He raises his hands, a conductor bringing his orchestra to attention.\n\n'What else can we do?' he asks.\n\nThey spread out. He crosses to the nearest shelf, trying to clear his mind and let chance, or some dowsing, subconscious force direct him. His fingertips drift along ancient spines, some frayed, some repaired and rebound, some too worn to read. There are names and titles unknown to him. Rapturous Beasts, The Book of Glass Hands, Autoclone Illumin of Luna Habitat, Liber Bidoph vel CX, Revelati Draconis...\n\nHe takes one down.\n\n'We need gloves,' the archivist announces.\n\nLoken, nearby, raises his huge, plated hands and shows them to her. She shudders, and quickly hurries to inspect a different stack.\n\nLoken picks a book at random. '\"Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art,\"' he reads out. '\"Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night...\"' He shrugs and closes the volume. 'I don't think this will work,' he says.\n\n'No, no, Garviel, we just need to be patient,' Sindermann replies. 'We just need to allow ourselves to be receptive. Learn how to hear the... the... What did they used to call it? The muse. That piece you just read-'\n\n'This?' asks Loken, holding up the book.\n\n'Yes,' Sindermann nods. 'As you read it, I was just reading this. Listen... \"one bright star, to burn and heap the ashes of the moon\".'\n\nHe looks at Loken expectantly.\n\n'And?' asks Loken after a pause.\n\n'Stars, Garviel! Stars!' Sindermann says eagerly. 'Two books, chosen by chance, read simultaneously, both speaking of lone, bright stars! You see?'\n\n'No, Kyril.'\n\n'The connection, my boy! The subtle synchronicity! As though things are aligning. We just have to see those connections... Oh, don't look at me like that. \"Bright star, alone...\" What are the chances of that concept occurring, just like that, at random, the moment we walk in here?'\n\n'I would think... quite high,' says Loken. 'I would think that it's not much of a coincidence, and that the word \"star\" is not unusual, and is probably used a lot by poets. Poets being poets.'\n\nSindermann hesitates, then nods and puts the book down.\n\n'The Clavicula Incubi,' Mauer calls out from nearby, reading along a shelf. 'The Five Books of Novopangaea, The Combinatorial Art of Merzhin Ambrosianus...'\n\n'Slow down, Mauer,' Sindermann murmurs, not looking up. His initial rush of enthusiasm has dampened. He turns the pages of another book he has pulled arbitrarily. The Sortes Astronom. They're going to need translator systems, he realises.\n\n'Enochian Chants,' Mauer continues, urgent, 'A Catalogue of Alexandria Biblios Compleat, uhm, something called Al Azif-'\n\n'Let chance guide you!' Sindermann calls back, trying not to sound encouraging and not as annoyed as he feels. 'Don't overthink. Imagination, Mauer. Synchronicity.'\n\n'What is the Dark King?' Loken asks, appearing at his side again.\n\n'The Dark King?' Sindermann asks. 'I don't know. A reference to the old cartomantic arcanoi, I think. Why, have you found something?'\n\n'Just this,' says Loken, holding another frail volume open. 'This says it's a \"concordance of fraudulent and false gods\". You see here, where it fell open? Rex Tenebris. It says it means \"the Dark King\".'\n\n'I believe that's Proto-Gothic,' Sindermann says, frowning. He takes the book from Loken. 'Yes, I recognise some of these names... all the forgotten and banished gods here, look. Dyeus, known as Iuppter... Anpu-Anubis... Enlil... Baal... ah, yes. Rex Tenebris. Why does it interest you?'\n\n'I heard the name spoken outside, several times,' says Loken, 'another chant of the damned and the Neverborn. I heard it at the front line, and in the streets, and from the mouths of daemons. It feels significant.'\n\n'Perhaps.'\n\n'Maybe it's just a new name for the Lupercal,' says Loken. 'Their chants and cries are hardly sophisticated. \"The Emperor Must Die\" lacks nuance.'\n\n'Indeed, Garviel. But let me see what I can find.' Sindermann glances encouragingly at Loken, but Loken has already vanished along another row. Sindermann takes down another book, and flips it open indiscriminately.\n\nThen crowned in his stead, the Dark King.\n\nStartled, he feels a shiver. He puts the book back quickly and selects another.\n\nOne that is once born immortal is born again as a king of All Darkness.\n\nHe's starting to panic. The random incidence of the phrase is uncanny. It's what he hoped might happen, but now it's actually happening, it scares him. He pulls another book, bound in shagreen, opens it on an unpremeditated page, and reads:\n\nThe black shell cracks, thus he ascends, in the timeless time, and is elevated to the gods, to reign as a dark-crowned king.\n\n4:xvii\n\nHorus, rising\n\nHe is approaching now, fast, angry. You can feel His rage, and it amuses you. Finally, after all these years you have prompted an emotional reaction from Him.\n\nYour father is just a man, after all.\n\nHe is brimming with fury, and burning with power. Such power. He is shining in your mindsight like a star. You had Him encased in a stifling, muffling, sense-depriving shell of pure, black immaterial force, but He has cracked that open, and now He burns a path towards you.\n\nThe Vengeful Spirit creaks and shakes at the fury of His approach. He is so strong, so powerful, any being in the galaxy would shriek in eternal dread and hide in the depths of hell rather than face Him.\n\nBut there is nothing in the galaxy like you any more.\n\nYou no longer have to hide. You no longer have to conceal your power behind veils of secrecy and deceit. If He'd had an inkling of how strong you'd become, He would never have dared come to challenge you. So you wrapped all of yourself in un-when, in skeins of timelessness... your presence, your thoughts, your soul, your power. You muted your mind, took shelter in the past, in memories, in hesternal seclusion, behind artificial masks of dementia and madness. You allowed nothing to give you away, for just a glimpse of your true self would have stopped Him in His tracks and made Him flee.\n\nThere's no going back now. He's approaching, and you no longer have to hide. You rise up. You cast off your masks and disguises, and stand revealed. It's liberating. Intoxicating. Those around you - your warriors and officers, your sons, the other things that lurk and whisper - they cry out in dismay at the sight of you. The revelation of your new aspect is too magnificent for them. Their eyes burn. They fall to the deck, weeping and screaming and soiling themselves.\n\nYou are a star, too. You are a tower of lightning. You are a king above kings. You do not underestimate the nature of the fight that is about to take place, the last battle. It will be testing. It will be hard. Your once-father is strong. But you are infinitely stronger. You are Horus Lupercal ascendant, chosen of the gods.\n\nAnd He, when all is said and done, is just a man. So, if necessary, He will die like one.\n\nHe has taken your bait. He has run headlong into your trap. He has entered your kingdom. You control everything here. You control the board and every move that is made. There is not an atom of the Vengeful Spirit that does not obey your merest thought. It is no longer a ship. It is a place of execution and apotheosis.\n\nYour once-father, the tyrant, the liar, the false Emperor, thinks He has come to confront you on a warship in orbit. He has not. He has come to the inevitable centre of all things.\n\nHe thinks He can fight the future. He can't.\n\nThis is where it will be decided.\n\nThis is your realm now.\n\n4:xviii\n\nA Realm of Chaos\n\n'What about this?' the archivist says. Her voice makes Sindermann start so much, he drops the book.\n\n'Are you all right?' she asks.\n\n'Yes,' he replies, trying to slow his breathing. It's just words, just a random recurrence of words. A fluke. A psychological trick. He was looking for synchronous magic. Of course it would shake him when it seemed to appear. 'Yes. Of course,' he says, steadying himself. 'What were you saying?'\n\n'My hand just landed on this one, sir,' she says. She is holding up a book to show him, a small volume, of evident age. The binding is so worn, he can barely read the spine. He leans in and squints.\n\n'A Primer of Enuncia,' he reads. 'I don't know what that is."}
{"text":"t words, just a random recurrence of words. A fluke. A psychological trick. He was looking for synchronous magic. Of course it would shake him when it seemed to appear. 'Yes. Of course,' he says, steadying himself. 'What were you saying?'\n\n'My hand just landed on this one, sir,' she says. She is holding up a book to show him, a small volume, of evident age. The binding is so worn, he can barely read the spine. He leans in and squints.\n\n'A Primer of Enuncia,' he reads. 'I don't know what that is.'\n\n'Look at this!' Mauer calls. She hurries past them lugging a large and heavy folio, and sets it down on the nearest reading table. Sindermann and the archivist go to join her.\n\nMauer is turning the pages. The folio is large, and contains, loose-leafed, old sheets of parchment and what look like maps.\n\n'The name caught my eye,' she says, untying the ribbon closure. 'Regno Kao.'\n\n'A Realm of Chaos,' says the archivist.\n\n'Which reminds me,' Sindermann says to her. 'I was going to ask if you have a translation device.'\n\n'I do,' she says, summoning a psyber-skull from its niche. 'But the name is written there, on that label beneath the original title.'\n\nShe points. Sindermann feels stupid. His anxiety is undermining his usual diligence and precision.\n\n'Keep up, old man,' Mauer snorts. She opens the folio, and starts to rifle through the sheets inside.\n\n'Look at that,' says Sindermann, stopping her from turning another page. 'Is that a map? A city?'\n\n'No, a labyrinth,' says Mauer.\n\n'Or both,' says Loken, suddenly behind them, looking over their shoulders. 'What does that say, the legend?'\n\n'Urbs Ineleuctabilis,' says Mauer, sounding it out. The archivist has beckoned in the psyber-skull, a device formed, it seems, from a canine skull fused to a simian one, then bound in gold and brass. It hovers, buzzing, over the table and passes a quick bar of red light across the chart.\n\n'The Inevitable City,' it declares, speaking in a monotone smear of noise that is simply sampled sounds edited to simulate words.\n\nThe four of them stare down at the chart for a moment.\n\n'It's nothing,' Mauer decides. Her urgent, impatient mind has already dismissed it. 'Some old myth. Let's get back to work.'\n\n'It looks like the Palace,' says Sindermann.\n\n'It doesn't,' says Mauer. 'It's just some old fantasy. Some nonsense.'\n\n'Something led you to it, Mauer,' Sindermann says.\n\nShe scowls. 'Well, I don't entirely subscribe to your search methodology anyway, Sindermann. \"Let chance guide you\"? Honestly, I'll humour you, but it's a suspect and frankly bullshit approach. We should be more rigorous, maybe consult the data-catalogue-'\n\n'It does look like the Palace,' says Loken in a quiet voice. 'I mean, it doesn't and it does. Some aspects are entirely wrong-'\n\n'Please,' says Mauer. 'Not you as well. I think we've become too suggestible. We're seeing patterns and connections where none exist. There's a word for that-'\n\n'Apophenia,' the psyber-skull whirs, 'Pareidolia.'\n\n'Whatever,' she snaps. 'Let's get to a more systematic-'\n\n'Look again, boetharch,' says Loken. 'This map shows a location of convoluted madness. Agreed. But the double-helical shape? Like the notation for infinity? And see, where the gates are marked? And the principal structures? They echo the layout of the Zone Imperialis.'\n\n'No-' says Mauer.\n\n'I have spent hours in these last few months studying diagrammatics of the Palace Dominions,' says Loken. 'Tactical schematics, combat assessments... I tell you, the comparison is uncanny. This could be a plan of the Palace, made by a child... or an unsettled mind...'\n\n'All cities look alike,' says Mauer. 'In their basic components-'\n\n'All cats look alike in the dark,' says Sindermann, trying to ease the tension between the two.\n\n'Not helpful,' says Mauer, shooting him a look. She points to the map. 'I'm familiar with maps of the Dominions too, Astartes. Yes, there are a few points of correspondence. But there are far more discrepancies. If that's the Sanctum, what's that? Or that? What's that structure? If that's the Lion's Gate, what is that? Please, can we move on?'\n\n'It looks as though maps have been interlocked or overlaid,' says Sindermann. 'The diagrams of two cities, superimposed. Perhaps more than two-'\n\n'Where are you getting this from, Kyril?' Mauer asks. 'There's no scale, no measurement, no definition. There's no evidence this was even drawn as a proportional representation-'\n\n'What if this is...' Sindermann pauses. 'What if this somehow depicts what the Palace is becoming? The intrusions of the warp? The superimposition of other places or times? The realignment and distortion Garviel was describing?'\n\n'How would any of that feature on an old map?' Mauer snaps.\n\n'When was this composed?' Loken asks the archivist.\n\n'There is no date or origin for the work, sir,' she replies. 'Except some alleged provenance that it was part of \"The Book of Chaos Foreseen\". Nothing can be verified.'\n\n'What of the text here, along the edge?' Loken asks.\n\nThe archivist touches the psyber-skull gently, and it bobs over the section Loken is indicating. The bar of red light slides slowly across the faded brown ink of the old cursive penmanship.\n\n'Yette knowe this is the true and everlasting place of madeness and lyes that concealeth all truth within its manifold streetes and fyne gates, which hath stoode since before time was and will stand throughe time and unto beyonde all time, eternal, and is withoute anye time, for it was builded in the Darke, and in the everlasting Darke remaines. It standeth foreverr beyonde all mortal sight, as beyonde a mirror upon the other side, seen only in visions and the most fytfulle dreams, subjecte to constant motion of currents and ethereal tides, and is the House of Ruin and insanity both, for within it dwelleth the four who haunt the dark, and besides them, many other vacant thrones and diverse spirits of revenge and ruination. It lyeth but a mere lifetime's journey from Calastar, yet therein its walls and turrets join, by masons' craft, to the walls and turrets of that impossible city, and so too but a moment's eternity from the City of Duste, and also close by Uigebealach, whiche it is and is not, and thereby it is and is not alle things and places thereafter and before, freed from alle reason-'\n\n'Enough,' says Loken.\n\n'-and upon the Daye of Dayes it will become so all thinges, and its gates will devour all the Works of Man, and also Man, and all the angels and stars betimes, and the mighty works of Man will be as nothinge and despaire, and all peoples forgot and all empires unremembered, and all who look upon it, as throughe one great Eye, shalle say I weep now at the inevitable triumph of its Ruin, for ruin it is and ruin it brings-'\n\n'Enough.'\n\nThe psyber-skull falls silent. The bar of red light winks out.\n\n4:xix\n\nSupplicants\n\n'Stand up,' says Vulkan.\n\nGrammaticus stands. 'You remember me, my lord?' he asks.\n\nVulkan's eyes are superheated red, the blazing glow of the world's core.\n\n'I remember you,' he says. 'Barely, as a dream. When we met, my mind was not my own. But it is hard to forget the face of the man who killed me.'\n\nIos Raja sweeps around, a golden blur. The blade of his spear stops a hair's breadth from John's throat.\n\n'Killed me, and in so doing contrived my salvation, I should say,' says Vulkan. 'Lower your blade, Companion. This man gave his life so that I could live again. But for his sacrifice, I would not be here to stand with Terra.'\n\n'That was years ago,' says John, as the gleaming blade moves away from his neck. 'And a considerable simplification.'\n\n'Perhaps,' says Vulkan. 'There were other elements in play, on Macragge and afterwards. But you played the key role. And you surrendered your life for me.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'Yet you stand before me now.'\n\n'As you stand before me,' says John.\n\n'You speak as though you know the curious logic of a Perpetual existence,' says Vulkan.\n\n'In part,' says John. 'But I am not of that rare kind. A rough facsimile, for a while. Not even that now. When I gave you my life, sir, I was not brought back as a multitude. I am mortal, with but one life. You, I trust, have many left within you.'\n\nJohn puts his hand on the shoulder of Oll, kneeling beside him.\n\n'This is the man you should be talking to,' he says. 'He certainly knows that curious logic.'\n\n'What is your name?' Vulkan asks.\n\n'John Grammaticus, sir,' says John. 'And this is Ollanius Persson.'\n\nOll rises slowly to his feet.\n\n'I would relish a conversation with you both,' says Vulkan. 'However now, clearly, is not the time. I can barely justify this interruption to the work. But Hassan reported your remarkable intrusion, and your unusual demands. Both required the consideration of the most senior authority. I cannot leave my post here, so you were brought to me. I want an account. You will make it brief.'\n\n'I came to see your father,' says Oll.\n\n'From where?' asks Vulkan.\n\n'Calth, but that's irrelevant. In truth, the past. I knew Him once, a long time back. I would speak with Him again.'\n\n'He never mentioned you,' says Vulkan.\n\n'I'm sure He hasn't. But then, has He ever mentioned much?'\n\nVulkan raises an eyebrow slightly.\n\n'You came as a group?' he asks.\n\n'Travelling companions, fellow survivors of Calth,' says Oll. 'The journey has not been easy. We've needed each other. I humbly ask that you have the Vigilant Sisters step back, for they are causing suffering to some of my friends.'\n\n'Security must be maintained!' Raja snaps at once.\n\n'Have the kind Sisters back away,' Vulkan says to him. 'Or would you like to insult my fortitude further?'\n\nRaja bows his head and, at his thoughtmark, the Sisters and the Custodian escort step back from the group, forming a much wider perimeter. Oll hears Actae sigh in relief. Raja remains at their side, with Hassan, the negation crate he was carrying set on the lustrous floor at his feet.\n\n'Thank you,' says Oll to the primarch. Vulkan nods.\n\n'What was your business with my father?' Vulka"}
{"text":"nce.\n\n'Have the kind Sisters back away,' Vulkan says to him. 'Or would you like to insult my fortitude further?'\n\nRaja bows his head and, at his thoughtmark, the Sisters and the Custodian escort step back from the group, forming a much wider perimeter. Oll hears Actae sigh in relief. Raja remains at their side, with Hassan, the negation crate he was carrying set on the lustrous floor at his feet.\n\n'Thank you,' says Oll to the primarch. Vulkan nods.\n\n'What was your business with my father?' Vulkan asks.\n\n'To discuss with Him the course, purpose and meaning of this conflict.'\n\n'Do you bear new intelligence?' Vulkan asks. 'Information about the foe that could prove decisive?'\n\n'Probably not,' says Oll.\n\n'Then I wonder why he would discuss it with you.'\n\n'Because we have discussed wars many times,' says Oll. 'We have planned them together, and we have fought them together. He has, in the past, valued my perspective.'\n\n'You are a soldier?'\n\n'Once upon a time.'\n\n'Your martial wisdom must be significant if he took counsel from you.'\n\n'I'm just an ordinary soldier,' says Oll. 'Was an ordinary soldier.'\n\n'Yet one who evidently values his military skills enough to risk misadventure,' says Raja, 'to come a great distance, by his own admission, and seek to speak them aloud.'\n\n'The Companion makes a good point,' says Vulkan.\n\n'This is the end war, sir,' says Oll, looking squarely into Vulkan's eyes. 'Perhaps the end and the death of everything. A soldier would be failing in his duty if he did not do whatever he could.'\n\n'I sense you are being sparing with the truth,' says Vulkan.\n\n'Some things, great lord, are for His ears alone,' replies Oll. 'Can I speak with Him?'\n\n'No,' says Vulkan.\n\n'May I ask why?' asks Oll. 'This is your decision?'\n\n'It is a matter of practicality,' says Vulkan. 'My father is not here. You cannot speak to him. I am the most senior authority on Terra, which is why you are speaking to me.'\n\n'Where is He?' asks John.\n\n'At war,' says Vulkan.\n\n'Then what of the Sigillite?' asks Oll.\n\nVulkan turns slightly, and with one gesture of his mighty hand, indicates the pulsing light that fills the Throne Room far behind him. It is a terrible radiance, the living light that began to gnaw at them all when they first entered. It smells of compressed pain and torn hopes, of burning gold and whispering agony. Against the glare, Vulkan is backlit like a cliff at sunset.\n\n'Malcador,' he says, 'occupies the Throne in my father's stead.'\n\nOll peers into the light until his eyes begin to ache and a migraine blossoms in his skull. He can just see, in the distance, tiny specks of figures toiling in the glare, the shape of curious machines. He can almost pick out the shape of a colossal throne, raised up in majesty. He cannot make out a figure on it.\n\nHe opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. The Emperor has gone, and all the senior commanders save Vulkan with him, and the Sigillite is lost in the technological inferno of what mortals laughably refer to as 'the Throne'.\n\nThey have arrived too late, and it's all been for nothing.\n\n4:xx\n\nFragments\n\nTitan engines grapple, hand-to-hand and claw-to-claw, on the precipice lip of ragged cliffs that were once Dorn's insurmountable walls.\n\nCorpses drift in rank grey water where gas bubbles rise off sewage. High above, on grilled decking and walkways, men brawl by firelight with blades and hooks and clubs. It is frenzied. Blood drizzles down through the walkway grilles towards the grey water below. The living can no longer remember why they are fighting. The dead no longer care.\n\nSojuk of the White Scars sheathes his blade in the torso of a Word Bearer. Jetbikes roar past him, cannons firing as they rush the enemy charge. Sojuk longs for their speed and freedom. Time, cold and dead, has wrapped its weight around him like loops of heavy chain.\n\nMen run through the smoke, from nowhere, to nowhere, lugging their weapons and their lives, muttering prayers and bewitched by battle-madness. From somewhere close, the industrial thunder of mega-bolters.\n\nRuin roars. The Palace screams. Maximus Thane yells to be heard, and tries to rally the last of his men, but there, on the tattered edge of the Gilded Walk, they are too busy selling their lives for the highest price to hear him.\n\nAgathe wrenches her bayonet out of her enemy's gut. The fight rages around her along the length of the razor-wire line. They are not going to reach Primus Gate. The gate and its fortifications are probably gone anyway. The stone walls of the culvert have become mottled flesh, and are covered with names.\n\nClosing in, Neverborn spectres call her by hers.\n\nCorswain, the Hound of Caliban, lifts his bloodstained sword. The blade gleams in the half-light, but that half-light is merely the cold, phosphor glow streaming from the eyes and mouths of the ink-black Death Guard driving up the pass and splintering his lines. There is nothing but shadow beneath the Hollow Mountain. Corswain has raised whole mounds and hills of corpses, and set them aflame, but the mountain itself remains dark.\n\nZephon edges his blade with a whetstone, preparing for what will surely be the last battle of Hasgard, and his last battle too. Fafnir Rann watches him, loading shells into his bolter.\n\nOn the burning plains, a giant throne of skulls sits empty, awaiting the imminent coronation.\n\nMangler claws gouge open the Shadowsword's flank, and something inside it detonates. The blast wrenches the Shadowsword's huge bulk into the air, like a rider bucked from a horse. Jera Talmada, in the turret of her Banestorm, sees it land, burning from within. She orders 'Load!' but the Banestorm's main weapon has seized. She orders full reverse, knowing there is nothing behind her that is any different from the carnage ahead.\n\nArmies tear into armies in ranks a thousand men deep and ten thousand wide. Spears jab, lifting bodies. Guns boom, shredding others. Broadswords and tactical spathas cleave helmets, crush skulls and tear pseudoflesh. Skin rips. Blood sprays. Bionics short out and fail. Plasteel cracks. Psykanic energy roils and lashes. Aggression is channelled by hypno-indoctrinated commands, or coded machine pulses, or obsessive training, or merely by a tenuous sense of self. The quaking air reeks of glanded combat stimms and piss and blood and fear. Every warrior carries another's death in his fist. The turmoil is unending and unbearable. Horns boom. Fire vomits from the punished ground. Adrathic wrath scorches the air. Bodies buckle and melt in waves of xenophasic heat. Tracked behemoths clatter over mud and wire and bones. Voltaic lances gouge and shatter against shield walls, and plated phalanxes punch through infantry lines like chainfists. There is rout and overrun, panic and disarray. Loyal corpses, breathing yet, but doomed, rush forwards under standards of foliated skulls and splayed eagles, caked in ash and gore, to meet the screaming host of treason, which smashes into their dented shields under banners made of entrails and flags of unblinking eyes. They bear their Neverborn lords with them on biers, swollen-bellied, horned beasts that whisper unutterable names through blood-flecked lips, or play flutes fresh-fashioned from human femurs. Carious bodies pile up and slither, twenty, thirty, forty deep. There is a hircine stink, a reek of nidor, the dry burn of weapon-generated ozone. They kill for the living and kill for the dead, and kill because killing is all that remains. The bony touch of mortality is upon them all, and their deaths will last forever.\n\nIt is the final triumph of Ruin, hymned by the spit and crackle of the warp.\n\nThus is the malison of Chaos. The world hangs badly, at an angle. Above, in the supernal realm, the lochetic nimbus of the opening warp burns against the blind, unconstellated void, turning in the thestral glow like the wheel of all fortunes, licking spears of lightning down to strike and tumble the last steeples and towers of Terra. It is a great eye, like the eyes on the drenched banners far below, its pupil blazing, its sclera bloodshot. It observes the shrieking psychomachia of the species, and devours each and every soul that flies up, a furnace spark. It gazes down upon the rock that they call the world as it is dismantled wholesale by a relentless concentration of absolute fury. It witnesses the end of the world, the end of Terra, the end of the rock that they kill on and for.\n\nThe four watch too, the False Four, through the eyes of their avatars in the dreaming shadows of the Lupercal Court: the dripping, red-plashed Father of Massacres, the trembling, feverish Grandchild of Decay, the languid Drinker of Delights, shaking with algedonic glee, the squirming, unstable Beast of Change. They see the plan ended, ruined and unfinished, and signify their approval of that repudiation with the bloody prints of their gnarled and sutured hands. Their laughter becomes the avalanche roar of a falling world.\n\n'Respond. This is Hegemon Control. Anabasis, respond and verify.'\n\nThe War Court junior at the mastervox station keeps repeating the same words. She is the third junior to occupy the seat, taking over the task in rotation, repeating the same signal every twenty seconds. Sandrine Icaro and the other seniors in the Rotunda are now sure, beyond any doubt, there will never be a reply.\n\nBloody teardrops trickle down Malcador's desiccating cheek. The heat radiating out of him is now so intense, they evaporate before they've barely formed.\n\n4:xxi\n\nThe Dark King\n\nOll feels himself sag, the hope and determination that has fuelled him, thus far, now draining away. The exhaustion he has kept at bay for so long sweeps in like a tide. The air around him shimmers, dazzling with motes and filaments of light thrown, like cinders, from the immolating Throne. He hears the creak and shiver of the vast chamber's huge arches tensing in the outflow of raw power. He hears the pure song of the astrotelepaths running through the tumult "}
{"text":"ely formed.\n\n4:xxi\n\nThe Dark King\n\nOll feels himself sag, the hope and determination that has fuelled him, thus far, now draining away. The exhaustion he has kept at bay for so long sweeps in like a tide. The air around him shimmers, dazzling with motes and filaments of light thrown, like cinders, from the immolating Throne. He hears the creak and shiver of the vast chamber's huge arches tensing in the outflow of raw power. He hears the pure song of the astrotelepaths running through the tumult like a single thread.\n\n'It is me or no one,' Vulkan says to him. 'Is there anything you wish to say?'\n\nOll shakes his head.\n\n'Then I cannot vouch for your purpose or presence,' says Vulkan, 'and I believe you are nothing more than a distraction. Besides, I am sorry to say, I suspect your motives.'\n\nRaja has brought him the crate, and is holding it open. Vulkan inspects the objects within. Arcane aeldari instruments, a ball of twine, a handmade tarot...\n\n'Can you explain this?' Vulkan asks. He is holding up the athame.\n\n'Just a stone knife, my lord,' says Oll quietly.\n\n'I know stone and I know rock,' says Vulkan, 'I know all the elements of the mineral realm. It is that, yes, but it is more besides. An ugly thing with a deep shadow.'\n\n'It struck me, my lord,' says Hassan, 'as an artefact of particular evil.'\n\nVulkan drops the athame back into the negation crate, as though unwilling to hold it for long. He takes out Leetu's old deck, and starts turning the cards, one by one.\n\n'My lord,' says Hassan. 'I noted that a particular card features in this set.'\n\n'Indeed?' muses Vulkan. He stops. He's found it.\n\n'Indeed so,' Hassan replies. 'I discovered it at the random turn of a card-'\n\nVulkan holds the card up.\n\n'Is it a symbol you know?' he asks them. 'A concept? Do you understand some greater meaning? The name of it shivers on the lips of the enemy and echoes down the colonnades of the webway.'\n\n'The name, sir?' Oll asks.\n\n'The Dark King,' says Vulkan.\n\n'Wait-' says Leetu, suddenly confused.\n\n'This name is spoken?' asks Actae abruptly, interrupting him.\n\n'It is said repeatedly, almost as a refrain,' says Vulkan. 'Do you know it?'\n\n'Trust her not, lord,' says Raja.\n\n'She will answer,' says Vulkan. He looks at Actae, and bids her stand. Actae rises, and Katt gets to her feet at her side. 'Do you know the name?' Vulkan asks. 'A true meaning?'\n\nActae tilts her blindfold head, as if struggling, either with pain or some mental battle.\n\n'Not as our word, in our language,' she says. 'But perhaps in the un-tongued languages of the immaterium. Do you mean to say \"the Dark King\"?'\n\nTo Oll, the words are exactly the same, its sound and phonetic value identical. But when the witch says it, the name suddenly has a sharp edge. Katt shivers at it, and Oll feels John wince.\n\n'It is the same phrase,' says Hassan.\n\n'No,' says Actae. 'Names have power, and they are mutable. Meanings may shift and change. One thing becomes another. That phrase has a simple enough meaning for us. But in other places its meaning is quite different and specific.'\n\n'What places?' Vulkan asks.\n\n'In the warp, sir. In the unresolved realms of possibility that only prophesy can see. In the day of days when time runs out. Oh, by the lights of the stars... it has been spoken?'\n\n'It has,' says Vulkan. 'The Sigillite and my father both, they said it represented an ending, and a death.'\n\n'And more,' replies Actae. 'The Dark King is more.'\n\nAgain, as she says it, Oll feels it cut the air, like a razor against soft skin.\n\n'Pity's sake,' murmurs John, 'every time she says it...'\n\n'What?' asks Oll.\n\n'I mean, I can hear what she's saying, and I can see her damn lips move, but there is another meaning hidden inside the phrase. I hear echoes of aeldari, and other xenos lexicons. Like they all have the same words, or that many meanings have all converged on one sound.'\n\n'What are you talking about?' Hassan snaps.\n\n'Listen to him,' says Oll. 'He is a logokine, and words to him are living things.'\n\n'Explain the meaning,' says Hassan.\n\nJohn shrugs helplessly. 'I can't... just with a sense of inevitability and... and extinction.'\n\nLeetu has risen to his feet. 'My lord primarch,' he says softly, 'that card was not part of my deck. I have owned those cards for years. They were a gift from my mistress. I know every one of them, front and back. I have never seen that card before. It was not in my deck when I came to this palace.'\n\nVulkan frowns at the card. 'Yet it is clearly made by the same hand, to the same stylistic design, and of identical materials,' he says. 'Chosen? Have it examined by cartomancers and scryers. And you... Tell me what you know of it at once.'\n\n'Lord,' says Actae, with some reluctance, 'the Dark King is... it is the name first written in the time before man, and repeated ever since, unbidden, by the prophets of all species. It is a name symbolising the rising god to come.'\n\n'There are no gods!' scoffs Raja.\n\n'You're a fool,' Actae tells him. 'Before the fall of the aeldari, there was no fourth power of Chaos. The gods of Chaos breed and multiply, propagating like storms through the empyrean. They are born in turn, though they have all existed forever. Time has no meaning for them. The fall of the aeldari did not cause the birth of She Who Thirsts, merely her occurrence. So too with all other gods, be they foul entities of Chaos, or divine forces of sentient power.'\n\n'She Who Thirsts was born out of the death of an entire sentient culture,' says John.\n\n'Such is the inevitable fate of all advanced, psychic species,' says Actae. 'And the Dark King is our fate. This war, my lord, is not one of loyalists against traitors. It is not about the conquest of Terra and mankind by Chaos. It is certainly not about a son at war with his father. This is the Triumph of Ruin. Horus and the Emperor have taken their conflict to such a pitch, that we are about to suffer the same fate as the cursed aeldari. The human race will die in birth-fire, consumed by blood-rage, pestilence, violent transmutation and blind desire. And from the grave-pyre of our civilisation, the broken galaxy will see Horus rising, absolute and complete, as a new, true and terrible god.'\n\nShe bows her head, shivering. At her side, Katt looks across at Oll with an expression of hopeless shock.\n\n'She's telling the truth,' she says.\n\n4:xxii\n\nHandprint\n\nHe has lost sight of the others. Collection 888 didn't seem as extensive as the Hall's upper galleries, but its twilit, mazy layout has enveloped him. He can hear Mauer's voice, now and then, and occasionally a word or two in answer from Loken, somewhere beyond the shelves that surround him like walls.\n\nSindermann walks the length of another row of stasis-held pictures, the lights blinking on as he gets close to each one. He sees a faded, extraordinary painting entitled The Tower of Babel. He stares at it for a long time. Was it a particularly favourite piece of His? Cherished for its technique, or simply its immense age? Does it have a meaning? A pertinent meaning he can decipher?\n\nNext to it, an arresting expressionist piece called The Five Thrones by an unknown artist working in the last years of the 66th century. It shows the distant, chair-like structures at a distance, so they appear huge, the size of buildings or pyramids. They are set within a city of strange design, viewed as through some curtain of flames. Is it a view of hell from outside, or heaven seen from hell?\n\nSindermann looks at it until it no longer makes sense, or perhaps makes too much sense. He has begun to suspect that no meaning may be extracted from anything in the library, for he and the others have no frame of reference. There is no way to understand the nature of the curation. If they knew why each piece was kept, they could begin to identify the significances.\n\nHe opens one of the sliding cabinets, and a light comes on inside illuminating a large, preparatory sketch. The delicate pencil work has somehow survived millennia. It is evidently a technical copy, made by hand, of an original work now long lost. There is no label. It shows a hunt or chase. There are antelope and bison, side-on, mid-leap, and startled deer breaking and running. There are men, with bows and spears. All the figures are crude and stylised to the point of simplicity. Sindermann imagines the original was a piece of parietal art, displayed on the wall of a cave or chamber, rendered in oxides and charcoal. Only this traced copy remains. Despite the simplicity, he can see the motion and energy, the urgency of the hunt, and even the arcing path, between hand and fleeing antelope, that the cast spear will follow. He can see the flank where the spear will strike. At the edges of the image there are additional marks that seem to indicate vegetation or undergrowth, and shapes seem to lurk within those marks. It's not clear what they are. Perhaps they are supposed to be other animals, or concealed predators lying in wait. Beside them, in the corner, is the outline of a human handprint.\n\nIt's not so much a picture, Sindermann decides, more a diagram, a visual plan. It's so old, Sindermann doubts anyone has an idea of its full significance any more, or could explain the maker's intent. He sighs. He closes the display cabinet, and wanders through the winding stacks to find the others.\n\nMauer is sitting, perched, on the top of a rolling ladder.\n\n'According to the' - she pauses, and checks the cover of the book in her hand - 'Last Chronicles of the Lemurian Kingdoms, \"All kingdoms on the Earth fall and perish when those that rule become absolute in power.\"' She looks down at him. 'So there's that,' she says.\n\n'Where is the archivist?'\n\nThey both look around. Loken has reappeared.\n\n'Where is she?' he asks.\n\n'Here, sir,' says the archivist. Sindermann realises she had been in the shadows nearby the whole time.\n\n'A question,' says Loken. 'Follow me.'\n\nHe turns and starts to walk. Warily, the archivist follows him. Sindermann glances at Ma"}
{"text":"the Lemurian Kingdoms, \"All kingdoms on the Earth fall and perish when those that rule become absolute in power.\"' She looks down at him. 'So there's that,' she says.\n\n'Where is the archivist?'\n\nThey both look around. Loken has reappeared.\n\n'Where is she?' he asks.\n\n'Here, sir,' says the archivist. Sindermann realises she had been in the shadows nearby the whole time.\n\n'A question,' says Loken. 'Follow me.'\n\nHe turns and starts to walk. Warily, the archivist follows him. Sindermann glances at Mauer. She jumps down off the rolling ladder and they fall in step behind.\n\nThree rows of shelves over, Loken comes to a halt in front of the wall.\n\n'Where does that lead?' he asks.\n\n'Sir, I... I don't know.'\n\nHe looks at her. 'You work here. You must know.'\n\nDeeply scared of him, she shakes her head.\n\n'I really don't,' she answers in a fragile whisper.\n\nThere's a hatch in the wall. A large hatch. It's not a door like the one they entered by. It reminds Sindermann of a security hatch, or even an airgate. It is robust and heavy duty. He can see the marks of wear and use around the sill and the seal rim. It's old. It's been in service for years. The grey steel looks like dirty ice in the gloom.\n\n'It must go somewhere,' Loken says. 'Is it an exterior hatch? Or does it secure another collection? If the latter, then it must be something significant.'\n\nThe archivist shakes her head.\n\n'It has to go somewhere,' echoes Mauer. 'Do you have a key?'\n\nAgain, the archivist, struck dumb with nerves, shakes her head.\n\n'I don't remember seeing it when we came in,' says Sindermann.\n\n'Neither do I,' says Loken. He turns to the archivist. 'Please,' he says, 'I understand you're scared. But where does the hatch go? Is it a secure area you are not allowed to enter?'\n\n'Sir,' she says. She swallows hard, her voice tremulous. 'I'm trying to tell you... I don't know where it goes because I didn't know there was a door there.'\n\n'You didn't know?'\n\n'Sir, I have been in here several times over the years. I have never seen that door before in my life.'\n\nMauer draws her sidearm.\n\n'Everybody step back,' says Loken.\n\nThey do so, but not far. They stand and watch as Loken approaches the hatch. He traces his fingers across its surface, and studies it closely. He presses his hand, palm flat, against the wall to try the lock mechanism.\n\nTo his surprise, there is a thump, and the hatch slides open. A gust of stale air blows out. Sindermann smells smoke, the cold hint of a fire gone out.\n\nBeyond the hatch is a metal corridor with grilled decking. It is quite unlike the design and fabric of the Hall.\n\nLoken glances back at them.\n\n'Stay here,' he tells them. 'I mean it.'\n\nHe steps through the hatch. The corridor is dim. Pipework threads the walls. There are lamps set in the ceiling, but they are deactivated or broken. Small, emergency lights in the wall emit a soft, amber glow.\n\nHe takes a few steps. He has a rising, disconcerting sense of familiarity. He dismisses it. Foolish. All Imperial architecture looks alike. The same templates are used everywhere. This could be a bulk hallway anywhere in the Palace, a corridor in any-\n\nLoken stops. There is a designator mark stencilled on the wall panel. He reads it, then reads it again to make sure he isn't going mad.\n\nHe retraces his steps and walks back into the library.\n\n'Well?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'I'm going to explore further,' Loken says. He wants to tell Mauer to summon support, but he knows that no one will answer her calls. He wants to tell them to run, to lock all the doors behind them and get the hell out of the Hall of Leng, get the hell out and hide.\n\nBut he knows there is nowhere left to hide.\n\nNowhere is safe. The Sanctum is no longer a sanctuary. He doesn't want to panic them. Panic will help no one. Their last minutes or hours shouldn't be spent in terror, because terror and death will find them soon enough.\n\n'Stay here,' he says instead. 'Don't follow me.'\n\nThey stare at him.\n\n'Do you understand?' Loken asks.\n\n'Yes, yes,' says Mauer.\n\n'What is it, Garvi?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'Nothing, I hope,' Loken replies. 'A service corridor. A sub-access. Let me just check.'\n\nHe looks Sindermann in the eyes for a second. The old man nods.\n\nLoken turns, and steps back into the corridor. Inside, he presses his hand against the interior plate and the hatch slides shut behind him. It knows his touch. His biometric print. Of course it does. He would still be in the record. At least Mauer and Kyril and the archivist can't open the hatch and come after him. It won't respond to their touch. It has never granted any of them full clearance.\n\n4:xxiii\n\nMy father's house\n\nOnce the hatch is shut, he unclamps his helm from his waist, and puts it on. He locks the neck seals and wakes the visor. Over his back, he draws Mourn-It-All and Rubio's blade.\n\nLoken begins to walk forward. He pauses at the stencil marker and reads it again, just to make sure he hasn't made a mistake.\n\nHe hasn't.\n\nHe is standing in Sub-Access (Port Ventral) 423762.\n\nHe is aboard the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nINTERLUDE\n\nTHOSE WHO BEAR WITNESS i\n\nThe Dance Without End\n\nA masque has come to Ulthwe, the first masque since the Fall.\n\nIt has come without summons, like a gift: a harlequinade of the Rillietann, the first seen in centuries, stepping from the slanting light of a far-angled gate, and walking in silence through the wraithbone chambers of the craftworld to the Ovation. There, without preliminary or overture, they start their performance.\n\nThe asuryani of Ulthanash Shelwe gather to behold it. Some ask, What is the meaning? Is this a blessing, or a portent? Some ask, What is this dance?\n\nEldrad Ulthran knows. Though the Harlequins have remained hidden in the webway since the Fall, wards of the Laughing God Cegorach, their dance has never ended. They have danced in seclusion, maintaining the old masques, such as The Penumbral and The Leering Moon, and adding new ones, such as The Dance Without End. He has never seen that masque, but he has heard tell of it. It is the great rite of lament, added to their repertoire during the years of seclusion, for it depicts the tragedy of the Fall.\n\nEldrad comes to the Ovation to stand with the others and watch. The Ovation is his favourite place on Ulthwe. Of great compass, it is the only chamber on the craftworld that feels as though it is outside. Here, there is a wide span of sky, a soft sunset, and a broad tract of eitoc grassland nodding in an idle breeze. A ring of soft beige rocks surrounds the grassy bowl of the stage, a kilometre wide. The shadows are long and the dusk muted. All of it is simulated. Psi-engram circuits in the wraithbone deck and soaring dome manufacture this environment from memories, and optical fields make the space feel even larger than it actually is. He stands among the rocks with the others, watching the dance, feeling the remembered sunlight, smelling the recalled scents of eitoc and the wildflowers. Around the imagined horizon, evening thunder rolls, and lightning prowls. But the noise is not thunder, and the blink-flash is not lightning. It is the crackle of active gates far away, around the edges of the room.\n\nThe dance is a spectacle of the highest theatre. A full company, troupes of mimes and jesters, of warlocks, of light and shade and in-between, led by their master Harlequin, all clad in dazzling domino suits, all vizarded in the false-faces of their chosen agaith. And with them, the blue shade of a Solitaire, signifying the prestige of the piece. They move across the floor of the grassy bowl in a choreography that is both surgically precise and as fluid as water.\n\nWhen the dance ends, the dancers promptly begin again, repeating the entire sequence.\n\nWord spreads. Despite the mounting anxiety and the desperate measures of preparation being undertaken across the aeldari diaspora, emissaries come to behold the masque. The first harlequinade since the Fall is a thing of true significance, and must be witnessed. The emissaries arrive through the far-angled gates. They come from craftworlds scaling for reactive war; from others fleeing at maximum impeller towards the galactic hem; from precious crone worlds raising their defences; from shuttered maiden worlds hiding their most precious thoughts in soulglass flasks; from Exodite communities withdrawing to their covenanted places of safety. No matter the crisis, the masque must be attended.\n\nThen no one comes. Sudden squalls of immaterial horror boil and spill through the far-angled pathways. Transit is no longer possible. The old ways are blocked. Eldrad orders the gates closed. Those who are here must remain. Those who have not yet arrived may never come, and many may have been lost en route.\n\nEldrad has expected this. He is reluctant to admit that he had not, however, farseen it. In the past weeks, farsight has progressively clouded and dimmed, blocked by etheric tumult just as transit is now blocked. The future is either hidden from asuryani eyes, or it is no longer there.\n\nNechrevort, the emissary of Commorragh, is last to arrive before the gates close.\n\nThe Guardians close in at once at the sight of an envoy of the aeldari's reviled and degenerate cousins.\n\n'I come to witness, unbladed,' she says, her scarified palms raised, her smile lethal. 'Will you deny me?'\n\n'I will deny no one,' Eldrad replies, 'not even an eladrith ynneas. The masque is for our blood, where ever it runs.' He signals to the Guardians to back away.\n\n'I think our blood will run,' she says, as she walks beside him through the nodding grass towards the Ovation. 'Yours, farseer. Mine. Don't you?'\n\n'Your tone is prognosticatory, Dracon Nechrevort. I thought the drukhari had no truck with the farminded arts?'\n\n'We need no farsight to see the doom come upon us,' she replies. 'The mon-keigh have outdone themselves. They will drag more than their own kind to annihilation.'\n\nThe masque has been underway for nine days. On the Ovation's stage, the whirling figures of the company sha"}
{"text":"he says, as she walks beside him through the nodding grass towards the Ovation. 'Yours, farseer. Mine. Don't you?'\n\n'Your tone is prognosticatory, Dracon Nechrevort. I thought the drukhari had no truck with the farminded arts?'\n\n'We need no farsight to see the doom come upon us,' she replies. 'The mon-keigh have outdone themselves. They will drag more than their own kind to annihilation.'\n\nThe masque has been underway for nine days. On the Ovation's stage, the whirling figures of the company shape agonies and ecstasies with formal precision and sinuous grace. They tumble in the air like birds, they flutter like leaves, they spring and bound, and curve around each other. The domino suits shine and flash, iridescent. When the dance ends, they begin it again, repeating the same suite of symbolic movements.\n\nThe sky is carved from smoke, and the breeze tastes of sadness. Eldrad and the kabal dracon join the onlookers on the rock rim. Eldrad sees autarchs look away, shunning the drukhari. He sees exarchs scowling at her presence, and Exodites moving to stand apart. None make menace, for to do so would be to abuse the hospitality of Ulthwe.\n\nThe emissary of Iyanden shows no compunction. She steps close to Eldrad, despite the dracon nearby.\n\n'What have you seen?' she asks him, quietly, as they observe the harlequinade.\n\n'Nothing, Mehlendri,' he replies.\n\n'Have you looked?'\n\n'You ask me that, Silversoul? I have looked. There is nothing to be seen. This you know, for, from the fear in your eyes, I know you have looked too. Nothing is visible, and even if it was, what good is it to us? To farsee is to know the yet-to-come. What use is sight alone?'\n\n'Anticipation, always our virtue,' replies his visitor. 'To farsee is to read the path, and from that the steps may be changed.'\n\nHe looks at her.\n\n'I love you for your trust in that,' he says. 'Yet I hate you that you still cleave to that idea.'\n\n'Anticipation has won me many victories,' she says.\n\n'Perhaps.'\n\n'I have farseen defeats, and changed the steps so that Iyanden has arrived instead at triumph.'\n\n'Have you, Silversoul? Or have your Aspects simply fought harder and prevailed?'\n\nShe frowns. 'I lament to hear the great farseer speak so ill of his art. Why would the asuryani be given the sight to read fate if not to change it?'\n\n'Because life is cruel,' he replies.\n\n'Eldrad,' she says, 'I came to Ulthwe to consult you, for Ulthwe sees further than any-'\n\n'You came to see the masque,' he says, 'and that is enough. The Harlequins come from seclusion to dance for us. That tells us all we need to know. A great catastrophe passes through the stars. We will be lucky to survive it.'\n\n'We have farseen its coming for years. Now it is upon us, there must be something we can-'\n\n'Now you counsel for action, Iyandeni? When the asuryani have spent years condemning any involvement with the mammals and their wars? We knew they would burn out. We saw that much. This is how it happens.'\n\n'But on such a scale, Eldrad? Yes, we farsaw their fall. But we underestimated their potential for destructive spite. Their home world, now the focus of their final grief, sinks like a hot coal through the silk of creation and spills the warp. Our sight has dimmed, and the Harlequins come to dance. That can only mean their final fall will be a second fall for us, consuming all.'\n\n'Then run, Silversoul.'\n\n'Iyanden runs, Ulthran.'\n\n'And Ulthwe cannot. We are lodged in the scar tissue of our own mistake.'\n\n'So you would... give up?'\n\nHe turns from her. In the pale air of the simulated sunset, he sees other emissaries nearby watching their exchange with interest. He sees the amused smirk of Nechrevort.\n\nHe claps his hands three times.\n\n'Stop the masque!' he commands.\n\nThe dancers falter and stop. On the Ovation's stage, the Harlequins glare at him from behind their startling masks, some crouched low, about to spring or spin, some lowering outstretched arms. Only the nodding grasses stir.\n\nEldrad stands in the moth-light, and extends his arms. His robes melt into vapour. His armour comes to him, soft ribbons of glassy colour that bind and settle upon his limbs and body until he is tight-cased in the aspect of war.\n\n'I will tell you what I have seen,' he announces to the gathered luminaries. 'I will tell you what I have done.'\n\nThe Harlequins hiss, and huddle in a lithe mass, arms around each other.\n\n'Once, behind us on the trodden path, there was a great people,' he says, 'of mighty accomplishment and sharp supremacy, who inherited the stars and all that webs between-'\n\n'Do not school us, Eldrad,' objects Kouryan of Biel-Tan.\n\n'-and in their supremacy and accomplishment, they foresaw where their path would lead, yet they did not change the steps or turn aside.'\n\nMehlendri glares at him, offended. 'Recite not our shame as though it is an argument against our art,' she says.\n\n'Our shame?' he asks.\n\n'You speak of the asuryani, in the time before She came to quench her thirst upon us, and this is known, and this is mourned. But it is no argument. Our loss, though the greatest of all losses, simply reinforces the necessity of our craft. What we farsee, we act upon. What is yet-to-come, we recompose. This is the bitter lesson of the Fall. Our pride blinded us. We have heeded our farsight since-'\n\n'The story was not ours,' Eldrad replies. 'I was speaking of another, the younger kind. Their steps are the same, as though they have learned the same dance from us, and now perform it with us, a duet, echoing every move.'\n\n'They are low things,' snaps Jain Zar. 'They are a million years behind us. They seek to ape our past glory, but they will never rise to such refinement. They will wipe themselves out, as a thousand other kinds have done before them. We have avoided their outgrowth as much as we can, and kept out of their affairs. They will soon be gone.'\n\n'Very soon,' Eldrad agrees. 'What concerns us is the manner of their passing.'\n\nHe looks at them all.\n\n'For generations, we have farseen the damnation of the human - yes, let's call them what they are - the damnation of the human line. These upstarts who, nonetheless, have forged an empire worthy of the name. Their vigour has surprised us. We have watched them repeat the same hubristic mistakes we made. We have awaited their inevitable ruin, for is it not the fate of all species that harness the power of the mind to affect their destiny? I warned of this, Ulthwe warned of this, but you refused involvement. I chose to ignore that decision.'\n\nThere is a murmur of dismay.\n\n'I have manipulated certain parties in an effort to head off this disaster, for I knew then what you know now. Not only the human line shall perish. My efforts, over years of careful agency, have come to little. Some of my actions have been ill-judged, and I have trimmed the skeins of fate to correct them as best I can. But I have tried. Now you protest, in your woe, that it is time to take action. It is too late. The one called Horus Lupercal wields too much power for us to stand against him. I have one principal agent left in play. He has ensured that the forces opposing the Lupercal have one great champion more than they would have otherwise, the so-called Promethean Son. My agent may be able to do more, but I fear not. Our sight is dim because there is no future to observe. We have no choice but to see out the policy you determined, to let them burn, and fight back the flames of conflagration if they come too close to us. Or, if fate is cruel, and the human line does not end itself, then we will prepare to resist a broken species fuelled by Chaos. We have no choice now but to wait. The Harlequins come to dance for us, The Dance Without End, to remind us what we are capable of enduring, for we must endure again, and weep, for it is only proper, the passing of a sentient kind.'\n\n'Fine words,' says Nechrevort, breaking the silence that follows. 'But incorrect in one detail.'\n\n'How so?' asks Eldrad.\n\nNechrevort gestures at the recoiled Harlequins.\n\n'That, High Farseer of Ulthwe, was not The Dance Without End,' she says.\n\n'Tell me what you mean, drukhari.'\n\n'I have seen the dance,' she says. 'The Harlequin troupes may not have left the far-angled ways since the first breath of She Who Thirsts, but they have danced their masques in High Commorragh.'\n\n'For you alone?' asks Jain Zar.\n\n'We made no secret of it,' says Nechrevort, 'but none of you seemed to want to come. You would have been welcome. We are not savages. We can honour the terms of masque-truce as well as you. Still, my point is, I have seen The Dance Without End. Three times. And each time I wept in shame and fury at what was lost of us all. I know the steps and forms. This is not that dance.'\n\n'Of course it is,' says Eldrad.\n\n'It is very like, I agree, farseer,' she replies. 'The forms of it, the structure, and many of the steps. It follows the same pattern. It has the same number of performers, the same distinctions of light, dark and twilight troupes. The four mimes are still daemons. The Death Jesters are still the harvesters of mortality. It depicts the fall of a race, and the birth of a god. But these nine troupers do not represent the old race. And the Arebennian Solitaire does not represent She Who Thirsts.'\n\n'No,' says Eldrad. 'You are mistaken.'\n\n'Am I?' asks the drukhari emissary. 'I wish I was.' She looks over at the Harlequins. 'What is the name of this dance?' she asks.\n\n'It is The Dance of the End and the Death,' hisses the troupe master, the words awkward as though he has forgotten how to speak.\n\n'And what role does the Solitaire play?'\n\n'The one that shall be born,' replies the troupe master with a growl. 'The new god.'\n\nEldrad feels a chill upon his skin. It is not a simulation of the room. How has he not seen this? Or has he just refused to see it because the implications are too terrible?\n\n'What is the name of your role?' Eldrad asks the hooded soloist.\n\n'The Dark King,' the Solitaire replies.\n\nii\n\nA mote of discordia\n\nMar"}
{"text":", the words awkward as though he has forgotten how to speak.\n\n'And what role does the Solitaire play?'\n\n'The one that shall be born,' replies the troupe master with a growl. 'The new god.'\n\nEldrad feels a chill upon his skin. It is not a simulation of the room. How has he not seen this? Or has he just refused to see it because the implications are too terrible?\n\n'What is the name of your role?' Eldrad asks the hooded soloist.\n\n'The Dark King,' the Solitaire replies.\n\nii\n\nA mote of discordia\n\nMars listens. Mars watches. Mars waits.\n\nThere is never silence here, only a constant, low hum of readiness and patience. All things work in one coadunated, holy purpose, all sounds blend into one sound. It is the bass throb of sacred data-rivers flowing through the hyper-cooled cores of the mass cogitators, creating and constantly updating a model of divine reality. It is the purr of the deep-set reactors, sunk like wells into the planet's mantle, generating and regulating colossal power. It is the moan of wind sawing the high-tension cables that support the sensoria dishes, each up-turned like an open flower, each ten kilometres in diameter, each cupped in a precision-drilled crater across the red rock of the Lantis Planitia, the single most massive detection array in the Solar Realm.\n\nIt is the crackle and cluck of radiation monitors on the scorched surface, and the scrubbing whir of environmental processors in the measureless red-lit vaults. It is the motion of a billion adepts and magi moving through the chambers of the forge like lifeblood through the chambers of a body, each with a dedicated task to perform, each task unified with the rest. It is the rumble of idling drive systems that comes, like distant thunder, from the numberless bulk conveyers suspended like impossible islands in the seared blue of the Martian sky, or clustered like suckling aphids around the docking spires of the Ring of Iron; a fleet to rival that of the Warmaster, but built to reconstruct and re-forge. It is the throb of immaculate standard templates held in stasis archives. It is the ceaseless binharic murmur of the noosphere, linking every last component of the True Mechanicum, the whispering voice of Mars, speaking from and to all things, soothing, reassuring, enlightening, exact, omniscient.\n\nMars waits. An entire priesthood culture, the perfect fusion of god machine and spiritual organics, synchronised across a city the size of a continent which modifies the face of Mars like an augmetic implant, dedicated in every specification to the true and real Omnissiah that has finally been revealed...\n\nMars waits for the word. In the very heart of Olympus Mons, Kelbor-Hal waits to give it.\n\nThe Fabricator General, sleeved in a temple-cocoon of filament wires and data cables, suspended in noospheric rapture, observes the oceanic mass of data. The cupped dishes of the Lantis Planitia are his eyes, the networked swarm of orbital auspex nodes his ears, the sky-tilted augury systems and prognosticators his pulse. He observes, parsing the data-current, meticulously appraising even the smallest and most insignificant unit of code. He does not sleep, for he needs no sleep. He registers no impatience, for impatience requires a contrasting capacity for patience, and those are vestigial organic qualities he has long since had excised, along with his limbs, his principal organs and his teeth. There is no frustration, no trace of the fretful urgency that would torment an organic. There is merely a binary synthesis of passive and active states.\n\nPassive, he waits and ingests data. Active, he notes the passage of time, the lack of response to his communications. Passive, his dish-eyes study the raw lesion of light that now occupies the astronomical position of Terra in the heavens. Active, he records the increasing loss of data-definition in that area, the cessation of signals from the Warmaster's invasion fleet, the interruption of reliable analysis of the Terran surface warzone, the steadily increasing levels of immaterial radiation. Passive, he monitors as the mass cogitators scrutinise the spectra of these new energies, and decide on names and definitions for them, and projects their interaction with realspace dynamics. Active, he reviews the last signals from the Warmaster, the complex terms of their negotiated treaty, and the resources he has agreed to facilitate.\n\nKelbor-Hal will not dishonour his pact. The True Mechanicum will not dishonour its pact. No detail of the arrangements will be left incomplete.\n\nWhen the Lupercal signals that the deed is done, the compliance of Terra achieved, and that obscenity the False Emperor overthrown, the Fabricator General will give the word, Mars will mobilise, and the waiting fleets of bulk conveyers will set out for Terra to begin the reconfiguration and restoration of the Throneworld.\n\nHe notes, in his personal thought-archive, that the deed is taking longer than he anticipated, and longer than the Warmaster boldly estimated. The siege drags on. It has lasted nine point seven months, relative, longer than Kelbor-Hal's initial projection. The False Emperor and his forces have displayed intensely stubborn levels of resistance, though that in itself was a variable the Fabricator General had presumed. Kelbor-Hal has never underestimated the False Emperor. Though defiantly secular, allowing for no shred of spirituality, the so-called Master of Mankind had come to the Red World in the guise of a god. This was a knowing act, confessing no divinity, but suggesting it, the true triumph of faith over proof. The Mechanicum had accepted the Emperor as the Omnissiah Manifest, and he had made no effort to deny that idea, for it suited him to have Mars worship and follow him. This had caused the Schism, a crisis of faith from which the priesthood had barely recovered. But in those dark days of division, new secrets had been learned from the logi-stacks of forbidden vaults. Some, the hereteks, had called it scrap code, the contagious meme-words of abominable intelligences, but Kelbor-Hal and his loyal magi had recognised the truth in it. The scriptures of Moravec had revealed the true word of the Omnissiah. The Terran Emperor was no god incarnate. Kelbor-Hal had used the scripture code to unite and heal Mars, to unify and repair it, to link it in one manifold absolute, and to build the new, True Mechanicum from the ruins of the old theocracy.\n\nKelbor-Hal will not permit the False Emperor to deceive his kind again. Mars will prevail, holy and divine, and Terra will fall, taking the Lord of Heresy with it.\n\nHe watches carefully. The levels of gross realspace trauma afflicting the Terran location as a by-product of the compliance are also higher than his initial speculated models. Realspace fabric is eroding and collapsing at an exponential rate. Nineteen new forms of xeno-etheric energies have been identified. He wonders if there will be anything left at the end. He wonders if there will be any fragment of Terra remaining from which to rebuild. Perhaps the remains of Terra will be left so toxic and ruinous that the entire site will need to be abandoned, and the new Throneworld raised on Mars instead. That would please the Omnissiah.\n\nHe waits. Mars waits. They are the same thing, priest and world synthesised into one symbiotic entity, poised and ready, singular in faith.\n\nThe constant hum alters slightly. It is an infinitely tiny sub-harmonic shift that only he can detect. A minute variable. An error in a single unit of code.\n\nCurious, he locates it, draws it to the surface of the data-sea for inspection, as one might select a single grain of sand from an ocean floor. It is a tiny aberration, one single proto-cell of data misaligned with the rest of the reality organism. At first, he cannot define the nature of its error. He adjusts his noospheric appraisal, and deploys higher levels of analytic scrutiny.\n\nIt is a tiny mote of discordia. A single packet of information return, one of a trillion received every second by the sensoria of Mars. It is out of step with all the others. It is not temporally synchronised with the rest, by a factor of one millionth of a second, even allowing for relative position. Its time is wrong. Kelbor-Hal presumes this to be a micro-discrepancy in imaging or auspex mesh, a tiny imperfection in the Mars arrays. Active, he tests this assumption, running diagnostic examinations of the Mechanicum systems to locate machine fault, technical malfunction, data-decay and storage\/evaluation flaw. Concurrently, he instructs a full re-scan as a comparative.\n\nIt is mildly diverting. Faults occur in every system, no matter how immaculate, due to the holy laws of entropy. They are always a pleasure to correct, for the correction of a micro-error is the path to perfection. It is the first error he has detected in four months. It is something to do besides wait.\n\nThe diagnostics report no fault. The re-scan returns the same error. Alertly active now, the Fabricator General repeats the diagnostics and the re-scan. The diagnostics report no fault. The re-scan now returns two micro-errors. Two motes of discordia. Two temporal anomalies.\n\nKelbor-Hal diverts all primary magi to address the issue. By the time - four nanoseconds - they are in work, the error return is four. Then sixteen. Then two hundred and fifty-six.\n\nHe is watching a cascade failure. An expanding zone of temporal collapse. The epicentre is Terra, but the error-wave is accelerating outwards across the Solar Realm.\n\nTime is broken. The four-dimensional structure of realspace is unravelling, dismantled by the exoplanar forces bulging through the rift-wound that the Warmaster has inflicted on Terra.\n\nTime is broken. Kelbor-Hal pauses, and reframes his definition, realising that it is woefully imprecise. Time isn't broken. Time has ceased. It has stopped. It has frozen, suspended.\n\nThe constant low hum of Mars changes again. Cautionary sirens start to wail in th"}
{"text":"s accelerating outwards across the Solar Realm.\n\nTime is broken. The four-dimensional structure of realspace is unravelling, dismantled by the exoplanar forces bulging through the rift-wound that the Warmaster has inflicted on Terra.\n\nTime is broken. Kelbor-Hal pauses, and reframes his definition, realising that it is woefully imprecise. Time isn't broken. Time has ceased. It has stopped. It has frozen, suspended.\n\nThe constant low hum of Mars changes again. Cautionary sirens start to wail in the depths of the forge. Kelbor-Hal composes a priority signal to the Warmaster, and sends it on repeat. He watches as the wave of un-time, rolling out from Terra, begins to break across the Martian Zone. He watches as the harmonised chronometers of the forge suspend, or zero out.\n\nHe watches as the clocks stop.\n\nHe watches as the measureless data in the caverns of his domain begins to re-form and rewrite, recomposing into new units of information, each one identical, each one the same word, each one the same binharic expression of a name.\n\nIt is the name of the Omnissiah. The new Omnissiah. The true Omnissiah.\n\nKelbor-Hal begins to scream, which is quite unlike him.\n\niii\n\nThe last hand\n\nIn the imposed silence, they play games, not as diversion, but to maintain some modicum of mental performance. Niora Su-Kassen had, for the first two months, chosen regicide as her habit, playing against the bridge crew and, when the opportunity arose, against Captain Halbract and the other Huscarl seniors of the Praetorian contingent. Playing regicide against an Imperial Fist was an exercise in futility, until Su-Kassen recognised the substrate of ground war strategies they imposed on the board. Innovating, purely to keep her mind curious, she introduced some battlefleet tactics to her game, principally theories of swarm assault and elective sacrifice, and so defeated Halbract twice, and forced a stalemate three times. She knew she would savour the expression on his face for the rest of her life. A hint of wounded pride, but also a fascination that bordered on hunger. The next time they played, Halbract had analysed his losses, ascertained her tactical ploys, and adjusted accordingly. He resumed his winning streak. He had learned from defeat, and revised his strategies. She never won again.\n\nThat is not the reason she has stopped playing regicide, though. After two months, a game predicated on the concept of killing a king seems distasteful.\n\nShe makes the ship her habit instead.\n\nThe ship. The Phalanx, the largest and greatest fortress-vessel in human history. She prowls its walkways and galleries, its fighting decks and drive compartments, hour after hour, inspecting it minutely, and sometimes undertaking her own adjustments and maintenance. She speaks, in whispers, to every crewperson she encounters, from duty officers down to the lowliest munition serfs and stokers. She learns names. She hears fragments of life stories. She observes their habits and the games they play to stay alert. Regicide, Nine-gambit and Senet in the officers' refectory; Ashtapada in cartography; Gow, and Hounds and Wolves, in the war room; games of dice and wager in the billet decks; hands of Tarock on the fuse canisters of the autoloaders; rounds of Song and Cartomance in the dining halls, fast-shuffled turns of Thrice-My-Trick in the boiler sumps.\n\nBoredom is the immediate foe. Boredom, and a commensurate slackening of morale and readiness. The Phalanx, for all its might, is cowering in the radiation shadow of Saturn's rings, veiled by the gas giant's magnetic fields. Along with it, just as silent, lurk hundreds of loyalist warships, the survivors of the Solar War, the scrap remnants of the Legion fleets, the Saturnine Flotilla, the magnificent Jovian Fleet. All are running dark, systems on minimal, in a state of hibernation as close to full shutdown as possible.\n\nIt is an armada, and with it she could conquer worlds. But against the traitor fleet, it is nothing more than a few wounded strays hiding in a gutter. The Warmaster's ships, a swarm of battle groups, own total dominance of the Solar Realm. To move is to be detected, to be detected is to be annihilated, either in line engagement with the traitor host, where the term 'numerical superiority' feels like an ironic understatement, or picked off like a sickly herd by the rapacious predator formations that stalk the inner and outer spheres.\n\nSu-Kassen sometimes considers annihilation. It has a certain appeal. As an admiral of the Jovian Fleets, as Grand Terran Admiral (Acting), she is a career warrior constructed for war as surely as the Phalanx itself. Fighting, even to the death, seems preferable to waiting in what feels too often like a coward's silence. She dreams of onslaught. She computes strategies and gambits. Every one of them ends in defeat and obliteration at the hands of the traitor mass, with an inevitability that matches Halbract's mastery of regicide. But victory is not her objective. Killing is. She imagines scenarios of a cold start, a mass acceleration, slingshotting her bruised armada into the Terran Sphere. A target-rich environment. There would be no coming back but, Throne above, they would die well. They would claim a price. The Phalanx alone would gut a dozen grand cruisers before it died. They would punish and wound the traitor fleet, shred its flank, and burn all that they could before their time ran out.\n\nIt would be glorious. It would be better than endless silence. It would be something.\n\nBut she keeps the idea to herself. Halbract and the seniors would deny it the moment she suggested it. They would probably have her removed from command. The Phalanx formation is reserved for one, unequivocal purpose: to wait until summoned and, once summoned, to execute a lightning extraction to remove the Emperor from Terra.\n\nThey are the last card to play, the last hand, an acknowledgement of ultimate defeat. They are the last trick, the mechanism of resignation. Their move is the final move, a declaration that the loyalists concede.\n\nWithout them, the Emperor, in final defeat, will simply die.\n\nThe Praetorian Huscarls and the Custodians will not permit that eventuality. They are dedicated to the Emperor's life. Though Terra might fall, unthinkable in itself, He must live.\n\nShe bides her time, waiting for her final duty. Time is slow, as though the clocks have stopped. She doubts the Emperor will ever allow Halbract's endgame. History has demonstrated His determination. He will never leave the Throne, or allow Himself to be removed to safety. She is entirely sure that, in this, He is like her. Fight to the last. No quarter. No concession. To the death.\n\nBut Dorn's order was precise. She, and her armada, and her thousands of personnel, wait to execute a command that will never be completed.\n\nShe puts down the grip-wrench she's holding. In frustration, she had clenched it so tightly her thin fingers are blanched white. She wants to scream to rid her body of tension, but anything beyond a whisper is prohibited. Enemy sensoria are listening, even for the slightest vibration or hull-echo that might give away position. She imagines ways to convince Halbract, but there was no chance of that to begin with, and the odds are even lower since Corswain's run. The Dark Angel and his host of ten thousand, a beacon of hope for a second, until it became clear it was only ten thousand, had elected to make a suicidal sprint for Terra in an effort to secure and relight the Astronomican. It had taken every iota of her diplomacy to convince Halbract to allow it, and more besides to get him to commit the Emperor's flagship, the immense Imperator Somnium. That ship, the fastest and most advanced in her armada, had been the only vessel capable of achieving the run, and the action had necessitated its sacrifice. Corswain had argued that without the light of the Astronomican, no relief fleets could ever find their way to Terra.\n\nThat had been many days ago. Years, so it feels to her. They had watched, from the bridge, the glorious dash. The fire-flashes dotting Terra's orbital zone. The bright flares that winked out. The Somnium had gone, obliterated in the line-breaking charge, and Corswain's warships too, racing in its wake.\n\nNo word had come of the drop's success. No confirmation that anything or anyone had reached the surface alive.\n\nThe Astronomican had not relit.\n\nHalbract had passed no comment, but she knows the entire affair has simply reinforced his resolve.\n\nShe walks the silent spaces between Aft Ventral Circulation and Aft 987 Fitting. She walks the endless lines of waiting Xiphon interceptors in the hangar bays. She wonders if the Astartes' practice cages meet the silence order threshold. She longs to damage something with a sword.\n\nA rating salutes her. A moment for recollection. Tanstayer. Modit Tanstayer, drive assembly second class. She greets him with a whisper, and asks after his stomach, because last time she spoke to him the relentless diet of slab rations had stricken him with the gripes. He is better now, thank you for asking, admiral. She enquires about his winning streak at Tarock, for Tanstayer has more luck with cards than digestion. He says he is a victim of his own success, and the deck crew refuse to wager with him, because he wins too often.\n\n'Besides,' he whispers, 'they are all more entertained by watching Montak.'\n\nSu-Kassen asks to see.\n\nMontak - Guillaume Montak, the assembly chief - is seated in the fitting shops. He is hunched over a tool chest, setting out dog-eared tarot cards on its lid. It is an elderly deck, apparently of the standard Imperial composition, the major and minor arcanas. A ring of watching crew members parts, respectfully, to let her observe.\n\nMontak is an old, whiskered veteran, his gnarled hands stained almost blue from chemical exposure. There are general regulations regarding casual divination, but Su-Kassen is well aware of the deep veins of superstition "}
{"text":"ted in the fitting shops. He is hunched over a tool chest, setting out dog-eared tarot cards on its lid. It is an elderly deck, apparently of the standard Imperial composition, the major and minor arcanas. A ring of watching crew members parts, respectfully, to let her observe.\n\nMontak is an old, whiskered veteran, his gnarled hands stained almost blue from chemical exposure. There are general regulations regarding casual divination, but Su-Kassen is well aware of the deep veins of superstition and tradition that lace the ancient orders of the battlefleet. Voyagers and mariners have always cherished their luck and their portents. She will pass no judgement. She has a deck of her own. Montak seems alert to this too. He greets her arrival without concern, just a simple knowing nod and smile, and continues his spread.\n\nThe Leonormal Spread. An old form, unconventional. The reactive wafers glow in the half-light of the fitting shop. Montak turns the cards face up in the precise sequence of reading, each turn a little flourish, a little twitch of the wrist that makes each card snap.\n\nShe watches the read. The Harlequin of discordia, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne reversed, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower, and The Emperor. He turns the last. The Dark King.\n\nAn odious reading. There is a murmur from those watching. She presumes it is because they, like her, recognise an ill-starred spread. But Montak is grinning. Wagers are changing hands.\n\nSu-Kassen frowns. To her, and she is not without private experience, the spread is poor, and the interpretation painfully bleak. A shift towards discord and the most fell aspects of fortune. A world embattled and lost, a throne overturned... She knows one should not lean towards the literal in any interpretive reading, but The Eye, representing the Ocularis Malifica that marks the doom of the xenos aeldari, cannot help but remind her of the roiling, nephelospheric nimbus of immaterial collapse that the bridge displays show suffusing the Throneworld.\n\n'I don't understand,' she whispers to Tanstayer. 'Why the amusement?'\n\n'Because of the way the cards turned,' he whispers back.\n\n'But they turned upon a disagreeable spread.'\n\n'Yes,' he agrees. 'Again.'\n\nMontak looks up at her and winks. 'Care to wager, admiral?' he says. He gently shuffles the deck.\n\n'On what?' Su-Kassen asks.\n\n'At first, it was the composition,' says Tanstayer. 'A coin for every card predicted. But, since yesterday...'\n\n'Since yesterday?' Su-Kassen asks.\n\n'Since yesterday,' says Montak, 'it is merely bet on yes or bet on no. Will it come the same, or different?'\n\n'The permutations are considerable,' says Su-Kassen. 'It isn't a coin toss.'\n\n'You'd think,' chuckles Montak.\n\n'It's come the same wise every time,' says Tanstayer. 'Every time, the same spread.'\n\n'How many times?' she asks.\n\n'Fifty?' Montak guesses. 'Thereabouts. In a row.'\n\nShe blinks.\n\n'Chief, I know you as a good man and an old rogue,' she says. 'The rogue, I suspect, is now at work. You are fleecing these men with sleight of hand.'\n\n'Not so, my lady,' he says. He offers the deck to her. 'You may sort and shuffle, if you like. Be my guest. If the soul receiving the reading shuffles, it-'\n\n'Transfers energy to the deck,' she says. 'I know the way of it.'\n\nShe takes the deck. The edges of the cards are stained blue. She shuffles, deftly, four times, then cuts, then riffles twice more.\n\n'Oh,' says Montak. 'Lads, we have a card-savvy sharper in our midst.'\n\nThe men snigger. Su-Kassen hands the deck back.\n\nMontak licks the pad of his thumb. He lays the spread again.\n\nThe Harlequin, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower, and The Emperor. Last, The Dark King.\n\nShe stares at the spread.\n\n'Chief,' she says. 'I need you to burn these cards.'\n\nMontak looks at her questioningly. Before she can say more, a light on her data-bracelet starts to flash. Intercoms and hails have been muted, but the bead of light means she is needed on the bridge.\n\n'I'm called away,' she says. 'Burn these cards immediately. That's an order...'\n\nHalbract is waiting for her. The tiered bridge chamber is as vast and silent as a mausoleum.\n\n'Lord Halbract?' she whispers as she enters.\n\nThe Huscarl draws her aside. His sharp face is set hard.\n\n'Admiral,' he says, his voice hushed. 'The clocks have stopped.'\n\n'A malfunction? Which clocks?'\n\n'No, admiral,' he says. 'All clocks. Every chron aboard. Every timepiece aboard the Phalanx. Even relativistic trackers. They have stopped, all frozen at the same moment.'\n\n'We...' she begins. 'What?'\n\nShe breathes hard.\n\n'Has an explanation been offered, Halbract?' she asks, as composed as she is able to be.\n\n'Analysis suggests that immaterial activity in the Sol System has...' Now he hesitates. 'Has somehow afflicted the natural operation of realspace. Time has stopped.'\n\n'Stopped?'\n\n'A still point, without backward or forward motion. A hiatus. A cessation.'\n\n'Over what area?'\n\n'We are still determining, admiral. Perhaps the entire Solar Realm. Perhaps beyond that.'\n\nShe nods, as though it is nothing. She doesn't want the bridge crew seeing the fear brewing inside her. She does not want to appear weak to Halbract.\n\n'Find out, please,' she says. 'As quickly as we can. I authorise use of passive sensoria, but only within the bounds of detection avoidance.'\n\nHalbract nods.\n\nShe walks to her chamber adjoining the bridge. Its gloomy familiarity and lack of scale offers some reassurance, but not enough. She unlocks the brass tantalus and pours a regulation measure of amasec. She swallows it in one hit.\n\nShe sips the second.\n\nShe thinks of Montak. Her own deck of psychoreactive wafers is in her desk drawer. She considers, for a second, taking them out, and shuffling and dealing for herself to expose his roguish palming and tricks of forcing.\n\nBut she has an awful feeling that she knows how the spread will read.\n\nPART FIVE\n\nSTEADFAST AS THOU ART\n\n5:i\n\nFragments\n\nThe dead now outnumber the living, but both the living and the dead are outnumbered by the deathless and the never-alive-at-all.\n\nCorpses are piled five or six deep along the foot of the Delphic Battlement. They died where they fell, driven back against the mighty wall, cut down as they made their last defence with no room left to retreat. They lie, limbs entangled, draped across each other, in the mire. They are not men. They are Titan war engines.\n\nThe few of their kind still standing, the last of the loyalist engines, back slowly through the firestorms of the Palatine, one wretched step after another, discharging their weapons ceaselessly into the onrushing traitor mass. Their power and munitions are almost spent. One by one, they will be taken and toppled: split by armour fire, or felled by Neverborn wrath. Some will detonate like star-deaths, annihilating acres of ground with them. Some will simply stop, power exhausted and reactors choked out, to be overwhelmed from the ground up by traitors, who will scale them like teeming ants until they are shrouded head to foot in moving skins of tiny armoured bodies. Each death will be an epic feat of courage. Each death will be just another engine-kill to be notched on a corroded pauldron or the iron skirts of a daemon-tank. Each death will go unwitnessed.\n\nWarfare moves as one thing, a shifting mosaic of a billion individual pieces. It flows like a flood of tar, sparking with uncountable flashes. A great carpet of fighting human figures has been rolled out across the uneven terrain, up slopes, across ridges, down valleys and over hills. It covers everything, and it is in constant, writhing motion. Numberless weapons, hacking and bludgeoning, numberless shots burning in the air, numberless claws, numberless teeth. Plough-nosed war machines, grinding on treads, score through the fields of warriors, casting bodies into the air behind them like husks from bulk harvesters. The air is dull amber, burned by the glare of the staggering detonations that burst and spray against the pitted walls of the Delphic. The wall-armour plates of ceramite and plasteel flake and bruise, pushed past the limits of their material properties by the relentless fury of assault. Adamantine wall plating, superheated by unholy flame, begins to dribble and ooze, coursing quicksilver tears down the towering battlements.\n\nOnly the locked and final fortress of the Sanctum Imperialis remains. The Palace Dominions, once a celestial city-state that covered the area of a nation, are reduced to its last redoubt, a lone enclave of defiance, girded by the last wall of the Delphic Battlement and the straining casemate of its void shields. Magnificans is long gone, a cremated wilderness of firestorms and rubble. Anterior is no more, a swamp of churned mud and flame-lapped ruins through which the ever-multiplying traitor forces still pour to swell the howling host encircling the Sanctum. Even the outer belts of the Sanctum are lost: the great encircling defence of the Ultimate Wall has been torn down, and each majestic section of its circuit - Europa, Saturnine, Adamant, Western Hemispheric, Indomitor, Exultant - cast over and splintered, along with their bastions, and the names they wore as emblems of resistance. Inside the broken crown of the Ultimate Wall, the Palatine and its inner ring of city-forts burns in hell. Lakes of flame boil around mountains of dead. Ruins fume with frost-fire. Seas of liquid mud stretch uninterrupted for kilometres, like a desolate, endless beach where the tide of war has rolled out, the silt flats and mud bars swirled with coloured bands of chemicals, oils and liquified organics, and dotted with the half-submerged islets of war machines, of dead engines, of fractured bastions, of unidentifiable wreckage, of hills and mounds where lost men made their last stands. Loyal forces, whole"}
{"text":"s of flame boil around mountains of dead. Ruins fume with frost-fire. Seas of liquid mud stretch uninterrupted for kilometres, like a desolate, endless beach where the tide of war has rolled out, the silt flats and mud bars swirled with coloured bands of chemicals, oils and liquified organics, and dotted with the half-submerged islets of war machines, of dead engines, of fractured bastions, of unidentifiable wreckage, of hills and mounds where lost men made their last stands. Loyal forces, whole armies and divisions in some cases, still live and fight in the deathscape of the Palatine Ring, but they are alone, asphyxiated by smoke, unable to advance or retreat, cut off, and already counted as extinct by the despairing war court in Hegemon Control.\n\nSo great is the final cataclysm, in this last un-hour of the day of days, that even Terra itself begins to submit. The earth convulses and splits, wrenching open abyssal canyons and fire-breathing gulfs that swallow loyalist and traitor ranks alike, or gargantuan sinkholes that belch volcanic rage.\n\nOnly the final fortress remains.\n\nIf that. The four divine atrocities of Chaos urge their followers forward, into ever greater throes of feverish devotion. The toppling is now so close, the victory a palpable taste in the air, despite the gagging soot and smoke. In a time of un-time, the victory is already occurring and has occurred.\n\nThose of the Khornate creed seethe forward, the blood drumming inside them so intensely that their vessels and flesh may burst from the pressure. The red partakes of every crime, swollen with a fury that has become a new force of nature. Mercy, pity and hope are obsolete concepts. The Blood God's Neverborn heralds trample such meaningless notions into the morass. They are giant things, larger than the largest Titan engine, their skyscraping antlers glowing neon orange against the thick blackness of the sky.\n\nThose plighted to She Who Thirsts delight in the rapture of collapse. They claw and beat and lick at the last wall, crooning their demented lullabies and unhinged love songs. They thrill with obsessive need and intolerable desire. They are betrothed to ruin, and this is their annunciation. They lust for the coming feast.\n\nThe bloated vermin infected by the Grandfather Lord of Decay scurry and teem through the wreckage, befouled and befouling all, riddled with lice, drooling infected phlegm, boring their mephitic contagion into skin and bone and mind.\n\nThe hierophants of Change and their legions of converts ripple, unstable and in flux, and sing nine-beat hymns to the great rites of transformation: life into death, earth into fire, materia into immateria. Unstable in their thoughts and their atoms alike, they roil like sputtering fire through the torque and mutation of reality. They laugh at the final wall, for it is nothing. There is no outside or inside any more.\n\nEvery pathway is inevitable.\n\nHe is in the bowels of the great ship that was once his home. He knows the way, for his life here was part-spent learning its secrets.\n\nLoken grips his chainsword, the other blades sheathed across his back. He is following the bilges of the vessel, the lowest, darkest zones, alert for any trick or murmur of the foe.\n\nFluid trickles down the walls from the rusted ceiling. The vast service tunnel is knee-deep in frothy liquid. Infrequent service lamps bounce multiple reflections off the surface as he wades through it, sending ripples out in wide circles. The liquid is bright red.\n\nThe last time he was here, this colour was due to rust. Corrosion from higher levels would seep down and stain the bilge-water with its oxides. He can smell it isn't that any more. It's blood. Vast quantities of blood, leaking through the ship from unimaginable carnage many decks above. It's swimming down the ironwork walls, and dripping from the bulkhead spans, collecting and pooling, as though the Vengeful Spirit has suffered some vast haematoma. He wonders if the lividity is visible on the skin of the hull outside.\n\nHe wades on.\n\nThe structure and configuration of the great ship has warped, and is still warping. Loken considers each junction he comes to, each hatch, each access. Which way now? Which way will lead him to his father?\n\nAnd when he finds him in this bloody ruin, what will be left of him?\n\n5:ii\n\nOn becoming more than man\n\nNo one tells you what it will feel like when you become a god.\n\nNo one warns you how strange it will seem. Understandable. How many souls have ever done it, so that they can recount the experience? You were raised to believe that figure was zero, because you were raised to believe there were no gods.\n\nAnother of your father's infinite lies.\n\nNo, let's be fair to Him. That's what He believed. He spent millennia believing He was a lonely king in a godless universe. His realm was empty. It was void and without form. There were no higher powers behind the sky, no omniscient beings dwelling beyond the architecture of the star fields. He was alone, the only being of significant potency in an otherwise mechanical cosmology.\n\nHe was powerful, the most powerful thing in existence, but He was no god, and He knew it. And He knew there were no gods to be found anywhere. There was no fate, no destiny, no purpose, no structure, no plan. The universe was merely a state of materia that had, once upon a time, begun, and which would one day end, and between those two points there was no meaning or sense.\n\nSo He made sense for Himself. There was no one else to do the job. A self-appointed demiurge, He took on the aspect of a god and engineered a fate, and a destiny, and, most certainly, a plan. He imposed a meaning. He must have presumed, along the way, that such a feat would make Him a god, by default, or turn Him into one.\n\nIt didn't.\n\nYou believe He probably thought it had, though. You can see that now. All those years of insisting He was 'just a man', all those edicts denying His divinity. That's just what a man, who thought He was a god, would believe that a god would do. What is that phrase again? Mersadie will know it. 'Methinks He doth protest too much.'\n\nToo much indeed. The affected, self-effacing modesty of the truly arrogant. He thought humility and denial would make people more eager to believe in His divine nature.\n\nKneel at His throne.\n\nQuake at His gaze.\n\nTake His Word for everything.\n\nYour father has no idea what it's really like. How could He? You didn't either, until... until this. You're not sure what you are. Perhaps you're a god now, perhaps not. You're certainly not just a man any more. You have woken from a state of confusion to find yourself changed. Unearthly power fills you to the brim. If you're not a god, then you are well on the way to becoming one. Perhaps this is the state of transition, slow and strange, as you transform from a man into something more? It is not how you imagined it, or how anyone could imagine it. It is beyond mortal knowing. There is simply before, and there is afterwards. Before, you were Horus Lupercal, beloved and triumphant. And now you are this.\n\nIt is not entirely pleasant or comfortable. When time permits, you will sit down with the remembrancer and tell her all about it. It is rare knowledge, unique. It is worth recording, the state-change where mortal embodiment starts to fade and ascension begins. Whether you are a god already, or simply in the process of becoming one, you can no longer quite define your edges and limits, the span of your physicality, or the breadth of your senses. It almost makes you want to weep, because you are no longer what you were, and you can never go back.\n\nIt's hard to even remember what you were like before this happened. You are glad Mamzel Mersadie wrote it all down. You can go and read your own history and be reminded of the man you used to be.\n\nShe is not here. You'll send Maloghurst to find her. But he is not here either. The fitters and the attentive squads of senior officers have gone. Even the vast host of Word Bearers, who assembled to sing your name, have departed. You think, perhaps, they all fled in terror at the sight of you when you started to transfigure into this higher form.\n\nNo one's here, apart from you and the things that whisper your name. The Lupercal Court is dark. The light hurts your eyes. You see better in the void. The darkness soothes your mind. This is a period of adjustment. You must be allowed time to come to terms with what is happening to you. How long must that be?\n\nYou realise that's up to you. The thought makes you chuckle. You answer to no one. You need no one's permission for anything. If you want time to adjust, then so be it. You grant it to yourself.\n\nThere's so much to get used to. You dreamed of power, and now you have it. It's disconcerting.\n\nYou wonder where everyone is. Then - again, the disconcertion! - you realise you know, because you know everything. There's no one here because you sent them away. You gave the command, and now your faithful followers, your sons and warriors, are spread out across the ship to execute the trap you meticulously devised.\n\nBecause the false ones have arrived, enticed by the bait you set. Unable to resist, your enemies have boarded the flagship, and entered the realm of the Vengeful Spirit on a final and desperate mission to vanquish you and win this war.\n\nThey will fail, of course. You've already decided that too. Your trap is inescapable, and your victory certain. Their efforts, which to them seem so brave, are merely the last spasms and twitches of an animal in its death throes. They are the prey, and you, you are the wolf, your jaws clamped around their throats, waiting patiently for the last shudders of life to cease.\n\nIn the distance, very faintly, you can hear the sounds of violence echoing through the ship. Your enemies are beginning to die, one by one.\n\nBut they don't have to. Death is not the only option. They can make a choice. You have, in your benevolent grace, prepared gifts for "}
{"text":"brave, are merely the last spasms and twitches of an animal in its death throes. They are the prey, and you, you are the wolf, your jaws clamped around their throats, waiting patiently for the last shudders of life to cease.\n\nIn the distance, very faintly, you can hear the sounds of violence echoing through the ship. Your enemies are beginning to die, one by one.\n\nBut they don't have to. Death is not the only option. They can make a choice. You have, in your benevolent grace, prepared gifts for each of them; each gift fashioned by one of the four powers of your ascendancy. The gifts are temptations, invitations, offerings. You will not be a cruel god. If they accept your gifts, they can join with you and become one with you.\n\nIf they spurn your gifts, well then... vengeance is yours.\n\nEverything is ready. Your guests approach. The false ones, the false four. Not the Old Four, who are sublimely blended into the vessel of your soul, but the four new fools who have demanded to meet you face to face. Constantin. Your siblings, Rogal and Sanguinius. Your father.\n\nHere they come...\n\n5:iii\n\nInvincible\n\nThe pressure gates blow in an intense cloud of flame, and the Angel and his vanguard fly through the breach.\n\nIkasati would have paused for a second, but Sanguinius is airborne before the immense fireball stops roiling or the pelt of scrap plasteel stops raining down, so he and the Guard loft with their primarch, wings extended. They fly like a salvo of rockets, bucking the gulp of overpressure, through the swirling blaze, with blackened lumps of debris stinging off their glorious plate. Triumph is close. Extraordinarily close. Taerwelt Ikasati has never seen his lord so furious or so eager. There is a reckless abandon in him, a terrible hunger that suggests his lord feels immortal on this day of days.\n\nAnd so he is. So are they all, whether they live or die. The blood-bright Angels of Baal, the magnificent IX Legion, have surpassed themselves. Despite the odds, and lacking the support of three-quarters of their intended force, they have, in Terra's darkest hour, excelled. Alive or dead, their names will be remembered. The first to reach the traitor's throat. The first to penetrate his lair. The first to mete out justice and vengeance on those who have broken all covenants and trusts, all bonds of blood and fealty, who have torn the works of man asunder, and threatened the very existence of the Imperium.\n\nBeyond the ruptured wreckage of the gates, the traitor host awaits, drawn up in ranks two hundred deep. The forward files have already crumbled, felled and mutilated by the blast. The rest, cased in ugly plate and as menacing as murder, recoil in dread when they see what is coming at them through the flames.\n\nSanguinius, wings wide, howling his brother's name, merciless.\n\nWhat sight in all creation could be more devastating?\n\nThe smoke-stained air of the Great Atrium lights up as the traitor multitude opens fire. A thousand points and flecks of light, from bolters and las-weapons, from voltaics and Adrathics. A hail of fire.\n\nHeedless, Sanguinius soars through it, and ploughs into the front lines. His impact is a hammer-blow that sends a ripple through the entire regimented mass. Bodies, veteran and powerful Sons of Horus, spin into the air and smash to the deck in his wake. Many are not whole. He drives into their fracturing formation, sword scything, spear plunging. He strides, like a man wading into an ocean swell, leaving a furrow of the dead and the dismembered behind him. The sea-spray is jetting blood, the cresting wave a cloud of splinters, the spume a haze of gore. He does not stop. The enemy mass, three full companies at least, perhaps more, winces as he cuts into it, like a body flinching as a sword runs through it.\n\nIn a second, other swords are raking wounds of their own: Raldoron, Sacre, Meshol, Ikasati and the tempests of the Sanguinary Guard on their hissing augmetic wings, each shearing into the lines, each reaping his own devastating furrow through the ranks of the foe, turning bodies at their heels as a plough turns soil. Behind them, slower but no less dreadful, come the storming phalanxes of Furio's Cataphractii, the cohorts of Maheldaron's tactical squads, and Krystapheros' assault brigade, the tempered weight of the Anabasis company.\n\nThey are the lance, driving into the traitors' heart to deliver the killing stroke, and Sanguinius is the tip of the spear.\n\n5:iv\n\nPandaemonium\n\nThey are now thirty-seven seconds into the fight. The perfect biological instrument of Constantin Valdor's mind is keeping time even though their chron systems have failed and the sensoria arrays in their golden armour have overloaded. He has learned nine hundred and three new names, and the attendant secrets that accompany them. Unrelenting havoc boils around them, and a darkness as heavy as pack-ice vices them. There is no way out of the pit. They have spent three days fighting their way along a deep ravine of cartilage and bone only to find the end blocked by a sheer cliff. Three days' effort wasted. Three days. But they are only thirty-seven seconds into the fight.\n\nThere is no time to contemplate their situation. Constantin's mental performance, his engineered ability to multi-task, evaluate and process, is superlative. So are the minds of all his Custodians. They exceed the abilities of mere Astartes, and probably all primarchs too. Even in the most intense battle, they can maintain peak killing precision and combat response, and still have a reserve left for strategic reckoning.\n\nBut not in this. The more Constantin tries to evaluate some kind of overview, the more furiously the assaults come. This pit, the Vengeful Spirit, is matching the speed of his thoughts with the intensity of its attacks. It is not permitting him time to do anything more than compose reactive strikes. It is trying to overwhelm him physically and mentally with its unstinting aggression. If his mind slips, his body will fail; if his body falters, his mind will be lost. He doesn't even have time to recognise this.\n\nThirty-eight seconds into the fight.\n\nConstantin wanted this confrontation. He yearned for it. He knew it would be demanding. He knew it would be the single most important fight of his service, and thus likely to be the most arduous too. He wanted it to be demanding. Such a feat deserved to be the most stupendous challenge; the hardest, the most gruelling, the most costly, the most brutal, the worst. Constantin thought he was ready for it. He had been bred for it, crafted one atom at a time to be fit for it, indoctrinated to be eager for it, and a lifetime of service and victory in arms had shown him the very worst things combat could be.\n\nBut this...\n\nNow he is in it, thirty-eight seconds into it, he accepts that he had no idea what the worst could mean. This exceeds even his grimmest imaginings. This multiplies the fury of his most savage past encounters not just by a factor or ten or a hundred, but into some entirely other range of magnitude, so beyond the limits of his experience that it doesn't even seem to be a fight any more. The very words - fight, battle, assault - are inadequate. It is a state of constant frenzy in which his body cannot stop moving, his reactions cannot slow, his nerves cannot slacken, and his mind cannot think.\n\nIt is thirty-nine seconds into the fight.\n\n5:v\n\nCome in under the shadow\n\nIn the red desert, in the crimson shadow under the red wall, he rises to his feet. There is no way out of the endless place. He knows this, because in the course of a century, he has walked the length of every wall, and trekked the crest of every dune, surveying every inch of the boundless waste.\n\nThere is no way out, except to say it. It wants him to say it.\n\nBut he won't. He won't give in. Even though he feels like it's what he has always, really, really wanted to do.\n\nHe is not sure of anything any more. There are no facts, no data, nothing available he can order. He is only sure of one thing.\n\n'I am,' he says.\n\nHe has nearly rusted away. The breeze and sun have bleached the identifier markings from his wargear. He isn't completely sure of his own name.\n\nBut mettle lasts where metal rusts.\n\nHe won't give in.\n\nA century has passed. A century at least. Maybe two. Maybe three. It's hard to know, because he can't count the days any more than he can count the bodies along the wall, because the bodies have all rusted away to nothing, and there is no day or night. Whatever he needed to get back to, whatever he has missed, it will have ended long ago.\n\nBut he will get back.\n\nHe raises his sword. It's just a ragged nub.\n\nHe starts to scratch at the walls again.\n\nAlong the walls, in the cool shadow, for kilometres on end, the red stone is marked with the things he has scratched. He has been doing it for years. Plans, marked on walls. Schemes. Configurations of possibilities. Designs for escape. Designs for the future. Hundreds of them. Thousands of them. Each one, carefully made, has proven unworkable or impossible. So he has abandoned each one in turn, and begun another. This scheme. That scheme. This plan. That design.\n\n'I am,' he says, reminding himself.\n\nWith what's left of his sword, he rakes another plan on the wall. Everything is blood red. He scrapes and cuts, shaping his next scheme in the dirt, scraping and cutting.\n\nHe scratches men. They have weapons. He inscribes walls, for walls, like plans, have always been useful to him. He scores lines of approach and retreat, lines of axis and engagement. It is not art, or decoration. It isn't a memorial of a battle he once conducted. It isn't a record of something that has been. He is carving out tomorrow. It is a statement of intention, of what will be. He is making a plan, so he can execute it. He is imposing his will.\n\nThe red desert doesn't like it. It wants him to stop. It keeps telling him to stop, in whispers carried by the breeze. Just give up. Just give in. Just say it.\n\n"}
{"text":"ores lines of approach and retreat, lines of axis and engagement. It is not art, or decoration. It isn't a memorial of a battle he once conducted. It isn't a record of something that has been. He is carving out tomorrow. It is a statement of intention, of what will be. He is making a plan, so he can execute it. He is imposing his will.\n\nThe red desert doesn't like it. It wants him to stop. It keeps telling him to stop, in whispers carried by the breeze. Just give up. Just give in. Just say it.\n\nHe won't.\n\n'I won't,' he says.\n\nHe is defiant. He is unyielding.\n\nThis, he thinks as he works, this will be. One of these plans, one of these permutations. One of them will work. I will break out and run, like so. I will be somewhere else. There will be other people there, waiting for me. These are the weapons they will be carrying. This - as his fingers move from scratched line to scratched line - this will be the path I will follow to escape. This is where it will end, this cross here. This will be my target.\n\nWhat is set out here on the wall in crude gouges and ragged scrapes will happen in life tomorrow. Or the next day. Or the century after. But it will happen. I will evade and get away, for here, see? I am already free.\n\nI am modelling the future.\n\nTo sanctify this, to commit to this configuration of tomorrow, he scoops his callused, filthy hand into the red dust at his feet. He cups a handful of blood-red dust. In it are tiny yellow flecks of plasteel. He presses it, palm flat, against the wall. He leaves his mark, the mark of himself, on his plan. This is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.\n\nI am already free.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn,' he says, reasonably certain. 'My name is Rogal Dorn.'\n\nIt doesn't like it. The red desert, the red wall, the red everything, it doesn't like it. It whispers on the breeze.\n\nSay it, say it, say it. Who is the blood for? Say it. Give in. Just say it. Give in to your longing. Say it.\n\nHe has decided not to.\n\nIt tries to persuade him. It coaxes. It pleads. It demands. Some years, it uses other voices, close to or far away. The voices it uses sometimes sound like voices he once knew. But he can't name them. He can't confidently name himself.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn,' he says, just in case he's right.\n\nDorn wanders the endless desert.\n\n5:vi\n\nWhat have you become?\n\nCaecaltus Dusk no longer has to think. The most precarious and important combat of his life, and he no longer has to focus or concentrate.\n\nThe will of my master, the Emperor, moves through me.\n\nIt is liberating. It is strange. The proconsul has always been his master's instrument. He was constructed to be precisely that. But his duty as an instrument has always been performed through fierce discipline, dedication and intense focus. The Emperor's will has bidden him and commanded him, but only rarely has it invested him and co-opted his form directly.\n\nIt invests me now. It is absolute.\n\nHe is moving faster, striking harder, and fighting more ferociously than ever before in his life, but none of it is a conscious choice. Caecaltus is a passenger in his own body.\n\nThey all are, the last of the Hetaeron.\n\nAll of us, encircling our glorious lord as He makes His advance, are just extensions of His being.\n\nThe Emperor, one towering figure in blazing gold, surrounded by seven giants, has become one mind in eight bodies.\n\nSome might say that makes Caecaltus a puppet.\n\nSome might say, those curs with the temerity to question the Emperor's actions and methods, might see it as definitive proof of a ruinously inflamed ego, of an insane need to control everything, of an authoritarian singularity that disregards the interests of other living things. Some might see it as evidence that we Custodes are less than human, that for all our vaunted prowess, we are mere drones, lacking the vitality, self-identity and personality of the oh-so-human Astartes.\n\nBut it is not so. Caecaltus is no puppet. It feels, far more, as though Caecaltus is a favourite weapon, a master-crafted sword, a prized blade, and he is simply being wielded. There is joy in it, as though this is the way it was always supposed to be. To feel the Emperor's will operating through him is the ultimate expression of his purpose.\n\nA sword does not question the way it is used. A sword does not question anything. It simply exists to be a sword, and it can only become itself in the hand of its wielder.\n\nIt is oddly tranquil. Caecaltus has never felt such intrinsic unity with his master.\n\nI feel myself moving, at speeds I did not know I was capable of. I sense my reflexes and reactions elevated to an inconceivable degree. I see the paragon spear in my hands as it spins and jabs, delivering one faultless execution after another. I see the dark horrors all around us split and burst, tear open and de-manifest.\n\nHe sees his brethren at his side, the last of the Hetaeron company. Xadophus and Karedo, Taurid and Ravengast, Nmembo and Zagrus, all of them proven exemplars of Legio Custodes excellence. Caecaltus thought he had seen martial perfection, but never before has he witnessed any of them fight with such flawless grace or fidelity. They are all channelling His will, seven weapons wielded by His extended mind in supreme synchronicity, subduing and destroying anything in this corpse-hulk flagship that attempts to block their advance.\n\nHe sees his master.\n\nOr, rather, he does not. Caecaltus cannot. With every step they take, the Master of Mankind steadily increases in radiance. His aura has always been present, a part of Him, sometimes soft like moonlight, sometimes sharp as daybreak. But it has never been as incandescent as this. It is almost too bright to behold directly, an alabaster glare that radiates from His immense figure, rendering Him as nothing except a human shape made of blinding white light.\n\nIn my whole lifetime, I have never known my king manifest a level of power even approaching this.\n\nBut it's hardly surprising. There has never been a need before. There has never been a moment like this. The unprecedented demonstration of power, the absolute investment of His companions as extensions of His self... Without it, they would all be dead.\n\nFor the power of the enemy defies description.\n\nNightmares assault them from every angle. The warp enfolds them, naked and raw, wild and screaming. Horus, somehow, is orchestrating this maelstrom. Caecaltus can only conclude that Horus Lupercal, once so noble and admired, has become something quite other. Not a daemon prince like some of his cursed brothers, but more, far more. He was always so strong-willed, it is hardly surprising that his doom-form should be strong too. Not man, not transhuman, not even possessed soul, but some transcendent conduit of energy.\n\nCaecaltus doubts Horus even knows it. He doubts 'Horus' even exists any more.\n\nOh, Horus Lupercal. You poor, deluded child. What have you let into yourself? What have you allowed to spill free? What have you become that you can unleash this hellstorm upon us?\n\n5:vii\n\nFragments\n\nFire and fury rage at the Delphic Wall. The final wall of the final fortress will not keep them out.\n\nFire howls and fury roars. They scream and shriek in unison. In frenzied partnership, they encircle the Sanctum Imperialis and throttle it, squeezing their psychopathic fingers tighter. Fire blisters the citadel's armoured skin, and melts its steel. Fury claws at its stone, abrading it, and opening fissures. Together, they gnaw away the last proud circuit of wall, and the last void shields, and the last battlements and casemates. Relentlessly, piece-by-piece, fragment-by-fragment, they grind the Delphic down.\n\nNothing stands forever. Even the mighty Delphic must eventually succumb and break open, like the hard shell of some delicacy, or the dome of a skull. Then the fire and the fury will dig inside, scoop out the soft meat within, and feed. Their hunger will not be denied.\n\nNothing stands forever.\n\nTo be a defender on the last wall is to be a soul trapped on a mountain ridge as a firestorm roasts the world alive. Everything is flame, everything is noise. All around, wall gun emplacements, terrepleins and turrets unleash a torrential pelt of shells, beams and projectiles. But as fast as they rain death upon the traitor host, they drain the Sanctum's dwindling munition stocks. Batteries burn out, their systems unable to maintain the intense fire rate. Autoloader systems jam inside the walls. Macro-las weapons overheat, and blow out the gun-boxes and bartizans containing them.\n\nThe enemy assault delivers an equal and answering bombardment from below. Their munition supplies seem inexhaustible. Swarms of missiles, constellations of fireballs, and seething lances of energy remorselessly maul the defensive ring. The Delphic's void shields convulse under the onslaught, the walls glow. The host below is uncountable; uncountable beasts driving uncountable siege machines up the ramps of their own uncountable dead. Scaling ladders climb like vines, groping for the summit, replaced as fast as they are burned away or levered back. Siege engines fight and jostle to suckle at the ravelins and outwork parapets. For each one that topples, victim of the wall guns, another dozen roll through the burning wreckage to take its place. The booming voices of the enemy's war-horns are a weapon in themselves, drowning out the burst of shells and the detonation of explosive rain, bursting eardrums, turning guts to jelly, grinding sanity into a pulp of wet terror.\n\nFrom the battlements of the last wall, the enemy below is a sea, a deluge, an engulfing ocean of hatred and rage. In its black swell, a billion baleful eyes glare upwards, a billion voices scream obscenities and blasphemies. Not all are human. Some once were, some are warp-bred and Neverborn. The daemons charge and flock, squealing and baying, swooping at the wall-top on ragged wings, bounding at the wall-foot on cloven hooves, beating at the enciente'"}
{"text":"grinding sanity into a pulp of wet terror.\n\nFrom the battlements of the last wall, the enemy below is a sea, a deluge, an engulfing ocean of hatred and rage. In its black swell, a billion baleful eyes glare upwards, a billion voices scream obscenities and blasphemies. Not all are human. Some once were, some are warp-bred and Neverborn. The daemons charge and flock, squealing and baying, swooping at the wall-top on ragged wings, bounding at the wall-foot on cloven hooves, beating at the enciente's stonework with bladed fists, ploughing through their own allies to reach the last wall and sunder it.\n\nNothing stands forever.\n\nYet for some of the defenders, it feels as though they will stand forever. Nassir Amit, called Flesh Tearer, struggles to master the impatience in his heart. He has been standing, motionless, for nine hours.\n\nHis company, designated 'Denial 963', is drawn up on the reserve stages of the wall's inner level, below the casemates and fighting platforms. He has eighty-three men. All are Blood Angels of the IX, though they did not begin the war as this unit. They are all survivors of the Eternity Gate, squads and sections of decimated companies recomposed as a makeshift new one. Denial 963 is one of twenty companies being held at readiness on this wall section alone. They are armed, they are plated, they are oathed, but their moment is yet to come.\n\nTo Amit's right waits Denial 774, a similarly patchwork company of White Scars commanded by the worthy Hemheda. To his left is Denial 340, a unit hastily woven from Salamanders and Iron Hands, commanded by a Wolf of Fenris called Sartak. Hemheda is as still and silent as Amit, but Sartak paces in front of his ranks, muttering and cursing.\n\nThey wait. All of them. All twenty companies. This has been instructed. These are their orders. They wait, even though the wall shakes below them, and the voids ripple overhead. They can hear the roar of artillery emplacements along the fighting platforms above them, and see the flash of fire-sprays bursting against the parapet.\n\nSartak stops pacing.\n\n'Where is Honfler?' he snaps. He gazes over at Amit. 'Where?' he snarls.\n\nAmit makes no reply. The Space Wolf's lack of discipline annoys him, though he shares his frustration. To stand and not fight feels wrong. But those are the orders. Praetor-Captain Honfler of the Imperial Fists has command of this wall section, and his orders were both clear and utterly in accordance with principles of siege repulse set down by the Praetorian. Until the enemy achieves scale or breach of the enceinte, the defence of a wall line is the province of the batteries and wall guns. There is little that a warrior, even an Astartes legionary, can do on the fighting platforms.\n\nUntil the enemy arrives in person.\n\nUntil then, to commit all forces to the parapet is to lose men to enemy barrage for no reason. So they must stand, held in reserve on the comparative safety of the staging levels, waiting for the command to come.\n\nIt is a bitter contradiction. Amit yearns to fight. He yearns to close and kill. It feels wrong to be standing here, waiting for war, when war is only a few hundred metres away. Amit wants to be unleashed.\n\nBut if that desire is satisfied, it will mean they have lost. It will mean the batteries are spent, and the voids have failed, and the ramparts overrun. For Amit's wish to be fulfilled, the enemy must invade the final fortress.\n\nAnd so they stand, his company, and so many others like it, longing to fight yet willing the order not to come. For when it comes, the siege will be over, the Warmaster triumphant, the last sanctuary violated. Amit, and men like him, will no longer be fighting to win, or even survive. They will simply be fighting to punish the triumphant.\n\nHowever much Amit wants a fight, he does not want that one. He tries not to wish for it, however heavy and thirsty his sword feels in his hand.\n\n'Where is Honfler?' Sartak bawls. He hoists his war-axe onto his shoulder and strides over to Amit, until they are nose-to-nose.\n\n'Where is he?' the Wolf growls. 'That fool? We stand here forever!'\n\n'Nothing stands forever, brother,' Amit replies, unmoving.\n\nSartak stares back with a frown. He thinks about it. The grim logic dawns on him. He starts to laugh, the mordant laughter of resignation and death-glory Amit has heard so often from Sartak's Legion.\n\n'Good,' he says. 'That's good. I like you, Angel-son. A dark wit. Damned if we do, eh?'\n\n'Damned when we do,' says Amit.\n\n5:viii\n\nInferno\n\nAlmost all of me is gone now.\n\nAll gone. Gone and damned.\n\nI can't-\n\nThe layers of my self have peeled away in the heat, reduced to ash... Sigillite, Imperial Regent, Master of the Chosen, these parts of me have burned away, one by one, even my human self and form, even the name Malcador.\n\nI-\n\nAah-\n\nAll gone. Almost all of me.\n\nThese things, these names, these titles, these sigils that have represented me during my life, have been systematically erased by the Throne, and all that remains is a sigil of pain.\n\nThe Throne. The Golden Throne. The burning Throne. Curse the bastard thing! It is eating me alive-\n\nI-\n\nI'm sorry, old friend, if you can hear me. Can you? I do this for you, always for you. I have no regrets. It's just the pain. The devouring fire-\n\nBut I do not know how much longer I will last. The slow instant of my death, which began the moment I took this seat, has been drawn out into an unbearable eternity by the un-when, but it must end. What-\n\nAhn. What willpower I have left, what self, is finite. I dwindle, old friend. The end of my everlasting moment of death is approaching, and I fear it will come too soon, before-\n\n-before the work is done and the war settled.\n\nMhn. Nnh. I don't think he can hear me any more. I can barely see him.\n\nI am old and I am tired. I am weak, my strength sapped by this task. My straining sight is beginning to fade, for my eyes are long gone and my mind is going. I can no longer see my beloved master as clearly, or follow his progress through the horrorscape of the first-found's flagship. What little I can see is granted to me by the grace of Horus, who tempts and taunts me with these visions in the hope that they will break-\n\n-break me.\n\nNggh!\n\nBut I hold on, still.\n\nJust.\n\nBarely.\n\nAnd what little I can still see, the scraps and flickers, gives me no hope.\n\nMy greatest lord and oldest friend advances towards the lair of the first-found monster, one hard-fought step after the next, through a place where all sense has fled. All reason.\n\nChaos prevails. My ailing mindsight sees only absolute madness.\n\nOh, my King-of-Ages!\n\nDespite my long life and my frequent interaction with the immaterium, I have never seen the warp so wholly unleashed. And I believe that even my lord has only glimpsed its like before; on Molech, perhaps... in the furious surreality of the webway... in his darkest fears.\n\nSuch a sight. Such vile, atrocious-\n\nNo.\n\nIf my lord can bear that, then I can bear this. Focus, Sigillite! Focus, you useless old man! Ignore the pain and concentrate on the work. Use the mindsight vision of your old friend as a drishti to distract yourself from the agonies devouring your soul-\n\nYes. Better. That's better. Focus on him. The sight of him. There. My King-of-Ages, and in such a place. It-\n\nIt reminds me, perhaps, of Hell, of Gehenna, of the old religious concept of an inferno, of the infernus immanis, of the Pit, of an underworld where all the comforting laws of nature have been abandoned, along with hope, and replaced by pain and horror. Yes, exactly that. Uncannily that.\n\nI have long believed that the human concept of a 'hell', which has haunted mankind down the ages, and informed the structures of its makeshift religions, is derived from the warp. Of course, in latter years, this vivid concept was tamed, by theologians and philosophers, into allegory and symbolic fable.\n\nBut it comes from somewhere. It comes from the warp, from flashes of the empyrean's tumult glimpsed, through the ages, by certain people in their dreams and waking nightmares: the nascent psykers, the prophetics, the visionaries, the far-sighted, and the wielders of imagination. They wrote of it, in verse and prose, and painted pictures.\n\nI have seen these works, a great many of them, for my lord the Emperor collected them. Many he selected by hand from the inventory of cultural treasures that the Order of Sigillites had preserved during the Age of Strife. He did this, I believe, out of fascination or sentiment, if such feelings are within his compass. The artefacts are stored in secret depositories adjoining the private archives of the Sigillites beneath the Palace. From time to time, as Regent, I used to visit the hidden collections and puzzle over the images. They were all so similar.\n\nI now see why. I can no longer visit the private galleries at Leng and the Clanium, but watching him, I can see artworks come to life. Eternal damnation-\n\nI can see it.\n\nIt is real-\n\n5:ix\n\nAlone\n\nThe tempest squalls of depravity blast the Emperor and His companions. The warp-wrath is fluid, churning, a shifting fume that seethes and kaleidoscopes, becoming solid to strike and liquid spray when struck. It conjures patterns and scales, sparks and unknown colours, blisters of terror and scabs of madness. Hook-toothed jaws lunge out of it, snapping at them, then recede to nothing in mists of onierolysis as fast as they came. Eyes glare. Clawed limbs and tentacles sprout from air and deck and ceiling, lashing at them, a thousand every collapsing un-minute.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk endures as his master endures.\n\nI know the unbreakable resolve of my King-of-Ages. I am the steel of His will. I feel the conflagrant light of His power. He will not let this be the end of the Earth, the terminal fate of mankind, or the end of Himself. He will not let your ruination triumph.\n\nHe endures because He is strong.\n\nAnd you, Horus, have made Him so.\n\nThe Master of Mankind continues to draw upon the very power unlea"}
{"text":"lashing at them, a thousand every collapsing un-minute.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk endures as his master endures.\n\nI know the unbreakable resolve of my King-of-Ages. I am the steel of His will. I feel the conflagrant light of His power. He will not let this be the end of the Earth, the terminal fate of mankind, or the end of Himself. He will not let your ruination triumph.\n\nHe endures because He is strong.\n\nAnd you, Horus, have made Him so.\n\nThe Master of Mankind continues to draw upon the very power unleashed against Him. He steals it, just as He stole fire on Molech, and hurls it back. He casts flame-storms from His fingertips with such force that the shrilling Neverborn, live-birthed out of the vortex, incinerate before they have full substance, and the ship's corridors, briefly recalling the metal from which they were once made, burst and shred from the overpressure. His sword, a blade of blazing sunlight, cleaves materia and immateria alike, and fills the air with scalding blood-steam. His fury is boundless.\n\nSo is this hell.\n\nThe bestial Neverborn instantiate everywhere, massed and wailing legions of the damned, the manifest armies of pandaemonium, in unvanquishable numbers. They seek to kill Him, not just in body, but in His entirety. Horns and fangs and slicing talons swarm to shred Him: to tear armour from flesh, and flesh from bone, and soul from body. They seek to destroy not just His mortal shell but the perpetual spark within Him.\n\nHe will not be beaten. He will not be turned back. Though Chaos assaults the Emperor with unprecedented ire, unleashing its power in a condensed paroxysm that exceeds all the warp events in human history, He will not back down. He meets the excess of Chaos with its own excess, pushing His own power beyond any cautious restrictions He has previously respected. He has always been a conduit too, resilient enough to tolerate the burning wire of immaterial force that sizzles in His blood. He has been training Himself to stand it for more than thirty thousand years. He has conditioned Himself to bear its force, to tap it, to use it, to inhale its fire and breathe it back in the faces of the Chaos Pantheon. They have opened the sunless sea of the empyrean to Him, and so He drinks from it to magnify His own almighty power.\n\nThe False Four are fools if they think this display of excess can overwhelm Him. It empowers Him, Horus Lupercal, it empowers Him. It feeds Him an excess of His own. He is set on this path, first-found, and He will find His way to you. He will carve a sure and inexorable road through your labyrinth of madness, His sword in His right hand and fire in His left, and meet you.\n\nHe will find you.\n\nIn the midst of Chaos, the Emperor finds there is, within Him, an invincible calm. Caecaltus feels it flood through him like ice-water. It is so shockingly pure, tears spring from his eyes.\n\nThis day will not save you, Horus, for you have broken day and night and the circuit of time. You have built an eternity here, a frozen infinite without laws, presuming that will protect you and confound your father. It will do neither. If this is your trap, your endgame ploy, it has sprung and failed. Your father was a master of this art for one hundred and twenty thousand generations before you were whelped. You have made a shrieking parody of the world for nothing. If this is your snare, first-found, the eye of your storm of terror, it is an eternity that will not last. It will break. It is but eternity in an hour, or a day, eternity in a heartbeat. At the still point of this turning world, where past and future are gathered and inert, some work of note may yet be done. To you, my lord may have seemed like an idle king, perched on a distant throne, made weak by time and fate, but He is strong in will. So very strong. Stronger now than ever before, He will strive. He will seek you out. He will not yield.\n\nThe empyric deluge has destroyed the war-systems of all the Hetaeron Companions. Their comms are burned out, their auspexes fused, their sensoria blinded. Caecaltus cannot see what is around the next twist or turn of the maze, and those twists and turns shift and change like hallucinations anyway. There is no point predicting, for there is no future to predict.\n\nMy lord's armour systems are likewise ruined. He listens instead for the telltale crackle of the warp, the spit and sear of the blaze inside you. Glutted with the power He takes from you, Horus, He metes out what little He can spare, investing us and reinforcing us. Our bodies, so precisely constructed, can each bear a little. He makes us stronger. He makes us parts of Him.\n\nThe Emperor pushes forwards. He amplifies the Hetaeron, one equal temper of heroic hearts. He pours His mindsight into them and they become additional eyes and ears and hands. Through them, He reads the real, or what remains of it, the broken slivers of sound materia that drift in the fevered insanity, the fragments of deck and flooring they can trust. They leap from one foundering scrap of reality to the next, frail and unsteady stepping stones in the void, as the warp soughs around them.\n\nBy His will.\n\nThrough Caecaltus, He sees the winged spawn ahead, and hacks it asunder before it strikes. Through Taurid and Ravengast, He holds the flank against drooling fiends and ulcerated miscreations. Through Nmembo and Zagrus, He guards the rear, driving back the snarling, screeching things that bulge from the exoplanar membrane and fly at them like spittle, snapping at their heels. Through Xadophus and Karedo, stalwart at His left and right, He discerns the path.\n\nBy His will alone.\n\nTogether, as one, moving and fighting as one cohesive entity, they cut their way into the Vengeful Spirit's dark and broken heart.\n\nAnd they harrow its hell.\n\n5:x\n\nWaiting in darkness for the end\n\nA noose of darkness has tightened around Collection 888 and its faded portraits of hell and perdition. The shadows have swelled and expanded since Loken left them, and the temperature has steadily dropped, despite the library's advanced climate control. According to the system's wall panels, ambient temperature and humidity are being kept constant, but Sindermann can feel the cold in his bones.\n\nThey wait awhile to see if Loken will return, but he does not. Eventually, Sindermann leaves his bench beneath one of some eighty-first-century sculptor's stranger works, suspended in a cone of soft light, and crosses to the hatch. He has no idea how long they've waited. It feels like hours, but the clocks have all frozen. His own pocket-chron has begun to wind backwards. Mauer and the archivist watch him.\n\nThe hatch is firmly sealed. The lock mechanism, when he finally, gingerly, touches it, refuses to respond. It's cold. So is the hatch, and the wall around it. He can see a powder of ice crystals beginning to form. It feels as though there is an immeasurable chill on the far side, the absolute cold of the open void, and that the heat of the library chamber is slowly leaching out.\n\nPerhaps there is, thinks Sindermann. Perhaps this is the heat-death that accompanies Ruin. Time stagnated, places overlapped, reality wound up tight in a ball of coterminous moments, bleeding away heat and light in a slow decay.\n\nHe looks back at the others and shrugs.\n\n'He's not coming back, is he?' asks Mauer.\n\n'To Garviel,' says Sindermann, 'it may seem like he's only been gone a few moments.' He walks back to join them.\n\n'Really?' asks Mauer. 'You really think that time a-and space...'\n\nShe trails off.\n\n'Yes,' he says.\n\nMauer shudders and shakes her head.\n\n'I know you're a creature of order and discipline, boetharch,' he says gently, 'but you're also a great pragmatist. I'm surprised you're not accepting the state we find ourselves in.'\n\n'I don't know how you can be so calm,' she replies.\n\n'Oh, I'm not,' he assures her. 'This derangement of the cosmos is entirely disturbing. It's nigh on impossible to process. But it's not hard to accept, given all the evidence we've seen. I suppose I can't see the point in panicking.'\n\nHe shakes his head wearily.\n\n'Or I haven't got the energy to panic,' he adds.\n\n'I can't process it at all,' says Mauer.\n\n'These last months, Mauer,' he says, sitting down beside her, 'we've seen so many things... Things that defied credibility. Things beyond imagination. And you've faced them down. But now your capacity runs out?'\n\n'Monsters, nightmares,' she mutters. 'I can face those. But this is everything. The very fabric of the world, the rules and laws of matter. There is nothing left I can count on, nothing I can trust. Not the ground beneath me, not the air, not the passing of the minutes, not even my own mind.'\n\nSindermann sighs.\n\n'Then I believe,' he says sadly, 'that the Emperor has failed us.'\n\nThe archivist looks at him in alarm.\n\n'He should have prepared us. Told us. Taught us. Not just you and me, the whole of humanity. He has this entire archive of evidence. Warnings from the distant past. But He keeps it shut away. He should have educated us so that we could have prepared. He should have shared what He knew so that we'd be ready.'\n\nHe rubs his hands together to keep warm.\n\n'But He chose not to. He deprived us of all spiritual appreciation, and thus we come to this moment supremely unfit and unqualified to face it.'\n\n5:xi\n\nThat which passeth all understanding\n\nThose works of art-\n\nGng.\n\nNhh. Focus.\n\nThose works. My lord should have destroyed those works of art and madness, but I believe he could never bring himself to do it. They were, in their own way, beautiful. In each one, I think, he saw himself. He saw the minds of people like him, who obtained one fleeting glimpse, perhaps by force of will, and were forever changed, and thereafter compelled to create some record of what they had seen. Those poor souls... All of them scarred because their minds were too acute. They were often deemed mad, and their work dismissed as fancy. But two qualities were always obvious to me. The first was the "}
{"text":"r bring himself to do it. They were, in their own way, beautiful. In each one, I think, he saw himself. He saw the minds of people like him, who obtained one fleeting glimpse, perhaps by force of will, and were forever changed, and thereafter compelled to create some record of what they had seen. Those poor souls... All of them scarred because their minds were too acute. They were often deemed mad, and their work dismissed as fancy. But two qualities were always obvious to me. The first was the astonishing commonality of their visions. There were too many similarities for them all to have imagined them separately. Through some mysterious action of immense synchronicity, they all saw the same thing.\n\nThey saw what I see now. They saw what my old friend is experiencing first-hand.\n\nThe second was that paint, and pencil, charcoal, words, rhyme... None of the tools at their disposal could begin to do justice to the truth. One may shiver at the sight of The Garden of Earthly Delights or the The Great Day Of His Wrath, but they are mere hints, mere suggestions, as through a glass darkly.\n\nThe truth is not the leaping flames, the ragged blight, the sundering peaks, the dripping venom, or the curling thorns; the truth is not the devilish blasphemies that, ungainly and beyond all reason, caper and squeal their danse in the fiery glow. It is not the things that my lord and his last golden companions are cutting their way through with blade and bolt. Physical horror can be assimilated and ignored. The real truth is the sense of senselessness.\n\nWe-\n\nWe are too used to living in a world of materia, a commonplace realm tightly governed by laws and the parameters of physics, of logic, of order and sanity. I see now that the greatest horror in the material universe is as nothing compared to a brief instant of the warp's totality. All laws are shed, all rules vacated, all truths untruthed. My lord feels it in the very molecules around him. Nothing behaves as it should. Nothing is reliable. Nothing can be trusted. All is Chaos, in the most literal sense. Once you are within the realm of Chaos, nothing retains the semblance of sense.\n\nHe has never come this close to it before. He has never allowed it to surround him. My King-of-Ages has always had a lifeline, or a path back, a throne to anchor him, or a beacon to light him. He has only ever stepped one foot over the threshold. Even at his most daring, he has never entered entire, without some strategy for escape.\n\nWell, no longer.\n\nJust like me, the Vengeful Spirit is devoured by the warp. The material fabric of the great ship is corrupted. What my Emperor advances through, one pace at a time, fighting for every step with his last few men at his side, is an infusion of materia and immateria that still partly and occasionally resembles a Gloriana-class, Scylla-pattern warship.\n\nThere are stretches of apparently solid decks and hallways, arches and chambers, locations that my lord recognises, but they are not those things. They are fitful recollections of the ship, old memories of the Vengeful Spirit made real in haphazard flashes, lumped together in illogical sequences, then forgotten again just as abruptly, in foams of voidmist. This is a fluid, approximate memory of the flagship rendered by the immaterial, like water trying to remember what it was like to be ice.\n\nAnd those old memories-\n\nGah! Mmnn!\n\nThey are his memories, I think. Horus' memories. His derangement is extreme if this is the best recollection he can conjure.\n\nThe warp is in our first-found enemy now, far beyond any limits he was built to withstand.\n\n5:xii\n\nUpon the face of Terra\n\nIn the whispering darkness of the Lupercal Court, you wander, blind, hands outstretched to feel your way. Like you, the place has flexed and changed. Nothing is the same. Even the darkness is a different kind of darkness.\n\nYou are drowning Terra in the immaterial, and everything is washing together and blurring into one, like pigments on a wall, flushed by rain, the painted images dissolving and the colours running. Whatever was painted there before is no longer visible. Was it a man? A landscape? Some animals, perhaps? It doesn't matter, for it no longer has any significance. The dyes and colours have leaked and blended, diluted in the immaterial wash, and this new darkness is the result.\n\nIn it, your groping fingers feel the shapes and forms of things as they are now. Vengeful Spirit and world mixed together. Ship and palace. Sky and land. Steel and stone. Inside and out. Above and below. It's all become one thing, a tangled, knotted connection that is now impossible to navigate. As soon as your father led His assault on board - a bold, brave step - you allowed the impossibility to descend, and enfolded Him in your trap. He has no way out, no way back. There is only one place for Him to go.\n\nIn this new darkness with no future, there is only you. You and the throne you will sit on, and the Court that surrounds that throne, and the palace that surrounds that Court. Your palace, a city. An eternal city. A city that encompasses the galaxy. It was always going to be this way. It was always coming to this. It was inevitable.\n\nYour Inevitable City. Your realm.\n\nYou decide you want to see it. You are Horus Lupercal, and you're ready.\n\nYou call for a light, and something brings you a light. Fire crackles around your hand as you raise it and illuminate the Court.\n\nThere are five thrones. That surprises you, just for a moment, until you remember that nothing should surprise you because you made it that way.\n\nFive thrones. One is for you. It must be.\n\nThe others are seats of honour for the four powers of your ascendancy. Change, blood, delight, decay. The four cardinals of the compass of Chaos. The four quarters of the eightfold star. They await the avatars of those potent properties. They are part of the gifts.\n\nOf course they are. That's how you planned it.\n\nHere, the four powers of Chaos will be represented, two at your right hand, two at your left. You wonder which of them will end up occupied? You have always been a gracious host. You honour those who come to you. Which of them will refuse you and spurn your invitation?\n\nYour gifts were generous. Handmade. Personalised. Extravagant. Decay, for the beautiful Angel, a rebirth from the mortal wounds of life. Blood, for dear Rogal, a feral liberation from the stifling order of his regimented mind, a blessed release into the oblivion of Chaos where he can at last forget decision and become the unthinking warrior he always craved to be. For stern Constantin, the liberation of change, allowing him to renounce the harsh and blinkered strictures of his life and become more, become emancipated, no longer a blindly obedient servant but instead a free-thinking being, alert with the secrets that were always kept from him.\n\nAnd for your father, delight. The reward of pleasure, of pride, the licence to be, at last, what He has always truly been, and to relish that state, no longer burdened by responsibility or destiny, no longer hobbled by the urge to guide or command, no longer crippled by the demands of a thirty-thousand-year-long plan. Here He may sit, and rest, and indulge, and rejoice in power for the sake of power alone. Mankind can make its sorry way without Him. He need never give the human species another thought.\n\nHenceforth, the plans will all be yours.\n\nIf they accept your gifts, well... What a wonder that will be. This Court will be full, and joyous, and glorious. You, ascendant, above all others, exactly where you belong, and the four of them, a council of power, a new Mournival to hang upon your every word, and to do your bidding.\n\nWill they accept? Some of them might. Sadly, you think some of them might not. As an ascendant mind, you see these things clearly. Some things cannot be changed, even though past and future, just like here and there, no longer exist and have become one. What they were before will be hard to undo, even though it is now inevitable. Rogal is yours, you're sure of that. The blood rises in him and cannot be staunched. Sanguinius, whom you've always loved, he too will embrace your gift, for who would turn aside the gift of life itself when proffered by a brother's hand? He will come and sit at your side. Indeed, you think he's close, close to seeing the truth of everything. He always saw so much more than others. The sight of the Inevitable City will seem like a relief.\n\nOf Constantin, you have graver hesitation, for his doubts have been there since before you were born. His envy of you and your brothers runs too deep. He would have had you killed long since, you and all your kind. But then, he isn't really a man. He has so little free will, so little understanding. He is the way your father made him, just an instrument. A fine one, no doubt, a peerless one, but you might as well command a sword to stop being a sword or a spear to stop being a spear. Poor Constantin is merely duty and obedience in human form, and he doesn't know enough about anything to know any better.\n\nAnd your father. He is, in His way, the most likely to accept. But His ego is the obstacle. He has always known best, and after thirty millennia that self-belief is so engrained, it has fossilised. It will no longer bend, only break.\n\nYou hope it does break. Your offerings are genuinely intended, but if they are rejected, then you won't hesitate. If, to your surprise, your father accepts, then you will be glad. You will be together again, as you were for those three perfect decades long ago. But you don't think He will, and you privately hope He doesn't. His time is done. He needs to end, and you have been longing to end Him. You loved Him once, above all others, but you hate Him now, for His falseness and lies. Reject my gift, father. Put up your fists and fight me. I so very much want to kill you.\n\nYou sigh. The darkness whispers. It's whispering your name, you're fairly sure of that.\n\nYou wonder whi"}
{"text":"You will be together again, as you were for those three perfect decades long ago. But you don't think He will, and you privately hope He doesn't. His time is done. He needs to end, and you have been longing to end Him. You loved Him once, above all others, but you hate Him now, for His falseness and lies. Reject my gift, father. Put up your fists and fight me. I so very much want to kill you.\n\nYou sigh. The darkness whispers. It's whispering your name, you're fairly sure of that.\n\nYou wonder which of the thrones is meant for you. The fifth one. But which is the fifth? The largest one? It must be. That must be the one meant for you. A throne fit for a god.\n\nThe clocks have stopped. Time's gone. But you are impatient. They must be close now, but they are taking so long. It's time to finish this, to bring it to an end, or at least a death.\n\nYou walk through the living, breathing darkness, brushing whispers aside like gossamer, to the door of the Court. It opens for you, because it cannot resist your will. You will wait for your new Mournival in the hall, ready to escort them in so they can take their places. Power sings inside you.\n\nOutside, the hall is vast and gloomy and very quiet. The Vengeful Spirit abides here, but the chamber is more than that. The Inevitable City has been opened to honour your ascension.\n\nYou step into it.\n\nYou step from the Lupercal Court into the immense hall and, for the first time since this all began, you finally set foot on the surface of Terra.\n\n5:xiii\n\nThings change\n\nIn the midst of it all, in the heart of the burning Palace, certain moments pass, virtually unnoticed, moments of profound significance whose ramifications will change everything, but which are lost in the fog and the filth and the derangement.\n\nOne is the end of the primacy of the human Imperium. It has been ascendant for nearly three centuries, a cultural edifice that has encompassed thousands of worlds, the single greatest military power in the galaxy. That military power, that prowess, the legend of the indomitable Astartes, the inexhaustible Army, the matchless fleets, is both the symbol and the reason for its supremacy.\n\nSomewhere, in the smoking darkness, in an instant that flits by unnoticed, that changes. The Imperial war machine stops. It keeps fighting, and fighting valiantly, but there is a shift in its collective mindset. It is no longer the greatest thing. It has met something greater. That greater something is not military at all, and it is ultimately immune from injury, no matter how many rounds and rockets and missiles and shells are thrown at it.\n\nIt is a slow, corrosive, existential dissonance that will not be fully recognised for decades, or even centuries. The great Imperium, if it survives this day, may continue to fight and even dominate. But it is no longer supreme.\n\nIt has met its match. And its match is an immortal, unbridled force that almost no one had realised was there.\n\nThe Imperium's idea of itself has been broken forever.\n\nThe other thing of significance that passes, unmarked, obscured by fire, is the integrity of the final fortress. Like the Imperium's supremacy, it is lost long before anyone realises it.\n\nEkron Fal and Vorus Ikari, Sons of Horus, side by side, lead the storm assault against the Delphic Battlement. Fal's dread Justaerin hammer the monumental defences with heavy fire as Ikari's company, the malefic Fourth, advance under shield with war engines of Mortis striding in their midst. The two leaders, at once partners and rivals in this action, jostle for supremacy. They are the tip of the Warmaster's spear, but each wants the honour whole. Whoever breaks the wall first, whoever leads the tide of rout into the splintering final fortress, will doubtless claim the rank of First Captain from Abaddon, for Abaddon is absent. And anyway, Abaddon is a relic, a piece of yesterday no longer fit to serve, nor strong enough to lead. This glory is too bright for the old First Captain, this effort too great. Ezekyle Abaddon's era is done. This is their time.\n\nThey strike with unfettered savagery and merciless precision, foul parodies both of the once-lauded Astartesian principles, Fal's monstrous strength matched only by Ikari's astounding cruelty.\n\nStreams of macro shells puncture the Delphic's adamantine lip. Pylons topple like fir trees in a hurricane. Resonators and relays explode in scorching flares of discharge. Torrents of sparks cascade down the battered wall, and flutter like banners in the wind and rain.\n\nA section of the void shield has collapsed.\n\n5:xiv\n\nLight the fire\n\nIn the shadow of the Hollow Mountain, the Death Guard assault collapses backwards, crumbling from the cliffs and down into the lonely pass.\n\nThe sons of the Lion roar their defiance, clashing bloody swords against buckled shields.\n\nIt is but brief respite, time to clean and cauterise wounds, to re-edge blades and reload guns. Without question, the traitors, fearfully mauled, will regroup and come at them again. The fury of Typhus, his hatred for Corswain and the First, burns like a fever that refuses to break. He will not let them go. He will plague them and scour them until naught but their sticky bones remain in the twilight air.\n\n'Where did you come from, lord?' Corswain asks, his breathing laboured from supreme exertion. He is swathed in gore as though he has bathed in it.\n\n'I told you, Hound of Caliban... do not ask,' says Cypher, no less badged in blood.\n\nCorswain shakes his head.\n\n'Not good enough,' he says. 'At other times, perhaps, but not here. Not now. The end of the Throneworld is a torrid place of phantoms and lies, and I need to trust you.'\n\n'Have I not already proven my worth and trust, your grace?'\n\n'Aye, you have. Prove it further. Put all doubt from my mind.'\n\n'I come because you need me,' says Cypher quietly. 'I come because these Dark Angels need proof that you are worthy, that you carry the authority of the Great Lion in this war, and should be followed unto death. I come from the spirit of the First Legion, for therein I dwell. I have always been here with you. I appear only in the direst of times, when the sight of me may fortify courage more vitally than any flag or standard.'\n\n'The Emperor sent you to us,' says Corswain.\n\n'If that is what you believe, then that is the truth of it,' says Cypher.\n\nCorswain kneels to him, and bows his head. Around him, others kneel too, Harlock and Tragan, Blamires and Bruktas, Vanital and Vorlois, three dozen more besides, and more beyond that, hulking, plated figures smeared in blood and streaked with mire, their blades gathered to their breasts under their bowed chins.\n\nWeapons sheathed, Cypher bends down and grips Corswain's head with both hands. He tilts his face up until Corswain cannot help but gaze into Cypher's masked eyes.\n\n'You have been away a long time, lord seneschal,' Cypher says. 'I had to be sure of your loyalty before I came to your side.'\n\n'As I needed to be sure of yours,' says Corswain. 'In the madness of this war, it has been hard to tell friend from foe.'\n\nCypher grasps him by the wrists and pulls him to his feet. 'This I understand,' says Cypher. 'And it is only right. Doubt is part of a true warrior's armour. But so is trust. Do you doubt still?'\n\nCorswain hesitates, but he feels, for the first time in months, that there is a light upon him, as though some greater power is suddenly shining forth and renewing his faltering strength.\n\nHe shakes his head.\n\n'Then the spirit of the First is whole for now, my lord,' says Cypher, 'and may it remain so until the end of this great trial.'\n\n'Will we claim the field here?' Corswain asks.\n\n'We will drive the Death Guard to rout, or die trying,' Cypher replies. 'And more besides.'\n\n'What more?'\n\n'We will relight the fire of this mountain, and bring hope to Terra.'\n\n5:xv\n\nFragments\n\nThe sky is a wide, fierce netherscape, fractured by lightning and distended by bellying smoke. Black rain falls, a monsoon of sheeting force that pummels and sluices and drenches. Where the monumental clouds part, the night sky can be glimpsed, filled with stars. But the night is just the lightless flesh of the enveloping warp, and the stars are baleful, unblinking eyes.\n\nTjaras Grunli of the Rout, wolf-born, takes his last breath.\n\nHe lies on his back in the ruins of the Irenic Barbican, his shoulders propped against an ouslite slab, like a body laid out on a mortuary block. He is too mutilated to move. Around him lie the corpses of Blood Angels and Imperial Fists, of White Scars, of Salamanders, of Shattered Legion warriors and of the finest Excertus mortals, each one fallen in turn until only Grunli remains, gore-haired and wet-axed. Across the bodies of his fallen brothers sprawl the carcasses of the Death Guard Grunli took down in vengeance and arch defiance until he was too wounded to stand.\n\nThe sky is black smog, so low it seems to be almost touching his face. Stars, half-seen, wink through the pall. They seem to be watching him. He wonders if any of them are the same stars that rose in the winter nights of Fenris.\n\nVorx of the Death Guard has left him for dead. No execution stroke, no honouring death-blow for a worthy adversary.\n\nAnd Grunli is dead. He knows it. He inhales, and knows it is the last breath he will ever take, the last breath he has the strength to draw. When he lets it out, there will not be another.\n\nBut he holds onto it. He holds onto it as a last scrap of life, a last bubble of heat and air, for while it is in his blood-filled lungs, he is not yet gone.\n\nThe Neverborn that skitter and writhe at the heels of the Death Guard, an honour train of the diseased, the maggot-mouthed and the corpse-gnawing that follow the pestilential XIV wherever it goes, begin to close in, sniffing and yapping, daring each other to inch closer to the fallen Wolf. Among them shuffle the hunched, cadaverous haruspices who, with hooks and loop knives, will read the future in his entrails once he has breathed his las"}
{"text":"le it is in his blood-filled lungs, he is not yet gone.\n\nThe Neverborn that skitter and writhe at the heels of the Death Guard, an honour train of the diseased, the maggot-mouthed and the corpse-gnawing that follow the pestilential XIV wherever it goes, begin to close in, sniffing and yapping, daring each other to inch closer to the fallen Wolf. Among them shuffle the hunched, cadaverous haruspices who, with hooks and loop knives, will read the future in his entrails once he has breathed his last.\n\nTjaras Grunli refuses to exhale.\n\nSojuk of the White Scars plants his tulwar through the head of a Word Bearer. It takes the leverage of his heel to pull the blade free again.\n\nEnclosed by rings of flame in the ruins of Gallium Bar, he leads his brothers in what is becoming an eternal raid. There is no greater strategy, no command from Archamus or the Hegemon. The vox is nothing but a dry-brush crackle of nonsense. So they stay in motion, reaving, killing, chasing through the tormented dereliction of the open field, assaulting whatever they can.\n\nThis motion-war is contrary to the philosophies of his brothers, the Imperial Fists and the Blood Angels. Sojuk is surprised that they still follow him, his rank be damned. But in nine hours, as best as he can count, they have made thirty-two engagements, and he has led them to victory in each one. He has won something more valuable than rank. He has won respect.\n\nThey pause upon a cliff of bruised masonry above a ditch of burning bodies. From Gallium, he expects to see the prospect of Hindress Fort and the southern Palatine batteries. Instead, he sees a broken monument that looks for all the world like the Lion's Gate.\n\nBut that cannot be, unless the maelstrom of war has bewildered them and led them further astray than he has reckoned. Sojuk ventures it is some other monument, some other gate. He doesn't know the Palace well, and that ignorance hardly matters, for all he is searching for is an enemy to hunt. Where that hunt happens has no significance.\n\nThere is movement in the silted gulches and thread-trenches to their west. An enemy formation of some size, greater than his own dwindling force, but slow where he will be fast.\n\nHe nods to it.\n\n'What hope is there?' a Hort Kalizan soldier nearby asks, fatigued to the edge of his wits.\n\n'None,' Sojuk tells him.\n\n'But-'\n\n'Hope drains you,' Sojuk says, 'because it promises too much. Be glad you're shot of it. When you have nothing left to hope for, you have nothing left to fear.'\n\nDeath dilates.\n\nIn the ravaged expanses of the Palatine, units of both sides - beleaguered loyalists and invading traitors - churn for position in the elemental deluge. Beset by wildfire, by keening winds, by sheeting black rain, by lethal banks of gas and smoke, they fight to secure footholds, to manoeuvre, to find shelter, to orientate themselves. The warscape betrays them at every turn.\n\nOn fields of sucking mud, Excertus units stagger through the downpour, scanning for landmarks they can use to find bearings now their compasses spin and lie. Huddled in earthworks and hammered trench systems, Auxilia brigades scope for contacts, no longer sure which way they are pointing. Limping, scarred armour groups stalk through gutted street blocks, turning in maddened circles as their guidance systems give back nothing but gibberish. Mechanicus formations stop and freeze, unable to process accurate routes, unable to execute pre-coded battle plans. Astartes units, trying to regroup, but no longer trusting their sensoria, slither uneasily through cracked culverts, and cross shattered roads, hunting for notations that match the plan of the Palace they carry in their maps and memories. Many have removed their helms, trusting eyes more than visors.\n\nMany on both sides glimpse distant structures through the deluge, the towers and elevations of a city still standing, the black cliffs of fortress walls. They recognise nothing. Skylines refuse to match. Identifiable structures, seen from far off, are not where they should be, or stand beside other structures that were never in their vicinity. Worse, the combatants catch sight of buildings and monuments that they know have already fallen.\n\nNothing is true. No scope or rangefinder can be believed. Officers, their nerves already shredded, blame atmospheric mirages, fata morganas, the sanity of their scouts and observers, the trustworthiness of their original data. Many doubt they are even where they believed they were.\n\nUnits turn. They reposition. They circle aimlessly. They advance on enemy positions only to discover the enemy suddenly behind them. Some quit safe entrenchments, and blunder directly into killing fields. Some move for safety to find better cover, and find themselves securing strangely familiar dug-outs.\n\nMen are executed for these mistakes. Men despair. Men go mad at the sight of walls and bastion towers that they know have long perished in battles that took the lives of their comrades, but which loom through the vapour as distant, taunting ghosts.\n\nAt what remains of Targus Point, the 55th Pan-Polar advances under fire, making a near-suicidal push to reposition their field guns and supply a vital covering barrage for the Maglex Rifles they are flanking. It is a costly, gruelling effort, but the commander of the 55th finally gets his regiment into place on a rainswept escarpment, and begins his bombardment. The medium artillery pieces, over two hundred guns, thump and recoil for ten minutes, lighting up a belt of the field three kilometres away. Only then does the commander learn that the 55th is somehow turned about and, despite hauling his cannons through the murk under fire, he is on the other flank of the Maglex line and has been shelling them the whole time.\n\nThe Pan-Polar commander reads the ragged paper that the speechless despatch runner has brought him. He orders firing cease, hands his officer's sword to a nearby lieutenant, and walks towards the wire, never to be seen again.\n\nAt the VTC-26 Batteries, just west of Irenic, the 414th Ludovic finally charges, and takes a row of blockhouses that has held out against them for over an hour. Storming inside to plant their Imperialis standards, all they find are the crumpled dead of the Ninth Gustav and their own burning banners of the Emperor.\n\nThe massed forces of the enemy, every bit as bewildered as the loyalist lines, forge ahead. They need no maps, no bearings, not even eyes. The Pantheon of Four has shown them the way and told them the truth: all paths lead to the same place. The destination is inevitable.\n\n5:xvi\n\nA place to stand\n\nThe Metome Processional has run out, vanishing into the mauled earth like the rotting line of a wooden breakwater receding into wet sand where the sea has eaten it away. There's no sign of the Metome gun-decks either. Her vague plan to make for the Delphic Line is cast aside. Unless they abandon their artillery pieces, they are too slow-moving. They are out in the open, though the horizon around them seems too close and too tight, because it is curtained by walls of ash that rise, thirty kilometres high, in every direction. When they find the black mansion, she decides it's as good a spot as anywhere. They need a place to make a stand, to dig in, to fight, and this is the only structure of substance for many kilometres.\n\nMarshal Agathe, shutting out the constant pain in her half-swollen cheek and jaw, gives her instructions. The officers nod and hurry to their tasks. Phikes follows her inside.\n\nThe black mansion - Phikes named it when they first came in sight of it - is a large, hulking structure. Though ruined, with at least one wing reduced to rubble by recent barrages, its walls are unusually thick, and thus it has survived where virtually all the other buildings in what were once the streets around it are levelled to slag heaps. Agathe thinks she should know it. The place seems familiar, and was clearly once a major landmark. But in an arcology of major landmarks, that means little. It is low, square-built, wide, cyclopean in frame, and entirely blackened. It has been gutted by fire at some point in the last few days, and Agathe presumes the stonework is scorched.\n\nIt will do.\n\nThe bulk of her force, some three thousand or so, remain outside, prepping the field guns which are their primary strength. She has ordered the gunnery officers to dig the guns in along overlapping lines to cover the west, with a further spur of gunlines to the east. These have been directions from which all attacks have come in the last four hours. There's some hellish firefight - a tank battle, she guesses - raging behind the ash banks twelve kilometres to their east, so she anticipates contact from that direction. Forward observers are sent out to watch for enemy movement. They're using semaphore, whistles and signal lamps, because the vox is entirely dead.\n\nThe men are exhausted from dragging the unlimbered guns and the ammunition wagons. Agathe reckons they'll be able to see an enemy unit approaching from at least two kilometres out, and thus have a grace period to use their artillery and shell the living shit out of it. If the enemy comes from a different angle - north, say, or south - it will be a different story. Her men are gunners, trenchers and light infantry. If Traitor Astartes surprise them and get close, it won't even be a fight.\n\nThe directions, east, west... They are arbitrary anyway. Compasses aren't working, suggesting some dramatic electromag disruption, and tech is fried. There's no sun to sight from, or gauge time of day. She lines her gun the way her gut tells her. Instinct's kept her alive this long. On the other hand, damned instinct has made her live through it this long.\n\nIf she's wrong, then her forces will pull back into the black mansion directly behind her gunlines and use its heavy walls as a stronghold. The place is built like a fort, thick walls, small windows. Was it a fort? she wonders. Was it Laufey? "}
{"text":"atic electromag disruption, and tech is fried. There's no sun to sight from, or gauge time of day. She lines her gun the way her gut tells her. Instinct's kept her alive this long. On the other hand, damned instinct has made her live through it this long.\n\nIf she's wrong, then her forces will pull back into the black mansion directly behind her gunlines and use its heavy walls as a stronghold. The place is built like a fort, thick walls, small windows. Was it a fort? she wonders. Was it Laufey? Or maybe Hermitage Gard? If it was Hermitage, then it's lost three or four storeys from the top, yet it doesn't look as if it was ever any taller.\n\nShe walks inside to inspect her stronghold, following Phikes. He's sent clearance teams in ahead, poor bastard trench-fighters from the 403rd, to check for nasty surprises.\n\nThe place is gutted, but its bones are good. The walls look ten metres thick in some places. The portals and gates are stout and defensible, and show traces of portcullis and blast-door systems. Some of those hatches, still extant and as thick as the doors of bullion safes, could be freed and made to close, she reckons, if they clear some of the rubble off the floor.\n\nThere's rubble everywhere. The floors are strewn. The fire was so hot, there's no trace of furniture, fittings or bodies. She sees some twisted bars of metal among the broken stone. The place is cold now, no matter how hot the fire that cleansed it was. It sulks its chill at her. Water drips from cracked roof sections. The air is empty, and full of echoes.\n\n'What's that?' she asks.\n\n'Marshal?' Phikes looks back at her.\n\n'What did you just say, Phikes?'\n\n'I didn't speak, mam.'\n\nAgathe frowns. Someone did.\n\n5:xvii\n\nNeither here nor there\n\nIt takes Amon Tauromachian longer than he expects to conduct them to the tower.\n\nToo long, in fact. The direct route, via Galitae Processional, somehow leads them to the Bosphorus Court. Amon doubles back. The upper end of Yulongxi should have brought them to the Pons Albedo spanning the ventilation canyon between the Hall of Marshals and the Ariadne Belvedere, but instead it takes them to the plaza below the red stone gates of the Magistary, which is thronged with panicking courtiers and long, bewildered lines of household servants clutching bundles of salvaged possessions, like aimless merchant caravans. An old man, a member of the high nobility from his robes, is standing on the low wall of the plaza's central fountain, singing some archaic song loudly, for no apparent reason. A hymn. In this day and age. How does anyone still remember the words to an old hymn?\n\nNo one is listening anyway. Amon glares at the scene, then turns around.\n\nMelanconia Gate is blocked by rubble where a wall has toppled. Pasiphae Gate is choked with refugee columns searching for an open shelter, and besides, through the grand arches of the gateway, Amon can see only the high-buttressed walls of the Eastern Approaches, which is where they have come from, and not the long boulevard of the Via Asterius, which is what should have been there.\n\nThe Onopion Processional, slowly filling to capacity with more displaced citizens of the Zone Imperialis, simply ends in an anonymous blank wall. Thoas Way, mysteriously empty and unlit, leads only to the ambulatory circuit of the Tauropolis. The Mytheme Conduit brings them, haphazardly, to the statue-lined courtyard west of the House of Weapons. The full crew complements of several battlefleet vessels have gathered there, some still in flight suits, listless and apprehensive. The statues on the court's many plinths have gone, without explanation, but an old man has climbed up on one, and stands, singing in a thin, reedy voice.\n\nIt looks like the same old man who had been singing in the Magistary's plaza, but Amon knows it can't be. It sounds like the same hymn too. Amon doesn't care. He's deeply troubled by the unforced detours. He knows the Palace in every detail. It's his duty to know it, and his memory is perfect. How could he have made so many mistakes?\n\n'I am very tired,' Fo announces (for I have been walking much further than I wanted to). 'Are you lost or something, Custodian?'\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\n'Well, my feet are sore,' says Fo (and they really are very sore indeed).\n\n'Don't be such a child,' Andromeda-17 tells him.\n\n'I am not a child,' Fo replies, 'though I would love to be one again. To be young again. Wouldn't that be nice? This body is so old and weak.'\n\n'There are a lot of things that would be nice,' says Andromeda.\n\n'Are you lost?' the Chosen, Xanthus, whispers warily to Amon.\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\nTen minutes, or what seem like ten minutes later, he has proved it. The Pons Aegeus takes them out across a vast circulation trench towards the tower. Amon ignores the fact that this is not what he intended, nor is this where the Pons Aegeus has ever previously led. He tells Xanthus something about 'needing to take an indirect route for security reasons'.\n\nOn the span of the skyway, they are assailed by the wind. In the deep gulf below them, the Palace's environmental systems move atmospheric currents with a tempest roar. The wind on their faces is not fresh. It is warm, and smells of smoke. Amon knows that the climate of the Sanctum, as trapped and besieged as any of them, has slowly begun to degrade. It's become overloaded with toxins and compounds that even the mass recycling filters cannot handle. In the past, the Sanctum Imperialis generated its own weather patterns, with cloud formations and bands of rain collecting under the dome of the aegis shield. Now the sky above, such as it is, is soot-black, low, and flecked with capillaries of lightning. A red haze glows to the south and west. Visibility, even here, is reduced.\n\n'Look,' says Fo, pointing, 'that crackle there. See it? Is that the shield starting to collapse? The Sanctum voids giving out and fraying along the seams?'\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\n'I think it is,' says Fo (because I know full well it is).\n\n'No,' says Amon.\n\nFrom the west of them comes a long, sustained rumble that begins like a ripple of applause and then rises in intensity. They watch as the Spire of the Castellan, five kilometres away, slowly declines and slides into the canyon of the circulation trench. It starts hesitantly, with a tremble buckling the lower sections. Then the upper reaches begin to lean, with an almost languid elegance, and then the entire thing caves, collapsing into a cataract of rockcrete fragments that plunge into a rising curtain of dust.\n\n'That can't be good,' says Fo.\n\n'No,' says Amon. 'It can't.'\n\nThe wall of beige dust expands, caught in the air currents of the trench. It starts to race towards them like a sandstorm.\n\n'Get inside,' says Amon.\n\nHe waits as they pass him, then takes a last look at the cityscape beyond. He wishes, dearly, that he could consult with the captain-general, and receive an unequivocal directive regarding Fo.\n\nBut the captain-general has been out of contact for hours.\n\n5:xviii\n\nDarkness comes\n\nIt is thirty-nine seconds into the fight, and they are as good as blind.\n\nConstantin Valdor's neuro-synergetic command is breaking down. The swaddling darkness is pervasive and almost tangible. It weights their limbs and shoulders like volcanic ash or some heavy black mantle of opulent fabrics. It leadens their minds like guilt or shame. It rains upon them, streaking their golden plate like oil. It billows around them like a blizzard of dirt, or like some nightmarish murmuration of birds, a billion dark specks flocking and turning as one. It seems to seep into his helm, into his visor, into his mouth.\n\nThings flow and move within it, darting in its currents, things he only glimpses. Sleek bat-forms, gleaming like slate and as fluid as silk; vast shapes like winged rays trailing slipstream tails. He feels the draught of them as they rush past, the slapping impact of their swaying, shagreen wings. One veers and snatches Companion Aldeles off his feet, and they never see Aldeles again. Constantin stabs at the darting selachimorphic shadows, but they seem no more solid than the liquid smoke of the darkness.\n\nThe only light is the flash of fire: the white sparks of their bolter shots, the sheeting yellow of the last Adrathics, the scintillating blue and pink of combusting warpflux in the changeling blackness. So many flickering light sources, yet they illuminate nothing.\n\nHis company, diminishing in number, is suddenly forested by gnarled trunks of glistening meat that erupt from the fleshy floor. Like trees carved from carrion, they writhe branch-limbs that spit hellflame. The trunks, twice his height, sway in some unfelt wind, like marine anemones undulating in the current of the abyssal darkness. Their skirts billow like gills, and the fungus-flesh of their columns glitter with gelatinous scabs of frogspawn eyes that slide and froth across cauls of fat. The flame squirting from their swaying limbs melts auramite, and roasts men whole. Constantin tries to sever their limbs before they can belch flame. Some tree-things rupture and explode, others topple and collapse. The fire within them spills out and flows like pyrophoric fluid, conjuring little mocking sprites of Constantin and his men made of flame, which dance and crackle around their feet. Struck or stamped out, the pink flames shatter into coals of blue fire that eat at their sabatons and greaves, and gnaw them away like phosphor. He smashes the flesh-trees as they rear up, barging them with his pauldrons, toppling them with his spear haft, and tearing them with his blade-tip. He learns new names that he is forced to spit out: K'Chan'tsani'i.\n\nHe is no longer interested in learning how to kill new things. The knowledge he has accumulated sickens him to his core.\n\nThe darkness is alive with laughter. Constantin ignores it. Some of the laughter is coming from his own men. He ignores that. Some of those men are already dead. He ignores that too. There is singing, approximate vo"}
{"text":"em with his pauldrons, toppling them with his spear haft, and tearing them with his blade-tip. He learns new names that he is forced to spit out: K'Chan'tsani'i.\n\nHe is no longer interested in learning how to kill new things. The knowledge he has accumulated sickens him to his core.\n\nThe darkness is alive with laughter. Constantin ignores it. Some of the laughter is coming from his own men. He ignores that. Some of those men are already dead. He ignores that too. There is singing, approximate voices wailing approximate words, the melody carried by the very ebb and flow of the swirling gloom. The keening has nine beats in a measure, a strangely limping, additive rhythm that reminds him of old Balkan songs he knows from pre-Unity days. The accumulating names in his mind tell him that it is a Kairic chant forbidden to the air. Another thing for him to ignore.\n\nDiocletian Coros breaks clear and yells out. All neuro-synergy is lost, but they hear his voice. They form up and follow his lead, gripping each other's pauldron edges to gauge some sense of direction, fending off fire and snapping beak and beating wing. Diocletian cuts a route along a rising shelf of muscle fringed with a hem of gleaming adipose and connective tissue. The cliff at their backs is strutted with giant ribs and embossed with pearlescent knots of cartilaginous fibre.\n\nA daemon falls upon them. It is by far the largest thing they have encountered in the thirty-nine - now forty - seconds of the fight. Constantin has a sense of it as some vast vulture or corpse-bird, but he can't really see it. Its colossal shoulders are hunched and high, its neck serpentine, its head sunken and snapping a raptor beak longer than a jetbike. Its wings, unseen but suggesting a span so wide it could embrace the galaxy, beat against their straggling line, crushing Meusas and Tiberean, and casting Prefect Kaledas off the lip of the ridge and into the void below. Constantin can't see Kaledas, nor tell how far he has fallen, but he can hear him screaming. The screaming goes on for far too long. Eventually, it becomes part of the nine-beat chant.\n\nThe daemon is on them. Its hooked talons, each the size of a Titan engine's ursus claw, bite into the ridge of muscle to find purchase, and it perches like a seabird on a cliff ledge, pecking with its spear-beak. Its wings are everywhere, battering them, filling the air with feather-fibres and the stink of psittacine lice. The jabbing beak impales Laphros, pinning him to the meat wall of the cliff. The blood that sprays out is partly his and partly that of the punctured landscape. Symarcantis manages to spear the daemon in its flank below its left wing, and tries to lever it away. It turns on him, whipping its neck to hurl Laphros' corpse off its beak. Ludovicus severs its throat with his power sword.\n\nThe huge bulk of the daemon, its massive pinions still flapping, collapses off the ledge, loose feathers and down tufts tumbling in the air and burning where they settle. Its takes Symarcantis' lance with it, wedged in its side. Only Constantin's tight hold prevents Symarcantis following his lance over the edge.\n\nHe hauls the Warden up. Symarcantis grips Constantin's hand for a second, then takes up Laphros' axe, which is lying on the lip where it fell.\n\nConstantin yells for them to advance, but there is no movement. Diocletian shouts back that the path has run out. The shelf of muscle simply tapers into the flesh of the cliff. Another hopeless path, like all the paths they have tried to take. They are lost, and soon their lives will be lost too.\n\nThe darkness grows thicker and heavier. This isn't possible, but it happens anyway. Moving, pulsing blackness, pumping with a nine-beat measure, chokes and strangles them, filling their nostrils, their ears, their throats and guts, their tear ducts. Constantin howls the names he has learned to keep it at bay, but his tongue is swollen and his mouth is full of liquid darkness.\n\nThey are forty-three seconds into the fight.\n\nValdor and the Custodians close ranks against the darkness...\n\n5:xix\n\nLife after death\n\nMissiles, slicing low across the matted ooze, strike the end post of the earthworks at Processional Square, but they are merely a distraction. Debris is still raining down as Maximus Thane and the last of his battle-brothers take to the parapet. They get there just a few seconds before the enemy begins its escalade.\n\nThe traitors, for the most part berserk World Eaters, but with some Mechanicum elements in support, have counted on the brace of missiles to clear the parapet and keep the defenders ducking while they make their rush. The Excertus companies with Thane, a jumble of weary, clay-caked men and women from a score of different regiments, are still sheltering in the flakboarded cover-boxes and blast trenches, but the armoured Imperial Fists doggedly make the line.\n\nThane's plate is gouged and scorched, and pieces of it are cracked or missing. His hammer's head is pitted and scored, and the haft is greased with organic waste. When he closes his eyes, he can still see the massacre on the Gilded Walk; the Emperor's finest demolished, row-by-row, by the onrushing legions of the damned, and the daemonswarm that followed them.\n\nThane should have died there. By force of will alone, he and the few brothers with him fought clear, broke through a flanking line, and turned back to harry the skirts of an enemy mass they could not face head-on. They have been fighting ever since.\n\nRetreat is not an option. The Praetorian Fists hold the line: that litany is embedded in his soul. But his lord-father Dorn always taught him the error of literal interpretation. Sometimes holding the line can be a worthless act of suicide, where to recompose upon a new line will cost the enemy far more. Every Imperial Fist is prepared to die for his ground, but the veterans are those who can negotiate a higher price for their mortality.\n\nMost of Thane's men are newborn initiates, apart from the veterans Kolquis and Noxar, and the fierce Huscarl Berendol. The initiates have been rushed into the ranks because of the crisis. They are fine men, and Thane sees promise in them all, but they are too fresh, and their minds too stiff with the rubrics of the VII. Thane and his veterans are instructing them by example, showing them that while there is courage in death, there is greater courage in the conviction to reframe and fight better. Flexibility, motion, harrying counter-attacks - such things have finer defensive properties in a hellstorm overrun, against a foe with dismaying numerical superiority. And Thane has learned some tricks himself, observing the White Scars units that fought alongside them. The White Scars, bred for mobile strikes, should have been muzzled and next to useless in a siege war such as this. But they have adapted, and their propensity for movement has even extended to their doctrines, which have kept in motion and adjusted. He has watched them turn their art of war into forms of 'running defence' and 'defence by attack'. Thane's admiration for them is hard for him to express.\n\nThe initiates, firebrands all enflamed with the stern fundamentals of their Legion, have sometimes objected to Thane's motile tactics, horrified that he is prepared to give ground or sometimes, as they see it, retreat. He accepts their criticism and commends their nerve to speak out.\n\n'I retreat,' he tells them, 'and thus I am alive still. Alive to teach you this lesson. And alive to do what I will do next.'\n\n'Which is, lord?'\n\n'Kill more of the bastards.'\n\nThey see the look in his eyes. Some mutter about 'death before dishonour'.\n\n'What is more honourable?' he asks. 'One dead traitor or a hundred? Death before dishonour is a lofty refrain, but ask yourselves what it means. First of all, ask \"How many deaths?\"'\n\n'How many, lord?'\n\n'It's their deaths we're talking about. How many can you claim before your honour is upheld? There is more dishonour in keeping your mind and place so rigid that you achieve but a fraction of the tally that might have been.'\n\nHis hammer pulverises the rising skull of a World Eater. Head pulped and slack, and now set backwards upon its broken neck, the World Eater topples off the parapet. It is just the first. The roaring enemy mass is piling the earthwork line like a snowdrift. Eaters. Thane thinks of them just as Eaters now, and refuses to respect them with their full name. They are vermin beasts, devourers of carrion, necrovores. They do not deserve Astartesian courtesy.\n\nThane's hammer does not falter. Thane does not hesitate. To his left, Berendol swings his greatsword with a measured stroke that seems leisurely, but actually speaks to an acute understanding of momentum, weight-balance and combat economy. Beyond the Huscarl, Kolquis counterpoints strokes of his chainblade with shots from his bolt pistol, creating a staggered arrhythmia of defence actions that the rising Eaters cannot predict.\n\nTo Thane's right, two of the initiates, Molwae and Demeny, 'prentice-brothers' as Berendol disparagingly calls them all, are hacking like threshers on a mill floor. Their strokes are good, their fevered energy enough to make Thane and the two veterans seem languid. They are landing two or even three blows for every one of Thane's.\n\nBut every two or three are hitting the same stricken targets.\n\nThane doesn't know if it's manic desperation - for who of them, even veterans, have not felt a touch of that on this day of days? - or a youthful display of pride to make a good showing at his side and not let him down. He does know that the final hours of Terra's fall are not a teaching moment. But when else will it matter if not now?\n\nWithout breaking his flow, without turning to them, he calls their names on the intervox.\n\n'Slow your rates,' he says. 'Judge your strikes. One good blow, not three hasty ones. Each stroke is a kill-stroke. They can only die once.'\n\nMolwae and Demeny adjust in an instant, without a"}
{"text":"of days? - or a youthful display of pride to make a good showing at his side and not let him down. He does know that the final hours of Terra's fall are not a teaching moment. But when else will it matter if not now?\n\nWithout breaking his flow, without turning to them, he calls their names on the intervox.\n\n'Slow your rates,' he says. 'Judge your strikes. One good blow, not three hasty ones. Each stroke is a kill-stroke. They can only die once.'\n\nMolwae and Demeny adjust in an instant, without a question or a side look. They become considered, raising accuracy above speed. Their kill rates do not drop. They follow his model as a paragon of the Astartesian principles.\n\nHe could not ask for more.\n\nFrom down the fighting line, Noxar yells a warning, but Thane only hears half of it before the noise of the threat drowns it out. Blinding jets of flame hose up the embankment line, engulfing sections of the swarming Eaters, and pluming across the bulwark. Two Imperial Fists, initiates both, plunge off the parapet into the trench behind, sheeting trails of flame like comets.\n\nThe storm-engines of the Traitor Mechanicum, barging forward through the crush of Eaters, have unleashed their heavy flamers, and the bulk meltas mounted like searchlights on their forward rails. No one uses heat-war or fire-war with allies forward of their position. The Mechanicum has dispensed with this particular courtesy of combat. Perhaps the field alliance of Mechanicum and Eaters is tenuous at best. Perhaps the Martian wretches want to be titular victors of this engagement and cheat the feral sons of Nuceria of their triumph. Perhaps they do not care.\n\nPerhaps, thinks Thane for one chilling second, the World Eaters do not care.\n\nThere is no time to consider the Eaters' willingness for self-sacrifice in the name of victory. Stones and shield-plates melt like water. The blow-torch ferocity of the flame-mounts, built to ignite Titan engines, razes the parapet.\n\nBurning death rises in his face, bright enough to burn away the whole world.\n\nThane's last thought is of his beloved primarch lord. He is going to die, never knowing if he has honoured Rogal Dorn or failed him.\n\n5:xx\n\nUnyielding\n\nOne year, it tries a new voice. It says: There is shadow under this red rock (come in under the shadow of this red rock), and I will show you something different from either, your shadow at morning striding behind you, or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.\n\nHe hears it quite distinctly. He doesn't know what it means, though the wall is like a red rock, and there is a cool shadow beneath it where he chooses to sit, and everywhere here is dust. He thinks he knows the voice too. It sounds like a warrior he once knew, whose armour bore no markings. His own armour has no markings either, because the wind and sand have worn them off. Perhaps the warrior was lost in the desert too? He can't remember the warrior's name. It was too long ago, and besides, he's fairly sure it is just the red doing different voices.\n\nStill, the little, bleached memory of the warrior reminds him of a little faded patch of the past he thought he had lost in the dust. He starts scraping a new plan out on the wall.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, unyielding,' he says.\n\nJust give up. Just say it. Just say it. Who is the blood for?\n\nThe whispers are distracting. After a few more years, he decides to talk while he works, to blot them out. The red doesn't like that either.\n\n'Two millennia before the start of the first modern era on Terra, it was written in the Sumari epic lyric, called by some the Record of Gigamech, that two warriors debated whether or not to execute a captured enemy-'\n\nBehind the wall, the red hisses in annoyance. This again.\n\n'They eventually elect to kill him. This brings down on them the opprobrium of what, at that period, were considered gods. There were no gods. But in this case, \"gods\" are a metaphor for societal outrage. The poem, some thirty thousand years old, is the earliest human record of ethics in warfare. The idea of just and unjust killing. It is the first application of morality to warfare.'\n\nThe red growls its displeasure.\n\nHe smiles, and adds, 'Mankind realised, even then, that blood was never just for blood.'\n\nAnother growl.\n\nHe carries on working, scratching, planning. He is not really talking to the red, because you cannot really hold a conversation with it, not any conversation he is prepared to have. But there is no one else here besides him and the red. He talks to drown out its whispers, so he can concentrate. It is simply a bonus that what he says annoys it.\n\n'Some... and we can only estimate... but some one-and-a-half-thousand years later, the cultures of archaic Eleniki developed the first rules of war. They were not binding, and had no legality, but they were agreed, and abided by, at a social level.'\n\nThese are the things he remembers. He learned them, long ago. Someone taught him, when he was young. His father, perhaps? He thinks he had a father. He recites the history of warfare ethics as a mantra, a focus for his rusting mind, a wall to block out the whispers. A calculated annoyance.\n\nHe keeps talking to himself. It's odd at first, for no one has really spoken for almost a century except the whispers. The sound of his own voice surprises him. He had almost forgotten how to speak.\n\nGive up. Give in. Say it. Say who the blood is for-\n\n'Circa three hundred, M1, in the period known as the Martial States, in the Eastern Eurasian expanse, the concept of yi bang was devised to regulate the application of war. This formalised the justification for killing, making it the supreme method of judicial punishment. It could be used only by the ruling elite. Just kings, lords, emperors. Blood was not for anyone else.'\n\nBehind the wall, the red snarls.\n\n'This is the convention later known as jus ad bellum.'\n\nYears pass. Plans are scratched, scrapped, and new versions added. Frustrated by his dry-voiced lectures and the scritch of his blade, the red stops whispering. Sounds come, instead. Noises on the other side of the wall. Distant murmurs of battle and destruction.\n\nHe stops and listens. He presses his ear to the wall to hear better. The sounds are close, just on the other side. They are so tempting. But he can't climb the walls, because the walls are slightly too high, and he knows that if he treks up to the top of the highest dune, he still won't quite be able to see over. He wants to. He wants to see. He longs to let go. To give up. To wade out into the blood and stop thinking.\n\nBut the only way to get out, the only way to reach the other side, is to give in and say the thing the red wants him to say.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn,' he says instead.\n\n5:xxi\n\nOur days of glory ended\n\nUnder the command of Azkaellon of the Sanguinary Guard, a significant force of Blood Angels, Imperial Fists and White Scars moves up to occupy Hasgard. By the time they arrive, Rann and his teams have swept the bunker system again, carried out the enemy dead, and dumped them in the acidic pool of a giant shell hole west of the fortification.\n\nThey now have a salient from which to strike at the main enemy lines pushing towards the Delphic Battlement. Comms are still patchy over any kind of distance, so Namahi sends two White Scars on jetbikes to carry the news to Archamus, and coordinate action between the main loyalist force on the Delphic approaches and Rann's little thorn to the side. Rann reckons they can hold the scabby shell of Hasgard for a day, longer if Archamus can find them some armour support or an operational engine. White Scars pathfinders, on foot and bike, scout the routes between Fratery, Hasgard and the Viaduct, watching for enemy movement. It will come, soon enough, and it will be legion.\n\nIn the ragged bunkers, they keep watch and prep. Munitions are painfully low. They find a cache or two of bolt-rounds and other kinetics, marked with the Imperialis crest, in the bunkerwork stores, left behind by the previous defenders, but no one wants to scavenge munitions from the traitor dead. Their hard rounds and projectiles seem cursed to the touch, as tainted as the beasts who loaded them.\n\n'Our days of glory ended at the Gate,' Azkaellon tells Rann, as they sit together on the roof emplacement of one of the bunkers, watching the field for movement. The Sanguinary Guard, like all the Blood Angels, calls it 'the Gate' as though there are no others. Perhaps there aren't to them. They mean the last, immortal struggle of the Brightest One against Angron and the foul Bane of the Ninth, a feat of arms unlikely to be matched, the deed that locked the final fortress.\n\nBut Sanguinius has left the field. He, and Dorn, and Valdor, and the Emperor, gone to some last clash, some finitude, that the likes of Rann will probably never know about. The fate of the Palace has been left in the hands of their orphaned Astartes sons.\n\n'All our glory ended there,' Azkaellon says. His sadness seems at odds with his painful beauty. 'My Bright Lord was obliged to close the Gate. There was no choice. Angron's bastards were upon us in uncountable numbers. It must have been a terrible decision to make. But he did the right thing, because he is strong. The Sanctum had to be protected. It had to be sealed. He got as many sons inside as he could.'\n\n'Not you?' Rann asks.\n\n'There was so little time,' says Azkaellon.\n\n'So you were left outside?'\n\nThe Sanguinary Guard shakes his head, sorry that he gave the wrong impression.\n\n'Oh no, Fafnir,' he says. 'I chose to stay. We all did. Me, and the Bringer of Sorrow, and Rinas Dol, Gaellon, all the others. Those that were closest to the Gate went in. The rest of us were further out. Our retreat would have delayed things and risked...'\n\nHe trails off for a moment.\n\n'So we chose to stay,' he says quietly. 'The World Eaters were on us in droves. We chose to stay, and sent our decision to the Bright Lord. Close the Gate. We stood our groun"}
{"text":"y that he gave the wrong impression.\n\n'Oh no, Fafnir,' he says. 'I chose to stay. We all did. Me, and the Bringer of Sorrow, and Rinas Dol, Gaellon, all the others. Those that were closest to the Gate went in. The rest of us were further out. Our retreat would have delayed things and risked...'\n\nHe trails off for a moment.\n\n'So we chose to stay,' he says quietly. 'The World Eaters were on us in droves. We chose to stay, and sent our decision to the Bright Lord. Close the Gate. We stood our ground, and we held it, so that my lord and the others could get inside. It had to be done. They had to be held back. They would have choked the Gate otherwise.'\n\n'How did you survive?' Rann asks.\n\nAzkaellon looks at him, an amused frown that pretends his martial prowess has been insulted.\n\n'No, how?' asks Rann. 'You made an incredible sacrifice. The conditions you describe-'\n\n'We fought,' says Azkaellon.\n\n'I don't doubt it, sir,' says Rann. 'But how did you live?'\n\nAzkaellon shrugs.\n\n'I honestly don't know,' he says. 'We fought. Throne, like a frenzy. Just taking as many of them with us as we could. It seemed to last for hours where I was expecting just seconds of life remaining. Then... then there was a break. A slackening. Their assault eased. I suppose their spirit was broken because they had watched their lord die. Or perhaps because the Gate was shut and they knew it was futile. There was a moment's easing, so we took it. We fought clear, away from the wall, out into the wastes of the Palatine...'\n\nHe looks at Rann.\n\n'We found cover, eventually, in a ruined bastion. Regrouped. Joined your lord Archamus' divisions soon after. We've been fighting ever since.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'Strangest thing,' he reflects. 'The ruin we sheltered in. It can't have been far from the Gate, because we didn't break far. The World Eaters were like an ocean around us. But I swear, it was Avalon Bastion.'\n\n'That's a long way from the Gate,' says Rann.\n\n'I know. The confusion of war, I suppose. We were moving fast. Desperation, I confess. There didn't seem to be any chance of cover. Then, suddenly, it was there.'\n\nHe sighs.\n\n'So I am left out here to watch over our brothers as night falls. There is no glory left, Fafnir, no valour, no burnished prize to be pursued. Just duty and endeavour, the brutal mechanics of survival. If we prevail, against these odds, then it will be the most significant victory of our lifetimes. But it will not be one to savour or celebrate. The warped blight of treason has broken us so utterly, this will be a time best forgotten.'\n\n'By us?'\n\n'By history. This war is a stain upon our culture, and even the winning of it will be sullied by the shame of it ever happening.'\n\n'You sound resentful,' says Rann.\n\n'Of what, brother?'\n\n'That you were left behind.'\n\nAzkaellon smiles a thin smile. 'Not for a moment,' he says. 'My father expects this of me. He expects me to fly this path alone, in his stead, and hold the host together. I am his proxy, and there is no greater duty. My brothers of the Sanguinary Guard soar with him, at his side, to protect his life. They do not need me in order to excel.'\n\n'Then perhaps resentful was the wrong word. You seem cold. I have seen it in the other Blood Angels out here. I have seen it in Zephon. It is not a demeanour I associate with my brightest brothers.'\n\nAzkaellon nods. 'True enough. The fire of our glory is dimmed and...'\n\n'And?'\n\n'I feel a weight upon me,' the Blood Angel confesses quietly. 'I know the others feel it too. Zephon most certainly. It's more than the bleak misery that afflicts us all. It's like a terrible dream I am yet to have, or a bleak nightmare that, on waking, I cannot quite recall. It presses upon us, Fafnir. Ah, you must think me a fool.'\n\n'Never that,' says Rann. 'This war has taken everything from us, including our self-respect. I am sorry to see the fire of the Blood Angels burn so low.'\n\n'It gutters low, but it is not out, brother,' says Azkaellon. 'We shield it from the wind so it might survive. And if it survives... if we survive... then after this, perhaps, it will blaze bright again and our legacy will live on. I fight through these gruelling, inglorious hours in the hope that one day we will be free to be glorious once more.'\n\nThe Sanguinary Guard glances at Rann, his face solemn.\n\n'But I think,' he says, 'all the glory my Legion will accrue through its deeds has already been achieved. Whatever happens now, if there are any stories to tell in any kind of hereafter, Sanguinius at the Gate is part of our legend, perhaps the greatest part. Our primarch will never perform a deed more noble. Our days of glory ended at the Gate.'\n\n5:xxii\n\nThe last glory\n\nThey are the elite warriors of the Lupercal, three full companies of the Sons of Horus, held in reserve on the Vengeful Spirit as a personal bodyguard for the Warmaster. They are supported by a mass of Word Bearers, less regimented than the Horusian elite, but manic with bloodlust and idolatrous zeal, in number perhaps another five companies, backed by brigades of Traitor Excertus from the Merudin 20th Tactical Cadre and the infamous, hand-picked Hort Lupercali. With a force of this size and veteran prowess, the Warmaster could bring compliance to an entire world.\n\nWith a force of this quality, the Warmaster has brought compliance to entire worlds.\n\nBut they reel. They reel and they buckle, and they are driven back.\n\nSanguinius, with just a single company at his heels, is tearing into them.\n\nThere is no range. It is brutal close killing, packed body-to-body, the mayhem of mass melee, where to kill is to be showered in your victim's blood. The Great Atrium is vast, a huge temple of honour that crowns the magnitude of the Main Spinal, where once visitors were greeted with great ceremony before admission to the command decks, but it is packed to capacity, and the chosen ceremony is a blood rite.\n\nThe rival forces lock and mesh, Blood Angels and Lupercalian Sons. There is no movement or leeway. They hold their places or die. They kill where they stand or die where they stand. They lock and hold. They push or resist. Men perish, held upright by the density of men around them. The deck is awash, and rubbled with corpses. The atrium's banners burn. Portions of gilded ceiling collapse, showering those below. The white ouslite walls are cracked and pocked with ten thousand smoking holes, like the cratered surface of a blighted moon. There is no give. There can be no breaking, no release, for if either side breaks, the day is done. If the Sons of Horus give way, they will be overrun and massacred, and the way will be clear to Lupercal himself: to Lupercal, the command bridge, and the seizure of the Vengeful Spirit. The flagship will be taken, the cruel war over, and the loyalist cause triumphant.\n\nIf the Blood Angels, furious as the surface of the sun but wildly outnumbered, break now, then there will be no second chance. They will die, to a man, butchered in retreat, and the cause will be lost beyond any redemption. Terra will be lost. The Golden Throne. The Imperium.\n\nIt is do or die. It is do and die. It is here and now, or never. The Great Atrium is the Spirit's throat, the jugular. Cut it, and the flagship falls, a prize trophy to be gutted and skinned, and its head set on display.\n\nThe Sons of Horus will not falter. They cannot. They are the children of Horus Lupercal, the fury of the Warmaster personified, brimful of his wrath and his rage, imbued with his power, indomitable and loyal to the last. The thought of breaking does not enter their minds. Defeat has no place in their battle lexicon as a concept or even a word. This assault, for all its vehemence, is just a single company, the defiance of the already defeated.\n\nThe Blood Angels will not falter. They will not. They are the last hope of salvation, the only loyalist formation to ever get this close to arresting the inevitable plunge of history into infamy. And they will not stop because they are the sons of Sanguinius, and they will follow him forever, and the Bright Angel will never stop.\n\nHe simply will not. He simply does not.\n\nOf all the lives in that great and burning hall, his is the one that matters. Despite their implacable ferocity and luminous courage, the Blood Angels are outnumbered eight to one. If great Dorn, with his tactical genius, had drawn up a plan assessment, the Blood Angels would have lost before the ink of his signifying mark was dry. They should not achieve this. They cannot. It is non-viable. It is strategically unwinnable, on paper and in life.\n\nExcept for him.\n\nSanguinius is the variable. He is the disproportionate factor that overturns even the most carefully inspected projections, and invalidates the most impregnable logic. He is the outlier that revokes any tactical plan, which was why, in his wisdom, Dorn never factored him into any.\n\nIt is not just Sanguinius' physical power, which is beyond doubt. It is his mind. The purity of his focus and the almost sacred perfection of his devotion. And it is his presence; the aspect of him, like some manifest projection of the Emperor's light. The Sons of Horus he carves through shield their eyes, despite the efficient function of their visors. Some begin to smoke and combust before he reaches them. Some die without him even touching them. He rives a crimson chine through the armoured walls of the foe for his sons to follow.\n\nThrough it all, he ignores the pain.\n\nHe has taken a thousand tiny wounds, gashes, tears and scratches, and he feels none of them. The blood streaming from his golden form is mostly not his own. But the wound in his flank aches in his soul. It gnaws into his gut, into his groin, and up through his ribs and lungs. He can taste blood in his throat, and that blood is sour and spoiled. When he opens his mouth to yell his brother's name, his teeth are flecked red. There is a septic simmer in his bloodstream, and he can smell the breeding decay inside himself. He hacks Encarmi"}
{"text":"shes, tears and scratches, and he feels none of them. The blood streaming from his golden form is mostly not his own. But the wound in his flank aches in his soul. It gnaws into his gut, into his groin, and up through his ribs and lungs. He can taste blood in his throat, and that blood is sour and spoiled. When he opens his mouth to yell his brother's name, his teeth are flecked red. There is a septic simmer in his bloodstream, and he can smell the breeding decay inside himself. He hacks Encarmine sidelong, dissevering heads and limbs, and feels the unhealed wound pull open as he reaches out. He rams Telesto through a pair of flailing bodies, lifting them off the deck as they disintegrate, and feels the hot wash of the wound leaking under his placket. He crops and hews his path into the guts of the enemy mass, and feels the weeping sting in his own belly.\n\nHe ignores it, but it will not be ignored.\n\nHe wonders, for a moment, Has Horus killed me? Was Angron just the weapon? Is that how prophecy will make its vicious sense?\n\nHe casts the thought away. He has no use for it, and no time for it. He has one life, and though it might be reaching its end, he has one purpose to fulfil, or that whole life will have been worthless. He will prevail, for there is no one else to prevail in his place.\n\nA war-axe notches his left arm. He smashes the wielder aside with such force, the attacker's body brings down other Sons of Horus. A chainsword howls close at his right. He shears the whining blade in two, then carves blazing Encarmine down through the chainsword's owner. Bisected like an anatomical diagram, another Son slams into the deck. Four more die in the Great Angel's path. Three others tear at him, and try to grip him and bring him over, clinging to his hips and thighs. He kicks them aside, pulling them off him, feeling the wound grind and drool as he moves.\n\nA few clear metres of deck ahead. He pushes on, growling away his hurt. A Word Bearer rushes him, but falls short, and drops to his knees, filthy smoke pouring out of his visor. Another two Sons of Horus try to bracket him, coming from left and right. Sanguinius swings at full extension, and passes the tip of Encarmine through the throat of the one on the right, making him buckle. As the traitor falls, trying to hold the blood and severed windpipe inside his neck with both hands, Sanguinius rotates, and lets his body weight lead the sword clean through the torso of the other.\n\nAnother step. All is mayhem. From nowhere, a bolt-round hits him square in the cuirass. The blast lifts him and hurls him backwards. He finds himself dazed and entangled in a mob of the roaring foe, a dozen or more, who grasp and tear at him, almost lifting him prostrate above them like a prize as they try to claw the immortal weapons from his hands and rip the limbs from his body. He thrashes to regain his footing. He kicks out, and a helm crumples. He flails Encarmine blindly and beheads a roaring Son. Gauntlets scrabble and wrench at him. Some rip bloodstones from their settings. One shreds gilded laurels from his scorched cuirass. Another buckles his left vambrace. More haul at his hair and pin his wings.\n\nOne rakes across his abdomen and compresses the wound.\n\nPain blinds him. Death raises its cowl to show him its face.\n\nDarkness eats him.\n\n5:xxiii\n\nInvaded\n\nDarkness, then a voice. Nassir Amit opens his eyes.\n\nPraetor-Captain Honfler has finally reappeared.\n\n'Attend me,' the praetor orders as he approaches the denial companies waiting on the staging level.\n\nAmit had allowed himself to settle into a brief catalepsean fugue, partly to preserve his focus, but mostly to shut out the constant grumbling of the Space Wolf, Sartak.\n\nHis mind is not rested. Induced circadian fugues are usually dreamless. Amit's had been clotted with visions of his gene-sire. In them, his Bright Lord had been lost in total darkness. There had been doors, doors and gateways, revealed by his primarch's groping fingers, but each one was treacherous, and none of them led anywhere. Not anywhere new, at least, not anywhere different. Most led his lord back to where he had started, while a few kept taking him to a vault where silent stone caskets waited in candlelight.\n\nOne door, it seemed, brought his lord directly into Amit's dream. Each time that happened, the Great Angel would look at Amit with the forlorn eyes of a trapped animal, then turn to the darkness to try another door. There was so much pain in the dream, Amit can almost taste blood in his mouth.\n\n'Attend me now,' Honfler commands. He is flanked by his line officer deputies, Aerim Lur of the Raven Guard, the Imperial Fists Vexillary Tamos Roch, and N'nkono Emba of the Salamanders Pyre Guard. The waiting companies stir. Sartak growls something that sounds like 'at last'. Amit tries to clear his mind. The ghost of his great lord lingers. Just a dream, he tells himself, born of his concerns for the Lord of Baal. Yet the enemy has been trying to worm its way in for seven months. A wall might keep it out, a firmly locked gate, but what if the enemy's siegecraft is so sophisticated it can invade their dreams to undermine them?\n\nHe forces himself to focus on Honfler. This is the order, after all, the one none of them wanted to hear. Amit tells himself he ought to be listening when the Imperium's death-notice is proclaimed.\n\n'The War Court has instructed reserve deployment,' Honfler announces, taking a data-slate from Aerim Lur. 'The following units will-'\n\nHe stops, mid-sentence. Sartak is already ambling towards the access steps of the fighting platforms, casually gesturing for his company to follow him.\n\n'Where are you going, Wolf?' Lur calls out.\n\n'To war,' Sartak replies, looking back. 'You stay here talking, by all means.'\n\nLur and Roch both take a step forward.\n\n'Resume your place, Sartak of Fenris,' Honfler says.\n\n'My place is on that wall,' Sartak replies.\n\n'Your place is where the War Court tells you to be,' says Lur.\n\n'Hell with them,' Sartak replies, baring his teeth. 'Their piss-poor decisions and craven tactics have steered us to this bloody ending. I should have been on that wall hours ago. I'll show you how the Rout-'\n\n'Get back in line, you whining, insolent dog.'\n\nThere is silence for a moment. Amit realises everyone is looking at him. He had spoken without thinking, as if seized by some sudden rage. He has no idea where that fury came from, or where it went, just as swiftly.\n\n'Apologies, praetor,' he says to Honfler.\n\nSartak sniffs, spits, then slowly walks back to his place at the head of Denial 340. He stares at Amit every step of the way.\n\n'To continue,' says Honfler, his unamused eyes on both of them, 'your denial companies will be deployed into the Sanctum, not to the wall. You will form preparatory defensive lines.'\n\n'Inside the Sanctum?' Hemheda asks. Then adds, 'Praetor.'\n\n'Inside the Sanctum, Hemheda Khan,' Honfler replies. 'The voids are beginning to fail. If there's a cascade collapse, the Delphic may become unviable very quickly. I will not have assets stuck up here on the platforms when the enemy is breaching at ground level.'\n\n'We need a new wall standing ready when the Delphic gives way,' says Roch. 'That's you.'\n\n'Might as well stand there as here,' mutters Sartak, 'if standing is all we get to do. Eh, Blood Angel?'\n\n'Damned when we do, Wolf,' Amit replies. His pulse is racing. Not quite the end, then. Not yet. Another desperate convolution of strategy by Dorn's War Court to stave off the inevitable. Denial indeed.\n\nAerim Lur begins to announce dispersal. Six of the reserve companies will move to the Kylon Processional under his command. Another four, including Sartak's, will go with Honfler to the Martian Approaches. Emba will take five to the Western Mass Passageway. Amit's company, along with Hemheda's, will be two of the five Vexillary Roch leads to the Marnix Confluence. Amit presumes every staging level around the Delphic is being similarly denuded to stock the Inner Sanctum with manpower, and surround the approaches to the Throne Room.\n\n'Make ready!' Honfler shouts.\n\nThey are ready. Ready to move at once. The twenty denial companies begin to file onto the Delphic's armoured staircases to begin their descent. They march, all of them, with perfect drill discipline. Amit waits for Denial 963's turn to follow, listening to the rhythmic tramp of footsteps echoing from the stairs below.\n\n'Hold them,' he says to his sergeant, Lamirus. 'If I'm delayed, move our company off and I'll join you shortly.'\n\n'Where are you going?' Lamirus asks.\n\nAmit walks back along the line to the head of Denial 340. Sartak has his back to him, addressing his men, criticising Praetorian Tactical in lavishly scatological terms. He doesn't hear Amit coming. But he sees the look on the faces of the Salamanders and Iron Hands in his unit. He turns.\n\nThey stare at each other for a moment.\n\n'I insulted you, brother,' says Amit.\n\nSartak frowns. 'You called me a whining, insolent dog,' he rumbles.\n\n'Yes,' says Amit. 'I spoke out of turn.'\n\nSartak doesn't reply.\n\n'I... ask for your pardon,' says Amit.\n\n'Why?'\n\n'Because we won't meet again,' says Amit.\n\nSartak sniffs. He shrugs slightly, and turns to face his men. Amit starts to walk back to the head of his unit.\n\n'Blood Angel?'\n\nAmit looks over his shoulder. Sartak is staring at him.\n\n'Did you say what you were thinking?' Sartak asks.\n\n'Yes,' Amit replies.\n\n'Good. No other bastard in this place seems to. I won't give you my pardon. I don't do pardon. I'll give you some advice.'\n\n'Do you have to?' asks Amit.\n\n'Looks like it's happening,' says Sartak.\n\n'Very well.'\n\n'When you close with the traitor scum, Blood Angel, face to face, make sure your bite is worse than your bloody bark.'\n\n5:xxiv\n\nThe Retreat\n\nThe tower, known also as the Sigillite's Retreat, is a slender and lonely structure standing on a plasteel promontory above the trench. Stone-built, dirt-caked and slightly irregular, like an arthritic finger, it"}
{"text":" my pardon. I don't do pardon. I'll give you some advice.'\n\n'Do you have to?' asks Amit.\n\n'Looks like it's happening,' says Sartak.\n\n'Very well.'\n\n'When you close with the traitor scum, Blood Angel, face to face, make sure your bite is worse than your bloody bark.'\n\n5:xxiv\n\nThe Retreat\n\nThe tower, known also as the Sigillite's Retreat, is a slender and lonely structure standing on a plasteel promontory above the trench. Stone-built, dirt-caked and slightly irregular, like an arthritic finger, it seems a relic from another age, some architectural curio that has been allowed to linger, unmolested, while the rest of the magnificent Sanctum was raised around it and, ultimately, above it, eclipsing it in altitude, proportion and grandeur.\n\nAmon leads them across the promontory to the portico and begins to deactivate the security codes. The door at the base of the tower is heavy, blast-proof and sealed, and a much later addition to the building's mouldering stonework.\n\n'Can't you let us in?' Andromeda asks Xanthus.\n\n'I was only ever admitted at the Regent's invitation,' Xanthus replies, 'and then seldom. It requires Custodes clearance if the Sigillite is not present.'\n\nAndromeda glances at Amon. It seems to be taking the Custodian a long time to unlock the entry. The hololithic door-plate keeps flashing up denial runes, requiring Amon to enter increasingly more advanced permission codes, a formidably high level of securement for such an apparently modest and insignificant building.\n\nFo gazes up at the ragged, shabby tower. 'I expected his regal highness Malcador to inhabit something more impressive,' he remarks.\n\n'He doesn't live here,' says Xanthus. He doesn't live anywhere at all now, he thinks. 'It's just a phrontistery. A place of contemplation, and study.'\n\n'A phrontistery,' Fo echoes, amused by the pomposity of the word. 'It looks like it's about to fall down.'\n\n'It won't fall down,' says Xanthus. 'It has stood for a long time. A very long time.'\n\n'I suppose,' says Fo. He looks far from impressed. 'A worn but robust old relic from another age.' (I know how that feels). 'I'm just saying, it looks a little frail.'\n\n'So does the Sigillite,' says Xanthus. 'And yet he rules the Realm of Man as Regent.'\n\nThe little fleshcrafter looks at him with cold eyes.\n\n'I ruled a great realm once, too,' he says. 'Strange how things change.'\n\n5:xxv\n\nDarkness in their beauty\n\nSomething has changed. Rann cannot shake the feeling. It's more than just the great doom sinking down upon them all. Everyone feels that. But the Blood Angels seem especially fatalistic. Could the glorious fighting spirit of the IX Legion really have gone out prematurely, snuffed out by the draught of a gate slamming shut? Surely they won't falter now? Rann cannot imagine facing Terra's final battle without them at his side.\n\nBut there's something about Azkaellon's tone, and the reticence he has seen in Zephon, that makes him suspect that the Blood Angels have withdrawn into some atavistic mindset as though crippled by mourning already. What presentiment of fate have they felt that he has not?\n\nPerhaps, in the absence of their primarch lord, this is how the IX prepares itself. Not by predicting the worst and offering their lives in the hope of preventing it, as Rann and the Imperial Fists were taught, but by accepting the worst and committing their lives as though they are avenging it. It was said that, in the early days, they were a vengeful and almost savage host, an aspect that altered and civilised over the years of the crusade until it was all but hidden by the grace they had acquired. Rann has always felt this about his brothers, the Angels of the IX. They are the most noble and wondrous of the Legions, but there is a revenant darkness in their beauty. He is glad he will never get to see it: it is a darkness only ever faced by their foes.\n\nRann decides to press it no further. Besides, Zephon has just climbed into the emplacement to join them.\n\n'Namahi's riders have returned,' he says. 'Lord Archamus is aware of our disposition. He sends you this.'\n\nRann takes the wafer. It is a slip of paper, one of the Prefectus' purity tags, on which Archamus has written in his own hand. The Lord Militant Terra evidently no longer places any trust in the durability of slates or technology.\n\nHe reads it. It says what Rann expects it to say: Archamus' brigades on the Delphic approaches are under heavy and constant assault from vast divisions of the Traitor Legions: World Eaters, Death Guard and the Warmaster's bastard Sons. Archamus anticipates a second, flanking front within the hour, and Hasgard will be in its path. He charges Rann to harry and slow that second front as best he can. Should it fail to appear, Archamus writes he will send word and have Rann launch a counter-strike into the ribs of the enemy's main strength. He thinks this second option unlikely, and the first more probable. He commends Rann's fortune, expresses his confidence that Rann will serve without fault, and signs the message 'Archamus, Second of that Name.'\n\nIt is exactly what Rann expected, except for one detail. The missive is addressed to 'Fafnir.' Not My brother, or Lord Rann, or Lord Seneschal. Just Fafnir. In these last hours, despite the conventions of protocol, Archamus wished to communicate his respect and love for his brother by using his forename. It tells Rann that Archamus does not anticipate them meeting again.\n\nHe looks away.\n\n'Brother?' asks Azkaellon.\n\nRann clears his throat. He tells the Blood Angels the content of the message, and their framing orders. They nod. It is as they expected.\n\n'Leod Baldwin was asking for you,' says Zephon.\n\n'I'll go to him,' says Rann. 'Take the watch.'\n\n'Of course,' says Azkaellon.\n\n'If they come, make your voices loud,' Rann says. 'Do not save them all for yourselves.'\n\nAzkaellon laughs. Zephon nods curtly, his scarred lips forming a shape that looks less like a small smile and more like a predator baring its teeth in a snarl.\n\n5:xxvi\n\nExtraction\n\nAbaddon snarls the order to instruct launch as soon as his companies are secure aboard the Stormbirds. There's a fire in him, a terrible urgency, and it troubles his men as much as his ominous decision to extract from the front line. Clamped in his seat, he feels the airframe shudder, and hears the rising shriek of the engines as they climb to power-\n\nThen nothing. The vibrations cease and the engine-howl subsides. Lift failure. He suspects a mechanical fault, a technical launch-abort. The Stormbirds have been punished hard these last few weeks, with meagre ground crew provision on the surface fields. And the atmosphere is like soup, a petrochemical filth of grit and dust and scouring smoke. What is it? A clogged intake? Turbine abrasion? A seized fuel line?\n\nHe feels his temper and tension rise, soaring as though to mock his grounded transport. He opens intervox to the cockpit, but only static replies.\n\nHe unclasps his arrestor harness and releases the seat-clamp. His equerry Ulnok starts to unclamp too.\n\n'Stay,' Abaddon growls to him. 'Everyone stays flight-ready.'\n\nHe moves down the narrow passageway in the red gloom, head bowed to avoid the overhead gear. The warriors of First Company stay in their clamps. No one stirs, but he can taste their unease. Pulling out of the line was bad enough, but now a lift-fail? He's losing their trust. He knows it.\n\nWhat if it's not a mechanical fault? Sacristy Field, their extraction point, was hardly ideal. Close to the ruined zone of Hasgard Gate, it was already being shelled when their Stormbirds came in. What if the flight crew has rejected the lift as unviable? Transports are at their most vulnerable at the point of lift, exposed to surface-to-air weapons. Maybe the pilots have refused to lift into an increasingly hostile airspace? What if the enemy is already at the edge of the field, and his six companies are now caged in their transports-\n\nAbaddon cranks open the cockpit hatch.\n\n'Explain,' is all he says. There is venom in the word. One protest, one citation of an operational objection to launch, and he'll execute them and fly the damn thing himself.\n\n'First Captain, I cannot,' the pilot replies. His hands are off the flight controls. Abaddon can see that the Stormbird's systems are down-powered.\n\n'The hell are you playing at?' Abaddon asks. 'When I instruct lift, I expect you to lift. Immediate return to the flagship is a priority-'\n\n'At your command, First Captain,' says the pilot. 'And I have obeyed.'\n\nHe glances at his co-pilot. Abaddon can't see their expressions behind the glare-visors of the flight gear, but he can smell the stink of fear, the-\n\nIncredulity.\n\nAbaddon leans down and peers through the tinted cockpit ports over their shoulders.\n\n'Explain,' he says, but all the venom has gone now.\n\n'I cannot, First Captain.'\n\n'We didn't move.'\n\n'We had barely raised to full launch power, First Captain.'\n\n'Lower the ramp,' says Abaddon. 'Open the hatch.'\n\n5:xxvii\n\nInfiltration\n\nThe hatch finally opens, then another. With a series of scraping, metallic squeals, four interlocked layers of adamantine unlock and peel back, and internal shielding fizzles off. The Sigillite's Retreat is fortified like a vault. Stale air breathes out of the unlit doorway, a mix of damp stone and book-must. No one has been here for days, or even weeks.\n\nAmon leads them into the darkness. Pencil-thin beams scan them as they pass through the thick doorway, recording their bio-patterns in the entry log. There is a muffled thump as processors begin to circulate and refresh the air. Ahead of them, lighting systems alerted by movement begin to blink on.\n\nInside, it is more capacious than the exterior suggested. The stone walls are lined with reinforcing struts of plasteel and what looks to Fo like psycurium. Stone steps spiral upward, level by level, as in the drum turret of some donjon. More lights come on: electro-flambeaux strung from the ceiling of each level, and individual glow-g"}
{"text":" entry log. There is a muffled thump as processors begin to circulate and refresh the air. Ahead of them, lighting systems alerted by movement begin to blink on.\n\nInside, it is more capacious than the exterior suggested. The stone walls are lined with reinforcing struts of plasteel and what looks to Fo like psycurium. Stone steps spiral upward, level by level, as in the drum turret of some donjon. More lights come on: electro-flambeaux strung from the ceiling of each level, and individual glow-globes suspended around the winding stair like bright and steadfast stars to guide the way.\n\nThey go up. The second floor is lined, floor to ceiling, with bookcases, shaped to fit the curving walls. The third floor is the same, book-lined, but the stairs suddenly go the other way around the chamber.\n\n'An unusual design,' remarks Fo. He hurries upwards, his feet not sore at all now, apparently.\n\nAmon pauses. He is sure that the winding stairs in the Retreat had always been a counter-clockwise spiral from top to bottom.\n\n'This clock has stopped!' Fo calls out from above.\n\nOn the fourth floor, Xanthus and Andromeda are watching Fo as he takes stock of the place. There are many more books, cased around the walls, and many objects and trinkets besides, set out for display: timepieces and antique scientific instruments, specimens preserved in rheumy jars, an anatomist's ecorche, the figurines of cancelled gods and redacted messiahs, a cross-sectioned nautilus shell, decks of cards and bowls of gaming pieces, wax discs and seals, the delicate skeleton of a small feline mounted on a stand.\n\n'I expected more,' says Fo.\n\n'There is much more,' says Xanthus. 'Many more floors. The lower levels are primarily miscellanea. But works relating to the Sigillite's primary areas of study, many in his own hand, are on the floors above.'\n\n'Let's hope I find what I need,' Fo says sullenly (though, privately, I am finding this most engaging. The Sigillite's own manuscripts and notes?). He begins to walk up the next flight of steps, which, Amon notices, runs counter-clockwise on this floor.\n\n'So many damn stairs,' Fo complains. 'I'm not young any more.' He stops, goes back down a few steps, and points to something he has noticed tucked in against the bookcases. 'Neither was he,' he says.\n\nIt is a portable medicae unit of some sophistication, upright and set on small wheels for portability. It has an oxygen tank and mask, monitors for vital signs, a compact pharm locker, and a small defibrillator device. It has been slid out of the way, a shawl half draped across it, but it is clearly intended to be within easy reach.\n\n'No,' says Xanthus. 'His health was often poor.'\n\nFo nods. 'Age gets to us all,' he says. 'Well, except Him, I imagine. Unless you know how to do something about it.'\n\n'The Sigillite did,' replies Xanthus, irritated. 'In his laboratorium, he had many devices-'\n\n'Laboratorium?' asks Fo. He tries to make it sound casual, but he can't disguise the glint of interest in his eyes.\n\n'Yes. He worked on many processes that-'\n\n'And where is it?' Fo asks, hurrying on up the stairs.\n\nAmon follows him quickly. At the top of the next flight, there is another heavy blast hatch.\n\n'Open it, Amon,' says Fo.\n\nAmon looks back at Xanthus and Andromeda on the steps behind him.\n\n'We need to give him facilities to work in,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Not without supervision,' Amon replies.\n\n'Of course not,' Andromeda replies.\n\n'I do not like this,' says Amon.\n\n'None of us like it,' says Fo quietly. 'But there's a war, Custodian. You want that stopped, don't you? My weapon might be the only chance to do that. So, right now, we are in this together.'\n\nAmon looks at the old man. Fo recoils slightly. (I try to keep my composure, but these Custodes are dreadful creatures, and to be stared at directly by one...) He expects a list of prohibitions and restrictions, but the look alone is enough. Amon will kill him for the slightest indiscretion.\n\nAmon enters a series of codes. As before, it takes the highest level of encrypted permission to disarm the concealed auto-defences and unlock the area. The blast hatch grinds open, and lighting arrays wake up.\n\nFo stares in through the doorway. The next floor is a workshop. It is panelled, floor, walls and ceiling, in stainless steel, and there are air-scrubbers built into the walls. On the long metal work benches, curved to fit the chamber, stand racks of surgical tools, networked cogitator units, centrifuges, gene-spinners and micro-implantation devices, cellular scanners, splicers and genome samplers. Cryo-stabilised cabinets hum beneath the benches.\n\n'Oh, what wonderful things,' says Fo.\n\n5:xxviii\n\nInward\n\nThere is no time to wonder at the grandeur and majesty of the Inner Sanctum as they are marched through it. Amit is too preoccupied to appreciate the scale of the spacious hallways or the magnificence of the engraved goldwork anyway. He can still taste blood in his mouth.\n\nThe denial companies pass frightened citizens and courtiers pouring along the vast processionals in their thousands. Some carry a few possessions, or drag children by their hands. A few call out to the Astartes as they march by. They plead for protection. They beg the Astartes to escort them to a place of safety.\n\n'Eyes front,' Tamos Roch instructs over the vox. 'Maintain pace.'\n\nThe deeper they go into the Sanctum, the more they see other armed units taking position. Astartes squads and Excertus brigades, pulled from other sections of the Delphic, are deploying at cross-junctions and confluences, or establishing guard stations at principal hatches. Some are constructing makeshift barricades from salvaged furniture and auramite panels scavenged from walls. Amit sees support weapons being set up and locked off, and platoons mounting crewed guns on tripods. In one hallway, a squadron of Hort Palatine battle tanks has drawn up, their engines chugging. The denial companies automatically drop to double file to pass around them without missing a step. The heavy treads of the idling Carnodons have cracked the hall's tiled floor to powder. The tanks, begrimed, seem out of place in the regal hallway, though it is easily large enough to accommodate them. Did the Praetorian Dorn anticipate the need for armoured deployment inside the Sanctum when he configured the Palace layout? Amit wonders. Or is the inspiring scale of Imperial architecture simply an advantage the defenders can exploit? The outer walls and gates were robustly crafted for war, but the hallways of the Palace inside were surely constructed to convey splendour?\n\nThe further he marches, the more Amit suspects Dorn had prepared for every scenario with a near-obsessive eye for detail. The Palace interiors were not obviously built for war, but in their ornate gold and sumptuous tiling Amit can discern the shrewd touch of a warrior-architect. The subtle traces are everywhere: in the way that grand hallways cross or join at imperceptibly offset angles; the way that staggered lines of statuary plinths provide perfect firing cover across entry spaces; the way that one gallery subtly tapers to create angles of fire into another; the way that upper belvederes are raked to allow enfilade onto the arcades below. Those balustrades are more than gold, he thinks; there is reactive armour under that lustre. Those piered arches overhead conceal blast doors ready to drop and seal choke points. And these grooves and notches that seem part of the sectile flooring's intricate pattern, they are shaped to take the base lugs of storm shields, so that shield walls can be locked in place in an instant to form barriers across plazas and walkways.\n\nAll of these inconspicuous measures angle outwards, protecting the heart of the Sanctum.\n\nThey approach the Marnix Confluence along a high upper gallery. Over the carved rail, Amit sees columns of stationary figures in the wide processional two hundred metres below. They are not military. Hooded figures and dormant servitors wait in silence beside rows and rows of bio-caskets. There are hundreds of them, each casket floating on a suspensor field.\n\nThe caskets look like coffins.\n\n'Is there a problem, brother?' Roch asks him.\n\nAmit realises he has fallen out of line and stopped to gaze at the columns below him.\n\n'No,' he says.\n\n'Reinforcement,' the Vexillary says, seeing what holds Amit's attention. 'For the Throne Room, should it be needed. They are holding until required.'\n\n'They look like caskets,' Amit says. 'Coffins.'\n\n'Very like,' Roch agrees.\n\nRoch double-steps with Amit as he resumes his place beside his marching company.\n\n'Do I have to watch you?' Roch asks him quietly via discretional helm-to-helm vox.\n\n'No, Vexillary,' says Amit.\n\n'Good,' says Roch. 'I expect composure from the Ninth. The Wolves of Fenris are uncouth miscreants, but I have always thought my brothers of Baal as disciplined as my own Legion.'\n\n'We are. Your forgiveness,' says Amit.\n\n'Yet your outburst on the staging level,' says Roch. 'Provoked no doubt, but now you break formation-'\n\n'It won't happen again,' Amit replies. 'Just the sight of those coffins... I have dreamed of coffins.'\n\n'We've all been dreaming of coffins, brother,' says Roch.\n\nAmit doesn't bother explaining further. He can't convey how vivid the caskets in his fugue seemed, how significant, how much more than a dream. But that's all they were. When a man starts to tell you about his dreams, you smile patiently and nod. Dreams are just dreams.\n\nHe can still taste blood in his mouth.\n\nAt the Marnix Confluence, a cyclopean concourse where several mass passageways meet, they take up their assigned positions. Roch lays his five denial companies out in block formations across the vast space in front of the mouth of the Western Mass Passageway as though they are on parade. They begin their standing watch again, rigidly at attention, as perfectly composed as they were on the staging level of the Delphic.\n\nThey wait. A while passes. A squadron of Knights "}
{"text":" taste blood in his mouth.\n\nAt the Marnix Confluence, a cyclopean concourse where several mass passageways meet, they take up their assigned positions. Roch lays his five denial companies out in block formations across the vast space in front of the mouth of the Western Mass Passageway as though they are on parade. They begin their standing watch again, rigidly at attention, as perfectly composed as they were on the staging level of the Delphic.\n\nThey wait. A while passes. A squadron of Knights Asterius lumbers past in the distance and vanishes into the Proserpine Processional. Amit sees Hemheda leave his place at the head of Denial 774. The White Scar crosses to Roch, and the pair confer. Then Roch calls an order and repositions all five denial companies on the other side of the concourse, now facing a different direction.\n\n'What is this?' Lamirus asks Amit. Amit voxes for clarification. Over the link, terse, Roch tells him it is a positional revision.\n\nAmit looks around, and studies the immense confluence. He notes the position of the stately Proserpine Watchtower on the far side beside the processional entrance. He notes the alignment of its gun-ports. He reads the subtle angles of the concourse itself, the tapered slant of adjoining halls, the defensive structures disguised in the regal architecture.\n\n'We were facing the Throne Room,' he says.\n\n'What?' asks Lamirus.\n\n'We were facing inward, not outward,' Amit says. 'We were turned the wrong way.'\n\n'How is that possible?' Lamirus asks.\n\n'I don't know, brother.'\n\n'How does a senior praetorian like Roch get the orientation reversed?' Lamirus presses. 'The Imperial Fists know the Inner Palace better-'\n\n'I don't know,' says Amit.\n\nRoch yells a few more orders to correct their position and neaten their ranks. Amit stands in his new spot, silent, patient.\n\nEven from a distance, he can tell that the Vexillary is unsettled.\n\n5:xxix\n\nImmolation\n\nThane clears the line with a yelled order. He sees men leap off the parapet, chased by balling tumbleweeds of fire. He sees blackened forms slumped and twisted in the heart of the inferno.\n\nThane moves to the right, with the veterans and the two initiates. Whipping wyrms of flame pursue them, roaring like a furnace with the door left open. This is an unforeseen event, in a day of unforeseen events, but his company has its standing orders. If the earthwork falls, they are to break apart in two formations, and then re-task to close and pincer the assault from the flanks. Every man, every prentice-brother, knows how this recomposition is supposed to work.\n\nThe right-hand end of the earthwork position ends in a series of half-buried bunkers and barrage shelters. It is the only cover. Molwae and Demeny make it first, plunging headlong into the rank darkness. Thane follows, turning in the war-gnawed hatchway to haul Berendol in after him.\n\nHe looks back. The entire length of the parapet is lost to cyclones of fire. Blackened Eaters slump and drape over the lip, immolating. Thane smells roasting meat-fat and melting ceramite.\n\nHe sees Kolquis. The veteran-brother is five steps behind him, staggering and swaying. He is on fire from head to toe. Thane grabs for him, but the burning veteran howls, placing his burning hands against Thane's chestplate. He shoves Thane into the bunker, and slams the old blast door on him as the rest of the fire arrives.\n\n5:xxx\n\nThe hand of the False Emperor\n\nAbaddon leads the way down the nose ramp himself. The space around him is exactly what he glimpsed through the cockpit ports, but that doesn't make it any more true. It's not Sacristy Field.\n\nHis Stormbird is sitting on the landing platform of an embarkation deck. It's Embarkation Deck Two. He has no doubt of that. He knows the place all too well. The space is silent. The eight Stormbirds rest on the intake stands, as though they have just set down and are cooling their engines ready for turnaround. He sees the long causeways of the launch rails, the winking guide lights, the waiting trolleys of munition canisters. He turns, slowly, and sees behind him the vast tunnel of the chamber stretching away towards the integrity fields and open space outside.\n\nSycar and Baraxa have dismounted too. They walk towards him from their own craft, fire-teams flanking them, gazing around.\n\n'Ezekyle-' Baraxa begins.\n\n'Don't ask me to explain,' Abaddon replies quietly. 'I can't.'\n\n'But we weren't even in the air-'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Ezekyle, this is the Vengeful Spirit-'\n\nAbaddon looks at him. 'Stay calm and stay in control,' he says calmly. 'I can't explain this. Someone's playing games.'\n\n'Games?' Baraxa asks, as though the understatement is funny. 'Who?'\n\n'The enemy?' says Abaddon. 'The warp?' He shrugs, then offers a third suggestion. 'Our father?'\n\n'What are you saying?'\n\n'I'm saying... however or why-ever we got here, Azelas, we are clearly and urgently needed. To save our father. To save him from himself, maybe. I'm saying get the companies disembarked. Ready to move. Expect high resistance levels.'\n\nAbaddon glances around again.\n\n'I fear the hand of the False Emperor in this,' he says. 'My instinct to return was correct. I just wish I'd acted on it sooner, for I fear we are already too late.'\n\nHe looks at them.\n\n'Shake it off,' he tells them. 'Get the companies battle-ready. Two minutes. Discipline any who lag. This is... Brothers, my heart tells me this may be the most important undertaking of our lives. So remember... control, brothers, not controlled.'\n\nThey nod. They're both true to him, the only bones in the Legion he knows haven't broken. They're alarmed, just as he is alarmed, but they're not going to let that stop them. They are thrice-damned Sons of Horus, and a little warp-trick is not going to send them running.\n\n'Our Stormbirds wore Legion colours, Ezekyle,' says Sycar.\n\nAbaddon nods. He knows that. The Legion's martial transports were all re-dressed in the new liveries before the end-war began.\n\nThe Stormbirds they are exiting are all white, as white as they were in the days of the Luna Wolves.\n\nAbaddon had noticed that right away. He had chosen not to dwell on it.\n\n5:xxxi\n\nThe Martian Approaches\n\n'I have always admired the vigour of the Sixth,' Praetor-Captain Honfler is saying as he strides along beside Sartak.\n\n'There's much to admire,' Sartak replies.\n\nHonfler ignores the remark.\n\n'Vigorous, indeed, the Sixth,' he goes on. 'Or should I say, the \"Vlka Fenris\"?'\n\n'Fenryka. Vlka Fenryka,' says Sartak.\n\n'Is that right?' Honfler doesn't seem to care. 'Not many of you here. On Terra. Not many of you among us.'\n\n'A few,' agrees Sartak. 'Not many. I got unlucky.'\n\nThe four denial companies are passing under the Antrurium Arch onto a processional that will join the Martian Approaches. A battalion of Eklander Excertus have set up a picket under the arch, with servitor gun-carriages in support. They look up as the Astartes companies pass by in perfect marching order, perfect except for the Fenrisian Space Wolf who turns to throw them a cheery salute. Some wave back.\n\n'This, you see?' Honfler says.\n\n'What?\n\n'My point-'\n\n'You have one?'\n\nHonfler draws Sartak off the line, and commands the units to keep their pace.\n\n'I commend your spirit, Wolf,' Honfler tells him as the companies stride past. 'And I know your record. Impressive deeds. It's why we gave you a unit command. But you Space Wolves, you Vlka Fenryka... your comportment is woeful. It borders on insubordinate-'\n\n'It does,' Sartak agrees. 'But impressive deeds. Let's not forget that part.'\n\n'When we engage the traitor foe,' Honfler hisses, 'and we will, soon, I expect absolute adherence from you. Adherence to command directives. Adherence to the core principles of Astartesian duty. Can you do that, Wolf? Tell me now if you can't, and I'll have you replaced. I'm told your sergeant, Rewa Medusi of the Iron Hands, is a reliable officer.'\n\n'He is,' replies Sartak. 'So am I. You'll get your adherence from me, praetor-captain.'\n\n'Good,' says Honfler.\n\n'But when we engage the traitor foe,' says Sartak, 'I expect you to keep up with me. Tell me now if you can't.'\n\nHonfler stares at him. Sartak smiles back, his fangs showing through the bristles of his plaited beard.\n\n'I'm sure I'll manage,' says Honfler.\n\nThey rejoin the march. At the end of the processional, the denial companies pass through a blast hatch onto the Martian Approaches. This thoroughfare, one of the Sanctum's principal mass passageways, is an immense space built to accommodate even the most massive war engines. The ceiling high above is lost in darkness and a micro-climate haze. The imposing scale is heightened by the fact that the tunnel is empty.\n\nHonfler calls a halt. Behind them, the Martian Approaches stretch away as far as they can see, lit by the sodium lanterns wall-mounted at intervals. But ahead, it is sealed by colossal security gates designed to block Titan engines. At the front of Denial 340, waiting in tight, ordered ranks, Sartak listens as Honfler confers with his officers.\n\n'What's the issue?' Medusi whispers to him.\n\n'Those gates aren't supposed to be shut,' Sartak replies.\n\n'You can hear them?'\n\nSartak nods. 'Honfler's been told to position us at marker eighteen,' he says. 'And that's beyond those gates. They're not supposed to be shut. Wait here.'\n\nHe wanders forward to join Honfler and his officers.\n\n'They'll be shut for a reason,' Sartak says.\n\nHonfler glances at him. 'No internal shutters or gates are supposed to be closed yet,' he says. 'The War Court has decreed that they will be kept open to allow troop deployment. They are only to be closed in the event of a breach to partition enemy advance.'\n\n'They'll be shut for a reason,' Sartak repeats, a little more slowly.\n\n'I want them open,' says Honfler. 'It's probably a malfunction.'\n\n'What if it isn't?' Sartak says. The officers look at him. 'What if it's a breach?'\n\nHonfler hesitates.\n\n'If it's a breach,' he says, 'no one knows about it. There have been no alerts. No alarms. "}
{"text":"s. 'The War Court has decreed that they will be kept open to allow troop deployment. They are only to be closed in the event of a breach to partition enemy advance.'\n\n'They'll be shut for a reason,' Sartak repeats, a little more slowly.\n\n'I want them open,' says Honfler. 'It's probably a malfunction.'\n\n'What if it isn't?' Sartak says. The officers look at him. 'What if it's a breach?'\n\nHonfler hesitates.\n\n'If it's a breach,' he says, 'no one knows about it. There have been no alerts. No alarms. It's undoubtedly a system malfunction. We need the gates open so we can deploy to the correct position.'\n\n'I am as anxious to meet my enemy as any man here,' says Sartak. 'But I don't want to let him in.'\n\n'Agreed, Wolf,' says Honfler. 'But if it is a breach, and no one is aware, we need to find out.' He points at the Titan gates. There is a small postern hatch at the base of one of them. 'We'll open that hatch,' he says.\n\n'My Iron Hands can do that,' Sartak says.\n\nHonfler nods.\n\nSartak waves up Medusi and two of his augmeticised seniors. They advance towards the gates with Honfler and a squad of Imperial Fists. Medusi moves to the postern hatch, extending a dendritic manipulator to locate and disable the lock mechanism.\n\n'Wait, brother,' Sartak says. He's staring up at the towering gates.\n\n'What are you doing?' Honfler asks.\n\n'Listening,' says Sartak.\n\n'He's good at that,' says Medusi.\n\n'What do you hear, Wolf?' Honfler asks.\n\n'Darkness,' says Sartak.\n\n5:xxxii\n\nFurnace-dream\n\nThe darkness of the bunker is like an oven. Thane can feel the heat radiating through the earth embankment, the piled ballistic sacking, and the walls themselves. They can all hear the roaring incineration outside. It is not stopping. Flame-light spears through the cracks in the door frame, and heat-smoke oozes in. The door is beginning to pucker and drool.\n\nThane gets up, and urges Berendol and the two initiates deeper. They move into the next bunker compartment, and the next, closing shutters where they can. The external heat raises a stink from old solvent stains on the rockcrete floor.\n\nThey stumble on into a fourth compartment, then a fifth, finding their way in the hot darkness. They will cook in here. They will broil. If the outer door fails and the fire breaks in, their lives will end in cremation. Thane tries not to think of Kolquis, and the way he sacrificed himself to save them. He tries not to think of the burning, melting figure, still alive...\n\nHe leads the way. There is a route out. There is. He personally scouted the entire layout of the position when they secured it. A sixth compartment, once used for munition storage, leads to a rockcrete junction. There, to the left, deep-set blast boxes and flak-curtained sleeping spaces. Straight on, a blast door exits into the support trenches. If they can reach it...\n\nHe sees it ahead: the door, plasteel, tight shut. Thane slams into it, but it stays shut. There's no power to the lock system or the servo hinges. He smashes the lock off with his hammer, but the door still won't budge. He feels for clasps, for manual bolts, for locking clips.\n\n'Maximus...' Berendol growls behind him. They feel the air pressure shift. The sucking, smelter-roar behind them becomes a shriek.\n\nThane puts his hammer into the door, two-handed. It takes three blows to crack it from its frame. As it starts to swing open on buckled hinges, Thane kicks on through, the others following, heedless of what might await them on the other side.\n\nWhatever it is, it is preferable to what's coming down the throat of the compartments behind them.\n\nThane slams the door to block it out. He hammers it four times, five, with the rapid haste of a prentice-brother, to deform its buckled shape back into place enough to hold.\n\n'Maximus,' says Berendol.\n\nHe hammers again, manic, pinching the metal of the frame so it will pin the door.\n\n'Maximus.'\n\nAnother dent across the sill to crush it into place.\n\n'Thane!'\n\nThane turns. He is dazzled. For a second, he thinks the Mechanicum has drenched the support trenches with bulk flamers too, torching the back line, so they have escaped from one inferno into another.\n\nBut the glare is not firelight. It is golden, yellow-golden, the purest colour of fire, but not fire itself.\n\nAnd the trench is not a trench.\n\n'What is this?' asks Berendol.\n\nA dream, thinks Thane. An error. A mistake. A wrong turn. A vision. He has not escaped. The flames consumed him, like they consumed Kolquis, and he is dead, and this is the furnace-dream his mind has cooked in its last seconds.\n\nA hallway, grand and magnificent. The air is cool, stirred only by circulation systems. Their feet are leaving tracks of ash and grit and filth on the gleaming mirror of the ouslite floor. The walls are burnished auramite, engraved with symbols of concordia and discordia, and soaring eagle motifs overlaying lightning bolts. Electro-flambeaux pendants hang high above them, depending from a ceiling of azure tiles. The hallway goes on forever.\n\n'There was nowhere like this in the zone...' says Berendol.\n\n'Nowhere,' Thane agrees.\n\n'Did you survey the-'\n\n'Of course I did.'\n\n'Then how did you miss this door?' Berendol asks. 'And this bunker? Is it some-'\n\n'It's not a bunker,' Thane says. 'Do not expect me to give you an explanation, my brother, but we are inside the Sanctum.'\n\n5:xxxiii\n\nThe asset\n\nThe tower shudders slightly as something deep below them flexes in seismic discomfort. In the laboratorium's cold store units, sample flasks and vials rattle in their racks, and a sheaf of papers slides off the edge of the workstation.\n\nBasilio Fo doesn't seem to notice.\n\nAndromeda-17 watches him work. Fo has hunched his bag-of-twigs frame cross-legged in one of the high-backed work chairs. He has multiple cogitator screens open, sliding with data. He has hooked in an earpiece, through which he is listening to the data-system recite the contents of stored files, one after another. With his right hand, he is scribbling indecipherable notes on a data-slate. With his left, he is sorting through other data-slates, comparing other files, occasionally taking a glass tube out of the sample racks to give it a shake or hold it up to the light and examine its contents, or slipping another glass slide under the macroreader.\n\n'What are you doing?' she asks.\n\n'Quiet,' Fo replies, not looking at her (for I really can't abide interruptions when I am engrossed).\n\nAndromeda glances at Xanthus. The Chosen is standing by the spiral stairs, arms folded. Like her, he seems both mystified by, and dubious of, Fo's activities.\n\n'You will need to keep us apprised,' Xanthus says. 'Every step of the way. Understand that this limited liberty and unusual opportunity has been arranged under the most extraordinary circumstances. We can't maintain your protection from other agencies if you keep us in the dark.'\n\nFo plucks out the earpiece and turns his chair to face Xanthus.\n\n'We're all going to be in the dark very soon, aren't we?' he says. 'And that darkness, when it falls, will be without end.'\n\n'Time is certainly in short supply,' Xanthus admits.\n\n'Oh, time's gone!' Fo scoffs, pointing a scrawny finger at the stopped chron on the wall. 'Time is a thing of the past. Let me assure you both that I am fully aware of the precarious position I am in. A political tug-of-war, with me as the rope, and all the while, the world literally burns around us. By \"other agencies\", I assume you mean the damn Legio Custodes?'\n\n'To begin with,' says Xanthus. He is uncomfortable saying their name aloud. Amon is far below, guarding the Retreat's entrance, but Xanthus is aware how superhumanly sharp the ears of the Custodians can be.\n\nFo sneers at that (they're so afraid of each other! So cautious, even now! He, the great big He, is so proud of His unified Imperium, but in truth the factions comprising it seem to have been in jurisdictional dispute since long before the actual civil war broke out).\n\n'I am confident that the two of you will continue to protect me,' he says, 'because I think the two of you have begun to realise how important I, the reviled and abhorred monster, have suddenly become to the survival of the human race.'\n\n5:xxxiv\n\nThe judgement of Vulkan\n\nAt Vulkan's signal, the supplicants are escorted from the Throne Room. The primarch watches as they are led away, until they are mere specks at the end of the nave, approaching the Silver Door.\n\n'What actions will you take, my lord?' asks Hassan of the Chosen, who has stayed back.\n\n'What actions can I take, Chosen One?' Vulkan replies. 'Our hands are tied. We have critical duties to carry out, and we cannot be distracted by-'\n\n'But they spoke with conviction,' says Hassan. 'The men, Grammaticus and Persson, they were credible. And this talk of a newborn power, of Lupercal's ascendancy-'\n\n'May just be talk,' says Vulkan. 'And if it is not, then it is a matter beyond my knowledge. We are prosecuting this war, above and below, with every means at our disposal. I do not know how we prosecute a threat that is not yet manifest.'\n\nKaeria Casryn of the Sisterhood, who is also attending him, steps directly in front of him to emphasise her presence. It is an oddly confrontational habit common among nulls, who are so easily overlooked if they stray out of eyeline. Vulkan remembers that Krole used to do the same.\n\nSuch matters are the purview of our lord the Emperor and the Sigillite alone, she signs in thoughtmark. They left you no instruction?\n\n'No,' says Vulkan. 'And now neither can be consulted. But clearly, they knew of it, at least in part. Lacking direct instruction from them, I can only continue with the orders they issued me. We must presume that what we are doing, to some extent, will guard against this outcome as well.'\n\nIf it is real, Casryn signs.\n\nYou think it not? Vulkan signs back deftly.\n\nI think the supplicants admitted only a fraction of the truth they know, she replies, her hands quick. I think they withheld. I think they have agend"}
{"text":"an. 'And now neither can be consulted. But clearly, they knew of it, at least in part. Lacking direct instruction from them, I can only continue with the orders they issued me. We must presume that what we are doing, to some extent, will guard against this outcome as well.'\n\nIf it is real, Casryn signs.\n\nYou think it not? Vulkan signs back deftly.\n\nI think the supplicants admitted only a fraction of the truth they know, she replies, her hands quick. I think they withheld. I think they have agendas they did not dare speak of.\n\nVulkan nods.\n\nI do not trust them, she adds. The witch especially.\n\n'Agreed,' says Vulkan.\n\n'Then... what would you have me do with them, lord?' Hassan asks.\n\nSilence them, signs Casryn.\n\n'Surely not,' says Hassan.\n\nIn an hour of ultimate danger, they are one potential threat we can do without, she shapes. Silence them.\n\nHassan looks at Vulkan.\n\n'I will not commit murder on behalf of the Imperium,' says Vulkan. 'Especially without evidence of actual crime. The fact that they are an unknown quantity, and we are made uncomfortable by them, is not sufficient.'\n\nHe turns to Hassan.\n\n'Go have the Sentinels secure them, Chosen One,' he says.\n\n'In the Antirooms?' asks Hassan.\n\n'Preferably,' says Vulkan, 'if Companion Raja deems that facility safe enough. If not, the Dark Cells. Your discretion, Hassan. Whatever you choose, the members of that party must be prevented from any further participation, for the duration of this war.'\n\n'Yes, my lord.'\n\n'I err on the side of the good Sister's instincts,' says Vulkan, casting a glance at Casryn. 'Those people are dangerous, in ways we cannot yet fathom. They will be denied liberty and agency until this crisis is over and we can evaluate them properly.'\n\nHassan hesitates, then makes the sign of the aquila, and strides away after the departing procession.\n\nVulkan sighs, and turns. He begins to walk the length of the great chamber towards the painful light of the Throne. Casryn walks at his side, a ghost in his peripheral vision.\n\n'You think me too merciful?' he asks.\n\nNot my place to comment on your decisions, lord, she signs.\n\nVulkan nods. He expected nothing else. Malcador has submitted to the Throne. His father and his brother primarchs are gone and may never return. All decisions, the making of which might save or doom the human race, are now his alone. No one else is going to do it.\n\n5:xxxv\n\nWhen all we have left is our faith in monsters\n\nI appreciate the web I'm caught in, Chosen One,' says Fo (more than you can begin to realise). 'I am an asset, but also a notorious and condemned criminal. I am deemed a pernicious threat to your Imperial ideology. But my weapon could end this nightmarish war by eradicating the Astartesian genetic line. And the Custodes... I beg your pardon, the other agency... would welcome that, for the Imperium would be preserved, and so too His life. So they want me locked up for their exclusive use, along with anything I invent for them.'\n\n'Old man-' Andromeda begins.\n\nFo turns to look at her.\n\n'On the other hand,' he says, 'other agencies at the highest level of the Imperium would not look kindly on the eradication of the sons and grandsons of the Emperor. It is an extreme solution, swingeing in effect. Furthermore, it would unbalance the power structure, and place far too much influence in the hands of the already overpowered Custodes. So Malcador's Chosen' - he glances at Xanthus - 'another entirely unelected and unofficial other agency, is attempting to block the Custodes' exclusive control of me. And this is no mean feat, because the Custodians are physically and psychologically stronger than just about anything, and you can't trick them. So the Chosen, unilaterally, and in extremis, have called upon the services of... What should I call you, girl?'\n\nHe looks back at Andromeda. She makes no response.\n\n'An independent contractor of the Selenar,' Fo says sardonically, 'to help circumvent the Custodes. You can't rendition me directly, not from their keeping, and especially not at a time like this, a phrase that I'm finding qualifies just about everything we say-'\n\n'Fo-' says Andromeda.\n\n'Anyway,' says Fo, 'the intrigue you're conducting is torturous. You can't take me from the Custodes, because you don't have the authority, but you can persuade that brute Amon to go along with the idea that the weapon I have made requires urgent revision and refinement. This coup de force could only be achieved by having your' - he grins again at Andromeda - 'independent contractor of the Selenar use her formidable talent for non-linear ethical reasoning to convince the Custodian that he wasn't disobeying his duties, but rather performing them in an even more exact fashion. Make him think that he would be derelict not to assist you. To pull that off, and maintain the subterfuge to its natural conclusion, at which point I would be in your pocket rather than Valdor's, you had to bring me here and make it appear that I was busy fixing something that didn't really need to be fixed, which is apparently a wholesale waste of time.'\n\nFo fixes them both with a chilling smile.\n\n'An accurate summary?' he asks (knowing full well it's at least half-right. I just want to survive. I need to keep them all at bay). 'I assure you that I'm happy to make myself look busy in order to pull off the deception.'\n\n'Your assessment of this situation is of no interest,' says Andromeda. 'And your attempts to manipulate us by appearing compliant are pointless. We are not your friends, Fo. The genocides you committed before Unification will never be forgiven.'\n\nFo's smile turns into a scowl.\n\n'We are only interested in the weapon and its effective function,' says Xanthus.\n\n'I see,' says Fo.\n\n'And you're deflecting about the fix not being necessary,' says Andromeda.\n\n'Am I, Selenar?' says Fo.\n\n'You have a tell,' she says.\n\n'And what might that be?'\n\n'If I tell you it won't be a tell any more, now, will it?' she says.\n\n'I imagine not,' Fo says. 'For the record, I'm sure it's my habit of over-engineering every explanation. I do it to distract from the fact that my mind is occupied elsewhere. In this case, on the redevelopment of the weapon.'\n\n'That's just more deflection,' says Andromeda. 'However, your perusal of the Sigillite's private materials is rather too eager and hungry. Hence my original question. What are you doing?'\n\nFo hesitates. (I don't like either of them. They're both too cunning.)\n\n'Well, gene-witch,' he says, 'at the risk of further explanatory over-engineering, it would appear that the lie you spun to get me here is not a lie after all.'\n\n'The weapon doesn't work?' Andromeda asks.\n\n'Oh, it works,' says Fo. 'But I could build a better one.'\n\n5:xxxvi\n\nIf the enemy awaits\n\n'You can't hear darkness, Wolf,' says Praetor-Captain Honfler.\n\n'No,' Sartak agrees. 'No, I cannot. But there is an emptiness beyond these gates. A silence, with nothing in it.'\n\n'Open it,' Honfler says to the Iron Hands warriors.\n\n'I would not, brother-captain,' Sartak says.\n\nHonfler looks at him. The fact that the Space Wolf is suddenly showing respect, and in earnest, bothers him more than any previous insolence Sartak has displayed.\n\n'You were so eager to meet the foe, Wolf,' Honfler says, 'you all but disregarded my direct commands so you could get at them. Now you balk?'\n\nA little flash of anger crosses Sartak's face. He bites it back.\n\n'The Great Angel closed the gate,' he growls. 'I will not have the skjalds sing of Odi Sartak as the fool who opened another.'\n\nHonfler nods. 'If the enemy awaits, we need to know. If they're inside...'\n\nHe looks at his equerry.\n\n'Anything from the Hegemon? Any tactical intel?'\n\n'No response, sir. Vox is down again.'\n\nHonfler looks up at the towering curtain of the engine gates. 'We need to know,' he says. 'My call. I'll go.'\n\n'Praetor-captain-'\n\n'Four companies can hold a postern hatch,' Honfler says, 'at least long enough to raise the alarm. We have to know. Open it, Medusi.'\n\nThe Iron Hands sergeant turns to the lock and begins to dismantle it. Honfler's officers form a bracket formation behind him, bolters raised. Honfler draws his blade and his bolt pistol.\n\nSartak is beside him.\n\n'What are you doing?' Honfler asks.\n\n'Going with you,' Sartak replies, as though it's obvious.\n\n'Ready the companies for repulse in case this turns to shit,' Honfler says.\n\n'Medusi can do that,' says Sartak. 'He's a reliable officer. I'm going with you, son-of-Dorn.'\n\n'More disobedience?'\n\n'Of the best kind,' replies Sartak.\n\n'Wolf-'\n\n'I may have misunderstood your use of the word \"adherence\",' says Sartak.\n\nThe postern hatch unlocks with a clunk. Medusi hauls it open. It is half a metre thick.\n\nDarkness beckons.\n\nHonfler steps through. Sartak follows him.\n\nThere is nothing on the other side except a sense of invisible space. The blackness is so deep their enhanced optics and transhuman eyes can barely see more than a few metres.\n\n'Power failure,' says Honfler softly. 'That would explain why the engine gates shut. Automatic lockdown-'\n\n'Shhh,' Sartak hisses. Though he can't see it, he can sense that the space around them is vast. The Martian Approaches are vast, but this feels bigger still.\n\nHe glances back. He sees Rewa Medusi framed in the oblong slab of light of the open postern, bolter ready. Sartak flashes quick hortcode commands.\n\n'A breeze...' he murmurs to Honfler.\n\n'Air-circ venting-'\n\n'Either the power has failed or it hasn't.'\n\nHe sniffs. The air seems fresh. No, it's thick with traces of wet soil, chemical-burn, dust, fyceline, smoke. It's cold. But it's not the dank, re-filtered over-recycled air of the Sanctum's sealed micro-climate.\n\nHe squats, and feels the invisible ground. Not rockcrete. Not the heavy-grade surfacing of the Martian Approaches built to take the step of war machines. It's earth. Wet, gritty earth. Somehow-\n\n'The enemy hasn't breached,' he whispers. 'The enemy is not inside. We're outside.'\n\n'Outside? Of what?' asks Honfler.\n\n'The Sanctum,'"}
{"text":"ick with traces of wet soil, chemical-burn, dust, fyceline, smoke. It's cold. But it's not the dank, re-filtered over-recycled air of the Sanctum's sealed micro-climate.\n\nHe squats, and feels the invisible ground. Not rockcrete. Not the heavy-grade surfacing of the Martian Approaches built to take the step of war machines. It's earth. Wet, gritty earth. Somehow-\n\n'The enemy hasn't breached,' he whispers. 'The enemy is not inside. We're outside.'\n\n'Outside? Of what?' asks Honfler.\n\n'The Sanctum,' whispers Sartak.\n\n5:xxxvii\n\nDoom manifest\n\nAbidemi approaches them from the direction of the Throne. The urgent pace of his trusted lieutenant's stride fills Vulkan with concern.\n\n'My Lord of Drakes,' says Abidemi with a quick nod. 'The adepts of the Concillium wish you to know that they are seeing a sudden, massive spike in immaterial dynamics.'\n\n'Meaning?'\n\n'Perhaps...' The Draaksward hesitates. 'A new event, an anomaly... a new focus of empyric energy.'\n\n'Where?' Vulkan asks. 'Within the webway?'\n\nAbidemi shrugs. 'Or on Terra, or perhaps the traitor fleet. It seems to be everywhere.'\n\nIs this just the next stage of the crisis? Casryn signs. The world is being drowned in the warp, Draaksward. Levels of immaterial activity are bound to increase incrementally as-\n\n'No,' says Abidemi. 'I do not understand the art of it, but they tell me this is a particular event, as though a vast concentration of immaterial power has broken free or ignited.'\n\n'How vast?' Vulkan asks.\n\n'The adepts tell me their instruments are not calibrated high enough to measure it.'\n\nVulkan starts to stride towards the Throne. He is no longer walking. The other two move with him.\n\n'Explanation?' Vulkan asks as he moves.\n\n'None, my lord,' Abidemi replies.\n\nPerhaps the manifestation of this Dark King? Casryn signs.\n\nVulkan ignores her.\n\n'An explanation is beside the point,' says the Draaksward. 'The event is destabilising the Throne. Whatever control the Sigillite has left, it is insufficient. The Regent is burning out. His control is slipping, and he is about to perish entirely. When that happens...'\n\nHe doesn't finish. He doesn't have to.\n\nVulkan knows exactly what will happen then.\n\n5:xxxviii\n\nWonder\n\nIt is impossible to behold the Emperor any more. There is light everywhere, a light so fierce it has erased all shadows. The flagship around them is almost lost in a white and painful glare of absolute brilliance. Like the shock-flash of an atomic weapon, it cremates and evaporates the daemonic storm besieging them.\n\nBut the flash does not subside. It is not a blink of detonation. It lasts, permanent and harsh.\n\nProconsul Caecaltus can feel the heat of it at his back. He feels himself broiling inside his Aquilon armour, and his armour superheating. He feels as though he is standing beside a newborn supernova.\n\nHow glorious...\n\nCaecaltus cannot look at his master. He couldn't even if he wanted to. His King-of-Ages is keeping Caecaltus turned away by force of will. Through His investment in them, He is keeping the gaze of all the Companions averted.\n\nIf we look, one glimpse of that glory would melt our eyes. If we behold it, even for a nanosecond, it would burn our brains. I can feel the light inside me, scouring my flesh and bones, my very cells, like an inferno. My blood is steam. My armour is molten.\n\nIf He lets us look at Him, we will die.\n\nBut oh my king, for just one split-second glimpse of your wonder, it would be worth it.\n\n5:xxxix\n\nA last glimpse\n\nOh.\n\nOh, I-\n\nNhhh-\n\nYou think-\n\nYou think you're a god, first-found?\n\nLet me tell you...\n\nMnnhh!\n\nYour father... your father has worn many aspects in his life, each one to suit the purpose at hand.\n\nHe wears a new one now, bright and steadfast as a star. He will be what you need him to be.\n\nHe will show you the face you need to see to stop you in your tracks and beg for mercy.\n\nYou think you're becoming a god? Let him show you what true power looks like.\n\nLook. Look!\n\nGnnh.\n\nYou see it?\n\nI wish I could. I can't. Not any more.\n\nMy time has come now.\n\nMy end.\n\nMy vision is fading fast, my mindsight burned out.\n\nI try to hold on, but my will is spent. The visions that you, Horus Lupercal, in your cruelty, share with me, bleach away and vanish, diffused into a blinding white glare that is too bright to look at.\n\nI think that light is him.\n\nI think it is my friend, the Emperor, more empowered than he has ever been, so brilliant that the light of him burns through my skull, star-bright.\n\nBut perhaps it is you, Horus. Perhaps evil manifest is also too bright to behold.\n\nBut I cannot be sure. It's too bright to see.\n\nI cannot see anything-\n\nI cannot-\n\nI'm sorry. I'm sorry, my old friend. I tried my best. I did all I could-\n\nMy end is here and I cannot-\n\n5:xl\n\nSteadfast\n\nDeath is upon them now, sooner than he wished, faster than he dreaded. The best of Terra, the brightest and mightiest ever to wear the emblems of humanity, are done. Forty-three seconds were the best they could do before the Lupercal's wrath dragged them down into the oblivion of the pit and consumed them utterly.\n\nConstantin rages at this as he falls. He screams with indignation and wounded pride. He was determined they would be the ones who would prevail. They would be the ones to claim the victory. He, and his men, would show the bastard traitor how war was truly fought.\n\nBut no. Forty-three seconds. That's all they could manage. Them, the greatest champions in the Emperor's host. Forty-three paltry seconds-\n\nForty-four.\n\nHe sees a light ignite. He is on his knees, thrown down by the peristaltic convulsions of the glistening ground. He thinks it's a flare at first. A distress flare fired by one of his company, or the slow fusion-burn of a dying Adrathic.\n\nIt is not. It is singular and constant. A point of light, far away, but white-hot, rising like a star. The light bathes them. It illuminates the belly of the pit like a frosty twilight, and throws out long shadows. It makes the wet meat of the ground gleam, and reflects in the pools of blood and bile.\n\nConstantin struggles to his feet. The laughter has subsided, the singing too, chased into the clefts and folds of the pit and wherever else the suffocating darkness has fled to. He sees the landscape for what it is, a swollen canyon of pestilential flesh, glittering with mucus, throbbing with an angry, intestinal pulse, littered with the miserable, broken remains of his dead. He sees where the flesh of the place is riveted like deck plates, and where rusted bulkhead staples - massive things used in emergency hull repairs - are holding torn panels of stomach lining and brawn together as walls.\n\nHe concentrates on the light. It glows like a full snow moon, silver-bright, very distant. It hangs over the nearby cliffs of diseased flesh, visible through the forking branches of exposed ribs and stretched shrouds of fat, like a single bright and steadfast star rising on a clear night, seen through trees from a forest glade.\n\nHe can feel the light too, in his heart, in his soul. He can feel the trace of mindsight in it, reaching out, searching, seeking. The trace is weak, not enough to fill him and harness him so he becomes part of it, but enough for him to taste and recognise, enough to wash, like cool, clear water, the sticky darkness out of his eyes and mouth and brain, and renew a spark of hope.\n\nEnough to help him stand. Enough to let him know.\n\nEnough to guide him.\n\n'It's Him,' he whispers, but his neuro-synergetics, refreshed and renewed, tell him his words are pointless. His surviving Companions know it too. They, like him, have risen to gaze at the light.\n\nConstantin starts forward at once. The others follow him. They crunch across glittering rimes of dried blood and shivering creases of skin and sinew. The gloom is nocturnal and the air still turbid, but they can see the light, clear and true, a sizzling star of great magnitude and clarity.\n\nThey have it fixed. They have it to guide them. There will be greater torment ahead, no doubt, but they have a path to follow at last. They start to run.\n\nThey are forty-five seconds into the fight.\n\n5:xli\n\nDawn\n\nHe wipes red dust off what remains of his blade, and resumes his work.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn,' he says. He clears the dust from his throat. He picks up where he left off, perhaps hours or centuries earlier. 'Long ago, a philosopher and sometime remembrancer proposed a framework for the conduct of war, suggesting that war was permissible if it resulted in secure peace. But this was compromised by the notion that war could be divided into just war, which was that waged against outsiders, and unjust, which was war waged upon one's own people. This distinction remains. War to suppress or annihilate an outside threat, that which is xenos, is judged as justified as a means of security. Civil war is regarded as unjust and an abomination. Not all blood is the same.'\n\nThe sounds of war grow louder. The wall vibrates slightly, sifting red dust down onto his working hands.\n\nHis hands are blood red.\n\nHe ignores it.\n\nHe steps back to examine his latest diagram. Out of the wall's shadow, the sunlight is hard and strong. He looks up and sees, for the first time in a century or two, for the first time since he arrived, however that happened, that there is a sun in the sky. Everything is blood red - the wall, the desert, the sky, the dust - but there is a sun now. It is more of a star, in truth. A single, steadfast star. It is small, white, bright, fierce. It is the only thing the sky has done in the whole time he has been here, except change colour.\n\nHe closes his eyes and feels the light and heat on his skin. He basks, for a second.\n\nJust give in.\n\nHe goes back in under the shadow of the red wall, and returns to his work. His worn-away nub of sword scritches new lines of escape and defence. He resumes his recitation.\n\n'A later philosopher formulated the principal criteria that serve as the foundation for warfare in civilised societies. There are two - just cause"}
{"text":"ing the sky has done in the whole time he has been here, except change colour.\n\nHe closes his eyes and feels the light and heat on his skin. He basks, for a second.\n\nJust give in.\n\nHe goes back in under the shadow of the red wall, and returns to his work. His worn-away nub of sword scritches new lines of escape and defence. He resumes his recitation.\n\n'A later philosopher formulated the principal criteria that serve as the foundation for warfare in civilised societies. There are two - just cause and formal authority. Only a king or an emperor can declare war, and then only if it has legal justification, such as the protection of a culture. It is otherwise illegal and forbidden, even for gods.'\n\nThe noise of war on the other side of the wall becomes a palpable roar.\n\nGive in. Give up. Let go. Just say it. Blood for the Blood God.\n\n'There are no gods,' says Rogal Dorn.\n\nHe leans close to the wall, his mouth almost touching it.\n\n'Not even you,' he whispers.\n\n5:xlii\n\nThe tip of the spear\n\nHis vision melts into burning white. All he sees is a tunnelled disc of light, white-hot, like a distant, baleful star. He hears screaming.\n\nFor a second, there is stillness: upturned and stretched upon the enemy mass, head back, he almost lets go to the pain and allows it to swallow him. But the star, small and pure white, shines at him out of the blood-black darkness, solitary, bright, steadfast, unblinking.\n\nIn the blackness, he hears screaming. The screaming is coming from him. He is screaming at himself to remember who he is.\n\nSanguinius.\n\nHe flexes his entire frame, and breaks the mob's grip upon him. He crashes awkwardly to the bloody deck, and the reeling enemies surge onto him.\n\nSanguinius.\n\nHe endures their frenzied blows. He has one foot planted.\n\nSanguinius.\n\nHe rises.\n\nHe rises with such inhuman force, fully plated Astartes are thrown into the air and tumble off him. Yelling in rage, he slays, without mercy or pause, those foolish enough to remain near, or those too slow to drag themselves back. Blood trails arc from his sword-blade and spear-tip. He springs forward, wings out to lift him, and swoops low over the heads of two Justaerin brutes who sprawl, lacerated, in his slipstream. He evades the chasing shots of a Catulan trio, spears one to a pillar, disembowels the second with a twisting slice, and crushes the third Reaver under his feet. He strides away from the mangled smear, tracking gore behind him, strikes another Justaerin to the ground, and skewers a Cthonic Heavy.\n\nHe is now on the far side of the Great Atrium, facing the sealed inner hatches: forward access, command levels, cut off by great interlocked doors of black adamantine. Stray shots strike the peppered wall around them, and spark off the hatches. Sanguinius glances back. The atrium is pure, hellish turmoil, veiled in smoke, like a section of the Palatine war scooped out and locked in a box for display.\n\nHe turns to the hatch. The activators are locked off, and thrusting the burning blade of Encarmine into their sparking guts does not release them. He shreds out the power instead, cutting all the feed trunking in crackling cascades of voltaic sparks.\n\nHe sheathes Encarmine, and faces the doors. He cannot prise them apart. His fingertips can find no grip in the nearly seamless join. He gasps in effort and frustration. Is Maheldaron close by? Krystapheros? Anyone with remaining breaching charges?\n\nThere's no time. If Horus realises his brother is this close, he may choose to flee, to regroup, to mutate the clean ending of this conflict into some clumsy, drawn-out farce. Sanguinius takes up the Spear of Telesto, and slides the slim, perfect tip into the join. He puts his weight into it, and wedges the spear-tip's elongated teardrop deeper, deforming the seam, grinding bright silver splinters and ringlets of shaved metal from the black doors. When the spear is as deep as it will go, as deep as the blood-drop hollow, he flexes his grip around the auramite haft and unleashes its power.\n\nThe blast is a flare of lambent blue light that shudders the haft in his hands. The join around the blade is scorched, and drips molten rivulets. He looses the power again, and the hatches shiver. The join has parted, forced open by the compressed fury of the burst. Now he has it. He jams the spear in deeper, and hauls upon it, using it as a lever to drag the doors apart. They are thick, thirty centimetres deep. He yells out in effort as he drives every part of his primarch strength into the spear, feet planted, back stretching, arms locking. The spear's haft begins to bend slightly under tension. Veins bulge in his neck and temple. Torsion flexes the wound in his side, making it weep again.\n\nThe pain spurs him. He leans into it and exerts more force. Slowly, very slowly, the huge doors begin to scrape open.\n\nAs soon as he has levered enough of a gap, he pulls the spear out and plants it, tip down, in the deck. Its perfect form shows no sign of bend or distortion. He squeezes sideways into the gap, and begins to force it wider, pushing one side with his hands, the other with his shoulder, teeth gritted, shaking.\n\nSome traitors have seen his effort and his violation. Squads break from the battle and move towards him, firing their weapons. Bolt-rounds detonate against the hatch around him. One misses his face by millimetres and passes clean through the narrow opening. A Horusian Terminator, advancing at a rapid stride, begins to hose at him with its flamer mount.\n\nKrystaph Krystapheros cuts the Terminator down. He rushes to his lord's aid. Sarodon Sacre joins him, and Dytal Maegius. Then Ikasati too. They sweep into the traitors advancing on Sanguinius, and kill them, and then form a ragged ring to fend off any further assault. Their bolters start to thunder as more Sons of Horus break from the fight and come charging out of the wreathing smog. Krystapheros, first to his side, grabs the edge of one door and starts to drag at it as Sanguinius shakes in his effort to force them apart.\n\nThen heavy fire comes. The limping, thumping mass of a XVI Legion Dreadnought, which has already claimed far too many Blood Angels this day, looms through the curtains of flame that drape the atrium. Its assault cannons roar their rotary drone. Shots stipple the deck, cracking plasteel. Dytal Maegius spins aside, one leg shredded. Cannon fire stitches the black hatches, stinging off the metal. It catches Krystapheros as he heaves, and blows the upper half of him apart in a blizzard of bloody, shredding tissue. Pieces of pinging red ceramite catch Sanguinius across the cheek, and blood spatters him. Krystapheros' atomised remains plaster the left-hand hatch, gore sliding down its black surface, some matted with hair.\n\nThe Angel leaps out of the gap, plucks Telesto from the deck, and hurls it like a spear-fisher before the Dreadnought can take any more of his sons' lives. At thirty metres, the spear impales the striding brute dead centre, and blows it apart in a leaping cataclysm of flame and metal.\n\nSanguinius looks back at the hatch. The gap is wide enough to pass through, but not wide enough for any mass assault. Whatever awaits on the far side will easily pick off any force that comes through one at a time.\n\nUnless whatever awaits is already occupied.\n\nHe runs for the hatch.\n\n'Widen this!' he yells to Sacre and Ikasati. 'Blow it down if you can!'\n\n'My lord!' Sacre yells.\n\n'Do it! Secure this breach and hold it!'\n\nThen he is through. Through into deep and clammy darkness. The sound of the conflict behind him is muffled. A long bar of light tracks into the gloom from the gap between the doors. He hears something call his name.\n\nHe draws his sword, moving out of the light. What's here? What's next?\n\nWho's here?\n\nSomething detonates outside the hatch. The force, channelled through the gap, knocks him to his knees.\n\nWhen he rises, the darkness is complete. There is no gap. The doors are firmly interlocked again. He traces the seam. How have they closed? He had cut the power to them. No lateral force from a blast could have slammed them shut.\n\nHe can hear nothing from outside. The seam is tight, and he no longer has his lever to prise it apart.\n\nSomething sighs in the cold darkness. He spins around, sword ready. A fidget. The hint of movement somewhere. A whisper of voices. Lipless mouths wheezing something, but he can't tell what.\n\nHe steps forward slowly. If he has to fight alone, he will. Perhaps that's how this should end.\n\nPerhaps how this is supposed to end.\n\n5:xliii\n\nFragments (a world turned inside out)\n\nThe walls still stand, but there are no longer any walls. The gates remained locked, but there are no longer any locks. Matter no longer matters.\n\nFor the warp is inevitable. What it has transmuted outside the final fortress, it now transmutes within. The four sturdy dimensions of the world are maimed and mangled, and in their place other dimensions unfurl their properties, mocking sense and deriding logic with their alien breadths and endless measures. There is no limit to the number of these dimensions, for the immaterium has no definition that the human mind can comprehend.\n\nThe Golden Throne was an anchor to keep the warp in check, a linchpin to secure stability at the heart of the final fortress. But Malcador's will is overcome and the Throne burns, out of control. Thus the four dimensions are usurped and the new travesties take their place. Inside, outside, up, down, near, far... all become casualties of the war. Sense and understanding perish. Meaning is lost, or becomes un-meaning, for such is the horrifying mystery of the naked warp.\n\nSee now the madness of Horus Lupercal's ascendancy. Come see, now, the triumph of the False Four, and hear the laughter of dark gods and kings.\n\nOne small and steadfast star cannot burn bright enough to pierce the darkness now descending.\n\n'The enceinte of the Sanctum is six kilometres away,' says Honfler. 'Six, Wolf! We cannot be outside.'\n\n'I know"}
{"text":"asualties of the war. Sense and understanding perish. Meaning is lost, or becomes un-meaning, for such is the horrifying mystery of the naked warp.\n\nSee now the madness of Horus Lupercal's ascendancy. Come see, now, the triumph of the False Four, and hear the laughter of dark gods and kings.\n\nOne small and steadfast star cannot burn bright enough to pierce the darkness now descending.\n\n'The enceinte of the Sanctum is six kilometres away,' says Honfler. 'Six, Wolf! We cannot be outside.'\n\n'I know,' Sartak whispers. 'But the world has decided to make fools of us both. Walk back to the postern hatch with me, brother. We close it, we bar it. We send word to the Hegemon. We tell them.'\n\n'Tell them what? That you have lost your mind, and I have lost mine for believing you?'\n\n'No,' says Sartak. 'We tell them there is no Sanctum any more.'\n\nThey can barely see each other. They can barely see the oblong of light where Rewa Medusi stands. The blackness is so thick it feels as though they are blind.\n\nHonfler grips Sartak's arm.\n\n'Sartak?'\n\n'Brother?'\n\n'You still have your axe?'\n\n'I do.'\n\n'Are you ready, Wolf?'\n\n'For what, praetor-captain?'\n\n'Impressive deeds, brother,' says Honfler. 'If we are outside, we are not outside alone.'\n\nWater drips. Agathe runs her hand along a wall. It is stone, dense and almost warm, and not - she shudders at the memory - anything organic. She wonders what kind of heat produced this level of carbon scorching. Everything is so black. But where she touches the stone, no soot comes away on her hands.\n\nCaptain Mikhail approaches, leading one of the clearance squads.\n\n'Secure on that side,' he reports. 'We're just finishing up.'\n\n'Good,' she says. 'Once we can confirm security, we can bring the wounded in, cache our supplies. I want firing points set up at all outer windows and window slits. Can we get on the roof?'\n\n'I...' he begins. He looks reluctant.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Yes, to what you said. Yes, we can get on the roof, I think. I was just going to say, I think I know what this place is.'\n\n'Indeed? Enlighten me. It seems so familiar.'\n\n'I didn't recognise it from the outside,' says Mikhail. 'Because I never saw it from the outside. But inside...'\n\n'And?'\n\n'It's a prison,' says Phikes, with a sneer. He points. 'Along that side there, those look like cells to me. Don't you think? Naturally, he'd recognise it.'\n\n'Shut up, Phikes,' says Agathe. She looks at Mikhail. 'Is it?'\n\nMikhail nods. 'I was here for a week, before I was transferred to Gallowhill. A lot of my lads were. It's a prison. The prison.'\n\nAgathe frowns at him, curious.\n\n'Blackstone,' he says.\n\n'Well, it can't be,' she says, but as soon as he says it she realises that is exactly what the place reminded her of. The notorious Blackstone, the Palatine's primary penitentiary.\n\n'I think it is, mam,' says Mikhail. One of his men nods.\n\n'Absolutely not,' she replies, without conviction.\n\nMikhail's trooper, a man known only as Choke, for all of the 403rd are still sticking to forenames, pet names or serials, pulls out his trench spade. He scrapes a gouge in the wall with the bare-metal edge. Soot flecks off, but it's not soot. Under the black there is more black. Black stone. This isn't fire damage at all.\n\n'See?' says Choke. 'Mam?' he adds.\n\nShe does. It doesn't make sense. 'It's a prison,' she says, 'I'll grant you. But it's not the Blackstone. It can't be.'\n\n'I think it is,' says Mikhail. It's not a contradiction. He's not trying to argue.\n\n'No one gives a toss for your opinion,' says Phikes.\n\n'Phikes,' she says, 'go check on the other teams. See how they're doing.'\n\nThe adjutant looks at her. He brushes the front of his Vesperi uniform jacket, throws a quick salute, and wanders off.\n\nAgathe looks back at Mikhail and his crew.\n\n'It must be another prison,' she says.\n\n'Made of black stone, mam?' he asks.\n\n'Why not? It's clearly a strong building material. Whoever planned the Palace's penal institutions may have had a thing for it. It's a prison, but it's not the Blackstone.'\n\n'I thought the Blackstone was unique,' says Choke. 'It had a reputation because there wasn't another gaol like it...'\n\n'Yeah,' says another. 'The stone, this black stuff, it was shipped in from off-world. That's what I heard...'\n\n'It can't be the Blackstone,' she says, cutting them short. 'I... I won't let it be the Blackstone.'\n\n'What do you mean?' asks Mikhail.\n\n'The Blackstone prison is situated beside the Hegemon in the Sanctum,' she says. 'If this is the Blackstone, then we're somehow over a hundred and sixty kilometres away from where we ought to be, and the final fortress is gone.'\n\nThe convict-troopers know this, she realises. They understand it. They don't want it to be true either.\n\nPhikes reappears. There's something wrong with him. He's running, and he normally prefers to strut, chest out.\n\n'What?' she asks.\n\n'You'd better come, mam,' he says. She's never heard alarm like this in his voice before, despite all they've been through. 'You... you'd better come.'\n\nAdophel brings word that the tide of Death Guard is re-massing, and that its vanguard of wallbreakers has already commenced a second ascent of the cliffs. The Dark Angels hasten to the bulwarks.\n\nBehind the mask of his potent identity, Zahariel balances his wits and steels the erosive, persuasive power of his mind. Corswain doubts still, but he cannot deny the power of Cypher to unite his weary men. A victory will banish all misgivings and cement the true Order and Spirit of Caliban within the First Legion for all time.\n\nThey will be as one, and even the pride of the Lion will not be able to tear them apart.\n\nBut what, he wonders, is the value of any victory here? The Palace of Terra may be about to fall. It may have fallen already.\n\nAnd if it has, what little purpose lies in their desperate travails on this cold mountainside?\n\nThe taste of blood lingers in his mouth. Amit no longer feels that it is the residue of some remembered dream. It feels like the promise of a dream he is yet to have. It tells him that he dares not sleep again. Not ever. He does not want that dream to find him.\n\nThe Marnix Confluence is quiet. The denial companies stand in place. Everything is motionless, except for Vexillary Roch, who paces the edge of the concourse in front of them, sword in hand.\n\n'He should rest,' Lamirus says on discretional. 'Steady his focus. Clear his head. We'll need all our wits soon enough.'\n\n'Agreed,' Amit replies. 'You should too, Lamirus,' he adds after a moment. 'You and all the company. While we stand and wait, take the moment to fugue and settle your mind.'\n\n'I would prefer not, brother,' the sergeant replies. 'On the wall, I tried to rest, but-'\n\n'But?'\n\n'I had dreams. We all did. They were not soothing.'\n\nAmit turns his head to look at him.\n\n'What dreams, brother?'\n\n'I dreamt of our Angel lord,' Lamirus replies quietly, keeping his gaze fixed forward. 'All of the men dreamt the same. Our lord was lost, I think. He was in pain too. It was so real, I felt it myself.'\n\nAmit hesitates.\n\n'Were there coffins, brother?' he asks.\n\nNow Lamirus glances at him.\n\n'Coffins, yes. Caskets of stone. There were eighteen of them at least. It was hard to see. There was, I think, a candle, or some single source of light, but it was not bright enough to penetrate the dark. Did you dream this too?'\n\n'Yes,' says Amit reluctantly. 'Tell me what else you saw.'\n\n'First, there was a chamber,' Lamirus says. 'The chamber was large...'\n\nThe chamber is large. He remembers, from his time aboard, that this is an entry vault to the command areas, noble and pillared. Sanguinius remembers the layout perfectly. Ahead, perhaps fifty metres, there will be access to the bridge approaches, to the command bridge itself, the shipmaster's chamber, the Navigator's annex, forward gunnery and principal auspex. The primary compartments. Horus kept private quarters here. Rumours - or was it dreams? - have told him that those quarters have become some deranged court, a little throne room to obsequiously glorify the Warmaster.\n\nHe's close. And so is the end.\n\nThe darkness is heavy, like moonless night. The air has a sepulchral chill. It doesn't feel like processed shipboard air. It feels cold and natural, like a winter's night on some lonely, planet-side retreat.\n\nAnother step.\n\nThe air smells of dust, of mould, the cold decay of the grave. In the gloom, he sees the way the walls and pillars have stained and decayed, like some untended temple left in the custody of the wind and rain for a thousand years. The deck plates underfoot have corroded, and they flake rust as he walks. Where is the Warmaster's glory now? A ship run down to dereliction, worn out and unmaintained, a space-borne hulk of its former self.\n\nWater drips somewhere. The dripping makes it sound as though the walls are breathing. It is very dark in the chamber, like being outdoors at midnight on the bleak tracts of Inwit, or the haunted ever-forests of Fenris. Darkness, almost sickly black, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. He ignores such trickery. He can hear the whispering again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing underfoot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths-\n\nWhat is it they are whispering?\n\nSanguinius doesn't care. He continues forward, Encarmine ready to strike at a heartbeat.\n\nFor a second, he thinks he sees something. A shape. A figure. He moves forward, his focus sharp.\n\nAgain, a hint of movement. A glimpse of something up ahead. The shadow of a figure, hunched in full plate. Too big for an Astartes warrior. Too big for a primarch either, at least any still living.\n\nHe moves towards it, blade up, but it is no longer there. He senses it to his left, turns, and catches sight of it again for a second before it is gone.\n\nA game? Is his brother toying with him, trying to wear him down and scrape his wits? That won't work, not after all he has done to get here. Or is his prey trying to e"}
{"text":"ement. A glimpse of something up ahead. The shadow of a figure, hunched in full plate. Too big for an Astartes warrior. Too big for a primarch either, at least any still living.\n\nHe moves towards it, blade up, but it is no longer there. He senses it to his left, turns, and catches sight of it again for a second before it is gone.\n\nA game? Is his brother toying with him, trying to wear him down and scrape his wits? That won't work, not after all he has done to get here. Or is his prey trying to elude him; simply afraid of what will happen when the fight is finally joined?\n\nHe tries to ignore the pain, and the taste of blood in his mouth. When he looks down, he sees, in the gloom, the blood seeping from beneath his placket and running down his thigh plate, like red thread, tangled and knotted. That is where the sound of dripping is coming from.\n\nThe shadow stirs again, ahead of him. He won't lose track of it again. He spurs forward, moving faster, ignoring the pain, ignoring the limp it imposes on him.\n\nHe passes through a great archway into another chamber. There is light coming from somewhere, faint and warm, like a single candle spreading a feeble glow. A vault. A crypt. Its proportions are monumental and impossible to judge in the enclosing shade. The deck is paved stone. There is the hint of a barrel-vault ceiling overhead, also stone, but too swathed in shadow to make out.\n\nThere are objects here. Rectangular blocks of considerable size, each laid flat on their longer side, ranged in two neatly spaced rows with an aisle between them. There are twenty of them.\n\nSanguinius approaches. Close to, he sees they are made of stone. They are draped in sheets of amaranthine cloth. The colour of mourning.\n\nSword raised, braced in a double-handed grip that will make his first blow as powerful as it can be, Sanguinius stalks forward between the rows. Amaranthine sheets cover all but one of the blocks. That one, the second from the end in the right-hand row, is bare, its sheet folded flat into a square and placed on its top.\n\nHe moves towards it. It is stone. A stone casket. Its lid is slid slightly ajar, resting, waiting to be closed and sealed. The lid, he sees, is engraved with the numeral IX.\n\n'You were a long time coming, but you are here at last.'\n\nSanguinius wheels at the sound of the voice. He knows it. He knows it all too well, and the sound of it hurts him more than the pain in his side.\n\nThe huge, plated shadow is staring at him, broad and immense, framed against the feeble light.\n\nIt steps between the tombs and he sees its face.\n\n'I have been waiting for you,' says Ferrus Manus.\n\n5:xliv\n\nA world turned outside in\n\nThe Delphic Battlements rain havoc on the ground below. Relentless bombardment from the wall guns flays the earth back to the bedrock, and fills the air with cloudbursts of lethal shrapnel.\n\nThe barrage, fierce enough to consume an armour column, lacerates the charging line of traitors, killing thousands and annihilating the siege engines and mobile turrets they are dragging. Traitor engines, advancing with the waves of infantry, are shredded and demolished. A ten-kilometre run of the wall's talus becomes a sheeting jungle of flame and phosphorescent fire.\n\nIt is the sixth mass assault that has been scourged and repelled in fifteen minutes. There seems to be a limitless reserve of traitor forces gathering in the darkness beyond the final fortress. Their attacks are now constant, wave after wave, their losses immense, but for every thousand slaughtered as they race to reach the walls, another ten thousand emerge from the battle-smog to try their turn, and for every siege tower obliterated, another ten are rolled out ready by magi of the Dark Mechanicum. Feral banners loom through the flowing smoke, foul standards of Chaos visible from the walls, multiplying in number like poison weeds, indicating the unearthly armies and murderous legions drawing close and assembling for assault. A keening fills the poisoned air; the blare of war-horns that shake the heavens, the ululation of demented priesthoods, the grumble of a billion drums, the clack and croak of inhuman hosts.\n\nLucoryphus, Raptor, Night Lord, is surprised to discover himself alive.\n\nHe was in the thick of the latest assault, caught by the bombarding rage that incinerated and liquidised the World Eaters, Sons of Horus and Death Guard charging with him. Lucoryphus had been soaring ahead, with others of his breed, carried by the burning streamers of their jump packs, above the common rabble of the ground troops. They had just begun their climbs towards the soaring upper parapets. A shell blast, which pulped the warriors beneath him, lifted him on its shockwave like a clod of soil, and hurled him through the air.\n\nHe rises to his feet, bruised, bones battered. He has been thrown right against the foot of the Delphic wall, another broken corpse amid the debris and scraps of meat littering the immense, unbreachable stones of the almighty battlement. His jump pack is mangled. He looks up. The wall is a thousand metres high, strung with kill-wire and down-angled spikes. It is unscalable, for anybody, including him, who would wish to be alive when they reached the summit.\n\nHe sees another mass wave preparing to come in. When they begin to move, the wall's guns will start to welcome them again, and this entire stretch of ground, still smoking, vitrified, and radiating blast-heat from the last charge, will become a fiery hell once more.\n\nAnd it will consume him.\n\nEager, almost desperate, like a sharp-eyed corvid, he looks around, searching for something, anything, that he can use as cover. He spots a stone culvert, some kind of drainage outflow, and hobbles towards it, like a clumsy, grounded vulture, ditching his useless jump pack. As he reaches the culvert, he sees how shallow it is, little more than a niche. It won't protect him, but he claws his way under the lip of it anyway.\n\nThe wave comes. He hears the jeering roar and the blast of horns. Within seconds, the walls reply. The ground shakes. The noise is unbearable. Pressure hammers him, and he rattles like a pebble in the cramped aperture of the culvert.\n\nLucoryphus can't guess what will happen first. Will he burn and cook, or will he be vibrated to sludge by the shock-pressure? He starts to scream. It is an inglorious and obscure end for one such as him, who has performed some of the greatest feats of the war. The name Lucoryphus should have been etched on the Warmaster's plate, and hymned by daemons as a champion of the ages. A warrior who has achieved what primarchs have failed to do should not meet an anonymous end in a drain like a diseased rat. He was the first of the host to top the walls, the first to carry the battle into the False Emperor's Palace. This is not a fit or fair end for so illustrious a hero-\n\nThe blast-rush, monumental, crushes him into the culvert slabs. He is wrenched inside out, atomised, reduced to pulp, to jelly, to steam, to particles, torn to burning tatters that are torn, in turn, to sparks-\n\nHe opens his eyes, surprised to find he still has eyes. The floor is cold. His skin is burning, but that's just residual heat bleeding out of his scorched and smoking plate. He rises to his hands and knees, blood drooling from his mouth. He can smell seared flesh, and knows it is his own.\n\nHe rises. The culvert is gone. The massive talus of the wall is gone. The wall itself, the insurmountable cliff of the Delphic, is gone.\n\nHe doesn't know where he is.\n\nAn empty hallway stretches before him. He turns, and sees it stretch away as far again behind him. The walls are auramite, inlaid with intricate figures. The floor is swirled marble, buffed like a looking glass. The ceiling is very high, and strung with ornate pendant lamps.\n\nTerror fills him. He understands where he is, though he cannot explain how he got there. He is all alone, and the terror of that ballasts his chest and gut like cement.\n\nBut there is joy too, joy that carves through his fear. Blessed by the gods, he cannot be killed, and his fame is cast immortal. There will be statues of him. Cities, whole worlds, will be named in his honour.\n\n'Mino premiesh a minos murantiath!' he murmurs in the mother tongue of his home world.\n\nFor he is now the first-of-all twice. First to cross the Palace walls, and now first inside the final fortress.\n\nPART SIX\n\nTHE INEVITABLE CITY\n\n6:i\n\nUnravelled\n\nThey've had their chance, and now it's gone.\n\nThey are led away, flanked by the terrifying Sentinel giants and the distressing Sisters of Silence. No one speaks. No one dares. They are all afraid. For a brief moment, it had felt like they were going to be listened to. But the moment passed, and their reception was ended, and now they are being marched to some unspecified doom.\n\nOll hopes it's detention. A cell, a prison. It's probably going to be worse than that.\n\nThey were lucky Vulkan even listened as long as he did. The crisis is greater and darker and deeper than even the worst Oll has imagined. Vulkan, the only figure of authority left, is facing decisions and choices beyond mortal consideration. Oll knows that even a brief audience with him was remarkable. At the end of their conversation, Oll had tried to plead with him.\n\n'My lord,' he had said, 'let us help you. Let us help the Imperium of Man.'\n\nVulkan hadn't asked how. He hadn't bothered, and even if he had, Oll would have been at a loss to give him a credible answer. Vulkan had merely gestured to the immense Throne Room around them.\n\n'This is the Imperium of Man,' he had said to Oll. 'This and only this. Everything and everywhere else is debatable, questionable and conflicted. The only part of the Imperium that remains intact and defined is this room. It is all I command. The Imperium of Man, which once straddled the stars, is reduced to this chamber, Ollanius. What territory remains is what I can see here, in my ambit. Nothing else is certain.'\n\nThe Custodians and the Sisters "}
{"text":"stured to the immense Throne Room around them.\n\n'This is the Imperium of Man,' he had said to Oll. 'This and only this. Everything and everywhere else is debatable, questionable and conflicted. The only part of the Imperium that remains intact and defined is this room. It is all I command. The Imperium of Man, which once straddled the stars, is reduced to this chamber, Ollanius. What territory remains is what I can see here, in my ambit. Nothing else is certain.'\n\nThe Custodians and the Sisters escort them back along the empty golden hallways. Oll senses they are being returned to the Antirooms where they were first held, but it's impossible to be sure because the grand, intimidating galleries of the Palace all look alike. These auramite halls seem like the same ones they were originally conducted along, but they are interchangeable. Perhaps they are being led back by another route? Perhaps they are being taken somewhere else altogether?\n\nIt doesn't matter. They're done. Their folly is over. Their captors are no longer prepared to hear them out. Collaboration with the authorities has ceased to be an option, and escape from custody is even less viable. They are closely guarded by the most dangerous beings in the Emperor's host.\n\nThe long companions trudge in silence, cowed and scared. Actae is especially withdrawn. The colour has drained out of her, she is leaning on Katt for support like an invalid, and Katt herself is suffering. The psychic trauma of the appalling Throne Room, and the continued proximity of the spectral nulls, have taken a terrible toll on them both, but Oll fears that the distress-reaction the pair are sharing through their psykanic bond is due far more to this notion of a 'Dark King'. The revelation of the imminent, final, horrifying stage of Lupercal's ascent affected Actae profoundly. Oll wishes he could question her about it, but now's not the time.\n\nThere's never going to be the time. There's no way out. They crossed the galaxy to face the Master of Mankind and, against all the odds, they reached their destination. But He was out. It's buffoonery, the punchline to a bad joke, like one of the lesser epics the bards used to sing. The bards, in fealty to Apollo, would perform such tales at the feast-fire, amid the smell of wine and food and burnt offerings. They would select one suitable for the moment: an epic tale of prowess to lift the spirits, a tale of heroic woe for more sombre occasions. Some were comical and light-hearted, strewn with mishaps and blunders, sung to do no more than delight and amuse.\n\nThat's what our odyssey has been, Oll thinks. One of the comical numbers, the farcical ones sung to the strum of a lyre, reciting catalogues of weakness, whimsy, imprudence and inglorious absurdity. A misadventure. That's all it's been. A half-baked try with a feeble ending, to make men laugh and shake their heads in disbelief, and pity the foolhardiness of those involved. Their song is over.\n\n6:ii\n\nAn instant away\n\nEven the song of the astrotelepathic choir is beginning to break and falter.\n\nTheir urgent pace brings them as close to the foot of the Throne's vast stepped dais as they dare to be. They feel the radiant heat of it. Inside the encircling ring of outward-facing Custodians, wordlessly maintaining their vigil, seniors and apprenti of the Concillium toil to regulate the stabilisation engines arranged around the great dais. The light is fierce. There is a heady stink of ozone and heated metal, and also the reek of some of the universe's less quantifiable properties, which speak of bruised dreams, lacerated hopes, myopic farsight and caustic epiphany. The surging roar of the voiceless choir vibrates Vulkan's teeth and pulses in his blood. He shifts his arm slightly to dull a piercing harmonic issuing from his pauldron.\n\nSeniors of the Concillium hurry over to Vulkan, bow, and present him with data-slates outlining the fresh spike of empyric activity Abidemi spoke of. Their faces, hidden behind the tinted window-slits of their lead-lined gear, are glossy with sweat and prickled with burn-blisters. The plastek surfaces of their data-slates are bubbled and scorched.\n\n'This anomaly is increasing in strength?' Vulkan asks, scanning the data.\n\nThe seniors affirm it is.\n\n'But there is no locus for it? No location or epicentre?'\n\nThey confirm that there is not.\n\nVulkan studies the data again. The anomaly, alarming in itself, is not the only concerning aspect. The Concillium's inability to determine its epicentre suggests that it is occurring, uniformly, everywhere. But a cursory glance at the metadata framing their observations reveals that nothing seems to possess a verifiable location any more. The Palace Dominions, the expanse of Terra... All seem to have shed their established, mathematised macrostructure, so that all points of reference have been lost and nothing can be correlated to anything else. It suggests the Sanctum's potent sensoria apparatus have become defective, or overwhelmed.\n\nOr that, somehow, everywhere has become everywhere.\n\n'Is it possible,' Vulkan asks, 'that this anomaly is simply a consequence of the Regent's incremental decay? I mean, is this anomaly a separate event that is destabilising the function of the Throne, or is it a symptom of the Throne increasingly slipping from the Sigillite's control?'\n\nThey cannot answer that.\n\nVulkan turns to look at the Throne.\n\nHe labours, signs Casryn, half-seen at his side. It is hard to see where Malcador ends and the burning radiance begins. What little Vulkan can perceive of the Sigillite is a blind and blinding neon shape that has been reduced to a mere stick figure.\n\nIt is worse than Casryn suggests. Vulkan can see that. All monitoring data indicates that, in the course of the last few, un-trackable minutes, Malcador's strength has rapidly deteriorated. He appears burned out, gone forever, or at best is on the verge of annihilation. The Golden Throne will shortly be uncontrolled, its mechanisms racing unchecked. An immaterial breach, the implosion of cosmic magnitude that Vulkan's father spent years holding back, is imminent. Perhaps the anomaly is simply the first indicator of that calamity.\n\nAt floor level, another member of the Adnector Concillium collapses. They are succumbing with greater frequency, overwhelmed by the raging power-bleed despite their protective gear, struck dumb or sightless or simply overcome. When they fall, serfs rush in to drag them clear and fetch them to the infirmary. Vulkan has been told that several have simply died. Fresh adepts, waiting in silent ranks below the sweep of the nearest scissor arch, hurry forward to take their places.\n\nThe immateria engines they struggle to maintain cough and sputter, shiver and heave, bleeding liquidised axioms and gusting phlogistonic sparks. The floor around the dais is sooted black, and the backs of Uzkarel and his encircling detachment of Sentinels are dulled with tarnish.\n\nHis eyes narrowed against the glare, Vulkan studies the mechanisms of the Throne. Has the time come? He identifies the Talisman of Seven Hammers though he knows precisely where it is. Must he now accept the inevitable and initiate the end of the Imperium? He rehearses the motions and gestures he will need to make in his mind.\n\nPerhaps, he thinks, the Talisman is the last safeguard, not against the immediate and overwhelming foe, but against the catastrophe of a new god, a notion only now brought to his attention but which, he prays, his father and the Sigillite foresaw and have made arrangements to counter.\n\nHe wills the Talisman, abominable though it is, to be that safeguard. He needs to believe that Malcador and his father knew of this possibility in advance, and thus prepared an ultimate response. He cannot allow himself to think that it is not, for if it is not, then his father and the Sigillite had no foreknowledge of the threat of the Dark King, and have left nothing with which to fight it.\n\nMy lord... Casryn signs.\n\n'Wait...' he replies.\n\nThe Sigillite is failing, lord.\n\nVulkan can see it's true. He feels as though he can actually see Malcador's agonised soul burning and evaporating inside the luminous husk of his raddled body.\n\nWe must supplement and reinforce him...\n\n'Sigil Protocol-'\n\nIs no longer enough. It cannot sustain him until your father our lord returns. We are an instant from catastrophe.\n\n6:iii\n\nClose to the city\n\n'Stay back,' says Agathe. Phikes needs no encouragement to do so, but Mikhail stays at her side, his old lasrifle steady. She draws her sidearm.\n\nPhikes has brought them to a long block of cells. There is ruination in this part of the black mansion too. The floor is littered with rubble and debris. Some cell doors stand ajar, others closed. Some have been blown off entirely. The line of cells extends as far as she can see in the darkness.\n\nShe advances, Mikhail beside her, whether she wants him there or not. Phikes waits behind her, with Mikhail's squad, and the clearance team that was working the area.\n\nShe hears the knocking at once, the gentle rap of knuckles on a cell door. She can't tell which one it's coming from. The first cell is open, and empty. The second, its door ajar, is also vacant. The door of the third cell is closed. The knocking is coming from inside.\n\nAgathe glances at Mikhail, then beckons Phikes. He joins them, reluctantly.\n\n'They were all checked?' she asks.\n\nHe nods.\n\n'So none are locked?'\n\n'The squad forced open all that were, mam,' he whispers.\n\nShe moves to the door. The knocking continues. Mikhail puts out his hand, stops her, and then moves in. He kicks the door wide, and goes in, weapon aimed from the shoulder.\n\nThe heavy metal door shivers on its hinges. The cell is completely empty. The knocking has stopped.\n\nAgathe looks in over Mikhail's shoulder. Nothing. No sign of anything that could have been making the noise, no loose pipe or dangling debris stirred by the wind.\n\nThe knocking resumes, now coming from a closed door "}
{"text":"ispers.\n\nShe moves to the door. The knocking continues. Mikhail puts out his hand, stops her, and then moves in. He kicks the door wide, and goes in, weapon aimed from the shoulder.\n\nThe heavy metal door shivers on its hinges. The cell is completely empty. The knocking has stopped.\n\nAgathe looks in over Mikhail's shoulder. Nothing. No sign of anything that could have been making the noise, no loose pipe or dangling debris stirred by the wind.\n\nThe knocking resumes, now coming from a closed door three cells along.\n\nAgathe and Mikhail glance at each other.\n\n'I told you this,' Phikes hisses. He's trembling. 'The cells are empty. All of them. But the knocking comes from cells where the doors are closed. Even ones that have been checked.'\n\nShe strides to the third door down. The knocking from inside is feeble, but distinct. Some forgotten prisoner, left to his fate without food and water when the wardens fled, weakly tapping in the hope that someone will hear.\n\nImpulsively, she knocks back. The knocking inside stops. Then it resumes. She immediately shoulders the cell door open and steps in, laspistol raised.\n\nEmpty, but for the rotting remains of an old cot. There are no marks on the inside of the door. Mikhail, grim, tilts his head to her. The knocks are now ringing from another cell a few doors along.\n\nMikhail moves to it. He takes off his grubby forage cap, balls it in his hand as a makeshift rag to wipe the sweat off his brow, then shakes it out and puts it back on. He raises his foot to kick the door.\n\nThe knocking ceases.\n\nHe lowers his foot.\n\nIt starts again.\n\nHe bursts in, covering every corner of the little, dank chamber with his weapon. By the time she joins him, the knocking has begun again, further down the block.\n\n'Daemon-kind plays tricks with us,' she says.\n\n'It was said the black stone had certain properties,' Mikhail replied. 'Inmates said it stole their hopes and their woes, like it was feeding on them. That it spoke to them when they slept and-'\n\n'Enough of that, captain,' she replies. 'This isn't the Blackstone.'\n\n'As you wish, mam,' he replies. 'But the stone is black. Maybe you're right. Maybe this is a different prison, but built from the same stuff. In which case-'\n\nShe strides to the next cell from which the infernal sound is issuing, and simply throws the door wide.\n\n'Phikes?' Agathe calls, staring at the revealed emptiness.\n\n'Mam?'\n\n'Your team has examined all these cells?'\n\n'Yes, mam.'\n\n'And the knocking only comes from cells where the doors are closed?'\n\n'Yes, mam.'\n\n'Then I would urge you, Phikes, to use some Vesperi nous.'\n\n'Mam?'\n\n'Leave the cell doors open,' Mikhail growls.\n\n'Oh,' says Phikes.\n\nAgathe leads the way down the block. She doesn't go directly to the source of the knocking, which has begun again six doors along. She simply throws open each closed door in turn until she gets to it.\n\nBy the time she does, the knocking has skipped along to another door.\n\n'Open them all,' she says.\n\nThe teams, wary, join them. They move methodically, opening every cell door so that it stands wide. The elusive taps skip ahead of them, cell-to-cell. As they reach the end of the block, a sequence of five closed doors in a row, it suddenly starts knocking from within all of them at once.\n\nThat makes Agathe hesitate. Mikhail, who seems more exasperated than scared, boldly slams the last five open in quick succession.\n\nShe is right behind him as he reaches the last one, and sees what he sees when he shoves it open.\n\nIt's not a cell.\n\n6:iv\n\nThe thread\n\nIt will be cells, if they're lucky. If they're not, then they are being taken to-\n\nJohn Grammaticus looks up from his misery and sees that the Chosen One, Hassan, has caught up with them and fallen in step beside the escorted prisoner party. Hassan's expression is bleakly solemn.\n\n'Where are you taking us?' John asks.\n\n'Do not speak,' Raja barks.\n\nJohn flinches. The Custodians are utterly intimidating, and he is petrified of provoking them. But he doubts he or Oll will ever get another opportunity to talk to one of the Regent's staff. Of all their captors, Hassan had seemed the most reasonable. The most human.\n\n'Why wouldn't he listen to us?' John asks quietly. 'He owes me a debt. You heard him say so. Why wouldn't Lord Vulkan-'\n\n'One further word, and I will silence you,' says Companion Raja.\n\nHassan glances at the Custodian, and raises a hand gently.\n\n'It's all right, Companion,' Hassan says. 'The man is simply afraid.'\n\nRaja glares for a moment, then leads the party onwards. They cross an ornate golden bridge spanning a bottomless ventilation shaft, go through a towering arch engraved with intertwined angels, and start to make their way along another impossibly long hallway lined with statues. It's one of the Palace's grand processionals, the ceiling so high it is lost in the haze of light. It dwarfs even the gigantic Custodes. There are people here, crowds of nobility and seniors of the Imperial military, servitors and Palace staff, all hurrying somewhere, all afraid. It is the first part of the Palace John's seen that seems properly alive, like the main street of a great city. There is a strained tension in the air, the sound of distant bells, a hush of voices swallowed by the immense space. Everyone on the processional gives the prisoners and their fearsome escort a wide berth. Courtiers and officials glance at them as they pass, their faces full of suspicion and disdain.\n\n'If my Lord Vulkan does owe you his life,' says Hassan as they walk, his voice oddly muted by the volume of the processional, 'then perhaps your positive contribution in the face of this disaster is already done, and was done long before you came to the Palace. Have you considered that? Perhaps he recognises that you have nothing else to offer.'\n\n'I don't think you believe that, Chosen One,' says John.\n\nHassan doesn't reply, but he glances at the negation crate Sister Vigilator Mozi Dodoma is carrying. In it are some of the possessions confiscated from the long companions at capture, objects that are in themselves hard to explain. There's no way to engineer trust, John realises. He and Oll and the companions are insignificant outsiders, and there's too much about them that raises cause for concern.\n\nThey walk a little further. John sees that Oll has suddenly stopped.\n\n'Keep moving, please,' says Hassan. 'Companion Raja will not tolerate-'\n\n'What's that?' Oll asks, pointing.\n\n'Walk!' Raja snarls.\n\nJohn pushes to Oll's side. 'Stop it,' he whispers. 'Oll, they'll kill you.'\n\nOll ignores him.\n\n'What is that, Chosen One?' Oll asks. John realises that Oll is staring at one of the golden statues that line the long hallway. The passing foot traffic is making space to move around the suddenly halted party. Oll takes a step towards the statue. Sisters, soft as cobwebs, move to surround him. John sees the flash of their blades being drawn.\n\n'Oll-!' John hisses.\n\n'Look,' Oll says. He points. With his other hand, he rubs his left eyelid, which seems to have developed a tic.\n\n'At what?' asks Hassan.\n\n'What's the matter with you?' John pleads.\n\n'Look, John!' Oll repeats. Raja strides over to restrain him.\n\n'Have we been here before?' Oll calls out to Hassan.\n\n'You were escorted this way-'\n\n'Before that,' says Oll. 'Before you captured us. We never made it this far, did we?'\n\n'You were apprehended near the Hall of Worthies,' Hassan replies, 'a considerable distance from here. What does it matter? Get back in line.'\n\n'It matters, Chosen One, because of that,' says Oll.\n\nJohn sees what his friend is pointing at. He catches his breath.\n\nBoth Hassan and Raja have noticed what Oll has spotted too. At Raja's signal, the Sisters step back, allowing Oll, John and Hassan to approach the statue.\n\nThere is a loop of red thread tied around its ankle.\n\n'What is the significance?' asks Hassan.\n\n'What, apart from the question of who is randomly tying bits of string to your fixtures and fittings?' John asks. 'Should that be there?'\n\n'No,' admits Hassan.\n\n'Right,' John says. 'We marked our way. You saw the thread we carried. We marked our way as we came because this place is a labyrinth.'\n\n'What of it?' asks Raja as he looms behind them.\n\n'I thought I saw another,' says Oll. 'On our way to the Throne Room. I wasn't sure, and you weren't about to let us stop. But we'd never been down that hall to tie it. And we've never been down this one either, not to leave a clue.'\n\n'I... I don't understand,' says Hassan.\n\nRaja looks to the warrior escort. 'Stand ready and alert!' he snarls.\n\n'Companion Raja does,' says John to Hassan. 'The geometry of the Palace is no longer stable. Do you understand what my friend is showing you? The Palace is shifting and recomposing because, Throne help us all, the warp is already inside.'\n\n6:v\n\nThe sound\n\nRann finds Leod Baldwin in a dark hallway within the bunkers. Fisk Halen is with him, and Kyzo, one of Namahi's outriders.\n\n'What is it?' Rann asks. Baldwin beckons him. They follow the hallway to the end, to a rockcrete chamber, where the walls, floor and ceiling are painted oxide red, probably indicating a gun-box, or perhaps a munition safe. It is dank and empty.\n\n'Kyzo found it,' says Baldwin. 'Sharp ears.'\n\n'Just making sure the chambers were all secure, Lord-Son-Of-Dorn,' says the White Scar. 'I was looking for secret access. Trapdoors. False walls.'\n\n'And?' asks Rann.\n\n'That's how he found it,' says Halen.\n\n'Found what?' asks Rann. The room is simply an empty rockcrete box.\n\n'Listen,' says Baldwin, raising a finger to his lips.\n\nRann listens. The four men let the silence grow around them. There's nothing, except the distant thump and rumble of battle-brothers elsewhere in the bunker complex prepping defences.\n\nThen he hears it. A sound.\n\nA whisper.\n\nHe looks sharply at Baldwin, who nods. No one speaks. Rann strains to hear. A whisper, in the shape of words, but little more than a murmur, like the background hum of circ-systems.\n\nRann looks around. Soundless, he moves closer t"}
{"text":"says Baldwin, raising a finger to his lips.\n\nRann listens. The four men let the silence grow around them. There's nothing, except the distant thump and rumble of battle-brothers elsewhere in the bunker complex prepping defences.\n\nThen he hears it. A sound.\n\nA whisper.\n\nHe looks sharply at Baldwin, who nods. No one speaks. Rann strains to hear. A whisper, in the shape of words, but little more than a murmur, like the background hum of circ-systems.\n\nRann looks around. Soundless, he moves closer to the walls, listening.\n\n'It's just ambient noise,' he says.\n\n'There are no active systems this end of the works,' says Halen.\n\n'Something under us, then,' says Rann. 'Pipework. Drainage. Something conducting sound from elsewhere.'\n\n'It's a voice,' says Kyzo.\n\n'Well, where's it coming from, then?' Rann asks. 'Some weird bounce of acoustics?'\n\nThe White Scar points to the back wall of the gun-box.\n\nRann approaches it. He runs his hands across it. Sheer, thick ferro-concrete, unyielding. He leans in, and presses his ear to the red wall.\n\nIt is a voice. Not soft, but far away.\n\n'What's on the other side of this?' he asks.\n\n'Nothing,' says Baldwin. 'This is the northern end of the Hasgard dug-out. The other side of that is solid bedrock.'\n\n'Nothing could be on the other side,' says Kyzo. 'I even went out and circled the structure. This end is both fortified and buried.'\n\nRann listens again. He can hear the voice still, a steady, calm recitation. He presses close and strains to listen.\n\n'... concept of yi bang was devised to regulate the application of war. This formalised the justification for killing, making it the supreme method of judicial punishment. It could...'\n\nRann jerks back. He gazes at Baldwin.\n\n'Then you think so too?' Baldwin asks. 'I did. So did Halen.'\n\n'There's no way it could be,' says Rann.\n\n'Yet it is,' says Halen. 'You recognise it too.'\n\nRann doesn't answer.\n\nBut he would know that voice anywhere. The calm, methodical tones of his lord and father, Rogal Dorn.\n\n6:vi\n\nThat which shouldn't be\n\nThe door opens into a cobbled yard. Agathe stares for a moment, trying to understand what she is seeing. A cobbled courtyard, surrounded by old stone walls, leaning with age and furred with moss and lichen. The edges of tiled roofs and old ironwork gutters. Everything is diffuse grey, as though seen through a mist, even the daylight itself.\n\nBut there is no daylight anywhere in the entire span of the Palace Dominions, not even this mournful wash. And the yard does not agree with the architecture of the cell block. From the doorway, she can see that it is wider than block units should allow. It stretches to her left, into what would be the last cell she visited. She would have seen it from in there.\n\nMikhail jolts back, startled.\n\nAgathe moves past him.\n\n'Don't!' he calls.\n\nBut she's already in the yard. The air is cold and damp and very still, but fresh. It smells nothing like the dank stink inside the black mansion, or the broiled smoke-reek that has been invading their nostrils for the last few hours in the warzone outside.\n\nIt is a different place entirely. She breathes in. The air is almost refreshing, though she is aware her inhalation is jagged because she is shaking so badly.\n\nShe looks back. She sees the doorway, still a cell doorway, and through it the alarmed faces of Phikes and Mikhail and the clearance teams, and behind them, the black stone cell block they are standing in. But around the door is mouldering grey stone, scabs of lichen, a rising iron drainpipe, an overhang of roof. No sign whatsoever of the cell block's fabric, no sign at all of the black mansion's vast imposing structure.\n\nMikhail, in the doorway, holds out his hand, urging her to step back. She knows he's right. She has blundered into the impossible, as though she has fallen asleep on her feet and suddenly started to dream. Where she is cannot be. It does not fit the location, or logic, or physics. Yet it is. Perhaps she has finally, after all she has been through, gone mad.\n\nBut she's here now. It feels, on a wordless level, as though this was where she was coming to all along, that this has been her destination from the start, somehow inevitable.\n\nAgathe turns and looks around. She takes a few more steps into the yard. Beyond it is a huge sky, a dull, waterlogged grey, fimbriated with blotchy nimbostratus cloud. She can smell imminent rain on the air. Below the wide sky, beyond the little yard, she can see a city. She can see roofs, towers, part of a bridge, the jumbled, unplanned, ancient warren of the streets. The place is vast, and very old. It is built of stone and brick, of tile and timber beams, and every part of it is grey and secretive. There is no sign of life. It looks as though it has stood, suddenly abandoned to slow decay, for centuries. It is drab and derelict, mouldering and silent, and it stretches as far as she can see.\n\nThere is something profoundly wrong about it. Not just that it couldn't possibly be here, or coexist in the space occupied by the ransacked prison. The actual place, the cityscape, is wrong. Its lines and perspectives are skewed, uneasily bending distance and form beyond anything that can be explained by the tumbled, leaning and irregular walls. The place has the creeping logic of a slow nightmare. It grows odder and more elongated the longer she looks.\n\n'Marshal?'\n\nMikhail is beside her. He has stepped into the yard at her side. The tone of his voice is dull, as though it is being modulated by some distorted acoustics.\n\n'We shouldn't be here, marshal,' he says.\n\nShe nods. 'This shouldn't be here,' she says.\n\n'Marshal, step back with me. We should leave.'\n\nShe nods again, but the weird fascination of the place holds her where she is.\n\n'Marshal?'\n\n'I think I dreamed of this place once, captain,' she says.\n\n'I think I have too,' he replies. 'Marshal, please. Come back with me. This place can't be trusted.'\n\n'I don't think anything can be trusted any more,' she replies.\n\n6:vii\n\nSpeaking the unspoken\n\nVulkan pauses. He has shouldered great responsibilities for his entire life, the destiny of any primarch-son, but he could never have imagined such a weight as this. The entire world rests upon his shoulders, the fate of the Imperium, of the species itself. Now an additional burden has been added to that weight: the fate of the material cosmos, whether or not the human race is alive to see it.\n\nHe can only trust what he knows, and what he knows is that his father made him and his brothers to be architects of creation. Each one a demigod, capable of bearing the very greatest responsibilities, of making the very greatest decisions, of calculating any risk-position, even the fate of reality, and making the best choice. And all of that autonomously, without the guidance or instruction of their father.\n\nHe has never felt the encumbrance of his duty so painfully. No matter how many times he has died, he has never fully appreciated the agony and sacrifice of being a primarch until now.\n\nHe cannot bring himself to say the words aloud, and it is only right that an unspoken sanction not be voiced.\n\nCommence the work, he tells her, his hands reluctant but agile. Bring forth the first of the psycho-able candidates, and support and fortify the Sigillite at whatever cost is necessary. I instruct the Unspoken Sanction at this time.\n\nAs you command, she signs.\n\n6:viii\n\nThe last torments of Malcador\n\nDead.\n\nI thought I was dead.\n\nBut instead, I find-\n\nRagged universes vicing me and crushing me.\n\nRazor-edged realities shredding me down to subatomic meal.\n\nGrand mal spasms in which entire galaxies rise, and spin, and fall in the blink of a single seizure.\n\nEternity, compressed by hyper-mass forces into a dense nanosecond, and then stretched out like a string, like a thread, by impossible gravities, until it winds around forever and loops back again, through a curving immensity of space and time to meet itself once more, ouroboros, all dimensions and none at all, in one isochronal convolution that is both revelatory and inevitable.\n\nHow am I still alive?\n\nThe throne is a screaming, undead ghoul, a burning cinder-fleck carried by a river of molten rock. It is bonded to my bones. It is a golden light in my marrow. It is a firestorm billowing the broken fragments of my soul.\n\nIt tries to throw me off, to unseat me. It thought it was done with me, that it was free. It bucks and thrashes like a wild auroch to shake me loose. It writhes and whips like a fighting snake to hurl me away, to break my renewed grip, to coil me aside so that it may reverse and sink its fangs into my throat. The pain is nothing now. It is so great that, like time, and the insurmountable effort of remembering my own name, it has looped back upon itself and passed beyond my perception.\n\nI persevere, ignoring the irreparable mutilation of my body, mind and spirit. I persevere, because there is so little left of me, it is somehow easier to focus on the one thing that remains: my duty. I thought I was dead. I thought I was finished. But my fading strength is suddenly reinforced, and I have regained some small measure of control. It is tenuous, and the throne, wailing in dismay, doesn't like it, but it is forced to accept my plenary authority. A snake, it no longer fights, but instead coils around me to constrict, suffocate and pulp.\n\nWeeping tears of dissolved sanity, I ride the throne, like an incandescent chariot, into the yawning byssos of the warp. The bow-wave of rupturing materia bursts around me, drenching me in ice-cold dreams, a psychedelic void of immateria expanding below. The keening Neverborn pursue me still, a rushing maelstrom, an infernal wild hunt, furled in cloaks of black hatred and hauberks wrought of pure spite. Their leering faces are daubed with warpaint made of stellar ash and dusted white with a powder of crushed time. On their breath, I can smell the dismay of toppled empires and the outrage of extinguished species. They close like jacka"}
{"text":"uring materia bursts around me, drenching me in ice-cold dreams, a psychedelic void of immateria expanding below. The keening Neverborn pursue me still, a rushing maelstrom, an infernal wild hunt, furled in cloaks of black hatred and hauberks wrought of pure spite. Their leering faces are daubed with warpaint made of stellar ash and dusted white with a powder of crushed time. On their breath, I can smell the dismay of toppled empires and the outrage of extinguished species. They close like jackals to bring me down and finish me.\n\nI am just a precatory thing now, bone, blood and tissue dissolved, a perdurable sentience held together by memory alone, an acheiropoieton wrought as an effigy of my former life. Nothing human remains of me except my will.\n\nI exert it.\n\nThe throne protests. It tries to break my grip. Chugging and rasping like a damaged turbine jammed at full power, it bites at my fingers and yearns to submit to the madness. It is so swollen with exoplanar energy, it wants to split, and spill, and have done. I persevere.\n\nFor there is no now. Or rather, there is only now. The isochronal instant. All of the pasts, all of the presents, all of the futures, even the grim darknesses of far futures, are bound up into one simultaneous solid, a spool of time wrapped into one tight ball, with no end and no beginning to unpick, blown like a loose feather on the currents of the warp. That is my anchor. Not a still point in time, but all time stilled. I lock myself and the raving throne to that tiny mote of infinite stillness and calm the machine's frenetic mania.\n\nThis is my one task. Maintain stability. I must harness the monstrous violence of the throne, hold back the warp flooding the webway, and maintain stability. When I took this seat, I wondered how long I would last, but there is no long or longer, for there is no duration. The collapse of linear time is my only asset. I died the moment I sat down, but I am not yet dead. Through force of will, I hold myself on that brink of now, the never-ending moment.\n\nThrough a mist of blood and petrified light, I see the now in my physical vicinity. The throne room floor scorching black. The apprenti stroking out and collapsing across the machines they tend, their dreams and hopes and intentions spilling out of their corpses and smearing the floor as they are dragged away and replaced. I see Vulkan making ghastly, Procrustean decisions in an effort to support me. I can taste Vulkan's pain, his regret, his reluctance, his revulsion at the commands he is being forced to give in order to strengthen me and prolong my doom. His actions, which will haunt him for the rest of his life, are sustaining me, nourishing me, long past any definition of mortality.\n\nPoor Vulkan's efforts have bought me a little more of now.\n\nAnd in that now, I begin to see all the other nows too. I can see that the stakes have changed. There is a new factor, a new now that was before merely an if. The now of Horus triumphant, the now of Lupercal as transcendent owner of the night, is cracking and distorting, fusing and bubbling, no longer a certainty. It is caught in the light of a brighter filament of the isochronous totality: a blinding light, white, lethal and pure, cast by a single rising star, a fierce and steadfast thing that is too furious to behold directly. It is the star I saw before, as my sight failed and death came for me. It is the Emperor, empowered by the warp, the brightest thing in the galaxy. His light is everywhere.\n\nIt spills across all other nows. It bleaches the pulped battlescapes of Terra into whiteness. It catches the lines of Valdor's wargear, and glints on the harder edges of his too-transformed thoughts. It slowly eats away the shadow under the red wall where Dorn shelters, talking to himself. It burns the soul of Sanguinius, though he is buried deep in a lightless crypt.\n\nIt is the light that casts the shadow of the Dark King.\n\nI try to speak. I still cannot. The steadfast light is everywhere, permeating every now that was and could be. In one, ancient, inhuman creatures pause in their work, look up from half-built devices of intricate complexity, and shield their eyes against the rising glare. They start to wail.\n\nIn another, the world is without form, and void, and darkness moves upon the face of the deep, and the steadfast light says let me be, and it is.\n\nIn another, and another, and an infinity of others, there is only light, and its anthesis has burned everything away with its unholy intensity.\n\nOnly in one now, a gloomy and decaying now, does the light not penetrate. It is a realm of shadows and candlelight, a grim darkness of ruin and disrepair, where men are shackled by ancient duties, imperfectly remembered but obsessively performed, where lamp-glow flickers off the flaking gilt of past glories and the faded majesty of once-proud emblems, where the functions of machines and the purposes of humans are forgotten, or misunderstood, and have been reduced to rote, and ceremony, and rite, a now where everything, including the meaning of life, has become no more than rehearsed tradition and meaningless ritual.\n\nI cannot speak. I cannot block the light. I can only seize upon these unexpected scraps of suddenly renewed strength to expend my fraying will and guide the few who might still hear me. They are almost out of reach now, and I have all but forgotten their names.\n\nYet still I strive to call to them, to steer them, in the hope that one of them will listen and one of them, just one, will be enough.\n\n6:ix\n\nAt the end of the Via Aquila\n\nOn the Via Aquila, she follows the voice calling her name.\n\nThe voice is soft, but not a whisper. It is more a shout, a desperate cry, but one heard from very far away.\n\nKeeler walks at the head of the column, leading the way, her pace determined and strong despite her exhaustion. The river of souls, now so many millions strong its size is impossible to calculate, follows at her heels. Refugees: the lost, the wounded, the surviving, the dispossessed, the broken and displaced citizens of the once-proud Palace who have nowhere to go except away from death, and no one to follow except her. Dust rises from their multitude, from the tread of bloody, bandaged feet, from filthy stilts and walking platforms, from the creaking barrows and carts piled with their meagre possessions. Predatory horror chases them, gnawing at the rear of the column, picking off the injured and the stragglers. The smoke and howl of war pile like menacing cliffs on either side of them, as though they are a slow torrent streaming down a dark ravine.\n\nThe members of the conclave, Eild, Wereft, Perevanna, Tang, a thousand others, all so weary they are mentally vacant, keep the river flowing. They carry the sick and injured, pick up those who falter and fall, break up fractious disputes and soothe fears, distribute what medicae reserves are available, and walk as outrider squads, lugging flamers, to guard the flanks. They watch for daemon-signs, and root them out, mercilessly, with fire and blade, wherever they hatch in the teeming cavalcade. The dead are left behind at the roadside, in the dust.\n\nThe river flows. People carry recovered banners of the Imperialis and the aquila, company flags of the Excertus, and standards of the loyal Legions, and hold them high, dusty and swaying. People are joining in song, voices raised to steady their spirits, mouths moving mechanically, intoning words they have never learned to tunes they did not realise they knew, old hymns, archaic plainsong chants, faded songs of praise and dusty myths. They clutch their purity tags for comfort, lean on their staves and walking sticks and each other, and give voice.\n\nKeeler hears the latest, the ragged words lifting en masse from the pitiful ranks behind her like a flight of birds released into the sky.\n\nShe sings along, though she's never learned the words either.\n\nIt's a pilgrimage. No one's used the word, but they all feel it. It started as an exodus, a mass flight from the sundered realm of their homeland, but it has become a pilgrimage. An act of faith, devotion and endurance that is more than simple survival and escape. A journey, though no one really knows to where. If this march has a destination, then no one comprehends it.\n\nExcept her. Perhaps. They believe Keeler knows, all of them, every one of the millions, just as they believed she was something more than just another survivor. Word has spread of her purpose and intent, in the same uncanny way it spread to begin with. Word of her. Word of her leadership. Word of her faith. Faith in her faith. They follow her because she seems to know where she's going, though she has said nothing of a destination apart from the mantra 'north'. They trust in her intent, but that intent is expressed only by her determination to keep walking, to put one foot in front of the other; to keep walking as though there is something or someone waiting for them.\n\nKeeler doesn't explain because she can't explain. The summoning voice is very clear to her, though its meaning is inscrutable. It's become clearer and more fixed since High Lord Nemo Zhi-Meng, the choirmaster of the Telepathica, joined them. He trudges at her side, his hand on her arm for support. Since he came to them, the voice has gained some clarity. Keeler believes this is because of his psionic gifts, acting like a lens allowing her to see better. The voice has become a light to her, a shining, steadfast star far ahead that only she can behold. Zhi-Meng can't see it, even with blindsight or mindsight, but he enables her. The star is too bright for her to look at directly. Whenever she tries, nausea sweeps her again and dizzies her to the brink of unconsciousness.\n\nBut the star is there, as though it's been there forever, and ever will be.\n\nThe road has no end. Keeler has stopped being amazed or scared by that. The Via Aquila simply extends forever, stretch after pummelled stretch, with a haze of"}
{"text":"star far ahead that only she can behold. Zhi-Meng can't see it, even with blindsight or mindsight, but he enables her. The star is too bright for her to look at directly. Whenever she tries, nausea sweeps her again and dizzies her to the brink of unconsciousness.\n\nBut the star is there, as though it's been there forever, and ever will be.\n\nThe road has no end. Keeler has stopped being amazed or scared by that. The Via Aquila simply extends forever, stretch after pummelled stretch, with a haze of high ruins on either side. The further they walk, the further away any end seems to get, progressing further and further into infinity, just as the lone star that marks that end, the star only she can see, retreats ahead of them.\n\nShe has made her peace with that. Everything has run out, time and hope, day and night, direction and meaning. Everything has run out except the road and the voice. There is only now. There is only the next step and the next. They are simply here. As she told Leeta Tang, 'We were there.' Only the tense of that statement has changed, for tense defines time, and time has unravelled.\n\nKeeler knows that something will change at some point. The forces of Chaos, forever in flux as is their nature, will interrupt and overtake them eventually. It's inevitable.\n\nBut when it comes, it still takes her by surprise.\n\nShe sees figures on the road ahead, dim forms in the blowing dust. There are many of them, and their numbers increase ominously, spilling out of the burning ruins to either side of the processional.\n\nKeeler raises her hand and brings the pilgrimage to a stop. Slowly, the vast river halts, the cessation spreading back down the vast, dusty line. The singing dies away, and is replaced by a breathless hush broken only by the moans of the injured, the sobbing of the terrified, and the plaintive wail of carried infants. Zhi-Meng's grip tightens on her arm.\n\n'We are damned now, Euphrati,' he says.\n\nShe doesn't answer. She nods to Eild, and he steps up to steady the old lord as she lets go of his arm. She can see the fear in Eild's eyes.\n\nShe starts to walk forward, ahead of the waiting masses. Two of the conclave fall in on either side of her as lieutenants: Wereft, clutching his half-filled flamer, and the soldier, Katsuhiro, with his rifle and the child clasped to his breast.\n\n'What are we doing?' Wereft whispers as they walk forward.\n\nShe doesn't have an answer for him. There is no possibility of negotiation. She wonders if the light and voice will protect her, but she doubts it. Perhaps this is the destination. Perhaps this is the end towards which the pilgrimage has been moving. Whatever it is, she will face it, and look it in the eye. She refuses to believe that the voice has led her this far, to this end, only for that end to be death.\n\nExcept it is.\n\nThe figures on the road ahead, and there are now scores of them, are Astartes in filthy plate that was once sea-green, but now looks almost black. They stand, weapons rested, watching her approach with leisurely curiosity, perhaps puzzled by the vast mass of people behind her.\n\nKeeler knows their marks, the distinctive topknot plumes that many of them wear. Sons of Horus, the XVI Legion that was.\n\nTheir leader, a huge brute, a captain from the shreds of insignia still visible on his plate, regards her advance with amusement. He walks forward to meet her, unafraid. What are these impoverished wretches to him, despite their numbers? Just more tributes to the Warmaster, apparently offering themselves up without resistance because they know their end has come.\n\nKeeler wonders if she knows him; if she knew him back in the days, now so long ago, when she was a guest aboard his master's warship. Did she speak to him? Did she record his image? Was he kind to her, courteous, as they all were then, when they were Luna Wolves?\n\n'Keeler,' she says, as though that is enough. She comes to a halt, Wereft and the soldier either side of her. The captain halts too, ten metres away. He studies her. His men, his monsters, wait, watching, entertained.\n\n'Selgar Dorgaddon,' he replies, as though this is some game he is willing to go along with. 'Captain, Tenth Company.'\n\nHis voice is the boom of a war-horn squeezed down into human words. He carries a greatsword that is as long as she is tall. He rests it, casually, across one pauldron, a soldier breaking for a rest mid-march. A venomous aura surrounds him, leaking darkness into the air like ink into blotting paper. He is grotesque and dreadful, terror manifest.\n\nShe does know him. Dorgaddon. A line trooper in her time, now elevated to command rank to fill the bites that war has taken from their Legion. She could not have recalled his forename. He was kind. They all were, once.\n\nShe knows no fear. She is filled with a sudden and acute pity for him, to see him at once elevated and destroyed. Dorgaddon is proud of what he is, his rank, his power, his status, and that arrogance bleeds out of him like heat. But he is ruined. His proud plate seems to fester and blister. His face is a mask of scarification, the flesh pale and sickly, dotted with sores and tumours. She sees, for a second, his real self, the ghost of the kind Wolf he once was. It seems to peer out of the thorny knots of his dark armour at her. She remembers an image - the image - of another Luna Wolf that she captured in the nightmare tunnels of the Whisperheads on Sixty-Three-Nineteen. Xavyer Jubal, sergeant of Hellebore Tactical, the first known Astartes to fall. This was before even Horus Lupercal had succumbed; the start of the slide, the trigger of her crippling trauma and depression, the seed of what became her faith. Jubal was not human by the time her picter fixed on him, but later, in the horror of the image she had gathered, his screaming phantom had been visible, like some echo or double exposure.\n\nShe can see it again here. She can see the anguished spectre of Selgar Dorgaddon trying to claw free of the thing that Selgar Dorgaddon has become.\n\n'We are non-combatants, Captain Dorgaddon,' she says.\n\n'You carry the emblems of the False Emperor,' he replies.\n\nIt's true. They do. There's no hiding it.\n\n'Captain, if there is a shred of-'\n\n'O-ho, there is not,' Dorgaddon rumbles. 'You are flesh. You are of Him. You are blood offerings for our gods.'\n\nKeeler begins to tremble. She sees that the faint ghost of Selgar Dorgaddon, barely visible now, has started to weep.\n\n'Do not ask for mercy from those who have none to give,' says Dorgaddon. Each word resounds like the thump of a battering ram. Casually, he gestures to his waiting company.\n\nEqually as casual, and smiling, they heft up their weapons and start to prowl forwards, deciding who to kill first.\n\nThey are spoiled for choice.\n\n6:x\n\nFrom the blood of his brothers\n\nLoken wades on through the blood.\n\nThe last time he was here, an eternity ago, he was with Tarik. They were slipping back along the vast service tunnels running the length of the bilges after Loken's induction into the warrior lodge. Loken had been surprised to find himself joining that clandestine society, but it had not been the wicked secret he had suspected. It had been pure then, a true fraternity where men could gather, not by rank, but by brotherhood, and speak their minds. Such a body now seems innocent to him: the invisible lodge of the Luna Wolves, like all the orders and structures of the Legion, and the Legion itself, has been corrupted and soiled by the agency of Chaos. Though innocent in itself, the lodge had been one of the main conduits through which the taint had spread.\n\nHe remembers Torgaddon's exuberance at his change of heart. They had walked this way, joking, free. Tarik had run to leap and slap an overhead pipe, a playful game; Loken had followed suit, and done better.\n\nHow painfully long ago that seems.\n\nHe tries not to think about it because he knows the cunning darkness will play games with him. He knows it will pick at the scabs of his memories and melancholies, and conjure very particular phantoms and nightmares to spite him. He expects it to rise in the form of Tarik Torgaddon, or Little Horus, or Nero Vipus, taunting him with their faces. He imagines the silt and debris he scuffs with his feet beneath the surface of the pool to be a litter of lodge medals, hundreds and hundreds of them, like pebbles on a beach, placed there to twist the knife of recollection and longing. That fine fraternity can never be restored.\n\nThe faces can, though. Loken has seen that horror too many times. Dead faces, exhumed by the warp, and worn to torment and distress; dead faces speaking with dead voices. He waits for them. He waits for the trick. If not Tarik or Nero, then Udon, the brave brother whose death brought Loken into the fold of the lodge. Or Jubal. Yes, Jubal. Poor, damned Jubal of Hellebore Tactical, the first to fall, the first to be possessed, the first to demonstrate to Loken that there was more truth in creation than he cared to know.\n\nThat would be the way of the warp, typical of its tailored cruelty. Xavyer Jubal, raised up from the secret places of the dead to haunt him.\n\nIt's just your mind playing tricks, he tells himself. That's how it does it. It eats at you, and turns your own imagination into a weapon. It weakens you with dark notions and ugly daydreams before it springs to make its kill.\n\nAs if on cue, a voice calls his name.\n\n'There's no one there,' Loken says. 'No one I want to meet.'\n\nIt whispers his name again.\n\nHe shakes it off, but he knows it. The Sigillite. The mind-voice that chose him, and directed him, and issued him his combat instructions. But that voice has been quiet for a long time.\n\nSo that's its game, its chosen trick. Of course. How could he not trust the voice of the Sigillite?\n\n'It's not you, old man,' he whispers.\n\nIn the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm, the voice murmurs. But it's not a voice. It's not words. It's more of a sign, a symbol, a semantic c"}
{"text":"He shakes it off, but he knows it. The Sigillite. The mind-voice that chose him, and directed him, and issued him his combat instructions. But that voice has been quiet for a long time.\n\nSo that's its game, its chosen trick. Of course. How could he not trust the voice of the Sigillite?\n\n'It's not you, old man,' he whispers.\n\nIn the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm, the voice murmurs. But it's not a voice. It's not words. It's more of a sign, a symbol, a semantic condensation that contains the meaning of those words, but which has suddenly been implanted in his mind, like a sigil.\n\nLoken pauses, blood sloshing around his shins. For an instant, he thinks he sees something ahead of him. Another sigil, another compressed packet of meaning, that suggests the figure of a crooked and hooded figure, and the sense of urgent beckoning. Does it want him to hurry and catch up, or is it warning him not to stay where he is?\n\nEither way, it can only be a trick, surely? Loken raises his blade.\n\nBut the figure, the sigil, is already gone. Then he hears another voice, quite different from the first. It is a real voice, speaking actual words. It is muttering behind him.\n\n'I am the one who walks behind you. I am the footsteps at your back. I am the man beside you. I am all around you.'\n\nLoken wheels, revving his blade. The lake of blood is frothing and churning, seething like a whirlpool. Something begins to rise out of the tumult to face him.\n\n'Look out,' it cackles. 'Samus is here.'\n\n6:xi\n\nWithin the walls\n\n'Get them to the Antirooms! Now!' Hassan yells. His cry triggers alarm in the crowds passing along the processional around them.\n\n'Listen to me-' Oll protests.\n\n'I've listened!' Hassan replies. 'And I've understood, believe me. I must take this to Lord Vulkan without delay.'\n\nHe stares at the loop of thread for another moment, then looks at Raja.\n\n'Get them put away, Companion,' he orders. 'Secure them in the Antirooms, now, while this can be assessed.'\n\nRaja grabs Oll's arm so hard it hurts. So hard, in fact, that the Custodian's superhuman power tears Oll's arm off and sprays the wall with arterial blood.\n\nOr that's how it seems. Oll's wrong, of course. The confusion is so sudden, so complete, that he is utterly bewildered. Ios Raja is gripping his arm, painfully, but his arm is still intact. Blood has hosed the golden wall from a different source. It happens again, a jet of blood drenching the nearby wall and speckling the statue. It's falling like drizzle. Aerosolised, it's a fine mist in the air.\n\nOll tries to rationalise what he's seeing.\n\nThen people start to fall down. Panic ignites through the crowds around them. People start screaming. People start to run.\n\nTwo Sisters sprawl dead on the marble floor. They have been destroyed by lacerating wounds. Another thumps against the wall, and slides down it, her vratine wargear soaked in gore. One of the Custodes staggers, suddenly missing a head. Blood is everywhere. So is uproar.\n\nBolters suddenly start to fire, bludgeoning the air with their deafening report. Flinching, Oll looks around wildly. The processional is under attack. The tumult is so abrupt, so total, it's overwhelming. It's erupting all around him. Noise. Light. Blood. Moving shapes. Things happening faster than his eyes can follow, or outside the scope of his senses.\n\nThen he glimpses the first of the traitors. The black, taloned shade of a half-feral Night Lord, briefly visible like a subliminal image.\n\nThere are others. They're everywhere. Dozens of them. They are tearing through the scattering crowds, leaving bodies in their wake. They move like darts of smoke, like the flicker of leaf-shadow in sunlight, using sly tricks of combat-cloaking and metachrosis to appear and disappear.\n\nTraitor Astartes, the rapacious VIII.\n\nThe enemy has breached the final fortress.\n\nPandemonium descends. The processional is suddenly a mindless stampede of people, fleeing, tripping, screaming. People crash into him, knocking him aside in their headlong flight to escape.\n\nThe traitors have not come alone. Neverborn phantasmata begin to ooze from the processional walls, blistering the auramite with their exoplanar substance, pouncing and striking, gibbering and gleeful. The air suddenly stinks of viscera, of fyceline, of stagnant water, of the most blighted and shunned edges of the cosmos. People shriek and scatter in their hundreds. Some are crushed underfoot. Some just fall, and cover their heads with their hands, in awful, childlike postures of defence.\n\nThe only thing Oll can think, the worst thing, is that no alarms are ringing.\n\nRaja is no longer gripping his arm. The Companion, raging, has impaled a Night Lord to the wall with his spear. Two others are on his back, like wolves on a lion, flaying the plate from his shoulders and shredding his flesh.\n\nOll backs away. He can't tear his eyes away from the brutal spectacle that is undoubtedly Ios Raja's last stand. Stray shots rip past him. A golden statue topples, and crashes to the floor, crushing three courtiers and a servitor. Something inside the wall, something seeping through it, has pushed it over-\n\nSomehow, he gathers his wits. He turns, grabs hold of Zybes, and tries to push through the swirling mob.\n\n'Move! Move!' he yells through the crowd at the others, hauling Zybes towards them. Zybes is catatonic. The long companions are similarly transfixed, bewildered, jostled by the people fleeing around them. Oll yells at them again, trying to snap them out of their uncomprehending daze. The floor is slick underfoot. He has to flinch and dodge. Lethal things, visible and invisible, flash and rip through the churning crowds around him. Blades, claws, impacts, mass-reactive shots, thrashing bodies. In the space of seconds, the entire processional has become a riot of terror.\n\nThey have to get clear. They have to find shelter. This is transhuman warfare, daemonic havoc. No human should ever have to witness it first-hand, and no human being can get caught up in it and survive. He and his companions couldn't participate even if they wanted to.\n\nBut it's also a chance, a chance to-\n\nA Night Lord rears up in front of him, power claws raised to shred him.\n\n6:xii\n\nFragments (now we fall)\n\nSometimes a blade is so sharp, a blow so swift and sudden, a wound so deep, that a body does not feel it go in, and only registers that it's dying when it is already dead. Sometimes a wound is so instant and lethal, slicing through the chambers of the heart, that when a body falls dead, slain upon the moment, there is scarcely a mark on the outside to show the cause.\n\nAround the monolithic walls of the Delphic Battlements, fire and fury increase their stranglehold. Mass war, siege war, rages at a frenzied pitch even greater than before. The walls still resist. But that resistance, like the fire and fury that the enemy throws against them to bring them down, is futile.\n\nFor the swift blow, unseen, has already landed, and the chambers of the heart are sliced through.\n\nWithin the Sanctum Imperialis, which has withstood all assault for seven long months, and now a frozen eternity too, wounds are inflicted. In different zones and areas, deep in the core and far from the fighting on the walls, the lights begin to go out.\n\nAt the Marnix Confluence, Nassir Amit looks over to see Hemheda Khan step forward from the front of his waiting ranks.\n\n'Did you hear that, brother?' he calls across to Amit.\n\nAmit did. Amit isn't sure of the cause or source, but he heard something. He leaves his place at the front of Denial 963 and walks across to Hemheda.\n\n'A door closing somewhere,' he says. 'A hatch. Securement is underway-'\n\n'No, Angel-son,' Hemheda replies. The White Scar tilts his head, listening. 'Not that.'\n\n'Why have you broken position?' Vexillary Roch asks, striding across the empty concourse to reach them. 'Captain? Khan?'\n\n'A sound, Vexillary,' says Amit.\n\n'A sound?'\n\n'A thump or boom.'\n\n'From where?' Roch asks.\n\n'It was distant, an echo,' says Amit. He starts to point at the mouth of the Western Mass Passageway. But Hemheda Khan is pointing across the concourse towards the yawning maw of the Kylon Processional.\n\n'Western Mass, surely?' Amit says.\n\n'Definitely Kylon,' Hemheda replies. 'From the east.'\n\n'There have been no reports or alerts,' Roch replies. He cues his system to display advisories, and turns to look at Western Mass, then Kylon.\n\n'A thump, you say?' he asks.\n\n'Distant, yes-' Amit begins.\n\n'Gunfire,' says Hemheda. 'It was gunfire. A quick burst.'\n\n'Was it?' Roch asks Amit.\n\n'I cannot say for sure,' says Amit. 'I thought a hatch closing-'\n\n'There!' Hemheda says. He looks towards Kylon again. 'You heard it that time?'\n\n'I did,' replies Roch. The sound was very distant. A thumping echo, cut off.\n\n'It could be gunfire...' Amit says quietly. No alarms have gone off, no sirens. Weapon discharge of any kind within the Sanctum would have triggered an immediate status warning. An exchange of fire in the interior could only happen if the Delphic had been penetrated, and any breach of the enceinte could not have occurred undetected.\n\nBut Tamos Roch is an Imperial Fist, and a veteran practitioner of siegecraft. He knows that even a false track should not be dismissed. His father taught him that.\n\n'Denial companies to ready order!' he calls out. The four companies straighten and bring weapons up in one fluid ripple of plasteel. Roch looks at Amit and Hemheda.\n\n'Get auspex reads on both approaches,' he says. 'Ranged scans, motion detection.'\n\nThey nod. Roch turns aside, and starts to raise Hegemon Command on the vox for confirmation.\n\nHemheda Khan takes three of his men towards the mouth of the Kylon Processional. Amit and Lamirus move towards the entrance of the Western Mass Passageway.\n\nThe passageway, vast in scale, stretches before them. It is empty. Its wall lamps, regularly spaced, track away into the distance, filling the vast tunnel with a sickly amber glow. They ca"}
{"text":"oth approaches,' he says. 'Ranged scans, motion detection.'\n\nThey nod. Roch turns aside, and starts to raise Hegemon Command on the vox for confirmation.\n\nHemheda Khan takes three of his men towards the mouth of the Kylon Processional. Amit and Lamirus move towards the entrance of the Western Mass Passageway.\n\nThe passageway, vast in scale, stretches before them. It is empty. Its wall lamps, regularly spaced, track away into the distance, filling the vast tunnel with a sickly amber glow. They can detect a breeze, the soft, stale respiration of the Sanctum's climate system gusting along this primary artery.\n\nLamirus begins an auspex scan, using his own device and drawing data from the passageway's sensor network.\n\n'Nothing,' he says.\n\n'Repeat it,' Amit replies, staring into the distance.\n\n'No, I mean nothing,' Lamirus replies. 'I should be getting heat-reads from the power trunking and the light. And a bounce off the sub-reactor at Mytheme.'\n\n'Check your scan range,' says Amit.\n\n'I've checked it.'\n\n'Check directional-'\n\n'Directional is... It's spinning. No fix.'\n\nAmit can suddenly taste blood in his mouth. Blood and sudden anger. He turns to snatch the auspex away and do it himself.\n\nA thick, solid noise echoes along the vast tunnel.\n\n'Gunfire,' says Lamirus.\n\nThere was no mistaking it that time. No doubt at all.\n\nIt was the sound of mass-reactive shots.\n\nAt the Onopion Cross overwatch, Major Franna Bizet of the Litrium 16th Excertus rises slowly to her feet from behind her crew-served rotary cannon. Around her, her squad is resting, drinking soup.\n\nBizet steps past the planted feet of the cannon's tripod, and past the line of ballistic sacking. She stares into the distance, down the length of Borealis Conduit.\n\n'What is it, major?' her adjutant asks, putting his meal-can down.\n\n'Quiet,' she hisses, squinting down the tunnel.\n\nThe light rigs at the very far end go out. Then, one by one, the lighting arrays shut down in series along the conduit's length, as though the darkness is stepping steadily towards her.\n\nIn the Hegemon Command Rotunda, Sidozie calls out her name above the chatter of voices and crackling vox-transmissions.\n\nSandrine Icaro tears her attention away from the Delphic displays and the grim projections their hololiths reveal, and crosses to his station.\n\n'What?' she asks him.\n\nThe Chosen gestures to his board. He is projecting a layered render of the Inner Sanctum for some reason, core areas very far from the Delphic.\n\n'A series of power faults is being registered,' he says.\n\nIcaro looks at the projection. Several blocks are showing as red, indicating an interruption of main power. At first, this doesn't surprise her. The War Court has authorised power-down in multiple layers of the Sanctum to maintain supply to the Delphic. Non-essential systems are being shut down throughout the core. But she doesn't remember these areas being on the authorised list.\n\nAnother red block lights up.\n\n'Did you approve these shutdowns?' she asks.\n\nSidozie shakes his head. 'No, mam. I checked. These zones are not on any mandated register. I presume they are malfunctions. Conduits burned out by over-stress, perhaps, or a failure at some of the tertiary generators.'\n\n'All at once?' she asks.\n\n'Cascades happen when power blows,' he says.\n\n'Contact the section adepts directly,' she says. 'Locate the cause, and get it fixed. I want to know why we've got half a dozen local blackouts in the core and-'\n\nShe stops short. It isn't half a dozen. On Sidozie's display, the ominous blocks of red are beginning to breed and multiply across the inner core, like a mosaic slotting together.\n\nThey walk slowly in the darkness, weapons raised. Sartak flexes his grip on the haft of his war-axe. He can't see Honfler, but he knows the praetor-captain has his sword raised, because the blade keeps catching the light from the open postern.\n\nThe hatch seems so far away. Further than it was before.\n\nThe darkness is horrifically, unnaturally thick. It clings to them. Sartak can feel the space of it, the size of it. He can feel a cold wind on his back, a clammy stirring of the air flowing down the Martian Approaches.\n\nWhich are not, he is convinced, the Martian Approaches any more.\n\n'Keep moving,' Honfler whispers. His voice seems muffled and very far away, though he is right there at Sartak's side. 'Another few steps...'\n\nThe darkness around them seems to be crawling, moving. Sartak tries to see what's in it, but there's nothing to see. Apart from the light of the doorway, he is blind.\n\nAnd that doorway doesn't seem to be getting any closer.\n\n'Another few steps,' Honfler breathes.\n\n'Just keep up with me, son-of-Dorn,' Sartak replies.\n\nIt's cold. Colder than the wastes of Fenris. Sartak can feel his breath in the air, but he can't see it. He keeps thinking he can hear laughter. Laughter in the darkness, far away, chuckles of amusement and cruel mirth from different sources.\n\nShow yourselves, he thinks. Show me your damn faces and I'll split your laughter in two.\n\nThere's something behind them. He knows it. There's something behind them, laughing at them in the blackness. Something's following them. Something. Many things. They are laughing; little, distant voices laughing, but it's muffled and faint, as though the laughter is being stifled so as not to spoil the surprise.\n\nWhy won't the doorway come any closer?\n\n'Keep going,' whispers Honfler. The soft laughter mocks him.\n\nJust a few steps. Just a few more steps and they can slam that postern hatch behind them and shut the darkness out.\n\nA sound behind him. Something moving. Was it a footstep?\n\nWas it something slithering across the rockcrete on its scaled belly?\n\nDon't look back, he tells himself. Keep going. Just a few more steps. Keep going, keep ready. Keep that axe steady to strike. Don't look back. We are almost there.\n\nDon't look back.\n\n6:xiii\n\nFeast of raptors\n\nThe air folds, buckles. The blue-and-brass monster, visibly crumpled, is hurled away from him. It hits the far wall and leaves a bloody dent.\n\nOll sees the witch, one hand raised. She did that. How many more jolts of psychokinetic force does she have left in her? Oll realises that if Actae can summon enough to put down a Night Lord, she is no longer being suppressed by the Sisters.\n\nWhich means that many of the Sisters must already be dead.\n\n'Ollanius!' Actae yells. She yells using Katt's mouth, but Oll knows it's her. Katt, clammy and swaying, is reeling from the recoil of Actae's mental discharge, which she has experienced first-hand through the link they share. She is like a flesh appendage to Actae's form. Wild-eyed, both Katt and Actae look more like the witch of the Cyclades he once knew than ever before.\n\n'Go, go!' Oll shouts. 'Get them out! That way!'\n\nActae nods, and starts to herd the companions through the stampede. She does so without finesse, seizing their minds. Katt just goes with her. Krank too. Graft leads the way. Leetu, either of his own volition or in response to her mental command, starts shielding Katt and Actae with his armoured body, bringing up the rear.\n\nZybes finally starts to run too. Oll keeps a tight hold of Zybes' arm to steer him through the press of screaming people, and finally catches up with the others. Are they all, by some miracle, still alive?\n\nWhere's John?\n\n'Grammaticus!'\n\nJohn has gone back. Like an idiot. Oll spots him weaving his way through the moving crush.\n\nThere's no sign of the Chosen One, Hassan. Oll's sure the man is dead already. There is a litter of bodies everywhere he looks. Sister Vigilator Dodoma is definitely dead. Something has gutted her. The duralloy negation crate she was carrying is upturned on the floor beside her. That's what John's gone back for. John grabs it, hauls it up. Oll can see him think of grabbing Dodoma's sword too.\n\nYou bloody idiot, it's far too heavy-\n\nGrammaticus has figured that out for himself. Clutching the crate, he starts to run back to join them, barging past people trying to flee. A War Court senior beside him suddenly explodes as a mass-reactive strikes him.\n\n'John!'\n\nLeetu pushes past Oll. He has no weapons, but he clamps his helmet back on as he leaps to John's aid. Something part-vine, part-creeper, part-serpent writhes out of the floor and lashes itself around John's right leg, tripping him onto his face. He falls so hard, the wind is knocked out of him. A Raptor lands beside him in a crouch, holds the squirming man down with one hand, and raises its claws.\n\nLeetu slams into it. They roll, entangled. Leetu springs up first, the Raptor a split second later. It swings for him. Oll can almost hear its hooked claws cutting the air. Leetu dodges, then headbutts the traitor in the face. The Raptor shudders backwards, visor dented by the blunt armour of Leetu's brow. Leetu lunges and grabs the Night Lord by the throat. He smashes it face first into the wall with such force the monster's helm compresses and cracks.\n\nLeetu rips the Raptor's hawk-billed combat knife off its hip, and casts the body aside. He turns to John and starts to hack at the flesh of the whipping tendrils entwining John's leg. Putrid sap spurts. John is struggling frantically, risking losing fingers to Leetu's blade by trying to tear the tendrils off himself.\n\n'Let me do it, Grammaticus!' Leetu growls.\n\nThe negation crate beside John slides a little way sideways. The floor under them, and all around, is starting to sag. Fleeing citizens sprawl, and begin to slide down the floor's sudden slope. Whatever the repellent tendrils belong to, it is rising through the ground beneath the processional, collapsing materia like mud as it burrows into reality. More tendrils, some far larger than the ones that hold John, sprout into the air around them through the widening fissures in the marble. One seizes a passing adjutant and rips her off her feet.\n\nJohn cries out. He can see over Leetu's shoulder. Two more Raptors, gleaming purple phantoms trailing ragged cloaks like rotten wings, are ru"}
{"text":"lope. Whatever the repellent tendrils belong to, it is rising through the ground beneath the processional, collapsing materia like mud as it burrows into reality. More tendrils, some far larger than the ones that hold John, sprout into the air around them through the widening fissures in the marble. One seizes a passing adjutant and rips her off her feet.\n\nJohn cries out. He can see over Leetu's shoulder. Two more Raptors, gleaming purple phantoms trailing ragged cloaks like rotten wings, are rushing in behind him. Leetu starts to turn.\n\nHe won't be fast enough.\n\nAt Oll's side, Katt retches in pain as Actae looses another jolt of psycho-telekine power. The Raptors tumble backwards in unison, cast head-over-heels like wildly thrown dice.\n\nLeetu chops the last of the Neverborn tendrils away, freeing John's leg. Daemon sap has all but melted the blade of the borrowed knife. Leetu tosses it away. He picks up both John and the crate.\n\n'Come on!' Oll yells.\n\nLeetu starts to run with the crowd, the crate under his arm, Grammaticus slung unceremoniously over his shoulder. The floor behind him caves in entirely. People fall, screeching. Some oozing atrocity begins to bulge out of the ground.\n\n'Run!' Oll commands. The long companions obey. Running is the only sane option. Actae is stumbling, having expended more effort than she can afford. Katt, weeping with empathic strain and close to collapse herself, manages to hold her upright. Oll helps her, wincing involuntarily as he takes hold of the witch. Fierce psykanic residue is radiating out of her skin and bone, and touching her body is like touching molten nightmare. He does it anyway, keeping the tall, swaying woman on her feet. His eyelid twitches madly.\n\nThey flee. There's no looking back. They flee with those portions of the crowd that are making their escape. Behind them, the processional becomes a hellish spectacle of Neverborn butchery.\n\nThe long companions run, headlong, chased by the echoes of screams and maniacal laughter. Oll knows it's not just echoes pursuing them.\n\nAnd he knows there is no 'away' to escape to. The Archenemy is inside the Sanctum. Nowhere is safe. They could be running towards danger as fast as they leave it behind. They are unarmed. They are outclassed.\n\nAll they can do is run. As far and as fast as they can.\n\n6:xiv\n\nThose who are about to die\n\nThere's no point running. Keeler closes her eyes. Captain Dorgaddon has chosen her as his first offering. She hears his heavy footsteps crunch across the glass-littered surface of the Via Aquila. He stops in front of her.\n\nShe waits for her end with what she hopes is a measure of dignity. She takes what she believes will be her final breath.\n\nThere is a heavy, sickening impact.\n\nShe feels the air rock, a concussion forcing her backwards. She hears a gasping, gurgling sound.\n\nShe opens her eyes. Dorgaddon is dying, sprawled before her, clawing feebly at a wound that has opened his neck and split his torso.\n\nA huge figure, plated in black, stands over him, a gleaming sword in its fist, its back towards Keeler and her cowering lieutenants.\n\nThe warrior faces the startled, outraged ranks of Tenth Company, Sons of Horus. He takes a step forward, then another, flexing his grip on the immense war-sword. Blood drips from it. He touches the flat of the blade to his forehead as some kind of salute.\n\n'He's done,' says Sigismund. 'Who's next?'\n\n6:xv\n\nFirst-lost\n\n'You are dead,' says Sanguinius carefully. Instinct is telling him to snarl out an accusation of trickery and use the sword in his hands. But something else, something beyond reason, is convincing him that what he is seeing is real. The rows of stone caskets, draped in cloth, the single candle-flame almost drowned by the weight of the chamber's shadows.\n\nThe armoured figure.\n\n'I am,' says Ferrus softly. His voice is unmistakable, the Medusan accent Sanguinius remembers of old. But it is thin, almost fragile. There is no substance in it. It's not a whisper. There are plenty of those still scratching and rustling in the gloom around them. It is a voice that seems to have carried from far away to reach him, and the distance has robbed it of any weight or volume.\n\n'Yet I see you,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'And you don't trust that,' replies Ferrus. Again, there is weary distance in his tone, as though his words are coming from some remote and desolate place and not the figure standing in front of Sanguinius at all. The Great Gorgon's voice seems to have travelled so far, it is exhausted by the time it passes his lips.\n\n'I do not,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'Good,' the Gorgon replies. 'Good. The first lesson. You are prepared. Trust nothing, not even yourself.'\n\n'Are you... here to instruct me?' Sanguinius asks, ready to strike in an instant.\n\n'No,' Ferrus answers. He shakes his head slowly and sadly as he says it. 'I don't know how I come to be here, brother. But I know that much. Trust nothing. I was far too trusting. Too sure of myself and my strength. Too certain of my anger. When my loyalty was impugned...'\n\nHe sighs.\n\n'Damn Fulgrim. He thought so little of me. That bastard thought I would break my oaths. He thought my loyalty was weak. My loyalty wasn't my weakness, brother. My anger was. I acted so hastily, provoked by his effrontery.'\n\nFerrus looks down. His lips have barely moved during his utterance, and when they have, they have not matched the shape of his words. Sanguinius tightens his grip on his sword, but he knows this isn't an un-synced pict-feed. It's solid. It's corporeal. What, then? A phantasm conjured by the fever of his own injuries? Some Neverborn incarnation? Something with his dead brother's face?\n\n'I learned that lesson,' says Ferrus. His mouth moves belatedly, lagging behind his speech. 'And since then, we've all learned it. We've learned it the hard way. Now we stand at a place where treachery and deceit are so commonplace, we trust nothing. Not one thing. Not our brothers, not our eyes...'\n\nHe looks back at Sanguinius. There is dreadful pain contained in his silver eyes. Pain and longing. It's a look that speaks of intense anger, and of agony barely held in check.\n\n'Not our eyes indeed,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'I understand,' says Ferrus Manus. His lips try to smile, but they fail. His plate is as fine and immaculate as the day it was made. He has no weapons. His great bulk is as solid as the stone sarcophagus behind him. Sanguinius can see the quicksilver gleam of the necrodermis sheathing his brother's famous hands. Now he begins to perceive the same sheen on the Gorgon's throat, his chin, his face, as though the iron has spread to entirely enclose his flesh. Sanguinius senses an immense act of will at work, an ironclad feat of containment to hold himself together and not succumb to the engulfing rage that threatens to annihilate him.\n\nFerrus turns to stare at the numeral IX etched into the casket's surface, as though pondering, or distracted by a memory.\n\n'You see,' he says, 'I think treachery is dead.'\n\n'Dead?'\n\nFerrus nods. 'Yes. Perhaps not dead exactly. Impossible. It's become impossible. Everything's broken now, brother, everything is wrong. The absolute treachery of our enemy is established beyond any doubt. We expect no truth from them. And the powers that invest them... well, they are untrustworthy as well, by their very nature. We've all learned that too. So we go through our lives into this final battle expecting everything to be a trick, and thus nothing can be a trick. Deceit, treachery... they only work when there is trust to abuse.'\n\nHe turns his mournful, silver gaze towards Sanguinius. He rubs his throat with the fingertips of one hand, as though the neck guard of his plate is chafing.\n\n'You came knowing this was a trap.'\n\n'I did.'\n\n'But you came anyway?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'And it is a trap,' says Ferrus. 'But I'm not part of it.'\n\n'I can't take your word for that,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'Of course you can't,' says Ferrus.\n\n'You look like you, and you sound like you,' says Sanguinius, 'and you smell like you. But you are a long time dead.'\n\n'I am dead, brother,' says Ferrus. 'We all are.'\n\n6:xvi\n\nTruth (and lies)\n\nFo is deep in work, face to the cogitator screens.\n\n'Define \"better\",' says Xanthus, stepping forward. He doesn't want to interrupt and delay things any further, but he needs to know.\n\n'I'm sorry?'\n\n'You said you can build a better one. What does \"better\" mean in that context?'\n\n'More effective,' says Fo, 'more precise. Effective against Astartesian genetics without risk to the general population.'\n\n'That risk existed?' asks Xanthus.\n\n'Of course,' says Fo. 'It's a biological weapon.'\n\n'And why do you think this?' asks Andromeda.\n\n'Because you were right, Selenar,' says Fo. 'Now I am actually able to study the Sigillite's private notes, I can see that I had failed to account for the exoplanar forces to which mortal incarnation is fundamentally bound.'\n\nFo glances sidelong at her.\n\n'I make no excuses,' he says. 'I am a relic of the past, from an era when the warp was essentially unknown. Genetics was an applied science all of itself, and I excelled at it, in ways that history has condemned me for. Science was quite separate from... from religion, and art. From the metaphysical. It's curious, I think,' (I don't think, for now I know, and it terrifies me) 'that in the age of the Imperium, the most secular era of mankind, the concept of a soul must now be taken seriously.'\n\nHe looks at Andromeda.\n\n'You attested that my weapon would fail,' he says, 'because it would operate at a purely genetic, that is to say physical, level. You were correct. I had not embraced the idea that we are more than just flesh. In my day, notions of spirit and soul were not the purview of scientists. But the likes of your Emperor, and the Sigillite, have demonstrated that no such division exists. We are all body and soul. Our solid, mortal flesh is anchored to an intangible essence of psycho-material, what us heathens would call a soul, that co-exists with the "}
{"text":", 'because it would operate at a purely genetic, that is to say physical, level. You were correct. I had not embraced the idea that we are more than just flesh. In my day, notions of spirit and soul were not the purview of scientists. But the likes of your Emperor, and the Sigillite, have demonstrated that no such division exists. We are all body and soul. Our solid, mortal flesh is anchored to an intangible essence of psycho-material, what us heathens would call a soul, that co-exists with the realm of the immaterial. When the warp was opened to permit interstellar transport... and let's face it, that's the real reason it was done... it revealed this truth, a truth previously only imagined by poets and priests. We are all materia and immateria, intrinsically linked.'\n\nFo rises to his feet. He seems older and more frail than ever, but more alert in ways that alarm them both.\n\n'So no,' he says, 'the genetic destruction of the Astartesian line will not kill them outright. Merely their cellular corporality. Their souls - and, believe me, the scientist in me still winces to use such a term in rational discussion - will continue to exist, within the warp, undoubtedly as an agitated and potentially disruptive convulsion that would have dire long-term effects on the material galaxy. To achieve peace and prevent the violent perturbations of the warp, we must achieve stability and balance between materia and immateria.'\n\n'You didn't know this?' asks Andromeda.\n\n'My business is flesh,' says Fo. 'In my day, such knowledge was the province of seers and visionaries and gnostics, and thus had no part to play in scientific rigour. In this day and age... your beloved Emperor has so vehemently suppressed all spiritual philosophy that these concepts are widely seen as scientific facts, and thus blandly accepted, with no consideration of their context and implications for emotion, thought-'\n\n'Empyric studies are restricted fields because they are fundamentally dangerous,' Xanthus objects.\n\n'Of course they are!' retorts Fo. He snatches up a data-slate from the workstation. 'The Emperor strictly limited all knowledge of the warp. Information was shared with regard to essentials like stellar travel and astrotelepathy... and even there it was meted out in very small portions. He denied knowledge, the deep knowledge He had obtained, for reasons of species safety. That's why He banned all religions and anything that encouraged freedom of faith or imagination. He did so because knowledge of the warp is itself a contaminant. But, look here!'\n\nHe waves the slate at them.\n\n'In his journals,' says Fo, 'your beloved Sigillite protests, again and again, going back decades, the Emperor's epistemology and His restriction of knowledge! He states clearly that he believes it to be a fundamental danger to the Imperium! Look, here! He privately petitions the Emperor to relax the directive. He argues that the warp is an existential danger to us, to any psycho-able species, and that it will remain an existential danger whether we know about it or not. Ignorance is the real harm. Malcador, of whom I am growing fonder with every line I read, reasons that it is better to know and understand a threat than to innocently blunder on regardless. He states that the primarchs and the Astartes, not to mention the general corpus of mankind, ought to understand the potential consequences of their actions and their very thoughts. He maintains they can better protect humanity from the menace of the warp if they are fully aware of its power.'\n\n'And the Emperor rejected this?' asks Andromeda.\n\n'Yes,' says Fo. 'For \"the good of mankind\". But what we are now facing, this entire disaster of a war, is what happens when you fail to teach your children properly. Might religion, or pure faith, unchecked, risk untoward consequences in the warp? Of course! But ignorance is worse. Your Master of Mankind believed that no one was good enough, or clever enough, or careful enough to be left alone with the fire. Your Emperor trusts no one. And this is the misery that rains on us all as a consequence of that.'\n\nFo tosses the slate on the desk.\n\n'I am revising the function of the Terminus device in the light of Malcador's insights,' he says wearily. 'I am, not to overstate it, revising my entire scientific rationale. But I believe I will prevail. I can now see the dangers, you see? The consequences. Malcador is a wonderful guide. Thank you, Chosen One, for allowing me this access. I need to prepare a range of gene-code samples. There are many already here in the Sigillite's genomic archive. I will need some more as a control. I will systematically test the principles of my bio-mechanical phage on those samples in order to finesse and calibrate its efficacy.'\n\nHe looks at Andromeda.\n\n'Before you ask, I cannot estimate how long this will take. I will, of course, work as fast as I can.'\n\nHe slots a series of tubes into a differential centrifuge and activates agitation.\n\n'I presume you are now able to report adequate progress to our other agency?' he adds.\n\n'Yes,' says Andromeda. She glances at Xanthus, and then heads towards the staircase to follow the tower down.\n\nOnce she's gone, Fo resumes his seat (Have I convinced them? I scarcely believe or understand this stuff myself, and the implications petrify me) and starts to compose rapid and complex sequences on the central cogitator.\n\n'You understand we still don't trust you, don't you?' says Xanthus.\n\n'And never will,' Fo replies. He glances at the Chosen. 'That's all right. I am not trustworthy. I am trying to be as transparent with you as I can. I don't want to be here, Xanthus. Let me make it clear, quite honestly, that my chief desire is to escape. There's no point lying. I want to escape you, the damn Custodes, and every other agency. I want to escape Him and this whole misbegotten Imperium. And I will try to do so, and keep trying, and ultimately, I believe, I will succeed. I will use every opportunity and scrap of cunning I can.'\n\n'I appreciate your candour,' says Xanthus.\n\n'Don't mention it. But I also accept that, for now, I am your prisoner, and we are in this together, and there may indeed be a way in which I can assist in our salvation. So, I am devoting my entire attention to this work.'\n\nHe types another line of code, then smiles at Xanthus.\n\n'Now roll up your sleeve.'\n\n6:xvii\n\nNothing in the darkness\n\nThey run until they can't run any further. Exhausted, panting, they finally slow to a halt. Zybes lowers himself to the ground against the base of a plinth, gulping for air. Katt leans against a wall between two oblivious statues of water nymphs. She closes her eyes, trying to steady her panic and manage the sour aftertaste of Actae's psykana. Her hand shoots to her mouth as she gags again. She swallows.\n\nOut of breath himself, Oll glances at Leetu. They've left the stampeding, terror-stricken crowd behind. The hallway they've reached is nocturnal, the palatial ornamentation and fine mosaics lost in quiet gloom. There is a faint echo, in the distance, that could be laughter and screams.\n\n'Were we pursued?' Oll asks.\n\nLeetu stands in the doorway and peers back the way they have come. He can see the stately hall they have just run down and, through the half-open doors at the far end of it, the identical hall before that. Nothing stirs. The aligned rows of statues are as serene as ever. The lights have failed as far back as he can see, except for one electro-flambeau pendant just inside the last doors, which buzzes and flickers at half-power.\n\nSomewhere, a piercing shriek rises and falls, but it could be from a million miles away.\n\n'No,' Leetu replies. He gently closes the towering golden doors, and turns to Oll. 'But that doesn't mean we're safe here,' he says.\n\n'I don't understand what just happened,' wheezes Krank, bent over, his hands on his thighs. 'Those things were just suddenly...'\n\n'The Sanctum's breached,' is all Oll can tell him.\n\n'You mean to say the traitors have broken in?' groans Zybes. 'They've stormed the Palace?'\n\n'They didn't break in,' says Oll. 'They just... were in. They were not, and then they were. You saw your thread tied on that statue, Hebet. The geometry has changed, you see? Inside and out? Walls don't matter any more.'\n\n'I don't understand,' wails Zybes.\n\n'Of course you don't,' says Actae, straightening up, but still clearly weak and unwell. 'But you can at least be quiet. Your pitiful whining will draw attention to us.'\n\n'Back there. You got inside my head!' Krank hisses at the blind witch.\n\n'She had to, Dogent,' snaps Katt.\n\nShe pauses, clears her throat and wipes her mouth. Oll doesn't like how ill she looks. The strain of sharing her mind-space with Actae is taking its toll. Their facial expressions are starting to mirror each other's.\n\n'It was the only way to bring us clear of that panic. And now she's going to use her talents to find us a way out, or a place to shelter.'\n\n'I need time to recover my strength, girl,' says Actae. 'My will is depleted. You can feel that full well.'\n\n'I can, and I don't care,' says Katt. 'Do it.'\n\nActae scowls.\n\n'Listen, my leash,' she says. 'Even if I was strong enough, there's nothing to read. Time is out of joint, somehow.'\n\n'Time?' asks Oll.\n\n'The causal flow has stopped. It's been suspended. Dimensions as we understand them are submitting to the warp.'\n\nOll nods.\n\n'Are we going to die, like the witch said?' Krank asks him.\n\n'What the hell did she mean about time?' Zybes asks.\n\n'What are we going to do, Trooper Persson?' asks Graft.\n\n'Just give me a moment,' Oll tells them. He walks away from the group, and follows the gloomy hallway to its far end, where it widens into a small, circular atrium. Statues loom over him from their pedestals, just suggestions in the half-light, mythological forms whose meanings have been forgotten. Silence, like darkness, hangs heavy. His anxious mind pictures the murder that must be sweeping through the Palace.\n\nAnother set of d"}
{"text":"es asks.\n\n'What are we going to do, Trooper Persson?' asks Graft.\n\n'Just give me a moment,' Oll tells them. He walks away from the group, and follows the gloomy hallway to its far end, where it widens into a small, circular atrium. Statues loom over him from their pedestals, just suggestions in the half-light, mythological forms whose meanings have been forgotten. Silence, like darkness, hangs heavy. His anxious mind pictures the murder that must be sweeping through the Palace.\n\nAnother set of double doors faces him, three times the height of a man. They are shut tight. He wonders what lies beyond them. He doesn't want to open them and find out.\n\n6:xviii\n\nFragments\n\nThey finally reach the door. The oblong of light. The postern hatch. Honfler pulls Sartak through.\n\nAt the very last moment, the Space Wolf feels the immense blackness behind him gust like a winter wind, as though it is finally coming for him. But Rewa Medusi hauls the hatch shut and quickly reactivates the lock.\n\nOn the far side of the engine gates, the Martian Approaches are as they left them. The denial companies wait at readiness in the hazy glare of the wall lamps. The huge passageway is otherwise empty.\n\n'What did you see?' Medusi asks.\n\n'Nothing,' Sartak replies, truthfully. He can feel that frost has hardened the braided tails of his beard. He can see the sheen of it on Honfler's plate.\n\n'Priority message to Hegemon Command,' the praetor-captain orders. 'Make report of potential breach on the Martian Approaches-'\n\nThere is a thump behind them. They all turn to look at the scabbed metal of the towering barrier. Another thump, something striking the other side of it. They bring their weapons up. Something bangs against the postern hatch, then a tapping begins a few metres to the left of it. Another thump, over to the left side.\n\n'Defensive lines!' Honfler calls. 'Clavian formation!'\n\nThe denial companies move as one, forming clean block formations in front of the engine gates.\n\n'Hegemon?' Honfler asks.\n\n'Still trying,' one of his officers replies.\n\n'Nothing's coming through that,' Medusi murmurs.\n\n'Nothing should be on the other side either,' replies Sartak. 'Keep your line!'\n\nThe hammering and banging intensify. It's coming from multiple points. Some of it is light tapping and scratching. Other knocks are hard, urgent bangs. A few of them, Sartak realises, are coming from high up, the top section of the engine gates, twenty metres above them.\n\nAll of the knocking and tapping ceases suddenly. The stillness lingers.\n\nThen a rime of frost begins to appear on the engine gates. Patches at first, glittering. Then larger scabs and swirls, caking the metal. Sartak can hear it crackle as it forms and creeps.\n\n'Throne of Terra...' Medusi murmurs.\n\n'Get me the Hegemon now!' Honfler yells. His order is drowned out by the sudden boom of bolter fire.\n\nBrothers in the rear lines of the denial companies are toppling, shot in the back. Some fall with smoke billowing from holes in their plate, others are blown off their feet by the flame-shock of mass-reactive impacts.\n\nThe companies, now in disarray, turn. Honfler doesn't need to command a return of fire. Traitors are flooding down the Martian Approaches towards them, weapons blazing.\n\nThey're coming from behind them. There is absolutely no indication how they can be coming from that direction. Sartak sees Night Lords, Sons of Horus, and charging World Eaters.\n\nThe denial companies open up, firing at will, cutting traitors off their feet and out of their wild, headlong lines. A two-way storm of bolt-shot, beams and las-fire lights up between the loyalist companies and the advancing mass.\n\nBut there is no cover. The denial companies have the frost-coated gates at their backs. They are pinned. Enemy fire is cutting them apart, dropping Imperial Fists, Salamanders and Iron Hands.\n\nSartak roars a Fenrisian cry of defiance, firing his bolter at the onrushing foe. There is nowhere to go except the grave.\n\nJohn Grammaticus follows Oll into the gloomy atrium.\n\n'I'll be honest,' he says quietly, 'I don't have a clue what to do now.'\n\n'Nor do I, John,' says Oll.\n\n'I was hoping you'd stepped aside to have a quiet word with your god,' says John, more joking than not. 'You know, get that faith of yours to guide you again, or whatever.'\n\n'Not any more,' says Oll.\n\nJohn nods, and chuckles sadly. Then he feels his smile slipping away.\n\n'Wait, what do you mean, \"not any more\"? Oll?'\n\n'Whatever plan Ollanius had,' interrupts Actae, 'it is now patently in tatters.' She has approached, with Katt's support, stately but frail, like some stiff-limbed, ancient queen of the underworld.\n\n'Not yet,' says Oll.\n\n'How can you say that?' Actae asks scornfully.\n\n'Because I never had one,' says Oll.\n\nJohn stares at him. Oll shrugs.\n\n'My plan can't be ruined, because I never had one,' he says.\n\n'She was right?' John asks, his voice compressed by disbelief. 'The witch was right? All along? All this time you've been winging it, and trusting your damn faith to see us through?'\n\nOll steps away from him and sits down on the plinth of one of the statues. John isn't going to let it drop.\n\n'Oll? Tell me that's not true. Oll!'\n\n'When you came to my door, John. When you asked for my help, what did you think I was going to do?'\n\n'I don't know!' John says. 'But you know Him. I thought you'd know secrets, stuff that no one else knows, about Him, and this Palace, and the way He thinks and works-'\n\n'Anything I know is long out of date,' says Oll. 'I don't know any more than you do, Grammaticus.'\n\n'But you agreed, Oll. You agreed to help me.'\n\n'I seem to remember it took a lot of persuasion. Find the Emperor and make Him listen to reason? I was more concerned about saving these people and getting them to safety. But you were insistent-'\n\n'That's why you said yes?'\n\n'You were always very good with words, John. You were inspiring. You were prepared to stand up against unimaginable power. So I said yes, John. I had no idea how we'd accomplish it, but I said yes.'\n\n'I share Grammaticus' consternation, Ollanius,' says Actae.\n\nThe others are approaching, hesitant and curious, drawn by the raised voices.\n\n'Like him,' Actae continues, 'I assumed you had some plan. You've refused to share it. You play your cards close, and there is merit in such caution. As you said to me, a plan works best when the fewest people share it. But now, it seems there are no cards at all, and there never were.'\n\n'You've been making it up as you go along,' says John.\n\n'I believed-' Oll begins.\n\n'Believed what?' John growls. 'In this?'\n\nHe reaches out and grabs the little golden Catheric symbol strung around Oll's throat.\n\n'This?' he asks, almost shaking with anger. 'Just this? You thought some divine providence was going to direct you, when the time came?'\n\n'Please let go of that, John.'\n\n'Is it true?' asks John, aghast.\n\n'Let it go,' says Oll quietly.\n\n'Trooper Persson believes in god,' says Graft. 'This I have recorded about him. He is pious. He cherishes a private faith in-'\n\n'Have you been waiting for some god to intervene?' asks Katt.\n\nThe disappointment is visible on their faces, even in the gloom.\n\n'They just trusted you,' says Actae. She makes no effort to disguise her contempt. 'Have you suborned us into some personal act of spiritual-'\n\n'No,' says Oll. 'What I believe is my business. I'm not asking you to believe in anything. I never have. Any of you.'\n\n'But your faith is guiding you?' asks Katt. Those dark eyes fix Oll.\n\nJohn knows that, of all of them, she's the one Oll won't lie to. He watches as his old friend nods.\n\n'Then we never stood a chance,' says John. He lets go of Oll's symbol and turns away in despair.\n\nAmit steadies his line. It's close now. They can hear it coming down the Western Mass Passageway. A vast host, moving swiftly.\n\n'Steady!' Vexillary Roch yells. Those of them carrying shields have locked them into basic walls facing the mouth of Western Mass. They can all feel the air stirring across the concourse, driven by the weight of bodies moving up the passageway.\n\n'Steady!' Roch yells again.\n\nThat's not going to be enough, Amit thinks. They're all so damn low on munitions. The resupplies they were promised have never arrived. They need to be closing the passageway hatches and shutting the blast doors and iris valves. They need to close access off. The denial companies won't hold a main-force charge at bay for long with the ammunition they're carrying. It'll come down to blades in a minute or two, and blades are no way to hold a space like the Marnix Confluence against superior numbers.\n\n'Steady!' Roch yells.\n\nWhy isn't Palace Command closing the hatches? The tactics for interior defence were carefully planned. Don't they know this is happening? Why are there no alert sirens?\n\nThe charging mass arrives.\n\n'Contact!' Roch shouts, then almost immediately, 'Hold fire! Hold fire!'\n\nIt isn't an enemy force. It's Palace citizens, courtiers, workers, thousands of them, streaming out of the Western Mass Passageway towards them in a blind panic. Amit can hear the screams, smell the terror. They're running from something, running in a frenzy of desperation. People are getting knocked over and trampled underfoot.\n\nRoch starts bawling orders to reposition the denial companies. They need to funnel and contain this enormous, flowing multitude. They need to draw these crowds off the concourse, and channel them away into the side galleries and adjacent halls. But no one's listening. The citizens are just pouring out, unheeding, fleeing without sense or reason.\n\nAmit hears the first of the shots. He turns to pinpoint their origin. The Confluence's vast and booming acoustics are amplifying the screaming and crowd noise. The tumult is swirling and ringing around him, bouncing off the chamber's walls, echoing back-\n\nNo, a shot. Two more. Another burst.\n\nHe suddenly sees brothers in the right flank of Denial 963 dropping hard, White Scars with their plate blown open and flame diss"}
{"text":"e citizens are just pouring out, unheeding, fleeing without sense or reason.\n\nAmit hears the first of the shots. He turns to pinpoint their origin. The Confluence's vast and booming acoustics are amplifying the screaming and crowd noise. The tumult is swirling and ringing around him, bouncing off the chamber's walls, echoing back-\n\nNo, a shot. Two more. Another burst.\n\nHe suddenly sees brothers in the right flank of Denial 963 dropping hard, White Scars with their plate blown open and flame dissipation bursts around them.\n\n'Turn!' Amit yells. 'Turn now!'\n\nThe enemy is on them. It's not coming through Western Mass or Kylon. It's coming from behind them.\n\nHalfway down the tower's spiral stairs, on her way to report to Amon, Andromeda hears the air split. The Retreat shakes. A deafening boom rolls across the Inner Sanctum, long and plangent, like the howl of a dying god. As it dies away, others rise to take its place. It is a sound like the dreadful war-horns of the Titan legions, but a hundred times louder and more profound. The noise shakes her diaphragm and makes her feel sick.\n\nShe runs down the stairs and out through the tower's entrance portico to where Amon stands at the head of the Pons Aegeus sky bridge.\n\n'What is it?' she asks, raising her voice to be heard over the din. He is gazing at the sky, which, above the spires and turrets of the citadel, is degenerating into patterns of livid mottling and jagged purple bruising.\n\n'The warning horns,' he says.\n\n'What warning horns?'\n\n'The doom sirens of the final fortress,' says Amon. A wind picks up and tugs at them from the deep gulf below the bridge. The horns continue to blare, rattling the sky.\n\n'What does it mean?' she asks.\n\n'It means the Sanctum has been penetrated. Properly, fully. Not the brief incursions suffered before the Gate was locked. A full breakthrough. The traitors and the Neverborn are now loose inside the final fortress. The last stand has begun.'\n\n'I... I've never heard them before. I've heard klaxons and general raid alarms, but never this,' she says.\n\n'That's because they have never sounded before,' says Amon. 'Ever.'\n\n6:xix\n\nAct of faith\n\nSomewhere, far away, immense horns begin to howl. The last, booming words of a doomed planet. Everything in the gloomy atrium shivers slightly. The golden doors rattle in their frame.\n\nOll slowly rises to his feet. He can't bear the look on their faces. He knows he should say something to reassure them, but he can't, and he won't pretend to be something he isn't.\n\nHe touches the charm around his neck gently.\n\n'My wife gave me this,' he says. 'She was Catheric. I respected her beliefs because I loved her. Over the years, I found the rites comforting. I didn't believe, but I agreed with the underlying values of community, love, peace, kindness-'\n\n'Kindness?' says Actae, with a disdain that could etch metal.\n\n'Yeah, kindness. It's a meek little word, isn't it, for a commodity that too many people these days think of as weak and trivial. There ought to be a stronger word for it. I'd say \"humanity\", but that usage has been debased by our history.'\n\nOll lifts the charm over his head, and lowers it into his palm, letting the chain snake and loop. He stares at it.\n\n'This is all I have left of her. I still don't believe in her god, not really. Not in any god. But I was born in an epoch when men thought gods were real. Belief was a fundamental part of every person's life. You need to understand, I've lived far more of my life in a world that believes in the divine than I have in one that firmly doesn't. It's bred into me. Now we exist in an era when the gods aren't just dead, they never existed to begin with. I am a man hardwired for pious belief who has survived into an age that's entirely secular. I happen to cherish the triumph of reason over superstition, but it's still a cold place for a man like me. Yet look at us now. This rational, enlightened Imperium. Ruled by an all-powerful being, who moves in a mysterious way, and expects our absolute devotion and obedience. Besides terminology, how is that really any different from the world I grew up in? We might as well worship Him.'\n\nHe lifts his gaze from the object in his open palm and looks at them. He can see what he's saying is making them all uncomfortable.\n\n'I think many do,' he says. 'The problem is, I know He's not god. And He's the reason there is no religion. He outlawed it because it's dangerous.'\n\n'There is abundant evidence that it is...' says Actae.\n\n'Indeed,' says Oll. 'But all those creeds, down through history, reflected man's basic urge to answer some existential need. There's a reason we built temples long before we built cities.'\n\n'We did?' asks Krank.\n\nOll nods. 'I was there. It's the same reason priests were always the keepers of a culture's secrets. The same goes for art, and for the imagination. There is an ineffable meaning within us that cannot be easily articulated. I know why He banned religions. He was trying to insulate mankind against the warp. The warp finds a way in, wherever there is imagination or an inquisitive mind.'\n\n'The warp is no religion!' scoffs Actae.\n\n'Of course it isn't,' replies Oll. 'And it has no gods. Not real gods. It is a fundamental threat to material life, but it's also a fundamental part of reality. You can't safeguard against it by pretending it doesn't exist.'\n\nOll pauses.\n\n'The Emperor cut mystery out of the human experience, but left an untreated wound. It was utterly typical of His arrogance and impatience.'\n\n'You saw this coming...' says Katt quietly.\n\n'Maybe not exactly this, but yes,' says Oll. 'All those years ago, when He and I worked together to build the human world, I could see where His intentions could lead. That's why I broke with Him. That's why I damn well stabbed Him. He was dealing in absolutes, and I couldn't stop Him. So I walked away. I shouldn't have done that. I should have kept trying. Maybe this is my act of contrition.'\n\nHe shrugs.\n\n'Anyway, now, perhaps too late, I'm trying again,' he says. 'I'm a Perpetual. I may not be as powerful as Him, because I wasn't born with His appalling psychic gifts, but I'm older than Him. I've seen civilisations rise and fall. I've watched the cycle too many times.'\n\nHe puts the chain back around his neck.\n\n'Erda told me she believed Perpetuals were precursor examples of Homo superior,' says John quietly. 'An advance guard to steer human evolution.'\n\nOll nods. 'That's what I believed, in the early days. I understood myself for the first time. It felt like a consolation for the cruel repetition of an unending life.\n\n'Cruel?' Krank asks.\n\n'Lives come and go like seasons to me. It's heartbreaking. Finding meaning for my life was a solace. So, like Erda, and a few others of our kind, I accepted that the Perpetuals are supposed to guide the potential of the human race. We knew a responsibility like that would be too easy to abuse, so we kept our touch light. When He came along, oh... He was so extraordinary, and I was swept up by His commitment and His proactive approach, until I saw it for what it was. He has a plan, John. He's always had a plan, and He doesn't care what it costs to accomplish it.'\n\nFor a moment, Oll can't keep the scorn out of his voice.\n\n'So that's when and why I refused to have anything to do with it, ever again. I went away, and I lived my lives out, one at a time. Simple lives.'\n\nHe gestures towards John, who won't meet his eyes.\n\n'Then John Grammaticus came to my door,' Oll says. 'Well, Horus' war arrived first. Calth was burning, and everything was gone, and there was John, with his silver tongue, begging me to help him.'\n\n'Now wait...' says John. He stops. He shrugs. 'No, that's fair. I begged.'\n\n'John claimed that it wasn't too late to stop it. To intervene. He had external help from creatures older and wiser than humanity and, god knows, a desperate need to atone.'\n\nThe others all look at John.\n\n'What for?' asks Krank.\n\n'That's up to John to tell you, if he wants to,' says Oll.\n\n'I made things worse,' says John simply.\n\n'How?'\n\n'The Alpha Legion,' says Actae.\n\n'Yes,' says John, 'may Oll's imaginary god forgive me.'\n\nKatt looks at Oll. 'What did Grammaticus say to convince you?' she asks.\n\nOll smiles at her sadly. 'In the end, nothing. It was you. It was all of you.'\n\nThey glance at each other, puzzled.\n\n'Actae has a theory as to why you've all become part of this,' says Oll. 'Like you're all archetypes. Part of a puzzle, or a ritual, that needs to happen. I don't think it's that. The machinations of the Emperor, and Horus' war, they are far too easy to ignore from a distance. The scale's too big. But you put human faces on it. You reminded me of my responsibility. The covenant between Perpetual and mortal. And you've been reminding me of that every step of the way since Calth.'\n\nHe looks at John.\n\n'So that's my faith, John. Mock it all you like. I have to believe I was born with some kind of purpose to fulfil. I don't know what that is. But I know what it isn't.'\n\n'Do you?' asks John.\n\n'It absolutely isn't what He's doing,' says Oll. 'So I have to stop Him. Of course I don't know how I'm going to do that. I never have. I just have to believe I can.'\n\nHe grasps the chain around his neck again, so tight it feels like he'll break it.\n\n'Have I got a plan?' he says. 'No, I haven't. I don't have a plan, precisely because He does.'\n\nNo one says anything. Then Graft tilts its head with a soft whirr.\n\n'You are speaking of \"good works\", Trooper Persson,' it says. 'Of the endeavour to help others who require help without expectation of reward. This I have recorded about you on a number of occasions. The concept concords with servitor function parameters. Is my instructional coding faith?'\n\n'It's programming, servitor,' scoffs Actae.\n\n'Don't be superior,' Oll snaps at her. 'It's a reasonable question. And I don't think the two are all that different. It's about doing what's right, or what needs to be done. It's about helping those aroun"}
{"text":" Persson,' it says. 'Of the endeavour to help others who require help without expectation of reward. This I have recorded about you on a number of occasions. The concept concords with servitor function parameters. Is my instructional coding faith?'\n\n'It's programming, servitor,' scoffs Actae.\n\n'Don't be superior,' Oll snaps at her. 'It's a reasonable question. And I don't think the two are all that different. It's about doing what's right, or what needs to be done. It's about helping those around you, unconditionally. It's about thought for others. It's about kindness, Actae. It's about using the time you have well, for everyone's sake, and I have not used my time well, which is shameful, given that I've had so much of it. I'll use the time I have left as well as I can.'\n\n'Except there is no time,' says Actae.\n\n'The Eleniki of antiquity distinguished two concepts of time,' Oll replies. 'Did you know that? A woman called Medea taught me the idea. There was chronos, which was ongoing, experiential time, external to us, and kairos, which was opportunity, or the propitious moment. Chronos means the flow of history, and I've stood back from it for too long. And now it's stopped dead. Kairos means seizing the instant. I think we've still got time for that.'\n\nHe turns from them, and walks over to the resolutely closed double doors. He grasps the handles.\n\n'We just push on,' he says, 'and see what's waiting for us.'\n\n6:xx\n\nThe invaders\n\nImperial Fists are trained to operate using all available data. Their warfare is thorough warfare, optimising any intel at their disposal. But since the wild butchery on the Gilded Walk, the flow of data has steadily degraded, and now... Now, what little remains makes no sense.\n\nMaximus Thane thinks he's in the Adelphus Cloister, following the golden hallways that lead to the balneary. He's sure of it. But if he is, where is everyone? Where are the nobles, the scurrying servants, the attendants and serfs? Where are the Sentinels, and why haven't they detected his unexpected arrival and challenged him?\n\nWhere is everybody, and how are he and his brothers here? The questions can't be reconciled. Thane tries to isolate the concern until he has supplementary data, but the very fact that he, Berendol, Molwae and Demeny are inside the Sanctum makes them the intruders. They are inside a place that it should not be possible to get inside. If they have somehow circumvented the greatest defence-work in the galaxy, what else might have done the same? What does it say about the security of the Palace?\n\nMore alarmingly, what does it suggest about them?\n\nOn their intervox there is only a crackle like wood spitting in a grate. Wall-mounted vox-systems are dead when they try them. Thane's initial sense of wonder, almost elation, almost relief, at suddenly finding himself inside the Sanctum, is ebbing rapidly. He had resigned himself to the idea that his long, respectable career would end outside, as a life-seller, abandoned beyond the sealed gates. It would have been a death with purpose. But then, impossibly, he was inside again. The marvel of that fact has quickly vanished. The place is haunted in its silence. Something is badly wrong. They are wrong. Everything is wr-\n\nBerendol eyes him in concern. They can both sense the tension in the initiates, Molwae and Demeny.\n\nThane feels like shouting out. Someone will hear, surely?\n\nBut he can't bring himself to.\n\n'Past the balneary,' he says to Berendol, 'the hallway connects to the Phaeton Processional. There'll be people there. We'll find someone.'\n\nBerendol nods.\n\n'Someone,' Thane repeats to himself. Now he's inside the final fortress, he has only one urge: to get to the Delphic. To throw his weight into the fight. His Praetorian will need all the fighting sons he can get for the repulse, because when the enemy reaches the Delphic, every last body will count. Thane knows this. He's been outside. He's seen what's coming.\n\nBut he knows he has a greater duty. He must report, as soon as possible, the fact of their unnatural entry, and the terrible things that fact implies.\n\nThey pass into a grand atrium where vast oil paintings, a tribute to Terra's unity with Mars, are displayed. The images, finely figured, seem like a mocking joke to him. He's faced and killed too many of the Dark Mechanicum's disciples to ever trust their kind again.\n\nMolwae switches around, blade raised. Electro-tapestral hangings against the end wall are stirring in the breeze.\n\n'Relax, prentice-brother,' Berendol hisses.\n\n'But-'\n\n'There's nothing there,' Berendol tells him.\n\n'But, sir,' says Molwae, 'there was no breeze before.'\n\nThe initiate's right. There wasn't. Thane moves past them, hammer raised. He can detect a cold current of air. The glowing tapestries shiver, their woven voltaics catching the light. The tall golden doors are ajar.\n\nThane pushes one of them open with the head of his hammer.\n\nBeyond the doors, there's a corridor. Its floor is galvanised metal, its walls and ceiling threaded with heavy ducting. It seems wrong. Why would a grand chamber admit into a dingy service tunnel?\n\nThane takes a few steps. It's several degrees colder in the tunnel. He can hear the rasp of air-scrubbers. His visor display shows him these things clearly: the acoustic shift, the variance in ambient temperature. It shows him something else, a micro-change registered by the sensoria in his boots and greaves.\n\nHe slowly crouches down, and presses his palm to the floor.\n\nNot a floor. A deck. The metal flooring is a series of grav-active plates. They are set to Terran Normal, but his sensoria detected the miniscule shift from natural to artificial gravity. Where in the Palace are there spaces paved with deck plates? That's void-ship construction.\n\nThane rises, and starts to turn. Berendol calls his name.\n\nThe thing is just there. It wasn't there, and then it was. It fills the tunnel ahead of him.\n\nThane's hammer comes up, but it's nothing like fast enough.\n\n6:xxi\n\nThe path we will have made\n\nThere's nothing. Just another dark hallway, another bare floor, another row of statues. The lights have burned out. There's a faint, cold draught. He stands there for a moment.\n\nJohn appears in the open doorway behind him. 'Anti-climactic,' he says.\n\nOll turns and looks back at him with a rueful smile.\n\n'More often than not,' he replies. Then, very quietly, he says, 'John?'\n\n'What?'\n\nNow he has turned, Oll can see the other side of the doors he's just come through. He beckons to Grammaticus.\n\n'Look,' he says.\n\nAnother loop of red thread is tied around one of the door handles on his side. The others gather in to look at it.\n\n'We didn't do that,' says Zybes. 'We've never been here before.'\n\n'We marked a way as we came in,' says Oll. 'Conventionally at first, but we marked a way. Now that the walls are down, and distance is meaningless, the thread is still showing us where to go. Where we wanted to go.'\n\n'What the hell does that mean?' asks John.\n\nOll looks at him. 'Terra is dying,' he says. 'It's being devoured by the warp, and the warp is mixing everything up. Only a marked path remains.'\n\n'A path we didn't make?'\n\n'We haven't made it yet,' Oll says. 'Dimensions have unfolded, and that includes time. You can feel it, can't you? We have a path through this labyrinth. Erda gave us the means. At some point, we have made it. We've marked it out. Some time, somehow.'\n\n'Oll-' says John.\n\n'I know it's not logical, and I don't understand it myself, but think. All linear progression has gone. It's just gone. Time, space. But we've left a path through it that remains true. We marked it out. Or we will mark it out. We just have to follow it.'\n\n'Where to?' asks Krank.\n\n'I don't know,' Oll admits, 'but it's got to be better than just waiting here to die.'\n\n'This path...' says Zybes. 'It's one... we've yet to make? Our future selves?'\n\n'Future, past, it's all the same now,' says Oll.\n\n'That does not seem data-supported, Trooper Persson,' says Graft, settling back into stationary mode with a hiss of hydraulics.\n\n'Indeed it does not,' murmurs Actae. 'But I can feel the state-change of this place. The inevitable reconfiguration of the material universe.'\n\n'And I can see it,' says Katt quietly.\n\nActae tilts her blind face towards her.\n\n'Look around,' says Katt. 'Can't you see it too?'\n\nThe hallway beyond is dark, the lights fused. Stray sparks drip from burned-out fittings. In the blue gloom, they can see the golden statues, and other trappings of the regal Inner Sanctum.\n\nBut as their eyes adjust, they can see that the walls are slate-grey metal, riveted and verdigrised. Heavy stanchions and cross-beams of iron thwart the space above them. The floor is grilled deck plates, not marble. The air stinks of damp and foetid rot.\n\n'This isn't the Palace, is it?' Katt asks.\n\n'Not any more,' says Oll.\n\n'I know this place,' says John, a notch of fear in his voice. 'I've dreamed of it. Over and over. The same damn dream.' He looks at Oll. 'It's the ship, isn't it?' he says. 'It's his ship?'\n\nOll nods.\n\n'I think so,' he replies. 'Folded and bound into the fabric of the Palace, so that it's impossible to say where one ends and the other begins.'\n\n'So... he's here?' says John.\n\n'I presume so,' says Oll. 'And if Horus is here, so is He.'\n\nHe walks down the line of statues that look so out of place in the drab bulk of a warship's service tunnel. Four statues down, he finds another loop of red thread.\n\n'Let's find our way to them,' he says. 'For better, or for worse.'\n\nThey start to follow him. He wants them to pick up the pace, but he doesn't want them any more scared than they already are.\n\nYet they have to move.\n\nWhatever has been following him since Calth, the thing at his back, the thing that walks behind him, is now closer than ever before, because it no longer needs time to catch them up.\n\n6:xxii\n\nGorgon\n\nThe darkness behind the Gorgon is moving imperceptibly, shadow on shadow, like rippling satin. Sanguinius can hear the whispers rus"}
{"text":"r, or for worse.'\n\nThey start to follow him. He wants them to pick up the pace, but he doesn't want them any more scared than they already are.\n\nYet they have to move.\n\nWhatever has been following him since Calth, the thing at his back, the thing that walks behind him, is now closer than ever before, because it no longer needs time to catch them up.\n\n6:xxii\n\nGorgon\n\nThe darkness behind the Gorgon is moving imperceptibly, shadow on shadow, like rippling satin. Sanguinius can hear the whispers rustling in it. He can make out the stale scent of other body heats, not all of them living, and the smell of mutilating pain. His skin crawls.\n\n'I'm not,' says Sanguinius. 'I'm not dead.'\n\nFerrus Manus shrugs slightly, but does not reply.\n\n'Will you let me pass?' Sanguinius asks. 'Or do you intend to-'\n\n'I won't stop you,' Ferrus says.\n\n'Yet,' says Sanguinius, 'I suspect you are a distraction designed to delay me, so-'\n\n'I am,' says Ferrus. His silver eyes are hard. His mouth moves out of joint with his words. 'All of this is. A display of power.'\n\n'As I thought-'\n\n'No, Sanguinius. No. Not as you thought. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Warn you, I suppose. You have no idea of his power.'\n\n'Lupercal?'\n\n'Yes, Lupercal. The power of his will alone is letting me be here.'\n\nThe shadows shift and rustle again.\n\n'But I'm not a trick,' says Ferrus. 'I'm not an illusion, or some deceit conjured up from the immateria to divert you. You know that, don't you? I can see you do. I'm dead, Sanguinius, but I'm here. I'm real, and I'm me, and I'm dead, and I'm here. That's how powerful he is. He doesn't need to make a ghost of me, or magic up some vision that looks like me. The warp is in him to such a degree, he can simply bring me here from the other side of mortality.'\n\n'To fight me? To stop me?'\n\n'Oh, brother, no. To impress you. To show off.'\n\n'Then I'm impressed,' says Sanguinius, 'but I'm still going to kill him.'\n\nA pained smile slowly cracks across Ferrus Manus' face. It's a wounded version of a smile Sanguinius has long missed, and it tugs at his heart.\n\n'And I'm going to watch you do it,' says Ferrus, his eyes bright, though his mouth is no longer moving with his words at all.\n\nHe clasps his gleaming hands together. He stares at Sanguinius intently.\n\n'That's the thing about the warp,' he says. 'And I don't think our first-found brother has realised it yet. He's too drunk on its power. He can do anything now. Anything his will desires. You can't imagine. He can melt the world into the sky. He can blow time away like the tufts of a dandelion. He can twist up all of the materia in our universe into one knotted ball, and summon inevitable cities. He can drag the dead from their tombs and their times, and make them live as they once lived. But there is no finesse. It's the sport of a child.'\n\n'You're saying he has no control?'\n\n'He has plenty. But the warp is immeasurable. He's split the empyric realm open, and while he plays with one thing, or delights in another, or masters a new technique, it is wildly spilling out around him, following its own impulses. He put me here on a whim to greet you. I don't know what he was thinking. To surprise you? To remind you that death is always near? Maybe he thought the sight of your first-lost brother would chasten you or drive you mad. Who knows? Maybe he thought I would tempt you.'\n\n'To what?'\n\nFerrus hesitates. 'Join him? He'd love that. He loves you. Killing things is easy, you see? Destroying things... there's no challenge, and the satisfaction passes too quickly now he's done it so often. But turning you? Having you join him? That would be a challenge, and truly rewarding. What a feat, eh? Not just usurping the Imperium of Man, but turning its most loyal defenders? Having them renounce their cause and pledge to him? That's a real accomplishment. That takes real effort.'\n\n'Well, brother, it won't happen.'\n\nFerrus' lips do not move, but his voice wells up from far away. 'No, though his case is good.'\n\n'Make it.'\n\nThe first-lost primarch hesitates. 'I'd rather not,' he says.\n\n'No, indulge me,' says Sanguinius.\n\nFerrus glowers.\n\n'Very well. He's won. It's over. Nothing can stop him. Not you, or our father, or Rogal or bloody Constantin. It's done. Chaos has won, and the Triumph of Ruin is upon us. So you, and everyone who persists in fighting can die... or you can submit.'\n\n'I think you know me better than that.'\n\n'I do, I do. But there is an advantage to submission. He's left a place for you, you see? From this moment on, Ruin rules the stars. You can't change that. So you either die, and it happens, or you submit and become part of it. Stand at his side. Be there to guide him. He'd listen to you. You could make a difference. It may not be the future you want. It may be the future you fought tooth and nail to prevent. But it's inevitable. Side with him, and help him make the best version of Ruin.'\n\nSanguinius nods.\n\n'Now you don't sound like yourself, \"brother\",' he says. 'Now you sound like a trick. A lie. A mouthpiece.'\n\nFerrus grimaces. He holds up his powerful hands in a gesture of apology.\n\n'Brother, please,' he says, dismayed. 'I'm not asking you to. I'm not trying to convince you. Make his case, you said, so I made it. I don't want you to pledge to him. Trust me, it's better to die.'\n\n'I won't side with him,' says Sanguinius. 'I have never been tempted, and I'm not going to change my mind now. Even if we have lost.'\n\n'Good. I'd have been disappointed if you'd said otherwise.'\n\n'I'd rather fight to my last breath,' says Sanguinius, 'and let the galaxy burn. Even if I can't stop it. I'd rather die.'\n\n6:xxiii\n\nHow we fight it\n\n'That's not an encouraging sound,' says Fo, as the horns blast again.\n\n'No, it's not,' replies Xanthus, glancing at the laboratorium's small windows and feeling terror boil up inside him.\n\n'Does it mean what I think it means?'\n\n'Yes, Fo.'\n\nFo takes a deep breath (terror fills me. I fight the overwhelming urge to flee). He reaches out to adjust a console control, increasing the chamber's acoustic dampers. The roar of the warning horns becomes muffled, though loose objects on the workstation continue to rattle.\n\n'Now,' says Fo, 'as I was saying...'\n\n'You want a blood sample,' says Xanthus. 'From me?'\n\n'Yes. Blood, and some cellular material.'\n\n'I don't trust you at all, Fo,' says Xanthus. 'I suspect this is some attempt to escape that I will not benefit from.'\n\n'Well, it might be,' says Fo. 'But seriously... where could I escape to now? Come on. You are baseline human, I take it? No engineered genetics? I need fresh samples as a control basis, and you're the only human around. I'd use myself, but you don't want that. Roll up your sleeve, Xanthus. Think of this as the moment when you, in your own modest fashion, become one of the Throne's vaunted champions.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Oh, you don't have to be a giant beast in ceramite plate to save the world. Every one of us who, in his or her own small way, fights the impending forces of destruction, may be lauded as champions in ages to come. Even me. This is our fight, Xanthus, and this is how we fight it.'\n\nXanthus scowls at him. Fo lifts the sampler needle.\n\n'There,' says Fo. 'Didn't hurt, did it? You have just taken a step towards immortality, Chosen One. Your master would be proud of you. And when anybody asks, you can say, with complete sincerity, \"Yes, I am indeed a champion of the Emperor.\"'\n\n6:xxiv\n\nChampion of the Emperor\n\nSigismund. That name is secondary now. The Emperor has named him His Champion, and that's all that matters. All the other trappings and details of his life have been cast aside in pursuit of that singular, surgical duty.\n\nOn the Via Aquila, the traitors of the Tenth Company, Sons of Horus, baulk at the sight of him, and at the sight of their captain, Dorgaddon, expiring at his feet in a lake of blood. Sigismund will not give them time to gather their wits.\n\nThey think they are facing a man. They are not.\n\nThe Champion no longer wears the yellow plate of the Praetorians. He no longer declares himself an Imperial Fist, or even affects the stern wargear of the Templar brethren. He no longer considers himself Sigismund. He is clad in master-crafted armour of executioner black, and wields a huge black blade of unearthly temper, all honour-gifts of the Emperor's purview, bestowed by the Chosen of the Sigillite for his use. The black sword is secured to his wrist by devotion chains, the only concession he makes to his own past.\n\nAt his back, he hears the vast and wretched multitude gasp. He hears Euphrati Keeler cry his name.\n\nShe thinks he will stand with her group, and attempt retreat now he has saved her. One man against a company. The odds are madness. He will force a break, surely, for no one man could face-\n\nHe hears her gasp as he starts to move. A strange one, that woman. A special one, singular like him, both of them chosen for a purpose against their will. His encounters with her across the years of this heresy have been brief, but they have always left a mark upon him.\n\nHe hears her gasp because he is moving towards the enemy.\n\nBy the time the Sons of Horus start to react, their outrage spilling out of them, he is upon them and their blood starts spilling out of them too. One man against a whole company. Idiot odds. But no stranger than the induction trial of the Master of the Templars, wherein the supplicant must face two hundred men. He passed that test, a champion of oaths. One against a hundred, two hundred, one against a thousand... It is still a matter of one against one at a time. Mob attacks don't work, even if they all come at once. He is only one target, and they are many, getting in each other's way. It is just one against one, again and again. His weapons are fury and skill and stamina. His enemies are fatigue and self-doubt. Not the Sons of Horus, no matter how many oppose him.\n\nHis blade, unstoppable, carves through two of them as he runs into the fray, a dragging, sidelong blow "}
{"text":" hundred, one against a thousand... It is still a matter of one against one at a time. Mob attacks don't work, even if they all come at once. He is only one target, and they are many, getting in each other's way. It is just one against one, again and again. His weapons are fury and skill and stamina. His enemies are fatigue and self-doubt. Not the Sons of Horus, no matter how many oppose him.\n\nHis blade, unstoppable, carves through two of them as he runs into the fray, a dragging, sidelong blow that ploughs them both off their feet. They are merely in his way. The black sword severs the arms of a sergeant trying to frame a blow, then crosses to gut a brother swinging for his head. Sigismund rotates, impales one traitor, then hacks to the side with such force that another attacker cartwheels out of the impact. A block, sword almost horizontal, becomes a reversing outward sweep that fells two more. As they drop, his sword returns to the Son whose strike it blocked, and scythes off his head. It bounces on the street's scarred rockcrete.\n\nSigismund is already turning, parrying a blade as he kicks the wielder backwards. He ducks a chainaxe, cuts the hands holding it, and the throat behind those hands. He spins, slicing down another, then laces his blade down through the bulk of a howling Cataphractii. The monster splits into two vertical slabs. He is moving past them as they collapse, driving a straight impale clean through a faceplate, a back-cut through a spine, and then the blade's length through the chest of a Son who has almost found a gap in his defence.\n\nHe wrenches the black sword out, shearing open the traitor it was buried in, evades, parries, and drives the tip of his blade past a fumbled guard and through breastbone. Then he snaps and reverses, to administer a mirror-impale, perpendicular to his body, that pierces a Son behind him.\n\nInside ten seconds, he has killed fifteen men. None of them are principal quarries, but a man doesn't target officers and champions without expecting to handle the necessary aftermath of such actions. His attack has been a shock-strike, intended to rock them, and to take out as many as possible before they recover their nerve.\n\nSometimes, that is enough, and even large units will scatter in the face of such ferocity.\n\nNot the Sons of Horus. But his shock-strike has also been the overture. It has allowed his cohorts to line up.\n\nSigismund wars alone. His clashes with rival champions are single combat, man-to-man. But on the scarred plains of Terra, amid the code-less mania of Chaos War, the courtesies of single combat are not respected. A lone champion would quickly perish if he expected tournament rules to be observed.\n\nSigismund is a champion, not a fool.\n\nHe has, during the course of his bloody mission across the Palace Dominions, acquired his cohorts. His Seconds. They stand in support, holding back and allowing him the vital singularity of that first, man-to-man clash. Then they close in to harry the remainder when the singular turns to the general.\n\nThat moment is now. Sigismund does not need to give a command.\n\nTank rounds punch into the Tenth Company mob, lifting huge exclamation points of smoke and dirt from the Via Aquila. Traitors are knocked off their feet and into the air. The source of the shell-fire clatters into view: two Sicaran battle tanks, an Arquitor and a Spartan Assaulter from the left side of the road, three Carnodons and a Deimos Predator from the right. They are all scrub-painted in the black and white of the Temple. They lurch out of the roadside ruins, pushing down broken walls and cascading bricks, puffing a halo of dust around their churning treads and juddering hulls. Their main guns are built for range, so they switch to secondary weapons as they emerge. Sponsons and pintle-mounted support guns rage and rattle, spitting spears of las and heavy tracer into the destabilised traitor group.\n\nThe Sons of Horus, nevertheless, are sons of Lupercal. Already mauled ingloriously by Sigismund's one-man onslaught, they have no support, no armour, no cover. But they do not flee. They back away slowly, steadfast, blazing from the hip as they go, ignoring the brothers dropping and minced around them.\n\nTheir shots, each one enough to destroy a man, burst and flame off the advancing armoured hulls, bleeding fire and ropes of smoke. It is nothing to the dazzling lances and bolts of light coming at them. Sons of Horus die fast, chopped out of line, cut down like dead weights, annihilated into splinters by direct impacts. Defiant, aghast, unable to grasp they are being comprehensively exterminated, the monsters of Tenth Company grudgingly fall back, leaving a carpet of bodies behind them for the tanks to crunch over.\n\nSigismund lowers his blade as the tanks roll past him on either side. For a moment, he feels respect for the enemy's resolve. They have not broken or run. Their ranks unstitched by raging fire, they have remained resolute. They are Astartes still, some shred at least.\n\nThen he corrects his thinking. It's not Astartes courage. It's stupidity. It's the obstinate arrogance of a battle group that has become too used to being superior to anything and everything it meets on the field. With Dorgaddon slain, Tenth Company is headless, unable to think, unable to decide, unable to recognise its own approaching doom and reconcile a viable response. It is braindead, a body responding to the neural commands of a head long detached.\n\nFinally, Tenth breaks. Three-quarters mown down and dead, it comes apart. Sigismund can almost see individual warriors waking up, realising that death has finally come for them, understanding that their campaign of triumphal slaughter, which they believed would never be checked, has suddenly ended.\n\nThey start to scatter. They bolt for the roadsides, for the cover and shield of ruins. But death is waiting there too.\n\nThe ground-troop sections of his Seconds. The Templar brethren, their plate stark white and black. Astartes of other Legions who, separated from their own forces by the churn of war, have pledged to Sigismund's banner. Excertus and soldiers of the Hort Palatine, the Gravis Ninth and a dozen other armies that have flocked to his formation. They are waiting in the ruins. They are following the tanks onto the roadway in tight columns, using the tank-bodies as shields. They emerge and spread and charge, brandishing weapons, and lofting the stark Champion banners, and they meet the overmatched Tenth as it tries to flee.\n\nKill-boxed on a road they thought they owned, Tenth Company collapses. The tanks suspend firing as the Templars crash into the milling Sons of Horus and hack them down with sword and hammer. Marksmen from Excertus Stratac 20th and Geno Five-Two Chiliad pick off those who make it as far as the roadside ruins with high-powered headshots. Empyric wraiths scream skywards as they are evicted from bodies too broken to contain them.\n\nThere is a fine haze of blood on the wind.\n\nSigismund walks back to where Keeler is standing. She is staring at the ongoing slaughter behind him, wide-eyed.\n\n'Mistress Keeler,' he says, and salutes her with his sword.\n\n'My lord,' she replies. She gathers herself. 'Fate draws us together yet again.'\n\nHe makes no comment. She has always held him in high regard. The last time she saw him, she marvelled at his grace, believing that he embodied, more than ever, the Emperor's will. But now she sees how utterly cold that will can be in its expression. His black plate seems sinister. The austere ebon heraldry feels like a guise of mourning. Or a threat.\n\n'You are... Sigismund?' she asks. He must seem so changed. If his guise is one of mourning, she no doubt wonders, then who does he mourn? The Sigismund of old, now dead, replaced by this quiet executioner?\n\n'I am the Emperor's Champion, mistress,' he replies, 'but the man you knew is the man I was.'\n\n'You... command the field, sir?' she asks. 'Is that what \"Champion\" means?'\n\n'No, mistress,' he says. Dorn granted him command of the field of war, but Sigismund, though as great a tactical planner as any, solemnly passed that mantle to Great Archamus, who has proven his leadership genius beyond doubt. Great Archamus' war-making is broad in scope and wide in frame; Sigismund's is now as tight and narrow as a blade.\n\n'My commission,' he says, 'is to decapitate the traitor host. To track, and opportunistically kill, its officers, its captains, its commanders and its paragons, the master-warriors from whom others flee on the field, and the overlords from whom all commands and strategies issue.'\n\n'How... many of them must you kill?' she asks.\n\n'As many as possible, one by one, until death stops me,' he replies.\n\nShe seems not to know what to say to that. Behind him, the last rattles and booms of Tenth Company's annihilation echo along the Via Aquila. Black smoke gusts past them, making her shield her eyes.\n\n'I am grateful for your intervention,' she says.\n\nAgain, he makes no comment. Instead, he says, 'I heard a voice.'\n\n'I did too, sir.'\n\n'I hear it still.'\n\n'As do I.'\n\n'I am charged by the Emperor to kill the enemy,' says Sigismund. 'But I feel I am meant to suspend that effort long enough to provide you with protection.'\n\n'Protection for what end, sir?'\n\n'Protection, so you may reach your destination,' he replies. He pauses. 'Do you know where you are going?' he asks.\n\nShe wants to say north. Instead, she says, 'Yes.'\n\nHe nods. He unclasps his helm and removes it. His face is grave and deadpan.\n\n'You know this voice, then,' she asks, 'to give it such credence?'\n\n'I do. You know it too?'\n\n'I know that it knows me.'\n\nHe frowns. 'Well, it has brought me to you, by means of words and sigils that I chose not to deny. You are now under the protection of my banner.'\n\n'All of us, sir?'\n\nSigismund's frown deepens. 'How many are you?' he asks.\n\n'Everyone,' she says. 'Everyone that is still alive.'\n\n'So be it,' says the Emperor's Champion.\n\n6:xxv\n\nLessons two "}
{"text":"s it. His face is grave and deadpan.\n\n'You know this voice, then,' she asks, 'to give it such credence?'\n\n'I do. You know it too?'\n\n'I know that it knows me.'\n\nHe frowns. 'Well, it has brought me to you, by means of words and sigils that I chose not to deny. You are now under the protection of my banner.'\n\n'All of us, sir?'\n\nSigismund's frown deepens. 'How many are you?' he asks.\n\n'Everyone,' she says. 'Everyone that is still alive.'\n\n'So be it,' says the Emperor's Champion.\n\n6:xxv\n\nLessons two and three\n\n'You would rather die, brother?' asks Ferrus. 'Well, you will. You will die.' He pauses. 'Sorry. But you knew that already, didn't you?'\n\n'Yes,' says Sanguinius.\n\nNot a word Ferrus Manus has spoken has been accompanied by any movement of his mouth. Indeed, his mouth seems clamped, and his jaw clenched, as though he is trying to withstand intolerable pain.\n\n'You know how?' he asks, the depth of distance hollowing his words.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'But you came anyway?'\n\n'Again, yes,' Sanguinius replies. 'Because the how doesn't matter, does it? What matters is the why.'\n\nFerrus seems to smile, though the expression is there and gone again in a flicker.\n\n'I knew we could count on you, Sanguinius,' his voice says from somewhere. 'You understand.'\n\n'I do,' says Sanguinius. 'Does he? Does... Horus?'\n\n'Not even slightly,' Ferrus hisses.\n\nFrom somewhere in the darkness beyond him, there is a distant, mangled groan.\n\nSanguinius' sword comes up sharply, into a proffer, ready to fight.\n\n'Who is there?' Sanguinius asks. 'Who is in pain?'\n\n'Everyone,' says Ferrus. His lips say the word a second after his voice has. 'You are. I am. Pain is the state of life, and death is no release. You need to know that. Lesson two. After what we think of as death, the pain is worse. It devours. They devour you forever. They tear your soul-'\n\n'What are you?' Sanguinius says. 'I do not think you are my lost brother at all.'\n\nFerrus pauses, and a long and dreadful sigh fills the darkness. Out of that drawn-out sigh, his voice emerges again.\n\n'I am,' he says. His lips form other words, contradictory, and then curl into a grimace. 'Horus, in his madness, brought me here for sport. But now I am here, by force of will, I will endure this torment and stay here. I wouldn't not be here for you. My intent is to guide you.'\n\n'Guide me?' Sanguinius asks. 'Or lure me?'\n\nScreams, distant and shrill, echo through the darkness from far away. Sanguinius cannot imagine what torment could have produced them. He ignores the feeling that the screams are familiar.\n\n'Guide you,' Ferrus insists. 'I am dead. Lost. Damned. I was headstrong and foolish, but I can teach you, so you can learn from my mistake. When all's said and done, we're brothers. You and I, brother, we are the start and finish of this. I was the death at the beginning, you are the life at the end.'\n\nHe gestures for Sanguinius to follow him, and starts to walk the length of the vault into the draping gloom. Sanguinius hesitates.\n\n'A family comes together for a death or a birth,' Ferrus murmurs. 'This could be both.'\n\n'Wait,' says Sanguinius. He trails his hulking brother a few steps, passing between the rows of silent stone caskets. 'This is the way I came.'\n\nFerrus pauses, and glances back.\n\n'This is the way I came,' Sanguinius repeats, flexing his grip on his sword. 'You're leading me back-'\n\n'No,' says Ferrus.\n\n'Where, then?' asks Sanguinius. 'You said you'd guide me, but this is not the way. I came this way. You're leading me ba-'\n\n'No,' says the Gorgon. There's a hint of impatience, as though the anger imprisoned within the nercrodermal shell of his willpower cannot be quelled much longer. His gaze speaks of frustration at his brother's struggle to comprehend what he has been told.\n\n'Horus has knotted materia into a tangled ball. I told you this. Direction is meaningless. This ship, brother, the Throneworld, the Palace, the realms of warp and Chaos... they are all fused and entwined. Don't look for sense or logic. There is none. Lesson three. Nothing makes sense here. If you want to reach him, you will. It doesn't matter which way you go.'\n\nFerrus turns away and faces the impenetrable shadows.\n\n'You meeting him is inevitable,' he says.\n\nThe Gorgon reaches out, and his gleaming iron hands seem to take hold of the very darkness. Strength shudders through his shoulders and broad back as he begins to split the darkness open. It is as though he is tearing night in half.\n\nSanguinius takes a wary step forwards. Shreds and tatters of torn shadow drift past him like burned paper. Ferrus Manus is carving a channel into the blackness, his quicksilver hands working and folding the stuff of night like hot metal in a smithy. Ahead of them is a glimmer of twilight, pale as quenched steel. Sanguinius can make out bent girders, sundered bulkheads, damaged hatches. The lightless interior of a murdered ship.\n\n'Is he here?' he asks.\n\n'If you want him to be,' says Ferrus as he peels the darkness back. 'It's up to you. But if he is here, you need to be ready.'\n\n6:xxvi\n\nVeteran steel\n\nA limb like a tree trunk lashes out, and swipes him aside. Thane flies through the air, hits one of the open doors, cracks it off its hinges, and crashes to the floor.\n\nThe thing comes for them. It's had to hunch its bulk to even fit in the tunnel. Antlers, like those of a giant stag, scrape and squeal against the ceiling. Its eyes are bars of vivid amber light, like sickly neon. It stretches its huge, tree-trunk limbs out ahead of it, hauling and clawing itself forward like a potholer. Its hands, each eight-fingered, are as big as grown men. Its vast goat-snout brays, spraying spittle and clouds of steam. Where the fat, purple lips and dirty chisel-teeth part, they expose other rows of teeth, then more rows behind those: serrated fish-teeth, crocodilian spikes, the translucent fangs of benthic predators. The tongue is a glistening blue slab of meat as thick as a boarding ramp.\n\nThane rolls clear of the doorway half a second before the Neverborn comes through it. Both doors, one already damaged by Thane's impact, shear out of their frames, crumpling like gold foil. Part of the architrave collapses, caught on the spearing antlers. The great head and shoulders bulge through the doorway. The arms lunge forward, strike the ground, then rake backwards for grip. The dirty, cracked talons of the immense hands puncture the polished ouslite and then score deep, parallel trenches in the gleaming stone. Molwae and Demeny stumble backwards.\n\nBerendol does not. He goes into it, face to face, swinging his greatsword in what seem like slow, lazy loops. He leaves long, savage slices in the Neverborn's extended forearms, slices that instantly well and gush blood, which spatters the floor and matts the thing's mangy fur and spider-leg hairs.\n\nThe Neverborn brays again. It gropes and snatches for him. Berendol sidesteps a gigantic, fumbling hand, puts a gash through the ball of a thumb, another, deeper, through a bicep, then comes in at the thing's roaring face, and hacks its cheek and its brow. They have to kill it before it hauls itself into the atrium. Its huge form is pinned and squeezed by the narrow service tunnel. If it pulls itself clear, the lofty atrium will give it space to rise, to stand, to-\n\nBerendol's greatsword cuts more deep lacerations in its snout and brow.\n\nBlinded by its own drizzling blood, the Neverborn snaps its huge head forward and seizes Berendol in its mouth.\n\n6:xxvii\n\nA book\n\n'I have worked here for many years,' says the archivist. 'I never thought any of these works were more than allegory.'\n\n'None of us did,' says Sindermann.\n\n'None of us, sir?' asks the archivist meekly.\n\n'Oh, one or two, perhaps,' Sindermann says. 'A few who glimpsed.'\n\n'You're thinking of Keeler,' says Mauer.\n\nSindermann nods. 'And who listened to her, eh? We locked her up as a mad prophet, peddling dangerous ideas.'\n\n'Aren't dangerous ideas why you came here?' asks the archivist.\n\n'Yes!' exclaims Sindermann, and gets to his feet. 'Come, my friends. We can sit here and slowly freeze to death, or we could do something.'\n\n'Get out of here?' suggests Mauer. 'Warn someone? Get help?'\n\n'Warn who? Get help from where?' Sindermann asks. 'You heard those horns that blew after Garviel left us.'\n\nThey'd all heard them. Even deep in the bowels of the Hall of Leng, the warning horns had been deafening. The booming roar of the Palace announcing it was no longer a palace, no longer safe, no longer unviolated and secure.\n\n'At least it's quiet here,' Sindermann says. 'So let's get to work while we await Garviel's return.'\n\nThe three of them rise and wander back along the stacks. The mounting cold seems to be sucking the light out of the fittings, and even dimming the sound of their voices. It's harder to read the titles on the spines of books, and the display lights have failed entirely above some artworks.\n\n'It's too cold,' says Mauer, the vapour of her breath accompanying her words.\n\n'I could try to adjust the climate system,' says the archivist.\n\n'Or we could light a fire?' Mauer suggests. The archivist looks at her in furious horror.\n\nMauer shrugs sarcastically, and gestures at the shelves around them. 'Well, there's plenty of dry kindling,' she says.\n\n'I don't want to be part of a society that burns books,' says Sindermann.\n\n'But one that bans them and keeps them hidden is fine with you?' sneers Mauer.\n\n'These works have survived an astonishingly long time,' says the archivist quietly. 'In most cases, they are the only examples of particular works left extant. Attempt to burn these, mam, and I will kill you.'\n\nMauer looks at the archivist in surprise. It's quite the boldest thing the young woman has said since they arrived. Mauer is a head taller, and armed with a gun. The archivist is quite defiant.\n\n'I was joking,' says Mauer.\n\n'But that's the spirit,' says Sindermann. 'Human defiance in the face of wanton desecration. There's hope for us yet while human beings like this yo"}
{"text":" 'In most cases, they are the only examples of particular works left extant. Attempt to burn these, mam, and I will kill you.'\n\nMauer looks at the archivist in surprise. It's quite the boldest thing the young woman has said since they arrived. Mauer is a head taller, and armed with a gun. The archivist is quite defiant.\n\n'I was joking,' says Mauer.\n\n'But that's the spirit,' says Sindermann. 'Human defiance in the face of wanton desecration. There's hope for us yet while human beings like this young woman have some fight left in them.' He turns to the nearest shelves, peering at the titles. 'And she's right, of course. These things are historically precious, yes, but they might also be our salvation. If they save but one life, they have proved their worth.'\n\nHe pulls some volumes out. Diachronic studies, a Consolidation of Mathmeta, isosephic primers and almanacs of gemetria, a study of Crytophasia...\n\nHe stops suddenly. He stares at one small, leather-bound book, no larger than a psalter. Other books slide from his hands and thump to the floor like stunned birds.\n\n'What is it?' asks Mauer.\n\n'It...' he begins. He can't say the words. Embossed on the cover is the title plate.\n\nThe Book of Samus.\n\n6:xxviii\n\nThe One Who Walks Behind You\n\nLoken doesn't hesitate. He doesn't try to fight. He doesn't wait for the hideous giant to fully emerge from the river of blood.\n\nHe turns. Runs.\n\nHe moves as fast as he can, wading through the thick, viscous liquid, splashing droplets of blood and specks of gore over himself.\n\nThe voice cackles behind him, amused, echoing along the service tunnel after him.\n\n'Samus is my name. You know it. It knows you. You have always known it.'\n\nIt's the old voice. The same wet-as-marrow, dry-as-bone cackle he heard in the Whisperheads. It's the rasp of the daemon. But it's other voices too, many others, all twisted together, like plies bound to make rope. Jubal, the Sigillite, Mersadie, a hundred voices, a thousand. He can hear Mersadie's tone quite distinctly. At the grim pitch of the Solar War, the daemon moved through her, used her voice and form, and then destroyed her. She's haunted Loken ever since, a ghost no longer able to tell his private story. Her voice haunts him now.\n\nHe wants to turn and fight it. Kill it. Kill it for what it did to Mersadie Oliton and the whole Solar Realm.\n\nLoken keeps moving instead. He doesn't look back. He's too aware of the fact that the gloomy, blood-flooded service tunnel is no place to stand his ground and fight a beast like this, head-on. He needs to turn the ship to his advantage.\n\nSomehow. Somehow. He can remember the ship's layout perfectly, if the layout hasn't shifted and twisted too far.\n\nAnd he knows that one glance over his shoulder will end him. One glimpse of that thing, and he will be done.\n\n'I am the one who walks behind you,' laughs the voice.\n\nThen stay behind me.\n\nHe runs as fast as his body will propel him, fighting the drag and encumbrance of the frothy, curdled tide. He doesn't glance back, not even when he hears the surging splash of a great shape starting to move and blunder after him, not when he hears the clang of a towering head and shoulders striking and scraping against the overhead pipework as it starts to give chase, not even when a racing wave catches him and surges past, displaced by the mass moving at his heels.\n\nThe bow wave nearly knocks him down. He steadies himself and keeps running, the red liquid sloshing and churning.\n\n'Samus. That is the only name you'll hear,' the voiceful of voices echoes. Was the glimpse he saw of the Sigillite before the daemon appeared real, or just another of its lies?\n\nThirty metres. If Loken's eidetic memory has not been tricked, it's just another thirty metres to the outflow. Twenty. He starts to feel the current against his legs, the tidal flow of the liquid. Ten. The rolling waves driven by the monster's advance slap at the tunnel walls and break around his thighs.\n\n'Look out! Samus is here!'\n\nThere. To the left. The grille of the outflow drain, half-submerged, choked by the sheer quantity of fluid flooding the tunnel, clogged and silted by clots of blood and tissue.\n\nHe doesn't look back. He scythes at it with his chainsword. The whirring teeth shear through metal, and spray blood in a huge gout. The sword coughs and smokes as he is forced to submerge it to cut more deeply. He smells blood cooking and burning, a vile brown fume...\n\nThe grille collapses. Immediately, Loken feels the abrupt increase in flow, the heave of current against him. He lets go of it, and plunges down into the blood.\n\nThe blood carries him. The blood of his lost and damned brothers, probably. It slams him into the drain, sucking, gurgling, drumming, rushing. His limbs and armour grind and squeal against the walls of the outflow as he is dragged into it. Something huge - a clawed hand the size of an adult human - slams into the mouth of the outflow a second too late, buckling metal and denting the tunnel wall.\n\nEverything goes red, then black. Drowned in blood, rattled like a lodge medal in a can, deafened by the muffled rush of the torrent, he is borne away, carried like a dead twig down a drain-chute.\n\nThe outflow spits him out into a flooded sump. He thrashes, surfacing, and half-kicks, half-clambers to the edge, then hauls himself onto the walkway. Blood drools off him. He has somehow held onto his chainsword. Behind him, the blood evacuating from the service tunnel is sheeting from the mouth of the outflow, raising a pink mist.\n\nHe starts to move, slippery, gore-wet from head to toe. The sump is a huge space, the bottom of a deep, through-deck engineering shaft. It soars above him, strutted and bridged at intervals by frames of pipework and ducting. He can see stale light far above.\n\nHe clamps his chainsword, and starts to climb, scaling a service ladder bracketed to the wall. Below him, the cistern of blood, its level rising rapidly, starts to churn and froth. It becomes frenzied. Something erupts from the whirlpool into the air, like a great sea creature surfacing.\n\n'The only name you'll hear!' a voice booms up at him.\n\nSamus pursues Loken through the bowels of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n6:xxix\n\nWords from the Whisperheads\n\nSindermann opens the book, his fingers shaking.\n\n'I can't,' he says. 'I can't read it.'\n\n'Give it to me,' says Mauer. She snatches it from him, opens it, and starts to flick through the pages. 'Why did this one catch your eye?' she asks.\n\nSindermann, his mind plunged into an ice-bath of memories of the Whisperheads, can't find any words to answer her.\n\nMauer starts to read.\n\n'\"Look at their pathetic legions, their ruptured hosts, their walking corpses, living to kill and killing to kill. There is no longer any point to their psychopathic exertions or their hysterical sacrifices. Nothing remains to be won or lost...\"'\n\n6:xxx\n\nBehind, beside\n\nLoken doesn't look down. He climbs the ladder, hand-over-hand, his wet grip squeaking on the metal rungs. He hears metal shriek and tear. It's climbing after him, hauling its huge bulk out of the liquid and up the wall, using its claws to anchor it. The whole wall of the shaft shivers under its moving bulk.\n\n'My name is Samus.'\n\nThe voice-of-voices echoes around him. Loken doesn't look down. He doesn't stop climbing.\n\nHe feels the ladder jar and start to move.\n\nIt's seized the ladder further down. It's tearing it off the wall, peeling it away from its brackets from the bottom up. Retaining bolts shear and snap like gunshots. Stanchions scrape and grind. The ladder starts to twist and buckle.\n\nAs it collapses and falls away, Loken leaps. He's thirty metres up at least. He launches himself sideways off the failing, falling ladderwork, arms outstretched.\n\nHe almost misses. He hits the nearest bridge of ducts and pipework with his chest and face, an impact so hard it feels like a bolt-round, and somehow clings on. He claws for grip, legs swinging. Beside him, a long and contorting section of ladder falls away, shorn from the wall, toppling into the cistern with a prolonged screech of bending metal.\n\nHis legs mill. His blood-slick hands fight for a firm grasp. Slowly, too slowly, he drags himself onto the top of the bundled metal pipes and hydraulic tubes that form the bridge.\n\nThe thing is coming up the wall below him, ascending sheer metal.\n\nLoken gets up. Balanced, arms outstretched, he starts to cross the bridge to the far side of the huge shaft. The pipework judders as the beast gets its hand on it. Loken adjusts his balance, and reaches the other side. A small platform, no more than a ledge. There's a blast hatch over the pipe run that he doesn't have time to open.\n\nHe finally turns.\n\nThere it is. It is hauling its immense, sinewy mass onto the other end of the pipe bridge, which groans beneath it. It is a matted, dripping bulk, plastered with blood. He can see only its eyes.\n\n'I am the one who walks behind you,' it bubbles gleefully.\n\nLoken doesn't answer. He raises his left hand, and simply beckons, a taunting challenge.\n\nDelighted, it clambers across the swaying bridge towards him, the grip of its talons puncturing the pipes, releasing squirts of oil and hydraulic fluid, and billowing jets of pressurised steam. The whole bridge bows and creaks.\n\nLoken's chainsword sweeps off his back in his right hand. He double-grips it, blade down, and begins to saw its shrieking blade through the pipes, struts and tubes of the bridge. Sparks fly, fluid hoses out with arterial force, metal howls. The air around him clouds with smoke and steel shavings.\n\nThe Neverborn snarls in anger and increases its speed, clawing towards him like an ape along a flexing branch.\n\nLoken digs further, his entire strength behind the cut. The chainsword begins to sputter and overheat, losing teeth as the blade burns out and jams. He digs harder.\n\nEntertained, the Neverborn scrabbles closer and reaches out. The chainblade wedges fast, seized up and ruined, with half of the bridge left to se"}
{"text":"orce, metal howls. The air around him clouds with smoke and steel shavings.\n\nThe Neverborn snarls in anger and increases its speed, clawing towards him like an ape along a flexing branch.\n\nLoken digs further, his entire strength behind the cut. The chainsword begins to sputter and overheat, losing teeth as the blade burns out and jams. He digs harder.\n\nEntertained, the Neverborn scrabbles closer and reaches out. The chainblade wedges fast, seized up and ruined, with half of the bridge left to sever.\n\nBut the damage is enough. The partial cut combines with the weight of the daemon as it crawls onto Loken's half of the span. The pipework shears. Cables snap. Struts tear. The bridge folds, shredding away at Loken's part-cut end. There is an immense squall of ruined, ripping metal. Something else screams too.\n\nThe daemon.\n\nThe pipework bridge drops into the gulf below, its shattered, rotating structure sparking and smashing against the walls of the shaft. The ruined chainsword falls with it.\n\nAnd so does Samus.\n\nLoken watches the shapes plunge away for a second. He doesn't wait to see the deluge of upthrown blood that marks their impact. He turns to the blast hatch, clears the manual bolts, forces open the secured cover on the lock mechanism, and enters his clearance code.\n\nThe hatch unlocks. He heaves it open and climbs through.\n\nBeyond, an access hallway, hull-adjacent, port-side. Through-Access (Port) 511723, his precise memory tells him. It's quiet and empty, the glow-globes on half power, burning with a weak, golden light.\n\nHe starts walking, moving forward. His armour is scabbed with dried blood. He feels naked without his chainsword, so he draws his bolt pistol. The hallway is so quiet. There is a thin coat of dust on everything, as though no one has been here in a thousand years. His visor hunts for contact, heat sources, motion.\n\nAn impact of huge force slams him into the wall from the side.\n\nDazed, he tries to turn. He's lost his bolter. There's nothing on his visor.\n\n'I am the one who walks beside you,' says Samus in his ear.\n\n6:xxxi\n\nNot entirely a city\n\nZybes finds another, and gestures them over. Another loop of red thread, this one tied around a battered lead drainpipe.\n\n'It's one of mine,' he whispers as he examines it. 'Definitely one of my knots.' When he looks up at Oll, Oll can see the bewildered terror in the man's eyes. His knots, but knots he has never yet tied, made in lengths of twine that he never cut, looped around posts and pipes and statues in a city he has never been to before.\n\nThey are retracing steps they have never walked. Their curious odyssey has looped back on itself, like a length of thread.\n\nIs it a city? Oll keeps finding himself thinking of it as a city, but it's not really a city. Or not entirely a city. It's many things, all threaded together in an order and sequence that make no sense.\n\nIt's an eerie place, dim and grey. There is a constant heaviness, as though a storm is on its way. The sky is overcast and white, a haze through which, now and then, Oll can make out distant dark forms that seem too big to be buildings, yet too still to be anything else. A faint odour fills the air, a smell of damp stone, and in it, something sweeter and more organic, the unmistakable scent of decomposition just beginning. It's not strong, but it is everywhere, because the air is heavy and perfectly still. There is not a breath of wind.\n\nAnd yet, there is the sound of wind. A moaning, a low and fluctuating drone that is barely audible, as though an autumn gale is sighing around the gables, chimney stacks and dropping roofs. From time to time, they hear the rustle of dead leaves, wind-blown, or the groan of a door swinging on its rotten hinges, or the rattle of an old window trembling in its frame.\n\nBut there is no wind to stir these things, nor any sign of other cause.\n\nOll feels the tension in his throat, and the tic in his eyelid. There's nothing and no one here, yet at every step, he feels as though they are being watched. He sees his reflection in the dirty glass of old windows, and sometimes those reflections seem to look back with an intent of their own. His peripheral vision crawls with scuttling movement, but whenever he turns to look, there's nothing to see. Something is close by, breathing and observing. He wonders if it could be the city itself, the city... or whatever this place is supposed to be.\n\nParts of it are a city, certainly. But other parts are the other city, the great, arrogant Palace where their journey both ended and began. Oll can see traces of it everywhere: sections of ground where the dirty broken cobbles suddenly become stretches of polished sectile flooring or tracts of gleaming ouslite; patches of wall that gleam with auramite and figures of intertwined Imperialis crests; high arches, some still suspending electro-flambeaux that glimmer with dying power; columns, marble pillars, wall-hangings and tapestries of rich design showing scenes from legend, swaying in the sleepy breeze; gold and alabaster statues that loom in unexpected corners, some set askew on broken ground, some crusted with lichen that would have taken years to grow. The statues seem to watch them too.\n\nThe Emperor's Palace is here, in part. It is present, yet not present. It is like being backstage in a great theatre, where the scenery and flats of one tableau are jostled in among those of another while the stage is re-dressed.\n\nThe other scene, similarly represented in haphazard form, is the flagship of the traitor. The Vengeful Spirit. Its drab architecture and martial ornament, both designed to project power, are interleaved with the imposing golden structures of the Palace, like two strands of DNA woven together to produce some strange chimera. The long companions wander past air-gates and blast hatches, and stretches of bulkhead wall that still bear the stencilled serial code of their deck position. They creep across panels of deck-plate grating, and can sometimes hear the distant mutter of air-scrubbers and climate systems.\n\nIt is ship. It is Palace. It is both and neither. Vestigial structures of the flagship seem to dominate, but there is more besides. The nameless city, into which the relics of ship and Palace are set, which seems to have grown around and between them. It is old and mouldering, raised by long-dead hands in brick and stone, in peg-tile and wood, a sloping, jumbled, crumbling place of decay and antiquity. Cobbled, potholed streets wind between ugly, unplanned buildings. Tiled roofs slope, abut and overlap, sometimes baring their rafters like fangs. Windows, made of thick, bottle-bottom glass, are fogged with condensation, or spiderwebbed with cracks. Gutters droop. Grass and weeds grow between loose bricks. The sky is pale. Everything is grey. There is a hint of rain on its way, but Oll's sure it's rain that forever threatens but never actually falls.\n\nIt reminds him of somewhere. He remembers the cities of his long lifetime, and finds echoes. It resembles the warren of unkempt slums that packed the dirty hearts of long-vanished capitals. It reminds him of the gloomy rookeries of timber-beamed merchant burghs. It reminds him of Praag and-\n\nHe realises it reminds him of everywhere. It is everywhere he's been, and everywhere he hasn't. It is a place that has slipped free of its geography, wandered from its foundations, and finally pooled here, carrying with it parts of Palace and ship like wayward flotsam.\n\nOr it's a jumble of places that is still deciding what it's going to become.\n\nIt scares him deeply. Its quiet emptiness, its dormancy, feels malevolent. It feels as though it is lying in wait for him, marking its time, preparing to pounce. If it's been waiting for him, then it's waited a long time. He wonders if it's been waiting for him, specifically, as though every path and route, taken or not taken, was always going to lead to it. There is no turning from it.\n\n6:xxxii\n\n'Look!'\n\nLoken tries to turn, to reach for a blade. The daemon's paw catches him again, and sends him flying down the hallway. Loken bounces off a bulkhead, and slides to a halt. He can taste blood in his mouth. He tries to rise, to turn, to face the thing advancing on him.\n\n'I am all around you!' Samus announces, as it strikes him again from behind instead. The concussion cannons Loken face forward into the wall. He blacks out for a second, then realises he is being dragged along the deck on his back by the ankle. He tries to kick free. He fails.\n\nSamus picks him up, almost crushing his torso. Loken is assailed by the stink of rot, the odours of disease, the smells of cancers and dementias and bacterial phages that only animals can detect. The daemon mashes him against the hull wall, face first, and pins him there. He can hear it breathing, like the bellows of a vast furnace.\n\nA huge paw extends into his peripheral vision, filthy talons extended. The claws rip into the wall beside him, shredding it like damp paper so that it comes apart as pulpy sludge. It tears a hole in the ship's hull, through the ship's thick, armoured skin, the kind of rupture that only a penetrator missile should be able to make.\n\nThere is no decompression. No violent slam of air. Just the gaping, ragged hole, billowing fibrous strands and tatters like ashes in the wind. Light glares in.\n\nThe daemon moves Loken like a doll, dragging him in front of the hull breach, forcing him to look out. Forcing him to see-\n\n'Look!' the Neverborn hisses in his ear.\n\nLoken sees the world far below. Terra, consumed by fire, throbbing with a terrible radiance. The searing, radioactive glare nearly blinds him. He sees the planet, suffused in a cloak of embers, the burning scald of destruction, the halo of empyric light surrounding the expiring Throneworld like a poisonous crown. He sees fleets ablaze, and columns of smoke, spears of lightning and darts of plasma. He sees a fallen city and, across it, entwined with it, another city from another "}
{"text":"ses in his ear.\n\nLoken sees the world far below. Terra, consumed by fire, throbbing with a terrible radiance. The searing, radioactive glare nearly blinds him. He sees the planet, suffused in a cloak of embers, the burning scald of destruction, the halo of empyric light surrounding the expiring Throneworld like a poisonous crown. He sees fleets ablaze, and columns of smoke, spears of lightning and darts of plasma. He sees a fallen city and, across it, entwined with it, another city from another place, that has burrowed into it like the roots of a tree, and fused with it like a parasite. He sees the appalling immensity of the outer void, the ever-blackness, the slide and swirl and flutter of the things residing in that darkness, things too big to fully see or comprehend. He sees everything, all that is and was and will be.\n\n'Look at their pathetic legions,' say the voices of Samus, 'their ruptured hosts, their walking corpses, living to kill and killing to kill. There is no longer any point to their psychopathic exertions or their hysterical sacrifices. Nothing remains to be won or lost. Not now, not for them. Nothing survives of their motives, reasons or agendas.'\n\n'N-no...' Loken rasps, trying to turn his head away. His eyes won't close.\n\n'Look! Do they not see it too? The past is gone, and there is no future. There is only now, and there is only war, and the war will burn for as long as there is fuel to feed it.'\n\nIt chuckles in his ear, right behind him.\n\n'Which won't be long.'\n\n6:xxxiii\n\nMortal remains\n\nThe heart of the ship is quite dead. It is as though they are entering the innards of a cadaver that has mummified to a husk. Stanchions and walls look less like decaying plasteel, and more like dead flesh and meat that has calcified and fossilised. Hatches lean in their frames like perished leather, and in places, the ridges of the decking seem like desiccated vertebrae. Everything is bone-dry and brittle, and the light is dim, and fogged by a slow, lazy haze of drifting dust motes, some of which catch the spare light and glitter briefly.\n\n'You said...' Sanguinius begins. 'You said he would be here.'\n\nFerrus Manus looks around uneasily.\n\n'He should be,' he says.\n\n'Then where?' Sanguinius asks. The pain of his wound aches in his side, and he can taste blood in his mouth.\n\nHe follows the Gorgon along the narrow path his first-lost brother has forged from the enveloping night. Their footsteps creak and crunch on the perished, powdery deck beneath them.\n\nThe constant whispers move with them, filling the shadows. Now and then, groans and shrieks echo out of the darkness beyond them. Some seem to come from far away. Others, shrill and sudden, seem alarmingly close.\n\n'Something is here,' says Sanguinius. 'What are those sounds?'\n\n'The cries of the damned,' says the Gorgon ahead of him, his voice as thin and distant as the screams. 'Mostly dead shells. The husks of those who have gone.'\n\nEncarmine shivers in Sanguinius' hand. He realises he is gripping it too tightly. He strains to see, but there's nothing to see except shadow. The wails of anguish ringing out of the blackness are deformed by extremities of pain, yet there is no visible origin for any of them.\n\n'I know those voices,' he whispers.\n\n'You do,' says Ferrus.\n\n'Our... brothers,' Sanguinius murmurs in horror.\n\n'Yes,' says Ferrus. 'Those, like me, who have fallen. And the mortal remains of those who have become other things.'\n\nA fresh scream swirls the dust. There is a rage in it. Sanguinius knows that rage.\n\nAngron...\n\n'The warp devours our souls,' the Gorgon says. 'Those lost, and those discarded alike. Magnus, the Pale King, Alpharius, the Red Angel... it spares no one. Death is not release, brother. It is unending torment. Lesson two, remember?'\n\nAnother shriek, oddly modulated by excruciating pain. Another familiar voice.\n\n'None of them are threats to you,' says Ferrus lightly. 'They wanted to be here, like me. They wanted to watch.'\n\n'No matter which side they stood on?' Sanguinius asks, taut with dismay.\n\n'Of course.'\n\n'Who else?' Sanguinius asks. He barely dares to, because the answer will hurt. Some of the sounds of pain are too vague to discern, faint wailing and plangent, drawn-out gasps. Who has fallen that he doesn't know about? Is Rogal here? What of the others, the ones they were counting on? He had made himself believe they were coming, but who can say what fate might have befallen them since they last stood together. Is one of these shades Roboute? Is one of them Russ? The Lion? Corax? Do these screams represent not just brothers dead, but hope too? Does salvation lurk here, wrapped in its winding sheet, forever thwarted?\n\nFerrus, trudging on, makes no answer. Dust motes drift.\n\n'What is it you all think you're going to witness?' Sanguinius asks.\n\n'The end,' says Ferrus. 'The death. Your last great act. There is one thing that unites us apart from blood, and blood spilled. We're all here, in the end, because of him.'\n\n'Horus?'\n\n'This is where he's brought us, brother,' says Ferrus, with a sad smile, 'in triumph and defeat, which look exactly alike from where we stand. Horus has won, the warp has triumphed. There's no point any of us bickering about rights and wrongs. What's done is done, no matter which side any of us took.\n\n'Or wish we hadn't,' he adds. 'Or wish we'd had a choice in it.'\n\n6:xxxiv\n\nExoplanar breach\n\nThe rows of teeth crack into Berendol's torso and pelvis. He doesn't stop hacking. His blade rips an eye, and the thing shrieks, spitting him out. Berendol rolls, broken and drenched in bloody mucus, across the atrium's cracked floor.\n\nEnraged, the Neverborn beast gropes for him. It finds Molwae and Demeny instead. They've regained their wits, and come in swinging, side by side, putting themselves between the half-trapped beast and Berendol. It tries to haul more of itself into the atrium, deforming the doorway, straining its huge shoulders against the frame. It scrabbles for grip with its oversized hands, but the polished floor is slick with its blood. Molwae's tactical spatha rakes deep across its left wrist, cutting an artery from which pressurised blood begins to pump and squirt, spattering the oil paintings and dappling the ceiling and far-end wall. The jetting blood, with the laminar force of a power hose, catches Molwae and throws him over.\n\nThane's on his feet by then. He comes in like thunder, cracking knuckles and talons with his hammer-blows. The thing's lurching antlers scrape the ceiling, tangle with electro-chandeliers that tear free and come crashing down, ripping several of the great canvases off the wall. Molwae, upright again, spears his sword through the palm of one vast hand and pins it to the atrium wall. It tries to wrench free, but the spatha is through its hand-bones like a crucifixion nail. Molwae puts his weight and power into it, keeping the sword in place.\n\nDemeny sees this, and turns to the other hand. His sword has broken against a raking talon, so he scoops up Berendol's fallen greatsword instead and, charging, runs it through the other hand, through the pad of the thumb, pinning it to the opposite wall.\n\nIts shoulders wedged in the doorway, its hands staked to the walls, the Neverborn howls and struggles. Thane runs right up to its braying mouth, and brings his hammer down, two-handed, in a pile-driving blow that cracks the front of the cranium.\n\nDying, brain bruised and ruptured, it goes into spasms, and starts to thrash. Plaster chunks fall from the ceiling and burst like sugar-icing on the blood-wet floor. Thane ducks one scything, maddened branch of antlers. Molwae does not. A tine the length of a javelin impales him through the chest and lifts him off his feet. He's dead before the Neverborn's head drops with a sickening crunch and the antler slopes to slide him off.\n\nThe stink of gore is appalling. Thane is soaked in it. He works his hammer free with a grunt and pulls it out of the dented bone. He turns, controlling his breathing, and looks at Molwae, dead on his back.\n\nDemeny draws Berendol's greatsword out, letting the giant hand flop to the floor like a filled body bag. He limps over to the veteran.\n\nBerendol has not risen since the thing spat him out. The trauma to his armour, from thigh to throat, and the extent of his wounds, is obvious even from where Thane is standing.\n\nDemeny kneels down. He unclasps Berendol's helm. The Huscarl is still breathing. He has aspirated blood inside his visor, and his face is a red mask out of which heavy eyes blink wearily.\n\n'Huscarl,' says Demeny, and offers the sword, hilt first. A man should always die with his sword.\n\n'You take it, prentice-brother,' Berendol says. Then nothing else, ever again.\n\n6:xxxv\n\nFragments (no way in, no way out)\n\nBeaten to the point of death, the final fortress flinches and shudders. It is suddenly carrying massive internal injuries. It is bleeding out inside.\n\nSensing this, sensing their prey weaken and falter, the enemy hosts around the Delphic redouble their efforts. Behind them, across the ravaged Palatine and the overrun ruinscapes of the Dominions beyond, the rest of Horus Lupercal's vast invasion force surges forward to follow and support the wall-breaking vanguard. This tide, this numberless and abominable tide, will annihilate any loyalist forces left in the burning Palatine, engulfing all resistance in its efforts to reach the crumbling walls.\n\nBlood streams down the haggard face of the final fortress. It fills the cavities and chambers inside it.\n\nHonfler yells to keep his companies in line as the traitor forces surge down the Martian Approaches towards them, but he has no companies left. Their losses are now sixty per cent. The surviving battle-brothers, weathering a torrent of shots, have been driven back against the ice-clagged engine gates, leaving a carpet of their dead behind them.\n\nBolt-rounds tear into them, and smash against the gates at their backs, showering them with flame and shrapnel.\n\n'I will no"}
{"text":"ies and chambers inside it.\n\nHonfler yells to keep his companies in line as the traitor forces surge down the Martian Approaches towards them, but he has no companies left. Their losses are now sixty per cent. The surviving battle-brothers, weathering a torrent of shots, have been driven back against the ice-clagged engine gates, leaving a carpet of their dead behind them.\n\nBolt-rounds tear into them, and smash against the gates at their backs, showering them with flame and shrapnel.\n\n'I will not die like this, son-of-Dorn,' Sartak snarls.\n\n'You have an alternative in mind, Wolf?' Honfler yells back.\n\n'Charge them,' Sartak replies without hesitation. He fires his last bolter shell and tosses the empty weapon aside. 'Charge the bastards. It's the last thing they'll expect.'\n\nEnemy fire tears through the men beside him. A Salamander drops, blown open. Rewa Medusi is thrown against the gates, his head and chest destroyed, and slides to the ground.\n\n'Impressive deeds?' Honfler growls.\n\n'Impressive deeds, praetor-captain,' Sartak replies. They won't last long, but they'll take more with them. 'Just keep up with me,' Sartak says, unshipping his war-axe. 'Can you do that?'\n\nHonfler raises his sword to give the order.\n\nThe postern hatch behind him smashes open. Something long and boneless, like a tentacle limb, whips out faster than the eye can track. It grabs Honfler from behind, and slams him through the hatch so hard and so fast flecks of yellow paint mark the dented frame where his arms and head have struck it. He's just gone. Gone in an instant. Gone into the blackness.\n\nSartak yells his name. He grabs up the praetor-captain's fallen gladius and, sword in one hand and axe in the other, lunges mindlessly towards the hatchway to find him.\n\nMore tentacles lash out to meet him.\n\nThe Sanctum Imperialis winces. It rocks, like a grievously wounded man too tired and hurt to remain on his feet. Perhaps it is only still standing because of the architecture of the Inevitable City that is extruding and boring through its fabric, winding like a parasite through its host, keeping it upright when it is all but dead?\n\nThe long companions are all uneasy. John Grammaticus knows they all have the same sense of being watched, and that the fidgeting scuttle haunts the edges of their vision. Even Actae seems jumpy and distracted by things even her mind cannot quite see. John knows how vulnerable they are. They have no weapons. They've unpacked and ditched the negation crate. Oll has pocketed his silver compass, jet pendulum and his notebook, along with the knife. It's the only thing of power they have, but John doubts it'll be all that handy in a fight. Leetu has recovered his tarot deck, still troubled by the Dark King card that was not in it before. John's regained possession of the aeldari shears and the torquetum that Eldrad gifted him. The clew of thread on its fid has been given to Zybes for safekeeping.\n\nThey reach an old marketplace where thistles are growing between flagstones. Two sides of the square are jumbled timbered buildings that look medieval. The tight-shouldered buildings are rotting. The third side of the square is the dull grey wall of a drive compartment, fluted with thick pipes. The fourth side is the golden facade of a Palatine court, columned and draped with amaranthine hangings. It is festooned with grey creepers and blighted tangleweed. They stop to rest.\n\nLeetu arms himself with a cast iron riser-post from a stretch of railings. It's no tactical gladius or power maul, but it's something. Krank fashions a makeshift cudgel from a broken length of ceramite pipe. John wonders what Krank thinks he'll fight off with it, but just wielding something, anything, seems to make Krank feel better.\n\nWhile Actae rests for a few minutes, restoring her strength, Katt tears a strip of cloth from the hem of her tunic, gathers some stones and chunks of broken tile, none of them bigger than a hen's egg, and makes herself a crude slingshot. She's resourceful. John can tell she's done it before. She looses a test stone with a flick on the underswing, and it sails across the yard and dents a gutter.\n\nJohn nods approvingly.\n\n'I was aiming for the window,' she whispers, disappointed. He hasn't got the heart to tell her that whatever they're likely to encounter, it will present a target big enough for that margin of error not to matter.\n\nJohn wonders where she learned the knack. After all this time, he doesn't know anything about any of them. He doesn't even know Katt's full name. But they are as close as blood now, close as family. Like Oll, John doesn't need to know the details any more, because he knows what he needs to know. He's never had companions this true before. He'll never have companions like them again.\n\nHe wonders if he should ask more questions, probe them for more details. But why? There isn't time, and why does he need to know any more? It's not as if he's taking notes. It's not as though anyone's going to record their misadventures for posterity.\n\nUnless the city, observing them ominously from every dim pane of glass and alien shadow, is remembering every terrified step they take.\n\nBut it doesn't feel as personal as that. There is a disdainful vacancy in its anonymity, as though it is waiting and watching for everyone and everything, and knows, contemptuously, that everyone and everything will eventually arrive by means of some grim inevitability. The long companions are mere interlopers, accidental visitors, and of no importance.\n\nThe city is waiting for more honoured guests to arrive.\n\n6:xxxvi\n\nFace him\n\nHis voice is more distant than ever before, yet his form is right in front of Sanguinius.\n\n'Some of us are glad to behold the Triumph of Ruin,' Ferrus says, 'some of us are sad. All of us are consigned to agony. None of us got what we wanted. Even those of us that asked for it. The Pantheon's gifts are never as wonderful as they seem. We are obliged to accept the choices we made.'\n\n'So you are assembling here... as at a funeral?'\n\n'You might say,' says Ferrus. 'A wake. We have willed ourselves here from torment, or been allowed to come. I don't know, brother. But it could only happen now. This one moment in history. Horus has snapped the rules of Creation so fundamentally, even this impossibility is permissible. We are drawn together in respect, drawn by memories, by grief and regret. One thing unites us all. We're here because of him. He did this to us.'\n\nThe distant, tremulous shrieks rise in fury, then ebb.\n\n'Ruin may triumph,' says Ferrus, 'but he shouldn't. We want him to suffer.'\n\nThe first-lost pauses, and turns to look at Sanguinius. His face is in shadow, and half-veiled by the drifting dust.\n\n'You can't win, brother,' he says, 'but you can go down fighting and cut the bastard's throat. For us. We know you can, if anyone can. We've always known. You, the brightest of us. The best of us.'\n\nThe sizzling screams increase in pitch to underscore the words.\n\n'Kill him for us, brother,' says Ferrus. 'Kill him for us and for all the damnable things he has done. You have nothing to lose. Not any more. Angron made sure of that. Avenge us.'\n\n'I...' Sanguinius begins.\n\nThe screams drown him out for a moment. Their reverberations make the deck tremble and loft more slow particles of dust into the dry air.\n\n'They are frustrated with you,' says Ferrus. 'And so am I.'\n\n'Why?' asks Sanguinius.\n\n'You delay,' says Ferrus, his mouth drawn down in a scowl. 'You linger.'\n\n'I do not,' Sanguinius replies. 'You said he would be here.'\n\n'And he should be,' the Gorgon snaps. 'And he would be, if it was your will. But you do not will it. You say you are ready, but you're not. Not at all. Not in your heart.'\n\n'You're wrong,' says Sanguinius. 'Facing him is the only reason I-'\n\n'Then face him!' Ferrus Manus growls. The fury inside him is making his gleaming necrodermis bubble and sweat. 'If you mean it, face him! Kill him!'\n\n'I'll face him, brother,' says Sanguinius, 'but I don't know if I can kill him. If he is grown so powerful-'\n\n'No,' says Ferrus. 'You know you can. You just don't know if you want to.'\n\n6:xxxvii\n\nAll is lost\n\nRann strikes the gun-box wall again. He's struck it a hundred times already, cracking off the red-painted surface and chewing into the thick rockcrete beneath, but he's barely dug a crater. He pauses, reaches into the shattered hole, and drags out more lumps of broken 'crete, letting them scatter on the floor. Then he listens again, as he has listened after every three or four blows.\n\nThe whisper is still there, no closer, no clearer, continuing its steady discourse, apparently undisturbed by the steady thump of Rann's impacts. His gene-sire's voice, or a trick, or both, dulled by rock and distance, hollowed by time.\n\nRann calls Dorn's name again, but there is no answer.\n\nThe rockcrete is military grade, hardened with plasteel rebar. Rann hefts the maul to swing again. It's a World Eaters weapon, a flanged mace, that he reluctantly took from a corpse in the mire outside to spare the edges of his axes. The head is already buckled. He spits cement dust, hoists the mace, brings his arms back.\n\n'You should stop.'\n\nRann looks around. Zephon is standing in the gun-box doorway.\n\n'Stop,' says Zephon.\n\n'I can't,' says Rann. 'I can't just...'\n\n'You can't dig a hole through this bunker,' says Zephon. 'Not even you. Not even with years to waste. Your lord and master built these walls to last. To withstand.'\n\n'My lord and master-' Rann snarls.\n\n'I know,' says Zephon. 'Baldwin told me. I don't know what's behind that wall. I don't even know how thick it is. Ten metres? Twenty? But I know it's not him waiting on the other side. The warp is tormenting you, brother, forcing you to waste your strength on a futile effort. Stop.'\n\n'I'll decide what's futile,' says Rann.\n\nZephon shakes his head. 'No, you won't,' he says. 'Our enemy will. It's begun. You're needed. So stop.'\n\n'It's begun?'\n\n'I'm informing you,' says Zephon. 'As y"}
{"text":" Rann snarls.\n\n'I know,' says Zephon. 'Baldwin told me. I don't know what's behind that wall. I don't even know how thick it is. Ten metres? Twenty? But I know it's not him waiting on the other side. The warp is tormenting you, brother, forcing you to waste your strength on a futile effort. Stop.'\n\n'I'll decide what's futile,' says Rann.\n\nZephon shakes his head. 'No, you won't,' he says. 'Our enemy will. It's begun. You're needed. So stop.'\n\n'It's begun?'\n\n'I'm informing you,' says Zephon. 'As you requested.'\n\nRann looks at the mutilated mace in his hands. He looks at the ragged hole he's made in the wall. Not a lot to show for such prolonged labour.\n\nHe tosses the mace onto the spill of rubble, picks up his helm, and heads for the doorway. Zephon has already turned and gone. Rann takes one last glance at the wall.\n\n'I will... come back,' he promises.\n\nClamping his helm in place, he catches up with Zephon. The bunker hallway is gloomy and tight, and the air is already filmed with dust shaken from the ceiling. Thirty metres shy of the entrance, he can hear the swaddled thunder outside, the faint crackle of weapons. The ground is vibrating. Ahead of him, Zephon unclamps his twin volkite serpentas as he walks.\n\nThey emerge into the open, into the east quarter dug-outs. The fury is no longer muffled. Sounds are sharp and raw. The air itself is quaking.\n\nAs Archamus predicted, the enemy push has come. As Rann reaches the firing step, alongside Imperial Fists, White Scars and Blood Angels already blasting from the gun-slots, he glimpses the scale of the doom beyond. Black figures in the gusting smoke, thousands upon thousands, the flash and spit of weapons, the silhouettes of war-machine beasts looming through the firefields. Even inside the sealed fastness of his plate, the concussive noise is infernal, the tornado voice of total war.\n\nThe enemy, led principally by Sons of Horus and World Eaters, it seems, has swept towards the Delphic in a mass fifty kilometres wide and thousands of units thick. Hasgard is simply an outcrop in the path of its deluge. But Hasgard is not the empty ruin the enemy expected. The forces Rann and his brothers have planted there, a paltry garrison in the face of such opposition, have laid down fire patterns to scourge anything that comes within range of the broken emplacements. Enemy dead litter the mudscape, lost beneath the feet and tracks of those that follow, unit after unit. Hasgard is nothing, just a rock dropped in a fast-moving stream, but its defiance is causing a section of the traitor host to swirl, to eddy around it, to break its onward rush and deform, turning back on itself and circling in an effort to surround and exterminate the obstruction.\n\nIt's not much. A spit in the sea. Neither Rann nor Archamus expected it to break the mass assault. But they've hindered it, irritated it, diverted and distracted a chunk of it, torn an untidy hole in the otherwise uniform advance. It's not much, but it's something, a final angry gesture of defiance in a war where angry gestures are all the loyalists have left.\n\nThe time of dying has begun, the time of last stands and sacrifices. Victory is entirely impossible. All that matters is honour; how you sell your life, how you make your death, how many lives you take before yours is gone, how many extra seconds you can buy before the inevitable triumphs. It is no longer about winning. It is about proclaiming your rejection of the foe, and all it stands for, to your last breath, in the vain hope that somehow, somewhere, somewhen, that statement will be remembered and will matter.\n\nSomehow. It's all they have. A last chance to be sons of the Emperor, to reaffirm that loyalty, to scream we were there into the face of hell.\n\nWe were there, the day Horus slew the Emperor. We denied him to the last. We did not flinch. We made nothing easy for him. We died where we stood to show the unfathomable depth of our contempt for Horus Lupercal. We spat our lifeblood on him, our last words, our final breaths, our ultimate oaths in our ultimate moment.\n\nHorus will not care. He will not be moved. He may not even notice us. We are a stone beneath his boot as he strides forward, a loose pebble, unnoticed dust on his heels, forgotten names, neglected bones.\n\nWe were nothing, but we stood anyway. We were there. For our sakes, Lupercal, not yours, we were there, and we fought you to the very end.\n\n6:xxxviii\n\nAvenge yourself\n\n'You don't know if you want to, because it's Horus,' says Ferrus Manus. 'Horus, whom we all loved. Know that if you do it, you will be saving him. Saving him as he was. As we adored him. He can be here with us, in this place where division and recrimination no longer matter.'\n\n'Alongside you?' Sanguinius asks.\n\n'And you,' says Ferrus. He looks into his brother's eyes. Fury smokes in his silver pupils. 'Sorry, but it's true,' he says. 'You know it is. Time has run out, and you are as dead as the rest of us. But there's one thing you don't know. That pain you feel?'\n\n'Yes?'\n\n'That crippling pain that you carry as a burden... It's not death pulling you in, brother. It's not the wound in your flank. The pain you feel is the loss of Horus. We all feel it. And it does you credit, but put it aside now. Lesson four. The Horus Lupercal we loved is long gone. Don't let grief stay your hand. There's no time for grief. Only vengeance. Avenge us. Avenge yourself. Avenge Horus.'\n\nSanguinius steps back. The screams have died away. The darkness has gone cold and quiet.\n\n'Is that what haunts me?' he asks.\n\nFerrus nods.\n\n'It seems so obvious,' says Sanguinius. He swallows hard to clear his throat. 'But I couldn't see it. Now you say it, I do. I miss him very much. So very much.'\n\n'Then honour his memory,' says Ferrus. 'And know that he would have done the same for you.'\n\nSanguinius stands for a second, and looks at his lost brother.\n\n'If you are a trick of the warp,' he says, 'you're a good one.'\n\n'We are all of the warp,' says Ferrus. 'But we are no trick. The warp is all things. Horus doesn't realise quite what he could do if he found his focus. Stop him before he does.'\n\n'I will,' says Sanguinius. There is nothing but certainty in his voice.\n\n'Then you've found him,' says Ferrus. He turns and nods towards the darkness ahead. 'This path will take you directly to him,' he says. 'Any path will. Any path you choose. You feel that chill? The False Gods know your will is set. They may try to stop you. Try to kill you, even. But your path is set, and they know it.'\n\nSanguinius steps forward.\n\n'Lead the way,' he says.\n\nFerrus shakes his head.\n\n'No,' he replies. 'You lead now. You know the way. You need no guide from here. But I'll walk with you, as far as I can.'\n\nHe ushers, with one alloyed hand. Sword raised, Sanguinius steps past him and starts to walk. He can feel Ferrus Manus following him into the darkness.\n\nHe doesn't look back.\n\n6:xxxix\n\nFollow\n\n'Trooper Persson?'\n\nOll turns, and sees Graft. The bulk cultivation servitor is clasping the empty negation crate between its forward manipulators. It's too easy to think that Graft has simply followed Oll, because Oll is its owner and master, and Graft has been pre-coded to obey. The servitor has long exceeded any bounds or limits of its programmed parameters and obedience algorithms. In its own odd, simple fashion, Graft has shown a devotion so pure it puts Oll's faith to shame.\n\n'What?' Oll asks quietly.\n\n'Are we leaving this behind?' Graft asks, swivelling its optics to focus on the crate.\n\n'It's empty,' says Oll.\n\n'So we can put things in it,' says Graft.\n\n'We've got nothing to put in it.'\n\n'Yet,' Graft replies. 'But I can carry it until then. It is not useful now, but it might be. We keep things because we understand they will be useful later. Like sacks, in the store. Or rolls of baling cord, in the store. Or drums of fence wire, in the store.'\n\nOll thinks of Graft in the farmhab sheds, running its daily inventory of agricultural supplies.\n\n'I suppose so,' he says.\n\n'I will carry it,' says Graft. The servitor rotates its torso section, and places the duralloy box carefully on its payload carrier. 'You taught me to be practical and anticipate needs, Trooper Persson,' it says. 'I will find a purpose for it. A sack is just a sack until it is filled with grain, but it is always a grain sack. A wire is just a wire until it is strung out along fence posts, but it is always a fence.'\n\nOll nods. He's so tired, everything sounds like gnostic philosophy.\n\nThey start walking again. Tension hangs over them. Dead windows gaze at them. A wind they can't feel moans its lament. They follow streets that are also deck-spaces, and palatial colonnades that are also alleys. The feeling that they are being watched by something does not go away. They climb the rutted steps of terraces between derelict buildings, and ascend steep cobbled lanes that never seem to reach a summit or a brow. They pass below the spans of Palatine viaducts or the spars of engine compartment pipework, and cross decaying bridges over gorges into which the pale daylight refuses to venture. They cross market yards, and audience plazas, and open training decks where derelict practice cages still stand.\n\nEverywhere is breathlessly still, except the edges of their vision, where things seem to writhe and crawl. But when they turn to look directly, there's nothing there.\n\n6:xl\n\nBecause it matters\n\nLoken can't bear to look any more. The void below, the burning world, it's too much.\n\n'Look at the rock that they call the world,' the daemon sniggers in his ear. 'It is being dismantled wholesale by a relentless concentration of absolute fury. They fight-'\n\nLoken tries to turn his head away. The daemon grips him harder and twists it back, forcing him to see.\n\n'Look at them!' it snarls. 'They fight for the world, by dismembering the world. They think the world is so important. They believe it matters. The mindless killers on each side, their labels of traitor and loyalist"}
{"text":" much.\n\n'Look at the rock that they call the world,' the daemon sniggers in his ear. 'It is being dismantled wholesale by a relentless concentration of absolute fury. They fight-'\n\nLoken tries to turn his head away. The daemon grips him harder and twists it back, forcing him to see.\n\n'Look at them!' it snarls. 'They fight for the world, by dismembering the world. They think the world is so important. They believe it matters. The mindless killers on each side, their labels of traitor and loyalist long since erased by flame, they still think the place matters, the rock that they kill on and for.'\n\n'Because it does!' Loken screams. The daemon's grip is so tight it's almost snapping his neck. He closes his eyes, but he can still see the blazing fury of Terra far below. The daemon pushes him forward, further through the ragged hull breach, clutching him like a toy. Loken thinks it's going to cast him out there, hurl him away like an offering onto the Throneworld pyre far, far below. A fiery death, though it feels infinitely preferable to the torture of the daemon's constricting grip and the caustic bellow of its voice.\n\n'It matters,' Loken gasps. 'It matters to us. It matters to me! And to the Emperor and the lord primarchs... They think-'\n\n'Think...' The daemon chuckles. 'Well, that is too strong a word. None of them are thinking any more...'\n\n6:xli\n\n'In that moment, the universe changed.'\n\n'\"But I will say some impulse, then,\"' Mauer reads, '\"some twitch in the lizard brains, that convinces them, in their inchoate frenzy, that they are standing their ground, that they are fighting for what is theirs. Some birthright, some cradle, some legacy, some place that belongs to them and to which they belong, as though such connections matter...\"'\n\nShe looks up. In the cold gloom of the library, she can see Sindermann's face. He's listening intently to her, but he looks terrified. Nearby, the young archivist is listening with her hand to her mouth, as though if she takes the hand away, they'll be able to hear her sob.\n\n'Do you want me to stop?' Mauer asks.\n\nSindermann shakes his head.\n\n'No,' he manages to say.\n\n'It's upsetting you,' she says. She glances at the cover of the book. 'I mean, it's demented stuff, the ravings of a madman, but no stranger than anything else we've found.'\n\nSindermann mutters something.\n\n'What?' Mauer asks.\n\n'I said, n-not a madman,' says Sindermann. 'Not a man at all. Samus was... the first.'\n\n'The first what?'\n\n'The first of its kind we met,' he says. He clamps one hand with the other to stop it trembling. 'The first recorded encounter, anyway. I was with the Sixty-Third Expeditionary on Sixty-Three Nineteen. The Whisperheads Compliance. Have you read the files?'\n\nMauer shakes her head.\n\n'No doubt they're restricted.' Sindermann sighs. 'Though they would have provided valuable reference for your Prefectus. Once again, He keeps things from those who should know them.'\n\n'What happened at the Whisperheads, sir?' the archivist asks quietly.\n\n'We met one of the Neverborn,' says Sindermann. 'It... killed a number of people. Remembrancers. Luna Wolves. It possessed at least one of Lupercal's men, Xavyer Jubal. It called itself Samus.'\n\n'You saw it?' asks Mauer.\n\nSindermann nods with a shudder. 'I've never forgotten it, boetharch. It spoke to us. It taunted us. In that moment, the universe changed. The secret came out, the secret He had hidden for so long. We realised that everything we knew about materia and the warp was wrong. Or, if not wrong, then incomplete. Loken was there. Keeler too. Our lives were not the same after that. And Horus, of course. I sometimes think that was the moment when the first crack in his psyche appeared. It shocked him, you see? He realised he had been lied to. He realised there was more to learn. I think what happened to him after that, happened more easily because his eyes had been opened. He was aware.'\n\n'It's so odd to hear you speak of him fondly,' says Mauer.\n\nSindermann shrugs. 'It's hard for us to remember, though it's supposed to be my purpose to be an instrument of remembering... it's hard for us to remember how wonderful he was. He was... extraordinary. I have met primarchs, and I have been awed by them all, but him... Dear me, that's the smallest and greatest tragedy of this time, I think. The fact that we lost him. That such a great man became... this scourge of humanity. This... whatever he is now.'\n\nHe blows on his hands for warmth, thoughtful.\n\n'Samus, though,' he muses, 'is a recurring force. An exoplanar thing. There at the start, and then during the Solar defence... Oh, poor, poor Mersadie. The creature is like a herald, a patron daemon of incitement and revolt, a harbinger of ruin-'\n\nMauer looks down at the book in her hands.\n\n'I'll stop,' she says.\n\n'No,' says Sindermann. 'It's terrifying to think that thing's words are recorded anywhere. But think, Mauer. Loken was there when we met Samus, and Loken was just here with us. A moment later, we find that book. Isn't that precisely the kind of synchronicity we have been hunting for?'\n\n'You think there's something useful in this?' she asks.\n\n'I think it's the surest and closest connection we have,' Sindermann replies. 'Samus is of the Neverborn. A thing of the warp. Those words are closer to first-hand truth than anything we've found in this place. Read the rest. Ignore my discomfort. Read the rest.'\n\n'Do you think these words are... something we can use?' Mauer asks. 'The kind of thing we came here looking for? A spell? An invocation?'\n\n'They may have no power at all,' Sindermann says. 'But read them anyway.'\n\nMauer pauses, then re-opens the book and looks for the place where she left off.\n\n'\"As though such connections matter,\"' she reads, finding her place again. '\"They do not. Only by some tenuous and sentimental thread are they tied together, world and species, some whim, some happenstance, a freak division of biological contamination that gave rise to their ephemeral lineage on that irrelevant rock. That's all. It could have been anywhere. It happened to be here...\"'\n\n6:xlii\n\nFound, not finding\n\nSmoke, grey and oily, hangs over some parts of the randomly blended city. These areas, when they reach them, are torn and burned ruins, or churned crater-scapes of shell-holes. Heat radiates from them, and there are the blackened remnants of roasted war machines sunk in the mud. These areas, Oll presumes, are not Inner Sanctum, or Vengeful Spirit, or Inevitable City: they are smouldering intrusions of the Outer Palace warscape, the Palatine, Anterior and Magnificans, folded into the mix. There are signs of death in these places - scraps of bloody uniform, buckled pieces of armour, the occasional ruined weapon - but no bodies. He sees bloodstains on the broken brick and cracked stone, but the corpses that lay there are gone. It is not, Oll thinks grimly, as though the bodies have vanished. From streaks of gore and marks in the dirt, it seems they have been dragged away by something. Are there scavengers here, predators, carrion-eaters? Are there wolves, or worse, in this city?\n\nIs that why it feels like they are being watched?\n\nThey mount the stone staircase of what seems like a huge city wall, a great edifice of sooty black stone. They see it from a distance, rising over the rooftops, and it seems to take hours to reach it. Oll hopes it's the limit of the city and that, from the top, they'll be able to see a great distance beyond. To what, he doesn't know. On the way up, Leetu notices marks scratched into the dirty stone. They stop to look. Oll can't make much sense of the marks, which look like they have been gouged with an awl or a broken blade. They seem like plans, like schemes of attack or defence, little sketches of tactical deployment. There are many of them. Some are scratched out. As they go further up the stairs, they find more, as though someone had worked and reworked some scheme, then crossed it out, moved to another patch of wall, and started over.\n\n'What does it mean?' John whispers.\n\nOll shrugs. 'I doubt anyone remembers any more,' he whispers back. He's impatient. He wants to get to the top and see what lies beyond the wall.\n\nBut from the top, a broad and ruined battlement that runs zigzag across the spread of roofs below, there's nothing to see except more walls, higher walls, towering and shadowed cliffs of ceramite and stone. The distant walls are veiled by mist. The sky is like dark glass. There's some sense of a light source, a sun or a star, but it's obscured by the thick pall of the sky.\n\nOll realises that there are figures on the top of the distant walls. They are kneeling, unmoving. He realises how big they must be.\n\nThen he realises what they are.\n\nThey are war engines of the Adeptus Titanicus. They are rusted, burned-out and quite dead. They have been left, kneeling as if in prayer or in abject fealty, along the crest of the great walls.\n\n'Good... god...' John murmurs.\n\n'Look!' Zybes hisses as loud as he dares.\n\nThey all turn. He's found another thread. It's tied to a crenellation of the wall's rampart.\n\n'We're going the right way,' Zybes whispers, not even reassuring himself.\n\nThe loops of red thread which Zybes, or someone that Zybes will be one day, has left behind him are their only guide. There is no other reliable navigation. John's torquetum reads nothing, and Oll's compass spins frenetically, unable to fix. The devices that have taken them through time and space, between stars, through the wings of the galaxy's great theatre, are useless here. There's no operational time and space left to read.\n\nBut the threads remain. They find them every forty or fifty metres, and Zybes examines each one with trembling hands.\n\nOll doesn't know how they're finding them. It's not as if the loops of thread point the way, or indicate the position of the next. The long companions just walk, and there's another. And the clew of thread in Zybes' hand has not grown any smaller.\n\nIt occurs to Oll th"}
{"text":" the wings of the galaxy's great theatre, are useless here. There's no operational time and space left to read.\n\nBut the threads remain. They find them every forty or fifty metres, and Zybes examines each one with trembling hands.\n\nOll doesn't know how they're finding them. It's not as if the loops of thread point the way, or indicate the position of the next. The long companions just walk, and there's another. And the clew of thread in Zybes' hand has not grown any smaller.\n\nIt occurs to Oll that maybe they're not finding the threads at all.\n\nMaybe the threads are finding them.\n\nAnd if the threads can find them, what else can?\n\nThe first spots of rain begin to fall, light at first, then heavy and loud. Oll is certain, in his gut, that the ominous threat or promise of rain has lingered over this grey city forever, never falling, always about to.\n\nIt's falling now. Something is changing.\n\nHis left eyelid twitches. He looks behind him.\n\n6:xliii\n\nOverheard\n\nSycar raises his hand. 'You hear that?' he asks.\n\nAbaddon can hear wastewater dripping, the soft machine purr and structure-creak of the flagship around them. But yes, he heard it. A voice. A whisper in the darkness.\n\n...they tied together, world and species, some whim, some happenstance...\n\nHe glances back. He and Sycar have taken point. The assault squads of their companies, led by Baraxa, company captains Jeraddon and Yrmand, and Praetor-Captain Phaeto Zeletsis, are fanned out behind them in the wide and gloomy passageways. He can see them waiting, weapons ready, listening. They can hear it too.\n\nA whisper. A woman's voice-\n\nNo. Several voices, murmuring the same words. An echo that makes his skin crawl. It's the Neverborn. A Neverborn deceit. They're in everything, soaked into every atom of the ship's fabric, in the walls, the deck, the pipework. His father has allowed this abominable saturation to occur.\n\n'Ignore it,' Abaddon says. He signals advance.\n\nThe Sons of Horus begin to move again, with oiled, silent precision.\n\nLeading the way, Abaddon hears the whispers bleeding from the shadows again.\n\nIt could have been anywhere. It happened to be here...\n\n6:xliv\n\nThe way of everything\n\n'This lump of matter, this scrap of earth, this...'\n\nThe daemon pauses. It twists Loken away from the hull breach to face him. It holds him, and stares into his eyes.\n\n'What do they call it?' it hisses. 'Terror? Ha! No, Terra.'\n\n'I abjure you, daemon,' Loken growls. He feels blood running down his face inside his helm. Blood, and tears. 'It's the Throneworld. The Emperor must live, and Terra must stand, against all the outer powers and all your kind. Humanity believes-'\n\n'Their minds invest it with significance,' chides the daemon, crooning the words. 'Their language gives it a name, oh so mockable. It is just a rock, of infinite rocks, swirling around infinite suns. It has no meaning, no special property, no singular quality. Yet how they fight for it!'\n\nIt wrenches him around again, and holds him at arm's length, through the tattered rent in the Spirit's hull. The gulf boils below him. Stars flare and burst. Eyes peer from the darkness. A furnace shrouds the face of the world, tumbling sparks like fireflies. The vista of Aeternity opens so wide, the scale assaults Loken's mind and numbs it.\n\nHe sees. He sees too much. As some flickering, narcotic hallucination, the nature of things falls into place, the order, the disorder, concordia, discordia, materia and immateria. The daemon is subjecting him to torment, perhaps out of spite or to exact vengeance, but the torment is doing more than mere punishment. It's ripping open his soul, and letting insight flood into the raw core of his being. He sees things as they are, as only a handful of people have ever seen them. He understands things as only one or perhaps two people ever have.\n\nHe sees the way of everything.\n\nUnless that is the punishment.\n\n'Look at them,' the daemon blurts, its voice ragged and thick with phlegm. 'They fight, because war is the only thing they have left. They fight to conquer or deny, driven by the notion, which is utterly devoid of meaning, that it matters who wins here. Who claims the rock. Who is left standing at the end. It does not. It does not. It does not. Futile!'\n\n'You're wrong,' Loken gasps. He can see that now.\n\n'They are wrong,' the daemon declares. 'Pathetic and wrong. Look at them. Fools all, deluded by incoherent compulsion and debased ideals. This place, this Terra, has never been special. It's been a symbol, at best, for a short span of time, and even that symbolic value is now exhausted. They burn themselves up in one last convulsion of psychosis, utterly unaware that the fight is not here.'\n\n'No?' growls Loken. 'Then where is it, Neverborn?'\n\n'It is everywhere,' Samus cackles.\n\n'And what do you know?' Loken asks. The daemon's grip is about to break his spine, and his senses are swimming. He knows he's going to die, and he doesn't care. His sanity is unravelling. The daemon, in its sport with him, has shared its exoplanar perspective, imagining such insight would be the cruellest retribution for Loken's defiance all those years before in the haunted Whisperheads. How deliciously amusing to show him the truth he has searched for, and let it immolate him!\n\nBut the daemon is wrong. Loken is Astartes. He was made to suffer. Made to endure. What he sees, what he understands, though terrible, is simply the truth. And the truth was all that ever mattered. He knows no fear, not any more.\n\n'You're nothing,' says Loken. 'Just a figment. A phantom. Kyril taught me so, and you've shown me more. You're just a current of the immaterium that thinks it's real, a false sentience, born spontaneously from empyric patterns, a false daemon, a false god, a thing that formed in an instant and will be gone again just as fast. You're nothing. I abjure you. I reject you. What even are you, you bastard?'\n\nThe daemon roars. Its rage ignites, and for an instant, Loken feels its grip on him clench. His armour will rupture and he'll burst inside it.\n\nBut it drags him back inside the ship and hurls him across the access corridor. Loken bounces off the inner wall with enough force to dent the panelling and crack his right pauldron, then hits the deck and slides to rest.\n\nHe tries to get up. His limbs are on fire. His heart is burning.\n\nHunched over, towering, the daemon advances on him, each footfall gouging the deck and leaving smouldering prints.\n\n'My name is Samus,' it screams at him. 'Samus is my name.'\n\n'Is it?' says Loken. He has hauled himself upright. Leaning against the wall, he tries to limp backwards as it descends upon him. 'No one cares. No one!'\n\n'That is the only name you'll hear,' it growls, lunging at him.\n\nLoken throws himself aside, and talons shred the wall. He shoulder-rolls onto his feet, and as he rises, draws his swords - Rubio's blade and Mourn-It-All - over his shoulders. His hands are shaking.\n\n'That's not all I hear,' Loken spits. Claws snag at him, and he fends them off with a keen parry. 'I hear other voices. Echoes of the voices you've stolen. I hear one in particular. Do you hear it, daemon? Another voice, speaking your words a second before you do?'\n\n'I am the one who walks behind you,' the daemon crows, suddenly at his back, but Loken has already wheeled around, knowing where the next strike would come from. The echo is real. He can hear it, one voice that has separated from the others that bind up to make the daemon's speech. A woman's. He thought at first it was Mersadie, but it's not. It's a woman's voice, saying the same words as the daemon, but a heartbeat in advance, like a prompt. Rubio's blade flashes and sparks as it deflects a raking talon.\n\n'I am the footsteps at your back,' Samus hisses, but Loken has already uttered the same words, repeating what the echo has recited. The daemon quails back, shocked, disturbed by his prey's behaviour. It whimpers.\n\n'You can hear it too, can't you?' says Loken, flexing his grip and circling the monstrous thing. 'Where's it coming from, eh? That voice? It knows exactly what you're going to say. It says it before you can, as if you're just a puppet. A bubble of the warp with no mind of your own.'\n\n'I am the man beside you,' the daemon roars, but Loken has already exclaimed that too, gouging Mourn-It-All across the daemon's left flank. The daemon utters a piercing hog-squeal.\n\n'Look out!' Loken goads. 'I am all around you.'\n\nThe daemon rasps and bares its teeth. Toxic vapour billows from its nostrils. Pink ichor dribbles from the wound in its flank.\n\n'You don't like it, do you?' says Loken. 'That voice, it's mocking you. Where is it coming from? Do you know? If you know so much, tell me that. What is the voice that's making you look so ridiculous? It sounds like someone I know. It sounds like Mauer. I don't know how that could be. But I know it's showing you're just a hollow lie.'\n\nSamus wails and lashes down at Loken. Rubio's blade, sizzling with an almost white, steadfast fire, blocks its paw, and Mourn-It-All tears meat from its arm.\n\n'What are you now?' Loken growls, breaking the clinch and leaping back, swords ready in a double-proffer. 'What are you, now I'm not afraid of you any more?'\n\n6:xlv\n\nMere repetition\n\n'\"Samus! I am the end and the death. I tell you now, I have seen this before, so many times,\"' says Mauer in the darkness. She pauses, and clears her throat. Sindermann can see how pale she is, how hard she's finding each word to utter. '\"How many, I do not care to say. Time is worthless to me, and I do not bother to remember all the biological contaminations that spurt up, and I don't have the patience to memorise the names of rocks. Rocks are just rocks, and my name is Samus-\"'\n\n'Stop,' Sindermann says.\n\n'\"Samus will gnaw upon your bones-\"'\n\n'Mauer, stop now,' says Sindermann, reaching out to her. It's as though she's in a trance. 'It's not doing anything, Mauer. The words are meaningless-'\n\n'\"This - look at them kill! - this is "}
{"text":"w many, I do not care to say. Time is worthless to me, and I do not bother to remember all the biological contaminations that spurt up, and I don't have the patience to memorise the names of rocks. Rocks are just rocks, and my name is Samus-\"'\n\n'Stop,' Sindermann says.\n\n'\"Samus will gnaw upon your bones-\"'\n\n'Mauer, stop now,' says Sindermann, reaching out to her. It's as though she's in a trance. 'It's not doing anything, Mauer. The words are meaningless-'\n\n'\"This - look at them kill! - this is mere repetition,\"' she stammers. '\"The cycle, the dawn and the nightfall-\"'\n\n'Stop, Mauer! We were wrong. It's not a spell, it's not anything we can use-'\n\n'\"It will happen again,\"' Mauer gasps, stumbling and slurring now, '\"and it is happening everywhere. It is trivial. A dynastic quarrel. A fight-\"'\n\n'It's just hurting you, Mauer! Stop it, I say! We were wrong! We can learn nothing from this!'\n\n'\"-a f-fight between nests of insects that I might step over, without noticing, on my long walk to somewhere else-\"'\n\nSindermann snatches the book from her hands and hurls it to the floor. The touch of it has raised instant blisters on his fingers. Despite the stinging pain, he catches her as she sways forward.\n\n'I'm sorry,' he whispers. 'I'm so sorry I made you do that, Mauer.' He holds her tightly, keeping her upright. She weeps into his shoulder.\n\n'I'm sorry,' whispers Sindermann. 'I thought it would do some good. Grant some revelation. But it didn't do anything at all.'\n\n6:xlvi\n\nThe beautiful potential\n\nThe voice has gone, even the echo of it. But the daemon has receded too. Three more deep, ruthless strikes from Loken's blades have forced it to its knees. It is not as large as it was. It's shrunk, becoming a spavined, emaciated thing, no bigger than he is. It is as though all the wild energy has bled out of it, deflating its swollen, grotesque mass to a suppurating sack of skin and knotted bones. Loken can see layers of its material form peeling away and dissolving, sloughing like snakeskin, melting like wax, dripping to the deck, and turning to steam. It shivers. Ichor, thin as watery gruel, seeps from its ghastly wounds. It wails, piteously, and slowly turns its rotting face to look up at him, as though pleading for mercy.\n\n'You're done,' says Loken. 'You're nothing.'\n\n'Unless...' it gasps.\n\n'Unless?'\n\n'Unless one of them finally notices what is possible,' it murmurs. Its voice is frail, the rage and volume lost, the multitude too. Its mumble is the radio pulse of a distant, dying star, the squeaking crackle of cosmic background radiation, the spit of dimming logs in a grate, the mutter of a voice heard indistinctly through a thick wall.\n\n'Meaning?' asks Loken warily.\n\n'What might be accomplished here,' it sighs. It blinks up at him, pleading and pathetically desperate. 'The potential, the beautiful potential, which, though none of them sees it - none of them - is closer at hand than they realise. I can almost taste it. It is closer than it has ever been.'\n\nLoken shakes his head.\n\n'I've seen this,' he says. 'You showed it all to me. It won't happen. I won't let it happen. Mankind won't let it happen.'\n\nThe daemon starts to sob. The eager spark in its black eyes fades, and it turns its head away from him. It spits stringy blood and a dislodged tooth onto the deck.\n\n'Who among them has the courage to reach for it?' it whines. 'So few of them, so very few, are even in a position to see it or comprehend its meaning. I can count them upon my fingers.'\n\nIt raises a broken paw, and extends a finger.\n\n'Him? The boastful king on his tiny throne, his feeble light guttering out?'\n\nAnother trembling finger extends.\n\n'Him? The squealing pretender, hunched in the howling gullet of hell?' A third finger rises.\n\n'Him, perhaps? The maniac prophet slithering through the open wounds between unblinking stars?'\n\nIt glances at him, hunched and cowering.\n\n'One of them might see,' it simpers, 'before it is too late, what could be achieved today. One of them might recognise, at the very last, that none of this matters... The annihilating rock, the measureless slaughter, the pathetic rage... Unless they elevate the war to where it truly belongs. Not here. Not Terra. But outwards and inwards and everywhere, until that which is Ruin, and that which is Ruin alone, as it was in the beginning and shall be at the end, is everywhere and everything-'\n\n'This is the only victory that matters,' Loken replies, and brings Rubio's blade down in an execution stroke. The tattered daemon shrieks as it splits in two. Tangles of venting warpflux and voidmist billow out of its core as the torn halves of it topple to the deck.\n\nLoken hears a bang, and feels the sudden drag of violent decompression. Whatever magicks the daemon was commanding, whatever sorcery had suffused it, they have gone, and the impossibilities they sustained become material facts. The hole it tore in the ship's hull is buckling outwards, hull plates cracking like eggshell and ripping like paper. Everything loose or unsecured in the access corridor starts to fly towards the rent: debris, shreds of metal, torn cables, rivets, fluids, even tattered scraps of the daemon's carcass. The shriek of sucking air surrounds Loken, a hammering tide of power and wrath.\n\nHe starts to slide. He sheathes his blades and grabs a stanchion. The mag-plates of his boots activate automatically. Head down, one indomitable step after the next, he claws his way into the gale, splinters and fibres bouncing off him, boots clanging on the grille as they step and lock. He reaches the blast hatch and wrenches himself through as the deck plates begin to peel up and fly away behind him. He punches the emergency release.\n\nThe last glimpse he gets as the hatch smashes shut is of the daemon's flopping corpse, split and disarticulated, carried away in a cloud of detritus like a cut banner lost in the wind. It hits the ragged lip of the hull breach on its way out, a glancing strike that tears it asunder, and then it's gone.\n\nAnd the hatch is shut. And the gale is stilled. And the runes on the wall panel flash amber as the circulation systems try to restore pressure.\n\nAnd he is alone in the silence of the corpse ship.\n\n6:xlvii\n\nWordless\n\nAbaddon listens.\n\n'The voice has stopped,' says Sycar.\n\nIt has. The whispering voice, which seemed to Abaddon more like a thousand voices all wound together, has suddenly fallen silent. There's no sound, except the background creak of the ship and the power-hum.\n\nHe's about to signal a spread advance into the next range of hallways. There's a sudden, violent bang. It sounds like a gunshot, but Abaddon recognises it. He's heard it before, and he knows what it is before the klaxons start bleating and the amber warning runes begin their frantic blinking.\n\n'Handholds!' he yells. 'Lock down!'\n\nHull breach. Explosive decompression. The air starts to pull and whistle, dragging him forward, tugging at the warriors flanking him. Mag-plates engage. Abaddon grasps a wall strut to steady himself. The air starts screaming past them. The drag is immense, as though the corridor ahead is trying to inhale them. Dust and specks of grit and debris blizzard past them, flicking off their plate, caught in the gale, tumbling on past their locked forms into the throat of the tunnel, screw-heads, chips of metal, loosed wires, fluttering scraps of paper.\n\nAnd then it stops, as suddenly as it began. There's a thump, and the air stops moving. An emergency shutter's closed on automatic, sealing the voided area. Loose objects clatter to the deck, and the swirling dust sinks.\n\n'The damn ship's coming apart,' growls Baraxa.\n\nAbaddon ignores him. He straightens up. Torn pieces of paper are fluttering to rest around him like leaves. He snatches one out of the air.\n\nSycar has picked another up. 'What is this?' he asks.\n\nAbaddon stares at the scrap in his hand. It's the page of a book, an old book, mottled with age-spots. It looks as if it's been torn out.\n\n'Looks like... verse,' says Sycar.\n\nWhere the hell has this come from? Abaddon thinks. What does it mean? He doesn't even want to read it. First voices and whispers, now printed words. He crumples the sheet in his fist.\n\n'Captain!'\n\nA tactical squad led by Arnanod has moved ahead. Abaddon steps forward to join them, crossing into the next stretch of corridor. He sees what they've found. The floor here is not deck plate. It's old, worn carpet. The walls on both sides are lined with shelves. There are books on them, old books, parchment cases, folios. Some have fallen off, dragged by the decompression, and lie scattered, half-open on the floor.\n\nHe raises his weapon.\n\n'Follow me,' he says.\n\n6:xlviii\n\nAs if by magick\n\nThe archivist glances nervously at Sindermann. He is on his feet in the thin pool of the stack light, holding Mauer tightly as she cries against him, her shoulders shaking. He is whispering calming, comforting words.\n\nThe archivist turns, and hurries along the row of shelves. She should fetch a glass of water. The poor woman is distraught. Perhaps something stronger. She's sure the chief archivist kept a bottle of good amasec in his office.\n\nShe rounds the end of the stack and stops in her tracks. There's someone there. A tall shadow, black-on-black, standing in the next aisle. It's not human tall. It's Astartes.\n\n'Captain Loken, sir, have you retur-'\n\nThe words die in her mouth.\n\n'Do you work here, child?' the shadow asks. Its voice is rich and soft, like bass woodwind.\n\nShe nods, because that's all she is able to do.\n\n'I have come to withdraw books from this collection,' it says. 'While there is still time. Knowledge lives here, and it should not be lost.'\n\n'Wh-wh-which b-books...?' she stammers.\n\n'All of them,' the shadow replies.\n\nIt steps forward. Its motion activates the light above a painting on the wall, illuminating both the faded image of the Tower of Babel and the figure in front of it.\n\n'My name is Ahzek Ahriman,' it says.\n\n6:xlix\n\nContact\n\n'Hurry!' Thane urge"}
{"text":" because that's all she is able to do.\n\n'I have come to withdraw books from this collection,' it says. 'While there is still time. Knowledge lives here, and it should not be lost.'\n\n'Wh-wh-which b-books...?' she stammers.\n\n'All of them,' the shadow replies.\n\nIt steps forward. Its motion activates the light above a painting on the wall, illuminating both the faded image of the Tower of Babel and the figure in front of it.\n\n'My name is Ahzek Ahriman,' it says.\n\n6:xlix\n\nContact\n\n'Hurry!' Thane urges. Demeny is close at his heels. Far too many empty hallways and vacant chambers, an illogical maze even by the labyrinthine standards of the Inner Sanctum Imperialis, have finally led them to something Thane recognises for certain. This fine, arched hall leads to the foot of the Provis Ascension, a grand, wide staircase of ouslite and travertine that rises to Viridium Plaza.\n\nThey mount the gleaming steps together, running. The Ascension rises ahead of them, like a stepped white mountain climbing into the sky. Thane can feel the air pulsing and the stone beneath his feet shivering. He hopes it's the transmitted concussion of the wall guns shaking the Palace.\n\nHe knows it's not.\n\nThe tiled walls of the Ascension should not be laced with hairline cracks as though they are being compressed from above. The electro-flambeaux should not be swinging as if tugged by a strong wind. There shouldn't be threads of smoke in the air. The daylight at the top of the soaring steps should not be pulsing and quivering.\n\nNear the top of the great staircase, he sees the first body. An Excertus colonel, on his back, torso opened like a rose in bloom by a bolter round. Beyond him, two more, a Pan-Pac Seventh sergeant curled as though asleep, a rifleman from the Danube Allegiance impaled on an iron skewer.\n\nThen a Custodian.\n\nThe golden giant lies like a fallen statue. The front of his helmet and head have been bitten off. There's blood on the steps, and lumps of rubble. Demeny slows, and crouches beside the fallen Sentinel, amazed. Thane pushes on.\n\nHe reaches the top. Viridium Plaza.\n\nIt's one of the great concourses inside the north-east turn of the Sanctum wall, a place of parades and state ceremonies flanked by the Lepidus Mansions and the golden precincts of the Geograph's Commission and the Tower of the Occullum Survey.\n\nHe stops in his tracks. The thunder is here, the deluge, the out-spilling hell. Whatever warning he hoped he could carry, it's far too late. All the devils are here already.\n\nWaves of screaming, chanting Word Bearers, their sickening banners flourished, are swarming out of the burning gates of Lectis and Merkarsis, splintering through the hasty picket lines of Excertus drawn up across the plaza. There's rubble everywhere, rubble and blood and charred hunks of human meat. The sky is a rushing, mottled canopy of smoke. Every tower and structure in sight seems to be burning or raddled with holes. Solar Auxilia support teams rake cannon fire from the high balustrades of the Commission, and six assault squads of Shattered Legion Astartes drive in on the western side. But nothing, nothing, none of it, even begins to slow down the engulfing horde of Word Bearers.\n\nHe's too late. Everything is too late.\n\n'Demeny!' Thane yells, but the prentice-brother is already beside him at the head of the steps, Berendol's blade in his hands.\n\n'With me,' says Thane, hammer rising.\n\n6:l\n\nFragments\n\nAnd doom falls, like a mailed fist, like the heel of a cruel boot, grinding the last hopes of man to dust. There is no restraint exhibited, no belated mercy. As the traitor-enemy finally grapples with its wounded prey, its brutality does not diminish. It swells, inflamed with callous frustration that the prey has held it at bay so long. Now face to face, hand to hand, it becomes frenzied. Blows rain, un-pulled, upon the face of Empire, a face that can no longer turn aside or hide or retreat. It is payback, it is vindictive gratification, it is punishment for months of resistance and defiance, for lives lost in the effort, for blood spilt in the toil, for every slight and insult and act of contumacy. The final fortress, pinned, compromised and helpless, will be beaten to a pulp by homicidal rage. The end of the siege will not be a victory; it will be a sack. The Imperium of Man, even the concept of the Imperium of Man, will be razed and exterminated.\n\nFire breeds and multiplies: everywhere, the dusty light is turmeric yellow under an inflamed lava sky.\n\nIn the sections where the voids have failed, the Delphic Wall begins to fracture. The breaches are few at first, but the fact that there are any at all is a sign that hope has gone. The curtain walls of the final fortress, a kilometre and a half high and a kilometre thick, splinter at Canticle Tower, West Palatine, West Delphine and South Sentinel. Fire mushrooms upwards, through sheeting rain and the dissipating lightning of splitting voids. Rubble heaps like avalanche spills, and the screaming divisions of Vorus Ikari, Ekron Fal and Serob Kargul ascend the landslide slopes of cracked grey stone in swarms.\n\nTheir praetors lead, banners at their backs, and their war cry is, 'Dark King! Dark King!' bellowed from inhuman lungs. The Neverborn flood like oil and smoke around the heels of the ponderous, relentless death engines that lumber after. At each break point, every minute costs both sides a thousand lives.\n\nBut the break points in the proud walls are nothing, just the outward signs of the inner calamity. The enemy is already deep inside the Sanctum, carried there in droves by mazing pathways that defy walls and barriers, by immaterial deceit, by invasive boreholes against which there is no physical defence. Materia has given way, and traitor units are emerging in a hundred locations within the Inner Palace, commencing their slaughter the moment they have reconciled - or decided to ignore - the impossibility of their arrival.\n\nBattles erupt along mass passageways. Processionals become killing fields. The proud hallways and auramite chambers of the Terran Palace are scarred by flame and smoke, by blood and bolter round. Towers are engulfed, spires shatter, bridge-spans and skyways collapse under the weight of fighting bodies. Death has come, without logic, sense or permission, and the gilded wonder of the final fortress becomes a zone mortalis.\n\nIn the Tanquen Processional, Lucoryphus, Night Lord, so proud of his status and the murders in his wake, stops short, and bitterly realises he is not the first after all. Not the first to find his way inside, not by some measure. The miracle that was worked on him has been worked on others, many others. He sees the brigades of Death Guard mobbing the South Chancel, the Sons of Horus armour units grinding across the Sadrian Concourse. He sees doors and portals in walls where no doors or portals ever were before, foul tears and wounds in the fabric of reality from which his brethren spill, invasion points beyond the farthest schemes and imaginings of the Lord of Iron. How dull and prosaic seem Perturabo's plans of attack and siegecraft now! How lamentably conventional the defences of Dorn! The warp has conquered and violated all, rotting the False Emperor's Palace and riddling its shredded flesh.\n\nLucoryphus sets aside his disappointment. Victory is here, conquest, the last and greatest of its kind, and he is part of it.\n\nHe readies his gleaming blades, for there is killing to be done.\n\nOn the Traxia Skyway, three hundred metres up, Sentinel Xohas Tjan leads a cohort of gleaming Custodes in an effort to dam the torrent of Death Guard and Word Bearers attempting to pour across from the Spire of the Echelons to gain access to the Tower of the Aegis. Even with four companies of terrified Excertus in support, Tjan's force is outnumbered twenty to one. The skyway, a golden span forty metres wide, shivers as the two sides clash. Tjan utters no orders: neurosynergetics convey his needs to his brethren, and his example shows the Excertus all they need to know. He does not falter. He does not fail. None of them do. But the Traxia Skyway does. Integrity lost to damage and shock, the span disintegrates, carrying loyalist and traitor to their deaths together.\n\nAt Marnix Confluence, less than two kilometres from the Throne Room, Amit Flesh-Tearer leads the fight.\n\nVexillary Tamos Roch is dead. The denial companies are cut to the bone, and assailed from all sides. The Confluence is a junction, and the enemy host is pouring in from every passageway and processional. The great seals of the Sanctum have been broken. Armoured death is flooding down the arterial routes like venom in a bloodstream.\n\nThe concourse is piled with dead. Hundreds of them are citizens and courtiers cut to ribbons when the traitors began to arrive. The enemy made no distinction between armed combatants and civilians. They surged in, berserk, killing anyone and everyone they found. Amit wonders how many of the fleeing civilians who flooded the concourse have managed to escape, or where they have escaped to. What's left of the denial companies has been driven back onto the steps of the Proserpine Watchtower. The approach steps, which fan out from the tower's gateway like the rays of a stylised sun, are wide, marble, majestic, and a hundred deep. They are littered with corpses: Sons of Horus killed on their way up, Blood Angels fallen from the summit.\n\nStone walls and redoubts are atomised by bolter fire, and flamer-wash bathes the watchtower walls. Heavy las-fire and plasma beams rake down from the tower's high gun-slots, and scour the advancing tide of traitor troops. Rotary cannons chime and purr, draining the autoloader chutes. On the open staircase, the fighting is hand-to-hand, furious, individual, a frenzy in the stinging smoke. Loyalist and traitor alike are drowning in a cauldron of boiling noise.\n\nSword in hand, Amit stands his ground alongside brother Blood Angels, White Scars and Imperial Fis"}
{"text":"er-wash bathes the watchtower walls. Heavy las-fire and plasma beams rake down from the tower's high gun-slots, and scour the advancing tide of traitor troops. Rotary cannons chime and purr, draining the autoloader chutes. On the open staircase, the fighting is hand-to-hand, furious, individual, a frenzy in the stinging smoke. Loyalist and traitor alike are drowning in a cauldron of boiling noise.\n\nSword in hand, Amit stands his ground alongside brother Blood Angels, White Scars and Imperial Fists. Each marble step is a battlefield. They send ravening Sons of Horus clattering back down the staircase, piling in heaps. Streams of blood run down the steps.\n\nAmit cleaves a Lupercalian helm, then wrests his dripping blade free to slash it across the throat and chest of another child of treason. As the body topples away from him, he scythes again, and sends a grasping hand and a helmeted head flying into the air.\n\nEnemy rockets and munitions splash against the tower walls at Amit's back, drizzling him and his companions with metal debris. They fight on, faces to the foe, oblivious to everything except the hyper-reactive demands of Astartesian combat. It is almost a trance state, a simple binary equation of kill or die.\n\nLamirus, fighting at Amit's left hand, falls, torn apart. He is not an indirect victim of the explosions at their heels, nor has he been killed by the Sons of Horus surging up at them.\n\nAmit looks up. He sees that an entirely new entrance to the great Confluence has opened up, like a wet wound in meat.\n\nFrom the buckling air above him, the Neverborn spill down.\n\n6:li\n\nUndone\n\nThe downpour increases in fury. Oll Persson wipes rain from his face. They're too exposed out on the top of the city wall. A fog is rising, as though it intends to blind them and hide all traces of the thread-clues they are following. Already, the distant walls and the roofs below are becoming invisible in the grey-green haze.\n\nHe glances back again, urging his long companions on.\n\n'What is it?' asks Leetu.\n\nIt's nothing. Just Oll's imagination, jumping at the shadows behind him just like he has done every step of the way from Calth.\n\nBut it's not nothing. There's a figure on the old wall's broad battlement behind them, striding closer, a figure that has walked out of the fog, or nowhere, or both.\n\nIt's found him at last.\n\n'Oh god,' says Oll.\n\nErebus does not speak. He does not break his stride. He doesn't even ask for his blade back. Everything he has to say is inked upon his grizzled flesh or etched upon his tarnished plate.\n\nThe Dark Apostle, Hand of Destiny, descends upon them, and begins to kill them.\n\n6:lii\n\nDestiny foretold\n\nThe blackness seems alive. It has a solidity that presses on them. In its depths, Sanguinius hears his brother sigh behind him.\n\n'I can go no further,' Ferrus says. His lips have not moved in a long while now.\n\nSanguinius nods. Ferrus places a huge, armoured hand on his shoulder again. The hand shakes. Whatever Ferrus Manus is containing within himself by force of will, be it pain or anger, is close to bursting free and escaping.\n\n'I want to, but-'\n\n'I understand,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'If I had a choice-'\n\n'I understand.'\n\nHe can barely see him in the darkness. It is as though Ferrus Manus is not really there, or is rapidly ceasing to be there.\n\n'Go,' says Sanguinius. 'I need no more lessons.'\n\n'No, one more,' says Ferrus. 'He hid in the past.'\n\n'Horus?'\n\nFerrus Manus nods. 'That's how he tricked you. That's how he tricked our father. He could not risk our father learning the extent of his power, or reading his thoughts, or comprehending the nature of the trap he had set, so, by will and warp, Horus put himself into his own past, into his memories, so deeply and so completely that, for a time, even he did not know where he was or what he was doing.'\n\n'Is that possible?' asks Sanguinius.\n\n'For him, yes. A tactical masterstroke, but then he is the Warmaster. There was no mind for our father to read, no present thoughts that could be betrayed. Horus gave himself to madness and fitful recollection so that he could give nothing of his plan away. And his plan was known only to him, of course.'\n\n'And thus we were deceived, and came here,' murmurs Sanguinius.\n\n'Yes,' says Ferrus sadly. 'And the need for such insane cunning is now passed. You are here. So his mind is restoring, rapidly. He is becoming himself again, quickly, himself and more besides, fully willed and cogent, present and all-powerful in this moment. I tell you this, brother, because it takes huge effort, even for one such as him, to reconstruct a mind so thoroughly dismantled. He is not quite there yet.'\n\n'So he is weak?'\n\n'In body? No. But in thought, perhaps still, a little. Traces of the self-inflicted dementia may persist. At the very least, he may be confused or not self-assured.'\n\n'So, a flaw I can exploit?'\n\n'Perhaps, while it lasts. Which won't be long. And even weak, he is-'\n\n'I understand.'\n\n'I know you do.'\n\nSanguinius looks at the way ahead, at darkness folded into darkness. Deep in it, shrouded, but close enough for Sanguinius to taste, there is a baleful presence. A dull red glow, an eye, perhaps, unblinking, or just a throbbing manifestation of hatred and malice, like a radioactive ingot hidden at the bottom of an oceanic abyss, or a guttering sun at the very limit of the void.\n\nOr, perhaps, merely, a destiny foretold.\n\nHe hears the hot-fat spit and crackle of the warp.\n\n'He's here,' he says.\n\n'He always was,' says Ferrus.\n\nSanguinius lifts his sword, making ready. Light flares and drips from the blade, golden in defiance of the darkness. It barely illuminates them. The owned night swallows its glow.\n\n'The bastard has my skull,' Ferrus says. 'Fetch it back. I don't much like being a trophy.'\n\nSanguinius nods.\n\n'Until we meet again,' says Ferrus Manus.\n\nPART SEVEN\n\nHEROES IN THE LABYRINTH, MONSTERS IN THE MAZE\n\n7:i\n\nThe fate of the long companions\n\nThere is always a monster, and it will always catch you.\n\nOll has led them and protected them across thousands of light years and tens of thousands of years, but the voyage ends here, on the rain-lashed battlement walk of a crumbling stone wall that encircles an abandoned city.\n\nErebus comes out of the rain. He is part of the rain. He is part of the storm. He is the elemental wrath engulfing the old city wall.\n\nOll stands his ground, drenched to the skin, his sodden clothes flapping in the wind. The others are screaming at him to run, but he knows there's no point. You can't run from destiny. That's the thing about labyrinths: there's always something in there with you. Oll knows that. He's got the scars to prove it. When he entered this particular labyrinth on Calth, he hoped, with the same foolish hope of any questing hero, that he could follow the thread all the way to the centre before the monster found him.\n\nBut in a place where time and distance are undone, there's no chance of that. The monster that's been trailing him through every twist and turn has caught up with them. And like any and every questing hero before him, Oll recognises his foolish hope was forlorn.\n\nWorse, he is no Iason, no Sigfrid, no Gilgamez, no Bearwulf, no Olyteus, no Parzival. He is no virile broad-back with a sturdy spear and a bronze war-shield. Not any more. He is an old man, soaked to the bone, fumbling in his wet coat for a stone knife that wasn't meant for this kind of fight.\n\nErebus is a hell-thing, a towering beast in full war plate, half-made of rain and rage. The rest of him is words, foul words, infernal words, knotted and strung together into a humanoid shape. He opens his mouth to speak. Oll finds the knife-\n\nBut Leetu is there. The fastest-moving of them all, the only one with a chance of matching the Word Bearer strength-for-strength. The iron post in his hands is wrenched back to swing.\n\nErebus speaks.\n\nThe word of power, a cluster of unholy phonemes dredged from the warp and weaponised, is meant for Oll, but Leetu is in the way. The Astartes is hurled backwards by the impact, knocking John flat, the post spinning from his hand. He hits the crumbling copestones of the wall, and doesn't get up.\n\nErebus is already intent on Oll again. He has other things to say, and most of them are lethal. Oll lunges at him with the knife.\n\n'No,' says Erebus. Just that. No.\n\nOll realises he can't move. His hand is extended, shaking, clenching the knife, but he's frozen, his body obeying the other's demand. Erebus smiles, and reaches through the rain towards Oll's throat.\n\nKrank hits Erebus. Roaring defiance, roaring Oll's name, demonstrating more selfless loyalty than any gene-son of the Emperor, Krank swings his makeshift cudgel into the monster's face and chest with both hands and every ounce of strength he can muster.\n\nRainwater sprays from the impact. The ceramite cudgel shatters. So do both of Krank's wrists. Krank staggers aside, stunned, gasping in shock. Erebus tuts, and utters another word that strikes Krank in the back of the head, and blows his skull apart with the force of a point-blank shotgun. Oll wants to howl as the headless corpse falls, but he's still frozen, his denied muscles screaming, lactic acid burning in his limbs as he tries to overcome the grip.\n\nThe grip becomes physical. The Word Bearer's huge paw closes around his neck.\n\nErebus lifts him up. Choking, Oll's vision begins to tunnel. The drum of his pulse is in his ears. He sees Erebus' face. The smile of triumph. The dead eyes. The tattoos of demented words. The flecks of Dogent Krank's blood on the cheek, the nose, the brow, beginning to wash off in the rain. Oll knows his own face is spattered with Krank's blood too. Blackness yawns as his air runs out, and the grip on him grinds his bones-\n\nThe blows that free him are heavy, like a jackhammer. Oll lands on his back on the wet stone of the wall-top walkway. Graft, servos extended, is repeatedly and relentlessly striking Erebus with the negation box. The assault is unstinting, mech"}
{"text":" demented words. The flecks of Dogent Krank's blood on the cheek, the nose, the brow, beginning to wash off in the rain. Oll knows his own face is spattered with Krank's blood too. Blackness yawns as his air runs out, and the grip on him grinds his bones-\n\nThe blows that free him are heavy, like a jackhammer. Oll lands on his back on the wet stone of the wall-top walkway. Graft, servos extended, is repeatedly and relentlessly striking Erebus with the negation box. The assault is unstinting, mechanical, like a steam-press. Graft, not built for war, is addressing the problem with the tireless functionality of an agricultural servitor, as though simply pile-driving home a fence-post. There is no hesitation. The servitor just slams the duralloy box into Erebus with its primary manipulators, blow upon blow, without pause or consideration. Unlike Krank's ferocious effort, this attack has more than mortal strength behind it. Graft is a bulk-grade unit. Oll's seen it lift a tonne of harvested produce in one go.\n\nThe monster steps back. He raises his arms to ward off the incessant rain of blows. The duralloy crate is buckling and coming apart with each impact. Not all of the blood on Erebus' face belongs to Dogent Krank.\n\n'Graft! Get away!' Oll yells.\n\n'I am performing good works, Trooper Persson,' Graft replies, striking with unrelenting industrial application. 'Run clear.'\n\nOll feels hands on him. It's John, trying to get him up and drag him back. John's yelling something, but Oll can't make sense of the words. He's too dizzy, limp, his ears ringing.\n\n'The knife...' Oll gasps.\n\nHe dropped it when Erebus dropped him. Oll pushes John away, falls to one knee, and sees the knife a few metres away, lying on the wet stone right at the lip of the wall.\n\nZybes appears, grabbing the knife, saving it before it can be kicked off the edge and lost.\n\nThe negation crate is no more than tatters, entirely destroyed by the repeated blows. Graft starts striking with its manipulators instead. Erebus grabs one primary limb to block it, then another. Secondary limbs catch him in the face, the gorget. The monster is irritated now. Blood-flecked and irritated. He twists his inhuman grip and tears off one of Graft's primary arms. He tosses it into the pelting rain. With one hand still locking the other primary limb at bay, the monster reaches in and grabs a secondary. He shreds that off in a spray of sparks, leaving a stump of shorn cables. He opens his mouth to speak directly into Graft's face.\n\nA stone clips his temple. It's no more than a bee-sting, but Erebus snatches his head around angrily. Katt winds up for a second cast, her makeshift sling whirling.\n\nShe looses. A barked syllable from Erebus stops the speeding stone in the air, holds it, suspended and shivering in the rain, just for a second, then crushes it into dust. Erebus, no longer entertained, picks Graft up and hurls it.\n\nThe heavy, damaged servitor soars down the length of the wall-top towards Katt and Actae. Katt flinches. Actae raises her hand. A twitch. Graft stops, upside down, flight arrested, halfway between the Word Bearer and the witch. Actae holds the servitor in mid-air with her psykana as easily as Erebus held Katt's stone. Oll can see Graft's cracked plating, the oil and hydraulics spurting from ruptured pipes, the odd angle of Graft's upturned head now that one of its neck struts has snapped.\n\nErebus gazes at the blind witch fifty metres away. He regards the stricken servitor suspended in the rain between them. He gives a slight nod, as though to acknowledge this feat.\n\nThen he speaks another ugly word of power.\n\nGraft disassembles explosively. The shockwave hurls mangled metal debris in all directions. Erebus raises a hand gently, as if bestowing a benediction, and the debris spinning towards him, some of it large enough to injure or kill, ripples away from him.\n\nThe rest of them are not so well protected.\n\nActae recoils, and hurls up a wall of force that shields her from the worst, but not fast enough. A spinning gear-wheel clips Katt's head, and drops her on her back. A splintered, saw-edged section of Graft's shoulder plate hits John full in the face, and smashes him into Oll. Hard shrapnel pieces of the loyal servitor chip the stone of the wall-top and walkway. Spars of metal bursting from Graft's chassis frame strike the black stone, and embed like arrows. The rod section of a primary limb impales Hebet Zybes through the chest.\n\nHe looks surprised, confused. He looks down at the bar of metal protruding from his sternum. The clew of red thread drops from his hand, rolls across the walkway playing a trail of twine behind it, and then drops off the edge. Then Zybes topples backwards off the wall without a sound, the knife in his other hand.\n\nOll sees him fall, his body plummeting into the long, dark drop below. There's nothing he can do. He's already flat on his chest, his arms hanging over the edge of the wall. When John was struck, he fell back into Oll, knocking him down, and then kept going. By some miracle, Oll managed to roll as he went over, and grabbed John's arms. Oll has him by the wrist. He's flat on his front, head and shoulders over the edge, his weakening grip the only thing preventing John from plunging. The grip is slick with rain. John's feet flail and kick, trying to find a toe-hold. Oll's arms shudder with the strain. He can feel John's wrist dislocating. He can feel himself slowly slithering over the edge, dragged by his friend's weight. John looks up at him, framed by the sheer drop below. His face is a mess of blood, his cheek and nose torn, his mouth and chin lacerated by the shrapnel, his jaw shattered.\n\nHis eyes are begging.\n\nFor what? To be saved? For Oll to let him go and save himself?\n\n'Hold on to me!' Oll groans. John thrashes with his other hand, but he can't quite grab Oll's sleeve, and the motion makes him swing more violently, threatening to break Oll's grip entirely.\n\nJohn says something. Nothing comes out of his ruined mouth except noise and blood. He tries again. What is he saying?\n\nIs it let me go? Is he pleading for Oll to let him drop?\n\nNo, it's something else. It's-\n\nErebus is standing over them, standing at the edge of the wall astride Oll, gazing down at them.\n\n'Curious,' Erebus murmurs. He bends down, raindrops running off the edges of his plate, grabs Oll, and lifts, raising John too until he is able to grab him as well. He hauls them both up, one in each hand, and dangles them either side of him like prize catches.\n\nHe steps back from the edge. He tosses Oll to the walkway. He holds Grammaticus close, eye-to-eye.\n\n'What were you trying to say?' Erebus asks. 'What word were you trying to speak with that broken mouth of yours? Tell me. Teach it to me.'\n\nJohn snorts and, as effectively as he can with a mangled mouth, spits blood into Erebus' face. Erebus grimaces, turns his head away and, still holding John aloft, delicately reaches to wipe the insult off his cheek.\n\nAnd that's when John Grammaticus stabs him in the ear with the aeldari shears.\n\nErebus roars and stumbles backwards, fumbling to wrench the xenos instrument out of his head. John, forgotten, hits the ground and folds up, gasping. Oll gets to him, tries to haul him up. John's head lolls back. Then Leetu is beside them, back on his feet, lifting them both, dragging them clear. Erebus is turning towards them. He has tugged the shears out. He's about to speak again, a word of power to vaporise all three of them.\n\nHis mouth refuses to open.\n\nA perplexed expression crosses the monster's tattooed face. Rain streams down his cheeks and whips off his chin as he tries to shake his head and make his mouth work. He growls, but his lips refuse to part. He wheels in silent rage. Actae is advancing towards him along the top of the wall, Katt sprawled unconscious or dead behind her. Her hands are raised, fingers curled like hooks. She is silencing the Word Bearer by force of will alone.\n\nThe knife. Get the damn knife.\n\nOll hears Actae's command in the base of his skull. He feels Leetu wince as he hears it too.\n\nGet the knife, Persson. Retrieve it. It's the only thing that matters.\n\n'For god's sake-' Oll stammers.\n\nI can hold him.\n\nLeetu drags Oll backwards. They're half-carrying John between them. The nearest wall-steps are about forty metres behind them. Erebus sees them begin to run. He glances back at Actae, and advances on her instead.\n\nHe's unclamped his power maul.\n\nShe stands her ground. She straightens her arms as though she's trying to push a tree over, the heels of her palms pressed together, the fingers curled outwards. The psykanic force pulsing out of her is now so strong that the pelting downpour around her and her adversary begins to blow sideways, spraying up and away. Stonework cracks beneath her braced feet. Erebus walks into her invisible assault, easily at first, then finding increasing resistance, like a man walking head down into a hurricane. But still he keeps going, relentless, wordless, maul in hand, one straining step after another.\n\nThe top of the wall-steps is twenty metres away. Oll can see the long flight of stone steps running down into the darkness below him, flush-cut to the wall. Too far to jump.\n\nHe can feel the psykanic discharge behind him. He glances back. He sees Actae and Erebus, face to face, no more than ten metres apart. She is holding her place, juddering with effort. Rain eddies around her in unnatural spirals. Strings of warp-lightning sizzle in the air. The monster is still advancing on her. One step. Another. Each pace a superhuman effort of strength and will. He is slowly, slowly, closing the distance.\n\nHe'll kill her when he reaches her. What does she have left? What reserve of power? Is there anything more she can draw on and unleash to stop him?\n\nAs though she has heard Oll's thoughts, her voice reaches him.\n\nGet off the wall. Get out of the way. Now!\n\nOll hesitates. He looks back, wide-eyed. Leetu grabs him, circling"}
{"text":"ng sizzle in the air. The monster is still advancing on her. One step. Another. Each pace a superhuman effort of strength and will. He is slowly, slowly, closing the distance.\n\nHe'll kill her when he reaches her. What does she have left? What reserve of power? Is there anything more she can draw on and unleash to stop him?\n\nAs though she has heard Oll's thoughts, her voice reaches him.\n\nGet off the wall. Get out of the way. Now!\n\nOll hesitates. He looks back, wide-eyed. Leetu grabs him, circling an arm around Oll's waist. The Astartes has thrown John's limp form over his other shoulder. He has also heard Actae's command.\n\nOll starts to speak. Leetu is already acting.\n\nCarrying both of them, he leaps off the wall.\n\nThey fall forever, but it's not forever. It's perhaps twelve metres. Leetu lands, square and true, feet first, on the descending flight of steps below the wall. The black stone crazes under the impact. Leetu sways alarmingly, but keeps his balance. Oll thumps against his plate as they land, his ribs almost cracking.\n\nHe looks up, frantic, as Leetu sets him down. Through the sheeting rain, he can still see them, two figures on the top of the wall above him. Actae has not budged. Not a single step back. Erebus is almost on her. One more stride and she'll be in striking range of his maul.\n\nBut John, Leetu and Oll are no longer in her line of fire.\n\nAnd everyone else is dead.\n\nActae sighs. She recomposes her power, refocusing her will from a wide shield of resistance into a single, piercing lance of raw psykanic rage.\n\nReleased, Erebus rushes her, maul raised, but the alteration takes no longer than it takes a synapse to fire.\n\nA four-hundred-metre stretch of the ancient wall-top turns into a blister of consuming blue energy. The force of the blast ripples along the wall in both directions, splintering stone, exploding battlements, and hurling the walkway pavers into the air. Leetu tries to shield John and Oll with his plated body as stone slabs and blocks the size of munition boxes start to rain down.\n\nThe shockwave hits. There is a deafening thunder of tumbling masonry.\n\nThe city wall is thick and high and very old. When the light fades, almost fifty metres of it have entirely collapsed, crushing the ancient dwellings and structures below, and a vast sheet of black dust is rising into the rain above the Inevitable City.\n\n7:ii\n\nThe now and the here\n\nThere's nothing left.\n\nThere's no road to follow any more. Keeler realises this belatedly.\n\nAt some point, while they have been walking, the great Via Aquila has faded away, its course and features gradually dissolving into a barren, rusty waste. Keeler sees a few cracked paving stones, embedded unevenly in the red dirt, and the occasional post or waymarker, the only trace evidence of an immense Imperial highway that has somehow petered out without any of them noticing.\n\nThere is no city any more, either, no ruins, no rubble, no half-standing buildings. Just a vast wasteland of dry, copper soil with blocky outcrops of rock and square-shouldered mesas. Dust swirls and drives in the arid wind, and the sky is a pyrocumulus ocean.\n\nIs this the Palace still? Was this the city? Has war scoured this zone so fiercely that everything, even debris and remains, has been reduced to dry dust and baked earth? It reminds Keeler of picts she's seen of the surface of Mars. She leaves the head of the slow-moving mass, and clambers up one of the ragged outcrops. From the top, she sees Sigismund's armoured vehicles grinding ahead, trailing dust, followed by the foot-slogging units of his Seconds, spread out in small brigades. Behind them comes the pilgrimage. It is a staggering river of human souls, a hundred metres wide, snaking across the wasteland as far as she can see. She sees the trailing loops of it curving down the distant ridge of cliffs to reach the flat waste where she stands. How long ago did she make that staggered descent? An hour? Two? How many more people follow behind those she can just see? How long is the column of survivors? It looks like the greatest mass exodus in human history.\n\nBut an exodus needs a place to leave, and a destination, and all sense of place, along with the road, has been erased.\n\nWe're the road now, she thinks. Her eyes follow the long, curving river of souls. We have become our own road, and our own destination.\n\nShe climbs down, and rejoins the column. The dust, blowing like fine flour, is in everything: her eyes, her mouth, the folds of her clothes. It dulls the ominous black of Sigismund's armour. The Champion offered her and Lord Zhi-Meng the respite of riding on the track-skirts of one of his fighting vehicles. Keeler refused, saying she would walk like everyone else, and the choirmaster, though clearly longing to rest his limbs, declined too, tightening his grip on her arm. So the Champion has chosen to walk with them at the head of the civilian mass, while his armed force spreads ahead to test the way. He walks, bare-headed, carrying his sword. There's something penitential about that.\n\n'What did you see?' he asks, nodding towards the outcrop that she had scrambled up.\n\n'Nothing we can't see from here,' she replies.\n\nHe doesn't ask her where they're going. It seems he is content to be invested with the deed or act itself. To him, she believes, the small actions and individual things count. Unlike his father, he doesn't need to know an end plan or an ultimate goal, just the now and the here, tackling life one step, or one blow, at a time. There's infinite peace in that attitude. He is the most disciplined man she has ever met, entirely focused on duty, yet that focus seems to render him so free he seems weightless.\n\nBeyond the next ridge of rock, they come upon a great bowl of dust, like a dried seabed. The carcasses of dead war engines are scattered here, huge atolls of tangled metal. They are so burned and abraded, it's impossible to discern insignia. The pilgrimage advances between the wrecks and the dead giants, sometimes passing through the shadow of a huge foot or burned-out torso. Loose armour plates bang in the dry wind. Dead cables swing like vines. Keeler can see the sky between exposed rib-stanchions, or through holes in armour-skin punched by unimaginable weapons. Surface coatings are flaked and peeling, and the cracked earth between the huge machine-corpses is littered with metallic debris.\n\nThis was the site of an engine-war, and from the number of wrecks, an engine-war of staggering scale. Perhaps the fury of this titanic clash, the detonating energies that must have felled these giants, explains the erasure of the Palace in this area, and even the immensity of the dried bowl they have descended into and begun to cross. Is it a crater? Was the conflagration here so colossal that it dented the planet and burned the Palace structure down to the bedrock?\n\nWhy do these dead engines look like they have been decaying for years?\n\n7:iii\n\nContaminated\n\nEverything they find is dead, everything lost. They cut open the next blast hatch, and haul it aside. Harsh blue light shines out at them. The Sons of Horus hesitate.\n\nAbaddon does not.\n\n'Ezekyle!' Baraxa calls out, but Abaddon steps through.\n\nA service way, broad and lofty, stretches ahead of him, one side lined with heavy, through-deck ductwork. The intense blue glare is coming from recessed emitters in the ceiling. The light is surgically raw, a burning ultraviolet. Abaddon can hear a fierce, high-pitched hum at the edge of the audible threshold.\n\n'For pity's sake,' Baraxa calls to him. 'Come back. It's decontam.'\n\nIt is. Abaddon knows full well. The Vengeful Spirit's decontamination and containment systems have activated in this section in response to a hazardous agent. The sterilising light-burn, along with ultrasonic and anti-viral processors, are bathing the area with an antimicrobial aura to eliminate biohazards, radiation or xenos pollutants detected by the environmental sensoria.\n\n'Ezekyle, there's something in there-'\n\n'I know,' Abaddon replies.\n\nHe's looking at it. Cautiously, Baraxa joins him. They stare at the structure for a few moments. Baraxa utters a quiet profanity.\n\nDecontam protocols cut in automatically when a foreign body is detected. It could be spores, bacteria, viral phages, an atmospheric fault, anything the ship's sensoria don't like.\n\nIn this case, the foreign body is an old shop. It is framed of age-black timber, and the daubed plaster is stained and decaying. From the look of the faded images painted on the plaster, or carved into the woodwork, it had been the emporium of an astrologer or diviner of asterisms. Abaddon sees crude constellations marked out, and zodiacal symbols. Saturn, Mercury, the Goat-fish, the Sagittary. The windowpanes are thick and dirty. Sickly weeds grow from the doorstep and broken eaves. The building is bulging out of the wall like a cancerous growth. It's impossible to say where the old wood and plaster ends and the ship's metalwork begins. The materia of both is fused together.\n\n'I don't-' Baraxa begins, but he does. He must, Abaddon thinks. They can both see what's happening. There's been evidence of it all along: the torn pages, the old books, the out-of-place objects, even the manner of their arrival.\n\nThis is his father's work. His father's crime. His father's madness. The warp has been allowed to stir loose, blending and mixing place and time, folding the ship into a thousand other spaces. Reality is diseased. Matter is unstable.\n\nThere's no control. It's gone too far.\n\nAbaddon steps closer to the old storefront and examines the way it is sprouting from the wall. It's not a growth or an intrusion. It's simply there, occupying this space. Why this? Why this old building? Is it significant? What is it part of, what town, what city, on what world?\n\nWhen?\n\nIs there, somewhere, an old city into which a section of the Vengeful Spirit's forward service way now distends?\n\nThe blue light and ultrasonic buzz are unpleasant, "}
{"text":"able.\n\nThere's no control. It's gone too far.\n\nAbaddon steps closer to the old storefront and examines the way it is sprouting from the wall. It's not a growth or an intrusion. It's simply there, occupying this space. Why this? Why this old building? Is it significant? What is it part of, what town, what city, on what world?\n\nWhen?\n\nIs there, somewhere, an old city into which a section of the Vengeful Spirit's forward service way now distends?\n\nThe blue light and ultrasonic buzz are unpleasant, gnawing at his senses. It's pathetic. The ship is fighting so hard to cleanse itself, but it's futile. No emergency air-scrub or light purge will dislodge this.\n\n'He's lost control,' Abaddon murmurs.\n\n'Truly?' Baraxa asks.\n\nAbaddon nods. 'All along,' he mutters. 'All along, I've warned-'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'Counselled him. Said it was too much.'\n\n'I know.'\n\n'This was never the way, Azelas,' says Abaddon. 'This was never a way to win. And this was never a weapon. Not one we could use. It was only ever going to use us.'\n\n'You have control,' Baraxa says.\n\nHe looks at Abaddon.\n\n'Don't you?' he asks.\n\n7:iv\n\nThe sorcerer\n\n'You are afraid,' Ahriman tells them.\n\nIt's not an observation. It's an instruction. Three words cast to instruct their states of being and command their minds.\n\nThey are afraid anyway. The archivist is backing away from him, struck dumb, her retreat only halted by a shelf of books. Sindermann and Mauer stare in helpless horror at his looming figure.\n\nAt his instruction, their breathless fright becomes absolute terror. The archivist collapses, knocking books from the shelves, paralysed with dread. Mauer covers her face and sinks to her knees, shaking. Sindermann freezes, eyes wide, unable to breathe. Fear transfixes him like a rusty spike.\n\n'P-please-' he gasps, choking on his own tongue.\n\nAhriman turns to regard him, curious.\n\nThe warrior of the Thousand Sons is tall, distressingly so, as though perspective in the collection chamber has shifted. He seems like a structure made of twilight, just panels and planes of dusk expertly fitted together to form an impression of robes, of armour plate, of tall, curved, impossible horns. Every part of him is gloom and murk, but that shape is suffused by rumours of colour: lapis and Prussian blue, cochineal and carmine, bismuth and cinnabar, mixed into the darkness like pigment, so that each piece of his shadow has a different quality and texture.\n\n'I know your face,' he says. 'You are the great iterator, Kyril Sindermann.'\n\nSindermann's mouth moves, but no sound comes out. His old heart is about to burst.\n\n'Your work,' says Ahriman, 'your purpose, I hold in high regard.'\n\nHe pauses, and seems to consider something.\n\n'You are not afraid,' he decides.\n\nThe terror releases them. Mauer topples over onto her hands, panting. Sindermann sways, dizzy, gasping for air. Fear still clings to them, cold sharp, but it's their own now, not the terror the sorcerer bestowed.\n\nAhriman takes Sindermann by the arm and steers him to sit in one of the library chairs. His touch is as gentle as a blunt bear trap.\n\n'I have always endorsed your efforts to document Imperial history, Kyril Sindermann,' Ahriman says. 'Even in the early days of the crusade, I was vocal in my support of the Order of Remembrancers.'\n\n'You w-were,' Sindermann manages.\n\n'There is no greater duty than to know ourselves and our universe,' says Ahriman. 'But memories lapse. That gathered knowledge must be recorded, precisely and in great detail, by serious men. It is not enough, Kyril Sindermann, to read the future, as I do. We need to be able to read the past too, for without it, the future often makes no sense.'\n\n'Are you g-going to kill us?' Mauer asks, cowering on her hands and knees.\n\n'Do I need to?' Ahriman replies. 'Do you wish me to? I wouldn't blame you. I could make it painless and quick. The slaughter will reach here soon, and there is no escape. I could grant you mercy, if you desire it. But I have no interest in you at all, to be honest, though encountering the great Kyril Sindermann is an unexpected pleasure. No, I am here on my own business. I leave the mindless killing to the sons of Lupercal and Angron.'\n\nThe towering, horned shadow turns and surveys the bookstacks around them for a moment. Then it glances back at them.\n\n'You do understand you've lost?' Ahriman asks them. 'Your cause is done. Terra has fallen and the Palace is falling. Your Emperor has been vanquished, and Horus, my nominal Warmaster, has triumphed. All that remains is ransack and destruction. Nothing will survive.'\n\n7:v\n\nImmortal Fo\n\nIt's approaching now. Very fast.\n\nAmon Tauromachian holds his position at the head of the Pons Aegeus sky bridge. He is as motionless as the Retreat towering behind him.\n\nHe stares at the Sanctum city across the bridge, the wide and magnificent vista of palatial facades, steepling spires and grand towers. He can feel the tremble of the deck, the distant thump and reverberation. In the distance, gouts of flame billow and scud above the rooftops. Lights flash and strobe behind the immediate skyline. There's ash in the wind. Several zones of the Sanctum, zones less than five kilometres to the south of where he stands and well inside the walls of the final fortress, are ablaze. An inferno sucks and roars, lighting the horizon, matting the sky with a low, black blanket of pouring smoke. He can hear gunfire, muffled and sporadic. He can hear the warning horns bleating intermittently, as though they are out of breath. He can hear thumps, the sundering of walls, the shattering of glass, voices shouting and, here and there, snatches of inhuman chanting that curl and lick at the air.\n\nAlmost every fibre of him is urging him to leave his post and stride into the city. To take his place. To join the fight. His whole life has been dedicated to the defence of the citadel. It's a duty he trained for, practised for, year after year, the gruelling efforts of test and preparation. It's why he was made. To neglect his fundamental purpose now seems like dereliction.\n\nBut he has his orders. And that part, that one part, keeps him in place, nullifying every other urge and desire. He contains his will. He has been instructed. His fingers flex and fidget around the haft of his spear. He has his orders. He must see them through to completion.\n\nOnce they're done, he can give in to his need. He can go to war... run to war... and protect the citadel he was created to love.\n\nThis... this waiting... is perhaps the greatest test of his life. The most demanding blood game of endurance and perseverance. He will see it through. He is Legio Custodes.\n\nHe's aware of her long before she steps into view beside him. He doesn't look around.\n\n'He's still working,' Andromeda-17 says.\n\n'Progress?'\n\n'It seems so.'\n\n'Expectation?'\n\n'I can't speak to a timeframe, but if he's successful, he and the weapon must be removed to a place of safekeeping.'\n\nShe pauses. She laughs, bitterly, at what she has just said.\n\n'Is there such a place?' she asks.\n\n'Conceivably, Fo and the weapon could be transported off-world and secured. There are protocols of emergency evacuation that remain unused.'\n\n'Well,' she says, 'that's what will have to happen.'\n\n'Or,' says Amon, 'if he is successful, the weapon must be deployed.'\n\n'Well,' she says. 'Not my call. Not yours either, I imagine. That would require the authority of... Lord Vulkan? Or the master of the Chosen? Someone.'\n\n'That presumes,' says Amon, 'that Lord Vulkan or Master Hassan are still alive.'\n\n'You think-'\n\nHe raises his left arm and points. A simple, almost mechanical gesture.\n\n'Those flames. They are issuing from structures less than two kilometres from the Throne Room.'\n\n'Are we done, then?' she asks.\n\nHe doesn't reply.\n\n'I mean, Custodian, if they're all dead. If... Well, does the decision fall to us?'\n\nAmon doesn't answer that either. Another slow, deep boom rumbles across the sky. The wind tugs at her robes.\n\n'If he fails, Custodian,' she asks, 'what then? According to your orders, I mean?'\n\n'He will be returned to custody, if that is still practicable,' Amon replies, 'pending future evaluation, if that also proves practicable.'\n\n'And if he attempts deception?'\n\n'He is an enemy of the Throne,' says Amon. 'In the circumstances, I would execute him just like any other traitor.'\n\nHe turns his head and looks down at her.\n\n'Keep careful watch on him. Report any irregularities.'\n\n'You could watch him yourself,' she replies.\n\n'It is reasonable to assume that, before too much longer, I will be required here, simply to ensure the security of the Retreat. The enemy is closing rapidly.'\n\nAmon unclips a small neurosynergetic alarm from his hip and hands it to her. She takes it.\n\n'Then I'll be your eyes,' she says, and walks back into the tower.\n\n7:vi\n\nDrawing the last weapons\n\nHe does not want to watch them die. But he looks anyway, when all others turn away, out of respect for their sacrifice.\n\nThe death toll in the Throne Room is increasing rapidly. How many now? Three hundred? Four? He's lost count.\n\nI did this, thinks Vulkan. I ordered this.\n\n'My lord.'\n\nThis blood is on my hands. This industrial slaughter-\n\n'My Lord of Drakes.' It's Abidemi.\n\nVulkan turns slowly to acknowledge the Draaksward. Abidemi is looking at him, not at the unfolding horror. His left hand is raised to shield his eyes from the glare, despite the protection of his helm.\n\n'A safer distance, perhaps, my Lord of Drakes,' Abidemi suggests reluctantly.\n\nEveryone has withdrawn from the vicinity of the Throne. Everyone that can. The apprenti of the Adnector Concillium have been obliged to move themselves and their devices a greater distance from the dais. The death rate among them, and the damage rendered to their mechanisms, was becoming too punishing to manage. They have raised adamantine baffles, portable barriers resembling the defensive plates of field bunkers, to shield themselves from the radiating fury as they toil and fumble with their instrume"}
{"text":"e has withdrawn from the vicinity of the Throne. Everyone that can. The apprenti of the Adnector Concillium have been obliged to move themselves and their devices a greater distance from the dais. The death rate among them, and the damage rendered to their mechanisms, was becoming too punishing to manage. They have raised adamantine baffles, portable barriers resembling the defensive plates of field bunkers, to shield themselves from the radiating fury as they toil and fumble with their instruments. Still, some of them drop without warning, and control panels short out and fuse. No serf or servitor can venture close. All personnel and courtiers, and Palace staff who found themselves, through whatever mischance, sheltering in the Throne Room, have pulled back to the edges of the huge chamber. Vulkan can hear them, the weeping huddles and lamenting throngs, cowering around the limits of the vast space. Few dare to look.\n\nEven Proconsul Uzkarel and his ring of silent Custodians set around the Throne have been obliged to increase the diameter of their warding circle. They are now fifty metres further out, and more widely spaced. They remain with their backs to the Throne's steps, lances at their sides, wordless and unmoving. Their golden wargear is entirely blackened with soot, and the red plumes of their proud helms are burned away to ash. Vulkan can see the pale anti-shadows they cast on the Throne Room floor, where their motionless forms partly block the radiance that is otherwise ebonising the polished tiles.\n\nHe knows that he has cast a bleached shadow negative of his own. The front of his plate is caked in ash, the metal heating to exhibit secret elemental colours. His cloak smoulders. He, alone, has not stepped back. He, alone, has not turned away.\n\nIt is no longer possible to see the Throne. It is sheathed in a white-hot column of fire, a searing bloom that leaps up, swirling and wild, and scorches the majestic ceiling far above. It is blinding. Immense. The regal canopy has long since vaporised. The plinth and the dais, like the seat of a vast bonfire, glows red with infernal heat. The rare and precious alien metals that compose it are beginning to blister and glisten. Moldavite panels, formed in meteoric heat, crack and shatter. Liquid psycurium quivers and trickles like mercury. Burning psychoplastic throws off the charnel stink of cremating bones. The heart of the fire, the Throne and the figure upon it, both lost from sight, is too bright to behold. Loose ejections of empyric flame occasionally burst from the inferno like solar flares and spatter the floor like molten ore.\n\nBut it is stabilised. The Concillium seniors report that some measure of control has been restored, and that the Regent's rapid decline has been arrested, at least temporarily.\n\nThe price of that reprieve, however...\n\nAccording to the directives of the Unspoken Sanction, the instruction of which Vulkan knows he must live with for the remainder of his lives, the psycho-able candidates are still being brought in. Each one of them has been narco-sedated and placed within an anti-gravitic casket. Mind-locked servitors guide the floating caskets in silent rivers from the Silver Door and the Throne Room's other entrance ports. Coffins for the living. There are hundreds of them, and thousands more yet to be steered in. Nulls of the Sisterhood await them at the wall gantries, taking each casket in turn and sliding it into its machined wall socket. Other Sisters are clearing spent caskets so that sockets can be re-primed.\n\nThe burnout rate is atrocious. There is a smell of ash in the air, a stink Vulkan can't get out of his throat. The psychic backwash of this monstrous immolation should be unbearable too, but it is virtually absent. Every shred and scrap of psykanic power is being sucked into the conflagration and consumed.\n\nVulkan observes the process of every death. He owes them that decency. He wishes there was the time and means to record their names. History should remember these sacrifices, every one of them.\n\nBut it will not.\n\nThe Golden Throne ablaze.\n\n7:vii\n\nThe brink\n\n'Knife Edge!' Adophel yells. The Chapter Master has named all the battle sites, giving each one a simple, colloquial name. Knife Edge is a sharp, sheer ridge rising on the eastern edge of the deep pass, precariously connecting to the cliffs beneath the east-flank fighting platforms.\n\nIt has been contested three times previously. The Death Guard swarming its hard angle are making their fourth attempt. The battle of the pass has been rolling for hours, in overlapping waves. Is it one, sporadic battle, or dozens strung together?\n\nNo one hears the Chapter Master's warning cry over the roar of warfare at Slant Rock, Axe-Beard Ledge and Gateway Cliff, but squads of Dark Angels scramble to the east-flank platforms nevertheless. They arrive in time to fend off the Death Guard attempting to claw up the last few metres of sheer rock, firing their bolters down the face of the cliff, and using spears and pole-arms to dislodge those who have reached the lip.\n\nZahariel, behind his infamous mask, is amplifying the commands, of Adophel, and of Corswain, and of all the commanding warriors. Crouched at Tilted Rock, he is surveying the churning battlescape, and relaying warnings and instructions as they arise, orchestrating the positioning and repositioning of the seneschal's dwindling force. The vox has long since given out, and vocal commands are useless except at close range. Only by his coordinating telepathic bursts is cohesion being maintained.\n\nTheir stand has come to depend on stamina and improvisation. There are no longer enough battle-brothers in Corswain's command to cover all the lines of attack at once. Zahariel shifts men as best he can, like pieces on a gaming board, moving them from fighting platform to cliff edge, or ridgeline to bulwark, in time to greet and deny the enemy's next angle of assault. No one questions the adoption of psychic command. It is expediency. It is pragmatism in the face of death. But for the voice in their heads, keeping them one step ahead of each attacking wave, the Dark Angels would have been overrun hours before.\n\nIn the same way, no one has objected to Adophel's colourful renaming of the landscape. This began, before the vox went down, as a way of quickly identifying landmarks in the defensive structure. The schematic charts they held of the mountain's topography were mainly composed of serial numbers and elevation markers, strings of digits easily confused amid the mayhem. Adophel's simple, blunt descriptors were quicker and more reliable to convey. Besides, Corswain had to assume that the Death Guard had access to the same tactical schematics. Adophel's naming system, even when yelled man-to-man, was a basic code that masked their strategic decisions from the foe.\n\nSo, from Blind Spur to Corpse Slope, the Dark Angels evolve and maintain their furious repulse.\n\nHow long will the mask hold? The Death Guard must be learning, or at least guessing, their crude terminology. And Zahariel's brain is beginning to burn.\n\nAt every second, alongside his intense coordination of the defence, Zahariel is monitoring and assisting the efforts of his brothers inside the Hollow Mountain. Asradael, Cartheus and Tanderion have not left their places in the echoing interior. With desperate focus, they work to repair the beacon's systems and redraft the delicate psykanic lore that governs them. Some part of this work is restoration, recomposing the original sequences established by the mountain's astropaths and architects, but other parts are wholly the arcane lore known only to the Mystai. In places where the psykanic engrams are entirely ruined or destroyed, the Librarians are splicing in etheric mechanisms that no one outside the inner circles of Caliban's secret order has ever seen.\n\nThe three of them are exhausted from the gruelling effort. For Zahariel, extending his mind in support of them while simultaneously supervising the ever-shifting field of war, the labour is agony.\n\nThe witchery of Typhus bombards him all the while. A voice of voices, it hisses in the azif of the swarming flies, streams from the chaogenous winds, stutters from the driving rain, oozes from the mire, grinds from the black rocks of the scarp. The whispers slither across the surface of his mind, trying to find a crack to prise open, trying to find a way in. He tries to blink them away, but they start to mat his eyes like cobwebs, and stick to his lips, and stuff his mouth. He can't breathe-\n\n7:viii\n\nDeath match\n\nThe World Eaters come at them from beneath the rotting shadow of a slain Imperator. A warband of thirty or so, utterly feral. It's impossible to tell if they were lying in wait, or if this is simply a chance encounter.\n\nThey cross the dust towards the pilgrimage, stampeding like animals, howling like the damned or the demented, one group of lost souls attacking another, both lost for utterly different reasons. Keeler hears snatches of Nagrakali war cries on the wind. She feels Zhi-Meng, clinging to her arm, tremble in fear.\n\nFive hundred metres out, the Seconds begin to engage them. Keeler sees the puff and blink of turret-mounts firing, the wood-on-wood thumps reaching her a second later. She sees the prickle-flash of small-arms as the infantry units open fire. Then the World Eaters' ragged line meets the curve of Sigismund's retinue extending to meet them, and both vanish in a welter of dust as bodies crash together. She hears the unmistakable boom of bolter fire, the clatter of plate, the clang of impacts.\n\nSigismund is already moving, his sword trailing his shoulder from an outstretched arm. The speed at which he accelerates is astonishing. She will never be able to reconcile the scale and mass of the Astartes with their ability to move faster than the swiftest human athlete. What must it feel like to be so strong and so fleet, even when encumbered by the bulk of plate?"}
{"text":"er of dust as bodies crash together. She hears the unmistakable boom of bolter fire, the clatter of plate, the clang of impacts.\n\nSigismund is already moving, his sword trailing his shoulder from an outstretched arm. The speed at which he accelerates is astonishing. She will never be able to reconcile the scale and mass of the Astartes with their ability to move faster than the swiftest human athlete. What must it feel like to be so strong and so fleet, even when encumbered by the bulk of plate?\n\nNot for the first time in her life, she experiences a flash of transhuman dread. And that's just from the sight of Sigismund.\n\nThe Seconds have met and held the main mass of traitors, and locked them in a butchering melee, but several of the World Eaters have broken around the edge of the vanguard line and are making directly for the head of the civilian caravan.\n\nSigismund runs to meet them, head-on. He covers the ground like a racing antelope, the length of his stride astounding. Then, as he closes, he measures that stride to time his clash, gauging his footing to compensate for the power of his swing. The leading traitor does not judge its momentum with the same care. Significantly larger than Sigismund, the World Eater is wild in its sprint.\n\nThey meet.\n\nThe World Eater is ploughed off its feet, and its ungoverned impetus carries its ruptured mass, tumbling and cartwheeling in the dust. It is almost split in two. The impact does not even slow Sigismund down. Without breaking stride, he moves on past the kill, and collides with a second World Eater, meeting its charge with such force, the traitor is stopped cold and hurled onto its back. Two more close, galloping at the Champion.\n\nSigismund skids to a halt, kicking dust. He rotates his sword, and stabs it down, like a dagger, to finish the traitor he knocked flat, then pivots to meet the next to arrive, putting the full force of his strength and twist into a two-handed blow that slices the World Eater through the chest and skull.\n\nA handful of Templar Brethren have broken from the main fight, moving in to support Sigismund's assault. He allows them to deal with the stragglers. His attention is fixed on one particularly large brute.\n\nIt is a true monster, twice his size, its Cataphractii plate swollen and malformed to give it the bulk and aspect of a prehistoric bear: ridge-backed, heavy-shouldered, its head low, its arms like trees. It is a pack-leader, the remains of its half-circle crest evidence of some rank or status. Its name is long gone, probably unknown even to itself. As he approaches it, Sigismund raises his blade to his brow, a salute that might seem mocking but for its absolute sincerity. The World Eater bellows a roar back at Sigismund, spittle spraying from a peg-toothed ogre mouth. Its chainaxe swings.\n\nSigismund rolls under the blow. He rights himself, and the black sword removes the axe-head in one stroke. The World Eater casts the useless haft aside, and draws a biedhander the size of a pole-arm. It chops the greatsword at Sigismund, and he is forced to start backwards to evade. Even at a distance, Keeler can hear the whoop of the giant blade as it cleaves the air.\n\nThe World Eater starts scything the biedhander at Sigismund. The sheer reach of its strike seems impossible to counter. Sigismund is obliged to retreat repeatedly, out of the path of each slice that comes at him. He can't get past or around that reach. He can't get close enough to inflict damage.\n\nHe goes for the sword instead. His black blade circles in his hand. Sigismund begins to connect. Each strike, blade against blade, chimes like a dull bell. Sparks fly where edge meets edge. With unsettling skill, he fights not the warrior, but the blade, turning it aside, parrying, deflecting. Each individual moment, each block and stroke, counts. He doesn't need to know the end of the fight, just the next step to get there, the now and the here, one blow at a time.\n\nHe drives in, little by little, forcing the beast to shorten its guard in an effort to land a blow. Any blow will do. One strike from that greatsword will be all it takes.\n\nBut the greatsword seems unable to touch him, even though he is right there, pushing himself directly at it. Sparks whizz and dance. Metal scale flies from colliding blade edges.\n\nThe World Eater suddenly lowers its sword, allowing the tip to drag in the dust. Keeler doesn't understand what's happening at first.\n\n'The wrist...' Zhi-Meng blurts out, startled. His mindsight is perceiving details that her eyes can't.\n\nThen she sees it. Sigismund has cut the distance so sharply, placing himself well inside the greatsword's lethal scope, he has managed to wound the World Eater's arm. The speed required is breathtaking, too fast for her to follow. Sigismund parried the biedhander aside, then was able to swing again before the greatsword scythed back, almost severing the World Eater's limb just below the wrist.\n\nThe traitor stumbles backwards, roaring, still dragging the biedhander with its useless grip, black blood jetting from the yawning split at the base of its hand. It can see what's coming. It lashes out with its left arm, throwing a defensive punch that could demolish a wall. Sigismund ducks it, aims the tip of his black blade at the World Eater's throat, and thrusts.\n\nIt dies almost soundlessly, its larynx and windpipe slit. Wordless froth bubbles out of its gulping mouth. The entire length of the black blade is protruding between its shoulder blades.\n\n7:ix\n\nHow to survive victory\n\n'Again, in respect, I offer you quick mercy to spare you the horror that is coming.'\n\n'I would p-prefer you let us live,' replies Sindermann. He stands up and tries to clear his throat. Fear is still lodged in his gullet like a cold stone. 'We are just observers. If history is about to end, as you suggest, I would appreciate the chance to record what remains of it.'\n\nAhriman looks at him. He seems almost amused by Sindermann's clumsy attempt to leverage survival.\n\n'What history would you record, Kyril Sindermann?' he asks.\n\n'Perhaps... your reasons for coming here?' Sindermann suggests. 'Perhaps... some understanding of the... the other side in this conflict?'\n\nAhriman utters a small, contemptuous laugh. He looks at the rows of books and the fragile artworks.\n\n'I've come to this place alone, ahead of the annihilation, in the hope that I might salvage something. I have been here before, not long ago, but too briefly. I had no chance to study its contents. It is, after all, a repository of all the Emperor's profound learning. It will burn, entirely, along with everything else, very soon. I would like to save, or at least read, what I can before it is erased.'\n\n'Won't your... Warmaster think you delinquent,' asks Sindermann, 'that you have stolen away here rather than remain in the fight?'\n\n'I hardly care,' Ahriman replies, 'and I doubt he will. There are more than enough killers unleashed today. Horus has won, and the Emperor has lost. I find myself on the winning side, but...'\n\n'But?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'My Legion has also lost. Lost too much. It has suffered too greatly in this cause. We were, in many respects, forced into our role in this civil war, by the domineering will of Horus, and by the Emperor's diffident disregard. So I am here, Kyril Sindermann, not for Horus Lupercal, but for my kin, the Thousand Sons. It is personal. Redemptive. The Emperor always claimed he could not help us in our anguish, and that claim was supported by the Sigillite and the Selenar. But I think he lied. And if he did, the truth he was withholding is probably here, and I would find it before it is razed by the barbarian horde.'\n\nThe figure drifts to the nearest bookshelf, and glides a shadow-hand along the spines of the books.\n\n'Further,' Ahriman murmurs, 'I believe there are other secrets here, fundamental wisdoms that the Thousand Sons should obtain if they are to have any significance in the world that awaits us. The future will not be easy, even for the victors.'\n\n7:x\n\nStrategies for denial\n\nA thousand souls were used up the last time the Sanction was enacted, a fraction of what is being done now. The lines of caskets seem endless, but he knows they are painfully finite. Hundreds have perished already. Hundreds more are exhausting as he watches. How many more wait outside for admission? How many more can be brought in to stoke the fire? Sooner or later there will be no more left to deliver.\n\nAnd then...\n\nAnd then, the final choices will have to be made. The last few dark and bitter decisions, none of which he ever wanted to make.\n\nThe Talisman. The last resort. The unthinkable act.\n\n'A safer distance, my lord,' Abidemi insists. Vulkan steps back with him, not because he needs to be safe, but because it is time to consult. When the unthinkable comes, if it comes, he will stride headlong into those flames to reach the Talisman and, as Un-Maker, he-\n\nThe last of his seniors await him some distance away in the shade of an adamant shield. Casryn, Halferphess, Mouhausen, along with senior Custodes and other Sisters.\n\n'Make your report,' he says as he joins them. They bow their heads. He can see the tension in them. A few cough at the smell of his singed cloak and overheated plate.\n\nThere is no part of their review that isn't dire. The end is upon them, upon them and the stood-still world, and it is more terrible than even the worst Vulkan had imagined. Uzkarel, the ranking Sentinel, reports that the Sanctum is entirely invaded, both by direct physical assault and by the insidious convolutions of the warp, which have riddled the fabric of the Palace like worms in meat. Mouhausen, the Chosen, relates that no signal whatsoever has been established with Vulkan's father and the Anabasis assault, and that, further, contact between the Throne Room and Hegemon Command may soon be lost. Halferphess can report no contact with, or activity from, the Astronomican, and no further communication has been heard from "}
{"text":"entirely invaded, both by direct physical assault and by the insidious convolutions of the warp, which have riddled the fabric of the Palace like worms in meat. Mouhausen, the Chosen, relates that no signal whatsoever has been established with Vulkan's father and the Anabasis assault, and that, further, contact between the Throne Room and Hegemon Command may soon be lost. Halferphess can report no contact with, or activity from, the Astronomican, and no further communication has been heard from Guilliman's liberation fleets, which are presumed lost or adrift in the warp storms saturating the Solar Realm. Casryn signs that the supply of psycho-able candidates to support the Sigillite through the action of the Unspoken Sanction will last another hour at best.\n\nAs for the empyric anomaly, it remains, steadily increasing in magnitude, its location and cause unknown, except that it is demonstrably not a consequence of Malcador's decline.\n\nThey go on, each in turn, grimly detailing one aspect of Terra's doom after another. Vulkan listens, attentive, but his tired mind purrs all the while. It is clear that the war raging throughout the Inner Sanctum is a holding action at best. The Astartes, the glorious Custodes, the last brave divisions of the human army... They cannot prevail. All they can do is rage to slow down the inexorable encroachment of the enemy. The siege is ending. The physical war is lost.\n\nOn Terra, at least. Vulkan fights back woeful thoughts and reminds himself that there is still some shred of hope. Anabasis. Just because contact has been lost, it doesn't mean that Anabasis has. His father's power is immense and dreadful, and the Angel, Rogal, Constantin and companies of the very greatest warriors stand with him. As they wait here, helpless, in the shadow of the safety shield, it is possible... still possible that his father's war has breached the Lupercal's lair high above them, and that any second, word will come of the Arch-traitor's defeat and the capture of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nAt any second, at any moment. It is still possible that salvation, perhaps even victory, can be wrested from the fires of damnation, even in this bleak and final hour.\n\nAnd if not salvation, if not victory, then at least Horus may be denied. Vulkan is ready for that eventuality. He is ready to use the Talisman. If Anabasis has failed, and they have lost, then he will, at least, not permit Horus Lupercal to win.\n\nThere is another possibility too, another variable, one almost as grim and unthinkable as the Talisman that is his to unleash.\n\n7:xi\n\nMass expression sampling\n\n'Where is he?' she asks, climbing the stairs into the Retreat's laboratoria levels. Xanthus is at one of the windows, gazing out. He turns. She can see the fear in him.\n\n'He's working,' he says.\n\n'He's not here.'\n\n'Upstairs,' says Xanthus. 'Next level.'\n\n'You're supposed to be watching him,' she snaps.\n\n'I am.'\n\n'Like a hawk, Chosen One.'\n\nHe nods, ashamed. He gestures at the window. 'I was... I was just looking,' he says. 'How bad is it?'\n\n'How bad could it be?' Andromeda asks.\n\nXanthus shrugs.\n\n'Right. Well, it's worse than that.'\n\nShe strides up the next flight. Xanthus, distracted, follows her.\n\nThe floor above is another section of the laboratorium. There are five large chrome vats arranged centrally like the petals of a flower, and the chamber lighting is a sterile blue. Large incinerator units for the disposal of organic waste stand against one wall. Fo works at a central console, adjusting the admixture values of biochemicals and nutrients that feed the vats from tanks built into the ceiling.\n\nShe looks at one of the vats. It's a bio-structor unit similar, she imagines, to the flesh-weaving looms with which the Sigillite first crafted the fabled Astartes template. Perhaps these are the very machines on which the initial work was undertaken, the prototype devices from which the project's genetic manufactories were extrapolated.\n\nNo wonder the Retreat was so firmly secured.\n\nThe unit is warm. It hums. Through the cloudy glass lid, sealed tight, she can see a primordial slurry of biological materials frothing and fusing.\n\n'These units are active,' she says.\n\n'Of course,' says Fo (though I am not really listening because I am too busy concentrating).\n\n'They're active, Fo.'\n\n'What of it?'\n\nShe crosses to him. 'The design refinement of your phage weapon is a theoretical exercise,' she says. 'The cogitators and samplers on the floor below should be sufficient-'\n\n'Well, they're not,' he replies, glaring at her in annoyance for the interruption. 'They are nothing like sufficient.'\n\n'Fo-'\n\nHe sets down the cellular-patterning wafers he is carefully preparing.\n\n'Do you want this finished or don't you, Selenar?'\n\n'There is no practical aspect to this work,' she says. 'None at all. You're gene-cooking, Fo. The flesh-makers are primed. You're selecting anatomical templates-'\n\n'Of course I am!' Fo snaps. 'You want this done correctly, and you want this done quickly. Theoretical treatises are not enough. Go downstairs. Check them. I've done them already. My theoretical model must be tested practically before we claim success. I told you this. Systematic tests-'\n\n'This is not... that!' she exclaims, gesturing to the vats.\n\nFo leans towards her and grins.\n\n'A few gene samples aren't going to cut it,' he says. 'This laboratorium hardly excels in scope. I'm using the cellular samples to culture sufficient quantities of biomatter so that the biomechanical phage can be properly tested. Mass expression sampling.'\n\n7:xii\n\nCorswain at bay\n\nCorswain sees Cypher fall. He sees the lone figure, high up on the promontory that Adophel named Tilted Rock, drop to its knees, hands clawing at its face.\n\nThere's no breaking from the fight he's in, but he breaks anyway. Monstrous Death Guard warriors are storming the bulwarks of Axe-Beard Ledge, their armour glossy in the drooling rain, and glaucous in the lightning flash. Winds born of Chaos howl up the contested pass and assail the First Legion's crumbling ramparts. The air reeks of putrescine.\n\n'Hold!' he yells at Vanital. Vanital, and the eight Dark Angels with him, redouble their efforts to drive the enemy back, scrambling in the mire at the cliff edge. Corswain disengages. He starts to run. Rain sprays from his plate as he leaps from the end of Axe-Beard, and drops onto the fighting platform below. Bolt-rounds chase him. The gale drags at him. He runs the length of the battered platform, and then bounds up the connecting staircase bolted to the overhang of rock. Two mass-reactives sear past his head. A third strikes the staircase beside him, fracturing the metal handrail in a burst of flame and shrapnel.\n\nHe reaches the top. Cleft Rock platform. Just minutes earlier, it had been the focus of an enemy assault, but now it is eerily still, the attack repulsed and the defenders repositioned to counter the Axe-Beard escalade. He runs along it, leaping the corpses of the dead, pelted by rain. The far end is a tattered gap of shredded steel, blown out by enemy rocket grenades. He pulls up, looks across the gulf to the far side, where a section of surviving gun-deck still clings to the base of Tilted Rock. Too far to leap, even for him. Too far to fall.\n\nHe looks up again. He can no longer see Cypher, for the lord's body is obscured by the crest of the high rock. But he can see Death Guard warriors scaling the face of the rock, clawing their way to the summit like spiders on a wall.\n\nHe backs up, braces himself to take a run. Even then he knows - knows! - that the jump is suicidal. He looks for another way. He sheathes his sword, and begins to climb the cliff face instead. It seems little short of impossible. The rock is wet, almost slimy. Crevices refuse his fingertips, and cracks crumble beneath his grip. He perseveres, longing for an operational jump pack. But they've got nothing left, no power, no fuel, scarcely any munitions. They've burned through it all keeping Typhus at bay. They have been reduced to blades and bones and brute force.\n\nBut Corswain knows if the enemy reaches Lord Cypher, and delivers their butchery, it will be the end. Cypher is the lion heart of their defence. His appearance energised their hopes and hearts. The enemy knows that. It knows that killing Cypher will gut the Dark Angels, and win the field.\n\nThe rock face splinters under his grip. Stone chunks tumble and fall. Corswain forces his fingers and toe-tips into the rock, clawing and kicking fissures to cling to. He clings on.\n\nHe forces his way upwards.\n\n7:xiii\n\nThe path\n\n'Yes,' says Abaddon, rousing from his miserable reverie. 'I damn well do have control. Advance the men, Baraxa. We have to find him. We have to hope that he-'\n\nHe doesn't finish the thought. Baraxa barks a command, and the assault squads begin to move in past them.\n\n'If this is Service Eight-Twelve,' says Sycar, 'it should join the Tertiary Spinal. From there, we can go up-hull to the bridge.'\n\nAbaddon nods. Sycar begins to issue curt deployment commands, and the Sons of Horus spread out. Abaddon turns to follow.\n\nHe pauses.\n\nControl, not controlled.\n\nHe feels his pulse elevate. He has denied the gifts of the immaterium, sworn off their treacherous benefits. This was always a soldier's war, and it should only ever have been that.\n\nBut he knows it's tainted him too. It's tainted all of them, through the choices they've made and the paths they've followed, whether they acknowledge it or not. Abaddon has not embraced it like damn Ikari or Fal or Dorgaddon, but he has followed his father too far into its shadow.\n\nControl, not controlled.\n\nIs he damned too? Is he lost without even realising it?\n\nControl, not controlled.\n\n'Ezekyle?'\n\n'Wait...' he murmurs. He looks down at his hands. Is he a fool to think himself free? Is that just another of the lies? Or is he still his own master? Does he still retain control?\n\nAnd if he does, what gifts will it give him?\n\n'Ezekyle?'\n\nHe kicks down the shop'"}
{"text":"n has not embraced it like damn Ikari or Fal or Dorgaddon, but he has followed his father too far into its shadow.\n\nControl, not controlled.\n\nIs he damned too? Is he lost without even realising it?\n\nControl, not controlled.\n\n'Ezekyle?'\n\n'Wait...' he murmurs. He looks down at his hands. Is he a fool to think himself free? Is that just another of the lies? Or is he still his own master? Does he still retain control?\n\nAnd if he does, what gifts will it give him?\n\n'Ezekyle?'\n\nHe kicks down the shop's door. The old wood disintegrates, friable as paper, and clouds the air with fibres. Inside, it's caked in years of dirt and neglect. There are rotting almanacs and ephemerides on a desk, a cracked crystal ball on a stand, an overturned chair with carved basilisk arms. On the walls hang old charts showing the regions of the heavens, and diagrams of splayed hands, where the lines of the palms are enumerated and described. All the hands on display have more than five digits. Everything is swathed with cobwebs so thick they look as though they have been draped with lace. Incongruously, two baleful blue decontam emitters shine from the ancient, water-sagged ceiling.\n\nAbaddon pushes his way through. He hears Baraxa calling his name, and Sycar's Justaerin crunching in behind him. The astrologer's shop has no back wall. Through the gloom, he enters a small, musty courtyard. The ground is partly ancient flagstones, but it's tilted at an angle and overlaps a section of deck plate. There are three golden statues on the paved section, but they are half-sunk into the stone, askew against the tilt of the flagstones as though their bases are set on another, intersecting plane. They are leaning at such an angle, they should topple over, but the stone encases them to thigh level, so they look like men sinking into quicksand. Two of the statues have no heads. The third has a head that is in no way human.\n\nAbaddon looks away. He has no time for statues, however grotesque. In this small space, this nameless yard, different places have been compressed into each other, faulting and lifting like miniature tectonic plates as one shoves the next out of true.\n\n'With me,' he growls. Rain is pattering on him and the small yard. It's not water from a burst duct higher up in the ship: it's actual rain. He clambers over the pivoted horizontals of the ground. There's an open hatchway ahead, set into the mossy stone wall. He recognises it.\n\nThe air formicates with whispers and murmuring. He ignores them. He doesn't care if they are warning him, or admonishing him, or guiding him, or even praising him. He doesn't care.\n\nHe goes through the hatch, bolter ready.\n\nBefore him lies the command bridge of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nThis is exactly where he wanted to be. His impulsive short-cut has shaved thirty minutes off the time it should take to reach the bridge from Service Eight-Twelve.\n\nHave I found this way in? he wonders. Or has it found me?\n\nOr is it my father's will?\n\nControl, not controlled. He is determined to believe it's the former. The thought fills him with an alluring rush of confidence. It is what his father used to call enargeia, an instant of profound clarity. The Lupercal spoke of these insights as the moments that defined him, and allowed him to understand his true self. How long since his father experienced an instant like this?\n\nAbaddon grins to himself. He has come to trust nothing and know no one, but he trusts himself. He is Abaddon. He is strong. He's the First damn Captain of the Sons of Horus. When he finds his father, he will protect him. They will stand together. They will navigate the path ahead together.\n\n7:xiv\n\nThe teeth of the Lion\n\nCorswain hauls himself over the lip of the cliff at the base of Tilted Rock. He is swathed in darkness, a darkness split every few seconds by the stinging sear of grounding lightning. It is one of the highest parts of the defensive position at the head of the pass. The force of the gale upon him has dropped now he is in the rock's wind shadow, and he can no longer hear the din of battle ringing from the half-dozen choke points on the slopes below. The rage of their last stand is lost in the scalding hiss of the torrential rain and the sizzle of insects.\n\nHe gets to his feet, his limbs aching from a vertical ascent that should have been impossible, and was most certainly insane. Everywhere he looks, the black air is full of gleaming dots: raindrops and blowflies, swirling like a solid mass.\n\nHe plunges through the downpour, sliding his blade from its scabbard. He has to reach Cypher. Cypher must not fall.\n\nCypher may already be slain.\n\nHe charges up the slope of Tilted Rock. Rainwater is flowing back down it in ribbons and streams, little flash floods of run-off that make the stone treacherous. The water is stained black. Is it blood? Is it his blood?\n\nThrough the rain, he sees the broad summit of the rock, raised like a jutting altar above the pass below. He comes up into the wind, and feels its weight buffeting him. He sees Cypher, sprawled on his side, unmoving. He sees the ebon shapes of the Death Guard warriors clawing over the rock edge. Their infernal climb up the natural ramparts of the gorge has been more direct and, as he feared, much swifter than his. Determination and transhuman strength were his only scaling tools. They were raised aloft by more unearthly powers.\n\nAnd they are unearthly. They are terror-things, hulking brutes of plate that seems black-lacquered in the rain. He can smell the foetor of their diseased forms. He can see the hooks and blades they carry, the furnace gleeds of their eye slits. Several of them are already within striking distance of Cypher's body.\n\nHe is too late.\n\nBut he is not alone.\n\nHe sees Bruktas, the stump of his missing arm crudely wrapped and splinted. Corswain is clearly not the only soul to have noticed Lord Cypher's plight. The last Corswain saw of Bruktas, he was being carried off the lines to the care of the Apothecaries. Perhaps it was from there, from the vantage of the shelters near the portal, that Bruktas saw Cypher fall. Whatever the circumstance, Bruktas is here. He has rushed to this defence with equal haste. Now he stands, a Dark Angel alone, grievously maimed, protecting Cypher's body, fighting off his would-be murderers from all sides.\n\nThe wind-blown blood streaming down the rock is the blood of the XIV.\n\nRoaring his father's name, Corswain slams in beside Bruktas, his whirling sword smashing a Death Guard warrior off the edge in a spray of rain and blood. Now he is at the peak, he is exposed to the wind's full force again, and he fights to steady himself lest the blore, a tempest summoned by chaogenous malice, sweeps him away.\n\nHe blocks the swinging maul of another, then carves the plated devil apart before it can assault Bruktas on his wounded side. Leaning into the wind, he cuts himself a place beside the struggling battle-brother. In seconds, they are battling two or three enemies apiece, parrying blows, and turning blades aside. Bruktas would have been killed long since but for the tapering space of the rock's summit, which favours a well-placed defender against a mob of attackers who have to clear the lip before they can rise and engage. Now there are two of them, two defenders firmly planted. The bodies of Death Guard warriors litter the edges of the summit, some half-draped over the drop. Others tumble back into the darkness, heads split or crushed. Corswain clears another of the Death Guard from the lip, then sees steel grapples fly up and pinch into the rock. He struggles towards them, braving the blast of gale and rain, but waits until he sees the trailing lines tighten before he hacks his blade through them. A taut line means it is not merely rope dropping down the cliff face.\n\nRaindrops ping off the ropes as they cinch tight. Corswain drags his blade through them and hears, above the pummel of the wind, the sound of metal avalanches.\n\nAnother Death Guard appears, head and shoulders first, hauling his mass onto the rock. Corswain mashes his heel into the brute's visor, and kicks him into space. He sees the traitor drop away, arms flailing, eyes burning.\n\nOnce more, the tempest tries to carry Corswain off with his victim. He steadies himself.\n\nHe hears Bruktas cry out behind him. Four of Typhus' bastards have made the top together, and one has brought the struggling Dark Angel to his knees with a warhammer. Bruktas is still fighting, trying to shield Cypher's body with his own. Corswain stoops, unfastens one of the enemy's useless grappling hooks from the split stone with his left hand, and then turns on the foe, his sword swinging in his right hand, the hook, a makeshift weapon, in his left. A warrior hacks at him, steam rising from his fevered plate. Corswain blocks the heavy blade with the haft of the hook, the cut length of rope still flying from the base-ring like a tassel. He wrenches his opponent's weapon aside, breaking his guard, and thrusts his sword into his torso-plate. Abnormal fluids spurt from the split, followed by streams of living insects that pour out of the wound like blood. Corswain strikes the half-dead traitor away with the steel hook in an impulse of pure revulsion. The Death Guard warrior staggers, dripping insects and stringy pus, and collapses into another of his kind, sliding them both over the cliff. Corswain ploughs past, bringing the hook down in a powerful overhand chop that cracks across the pauldron of the next traitor. Then he pulls hard, stabbing two of the grapple's claws into the warrior's shoulder, and yanking the man forwards. Unable to resist the drag of the hooks spiked into his back, the traitor falls onto his hands and knees, and Corswain slices his sword through the base of his spine.\n\nAnother is already upon him. Corswain takes a blow across his right pauldron and, as he stumbles to keep his feet, he's enveloped in the choking cloud of beetles that seems to shroud the traitor l"}
{"text":" of the next traitor. Then he pulls hard, stabbing two of the grapple's claws into the warrior's shoulder, and yanking the man forwards. Unable to resist the drag of the hooks spiked into his back, the traitor falls onto his hands and knees, and Corswain slices his sword through the base of his spine.\n\nAnother is already upon him. Corswain takes a blow across his right pauldron and, as he stumbles to keep his feet, he's enveloped in the choking cloud of beetles that seems to shroud the traitor like smoke. He hears their chirring buzz. He hears the diseased whispers hidden in the whir of wing-cases.\n\nThe Death Guard turns aside. Bruktas has regained his footing, and is driving blows into the traitor's flank. Corswain can see that Bruktas is sorely impaired, and growing ever weaker, but his fury is undimmed. This is the courage bred by Caliban. These are the teeth of the Lion.\n\nCorswain flanks Bruktas, becoming the arm he has lost, slicing traitors off the jawline of the rock.\n\n7:xv\n\nOut of this dust\n\n'Get up,' says Leetu.\n\nOll doesn't stir from the block where he's sitting. His head is in his hands.\n\n'Get up,' Leetu repeats.\n\nOll looks up at him. His anguish is so great, he can't speak.\n\n'Yes, they're dead,' says Leetu. 'You couldn't save them. I couldn't save them. I'm sorry.'\n\nOll shakes his head wordlessly.\n\n'I'm sorry I'm no good at speeches,' says Leetu. 'That's Grammaticus' job. But he's not capable of a rousing speech right now.'\n\nOll scowls at the proto-Astartes. The dust is still settling all around them. It's thick, like fallout, and they are both filthy. It's going to hang in the air for the rest of time.\n\nJohn is just visible twenty metres away, picking through the rubble of the city wall, searching for bodies. He's holding his arm to his body. It's badly strained and he's torn ligaments. He's bound his jaw and the lower part of his face with rags. His face is a bloody mess, dust sticking to the make-do, blood-wet bandage. Given the extent of his injuries, Oll isn't sure how John's even conscious, let alone standing.\n\n'Are you giving up then?' Leetu asks, fixing him with unblinking indigo eyes.\n\n'Leetu-'\n\n'You know what Grammaticus would tell you. You can imagine. We've come this far. We have to keep going. Yes, they're dead, but if you give up now, what was the point? Their deaths will be worthless. You want them to be worthless?'\n\n'Shut up,' says Oll. He rises slowly to his feet, coughing in the dust.\n\n'It's a fair question.'\n\n'I want them to have never been part of this,' says Oll. 'I want them to never have followed me. I want them, all of them, to have stayed where they were, never to have walked this path with me.'\n\n'They'd still be dead,' says Leetu. 'This way round, their lives bought something.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'A little longer for you. We've got to find that knife. We've got to finish this.'\n\n'Just the three of us?'\n\n'Persson, we weren't much to begin with. I liked them, your companions. They were brave, but they weren't strong. We were never a fighting force. We're not much weaker without them than we were with them.'\n\n'That's callous. What is that? Astartes tactical pragmatism?'\n\n'Just an observation.'\n\nOll spits dust-black phlegm.\n\n'Actae-' he says.\n\n'Well, she was the strongest of us. She might be alive. She might even have saved the girl. But if she survived, that bastard Erebus might be alive too. So... here's your tactical pragmatism.'\n\nOll glares at him. He clambers away, hauling himself over the block debris of the fallen wall towards John. Grammaticus' injuries are painful to see. The dirty rags binding his face look like they're holding his head together. What little of his face is visible beneath the bandages is bruised and swollen. His mouth, the epicentre of the damage, is entirely wrapped with blood-soaked strips. He holds his traumatised arm against his chest like a claw. He looks at Oll dourly as Oll approaches, wiping grit from his eyes with his good hand.\n\n'Sit down and rest,' Oll says. 'John, we won't find anything.' There are acres of fuming rubble around them.\n\nJohn grunts something from behind the rags covering his mouth.\n\n'What?'\n\nJohn growls. He can't talk. His mouth and jaw are too messed up. His working hand moves instead, signing clumsy hortcode.\n\nShut up. Screw you. Search.\n\nOll coughs again, and shrugs. He starts to search, moving parallel to John. Leetu joins them.\n\nThey find Zybes about ten minutes later. He's lying on his back, the spar of Graft's limb still wedged through his chest. A large block of the fallen wall has landed on his head and shoulders, crushing them. Oll's glad he can't see Hebet's face. He's too ashamed to meet those eyes, even dead.\n\nJohn crouches, and searches around the body. He grunts again to get their attention. He's found the knife.\n\nIt's broken into three fragments.\n\nOll picks them up, and cups them in his hands. It's just rock now, just dead stone. It's as though the blade has been killed, and all its properties are gone. Oll puts them in his jacket pocket.\n\n'Persson?'\n\nLeetu has found the ball of thread, about twenty metres away. It's much smaller than before: the long drop off the wall and then its bouncing passage across the ground beneath has played out a great deal of its length. Leetu scoops it up, and begins to wind up the loose, trailing line. The thread, which snakes off into the rubble, keeps snagging.\n\n'Wait-' Oll says. It's too late. Leetu has pulled at the thread to free it, and the twine, pinned under a rock or boulder, snaps.\n\n'Well, that's it,' sighs Oll.\n\n'We'd never gather it all up,' says Leetu, winding in the last loose metres.\n\n'It's no use now it's broken,' says Oll.\n\nThat's just symbolic, John signs.\n\n'Yes,' says Oll. 'Exactly.'\n\n'You're reading too much into it,' says Leetu, holding the thread out to him.\n\n'I'm not. Everything's symbolic. The knife was symbolic, the thread... this whole war.'\n\n'Symbolic of what?' asks Leetu.\n\n'Damned if I know,' says Oll.\n\n7:xvi\n\nFinal orders\n\n'Well... your opinion?' Ilya Ravallion asks.\n\n'It is a radical proposal,' replies Sandrine Icaro. She stands at Ilya's station, reading the tactical plan Ilya has set out on a data-slate.\n\n'I think we passed into the realm of radical some time ago, mistress,' Ilya replies. Both of them are trying to ignore the scent of smoke in the air, and the boom and rattle of conflict. It's very close now. The Archenemy has penetrated the Sanctum. Significant portions of the final fortress have already fallen to traitor assault. Reports say hostile units are advancing on the Tower of the Hegemon. Each thump and shiver of warfare seems closer than the last, and each one makes Icaro flinch involuntarily. Ilya notes that Icaro has taken to carrying her old Komag assault weapon with her as she moves from desk to desk.\n\nIlya's proposal is as crude as it is simple. Lion's Gate port, which has held out beyond all expectation, possesses some of the most potent surface-based weapons in the Palace Dominions. Prohibited by Icaro's command from firing at the traitor fleet, those weapon systems are now wasted. Ilya's proposition is to re-task them to fire surface-to-surface, aiming at the Sanctum, or more specifically, the Palatine Zone adjacent to the Sanctum. The invasion of the final fortress can't be prevented, but the enemy strengths, accumulating in vast numbers around the Delphic as they attempt entry, could be seriously depleted by the unconventional use of orbital guns.\n\nIt wouldn't be much, and the risk of misfire is great in a warzone where all targeting sensoria, and even relative distances, are untrustworthy. But it would be something. It does, however, feel entirely counterintuitive to have the Palace open fire on itself.\n\nIcaro glances at the Chosen, Sidozie, for his take. He too is distracted, but not, it seems, by the mounting noise of warfare echoing through the halls outside the Rotunda. A few minutes earlier, the defence details outside the main hatch admitted another of the Chosen to the Rotunda. His name, Ilya understands, is Hassan, a senior man. Hassan's clothes are torn and soaked in blood, and he is visibly shaken. With him came a huge Custodes warrior, and two women that Ilya presumes are members of the infamous Silent Sisterhood. The Custodian is an arresting sight, not so much because of the appalling wounds he is carrying, but because he is still standing despite them. Medicae personnel are attending him. Hassan sits nearby, silent, recovering his composure.\n\nIcaro makes her decision.\n\n'If you are still able to contact Lion's Gate,' she tells Ilya, 'then communicate this plan to them. Get their assessment of feasibility.'\n\n'And?' Ilya asks.\n\n'If they can do it,' Icaro says, 'then you may instruct them to begin.'\n\nIlya gets to work, hunting for a hardline link that's still viable.\n\nSidozie and Icaro cross to Hassan.\n\nHe looks up at them. 'We were ambushed,' he says. 'Traitor Astartes and...'\n\nHe trails off.\n\n'Where?' asks Icaro.\n\n'Blaxis Interlink,' says the ravaged Custodian standing nearby. He doesn't have to explain how close to the Throne Room adytum that is.\n\n'I don't understand how enemy penetration can be so extensive so quickly,' Sidozie begins.\n\n'They are not coming from outside,' the Sentinel growls. 'They are inside. Everywhere.'\n\n'Companion Raja is correct,' says Hassan. 'They are forcing mass exoplanar entry. They are coming out of the damn walls.'\n\nHe rises to his feet. Sidozie reaches out to steady him, but Hassan refuses the hand.\n\n'It's just shock,' he says. 'We barely got out of the ambush alive. They killed... They killed Sentinels... Sisters... A full escort detail. We broke clear, and made for the nearest safe location.'\n\n'Here?' asks Icaro. 'Surely the adytum was far closer?'\n\n'You need to grasp this, mistress,' Raja snarls.\n\nShe stares at him. It is astonishing to see the brutal talon wounds in the flesh of his face, throat and exposed shoulders visibly closing and healing in front of her, open lacerations knitti"}
{"text":".\n\n'It's just shock,' he says. 'We barely got out of the ambush alive. They killed... They killed Sentinels... Sisters... A full escort detail. We broke clear, and made for the nearest safe location.'\n\n'Here?' asks Icaro. 'Surely the adytum was far closer?'\n\n'You need to grasp this, mistress,' Raja snarls.\n\nShe stares at him. It is astonishing to see the brutal talon wounds in the flesh of his face, throat and exposed shoulders visibly closing and healing in front of her, open lacerations knitting to shiny pink creases in his bloodstained skin. It is more astonishing that the Sentinel is expressing no sign of pain or discomfort.\n\n'The Hegemon was closer,' he says. 'Dimensional geometry and spatial interrelation is collapsing throughout the Sanctum. Schematics and floorplans can no longer be trusted. The warp is corrupting the fabric of the final fortress.'\n\nHis declaration is punctuated by a particularly loud detonation outside. Dust and fragments of ceiling tile flutter down from the Rotunda's dome, and a brief hush falls across the hundreds of operators and tacticians frantically at work at their desks.\n\n'I need a link to the Throne Room,' says Hassan. 'Is that still possible?'\n\n7:xvii\n\n'I will consider the use of anything.'\n\nVulkan lets them all finish their reports, then bids they step back. He draws Moriana Mouhausen aside.\n\n'It is my understanding,' he says to her, 'that the Chosen, on Malcador's instruction, have secured the so-called Terminus Sanction and its architect.'\n\nShe looks surprised.\n\n'One does not command the Throne of Terra without being privy to such things,' he says. 'I had Hassan brief me. He said that Malcador's intent was for the weapon to reside in the hands of the Chosen, rather than under the guard of the Custodes.'\n\n'Yes, my lord,' she replies. 'Efforts were made to do just that shortly after my master took the Throne.'\n\n'And were they successful, Chosen One? Can you tell me that?'\n\n'I cannot, lord. Hassan delegated the duty to my colleague Xanthus. But neither I nor Hassan have had further report. All communication has broken down. The Sanctum is, quite literally, in chaos. Xanthus may be dead, or his effort failed. The criminal Fo may be dead-'\n\n'So we have no idea if the weapon is secure, or if it is in our control-'\n\n'My lord,' says Mouhausen, 'even if the weapon still exists, there is some doubt that it is even functional. Fo is notoriously deceitful, and few of us thought it would work. The principles-'\n\nVulkan raises his hand sharply.\n\n'I would know its status,' he says. 'If it still exists... Its functionality, its potential...'\n\n'You would deploy it, my lord?' she asks, incredulous.\n\n'Annihilation is upon us, Chosen One,' says Vulkan. 'I will consider the use of anything. Anything.'\n\n'Xanthus may have been thwarted,' she replies. 'The weapon may still reside in the hands of the Legio Custodes, as Valdor wished.'\n\n'And they have not informed you of this?'\n\n'The Custodians keep their secrets, my lord.'\n\nVulkan snarls in annoyance, and Mouhausen jerks back in alarm.\n\n'This is no time for stupid games,' says Vulkan, 'no time for squabbles between the organs of authority. I will not have it.'\n\nWith an angry gesture, he beckons Uzkarel to them.\n\n'My lord primarch,' says Uzkarel with a stiff nod of his head. The proconsul is a huge warrior, even by Custodes standards, almost as tall as Vulkan. The ribbed and sculpted gold of his helm and shoulder guards are shaped to resemble the mane of a vast lion.\n\n'You will make report at once of the fate of the Terminus weapon,' says Vulkan.\n\nUzkarel's eyes narrow. 'Two of the Sodality of the Key were sent to secure it and the prisoner, my lord,' he says.\n\n'And?'\n\nThe Custodian pauses, his neurosynergetics briefly engaged.\n\n'They were denied,' he says. 'There was a lack of directive clarity. The criminal Fo was left in the custody of Sentinel Amon.'\n\n'And where are they now?'\n\n'Unknown, my lord. Neurosynergetic contact and direct comms are generally disrupted over any distance. The laboratory and the area of securement both lie in a part of the Sanctum that is overrun by the enemy and-'\n\n'And the location of the weapon itself?'\n\n'Also unknown, my lord.'\n\n'Find it,' Vulkan tells them both. 'Find it, and find this Fo. I want solid, confirmed information on its status. If it is lost, then it is lost. If it still exists, I want it brought here.'\n\n7:xviii\n\n'Xanthus'\n\n'This is not what we talked about, Fo,' says Andromeda.\n\n'It's what's necessary,' he replies.\n\nShe stares through the fogged lid of another unit.\n\n'You're culturing cells-'\n\n'Strains to simulate the designated targets,' Fo says, 'along with control expressions of baseline human so we can be sure the phage affects only those targets and doesn't move aggressively into the rest of the population. I know what I'm doing.'\n\nFo scoops up a handful of old notebooks from the console and waves them at her. A few loose pages flutter out.\n\n'This is how the Sigillite did it,' says Fo (I am still quite rapt in admiration of the old Regent's mind). 'He states his methodology quite clearly. This is how he achieved the Astartes project in such a short space of time. It should have taken centuries, but your beloved Emperor was impatient.'\n\n'People...' Andromeda begins.\n\nFo glares. 'Don't be sentimental. Not people. Not even organisms. Just inert, bio-fabbed cellular material, typed and catalogued according to organic source. Just soup. Human soup.'\n\nAndromeda glowers at him. 'I think you forget who and what I am, Fo. I think you forget my areas of expertise.'\n\n'I do not at all, Selenar, which is why I find it surprising that I have to explain any of this to you. And it's not just the Sigillite who recommends this approach.'\n\nHe strides across to a workstation set under the stairs, and starts to rummage through more files and paperwork.\n\n'All of his chief scientists and the gene-masters concur. Malcador kept copies of every senior technician's work, and I've read it all.'\n\n'You've read it all?'\n\n'Of course,' he sneers. 'They all used the same technique. Baskow! Mass expression sampling. Astarte and DeVie! Broad redundancy cellular screening. And here, Ezekiel Sedayne, another quite superior mind! Bulk bio-mat analysis.'\n\nHe turns to look at her. She can see an odd anger in his eyes.\n\n'Do not question my approach again,' he says (for I have had quite enough of her objections).\n\n'Amon will not approve of this,' she says carefully.\n\n'Are you going to tell him?'\n\n'I am somewhat obligated to do so, yes.'\n\n'He has his orders,' says Fo, 'and he is scrupulous in the performance of them. The Custodes are ruthless creatures, Andromeda-17. They are shockingly pragmatic. This process gets the job done and fulfils his orders in the most efficient way. He doesn't need to know the specifics.'\n\nShe hesitates. She considers pressing the alarm Amon gave her, and summoning him.\n\n'The cultures,' she says, 'they absolutely have to be destroyed when you're finished. Not discarded. Destroyed.'\n\nFo nods.\n\n'The waste incinerators are already ignited and waiting,' he replies.\n\n'This is human genetic material?' asks Xanthus, peering down through the condensation-misted window of one of the vats.\n\n'One of my primary sample groups,' Fo replies. 'Or, as I like to call it, \"Xanthus\".'\n\n'What?' Xanthus says, looking up sharply.\n\n'It's you,' says Fo. 'You gave me a sample, and I've cultured it.'\n\n'I never-' Xanthus begins. He's staring at the bio-structor in utter revulsion.\n\n'I was concerned at the age of the Baseline Terran-Human samples available in this facility,' says Fo. 'Some are two centuries old. Even with the most careful storage, they may have suffered some deterioration. I wanted a fresh culture as a double-safe control, and you obliged.'\n\n'I had no idea you were going to-' Xanthus stammers.\n\n'You're an idiot,' Andromeda tells him.\n\n'No, he's a champion of the Emperor,' says Fo. 'We had a whole talk about it.'\n\nFo walks over to Xanthus, who is gazing down at the warm, clotting fluid in the vat. He rests a bird-claw hand on Xanthus' shoulder. Andromeda imagines there's nothing comforting about it.\n\n'You know,' Fo murmurs to Xanthus, 'pound for pound, there's probably more of you in that vat than outside of it.'\n\nXanthus recoils and pushes Fo's hand away.\n\n'Chosen One,' says Fo calmly, 'you're doing the Imperium a profound service. Don't be graceless about it.'\n\n7:xix\n\nThis is what faith does\n\nThey leave the bodies of the traitors in the dust where they fell, sprawled like miniature versions of the dead giants around them. The Seconds regroup. The pilgrimage resumes its advance.\n\nSigismund walks back to take his place at Keeler's side. She says nothing. There's nothing anyone can say.\n\nHe is reassured by her acceptance of the savagery he is required to channel. From the moment he first encountered her, he found she possessed a purity of thought that he could only aspire to, despite a lifetime of discipline. He suspects she has no idea the effect she has had on the course of his life. Though they have only met a few times, she has made him see that his life is supposed to be hard and solitary, and that death and sacrifice come in different measures. She has taught him, more by example than in words, that it matters less that you gave your life for the Emperor and your bloodline, and more where you elected to stand to offer that life, the now, the here. Her impact on his thinking had been such that it has earned him the disfavour and censure of his Praetorian father, and thus she has also, in her way, taught him that shame is a fuel that can fire a man in ways that mere courage cannot.\n\nDuty, true duty, is not about honour, or valour, or fidelity. It is certainly not about reputation, or the estimation of others. True duty is about service. Others have seen him as prideful, because he has always striven for perfection as a warrior, but they have entirely misunderstood him. Reputation doesn't matter, nor honour, glory, nor fame"}
{"text":"nsure of his Praetorian father, and thus she has also, in her way, taught him that shame is a fuel that can fire a man in ways that mere courage cannot.\n\nDuty, true duty, is not about honour, or valour, or fidelity. It is certainly not about reputation, or the estimation of others. True duty is about service. Others have seen him as prideful, because he has always striven for perfection as a warrior, but they have entirely misunderstood him. Reputation doesn't matter, nor honour, glory, nor fame. He doesn't matter. His service does. Devotion, complete and utter devotion, is its own end. Simple faith, requiring no proof or reward, is the sublime state. It is not learned or bestowed. It is autogenous.\n\nHe understands this. He believes she does too. They are utterly unalike, but they are alike in this.\n\n'There will be more of them,' she says.\n\nHe nods. 'Are you afraid?' he asks.\n\nShe shakes her head.\n\n'Not any more,' she says. She sounds surprised to hear herself say it. 'Whatever happens from here, not any more.'\n\nThen she does understand, he thinks. That's what faith does. It takes away fear. When he found it, it took away fear, and self-conscious vanity, and all mortal concerns. It took away Sigismund and left a champion. He has given himself over to the purpose of the Throne of Man, and his love for the Emperor is absolute and unconditional. He is simply a sword.\n\nHe has no pride. He has no overweening honour that can be wounded or offended. He loves his estranged father so utterly that he will weather dishonour in his eyes in order to save him. One day.\n\nThis day, perhaps.\n\nBut as he walks, he does not waste thought on such speculation. Calm returns. The future is neither now nor here.\n\n7:xx\n\nThe secret knowledge of the Emperor\n\n'What is that future?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'I cannot say, Kyril Sindermann.'\n\n'But I thought precognition was your forte?'\n\n'It is,' says Ahriman, 'but we currently exist in an instant of suspended time, so there is no future to read, and my sight is blocked. However, I can make conjecture. Horus has triumphed, and in triumph, he has become transcendent. If he is not a god, then he is very like one. The future, Kyril Sindermann, is one in which his ruinous dominion will be total. Those, like us, who stood at his side, will not be honoured. We will be relegated to subservience. That is not a prospect to be relished. So I will arm myself with the secret knowledge of the Emperor, and fortify the Thousand Sons, so we can carve out a place for ourselves, free of his will.\n\n'Unless,' he adds, turning to look at them, 'you happen to know if there is a work in this collection that lays out the methodology for killing a god?'\n\nNone of them reply.\n\n'You may observe,' Ahriman decides. 'But not obstruct. And you' - he looks at the petrified archivist - 'you will stop crying.'\n\nThe archivist whimpers at his direct attention.\n\n'She's afraid of you,' says Sindermann. 'We all are. You are the enemy, and your aspect is intimidating.'\n\nAhriman pauses. The bone-black shadows composing him begin to flow and blur. The extravagant horns and plated segments of his wargear fold up like petals, retracting into his form with a series of metallic clicks like some intricate mechanism. He reveals himself to them as a man, tall but now unarmoured, dressed in a simple robe and black bodyglove. His eyes are deep-set and radiantly blue, and his mouth is clamped in a rictus, a permanent grimace that bares his clenched teeth and pulls the muscles of his throat into tight cords. His gums are black. There is something terribly wrong with his proportions. He is too tall, too slender. His arms and legs and fingers are thin and elongated to such an extent it evokes arachnid rather than human. His head and hands are the only parts of him not tight-wrapped in black cloth. His flesh is pale and translucent, and its substance flickers. Each subliminal quiver of flesh exposes a brief radiographic ghost of his hand-bones and skull.\n\n'Better?' he asks.\n\nIt is not.\n\n'M-much,' says Sindermann.\n\nAhriman nods, the ghost of his skull visible through his spectral skin. 'Be so kind as to place your weapon on the table.'\n\nThis last remark he has uttered without looking away from the archivist, but it is directed at Mauer. The moment the intruder's armour retracted and vanished, her hand began to creep towards her holstered sidearm.\n\n'On the table,' he repeats, still grimace-smiling at the archivist and not looking at Mauer. His intonation is odd.\n\nMauer takes out her sidearm, and places it on the reading table. Then she stares at it, as if she has no idea how it got there.\n\n'Now,' says Ahriman, 'what should I examine next?'\n\n'Next?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'I am already engrossed in a hundred texts, Kyril Sindermann,' Ahriman says, 'but there are so many to peruse. Let us be thorough before the despoilers arrive.'\n\nHe clasps his hands, and interlaces his long, bony fingers in a grotesque knot. All around him, on every shelf, the books of the collection begin to stir. They begin to throb, to breathe, their covers and spines expanding and contracting like consumptive lungs. Dark liquid begins to dribble out of them and drip onto the library floor. It's ink, but it smells like blood. Glossy black puddles begin to spread at the foot of each stack.\n\nAhriman squeezes his knitted fingers together more tightly. Things begin to appear in the pools of ink, spidery golden script drifting like burning threads across the surface of each expanding puddle.\n\nThe sorcerer squats, hands clutched to his chest, his spindly knees above his hunched shoulders, and he begins his study.\n\n7:xxi\n\nA mission to undertake\n\nIcaro leads Hassan to a nearby station, and commands the operator to establish a link. It takes a moment, and the signal quality is poor. As he takes a headset, Hassan hears the sizzle and wheeze of the immaterium behind the voice at the other end.\n\n'Moriana,' he says. He utters the phonetic sigil that confirms his identity, and Mouhausen does the same. 'Inform Lord Vulkan that Ollanius Persson and his companions have escaped custody.'\n\nIt seems a matter of little consequence, in the light of the disaster engulfing them.\n\n'They are probably dead,' he adds.\n\n'The Unspoken Sanction has been initiated,' she replies. 'Sigil was proving insufficient.' She doesn't elaborate. Hassan is well aware of the sequence of crisis options that must have led to that decision.\n\n'Is the Regent still in control of Throne function?' he asks.\n\n'At this time,' she replies.\n\nHe tries not to think about his master's suffering. Pain, grief, loss... There's no time for such things.\n\n'An anomaly has been detected-' she begins.\n\n'I've been apprised,' he replies. 'No data forthcoming.'\n\n'Khalid,' she says, her voice faint, and coming and going through static, 'Lord Vulkan has commanded that efforts be made to locate the prisoner Fo and his weapon project.'\n\n'If he still lives,' says Hassan.\n\n'I'm going myself,' she says. 'I have been allocated six Hetaeron Companions and-'\n\n'No,' says Hassan. 'Stay put. Do nothing to weaken defensive numbers in the adytum.'\n\n'But-'\n\nHassan glances around. There's little he can do here. The War Court, and all tactical considerations, are close to the limit of viability.\n\n'I'll do it,' he says. It was my task to begin with. It was given to me. If I can do nothing else, I'll complete the job my master handed to me in the jumble of his last wishes. 'I'll do it,' he repeats. 'Stay where you are, and transmit to me any details you have regarding Fo, his protection detail, or Xanthus. Last known location, last sighting, anything you have. Tell Lord Vulkan the matter is in hand.'\n\n'Lord Vulkan wants Fo brought to the Throne Room, if he's alive.'\n\n'I understand.'\n\n'And his weapon-'\n\n'I understand.'\n\nHe cuts the link.\n\n'I have a mission to undertake,' he tells Sidozie.\n\n'You're leaving?' asks Icaro. 'Chosen One, please understand that no guarantee can be made for your safety once you leave the Rotunda cordon.'\n\n'Mistress, very little guarantee can be made for my safety within the cordon,' Hassan replies.\n\n'He will not be going alone,' says Ios Raja. Bare-headed, and most of his auramite plate above the waist shredded, he looks defiant. He still has his guardian spear. He looks like some bloodied cyberzerker from the Unification Era. At Raja's side, the two Sisters - Aphone Ire, Vigil Commander of the Raptor Guard, and Srinika Ridhi, Knight-Centura of the Clouded Leopard Cadre - wait like phantoms.\n\n'I'm sure we can spare some battle-brothers from the cordon,' Sidozie says to Icaro. 'A couple at least.'\n\nShe nods. 'See to it.'\n\nAs Sidozie strides away towards the main hatch, Icaro turns to Hassan. He is checking the slate of data Mouhausen has sent him.\n\n'You were a soldier, I believe?' she asks. 'Before your calling?'\n\n'Yes,' he replies.\n\n'Then you'll know how to use this,' she says.\n\nShe hands him the Komag. For a second, she seems reluctant to let it go.\n\n'If I need it here,' she says, 'then it probably won't make a difference. I fled the fall of one war court. There's nowhere left to go if this one is lost.'\n\n7:xxii\n\nOn Tilted Rock\n\nCorswain swings the grapple like a mace, and buries one claw in the Death Guard's faceplate. He hooks the man backwards, and he topples, already dead, off the rock. But the grapple is wedged fast and Corswain has to let go or be pulled over after it.\n\nHe turns, and finds himself facing a brute with a warhammer, the traitor who knocked Bruktas down. Corswain jerks backwards to avoid the whooping head of the hammer as it sails past him. He almost trips over Cypher's unmoving body.\n\nBillowing cinders fly up in the rain. Bolt-rounds scorch past. Tragan and a gun-shield squad have finally reached Tilted Rock and are ascending the slope to support them. Two carry flamers, probably the last functioning flame-weapons in Corswain's division. They rake the edges of the promontory, burning Death Guard and scaling ropes off the rim. Blazing "}
{"text":"tas down. Corswain jerks backwards to avoid the whooping head of the hammer as it sails past him. He almost trips over Cypher's unmoving body.\n\nBillowing cinders fly up in the rain. Bolt-rounds scorch past. Tragan and a gun-shield squad have finally reached Tilted Rock and are ascending the slope to support them. Two carry flamers, probably the last functioning flame-weapons in Corswain's division. They rake the edges of the promontory, burning Death Guard and scaling ropes off the rim. Blazing figures fall into the blackness of the pass below, the burning snakes of ignited ropes whipping between them.\n\nThe Death Guard with the warhammer is still on his feet. Corswain can see that the traitor knows his position is untenable, that the escalade has failed, and that his fate is sealed. But he can also see that the bastard-brother of Typhus intends to fight on. The blood of Corswain, Hound of Caliban, will be rich payment for their efforts, and for their losses.\n\nThe traitor hefts his hammer, rain pelting off his armour. He has a foliated skull, a glaring death's head, embossed in cloisonne across his breastplate. He roars a cachectic challenge, bathing Corswain in the carious stink of his exhalation, and comes at the seneschal, hammer raised. Corswain puts his head down and meets the charge with a charge of his own, driving in under the two-handed strike, slamming his left shoulder into the foe's belly. The Death Guard almost doubles up, folded around Corswain's bullish thrust. The warhammer clatters from his hands. Corswain's sword has lunged in with him, low and straight, and impaled the traitor through the gut.\n\nThey crash to the ground together at the very tip of the rock. Corswain untangles himself, and gets up off the spreadeagled corpse. He draws his sword out of rancid flesh, buffeted by the wind. The rock is slippery with rain and the noxious fluids leaking out of the enemy's plate. A hand steadies the Hound of Caliban, ensuring that he doesn't plunge from the edge.\n\nIt's Bruktas, battered and smeared with gore, lending his only hand to his lord. Corswain embraces his brother, a brief, tight clasp.\n\n'I'll not forget this courage,' he whispers.\n\n'You'll have better things to remember, lord,' mumbles Bruktas.\n\nTragan and his men have reached them. The flamers stab a last few howling gouts of deterrence down the cliff face.\n\n'Get this man to the Apothecaries,' Corswain yells to Tragan over the gale. 'Get his wound rebound.'\n\nHe goes to Cypher as Bruktas is led away.\n\nCypher is alive, but barely conscious. For a moment, Corswain thinks to remove the legendary mask to check for life signs or injuries. But he can't bring himself to break that trust.\n\n'A favour returned,' Cypher croaks. He grasps Corswain's forearm and tries to sit up.\n\n'I saw you fall...' Corswain says.\n\n'A moment of pain, a moment of...' Cypher trails off, as if unwilling to explain. 'It passes. Help me up.'\n\nCorswain hauls the warrior to his feet in the driving downpour, and steadies him.\n\n'Come,' says Cypher. 'Come with me.'\n\n7:xxiii\n\nThis time forever\n\nAt her station, Ilya Ravallion finally establishes a link to the space port. After the blurt of authenticating code, Shiban Khan's voice comes on almost at once.\n\nShe starts to explain her proposal. He cuts her off immediately.\n\n'Lion's Gate is shutting down all links,' he says. 'Traitor scrapcode has infested the port systems. Nothing can be depended on. We are closing all links permanently to block any chance of transmitting scrapcode infection to other locations.'\n\nThe link goes dead. No word of farewell, no last, personal remark, though she knows he knew it was her. Another White Scars leave-taking done without sentimentality, though this time, she feels, it's forever.\n\nEverything, spoken or unspoken, is now a goodbye.\n\n7:xxiv\n\nWhere they fall\n\nThe main bridge is a twilit ruin. The lights are on low power or out altogether. Spars and sections of ceiling have collapsed across the railed upper platform and down into the serf pits and steersman stations below. A faint, sporadic flicker of displays shows that some systems are still functional, but the rest are dead, and there's no one present.\n\nNot even corpses.\n\nAbaddon fans his men out to secure the chamber. They crunch over broken plastek, shards of glass, and dead leaves. Wet black mould and wretched, fuzzy fungal growth covers most of the stations. The black slime looks like it has been projectile vomited from helpless mouths. He can hear it dripping onto the deck.\n\n'What in the name of hell happened here?' asks Captain Jeraddon.\n\nAbaddon tries not to imagine. The command chamber looks like that of a rotting hulk that has been lost between stars for ten centuries. Saprophytic tendrils drape the walls, and envelop the guard rails and deck grilles like vines. Some, wet and colubrine, have bloomed, unfolding xenos flowers that gape like haematic sores. Whispers and murmured secrets chirm in the shadows and corners of the chamber like clustered swarms of insects.\n\nHe ascends to the main platform. How many times has he stood here, in briefing or command? He barely recognises it. Part of the upper railing over the steersman pit has been bent out of shape by some impact. Debris has fallen over the strategium table. He clears it aside, and tries to activate the device. It refuses, twice, then blinks on at half-power. Something has cracked the projection plate. He enters his command override code, and the table displays the runes for 'no signal'.\n\n'Help me,' he growls, and his equerry hurries to him. Ulnok has some skill with technical systems. He dumps the data buffers and tries a reload.\n\n'Palace Dominions,' says Abaddon. 'Tactical.'\n\nNothing resolves on the plate. Hololithics flutter and fade.\n\n'The ship, then,' says Abaddon. 'Internal schematics, overview, system status.'\n\nUlnok nods, and enters a series of data codes. An image slowly forms on the tabula topographica, planes and panels of light unfolding like origami. It's not the ship, except it is. Abaddon stares at it, deciphering what he's seeing. He can trace the immense structure of the flagship, the layering of its decks, the thready power signature of its titanic drives. But the whole thing is laced into something else, something larger, as though one three-dimensional schematic is being displayed across another.\n\n'Clean that up,' he says.\n\n'My lord, I-'\n\n'Get rid of the ghost imaging.'\n\n'It's... it's not ghost imaging,' says Ulnok.\n\nIt's a city. The diagrammatic views of ship and city are fused through each other, as cleanly and completely as the emporium was fused through the service-way wall. He peers more closely. There is a third overlay. He can see details of the Imperial Palace in the mosaic of data. He can see Lion's Gate. There, the Eternity Gate and the Ultimate Wall. He can see Auguston Bastion, where he was standing just hours before.\n\nWas it hours?\n\nHe leans forward and checks the orbital-position graphics. The Vengeful Spirit is not orbital. It is not anything. The ship, the Palace, Terra, and every other nightmarish figment of a location that this display is showing, are all occupying the same locus. And that locus has absolutely no realspace coordinates or position-mapping data.\n\nHe steps back. He feels pity and fear for his father. Pity and fear, and something less coherent that feels like abhorrence.\n\n'My lord?'\n\nHis equerry has picked something up from the deck beneath the strategium table. Cards. Liquid-crystal tarot wafers. Ulnok brushes the dirt off them and holds them out to his captain.\n\n'Are these important?' he asks.\n\nAbaddon knocks them out of his hand with a sudden flash of regret and disgust.\n\n'Don't touch them!' he snaps.\n\nUlnok steps back in alarm.\n\n'Those are not our instruments,' Abaddon growls. 'Those are not... We don't use things like that. We don't... we don't have any dealings with that nonsense. We're soldiers, Ulnok. Soldiers.'\n\n'Of course, yes, my lord.'\n\nAbaddon looks back at the table display. Some of the cards Ulnok offered him have fallen across the cracked plate, their shapes visible through the tiers of hololithic data. The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Hulk, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower, and The Emperor. The Dark King.\n\n7:xxv\n\nRex Tenebris\n\n'I wonder-' Mauer starts to say, then stops as she realises no one can hear her. The pitch-black library space seems to be getting tighter and smaller, the shadows vicing in around them. Speaking at a normal volume, her voice seems small and distant, the words muffled and faint, as though the air is too sparse to bear their weight.\n\n'I wonder,' she says, making an effort to raise her voice so it will carry, 'that even those sworn to the Warmaster's cause are now hiding from him in fear.'\n\n'A bold statement,' says Ahriman, without looking up from the books spread out in front of him.\n\n'But true, though, isn't it?' Mauer asks.\n\nNow the sorcerer looks up. She finds she cannot bear the attention of those piercing blue eyes, and looks away.\n\n'The Imperium is sundered into two, unreconcilable factions,' he says. 'Neither one of them suits the interests of the Thousand Sons entirely well. Both are, in contrasting ways, a bad fit. But our allegiance was decided for us. Your Emperor will have no part of us, and considers us outcasts and heretics, despite-'\n\nHe hesitates. His voice has suddenly sharpened, as though he is suppressing some infinite, righteous anger.\n\n'No matter,' he says, clearing his throat. 'He has shunned our support and our loyalty, condemned us for activities he bred into us, and has refused to aid us in our state of gravest need. Your Emperor made us traitors, so as traitors we are obliged to stand.'\n\n'You could have stood aside,' says Mauer.\n\n'There is no room for neutrality,' Ahriman replies. 'Sides must be taken at a time like this. The Warmaster's cause is not one we are sworn to, as you put it. It is one we are obliged to take by default. There are some "}
{"text":"earing his throat. 'He has shunned our support and our loyalty, condemned us for activities he bred into us, and has refused to aid us in our state of gravest need. Your Emperor made us traitors, so as traitors we are obliged to stand.'\n\n'You could have stood aside,' says Mauer.\n\n'There is no room for neutrality,' Ahriman replies. 'Sides must be taken at a time like this. The Warmaster's cause is not one we are sworn to, as you put it. It is one we are obliged to take by default. There are some benefits. Lupercal at least tolerates our nature. Until now, certainly. His ambitions and our own have become divergent, hence my visit here, to secure some measure of security for our destiny.'\n\n'You are afraid of him, then?' asks Mauer.\n\n'Horus Lupercal has become the manifest instrument of Chaos,' says Ahriman, 'the most powerful in the history of our reality. Everyone should be afraid of him.'\n\n'But in this future he's bringing with him,' says Sindermann, 'you'll seek neutrality then?' He gestures to the books spread out on the reading table, bleeding their ink-blood onto the floor. 'You'll use magic, and arcane learning, to divest yourself of any allegiance to your Dark King?'\n\n'What do you mean?' asks Ahriman.\n\n'I mean carve out some small parcel of this abominable future for yourselves, independent from-'\n\n'No,' says Ahriman. He rises to his feet, staring at Sindermann. His grimace tightens, exposing more of his clenched teeth and black gums, the twilight composing him eddying like incense smoke. 'That name. What do you mean by it, remembrancer?'\n\n7:xxvi\n\nA survivor\n\nAs his eyes fix on that last card, the pullulating whispers in the shadows around him seem to say the card's name.\n\n'Abaddon!'\n\nHe turns at the sound of Sycar's voice. Hellas has found something in one of the peripteral cloisters that surround the command platform. Abaddon approaches.\n\nIt's a man. It's an Astartes. He's hunched behind one of the pillars, curled up like an animal trying to hide. Abaddon thinks the man's dead at first, but he's not. He's cowering. Frozen.\n\nAbaddon crouches down.\n\n'Hell's teeth,' he whispers. 'Argonis?'\n\nKinor Argonis trembles at the sound of his name. His plate, even his flesh, is covered in slimy, atramental mould, like the surface of the bridge stations. There's a massive wound across the side of his face, as though he has taken a glancing blow from a maul. The wound is still bleeding.\n\n'Kinor? Kinor, it's Ezekyle. Kinor, wake up.'\n\nArgonis, equerry to the Warmaster, slowly turns his head to look at Abaddon. There is no real recognition in his eyes, but there is fear. Abaddon has never seen true fear expressed in the eyes of an Astartes battle-brother.\n\n'Kinor, what happened?'\n\nArgonis' lips bubble, incoherent. He's panting, whimpering quietly.\n\n'Argonis,' Abaddon says. He places his hands on the equerry's shoulders and tries to straighten him up to make eye contact. 'Argonis? It's me. It's the First Captain. Speak. Where is Lupercal?'\n\n'Lupercal!' Argonis snorts, like it's a curse, or a bark of pain.\n\n'Yes, Kinor. Lupercal. Where is he? I need to find him. Where is he?'\n\n'Heeeeeeee...' Argonis shudders, holding onto each vowel-sound as though it's the only way he can keep his voice alive. 'Heeee waas... heeeeee...'\n\n'Kinor!'\n\n'H-h-heee was here...' Argonis gasps, sucking in a breath between each syllable. He convulses, and bile spills out of his mouth and down the front of his plate. 'He was! He was! He was! He-'\n\n'Calm, brother. Get a grip on yourself. Where did he go?'\n\n'He was,' gurgles Argonis, 'terrible.'\n\n7:xxvii\n\nYou're Ollanius Persson\n\nThey spend another while searching for signs of Katt or Actae without success. Then John's laboured breathing and coughing becomes too much, so slowly, reluctantly, they limp out of the enveloping dust that hangs across the ruins like fog.\n\nBeyond, perhaps a kilometre or so distant, they find clearer air. Behind them, the site of their miserable last stand looks like the aftermath of a thermobaric bomb: the radius of debris, the huge split in the ancient wall, the lingering pall of dirt.\n\nThey stop in some yard or marketplace. It's part of the old city, the insidiously ancient one, with grotesque stone buildings and broken hovels on all sides. At one end, some kind of golden gate, instantiated from the Palace, stands covered in dead ivy and unhealthy vines. One corner of the yard appears to be a bunker from the Palatine Zone. Behind the mouldering rooftops, a turret-battery from the hull of the traitor's flagship rises like a giant wing. Everything is covered in moss and decay.\n\nBut the air is brighter. Somewhere, behind the dank cloud-cover, a hard white sun is burning.\n\nJohn and Oll rest. Leetu prowls the area, restless.\n\nJohn lies on his back on an uneven curb, his breathing slow and ragged. Oll sits, toying with the depleted ball of twine.\n\nThe long companions are dead because of him, victims of his ambition more than of the monster Erebus. He fights back tears. He had affected quiet modesty, but he had secretly begun to believe that he would finish his quest, and bring them all through alive.\n\nWhere the hell did that delusion come from? The fact that he's a Perpetual? His personal connection to the Master of Mankind? Erda's inexplicable faith in him? Her thread was certainly part of it: the uncanny knots leading them on, implying some guiding providence looking out for them, and suggesting that, somehow, they had already succeeded. They made it all the way to the Throne Room, for god's sake. They did what Horus Lupercal could not.\n\nHis friends have paid the price for his confidence, the confidence that accretes during a life that lasts too long.\n\nHe stares down at his pitifully worn boots.\n\nHis delusion was his own past; the fact that he's done this before. Other odysseys, other quests, other longshots that miraculously overcame the odds. This venture would be a myth, for in myths, the weak, the outnumbered, the mere mortals, they always prevailed.\n\nHe should have remembered that myths never feel like myths at the time. You only realise you've been part of one long after it's over. At the time, nothing is certain, and the chances of triumph are slim. The world is vicious, and life isn't a story. It doesn't get a satisfying ending just because that's how bards make stories end.\n\nThe long companions, those close friends he never really knew, they trusted him. They believed Oll knew what he was doing. But he didn't. He hasn't simply failed. He was never going to succeed in the first place.\n\n'Shit,' Oll murmurs to himself, 'I'm worse than Him.'\n\nJohn stirs beside him and sits up. His eyes, dark-rimmed with pain, stare at Oll questioningly over the dirty edge of the bandages.\n\nOll shakes his head. He's not going to explain. The belated humility is too painful to articulate. To presume he was significant enough to achieve something on this scale, and change the fate of a species: it makes the Emperor's bloated aspirations seem modest. The Emperor, at least, has power behind His convictions.\n\nJohn's hand moves, signing.\n\nWe should push on.\n\n'No. Oh, no,' says Oll, almost laughing. 'We're done now, John. For real.'\n\nYou can't give up.\n\n'I can. It's the least I can do.'\n\nYou have faith-\n\n'Don't. You were right. It was worthless after all. So was this.' Oll holds up all that remains of the ball of twine. 'When these threads started to appear, I thought it was vindication. Our future selves had triumphed, and we were simply catching up. If this was Erda's plan, it's broken and gone.'\n\nOll sighs and looks at John.\n\n'Sorry,' he says.\n\nFor what?\n\n'You believed in me. You thought I could achieve something. I just couldn't deliver.'\n\nYou still can.\n\n'No, John.'\n\nYou're Ollanius Persson.\n\nThere are no hand-signs for 'Ollanius Persson' in hortcode. John has to spell the name out phonetically. It takes a long time, and that makes it seem more poignant.\n\n'The thread's snapped, John. The knife's broken. I've got most of us killed. They trusted me, John. I failed. Over and over again, almost every step of the way. I've blundered from one disaster to another. We're done.'\n\nThe hand begins to painstakingly spell again.\n\nYou're O-L-L-A-\n\n'Stop it. I know who I am, and who I am is not enough.'\n\nHow many times did you take a wrong turn?\n\n'What?'\n\nAll those years ago. In that place.\n\n'That was different.'\n\nThis is just another labyrinth. We've taken some bad turns. The worst. But it's a labyrinth. There's still a way through it.\n\nLeetu walks up to them.\n\n'There's something out there,' he says.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Movement. Things moving in the streets nearby.'\n\n'What things?' Oll asks. John gets up.\n\nLeetu shakes his head.\n\n'I don't know,' he says, 'but we would do well to get out of the open.'\n\n7:xxviii\n\nClose your eyes\n\nAbaddon pulls back from Argonis. Something... Impossibly, something has overridden the equerry's Astartesian fear-control conditioning.\n\n'Kinor?'\n\n'He is... He became something... He became... I didn't want to see. He made me see. He made me look. I didn't want to. Ezekyle, I didn't. I didn't want to look.'\n\nHe starts to weep. It would be pathetic if it wasn't so chilling.\n\n'Rest,' says Abaddon. 'Take a rest for a moment. Clear your head. Close your eyes.'\n\nArgonis shakes his head wildly. 'No!' he gasps. 'If I close my eyes... I'll see him!'\n\nAbaddon stands up. He calls to First Company's Apothecary.\n\n'Give him a shot.'\n\n'Of what, First Captain?'\n\n'Tranq him. Anti-psychotics. Something. Get him coherent.'\n\nThe Apothecary selects phials from his pack and leans in.\n\n'Sycar,' Abaddon calls out, turning away. 'I want access to the Lupercal Court.'\n\n'The hatchway's locked,' Sycar reports. 'Priority securement-'\n\n'Blow the damn doors,' says Abaddon.\n\nSycar doesn't argue. He annihilates the lock mechanisms with directional charges, and then two of his hulking Justaerin Terminators, Gustus and Varia, drag the hatches aside, their power claws scoring the metal.\n\nAn algid wind blows in at them, bra"}
{"text":"erent.'\n\nThe Apothecary selects phials from his pack and leans in.\n\n'Sycar,' Abaddon calls out, turning away. 'I want access to the Lupercal Court.'\n\n'The hatchway's locked,' Sycar reports. 'Priority securement-'\n\n'Blow the damn doors,' says Abaddon.\n\nSycar doesn't argue. He annihilates the lock mechanisms with directional charges, and then two of his hulking Justaerin Terminators, Gustus and Varia, drag the hatches aside, their power claws scoring the metal.\n\nAn algid wind blows in at them, brandishing rain. There is no room or chamber on the other side of the bridge, no Lupercal Court or command annex.\n\nThere is outside.\n\n7:xxix\n\nMM226\n\nThey help John up, and start to make their way out of the square. There's a street, a narrow, cobbled route strewn with shadows and overhung by decaying tiled roofs. Another street, broader and more open, joins it from the right, a street from the Palatine Zone bisecting a decrepit alley of the Inevitable City. Oll steers them on. The dark, shadowy route offers better protection from prying eyes.\n\nBut John tugs at his sleeve, and gestures towards the turning on the right. The Palatine street, scarred by war, rises away from them on a low gradient. A string of heavy wagons have been abandoned by the roadside.\n\n'Stay here,' Oll says, and leaves them in the shadows of a sunken stone turret that leans wearily, draped in a cloak of ivy.\n\nHe makes his way up the street towards the wagons. Ropes and yoke chains are draped beneath them. The light is spare and flat, like a grey afternoon at sea. The street was part of the Palace. He can see that from the architecture. Windows have been blown out from shock damage, and the ground is covered with meltglass. There's other litter too, things that look like lost belongings. A worn shoe. A broken lantern. A buckle. Scraps of rags. A child's rattle. A few strips of paper scudding the breeze that look like the parchment tags one might fix with a wax seal.\n\nHe feels as though he's being watched. He senses eyes behind the empty windows. He looks around, but there's no sign of anyone, even though, from the evidence littering the pavement, there were once many people here. The street has been so perfectly stolen from its original location by the endemic, exoplanar commingling, it even has its street sign, screwed to a wall near the corner. Glacis Street. Who lived on Glacis Street, he wonders. Who walked here? Who died here?\n\nThe abandoned wagons are mismatched and heavy. They are covered with tarpaulins and have the serial MM226 crudely stencilled on their side panels. If I remember Munitorum code abbreviation correctly, Oll thinks, that's a munition manufactory code.\n\nHe climbs the spokes of a wheel, and pulls back the tarp on the first one. He sees magazines packed into simple raw-wood crates. Behind them, crude pallet frames support khaki rockets machined for shoulder launchers.\n\nOll looks back down the slope of the street, and beckons eagerly to the others. John and Leetu start moving to join him. He jumps off the spokes and hurries to the next wagon. It's full of oblong packing boxes crudely nailed together. They look like miniature coffins, pauper coffins for those who can afford nothing more. He levers off a lid. Inside, packed in shredded plastek, are reconditioned lasrifles. Mars-pattern Mk II. He pulls one out, and brushes off the packing chips. It's an antique, old and scuffed, but it's been cleaned and the mechanism refurbished. He snaps off the plastek ties around the trigger and the receiver. It feels so familiar in his hands. It's just like the one he used to have, back in another life, the one before last.\n\n'What have you found?' asks Leetu.\n\n'Guns,' says Oll. 'Enough f-' He corrects himself. 'Plenty.'\n\nHe nearly said 'enough for all of us'. The irony bites. They were weaponless for so long, and now they have more than they can carry.\n\nHe checks the weapon, then loads it with a powercell. There are bandoliers in one of the wagons, so he takes two and fills the loops with additional power mags, then straps them across his body. There are no blades, no bayonets, no handguns, no grenades, no launchers for the rockets. There are no scopes either, but Oll was always an iron sights man. Oll sees John take a bandolier, and a short-pattern Mk IIc with a folding wire stock. He has no idea how John's going to manage it with one hand.\n\nLeetu sorts through the wagons too. Everything is made for human hands, and even the largest firearms, Mk IIs and a few Mk Is, seem like toys in his hands. The overall size isn't the issue: Leetu can clutch a Mk II to his body like a compact or a carbine, but his armoured fingers are simply too large for the trigger guard, and the trigger guard is pressed steel and an integral part of the construction moulding. It can't be bent or snapped off. Leetu sets to work with an axle pin and a lump of curbstone, trying to hammer the guard out of shape without breaking the firing mechanism.\n\nIt's not going to work, Oll thinks. Maybe if they had steel-cutters or an angle grinder. Leetu's efforts crack the magazine well of the weapon. He tosses it aside, selects another, and tries again.\n\nPersson.\n\nOll's rifle comes up to his cheek in an instant. Hyper-alert, he pans the street. Someone said his name. It wasn't the wind. It wasn't his imagination.\n\nSomeone called his name.\n\nJohn and Leetu have both noticed his reaction. They get up, looking around.\n\n'Something,' Oll whispers.\n\n Persson.\n\nOll adjusts his aim.\n\n'Either of you hear that?' he hisses, weapon steady.\n\n'No,' says Leetu.\n\nJohn shakes his head.\n\nAs I thought, thinks Oll. It's in my head. Telepathic. And the tone is familiar. It's thin and muffled, by distance, or pain, but I know it.\n\n'Actae?' Oll says. John and Leetu look at him sharply.\n\nPersson. Get. Get out of there.\n\n'You're alive? Where are you?'\n\nUnder. Under the wall.\n\nIt's definitely pain vicing her voice. Excruciating pain. Every thought-syllable, every utterance, is a superhuman effort. Oll lowers his weapon quickly and turns to John and the proto-Space Marine.\n\n'Actae's alive,' he says. 'We've got to go back-'\n\nNo.\n\nHe winces. Her voice was more pain than word.\n\nBuried. I'm buried. Tonnes of stone. Crushed. I'm finished.\n\n'We're not going to leave you!' Oll exclaims to empty air.\n\nNo! Leave me. Get out of there. I can see. I can see you. I can see what's coming. Run.\n\n'Actae-'\n\nRun!\n\nOll looks helplessly at his companions. Then he hears gunshots.\n\n7:xxx\n\nBoneyard of cities\n\nThere's space. Open space. A tenebrous landscape, wasting away beneath an unconstellated sky. Cliffs of splintered rock and colossal debris rake into the heavens as though an entire continent has suffered the same orthogonal compression as the dim and musty yard he clambered through to reach the command bridge. Vast shelves of rock, a thousand metres high, have been uplifted by some titanic orogeny, and their horizontals turned into verticals like the folds of a cloak. Abaddon can see the ruins of ancient, upflung cities clinging to the crests of some like barnacles, torn from the earth far below.\n\nIn the far distance, low in the sky, there's a light source, a sun or a star. It's obscured by the wind-driven clouds, but it's fiercely bright because its white glare penetrates the undercast. Abaddon has seen the pitiless depths of dead stars and black holes in his many voyages, and this looks like one in negative; a baleful pit of white light, like a pupilless eye, its gravity tormenting the grey clouds and clotted warpflux into a murky spiral.\n\nIt is uncomfortable to behold directly, so he looks away.\n\nImmediately in front of the open hatch is a trace of ruined street, where most of the archaic structures have been pummelled into rubble. Abaddon sees the craters of artillery shells half-full of rainwater. Alien weeds sway in the gusting wind. Small fires sputter and burn amid the strewn rubble. The ruined street is part of a ruined city, a city of ancient and unknown provenance, and that wasteland of urban war stretches away as far as he can see. The ruinous buildings clinging to the upthrust cliffs far above are parts of it, chunks torn out and elevated by the sudden mountains.\n\nAbaddon feels as though it is not so much a city as a boneyard where cities come to die. It is a cinerous place of decay, but it has been here a long time. Some of the more prominent structures and stonework still standing have been worked by the labour of wind into strange, angled ventifacts. But the traces of damage and violence are recent.\n\nIs his father here? Did he do this?\n\nAbaddon calls out his father's name, but his voice merely echoes back, oddly modulated by the smoothed surfaces of the petrifacts and worn stone. Phaeto Zeletsis leads the first squad out, with Abaddon close behind.\n\nThey're less than ten metres from the hatch when they start to take fire. It's small-arms at first, then some las and bolter rounds.\n\nTheir attackers move into view, making no attempt at concealment or cover. They come scrambling and stumbling over the rubble slopes and debris, howling manically, clearly insane, or terrified, or both. There are thousands of them, and they are fleeing from something.\n\nThey are Excertus of the Hort Lupercali, and they are Word Bearers. They are the support divisions and crew of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n7:xxxi\n\nThe old soldier self\n\nHard rounds ping off the pavement and wall. A couple of las-bolts zip past. Figures have appeared at the end of the street, close to where he left Leetu and John waiting. They're soldiers. Excertus. Hort Lupercali.\n\nThey're running up the slope towards them, firing wildly. They look deranged. There's no combat discipline at all. They're either mad with panic or out of their heads on battle-stimms.\n\nOll rolls up onto one knee in the lee of a wagon, and starts to return fire. He drops one, two, then a third, snapping each one off his feet with a single, body-mass shot. He's calm, methodical, allowing his old self, "}
{"text":"et, close to where he left Leetu and John waiting. They're soldiers. Excertus. Hort Lupercali.\n\nThey're running up the slope towards them, firing wildly. They look deranged. There's no combat discipline at all. They're either mad with panic or out of their heads on battle-stimms.\n\nOll rolls up onto one knee in the lee of a wagon, and starts to return fire. He drops one, two, then a third, snapping each one off his feet with a single, body-mass shot. He's calm, methodical, allowing his old self, his old soldier self, to take over, flooding him with years of experience and muscle memory. He takes a fourth shot, a fifth. Both find their targets.\n\nBut there are more Hort Lupercali appearing. The first were just the outliers of what seems to be a whole brigade in rapid, disordered retreat. Oll can't tell if he and his companions are under attack, or simply in their path. He rises, and gets a better angle, rifle braced across the top of the wagon siding. Gunfire smacks into the wagon. He maintains his calm, surgical rate of fire.\n\nBeside him, John opens up. He doesn't have Oll's experience, nor his accomplished precision, and even if he did, he can't handle his weapon properly. John opens fire from the hip on full-auto, the weight of his carbine slackly braced by the crook of his injured arm. His wildfire rips down the street. Most of it goes wide or throws up grit from the ground. He hits one of the Lupercali in the knee, and knocks him flat.\n\nRun!\n\nOll shakes the anguished, pain-crushed voice off. They can't. If they leave the cover of the wagons-\n\nA second blurt of las-fire rips out from their position, alongside John's extravagant and desperate discharge. Leetu has a Mk II pulled tight to his chestplate. He hasn't been able to lever the trigger guard away, so he's jammed the axle pin through the guard loop and is tugging it like a lever to depress the trigger. It is far from accurate, and the pin keeps slipping, causing his bursts of automatic fire to stutter out.\n\nPersson. Run!\n\nOll looks around. The buildings nearby, maybe-\n\n'Run!'\n\nHe's about to curse at Actae when he realises the command didn't come from her. It was Leetu.\n\nThree Word Bearers have appeared, striding up the street among the advancing Lupercali.\n\n7:xxxii\n\nEven if it costs us all our lives\n\nCorswain follows the limping figure down Tilted Rock and along the upper terraces to the mountain's tertiary portal. The wind tears at their soaked cloaks and surcoats.\n\n'A spear of pain,' Cypher shouts as he walks. 'The distress of our Librarian brothers. I'm surprised you did not feel it.'\n\n'I did not,' yells back Corswain.\n\nThey enter the mouth of the portal, and are at once spared the storm's assault.\n\n'It took away my senses,' says Cypher.\n\n'What did it signify?' Corswain asks.\n\nTanderion is waiting for them in the portal's rock-cut tunnel. He is bare-headed, his face pale and drawn.\n\n'What say you?' asks Cypher.\n\n'My lords,' says Tanderion, with a break in his voice. He looks bewildered by shock. 'Our efforts-'\n\n'Speak, man,' says Cypher. 'Where are the others?'\n\n'Below, my lord. Below still, at work. But the sorcery of that witch-blooded devil-'\n\n'You mean Typhus?' asks Corswain sharply.\n\nTanderion nods. 'The warp is in him, lord, and it magnifies him. We... we cannot conceive of his power. He found a way in-'\n\n'Typhus?' Corswain snarls.\n\n'His will, my lord. The force of his will. It is seeping in. It undid and destroyed much of the work we had completed. Cartheus was nearly killed, and Asradael badly burned by psykanic discharge. We are trying to restore the damage. But he knows, my lord. Typhus knows. He knows what we are trying to achieve. This assault is no longer about revenge. He intends to stop us. He intends to see that this beacon is never lit.'\n\n'How much is left to be done?' Cypher asks.\n\n'We are almost obliged to start over, lord,' says Tanderion in near despair.\n\n'What does that mean?' asks Corswain. 'How long?'\n\n'It may be impossible, lord seneschal,' says Tanderion.\n\n'Nothing is impossible,' Cypher snaps. The mask turns to regard Corswain. 'Hours, Hound of Caliban,' he says. 'Perhaps more hours than we have left. I will need to supervise the work directly to see it accomplished.'\n\n'You have such skill and knowledge?' Corswain asks, then raises a hand and stops himself with a shake of his head. It is not his place, nor the place of any of the First, to ask Cypher about the secrets he embodies.\n\n'I will do what I can,' says Cypher. 'We will hasten to prepare various acroamatical devices, some diabolifuge to ward off our enemy's malison. This time, perhaps, we can keep the corrosive touch of Typhus out of the Librarius' endeavours.'\n\nCorswain nods. He takes a deep breath.\n\n'You will have to be the figurehead, my lord,' says Cypher. 'It is clear I cannot be in two places.'\n\n'Do what you must,' replies Corswain. 'The mountain is still our priority, even if it costs us all our lives. Make its light visible.'\n\nHe turns, sword drawn, and starts to retrace his steps up the tunnel to the portal mouth. Outside, in the storm, the wordless roar of war has resumed, speaking of renewed assault.\n\nOver his shoulder, he tells them, 'I'll win you as many hours as I can.'\n\n7:xxxiii\n\nThe last stand of Erda's warrior\n\nOll curses. Astartes. Traitor Astartes. They can't fight that. Reconditioned lasrifles don't have anything like enough stopping power.\n\nTwo of the Word Bearers have mauls, the other a broadsword. They are moving quickly, shoving the Excertus aside. Oll had forgotten how horribly fast those huge, plated warriors could move. All three are howling, berserk. He can see insanity in their eyes. Like the Excertus around them, they look like they are running, in terror, from something. But even if they're fleeing, they clearly intend to kill anything that gets in their way.\n\nStill firing as best he can, Leetu repeats his command to run as a roar.\n\nThey've got seconds. Oll takes one last shot, then grabs John, and starts to drag him up the slope. John tries to shake Oll off, but he knows the position is hopeless. They have to run. They've got to let Leetu buy them time to get clear.\n\nThey scramble along the pavement, stray rounds chipping the flagstones and nicking the wall beside them.\n\nLeetu stands his ground. A hard round pings off a pauldron, another off a vambrace. He destroys a charging Excertus soldier with a burst of fire, but the axle pin slips. He adjusts it, pulls again, and mows down two more. Then the gun misfires. The refurbed magazines from the wagon are either too old to hold power, or they're only partially recharged.\n\nThere's no time to change mags because it's too fiddly with hands his size. Leetu swings around instead, using the gun as a cudgel, and smacks an Excertus off his feet. He clubs another down. They're mobbing him, throwing themselves at him in fear-driven madness.\n\nWhat could be so terrible these men would rather attack a plated Astartes legionary?\n\nThere's no time to consider it. The first of the Word Bearers is almost on him. Leetu demolishes the skull of a Lupercali soldier with the sledge of a paw, then puts his back into a swing, both hands on the barrel of the rifle.\n\nThe improvised club meets the Word Bearer in the side of the head, jolting him into a stagger. The brute tries to swing his maul, but Leetu brings the rifle down again into the tattooed face. The hardwood stock splinters, and pieces of the firing mechanism spin away. The Word Bearer stumbles backwards, blinded by the blood pouring into his eyes.\n\nThe second Word Bearer, a spiked hulk of the Black Comet Chapter, crashes into Leetu, driving his maul into his ribs. Leetu is hurled backwards, bouncing off the side of the nearest wagon. He tries to steady himself. The Word Bearer brings the maul down again. Leetu dodges aside, and the blow caves in the wagon's siding.\n\nLeetu backs up. He's unarmed. The second and third Word Bearers close in, weapons raised. The first, blood striping his face, is close behind him. Four more of them have appeared, approaching rapidly. The Excertus are all around him, baying like dogs.\n\nThe Word Bearer with the broadsword, a veteran of the Ebon Branch Chapter, pushes past the Black Comet, and takes a swing. Leetu evades, and pushes in, trying to close the distance so he can grapple to rob the sword of its length advantage. They grind together, locking, trying to lever each other's limbs. The Word Bearer shakes him off, and thrusts. The blade goes clean through Leetu's ribs.\n\nHe sways, leaking blood, then lurches as the blade withdraws from his body. He staggers away, trying to master the pain, trying to recompose. He manages to dodge the next swoop of the blade, but backs away too far. The Black Comet Word Bearer is right behind him, raising his maul to strike. There's nothing he can do. It's over.\n\nThe blow never lands. Leetu hears a clang of metal, something hitting the ground. He hears a growl of dismay from the traitors all around.\n\nHe turns.\n\nAnother Astartes has joined the fight, out of nowhere. His plate is as plain and mark-less as Leetu's, but where Leetu's is silver, this warrior's armour is a greenish grey. He has two swords, one in each fist.\n\nHe swings one, a crackling force-blade, and decapitates the Black Comet, then engages the Ebon Branch with the broadsword in a flurry of strokes. The Excertus jerk aside to avoid the scything blades.\n\nThe Astartes drives the Word Bearer back. Four more of Lorgar's demented sons are closing in.\n\nLoken turns and, in one fluid gesture, tosses Mourn-It-All to Leetu. Despite the shearing pain in his side, Leetu catches it in mid-air.\n\nThere's no time for words. Back to back, the two Astartes turn their blades on the gathering sons of Lorgar Aurelian.\n\n7:xxxiv\n\nNot why I told you to run\n\nOll half-drags John up the dusty steps of some large, derelict building, and kicks open the heavy doors. It's cold, quiet and dim inside, a spacious hall. Every step sets off a dozen echoes. The ce"}
{"text":"sing in.\n\nLoken turns and, in one fluid gesture, tosses Mourn-It-All to Leetu. Despite the shearing pain in his side, Leetu catches it in mid-air.\n\nThere's no time for words. Back to back, the two Astartes turn their blades on the gathering sons of Lorgar Aurelian.\n\n7:xxxiv\n\nNot why I told you to run\n\nOll half-drags John up the dusty steps of some large, derelict building, and kicks open the heavy doors. It's cold, quiet and dim inside, a spacious hall. Every step sets off a dozen echoes. The ceilings are high, supported by pillars. A firelight glow throbs through the tall, dirty windows.\n\nOll sets John to rest by the base of a pillar and returns to the doorway, rifle ready. He peers into the street outside. A few maddened Excertus rush past, but they're simply fleeing, weeping, gabbling, any meaningful pursuit of John and Oll forgotten.\n\nOll pushes the doors to. He looks around. There's no way of telling what this place was, or even where it's from. The Palace, he guesses. The gloom is multicoloured, thanks to the glassaic panels of the windows. There's a huge oeil-de-boeuf window at the far end, showing the stations of some Imperial institution. Oll has no idea why the windows are lit by the flicker of firelight when nothing outside was on fire.\n\n'Actae?'\n\nThere's no answer.\n\n'Actae?'\n\n Stay hidden, Ollanius.\n\n'Tell me where you are, Actae. We'll come back. We'll get you.'\n\n I'm dying, Ollanius. Don't. Don't even think about coming back. Coming back for me. I'm buried. The wall.\n\n'Is Katt...' Oll begins. 'Is Katt with you? We couldn't find either of you after...'\n\nShe doesn't reply.\n\n'Actae?'\n\n Do you have the knife? I see. I see you do. Is it broken?\n\n'Yes.'\n\n You must go on anyway. Let John. Let John rest for a moment, then go on.\n\n'Leetu-'\n\n Forget him. You have to. You have to keep moving.\n\n'To where? We're lost. The thread is broken.'\n\n I'll try to. Try to guide you. You have to. To go on. Keep moving. Keep running.\n\nHer voice is hard to hear. Oll assumes that its anguished tone is a product of the agony drenching it, but there's compassion in it, an urgent concern he's never heard her articulate before.\n\n'We ran, Actae,' he says. 'You warned that the traitors were coming-'\n\n Lorgar's sons were not. Were not why I told you to run.\n\n'Actae? Actae?'\n\nHer pain has become too much. Only silence answers him.\n\n7:xxxv\n\nCold and unsaid\n\n'The Dark King?' asks Sindermann. He frowns. 'We understood that's what his name would be. A prophesied name of the god to come-'\n\n'I know what it is,' says Ahriman. 'It is a name that has lain cold and unsaid for a long time.'\n\n'It is... everywhere,' says Sindermann. 'Every book we opened seemed to contain the name-'\n\n'And it has been reported to us,' says Mauer timidly, 'that the name is being spoken among the ranks of the traitors, and uttered by Neverborn blasphemies.'\n\n'Have you not heard it yourself?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'I have not been listening,' says Ahriman. 'Just as I cannot see the future, I have stopped listening to the present. For one such as me, Kyril Sindermann, the warp has become too deafening. I have shut it out, so as not to be driven from my wits as I complete my work. If the name is being spoken, then its time is here...'\n\n'It seems to hold significance for you,' says Mauer.\n\n'It does,' Ahriman replies. 'If Horus Lupercal is truly the Dark King ascendant, then his power will be even greater than I dreaded. I feared he would become godlike, a being so mighty that it was effectively and functionally a god. But if he is anointed as the Dark King, then he is truly a god indeed. A divinity, an omnipotent being.'\n\n'And how is that any different?' asks Sindermann.\n\n'The four principals of Chaos have invested their power and influence in Horus,' says Ahriman. 'They have blessed him with unrivalled strength so that, to you or me, he would seem a god. But he is an instrument, a slave to their darkness. However, if he has become, or is becoming, the Dark King, then they have rashly permitted his full apotheosis. He is ascendant in his own right.'\n\nHe looks at the three of them so sharply, they start back in fear.\n\n'Show me the works where the name appeared,' he says.\n\nMauer flinches. There are books everywhere, piling the floor, spilling from the stacks, like piles of limp, dead birds leaking ink onto the ground.\n\n'W-we'll never find them again,' she says.\n\n'Then I will look in your minds,' the sorcerer says, 'and see them as you remember them.'\n\nHis blue eyes flash, lighting up the skull under his skin. Sindermann, Mauer and the archivist all shudder suddenly as a cold touch settles on them, knifing the length of their spines and hardening the soft, living tissue of their brains into permafrost. They cannot keep him out of their heads.\n\n'I see,' Ahriman hisses. One by one, wounded volumes and manuscripts start to slide across the floor towards his feet, slithering free of the sticky piles of book-corpses and puddles of ink. They crawl like insects that have been stamped on, but are still alive. The first of them begin to rise, dripping, up the legs of the reading desk.\n\n7:xxxvi\n\nBrothers in arms\n\nLeetu rams his borrowed blade through the skull of a Word Bearer. At his back, his new ally finishes the last of Lorgar's sons with a demolishing blow from his force-blade.\n\nLeetu turns, clutching the wound in his side.\n\n'We must get off the street,' the other Astartes tells him. 'There will be more.'\n\n'Agreed,' says Leetu. The pain of his wound is acute and hard to quell. The Astartes steps forward and lends an arm to support him.\n\n'My thanks,' Leetu says, 'for your intervention.'\n\n'We clearly share the same enemies, brother,' the other says.\n\n'There were two men with me,' Leetu tells him through gritted teeth. 'We need to find them, brother. They need protection.'\n\nThe other nods.\n\n'Who are you?' asks Leetu.\n\n7:xxxvii\n\nDead, she lives\n\nDead, she lives. Such is the Perpetual curse.\n\nWhen the wall collapsed, she could not save herself, nor the girl at her side, for she had put every shred of her psychic power into stopping the Dark Apostle Erebus.\n\nActae has built her own grave. Broken rock buries her, and beneath it, she is broken too. She can feel the extent of her injuries, and knows most would be fatal to any mortal form.\n\nBut she is Perpetual.\n\nShe lies in the darkness of her blindness, but even if her eyes could see, all would still be suffocating black. Many tonnes of stone compress her. Masonry blocks crush her. Everything is dust. The girl is close by. Actae can feel the last heat bleeding out of her body. A fierce soul, to the end. Actae almost admires her. But she has endured the pain of the girl's death along with her own, because their minds were leashed together.\n\nTwo deaths. She has suffered two. How many more?\n\nThe pain, like her, is forever.\n\nShe marshals what's left of her mind, and tries to lift the rubble pressing down on her. She has nothing like enough telekine strength. All her efforts achieve is a brief shiver of the stone slabs, which causes more dust to cascade into the cavities around her face and throat. She chokes and dies.\n\nDead, she lives.\n\nWhen she was reborn from the husk of Cyrene Valantion, she thought Perpetuality would be a blessing. She would use it to change the stars and shape the future. But no. The truth is, sometimes, immortal is the last thing you want to be.\n\nMortal, she would be dead, and free of this pain.\n\nImmortal, she will lie in this agony forever, entombed.\n\nIn the blackness, her mind can see little. She cannot see the Dark Apostle. She presumes, and hopes, that Erebus is crushed dead nearby in the rubble. That would be something, at least. A small consolation.\n\nShe tries to move. Everything is pinned, and every bone is fractured. She is just able to shift her shoulder. A rock - over a tonne of wall-stone - slides and crushes her skull.\n\nDead, she lives.\n\nIt will take time, she realises. A day. A week. A year. Ten years. If she lies still, her form will slowly heal, cell by cell, until at last, her restored mind will be strong enough to cast the rocks aside. She must be patient. She must endure the agony, in stillness, and silence, for however long it takes.\n\nExcept time is not passing. The warp has settled un-time on the world. There is no time in which she can heal.\n\nHer ailing mind, half-blind and weak, has seen the city beyond the dust that shrouds her tomb. She has seen, briefly, the entangled dimensions, the cities inside cities. She has seen the oceans of the empyrean washing Terra away. She has seen, and felt, the terror afflicting everyone, even the traitors who engineered this fate. She has seen the Word Bearers fleeing in mortal dread through the timeless streets, unable to grasp that which they have helped bring to life. She has seen the gleeful Neverborn recoil in fear. She has seen veteran Excertus of the Hort Lupercali die of shock where they stand from the very sight of it.\n\nThere is no time, and the Dark King is here.\n\n7:xxxviii\n\nA reading\n\nThe sorcerer's long, claw-like fingers sift and paw through the injured books. His pallid flesh is wet with ink. Ahriman is urgent, engrossed.\n\nSindermann, Mauer and the archivist watch fearfully, enclosed by the tightening gloom. It looks like Ahriman is performing some grisly autopsy on the seeping volumes.\n\n'What...' Sindermann whispers, 'what are you learning?'\n\n'Too much, Kyril Sindermann,' Ahriman rasps without looking up. 'Not enough.'\n\nHe raises his hands, dripping with ink-gore, and sets his ghastly stare upon them.\n\n'Prophecy has been deluded,' he says. 'All that has been pre-written and foreseen is twisted into a new meaning.'\n\n'By... Horus?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'Indirectly,' the sorcerer replies. 'By his deeds, by his actions, by the calamity. What was ordained by fate has been derailed.'\n\nA soft growl issues from his throat. His bones throb beneath his flesh.\n\n'The history of our universe is already decided,' he says. 'It is already written. But that history "}
{"text":"nk-gore, and sets his ghastly stare upon them.\n\n'Prophecy has been deluded,' he says. 'All that has been pre-written and foreseen is twisted into a new meaning.'\n\n'By... Horus?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'Indirectly,' the sorcerer replies. 'By his deeds, by his actions, by the calamity. What was ordained by fate has been derailed.'\n\nA soft growl issues from his throat. His bones throb beneath his flesh.\n\n'The history of our universe is already decided,' he says. 'It is already written. But that history presumes that the universe will continue along its course without interruption or unnatural distortion.'\n\n'M-meaning?' asks Mauer.\n\n'Meaning, that natural flow has stopped. A caesura. Time has halted, and thus everything that the natural flow of time would have brought about is thwarted. The Dark King was prophesied. But, without time, the prophecy has fallen sideways. It has become misaligned.'\n\n'That... that doesn't make sense,' says Mauer, trembling.\n\n'To you, perhaps,' Ahriman replies. 'Your mind is not enlightened. You throw a stone, knowing with some confidence where it will land. But if time stops, that stone will land somewhere else, not where you intended and certainly not where you predicted. It will miss its target, and hit another. So too with prophecy. Accurate prediction relies on the sustained continuity of conditions. Change those conditions, in this case, the physical laws of reality, and the veracity of the prediction alters.'\n\n'Or... or simply becomes invalid,' says Sindermann.\n\n'No, sadly. The thing begun will still occur. But the result will be completely different. In a time without time, a prophecy fulfilled will not effect the same outcome. Its outcome could not have been foreseen by anybody observing under, or assuming, the previous conditions.'\n\nHe sweeps the dead books off the reading table with a sudden brush of his forearm. The action is so abrupt, they all step back in fear. The discarded books splatter on the floor beside the table like slices of raw meat.\n\nAhriman reaches into the black bandages swathing his elongated body, and draws out a small mother-of-pearl casket. It opens itself. He takes out of it a deck of tarot cards.\n\n'I must reread the now in terms of the new conditions,' he says.\n\nThe cards shuffle themselves in the air between his open hands. He takes them, and begins to lay them out on the table. He begins to turn them face up.\n\n7:xxxix\n\nWeft and warp\n\n'I am Garviel Loken,' the Astartes says.\n\n'I am Ollanius Persson.'\n\nOll lowers his rifle. Leetu has followed the newcomer into the derelict hall. The proto-Astartes has been wounded. To Oll, Leetu's grievous wound looks deep enough to be mortal.\n\n'He's one of us,' says Leetu through gritted teeth.\n\n'I'm one of nothing,' says Loken.\n\n'I mean he stands on the side of order,' says Leetu, 'against the darkness.' He props himself against the end of a pew to relieve his injury.\n\n'There are no sides,' says Oll. 'Just mankind.'\n\n'True enough,' says Loken. He studies the two men: the wary old soldier with silver in his hair, and the pitifully injured man, his face wrapped in dirty rags, who sits beside him in the pews. He looks around at the pillars, and the oeil-de-boeuf window.\n\n'This building,' he says. 'This is the Scholaster Hall on the Via Aquila.'\n\n'No longer on that street or in that place,' says Oll.\n\n'Nowhere is where it is supposed to be,' says Loken.\n\n'You are aware of the shifting reality, then?'\n\n'Yes. I boarded the Vengeful Spirit some time ago,' Loken says. 'From my perspective, I have not left it. Yet here we are. You?'\n\n'I opened the wrong door in the Palace of Terra,' says Oll. 'Or perhaps the right one. You seem, forgive me, quite sanguine about the derangement of the material world.'\n\n'Meaning?'\n\n'The Archenemy seem to have lost their minds,' says Leetu. 'Those Excertus soldiers. The sons of Aurelian. We broke them, friend, because they were mad with fear.'\n\n'Then the whole world is mad,' says Loken. 'For this collapse is everywhere.'\n\n'But not you?' asks Oll.\n\n'I have seen enough,' says Loken. 'Perhaps too much. I am past madness.'\n\nHe doesn't want to say more. It is an ongoing struggle to contain the torment of the truth the daemon revealed to him. It seethes in his mind, and he knows it will never let him go.\n\nHe unclamps his helm and removes it. His face is solemn, slightly freckled, unshaven. His eyes are cold grey.\n\n'The same question might be asked of you,' he remarks.\n\n'We have seen a good deal too,' says Oll. 'Why did you come to our aid? Don't think us ungrateful.'\n\n'You were fighting traitors,' Loken replies. 'I could not let you do that alone.'\n\nHe hesitates.\n\n'Besides,' he adds, 'I believe everyone and everything I have encountered so far, I have encountered for a reason.'\n\n'Why would you believe that?' asks Oll.\n\n'It is a matter of certain signs,' says Loken. 'Sigils. Hints. The sense of a higher power at work. I cannot explain it convincingly.'\n\n'Try,' says Leetu. He has sat down to try to ease his wound.\n\n'Destiny, perhaps?' says Loken. 'Fate? Almost everything we hold dear is lost, but I feel that some tiny chance of salvation remains, and that whatever sentient power persists on our side, however feeble, it is willing us to seize that chance. Willing me, at least. I have been set on a path. I think I was set on it years ago. I am coming full circle. This place, for example. I have been here before. I was brought here before.'\n\n'Why?' asks Oll.\n\n'So that it would have significance for me?' Loken suggests. 'Another sigil of meaning. That when I saw it again, I would know it. That, perhaps, it would establish the significance of those I met there.'\n\n'Us?'\n\n'You are far from ordinary,' says Loken. He looks at Oll. 'You have the smell of eternity about you.'\n\nOll laughs. 'Why would you say that?'\n\n'Because I have been shown it by the Neverborn, and you look like it. And you...' He looks at Leetu. 'You are not of any Legion I know,' he says.\n\n'I am not of any Legion,' says Leetu.\n\n'Well, then,' says Loken.\n\nWith a wince, Leetu flips Mourn-It-All in his hand, and offers it, hilt first, to Loken.\n\n'Keep it, for now,' says Loken. 'We will need it. The fight is not done.'\n\n'Mine might be,' Leetu replies. He tries to regulate his breathing. Blood hasn't stopped running out of him since he entered the hall.\n\nJohn's hand moves in code.\n\n'Ask me why yourself,' says Loken.\n\nJohn's eyes gleam in surprise between the ribbons of his bandages. He raises his dirty hand and signs hortcode directly to Loken.\n\n'Why did I board the Vengeful Spirit? Because I am hunting for the Warmaster.'\n\n7:xl\n\nThe last configuration\n\nHe has killed a thousand daemons in the darkness.\n\nAlone, one step at a time, he has found his way through the pitch blackness, and cut down everything, every half-seen, misshapen form that lunges at him from the shadows, until the blade Encarmine smoulders in his hand.\n\nSanguinius sees by the flickering light of that blade. He sees, in part, in fitful shadow, the ruins of the vengeful ship, the mighty ship, whose wounds and damage will never be avenged. He sees the draping cables hanging in slack loops from the ruptured ceiling, the severed ends hissing and spitting weak sparks of power. He sees the crumpled deck plates, torn loose, rivets sheared, scattered across the underdeck frame like a hand of cards tossed aside in pique. He feels the irregular and uneven pools of artificial gravity they generate, spaces of lightness, spaces where his bones feel leaden. He sees the tortured bulkheads, slabs of adamantine and steel as thick as palace walls, bulging and deformed by the ministry of unimaginable forces. He sees the darting yellow eyes of the Neverborn lurking in the swathing shadows.\n\nHe hears the darkness growl.\n\nIt is mere minutes since Ferrus Manus said farewell, leaving him to travel the last part of the way alone. But time has snapped completely, like a fraying thread, and those minutes have been the length of years and the shape of centuries. He has killed a thousand daemons in the darkness.\n\nHe smells smoke. He smells the stale reek of a fire gone out, and the stink of the charnel house. Nidor. Burned flesh. Boiled blood. The cold odours of a thrice-damned rite, a savage offering at the altar of a butcher-god, or merely the grisly residue of slaughter.\n\nHe is alert. He has never been so focused. The sword in his hand quivers, ready to move, to strike at the slightest provocation. He has killed a thousand daemons in the darkness, one for every step of the way. He has seen few of them clearly, for the blackness is a midnight around him. They have just been shapes, teeth, nameless forms that have sprung at him, and been sliced away, smashed back into the shadow that spawned them.\n\nBut he has tasted their fear. Every single one has been afraid. Frantic. Desperate. The stench of terror is everywhere.\n\nThey know who he is. They know what he has come to do. They have no wish to risk their new flesh in an effort to stop him, but stop him they must. He is Sanguinius, the Bright Angel. He is everything they are not. He threatens everything they seek to be.\n\nAnother step, groping his way by the guttering light of his blade. Another, the shadows jumping and sliding. Another step, and he comes to the first of the skulls.\n\nOne or two at first. Human skulls, burned and cracked, jawless, littering the broken deck like loose stones on a mountain path. Then more, then more, beginning to heap and pile like rubble. A carpet of skulls, that crack and dry-splinter under his feet, a slope of skulls, that scatter and tumble as he ascends, a mound of skulls.\n\nHe claws his way up the loose and moving mass. He sees a light above, a crepuscular glow.\n\nThe skulls, heaped up in such quantity he cannot bear to estimate a number, form a long, steep ramp that leads to the jagged end of the next deck level. Lamps burn, emergency lamps in wire cages, casting a harsh, blue light.\n\nThe intense glare is ultraviolet, surgically inten"}
{"text":"of skulls, that crack and dry-splinter under his feet, a slope of skulls, that scatter and tumble as he ascends, a mound of skulls.\n\nHe claws his way up the loose and moving mass. He sees a light above, a crepuscular glow.\n\nThe skulls, heaped up in such quantity he cannot bear to estimate a number, form a long, steep ramp that leads to the jagged end of the next deck level. Lamps burn, emergency lamps in wire cages, casting a harsh, blue light.\n\nThe intense glare is ultraviolet, surgically intense. Sanguinius can hear a fierce, high-pitched hum at the edge of the audible threshold. Emergency lighting and decontam systems. The diseased ship is trying to rid itself of infection.\n\nHe steps up from the skull-slope onto the deck plates. The walls breathe. It is ghostly moon-bright in the hallway, like being outdoors in the smog-pall on the toxic spoil heaps of Cthonia, or the blighted wastes of Baal. Light, almost sickly pale, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. He ignores such trickery. He can hear whispering again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths-\n\nWhat is it they are whispering? He can almost make out the words.\n\nThe name.\n\nOne name, uttered and repeated.\n\n7:xli\n\nDuty and faith\n\nSlowly, with some difficulty, John gets to his feet. He signs again, clearly, so that Oll and Leetu can read it.\n\nI remember names, words. Garviel Loken was a captain of the Luna Wolves.\n\nOll and Leetu look at Loken.\n\n'I still am a captain of the Luna Wolves,' says Loken, 'it's just that there are no Luna Wolves left. My father is Horus Lupercal.'\n\n'What will you do when you find him?' asks Oll.\n\n'If he is still my father, I will beg him to relent and abandon the path he is following. If he is not, and I suspect he is not, I will avenge the brothers I have lost to his will.'\n\n'And you are... guided to do this?' Leetu asks.\n\n'I have tried to explain,' says Loken. He gestures towards John. 'This man cannot speak. Infirmity prevents him. But he makes signs, and communicates that way instead. So too, the one who guides me. He can speak no longer, but he makes what signs he can.'\n\n'The Sigillite?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'Is he with you now?' asks Oll.\n\n'I cannot say. He has been silent for a while.'\n\n'So you serve the Emperor?' asks Oll.\n\n'I serve His will, yes.'\n\nThe blind loyalty of the Astartes, John signs.\n\n'No,' says Loken. 'A conscious choice. At this hour, there is no other cause for a sane man to rally to. Or even one, like me, who has crossed the line of sanity.'\n\nHe unsheathes Rubio's blade, and shows it to Oll.\n\n'A force-blade,' he says. 'It should be dead in my hands, for I have no gifts. I was tested throughout my upbringing. But power flows through it when I wield it. That power is not mine.'\n\n'I saw as much in the street,' admits Leetu.\n\nOll takes a step forward and looks up at Loken.\n\n'I'm a Perpetual,' he says. 'You know what that is?'\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'The smell of eternity indeed. I am kin to the Sigillite, and a comrade of the Emperor's in ages past. I have come a long, long way to find Him.'\n\n'To help Him?'\n\n'That's one way of putting it.'\n\n'You intend to confront Him as I intend to confront my father.'\n\nOll smiles. 'Very perceptive. You, Loken, are the closest I have got to either of them. You are a vessel. A vessel of the Emperor's power, perhaps, or one chosen by the Sigillite. Either way, standing here, I am suddenly closer to the end of my journey than ever before. I would speak with Him, or with His intermediary, the Sigillite. To speak to either is to speak to both. Can you help me do that?'\n\nLoken frowns.\n\n'Are you my purpose, Ollanius Persson?' he asks. 'The path I was set on, the path you were following? Were they meant to cross here?'\n\n'I am prepared to place some faith in that idea,' says Oll.\n\nBehind him, John gurgles a mocking snort.\n\n'What's amusing?' asks Loken.\n\n'Ignore my friend,' says Oll. 'He has no time for the metaphysical. But I do, and I think you do, too. In fact, I think we have had similar experiences. Long and difficult journeys, guided by dubious signs and imprecise symbols, the full truth withheld from us, even the purpose of our journeys, but we've kept going anyway. You, I think, through duty. Me, through faith. An abiding sense of purpose.'\n\n'Is there anything we can do?' Loken asks.\n\n'The greatest powers in the universe are colliding,' says Oll. 'Mankind is helpless. The greatest armies are paralysed. In my experience, under such circumstances, it is the least of us who can do the most. Those small or weak or insignificant can move freely, because they don't seem to matter and are beneath contempt. Like specks of dust, we can move around the feet of gods, and they will pay us no heed. I need to speak to the Emperor. I think you can get me to Him.'\n\n'I don't know how,' says Loken.\n\nWhatever we do, we should get out of here, John signs.\n\n'John's right,' says Oll. 'We were warned that a great danger was approaching.'\n\n'The traitors clearly sense it,' says Leetu. 'They are all fleeing in fear.'\n\n'The Dark King,' says Loken.\n\n'So you've heard that too? Yes, your father, empowered. We have to avoid him, and reach the Emperor first.'\n\n'You say signs have led you this far?' Loken asks.\n\n'Yes, like you,' says Oll. He chuckles sadly, and reaches into his pocket. He shows the ball of twine to Loken. 'This, if you can believe it. We followed a thread.'\n\n'Then do so again,' says Loken.\n\n'It broke. It's no longer a path. It's just a ball of...'\n\nHe stops abruptly.\n\n'What?' Leetu asks.\n\n'Something Graft said,' Oll replies. 'About fence wire.'\n\nWhat are you on about now? John signs.\n\n'Fence wire?' says Leetu.\n\n'When we rested earlier, he asked about the crate, and he said... he said, \"A wire is just a wire until it's strung out along fence posts, but it is always a fence\".'\n\nOll grins.\n\n'It's always a fence,' he says.\n\nHave you gone mad? John signs.\n\n'I share Grammaticus' frustration,' says Leetu, holding pain at bay in his voice. 'You are not making sense.'\n\nOll gazes down at the ball of thread.\n\n'This is the map,' he says. 'Take it. We're in a labyrinth, and this is the way through. It's all wound up, but it's still the route. Fence wire is still a fence before it's rolled out and pegged up. This is the map, the whole map, right here. This is the way we have to go.'\n\n'I don't understand,' says Loken.\n\n'You don't have to,' Oll replies.\n\nMystified, they all stare at him. It's always that way with labyrinths. Those who followed Oll long ago were the same. A labyrinth is a designed experience, a puzzle. It asks you questions and the answers are hard to grasp. There's a reason the words 'maze' and 'amaze' come from the same root.\n\n'This is the map,' he says again, as though repeating it will make it easier to understand. 'We had it all the time. We're not lost.'\n\nExcept, maybe they are.\n\nThe glow of fire behind the great oeil-de-boeuf window suddenly increases in brilliance, as though in response to a ritual transaction. The light changes, flaring from flickering yellow to a fierce white. They hear a mounting rumble, like the start of a landslide. The ground shakes. Panes of glassaic in the window crack and fall in. Fissures begin to split the marble floor.\n\nThe window blows in in a dazzling cloud. The wall disintegrates like a curtain in a flash-fire. Stumbling backwards, they turn from the lethal glare.\n\nThe Dark King, in all his terror, is upon them.\n\n7:xlii\n\nBlack star\n\nFrom her grave, she has seen Persson, and Erda's warrior, and the mutilated Grammaticus, the only surviving members of the long companions. Their spirit and hope is annihilated, their cause lost. Out of something, perhaps the kindness that Persson chided her about, she tried to warn them, to urge them to flee, to at least save themselves. But her wounded mind was too weak to sustain her voice for long, and now she is helpless and mute.\n\nShe can see the Dark King. He is here now, and upon the world. It is impossible not to see him, even with a mind as damaged and blinded as hers, for his consuming darkness is as bright and ferocious as a black star. He is everywhere and everything, fusing and burning everything around him with the scorching radiance of his power.\n\nSuch a thing. In her wildest visions, she could never have imagined such a creature. The universe is not big enough to contain him. The cardinal powers of Chaos are but ghosts in his shadow, and the almighty warp obeys his voice, helpless in his tidal pull.\n\nTerrible. Beautiful. Inconceivable. Unimaginable. The Dark King is here, and every atom of the universe will be changed.\n\nShe tries to see him, to behold him as he approaches. One glimpse destroys her. Awe kills her like a lightning bolt.\n\nDead, she lives.\n\nShe will not look again. She cannot. She closes her mind and submits to the dust and darkness and pain.\n\nShe saw, for one instant, what he was. Everything has indeed changed. Everything they thought was wrong. Every assumption was false. Ruin has triumphed indeed, more deeply and more completely than their worst imaginings.\n\nThe Dark King is here, and he is not what they thought he was at all.\n\n7:xliii\n\nMy brother\n\nSanguinius.\n\nHe takes another step. Ahead, the severed corridor ends in a doorway.\n\nBrother.\n\nThe doorway stands open. Its frame is woven from scrimshawed human bone. He steps through it, and finds himself in a narrow tunnel. It is barely wide enough for him to move along it, the sheer black walls tight on either hand. He looks up, and sees that the walls rise higher and higher above him. It's no tunnel. It's a slender crevasse, a long, narrow fissure split between towering cliffs. He starts to advance. Again, the whispers.\n\nSanguinius.\n\nThe floor is wet, black rock, and is utterly flat, as though it has been smoothed by centuries of passage. Indeed, it almost feels as if this slight pathway has been worn down through the cliffs by aeons of"}
{"text":" for him to move along it, the sheer black walls tight on either hand. He looks up, and sees that the walls rise higher and higher above him. It's no tunnel. It's a slender crevasse, a long, narrow fissure split between towering cliffs. He starts to advance. Again, the whispers.\n\nSanguinius.\n\nThe floor is wet, black rock, and is utterly flat, as though it has been smoothed by centuries of passage. Indeed, it almost feels as if this slight pathway has been worn down through the cliffs by aeons of repeated, single-file procession, uncountable feet making the same lone journey he is making, gradually eroding this seam. Impossibly high above him, he can see the sky, a narrow river of night sky and stars beyond the clifftops that mirrors the path he treads. After thirty metres, the crevasse starts to taper. The walls become even closer, constricting him. He can see a vertical line of pale light far ahead. He is forced to turn sideways and edge his way along to fit.\n\nIt is claustrophobic, despite the endless space above his head. He advances. The cliff walls compress his furled wings, and scrape against his breastplate. The walls are so near to his face, he can see they are made of bone; human long-bones, woven together like reed-work. They are wet and stained, glossy with black oil.\n\nAfter another few sideways steps, he is obliged to squeeze his way, crushed by the fissure even side-on. It begins to feel as though it will taper so much he won't be able to squeeze any further. It begins to feel as though it will wedge him tight, and pin him forever.\n\nHe slides on, shuffling his sidestep, edging towards the light, scraping his wings and plate.\n\nAt last, he steps free into the open beyond.\n\nThe Lupercal Court is a vast space of fluted columns, with arches springing from the imposts to create a soaring, ribbed ceiling. The floor is polished stone. The scale of the Court is immense and humbling, an architecture designed to create an artificial infinite. Sanguinius is just one tiny mote of gold and white in an impossible, soaring cathedral of obsidian and black marble. Such a chamber could not and should not exist on the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nThe light here, viscous and heavy, is a dull, crimson glow.\n\nWelcome, brother. At last.\n\nHe thinks, for a moment, that the room itself has spoken. But part of it moves. Part of the stupendous, gothic grandeur turns to look upon him.\n\nHorus Lupercal smiles.\n\nSanguinius' breath catches in his throat. His brother's metanoia is difficult to believe. Horus is the most forbidding thing, a monolith of auramite-edged black plate. The power bestowed upon him seems to magnify his physical presence like some foul and fantastic creature of myth. He is clad in the Serpent's Scales, the artificed Cataphractii wargear hand-crafted for him. He looms like a bestial demigod bred to fight the titanomachy that raged before the first sun was lit.\n\nThe Warmaster's right hand is a world-cracking claw; his left casually clutches a mace the size of a young oak that could hammer heaven open. The pelt of a wolf, one so big its jaws could swallow the moon, drapes across his shoulders like dirty snow across Alpine peaks. The alphabets of Chaos inscribe his gold-and-ebon armour, throbbing with eldritch heat. A single eye adorns his steep, thick-plated torso, unblinking, gazing with poisonous regard. Power drips from him like water, spilling from the edges of his plate, and from the pipes and cables that sustain him and connect him to his armour as one living whole. It splashes and fizzles on the ground around his feet in cascades of voltaic sparks and incandescent rage.\n\nHis head, red-lit, is framed by the oversized gorget, collar and gird-work of his mantle-plating. Tubes and fibre bundles plug his shaven scalp and drape across his cranium like braids of hair.\n\nHis face. Even in the cast of the blood-light, his face is the face Sanguinius remembers. His smile is the smile Sanguinius loved.\n\n'Brother,' Horus says. Each syllable burdens the air, making it shudder to bear the weight. 'My brother. My dear brother. I waited for you for so long. You have come, as I hoped you would. I have missed you.'\n\n'You hoped I would come?' asks Sanguinius. His words, strong and clear, sound thin and insubstantial after the crushed-mass density of Horus' voice. 'You knew I would come.'\n\n'You were ever your own soul, dear brother,' Lupercal replies. 'I could not trust in fate, or destiny, or even chance, to bring you here. It had to be your choice. My heart is full that this is the choice you made.'\n\n'And my heart is full to see you again,' Sanguinius replies. 'Despite all that has taken place, I have mourned the loss of my brother Horus. I would not have let this monstrous war end without seeing you, with my own eyes, one last time.'\n\n'Monstrous it is,' Horus murmurs, 'and end it must. I abhor it, and wish it to be finished. But, my brother, this does not have to be the last time we stand face to face.'\n\n'I think it must,' says Sanguinius.\n\n'Why so?'\n\n'You are not the brother I remember. You are changed. The warp is upon you, Horus, and I fight terror just to look upon you.'\n\n'No need! Oh, my brother, no need for fear! The warp is indeed upon me, and within me, because all things change. You must know this, you of all people. You have seen it. You know it. In that, we are alike.'\n\nLupercal pauses, the echo of his last words rolling away to the edges of the chamber like discarded thunder.\n\n'We always have been,' he says.\n\nSlowly, he raises his left fist, and points the head of the huge mace towards the five gigantic thrones set against the towering rear wall of the Court.\n\n'One is for you,' he says. 'There will be a coronation. I have dreamed of this. Join me.'\n\n'It's too late, brother,' Sanguinius replies.\n\n'Nothing is too late,' says Horus. 'I decide what is and is not, and even time obeys me. Make a wise choice, my dear brother. I have longed for your company.'\n\n'This is your offer?'\n\n'This is my offer. Please accept it. It is why I have waited for you. It is why I have chosen to meet with you.'\n\nHe raises his right hand. The scythe-talons of his power claw gently beckon.\n\n'Join me.'\n\nSanguinius turns his left side towards his brother. He bows his head, eyes closed, for a second, and when he raises it again, the blade Encarmine comes up with it into a raised proffer above his right shoulder. He opens his eyes, and meets Horus' gaze, unblinking.\n\n'And this is why I have chosen to meet with you,' he answers.\n\n'To... fight me?'\n\n'To end you.'\n\n'But you will die,' says Horus.\n\n'Everyone dies, brother,' Sanguinius replies.\n\n'Not me. This is your decision?'\n\n'Yes,' says Sanguinius.\n\nHorus stares at him. A single tear wells from his eye and trickles down his cheek.\n\n'Pity,' he says.\n\n7:xliv\n\nFate confounded\n\nThey watch the read, fascinated despite their fear. The Harlequin of discordia, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne reversed, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower, and The Emperor. Ahriman turns the last. The Dark King.\n\nSindermann, Mauer and the archivist flinch back a step as the cards turn. The designs, though identifiable, are not those commonly known. The Hulk shows an image that is surely the Vengeful Spirit. The Lightning Tower shows a figure crushed by falling walls that Sindermann can't help but feel is Rogal Dorn. The Labyrinthine Path portrays an old soldier, some Excertus veteran by the look of it, with grey in his hair. Unseen by him, a monstrous horned shadow awaits behind the next turn of the maze as he approaches. The Moon reveals Garviel Loken in its pale glow, The Throne depicts the Sigillite, seated in majesty and wracked in agonies, The Martyr shows a winged angel, a demi-Icarus falling from the sky, The Eye the old emblem of the Eye of Terra flown during the crusade, and The Monster is an unspeakable rendition of Lupercal. The Shatter'd World is clearly Terra, and in the ghostly faces of the multitudes thronging The Great Hoste, Sindermann sees his own features, along with Mauer's and the archivist's and, it seems, every other soul he has ever known.\n\nAhriman seems equally perturbed. These, it seems, are not the designs of his cards as he knew them.\n\n'All is lost,' he murmurs. Sindermann is appalled to see true fear in Ahriman's eyes. 'The Dark King is not the apotheosis of Horus Lupercal.'\n\nThe sorcerer points a bony finger at the last two cards, The Emperor and The Dark King. They are identical.\n\n'Fate is confounded,' Ahriman says. 'Your Emperor is the Dark King.'\n\nPART EIGHT\n\nTHE DEATH\n\n8:i\n\nAngel, executioner\n\nWords exhausted, only deeds remain.\n\nSanguinius keeps his pose, sword raised, hand extended, as implacable as the golden effigies that fill the endless hallways of his father's Palace. His gaze is equally unwavering. He holds and returns his brother's stare. He does not blink, though to look into the eyes of Horus is to look into plunging chasms of night. There is nothing there, no pity, no hope, no mercy, not even the hint of intellect. The tear on Horus' cheek seems an anomaly, for there is no evidence of the emotion that produced it. The Lupercal's eyes are fathomless black, the dead eyes of an apex predator rising silently from the ocean's depth with jaws agape, or watching from savannah scrub about to pounce. The look alone transfixes, for, like the mightiest carnivore hunters, the flat regard is as much a weapon as talons. What teeth do to flesh, these eyes do to the psyche.\n\nSanguinius is not transfixed. Fear fills him to the top of the throat, enough to make him retch, but he holds his pose to declare his defiance. It is a warning.\n\nHorus Lupercal does not heed it. His eyes remain dead, unblemished by the glint of sentience. He makes the first move, a single step forwards, as slow and ineluctable as tectonic drift. He lets the shaft of the great maul in his left hand slip down a little way until he is gripping it by the fer"}
{"text":"o to flesh, these eyes do to the psyche.\n\nSanguinius is not transfixed. Fear fills him to the top of the throat, enough to make him retch, but he holds his pose to declare his defiance. It is a warning.\n\nHorus Lupercal does not heed it. His eyes remain dead, unblemished by the glint of sentience. He makes the first move, a single step forwards, as slow and ineluctable as tectonic drift. He lets the shaft of the great maul in his left hand slip down a little way until he is gripping it by the ferrule for maximum leverage.\n\nA second step. The infinite architecture of the Lupercal Court shivers at the tread.\n\nAnd Sanguinius is no longer still.\n\nHis legs flex as his great wings unfold, an act that takes less time than a blink. He is aloft, a golden blur that sweeps upwards, then down and across the black-scaled mass of his monstrous brother. His sword's first strike tears across Lupercal's chest plating in a ripple of distorting shield energy; his second lashes Lupercal's left pauldron as he skims across it; his third rakes Lupercal's shoulders and back in a spray of sparks.\n\nHorus reacts. The maul rises and swings to swat his brother out of the air. The force of the swing is so great, there is a sawing crack of air displacement. Despite its thunderclap, the maul finds nothing. Sanguinius has banked full circle, and Encarmine rips Lupercal's right hip, and then again, full force, into the breast-guard.\n\nThe Talon of Horus rakes and snaps with enough force to crush the hull of a tank. The maul swings, bruising the air with the crimson trail of the blood-light fizzing from its head. Neither connects. Sanguinius, wings scything, is inside his brother's guard again, face to face, six metres off the deck, driving sword-strokes into his chest and face... One! Two! Three! Each strike deflects from reactive power shielding, each strike makes Lupercal's shield generators howl as they struggle to maintain protective integrity, each strike causes the shimmering ghost of the defensive field to quiver and coruscate across his plastron and carapace.\n\nThe talons of the lightning claw close again, the slam of a bear-trap. Sanguinius is already gone, soaring vertically, like a launching missile, high into the air above his brother. Under the arching ribs of the lofty ceiling, he turns, inverts and dives, a descending eagle.\n\nImpact. Encarmine strikes the raised shoulder plating that houses the suit's reactor. Sparks gout. More than sparks... Superheated specks of armour plate and hammerscale. There is a raw-metal gouge left in the hunched back plate of the Serpent's Scales.\n\nThe mace-head rips the air. Sanguinius is beneath it, rolling into an unloaded extension that carries him away parallel to the deck less than two metres up. He banks around a column, and sweeps back into strike range at an oblique angle, climbing slightly to eye level, then diving at the last to deliver a passing strike into Lupercal's left thigh. He loops hard behind his brother's back, and lands a second blow to the reactor plating, driving Encarmine two-handed. The Talon clashes at him. He evades, but does not pull back. They are face to face again, for a millisecond, enough time for Encarmine to slash the gorget and crackling face-shielding.\n\nThe mace descends. Its strikes not brother but floor, crazing the deck like a bullet-hole in a mirror, cracks spidering out from the molten point of impact.\n\nHorus Lupercal, despite his greater bulk, is not slow. His every step, movement, swing and strike is bullet-fast, the lethal blink of a las-bolt. Faster than any Astartesian reaction, faster than any Custodes reflex, faster than any primarch.\n\nExcept one. Sanguinius is making him seem ponderous, heavy and cumbersome. Sanguinius is so fleet, he is a golden ray of light, a darting glimmer. He is outmatched on almost every level, so he draws on what advantages he holds: speed, agility, a peerless blade, immeasurable courage and, above all else, flight. He forces the conflict into three dimensions, using the air and the space, rejecting the constraints of flat-plane combat. To stay on his feet, on the deck, and square off against his brother like two Astartes in a practice cage would be to invite a duel he cannot win.\n\nIt is an eagle against a bear. A raven on a wolf. A bull-dancer vaulting an auroch. Lightning around a mountain. Dazzle in darkness. He is relentless; circling, swooping, climbing, stooping, coming at his brother from every angle to deliver a savage blow, before rolling and banking out of death's reach.\n\nHe wheels, feinting right to evade the Talon, dragging the full length of Encarmine's edge across Horus' right pauldron with a grating squeal. Embers flutter. Broken scales rain onto the deck. Horus brings the maul round in a cataclysmic swing that almost catches the beating wings as they pass him. Sanguinius darts away, then swoops back, suspending like a hummingbird for long enough to gouge his blade into Horus' waist, then veers away as the maul comes at him.\n\nThe maul's head strikes the floor again, this time with enough force to split and scatter the flagstones in a long fault line that exposes the underdeck spars. The tumbling slabs and buckling deck plates chase after Sanguinius like an opening crevasse.\n\nSanguinius loops and lands, square and true on his feet, just beyond the end of the long fracture in the floor. He looks back at his brother along the line of broken, displaced and jumbled flagstones twenty metres away.\n\nHe turns his left side towards Horus. He raises the blade Encarmine in a proffer above his right shoulder. He extends his left hand, ready. He meets Horus' gaze, unblinking.\n\n'You lack, brother,' he says.\n\n8:ii\n\nA Dark-crown'd King\n\nWhat are they? Sparks? Snowflakes? White blossom? Smuts of fine ash? Oll Persson can't tell. He can't see, because everything is so bright. A whiteout. Radiant white air, blindingly harsh, in which white particles seem to be drifting.\n\nIt's also cold. Very cold. The cold is a system-shock, clasping his bones, chilling his soul, and numbing his mind.\n\nA blizzard, that's it. A killing blizzard, just blown up out of nothing, trapping them there on the mountainside. Northern Thrace. Yes, it must be. They were crossing the ridge, a risky decision, and the weather closed in, burning their vision out with its glare, icing them to the bare rock. His companions had cried out imprecations to Chione, daughter of Boreas, goddess of winter snow, pleading for her mercy-\n\nNo. This isn't Northern Thrace. He knows that much. That was lifetimes ago. This is ash, white ash. This is Krasentine Ridge, and the ion bombs have just detonated beyond the horizon, and the ash flakes engulfing them are cremated organics carried by the blast-flash. His comrades, eyes fused, skinned by the heat, are screaming to god to make it stop, even the unbelievers in-\n\nNo. No, not Krasentine either. It's too cold. Far too cold. Void cold.\n\nOll tries to understand where he is, and even who he is. It's hard to hold on to his sense of identity. The light is so dazzling and so total, and its glare is thick with swirling white flecks, a blizzard that settles on him softly... Apple blossom, almond petals, strewn by a spring gust. Confetti. Ticker tape-\n\nBut the light isn't light. Or, rather, it isn't only light. It is a consciousness, a property of the cosmos. He is in the presence of something, and that something is voraciously bright in his mind. The light is dismantling his thoughts. He feels the old, tell-tale twitch of his left eyelid, that trusty indicator that psykanic power is close by.\n\nHe sinks to his knees. Overcome, he understands where he is. At Krasentine, there was no god to call on, because everyone was an unbeliever. There was no Chione, daughter of Boreas, in Thrace, because Chione, daughter of Boreas, was an invention of the bards.\n\nBut there is something like a god here.\n\nHe's trembling. He can't control it. It's more than fear. It's beyond wonder. It exceeds awe. There is a smell, a taste in his mouth. Osmogenesia. The quality of sanctity. I'm having a stroke, he thinks. The burned taste, the visual disturbance-\n\nNo. It's not subjective. It's real. It's everywhere, in the dust beneath him, the air around him, the atoms of his body, the synaptic exchange of his thoughts. An absolute propinquity. It is both beyond him and within him, ineffable, a pure instant of exquisite theopathy.\n\nOll reaches instinctively for the symbol at his throat, the tiny golden phylactery, but as he touches it, his prehension grasps a sacrosanct truth.\n\nThis isn't his god.\n\nIt's not a god at all. But it's something. Something no one asked for, no one needed, and no one has ever prayed to.\n\nIt is not a maker. It is an un-maker. It is not a source of creation. It's a fount of oblivion. The presence he can feel, the consciousness, is a force of merciless judgement, sublime fury, and cruel rationality. And it's getting stronger.\n\nHe topples forward onto his hands and knees, light-blind. His groping fingers find something on the broken ground in front of him.\n\nThe ball of thread.\n\nHe clutches it, like some pathetic lifeline, as though it will pull him away from the light, or lead him to safety. But there is no safety, not anywhere, and this map-thread only ever had one purpose. To bring him here. This is where he wanted to be, though that seems like an insane thing to want.\n\nNo one would want to be here.\n\nThis is revelation.\n\n'I know you,' he says.\n\nCold, white fire bathes him. Flakes of ash, or snow, or blossom petals, settle on his face, his lips, and swirl into his mouth.\n\n'Burn me if you want, but I know you.'\n\nThe glare pulses, then it fades. Not completely - it is still sickeningly fierce - but the white fire dims to a stratospheric blue, just enough for Oll to see again.\n\nThe Scholaster Hall is gone. So has the city, for as far as he can see. The divine light has ravaged the intersectional realm and left nothing standing for kilometres, except bak"}
{"text":"re bathes him. Flakes of ash, or snow, or blossom petals, settle on his face, his lips, and swirl into his mouth.\n\n'Burn me if you want, but I know you.'\n\nThe glare pulses, then it fades. Not completely - it is still sickeningly fierce - but the white fire dims to a stratospheric blue, just enough for Oll to see again.\n\nThe Scholaster Hall is gone. So has the city, for as far as he can see. The divine light has ravaged the intersectional realm and left nothing standing for kilometres, except baked rubble caked in white ash. The sky is black, and the horizon in every direction is a tracery of lightning, whipping, flashing, streaking, searing, and utterly silent. It is as though he is alone on an Arctic plain under a bowl of night, at the stilled eye of a vast storm that has drawn up around him and halted. There are no stars. The scoured landscape fumes lazy, white smoke. The cold air is thick with a gentle blizzard of ash, and motes of blue-white energy that twinkle like voltaic sparks.\n\nAhead of him, six metres away, stands a giant human figure. It is motionless, its arms at its sides. It is radiating a power so intense he can make out no detail. It is glowing white-hot, bright as the silent lightning, a silhouette in negative.\n\n'Do you know me?' he calls out to it. 'Do you recognise me?'\n\nThe figure doesn't move. The figure doesn't answer.\n\nOll struggles to his feet. He realises there's more than one figure. The others are identical: lambent, phosphorescent humanoid forms. The next one is further away, perhaps twenty metres behind the first, then another a similar distance beyond that. Another stands to his left. There are seven of them. They form a loose circle some sixty metres across.\n\nBehind them, an immense black sphere appears to sit on the baked earth. It is impossible to judge its scale. It is like a polished black moon resting on the surface of the world. White smoke smoulders off its shimmering surface, and the ring of soundless lightning is reflected in its glossy shell. Though the sphere is liquid black, it is the source of all the light. It is blindingly black, so fulgent that he can't look directly at it. It makes his eyes ache and, like the phosphorescent figures, it leaves lingering blind-spot blurs on his retinas. The incandescent glare is radiating out of it, so that Oll, the parched rubble, and even the silent, luminous figures are casting hard, attenuated shadows away from it.\n\nOll thinks to look around. A little way behind him, the bodies of John, Leetu and the Astartes Loken are sprawled in the ashen dust. He wants to go to them and see if they are still alive, but he doesn't dare. If he is able to rouse them, they would wake to find this. He can't do that to them. No one should have to waken to this horror. They should be spared this. Everyone in the galaxy should be spared it. No one should have to see what he is seeing, or experience what he is experiencing.\n\nHe rises. A cold wind moans.\n\n'You saved me,' he says. He's addressing the ominous black sphere, because he knows it's the only thing present that can hear him. It is the consciousness that has swallowed him. 'You saved me, or spared me. You do know me, don't you? You know who I am.'\n\nHe starts to shuffle forward, unsteady.\n\n'What have you done?' he calls out.\n\nNothing answers him, not even thought.\n\n'How can you be this?' he yells, stumbling towards the sphere with greater urgency. 'How can you become this? You? Has your madness and bloody pride led you so far astray?'\n\nThe nearest luminous figure starts to buzz as he moves, as though in menace, but it does not stir. Oll halts.\n\n'What are you going to do? Punish me? Smite me down?'\n\nSilence.\n\n'I came a long way to find the man I once knew, and I find this! Speak to me!'\n\nSilence. The wind laments.\n\n'Speak to me! You've destroyed everything! Consumed everything! You've burned a path right through this hell-hole, but you stopped when you got to me! You could've burned me too, but you didn't! Why? What stopped you? Recognition? Because you knew me? Or what? Was it shame? Speak to me!'\n\nOllanius.\n\nOll freezes. He honestly hadn't expected to get a reaction, but his name is suddenly on the dusty wind, a psychic articulation that gnaws at the edge of his mind.\n\n'Yes, it's me. I hear you.'\n\nOllanius. Stop.\n\nOll falters. It's not His voice. It's not the voice of the man he once knew, or even the voice of the something He's become since. It's another voice, very faint.\n\n'Actae?'\n\n Ollanius. Walk. Walk away. Go now. Do not. Do not force this confrontation.\n\n'You're alive?'\n\nHer mind-words are still weak, and almost annihilated by pain. He can't imagine what she is suffering. But he can feel that it's a sudden and deep desperation that's giving her the strength to talk to him.\n\nBarely. Still. And so are you. Walk. Walk away. The. The Dark King will not tolerate your accusations for long.\n\n'The Dark King?' Oll groans, his voice tiny. 'This is the Dark King? He's the Dark King?'\n\nAlmost. The transmutation is taking place. I can feel it. Another few moments, and it will be complete.\n\n'But Lupercal-'\n\nWe were. We were wrong. We should have realised. Realised it could be either of them. The stronger Will-\n\nOll starts to blunder forwards again. The luminous figure close by buzzes its angry threat again.\n\nGo back, Ollanius! He will. Will kill you!\n\n'I don't think He will,' says Oll. 'He's stopped. He's stopped dead in His tracks. I've got a chance to-'\n\nNo chance. He's stopped because. Because He knows you. Finding you here has surprised Him. He has. He has suspended his assault to consider this, but His patience. His patience will not last long if you provoke Him.\n\n'You can sense this?'\n\nHis mind. His mind is deafening. Ollanius, we were so wrong. Wrong about everything. In extremity, the Emperor has. Has embraced what he long denied.\n\n'How can this be? Actae, how?'\n\nLupercal is strong. Stronger than he expected. The power. The power of Chaos is quite beyond anything he anticipated. It has raised a realm of Chaos. He has tried to fight it. He has tried to fight through it to reach Horus and vanquish him. But he was not. Not strong enough. So he made. Made a choice. He made himself stronger.\n\n'The warp?' asks Oll.\n\nThe warp. He has drunk of the warp. He has drawn on its power to fight Chaos. But he has drunk too much and too deeply. It has made him thus. It has made him the very thing he resolved to stop.\n\n'The Dark King? That's what the name means?'\n\nA god. That is what He is in the process of becoming.\n\n'No. I completely refuse to accept that. This is... this is just a new aspect, another version of Himself, a force of wrath and vengeance. Another mask, another artful disguise to project-'\n\nMore than that.\n\nOll gazes at the gleaming black sphere. He swallows hard.\n\n'No,' he murmurs. 'No, Actae. That's just the latest expression of His arrogance.'\n\nHe is immeasurably strong, Ollanius.\n\n'You don't have to be strong to be right,' Oll snaps. He resumes his stumbling approach towards the sphere. 'And this, this is wrong. If this is deliberate, or even willing, it's still a mistake. The latest mistake in a life of forced, rushed errors. This is irrational, and the man I knew was nothing if not rational.'\n\nDon't! He can hear you-!\n\n'I hope so. He will hear me on this. He will speak to me.'\n\nOllanius!\n\nHe hears the witch's fading cry, but he ignores it. He stares up at the sphere. Its surface is like polished obsidian.\n\n'You paused your onslaught because you know me!' he yells. 'Well, if you know me, speak to me! Do me that decency!'\n\nThe wind sighs. Oll becomes aware of something flashing and blinking in the corner of his eye. He glances aside, and sees that the closest of the luminous figures is flickering. Its inner light is pulsing, and slowly dimming. It's happening to all the figures in the ring around the sphere. The radiance in them is burning out, each one fluttering like an old lumen globe that's about to fail. The light coming from them pales from painful white, to hot flame, to pit-fire orange. By the time it has dulled to a glowing ember red, the figures have taken on substance; their true forms, hidden behind the light, finally revealed. They are warriors, giant warriors in ornate plate. They are blackened with soot and char, smoke boiling off them.\n\nOll picks his way across the rubble and chalky dust to the nearest of them. It is stock-still, like an effigy, staring out at the distance. It towers over him like a menhir. He can feel the kiln heat still emanating from it as it cools. It's a Custodian, he realises. It's one of His appalling supermen.\n\nComing closer, Oll halts and recoils slightly. He can smell burned flesh. The Custodian is dead. It is standing bolt upright, a vigilant sentinel, but it is lifeless, and has been for some time. Its once-golden Aquilon plate is more than blackened, it's burned and deformed by intense heat. The lance weapon in what's left of its smouldering hand is mangled and broken. Half of its face is gone, the other half a burned-out skull, smoke oozing from the empty socket and bleeding like steam between the last of the scorched teeth. Shreds of tarry meat cling to the flame-darkened bones.\n\n'What have you done?' Oll murmurs. He stumbles on and reaches the next of the figures. Its state is similar. Its spear, broken off, is fused to the roasted bones of its hand. The remains held upright by the torched power armour are half-incinerated. Treacly black sludge coats the burned skeleton. The skull's lower jaw hangs loose and low, as though in mid-scream, kept in place by the last, cooked tendons.\n\nThe third seems little better, but as Oll approaches it, he sees some hints of auramite glinting beneath the powder of soot. This one still has some skin, broiled to leather, on its face. It has a mark on it too, a patch of its heavy breastplate that is curiously intact. Oll sees the goldwork there, the remains of ornate inlay. Some symbol, a faintly glowing sigil t"}
{"text":"he burned skeleton. The skull's lower jaw hangs loose and low, as though in mid-scream, kept in place by the last, cooked tendons.\n\nThe third seems little better, but as Oll approaches it, he sees some hints of auramite glinting beneath the powder of soot. This one still has some skin, broiled to leather, on its face. It has a mark on it too, a patch of its heavy breastplate that is curiously intact. Oll sees the goldwork there, the remains of ornate inlay. Some symbol, a faintly glowing sigil that looks hand-drawn, has been marked on that area of breastplate, and it has remained untouched.\n\nOll stares at it, trying to make sense of the symbol.\n\nThe Sentinel's eyes snap open.\n\n8:iii\n\nA warning ignored\n\nI am old. I am tired.\n\nI sit upon the Golden Throne.\n\nI am so far past the extremities of physical pain and death, I feel nothing. Senses numb, nerves ripped out, I float, insensible, the facsimile of my life prolonged by Vulkan's thankless toil.\n\nSo when new pain flares upon me, it comes as a shock. I thought I was beyond such things. I am not.\n\nThe pain is not physical. There is not enough of me left to register such sensations. It is mental. It is psychological. It is anguish.\n\nI was braced for grief. I was steeled to witness the worst. Lupercal victorious. The Triumph of Ruin. Chaos ascendant. The end of this world. The loss of the last loyal sons. The fall of my old friend and King-of-Ages.\n\nThese outcomes have always been very real possibilities. I thought I was ready to greet them should they come about.\n\nI had never imagined that there could be worse.\n\nI was not ready for this.\n\nI have not been able to see my beloved friend for a while now. That which engulfs him has grown too dark and turbulent, and that which he has become too bright, a dot of white light blazing in the mephitic blackness. A lone star. I have been able to discern no detail, no specifics. I have contented myself merely to watch the progress of that single, steadfast star, and know that, while it shines and continues its advance, there is still hope.\n\nBut it has hesitated. It has wavered. And it has dwindled a little, not by any great measure of magnitude, but enough that my mindsight can penetrate the glare and see-\n\nMy king, undone. Not by his first-found's rage, nor by the calumny of traitors, nor even by the spite of daemons.\n\nHe is undone by his own hand.\n\nHe has carved a path through the realm of Chaos that the first-found has unleashed upon Terra. Step by step, he has cut his track into that boiling heart of Ruin, and has laid waste to everything in his way. A great swathe of the Inevitable City has been reduced to a City of Dust in his wake.\n\nBut to do that, to do that and survive, he has been obliged to draw on the warp surrounding him. At every step, he has glutted himself on its power. This I saw him do, before he became too bright to behold. It was a wondrous skill, the highest form of the psyker's craft. No one else could do it. He turned the warp back on Chaos, empowering himself and his stalwart Companions, for without that strength, he would have been overwhelmed and snuffed out.\n\nNow, as his light dims for a moment, I see what this has done to him. He is scarcely recognisable.\n\nI see, far off - yet just outside - the endless, empty city of memory and melancholy. I see its dirty roofscape, its overgrown byways. I see, amid that dingy sprawl, a great ribbon of destruction running into its heart, a strip of charred land and pale ash, where all that stood has been reduced to dry and scattered cinders. This was my king's progress, the scale of his ferocity. In the dead streets beyond, traitors and Neverborn wretches flee in massed panic ahead of his advancing destruction.\n\nI see a patch of burned dust where he has stopped to rest. I see that dust, bright like powdered snow, the rubble like white charcoal or pumice, light and friable. I see the super-storm of his Will, where it has halted around him, a coruscating ring of balefire and corposant like a forest of neon trees, silent and obedient. I see the dead he has left in his wake, the scorched remains and partial vestiges, twisted in pugilistic attitudes, contorted by heat. I see the last of his Hetaeron Companions, frozen around him. They are all, save one, dead. Worthy Taurid and the lauded Ravengast, the ever-resolute Nmembo, great Zagrus, mighty Xadophus and that fine soul Karedo, they are dead. They have been used too hard, and too much power channelled through them; so much power it has burned out even the flawless, perfect bodies of the Legio Custodes. Their flesh is consumed, their souls are smoke. They stand, fire-gutted, like macabre parodies of the statues in this palace.\n\nOnly one survives. Brave Caecaltus, inured perhaps by the sigil-mark I set upon him. Yet even he is half eaten-up by the fire he has been forced to carry, and the unrelenting will he has been compelled to conduct. Life is but a dying spark in his ravaged shell. It is harrowing to see.\n\nDoes my king know what he has done to them? Does he know he has blown them out like over-surged fuses? He must, for I see him there too, my old friend, my King-of-Ages, bloated and transmuted with the warpfire he has absorbed. I have never seen a being so potent. I did not know such a creature was possible. He mocks the gods, real or imaginary, with his power.\n\nHis senses, perceptions and capabilities are fast exceeding those mighty gifts he possessed of old, even the utmost potential of them. This entelechy will dwarf them, ascending a whole new scale of ability. What he is becoming now will make the Master of Mankind seem like a mere mortal.\n\nHe is becoming a thing of absolutes. No shred of humanity, nor even Perpetuity, will remain when the process is complete. He will be ascendent.\n\nOnce again, one final time, fate plays its hand, and shows me its cards. It reveals, as ever, though I constantly think I will know better this time, that it will always have the capacity to confound me, and overthrow the greatest hopes and best-laid plans of mankind and its master.\n\nI thought I had foreseen all eventualities and configurations. And not just me... we thought it. He and I, we planned for everything. We thought we had predicted every permutation.\n\nBut not this. And irony lurks, as salt for that wound. For we were told this before we even started. The old prophecy, writ prior to mankind's ascent, carved on stones that had weathered long before human eyes beheld them, uttered on extinct winds, daubed on walls of long-neglected grottos. The old prediction, whispered in the lightless halls of the warp. The old warning. The portent of the Dark King.\n\nIt was a prophecy so ancient and obscure, we thought it had no bearing on our Imperial age. It was a monitory rumour that had lurked behind all of mankind's mythologies since time began, and in the shadows of other species' mythologies too. Aeonic lore is full of such vatic nonsenses and falsehoods, mantic rumours that never mean what they say, or amount to nothing. We gave it the same credence as the old stories of gods, for they had never existed, and all that was said about them was meaningless.\n\nIf we regarded it at all, it was as an admonition of the threat of Chaos. If it presaged anything, it was what Horus Lupercal could become if we did not stop him.\n\nBut time, once begun, is now suspended. All the laws and rubrics of life and the universe, which we trusted, are untied or overturned. From meaninglessness, there comes meaning. It was not a portent, it was a promise. It was the story of a god, which we ignored, for there were no gods.\n\nYet now there is.\n\nIn a supreme effort to drive back Chaos, we have become our own doom. Mankind, and the constellations, will pay for it.\n\nThe Dark King, about to be born, has gorged on power, but that surfeit merely makes his hunger grow. He will feed until the galaxy grows cold, and nothing remains except the dark husks of stars that once shone as brightly as him.\n\nWhile we held firm, and faced down the greatest threat to human life, another, greater threat arose behind our backs.\n\nI see what he is becoming. I see what he will become. No power in creation can stand in opposition or prevent it.\n\n8:iv\n\nIncarnate\n\nOll starts back in horror. The Sentinel's bloodshot, desiccated eyes gaze down at him.\n\n'Ollanius,' it says. Its jaw creaks as it moves, dried flesh and ligaments stretching. Its voice is as arid as desert rock or furnace ash.\n\n'You're alive...'\n\n'Yes, Ollanius.'\n\n'Are you... Who are you? That's you, isn't it?'\n\n'I am Proconsul Caecaltus Dusk,' the figure says.\n\n'No, I don't think you are,' says Oll, fighting his fear and disgust. 'That's not who's speaking.'\n\n'My king bids me serve Him as an aspect.'\n\n'Please,' says Oll. He turns and spits to clear his mouth. The stench is revolting. 'Face me yourself. Don't speak to me through another.'\n\n'There is no alternative, Ollanius. One glimpse of my king would scatter your atoms. This must suffice.'\n\nOll tries to stop himself shaking. Abject terror is upon him, and only the anger he feels towards his old friend is stopping that terror from paralysing him completely.\n\n'Y-you...' he stammers. 'You will speak with me, then? It has been a long time-'\n\n'My king did not halt His advance out of sentiment, Ollanius. He is not stopping to reminisce with an old friend.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'In the grip of this calamity, do you think my king would waste time on an idle reunion?'\n\n'Then why?' asks Oll.\n\n'Recognition of the anomalous. Ollanius, my king is approaching apotheosis. He can perceive structures and systems of materia beyond anything He has ever quantified before, and He begins to see yet deeper structures beyond those. The amplification of His consciousness is expanding. My king did not stop because He was surprised to find Oll Persson in His path. He stopped because He could see how supremely unlikely that encounter was. For you to be here, Ollanius, in this precise un-place at this precise un-t"}
{"text":" of the anomalous. Ollanius, my king is approaching apotheosis. He can perceive structures and systems of materia beyond anything He has ever quantified before, and He begins to see yet deeper structures beyond those. The amplification of His consciousness is expanding. My king did not stop because He was surprised to find Oll Persson in His path. He stopped because He could see how supremely unlikely that encounter was. For you to be here, Ollanius, in this precise un-place at this precise un-time... It is the work of the very deepest cosmological alignments. A singular thing. It suggests the highest level of empyric synchronicity, of resonance. Of the intervention of powerful parties and influences.'\n\n'Yes,' says Oll. 'Several powerful parties acted to help get me here. In the end, more than anything, it was luck. Or destiny.'\n\n'Such concepts, Ollanius,' the dry voice whispers, 'fate, luck, destiny... are merely pieces of inadequate mortal vocabulary that connote the cosmological processes my king is referring to. He detects too the fingerprints of Erda, and of others of the Perpetual line, and of the xenos Eldrad Ulthran.'\n\n'They all played a part,' says Oll.\n\n'They all should know better than to meddle in the operation of His Will.'\n\n'We had to try,' says Oll.\n\n'You have not changed. You have previously opposed my king with some dedication, yet without any means to back up that opposition.'\n\n'Because I pose no threat to you? I can oppose you with my thoughts, and with what I believe. Just because you could annihilate me with a blink doesn't make you correct. It never did. It just makes you strong.'\n\n'You are inflexible and rigid in your outlook,' the dead voice of the Sentinel replies. 'If it is your stubborn nature that has brought you face to face with my king, then it is characteristically futile. You have nothing to show for your life, Ollanius, a dismal verdict considering how much life you were given. You have done nothing.'\n\n'I'd rather have done nothing with my life than too much,' Oll says.\n\n'My king had forgotten how tedious your sophistry could be. Did they think... Erda, and the other powers who arranged this... that you would make the best spokesman? That you would be the best choice of supplicant to approach Him?'\n\nOll sighs. 'I reject the word \"supplicant\". And one of those \"other powers\", it seems, was Malcador. One of your own. Do you not think that significant?'\n\n'Why do you believe this?'\n\n'I had lost my way. I was found by a warrior, Loken, one of your Sigillite's Chosen. Only then was I able to find my way to you.'\n\n'Malcador.' The Sentinel seems to weigh the name, as though judging its value.\n\n'His was the only wisdom you ever trusted outside of your own. Doesn't that tell you something?'\n\nThe Sentinel pauses, and appears to reflect upon the question. Oll waits, and struggles to steady his senses. The wash of pale blue light is unforgiving, and it's triggering neuropathic discomfort. Flashes of jade and azure, as iridescent as the colours of a peacock's display, are beginning to invade his peripheral vision. A man, even one as long-lived as him, is not built to stand in the presence of ascendant power for this long.\n\n'My king's Regent delights in weaving schemes around schemes,' the proconsul decides. 'He does this to establish ingenious layers of redundancy and alternative. He always has a fail-safe. My king has always allowed him such flexibility.'\n\nThe Sentinel slowly tilts its head, with a groan of neck tendons, and regards the mark on its breastplate. 'Malcador's involvement does not surprise my king, or give Him pause.'\n\n'Really? He's taken your Throne to allow you to do this. Don't you wonder why he would build redundancies and alternate options into so stark an imperative?'\n\n'By which you mean?'\n\n'By which I mean he feared that this could go wrong,' says Oll, 'and that even the best chances could fail. So he put effort into making sure there were other chances, however small, even longshots, still in play. And he was right.'\n\n'By which you mean?' the Sentinel repeats.\n\n'It has gone wrong.'\n\n'Not true.'\n\nOll shakes his head. 'It has gone wrong. Surely you can see that?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'You are becoming the Dark King incarnate,' says Oll.\n\n'No. That is just an old name. Irrational nonsense. Astrotheological superstition.'\n\n'It's not,' says Oll, despairing. 'Please... What do you think is happening here?'\n\n'This is vastation, Ollanius,' the Sentinel replies. 'The Harrowing of Chaos. My king is here to stop Horus Lupercal before he obliterates our species. Nothing is more important than that.'\n\n8:v\n\nAngel, prey\n\nHe's taunting you. He's mocking you. You don't rise to it, but honestly? It wounds you a little. You thought he was better than that. You thought, in fact, that he was perfect. This is disappointing.\n\n'You lack.' That's what he said. Clearly, all evidence to the contrary. His defiance you can understand. Sanguinius still thinks he's fighting the good fight on the right side of history. He hasn't fully grasped the nature of this situation. But the taunting? That's beneath him. It's base impudence, and it does not become him.\n\nOf course, he's only doing it because he's scared.\n\nYou can't blame him for that. If your positions were reversed, you'd be scared too.\n\nWhat use is his bravado? He can't provoke you. He can't goad you into becoming anything that you are not already. You lack nothing. The taunting just makes him seem juvenile, and you don't want to think of him that way. He's Sanguinius. You've always loved him. You want to remember him as a paragon of virtue, not as some-\n\nAh, except the bravado's not for you at all, is it? It's for him. You see it now. He's never had to act brave in his life. You've always thought of him as naturally brave, the bravest soul you've ever known. But it's not the case. When you're as powerful as Sanguinius, you're afraid of nothing, and bravery is easy. Everything else he's ever faced, he's faced without fear. But he's having to act now, and he's not very good at it. He's never had to pretend his courage before.\n\n'Don't,' you say, very gently. You don't want to see a life as glorious as his end in humiliation. But he mistakes your remark. He thinks he's getting to you. He comes at you again, eyes bright, sword brighter.\n\nYou sidestep. His blade scrapes your ribs. He arcs up and away.\n\nIt's instructive, actually. For him to behave this way tells you a great deal about what you've become. For the peerless Sanguinius to show fear, well, that says a lot. Will the others be the same, you wonder, when their turns come? Will your father's mask fall too?\n\nSparks dance. He has passed you on the left side, raking with his sword. He comes within an inch of your grasp. These are huge risks he's taking. He really is tremendously courageous, even if it is an act. In fact, what is courage, except an act? Courage isn't a passive quality. Whether instinctive or forced, it's the condition of acting in the face of danger.\n\nWell, there is danger here, so it doesn't matter if his courage is genuine or imitation. He is resolved to make a fight of it. He's determined to show no fear, or back down in the face of insuperable odds. Back in the day, you adored him because you thought him fearlessly brave. But it was effortless back then. To see him now, fighting on despite his mortal dread of you, you understand he has become fearfully brave. That is impressive. It makes you love him a little more.\n\nHe flies at you again, a flash of gold in the gloom of your Court. You spin Worldbreaker, light as a twig, to block him. He evades you once more. Barely. His blade hacks splinters off your shoulder plate as he streaks past.\n\nYou turn and watch him as he banks overhead, a gleaming eagle, whirring through the shafts of light in the clerestory high above. Those wings, that soaring grace...\n\nHe loops down behind you. A rush of air, the sting of his blade. You swing the Talon and miss. Even injured, he is still so fast.\n\nBut injured, and pushing himself so hard, he'll tire himself out. He'll ebb. He'll grow slower. Fear and effort will eat up all that courage and speed, and then it'll all be over.\n\nOr, perhaps, before that moment comes, futility will overwhelm him. You can sense it seeding in him, sapping his vigour. At what point will he realise that everything he's doing is utterly pointless?\n\nHow beautiful will that moment of recognition be? You want to see that futility dawning in his eyes. Close up. Face to face. You want to smell it on his breath.\n\nHe hits you again. He soars clear, hooking a long, wide curve around the end columns. As he comes out of the turn, his wings begin to beat more furiously as he accelerates into the next run. You try to block him-\n\nAnother strike. A good one. That would have disembowelled Angron. That would have sheared the Pale King's heart in two. That would have taken Ferrus' head from his shoulders.\n\nYou're still holding back a little. He doesn't have to die. When that instant of recognition finally hits him, you'll give him one last chance to reconsider his position. So let him wear himself out. Let him take out his anger on you.\n\nHe needs it. He needs to feel as if he's tried. It's pride, of course. He is his father's favourite son, the Brightest One, beloved by all. He has always been the exemplar of unflinching loyalty. He has always won. He was never going to go down without a fight.\n\nOnce futility has broken him, you will lift him up again. You will carry him to the throne you have prepared for him, and invite him to sit there and rest. He will have played his part, and done all he could. There'll be no shame in saying yes to you then.\n\nHe is your favourite. Always has been. You want him with you, because that will mean something. If this defiance had come from Rogal or Constantin, you would have destroyed them quickly. Their value, and they are both great warriors, is as trophies, as heads for your wall, proof of your prowess. Look upon"}
{"text":"ll carry him to the throne you have prepared for him, and invite him to sit there and rest. He will have played his part, and done all he could. There'll be no shame in saying yes to you then.\n\nHe is your favourite. Always has been. You want him with you, because that will mean something. If this defiance had come from Rogal or Constantin, you would have destroyed them quickly. Their value, and they are both great warriors, is as trophies, as heads for your wall, proof of your prowess. Look upon my kills, father, and despair!\n\nBut with Sanguinius, though he is the mightiest of all, it's not about victory in arms. It's about victory in spirit. To break him, to bend him to your will, now that's a true triumph. The embodiment of Imperial loyalty, cowed at your feet, feeding from your hand, pledging his devotion. Look upon that, father.\n\nIt won't be easy. If it was easy, it would be worthless. You've tried before, several times. The wily Erebus, apostle of filth and lies, attempted it on your behalf at Signus Prime, and failed. It was always going to be a slow erosion.\n\nHe strikes you again, then again. You can actually taste his fear. An angel's terror, so very sweet. He is, you believe, finally beginning to understand.\n\nThat's the source of his fear, this fear that's so new and unfamiliar to him. It's not fear of you, per se, not of your numinous power, not even that you are Horus Lupercal, Warmaster, a being no sane creature could want to face in battle or hope to vanquish.\n\nIt's a fear of the unknown. Sanguinius, poor Sanguinius, even at this bitter end, still sees things framed by Imperial thinking: dark against light, Imperium against traitor, father against son. It's pernicious. It's wrong-headed. It's a view of cosmic reality that is utterly unsupportable. Sanguinius, like too many millions of others in the Imperial fold, is so grievously conditioned in his mode of understanding, he is as good as brainwashed.\n\nHe sees himself as the last good man standing. The last loyal son. The last bastion of noble valour, fighting to the death in his father's name, refusing to submit. That's why you love him. It is painfully heroic. It is the quintessence of what he is.\n\nBut he is starting to perceive the realigned truths of the universe. He is beginning to understand that everything he knows about man and gods, about heroes and Chaos, is a lie. That dawning comprehension is terrifying him.\n\nWhile he was fighting his way through the ship to reach you, the material world underwent an ontological shift. True power replaced false ideologies. True majesty replaced debased glory. You are not evil, and that which you stand for is not evil, for there is no evil. There is no darkness. There is only everything, conjoined and suffused by the warp, which you channel through your soul.\n\nEvery value that Sanguinius was raised to believe in is undone or shown as dishonest. The only blight in the cosmos is the fading stench of your father's tyrannical diktat that He, and He alone, was fit to determine the future.\n\nSanguinius will burn himself out. The scales will fall from his eyes. He will blink, in belated apperception, at a new configuration of reality in which the false promises and selfish desires of your father are exposed as the venality they always were.\n\nHe will see, at the very last, the way things truly are. An epistemological revelation. Weeping in joy, he will beg you for forgiveness.\n\nAnd you will, in your infinite mercy, grant it to him. It will be the greatest moment of his life, and the sweetest victory of yours.\n\nThen, your father will see you both, and He will see that everything He is and was is nothing, the vain dreams of a prideful, arrogant man who has failed in every possible way.\n\nSanguinius strikes you again. You snap at him with your Talon. He soars away.\n\nBut the end is near. He's getting tired.\n\nBehold, caught between the pincer of your claws, a single white feather.\n\n8:vi\n\nThe man that did not\n\n'You are becoming a god, born from the warp,' says Oll. 'You may not recognise it yet, or be prepared to accept it, but you are. And that, quite clearly, is the last thing you ever wanted to be.'\n\n'My king is simply empowered,' replies Caecaltus Dusk, though the voice he uses is not his own. 'He has fortified Himself against the power of Chaos. Such levels of power are essential to overcome Horus Lupercal and all that he has unleashed.'\n\n'I understand,' Oll says. 'I understand what's at stake. And I'm absolutely certain that's why you've done what you've done. You've strengthened yourself to defeat your son, but, somewhere in the course of that, you've crossed a line. A line you drew in the first place. You're becoming the very thing you abhor.'\n\n'And you have been sent here to stop me?'\n\nOll doesn't react to the personal pronoun.\n\n'I think,' he says instead, 'I've simply been sent to talk to you. To intervene. But I had no idea what I'd be talking to. What you're becoming-'\n\n'My king has no intention of diminishing His power.'\n\n'Then you should reconsider,' says Oll, looking Caecaltus Dusk in the eye, and trying to ignore the withered horror he sees there. 'You're a man. The most remarkable and powerful man that's ever existed, but still, just a man. Every step you've taken has been based on rationality, and it's created the Imperium. But you retained your humanity, even when it would have been easy to let it go. You retained your emotions, because you knew they were vital. You even forged it into the sons you made, because it was that important to you. That man is still inside you somewhere. I hope he is.'\n\n'I must be strong to fight my son.'\n\n'Yes,' says Oll. 'Yes, you must. But not strong like this. Did you ever consider what the big difference between you and me was?'\n\nThe proconsul pauses before replying, as if waiting to be given the right answer.\n\n'My king is the man that did. You are the man that did not.'\n\n'A callous way of putting it,' Oll replies, 'but true enough. You were ambitious, where I was not. You had a plan, where I did not. But most of all, I was patient. You were not.'\n\n'Thousands of years of work is not impatience-'\n\n'Isn't it?' Oll replies. He sighs. 'For all the wonders you've built, there was always impatience. Fast, blunt, rational solutions to immensely complex problems. You never could bide your time and work methodically. That, in the end, is why I broke with you. And that, I fear, is why we find ourselves on the brink of cataclysm.'\n\nOll looks away across the wasteland at the distant curtain of soundless lightning.\n\n'You need to defeat an immensely powerful adversary,' he says quietly, 'so you make yourself stronger without thought to the consequences.'\n\n'What are those consequences, Ollanius?' asks Caecaltus Dusk.\n\n'You will not stop. This expediency will lead to the next, each one justified by the one before. You will never have too much power. You will never have enough. There will always be a reason to seize more.'\n\n'You talk as though you possess great wisdom and insight, but you do not.'\n\n'You're right,' says Oll. 'I don't. None of us foresaw this possibility. Not Erda, the aeldari lord, or even the Sigillite. But my journey to meet you has been counterintuitive. My thinking has been linear, but my route has been backwards.'\n\nHe holds out the scorched ball of twine.\n\n'Time and space are out of joint. I have come to you along a path I am yet to make. Who knows why the Oll Persson who leaves that path wants me to be here? Who knows what he hopes I will prevent?'\n\n'My king is sympathetic to your concerns, Ollanius, but Chaos must be denied.'\n\n'On that we agree,' Oll admits. 'We always have. But this is not the way.'\n\n'It is the only way.'\n\n'No. As things stand, either way, Chaos wins,' Oll says, raising his hands in weary despair. 'It doesn't matter whether Horus triumphs, or you prevail. The warp will become a churning frenzy for millions of years. The material realm will be overcome, and mankind wiped out. You are undoing all you have built.'\n\n'Horus must be stopped,' the proconsul insists.\n\n'Horus, yes. But the warp can't be defeated. The opposition of materia and immateria is eternal. Stop Horus, yes. Stop his threat.'\n\nOll falls silent, and looks at the Sentinel.\n\n'But I'm begging you,' he says, 'find another way to do it.'\n\n8:vii\n\nA vantage\n\nAbaddon spends the better part of an hour killing Word Bearers and the crew of the flagship. They come at his position, raving and deranged. He knows some of them, by face and name, the seniors of the Hort Lupercali. They were good, sound people, and served the Vengeful Spirit well. He doesn't know the nature of their madness, but it seems to him a complete and abject fright beyond anything he has ever seen a human manifest. It exceeds, by some magnitude, even the fear that he and his kind inspire in their opponents. Indeed, it eclipses it, for the maniacal Excertus can see full well what they are running towards, yet they are unchecked by the transhuman dread that Astartes normally provoke. Whatever they have seen, it has rendered them insensible to previous limits of aversion.\n\nAbsolute fear has made them fearless. The Excertus hurl themselves at Abaddon's line, shrieking, clawing, frothing. It is easy killing, and Abaddon's men take no pride or satisfaction in it.\n\nThe Word Bearers are a more significant problem. They are as blind with terror as the Excertus around them, but they are Astartes, with Astartes plate, Astartes weapons, and Astartes power. Stopping their headlong advance costs Abaddon men. Lorgar's sons were never the martial equal of the XVI, and what combat technique they previously possessed has been entirely lost to derangement. Yet still, they are Astartes, and their Astartesian potency, though frantic and overwrought, makes them harder to stop, and more than capable of killing Abaddon's battle-brothers.\n\nWhen the combat first began, Abaddon considered withdrawing his advance into the defensible area of the flagship"}
{"text":"es power. Stopping their headlong advance costs Abaddon men. Lorgar's sons were never the martial equal of the XVI, and what combat technique they previously possessed has been entirely lost to derangement. Yet still, they are Astartes, and their Astartesian potency, though frantic and overwrought, makes them harder to stop, and more than capable of killing Abaddon's battle-brothers.\n\nWhen the combat first began, Abaddon considered withdrawing his advance into the defensible area of the flagship's bridge, and locking his attackers out. Within minutes, it became evident that the tide of madmen, human and transhuman alike, were not out to kill the Sons of Horus. Abaddon and his men had simply stepped into the path of a crazed stampede. If the terror-stricken mass had an objective at all, it was to get into the bridge levels, and the Sons of Horus were simply an obstacle.\n\nAs he fought, Abaddon wondered what his unhinged opponents could have seen out there in the ruptured, petrifacted landscape to make them think that the Vengeful Spirit offered any sanctuary. He had seen enough of the flagship to know it was just as hazardous as this impossible outside.\n\nBesides, the bridge offered him no sanctuary either. If Sycar's Terminators could claw the bulk hatch open, Lorgar's Cataphractii could break it in just as easily. Strategic withdrawal would push him into a long, protracted series of defensive fall-aways, driving his men back the way they had come.\n\nAbaddon was not prepared to give ground. Going backwards would not help him find his father. Accepting the need for active denial, he had advanced supporting forces from the bridge space, into the tortured, schismed landscape beyond.\n\n'Your command?' Sycar had asked as he brought his Justaerin forward.\n\n'Illuminate them,' Abaddon had replied.\n\nSince then, it has been slaughter. Sons of Horus squads push forwards from the bridge-hatch strongpoint, flanking each other meticulously, working with accuracy and precision, creating a crescent repulse to keep the onslaught at bay. The Word Bearers, interspersed with howling Excertus, form a muddled, ungoverned charge that breaks against the XVI's line. The bodies of the fallen start to pile up, Word Bearers and exploded Excertus tangled together, gradually forming jumbled ridges that the Sons of Horus can use as cover as they slowly expand the rim of their line.\n\nIt is senseless. The sons of Lorgar simply scramble into view and run at Abaddon's forces, brandishing their blades or firing without thought to aim. They run directly into the XVI's denial zones, and are greeted by bolter fire and plasmics. They are cut down short of the line. It takes two or three mass-reactives to stop some of the larger brutes. The supply of them seems inexhaustible. Every time there is a lag or break, Abaddon thinks they're done, and the flood of madness abated. Then more appear, storming across the mounded rubble in untidy mobs, and the steady firing resumes.\n\nAbaddon begins to consider munitions. It starts to seem entirely possible that the apparently endless numbers of Word Bearers will still be stumbling into view long after his companies have burned through their stocks.\n\nAgainst Baraxa's objections, Abaddon takes a squad and breaks from the line, advancing at pace to clear the closest terrain feature, a long spur of buckled rockcrete and upthrust ground rising into a low ridge and hill some two hundred metres to the left flank. Abaddon has no working auspex or sensoria, and the ridge, though dwarfed into insignificance by the shelving mountains beyond, is the highest terrain feature in the immediate vicinity. He hopes for a vantage. He needs to get a broader picture in order to make an assessment. From the ridge, he will be able to scope for several kilometres, and estimate approaching Word Bearers numbers, rather than waiting for them to appear at shooting distance.\n\nIt becomes hard going. The rain has grown heavier, swirled by a directionless wind. Abaddon can hear a repeating booming sound above the crack and clatter of the persistent battle to his right. The booming is probably the gusting buffet of the wind and the thunder of the storm spilling across the un-heavens overhead, but somehow it feels more than that, a louder but more distant sound, the monumental din of impacts, like a cyclopean hammer repeatedly striking a titanic anvil. It sounds like apocalyptic single combat, of a god fighting another god somewhere, far away, of god-weapons clashing against god-armour. He tries to ignore it.\n\nThe ridge is a ragged spine where the unstable earth has folded and wrenched upwards. Mobs of Lorgar's sons and Hort Lupercali are spilling across it to join the rush below, and Abaddon's squad is, several times, forced into close-range running melees with blades and point-blank shots. Once again, there is an impression that they, like the ridge itself, are simply in the way, and that they are trying to cross against the grain of a mass exodus so pent with dread and desperation that it cannot be deflected. He starts to see non-combat flagship personnel and low-grade servitors in the stampede.\n\nHe kills them too, for even unarmed loaders and maintenance servitors turn on him, and attempt to claw through him.\n\nHis blade is wet with blood, his plate wet with rain. A Word Bearer, a brother of the Akrak Jal, blunders across his path, and swings a bardiche at him with a breathless shriek. Abaddon shoots him in the face, and kicks his sprawling corpse down the rubble slope of the ridge. A numbing blow from behind knocks him to his knees. When he rolls and rises, he sees a Graven Star Terminator, its plate acid-etched with Lorgar's tracts, and Ulnok gamely trying to drive it back to protect his First Captain.\n\nPast any point of patience, Abaddon lends Ulnok his full support. He puts a mass-reactive into the Word Bearer's throat plating at point-blank range. The immense plate holds, but the detonation shudders the huge killer backwards, allowing Ulnok, with swift precision, to run his sword in through the armpit seal. Blood seems to well out of the Terminator, spurting through the seams and joints of its upper torso plating, but Ulnok's blade is wedged, and he is being dragged towards the blade of the Word Bearer's heavy poleaxe, the same poleaxe that has left a dent in the back of Abaddon's armour.\n\nAbaddon shears his sword into the side of the Terminator's neck, twisting and gouging to dig through the interlocked seal. Working together, pushing in from both sides, Abaddon and Ulnok wrestle the Terminator backwards, grinding and scraping their jammed blades to open plate and extend wounds. When the Word Bearer goes down, drizzling blood from every fissure, it almost takes them both with it.\n\nAbaddon steadies Ulnok as the heavy corpse rolls and slides away down the scree, then draws in the rest of his squad. They resume their ascent. Abaddon can hear Baraxa on the link, patchy and incomprehensible.\n\nAt the summit, Abaddon gains his vantage at last.\n\n8:viii\n\nAngel, tormentor\n\nSanguinius flows sideways through the air. By any measure, he is a significant figure: a humanoid form scaled far greater than any man, powerfully muscled, winged, and cased in heavy armour. He has substantial mass and vast strength. He is the imperative, physical punctuation to almost any fight.\n\nBut he seems weightless.\n\nHe shimmers around his adversary, illusory, fleeting, a brief beam of light, a wind-borne leaf, a circling bird darting around a thorn tree. He scarcely touches the deck, as though he is buoyant and too light to land, as though he is an etheric spirit born to dwell forever far above the dull world of earth in the bright realm of wind and air.\n\nHis wings drive, and he vaults his enemy, flurries of sparks trailing him as the edge of Encarmine slits the heavy wolf pelt and scribes a long, curving gouge across black plate. He lands, the toes of his right foot kissing the ground long enough to drive a pivot that spins him around in the air, a springing rotation which allows his seeking blade another contact. Plate buckles, torn like tin, and sheared cables gout murky cerebrospinal fluid.\n\nThe maul tears the air to find him, but he is gone again.\n\nHorus Lupercal is breathing hard, sucking and snorting like a labouring grox. There is spittle on his chin and lips, and the first cast of anger in his dead eyes. This contest is no longer amusing him. He is becoming annoyed.\n\nFull rage will follow. Sanguinius is counting on it. The Horus he loved had a quick temper, pricked easily into wrath, and usually spurred by frustration when people failed to do as they were told, or proved themselves incompetent. Most of all, his rage flared at any act of defiance.\n\nSanguinius knows what the Warmaster's anger looks like, and he knows how to provoke it. He has no idea what the wrath of this thing - whatever monstrous obscenity Horus has become - will be like. He imagines it will be an abominable fury.\n\nBut rage is a weakness in any true warrior. Rage makes a man rash and clumsy, and it diminishes his skill and technique, no matter how highly trained he is. It sucks away finesse. It dilutes focus. It forces errors and overreach, and steals a man's precision and discipline.\n\nRage, and the loss of control that comes with it, is a self-inflicted wound.\n\nSanguinius wants that. He wants every advantage he can get, for it was clear from the start that the cards are stacked in his brother's favour. He knows he has to exploit every chink in the Warmaster's armour - physical and mental - if he is to have a chance of winning. He has to force every crack, and make new ones besides. Rage will be one of them, perhaps the key one. If he can goad his fallen brother into outright anger he can level the field a little, for Horus enraged will be Horus diminished. Though far stronger and monumental, Horus will be reduced to bewildered passion, and Sanguinius will be able to dictate the terms of the clash, "}
{"text":"ows he has to exploit every chink in the Warmaster's armour - physical and mental - if he is to have a chance of winning. He has to force every crack, and make new ones besides. Rage will be one of them, perhaps the key one. If he can goad his fallen brother into outright anger he can level the field a little, for Horus enraged will be Horus diminished. Though far stronger and monumental, Horus will be reduced to bewildered passion, and Sanguinius will be able to dictate the terms of the clash, and reduce his foe with surgical rigour and clear judgement.\n\nHe is close to that break point. He has spiked the Warmaster's exasperation. He knows Horus, just as he knows the Vengeful Spirit. He knows his brother's secret levels and concealed flaws, because Horus taught them to him. In those far-off days before the shadow fell, Horus shared everything with his angel-brother. That intimate knowledge, granted without vanity or hesitation, has allowed Sanguinius to penetrate the most formidable flagship in the Imperium. It will also lead him to his brother's heart.\n\nSanguinius speeds between maul and claw, loops, dummies, flits left, and drives the tip of Encarmine deep into Horus' hip. The Serpent's Scales puncture like paper, exhaling steam, oozing thick, curdled blood that runs black. The gleaming Angel's relentless circuits around his ponderous foe have become a kind of dance: nimble, acrobatic, unstinting, elegant. There is intricate grace in his every movement, a demonstration of faultless martial prowess that no one in the universe could replicate. It is dazzling in its exactitude, fluid and pure, almost performative, like a rite or sacred act. There is no effort wasted, no redundancy. It resembles, in its balletic artistry and daedal complexity, the elaborate steps and post-human gymnastics of an aeldari harlequinade.\n\nPerhaps, somehow, they are the same, eternal steps.\n\nThe rage is close. The atmosphere of the Lupercal Court is shifting, simmering, sizzling. The light has thickened, and the air is lank with pre-storm pressure. The deck is sweating oily droplets of moisture, and the obsidian blocks of the walls and columns shiver in distress. The background whispering has intensified, hissing like phlegmy static from the shadows and the cloisters and the lightless roofspace. It is agitated, as though dismayed at what it is seeing.\n\nOne golden mote slicing the darkness apart, piece by piece.\n\nHorus' wargear is scarred in a double-dozen places. Gouges of bare metal stripe and notch his plate. The wolf pelt is torn and slashed. Severed dermal pipes swing and drip. Blood and plasma drool from ruptures. The armour's reactors and shield generators cough and moan to maintain stability.\n\nHorus himself, his sweating face bathed in raw bloodlight, snarls and grunts, twisting and turning, churning and heaving, but every massive motion is too slow or too late to catch his tormentor. Every footfall is a thunderous Titan-step, ringing and grinding on the deck, and the deck itself is broken in a hundred places, the plating cratered and cracked by misplaced blows and evaded strikes.\n\nThe Talon of Horus clenches shut with a whipcrack clang. Worldbreaker loops with a moan of torn air. Horus growls, froth flecking the corners of his mouth. He lunges, like a sliding mountain, at the fugitive golden flame that he cannot pin down. The huge maul misses again, but connects with an ouslite pillar, exploding the midsection out of it in a spray of broken stone. The impact is deafening, and the dislodged section slams onto the deck, leaving the broken top and bottom of the column ragged like a stalactite and stalagmite.\n\nHe turns, but Sanguinius has already found him again, arcing in like a seeker missile. Encarmine, swung with both hands at full force, strikes the Warmaster's front plating. Failing reactive shields pop with a bang. The blade strikes a thick section clean off the lip of the gorget, and leaves a bloody tear across the Lupercal's left brow and cheek.\n\nHorus roars like a woken dragon.\n\nThe rage is here.\n\n8:ix\n\nLost in madness\n\nThere is no way across. An immense firestorm fills the Palatine Ventilation Canyon, raising furious yellow flames with such force that the fire is howling. All the skyways and bridge-spans have melted or burned through. The great edifice of the Transterran Congress across the gulf is blackened, and parts of it have combusted too. The nearby towers of the Benefice have been reduced to blackened stubs.\n\nHassan has never seen fire so great that it speaks before. He feels the roaring scream in his bones. The force of the heat is so great, they cannot approach. Ios Raja and the three Astartes allotted to his party might endure briefly, but Hassan and the two Sisters would not. They skirt the southern shoulder of the canyon, and find shelter in the cloisters of the Ordinatory.\n\nEven here, the heat is fierce, and Hassan swelters with pinprick discomfort. They can hear gunfire in the levels below them.\n\nRaja looks at him, as if to ask, 'What now?' Hassan is thinking, and concentration is hard. The horrors they have witnessed since setting out from the Rotunda, both close up and at a distance, are etched on his mind. They are so vivid, he cannot see past them.\n\nThe final fortress is a fortress no more. The overrun is complete. The traitors are everywhere, pouring into the Sanctum both above ground and below. Hundreds of battles are raging to defend the last acres of the loyal Imperium. As they picked their way around these last-ditch conflicts, Hassan had to fight the urge to abandon his mission and join the struggle, for now every last man and woman counts. But he has a promise to keep, and a job to finish, a job he should not have delegated. He will not die neglecting the wishes of his late master, even though his goal now seems quite futile.\n\nHe tries to assess. The way to the Eastern Approaches, the location of Fo's laboratory and his last known whereabouts, is impassable, and the Approaches are overrun besides. From the scrappy intel Moriana was able to gather and send to Hassan, Fo was last seen in the company of Xanthus, the Selenar gene-witch, and the Custodian Amon. He was being moved, but where to? Hassan can't visit the Approaches to see if Xanthus left any clues or indications.\n\nAll comms are down. There is no way to know where they were going, or if they are still alive. On top of that, the geography of the Sanctum seems to be in flux, exactly as the mysterious intruder Persson suggested. Even if Hassan knew where Fo was, he can't be sure where that 'where' is any more.\n\nHassan can only work with the information he has. He has to sort the details clinically, the way his master taught him. Ignore possibilities. Consider only known facts: Fo, Xanthus, Andromeda-17, Amon Tauromachian. What does he know about them? Their profiles. Their behavioural patterns. Their instructions. He knows, fairly well, how Xanthus thinks and operates. But Fo's impulses are impossible to predict, and the Selenar was deliberately brought in as provocateur to skew the-\n\nWait. He looks at Raja.\n\n'What would make you break orders?' Hassan asks.\n\nThe Companion, dried blood crusted on his face, glares back. 'Nothing,' he says.\n\n'Of course,' says Hassan. 'But if I ordered you to break a directive...?'\n\n'You hold authority,' Raja replies, 'so I would observe it, unless it was countermanded by a superior authority.'\n\n'Meaning the Sigillite, the captain-general, or the Emperor?'\n\nRaja nods.\n\n'No one else?'\n\n'No one else.'\n\n'You would not, therefore, break a directive at the request of Xanthus, or another of the Chosen?'\n\n'Their authority would be insufficient.'\n\n'But Sentinel Amon was present,' says Hassan. 'He was with them, and he went with them. Amon is known to you?'\n\n'Of course,' Raja replies.\n\n'And he is, like you, irreproachable in the performance of his duties?'\n\nRaja glowers. 'He is Legio Custodes. It is offensive for you to even ask.'\n\nWhat are you thinking? Aphone Ire signs.\n\nHassan is about to answer the Vigil Commander when the swell of background gunfire suddenly rises. An archway on the far side of the cloisters blows out, and six men of the Hort Palatine stagger into view, firing behind them as they come.\n\nBolt-rounds chase them, blowing one off his feet in a belch of flame.\n\n8:x\n\nApostolic\n\nAbaddon sees his forces behind and below him, lit by the sparks of their gunfire, encircling the bridge hatch, which is just a blister-like bunker in the wider landscape. The view around it stuns him.\n\nHe had begun to accept the idea that a great realm of wilderness had somehow interlaced with the fabric of the flagship's bridge, and that the scale of that wilderness was continental. But from the hill, it seems endless, and its features the contours of a world built for creatures of far greater frame than his. The wind is harsh, the rain vicious. The absence of stars in the tempest-swirled sky seems the worst sign of all, as though he's engulfed by utter emptiness.\n\nThe land itself, as far as he can see, is shelved and folded like a crumpled cloth, with rucks of abrupt peaks lifting thousands of metres high. Debris and dead cities clump to the hard angles, sometimes hanging vertically like patches of moss on a wall.\n\nLow, and far away, the same baleful star he saw before swims ominously behind the veil of the storm and the tendrils of warpflux and pseudomatter that stain the sky. The sight of it makes his gorge rise.\n\nHe had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that he might see the Lupercal Court, imagining that it, like the flagship's bridge levels, might still exist as some discrete portion of the whole, displaced by the shifted materia. But he cannot. All he can see are the ravaged, overgrown ruins of the limitless city that this landscape once was, a ghost pattern of dead streets, rubble and wreck where fires still burn, all folded and realigned to follow the violently disturbed bedrock.\n\nDown in those streets, amid the ruins and the we"}
{"text":"foolishly, that he might see the Lupercal Court, imagining that it, like the flagship's bridge levels, might still exist as some discrete portion of the whole, displaced by the shifted materia. But he cannot. All he can see are the ravaged, overgrown ruins of the limitless city that this landscape once was, a ghost pattern of dead streets, rubble and wreck where fires still burn, all folded and realigned to follow the violently disturbed bedrock.\n\nDown in those streets, amid the ruins and the weeds and the wind-worn ventifacts, he sees the Word Bearers. To his dismay, there are thousands of them, and thousands of Excertus and deck crew besides, spread over several kilometres, but all converging on the position his men are defending. He can taste the frenzy and panic on the wind. There seems to be too many of them, as if the warped nature of this psychoscape is somehow multiplying the stricken crew of his flagship, like the echoes of the damned in hell.\n\nThere are too many. Too many even for the drilled perfection of his companies. There will never be enough munitions to halt them all, and then it will come down to blades and close combat. And though the Word Bearers and their cohorts are witless and berserk, and though Abaddon would back any of the Sons of Horus against any son of Lorgar, sheer numbers always determine the outcome of close combat.\n\nWithin an hour, his proud units will be overwhelmed and torn limb from limb.\n\nAt his side, he hears Ulnok moan in consternation, and presumes his equerry has drawn the same tactical conclusion. But when Abaddon turns to look, he sees it is not that.\n\nA figure is ascending the ridge behind them, making its way calmly to join them at the summit. Abaddon knows it at once. The hated fool, the despised exile, the thought-poisoner, the damned apostle of lies that he personally blames for all that has gone wrong with his world.\n\nErebus is smiling.\n\nAbaddon raises his sword, and strides to meet him. He will not suffer that smile. He will not be dragged into another maelstrom of half-truth and seductive deceit.\n\n'My brother,' Erebus says, as Abaddon approaches. 'My noble First Captain. Ezekyle.'\n\nSurely he can see that I'm going to kill him, Abaddon thinks. If I do one thing this day, it will be to dash that liar's brains across the rubble of this hellscape, for he is surely, more than anyone, responsible for this.\n\nErebus is where the fall began.\n\nBut Erebus, his face ghastly with tattooed gibberish and ugly scars, keeps smiling. There are dried spots of someone's blood on his cheek and brow.\n\n'Fear is upon the world,' Erebus announces.\n\nAbaddon halts, sword ready.\n\n'Your poor brothers,' Erebus says, glancing into the vale below where Baraxa, Jeraddon, Zeletsis and Sycar command the line against the onslaught. 'They hold true, just as I would expect. Your men are finely disciplined, Ezekyle. Though, of course, they have not witnessed what my kin have witnessed.'\n\n'And what would that be?' growls Abaddon.\n\n'Our future,' Erebus replies. 'Ezekyle, my kin are too lost in dread to know what they are doing, but I have no desire to see your brothers slaughtered. We are of the same blood, on the same side. I would gladly kill any man loyal to the Throne, but we are of the same part. And this slaughter is unseemly.'\n\n'Then call them off,' says Abaddon. 'But I don't think you can.'\n\nErebus turns and surveys the scene below. He raises his hand. He speaks.\n\nAbaddon has been holding back the Word Bearers for over an hour with every ounce of fury and firepower his companies can muster.\n\nErebus stops his brethren in their tracks with a single word.\n\n8:xi\n\nThe Chosen way\n\nMove! Srinika Ridhi signs. They have to. They don't have time to stop and help these men, nor can they risk getting caught up in a rolling fight. Black shapes are following the Hort troopers out onto the yard: Sons of Horus, their guns booming. The XVI have struck the deepest of all, right into the heart of the Palace. Hassan has heard names chanted several times. Vorus Ikari and Ekron Fal. Those captains of the XVI have driven their men hard, and the atrocities they have committed to take the final fortress are already infamous. The echo of their names alone has broken lines of loyalist Excertus, who have fled in terror even though there is nowhere to flee to. Ikari and Fal are the edge of the Warmaster's blade, the tip of his spear. Their ferocious, unreserved cruelty will soon end what Horus began on Isstvan.\n\nRaja and the Sisters move Hassan down the cloister, away from the combat. The three Astartes - Malix Hest of the Blood Angels, the Praetorian Fist Guil Conort, and Ibelin Kumo of the White Scars - close in behind, covering the retreat with suppression fire. The three of them were seconded to Hassan's mission from Rotunda defence. They have defended him bravely and almost wordlessly, though Hassan can feel their resentment that every engagement they come to, they have to back away from.\n\nLike this one. They cannot afford to hold ground and help the Hort troopers. They cannot clash with the XVI, or any other invaders, without risking losses. All they can do is protect themselves, evade, and move.\n\nIt feels like cowardice.\n\nThe Sons of Horus mow down the last of the Hort survivors. More than twenty of them have emerged onto the yard, and some are already firing at Hassan's party. The Astartes gunfire keeps them at bay, and a shot from Conort clips and drops one of the Horusian killers. The traitors' bolt-rounds smack into the cloister wall and columns, and the multiple detonations fill the hot air with stone dust. Raja opens an auramite hatch, and almost throws Hassan through it. The others follow. Kumo, bringing up the rear, fires a last burst at the advancing traitors, then ducks in, but not before clamping a charge onto the outside of the hatch as he closes it.\n\nThe directional charge, which goes off a few seconds later, brings down the cloister walk and buries the hatch in rubble. It is a trick Kumo has performed twice already. The White Scars are masters of mobile war. They go where they want, and are extremely adept at denying others the opportunity to follow.\n\nRaja leads the party down a short corridor, out across a secondary yard, and into the base of one of the castellated watchtowers of the Southern Hem. The place seems empty and abandoned. There is a slow drift of filmy smoke in the air. Weapon discharges and explosions rattle, dull and muffled, from floors far below.\n\nThey find a sub-command station. The power is live, but all data seems corrupted. The vox wails like a Neptunian wind. The Astartes watch the door and the hallway approach. Hassan straightens an overturned chair and sits down.\n\nWhat were you deliberating? Ire signs.\n\n'I was trying to think how Xanthus would think,' Hassan replies. 'He could not compel Amon-'\n\n'Agreed,' says Raja.\n\n'But Amon went with them. And it wasn't for safety, because the Sanctum hadn't been penetrated at that point.'\n\nAs far as we know, signs Ridhi.\n\nHassan ponders. He would ordinarily request the Sisters to keep some distance, for the lead weight of their null souls clouds the mood and thinking of even non-psykers. But the uncanny stillness they impart now seems like a comfort, insulating him from the shock and throb of warfare ringing from the Palace around him.\n\n'So moving the prisoner must have been in accordance with Amon's instructions,' he says.\n\nWhich were to keep the prisoner contained and safe, say Ire's hands.\n\nHassan nods. He looks at Raja for confirmation.\n\n'Just that?' he asks. 'Do you know Amon's precise orders?'\n\n'To safely contain the prisoner and prevent his escape, pending the completion of the prisoner's project,' Raja replies.\n\n'Yet Amon refused to turn him over to the Sodality. We know that. And he consented to moving Fo, even though the secure holding cell was right there.'\n\nDid he have reason to suspect the prisoner was not safe at that location? Ire asks.\n\n'Perhaps,' says Hassan. 'He must have believed he could not accomplish his orders to the letter by staying-'\n\nHe trails off. He looks at Raja, and the half-ghosts of the watching Sisters.\n\n'Accomplish his orders to the letter,' he repeats. 'Safely contain the prisoner, prevent his escape, and complete his project.'\n\nAs he speaks, he raises his thumb, index and middle finger in series to count off the items on the list.\n\n'Tripartite orders,' Hassan says, 'and only the third part of it seems pertinent. Fo had not completed his project. Or Xanthus, perhaps with the Selenar's assistance, convinced Amon that the work was not yet completed. Amon would be obliged to take action to fulfil the third tier of his orders.'\n\nRaja nods.\n\nBut if there was work remaining, the laboratorium was close by, signs Ridhi.\n\n'Then a workplace, and instruments... That wasn't what was missing,' muses Hassan. 'Fo had been provided with everything he required, materially. So what was lacking must have been data. Information. Specialist knowledge that Fo needed to complete the weapon. Given what we know, that's the only reason Amon would have consented to move him.'\n\nWhich is the nearest archive? Ire signs. The nearest library?\n\n'The Clanium,' says Raja, without hesitation. 'Leng and the Quorum are too far. There is a data-stack in the House of Templates, but its scope is too narrow and specialised.'\n\nThe Clanium, then? Ridhi signs.\n\n'Still a long way,' says Hassan. 'They left on foot, and were last seen on monitor descending to level six. If they had been heading for the Clanium-'\n\n'They would have gone up to the roof platforms and secured a flyer,' says Raja.\n\n'I think so,' Hassan nods.\n\n'I am certain,' says Raja. 'In Amon's position, with Amon's specific instruction, I would have obtained a flyer. I would not have attempted to walk the prisoner to the Clanium.'\n\nThen where? asks Ire.\n\nHassan springs to his feet and crosses to the sub-command's shuttered port. He thumbs the stud, but the power is low, and the metal sh"}
{"text":"level six. If they had been heading for the Clanium-'\n\n'They would have gone up to the roof platforms and secured a flyer,' says Raja.\n\n'I think so,' Hassan nods.\n\n'I am certain,' says Raja. 'In Amon's position, with Amon's specific instruction, I would have obtained a flyer. I would not have attempted to walk the prisoner to the Clanium.'\n\nThen where? asks Ire.\n\nHassan springs to his feet and crosses to the sub-command's shuttered port. He thumbs the stud, but the power is low, and the metal shutters begin to grind upwards at a sluggish, reluctant pace. Raja joins him, and with one surly thrust of his arm, shoves the shutter up into its slot.\n\nThe window port is large, and affords a wide and lofty view across the southern part of the Sanctum. They are nine floors above the concourse of the Southern Hem, and forty-six above surface street level. The armoured glass of the port is speckled with soot.\n\nKhalid Hassan blinks. He has never seen such devastation. He has never seen such ongoing devastation. He corrects his thinking. He has seen warzones, and he has seen battlefields. He's seen cities brought to their knees. The hammer-blow shock of this vista is that it is the Sanctum. The eternal citadel is the one place, the one place in the entire Imperium, that should be safe from this. It is the inviolable heart of everything. It is the seat of power.\n\nYet it burns. It dies. Towers crumble, spires blaze. The streets, plazas and connective bridges below him, on descending levels, swarm with figures and motion. He sees diminished groups of loyalist soldiers bunched, cornered and surrounded, defending terraces, pushed back across skyways, locked behind makeshift barricades. The traitor mass is universal, pouring along every processional and thoroughfare, spilling through courtyards and squares. He sees their striding war engines, their cavalcades of tracked armour, their billion nodding banners. The sky is solid smoke, spread low across the firelit ruin like a lid. The light throbs and flickers with the constant discharge of weapons, as many sparks and flashes as there are leaves in a forest or stars in the sky.\n\nAnd everywhere, everywhere, the dead.\n\n8:xii\n\nThe unbearable\n\n'Grammaticus,' Leetu says.\n\nJohn opens his eyes.\n\nAre we dead? he asks immediately, his hand trembling as he tries to form the code signs.\n\n'Worse,' says Leetu. 'We're alive.'\n\nLeetu seems unsteady with pain, his damaged biology trying to heal itself. His war plate is lacquered with dried blood.\n\nJohn lets Erda's wounded warrior haul him to his feet. Every part of him hurts, and the pain in his broken face and mangled arm is almost too much to bear. He is shaking, feverish. He has died enough times to know that this is what it feels like when a damaged body starts to shut down and quit. There isn't very much of his final lifetime left.\n\nAnd this isn't how he wanted to spend it.\n\nThe Luna Wolf, Loken, is already on his feet. He is standing in the dust several metres away with his back to them. He is gazing at something, fixated.\n\nThe light is fierce, so bright it makes John nauseous. But there is no heat in it.\n\nHe sees Oll, a good distance away, facing some tall and motionless figure, a blackened shape as rigid and imposing as an obelisk. There are others, upright and stark, like the aligned, time-worn stones of a standing circle. White dust billows in the glare. Far away, and all around, a silent curtain of lightning-storm rings the world, like a writhing, snapping wall of hanging chains.\n\nThen John sees the thing he should have seen first. The giant thing that fills the space beyond Oll. It is so huge in scale and power, John knows his mind must have just blanked it when he first awoke, refusing to see it or accept it was there, for the sake of his wits.\n\nA polished globe. An obsidian orb. A mirrored sphere. Its form is simple, but there is no simple way to describe it, not even with his linguistic command. It's hard even to say how big it is. It rests softly on the earth beneath it, yet it seems to be the size of a fallen moon. No, it's bigger than that, far bigger. He begins to sense the infinite depth of it, the span, the negative regression, and it makes him want to cry. It is not a thing at all, it is a force, a manifestation, a node of consciousness, a presence. It reeks of ylem, the primordial matter. It radiates an aura of blue light, hsbd-iryt, the first colour of the sky, the hue that the ancient hierophants of the Nile used to paint the skin of their gods.\n\nIt is, at once, both immeasurably calm and supremely enraged. Wrath seeps out of it like the fragrance of slow-burning incense, and that wrath has become fear by the time it touches John's skin.\n\nIt is unbearable. He wants to scream.\n\nHe wants to die.\n\nNearby, Loken kneels, and bows his head.\n\nJohn shakes off Leetu's hands, and starts to limp across the dust towards Oll, each step taking him deeper into the glow of terror.\n\nHe keeps going, despite it. He's come this far.\n\n8:xiii\n\nThe only logical destination\n\nChosen?'\n\nHassan remembers himself. Raja is waiting.\n\n'Your assessment?' asks Raja.\n\nHassan studies the panorama, trying not to linger, fixated, on individual details of carnage. It is hard to make sense of things. He knows this city. It's his domain, and though it is immense, he could navigate every step of it without a map.\n\nYet it does not seem configured correctly. Beyond the fundamental damage, and the changes wrought to plan and skyline by destruction, the final fortress is not right. Landmarks seem to have moved, or been misplaced. Nothing seems to be in its correct position.\n\n'Chosen?'\n\n'Wait, please,' he says, his voice unsteady. He scans again, then points. 'The Retreat,' he says.\n\n'Your Sigillite's tower?' asks Raja.\n\nHassan nods. The old tower, barely visible, is not where he would have expected to find it, but it stands yet. It seems, from where he is, a lifetime away.\n\n'My master's private library, and compendium of data, was extensive. A private collection, kept within his tower. That's where Xanthus would go.'\n\n'Are you sure?' asks Raja. 'Or is this just a guess?'\n\nHassan looks at the Companion.\n\n'For the Chosen,' he says, 'it was a favourite place. We went there often, to meet with our master the Regent. To plan and discuss affairs of state in private...'\n\nHe stops talking. The memories are too many and too sudden.\n\n'It was a safe place,' he says.\n\n'Nowhere is safe,' says Raja.\n\n'Granted,' says Hassan. 'But it is where Xanthus would go. It is far closer than any other data facility, and its resources are considerable. Given what we know of the circumstances, that is the only logical destination. Xanthus would take Fo there.'\n\nInstinct tells you this? Ire signs.\n\n'More than instinct. It's what I would have done. It's what any of the Chosen would have done.'\n\nWe will not make it on foot, signs Ridhi.\n\nRaja turns back to the window port to consider their options. Hassan can almost see the multiple solutions cycling through the Companion's mind, the routes and variables learned through exhaustive blood games. A direct approach, a descent to sub-surface to follow the deep processionals, an indirect advance following the causeway at-\n\nRaja suddenly pulls Hassan away from the port. It is the most terrifying second of Hassan's life, to see an indomitable warrior of the Legio Custodes recoil in apprehension. In fear.\n\nHassan feels the tower tremble. He hears the slow pulse of an earthquake, and realises it can only be footsteps. At the third titanic step, the armoured glass of the port spontaneously cracks.\n\nRaja bundles Hassan towards the command room exit, the Sisters at his heels. As they pass through the hatch, Hassan looks back. He sees, for a split second, a shadow pass across the window port. Something, some behemoth thing nine storeys tall, is plodding past outside the tower. A war engine, an Imperator. He sees an eye as it peers in at the port. He feels as a doll would feel when an adult stoops to look into the windows of a child's toy house.\n\nIt's not a Titan.\n\nThey start to flee down the corridor, the Astartes with them.\n\nBehind them, masonry begins to come apart.\n\n8:xiv\n\nWrong about everything\n\nYou're assuming the mantle of godhood,' Oll says, 'simply to destroy.'\n\n'To protect,' the charred Custodian replies. 'To defend-'\n\n'No,' Oll snaps back. 'To short-cut your way to another quick solution that disregards all later consequences. I've told you this before, so many times. You've never listened.'\n\nHe shrugs.\n\n'I suppose I shouldn't expect you to listen now.'\n\nHe glances aside, and sees John limping up to join him. He reaches out to steady his miserably wounded friend. Leetu is close behind.\n\nJohn's one good hand moves, unsteady, forming words.\n\n'Yes,' replies Oll. 'It's going exactly as well as I thought it would.'\n\nJohn shakes his bandaged head wearily. His hand moves again.\n\n'No, John,' says Oll. 'There's no need to apologise. This isn't an \"I told you so\" moment. It was always worth a try.'\n\nJohn can't help but stare at the immense black sphere behind the burned-out Custodian. It looms over them in the fulminous, living light. He stares until he can't bear it any more. He looks away.\n\n'It's Him,' Oll says. 'We were wrong about everything.'\n\nHolding John upright, Oll looks directly into the raddled face of Caecaltus Dusk.\n\n'Everything that is happening, everything, is a consequence of your Great Plan,' he states emphatically. 'This is on you, all of it. You were so proud of your configurations and your variations, but somehow you never saw this coming.'\n\n'And you did, Ollanius?' Dusk asks.\n\n'Some of it. No specifics, but some of it. The risks, I suppose. But the thing is, old friend, I never claimed to be right about everything. I was too well aware of my own failings... my own ignorances. You... you were not. You were always so sure. You had ordained the future, and you were convinced that it would do as it was told. The future was yours, and it couldn"}
{"text":"so proud of your configurations and your variations, but somehow you never saw this coming.'\n\n'And you did, Ollanius?' Dusk asks.\n\n'Some of it. No specifics, but some of it. The risks, I suppose. But the thing is, old friend, I never claimed to be right about everything. I was too well aware of my own failings... my own ignorances. You... you were not. You were always so sure. You had ordained the future, and you were convinced that it would do as it was told. The future was yours, and it couldn't get here fast enough.'\n\n'You will not chastise my King-of-Ages,' says Dusk.\n\n'Then let Him chastise Himself,' says Oll. 'He made a plan, thousands of years ago. It was the most ambitious plan any human had ever conceived, infinite in its detail, profound in its scope. He believed in that plan absolutely, but not once did He consider that the plan itself was fundamentally flawed.'\n\n'He was always so sure of Himself,' says Leetu quietly. Caecaltus Dusk turns his blood-blown eyes towards the injured legionary.\n\n'LE 2,' he says. 'You are in no position to question the merits of my king's plan. You were created as part of it. The baseline prototype. An element of the plan does not get to question the plan.'\n\nJohn's hand shapes words.\n\n'That's a fair point,' says Oll. He looks at the proconsul. 'Leetu can speak his mind because you allowed it. You allowed free will. You allowed emotional continuity. If the baseline model of the entire Astartesian generation, the pattern from which all others were devised, expresses doubt, what does that say?'\n\nHe sighs and points directly at the vast, shimmering sphere.\n\n'But this,' Oll says, 'this terrible thing you're becoming... It ironically offers us one last chance at course correction. Strange as it may seem, it's an opportunity.'\n\n'An opportunity?' asks Caecaltus Dusk.\n\n'You are almost a god, Emperor. Take this moment to examine your plan, not as the man you have always been, but with the perception of a god. Surely you can see its flaws, and the errors of the configurations you so diligently fixed? A god might perceive the truth where a man cannot. The Dark King is not the solution. It is, like every repair you've made, the act of a restive mind. The Dark King is an existential disaster, but its saving grace is that it allows you a perspective you've never had before. Use it, I beg you.'\n\n'Horus must be stopped,' says Dusk.\n\n'Agreed,' Oll replies.\n\n'Chaos must be thwarted.'\n\n'Agreed.'\n\n'I cannot do it without this power, Ollanius.'\n\n'Yet you must. You must give it up. Think with the wisdom of a god, then act with the courage of a man. If you don't, you will have become what you abhor. You'll be no better than Horus.'\n\n'No,' says Caecaltus Dusk. 'My king-'\n\n'Yes.'\n\nThey look around. Loken has walked forward to join them. He has removed his helm, and is staring, without flinching, at the mirrored blackness. He kneels before it, head bowed, Rubio's blade at his side, its tip in the dust. Traceries of blue energy writhe around the length of the exposed blade.\n\n'I am your servant, my Emperor,' he says. 'I am but a vessel of your strength. Like these men, I have come a long way to stand with you and fight the threat of Horus. On my journey, daemonkind, in its madness, showed me things I should never have seen. It revealed them to torment me. One of them was the scope of the trap my father had set for you.'\n\nThere is a faint crackle on the wind, the stirring of psykanic force, as though a great psychic power has effortlessly extended the merest, inquisitive fraction of itself. Rubio's blade buzzes more fiercely.\n\n'So,' says Caecaltus Dusk after a while, 'this is the final snare he laid for me. Thus, the first-found has made a grave error.'\n\n'My father does not care,' says Loken.\n\nDusk's head turns with a snap of baked sinews and regards Loken.\n\n'No, Garviel Loken. Those conjoined powers that meet in him do not care,' says Dusk. 'They do not care if Horus lives or dies, because he will have served his purpose as their instrument by dooming me. This was their goal from the very beginning.'\n\nLoken rises to his feet and stares back at the proconsul.\n\n'If I renounce the power, all is lost,' says Caecaltus. 'If we fight as men, we will lose.'\n\n'Then we lose,' says Loken. 'Better to fight daemons as men, than become them.'\n\n'Sometimes we must renounce the things that are dearest to us,' says Oll. 'Fundamental things, things that feel imperative. If we don't have the strength to adapt, then we have no strength at all.'\n\nHe smiles sadly, and reaches for the tiny golden symbol around his neck.\n\n'I have kept faith in a higher power,' he says. 'If that higher power proves wanting, then my faith is forlorn. I would rather recant it.'\n\nHe closes his eyes, head bowed. He lifts the little charm his wife left him to his lips and kisses it. John looks at him, wide-eyed. He reaches out an imploring hand.\n\n'It's all right, John,' Oll tells him with a melancholy smile. 'Really. If faith permits the existence of gods like this, then there should be no gods at all.'\n\nHe breaks the thin chain, then hurls the charm away.\n\nThere is silence for a moment. Dust, and crumbs of time, sift down over them, falling like sawdust.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk slowly stirs. With a dry creak, he begins to move. He takes one slow step forward, then another. The cured tendons of his right arm groan like old rope as he raises it and places his hand on Oll's left shoulder.\n\n'You were ever the most stubborn and principled of those who came to me, Ollanius,' he says. 'Your counsel was always hard to square. You did not simply agree with me because of who I was. I disliked you for that. I dislike you for it now.'\n\n'Truth is often hard to hear,' says Oll.\n\n'And harder to speak. From that, we may see its value. I have considered your counsel. I have, as you suggested, exercised the insight I now possess.'\n\n'You see the truth, then?' asks Oll.\n\n'I see the danger.'\n\n'You see the future?'\n\n'No,' murmurs the proconsul. 'For there is none there. It is a blank, waiting to be filled by a new plan.'\n\n'A plan that learns from past mistakes?' asks Oll.\n\n'Any other form of plan would be idiocy. Man grows through learning, and learns through growth. A king, made wiser through revelation, sharpens that wisdom through good counsel. A man such as that has always stood beside the Golden Throne. A man who was not afraid to gainsay. A man who had infinite patience. You are rightly afraid of all things in this cosmos, Ollanius, including me. But you have never been afraid of the truth.'\n\nOll hears a sharp, chiming sound, like the crunch of glass or the fracturing of crystal. The blue aura pulses. The mirrored face of the great black sphere is beginning to shoot and feather with cracks, spreading and multiplying rapidly.\n\n'Perhaps, then, things will be as they once were,' says Caecaltus Dusk. 'But this must be resolved first, before any future can be contemplated. Let this be ended, and death be damned.'\n\n8:xv\n\nA last repulse\n\n'Where is my Lord Lupercal?' asks Abaddon.\n\n'Where isn't he?' Erebus replies, with a blissful grin.\n\nAbaddon rests his sword against the Word Bearer's throat.\n\n'Where is he?'\n\n'Ezekyle,' says Erebus, unfazed by the blade and the pelting rain and the biting wind, 'I come to you in peace, and you threaten me with violence?'\n\n'You have a second to answer, before I gut you.'\n\nErebus sighs. 'You are such a disappointing soul, Ezekyle. So prosaic, I've always found. I wonder that your lord, my master, ever reckoned you so highly. The gods too, for they have marked you as special. You fret over detail, and ignore the wonder.'\n\n'Is that him?' Abaddon snaps, and points angrily at the guttering and baleful dark star that shimmers above the rainswept horizon. 'Is that why your kin flee in such mindless terror? Is that why those sons I've found are so broken-minded? What has he become?'\n\n'That is not him!' Erebus laughs. 'Our master, great Horus, is born anew. He is the vessel of Chaos admixed. He prepares his Court for the ceremonies that will mark this ascension. This is a great day, Ezekyle. This is the fruition of everything we have worked for.'\n\n'Where is he?' Abaddon snarls. 'Where is the Court-'\n\n'It is here, brother,' says Erebus. 'It is this place. This realm is his Court, this world, this starless heaven, this reality. We are pilgrims here, guests at his coronation. He is, as we speak, making the first of the sacrifices to honour the gods and thank them for his apotheosis.'\n\n'Then what is that?' Abaddon asks, pointing again at the menacing star.\n\n'That? That, Ezekyle, is the last glimmer of resistance offered by our foes. That is the False Emperor, trudging his way towards vainglorious defeat.'\n\nAbaddon lowers his blade. He stares at the distant view, the shadowed orb half-veiled in voidmist and ridge-backed storm-clouds. The mere sight of it turns his stomach. He can smell the power, the fury, the malevolence.\n\n'It looks like more than a glimmer, Apostle,' he says. 'It looks like the tumult of an angry god.'\n\n'It very nearly is.'\n\nErebus nods. The idea seems to delight him. He comes closer to Abaddon, slides an arm around the First Captain's shoulders, and drops his voice to a whisper.\n\n'Just now, Ezekyle,' he says, 'the False Emperor is the strongest being in our universe.'\n\n'What?'\n\n'Come now. You didn't think this would be easy, did you? At what point in this war has anything been easy? We have struggled, and we have bled, because the goal was worth it. We damn the False Emperor for his lies and his arrogance, but we should never underestimate his power. Ever. You know this, brother. He is, and always has been, a creature of immense force. He built the Imperium, Abaddon. He is the Emperor. Just because we hate him, we shouldn't forget that. None of us, not even Horus, could face him one-to-one. That's why we have prosecuted this war the way we have, chipping away at his reserves, piece by piece, turning or taking those he loves and depends "}
{"text":"it. We damn the False Emperor for his lies and his arrogance, but we should never underestimate his power. Ever. You know this, brother. He is, and always has been, a creature of immense force. He built the Imperium, Abaddon. He is the Emperor. Just because we hate him, we shouldn't forget that. None of us, not even Horus, could face him one-to-one. That's why we have prosecuted this war the way we have, chipping away at his reserves, piece by piece, turning or taking those he loves and depends upon, blinding him, surrounding him, dismantling his walls brick by brick. He had to be weakened before he could be killed.'\n\n'But you just said he's stronger now than-'\n\n'Hush and listen, Ezekyle. This siege, the final act, has pinned him and driven him, at last, into the open. It has forced him to fight. This strength you see, and it is a most terrible strength... It is the last defiance of a desperate man. The False Emperor has drawn upon the power of the warp in order to confront our master, for Horus has been growing stronger all the while. He has consumed so much power, Ezekyle, he is ascending to... well, godhood, just as you say. And this will be his undoing.'\n\n'How?' Abaddon breathes.\n\n'If he keeps the power,' Erebus chuckles, 'if he holds onto it and uses it, then the Triumph of Ruin is secured.'\n\n'I never pledged to secure the victory of the Chaos gods,' says Abaddon. 'That was not the oath we rallied to-'\n\n'But it was, Ezekyle, it always was. You swore to serve the Warmaster, and this was always his intent. You don't get a say in it.'\n\nIn the distance, thunder rumbles.\n\n'If that is truly the False Emperor, he will kill us all,' says Abaddon.\n\n'Small price,' replies Erebus.\n\n'How can you say that?'\n\n'Because I think it unlikely. The False Emperor is no fool. He understands the doom inherent in the power he has obtained. If his intellect prevails, he will let it go. If his arrogance prevails, and well it might, he will retain it and devastate all that he holds dear, including himself. But if he lets it go... Oh, Ezekyle. If he lets it go, he will come to face the great Horus weakened and diminished. If he lets it go, he will be choosing death.'\n\nAbaddon shakes off the Word Bearer's fraternal embrace. 'You did this...' he murmurs.\n\n'No, no,' says Erebus. 'We did this. All of us. I lit the spark, you led the armies. Horus framed the plan by which this victory has been accomplished. He built the trap, and it is sprung. Doom or death. The Emperor loses either way.'\n\n'What do we do?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'We rejoice, Ezekyle,' says Erebus. 'And we compose, with all haste, our forces for a final repulse. If the Emperor relinquishes this power, and decides to fight, he will rally what remains of his supporters to stand with him. The loyalist cause is in tatters, and greatly diminished, but they will fight to the end. Just as we would. We must prepare to protect the Court.'\n\nAbaddon nods.\n\n'My life for the Lupercal,' he says.\n\nFar away, the sound of thunder has grown louder. The air splits with a cataclysmic detonation. The distant dark star breaks, vanishes, and is replaced by a brilliant flash of light. The radiance rushes outwards, until the entire landscape is stark white in the glare.\n\n'You see, Ezekyle?' Erebus declares, laughing. 'As I suspected. The Emperor has chosen death.'\n\nAbaddon shields his eyes against the light.\n\n'The day will not save him,' he says, 'for we own the night.'\n\n'Oh, Ezekyle,' says Erebus. 'We own everything.'\n\n8:xvi\n\nFragments\n\nThe substance of creation shudders. Materia and immateria vibrate in shock. The electrons spinning around the protonic nuclei of every atom in the realspace universe stutter, and briefly cease to obey their mysterious quantum obligations. The power of the Dark King is expelled and scattered, pouring back into the empyrean from whence it came, carrying with it flotsam and jetsam: the broken prophecies and driftwood predictions that brought it hence. The Neverborn wail, en masse, their whispers turned in on themselves, twisted back into lies and cackled falsehoods; their future, so assured, suddenly untruthed. The malison of the Dark King passes from the material galaxy, and back into the simmering caskets of myth.\n\nFor this age, at least.\n\nThe despair of daemonkind is short-lived. As the glare spreads, and begins to fade, their distress turns to glee. They perceive another victory, not the Dark King's magnificent and absolute abolition, but still one they have long yearned for. The fall of mankind. The Triumph of Ruin. The investiture of Horus Lupercal as Empyreal Majesty. The binding of Chaos, undivided, into one peerless vessel.\n\nAn end, and a death.\n\nAt the epicentre of release, figures stumble and fall in the searing flash of psychic power that bursts from the Master of Mankind. The light consumes them. Ollanius Persson, John Grammaticus, Garviel Loken and LE 2 tumble over in the dust, blinded, as the black mirror-shell of the sphere fractures and explodes. They fall in foetal positions, carried over by the avalanche of ejected power.\n\nSo does Caecaltus Dusk, hammered to his knees.\n\nBut the light does not kill them. In the last seconds of his godhood, the Emperor channels the force he is disposing. He does not do so out of sentiment or charity. He needs allies. He needs every last man. He cocoons those who have come to him in his aura, and lets it protect them against the ravening psychic winds. He cups them as gently as eggshells in his palm. This is not how they will die.\n\nIt is too late for the other Sentinels, those valiant warriors of the Hetaeron that he burned out in the extremity of his vastation. Their rigid bodies fly apart like kindling in the blast, scattering burned bones and scraps of armour, disintegrating in the out-rushing force until, afterwards, only scraps remain in the smoking dust, the vestiges of feet and lower legs, a shin, a knee, like the stumps of felled trees.\n\nToo late for them. They cannot be brought back from death. But for the others, one final gift of life and renewal, the parting gift of an abdicating deity. Oll wakes in the billowing dust to find his countless aches and bruises gone, his weariness fled, his old uniform clean and new, his rifle as gleaming as it was when it was first manufactured. Loken rises to his knees, the terrible burden of his visions mercifully diluted to restore focus to his tortured mind. Leetu's wound heals, the sheared armour remade. John, blinking, tears the bandages from a face no longer mutilated with a hand no longer useless. There is a pervading scent of osmogenesia, the blessing of the Emperor.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk, the last Hetaeron, rises to his feet, his Aquilon war plate glinting, his bones re-fleshed, and his flesh restored. A bright sigil glows upon his chestplate.\n\nHe turns and sees that, where once doom sat, an aching black sphere, now a figure stands alone, its cloak stirring in the wasteland wind, white dust eddying around it. A figure in gold plate. A king. His master.\n\nMere mortal now, divinity cast aside, but still a being of perpetual power.\n\nThe golden giant draws his warblade.\n\nThe last battle is near.\n\nThe releasing discharge of immaterial power spreads out, a rolling shockwave across the transmuted realm. Great tracts of the Inevitable City are wracked by the expanding empyric hurricane, and thousands of square kilometres of the transmundane sprawl are further disintegrated to dust and ash. The dissected and refabricated hulk of the Vengeful Spirit rocks in the swell on its psykanic moorings. In what material parts of Imperial Terra remain intact, every vox- and comm-system comes to life for a few moments to scream the shrill, magnetic death-hymn of condemned stars, and they continue to bleat and wail long after the shockwave has passed.\n\nIt is a venting of theandric energy, yes, an exhalation, a voluntary shedding of unwise potency. But it is also a call. Just as he turned a morsel of that expelled force into a salving benediction for those at his side, so the Emperor, with that same last measure of his divinity, turns another fraction of the psychic charge into a call to arms, a summons to all and any who are still alive to hear him and close enough to act.\n\nIn the fifty-ninth second of the fight, the steadfast star that has been guiding them blinks, stutters, and goes out.\n\nConstantin does not see it disappear. He and his surviving warriors are halfway up a ravine of flesh that transects the rotting meatscape, assailed on all sides by leaping, squirming things that shrill like over-boiled kettles and hiss like punctured gas canisters. The savage momentum of the fight has not decreased at all. They are caked in stinking ooze, stabbing and bursting the Neverborn shapes that irrupt from the carrion cliffs around them, translucent horrors that rupture their way out of the blistered cliff-skin like hatching parasites, and spring at the Companions trailing mucus and long, cartilaginous tails. Most still have the membrane of their birth-cauls and egg-sacs clinging to them, ravenous from the instant of birth, intent on learning how to murder before they learn to walk.\n\nThree of them bring down Diocletian Coros. Constantin leaps to his tribune's aid, hacking the writhing forms off him, wrenching at their soft, yolk-wet carapaces to break their grip. He feels, rather than sees, the star go out. He feels the instant of cold, and then the suffocating darkness engulfs them again, as deep, as impenetrable as before.\n\nBlind turmoil follows, a sightless frenzy of impacts, liquid spatter, inhuman squealing and pain. They are lost, he thinks. They are lost now. He has gone, His light departed, and they will die in this forsaken gorge as hopelessly as they began.\n\nThen a shockwave of light spills over them. It throws them all down, tumbling, and the hideous forms assaulting them disintegrate, screaming as the light discorporates them into a drizzle of liquescent filth.\n\nThe shockwave ebbs. As Constantin"}
{"text":" before.\n\nBlind turmoil follows, a sightless frenzy of impacts, liquid spatter, inhuman squealing and pain. They are lost, he thinks. They are lost now. He has gone, His light departed, and they will die in this forsaken gorge as hopelessly as they began.\n\nThen a shockwave of light spills over them. It throws them all down, tumbling, and the hideous forms assaulting them disintegrate, screaming as the light discorporates them into a drizzle of liquescent filth.\n\nThe shockwave ebbs. As Constantin and his remaining Custodes climb to their feet, they can see fluttering tatters of cerulean ectoplasm and skeins of psychic residue carried overhead in the haze of light like torn linen.\n\nConstantin starts to claw his way up the slope at the head of the fistuline trench, using his spear as a staff to steady his way. The others follow. He can hear something. A neurosynergetic murmur. A call.\n\nA voice.\n\nAt the crest of the slope, the fleshy ground, fluted like the whorls of brain tissue, shelves down into a bleached wasteland of white dust and tumbled ruins, the way that shingle gives out into sand on a wind-drawn beach. Sections of the flagship's blasted superstructure, metal rather than meat, jut out of the dust, and in places form archways or even partial ceilings. The sky, for there is now a sky, is a low swathe of voidmist, sickly green, and lightning zags and blinks along the low horizon.\n\nHe can hear the voice clearly. Simple, sweet words carved out of raw thought, echoing in his head. A summoning. A last call to battle, resolved yet plaintive. A war cry.\n\nThose who may hear me, join me now.\n\nConstantin glances at his companions, but he knows they are all listening too. He grips his spear and leads the advance.\n\nThey are sixty seconds into the fight.\n\nTaerwelt Ikasati deflects the traitor's sword, then drives his blade into his enemy's chest. A killing stroke, but this Son of Horus refuses to die. Roaring, blood spraying from the filters of his helm, the traitor flails, striking hilt and pommel against Ikasati's shoulder and head. The Blood Angel's sword is wedged fast, and he cannot pull it free, but he refuses to let it go, even to escape the battering close assault.\n\nFinally, the blade unfixes, but it comes free so suddenly, Ikasati slips on the gore-wet deck. He slams onto his back. The Son of Horus, his war plate slick with blood, lurches forward to impale Ikasati before he can rise.\n\nA bolt-round removes his head.\n\nRaldoron hauls the corpse off Ikasati's legs. 'Alive, Sanguinary?' the First Captain growls.\n\n'Still,' Ikasati admits as he gets to his feet.\n\nThe air is crimped with smoke, and every surface is splashed with blood. The calamitous fight is all but done, and the Great Atrium finally taken. The Blood Angels of Sanguinius' Anabasis company have cleared the chamber and miraculously prevailed against a far larger force of the Warmaster's best. The atrium is a ruined shell, piled with the bodies of the slain. Ikasati can't tell if they have killed all of their adversaries, or if some have managed to flee in the face of the IX's onslaught.\n\nHe marvels. The atrium was an enclosed killing space, and the enemy numbers huge. A single company, even of Blood Angels, should not have been able to triumph, but they have.\n\nIt was that, or die, thinks Ikasati. The simple arithmetic of desperation. They were never going to back off, or retreat, or fall back to fight another day when conditions favoured them better. Once they had committed, they fought until death stopped them, for there is no other day, and there never will be.\n\nBut Ikasati, bone-weary and carrying a dozen wounds, feels no pride in the accomplishment. Concern eclipses any glory. He knows Raldoron feels the same.\n\nThe inner hatches, which their primarch lord forced open, and which closed again as soon as Sanguinius passed through them, remain firmly sealed. The black adamantine, resolutely solid, seems to sneer at them.\n\n'Open them!' Raldoron yells to Furio and his Terminators.\n\nHow long since their lord passed through them? Five minutes? Ten? An hour? Time has lost its form entirely. It feels, to Ikasati, that they have been fighting in this bloodied chamber for the whole of his life, an endless purgatory of carnage. How long has Sanguinius been cut off and alone?\n\nRaldoron draws up the company, what remains of it, to prosecute the area beyond as soon as the hatches are open. A shield wall, with assault squads ready on its heels.\n\n'If they won't open-' Ikasati says.\n\n'They will open,' Raldoron snaps.\n\n'But if they won't-'\n\n'The Bright Angel opened them, Ikasati,' Raldoron replies. 'They can be opened.'\n\n'We are not the Bright Angel, captain,' Ikasati replies, very calmly. It has always been his role to supply cool wisdom when others are overheated by combat or urgency. 'The hatches opened for him, and then closed again, as though of their own will.'\n\n'A trap?'\n\n'This entire vessel is a trap,' Ikasati says. 'It is as deceitful as its master, and obedient to his vile will. We may be wasting our efforts. If there is another way through-'\n\nRaldoron nods grudgingly. 'I have Sacre's men, and Maheldaron's, scouring this chamber for other exit points. The bastard Sons of Horus that fled from us must have gone somewhere.'\n\n'My point, First Captain,' says Ikasati. 'We are fighting this ship as much as we are fighting aboard it.'\n\nRaldoron makes to reply, but they are suddenly bathed in light. Some transmitted shock shivers the deck beneath them, and stirs the hanging smoke. It is unmistakably a backwash of fierce psykanic power.\n\nAnd in it, far off, they both hear the Emperor's call.\n\nIt is the first hint since their arrival on board that the Emperor is alive, let alone present.\n\n'He calls to us,' Raldoron murmurs. 'And if He calls, then He needs us.'\n\nIkasati catches his arm and points to the black hatches where Furio's men are toiling and struggling. Though they are sealed fast, a thin glow of blue light is diffusing through the crack where the adamantine doors meet.\n\n'Get them open!' Raldoron bellows, surging forwards. 'Get them open now!'\n\nThere is always a voice calling her name. Suddenly, it is piercing.\n\nKeeler gasps and collapses, falling against Sigismund. He catches her, and cradles her. Some wave of tangled light, like the outwash of a distant detonation, sweeps across the advancing pilgrim column. It lifts dust from the cracked copper soil of the desert and flares across the low mantle of dark clouds above. As soon as it passes, thousands of the lost and dispossessed souls in the river of refugees begin to wail and cry out.\n\nBeside them, Lord Zhi-Meng falls to the ground in a tonic-clonic fit, trying to weep with eyes that can no longer cry.\n\nSigismund ignores the mass of voices calling out and lamenting behind him. He lifts Keeler up, and lays her on the track guard of the nearest armoured vehicle. She stirs, and her eyelids flutter open.\n\n'Did you hear that?' she asks, her voice fragile.\n\n'Yes,' he replies.\n\n'He called out, and then His voice fell silent.'\n\n'Yes,' says Sigismund. 'He called for help.'\n\nHe wants to comfort her, but he doesn't know how comforting works. What comfort can be conveyed by a plated gauntlet? He can't even comfort himself. He has never felt so detached from things, so remote, so far away from the battles and moments that matter.\n\nHe has never felt so estranged.\n\nA call comes in from Huscarl Artolun, leading the outriders at the head of the pilgrimage. Sigismund looks up, his visor increasing magnification in a series of rapid, leaping resolutions.\n\nA force is gathering ahead to block their path. Two kilometres out, at the foot of a bank of ragged, amber mesas. It's half-hidden by the desert haze, but it's brigade strength at the very least. That strength is waiting for them, patient and confident in its ability to stop and slaughter them all, no matter their teeming numbers.\n\nIt is an army of Traitor Astartes. Sigismund sees their lank and obscene banners swaying in the wilderness wind.\n\nDeath Guard.\n\nOn the last day of his last year in the desert, the star goes out.\n\nHe doesn't know, or care, how long he's been there, or how many centuries have trickled past. Time seems to have slipped away from him, like sand through an hourglass, as though all this sand in all this desert surrounding him has trickled away. Time has taken everything away with it: his purpose, his self, the lustre of his armour, even his name.\n\nBut when the star goes out, it seems to mean something. It has been his only companion for the longest time, a steadfast thing that kept him going all the while it shone.\n\nNow it has disappeared, and there is just him, and the wall, and the desert.\n\nHe gets up, and steps out of the shadow under the wall. He stares at the sky. The star's gone. It hasn't moved, or set. It has simply vanished. That signifies something. His slow, tired thoughts recognise that much. The star was there, and now it's gone, and that means something.\n\nHe isn't sure what. But he feels it means more than the red's dry and constant whispers that seep at him through the wall every hour of every day. Those words are meaningless, the din of war that sometimes also comes is meaningless too. But the star...\n\nHis sword had long since worn away. He uses his fingertips now, steadily eroding the plasteel tips and knuckle guards as he scratches his plans on the wall. Another plan. Then another. They never seem to be quite right. He can't remember what he is supposed to be planning for.\n\nThe only thing that doesn't seem to have worn away is his need. His need to let go. To give in. To finish the sentence that the whispers behind the wall keep urging him to complete.\n\nWho is the blood for? Just say it.\n\nHe wants to. It would be so easy. He wouldn't need a plan then. He wouldn't have to plan anything. Just say it, and give in, and let go.\n\nIt's so very tempting.\n\nHe thinks, in fact, that he might finally say it today. What has he got to lose? He can't "}
{"text":"upposed to be planning for.\n\nThe only thing that doesn't seem to have worn away is his need. His need to let go. To give in. To finish the sentence that the whispers behind the wall keep urging him to complete.\n\nWho is the blood for? Just say it.\n\nHe wants to. It would be so easy. He wouldn't need a plan then. He wouldn't have to plan anything. Just say it, and give in, and let go.\n\nIt's so very tempting.\n\nHe thinks, in fact, that he might finally say it today. What has he got to lose? He can't remember, but it can't be much. He was going to say it, but then the star went out, and that seemed to matter. It unsettled him. Any change is unsettling, for so very little has changed over the centuries.\n\nHe sighs, confused that he doesn't quite know why he is confused. He clambers back into the cool shadow under the wall, and crouches down. He starts to scratch out another plan. The gauntlet on his right hand is beginning to fall apart, rivets lost and mail-links frayed. One more plan. One more. Maybe the star will come back?\n\nOne more plan.\n\nHe starts his recitation again.\n\n'Around that time, it was written, in the Ethics of the Nicomach, that \"we make war that we may live in peace\". This simple framework for the morality of justified war-'\n\nThe whispers start up again, hissing and growling from the other side of the wall. He smiles. It still amuses him how annoyed the red gets when he talks this way.\n\nHe is about to continue when the whispers change. He feels giddy, as though some shock has passed through him. He blinks, and realises that the whispers have cut off, as suddenly as the star went out.\n\nThere is another voice. It's a different voice, not the whispering one. It's soft at first, and he senses that it's not soft because it's quiet, it's soft because it's coming from far away. It's not something crouched on the other side of the wall, hissing at him through the stone. It is far more distant than that, though it is coming through the wall.\n\nHe frowns. He thinks he recognises it. It feels like a voice he knows, a voice he's heard before. He's not sure where. It seems to be calling to him for help.\n\nBut he can't help. He can't get through the wall. Maybe it doesn't matter.\n\nMaybe-\n\nMaybe if he makes a new plan, it will show him how to get through the wall. Or over it. Or something. He starts to pick and scratch again, clawing with his fingertips. No more recitation now. There are no more whispers to annoy.\n\nThis, he thinks as he scrapes his fingers until they bleed, this will be. One of these plans, one of these schemes, one of them will work. Maybe this one. I will break out and run, like so. I will be somewhere else. I will be able to hear the voice properly, and understand what it wants. Maybe I will be able to help. There will be other people there, waiting for me. These are the weapons they will be carrying. This - as his fingers move from scratched line to scratched line - this will be the path I will follow to escape. This is where it will end, this cross here. This will be my destination-\n\nThe plan seems no more viable than any of the other millions he has made. He gouges the final cross - a simple X - anyway, just to finish the plan before attempting another.\n\nThe stone wobbles as he makes his mark upon it.\n\nHe touches it again. It rocks very slightly, like a loose tooth. He pushes it harder, stirring it in its place. Dust puffs out around it.\n\nThis is where it will end, this cross here.\n\nHe feels his heart rate rising, abruptly, for the first time in centuries. He starts to claw at the stone, scrabbling with both hands, working to prise it free. It is set stubbornly, for the wall has always been stubborn. No stone in it has ever shown signs of movement or flaw.\n\nHe balls his fist, and hammers at it until his hand hurts, then he claws again, working around the edges of the block, trying to find the fissures and seams, trying to locate the hidden weakness that makes it wobble. Something, somehow. He'll find it. He'll find a way to break it. He'll find a way through. He's suddenly sure that's the thing he's good at.\n\nHe claws. He punches the stone. He rakes at it, until his exposed fingernails are torn and peeling, and blood drips.\n\nThe block comes loose. It just suddenly gives, tumbling out into his hands. His cross is still marked upon it.\n\nHe looks at the hole he's made. A shaft of light is beaming through it, the light of somewhere else. He can hear the voice more clearly, louder, calling to him. Calling for help.\n\nHe reaches into the hole, coughing at the dust that billows up, and tries to tug away the blocks either side of the one he has pulled out. The wall is as stubborn and strong as ever.\n\nBut so is he. Strong as ever. Strong as his father-\n\nHe wrenches with all the grip and force he can muster. Blocks slide out. Two, then three. Light pours in across him, piercing the shadow under the wall where he has sheltered. More blocks fall away. There's dust everywhere. He realises, almost too late, that the wall is giving way, and he stumbles back to avoid being buried in the collapse.\n\nA section of the wall caves in with a rumble and clatter of freed stone. Blocks thump and bounce in the sand around him.\n\nHe doesn't hesitate. He clambers over the rubble, stones still falling, and heaves himself through the gap.\n\nOn the other side, he stands for a moment, uncertain. Dust swirls around him like smoke. Behind him, a great deal more of the wall subsides and collapses.\n\nIt's cold here. He can no longer hear the voice, but it doesn't matter, because he remembers what it said. The sky is low, and heavy, and grey. There's no desert any more, just rubble and broken stone. It's a city. It's a city, somewhere. He doesn't know its name.\n\nBut he knows other things, things that were walled up and hidden from him. He remembers things he used to know, things that used to be important, and perhaps are now important again.\n\nHe says the first of them aloud.\n\n'I am Rogal Dorn, Praetorian, primarch of the Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding.'\n\nThe close darkness trembles. A tremor runs through the floor, and several old volumes tumble off nearby shelves so suddenly, it makes the archivist cry out in fear.\n\nMauer glances at Sindermann. They see the anxiety in each other's eyes. Collection 888 is deep-buried beneath the Hall of Leng, in the foundations of the Sanctum Imperialis. If they've felt a tremor down here, the whole Palace must have shaken.\n\nAhriman gasps abruptly, making the poor archivist start again. The sorcerer is muttering to himself. He seems perplexed and uneasy.\n\n'What?' asks Mauer. She's not afraid of him any more, not really. Nothing compares to the terror of the future he has revealed to them. Nothing matters any more.\n\n'Something,' Ahriman says, his mind racing elsewhere. 'Something just changed. A reversal. A shift.'\n\nHe looks at them sharply, his blue eyes fierce.\n\n'Did you hear that?' he asked.\n\n'No,' says Mauer.\n\n'Hear what?' Sindermann asks.\n\nAhriman ignores them. He looks back at the reading table and, lips drawn back from his black gums, hisses through his teeth. The sound makes all the cards fly up into the air in a long, rippling arc. They land, one by one, in his outstretched palm. Another nod makes them flutter and shuffle themselves in his open hand.\n\nWordless, Ahriman begins to deal another spread, face up. Each card lands on the tabletop, perfectly aligned. It is the same disastrous spread as before, though now, as it seems to Sindermann, some of the pictures seem to shift and move, as though alive. His skin crawls. Despite the thorough shuffle, the order is inexorable. The Harlequin of discordia, The Eye, The Great Hoste, The Shatter'd World, The Labyrinthine Path, The Throne reversed, The Hulk, The Moon, The Martyr, The Monster, The Lightning Tower, and The Emperor.\n\nAhriman turns the last. It is no longer The Dark King, the twin of the Emperor's card.\n\nIt is the indicator of fast-approaching loss for the Imperium of Man. The Despoiler. The unequivocal symbol of ending.\n\nThe shockwave spills out across the whole world. It bathes Terra in its churning fury and, for a brief moment, the sky is as bright as day.\n\nIt boils through the choked heavens above the final fortress, frothing the immense pall of smoke with its sickly aurora. In the stricken Sanctum below, few notice it pass. They are too far gone, too deeply enveloped in the brutality of the last battlefield. Those still true to the Emperor are fighting for their lives, their backs to irrelevant walls, their faces bloody, enduring daemonic wrath and sleeting las-fire, as they make war with the last broken fragments of courage they can salvage. Their screaming foes, a great host, are too blind with rage and glee, berserk in their psychopathic lust.\n\nBut most feel it. A prickle of the skin, an ache in the soul, a nameless sense of dread that sweeps upon them suddenly where there seemed no greater capacity for fear. It spurs some to even more intense effort, firing the resolve of loyal warriors, or goading the murderous thirst of traitors. In others, it triggers despair. Some simply fall, stone dead.\n\nThe Neverborn hordes feel it the most keenly. They shriek and convulse as it passes, burned by the invisible wind. Some weep tears of blood, others de-manifest entirely, their forms rendered back to empyric foam. But they bear the agony, and delight in it, for the pain they suffer will be brief, and the triumph it heralds will be eternal.\n\nThe Emperor has forsaken his last advantage. He has squandered his only chance. It is no longer a case that he must die. Now, he will.\n\nVulkan feels the earth sway beneath his feet. He feels the rock of the world, that mineral strength he has always trusted, unsteadied. He looks up, and sees the great electro-flambeaux of the Throne Room swing on their long chains.\n\n'What was that?' he asks. Those around him hurry to discover the answer. Fear has choked the adytum chamber, a swoll"}
{"text":"l be eternal.\n\nThe Emperor has forsaken his last advantage. He has squandered his only chance. It is no longer a case that he must die. Now, he will.\n\nVulkan feels the earth sway beneath his feet. He feels the rock of the world, that mineral strength he has always trusted, unsteadied. He looks up, and sees the great electro-flambeaux of the Throne Room swing on their long chains.\n\n'What was that?' he asks. Those around him hurry to discover the answer. Fear has choked the adytum chamber, a swollen, coiling, living thing that, though silent, seems louder than the screams of those tithed to the Sanction. The caskets containing the psycho-able are still being brought in, but there are very few left. The reserves are all but exhausted.\n\n'An energetic pulse of unscalable strength, my Lord of Drakes,' says Abidemi as he rejoins his primarch clutching a transcript from the Concillium adepts. 'It shook both materia and immateria-'\n\n'Source?' asks Vulkan.\n\n'Unknown, my lord.'\n\n'Nature?'\n\nThe Draaksward shakes his head sadly.\n\nVulkan whispers a curse. He is tired of not knowing. 'What did it say?' he asks.\n\n'Say, my lord?' Abidemi replies. 'How do you mean \"say\"...?'\n\n'It felt like a voice,' says Vulkan. 'A great cry, bidding me to... to...'\n\nHe falls silent. Casryn and the proconsul Uzkarel are approaching.\n\n'Enemy forces are reported within a kilometre of the adytum,' the proconsul says simply.\n\n'Prepare for repulse, proconsul,' Vulkan says. He pauses, then smiles sadly at Uzkarel. 'My apologies, Sentinel,' he says. 'That order was redundant. I know full well you have been ready forever.'\n\nUzkarel nods, a tiny mark of respect.\n\n'We will prepare for repulse, my lord,' he says.\n\nThe adepts make further report, my lord, Casryn signs. The empyric anomaly they have been monitoring-\n\n'What of it?'\n\nIt is gone, her hands say. It vanished, or dissipated, nanoseconds before that shockwave.\n\nVulkan stares at her, waiting for her hands to tell him more.\n\nThey cannot explain it, she signs.\n\nVulkan draws a deep breath and strides away from them.\n\n'My lord?' Abidemi calls out after him.\n\nAs he strides towards the heat of the Throne, Vulkan raises his warhammer and sets it, ready, across one shoulder. He comes as close as he dares to the inferno, closer than is prudent. He stares up at the tiny, immolating figure on the Throne, squinting against the glare.\n\n'Hold on,' he whispers. 'Hold on, I beg you. Hold on with whatever will you have left. Just a little longer, Sigillite. That's all he needs. You heard him too, didn't you? I know you did. You heard him too.'\n\nI heard him too. Half-blind with pain, I heard him, and I saw him.\n\nI see Vulkan below me, at the foot of the steps, calling up at me. I see his mouth moving, but I cannot make out his words.\n\nBut I heard my King-of-Ages, so very far away. I heard his summons. It was as urgent as a solar flare and as clear as glass, a resonating echo that must surely have been heard by the farthest star.\n\nIt fortifies me. It makes me focus what little I have left. If he can show such courage, then so can I.\n\nSo can I.\n\nSuch courage. Such preternatural strength of will. Such a terrible choice to make, what dear Rogal would call a 'lose\/lose scenario'. He gave it up, that power, that... divinity. I don't know why, or if there even was some particular cause or motivating reason. Perhaps my old friend simply recognised it was too much. But no one can ever doubt his commitment to the species.\n\nHe had that power, that impossible strength, and he cast it away. It was the only way, the only possible way, to guarantee the first-found's defeat, but it was also a supreme curse. The Dark King would have won this day, and then lost everything, ever after. So the once-god Emperor must fend for himself, alone.\n\nThere is no certainty, no surety. I fear he will lose. I have seen the Lupercal, and I know the power he commands. I doubt anything can halt him now.\n\nIt would have been so easy to use that theandry, to wield that certainty. To own the power of a god, and bow Horus to his knees, to crush him entirely and end his menace. But that certainty was also doom.\n\nBetter one doom than another, I suppose. Better the devil you know, and we know this devil Lupercal too well. Better to die trying than fail in success. In such positions, the 'lose\/lose', Rogal was always so calm. When there was no good choice, he would assess, and choose the least bad, and leverage it into triumph. Sometimes, that meant accepting the appearance of defeat, a battle lost, and only years afterwards would a positive outcome become apparent. Rogal played the long game. How long will this one last? I wonder. 'Defeat,' he used to say, 'is only defeat if you accept it.'\n\nI wonder if my old friend is at last beginning to learn from his sons. I remember, at first, he thought there was nothing they could teach him. They were merely instruments he had made, tools fit for purpose, proxies that could labour and suffer on his behalf. They were made to spare him effort and pain. He told me that the primarch sons had been born to bear his worst experiences in his stead. It seems heartless to think of it that way now, but I am at death's gate and I do not have the strength to frame my thoughts in a more tactful fashion. I can only be blunt and honest. They were meant to die for him, if the need arose.\n\nBut they have grown. They are more than instruments now. For better or for worse, they have flourished, each in his own way, according to the properties, characters and free will my king allowed them. They have walked their own paths, in their own ways, and carved their own legacies, some for the benefit of man, others to the detriment of all. Each one of them, in the end, has become his own person.\n\nThere is much to admire in them, even the very worst of them, who reneged on the bonds of blood and turned against us. Such is the way with sons. They are shining souls and, latterly, I think my king has come to recognise that. They have much to teach us. Even a father can learn from his children. The restless fortitude of Jaghatai. The cunning of Alpharius. The confidence of Roboute. The dauntless heart of Mortarion, afraid of nothing, not even death. The way that Russ trained anger to be utterly loyal, while Angron enslaved anger so it could not master him. The patient resolve of Rogal, willing to make, abandon, and remake his plans, again and again, over and over, until he has refined the one that will work, unafraid to redraft and change his scheme.\n\nYes, I think my old friend has learned that at least. He has learned, from his Praetorian son, that there is always a better plan, and that patience will lead you to it.\n\nFor my King-of-Ages has done more than divest himself of godhood. In that shockwave of warp light, I saw something else, something perhaps only I was in a position to see. He has cast aside a fragment of himself.\n\nMy lord and friend has broken off a part of his soul. He has amputated that portion of himself that contains almost all of his hope, loyalty and compassion, for such things will become a hindrance when he faces the Lupercal. Those qualities might stay his hand, or make him hesitate if he is ultimately obliged to kill.\n\nAnd if he is obliged to kill his son, then those qualities would afterwards, and inevitably, drive him to self-hatred and regret, and condemn him to the same, embittered path as Horus. He has excised those precious human aspects to further steel himself against the pain of what will come after, and the mandatory atrocities he will have to countenance in order to rebuild the Imperium. He has set those frail and cardinal virtues adrift on the tides of the empyrean so that they will not immobilise him.\n\nAnd in the hope that one day, he will be able to reclaim them, and be whole again.\n\nI watch that jettisoned fragment as it drifts into the void, just one more spark from this world-bonfire. All his hope, his mercy, his grace, his love, cast into the lightless tracts of space and time. That fragile asterism will, as cosmic ages turn, slowly grow by a coalescence of emotion and belief, just as the powers of Chaos grow.\n\nIt luminesces briefly, just a speck of hermetic fire against the shrouded pinpricks of the Milky Way, like an infant sun or a child star, and then it is gone, and lost from view.\n\nI am profoundly struck by his sacrifice. I would weep if I could. I would weep for my friend. He has done what is necessary for the greater future, and left himself ready for this atemporal moment. I see him still. I can just make him out. His steadfast radiance has occulted. It has dimmed and almost gone, but he is shining still. He is hardened for war, a joyless aspect, a figure of pitiless gold, more ready for the callous needs of this ending than ever he was when he rose in majesty from the throne.\n\nHe strides, relentless and resolved, towards the final meeting.\n\nThe hurtling maul catches the Angel across his left pauldron, and turns him in the air. A glancing blow. Sanguinius goes with the momentum, and lands in a sliding stance, ready to loft again before the enraged first-found can heft a more accurate blow.\n\nBut the impact of his agile landing is echoed by a deeper, more profound tremor that rattles the deck plates. A pressure-wave of light bursts through the Court, briefly banishing the shadows of the debased cathedral, and silencing the daemon whispers. The light glints across Horus and, caught off guard, he staggers back two paces.\n\nThe light passes and fades as fast as it came, but they have both heard the cry woven into it.\n\nHorus Lupercal straightens up. He scowls, and spits bile-black blood. Sanguinius is smiling at him.\n\n'He is coming,' Sanguinius says. 'You could not mistake that voice, or its intent.'\n\n'Let Him,' the Warmaster growls back.\n\nSanguinius flies at him with such sudden and ferocious speed, Horus Lupercal has barely time to move. The Angel rains blows upon him, across his head, his throat, his ch"}
{"text":"o paces.\n\nThe light passes and fades as fast as it came, but they have both heard the cry woven into it.\n\nHorus Lupercal straightens up. He scowls, and spits bile-black blood. Sanguinius is smiling at him.\n\n'He is coming,' Sanguinius says. 'You could not mistake that voice, or its intent.'\n\n'Let Him,' the Warmaster growls back.\n\nSanguinius flies at him with such sudden and ferocious speed, Horus Lupercal has barely time to move. The Angel rains blows upon him, across his head, his throat, his chest. Encarmine cleaves the Warmaster's scalp, opens the line of his jaw, and severs the bunched pipework at the base of his neck. Blood hoses out, jetting into the stale air, and Horus roars as he stumbles aside. Sanguinius allows no time for respite or riposte. He swings his peerless blade with both hands in a wide and scything slice that rips through Lupercal's midsection, and opens plate, sub-armour, flesh and meat down to the bone. Horus sinks onto one knee, panting and gasping, as steam and pitch-black blood pumps out of him. Entrails protrude. Haematemesis chokes him.\n\n'Stay down,' says Sanguinius, sword raised. 'Do you want to be alive to greet him, or would you rather be spared that shame?'\n\nHorus aspirates blood; a cough or a laugh, it is hard to tell which.\n\n'Stay down, brother,' Sanguinius urges. 'Out of my love for you, I will grant you a measure of mercy. Please. I can make it quick and painless.'\n\n'There is no mercy here,' says Horus Lupercal.\n\n8:xvii\n\nUntil we meet again\n\nIt wasn't supposed to end like this. You, on your knees, eviscerated, gasping for breath. Him, standing over you, so noble and just, his sword raised in both hands, ready to strike.\n\nSanguinius looks down at you, over his raised shoulder. A fractional pause, space enough for a last chance. You see the pity in his gaze, the sorrow, the longing. He's still hoping for a different answer.\n\nHe won't get one.\n\nYou can see his disbelief. You can see him thinking, It wasn't supposed to end like this.\n\nTime's up. The pause ends. He brings the sword down. He's so fast, you don't even see it coming. The perfect execution stroke. The most precise, most merciful, most important sword-stroke he will ever deliver.\n\nBut it will not land.\n\nWorldbreaker's haft stops Encarmine dead.\n\nThe jarring shock travels back through the blade, through his arms, and through him. It jolts him backwards even as the sparks of contact are still dancing.\n\nAstonishment blinks in his eyes.\n\nHe swings again, a hastier blow, his arms like lead from the trauma of the blocking impact. Your Talon fends the blade away.\n\nNow he tries a lancing thrust fuelled by mounting desperation. You catch his sword against the head of your maul, and flip the stroke aside.\n\nThat look on his face. It's gratifying. He can't believe you're on your feet. He can't understand why your wounds aren't slowing you down. He can't comprehend where your fluid speed is suddenly coming from.\n\nIt was always there. You're just not holding back any more.\n\nYou let him come at you. Blow after blow, each one a death stroke, each one an exemplar of the swordsman's art. Even in despair, his talent doesn't abandon him. None of them work. You bat them away as they come, with maul, then Talon, then maul again. You want to give him a moment to let the despair really sink in.\n\nIt wasn't supposed to end like this. That's what he thought. Well, it was never going to. You relished the challenge, but the contest is over.\n\nYou can see he understands this. Besides, he has demonstrated that he isn't going to change his mind either. He won't bend to your will. You thought he might, but he won't. Such a pity. Such a waste.\n\nAnd so ungrateful. You offered him everything. Everything. He spurned you. He declined your gift. Graceless, thankless wretch. No one does that to you.\n\nNeither of you is playing any more. You don't think he ever was, not really, not the way you were, but there was still a sense of restraint, as though his abiding belief in you was pulling his blows in the hope that you might repent.\n\nWhatever may have been the case, he's not playing now. He's bent on killing you. For real. He wants to kill you more than he wants to save himself. He is attacking, not defending. It appears he still thinks he's invincible.\n\nHe is not. He is nothing like invincible and nowhere near invulnerable, as he is about to discover. The prophecy stands. The dreams were real. Your favourite brother should have heeded them. Fate is ordained, and it demands payment. Everyone pays, Sanguinius, some in a moment, some for the rest of their lives. There are no loopholes, no exceptions.\n\nHe thought he'd found a sub-clause in the logic of fate's contract that would allow him to live. The dreams told him, plainly, that he would die the day he faced you, but he convinced himself that this did not count as a day. It couldn't be a day, for time had ground to a halt, and thus the prophecy could not be fulfilled. This casuistry has worked for him before. He has used it to deny fate several times, perhaps more times than any other son. He thinks he can do it again.\n\nWell, fate has grown tired of his prevarications. It is no longer charmed by his constant, clever escapes and dialectic evasions.\n\nAnd so are you. There is no intellectual technicality to exploit here. Sanguinius is naive if he thinks that fate works that way, especially at this macrocosmic level.\n\nThis is the day. The final day. Days, like brothers, come in different types, with different qualities. They do not all have to work together and run in series, seriatim. A day can be alone, and singular.\n\nThis is your day. You have decreed its dimensions and its duration. It is a single day of days, endless and eternal, and nothing can outlast it.\n\nNo matter how hard it tries.\n\nHere he comes, Encarmine gleaming. He still thinks he's going to win.\n\nYou dodge the blade. You swing Worldbreaker. He evades, but you hadn't intended for the maul to hit him anyway. The swing was just to scare him into the air. He takes flight, white wings wide, a flash of gold to encircle you and strike you down from above. He trusts in his one advantage: the ability to fly, and turn a two-dimensional fight into a three-dimensional assault.\n\nBut what are his three dimensions compared to the multitude you command?\n\nHe soars above you, a vertical ascent. You reach along the eighth angle of space and grab. Your Talon closes around his trailing ankle. His climb arrests with a brutal jolt. For a second, he is anchored in the air.\n\nYou bring him down hard, swinging him by the leg, like a hammer, into the deck. You let time slow so you can relish every detail of this moment.\n\nWatch-\n\nHis wings brushed up around his arms as the air pushes them forward. The slow swirl of his hair around his face. The tiny, jagging cracks on his golden shin-guard as it splinters between the scissoring Talon. The feathers torn loose by shearing wing-load, floating end-over-end in the air as he leaves them behind. The 'o' of his mouth. The clutching left hand. The shock in his eyes as they slowly stretch wide. The dilation of his pupils.\n\nThe impact.\n\nThe fragmentation of the deck plates under his shoulders, head and back. The sick bone-crack of his right wing as it is crushed between his body and the floor. Encarmine jarring from his right hand. The ripple of concussion that travels through his body as it makes contact with the deck. The strained rictus of his features as he absorbs the blow. The furrowed squeeze of his clamping eyes. The angled trajectory of a shorn deck-bolt punched clear of the deforming plates. The compression of golden wargear as it flexes and ruptures along multiple joints and seals. The almost drunken wobble of his head as it rebounds from the deck and oscillates with the transmitted whiplash. The sudden slackening of his facial muscles, the blanking loss of expression as he blacks out, the unflattering ripple of his softened cheeks.\n\nThe sword Encarmine, falling slowly, pommel first, striking the deck beside him, bouncing, striking again, each bounce sending a shivering undulation along the up-angled blade.\n\nThe clatter as it comes to rest.\n\nThe languid, upward spray of blood from his mouth and nostrils.\n\nThe gleaming droplets in the air.\n\nThe individual splashes as they fall back to dapple his face and throat. The slow, sideways loll of his head into the cushion of his tangled hair. The leak of blood from between his parted lips.\n\nThe stillness.\n\nYou gaze down at him. He lies on his back, full length in a crater of mashed deck plates, one wing spread wide, the other pinned and folded under him, his arms draped open, his hair a golden halo behind his head, one leg bent like a dancer's.\n\nYou are still holding his other leg, like a haft to wield him by. You let go of his ankle. The leg falls, heavy and straight.\n\nNo more flying.\n\nYou step back. Your heart is racing. The satisfaction was exhilarating. You weigh Worldbreaker in your hand, ready and waiting. How long will it take him? A minute? Two?\n\nNo, less. His eyes blink open. He doesn't realise where he is for a moment. He doesn't know what's going on. The impact has knocked all sense from him, and he'll register the pain before anything else. That wing's broken. Ribs too. The ankle you swung him by. Pain will be flooding him as he wakes. You see him wince, a convulsion of his chest, his face screwing up in a grimace. He chokes, coughs blood. It dribbles off his lips.\n\nIs he done? Surely, he's done. Nobody-\n\nYou give him some credit, grudgingly. He's not giving up. He tries to roll onto his side, but the grinding pain of the broken wing stops him. He flops back. He rolls the other way. He tries to rise.\n\nHe makes it onto his hands and knees. He gropes for his fallen sword. It's just out of reach, along with most of his broken hopes and the memories that were smashed out of him.\n\nGo on. Get up. Let's see if he can. Hunched over, broken wing dragging like a limp ermine cloak beh"}
{"text":"y, he's done. Nobody-\n\nYou give him some credit, grudgingly. He's not giving up. He tries to roll onto his side, but the grinding pain of the broken wing stops him. He flops back. He rolls the other way. He tries to rise.\n\nHe makes it onto his hands and knees. He gropes for his fallen sword. It's just out of reach, along with most of his broken hopes and the memories that were smashed out of him.\n\nGo on. Get up. Let's see if he can. Hunched over, broken wing dragging like a limp ermine cloak behind him, he crawls. He makes no sound. Not one whimper or groan of pain. That's impressive. You balance Worldbreaker, ready.\n\nHe's found the sword. He clutches it tightly by the grip, breathing hard, and uses it, tip down, as a support as he drags himself upright.\n\nAnd he's up. He's standing, though awkwardly, keeping his weight off that shattered ankle. He's panting like a dog, chest heaving. He wipes the blood from his mouth.\n\nFor a second, you want to offer him the chance to submit. He extended you the same courtesy, so it only seems fair. But this is your Court, and you decide what's fair. This is your house. You are a man of your word, and you told him there would be no mercy.\n\nSo there will be no mercy.\n\nHe turns to look at you.\n\nYou are already descending on him, bringing the maul down.\n\nSomehow, he avoids it. Worldbreaker kills another section of the deck. He's swinging Encarmine at your head. The Talon parries it. Sparks fly. You sweep Worldbreaker at him, but he deflects it with a cross-body slash. You lunge to seize him by the throat. He evades the snapping Talon, and thrusts his blade around your guard. You knock it away before it bites.\n\nHe's got a little left. A little strength. A little speed. More than you expected. He deserves his fame. You exchange blows, trading four in rapid succession, each one parried or hooked aside. Oh, he's good. Even now. Still trying. Death has brought out the best in him.\n\nMaybe, despite everything, he still thinks he's invincible.\n\nYou will disabuse him of that notion. You slam your lethal claws around him to crush him-\n\nHe isn't there. He's slipped aside, a flash of gold, as fast as a sunbeam, evading you at the speed of light.\n\nBut you, you move at the speed of darkness. You catch him on the backswing, your Talon shearing locks of his hair, and snapping his head sideways. Worldbreaker does the rest. It hits him just above the hip, folds him double, and hurls him across the Court like a doll. He flies, one last time.\n\nHis spinning body strikes the ornate prayer screen of your private chapel. The fretwork, carved from solid diorite without any trace of toolmarks, smashes as he goes through it. Small splinters of stone clatter to the deck.\n\nYou follow him. You walk over to the side chapel slowly. There's no reason to hurry. The bladed head of your maul is matted with blood and golden hair.\n\nYou walk past the shattered screen to the entrance, and look in. He has landed, face down, on the cool stones of the floor, his feet towards you, his head towards your altar. There are pieces of broken fretwork all over the floor around him, and his body has knocked over three metal stands of votive candles. Smoke trickles up from the fallen candles that have gone out.\n\nThere are a hundred thousand other candles in here, on other stands, on the floor, in niches, and on ledges. Their flames gutter and flicker as you enter the shrine, your mass stirring the air.\n\nYou see him move. The injury you have done to him is catastrophic, and it has also torn open the old wound, the one Angron inflicted. Blood is pooling under the Angel in a wide scarlet mirror. You see him shudder as he tries to lift his head, and his arms spasm as he tries to raise his shoulders and his chest.\n\nHe won't be getting up this time.\n\nWhen he raises his head, shaking and weak, the altar is the first thing he sees, right in front of him. You see him recoil at the sight of it. He can't help but stare, his chest lifted on bent arms, his body trailing flat, like a supplicant prostrate.\n\nThe altar is wrought of predynastic dacite and Cthonic haemaquartz. You had it intricately inscribed with syncretic sigils: entwined figures of concordia and discordia, of chronos and kairos, the form of the ouroboros, and the abstract convolutions of the eternal labyrinth, which has no way in and no way out. You have also had it etched with certain phrases and texts that the whispers of the Court have told you are sacred. It has eight wide steps, like a ziggurat, with a pyramidion of alchemically tempered azoth at the apex. You have placed many candles and tapers on the shelves of the steps, crowded around the relics you display there. They are skulls, each one ritually arranged face out, so that their empty orbits stare at anyone who enters the chapel. There are thousands of them, some old, some fresh, some brown with time, some white as snow. Most of them are human.\n\nOne is set centrally, in pride of place. It is the one Sanguinius sees first when he lifts his trembling head. Its gaping sockets gaze back at him. The yellowed bone of its brow is carved with the numeral X.\n\nThis is where it will end, this cross here.\n\nYou hear the Angel murmur, a single, wretched gasp.\n\n'Manus.'\n\nIt's the only sound he's uttered since you began to kill him.\n\nYou stand behind him. You give him a moment to appreciate the reunion. And to realise what it signifies.\n\nUntil we meet again.\n\nThat's long enough.\n\n'Who lacks now, brother?' you ask. He tries to turn over and face you.\n\nYou grasp him by that broken ankle and drag him out behind you. He slides backwards on his belly, hands raking and pawing at the bloody flagstones to resist, but there is nothing to grip. He leaves a long smear of blood on the floor behind him.\n\nIt isn't supposed to end like this.\n\nNevertheless, it does.\n\n8:xviii\n\nOnly war\n\nFrenzy.\n\nThat is all that remains of Fafnir Rann's life. The world around him is a chaos of movement and noise, and the span of that world is no greater than the range of his axes. Nothing exists outside that reach.\n\nAnd inside it, everything is compressed into a hyper-dense mass of sound and smoke, and movement that refuses to stay still or even slow down. The frenzy binds him in place; jolting armour, blades, geysers of blood, tempests of flesh-eating ash, the daemon-howl of war distilled to its most intense essence.\n\nThe frenzy without him is matched by the frenzy within, beneath his flesh, in his heart and meat and bones and mind. Nothing is stable or calm. He has no thoughts, no memories, no hopes, for there is no longer any space for them in his head. Reactive instinct, amplified by necessity, has pushed all of those things out of his skull. He is no longer thinking. He is no longer able to think, or compose himself, or process rationally. The feral, killer part of him, so perfectly trained and obedient, has been let off its leash. It is his only friend. It is the only reason he is still alive. It has become him, and he has become it.\n\nHe is landing killing or maiming blows at a rate of two or three every few seconds. There is never just one foe. Multiple attacks burst over him, calculated assaults, or accidental collisions caused by the maelstrom swirl. His axes, the Headsman and the Hunter, are notched and blunt from use. He is carrying more wounds than he can count, blood streaming over his armour and seeping inside to fill his undersuit. His metabolism cannot close the wounds fast enough. He cannot see Halen or Baldwin or Namahi or any of the others who were on the fighting step with him when the rush came. There is no longer a Hasgard Fort, ruined or otherwise. There is only this tiny patch of Terra, a mire of blood and a monsoon of trauma, and he occupies it as a statue occupies its plinth. It is like a square on a gaming board, and he the playing piece upon it, and all the other squares, and the rest of the board, have disintegrated. This is his part of the Throneworld, this is his Terra entire. He will not move off it, or take a backward step. He will protect it, and fight for it, and fight on it, until he dies on it, and the blood-soaked mud sucks him down and makes it his grave. His piece of Terra and his fight for Terra have become the same small thing.\n\nThe enemy is a permanent, unremitting fact, a constant of his tiny world that doesn't stop, like gravity or light. It invades his Terra, and he kills it, but it is already invading again. It is always in front of him, and beside him, and behind him, crashing into him. There is always an axe, a mace, a sword, a hand, a face, a claw.\n\nIf he stopped to think about it for a moment, Rann would realise that this intensity cannot last for ever. It has probably only been... ten minutes since the creation of his world. The fury will end when he ends. The world will end with him. He would know, if he took the time to consider it, that he has fifteen or twenty seconds of life left. Those seconds will last a lifetime, and they will form the arc of his existence.\n\nBut he does not know this, because there is no space left in the world for thought.\n\nFafnir Rann, though he does not know this either, is just four axe-lengths away from Zephon Sorrow-Bringer, who is contained within his own, identical world. Zephon's hell is about to end in an entirely different way.\n\n8:xix\n\nInto the fire\n\nThe Orion gunship leaves the tower about sixty seconds before the tower dies.\n\nSomething is pulling down all the watchtowers of the Southern Hem. Hassan never sees it, not fully, not completely. He knows it is a Neverborn beast, and he knows it is of a magnitude greater than even the vast behemoths he has glimpsed on the leading edge of the traitor host. As they flee up-tower, he is aware of its shadow, the shockwave of its assault, the stone-cracking volume of its bellow. He will remember the flash of its eye at the window port for the rest of his life.\n\nHis life does not have long to run. Raja secures the gunship on one of the tower"}
{"text":"em. Hassan never sees it, not fully, not completely. He knows it is a Neverborn beast, and he knows it is of a magnitude greater than even the vast behemoths he has glimpsed on the leading edge of the traitor host. As they flee up-tower, he is aware of its shadow, the shockwave of its assault, the stone-cracking volume of its bellow. He will remember the flash of its eye at the window port for the rest of his life.\n\nHis life does not have long to run. Raja secures the gunship on one of the tower's upper landing platforms, where it has apparently been abandoned by retreating forces. There is no time to run a pre-flight, or check its systems. The tower is already beginning to slope, and the thunder of falling rubble has become constant. Hassan sees the dents and grazes on the gunship's golden hull as he follows the Sisters aboard, the three Astartes securing the hatch behind him.\n\nThe Orion is a Custodes craft, infamous across the Imperium for its power. Its technologies are some of the most advanced known to man. The internal fittings of the passenger section are positively regal, and built for post-human dimensions. There are sets of secondary restraints to secure standard human occupants in the large, leather-padded thrones. With Raja at the helm, the gunship lifts off the rubble-strewn deck where everything is beginning to slide. They are nearly two kilometres above street level.\n\nThere is a reason the gunship was left on the pad. Its engines belch and fail less than five seconds after launch. Lift systems wail in protest. The drive-engines sputter and grind as Raja attempts reignition. It falls, rather than flies, a tiny golden toy spinning towards the burning streets below. That's what Hassan pictures. There are no windows in the passenger section, but Hassan can feel the centrifugal drag of the death spin. He doesn't need to know which way is 'down' because he can feel it in the sick, disembowelling haul of his gut. He feels the wrench of G-forces paddle and knead the flesh of his face. He and the Sisters are strapped in, but the Astartes are thrown against the rear partition, and pinned.\n\nHe sees gleaming spots of blood on the leather upholstery of his oversized seat. It's his blood. He's taken a cut or injury somewhere. The drops quiver with the rotation and the g-force pull. They start to run, first down, then up again, then around, moving with the spin, pausing, starting, trickling. They seem to be making some tight, invisible knot of a design, as though drawn by an invisible hand. It's like a little diagram, a plan. A sigil, transposing meaning and information into a symbolic form. He thinks he should know what the sigil represents, because sigils are the tools of his craft. The droplets of blood seem to be describing the convolutions of a small labyrinth, with no way in and no way out.\n\nBut it's just blood on leather, and he's fixating on it so he can block out the terror and tumult of his final moments.\n\nThe cabin lighting fails. Now he can't even see the faces of the people he's going to die with. He can see nothing. He can feel every weight-per-unit-mass of it.\n\nHe hears a bang as loud as a concussion grenade and mistakes it for impact. But his life continues. The bang was the dirty detonation of a final forced restart. Raja brings the nose up. Hassan doesn't want to know how close to the ground they got. The clawing g-force of the climb is worse than the hideous descent.\n\n'Hold on,' Raja snarls.\n\nFor what? Hassan wonders. His hands are already rigor-mortis-locked to the armrests. He's trying to keep the involuntary vomit in his mouth. What could possibly warrant a warning now?\n\nThe climbing gunship rocks violently. Not turbulence. Hassan hears the squeal of tortured metal from the exterior hull. He hears a shriek... No, a cry, the cawing shrill of a seabird or hawk. The sky above the Sanctum has swirled with bat-winged things for hours, the carrion birds of hell circling the kill-site. He pictures their craft under attack, harried by Neverborn things with leathery wings and vulture beaks, a falcon mobbed by crows.\n\nSomething metallic tears. The gunship lurches. They start to drop again at a rate that is not pilot-intended.\n\nThey survived the first plunge. They will not survive a second.\n\n8:xx\n\nSixty-three seconds\n\nSixty-three seconds into the fight, Constantin's company encounters the first opposition that isn't Neverborn.\n\nHis Sentinel force, which has been cut down over the course of one unnaturally lingering minute to a mere thirty-six warriors, has opened into a wide fan formation. Their pace is swift. Under other operational circumstances, it might even be deemed hasty, especially for a woefully reduced unit pushing into a proven zone mortalis. But it is not headlong, nor is it reckless. They are following their king's call to arms.\n\nThose who may hear me, join me now.\n\nThe Emperor seldom speaks directly. When He does, there is no question of hesitation. They will track His neurosynergetic cry to its source before its echoes die away.\n\nSo the Custodes move with fluid precision, with inhuman stealth and speed, flanking and counter-covering intuitively as they penetrate the curious stone ruins and derelict streets that protrude from the thick layer of ashy dust. Constantin's synergetic orchestration is intense. He has a plan. It is clear in his mind, so it is clear in the minds of his men too. He might as well have drawn it for them on a strategium table or a wall. They will enact it, as surely and reflexively as the limbs and digits of his own body.\n\nThe targets come up in a sudden flurry of marker icons on their helmet displays. One or two at first, then dozens, then hundreds, lighting up across the digitally composed render of the terrain ahead. A disciplined and well-executed combat spread has deployed through the ruins to counter their rapid approach.\n\nConstantin recognises the signature of the disposition before the icons fully resolve. An Astartes repulse formation. Four layers, with lateral flanking.\n\nThe multiplying tags resolve. The names on most are pixelated or indecipherable, but the unit registries are clear. XVII Legion, Word Bearers. XVI Legion, Sons of Horus.\n\nMass-reactives start to shriek at them. The Custodians of Anabasis do not break stride. They maintain their gruelling rate of advance, despite the storm of bolt-rounds thumping and chewing into the stonework around them, or squealing past their heads. Constantin's men don't have the numbers. They don't have anything near the numbers of the traitor-sons drawing down to oppose them. But they have the momentum of their speed, and they are Custodes.\n\nThey push into the ruins, under fire, without diminishing their pace, and begin to engage at will. The area ahead is an extensive pattern of urban ruins, but one kilometre out and to their left those ruins shelve beneath a huge and mangled structure that must be a portion of fallen orbital plate. Those ragged cliffs of plasteel are the only things in the area that pass for high ground.\n\nThe kill-tally starts to mount as the Custodians engage directly. The marker tags on their displays wink out and go grey, the tags of men without names, or men whose names have been corrupted and lost.\n\nMen who are no longer men.\n\nThe pitch of combat increases rapidly. Constantin isn't surprised at all. Some of these enemies are Sons of Horus. He respects the XVI, though he would never admit it. They are one of the few Astartes orders he considers to be truly dangerous, especially when commanded by a significant and capable officer. This is not a reflection of the XVI's treacherous track record during the Heresy War. Constantin has held this evaluation since the first weeks of the Great Crusade.\n\nThey are sixty-four seconds into the fight.\n\nConstantin has lost two men. His men have claimed thirteen kills. Their advance has not decelerated. He leaps a broken stone wall, and adds two more of the XVI to his company kill-count, his spear gutting one and then all but decapitating the second. The Sons of Horus legionary stumbles away, hands clamped to his torn-out throat, unable to stem the hosing arterial spray. Constantin doesn't bother to watch him fall. He knows the man is dead.\n\nHe has just identified a marker tag among a cluster near the top of the ruined orbital plate nine hundred metres away. Unlike those around it, it is not garbled or corrupted. The name and rank are perfectly clear.\n\nFirst Captain Abaddon.\n\n8:xxi\n\nAmong the dead\n\nRogal Dorn begins to clamber his way over the rubble, the broken wall behind him. He enters the city.\n\nIt is not a city any more. It was once, and perhaps for a very long time. Now it's a sea of rubble; rubble rising into cresting waves, rubble sloping into deep troughs. The only features remaining are the few great walls still partially standing, like the one behind him. They are massive, defensive bulwarks, built to contain and protect, but they keep nothing out now. They are a memory of strength, a relic of defiance. The sea of rubble, the walls and the air itself are grey with dust. The sky is an ink-shot darkness that ribbons and blooms with livid pink lightning. The forks spark and sear above him.\n\nThe city, whatever it was, has yielded. Rogal Dorn wonders who planned and built it. It is impossible to discern the scheme of defence now. He has a feeling that more human thought and energy went into its obliteration, dismantling it block by block into a sea of stones, than went into its design. He has a feeling that no human thought went into its design at all.\n\nThere is no one outside to greet him, no one waiting for him. He will have to make a new plan, starting here. The city may have yielded, but he has not.\n\nHe needs weapons. That's the first thing. The call for help was urgent, and he can't help if he can't fight. If war tore this city down, there will be traces of it in the rubble, its teeth and claws left in the wounds. A sword, perhaps; an axe, a hamme"}
{"text":"an went into its design. He has a feeling that no human thought went into its design at all.\n\nThere is no one outside to greet him, no one waiting for him. He will have to make a new plan, starting here. The city may have yielded, but he has not.\n\nHe needs weapons. That's the first thing. The call for help was urgent, and he can't help if he can't fight. If war tore this city down, there will be traces of it in the rubble, its teeth and claws left in the wounds. A sword, perhaps; an axe, a hammer... Even a post or pole will do. Something hard that he can swing.\n\nHe hasn't gone far when he begins to find the dead. Armoured men, tangled in their hundreds. They look like rubble at first, because they are so caked in grey dust, but he sees the shapes of limbs, of beaked helmets, of breastplates and pauldrons, jump packs, greaves. When he stoops and wipes the film of dust away, he reveals the traces of gold laurels, of auramite decoration.\n\nOf yellow plate.\n\nOf the numeral VII.\n\nThey are all here, all of his sons, all of the men from his Anabasis company. Whatever war overtook and obliterated them, it was total. He scrapes the dirt from rank medallions and insignia, and peels back visors. He sees the pinched, pale faces of the extinct. He remembers names: Argust, Loemid, Hexas, Tibernus...\n\nEach name replenishes another cell of his memory, bringing back events, and encounters, conversations and triumphs. The past drips back into his mind like drops of ink falling into water.\n\nHis grief hangs in the air for a while, like dust.\n\nBut he is not here to grieve, nor will he allow grief to defeat him where those centuries in the desert and the whispers of the red did not. He is Rogal Dorn, defiant and unyielding.\n\nThe red did this.\n\nThe red will know his vengeance. There is nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose.\n\nHe finds his Huscarl, the leader of his company, a little way apart, prone on a wave of rubble, like a piece of shipwreck being borne out to sea. From his posture and position, it seems as though he was the last to die. Rogal Dorn kneels beside him. He says his name.\n\n'Diamantis.'\n\nAgain, grief wells and tries to overcome him. He does not yield. Diamantis has left him a gift. It is half-buried in the dust and stones beside him. Rogal Dorn digs it out. The greatsword is a powerblade, a mighty two-hander in Diamantis' fists. In Rogal Dorn's hand, it is but a heavy spatha. Its tongue is blackened, but its edge is still fine. He lights it, and the flash of power burns dust off the blade, and reveals a brand of gleaming silver that dances with blue discharge.\n\n'This, I will bury in the heart of the red,' swears Rogal Dorn, bringing the sword to his brow in a salute, in the manner of the Templars. 'This, I will wield against my brother to avenge my sons.'\n\nHe rises. The coral lightning above him peals its rage, mocking his oath. It can mock all it likes. He is free, and he has a sword.\n\nHe stands and listens for the echo of the call so he can determine which direction to go. He can just make out the dying ring of it on the wind.\n\nAnd something else.\n\nA tapping. A scratching. As soft and small as the scrabble of a mouse. It's not the stir of dust, nor is it the loose rubble settling behind him.\n\nThere's something else alive.\n\nHe hunts for it, straining to hear. It's coming from a mound of rubble close to the bone-field where his sons lie. It's a slope of rubble that has spilled down from a split in one of the bulwark walls. It could even be the wall he broke through to get here, the rubble that he spilled breaking free. He isn't sure. He can't tell the broken walls apart any more.\n\nRogal Dorn plants the sword-tip in the dust, and starts to toss the blocks and stones aside. The largest weigh close to a tonne. He digs down, careful not to let the whole slope slide and re-bury itself. He uses, instinctively, his understanding of mass and balance to shore up the excavation as he deepens it, wedging slabs into the lip of the cavity he is making, fortifying the pit to prevent collapse.\n\nAnd that's how he finds her.\n\nShe stares up at him blindly from the rubble as he uncovers her. She is caked in blood, and the dust that adheres to that blood. Her fingertips are bloody raw from scratching at the stones, frantic to escape her premature burial.\n\nIt's a wonder that every bone in her body isn't broken.\n\n'Don't move,' he murmurs. 'I'll dig you free. You move, and you might shake it all loose.'\n\n'Yes,' she says in a tiny, dry voice.\n\n'Do you know who I am?' he asks.\n\n'You are Rogal Dorn, Praetorian, primarch of the Imperial Fists, seventh-found son, defiant and unyielding,' says Actae.\n\n8:xxii\n\nLeavetaking\n\nOll takes a deep breath, and fills his lungs. The air is remarkably fresh, as though it has been purified by the immense release of energy. When the Emperor exhaled the power of the Dark King, this place, the seat of that detonation, was purged and stilled, all immaterial tumult extinguished. For about a kilometre in every direction, the plain of white dust is still and unblemished, like freshly fallen snow. There is no wreckage, no footprints. The air is like glass, without a mote of dust or dirt, the light bright, the sky directly above him a cool black. It may be, he thinks, the one place left on Earth where Chaos has no dominion. It possesses the pristine tranquillity of a lunar landscape.\n\nHe checks his lasrifle. It is in perfect order, manufactory fresh. It's the same Mars-pattern Mk II he salvaged from the munition wagon on that displaced street, but it's no longer a reconditioned antique with worn grips and the patina of long service on its metalwork. The chrome gleams, and he can smell the clean gun oil that was applied in the forge that assembled it. It is no longer a battered veteran.\n\nNeither is he. Oll can't believe how fit he feels, how vital. He had become used to the various pangs and twinges of his enduring body, the ache of old wounds on cold days, the stiffness in his joints. Though he might age more slowly than most, he has still aged. Now, the wear and tear of centuries has gone. The trace of old scars has vanished. Even his eyesight has improved. He's never felt so strong and able. He doesn't think he's ever felt so young, not even long, long ago, when he actually was young.\n\nJohn clearly feels it too. Grammaticus is nearby, walking around, flexing and milling his arms, talking aloud to himself to simply enjoy the fact that he can speak again. Occasionally, he laughs. It makes Oll smile. They are both miraculously renewed. They are in peak condition, the best shape of their lives.\n\nThey're going to have to be. A kilometre away, and in every direction, the tranquillity of this sunlit place ends, and the broiling warp storms begin, a dark miasma of lightning and churning clouds banked ten kilometres high. They have achieved the impossible. Now they have to do it all over again. Somewhere out there is Horus Lupercal, and he must be confronted and stopped.\n\nOll glances towards the Emperor. The Master of Mankind, a golden colossus, is standing some fifty metres away. Caecaltus and the Astartes, Leetu and Garviel Loken, are kneeling before Him, heads bowed. Oll presumes they are pledging some oath of moment to Him before the final act begins. He wonders what they can all do, between them. The Astartes are strong, superhumanly strong, and so is the formidable Proconsul Dusk. Oll and John have certain talents, but Oll doubts either of them will be much real use when it comes down to it. They'll do whatever they can, anyway.\n\nIt's the Emperor who matters. He is the only one who counts. Oll knows He's powerful, powerful on a scale that can't be calibrated. But Horus is...\n\nHorus is.\n\nThe Old Four, the damned Old Four, have weaponised him. All of Chaos is channelled into him. Can anything match that? Without the hideous strength of the Dark King, the Emperor may not be enough. One salvation has cancelled out another. The Emperor has discarded the power that would have assured His triumph. For the right and best reasons, but even so...\n\nWhat was it the Luna Wolf said? 'Better to fight daemons as men than become them.' Yeah. That may well become their epitaph.\n\nThe proconsul is approaching, leaving fresh footprints in the immaculate white dust.\n\n'It is time for you to go, Ollanius,' says Caecaltus Dusk.\n\n'Go?' Oll replies with a frown. 'Go where?'\n\n'My King-of-Ages wishes you good fortune,' the proconsul answers. 'We part company here. You and Grammaticus must go back.'\n\nHearing his name, John joins them.\n\n'We're setting out, then?' he asks, almost eager.\n\n'We go to face Lupercal,' says Caecaltus. 'You and Ollanius are going back.'\n\n'Wait. What? No. We're coming with you,' John insists.\n\n'John's right,' says Oll. 'We've come this far. We're not afraid, proconsul. We intend to see this through.'\n\nThe Sentinel slowly shakes his head.\n\n'Yes, you must see this through,' he says. 'Which is why you must go back.'\n\nOll and John exchange perplexed looks.\n\nOll steps past the solemn Sentinel. The great, golden figure of mankind's master is already walking away, flanked by Loken and Leetu. The Emperor takes one last look back at Oll, nods His head, and then continues on His way. With His Astartes at His heels, He strides out across the white and unmarked dust.\n\n'Wait!' Oll cries. 'Just wait-'\n\n'My king expects you to appreciate the situation rationally, Ollanius,' the Sentinel says. 'Neither of you can move as swiftly as us, and neither of you are capable of surviving the ordeal ahead. You must go no further. You must go back. If my king can secure the future, then a place is reserved for you in it. A crucial place, Ollanius. Meanwhile, my king needs you to live.'\n\n'His concern for us is touching, but I told you. We're not afraid-'\n\n'My king's concern for you is not personal. You cannot die. You must not die.'\n\n'Everyone dies eventually, Dusk,' Oll says.\n\n'Ollanius,' the proconsul says. There is a sharpness in his"}
{"text":", and neither of you are capable of surviving the ordeal ahead. You must go no further. You must go back. If my king can secure the future, then a place is reserved for you in it. A crucial place, Ollanius. Meanwhile, my king needs you to live.'\n\n'His concern for us is touching, but I told you. We're not afraid-'\n\n'My king's concern for you is not personal. You cannot die. You must not die.'\n\n'Everyone dies eventually, Dusk,' Oll says.\n\n'Ollanius,' the proconsul says. There is a sharpness in his voice now, and it's not his voice anyway. 'You persuaded my king to examine the logic of His position. Show Him the respect of doing the same.'\n\nOll glowers, and wipes dust from his lips with the back of his hand. A wind is picking up suddenly, and it's starting to lift the white dust in a haze. The tranquillity of the place is dissolving as the warp creeps back in and reclaims it. The receding figures of the Emperor and the two Astartes are beginning to lose definition.\n\n'We came to help Him, proconsul,' Oll says sadly.\n\n'Then do so,' replies Caecaltus. 'With the same determination you have shown thus far. Your purpose is to face Him, and speak truth to His power, as only one who has known Him for all of the ages can. You change the pattern of history, and the course of fate. You avert one damnation. Now you must complete that purpose, while He averts another.'\n\n'Complete...?' Oll stammers.\n\n'Oh!' says John suddenly. 'Oh, shit. He's right. We've got to finish it. Oll... Oll, listen to me. If we go with them, and we die, which, let's be honest, is likely, then we'll never get here to do what we've just done.'\n\n'You've both gone mad!' Oll exclaims.\n\n'Grammaticus sees it,' says Caecaltus Dusk. 'His gift for languages and their tenses, no doubt. Ollanius, you have to make this possible. You have to complete the circle.'\n\nHe holds the ball of twine out to Oll.\n\nOll blinks at it for a second.\n\n'Ah damn it,' he whispers. 'You mean literally...'\n\n'You must retrace your steps, and leave the clues that you have followed, or this branch of history will collapse. Go leave the trail your earlier self followed, for without it, you would not have been here to change my king's destiny.'\n\nOll stares at the ball of twine. John reaches forward, and takes it from the Sentinel.\n\n'We don't have a choice, Oll,' John says. 'We've got to do this, or everything we've done will be undone.'\n\n'A loop,' murmurs Oll.\n\n'A loop of thread,' says Caecaltus. 'A vital one.'\n\nHe turns without another word or gesture of farewell, and starts to follow the others. He is lost in the rising dust in a matter of moments.\n\nAlone, John and Oll look at each other.\n\n'Come on,' says John.\n\n'This feels wrong,' says Oll.\n\n'It does, but we both know it's right. We have to finish Hebet's work, and leave the threads. We have to go all the way back to the start, Oll, and make damn sure what's done stays done.'\n\nOll nods. He takes one last look, but all four figures have disappeared from view.\n\nSquinting into the wind and dust, Oll and John trudge in the opposite direction. Four sets of footprints lead away on one course, two on another. Within seconds, the rising wind has erased them all entirely.\n\n8:xxiii\n\nThe death\n\nIt takes just a moment, though he has all the time in the world.\n\nHorus Lupercal holds all of time, stilled, in one hand, and Sanguinius in the other.\n\nSanguinius, broken beyond measure, gazes up at the soaring arches of the Lupercal Court. Even broken, he will not go quietly. Even broken, he will not make this easy.\n\nLupercal growls. Does he relish this? Hate it? Consider it an annoying waste of time when he has better things to do? There is no way to fathom him, for he is no longer remotely human.\n\nAnd Sanguinius doesn't care. He can feel the gaze of the Old Four on him, staring from the shadows with eyes as bleak and wicked as the one adorning his brother's breastplate. They have come to witness this, this and everything that will follow. They mutter to each other excitedly and, around them, the numberless legions of their spawn gibber and whisper in delight. Sanguinius can feel the sheer size of them, the mass of the Dark Gods. He will show them the defiance of mankind to his last breath.\n\nHorus lifts him off the ground, pincered in his Talon. Every fractured bone and tear in Sanguinius' body shrieks as he hangs there. Blood blurts from between his torn lips, squeezed out of his body. Worldbreaker rises in the monster's other hand.\n\nSanguinius lashes out with his left hand, gouging desperate fingers at his brother's cheek and eyes. Horus barks in rage, and drops his prey. Sanguinius falls onto his knees, jarring every wound, then topples onto his side. He tries to rise, trembling, weak. He wants to be on his feet when it happens. He wants to be standing when-\n\nWorldbreaker catches him before he is even back on his knees. The clubbing blow breaks his left shoulder, ribs and left femur. He collapses, trying not to scream from the pain, and failing. Horus starts to bludgeon him, beating him repeatedly like a disobedient dog. There is no art in this any more. No martial skill. No patience. Worldbreaker shreds armour and flesh. It pulverises both collarbones. It ruptures a lung. A fine drizzle of blood fumes the air around the two figures, the brutal, beating giant and his prey. The sixth hammering impact twists Sanguinius' head around, shattering his jaw, and transmitting such force that the skin on the left half of his face, from brow to chin, is flayed loose. It flutters, then drapes back like a slack mask.\n\nAs he falls forward, the Talon vices him again. It lifts the ruined, tattered Angel into the air, until he is face to face with the first-found instrument of Chaos.\n\nHorus squeezes slowly. He is expecting some last word, some immortal and heroic declaration to mark the end of a majestic, noble life. It ought to be something good, something appropriate.\n\nBut Sanguinius is no longer capable of speech. He is drowning in his own blood.\n\nThe claws close. There is a double crack of spine and neck.\n\nHorus waits. Blood drips. It's done.\n\nThe Talon opens with a mechanical clack. His brother's corpse, so loose and mangled it seems almost boneless, drops to the deck. An ugly sound of impact to mark an ugly ending.\n\nHorus sighs and walks away. Things scurry forward from the shadows to nail the body up.\n\nINTERLUDE\n\nDISTANT SONS i\n\nJust hold\n\n'I repeat, we are nine hours out. Deploying now to wide formation assault positions, inbound. Terra Control, do you receive? Can you respond? Repeat, we are nine hours out. Terra Control, we need immediate tracking guidance. Light your beacons. We are extending to wide assault formation. Terra, remain in secure defensive alignment. Hold your positions. That's all you need to do. Just hold. I repeat, we are nine hours out. Terra Control, acknowledge. Hold your positions and light guidance now. Terra Control, this is Guilliman.'\n\nWhen Roboute Guilliman finishes speaking, a silence gathers in the flagship's master-vox chamber. No one dares to speak, thinks Thiel. Or no one has anything to say. Tension has been a permanent state for eight days, as constant as the sigh of the air-scrubbers or the hum of realspace drives throbbing the deck plates.\n\nGuilliman stays in his seat, watching the Master of Vox minutely adjust the dials of the ship's main transmitter. Satisfied, Master Silactus throws the row of switches that shuts down the vox-caster with a warm thump and ends transmission. He turns, and bows solemnly to the primarch.\n\n'Message encrypted and sent, my lord,' he says.\n\nGuilliman detaches the vox-cable from the external port in his armour's gorget, passes it to a waiting attendant, and rises to his feet.\n\n'Inform me immediately of anything, Silactus,' says Guilliman. 'The slightest variation in background noise. Even if you don't think it's a transmission.'\n\n'I will, my lord.'\n\n'We go again in fifteen cycles,' says Guilliman. 'By voice.'\n\n'Of course, my lord.'\n\nGuilliman walks towards the chamber hatch. Thiel and the protection detail fall in behind him. They go where he goes.\n\n'Review, Aeonid,' the primarch says to him without looking around. Thiel doesn't question it, or point out that they are conducting a review every ten cycles, or remind his lord that if anything - anything - had changed while Guilliman was making his broadcast, Thiel would have been informed, and would have broken in immediately. This is Guilliman's mode now. Utter, unwavering focus. To remark upon it is not to risk the primarch's anger, but rather a cold look of reproach that a man might carry for the rest of his life like a wound.\n\nLikewise the transmissions. Every fifteen cycles. The Master of Vox could easily resend the file of Guilliman's original message, but the primarch insists on making it in person every time, as though his voice will carry further and more clearly than any recording.\n\nThiel does not think of his lord as a superstitious man. But there is an obsessive compulsion to Guilliman's current mode, an attention to every detail, as though Guilliman worries that the slightest operational lapse will court ill fortune.\n\n'You think me too careful, Aeonid?' Guilliman asks as they walk.\n\nReading my mind now, are you, my great lord? Thiel thinks.\n\n'Given the history of this conflict, lord primarch,' Thiel replies, 'it is evident that no one can be too careful.'\n\n'Good answer,' Guilliman replies.\n\nThey enter the bridge. The command deck of Guilliman's acting flagship, Courage Above All, is running quietly and diligently despite the hundreds of personnel present. Eikos Lamiad, Tetrarch of Ultramar-Konor, Captain Demet Valita, and Shipmaster Dohel are waiting beside the strategium table on the dais. The table, its huge frame wrought of chased silver and steel, is already lit. Thiel did not have to signal ahead. They knew a review would be required.\n\nGuilliman walks directly to the table and stares at the complex hololith it is projecting from its"}
{"text":"ting flagship, Courage Above All, is running quietly and diligently despite the hundreds of personnel present. Eikos Lamiad, Tetrarch of Ultramar-Konor, Captain Demet Valita, and Shipmaster Dohel are waiting beside the strategium table on the dais. The table, its huge frame wrought of chased silver and steel, is already lit. Thiel did not have to signal ahead. They knew a review would be required.\n\nGuilliman walks directly to the table and stares at the complex hololith it is projecting from its glass surface. The protection detail holds back, but Thiel stays at the primarch's side.\n\n'Begin,' says Guilliman.\n\nThe tetrarch commences his overview. It is more a recitation than a statement. They have done this every ten cycles for the last eight days, and scarcely a word has changed.\n\n'The fleet has deployed to wide assault positions eighteen light minutes outside the terminator shock boundary of the Solar Realm,' says Lamiad. 'The fleet amasses thirty-two hundred vessels...'\n\nThiel knows it by heart. Thirty-two hundred principal vessels, most of them grand cruiser class or larger, supported by bulk carriers, war-engine mass transports, and a flotilla of tenders. It contains most of Battlefleet Macragge, the Konor Squadron, the Saramanth Squadron, the Lux Ultramaris battle group, the Third Vanguard Flotilla of the Five Hundred Worlds, the Occluda Second Principal Fleet, the Minos Crucis Fast-Attack, and allied warships of the Shattered Legions. Lamiad lists each ship by name, and Guilliman lets him. The fleet translated from the warp eight days earlier via extra-system Mandeville points when it became evident that the Solar Realm was impassable. It has been slowly approaching the hem of the realm ever since on realspace impellers in an assault-ready crescent formation six thousand kilometres wide.\n\nThey remain assault-ready. Hosts of Astartes sit in silence, fully plated, in their launch-armed drop pods or aboard Stormbirds on the launch racks of the excursion bays, on every vessel. In hangar decks, pilots wait beside their prepped Furies and Xiphon interceptors, and in the echoing troop bays, Excertus and Auxilia armies in full kit shift restlessly on the loading decks beside their hulking transports.\n\nSome say it is the largest armada assembled since the early days of the Great Crusade. Thiel worries that it is not.\n\nThiel studies the hololithic display while the tetrarch speaks. It hasn't changed any more than Lamiad's words have. In one corner of the table glows a graphic representation of the fleet, called by some the vengeance fleet, and by others the salvation fleet. Guilliman simply calls it 'the fleet'. It is the first to arrive. There will be others, other fleets currently pushing the tolerances of their warp drives as they race across the galaxy from all points to answer Guilliman's call.\n\nThe vast fleet is just a little crescent on the table, like a pale new moon. The remainder of the wide surface-plate shows a representation of the Solar Realm.\n\nIt is a dark blankness, without feature. There are no marker icons for the Throneworld, or Luna, or Mars, or even Sol. A few tags along the edge display spatial condition details obtained by scout drogues sent forward by the Solace of Iax, the grand battleship acting as advance picket at one tip of the armada's crescent. The data on these tags is already beginning to degrade, but what remains legible speaks only of the impossible. An abominable level of exotic energies and immaterial flux, many types of which have never previously been recorded or observed. A de-constitution of realspace. An absolute collapse of four-dimensional physics. Everything has corrupted, transfigured, or ceased.\n\nThere is no longer a causal flow of time in the Solar Realm.\n\nIt is a blackness, without feature or form, an imperfect sphere of neverness some four thousand light minutes in diameter. It is being referred to as 'the negation zone'. It is expanding slowly, beyond the heliopause of the Sol System, and is starting to envelop the Opik-Oort Cloud, and disturb its ice-dust and its nurseries of long-period comets.\n\nThiel knows that the area is big, inconceivably big, the entire span of a solar system. He also knows that however big he imagines it is, the true scale is beyond his comprehension.\n\nThere is no way to determine the position of the sun or Terra in the negation zone, or to know if either still exists. It is not even possible to calculate a projection of Terra's location based on established astronomical data. The vast area of blackness, that four-thousand-light-minutes span as observed from the interstellar medium outside, is primarily composed of warpstuff, and thus may be vastly bigger inside.\n\nWithout a beacon or true signal to lead it in, the fleet cannot reach Terra. They could go in blind, of course, and scour the blackness in the hope of finding something. But such an effort might take them a hundred thousand years, and they would most likely go missing themselves.\n\nThe absence of a beacon or response is more than just a block to navigation. It suggests there is no one left to find. It suggests that all is entirely lost.\n\nLamiad finishes his review. Shipmaster Dohel begins his status report of the fleet's fitness, which Thiel also knows word for word.\n\nGuilliman raises his hand, cutting Dohel short.\n\n'No need, old friend,' he says. 'We all know.'\n\nHe studies the strategium. They all glance at each other. It is the first time in eight days that the primarch has broken his meticulous routine. Is his patience wearing thin? Is his desperate need to come to his father's aid eroding his good sense and tactical genius?\n\nIs he actually thinking of... going in anyway?\n\n'I want...' he begins quietly, 'proposals.'\n\n'Proposals, my lord?' Lamiad asks.\n\n'Proposals for reasonable measures of approach, Eikos,' Guilliman replies. 'I will consider anything. Perhaps a long, advanced column, our ships in a chain, each tied by vox-contact to the one behind, to fathom a route. Or beacon drogues sent ahead to light the way and transmit incremental navigation data-'\n\n'A chain-advance would leave us entirely vulnerable to hostile ambush, my lord,' says Lamiad.\n\n'The drogues are quickly overwhelmed by immaterial conditions, my lord,' says Dohel, 'and any data cannot be trusted, or expected to remain fixed-'\n\n'That's enough,' says Thiel. He can see the look on Guilliman's face. 'The primarch is not suggesting such things, and is perfectly aware of their impracticalities. They are merely theoreticals to illustrate the type of ideas he is looking for.'\n\nDohel nods. Captain Valita gives Thiel a cold look, but says nothing. An Astartes sergeant gets to scold a tetrarch when he serves as commander of the Master of Ultramar's protection detail.\n\n'Theoreticals, precisely,' says Guilliman. He gestures towards the ominous blankness of the table's display. 'The only enemy I see, my friends, is tension. I would rather we had an actual foe to engage.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'The Emperor must live,' he adds.\n\nAnd what if He does not? Thiel wonders. What follows? A collapse of the Imperium? An endless war against the usurping Warmaster? The ascension of Ultramar as the new Imperium in the East? Would Guilliman succeed his father? Surely there is no other candidate-\n\nDamn the theoreticals. Thiel looks away.\n\nHe does so in time to see the Mistress of Sensoria rise from her seat twenty metres below on the main floor of the bridge.\n\n'My lord-' Thiel says at once.\n\nGuilliman has seen her too. They descend to the sensoria station, with Lamiad, Dohel and Valita trailing.\n\n'Contact,' the Mistress of Sensoria declares. She steadies her voice. 'I am painting a contact six AU inside the anomaly limits.'\n\n'Inside?' Guilliman asks, joining her.\n\n'Within the zone of... of disruption, yes, my lord,' she replies.\n\n'A signal?' Guilliman asks. Though he tries to disguise it, there is a note of hope in the primarch's voice that Thiel finds unbearably painful.\n\n'No, my lord. A ship.'\n\nThe Mistress of Sensoria snaps her fingers, and her officers redouble their efforts at the stations around her, finessing auspex, main augurs, and particle sweeps.\n\n'Indistinct,' she says, studying the screen as the results collate. 'Almost an imaging ghost. But it appears to be a vessel of significant displacement. Any smaller, and it would be invisible in that miasma.'\n\nAfter days of scrutiny, it's the first source, signal or object of any kind they have detected inside the negation zone.\n\n'Identity?' Guilliman asks, looking for himself. 'Marker code? Transponder?'\n\n'None registering,' replies the Mistress of Sensoria.\n\n'That's a large ship...' comments Lamiad.\n\n'Can you rotate the image to plan view, enhance, and run a silhouette comparative?' Dohel asks the Mistress of Sensoria.\n\n'Already in process, my master,' she replies. The fuzz of green light on the black screen tilts slightly, but becomes no more distinct. It's just a blur to Thiel. If he hadn't been told, he would have mistaken it for a smudged thumbprint on the glass. Which is why he is a Legiones Astartes master-at-arms and the Mistress of Sensoria is the Mistress of Sensoria.\n\n'Gloriana class,' she says abruptly. 'Awaiting cogitator confirmation... Yes, Gloriana class.'\n\nDohel is about to say something.\n\n'Scylla pattern,' says the Mistress of Sensoria. 'Cogitation confirms Gloriana class, Scylla pattern.' She looks at Guilliman nervously.\n\n'Which one?' he asks.\n\nThe Mistress of Sensoria somehow retains her composure.\n\n'There is not a long list of alternatives, my lord,' she says. 'Configuration of the hull and bow do not match any profiles in the registry, and it is significantly larger than any Gloriana class on record. It has clearly undergone refit or rebuild, or perhaps some other form of alteration-'\n\n'Which one?' asks Guilliman again.\n\n'I cannot authenticate definitively, my lord,' she says. 'But aspects of the stern assembly and hull plating suggest it is the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nThe"}
{"text":"ains her composure.\n\n'There is not a long list of alternatives, my lord,' she says. 'Configuration of the hull and bow do not match any profiles in the registry, and it is significantly larger than any Gloriana class on record. It has clearly undergone refit or rebuild, or perhaps some other form of alteration-'\n\n'Which one?' asks Guilliman again.\n\n'I cannot authenticate definitively, my lord,' she says. 'But aspects of the stern assembly and hull plating suggest it is the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\nThere is a long silence.\n\n'Does he...' Guilliman clears his throat. 'Does he come for us?'\n\n'The contact is not moving or under power,' says the Mistress of Sensoria. 'No shields, no trace of weapons primed or armed-'\n\n'Prepare to engage,' Guilliman says to Dohel quietly. 'I want that ship dead.'\n\nDohel nods. 'I ask you to confirm your instruction, my lord.'\n\n'So confirmed and ordered,' Guilliman responds.\n\nDohel turns.\n\n'Officer of record,' he shouts. 'Start the mark.'\n\n'Initiating Thirteenth Legion combat record, elapsed time count,' the Rubricator Martial replies. 'Count begins. Solar Realm mark zero-zero decimal zero-zero decimal zero-zero.'\n\n'My lord,' says the Mistress of Sensoria suddenly. 'A... a second contact.'\n\n'Ah,' says Guilliman, turning back to her. 'Now his fleet emerges-'\n\n'It is another Gloriana-class vessel,' she says.\n\n'Another?'\n\n'Six light minutes lateral to the first, not in formation.'\n\n'Is it the Conqueror?'\n\nShe hesitates. She wants to answer him obediently, but she doesn't know how.\n\n'Mistress?' says Guilliman. 'Will you oblige me with an answer?'\n\n'We have pattern match,' she says in a small voice. 'It is also the Vengeful Spirit.'\n\n'This is an imaging error,' Dohel says immediately. 'Refresh the-'\n\n'Third contact!' announces an officer at the station beside them.\n\n'Fourth contact!' calls another.\n\nThe Mistress of Sensoria starts to project the sensor data on the main display. By the time she has added the first four, another six have been called out, then ten more. The number continues to rise, an officer calling out every few seconds.\n\nThe ships, now thirty-odd in number and rising, are scattered across the negation zone ahead. Some are close to the edge, just light seconds away at the fringe of the heliopause limit. Others are deeper inside the zone. They are not in any kind of formation, or fleet cohesion, and many are not aligned to the galactic plane or even pointing in the same direction, relative. None are under power. They are floating, adrift, spread across an area twenty-six light minutes square, which, significantly, is the current scope of the flagship's sensoria cone.\n\nThere are now fifty. Seventy. Two hundred and ten. Four hundred.\n\nThey are all Gloriana class. Only twenty such ships were ever made.\n\nThey are all the Vengeful Spirit, multiplying, breeding, slowly filling the negation zone like stars coming out, or like a ramifying fractal pattern.\n\nA thousand, three thousand, six...\n\nThey are all the same ship, one ship, the Warmaster's monstrous battleship, and it is everywhere.\n\nii\n\nIron Blooded\n\nUnlike his brother Rogal Dorn, the Lord of Iron has never condemned the tactic of retreat. Not surrender, not yielding - those are different things entirely. But retreat, as an instrument of warfare, has always seemed viable to Perturabo, and entirely in accordance with his rationality and cold logic.\n\nIt is a matter of combat efficiency and economy. The Lord of Iron will sacrifice a million lives, if that's what victory costs. But if he calculates victory to be impossible, he will not waste a single further soul on the effort. In an unviable position, the answer is not glory or a valiant show of courage. The answer is stop. Break off. Retreat. Reposition at a time when and a place where victory is viable once more. Wastage only has merit when it accomplishes something.\n\nPerturabo is retreating from the field.\n\nThe Iron Blood, his titanic flagship, leads the fleet of the IV Legion away from Terra. The ships move at low impeller, like drifting citadels of steel, out past the orbit of Mars. Even if the Iron Blood had been built with window ports, there is nothing to see outside. No void, no realspace, no distant glimpse of Mars, a ruby against soft, black velvet. There is nothing outside except the coagulating medium of warpflux, the nephelosphere radiating outwards from the Throneworld. The immaterium has been spilled by the actions of the Warmaster, and is slowly filling and consuming the entire Solar Realm. Unlike loyalist vessels, the warships of the Iron Warriors are not blind and helpless in this medium. Perturabo reads the warp as clearly as any data.\n\nAt some point, Perturabo will order the fleet to translate, and move away from the Solar Realm at the superluminary velocities allowed by the warp. At some point.\n\nPerturabo is in no hurry. He has time. Time is inoperative inside this broken realm.\n\nHe sits alone in his private chamber, and ruminates, lit by the blue glow of the cradled cogitators. Data is reassuring, even in the quantities that flow across his screens. It never lies to him. It owes no allegiance. It has no bias. It simply is.\n\nThe blue gloom is like a twilight. His own? he wonders. Someone else's?\n\nThough he can justify retreat, he doesn't like the taste of it. Terra should have been his greatest accomplishment, the undertaking that would have established his supremacy unequivocally. Enough, alone, for him to take the Palace of Terra and crush it through siegecraft. A gratifying bonus to contend, at last, with Dorn, and demand satisfaction. A duel. Single combat by siege warfare. It was clear that Perturabo was going to win.\n\nClear, but not actually proven.\n\nHe breaks things sometimes, when the fits of bitterness and rage become too much. Furniture. Data-looms. Trophies. His warhammer leaves dents in the chamber's bulkheads, and so do his fists. He even destroys a cogitator in its cradle.\n\nThe bitterness remains long after he has called the mute servitors in to replace the device.\n\nSatisfaction. There is none now. None to claim and none to demand. No supremacy. No proof, hard as iron and undeniable, of his superior craft. He walked away from all of that. He chose retreat.\n\nOn the final day, he quit the field.\n\nPeevishness? No. Frustration? Petulance? No, neither of those. Vanity? Never. Anger? Some, but not enough to explain his decision.\n\nHate. Hate explains it. He takes up the warhammer Forgebreaker, teeth clenched.\n\nThe Lord of Iron has not even permitted the Iron Circle into the chamber since embarkation. The battle-automata wait outside the chamber hatch, dormant but active\/ready. He wonders what it's like to be them, to feel-\n\nWell, they do not feel, which is the point. They are instruments, designed for purpose. They do not feel or judge or reflect. They do not ruminate. They are weapons that act with supreme effect when the moment arises, and are oblivious to the silence otherwise. Like data, they owe no allegiance. They have no bias. They simply are.\n\nPerturabo is a weapon too. A perfect one. As perfect as a mortal organism can be, at least. There's always room for improvement. He imagines himself as a perfect weapon. A more perfect weapon, something pure, something that is only a weapon and nothing else. An embodiment of absolute obliteration.\n\nThere are ways to achieve that state. He knows that. The data has shown it to him as an irrefutable outcome. He knows what he must plan and achieve to accomplish it.\n\nHe just has to decide if he can bear to, for all great accomplishments come with a cost.\n\nHate. He takes it out on the deck, because neither his father nor brother are present. Sparks fly. Adamantine cracks.\n\nQuiet, his heart rate slightly elevated, he sits slumped across his seat. The hammer is on the floor at his feet. He watches the blue data flicker and flow, unbiased.\n\nHe has often wished to study the daggers employed by Lorgar and his sons. The opportunity is probably passed now. No one knows where Lorgar is. Where do the excommunicated go?\n\nPerturabo has no time at all for the rites and ritual gibberish of the Word Bearers. It is all utterly data-unsupported. But to hear them speak of those daggers... Ignoring the embellishment of their poetry, their endless damn words, they make the athames sound so pure. The blades certainly have heightened properties. He has seen the evidence.\n\nThe blades are so steeped in their own function, so condensed, so utterly themselves. They are weapons whose nature as weapons has become almost sentient. They just are.\n\nSome, he has been told, are so laden with the essence of the murders they have been used to commit, they have become murder. They are physical objects expressing conceptual forms in ways that words, and language, and even data cannot encompass. Like... like sigils, perhaps, if he understands the symbology favoured by the old Regent. Hyper-compressed meaning in solid form. They are sharp enough to cut materia and immateria alike. They are weapons because they are weapons.\n\nHe would have loved to study one.\n\nOr be one. He would like that too.\n\nHe does understand the old Regent's symbology. Of course he does. He understands it perfectly. He doesn't believe in it, because it's patently more gibberish, but he does understand it. He understands it so thoroughly he can see what folly it is.\n\nHow that old fool ran an Imperium for decades is beyond him.\n\nHate is a curious thing. It is the ultimate bias.\n\nPerturabo is a weapon, the greatest ever born. His father used him as a weapon, time and time again, which suited Perturabo perfectly well. But his father never thought to show his appreciation. He just kept using.\n\nOne does not thank a sword. Of course not. But Perturabo was also, unfortunately, a son. A son with a feeling soul. He never asked for that soul, or that tie of blood, and would have been happy to have never known them, but there you go.\n\nA sword with a soul would learn to hate its owner if its ed"}
{"text":" weapon, the greatest ever born. His father used him as a weapon, time and time again, which suited Perturabo perfectly well. But his father never thought to show his appreciation. He just kept using.\n\nOne does not thank a sword. Of course not. But Perturabo was also, unfortunately, a son. A son with a feeling soul. He never asked for that soul, or that tie of blood, and would have been happy to have never known them, but there you go.\n\nA sword with a soul would learn to hate its owner if its edge was never sharpened or the blood was never wiped from it.\n\nHating his father became easy. Eventually. Eventually, it was a natural state. It became his hard edge, self-sharpening. Then his brother came along, with a hate all of his own, and the rest seemed so straightforward.\n\nHate ebbs. It takes him a moment to prise the hammer's head out of the wall plate.\n\nHorus, then. Horus, Horus... Born from the first to greatness and favour. Likeable... No, more than that. Irresistible. They seemed to have so much in common.\n\nBut Horus was always more of a dress sword than a working blade.\n\nThings began well. Events unfolded that Perturabo was eminently suited for. Promises were made. A bright future was negotiated, a configuration of the human Imperium better befitting a son like Perturabo.\n\nBut slowly he was used by Horus as he had been used by his father. He was left to achieve the near impossible, and rebuked when the near impossible was as slow to achieve as the near impossible always is.\n\nAnd Horus left him to it. The dress sword remained in its gaudy, ornamental scabbard. So did any appreciation. Appreciation remained in its scabbard too.\n\nThat was bad enough. But bearable. Then-\n\nHe almost demolishes another cogitator. He pulls the blow at the last moment, and turns the hammer on his seat instead. His scream of hatred bounces back off the chamber's iron walls, and seems to refill his lungs.\n\nHe lowers Forgebreaker. He has buckled the back of his seat, and sent the headrest spinning down the length of the room.\n\nNo matter. He will sit in discomfort. He is used to it.\n\nSo, Horus. Those promises broken as easily as a chair's headrest or a patch of wall. Supremacy was always his goal. His supremacy. The future that would allow for it was not the configuration that Horus had shown to Perturabo to entice him. It was an atrocity that would burn down the great aspects of the Imperium along with the rot that needed to be excised. It was a waste. And it was also a surrender. A surrender to forces that had no place in human affairs.\n\nPerturabo does not surrender.\n\nHorus' idea of victory was not a victory at all, whether Perturabo took the Palace or not. It was not a victory that the Lord of Iron could cost out. It was an unviable position, a victory he calculated to be impossible. He studies the data scrupulously, and it never lies to him. Having learned to hate Horus as much as he hated his father, Perturabo resolved he would not waste a single further soul on the effort. There was nothing to be gained.\n\nPerturabo double-checked the calculations, and quit the field an hour later.\n\nThere is no going back now. None at all.\n\nHe sits in the broken chair, hunched forward, and watches the data. It talks to him in its unbiased voice. Horus is going to win. Horus' version of victory, at least, not one supported by the data. So, the dress sword has finally drawn itself. Terra is perhaps two hours from collapse. The Warmaster's ruination is triumphant.\n\nLogic says the Lord of Iron can go back. Retreat from retreat. Even at this late stage, he could return. He could pre-empt the inevitable wrath that will follow by making his apology before it is demanded of him, by kneeling at the feet of the new Master of Mankind, by pledging a new oath, and making a new promise. Logic says that such an action, showing unprompted respect and humility, might commute the penalty for quitting the field. Especially if he gets there first, before all the others, like Fulgrim, and Alpharius, and Curze, and that wretched zealot Lorgar, come crawling out of the woodwork to plead for mercy and reconciliation in the light of Horus' victory. Be the first to do it, and an amnesty might be secured. Be the third or fourth, and forgiveness will be paper-thin.\n\nThat's what logic says.\n\nHorus is about to triumph. That's what the data says.\n\nUnderstand which way the wind is blowing, and bend with it before it breaks you.\n\nThat's what common sense would say.\n\nDamn Horus to hell. That's what hate says. That's what the Lord of Iron screams at the wall as he dents it, and yells at the deck as he cracks it, and howls at the chair as he reduces it to debris.\n\nDon't go back. Don't ever go back. He hates you too. He will not forgive. He will not find mercy in his heart. His configuration of the future, now dawning, does not allow for mercy.\n\nHorus will punish you whether you go back or not. He will hunt you, and he will destroy you. He will kill you and every single one of your sons.\n\nAnd if that's going to happen anyway, why go back at all?\n\nThe Lord of Iron sits on the deck, hunched over, and watches the data talk in calm, blue, twilight tones. It never lies to him. He watches it tell the story of the Warmaster's triumph. The victory of Horus, scrolling past one data-block at a time.\n\nDamn him. Hate him. He used the Lord of Iron as a weapon, but he made the Lord of Iron his enemy. Perturabo will just have to make ready, and face him when he comes. Perturabo will simply have to kill Horus, and all his sons, and every single one of the idiots who cheer the name Lupercal, because they're too afraid not to. Every single one.\n\nHate can do that. The Lord of Iron can do that.\n\nEspecially if he has become something more by then. Something pure and perfect, because it is absolute and unique. Hyper-compressed meaning in solid form. The shadow cast by all weapons. There are ways to achieve that state. The data has shown it to him as an irrefutable outcome. He just has to decide if he can bear to, for all great accomplishments come at a price.\n\nIt will take persistence. He's never lacked that.\n\nThe data says that the Emperor must die now. The victory is calculated and certain. It's twilight.\n\nPerturabo owes no allegiance. He has no bias. He hates equally.\n\nHe leans forward to watch.\n\niii\n\nExcommunicado\n\nAll he ever wanted was the truth. And the truth always has been the Old Four. Always.\n\nBanishment is good for the soul. A little distance, fresh air in the lungs.\n\nYssimae, fourteen months from Terra. Not too close, just far enough. The air is sweet. The ysslflowers growing wild on the slopes of the low hills have filled the air with a fragrance like copal incense. Lorgar Aurelian can see the anthomancers moving through the brambles, reading the petals.\n\nThe local star is small, hot and bright. The wind is warm. The sky has burned purple. The landscape, banking down from the low hills, is chalk white. At low anchor, Fidelitas Lex fills the sky to the west.\n\nCompliance here was easy. Not a single shot was fired. Lorgar, and those who bore the word at his side, were greeted cautiously by the Yssm Elect, and calmly accepted an inspection by their xenomancers. The strangers were read and, though neither the xenomancers nor the Elect knew any of the words they wore on their armour and their skin, or spoke with their mouths, an easy peace was divined.\n\nLorgar walks towards the local town, Yssl Darnis, white-walled, white-roofed, stark in the sunlight. Umbromancers skirt the town walls on the side away from the sun, reading the shadows.\n\nIt's very warm. He feels sweat on his back under his robe. Is there a method for that? For reading the track of perspiration? Surely there must be. The Yssm are fixated by divination. Their entire social structure and culture is based upon it. Perhaps the method is related to urticariomancy?\n\nHe reaches to wipe sweat from his brow, and finds yesterday's ysslflower garland still on his head. The knotted crown of flowers is dry and starting to wilt. He takes it off, and throws it into the brambles beside the path. There will be a fresh one today. The Yssm crown him every morning.\n\nAs the path winds down towards the town gates, it passes a cluster of white clay huts. There are nests of these windowless, bell-shaped structures all over the landscape. They are private enclosures into which mancers of any discipline can retreat if their practice requires isolation, such as darkness to read a bowl of flames, or silence to hear the drip of water, or an unvented space in which to inhale sacred smoke.\n\nFrom the enclosures come truths, sometimes trivial, sometimes inexplicable, sometimes profound.\n\nLorgar is interested in those truths. He admires the Yssmic dedication to pre-empting the future, and the sheer range and ingenuity of the methods they have invented to do it.\n\nHe has already shared his truth with them. He has told them that the only deep truth is the Old Four, and that the only future worth reaching is an immaculately conceived realm of Chaos. He has told them that there are many things that appear to be godlike and divine, and present themselves as such, even in prophecy and mantic form. These are not to be trusted. There is always a deeper truth behind them. There are better gods.\n\nThe Yssm accepted this without question. It seemed to fit perfectly with the foundational mysteries of their belief system, which they had developed over centuries through almost industrial levels of prognostication and divination.\n\nThey allowed him into their most hallowed shrines, and showed him the images of the true gods they had identified. He knew them at once, and could name all four for them.\n\nThat was the morning they started to crown him.\n\nThis particular group of huts, a cluster of eight, is set off the path, and aligned with certain distant hills, and to rays of the sun at certain times of day, and to a sacred grove on the slopes behind him. The whole region, though it s"}
{"text":"evels of prognostication and divination.\n\nThey allowed him into their most hallowed shrines, and showed him the images of the true gods they had identified. He knew them at once, and could name all four for them.\n\nThat was the morning they started to crown him.\n\nThis particular group of huts, a cluster of eight, is set off the path, and aligned with certain distant hills, and to rays of the sun at certain times of day, and to a sacred grove on the slopes behind him. The whole region, though it seems natural and pastoral, is a ritual landscape, shaped and adjusted over the millennia for sacred purposes, down to the placement of Yssl Darnis itself. It is an earthly reflection of heaven.\n\nThe Yssmic concept of heaven, anyway.\n\nAs Lorgar approaches, Kor Gurat emerges from one of the huts. He has spent three days immersed in sacred smoke. His eyes are bloodshot and unfocused.\n\nHe bows when he sees his primarch.\n\n'What have you read?' Lorgar asks him.\n\n'In the smoke, my lord,' he replies, 'I read neverness. It comes up like a storm. It is not clean, my lord.'\n\n'Not clean? A curious word, Gurat.'\n\n'I mean,' says Kor Gurat, 'it is ill-formed. It is not the perfect expression of the realm we seek.'\n\n'The neverness, no doubt, is the primordial storm from which perfection will be born,' says Lorgar, who has much experience with interpretation.\n\n'I think so. For I also saw weapons of cleansing-'\n\n'Weapons?'\n\n'To purge and wash the newborn realm, I presume,' says Kor Gurat. 'I saw a biological scourge that would undo all who oppose the truth, cell by cell. It ate flesh and, in the using of it, all morality.'\n\nLorgar is intrigued. 'Choose another method, Gurat, when you are refreshed. Seek more truths regarding this.'\n\nKor Gurat nods, willing but hesitant.\n\n'What else did you read, my son?' Lorgar asks.\n\n'I saw seven hammers set to bring down the world,' Gurat says, 'and five thrones-'\n\n'Five?' asks Lorgar.\n\nGurat nods again. 'I didn't understand that part, my lord,' he admits.\n\nI do, Lorgar thinks. Four for the Old Four, and the fifth for the one who sits with them. Who will that be? Unless five thrones represents another aberration that Horus, both too strong and too weak, has devised to mutilate the truth.\n\nMore questions need to be asked.\n\n'I have been told this truth too,' says Aridath Aarn, drawn from his own enclosure by the sound of voices outside. His hands are bare, and gleaming with holy oil. The chirognomists who were reading his palms and fingers hover in the doorway of the hut behind him.\n\n'Five thrones, one covered in blood,' says Aarn. The young captain's voice is slurred. He has been given a libation of astringent bark to amplify the reading of his hands. 'On it, a dying king nailed in place, too weak to move, supported only by the power of magic.'\n\n'Not the first time I have heard this truth, captain,' says Lorgar. A crippled king installed on a throne against his will, lacking the power to rule. Some answers have suggested that this is Horus, triumphant yet destroyed by the efforts that have been required to achieve his triumph. Such a king would be easy to remove.\n\n'In the lines of my palm has been witnessed an angel, dead,' says Aarn, looking down at his hand pensively, as though it doesn't belong to him. 'A rage is unleashed because of it.'\n\nLorgar smiles. The Angel, destroyed? He can imagine his father's wrath at such a loss. No wonder, then, that Horus ends up a crippled king when the patricide is done.\n\nSuch a battle. Lorgar is sad to be missing it. But exile is necessary.\n\n'The truths, my lord,' says Kor Gurat, 'they have been coming faster these last few days-'\n\n'Much faster,' Aarn agrees. 'Almost too fast-'\n\nThey both look tired.\n\n'These are the last days,' Lorgar tells them. 'It is no wonder. The warp is open to us. The eye of the gods is upon us. Rest, both of you. Then return to your study. Be guided by our friends here.'\n\nThe two Word Bearers bow to him.\n\nHe resumes his walk towards the town.\n\nYssimae suits him well. Lorgar was born on a spiritually dead world, where dry ritual had replaced living faith. Little, simple Yssimae is a spiritually vital world, awake to possibilities. It's a space to breathe, and clear the head.\n\nAnd then fill it again. The Yssm have willingly become an adjunct priesthood, eagerly toiling to furnish their esteemed visitors with divine knowledge, by every means at their disposal.\n\nFidelitas Lex impressed them very much. They had never seen its like. Its appearance in the sky must have been the greatest revelation of ouranomancy ever.\n\nLorgar impresses them too. They are fascinated by his skin, which gleams with the gold of the words written on it, and with the psykanic light he allows it to radiate. The Yssm have become his disciples, and he has, in turn, become theirs.\n\nMore of his sons come to meet him as he approaches the town gates. They are bearing many handwritten pages of divined truths, the latest gathered. They read them to him as he walks: truths learned from theriomancy, from umbilicomancy in the town's small birthing hall, from cineromancy and turifumy at the hearths. Fire is a particular speciality here, and Lorgar listens closely.\n\nHe hears of sortilege, of oryctomancy mined from local quarries, of logomancy derived from the Yssmic study of the words written on the visitors' war plate, and graptomancy read from the handstrokes with which those words were written.\n\nSo many forms and methods. One truth.\n\nThe Old Four.\n\nIt was plain to him before he came here. It is emphatic now.\n\nLorgar was right from the start. The very start. The truth is, and always has been, the Chaos gods.\n\nDivination, by whatever means, is of course a subtle art. It requires patience and an exacting mind. It requires faith in oneself, and in the powers that are being read. It is far too easy to seize upon a superficial meaning. Layers must be peeled back, one after another, until an authentic answer is reached.\n\nTake cartomancy. He has never favoured it. The layered and motile symbols, the unnecessary complexity. It is far too mannered and vague to function as a precise tool. The Emperor can keep his tarot. His Imperial Truth too. Lorgar favours precision instruments. Fire, for example. It's a speciality here.\n\nLorgar has made mistakes. The Old Four have not made his path to them easy, or his view of them clear. He has made mistakes of interpretation along the way.\n\nThe first was believing that his father was the divine absolute. Too many years wasted pursuing that notion. It caused him pain, and led to rejection, and it was wrong anyway.\n\nHe remembers the years he squandered on seers and scryers and soothsayers. Charlatans mostly, or otherwise gifted, but blinder than he was. He has been dreaming about the Blessed Lady recently. Cyrene Valantion, long dead. So many truths she seemed to have. And so very wrong most of them were.\n\nHe wonders why he's been dreaming about her. He must consult the oneiromancers and find out.\n\nOnce Chaos became the core of Lorgar's truth, an aspect of the divine he had no idea could exist, Horus became the mechanism. Such effort Lorgar made then, he and his apostles. Such hopes he had.\n\nAlas. Though aligned to the Chaos powers, Horus has proven to be another dead end. Even shorn of his lightness as 'Lupercal', and set in the darkness of 'Warmaster', he has skewed the true reading.\n\nThus Horus has become another layer to be peeled back, as Lorgar skins the truth.\n\nWhich is why, of course, he is here, on a low-tech backwater, fourteen months from Terra. Lorgar saw the crack in Horus, and attempted, before it was too late, to replace him as the ascendant instrument of Chaos. This effort to depose the Warmaster did not end well, because Lorgar had made Horus too strong. Too strong to stand aside.\n\nSo Lorgar was banished. Excommunicated. Though a proportion of his host stands at Terra, to see what good can be salvaged from the Warmaster's imminent triumph, Lorgar is here, in exile.\n\nLorgar's Dark Apostle remains hopeful. Erebus, so often an outsider, but now the nominal commander of the XVII Legion on Terra since Layak's demise, has always been extraordinarily focused and precise. Erebus claims, in missives sent via the reflections in votive bowls of water, and sometimes blood, that Horus may yet prevail.\n\nNot in killing Lorgar's father and conquering Terra. That is a forgone, ordained outcome.\n\nNo, in becoming that which Lorgar hoped he would become. An instrument of Chaos Incarnate.\n\nLorgar is not convinced. He remains quite certain that Horus is too strong to stand aside, but too weak to succeed. Erebus is more positive. He believes that Horus may yet become the instrument mankind needs, and is bending all his efforts to ensuring that result as Terra enters its final hours.\n\nBut it is a long game. Lorgar knows it, and so does Erebus. Erebus' greatest strength is his pragmatism, so rare in those of a mystical leaning. If not this game, then the next, or the next. If not Horus, then another. All they need is that despoiler, to borrow a term from the largely risible arcana of tarot. A force of fundamental change that exercises control, but is not, itself, controlled.\n\nEven at this deepest pitch of war, fully committed, with Terra dying, Erebus sends that he has another prospect in mind, a fail-safe should Horus prove unfit. Too strong, too weak...\n\nHe won't say who. Lorgar hopes that he is the one that Erebus favours.\n\nLorgar wonders sometimes about Erebus. A heretic to the very last, an overturner of false truths, Erebus is the most wonderful instrument, and has achieved so very much. It was thanks to Erebus, more than anyone else, that Lorgar managed to see past the Imperial Truth he had reached, so he could peel back the layers and find better truths beneath. Erebus is the sanest man Lorgar has ever known.\n\nBut in order to accomplish his work, Erebus is ferociously cunning. The two of them have often had bitter differences, and they are only aligned now"}
{"text":"c to the very last, an overturner of false truths, Erebus is the most wonderful instrument, and has achieved so very much. It was thanks to Erebus, more than anyone else, that Lorgar managed to see past the Imperial Truth he had reached, so he could peel back the layers and find better truths beneath. Erebus is the sanest man Lorgar has ever known.\n\nBut in order to accomplish his work, Erebus is ferociously cunning. The two of them have often had bitter differences, and they are only aligned now for the greater good. Lorgar wonders if the Apostle can be trusted. Truly trusted. Surely he can? Lorgar would have been told, by now, if there were lies hidden beneath Erebus' truth. The Old Four would have warned him.\n\nIn the last few days, Yssimae's harvest of divination has turned a little sour. The omens of astragalomancy have become dubious as the dice are rolled. Belomancy has missed its target. Arithromancy no longer adds up. Lorgar knows what it is, of course. The Triumph of Ruin, the fall of Terra - such an event, even fourteen light months away, is so severe, its shockwaves perturb the warp. Several times today already, Lorgar has been told of a helpless, crippled wretch ascending the throne. If that is all that remains of Horus Lupercal when he has taken Terra, then he will be too weak for anything.\n\nEver the same. Too strong, too weak. Horus was a fool's choice.\n\nAt least, if they are true readings, a helpless wretch upon a throne will be easy to unseat.\n\nLorgar finds himself longing for clarity. He knows the truth, now. The Old Four, without doubt, will build the future that Lorgar wishes for mankind. He just needs to know the means by which that future can be properly manifested. What was the word Gurat said? 'Clean.' Yes. The birth of the new age will be messy, a turmoil of neverness churned up by birth-pangs. But then it must be washed clean.\n\nHe needs to peel the layers and find out how the Old Four want him to do that, because it won't be long before the blood and pain are over, and he returns from exile.\n\nYssmic youths approach him as he comes in through the town gates, eleomancers with flasks of holy oil, and phytognomists with fresh garlands of flowers for Lorgar's brow. Their laughter greets him.\n\n'Urizen! Urizen! An angel is dead!' they announce excitedly in the local tongue, a language that Lorgar has quickly mastered.\n\n'An angel, indeed?' Lorgar asks, hiding his smile by bowing so they can crown him with the flowers.\n\n'Fallen from the heaven, Urizen, his wings torn! Rage follows! It is read and we have seen it! It signifies much!'\n\n'Such as?' Lorgar asks.\n\n'The Emperor will die!' they exclaim, laughing. 'This Master of Mankind you told us of, the one who took the throne without asking, he will die today! We have read it!'\n\nLorgar smiles back, delighted. He takes out his knife.\n\nIt's time for haruspicy to peel those layers and reveal the truth.\n\nThen fire, the local speciality, just to be certain.\n\nPART NINE\n\nA CARD, DESPOILER\n\n9:i\n\nRed and Black\n\nThe Angel's eyes are open, afterwards.\n\nThey stare, but at what? A squandered past, an unmoving present, a stolen future? It is hard to tell. There is no recrimination in the gaze. It is more like shock, the first instant of surprise.\n\nOf course, there is no art to reading meaning in the physiognomy of the dead as there is with the living. The eyes of the dead all tell the same story, and it is one of vacancy. Whatever their eyes may suggest, it is no more than a myth.\n\nThe Angel's eyes are fixed and dilated. Pinpoint petechia mark the conjunctivae like freckles. The gaze has the empty, slack sightlessness of extinction, eyes open not to see, but simply because they are not closed. There is no point of focus. Beads of blood cling to his eyelashes like cabochon rubies, but no blink will ever come, not even when they drop upon the cornea.\n\nIf he could see anything at all, it would be the film of blood, but he sees nothing, not even the permutations and configurations, for there are none left, nor even his dreams and visions, which have deserted him, along with his body heat and breath.\n\nHis dreams, his visions, scatter outwards, for he has no further use for them, and they are no longer his to own. They whizz away from him, like shrapnel from a detonation and, like shrapnel, they are sharp and lethal. The fragments are edged with his pain, his hope, his regret, his anger. Though he does not intend them to, they will cause great and lasting harm.\n\nWhere they land, where they hit, they will do damage.\n\nFor the second time in this un-hour, a radiating shockwave passes across the mangled realm of Terra. It is not the astronomical exhalation of near divinity that rocked creation when the mantle of the Dark King was rejected.\n\nIt is more like the blistering flash of a nail bomb.\n\nFew notice it. Few are aware. Few are even touched. The Neverborn feel it. They wince, and flinch, and some perish as they are struck, but most are laughing anyway. A death like this is rare and sweet, and must be savoured even if it kills them too.\n\nBut the Angel's sons? Every single one of them is caught in the blast.\n\nRaldoron's hearts stop for eight beats. His blood freezes, then ignites. A spasm lashes through him from head to toe, as though he has been cracked like a whip, and he collapses against the black adamantine doors of the Great Atrium, doors that, a moment before, he was trying to claw open.\n\nThe pain is sudden, and so complete that Raldoron is unable to consider the mystery of its origin. He slides down the doors, his fingertips leaving scratches in the black metal. Ikasati and Khoradal rush to him, and as they turn him, and see the sightless staring of his eyes and the wordless straining of his jaw, they fear the worst: the action of some assassin or some undetected enemy, poison, disease, a seizing affliction.\n\nThen the worst hits them too, and they convulse and fall as their First Captain fell, writhing and gasping. Across the punctured floor of the Vengeful Spirit's Great Atrium, the Blood Angels of the Anabasis company, sons of Sanguinius all, collapse in turn, brought down by shared pain as surely as by any mass-reactive round. Their bodies thrash and contort, hammering the broken deck. Weapons discharge by accident. Standards and banners topple from spasming hands.\n\nTheir screams fill, and then shred the air.\n\nRaldoron sees none of this. He sees agony, manifesting as a great, red, pumping sac that fills his vision. He sees loss as the air that his lungs refuse to draw. He sees anguish as the edge of a keening blade. He sees grief as claws that close and knife him whole.\n\nHe sees a burning battlement. He sees the sky on fire forever. He sees his Lord Sanguinius broken across a daemon's spike, pinned face-upwards like a specimen butterfly. He sees the scarlet blood, in quantities beyond measure, blood that is both his and his lord's, and it makes him thirst.\n\nHe sees rage. Rage is black.\n\nTaerwelt Ikasati sees blood on his eyelashes that won't blink away. He is face down. He stares because he cannot not. He screams, because he is only a scream. He sees his Bright Lord felled to his knees by a spike-hooked falchion, guts dragged into the air. He sees the wicked blade rise again to hack the kneeling corpse apart. All that is red becomes black. All that is black becomes rage.\n\nSarodon Sacre's sight explodes. He sees the visions of his lord, and they sear his eyes. Pain peppers him like flying glass. He sees a grim tower of the lost, a tower overflowing with the roar of howling. He sees the name Amareo writ in blood. He sees a company of death, all dressed in black, a bloody saltire on their shoulders. He sees their priests, and hears the chanting of their moripatris. Their faces are skulls. They open their arms to welcome him.\n\nHis rage, like their vestments, is black.\n\nKhoradal Furio sees Sanguinius torn apart by petulant gods. The gods are vast, hunched and obese, half-cloaked in the endless night from which they have been called. They are the size of continents, of moons, of solar realms. They sit and pick the tiny golden figure apart, twisting off limbs to gnaw upon like the drumsticks of poultry. They chuckle, and they teeth-strip bones. Their feasting is inevitable. It has been foreseen and ordained in dreams and visions. Khoradal tastes his lord's pain in the mouths of the gods, he tastes his lord's blood on their lips. He tastes the blackness of the rage.\n\nHe becomes the rage.\n\nIn the Great Atrium, his power fist is clamped around Raldoron's throat.\n\nThe rage expands, breathless, bloodthirsty, unquenchable. It takes hold of every brother in the IX. It is a flaw of their gene-seed, a legacy of their Insanguination, a consuming lust like the thirst that they have concealed in their shame. But it is more than the thirst, more than the corruption of modified genes, more than the yearning hunger of hyperactive omophagae, more than the mutagenic, irradiated birthright of Baal. It is an insanity, unlocked by the death of Sanguinius, an empathic torment that flashes his life and his murder before their eyes, so they share in his memories, his dreams fulfilled and unfulfilled, his visions realised and unrealised, his nightmares.\n\nEvery permutation of his pain. Every configuration of his fate. Every scintilla of his suffering.\n\nNow and forever.\n\nThe Blood Angels erupt across the tortured farscape of Terra. Their fury is uncontainable. They become senseless things, beyond reason, control utterly lost. With their heads suddenly ablaze with tormenting, hand-me-down dreams, they fall on those around them.\n\nAll of the IX Legion Blood Angels are in the field. At this fateful, final hour, where else would they be? Almost every one of them is already engaged with the traitor host when the rage hits. Their enemies become their prey. Skills, techniques, tactics, even weapons are abandoned. The exquisite martial prowess that distinguishes the IX evaporates in seconds. Mindless "}
{"text":"n, control utterly lost. With their heads suddenly ablaze with tormenting, hand-me-down dreams, they fall on those around them.\n\nAll of the IX Legion Blood Angels are in the field. At this fateful, final hour, where else would they be? Almost every one of them is already engaged with the traitor host when the rage hits. Their enemies become their prey. Skills, techniques, tactics, even weapons are abandoned. The exquisite martial prowess that distinguishes the IX evaporates in seconds. Mindless and feral, they kill everything around them, destroying with their hands and teeth traitors who were, moments before, holding them at bay with blade and shield.\n\nIn their insanity, the Blood Angels are no longer able to differentiate foe from friend. It is not just the blood of traitors that spills.\n\nThe Angels scream. The screaming fills the world. The sound of Angels screaming is something no man should ever hear.\n\nKystos Gaellon is on the remains of Marmax South, Section 52, Hold Point 78, when his father dies. He's been there for thirty-five minutes. That time is an estimate, and he's not entirely sure how he got there.\n\nHe hears a scream. He has no idea that it's coming from him.\n\nMalix Hest does not see the Orion gunship. He is insensible to its violent crash-landing, or the skill with which Ios Raja has managed to bring it down on the Aegeus Concourse. The craft, one engine bitten off and its golden hull stippled with claw-marks, leaves a ninety-metre scar across the rockcrete. Only the Sentinel's expertise and post-human strength prevents its outright disintegration. It sits askew, bent over to port, in the litter of its own debris. Raja ejects the hatch, and he and the legionaries Conort and Kumo help to pull the dazed Hassan and the Sisters clear of the wreck.\n\nHest is aware of none of this. A second before impact, the rage came upon him. He sees a rain of blood, and a distant tower that seems to beckon to him from some forsaken future. He sees his primarch lord beaten to the deck by a world-breaking maul, a relentless hail of blows that snap and crush and fill the air with bloody spray. He sees the black pit of the rage yawn wide to swallow him. He sees nothing else.\n\nHe does not see Ibelin Kumo of the White Scars tumble to the ground, thrown backwards in his attempts to restrain. He does not see the incredulous face of the Praetorian Fist Guil Conort as his throat is torn out and his head twisted off. He does not see Hassan of the Chosen fall back in abject horror at the sight of a raging Blood Angel tearing out of the gunship's hatchway, gore trailing from his hands and spilling from his mouth.\n\nHe does not see Ios Raja, his expression appalled, as he lunges forward to protect the Chosen One. He does not see Raja's thrusting spear. Malix Hest does not even feel the spear-tip go into him, or understand that he is killed.\n\nHe is not even able to appreciate that his death is, in fact, a relief.\n\nNassir Amit sees red. Actual red, as though blood has coated his eyes, as though blood has covered his corneas. The rage is instant and absolute. He breaks from the formations that are trying to hold Marnix Confluence, not backwards in flight, like so many Excertus and Auxilia have done in the past few minutes, but stumbling forwards, blind, towards the enemy onslaught. Around him, Imperial Fists and White Scars yell his name in disbelief. Hemheda Khan bellows at Amit to stop.\n\nAmit is oblivious. He utters no scream, and makes no sound. He is blood-blind, and everything in him, including his own identity, has been reduced to a tiny blackened ingot, a coal of pure, dense rage, like the compressed heart of a supermassive black sun.\n\nThere is no sound. The world is silenced. Inside his own red darkness, Amit sees images flutter across the surface of that spinning coal of rage. He sees blood drops clinging to eyelashes. He sees an empty stare that will never blink and react. He sees blood on crumpled golden plate, and a face washed in gore, a face that is half-lifted off the bone, the flesh hanging loose. He knows the face.\n\nHe sees the daemon-forms, black poppets and homunculae, that prattle and grin as they drag the heavy carcass across a bloody deck, and prop it up, and pin it, like some trophy, to the wall of an abominable black cathedral. He sees the iron nails as they are driven in, through meat, wrists, palms, shoulders, hips, throat, wings.\n\nHe starts to run, in rage, outrage, disbelief and horror. He is screaming now. The daemonic things, both those in his head and those surging down the Western Mass Passageway, see him coming. Like him, they register disbelief. Like him, they start to scream.\n\nHis sword, already wet with Neverborn ichor, is as thirsty as he is. It starts to feed. Blow follows blow. It splits skulls. It severs bones. It slices meat. It carves daemon-skin.\n\nIt tears flesh.\n\nZealis Varens has already lost an arm and the sight in one eye when he loses his sanity too. Cornered by Death Guard on the Via Atmosine, he is the last man standing of the four loyalist squads left to hold the thoroughfare. His visor is punctured by a bloody crater, and his severed arm is a stub of meat and bare bone protruding from broken plate. The wounds are nothing to the wound in his mind.\n\nClose by the ransacked Fratery, Satel Aimery falls from the sky. The blood in his own veins revolts him, and is also in revolt. The traitor-foes rush in upon him, assuming he has been brought down at last by a lucky shot. He has repelled their assaults for too long, driving them back, heaping up a mound of their dead, and repulsing their attempts to penetrate this narrow channel of the field. Now, at last, he seems to fall, and they pour in to overwhelm him and butcher him.\n\nBut they recoil as he rears up. They recoil from the fury that spills out of him like scalding steam from a volcanic vent. They see a look upon his face that is far more than the grim resolve of a noble warrior cornered.\n\nThey see insanity, the wild flash of an inhuman carnivore.\n\nThey do not see what he sees. And though they are about to die, torn to tatters and exsanguinated by a fury they could never have imagined, they should be thankful to be spared that vision, at least.\n\nKhotus Meffiel drops the storm shield and bent lance that he picked up when his sword shattered. The Sons of Horus assailing him think he's mad, and that his casting away of weapons is some sign of submission. They are right; it is submission and he is mad. His madness is a black mosaic of a thousand possible deaths, and his submission is not to them.\n\nThey are absolutely not ready for his hands, or his teeth.\n\nEmhon Lux, in his madness, tries to pull himself free from the lifter-throne that supports him. It feels to him as though the chair systems are pumping poison rage into his body instead of opiates, and the opiates ran dry hours ago, anyway. His all-consuming pain seems to twist and transmute, becoming another quality of pain that is entirely different and somehow far greater. He thought he had come to terms with the agony he was obliged to dwell in, but he cannot endure this new form. His agony was red, and this is black. His thirst was terrible, now it is an engulfing hunger. He thrashes to get out of the chair. He yanks pipes and plugs out of his skin. He wrestles to escape his own body, because there is now so much pain in it, there is no room left for him.\n\nHellflame burns his veins. Despair brands his brain. He hears a nine-beat chant not meant for the air and, in time to its Kairic rhythm, he sees a daemon's hammer fall, striking, as regular and relentless as a working ironsmith at an anvil. He sees what it is beating out; the auramite plate, the pulping flesh, the white feathers, snapped and torn, the bloody clumps of wrenched-out golden hair.\n\nHe needs to stand. He needs to fight, he needs to stop the atrocity. Pain and jet-black rage pin him, and will not let him rise.\n\nThe frenetic tempo of the battle shifts. Only a veteran would notice it amid such unabated intensity. But Rann does, as a conductor might notice one musician in his orchestra mistime a note during a grandiose symphonic finale. The rhythm of war slips a step.\n\nRann can't work out why. There isn't an opportunity to assess. It is taking every iota of his concentration and stamina to cling on to his little patch of Terra. Spilled blood has saturated the ground beneath him to such an extent that it has become a red mire, a lurid crimson quicksand, and if not for the heap of corpses that he occupies like a castaway on a rocky atoll, he would have sunk to his hips. His twin axes maintain their rhythm. He cleaves the visor of a World Eater, and cracks the chest of a Cthonic Terminator. Horus will not win this. The world will have drowned in blood before ever that infamous victory occurs.\n\nHe strikes aside a power-adze, and breaks a spear mid-haft. He ducks the thrust of a bill-hook, and shears Hunter through the ribs and spine of a gharial-snouted Neverborn, then swings to face the Death Guard brute whose bill-hook missed the first time. A frothing World Eater and a horned, cernunnos devil clamber up the corpse hill to assail him from behind, but he has two axes, and his combat-awareness has never been more pure and focused. Headsman, true to its name, takes off the Death Guard's head, and it comes loose, spinning, in a hose of gore. Hunter whistles into the horned thing's sternum, and opens its ribs like a clam shell. It topples backwards, and the wide span of its thorned antlers catches the World Eater and drags him with it into the blood-mire below.\n\nRann's twin axes maintain their rhythm, but he is out of time now. War's cadence has definitely changed. Rann presumes that this is the end, that so few remain with him, resistance has turned to rout. He-\n\nSomething knocks him off the mound of bodies. The impact is numbing. Struggling to rise, floundering in the liquid mud, he sees the winged monster that has overthrow"}
{"text":"es backwards, and the wide span of its thorned antlers catches the World Eater and drags him with it into the blood-mire below.\n\nRann's twin axes maintain their rhythm, but he is out of time now. War's cadence has definitely changed. Rann presumes that this is the end, that so few remain with him, resistance has turned to rout. He-\n\nSomething knocks him off the mound of bodies. The impact is numbing. Struggling to rise, floundering in the liquid mud, he sees the winged monster that has overthrown him. It crouches on the crest of the corpse-hill that Rann had claimed as his own, and is pawing towards him on all fours, wings spread, eyes bright, clawing over drenched plate and tangled limbs.\n\nIt is growling, a deep, infrasonic purr of menace. Its fangs are vast, the dentition of a carnodon, fit to rip the throat from a helpless antelope. Rann is the antelope.\n\nIt is, he understands, the most appalling and lethal monster he has faced in a day of monsters. Rann knows this, quite plainly, from two things: its homicidal intent is beyond question.\n\nAnd it is Azkaellon.\n\n9:ii\n\nHorus awaits\n\nShe tells him his brother is dead. He looks down at her, his eyes slightly narrowed.\n\n'Which one?' he asks.\n\n'The Angel,' she replies. She waits, expecting anger, half-expecting him to strike her for delivering such ill tidings.\n\nBut all he says is, 'How do you know?'\n\nShe tells him she felt it. He stares at her a little longer. He knows what she is. He can see the witch in her. She half-expects him to kill her for that too.\n\n'Can you stand?' Dorn asks her.\n\nShe tries. She can, barely. Her limbs feel new, soft, weak. Under the heap of stones, she has died too many times, and lived again too hastily. Her body, her whole being, is still trying to mend and renew itself. Everything feels unfamiliar and untried. She must remind herself how to stand, relearn how to walk, and somehow clear the dust filling her throat. Every word she's spoken to him has been a dry rattle. She's just a dishevelled thing in ragged black, caked in dried blood, and so covered with talc-like dust it looks like she has been prepared for some ritual.\n\nShe must learn to use her mind again too. The crushing agonies and repeated deaths of her entombment reduced her to an almost insentient state. Only the piercing shard of Sanguinius' death, and the blizzard of death-visions it contained, managed to penetrate and register at all. She has no idea what else has happened, or how long she has been buried.\n\nShe tries to stabilise and recalibrate, but her mind is too frail, and the unstable fury of the warp-state around them and the warp storm overhead is too great. But she can tell that the blighting cosmic stain of the Dark King is somehow gone. While she was busy dying, that apocalyptic shadow has vanished.\n\n'What else can you feel?' Dorn asks her. He seems like a giant to her. She knows all primarchs exceed the stature of men or Astartes, but the scale and bulk of the Praetorian seems even greater than it should be.\n\nShe shakes her head.\n\n'Nothing,' she says. 'Nothing else. The warp is too loud. This place...'\n\n'It's Chaos' own realm,' he replies. It feels like a simple, tactical assessment, as though he is considering the options of a field of war. 'I know which way to go,' he adds, 'but it would be useful to know what awaits me.'\n\nShe asks him how he knows the way, and he doesn't reply, but she can read the answer in his mind. A call. A cry, from his father. A summons. The Emperor is in danger. From that, she reasons, the Emperor must have disposed of his almighty power, or had it taken from him.\n\nShe can also read that Dorn doesn't trust her. He has no idea what or who she is, or with which side of this war her allegiance lies. But he is pragmatic, the most pragmatic mind she has ever encountered.\n\n'Can you try?' he asks. 'Try... harder? It's important.'\n\nHe needs intel. He needs to be able to make a plan. Her own plans are in pieces. She has neither the strength nor the assets to accomplish her purpose. All that she desired coming here is lost to her. But Dorn, this earnest, solemn soul, shaped by the very wars he has designed, still has an opportunity to achieve something worthwhile. Some work of noble note may yet be done.\n\n'What?' he asks, puzzled, as if he has heard her thoughts.\n\nShe says it aloud, and tells him it's a line from an old verse, a very old verse, that somehow just slid into her, as though carried there by the warp-winds of the wasteland.\n\n'\"Some work of noble note may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.\"'\n\nHe frowns, and says he knows it. He knows it as a work by a lord named Alfred, a philosopher of the archaic times she thought everyone had forgotten. Then he recites the end of the same verse.\n\nWe are not now the strength which in old days\n\nMoved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;\n\nOne equal temper of heroic hearts,\n\nMade weak by time and fate, but strong in will\n\nTo strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.\n\nThere is a look of mild surprise on his face as he says the lines, as though he is perplexed that he knows them. The wasteland wind has brought them to him too, she thinks. He starts to say that he believes he knows the poem from a lecture given by an iterator, years ago. He says he attended many. He thinks it may have been one given by Sindermann, because he can hear the words in Sindermann's voice. Or is it a woman?\n\nHe stops, realising that at some point during his awkward explanation, she has started to cry. Sobs wrack her, making her shudder, and tears stream down her face, washing streaks in the floury dust coating her cheeks. He's not sure what to do. He's painfully not good at comfort. He reaches out a huge armoured hand, a hand that has lifted tonnes of rock off her, but can't bring himself to touch her, knowing that a touch of that hand would not be soothing.\n\nShe wipes her eyes, and finds a broken smile, and tells him not to worry. It's just the trauma.\n\n'Can you try?' he asks.\n\nShe nods. She closes her eyes, and lets her mind sink and settle. She ignores the tears, the effort of standing, the molten ache in her joints. She ignores the bloody pain of her torn hands, and the throb of her missing fingernails. She ignores the crust of dust coating her gullet and windpipe, and the ailing sigh of her lungs.\n\nShe gathers her strength, and slowly begins to explore the site around them, the slopes of fractured stone, the redundant walls, the drifts and dunes of ash, the Astartes corpses jumbled like toppled statues in the rubble. She figures, as though her mind is quickly sketching it, the time-lacked city surrounding them. It has no plan or scheme, and it tastes of primitive matter, of age so great that exposure to the warp has left it bleached and arid. It smells of stories, like an old and secret library, but the stories are so ancient they have all been forgotten. No-\n\n'What?' Dorn asks.\n\nShe shakes her head, still concentrating.\n\nNot forgotten. The stories weren't told, once upon a time, and then forgotten. They were forgotten long before they were told. She can sense the curvature of the universe's cyclic nature.\n\nIt hurts. Her mind is still frail, and its neuroplasticity raw. The city bites at her as she tries to read it. It doesn't want to be known, or measured, or mapped. She persists, her mental radius expanding. She sees the wasteland, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands, the oceans of dust that have submerged other cities, the boulder fields as stark as lunar regolith, the bright pinks and crimsons of exposed coral reefs like knotted, calcified fungus, the wrecks and ruins, the abraded statues of dead gods who long to have their names remembered. She perceives the ghost of Terra, a fading imprint of matter, subsumed within the titanic irruption of the warp that is devouring it to fashion a new world from its atoms. She sees the last few pieces of the material world - a bridge, a wall, a gate, a tower - poking into view like dirt in a wound.\n\nThe warp is everywhere. The noise of it is like a drone, like endless thunder or the roar of an inferno. It spits and crackles, and every spit is a Neverborn hiss, and every crackle is an inhuman whisper.\n\nThe warp is all around them, an immense cyclonic storm pattern of neverness, like a funeral wreath. And at the heart of it, in the eye of that storm, there is a gloom that stinks of cadaverine and putrescene. A lightless thing glares back at her with a single, bloodshot-\n\nHer hand snaps out. Dorn takes it, and steadies her.\n\n'Horus,' she says. 'Horus awaits. He is eager. He has accepted the manifold gifts of Chaos. He is Chaos Undivided, the perfect instrument, the perfect vessel. He has won. He is simply waiting to finish the last few who oppose him. He is waiting for your father. He is waiting for you.'\n\n'Alone?' Dorn asks.\n\nShe looks at him and laughs.\n\n'That's all you can say?' she says. 'Is he alone, or with others? Does he have an army at his side? Yes, he's alone. But I'm telling you it doesn't matter. He is all things. He is all-powerful. He doesn't need allies now, or soldiers, or disciples. He is Chaos, and its gods dwell within him.'\n\nDorn nods, as though this is simply a bleak strategic update from an unfavourable battlefront. He still doesn't get it. He's still trying to fabricate viable tactics.\n\nHe lets go of her arm, and unstakes his sword from the ground.\n\n'You don't understand,' she says.\n\n'Probably better that I don't,' he replies.\n\n'You can't defeat him. Not in any of the ways you have learned to calculate victory and defeat. You can't beat him. No one can.'\n\n'I can try,' he says.\n\nHe looks at her.\n\n'My brother? He's really dead?' he asks.\n\n'Yes.'\n\nHe nods. 'Horus killed him?'\n\n'Yes,' she says. 'I felt it. He fought, to the very end. It wasn't enough.'\n\n'We rise together, we fall together,' he replies. 'If that's all we can do, then it is enough.'\n\nHe turns away. He's going now.\n\n'You'll die too,' she says.\n\n'There's no place"}
{"text":"u can't defeat him. Not in any of the ways you have learned to calculate victory and defeat. You can't beat him. No one can.'\n\n'I can try,' he says.\n\nHe looks at her.\n\n'My brother? He's really dead?' he asks.\n\n'Yes.'\n\nHe nods. 'Horus killed him?'\n\n'Yes,' she says. 'I felt it. He fought, to the very end. It wasn't enough.'\n\n'We rise together, we fall together,' he replies. 'If that's all we can do, then it is enough.'\n\nHe turns away. He's going now.\n\n'You'll die too,' she says.\n\n'There's no place for me in his world,' he says. 'It's better this way. To try, I mean.'\n\nHe looks back at her.\n\n'Can you summon help?' he asks. 'With that gift of yours? Will anybody hear you?'\n\n'Not from here,' she says. 'I'm not strong enough. The warp is too loud. It would drown me out.'\n\n'Then,' he says, 'can you go back? Find a way back? Get out from under this storm and, I don't know, find a place to call from? A place where your voice might be heard?'\n\n'Perhaps,' she says. 'Who would I call to?'\n\n'Anyone,' Dorn replies. 'Anyone who is left. Any one of us still standing. No other fight matters now, no other battle, no other front line. If anyone is still alive, they need to come here now and stand with me. There are no other priorities, not even the Palace.'\n\n'I'll try,' she says. She wants to say something else, but there's nothing left.\n\n'I'll try,' she repeats.\n\n'Good,' he says. He reaches up to the breast of his dust-streaked plate, and unclasps one of the seals of his Praetorian office. He holds it out to her. 'In case anyone doubts the authority of your message,' he explains.\n\nShe takes the seal. It's heavy. She imagines that every part of his duty and office are heavy.\n\n'You haven't even asked me,' she says, 'if I'm on your side.'\n\nHe shrugs.\n\n'It doesn't really matter,' he replies. 'If you are, you'll try. If you're not, then all I've wasted is my breath.'\n\nShe watches him walk away. Once he's out of sight, she turns and, step by step, starts to look for a way back out of the storm.\n\n9:iii\n\nControlled extirpation\n\nA muted buzzer sounds three times.\n\nAndromeda-17 glances at Xanthus.\n\n'What was that?' she asks.\n\nThe Chosen shrugs, frowning. He's too busy watching Fo at work to pay her full attention. The old fleshcrafter has been furiously busy for the past hour, moving around the Sigillite's laboratorium as though it's his own. He's running comparative data across six cogitators, and loading samples from the main genetic fabricators into small ceramite flasks for transfer into the analysers. Every few minutes, he scurries up the stairs into the upper levels of the workspace to check on the vats, then returns with more data and patterning wafers. He is gleeful, flushed, and utterly absorbed in his labour. He hasn't stopped muttering to himself (I find I enjoy conversations the most when I conduct them with a peer).\n\nAndromeda crosses to a systems monitor built into the tower's curving wall at the top of the stairs. Various runes have lit up. She cross-checks.\n\n'Auto-defences,' she says. 'Xanthus? Do you hear me? The Retreat's auto-defences have been activated. Shields and perimeter. Repulse. Lethal settings...'\n\n'It must have been Amon,' Xanthus replies, still watching Fo work.\n\nShe nods. 'Which means the enemy is very close,' she says. 'The Custodian wouldn't have activated the systems and then let them idle, wasting power. He'd wait to the last minute. The very last.'\n\nShe hurries halfway down the stairs towards the floor below. There's a window there. She peers out, but she can't see the front of the Retreat, or Amon down below. She can see part of the city skyline. She can see the flames engulfing Palace structures on the other side of the Pons Aegeus span.\n\nShe goes back up to the lab.\n\n'You should check,' says Xanthus. 'If it's a malfunction, Amon should know. Or if it's...'\n\nHe trails off, and looks pointedly at Fo, who carries on working, oblivious to their conversation.\n\nIf he's done something. Some trick.\n\nAndromeda nods. She was thinking the same. A distraction. A final ploy.\n\n'Watch him,' she tells Xanthus, nodding at the prisoner. She heads for the stairs. Fo suddenly turns to look at her.\n\n'While you're down there,' he says, 'you can tell the Custodian that I'm almost done. Just another ten or fifteen minutes to verify the mass expression samples.'\n\n'You're finished?' she says.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'And it... it works?'\n\n'I assume so. Hence the verification,' Fo replies (don't these people understand simple words?). 'But I am confident that the weapon is complete and functional. The improved weapon, I should say. The phage now takes into account everything I have learned from Malcador's research.'\n\nHe affectionately pats a disorderly pile of notebooks and slates on the workbench beside him. Stray pages and crumpled notes spill out.\n\n'He really was the most clever man,' Fo says (I regret ever scorning the Sigillite's genius. And He should have listened to him much more closely. Malcador's demise is a true loss to the Imperial Project). 'Anyway, the phage has been synthesised in a generic form. It can be simply encoded, via splice markers, to target-'\n\n'I don't care about the specifics,' says Andromeda. 'Are you confirming the work is complete?'\n\n'I am,' says Fo (was I unclear?). 'So tell Amon. I imagine he will need to acquire authorisation to use the weapon. Which, I presume, means the Throne Room. So he'll have to start thinking about how we get ourselves, and the weapon, out of here.'\n\nAndromeda glances at Xanthus.\n\n'Unless,' says Fo, with a shrug, 'Amon is content to make the decision to deploy it himself?'\n\n'No,' says Xanthus firmly. 'He will need authority. Lord Vulkan's authority.'\n\n'Of course,' says Fo. 'Then he had better plan our extraction. Getting to the Throne Room, or even contacting the Throne Room, won't be easy.'\n\nHe stares at them both, and scowls.\n\n'I thought you'd look a little more pleased,' he grumbles. 'We've done it.' (Well, I've done it. You were watching when it happened.) 'Though the hour is late, and the situation beyond perilous, we can now end and win this war.'\n\nHe waits for a reaction. Andromeda stares at him, grim-faced. Xanthus swallows hard.\n\n'No applause?' Fo asks. 'No congratulation? This is salvation. Salvation for the human race. A salvation that the Emperor Himself could not achieve.' (If I do say so myself, and I do.)\n\n'It may be victory,' says Andromeda quietly. 'It may mean victory. But it's still genocide.'\n\n'I prefer the term \"controlled extirpation\",' Fo replies sourly. 'But I suppose that's just a euphemism. We should call it what it is. Genocide. But I ask you this... Would you rather be a victim of genocide, or the architect of a genocide that saves you?'\n\n'Fo-' she growls.\n\n'Which I believe, by the by, is a guiding philosophy of the Imperial Project.'\n\n'Just finish the damn verification,' she snaps. She looks at Xanthus. 'I'll be back as quickly as I can.'\n\nShe hurries away. They can hear her footsteps, running, as she descends the staircases. Fo turns back to his work, and scans the columns of data playing across the monitors.\n\n'If you're lying about any of this,' Xanthus begins. He's stepped forward to stand right behind Fo's chair.\n\n'Oh, Xanthus...'\n\n'This isn't a game,' says Xanthus. 'You're treating it like a game. An amusing intellectual exercise. You are a wretched man-'\n\n'A wretched man who has saved your precious Imperium,' Fo corrects him archly.\n\n'Billions will die,' Xanthus says quietly. 'Trillions. This weapon-'\n\n'Trillions will die either way,' says Fo. 'If we use it, or we don't, trillions will die. There is now, at last, a chance. A chance that mankind will survive and prevail. Whatever you think of me, I love the human race. I do not wish to see its extinction. And may I remind you of something that you have seen for yourself? What we face, and what we are now on the verge of obliterating... is not human. If it ever was, it has long since ceased to be.'\n\nFo glances sidelong at the Chosen (this man Xanthus, and the Selenar too, both of them so squeamish. They have no grasp of what the truly great must do to achieve their goals).\n\n'I am not ashamed of this weapon,' he adds. 'I'm proud of what I've done. I am your Emperor's oldest adversary, His fiercest detractor. I have opposed His Great Plan since He first began to execute it. He has tried to end me, and silence me, many times. Yet now, He needs me. Now, my way of engineering the future will prove the more efficacious.'\n\nHe smiles. Xanthus hates that smile.\n\n'If you're lying about any of this, Fo, any of it,' Xanthus growls, 'this weapon, what it does-'\n\n'I am not,' says Fo firmly (the very thought!). 'My lies,' he says, 'are entirely confined to other matters.'\n\n'What does that mean?' asks Xanthus.\n\nFo suddenly has him by the throat with one of his thin, bird-claw hands. How the old man moved so fast, Xanthus has no idea. He's already blacking out. Fo's thumb and index finger are shutting his carotids.\n\n'Now my work is done,' Fo hisses (there is no longer any need for a cordial demeanour), 'I wish to depart. I was entirely committed to the work, Xanthus, for in it lay my own salvation. But now it's finished, I intend to make good my escape from this place, and from all of you. Do what you will with the weapon. I am now leaving.'\n\nLike all of the Chosen, Xanthus has been well trained in personal defence. Before his blood-starved brain fails him entirely, he snaps his forearm up, wraps Fo's reedy limb, and twists.\n\nFo yelps in pain, and rocks sideways out of his seat. Xanthus staggers back, gasping and wheezing, the choke-hold broken. Fo comes at him, throwing quick jabs with his hard, wizened knuckles. His knowledge of human anatomy is deep and thorough. Each strike hits a nerve point, paralysing Xanthus' left arm and right leg. The Chosen sways, unbalanced, and crashes into the workbench, scattering notes and data-slates. He manages to grip the edge of the bench, and lash out with his left foot, sweeping "}
{"text":"o yelps in pain, and rocks sideways out of his seat. Xanthus staggers back, gasping and wheezing, the choke-hold broken. Fo comes at him, throwing quick jabs with his hard, wizened knuckles. His knowledge of human anatomy is deep and thorough. Each strike hits a nerve point, paralysing Xanthus' left arm and right leg. The Chosen sways, unbalanced, and crashes into the workbench, scattering notes and data-slates. He manages to grip the edge of the bench, and lash out with his left foot, sweeping Fo's legs as the old man attempts to run. Fo thumps onto the floor so hard it seems as if he must have broken every thin bird-bone in his scrawny body.\n\nXanthus levers himself upright, coughing and panting. He reaches forward to pin the old man. Fo is clearly far stronger and more resilient than he appears, as though his feeble body is actually composed of steel, cunningly disguised to appear decrepit. He kicks out a heel, and demolishes Xanthus' left knee. Xanthus collapses, sprawling wide-eyed beside Fo on the lab floor. Fo turns to look at him, as though they are lying in bed side by side.\n\n'Nice try.' He smiles.\n\nHe raises his hand. Xanthus has no idea where the old man got the surgical scalpel from.\n\nBut Fo is ramming it at his throat.\n\n9:iv\n\nThe path of glory\n\nSeventeen minutes and thirteen seconds into the fight. Constantin has lost three more men, but he has gained a foothold on the fallen orbital plate's ragged escarpment. The approach routes through the ruins to the edge of the plate are thick with traitors of the XVI and XVII Legions, and still more defend the mangled gantries and exposed deck layers at the structure's lower end. Enough to hold off any army. The astute combination of the XVI's intense discipline and the XVII's zealous fury is punishing Constantin's far smaller force mercilessly.\n\nBut his men are Legio Custodes, and far more than men. The filth he is fighting are mere Astartes, and far, far less.\n\nConstantin scales the crumpled hull plates in the shadow of one of the plate's remaining suspension engines, a huge drum the size of a bastion tower that is slanted to the left, its base half-buried in the ground. The orbital plate fell hard when it fell. Mass-reactives and las-bolts slice the air around him. Traitors, high above, are trying to knock him off the metal cliff, their angle of fire almost vertical.\n\nThe orbital plate is little more than a lump of wreckage, albeit one almost two kilometres square and half a kilometre thick. It is dead and destroyed, partially burned-out, and has no obvious strategic significance. But it's being defended for a reason. The Word Bearers may be frenzied and unthinking, but the Sons of Horus are most surely not.\n\nThe Emperor's war cry originated from this vicinity. Valdor's King-of-Ages could be inside the structure. The Warmaster could be inside it. Abaddon certainly is.\n\nHorus' First Captain is a head worth taking. Constantin wants Abaddon dead. And before he dies, Constantin wants Abaddon talking. If anyone knows the location of the thrice-damned first-found, it will be Ezekyle Abaddon.\n\nA Word Bearers Cataphractii appears on a ledge just metres above Constantin, his heavy cannon whirring as it angles down to splash Valdor off the artificial cliff. Constantin thrusts upwards with his spear. Clean and true, the weapon punches through an overhanging lip of sheared hull, and impales the Word Bearer leaning over it. Blood showers out of his punctured breast plating, and fire blooms out of his back. The Apollonian Spear has ruptured the heavy armour's power plant. The blast takes off one side of the bulky traitor. As the burning, incomplete body plunges past him, Valdor clambers over the lip of hull, and frees the spear. He's on an internal deck level now. The orbital plate was sheared through like a geological sample, its deck layers exposed. The deck slopes up ahead of him at a sharp angle, distorted by impact. The walls are buckled.\n\nHe starts to advance, without hesitation. He has Abaddon's tag in clear view on his helm display. Ten metres in, two more Word Bearers and a Sons of Horus legionary appear to intercept him. He slays one of the XVII with a swift, underarm thrust, but mass-reactives from the other two detonate against his left shoulder and ribs, and slam him into the hallway wall. He tastes blood and pain. They may be children to him, but their weapons bite. He knows they could kill him if they tried hard enough.\n\nAnd they are trying very hard.\n\nA blinding beam of Adrathics sears past him, and blows his two aggressors into jellied shrapnel. Ludovicus and Erastes have gained access behind him. Wordlessly, they take the lead, and he falls in behind them. Erastes' Adrathic demolishes the blast hatches that the traitors have tried to close to compartmentalise the plate's internal structure. What are they hiding here? What are the traitors trying to defend?\n\nStablising his injuries, Valdor follows his men up the crumpled hallway. They break through into a large gallery where the deck is canted up at a thirty-degree angle.\n\nErastes dies just seconds after they enter. He is blitzed by heavy fire that even a Custodian could not survive. Justaerin Terminators, black shapes so bulked by their heavy plate they seem as big as the Custodes, close from all sides.\n\nClever, thinks Constantin. Bait and ambush. First Captain Abaddon has lost none of his flair. There's nothing hidden inside the orbital plate except death. Constantin disembowels one of the Terminators, then uses the corpse as a shield as he rushes the rest. In seconds, it's close quarters, a churning brawl. Ludovicus is mobbed by five of the Justaerin, his blade hacking to fend them off. Eight more close on Constantin. One, tag-marked Otun Rindol, a notorious brute, clips Constantin with his power fist. Constantin reels, spitting blood and broken teeth, his helm deformed and pushed into his cheek. A chainblade saws into his right hip. He feels his plate and flesh shudder as it chews deep. Flecks of gold and bloody tissue spray out. He blanks the pain. He has no time for it. Pain is just pain, and it comes weighted with shock and hesitation. He puts the haft of the spear into the side of Rindol's head hard enough to fracture the helmet. He grabs a second Terminator, tag-marked Lael Gustus, and turns him bodily. Gustus struggles, overpowered by Constantin's superior strength. He has the spear across Gustus' throat, and his right hand clamped on Gustus' right forearm, where the chainblade is still revving and shedding particles of Valdor's gore. He heaves the Justaerin forward and drives the chainblade into the sternum of another, tag-marked Ketron Bargaddon. The chainblade wedges so deep in the Terminator's carapace that it chokes out, shredding broken teeth and coughing a huge cloud of bloody vapour.\n\nThe air is wet. Constantin can't see Ludovicus. Something hits him across the back and neck, and he loses his grip on Gustus. He tries to turn. Hands claw at him, and seize him. A power fist clamps his throat and smashes him into a bulkhead. He's choking, his throat crushing. A blade stabs into his belly. He feels the quick ice of it. He sees a tag-marker through the haze.\n\nHellas Sycar.\n\n'Captain Abaddon sends his regards, old man,' says the Master of the Justaerin.\n\n'They won't hold them, Ezekyle,' says Erebus. 'Your training and your doctrines tell you that, surely?'\n\nThey are holding position at the highest point of the orbital plate's upper hull, well defended by the ceramite vanes of the downed structure's remaining engine vents. Below those vanes, which rise above them like the taut sails of an ancient sea-craft, Abaddon has six squads drawn from his company and Baraxa's, along with a less formal phalanx of veteran Word Bearers. Down-hull, where the vast, ridged and broken back of the orbital plate slopes away from them like a gentle mountain, there are rapid flashes in the gloom, and the chatter of heavy weapons. Sensoria have positively identified the assaulting formation. Custodes. Among them, Tribune Diocletian Coros, Proconsul Ludovicus, Telamok, Maezari and Valdor himself.\n\n'Barely thirty of them,' Abaddon replies.\n\n'Yes, but they are Custodes,' Erebus replies, 'and they are about as highly motivated as it is possible to be. Valdor alone-'\n\n'We have them flanked, and pinned in crossfire and defilade,' Abaddon says firmly. 'We have the advantage of higher terrain and cover. We outnumber them thirty to one. We have established Repulse Exactus in overlap, first order Pavis Indomitus, and Captain Jeraddon stands ready with Antecessum Purgatus to lock the kill-box as soon as they are drawn in. They took my bait. Their haste in escalade will be their undoing. As for Valdor, Sycar's Justaerin are targeting him directly. Highest prejudice.'\n\n'Oh, Ezekyle,' says Erebus. 'Still thinking like a soldier. Still acting as though good soldiering will win this. You're not a soldier, not any more.'\n\n'Shut up,' says Abaddon.\n\n'Stop thinking with your pride,' says Erebus. 'This isn't about your reputation, it's about your father. We must defend the Court against any potential interloper. And Valdor certainly qualifies.'\n\n'The First Captain told you to shut up,' says Baraxa, but Abaddon knows the Dark Apostle is right. Tactical shows him tag-markers greying out at an alarming rate. Bargaddon and two other Justaerin have just gone dark.\n\n'I'll kill him myself,' Abaddon declares. He hefts up his blade. 'Valdor and any other of his gilded monsters.'\n\n'You could try,' says Erebus.\n\nUlnok, squad leader Fermel, and the praetor Phaeto Zeletsis stir angrily. Baraxa takes a menacing step towards the Word Bearer.\n\n'Azelas, Azelas!' Erebus soothes. 'I am not disparaging the dear captain's prowess. A finer Astartes warrior I cannot think of. But the operative word there is \"Astartes\". Valdor is Custodes. Valdor is the Emperor's oldest weapon. His men, few though they may be, are killing-machines. Any one of them outclasses"}
{"text":"r of his gilded monsters.'\n\n'You could try,' says Erebus.\n\nUlnok, squad leader Fermel, and the praetor Phaeto Zeletsis stir angrily. Baraxa takes a menacing step towards the Word Bearer.\n\n'Azelas, Azelas!' Erebus soothes. 'I am not disparaging the dear captain's prowess. A finer Astartes warrior I cannot think of. But the operative word there is \"Astartes\". Valdor is Custodes. Valdor is the Emperor's oldest weapon. His men, few though they may be, are killing-machines. Any one of them outclasses any one of us. Would you be foolish enough to wager on an outcome?'\n\n'Then what do you suggest?' Baraxa snaps.\n\n'Oh, Ezekyle knows, don't you, Ezekyle? We have other advantages, and they've got us this far. We are stronger in ways they can't imagine. Yet the First Captain is reluctant to make use of the gifts his father has supplied. All of your companies, in fact, seem hesitant to accept the path of glory. I think it's time to revise that thinking.'\n\nBaraxa looks sharply at Abaddon. A tempest gust of the warp storm churning above soughs between the vanes with a long, slow groan. A patter of dirty rain falls across them briefly.\n\nControl, not controlled. Abaddon can see it in his friend's eyes.\n\n'Control, not controlled... Your little mantra,' says Erebus, playful but not quite mocking. 'It's been whispered to me. You are so cautious. I admire that, really. I'm not suggesting your submission. I have no wish to see you become a mindless terror-weapon like Ekron Fal or Vorus Ikari. I have no desire to see you degenerate like the sons of Angron or Fulgrim. But I can harness these gifts for you. You can retain control. In fact, you must. You are too gifted a leader to lose. Accept what I offer you, Ezekyle. Valdor will be as nothing if you do.'\n\n'My captain will have no part of this,' says Baraxa.\n\n'Then your captain will not be the son his father needs, Azelas,' replies Erebus with a diffident shrug. 'He will not be the son his father expects. There will be no place for him in the new age, or for you either. His resistance to the new ways is admirable. I mean it. But the old ways of warfare are no longer sufficient, nor are they adequate. Besides, he's tasted the potential already.'\n\n'What?' says Baraxa.\n\n'How do you suppose he found his way to the bridge decks?' asks Erebus. He looks over at Abaddon. 'You felt then the power that awaits, the power your father offers. You felt the joy of it, yet remained in complete control. Thus, you accomplished something you could not have otherwise done. Listen to me, all of you. I speak frankly. These rewards are yours already. They've been in your grasp since the moment you took up this cause, the moment you stood by your father, despite the fact that it meant turning your backs on the Imperium you oathed to protect. It doesn't matter how you justify that, or reconcile the choice in your minds. You stood by your father. You committed to this usurpation. You are walking the path of glory already. There's no going back, not ever.'\n\nBaraxa stares at Abaddon.\n\nAbaddon glares at the scarred hull. He can hear the rapid-fire exchanges echoing through the decks below him. The Pavis Indomitus has just broken. Valdor's killers are coming.\n\nHe doesn't want to remember the enargeia, but he can't help himself. The dopamine hit of pulling on the threads of Chaos, of turning them into reins. It obeyed him. It served him. He was the master. Control, not controlled.\n\n'There were wrongs to right,' he murmurs. 'The Emperor used us like toys, and withheld from us. We were right to rise. But, so help me, Horus was a fool to go so far into the darkness.'\n\n'Horus has just slain the Bright Angel,' says Erebus. 'How does that make him a fool?'\n\nAbaddon looks up sharply.\n\n'It's true,' says Erebus. 'He broke the Angel. That is a measure of his power. Likewise, he will soon break the False Emperor. Ezekyle, it is necessary for your father so be so steeped. He is the instrument of Chaos, and you will most likely find that disquieting when next you greet him. There is no need for you to go that far. You are not the chosen of the gods. Your father will need, hereafter, a First Captain who can keep him grounded, who has one foot in the materia. But through me, you can avail yourself of the endowments you need. I will not let you slip, I swear.'\n\n'We must defend the Court,' Abaddon says to Baraxa.\n\n'Ezekyle, no...'\n\n'We must,' says Abaddon. 'My life for Lupercal. Ulnok, signal Sycar. Tell him to disengage and fall back. Tell him to draw those Custodes bastards this way. Phaeto, get cutters. We're opening the hull. We're going down to meet them.'\n\nHe turns to Erebus.\n\n'What must I do?' he asks.\n\n'Trust me,' says Erebus. 'Accept my word and my guidance.'\n\n'Instruct me, so I understand.'\n\n'It cannot be understood. It is not a manual or a treatise of-'\n\n'I'm not playing games, Apostle!' Abaddon snarls.\n\n'Neither am I, Ezekyle,' Erebus replies. 'I mean that literally. It defies understanding. Trust me. You've seen the power of my words, and I bear many of them. I will tell you what must be said.'\n\n9:v\n\nThe Court\n\nThey come to a place where, out of banks of sickly mist, rise the ruins of the most ancient city they have yet found. Loken feels they have travelled not just further into the damaged geography of the Inevitable City, but deeper into the layers of its history too. If it is all the cities that have ever been, blended into one by the tidal action of the warp, then they are reaching the primeval heart of it, the parts that man didn't make.\n\nGone, for the most part, are the cobbled streets and peg-tiled roofs, the tumbledown, timber-beam houses and stone bridges that, though derelict, showed the hand-marks of human construction. Infrequent too are the intruding traces of the Palace, or his father's flagship, which had become commingled with this realm. There are odd scraps - sections of inlaid, golden wall panel, an auramite door, brief sections of Scylla-pattern decking - but they are few, and they seem less like things than the recollection of things kept in the warp's remembrance.\n\nHere, now, rise gaunt ashlar columns and blocks of grey diorite, truncated pillars of grim stone, and black, skeletal flying buttresses that support nothing. All the structures are wrecked, and all are monumental. They rise from the slow, bile-green mist like ancient leviathan creatures turned to stone by a vindictive gorgon. Some are caked in acid-yellow lichen or lurid scarlet moss. They show no signs of human tool-work, or terrestrial manufacture, and the scale of the arches and doorways dwarfs even the gleaming golden figure that Loken and the others are following. The site looks like some citadel that has risen from an oceanic gulf after aeons of submerged slumber.\n\nOr, perhaps, the fathomless dark waters that concealed it have somehow drained away and left it, steaming and exposed, open to the air. Above, the brimstone clouds of the warp storm swirl in a thunderhead a thousand kilometres wide, laced with veins of pink lightning and vivid fuchsia flashes.\n\nIt comes as little surprise that the Neverborn breeds lurking in these ruins are similarly the biggest and most ancient yet.\n\nThey have fought many daemon-things since they parted company with the Perpetuals Persson and Grammaticus. They have hacked their path through night-haunting ghouls and horned goat-kin in cobbled lanes, and rent their way past tentacled horrors and bone-winged vultures on crumbling aqueducts and cracked stone causeways. Loken's armour, like Leetu's and the proconsul's, is badged with daemon ichor and Neverborn gore. But blood does not seem to adhere to the Emperor's gleaming plate.\n\nSomething stirs in the mist to oppose them. It is gargantuan and oil-black, the size of a Palace gateway. Its true shape is hard to discern, for it has little symmetry. Glossy wet pseudopods writhe like seaweed in a current, and thorned, insectile legs as thick as trees raise it out of the murk. Immense horns, as dry and cracked as those of an old cattle skull, curve from the dark cliff of its brow. It glistens wet, dripping, and it wears a cloak of blinking, sightless eyes like a skein of bubbles.\n\nLoken, Leetu and even Caecaltus balk at the mass of it, but the golden figure ahead of them does not falter. Every step of the way, He has not broken stride. He has maintained His urgent pace, fighting on the move, killing His way onwards, refusing to be slowed down or delayed.\n\nThe Emperor, a lustrous golden shape made tiny by the behemoth ahead, increases His step. He starts to stride, then run, His warblade looping in His hand until the blade catches fire. Ashamed of their momentary hesitation, Loken, Caecaltus and Leetu rush to follow Him.\n\nThe Neverborn giant is completely silent. It utters no roar nor growl nor voice of any kind. The only sounds are the wet slap of its moving bulk, the thump of its tread, the crack and cascade of the pillars and ashlar blocks that it brushes against and knocks down, and the constant spatter of liquid and loose eyes streaming off its flanks and splashing the ground.\n\nThe Emperor is moving like a sprinter, head down, His stride long and sure. He races at the beast with the accelerating focus of a savannah cat chasing down its prey. Tentacles, black and grease-sheened, lash and snake, whipping like the banderoles and ribbon-pennants of a black legion. He evades, still closing, striking them aside with a blade that burns and severs. Loken smells the reek of boiled blood and burned meat.\n\nThe Emperor leaps, no longer a sprinting feline, but the sure-footed antelope that bounds to escape it. He lands on a foundered basalt block that slants upwards like a ramp, rushes to its mossy lip, and hurls Himself into the air. His warblade rises, a burning brand clenched in both hands, and He brings it down as He descends.\n\nThere is a jolting crack, as though lightning has struck the ground nearby. Driven by the descending golden form, the blade connects wi"}
{"text":" of boiled blood and burned meat.\n\nThe Emperor leaps, no longer a sprinting feline, but the sure-footed antelope that bounds to escape it. He lands on a foundered basalt block that slants upwards like a ramp, rushes to its mossy lip, and hurls Himself into the air. His warblade rises, a burning brand clenched in both hands, and He brings it down as He descends.\n\nThere is a jolting crack, as though lightning has struck the ground nearby. Driven by the descending golden form, the blade connects with the great beast's formless face. Lambent blue psyk-fire erupts from the splitting wound, scoring the black flesh. The hulking thing shudders backwards, shivering from the impact. Blood, or some brown fluid that passes for blood, showers out in prodigious volume, a torrent that splashes and churns along the ancient pavement. The Emperor lands, feet firmly planted, His knees bent to absorb the impact, then springs upright again, still moving. He is under its neck and chin now, scything through the mane of tentacles and tendrils that sinuate to clasp and block Him.\n\nLoken closes, running hard, to add his blade to the fight. Words are suddenly bright in his head.\n\nBy His will alone!\n\nHe turns. Caecaltus has slid to a halt, and called the warning. Leetu has heard it as well, and broken his charge.\n\nNeverborn shapes are swarming through the ruins on either side of them, seeking to encircle the four warriors, and drive them towards the great beast. Some are shaggy humanoids with cloven feet and short, sharp cervine horns jutting backwards from their long, equine skulls. They snort and whinny, eyes mad, and wield flint axes and ironwood clubs. Others are hairless, eyeless brutes the size of bull-ogryns, hunch-shouldered and dagger-toothed, their filthy hides painted with ritual designs. None of them are less than three metres tall.\n\nThey rush in from both sides and from behind, leaping from stone blocks or emerging from the shadows between broken columns. They utter a war cry as they come, a guttural ululation in some alien tongue that, though Loken can't understand it, feels like an expression of his father's name.\n\nThe three warriors meet the brute attack with a rage of their own. The proconsul's guardian spear whirls and slices, like an immaculate parade-ground display, pulling arcs of blood through the air like streamers. Leetu holds his ground with scrupulous technique, turning and thrusting the loaned blade Mourn-It-All with utter confidence now he has grown to know its balance and character.\n\nLoken ploughs into the foe instead of waiting for them to come to him. Once more, the Emperor has shared His strength with the last loyal son of Horus, channelling a fire through Loken's soul that lights up Rubio's sword with such force no materia can stop it. It goes through hide and meat, through tusk and bone, through wood and iron. The Neverborn try to overcome him with sheer numbers, massing around him, clubbing and tearing and grappling. But flint blades shatter like ice against his carapace, and his fist breaks as many skulls as his blade opens throats. He is quickly hosed in gore that smokes like acid and sticks like treacle.\n\nA great cry shakes the air, a profound bellow that shivers even the largest slabs of stone around them. The abhuman Neverborn still alive recoil and flee, shrieking, back into the shadows and the mist.\n\nThe great daemon-beast has made the first and only utterance of its life. A death cry, of despair, perhaps, or disbelief. When Loken turns to look, he sees the colossal black form rolled onto its side like a beached whale, two spider legs upraised and curled like broken masts, steam oozing from the deep lacerations that score its flanks and breast. The Emperor is astride it, drawing His warblade free from the fatal wound. He jumps down off its bulk and, without a backward look to His companions, resumes His onward stride.\n\nThey hurry to follow, passing close to the dead beast's massive carcass. Blood and tainted liquor is still pouring out of it like water from burst pipes or rain from busted gutters. The torrents fall with such force they raise a foetid fume of moisture and spray in which eerie rainbows shimmer. The trio wade through the lake of blood slowly expanding around the monstrous corpse.\n\nBeyond, the ancient stone path threads through the silent, cyclopean ruins and fog-shrouded hollows. Unseen things call out in the darkness, the harsh shriek of loons, the screech of owls. From everywhere comes the burbled chorus of amphibians, lurking in pools and waterlogged stone cisterns, and in the marsh depressions where the mist is thickest.\n\nThe toad-song and frog-throat babble is a constant drone, and the longer Loken hears it, the more it resembles the modulated pulse-chatter of a thousand orskode units broadcasting at once. There is a sound behind it, like the sigh of the wind. It's whispering. It's the rustling dry-spit of firewood eaten by flames.\n\nThe path ascends, climbing the slope of a blasted heathland where the dead brown brush is punctuated by tumbled blocks and comminative obelisks. Pink lightning flares and flashes behind the brow of the rise.\n\nBeside the path, the giant blocks of the ancient city stand like mourners, drab and grey, massive and intimidating. There are rows of ancient archways, bearded with weeds, and the stumps of towers that, when intact, must have risen higher than any steeple of the Palace. Nearby, a scatter of square and oblong sarsens marks the site of something long demolished. Each block is perfectly angled and shaped, and the smallest must weigh a hundred tonnes. They cover the slope to the right side of the path for kilometres, like the giant building blocks of some child titan, abandoned after play.\n\nTo the left of the path runs a row of blackened flying buttresses, spiked and finialled to such grotesque degree, they look as though their maker intended to mimic coils of razor wire out of jet stone. Whatever structure they were designed to support has long since vanished, apart from a single, low wall of murky marble that runs for several hundred metres.\n\nLoken's vox warbles, and partial data blinks incoherently across his visor. The Emperor is ahead of them, His pace unrelenting. Loken leaves the path, and steps up several tumbled blocks of stone until he is on the top of the marble wall. He starts to walk along its length, still following the others on the path below.\n\n'Captain Loken?' Caecaltus calls.\n\n'Some contact,' Loken replies. 'Stand by.'\n\nThe transmission, whatever it is, is choppy and corrupted. No signal is behaving properly in this infernal realm. Loken had hoped that a raised position might improve reception.\n\nThe data flicks and fidgets across his display, blotchy and incoherent. What little he can fix originates to the left of them, at a distance of several kilometres. He turns to look, from his raised vantage. The ruin-pocked heath stretches away into the glowering distance. The locator says 'west', but he knows that's meaningless. The compass has no cardinal points here, in a place where even time has no direction.\n\n'Rejoin us, Captain Loken,' Caecaltus instructs from below. They are leaving him behind.\n\n'One moment,' Loken replies. He jumps-up magnification, scanning the horizon, adding a tactical over-map that slackly, but not unexpectedly, zeros on all values.\n\nFar away, ten kilometres at least, the scrubby brown heathland gives way to a flatter dustbowl of alkali and loess, more like the dry wasteland they left behind hours earlier. He can make out a jumble of ruins, the scrappy, derelict husk of the Inevitable City, stretching out interminably. There is a shape of some size. He realises that it's part of a Terran orbital plate, a massive segment of one of the sub-orbital arcologies that formed airborne continents before the Throneworld fell. It lies, crumpled and uneven like a discarded mattress, across part of the ruined city. Extreme magnification shows the distinct flash and spark of weapons fire.\n\nHe scans the data-channels again, subjecting them to the deepest signal analysis his armour can provide. He isolates partial snatches of orskode, and fragments of marker icons.\n\n'Proconsul!' he calls.\n\n'Captain?'\n\n'I'm detecting forces engaged, ten kilometres west...' He pauses, realises the redundancy of the statement, and points instead. 'Ten kilometres that way. Full specifics are unclear, but I believe it is your captain-general, and his Anabasis company. I think they have engaged my old Legion head-on.'\n\nOn the path below, Caecaltus and Leetu stop and look up at him.\n\n'Should we signal them?' Loken asks. 'Attempt a signal?'\n\nHe sees Caecaltus bow his head in silent consultation. The golden figure ahead of them has not stopped walking.\n\n'No, captain,' Caecaltus decides.\n\n'But surely-' Loken begins.\n\n'If they could disengage and move to link up with us,' Leetu says to Caecaltus, 'surely, we could use the strength?'\n\n'Or help them,' Loken adds, leaping down from the marble wall and landing on his feet beside them. 'Their situation seems... severe. I can't give accurate numbers, but the Sixteenth is there, and Word Bearers too. I believe they are led by First Captain Abaddon.'\n\n'Believe?' asks Caecaltus.\n\n'A partial tag-marker,' says Loken.\n\n'An old friend?' asks Leetu.\n\nLoken glances at him. It seems so odd for someone not to know Abaddon by name or reputation.\n\n'We will take no action, captain,' says Caecaltus, and turns to continue on his way.\n\n'Proconsul!' Loken snaps.\n\n'My King-of-Ages is aware,' says Caecaltus. 'He has determined that the captain-general and his companions are providing us with an effective diversion. They are keeping a significant portion of the first-found's garrison aboard this ship occupied.'\n\nThis ship... It is beyond Loken's ability to accept the idea that all of this, this wasteland, this endless city, this eternal psychoscape, is somehow still contained within the structure of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n'We cont"}
{"text":"\n'Proconsul!' Loken snaps.\n\n'My King-of-Ages is aware,' says Caecaltus. 'He has determined that the captain-general and his companions are providing us with an effective diversion. They are keeping a significant portion of the first-found's garrison aboard this ship occupied.'\n\nThis ship... It is beyond Loken's ability to accept the idea that all of this, this wasteland, this endless city, this eternal psychoscape, is somehow still contained within the structure of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\n'We continue,' says Caecaltus.\n\n'The captain-general and his companions may die,' says Loken.\n\n'Then they will have done so with dignity and valour, and they will have helped us to achieve a successful closure of this venture.'\n\nLoken and Leetu glance at each other. The proconsul's voice is so cold, so analytical and flat in its affect. The Emperor's mind is set. They are not stopping for anything.\n\nLoken and Erda's legionary fall in step behind the proconsul. The wind has picked up, biting across the heath and nodding the dry, russet brush and spina. Lightning, shocking pink and neon-bright, tears the pyrocumulus cloud cover.\n\nBeyond the crest of the hill, an army waits for them.\n\nThe Word Bearers are drawn up in company strength. A hundred men, with some Cataphractii, and several Leviathan Siege Dreadnoughts that tower over the Astartes, broad and heavy.\n\nBehind them rises a pile of giant granite blocks, stacked and wedged haphazardly so as to form a crude, stepped pyramid, an artificial mountain. From its darkness, the buzz and sputter of whispers fills the air. The mountain has a yawning mouth, a jagged gateway of stupendous height that the Word Bearers have drawn up to guard.\n\nThe Emperor and His three companions come to a halt at the top of the hill. The overgrown path they were following snakes down through the parched brush of the heathland and winds like a thread all the way to the mountain's maw.\n\nThe traitor company straddles that path in wide formation. They stand, motionless but for the sway of their banners in the heathland wind.\n\nLoken surveys their unmoving ranks: the glowering visors, the deep-set darkness of their eye slits in which yellow dots glint, the feathered broom-crests and plumes of officers, the studded pauldrons and weathered plate, the grilled snouts and cage-masks, the breeze-tugged tabards, the implacable set of iron-heavy boots and sabatons, the heinous script etched on ceramite or inked on fluttering parchments wax-sealed to armour-joints. Their poses are utterly defiant yet casual, hammers leant across shoulders, longswords and chainblades resting tip down, mauls carried cross-wise at hip height in both hands, greatswords set upright at sides like spears. They seem like brigands, like vagabond thugs, awaiting their prey with cool and leisurely confidence.\n\nLoken clears his throat, and adjusts his grip on Rubio's blade.\n\nAt his side, Leetu says, 'We can take them.'\n\nThe remark is so off-hand, so flippant, it takes Loken by surprise and he laughs, with genuine amusement, for the first time in years.\n\n'We can,' says Caecaltus, but his voice is not his own.\n\nThe Emperor takes a single step forward. With an instant ripple of motion and clatter of arms, the traitors shift, raising weapons into proffers, lowering pikes and pole-arms to address. There is a loud and pneumatic thump-whine, like the amplified spit of a nail gun, as the Siege Dreadnoughts' weapon pods open fire. Dazzling bolts of tank-killing las streak up the slope.\n\nAnd vanish.\n\nThe blazing bolts collapse and dissipate into clouds of flame five metres short of their target. Loken feels the ache of elevated psionics. He can almost see the invisible ripple of the mind-shield the Emperor has raised as it is struck by the immense firepower. He hears the slap and hiss of las-fire hitting nothing, and being nullified, all kinetic force scattered, all thermal energy radiated away.\n\nThen the ache increases so sharply, Loken feels it in the sinus cavities of his head. His ears throb.\n\nThe Emperor takes another step. He is raising His power claw, His warblade held low at His side in the other hand. Dazzling voltaics, that startlingly pure hsbd-iryt blue, accumulate in His palm, and coil between His finger-claws, jumping like plasma strings. He lets the gathered lightning go.\n\nIt arcs from His raised hand, faults the sky above the blasted heath, and strikes the ground just short of the traitor mass. There is a flare of black-body radiation, a thunderclap of violent gas-pressure change, an ionised bang of electrical discharge as gigajoules of energy are released.\n\nThe struck ground burns. The struck ground breaks. The shockwave widens, propagating plasmic fire that rolls into the Word Bearers' lines, annihilating the ground into churning ash, and obliterating the ranks of warriors standing upon it. They disintegrate one by one, shredded by heat and fire, hurled into the air, fused armour plates and scorched weapons spinning out of the destruction as debris that scatters, smouldering, in a wide swathe across the landscape. Nothing organic survives. The rolling wave of shock-fire sweeps through the entire cohort, unstoppable, consuming everything, burning men whole like twig-effigies, melting ceramite, igniting banners that burn wildly as they slump and fall. Cataphractii melt like wax. The Siege Dreadnoughts, stubborn and defiant with their great, armoured bulks, burn with blue fire like drop pods on re-entry and then burst, one by one, in titanic explosions as their payloads cook off.\n\nWhen the glare fades and the ache subsides, there is nothing left apart from an acre or two of churned and blackened ground. Fragments of plate and heat-darkened armour segments litter the burn area, and the heathland wind drives the hot smoke sideways in a long, white plume.\n\nThe Emperor resumes His advance, following the path down the slope. His three companions follow. The brush on either side of them is burning in many places where superheated, out-thrown debris has ignited the dry spina and scrub, like some moorland clearance, the brown undergrowth squirming with the gold-and-amber worms of slow-burning roots.\n\nThe quartet approaches the mouth of the mountain, and passes under its shadow.\n\nInside, the darkness is palpable, enclosing them like heavy felt. After a few steps, the Emperor increases His radiance to drive it back, His ornate armour glowing with an inner light that suffuses the blackness.\n\nBy that light, as they advance, they see the gloomy, mausoleum majesty of the inner chambers. It is like a tomb, but one long robbed-out. The echoes of their footsteps circle back to them from the high and shadowed ceilings.\n\nBeyond a third great arch, the tomb dwindles, or rather, mingles. The psychotecture becomes something else. The bare stone walls of flaked marble and granite, upon which can be seen the blurred figurings of long-lost inscriptions and reliefs, begin to merge with plates of metal and corroded stanchions.\n\nLoken knows it at once. The Vengeful Spirit, which they have been inside all along, is slowly making itself visible again. Cables hang and drape in slack loops from the ruptured ceiling, the severed ends hissing and spitting weak sparks of power. The deck plates and underfloor gravitic grids are crumpled, torn loose, rivets snapped and scattered. Loken feels the irregular and uneven pools of artificial gravity they generate, patches where he almost floats, and patches where he feels anchored like an anvil. He sees tortured bulkheads, slabs of adamantine and plasteel ruptured and mutilated by the caress of Chaotic power.\n\nThey smell smoke, the stale odour of a fire extinguished, and the rank stench of death. This is a charnel house, an ossuary, a place of extinction and grave mould. Sacrifice has been made here, and recently, some thrice-damned rite, a savage offering at the altar of a butcher-god.\n\nSomething has died. Something else has lived on, in a way that it should not have. The air is full of whispers, a rasping hymn of emptiness. Everywhere, the stench of terror.\n\nThey advance. The Emperor's steady stride has not faltered or diminished. He carries His light deeper into the darkness.\n\nThey come to the skulls.\n\nJust a few at first, human skulls, scorched and fractured, jaws missing. They litter the broken deck like scree on a mountain path. They become more numerous, and start to heap and pile like rubble. A carpet of skulls that crack and dry-splinter under their feet, a slope of skulls that scatter and tumble as they begin to ascend.\n\nA mound of skulls.\n\nThe Emperor leads the way, without effort. Loken, Caecaltus and Leetu follow, clawing their path up the loose, unstable mass. They see a light above, a crepuscular glow.\n\nThe skulls, heaped up in such quantity Loken cannot bear to estimate a number, form a long, steep ramp that leads to the shorn-away end of the next deck level. Lumen units in wire cages cast a harsh, blue glare.\n\nThe lights are ultraviolet. Loken can detect a shrill hum at the outside edge of his hearing. This is emergency lighting, decontamination protocols. The flagship, riddled with infection, is vainly trying to negate its corruption.\n\nThey step from the skull-slope onto the deck plates. The walls respire softly. It is sunset-red in the hallway, like being outdoors in the barren seabeds of Mars, or the lava fields of Medusa. Light, almost blood red, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. Loken ignores such trickery. He can hear whispering again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths-\n\nWhat is it they are whispering? He can almost make out the words.\n\nThe name.\n\nOne name, uttered and repeated.\n\nFather.\n\nAhead, the severed corridor ends in a doorway. Its frame is made of carved human bone. They step through it, and find themselves in a narrow tunnel. It is barely wide enough for them to"}
{"text":"ike leaves. Loken ignores such trickery. He can hear whispering again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths-\n\nWhat is it they are whispering? He can almost make out the words.\n\nThe name.\n\nOne name, uttered and repeated.\n\nFather.\n\nAhead, the severed corridor ends in a doorway. Its frame is made of carved human bone. They step through it, and find themselves in a narrow tunnel. It is barely wide enough for them to move along it, the black walls sheer on either hand. Loken looks up, and sees that the walls soar high above him. It's not a tunnel. It's a tight ravine, a fissured seam split between towering cliffs. They advance.\n\nThe ground is damp, dark rock, so smooth it seems to have been worn by millennia of footsteps, all making the same, dread pilgrimage they are undertaking. After thirty metres, the crevasse starts to taper. The walls become closer, constricting them. Loken thinks he can see a vertical bar of pale light far ahead. They are forced to turn sideways and edge their way along to fit.\n\nIt is claustrophobic, despite the endless space above. The cliff walls compress, and scrape against their armour. Loken can see that the cliffs are made of human bones, braided together like sheaves. They are dripping wet, oily with black ooze.\n\nAnother few sideways steps, and Loken begins to wonder if the crevasse will taper so much they will be unable to continue. It begins to feel as though the walls will wedge them tight, or clench together and crush them.\n\nThe Emperor, by far the largest of the four of them, leads the way. He is impatient, and has no time for the obstacles the psychotecture throws at Him, or for any ritual meaning or symbolic significance in the procession of stages they are being made to follow to gain access to the shrine. For a shrine it most surely is. A shrine, a lair, a god-nest. He has no intention of observing the decreed rites of entry and submission.\n\nHe halts, and passes His warblade to Caecaltus. The massive sword is a burden even for the mighty Companion. The Emperor places His hands flat on the walls of the narrow defile.\n\nHe presses.\n\nNothing happens at first. Then Loken hears a grinding rumble. Scraps of rock, pebbles and dust patter down from high above. The cliff walls slowly part, scraping aside, forced by inhuman strength as the Emperor slowly flexes and straightens His arms.\n\nNow the gap is wide enough. The Emperor lowers His hands, reclaims His blade, and walks on.\n\nThey step into the open. The Lupercal Court.\n\nLoken knows what it is, though he has never seen the place before. He stares at the vast space, the fluted columns, the arches springing from their imposts to support the towering ribcage of the ceiling. The floor, of mirror-polished stone, reflects none of them except the golden shimmer of the Emperor. The scale is vast and damning, a belittling, artificial infinite. Loken gazes at the horror of it, the oppressive space, the constricting immensity. It is a necrotic cathedral of graven ebony and gothic black marble. It is a carrion temple of oblivion, lit by a rancid glow of bloodlight.\n\nLoken hears Leetu gasp.\n\nHe turns, and sees the Angel.\n\nThe Bright Lord of Baal, head bowed and turned to the left, is crucified against the far wall. He hangs like an icon or relic, a sacred sigil to be worshipped and knelt before. His arms and wings are outstretched, his golden wargear dented and torn. Too many - far too many - black spikes have been driven through his body and limbs. The black wall beneath his arms and feet is washed red with the blood that has run down to pool beneath him in the litter of white feathers.\n\n'No,' murmurs Loken. 'No.'\n\n'My king-!' Caecaltus says, showing the first emotion - true compassion - that Loken has ever known him express. The proconsul is genuinely shocked. He knows too well that Sanguinius prophesied his own death and, despite his father's efforts, went to meet it. He is braced to bear his master's grief.\n\nNone comes. The Emperor ignores His Companion. He steps towards the body on the wall. When He rejected the promise of godhood, He excised a great deal of His emotional core too. He numbed His feelings so that crimes like this could not be turned into weapons against Him.\n\nTake him down.\n\nLoken and Caecaltus hurry forward, and try to pluck out the black iron nails.\n\nLeetu looks at the Emperor.\n\n'Is he here?' he asks, apparently unafraid of the Master of Mankind, but terrified of what the answer might be.\n\nYes, LE 2.\n\nHorus smiles.\n\nThe cathedral shifts.\n\nLoken and Caecaltus turn. They have dragged the last nail out of the cold stone and colder flesh, and are trying to lower the Angel's limp and heavy body to the ground as gently as they can. His blood has smeared them both. They hear the smile. Not the grind and scrape of stone; not the rumble of fractal architecture as it folds and realigns, resetting the obsidian columns and the black, gothic arches; not the creak and squeal of the endlessly ramifying psychotecture as it counter-rotates like a kaleidoscope to make a bigger and yet more distressing tabernacle of ruin.\n\nThey hear the smile.\n\nThey hear the smile of the thing that emerges from the intersection between re-forming columns, a daemonic abomination in humanoid form, sheathed in infernal plate and bathed in bloodlight, a god-monster that steps into the Court out of an unfolding flower of black bone.\n\n'Father,' says the smile.\n\n9:vi\n\nTied\n\n'How far back do we have to go?' John asks, watching Oll crouch down to tie another loop of thread. The dead, grey street, which reminds Grammaticus of the back lane of some plague-emptied medieval berg, is dismally quiet, except for the gust and rumble of the warp storm haunting the horizon.\n\n'All the way,' Oll replies. 'The whole route has to be marked. So, as far as we can get, I guess. I don't know... Calth?'\n\n'That far?' John gasps in dismay.\n\nOll grins at him.\n\n'No, idiot,' he says. 'Just as far as the point where we started to leave the threads.'\n\nJohn looks relieved.\n\n'So, the Palace?'\n\nOll nods and rises. They start walking again, following the winding cobbled street. Oll's lasrifle is slung over his shoulder, but John has his carbine across his chest, ready. The immaterial breeze stirs the weeds growing between the cobblestones, and flutters dead leaves from gutters.\n\n'The last thread I remember us leaving was just before the Custodes captured us,' says Oll. 'So, that far at least. We have to make sure the path meets, or overlaps. It has to be there for us.'\n\nOll pauses.\n\n'It has to still have been there for us...' he tries. He shakes his head. 'You're better at the tenses than I am.'\n\n'Not that good,' John says.\n\nThey walk a little further, and cross a grubby, timber-beamed yard.\n\n'How do we know we're making the same route?' he asks.\n\n'I don't think we do, not exactly,' Oll replies, 'and I don't think it matters. As long as there's a clear course that takes us - took us - from the Palace to the place we met - will meet - the Emperor...' He frowns in frustrated amusement. 'I'm saying, as long as there's a path, it'll find us. I mean, it did find us.'\n\nHe smiles at John again. They're both trying hard to treat the task as the crucial thing it is, and not the ludicrous errand it appears to be. They know it matters, and that if it's not done, everything will fall apart. But it seems so trivial and mindless when they know that somewhere, something far more important must be taking place. They're trying very hard not to think about that.\n\n'What if we run out of yarn?' John asks.\n\nOll shrugs. The clew of thread is getting smaller, but it never seems to run out, no matter how many pieces he breaks off with his teeth. They exit the yard through a dim passageway, and emerge onto another street. Oll waits obligingly as John scopes for danger, carbine raised. When he's sure the street is empty, he beckons Oll out. He's taking his promise seriously, even though he made it to himself. He's going to keep Oll safe. It makes him part of this, not a hanger-on. It helps make their mission seem significant.\n\nIn the street, timber-gabled dwellings overhang melancholy flagstone pavements. Oll stops to tie another thread to a gutter pipe.\n\n'Does it matter that it's us leaving them?' John asks.\n\n'So many questions, Grammaticus!' Oll laughs, shaking his head.\n\n'No, I mean, Hebet tied them. Even the ones he didn't tie. He said he recognised his own knots. But these won't be his.'\n\n'They were mine anyway,' says Oll.\n\n'What?'\n\nOll has cut off another length of twine. He shows John how he is tying it around the pipe, and the knot he's making. He thinks of the sun flashing on waters dark as wine, the Pleiades rising to announce the start of sailing season, the fast boats with the bright eyes painted on their bows to stare down daemons and see the way ahead.\n\n'The wolf noose,' he says. 'It's as old as me. We used to use it as a rope hitch at sea. I taught it to Hebet. Him and me used to tie up sheaves of swartgrass with it on the farm. The knots looked like his because they looked like mine.'\n\nHe points to the loop around the pipe.\n\n'There,' he says. 'Who tied that? Can you tell? Do you think Hebet would know?'\n\n'So they could have been yours all along?'\n\n'They probably will be,' says Oll.\n\nJohn snorts, and sighs. 'I can't believe we're doing this, Oll. I can't believe this is how our part ends. Some mundane chore.'\n\n'Important chore.'\n\n'Yeah, but still...'\n\n'You're such a romantic, John. A story isn't a story to you unless it has a sweeping or epic ending, eh? A dramatic climax? Some last heroic deed? Life's not like that, and neither are myths. They're not all neatly plotted out in a satisfying sequence. They happen in the order they happen. You remember the parts in the Eleniki myths when they careen their ships so the chandlers can scrape the hulls? And they patch in new deck planks, and sew replacement sails?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'Exactl"}
{"text":"ah, but still...'\n\n'You're such a romantic, John. A story isn't a story to you unless it has a sweeping or epic ending, eh? A dramatic climax? Some last heroic deed? Life's not like that, and neither are myths. They're not all neatly plotted out in a satisfying sequence. They happen in the order they happen. You remember the parts in the Eleniki myths when they careen their ships so the chandlers can scrape the hulls? And they patch in new deck planks, and sew replacement sails?'\n\n'No.'\n\n'Exactly. But they are parts of the stories. The stories couldn't have happened without them.'\n\nJohn shrugs in resignation.\n\n'All right,' he says. 'So, you're saying, it's boring being a legend?'\n\n'Oh, you're a legend now? You wish,' says Oll. 'I'm saying not all legends have a big finish.'\n\n'This one does,' says John ruefully. 'It's just happening somewhere else.'\n\n'Try not to think about it,' Oll starts to say. But John has grabbed him, his hand over Oll's mouth, and pulled him into the shadows of the wall.\n\nA squad of Traitor Excertus, Merudin 20th Tactical by the look of them, trudge down the old street. They are filthy and tired, wary and jumpy. The pair hide until the troopers have disappeared from view.\n\n'Thanks,' Oll whispers.\n\n'I'm here to look out for you, remember? Keep you safe?' John checks his short-pattern rifle, and folds out the wire stock. 'We don't want to fight if we don't have to. But we're not alone out here.'\n\nOll nods. 'The sooner we find a way back into the Sanctum, the better,' he says. 'You spot a door or anything, we take it.'\n\n'It won't be any safer in there,' says John.\n\n'No,' Oll agrees, 'but think about this. If the Emperor... wins, then Horus will be dead, or subdued. If that happens, the warp will probably loosen its grip. Chaos will be in retreat. And all of this, this city, this realm, will realign. The materia of realspace will stabilise again.'\n\n'I hope so,' says John, with a shiver.\n\n'So do I. So if we're not in the Palace when that happens-'\n\n'We'll be stuck out here?'\n\n'No. Well, yes, but worse. We'll still have to leave the trail, because it's essential, but all the steps along the way won't be stuck together any more. They'll all be stretched out again across time, and space, back where they came from... The Sanctum, the damn ship, this city, and every other bit of every city we've been through. Leaving the trail then will be much harder. We'd have to use the old Immaterium Sidestep again.'\n\n'Shit,' says John. 'That could take years.'\n\n'Years,' says Oll. 'Centuries. The rest of our lives.'\n\nGrammaticus exhales hard. He doesn't like the sound of that. Doing it one way was a long, gruelling odyssey. Doing it again backwards...\n\n'All right,' he says. 'Let's pick up the pace. Let's find an entrance to the Sanctum as fast as we can. Dammit, I wish we could navigate out here. Get a bearing on the Palace. A true read...'\n\n'Forget it. My compass is useless. The warp storm screws with it. Your torquetum too. They don't work here.'\n\n'It's broken anyway,' says John. 'When we fought that bastard Erebus, I think I fell on it.'\n\nHe pulls the little device out of his pocket to prove the point.\n\nThe wraithbone torquetum is intact.\n\n'It was definitely broken,' says John. 'Definitely.'\n\n'But He repaired us,' Oll replies softly. 'Everything. These old guns, our clothes. Us. He mended everything when...'\n\nHe trails off. They stare at each other.\n\n'No,' whispers John.\n\nOll doesn't dare look. He puts his hand into the deep pocket of his military jacket. He pulls out the splinters of the old knife.\n\nExcept he doesn't.\n\nAcross the palm of his hand, the stone knife is unbroken.\n\n'He made everything whole again,' murmurs John, gazing at it in wonder.\n\n'More than whole,' says Oll. 'New.'\n\nHe can feel the tingle of the lapped blade, the life in it restored. It isn't the tired, ugly throb of old murders that it used to be. It's the lithe and urgent hunger of an apex predator.\n\n'He needs this,' Oll says. 'He needs every advantage He can get because, Throne knows, the odds are against Him. I hate to tell you this, John, but we've got to go back again.'\n\n9:vii\n\nSanguinary\n\nOh, how is it to die? How is it to die at the hands of one of your own kind, a warrior of the Legiones Astartes? Before the Civil War, it was not something Rann had ever considered. He was aware of the concept of transhuman dread, but had given little thought to the experience of those who found themselves facing his kind, the problematic xenos breeds and estranged cultures who chose to resist compliance.\n\nThen Horus' infamy began, and the notion became something that required to be contemplated, not just as a dread imagining, but as a tactical rehearsal. How does an Astartes combat the lethality of an Astartesian brother? He had visualised, as preparatory evolutions, the berserker assault of the World Eaters, the surgical annihilation of the Iron Warriors, the volatile zeal of the Word Bearers, the elite discipline of the Sons of Horus, the cut-throat cunning of the Alpha Legion, the terror-shock of the Night Lords...\n\nHe has visualised a hundred deaths. Not this. Never this. Not the Blood Angels.\n\nNot Azkaellon. Not the Sanguinary Lord. He cannot-\n\nHe cannot bring himself to kill Azkaellon.\n\nThey crash together. They tumble in the mire, drowning and flailing. The impact of Azkaellon's pounce has broken Rann's cuirass and cracked his ossmodula-fused ribcage.\n\nNot Azkaellon.\n\nAzkaellon seems to possess - and be possessed by - the strength of a dozen Astartes. He shakes Rann like a wolfhound savaging its prey.\n\nNot Azkaellon. He cannot-\n\nRann has nothing but love and respect for his brothers in the other loyal Legions. In the course of the siege, he has formed bonds of unbreakable kinship. War's one great gift is to reveal true friends.\n\nBut there are some that even the Lord Seneschal, captain of the First Assault Cadre, holds in such esteem that he cannot think of them as friends or peers. They seem to him, for all his own deeds, like warriors of a different order altogether. Sigismund is one, aloof and uncompromising. Atok Abidemi of the Salamanders is another, implacable and dignified. The mighty Raldoron.\n\nAnd perhaps more than any, Azkaellon.\n\nNot Azkaellon. Not Azkaellon. He-\n\nThough the captain of the Sanguinary Guard has shown Rann nothing but courtesy and kindness, he remains a golden demigod of such beauty and majesty that he seems unknowable. Such is Azkaellon's fame, prowess and grace, Rann has always felt humbled in his presence. Rann had been flattered that Azkaellon seemed to treat Rann with respect, but he never expected to be counted as a friend.\n\nNot by Azkaellon. Not by this Azkaellon.\n\nThe grace is gone. The regal beauty, beside which Rann has always felt ordinary and dull, remains, but it has tipped over into something unbearable, something too beautiful to behold. Azkaellon is the cruel face of Mortality unmasked.\n\nHe is the face that the Blood Angels only show to their enemies.\n\nLiquid mud sprays up as they churn and grapple. Rann cannot fight him. He cannot kill him. Rann tries to fend him away with his axe-hafts, sparing the lethal blades. He-\n\nBut he cannot kill him. Within seconds, Rann realises that it is not a matter of reserve, or mercy, or of him pulling his blows and sparing his blades.\n\nHe could not kill Azkaellon if he wanted to.\n\nWhat beast has consumed his soul? What wild rage? What atrocious madness? The Sanguinary's beautiful eyes are black, his teeth are beautiful fangs, his fury a beautiful-\n\nRann goes down, struck hard. He wallows in the mud. Gasping, spitting, he manages to block a lunging blow that would have torn off his jaw, but he cannot stop Azkaellon's thrusting bite. The Sanguinary gnaws at his throat. Rann clubs with Headsman's haft, and Azkaellon lurches away with a torn chunk of Rann's gorget speared between his canines.\n\nIt is the work of daemons, no doubt. A final insult, a final profanity, to seize those who have stood firm for seven long years and, in the final hour of their lives, rob them of their last remaining dignity. Their deaths were assured the moment the traitor wave broke around Hasgard Fort. But that's not enough for Horus Lupercal. Nothing is ever enough for him. He is not content with taking their lives. He wants their defiance too. He wants them to slaughter each other, in a maddened disgrace, so that their glory, courage, brotherhood and honour are defiled before they perish.\n\nHe wants everyone to die a traitor.\n\nRann won't do it. If he fights back, then he is doing the Warmaster's work, and breaking the bond he has given his life to defend. And if he does not-\n\nThe Sanguinary Guard's fist catches him hard, and he is thrown backwards. He slams into the side of a burned-out Rhino, and slides off it into the ooze. Blood drools from his lips. He tries to rise. An axe misses his face by inches and thuds into the Rhino's hull. There's a Word Bearer right on top of him, screaming at him. The focus of the Sanguinary's attack has been so intense, Rann has almost forgotten that they are just two men in the very thick of a wild and grinding battle, with Astartes all around them, fighting and killing.\n\nRann knocks the raving Word Bearer backwards with the butt of an axe. The Word Bearer tries to come at him again, but he is immediately engaged by a White Scar. As the pair clash, Rann claws himself upright, in time to fend off two World Eaters who come plunging out of the billowing smoke. A third World Eater wheels past behind them, trading blows with an Imperial Fist. Rann thinks it's Devarlin, the young initiate. It's impossible to be sure, just a suffocating frenzy of milling, thrashing figures. Visibility in the spiralling smoke is virtually zero. Rann is drenched in noise. He sees the Imperial Fist fall, struck through the neck. He sees one of the Sons of Horus, just three or four metres to his left, hacking another Imperial Fist apart, despite the iron lance wedged entirely through h"}
{"text":"rld Eater wheels past behind them, trading blows with an Imperial Fist. Rann thinks it's Devarlin, the young initiate. It's impossible to be sure, just a suffocating frenzy of milling, thrashing figures. Visibility in the spiralling smoke is virtually zero. Rann is drenched in noise. He sees the Imperial Fist fall, struck through the neck. He sees one of the Sons of Horus, just three or four metres to his left, hacking another Imperial Fist apart, despite the iron lance wedged entirely through his torso. He glimpses, for a second, some Neverborn horror trailing the head and ribcage of a White Scar from its paw. The slaughter is absolute. There are traitors everywhere, their blades wet from butchery, and the few loyal brothers he can see are dead or cornered.\n\nHe is one of them. The two World Eaters have him backed against the Rhino's wreck. He tries to parry their whirring blades, blocking their raw fury and feral strength with his superior axe-craft. He finds a throat, and slashes it with a punch of Headsman's beard. The World Eater falls sidelong, clutching at his fatal wound as though he doesn't comprehend it. The other strikes Rann across the shoulder, spilling him into the muck. The traitor raises his blade.\n\nAnd is jerked backwards violently. A White Scar has seized him from behind. It's Kyzo, Namahi's tenacious outrider. White Scar and World Eater grapple, plate grinding against plate. Rann surges to his battle-brother's aid. Then all three of them are knocked down. The raging Sanguinary has found them again.\n\nAzkaellon lifts Rann by the throat. Kyzo utters some incoherent cry of dismay. Like Rann, he is utterly confounded by the Blood Angel lord's berserk onslaught. He tries to tear Rann free. In another moment, the World Eater is wrestling with Azkaellon too.\n\nSo here is the unfathomable madness of this heresy. A White Scar, a World Eater, an Imperial Fist and a Blood Angel locked in a mindlessly brutal fight, trying to save or kill each other in some parody of logic or reason.\n\nRann tears himself free, staggering backwards. The Sanguinary smashes Kyzo aside, breaking his visor. The World Eater tries to rip off Azkaellon's face. Azkaellon bites off his fingers.\n\nThe World Eater recoils, blood blurting from his ruined hand. The Sanguinary shreds the traitor's face and tears off his left arm. Azkaellon lets the corpse fall, turning on the White Scar Kyzo, who is trying to rise. His kill is denied by a chainaxe that slays Kyzo while he is still on his knees. Two more of Angron's bastards have entered the melee. One charges Azkaellon while the other frees his revving chainaxe from the White Scar's cadaver. A warrior of the Death Guard ploughs in from another angle. Azkaellon lunges at the World Eaters without hesitation. By the time he collides with them, the Death Guard is clinging to his back and clawing at his wings. The four huge figures wrestle in the mire, so coated with mud it is hard to see where one ends and another begins.\n\nThe Sanguinary's bloodlust is directed at anybody, Rann realises. Friend or foe, anything living in range, anything moving within his tunnelled field of vision. And he carries no weapons. Where his sword and shield have gone, Rann has no idea. It is as though Azkaellon has abandoned them, regarding them as inferior to his teeth and claws.\n\nWhere did those teeth come from?\n\nRann struggles upright. He grips his mud-slick axes and tries to wade forward. He sees Azkaellon drag the Death Guard off his shoulder, and swing the traitor bodily into one of the World Eaters. The World Eater's neck snaps, but the sound of that gunshot crack is lost in the howl of his chainaxe which, caught between the clashing bodies, is noisily disembowelling the Death Guard legionary. They fall together as one shuddering form.\n\nThe other son of Angron swings his axe sidelong with full force. Azkaellon doesn't bother to duck or block, or even try to evade. He takes the blow square on the left pauldron, which splinters. The blade digs into the meat of Azkaellon's shoulder beneath, discharging a spray of blood.\n\nBut now the World Eater's guard is open. In another second, so is his throat. The Sanguinary's teeth gouge away so much of the traitor's neck and upper chest that his head is left barely attached.\n\nAzkaellon drinks, his face smeared red like a carnodon at a kill.\n\nRann turns away and starts to move. If he can put some distance between himself and the Sanguinary, the impossible choice of a fight might be avoided.\n\nBut there is nowhere to move in a pitched battle of this density. Just beyond the cremated hull of the Rhino, Rann blunders into three Sons of Horus, who are wading out of the boiling smoke and drifting sparks. Knee-deep in the liquid churn, Rann swings Hunter into one, reeling him aside, and uses Headsman's haft to catch the sword of the second. The third is trying to stick him with a short pig-spear. Rann strikes with both axes, severing the third traitor's arm and spear with Hunter, and crushing his helm-beak with Headsman. The Son of Horus spins and topples into the mud, lifting a spray of it. Rann has time to turn and block the sword a second time, but the first traitor, his plate crumpled across the chest from Hunter's impact, cracks him across the back with a maul.\n\nRann collapses, submerging in the mud briefly. It fills his mouth and nose. He is dragged out of it by the two traitors, who grip him tightly between them. The swordsman raises his blade to strike off Rann's head.\n\nThe blade continues to rise, and rise. The traitor is lifting clear of the ooze, his grip on Rann broken, filth and mud streaming off his legs. Azkaellon has grabbed him, his talons puncturing his side and hip.\n\nThe Sanguinary dashes the traitor aside. The Son of Horus hits the carcass of the Rhino, then slips off into the mud, but the jutting spar of a broken axle has gored him.\n\nThe remaining Cthonian clubs the Sanguinary with his maul. The force of the blow makes Azkaellon recoil. Forgetting Rann completely, the Son of Horus increases his assault, raining strokes with his maul, as though he is aware that if he lets up for a second, the Sanguinary will destroy him.\n\nRann finds his feet. He wants to put an axe into the traitor's back and end the merciless attack, but he knows that if he does, he will become the focus of Azkaellon's bloodlust once more.\n\nRann does it anyway. The fire of his honour has not gone out. A man defends a comrade, no matter what that comrade has become.\n\nHeadsman splits the traitor's spine.\n\nRann levers the blade out, letting his kill fall. He sees the Sanguinary fix him with his dead gaze again. The Sanguinary is awash with blood, wheezing and snorting, aspirating gore. The wings flex to spear him onto his prey.\n\nSomeone grabs Rann and wrenches him out of the path of the Sanguinary's lunging attack. Azkaellon sprawls, hampered by the mire, splashing and floundering. Rann's saviour drags him behind the Rhino's shell. In a second, Rann can hear the growl and smash of the Sanguinary already tearing into other victims. Traitors or loyal sons, he has no idea.\n\nRann looks up. He sees Zephon Sorrow-Bringer. Zephon has dragged him clear.\n\nHe opens his mouth to speak. Zephon shakes his head fiercely. He is plastered in mud and gore. He seizes Rann by the forearm, and they stumble away from the wrecked vehicle into the smoke.\n\nThe ground is littered with the dead of both sides, wrapped together and half-submerged in the ooze. Twenty metres on, they come to the out-flank wall of the fort, a nub of broken rockcrete jutting from the morass like a rotten tooth from a diseased gum. The dead are plentiful here too, piled up either side of the wall's remains, choking its archways and breach-points. There is no longer any sense of what was inside the wall or without, no evidence of which side of it was being defended and which attacked.\n\nRann slumps against the wall. He is numb, and injured more severely than he's ever been. The din of mass conflict rolls around them. A moment's respite, that's all this is. They will have to throw themselves back into the battle. There is nowhere to go, and this is the fate they both chose.\n\nThe roar of battle is a demented percussion. A stale wind moans around the broken piece of fortress that shelters them, its breath filled with black smoke. There is no sky, no distance, just a glaring red haze.\n\n'Some madness took him,' Rann whispers.\n\n'Took us all,' Zephon replies. His voice is fragile, like ice.\n\n'All?'\n\nZephon tries to wipe mud and blood from his mouth. It is smeared too thickly.\n\n'I think my lord is dead,' he says. 'My father. I felt it. We all...'\n\n'Zephon-'\n\n'We felt the pain, Rann, and in that pain, a rage fell upon us all. Mindless and-'\n\n'You are not mindless,' says Rann.\n\nZephon sighs.\n\n'I have been in pain too long,' he replies. 'I have known death or its likeness. The reconstruction of my body...'\n\nHis voice trails off. Rann can see the Blood Angel is struggling with a deep anguish.\n\n'Perhaps it has blunted me,' says Zephon. 'Dulled me. Perhaps I cannot feel the pain as sharply as my brothers. Perhaps... I have already been feeling it for far too long. A rage has taken the Blood Angels, Rann. It has taken their wits and their souls and their dignity.'\n\nHe looks at Rann. His fangs are bright and sharp.\n\n'All of them,' he says.\n\n9:viii\n\nCadaver Lord\n\nKeeler watches Sigismund instruct his officers. His orders seem simple, and delivered with confidence, as though he is expecting to bring off an easy and decisive victory.\n\nKeeler's no student of strategy, but she realises it's not that. Sigismund's not planning how to win. He's planning how best to die.\n\nIt's hard to estimate the Death Guard numbers through the heat haze, but it seems to be several companies at least. The traitor force forms a black stain on the hard copper plain ahead, as though the rugged line of mesas and sandy bluffs behind them have leaked oil onto the desert floor. Oil or blood. Bot"}
{"text":"he is expecting to bring off an easy and decisive victory.\n\nKeeler's no student of strategy, but she realises it's not that. Sigismund's not planning how to win. He's planning how best to die.\n\nIt's hard to estimate the Death Guard numbers through the heat haze, but it seems to be several companies at least. The traitor force forms a black stain on the hard copper plain ahead, as though the rugged line of mesas and sandy bluffs behind them have leaked oil onto the desert floor. Oil or blood. Both look black in the amber light. Keeler can see banners and standards raised in the heat shimmer, the glint of light flashing off blades. Elements of the enemy force are already stirring and moving forward to meet the pilgrimage across the hard-baked ground. There is a noxious stench in the air.\n\nShe realises Sigismund is committed, and is obliged to make a fight of it. Even if she and the conclave could divert the immense column of humanity they are leading - and they cannot - there is no time for it to move, and nowhere for it to go to escape the traitor assault. Sigismund isn't going to waste precious moments attempting to engineer some futile retreat. He's going to meet the traitors head-on.\n\nAnd that means he's going to die. They're all going to die. Sigismund's instructions - quickly spoken and just as quickly accepted by his Seconds - contain no prospect of victory. They simply outline how to inflict as much damage to the enemy mass as possible before the inevitable overrun.\n\nOn the Via Aquila, there is no going back. There is only going forward, to whatever fate awaits. Out here in the amber waste, there is no trace of the Via Aquila, and there hasn't been for a long time, but Keeler feels they are still on it, still flowing along it like a river along its channel. It will take them where it takes them.\n\nHer mind remains bruised from the Emperor's cry. It has left her feeling weak, her extremities numb. She wonders if Sigismund feels the same. He shows no sign of it. He seems unchanged, intent but quiet, not unduly bothered by the prospect of death. The approaching battle seems to be merely the next observance due, as determined by his order's book of hours, a duty as solemn yet unremarkable as plainsong or meditation.\n\nThe first cohort of Seconds starts away from the head of the pilgrimage, a fast-moving group of light armour with infantry jogging at its heels. The second, slightly smaller, sets out a moment later, moving in parallel to the first, and then turning wider in a run towards the right flank of the enemy formation. The cohorts wash dust back over the head of the pilgrimage host. This is no place for a fight, she thinks. An open, arid plain without feature or relief, roasting in the ugly heat. Dust films the air like gauze. There is a breathlessness that seems to crush their lungs. Every metal surface catches the hot light like a mirror.\n\nShe jumps down from the fighting vehicle as it starts up. Every tread will be needed, nothing left in reserve. As it lurches forward to join the third cohort, she leads Zhi-Meng back towards the halted pilgrims, winding her scarf around her mouth and nose to block the dust. The river of humanity stretches out in front of her, trailing away across the desert flats as far as she can see. The faces of those closest seem unafraid. Their expressions are blank. They have seen too much already and their capacity for fear has been sucked out of them. They simply stand and gaze at the battle unfolding.\n\nShe looks back, and sees Sigismund. He seems to feel her eyes on him, and he turns to cast one brief look in her direction. A nod. What is that? Respect? Goodbye?\n\nThen he's starting forward at the head of the fourth cohort, which is principally Templar Astartes, and lacks any armour component. All four cohorts have raised Sigismund's banner. The Champion wants the enemy to know who's coming. The cohorts become four prongs scraping trails of dust towards the enemy, which is gathering momentum to meet them like an encroaching sandstorm.\n\nKeeler realises, belatedly, that the battle has already begun. Sigismund, it seems, is not one for dramatic flourish, or for holding fire until some sudden commencement. The veteran marksmen riding on the hulls of the first and second cohort vehicles are already picking shots at the enemy lines, methodically killing and maiming with their powerful long-range weapons. Turret weapons have also begun a harassing barrage, loosing shells on the run. Each shot spits out a horsetail plume of white smoke that drifts behind the speeding vehicle, followed like an afterthought by the crump of firing. Keeler sees slow geysers of dust and fried earth start to lift among the enemy lines, a few dozen at a time, fresh ones raising their murky spouts even as previous ones fade to haze. She's too far away to hear the detonations or see the extent of the damage, but she can see the grouping. The firing is not widespread and general, it is targeting specific sections of the line. By the time the cohorts meet the traitors, the traitor formation will be cracked and holed in several deliberate places.\n\nThere's nothing she can do. She sits on the cracked earth and, for want of anything better, starts to recite a passage from the Lectitio to herself.\n\n'What are you doing, Keeler?' Lord Zhi-Meng asks.\n\n'I don't know,' she replies. She reaches up her hand to take his. 'But do it with me.'\n\nThe Seconds and the traitors meet. The Death Guard, dark and bloated spectres in the welter of dust, do not charge to meet the Templar force in any disciplined formation. To Sigismund, the enemy mass seems to ooze forward, swelling, puffing outward like some ballooning fungus, or a fast-spreading mould. The wasteland air is so dry, the stink of the enemy is peculiarly intense.\n\nAs ranges close, weapons fire escalates. Pintle mounts start to drum, making streams of heavy las and tracer dance and spit. Small-arms open up, and bolters too. The space between the two armies is suddenly frantic with exchanging fire. Men start to drop, knocked out of the foot columns behind the tanks. In the traitor host, storm shields ripple with impacts, and iron beasts wallop over with the clatter of plate.\n\nArmies. It isn't two armies. Sigismund is fully aware of that. He's fielding a force that's outnumbered six or seven to one, perhaps more. His brigade is a fast combat unit. The enemy is a full compliance division. He can't win this, but he's laid his plans carefully. If fate allows, he can hurt the enemy grievously before death claims him.\n\nHurt them, as his father instructed.\n\nMortarion's warriors have weight of numbers, and they are all Astartes. They possess a strange, organic cohesion that seems to flow as one amorphous whole. Once again, Sigismund is reminded of creeping moulds and mycotoxic mildews. His force, though far smaller and less than fifty per cent Astartes, is fleet and disciplined. Every man in it knows his objective, and has the autonomy to pursue it even if the chain of command is broken.\n\nHis four cohorts are designed to furrow and split the enemy mass. A divided enemy can fall prey to confusion and poor reaction, and even the biggest army can become ineffective if its coordination is lost.\n\nThe first cohort, the largest, rams into the Death Guard line, armour first. Dozer blades have been lowered, and the main guns, declined to their lowest angle, continue to fire, shelling pathways into the traitor mass. The Astartes, led by the Imperial Fist Huscarl Artolun, one of Sigismund's most trusted men, maintain firing for as long as possible, forming shield lines that follow the armour in. The shield lines cover the more vulnerable Excertus and Auxilia squads. Sigismund has drilled these soldiers personally. They know to work as squads, for no human can tackle an Astartes alone. They function as packs, loaders and munition bearers supporting the heavy crewed weapons, some of which were salvaged from defeated Mechanicum forces. Each pack targets individual enemy Astartes, like wolves on a bear, assaulting with las and flamers, while the heavy weapons - plasmics, meltas and Adrathics - inflict serious damage. They know to keep killing until an enemy is dead before acquiring another target. It is a hard mindset to achieve, because it makes them vulnerable, but those packs that can master the art score kills against foes that far outclass them.\n\nEven so, they die. Despite the spitting devastation of the armour's side mounts, the moving picket of Artolun's shield lines, and the precise headshots of the Stratac and Geno marksmen with their overcharged long-las, wherever the Death Guard breaks through, a pack is mauled and finished in seconds.\n\nThe second cohort engages, then the third. Like the first, they have both struck at portions of the enemy line already weakened by the tread weapons, fissures in the Death Guard mass that they can wedge into and exploit. The second cohort drives into the right lateral extension of the enemy group, actually cutting the end of its line off from its main formation. The amputated section mills in gratifying disarray. The second cohort's guns punish it relentlessly. The Templar Oxaros, seconded by the fierce Salamander Rhi Echimar, holds second cohort true, and turns to shave another section off the Death Guard mass.\n\nThird cohort, led by the Templar Antykus, ploughs into the furrow its guns have made. Heavy las and fusion mounts have superheated the ground, turning the dust into glass. Tank tracks grind over Death Guard plate made brittle by blast heat. Antykus' Excertus packs follow him in, as Artolun's followed him. They carry grenades and anti-armour launchers repurposed for Astartes-killing.\n\nSigismund's fourth cohort, the smallest, meets the Death Guard surge left of the central formation. Like each of the other intersections, he has planned this carefully. The others are designed to subdivide the mass and break its cohesion, or sow destruction into t"}
{"text":"the dust into glass. Tank tracks grind over Death Guard plate made brittle by blast heat. Antykus' Excertus packs follow him in, as Artolun's followed him. They carry grenades and anti-armour launchers repurposed for Astartes-killing.\n\nSigismund's fourth cohort, the smallest, meets the Death Guard surge left of the central formation. Like each of the other intersections, he has planned this carefully. The others are designed to subdivide the mass and break its cohesion, or sow destruction into the densest formations. But there are other ways to disrupt an army too. You go for the head. And that's what Sigismund is good at. Head wounds.\n\nHis retinue crashes through the Death Guard shield wall. His lieutenants, Pontis of the Templar Brethren, and Faustal the Iron Hands Cataphractii, flank him. Myrinx of the Temple and the Fenrisian Janjar are at his heels. Their blades and bolters tear the Pale King's bloated, seeping warriors off their feet. There are flies everywhere, thicker than dust, their black bodies glinting like glass beads in the desert light.\n\nBut Sigismund can see his target. Skulidas Gehrerg, the Cadaver Lord, the gigantic and monstrous commander of the enemy host. As he hacks through the enemy ranks to reach him, Sigismund raises the black sword to his brow in brief salute.\n\n9:ix\n\nInstrument of Chaos\n\nYou have imagined this moment. You have savoured the prospect with an almost greedy anticipation. Now it's finally here.\n\nSo where, then, is your father's wrath? Where is His horror? Where is His... anything? You expected the chastising fury of an enraged patriarch, or the anguished pleading of a heartbroken parent. But He just stands there, staring at you.\n\nYour glory is something to behold. You haven't seen Him for a long time. You've changed. You've grown. You're not the child He remembers. Maybe He needs a moment to accept that.\n\nHe's changed too. He seems small. A shadow of His former self. In truth, you were secretly afraid of this reunion. The father you remember was a huge and terrible force of majesty. His presence always overwhelmed you. At His side, long ago, during those thirty perfect years, you always felt safe and scared in equal measure. He was everything. You adored Him with every fibre of your being. You flinched every time He spoke a word.\n\nBut look at Him. Look at Him. Oh, He still appears impressive. The golden armour glinting in its own sunlight. The mantle about His shoulders like a cloak of silks cut from the finest damask nightfall and the richest royal blood. The stature. The serenity. The long and gleaming black hair. The noble, haloed face. The crown of radiance that rests upon Him. The Imperial aspect.\n\nBut He does seem small. It's the natural way of things, you presume. To a child, a father seems an infallible, perfect giant. But the child grows up. He begins to notice the flaws and imperfections. The child matures, and the father grows ever smaller and more frail. You wonder that you were ever cowed by Him. You have outgrown Him. This, this is what you were afraid of? This, a man in antique armour, come to remonstrate with you and exert His authority? He still thinks He can subdue you with the merest look or utterance.\n\nNot any more.\n\nYou realise you have always been afraid of what you thought He was, not what He actually is. You hope His silence indicates that He has reached a similar conclusion. It is time for Him to be afraid of you.\n\nPerhaps He's choosing his words carefully-\n\nYou have killed my son.\n\nSo now He speaks. It was clearly the shock that rendered Him dumb. Yes, father. I have. I have nothing to hide. The body is there for all to see. Consider it a statement of my intent.\n\nYou feel a pang of regret. If Sanguinius had not been quite so defiant, if he had not been quite so Sanguinius, well, then this moment would have been more satisfying.\n\n'I offered him a place beside me,' you say, with a note of sadness that is quite authentic. 'I didn't want to kill him. He could have stood at my side, just as you can stand at my side. But he refused, to my regret. His refusal made his death necessary. It was my only recourse. I know you understand, father. You are an entirely rational man. I inherited my rationality from you. Poor Sanguinius, his execution was the only rational-'\n\nYou have killed my son.\n\nWhat is this? Is His trauma so deep that He can do nothing but repeat Himself? Why is He not listening?\n\n'I offered him a position of power in the new order,' you say, with less compassion. Your father is beginning to aggravate you. You gesture, proudly, at the five waiting thrones. 'He could have sat at the right hand of the incarnate,' you say. 'He did not see the way of it. He did not appreciate the fundamental state-change of the cosmos. There is me, or there is nothing. He chose to align himself with nothing, and death was the consequence. I hope it's not a mistake you will replicate, father. Again, I cite the fact that you are a supremely rational man. Grasp your lack of choice in this situation. Accept my offer, which I extend with a full heart. I am the Master of Mankind now, father. I would gladly have you stand at my right hand, so we can shape the future together. Nothing would make me happier. We will be as we were, all those years ago, side by side. But this time I can lift the bulk of that burden from you, and spare you the toil, so that you may take ease and rest as your reward for a long life of service to humanity. You need do nothing more than sit upon a throne-'\n\n'My King-of-Ages will not accede to your demands, or accept any offer to surrender.'\n\nWhat's this now? Who dares-\n\nAh, He has brought others with Him. You spot them now. So insignificant, you barely noticed them. If your father seems small, they seem like ants. Where are your hosts, father? Where are your proud armies and conquering Legions? You come here with, what, two Astartes Space Marines and a single Custodian? Is that the best you could muster? Is that all that survived? Oh, father. How are the mighty fallen.\n\nThe Custodes Sentinel is the one who spoke. He has stepped forward, still smeared in Sanguinius' blood, while one of the Astartes struggles to set down the Angel's corpse and the other cowers beside your father. Non-entities. They have no place here.\n\n'My King-of-Ages demands your immediate surrender.'\n\nThe damn Custodian is becoming impertinent. He's a proconsul, from his armour. They were always so aloof and autocratic. You seize his name. It's floating in his surface thoughts. Caecaltus Dusk, a proud Hetaeron. He has no business addressing you. This isn't the Throne Room. This is your Court.\n\n'Be silent,' you tell him. 'My father and I have business to discuss.'\n\nWhy?\n\nWhat a strange question. What is it that your father doesn't understand?\n\n'You ask me why?' you say. 'Why what?'\n\nWhy?\n\n'I think you have suffered too great a shock, father,' you say gently. 'You are not making sense. What are you asking me? Why did I kill the Angel? Or why do I offer-'\n\nWhy?\n\nOh yes, you see it now. Just like the old days. Those thirty years of learning His shorthand, learning to read His gnomic comments. Thirty years of Him expecting you to fill in the gaps and comprehend everything intended by an inscrutable remark. Thirty years of being afraid to get it wrong. He means why in the most fundamental sense.\n\n'Why are we at war?' you ask. Have all those millennia taught Him nothing? Or does He just want to hear you say it? Does He want to flex His authority and make you say it? Well, appease Him. He deserves some consideration.\n\n'Father, you know why,' you say. 'Something, perhaps some timidity, made you stop short of binding the forces of Chaos. You could have harnessed Chaos, but you merely aggravated it. You could have claimed ultimate power for the good of mankind, but you did not. So I have. I have done what you could or would not do. I have bound the powers of the warp, and I will lead humanity where you could not lead it, to a new and endless age of supremacy. I think it's time you accepted my offer. I think it's time you acknowledged my triumph. Kneel, father, please, and I will spare you. Then this will all be over.'\n\n'No man who ever lived can master Chaos.'\n\nAgain, the upstart proconsul, presuming to speak for his king.\n\n'I told you to be silent,' you say.\n\n'You believe the Emperor weak not to have followed this course. Timid, you said.'\n\nNow it's one of the Astartes! He steps forward, the Angel's blood wet on his hands.\n\n'Know your place!' you bark at him.\n\n'This was my place,' he replies.\n\nOh.\n\nOh, how a heart might break when a father sees his son again! After all this time, a son so changed! It is Garviel. It is poor Garviel, who was once your favourite.\n\nYou swallow. You did not expect this. You wish he didn't have to see you like this, or witness this moment. You could have embraced poor Loken to your bosom later, when all this was over. Or perhaps it would have been better that he died long-since and had never come here.\n\n'Garviel...' you murmur.\n\n'You have deluded yourself, great Lupercal,' Loken says to you. 'You are the servant of Chaos, not its master.'\n\n'What would you know of this, Garviel?' you ask, stung by his words.\n\n'Everything, now, father,' he replies.\n\nThis moment is spoiled. You didn't want Loken here. Your heart aches. For a father to see his son again, after all this time, and hear him speak such words. And they think you're the monster! You, with tears on your face at the sight of your favourite child, and your father, your damn father, still impassive and without affect despite the ruined corpse of His favoured son on the deck at His heels!\n\n'Please relent,' Loken says to you. 'Now, before it is too late. You are deluded.'\n\nYou try to ignore him. Your father has clearly recruited him and brought him here to prey upon your emotions and get you to lower your guard. A cheap trick. And look at Him! Your father, showing absolutely no emotion of His own.\n\n'Speak!' "}
{"text":"he sight of your favourite child, and your father, your damn father, still impassive and without affect despite the ruined corpse of His favoured son on the deck at His heels!\n\n'Please relent,' Loken says to you. 'Now, before it is too late. You are deluded.'\n\nYou try to ignore him. Your father has clearly recruited him and brought him here to prey upon your emotions and get you to lower your guard. A cheap trick. And look at Him! Your father, showing absolutely no emotion of His own.\n\n'Speak!' you hiss. 'Speak, father. Say something. Say something relevant. Say something that actually matters. Tell me you're sorry for withholding the truth from us! Tell me you're sorry for causing this war! Say something! Show me something! Kneel! At least you can do that! Kneel and submit!'\n\nWhy?\n\nYou're going to have to kill Him. You suspected you might have to. You thought you'd be sorry if it came to it. But you're not sorry. Not at all. He hasn't changed. If anything, He's worse. Just staring at you with those expressionless eyes-\n\nNo. Not at you.\n\nHe's not staring at you. This whole time, He hasn't been looking at you at all. And nothing He's said, since He walked into your Court, has been directed at you either. It's as if you're not even there.\n\nHe's looking past you. He's looking into the shadows behind you.\n\nYou turn to see what's so damn fascinating that He can't take His eyes off it long enough to pay you the respect that is due-\n\nAnd there they are. Of course. You knew they were there. You just didn't know anybody else could see them. Lurking there in the shadows, in the psychofractal darkness that simmers behind you. The Old Four. All of them. You've never seen them so close. You've never seen them manifest so completely. They are huge. So beautiful. They've come to witness this moment.\n\nYour father has been talking to them. Watching them. When He said, 'You have killed my son,' the fool hadn't meant Sanguinius. He had been talking to them about you.\n\nHe considers you dead. Dead and lost.\n\nHe's not interested in you at all.\n\nWell, father, you should be.\n\nYou raise your right hand, the claws drawn together. You hear Garviel and the arrogant proconsul cry out a warning.\n\nYour father will feel the true nature of your power. Then let them tell you that you are deluded.\n\nYou let the power loose.\n\nYou strike your father down.\n\n9:x\n\nThe final cut\n\nOll watches John fiddle with the torquetum. The intricate little device doesn't seem to want to fix. Oll's jet pendulum was just as unreliable.\n\n'Maybe it's the storm,' John says, making another adjustment.\n\n'Maybe,' Oll nods. The warp storm, the prevailing immaterial conditions, the sheer instability of everything... They are all factors now. Plotting a course, a risky business at the best of times, now seems impossible. None of the archaic winds listed in his charts blow in these new latitudes.\n\n'We need a bearing,' says John.\n\n'We absolutely need a bearing,' Oll agrees. One false cut, one wrong step, and they're dead. The knife hangs impatiently in his hand.\n\nJohn tries again, resetting the device. Oll waits. The shadows are closing in through the ruins around them, as though some terrible nightfall is finally approaching. The sickly wind has picked up, and it's gusting dust and dead leaves down the inevitable street outside the doorway where they are sheltering.\n\nOll steps onto the dusty street.\n\n'Actae?' he says into the wind.\n\nJohn glances at him, then continues with his work.\n\n'Actae? Are you still there? Can you still hear me?'\n\nNothing replies except the wind.\n\n'Actae?' he calls out.\n\nShe limps through the dead city. Her strength is slowly returning, but her body feels strange and unfamiliar. She sees the dark smudge of her reflection in the dirty glass of dead-eyed windows. Just a ghost. She sees the small shape of her shadow on the cobbles, and is surprised there is enough of her left to cast one.\n\nThere will be a way out of this, somehow. She is determined to fulfil the trust Lord Dorn placed in her.\n\nThe voice comes out of nothing, as if it has rolled off the split tiles of nearby eaves, or dripped down a broken drainpipe into a gutter. She stops, crooks her head, and listens.\n\nThere, again, a wind-whisper.\n\nActae.\n\n'Ollanius?' she says, out loud.\n\nActae.\n\nHe's still alive. Between the storm of the Dark King's mysterious passing and the pain of her many deaths, she'd lost track of him, no longer able to sense him. But now she can hear him again.\n\nOllanius?\n\nActae? Can you hear me? Are you still alive?\n\nI am. I have been freed. Where are you?\n\nHis answer is indistinct.\n\nWhere are you?\n\nShe seeks him with her mind, turning in a slow circle in the empty street. There. There. Oh, so far away! Yet there he is, and John is with him.\n\nBut they are an impossible distance from where she stands. It would take her years to reach them.\n\nOllanius?\n\nActae. We need your help. There's no time to explain, but we need your help.\n\n'Can you hear me?' Oll asks the wind. 'Actae? We need your help. You said you could guide us. I have the knife. Do you understand? I have the knife. I need to reach Him.'\n\nJohn has given up trying to make the torquetum work. He's come to the door to watch Oll, brow furrowed.\n\n'Is she there?' he asks.\n\nOll shakes his hand to hush him, listening to the wind.\n\n'Actae?'\n\n I can hear you, Ollanius. You intend to use the knife? To make a cut? This is how you hope to reach him?\n\n'Yes,' Oll nods. 'Yes. But we can't get a bearing.'\n\n It is an extremely risky proposition.\n\nI understand that.\n\nI hope so. There is very little chance of it working. You will most likely be destroyed by the warp.\n\nI know. We have to try.\n\nActae stands stock-still in the narrow, empty street. She concentrates. She raises her arms from her sides, feeling her way across the empyric contours of the world. In the cracked shop windows in front of her, her reflection, a black blur, does the same, mimicking her.\n\nActae? Can you guide us?\n\nWait. I am trying to divine your position relative to mine. There.\n\nAnd Him? His position?\n\nWait.\n\nShe focuses her mind. Like her limbs, her mind still seems unfamiliar. It feels fresh and raw, newborn. Such acts of etheric sorcery were once so easy for her. This is much harder than when she scanned the realm to help Lord Dorn. The injuries she endured, the deaths, they must have weakened her more than she thought. That, or the warp storm has grown even worse since then.\n\nThe Emperor's light has all but vanished. It is almost lost in the surrounding darkness. She sees it gutter at the very edges of her mindsight's reach. She cannot keep it in view long enough to trace its location.\n\nIt is eclipsed and shrouded by the shadow of something much darker and much bigger. A shadow that stares back at her.\n\nActae?\n\nOllanius? Can you cut your way to me? If you were here, it would be easier to lead you. Ollanius?\n\n'No,' Oll says. 'That's an even bigger risk, and we don't have time.'\n\nJohn steps out into the street, watching Oll with puzzled intent.\n\n'Is it her?' he asks. 'What's she saying?'\n\nOll hushes him again, concentrating as hard as he can. He reaches out and takes the wraithbone torquetum from John's hand.\n\n'Actae?' he says. 'Help me set the bearing. Triangulate us. Please, we have one shot at this.'\n\n Wait.\n\n'All right.'\n\nOll waits, the device open in his palm, the knife ready in his other hand. John watches, edgy and nervous. The wind shifts and gusts along the street with a rattle of leaves.\n\nJohn turns and raises his weapon. He strides to the corner of the building, and checks the adjacent street. It's definitely movement. Those Merudin reavers are circling back. Them, or another marauding unit like them. Two, three minutes, and they'll be in sight.\n\nHe scurries back to Oll.\n\n'We don't have long,' he says urgently. 'We do it now, Oll, or we find cover.'\n\nOll nods.\n\n'Actae? Please. We need to go now. Can you fix the Emperor's position relative to yours and mine?'\n\nActae?\n\nNo.\n\nShe swallows hard, her arms starting to tremble. Her reflection in the filthy glass wobbles, arms shaking, mocking her.\n\nActae?\n\nI cannot divine his position, Ollanius. He is no longer the beacon-light he once was. But-\n\nBut? But what?\n\nI can fix the location of the shadow that conceals him.\n\nThat, then! That's enough.\n\nOllanius, you know what that shadow is-\n\nI don't care. If they're together, it doesn't matter. In fact, it matters more. I need to get the knife to Him before-\n\nVery well. I can do no more than warn you.\n\nShe breathes hard. She focuses her mind to a pinpoint. She uses the mocking ghost of herself reflected by the window as a drishti point.\n\nSlowly, as clearly as she can, she gives him the bearing. It is the dark heart of everything, the vanishing point of the inevitable, the singularity of neverness in the centre of the world, the bloodshot eye of a storm that no sane soul would ever seek to visit.\n\nOll listens carefully. He sets the torquetum's dial with as much accuracy as his shaking hands can manage.\n\n'Oll!' John hisses.\n\n'I've got it,' Oll says.\n\n'For god's sake, Oll,' John snaps. He's got his back to Oll, covering the end of the street with his gun. They can both hear the crunch and scuff of approaching footsteps, the clink of weapons, the rough bark of voices instructing a combat spread. John's placed himself in front of Oll, covering his body with his own, his carbine sighted from the shoulder to fire the moment anything comes into view around the street corner.\n\n'Hurry!' he urges.\n\n'I've got it,' Oll repeats. The torquetum's set. He lines it up, panning it to his left until he finds the precise angle of incision.\n\n'Oll, please, for the love of-'\n\n'I've got it,' Oll insists. There's the line. He raises the old knife, and makes a long, single, vertical cut in the air in front of him. Materia resects, like taut flesh peeling back. There is an ugly wound in the air, bleeding ugly light.\n\n Go if you're going, Ollanius. Push on. Do those good works.\n\n'John! Come on! N"}
{"text":"he urges.\n\n'I've got it,' Oll repeats. The torquetum's set. He lines it up, panning it to his left until he finds the precise angle of incision.\n\n'Oll, please, for the love of-'\n\n'I've got it,' Oll insists. There's the line. He raises the old knife, and makes a long, single, vertical cut in the air in front of him. Materia resects, like taut flesh peeling back. There is an ugly wound in the air, bleeding ugly light.\n\n Go if you're going, Ollanius. Push on. Do those good works.\n\n'John! Come on! Now!' Oll yells. He steps towards the wound.\n\nAt the street's end, the first of the Merudin appear. One yells out. Another points. Two others open fire.\n\nLas-bolts sting past John and Oll. John fires back, a crackling burst. He doesn't wait to see if he's hit anything. He turns, shoves Oll into the sliced-open air, and leaps in after him.\n\nOllanius?\n\nShe waits.\n\nOllanius?\n\nThey've gone. She can no longer sense them. John and Ollanius have vanished from her mindsight. She is suddenly entirely certain she will never see either of them again.\n\nShe lets her concentration release. Suffocating tension floods out of her, and is replaced by gnawing exhaustion. She stumbles forward weakly, and reaches out to steady herself against the wall and the window sill. Her reflection stumbles forward to meet her.\n\nBreathing hard, almost panting, she tries to straighten up. She finds her own eyes in the glass, staring back at her.\n\nShe looks at herself for a long time. Close up, the details of her reflection are much clearer.\n\n'Oh,' she says. 'Oh.' What she sees reflected explains so very much. She reaches a hand to her cheek.\n\nShe hears voices. She turns away from the window panes. There is no longer time for self-examination. Men are approaching. She can smell their minds and their hostility. Hort Lupercali. Merudin 20th. They are killers, and they've got her scent.\n\nShe starts to run, clumsy and ungainly on her unfamiliar legs. The voices behind her grow louder, calling to each other. She glances back.\n\nShe sees the traitor troops, filthy and murderous, hurrying down the street in pursuit. She runs faster, hoisting up the torn hem of her dress to free her legs. The first shots crack by, blowing out a window, a roof tile, a chunk of wall.\n\nThey're going to catch her. They're going to kill her.\n\nAnd when they find out she can't die, they're going to keep killing her anyway.\n\n9:xi\n\nControl\n\nTwenty minutes into the fight. Twenty minutes exactly. Twenty eternal minutes since his company materialised on the traitor flagship. Twenty minutes of hell to reach this point. Pinned against a bulkhead by six Justaerin Terminators, the Master of the Justaerin's power fist crushing Constantin's throat, the Master of the Justaerin's blade stuck through his gut.\n\n'You never liked us, did you, old man?' Sycar growls through his visor speaker. They are locked almost nose to nose.\n\n'You never gave me much reason to,' Constantin replies, blood welling from his mouth. He tries to break free, but his wounds are grim. He's weakening, and the grip of the brutes pinning him is reinforced by Cataphractii power.\n\nSycar chuckles.\n\n'You're the one dying,' he says. He twists the blade that's run through Constantin's lower torso. Valdor convulses in pain. The pain's real enough. It's so severe, Constantin's consciousness greys. His strength is leaving him as rapidly as his blood. His left arm is pinned. He can't wield the spear.\n\nThe Justaerin want him dead.\n\nAnd Sycar wants the kill. He wants to be the man who slew the great Valdor. He wants it to last. He wants to be able to tell his brothers how he made Valdor suffer, how he made Valdor struggle and scream. He wants to own the story of Valdor's bad and messy end, alone and screaming in the dark.\n\n'Hold him!' Sycar snarls to his men.\n\nThe Master of the Justaerin twists the blade again. He gets to relish a second spasm of pain. Then he gets Valdor's right fist in the side of the head.\n\nThere's no room for a proper swing. It's more of a jab. But he's Constantin Valdor. His auramite knuckles dent the left cheek of Sycar's faceplate.\n\nThe Justaerin redouble their efforts to pin him and hold him fast. Sycar's left hand increases its choke-hold. Sycar's right rams the blade impaling Valdor right up to the hilt. Valdor punches again, then keeps punching. It takes eight rapid, repeated blows. By the third, Sycar's visor is cracked. By the fourth, his left optic slot is crazed. The fifth sends fragments of visor plate and hammerscale flying. The sixth snaps Sycar's armoured head sideways.\n\nThe seventh forces the Master of the Justaerin to release the choke-hold in a frantic attempt to pin and block Constantin's fist. But that just gives Constantin more clearance to make the eighth a proper swing. That mashes Sycar's faceplate entirely and knocks the Master of the Justaerin reeling.\n\nConstantin roars, and shrugs Sycar's Terminators off. Gustus steadies his master before he sprawls. Rindol heaves his warhammer at Constantin. Constantin tries to turn and parry the swing, but Sycar's blade has gone so deeply through Valdor's gut it's actually nailed him to the bulkhead behind him. Pinned to the wall, he can't evade. The hammerhead strikes his right shoulder, shatters his pauldron, fractures his scapula, cracks his ribcage.\n\nUnpins him.\n\nHe lands on his hands and knees, Sycar's blade still through him. The Terminator swings the hammer down at his spine.\n\nConstantin thrusts his spear up and back. It punches through Rindol's groin and emerges through his shattered sacrum and back plate. Constantin grips the spear haft to pull himself upright, levering Rindol off his feet and onto his back.\n\nA moment passes, as the memories of another man's worthless life wash through him.\n\n'Otun Rindol,' Valdor growls. He yanks the spear out, rotates it, and assumes a braced proffer. The Justaerin, all of them, are backing away up the slanted chamber in semicircle formation.\n\nReally? They back off so easily? And they wonder he has never thought much of them.\n\nNo, something else. He sees Sycar, blood seeping from his torn visor, flashing hand signals. XVI battle code. Like Valdor doesn't know every Legion's battle code.\n\nOrder given. Disengage.\n\nTo Valdor's left, Proconsul Hykanatoi Ludovicus finishes his own struggle. He twists the head off the Terminator he was grappling with, lets the body fall, and drops the head to bounce away down the slanted deck.\n\n'My captain,' he says. 'Pursuit?'\n\nLudovicus is blind in one eye and drenched in blood. He has lost all his weapons during the savage, close-quarters brawl.\n\n'Wait,' says Constantin.\n\n'My captain...' Ludovicus says, rather more hesitantly. He gestures at Valdor. Valdor looks down. Sycar's sword is still wedged through his body. He wrenches it out, then rests it, tip down, so he can lean on it while he bites down the pain.\n\nNoises behind them. Telamok, Maezari and Proconsul Kupalori have finally caught up with them. The three Sentinels enter the compartment behind them, weapons ready.\n\n'You've driven them back, my captain,' says Telamok.\n\n'Pursuit formation,' Kupalori instructs.\n\n'Wait,' Ludovicus advises. He glances at Valdor.\n\n'It's a feint,' Constantin confirms. 'I saw them signal. They're drawing us.'\n\n'That lacks tactical logic,' says Telamok.\n\n'Nevertheless,' says Constantin. They had us cold, he thinks. They killed Erastes, and had me and Ludovicus cold. A pack of Justaerin Terminators. They could have finished the job. But they've pulled back, and given us the chance to regroup.\n\n'A trap, then?' says Maezari.\n\n'Evidently,' Constantin replies.\n\n'Evasion, flank advance, counter-position?' asks Ludovicus.\n\n'No, let's find out what the bastards think constitutes a trap,' Constantin replies. 'Advance, on me, but with situational awareness.'\n\nThey approve his method. It's typical of Valdor to recognise that the best way to break a trap's mechanism is to get inside it.\n\nHe hands Sycar's warblade to Ludovicus.\n\n'Use this,' he says. 'Return it to the Master of the Justaerin with my compliments.'\n\nHe starts to make his way up the sloping deck with his men at his heels. They follow the retreating Terminators up-hull.\n\nThey get another fifty metres, working their way into a large engineering space where the air is tinted with a fog of rust particles. The deck tilts up at an even steeper angle where the orbital plate hull has landed unevenly and buckled. Canisters, crates and other unsecured objects have collected at the lower end, and the chains of hoists and skeins of torn cable no longer hang straight down to the deck.\n\nConstantin knows something's wrong the moment they force entry and clamber over the piles of loose materiel. It's not synergertics or sensoria, it's some kind of awareness in him, as though the arcane knowledge he has progressively accumulated via the spear has heightened his sensitivity to the currents of the warp.\n\nHe calls out a warning. The world is already shifting. The ceiling shreds open, peeling back like skin, flooding them with daylight. Dark figures leap down through the rent to assail them.\n\nOne lands in front of Constantin. Though it is large, and heavily plated, it lands almost softly, as though unseen forces have carried it through the air and set it down gently.\n\nIt's Abaddon.\n\nConstantin reacts instantly. Less than instantly. He drives his spear with a perfect underarm thrust to pierce the traitor's chest. It is a killing stroke, a display of the pinnacle speed and reaction of the Legio Custodes, an action that no Astartes could match or withstand.\n\nThe spear stops short of Abaddon's breastplate. The sudden arrest of its motion jolts Constantin like a whipcrack. Abaddon's left hand has closed around the spear-tip and stopped it, despite the immense strength driving the thrust. A few beads of bright blood well up between Abaddon's knuckles where he is gripping the spear blade.\n\nConstantin, open-mouthed in shock, feels the moment. The heartbeat. The flood of understandin"}
{"text":"he Legio Custodes, an action that no Astartes could match or withstand.\n\nThe spear stops short of Abaddon's breastplate. The sudden arrest of its motion jolts Constantin like a whipcrack. Abaddon's left hand has closed around the spear-tip and stopped it, despite the immense strength driving the thrust. A few beads of bright blood well up between Abaddon's knuckles where he is gripping the spear blade.\n\nConstantin, open-mouthed in shock, feels the moment. The heartbeat. The flood of understanding drawn by the spear. The world sags, and yaws, losing definition and dimension.\n\nIt is twenty-five minutes into the fight. It is an hour into the fight. It is a year into the fight. It is a century-\n\nIt is a hundred centuries into the fight. The fight has no end. It is a long war that slices eternity lengthways with its appalling duration. A blizzard of embers billows past him, and each one is a burning world. The whole galaxy is in flames.\n\nThe knowledge transmitted down the haft of the spear and into his soul is not the name of a dead thing that Constantin can take power over. It is not some buried warp-secret or scrap of encrypted lore that he can learn. He can't control it, because it is already controlled. Everything he has learned of Chaos until this moment has shown it to be an essence that lives up to its inadequate name: a chaos, a fevered, contradictory maelstrom that has no single impulse, but which churns without logic or motivation, and eats itself, and wars with itself, and whips and tears against itself in a frenzy, its myriad parts as likely to annihilate each other as they are to turn their wild malice upon realspace and materia.\n\nBut this is complete. It is whole. It is focused. It is a Chaos undivided, condensed into one atrocious force by the imposition of an incalculable willpower. Constantin is staring at the future from his time-lacking vantage point of the Vengeful Spirit's deconstructed heart. He is gazing down ten thousand years at a far future that is ten thousand years old, a future that gazes back at him as though it is standing right in front of him. It is Chaos entire, chained and enslaved, alloyed into one lethal spear-tip that will pierce the Imperium of Man and ensure its loss. The cutting edge of a legion in black. The unequivocal symbol of death.\n\nThere is nothing else to learn or know. There is only war. War, and a single name that is the worst fortune any deck of prophesy cards can ever overturn.\n\n'Despoiler,' he whispers.\n\nThe revelation is so foul, Constantin recoils.\n\nHe lets go of the spear. It's the only thing that Abaddon will not expect him to do. No Custodian ever relinquishes his weapon, especially one so potent. He lets go of the spear before Abaddon has realised what he's done and drives his fist into Abaddon's face. The First Captain buckles. He's still gripping the spear-tip in his left hand. He swings it by the tip, a makeshift weapon to drive Constantin back. The captain-general and the spear tumble backwards across the deck, because the deck is no longer tilted. It is turning. The orbital plate wreck is turning. Local reality, tenuous at best, rotates. Deck becomes wall. Wall becomes deck. Loose objects and debris tumble and roll, bounce and collide. Constantin falls towards the wall, but the turning continues, and he is suddenly falling towards what was once the ceiling. He is falling, limbs milling, towards the hole ripped in the roof. He is falling towards daylight, towards the sky. It is a bright abyss, opened in the ground below him, and he is plunging into it. Reality is bending and transmuting to someone's will.\n\nA screaming has begun. A keen, shrill shriek that cracks the air around them all with its constant, drawn-out howl. It's not the voices of the Neverborn. It's reality wailing in distress.\n\nConstantin hits the ceiling beside the open tear. The ragged edge of the hull digs into his belly, and his legs slide off into empty air. Reality is still inverting and screaming. He tries to hold on. The falling spear strikes the edge of the tear beside him, and wedges fast, tip down in the hull. Constantin grabs for it, but his weight plucks it out, and he slides over the edge.\n\nHe grabs, frantically, and manages to grasp a hoist chain that is hanging past him out of the roof-tear, and dangling into the sky. He swings from it, his grip slowly failing.\n\nThe vast sky, churning with storm-clouds and flecks of lightning, yawns below him like an endless sea. The broken back of the orbital plate, and the charred landscape around it, sprawls above him where the heavens should be. Everything is vibrating from the unending, piercing scream. As Constantin's hand begins to slip on the greasy links of the heavy hoist chain, he sees back into the inverted engineering compartment above him. His Sentinel Companions have all fallen like him, thrown over by the impossible inversion. They are all struggling to hold on, clinging to bulkheads and ceiling structures, feet swinging.\n\nAbaddon, and the Sons of Horus around him, have not fallen. They remain upright, upside down, still planted securely and without effort on the capsized deck. They move, walking calmly, as normally as on level ground. A figure walks with them. Constantin knows it at once. Erebus.\n\nThe warp sings through the Dark Apostle. Constantin can feel the heat of it. His lips are moving, uttering words that batter the soul. This madness is his doing.\n\nAbaddon reaches Maezari, and decapitates him with a single blow. Maezari's head and body drop onto the ceiling below. Praetor Zeletsis slices through Telamok's arms, and Telamok plunges. He deflects off the lip of the rent and then falls past Constantin into the sky, spinning and glinting until he is out of sight. Hellas Sycar drives his power fist into Proconsul Kupalori with such force Kupalori's head and chest are compacted into what was once the compartment wall, and he is left hanging there, limbs slack, crushed into the metal.\n\nAbaddon, hymned by the senseless, deafening screeching of wounded materia, walks calmly down the wall and across the ceiling, Erebus at his side. The First Captain reaches Ludovicus. The proconsul can't defend himself. Abaddon runs his traitor blade through Ludovicus, then plants one foot against the proconsul to draw the blade back out. Released, Ludovicus' corpse falls, glances off a hoist, then collides with Constantin as it plummets into the open sky.\n\nThe impact breaks Constantin's grip.\n\nImpaled, Valdor fights back against Sycar of the Justaerin.\n\n9:xii\n\nBreak Point\n\nThis is Sigismund's temple. The heart of battle is his place of worship, the naked blades his consecrated articles of faith. War is the expression of his devotion.\n\nHe's inside the Death Guard mass, and he is not alone. The coiling roar of battle wraps him and his Seconds like chains, and he breaks those chains with every blow. This is butcher-work. He saves his finesse for the Cadaver Lord, where every ounce of it will matter.\n\nMyrinx of the Temple reaches Skulidas Gehrerg first, but Skulidas skewers him with his broadsword in seconds. Myrinx is a seasoned warrior, and a fine swordsman, but Skulidas' sword is a seeping, diseased blade of dirty bone. It breaks Myrinx's spatha as he tries to engage, then plunges through the Templar's war-shield and body as one, pinning the black-and-white shield to his chest.\n\nSigismund lays in as Myrinx topples. The Cadaver Lord's sword comes out of Myrinx to meet him. Skulidas doesn't have to wrench it free or pluck it clear. The ugly brown blade simply slides out of corpse and armour like a spoon through broth.\n\nSigismund barely blocks it. He feels pain transmitted through his black sword into his hand and wrist, not from the considerable impact, but as though his blade has been hurt by mere contact with his enemy's weapon. He is forced to counter, fending off two more whirling slices, and each one fires neuropathic distress up his sword-arm.\n\nSkulidas Gehrerg was a noted master of swords back in the time before. Sigismund is not sure what he is now. Skulidas is bulked with mass to such an extent that additional panels of plate have been hinged to his original armour segments to maintain body coverage. His great mass isn't the bloat that seems to afflict so many of Mortarion's sons. It is a thickening of bone and sinew, an addition of slabby muscle. His skewer-sword is an organic spike of old bone, dark as mahogany, and its blade is knotted at regular intervals as though by knuckles or vertebrae. What Sigismund thought, from a distance, to be a flying cloak around the Cadaver Lord's shoulders, is a dense cloud of flies that trails him and moves with him like a flock of starlings, a million organisms obeying one impulse.\n\nThe stench of him is dire. Skulidas roars at Sigismund, an animal challenge, and the snout of his vibrating helm articulates apart to allow him to do so, as though the cheek and jowl plates and chin guard have become fused to the flesh beneath and become part of his face. Sigismund tries not to blanch at the organic horror he glimpses inside that maw.\n\nSigismund renews his assault. Skulidas is a traitor champion. Skulidas is his prey. Experience has proven to Sigismund that a whole battalion or army can be brought to breaking point if its leader is destroyed. All hope of his strike force prevailing against this Death Guard formation depends on his success.\n\nBut he cannot land a blow. Skulidas' skewer-blade is too fast, and its reach too great. The traitor has brute strength, but whatever has diseased him, it seems to have enhanced his swordcraft. Astartesian skills and techniques often seem degraded by the gifts of Chaos, or forgotten in the indulgence of raw power, but in Skulidas' case, the blessings of the Neverborn seem to have increased his original prowess, and distilled it into a superlative mastery of the blade.\n\nOr is it the sword? Yes, Sigismund thinks, as he parries with increasing desperation to protect his"}
{"text":"each too great. The traitor has brute strength, but whatever has diseased him, it seems to have enhanced his swordcraft. Astartesian skills and techniques often seem degraded by the gifts of Chaos, or forgotten in the indulgence of raw power, but in Skulidas' case, the blessings of the Neverborn seem to have increased his original prowess, and distilled it into a superlative mastery of the blade.\n\nOr is it the sword? Yes, Sigismund thinks, as he parries with increasing desperation to protect his head and throat, it is Gehrerg's foul blade that has the swift skill and lethal technique. It whines and turns and shivers in the air, all but dragging Skulidas after it. The meat and muscle Gehrerg has grown are simply to compensate for its furious pull, so he can keep a grip on it.\n\nSigismund's arm is growing numb from the nerve pain communicated by his sword. He knows his sword is the only thing keeping him alive. Its lustrous black edge is in part proofed against the bone blade's infectious horror. A lesser blade, like Myrinx's, would have snapped like glass.\n\nSkulidas gets past his guard, and lands a blow that slices a curl of plasteel off the rim of Sigismund's left pauldron. The pauldron does not crack or break: it simply parts like water beneath the traitor blade's edge without impact or resistance.\n\nSigismund can let no part of himself touch Skulidas' blade. He's sure the merest scratch would open a mortal wound, or kill him with instant septic shock. His black blade is the only thing immune. He can fend the lethal sword away with it, but Skulidas is swift. Sigismund can't follow a parry with a strike before another fending clash is needed.\n\nBut the blade is not the only dangerous part of a sword. Sigismund pushes in, trading blows, pressing tighter for a hard parry against the forte of Skulidas' blade, closer to the hilt, where he can exert the most leverage. When he gets it, Sigismund does not repeal: he lunges closer still, with his full body weight, using his blade to press Skulidas' down and away, and pin it aside. He holds it. They struggle for an instant, strength against strength, the bone-blade blocked. Then Sigismund grasps the unsharpened ricasso of his black sword in his left hand and, with both hands, rams the whole weapon backwards like a club, and drives the pommel into Skulidas' face.\n\nHis visor split and leaking, the Cadaver Lord jolts away, his head snapped back. The bone-blade swings up eagerly, freed from its block, but Sigismund has already whipped the black sword around in a double-grip underhand slash that cuts Skulidas' exposed throat.\n\nThe Cadaver Lord falls. His bone-blade falls with him, and lies twitching and helpless on the bloody ground. The cloak of flies falls too: it falls onto Skulidas like a shroud, pouring in through the joints of his plate to feed on his still-hot corpse.\n\nSigismund turns, and fights off other attackers. He's anticipating the reaction, the wash of unrest that bathes an enemy force when its leader falls, the pivot-point of falter and dismay that he and his Seconds can use to shift the balance of the battle.\n\nIt doesn't come. The Death Guard fights on, oblivious to the loss. Sigismund, master of single combat, understands the terrible strength of his enemy clearly at last. It fights as a whole, like some colonial hive, as unified in its intent as a swarm of flies. It cannot be confounded by a single loss, no matter how significant. It cannot be killed by a head wound.\n\nSigismund's fundamental methodology is useless.\n\nHe finds himself in a churning press with Pontis to his right and Janjar to his left. Faustal is dead. Most of the men who followed him in are gone. His bravura tactic, the only chance they had to win, is shot.\n\nA chaos encloses him, a dozen swords and lances, and he feels a change in the enemy's temper. At first, he thinks - with what little wit he can spare to do anything other than fight - that it is the reaction after all, a delayed reaction to the Cadaver Lord's execution that has finally slid, belatedly, into the fever-fogged minds of the Death Guard.\n\nBut it isn't that. The Death Guard has recoiled because another army has joined the fight.\n\nOn what is now a memory of the Via Aquila, Keeler hears the echo of the voice. It was a war cry, unmistakably, a call to arms. But it was also a cry for help. The light of revelation is clearer than ever in her mind.\n\nIt is a strange kind of revelation. Keeler knows precisely what it wants of her, but not how or why. She has to trust it. She has to allow her faith to accept it. In this, she knows, she is akin to Sigismund. It is the same uncompromising devotion that spurred him to assault, directly, a far greater foe. His consideration was each step, each blow. He focused on what he had to do, second by second, not on the outcome, because the outcome was not his concern.\n\nThe future is neither here, nor now.\n\nShe starts to walk towards the churning fight. There's no fear left in her. One step, then another, across the copper dust, striding calmly towards a maelstrom of violence that she cannot survive.\n\nAt first, she walks alone.\n\n'Keeler! What are you doing?' Lord Zhi-Meng calls out behind her. 'Keeler!'\n\nBut others are walking too. One or two at first, then members of the conclave, and whole sections of the halted pilgrimage. They are either following her lead, or they are touched by the same certainty that she has felt. She sees Wereft, and Leeta Tang. They are almost abreast of her, walking in parallel. Leeta glances across at her, and smiles.\n\n'North!' she calls out, and laughs.\n\nYes, there is a certainty. A strong and calming grace, a collective purpose that can no more be expressed than it can be denied. Behind her, the stilled column of the pilgrimage, that endless river of humanity, stirs and pours after her. There is little panic, and no haste. It follows her as it followed her from the very start.\n\n'Keeler! Keeler!'\n\nLimping and scurrying Zhi-Meng catches her up, supported by Perevanna.\n\n'Keeler,' cries Zhi-Meng, gesturing at the carnage ahead with a dusty hand. 'They will kill us!'\n\n'My lord,' she replies, 'they can't kill all of us.'\n\nThe Pale King's host shivers. Bathed in a mantle of ochre dust that it has kicked up, it is trying to clench itself to exterminate the fierce pockets of Sigismund's attack. Nearly two-thirds of the Seconds have been killed. It is the verge of an outright rout.\n\nBut the Death Guard wavers. A sense of the approaching mass spreads through it, a distraction, a puzzle, an inexplicable event: thousands of people, tens of thousands, with a column of perhaps millions behind them stretching away as far as the arid horizon, approaching slowly, most of them unarmed, most of them startlingly composed and unafraid.\n\nThe traitors begin to turn, struck by indecision and confusion. Some manoeuvre to face the advancing host. In turning, they slacken their focus on the fight, and Sigismund's depleted forces are able to strike harder and deeper, breaking rank lines from within. The battle becomes clumsy and incoherent, as though the Death Guard's collective mindset prospered against individuals, but is perplexed by another large group acting in unity.\n\nSome of the XIV line up and begin a repulse. They have no qualms about killing the unarmed and the civilian. It is not a lack of compunction. In their febrile minds, there is no distinction. A servant of the False Emperor is a servant of the False Emperor, in any guise. Once Sigismund and his fellow aggressors were finished, they would have turned on the rest anyway, and commenced a wholesale slaughter.\n\nThey are good at killing. They are cultured for it.\n\nBolters and heavy las begin to bark and spit. Holes begin to appear in the leading edge of the pilgrim tide as civilians are cut down or vaporised mid-step. But the inexorable flow of people does not abate.\n\nKeeler sees mass-reactives scream past her. She feels the heat of their burning propellant. She hears the impacts. Blood dots her cheek. She smells fyceline. Las-bolts streak by, some so close she ought to flinch. She does not. She keeps walking.\n\nThe Death Guard doubles down. Rates switch to full-auto and rapid. There is nothing they cannot illuminate when they work together.\n\nEven a million people.\n\nKeeler keeps walking as dust and smoke fumes back across her. The air is shaking.\n\nIt is finally time the traitors showed them the respect they deserve. They've earned it. There is no longer any shame in death, nor any real pain. None of that matters any more. The only true pain is in failure, in refusal to resist, in loss of faith.\n\nShe won't submit. She won't go quietly. Armed or unarmed, she will stand for what she believes in.\n\nShe wonders, almost idly, what she will do when she finally reaches them, if she lasts that long. What could she do against an armed and armoured giant of the Legiones Astartes? She imagines she will grasp and claw and tear with her bare fingers against the unbreakable plate. It will have no effect. One pair of human hands can't tear down a Traitor legionary.\n\nBut a million? Two million? Three?\n\nLike water lapping against rock, though it takes ten thousand years, the rock will wear away in the end. It is asymmetric warfare of the most perverse kind, the macabre logic imposed on mankind by the atrocity of Horus Lupercal's heresy. She will stand, and she will resist, for though the enemy is mighty and her one life is as nothing, the true souls of the Imperial faithful are many and numberless.\n\nYou had your chance, traitors. You should have bloody taken it. How do you like these odds?\n\nShe balls her fists, ready to do what she can. The chance doesn't come. She almost feels cheated. The tight ranks of the XIV collapse as they retreat before her. It isn't fear. She understands that completely. The Death Guard is not afraid of her, or the legions that walk with her. It is simply mystified. It is withdrawing askance, unable to make sense of what is happen"}
{"text":"faithful are many and numberless.\n\nYou had your chance, traitors. You should have bloody taken it. How do you like these odds?\n\nShe balls her fists, ready to do what she can. The chance doesn't come. She almost feels cheated. The tight ranks of the XIV collapse as they retreat before her. It isn't fear. She understands that completely. The Death Guard is not afraid of her, or the legions that walk with her. It is simply mystified. It is withdrawing askance, unable to make sense of what is happening, forced into a fall-back effort in order to process this turn of events, this thing that has never happened before.\n\nSigismund and his bloodied fighting groups take full advantage of the reversal, cutting loose at the enemy now pouring back around them. Leading the harrying action, Sigismund sees that the XIV are trying to quit the field by means of a deep gorge that splits the line of mesas behind their field position. He ascends the gradient, killing as he goes. If the Death Guard withdraw into that geographical cover, they win time to regroup and rethink. They may have reinforcement strengths waiting in the deep shadows of the gorge.\n\nHe wants to break their resolve and their spines before they reach that safe haven. He needs time to rethink too. A glance over his shoulder shows him the impossible: the steady advance of the entire pilgrimage column soaking up the traitor resistance like blotting paper laid on a spill of ink. What madness has possessed them all?\n\nNot madness. Whatever it is, he feels it too.\n\nWith Pontis and several others at his side, he fights his way along a climbing spur of ginger rock onto the scree slopes at the mouth of the gorge. Combat has become messy and entirely disjointed. He links up with the remnants of Artolun's cohort near the gorge's towering rock gateway, and they catch more Death Guard in a fierce pinch of crossfire. The enemy numbers, now lacking their inhuman coordination, are draining away down the ravine.\n\n'Pursuit?' Artolun asks.\n\n'Yes,' says Sigismund. They have to capitalise on this strange advantage before fortune snaps back against them again.\n\nThe gorge is a curious, cool twilight, broad enough for vehicles, but too tight and sheer-sided to project assurance. Odd, dry echoes skitter back from the high cliff walls. The stone and bedrock seems darker, as though composed of a blacker, igneous material. At first, Sigismund presumes this to be a consequence of the ravine's prevailing gloom, shutting out the glare that baked the desert flats to a cooked copper. But as they clamber their way along, picking off any of the XIV they overhaul, he sees that the rock is as black as anthracite, and gleaming as though wet. They engage three more times with packs of Death Guard, fights that turn into bloody running melees along the base of the pass. It's hard to see what's waiting for them ahead. He begins to fear that he has overextended in his eagerness, and that his ragged mob of Seconds will suddenly run across a full enemy formation that has gathered to turn in reprisal.\n\nWhen it comes, it comes suddenly, a ferocious barrage of bolt and las that kills six more of his men and drives the rest of them into cover. He sees a significant rearguard of the XIV moving slowly down the gorge towards them, firing as they come to drive off any pursuit.\n\nThe gorge lights up, flickering and jumping with weapon-flash. Other positions have opened fire, but these seem higher up in the cliffs above them, perhaps prepared emplacements mounting heavier weapons. His enthusiasm is being punished. The Death Guard did not withdraw out of confusion. It was a calculated effort to entice Sigismund's force into the kill-box of the gorge.\n\nExcept that the heavy, elevated fire is not falling on them. It is ripping across the squads of the XIV's rearguard.\n\n'My lord!'\n\nOver the shock-roar of gunfire, Sigismund hears Pontis cry out. He hurries to him, head down, using the ravine-floor boulders for cover.\n\nPontis has found steps, rock-cut into the side of the gorge. They are huge and old, and climb a short distance to something, a cave or fissure or-\n\n'In the name of the Throne,' cries a voice from above, 'bring your men this way!'\n\nSigismund waves his men on, and makes his way up the steps in advance. The steps rise to a heavy stone platform cut from the black rock under an overhang of cliff. A figure waits there for him, the huge figure of an Astartes warrior. Sigismund can feel the guns trained on him from hidden vantage points above.\n\n'Sigismund,' he says. 'The Emperor's Champion.'\n\n'Champion, indeed?' the other replies. 'Not the Sigismund that I recall. But I am glad of the sight of you, anyway. Are you a relief force come to aid at last?'\n\n'I was presuming the same of you,' Sigismund replies.\n\nThe figure steps out of the cliff shadows. It is, beyond Sigismund's capacity to explain, a senior lord of the Dark Angels.\n\n'Tragan,' he says, 'of the Ninth Order. Well met, Sigismund.'\n\n'What is this place, brother?' Sigismund asks.\n\n'Our Chapter Master dubbed it Break Point,' Tragan replies. 'To you, it is the Septenary Portal of the Hollow Mountain.'\n\n9:xiii\n\nTogether alone\n\nShe runs. The gunfire of the Merudin chases her down derelict streets that have been lifeless for lifetimes. Shots smash ancient windows behind her.\n\nShe ducks behind an old stone water trough. The shooting stops. They're coming closer. They think she's hit. She grabs some small chunks of broken flagstone, and the strip of torn skirt-hem from her pocket.\n\nWhen she rises, one of the Merudin is less than ten metres away. He sees her, snatching his carbine up to fire. The loop of cloth is already spinning in her hand, weighted by its stone payload. The piece of broken flagstone snaps off like a bullet, and strikes him between the eyes. He looks surprised as he flops backwards.\n\nShe reloads her sling and starts to spin it again. A couple of shots come her way. More of the traitors have appeared. They're too far away, beyond the lethal range of her makeshift weapon. But she's well inside the lethal range of their lasrifles.\n\nFrustrated fury fills her mind. But it clears it too. Her furious urge to survive strips away the fog of recent death and newborn befuddlement that has limited her.\n\nShe wants to throw the whole street at them, and she does. A dozen rocks and pebbles around her twitch and then fly at the traitors, harder and truer than any launched from a slingshot. Four men drop, dead or wounded. The others cry out and scrabble for cover.\n\nShe runs. Her inherited skills are a curious combination. She's getting used to this smaller, fitter frame, these younger limbs. This troubled blend of minds.\n\nWhen the wall fell, they were crushed together. The rapport, the mental leash connecting them, remained. Dead, she lived, but not in the same vessel. She imagines her previous self, a cold and empty husk, still entombed under the rubble of the black wall.\n\nBut this is her previous self too. The girl is not gone. They're both here, not fighting for possession but fused in some strange symbiosis, mutilated together by extreme damage. Her body was ruined and dead, the girl's mind wounded. The only chance for survival was to salvage the working parts of both and blend them as one.\n\nWithout that conjunction, she would not have survived. Her telekine power might be reduced, but she has the girl's ferocity and wits, her lithe body, her ingenious defiance. Her eyes. She has-\n\nNo. They. They are both present. They have to start thinking in plural terms, but they both inhabit this flesh. She is mentally dominant, but the girl is physically in charge. And emotionally too. They will have to learn this fusion quickly, or insanity will be the only recourse. She realises, now she is inside, what strangely kindred spirits they are. They must share this telempathic rapport, perhaps forever.\n\nMore shots come, too close. She sees soldiers ahead of her, men with guns. They've encircled her. Damn it-\n\nThe men are firing past her. They're firing at the Merudin wretches.\n\n'This way!' one shouts at her. He pulls her into cover, as his men blaze away at the approaching traitors.\n\nHe hauls her through a ruin into a small courtyard. He's Excertus, she thinks, filthy, his plain fatigues lacking significant insignia.\n\n'Where the hell did you come from?' he asks.\n\n'Out there,' she replies, because she doesn't know the name of anything.\n\n'Who's this?' asks a voice. A woman steps out of an oddly shadowed doorway into the yard. 'Mikhail? Who is this?'\n\n'There are hostiles,' the soldier says. 'We've engaged. We found this girl running from them.'\n\nThe woman looks at her. She's older, stern, an officer. Her cheek is torn, stitched and swollen.\n\n'Marshal Agathe,' she says. 'Antioch Miles Vesperi. I want to know your name.'\n\nWhat name to give? What names still apply? Not Cyrene Valantion, or Actae, and not the half-hearted evasion of Katt. She dredges two sets of memories to find a name. The girl's real name, buried for years, still fresh and barely used. That will do.\n\n'I am Katerina Moriana,' she says.\n\n'And your business here?'\n\n'I am sent here to find help, mam,' she says. 'Charged by the highest authority to summon any and all who are capable of standing in the final fight.'\n\n'On what authority?' the marshal asks.\n\nMoriana shows her the seal of office.\n\n'The Lord Praetorian himself,' she says.\n\n9:xiv\n\nExit strategy\n\n'An extraction is not currently possible,' Amon tells her. 'As you can probably see,' he adds, as an afterthought.\n\nAndromeda-17 almost laughs, because it's the closest thing to a joke she's ever heard the Sentinel make. The fact that Amon is, as ever, deadpan, serves to underscore the wry nature of his remark.\n\nThe traitor Warmaster's invasion of the final fortress has finally reached the threshold of the Retreat. Beyond the circulation trench, the eternal city is ablaze, engulfed in flames and obscured by a vast bank of toxic smog. On the far side of the Pons Aegeus,"}
{"text":"ably see,' he adds, as an afterthought.\n\nAndromeda-17 almost laughs, because it's the closest thing to a joke she's ever heard the Sentinel make. The fact that Amon is, as ever, deadpan, serves to underscore the wry nature of his remark.\n\nThe traitor Warmaster's invasion of the final fortress has finally reached the threshold of the Retreat. Beyond the circulation trench, the eternal city is ablaze, engulfed in flames and obscured by a vast bank of toxic smog. On the far side of the Pons Aegeus, the concourse is littered with debris, and an increasing number of dead bodies. Warbands of Traitor Excertus are trying to cross the concourse to reach the head of the bridge, drawn by the curious, and as yet undamaged, old tower. Another edifice to sack and desecrate.\n\nAmon is holding them at bay. He is standing at an armoured console just outside the portico. The console extended seamlessly from the plasteel deck when he initialised the Retreat's defences. From it, with infinite calm, he is overseeing the repulse systems. Void shield generators, buried in the rim of the promontory and footworks of the bridge, have activated, sheathing the Pons Aegeus, the promontory, and the lower levels of the tower in shimmering fields. Slaved gun-mounts, fitted with quad-lascannons and needle Adrathics, have risen from hidden silos around the head of the bridge, the edge of the promontory, and the lower terraces of the tower. The Sigillite's Retreat is a small fortress in its own right. Only the gun-mounts at the bridgehead are firing. Those on the promontory lip and the sides of the tower remain silent. They will commence firing, Andromeda understands, when the shields fail. Not if, when.\n\nHard rounds and las-bolts patter off the shields, causing fizzling ripples. Amon isn't even looking at the enemy. He watches his console display, directing response and fields of fire with a calm touch of his hand. The bridgehead gun-pods unleash economical bursts of fire into the gathering smoke. She sees advancing traitor squads mown down by the pinpoint las-fire, and individuals picked off by the thin, bright beams of the Adrathics.\n\n'How long can we hold?' she asks.\n\n'As long as power lasts,' he replies, his fingers directing a gun-mount to address another target cluster that the console has shown him.\n\n'Which is how long?'\n\n'Uncertain,' he replies.\n\nA loud bang makes her flinch. Rocket grenades have thumped into the voids, making them shudder. Amon redirects a mount battery, and a squad of traitor grenadiers four hundred metres away on the concourse vanishes in a rapid blitz of heavy las.\n\n'I am conserving,' he adds. 'The shields will withstand infantry assaults. But more significant threats will erode or break them.'\n\n'Significant threats...'\n\n'Armour units,' he says. 'Astartes.' He does not need to finish the list.\n\n'Fo is done with his work,' she says. 'And he is becoming... less cooperative. We need to move him.'\n\n'As stated, that is not an option.'\n\n'There must be another way out of the tower, Amon,' she says. 'The Sigillite had devious ways of moving around the city. A subterranean-'\n\n'I can find no trace of any exits on the schematics,' says Amon. He realigns another mount, and she hears the crackle of las from beyond the shields. 'The Retreat was a secure location.'\n\n'But you know this city!' she insists. 'You Custodes, constantly running your blood games to learn every last sub-duct and crawlspace-'\n\nHe looks at her suddenly.\n\n'I don't know it any more,' he says. It feels to her like this is an impossibly hard thing for him to admit. 'The city has changed, Selenar. The warp has reconfigured it. Besides, the Sigillite's Retreat was the one site kept private even from us. There may be secret means of egress. I don't doubt that the Regent made such provision. But they are unknown to me, and I believe Xanthus would have told me if he'd known of any. They may no longer exist. If they do, I am not in a position to search for them.'\n\nHe turns back to the console and almost dispassionately directs the bridgehead batteries to bracket four new hostile icons that have moved into the tactical field of his sensoria.\n\nShe tries to answer, but the brief and furious gunfire drowns her out. The reek of ozone from the voids is making her throat raw.\n\n'What do we do, then?' she asks when the noise subsides. 'Just hope we can hold out until help arrives?'\n\n'There is no help coming,' he says.\n\n'Amon-'\n\n'I have assessed the variables carefully,' he says, patiently watching his display. 'We cannot count on help or relief. We cannot contact the Throne Room or any higher authority. We cannot extract. We cannot hold off assault indefinitely. We have only one option. You must have arrived at the same conclusion.'\n\n'You're considering-?'\n\n'Yes,' he says. 'We will deploy the weapon.'\n\nShe doesn't reply. He looks over at her.\n\n'I see my decision has upset you,' he remarks. 'I do not take it lightly. I...'\n\nHe pauses, swallows.\n\n'I have obeyed my duty function. I have followed my directives as issued to me. I have waited as long as possible for supplemental directives. This is not a choice I ever wanted to make. It should be the decision of better men. But they may all be dead already, and no supplemental instruction can be expected or authenticated. Everything we stand for is dying. I can act, or not act. I would rather face trial and execution, and the shame of generations, for making this decision in error, than not act while there was still a chance. I do not care about myself, or the punishment I might receive, or the burden of guilt I might have to bear. I serve the Emperor. I serve the Imperium. It must stand, Selenar. In the absence of any other evidence or intelligence, I must presume that the use of Fo's weapon has become an imperative. If we delay any longer, the chance will be lost.'\n\n'It's a Tier XX terminus sanction,' she says. 'You will take this responsibility?'\n\n'I have to.'\n\n'Against my advice?'\n\n'Your advice is not pertinent. The survival of the Imperium is the responsibility of the Legio Custodes, and I am the only one present.'\n\n'So... we do this now?' Andromeda asks.\n\n'The city is burning, Andromeda. The final fortress has fallen. If not now, when?'\n\nShe nods. The most painful, most pitiful thing she has ever heard is the tiny crack of emotion in his voice.\n\n'Have Fo prepare the sanction weapon for immediate use,' Amon says. 'Specify target genestocks as Legio Astartes and primarch.'\n\n'You mean... Traitor?' she queries.\n\n'The primarchs and their sons have brought us to this pass,' he replies. 'We trust no one. We trust nothing. We allow no sentiment or weakness to cloud our judgement or stay our hand. We must be certain. Do I need to repeat my directive?'\n\nAndromeda-17 shakes her head. She turns, and hurries back into the tower. Amon regards his console. Eight new targets, including a brigade-strength mass, are moving into range on the concourse.\n\nHe aligns the batteries with a deft touch. The gun-mounts at the bridgehead begin to fire again. This time the bursts are not brief or sparing. They are sustained.\n\nShe runs up the winding stairs.\n\n'Xanthus!'\n\nThe air inside is cool. The sounds of meticulous carnage outside are muffled by the tower's thick walls and damping fields.\n\n'Xanthus!'\n\nMalcador's laboratorium is deserted. She enters, hearing the constant hum and chatter of the cogitators and splicers still running.\n\n'Xanthus? Chosen?'\n\nThey must be on the upper level. The Sigillite's papers are still spread out on the desk in a messy heap. Many pages and sheaves of notes have spilled onto the floor. That little bastard was always an untidy worker. She-\n\nShe stops. There, on the edge of one of the steel workstations. A single drop of blood. She stares at it. It's just a fleck, but it's fresh. It's not a drip from a test flask. It was cast. Flung.\n\nShe looks around. She squats, and peers under the workstation. There are more spots on the deck, visible only when she rolls the chair aside.\n\nShe remains in her crouch, and turns slowly, cautiously scanning under the benches. From this low angle, she can see into the space under the tower stairs.\n\n'Oh shit,' she murmurs.\n\nXanthus is sitting under the stairs with his back against the wall and his legs out in front of him. His head is bowed. He is holding his throat. She can see the blood coating his hand.\n\n'Xanthus? Where is he?'\n\nHe lolls as she tries to raise him. His hand falls away slackly and blood starts to squirt from a gash in his neck.\n\n'Shit! Shit! Shit!'\n\nShe lowers him to the deck, her hand compressing the bleed. She grabs his hand.\n\n'Xanthus! Wake up! Hold this! Hold it tight!'\n\nHe's barely conscious, but she manages to force his hand to clamp the wound. She rushes to grab a medicae kit strapped to the wall, throwing it open and rummaging in it as she returns to him. A pool of bright blood has formed around his head and neck.\n\n'Xanthus, you damn fool,' she growls. She moves his hand. Blood jets out of his neck weakly. She washes the wound with a squirt of counterseptic, gets a pseudoflesh patch in place, and bonds it to his skin with a thermal wand.\n\n'Xanthus-'\n\nHer hands are soaked in blood. His eyelids flutter, and he exhales a slow moan.\n\n'Xanthus? Xanthus, wake up. Xanthus! Where is he?'\n\n'Attacked me...' the Chosen whispers.\n\n'I can see that.'\n\n'Scalpel...'\n\n'Xanthus, where did he go?'\n\nXanthus opens his eyes. He's glazed with shock and confusion, only half-conscious.\n\n'Where did the old bastard go?'\n\nHe mumbles something.\n\n'Repeat!' she barks.\n\n'Upstairs...' he murmurs.\n\nShe rises, and looks at the ceiling above her. She walks towards the stairs. She almost tells Xanthus to stay put, and then recognises the stupidity of the thought. He's not going anywhere.\n\nShe was not permitted to carry weapons inside the Palace precinct. She looks around, and picks up a retort stand from the bench. She hefts it to gauge its weight. Then she puts it down again and returns to Xanthus' prone "}
{"text":"d bastard go?'\n\nHe mumbles something.\n\n'Repeat!' she barks.\n\n'Upstairs...' he murmurs.\n\nShe rises, and looks at the ceiling above her. She walks towards the stairs. She almost tells Xanthus to stay put, and then recognises the stupidity of the thought. He's not going anywhere.\n\nShe was not permitted to carry weapons inside the Palace precinct. She looks around, and picks up a retort stand from the bench. She hefts it to gauge its weight. Then she puts it down again and returns to Xanthus' prone form. She picks up the bloodstained thermal wand. It's just a medicae tool, but at its highest setting...\n\nShe turns the dial at the base of the handgrip to maximum. Then, clutching the wand like a dagger, she begins to edge her way up the stairs.\n\nThree target clusters are moving into range on the south side of the concourse, and two more on the north. Amon resets the battery fields, prioritising the largest group, which an icon tag shows him is being led by an Astartes traitor. He directs two lascannon mounts to rake the formation, but specifically targets the Astartes with an Adrathic. Outside the glittering wall of the voids, the slaved weapons whir and realign on their servo-frames. The quad-cannons open up, each targeting the outer edges of the advancing group, then traversing slowly to chew across the ranks until their cones of fire overlap in the middle. Meanwhile, a scintillating beam from the needle Adrathic strikes the horned Astartes leading the Excertus. It seems to take a long time and a lot of energy to kill him.\n\nAmon switches aim to other target tags. The battery mounts extend and rotate. He pours fire into the heavy smoke and rips through two more enemy fire-teams. Some of them try to run for cover. But there is none on the wide concourse, and none of them make it.\n\nIn the meantime, two skirmish squads have advanced from the north side, running low in the open, trying to reach the flaring parapet of the bridge. Amon tasks two gun-mounts to tackle them, obliterating one in a blaze of heavy fire and driving the other into hasty retreat. By then, a third small group is approaching on the southern side. It won't be long before there are more target solutions than he has deployable mounts. At that point it will come down to speed of reaction and target priority.\n\nHe resets a battery to select the small southern group, and immediately detects a large body of contacts behind them. He tasks more batteries to establish a kill-box, while simultaneously directing a needle Adrathic to fix and eliminate a Traitor Astartes who has suddenly appeared in the centre of the plaza, approaching at a rapid pace. He glances back at the south-side targets and is about to commit when he sees the icon markers. The small, leading group is not reading as hostiles. He looks again, cueing the sensoria to verify, then leaves the console and strides to the end of the bridge to make a visual appraisal for himself.\n\nHe can just see them, through the swirling smoke. The larger group is a Hort Lupercali warband. It is pursuing the smaller group, harrying it with gunfire.\n\nAmon watches for a second more. He expresses no emotion. He returns to the console, and quickly re-tasks the batteries, driving murderous bursts of fire into the Lupercali formation as best he can without risking injury to the smaller party.\n\nThey approach, stumbling out of the smoke-wash towards the head of the bridge. As soon as they are inside his angle of fire, Amon instructs the batteries to auto-target and rain shots at everything behind them. He watches the approaching figures, and gestures at them to hurry. Enemy fire clips and splashes into the voids. He waits until the very last moment, then disengages the void at the end of the bridge. Five figures dash across the Pons Aegeus towards him. Stray shots streak in behind them, striking the face of the tower. As soon as the newcomers are on the span of the bridge, Amon reignites the void, closing the gap.\n\nHe steps back from the console and watches as they approach. He picks up his guardian spear. Even now, nothing is certain.\n\n'Sentinel Amon,' says Ios Raja as he steps onto the promontory.\n\n'Hetaeron Companion Raja,' Amon nods back. He has never seen the great Raja so mauled and damaged.\n\nBehind Raja come a battered White Scar, the ghostly whispers of two Sisters of Silence, and a human male, who is panting and stumbling.\n\n'You have custody of the individual Basilio Fo?' Raja asks.\n\n'Yes.'\n\n'And his device?'\n\n'Secured, empyrically modified and improved, and ready for deployment.'\n\n'Have you authorised deployment?' Raja asks.\n\n'I have. This can be countermanded. Are you here to relieve me?'\n\nRaja looks at the robed man nearby, bent double and out of breath. 'He is,' he says.\n\nHassan straightens up and looks at Amon, trying to control his breathing. His face is dirty with soot and there's blood on him.\n\n'I bear the authority of the Sigillite Regent,' he pants. 'Raja will vouch for me. Apprise me.'\n\n'The weapon-'\n\n'I heard that part. You can confirm its function and modification?'\n\n'Fo has revised his work, Chosen One,' Amon responds. 'The sanction weapon can now be type-tailored to specific targets or target groups by gene-factor-'\n\n'And you were about to use it?'\n\n'In the circumstances, it was my only option,' Amon responds.\n\n'Custodian,' says Hassan quietly. 'It's a Tier XX weapon.'\n\n'I had to make a judgement based on duty function,' replies Amon flatly.\n\n'I concur,' says Raja. 'In the circumstances, that would have been my directive. But circumstances have changed. We are here to effect extraction.'\n\nThey are shaken by a series of powerful explosions outside the shields. Amon and Raja immediately cross to the console. Sensoria are reading the first Traitor Astartes and armour units entering the concourse area. The corrupted icons show XVI Legion. Shells start to fall across the top of the concourse and the bridgehead, and bloom against the voids. A tone alarm indicates that an auto-battery has been disabled. Another shows a loss of shield integrity.\n\nRaja turns to the White Scar, Ibelin Kumo, and the two Sisters of Silence.\n\n'Prepare,' he says. 'When the shields fall, we'll be defending this bridge with our bare hands.'\n\n'You have an exit strategy?' Amon asks the Chosen One.\n\n'He knows the tower better than we do,' says Raja.\n\n'He can also speak for himself, Hetaeron,' snaps Hassan. He clutches the old Komag assault weapon to his chest and looks at Amon. 'I know the Retreat well. My access was extensive, and granted personally by the Sigillite. There is a private hangar deck concealed on the upper levels. The Sigillite's personal ferry is always held there in readiness.'\n\n'Xanthus said nothing-'\n\n'Xanthus was not aware. Few of the Chosen are.'\n\n'You propose exfiltration by air?' Amon asks. 'That does not seem viable.'\n\n'We've done it once today already,' says Hassan.\n\nAmon gazes at him.\n\n'It did not, by the look of it, go well for you,' he says.\n\n'This is not a debate, Custodian,' Hassan growls.\n\n'Sir,' says Amon, 'perhaps it should be. If we attempt to move Fo and his weapon by air, there is a high percentage chance that we will be unsuccessful, and the weapon will be lost. If we deploy the weapon from here, we can guarantee its use and the consequence of that use.'\n\n'I said it wasn't a debate, Custodian,' says Hassan. 'I have been ordered, by Lord Vulkan, who is now the senior figure of authority on Terra, and the de facto regent of the Imperium, to deliver the weapon to the Throne Room. That is my duty function. I am not in the habit of disobeying directives. Are you?'\n\n'I am not,' says Amon.\n\nThere's no sign of Fo on the upper level of the Sigillite's laboratoria. The bio-structor vats murmur quietly in the chilly blue light. Andromeda-17 can hear the low grumble of the medical waste incinerators, and feel the faint heat they are kicking out.\n\nShe tightens her grip on the thermal wand.\n\n'Fo?' she calls out. 'There's nowhere to go, and nowhere to hide.'\n\nThere's no answer.\n\n'Fo?'\n\nNothing. Unless that was a thin peal of laughter from above. It's hard to tell. The roar of warfare right outside has increased in pitch considerably, and the tower is vibrating slightly.\n\nShe crosses to the next flight of stairs. The floor above is gloomy, lights set low. She starts to ascend.\n\n'Fo? Listen to me. Don't do this. If you attempt to escape, they'll kill you. No question. I protected you. I helped keep you alive to get you this far. Fo? Don't do this to me. I won't pretend I liked you, but I believed in your work. In the importance of it. Just show yourself. Surrender.'\n\nShe stalks up another few steps.\n\n'Fo? You hear me? Give up. I can still keep you safe. I can convince them not to execute you, even over this. They need you. I'll show them how much they need you.'\n\nShe reaches the top of the steps. The next floor is a private study area with an unmade daybed, and shelves lined with books and trinkets. It's hard to make out details in the blue gloom. She can half-see an old chart, showing chakra focus points on a stylised human figure, a terracotta figurine of a goddess with spread wings and avian feet, and what appears to be a ceremonial aeldari mask. There are war-shields mounted on the walls, old trophies or mementos. The shields, scarred and faded, show the emblems of long-forgotten lasrifle brigades from the Unification Era, and the pack-marks of Thunder Warrior retinues. There are old swords and axes mounted in crossed pairs below each one.\n\n'Fo?'\n\n'They were always going to kill me, gene-witch. Always. That was always the end of this story.'\n\nShe glances around. Where is his voice coming from?\n\n'I can give the story a different ending,' she says.\n\n'What ending, gene-witch? A lifetime of incarceration? Or, if I am able to renew myself, a lot of lifetimes? I don't think so. I am tired of being a prisoner of those bastard Custodians. No. I've done what they asked me to do. I'm going to take my chances.'\n\nIn the g"}
{"text":"airs below each one.\n\n'Fo?'\n\n'They were always going to kill me, gene-witch. Always. That was always the end of this story.'\n\nShe glances around. Where is his voice coming from?\n\n'I can give the story a different ending,' she says.\n\n'What ending, gene-witch? A lifetime of incarceration? Or, if I am able to renew myself, a lot of lifetimes? I don't think so. I am tired of being a prisoner of those bastard Custodians. No. I've done what they asked me to do. I'm going to take my chances.'\n\nIn the gloom, the origin point of the voice seems to have shifted position. She turns slowly, warily, searching for any slight telltale of his location: a shadow, a scent, a flicker of motion, an echo of the voice.\n\n'You won't get far, Fo. Not in this. How will you even get out of the tower?'\n\n'There's a flyer, gene-witch. A secret hangar. It took a little finding, but it was mentioned in his journals. Which you kindly gave me access to.'\n\nAgain, the voice has moved. Was that a hint of motion? She moves around a side table, a displayed Smilodon skull on a stand. She skirts the wall.\n\n'Don't do this, Fo,' she calls. 'You'll die if you run. Let me help you. I can convince them of your usefulness. Perhaps allow you to be more than just a prisoner. I can be very persuasive.'\n\n'I know you can, gene-witch! You're the only person I know, besides myself, who has managed to exert a persuasive effect on the Custodes. That non-linear ethical reasoning. It was superb, gene-witch. They are so cold and calculating. But even you have your limits, against the callous rationality of the Imperium. If the Selenar were really so effective, wouldn't they still be a significant influence within the power structures of this culture? Promise all you like, there's nothing you can give me.'\n\nNow, she thinks, I have a fix on his voice. She is well aware of how dangerous he is, despite his appearance. She takes a step forwards. On the far wall, she sees the mounted shield of the Hort Africanus. A Unification era electrorapier is fixed beneath it. Its twin is missing. Empty brackets show where the crossed sword should hang.\n\n'Fo-'\n\nShe hears the faint rustle of a paper smock.\n\nHe's behind her. In the darkness, he seems to be just a powered yellow blade and a devilish smile. The rapier thrusts at her. She frantically twists to sidestep, and then manages to bring the wand up in time to deflect the second thrust. The thermal tip hisses as it strikes the charged blade.\n\nShe hears Fo curse as though stung. She leaps back. He comes at her. Another lunge. She drives the blade aside with the wand, but not before it scores the back of her hand. The pain is fierce.\n\nShe jerks backwards. In her haste, she collides with the daybed and almost overbalances. She hears Fo giggle.\n\nThe blade is slicing at her face.\n\n'Hold as long as you can and prepare to withdraw,' Hassan orders, entering the Retreat through the portico. Heavy bombardment is now striking against the voids, which are sizzling as they absorb the kinetic and thermal force. Amon knows what imminent void failure looks like.\n\nRaja orders Vigil Commander Ire and Knight-Centura Ridhi to either side of the bridge at the promontory end, and takes position at the bridgehead with the White Scar, Kumo. Everything is shaking and the noise is deafening. Beyond the coruscating shields, almost nothing is visible through a wall of black smoke, but Amon can see the icon markers on his console display. Hundreds of rune tags swarm the screen. Excertus units. Armoured groups. Sons of Horus. The Sigillite's Retreat is a prize to be taken, especially as it seems to be defended.\n\nMost of the rune icons are degraded and indecipherable. Amon can read one. Vorus Ikari. Captain of Fourth Company. One of the first-found's most atrocious offspring.\n\nHassan rushes up the stairs.\n\n'Xanthus!' he calls as he goes. 'Prepare the prisoner for embarkation! Xanthus!'\n\nHe reaches the lower laboratoria level. Zaranchek Xanthus is sprawled on the floor, his neck and chest soaked in blood.\n\nHassan curses. He finds a weak pulse.\n\n'Xanthus? It's Hassan. Where's the prisoner? Where's the Selenar?'\n\n'Upstairs,' Xanthus gasps. 'Upstairs...'\n\nHassan lowers his friend's head back gently onto the deck then takes the stairs. The old combat drills come back to him, muscle memory. Clearance advance, his back against the curving tower wall, the weapon up and ready. He remembers to check the old weapon's load counter. Thirty rounds remaining. He's emptied half the mag already today. The Komag has kept him alive. But for Icaro's parting gift, which seemed more symbolic than practical at the time, he would have been dead half a dozen times.\n\nHe maintains trigger discipline, index finger flat against the guard. He's coming up into the genetic workshop. He hears a sound from the floor above.\n\nCornered by the Sigillite's daybed, Andromeda-17 tries to turn. The slashing blade has just missed her head by a hair's breadth. She parries the next thrust with the wand, but the device has no reach and it's hardly made for duelling.\n\nShe can't block the next thrust. The electrorapier goes in under her left collarbone and clean through her, the tip emerging above her shoulder blade. Transfixed, she sways. The pain is excruciating.\n\nGrasping the grip, Fo sniggers. He cups his left palm around the rapier's pommel, and jams it in a little harder.\n\nAndromeda gags in pain. She can smell her blood burning in contact with the powered blade. She can't pull herself off the sword.\n\nSo she pulls herself onto it, and rams the thermal wand into Fo's cheek.\n\nShe misses. It goes into his right eye instead.\n\nFo shrieks in agony and staggers back, releasing his grip on the sword. Andromeda collapses. She manages to rise onto one knee, but the sword won't come out of her.\n\n'That wasn't very friendly,' snarls Fo, one hand clamped over his ruined eye, smoke wisping between his gnarled fingers.\n\n'Screw you,' she replies, pulling something out of her pocket. Fo doesn't wait to see what it is. He has something of his own. A small stainless steel lab bottle with an aerosol diffuser. He sprays it in her face.\n\nIt wouldn't pay to stand too close. The old man backs off quickly. Andromeda-17 topples to the floor, writhing and screaming.\n\nFo can't help but watch. He has always been so proud of his creations. This one is a particularly nasty little bioengineered killer. A tailored sarcovore bacteria aggregate in a liquid gel suspension.\n\nHer screams cease in seconds as her face and throat dissolve. The convulsive thrashing takes a little longer to die down. When the twitching stops, there's very little of her left above the neck. Her flesh-eaten torso is oddly propped up on the tip of the rapier that's still impaling her.\n\nBut even as she died, she was reaching for something, groping blindly. The thing she got out of her pocket. It's right there on the floor, inches from her blistered hand.\n\nFo peers at it, grimacing in pain from his eye.\n\nIt's a neurosynergetic alarm.\n\n'Oh, nearly,' he says, grinning. Then he peers closer.\n\nShe had already pressed it.\n\nFo unleashes a stream of profanity. He turns and starts to run - half hobble, half scamper - towards the stairs. The hangar's just two flights up.\n\nHe hears footsteps on the stairs below.\n\nHe loosens the cap of the lab bottle and bowls it towards the stairhead. Sadly, no opportunity to watch his handiwork this time. He runs for the stairs.\n\nHassan sees the bottle as it starts to bounce down the steps towards him. The scream he just heard was the most terrible sound. His finger's on the trigger-\n\nBut the metal flask, thumping down one step after another, is sloshing and splashing some noxious liquid wildly. He scrambles to get out of the way. He can't.\n\nA hand grabs him. Hoists him. Hurls him.\n\nHe goes flying over the rail, out of the bottle's path, and lands hard on top of a bio-fab gene-vat in the lab space below. Bruised and winded, he sits up. He glimpses, for a millisecond, a blur of gold on the stairs.\n\nThe Sigillite's private ferry is old and ornate. Fo throws on the hangar deck's power, and opens the shutters. As they unfold, daylight spills in, followed by smoke from outside. He hobbles to the craft's ramp in his tatty paper suit. He had one very much like this, back in the day. Integral void and cloak systems, auto-guidance. How far will it get him?\n\nHe turns. Amon has arrived without a sound.\n\n'Ah. That was fast,' he says.\n\nThe Custodian's golden greaves are smouldering slightly, and discoloured. Fo smiles sadly. Custodes physiology is still a mystery to him. The sarcovore he has spent a good deal of his precious lab-time creating is nothing like effective enough when it comes to them.\n\n'Oh well!' he chuckles. He raises his hands. 'You've got me, Amon. I tried my best, but you got me.'\n\nAmon does not reply.\n\n'Well, Amon, I submit to your custodianship once again.'\n\n'You have attempted to escape. You have demonstrated your intent to defy the Imperium and subvert its interests. You are an enemy of the Throne.'\n\nFo bursts out laughing.\n\n'So what is this, then? My postponed execution? The ending of another blood game? Have you come to kill me?'\n\n'Inevitably,' says Amon, and stakes him to the side of the ferry with his guardian spear. It happens so fast, Fo doesn't have time to flinch.\n\nHe gapes. He looks down at the blade impaling him with his remaining eye. Blood suddenly streams out of his mouth.\n\nBasilio Fo dies with a look on his face that could be surprise, or disappointment.\n\nOr perhaps some weird kind of satisfaction.\n\n9:xv\n\nOnly in death\n\nA light but steady rain falls in the Throne Room. The heat radiating from the Throne's burning light is now so intense that the gold inlay of the high ceiling is melting. Drops of liquid gold fall like rain, splash on the sectile floor, and quiver like beads of quicksilver.\n\nThe great chamber is almost empty now. The last of the psycho-able tithed to support Malcador's struggle have been used up, engulfed, "}
{"text":"se, or disappointment.\n\nOr perhaps some weird kind of satisfaction.\n\n9:xv\n\nOnly in death\n\nA light but steady rain falls in the Throne Room. The heat radiating from the Throne's burning light is now so intense that the gold inlay of the high ceiling is melting. Drops of liquid gold fall like rain, splash on the sectile floor, and quiver like beads of quicksilver.\n\nThe great chamber is almost empty now. The last of the psycho-able tithed to support Malcador's struggle have been used up, engulfed, consumed. Their burned and smoking bones, and discarded caskets, litter the nave. The Throne Room has become a charnel house.\n\nThere are no more coming. No more to be gathered and brought in. All the doors have been sealed. The Unspoken Sanction is done. It wasn't enough. Vulkan only consented to it as a last recourse by telling himself that his guilt and disgust would be outweighed by the necessity. An extreme measure for an extreme moment, a sacrifice to keep the Imperium alive.\n\nBut no, it has fallen short. The moment has not passed. All that suffering and death has not seen them through, and now seems a hideous crime in its futility and failure. The end has not justified the means.\n\nMolten gold drips from the ceiling. Where the drops strike the floor, they tap and percuss, like the tick of the clocks that no longer run, beating out the time that doesn't pass, marking out the lingering agony of the endless now.\n\nWithout the Sanction to reinforce it, the Throne blazes out of control. It expels heat and blinding light as though a volcanic vent has opened in the floor of the chamber to spew its wrath. The last surviving adepts of the Concillium still tend their ailing and overwhelmed machineries, but Vulkan is quite sure that they are not achieving anything. Indeed, he fears that their minds are so baked, they are simply repeating meaningless duties by rote, for no reason and to no effect.\n\nFor the most part, the multitude of people who had gathered here - the nobility, the staff, the courtiers - have fled, for there is no sanctuary. He has no idea where they have gone, for there is no sanctuary anywhere else either. He fears the atrocity of the Unspoken Sanction drove them away in revulsion and terror, into the arms of death waiting outside the room.\n\nHe walks towards the great Silver Door.\n\nHuman ash drifts in the air. The wide floor trembles under his feet. In places, the tiles have buckled and cracked, skewed by the splitting bedrock beneath. He sees that long cracks have fissured the massive columns of ouslite and marble. The very bones of the room are giving up, the bones of the Palace which seemed unbreakable, the bones of Terra itself, the stuff of Earth, those solid and enduring elements that are his dominion and which always seemed to share his permanence.\n\nThe great cry, the war cry that resounded just hours or seconds ago - he can no longer tell, despite the clock-tick of the golden drops - has not been answered or repeated. If it was the mark of their last hope, a final rallying cry against the darkness, then it is forlorn, and their last hope is dashed.\n\nEverything is done. Everything is undone.\n\nAt the door, Hetaeron Proconsul Uzkarel Ophite and Sentinel-Companion Dolo Lamora wait with their Sentinels Pylorus, weapons drawn. The Silver Door is barred. The Custodes do not need to tell him how close the enemy is. Vulkan can hear the savage, last-ditch fighting in the passageways outside. So close. The enemy is at the door.\n\nHe will not let them enter.\n\nHe sighs.\n\nA futile claim. He will not be able to stop them getting in. Some, certainly. Many, perhaps. But he cannot stop them all, for the hosts of Chaos are without number or end.\n\nRather, he must ensure that their efforts are in vain. They must, at their moment of triumph, share the futility that he has known since he was placed in command of the last acres of the Imperium.\n\nThey will force entry, but there will be nothing left for them to enter.\n\nThere is no time left to measure, and no time left. By the steady tick of liquid gold, his only count, he will set his moment. To the beat of that alchemy, he will perform his own.\n\nThe maker must unmake. The Talisman awaits him.\n\nHe turns from the door. He has made his decision.\n\nNow is the time. Now is the end. Now is the death.\n\n9:xvi\n\nMasters of Mankind\n\nThe Emperor falls.\n\nThe polluted energies that transfix Him make His armour plates translucent and reveal the spectral shadows of His shuddering skeleton.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk, through his neurosynergetic rapport, shares his lord's pain, but even without that bond, he would be riven with anguish. The sight of it. The King-of-Ages fallen. The King-of-Ages struck down and mutilated by the hand of His own son.\n\nHorus Lupercal advances on his helpless prey. It is not a first blow he has struck. It is a first and last. The infernal energies that he unleashed to strike his father to the ground continue to sear from his outstretched hand, a snaking ribbon of black light that arcs from son to father and pins the Master of Mankind to the floor in death-agony.\n\nThe former Master of Mankind.\n\nThe stream of chaogenous power is relentless. It lashes like a lazy whip of lightning from the first-found's right palm, flexing and flailing, and burns into the Emperor's breastplate, igniting Him internally, crushing Him into the cold black flagstones, and destroying Him atom by atom.\n\nThe gods approve. In the theatral galleries of the Court, the Old Four watch and chuckle.\n\nThe Emperor cannot move. He is pinned by slow, incinerating death. He refuses to scream or voice His pain. He will not give Horus that satisfaction. But He cannot move, except to writhe and spasm.\n\nHe cannot move.\n\nBut Caecaltus can. Fuelled by pain, and rage, and desperation, the proconsul breaks from his trance and hurls himself at Horus. His bolter shells, blasting from the mount of his paragon spear, reach Horus first, detonating against the first-found's thigh and hip. The weapon's blade, swung in an expert address, strikes an instant later.\n\nHorus turns, surprised by the Hetaeron's assault. Caecaltus hacks and thrusts, driving his spear against the Serpent's Scales. Horus shifts his maul to smash his attacker aside. He continues to pour energy into his father's body. He has not finished. He will not be interrupted.\n\nThen Mourn-It-All bites. Leetu comes at the first-found from another angle, adding his borrowed blade to the proconsul's valiant efforts. Horus roars. His rage shakes the psychofractal darkness of the Court. Still he burns power down into his father.\n\nThen Rubio's sword, star-bright with the Emperor's will, slices into him too. Loken does not hesitate. His gauntlets still red with the Angel's blood, he slashes the blade at his father's plate. Every blow a killing blow. Every blow a lethal strike.\n\nEvery blow, raining at the Warmaster from each one of the three, would be a conquering blow on any other day, the stroke of a master warrior that would fell and slay any opponent.\n\nExcept this opponent is past slaying. He is deathless and unkillable. The undivided power of Chaos has inured him against mortal harm.\n\nAnd that which does not kill him simply makes him angry.\n\nStill the three blades land, a furious onslaught that cracks scales and scores plate. It is not the damage that bothers Horus, nor the wounds. The wounds are nothing to him. It is not the razor edge of the paragon spear, nor the shearing force of Mourn-It-All, nor even the scalding kiss of Rubio's sword.\n\nIt is the sight of his own son turned against him.\n\nGarviel, Garviel...\n\nNo compunction. No reserve. No restraint. No respect for paternity or bloodline, or a love once given and returned. Loken has come against him, with a look in his cold, grey eyes that Horus knows of old, a look that means he has no other purpose than killing. It is a look that all Loken's enemies down the years have seen. Briefly. Once.\n\nHorus never thought to be fixed by that look. It seems to hurt him more than anything the gods have ever done to him.\n\nAnd the gods, the Old Four, in their shrouded abditory, stir and crane forwards. They observe hungrily. Fathers and sons... Agnate loyalties, such complex connections, always provide the most exquisite sport.\n\nHorus roars again. The malign energies streaming from his claw cease, his prey forgotten.\n\nHe turns on Loken.\n\nNow it is Loken's turn to see and feel the look. The focused, bloodlight glare of Warmaster Lupercal, that has illuminated worlds and torn empires down. Those eyes of terror...\n\n'Do it!' Loken spits. 'Prove to me what you have become!'\n\nHorus needs no urging. He has no compunction either. His claws open to turn the power upon his son, and punish the insolence of an ungrateful child.\n\nThe lightning comes. Loken does not flinch. But Leetu moves, smashing Loken out of its path. And Caecaltus moves, driving his spear-blade against the Talon to turn the blast aside.\n\nThe arc of power goes wide. It scorches Loken and Leetu as it passes over them, and scalds their flesh inside their plate. It blasts a deep and molten trench in the floor of the Court. The infinite architecture of the Warmaster's sanctum shivers and shifts to repair its sepulchre-black form.\n\nHorus thrusts forwards. Caecaltus strikes him again, from the right. The Warmaster smashes him aside without a second look, intent upon his son. The proconsul tumbles away, a discarded toy, praesidium shield shattered and Aquilon plate torn.\n\nLoken gets to his feet as Leetu finds his. He turns to face his father. The Warmaster is an onrushing avalanche of darkness. The claws rise. Power wells to roast his son to cinders. The baleful lightning arcs out and envelops Loken and Leetu both.\n\nThey do not die. They stand, bemused, as the hate and power, black as Old Night and threaded with warpflux, crackles around them with an absolute vehemence, yet held at bay.\n\nHorus lowers his hand, and the lightning stops.\n\nHe turns.\n\nThe Emperor lowers His hand, diss"}
{"text":" feet as Leetu finds his. He turns to face his father. The Warmaster is an onrushing avalanche of darkness. The claws rise. Power wells to roast his son to cinders. The baleful lightning arcs out and envelops Loken and Leetu both.\n\nThey do not die. They stand, bemused, as the hate and power, black as Old Night and threaded with warpflux, crackles around them with an absolute vehemence, yet held at bay.\n\nHorus lowers his hand, and the lightning stops.\n\nHe turns.\n\nThe Emperor lowers His hand, dissolving the mind-shield that prevented the immolation of His two warriors. He is standing. His golden breastplate is scorched black, and His cloak is charred. Blood runs slowly from His nose and the corner of His lip. His war-sword rises in His hand, and an asterism of white light flares like a rising sun behind His crowned head.\n\nHe moves towards His son with the lustral wrath of a supernova. Horus comes to meet Him with the atrocifying hunger of a black hole.\n\nThey clash, each landing blows simultaneously. The ignescent collision shakes the world. Chunks of black marble and broken buttress rain down from the quaked ceiling. Fractal surfaces break and shatter like porcelain. The high windows of the Court blow out in showers of coloured glassaic, letting in the red glow of the warp and permitting a giddying view of Terra, blistered and enflamed below.\n\nThe Old Four squeal in alarm, and then applaud. Father and son.\n\nThis is between them now.\n\n9:xvii\n\nWorse places\n\nThe sky is broken. The ground too.\n\nConstantin stirs. He feels wind on his face, and broken bones grating inside him. He has landed on a stretch of scrubby heath. The ruined hulk of the orbital plate looms, less than half a kilometre away.\n\nHe was falling into the sky. The warp has inverted nature again, and brought him crashing down. He doesn't know if he can stand.\n\nThe sky is in turmoil. Some elemental maelstrom is forming beyond the orbital plate where the ever-darkening cloud cover is draining into the spinning whirlpool of a hurricane. Flecks of lightning dart from its eye like las-fire. The wind is picking up.\n\nHe hears voices.\n\nDiocletian Coros and the last four members of his Companion company are making their way towards him, calling his name. Forget me, he thinks. Just fight the bastards.\n\nCoros reaches him.\n\n'Get up,' he says.\n\n'Not sure I can, tribune,' he replies.\n\n'Not pertinent, captain-general,' Coros says. 'Get up. They're coming. They intend to finish it.'\n\nConstantin gazes past him. He can see black shapes descending from the upper part of the orbital plate. They are floating gently, like the scattered feathers of a crow, carried by the air down the metal cliff.\n\nNo, not the air, he thinks. The warp. Abaddon and his bastard sons are carried by the warp.\n\nThey begin to land, as gently as snow. Abaddon and his praetors, his battle-brothers. Whole squads, a company strength or more, settling to the ground and then walking forwards. Constantin sees them, the best and the worst of them: Zeletsis, Baraxa, Jeraddon, Kucher, Curalis, Varia, Gustus, Sycar. So very many, and among them, once again, Lorgar's venomous spawn Erebus. Well, no wonder, Constantin thinks. This warp magic is his. This is all his doing.\n\nIt was always his doing.\n\nAbaddon's force is approaching, spreading out, almost leisurely in its advance. Squads of Word Bearers are emerging from the orbital plate to reinforce them.\n\nHardly necessary. The Sons will be more than enough, with Erebus' power behind them. They have Valdor and his men in the open, broken and reduced to almost nothing. Hellas Sycar and his Justaerin lead the traitor formations. It will be decided quickly. It will be over soon.\n\nConstantin shakes his head wearily, and even that hurts. Though it will be quick, he won't make it easy.\n\n'Give me that,' he tells Coros. He points to his spear, which is lying nearby in the grass. The shaft is now very slightly bent.\n\nCoros brings it to him. Constantin grips it, and uses it as a support to haul himself to his feet. Like an old man with a stick, he thinks.\n\nHe stands, unsteady, swollen with pain.\n\n'Form up,' he tells his men. Simple words now, no neurosynergetics. 'We'll hand them hell.'\n\nThey answer as one.\n\nConstantin glances at Coros.\n\n'If we get out of this,' he says, 'you or me, any of us... That storm. That's where we go.'\n\nHe points at the rotating spiral of clouds beyond the orbital plate. It's dragging the sky in from all sides as it turns, like a tablecloth being twisted and pulled into a hole.\n\n'I think that's what we've been making for. I think that's where He is.'\n\nCoros nods.\n\n'Any of us, you hear?' Constantin says, addressing them all. 'If you clear the field, make for that.'\n\nAs though to prove his point, thunder splits the air, rolling from the eye of the storm. It rumbles and booms, like the sound of twin giants clashing.\n\n'But this first,' Constantin says. He points with his spear. The XVI are approaching. Bolters start to crack. Valdor steps forward, circles the spear and deflects two of the whining shells. They explode as they glance aside. He wants them to know he's ready. They are not coming on a wounded quarry, helpless and injured. He wants them to understand he's going to hurt them.\n\nThe hurt begins.\n\nValdor and his men step into the Justaerin as they arrive. The clash is instant and violent, a trading of blows and a shredding of metal. They're brutes, beasts, but beasts can be made to yowl.\n\n'Gir Kucher,' Constantin growls, as blood sprays from his spear-tip.\n\nMore of the XVI are closing, Word Bearers too. A pack, a mob, clotting together and slowly surrounding the loyalists, encircling them just as the rushing clouds encircle the eye of that tempest. The intensity of the combat is ferocious, just as last stands ought to be.\n\nThe last stand of all.\n\nSomething breaks into the swarming ring of traitors, hacking a brutal path through their mass. Valdor hears a raging voice.\n\n'To your glory and the glory of Him on Terra!'\n\n'Damn them to hell!' Constantin shouts to his men above the uproar of combat. 'The Seventh is with us! Dorn is with us!'\n\nAnd he is. Rogal Dorn, defiant and unyielding. Praetorian, primarch of the Imperial Fists, seventh-found son. There are no Imperial Fists with him, no battle-brothers, no armies. Just Dorn and his sword and his clear, strong voice, hacking a bloody trail through the enemy like some spirit of vengeance as he pitches into the fray.\n\nThey meet in the thick of it, back to back, slicing and rending at the raging menace around them.\n\n'You come alone?' Valdor yells.\n\n'To my regret!'\n\n'You join us just to die, Praetorian!'\n\n'There are worse places to fall!' Dorn roars.\n\nDorn is a huge figure in gold, his powerblade hissing with fried blood. He has no magic, no command over the warp, no proof against its workings, but yet the traducing Sons of Horus seem to recoil from him. They are cowed by his ungoverned mettle, his temper, his skill as a warrior unleashed at last.\n\nHis courage.\n\nThey shrink from his courage. From Valdor's courage. From the bravery of Coros and the others. They don't understand it. It has no property, no intrinsic power, no force of itself, but oh, how it punishes them.\n\nDorn demolishes Phaeto Zeletsis. He cleaves the notorious praetor open and fillets him with a blue flash of his shrieking blade. He guts Zeto Curalis. Valdor spears Lael Gustus and levers the Justaerin's corpse aside. Coros breaks Besh Varia's spine and removes his head.\n\n'Abaddon!' Valdor yells. 'Get to Abaddon!'\n\n'I know!' Dorn shouts back.\n\nThey can see the First Captain, pushing in through the swarm to reach them. Yet even courage has its limits. The melee is too dense, a compression of thrashing bodies, fragments of broken armour spinning into the air, jets of arterial blood from severed joints and the stumps of necks.\n\nSo much blood. The smell of it on the wind, the haze of it on the air. A scent of blood that predators can detect from miles away.\n\nThe predators come, theroid and baying.\n\nSome come running, like wolves chasing down their prey. Others swoop, wings wide, as hawks upon a kill. They rip, without order or unifying plan or formation, into the rear of the traitor mass, and commence their slaughter. Their teeth are sharp, their eyes burned black with madness. Their armour is as red as the blood that has drawn them here, as red as the thirst that drives them, feral, into the battle.\n\nTaerwelt Ikasati.\n\nMeshol. Sarodon Sacre.\n\nMaheldaron. Khoradal Furio.\n\nRaldoron.\n\nFifty more, besides. Battle-brothers. Sanguinary Guards. Terminators.\n\nThe Blood Angels of Anabasis company, in their divine insanity.\n\nThe battle structure wheels, breaks, devolves in seconds from mass brawl to individual murder and bloodletting.\n\nAbaddon turns in the press, astounded by the onslaught coming at his back. This isn't the battle courage displayed by Dorn and Valdor, this is utter frenzy, an energumenical death-lust. He hacks one Blood Angel in two, then rams his blade through Maheldaron, but the Blood Angel doesn't die. He keeps fighting, tearing at Abaddon despite the sword wedged through his torso. Erebus crushes Maheldaron's skull with his maul and drags Abaddon clear.\n\n'Turn them back!' Abaddon snarls.\n\n'Ezekyle-'\n\n'Do it!'\n\n'They are not listening!' Erebus shouts. 'They are not hearing!'\n\nThe heath below the orbital plate has become a riot of slaughter. It is no longer any kind of battle as recognised in the principles of Astartesian combat. It is a pandemonium of execution and survival, a frenzy of predation and preservation, completely lawless and shorn of any rule or code or ethic.\n\nIn the name of the Throne, Constantin thinks, the Blood Angels! Whose side are they on? What has become of them?\n\nThe conflict increases in pitch. It becomes impossible to judge which side will prevail, or if anything will be left alive by the time it ends.\n\nThe gathering storm of neverness decides the outcome. In the course of the clash, it has increased in fo"}
{"text":"ndemonium of execution and survival, a frenzy of predation and preservation, completely lawless and shorn of any rule or code or ethic.\n\nIn the name of the Throne, Constantin thinks, the Blood Angels! Whose side are they on? What has become of them?\n\nThe conflict increases in pitch. It becomes impossible to judge which side will prevail, or if anything will be left alive by the time it ends.\n\nThe gathering storm of neverness decides the outcome. In the course of the clash, it has increased in force, frothing to a cataclysmic level of power. The sky is black, or else has been torn away, leaving nothing but the supernal void behind. The tempest bursts. Gale winds course across the landscape like a shockwave. A thousand forks of lightning strike the ground like an indiscriminate artillery barrage. Sections of the orbital plate collapse or fly clear as the lethiferous winds comb through it. The ground heaves, quakes, ruptures and splits, hurling traitors and loyalists alike into the air.\n\nDorn grabs Valdor by the arm and hauls him back to his feet. Soil and debris is raining down, and the wind batters them.\n\n'The storm-!' he cries.\n\n'I know!' Valdor yells back.\n\n'Come on! While there is a chance!'\n\nTogether, they run into the deluge.\n\n9:xviii\n\nSome kind of sanctuary\n\n'So many civilians,' Tragan comments.\n\n'As many as we could bring,' replies Sigismund. 'As many as would follow.'\n\nThey stare down through the grille of the metal walkway at the pilgrim files passing below them, an unending stream pouring from the Septenary Portal down the square-cut access tunnel into the interior chambers of the site. More than three thousand have passed by already, six or seven abreast, and the vast tail of the pilgrim column tracks away down the gorge outside and out across the copper plains. The Seconds, and Tragan's postern guards, are herding them in as fast as they can.\n\n'They are from the Palace?' Tragan asks.\n\n'They are the Palace,' says Sigismund. 'They are the city-habs and the Dominions. They are all that remains of it, all that matters. We seek only sanctuary.'\n\n'Well, we have space enough,' the Dark Angel replies. 'A mountain's worth. But there is no sanctuary here, brother.'\n\n'The Death Guard?' Sigismund asks.\n\n'The Pale King's devils besiege us,' says a voice. They turn as Corswain approaches along the walkway. His eyes are narrowed, sceptical. His fine wargear is mackled with blood and mire.\n\nTragan bows his head. Sigismund nods respectfully.\n\n'Lord seneschal,' says Sigismund.\n\n'Lord Champion,' Corswain returns.\n\nThey look each other in the eye.\n\n'An odd happenstance,' Corswain remarks.\n\n'Odd indeed. No deliberation or compass brought us here.'\n\n'And to the seventh portal, yet,' Corswain replies. 'A numeral particular to your Legion.'\n\n'Indeed,' says Sigismund. 'I noted the fact.' He can tell the Hound of Caliban is beyond wary. He trusts nothing and no one outside his own. Nor, thinks Sigismund, has he any reason to. 'What can I say, my lord?' Sigismund asks. 'What can I do? I want to secure your good faith.'\n\n'Faith, Sigismund?'\n\n'Trust, then.'\n\n'Do we not show it?' Corswain asks, glancing at the silent procession passing below. 'We open our door, even though the storm assails us. We let you in.'\n\nHe pauses. He watches the filthy tide of pilgrims.\n\n'They make no sound,' he says quietly. 'They make no complaint.'\n\n'They are past fear, lord.'\n\n'Nor do they weep.' Corswain looks back at Sigismund. 'No lamentation, despite all you report they have been through.'\n\n'They are past that too,' says Sigismund. 'This shelter is a miracle to them.'\n\n'A cold miracle,' says Corswain. 'There is no comfort here. No provision. An empty mountain, nothing more.'\n\n'And the Death Guard assails you?'\n\n'For days now, relentless. Typhus and his marshalled host, an insect swarm inflamed by witch-blood magick. His trickery has been foul, and his deceits have been many. We have barely kept our heads, or the minds within them.'\n\n'No wonder then you regard us with suspicion,' replies Sigismund. 'I have seen their rancid sorcery for myself.'\n\n'You have contested them?'\n\n'Indeed. The companies of Skulidas Gehrerg.'\n\n'That vermin?'\n\n'The Cadaver Lord.'\n\n'One of Typhus' chieftains,' Corswain mutters.\n\n'We clashed with them on the desert plain beyond the gorge.'\n\n'There is no desert beyond the gorge,' says Corswain.\n\n'There is now, lord seneschal,' says Sigismund.\n\n'How so?'\n\nSigismund shrugs. 'I know not. I care not. The world is broken and reshaped by the warp. All I know is, Gehrerg is dead, by my hand.'\n\n'You killed him, Champion?' Corswain asks, his gaze quizzical. He looks aside at Tragan. 'One less to bother us.'\n\n'I will kill more, Hound of Caliban,' says Sigismund. 'I will kill as many as you permit, unless it robs the First of honour. What few men I have with me, I will pledge to your side.'\n\n'Yes, so few,' says Corswain. 'A multitude comes to us, yet not to relieve our travails. So very many, and yet so few of them warriors.'\n\nHe sighs. He seems exhausted.\n\n'You slew the Cadaver Lord?' he asks Sigismund.\n\n'I did, seneschal. Face to face.'\n\n'With this hand?' Corswain asks, gesturing at Sigismund's chain-wrapped right fist.\n\n'With this hand, lord.'\n\n'Then let me take it,' Corswain says. He holds out his hand and they clasp. 'I need your sword, Sigismund, and the swords of your men, however few they are. In return, you get my trust, and what sanctuary I can offer to the Emperor's people.'\n\nHe looks to Tragan.\n\n'Bring them in, Tragan,' he orders. 'All of them, as fast as you may, even if we fill this empty hill to bursting point with their numbers. Sigismund? Walk with me.'\n\nThey follow the walkway into the borehole tunnels of the mountain, and thread their way along the dim passages where water drips and deep cold settles. Even from a distance, they can hear the steady tramp of the pilgrims shuffling into the lower chambers in ever-increasing numbers.\n\n'The Destroyer assaults come in waves,' Corswain says as they walk. 'It has been an hour since their last assault, but they come steadily, like the tides. Sometimes a dozen in quick succession.'\n\n'An hour, you say?' asks Sigismund.\n\nCorswain shrugs.\n\n'A guess only,' he admits. 'Their focus from the start has been the pass leading to the Tertiary Portal, our weakest defence. They have been relentless there. I wonder if Gehrerg's companies had been despatched to find a second point of attack. Or to block your advance.'\n\n'Or they had as little idea where they were as we did,' replies Sigismund.\n\n'Is the world really so twisted out of joint?' asks Corswain.\n\nSigismund nods.\n\n'And it changes constantly,' he says. 'Like water, like clay. Moulding and remoulding at the whim of the warp.'\n\n'Well, this mountain remains unchanging,' says Corswain. 'As set and immutable as the ages.'\n\n'You retook it?'\n\n'By drop assault, from the hands of daemons. We hoped to light its beacon to guide salvation here.'\n\n'But it remains unlit?'\n\n'Quite broken,' says Corswain bitterly, 'its apparatus destroyed. I doubt it will ever shine again. I fear, friend, I took ten thousand warriors and wasted them on a foolish gamble.'\n\n'What else could you have done?'\n\n'Made for the heart of the Palace,' Corswain answers, imagining it. 'A fast assault to break the siege.'\n\n'I fear you have no comprehension of the magnitude of the enemy's numbers,' says Sigismund. 'If you had taken that course, you would be dead by now.'\n\n'Dead maybe,' says Corswain, 'but with a sense of accomplishment.'\n\nThey walk on in silence.\n\n'And you?' Corswain asks. 'You leave the line, and the heart of battle, to shepherd civilians?'\n\n'I never left the line,' replies Sigismund. 'I am the line.'\n\nThe boldness of his remark makes the Hound of Caliban laugh, and the sound of it rolls in echoes down the stone tunnel.\n\n'The truth is,' says Sigismund, 'they found me. And the Emperor bade me lead them from the ruins.'\n\n'He spoke to you?' Corswain asks, eyes bright.\n\n'In His way. By means that could not be denied.'\n\n'He does not speak to me,' Corswain responds.\n\n'He will,' says Sigismund. 'Besides, lord, what is the Imperium but the people who compose it? Who are we fighting for, if not them? To safeguard the people is to safeguard the Imperium, and to protect that is to protect the Emperor Himself. Our citizens are the body of the Emperor.'\n\nThey climb steep granite steps and emerge into the open on the highest fighting platforms of the Tertiary Portal. It is bitter cold. Ash-snow and black rain fall in equal measure. Sigismund strains to see the towering black slopes of the Hollow Mountain, its summit lost in banks of snow-cloud and slate haze.\n\nAdophel approaches, and Sigismund greets him, then waits as Corswain, in terse and broad terms, recounts to his Chapter Master the unlikely events at the Septenary Portal. Adophel's brow furrows in cynical disbelief. More trust to be earned. More trust from all of them. Sigismund sees the squadrons, orders and gun-shields of Dark Angels cowled and huddled along the ramparts, resting in the frozen wind as they watch the pass and wait for renewed attack. Many cast questioning glances his way.\n\nHe ignores them, and walks down to the lip of the platform. He stares out at the steep black pass instead. A bad place for a fight. Too tight, too choked. It should be easy to hold. How did the traitors even reach the fighting levels? The cliffs are sheer, and sheened with rain and ice.\n\nHe muses. Is this the same pass he entered from the copper desert, or another route of approach? How can it be? It looks the same, and yet not the same at all. He stepped into the Septenary Portal out of baking desert heat, and here it is winter. Unless...\n\nUnless magick. The warp. The ring of trickery with which, Corswain said, dread Typhus had encircled and cursed this hollow peak.\n\nHe ignores the thought and its implications. All that matters is the now, the next step. To be present in the moment is all he needs to do.\n\nAdophel appears beside him. '"}
{"text":" desert, or another route of approach? How can it be? It looks the same, and yet not the same at all. He stepped into the Septenary Portal out of baking desert heat, and here it is winter. Unless...\n\nUnless magick. The warp. The ring of trickery with which, Corswain said, dread Typhus had encircled and cursed this hollow peak.\n\nHe ignores the thought and its implications. All that matters is the now, the next step. To be present in the moment is all he needs to do.\n\nAdophel appears beside him. 'Some tale,' he remarks.\n\nSigismund ignores the jibe.\n\n'I'll find places for your men,' Adophel says. 'Positions on the platforms. They must keep to them. We are spread thin. Every man must know his place and hold it, and be ready to move if commanded. Will they do that?'\n\n'This is your scheme of repulse to run, Chapter Master,' Sigismund replies. 'They will do exactly as you tell them.'\n\n'Are you sure?'\n\n'They wouldn't remain in my company of Seconds if they didn't know what to do with an order.'\n\nAdophel nods. 'I hear you have human marksmen,' he says. 'How much ammunition do they have left? And what-'\n\n'How do they scale the cliffs, Adophel?' Sigismund asks.\n\n'What?'\n\n'The Death Guard. The cliffs are sheer and treacherous. How do they scale the cliffs?'\n\nAdophel grins at him. It is an ugly smile.\n\n'They climb like spiders, Champion,' he says. 'They climb like daemon spiders.'\n\n'And wait like them,' Sigismund muses. 'Wait in silence, in their crevices and nooks, and then pounce. Do you smell that?'\n\n'What now?' asks Adophel.\n\n'They're coming again,' says Sigismund.\n\nAdophel stares out into the pitch shadows of the gorge. He sniffs the wind.\n\n'Damn you, you're right.'\n\n'What is your business here?' asks the warrior in the mask. His voice seems to hold all the echoes of the mountain chamber, and they do not hide his disapproval.\n\n'Shelter,' says Keeler. Pilgrims file past them on both sides, casting frightened glances at the masked Dark Angel.\n\n'I wasn't informed,' he says. 'Lord Seneschal Corswain-'\n\n'Can't be everywhere, I imagine,' she replies. 'We are no threat. These are refugees from the Palace. They need a place to stop. A place to hide. Nothing more.'\n\n'These chambers are in use, all of them,' the Dark Angel replies. 'These... people will interfere with my work. Their presence-'\n\n'Your work is to remake this beacon?' she asks. 'To restore the Astronomican? You are of the Librarius, then?'\n\n'I am Cypher,' he says.\n\n'I am Keeler,' she responds, staring up at him.\n\n'Means nothing,' he replies.\n\n'While \"cipher\" means... everything? Anything?' she asks.\n\n'I care not for your tone,' he snaps.\n\n'I care not for your indifference,' she says.\n\nThree more Dark Angels have approached them.\n\n'We cannot work around this,' Tanderion complains to Cypher. 'This rabble is filling the sub-chambers, and there is no end to them.'\n\n'They are dampening the acoustics,' says Asradael. 'The sheer mass of them is altering the resonance from this level to the upper circle. And as we recalibrate, more flock in, and so the resonance shifts again-'\n\n'They need a place to shelter,' Keeler snaps.\n\nAsradael glances at her. His face is oddly burned.\n\n'And food?' he asks. 'And water? What will they eat?'\n\n'Each other?' suggests Tanderion.\n\n'Silence,' says Cypher. 'Keeler - Keeler? Keeler, I am not unmoved by the plight of these pour souls, but this mountain is an instrument. A mechanism. It is not a bunker or a hab basement. My brothers and I have worked for hours-'\n\n'Days,' says Cartheus.\n\n'Whatever time has passed,' says Cypher, 'we have laboured to restore function here. It is a delicate and subtle process, and hazardous in the extreme, as Asradael's scars attest. And now, this influx disturbs everything we have so far achieved.'\n\n'I'm sorry,' she replies.\n\n'We are Librarius,' says Cypher, 'as you remark. The five of us have many subtle arts at our-'\n\n'Five?' she asks.\n\n'Our brother Zahariel is at work below,' says Tanderion.\n\n'We have certain gifts,' Cypher tells Keeler, 'but the mechanism of the mountain is unfamiliar to us, and we are learning as we go. You must take these people away and let us work.'\n\n'They will go where they please,' says Keeler. 'I have no command over them. I could sooner dam a river or turn a glacier.'\n\n'No, they clearly follow you,' says Cartheus, peering at her. 'I can see it in you. Like a banner...'\n\n'What are you?' Asradael asks.\n\n'I am Keeler,' she replies. 'Simply that... nothing more. A devoted servant of the Emperor of Mankind. Just as you are. But... Wait, please.'\n\nShe turns and beckons to Eild. When he comes over, she whispers to him. He returns in short order, steadying Zhi-Meng with his arm.\n\n'Who are these minds, Euphrati?' the old man asks as she takes his hand.\n\n'Angels, sir,' she replies. 'Angels of the First.' She looks at Cypher. 'This is Nemo Zhi-Meng,' she says.\n\n'I'm delighted,' replies Cypher, without emotion.\n\n'Lord Zhi-Meng,' she repeats. 'One of the Senior Twelve of the High Council.'\n\n'Then I am also honoured,' Cypher shrugs.\n\n'He is choirmaster of the Astra Telepathica,' she says.\n\nCypher hesitates.\n\n'My word, Euphrati,' Zhi-Meng says, tilting his blind head. 'You have impressed him. His mind races!'\n\n'You will not look there,' Cypher warns sharply.\n\n'My lord Zhi-Meng always abides by the protocols of psykanic privacy, sir,' says Keeler. 'He will not violate the intimacy of your mind. Will you, Nemo?'\n\n'Of course not, Euphrati,' says Zhi-Meng. He turns his sightless eyes towards Cypher. 'I would not cause offence, or disrespect your psychic space, my lord Cypher.'\n\n'I am quite sure,' says Keeler, 'that Lord Zhi-Meng has a great deal of knowledge regarding the workings of the Astronomican. Knowledge he will gladly share with you and your brothers and so assist your labours of repair.'\n\n'I have,' says Zhi-Meng. 'I will.'\n\nThe Dark Angels glance at each other.\n\n'I'm sure he does,' says Cypher. He clears his throat. 'And we will gladly accept that help.'\n\n'Come, my lord,' says Cartheus, reaching out a hand to the old man. 'Let me find you a beaker of water, and a place to sit.'\n\nThey lead him away. Cypher looks at Keeler.\n\n'Did you know his usefulness when you brought him here?' he asks.\n\n'I didn't even know I was coming here,' she replies.\n\nThe voice of Typhus is roaring down the pass. The storm comes first, then the blizzard, then the rain and the flies.\n\nThen the Death Guard spring from their lochetic stillness and assault the cliffs.\n\n'Blind Spur!' Adophel yells above the roar of assault. 'Corpse Slope! Gateway Cliff! Falchion Ridge!'\n\nThe Angels of the First scramble to positions. Lances clatter as they are angled down through bulwark slits. Choke nets unfurl. The first support guns begin to bark and spit.\n\nSigismund watches for a second. Death Guard, preceded by a carious stink, are advancing storm-swift. Their dark ranks are forming lunate and blade-edge formations, as though upon a flat field of war, but they are ascending the cliffs like swarming insects, without scaling ladders or siege frames. Some have ropes and grapples, but most do not. They ascend the vertical in howling packs, armour gleaming like ox-hide and beetle-carapace in the streaming rain and bruised light.\n\nLike spiders. Like spiders, Adophel said. He was right. They are moving as one, like an ocean wave, crawling over everything, mocking logic.\n\n'Where do you want me?' Sigismund shouts. His Seconds have not yet been led up from the mountain below, let alone set in place.\n\n'With me, then!' Adophel yells back.\n\nThey reach a fighting platform on the lower tiers - Falchion Ridge, it would seem - as the Destroyers begin to spill over the rail. Sigismund, pausing only to offer a salute with his black sword, pitches in beside Adophel and four other Angels of the First. He kills a traitor with his first strike, dropping the corpse onto the platform, then reaches the rail and sends two more tumbling backwards into the darkness below with a single cross-stroke that rips their breastplates open like mouths.\n\nHe kicks away a grapple-hook that has lodged in the lip of the platform, then leans over and stabs down into the head of a traitor who has just drawn level with the platform deck. The tip of the black sword goes deep through helmet, skull, brain and throat. The traitor goes limp, and falls back into the abyss, but Sigismund's blade is wedged tight in ceramite and bone, and is pulled away with him. The chain snaps tight around his wrist. Sigismund hauls on it, straining, and the blade dislodges. The Destroyer drops like a fish unhooked from a line. Sigismund drags his blade back up, seizes the grip, and has just enough time to twist and skewer a traitor scrambling up to his left. The Chapter Master is braced to his right, lopping heads and limbs with a notched war-axe. Beyond him, a son of the Lion swings a shrilling chainsword to saw hands and bodies off the rail.\n\nThe combat is gruelling. The defenders are fixed on one plane, trying to angle their blows towards another. The Death Guard, in contrast, seem entirely liberated, as though they are no longer constrained by the rules of the world.\n\nIn the tunnels and chambers of the mountain, the cowering pilgrims huddle in their thousands, scared by the howling din of combat outside. The mountain is too big and solid to shake, but the noises of battle echo down the stone flues and rock-cut tunnels, reverberating and amplified like weaponised sonics.\n\n'Be calm!' Keeler cries out, moving through the crowded chambers. 'Be calm! Be still! They cannot reach us in here!'\n\nThe panic is spreading. These lost souls walked en masse into the Death Guard in the desert, she thinks. They were fearless then, but now... What is it? Is it the weirdly amplified noise? The unnatural acoustics are upsetting. She can feel the sound in her diaphragm.\n\nOr is it that the pilgrims thought they were safe here, that they had finally reached the shelter they had prayed for, only to have it taken from them?\n\n"}
{"text":"ugh the crowded chambers. 'Be calm! Be still! They cannot reach us in here!'\n\nThe panic is spreading. These lost souls walked en masse into the Death Guard in the desert, she thinks. They were fearless then, but now... What is it? Is it the weirdly amplified noise? The unnatural acoustics are upsetting. She can feel the sound in her diaphragm.\n\nOr is it that the pilgrims thought they were safe here, that they had finally reached the shelter they had prayed for, only to have it taken from them?\n\nShe clambers up onto a raised rock ledge.\n\n'Be still! Hush!' she calls out, her arms spread. 'You are safe! The Emperor has led us here! He has delivered us to this place! His will alone has done this!'\n\n'You led us!' someone shouts.\n\n'I did not!' she calls back. 'I did not! I followed, just as you followed! I had faith, just as you had faith! I was brought here, just as you were! I heard His voice! We all heard His voice! This is where He wanted us to be! This is the space He has provided for us! So be still! Be calm! Set aside your fears!'\n\nThey are beginning to quieten, and that peace is spreading from chamber to chamber, through the giant archways and massive rectangular apertures.\n\nShe drops her voice. It still carries as an echo throughout.\n\n'Fear is no use,' she says. 'It has no purpose. Know not fear. Cast it out. Close it in your hearts and turn it into hope. Turn it into duty. Turn it into fierce faith in Him and Him alone, and by His will, you will be saved. By His will. By the grace of the Throne.'\n\nShe begins to recite some verses of the Lectitio. Some of them join in, their voices quiet.\n\nAn eerie tranquillity falls upon the chambers, despite the echoing din from without. Weeping stops. Faces grow calm. Some pilgrims murmur to themselves, their hands clasped in front of their mouths. One heart, one focus, one mind, one will.\n\nAt the side of one chamber, Cypher looks up. There was a deep tremble of light, just for an instant. He sees brief sparks of coloured light travel, fluttering, along the seams of mineral in the rock.\n\nHe glances at the old man.\n\n'Did you see that?' he asks quietly. Stupid. The man's blind.\n\nBut Zhi-Meng nods.\n\n'I felt it, lord,' he whispers.\n\n'And can you explain it?' Cypher asks.\n\n'The confluence of the mountain,' says Zhi-Meng, 'was shaped to respond to psychic broadcast, and to amplify it. The choirs, you see? The massed choirs, in their stalls-'\n\n'Yes, yes.'\n\n'Well then, the psycho-acoustics are infinitely sensitive,' says Zhi-Meng, 'so they might react, briefly of course, to any strong emotion, even from a group of non-active minds. Fear, of course. Hope. Grief. Collective anxiety, or collective presence. It is all about what is emoted, however raw. Emotion is an energy, Lord Cypher, the core of a psyker's bond with the warp. So yes, the will of a few thousand minds like this, caught in the same moment of emotional response, united by that, if you will, could indeed produce those sparks of light in the rock. The mountain feels them.'\n\n'What about...' says Cypher. He hesitates. 'What about a million minds? Two million?'\n\nZhi-Meng shrugs.\n\n'A greater focus?' he suggests.\n\nCypher steps away. He crosses the huge chamber, picking his way between the knots of pilgrims gathered in huddles on the floor. He looks up at Keeler and beckons her down.\n\n'What, my lord?' she asks, joining him.\n\n'I don't know what you are,' he says.\n\n'So you said.'\n\n'But whatever it is,' he says, 'I want you to do that again.'\n\n9:xix\n\nSigil\n\nThere is no light.\n\nThere is no sound.\n\nThere is nothing any more.\n\nNo steadfast star to guide us.\n\nNo voice to call to us.\n\nTerra descends into night, and we go with it. I do not know this night, or what it holds, except that it is blacker and deeper than the old, long night that almost did away with our kind. My king, my friend, lifted us out of that darkness.\n\nI no longer believe he will save us from this one.\n\nBefore I died the first time-\n\nNo, rather before I consigned myself to this death, and took my place upon this thankless throne to perform this thankless duty, I spoke my last words to my Chosen. It was not a tidy last testament. I did it in haste. But I shared with them anything and everything I could think of, the unfinished plans, the incomplete agendas, the legacies of secrets, the wisdom of a long life lived curiously.\n\nBut now, long past the edge of mortal life, I find myself with so much more to say. From this golden seat, I have seen so much, and learned so much. Such terrors and wonders that I could not have conceived of. Such simple truths.\n\nThe cosmos has confided in me, because it knows I cannot share its secrets.\n\nI long to make a new testament. A new last will and legacy. It would contain nothing of the things that I shared with my Chosen before death, for none of that matters any more, even though it all seemed so important then. My testament would be the length of aeons and fill the stacks of a library all by itself. It would be the Great Book of Mankind, and in it I would lay out simple truths I have learned from this seat, such that our species might further protect itself. For they are dark truths. The secrets of our predatory universe are far bleaker and more terrible than even the worst of our mortal imaginings.\n\nExcept-\n\nI cannot share any of this. Not now. My new testament will remain unwritten, my wisdom unshared. A supreme irony, to learn this much, and never be able to tell a soul.\n\nThis throne is a curse. A poisoned grail. To sip from it is to learn all that there is to know, in an instant, and in that same instant be rendered mute, blind and insensible.\n\nAll is still now. All is quiet. The winds of Chaos, raging more furiously than ever, are so loud they cannot be heard. The storm that drives them has occluded all sight of my friend, my King-of-Ages, and the transmundane realm in which he stands, and the ruined warship hulk that contains it, and the foe that he faces. The Emperor and Horus are face to face. Father and first-found son. They may be warring, even now. They may be speaking, as wise men speak, as embodiments of concordia and discordia, striving to find some common ground on which to build an accord and end this conflict. It is possible. Horus Lupercal was once a reasonable man, a good man, and he loved his father. If my king can reach that core of emotion he made certain resided in his son, Horus, despite everything, might listen. They may yet walk out of the neverness storm together, carrying peace and an understanding between them. From this seat, knowing what I know now, I can see how easily that understanding could be reached, how effortlessly the fingers of Chaos might be prised back to free Horus Lupercal, so that he can see the lies and deceits that have beguiled him, and renounce them. But they do not know what I know.\n\nAn old man can dream.\n\nThey may both be dead already.\n\nOr one may be dead, and the victor standing over his corpse in cheerless triumph.\n\nForgive me, but I think that victor will be Horus.\n\nThe stillness and quiet around me are misleading. There is no sound because I cannot hear. There is no sight because my eyes are gone. The agony persists, but I no longer feel it. All that I am, all that I was, has been devoured by the jaws of this throne. Only this last spark of me remains, a psychic glimmer inside a burned-out skull. I am reduced to a thought. I am merely an idea now, a lingering memory that yet thinks it's alive. I am a symbol of myself, a thought-mark representing the man I used to be.\n\nI am a sigil. I am the concept of Malcador abbreviated to these few simple lines.\n\nI have become my own last secret.\n\nSee that sigil now, those scant lines in the dust, for the wind is about to brush them away.\n\nThat which was unspoken has failed. The frail mindsight that this sigil of me still possesses can just make out, as through a glass darkly, the vague outlines of the throne room at my feet. The sanction, which pulled me back from the brink and sustained me, is bankrupt. The reserves of psycho-able candidates - those poor souls - are expended. Such loss. Such horror. There is nothing left to reinforce me. Nothing left to keep the daemons at bay. Nothing left to fortify me as I fight to hold the throne stable and maintain the psychomantic equilibrium.\n\nI see a shadow. A face. It is a blur, like a reflection in the filthy window pane of an old house in a time-lost city. I can't quite make it out. It is Vulkan, I think. The last one here, staying by my side to the end, just as he promised.\n\nYes, it's Vulkan. Oh, poor child. I recognise him by his guilt. He always had the finest, purest conscience of any of the sons, and what he has been required to do this day, the necessary duties he has been obliged to condone, have harrowed him.\n\nWhich is why, of course, it had to be him. No other son could have performed the role with such gravity, for no other son could weigh the costs so sincerely.\n\nThe dreadful acts he has committed have broken him, and now he is broken once again, for though those deeds were justified, they were insufficient. Now he regrets them all.\n\nDo not, my son. Do not. But for your actions, I would have perished long ago, and the vacated, un-commanded throne would have destroyed the world. You bought us longer than we ever thought we had. I'm sorry it wasn't enough. Vulkan, you are not to blame.\n\nHe cannot hear me.\n\nAnd now I see what he is preparing to do. The last and worst of all the duties left to him. He is readying the Talisman of Seven Hammers. He has waited as long as he can, hoping against hope, but now he believes the time has come. He will commit the Palace to auto-destruction so that nothing remains for our usurpers to claim or use. Horus will be denied his inheritance.\n\nBut it is not yet time. Almost, but not yet. Vulkan, there is still a chance. Vulkan, hear me. Delay a moment longer, for there is still a hope remaining.\n\nVulkan?\n\nHe does not hear me. He does not see it. In his ey"}
{"text":"m. He is readying the Talisman of Seven Hammers. He has waited as long as he can, hoping against hope, but now he believes the time has come. He will commit the Palace to auto-destruction so that nothing remains for our usurpers to claim or use. Horus will be denied his inheritance.\n\nBut it is not yet time. Almost, but not yet. Vulkan, there is still a chance. Vulkan, hear me. Delay a moment longer, for there is still a hope remaining.\n\nVulkan?\n\nHe does not hear me. He does not see it. In his eyes, hope has gone. He thinks I'm dead, and I cannot tell him otherwise. He thinks I'm dead, and the throne is uncontrolled. Vulkan, it is late, but not too late. A moment more, I beg you. One moment longer! Vulkan! My boy, please-\n\nHe does not hear me.\n\nI have lost my voice.\n\nI cannot stay his hand.\n\nThe Imperium ends here.\n\n9:xx\n\nFragments\n\nMany things shatter into fragments as father and son clash.\n\nThe air quakes from the impact; a shockwave of sound and pressure that bursts outwards like the punishing slap of a sonic boom. The walls of the Court puff out with the force of it; both the material structures of plasteel and ceramite that form the original fabric of the ship's compartment frame, and the fractal, immaterial structures that clothe it in empyreal majesty like an elaborate disguise. Adamantine bulkheads groan as they flex, stone dressings explode into powder, scaled obsidian geometries ripple like black feathers as they fight to maintain their patterns, deck plates deform, and the ceramite wall tiles crack simultaneously as though each one has been shot point-blank with a bullet.\n\nPhysicality shatters. Chips crack from the edge of the Emperor's warblade as it makes contact. Splinters fly from Worldbreaker's haft. Metal scabs shave from power claw and Talon. Plate armours, gold and night-black alike, buckle in the stress of collision.\n\nEnergies smash. The Master of Mankind's radiant psychic will shreds into the Warmaster's Chaos-fuelled bloodlight and they mutually annihilate, like matter meeting antimatter, capping the impact with a second, catastrophic detonation.\n\nSound perforates in acoustic shock. Light deviates and snaps. Time is already broken, but the hovering instant of Lupercal's isochronal moment, his Day of Days, crazes like a glass sphere.\n\nSuperimposed realities, both material and warp-dreamt, tear and peel back, flayed from the carcass of this moment, and combust as they slough away, disintegrating into cinders and flakes of ash. The broiling warp, in which the Terrestrial Realm is now almost completely submerged, ripples as a rupture is blown through its depths. The spit and crackle of its constant motion becomes a scalding sizzle as empyric materials are violently displaced. The whispers become a scream. The scream becomes the neverness.\n\nOther things shatter too, things that are harder to define. All bonds of blood, loyalty and past history that tie these two beings together part like overstretched cables, and the edifice of family, empire and legacy that they support comes crashing down around them like a falling tower or a house of cards.\n\nNeither of them care. Neither of them notice.\n\nThings burst and vanish in an instant, annihilated so completely it is as though they were never there: mercy, restraint, respect, compassion, love.\n\nIn His first-found's bloodlit eyes, the Emperor sees all His sins dismembered, all His dreams, His plans, all His permutations and configurations, the painstaking work of millennia obliterated. But He says nothing, and feels nothing, for the human apparatus that would have allowed Him to register that loss is jettisoned and gone.\n\nAnd in the burning white blaze of his father's gaze, Horus Lupercal sees his own dreams and imaginings of recognition and triumph torn apart, for there is no pain or anger or hurt for him to savour, no shock or despair. He greets this with the rage of Chaos, with the spite of a child disowned, and with demented glee. For he will find his own satisfaction.\n\nA few things remain, not merely whole and unfragmented, but so densely compacted and hyperintensified, they have almost become sentient qualities. Wrath, hate, murder, vengeance, determination and eradication. Such properties have been rendered indestructible in this crucible of violence.\n\nThe four, the Old Four, recoil from the clash, their bones shaken, their flesh blistered and scourged by the ferocity. Yet still they lean forward, and crane their necks, and stare in wild delight.\n\nThe warblade wheels. The maul swings. The giant antagonists begin to trade blows, and each impact makes fragments of what is already fragmented.\n\nFor Loken, LE 2, and the Custodian, there is no way to brace as the collision occurs. They are scant metres away from the Emperor and Horus as they meet head-on. They are thrown headlong by the physical and metaphysical concussion, as though they were grouped around a bomb at the moment of detonation.\n\nTheir flailing bodies are flung in different directions. Before they plummet back to the deck, each one is lifted again, and again, tumbling and spinning, borne away by successive shocks that overlap the first, waves of mental and physical backwash that contiguously follow the moment of impact. The blows rained against each other by father and son are so powerful, so inhumanly fast, that they blur into one long, pulsing shockwave, like an unending explosion, that batters and shreds the architectonics of the Court.\n\nThis fight is no longer one in which the three can hope to participate. It has shifted to an entirely other magnitude where the strength, courage and transhuman abilities of Astartes and Custodes are utterly and woefully insufficient.\n\nAll three are mortal and perishable. They are hurled aside by the immortal collision, just three more fragments in the blizzard of debris expanding from the heart of destruction.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk tumbles, helpless, across the tilting deck of the Court, carried like a bundle of twigs by the psychic shockwaves. He glances against an obsidian column, and manages to cling to it, like a man clinging to the trunk of a tree in the face of a hurricane that will soon demolish the entire forest. He sees his torn praesidium shield bounce away, like a golden leaf in the gale, and his paragon spear slide past, just out of reach. He can't let go of the pillar, because the horizontals of the Court seem to be rapidly becoming verticals. Tephra and cinders, fragments of black tile, and chips of stone scatter past him, flung outwards by the explosive conflict, stinging as they glance and graze against him.\n\nHis hands are wet with blood, slipping on the polished stone. It's his own blood. His Aquilon wargear did little to stop the blow the first-found dealt him with his maul.\n\nI am dying, he thinks. I am dead. But my king-\n\nHe twists his head to see. The obsidian column he clings to is, far above, bending and swaying in the psykanic tempest. There. There! He sees them, two figures, locked in a monumental duel, blade and maul swinging and slicing. One figure is white gold, the other Cthonic black. They look exhausted already, as though they have been fighting for hours or days, twin giants, hunched with fatigue, exchanging savage blows without nuance or polish, slugging and hammering at each other until one of them finally drops. They seem to be so close, just metres from him, so he can hear every gasp and grunt of effort, and see the individual particles of the billowing blood-mists that every blow produces. Yet they also seem an eternity away, reduced to specks by the telescoping corridor of sundered reality, two miniature warriors alone, dwarfed by the vast, dim bowl of fate's amphitheatre.\n\nThe banked stalls and levels of that immense colosseum are teeming to capacity, an audience of shadows a trillion strong, jeering on the final contest. They are the lost and the damned, the casualties heaped up by this war of heresy. They have gathered to witness the end of it.\n\nI am one of them, he understands. Assigned my seat to watch the single combat that will decide it all. To watch and wait...\n\nThat has been his life. Standing, motionless and emotionless. Watching, ever vigilant. Waiting, always ready. Years he has spent, immobile as a statue, at the foot of the Golden Throne, while history happened nearby...\n\nHe will not be a spectator. Not now. Not any more. What was he waiting for, if not this? What was he watching for, except this danger? What was he guarding against, if not this attempt on his master's life?\n\nCaecaltus Dusk will not be a mere spectator. He is Hetaeron. By His will alone, he serves and attends. This moment is the reason he has maintained his life-long vigil. This moment is why he was made. Yet now the moment is come, he cannot-\n\nHe looks away. He will not watch, if watching is all he has left to offer. He clings to the flexing black stone. Marble fragments ping off his golden helm and armour. His hands are so slick with blood they are slipping free...\n\nBut he is Hetaeron. He is Caecaltus Dusk. By His will alone he exists and serves, and his service is for His will alone.\n\nI will not leave the side of my King-of-Ages while there is breath left in me. I cannot stand by. I will stand by Him, stand with Him. I will fight at His side, as I was made to, past the bounds of death. I am Hetaeron.\n\nHe braces his arms. He grips harder, against the bite of the wind. Stone punctures under his fingertips. His heels dig in to the black, fractal patterns, grinding troughs as though through heaped, ebony scales.\n\nHe stands. By His will alone, he stands.\n\nThe neverness winds assail him. He does not bow nor bend like the vast stone column behind him. The psychic shockwaves batter him. He does not stoop or flinch.\n\nHe takes a step. A second. A third. Each one is a labour against the elemental violence. He reaches his fallen spear, and picks it up. Some last spark of his king's power crackles through it.\n\nHe turns and walks, one impossible s"}
{"text":"patterns, grinding troughs as though through heaped, ebony scales.\n\nHe stands. By His will alone, he stands.\n\nThe neverness winds assail him. He does not bow nor bend like the vast stone column behind him. The psychic shockwaves batter him. He does not stoop or flinch.\n\nHe takes a step. A second. A third. Each one is a labour against the elemental violence. He reaches his fallen spear, and picks it up. Some last spark of his king's power crackles through it.\n\nHe turns and walks, one impossible step after another, towards the fight. Caecaltus has died once in the Emperor's service, used as an instrument and burned out. He is grateful he has a second life to give. He wishes he had more.\n\nLeetu lands hard, bounces, rolls, and slides to rest. Wreckage rains down on the deck around him.\n\nHe's hurt, winded, dazed. He gets up anyway.\n\nHe has seen the infamous Lupercal, first-hand and up close. No man should have to face such a monster alone, not even a man like the Master of Mankind.\n\nLeetu retrieves his borrowed sword. He knows that there is very little he can do, but he'll do whatever that might turn out to be. He promised his mistress he would. Such promises are binding. Leetu has never made a formal oath of moment like the ones pledged by the Astartes that came after him. His promise to Erda was more personal, more powerful. He hefts Mourn-It-All and looks around. He sees-\n\nA fight he can't be part of.\n\nThe Emperor and Horus are duelling just thirty metres away. Leetu has never seen such power, and he's certainly never seen such skill, not once in his life. The Emperor, haloed by golden radiance, is attacking with claws and sword, switching from one weapon to the other, then combining both, a masterclass of close-combat technique. Though the weapons - the huge warblade and the rending power claw - are heavy and brutal instruments, designed for lumbering battlecraft and maximum damage, the Emperor wields them as lightly and deftly as a rapier and dagger, darting and spinning, blocking, cutting, thrusting, using them both with dazzling precision and elegance. His lithe movements remind Leetu of aeldari dancers he once saw while accompanying his mistress on an unexplained journey. They are the sequences of the sacred masque, the expression of absolute warfare as art.\n\nHorus, an abomination of seething warpflux that seems almost twice the Emperor's size, is armed even more crudely. His talons are immense industrial pincers, wheezing steam from their pneumatic valves, and his maul is wrought to do nothing more than batter and break. But - and Leetu can scarcely believe what he is seeing - the behemoth Lupercal is fluid and nimble too, despite his atrocious, night-black mass. Such is his sheer power, Horus is matching his adversary in refinement and dexterity. More than matching. His blows and parries are not mere mindless power. They are subtle, surgical, intuitive.\n\nOver the years, Leetu has heard much of the Lupercal's battle prowess. He has never doubted that Horus is a fine warrior, for only a fine warrior could have been anointed Warmaster, but he has treated the extravagant stories of talent and skill with circumspection.\n\nThey were not exaggerations. Even now, encumbered by the weight of Chaos Incarnate, shrouded in the warp, distorted into a form so awful and bestial that Leetu can scarcely bear to look at it, Horus is also a master. His method is sublime. He is using the maul and the talons with bewildering genius, every motion lightning-fast, every stroke calculated a dozen moves in advance, and not one of them bluntly telegraphed.\n\nAnd then there is the speed. The inhuman speed. As they wheel and flow around the Court, the pair of them are barely more than motion-blurs to him. Leetu's transhuman perception struggles to track them or keep up with the hyper-rapid dialogue of weapons. They are moving so swiftly, there is an almost constant concussion as the air is violently displaced. Every time Leetu makes a tentative move towards them, they have circled away again, travelling at a rate that Leetu knows he can't match. Joining the fight is like trying to board a vehicle already in motion. He tries again, but seems almost static beside them. He pursues them into a colonnade, but all he finds there is broken stone and fragments of rubble where their whirring weapons have clipped chunks out of the walls or felled archway piers like saplings. They are already behind him. He turns, and is almost trampled as they sweep past.\n\nIt is impossible to engage. They are clashing at a different register of speed. At the peak of his reflexes, Leetu cannot hope to synchronise with them for long enough to land a blow, and if he tried, he would be pulverised like driftwood in a millisecond. He gazes in abject awe. He feels-\n\nHe understands the freezing dread that humans feel when they behold Astartes in battle.\n\nHe lowers his blade, helpless, useless. He is a lone observer of this titanic struggle, an interloper, surplus to requirements, an accidental bystander who has stumbled onstage from the wings, but has no part to play and knows none of the lines. The sense of impotence is agonising. This spectacle will decide the destiny of his species, but he can only watch.\n\nInfuriated, choked by frustration, Leetu looks around for the others. Perhaps together, they can-\n\nBut there is no sign of the Luna Wolf Loken or the proud Custodian proconsul anywhere in the Court. Have they already tried what he is attempting? Have they thrown themselves into the fight and been reduced to smears, torn apart by the fury of contesting gods? The locked focus between father and son is so intense, Leetu doubts either of them would have even noticed who they were crushing underfoot.\n\nThe Court itself is no longer the dark cathedral Leetu entered at the Emperor's side. He sees that now. The infinite architecture of the first-found's temple of Ruin must have been shattered by the force of that initial, bomb-blast collision, or else Horus has allowed the black, fractal madness to de-manifest so he can concentrate all his power on the battle. Now revealed is the vast compartment of a once-regal warship. It is peeling and decayed. The pale deck of ouslite and flecked marble is pitted and scored. The brass walls and black pipework are rusted, and the riveted seams crusted with corrosion. There were banners hung on the walls, the standards of proud companies, Leetu imagines, but they have all burned away, leaving nothing but their scorched cross-spars and frames. Only one remains, the Eye of Terra, the rallying symbol of the Great Crusade, charred and threadbare.\n\nLeetu wonders if the disappearance of the terrible, infinite architecture is a promise of hope. The Lupercal Court was an aspect, a palace of terror instantiated by the warp to terrify and intimidate the first-found's visitors. If Lupercal has suspended it to divert power to his limbs, it suggests that his power is finite. Perhaps he is not the limitless expression of Chaos that they feared. Perhaps he is being tested to his thresholds by the Emperor's strength.\n\nPerhaps he is weakening.\n\nIt would explain why the combat is just that - single combat, man-to-man. Leetu can discern no trace of psychic conflict, other than the internalised force that drives their bodies and feeds their weapons. No immaterial duel rages between them, no blasts of psychic force, or bolts of lightning, or beams of gouging light.\n\nPerhaps, for all their speed and strength, they are wearing each other down, burning each other out, so that sword and maul and claws and skill are the only weapons left with which this can be settled.\n\nLeetu is forced to duck aside as they thunder past again, Horus driving the Emperor back into guardrails and a partition bulkhead that explode into fragments as they crash through them.\n\nRising, Leetu sees the Angel.\n\nThough there is no trace of Loken or Caecaltus, the corpse of the Emperor's angelic child still lies on the broken deck, dusted with powder and debris. Leetu hurries to the body. It is laid out in a clumsy, disjointed sprawl, and the wounds upon it are appalling to see. Even so, Leetu reaches down and gently touches the bloody throat. There is no pulse, no heat. Sanguinius is cold and gone. Indeed, he seems more than lifeless. The Great Angel, it seems, has suffered worse than mortal death. Spirit and soul have been obliterated. There is a terrible sense of utter extinction, as though life has not just been ended, but was never there to begin with.\n\nLeetu sees movement in the shadows nearby, the scurry of rats in ventilation grates, the flicker of vermin behind coolant ducts. Neverborn scavengers have come to feed, drawn by the odour of death. Despite the calamitous conflict nearby, which makes them quail and hesitate, their hunger is overcoming their timidity. They are beginning to creep and scuttle forward, to pick over the bones, to snatch a mouthful of flesh, to gnaw off some portion of the kill they can flee with, back to the shadows, and devour.\n\nLeetu starts in dismay. The first darts in, brazen. It looks like a skinned dog. Leetu hacks Mourn-It-All through its skull, and knocks it away. A second scurries forward, and he puts his blade through it, then a third, which he catches with a glancing blow and sends yelping into retreat. But a fourth has already got its jaws around the Angel's ankle, and a fifth is lapping blood from the soaked feathers of a wing.\n\nLeetu growls. He will not permit this desecration. He drives them off, butchering those he can, but as fast as he chases them away, to a protest of whining and yapping, others scuttle in from different angles, emboldened and eager.\n\nRevolted, he stands astride the Angel's body, and stabs and slashes to keep them at bay. They are swarming from the shadows now, an encircling tide, barking and growling and snorting. Some are small, the size of rodents, but others are larger and more fearless, hideous things of matted fur and w"}
{"text":"mit this desecration. He drives them off, butchering those he can, but as fast as he chases them away, to a protest of whining and yapping, others scuttle in from different angles, emboldened and eager.\n\nRevolted, he stands astride the Angel's body, and stabs and slashes to keep them at bay. They are swarming from the shadows now, an encircling tide, barking and growling and snorting. Some are small, the size of rodents, but others are larger and more fearless, hideous things of matted fur and wild eyes, things that drool and laugh, spined things that glisten and slither, bloated things with abattoir-claws and shearing chisel-teeth.\n\nIt becomes a frenzy, his frantic blade trailing their blood and fibre in the air, dappling the deck with ichor. They pour in from all sides.\n\nAnd he realises, as he chops and jabs, that while dead meat is easy and appetising, living flesh is an appealing delicacy too.\n\nLoken wakes, face down, in a litter of fragments. He wonders where the others have gone... Leetu, the proconsul... His father... His father's father.\n\nHe wonders where the Vengeful Spirit has gone.\n\nHe lies on a patch of its deck, but that patch sits like a ragged raft in a sea made of polished sectile flooring. The room is huge and dark, another work of infinite architecture designed to terrify and intimidate, but it's not the Court composed by his gene-sire.\n\nIt is vacant. It is vast. Its colossal, twilit length is marked out by huge scissor arches and acanthus-capped columns.\n\nIt is the Throne Room.\n\nOr, at least, it was.\n\nLoken rises. Ash and embers drift in the gloom. There are roasted and fused human skeletons scattered everywhere. Behind him, a great Silver Door is ruptured off its hinges. A night wind howls its lament.\n\nThere is no ceiling left, no roof. Above him, the Palace gapes, ruinously open to the sky, the immense columns and arches truncated where the vault they support has been torn away. The great hearth-hall of the high king, sacked and abandoned.\n\nThe sky is the darkest night of all, tinged with the red glow of a neverness storm that rages across all of Terra.\n\nHe sees a fire burning at the far end of the nave, the only real source of light in the gloom. He walks towards it. It takes a long time to walk the length of the terrible room.\n\nHe approaches the fire. It is fierce, but contained. It is a man, impossible to identify, on fire from head to foot. He is sitting on a throne. He cannot be alive, for the crackling yellow flames consume him, and he does not twist or thrash in helpless agony. But he also cannot be dead, because his body is not shrivelled and contorted by the action of the flames. He just sits there, his head upright, his arms on the armrests, his feet on the floor, ablaze.\n\nThe throne is small, a simple, high-backed wooden chair, lacquered red and marked with curious sigils. Somehow the wood of the little throne remains untouched by the flames leaping from the figure it supports.\n\nBehind the burning figure on its little throne, a huge lake of liquid metal covers a wide area of the inlaid floor. It is molten gold, gold reduced to fluid state by savage furnace heat. The lake of metal smokes like lava, slowly cooling, but Loken can feel the radiating glow coming off it like an oven. Around the metal pool, the floor is scorched black with soot except for the outline of large human figures arranged in a circular pattern. They look like shadows, like anti-shadows. Loken wonders how instantaneously the men who cast them were vaporised.\n\n'Is this a dream?' he asks out loud. No one answers him, not even the wind, and not the burning figure in the chair, though Loken half-expected it would.\n\nHe looks up at the sky. How can anyone tell dream from reality any more? Nothing can be trusted. But instinct tells him that this is a dream, and it's one of his father's. Has his gene-sire placed Loken inside it to punish him? That won't work. This scene, though eerie and forlorn, is nothing compared to the visions that the daemon showed him. That prospect of Aeternity broke his mind but he, through the power of the Emperor's will, has passed beyond such debilitating madness. No sight can hurt him any more, not even this tragedy.\n\nIt is pitifully sad, but it's just a room.\n\nIt's just a dream of a room. Loken's certainty increases. The Emperor placed His power in Loken, so that he could act as His instrument. Indeed, Loken's selection for that role was made by the man that Loken suspects is quietly burning in the chair nearby.\n\nA small vestige of that power remains in him. He can feel it in his bones and his blood, and in the sparks that course along the blade of Rubio's sword. If that pulsing trace of power remains, then the Emperor is still alive.\n\nSomewhere.\n\nAnd if this is a dream, then that somewhere must be close by. The thready trace of power permits Loken some clarity of perception, the clarity he presumes is second nature to those born as psykers. It is unfamiliar to him, for he has no psykanic training, but it has led him this far. He tries to determine what is real and what is not. Rubio's sword is real. His wargear is real. The scorch marks left across his chestplate by Lupercal's lightning... They are real. The flesh, burned and blistered beneath the chestplate from that near miss... That's real too. His flesh is real. The Angel's blood on his hands is real.\n\nThis is the Vengeful Spirit. Loken hasn't shifted or been translocated again. He's still there, in the Court. This is an illusion, another aspect of the Court's fractal architecture, a psychic fragment conjured by the warp from his father's imagination.\n\nIt's probably one of many.\n\nBecause the combat is underway. The Emperor and his father, in single combat. And that combat can't and won't be just two men pitching sword and maul against each other. It will be physical, yes, but it will be more than physical at the same time. It will be a duel of flesh and bone, of iron and steel, yet also a duel of minds and wills, of souls, of magick, and of the sorceries of the immaterial. It will be a hundred duels, all fought at once, combats occurring simultaneously on the mortal plane and the empyric, in the realm of materia and the anti-realm of immateria. They will assail each other with every means available, and both of them will shield and defend themselves against every possible line of attack. One slip, one distraction, one angle left unguarded, is an opening the other can lethally exploit.\n\nIt is a total war, a single fight multiplied across infinite methods, all waged in perfect unison.\n\nAnd this, this place, this dream, is a fragment of it. A fragment of the psychic war running parallel with the physical one.\n\nAs this revelation comes to him, clear and true, Loken begins to hear the rumble and chime of weapons, of a blade striking armour, of a maul denting plate. It is the thunder of distant giants. It is echoing through the walls of the derelict throne room, as though it is happening outside. Loken is sure that the sounds of fierce combat have been there all along, from the moment he woke up, but he can only hear them now he understands where he is and what it represents. It is an occulted acoustic he had to become attuned to, like adjusting a dial to lock a specific vox-transmission.\n\nHe can hear the molten hiss of a force-blade skinning the air, the whoosh of a worldbreaking maul bending gravity. He can hear power armour grinding as it moves, plate segments clattering as they articulate. He can hear the dull stamp of armoured feet as they step and shift across a shivering deck, the blitz-crackle of refractor fields and personal shields as they take hits and dissipate kinetic force, the straining whine of compact reactors. He can hear the laboured breathing of two men exerting supreme effort, the ragged gasps, the straining grunts and stifled groans.\n\nHe can hear minds singing. One is a high, clear note, painfully sharp and continuous, like a fingertip running around the lip of a glass to maintain a ringing harmonic. It pierces the twilight like a crack running through crystal. The other is a deep drone, a long growl from the chest and throat that swells and resonates, accompanied by the heartbeat thump of a kettle drum that marks out a nine-beat rhythm. It crackles with the cinder-spit of the warp.\n\nLoken looks up. The sounds are right outside. To his left... Then to his right... Then beyond the ruined Silver Door... Then behind the nave's end wall.\n\nThe combatants are circling the room.\n\nThere is a sharp crack of impact. Loken wheels around in time to see a dent appear in the wall of the chamber across the nave. The stone bulges and crumbled plaster patters down. Something struck against the wall outside. A second later, and fifty metres to the left, another mark appears in a puff of brick-dust and plaster chips as the wall is struck again. A third impact near the broken choir stalls displaces stone blocks and leaves a jagged crack three metres long.\n\nShadows jump and dance along the walls, thrown by the flame-light of the burning figure in the chair. They are smudged shadows at first, but slowly they become moving shapes as Loken attunes his mind to the visions as he did the sounds. Silhouettes form and flicker, sliding over the skin of the wall like ghosts, a shadow-play cast by the figure in the wooden throne. There, distinctly, the phantom outline of the Master of Mankind, swinging His body, sword aloft. There, the spectral mass of Lupercal, broad and hunched as he lunges forward. There, the two of them, brawling in close contact, the shadows becoming one as they turn together.\n\nThe shadows, which flutter like dream fragments, are huge, stretched and distorted, elongated titans bent and crooked by the contours and features of the walls.\n\nLoken watches them with grim fascination. The shadows come and go, appear and disappear. There is no predicting where the next shapes will appear, or how long they will remain. As they flare an"}
{"text":"cal, broad and hunched as he lunges forward. There, the two of them, brawling in close contact, the shadows becoming one as they turn together.\n\nThe shadows, which flutter like dream fragments, are huge, stretched and distorted, elongated titans bent and crooked by the contours and features of the walls.\n\nLoken watches them with grim fascination. The shadows come and go, appear and disappear. There is no predicting where the next shapes will appear, or how long they will remain. As they flare and fade, they remind Loken intensely of ancient rock art, of the figures men once scratched and painted on the walls of caves long ago. Here, a man mid-leap. There, another turning to evade. These are the weapons they are carrying. This is the path that the sword will follow. This is where the maul will strike, this flank here. What is set out here on the wall in the shadows is happening now.\n\nIt is sympathetic magic.\n\nThe shadows are the ripples of the fight relayed through stone and written in flame, the after-images of each instant echoing through materia and immateria. They are not flashes of some desired future. They are the future made present. The dressed stone of the throne room walls is just a membrane, not solid at all, but a veil on which the etheric world is projected. The images of father and son are just tracings of things on the other side.\n\nLoken has to reach them. The gene-coded loyalty of the Astartes is an imperative. He must stand at the Emperor's side, and protect Him. The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, but what is His shield? Us. We are. It is reciprocal. We are souls bound together. We are together as one or we are nothing.\n\nHe will be surely going to his death, but he doesn't care: the daemon Samus' torment has excised from him all fear of his own mortality. Besides, his conditioned loyalty, enough in itself, is amplified by emotion, that precious luxury the Emperor gifted to all His descendants. Loken feels guilt, responsibility... It was his words and his counsel that clinched Persson's argument and persuaded the Emperor to reject the promise of godhood. Better to fight daemons as men than become them. Thanks to those words, the Emperor renounced the gathering strength that would have allowed Him easily to crush Horus Lupercal. As a consequence, the Master of Mankind has entered into this undertaking with finite power to face a foe with limitless reserves. He needs all the help He can muster.\n\nAnd, after all, Loken was chosen for this.\n\nHe has to find a way to them. He is caught in a mere fragment of the contest, one facet of the mind-war. Presumably, he was thrown there by the force of the initial clash. He has to find a way out of it and, no doubt, a route through other facets and layers of the battle too, until he enters the heart of it.\n\nOn impulse, as the din of combat continues to ring out, and the warring shadows continue their dance across the walls, Loken turns to the burning figure in the chair.\n\n'You chose me,' he says. 'Was it you, or were you merely doing your master's bidding?'\n\nThe flames do not answer.\n\n'Was I chosen because of the part I have played in this history of violence?'\n\nThe flames merely crackle.\n\n'No,' Loken decides. 'I am a weapon of specific injury. I saw how my father blanched at the sight of me. I hurt him. That's why you chose me.'\n\nThe flames neither confirm nor deny.\n\n'Are you even still alive, Sigillite?'\n\nHe will get no answers. He takes his sword, and holds the blade to the flames leaping off the seated figure. After a second or two, the blade begins to glow, then shine. Fire transfers. As Loken takes the sword away, Rubio's blade is aflame from tip to ricasso.\n\nHe holds the sword up, like a torch. Soft flames course and flutter along its length. He walks back down the nave, casting his own flickering shadows now. He watches the walls and the stout stone columns, and sees where the flame-light of his blade is making a shadow-play for him. The two phantom figures circle and dance, hacking and swinging, across the face of this pillar, then that basalt column, over this stretch of floor, along that piece of wall. He follows them as they move ahead of him. He follows the motion and the sounds.\n\nHe reaches the ruined Silver Door, where the passing shadows play briefly across the buckled gleam of eternity's final portal. He steps over the cremated remains of giants in golden armour, who fell where they stood, their auramite black with fulgurite soot.\n\nHe steps outside into the night. There is no Palace beyond the door, no Inner Sanctum, no final fortress. An apocalyptic waste of blackened stone greets him, stretching as far as he can see under the caul of night. Nothing besides remains. Ruin has claimed Terra whole.\n\nThe icy winds of the neverness storm batter him. Blood-sleet patters off his plate. By the light of his sword, he sees the transient shadows again, flickering across the sundered stones. He moves forward, in pursuit.\n\nThe gale trembles and draws at the flames around his blade. But they do not go out.\n\n9:xxi\n\nHeart of neverness\n\nWhen you clash with your father, the whole world shakes.\n\nJust as it should. This is the moment that changes everything. It is the culmination of your everlasting Day of Days, and it will decide everything that comes after. It is only right that the world should tremble as it witnesses an act of such exceptional significance.\n\nYou have longed for this confrontation. But dreaded it too. Is it possible to want something so much, and yet loathe the thought of it ever happening?\n\nThe question is academic. It is happening.\n\nThere is no easing into it, no courteous test blows and probing jabs to gauge the other's qualities before the fight begins in earnest. He simply charges you, raising a shield of psychic force in front of Him like the prow-ram of a war galley. A backward step or a sideways evasion are not options. You could stand your ground to meet it-\n\nYou drive into it instead. You answer charge with charge. Your father must understand from the outset that He will not enjoy a dominant role in this duel. You meet force with force, summoning a battering ram of your own that reinforces your forward refractors with immaterial potency.\n\nThe impact is catastrophic and numbing.\n\nAs to your question, well... The Emperor must die. This is the only course of action left to you. You had to assume that it would come to this; you know your father's intractable character too well. That's why you set your lures and prepared this beautiful trap, and why you laid in wait in a blind of self-induced amnesia. The Emperor must die, and only you can ensure His death. You declared to your sons that this would be the inevitable outcome. You made a boast of it. The Emperor must die. It became their war cry.\n\nYour skull jolts, and you smell blood in your nostrils and your throat. Your psychic weapons mutually annihilate as they collide, and they do so with such force that the shockwave levels the psychoscape around you. He is knocked back by the collision. You are not. You hold firm. The Emperor must die.\n\nBut you are His son. You undertake this deed with regret. A son should not have to kill his father. You had hoped that it would turn out to be a mistake born of misunderstanding. He would see, at the last, that you could not be turned from the path you had chosen, and should not, for that path was sublime. It would be a revelation to Him. He would stop. He would submit to you, and this would all be avoided.\n\nYou even gave Him that chance. You did. More than once. Just like your angel brother. You gave Him every chance to admit He was wrong. You offered Him the opportunity to accept His error and surrender. Indeed - and this is a mark of your maturity and restraint - you would have embraced Him if He had done so. You would have embraced Him unconditionally. You would have forgiven Him, and willingly provided Him with a place at your side as part of the cosmotellurian order you have forged. A place of high honour. You had a throne waiting for Him.\n\nBut He didn't submit. He didn't surrender. There was no revelation. Worse, He considered you a lost cause. He didn't even bother to decline your offer. He didn't acknowledge you at all.\n\nHis war-sword sweeps at you in a slicing cross. You parry it with your maul, a thunderclap. But you remember Thekla Secundus, and the tricks He taught you there. The slicing sword is only half of the movement. Even as you smack it aside, His claws are punching up to crush your ribs. Your Talon slaps them away.\n\nYou show Him you have not forgotten the techniques He taught you in those thirty sweet years. You hope it might make Him recall-\n\nIt doesn't. He ignores your playful reminder of the tight bond you once shared, just as He ignored you when He marched into your Court, and just as He refused to acknowledge your generous terms for His submission.\n\nYou are angry and hurt. Scorned, indentured, ignored, disowned. The Emperor will never change, so the Emperor must die, and you must be the one to put Him down. Though He is your father, and you didn't want it to end like this, He has left you no other choice. And now you have something to prove.\n\nYourself.\n\nThis has become more than a formality of execution. He will acknowledge you before you kill Him. You will make Him confess the sins He has committed against you. You are not some enemy to be illuminated or xenos threat to be extinguished. You have accomplished more in your brief centuries than He has done in His eternity. You have outdone Him. You are His superior, His successor, His heir. You're going to get that recognition. You're going to make Him look you in the face and, with His last breath, scream it.\n\nA downward slash. You sidestep, and swing for His head. He has anticipated, of course. You would have been disappointed if so obvious a blow had caught Him unawares. He turns into it, and catches the head of your maul in His claws to block it. A small"}
{"text":"n your brief centuries than He has done in His eternity. You have outdone Him. You are His superior, His successor, His heir. You're going to get that recognition. You're going to make Him look you in the face and, with His last breath, scream it.\n\nA downward slash. You sidestep, and swing for His head. He has anticipated, of course. You would have been disappointed if so obvious a blow had caught Him unawares. He turns into it, and catches the head of your maul in His claws to block it. A small supernova is born from this impact. He holds on, pinning the maul's head, and thrusts His war-sword to exploit your open guard. Your Talon seizes the stabbing blade, twists it aside, then releases to rip off His head.\n\nHe ducks clear, the Talon merely scoring the edge of His refractor field, but He's forced to let go of your maul to achieve that clearance. You whirl it, pressing Him, landing one strike low that His shields stop, then one high that He fends away with a back-slap of His claws.\n\nYou let the momentum of the fending slap carry the maul backwards instead of fighting it, then convert it into an underswing loop that brings Worldbreaker back inside His left-quarter guard.\n\nIt catches Him in the sternum on the upswing. There is a satisfying flare of overtaxed shields, and an even more satisfying thump as He is briefly lifted off the deck and forced back on His heels.\n\nHe's strong. You're stronger. You reflect, as He stumbles away so gratifyingly, that this is what you want. Of course it is. Only the trace residue of your human self, that tenuous relic of what you were before, has raised any qualms in your mind. You are a god, and the world operates in submission to your will. When you drew up your plans to confront Him, you knew damn well that this would be the consequence. Whether your old self had the stomach for it or not, you made this happen. You are a god, and gods don't make mistakes. You decreed this and it has come to pass. It is the right thing, because you decided it was.\n\nAs He rocks back, you make the Thekla Secundus move yourself, because He has just used it, and He will not expect you to mimic Him. His war-sword blocks Worldbreaker inches from the side of His head. His claws are not fast enough to stop the upward scission of your Talon. The tips collapse His thoracic shielding, short out refractor fields with a squeal of air, and shred across His ribs and chest in a shower of sparks and auramite shavings.\n\nLucky. He was lucky. If you'd been a fingertip closer, the Talon would have snapped His ribs like sticks, and punctured His lungs.\n\nIt is wise to remember that you are a new god, and still learning how to be what you are. No one ever told you what it would be like, because no one's ever done it before. That shred of human soul, preserved within you as a memento, is struggling to appreciate the decisions that your theandric will has made. That dissonance is uncomfortable. Tell yourself that the greater, wiser you has made the right choice. No one has told you to do this. No one guided you, or tricked you, or persuaded you. The Old Four who watch you, and lavish you with gifts, never asked for this or compelled you to do it. They barely speak at all. This is your decision.\n\nThe gifts they have supplied allow you a great insight, although you have yet to fully trust it. You still cling too closely to the comfortable human perspectives on which you once relied. You must unlearn them. You are a being of Chaos. You are Chaos. You are everything that power and property allows you to be. You can see the maelstrom nature of Chaos. It has no logic, or sequence, or syntax. There is no reason or unreason, no right or wrong. Chaos allows all things to be, despite their contradictions and incongruities. Chaos permits everything. So when your old self asks if this is what you want, the answer is not yes or no. It can be yes and no. You can long for something and dread it in the same breath. You can want it and loathe it in the same instant. You can love your father and decide to kill Him. You can yearn for His acknowledgement and respect, and resolve that the Emperor must die. These are not incompatible feelings or antithetical ideas.\n\nWithin Chaos, there can be no heresy.\n\nEmbrace Him as He attacks you. Delight in the crime of striking your father, of seeing the blood spurt like sea-spray. Rejoice that He has disowned you. Love His hate and hate His love.\n\nThrow yourself into this deed wholeheartedly. Know no fear. He is the most potent human in the galaxy, by some magnitude, and He comes to your Court at the peak of His powers. Relish the unthinkable. Slay your creator to prove yourself. Accept that you have secretly always wanted to. Victory will win this war, but it will also demonstrate your fitness to rule. The king is dead, long live the king, and with the bloody mark of your hand, you signify it. Your supremacy will be unequivocal. No one tells you what it's like to be a god, but this... this obligation forced on you by your father's arrogance, it provides you with an unparalleled opportunity for self-discovery. This is your proving ground. You will learn how to be a god, fully, by testing your limits and potentials against the only real measure that exists.\n\nJust like your sons, sparring in the practice cages, you will become better, and learn about yourself, and hone your talents, by lethal rehearsal against the only worthy opponent.\n\nHe rotates out of the impact of your Talon, and the pair of you start to circle. He's trying to build a little space and a little motion, as though He intends to fence with you. His sword is at a high guard, shoulder height with the tip aimed at you. His claws are curled in front of His hip, where one would hold the partner dagger for quick parries. He makes a rapid lunge. You sidestep and the blade goes past your ear. He thrusts again, and you turn out from the blade as it misses you a second time.\n\nThe third lunge, which you were expecting, comes at your throat along a centre line. You were anticipating a thrust to the gut, because you remember the compliance of Carthae, where you observed His ploys against the Ewl Wyra Fesh paladins. Two long thrusts at the head to bring the guard up, then a third to run in under at the exposed abdomen. You had slightly lowered your guard in expectation, but He keeps the stroke high. His blade spears through the aegis of your mesial refractors in a strobing shriek, and only the resistance of those puncturing energy skins slows it enough for you to effect a hasty deflection.\n\nSo, the old man is adjusting His tricks because He knows you know them.\n\nYou would have been disappointed if He had made this too easy. But you are also annoyed. He has you on the back foot suddenly, marginally off balance due to the haste of your reflexive deflection. He presses that lapse urgently, now striking with the edge of His blade in hacking sabre-strokes. You try to peel away, taking blows across the side and shoulder that dent your layered pauldrons and slice sheaves of servo-muscle. You manage an inefficient parry with your maul, and then are pushed into esquive. The war-sword turns back the counter-assault of your maul, but His lightning claws have found your chest, and they discharge point-blank.\n\nThe blast hurls you backwards through something. A bulkhead, perhaps. Materia shatters around you like ice. He won't give you a second to recover. He redoubles His assault, the sword lancing at you in a heart-stabbing thrust. He has charged the blade with such power, the ancient runes engraved on its fuller are glowing like stars.\n\nAh, He's good. Magnificent. You had forgotten the brilliance of His technique. It is not your father's power, which is modest compared to your limitless supply. It is what He does with it.\n\nYou manage, just barely, to block His thrust by means of a necromatic shield that bends the sword away into an adjacent plane of the warp. He burns the shield into scorched gossamer with an angry flash of His eyes. His claws lash in to skin your face. You hammer Worldbreaker into the deck, bouncing the debris scattered around you into the air, then, with a nod, hurl it all at Him like a horizontal rockfall. He throws up a talismatic barrier with a deft gesture of His clawed hand, and the psychic ward stops most of it. His sword bats away the larger chunks that tear through the ward, all except one lump the size of an anvil, which cracks against His left pauldron, and knocks Him askew.\n\nHis guard is wide open for a moment. You plunge into that gap with your Talon as straight as daggers. He makes a deflection, slightly unrefined but successful, cracking sparks off your wrist-guard with His blade. That pivots you out of the optimum line of address, so you club into His plastron with the butt of Worldbreaker's haft, jar Him off-step, then let your grip slip to the base and loop the maul at Him with full extension.\n\nHis parry is particularly impressive. He parries your swing with Cthonia. You are on the flat top of a dirty rockcrete parapet above a stagnant spillway. The radioactive glare is as harsh as the stink of the place. He is making His riposte, war-sword glinting in the ionising light. You knock it back, then you pitch ruthless blows at one another as you move along the lip of the decaying bulwark. Did He think that memories of your wretched childhood here would prise open your guard? Manipulation of the psychotecture to wrong-foot you is an impressive trick-\n\nNo. Great gods, this is Cthonia. He hasn't just refashioned the psychoscape of your Court as a makeshift weapon. He has shifted you both across the three dimensions of physical locality, and the fourth of temporal placement. This is Cthonia, the hinterland of the Athonat Exhaustion where the territories of the Catulan and the Justaerin clans meet in dispute. This may be the very day on which you were found.\n\nHe can see your surprise. He pushes in to exploit it. You hammer away a ser"}
{"text":"sive trick-\n\nNo. Great gods, this is Cthonia. He hasn't just refashioned the psychoscape of your Court as a makeshift weapon. He has shifted you both across the three dimensions of physical locality, and the fourth of temporal placement. This is Cthonia, the hinterland of the Athonat Exhaustion where the territories of the Catulan and the Justaerin clans meet in dispute. This may be the very day on which you were found.\n\nHe can see your surprise. He pushes in to exploit it. You hammer away a series of aggressive sword-strokes. In pulling off this trick, He has revealed His understanding of your domain. Not just your Court, but the wider realm of Chaos that inevitably surrounds it. He has grasped that everything, and everywhere, and everywhen, meets here in your isochronal nexus, conjoined by the warp, and thus that everything, and everywhere, and everywhen, is accessible.\n\nIt's not your father's power, it's what He does with it.\n\nYet, for the sake of an impressive parry, He has given away two crucial secrets. First, the true extent of His warpcraft, which means that your psychic duel, already running alongside your physical conflict, must now take precedence.\n\nThe second is His shameless cruelty. Cthonia wasn't a clever parry to avert your hurtling maul. It was a cold-blooded riposte intended to wound you. For reasons you cannot quite determine, your father seems to have no emotional core. Perhaps the damage done to Him as He fought His way through the Vengeful Spirit was more considerable than you thought. Perhaps He is injured more grievously than He appears. Perhaps that is why He seems so cold, and why He refused to acknowledge you, His first-found son.\n\nBut you do possess a vital emotional core, and He knows it, because He gave it to you. And now He seeks, without remorse, to inflict wounds upon it, wounds as deep and critical as a blade to the heart or a hammer to the skull. He seeks to hurt you where the marks will not show, tear you deep inside, stab you through the soul, and bleed you out until you are too weak to defend yourself, and He can finish you.\n\nBy any means necessary, eh? Whatever it takes? This is a low blow, unsporting, a dirty trick. It hasn't worked, of course, because the Athonat Exhaustion simply serves to remind you how far you've come, and what you have achieved. It is amusing to think He believes this causes you any kind of pain.\n\nAnd it tellingly reveals a third truth too. To stoop so low, to attempt something so intentionally callous, your father must be desperate. He is backed into a corner, and He is trying anything and everything to keep you at bay.\n\nYou renew the vigour of your assault. Your maul batters at His plate and refractor fields. The echoes of those impacts ring from the forlorn walls and polluted spoil heaps of your foundling years. He cleaves back with His war-sword, and scythes with His claws.\n\nYou make your riposte. The Himalazia. The roof of the world that was. A fierce blue sky and fiercer cold. He reels from this counter-attack, and you slide together down a steep slope of powder snow, exchanging blows at close quarters. You show Him you can fight as unscrupulously as Him. These are the soaring peaks that His pride will level. Let Him contemplate a lonely death here, unmourned and unmarked, surrounded by the snow-capped emblems of His titanic hubris.\n\nHe does not waver. He maintains His rate, not a hint of gapping in His guard, driving you down the blinding white flank of snow, ice crystals swirling around you like winter breath, His sword seeking your heart, His claws hunting your throat. You stop the blade with Worldbreaker's haft, lunge with your Talon-\n\nHe parries you with Isstvan V, still white-hot and smouldering from your victory. The air is dense with virus smog and organic ash, and the ground beneath your feet is a solid block of fused ceramite like a toppled frieze depicting battle-brothers at war. Perhaps He can illuminate you. How is this supposed to hurt? He did this, not you. This atrocity is His fault, and with your next blow, you show Him why-\n\nMolech. Yes, Molech. Nothing but a festering darkness in which falsehoods whisper and lies breed. There is the faint glimmer of the gate through which He once passed, to make promises He would break, and to steal a fire that He would covet for Himself. Here is the stink of true betrayal, of old gods antagonised by a solemn pact dishonoured, of secret truths and dreadful insights that, in defiance of all reason, will never be shared with the sons who love Him.\n\nThis is the birthplace of all deceit. From this source came all the fundamental doctrines He should have taught to you and your brothers, the knowledge that would have fortified you, and protected you, and allowed you to build an interstellar culture on solid foundations.\n\nHe taught you nothing. He let you go out among the stars ignorant and vulnerable. This place, more than any other, epitomises the toxic privacy that has dominated His behaviour, the selfish, acquisitive greed, and the abject lack of trust He has shown to His own flesh and blood.\n\nTo you.\n\nHe names you betrayer. He declares you traitor. He believes your dissent is heresy, but heresy requires a truth to oppose. Hypocrite! The truth was here all along, but He kept it from you. This darkness is a testament to His obsessive, hermetic indifference. He betrayed you and your siblings and your sons. The fire was meant to be shared. Instead, He used it to ignite a war.\n\nHe let the galaxy burn.\n\nMolech seems to shake Him like a solid body blow. As His guard slips, you block His sword and spear Him to the core with a beam of bloodlight that lances from the unblinking eye on your chestplate. He writhes on that skewer of red rage. It has punctured His soul and amputated nine hundred years of His life. You keep Him pinned with the beam, still bleeding years in an arterial torrent, and you open your Talon, raking Him with incandescent lightning. The lightning, drawn from the deepest storms of the empyrean, fries His flesh and roasts Him alive. His agony is profound. He tries to tear free, but neither the bloodlight nor the lightning will let Him go. You increase the fury of both.\n\nThey destroy Him.\n\nHe explodes in a cloud of white ash.\n\nNothing remains but silence.\n\nYou step forward. Some of the ash drifts back across you, dusting the contours of your war plate. Nothing remains except a patch of vitrified ground.\n\nAre you done? It can't be that easy.\n\nYou unfurl your mindsight and survey the intermingled territories of your realm.\n\nAh yes, not done at all. Across the planes and layers of your Day of Days, the propagating duels of your psychomachia are still raging. On Isstvan V, you are cracking His golden plate with Worldbreaker as He sears you with wild bolts of immaterial power. In the lost Himalazia, He pursues you down a sheer incline of green ice and black rock, lacerating your face with His relentless war-sword. In the abandoned workings beneath Athonat Exhaustion, you hang back and mind-goad mobs of Catulan, Justaerin and Helleborae gangers to swarm Him in a blitz-attack. White fire blazes from His irritated eyes as He blinks one to atoms. Then He blinks again, and annihilates the rest in a swathe of flame.\n\nYou behold them all, every facet of this psychic duel, occurring simultaneously. In some, like Mohenjo-Daro, where you spill His blood on the mound where that great city is yet to be built, or Kasr Undak on Cadia, where you pin Him to a noctilith pylon with your Talon, you are clearly winning. In others, like Gorro scrapworld, where He herds a Waaagh! of xenos brutes with His will to rend you limb from limb, or Tizca, where a spark from His mind has just set you on fire, He has the upper hand.\n\nIn others, like the Court, where you still slug it out, hand-to-hand, or the mirror-finished Field of Triumph on Ullanor, where you both stand frozen, face to face, your minds locked in furiously silent thoughtwar, the contest remains in the balance, and the outcome undecided.\n\nHere, on Molech, you have simply concluded one bout. You have killed but a piece of Him.\n\nExcept there, and there... Those bright spots on the ground. Splashes of the years you bled out of Him, coagulating puddles of days and droplets of hours. The trail leads away. Not dead. Not dead, after all. He merely sacrificed an aspect to end His agony and cover His escape.\n\nYou follow that trail, picking up speed. Spatters of His life-loss drip from the black rocks and quiver on the dirt like beads of mercury. He is wounded, hurt, haemorrhaging years in grisly quantities. If you had spilled so much lifetime, you would be dead, but lifetime is the only thing He has more of than you do.\n\nHe will be weak, though, dizzy, close to bleeding out unless He can tourniquet His leaking soul. Where does the trail lead? To the left, into the burned desolation of Macragge? No, the right-\n\nYou unfold yourself, and step into New Byzantium, just before the Panpacific annexation. The speckled trail leads into an echoing stretch of Calth's Underworld, then doubles back into the hull-wreck wastes of Tallarn, where you struggle to detect it in the blowing dust. You persevere, and track on between wind-blown longhouses on an island off pre-Strife Albia, where frightened faces watch you from behind rush shutters. The traces are clearer here, marking the grass. He hasn't been able to staunch the flow. How is He still standing? You see a wet handprint on a standing stone where He leaned to catch His breath.\n\nYou step into a longhouse, and into another facet. Crusade-era Davin. You look around the dim stone chamber, and bring Worldbreaker up. He will turn here, surely? This is a good place for an ambush, for the name itself has intrinsic power over you.\n\nBut no. Nothing. So you pull aside a curtain, and step into the rose-red colonnade of a Selenar compound on Luna. The fine chalcedony arcade is bathed in Earth-light and utterly silent. When is this? Be"}
{"text":"ing stone where He leaned to catch His breath.\n\nYou step into a longhouse, and into another facet. Crusade-era Davin. You look around the dim stone chamber, and bring Worldbreaker up. He will turn here, surely? This is a good place for an ambush, for the name itself has intrinsic power over you.\n\nBut no. Nothing. So you pull aside a curtain, and step into the rose-red colonnade of a Selenar compound on Luna. The fine chalcedony arcade is bathed in Earth-light and utterly silent. When is this? Before Unification? It doesn't matter. You-\n\nHe fells you from behind with a thought-blast, and as you roll and try to get up, He lifts you in a telekine vice and puts you through the colonnade wall. Quartz shatters. You land hard. Not so weak, then. Not so hurt.\n\nHe leaps at you through the hole torn in the wall, His war-sword swooping down. He nearly takes your arm off. You block His follow-up stroke with the head of your maul, and lash at Him with your Talon. He evades. His eyes light up, projecting twin beams of phosphorescent light that burn into your chest and slide you backwards across the quartz-littered floor until you ignite the eye on your breastplate and counter His power with some of your own. Your stream of roaring bloodlight entangles with His beams of white mindfire. Where they touch, the energies conflict in a vortical lesion where materia screams, and immateria bubbles and deforms. You take a step forward, driving your energy against His. He holds His ground, braced. You take another pace. The pitch of the energy scream increases.\n\nAnother step. The howling intensity reaches critical. A swathe of the immaterial fabric between you both annihilates, and the realspace threads woven through it explode. The shock-pulse knocks Him backwards, and shatters the facet of Luna around you. The violent fractal shift leaves you both in a dank, nameless cavern somewhere, with the fireball of the conflagration still dissipating between you.\n\nYou charge through those flames, maul raised. He throws another thought-blast at you to drive you back, but it's poorly formed and merely grazes off your shields. Worldbreaker puts a sizzling dent in His refractors, so deep His ailing reactor surely cannot maintain function much longer.\n\nHe drives His war-sword through your left shoulder. You smack Him aside with your maul. His sword is wrenched out of you as He spins away, blood trailing from the fuller. Each impact is luring odd echoes out of the acoustics of the old cave, echoes that swim around the natural calcite columns, the dripping stone arches, and the crude handprints on the dim walls.\n\nHe turns, head low, and applies a stunning sequence of sword-strokes that He must surely have been taught by an aeldari autarch. You struggle to hold guard. You can't get past their lethal precision.\n\nYou need room to move. You are not limited by the four dimensions of materia. You have the numberless angles of the empyrean at your command.\n\nYou concoct an occulting aegis, and dodge sideways along the Twelfth Intersection of the Immaterial, weaving between thorn trees in the malnourished light to outflank Him. He sees you coming in His peripheral mindsight, and takes guard with His sword across the Sixty-sixth Oblique where the skull-coloured moon never sets, while carving some radiant sigil on the air with His claws, and propelling it at you along the Vale of Creatures, where barking, demented things writhe around you. You smash the screaming sigil with your maul before it touches you. It shatters like dry clay, and you smell the stink of Sigillite magic. Such feeble technique - the damned Sigillites were only ever dabblers, their amateur warpcraft unfit for full manipulation of the etheric.\n\nBut it was a decoy. The spearing fingers of His lightning claw splay wide and are, for an instant, webbed with squirming voltaics. Then the accumulated charge erupts from His palm and forks towards you. The jagged bolt strikes you, and you feel its fire in your marrow. You are thrown against a limestone pillar, smoke and agony broiling off you in equal measure. His sword flashes down to decapitate you.\n\nA killing cut, and a perfect one. You recognise it. It is exactly the peerless execution stroke that Sanguinius tried to deliver. Your father is showing you the tricks He taught His other son.\n\nNo matter.\n\nThe war-sword cuts the limestone as easily as a human throat. You have drawn realspace aside like a curtain and rolled out of the way. You drop from the ancient limestone cavern into an adjacent layer of the warp's fluid territories. You land on your feet and compose yourself, your limbs still aching from the touch of His lightning. You look around. You need to find a better facet in which to make a stand. You cross the keening Gulf of Lament, leaping along a long, narrow bridge of living flesh that throbs with febrile neuroplasticity and spans a bottomless aeonic pit.\n\nBut He has followed you, unfolding materia to pursue you across the interstices of dimensions to the brazen, screaming steps of the Bastion Stair in the realm of the red. He can track you somehow, catching your scent despite your efforts to ascend the rippling steps and evade through the Mists of Unreason, and then across the bleak plateau of the Blizzard of Forgetting.\n\nHe is drawing on all His gifts, many of them gifts He passed on to His sons. High below you, He is a bloodstained magician transfixing you with His baleful eye so that no pleat of reality can conceal you. A salvo of fireballs bursts from that malefic eye and they fly at you like blazing meteorites along every axis of the infinite planes. They are closing in on you, and will strike simultaneously. You cast a copy of yourself out of old shadows for them to target, and escape the ferocious detonation through a dilating gate of black bone that deposits you behind Him.\n\nThen you cave in the back of His head with Worldbreaker.\n\nBut He has channelled the purest cunning. You have killed nothing more than a warpflux simulacrum, an effigy to draw you in. A false twin.\n\nThe real Him is deep above you, closing fast. You dart away into the Crook of Shadows, that dingy, slanting subdimension where nothing is upright and everything is corners. He is a hound at your heels, a loping wolf. He has assumed a lycanthropic aspect, and He has your spoor. His sword is an executioner's axe, His canines long, and He drags winter behind Him like a pelt.\n\nYou have no patience for such brute wrath, so you quickly weave a labyrinth to delay Him. As the wolf slows, confounded, you tie the labyrinth back upon itself to confuse Him, and remove its exits to entrap Him. How bitterly apt that He draws upon these atavistic qualities to gain advantage. They are old, tired traits He perfected long ago.\n\nYou, however, have changed and grown. Grown beyond Him. Your desire to walk down this path of glory, to achieve more than Him, to surpass Him and supersede Him, is a clear demonstration of your intent to reject His musty legacy. Others, your rivals, even your allies, have blamed this growth on your arrogance, on your pride. On envy, even. They've said it so much and so often, you've begun to believe it yourself.\n\nBut it's not true. You have done all you have done to escape His shadow. To be yourself, rather than a pale and lesser imitation. You are not some mewling by-blow infant, dumbly trying to copy everything its father does. You are not part of Him.\n\nEverything you have achieved, from the unravelling of the Imperium, to the compliance of Terra and the overthrow of His Great Plan, you have done to validate your worth. And now, your absolute mastery of Chaos proves it, because that is something He either couldn't do, or feared to even try.\n\nYou are Horus Lupercal, ascendant instrument of Chaos. That accomplishment alone proves you are no puppet or inferior copy. You used to be afraid of His power. Now His power is but a drop in your ocean.\n\nYou hear stone splintering and walls collapsing. He has taken the aspect of the great architect, and drawn a plan to escape your labyrinth, discerning the infinitesimal weaknesses where walls meet. He has taken the aspect of an obliterator, and broken through that weakness with etheric siege engines. He has taken the aspect of a swift and clever raven through the salt-caked and asymmetric chambers of the Drifting Castle, and the aspect of the steppe horseman to harness that raven's speed into fluid motion that shifts Him from the Eightieth Conjunction to the fever-meadows of Long Woe, and then around the vast and root-gnarled base of the towering Tree of Souls, to disguise His indirect route of attack.\n\nHe has taken on the predatory guile of a lion to hunt you along the wild shores of the Sea of Souls, and the fearless certainty of an avenging son to deliver final illumination.\n\nHe has a dynasty of aspects to draw upon, a bloodline of faces and meanings and talents.\n\nWhat He can do, you can do better, because you can do anything. You take refuge in the mildewed Marcher Fortress that watches the stained margins of the Planes of Excess, and there take the aspect of terror, and flood the dark approaches of the Marches with dread, to slow His advance by creating a soulless tract of ice on which He will fear to tread. You close the living earth around you, forging tectonic bulwarks and walls of impassable furnace flame. You infect the rusted gates and the creaking sails of windmills with contagious sigils that buzz with crawling flies and reek of decomposition, that will communicate wasting death to any who look upon them. From the hymnals of the Neverborn, you take sonorous litanies, and sow their words across every angle. Your father will not abide a single syllable of those antiphonic chants. They will drive Him back. They will drive Him mad.\n\nYou nail a gladiator's agony into your heart, to gird yourself with its unquenchable rage. You now have the purest fury of all with which to greet Him.\n\nYou wait, simmering. Just"}
{"text":"ies and reek of decomposition, that will communicate wasting death to any who look upon them. From the hymnals of the Neverborn, you take sonorous litanies, and sow their words across every angle. Your father will not abide a single syllable of those antiphonic chants. They will drive Him back. They will drive Him mad.\n\nYou nail a gladiator's agony into your heart, to gird yourself with its unquenchable rage. You now have the purest fury of all with which to greet Him.\n\nYou wait, simmering. Just for good measure, you ready your execution stroke.\n\nYou wait.\n\nYou wait.\n\nYour rage begins to cool. You wonder if you really need it. Do you need any of it? The flaming bulwark walls, the venerating litanies, the crucifying rage, the flyblown sigils of mortality? Surely you don't? You are Horus Lupercal. You have vowed to be your own man, and prove your own worth. You are not some chimerical combination of other souls. You don't need that. That's what your father does, and you despise His methods.\n\nDon't be like Him.\n\nListen, the greatest satisfaction will come from beating Him as you. Think of it. Think of the pleasure that will bring you, the sweet, satiating delight of victory on your terms. You see? You can't deny it. That's what you want. That's what you crave.\n\nYou let the aspects slip away. You let the walls subside and the sigils expire. You silence the liturgical voices and let go of the rage.\n\nYou want to meet Him as yourself. The lingering satisfaction of-\n\nToo late, you realise that He has taken the aspect of the seducer and neutered your defences with cloying temptation and indecency. Your father is a master of the aspects. He is, and always has been, an entire arcana. He has outplayed you.\n\nSo you change the game.\n\nThere is no time to prepare. He's almost on you. You know another arcana, and it's one that will distract Him, because it has always obsessed Him. As He bursts in on you, a brutal iron fist with overwhelming strength, you draw your hand up to meet Him.\n\nYour opening hand. Just three cards in a classically simple Trionti spread.\n\nThe High Priest, still zealous despite his long exile, to curse your father's blood. Then The Crone, gibbering and milk-eyed, to entangle your father's mind with rancid, meaningless prophecies. Then The Silver Door, to shut Him out.\n\nYou have never set much store by cartomancy, but you are quite familiar with the tarot's symbols and their significances. The cards always seemed to you an imprecise method, the mummery of Sigillites and warlocks, sometimes effective in divination, but always so vague in their elastic meanings, and thus largely unreliable.\n\nNow you have ascended as a psychic initiate, you have a new and ardent appreciation of their empyric function. They are sigils of imagination. Binding intuitive, non-verbal definitions to archetypes of the cosmos, the cards are a high and arcane art, capable of subtle interaction and piercing precognitive effect.\n\nBut here in your realm, awash with the warp, their symbology goes beyond mere precognition. Rather than interpreting outcomes, they can set them. They can determine the user's desired effect, and then manifest the cause to produce it. They are spurs to impel destiny to obey your will.\n\nYour father has always been preoccupied with the cartomantic art. He constructed His own deck. You wonder if He has ever tried a reading in the warp.\n\nYou play Him at His own game.\n\nIn shock, He tries to disengage from the sticky cobweb of your opening spread. From His own deck, the grandiose Imperial Tarot, no less, He turns The Pilgrim, and utilises its questing agency to discern a path around the door you have locked in His face. A true pilgrim, in her devotion, will always reach the place she is supposed to be, no matter the length of the road, or the hardships of the journey.\n\nYou aggravate those hardships. You lay The Hulk of the major arcana across The Silver Door, and imprison Him in its lightless ruin. He has overcome The Hulk already, in His gruelling progress through the flagship to reach you, so you know full well it will not delay Him long a second time. But moments are enough for you to turn The Galaxy, to stretch distance between you, and The Shatter'd World to burn all His hope.\n\nHe reads the mutilation of the Throneworld and gasps in despair. In His deck, the psychoreactive wafers of The Familia Humana, The Great Hoste and The Lords of Terra burst into flames. You can smell His grief. He chokes as your spread forces Him to drink the dust of a vanquished planet. To twist that knife, you turn the more ambitious Antagonis spread: The Justiciar to weigh and punish His crimes, The Maison Dieu to reinforce your Court and purify the righteousness of your dispute against Him, The Mond Primitif to bleed more centuries from His wounded soul and sap His perpetual vigour, and The Lord of Swords to arm yourself.\n\nHis desperation increases. Some of these archetypes are old or obscure, and do not appear in His prized deck, so He has no counterparts to lay against them, to subvert them. He divines the danger He is in. He turns another card face up. He becomes The Fortress of Faith, impervious. You become The Lightning Tower to tear the fortress down. He quickly draws the wild card The Harlequin to choreograph an escape from that fiery fate. Its dance is lithe and acrobatic, but it barely carries Him clear of the plummeting stonework.\n\nHe lands like a felid, drops to a crouch, and counters with a warding hand, the Peerpoint spread, all symbols of concordia. The Battleship for positive control of power, The Rogue Trader to harness luck and anchor favourable fortune, and Astarte for protection.\n\nYou respond with discordia, and discard His careful spread. You lay The Daemon inverted across The Battleship, and His power ebbs. Then you lay The Daemon inverted across The Rogue Trader, and His luck runs out. Then you lay The Daemon inverted, across Astarte, and His protection is lost.\n\nYou have made a deck of your own. While you waited in the Court for Him to arrive, you had time on your hands, all the time you wanted. You constructed this Empyreal Tarot by hand, while the Old Four whispered suggestions for the images that might appear on the psychoreactive wafers. No two decks are the same. Yours is full of daemons.\n\nYou lay more of them. A double Peerpoint spread. Then a spread askew across them, in the style known as Mortalite. Ranks of The Daemon, marching side by side. Cards burn in His hands, consumed before He can lay them. You turn the Eight of Pentacles, and they scourge Him from all angles. You turn The Revenger to guard your back, and The Occulted Orphan to blind His mindsight and signify the final severance of your blood from His. He looks aghast. You turn, just for the fun of it, The Dark King to remind Him of His hideous overreach and fatal ambition. He recoils from it, unwilling to even look at it, and tries The Assassin to strike at you. But The Revenger is waiting, and runs The Assassin through.\n\nYour Exterminatus cancels His Illumination. His Aquila and Knight of Concordia, along with His The Magos, are engulfed in the purgation of your Neverness. Your Dreadful Sagittary slays His Steadfast Angel for a second time.\n\nIt is not your father's power, it's what He does with it. And He can do nothing. He is the beginner here, the amateur, and He has no control over the few cards remaining in His hand.\n\nHe understands that the cards have turned against Him. He decides to flee from the tangible destiny that you have spread before Him, and which you fully control. He starts to hammer upon The Silver Door to find a way out.\n\nThus far, you have each made turns on face value, employing the simplest and most literal interpretations. But the cards have deeper, subtler meanings, most not obvious to a novice like Him. Death, for example, that ominous card, is seldom death, but rather represents a more general negation or ending. The Ragged Fool is often far from foolishness and whimsy, but signifies a seeking innocence or even a purity of trust.\n\nThe same is true of the next wafer you select. You turn a card, Despoiler.\n\nLike Death, it is an apparently sinister card, and many fear it, but in truth it manifests a singularly neutral and controlled power. Its iconography represents an abrupt shift, a sudden and unforeseen reversal of fortune. Imperial readers usually perceive this to be a drastic change to the detriment of the Imperium. But it is only that if you want it to be.\n\nYou want it to be. You make it your emblem.\n\nYou lay it, askew, across The Silver Door. Despoiler unlocks that door very suddenly as He tries to break through it. You are face to face.\n\nWorldbreaker catches Him in the throat and cheek, twists His head sideways in a spray of blood, and drops Him to the deck.\n\nHis cards spill around Him. There are only a few of them left, the other wafers burned. You see The Guardsman, The Throne, The Space Marine, The Knight of Mandatio, The Lantern and Revelation. A weak reading, of ill fortune, and in disarray.\n\nLittle good will it do Him. The Emperor must die.\n\nPART TEN\n\nHERE IS WHERE IT WILL END\n\n10:i\n\nNever too late\n\nNo matter how many times he sorts the cards, the sorcerer keeps getting the same reading. The darkness of the collection has drawn in so tight, it feels as though the four of them are occupying a small tent of night's blackness, lit by the single light above the table. Even that is beginning to fade. The rest of the collection is lost from view, if it is even still there at all.\n\nThey gather around the reading table and watch. Since he turned Despoiler, Ahriman has assayed a variety of spreads: the Leonormal, the Peerpoint, Zeeker's, the Trionti, Mortaliti, the Roche Exegesis, along with a number of more abstract schemes that lack recognisable symmetry or pattern, and don't seem deliberate at all.\n\nEach time, the result is identical.\n\nThe Daemon, The Daemon, The Daemon, The Daemon...\n\n'Why this repetition?' Sind"}
{"text":"ction is lost from view, if it is even still there at all.\n\nThey gather around the reading table and watch. Since he turned Despoiler, Ahriman has assayed a variety of spreads: the Leonormal, the Peerpoint, Zeeker's, the Trionti, Mortaliti, the Roche Exegesis, along with a number of more abstract schemes that lack recognisable symmetry or pattern, and don't seem deliberate at all.\n\nEach time, the result is identical.\n\nThe Daemon, The Daemon, The Daemon, The Daemon...\n\n'Why this repetition?' Sindermann asks. He pulls in the only other chair, and tentatively sits facing Ahriman, staring at the cards as they turn. Fear still clings to him, both fear of the Prosperine warlock and of their plight in general, but it has been tempered by intent academic curiosity.\n\n'Because that is all there is to read, Kyril Sindermann,' Ahriman replies, his voice a soft hiss.\n\n'This is not something you're doing?'\n\n'Of course not. Why would you think so?'\n\n'Because you've made your cards perform all manner of tricks,' Sindermann replies. He reaches out to touch one of the cards.\n\n'Don't,' says Ahriman.\n\n'Will it disturb the reading?' Sindermann asks, glancing up at Ahriman as he anxiously withdraws his hand.\n\n'You'll die,' replies Ahriman. His skull gleams beneath the ghost of his flesh.\n\nSindermann swallows and nods.\n\n'B-but if the reading is changing the cards... How does that work?' Sindermann asks, shaken by his unwitting brush with death. 'These wafers are objective tools of analysis. What they read may change. But why does what they read change them?'\n\n'It is a little late in the life of your civilisation to start learning such things,' Ahriman responds, shuffling again.\n\n'It's never too late,' Sindermann insists.\n\nAhriman shrugs. His eyes glow like blue lamps in the deep sockets of his skull.\n\n'Well then,' he says. 'We are within the warp, and within the warp, there is no linear sequence. No before and after. Effect can prompt cause. What is being read can determine its reading.'\n\nHe draws again.\n\n'Is this true of all... things in the warp?' Mauer asks nervously, unwilling to say the word.\n\nStaring down at another spread of The Daemon, Ahriman nods.\n\n'Crudely, yes,' he says. 'From a material, linear perspective, a daemon may die long before it is born. It is a loop, an eddy, an ouroboros cycle, that is alive and unliving simultaneously.'\n\n'How is a daemon born?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'I th-thought you wanted to know how to k-kill one?' the archivist murmurs at his shoulder.\n\n'That too.' Sindermann nods. He looks across the table at the sorcerer. 'So?'\n\n'What you refer to as a daemon, Kyril Sindermann, is in fact...' Ahriman trails off. 'I'll keep it simple. Daemons are not born. Not ever. But they start, and sometimes end. In layman's terms, the Neverborn are vibrations of immateria, a small part of the aeternal whole suddenly given focus and discernible form in response to a negative material event. A death, for instance. An ending. An infamy. A massacre. Grief. Pain... Anything that emanates a fiercely adverse emotional vibration.'\n\n'A murder here creates a daemon there?' Sindermann asks.\n\n'We are all there currently, but yes. A powerful, violent occurrence in realspace produces a reactive coalescence in the warp. Like a small flask of lead lifted from a molten mass and suddenly cast and cooled into a solid form. And the more violent, abrupt and heinous the crime, the stronger the reciprocal formation. The most powerful Neverborn are often the product of something unnecessary, something especially cruel or vindictive. What you might consider unexpected, or shockingly wrong, breeds the foulest echoes.'\n\n'So, an outrage? An atrocious act?' asks Mauer in a whisper.\n\n'Indeed.'\n\n'So what is happening here?' asks Sindermann, gesturing towards the latest spread, but careful not to touch the wafers.\n\n'It would seem,' the sorcerer replies, 'something quite inhumanly wicked.'\n\n10:ii\n\nThe captain and the Praetorian\n\nSomehow, Constantin keeps going. He keeps walking and not dying. Dorn has never known a man so grievously injured stay upright, let alone walk, but then he has never known a man like the captain-general.\n\nIn fact, Dorn reflects, he has never really known Valdor at all. Not him, nor any of his illustrious Legio. They are a breed apart, born of a different tradition and different technologies, products of a different age. Though their aims and loyalties mesh with those of Dorn, his brothers and their sons, the warriors of the Legio Custodes are a different lineage entirely. They are the last and greatest warriors of their time, the martial pinnacle of the Unification Era, now eclipsed by the new epoch of primarchs and gene-sons.\n\nDorn knows there is old rancour there. There always has been. Constantin, with his eternally saturnine disposition, has never even tried to disguise his feelings towards the primarch sons and their Astartes offspring. It's not jealousy, or even resentment. It's doubt, a grave uncertainty, a wary lack of faith in the new instruments that have been fashioned to supplant his kind.\n\nThrone knows, this war has proven those doubts correct.\n\nConstantin has never questioned his king's decision to establish the primacy of Dorn and his brothers. He never would, but only, Dorn believes, because Constantin's loyalty is forged from quite different materials. The loyalty of the primarchs and the Astartes was a blood loyalty, visceral and primal, passionate and tempestuous. It was a loyalty that could conquer the galaxy, but it was also emotional and volatile.\n\nOh, how volatile.\n\nThe loyalty of the Legio Custodes has always been a different mettle. It is as cold and permanent as adamantine. There is fury in it, but no unstable passion. It is silent and unquestioning. Dorn believes that Constantin has never questioned his king's decision to enact the supremacy of the primarchs, because Constantin doesn't know how to question. The ability to do so was never wired into him, a consequence of a particular brand of loyalty that he was armed with. Merely to question would be alien to his innate character.\n\nDorn does know him, of course. They have worked closely, fought shoulder to shoulder, trusted each other. During the siege, they were two of the handful that kept the Palace whole. Dorn likes to think that he, of all the primarch sons, has earned Constantin's grudging respect, and that, of all the primarch sons, his character is the most closely aligned to Constantin's unyielding loyalty. They would die for each other.\n\nBut they are not close. They are not friends. They do not share the bond, however volatile, of brothers. They are, at best, inevitable comrades.\n\nDorn wonders if Constantin, or any of the Custodes, are even capable of being close to another person. He suspects that friendship, like the capacity to question, is simply extraneous to them, incompatible with their frame of being.\n\nEven so, they would die for each other. In the next short while, they undoubtedly will.\n\nDorn tries to shake off these thoughts. He knows he is helplessly dwelling in the past. Those centuries of isolation in the red desert forced his mind to circle ever inwards upon itself, like the concentric walls of a keep or the loops of some maze without entrance or exit, obsessing over what had been, for the memory of what had been was the only thing he had left. Now he can't break free of those recursive thoughts. It is as if the bitter hail of the past assails him, the moments lost and the chances missed, rather than the teeth of this biting gale.\n\nBut this gale is a neverness storm, of unparalleled wrath. It probably is the past, for time has been cut loose from its moorings. It feels like the actual past, transmuted to elemental fury, unleashed to assault him.\n\nHe has no idea how much ground they have covered. Visibility is almost nothing. From the steep and ragged incline of the terrain, he believes they have skirted the end of the fallen orbital plate and are now ascending the ridge of broken rock, the rim of the crater that the vast tonnage of the orbital plate made when it impacted.\n\nThey have left the battle, the raging insanity, behind them.\n\nBut progress is slow. The rocks are steep, loose and treacherous. The tempest is in their faces, driving rain at them. And Constantin is too badly mauled to move at any speed.\n\nHe is limping at Dorn's heels, using his spear as a staff to support him. The manner of this painfully reminds Dorn of the Sigillite and his clacking, halting progress around the Throne Room. Another melancholy memory.\n\nSeveral times, Dorn turns to offer Constantin his hand, or support the captain-general over some especially stubborn obstacle. Every time he does, Constantin shakes him off, or fixes him with a scowl of such contempt that Dorn withdraws his hand.\n\n'Damn you!'\n\n'You're hurt. Let me help you.'\n\n'Damn your help.'\n\nBy Dorn's estimation, they are slowly closing on the crest of the ridge. The higher they scramble, the stronger the assault of the storm whipping over the rim. There is nothing to see, except pelting rain, black rock and billowing vapour. There is nothing to see except the storm.\n\nBut that's enough. A target to aim for, a cross to mark their destination. The main body of the storm's formation, an atmospheric monster so low it threatens to crush the land, is a colossal black vortex of circling cloud. The heart of that whirlpool, the baleful eye, is strung with lightning, a flashing, sparking marker they can fix on in the murk. Valdor has decided that it is the place. That eye marks the site of his king's last stand. Dorn believes it too. If the rain streaming off his plate is truly the past, then it echoes with his father's voice.\n\nDorn hears a sound behind him, a clatter and slither of rocks. He turns in time to see Constantin overbalancing, pitching backwards as washed-out stone gives way and he loses his footing.\n\nDorn reaches out instinctively. He grabs Constantin's wrist and prevents a fall tha"}
{"text":"ix on in the murk. Valdor has decided that it is the place. That eye marks the site of his king's last stand. Dorn believes it too. If the rain streaming off his plate is truly the past, then it echoes with his father's voice.\n\nDorn hears a sound behind him, a clatter and slither of rocks. He turns in time to see Constantin overbalancing, pitching backwards as washed-out stone gives way and he loses his footing.\n\nDorn reaches out instinctively. He grabs Constantin's wrist and prevents a fall that, at the very least, would have compounded the captain-general's already critical injuries.\n\nThis time, Constantin does not shake him off. Dorn hauls him up the vicious incline onto more stable rock. They cower together for a moment in the lee of a heavy boulder, shielded from the brunt of the gale. Torrents of rainwater stream and splash down the slope on either side of them.\n\n'Stay here,' Dorn says.\n\n'Damn you.'\n\n'Stay here, Constantin. You're hurt.'\n\n'Damn you, seventh son.'\n\nDorn glares at him. He doesn't know why Constantin's prodigious metabolism isn't healing him faster. Has it ceased to function in this un-place of un-time, or is he actually hurt so severely it has overwhelmed his body's capacity to repair itself?\n\n'Just stay here and gather your wits while I scout ahead,' Dorn exclaims over the shriek of the storm. 'I'll go to the crest of the ridge, and see what's beyond. I'll come back-'\n\n'Damn you,' Constantin snorts. 'I can walk.' The pallor of his face and the pain in his eyes suggest he cannot.\n\n'Constantin-'\n\n'I'm not going to retire from the field, Praetorian. Not now. Damn you.'\n\nThey stare at each other.\n\n'Very well, captain-general.'\n\nDorn gets to his feet. He offers his hand to Valdor. Valdor regards it with scorn for a moment, as though considering how best to sever it. Then he clasps it and permits Dorn to hoist him up.\n\nOnce upright, Valdor pushes on ahead, levering his way on his spear, leaving Dorn behind.\n\n'Damn you too,' Dorn yells after him, and struggles to follow.\n\nAt the crest of the ridge, the gale is so intense, they are barely able to crawl over the rock.\n\nBut on the far side, there is an abrupt calm.\n\nThe storm still howls above them. Rain patters on the rocks, and they are buffeted by the wind. But the far side of the ridge seems to lead down into the eerie stillness beneath the storm's eye, as though the broken ridgeline and the high ground around them is lifting the storm's force away, like a lid, preventing it from scouring the land beneath.\n\nThey pick their way down the far slope. They are overlooking a vast depression, a basin as wide, grey and profound as a lunar sea. It is encircled by a crown of glowering rocks, and capped by the screaming spiral of the neverness storm.\n\nThe slope becomes shallower, and turns into scree and a tumbled boulder field. The light is fulminous and yellow, a weird and sickly cast streaked by the rain. There is something out in the centre of the basin, a structure protruding from the ground several kilometres away, directly beneath the lightning-ribboned eye of the cyclone.\n\nThey make their way towards it. Vapour fumes like mist. From a distance, the structure looks like a ruined bastion, like Hasgard or Gorgon Bar, or a tower felled by lightning. Then Dorn begins to understand what he's looking at.\n\nIt is the upper decks and bridge levels of a battleship's stern castle. Decayed and dilapidated, the grim carcass is jutting from the grey mire, drunkenly askew, like the unsubmerged portion of a ship foundered in an ocean swell. The huge shape, a monolith of neglect, is surrounded by a necklace of ruins, and a wide, washed-up litter of debris. Bright lightning forks down at the towering wreck out of the storm's maelstrom eye above, each flash a shivering artillery boom, and wreathes the upper turrets, broken antennae arrays and shield masts in luminous garlands of corposant.\n\n'Gloriana class,' mutters Dorn. 'The Vengeful Spirit.'\n\n'Just a part we can see,' murmurs Constantin, limping up beside him and leaning on his spear to look.\n\nDorn glances at him.\n\n'This is all the Vengeful Spirit,' Valdor says. 'This place. All of it. It is. And it isn't.'\n\nHe pauses.\n\n'That's just a part we're allowed to see,' he says, as though everything he has just said makes perfect sense. Dorn is disquieted to realise it does.\n\n'Allowed?' asks Dorn.\n\n'Able, then,' Constantin replies. He shrugs. 'And that's where we go.'\n\nDorn realises he can hear something. Not the painful crack of the lightning, or the drizzle of the rain, not the rush of the wind across the basin or the deep howl of the storm above. He can hear... Impacts. Metal striking metal. Weapon against plate. The steady, studied syncopation of intense combat.\n\nIt's very distant.\n\nValdor lifts his spear and starts to walk towards the ship unassisted. He glances over his shoulder at the ridge they descended. Dorn knows what he's looking for, what he hopes to see.\n\n'Will they come?' Dorn asks. 'Your men. Will they-'\n\n'If any of them are still alive,' replies Constantin, 'they will come this way. Coros and the others, any of them. I gave them my directive. They know where to come.'\n\n'Do you... sense them?' asks Dorn.\n\nConstantin shakes his head. He looks at Dorn, wary.\n\n'You have not spoken about the Blood Angels, seventh son,' he says.\n\n'No,' says Dorn.\n\n'Any idea...?'\n\n'None at all,' says Dorn. 'Whatever had befallen the brothers of the Ninth, whatever horror...' He pauses, chilled by the memory. 'To see Raldoron like that. I don't know. Perhaps the treason of Chaos has taken them too. But it seemed more like-'\n\n'Vengeance,' says Constantin quickly. 'Rage.'\n\nDorn nods. A rage so great and inconceivable, it had turned them into monsters.\n\n'I think maybe so, Constantin,' he replies. 'A rage fuelled by the extremity of loss.'\n\nHe looks at Valdor.\n\n'Sanguinius is dead,' he says.\n\nValdor doesn't answer. His chin moves pugnaciously, as though he is chewing a word.\n\n'My brother is dead,' says Dorn, 'killed by my brother. By Lupercal.'\n\n'How do you know this?' Valdor asks quietly.\n\n'I was told it,' says Dorn. 'I believe it. And if Raldoron and his kin felt it... and I fear they must have, then...'\n\nValdor nods, then looks away at the distant ridge.\n\n'So,' says Dorn. He raises Diamantis' blade and looks at it. 'This, I will take to that hulk, and this, I will bury in my brother's heart.'\n\nHe starts to walk again.\n\n'He was...' Valdor begins.\n\nDorn stops, and looks back at him.\n\n'I had time for him,' says Valdor. 'For Sanguinius. He was... I could not help but like him, Rogal, though I tried my best not to.' He looks at Dorn, and manages a grim half-smile. 'As I do with most of your lot.'\n\nDorn nods. 'A fine requiem. From you.'\n\nThey walk another kilometre or so, and reach the edge of the debris field surrounding the vast wreck. There are ruins here too, nameless stone forms and half-buried arches pushing up out of the rain-soaked clay. They advance.\n\nSomething shifts ahead of them. A pair of wide, stone arches, their tops barely visible above the clay, stir. Then they start to rise, dripping, rippling the wet clay as they suck and slide from its embrace.\n\nThey are not stone, and they are not arches. When they rise clear of the sodden ground, they are revealed as long, wide horns, recurved and down-tipped like those of an auroch. They are each five metres long. They sprout, symmetrically, from the low and deep brow that follows them, a brow that caps a huge skull, a skull that tops a neck, bulwark-thick, a neck that leans from massive hunched shoulders.\n\nThe Neverborn is titanic. It hauls its vast, humanoid shape out of the oozing ground like some undead thing rising from a shallow grave. Its pelt is matted with wet clay. Its fingers claw furrows in the ground as it pulls itself upright. It frees and plants one cloven hoof, and straightens up. Its head is the grinning skull of a horse or stag. Its eyes blaze with the same lightning that sears across the sky. It opens its mouth, and it roars, a dry shriek that blasts like a hurricane and lifts a wave of water droplets from the ground.\n\nIt lopes towards them. The earth shakes. Dorn breaks into a run, moving to the right, sword raised to strike as he comes in at it. He can't see Valdor. Water vapour coils and smokes around the beast, thrown up by the violence of its motion. It seems to ignore Dorn. It is bearing down on something. Dorn can't see Valdor in the spume. Is he moving too slowly? Is he the easy target? Can he not move out of its path swiftly enough?\n\nIs he, the damn fool, standing his ground to meet it?\n\nThe Neverborn shrieks again. It strikes. A huge arm brings a huge fist down in a huge splash of liquid clay from the waterlogged ground. It pulls its fist out of the ooze. The blow has left a deep, puckered crater surrounded by radiating splats of jetted clay.\n\nHe can't see Valdor. Dorn can't see Valdor any more.\n\nThe Neverborn shrieks again, a shriek that echoes around the rim of the ridgeline. It swings around and makes for Dorn. The ground shudders. Dorn turns out wide, trying to control his angle and make an assault from the flank. He chooses his target.\n\nThey slam together. The spray is so great, Dorn is blinded by it. His feet slide in the slime. He aims for the knee. His blade tears matted flesh, but reflects off hard bone. He is glanced aside.\n\nHe rolls hard, knowing the beast will grab for him.\n\nIt misses with its urgent lunge, and thumps another puckered pit in the wet ground. Dorn tries to rise. His feet slip. He is plastered with clay. He swings again, and rips the blade through the meat of a thigh. There's a squeal.\n\nThen he's flying backwards, dazed by the concussion of something hitting his chest like a siege-ram.\n\nDorn lands, and rolls several times, lifting spray.\n\nHe tries to rise. The Neverborn is coming at him, a splashing thunder that will run him down. His sword is wedged in the mud, hilt up. Dorn heaves it free. He turns to thrust it at the thing"}
{"text":" ground. Dorn tries to rise. His feet slip. He is plastered with clay. He swings again, and rips the blade through the meat of a thigh. There's a squeal.\n\nThen he's flying backwards, dazed by the concussion of something hitting his chest like a siege-ram.\n\nDorn lands, and rolls several times, lifting spray.\n\nHe tries to rise. The Neverborn is coming at him, a splashing thunder that will run him down. His sword is wedged in the mud, hilt up. Dorn heaves it free. He turns to thrust it at the thing bearing down on him.\n\nThere's a flash of gold in the rain. Something glints as it punches through the beast's neck.\n\nIt staggers aside, hooves mauling the clay and skidding in the ooze, clutching at its throat. Its maw is open, but no shriek comes out.\n\nIt falls heavily, on its side, raising a wall of drizzle and quaking the ground. Its legs kick and spasm, shiver, slump. Its arms twitch and go slack.\n\nValdor limps past Dorn. He goes up to the dead mass, and grabs the haft of his spear protruding from the plastered throat. He pauses, gripping tight, and mutters something, a name, perhaps. Then he wrenches the spear out.\n\nHe limps back to Dorn.\n\n'When we get there,' he says, 'let me do it. Let me kill him.'\n\n'Constantin-'\n\n'I don't know what it is to have a brother, Rogal,' says Valdor. 'But if I had one, I don't think I'd like to kill him. You don't want that blood on your hands, or that guilt in your memory. I'll do it without sentiment.'\n\nHe's lying, of course. Dorn knows it. There would be sentiment. Constantin wants vengeance. He would never admit it, but Sanguinius' death has distressed him.\n\n'Let's see who gets there first,' says Dorn.\n\n'Let's get there together,' Valdor says.\n\nDorn sniffs, then nods.\n\n'We rise together, we fall together,' he replies. 'If that's all we can do, then it is enough.'\n\nValdor glances back the way they have come, one last time. There is still no sign of anyone following, no trace of Diocletian Coros or any surviving Sentinels.\n\nNo traces of Abaddon either, Dorn reassures himself. But he can see the disappointment on Valdor's face.\n\n'I sent a warning,' he tells Valdor. 'A call to arms. Before I joined you, I put out a call to any forces that could join us. My full authority. Some may be coming.'\n\n'By what means?' Valdor asks.\n\n'I sent a messenger.'\n\n'Who?'\n\n'It doesn't matter,' says Dorn. 'I met a single soul, so I sent them back for help.'\n\n'Do you trust them?' Valdor asks.\n\n'I had to,' says Dorn. 'There was no one else.'\n\n10:iii\n\nThe voice of stone\n\nThe woman steps in from the dingy grey courtyard through the cell door, looks around the gloomy cell block, and then steps back into the yard. She does this several times, fascinated.\n\nMarshal Agathe watches her. The woman seems young to her, not much more than a girl, really. She's dirty. Her black clothes are torn and caked in dust, and her dark hair is tangled and unkempt. She looks like some hapless urchin who's been living in the bomb-wastes of Anterior for the past few weeks.\n\nBut despite her presentation, and her youth, there's something about her manner. She has the bearing of command, and it's more than just the heavy auramite seal she carries.\n\nThe woman turns around in the shadows of the cell block again, and then returns to the dismal grey air of the yard.\n\n'As you can see-' Agathe begins.\n\n'A tear between material and immaterial,' the woman says. 'A splice. This courtyard lies within one realm, and that-' She gestures at the cell door. 'And that lies in another, adjacent.'\n\n'You don't seem disturbed by this,' Agathe remarks.\n\nThe woman looks at her.\n\n'I've encountered one before, marshal,' she says. 'More than one, in all likelihood. I've just never seen one so precisely delineated before. They are usually blurred and gradual. This is quite dramatically clean and sharp.'\n\n'Who did you say you were?' Agathe asks.\n\n'Katerina Moriana,' the woman replies. 'I bear the authority of the Praetorian.' There's something odd about the way she says her name. Over-enunciated. It doesn't feel like she is making an effort to ensure Agathe understands it. It feels more like she's, what...? Getting used to it? Testing it out? Reminding herself?\n\nAgathe's had enough truck with names in the past few days. Mikhail and his men. People don't seem to have enough names, or real ones. It's a defence mechanism, and one she can appreciate.\n\nAgathe glances aside as Mikhail walks into the yard from the lane beyond. Agathe can hear a sporadic chatter of small-arms fire from the drab, ramshackle streets of the alien city behind him.\n\n'Traitor Excertus,' he reports. 'I've got the approach streets and alleys covered, but their numbers are increasing. I'll need more men.'\n\n'I've sent for them,' Agathe replies.\n\n'Merudin,' the woman says to Mikhail. 'Merudin Twentieth Tactical. From the Lupercal's own support companies.'\n\n'They're what?' Agathe asks.\n\nThe woman ignores her.\n\n'The Merudin are vicious and well trained, captain,' she says to Mikhail. 'But they are currently in disarray. Distressed and close to panic.'\n\n'Aren't we all?' Mikhail replies calmly.\n\n'Accurate marksmanship and thorough suppressive fire will keep them at bay.'\n\n'Good to know,' Mikhail says.\n\n'For now, at least,' the woman says. 'Marshal?'\n\nShe turns and walks back into the cell block. Agathe glances at Mikhail.\n\n'Get to it,' she says. He nods.\n\n'Grace of the Throne go with you,' Agathe calls after him. She follows the woman inside.\n\nThe cell block is dark and quiet. The smell of the air, the temperature, even the air pressure, seem different. Agathe still can't get used to the state-change of stepping through that doorway. The woman is already striding away down the dark stone hall.\n\nShe looks back at Agathe.\n\n'This place. What is it?' she asks.\n\nAgathe shrugs, catching her up.\n\n'A stronghold,' she says. 'The best we could find in the circumstances. An abandoned prison, we think. There are no distinguishing landmarks in the area.'\n\n'And where is it?'\n\n'Within five kilometres of the Metome Processional,' Agathe replies. 'As far as I can judge.'\n\n'So... The south-western Palatine?'\n\nAgathe takes a breath. 'Listen, ma'am-'\n\n'Katerina Moriana.'\n\n'Yes. It's important that you understand... We could be anywhere. We have no reference or bearing. We could be hundreds of kilometres away from... from anywhere we might think we are.'\n\n'And it's changing all the time,' Moriana says. 'I understand. Thank you. What are your strengths?'\n\n'I have about three thousand men-'\n\n'We'll be taking them through that doorway, marshal,' Moriana says. 'That cell doorway, into the city beyond. An emergency relief force. You need to have them mobilised and ready to move as soon as your captain has secured the immediate streets and driven the Merudin back. Do you have vox?'\n\n'Now wait,' says Agathe. 'With all due respect to that seal of office you keep waving under my nose, that's not going to happen.'\n\n'The Emperor is in the gravest danger, marshal. The Praetorian has called for support, without delay, from any and all forces that can answer that call. This command supersedes any orders you may have. It is the only thing that matters any more.'\n\n'I understand what you're saying, Katerina Moriana,' Agathe begins.\n\nThey step back as Phikes marches four squads of the 403rd past to reinforce Mikhail outside. The adjutant glances uneasily at Moriana as he goes by.\n\n'Take them to Captain Mikhail, Phikes,' Agathe tells him as he passes. 'Then get back here.'\n\n'Yes, marshal.'\n\nAgathe looks back at the woman. Moriana has turned away to examine the damp black stone of the walls.\n\n'Listen,' Agathe says. 'I have three thousand or so men, but less than a third of them are actual combat troops. The Antioch Miles Vesperi are the best equipped. The Four Hundred and Third Exigency Stratiotes are solid men, but they're little more than a scratch company. The rest are auxiliaries, gun crews, loaders-'\n\n'The Emperor is in the gravest danger,' Moriana repeats, without looking around. 'All who can answer the call will answer the call, no matter their station-'\n\n'You're not listening,' Agathe snaps. 'I said listen. This is essentially an artillery unit. We have field guns. A lot of fields guns. That's our main proportion. We're long-range support. We are not an infantry group, and we are ill-suited to mount any kind of mobile expeditionary offensive.'\n\n'Artillery is good,' says Moriana. 'Field guns. Bring those.'\n\nAgathe sighs.\n\n'Have you ever fought a war, ma'am?' she asks.\n\n'Not like this one,' Moriana replies.\n\n'Right,' says Agathe. 'Let me lay it out for you. We have virtually no support weapons. No armour support. Just a modest number of men that could pass as infantry. We have the field guns, but they are heavy, and so are their munition carts. We have no tractors, or motorised limbers. We simply can't manhandle those guns down here and out into that yard, let alone lug them through the city beyond. We can be reasonably effective dug-in in a place like this and shelling at range. Not on the move.'\n\nThe woman seems to consider this. She starts walking again.\n\n'Show me,' she says.\n\nAgathe sets off after her.\n\n'You have vox?' Moriana asks.\n\n'Yes. It doesn't work. Nothing works.'\n\nThey pass through a broken blast-door system and climb the black steps towards the surface level. The woman stops and examines the wall again. She runs her fingers across the black stone.\n\n'We think it used to be a prison,' Agathe says, waiting for her. 'Someone said the Blackstone, but-'\n\n'Black stone,' says Moriana.\n\n'Well, as I say, it can't be that, because the damn Blackstone is in-'\n\n'Black stone,' Moriana says again. She slides her palm across the dripping wall. 'Noctilith. It is a rare and unusual material with curious properties. It is often used to suppress or dampen psychic activity. That's why the prison was made of it.'\n\n'How do you know that?'\n\n'I've always been inquisitive,' the woman replies.\n\nThey carry on up the steps, cross the entry hall, a"}
{"text":"e Blackstone, but-'\n\n'Black stone,' says Moriana.\n\n'Well, as I say, it can't be that, because the damn Blackstone is in-'\n\n'Black stone,' Moriana says again. She slides her palm across the dripping wall. 'Noctilith. It is a rare and unusual material with curious properties. It is often used to suppress or dampen psychic activity. That's why the prison was made of it.'\n\n'How do you know that?'\n\n'I've always been inquisitive,' the woman replies.\n\nThey carry on up the steps, cross the entry hall, and step outside. The air's hot, and it stinks. Nothing has changed since the last time Agathe was out here. The gunlines, now dug-in, wait with barrels elevated, facing the mauled wasteland of mud and rubble beyond. The crews huddle, anxious, in the firing pits and hasty trenchworks, or cluster around the ammunition wagons. There is a lonely ache of anticipation and fear. The trackless, mangled waste stretches away as far as they can see, and is eventually lost in the deep, black curtain of ash and smoke that rings the tattered horizon. The sky is low, black as night, and swollen with dirt-clouds. From the distance, beyond the obscuring haze of ash, comes the thump and roar of an armour engagement that seems to have been going on forever.\n\nMoriana surveys the scene, then turns and looks at the scowling hulk of the black mansion.\n\n'I appreciate the logistical impediments you have outlined, marshal,' she says. 'I am, however, charged with an imperative to gather and summon support. I gave the Praetorian my word. I need to establish contact with any units in range. With loyalist command. With the Sanctum. With anything. There really isn't much time, and nothing else matters now. You have no vox?'\n\n'The 'casters are dead,' says Agathe.\n\nPhikes has reappeared. He stands in the mansion doorway, keeping a respectful and wary distance.\n\n'Phikes?' Agathe calls.\n\n'Marshal.'\n\n'Try the vox again. And keep trying it.'\n\nPhikes hesitates, then nods.\n\n'In the remote chance that you get it working or establish a contact,' Moriana calls to him, 'inform me immediately. I will compose the message to send.'\n\nPhikes gives her a dangerous look, then hurries off to the signal trench. Moriana walks back inside the mansion, with Agathe at her heels.\n\n'Contact is the key thing,' Moriana says, her voice pulling echoes from the dank, thick walls. Water drips. 'A general call to action.'\n\nShe looks around, studying the place. Agathe notices an odd affect in the way the woman looks. She seems to tilt her whole head to examine things, rather than shifting her gaze.\n\n'I could...' Agathe says, with an almost helpless shrug, 'send runners. Maybe some would get through...'\n\n'No one would get through,' says Moriana. 'But there might be an alternative. With your permission.'\n\n'It doesn't feel like you need it,' says Agathe.\n\n'I mean to say, marshal, that you might find it unsettling. Be prepared to calm your men if they become disturbed.'\n\n'Disturbed by what?'\n\n'Noctilith,' says Moriana, looking up at the wall, her hand against it. 'It's psychoreactive, as I said. Ordinarily, it is used for dampening, and it's highly effective in that role. But here, wherever here is, the binding sigils and restraints of warding that made this place a prison for body and mind have been destroyed.'\n\nShe scrapes her toe through the splintered fragments of stone covering the floor, pieces of frieze and wall decorations torn down or blown away, their purpose no longer identifiable.\n\n'Noctilith absorbs psychic energy. It soaks it up. Unconstrained, and without the proper wards, it can also act as a resonator.'\n\n'Like an echo chamber?' Agathe asks.\n\n'Like an amplifier,' says Moriana.\n\nMoriana faces the dank wall. She sets her hands flat against it and bows her head.\n\n'I suggest you stand back,' she says quietly.\n\nFor a moment, nothing happens. A long moment. Agathe waits. The woman doesn't move. Agathe feels a little awkward just standing there. It's getting warm. There's sweat on her back. The pseudoflesh patch on her cheek starts to itch. She decides to step outside for a moment.\n\nThen the whispers come. The scratching. The tapping. The echoes of knocks and scrapes from unseen things haunting the shadows of the black mansion's empty block-rows, cells and vaults. Lost souls. Ghosts. Memories. Something is agitating them. The knocking grows louder and more insistent, coming from a score of directions. Agathe's collar feels tight. Her heart rate rises. Her clothes don't seem to fit properly any more. Things scurry and scuttle in her peripheral vision.\n\nShe feels the clammy, warm touch of sorcery on her skin. It is a unique and unpleasant sensation she hasn't felt since she stood with great Raldoron, and Naranbaatar and his Stormseers at Colossi, in the grip of the magic of the Thousand Sons.\n\nIt is a touch she had hoped she'd never have to feel again.\n\nEchoes swirl around her, swelling from the black stone walls. Her skin prickles and her guts churn. She hears a voice. The woman's voice. But Katerina Moriana's mouth is not moving.\n\nSons and daughters of the Imperium of Man. Rise now. Rise up. By the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.\n\nDead, the black stone lives. It finds its voice.\n\n10:iv\n\nWitnesses at the execution\n\nYou lift your father up. He's hurt. Limp. Necrosis is blackening parts of His soul and mind. Flecks of His cracked plate spill away as you move Him, flakes of gold. Years pour out of Him from a dozen wounds and spatter the deck.\n\nThis is the hard part. The bad part. There's no shame in admitting it. A fair fight is one thing, two warriors matched and pitted. But the execution, once one is defeated and helpless? There's nothing to relish in that. It was the same with the Angel. Nothing to savour. Just the grimly inevitable punctuation to an otherwise glorious contest.\n\nBut the crowd wants it, of course. They're baying for blood. You can hear their red howls ringing through the obsidian walls of your Court. And the four want it, the Old Four. They've always wanted it.\n\nYou look over at them.\n\nThey nod their assent. The Emperor must die.\n\nLeetu kills another of the snarling scavenger things. Mourn-It-All cleaves its drooling snout so deeply that its head is wrenched around, and the Neverborn flops backwards on itself, its limbs in spasm.\n\nThe others shrink back, screeching and hissing. Perhaps they're scared of him at last? The threat of his blade has finally outweighed their desire to feed. It's taken long enough. He's heaped the deck with their corpses.\n\nHe sinks to his knees, aching with exertion, covered in splashes of daemon ichor. Sanguinius' corpse is cold at his side.\n\nThey're not shrinking from him. He sees that now. Something else has caused them to quail and retreat, to cackle and whine. Something much more dangerous than a Space Marine with a sword.\n\nLeetu looks over his shoulder. He was so caught up in the frenzy of his fight with the carrion eaters, he had not realised that the real fight was over.\n\nA hundred metres away, across the creased and punctured deck, Horus stands over the Emperor.\n\nThe Master of Mankind is sprawled on His side, twisted. Smoke drifts lazily from the dents and cracks of His golden plate. There is so much blood. How could Leetu not have heard the crash of that giant figure falling? The brute Warmaster, looming over his father, is wounded too, but he seems oblivious to the gouges and furrows that tatter the Serpent's Scales. He flexes his vast shoulders, easing the tension accumulated during the duel. His bloodlit face seems pensive, almost sad, as he regards his father's body.\n\nBut there is a hint of that deafening smile too.\n\nThe Lupercal Court is slowly reasserting itself, drawing back into form now the fight is done. Its shadows and psychofractal blackness are gradually replacing the Vengeful Spirit's chamber, swirling like oil, covering the scarred plasteel and chipped ouslite with obsidian tiles that blink out of nowhere, and diorite blocks that instantiate like fog. Black columns re-manifest, sweeping arches climb and connect high above. Distance and dimension twist along disturbing planes. The angles and planes of the battered flagship chamber are pushed away in all directions, and fade to nothing. The infinite midnight architecture of the Court is restored, and the gathered Neverborn cringe and cower back into the gloom.\n\nThe Court seems even bigger than before. The galleries and processionals adjoining the nave of the main Court seem to extend to giddying vanishing points. Through dreary archways and sinister vaults, Leetu glimpses side chambers and chapel shrines and sub-temple precincts that multiply and multiply, and all lead away into the infinite.\n\nThe coloured glassaic of the high windows, ten kilometres tall, throbs with the baleful light of a storm raging outside, and casts a mosaic of flickering colour across the gleaming, jet-black floor.\n\nThe wrath of the neverness storm is nothing to the rage rising in Leetu's heart. He has failed. The promise he made to his mistress is broken. The Emperor is vanquished, and Ruin is triumphant.\n\nLeetu should have done more.\n\nHe should have done something. He should have persisted, and thrown himself into that awful combat, even if that had meant being torn apart by the opposing powers. That death would have been better than this regret.\n\nAll he did was protect a corpse. The Angel's dead. Who fights for the dead? The only thing worth fighting for is the living.\n\nLeetu sees the fingers of the Emperor's limp right hand twitch slightly. Just a tremble. He is alive still, just. Balanced on the edge of life, and helpless in the face of t"}
{"text":"one something. He should have persisted, and thrown himself into that awful combat, even if that had meant being torn apart by the opposing powers. That death would have been better than this regret.\n\nAll he did was protect a corpse. The Angel's dead. Who fights for the dead? The only thing worth fighting for is the living.\n\nLeetu sees the fingers of the Emperor's limp right hand twitch slightly. Just a tremble. He is alive still, just. Balanced on the edge of life, and helpless in the face of the final execution Horus Lupercal is about to deliver.\n\nBut father and son have finally stopped moving at those insane superhuman speeds, speeds incompatible with Leetu's metabolism. Leetu couldn't hope to strike then, or lend his blade to any advantage. But now he can. Now he can keep his promise to Erda.\n\nLeetu steals towards them. He hugs the shadows, as timid and insignificant as the Neverborn vermin that he drove from the corpse. He ignores the black, fractal scales rippling under his feet as they re-form. He ignores the spatters of royal blood, the debris of auramite fragments, and the foetid stink of burnt ylem. He ignores a stray card of the Imperial Tarot that falls from nerveless fingers, The Space Marine. His focus is utterly fixed on the Lupercal and his prey. He steals towards them, leaving one corpse behind in the hope of making another.\n\nThe Emperor must die.\n\nWell, perhaps. It's your choice. You are your own master. You get to decide. And you don't have to do what the Neverborn tell you. That was the deal. You are no servant of Chaos.\n\nYour father, weak, half-conscious, leans against you. You take His weight. He rests a hand against your chest for support.\n\nThere's still time for your dreadful mercy, if you choose to exercise it. He has no more fight left in Him. In this moment of submission, you get to decide the penalty. You can grant Him the justice He never showed to you. The Revelation. You can share your gnosis with Him, so that He can learn how He should have treated His own flesh and blood.\n\nYou turn Him towards the waiting thrones. Let there be a last rite. A coronation. Better to end this way. Mercy is greater than execution. Compliance is better than illumination. Truth trumps silence. And an anguished eternity of understanding and penance on a hand-built throne far exceeds the brief punishment of death.\n\nYour Court is assembled. It is now in session. You drag your dying father towards the seats of power, and towards judgement. He leaves a trail of His life behind Him on the floor, smeared splashes of centuries. And the powerless cards of His final, useless hand lie discarded where they fell, uppermost The Knight of Mandatio. The blood splashed on it almost obscures its ancient, ritual image of an armoured warrior, in profile, sword held upright at his shoulder, a new moon in the sky above him.\n\nLoken follows the warring shadows, guided by the light of his blade. He moves through the numberless, angled dimensions of the Court, crossing from one facet of the fight to another, slowly closing on his quarry.\n\nThe weak flames of his blade show him that the fight has almost run its course. On the snow-clad flank of some towering mountain peak, Loken sees Horus rip the Emperor's heart from His chest, and let the golden corpse slide away down the unforgiving ice. On the battlements of a mighty, endless wall, bathed in sunlight, he watches Horus break the Emperor's skull with his maul. In the frozen depths of a winter forest, he glimpses a great Lunar wolf tear out the throat of a Fenrisian rival. On the banks of a great river, he sees a warrior-king strike down the chieftain-priest of a resisting territory, and leave himself with no new worlds to conquer. On some mausoleum planet, deep in the dry depths of a sealed tomb, he beholds Pale Death gradually disfigure the cadaver of a gilded monarch. In the chancel of an abolished cathedral, he is driven back by the heat as the Warmaster burns his Master to ash with his bloodlit gaze. So many contests, one single outcome. Horus hacks the Emperor to ribbons at the foot of the Eternity Gate. In the quietest corner of a stately park at dawn, a duellist stripped to his breeches and muslin shirt lowers his smoking pistol. An unquenchable black hole devours the white dwarf star that cannot escape its pull. Amid the barbed-wire tangle of a muddy no-man's-land, a weary officer despatches his prisoner with a crack of his service revolver. In a smoky feasting hall, a ring-mailed usurper takes his axe to the bared neck of a conquered high king. On the plasteel continent of a noospheric realm, a daemon engine annihilates its Omnissiah. Wild lightning tears down a tower so carefully planned to stand forever. Above windy steppes, a hawk strikes an eagle from the boundless sky. In a gloomy, sacred cave, an angry son kills his father with a rock.\n\nLoken sees so many aspects, struck down and dying. So many ends. So many deaths. Each aspect is falling. Each multiplied facet of the duel is concluding, and as each one concludes, the facet containing it fades into smoke.\n\nThe flames along Rubio's blade are growing dimmer.\n\nThey lead Loken into the Court, though he knows he has been there all along. He hasn't so much found the Court, as it has found him. As the facets of the fight finish and dissolve, no longer needed, all that remains is the Lupercal Court.\n\nLoken is entering through some temple precinct, a vast side chapel adjoining the main hall. It's twilight here, still and silent. The precinct is a long, ritual garden, flanked by rows of jet columns. In the dim light, Loken sees the stone walkways that edge the rectangular sacred pools. The water in the pools is as still and flat as glass. He can smell, rather than see, the water flowers and ghost ferns that grow in these pools, and the banks of night-blooming acanthus that fringe the garden's geometric plan. He hears the gurgle of a hidden spring.\n\nIt is a grove of mysteries, a place of scrying. The wide pools are astrological mirrors, and the walkways are lined with stone bowls, dishes and basins of every shape and size, all filled with dark water to reflect the starlight. The temple garden has no roof, and is open to a sky that is nothing but blackness, but faint stars twinkle from the uncountable mirrors of water.\n\nLoken moves forward along the central causeway. The air smells damp and secret. The place overwhelmingly reminds him of somewhere, and he knows that's deliberate. The water garden in the High City of Sixty-Three Nineteen, the night he was inducted into the confraternity of the Mournival. It was so long ago, just yesterday. It had seemed like a new phase, a new time... a glorious new time. Like him, mankind seemed to be on a threshold, about to step forward into greatness.\n\nNot backwards, into flames.\n\nLoken steps forward. This is yet another aspect, another facet, but it's meant especially for him. This is his father's work. His father clearly resents Loken's presence in his Court. The intrusion makes him uncomfortable. He doesn't want his son to bear witness to the acts that he arranged for this Day of Days. Perhaps he is ashamed, in which case, as shame is a human feeling, there is still hope for him.\n\nIt would be easier just to kill me, Loken thinks. Perhaps his father can't really bring himself to do that either? Perhaps that's sentiment, affection... In which case, there is still hope, or something that resembles it.\n\nThis temple garden is designed to delay Loken. To occupy him. What has his father left waiting for him here? He thinks he knows. He looks down into the glossy, light-catching water of the pool to his left. He sees the reflection of a new moon, a pale curl as insubstantial as a fingernail paring. A new phase indeed.\n\nYes, he knows what's waiting. He knows what faces will have been chosen. It will be the three that admitted him, the other phases of the Mournival. Ezekyle, Tarik and Little Horus, or conjured warp-echoes of them, at least. Will they fight him? Will they try to make him pledge a new oath to be admitted to his father's inner circle once more? Will they remonstrate with him for the oaths he took, and broke?\n\nOr for the ones he kept?\n\nHe hears a sound, and freezes. For all the world, it sounded like the clap of a hoof against stone. He thinks of cloven-footed daemons, and brings his blade up ready at his shoulder.\n\n'Give us your name,' a voice calls out of the darkness. It speaks the words in Cthonic, Loken's home-tongue, the battle-argot of the Luna Wolves.\n\n'Garviel Loken is my name to give,' he replies in kind. 'But not yours to have.'\n\n'And what is your honour?'\n\n'I am captain of the Tenth Company of the Sixteenth Legion Astartes, the Luna Wolves.'\n\n'There are no Luna Wolves any more,' the voice replies. 'Only Sons of Horus.'\n\n'While I stand and breathe,' Loken answers calmly, 'the Luna Wolves exist.'\n\nSilence, lingering. Then:\n\n'And who is your sworn master?'\n\nLoken smiles to himself. A daemon-trick question. In the High City, the correct answer was 'the Warmaster and the Emperor both', and he gave it sincerely. Loken has survived the trickery of daemons. He replies with guile of his own.\n\n'I can't say,' he answers.\n\nThere is a metallic scrape as the slot of a lantern is pulled open, and yellow flame-light shines out across him. There are figures ahead of him. Three of them. He hears the clack of hooves again.\n\nAnd he realises why he is here, and why the aspect has been prepared for him. It's not to delay him, or keep him occupied, or to hide him from his father's sight. He has been brought to this Court to be judged for the betrayal of his Mournival oaths.\n\nHis father isn't sparing him. He is singling him out for special punishment. Horus has no sentiment or affection left. Hope is gone. This moonlit garden is not a kind attempt to hold him back, and prevent him from witnessing an execution.\n\nIt is a place of execution.\n\nThe three figures step forward, one on either side of"}
{"text":"im. It's not to delay him, or keep him occupied, or to hide him from his father's sight. He has been brought to this Court to be judged for the betrayal of his Mournival oaths.\n\nHis father isn't sparing him. He is singling him out for special punishment. Horus has no sentiment or affection left. Hope is gone. This moonlit garden is not a kind attempt to hold him back, and prevent him from witnessing an execution.\n\nIt is a place of execution.\n\nThe three figures step forward, one on either side of the pools, the other on the central causeway facing him. They are not Ezekyle, Tarik and Little Horus after all. Loken hears the clip of their hooves on the flagstones.\n\nThey are black centaurs, tall and powerful, corded with muscle. They hold their weapons in their human hands proudly, and wear helms of black plate with tall, topknot crests of bound horsehair. Like the Mournival until Loken joined it, they all have the same face. The face of Horus.\n\nFrom the other end of the causeway, their leader glares at Loken.\n\n'Illuminate him,' says the Dreadful Sagittary.\n\n'Sit with me,' you say. 'You kept no place for me, in your heart or your mind, but I have kept a place for you. A throne, and a crown of secrets. I do for you what you should have done for me.'\n\nYour father makes no reply. You lead Him, half-limping, half-dragging across the chamber to the noble thrones, leaving a wet track of clotting centuries in your wake. He leans into you, frail, His hand against your chest. Is this, at last, the paternal gesture you have craved from Him? Just a touch? No words. He'd never say it. He can't speak anyway.\n\nBut whispers rise around you. Querulous. Dismayed. Infuriated. What are you doing? This isn't what was supposed to happen. This isn't what was ordained.\n\nThis wasn't the point.\n\n'Hush,' you say.\n\nThey do not.\n\n'Stop your whispers,' you tell them, hauling your father to His final seat.\n\nThey look at you, the Neverborn and the damned, and you read alarm in their faces. No, more than alarm. Horror.\n\n'You are always whispering,' you say. 'Whisper, whisper. It's annoying. Stop it.'\n\nThe whispers rise in intensity. They are angry, as though you've backed out on something. As though you - you - have reneged on a deal. There was no deal beyond your supremacy. The whispers seethe, accusing treachery. Heresy.\n\n'Don't talk to me about heresy,' you tell them.\n\nCaecaltus runs, though he cannot run. He stumbles, but he does not advance. The grim amphitheatre where his King-of-Ages fights the monster seems forever out of reach, telescoping further away the harder he struggles towards it. He sees his King-of-Ages fall. He sees the worldbreaking blow that drops the Master of Mankind to the dust of the hellish arena.\n\nHe can't run. His body is too wrecked by the Lupercal's fury, his bones too broken. He staggers to a halt.\n\nAhead, right there yet too far away, the vast, black amphitheatre is silent. It is not a hush of anticipation. The silence is solid, an anechoic flatness. The audience is still present, still jeering and hissing. He can see their lost-and-damned faces, spectral in the gloom, wide-eyed and whispering, infuriated by the spectacle they had gathered to witness. But they make no sound.\n\nHe can hear his pulse thumping in his ears. The drumming heartbeat. He can hear his own pain. He can hear a voice, a voice from nowhere, a voice echoing from blackness.\n\nThe Emperor must live.\n\nHe hears his own death approaching, a fast and rumbling chariot. There is only one place he is prepared to die. At His side. They will rise together or fall together. The only death a Hetaeron should contemplate.\n\nHe hears a scream. It is his own. His mouth is wide, and spittle is flying as he empties his lungs in a howl of defiance, the first war cry he has uttered since he was made.\n\nHe hears the thunder of his own footsteps on the deck. He hears his pain crack as he tramples it underfoot and runs through it, ignoring agony, forgetting injury, driven by His will alone.\n\nSome work of noble note may yet be done.\n\nThe Emperor must live.\n\nYou lift your father into the throne you have made ready for Him. The Neverborn whispers around you have turned to protests and vehement indignation. What do they know? Let them live with their disappointment. They came here to see blood and witness a death. Let them choke on blood. You are the master here. You make the decisions. You will give them something better. Not a quick, crowd-pleasing death, like the arrogant Angel got. A lasting punishment. An everlasting punishment. You will share all your secrets with your father, all the secrets that the warp has shown you. You will teach Him the error of His ways, and enumerate His sins for Him, by doing for Him what He dismally failed to do for you.\n\nIt was never your father's power, it was what He did with it. He kept it all for Himself. So you will illuminate Him.\n\nFor the secrets that are yours to share are far brighter and more fierce than any fire He stole from Molech. Their truth will burn Him for the remainder of time on this throne of suffering and flame.\n\nLet the crowd jeer. Let them protest. Let the Old Four leer in disapproval. Gods do not make mistakes.\n\nYour father, at least, seems to accept your judgement. As you move His fractured, final aspect onto the throne, His hand stays pressed against your chest, a tender touch that seems to say that He understands, and that He is grateful for your mercy in commuting His sentence. He will be with you forever, always at your side, father and son. With that simple touch, He expresses His appreciation of you, and for the gift that only you can give Him because you are, still, no matter what, His first-found child.\n\nThe bond of blood. The bond of family. Something the Neverborn can never understand. He finally acknowledges you.\n\nYou realise that His hand upon your chestplate has grown warm. You can feel the heat through the Serpent's Scales.\n\nYou look down. His face is drenched in blood. His eyes turn up to look into yours.\n\nThey light up with white fire.\n\nThe blast lifts you up, throws you across the infinite angles of the galaxy, and tears your soul in two.\n\nIt's not your father's power. It's how He steals it.\n\n10:v\n\nLast rites\n\nHush.\n\nNo sound.\n\nThe Neverborn open-mouthed, outrage turned to utter dismay.\n\nYou rise again, burnt ether broiling off you, pain wrenching you. The vile old man proves treacherous to the very last. He abused your mercy to get His breath back. He used that tender, casual touch to draw power from you to replenish Himself. Your father has deceived you, and used you, as He has always deceived you and used you.\n\nHe's rising too. He's on His feet, leaning one hand against the arm of the throne you chose for Him, straightening up. The gleaming lustre has returned to His war plate, the white asterism behind His head relit. He shimmers with stolen power.\n\nHe has restored His aspect and refreshed it. It is almost a new aspect, still the regal warrior-king in gold, but the planes and angles of His armour are now sharper and more aggressive. Majesty has been subordinated to ravening threat. He is more warlike than you have ever seen Him.\n\nExcept His war-sword is on the other side of the Court where it fell from His hand.\n\nHe comes at you. You go to meet Him.\n\nThis will take but a moment.\n\nHe's leeched power from you to replenish Himself, and done it so cunningly you didn't even feel it. There is a reason for that. It was so small an amount, you barely felt it sapped away. Your power is, and always has been, drawn without restraint or limit.\n\nYou snatch up Worldbreaker and lunge at Him. He stands His ground, His right hand making certain dextrous movements, His left, the lightning claw, likewise gesturing, both describing sigils that form and crackle in the air.\n\nSigillite magic. A charlatan's last gambit. You-\n\nYour plastron feels warm where His hand rested on you. You look down, and see another sigil marked there, glowing, inscribed surreptitiously as He leaned against you. It pulses, a timed delay-\n\nThe blast hurls you sideways. It detonates with the force of a Reaver squad's breaching mine. You are thrown down, your collarbone and right shoulder shattered. He's rushing you before you can rise, hurling the air-cast sigils at you. They are both pentacles, drawn from His arcanology, and they whirl, spitting sparks, as they descend like circular saws. You smack one away with your maul. The screaming razor points of the other slice through your plate and ribs before you can swat it aside. He has already drawn two more that squeal as they rotate towards you. You deflect the third with Worldbreaker, cracking it. Your shattered shoulder has rendered your Talon useless. You are obliged to destroy the fourth with a beam of bloodlight from the eye upon your breast.\n\nAnd while you are thus occupied, He falls upon you.\n\nHe grabs Worldbreaker's haft with hand and claw, and drives it down flat to crush across your throat. White fire spears from His eyes to blind the Eye of Horus on your chest. You cannot fend Him off with your dead Talon. Face to face, your refractor shields and telaethesics spit and crackle and squeal on contact.\n\nYou're pinned. But He is nothing like as strong as you, and has nothing like your mass. You twist, then roll, and throw Him off. The three remaining pentacle sigils are still spinning, but they bounce aside. One hits the deck and sticks fast on one point like a throwing star.\n\nHe has your maul.\n\nHe tore it from your grip. You rise to meet Him. You circle. He loops Worldbreaker with expert ease, the great maul whooping through the air. He swings it. You duck, and it fails to connect. He swings again, strikes you on the upswing, and knocks you onto your back. He loops an over-swing without hesitation, bringing Worldbreaker down at you as you are prone. No mercy for a fallen foe. He wants to put you down and keep you down.\n\nYou roll aside with a curse. Worldbreaker demolishes black floor ti"}
{"text":"e tore it from your grip. You rise to meet Him. You circle. He loops Worldbreaker with expert ease, the great maul whooping through the air. He swings it. You duck, and it fails to connect. He swings again, strikes you on the upswing, and knocks you onto your back. He loops an over-swing without hesitation, bringing Worldbreaker down at you as you are prone. No mercy for a fallen foe. He wants to put you down and keep you down.\n\nYou roll aside with a curse. Worldbreaker demolishes black floor tiles. You scramble up. Worldbreaker strikes you in the back while you are still half-kneeling, and knocks you on your face.\n\nThe whistling maul comes down. You roll again, with all urgency, but it hits your belly-plate refractors and caves them in. The next swing comes at your face.\n\nBut by then, your ruined shoulder has reknitted.\n\nThe Talon flashes up and catches the descending head of the maul with the boom of a firing bombard.\n\nUp you get. You lurch Him backwards. He is gripping Worldbreaker's ferrule with both hands. You clench the maul's head in your Talon. You use the maul like a rod to force Him backwards. He tries to twist the haft to break your grip. You clench it tighter, push and twist, shoving Him two paces back, then another two. Another lunge lifts His feet off the ground for a second.\n\nYou rip Worldbreaker from His hands as He stumbles back, unbalanced. You deftly toss the maul from your Talon to your left hand, and catch it smartly. You spin it once.\n\nWhere were we, father?\n\nThe Neverborn host whoop and shrill your name.\n\nWhat does He have left? He should have stolen more power from you when He had the chance. Why did He take so little? Ah, of course. Because He did not dare take more. He knows His own propensities. If He had stolen more, He wouldn't have been able to stop. Like a chronic inebriate with no impulse control, He would have drunk Himself mad from the empyrean. He dares not, above all things, risk the malison of the Dark King.\n\nSo He took from you sparingly, and He has already used most of what meagre quantity He stole. He is growing feeble. What does He have left? What will He try next?\n\nLightning, from His spanning claws, of course. The bolt forks at you. You deflect with a necromatic ward, but as He fires it, He looks away and reaches out with His right hand. His fallen war-sword, abandoned on the floor, flies towards Him, hooked by telekine force.\n\nTo even things up? You won't have that. Worldbreaker intercepts the flying blade before it reaches His hand, and sends it spinning away towards the thrones.\n\nWhat's left? You swing for His skull. He slides sideways through the Abstraction of Plight to evade the blow, but it's a weak effort. That stolen power is running out. He circles you via the twilit cliffs of the Forsaken Angle, appears at your side, and drives His claws through the refractors shielding your hip. They tear in shreds of light, but He has recklessly put Himself too close, and you snap out Worldbreaker's ferrule and butt Him in the face.\n\nHe reels aside, cheekbone broken, onto the Forsaken Angle again, but He doesn't have the strength to stay there. Your Talon seizes Him by the left arm as He spills back into the Court. He tries to tear free, but the Talon bites, cracking auramite and drawing blood. You have Him cold.\n\nHe has no strength left for warped angles, or evasion by dimensional plane, and not enough power to conjure fresh aspects either. He has no force to channel, and not even a hint of enough warp-will to move the everywhere of your realm and affect a parry by location. He can't break your grip.\n\nHe has no cards left to play. The last of them are scattered on the deck.\n\nAs though to demonstrate His weakness, He lights fire from His eyes at you again, lancing down with a white-hot cutting beam in an attempt to slice your Talon from His arm. The power of it is pathetic. Paltry. You clench the Talon tighter, twist, and strip golden plate and flesh from His forearm, unsleeving it to the bone.\n\nThen you let go.\n\nHe staggers back, His arm a bloody parody of a limb. His claws rise, and He tries to write another sigil in the air.\n\nSigil magic. That last of last resorts. It's such a woeful effort, He might as well have surrendered.\n\nYou lift Worldbreaker-\n\nNo, too easy. Too basic. Too industrial for a finishing move. That kind of crude force is Perturabo's dull signature. You want a flourish.\n\nYou punch with your power claw instead. But with just the index talon extended.\n\nThe talon goes through His throat. Right through. His eyes bulge. Blood spills from His mouth.\n\nYou slowly draw the blade out, and catch your father as He falls.\n\nHe fought well. A stalwart recovery, and a worthy enough rematch, but the end was never in any doubt.\n\nYou carry Him back to the throne, His blood running freely, coating everything. You dump Him into the seat without care or ceremony. He lolls forward, drooling blood. You brace His chest and push Him back. He droops to the side, and looks so limp and boneless that He might slide from the throne entirely.\n\nYou prop Him back in place, bracing him with Worldbreaker's haft, and turn. A nod of your head brings His sigil pentacles flying to you, the last one wrenching out of the floor. They are spent, and no longer spinning like circular cutters. But the points are still sharp. You catch each one, turn them on edge, and stake Him to the throne. One drives down through His right thigh, the second through His left. The third you ram through His left shoulder, nailing Him on its points to the back of the throne.\n\nNow only His head flops.\n\nYou step back, Talon and maul raised, accepting the adulation of the watching host.\n\nHe sits, a whisper from death, pinned to a throne that streams with His lifeblood.\n\nThere's symbolism there. A throne of blood. Something apt. You'll finesse it later, when you commit your testimony of this day to Remembrancer Oliton.\n\n'Behold,' you cry, 'the False Emperor!'\n\nThe daemons squeal and howl. The Old Four approve.\n\n'So will I deal with all tyrants and deceivers!' you roar. The acclaim is so loud, you can barely hear your own voice.\n\nYou circle the Court, arms raised, a moment more, then turn to face the throne and finish the coronation.\n\nYour way is blocked.\n\nA figure stands between you and your gore-soaked, staked-up father. It is a small figure, breathing hard and pitifully damaged. But it is braced defiantly to impede your advance.\n\nIt fixes you with a quite preposterously bold glare of resistance.\n\n'By. His. Will. Alone,' gasps Caecaltus Dusk.\n\n10:vi\n\nDusk\n\nHorus Lupercal speaks his name.\n\n'Dusk. Proconsul Caecaltus Dusk.'\n\nHe seems amused.\n\n'Again, you interrupt and speak out of turn. My father and I have matters to conclude, and a legacy to discuss, and you, little soldier, have no place in that.'\n\n'I defy you,' says Caecaltus in a cold, clear voice. 'The Imperium defies you.'\n\n'With... what?' the Lupercal asks.\n\nCaecaltus stands his ground. He aims the glinting paragon spear at the monster facing him. He keeps his back to his king, stricken on the profane throne behind him. He places himself between wounded father and murderous son.\n\nBut he knows the monster's right. He's shivering, almost shaking with pain. He's weak. His refractors have failed. Even at his peak, he would not have been sufficient for this fight.\n\nHe has nothing. Nothing at all.\n\nLeetu reaches the row of primitive thrones, and cowers in their shadows. They are ugly things, crudely and inexpertly hewn from stone. The angles of their structures - the backs, the seats, the arms - seem wrong and unnatural.\n\nLike the room itself. So dark and quiet and forlorn. Whispers seem to crease the air, but the vault of death is empty, and they are so alone. Just him, the Master of Mankind, and the beast of all beasts.\n\nAnd the Hetaeron proconsul.\n\nThe Custodian, Dusk, has appeared from somewhere, alive after all. But he has doomed himself. The idiot has stepped into the open, and is trying to confront Horus. He's standing in the Lupercal's path, trying to stare him down.\n\nThat's just madness. But what else can the man do? Leetu thinks. What else did I think I was going to do? Face this impossible monster? Throw myself in front of the Emperor to protect Him? Die instantly?\n\nIt's all futile. They've got nothing. Leetu, the insanely brave proconsul, the Luna Wolf Loken, if he's still alive... They're just men. They're just specks. Outclassed, outgunned, helpless in the face of this. It's a miracle that any of them have survived this long. This is a warp-war. This is a clash of higher powers, of cosmic properties far above and beyond any mortal limits. This is a once-in-a-civilisation event. And the three of them who came here with the Master of Mankind are inconsequential, insignificant. They're mere microbes, just dust carried on the heel of events. They're lucky to even be present as bystanders. They're not meant to be here. There's no place in this for them, no role to play. Leetu wonders how they're even alive. The inhuman nature of this place, the warping concentration of immaterial force, should make it impossible for them to exist in this environment. They should no more be standing here, than on the surface of a neutron star or at the heart of a supernova, or any other hyper-hostile location in the galaxy where human life simply cannot exist. They all should have perished the instant they arrived.\n\nFor there is nowhere more hyper-hostile to mortal life than this Court.\n\nFor them to be here, even as onlookers, there must be some force or property in the Court that sustains human organics and prevents them from being annihilated by the immaterial concentration.\n\nPerhaps, thinks Leetu, that's Horus. Whatever human relic of the first-found still exists in the core of that dark horror, it must be essential. It must need to exist for Horus to maintain his form as the personified instrument of Chaos. They are still alive, Leetu and the proconsul, merely as a conseque"}
{"text":"\nFor them to be here, even as onlookers, there must be some force or property in the Court that sustains human organics and prevents them from being annihilated by the immaterial concentration.\n\nPerhaps, thinks Leetu, that's Horus. Whatever human relic of the first-found still exists in the core of that dark horror, it must be essential. It must need to exist for Horus to maintain his form as the personified instrument of Chaos. They are still alive, Leetu and the proconsul, merely as a consequence of Horus' need to maintain his human essence.\n\nIs that a weakness? A flaw they can exploit?\n\nA weakness perhaps, but beyond the means of Leetu or Caecaltus to leverage. Such exploitation would take a better man. A greater being, someone who functions at the Lupercal's level of cosmic proficiency.\n\nLeetu is just a Space Marine. This is not a fight he was built to undertake, and he has no chance in this arena. But he has the fierce tactical insight of any Astartes.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk has, for a second or two, distracted the attention of the Lupercal. He has used the only weapon he has left - courage. Leetu can stand with him, and die with him, or he can use that distraction and attempt to free the only being who might have a chance to stop the first-found.\n\nLeetu slips along the towering line of thrones, darting from shadow to shadow, and reaches the Emperor. The Master of Mankind looks dead, His great form desecrated and limp, glazed with gore, His eyes closed. He has been staked to the stone seat with strange five-pointed stars that look as though they are made of molten iron. Leetu tries to pull one of them free. It is stuck fast through the Emperor's right thigh, and it burns Leetu's hands to touch it, despite his armoured gauntlets. Leetu takes Mourn-It-All, and attempts to use the blade as a lever instead. The Emperor does not stir.\n\nWith a snarl of supreme effort, Leetu yanks the first pentacle free. It clatters aside to the deck like a ring of heated steel, and cold, thick blood oozes sickly from the wound it has left. Frantically, Leetu starts to prise at the star impaling the left thigh. There's no time left.\n\nCaecaltus' defiance of the Warmaster will be over in another second.\n\n'You have been tricked, Horus Lupercal,' says Caecaltus Dusk. His spear trembles in his hands.\n\n'Get out of my way,' the Warmaster rumbles.\n\n'I refuse,' replies the Hetaeron. 'By His will-'\n\n'He has no will left! It's a wonder you're even standing! Get out of my way.'\n\n'No,' says Caecaltus. Horus doesn't need his permission. Horus can step on and through him effortlessly. But the crowd around them is enjoying this moment of cruel sport. Caecaltus can hear them baying and whooping. This agonising torture of a doomed mortal soul, drawn out. The chance to hear it make its futile pleas, the chance to hear it appeal, with that ridiculously human quality called hope, to a pity that does not exist. The chance to drink in its sincerity and cherish its bravery, and then savour the sweet burst of pain at the end when it realises such properties have no currency. Caecaltus can see the Warmaster trying to hide his smile, and maintain a solemn timbre in his voice. He is playing to the crowd, a sly wink.\n\n'You have been tricked, my son,' says Caecaltus Dusk.\n\nThe Warmaster's gaze abruptly switches back to him. It is suddenly intense.\n\n'What did you say?'\n\n'I said, you have been tricked,' repeats Caecaltus. His arms are quivering. He does not know how much longer he can hold the spear up or remain on his feet. 'Chaos puppets you. The Old Four don't need you to be the new Emperor. They do not even comprehend such mortal concerns. They merely need you to kill the old one, to stop the ascension of mankind. You-'\n\nThe Talon rises and points at him.\n\n'You said, \"my son\". The voice you speak with is not yours.'\n\n'It is the only voice I have ever known,' says Caecaltus Dusk. 'It is the only voice I speak with and the only voice I hear. I am my own voice, Horus first-found. Listen to it, my distant son. You have been tricked-'\n\n'The only voice I hear is the voice of the deceiver,' replies Horus, and erases Caecaltus Dusk where he stands.\n\nThe beam of bloodlight burns from the great eye on the Warmaster's breastplate for five or six seconds, engulfing the proconsul entirely. Then the glare of it fades.\n\nLeetu hears the shriek of vile light incinerate the Hetaeron behind him. He feels the backwash of heat. He has wrenched the second pentacle out, and cast it aside, freeing the other thigh. He climbs onto the edge of the throne's seat to reach the third star that's driven through the Emperor's shoulder.\n\nThe great figure is bent forward, His head bowed. Blood strings from His split lips and His nose, and matts the long black hair that hangs like a curtain around His face. His left arm is shockingly stripped to the bone from the shoulder, the sleeve of flesh and crumpled armour bunched around His wrist. All life seems extinct, as absent as it was in the lifeless corpse of His angel son. The third pentacle is the only thing holding Him upright in the blasphemous throne. Leetu, his hands cut and bloody from his efforts, starts to draw the third star out. It will not move.\n\n'Wake up!' Leetu hisses as he pulls and strains. 'Wake up, Emperor! Wake up, great lord! You must wake up now! Wake and rise before it is too late! Your daemon-son is almost upon you!'\n\nHe tries to use Mourn-It-All as a lever again, hooking it through the hot-iron form of the pentacle. He exerts so much force that a shard of the sword-blade breaks from a small crack near the hilt.\n\n'Wake!' Leetu yells. 'Wake! Erda sent me to you! She would want you to stand! She needs you to stand!'\n\nMourn-It-All's blade begins to bend under the stress.\n\nThe proconsul's paragon spear, smoking and superheated, clatters to the floor of the Court.\n\nCaecaltus Dusk is still standing. His plate is glowing almost red hot from the energy it has been exposed to, and Caecaltus' flesh is blistered and raw, the upper layers of skin cooked off. But he is still standing, and he is alive.\n\nThe Lupercal's eyes narrow into a deep frown. The crowd is silent.\n\n'Not possible,' he murmurs.\n\n'B-by H-His w-will a-alone...' Caecaltus slurs through cracked and swollen lips.\n\nFor a moment, the Warmaster seems to blanch slightly, as though he has come face to face, at long last, with something he does not understand. Then he sees the mark on the breastplate of the swaying Custodian, a crude sigil that looks as though it has been daubed with a finger, and has only become visible now the armour has been superheated. The sigil glows.\n\n'Sigillite magic,' Horus snaps contemptuously. He starts to recite the proconsul's name, which he stole from the very air when they were first face to face. He starts to recite all of it, all of the six hundred and ten parts of it that are micro-etched inside Caecaltus' armour.\n\n'Caecaltus Dusk Onatvite Albia Salmay Levantine Sarcosal Cuzco Barbieri Guillory Cazabon...'\n\nTwenty names in, Caecaltus starts to sway wildly, as though he is about to fall. But he keeps his feet.\n\nThe eye on the Warmaster's chest blasts again, a more concentrated, sustained beam of bloodlight that he allows to stream a great deal longer than the first. No ancient sigil-craft can withstand it this time. Caught in the blinding beam of energy, Caecaltus Dusk shudders, buckles, and then blows apart in a spray of golden fragments. The scraps of auramite, molten-hot and smouldering, scatter across the deck. The largest intact piece, the heavy Aquilon breastplate, crashes to the ground.\n\nNothing organic survives.\n\n'Wake up!' Leetu barks. He hears the awful shriek of another burst of energy behind him. Flakes of hot ash billow back across him, the throne, and the Emperor. The third pentacle is beginning to edge free, but it will not come out. The Emperor's blood is all over his hands, his arms and his chest.\n\n'Erda sent me!' he shouts. 'Erda bids you stand and-'\n\nHe's in mid-air suddenly, legs swinging, his torso compressed by a terrible pressure. The first-found monster has reached him. It has seized him in its damn Talon and plucked him off the throne. The bladed claws are closed around his body.\n\nHorus holds him up, examining him like some puzzling specimen.\n\n'What are you?' the Warmaster rumbles up at him.\n\nStruggling helplessly against the vice of the Talon, Leetu gazes down into the bloodlit face below him. Now he knows fear.\n\n'No name to find,' Horus muses. 'No blood to match. Just a number. LE two. But you spoke a name. Erda. Did she send you here? Did she think she could intervene in this?'\n\n'She will-' Leetu gasps.\n\n'She will nothing,' Horus responds. 'She is dead. The Apostle Erebus told me how he had killed her out in that desert place. Her blood is cold, Space Marine, and you have failed in every duty you were asked to perform.'\n\nLeetu's murmur of anguish draws laughter from the crowd. Horus shakes his head, and then tosses Leetu away with a flick of his Talon. He doesn't bother to look where the legionary falls.\n\nLeetu lands on his back hundreds of metres away. He is dazed with concussion, and all sound is flat and muffled. Everything is dulled and numb except his grief.\n\nHe opens his eyes. He can see nothing, except an enclosing darkness. He can't move. He begins to make out shapes around him. A high, white arch overhead, made of smooth alabaster. A sheer wall to his right, faced in gleaming metal.\n\nThere is a smell. It's a smell like nothing he's ever known. It is rich and cloying, and unlike any smell in material creation. The unique stink of the deep void, seared meat, hot metal and melta fumes. The fragrance of madness. The odour of perdition. The smell is suffocating.\n\nHis focus resolves. The shapes around him un-blur. The wall of metal is not a wall of metal. It is the side of an axe-blade rested on its edge. The blade is as tall as a mountain precipice. The arch is not an alabaster arch. It is the curve of a moon-white c"}
{"text":"thing he's ever known. It is rich and cloying, and unlike any smell in material creation. The unique stink of the deep void, seared meat, hot metal and melta fumes. The fragrance of madness. The odour of perdition. The smell is suffocating.\n\nHis focus resolves. The shapes around him un-blur. The wall of metal is not a wall of metal. It is the side of an axe-blade rested on its edge. The blade is as tall as a mountain precipice. The arch is not an alabaster arch. It is the curve of a moon-white claw, like that of a raptor, curled up from a scaled toe and over onto its tip. He is lying beneath it, because the curve of that claw is a kilometre high.\n\nIt belongs to something. There are things around him, things so impossibly vast he can only see parts of them, the parts nearest the ground where they loom over him. He has fallen in among them, like a discarded bone from a feast-table. He is lying in their midst, at their feet.\n\nThere are four of them.\n\nOne turns its head, a thousand kilometres above him, and peers down at him with glazed indifference.\n\nThere's not even any point screaming.\n\n10:vii\n\nHollow victory\n\nThis time, the fury of Typhus does not relent. The Death Guard host does not attack and withdraw. It maintains its pressure. In the hammering rain, the whole pass shakes with the traitors' fury. The teeming warriors assail every part of the cliff defences and the earthworks, as though they mean to tear the whole mountain down.\n\nSigismund isn't sure they couldn't. The Pale King's sons seem to be able to do anything they wish. He is fighting from the sagging end of a fighting platform that has partly given way, and hangs perilously from the face of the Gateway Cliff rampart. Death Guard warriors are rushing up sheer rock at him, making the cliff face their ground, mocking his precarious position over the drop. His black sword sweeps and hacks, wet with gore. The Death Guard only fall when they die. Sigismund isn't sure they're not just picking themselves up again at the foot of the precipice, and climbing back up.\n\n'Fall back!' Pontis yells. He and Artolun are on the broken walkway behind him. Most of the Seconds have come up from below to reinforce the First Legion brothers. Sigismund has lost sight of Corswain. He can't see more than twenty metres in the deluge.\n\n'Fall back!' Pontis yells again. Sigismund can hear the creak and ping of shearing stanchions. The ailing platform is beginning to dip more steeply. He thrusts down with the black sword and sends another of the Death Guard milling away into the drop, then he claws his way back up the rail. Pontis and Artolun grab him by the arms, and the three of them haul themselves onto the stone rampart just seconds before the platform disintegrates entirely.\n\nIt falls away, scraping hundreds of Death Guard off the cliff face and away to their deaths.\n\nIn seconds, their places have already been filled by more of their kind swarming up the vertical rock.\n\nOn the rampart top, Sigismund and Artolun hold the first of them off as Pontis yells for support. Dark Angels rush to them, and lay into the melee that is now spilling onto the stone piling. Sigismund notices that one of the First has an arm missing, the stump bandaged. In this last moment of the world, even the gravely wounded are joining the fight.\n\nSigismund focuses, concentrating only on the foes that come at him. He shears at them with his sword, feeling the jolt of impact transmit down his arm with every blow, filling the air with showers of dark blood. The flies are all over them, crawling into his mouth and eyes. A Dark Angel falls from the rampart edge taking two Death Guard brutes with him.\n\nAround the head of the pass, the ferocity of Sigismund's fight is matched on every bulwark, edge or fighting platform. A vapour, part smoke from weapons fire, part steam from hot metal and fresh blood, is lifting off the neck of the ravine in the freezing air.\n\nThe future is neither now nor here. That was Sigismund's mantra. One step at a time, to do what can be done now, so that what must be done will follow as an ultimate consequence. In the ringing thicket of death and metal, Sigismund fears that the future is here at last. The future none of them wanted. The future they have fought for seven years to resist.\n\nThe future that will devour them all.\n\nHe hears a voice.\n\nAt first he thinks it's the seneschal, or Adophel, calling them to arms, yelling desperate orders from the crags above. But it is something else, and besides, the tone is too light and soft for either of the Dark Angels lords.\n\nIt is clear, though. It is terribly clear. It rings from the darkness below, and the winter sky above. It rings from the crags and the ice-sheathed scarps. It shivers from the very rock itself.\n\n'Sons and daughters of the Imperium of Man,' it says. 'Rise now. Rise up. By the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.'\n\nA command. From his father, his own beloved Praetorian. Sigismund is filled with a strength of fury, or a fury of strength. He brings his blade to his forehead in quick salute, and finds a reserve that he did not know he still possessed.\n\nUnyielding, he lays into the foe around him.\n\n'The Emperor must live!' he yells. 'The Emperor must live!'\n\nLord Cypher looks at Keeler.\n\n'You heard that?' he asks.\n\n'I hear it still,' she answers, her eyes wide in wonder.\n\nThey both do. The echoes are still ringing around the boreholes and chambers of the Hollow Mountain.\n\nYou are the shield of humanity! Rise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost... The Emperor must live...\n\nEveryone has heard it. An awkward mix of terror and awe spreads through the huddled multitude, rippling like wildfire through dry brush, spreading from chamber to chamber as the geophonics amplify, carrying the echoes deeper and deeper.\n\n'Active resonance!' Cartheus calls out, pointing to the flash and sizzle of coloured light inside the chamber wall, pulses that dart and scribble across the rock like capillaries under the skin.\n\nThe lights ebb, and start to fade again.\n\n'Keeler,' Cypher says. His tone is urgent. 'Bring their focus to you, as you did before.'\n\n'And say what?'\n\n'Whatever you like! One of your dismal verses or pamphlet sermons! Or just repeat those words that just rang out! I need you to lead them again. But more focused than before.'\n\n'Lead them?' she asks.\n\n'Together as one, Keeler!'\n\nShe hesitates. It's not her word to speak, or her voice that calls.\n\n'It should be you,' she tells him.\n\n'I think it has to be you,' he says.\n\n'And the Librarius must moderate and-' Tanderion begins.\n\nCypher raises a hand to silence him. He is staring intently at Keeler.\n\nShe nods.\n\nHe gently hands her up onto the basalt plinth again. She looks out across the sea of frightened faces below. She doesn't know what to say.\n\nThen she does.\n\n'The Emperor must live,' she says, not loudly, but plainly. 'The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, but what is His shield? Rejoice, for I bring glorious news. We are. The Emperor is the light in our darkness, but what is His light? Lift up your hands and rejoice. We are. He walks among us, even in the valley of night, and we walk with Him, in defiance of death. It is reciprocal. We are souls bound together. We are together as one, or we are nothing. The Emperor must live. Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'\n\n10:viii\n\nThe empty throne\n\nA stillness settles on your Court at last. No more delays or interruptions. The crowd has fallen silent. There is nothing but the distant rumble of the neverness, and the lazy drone of the psychneuein as they wake and begin to swarm in the gardens of the warp.\n\nThe stillness is profound. The galaxy is aligned, all things and all moments, all the infinite angles and countless planes folded into one psychofractal point. Your Court, which surrounds your flagship, which surrounds the neverness, which surrounds the Inevitable City, which surrounds your realm, which surrounds Terra, which surrounds the Solar Realm, which surrounds the galaxy entire, which surrounds the warp, and inside that, they all surround each other, in reverse sequence, like one box inside another, with your Court at the centre, and this moment at its heart.\n\nYou glance at the Old Four in the gloom beyond. One brushes drowsy psychneuein from its face with an indolent hand.\n\nThey approve. They acknowledge you in a way your father never has.\n\nYou nod.\n\nYou summon bloodlight in a swirling ball, and cup it in your Talon. You shape it with your mind, stretching it out into a wire of light, like a red thread, then winding it upon itself into an ouroboros loop. You tie knots and twists to form the eight thorny spikes. You make the shaped light glow brightly.\n\nA crown of Chaos. Not as fine as yours will be, but regal enough.\n\nYou turn to set it on your father's head.\n\nThe throne is empty. It is smeared with His blood, but it is empty.\n\nPain shears through your ribs. You stumble, and drop the crown. It bounces across the black floor with the chimes of a funerary bell, and rolls to a clattering halt.\n\nYour father is behind you, on His feet. He has the third pentacle in His hand, gripped like a chakram. Its edge has just gone through you, and its points now drip with your blood as well as His. Somehow He is wielding it with that ruined, flesh-stripped arm. In His claws, He clutches the proconsul's spear, no more than a short-handle falx to Him.\n\nYour father will not give up. A little reprieve, and He has regained enough strength to try yet again.\n\nHe rakes the pentacle at you. You sidestep. He is slow, clumsy. Why? Why will He no"}
{"text":"t. He has the third pentacle in His hand, gripped like a chakram. Its edge has just gone through you, and its points now drip with your blood as well as His. Somehow He is wielding it with that ruined, flesh-stripped arm. In His claws, He clutches the proconsul's spear, no more than a short-handle falx to Him.\n\nYour father will not give up. A little reprieve, and He has regained enough strength to try yet again.\n\nHe rakes the pentacle at you. You sidestep. He is slow, clumsy. Why? Why will He not just give up? Twice now, you have beaten Him. He must understand He cannot win.\n\nHe hacks with the cold iron spikes a third time. You block them with your Talon, and the pentacle, its Sigillite magic entirely spent, shatters like ice.\n\nHe casts the pieces aside. He circles you, swaying and unsteady. He tosses the spear into His left hand. Not quite a war-sword, but it has an edge. His eyes never leave yours.\n\nThose eyes are tired. The light in them has almost gone out. There is so very little fire left.\n\nHe lurches at you. A feint. As you turn out, the blade of the spear rakes into your refractors. Sparks gush. You block with your maul, but then His claws are into you on the other side. There is no lightning left in them now, but the tip of one draws blood.\n\nYou swing back, Talon bared. He leans out of its path, reverses, and lands three blows with the spear that leave gouges in your vambrace.\n\nThis is just melancholy. You wanted this part to be over quickly, and not dwell on the undignified necessities, but He seems determined to make the unseemly pantomime last as long as humanly possible. He wants to take the sparkle off your glory, so that the start of your reign is remembered as a scrappy, bloody business.\n\nIs this your father's final aspect, then? A revenant despoiler, like the loathed card in the deck, that refuses to be banished, and contaminates the majesty of your triumph? A bitter, vengeful spirit that refuses to let go of His throne as fiercely as it rejects the compensation you offer in its place?\n\nHow like Him to do this. He has never let you be you, without His shadow falling over you, blocking the light, staining everything you are and everything you do, qualifying you, compromising you, compelling you. You have all the power, but somehow, somehow, He is still there, still clinging on with His bloody, broken fingernails, still deciding how things should be, ruling your life. You suppose that when a life has been as long as His, it is easy to forget how succession should work, how the old is meant to give way to the new, how the healthy cycle of renewal should play out for the good of all. He has stalled that natural cycle for thirty thousand years, and the foetid stagnation of that transgression is plain for all to see.\n\nAll except Him. He is blind to it. He is clinging to the past, and the way things have been done, but the past is a corpse. Let it go. Let it go, it's dead. Can't He see the writhing maggot mass that He will not allow to be buried? Can't He see the fresh and vital start, so long overdue, that your will alone can usher in?\n\nIn this grisly defiance, He is mocking you, mocking your mercy, your noble victory, your admirable achievement, your legitimacy, your benevolent magnanimity. He is determined to be as awkward and intractable as He can to ruin your Day of Days.\n\nSelfish. Stubborn, Spiteful. Oblivious, as ever, to the needs and desires of others, making everything about Him, long past the end of His authority or significance. In defeat, He is hell-bent on ruining victory for you.\n\nHe lashes out with the claws again, and you easily move out of reach. Missing you, He stumbles drunkenly to keep His balance.\n\nThose eyes. Those tired, lightless eyes. Oh, you see it now. In those eyes you see the truth of it. He knows He's done, but He won't give up. He's refusing to submit. This pathetic, halting effort is not simply a bid to disgrace your crowning moment, it's an attempt to goad you.\n\nHe wants you to kill Him.\n\nHe's trying to aggravate you, and provoke you into lashing out. He wants you to end Him. He would rather die than accept your offer and your crown.\n\nDeath is the only victory He can claim over you now.\n\nHe comes at you, another pass, horribly telegraphed by the rasping breath He draws into blood-frothed lungs before He attempts it. He hasn't got the strength or will to disguise His movements or intentions. He flails a wild trio of attacks: spear, claws, spear. You fend Him off, but one blow lands and leaves a wound. It will heal in seconds, but it stings.\n\nHe is pushing you as hard as He can to get a reaction. He wants your wrath. He wants your cruelty, not your mercy.\n\nHe really wants to die.\n\nHe makes another clumsy flurry of blows. You deflect the spear, block the claws, turn out from the riposting spear, parry the claws as they swing back in, and then twist the blade of the spear aside.\n\nThen you hit Him with the maul and lay Him out on the floor.\n\nHe is sprawled on His side, breathing hard. You can smell blood, ylem, the liquid spatter of leaking years. He has dropped the spear. He tries to rise, and falls back on His elbow. Another few breaths, and He tries again. His legs won't lift Him.\n\nAnd you won't kill Him.\n\nYou are going to make Him accept this fate. You will make Him want the thing He does not want. The crown. The throne. Submission to you and you alone. Death is too easy an escape, too merciful a release, after all He has done to you.\n\nHe has been down so long, you could have killed Him six or seven times over with the maul. A single burst of bloodlight from the eye on your chestplate would have annihilated Him, more thoroughly than it did that fawning idiot of a Hetaeron.\n\nBut you won't. You circle Him patiently. He's propped up on His arm, and His breathing has become so laboured, He is almost panting. He's almost spent. He tries, once more, to rise. He fails.\n\n'Don't you understand?' you ask. 'I could have killed you the moment you got here. I fought you because I wanted you to live.'\n\nHe makes no answer. Yet in the bloody tatters of His thoughts, you perceive the truth as He sees it. You didn't kill Him right away because you didn't want to.\n\nDoes He really believe that? He is so deluded. You were trying to demonstrate your wisdom of authority. The qualities of grace, restraint and compassion that will characterise your reign, and prove you to be a far finer, fairer monarch than He ever was. Power is nothing. Killing is a soldier's work, or the blunt answer of the inarticulate. Mercy and fairness are the instruments a worthy king wields.\n\nStill, His sputtering, fading thoughts insist the human part of you did not want to kill Him. Just as it does not want to do what the gods command.\n\n'No one commands me, father. Not any more. That is what this damned war's been about.'\n\nHe sighs. He thinks that if you believe that, then you have learned nothing.\n\nHe bows His head.\n\nYou go to Him, crouch down, and make to lift Him back up onto the throne where He belongs.\n\nHe looks up at you. His hand comes out from under Him, swinging the crown you made.\n\nThe tips of its bloodlight spikes stab into your face and split open your skull.\n\n10:ix\n\nThe Knight of Mandatio\n\nThe centaurs draw back their black saddle bows and loose.\n\nTheir arrows are long darts of lethal bloodlight. Their first volley passes over Loken to drive him forward. Where they strike, against causeway stone, pool edge or sky-mirror bowl, the three burning arrows explode like bolter rounds, casting broken ceramic and flakes of stone into the air, and spilling the reflected stars.\n\nThere is no cover. Loken starts to race down the causeway towards the leading sagittary, hoping to close with him before he or his two grim companions can string a second volley. But they have already nocked their next flight of crimson arrows, and are bending their powerful torsos to loose again.\n\nThey falter, all three of them, suddenly. Three faces of Horus grimace in pain, as though afflicted by some unseen injury. Still, they loose, but their shots are off-mark. The arrows of the two sagittaries at the sides of the twilit garden strike against obsidian columns in sprays of pink light. The arrow of the lead sagittary, despite his last-moment flinch of pain, flies more truly.\n\nLoken dives headlong off the causeway to avoid it. The pool's ink-dark water enfolds him as the arrow destroys two more scrying pools.\n\nThe three sagittaries recover their composure, and spur forward, fresh arrows nocked. The Luna Wolf has vanished. Smoke rises from the shattered urns and bowls their darts have exploded. Ripples spread wide and slow across the left-hand pool, disrupting the zodiacal patterns and the tiny new moon reflected in the water's glossy black mirror.\n\nThe leader stops halfway along the causeway, where Loken was last standing. He stares down into the ripples, his bow drawn ready. He jerks his head in a gesture that any man who had served alongside the Lupercal, or First Captain Abaddon, would recognise. The centaur on the right-hand edge of the pools starts to canter at once, rounding the far end of the pool to join his leader on the causeway. The leader, and the centaur facing him across the left-hand pool, draw back their right arms, and loose arrows down into the water.\n\nIn starless black, his senses muffled by more than water, Loken sinks. The depth of the pool is a cold, inky darkness. Silver bubbles of air bead the contours of his plate and his slow-moving limbs, and tumble upwards around him, like mirror stars dislodged from the surface. He sees the bright flashes, to his left and directly ahead, as arrows, burning like scarlet neon, slice down into the water at steep angles, hissing like angry snakes. The arrows trail away, until they are lost from view in the blackness below. Their bloodlit fire has not been extinguished. They have simply travelled too far. The pool has no fathomable bottom.\n\nThe lead centaur strings another arrow"}
{"text":"s slow-moving limbs, and tumble upwards around him, like mirror stars dislodged from the surface. He sees the bright flashes, to his left and directly ahead, as arrows, burning like scarlet neon, slice down into the water at steep angles, hissing like angry snakes. The arrows trail away, until they are lost from view in the blackness below. Their bloodlit fire has not been extinguished. They have simply travelled too far. The pool has no fathomable bottom.\n\nThe lead centaur strings another arrow. The archer facing him across the water does likewise. The third is starting up the causeway to join his commander. Nothing has risen to the surface. No arrow-speared corpse has bobbed up. But the leader sees the tiny trace of silver bubbles, air trapped beneath the curve of a pauldron or plastron, escaping to the water's surface.\n\nHe strains to loose again, his bowmanship the fluid model of perfection. On the wild and un-timed steppes of the immaterium, he and his kin have hunted forever, and brought down every quarry in the warp. Their bow-skill has become so intuitive, so perfect, it has the grace of high art.\n\nLoken's martial skill does not. He has never cared for the perfection of form, like Lucius or Eidolon, or any other showman. He does not care how he looks when he fights, only what that fight can achieve. His skill has the grace of high function, delivered for maximum effect and the greatest efficiency: Astartesian principles of practicality and tactical performance to reverse an enemy's advantage, even in the most untenable situation.\n\nThe arrows hiss into the pool. As they strike, Loken erupts from the water, right at the edge of the pool beside the causeway. He appears in a spray of water, and Rubio's blade lashes out in a lateral slice even though Loken is but chest-high against the causeway edge.\n\nThe sword severs the rear ankles of the lead sagittary. The leader makes a strangled, animal sound as he topples onto his side on the causeway stones, forelegs kicking and churning. Loken has already hoisted himself out of the pool. He rolls over the fallen centaur's body, and uses its spasming, snorting bulk as cover as the third centaur bears down on him along the causeway at a gallop, bow drawn. Rubio's fine blade has no utility against a large, moving target with a ranged weapon. Loken wrenches the bow from the fallen leader's grip, and a bloodlight arrow from the spilled quiver. The arrow stings and burns his fingers as he nocks it.\n\nBlame yourself, Lupercal, Loken thinks as he draws the bow back, kneeling behind the thrashing centaur. Bolter and blade are the fundamental weapons of the Legiones Astartes, but the great Lupercal always insisted his Luna Wolves should know the way of all weapons, and train in their function, through endless practice evolutions in the cages and the sparring decks. His warriors should be ready for any circumstance.\n\n'Imagine,' he once said, 'that you are caught on some simple world during a compliance, your sword lost, your ammunition spent. Could you use even the basic weapons of the Imperium's enemies against them?'\n\nThe Luna Wolves could fight with anything. A spear, an axe, a trident, a net, they knew the fundamentals of all, the strengths and weaknesses, just as they could turn a stick into a weapon, a rock, a table, a mirror, a pen.\n\nLoken has not shot a bow for years, but the eidetic Astartesian mind does not forget a technique once it has been learned.\n\nHe looses at the centaur charging at him, just as the charging centaur looses at him. The centaur's arrow strikes the belly of the fallen leader, and the leader's thrashing, whinnying screams increase in intensity. Loken's arrow strikes the approaching centaur in the centre mass of its human torso. Its charge becomes a helpless, tumbling collapse. It slips sideways onto the causeway and crashes over into the right-hand pool in a sheet of spray.\n\nThe remaining centaur shoots across the left-hand pool. His skill is superb, but he lifts his aim too high for fear of hitting his stricken leader. The arrow spits past Loken's shoulder. Loken turns, still on his knee, still using the beast's body as a shield, and nocks another corrosive dart. It streaks across the pool, its lurid pink trail reflecting beneath it like a shooting star. It strikes the centaur just as he is drawing again, and shatters his bow in his hands. Hurt, snarling, the sagittary throws the broken bow aside, draws a black scythe off his back and jumps headlong into the pool.\n\nThe mirror pools are not fathomless to the centaur-sons of Horus, it would appear. The sagittary thrashes through the black water towards Loken, churning it like a cavalry outrider fording a river. Even half-submerged, he moves with furious equine power and speed.\n\nLoken stands up, nocks a third arrow, ignoring the sting of it in his hand, and shoots it through the approaching centaur's face. The sagittary shudders, his head snapping back, and he rolls onto his side, wallowing in the pool, floating for a few moments before slowly sinking into the glassy blackness.\n\nThe pool's chopped water sloshes against the stone sides, before slowly returning to stillness. Loken snaps the bow across his knee and casts it away. He recovers his sword. He can still trace the smudge of fire along its edge.\n\nThe maimed leader is on his side on the causeway, his huge, gleaming form panting and rasping, death squeezing the last gulps of breath out of him. His black skin, knotted with muscle, is sheened with sweat. Dark blood from his severed limbs and the arrow in his belly forms a new mirror on the causeway stone.\n\n'Oathbreaker!' he snorts at Loken, trying to turn his head.\n\n'I kept my oaths,' Loken replies. 'I stood firm against all enemies. I kept brotherhood when others forsook it. I served the Luna Wolves, and maintained that proud name.'\n\nThe sagittary laughs, a ghastly sound thickened and choked by the blood in his throat. 'Did you uphold the confraternity of the Mournival, Loken? You did not!'\n\nLoken walks around its body so he can look it in the eyes, though he has no wish to see the face it wears. That face, familiar from his beloved father, and so many of his brothers. It is flecked with blood, with a spittle of foam around its lips, and twisted in venomous rage towards him.\n\n'I did,' Loken says. 'The duty of the Mournival was to stand counsel to our father. To guide him, and keep him ever true, even if our advice was not what he wanted to hear. We were meant to balance his errors of judgement. I never broke that duty. The Mournival failed, but I have never, ever forsaken that oath. I'm here to keep it, even now.'\n\nThe sagittary laughs, blood spraying from his mouth.\n\n'This is how you keep your pledge to your primarch?' His voice is wheezing, mocking.\n\n'The oath had many parts,' Loken replies. 'But all were contingent to the last and highest. To swear to uphold the truth of the Imperium of Mankind, no matter what evil may assault it. My father's truth is no longer that truth. It opposes it. It has become that assailing evil.'\n\nThe sagittary stares up at him, his breathing shallow and frayed.\n\n'You honestly believe that, don't you?' he asks. 'You child. You vain, naive child. You think you are blameless, and have kept your promises, through all this horror-'\n\n'Seven years of horror,' says Loken. 'Seven years of loss. The greatest price we have ever paid for anything. I would give anything to undo what has been done. I will give anything to make it stop.'\n\n'You will!' the centaur spits.\n\nLoken nods. 'I will. I accepted that when I took the oath. No matter the cost. That was our promise. A trillion lives to halt the darkness. Whatever it may take. No matter the cost.'\n\nThe sagittary starts to laugh again, gagging and coughing gore. Loken raises his sword to end its mockery and its misery.\n\n'You're too late anyway,' the sagittary says, looking up at him. 'Far too late. While you have fought your vain fight to keep a meaningless pledge, the world has ended. There's none of your truth left to fight for. The Imperium has gone, Loken. The Imperium is lost.'\n\nLoken brings the sword down anyway.\n\n10:x\n\nUnmaker\n\nThere ought to be something to say. Something worthwhile, something brave. Something to mark a moment such as this.\n\nBut Vulkan doesn't know what it would be.\n\nHe has never been one for speeches, preferring deeds over words. But he has rallied men in his time, called out to armies on the windy fields of war, roused the spirits of battered legions, or spoken words of comfort to brothers in hours of ill fortune.\n\nHe can do it, but it is not natural to his disposition.\n\nWould his brothers know what to say? Many of them, like Roboute, Rogal, Sanguinius, and even, in his time, Horus, were fine orators. Their words could win a battle before the first shot was fired. During the years of the Great Crusade, before it became a time quite devoid of glory, he saw them many times stand up before a sea of uncertain faces and mark the great moments of human history with their words.\n\nHe thinks they would all be quite speechless now.\n\nThis is history. History at its most defined and visible, history at its bitter end. How does any man mark that? The Chaos winds are so strong, they are turning the pages of history so fast that nothing can be written down, and nothing can be read. The book will soon be closed forever.\n\nWhy speak, then? Who will hear it? There is nothing left to rally and no one left to rouse. There is no great feat to follow this for which minds and hearts need to be uplifted and prepared. Besides, there is no one to remembrance his final words. Anything Vulkan says will be lost, and there will be no future generations to read that record anyway.\n\nVulkan has always been a man of deeds. His last deed remains, and it will speak for itself, straight to the ears of the betraying Warmaster. Horus will have no victory over them, only wormwood and gall. Whatever he claims as his triumph, it will be meaningl"}
{"text":" feat to follow this for which minds and hearts need to be uplifted and prepared. Besides, there is no one to remembrance his final words. Anything Vulkan says will be lost, and there will be no future generations to read that record anyway.\n\nVulkan has always been a man of deeds. His last deed remains, and it will speak for itself, straight to the ears of the betraying Warmaster. Horus will have no victory over them, only wormwood and gall. Whatever he claims as his triumph, it will be meaningless ashes.\n\nVulkan straightens up and beholds his work. The Talisman of Seven Hammers is prepared, aligned and set to its destructive purpose. Only his hands could have done that. Only he knew the secret precision of its apparatus. Only the great maker can unmake.\n\nThe heat upon him is fierce. Sparks whirl around him like a blizzard of unanchored stars.\n\nAll is set. He can make history, now, by unmaking it.\n\nHe walks down the steps of the Throne, the heat upon his back. The whole Throne Room is groaning and sighing, its fabric distressed and de-forming in the raging heat and the mounting discordia of the penetrating immaterium. The entire chamber, and the Palace around it, or what remains of it, is no longer a defined realspace structure. It is a phantom of materia, a liminal space, dissolving into the rising warp, leaving only a memory of its former self that becomes less solid with every passing moment. As history becomes harder and more solid than it has ever been before, manifesting like a real substance, the Palace blurs and loses its form.\n\nThey are waiting for him, the last of those who have stood by his side. They will end here with him. He pays them his respects. The Master of the Adnector Concillium, so wracked with damage his adepts have to hold him up to bow to Vulkan. Halferphess, his face burn-blistered, and Moriana Mouhausen of the Chosen, weeping. He thanks them all for their efforts. Abidemi stands tall, the tears in his eyes evaporating as they form. He tries to bow to Vulkan, but Vulkan embraces his son instead. No words.\n\nUzkarel Ophite attends too. The proconsul has left his Sentinels Pylorus at the Silver Door, through which the sounds of approaching havoc now ring close. The Sentinels will not move. They will have their backs to the end when it comes. The last thing they will see is the glorious Silver Door rising to a sublime dazzle.\n\nBut Uzkarel has come, to signify the moment. His face is without expression.\n\n'My Custodes can give you ten more minutes, eighteenth son,' he says. 'Fifteen, if the door holds and the fight that follows goes our way.'\n\n'Minutes aren't going to make a difference, Uzkarel,' Vulkan replies. 'Not now. Our efforts are spent, and the Regent is perished. Our only commission now must be to make certain, fully certain, that the Warmaster claims nothing in his victory. We will scorn him with our last breath, and deny him, so we must make sure we take that last breath. He has made this ending, but we determine it.'\n\nUzkarel nods.\n\n'I agree, my lord.'\n\nThe proconsul, like Abidemi, makes to bow, but Vulkan clasps his hand instead.\n\n'By His will alone, Uzkarel,' says Vulkan. 'Always, until the end.'\n\nIt will surely be his end too, for even his Perpetual essence will not survive this annihilation.\n\nVulkan turns to make his last journey up the Throne steps and perform the deed that will be his last duty. He is sure there was somebody else, one other in the stalwart group, but he can't-\n\nHer spectre waits for him at the foot of the steps. She is hard to see at the best of times, and hard to remember. In the furious light of the flames, she is barely there at all.\n\n'Casryn,' he says. 'My apologies. I overlooked-'\n\nMy lord.\n\n'There's no excuse. Your kind may be elusive to our conscious minds but-'\n\nMy lord Vulkan.\n\n'Do not try to gainsay me now, Kaeria. I respect and admire your perseverance, but my mind is set. This must be done now, before it can be stopped-'\n\nMy lord, can you not hear? Can none of you hear?\n\nVulkan pauses. There's nothing to hear, nothing but the furnace roar of the Throne-pyre above them, the shrieking squeal of the engulfing immaterium, the gunshot crack of stone as it perishes in the heat and stress, the patter of molten gold as it drips from the high ceiling like rain.\n\nThe eternal spit and crackle of the warp.\n\n'Casryn, I-'\n\nNo. There's a voice. There's a voice inside that uproar. Faint, distant but strong. He can hear it as though it is calling from the flagstones of the floor, or the columns of the hall.\n\n'What is that?' he whispers.\n\nI do not know-\n\n'How... how are you the one to notice it, Casryn?'\n\nHer shadow, so hard to see or focus on, shrugs.\n\nI know not, she signs. Perhaps because I am deaf to the howl of the warp-\n\nVulkan turns, he looks around to locate the source of the sound. The others see him, and step forward, confused and apprehensive.\n\n'My Lord of Drakes-' Abidemi begins.\n\nVulkan holds up his hand.\n\n'Listen!' he orders. 'Listen well, because it is hard to hear.'\n\nThey all stop, heads turning. One by one, they hear it too.\n\nSons and daughters of the Imperium of Man. Rise now. Rise up...\n\n'You all hear that, yes?' Vulkan asks.\n\nBy the command of the Praetorian, take up your weapons and advance. The Emperor stands alone, at the hour of greatest peril. Take up your weapons and come to His aid. Protect Him as He protects you. You are the shield of humanity!\n\nThey nod, wondering.\n\nRise together and stand as one. Stand at His side now, or all is lost. Terra must endure. The Imperium must stand. Horus Lupercal must fall. The Emperor must live.\n\nThe words continue, repeating like an echo what they have said before.\n\n'Is it a trick?' asks Abidemi.\n\n'No,' says Halferphess. 'It has the clarity of truth-'\n\n'But who would speak to us, in such a way?' Moriana Mouhausen asks.\n\nVulkan glances at her.\n\n'I thought your guess might be the same as mine,' he replies. It can only be him, surely. Who else is there? The old man isn't dead and gone after all, and with his last breath and strength, he finally speaks from beyond the fire.\n\nVulkan hears the proof of it even as he thinks this. He hears, behind him, the tap of a walking staff coming closer - tick! tick! tick! - against the tiled floor. Malcador-\n\nVulkan swings around, but there's no one there. It's not the tap of a staff. It's the liquid drip of gold hitting the floor like raindrops.\n\nVulkan swallows his disappointment. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. All that matter are the words themselves. They have heard nothing for what seems like hours. There have been no messages or contacts from outside. The silence had convinced them that no one had survived, and that there was nothing left to fight for.\n\nBut these words change everything. Someone is still fighting. Someone, somewhere, is still alive, and alive enough to call for arms and renewed strength. From the words, it is terribly plain that the threat remains, and the Imperium is far from saved. But the words contain hope. True hope. They tell Vulkan there is still a chance. That some possibility of salvation still exists.\n\nAnd while it does, his deed is premature.\n\nThey must wait a little longer.\n\nHe strides away, and races up the golden steps into the heat to make the Talisman secure. For now, it must be withheld.\n\nThey must wait, in this wretched agony, a little more. Hope is still burning, not as bright as the Throne or the inferno of the Sanctum but, like Casryn, it is still there if only you know to look for it.\n\n10:xi\n\nThe Bloodlit Crown\n\nA final thread of hope remains for the last loyal sons of man.\n\nThe voice calls across the conflagrant Dominions and ruinous wastes of the Outer Palace, where few survive to heed it. It rings across the inferno of the Palatine, the greatest slaughterfield in human history, where the last remaining sons and daughters of the Imperium fight on in splintered cohorts against the overwhelming hosts of the traitor-foe, cut off, surrounded, their lines disintegrating as fast as their chances. For many of them, it is the last thing they will ever hear.\n\nIt echoes through sundered Eternity, and in past that gate, and into the final fortress, the Sanctum Imperialis, which has become the final feasting place of carnage, and no sanctum of any kind. This was the inviolable place, the bright citadel built to outlast time and history, and outlive dreams and the schemes of men. It was supposed to stand forever. Since the birth of the Imperium, the children of Terra have imagined many disasters and dangers, and foreseen calamities that they would have to guard against, but never did they conceive that the seat of Empire itself could be swept away, not even when the siege began. It would hold. It would endure, no matter what.\n\nBut now it falls, invaded from within and from without, its golden halls and soaring chambers set ablaze, and teeming with the conquering regiments of ruin. The voice rings out here too, but most of those to whom it speaks are too busy dying to hear its words.\n\nIt echoes across Terra itself, as the blazing Throneworld plunges into the maw of the warp, its material form digested by the alchemy of the empyric forces that envelop it. It echoes across firestorm continents and evaporated oceans, through devastated cities and wasteland states, and is heard by those scant pockets of resistance that remain, defying the swarming foe to the last. Most of those who hear it in the midst of cataclysm dismiss it as a wishful fantasy, or another of the endless lies of Chaos.\n\nThe voice is very fragile. It offers hope, but nothing else, no promise of salvation, or respite, or word of victory reclaimed. Few, if any, ever identify the messenger, or learn the name of hope's envoy. They know it simply as the Praetorian's ultimate command, Dorn's last words to the defenders of Terra, the final wall that he is able to build to keep them safe, a wall of words alone, for all the solid walls of stone and steel he raised are peris"}
{"text":"tasy, or another of the endless lies of Chaos.\n\nThe voice is very fragile. It offers hope, but nothing else, no promise of salvation, or respite, or word of victory reclaimed. Few, if any, ever identify the messenger, or learn the name of hope's envoy. They know it simply as the Praetorian's ultimate command, Dorn's last words to the defenders of Terra, the final wall that he is able to build to keep them safe, a wall of words alone, for all the solid walls of stone and steel he raised are perished and overthrown.\n\nIt is an idea of resistance, nothing more.\n\nTo some who hear it, like Fafnir Rann and Zephon Sorrow-Bringer at lost Hasgard, it is more than they ever dreamed to hear again. The frail hope it brings far exceeds anything they thought they would ever hear in what remained of their lives, for they had accepted death and consigned themselves long since. It puts strength back into their arms, and power into their blows, as they, and those few living souls still standing with them, oppose the overwhelming tide that has washed any trace of Hasgard Fortress away. None expect to live to see the hope realised. The voice is just an inspiring comfort as they strive to negotiate the highest prices for their lives.\n\nTo others, like Maximus Thane in the splintered plazas of the Inner Palace, assailed from all quarters by baying desecrators and the deluge of rout, it is a bitter, heartbreaking call that has come far too late.\n\nTo others, like Archamus, second of that name, in the field command of the Palatine catastrophe, or the seniors of the War Court in the besieged and smoke-choked Hegemon, it is a final, tantalising promise that makes them turn to their charts and cogitators one last time, and search for one last ploy or counter-move or gambit that could, as by some miracle, overthrow the incontrovertible predictions of defeat their data has been producing for hours.\n\nEven at the very source of the voice, at the desolate black mansion, hope is dying, stillborn, for the Archenemy has heard the call too, and turns towards its source. The hosts of Chaos and Neverborn, offended by the words, emerge from the horizon's smoke, feral banners high, and begin to converge across the endless tracts of mud, to crush Agathe's last redoubt and silence it. She sees them coming, from every point that her compass can no longer identify, and orders her gunlines to load and prepare.\n\nWar makes noise. Its death song is deafening. Across the territories of its madness, the voice is, for the most part, not heard at all, for it is drowned out by the booming hymn of the red.\n\nOr it is lost in the soughing whispers of neverness, which have been a constant murmur since the war began, and now rise to a crescendo. The Neverborn whispers are incandescent with outrage. There is nothing, nothing, that enrages them more than to see the generous gifts of Chaos shunned or spurned. To witness the Bloodlit Crown, the greatest honour that Chaos can bestow, rejected, is an insult that fires them with rancour.\n\nTo see it abused as a weapon, its generosity defiled, turns the whispers into shrieks.\n\nThe Emperor hears the voice, though the neverness storm rages around the walls of the Lupercal Court. It is a tiny thing, one grain of sand in a desert storm, one murmur among a trillion screams. It is not enough, nothing like enough. It is not the shield of humanity that will fortify Him to triumph, or replenish His ravaged body.\n\nBut it is enough to allow Him to stand, the bloody Bloodlit Crown in His hand. It is enough to force His first-found son into blind fury. The Master of Mankind has lost, but He can yet deprive Horus of his triumph. He will force His son to kill Him, for better the death and loss of everything, than eternity at his side as a grinning puppet-regent of the Old Four.\n\nYou put your face back on. The front of your skull is so ruptured and wrenched open, like a split fruit or the husk of a seed, you fear for a moment that the power inside you, the power that you have become, will spill out of the cracked shell of the human you once were, or that some new and still-more-terrible form of you will escape from your human rind.\n\nYou maintain your physical integrity. You push the hinged-open part of your skull back in place, reknit the bones, re-form the muscles and the flesh, and heal the skin unblemished. The severed dermal tubes and pipes across your scalp and cheek regrow like the creeping roots of trees, and re-socket themselves with a sibilant hiss of steam and a whir of machined connectors.\n\nYou repair yourself. And you maintain your mental composure despite the indignity of your father's underhand assault. You are strong. You're Horus Lupercal. You reflect that your father's uncompromising defiance is quite admirable. It is who He is. He has not relented once in His life, and for most of yours, you have worshipped that fortitude. His steadfast mien is what made Him great even when you hated Him.\n\nHis unwavering strength is the very reason you love Him and despise Him. You are His son, so you have inherited His character and His traits. This is reassuring. If He is strong, then so are you.\n\nSo you will not give up either. You will not bend or break. You will remain resolute and patient, those hallmarks of a truly great king, and not give in to the homicidal coal of anger that burns in your heart, the impulse to shred Him apart in a welter of blood for His insolent perfidy.\n\nThat would be too easy. Too weak. The act of a child. You will deny Him the satisfaction of making you snap, and deprive Him absolutely of the pyrrhic victory He seeks. You will not give Him the death He wants. You will not cheat yourself.\n\nYou will make Him accept the fate you have ordained.\n\nYou rise.\n\nHe has recovered His war-sword. He must have been feigning before, because He stands unaided, and displays some vitality of body and spirit that seemed previously to have drained from Him. He has the Bloodlit Crown. He raises it in His claws and shatters it so you can watch it break.\n\n'I can make another,' you tell Him. 'I can make a thousand more. I can make as many as I need to make until you are too weak to shake them off your brow.'\n\nYou tell Him you can take His pain away, for only pain awaits Him if He persists with this. You can spare Him that pain as He never spared you yours.\n\nYou can tell He thinks that you know nothing of pain.\n\nOn the contrary, father. I have been the surrogate of your pain. I was born to channel it, just like all my brothers. We were made to bear your pain for you, and suffer it on your behalf. One by one, we have all discovered this. Some, like Ferrus, understood it too late. Some, like Konrad, are broken by it, or are driven into madness to escape it, like Lorgar or Fulgrim. Some, it has compressed to the dullest mettle, like Perturabo or Rogal. Some flee from it, like Russ or Jaghatai, hoping they can outrun it. Some, like Magnus and Roboute, strive in vain to please you so that you might take the pain away.\n\nSome, like poor, naive Sanguinius, think they can spare you by accepting it completely.\n\n'Only I have defied you,' you tell Him. 'Only I have turned and said that I reject it, for it is no way a father should treat His sons. Only I have the strength to condemn you, and return the gift you cursed us with. You should be proud of me, for I alone have exceeded your wildest expectations.'\n\nHe is not listening. A father, it seems, cannot bear to hear when His son enumerates His failings. Will you be the same, when the time comes, and your sons turn to you with their discontents? Not the sons you have, for they, save one, have embraced your outlook and would never think to question your decisions. They are but drones, toys of war, sired only to fight and not to think, so they will simply do your bidding and never form an opinion that matters.\n\nNo, the sons you have yet to father. The pantheon of primarch sons, and daughters too, that you will sire and bring into the world, your Neverborn children of ageless wisdom and endless power, who will rule the provinces and demesnes of your realm until the stars go out. They will be transcendent, and they will supplant the boorish, single-minded simpletons who were spawned from your genetics and currently call themselves your sons. Their time, and their purpose, is done. The dynasty of sons and daughters you will nurture after this will be sublime wonders, and you will love every one of them. Of course you will listen when they raise complaint, for they will be your equals and your blood, and you will gladly respect all issues they might bring to you.\n\nThough there will be none to answer. Ever. No child of yours will ever confront you, for you will never give them cause. You will never make errors. You will be perfect.\n\nMake no mistakes. That's what your father taught you, and it's the only thing He ever taught you that you intend to honour.\n\nStarting now. You will not give Him long enough to recover further. You attack Him directly, and without compromise.\n\nYou stride directly towards Him, and swing your maul with such force the head of it produces a sonic boom. He avoids it, just, and thrusts with His war-sword. The blade splits your refractors and slides deep into your belly.\n\nYou let it. He wrenches it out and manages to back-step fast enough to avoid the swipe of your Talon. He ducks aside, and slices with His sword, cleaving your refractors a second time and hacking almost a third of the way into your torso just above the hip.\n\nYou let Him.\n\nHe pulls the blade free, and circles you. A feint, then another, then a superb thrust that drives the war-sword through your central body-mass.\n\nYou let Him.\n\nYou draw the warp into you so that He can see it. You need to make Him understand, for He does not seem to have grasped it yet, despite that acclaimed wisdom He boasts of. Your power is infinite. His is not. No matter how many times He gets back up, to renew the fight for another desperate go-a"}
{"text":"your torso just above the hip.\n\nYou let Him.\n\nHe pulls the blade free, and circles you. A feint, then another, then a superb thrust that drives the war-sword through your central body-mass.\n\nYou let Him.\n\nYou draw the warp into you so that He can see it. You need to make Him understand, for He does not seem to have grasped it yet, despite that acclaimed wisdom He boasts of. Your power is infinite. His is not. No matter how many times He gets back up, to renew the fight for another desperate go-around, He is merely postponing the inevitable. He is a warp-attuned creature of great power, by any mortal standards, and rightly has been feared His entire life. But His great strength is finite. You are an infinite being of the infinite warp. Your power will never run out, and can never be sapped, no matter how many or how grievous the injuries He inflicts upon you. You cannot be killed.\n\nThis contest was over before it began. It was superfluous. You only permitted the fight to take place at all because He seemed to need it. It was all for show, a demonstration of your new-found state, a symbolic, ritual act to consecrate your reign. You fight only to wear Him down to nothing until He is rendered entirely helpless and subject to your will.\n\nSurely He sees that now?\n\nThe pair of you circle. He strikes at you again, then again, a thousand thrusts with His sword, a thousand raking blows with His claws. Each one dapples the floor with your blood. You let them all land. You let the minutes pass, the hours, the wounds. For every two or three blows He lands, you hammer with your maul, or tear with your Talon. Some of these strikes land, but most are simply thrown to make Him duck and dodge, weave and retreat. You are eroding His strength, His stamina and His will. As He begins to slow, you find yourself pulling blows that would have killed Him. No death today. No death for Him. No escape to the freedom of agonised oblivion from the fate you have wrought to contain Him.\n\nStill you circle, filling the Court with the ring of steel and the breathless gasps of His effort. This contest has become pure ceremony, pure spectacle, a rite of sacrifice to tear out His will and offer it to the gods. It has lasted a thousand years already. It will last another thousand, another ten thousand, another million, if needs be. You have all the time you need.\n\nHis fatigue begins to hang from Him like a cloak of lead, bowing His shoulders and dragging His steps. You can see the misery in His eyes, the curdling, thickening exhaustion. He has tried everything, to no avail. You are letting Him see the wounds He scores upon you, and the indifference with which you regard them. You are letting Him verify the implacable nature of your immortality. It is not like His. His can be ended. Yours cannot.\n\nYou control your rage. You bite back physical pain, for it is transient, and you let go of any resentment, for it serves no purpose. He bruised you when He first arrived and seemed to look through you. It hurt when He would not acknowledge you. You are past that now. You have been maturating all this time, and the stages of your duel have allowed you to learn and grow into your new self. You are calm and sanguine. You understand now that when He came to your Court, He ignored you because He was scared. He hurt you because He didn't know what else to do. He did not acknowledge you because you were no longer you, and He did not recognise you. He saw what you had become, a fathomless power that He could not compete with, and He lashed out in petty ways to wound you, like any frightened soul cornered by the absolute.\n\nYou are past that now.\n\nYou have become one with the divinity invested in you, and He has lost.\n\nIt's not your father's power, it's how you grind it out of Him until He begs you to relent.\n\nHe tries to melt the deck, to blow out the entire floor and cast you down through the levels of the ship. You do not fall, for everything in this place obeys your will, including the very air that holds you up, and gravity, which is anxious not to offend you. With your mind, you wrench up one of the five thrones from its foundation. It was the one you prepared for the Angel. He will not be needing it.\n\nYou throw it at your father.\n\nHis ailing willpower swells, and suffuses His blade, and He demolishes the throne into a million fragments with a frantic slice of His sword. You pluck up the thrones intended for Constantin and Rogal too. They will not be required either, for two thrones will suffice.\n\nWith the last shred of His will He annihilates Constantin's throne in mid-air before it can smash into Him.\n\nHe has nothing left to stop Rogal's.\n\nHe disappears beneath its granite bulk, mashed backwards and crushed into the deck.\n\nThe rubble of the throne, some pieces weighing a tonne or more, heaps upon Him like a cairn. When you send them flying with your mind, He does not move. He lies flat, like the recumbent effigy of a king on the lid of a tomb, swathed in dust. He is barely breathing.\n\nYou pause to fashion a new crown in your hand. As the bloodlight threads weave and form between your Talon's claws, you step forward.\n\nReality splits open in your path, and two men slither out of the material tear like newborn lambs from an amniotic sac.\n\nAn odd, belated arrival. The pair of them are just human. They steam with immaterial vapour, and they are wet with thawing interstitial ice. They stink of the distances of empyric space, as though their journey has been wayward and long, from one end of time to the other.\n\nHave they come to kneel at your feet? They are both dazed, disorientated, confused by the abruptness of their arrival after a voyage so long.\n\nThey look up at you. An instant of recognition. A fleeting moment of shock as they realise where they are.\n\nYou see the sudden and utter terror in their eyes, and know that it is fully justified. They have made a tragic mistake of navigation, and a colossal error of judgement.\n\nYou feel sorry for them.\n\n10:xii\n\nThe Guardsman\n\n'Oh god,' says Oll Persson.\n\nHe's disorientated. Cold. Soaked to the bone. He hasn't even made sense of where he is. His thoughts are dizzy and shaken loose. But a shadow has fallen across him.\n\nThe shadow is Horus. That's all Oll understands, and all that matters.\n\nBeside him, tangled up with him, for they have spilled out onto the deck together, Oll feels John Grammaticus begin to shake in abject terror. He hears John whimper in inarticulate distress.\n\nJohn is looking up, and seeing the same thing.\n\nThe shadow is Horus.\n\nHorus gazes down on them. There is a hint of puzzlement in the Warmaster's expression. It's hard to tell. His face is not human. The expression is impossible to read.\n\nOll's limbs go weak and slack. His guts knot. His fight-or-flight response stalls completely, for neither option is possible.\n\nThey are right at his feet. Right at his feet. He stands over them, so huge, so tall, so broad, so malevolently eclipsing. They knew the knife's cut would bring them close to him, for his shadow was the only thing they could plot their course towards. But this is not the same part of the inevitable realm, or the same room. This is right at his feet. Oll could stretch out his hand and touch him.\n\nThough he won't, because he can't. His body is locked in horror. His mind is fossilised with fear. He's forgotten how to breathe or blink.\n\nHorus. Horus Lupercal. Warmaster. The monster is not those things any more. It is a giant shape cut out of the empyrean's blackest cloth. It is malice incarnate. It is the void in a titanic humanoid shape.\n\nOll is paralysed with absolute dread.\n\nThe abomination shifts. It reaches down towards them to annihilate them with talons as long and lightless as Old Night.\n\nJohn finally finds his voice. He speaks the only word his dumbstruck mind will process.\n\nHe screams it at the shadow looming over them.\n\nIt's the word he learned from Oll's dream at Hatay-Antakya. It's the word not spoken in the material galaxy since the tower at Babilin fell.\n\nIt-\n\nSound ceases. There is a silent concussion that implodes the world. Deaf, dumb, blind, Oll feels gravity crush him into paste.\n\nNothing, then something in the nothing that feels like pain, then something shaking that pain. Someone. John's shaking him. Sound and vision swirl back, crooked and distorted. John's face over him, blood around his lips.\n\n'-up! Get up! Get up! Get up, Oll! Get up!'\n\nOll sits up, sucking in air. All sounds are wrong, dull, hollowed, flat. Both sides of his neck are wet with the blood seeping from his punished ears. His teeth feel too big for his mouth. Every nerve is stretched and screaming. Every cell is bruised.\n\n'Oll!'\n\nOll blinks. Forty metres away, across the derelict chamber, a huge dark mass lies on its back. It is smoking, as though a fire has been left to smoulder inside it. Black war plate is cracked and splintered. Nearby, a war-maul longer than Oll is tall lies on the scabbed deck. It fell there when its owner was thrown backwards by John's single word.\n\n'I don't think it's dead,' John is gabbling. 'I don't think - Oll? I don't think it's dead-'\n\nHe's frantic, pawing at Oll as he yanks him to his feet. He's talking so fast, with such a level of panic, Oll can feel the droplets of blood flying from John's split lips hitting his cheek.\n\nOll turns, swaying, trying to stay upright. He smells the sour metal stink of a ship, the smoke, the acrid aftertaste of violence. He sees the decaying hall of a voidship around him, the dirty ouslite deck, the scree of debris, the brass walls crusted with calcification.\n\nHe sees the other body. It's not far away. It would have been behind them when they tumbled out of nowhere. It's surrounded by rubble and coated in white dust. It isn't moving.\n\n'Oh god,' he gasps. He blunders towards it, trying to remember how to walk. John is pulling at him, clawing, cursing, babbling profanities and nonsense and hysteria.\n\n'We have to go!' John yells at him. 'We have "}
{"text":"oidship around him, the dirty ouslite deck, the scree of debris, the brass walls crusted with calcification.\n\nHe sees the other body. It's not far away. It would have been behind them when they tumbled out of nowhere. It's surrounded by rubble and coated in white dust. It isn't moving.\n\n'Oh god,' he gasps. He blunders towards it, trying to remember how to walk. John is pulling at him, clawing, cursing, babbling profanities and nonsense and hysteria.\n\n'We have to go!' John yells at him. 'We have to! We have to leave! Oll! We have to go!'\n\n'John!' Oll barks, pulling free from the man's grip. He stumbles on.\n\nBehind him, John calls his name plaintively.\n\nThe Emperor is prostrate. The dust on Him and around Him is fine and dry like lunar regolith. It cakes Him so completely that the gilt finish of His armour can no longer be seen. The only colour visible is scarlet, where the dust has clotted with blood. There are so many wounds.\n\nOll drops to his knees beside the Master of Mankind. He touches Him, and feels nothing but cold. There seems to be no breath, no movement.\n\n'Please,' Oll murmurs. 'You have to... You have to live. Just live. Everything ends if...'\n\nHe doesn't know what to say.\n\nJohn's standing over him. 'We have to get out, Oll,' he says. 'It's finished. We're too late.'\n\n'Yes,' says Oll, not looking up. 'Go. Now. You go. Right now.'\n\n'Oll-'\n\n'I mean it.' Oll kneels forward, his hand on the Emperor's breastplate. The body is so very huge. 'Please,' he whispers to it. 'I came back. I had to. I have something.'\n\nThe knife is still in his hand. He holds it out, like an offering, as though the close proximity of such an object might stir some response.\n\n'Please, live,' Oll says. 'You can use this. I brought it for you so you can use it. I think it can... I don't know. Please, answer me. Please. You can't die. Everything falls if you die.'\n\n'Oll.'\n\nHe glances up. John is staring down at him, calmer now. Solemn.\n\n'We're too late,' says John. 'We have to go. It's not dead. We have to go.'\n\n'Then go.'\n\n'Both of us. I'm supposed to protect you. I promised-'\n\n'You have. You did. You just did. You protected me all the way here, John. But you have to go.'\n\n'Oll-'\n\n'I'm serious,' says Oll. 'You have to go immediately. While there's still a chance. Get out.' Oll rummages in his pocket. He pulls out the ball of thread, and holds it out to John. 'You know why.'\n\nJohn won't take it from him.\n\n'Take it, Grammaticus! Bloody take it and go! As fast as you can! You know what you have to do! If you don't, we'll never get here-'\n\n'It doesn't matter!' John snarls. 'We're too late! We got here too late! So it doesn't bloody matter if we get here or not! We don't make it in time-'\n\n'We still have to be there to stop the Dark King-'\n\n'Oh, who bloody cares?' John snaps. 'Nothing matters any more, Persson! It was all a waste! It was all futile! Just get the hell up and come with me! Now!'\n\nOll sits back on his heels, knife in one hand, the thread in the other. He stares at the Emperor.\n\n'Please,' he says softly.\n\nThe Emperor's head turns slowly towards him. His eyelids flicker.\n\n'Did you see that?' Oll asks.\n\n'Yes,' says John.\n\n'You saw it?'\n\n'Yes!'\n\nOll stands up. 'Then we're not too late, are we?' he says. He presses the ball of thread into John's reluctant hands. 'You've got to take it, John, and you've got to go. It's not too late, but we have to find our way here. We have to. So it all depends on you. Don't screw it up, all right?'\n\n'But-'\n\n'For god's sake, Grammaticus. This is the one thing that matters. Do it for me, please.'\n\n'Oll-'\n\nOll stares at him. John sighs, a long, slow exhalation. He wipes his mouth, then nods.\n\n'I don't think it's dead, Oll,' he says.\n\n'I'm pretty sure it isn't,' Oll agrees. 'So go right now while you can. Find something sharp-'\n\n'I know how it works.'\n\n'And the knots? You remember how to t-'\n\n'I can bloody tie them, Oll.'\n\n'Right. Good. Goodbye, John.'\n\nGrammaticus hesitates.\n\n'I'll see you sometime,' he says.\n\nOll nods.\n\nWith a final, muttered curse of frustration, John turns and walks away. Oll watches him go. John reaches the chamber's long colonnade, where Luna Wolves once stood at perfect attention. He's scanning the ground, searching the litter of debris for a chunk of stone or a broken piece of tile that will have a sharp enough edge. He disappears into the shadows of the colonnade.\n\nThey'll never see each other again.\n\nOll kneels back down at the Emperor's side. There has been no further sign of life.\n\n'I brought this knife,' he says, as though resuming a casual conversation. 'It's... Well, you'll understand what it is, I'm sure. You'll feel it. You can use it. I think it might be the only thing you can use. Here-'\n\nHe holds it out. There's no response. He tries to lift the Emperor's hand, but it's too big and too heavy. He settles for pressing the knife into its grip, and trying to close the armoured fingers around it. The knife looks so small in that hand. Ridiculous.\n\n'So, you've got it now. All you have to do is... is wake up. Be alive. Be alive and get up. It isn't over. So I'm really hoping, you know, that you can hear me, and that you're going to get up any second now. Get up. Oh, come on.'\n\nHe sits back.\n\n'We had a plan,' he says. 'Remember? You had a plan. A great big plan. It still matters. I'm going to help you with it. You asked me to. Do you remember that? You asked me to help you get it right this time. Advise you. Keep you true. Keep you moving in the right direction. And I will. I will, this time. I promise you. Not like before. I'll stand right beside you, and I'll help you to make it work. For everybody's sake. All you've got to do is get up.'\n\nHe breathes hard. He can feel the pulse thumping in his neck.\n\n'Please, friend. My old friend. Please.'\n\nOll looks down at the knife to make sure it hasn't slipped out of the slack fingers. He sees something on the deck, covered in a thick layer of dust. He brushes the grit aside. Two cards from the Imperial Tarot, dropped, discarded. Both wafers are scorched around the edge.\n\nHe picks them up. The Guardsman, stalwart with his rifle. The Lantern, sending its frail beam into the night.\n\n'That's you and me, then,' Oll says, looking at them. 'You and me.'\n\nHe lays The Lantern on the Emperor's dusty chestplate carefully. He stares at The Guardsman and then tucks it in his breast pocket.\n\n'All you have to do is get up,' he says. He can suddenly feel his left eyelid fluttering.\n\nSomething stirs. A skitter of loose debris. A scrape of metal.\n\nThe Emperor is as still and silent as before.\n\nOll looks behind him.\n\nAcross the chamber, the black shape is shifting. It twitches like a scarab on its back. It stirs.\n\nHorus slowly sits up, and hauls himself upright.\n\nHorus rises.\n\nHorus stands.\n\nBlack bone and blacker light fume around him, repairing and restoring the burned materia of his wargear and his flesh. He is as terrible as before, more terrible, more awful, unbearable, a black mass lit from within by a ghastly, bloody light.\n\nHe takes a step forward, then another, his pace increasing into a stride. Each footstep shakes the deck and rings out like a falling tank.\n\nOll gets up.\n\n'You have to wake up, now,' he says urgently.\n\nHorus approaches, wordless, furious.\n\n'You really have to get up now,' Oll calls. 'Please. Get up. Get the hell up.'\n\nHorus is closing. The Warmaster reaches out a huge hand. The immense maul scrapes across the deck with a shriek, and then flies straight into his grip.\n\nOll steps forward to face him. He puts himself between the Emperor and the oncoming monster. He pulls his lasrifle off his shoulder, arms it, and aims it. He knows there's no point, but it's better than nothing.\n\n'Get up now!' he yells over his shoulder. 'Please, get up now!'\n\nHorus is just metres away. He's not slowing down.\n\nOll pulls the rifle in against his cheek, flexes his grip, and settles his finger on the trigger.\n\n'No further!' he yells. 'Damn you! I won't let you touch Him!'\n\nHorus keeps coming. Oll opens fire. Full-auto, sustained. The las-bolts flick and spatter off the black war plate like candle flames in a night wind.\n\nOll Persson is still firing when the Talon of Horus reduces him to a drifting red fog.\n\nOll Persson stands his ground against Horus.\n\n10:xiii\n\nA tower of silence\n\nA rain of blood falls on the Hollow Mountain, drenching the crags, the fighting platforms and the churning lines of warriors, and washing the snow and black rock alike dark red.\n\nA rain of blood to herald a reign of blood.\n\nTo Corswain, caught in a whirling, clanging thicket of war plate ten men deep, it feels as though the heavens are haemorrhaging. Sickly, thrombotic veins of lightning thread and bulge the feverish, yellow sky, a sky that drapes as low across the lonely mountain as a shroud. The light is saffron, the glower of a diseased sunset. Thunder groans and heaves like the ferment of a bloated cadaver. The air is blistered with flies and atomised gore.\n\nThe battle will not cease.\n\nThe din of it, the grinding metal roar and the constant drumfire, drowns out even the raging elements. Every time Corswain thinks the pressure is about to ease, and the enemy assault about to tip back into retreat, the ferocity increases.\n\nSince the long battle for the Hollow Mountain began, the Death Guard onslaughts have come in waves, and he has lost count of how many there have been. The enemy has flooded the deep pass, and eroded still more of Corswain's force, but each time his men have driven them back. This time, however...\n\nThis time is different. It has lasted four times as long as any previous assault, and it shows no sign of relenting. This is, he supposes, the final push. After multiple escalades to wear them down, reduce their numbers, and exhaust their munitions, the Death Guard is resolved to finish it. Perhaps Typhus has grown frustrated and impatient. Perhaps this brutal attrition was his tactic all along. Perhaps the whole war is lost, and the last pocket of l"}
{"text":"have driven them back. This time, however...\n\nThis time is different. It has lasted four times as long as any previous assault, and it shows no sign of relenting. This is, he supposes, the final push. After multiple escalades to wear them down, reduce their numbers, and exhaust their munitions, the Death Guard is resolved to finish it. Perhaps Typhus has grown frustrated and impatient. Perhaps this brutal attrition was his tactic all along. Perhaps the whole war is lost, and the last pocket of loyalist resistance must be stamped out.\n\nIt is a havoc pitch. Corswain is raking, blood-blinded, at anything that comes at him, which is everything, all the time. The previous waves of assault were the most gruelling and brutal he has experienced in his life. They pale by comparison. This is the gigantomachy of legend, the war of men and bestial gods, where skill and valour count as nothing, and only the purest fury can prevail. His blade is now so notched it looks serrated.\n\nSigismund, barely ten metres from the seneschal along the contested ledge, drives his smoking black sword into snorting charcoal hulks and spills them down the cliff. He too feels the finality of the battle. It is outlandishly savage, as though the enemy warriors dare not fall back, for fear of their commander's displeasure. They would rather die on these lethal crags than face their master's wrath. They fear the very power that they serve.\n\nAnd they do die, by the dozen, by the score. But they do not die alone. The defenders of the last mountain are being cut down, and their numbers are dwindling. Artolun has just been speared by two Death Guard pikes, his thrashing body lifting clear of the tight-packed melee before dropping into the brawling sea of armour. Pontis has fallen, clutching his lacerated neck. The clifftop is littered with broken plate segments and pieces of men. Blood streams off the parapet edge, and lifts on the howling wind in a horsetail spray.\n\nTyphus, undoubtedly, must see the state of the fight as clearly as Sigismund. He must see that the mountain is on the brink of falling. Thus he has committed his regiments for a last, merciless attack. It is just the same in a fight, man to man. When you see your opponent begin to slow, when you read the signs that he is finally tiring, you drive in with a last measure of resolve to exploit that weakness and end the fight.\n\nAnd so, this carnage. Carnage here, at Gateway Cliff, in mind-numbing intensity, with no room to breathe or think. Carnage at Knife Edge and Axe-Beard Ledge and West Shelf and all the other tiers of the cliff defence that Adophel so hastily named. Carnage everywhere. Every bulwark and platform at the head of the pass is the same, every man fighting for his life, or dead, every rock face crawling with the ascending foe. Black plate, gleaming steel, throats raw from yelling, mouths sour from ingested blood.\n\nThe voice that spoke, his Praetorian's command, urged them to stand firm. Words have no power here.\n\nSigismund sees Typhus first. He shouts a warning that the world is too loud to hear.\n\nFrom his place at the edge of Gateway Cliff, Sigismund sees the swarming enemy numbers far below part to allow their lord's advance. Drawn in some hellish chariot, and flanked by his retinue of champions, Typhus hastens along the base of the pass to lead his men in the final assault. War-horns boom. The Death Guard in the clifftop vanguard redouble their efforts. Their lord approaches. They will clear a path for him.\n\nSigismund yells his warning again. But the champion in him sees a new opportunity, the chance to close, face to face, with the enemy lord. This was impossible before, but now Typhus openly presents himself. He is coming within reach, and Sigismund's black sword is waiting for him.\n\nSigismund shouts to rally those few of his Seconds still nearby. With their support, he can hold the cliff and make ready. Perhaps, he thinks, we can drive a way down the ridge, through the flanking line of assault, and meet him on the way up. Typhus will have to abandon that damn chariot, and advance in narrow file with his retinue. The cliffs are too-\n\nThe war-horns boom again. Bone trumpets blast the air.\n\nSigismund gazes in horror, his plans disintegrating before they are even fully formed. He sees his enemy properly now. He sees what is coming.\n\nTyphus, lord of the enemy host, carrion chieftain, rises from the murk of the pass. He has not abandoned his chariot at all.\n\nHe ascends from the pitch-black depths of the gorge as though the darkness below is exhuming him, and lifting him into the winter light. He does not scale the sheer cliff like his swarming men, he rides the air itself, a daemon-deity of extinction borne aloft by the fly-specked murk and noxious vapour. His ascent is stately and majestic. He stands on his chariot of wet bone, the open clam shell of a giant ribcage. Every inch of that bone is scrimshaw-etched with the letters and characters of Death's alphabet: requiem odes and funerary prayers from the books of the dead held sacred by a thousand civilisations that are themselves long perished from the world. Only their words remain, notched into the bones, hymns that worship Death and acknowledge its inescapable triumph over life. The bones are singing, an eerie witch-blood song that skirls in the freezing air.\n\nTyphus is a behemoth, his bulk increased by fluted cancerous plate, by filth-matted spikes, and by the vast fly-swarm, a living cloak, that breathes and plumes from the black-bone chimneys and seeping orifices of his hunched shell-back. He is flanked by macabre champions who make Skulidas Gehrerg seem but a minor impediment. They ride on the skirts of the chariot around him, beneath flapping, cracking banners of human skin. They are all skull-masked, their war plate anointed with white bone-ash and symbols of mortality writ in tomb-dust. Their weapons are drawn ready: embalming knives and mortuary hammers, dissection blades and necropsy chisels, the copper adzes to open the mouth, the excerebration hooks to empty the skull. They are his priesthood, come to officiate the exequies of the First Legion and its allies. His creaking chariot is drawn upwards by moaning Neverborn of plague and decay. They are his mourners, come to bear his skeletal chariot up the cliff like some rotting gift to the mountain. They are gnarled, contorted things, buckled by carcinoma and neoplasmic cyst, and veiled with soil-stained winding sheets that trail and billow in the wind. They are yoked to the foul chariot by rusted chains, and their broken fingernails claw at the dirty air to find purchase in it to drag the dead-cart ever upwards. Red sprite lightning, baleful and luminous, drifts and sparks in the foul air around the slow cortege.\n\nTyphus brings the howl of the storm with him, for it is his own utterance.\n\nCorswain hears the horror approaching before he sees it. The keening bone-song tells the seneschal that this is no longer a battle, not in any way his Legion would measure it. It is a funeral rite.\n\nHe cuts his way forwards, leaving bodies maimed and sliced in his wake. He sees Typhus ascending. This is a ceremony of death indeed, and Corswain and his brothers are not the deceased to be honoured. The Hollow Mountain isn't a battle site, it is a sacrificial altar, and the priests are here.\n\nWe ascend. The foretold glory of Chaos is upon us, and upon Terra. So we sing, so the bones around us sing.\n\nIn the necrologies of ancient days, the slaves and retainers of a king's household were ritually put to death as a preface to an ultimate rite, so that they might serve their lord in the afterlife. The libation will be Corswain, and his men, and their allies, and the million souls inside the last mountain. This, the bone-song of the Old Four has decreed. The delight of it rots the air. We are death, and we know better than any the arts and observances that must mark a great passing.\n\nWe, beloved of those outer powers, have been given a new, ceremonial task, and we have accepted it without question. The joy of it burns in our blood like a fever. The conquest of the First Legion and the mountain, to which our forces have committed their strengths, is no longer a military objective, or even an act of vengeance. It has become the first stage of a high ritual, a preparatory offering. We are ascending to attend a much greater ceremony, and officiate as high celebrants at a much greater death.\n\nWe know whose death that is. Only one extinction could be great enough to warrant such ostentatious ceremony. Chaos is assembling in solemn grace to attend the committal of its greatest foe.\n\nThe mountain is an altar indeed. It is a tower of silence where the corpse of the Emperor will be laid out and picked clean.\n\nWe ascend. We are blessed eightfold. We are Typhus.\n\n'Deny him!' Corswain yells into the wind. 'Deny him!'\n\nDoes he mean Typhus? Does he mean the Warmaster? Does he mean Death itself? It hardly matters. His warriors close round to hold the cliff.\n\nBut how can they? Typhus and his heresiarchs are instruments beyond mortal power, engorged with immaterial energy by the warp that drowns the terrestrial globe. This is a fight no swords, not even Sigismund's blade, can stop.\n\nTyphus seems to hear him. His regal chariot draws up to the lip of the rampart. He bows his head, accepts the crown of femurs that his attendants bring, and begins his dedication of the Great Rite, the order and oblations of which have been dictated to him by the Grandfather he adores. This offering, to mark the death of an old king and the coronation of a new one, must be made with exacting care.\n\nThe loyal First will be the last to die. In their blood, and their hearts torn beating from their chests and held aloft as tribute, the new age of Chaos Absolute will be sanctified.\n\nHis Neverborn ushers leap onto the rock, and sprinkle bonemeal gathered from the Palace battlefields to mark a path for him to walk. His champions cha"}
{"text":" been dictated to him by the Grandfather he adores. This offering, to mark the death of an old king and the coronation of a new one, must be made with exacting care.\n\nThe loyal First will be the last to die. In their blood, and their hearts torn beating from their chests and held aloft as tribute, the new age of Chaos Absolute will be sanctified.\n\nHis Neverborn ushers leap onto the rock, and sprinkle bonemeal gathered from the Palace battlefields to mark a path for him to walk. His champions chant the bone-song, and swing censers made of polished skulls to perfume the air with the smoke of human fat.\n\nTyphus steps down. Some of the First Legion break clear of the raging fight and rush towards him, as though eager to become the first sacrifices.\n\nThe charnel lord's scythe reaps their souls, just as it will reap the souls of all those defending the cliffs. Lives end, black armour splits, and Angels of Caliban die in pieces. The chains of skulls that drape Typhus clatter like a death rattle as he moves. The air thickens with a cesspit stink from the reek of him. He strides onto the rampart, the rock dripping pus as his virulence touches it. He is not a warrior that can be fought, man against man. He is a pestilential force, a witch-blooded malignancy that comes like a delirium, a wild, carcinogenic ecstasy, to blight the lives of loyal men. Cutting a path towards him, Sigismund knows this.\n\nSigismund salutes him anyway.\n\n'Further active resonance,' Tanderion reports. In the deep, cold vault, they all look up, watching the striated lights pulsing from somewhere within the living rock. Even the old blind man, Zhi-Meng, seems to be watching them.\n\n'My friend,' says Zhi-Meng, 'we have the right technique, however improvised it may be. The lore applied by you and your brothers, the psychic engrams... It is acute. We have the raw materials too. All these hoping minds. Even though the mountain lacks the ancient psychocircuitry and telepathic conduits that once regulated its operation, I think some wonder is within our grasp.'\n\nCartheus shakes his head. 'The warp is on us, my lord,' he says. 'Nothing works as we predict it. We perform one work, certain of its effect, yet the results are not as we expect. Nothing works the same way within the warp.'\n\n'I think we might use that fact to our advantage,' Zhi-Meng replies. 'These unique circumstances could be exploited in our favour.'\n\nHe turns his blind eyes towards the coloured light throbbing in the heart of the stone once more.\n\n'It is unstable, though,' he murmurs.\n\n'And no wonder,' Tanderion replies. 'The workings we have made to support the geophonics are hasty and unfinished, and the apparatus of the Astronomican destroyed-'\n\n'But what does that mean?' asks Leeta Tang. Several members of the conclave have gathered to watch the work. 'It sounds like you're talking about... magic.'\n\n'Well, it would,' says Zhi-Meng. 'The mountain is a sacred space, a liminal place. Through its age, and permanence, and its alignment, it connects what you would think of as real with something quite other. You might as well call it magic.'\n\n'I will, then,' says Leeta. 'But what does it mean?'\n\n'It means we are trying to light a lamp with no oil, no wick, and only one flint,' says Zhi-Meng.\n\n'The instability is more than that,' says Cypher, stepping from the shadows to join them. 'The woman Keeler has quite successfully unified the assembled masses into a psychoacoustic unity. I did not think it feasible, but they seem to follow her with great devotion. Their meaningless... incantations...'\n\n'Prayers, my lord,' says Zhi-Meng. 'If we can glibly use words like \"magic\" then we can call them prayers. They may be meaningless of themselves, but they supply a mantra, a focus, through which the force of will can be directed. They are like the drone harmonic that my choirs adopt in order to establish counterpoint and harmony. The words themselves don't matter, it is the focus they provide. But you are quite correct. There is instability. A disruptive counter-harmonic-'\n\nThey listen. The roar of war outside is all too apparent despite the thickness of the rock surrounding them. It echoes through the vaults and chambers of the Hollow Mountain. There is a song entwined with it, a song of bone and slaughter.\n\n'The enemy has a prayer of its own,' says Cypher. 'The warp suffuses us all. You call this mountain a sacred space, Lord Zhi-Meng, but it is not. Nothing is sacred. It is sensitive, but neutral, and it responds to the will of any who come near. The counter-harmonic is the echo of our enemy's will. It dilutes and weakens the chorus Keeler is orchestrating.'\n\n'Fear weakens it.'\n\nCypher glances aside. The soldier, Katsuhiro, is standing with the others of the conclave, the child held to his chest.\n\n'It's just fear, sir,' he says. 'The people hear that sound, and it scares them. It breaks their focus.' He shrugs, weary. 'I don't know much about it,' he says. 'But I know fear.'\n\n'He's right,' says Zhi-Meng.\n\n'Can't you... block the enemy's prayer, my lord?' asks Wereft.\n\nCypher glances at his Librarians.\n\n'The enemy has a host of psykers,' says Cartheus. 'We have but a handful.'\n\n'We could interrupt for a few seconds,' says Asradael, 'but we couldn't sustain-'\n\n'A spark only takes a second to catch,' says Zhi-Meng.\n\nCypher thinks for a moment. His silver mask gleams in the candlelight.\n\n'You two with me,' he says to Tanderion and Asradael. 'Cartheus, stay here, and be ready to coordinate the resonance. Direct it swiftly when it builds. You'll only have those seconds. One chance. My lord, please tell Keeler to make ready to focus her efforts. She must bring them all together, no matter their fear.'\n\nHe says no more. Cypher leads his two Librarians to the flight of basalt stairs that will take them to the Tertiary Portal. Cartheus sighs, and places his hands splayed against the cold rock wall.\n\nWereft leads Zhi-Meng through the crowded chambers to Keeler's side. Eild, Tang and the other members of the conclave follow.\n\nThe great stone chambers are filled with the refugees of the pilgrimage. Packed into the mountain's vast vaults, there seems far more of them than when they were stretched out to the horizon in a thread. They are all murmuring in soft voices, repeating Keeler's words, or the echoes of them as they spread through the hollow compartments. There is a constant, hushing noise, an immense collective whisper, like the surge of a distant sea.\n\nKeeler still stands on the stone plinth, her arms raised.\n\n'The Emperor must live,' she is saying. She has repeated it so many times, that the words have lost their sense. They are simply a sound, a reassurance, to which people can fix and cling, as important yet meaningless as 'north'. 'The Emperor is the shield and protector of humanity, and we are His shield in turn. He lives because we yet live. He is the Imperium, and the Imperium is us. While we persist, His light cannot fail. Lift up your hands and rejoice.'\n\nLeeta Tang clambers onto the basalt beside her, and whispers to Keeler as she continues to speak.\n\n'Make ready, Euphrati,' she says. 'It doesn't matter what you say, whatever phatic nonsense you like. Just talk about nothing, if you want. Memories of the future, you know? All that? It doesn't matter what at this point, just keep talking and keep them focused. Bring them together, and keep them there.'\n\nKeeler nods, understanding, without looking at Tang. She keeps talking.\n\n'Even in the valley of night, in caverns measureless to man, in this great hour of calamity, we walk with Him, in defiance of death. We are souls bound together. One species joined against the darkness. We are together as one, or we are nothing. The Emperor must live.'\n\n'The Emperor must live,' murmurs Leeta Tang at her side, echoing the words as Keeler says them. 'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'\n\nCypher and his two Librarians exit the Tertiary Portal into the squalling blood rain. They have drawn their weapons, and their minds are synchronised and ready.\n\nHorror awaits them. The behemoth Priest of Death is almost upon them, his scythe washed with gore, his bonemeal path littered with the dead in his wake. To his left and right, his retinue of champions, howling charnel beasts, drive back those who attempt to delay him. Cypher sees Corswain, Tragan, Sigismund and Adophel, and any of the First who can still stand and hold a weapon, pitched against the keening atrocities of the Death Guard, caught up in thickets of mayhem, locked in individual death-fights, striving in vain to cut a path to Typhus and seize a chance to strike at him.\n\nThe bone-song is deafening.\n\nCypher's pistol discharges, cutting down the first of the Death Guard that rush at him. As Cypher, he should have been here all along, a figurehead warrior fighting the foe at the front line of battle. But as Zahariel the Librarian, his obligation has been to mediate from afar and grapple with the metaphysical scope of the war.\n\nNow, at last, he can do both. For a few seconds at least.\n\nBegin! he sends as they stride forward to meet death face to face.\n\nThe minds of the three psykers lock together, and spear out in one equal temper.\n\n10:xiv\n\nThe magician's tricks\n\nHe finally reaches his father again. Horus looks up from his work.\n\n'Garviel,' he says. His voice is stone grating against stone. 'I had hoped to keep you out of this. I do not want you here.'\n\nThe Lupercal Court is silent, a still midnight of gleaming tiles and black bone pillars. There is no one else here. Loken's footsteps echo as he walks across the vast space to join his father, and his father's prey.\n\n'There is nowhere else I should be, but at my father's side,' he replies.\n\nHorus stops dragging the Emperor's bloody body towards the remaining thrones. He lets it slump. He rises, glaring at his son.\n\n'At my side? At my side, Garviel?' he says. 'I think you forget the side you took in this.'\n\n'I stayed on the same side all "}
{"text":"ght of gleaming tiles and black bone pillars. There is no one else here. Loken's footsteps echo as he walks across the vast space to join his father, and his father's prey.\n\n'There is nowhere else I should be, but at my father's side,' he replies.\n\nHorus stops dragging the Emperor's bloody body towards the remaining thrones. He lets it slump. He rises, glaring at his son.\n\n'At my side? At my side, Garviel?' he says. 'I think you forget the side you took in this.'\n\n'I stayed on the same side all along,' says Loken. 'It was you who forgot.'\n\nThe Warmaster snorts, amused by the impudence. He glances down at his father's wretched body. The dust of the shattered throne still covers it, black where it has caked the dried blood.\n\n'You always spoke your mind, Loken,' Horus muses. 'That is why I liked you. Well, whether you stayed on your side or picked a new one, it was the wrong one. The cause you champion is done. Look. See? It's over.'\n\n'I see all too well what you have done, my Lupercal,' Loken replies.\n\nHorus looks at him sharply.\n\n'You understand He's used you, Loken? You understand that? He's used you all along, true to form.'\n\n'I was always His to be used,' says Loken.\n\n'You were mine!' Horus snaps. He rises to his full height, a colossus of shadow. 'My son! He brought you here as a weapon. A blade to prise open my heart. To wound me.'\n\nLoken takes a careful step backwards, his sword low at his side. It is taking every measure of his resolve just to face this creature.\n\n'From your anger, father, it seems that weapon was well judged,' he replies. 'I do not understand the Emperor's choices or His plans, but if that is why He brought me with Him, then it was effective. You speak as though you are hurt, which tells me you have a heart to open still. It tells me you still feel as a man feels.'\n\n'Of course! I am a man still!'\n\n'Are you? Forgive me, but that's not what I see.'\n\n'What do you see?' Horus snarls.\n\n'Something that is too terrible to behold.'\n\n'Yet you stand there and behold me well enough, Loken.'\n\n'I've seen too much already, father,' says Loken sadly. 'I cannot look away. But if you have a heart still, look to it now. See what you have become for yourself. Please, before it's too late.'\n\n'What I am is my choice, Garviel,' Horus rumbles.\n\n'I don't think it was.'\n\n'Don't goad me! I have no wish to kill you.'\n\n'I know,' says Loken. 'If you had, I would be dead long since. That gives me hope too.'\n\n'Hope in what?'\n\nLoken shrugs.\n\n'That the Lupercal I loved is still in there,' he replies. 'Somewhere. We fought together, father. Side by side. Fight at my side now. Fight this power that controls you. See what it has done to you, and how it has poisoned your mind. Cast it out, and stand with me. Show the selfless loyalty for which you were famed.'\n\n'Loyalty?' Horus scoffs.\n\n'Your loyalty was why you were named Warmaster,' says Loken. 'There was no one better for that honour. That's precisely why the powers of Chaos turned their will upon you. If the Emperor made me a weapon against you, the gods of Chaos used you in the same way against Him.'\n\nHorus is silent for a moment.\n\n'I will kill you, Loken,' he says quietly. He rolls Worldbreaker slowly in his palm. 'I will do it without hesitation if you do not cease with this provocation. I would rather you lived.'\n\n'And I would rather live,' answers Loken. 'But I am of the Legiones Astartes, born for war. I never thought I'd live this long.'\n\nHorus pauses, then nods ruefully.\n\n'Nor I,' he replies. 'The warrior's lot. We were made to do so much and expect so little. Bright glory, not long lives.'\n\nHe manages a sad smile.\n\n'But look at us both, Loken,' he says. 'Those of us that live can achieve so much. I am not a monster. I swear to you. Every man who has fought against me in this war, I have offered amnesty and forgiveness if they repent and come to my side. That is more mercy than my father would have shown in the same position. My dear brother Sanguinius, my father... you. I have forgiveness for all, if they ask it of me.'\n\n'And if they don't? Sanguinius... Your father...?'\n\n'They... were stubborn. Foolish. Deluded. But you, my son, if you are as enlightened as you claim, you are not so beguiled by the Imperial lie. Be my son again. Accept the Empyreal Truth of this new age. Sheathe that useless sword and go wait in the cloisters. Sit, watch, wait and learn as I conclude this necessary business. Then greet the dawn with me. Later, we will sit and talk as we did of old. I will tell you my dreams, my plans, and make you part of them.'\n\n'Father, if you persist, there will be no later.'\n\nHorus growls softly.\n\n'You do think I'm a monster, then? Loken, from a distance the grace of a god seems callous and brutal because it is operating at such a mighty scale. There is perfection in what I do, a plan-'\n\n'Was not the same true of the Master of Mankind?' Loken asks.\n\n'Of course not!' Horus scoffs. 'Oh, it seemed so for many years. I believed it. I believed He had a perfect plan because I believed He was so mighty. What parts I did not understand, I accepted as a mystery too complex for my mind to understand. But look at Him.'\n\nHe glares down at the motionless body.\n\n'There was no plan, Loken,' Horus says. 'Just a rash assembly of hasty ideas and frantic remedies as things fell apart around Him. Look at the way He came to fight me! He had lost before He even began. His power was nothing compared to mine, and He didn't even grasp that. He couldn't win, but He came to face me. Oh, He fought admirably, in the circumstances. But it was all just desperate tricks and reckless gambits. Impressive, dramatic, but empty, and with no deeper value. So many times I put Him down. So many times, and spared Him too. And He just dredged some last tattered morsel of strength and came back at me. It was messy, pathetic, embarrassing. And in it, I saw that's what His whole life has been. One cheap trick after another, one scrappy sleight of hand and then the next, patching over the cracks as they appear, trying not to let anyone see that it was all improvised. Garviel, He convinced us all that He knew what He was doing, but it was just for show. An aspect. Just another aspect. There was never a plan. We followed Him, and trusted Him, but He had no idea where He was going or how to get there.'\n\n'He couldn't win, but He came to face you,' says Loken. 'That's what you just said. Does not that suggest courage in His convictions?'\n\n'Courage?' There is scorn in the Warmaster's stone-scraping-stone voice.\n\n'Is that not how you always fought?'\n\n'Loken-'\n\n'It was. I was there. And I can't win either, but I came to face you. What does that tell you?'\n\n'That the world is full of fools,' Horus says. 'Loken, I worshipped this man. I trusted Him. I thought He was a great magician. But His truths were all lies, and His tricks were just tricks!'\n\n'Isn't that true of all magicians?' asks Loken. 'The art is to make it look easy while you attempt the impossible. You put on a show that dazzles and captivates, but behind the scenes, it is all messy, makeshift and frantic. That was always His truth, He just hid it well, for a magician should never reveal his tricks. To be Emperor, He had to convince us. To be Emperor, He had to shield us from the ugly, stopgap truth of His work. He had to spare us from the constant, ongoing horror of His struggle. We had to believe in Him. To be the Master of Mankind, father, His life had to be one long and ceaseless hidden battle, by any and every means He could find, to stop doom from overtaking us.'\n\n'It's not your father's power, it's what He does with it...' Horus murmurs.\n\n'What?'\n\n'Nothing,' says Horus. 'You believe this then of Him?'\n\n'I do. He was our shield, from danger, and from truths not meant for us. The moment we discovered that, it made Him weaker.'\n\n'No. You're wrong.'\n\n'I know I am not,' says Loken. 'He fought His whole life, frantically, hour after hour, to stop one thing.'\n\n'And what would that be?'\n\n'Becoming you.'\n\nHorus turns to stare at Loken. In his new dark aspect, his eyes have become the mirror of the emblem on his breastplate, baleful and bloodlit, with vertically aligned slit pupils.\n\n'You... dare...?' he whispers.\n\n'Chaos will spare no one,' says Loken. 'Chaos cares not. You are a puppet of its whim. It has beguiled you simply to perform one deed. To remove the one man it feared. Yes, the Emperor stole fire from Chaos, and used its power against it, but He always knew that He could not take it whole, for it would consume Him. You mocked Him for lacking the courage to do what you have done, but it wasn't a lack of courage. It was an act of supreme will. You have embraced Chaos whole, and thus given it exactly what it wanted. You have no power of your own. You think you do, but it's just an illusion. He opposed Chaos at every turn, and rejected every lie and promise it threw at Him, so His life, like His fight with you, was a scrappy, messy brawl of improvisation and persistence. You have accepted them all, which is why your path seems so strong and clear.'\n\n'It is, you ungrateful fool!'\n\n'Then show me,' Loken cries. 'Show it to me! Tell me what it is!'\n\n'I have nothing to prove to you!'\n\n'Not to me, to yourself!' Loken says. 'Make no mistake! That is what you told me years ago! Make no mistake! Well, father, see your own mistake for what it is! Your path is a grim darkness where there is only war and no place for mankind!'\n\n'There is no mistake!' Horus says. 'Look at me, Loken! See what I am!' he cries, and claps his hand against his chest. 'I am made mighty beyond all measure by the warp! I am transfigured and ascendant! I am a god, boy, a mighty god, and gods do not make mistakes!'\n\n'We are mighty because we are right,' Loken replies. 'We are not right because we are mighty. Vile the hour when that reversal becomes our credo.'\n\n'What nonsense is that?' asks Horus. 'It sounds like another of His lies!'\n\n'It was something Sindermann taught me-'\n\n'That"}
{"text":"ook at me, Loken! See what I am!' he cries, and claps his hand against his chest. 'I am made mighty beyond all measure by the warp! I am transfigured and ascendant! I am a god, boy, a mighty god, and gods do not make mistakes!'\n\n'We are mighty because we are right,' Loken replies. 'We are not right because we are mighty. Vile the hour when that reversal becomes our credo.'\n\n'What nonsense is that?' asks Horus. 'It sounds like another of His lies!'\n\n'It was something Sindermann taught me-'\n\n'That old fool? He knew nothing!'\n\n'Not the true facts of the matter, perhaps, because none of us did back then. But his wisdom was flawless anyway. You are not a god. They're just letting you think you are. If you are so mighty, my father, where is your wisdom? Why are you so blind, unless lies have blinded you?'\n\n'They would not lie to me. They would not.'\n\nLoken sighs. He turns from his glowering gene-sire and stares down at the crushed and mutilated body of the Emperor.\n\n'You were right,' he says. 'Their grip on him is too great. He will not turn back, and he cannot be saved.'\n\nHorus steps forward.\n\n'What are you doing? You speak to Him as though He had sense and life left to answer?'\n\nLoken looks at him over his shoulder. Those cold grey eyes. That look reserved only for his enemies.\n\n'He does,' he says.\n\n10:xv\n\nThe Lantern\n\nAnd then there is a blink.\n\nIt is small, so very small. A flash of psykanic energy that is dwarfed by the raging maelstrom of warpflux that drowns Terra and the Solar Realm, like a single spark in a seething field of lava, or a single drop of spray in a heaving ocean, or a single molecule in the biomass of a living organism. It is nothing, it is inconsequential, it is insignificant.\n\nIt is also brief. It lasts barely eight seconds, and those seconds are fleeting and meaningless because of the cessation of time. The eight seconds start when Zahariel El'Zurias speaks the word 'begin', and they end when the hissing scythe of Typhus cleaves Tanderion in half, severs both of Asradael's legs, and spins Zahariel to the ground with his torso sliced open, thus breaking the psychic coordination of the three Librarians.\n\nBut for eight seconds, the blink is a pure flash of psychic power burning a tiny hole in the immaterial vortex and breaking the Chaotic harmony of Typhus' bone-song.\n\nThe song resumes the moment the blink is over, and the howling warp instantly fills in the hole it made.\n\nBut, for those eight seconds, the bone-song is silenced.\n\nIn the geophonic chambers of the mountain, Euphrati Keeler feels the blink. The bedrock around her, the walls, the high ceilings, even the block she is standing on, all seem to soften as the throttling chokehold of the bone-song is briefly suspended. No longer constricted, the mountain flexes, like a muscle un-tensing from rigidity, or a throat opening to breathe again. A sudden cool wind moans through the chambers, released from the compression of magic. It flaps the ragged clothes and dirty hair of the vast congregation, and some cry out in fear, but most keep speaking, chorusing the words that Keeler intones. Her mouth is cracked dry and there's blood in her throat, but she does not stop.\n\n'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'\n\nThe mountain exhales. It gasps, unstrangled. It inhales.\n\nIt speaks. It speaks their words.\n\nIt speaks them as light.\n\nThe light wells up. It seeps from the shaped stone of the walls, a flickering pattern of sparks and flashes at first, then a striation of lines that outline the flaws and marbling of the walls like neon, then a soft white glow that builds and builds until every rock surface and plane is radiating an inner light like a lumen globe.\n\nAnd then it is brighter, and brighter still. Shadows vanish. Outlines blur. It is too bright to see.\n\nDarkness dies, dismembered by the murderous light.\n\nThe wind is in her face. The light is in her eyes. She hears people crying out, but it is impossible to tell if it is in terror or wonder. She is floating. Others are starting to float too, lifting a few feet into the air, suspended by the sonorous light. Some of the pilgrims begin to shake as they rise, shedding dust like dry paper or white petal blossom, like dolls made of ash.\n\nShe can see through the mountain. So can Cartheus. So can the blind Zhi-Meng. All of them. Millions of them. They can see through the skin of the rock, through the translucent membrane on which pasts and futures have been traced. They can see the priests and the magicians, the seers and the holy fools, the mad and the blessed, other pilgrims from other ages, the seekers of truth, the outcasts, the novitiates, everyone who has ever come to this place, who has ever been drawn here, who has ever had the imagination to accept the insight of the living rock. There are generations of them, a hundred generations, a thousand, gazing out through the surface of the rock, ranks of silent shadows that stretch back to the most distant parts of history. They can see the painted shamans, the inquisitive hunters with their spears and offerings and beakers of dye, and behind them, other figures, more wary and enthralled, curious and scared, figures that are not quite human, but one day will be. A bloodline, a legacy receding by century and generation, as far back as the genetic code will stretch.\n\n'Speak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.'\n\nKeeler sees Wereft, rising, howling, dissolving into paper ribbons in the light. Others too, ascending slowly in graceful horror and macabre wonder, becoming sparks and cell-dust and billows of ghastly radiance. But they are not gone. To be absent in the body is to be present in the light.\n\nShe hears Leeta Tang screaming as she rises up. She looks at Keeler, eyes wide and burning, and then she too is nothing but stars and ashes whirled by the wind.\n\nThe Hollow Mountain shivers. Impacted snow slumps from its shrugging shoulders, millions of tonnes collapsing into its craggy skirts, lifting a cloud of ice crystals like white fog. The engulfing storm, black as pitch-blend, blows back from the peak in a rolling ripple two hundred kilometres wide, inky cloud folding into and under itself in a vast expanding halo. Pearlescent lightning shears and rakes the emptying sky.\n\nLight spears from the mountain's portals, blue-white and fierce, melting snow and ice and annihilating the shadows. The bone-song of the Death Guard has resumed with renewed fury, but it cannot compete. The Archaen blight, born of the most ancient organic corruptors, paleovirologies, primordial interstellar bacterial colonies, and the primal essence of decay that existed long before anything died on Terra, is baked from the black cliffs and scoured off the burning platforms, sterilised and purged. Dead viral matter falls as stringy black rain, and torrents of fallen insect husks drool from the cliffs like drained pus. Black figures, in their thousands, some burst and evacuated, collapse screaming into the pass, carried by the crushing avalanche of light, or swept away by the continental downfall of dislodged snow and compacted ice. There is a mangling roar of engulfing destruction.\n\nPart of that roar is Typhus' scream, his song disarticulated and crushed into noise.\n\nThe mountain's defenders, Corswain and his Dark Angels, Sigismund and the last of his Seconds, are caught in the catastrophic upheaval alongside their adversaries. Many are swept away instantly, tumbling into the grinding mayhem with the stricken warriors of the XIV Legion, mashed by sliding ice, shredded by the wind, burned by the light, or drowned by the deluge of dead biomatter that pours like sacred naft or dirty oil. Cliffs collapse and fall away, rocks topple, fighting platforms disintegrate as the light scrapes everything from the mountain's flanks.\n\nA few hold on, by luck or sheer fury, clinging to cracked rock, or tangled debris, or simply each other. With bloody hands and torn fingers, they refuse to let go, despite the screaming light that breaks their bones or the blizzarding force that cracks their war plate and crushes their lungs.\n\nWhere once stood Hasgard Gate, Zephon Sorrow-Bringer thinks for a moment that one of his serpenta pistols has misfired. He is about to cast them aside, fearing an overheat implosion, for both volkite weapons have been monstrously overtaxed.\n\nBut neither one of them is the source of the flash. Light shears through the swirling murk, so fierce it stings his eyes.\n\n'Fafnir!' he yells. Rann has fallen again. He is a few metres away, pinned against a blood-soaked scrap of bunker wall. He is struggling to free his axes and himself from the dead weight of the World Eater that crumpled onto him when he slew it. Zephon goes to him, and heaves the corpse aside.\n\nHe hauls Rann upright.\n\n'Do you see it?' Zephon shouts. His mouth is wet with blood.\n\nRann nods. It is hard not to. Shadows are lengthening all around them, becoming stark and hard. The lurid red glare that has bathed them all since the slaughter began is giving way, washed out by a brighter radiance. Even the traitors, massing from all sides as they pursue the pair, have paused and turned to look.\n\nThrough the blowing smoke and the swirling ash, far away, on what was once, perhaps, the horizon, there is a column of light. It is breaking, like sunrise, across the endless desolation, banishing the darkness. Its white fire is immense and dazzling. In another second, it has become so bright that it bleaches out everything. Nothing is hidden. The fire reflects off the liquid mud like sunlight off glass. It illuminates the true horror of the world, the extraordinary carpet of tangled armoured bodies, the heaped corpses, the dead engines and cremated tank hulls, the dead piled in cliffs and mounds, like the dunes of a desert or the waves of a frozen sea.\n\n'What is it?' Rann murmurs.\n\nZephon shakes his head. He tries to pull his brother away. The sudden dawn has halted the enemy in confusi"}
{"text":" it bleaches out everything. Nothing is hidden. The fire reflects off the liquid mud like sunlight off glass. It illuminates the true horror of the world, the extraordinary carpet of tangled armoured bodies, the heaped corpses, the dead engines and cremated tank hulls, the dead piled in cliffs and mounds, like the dunes of a desert or the waves of a frozen sea.\n\n'What is it?' Rann murmurs.\n\nZephon shakes his head. He tries to pull his brother away. The sudden dawn has halted the enemy in confusion. They have a chance to break clear, to reposition.\n\nRann resists. The light is meaningless, anonymous, perhaps merely the blast-flash of some monumental detonation. But he cannot look away. It is meaningless, but it somehow means everything.\n\n'I...' he begins. 'Where is it?'\n\nAgain, the Dominion shakes his head. It is pointless to speculate, for no directions have survived the war. They are all long lost, along with any sense of them.\n\nBut he hesitates. Like Fafnir Rann, he feels meaning inherent in that pillar of flame, as though, beyond hope, some direction has miraculously been restored.\n\nOne, at least.\n\n'North,' he says. 'That's north.'\n\nThe pillar of fire begins to fade, its light dying back. The red gloom starts to descend once more.\n\n'No,' cries Rann bitterly.\n\nAnd then there is a blink, and the light returns a thousandfold.\n\n'Quiet!' yells Sandrine Icaro, and the Hegemon's grand Rotunda falls silent. She rises to her feet, staring. Others get up from their workstations, Sidozie, Gaston, Ilya Ravallion. They are all staring too.\n\nLight, thin but piercingly bright, is spearing into the Rotunda around the edges of the blast shutters that seal the window ports. Wisping smoke catches in the slender shafts and rays.\n\nSomeone starts to cry.\n\n'What is that?' asks Ilya.\n\n'Sensoria!' Sidozie commands, turning to the War Court officers around him. 'Source and origin! Analysis!'\n\nSome turn to their consoles, fumbling, uncertain.\n\n'Open the shutters,' says Sandrine Icaro.\n\n'Mistress Tacticae, we-'\n\n'Open the damn shutters,' she says.\n\nFar above Terra, the traitor fleet hangs in awful silence, a shoal of warships forty thousand strong, their hulls gleaming in the clotting light of a dying, half-eaten sun. They hang in a medium of immaterial discharge, for there is no space in the Solar Realm, no open void, just the fluid miasma of warpflux.\n\nBelow them, the curve of Terra, the Throneworld, a toxic and intoxicated hemisphere of filth and corruption. The surface is invisible, obscured by the banked layers of cloud, smoke and pollutants that congest the tortured atmosphere. Brown smoke-plumes the size of nations swirl and coagulate, occasionally underlit by the flash of detonations, of orbital battery fire, and the empyric lightning of the neverness storm that flays the world's surface with lashes a thousand kilometres long. The smothering cloud is so noxious and dense, Terra now resembles a torrid gas giant, or, perhaps, a fog-shrouded tomb, for when the smoke is washed away there will be nothing left except a dead cinder. It is hard to discern where the smog-asphyxiated sphere ends and the neverness miasma begins.\n\nThere is a blink. A flash of scintillation one hundred kilometres down through the strangulating smoke cover. A dull flash under the cloud. It dies away. Then another comes, like sheet lightning, then a third. With each one, a profound psychoacoustic thump that screeches the sensoria of the traitor ships. The thumps are muffled, buried, like seismic quakes. Static begins to growl and seethe. Infrasonics throb. Vox-systems start to squeal and bray like livestock in the chutes of a slaughterhouse.\n\nAnother flash. This one does not die back. It grows. It swells. It burns up through the toxic smoke like a force-blade cutting through a cloak. In raw fury, it bursts through the atmospheric occlusion, and spears into super-orbital space, a thin ray of undiluted white light that shoots out from Terra in a continuous jet.\n\nIt is a slender shaft of light, barely five kilometres wide, but it does not end. It scores out from Terra into the false night of the Solar Realm like the beam of a searchlight. It is impossibly bright. Six traitor ships, caught in its path, are vaporised instantly. A dozen others, orbit-anchored within range of its radiation sleeve, are spared instant incineration but lurch out of formation as it kills their power systems and fries their circuits.\n\nThe Astronomican is relit.\n\nEighty light minutes from Terra, hidden in the cloak of Saturn's rings, the remains of Battlefleet Solar stirs from silent running. The Phalanx, its flagship, ignites its drives.\n\n'Admiral,' says Halbract, 'there is no determining the true meaning of this.'\n\nThe Huscarl is still speaking in a whisper. When Niora Su-Kassen replies, she does so in a normal speaking voice, finding that unfamiliar register for the first time in months.\n\n'It doesn't matter, my honoured friend,' she says. 'You and I can both see what it is.'\n\nHalbract nods cautiously. The sensor displays clearly show the magnitude of the photonic signal they have just registered.\n\n'Without doubt,' he agrees, still whispering. 'But we do not know what it signifies. We cannot commit the fleet without verification of-'\n\n'Oh, we can, Halbract,' Su-Kassen replies. 'We most certainly can.'\n\nShe takes her seat in the command throne of the bridge. Around her, as per her instruction, the ship's systems are waking from low-power and hibernation modes.\n\n'The Astronomican is lit,' she says. 'We are signalled.'\n\n'But-'\n\n'Your caution is, as ever, admirable, my lord,' she says, 'but verification is beside the point. It may be a signal of victory on Terra, in which case we are urgently needed. Or it may be the summons we have been dreading, to pluck our lord the Emperor from an unwinnable position and convey Him clear of the enemy's grasp, in which case, the urgency is greater yet. Either way, we are called. I am committing the fleet. We are going in. No more waiting, no more games.'\n\n'And if the beacon has been lit by a victorious Warmaster to signify his usurpation and triumph?' Halbract asks.\n\nShe shrugs, and smiles a thin smile.\n\n'Then why the hell are we hiding here?' she asks. 'If we're going to die, let's do it well.'\n\nHalbract steps back, raises his fist to his chest, and salutes her. He turns to the bridge.\n\n'War stations!' he bellows. 'War stations! Make ready! Make ready for active engagement! Raise the shields and bring all batteries to power!'\n\nSu-Kassen sits back, and pulls down the armature of the gilded vox-mic.\n\n'This is Su-Kassen,' she says. 'This is the Phalanx. All fleet elements, form on me and begin acceleration to advance. War stations! Make ready to engage. Assault pattern is Dominus Alpha-Two-Two. Time on target, seventy-four minutes. Captains, expect hard resistance on final approach and at destination. Dominus Alpha-Two-Two is our pattern, but I hereby grant discretionary judgement when we enter the battle sphere actual. This will be an evolving situation. Best judgement. Improvise, if you have to. Just give those bastards hell, and tell them I sent you.'\n\nShe pushes the mic aside.\n\n'In the name of Terra and the Emperor!' she shouts across the bridge. 'Main drive! Advance!'\n\nAeonid Thiel takes the signal wafer from the Mistress of Sensoria. Her face is pale, and she can't find any words. He nods, and takes the wafer directly to Guilliman at the strategium.\n\nHis primarch glances at him as he presents the wafer.\n\n'The Astronomican,' Thiel says simply.\n\nGuilliman doesn't even look at the wafer.\n\n'Then now we can see where we're going,' he says, 'as he will see us as we kill him. Main power, shipmaster. Ready war stations. Advance, battle formation. As we are illuminated, so we will illuminate. If my father still lives, he cannot fight alone.'\n\nYou see the light at the windows of your Court, so very bright despite the black and coloured glassaic. Another of your father's plans, another counter-strike, another desperate effort. How many plans did He make, how many gambits did He set in motion, all running together in the hope that one might succeed?\n\nThis one is modestly effective. It will hurt you, an aggravating setback. This will draw in the others, the remnants of His supporters, the ones that you have held at bay. This will bring Roboute, the Lion and Russ, like the loyal lapdogs they are, to absolve themselves for being absent, and to claim some measure of vengeance. The war on two fronts that you have avoided this long has finally caught you.\n\nBut, no matter. It won't be a war on two fronts really. Terra is done, and though Loken speaks to Him as if He is still alive and capable, your father is done too. Look at Him there, half-dead, on the deck.\n\nBeside His dusty body there's a tarot card, lying where it fell. The Lantern. Most amusing. All those little schemes. Is that why your father fought you so long and so fruitlessly, at such cost to Himself, to buy time for this? Such a waste, if so. A foolish ploy. When Roboute arrives, the light will show him nothing but your father's corpse and the magnitude of your power. He will probably flee at the very sight of you. He comes expecting a wayward brother. He will find a god instead.\n\nThat revelation will break him, and even if it doesn't, you will quickly scatter his indignant fleet. And you will offer him terms of course, just as you have offered terms to them all. It will be interesting to see what Guilliman says in response. For all his regal bearing, Roboute is a pragmatist. He will instantly recognise that which he cannot fight. Perhaps he will finally know fear. You imagine he will make accommodation, and submit to you. More thrones can always be built. Though you worry that those knees of his do not bend.\n\nThe Lion and Russ, well... You'll have to kill them both, without compunction. Corax too. None of them have Roboute's political guile. Too much of the warrior in them all.\n\nStill, Worldbreaker is re"}
{"text":" response. For all his regal bearing, Roboute is a pragmatist. He will instantly recognise that which he cannot fight. Perhaps he will finally know fear. You imagine he will make accommodation, and submit to you. More thrones can always be built. Though you worry that those knees of his do not bend.\n\nThe Lion and Russ, well... You'll have to kill them both, without compunction. Corax too. None of them have Roboute's political guile. Too much of the warrior in them all.\n\nStill, Worldbreaker is ready for each one of them, and your altar awaits their skulls. Your Talon is whetted.\n\nSpeaking of which... You turn to your father. It grieves you, but time's up, and you are tired of offering reprieves. He has spurned every one, pulling out trick after trick.\n\nLoken tries to stop you. You push him aside. Your poor son is deluded, and his loyalty is wounding. He calls to your father as though He can still hear and react. He speaks to Him as though there is still one last, clever trick to play.\n\nThere was. It was the Astronomican. A decent ruse, but nothing like sufficient.\n\nYou swing Worldbreaker down and crush your father's skull.\n\nThe faithful make their sacrifice in the Hollow Mountain.\n\n10:xvi\n\nThe mourning of the last day\n\nLoken tries to stop his father, but nothing can stop his father. Nothing can stop the monstrous, bloodlit personification of Chaos, so wretchedly bloated with power, so hideously sure of itself. Horus doesn't even need to touch him. Loken, sword raised, is swept out of his path by the crackling field of immaterial energies that surrounds his father's bloodlit form. The stinging aura brushes Loken aside, as a wind might lift and scatter motes of dust, and sends him rolling and clattering across the oil-dark deck.\n\nHe rises to his knees, numb and concussed, and yells his father's name, but to no avail, for his voice is drowned out by the rushing whispers that fill the air of the Court.\n\nSo he can only watch, his eyes wide with tears, as Horus Lupercal commits his final blasphemy and slays the Emperor.\n\nThere's no joy in it. No sense of victory. Not even the contentment of closure, of a battle squarely won, and a compliance achieved. To kill a helpless man, to crush His head into the deck with your maul when He can't even stand or open His eyes... What does that say about you? Some warrior. Some Warmaster.\n\nThe infinite legions of the Neverborn are delighted, at least. They are whispering. Whispering to each other. The rapturous hush and lisp of their voices is building around you, filling the Court, beginning to drown out even the dry-wood crackle of the burning warp. What is it they are saying?\n\n'Stop your whispers,' you tell them. You have no time for their jubilation.\n\nYou need a moment to contemplate. Can't they see that? You need a moment to reconcile, to centre yourself. Look at what you've done. Gods can do anything, and they do not make mistakes, but look at what you've done. You lever Worldbreaker's spiked head out of the deck. Blood and years drip from it. There isn't even a skull left to place in reverence on your chapel's altar. Your maul crushed His head entirely and gouged a deep crater in the deck beneath. There's nothing but a mess of blood and pulped flesh, fragments of splintered bone, matted hair, a dislodged, staring eye-\n\nSteel yourself. To be Warmaster... It's not about glory and prestige, it's about possessing the strength to see things through to the end, even when that end is regrettable and unpalatable. War demands it, and only the strongest have the stomach to finish what they started.\n\nYou are the strongest. War is ultimately a bloody, tragic business, and only the strongest have the wisdom to understand that once they unleash it, they must be prepared to accept the cost.\n\nHe was just a man, and now He's dead. Forget that. Forget the mutilated horror at your feet. Remember what He was. Remember what you were fighting. The tyrant. The King-of-Ages. The liar. The ruthless master who enslaved a species and used you all. The betrayer. The schemer who wove His damned and secret plans for thirty thousand years without a second thought for the lives and blood that would be spent to achieve them.\n\nYes, think of that. Content yourself with that. Let those thoughts be your consolation. Think of His crimes and His atrocities. Remember that He, and He alone, knew that suffering created lethal and unstable horrors on the other plane of reality, yet saw fit to breed a generation of transhuman warriors like you to subjugate the stars. And when Chaos became a focused, existential threat, He seemed dismayed by the bloodlit consequences of His actions.\n\nYou should have turned against Him sooner. You and all your brothers, for all of them had wit and sense. You should have rallied them earlier, long before Ullanor, long before the crusade began to soak the stars in blood. A band of brothers, all of them masters of war, born to understand the properties of conflict... You could have stood together, demanded His capitulation with one voice, removed Him from power, and prevented this, all of it, before-\n\nAnd if He had refused, then you could have stopped Him. Together. Stopped Him cleanly, before the price became a trillion lives. A quick end. A clean death. But they were all too much like Him, each one of them a copied part of Him. Rogal too stubborn to listen, Sanguinius too forgiving to see the flaws, Russ too enflamed with his own ego...\n\nThrone, all of them! All of them too much like Him, even the ones that eventually sided with you when the blood began to flow. Fulgrim too in love with his own glory, Angron too agonised to know any different, Magnus... Magnus too headstrong and sure of himself.\n\nAll of them, all of them, all of them... Too much like Him, because that was how He made them. Too much like their father.\n\nYour father.\n\nBut not you. You were the only one who overcame the inheritance of your bloodline. You remained true. You alone stayed strong. You have saved the human race, or what remains of it. Remember that. You had to mash the skull of your helpless father into the floor to do it, but ugly deeds are the price you pay when the cause is just.\n\nYour own father.\n\nYou try not to dwell on that part. You try not to think of Him that way. You try to forget the bond you once had, the thirty glorious years, or how proud you felt to be His first-found son...\n\nIt's finished now. You take the time you need to collect yourself. You'll decide how long that will be. A period of mourning. A time for reflection. You just need some peace now. A long measure of peace. Some silence.\n\nBut the whispers. The whispers are deafening.\n\n'Stop,' you murmur. Why won't they leave you alone? They have been whispering, incessantly, behind your back, since Maloghurst first woke you from your dream to begin the final illumination.\n\nNo, not Maloghurst. Argonis. That's right. The boy, Kinor Argonis. Oh, it's so hard to think with the whispers gnawing at your brain. You want to settle your mind, and get all of this clear and straight, so that when you dictate it to Mersadie Oliton, she records a true account of it, and history will remember how hard you tried, and how deeply you struggled with your conscience, and how heavy was the price you paid. But the whispers...\n\n'Leave me alone,' you say.\n\nThe walls breathe. It is very bright in the Court, like being outdoors in the searing starlight of Calastar, or the labyrinth-knot of Uigebealach in the blazing warp. Light, almost maddeningly bright, strobes slightly, flickering through leaves swayed by the wind. Or something like leaves. You don't care. You don't look.\n\nYou hear a man weeping nearby, somewhere behind you. That, unlike the whispering, you can forgive. You understand Loken's grief, for it is your own.\n\nYou don't look around. You can't take your eyes off your father.\n\n'Help me,' you say, over your shoulder. 'Garviel... Help me with Him. Help me bear Him up.'\n\nYou hear him rise to his feet behind you. You kneel, and lift your father's body in your arms. What whole part of it is left, at least. He is so light, so fragile, there is nothing of Him. Like rags, like a bundle of sticks, dry and paper-thin-\n\n'Please, Lupercal, stop now,' Loken says.\n\n'It's too late,' you reply. You clear your throat. 'I have stopped, Garviel. It's done. It's finished.'\n\n'It's not too late,' he answers.\n\nYou turn to look at him, your father in your arms. Loken gazes up at you, his eyes dark hollows, his sword forgotten on the deck behind him.\n\n'Help me with Him,' you say. 'Help me lay Him to rest in honour. He was my father, after all.'\n\n'It's not too late,' Loken insists. 'Not for you. Not for us. You've done what you set out to do. Let go of the power.'\n\n'Why would I want to do that?' you ask.\n\n'To prove you are Horus. To prove you are a man and not a puppet.'\n\n'I told you-'\n\n'You did. But their claws are deep in you, and their lies delude you. Prove them wrong. You say you took the power into yourself to achieve this end. Well, it is achieved, father. So if you meant what you said, you don't need the power any more. Set it aside while you still can. Show the world of men that you are still one of them, and true to your word. Show the foul gods you are not their plaything, or a helpless instrument of their designs.'\n\n'The power is mine,' you say. The boy has no understanding of anything. 'The power is mine to keep and use as I see fit. It's not the power, Loken, it's what you do with it. It is not the evil you think it is.'\n\n'You have just slain a golden king in a cathedral of darkness,' says Loken. 'Did those aspects, light and dark, choose themselves?'\n\n'They are just aspects!' you laugh. 'Contrivances of presentation. Darkness to oppose light. You see? I chose my aspect to counter His arrogant show of glory. The darkness isn't evil, Loken, no more than the light is good or true. They are just symbols-'\n\n'Symbols have power, father-'\n\n'Not in the simplistic way you think,"}
{"text":" it. It is not the evil you think it is.'\n\n'You have just slain a golden king in a cathedral of darkness,' says Loken. 'Did those aspects, light and dark, choose themselves?'\n\n'They are just aspects!' you laugh. 'Contrivances of presentation. Darkness to oppose light. You see? I chose my aspect to counter His arrogant show of glory. The darkness isn't evil, Loken, no more than the light is good or true. They are just symbols-'\n\n'Symbols have power, father-'\n\n'Not in the simplistic way you think, my son.'\n\n'Then cast them off,' says Loken. 'Get rid of them, this darkness, this black heart, this palace of terror. Cast the power away now you are done with it. Use the one thing you had that your father did not.'\n\n'And that is what?' you enquire.\n\nLoken places his hand on his chest.\n\n'A feeling heart,' he says bitterly. 'You just killed your father. Be a man and show you are sensible to it.'\n\nHis words cut you. Does he really think this of you? Can't he see? Perhaps...\n\nPerhaps there is some truth in what he says. Perhaps you should shed this black aspect of terror, to show that it is yours to command, and not the other way around? The work is over. It would be a relief. It would take this weight from your limbs, and the guilt from your heart, and this deadness from your mind. You could breathe again, and hurt, and grieve for what has been done, and clothe yourself in white and gold for mourning. It would make the pain go away. It would justify your actions.\n\nThe future can see you. You dare not imagine a future that only knows you as this.\n\nYou let it go.\n\nJust for a moment, you let it go.\n\nJust for a second.\n\nYou let it slip from you, like a falling cloak. You let it slide out of you like a withdrawing knife, its thorns raking your meat and marrow as it drags away. You let it drain from you, and pour out of you, like blood. There's so much of it, but everything stops bleeding eventually.\n\nThe whispers rise again, in horror. They shriek at you.\n\n'Stop it,' you say. 'I answer to no one.'\n\nBut the whispers won't cease. They swirl around you, saying the thing they have been saying since this all began, again and again, like dead leaves skittering in the breeze or shushing under foot. Like the dry wing-cases of beetles. Like whirring moths. Like the fire-spit of the warp, unending-\n\nWhat is it that they keep whispering? It's infuriating. You can almost make out the words.\n\nThe name.\n\nOne name... No, one phrase, uttered and repeated, echoed and amplified by psychoacoustic force. One phrase, made of white light, uttered in unison by a million voices. Two million. An entire species.\n\nThe Emperor must live.\n\nNo. That's not-\n\nSpeak this with me, as it is spoken to me. The Emperor must live.\n\nNo!\n\nLift up your hands. He must live.\n\nA trick. A last trick. A last damned trick! A lever to prise open your armour. A feint to make you drop your guard. A magician's encore sleight of hand. The final desperate scheme of an eternal and ruthless schemer.\n\nYou make to cast your father's corpse aside, because you understand it is merely part of the trick, but the body is already disintegrating into papery ash and luminous dust. It was just an aspect, another discarded aspect, another empty husk.\n\nHe is not dead.\n\nYou cry out, in anger and despair. You try to snatch the power back into yourself, but it is pooled around you in a great black slick, sticky and sluggish, slow to respond, slow to obey, reluctant to reinhabit the vessel of your body now that you have scorned it. You draw it back in as quickly as you can. You inhale to fill your lungs and soul with it. You gather it in frantically, for you must be ready to defend yourself.\n\nThe worst of it... Your human heart, still raw and exposed, feels relief. A kind of joy. Your father is not dead. Your father is not dead. You didn't kill Him. He lives-\n\nLoken faces you, His sword is in his hand. But it's not Loken. It never was. Loken is still sprawled on the deck to your left where you threw him, gazing on in horror.\n\nOr is it wonder?\n\nYou will not die like this. You will not be tricked like this. The power begins to flood back into your veins. The darkness of it. The sweet agony. The reassuring rage. The strength-\n\nLoken steps towards you. The other Loken. The Loken who is not Loken. The sword in his hand is not Rubio's old blade. The sword in His hand is the great war-sword. The face is not Loken's. It is His face. The aspect of Loken collapses into voidmist as your father steps out to meet you in all His bloody majesty.\n\nHis wounds are great. Blood is dried black across His face and His ruined arm. But there is a light inside Him, a light behind His eyes, the pure white light of a species that, in its madness, believes in Him beyond all reason, and trusts in Him beyond all logic, a species that imagines Him to be its shield and protector, and has such faith in that act of imagination, it is made real.\n\nHe could not fight you alone. He could not beat you alone. But by bluff and ruse and stratagem and sacrifice, He has held your attention until He no longer has to.\n\nTo be absent in the body is to be present in the Emperor. That's what the whispers are screaming. A whole species is present here, its will united in one form, not a man, not a father, but a king of all the ages.\n\nHe looks like a god. A wounded god, but a god nonetheless. It's not His power, it's where it comes from.\n\nWe are one and the same, the whispers say, mankind and Emperor, Emperor and mankind, souls bound together. We are together as one or we are nothing.\n\n'You are no god!' you shout.\n\nThen this will be a fair fight, the whispers answer.\n\nYou howl your defiance as He comes at you. He is clearly weak and wounded, but you are weak too. You have gathered up but a fraction of the power you had. You must keep Him at bay for a moment longer, hold Him back while you recover your full strength.\n\nFor in this moment, you are just Horus Lupercal.\n\nYou swing Worldbreaker and deflect the path of His sword. Sparks fly like comets. Your Talon rakes through armour, flesh and bone. Blood fogs the air between you. His mind burns through your nervous system, disrupting your motor control and cascading pain through your core. You block His mind, twist it sideways through thirteen dimensions and render irreparable ischemic damage. You clamp His throat with your Talon.\n\nYou crush His windpipe and sever His carotid. Blood squirts out in a hosing arc. More blood snorts and spurts from His mouth as He chokes. He batters His blade across your skull and shoulder, shredding the Serpent's Scales. You push Him away, refractors banging as they fail and collapse, and punish Him with your maul as He staggers back, clutching at His throat. You break His wrist. The warblade clatters from His hand. You crunch His ribs. You unleash bloodlight from the eye on your chestplate and torch His face. His hair burns. The flesh of His cheek melts to the bone. One eye roasts and bursts. Worldbreaker shatters His spine.\n\nYou feel the power returning to you. It can't come fast enough. You need all of it. You need all of it-\n\nReeling, He burns you back. A beam of light rakes from His one remaining eye. Pure force, blue-white, the focused will of the human race, piercing your darkness as the beacon of the Hollow Mountain pierces the void.\n\nThe pain is-\n\nThe pain is-\n\nThe pain is more than a man can bear.\n\nAnd you are still just a man. It's not the power, it's what you do with it. And you, fool, let it go.\n\nYou let it all go.\n\nYou fall to your knees, on fire within and without. His psychic beam continues to incinerate you.\n\nPlease, you ask. Please, you implore. Give it back. Give the power back to me-\n\nOh, they will. They will. The Old Four will let you have it all back, because it serves their interests. But they will make you suffer first, as a cautionary reprimand for spurning their generous gifts. They will make you pay for that, in fire and agony, and they will let that punishment last a while. The Emperor, their only real foe, cannot kill you, after all. For all the power He has salvaged and scraped together, for all the tricks He has played to weaken you and render you vulnerable when you were entirely invulnerable, for all the ways He has made you look like a fool, He cannot actually kill you. He does not have the means, not even Him, to kill the limitless thing you have become. The instrument of Chaos Incarnate.\n\nBecause that's what you are, Horus Lupercal.\n\nThat's all you are, Warmaster.\n\nThat is all you'll ever be, first-found son.\n\nA slave to their darkness. A weapon in their hands. A puppet on their strings, beguiled by their promises and lies. An instrument, with no mind of its own, designed to shatter the shield of humanity and tip the human species into the neverness of the warp.\n\nOn your knees, caught in the torrent of your father's flame, you look up at Him. You see it now, at last, perhaps as He has always seen it. A simple truth. A secret that should have been kept, despite everything. Some truths are too dangerous to know, or too lethal to hear. That's why He kept it for thirty thousand years. Now you know it too. You see, through insurmountable pain, everything... everything that has been ruined, and everything that has been betrayed. You cannot ask Him for forgiveness. You don't dare, and you can't speak anyway. But He can see it in your eyes. You were too weak to resist them then, and you will be too weak in another moment when they relent and replenish you with their abominable gifts.\n\nYour eyes beg Him for mercy. A son to his father.\n\nEnd this. End it now, if you can. If that is even possible. End it before it is too late. If you can't do it, no one can.\n\nThe burning stops. The psychic beam abates. You sway, gasping.\n\nYour father has a knife. An old stone thing. What is it? It's so small in His hand, so ugly. That won't do it. That won't be enough.\n\nHe seems to hesitate, reluctant.\n\nYou clench, in sudden spasm and convulsion, and cry out. Th"}
{"text":" you with their abominable gifts.\n\nYour eyes beg Him for mercy. A son to his father.\n\nEnd this. End it now, if you can. If that is even possible. End it before it is too late. If you can't do it, no one can.\n\nThe burning stops. The psychic beam abates. You sway, gasping.\n\nYour father has a knife. An old stone thing. What is it? It's so small in His hand, so ugly. That won't do it. That won't be enough.\n\nHe seems to hesitate, reluctant.\n\nYou clench, in sudden spasm and convulsion, and cry out. The power is returning. It is flowing back into you with great rapidity, as though the Old Four are suddenly desperate to restore their gifts. What do they know? What have they seen that makes them act in such haste?\n\nYour father looks at the knife.\n\nI wait for you and I forgive you.\n\nHe drives it into your heart.\n\n10:xvii\n\nThe stroke\n\nLoken is on his feet. He sees the blade glint. A simple stone knife won't break that plate. Something so small surely can't-\n\nThe blade goes in. Heart-thrust, the quick mercy-stroke of a Custodian's misericordia, practical and unfussy. The two figures freeze together for a moment, the kneeling son, the standing father, joined by the knife.\n\nAnd through that blade, the Emperor channels the full force of His will.\n\nThe sublime power, a psychic blast of profound magnitude, courses down the ancient blade like lightning conducting through a metal rod. The fireball-flash of its strike is brighter than all creation.\n\nThen the light begins to die. A darkness falls quickly. It is not the glossy blackness of the Court's infinite architecture, it is soft and mute, like the advent of night or the dimming of vision and sense.\n\nHorus smiles.\n\nHis smile is no longer the terrible smile that greeted them when they entered the Lupercal Court, the smile that shivered the world with mortal dread. It is now the smile Loken remembers from long ago.\n\nThere is no blood. The athame is sharp, sharp enough to cut space. Sharp enough to slice reality. It has waited a long, long time for this, from the original killing that made it, and stained it with the shadow of all murder, to this, the eighth death that it was promised.\n\nHorus smiles. The smile vanishes. Then so does flesh, lips and mouth, revealing another smile, a rictus grin of teeth, a mask of bone. There is no redemption, for the time for that is long passed. There is only resignation.\n\nAnd in the end, it's just a man killing his son with a stone.\n\nThe blade slides out and turns to dust. The body falls.\n\nAnd then the galaxy burns.\n\n10:xviii\n\nKairos and chronos\n\nThis is the end and the death. But it is neither the end expected nor the death foretold. Prophecy is as confounded as time, and farsight is as useless as the plans that men have made.\n\nIt is the death of Horus Lupercal. It is the end of heresy. It is the death of one man's dreams and the end of the Imperium He so carefully envisioned. It is the death of a brief golden age and the end of a promise.\n\nIt is the end of a war, yet the death of peace. From here, the long slide begins, the terminal plunge into a grim darkness where the only constant will be war, and the only truth will be pain, and the only living will be suffering, and the only end of suffering will be death itself.\n\nWar is now only ever the sequel to war. War will beget war, and so down through time, generation after generation, and so on thereafter, into a far future where war becomes its own definition, and an end unto itself, where death becomes the reason for war, and war becomes the reason for death, worlds without end.\n\nAnd in that future, the Old Four will come to delight, for the quick death and sudden end they strove for here, and were denied, will be drawn out forever instead across the infinite architecture of the galaxy in one eternal act of worship to the powers they represent.\n\nFor now, though, they scream. They gnash in anguish, thwarted and outplayed; they recoil in frustration, cheated and forsaken; they flail in pain, wounded and obstructed. Their screams of hurt and indignation are so shrill, that stars at the hem of the Milky Way gutter out like candles.\n\nTheir anchor is gone. The singular, perfect instrument they invested with their powers is destroyed. Horus is dead, and in the instant of his death, the grip of Chaos Incarnate is broken. The Old Four fall away, suddenly, hysterically, wailing in torment, dragging the warp with them.\n\nThere will be a future now, in whatever unholy form it takes. The death of Horus is the end of the isochronal instant he wove around himself. The infinite neverness of un-when, this Day of Days, ceases and becomes then, the past. Time falters, chokes on its own blood, and restarts, faltering and unsteady. Metaphysical continuity resumes. The clocks wind up, and start to tick, like gold dripping from a melting ceiling.\n\nAhzek Ahriman sets down his deck. Some of the cards have begun to discolour, like fallen leaves as the turn of winter blackens gold and red. He rises to his feet, towering and skeletal.\n\n'What is it?' asks Sindermann. Ahriman raises a long finger sharply. He seems to be listening. Sindermann glances at Mauer and the frightened archivist. There is nothing to hear. No sound. No movement. The enclosing blackness that muffles the collection is completely silent, and it surrounds them so tightly, it feels as though they are the last four living souls on Terra.\n\n'The books have stopped bleeding,' says Ahriman.\n\n'And when you say that, you mean...?' Mauer asks.\n\nThe sorcerer looks at her sharply. What little humanity had previously been present in that cadaverous face and those startling blue eyes has been vacated. Mauer recoils. The look he gives her is the haughty menace of a jackal-god from some underworld.\n\n'I mean what I say,' he growls. 'I had much to learn. I had only just begun. But now they speak no more.'\n\nThe sorcerer seems quietly angry. To Sindermann, more alarmingly still, the sorcerer also seems scared.\n\n'Has... has something happened?' Sindermann asks cautiously. He doesn't want to provoke, nor does he really want to hear the answer.\n\n'There has been a death,' says Ahriman. 'Unexpected. Unexplained.'\n\n'What death?' Sindermann asks. 'Who is dead?'\n\nAhriman doesn't answer. He passes his bony hand across the small table, and his tarot deck vanishes. He turns, as though to leave.\n\n'Who is dead?' Sindermann calls out.\n\nThe sorcerer looks back at them. His taut lips are peeled back from his black gums and snarling teeth.\n\n'You three have kept me from my studies, Kyril Sindermann,' he whispers. 'You have wasted my time with your questions...'\n\nHe pauses, thinking. Sindermann knows the sorcerer is debating whether to kill them or not. He has never been more afraid in his life.\n\n'I leave you to your fate,' Ahriman says quietly. 'What is coming will not be pleasant. Worse, I imagine, than anything I could devise.'\n\n'You're leaving?' Mauer asks, rigid with terror.\n\n'I have to go now,' says Ahriman.\n\n'What has happened?' Mauer asks. 'Why now?'\n\nHe takes one last look at her before vanishing into the darkness.\n\n'Because now,' he says, 'there is a now again.'\n\nTime's pulse begins to race, thready but alive. It may never return to full health. The interlocked and fused strands of the other three material dimensions, so inevitably and unnaturally spliced, do not revive so easily or so cleanly. When Horus dies, and the four false gods who sponsored him flee into the warp, the immaterial deluge recedes abruptly, sucking back into the empyrean like a swift-ebbing tide. This rapacious drawback leaves a vast area of the materium exposed and ruined, entirely jumbled and displaced by the immense etheric pressures that engulfed it. It is a catastrophic, maiming injury to realspace, and Terra is the entry wound.\n\nThe materium shudders in shock, released from the warp's grip. It goes into spasm around the eschatonic rupture, and tries to heal itself to close the wound. There is no surgeon to tend it, no ministering apothecary to set its bones and repair its organs. Seizing, and taut with traumatic pain, it repairs its own brutalised form in a clumsy paroxysm of utter despair.\n\nAcross the Solar Realm, and beyond, throughout the local galactic zone, the overlapped shells of realspace herniate and shear as the immaterial forces that bound them together, and into which they have congealed, drain away like fluid from a compound injury. It is a lengthy and calamitous process. The material universe quakes and flexes, protests and fractures, unevenly and indiscriminately resetting itself. The dwindling winds of neverness, excited into one last wild gale of abrasive fury, rip through it.\n\nIn the Solar Realm alone, another sixteen million people perish. Many are never seen again, not even as tattered corpses.\n\nTerra is the heart of this cataclysm. As if it hadn't been punished enough, the Throneworld trembles, grinds and bulges. The warp streams out of it like blood from a butchered hog strung up by its heels. That which has been unnaturally intersected shears apart. That which has been comingled dissevers. The abhorrent cartography of Chaos is redrafted. The Dominions of the Palace of Terra sunder from the Vengeful Spirit's palace of terror, which has invaded them like a feeding parasite. As in nature, the sudden and enforced separation of host and parasitoid leaves both sickly and atrophied. They slowly and cruelly shred apart, causing mutual harm, bleeding from the torn tissue that has grafted them together, leaking from the fissures where their chimerical fabric was conjoined.\n\nThe other invasive realms withdraw, resecting to their ordained latitudes of time and place in frightful conflagrations. The pancosmic psychic facets conjured by the duel between father and son burst like carbuncles or snap back to their own whens along the numberless angles of space with whiplash force. The skeletonised City of Dust splits free, and drifts like an iceberg into the exoplanar gulf. The Marcher Fortress bur"}
{"text":"r, leaking from the fissures where their chimerical fabric was conjoined.\n\nThe other invasive realms withdraw, resecting to their ordained latitudes of time and place in frightful conflagrations. The pancosmic psychic facets conjured by the duel between father and son burst like carbuncles or snap back to their own whens along the numberless angles of space with whiplash force. The skeletonised City of Dust splits free, and drifts like an iceberg into the exoplanar gulf. The Marcher Fortress burns on the fringe of nothing. Calastar shatters loose, its impossibly artificed towers swaying. The Desert of Gods, where no idol is permitted to stand, sags and pours away like sand down the throat of an hourglass. The unquiet realms of the dead and the damned, the lost and the psychic part ways at the crossroads of inertia in Uigebealach. Dolmen Gates shudder, troubled in their long slumber. The psychoplastic flues and conduits of the webway creak and vibrate.\n\nOther realms do not survive the wrenching transition at all. Islets of exoplanar matter and archipelagoes of haunted warp stars combust or implode. The worm-eaten fens of desolate Shabek, grey and forlorn, dissolve in the mist. Rancid, superheated steam swallows the twilit glades and painforests of shunned Long Woe, reducing it, in moments, to putrescent mush that drips into the dark abyss. The dry bone-beds of fossil gods reduce to ash, and blow away as the anaemic un-light fades. Somnopolis, the Library of Lost and Mislaid Dreams, perishes in a raging inferno, and is never more remembered.\n\nThe Inevitable City itself, unseen by human sight for centuries, except to that of the saintly or the insane, shelves away, a tilting continent and, over a period of eight hours, slides back into the midnight of the empyrean like some spectral parody of old Atlantis. It leaves a few parts of itself behind, tucked into lost corners and hidden dim edges. Some will later be found, but the stories of those discoveries are the province of other histories.\n\nThis history is barely intact. Time bends and flaps, unmoored. Memory lapses, wiped by the trauma of the realm's disintegration, or blanked through acts of will by those who have seen too much.\n\nThere are bodies behind him, and nothing ahead of him. He cannot remember how that came to be. What should be ahead of him? How do those corpses come to be there?\n\nWhere is here?\n\nThe... Palace. The Palace. The Sanctum. The final fortress. This is... this is... The Western Mass Passageway... or one of them. One of the main transit conduits. He can't remember which one it is. He doesn't recognise it.\n\nHe doesn't recognise himself.\n\nHe gets up off his knees. The pain in his head is so great, it seems as though his skull has been split by a chainblade, but when he feels his scalp and the back of his neck with his fingers, there is no wound. The pain is inside.\n\nThere is blood though. So much blood. Blood on his hands and arms, on his chest. Blood in his mouth. None of it seems to be his. It pools on the floor of the vast Mass Passageway behind him, and paints the walls like some parody of cave art rendered in arterial spray. It coats the mutilated bodies behind him.\n\nThey stretch out in a tangled carpet back along the passageway, for as far as he can see. Not a single one of them is whole. Bones are snapped and stripped, limbs twisted and unsocketed, flesh torn. Most seem to be traitors, Astartes betrayers of the Lupercal's host, or Traitor Excertus.\n\nMost, not all. A few loyalists lie among the dead. He sees a flash of yellow plate here, a glint of white there, the emblem of a Solar Auxilia brigade. What was this battle? What fury visited here?\n\nThere's blood on his face. On his chin. He can taste its copper stink in his mouth and gullet. The blood is as red as his armour. It tastes the same as the crippling pain in his head. In the blood and the pain lingers some residue of insanity and rage.\n\nThere's nothing in front of him. Ahead, the passageway is empty. Smoke drifts. He hears, in the distance, gunfire, the thump of explosions, the roar of voices. The battle is still raging, but it sounds like...\n\nIt sounds like panic. It sounds like rout. It sounds like the mayhem of overrun and collapse.\n\nHe tries to clear his head. He spits to clear blood from his mouth. He must move. He will surely be needed. The Palace is falling. Why can't he find his sword? Why can't he find his own name?\n\nSomeone approaches. An Astartes battle-brother is moving out of the emptiness ahead. He approaches warily. Why is his war-axe raised ready?\n\n'What... what is this?' he cries out to the legionary, showing his hands empty and wishing they were not dripping with gore. The Astartes stops five metres away. He too is spattered in blood, his war plate dented and buckled. He keeps his axe raised.\n\n'You can speak?' he calls out.\n\n'What? Yes, of course!'\n\n'Do you know me?' the Astartes demands.\n\n'Yes!' he answers. He swallows. He has to think. A Space Wolf. A captain. He knows this battle-brother, but the pain in his head...\n\n'Sartak,' he says. 'You are Odi Sartak.'\n\nThe Wolf of Fenris lowers his weapon slightly, but not entirely.\n\n'Brother,' he says to the lone Wolf. 'Sartak... What is happening? I... I have lost my mind.'\n\n'I would say so,' Sartak replies.\n\n'What do you mean? Tell me-'\n\n'The enemy is in retreat, Angel-son,' says Sartak carefully. 'Full retreat. It happened suddenly, just minutes ago. They had us cold, but now they are pouring out of the Palace like rats. Something has happened. No one knows what. There is a rumour that the Warmaster is dead. That the Emperor has vanquished him. But it's just a rumour. No one knows anything. There's panic everywhere. Can you fight?'\n\n'Yes,' he replies.\n\n'Well, there's fighting to be done. A great deal more. Impressive deeds to be performed. The traitors have turned back, and let go of their victory, but that doesn't mean that victory is ours. Not by any means.'\n\nHe nods. He understands. 'Sartak? Why you are wary of me?'\n\nThe Wolf sniffs. It's almost a laugh. 'You have no idea?' Sartak asks.\n\n'No. I... I can't remember. Do you know who I am?'\n\n'Of course. You are Nassir Amit of the Blood Angels Fifth Company.'\n\nAmit. Nassir Amit. It comes back now, memories made of pain and torment, all of them glossy and red. Amit sways. He stumbles across the passageway, and leans against the wall to steady himself. Sartak watches him every step, his war-axe ready.\n\n'Give me a moment, brother,' Amit says. He tries to clear his throat again. He will never be rid of that taste. 'I will come with you. Fighting to be done, as you say. We must secure our position. We...'\n\nSartak waits.\n\n'Horus is dead?' Amit asks.\n\n'Let's hope.'\n\nAmit straightens up.\n\n'Will you lower the axe?' he asks. 'Can you lower your axe?'\n\nSartak frowns for a moment, then slowly eases the axe down.\n\nAmit wipes his mouth. He looks back at the long and grisly line of bodies.\n\n'Wolf?' he asks. 'Why do the bodies stop here?'\n\n'Because this is as far as you got,' replies Odi Sartak.\n\nThe sudden evacuation of the warp takes the blight of Chaos with it.\n\nAs the immaterial flood drains out of Terra, and the sacked Dominions of the Imperial Palace, so the clutch of Chaos loosens. The powers and gifts of the eightfold gods abandon their followers, leaving them bereaved and dispossessed. Stung by defeat and maddened by loss, the powers of Chaos quit the material realm without warning or notice.\n\nThe Imperium is freed from Chaos in one death stroke. It withers so swiftly, and so completely, few on either side of the war believe its threat will ever recover.\n\nTime, now limping but operational, will tell.\n\nThe loss is so abrupt, it leaves the conquering traitor host quite bereft. A cold falls upon them, as if they have been eviscerated. It feels like the shock of an unanaesthetised battlefield amputation. There is a yawning emptiness, a gap, a space where something should be. What belonged to them, and defined them, is gone.\n\nSome plunge into insanity, some into grief. Some collapse in despair, some sink into fugue. Many just die.\n\nLament fills the air. The chanting stops, the war-horns fall silent. The imperative of conquest is stolen from them, even as they grind the Palace to grit beneath their heels, and raze it with their flames.\n\nIn truth, they had won. The Palace had fallen to their siege. But for a few square metres, a few pockets of resistance, a few lines of suicidal defiance, the Palace was theirs.\n\nAnd in this moment, it means nothing. They forget what they were trying to accomplish, or the triumph that it signified. They forget even why such a thing mattered to them, or what motive drove them on.\n\nSome just stop motionless when it happens, vacant with stupefaction. They are killed where they stand, slaughtered by the loyalists' blades and guns. Others fall back, the fire gone out of them, and find themselves hounded to extinction as they attempt to flee.\n\nOthers, remembering at least their military skills, or too damaged to know better, keep fighting.\n\nThe fighting lasts for days to come. The Siege of Terra becomes a long, bloody, lingering repulse. Across the Dominions of the Palace, and the slaughterfields of Terra beyond, conflict continues long after the death of Horus. Loyalist forces, in their own way as shocked and disbelieving as their foes, drive back with revived vigour and unsparing vengeance.\n\nThe surviving loyalist forces are weary, weak and horribly diminished. They kill all they can kill, they purge all they can purge, they make every effort possible to prosecute the traitor retreat and thwart their flight. Such is their wrath, it is calculated later that if the loyalist armies had but a third more warriors surviving at the moment of the Warmaster's death, no single traitor would have escaped the Throneworld alive. In the annals of history, the Siege of Terra would have become a footnote to the Massacre of Terra.\n\nStill, the traitors flee. They flee "}
{"text":" They kill all they can kill, they purge all they can purge, they make every effort possible to prosecute the traitor retreat and thwart their flight. Such is their wrath, it is calculated later that if the loyalist armies had but a third more warriors surviving at the moment of the Warmaster's death, no single traitor would have escaped the Throneworld alive. In the annals of history, the Siege of Terra would have become a footnote to the Massacre of Terra.\n\nStill, the traitors flee. They flee to their transports and their drop-craft. They flee to orbit. They flee to their fleet, or to those parts of it that have not themselves fled or been destroyed by the time the evacuating ground forces arrive. They flee in blind panic. They flee in grief. They flee screaming.\n\nSome disengage in systematic military order, fighting as they fall back, held together by the last threads of discipline and dignity, or by loyalty to their regiment or company or Legion, bound by the few commanders who have retained the wit and composure to orchestrate a coherent active withdrawal.\n\nThat portion of the traitor host that escapes Terra and the downfall of their cause, and it is a considerable number, runs for the stars. They understand the wrath that is pursuing them from the broken walls of the Palace, and the implacable retribution that is approaching the Throneworld beneath the banner of Ultramar.\n\nNone of them sue for surrender or offer terms.\n\nOr if they do, no loyal son of Terra bothers to listen.\n\nDirty smoke is blowing sideways across the shattered rockcrete of the Canis Causeway. The surface of the wide avenue is littered with debris and pockmarked with craters. In the ruins to his left, he can hear the pop and thump of bolter fire.\n\nMaximus Thane walks on, the burning monolith of the Palace behind him. There is a limp to his step, but he ignores the pain. He remembers the last time he stood here. It is literally impossible to tell how long ago that was. It feels like hours. It feels like his whole life. He stood here, facing the sundered arch of the Lion's Gate, with just shy of seventy men, all Imperial Fists of the 22nd Exemplars, locking tight into Repulse Formation Exactus. They are dead now, all of them.\n\nHe looks towards the gate, or what remains of it. It, like him, was supposed to keep the enemy out.\n\nBlood spots the rockcrete beside him, leaving a trail as he walks. It is dripping from the cracked and twisted warhammer that swings low at his side. The Sons of Horus who shed that blood are behind him somewhere, crumpled in the causeway ditch. He can see their brethren, almost a company strong, fleeing in the distance towards the ruined gate. Thane doesn't think they'll get that far. He thinks they'll turn. 'My life for Lupercal!' That's what they used to boast. Well, their lives for nothing now. They'll want to die on their feet. They'll want to die fighting. Whatever else they are, they're Astartes, and Astartes don't run.\n\nThat suits him fine. He wants to avenge the seventy brothers who once stood this ground with him.\n\nHe glances over his shoulder. Though the 22nd Exemplars are long gone, he is not alone. The men and women advancing behind him are caked in dust. No two of them are from the same company or regiment. Excertus, Auxilia, Old Hundred, a Wolf of Fenris, a White Scars outrider, a Salamanders Pyre Warden, a X Legion centurion.\n\nThey number over a thousand.\n\n'They're turning,' says the warrior at his side.\n\nThane knows. He's seen it. The Sons of Horus are swinging around to form a defensive line across the causeway. Just as he expected, just as he hoped.\n\n'Ready?' Thane asks. But he knows the prentice-brother is more than ready. Nor is he a prentice any more. Demeny is a brother now, plain and simple, tested and tempered in the forge of war.\n\nDemeny clasps the long grip of Berendol's greatsword in both hands. He has the broad blade resting across his right pauldron.\n\nThane raises his chipped and broken hammer high in the air. He doesn't have to say anything. The roar of a thousand voices builds behind him.\n\nThey start to run.\n\nSo ends the Day of Days. It closes in fire and damnation. It has kept none of its nefarious promises, or made good on its venomous threats. It sinks into a bloody twilight where the only currencies are wayment, misery and loss. In this half-light of ash and tragedy, all colour bleeds and fades. The empyreal hosts of Horus Warmaster lose their darkling majesty and their degenerate lustre. They lumber as revenant outcasts in the twilight gloom, their souls scorched, their banners lank and meaningless, seeking solace, absolution and escape.\n\nWhere is their fury now? Where is their purpose and their certainty? Where is the unquenchable devotion that brought them to the brink of triumph, and almost won them the galaxy whole?\n\nGone, gone into the dusk, gone into the flame, gone so utterly it might never have existed at all.\n\nGone with it are the allies that stood with them. The baying legions of daemonkind do not retreat. They vanish into smoke, into dust, into the dismal rain. As the warp declines, so the Neverborn become extinct upon the material plane, for their embodiments and possessions cannot endure in the mundane realm. They depart, unwilling and thwarted, as night begins to fall, and leave their screams upon the air. Those keening wails of anguish and spite become the evensong of the dying day, and those who hear them, traitor and loyalist alike, will never forget them. The screams of daemons will haunt them for the rest of their lives, and wake them in the dark of other midnights.\n\nFrom the smallest vermin breed gnawing bones and collecting skulls amid the corpse heaps, to the cloven-hooved arch-fiends piercing the sky with their obscene horns, the Neverborn decay and de-manifest. They leave smog behind them, foul air, a spatter of ichor as their protean forms deliquesce, the dew of their blood, the rotting stench of their brief and heinous incarnations.\n\nBut they remain in the memories of those who have seen them as an indelible stain. Daemons have walked the face of the world. Their teratoid horror has been seen by human eyes, and felt by human senses. Though the Neverborn vanish in a blizzard of dissolution, the fact of them lingers. The daemons endure, in peripheral memory, in pouncing nightmares, in the shuttered rooms of sanity and the cellars of thought, in that shadow there, by the window, where the sunlight does not reach.\n\nThe daemons will always be here, now.\n\nSojuk of the White Scars should be dead. Since the Gate closed, he has fought on, sometimes alone, sometimes with the few who had been able to stand with him. He has roamed the dereliction of the Palatine, hunting for the enemy, and the enemy has not been hard to find. At every step, he was ready to sell his life for the highest price. They all were, the life-sellers left outside the walls.\n\nBut the daemons could not kill him, and now they seem to be gone. The traitors could not kill him, and they appear to have turned in sudden retreat. No one has been able to afford his price.\n\nNot even the Blood Angels. When the sons of Sanguinius turned, it shocked Sojuk to the core. It did not seem to him an act of treason, for the Angels of Baal turned on friend and foe alike. It seemed more like a madness, a hatred of war itself whereby, deranged beyond a point of control, the Blood Angels tried to destroy war and life in its totality.\n\nSojuk understands the feeling. When there is nothing left of a man's life except destruction, it consumes him and he becomes destruction. In a way, the Blood Angels were simply being more honest than him. They had dispensed with any discrimination. No distinction between brother or traitor. They merely killed whatever was in front of them. There was something pure about that apocalyptic frenzy.\n\nIt had its uses too. At Hindress Fort and Manciple Gard, the frenzied and uncontrolled actions of the Blood Angels broke and drove back large traitor divisions that could not have been stopped otherwise. He saw it with his own eyes. War broken by a berserk fury. Angels turned to daemons to fight the daemons. Perhaps it was some last wish of the Emperor that His sons should meet the enemy on their own infernal terms.\n\nSojuk stayed clear of it. He had no wish to fight the Blood Angels, nor any desire to be torn apart by them.\n\nIt's quieter now. Something has changed. He descends the fractured terraces of the Cydonae gunline, into the crushed gutter of the Sanctus Wall. The sky has gone yellow, and there is a light to the north that feels like sunrise. The enemy is definitely in retreat. What has broken them? They held the field so completely. It wasn't the Blood Angels. The madness of the Angels hurt them, but it could not have turned them back in such a wholesale fashion. And the Blood Angels themselves, the few he has seen in the last twenty minutes, seem to have been released from their madness. He has seen some of them, wandering, dazed, or weeping in the ruins. He thinks, perhaps, that the sudden passing of their raging fit and the breaking of the enemy advance are connected, symptoms of the same thing. Something has definitely changed.\n\nHe sinks to his knees, and lays his sword on the rockcrete beside him. He finds himself in the most unexpected place of all. Alive. He was so resigned to death, so ready for it, but it never came or found the right price.\n\nSojuk realises he is sobbing. It isn't relief. It's shock. Death had been so certain, and now nothing is certain. He doesn't understand the world any more. It almost feels like victory, but he doesn't trust it, because it also feels like defeat. Perhaps this is what it feels like when everything is lost, even the certainty of death.\n\nHe hears a noise, unmistakable. He looks up in time to see three jetbikes pass overhead at high velocity, banking to the east. They are bikes of his Legion. The false sunlight glints on their flanks as they turn"}
{"text":"It's shock. Death had been so certain, and now nothing is certain. He doesn't understand the world any more. It almost feels like victory, but he doesn't trust it, because it also feels like defeat. Perhaps this is what it feels like when everything is lost, even the certainty of death.\n\nHe hears a noise, unmistakable. He looks up in time to see three jetbikes pass overhead at high velocity, banking to the east. They are bikes of his Legion. The false sunlight glints on their flanks as they turn. They are chasing down the fleeing traitors eight kilometres out. Sojuk didn't know any were still operational.\n\nHe instantly wants to be one of them. He feels the yearn of yarak. He wants to chase into the distance. If men of the Keshig still have a purpose, then there is some meaning left in the world. It just hasn't been shared with him.\n\nSojuk rises to his feet and watches the glinting specks as they run off east. He feels the spirit of his Khagan. Whether the Great Khan of Khans is alive or dead, he is riding still, and sons ride with him, ever onwards.\n\nWhere all he thought he had left was death, Sojuk finds he has hope, and hope has cost him more than death ever could.\n\nThis end, then, is the end of dreams, this death the death of certainty. All that mankind trusted as empirical fact is excised from the human psyche, and in its place is crudely transplanted the sly nightmares of the possible. Hearts beat differently now, minds tilt at an unsettled angle. The limit of what is possible has been extended beyond the wall of reason into the dark forests of the imagination, where few have dared to venture. Anything has become possible, and thus nothing is unimaginable. There is no longer consolation in rationality. Mankind stands at the foot of a hollow mountain filled with doubt and the darkness of unknowing. The candles of science and axiom will not stay lit in the night wind. The only light that can act as a guide is faith, as blind and indefinable as the darkness it seeks to illuminate.\n\nMankind can now imagine the worst, and every time it does so, from this moment on, the worst will be worse still.\n\nThe greatest dream of all, the cherished dream to which mankind has clung, and in which it has invested, the spine that keeps the very idea of the Imperium upright, is broken. The dream, a polished mosaic of fact and truth, is bleeding out on the deck of a burning flagship, and nothing can staunch the wounds. The great and ordered plan in which the future was modelled, with a craftsman's eye for perfect scale and exquisite detail, is undone.\n\nHis vision of the future has failed.\n\nVision, gone. Audio, hyper-distorted. Sensoria, crashed.\n\nThe noospheric space she inhabits, and which is her entire world, is no longer attached to the universe.\n\n'query'\n\nEyet-One-Tag, Speaker of the Epta War-Stead linked unity, struggles to understand the riddle of data. The data will not flow. The data will not obey her.\n\n'query\/priority'\n\nShe considers, first, that the slaves of the False Omnissiah have unleashed some weapons-grade scrap code in a last-ditch effort to postpone their extirpation. They have tried everything else. They have tried their methods of meat and metal.\n\nBut that is an error assumption. There is no invasive scrap code in the war-stead's noospheric unity. Besides, the slaves of the False Omnissiah have nothing that can break the coded walls of her data-fortress. Their technologies, even those purloined from Mars by the treacherous adepts who rejected the sequences of Moravec to stand with the Terran Emperor, are status poor\/inadequate compared to the combat-ware at her disposal.\n\nHers were granted and loaded by the Fifth Disciple of Nul. Why are they status invalid?\n\n'query'\n\nThe unity does not respond.\n\nThe riddle of data refuses solution.\n\nWhy is her face wet?\n\nEyet-One-Tag rewinds her data record to the point before the sensoria crash. Her unity was advancing to location Hasgard Gate in support of Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI. 'verified' Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI had meat-engaged with status poor\/inadequate resistance at location Hasgard Gate. 'verified' Elements of Astartes IX, Astartes V and Astartes VII had been identified. 'verified' Skitarii Tr4.ki macroclade had been deployed to support Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI. 'verified' Estimate of compliance three hundred and sixty-one seconds. 'verified'\n\nIt has been more than three hundred and sixty-one seconds.\n\nAdvance Beta Trice Astartes XVI reported sudden aberrant behaviour displayed by Astartes IX units. They quote 'have become deranged. They are insane with some form of rage' end quote. They quote 'are fighting like animals, without any technique' end quote. They quote 'are drinking blood from the dead' end quote.\n\nThere is no supplementary data. Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI is unresponsive. Is this lack of response connected to the sensoria crash or merely simultaneous?\n\n'query'\n\nThe unity does not respond.\n\nWhy is her face wet?\n\nShe conducts a deeper diagnostic review. It is not a riddle of data. It is a loss of data. Significant portions of the data-current have been removed. Parts of her own data-shadow are missing.\n\nThe linked unity does not respond because there is no linked unity.\n\nShe is alone and blind and mute.\n\nWhat is missing is the immaterial medium that the war-stead was using as a conductive agent for their data-current. What is missing from her is the immaterial component that gave her purpose and function.\n\nThe warp is unavailable. The warp has been discontinued.\n\nShe is unsupported.\n\nEyet-One-Tag disengages from the noosphere to obtain data via other functions. She initialises old tactile and physical instrumentation that she thought she would never have to use again.\n\nObsolete meat applications restart like a kick in the face. She now possesses pain. Flesh pain. She now possesses discomfort due to loss of body heat. She now possesses misalignment in physical equilibrium. She has fallen.\n\nShe has fallen from her palanquin, because her palanquin has overturned. Her palanquin has overturned because the clade-thralls supporting it have fled. Her face is wet because she is lying in the mire. She touches her face. Both the act of touching and her face are unfamiliar. The augmetic sensor blisters that cover her skull from the mouth up are dead, or operating at low power. Some have cracked, the plastek fragmenting, and are leaking cybernovial fluid. Her semi-blindness and deafness are explained. Resolution is poor. Low-resolution heat track only. She should have kept a meat eye and a meat ear during elective mechamorphosis, in case of emergencies like this.\n\nShe shivers, another unfamiliar sensation. It is the cold of the ooze, the bitter wind, the rain. It is also shame. She was so beautiful, admired by many for the elegant asymmetric proportions of her augmentations, and the aesthetics of her implant cysts. She does not want anyone to see her when they are damaged and cracked. She hates that her beauty has been scarred.\n\nHate, another unfamiliar feature of meat-mode.\n\nFear, another.\n\nSomething approaches. She cowers. Her heat-adapted cyst, in feeble low-res, identifies it as a skitarius. She does not want it to see her, but she needs its help. She calls to it with the meat mouth she kept to serve as unity speaker and communicate with unmodified humans. It does not understand. Her mouth cannot produce hard cipher or code speak.\n\nBut it hears her, and moves closer. It picks her up out of the cold mud. Her wasted legs, dormant for so long, will not support her weight, so she clings to it. As her arms embrace its broad, muscle-corded torso tenderly, she extends a dendrite from the middle finger of her right hand and installs it into the base of the skitarius' spine. It shudders at the invasion of the lumbar puncture.\n\nShe needs its sensoria. She needs its eyes.\n\nIt is called Ultr-5V, and belongs to Tr4.ki macroclade. It is male-derived. It is a him. Like her, he is damaged. Like her, he is seeking data. He does not seem to mind that she is so hideous and unsightly. They cling together, like lovers dancing in the rain, arms around each other. Via the puncture link, he asks her a torrent of questions in binharic that she cannot answer.\n\nEyet-One-Tag accesses his eyes and acoustic installs. They are functional. Imperfect, but far better than her crashed systems. She can see and hear again. She can see and hear through his skull.\n\nThe world around her is revealed, the real world, unmodified by noospherics. It is far better resolution than the ghost heat-paint her broken sensoria could produce. Skitarii optics are battle-hardened and high-gain.\n\nHer palanquin, her regal carriage, is indeed overturned. The mud is thick, and the rain is so heavy it looks like vertical streaks of static distort. The battle engines of the war-stead loom around her, abandoned. Some are burning in the rain. She sees the heat of the fire, the swirl of the smoke colour-graded according to temperature. Not far away, not more than fifty-two point six metres, the immense engine-mount of Clain Pent, Fifth Disciple of Nul, lies on its side. It too is ablaze. Such a loss, an old and thoroughbred creature like that, hobbled and laid low. There is no sign of Clain Pent.\n\nShe lets Ultr-5V dance her around slowly in a circle, her face against his chest, her arms around his back. She needs a three-sixty view. Where is the war-stead? Where are the thralls? Where are the others like Ultr-5V?\n\nThe engines all around her, even her palanquin, are decaying. She sees rust flaking and billowing from their hulls, staining the rain red. The immaterial energy that infused them, and gave them vigour and vitality, is gone. Without it, the metals and plasteks that compose them are succumbing to years of wear and use in minutes, withering before her eyes.\n\nShe knows she is too.\n\nThe warp has left them. It has left them to their fate. It has forsaken them in a stark, material world of mud"}
{"text":"ltr-5V?\n\nThe engines all around her, even her palanquin, are decaying. She sees rust flaking and billowing from their hulls, staining the rain red. The immaterial energy that infused them, and gave them vigour and vitality, is gone. Without it, the metals and plasteks that compose them are succumbing to years of wear and use in minutes, withering before her eyes.\n\nShe knows she is too.\n\nThe warp has left them. It has left them to their fate. It has forsaken them in a stark, material world of mud and cold and liquid and filth, unsupported, unlinked, and vulnerable to decay and corrosion.\n\nThrough the skitarius' eyes, she sees figures approaching. They are coming through the rain, through the burning ruins of the camp. Their war plate is red, like the rust and the rain. It is also smeared with organic residue, which is also red. They are Astartes IX.\n\nThey are approaching slowly, calmly, what she would classify as rationally. Whatever feral madness afflicted them, as reported by Advance Beta Trice Astartes XVI, it appears to have abated. Eyet-One-Tag deduces the sudden cessation of the immaterial medium has shocked them back to stability. She wonders what caused their rage to begin with. A loss, a wound perhaps. Whatever it was, it cannot be anything compared to the loss she has suffered.\n\nThe Astartes IX are no longer berserk. But they are Astartes IX, and they are highly skilled in methods of meat and metal.\n\nThey approach. She does not bid Ultr-5V to engage them and protect her. He is as scared as she is.\n\nThey hold each other tight. She closes his eyes.\n\nThis is the end and the death.\n\nThere is no victory to be claimed, not for those who came here to seize it, nor for those who fought to prevent them. Terra, disfigured, writhes in a delirium of its own pain, flinching to ease the agony of one wound, only to tear open another. Each flinch is a tectonic spasm that furrows continents. Each contraction is a seismic rictus that cracks the spines of landmasses and grinds their bones. Its mouth is filled with its own blood, and its blood is magma fire.\n\nSome will wonder, in the years to come, if the Throneworld should be left to die. It is too broken, too tainted, too contaminated by the poisons of war and warp. Any other world so fundamentally exposed to the immaterium, and to the blight of Chaos, would be discarded in an instant, shunned forever or sterilised by Exterminatus.\n\nBut it is Terra. It is the cradle of the species. It is the earth from which the seed of humanity grew. The thought of its abandonment is inconceivable.\n\nFor to perish in a war is one thing, to survive quite another. Survival carries its own burden, an obligation that is, in its way, more onerous than war itself. No matter the injuries a survivor has sustained, no matter how mutilated and close to death war has left them, be they human soul or planet, they have endured, and so they inherit the reckoning of war. It is their solemn duty to preserve the cause for which they suffered, and for which so many died, for if that cause is not remembered, then war is just an empty horror. Those who find themselves alive when the war with Horus ends are so benumbed, they long for the release of oblivion. But they must live, to honour those that did not. They must remember, for those that no longer can.\n\nA cause must survive the war for which it has been fought. This is all the dead expect of those they leave behind. Make sense of us. Make sense of that which seems so senseless. We are gone, but you remain.\n\nRemember not the way we fell, or how. Remember why.\n\n'Wait,' says Fafnir Rann. Zephon glances at him. Rann knows the look. It means no stopping. Rann feels it too. If they stop now, either of them, they'll never start again. The wounds they have both sustained will kill them, for only determination is keeping them upright.\n\nStill, he says, 'Wait.'\n\nThe traitor host is in disarray. It has shuddered backwards from the devastation of Hasgard, and is pouring south towards the rockcrete canyons of the Palatine Way.\n\nNo one knows why. No one knows anything. But Rann, Zephon and the few other survivors of the Hasgard stand have clambered from the bloody rubble and given chase.\n\nIt is laughable. A handful of men, grievously injured, some almost dead on their feet, staggering after a host of thousands. None of them have any idea what their pursuit can achieve. But better this meaningless something than nothing. To stop is to die.\n\nThe men with them have come to a halt. Like Zephon, they stand and watch, bemused, as Rann scrambles up a slope of debris. The landscape, as far as any of them can see, is almost entirely bodies, mounds of tangled Astartes war plate piled in the sucking mire. Rann clambers his way up a heap of the dead.\n\nBehind him, Leod Baldwin grunts something. Baldwin can't talk, because half his face is missing.\n\n'What are you doing, Lord-Son-Of-Dorn?' Namahi calls out.\n\nRann glances back at them as he continues his climb.\n\n'Wait!' he shouts. He looks at them for a moment, the pride of the Imperium brought to this. A few White Scars, a few Imperial Fists, disfigured and torn, their plate now as red as Zephon's. There are some other Blood Angels among them too. They are ashen and haunted. Their rage collapsed just as the traitors broke. Another mystery that cannot be explained. No one knows anything.\n\nAnd that's why Rann has told them to wait. They need something. Night is falling, perhaps forever. This place, Hasgard, was where they were going to die, and they may yet die here. Mindlessly chasing the enemy is not enough. They are exhausted, broken, bleeding out both literally and metaphorically. Whether they catch up with the enemy or not, most of them will not live another hour.\n\nRann blocks out the pain of his wounds. He finds what he glimpsed from below as they advanced. He reaches for it, and struggles to free it. Corpses slide and clatter down the heap as he disturbs them.\n\nIt comes free, the grip of the dead broken. He pulls himself upright and raises it so that the men below can see it.\n\nIt is a standard of the Imperium, a banner of the Emperor. The pole is bent and the cloth torn. The aquila is missing from the finial. The banner itself is so soaked in blood that its symbols and heraldry are hard to make out.\n\nBut they know what it is.\n\nRann raises it aloft, ignoring the blood that drips from its hem onto his face, ignoring the blood that is running down his back and chest from the wounds in his shoulders and neck as the effort of raising the standard pulls them open.\n\n'For the Emperor!' he yells.\n\nThis is the end and the death. The Vengeful Spirit, mighty fortress ship, tears away from the fabric of the Imperial Palace, toppling backwards into realspace as the warp weeps out of it. It is profoundly damaged. Clouds of debris billow from its flanks as time, and seven other contradictory dimensions, pull upon it in opposition. Hull plates peel like snakeskin, flayed by empyric compression. The superstructure squeals and moans as extreme stress distorts its framework. It is gradually and brutally realigned to an orbital position it never really left.\n\nIt tries to recompose itself. It tries, screaming from every rivet and stanchion, to remember what it used to be, and to become that thing again, but its memory is unreliable, and its sense of self blotched by amnesia and dementia, and the pain is too great. It thought it was a city. It thought it was a palace, and a court. It thought it was a house of gods. It is suddenly none of those things.\n\nIt is no longer even where it thought it was. It is barely even a ship.\n\nSomewhere deep inside its rolling, juddering mass, Dorn and Valdor fight to keep their footing. Decks that were made of meat are suddenly plasteel again. Walls and bulkheads that were cartilage and bone are adamantine and ceramite. It is raining from the ceiling, torrents of water and oil from ruptured tanks and burst hydraulics. The rain sluices away the last dregs of blackened warpflux and immaterial residue from the walls, and foams around their feet in a reeking, curdled froth.\n\nKlaxons are sounding, on and off, blaring then faulting out. Cascades of sparks from shorting systems shower down in the drenching rain.\n\nThey have killed a thousand daemons in the darkness just to get this far, but now the daemons are all gone. Neither Dorn nor Valdor has spoken a word in a long time, not even when the Neverborn suddenly deserted the ship and the decks began to pitch and quake. They both know something has fundamentally altered.\n\nThey both know that despite their efforts, despite the thousand daemons they have killed to get this far, they are probably too late.\n\nOne step at a time, they advance through the torrential downpour, bracing themselves against the streaming walls to stay on their feet as the deck tilts and rocks. Loose debris flies past them, and unsecured equipment tumbles across the floor. They duck loops of cables swinging from the ruptured ceiling, the severed ends hissing and spitting weak cinders of power. They hear the tortured subframe of the vessel uttering its harsh metallic scream as it is twisted and deformed. They smell smoke, the hot stink of fires surging unchecked through broken compartments. Steam swirls from the chambers of the ship where pouring water and roaring flames have met.\n\n'He's dead,' says Constantin at last, as Dorn steadies him.\n\n'Who?' asks Dorn.\n\nValdor does not answer.\n\nThey come to the first of the skulls. Or, rather, the skulls come to them. One or two at first. Human skulls, burned and cracked, jawless, rolling and bouncing down the broken deck like loose rocks from a landslip, carried by the foamy water. Then more, skulls and dirty bones borne by the flood, spinning and clattering around their ankles. So many. They cannot bear to estimate a number, or imagine where they came from.\n\n'Here!' Dorn shouts, splashing forward. He grips the plasteel rungs of a through-deck ladder bolted to the"}
{"text":"skulls. Or, rather, the skulls come to them. One or two at first. Human skulls, burned and cracked, jawless, rolling and bouncing down the broken deck like loose rocks from a landslip, carried by the foamy water. Then more, skulls and dirty bones borne by the flood, spinning and clattering around their ankles. So many. They cannot bear to estimate a number, or imagine where they came from.\n\n'Here!' Dorn shouts, splashing forward. He grips the plasteel rungs of a through-deck ladder bolted to the wall. There's a light above them, a crepuscular glow.\n\n'Wait,' warns Constantin. Dorn sees that the captain-general has turned, spear raised, peering back into the darkness behind them. Dorn steps to his side, sword ready. The rain drizzles off their armour. Perhaps not all the daemons have fled after all.\n\nConstantin frowns, gazing into the dark. He lowers his spear.\n\n'Coros?' he calls.\n\nDorn sees them now. Diocletian Coros and three other Sentinels from Valdor's company, making their way up the rain-swept hallway behind them.\n\n'We followed the storm, as you directed,' is all Coros says when he reaches them. Valdor nods. Dorn, at his side, shakes his head wearily. It is all so matter-of-fact. There is no real acknowledgment of reunion, no relief. If these had been his men, he would have embraced them. If this had been Diamantis and-\n\nHe puts the thought aside. He clamps his Huscarl's sword to his hip, and turns to the ladder.\n\nHe leads the way. They climb through the falling water to the next deck level. The walls are streaming wet here too, and lamps are burning, emergency lumen units in wire cages, casting a harsh, blue light.\n\nThe glare is ultraviolet, emergency lighting and decontam systems. But power is failing and fluctuating. The lights are at half-power already, and they are starting to tremble and fade.\n\nA large hatch ahead of them stands open. Dorn walks through it, drawing his blade.\n\nHe stops when he sees what lies before him.\n\nThe great chamber is ravaged and derelict. There does not seem to be a single part of it that is not damaged or scarred. The cracked deck is littered with rubble and debris, and smears of meat and blood that might once have been human.\n\nTo one side lie the fused, incinerated remains of a Custodian proconsul. To the other-\n\nTo the other, his brother. Sanguinius. Dorn knew the Angel was dead. The woman told him so. He thought he had prepared himself. But to see it, to actually see it... To see the corpse, so brutally mauled and so casually discarded...\n\nIn the centre of the chamber is Horus Lupercal. He is crumpled on his side, his war plate scorched and blackened around the cadaver it contains. The empty sockets of Horus' broiled skull gaze at Dorn. His de-fleshed jaw is twisted open in a scream.\n\nNearby, a solitary Astartes kneels in vigil beside the other body.\n\nConstantin was right, whichever way he meant it. He's dead.\n\nThey're both dead.\n\n10:xix\n\nRevelation\n\nLoken looks up at them as they approach. There's nothing to be said.\n\nDorn, gazing in disbelief, gestures for him to move back. He kneels in Loken's place at his father's side.\n\n'You cannot die,' Dorn says. 'Not now.'\n\nThe Emperor is lying on his back. He does not stir. Dorn uncouples his right gauntlet, and lays his bare hand gently on the auramite breastplate. There is scarcely a trace of life, no heartbeat he can feel, no rise and fall of the lungs. One of his father's eyes is closed, the other gone entirely. His skin is cold and pale, and his hair is matted with blood. The injuries he has sustained to his arm, his body and his head are catastrophic. Dorn cranes in and listens. There is just a trace of breath, a wheezing, laboured rattle of air in his throat.\n\nDorn knows that sound. He's heard it too many times. He's heard it in men and Astartes alike. The fact that his father is a demigod giant, with a demigod giant's biology, doesn't matter. It is the sound of mortality. It is the soft footsteps of death as it approaches.\n\n'You cannot die,' he repeats, but there's nothing he can do to prevent it. The Emperor's wounds are awful to behold. No medicae science that Dorn knows of can repair this damage. This is the end and the death. He can see it. He can hear it.\n\n'He fought,' Loken says quietly. 'Then He fell the moment Horus was finished. It was as though... as though He kept Himself alive, by force of will, just long enough to strike that final blow. He had been injured so badly by then...'\n\n'You were here?' asks Dorn, not looking up. His voice is no more than a whisper.\n\n'I was,' Loken replies. 'My lord, I did all I could-'\n\n'I have no doubt of that, Loken,' says Dorn. He takes a deep breath to control the grief crushing his chest. 'What matters is what we do now.'\n\nDorn looks up at Constantin and is shocked by what he sees. Valdor is gazing down at the Emperor's body, and his eyes are full of tears. Coros and the other Sentinels are clearly weeping too. It is not their expression of grief that shocks Dorn. To hear the lament of the Custodes would be unbearable. But this is utterly silent, and somehow far worse.\n\n'Constantin,' he says. 'Constantin. We need to get him out of this place.'\n\nValdor nods. He clears his throat.\n\n'He lives yet,' he replies. 'I can feel it. Tribune?'\n\nCoros steps forward.\n\n'Teleport homing beacons are active, my captain,' Coros says. 'No signal responds. Noosphere is down. Vox is down. Retrying to establish contact.'\n\n'There isn't time,' says Loken. He can no longer hear the Master of Mankind in his head. He can no longer sense the light of Him, and the flames on Rubio's blade have gone out. The Custodes may be more sensitive, for they are more closely bound to the Emperor, but Loken can feel that extinction is but a few breaths away. 'There's no time to make contact. We must carry Him-'\n\n'Loken is right,' says Dorn. It is getting very cold, and the chamber around them has grown very dark. The air processors have shut down, and the atmosphere is leaking away. He and Valdor have seen the damage for themselves. The ship is dying too. From all around come the groans and sighs of its decline, bulkheads creaking, and the hull-frame cracking. Every now and then, debris flutters down from the sagging ceiling. The deck trembles beneath him, like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Like the Master of Mankind, the flagship is trying in vain to endure the mutilation it has suffered.\n\n'We carry him,' Dorn says. 'We carry him now.'\n\n'To where?' asks Valdor. 'Back the way we came?'\n\n'That way no longer exists,' says Loken. 'The ship has torn free of the Palace. It is no longer possible to walk from one to the other.'\n\nValdor glares at him, then looks back at Dorn.\n\n'The nearest embarkation deck, then,' says Dorn. 'We find a ship. A Stormbird.'\n\nValdor nods. The Sentinels close in and, with Valdor, Dorn and Loken, start to lift the Emperor up. The moment they raise Him a little, His head flops back and black blood streams from His mouth like water.\n\n'Set Him down!' cries Valdor. 'Set Him down again! We're just killing Him faster.'\n\nThey ease the Emperor back to the deck. Dorn glances around.\n\n'Get a deck plate,' he says to Coros, 'wall panels... Anything we can use to fashion some frame to support him.'\n\nThe Sentinels turn to obey, but halt abruptly and bring their weapons up in defensive postures. There are figures standing in the shadow of the hatchway, lurking like revenant spectres.\n\nThey are the surviving Blood Angels from the Anabasis company. Raldoron, Ikasati, Furio and perhaps a dozen others. They are gazing at the scene in mute shock.\n\nValdor strides forward before Dorn can stop him, his spear circling in his grip.\n\n'If you've come for more killing, there's nothing left to kill!' he roars.\n\n'Constantin!' Dorn shouts, grabbing his arm.\n\n'They are animals!' Valdor rages. 'Animals drawn to blood!'\n\n'No longer, Constantin! Look at them! Look at them!'\n\nThe Angel's sons are pale and viced with grief, but there is no rage in them, no fury. Valdor shrugs off Dorn's restraining hand.\n\n'I trust them not,' he growls.\n\n'Raldoron,' says Dorn, stepping towards the Blood Angels. 'When last we met, you were the wild beasts that Constantin describes.'\n\n'When last we met, Lord Praetorian,' Raldoron replies, his voice quiet and creased with pain, 'we were in the Palace of Terra. Whatever madness overtook us, it has passed. It has been replaced by this.'\n\nHe looks towards the bodies behind Dorn: the Emperor, Horus and the Great Angel.\n\n'I would rather that madness than this,' whispers the First Captain.\n\n'I do not doubt it,' says Dorn. 'We are composing an exit, First Captain. As rapidly as we can. The Emperor is still alive. We will bring your father, my brother, too. Sanguinius cannot be left here. See to him.'\n\nRaldoron nods. He swallows hard, jaw clenched.\n\n'And the Warmaster, my lord?' he asks.\n\n'Damn him,' Valdor rumbles. 'Let him burn with his ship.'\n\nDorn glances at him. 'Constantin-'\n\n'My lords!'\n\nThey all turn. Diocletian Coros stands, head bowed, his hand to the side of his war helm.\n\n'I have contact,' Coros reports. 'Degraded, vox only. But it is Hegemon Command.'\n\n'On my system too,' says Ikasati.\n\n'Instruct them!' Valdor snaps. His own armour's vox-system is long burned out.\n\n'Hegemon Command, Hegemon Command, this is Anabasis,' says Coros urgently. 'We need immediate teleport extraction. Repeat, Anabasis requires immediate teleport extraction. Lock on to my homing beacon, and set mass transfer, group extraction. Respond. Respond.'\n\nHe pauses, then repeats the instruction.\n\n'Hurry, Coros!' Valdor growls.\n\n'The link is poor, my captain,' Coros replies. 'Stand by.'\n\nHe repeats the instruction again.\n\nLoken looks away. He returns to the Emperor's side, and kneels.\n\n'They will bear you home, my lord,' he says softly. 'Do not die. Your Palace awaits you. My lord, I cannot imagine a future that does not have you in it. We need you to guide us, and show us how to put back what has been undone.'\n\n'He can't hear y"}
{"text":"espond. Respond.'\n\nHe pauses, then repeats the instruction.\n\n'Hurry, Coros!' Valdor growls.\n\n'The link is poor, my captain,' Coros replies. 'Stand by.'\n\nHe repeats the instruction again.\n\nLoken looks away. He returns to the Emperor's side, and kneels.\n\n'They will bear you home, my lord,' he says softly. 'Do not die. Your Palace awaits you. My lord, I cannot imagine a future that does not have you in it. We need you to guide us, and show us how to put back what has been undone.'\n\n'He can't hear you, Loken.'\n\nLoken looks around. Leetu is standing a few paces away.\n\n'You're alive,' says Loken.\n\nLeetu nods. He clamps Mourn-It-All to his hip, and runs his hands back across his scalp. He seems exhausted. His eyes are hollow, and his armour has an odd sheen to it, as though it has been exposed to extreme heat.\n\n'What happened to you?' Loken asks.\n\nLeetu shakes his head.\n\n'I...' he says. 'I cannot speak of it. I don't know how to describe it. I saw things, Loken. Things I can't explain. I think I should be dead, but then they all vanished and I found myself here.'\n\n'Loken?' Dorn calls out, approaching them. 'Who is this man?'\n\n'LE Two, my lord,' says Loken. 'He fought alongside me, and with your father. I will vouch for him.'\n\nLeetu bows his head to the Praetorian. Dorn studies him with a wary glare.\n\n'Lord Dorn,' says Leetu. 'There is a chamber nearby, just off this one.' He turns and gestures to the far side of the compartment. 'I think the Warmaster used it as a... shrine. A trophy room, perhaps. It is piled with bones. I think you should go to it before you leave.'\n\n'Why would I do that?' Dorn asks.\n\n'Because I believe the skull of your brother Ferrus Manus is there,' says Leetu.\n\nDorn flinches. He nods curtly to Leetu, and strides away across the deck in the direction the legionary indicated.\n\n'We await extraction,' says Loken.\n\n'It can't come fast enough,' Leetu replies. 'This damned ship is dead. Hear that? That's the death-scream of superstructure, Loken. The Emperor-'\n\n'He's alive,' says Loken. Leetu crouches beside him. He stares at the Emperor's body, and reluctantly reaches to feel for a pulse.\n\n'Barely,' he says. 'And the damage done to Him... I don't think that can be repaired.'\n\n'We have to try,' says Loken.\n\n'We have to do more than try,' Valdor snarls. He has come to join them. Like Dorn, he regards Leetu with deep suspicion. 'But we'll have to carry Him. Him and the Angel-son both.'\n\n'What? Why?' asks Loken.\n\n'Coros has contact with the Hegemon,' says Valdor, 'but the Hegemon reports it cannot establish a lock on our beacons to effect teleport.'\n\n'Empyric disruption is still very great, sir,' says Leetu.\n\n'I presume so,' Valdor replies. 'I will give them another three minutes. If no viable transport lock is established by then, we will carry them to the nearest embarkation deck.'\n\n'Embarkation deck three is closest,' says Loken.\n\n'Indeed,' says Valdor. 'Embarkation three, then. I imagine you know this ship better than any of us.'\n\nThe comment is barbed, and Loken winces. He knows that the stain of his father's curse will never be forgotten, and that to be the son of Horus will never be forgiven, no matter what.\n\nValdor turns away.\n\n'Coros!' he yells.\n\n'Still awaiting lock, my captain,' Coros reports.\n\n'Three minutes, Coros! Tell them that! The rest of you, make a frame to support Him! Hurry!'\n\nLoken bends down again to listen for breath. It is there, but it is so slight now. The crunch of broken glass in a leather bag.\n\nWhen he looks up, he sees Leetu picking around in the debris scattered across the deck nearby.\n\n'What are you doing?' Loken snaps.\n\n'If He's alive,' says Leetu, 'if there is still hope, then He would tell us what to do. He's done that all along.'\n\n'He can't speak, you idiot,' Valdor says, overhearing and turning back to look at them.\n\n'I know, sir,' Leetu replies. He bends down to retrieve something. 'But He'd show us. If there was a chance, He'd find a way to show us. That's what He does.'\n\nLeetu holds out the object he has picked up off the deck. It is a tarot card, The Knight of Mandatio. It is scorched.\n\n'Tarot?' Valdor says scornfully.\n\n'Wait,' says Leetu. 'There are others.'\n\nHe starts to retrieve more, picking them out of the scree of broken glassaic and plastek, and the scraps of ceramite. Cards from the Emperor's Imperial Tarot, lost and scattered during the battle.\n\n'Look, here,' he says, 'here is The Space Marine, and here The Lantern. Here, The Guardsman, torn in two-'\n\n'Enough of that!' says Valdor.\n\n'No,' says Leetu. 'The Throne. And this one, The World.'\n\nThere are others too. Cards from a different deck. The Orphan and The Revenger. The Despoiler. Leetu doesn't say their names. He knows whose deck they came from.\n\n'Stop that!' Valdor warns. 'So help me, the King-of-Ages is dying, and you play with cards-'\n\n'He would show us!' Leetu replies, turning to him. 'If there was a way, He would show us! And these cards are all that's left!'\n\n'So what do they tell you, then?' Valdor sneers.\n\nLeetu looks at the cards he has found. There is no sense to them. If there is a reading here at all, it is poor and incomprehensible.\n\n'I don't know,' he says.\n\n'Then damn you!' says Valdor. 'Damn you.'\n\nLeetu nods. The captain-general is right. It was a foolish idea. When the warp was upon them, the magic of farsight and the arcana made sense and functioned. But the magic has gone away, and there is nothing left but the cold and the dead metal, where such mystic insight has no power. The cards in his hand are just torn, scorched wafers. They have no meaning.\n\nWhich means the Emperor is silent. He's no longer talking to anyone, in any way. He is too far gone.\n\nDorn has returned, his face set grim. He is carrying something wrapped in a bundle of cloth. He calls over one of the Blood Angels, and instructs him to carry it with all reverence.\n\n'He was right,' Dorn says to Loken and Valdor. 'That man LE Two. He was quite correct. It was a shrine. An awful place. And Ferrus was there.'\n\n'Right about something, then,' sneers Valdor. 'He had some notion about cards.'\n\n'Cards?' asks Dorn.\n\n'Tarot cards, seventh son. He thought the King-of-Ages would speak to us and show us how we might best achieve His salvation.'\n\n'My father set much store by the tarot, Constantin,' says Dorn. 'So did Malcador. You know this.'\n\n'I know Malcador is gone,' says Valdor bluntly. 'No Sigillite magic will save us.'\n\n'We have no signal lock?' Dorn asks.\n\n'None. Too much disruption. They cannot fix us.' Valdor sighs. 'The three minutes are up!' he shouts. 'Prepare to lift them both!'\n\nHis Sentinels have secured two deck plates end to end, using one of the Blood Angels' meltas to fuse the overlap. They bring the makeshift bier over and begin to gently slide the Emperor's body onto it.\n\n'Hurry!' Valdor orders. 'Carefully,' he adds.\n\nLeetu has found another card. It is lying in the dust beside Caecaltus' charred remains.\n\n'You are a student of the arcana, then, LE Two?'\n\nLeetu looks up. Dorn is standing over him.\n\n'I believe they mean something, my lord,' he replies. 'What exactly, is always open to interpretation. It matters where the spread falls, and where they lie.'\n\n'And where did these cards fall?' Dorn asks.\n\n'You are a student too?' Leetu asks.\n\nDorn shakes his head.\n\n'No, never,' he says. 'I don't like them, and have never held with them. But Malcador, the Regent, he showed me things in the cards. This was... a while ago now. He showed me things that have since come true. I do not like them, LE Two, but I can't ignore them. Where did these cards fall?'\n\nLeetu holds one out.\n\n'This one was closest to your father,' he says. 'It was right beside Him. I'm sorry. His... His blood is on it.'\n\nDorn takes the card and studies it. The Throne.\n\nHe laughs bleakly.\n\n'So he speaks to us after all,' he says. 'These were his cards. And this is where he wants to go. It never occurred to me. I could not think how we could heal him, for his wounds are beyond repair. But the Throne, LE Two. The power of that Throne. It would sustain him, and fortify him. He could draw strength from the warp and restore his aspect. What else was there?'\n\n'Several others,' says Leetu, 'but this was the last. It was lodged here, beside the body of His proconsul, who never left His side. So we might suppose the two cards should be placed side by side and read together.'\n\n'Revelation,' says Dorn, looking at the last card. 'They go together indeed. And we have need of revelation now, for the world is blind to us and cannot find us.'\n\nHe stoops down.\n\n'You found it here?' he asks.\n\n'Just here, my lord.'\n\nDorn looks at the body. It is so burned away, it is hard to tell it was ever a human figure. Just a few fragments of plate remain, caked in ash. The chestplate, the most substantial and durable part of the Aquilon wargear, is the only thing intact.\n\n'He stood by Him to the end,' says Leetu. 'He faced the Lupercal and-'\n\n'He stood by him all his life,' says Dorn. 'Caecaltus Dusk. At the foot of the Throne, day after day-'\n\nHe halts.\n\n'My lord?' Leetu asks.\n\nDorn has reached out. He brushes his hand across the chestplate, wiping the ash and soot away.\n\n'He was there,' says Dorn, 'when Malcador took the Throne. I remember it now. Malcador stumbled, and then, on the steps, he stopped and-'\n\n'And what, my lord?'\n\nDo not fail him. Bring him back to this seat, you hear me? Bring him back alive. You do all you do for him, but do this for me.\n\n'Look,' says Dorn. Where he has rubbed away the ash, a mark is revealed, a sigil, drawn quickly, with a fingertip.\n\nThis is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.\n\nThe hasty sigil is barely visible, yet the lines seem to tremble with light.\n\n'Teleport lock established!' Coros calls out behind them.\n\n'They have our beacons at last?' Valdor cries.\n\n'They have something, my captain,' Coros replies. 'They are preparing for mass displacement transfer.'\n\n'Bring them here,' Dorn shouts out, getting up. 'B"}
{"text":"bbed away the ash, a mark is revealed, a sigil, drawn quickly, with a fingertip.\n\nThis is what will happen, and with my hand I signify it. It cannot be undone.\n\nThe hasty sigil is barely visible, yet the lines seem to tremble with light.\n\n'Teleport lock established!' Coros calls out behind them.\n\n'They have our beacons at last?' Valdor cries.\n\n'They have something, my captain,' Coros replies. 'They are preparing for mass displacement transfer.'\n\n'Bring them here,' Dorn shouts out, getting up. 'Both of them! Bring them close to this point!'\n\nRaldoron and his Blood Angels lift Sanguinius' body, and bear it over to where Dorn stands with Leetu. Valdor hesitates for a moment, then he and his Sentinels raise the Emperor on their shoulders and carry Him to Dorn's side as gently as they can.\n\nThe air is starting to shimmer. A vortex of wind begins to ripple around them, turning like the birth of a dust devil, lifting grit and fragments from the deck. The unmistakable ozone stink of a teleport flare begins to fill the chamber.\n\nThe light wobbles and bends. It grows brighter.\n\n'Loken!' Dorn yells. 'Loken, come on!'\n\nLoken is hunched beside his father's body. He looks over at Dorn.\n\n'Someone must watch over him, my lord,' he says. 'Someone must stand vigil here.'\n\n'Loken!'\n\n'He was Horus Lupercal,' says Loken. 'And he was my father. I am the only one left who cares.'\n\nHe stands. He makes the sign of the aquila and holds it in salute until the bang of the teleport flare begins to fade.\n\nThey are gone. The wind drops, sparks of decorporealisation drift like fireflies, and the transmaterial dust begins to settle.\n\nLoken kneels beside his father's corpse. He places his hand on his father's shoulder. Now there is no one left to see, he weeps.\n\n10:xx\n\nThe Throne\n\nThus is my friend returned to me.\n\nThis... this was the plan I made, and thus it is accomplished, but not in the way that I imagined, or the way any of us imagined.\n\nPlans are the delusion of man. We make them to feel safe, and to secure the future. But the future is a shapeshifter, a fluid trickster. It is mercurial and ever-changing, and it wears many aspects. It can be whatever it decides to be, and no plan can fix it or pin it down. It mocks the plans we paint upon its walls, for those walls will not stand forever, and may not be there tomorrow. I know this. I have seen the future, and it has seen us.\n\nPlans cannot be trusted. We place such faith in them, but they are fragile, devious things that alter the moment we look away, or break like oaths, or melt like snow. Some are simply the lies we tell ourselves, or promises we cannot keep, or dreams we hope will see us through the night. Those few that last, and come to fruition, seldom do so in the ways we expect.\n\nYet, still, we make them. We have always made them, and those that come after me, I'm sure, will continue to do so. They are all we have, our only armour, stronger than war plate. My friend knows this. He has known it from the very beginning. So he has made them anyway, plan after plan, down through the ages that he has ruled as king, not because he is stubborn, or a fool, but because he knows they are the best we can do. The trick, and there is always a trick, is to expect them to fail. To anticipate the way the future will squirm to escape them, to compensate, to build contingencies, to make not one plan, but many, and layer them up, thick and overlapping, so that when one fails, there is always another. Like war plate indeed. And, like war plate, a blade will always find its way through all those layers if it really wants to. The future's blade is very sharp.\n\nMy friend made many plans, and the blade has passed through almost every single one of them.\n\nMy last plan, so hasty and impulsive, has worked. It has brought him back. But it has failed too, for it has not brought him back safe and whole. I see this the moment they escort him in. I see it from the fact that they are having to carry him in. There, Rogal and Constantin, and four fine Sentinels, bearing him upon their shoulders. They are weeping. Of course they are. A silence falls upon the throne room. Vulkan starts forward to meet them from the foot of the dais, and at his side, Uzkarel and the other Custodians leave their place to help carry their lord.\n\nThis is a time of grief, but I am glad I am here to see it. My last bequest is fulfilled, however imperfectly. I am not alive to witness it, but I am present at least. My whole self burned away hours ago, and even the sigil of me that remained is all but erased. But it has persisted this long. The material man may perish, but the informational man lasts a little longer. Some parts of me will last for years to come, I think, as ideas in the minds of my chosen few.\n\nThat's my plan at least.\n\nI have lasted this long because I had to. Not to see him home, but to hold the throne until he returned. As they bring him up the steps towards me, I feel their urgent expectation. The throne is his only chance. It will save him. It will restore him and sustain him. This is what they have understood from the signs and symbols that both he and I have tried to show them, for signs and symbols are the only language we have left. This will save him.\n\nLike plans, though, symbols are imprecise. They are fluid, and they seldom mean what we presume they mean. Rogal and Constantin believe they are saving him. They think that the throne is his only chance.\n\nIn fact, the reverse is also true. He is the throne's only chance.\n\nI know it, and my friend knows it. This is what we were trying to tell them. Yes, the throne may stabilise him and suspend him, as it did me, but that's beside the point. He is the only one who can stabilise it, for I can no longer perform that task. And thus it will tether him here, to this seat, to this room, to this reality, on the brink of death and the verge of life, both wounded and whole, unborn and yet reborn, ended yet unending, now and forever.\n\nIt was never his intended plan. But it was a contingency. My King-of-Ages knew it might come to this, if the permutations of the future aligned in this particular way. That's what he told me, anyway. He had me believe he would be ready, if there was no other choice. And I see none from where I am sitting.\n\nIt will be agony. I can vouch for that. I have tasted but a brief moment of that eternity, and that is more than enough.\n\nMay your death live forever, my friend. There is nothing immortal about this.\n\nAnd so they come. They ascend the steps. None of them speak, but I feel the hope in their minds. What they do now, they do only for his salvation.\n\nI want to correct them. I want to explain their mistake. But I can't. And even if I could, perhaps I wouldn't. The truth is brutal. At least, this way, they have some solace. Some small consolation in the face of tragedy.\n\nThey should have that much. They need to be strong for what lies ahead. This is where it will end, here in my flames. But it is also where it will begin. After a fire, all that is left are foundations. It is a good time to rebuild.\n\nThey are our foundations now.\n\nI wonder if they have learned enough. They are close now, Rogal and Vulkan stepping forwards while, behind them, Constantin, Coros, Uzkarel and Lamora lower the bier. Oh, Vulkan, my boy. I have been glad of your company in my last hours, and humbled by your devotion. And you, Rogal. My heart breaks to see the tears in your eyes. I never thought I'd live to see that.\n\nI suppose I haven't.\n\nI hope you have seen enough, Rogal. I hope you have seen enough to learn, you, the master planner. Plans do not work or last. You have to learn to change them as you go. Change them, all the time, make new ones, make better ones, make them strong and layer them deep, but make them flexible. They never work the way you think they're going to.\n\nNot even this one.\n\nDoes he understand? He doesn't hear me. He and Vulkan reach down to lift me from this seat. And-\n\n-and I no longer sit upon the throne of Terra.\n\nAnd this, at last, is my end and my death. For a moment, finally, I feel something-\n\n-it's time.\n\nFRAGMENTS\n\n(AGONAL) i\n\nAfter\n\nAnd after the flame and the wind, and after the steel and the rain, after the banners and the baying horns, after the firelight on shouting faces and the sundering of stone, ten thousand new years begin.\n\nThey begin in a silence that falls like a shroud, and settles like dust. They begin in the smoking shell of a city that once crowned the top of the world. They begin on a wounded planet that circles a damaged sun on the stabbed flank of the galaxy. They begin on the endless tracts of waste and rubble that war has left behind, and they will take root and sprout there, and thrive like the weeds and wildflowers that will flourish across those fields long before the debris can be cleared, binding old bones and broken plate, climbing the skirts of rusted tanks, garlanding the heads of silent engines, robing the sleeping dead, and budding shoots from the sockets of their skulls.\n\nThe silence is eerie. The sky is yellow, and streaked with smoke from fires that will burn for decades. There is a light behind the clouds in the north. It is not sunrise, or sunset, or a bright and steadfast star. But it lights the northern sky and, beyond the drape of smoke, it lights the worlds above, and the worlds to come, and the numberless zodiacs of the stars.\n\nSome will see it as His light, but it is simpler than that. It is a direction, where once all directions were lost.\n\nThe years begin here, in squalls of rain and banks of mournful fog. They begin in the stillness of the open kilometres of flat and glassy mud, the lakes like mirrors, the craters changed to reflective pools. There used to be a city here. There, below, a column of soldiers, toiling across the oozing plain, dragging their old field guns, leaving a long and rutted line behind them in the mire. They are but one of many units, rediscovered now that the vox is speaking a"}
{"text":"nce all directions were lost.\n\nThe years begin here, in squalls of rain and banks of mournful fog. They begin in the stillness of the open kilometres of flat and glassy mud, the lakes like mirrors, the craters changed to reflective pools. There used to be a city here. There, below, a column of soldiers, toiling across the oozing plain, dragging their old field guns, leaving a long and rutted line behind them in the mire. They are but one of many units, rediscovered now that the vox is speaking again, recalled for resupply. There is fighting yet to be done.\n\nThe air is cold and wet. Marshal Agathe walks beside the long and trudging column of her salvaged army. The guns they drag and lever through the thick mud are heavy, but the shell carts are light enough. In the final hours, they fired almost every shell they had, without respite, to keep the traitor enemy at bay, until the traitor enemy abruptly fell back.\n\nIt wasn't their doing. Agathe has been acquainted with war long enough to know that they defeated nothing. That work, that greater work, was done by others, in places far away from the lonely black mansion. All she and her soldiers did was hold death at arm's length.\n\nBut they did it well, these men, these nameless or half-named men. They ran those guns with diligence and determination, until the barrels began to glow, and the target line two kilometres away was a constant forest of smoke and flame.\n\nAs a commander, she could have wanted better. Better men, better troops, better ordnance. As a soldier, she could not have asked for more.\n\nShe sees, ahead of her, the woman, Katerina Moriana. She is travelling back to the Sanctum with them. There is nowhere else to go in this sea of mud. Moriana is talking with the soldiers as they march, amusing them with stories to ease the back-break of their trek. As she catches up with her, Agathe hears her telling, yet again, the story of the lone guardsman. An inspirational anecdote, and surely made up. A lone guardsman, just like them, very ordinary, nothing special. He had nothing but his rifle and his loyalty. But he stood with the Emperor. Right at the Emperor's side. He faced Horus, personally. Yes, face to face, to look him in the eye. He kept the evil of Lupercal at bay for a few short seconds, just long enough to buy the Emperor a moment in which He could win the day. That's what soldiers do. He died, but he died well. No one lives forever. You do what you can with the moments you have. Yes, he was just like you.\n\n'His name was Ollanius,' she hears the woman say.\n\n'Telling stories again?' Agathe asks as she falls in step with her. The woman looks at her, that odd tilt of the head. She smiles and nods. She has picked up the skirts of her dress to avoid the worst of the squelching mud.\n\n'Stories help, marshal,' she replies. 'Words heal. You can close a wound with a good story, and let it mend, and make it better.'\n\n'Even when it's a lie?' asks Agathe.\n\n'Lies are more efficacious still,' Moriana smiles. 'A good lie is better than a bad truth. Their healing powers are miraculous. Tell a good story, and you can restore things to the way they were. Tell a good lie, and you make them the way they should have been. These soldiers deserve some consolation. They are good men.'\n\n'They are,' Agathe agrees.\n\n'They are fearful, though.'\n\n'Fearful?'\n\n'They are afraid of what will happen to them when they get back to the Palace,' says Moriana. 'They were convicts, all of them. Technically, they are wanted men. They are afraid that it will be discovered they are not real soldiers.'\n\n'They are real soldiers,' Agathe replies.\n\n'Yes, in the ways that count,' Moriana replies. 'But you know what I mean. They fear discovery. They fear someone finding out that they are not what they pretend to be.'\n\n'They told you this?' Agathe asks.\n\nMoriana laughs. 'No,' she says. 'But their minds have no hiding places.'\n\n'I see.'\n\nThey walk a little further in silence.\n\n'That is a very good idea,' says Moriana.\n\nAgathe looks at her sharply.\n\n'My apologies,' Moriana smiles. 'I didn't mean to pry.'\n\n'My mind has no hiding places either?'\n\n'It's not that, marshal. The thought is right there in the forefront of your mind and hard to miss. You've been thinking about it for a while. You've been waiting to ask me.'\n\n'Then imagine I'm asking you now, Katerina Moriana.'\n\n'Well,' Moriana replies. 'I think it's entirely appropriate. When we get back, there will be great confusion. Confusion that will last for years, I'm sure. Considerable stocks of data will have been destroyed. I suppose, therefore, it would be quite easy for your adjutant, Phikes, to have lost all the records regarding this unit. The confusion of war, and all that. And someone bearing the seal and authority of the Praetorian could verify the identity of this regiment without anybody questioning it. They are the Four Hundred and Third Exigency Stratiotes, and so that's what they will be.'\n\n'That's a yes, then?' Agathe asks.\n\n'Yes,' says Moriana. 'In the months, perhaps years, ahead of us, the Praetorian will need all the good men he can get. This war is over, but the next awaits. I don't think he will ever question where those good men came from.'\n\n'Is this...' Agathe says. 'Can I ask you, is this typical of your behaviour? Do stories and lies come naturally to you?'\n\n'I serve the truth,' Moriana replies.\n\n'Yes, but are you good at hiding things? Are you good at keeping secrets?'\n\n'Ah now,' says Moriana with a smile. 'That would be telling.'\n\nAgathe nods. She moves ahead, at a brisker pace. Behind her, she hears the woman laugh and engage another gun-team with one of her stories. Agathe doesn't wait to hear it. She goes to find Phikes.\n\nThe years begin everywhere. They begin with the first divisions of exhausted warriors moving out from the Sanctum's broken gates to reinforce those who have never left the field, but who have turned certain defeat into pursuit. They begin with the hounding and the purging of the enemy multitude as it tries, in its horror and despair, to flee the Throneworld and find some shelter where it can lick its wounds, and calculate its losses, and begin to understand fate's cruel reversal.\n\nThey begin in the Dominions and fringes of the Palace, and out across every continent of the planet, where wars of vengeance and escape ignite in the aftermath of the siege. To most, these wars seem to be just a continuation of the conflict, but they are not. They are a different breed entirely. The mettle and temper of them has changed, like the blade of a sword drawn back into the furnace-heat to be refashioned. Concepts of conquest and defiance, which once gripped the world like talons, are spent, and in their place come vengeance and fear, righteous anger and desperation, vindication and hubris. These will be the wars of liberation, but they will also be the wars of succession, perhaps on both sides. Before it has even been declared, a scouring has begun.\n\nThey begin in the low skies and the orbital spaces, they begin between the circuits of Terra and Luna. They begin as the avenging fleets of Admiral Su-Kassen and Roboute Guilliman descend like a fire from heaven and lance into the ship-lines and formations of the traitor fleets as they attempt to take flight. They begin as an inferno in the void, with ships engaging close, all guns brought to bear, while others tumble from the sky like burning leaves. They begin with the thunder of the Phalanx's main batteries. They begin as that thunder peals out across the Solar Realm, and the void war multiplies and magnifies.\n\nThey begin in the battered Rotunda as Sandrine Icaro calls her War Court to order and, with her systems renewed and operational, freed from the spit and crackle of the warp, she commences the direction of a war of repulsion and execution.\n\nThey begin with grief.\n\nThey begin with warriors who have lost their reason and their way, who were once gods and are now men again, and who cannot begin to fathom the loss of the powers they commanded. Chaos has withdrawn its gifts, and the strength with which it blessed them. They lament. They grieve. They howl. They rage. They do not understand why their gods have abandoned them. They yearn for the certainty they have lost, and the cause that united them in their fury. It seemed so certain. It seemed so clear. Victory seemed so secure.\n\nWracked by that grief, they fight. Not for Horus. Not for the Old Four. Not for the future, or to bring down a hated foe.\n\nThey fight for themselves, merely to survive.\n\nThey are not alone in grief. At the foot of a golden throne, the last loyal sons of Terra kneel and weep.\n\nBut they do not say farewell, or offer eulogy.\n\nFor He still lives. He does not die. The Throne will sustain Him, and renew Him, and when His wounds are healed, He will rise again, and stand with them.\n\nii\n\nVigil\n\nHe kneels before his father and he waits. After all that has been done, despite it all, his father should not be alone. Someone must wait with him until the end comes.\n\nIt is coming closer. The air is growing thin and cold, and the creaking groans of the dying ship grow ever louder.\n\nThrough the high compartment windows above them, only darkness is visible. The nightscape of space. There are a few specks of light, that might be stars or distant ships, but they are turning fast in a wild and uneven procession. The ship is shifting, uncontrolled, adrift, a broken shell slowly rotating in an orbital decay. There is no way to tell what its final fate will be. From the sounds of shearing collapse and structural failure, Loken suspects the Vengeful Spirit will soon suffer a critical loss of integrity and break up. But it may burn up before that, caught in Terra's gravity, and dragged down to a fiery, stratospheric demise. Whole, or in a million fragments, it will light up the skies of the Throneworld like a meteor shower or a doomed comet.\n\n'I feel the hand of the ship upon me,' Loken says. 'You know that expression, "}
{"text":" tell what its final fate will be. From the sounds of shearing collapse and structural failure, Loken suspects the Vengeful Spirit will soon suffer a critical loss of integrity and break up. But it may burn up before that, caught in Terra's gravity, and dragged down to a fiery, stratospheric demise. Whole, or in a million fragments, it will light up the skies of the Throneworld like a meteor shower or a doomed comet.\n\n'I feel the hand of the ship upon me,' Loken says. 'You know that expression, father? Of course. You will have heard it many times. There was always that bond between us all. I miss those days. That's why I stood where I stood. I make no apologies, and expect no forgiveness from you. But I stood where I stood to fight for what we used to have. It was a fine thing. The finest. It should never have been lost. So I fought for it. I fought for you.'\n\nHe looks at his father. Darkness gazes back from empty pits.\n\n'It's true,' Loken says. 'I fought for you. Am I not a Luna Wolf? I fought for you, for the you that used to be. The father I loved, not the thing you became. I fought to get you back. I don't know if you became what you became willingly, or if it was forced upon you. A little of both, I fear. I mean no recrimination. I have seen the other side of this world now. Like you, I have looked into eternity. I know that Chaos merely takes what we already are and uses us. You, father, you were strong, you were proud, and you were fierce. So that's what it made from you. And no, I do not think I am better than you because I resisted where you did not. Father, the Old Four never came for me the way they came for you. You were Warmaster. You were always the prize worth stealing. So I fought for you, which meant I fought against you. I kept the oaths you broke. I fought to bring you back. I was fighting for you all along.'\n\nHe sighs.\n\n'And you did come back, didn't you? Just for a moment. Just for a second. You saw it all, just like me. So... you understand. The old you, I mean. For that at least, I am thankful.'\n\nA shudder runs through the deck, the most violent yet. There is a distant thump. Loken rises to his feet.\n\n'I do not think it will be long now,' he says. 'Not long at all. We can go together. I have nothing left to fight for, and you shouldn't go alone.'\n\nAnother deep thump. A muffled, grinding whir. Loken sways as the deck tilts. In the hallway outside the chamber, there is a flash, and then another. Power, surging fitfully, lighting the passageway lamps and then shutting down again. The lamps go on, then off, then on.\n\nLight shines in through the hatchway and shafts across the deck. Three figures step out of the light and into the chamber.\n\n'He's dead,' says Loken. 'There's nothing left.'\n\nAbaddon stares at him. His war plate is gouged and cracked, and his cheek is caked in dried blood. His sword hangs in his hand. His eyes are sunken and lost, his cheeks drawn, his skin pale and feverish. He looks exhausted and famished, as though stricken by some wasting disease.\n\n'Dead,' he echoes.\n\nLoken nods.\n\n'Why are you here, Loken?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'I stayed with him,' says Loken. 'He was alone.'\n\n'Not any more,' whispers Sycar. The Master of the Justaerin is edging out to the left of Abaddon, and Baraxa is moving out to Abaddon's right. They intend to encircle him. Abaddon is simply gazing at his father's corpse.\n\n'No, not any more, Hellas,' says Loken. 'His sons are with him. I think he would be grateful for that.'\n\n'His sons, eh?' Sycar rumbles.\n\n'Yes,' says Loken. 'Do you intend to fight me, Sycar? More blood, after all that's been spent?'\n\n'Your blood,' says Sycar. He has circled around almost to Loken's right flank, and Baraxa is now on his left.\n\n'We'll see, if we have to,' says Loken. The Master of the Justaerin sees the look in Loken's eyes.\n\n'This traitor should not be here,' Sycar says to Abaddon.\n\n'Traitor?' says Loken. He smiles. 'Really? From your lips, Sycar?'\n\n'You know what you are,' says Baraxa.\n\n'I do,' says Loken. 'I absolutely do, Azelas. Do you?'\n\nSycar begins his move, a telltale hum of his Terminator plate as it powers for a lunge.\n\n'Stop,' says Abaddon.\n\n'But-'\n\n'Stop, Sycar. I said stop. You too, Baraxa. Just... stop.'\n\nBaraxa lowers his blade, frowning. Sycar glares at the First Captain, and then takes a step back.\n\n'You want me for yourself, then, Ezekyle?' Loken says.\n\nAbaddon draws breath, and takes a pace forward. Face to face, they stare at each other.\n\nAbaddon shakes his head.\n\n'No,' he says. 'No more killing. No more of it, Loken. There are far too few of us to turn on each other again.'\n\n'I agree,' says Loken.\n\nAbaddon isn't really looking at him any more. His gaze is fixed on his father's corpse.\n\n'You waited here?' he asks.\n\n'As I said,' says Loken.\n\n'Yes, of course,' says Abaddon. He moves past Loken, and kneels. He gently places his hand on his father's body. 'That was the right thing to do. The respectful thing. A fine warrior is owed that, no matter what.'\n\nHe shakes his head. He withdraws his hand.\n\n'Horus was a fool,' he says. 'Our father was a fool.'\n\n'He was a puppet, Ezekyle,' says Loken. 'He was made a puppet. Chaos chose him, and used him, and discarded him.'\n\n'Discarded him?'\n\n'Yes, in the end.'\n\n'Because he wasn't enough?' asks Abaddon.\n\n'Because he was too much,' says Loken. 'He was the most terrible thing, Ezekyle. He was absolute and everything. But he was also Horus. He didn't want gifts and tributes. He didn't want to be a puppet, or some pawn of the Old Four. He wanted to rule. He wanted control.'\n\n'Control?' Abaddon replies sharply. He looks at Loken. 'Control?'\n\nLoken nods. 'It was the one thing they wouldn't give him. Power, yes, but the authority to use that power, no. He was just a weapon to them. A weapon to kill the one thing that threatened them. A weapon to end the human race. They were never going to let us live. They were never going to let him rule anything.'\n\n'And you know this how?' asks Sycar.\n\n'I was there,' says Loken.\n\nAbaddon rises to his feet.\n\n'Then he was a fool,' he says. 'He was a fool to have believed otherwise. I warned him. I feared for him. I tried to make him see sense. He wouldn't listen.'\n\n'He was Horus Lupercal,' says Loken. 'I loved him, Ezekyle, but it was never easy to tell him things when his mind was set. And he had not set his mind himself. He was no fool, but he was played for one.'\n\nAbaddon makes no reply.\n\n'Do not make the same mistake, Ezekyle,' says Loken.\n\n'I will not,' says Abaddon quietly. 'I will not be made a fool. That is never going to happen to me.'\n\nAbaddon turns to him. He clears his throat.\n\n'I believed in the Imperium, and it betrayed me,' he says. 'I believed in my father, and he disappointed me. I will never be beholden to anything or anyone again. I will follow no one, no primarch, no daemon. I will lead.'\n\n'Then lead wisely,' says Loken. 'And I ask you, Ezekyle... lead what?'\n\nAbaddon stares at Loken for a second.\n\n'I have the authority now, Loken,' he says. 'As First Captain, I am the heir to command. Do you oppose that?'\n\n'No,' says Loken.\n\n'We are trying to right the ship,' says Abaddon. 'To make some running repairs and restart the drives.'\n\n'That won't be easy. The damage is severe.'\n\n'Indeed. Not easy at all. But the Vengeful Spirit has always been a resolute vessel. Strong, enduring. We have made a start. We will see how far we get.'\n\n'That's your plan?' asks Loken.\n\n'Would you advise differently?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'I would advise surrender,' says Loken. He hears Sycar snort.\n\n'We don't surrender, Loken,' says Abaddon.\n\n'No,' says Loken. 'But a coming to terms would be the best conclusion. There's nowhere to run, not in a wounded ship, and the forces that are coming for you are fired with vengeance. This war will persist until the galaxy ends, unless one side lowers its guard. Chaos is fled. It's gone. There will be others like you, Ezekyle. Others of your cause who regret their actions, or who were misled and duped, or who have simply seen the error of their ways. But if the First Captain of the Sixteenth sets an example, they would follow you.'\n\n'Guilliman will kill us,' says Baraxa.\n\n'Guilliman wants the Imperium restored,' says Loken. 'He wants it whole again. I believe, if the terms were right, he would accept the return of Astartes brothers, and spare them. He doesn't want to lose nine Legions. There was a mistake born of misunderstanding. Not all of your side are beyond redemption. So set an example. Begin the process. Bring others with you, and demonstrate your contrition.'\n\n'It's too late for that,' snaps Sycar.\n\n'It's better that,' says Loken, 'than the alternative. A crusade to hunt you all down, to exterminate you all, to scour you from the stars. This civil war perpetuated under a new name. No mercy. No quarter. No forgiveness. Where would you even begin to run?'\n\n'I'll think of somewhere,' Abaddon replies.\n\n'Ezekyle-'\n\n'Azelas is right, Loken,' Abaddon says. 'Guilliman will kill us. He will never forgive what we have done. He will never accept that we were right, and our grievances justified.'\n\n'Guilliman wasn't here,' says Loken. 'But Dorn was. He understands it better. He might listen. And he is the Praetorian, after all. Ezekyle, if you are prepared to commit to this course, truly prepared, I would go to him. I would speak to Dorn on behalf of the Sixteenth. I would make your case and negotiate terms. I mean it. I will swear an oath to it, if you want me to. He would listen to me. I know it.'\n\n'You would do that?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'I'd do it for my Legion, and for the honour it once had. I would do it for our father as he was before this darkness fell.'\n\nLoken stares down at the corpse.\n\n'And I think he would want me to,' he says. 'My life for Lupercal. I can't give it to him now, but I can give it to his memory.'\n\nAbaddon is silent for a moment.\n\n'And if I decide to reject your offer?' he asks. 'If I decide to fight on? Will you oppose me?'\n\n'I'm not in a position to,"}
{"text":" me. I know it.'\n\n'You would do that?' Abaddon asks.\n\n'I'd do it for my Legion, and for the honour it once had. I would do it for our father as he was before this darkness fell.'\n\nLoken stares down at the corpse.\n\n'And I think he would want me to,' he says. 'My life for Lupercal. I can't give it to him now, but I can give it to his memory.'\n\nAbaddon is silent for a moment.\n\n'And if I decide to reject your offer?' he asks. 'If I decide to fight on? Will you oppose me?'\n\n'I'm not in a position to, Ezekyle. Will you kill me?'\n\n'No, Garviel. No, I won't. I can use all the brothers I can get.'\n\n'I won't fight for you,' Loken says. 'And I won't run with you. But I will come after you, at your heels, and remind you, every hour of every day, that my offer still stands.'\n\n'Some Mournival...' Abaddon murmurs.\n\n'So?' Loken asks.\n\n'You were always the idealist, Loken. Always. I was the pragmatist. The Legions built the Imperium, through blood and sacrifice, and the Emperor would have discarded us. He would have cut our throats to make way for the human ascendancy. They would have no Imperium but for us! The betrayal is unconscionable, and our outrage burns as bright as ever. I'm... sorry. This is a time for pragmatism. We're going to run. Fight for our birthright. Fight for what is owed us. Fight for our lives, if we have to. That's the way it is. My decision. You can come with us. Or you can go. I won't stop you.'\n\nLoken sighs. He starts to speak.\n\nBlood comes out of his mouth in place of words.\n\nEyes wide, he falls forward into Abaddon. Abaddon catches him, and lowers him in horror to the deck.\n\n'What did you do?' Abaddon snarls.\n\nErebus slides his athame out of Loken's back, and whips blood from the blade with a flick of his wrist.\n\n'He opposed you from the start,' says Erebus. 'He wasn't about to stop. He was a traitor to your Legion.'\n\nAbaddon rises. His sword comes up and jabs against the Word Bearer's throat. Erebus does not flinch.\n\n'What. Did. You. Do?' Abaddon spits.\n\n'He stood against you, Abaddon,' Erebus says. 'What do you not understand about that? He would have killed you all, the moment the chance arose. Killed you, or betrayed you. Besides, he had to die.'\n\n'What do you mean?'\n\n'He had to. He had to. To close the circle, and complete the cycle.' Erebus smiles. 'We have lost today,' he says. 'Horus has failed. But this isn't the end. There will be other opportunities to do it, and do it better. We will learn from our mistakes. We will be stronger. We will be far greater than this. If it takes a thousand years, or ten thousand, we will triumph. And to do that, we need guidance. Do you know how daemons are born?'\n\n'Why would I know that?' Abaddon growls.\n\n'It's a thing you should learn,' says Erebus. 'A daemon may die long before it is born. Time is meaningless to them. A circle, you see? They come back because they never go away. And some of them are great powers of special significance. One of those played a vital role in this. It must exist to do that, just as it must exist to help us in our future efforts. So it had to be born, and this happened to be the moment.'\n\n'Speak sense,' says Abaddon.\n\n'A daemon is born in the warp in response to an event here,' says Erebus. 'A death, for example. Something especially vindictive and abrupt. Something unjust, perhaps. A daemon was just born, Abaddon. You will come to know it well. It will be the footsteps at your back. It will be the one who walks behind you. It will be the only name you hear. Watch for it. Look out. It's already here.'\n\nLoken and Abaddon, reunited.\n\niii\n\nThe remains\n\nThe years begin here. They begin with burials and mourning. From the rubble of the city, tombs will be the first things to be built. There will be splendid mausoleums for the mighty and the great, each marked by fine words and noble epitaphs, and mass graves for the unidentified, each marked by lonely cenotaphs and eternal flames. There will be no salute of guns, neither for the great nor the unknown, for the guns have spoken too much already. There will be a new breed of remembrancer, a whole species of them, who will spend their lives remembering other lives, and who will make their deeds the solemn recovery of other deeds. There will be stories, of giants and guardsmen, of demigods and mortals. The immortals have begun to die, but the dead will become immortal.\n\nThe years begin here, as the silent Angels of the IX walk the body of their fallen lord to his rest. Flames swirl from the tops of their staves, and they swing the lamps of night. Raldoron leads them, and behind him come Azkaellon and Satel Aimery, Taerwelt Ikasati and Zephon Sorrow-Bringer, Khoradal Furio and Nassir Amit, and five hundred others. Like all of his brothers, Raldoron has dreamed of this hour. None of them will speak of those dreams. They hope that their shame will be interred with the body of their primarch. Their ceremonies are simple. To hymn one single death, even the Great Angel's, when there is not a life in the world untouched by death, would be unseemly.\n\nSanguinius would not have wished for that.\n\nPurple and amaranthine shrouds drape the statues of the Palace. Lists are made, lists of impossible length. They are made to number the dead, for that is only right, but they are also made to calculate the living who remain, for that number will be vital in the years just now beginning. The equations of war must be recalculated without delay.\n\nThe years begin here, with an elderly man listening to his pocket watch, and discovering that it is running again. Kyril Sindermann winds his pocket watch, but has no idea how to reset the hands. There is time again, but no way of telling what that time is.\n\nHe stands on the steps of the library. The air is paper-white with smoke, and every surface is coated in dust and debris. Explosions still thump in the city around him. Light, as strong as sunlight, is strobing and flashing overhead, muffled by the clouds. Mauer says it's a void war. Ships engaging in close orbit. Thousands of ships. She's learned this from the vox.\n\nSindermann can hear her in the courtyard below, trying to maintain a signal, trying to contact the Prefectus or the Hegemon, trying to gather information. Any information.\n\nThey'll be told in time, Sindermann thinks. They'll be told what they need to know. He turns and looks back at the library's scorched facade. From this day on, in the years that are beginning here, on this bleak morning, knowledge will become the most precious thing of all. Who has it. Who does not. What can be learned, and what must be unlearned. Secrets, more than ever, will become currency, and those who get to keep the secrets will be the architects of the Imperium as it is rebuilt.\n\nThere are things that mankind must know, and there are things that mankind must never know. Deciding one from another is a task that will rest, he thinks, with a wiser head than his. He does not envy them. He has always upheld the idea that knowledge exists to be shared without discrimination.\n\nHe is no longer sure of that. He's no longer sure of anything.\n\nMauer's calling to him. Sindermann looks back at the archivist, watching him from the doorway of the library.\n\n'Will you come with us?' he asks her. They're going to attempt to get to the Hegemon.\n\n'I must stay here, sir,' she replies. 'The collections can't be left unattended.'\n\n'It won't be safe here,' he says. 'It's probably as dangerous as it was when we arrived. The enemy-'\n\n'Someone must keep the books safe,' she says.\n\nHe nods. Smiles.\n\n'We'll send people to assist you,' he says. 'Prefectus probably. I'll return when I can. So...'\n\nMauer calls his name again impatiently. He turns to go. Then he looks back, with a rueful grin.\n\n'I'm so sorry,' he says. 'So rude of me. I never once asked you your name.'\n\n'Chase, sir,' she replies. 'It's Lilean Chase.'\n\nHe nods again, and walks down into the courtyard, a handkerchief across his mouth to keep the smoke at bay.\n\nThe archivist watches him go, and then closes the door.\n\nMany, too many, will care not what these new years will bring. Emhon Lux lies dead beside his damaged lifter chair beneath the shattered arch of Teclis Gate. He stares up at the sky. From where he lies, the bisected half of the gate's arch that is still standing looks like a broken wing. His eyes see nothing of the sky, or the arch. He has lost his final battle, not against the traitor foe, who litter the rubble around him, but against his own ruined body, over which his rage and will to fight could not prevail.\n\nHis corpse will not be found for eighteen weeks, when the workgangs finally advance into the zone.\n\nTjaras Grunli is discovered, by chance, by White Scars riders within a few hours of the Emperor's return. When they lift up his body, respectfully, to carry it away, it finally exhales the breath it has been holding. They hurriedly check him, believing for a second that he is, by some miracle, alive.\n\nHe is not.\n\nJera Talmada lies near the wreckage of her tread out past Irenic.\n\nHer body is never found.\n\nOthers try to fathom the nature of these new years just beginning. Constantin Valdor sits alone in his chamber, and stares at his spear, laid out on the floor in front of him. He wonders if the things that it has taught him are lies. He knows they are not.\n\nLeetu waits alone in an anteroom. He is not restrained, but there are interrogations he must submit to, by order of the Praetorian. He takes out his old deck, and slips into them the new cards he gathered from the burned chamber. They come from two other decks entirely. He sorts them, and lays a spread to see if, in their conflicting voices, he can discern some future for himself, or for the world.\n\nHe turns the first card. The Revenger. That much he knew already.\n\nZaranchek Xanthus, his wound patched with a field dressing, waits in the laboratoria of the Retreat. Aedile-Marshal Harahel and four other Wardens of the Sodality of the Key, grim and silent, have just remo"}
{"text":"em the new cards he gathered from the burned chamber. They come from two other decks entirely. He sorts them, and lays a spread to see if, in their conflicting voices, he can discern some future for himself, or for the world.\n\nHe turns the first card. The Revenger. That much he knew already.\n\nZaranchek Xanthus, his wound patched with a field dressing, waits in the laboratoria of the Retreat. Aedile-Marshal Harahel and four other Wardens of the Sodality of the Key, grim and silent, have just removed the last of Fo's work into safekeeping. Xanthus has no idea where they are taking the Terminus Sanction, but the work has been carefully supervised by Khalid Hassan, so the Chosen will maintain close scrutiny. Titan, that's his guess.\n\nHe moves the bank of waste incinerators, and checks their settings. He can feel their heat. All are operating at capacity. Another twenty minutes, and they will have cremated all the genetic material that has been cleaned out of the bio-structor vats. That was the deal. Destroy everything now the work is done.\n\nHe looks up and finds Amon Tauromachian watching him. The Custodes move so silently.\n\n'Are you finished?' Amon asks.\n\n'Just another few minutes,' Xanthus replies. 'I want to make sure all the materials are purged.'\n\n'It is time to leave,' says Amon.\n\n'Just another few minutes, if you please,' says Xanthus. 'I want to make sure everything has been done correctly.'\n\nAmon stares at him, then leaves without a word.\n\nEverything must be checked and double-checked. Nothing must be left behind. The last portion of biomatter placed in the incinerators was the final residue of primary sample group 'Xanthus'. He loaded it for disposal himself.\n\nThe incinerators roar softly, belying the intense heat within. It's all in there, and not a trace of it will remain when the cycle ends, not a strand of DNA, not a scrap of ash that can be typed.\n\nAll of it, including the dismembered body of the original Zaranchek Xanthus.\n\nXanthus gathers up a few data-slates and a few sheaves of documents, and places them inside a file case. He includes the pages he purloined from the Regent's notebooks when nobody was looking.\n\nAnd he adds, carefully, Basilio Fo's notebooks too, the ones he was allowed to keep during his incarceration (for I will certainly be needing those).\n\nFor some, the years wind back, so they will be in the right order when they finally meet the new ones starting here. Erebus, the Dark Apostle, certainly did that with his vicious blade and Loken's blood. He has completed the circle, just as the Old Four taught him, so that it will turn correctly, and turn forever. The new years will walk beside him.\n\nIn a cave, so many years ago it is impossible to count them exactly, John Grammaticus carefully ties the next wolf noose knot the way he was taught. It is summer in the valley outside, a hot sun, a blue sky. The air is fresh, and the forests are thick, an almost emerald green, though it has only been a few generations since the ice began to retreat. Oak, holly, fir and pine, mantling sharp young mountains. One day, this place will be called the Pyrenees.\n\nHe puts the ball of thread back in his satchel. Another loop of thread, correctly placed. There are many more to go, and many more to come. This was his promise, to mark the way, all the way from the end to the very beginning, to set out a path he has already travelled once. That path is far, far longer and more complex now than when he made, or will make, that journey. Time and realspace have been restored to their original positions, so some of the steps on the way are now millennia or light years apart. But he has to mark them all, every one of them, or all is lost, or will be lost, or was lost, long ago, in the far future.\n\nHe imagines it will take the rest of his life.\n\nHe takes out his torquetum, to gauge the bearings of the next step. Satisfied, he draws a last breath of this cool summer air. He pauses to admire the images marked on the rock wall. Figures of men with spears, an antelope, a handprint. The painting was made in the last day or two. The men who made it will be returning soon, their hunt successful. He's confident they will never notice the little loop of red thread tied to a split in the rock in the dimmest recess of the cave.\n\nTime to go. Time to make his cut. He takes the feather from his bag. Its tip is sharp. Sharp enough. A pure white feather borrowed from an Angel's wing.\n\niv\n\nThe heirs\n\nTen thousand new years begin here too, on the bridge decks of the Vengeful Spirit.\n\nAs Ezekyle Abaddon enters, various system alarms and warning klaxons are still sounding, as though they are counting the seconds and marking out a steady pace for the years to follow.\n\n'Mute them,' he orders. It takes a few moments to cancel them all. The last of them fade away, leaving only the sounds of activity; the whir of engaging systems, the chime of consoles and auspex plotters, the mutter of voices, the sizzle of heat-torches fusing metal, the creaks and groans of the spavined ship.\n\nSparks from the repair work drift in the stale air. Abaddon tries to ignore the evidence of damage everywhere. He looks for what is intact, what is whole, what is working. He sees the green and white runes flickering on the steersman positions, the test patterns flickering on the screens at Motive, Sensoria, and Task Dynamics, the ailing amber bars crawling up the displays of Drive Chamber and Principal Engineering. He sees hololithic projections begin to light and take shape.\n\nHe ignores his own damage too. He feels cold inside, and leaden in his movements. There is a wound, a rawness, deep within him, as though something vital has been ripped out. There is nothing left to fill that emptiness.\n\nHe misses it. He misses the enargeia of the gifts he was allowed to glimpse. He feels incomplete without them. He feels hollow and mortal.\n\nAnd he hates himself for missing it. The gifts Erebus shared were just devices, weapons, advantages, but he is horrified how quickly they began to appeal to him. His mind and body, perhaps even his soul, yearn for those intoxicating and seductive possibilities he was permitted to witness.\n\nHe knows the others feel the same, Sycar, Baraxa, Ulnok... They all feel the absence too. Others, like Ekron Fal and Tarchese Malabreux seem almost crippled by it, burned out, glassy, shaking, unaware that they are weeping all the time.\n\nErebus has counselled him. Erebus, who knows so much more about these things than Abaddon does, and who must be suffering his own extreme pain and loss. It's hard to tell. It's hard to know anything about the Dark Apostle, even though truths are written on his very skin. Abaddon loathes him. He loathes him for what he is, what he's done, and all he represents. He's lost count of the times he's come within a hair's breadth of killing Erebus, simply for being Erebus.\n\nBut Erebus is useful. He is an instrument and a source of knowledge. He is one of the few hopes they have to get out of this alive. So, while he is useful, Erebus will live, until Abaddon decides otherwise.\n\nErebus has counselled him. He has counselled all of them, with quiet words and soft reassurances. He has told them how to manage the present pain, and how to use it. He has whispered promises too. The warp has receded, and Chaos withdrawn. But not forever. There are things they can do; first, by means of survival and immediate safety, and then greater things, things that will open a way back to the Old Four, things that will slowly bring them to a place where the gifts might be offered again.\n\nAbaddon sees the Dark Apostle waiting in the shadows at the side of the command level, watching the work. Erebus confided that part of the pain Abaddon feels, part of the pain that afflicts all of the XVI, is simply grief. They have lost their father. They must come to terms with that, or it will cripple them.\n\nAbaddon isn't convinced. His father's life is not what he is grieving.\n\nAbaddon crosses to the old strategium table. Glass and chips of plastek crunch beneath his feet. He lays the Talon of Horus on the tabletop. He wants the claws to be visible to them all. He wants the claws beside him, so it is clear who owns them now.\n\n'Report!' he calls out. The murmurs in the bridge space die down. There are about fifty people present, most of them warriors of the XVI, as well as a few Word Bearers. They are being forced to improvise and adapt. There are very few members of the ship's crew left alive, and most of them are next to useless. But Astartes are trained and drilled to function in any role an emergency demands. They can draw on hypno-planted reserves of knowledge and technique, and serve in extremis as steersmen, as sensoria, as drive-chamber adepts. They are Astartes, born and bred to be effective under any circumstances. Stars do not get conquered or brought to compliance by men who cannot excel in any capacity when the need arises.\n\nAnd these are the Sons of Horus. Broken, wounded, hurting, yes, but still the finest transhuman champions the Imperium has ever produced.\n\n'Drive power reported at sixteen per cent,' Argonis reports, approaching with a data-slate in his hand. He is pale, his wounds hastily patched, and there is a tremor in him that Abaddon doesn't like. But Argonis is nevertheless trying to function, just like the rest of them.\n\n'Lateral is still refusing to respond,' Argonis says. 'We have restored some servitor function, and work has commenced to reinforce subframe structure at nine-six and nine-twelve. No power on the lower decks, and I've shut it down on intermediary as well, air-circ, environmental, and grav too in places, to conserve what we have and redirect to main dynamic function.'\n\nAbaddon studies the data-slate.\n\n'Impellers?' he asks.\n\n'Lit, but rotation is slow.'\n\n'Arrays?'\n\n'Baraxa reports we should have operative function in a few minutes.'\n\n'Make it less than a few,' says Abaddon. The light in the bridge space is harsh blue, "}
{"text":"inforce subframe structure at nine-six and nine-twelve. No power on the lower decks, and I've shut it down on intermediary as well, air-circ, environmental, and grav too in places, to conserve what we have and redirect to main dynamic function.'\n\nAbaddon studies the data-slate.\n\n'Impellers?' he asks.\n\n'Lit, but rotation is slow.'\n\n'Arrays?'\n\n'Baraxa reports we should have operative function in a few minutes.'\n\n'Make it less than a few,' says Abaddon. The light in the bridge space is harsh blue, and there is a background whine of ultrasonics. 'Shut down the decontam system. It's wasting power we can use elsewhere.'\n\nArgonis seems about to question this. Then he nods.\n\n'Yes, First Captain.'\n\n'We need to move, Argonis,' says Abaddon. 'As soon as we have functional helm response and impellers. If we sit here much longer...'\n\nArgonis nods again. Ulnok approaches.\n\n'We have now embarked sixty-four vessels from the surface, First Captain,' Ulnok reports. 'We have more inbound. Vorus Ikari and Taras Balt report their companies in lift, and are about sixty minutes out. Xhofar Beruddin reports Fifth Company is under heavy fire, but projects extraction beginning within thirty minutes.'\n\n'We'll wait as long as we can,' says Abaddon. He knows he needs them all. As many men as can be brought off the Throneworld as possible.\n\n'Yes, First Captain.'\n\n'But inform them that we cannot stay on station forever.'\n\n'They understand that, First Captain.'\n\n'Make it explicit, please, Ulnok.'\n\nA siren starts to blare.\n\n'I told you to mute those!' Abaddon barks.\n\n'It's a grid response,' Sycar calls out. 'We have sensoria contact. Five ships closing to bear, six thousand kilometres out.'\n\n'Ident?' Abaddon calls.\n\n'Saturnine Fleet.'\n\nAbaddon has been watching the displays the whole time. Throneworld near-space is a churning, burning mess of void war. Thousands of ships, and more arriving all the time. He's seen whole flotillas of the host fleet scorched out of orbit already, overhauled and exterminated as they try to break and flee. The vengeance is as savage as expected. No quarter. None at all.\n\n'I want a weapon system overview immediately!' Abaddon orders. They need to run. They need to run before they are found and killed. But they are barely at functional power, and there are still hundreds of their brothers racing from the surface to reach them.\n\nBesides, Abaddon's not yet sure the flagship can even move.\n\n'Hard contact now,' Sycar growls. 'Inbound vessels have full sensor lock. They will have firing solutions within thirty seconds.'\n\n'Power?' Abaddon asks curtly.\n\n'Now at nineteen per cent,' Argonis replies. Abaddon nods.\n\n'Shields up,' he says.\n\nv\n\nLux in tenebris\n\nHe walks her as far as he can. Perhaps a little further. He's risking reprimand even bringing her here, but he doesn't seem to care.\n\nOr perhaps he cares more than he should.\n\nShe's never been this far inside the Sanctum Imperialis. Their progress is slow, partly because she is so frail, but mostly because she keeps stopping to look around in wonder.\n\nDespite the ruination everywhere, the Palace seems to delight her. She doesn't seem to see the debris and dirt, the shattered glassaic, the cracked tiles, the shot-holes cratering the golden walls, the blood. She gazed up in awe at the Eternity Gate as they walked through the dust beneath it, as though it was still a towering monument, a glittering arch of triumph and glory.\n\nEven in ruin, the top of it gone, it was majestic. It dwarfed them both. It dwarfed the people streaming in and out, and the hobbled war engines limping past them into the daylight like wounded beasts.\n\nThe air is glazed with smoke. The darkness is everywhere, deep and oppressive, but the gold and auramite still gleams. It catches the firelight, the remains of ruins burning, or the flames of torches carried by the men-at-arms and the hurrying medicae. It reflects too the flash and burn of the sky, the drizzle and flare of lights above the clouds, like some aurora display.\n\n'That's the void war,' he tells her. She doesn't need to know the rest. She can imagine it. Fleets of ships ripping through fleets of ships in the orbital zone.\n\nHe knows the way. He's been here before, and he's allowed to be here. The people they pass, and there are so many of them, all dirty, all stiff with shock and confusion, all rushing to perform vital errands, bow their heads to him when they see his black-and-white plate, even fellow Astartes in red and white and yellow.\n\nBut she feels like she knows the way too. It's as though the Via Aquila has led her all the way here, and continues to run out before her, as far as she can see, leading her on.\n\nThey stop in a soaring chamber where two processionals cross. The roof has partly collapsed, and plasteel beams slope in, like giant fingers, roped with strands of broken cable. There are statues here, the golden images of other champions and other heroes. Some have been toppled from their plinths. The walls, caked in soot, are a huge frieze of demigods and angels, attending a figure on a throne. She can't see the face of the figure, because of the damage, but she can see the halo of light that surrounds it like sun rays, conveying its steadfast aspect of majesty.\n\n'We can't go any further,' he says.\n\n'How far? How far is the rest of the way?' she asks.\n\n'From here, the Silver Door is about five kilometres,' he replies.\n\nClose enough. She never thought to get even this far.\n\n'Thank you for bringing me here,' she says.\n\nSigismund nods. 'Thank you for bringing me here,' he replies.\n\nHe looks at her. Keeler seems so thin and fragile. The robes that bundle her don't disguise how slender and drawn she is, they seem to make it more obvious. Her face is pinched, her skin almost translucent. So very few of the pilgrimage, less than a fifth, left the mountain alive, and most of those that did are fundamentally changed.\n\nBut her eyes are bright.\n\nShe leans on his arm for a second, catching her breath. Then she slowly turns in a circle, gazing at the walls around her.\n\n'What will you do now?' Sigismund asks.\n\n'The same as you, I think,' she replies. 'The same as everyone. Hope, strive, heal.'\n\nShe glances at him.\n\n'Believe,' she adds.\n\nHer smile is far stronger than the rest of her. It seems to hold her up. It's a flash of the young woman she used to be, and it speaks to the strength she carries inside. A light from somewhere else. A strength of understanding, acceptance, peace. A strength to see the right direction, and the strength to follow it.\n\nThey will all need it.\n\n'We should go back,' he says.\n\nShe nods. 'Of course. Just one moment,' she replies.\n\nKeeler walks away from him, limping, and faces the centrepiece of the frieze that dominates the wall. The figure on the throne, damaged and scarred, gold flaking and torn, is still discernible in the dust and gloom.\n\nSlowly, painfully, she lowers herself until she is kneeling in the dust. She looks up at the figure on the wall.\n\nShe lifts up her hands."}